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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41735 ***
+
+    THE
+    GIRL OF THE PERIOD
+    ETC.
+
+    VOL. I.
+
+
+
+
+    [REPRINTED, _by permission, from the_ SATURDAY REVIEW]
+
+
+
+
+    THE
+    GIRL OF THE PERIOD
+
+    AND OTHER
+    Social Essays
+
+    BY
+    E. LYNN LINTON
+
+    AUTHOR OF 'THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS' 'UNDER WHICH LORD?'
+    'THE REBEL OF THE FAMILY' 'IONE' ETC.
+
+    IN TWO VOLUMES
+
+    VOL. I.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+    LONDON
+    RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET
+    Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
+
+    1883
+
+    [_All rights reserved_]
+
+
+
+
+    LONDON: PRINTED BY
+    SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
+    AND PARLIAMENT STREET
+
+
+
+
+    Dedicated
+    TO
+    ALL GOOD GIRLS
+    AND
+    TRUE WOMEN
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+So many false reports followed the appearance of these essays, that I
+am grateful to the authorities of the _Saturday Review_ for their
+present permission to republish them under my own name, even though
+the best of the day has a little gone by, and other forms of folly
+have been flying about since these were shot at. The essays hit
+sharply enough at the time, and caused some ill-blood. 'The Girl of
+the Period' was especially obnoxious to many to whom women were the
+Sacred Sex above criticism and beyond rebuke; and I had to pay pretty
+smartly in private life, by those who knew, for what they termed a
+libel and an untruth. With these passionate repudiators on the one
+hand, on the other were some who, trading on the enforced anonymity of
+the paper, took spurious credit to themselves for the authorship. I
+was twice introduced to the 'Writer of the "Girl of the Period."' The
+first time he was a clergyman who had boldly told my friends that he
+had written the paper; the second, she was a lady of rank well
+known in London society, and to this hour believed by her own circle
+to have written this and other of the articles included in the present
+collection. I confess that, whether for praise or blame, I am glad to
+be able at last to assume the full responsibility of my own work.
+
+In re-reading these papers I am more than ever convinced that I have
+struck the right chord of condemnation, and advocated the best virtues
+and most valuable characteristics of women. I neither soften nor
+retract a line of what I have said. One of the modern phases of
+womanhood--hard, unloving, mercenary, ambitious, without domestic
+faculty and devoid of healthy natural instincts--is still to me a
+pitiable mistake and a grave national disaster. And I think now, as I
+thought when I wrote these papers, that a public and professional life
+for women is incompatible with the discharge of their highest duties
+or the cultivation of their noblest qualities. I think now, as I
+thought then, that the sphere of human action is determined by the
+fact of sex, and that there does exist both natural limitation and
+natural direction. This creed, which summarizes all that I have said
+_in extenso_, I repeat with emphasis, and maintain with the conviction
+of long years of experience.
+
+    E. LYNN LINTON.
+
+    1883.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
+
+
+                                PAGE
+
+    THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD         1
+
+    MODERN MOTHERS (I.)           10
+
+    MODERN MOTHERS (II.)          19
+
+    PAYING ONE'S SHOT             27
+
+    WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?         37
+
+    LITTLE WOMEN                  48
+
+    IDEAL WOMEN                   58
+
+    PINCHBECK                     69
+
+    AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD           79
+
+    FEMININE AFFECTATIONS         88
+
+    INTERFERENCE                  99
+
+    THE FASHIONABLE WOMAN        109
+
+    SLEEPING DOGS                119
+
+    BEAUTY AND BRAINS            128
+
+    NYMPHS                       137
+
+    MÉSALLIANCES                 147
+
+    WEAK SISTERS                 157
+
+    PINCHING SHOES               167
+
+    SUPERIOR BEINGS              176
+
+    FEMININE AMENITIES           184
+
+    GRIM FEMALES                 193
+
+    MATURE SIRENS                203
+
+    PUMPKINS                     213
+
+    WIDOWS                       223
+
+    DOLLS                        234
+
+    CHARMING WOMEN               244
+
+    APRON-STRINGS                254
+
+    FINE FEELINGS                264
+
+    SPHINXES                     273
+
+    FLIRTING                     281
+
+    SCRAMBLERS                   290
+
+    FLATTERY                     299
+
+    LA FEMME PASSÉE              309
+
+    SPOILT WOMEN                 317
+
+    DOVECOTS                     325
+
+    BORED HUSBANDS               335
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS
+UPON
+SOCIAL SUBJECTS.
+
+
+
+
+_THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD._
+
+
+Time was when the phrase, 'a fair young English girl,' meant the ideal
+of womanhood; to us, at least, of home birth and breeding. It meant a
+creature generous, capable, modest; something franker than a
+Frenchwoman, more to be trusted than an Italian, as brave as an
+American but more refined, as domestic as a German and more graceful.
+It meant a girl who could be trusted alone if need be, because of the
+innate purity and dignity of her nature, but who was neither bold in
+bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be
+her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival; one who would
+consider his interests as identical with her own, and not hold him as
+just so much fair game for spoil; who would make his house his true
+home and place of rest, not a mere passage-place for vanity and
+ostentation to pass through; a tender mother, an industrious
+housekeeper, a judicious mistress.
+
+We prided ourselves as a nation on our women. We thought we had the
+pick of creation in this fair young English girl of ours, and envied
+no other men their own. We admired the languid grace and subtle fire
+of the South; the docility and childlike affectionateness of the East
+seemed to us sweet and simple and restful; the vivacious sparkle of
+the trim and sprightly Parisienne was a pleasant little excitement
+when we met with it in its own domain; but our allegiance never
+wandered from our brown-haired girls at home, and our hearts were less
+vagrant than our fancies. This was in the old time, and when English
+girls were content to be what God and nature had made them. Of late
+years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the world a race
+of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal as if we had created
+another nation altogether. The Girl of the Period, and the fair young
+English girl of the past, have nothing in common save ancestry and
+their mother-tongue; and even of this last the modern version makes
+almost a new language, through the copious additions it has received
+from the current slang of the day.
+
+The Girl of the Period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her
+face, as the first articles of her personal religion--a creature whose
+sole idea of life is fun; whose sole aim is unbounded luxury; and
+whose dress is the chief object of such thought and intellect as
+she possesses. Her main endeavour is to outvie her neighbours in the
+extravagance of fashion. No matter if, in the time of crinolines, she
+sacrifices decency; in the time of trains, cleanliness; in the time of
+tied-back skirts, modesty; no matter either, if she makes herself a
+nuisance and an inconvenience to every one she meets;--the Girl of the
+Period has done away with such moral muffishness as consideration for
+others, or regard for counsel and rebuke. It was all very well in
+old-fashioned times, when fathers and mothers had some authority and
+were treated with respect, to be tutored and made to obey, but she is
+far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in mid-career by these slow
+old morals; and as she lives to please herself, she does not care if
+she displeases every one else.
+
+Nothing is too extraordinary and nothing too exaggerated for her
+vitiated taste; and things which in themselves would be useful reforms
+if let alone become monstrosities worse than those which they have
+displaced so soon as she begins to manipulate and improve. If a
+sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the mud, she raises hers midway
+to her knee. If the absurd structure of wire and buckram, once called
+a bonnet, is modified to something that shall protect the wearer's
+face without putting out the eyes of her companion, she cuts hers down
+to four straws and a rosebud, or a tag of lace and a bunch of glass
+beads. If there is a reaction against an excess of Rowland's Macassar,
+and hair shiny and sticky with grease is thought less nice than
+if left clean and healthily crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks
+hers out on end like certain savages in Africa, or lets it wander down
+her back like Madge Wildfire's, and thinks herself all the more
+beautiful the nearer she approaches in look to a negress or a maniac.
+
+With purity of taste she has lost also that far more precious purity
+and delicacy of perception which sometimes mean more than appears on
+the surface. What the _demi-monde_ does in its frantic efforts to
+excite attention, she also does in imitation. If some fashionable
+_dévergondée en évidence_ is reported to have come out with her dress
+below her shoulder-blades, and a gold strap for all the sleeve thought
+necessary, the Girl of the Period follows suit next day; and then she
+wonders that men sometimes mistake her for her prototype, or that
+mothers of girls not quite so far gone as herself refuse her as a
+companion for their daughters. She has blunted the fine edges of
+feeling so much that she cannot understand why she should be condemned
+for an imitation of form which does not include imitation of fact. She
+cannot be made to see that modesty of appearance and virtue in deed
+ought to be inseparable; and that no good girl can afford to appear
+bad, under pain of receiving the contempt awarded to the bad.
+
+This imitation of the _demi-monde_ in dress leads to something in
+manner and feeling, not quite so pronounced perhaps, but far too like
+to be honourable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It
+leads to slang, bold talk and general fastness; to the love of
+pleasure and indifference to duty; to the desire of money before
+either love or happiness; to uselessness at home, dissatisfaction with
+the monotony of ordinary life, horror of all useful work; in a word,
+to the worst forms of luxury and selfishness--to the most fatal
+effects arising from want of high principle and absence of tender
+feeling.
+
+The Girl of the Period envies the queens of the _demi-monde_ far more
+than she abhors them. She sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously
+appointed, and she knows them to be flattered, fêted, and courted with
+a certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only the
+admiration while she ignores the disdain. They have all that for which
+her soul is hungering; and she never stops to reflect at what a price
+they have bought their gains, and what fearful moral penalties they
+pay for their sensuous pleasures. She sees only the coarse gilding on
+the base token, and shuts her eyes to the hideous figure in the midst
+and the foul legend written round the edge. It is this envy of the
+pleasures, and indifference to the sins, of these women of the
+_demi-monde_ which is doing such infinite mischief to the modern girl.
+They brush too closely by each other, if not in actual deeds, yet in
+aims and feelings; for the luxury which is bought by vice with the one
+is that thing of all in life most passionately desired by the other,
+though she is not yet prepared to pay quite the same price.
+Unfortunately, she has already paid too much--all that once gave her
+distinctive national character.
+
+No one can say of the modern English girl that she is tender, loving,
+retiring or domestic. The old fault so often found by keen-sighted
+Frenchwomen, that she was so fatally _romanesque_, so prone to
+sacrifice appearances and social advantages for love, will never be
+set against the Girl of the Period. Love indeed is the last thing she
+thinks of, and the least of the dangers besetting her. Love in a
+cottage--that seductive dream which used to vex the heart and disturb
+the calculations of the prudent mother--is now a myth of past ages.
+The legal barter of herself for so much money, representing so much
+dash, so much luxury and pleasure--that is her idea of marriage; the
+only idea worth entertaining. For all seriousness of thought
+respecting the duties or the consequences of marriage, she has not a
+trace. If children come, they find but a stepmother's cold welcome
+from her; and if her husband thinks that he has married anything that
+is to belong to him--a _tacens et placens uxor_ pledged to make him
+happy--the sooner he wakes from his hallucination and understands that
+he has simply married some one who will condescend to spend his money
+on herself, and who will shelter her indiscretions behind the shield
+of his name, the less severe will be his disappointment. She has
+married his house, his carriage, his balance at the banker's, his
+title; and he himself is just the inevitable condition clogging
+the wheel of her fortune; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated with
+more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the old-fashioned
+sort, not Girls of the Period _pur sang_, who marry for love, or put
+the husband before the banker. But the Girl of the Period does not
+marry easily. Men are afraid of her; and with reason. They may amuse
+themselves with her for an evening, but they do not readily take her
+for life. Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a poor copy of
+the real thing; and the real thing is far more amusing than the copy,
+because it is real. Men can get that whenever they like; and when they
+go into their mothers' drawing-rooms, with their sisters and their
+sisters' friends, they want something of quite a different flavour.
+_Toujours perdrix_ is bad providing all the world over; but a
+continual weak imitation of _toujours perdrix_ is worse.
+
+If we must have only one kind of thing, let us have it genuine, and
+the queens of St. John's Wood in their unblushing honesty rather than
+their imitators and make-believes in Bayswater and Belgravia. For, at
+whatever cost of shocked self-love or pained modesty it may be, it
+cannot be too plainly told to the modern English girl that the net
+result of her present manner of life is to assimilate her as nearly as
+possible to a class of women whom we must not call by their proper--or
+improper--name. And we are willing to believe that she has still some
+modesty of soul left hidden under all this effrontery of fashion,
+and that, if she could be made to see herself as she appears to the
+eyes of men, she would mend her ways before too late.
+
+It is terribly significant of the present state of things when men are
+free to write as they do of the women of their own nation. Every word
+of censure flung against them is two-edged, and wounds those who
+condemn as much as those who are condemned; for surely it need hardly
+be said that men hold nothing so dear as the honour of their women,
+and that no one living would willingly lower the repute of his mother
+or his sisters. It is only when these have placed themselves beyond
+the pale of masculine respect that such things could be written as are
+written now. When women become again what they were once they will
+gather round them the love and homage and chivalrous devotion which
+were then an Englishwoman's natural inheritance.
+
+The marvel in the present fashion of life among women is, how it holds
+its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men. It used to be an
+old-time notion that the sexes were made for each other, and that it
+was only natural for them to please each other, and to set themselves
+out for that end. But the Girl of the Period does not please men. She
+pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how little she does
+that, the class of women she has taken as her models of itself
+testifies. All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and
+genuine girl of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty
+bashful modesties, to this loud and rampant modernization, with her
+false red hair and painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and
+by preference leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. She
+thinks she is piquante and exciting when she thus makes herself the
+bad copy of a worse original; and she will not see that though men
+laugh with her they do not respect her, though they flirt with her
+they do not marry her; she will not believe that she is not the kind
+of thing they want, and that she is acting against nature and her own
+interests when she disregards their advice and offends their taste. We
+do not understand how she makes out her account, viewing her life from
+any side; but all we can do is to wait patiently until the national
+madness has passed, and our women have come back again to the old
+English ideal, once the most beautiful, the most modest, the most
+essentially womanly in the world.
+
+
+
+
+_MODERN MOTHERS._
+
+I.
+
+
+No human affection has been so passionately praised as maternal love,
+and none is supposed to be so holy or so strong. Even the poetic
+aspect of that instinct which inspires the young with their dearest
+dreams does not rank so high as this; and neither lover's love nor
+conjugal love, neither filial affection nor fraternal, comes near the
+sanctity or grandeur of the maternal instinct. But all women are not
+equally rich in this great gift; and, to judge by appearances, English
+women are at this moment wonderfully poor. It may seem a harsh thing
+to say, but it is none the less true:--society has put maternity out
+of fashion, and the nursery is nine times out of ten a place of
+punishment, not of pleasure, to the modern mother.
+
+Two points connected with this subject are of growing importance at
+this present time--the one is the increasing disinclination of married
+women to be mothers at all; the other, the large number of those who,
+being mothers, will not, or cannot, nurse their own children. In the
+mad race after pleasure and excitement now going on through
+English society the tender duties of motherhood have become simply
+disagreeable restraints, and the old feeling of the blessing attending
+the quiver full is exchanged for one the very reverse. With some of
+the more intellectual and less instinctive sort, maternity is looked
+on as a kind of degradation; and women of this stamp, sensible enough
+in everything else, talk impatiently among themselves of the base
+necessities laid on them by men and nature, and how hateful to them is
+everything connected with their characteristic duties.
+
+This wild revolt against nature, and specially this abhorrence of
+maternity, is carried to a still greater extent by American women;
+with grave national consequences resulting; but though we have not yet
+reached the Transatlantic limit, the state of feminine feeling and
+physical condition among ourselves will disastrously affect the future
+unless something can be done to bring our women back to a healthier
+tone of mind and body. No one can object to women declining marriage
+altogether in favour of a voluntary self-devotion to some project or
+idea; but, when married, it is a monstrous doctrine to hold that they
+are in any way degraded by the consequences, and that natural
+functions are less honourable than social excitements. The world can
+get on without balls and morning calls; it can get on too without
+amateur art and incorrect music; but not without wives and mothers;
+and those times in a nation's history when women have been social
+ornaments rather than family home-stays have ever been times of
+national decadence and of moral failure.
+
+Part of this growing disinclination is due to the enormous expense
+incurred now by having children. As women have ceased to take any
+active share in their own housekeeping, whether in the kitchen or the
+nursery, the consequence is an additional cost for service, which is a
+serious item in the yearly accounts. Women who, if they lived a
+rational life, could and would nurse their children, now require a
+wet-nurse, or the services of an experienced woman who can 'bring up
+by hand,' as the phrase is; women who once would have had one
+nursemaid now have two; and women who, had they lived a generation
+ago, would have had none at all, must in their turn have a wretched
+young creature without thought or knowledge, into whose questionable
+care they deliver what should be the most sacred obligation and the
+most jealously-guarded charge they possess.
+
+It is rare if, in any section of society where hired service can be
+had, mothers give more than a superficial personal superintendence to
+nursery or schoolroom--a superintendence about as thorough as their
+housekeeping, and as efficient. The one set of duties is quite as
+unfashionable as the other; and money is held to relieve from the
+service of love as entirely as it relieves from the need of labour.
+And yet, side by side with this personal relinquishment of natural
+duties, has grown up, perhaps as an instinctive compensation, an
+amount of expensive management specially remarkable. There never was a
+time when children were made of so much individual importance in the
+family, yet were in so little direct relation with the mother--never a
+time when maternity did so little and social organization so much.
+Juvenile parties; the kind of moral obligation apparently felt by all
+parents to provide heated and unhealthy amusements for their boys and
+girls during the holidays; extravagance in dress, following the same
+extravagance among the mothers; the increasing cost of education; the
+fuss and turmoil generally made over them--all render children real
+burdens in a house where money is not too plentiful, and where every
+child that comes is not only an additional mouth to feed and an
+additional body to clothe, but a subtractor by just so much from the
+family fund of pleasure. Even where there is no lack of money, the
+unavoidable restraints of the condition, for at least some months,
+more than counterbalance any sentimental delight to be found in
+maternity. For, before all other things in life, maternity demands
+unselfishness in women; and this is just the one virtue of which women
+have least at this present time--just the one reason why motherhood is
+at a discount, and children are regarded as inflictions instead of
+blessings.
+
+Few middle-class women are content to bring up their children with the
+old-fashioned simplicity of former times, and to let them share
+and share alike in the family, with only so much difference in their
+treatment as is required by their difference of state; fewer still are
+willing to take on themselves the labour and care which must come with
+children in the easiest-going household, and so to save in the
+expenses by their own work. The shabbiest little wife, with her two
+financial ends always gaping and never meeting, must have her still
+shabbier little drudge to wheel her perambulator, so as to give her an
+air of fine-ladyhood and being too good for such work; and the most
+indolent housekeeper, whose superintendence of domestic matters takes
+her just half an hour, cannot find time to go into the gardens or the
+square with nurse and the children, so that she may watch over them
+herself and see that they are properly cared for.
+
+In France, where it is the fashion for mother and _bonne_ to be
+together both out of doors and at home, at least the children are not
+neglected nor ill-treated, as is too often the case with us; and if
+they are improperly managed, according to our ideas, the fault is in
+the system, not in the want of maternal supervision. Here it is a very
+rare case indeed when the mother accompanies the nurse and children;
+and those days when she does are nursery gala-days to be talked of and
+remembered for weeks after. As the little ones grow older, she may
+occasionally take them with her when she visits her more intimate
+friends; but this is for her own pleasure, not their good; and
+going with them to see that they are properly cared for has nothing to
+do with the matter.
+
+It is to be supposed that each mother has a profound belief in her own
+nurse, and that when she condemns the neglect and harshness shown to
+other children by the servants in charge, she makes a mental
+reservation in favour of her own, and is very sure that nothing
+improper nor cruel takes place in _her_ nursery. Her children do not
+complain; and she always tells them to come to her when anything is
+amiss. On which negative evidence she satisfies her soul, and makes
+sure that all is right because she is too neglectful to see if
+anything is wrong. She does not remember that her children do not
+complain because they dare not. Dear and beautiful as all mammas are
+to the small fry in the nursery, they are always in a certain sense
+Junos sitting on the top of Mount Olympus, making occasional gracious
+and benign descents, but practically too far removed for useful
+interference; while nurse is an ever-present power, capable of sly
+pinches and secret raids, as well as of more open oppression--a power,
+therefore, to be propitiated, if only with the grim subservience of a
+Yezidi too much afraid of the Evil One to oppose him. Wherefore nurse
+is propitiated, failing the protection of the glorified creature just
+gone to her grand dinner in a cloud of lace and a blaze of jewels; and
+the first lesson taught the youthful Christian in short frocks or
+knickerbockers is not to carry tales down stairs, and by no means
+to let mamma know what nurse desires should be kept secret.
+
+A great deal of other evil, beside these sly beginnings of deceit, is
+taught in the nursery; a great deal of vulgar thought, of
+superstitious fear, of class coarseness. As, indeed, how must it not
+be when we think of the early habits and education of the women taken
+into the nursery to give the first strong indelible impressions to the
+young souls under their care? Many a man with a ruined constitution,
+and many a woman with shattered nerves, can trace back the beginning
+of their sorrow to those neglected childish days when nurse had it all
+her own way because mamma never looked below the surface, and was
+satisfied with what was said instead of seeing for herself what was
+done. It is an odd state of society which tolerates this transfer of a
+mother's holiest and most important duty into the hands of a mere
+stranger, hired by the month, and never thoroughly known.
+
+Where the organization of the family is of the patriarchal kind--old
+retainers marrying and multiplying about the central home, and
+carrying on a warm personal attachment from generation to
+generation--this transfer of maternal care has not such bad effects;
+but in our present way of life, without love or real relationship
+between masters and servants, and where service is rendered for just
+so much money down and for nothing more noble, it is a hideous system,
+and one that makes the modern mother utterly inexplicable. We
+wonder where her mere instincts can be, not to speak of her reason,
+her love, her conscience, her pride. Pleasure and self-indulgence have
+indeed gained tremendous power, in these later days, when they can
+thus break down the force of the strongest law of nature--a law
+stronger even than that of self-preservation.
+
+Folly is the true capillary attraction of the moral world, and
+penetrates every stratum of society; and the folly of extravagant
+attire in the drawing-room is reproduced in the nursery. Not content
+with bewildering men's minds and emptying their husbands' purses for
+the enhancement of their own charms, women do the same by their
+children; and the mother who leaves the health and mind and temper and
+purity of her offspring in the keeping of a hired nurse takes especial
+care of the colour and cut of the frocks and petticoats. And there is
+always the same strain after show, and the same endeavour to make a
+little look a mickle. The children of five hundred a year must look
+like those of a thousand; and those of a thousand must rival the
+_tenue_ of little lords and ladies born in the purple; while the
+amount of money spent on clothes in the tradesman class is a matter of
+real amazement to those let into the secret. Simplicity of diet, too,
+is going out with simplicity of dress, with simplicity of habits
+generally; and stimulants and concentrated food are now the rule in
+the nursery, where they mar as many constitutions as they make. More
+than one child of whom we have had personal knowledge has yielded
+to disease induced by too stimulating and too heating a diet; but
+artificial habits demand corresponding artificiality of food, and so
+the candle burns at both ends instead of one.
+
+Again, as for the increasing inability of educated women to nurse
+their children, even if desirous of doing so, that also is a bodily
+condition brought about by an unwholesome and unnatural state of life.
+Late hours, high living, heated blood, and constantly breathing a
+vitiated atmosphere are the causes of this alarming physical defect.
+But it would be too much to expect that women should forego their
+pleasurable indulgences, or do anything disagreeable to their senses,
+for the sake of their offspring. They are not famous for looking far
+ahead on any matter; but to expect them to look beyond themselves, and
+their own present generation, is to expect the great miracle that
+never comes.
+
+
+
+
+_MODERN MOTHERS._
+
+II.
+
+
+There was once a superstition among us that mothers were of use in the
+world; that they had their functions and duties, without which society
+would not prosper nor hold together; and that much of the well-being
+of humanity, present and future, depended on them. Mothers in those
+bygone days were by no means effete personages or a worn-out
+institution, but living powers exercising a real and pervading
+influence; and they were credited with an authority which they did not
+scruple to use when required.
+
+One of the functions recognized as specially belonging to them was
+that of guarding their young people from the consequences of their own
+ignorance--keeping them from dangers both physical and moral until
+wise enough to take care of themselves, and supplementing by their own
+experience the want of it in their children. Another was that of
+preserving the tone of society on a high level, and supplying the
+antiseptic element by which the rest was kept pure; as, for example,
+insisting that the language used and the subjects discussed
+before them were such as should not offend the modesty of virtuous
+women; that the people with whom they were required to associate
+should be moderately honest and well conducted; and, in short, as
+mothers, discountenancing everything in other men and women which they
+would not like to see imitated by their own sons and daughters.
+
+This was one of the fond superstitions of an elder time. For
+ourselves, we boast of our freedom from superstition in these later
+days; of our proud renunciation of restraints and habits which were
+deemed beneficial by our forefathers; of our indifference to forms and
+hatred of humbug; and of all that tends to fetter what is called
+individualism. Hence we have found that we can go on without
+safeguards for our young; that society does not want its matrons as
+the preservative ingredient for keeping it pure; and that the world is
+all the merrier for the loosening of bonds which once it was the duty
+of women to draw closer. In fact, mothers have gone out, surviving
+only in the form of chaperons.
+
+More or less on the search for her own pleasure--if by any possibility
+of artifice she can be taken for less than sixty, still ready for odd
+snatches of flirting as she can find occasion--or, with her faculties
+concentrated on the chance of winning the rubber by indifferent
+play--the chaperon's charge is not a very onerous one; and her
+daughters know as well as she does that her presence is a blind rather
+than a protection. They are with mamma as a form of speech; but
+they are left to themselves as a matter of fact. Anyone who is in the
+confidence of young people of either sex knows a little of what goes
+on in the dark corners and on the steps of the stairs--a favourite
+anchorage for the loosely chaperoned in private houses where two
+hundred are invited and only a hundred can find room. But then the
+girls are 'with mamma,' and the young men are contented souls who take
+what they can get without making wry faces. Mamma, occupied in her own
+well-seasoned coquetries, or absorbed in the chances of her deep
+'finesse' and the winning trick, lets the girls take care of
+themselves, and would think it an intolerable impertinence should a
+friend hint to her that her place of chaperon included vigilant
+personal guardianship, and that she would do better to keep her
+daughters in her own charge than leave them to themselves.
+
+It is all very well for the advocates of youthful innocence to affect
+to resent the slur supposed to be cast on girlhood by the advocacy of
+this closer guardianship; or for those who do not know the world to
+make their ignorance the measure of another's knowledge, and to deny
+what they have not proved for themselves. Those who do know the world
+know what they say when they deprecate the excessive freedom which is
+too often granted to unmarried girls; and their warning is fully
+justified by experience when they call mothers back to their duty
+of stricter watchfulness. If indeed the young are capable of
+self-protection, then we grant with them that mothers are a
+mistake:--Let them abdicate without more ado. If license is more
+desirable than modesty, and liberty better than reticence, the girls
+may as well be left, as practically they are already, free from the
+mother's guardianship; but if we have a doubt that way, we may as well
+give it the benefit of consideration, and think a little on the
+subject before going further on the present line.
+
+From the first the mother, in the well-to-do classes, acts too much
+the part of the hen ostrich with her eggs. She trusts to the kindly
+influences of external circumstances rather than to her own care to
+make the hatching successful. Nurses, governesses, schools, in turn
+relieve her of the irksome duties of maternity. She sees her little
+ones at their stated hour, and for the other twenty-three leaves them
+to receive their first indelible impress from a class which she is
+never tired of disparaging.
+
+As the children grow older the women by whom they are moulded become
+higher in the social and intellectual scale, but they are no more than
+before subordinated to the mother's personal supervision. She, for her
+part, cares only that her girls shall be taught the correct shibboleth
+of their station; and for the rest, if she thinks at all, she cradles
+herself in a generous trust in the goodness of human nature, or the
+incorruptibility of her brood beyond that of any other woman's brood.
+When they come under her own immediate hand, 'finished' and ready
+to be introduced, she knows about as much of them as she knows of her
+neighbours' girls in the next square; and in nine cases out of ten the
+sole duties towards them which are undertaken by her are shirked when
+possible, as a _corvée_ which she is too wise to bear unnecessarily.
+When she can, she shuffles them off on some kind neighbourly hands,
+and lets her daughters 'go about' with the first person who offers,
+glad to have a little breathing time on her own side, and with always
+that generous trust in providence and vicarious protection which has
+marked her maternal career throughout.
+
+In the lower half of the middle class the liberty allowed to young
+girls grows yearly more and more unchecked. They walk alone, travel
+alone, visit alone; and the gravest evils have been known to arise
+from the habit which modern mothers have of sending their daughters of
+sixteen and upwards unaccompanied in London to colleges and classes.
+Mamma has grown stout and lazy, and has always some important matter
+on hand that keeps her at home, half asleep in the easy-chair, while
+the girls go to and fro, and take the exercise befitting their
+youthful energies. Of course no harm can befall them. They are _her_
+daughters, and the warnings given by the keener-eyed, who have had
+experience, are mere inventions of the enemy and slanders against the
+young. So they parade the streets, dressed in the most startling and
+meretricious costumes of the period; and that fatal doctrine of
+self-protection counts its victims by the score as the consequence.
+
+The world is fond of throwing the blame of any misfortune that may
+arise, now on the girl, now on the man concerned; but in honest fact
+that blame really belongs to the mothers who let their daughters run
+about the world without guide or guard. A work was given to them by
+nature and love to do which they have neglected, a duty which they
+have discarded. Whoever chooses may chaperon, accompany, mould their
+daughters, so long as they are freed from the trouble; and their
+dependence on the natural virtue of humanity and the beneficence of
+circumstance runs exactly parallel with their own indolence and
+neglect.
+
+In preserving the tone of society pure the modern mother is as far
+removed from the former ideal as she is in the duty of taking care of
+her girls. Too often she is found making herself prominent in support
+of the most objectionable movements; or, when doubtful questions are
+discussed in mixed society, she forgets that regard for the purity of
+her daughters should keep her silent, even if her own self-respect
+were too weak to restrain her. When the conscienceless world, living
+without a higher aim than that of success and what is known by getting
+on, condones all kinds of moral obliquity for the sake of financial
+prosperity and social position, do we find that, as a rule, mothers
+and matrons protest against opening their houses to this gilded
+rascality? If they did--if they made demerit and not poverty the
+cause of exclusion, virtue and not success the title to
+reception--there would be some check to the corruption which is so
+insolently rampant now.
+
+Women have this power in their own hands, more especially those women
+who are mothers. If they would only set themselves to check the
+inclination for loose talk and doubtful discussions which is
+characteristic of the present moment, they could put an end to it
+without delay. So also they might stop in less than a year the torrent
+of slang with which Young England floods its daily speech; and by
+setting themselves against the paint and dye and meretricious make-up
+generally of the modern girl, they might bring next quarter's fashions
+back to modesty and simplicity.
+
+Women are apt to murmur at their lot as one without influence,
+variety, stirring purpose, space for action. But it is, on the
+contrary, a lot full of dignity and importance if properly regarded
+and fitly undertaken. If they do not lead armies, they make the
+characters of the men who lead and are led. If they are not State
+Ministers nor Parliamentary orators, they raise by their nobleness or
+degrade by their want of delicacy and refinement the souls and minds
+of the men who are. If they are not in the throng and press of active
+life, they can cheer others on to high aims, or basely reward the
+baser methods of existence. As mothers they are the artificers who
+give the initial touch that lasts for life; and as women they
+complete what the mother began. Society is moulded mainly by them,
+and they bring up their daughters on their own pattern.
+
+It is surely weak and silly then to blame society for its ignoble
+tone, or the young for their disorders. All men want the corrective
+influence of social opinion, and it is chiefly women who create that
+opinion. Youth, too, will ever be disorderly if it gets the chance,
+and the race has not yet been born that carries old heads on young
+shoulders. It is for the mothers to supplement by their own wisdom the
+gaps left by the inexperience and ignorance of youth; it is for the
+mothers to guide aright the steps that are apt, without that guidance,
+to run astray, and to guard against passions, emotions, desires,
+which, if left to themselves, bring only evil and disaster, but which,
+guarded and directed, may be turned to the best ends. For ourselves,
+we deeply regret to see the rapid extinction of motherhood in its best
+sense, and decline to accept this modern loose-handed chaperon age as
+its worthy substitute. We repudiate the plea of the insubordination of
+the young so often put forward in defence of the new state of things,
+for it is simply nonsense. The young are what the mothers make them,
+just as society is what the matrons allow it to be; and if these
+mothers and matrons did their duty, we should hear no more of the
+wilfulness of the one or the shameless vagaries of the other. The
+remedy for each lies in their own hands only.
+
+
+
+
+_PAYING ONE'S SHOT._
+
+
+It would save much useless striving and needless disappointment if the
+necessity of paying one's shot were honestly accepted as absolute--if
+it were understood, once for all, that society, like other
+manifestations of humanity, is managed on the principle of exchange
+and barter, and equivalents demanded for value received. The
+benevolence which gives out of its own impulse, with no hope of reward
+save in the well-being of the recipient, has no place in the
+drawing-room code of morals. We may keep a useless creature from
+starving at the cost of so much of our substance _per diem_, for the
+sole remuneration of thanks and the consciousness of an equivocal act
+of charity; but who among us opens his doors, or gives a seat at his
+table, to drawing-room paupers unable to pay their shot? who cares to
+cultivate the acquaintance of men or women who are unable to make him
+any return? It is not necessary that this return should be in kind--a
+dinner for a dinner, a champagne supper for a champagne supper, and
+balls with waxed floors for balls with stretched linen; but shot
+must be paid in some form, whether in kind or not, and the social
+pauper who cannot pay his quota is Lazarus excluded from the feast.
+This is a hard saying, but it is a true one. We often hear worthy
+people who do not understand this law complain that they are
+neglected--left out of wedding breakfasts--passed over in dinner
+invitations--and that they find it difficult to keep acquaintances
+when made. But the fact is, these poor creatures who know so much
+about the cold-shoulder of society are simply those who cannot pay
+their shot, according to the currency of the class to which they
+aspire; and so by degrees they get winnowed through the meshes, and
+fall to a level where their funds will suffice to meet all demands,
+triumphantly. For the rejected of one level are not necessarily the
+rejected of all, and the base metal of one currency is sound coinage
+in another. People who would find it impossible to enter a
+drawing-room in Grosvenor Square may have all Bloomsbury at their
+command; and what was caviare to My Lord will be ambrosia to his
+valet--all depending on the amount of the shot to be paid and the
+relative value of coinage wherewith to pay it.
+
+The most simple form of payment is of course by the elemental process
+of reciprocity in kind; a dinner for a dinner and a supper for a
+supper:--a form as purely instinctive as an eye for an eye and a tooth
+for a tooth--the _lex talionis_ of early jurisprudence administered
+among wine-cups instead of in the shambles. But there are other
+modes of payment as efficient if less evident, and as imperative if
+more subtle. For instance, women pay their shot--when they pay it
+individually, and not through the vicarious merits of their masculine
+relations--by dressing well and looking nice; some by being pretty;
+some by being fashionable; a few by brilliant talk; while all ought to
+add to their private speciality the generic virtue of pleasant
+manners. If they are not pretty, pleasant, well-dressed nor
+well-connected, and if they have no masculine pegs of power by which
+they can be hooked on to the higher lines, they are let to drop
+through the social meshes without an effort made to retain them, as
+little fishes swim away unopposed through the loops which hold the
+bigger ones. These things are their social duties--the final cause of
+their drawing-room existence; and if they fail in them they fail in
+the purpose for which they were created socially, and may die out as
+soon as convenient. They have other duties, of course, and doubtless
+of far higher moment and greater worth; but the question now is only
+of their drawing-room duties--of the qualities which secure their
+recognition in society--of the special coinage in which they must pay
+their shot if they would assist at the great banquet of social life. A
+dowdy, humdrum, well-principled woman, whose toilette looks as if it
+had been made with the traditionary pitchfork, and whose powers of
+conversation do not go beyond the strength of _Cobwebs to Catch
+Flies_, or _Mangnall's Questions_, may be an admirable wife,
+the painstaking mother of future honest citizens, invaluable by a
+sick-bed, beyond price in the nursery, a pattern of all household
+economies, a woman absolutely faultless in her sphere--and that sphere
+a very sweet and lovely one. But her virtues are not those by which
+she can pay her shot in society; and the motherly goodness, of so much
+account in a dressing-jacket and list-slippers, is put out of court
+when the fee to be paid is liveliness of manner or elegance of
+appearance. Certainly, worthy women who dress ill and look ungraceful,
+and whose conversation is about up to the mark of their children's
+easy-spelling-books, are plentiful in society--unfortunately for those
+bracketed with them for two hours' penance; but in most cases they
+have their shot paid for them by the wealth, the importance, the
+repute, or the desirableness of their relations. They may pay it
+themselves by their own wealth and consequent liberal tariff of
+reciprocity; but this is rare; the possession of personal superiority
+of any kind for the most part acting as a moral stimulus with women
+whom the superiority of their male belongings does not touch. And, by
+the way, it is rather hard lines that so many celebrated men have such
+dowdy wives. Artists, poets, self-made men of all kinds often fail in
+this special article; and, while they themselves have caught the tone
+of the circle to which they have risen, and pay their shot by manner
+as well as by repute, their wives lag behind among the ashes of the
+past, like Cinderellas before the advent of the fairy godmother.
+How many of them are carried through society as clogs or excrescences
+which a polite world is bound to tolerate with more or less
+equanimity, according to the amount of sensitiveness bestowed by
+nature and cultivated by art! Sometimes, however, self-made men and
+their wives are wise in their generation and understand the terms on
+which society receives its members; in which case the marital
+Reputation goes to the front alone, and the conjugal Cinderella rests
+tranquilly in the rear.
+
+Notoriety of all kinds, short of murder or forgery, is one way of
+paying one's shot, specially into the coffers of the Leo Hunters, of
+whom there are many. It is shot paid to the general fund when one has
+seen an accident--better still, if one has been in it. Many a man has
+owed a rise in his scale of dinners to a railway smash; and to have
+been nearly burnt to death, to have escaped by a miracle from
+drowning, to have been set on by footpads or to have been visited by
+burglars, is worth a round of At Homes, because of the ready cash of a
+real adventure. To be connected more or less remotely with the
+fashionable tragedy of the hour is paying one's shot handsomely. To
+have been on speaking terms with the latest respectable scoundrel
+unmasked, or to have had dealings, sufficiently remote to have
+been cleanly, with the newest villainy, will be accepted as shot
+while the public interest in the matter lasts. A chance visit to
+ultra-grandees--grandees in ratio to the ordinary sphere--is shot
+paid with an air. A bad illness, or the attendance on one, with the
+apparently unconscious heroism of the details, comes in as part of the
+social fine; especially if the person relating his or her experience
+has the knack of epigram or exaggeration, while still keeping local
+colour and verisimilitude intact. Interesting people who have been
+abroad and seen things have good counters for a dinner-party; paying
+their shot for themselves and their hosts too, who put them forward as
+their contribution to the funds of the commonwealth, with certainty of
+acceptance. Some pay their shot by their power of procuring orders and
+free admissions. They know the manager of this theatre or the leading
+actor of that; they are acquainted with the principal members of the
+hanging committees, and are therefore great in private views; they are
+always good for a gratuitous treat to folks who can afford to pay
+twice the sum demanded for their day's pleasure. Such people may be
+stupid, ungainly, not specially polished, in grain unpleasant; but
+they circulate in society because they pay their shot and give back
+equivalents for value received. A country-house, where there is a good
+tennis-ground and a blushing bed of strawberries, is coinage that will
+carry the possessor very far ahead through London society; and by the
+same law you will find healthy, well-conditioned country folk tolerate
+undeniable little snobs of low calibre because of that sixteen-roomed
+house in Tyburnia, a visit to which represents so many concerts, so
+many theatres, a given number of exhibitions, and a certain
+quantity of operas and parties. Had those undeniable little snobs no
+funds wherewith to pay their shot, they would have had no place kept
+for them among the rose-trees and the strawberry-beds; but, bringing
+their quota as they do, they take their seat with the rest and are
+helped in their turn.
+
+In fact, humiliating to our self-love as it may be, the truth is, we
+are all valued socially, not for ourselves integrally, not for the
+mere worth of the naked soul, but for the kind of shot that we
+pay--for the advantage or amusement to others that we can bring--for
+something in ourselves which renders us desirable as companions--or
+for something belonging to our condition which makes us remunerative
+as guests. If we have no special qualification, if we neither look
+nice nor talk well, neither bring glory nor confer pleasure, we must
+expect to be shunted to the side in favour of others who are up to the
+right mark and who give as much as they receive. If this truth were
+once fully established as a matter of social science, a great advance
+would be made; for nothing helps people so much as to clear a subject
+of what fog may lie about it. And as the tendency of the age is to
+discover the fixed laws which regulate the mutable affairs of man, it
+would be just as well to extend the inquiry from the jury-box to the
+dinner-table, and from the blue-book to the visiting-list. Why is it
+that some people struggle all their lives to get a footing in society,
+yet die as they have lived--social Sisyphuses, never accomplishing
+their perpetually-recurring task? There must be a reason for it,
+seeing that nothing is ruled by blind chance, though much seems
+to lie outside the independent will of the individual. Enlighten
+these worthy people's minds on the unwritten laws of invitation, and
+show them that--thoroughly honest souls and to be trusted with untold
+gold or with their neighbour's pretty wife, which is perhaps a harder
+test, as they may be--they are by no means to be trusted with the
+amusement of a couple of companions at a dinner-table. Show them that,
+how rich soever they may be in the rough gold of domestic morality,
+they are bankrupts in the small-change which alone passes current in
+society--and, if invited where they aspire to be, they would be taken
+on as pauper cousins unable to pay their footing and good for neither
+meat nor garnish. Let them learn how to pay their shot, and their
+difficulties would vanish. They would leave off repeating the fable of
+Sisyphus, and attain completion of endeavour. No one need say this is
+a hard or a selfish doctrine, for we all follow it in practice. Among
+the people we invite to our houses are some whom we do not specially
+like, but whom we must ask because of shot paid in kind. There are
+people who may be personally disagreeable, ill-educated,
+uninteresting, ungainly, but whom we cannot cut because of the
+relations in which we stand towards them, and who take their place by
+right, because they pay their shot with punctuality. There are
+others whom we ask because of liking or desirability, and shot paid in
+some specific form of pleasantness, as in beauty, fashion, good
+manner, notoriety; but there are none absolutely barren of all gifts
+of pleasantness to the guests, of reflected honour to ourselves, and
+of social small-change according to the currency. We do not go into
+the byways and hedges to pick up drawing-room tatterdemalions who
+bring nothing with them and are simply so much deadweight on the rest,
+occupying so much valuable space and consuming so much vital energy.
+The law of reciprocity may be hard on the strivers who are ignorant of
+its inexorable provisions; but it is a wholesome law, like other rules
+and enactments against remediable pauperism. And were we once
+thoroughly to understand that, if we would sit securely at the table
+we must put something of value into the pool--that we must possess
+advantageous circumstances, or personal desirabilities, as the shot to
+be paid for our place--the art of society would be better cultivated
+than it is now, and the classification of guests would be carried out
+with greater judgment. Surely, if the need of being gracious in
+manner, sprightly in talk, and of pleasant appearance generally--all
+cultivable qualities, and to be learned if not born in us by
+nature--were accepted as an absolute necessity, without which we must
+expect to be overlooked and excluded, drawing-rooms would be far
+brighter and dinner-tables far pleasanter than they are at present; to
+the advantage of all concerned! And, after all, society is a
+great thing in human life. If not equal in importance to the family,
+or to political virtue, it has its own special value; and whatever
+adds to its better organization is a gain in every sense.
+
+
+
+
+_WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?_
+
+
+This is a question which one half the world is at this moment asking
+the other half; with very wild answers as the result. Woman's work
+seems to be in these days everything that it was not in times past,
+and nothing that it was. Professions are undertaken and careers
+invaded which were formerly held sacred to men; while things are left
+undone which, for all the generations that the world has lasted, have
+been naturally and instinctively assigned to women to do. From the
+savage squaw gathering fuel or drawing water for the wigwam, to the
+lady giving up the keys to her housekeeper, housekeeping has been
+considered one of the primary functions of women. The man to
+provide--the woman to dispense; the man to do the rough initial work
+of bread-winning, whether as a half-naked barbarian hunting live meat
+or as a City clerk painfully scoring lines of rugged figures--the
+woman to cook the meat when got, and to lay out to the best advantage
+for the family the quarter's salary gained by casting up ledgers and
+writing advices and bills of lading. Take human society in any
+phase we like, we must come down to these radical conditions; and any
+system which ignores this division of labour, and confounds these
+separate functions, is of necessity imperfect and wrong. We have
+nothing whatever to say against the professional self-support of women
+who have no men to work for them, and who must therefore work for
+themselves in order to live. In what direction soever they can best
+make their way, let them take it. Brains and intellectual gifts are of
+no sex and no condition, and it is far more important that good work
+should be done than that it should be done by this or that particular
+set of workers. But we are speaking of the home duties of married
+women, and of those girls who have no need to earn their daily bread,
+and who are not so specially gifted as to be driven afield by the
+irrepressible power of genius. We are speaking of women who cannot
+help in the family income, but who might both save and improve in the
+home; women whose lives are one long day of idleness, _ennui_ and
+vagrant imagination, because they despise the activities into which
+they were born, while seeking outlets for their energies impossible to
+them both by functional and social restrictions.
+
+It is strange to see into what unreasonable disrepute active
+housekeeping--first social duty--has fallen in England. Take a family
+with four or five hundred a year--and we know how small a sum that is
+for 'genteel humanity' in these days--the wife who is an active
+housekeeper, even with such an income, is an exception to the
+rule; and the daughters who are anything more than drawing-room dolls
+waiting for husbands to transfer them to a home of their own, where
+they may be as useless as they are now, are rarer still. For things
+are getting worse, not better, and our young women are less useful
+even than were their mothers; while these last do not, as a rule, come
+near the housekeeping ladies of olden times, who knew every secret of
+domestic economy and made a wise and pleasant 'distribution of bread'
+their grand point of honour. The usual method of London housekeeping,
+even in the second ranks of the middle-classes, is for the mistress to
+give her orders in the kitchen in the morning, leaving the cook to
+pass them on to the tradespeople when they call. If she be not very
+indolent, and if she have a due regard for neatness and cleanliness,
+she may supplement her kitchen commands by going up stairs through
+some of the bedrooms; but after a kind word of advice to the housemaid
+if she be sweet-tempered, or a harsh note of censure if she be of the
+cross-grained type, her work in that department will be done, and her
+duties for the day are at an end. There is none of the clever
+marketing by which fifty per cent. is saved in the outlay, if a woman
+knows what she is about and how to buy; none of that personal
+superintendence, so encouraging to servants when genially performed,
+which renders slighted work impossible; none of that 'seeing to
+things' herself, or doing the finer parts of the work with her
+own hands, which used to form part of a woman's unquestioned duty. She
+gives her orders, weighs out her supplies, then leaves the maids to do
+the best they know or the worst they will, according to the degree in
+which they are supplied with faculty or conscience. Many women boast
+that their housekeeping takes them perhaps an hour, perhaps half an
+hour, in the morning, and no more; and they think themselves clever
+and commendable in proportion to the small amount of time given to
+their largest family duty. This is all very well where the income is
+such as to secure first-class servants--professors of certain
+specialities of knowledge and far in advance of the mistress; but how
+about the comfort of the house under this hasty generalship, when the
+maids are mere scrubs who ought to go through years of training if
+they are ever to be worth their salt? It may be very well too in large
+households governed by general system, and not by individual ruling;
+but where the service is scant and poor, it is a stupid,
+uncomfortable, as well as wasteful way of housekeeping. It is
+analogous to English cookery--a revolting poverty of result with
+flaring prodigality of means; all the pompous paraphernalia of
+tradespeople and their carts and their red-books for orders, with
+nothing worth the trouble of booking; and everything of less quantity
+and lower quality than would be if personal pains were taken--which is
+always the best economy.
+
+What is there in practical housekeeping less honourable than the
+ordinary work of middle-class gentlewomen? and why should women shrink
+from doing for utility, and for the general comfort of the family,
+what they would do at any time for vanity or idleness? No one need go
+into extremes, and wish our middle-class gentlewomen to become
+exaggerated Marthas occupied only with much serving, Nausicaas washing
+linen, or 'wise Penelopes' spending their lives in needlework alone.
+But, without undertaking anything unpleasant to her senses or
+degrading to her condition, a lady might do hundreds of things which
+are now left undone in a house, or are given up to the coarse handling
+of servants; and domestic life would gain in consequence. What
+degradation, for instance, is there in cookery? and how much more home
+happiness would there not be if wives would take in hand that great
+cold-mutton question? But women are both selfish and small on this
+point. Born for the most part with feebly-developed gustativeness,
+they affect to despise the stronger instinct in men, and think it low
+and sensual if they are expected to give special attention to the
+meals of the man who provides the meat. This contempt for good cooking
+is one cause of the ignorance there is among them of how to secure
+good living. Those horrible traditions of 'plain roast and boiled'
+cling about them as articles of culinary faith; and because they have
+reached no higher knowledge for themselves, they decide that no one
+else shall go beyond them. For one middle-class gentlewoman who
+understands anything about cookery, or who really cares for it as
+a scientific art or domestic necessity, there are ten thousand who do
+not; yet our mothers and grandmothers were not ashamed to be known as
+deft professors, and homes were happier in proportion to the respect
+paid to the stewpan and the stockpot. And cookery is more interesting
+now than it was then, because more advanced, more scientific, and with
+improved appliances; and, at the same time, it is of confessedly more
+importance.
+
+It may seem humiliating, to those who go in for spirit pure and
+simple, to speak of the condition of the soul as in any way determined
+by beef and cabbage; but it is so, nevertheless; the connexion between
+food and virtue, food and thought, being a very close one. And the
+sooner wives recognize this connexion the better for them and for
+their husbands. The clumsy savagery of a plain cook, or the vile
+messes of a fourth-rate confectioner, are absolute sins in a house
+where a woman has all her senses, and can, if she will, attend
+personally to the cooking. Many things pass for crimes which are
+really not so bad as this. But how seldom do we find a house where the
+lady does look after the food of the family; where clean hands and
+educated brains are put to active service for the good of others! The
+trouble would be too great in our fine-lady days, even if there were
+the requisite ability; but there is as little ability as there is
+energy, and the plain cook with her savagery and the fourth-rate
+confectioner with his rancid pastry, have it all their own way,
+according as the election is for economy or ostentation. If by chance
+we stumble on a household where the woman does not disdain housewifely
+work, and specially does not disdain the practical superintendence of
+the kitchen, there we are sure to find cheerfulness and content.
+
+There seems to be something in the life of a practical housekeeper
+that answers to the needs of a woman's best nature, and that makes her
+pleasant and good-humoured. Perhaps it is the consciousness that she
+is doing her duty--of itself a wonderful sweetener of the temper;
+perhaps the greater amount of bodily exercise keeps her liver in good
+case; whatever the cause, sure it is that the homes of the active
+housekeepers are more harmonious than those of the feckless and
+do-nothing sort. Yet the snobbish half of the middle-classes holds
+housewifely work as degrading, save in the trumpery pretentiousness of
+'giving orders.' A woman may sit in a dirty drawing room which the
+slipshod maid has not had time to clean, but she must not take a
+duster in her hands and polish the legs of the chairs:--there is no
+disgrace in the dirt, only in the duster. She may do fancy-work of no
+earthly use, but she must not be caught making a gown. Indeed very few
+women could make one, and as few will do plain needlework. They will
+braid and embroider, 'cut holes, and sew them up again,' and spend any
+amount of time and money on beads and wools for messy draperies which
+no one wants. The end, being finery, sanctions the toil and
+refines it. But they will not do things of practical use; or, if they
+are compelled by the exigencies of circumstances, they think
+themselves martyrs and badly used by the Fates.
+
+The whole scheme of woman's life at this present time is untenable and
+unfair. She wants to have all the pleasures and none of the
+disagreeables. Her husband goes to the City and does monotonous and
+unpleasant work there; but his wife thinks herself very hardly dealt
+with if asked to do monotonous housework at home. Yet she does nothing
+more elevating nor more advantageous. Novel-reading, fancy-work,
+visiting and letter-writing, sum up her ordinary occupations; and she
+considers these more to the point than practical housekeeping. In fact
+it becomes a serious question what women think themselves sent into
+the world for--what they hold themselves designed by God to be or to
+do. They grumble at having children and at the toil and anxiety which
+a family entails; they think themselves degraded to the level of
+servants if they have to do any practical housework whatever; they
+assert their equality with man, and express their envy of his life,
+yet show themselves incapable of learning the first lesson set to
+men--that of doing what they do not like to do. What, then, do they
+want? What do they hold themselves made for? Certainly some of the
+more benevolent sort carry their energies out of doors, and leave such
+prosaic matters as savoury dinners and fast shirt-buttons for
+committees and charities, where they get excitement and _kudos_
+together. Others give themselves to what they call keeping up society,
+which means being more at home in every person's house than their own;
+and some do a little weak art, and others a little feeble literature;
+but there are very few indeed who honestly buckle to the natural
+duties of their position, and who bear with the tedium of home-work as
+men bear with the tedium of office-work.
+
+The little royalty of home is the last place where a woman cares to
+shine, and the most uninteresting of all the domains she seeks to
+govern. Fancy a high-souled creature, capable of æsthetics, giving her
+mind to soup or the right proportion of chutnee for the curry! Fancy,
+too, a brilliant creature fore-going an evening's conversational glory
+abroad for the sake of a prosaic husband's more prosaic dinner! He
+comes home tired from work, and desperately in need of a good dinner
+as a restorative; but the plain cook gives him cold meat and pickles,
+or an abomination which she calls hash, and the brilliant creature,
+full of mind, thinks the desire for anything else rank sensuality. It
+seems a little hard, certainly, on the unhappy fellow who works at the
+mill for such a return; but women believe that men are made only to
+work at the mill that they may receive the grist accruing, and be kept
+in idleness and uselessness all their lives. They have no idea of
+lightening the labour of that mill-round by doing their own
+natural work cheerfully and diligently. They will do everything but
+what they ought to do. They will make themselves doctors,
+committee-women, printers, what not; but they will not learn cooking,
+and they will not keep their own houses. There never was a time when
+women were less the helpmates of men than they are at present; when
+there was such a wide division between the interests and the
+sympathies of the sexes coincident with the endeavour, on the one
+side, to approximate their pursuits.
+
+A great demand is being made now for more work for woman and wider
+fields for her labour. We confess we should feel a deeper interest in
+the question if we saw more energy and conscience put into the work
+lying to her hand at home; and we hold that she ought to perfectly
+perform the duties which we may call instinctive to her sex before
+claiming those hitherto held remote from her natural condition. Much
+of this demand springs from restlessness and dissatisfaction; little,
+if any, from higher aspirations or nobler energies unused. Indeed, the
+nobler the woman the more thoroughly she will do her own proper work,
+in the spirit of old George Herbert's well-worn line; and the less she
+will feel herself above that work. It is only the weak who cannot
+raise their circumstances to the level of their thoughts; only the
+poor in spirit who cannot enrich their deeds by their motives.
+
+That very much of this demand for more power of work comes from
+necessity and the absolute need of bread, we know; and that the demand
+will grow louder as marriage becomes scarcer, and there are more women
+adrift in the world without the protection and help of men, we also
+know. But this belongs to another part of the subject. What we want to
+insist on now is the pitiable ignorance and shiftless indolence of
+most middle-class housekeepers; and what we would urge on woman is the
+value of a better system of life at home before laying claim to the
+discharge of extra-domestic duties abroad.
+
+
+
+
+_LITTLE WOMEN._
+
+
+The conventional idea of a brave, energetic, or a supremely criminal,
+woman has always been that of a tall, dark-haired, large-armed virago
+who might pass as the younger brother of her husband, and about whom
+nature seemed to have hesitated before determining whether to make her
+a man or a woman:--a kind of debateable land, in fact, between the two
+sexes, and almost as much the one as the other. Helen Macgregor, Lady
+Macbeth, Catharine de Medici, Mrs. Manning, and the old-fashioned
+murderesses in novels, were all of the muscular, black-brigand type,
+with more or less of regal grace super-added according to
+circumstances; and it would have been thought nothing but a puerile
+fancy to have supposed the contrary of those whose personal
+description was not already known. Crime, indeed, in art and fiction,
+was generally painted in very nice proportion to the number of cubic
+inches embodied and the depth of colour employed; though we are bound
+to add that the public favour ran towards muscular heroines almost as
+much as towards muscular murderesses, which to a certain extent
+redressed the overweighted balance. Our later novelists, however, have
+altered the whole setting of the palette. Instead of five foot ten of
+black and brown, they have gone in for four foot nothing of pink and
+yellow. Instead of tumbled masses of raven hair, they have shining
+coils of purest gold. Instead of hollow caverns whence flash
+unfathomable eyes eloquent of every damnable passion, they have limpid
+lakes of heavenly blue; and their worst sinners are in all respects
+fashioned as much after the outward semblance of the ideal saint as
+they have skill to design.
+
+The original notion was a very good one, and the revolution did not
+come before it was wanted; but it has been a little overdone of late,
+and we are threatened with as great a surfeit of small-limbed
+yellow-headed criminals as we have had of the black-haired virago. One
+gets weary of the most perfect model in time, if too constantly
+repeated; as now, when we have all begun to feel that the resources of
+the angel's face and demon's soul have been more heavily drawn on than
+is quite fair, and that, given 'heavy braids of golden hair,'
+'bewildering blue eyes,' 'a small lithe frame,' and special delicacy
+of feet and hands, we are booked for the companionship, through three
+volumes, of a young person to whom Messalina or Lucrezia Borgia was a
+mere novice.
+
+And yet there is a physiological truth in this association of energy
+with smallness--perhaps, also, with a certain tint of yellow hair,
+which, with a dash of red through it, is decidedly suggestive of
+nervous force. Suggestiveness, indeed, does not go very far in an
+argument; but the frequent connexion of energy and smallness in women
+is a thing which all may verify in their own circles. In daily life,
+who is the really formidable woman to encounter?--the black-browed,
+broad-shouldered giantess, with arms almost as big in the girth as a
+man's? or the pert, smart, trim little female, with no more biceps
+than a ladybird, and of just about equal strength with a sparrow? Nine
+times out of ten, the giantess with the heavy shoulders and broad
+black eyebrows is a timid, feeble-minded, good-tempered person,
+incapable of anything harsher than a mild remonstrance with her maid,
+or a gentle chastisement of her children. Nine times out of ten her
+husband has her in hand in the most perfect working order, so that she
+would swear the moon shone at midday if it were his pleasure that she
+should make a fool of herself by her submissiveness. One of the most
+obedient and indolent of earth's daughters, she gives no trouble to
+any one, save the trouble of rousing, exciting and setting going;
+while, as for the conception or execution of any naughty piece of
+self-assertion, she is as utterly incapable of either as if she were a
+child unborn, and demands nothing better than to feel the pressure of
+the leading-strings, and to know exactly by their strain where she is
+desired to go and what to do.
+
+But the little woman is irrepressible. Too fragile to come into
+the fighting section of humanity--a puny creature whom one blow from a
+man's huge fist could annihilate--absolutely fearless, and insolent
+with the insolence which only those dare show who know that
+retribution cannot follow--what can be done with her? She is afraid of
+nothing and to be controlled by no one. Sheltered behind her weakness
+as behind a triple shield of brass, the angriest man dare not touch
+her, while she provokes him to a combat in which his hands are tied.
+She gets her own way in everything and everywhere. At home and abroad
+she is equally dominant and irrepressible, equally free from obedience
+and from fear. Who breaks all the public order in sights and shows,
+and, in spite of King, Kaiser, or Policeman X, goes where it is
+expressly forbidden that she shall go? Not the large-boned, muscular
+woman, whatever her temperament; unless, indeed, of the exceptionally
+haughty type in distinctly inferior surroundings--and then she can
+queen it royally enough and set everything at most lordly defiance.
+
+But in general the large-boned woman obeys the orders given, because,
+while near enough to man to be somewhat on a par with him, she is
+still undeniably his inferior. She is too strong to shelter herself
+behind her weakness, yet too weak to assert her strength and defy her
+master on equal grounds. She is like a flying fish--not one thing
+wholly; and while capable of the inconveniences of two lives is
+incapable of the privileges of either. It is not she, for all her
+well-developed frame and formidable looks, but the little woman, who
+breaks the whole code of laws and defies all their defenders--the
+pert, smart, pretty little woman, who laughs in your face and goes
+straight ahead if you try to turn her to the right hand or to the
+left, receiving your remonstrances with the most sublime indifference,
+as if you were talking a foreign language she could not understand.
+She carries everything before her, wherever she is. You may see her
+stepping over barriers, slipping under ropes, penetrating to the green
+benches with a red ticket, taking the best places on the platform over
+the heads of their rightful owners, settling herself among the
+reserved seats without an inch of pasteboard to float her. You cannot
+turn her out by main force. British chivalry objects to the public
+laying on of hands in the case of a woman, even when most recalcitrant
+and disobedient; more particularly if she be a small and
+fragile-looking woman. So that, if it be only a usurpation of places
+specially masculine, she is allowed to retain what she has got, amid
+the grave looks of the elders--not really displeased at the flutter of
+her ribbons among them--and the titters and nudges of the young
+fellows.
+
+If the battle is between her and another woman, they are left to fight
+it out as they best can, with the odds laid heavily on the little one.
+All this time there is nothing of the tumult of contest about her.
+Fiery and combative as she generally is, when breaking the law in
+public places she is the very soul of serene daring. She shows no
+heat, no passion, no turbulence; she leaves these as extra weapons of
+defence to women who are assailable. For herself she requires no such
+aids. She knows her capabilities and the line of attack that best
+suits her, and she knows, too, that the fewer points of contest she
+exposes the more likely she is to slip into victory; the more she
+assumes and the less she argues, the slighter the hold she gives her
+opponents. She is either perfectly good-humoured or blankly innocent;
+she either smiles you into indulgence or wearies you into compliance
+by the sheer hopelessness of making any impression on her. She may,
+indeed, if of the very vociferous and shrill-tongued kind, burst out
+into such a noisy demonstration as makes you glad to escape from her,
+no matter what spoils you leave in her hands; just as a mastiff will
+slink away from a bantam hen all heckled feathers and screeching
+cackle and tremendous assumption of doing something terrible if he
+does not look out. Any way the little woman is unconquerable; and a
+tiny fragment of humanity at a public show, setting all rules and
+regulations at defiance, is only carrying out in the matter of benches
+the manner of life to which nature has dedicated her from the
+beginning.
+
+As a rule, the little woman is brave. When the lymphatic giantess
+falls into a faint or goes off into hysterics, she storms, or bustles
+about, or holds on like a game terrier, according to the work on hand.
+She will fly at any man who annoys her, and she bears herself as
+equal to the biggest and strongest fellow of her acquaintance. In
+general she does it all by sheer pluck, and is not notorious for
+subtlety or craft. Had Delilah been a little woman she would never
+have taken the trouble to shear Samson's locks. She would have stood
+up against him with all his strength untouched on his head, and she
+would have overcome him too. Judith and Jael were both probably large
+women. The work they went about demanded a certain strength of muscle
+and toughness of sinew; but who can say that Jezebel was not a small,
+freckled, auburn-haired Lady Audley of her time, full of the
+concentrated fire, the electric force, the passionate recklessness of
+her type? Regan and Goneril might have been beautiful demons of the
+same pattern; we have the example of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers
+as to what amount of spiritual devilry can exist with the face and
+manner of an angel direct from heaven; and perhaps Cordelia was a tall
+dark-haired girl, with a pair of brown eyes, and a long nose sloping
+downwards.
+
+Look at modern Jewesses, with their flashing Oriental orbs, their
+night-black tresses and the dusky shadows of their olive-coloured
+complexions. As catalogued properties according to the ideal, they
+would be placed in the list of the natural criminals and law-breakers,
+while in reality they are about as meek and docile a set of women as
+are to be found within the four seas. Pit a fiery little Welsh woman
+or a petulant Parisienne against the most regal and Junonic
+amongst them, and let them try conclusions in courage, in energy, in
+audacity; the Israelitish Juno will go down before either of the small
+Philistines, and the fallacy of weight and colour in the generation of
+power will be shown without the possibility of denial.
+
+Even in those old days of long ago, when human characteristics were
+embodied and deified, we do not find that the white-armed large-limbed
+Hera, though queen by right of marriage, lorded it over her sister
+goddesses by any superior energy or force of nature. On the contrary,
+she was rather a heavy-going person, and, unless moved to anger by her
+husband's numerous infidelities, took her Olympian life placidly
+enough, and once or twice got cheated in a way that did no great
+credit to her sagacity. A little Frenchwoman would have sailed round
+her easily; and as it was, shrewish though she was in her speech when
+provoked, her husband not only deceived but chastised her, and reduced
+her to penitence and obedience as no little woman would have suffered
+herself to be reduced.
+
+There is one celebrated race of women who were probably the
+powerfully-built, large-limbed creatures they are assumed to have
+been, and as brave and energetic as they were strong and big--the
+Norse women of the sagas, who, for good or evil, seem to have been a
+very influential element in the old Northern life. Prophetesses;
+physicians; dreamers of dreams and accredited interpreters as well;
+endowed with magic powers; admitted to a share in the councils of
+men; brave in war; active in peace; these fair-haired Scandinavian
+women were the fit comrades of their men, the fit wives and mothers of
+the Berserkers and the Vikings. They had no tame nor easy life of it,
+if all we hear of them be true. To defend the farm and the homestead
+during their husbands' absence, and to keep these and themselves
+intact against all bold rovers to whom the Tenth Commandment was an
+unknown law; to dazzle and bewilder by magic arts when they could not
+conquer by open strength; to unite craft and courage, deception and
+daring, loyalty and independence, demanded no small amount of opposing
+qualities. But the Steingerdas and Gudrunas were generally equal to
+any emergency of fate or fortune, and slashed their way through the
+history of their time more after the manner of men than of women;
+supplementing their downright blows by side thrusts of craftier
+cleverness when they had to meet power with skill and were fain to
+overthrow brutality by fraud. The Norse women were certainly as
+largely framed as they were mentally energetic, and as crafty as
+either; but we know of no other women who unite the same
+characteristics and are at once cunning, strong, brave and true.
+
+On the whole, then, the little women have the best of it. More petted
+than their bigger sisters, and infinitely more powerful, they have
+their own way in part because it really does not seem worth while
+to contest a point with such little creatures. There is nothing that
+wounds a man's self-respect in any victory they may get or claim.
+Where there is absolute inequality of strength, there can be no
+humiliation in the self-imposed defeat of the stronger; and as it is
+always more pleasant to have peace than war, and as big men for the
+most part rather like than not to put their necks under the tread of
+tiny feet, the little woman goes on her way triumphant to the end;
+breaking all the laws she does not like and throwing down all the
+barriers which impede her progress; irresistible and irrepressible in
+all circumstances and under any conditions.
+
+
+
+
+_IDEAL WOMEN._
+
+
+It is often objected against fault-finders, writers or others, that
+they destroy but do not build up; that while industriously blaming
+errors they take good care not to praise the counteracting virtues;
+that in their zeal against the vermin of which they are seeking to
+sweep the house clean they forget the nobler creatures which do the
+good work of keeping things sweet and wholesome. But it is impossible
+to be continually introducing the saving clause, 'all are not so bad
+as these.' The seven thousand righteous who have not bowed the knee to
+Baal are understood to exist in all communities; and, vicious as any
+special section may be, there must always be the hidden salt and
+savour of the virtuous to keep the whole from falling into utter
+corruption.
+
+This is specially true of modern women. Certainly some of them are as
+unsatisfactory as any of their kind who have ever appeared on earth
+before; but it would be very queer logic to infer therefore that all
+are bad alike, and that our modern womanhood is as ill off as the
+Cities of the Plain, which could not be saved for want of the ten just
+men to save them. Happily, we have noble women among us yet;
+women who believe in something besides pleasure, and who do their work
+faithfully, wherever it may lie; women who can and do sacrifice
+themselves for love and duty, and who do not think they were sent into
+the world simply to run one mad life-long race for wealth, for
+dissipation, for distinction. But the life of such women is
+essentially in retirement; and though the lesson they teach is
+beautiful, yet its influence is necessarily confined, because of the
+narrow sphere of the teacher. When public occasions for devotedness
+occur, we in some sort measure the extent to which the self-sacrifice
+of women can be carried; but in general their noblest virtues come out
+only in the quiet sacredness of home, and the most heroic lives of
+patience and well-doing go on in seclusion, uncheered by sympathy and
+unrewarded by applause.
+
+Still, it is impossible to write of one absolute womanly ideal--one
+single type that shall satisfy every man's fancy; for, naturally, what
+would be perfection to one is imperfection to another, according to
+the special bent of the individual mind. Thus one man's ideal of
+womanly perfection is in beauty, mere physical outside beauty; and not
+all the virtues under heaven could warm him into love with red hair or
+a snub nose. He is entirely happy if his wife be undeniably the
+handsomest woman of his acquaintance, and holds himself blessed when
+all men admire and all women envy. But he is blessed for his own
+sake rather than for hers. Pleasant as her loveliness is to look on,
+it is pleasanter to know that he is the possessor of it. The
+'handsomest woman in the room' comes into the same category as the
+finest picture or the most thoroughbred horse within his sphere; and
+if the degree of pride in his possession be different, the kind is the
+same. And so in minor proportions--from the most beautiful woman of
+all, to simply beauty as a _sine quâ non_, whatever else may be
+wanting. One other thing only is as absolute as this beauty, and that
+is its undivided possession.
+
+Another man's ideal is a good housekeeper and a careful mother; and he
+does not care a rush whether his wife, if she is these, be pretty or
+ugly. Provided she is active and industrious, minds the house well,
+brings up the children as they ought to be brought up, has good
+principles, is trustworthy and even-tempered, he is not particular as
+to colour or form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or a
+squint. Given the broad foundations of an honourable home, and he will
+forego the lath and plaster of personal appearance which will not bear
+the wear and tear of years and their troubles. The solid virtues
+stand. His balance at the banker's is a fact; his good name and credit
+with the tradespeople are facts; so is the comfort of his home; so are
+the health, the morals, the education of his children. All these are
+the true realities of life to him; but the beauty which changes to
+deformity by small-pox, which fades under dyspepsia, grows stale
+by habit, and is worn threadbare by the end of twenty years, is only a
+skin-deep grace which he does not value. Perhaps he is right.
+Certainly, some of the happiest marriages amongst one's acquaintances
+are those where the wife has not one perceptible physical charm, and
+where the whole force of her magnetic value lies in what she is, not
+in how she looks.
+
+Another man wants a tender, adoring, fair-haired seraph, who will
+worship him as a demigod and accept him as her best revelation of
+strength and wisdom. The more dependent she is, the better he will
+love her; the less of conscious thought, of active will, of
+originative power she has, the greater will be his regard and
+tenderness. To be the one sole teacher and protector of such a gentle
+little creature seems to him the most delicious joy and the best
+condition of married life; and he holds Milton's famous lines to be
+expressive of the only fitting relations between men and women. The
+adoring seraph is his ideal; Griselda, Desdemona, Lucy Ashton, are his
+highest culminations of womanly grace; and the qualities which appeal
+the most powerfully to his generosity are the patience which will not
+complain, the gentleness that cannot resent, and the love which
+nothing can chill.
+
+Another man wants a cultivated intelligence in his ideal. As an
+author, an artist, a student, a statesman, he would like his wife to
+be able to help him by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect.
+He believes in the sex of minds, and holds no work complete which
+has not been created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees
+how women have helped on the leaders in troublous times; he knows that
+almost all great men have owed something of their greatness to the
+influence of a mother or a wife; he remembers how thoughts which had
+lain dumb and dormant in men's brains for more than half their
+lifetime have suddenly wakened up into speech and activity by the
+influence of a woman great enough to call them forth. The adoring
+seraph would be an encumbrance and nothing better than a child on his
+hands; and the soul which had to be awakened and directed by him would
+run great chance of remaining torpid and inactive all its days. He has
+his own life to lead and round off; and, so far from wishing to
+influence another's, he wants to be helped for himself.
+
+Another man cares only for the birth and social position of the woman
+to whom he gives his name and affection. To another yellow gold stands
+higher than blue blood, and 'my wife's father' may have been a
+rag-picker, so long as rag-picking had been distilled in a
+sufficiently rich alembic leaving a residuum admitting no kind of
+doubt. Venus herself without a dowry would be only a pretty seaside
+girl with a Newtown pippin in her hand; but Miss Kilmansegg would be
+something worth thinking of, if but little worth looking at.
+
+One man delights in a smart, vivacious little woman of the
+irrepressible kind. It makes no difference to him how petulant
+she is, how full of fire and fury; the most passionate bursts of
+temper simply amuse him, like the anger of a canary-bird, and he holds
+it fine fun to watch the small virago in her tantrums, and to set her
+going again when he thinks she has been a long enough time in
+subsidence. His ideal of woman is an amusing little plaything, with a
+great facility for being put up, and a dash of viciousness to give it
+piquancy. Another wants a sweet and holy saint whose patient humility
+springs from principle rather than from fear; another likes a
+blithe-tempered, healthy girl with no nonsense about her, full of fun
+and ready for everything, and he is not particular as to the strict
+order or economy of the housekeeping, provided only his wife is at all
+times willing to be his pleasant playmate and companion. Another
+delights in something very quiet, very silent, very home-staying. One
+must have first-rate music in his ideal woman; another, unimpeachable
+taste; a third, strict order; a fourth, liberal breadth of nature; and
+each has his own ideal, not only of nature but of person--to the exact
+shade of the hair, the colour of the eyes and the oval of the face.
+But all agree in the great fundamental requirements of truth and
+modesty and love and unselfishness; for though it is impossible to
+write of one womanly ideal as an absolute, it is very possible to
+detail the virtues which ought to belong to all alike.
+
+If this diversity of ideals be true of individuals, it is especially
+true of nations, each of which has its own ideal woman varying
+according to what is called the genius of the country. To the
+Frenchman, if we are to believe Michelet and the novelists, it is a
+feverish little creature, full of nervous energy but without muscular
+force; of frail health and feeble organization; a prey to morbid
+fancies which she has no strength to control nor yet to resist; now
+weeping away her life in the pain of finding that her husband--a man
+gross and material because husband--does not understand her, now
+sighing over her delicious sins in the arms of the lover who does;
+without reasoning faculties but with divine intuitions which are as
+good as revelations; without cool judgment but with the light of
+burning passions which guide her just as well; thinking by her heart
+and carrying the most refined metaphysics into her love; subtle;
+incomprehensible by the coarser brains of men and women who are only
+honest; a creature born to bewilder and to be misled, to love and to
+be adored, to madden men and to be destroyed by them.
+
+It does not much signify that the reality is a shrewd, calculating,
+unromantic woman, with a hard face and keen eyes, who for the most
+part makes a good practical wife to her common-sense middle-aged
+husband, who thinks more of her social position than of her feelings,
+more of her children than of her lovers, more of her purse than of her
+heart, and whose great object of life is a daily struggle for
+centimes. It pleases the French to idealize their eminently practical
+and worldly-wise women into this queer compound of hysterics and
+adultery; and if it pleases them it need not displease us. To the
+German his ideal is of two kinds--one, his Martha, the domestic
+broad-faced _Hausmutter_, who cooks good dinners at small cost, and
+mends the family linen as religiously as if this were the Eleventh
+Commandment specially appointed for feminine fingers to keep, the
+poetic culmination of whom is Charlotte cutting bread and butter; the
+other, his Mary, his Bettina, full of mind and æsthetics and
+heart-uplifting love, yearning after the infinite with holes in her
+stockings and her shoes down at heel. For what are coarse material
+mendings to the æsthetic soul yearning after the Infinite and
+worshipping at the feet of the prophet?
+
+In Italy the ideal woman of late times was the ardent patriot, full of
+active energy, of physical force, of dauntless courage. In Poland it
+is the patriot too, but of a more refined and etherealized type,
+passively resenting Tartar tyranny by the subtlest feminine scorn, and
+living in perpetual music and mourning. In Spain it is a woman
+beautiful and impassioned, with the slight drawback of needing a world
+of looking after, of which the men are undeniably capable. In
+Mohammedan countries generally it is a comely smooth-skinned Dudù,
+patient and submissive, always in good humour with her master,
+economical in house-living to please the meanness, and gorgeous in
+occasional attire to gratify the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental;
+but by no means Dudù ever asleep and unoccupied. For, if not
+allowed to take part in active outside life, the Eastern's wife or
+wives have their home duties and their maternal cares like all other
+women, and find to their cost that, if they unduly neglect them, they
+will have a bad time of it with Ali Ben Hassan when the question comes
+of piastres and sequins, and the dogs of Jews who demand payment, and
+the pigs of Christians who follow suit.
+
+The American ideal is of two kinds, like the German--the one, the
+clever manager, the woman with good executive faculty in the matters
+of buckwheat cakes and oyster gumbo, as is needed in a country so
+poorly provided with 'helps;' the other, the aspiring soul who puts
+her aspirations into deeds, and goes out into the world to do battle
+with the sins of society as editress, preacher, stump-orator and the
+like. It must be rather embarrassing to some men that this special
+manifestation of the ideal woman at times advocates miscegenation and
+free love; but perhaps we of the narrow old conventional type are not
+up to the right mark yet, and have to wait until our own women are
+thoroughly emancipated before we can rightly appreciate these
+questions. At all events, if this kind of thing pleases the Americans,
+it is no more our business to interfere with them than with the French
+compound; and if miscegenation and free love seem to them the right
+manner of life, let them follow it.
+
+In all countries, then, the ideal woman changes, chameleon-like, to
+suit the taste of men; and the great doctrine that her happiness
+does somewhat depend on his liking is part of the very foundation of
+her existence. According to his will she is bond or free, educated or
+ignorant, lax or strict, housekeeping or roving; and though we
+advocate neither the bondage nor the ignorance, yet we do hold to the
+principle that, by the laws which regulate all human communities
+everywhere, she is bound to study the wishes of man and to mould her
+life in harmony with his liking. No society can get on in which there
+is total independence of sections and members, for society is built up
+on the mutual dependence of all its sections and all its members.
+Hence the defiant attitude which women have lately assumed, and their
+indifference to the wishes and remonstrances of men, cannot lead to
+any good results whatever. It is not the revolt of slaves against
+their tyrants which they have begun--in that we could sympathize--but
+it is a revolt against their duties.
+
+And this it is which makes the present state of things so deplorable.
+It is the vague restlessness, the fierce extravagance, the neglect of
+home, the indolent fine-ladyism, the passionate love of pleasure which
+characterises the modern woman, that saddens men and destroys in them
+that respect which their very pride prompts them to feel. And it is
+the painful conviction that the ideal woman of truth and modesty and
+simple love and homely living has somehow faded away under the paint
+and tinsel of this modern reality which makes us speak out as we
+have done, in the hope--perhaps a forlorn one--that if she could be
+made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she would, by the
+very force of natural instinct and social necessity, order herself in
+some accordance with the lost ideal, and become again what we once
+loved and what we all regret.
+
+
+
+
+_PINCHBECK._
+
+
+Not many years ago no really refined gentlewoman would have worn
+pinchbeck. False jewelry and imitation lace were touchstones with the
+sex, and the woman who would condescend to either was assumed, perhaps
+not quite without reason, to have lost something more than the mere
+niceness of technical taste. This feeling ran through the whole of
+society, and pinchbeck was considered as at once despicable and
+disreputable. The successful speculator, sprung from nothing, who had
+made his fortune during the war, might buy land, build himself a
+mansion and set up a magnificent establishment, but he was never
+looked on by the aboriginal gentry of the place as more than a lucky
+adventurer; and the blue blood, perhaps nourishing itself on thin
+beer, turned up its nose disdainfully at the claret and Madeira which
+had been personally earned and not lineally inherited. This
+exclusiveness was narrow in spirit and hard in individual working; and
+yet there was a wholesome sentiment underlying its pride which made it
+valuable in social ethics, if immoral on the score of natural equality
+and human charity. It was the rejection of pretentiousness, however
+gilded and glittering, in favour of reality, however poor and
+barren; it was the condemnation of make-believe--the repudiation of
+pinchbeck. It is not a generation since this was the normal attitude
+of society towards its _nouveaux riches_ and Brummagem jewelry; but
+time moves fast in these later days, and national sentiments change as
+quickly as national fashions.
+
+We are in the humour to rehabilitate all things, and pinchbeck has now
+its turn with the rest. The lady of slender means who would refuse to
+wear imitation lace and false jewelry is as rare as the country
+society which would exclude the _nouveau riche_ because of his
+newness, and not adopt him because of his riches. The whole anxiety
+now is, not what a thing is, but how it looks--not its quality, but
+its appearance. Every part of social and domestic life is dedicated to
+the apotheosis of pinchbeck. It meets us at the hall-door, where
+miserable stuccoed pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial
+dignity on a wretched jerry-built little villa run up without regard
+to one essential of home comfort or of architectural truth. It goes
+with us into the cold, conventional drawing-room, where all is for
+show and nothing for use, in which no one lives, and which is just the
+mere pretence of a dwelling-room, set out to deceive the world into
+the belief that its cheap finery is the expression of the every-day
+life and circumstances of the family. It sits with us at the table,
+which a confectioner out of a back street has furnished and where
+everything, down to the very flowers, is hired for the occasion.
+It glitters in the brooches and bracelets of the women, in the studs
+and signet-rings of the men. It is in the hired broughams, the hired
+waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers, the cheap
+champagne, and the affectation of social consideration that meet us at
+every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle-classes is
+penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck; and for
+one family that holds itself in the honour and simplicity of truth,
+ten thousand lie, to the world and to themselves, in frippery and
+pretence.
+
+The greatest sinners in this are women. Men are often ostentatious,
+often extravagant, and not unfrequently dishonest in that broad way of
+dishonesty which is called living beyond their means--sometimes making
+up the deficit by practices which end in the dock of the Old Bailey;
+but, as a rule, they go in for the real thing in details, and their
+pinchbeck is at the core rather than on the surface. Women, on the
+contrary, give themselves up to a more general pretentiousness, and,
+provided they can make a show, care very little about the means;
+provided they can ring their metal on the counter, they ignore the
+want of the hall-stamp underneath. Locality, dress, their
+visiting-list and domestic appearances are the four things which they
+demand shall be in accord with their neighbours'; and for these four
+surfaces they will sacrifice the whole internal fabric. They will have
+a showy-looking house, encrusted with base ornamentation and false
+grandeur, though it lets in wind, rain and noise almost as if it
+were made of mud or canvas, rather than a plain and substantial
+dwelling-place, with comfort instead of stucco, and moderately thick
+walls instead of porches and pilasters. Most of their time is
+necessarily passed at home, but they will undergo all manner of house
+discomfort resulting from this preference of cheap finery over solid
+structure, rather than forego their 'genteel locality' and stereotyped
+ornamentation. A family of daughters on the one side, diligent over
+the 'Battle of Prague;' a nursery full of crying babies on the other;
+more Battles of Prague opposite, diversified by a future Lind
+practising her scales unweariedly; water-pipes bursting in the frost;
+walls streaming in the thaw; the lower offices reeking and green with
+damp; the upper rooms too insecure for unrestricted movement--all
+these, and more miseries of the same kind, a woman given over to the
+worship of pinchbeck willingly encounters rather than shift into a
+locality relatively unfashionable to her sphere, but where she could
+have substantiality and comfort for the same rent that she pays now
+for flash and show.
+
+In dress it is the same thing. She must look like her neighbours, no
+matter whether they can spend pounds to her shillings, so runs up a
+milliner's bill beyond what she ought to afford for the whole family
+expenses. If others can buy gold, she can manage pinchbeck. Glass that
+looks like jet, like filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is
+every bit to her as good as the real thing; and if she cannot
+compass Valenciennes and Mechlin, she can go to Nottingham and buy
+machine-made imitations that will make quite as fine a show. How poor
+soever she may be, she must hang herself about with ornaments made of
+painted wood, of glass, of vulcanite; she must break out into spangles
+and beads and chains and _benoîtons_, which are cheap luxuries and, as
+she thinks, effective decorations. Flimsy silks make as rich a rustle
+to her ear as the stateliest brocade; and cotton velvet delights the
+soul that cannot aspire to Genoa. The love of pinchbeck is so deeply
+ingrained in her that even if, in a momentary fit of aberration into
+good taste, she condescends to a simple material about which there can
+be neither disguise nor pretence, she must load it with that
+detestable cheap finery of hers till she makes herself as vulgar in a
+muslin as she was in a cotton velvet. The _simplex munditiis_, which
+used to be held as a canon of feminine good taste, is now abandoned
+altogether, and the more she can bedizen herself according to the
+pattern of a Sandwich islander the more beautiful she thinks
+herself--the more certain the fascination of the men and the greater
+the jealousy of the women. This is the cause of all the tags and
+streamers, the bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces there, the
+puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off some dead girl's
+head, wherewith the modern Englishwoman delights to make herself
+hideous. It is pinchbeck throughout.
+
+But we fear woman is past praying for in the matter of fashion; and
+that she is too far given over to the abomination of pretence to be
+called back to truth for any ethical reason whatsoever, or indeed by
+anything short of high examples. And then, if simplicity became the
+fashion, we should have our pinchbeck votaries translating that into
+extremes as they do now with ornamentation; if my lady took to
+plainness, they would go to nakedness.
+
+Another bit of pinchbeck is the visiting-list--the cards of invitation
+stuck against the drawing-room glass--with the grandest names and
+largest fortunes put forward, irrespective of dates or tenses. The
+chance contact with the people represented may be quite out of the
+ordinary circumstances of life, but their names are paraded as if an
+accident, which has happened once and may never occur again, were in
+the daily order of events. They are brought to the front to make
+others believe that the whole social substance is of the same quality;
+that generals and admirals and lords and ladies are the common
+elements of the special circle in which the family habitually moves;
+that pinchbeck is good gold, and that 'composition' means marble.
+Women are exceedingly tenacious of these pasteboard appearances. In a
+house with its couple of female servants, where formal visitors are
+very rare and invitations, save by friendly word of mouth, rarer
+still, you may see a cracked china bowl or cheap mock _patera_ on the
+hall table, to receive the cards which are assumed to come in the
+thick showers usual with high people who have hall-porters and a
+thousand names or more on their books. The pile gets horribly dusty to
+be sure, and the upper layer turns by degrees from cream-colour to
+brown; but antiquity is not held to weaken the force of grandeur. The
+titled card left on a chance occasion more than a year ago still keeps
+the uppermost place, still represents a perpetual renewal of
+aristocratic visits and an unbroken succession of social triumphs.
+Yellowed and soiled, it is none the less the trump-card of the list;
+and while the outside world laughs and ridicules, the lady at home
+thinks that no one sees through this puerile pretence, and that the
+visiting-list is accepted according to the status of the fugleman at
+the head. She is very happy if she can say that the pattern of her
+dress, her cap, her bonnet, was taken from that of Lady So and So's;
+and we may be quite sure that all personal contact with grand folks so
+expresses itself and perpetuates the memory of the event, by such
+imitation--at a distance. It is too good an occasion for the airing of
+pinchbeck to be disregarded; consequently, for the most part it is
+turned to this practical account. Whether the fashion be suited to the
+material or to the other parts of the dress, is quite a secondary
+consideration; it being of the essence of pinchbeck to despise both
+fitness and harmony.
+
+There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the appearance of social
+influence, much cultivated by women of a certain activity of mind and
+with more definite aims than all women have. This belongs to a
+grade higher than the small pretences of which we have been
+speaking--to women who have money, and so far have one reality, but
+who have not, by their own birth or their husbands', the original
+standing which would give them this social influence as of right. Some
+make themselves notorious for their drawing-room patronage of artists,
+which however does not include buying their pictures; others gather
+round them scores of obscure authors, whose books they talk of but do
+not read; a few, a short time since, were centres of spiritualistic
+circles and got a queer kind of social influence thereby, so far as
+Philistine desire to witness the 'manifestations' went; and one or two
+are names of weight in the emancipated ranks, and take chiefly to what
+they call 'working women.' These are they who attend Ladies'
+Committees, where they talk bosh and pound away at utterly
+uninteresting subjects as diligently as if what they said had any
+point in it, and what they did any ultimate issue in probability or
+common sense. But beyond the fact of having a large house, where their
+several sets may assemble at stated periods, these would-be lady
+patronesses are utterly impotent to help or to hinder; and their
+patronage is just so much pinchbeck, not worth the trouble of
+weighing.
+
+In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless dissatisfaction with
+what they are and ceaseless endeavour to appear something they are
+not, our middle-class ladies are doing themselves and society
+infinite mischief. They set the tone to the world below them; and the
+small tradespeople and the servants, when they copy the vices of their
+superiors, do not imitate her grace the duchess, but the doctor's wife
+over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door, and the young ladies
+everywhere, who all try to appear like women of rank and fortune, and
+who are ashamed of nothing so much as of industry, truth and
+simplicity. Hence the rage for cheap finery in the kitchen, just a
+trifle more ugly and debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence
+the miserable pretentiousness and pinchbeck fine-ladyism filtering
+like poison through every pore of our society, to result God only
+knows in what grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and
+education will come to the front and endeavour to stay the plague
+already begun. Chains and brooches may seem but small material causes
+for important moral effects, but they are symbols; and, as symbols,
+they are of deep national value.
+
+No good will be done till we get back some of our fine old horror of
+pinchbeck, and once more insist on Truth as the foundation of our
+national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do
+not land us here; and the progress of the arts and sciences must not
+be brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the
+semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances.
+Women are always rushing about the world eager after everything but
+their home business. Here is something for them to do--the
+regeneration of society by means of their own energies; the bringing
+people back to the dignity of truth and the beauty of simplicity; the
+substitution of that self-respect which is content to appear what it
+is, for the feeble pride which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot
+get gold, which endeavours so hard to hide its real estate and to pass
+for what it is not and never can be.
+
+
+
+
+_AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD._
+
+
+Amongst other queer anomalies in human nature is the difference that
+lies between sectarian sins and personal immoralities, between the
+intellectual untruth of a man's creed and the spiritual evil of his
+own nature. Rigid Calvinism, for instance, which narrows the issues of
+divine grace and shuts up the avenues of salvation from all but a
+select few, is a sour and illiberal faith; and yet a rigid Calvinist,
+simply continuing to believe in predestination and election as he was
+taught from the beginning, may be a generous, genial, large-hearted
+man. An inventor scheming out the deadliest projectile that has yet
+been devised is not necessarily indifferent to human life on his own
+account; nor is every American who talks tall talk about the glorious
+destinies of his country and the infinite superiority of his
+countrymen, as conceited personally as he is vainglorious nationally.
+In fact, he may be a very modest fellow by his own fireside; and
+though in his quality of American he is of course able to whip
+universal creation, in his mere quality of man he is quite ready to
+take the lower seat at the table and to give honour where honour is
+due.
+
+This kind of distinction between the faults of the sect and the
+person, the nature and the cause, is very noticeable in women; and
+especially in all things relating to themselves. Individually, many
+among them are meek and long-suffering enough, and would be as little
+capable of resenting a wrong as of revenging it. Being used from the
+cradle to a good deal of snubbing, they take to it kindly as part of
+the inevitable order of things, and kiss the chastening rod with
+edifying humility; but, collectively, they are the most impatient of
+rebuke, the most arrogant in moral attitude, and the most restive of
+all created things sought to be led or driven. The woman who will bear
+to hear of her personal faults without offering a word in
+self-defence, and who will even say peccavi quite humbly if hard
+pressed, fires up into illimitable indignation when told that her
+foibles are characteristic of her sex, and that she is no worse than
+nature meant her to be. Personally she is willing to confess that she
+is only a poor worm grovelling in the dust--perhaps an exceptionally
+poor worm, if of the kind given to spiritual asceticism--but by her
+class she claims to be considered next door to an angel, and arrogates
+to her sex virtues which she would blush to claim on her own behalf.
+
+Men, as men, are all sorts of bad things, as every one knows. They are
+selfish, cruel, tyrannical, sensual, unjust, bloodthirsty--where does
+the list end? and human nature in the abstract is a bad thing
+too, given over to lies and various deadly lusts; but women, as women,
+are exempt from any special share in the general iniquity, and only
+come under the ban with universal nature--with lambs and doves and
+other pretty creatures--not quite perfection, because of the Fall
+which spoilt everything, and yet very near it. As children of the rash
+parents who corrupted the race they certainly suffer from the general
+infection of sin that followed, but, as daughters contrasted with the
+sons, they are so far superior to those evil-minded brethren of theirs
+that their comparative virtues by sex override their positive vices by
+race. As individuals, they are worms; as human beings, they are poor
+sinful souls; but by their womanhood they are above rebuke.
+
+Women have been so long wrapped in this pleasant little delusion about
+the sacredness of their sex, and the perfections belonging thereto by
+nature, that any attempt to show them the truth and convince them that
+they too are guilty of the mean faults and petty ways common to a
+fallen humanity--whereof certain manifestations are special to
+themselves--is met with the profound scorn or shrill cries of
+affronted womanhood. A man who speaks of their faults as they appear
+to him, and as he suffers by them, is illiberal and unmanly, and the
+rage of the more hysterically indignant would not be very far below
+that of the Thracian Mænads, could they lay hands on the offending
+Orpheus of the moment; but a woman who speaks from knowledge, and
+touches the weak places and the sore spots known best to the
+initiated, is a traitress even baser than the rude man who perhaps
+knows no better.
+
+The whole life and being of womanhood must be held sacred from
+censure, exalted as it is by a kind of sentimental apotheosis that
+will not bear reasoning about, to something very near divinity. Even
+the follies of fashion must be exempt from both ridicule and rebuke,
+on the ground of man's utter ignorance of the merits of the question;
+for how should a poor male body know anything about trains or
+crinolines, or the pleasure that a woman feels in making herself
+ridiculous or indecent in appearance and a nuisance to her neighbours?
+while, for anything graver than the follies of fashion, it is in a
+manner high treason against the supremacy of the sex to assume that
+they deserve either ridicule or rebuke. Besides, it is indelicate.
+Women are made to be worshipped, not criticized; to be reverenced as
+something mystically holy and incomprehensible by the grosser
+masculine faculties; and it is indiscreet, to say the least of it,
+when vile man takes it on himself to test the idol by the hard
+mechanical tests of truth and common-sense, and to show the world how
+much alloy is mingled with the gold.
+
+This is in ethics what the Oriental's reserve about his harem is in
+domestic life. The sacredness of a Mohammedan's womankind must be so
+complete that they are even nameless to the coarser sex; and not,
+'How is your wife?' 'How are your daughters?' but, 'How is your
+house?' is the only accepted form of words by which Ali may ask Hassan
+about the health of his Fatimas and Zuliekas. In much the same way our
+women must be kept behind the close gilded gratings of affected
+perfectness, and, above all things, never publicly discussed--much
+less publicly condemned.
+
+It is by no means a proof of wisdom, or of the power of logically
+reasoning out a position and its consequences, that women should thus
+demand to be treated as things superior to the faults and follies of
+humanity at large. They are clamouring loudly, and with some justice,
+for an equal share in the world's work and wages, and it is
+wonderfully stupid in them to stand on their womanly dignity and their
+quasi-sacredness, when told of their faults and measured according to
+their shortcomings, not their pretensions. If they come down into the
+arena to fight, they must fight subject to the conditions of the
+arena. They must not ask for special rules to be made in their
+behalf--for blunted weapons on the one side and impregnable defences
+on the other. If they demand either mystic reverence or chivalric
+homage they must be content with their own narrow but safe enclosure,
+where they have nothing to do but to look at the turmoil below, and
+accept with gratitude such portions of the good things fought for as
+the men to whom they belong see fit to bring them. They cannot at one
+and the same time have the good of both positions--the courtesy
+claimed by weakness and the honour paid to prowess. If they mingle in
+the _mêlée_ they must expect as hard knocks as the rest, and must
+submit to be bullied when they hit foul and to be struck home when
+they hit wide. If they do not like these conditions, let them keep out
+of the fray altogether; but if they choose to mingle in it, no
+hysterics of affronted womanhood, however loud the shrieks, will keep
+them safe from hard knocks and rough treatment.
+
+Time out of mind women have been credited with all the graces and
+virtues possible in a world which 'the trail of the serpent' has
+defiled. To be sure they have been cursed as well, as the causes of
+most of the miseries of society from Eve's time to Helen's, and later
+still. _Teterrima causa._ But the praise alone sticks, so far as their
+own self-belief is concerned, and men, who create the curses, may
+arrange them to their own liking. The poet says they are 'ministering
+angels;' the very name of mother is to some men almost as holy as that
+of God, and the most solemn oath a Frenchman can take in a private way
+is not by his own honour, but by the name or the head or the life of
+his mother.
+
+As wives--well, save in the old nursery doggrel which sets forth that
+they are made of 'all that's good if well understood'--as wives
+certainly they get not a few ungentle rubs. But then only a husband
+knows where the shoe pinches, and if he blasphemes during the wearing
+of it, on his own head be the guilt as is already the punishment.
+As maidens they are confessedly the most sacred manifestation of
+humanity, and to be approached with the reverence rightfully due to
+the holiest thing we know; while in the new spiritualistic world we
+are told to look for the time when the moral supremacy of woman shall
+be the recognized law of human life and the reign of violence and
+tears and all iniquity shall therefore be at an end. Thus the moral
+loveliness of collective womanhood is a dogma which men are taught from
+their boyhood as an article of faith if not a matter of experience,
+and women naturally keep them up to the mark--theoretically, at all
+events. Yet for all this lip-homage, of which so much account is
+made, women are often ill-used and brutalized, and in spite of
+their superior pretensions as often fall below men in every quality
+but that of patience. And patience is eminently the virtue of
+weakness, and therefore woman's cardinal grace; speaking broadly and
+allowing for exceptions. But what women do not see is that all this
+poetic flattery comes originally from the idealizing passion of men,
+and that, left to themselves, with only each other for critics and
+analyzers, they would soon find themselves stripped of their superfluous
+moral finery and reduced to the bare core of uncompromising truth.
+And this would be the best thing for them in the end. If they could
+but rise superior to the weakness of flattery, they would rise
+beyond the power of much that now degrades them. If they would but
+honestly consider the question of their own shortcomings when told
+where they fail, and what they cannot do, and what they will be sure
+to make a mess of if they attempt, they would prove their title to
+man's respect far more than they prove it now by the shrill cries and
+indignant remonstrances of affronted womanhood.
+
+This is the day of trial for many things--among others, for the
+capacity of women for an enlarged sphere of action and more public
+exercise of power. Do women think they show their fitness for nobler
+duties than those already assigned them, by their impatience under
+censure, which is, after all, but one mode of teaching? Are they
+qualifying themselves to act in concert with men, by assuming an
+absolute moral supremacy which it is a kind of sacrilege to deny? If
+they think they are on the right road as at present followed, let them
+go on in heaven's name. When they have wandered sufficiently far
+perhaps they will have sense enough to turn back, and see for
+themselves what mistakes they have made and might have avoided, had
+they had the wisdom of self-knowledge in only a small degree.
+Certainly, so long as womanhood is held to confer, _per se_, a special
+and unassailable divinity, so long will women be rendered
+comparatively incapable of the best work through vanity, through
+ignorance, and through impatience of the teaching that comes by
+rebuke. Nothing is so damaging in the long run as exaggerated
+pretensions; for by-and-by, after a certain period of uncritical
+homage, the world is sure to believe that the silver veil which it has
+so long respected hides deformity, not divinity, and that what is too
+sacred for public use is too poor for public honour. If the faults of
+women are not to be discussed, nor their follies condemned, because
+womanhood is a sacred thing and a man naturally respects his mother
+and sisters, then women must be content to live in a moral harem,
+where they will be safe from both the gaze and the censure of the
+outside world; they must not come down into the battle-fields and the
+workshops, where they forfeit all claim to protection and have to
+accept the man's law of 'no favour.' It must be one thing or the
+other. Either their merits must be weighed and their capacity assayed
+in reference to the place they want to take--and in doing this their
+faults must be boldly and distinctly discussed--or they must be
+content with their present condition; and, with the mystic sanctity of
+their womanhood, they must accept also its moral seclusion--belonging,
+by their very nature, to things too sacred for criticism and too
+perfect for censure. It rests with themselves to decide which it is to
+be.
+
+
+
+
+_FEMININE AFFECTATIONS._
+
+
+The old form of feminine affectation used to be that of a die-away
+fine lady afflicted with a mysterious malady known by the name of the
+vapours, or one, no less obscure, called the spleen. Sometimes it was
+an etherealized being who had no capacity for homely things, but who
+passed her life in an atmosphere of poetry and music, for the most
+part expressing her vague ideas in halting rhymes which gave more
+satisfaction to herself than to her friends. She was probably an
+Italian scholar and could quote Petrarch and Tasso, and did quote them
+pretty often; she might even be a Della Cruscan by honourable
+election, with her own peculiar wreath of laurel and her own silver
+lyre; any way she was 'a sister of the Muses,' and had something to do
+with Apollo or Minerva, whom she was sure to call Phoebus or Pallas
+Athene, as being the more poetical name of the two. Probably she had
+dealings with Diana too--for this kind of woman does not in any age
+affect the 'seaborn,' save in a hazy sentimental way that bears no
+fruits--a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit of counterpoint being
+to her worth all the manly love or fireside home delights that
+the world can give. What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or
+the rosy kisses of babies' lips compared to the pleasures of being a
+sister of the Muses and one of the beloved of Apollo! The Della
+Cruscan of former days, or her modern avatar, will tell you that music
+and poetry are godlike and bear the soul away to heaven, but that the
+nursery is a prison and babies are no dearer gaolers than any other;
+and that household duties disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the
+empyrean. This was the Ethereal Being of last generation--the
+Blue-stocking, as a poetess in white satin, with her eyes turned up to
+heaven and her hair in dishevelled cascades about her neck. She
+dropped her mantle as she finally departed; and we still have the
+Della Cruscan essence, if not in the precise form of earlier times. We
+still have ethereal beings who, as the practical outcome of their
+etherealization, rave about music and poetry and æsthetics and
+culture, and horribly neglect their babies and the weekly bills.
+
+A favourite form of feminine affectation among certain opposers of the
+prevalent fast type is in an intense womanliness--an aggravating
+intensity of womanliness--that makes one long for a little roughness,
+just to take off the cloying excess of sweetness. This kind is
+generally found with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the
+orbit, by which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face--a
+certain look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty
+thought, that is very effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness
+that the real cause of the darkened lids and cavernous orbits is most
+probably internal disease, when not antimony. Eyes of this sort stand
+for spirituality and loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of
+nature; and, as all men are neither chemists nor doctors, the
+simulation does quite as well as truth.
+
+The main characteristic of these women is self-consciousness. They
+live before a moral mirror, and pass their time in attitudinizing to
+what they think the best advantage. They can do nothing simply,
+nothing spontaneously and without the fullest consciousness as to how
+they do it, and how they look while they are doing it. In every action
+of their lives they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a
+novel, as impersonations of poetic images or thoughts. If they give
+you a glass of water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth and
+Beauty ministering to Strength or Age, as the case may be; if they
+bring you a photographic album, they are Titian's Daughter carrying
+her casket, a trifle modernized; if they hold a child in their arms,
+they are Madonnas, and look unutterable maternal love though they
+never saw the little creature before, and care for it no more than for
+the puppy in the mews; if they do any small personal office, or
+attempt to do it--making believe to tie a shoestring, comb out a curl,
+fasten a button--they are Charities in graceful attitudes, and expect
+you to think them both charitable and graceful. Nine times out of
+ten they can neither tie the string nor fasten the button with
+ordinary deftness--for they have a trick of using only the ends of
+their fingers when they do anything with their hands, as being more
+graceful and fitting in better, than would a firmer grasp, with the
+delicate womanliness of the character; and the less sweet and more
+commonplace woman who does not attitudinize morally and never parades
+her womanliness, beats them out of the field for real helpfulness, and
+is the Charity which the other only plays at being.
+
+This kind too affects, in theory, wonderful submissiveness to man. It
+upholds Griselda as the type of feminine perfection, and--still in
+theory--between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in for
+the tyranny. 'I would rather my husband beat me than let me do too
+much as I liked,' said one before she married, who, after she was
+married, managed to get entire possession of the domestic reins and
+took good care that her nominal lord should be her practical slave.
+For, notwithstanding the sweet submissiveness of her theory, the
+intensely womanly woman has the most astonishing knack of getting her
+own way and imposing her own will on others. The real tyrant among
+women is not the one who flounces and splutters and declares that
+nothing shall make her obey, but this soft-mannered, large-eyed,
+intensely womanly person who says that Griselda is her ideal and that
+the whole duty of woman lies in unquestioning obedience to man.
+
+In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman--the
+woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big buttons, of which she
+flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness
+of a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears
+unmistakeable shirt-fronts, linen collars, vests and plain ties, like
+a man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even
+nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and
+makes believe that the attitude is comfortable because it is manlike.
+If the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness,
+the mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores
+dogs and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She
+boasts of how good a marksman she is--she does not call herself
+markswoman--and how she can hit right and left and bring down both
+birds flying. When she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass
+between her first two fingers, hollows her underlip, and, throwing her
+head well back, tosses off the whole at a draught--she would disdain
+the lady-like sip or the closer gesture of ordinary women. She is
+great in cheese and bitter-beer, in claret-cup and still champagne,
+but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of effervescing wines.
+She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward, as men round their
+elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of carpentry,
+she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw. For charms
+to her watch-chain she wears a cork-screw, a gimlet, a big knife and a
+small foot-rule; and in contrast with the intensely womanly woman, who
+uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman when she does
+anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a needle would
+thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of which is
+affectation--from first to last affectation; a mere assumption of
+virile fashions utterly inharmonious to the whole being, physical and
+mental, of a woman.
+
+Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and
+orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a
+personal insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact
+limits of her mental sphere. This is the woman who assumes to be the
+antiseptic element in society; who makes believe that without her the
+world and human nature would go to the dogs and plunge headlong into
+the abyss of sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand
+heroism of man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavour and
+patient seeking after truth would serve his turn or the world's if she
+did not spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the
+boundary lines within which she would confine the range of thought and
+speculation. She knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is
+mere affectation, and that other minds have as much right to
+their own boundary lines as that which she claims for herself: but it
+seems to her pretty to assume that woman generally is the consecrated
+beadle of thought and morality, and that she, of all women, is most
+specially consecrated. As an offshoot of this kind stands the
+affectation of simplicity--the woman whose mental attitude is
+self-depreciation, and who poses herself as a mere nobody when the
+world is ringing with her praises. 'Is it possible that your Grace has
+ever heard of _me_?' said one of this class with prettily affected
+_naïveté_ at a time when all England was astir about her, and when
+colours and fashions went by her name to make them take with the
+public at large. No one knew better than the fair _ingénue_ in
+question how far and wide her fame had spread; but she thought it
+looked modest and simple to assume ignorance of her own value, and to
+declare that she was but a creeping worm when all the world knew that
+she was a soaring butterfly.
+
+There is a certain like kind of affectation very common among pretty
+women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are
+pretty, and not recognizing the effect of their beauty on men. Take a
+woman with bewildering eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape and
+fringed with long lashes which distract you to look at; the creature
+knows that her eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that fire
+burns and that ice melts; she knows the effect of that trick she has
+with them--the sudden uplifting of the heavy lid and the swift, full
+gaze that she gives right into a man's eyes. She has practised it
+often in the glass, and knows to a mathematical nicety the exact
+height to which the lid must be raised and the exact fixity of the
+gaze. She knows the whole meaning of the look and the stirring of
+men's blood that it creates; but if you speak to her of the effect of
+her trick, she puts on an air of extremest innocence, and protests her
+entire ignorance as to anything her eyes may say or mean; and if you
+press her hard she will look at you in the same way for your own
+benefit, and deny at the very moment of offence. Various other tricks
+has she with those bewildering eyes of hers--each more perilous than
+the other to men's peace; and all unsparingly employed, no matter what
+the result. For this is the woman who flirts to the extreme limits,
+then suddenly draws up and says she meant nothing. Step by step she
+has led you on, with looks and smiles and pretty doubtful phrases
+always susceptible of two meanings--the one for the ear by mere word,
+the other for the heart by the accompaniments of look and manner,
+which are intangible; step by step she has drawn you deeper and deeper
+into the maze where she has gone before as your decoy; then, when she
+has you safe, she raises her eyes for the last time, complains that
+you have mistaken her cruelly and that she has meant nothing more than
+any one else might mean; and what can she do to repair her mistake?
+Love you? marry you? No; she is engaged to your rival, who counts his
+thousands to your hundreds; and what a pity that you had not seen
+this all along and that you should have so misunderstood her! Besides,
+what is there about her that you or any one should love?
+
+Of all the many affectations of women, this affectation of their own
+harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when
+they practise their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most
+dangerous and the most disastrous. But what can one say to them? The
+very fact that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his
+perception until too late. That men love though they suffer is the
+woman's triumph, guilt and condonation; and so long as the trick
+succeeds it will be practised.
+
+Another affectation of the same family is the extreme friendliness and
+familiarity which some women adopt in their manners towards men. Young
+girls affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a
+year or so older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate,
+declare they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may not be
+natural! This form of affectation, once begun, continues through life;
+being too convenient to be lightly discarded; and youthful matrons not
+long out of their teens assume a tone and ways that would befit middle
+age counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous
+even then if the 'Indian summer' were specially bright and warm.
+
+Then there is that affectation pure and simple which is the mere
+affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the
+mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of attitude which by
+consciousness ceases to be grace, and the thousand little
+_minauderies_ and coquetries of the sex known to us all. And there is
+the affectation which people of a higher social sphere show when they
+condescend to those of low estate, and talk and look as if they are
+not quite certain of their company, and scarcely know if they are
+Christian or heathen, savage or civilized. And there is the
+affectation of the maternal passion with women who are never by any
+chance seen with their children, but who speak of them as if they were
+never out of their sight; the affectation of wifely adoration with
+women who are to be met about the world with every man of their
+acquaintance rather than with their lawful husbands; the affectation
+of asceticism in women who lead a self-enjoying life from end to end;
+and the affectation of political fervour in those who would not give
+up a ball or a new dress to save Europe from universal revolution.
+
+Go where we will, the affectation of being something she is not meets
+us in woman, like a ghost we cannot lay, a mist we cannot sweep away.
+In the holiest and the most trivial things we find it penetrating
+everywhere--even in church and at her prayers, when the pretty
+penitent, rising from her lengthy orisons, lifts her eyes and
+furtively looks about to see who has noticed her self-abasement and to
+whom her picturesque piety has commended itself. All sorts and
+patterns of good girls and pleasant women are very dear and
+delightful; but the pearl of great price is the thoroughly natural and
+unaffected woman--that is, the woman who is truthful to her heart's
+core, and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she
+would dare to tell a lie.
+
+
+
+
+_INTERFERENCE._
+
+
+About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely
+personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. We do not mean
+tyranny; that is another matter--tyranny being active while
+interference is negative--the one standing as the masculine, the other
+as the feminine, form of the same principle. Besides, tyranny has
+generally some personal gain in view when it takes it in hand to force
+people to do what they dislike to do; while interference seeks no good
+for itself at all, but simply prevents the exercise of free-will for
+the mere pleasure to be had out of such prevention.
+
+Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than domestic; but the
+curse of interference is seen most distinctly within the four walls of
+home, where also it is most felt. Very many people spend their lives
+in interfering with others--perpetually putting spokes into wheels
+with the turning of which they have nothing to do, and thrusting their
+fingers into pies about the baking of which they are in no way
+concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women make
+up the larger number and are the greater sinners. To be sure
+there are some men--small, fussy, finnicking fellows, with whom nature
+has made the irreparable blunder of sex--who are as troublesome in
+their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and most meddling
+women of their acquaintance; but the feminine characteristics of men
+are so exceptional that we need not take them into serious
+calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in any manly
+sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a right
+to control--say, with the wife's low dresses or the daughter's too
+patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are
+jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and,
+knowing what other men say of such displays, or fearing their effect,
+they stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But
+this kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes
+into another class of motives altogether and does not belong to that
+kind of interference of which we are speaking.
+
+Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other
+and with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to
+church and subscribing to their favourite mission, so much as they
+tell us what we are not to do. They do not command so much as they
+forbid. And, of all women, wives and daughters are the most given to
+handling these check-strings and putting on these drag-chains.
+Sisters, while young, are obliged to be less interfering, under pain
+of a perpetual round of bickering; for brothers are not apt to
+submit to the counsel of creatures for the most part so loftily
+snubbed as sisters; while mothers nine times out of ten are laid aside
+for all but sentimental purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be
+a boy and has learned to become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of
+personal and domestic interference lies with wives, and they know how
+to use the prerogative they assume. Take an unlucky man who smokes
+under protest--his wife not liking to forbid the pleasure entirely,
+but always grudging it and interfering with its exercise. Each cigar
+represents a battle, deepening in intensity according to the number.
+The first may have been had with only a light skirmish--perhaps a mere
+threatening of an attack that passed away without coming to actual
+onslaught; the second brings up the artillery; while the third or
+fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets the big guns thundering.
+She could understand a man smoking one cigar in the day, she says,
+with a gracious condescension to masculine weakness; but when it comes
+to more she feels that she is called on to interfere, and to do her
+best towards checking such a reprehensible excess. It does not weaken
+her position that she knows nothing of what she is talking about. She
+never smoked a cigar herself, therefore does not understand the uses
+nor the abuses of tobacco; but she holds herself pledged to interfere
+so soon as she gets the chance; and she redeems that pledge with
+energy.
+
+The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite to
+correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that he has a
+feeble digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the
+gauntlet of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines nor sups
+jollily with his friends without being plucked at and reminded that
+salmon always disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a
+headache to-morrow; and, 'My dear! when you know how bad salad is for
+you!' or, 'How can you eat that horrid pastry? You will be so ill in
+the night!' 'What! more wine? another glass of whisky? how foolish you
+are! how wrong!' The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear
+stimulants; the husband is a strong, large-framed man who can drink
+deep without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit
+is her husband's measure, and when he has gone beyond the range of her
+own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks
+herself justified in interfering with his further progress. For women
+cannot be brought to understand the capacities of a man's life; they
+cannot be made to understand that what is bad for themselves may not
+be bad for others, and that their weakness ought not to be the gauge
+of a man's strength.
+
+A pale, chilly woman, afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears
+furs and velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East
+Indian fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, father,
+sons, in about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must
+not go out without an overcoat; they must take an umbrella if the day
+is at all cloudy; they must not walk too far nor ride too hard; and
+they must be sure to be at home by a given hour.
+
+When such women as these have to do with men just on the boundary-line
+between the last days of vigour and the first of old age, they put
+forward the time of old age by many years. We see their men rapidly
+sink into the softness and incapacity of senility, when a more bracing
+life would have kept them good for half-a-dozen years longer. But
+women do not care for this. They like men to be their own companions
+and dread rather than desire the masculine comradeship which would
+keep them up to the mark of virile independence; for most women--but
+not all--would rather have their husbands manly in a womanly way than
+in a manly one, as being more within the compass of their own
+sympathies and understanding.
+
+The same kind of interference is very common where the husband is a
+man of broad humour--one who calls a spade a spade, with no
+circumlocution about an agricultural implement. According to the odd
+law of compensation which regulates so much of human action, the wife
+of such a man is generally one of the ultra-refined kind, who thinks
+herself consecrated the enduring censor of her husband's speech. As
+this is an example most frequently to be found in middle life and
+where there are children belonging to the establishment, the word of
+warning is generally 'papa!'--said with reproach or resentment,
+according to circumstances--which has, of course, the effect of
+drawing the attention of the young people to the paternal breadth of
+speech, and of fixing that special breach of decorum on their memory.
+Sometimes the wife has sufficient self-restraint not to give the word
+of warning in public, but can nurse her displeasure for a more
+convenient season; but so soon as they are alone the miserable man has
+to pass under the harrow, as only husbands with wives of a chastising
+spirit can pass under it, and his life is made a burden to him because
+of that unlucky anecdote told with such verve a few hours ago, and
+received with such shouts of pleasant laughter. Perhaps the anecdote
+was just a trifle doubtful; granted; but what does the wife take by
+her remonstrance? Most probably a quarrel; possibly a good-natured
+_peccavi_ for the sake of being let off the continuance of the sermon;
+perhaps a yawn; most certainly not reform. If the man be a man of free
+speech and broad humour by nature and liking, he will remain so to the
+end; and what the censorship of society leaves untouched, the
+interference of a wife will not control.
+
+Children come in for an enormous share of interference, which is not
+direction nor discipline, but simple interference for its own sake.
+There are mothers who meddle with every expression of individuality in
+their young people, quite irrespective of moral tendency, or whether
+the occasion is trivial or important. In the fancies, the pleasures,
+the minor details of dress in their children, there is always
+that intruding maternal finger upsetting the arrangements of the poor
+little pie as vigorously as if thrones and altars depended on the
+result. Not a game of any kind can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn
+instead of a pink, without maternal interference; so that the bloom is
+rubbed off every enjoyment, and life becomes reduced to a kind of
+goose-step, with mamma for the drill-sergeant prescribing the inches
+to be marked. Sisters, too, do a great deal of this kind of thing
+among each other; as all those who are intimate in houses where there
+are large families of unmarried girls must have seen. The nudges, the
+warning looks, the deprecating 'Amy's!' and 'Oh, Lucy's!' and 'Hush,
+Rose's!' by which some seek to act as household police over the
+others, are patent to all who use their senses. In some houses the
+younger sisters seem to have been born chiefly as training grounds for
+the elders, whereon they may exercise their powers of interference;
+and a hard time they have of it. If Emma goes to her embroidery, Ellen
+tells her she ought to practise her singing; if Jane is reading, Mary
+recommends sewing as a more profitable use of precious time; if Amy is
+at her easel, Ada wants to turn her round to the piano. It is quite
+the exception where four or five sisters leave each other free to do
+as each likes, and do not take to drilling and interference as part of
+the daily programme.
+
+Something of the reluctance to domestic service, so painfully apparent
+among the better class of working women, is due to this spirit of
+interference with women. The lady who wrote about the caps and gowns
+of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of dress, down to the very
+material of their gloves, was an instance of this spirit. For, when we
+come to analyze it, what does it really signify to us how our servants
+dress, so long as they are clean and decent and do not let their
+garments damage our goods? Fashion is almost always ridiculous, and
+women, as a rule, care more for dress than they care for anything
+else; and if the kitchen apes the parlour, and Phyllis gives as much
+thought to her new linsey as my lady gives to her new velvet, we
+cannot wonder at it, nor need we hold up our hands in horror at the
+depravity of the smaller person. Does one flight of stairs transpose
+morality? If it does not, there is no real ethical reason why my lady
+should interfere with poor Phyllis's enjoyment in her ugly little
+vanities, when she herself will not be interfered with--though press
+and pulpit both try to turn her out of her present path into the way
+which all ages have thought the best for her and the one naturally
+appointed. It is a thing that will not bear reasoning on, being simply
+a form of the old 'who will guard the guardian?' Who will direct the
+directress? and to whose interference will the interferer submit?
+
+There are two causes for this excessive love of interference among
+women. The one is the narrowness of their lives and objects, by which
+insignificant things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes;
+the other, their belief that they are the only saviours of society,
+and that without them man would become hopelessly corrupt. And to a
+certain extent this belief is true; but surely with restrictions!
+Because the clearer moral sense and greater physical weakness of women
+restrain men's fiercer passions and force them to be gentle and
+considerate, women are not, therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine
+life into whose hands is given the paying out of just so much rope as
+they think fit for the occasion. They would do better to look to their
+own tackle before settling so exactly the run of others; and if ever
+their desired time of equality is to come, it must come through mutual
+independence, not through womanly interference, and as much liberality
+and breadth given as demanded:--which, so far as humanity has gone
+hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of squaring accounts.
+
+Grant that women are the salt of the earth and the great antiseptic
+element in society, still that does not reduce everything else to the
+verge of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet they evidently think
+that it is so, and that they are each and all the keepers of keys
+which give them a special entrance to the temple of morality, and by
+which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser body of men. Hence
+they interfere and restrict and pay out just so much rope, and measure
+off just so much gambolling ground, as they think fit; then think vile
+man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things into his own
+hand and goes beyond their boundary-lines. It is all done in good if
+in a very narrow faith--that we admit willingly; but we would call
+their attention to the difference there is between influence and
+interference; which is just the difference between their ideal duty
+and their daily practice--between being the salt of the earth and the
+blister of the home.
+
+We think it only justice to put in a word for those poor henpecked
+fellows of husbands at a time when the whole cry is for Woman's
+Rights, which seems to mean chiefly her right of making man knuckle
+under on all occasions and of making one will serve for two lives--and
+that will hers. We assure her that she would get her own way in large
+matters much more easily if she would leave men more liberty in small
+ones, and not teaze them by interfering in things which do not concern
+her and have only reference to themselves.
+
+
+
+
+_THE FASHIONABLE WOMAN._
+
+
+Among the many odd products of a mature civilization, the fashionable
+woman is one of the oddest. From first to last she is an amazing
+spectacle; and if we take human life in any earnestness at all,
+whether individually, as the passage to an eternal existence the
+condition of which depends on what we are here, or collectively, as
+the highest thing we know, we can only look in blank astonishment at
+the fashionable woman and her career. She is the one sole capable
+member of the human family without duties and without useful
+occupation; the one sole being who might be swept out of existence
+altogether, without deranging the nice arrangement of things, or
+upsetting the balance of inter-dependent forces. We know of no other
+organic creation of which this could be said; but the fashionable
+woman is not as other creatures, being, fortunately, _sui generis_,
+and of a type not existing elsewhere. If we take the mere ordering of
+her days and the employment of her time as the sign of her mental
+state, we may perhaps measure to a certain extent, but not fully, the
+depth of inanity into which she has fallen and the immensity of her
+folly. Considering her as a being with the potentiality of
+reason, of usefulness, of thought, the actual result is surely the
+saddest and the strangest thing under heaven!
+
+She goes to bed at dawn and does not attempt to rise till noon. For
+the most part she breakfasts in bed, and then amuses herself with a
+cursory glance at the morning paper, if she have sufficient energy for
+so great a mental exertion; if she have not, she lies for another hour
+or two in that half-slumberous state which is so destructive to mind
+and body, weakening as it does both fibre and resolution, both muscle
+and good principle. At last she languidly rises, to be dressed in time
+for luncheon and her favoured intimates--the men who have the _entrée_
+at sacred hours when the world in general is forbidden. Some time
+later she dresses again for her drive--for the first part of the day's
+serious business; for paying visits and leaving cards; for buying
+jewelry and dresses, and ordering all sorts of unnecessary things at
+her milliner's; for this grand lady's ordinary 'day,' and that grand
+lady's extraordinary At Home; for her final slow parade in the Park,
+where she sees her friends as in an open air drawing-room, makes
+private appointments, carries on flirtations, and hears and retails
+gossip and scandal of a full flavour. Then she goes home to dress for
+tea in a 'lovely gown' of suggestive piquancy; to be followed by
+dinner, the opera or a concert, a _soirée_, or perhaps a ball or two;
+whence she returns towards morning, flushed with excitement or
+worn out with fatigue, feverish or nervous, as she has had pleasure
+and success or disappointment and annoyance.
+
+This is her outside life; and this is no fancy picture and no
+exaggeration. After a certain time of such an existence, can we wonder
+if her complexion fades and her eyes grow dim? if that inexpressible
+air of haggard weariness creeps over her, which ages even a young girl
+and makes a mature woman substantially an old one? It is then that she
+has recourse to those foul and fatal expedients of which we have heard
+more than enough in these latter days. She will not try simplicity of
+living, natural hours, wholesome occupation, unselfish endeavour, but
+rushes off for help to paints and cosmetics, to stimulants and drugs,
+and attempts to restore the tarnished freshness of her beauty by the
+very means which further corrode it. Every now and then, for very
+weariness when not for idleness, she feigns herself sick and has her
+favourite physician to attend her. In fact the funniest thing about
+her is the ease with which she takes to her bed on the slightest
+provocation, and the strange pleasure she seems to find in what is a
+penance to most women.
+
+You meet her in a heated, crowded, noisy room, looking just as she
+always looks, whatever her normal state of health may be; and in
+answer to your inquiries she tells you she has only two hours ago left
+her bed to come here, having been confined to her room for a week,
+with Dr. Blank in close attendance. If you are an intimate female
+friend she will whisper you the name of her malady, which is sure to
+be something terrific, and which, if true, would have kept her a real
+invalid for months instead of days; but if you are only a man she will
+make herself out to have been very ill indeed in a more mysterious
+way, and leave you to wonder at the extraordinary physique of
+fashionable women, which enables them to live on the most friendly
+touch-and-go terms with death, and to overcome mortal maladies by an
+effort of the will and the delights of a ducal ball. The favourite
+physician has a hard time of it with these ladies; and the more
+popular he is the harder his work. It is well for his generation when
+he is a man of honour and integrity, and knows how to add self-respect
+and moral power to the qualities which have made him the general
+favourite. For his influence over women is almost unlimited--like
+nothing so much as that of the handsome Abbé of the Regency or the
+fascinating Monsignore of Rome; and if he chooses to abuse it and turn
+it to evil issues, he can. And, however great the merit in him that he
+does not, it does not lessen the demerit of the woman that he could.
+
+Sometimes the fashionable woman takes up with the clergyman instead of
+the physician, and coquets with religious exercises rather than with
+drugs; but neither clergyman nor physician can change her mode of life
+nor give her truth nor common-sense. Sometimes there is a fluttering
+show of art-patronage, and the fashionable woman has a handsome
+painter or well-bred musician in her train, whom she pets publicly and
+patronizes graciously. Sometimes it is a young poet or a rising
+novelist, considerably honoured by the association, who dedicates his
+next novel to her, or writes verses in her praise, with such fervency
+of gratitude as sets the base Philistines on the scent of the
+secret--perhaps guessing not far amiss. For the fashionable woman has
+always some love-affair on hand, more or less platonic according to
+her own temperament or the boldness of the man--a love-affair in which
+the smallest ingredient is love; a love-affair which is vanity,
+idleness, a dissolute imagination and contempt of such prosaic things
+as morals; a love-affair not even to be excused by the tragic frenzy
+of earnest passion, and which may be guilty and yet not true.
+
+The physical effects of such a life as this are as bad as the mental,
+and both are as bad as the worst can make them. A feverish,
+overstrained condition of health either prevents the fashionable woman
+from being a mother at all, or makes her the mother of nervous, sickly
+children. Many a woman of high rank is at this moment paying bitterly
+for the disappointment of which she herself, in her illimitable folly,
+has been the sole and only cause. And, whether women like to hear it
+or not, it is none the less a truth that part of the reason for their
+being born at all is that they may in their turn bear children. The
+unnatural feeling against maternity existing among fashionable
+women is one of the worst mental signs of their state, as their
+frequent inability to be mothers is one of the worst physical results.
+This is a condition of things which no false modesty nor timid reserve
+should keep in the background, for it is a question of national
+importance, and will soon become one of national disaster unless
+checked by a healthier current and more natural circumstances.
+
+Dress, dissipation and flirting make up the questionable lines which
+enclose the life of the fashionable woman, and which enclose nothing
+useful, nothing good, nothing deep nor true nor holy. Her piety is a
+pastime; her art the poorest pretence; her pleasure consists only in
+hurry and excitement alternating with debasing sloth, in heartless
+coquetry or in lawless indulgence, as nature made her more vain or
+more sensual. As a wife she fulfils no wifely duty in any grand or
+loving sense, for the most part regarding her husband only as a banker
+or an adjunct, according to the terms of her marriage settlement; as a
+mother she is a stranger to her children, to whom nurse and governess
+supply her place and give such poor makeshift for maternal love as
+they are enabled or inclined. In no domestic relation is she of the
+smallest value, and of none in any social circumstance beside the
+adorning of a room--if she be pretty--and the help she gives to trade
+through her expenditure. She lives only in the gaslight, and her
+nature at last becomes as artificial as her habits.
+
+As years go on, and she changes from the acknowledged belle to
+_la femme passée_, she goes through a period of frantic endeavour to
+retain her youth; and even when time has clutched her with too firm a
+hand to be shaken off, and she begins to feel the infirmities which
+she still puts out all her strength to conceal, even then she grasps
+at the departing shadow and fresh daubs the crumbling ruin, in the
+belief that the world's eyes are dim and that stucco may pass for
+marble for another year or two longer. Or she becomes a Belgravian
+mother, with daughters to sell to the highest bidder; and then the aim
+of her life is to secure the purchaser. Her daughters are never
+objects of real love with the fashionable woman. They are essentially
+her rivals, and the idea of carrying on her life in theirs, of
+forgetting herself in them, occurs to her only as a forecast of death.
+She shrinks even from her sons, as living evidences of the lapse of
+time which she cannot deny, and awkward _memoria technica_ for fixing
+dates; and there is not a home presided over by a fashionable woman
+where the family is more than a mere name, a mere social convention
+loosely held together by circumstances, not by love.
+
+Closing such a life as this comes the unhonoured end, when the
+miserable made-up old creature totters down into the grave where paint
+and padding, and glossy plaits cut from some fresh young head, are of
+no more avail; and where death, which makes all things real, reduces
+her life of lies to the nothingness it has been from the beginning.
+What does she leave behind her? A memory by which her children
+may order their own lives in proud assurance that so they will order
+them best for virtue and for honour? Or a memory which speaks to them
+of time misused, of duties unfulfilled, of love discarded for
+pleasure, and of a life-long sacrifice of all things good and pure for
+selfishness?
+
+We all know examples of the worldly old woman clinging batlike to the
+last to the old roofs and rafters; and we all know how heartily we
+despise her, and how we ridicule her in our hearts, if not by our
+words. If the reigning queens of fashion, at present young and
+beautiful, would but remember that they are only that worldly old
+woman in embryo, and that in a very few years they will be her exact
+likeness, unhappily repeated for the scorn of the world once more to
+follow! The traditional skeleton at the feast had a wonderfully wise
+meaning, crude and gross as it was in form. For though its _memento
+mori_, too constantly before us, would either sadden or brutalize, as
+we were thoughtful or licentious, yet it is good to see the end of
+ourselves, and to study the meaning and lesson of our lives in those
+of our prototypes and elder likenesses.
+
+The pleasures of the world are, as we all know, very potent and very
+alluring, but nothing can be more unsatisfying if taken as the main
+purpose of life. While we are young, the mere stirring of the blood
+stands instead of anything more real; but as we go on, and the pulse
+flags and pleasurable occasions get rare and more rare, we find
+that we have been like the Prodigal Son, and that our food and his
+have been out of much the same trough, and come in the main to much
+the same thing.
+
+This is an age of extraordinary wealth and of corresponding
+extraordinary luxury; of unparalleled restlessness, which is not the
+same thing as activity or energy, but which is the kind of
+restlessness that disdains all quiet and repose, as unendurable
+stagnation. Hence the fashionable woman of the day is one of extremes
+in her own line also; and the idleness, the heartlessness, the
+self-indulgence, the want of high morality, and the insolent luxury at
+all times characteristic of her were never displayed with more cynical
+effrontery than at present, and never called for more severe
+condemnation.
+
+The fashionable women of Greece and Rome, of Italy and France, have
+left behind them names which the world has made typical of the vices
+naturally engendered by idleness and luxury. But do we wish that our
+women should become subjects for an English Juvenal? that fashion
+should create a race of Laïses and Messalinas, of Lucrezia Borgias and
+Madame du Barrys, out of the stock which once gave us Lucy Hutchinson
+and Elizabeth Fry? Once the name of Englishwoman carried with it a
+grave and noble echo as the name of women known for their gentle
+bearing and their blameless honour--of women who loved their husbands,
+and brought up about their own knees the children they were not
+reluctant to bear and not ashamed to love. Now, it too often means a
+girl of the period, a frisky matron, a fashionable woman--a thing of
+paints and pads, consorting with dealers of no doubtful calling for
+the purchase of what she grimly calls 'beauty,' making pleasure her
+only good and the world her highest god. It too often means a woman
+who is not ashamed to supplement her husband with a lover, but who is
+unwilling to become the honest mother of that husband's children. It
+too often means a hybrid creature, perverted out of the natural way
+altogether, affecting the license but ignorant of the strength of a
+man; as girl or woman alike valueless so far as her highest natural
+duties are concerned; and talking largely of liberty while showing at
+every turn how much she fails in that co-essential of liberty--knowledge
+how to use it.
+
+
+
+
+_SLEEPING DOGS._
+
+
+There is a capital old proverb, often quoted but not so often acted
+on, called 'Let sleeping dogs lie;' a proverb which, if we were to
+abide by its injunction, would keep us out of many a mess that we get
+into now, because we cannot let well alone. Certainly we fall into
+trouble sometimes, or rather we drift into it--we allow it to gather
+round us--for want of a frank explanation to clear off small
+misunderstandings. At least novelists say so, and then make a great
+point of the anguish endured by Henry and Angelina for three mortal
+volumes, because they were too stupid to ask the reason why the one
+looked cold the other evening at the duchess's ball, and the other
+looked shy the next morning in the park. But then novelists, poor
+souls, are driven to such extravagant expedients for motives and
+matter, that we can scarcely take them as rational exponents of real
+life in any way; though the very meaning and final cause of their
+profession is to depict human nature as it is, and to show the reflex
+action of character and circumstances somewhat according to the
+pattern set out in the actual world. But, leaving novelists
+alone, on the whole we find in real life that if speech is silvern,
+silence is essentially golden, and that more harm is done by saying
+too much than by saying too little; above all, that infinite mischief
+arises by not letting sleeping dogs lie.
+
+People are so wonderfully anxious to stir up the dregs of everything,
+they can never let things rest. Take a man or woman who has done
+something queer that gets noised abroad, and who is coldly looked on
+in consequence by those who believe the worst reports which arise as
+interpretations. Now the wisest thing undoubtedly is to bear this
+coldness as the righteous punishment of that folly, and to trust for
+rehabilitation to the mysterious process called 'living it down.' If
+there has been absolutely no sinfulness to speak of, nothing but a
+little imprudence and a big glossary of scandalous explanation, a
+little precipitancy and a great deal of ill-nature, by all means wake
+up the sleeping dog and set him howling through the streets. He may do
+good, seeing that truth would be your friend. But if there be a core
+of ugly fact, even if it be not quite so ugly as the envelope which
+rumour has wrapped round it, then fall back on the dignity of 'living
+it down,' and let the dog lie sleeping and muzzled.
+
+There is another, but an unsavoury saying, which advises against the
+stirring up of evil odours; but this is just what imprudent,
+high-spirited people will not understand. They will take their own way
+in spite of society and all its laws; they will kick over the
+traces when it suits them; they will do this and that of which the
+world says authoritatively, 'No, you shall not do it;' and then, when
+the day of wrath arrives, and down comes the whip on the offending
+back, they shriek piteously and wake up all the dogs in the town in
+the 'investigation of their case.' And a queer kennel enough they turn
+out sometimes! They would have done better to put up with their social
+thrashing than to have set the bloodhounds of 'investigation' on their
+heels.
+
+Actions for libel often do this kind of thing, as every one may read
+for himself. Many a man who gets his farthing damages had better have
+borne the surly growl of the only half-roused dog, than have
+retaliated, and so waked him up. The farthing damages, representing
+say a cuff on the head or a kick in the ribs, or a milder 'Lie down,
+sir!' may be very pleasant to the feelings of the yelped-at, as so
+much revenge exacted--Shylock's pound of flesh, without the blood. But
+what about the consequences? what about the disclosure of your secret
+follies and the uncovering of the foundations on which the libel
+rested? The foundations remain immoveable to the end of time if the
+superstructure be disroofed, and the sleeping dog is awakened, never
+to be set at rest again while he has a tooth in his head that can
+bite.
+
+One of the arts of peaceful living at home is contained in the power
+of letting sleeping dogs lie. Papa is surly--it is a way papas
+have--or mamma is snappish, as even the best of mammas are at
+times when the girls are tiresome and will flirt with ineligible
+younger brothers, or when the boys, who must marry money, are paying
+attention to dowerless beauty instead. Well, the family horizon is
+overcast, and the black dog keeps the gate of the family mansion.
+Better let it lie there asleep, if it will but remain so. It is not
+pleasant to have it there certainly, but it would be worse to rouse it
+into activity and to have a general yelping through the house.
+
+Sometimes, indeed, in a family given to tears and caresses and easily
+excited feelings, a frank challenge as to reasons why is answered by a
+temporary storm, followed by a scene of effusion and _attendrissement_,
+and the black dog is not awakened, but banished, by the rousing he has
+got. This is a method that can be tried when you have perfect knowledge
+and command of your material; else it is a dangerous, and nine times
+out of ten would be an unsuccessful, experiment. It is nearly always
+unsuccessful with husbands and wives, who often sulk, but rarely
+for causes needing explanation. Angelina knows quite well that she
+danced too often the other night with that fascinating young Lovelace
+for whom her Henry has a special, and not quite groundless, aversion.
+She may put on as many airs of injured innocence as she likes, and
+affect to consider herself an ill-used wife suffering grievous things
+because of her husband's displeasure and the black dog of sulks
+accompanying; but she knows as well as her Henry himself where her sin
+lies, and to kick at the black dog would only be to set him
+loose upon her, and be well barked at if not worried for her pains.
+The wiser course would be to muzzle him by ignoring his presence;
+and so in almost all cases of domestic dog, however black.
+
+A sleeping dog of another kind, which it would be well if women would
+always leave at rest, is the potential passion of a man who is a
+cherished friend but an impossible lover. Certain slow-going men are
+able to maintain for life a strong but strictly platonic attachment
+for certain women. If any warmer impulse or more powerful feeling give
+threatening notice of arising, it is kept in due subjection and a
+wholesome state of coolness, perhaps by its very hopelessness even if
+returned, perhaps by the fear or the knowledge that it would be
+ill-received, and that the only passport to the pleasant friendship so
+delighted in is in this calm and sober platonism. This is all very
+well so long as the woman minds what she is about; for the passionless
+attachment of a man depends mainly on her desire to keep things in
+their present place, and on her power of holding to the line to be
+observed. If she oversteps this line, if she wakens up that sleeping
+dog of passion, it is all over with her and platonism. What was once a
+pleasant truth would now be a burning satire; for friendship routed by
+love can never take service under its old banners again.
+
+And yet this is what women are continually doing. They are always
+complaining that men are not their friends, and that they are only
+selfish and self-seeking in their relations with them; yet no sooner
+do they possess a man friend who is nothing else than they try their
+utmost to convert him into a lover, and are not too well pleased if
+they do not succeed--which might by chance sometimes happen like any
+other rare occurrence, but not often. And yet success ruins
+everything. It takes away the friend and does not give an available
+lover; it destroys the existing good and substitutes nothing better.
+If the woman be of the fishpond type, whose heart Thackeray wanted to
+'drag,' she simply turns round upon the unhappy victim with one of the
+'looks that kill;' if she be more weak than vain and less designing
+than impulsive, she regrets the momentary infatuation which has lost
+her her friend; but in any case she has lost him--by her own folly,
+not by inevitable misfortune.
+
+Just as easy is it to rouse the sleeping dogs of hatred, of jealousy,
+of envy. You have a tepid well-controlled dislike to some one; and you
+know that he knows it. For feelings are eloquent, even when dumb, and
+express themselves in a thousand ways independent of words. You do not
+care much about your dislike--you do not nurse it nor feed it in any
+way, and are rather content than not to let it lie dormant, and so far
+harmless. But your unloved friend cannot let well alone. He will be
+always treading on your corns and touching you on the raw. That
+unlucky speculation you made; your play that was damned; the election
+you lost; the decision that was given against you, with
+costs--whenever you see him he is sure to introduce some topic that
+rubs you the wrong way, till at last the sleeping dog gets fairly
+roused, and what was merely a well-ordered dislike bursts out into a
+frantic and ungovernable hatred. It has been his own doing. Just as in
+the case of the platonic friend transformed into the passionate lover
+by the woman's wiles, so the dislike that gave you no trouble--become
+now the hatred which is a real curse to your existence--results from
+your friend's incessant rousing up of sleeping passions.
+
+Young people are much given to this kind of thing. There is an impish
+tendency in most girls, and in all boys, that makes teazing a matter
+of exquisite delight to them. If they know of any sleeping dog which
+an elder carries about under his cloak, they are never so happy as
+when they are rousing it to activity, though their own backs may get
+bitten in the fray. Let a youngster into the secret of a weakness, a
+sore, and if he can resist the temptation of torturing you as the
+result of his knowledge he may lay claim to a virtue almost unknown in
+boyish morals. But he sometimes pays dearly for his fun. More than one
+life-long dislike, culminating in a disastrous codicil or total
+omission from the body of the will, has been the return-blow for a
+course of boyish teazings which a testy old uncle or huffish maiden
+aunt has had to undergo. The punishment may be severe and unjust;
+but the provocation was great; and revenge is a human, if
+indefensible, instinct common to all classes.
+
+Fathers and mothers themselves are not always sacred ground, nor are
+their special dogs suffered to lie sleeping undisturbed; and perhaps
+the favouritism and comparative coldness patent in almost every family
+may be traced back to the propensity for soothing or for rousing those
+parental beasts. For even fathers and mothers have personal feelings
+in excess of their instincts, and they, no more than any one else,
+like to be put through their paces by the impish vivacity of youth,
+and made to dance according to the piping of an irreverent lad or
+saucy girl. If they have dogs, they do not want their children to pry
+into their kennels and whistle them out at their pleasure; and those
+who do so most will naturally get worst off in the great division of
+family love. 'Let sleeping dogs lie,' certainly, as a rule for private
+life.
+
+Historically, the saying does not hold good. For if the great leaders
+of thought and reform had not roused up the sleeping dogs of their
+day, and made them give tongue for all after ages to hear, we should
+be but poorly off at this present time. Many of our liberties have
+been got only by diligently prodding up that very sleepy dog, the
+public, till he has been forced to show his teeth; and history is full
+of instances of how much has been done, all the world over and in
+every age, by the like means. Sometimes the prodded dog flies at the
+wrong throat on the other side, as we have had a few notable
+instances of late; and then it would have been wiser to leave him
+quietly sleeping in the shade, whether at Mentana or elsewhere; to
+rouse for rending being a poor amusement at the best, and an eminently
+unprofitable use of leather.
+
+
+
+
+_BEAUTY AND BRAINS._
+
+
+That lovely woman fulfils only half her mission when she is
+unpersonable instead of beautiful, all young men, and all pretty girls
+secure in the consciousness of their own perfections, will agree.
+Indeed, it is cruel to hear the way in which ingenuous youths despise
+ugly girls, however clever, whose charm lies in their cleverness only,
+with a counteraction in their plainness. To hear them, one would think
+that hardness of feature was, like poverty, a crime voluntarily
+perpetrated, and that contempt was a righteous retribution for the
+offence. Yet their preference, though so cruelly expressed, is to a
+certain extent the right thing. When we are young, the beauty of women
+has a supreme attraction beyond all other possessions or qualities;
+and there are self-evident reasons why it should be so. It is only as
+we grow older that we know the value of brains, and, while still
+admiring beauty--as indeed who does not?--admire it as one passing by
+on the other side--as a grace to look at, but not to hold, unless
+accompanied by something more lasting.
+
+This is in the middle term of a man's life. Old age, perhaps with
+the unconscious yearning of regret, goes back to the love of youth and
+beauty for their own sake; extremes meeting here as in almost all
+other circumstances. The danger is when a young man, obeying the
+natural impulse of his age and state, marries beauty only, with
+nothing more durable beneath. The mind sees what it brings, and we
+love the ideal we create rather than the reality that exists. A pretty
+face, the unworn nerves of youth, the freshness of hope that has not
+yet been soured by disappointment nor chilled by experience, a neat
+stroke at croquet and a merry laugh easily excited, make a girl a
+goddess to a boy who is what he himself calls in love and his friends
+'spoony.' She may be narrow, selfish, spoilt, unfit to bear the
+burdens of life and unable to meet her trials patiently; she may be
+utterly unpractical and silly--one of those who never mature but only
+grow old--without judgment, forethought, common-sense or courage; but
+he sees nothing of all this. To him she is perfect; the 'jolliest girl
+in the world,' if he be slangy, or the 'dearest,' if he be
+affectionate; and he neither sees nor heeds her potential faults.
+
+It is only when she has stepped down from her pedestal to the level of
+the home-threshold that he finds out she is but a woman after all, and
+perhaps an exceptionally weak and peevish one. Then he knows that he
+would have done better for himself had he married that plain
+brave-hearted girl who would have had him to a dead certainty if he
+had asked her, but whom he so unmercifully laughed at when he was
+making love to his fascinating charmer. As years go on and reduce the
+Hebe and Hecate of eighteen to much the same kind of woman at
+forty--with perhaps the advantage on Hecate's side if of the sort that
+ripens well and improves by keeping--the man feels that he has been a
+fool after the manner of Bunyan's Passion; that he has eaten up his
+present in the past, and had all his good things at once. If he had
+but looked at the future and been able to wait! But in those days he
+wanted beauty that does not last, and cared nothing for brains which
+do; and so, having made his election he must abide by it, and eat
+bitter bread from the yeast of his own brewing.
+
+Many a man has cursed, his whole life long, the youthful infatuation
+that made him marry a pretty fool. Take the case of a rising
+politician whose fair-faced wife is either too stupid to care about
+his position, or who imperils it by her folly. If amiable and
+affectionate, and in her own silly little way ambitious, she does him
+incalculable mischief by exaggeration, and by saying and doing exactly
+the things which are most damaging to him; if stupid, she is just so
+much deadweight that he has to carry with him while swimming up the
+stream. She is very lovely certainly, and people crowd her
+drawing-room to look at her; but a plain-featured, sensible, shrewd
+woman, with no beauty to speak of but with tact and cleverness, would
+have helped him in his career far better than does his brainless
+Venus. He finds this out when it is too late to change M. for N.
+in the marriage service.
+
+The successful men of small beginnings are greatly liable to this
+curse of wifely hindrance. A barrister once briefless and now in
+silk--an artist once obscure and now famous--who in the days of
+impecuniosity and Bohemianism married the landlady's pretty daughter
+and towards the meridian of life find themselves in the front ranks of
+_la haute volée_ with a wife who drops her h's and multiplies her s's,
+know the full bitterness of the bread baked from that hasty brewing.
+Each woman may have been beautiful in her youth, and each man may have
+loved his own very passionately; but if she have nothing to supplement
+her beauty--if she have no brains to fall back on, by which she can be
+educated up to her husband's present social position as the wife of
+his successful maturity--she is a mistake. Dickens was quite right to
+kill off pretty childish Dora in 'David Copperfield.' If she had lived
+she would have been like Flora in 'Bleak House,' who indeed was Dora
+grown old but not matured; with all the grace and beauty of her youth
+gone, and nothing else to take their place.
+
+Men do not care for brains in excess in women. They like a sympathetic
+intellect which can follow and seize their thoughts as quickly as they
+are uttered; but they do not much care for any clear or specific
+knowledge of facts. Even the most philosophic among them would rather
+not be set right in a classical quotation, an astronomical
+calculation, or the exact bearing of a political question by a
+lovely being in tarlatane whom he was graciously unbending to
+instruct. Neither do they want anything very strong-minded. To most
+men, indeed, the feminine strong-mindedness that can discuss immoral
+problems without blushing is a quality as unwomanly as a
+well-developed biceps or a 'shoulder-of-mutton' fist. It is sympathy,
+not antagonism--it is companionship, not rivalry, still less
+supremacy, that they like in women; and some women with brains as well
+as learning--for the two are not the same thing--understand this, and
+keep their blue stockings well covered by their petticoats. Others,
+enthusiasts for freedom of thought and intellectual rights, show
+theirs defiantly; and meet with their reward. Men shrink from them.
+Even clever men, able to meet them on their own ground, do not feel
+drawn to them; while all but high-class minds are humiliated by their
+learning and dwarfed by their moral courage. And no man likes to feel
+humiliated or dwarfed in the presence of a woman, and because of her
+superiority.
+
+But the brains most useful to women, and most befitting their work in
+life, are those which show themselves in common-sense, in good
+judgment, and that kind of patient courage which enables them to bear
+small crosses and great trials alike with dignity and good temper.
+Mere intellectual culture, however valuable it may be in itself, does
+not equal the worth of this kind of moral power; for as the true
+domain of woman is the home, and her way of ordering her domestic
+life the best test of her faculties, mere intellectual culture does
+not help in this; and, in fact, is often a hindrance rather than a
+help. What good is there in one's wife being an accomplished
+mathematician, a sound scholar, a first-rate musician, a deeply-read
+theologian, if she cannot keep the accounts square, knows nothing of
+the management of children, lets herself be cheated by the servants
+and the tradespeople, has not her eyes opened to dirt and disorder,
+and gives way to a fretful temper on the smallest provocation?
+
+The pretty fool who spends half her time in trying on new dresses and
+studying the effect of colours, and who knows nothing beyond the last
+new novel and the latest plate of fashions, is not a more disastrous
+wife than the woman of profound learning whose education has taught
+her nothing practical. They stand at the opposite ends of the same
+scale, and neither end gives the true position of women. Indeed, if
+one must have a fool in one's house, the pretty one would be the best,
+as, at the least, pleasant to look at; which is something gained.
+
+The intellectual fool, with her head always in books and 'questions,'
+and her children dropping off like sheep for the want of womanly care,
+is something more than flesh and blood can tolerate. The pretty fool
+cannot help herself. If nature proved herself but a stepmother to her,
+and left out the best part of her wits while taking such especial care
+of her face, it is no fault of hers; but the intellectual fool is a
+case of maladministration of powers, for which she alone is
+responsible; and in this particular alternative between beauty and
+brains, without a shadow of doubt we would go in for beauty.
+
+Ball-rooms and dinner-tables are the two places where certain women
+most shine. In the ball-room Hebe is the queen, and has it all her own
+way without fear of rivals. A very few men who care for dancing for
+its own sake will certainly dance with Hecate if she is light on hand,
+keeps accurate time, and manages her feet with scientific precision;
+but to the ruck of youths, Hebe, who jerks herself into step every
+second round, but whose lovely face and perfect figure make up for
+everything, is the partner they all besiege. Only to those exceptional
+few who regard dancing as a serious art would she be a bore with her
+three jumps and a hop; while Hecate, waltzing like an angel, would be
+divine, in spite of her high cheek-bones and light green eyes _à fleur
+de tête_. But at a dinner-table, where a man likes to talk between the
+dishes, a sympathetic listener with pleasant manners, to whom he can
+air his stalest stories and recount his personal experiences, is
+preferable to the prettiest girl if a simpleton, only able to show her
+small white teeth in a silly smile, and say 'yes' and 'indeed' in the
+wrong places. The ball-room may be taken to represent youth; the
+dinner-table maturity. The one is the apotheosis of mere beauty, in
+clouds of millinery glory and a heaven of flirting; the other is solid
+enjoyment, with brains to talk to by the side and beauty to look
+at opposite, in just the disposition that makes life perfect. A
+well-ordered dinner-table is a social microcosm; and, being so, this
+is the blue riband of the arrangement.
+
+Every woman is bound to make the best of herself. The strong-minded
+women who hold themselves superior to the obligations of dress and
+manner and all the pleasant little artificial graces belonging to an
+artificial civilization, and who think any sacrifice made to
+appearance just so much waste of power, are awful creatures, ignorant
+of the real meaning of their sex--social Graiæ wanting in every charm
+of womanhood, and to be diligently shunned by the wary.
+
+This making the best of themselves is a very different thing from
+making dress and personal vanity the first considerations in life.
+Where women in general fail is in the exaggerations into which they
+fall on this and on almost every other question. They are apt to be
+either demireps or devotees; frights or flirts; fashionable to an
+extent that lands them in illimitable folly and drags their husbands'
+names through the mire, or they are so dowdy that they disgrace a
+well-ordered drawing-room, and among nicely-dressed women stand out as
+living sermons on slovenliness. If they are clever, they are too
+commonly blue-stockings, and let the whole household go by the board
+for the sake of their fruitless studies; and if they are domestic and
+good managers they sink into mere servants, never opening a book save
+their daily ledger, and having no thought beyond the cheesemonger's
+bill and the butcher's prices. They want that fine balance, that
+accurate self-measurement and knowledge of results, which goes by
+the name of common-sense and is the best manifestation of brains
+they can give, and the thing which men most prize. It is the most
+valuable working form of intellectual power, and has most endurance
+and vitality; and it is the form which helps a man on in life, when
+he has found it in his wife, quite as much as money or a good connexion.
+
+So that, on the whole, brains are before beauty in the solid things of
+life. For admiration and personal love and youthful enjoyment, beauty
+of course is supreme; but as we cannot be always young nor always apt
+for pleasure, it is as well to provide for the days when the daughters
+of music shall be brought low and the years draw nigh which have no
+pleasure in them.
+
+
+
+
+_NYMPHS._
+
+
+Between the time of the raw school-girl and that of the finished young
+lady is the short season of the nymph, when the physical enjoyment of
+life is perhaps at its keenest, and a girl is not afraid to use her
+limbs as nature meant her to use them, nor ashamed to take pleasure in
+her youth and strength. This is the time when a sharp run down a steep
+hill, with the chance of a tumble midway, is an exercise by no means
+objected to; when clambering over gates, stiles, and even crabbed
+stone-walls is not refused because of the undignified display of ankle
+which the adventure involves; when leaping a ditch comes in as one of
+the ordinary accidents of a marshland walk; and when the fun of riding
+is infinitely enhanced if the horse be only half broken or barebacked.
+
+The nymph--an out-of-door, breezy, healthy girl, more after the
+pattern of the Greek Oread than the Amazon--is found only in the
+country; and for the most part only in the remoter districts of the
+country. In the town she degenerates into fastness, according to the
+law which makes evil merely the misdirection of force, as dirt is
+only matter in the wrong place. But among the mountains, in the
+secluded midland villages, or out on the thinly-populated moorland
+tracts, the nymph may be found in the full perfection of her nature.
+And a very beautiful kind of nature it is; though it is to be feared
+that certain ladies of the stricter sort would call her 'tomboy', and
+that those of a still narrower way of thought, unable to distinguish
+between unconventionality and vulgarity, would hold her to be
+decidedly vulgar--which she is not--and would wonder at her mother for
+'letting her go on so.'
+
+You fall upon the nymph at all hours and in all seasons. Indeed, she
+boasts that no weather ever keeps her indoors, and prefers a little
+roughness of the elements to anything too luscious or sentimental. A
+fresh wind, a sharp frost, a blinding fall of snow, or a pelting
+shower of rain are all high jinks to the nymph, to whom it is rare fun
+to come in like a water-dog, dripping from every hair, or shaking the
+snow in masses from her hat and cloak. She prefers this kind of thing
+to the suggestive beauty of the moonlight or the fervid heats of
+summer; and thinks a long walk in the crisp sharp frost, with the
+leaves crackling under her feet, worth all the nightingales in the
+wood. And yet she loves the spring and summer too, for the sake of the
+flowers and the birds and the beasts and the insects they bring forth;
+for the nymph is almost always a naturalist of the perceptive and
+self-taught kind, and has a marvellous faculty for finding out
+nests and rare habitats, and for tracking unusual trails to the hidden
+home.
+
+There is no prettier sight among girls than the nymph when thoroughly
+at her ease, and enjoying herself in her own peculiar way. That
+wonderful grace of unconsciousness which belongs to savages and
+animals belongs to her also, and she moves with a supple freedom which
+affectation or shyness would equally destroy. To see her running down
+a green field, with the sunlight falling on her; her light dress blown
+into coloured clouds by the wind; her step a little too long for the
+correct town-walk--but so firmly planted and yet so light, so swift,
+so even!--her cheeks freshly flushed by exercise; her eyes bright and
+fearless; her white teeth shown below her upper lip as she comes
+forward with a ringing laugh, carrying a young bird which she has just
+caught, or a sheaf of wild flowers for which she has been perilling
+her neck, is to see a beautiful and gracious picture which you
+remember with pleasure all your life after. Or you meet her quite
+alone on a wide bleak moor, with her hat in her hand and her hair
+blowing across her face, looking for plovers' eggs, or ferns and
+orchids down in the damp hollows. She is by no means dressed according
+to the canons of _Le Follet_, and yet she always manages to have
+something picturesque about her--something that would delight an
+artist's taste, and that is in perfect harmony with herself and her
+surroundings--which she wears with profound ignorance as to how well
+it suits her--or at most with only an instinctive knowledge that
+it is the right thing for her. She may be shy as she meets you; if she
+is passing out of the nymph state into that of conscious womanhood,
+she will be shy; but if still a nymph with no disturbing influences at
+work, she will probably look at you with a fixed, perplexing,
+half-provoking look of frank curiosity which you can neither notice
+nor take advantage of; the trammels of conventional life fettering one
+side heavily, if not the other.
+
+Shocking as it is to say, the nymph may sometimes be met on the top of
+a haycart, and certainly in the hayfield, where she is engaged in
+scattering the 'cocks,' if not in raising them; and where even the
+haymakers themselves--and they are not a notably romantic race--do not
+grumble at the extra trouble she gives them, because of her evident
+delight in her misdeeds. Besides, she has a bright word for them as
+she passes; for the nymph has democratic tendencies, and is frank and
+'affable' to all classes alike. She needs to be a little looked after
+in this direction, not for mischief but for manners; for, if not
+judiciously checked, she may become in time coarse. There are seamy
+sides to everything, and the nymph does not escape the general law.
+
+If the nymph condescends to any game at all, it is croquet, at which
+she is inexorably severe. She knows nothing of the little weakness
+which makes her elder sisters overlook the patent spooning of the
+favourite curate, even though he is opposed to them--nothing of
+the tender favouritism which pushes on an awkward partner by deeds of
+helping outside the law. The nymph, who has no weakness nor tenderness
+of that kind, knows only the game; and the game has not elastic
+boundaries. Therefore she is inflexible in her justice to one side and
+the other. Is it not the game? she says when reproached with being
+disagreeable and unamiable.
+
+But even croquet is slow to the nymph, who has been known to handle a
+bat not discreditably, and who is an adept at firing at a mark with
+real powder and ball. If she lives near a lake, a river, or the sea,
+she is first-rate at boating, can feather her oar and back water with
+the skill of a veteran oarsman, and can reef a sail or steer close
+without the slightest hesitation or nervousness. She is also a famous
+swimmer, and takes the water like a duck; and at an ordinary summer
+seaside resort, if by chance she ever profanes herself by showing off
+there, she attracts a crowd of beach-loungers to watch her feats far
+outside the safe barrier of the bathing-machines. She is a great
+walker, wherever she lives. If a mountaineer, she is a clever
+cragswoman, making it a point of honour to go to the top of the most
+difficult and dangerous mountains in her neighbourhood, and coaxing
+her brothers to let her join them and their friends in expeditions
+which require both nerve and strength.
+
+Her greatest sphere of social glory is a picnic, where she always
+heads the exploring party, clambering up the rocks of the
+waterfall, or diving down into the close-smelling caves, or scaling
+the crumbling walls of the ruin before any one else can come up to
+her. She is specially happy at old ruins, where she flits in and out
+among the broken columns and under the mouldering arches, like a
+spirit of the place unduly disturbed. Sometimes she climbs up by
+unseen means, till she reaches a point where it makes one dizzy to see
+her; and sometimes she startles her company by the sudden bleating of
+a sheep, or the wild hoot of an owl. For she can imitate the sounds of
+animals for the most part with wonderful accuracy; though she can also
+sing simple ballads without music, with sweetness and correctness. She
+is fond of all animals and fears none. She will pass through a field
+thronged with wild-looking cattle without the least hesitation; and
+makes friends even with the yelping farm-dogs which come snapping and
+snarling at her heels. In winter she feeds the wood-birds by flocks,
+and always takes care that the horses have a handful of corn or a
+carrot when she goes to see them, and that the cows are the better for
+her visit by a bunch of lucerne or a fat fresh cabbage-leaf. The
+home-beasts show their pleasure when they hear her fleet footstep on
+the paved yard; and her favourite pony whinnies to her in a peculiar
+voice as she passes his stable door. These are her friends, and their
+love for her is her reward.
+
+In her early days the nymph was notorious for her dilapidated
+attire, perplexing mother and nurse to mend, or to understand why or
+how it had come about. But as her favourite hiding-place was in a
+forked branch midway up an old tree in the shrubbery, or a natural
+arbour which she had cut out for herself in the very heart of the
+underwood, it was scarcely to be wondered at if cloth and cotton
+testified to the severity of her retreats. She has still mysterious
+rents in her skirts, got no one knows how; and her mother still
+laments over her aptitude for rags, and wishes she could be brought to
+see the beauty of unstained apparel. She is given to early rising--to
+fits indeed of rising at some wild hour in the morning, for walks
+before breakfast and the like innocent insanities. Sometimes she takes
+it in hand to educate herself in certain stoicisms, and goes without
+butter at breakfast or without breakfast altogether, if she thinks
+that thereby she will grow stronger or less inclined to
+self-indulgence. For drink she will never touch wine nor beer; but she
+likes new milk, and is great in her capacity for water.
+
+The nymph is almost always of the middle-classes. It is next to
+impossible indeed that she should be found in the higher ranks, where
+girls are not left to themselves, and where no one lives in far-away
+country places out of the reach of public opinion and beyond the range
+of public overlooking. Some years ago, before the railroads and
+monster hotels had made the mountain districts like Hampstead or
+Richmond on a Sunday afternoon, the nymph was to be found in
+great abundance down in Cumberland and Westmoreland. By the more
+remote lakes, like Buttermere and Hawes Water, and in the secluded
+valleys running up from the larger lakes, you would come upon square
+stuccoed houses, generally abominably ugly, where the nymph was
+mistress of the situation. She might be met riding about alone in a
+flapping straw hat, long before hats were fashionable headgear for
+women, and in a blue baize skirt for all the riding-habit thought
+necessary; or she might be encountered on the wild fell sides, or on
+the mountain heights, or in her boat sculling among the lonely lake
+islets, or gathering water-lilies in the bays. In the desolate stretch
+of moorland country to the north of Skiddaw the whole female
+population a few years ago was of the nymph kind; but railroads and
+the penny-post, cheap trains, fashion and fine-ladyism have penetrated
+even into the heart of the wild mountains, and now the nymph there is
+only a transitional development--not, as formerly, a fixed type.
+
+The nymph is the very reverse of a flirt. She has no inclination that
+way, and looks shy and awkward at the men who pay her compliments or
+attempt anything like sentimentality. But she is not superior to boys,
+who are her chosen companions and favourites. A bold, brave boy, who
+just overtops her in skill and daring, is her delight; but anything
+over twenty is 'awfully old,' while forty and sixty are so remote that
+the lines blur and blend together and have no distinction. By-and-by
+the nymph becomes a staid young woman, and marries. If she goes
+into a close town and has children, very often her vigorous health
+gives way, and we see her in a few years nervous, emaciated,
+consumptive, and with a pitiful yearning for 'home' more pathetic than
+all the rest. But if she remains where she is, in the fresh pure air
+of her native place, she retains her youth and strength long after the
+age when ordinary women lose theirs, and her children are celebrated
+as magnificent specimens of the future generation.
+
+We often see in country places matrons of over forty who are still
+like young women, both in looks and bearing, both in mental innocence
+and physical power. They have the shy and innocent look of girls; they
+blush like girls; they know less evil than almost any town-bred girl
+of eighteen, mothers of stalwart youths though they may be; they can
+walk and laugh and take pleasure in their lives like girls; and their
+daughters find them as much sisters as mothers. It is not quite the
+same thing if they do not marry; for among the saddest sights of
+social life is that terrible fading and withering away of comely,
+healthy, vigorous young country girls, who slowly pass from nymphs,
+full of grace and beauty, of happiness and power, to antiquated
+virgins, soured, useless, debilitated and out of nature. Of these,
+too, there are plenty in country places; but perhaps some scheme will
+be some day set afoot which shall redress the overweighted balance and
+bring to the service of the future some of the healthiest and
+best of our women. Meanwhile the fresh, innocent, breezy nymph is a
+charming study; and may the time be far distant which shall see her
+tamed and civilized out of existence altogether!
+
+
+
+
+_MÉSALLIANCES._
+
+
+The French system of parents arranging the marriage of their children
+without the consent of the girl being even asked, but assumed as
+granted, is not so wholly monstrous as many people in England believe.
+It seems to be founded on the idea that, given a young girl who has
+been kept shut up from all possibility of forming the most shadowy
+attachment for any man whatsoever, and present to her as her husband a
+sufficiently well-endowed and nice-looking man, with whom come
+liberty, pretty dresses, balls, admiration and social standing, and
+the chances are she will love him and live with him in tolerable
+harmony to the end of the chapter. And this idea is by no means wholly
+beside the truth, as we find it in practice. The parents, who are
+better judges of character and circumstance than the daughter can
+possibly be, are supposed to take care that their future son-in-law is
+up to their standard, whatever that may be, and that the connexion is
+not of a kind to bring discredit on their house; and on this and the
+joint income, as the solid bases, they build the not very unreasonable
+hypothesis that one man is as good as another for the satisfaction
+of a quite untouched and virginal fancy, and that suitable external
+conditions go further and last longer than passion. They trust to the
+force of instinct to make all square with the affections, while they
+themselves arrange for the smooth running of the social circumstances;
+and they are not far out in their calculations.
+
+The young people of the two lonely lighthouse islands, who made love
+to each other through telescopes, are good examples of the way in
+which instinct simulates the impulse which calls itself love when
+there are two or three instead of one to look at. For we may be quite
+sure that had the lighthouse island youth been John instead of James,
+fair instead of dark, garrulous instead of reticent, short and fat
+instead of tall and slender, the lighthouse island girl would have
+loved him all the same, and would have quite believed that this man
+was the only man she ever could have loved, and that her instinctive
+gravitation was her free choice.
+
+The French system of marriage, then, based on this accommodating
+instinct, works well for women who are not strongly individual, not
+inconstant by temperament, and not given to sentimentality. But,
+seeing that all women are not merely negative, and that passions and
+affections do sometimes assert themselves inconveniently, the system
+has had the effect of making society lenient to the little follies of
+married women, unless too strongly pronounced--partly because the
+human heart insists on a certain amount of free-will, which fact
+must be recognized--but partly, we must remember, because of the want
+of the young-lady element in society. In England, where our girls are
+let loose early, we have free-trade in flirting; consequently, we
+think that all that sort of thing ought to be done before marriage,
+and that, when once a woman has made her choice and put her neck under
+the yoke, she ought to stick to her bargain and loyally fulfil her
+self-imposed engagement.
+
+One consequence of this free-trade in flirting and this large amount
+of personal liberty is that love-marriages are more frequent with us
+than with the French, with whom indeed, in the higher classes, they
+are next to impossible; and, unfortunately, the corollary to this is
+that love-marriages are too often _mésalliances_. There is of course
+no question, ethically, between virtuous vulgarity and refined vice. A
+groom who smells of the stable and speaks broad Somersetshire or
+racier Cumberland, but who is brave, faithful, honest, incapable of a
+lie or of meanness in any form, is a better man than the best-bred
+gentleman whose life is as vicious as his bearing is unexceptionable.
+The most undeniable taste in dress, and the most correct
+pronunciation, would scarcely reconcile us to cruelty, falsehood, or
+cowardice; and yet we do not know a father who would prefer to give
+his girl to the groom, rather than the gentleman, and who would think
+horny-handed virtue, dressed in fustian and smelling of the stable,
+the fitter husband of the two.
+
+If we take the same case out of our own time and circumstances, we
+have no doubt as to the choice to be made. It seems to us a very
+little matter that honest Charicles should tell his love to Aglaë in
+the broad Doric tongue instead of in the polished Athenian accents to
+which she was accustomed; that he should wear his chiton a hand's
+breadth too long or a span too short; that his chlamys should be flung
+across his brawny chest in a way which the young bloods of the time
+thought ungraceful; or that, as he assisted at a symposium, he should
+not hold the rhyton at quite the proper angle, but in a fashion at
+which the refined Cleon laughed as he nudged his neighbour. Yet all
+these conventional solecisms, of no account whatever now, would have
+weighed heavily against poor Charicles when he went to demand Aglaë's
+hand; and the balance would probably have gone down in favour of that
+scampish Cleon, who was an Athenian of the Athenians, perfect in all
+the graces of the age, but not to be compared to his rival in anything
+that makes a man noble or respectable. We, who read only from a
+distance, think that Aglaë's father made a mistake, and that the
+honester man would have been the better choice of the two.
+
+It is only when we bring the same circumstances home to ourselves that
+we realize the immense importance of the social element; and how, in
+this complex life of ours, we are unable to move in a single line
+independent of all it touches. Imagine a fine old county family
+with a son-in-law who ate peas with his knife, said 'you was' and
+'they is,' and came down to dinner in a shooting-jacket and a blue
+bird's-eye tied in a wisp about his throat! He might be the possessor
+of all imaginable virtues, and, if occasion required, a very hero and
+a _preux chevalier_, however rough; but occasions in which a man can
+be a hero or a _preux chevalier_ are rare, whereas dinner comes every
+day, and the senses are never shut. The core within a conventionally
+ungainly envelope may be as sound as is possible to a corrupt
+humanity, but social life requires manners as well as principles; and
+though eating peas with a knife is not so bad as telling falsehoods,
+still we should all agree in saying, Give us truth that does not eat
+peas with its knife; let us have honesty in a dress coat and
+pureheartedness in a clean shirt, seeing that there is no absolute
+necessity why these several things should be disunited.
+
+Love-marriages, made against the will of the parents before the
+character is formed and while the obligations of society are still
+unrealized, are generally _mésalliances_ founded on passion and fancy
+only. A man and woman of mature age who know what they want may make a
+_mésalliance_, but it is made with a full understanding and deliberate
+choice; and, if the thing turns out badly, they can blame themselves
+less for precipitancy than for wrong calculation. The man of fifty who
+marries his cook knows what he most values in women. It is not manners
+and it is not accomplishments; perhaps it is usefulness, perhaps
+good-temper; at all events it is something that the cook has and that
+the ladies of his acquaintance have not, and he is content to take the
+disadvantages of his choice with its advantages. But the boy who runs
+away with his mother's maid neither calculates nor sees any
+disadvantages. He marries a pretty girl because her beauty has touched
+his senses; or he is got hold of by an artful woman who has bamboozled
+and seduced him. It is only when his passion has worn off that he
+wakes to the full consequences of his mistake, and understands then
+how right his parents were when they cashiered his pretty Jane so soon
+as they became aware of what was going on, and sent that artful Sarah
+to the right about--just a week too late.
+
+It is the same with girls; but in a far greater extent. If a youth's
+_mésalliance_ is a millstone round his neck for life, a girl's is
+simply destruction. The natural instinct with all women is to marry
+above themselves; and we know on what physiological basis this
+instinct stands, and what useful racial ends it serves. And the
+natural instinct is as true in its social as in its physiological
+expression. A woman's honour is in her husband; her status, her social
+life, are determined by his; and even the few women who, having made a
+bad marriage, have nerve and character enough to set themselves free
+from the personal association, are never able to thoroughly regain
+their maiden place. There is always something about them which
+clogs and fetters them; always a kind of doubtful and depressing aura
+that surrounds and influences them. If they have not strength to free
+themselves, they never cease to feel the mistake they have made, until
+the old sad process of degeneration is accomplished, and the
+'grossness of his nature' has had strength to drag her down. After a
+time, if her ladyhood has been of a superficial kind only, a woman who
+has married beneath herself may ease down into her groove and be like
+the man she has married; if, however, she has sufficient force to
+resist outside influences she will not sink, and she will never cease
+to suffer. She has sinned against herself, her class and her natural
+instincts; and has done substantially a worse thing than has the boy
+who married his mother's maid. Society understands this, and not
+unjustly if harshly punishes the one while it lets the other go
+scot-free; so that the woman who makes a _mésalliance_ suffers on
+every side, and destroys her life almost as much as the woman who goes
+wrong.
+
+All this is as evident to parents and elders as that the sun shines.
+They understand the imperative needs of social life, and they know how
+fleeting are the passions of youth and how they fade by time and use
+and inharmonious conditions; and they feel that their first duty to
+their children is to prevent a _mésalliance_ which has nothing, and
+can have nothing, but passion for its basis. But novelists and poets
+are against the hard dull dictates of worldly wisdom, and join in
+the apotheosis of love at any cost--all for love and the world well
+lost; love in a cottage, with nightingales and honeysuckles as the
+chief means of paying the rent; Libussa and her ploughman; the
+princess and the swineherd, &c. And the fathers who stand out against
+the ruin of their girls by means of estimable men of inferior
+condition and with not enough to live on, are stony-hearted and cruel,
+while the daughters who take to cold poison in the back-garden, if
+they cannot compass a secret honeymoon or an open flight, have all the
+world's sympathy and none of its censure. The cruel parent is the
+favourite whipping-boy of poetry and fiction; and yet which is likely
+to be the better guide--reason or passion? experience or ignorance?
+calculation or impulse? maturity which can judge or youth which can
+only feel? There would be no hesitation in any other case than that of
+love; but the love-instinct is generally considered to be superior to
+every other consideration, and has to be obeyed as a divine voice, no
+matter at what cost or consequence.
+
+The ideal of life, according to some, is founded on early marriages.
+But men are slower in the final setting of their character than women,
+and one never knows how a young fellow of twenty or so will turn out.
+If he is devout now, he may be an infidel at forty; if, under home
+influences, he is temperate and pure, when these are withdrawn he may
+become a rake of the fastest kind. His temper, morals, business
+power, ability to resist temptation, all are as yet inchoate and
+undefined; nothing is sure; and the girl's fancy that makes him
+perfect in proportion to his good looks, is a mere instinct determined
+by chance association.
+
+A girl, too, has more character than she shows in her girlhood. Though
+she sets sooner than men, she does not set unalterably, and marriage
+and maternity bring out the depths of her nature as nothing else can.
+It is only common-sense, then, to marry her to a man whose character
+is already somewhat formed, rather than to one who is still fluid and
+floating.
+
+It is all very well to talk of fighting the battle of life together,
+and welding together by time. Many a man has been ruined by these
+metaphors. The theory, partly true and partly pretty, is good enough
+in its degree; and, indeed, so far as the welding goes, we weld
+together in almost all things by time. We wear our shoe till we wear
+it into shape and it ceases to pinch us; but, in the process, we go
+through a vast deal of pain, and are liable to make corns which last
+long after the shoe itself fits easily. We do not advocate the French
+system of marrying off our girls according to our own ideas of
+suitableness, and without consulting them; but we not the less think
+that, of all fatal social mistakes, _mésalliances_ are the most fatal,
+and, in the case of women, to be avoided and prevented at any
+cost short of a broken heart or a premature death. And even death
+would sometimes be better than the life-long misery, the enduring
+shame and humiliation, of certain _mésalliances_.
+
+
+
+
+_WEAK SISTERS._
+
+
+The line at which a virtue becomes a vice through excess can never be
+exactly defined, being one of those uncertain conditions which each
+mind must determine for itself. But there is a line, wheresoever we
+may choose to set it; and it is just this fine dividing mark which
+women are so apt to overrun. For women, as a rule, are nothing if not
+extreme. Whether as saints or sinners, they carry a principle to its
+outside limits; and of all partizans they are the most thoroughgoing,
+whether it be to serve God or the devil, liberty or bigotry, Bible
+Communism or Calvinistic Election. Sometimes they are just as extreme
+in their absolute negation of force, and in the narrowness of the
+limits within which they would confine all human expression either by
+word or deed--and especially all expression of feminine life. These
+are the women who carry womanly gentleness into the exaggeration of
+self-abasement, and make themselves mere footstools for the stronger
+creature to kick about at his pleasure; the weak sisters who think all
+self-reliance unfeminine, and any originality of thought or character
+an offence against the ordained inferiority of their sex. They
+are the parasitic plants of the human family, living by and on the
+strength of others; growths unable to stand alone, and, when deprived
+of their adventitious support, falling to the ground in a ruin perhaps
+worse than death.
+
+It is sad to see one of these weak sisters when given up to herself
+after she has lived on the strength of another. As a wife, she was
+probably a docile, gentle kind of Medora--at least on the outside; for
+we must not confound weakness with amiability--suffering many things
+because of imperfect servants and unprofitable tradesmen, maybe
+because of unruly children and encroaching friends, over none of whom
+she had so much moral power as enabled her to hold them in check; but
+on the whole drifting through her days peacefully enough, and, though
+always in difficulties, never quite aground. She had a tower of
+strength in her husband, on whom she leaned for assistance in all she
+undertook, whether it were to give a dose of Dalby to the child, or a
+scolding to the maid, or to pronounce upon the soundness of two rival
+sects each touting for her soul. While he lived she obeyed his
+counsel--not always without a futile echo of discontent in her own
+heart--and copied his opinions with what amount of accuracy nature had
+bestowed on her; though it must be confessed more often making a
+travesty than a facsimile, according to the trick of inferior
+translators, and not necessarily better pleased with his opinions than
+with his counsels. For your weak sister is frequently peevish,
+and though unable to originate is not always ready to obey cheerfully;
+cheerfulness indeed being for the most part an attribute of power.
+
+Still, there stood her tower of strength, and while it stood, she, the
+parasite growing round it, did well enough, and flourished with a
+pleasant semblance of individual life into the hollowness of which it
+was no one's business to inquire. But when the tower fell, where was
+the ivy? The husband taken away, what became of the wife?--he who had
+been the life and she only the parasite. Abandoned to the poor
+resources of her own judgment she is like one suddenly thrown into
+deep water, not knowing how to swim. She has no judgment. She has been
+so long accustomed to rely on the mind of another, that her will is
+paralyzed for want of use. She is any one's tool, any one's echo, and
+worse than that, if left to herself she is any one's victim. All she
+wants is to be spared the hardship of self-reliance and to be directed
+free of individual exertion. She is utterly helpless--helpless to act,
+to direct, to decide; and it depends on the mere chance of
+proprietorship whether her slavery shall be degradation or protection,
+ruin or safety. For she will be a slave, whosoever may be her
+proprietor; being the pabulum of which slaves and victims are
+naturally formed. The old age of Medora is Mrs. Borradaile, who, if
+her husband had lived, would have probably ended her life in an
+honourable captivity and a well-directed subserviency.
+
+We often see this kind of helpless weakness in the daughter of a man
+of overbearing will, or of a termagant mother fond of managing and
+impatient of opposition. During the plastic time of her life, when
+education might perhaps have developed a sufficient amount of mental
+muscle, and a course of judicious moulding might have fairly set her
+up, she is snubbed and suppressed till all power is crushed out of
+her. She is taught the virtue of self-abnegation till she has no self
+to abnegate; and the backbone of her individuality is so incessantly
+broken that at last there is no backbone left in her to break. She has
+become a mere human mollusc which, when it loses its native shell,
+drifts helplessly at the mercy of chance currents into the maw of any
+stronger creature that may fancy it for his prey. One often sees these
+poor things left orphans and friendless at forty or fifty years of
+age. They have lived all their lives in leading-strings, and now are
+utterly unable to walk alone. They are infants in all knowledge of the
+world, of business, of human life; their youth is gone, and with it
+such beauty and attractiveness as they might have had, so that men who
+liked them when fresh and gentle at twenty do not care to accept their
+wrinkled helplessness at forty. They have been kept in and kept down,
+and so have made no friends of their own; and then, when the
+strong-willed father dies and the termagant mother goes to the place
+where the wicked cease from troubling, the mollusc these have hitherto
+protected is left defenceless and alone. If she has money, her
+chances of escape from the social sharks always on the look-out for
+fat morsels are very small indeed. It is well if she falls into no
+worse hands than those of legitimate priests of either section,
+whether enthusiastic for chasubles or crazy for missions; and if her
+money is put to no baser use than supplying church embroidery for some
+Brother Ignatius at home, or blankets for converted Africans in the
+tropics. It might go into Agapemones, into spiritual Athenæums, into
+Bond Street back-parlours, where it certainly would do no good, take
+it any way one would; for, as it must go into some side-channel dug by
+stronger hands than hers, the question is, into which of the
+innumerable conduits offered for the conveyance of superfluous means
+shall it be directed?
+
+This is the woman who is sure to go in for religious excess of one
+kind or another, and for whom therefore, a convent with a sympathetic
+director is a godsend past words to describe. She is unfit for the
+life of the world outside. She has neither strength to protect
+herself, nor beauty to win the loving protection of men; she cannot be
+taken as a precious charge, but she will be made a pitiable victim;
+and, though matins and vespers come frightfully often, surely the
+narrow safety of a convent-cell is a better fate for her than the
+publicity of the witness-box at the Old Bailey! As she must have a
+master, her condition depends on what master she has; and the
+whole line of her future is ruled according to the fact whether she is
+directed or 'exploited,' and used to serve noble ends or base ones.
+
+As a mother, the weak sister is even more unsatisfactory than as a
+spinster left to herself with funds which she can manipulate at
+pleasure. She is affectionate and devoted; but of what use are
+affection and devotion without guiding sense or judgment? Even in the
+nursery, and while the little ones need only physical care, she is
+more obstructive than helpful, never having so much self-reliance nor
+readiness of wit as to dare a remedy for one of those sudden maladies,
+incidental to children, which are dangerous just in proportion to the
+length of time they are allowed to run unchecked. And if she should by
+chance remember anything of therapeutic value, she has no power to
+make her children take what they don't like to take, nor do what they
+don't like to do. In the horror of an accident she is lost. If her
+child were to cut an artery, she would take it up into her lap
+tenderly enough, but she would never dream of stopping the flow; if it
+swallowed poison, she would send for the doctor who lives ten miles
+away; and if it set itself on fire, she would probably rush with it
+into the street, for the chance of assistance from a friendly
+passer-by. She never has her senses under serviceable command; and her
+action in a moment of danger generally consists in unavailing pity or
+in obstructive terror, but never in useful service nor in valuable
+suggestion.
+
+But if useless in her nursery while her children are young, she is
+even more helpless as they get older; and the family of a weak woman
+grows up, unassisted by counsel or direction, just as the old Adam
+wills and the natural bent inclines. Her girls may be loud and fast,
+her sons idle and dissipated, but she is powerless to correct or to
+influence. If her husband does not take the reins into his own hands,
+or if she be a widow, the young people manage matters for themselves
+under the perilous guidance of youthful passions and inexperience. And
+nine times out of ten they give her but a rough corner for her own
+share. They have no respect for her, and, unless more generously
+compassionate than young people usually are, scarcely care to conceal
+the contempt they cannot help feeling. What can she expect? If she was
+not strong enough to root out the tares while still green and tender,
+can she wonder at their luxuriant growth about her feet now? She, like
+every one else, must learn the sad meaning of retribution, and how the
+weakness which allowed evil to flourish unsubdued has to share in its
+consequences and to suffer for its sin.
+
+Unsatisfactory in her home, the weak sister does not do much better in
+society. She is there the embodiment of restriction. She can bear
+nothing that has any flavour or colour in it. Topics of broad human
+interest are forbidden in her presence because they are vulgar,
+improper, unfeminine. She takes her stand on her womanhood, and makes
+that womanhood to be something apart from humanity in the gross.
+There must be no cakes and ale for others if she be virtuous; and
+spades are not to be called spades when she is by to hear. She is the
+limit beyond which no one must go, under pain of such displeasure as
+the weak sister can show. And, weak as she is in many things, she can
+compass a certain strength of displeasure; she can condemn,
+persistently if not passionately.
+
+Nothing is more curious than the way in which the weak sister
+exercises this power of condemnation, and nothing much more wide than
+its scope. If incapable of yielding to certain temptations, because
+incapable of feeling them, she has no pity for those who have not been
+able to resist; yet, on the other hand, she cannot comprehend the
+vigour of those who withstand such influences as conquer her. If she
+be under the shadow of family protection, safe in the power of those
+who know how to hold her in all honour and prosperity, she cannot
+forgive the poor weak waif--no weaker than herself!--who has been
+caught up in the outside desert of desolation, and made to subserve
+evil ends. Yet, on the other hand, for the woman who is able to think
+and act for herself she has a kind of superstitious horror; and she
+shrinks from one who has made herself notorious, no matter what the
+mode or method, as from something tainted, something unnatural and
+unwomanly. She has even grave doubts respecting the lawfulness of
+doing good if the manner of it gets into the papers and names are
+mentioned as well as things; and though the fashion of the day favours
+feminine notoriety in all directions, she holds by the instinct of her
+temperament, and languidly maintains that woman is the cipher to which
+man alone gives distinctive value. Griselda and Medora are the types
+to her of womanly perfection; and the only strength she tolerates in
+her own sex is the strength of endurance and the power of patience.
+She has no doubt in her own mind that the ordained purpose of woman is
+to be convenient for the high-handedness and brutality of man; and any
+woman who objects to this theory, and demands a better place for
+herself, is flying in the face of Providence and forfeiting one of the
+distinctive privileges of her sex. For the weak sister thinks, like
+some others, that it is better to be destroyed by orthodox means than
+to be saved by heterodox ones; and that if good Christians uphold
+moral suttee, they are only pagans and barbarians who would put out
+the flames and save the victim from the burning. So far she is
+respectable, in that she has a distinct theory about something; but it
+is wonderfully eloquent of her state that it should only be the theory
+of Griseldadom as womanly perfection, and the beauty to be found in
+the moral of Cinderella sitting supinely among the ashes, and
+forbidden to own even the glass-slipper that belonged to her.
+Fortunately for the world, the weak sister and her theories do not
+rule. Indeed we are in danger of going too much the other way in
+these times, and the revolt of our women against undue slavery goes
+very near to a revolt against wise submission. Still, women who are to
+be the mothers of men ought to have some kind of power, if the men are
+to be worth their place in the world; and if we want creatures with
+backbones we must not give our strength to rearing a race of molluscs.
+
+
+
+
+_PINCHING SHOES._
+
+
+There are two ways of dealing with pinching shoes. The one is to wear
+them till you get accustomed to the pressure, and so to wear them
+easy; the other is to kick them off and have done with them
+altogether. The one is founded on the accommodating principle of human
+nature by which it is enabled to fit itself to circumstances, the
+other is the high-handed masterfulness whereby the earth is subdued
+and obstacles are removed; the one is emblematic of Christian
+patience, the other of Pagan power. Both are good in certain states
+and neither is absolutely the best for all conditions. There are some
+shoes indeed, which, do what we will, we can never wear easy. We may
+keep them well fixed on our feet all our life, loyally accepting the
+pressure which fate and misfortune have imposed on us; but we go lame
+and hobbled in consequence, and never know what it is to make a free
+step, nor to walk on our way without discomfort. Examples abound; for
+among all the pilgrims toiling more or less painfully through life to
+death, there is not one whose shoes do not pinch him somewhere, how
+easy soever they may look and how soft soever the material of which
+they may be made. Even those proverbial possessors of roomy
+shoes, the traditional King and Princess, have their own little
+private bedroom slippers which pinch them, undetected by the gaping
+multitude who measure happiness by lengths of velvet and weight of
+gold embroidery; and the envied owners of the treasure which all seek
+and none find might better stand as instances of sorrow than of
+happiness--examples of how badly shod poor royalty is, and how, far
+more than meaner folk, it suffers from the pinching of its regal
+shoes.
+
+The uncongeniality of a profession into which a man may have been
+forced by the injudicious overruling of his friends, or by the
+exigencies of family position and inherited rights, is one form of the
+pinching shoe by no means rare to find. And here, again, poor royalty
+comes in for a share of the grip on tender places, and the consequent
+hobbling of its feet. For many an hereditary king was meant by nature
+to be nothing but a plain country gentleman at the best--perhaps even
+less; many, like poor 'Louis Capet,' would have gone to the end quite
+happily and respectably if only they might have kicked off the
+embroidered shoes of sovereignty and betaken themselves to the
+highlows of the herd--if only they might have exchanged the sceptre
+for the turning-lathe, the pen or the fowling-piece. 'Je déteste mon
+métier de roi,' Victor Emmanuel is reported to have said to a
+republican friend who sympathized with the monarch's well-known tastes
+in other things beside his hatred of the kingly profession; and
+history repeats this frank avowal in every page. But the purple is as
+hard to be got rid of as Deianeira's robe; for the most part carrying
+the skin along with it and trailed through a pool of blood in the act
+of transfer--which is scarcely what royalty, oppressed with its own
+greatness, and willing to rid itself of sceptre and shoes that it may
+enjoy itself in list-slippers after a more bourgeoise fashion, would
+find in accordance with its wishes.
+
+Lower down in the social scale we find the same kind of misfit between
+nature and position as a very frequent occurrence--pinching shoes,
+productive of innumerable corns and tender places, being many where
+the feet represent the temperament and the shoes are the profession.
+How often we see a natural 'heavy' securely swathed in cassock and
+bands, and set up in the pulpit of the family church, simply because
+the tithes were large and the advowson was part of the family
+inheritance. But that stiff rectorial shoe of his will never wear
+easy. The man's secret soul goes out to the parade-ground and the
+mess-table. The glitter and jingle and theatrical display of a
+soldier's life seem to him the finest things in the whole round of
+professions, and the quiet uneventful life of a village pastor is of
+all the most abhorrent. He wants to act, not to teach. Yet there he
+is, penned in beyond all power of breaking loose on this side the
+grave; bound to drone out muddled sermons half an hour long and
+eminently good for sleeping draughts, instead of shouting terse
+and stirring words of command which set the blood on fire to hear;
+bound to rout the shadowy enemy of souls with weapons he can neither
+feel nor use, instead of prancing off at the head of his men, waving
+his drawn sword above his head in a whirlwind of excitement and
+martial glory, to rout the tangible enemies of his country's flag. He
+loves his wife and takes a mild parsonic pleasure in his roses; he
+energizes his schools and beats up recruits for his parish penny
+readings; he lends his pulpit to missionary delegates and takes the
+chair at the meeting for the conversion of Jews; he does his duty,
+poor man, so far as he knows how and so far as nature gave him the
+power; but his feet are in pinching shoes all his life long, and no
+amount of walking on the clerical highway can ever make them pleasant
+wearing. Or he may have a passionate love for the sea, and be mewed up
+in a lawyer's musty office where his large limbs have not half enough
+space for their natural activity; where he is perched for twelve hours
+out of the twenty-four on a high stool against a desk instead of
+climbing cat-like up the ropes; and where he is set to engross a
+longwinded deed of conveyance, or to make a fair copy of a bill of
+costs, instead of bearing a hand in a gale and saving his ship by
+pluck and quickness. He could save a ship better than he can engross a
+deed; while, as for law, he cannot get as much of that into his heavy
+brain as would enable him to advise a client on the simplest case of
+assault; but he knows all the differences of rig, and the whole
+code of signals, and can tell you to a nicety about the flags of all
+nations, and the name and position of every spar and stay and sheet,
+and when to reef and when to set sail, with any other nautical
+information to be had from books and a chance cruise as far as the
+Nore. That pen behind his ear never ceases to gall and fret; his shoe
+never ceases to pinch; and to the last day of his life the high stool
+in the lawyer's office will be a place of penance and the sailor's
+quarter-deck the lost heaven of his ambition.
+
+No doubt, by the time the soldier wrongly labelled as a parson or the
+sailor painfully working the legal treadmill, comes to the end of his
+career, the old shoe which has pinched him so long will be worn
+comparatively easy. The gradual decay of manly vigour, and the slow
+but sure destruction of strong desires, reduce one's feet at last to
+masses of accommodating pulp; but what suffering we go through before
+this result can be attained!--what years of fruitless yearning, of
+fierce despair, of pathetic self-suppression, of jarring discord
+between work and fitness, pound all the life out of us before our
+bones become like wax and pinching shoes are transformed to
+easy-fitting slippers! For itself alone, not counting the beyond to
+which the hope clings, it would scarcely seem that such a life were
+worth the living.
+
+Another pinching shoe is to be found in climate and locality. A man
+hungering for the busy life of the city has to vegetate in the
+rural districts, where the days drop one after the other like leaden
+bullets, and time is only marked by an accession of dulness. Another,
+thirsting for the repose of the country, has to jostle daily through
+Cheapside. To one who thinks Canadian salmon-fishing the supreme of
+earthly happiness, fate gives the chance of chasing butterflies in
+Brazil; to another who holds 'the common objects of the seashore' of
+more account than silver and gold, an adverse fortune assigns a
+station in the middle of a plain as arid as if the world had been made
+without water; and a third, who cares for nothing but the free
+breathing of the open moors or the rugged beauty of the barren fells,
+is dropped down into the heart of a narrow valley where he cannot see
+the sun for the trees. At first this matter of locality seems to be
+but a very small grip on the foot, not worth a second thought; but it
+is one of a certain cumulative power impossible to describe, though
+keen enough to him who suffers; and the pinching shoe of uncongenial
+place is quite as hard to bear as that of uncongenial work.
+
+Again, a man to whom intellectual companionship means more than it
+does to many is thrown into a neighbourhood where he cannot hope to
+meet with comprehension, still less with sympathy. He is a
+Freethinker, and the neighbourhood goes in for the strictest Methodism
+or the highest ultra-Ritualism; he is a Radical, and he is in the very
+focus of county Toryism, where the doctrine of equality and the
+rights of man is just so much seditious blasphemy, while the British
+Constitution is held as a direct emanation from divine wisdom second
+only to the Bible; or he is a Tory to the backbone--and his backbone
+is a pretty stiff one--and he is in the midst of that blatant kind of
+Radicalism which thinks gentlehood a remnant of the dark ages, and
+confounds good breeding with servility, and loyalty to the Crown with
+oppression of the people. Surrounded by his kind, he is as much alone
+as if in the middle of a desert. An Englishman among Englishmen, he
+has no more mental companionship than if he were in a foreign country
+where he and his neighbour spoke different tongues, and each had a set
+of signs with not two agreeing. And this kind of solitude makes a
+pinching shoe to many minds; though to some of the more self-centred
+or defying kind it is bearable enough--perhaps even giving a sense of
+roominess which closer communion would destroy.
+
+Of course one of the worst of our pinching shoes is matrimony, when
+marriage means bondage and not union. The mismated wife or husband
+never leaves off, willingly or unwillingly, squeezing the tender
+places; and the more the pressure is objected to the worse the pain
+becomes. And nothing can relieve it. A country gentleman, hating the
+dust and noise of London, with all his interest in his county position
+and all his pleasure in his place, and a wife whose love lies in
+Queen's balls and opera-boxes, and to whom the country is simply a
+slice out of Siberia wherever it may be; a hearty hospitable man,
+liking to see his table well filled, and a wife with a weak digestion,
+irritable nerves and a morbid horror of society; a pushing and
+ambitious man, with a loud voice and an imposing presence, and a
+shrinking fireside woman, who asks only to glide unnoticed through the
+crowd and to creep noiselessly from her home to her grave--are not all
+these shod with pinching shoes, which, do what they will, go on
+pinching to the end, and which nothing short of death or the Sir James
+Hannen of the time can remove? The pinching shoe of matrimony pinches
+both sides equally--excepting indeed, one of the two is specially
+phlegmatic or pachydermatous, and then the grip is harmless; but, as a
+rule, the ring-fence of marriage doubles all conditions, and when A.
+walks hobbled, B. falls lame, and both suffer from the same misfit.
+However, the only thing to do is to bear and wear till the
+upper-leather yields or till the foot takes the required shape; but
+there is an eternity of pain to be gone through before either of these
+desirable ends comes about; and the instinct which dreads pain, and
+questions its necessity, is by no means a false one. For all that, we
+must wear our pinching shoes of matrimony till death or the Divorce
+Court pulls them from our feet; which points to the need of being more
+careful than we usually are about the fit beforehand.
+
+Poverty has a whole rack full of pinching shoes very hard to get
+accustomed to, and as bad to dance in lightly as were the fiery
+slippers of the naughty little girl in the German fairy-tale. Given a
+large heart, generous instincts and an empty purse, and we have the
+conditions of a real tragedy, both individual and social. For poverty
+does not mean only that elemental want of food and clothing which we
+generally associate with its name. Poverty may have two thousand a
+year as well as only a mouldy crust and three shillings a week from
+the parish; and poverty cursing its sore feet in a brougham is quite
+as common as poverty, full of corns and callosities, blaspheming
+behind a costermonger's barrow. The shoe may pinch horribly, though
+there is no question of hunger or the 'twopenny rope;' for it is all a
+matter of relative degree, and the means wherewith to meet wants. But
+as poverty is not one of those fixed conditions of human life which no
+human power can remove, we have not perhaps quite so much sympathy
+with its grips and pinches as in other things less remediable. For
+while there is work still undone in the world, there is gain still to
+be had. The man whose energies stagnate now in a dry channel can, if
+he will, turn them into one more fertile; and if he is making but a
+poor business out of meal, it is his own fault if he does not try to
+make a better out of malt. Where the shoe pinches hardest is in places
+which we cannot protect and with a grip which we cannot prevent; but
+we cannot say this of poverty as a necessary and inalienable
+condition, and sympathy is so much waste when circumstances can be
+changed by energy or will.
+
+
+
+
+_SUPERIOR BEINGS._
+
+
+Every now and then one comes across the path of a Superior Being--a
+being who seems to imagine itself made out of a different kind of clay
+from that which forms the coarser ruck of humanity, and whose presence
+crushes us with a sense of our own inferiority, exasperating or
+humiliating, according to the amount of natural pride bestowed upon
+us. The superior being is of either sex and of all denominations; and
+its superiority comes from many causes--being sometimes due to a wider
+grasp of intellect, sometimes to a loftier standard of morals,
+sometimes to better birth or a longer purse, and very often to the
+simple conceit of itself which simulates superiority and believes in
+its own apery. The chief characteristic of the superior being is that
+exalted pity for inferiority which springs from the consciousness of
+excellence. In fact, one of the main elements of superiority consists
+in this sublime consciousness of private exaltation, and the immense
+interval that separates it from the grosser condition it surveys.
+Rivalry is essentially angry and contentious, but confessed
+superiority can afford to be serene and compassionate. The little
+people who live in that meagre sphere of theirs, mental and social,
+with which not one point of its own extended circle comes in contact,
+are deserving of all pity and are below anything like active
+displeasure. That they should be content with such a meagre sphere
+seems inconceivable to the superior being, as it contemplates its own
+enlarged horizon with the complacency proper to a dweller in vastness.
+Or it may be that its own world is narrow; and its superiority will
+then be that it is high, safe, exclusive, while its pity will flow
+down for those poor wayfarers who wander afield in broad latitudes,
+and know nothing of the pleasure found in reserved places. In any case
+the region in which a superior being dwells is better than the region
+in which any other person dwells.
+
+Take a superior being who has made up a private account with truth,
+and who has, in his own mind at least, unlocked the gate of the great
+mysteries of life, and got to the back of that eternal Why? for ever
+confronting us. It does not in the least degree signify how the key is
+labelled. It may be High Church or Low Church, Swedenborgianism or
+Positivism. The name has nothing to do with the thing. It is the
+contented certainty of having unlocked that great gate at which others
+are hammering in vain which confers the superiority, and how the thing
+has been done does not affect the result. Neither does it disturb the
+equanimity of the superior being when he meets with opposing superior
+beings who have also made up their private accounts with truth,
+but in quite another handwriting and with a different sum-total at the
+bottom of the page; who have also unlocked the gate of the great
+mysteries, but with a key of contradictory wards, while the gate
+itself is of another order of architecture altogether. But then
+nothing ever does disturb the equanimity of the superior being; for,
+as he is above all rivalry, so is he beyond all teaching. The meeting
+of two superior beings of hostile creed is like the meeting of the two
+blind kings in the story, each claiming the crown for his own and both
+ignorant of the very existence of a rival. It may be that the superior
+being has soared away into the cold region of spiritual negation,
+whence he regards the praying and praising multitudes who go to church
+and believe in Providence as grown people regard children who still
+believe in ghosts and fairies. Or it may be that he has plunged into
+the phosphorescent atmosphere of mysticism and an all-pervading
+superstition; and then all who hold by scientific law, and who think
+the test of common sense not absolutely valueless, are Sadducees who
+know nothing of the glorious liberty of the light, but who prefer to
+live in darkness and to make themselves the agents of the great Lord
+of Lies.
+
+Sometimes the superior being goes in for the doctrine of love and
+impulse, as against reason or experience, holding the physiologist and
+political economist as creatures absolutely devoid of feeling; and
+sometimes his superiority is shown in the application of the
+hardest material laws to the most subtle and delicate manifestations
+of the mind. But on which side soever he ranks himself--as a
+spiritualist to whom reason and matter are stumbling-blocks and
+accursed, or as a materialist denying the existence of spiritual
+influences at all--he is equally secure of his own superiority and
+serene in his own conceit. That there should be two sides to any
+question never seems to strike him; and that a man of another creed
+should have as much right as himself to a hearing and consideration is
+the one hard saying impossible for him to receive. With a light and
+airy manner of playful contempt--sometimes with a heavy and Johnsonian
+scorn that keeps no terms with an opponent--the superior being meets
+all your arguments or batters down all your objections; sometimes,
+indeed, he will not condescend even so far as this, but when you
+express your adverse opinion just lifts up his eyebrows with a
+good-humoured kind of surprise at your mental state, but lets you see
+that he thinks you too hopeless, and himself too superior, to waste
+powder and shot upon you. It is of the nature of things that there
+should be moles and that there should be eagles; so much the worse for
+the moles, who must be content to remain blind, not seeing things
+patent to the nobler vision.
+
+The superior being is sometimes a person who is above all the passions
+and weaknesses of ordinary men; a philosopher, or an etherealized
+woman dwelling on serene Olympian heights which no clouds obscure
+and where no earth-fogs rise. The passions which shake the human soul,
+as tempests shake the forest trees, and warp men's lives according to
+the run of their own lines, are unknown to these Olympian personages
+who cannot understand their power. They look on these tempestuous
+souls with a curious analytical gaze, speculating on the geography of
+their Gethsemane, and wondering why they cannot keep as calm and quiet
+as they themselves are. They sit in scornful judgment on the
+mysterious impulses regulating human nature--regulating and
+disturbing--and think how perfect all things would be if only passions
+and instincts were cut out of the great plan, and men and women were
+left to the dominion of pure reason. But they do not take into account
+the law of constitutional necessity, and they are utterly unable to
+strike a balance between the good and evil wrought both by the
+tempests of souls and by those of nature. They only know that storms
+are inconvenient, and that for themselves they have no need of such
+convulsions to clear off stagnant humours; nor are they made of
+elements which kindle and explode at the contact of such or such
+materials. And if they know nothing of all this, why then should
+others? If they can sit on Olympian heights serene above all passion,
+why should not the whole world sit with them, and fogs and fires,
+earthquakes and deluges, be conditions unknown?
+
+When this kind of superior being is a woman, there is something pretty
+in the sublime assumption of her supremacy and the sweeping range
+of her condemnation. Sheltered from temptation and secure from danger,
+she looks out on life from the serene heights of her safe place, and
+wonders how men can fail and women fall before the power of trials of
+which she knows only the name. Her circulation is languid and her
+temperament phlegmatic; and the burning desire of life which sends the
+strong into danger, perhaps into sin, is as much unknown to her as is
+the fever of the tropics to a Laplander crouching in his snow-hut. But
+she judges none the less positively because of her ignorance; and, as
+she looks into your quivering face with her untroubled eyes, lets you
+see plainly enough how she despises all the human frailties under
+which you may have tripped and stumbled. Sometimes she rebukes you
+loftily. Your soul is sore with the consciousness of your sin, your
+heart is weak with the pain of life; but the superior being tells you
+that repentance cannot undo the evil that has been done, and that to
+feel pain is weak.
+
+The superiority which some women assume over men is very odd. It is
+like the grave rebuke of a child, not knowing what it is that it
+rebukes. When women take up their parable and censure men for the wild
+or evil things they do, not understanding how or why it has come about
+that they have done them, and knowing as little of the inner causes as
+of the outer, they are in the position of superior beings talking
+unmitigated rubbish. To be sure, it is very sweet and innocent
+rubbish, and has a lofty air about it that redeems what else
+would be mere presumption; but there is no more practical worth in
+what they say than there is in the child's rebuke when its doll will
+not stand upright on sawdust legs, nor eat a crumb of cake with waxen
+lips. This is one reason why women of the order of superior beings
+have so little influence over men; they judge without knowledge and
+condemn without insight. If they could thoroughly fathom man's nature,
+so as to understand his difficulties, they would then have moral power
+if their aims were higher than his, their principles more lofty, their
+practice more pure. As it is, they have next to none; and the very men
+who seem to yield most go only so far as to conceal what the superior
+being disapproves of; they do not change because of her greater weight
+of doctrine.
+
+Men show themselves as superior beings to women on another
+count--intellectually, rather than morally. While women rebuke men for
+their sins, men snub women for their follies; the one wields the
+spiritual, the other the intellectual, weapon of castigation, and both
+hold themselves superior, beyond all possibility of rivalry, according
+to the chance of sex. The masculine view of a subject always imposes
+itself on women as something unattainable by the feminine mind. Nine
+times out of ten it brings them to a due sense of their own
+inferiority, save in the case of the superior being, to whom of course
+the masculine view counts for nothing against her own. But even when
+women do not accept a man's opinions, they instinctively
+recognize his greater value, his greater breadth and strength. Perhaps
+they cry out against his hardness, if he is a political economist and
+they are emotional; or against his lower morality if he goes in for
+universal charity and philosophical latitudinarianism, and they are
+enthusiasts with a clearly-defined faith and a belief in its
+infallibility. These are wide tracts of difference between the two
+minds, not to be settled by the _ipse dixit_ of even a superior being;
+but in general the superiority of the man makes itself more felt than
+the superiority of the woman. While one preaches, the other ridicules;
+and snubbing does more than condemnation.
+
+
+
+
+_FEMININE AMENITIES._
+
+
+A man's foes are those of his own household, and the keenest enemies
+of women are women themselves. No one can inflict such humiliation on
+a woman as can a woman when she chooses; for if the art of high-handed
+snubbing belongs to men, that of subtle wounding is peculiarly
+feminine, and is practised by the best-bred of the sex. Women are
+always more or less antagonistic to each other. They are gregarious in
+fashions and emulative in follies, but they cannot combine; they never
+support their weak sisters; they shrink from those who are stronger
+than the average; and if they would speak the truth boldly, they would
+confess to a radical contempt for each other's intellect--which
+perhaps is the real reason why the sect of the 'emancipated' commands
+so small a following.
+
+Half a dozen ordinary men advocating 'emancipation' doctrines would do
+more towards leavening the whole bulk of womankind than any number of
+first-class women. Where these do stand by each other it is from
+instinctive or personal affection rather than from class solidarity.
+And this is one of the most striking distinctions of sex, and one
+cause, among others, why men have the upper hand, and why they are
+able to keep it. Certainly there are reasons, sufficiently good, why
+women do not more readily coalesce; and one is the immense difference
+between the two extremes--the silly being too silly to appreciate the
+wise, and the weak too weak to bear the armour of the strong. There is
+more difference between outsiders among women than there is among men;
+the feminine characteristic of exaggeration making a gap which the
+medium or average man fills. The ways of women with each other more
+than all else show the great difference between their _morale_ and
+that of men. They flatter and coax as men could not do, but they are
+also more rude to each other than any man would be to his fellow. It
+is amazing to see the things they can do and will bear--things which
+no man would dream of standing and which no man would dare to attempt.
+This is because they are not taught to respect each other, and because
+they have no fear of consequences. If one woman is insulted by
+another, she cannot demand satisfaction nor knock the offender down;
+and it is unladylike to swear and call names. She must bear what she
+can repay only in kind; but, to do her justice, she repays in a manner
+undeniably effective and to the point.
+
+There is nothing very pronounced about the feminine modes of
+aggression and retaliation; and yet each is eloquent and sufficient
+for its purpose. It may be only a stare, a shrug, a toss of the
+head; but women can throw an intensity of disdain into the simplest
+gesture which answers the end perfectly. The unabashed serenity and
+unflinching constancy with which one woman can stare down another is
+in itself an art that requires a certain amount of natural genius, as
+well as careful cultivation. She puts up her eyeglass--not being
+shortsighted--and surveys the enemy standing two feet from her, with a
+sublime contempt for her whole condition, or with a still more sublime
+ignoring of her sentient existence, that no words could give. If the
+enemy be sensitive and unused to the kind of thing, she is absolutely
+crushed, destroyed for the time, and reduced to the most pitiable
+state of self-abasement. If she be of a tougher fibre, and has had
+some experience of feminine warfare, she returns the stare with a
+corresponding amount of contempt or of obliviousness; and from that
+moment a contest is begun which never ceases and which continually
+gains in bitterness. The stare is the weapon of offence most in use
+among women, and is specially favoured by the experienced against the
+younger and less seasoned. It is one of the instinctive arms native to
+the sex; and we have only to watch the introduction of two girls to
+each other to see this, and to learn how even in youth is begun the
+exercise which time and use raise to such deadly perfection.
+
+In the conversations of women with each other we again meet with
+examples of their peculiar amenities to their own sex. They never
+refrain from showing how much they are bored; they contradict
+flatly, without the flimsiest veil of apology to hide their rudeness;
+and they interrupt ruthlessly, whatever the subject in hand may be.
+One lady was giving another a minute account of how the bride looked
+yesterday when she was married to Mr. A., of somewhat formidable
+boudoir repute, with whom her listener had had sundry tender passages
+which made the mention of his marriage a notoriously sore subject.
+'Ah! I see _you_ have taken that old silk which Madame Josephine
+wanted to palm off on me last year,' said the tortured listener
+brusquely breaking into the narrative without a lead of any kind. And
+the speaker was silenced. In this case it was the interchange of
+doubtful courtesies, wherein neither deserved pity; but to make a
+disparaging remark about a gown, in revenge for turning the knife in a
+wound, was a thoroughly feminine manner of retaliation, and one that
+would not have touched a man. Such shafts fall blunted against the
+rugged skin of the coarser creature; and the date or pattern of a bit
+of cloth would not have told much against the loss of a lover. But as
+most women passionately care for dress, their toilet is one of their
+most vulnerable parts. Ashamed to be unfashionable, they tolerate
+anything in each other rather than shabbiness or eccentricity, even
+when picturesque; hence a sarcastic allusion to the age of a few yards
+of silk as a set-off against a grossly cruel stab was a return wound
+of considerable depth cleverly given.
+
+The introduction of the womankind belonging to a favourite male
+acquaintance of somewhat lower social condition affords a splendid
+opportunity for the display of feminine amenity. The presentation
+cannot be refused, yet it is resented as an intrusion. 'Another
+daughter, Mr. C.! You must have a dozen daughters surely,' a peeress
+said disdainfully to a commoner whom personally she liked, but whose
+family she did not want to know. The poor man had but two; and this
+was the introduction of the second.
+
+Very painful to a high-spirited gentlewoman must be the way in which a
+superior creature of this kind receives her, if not of the same set as
+herself. The husband of the inferior creature may be adored, as men
+are adored by fashionable women who love only themselves, and care
+only for their own pleasures. Artist, man of letters, _beau sabreur_,
+he is the passing idol, the temporary toy, of a certain circle; and
+his wife has to be tolerated for his sake, and because she is a lady
+and fit to be presented, though an outsider. So they patronize her
+till the poor woman's blood is on fire; or they snub her till she has
+no moral consistency left in her, and is reduced to a mere mass of
+pulp. They keep her in another room while they talk to her husband
+with their other intimates; or they admit her into their circle, where
+she is made to feel like a Gentile among the faithful, for either they
+leave her unnoticed altogether or else speak to her on subjects quite
+apart from the general conversation, as if she were incapable of
+understanding them on their own ground. They ask her to dinner without
+her husband, and take care that there is no one to meet her whom she
+would like to see; but they ask him when they are at their grandest,
+and express their deep regret that his wife (uninvited) cannot
+accompany him. They know every turn and twist that can humiliate her
+if she has pretensions which they choose to demolish. They praise her
+toilet for its good taste in simplicity, when she thinks she is one of
+the finest on an occasion on which no one can be too fine. They tell
+her that pattern of hers is perfect, and made just like the dear
+duchess's famous dress last season, when she believes that she has
+Madame Josephine's last, freshly imported from Paris. They celebrate
+her dinner as the very perfection of a refined family dinner without
+parade or cost, though it has all been had from the crack
+confectioner's, and though the bill for the entertainment will cause
+many a day of family pinching. These are the things which women say to
+one another when they wish to pain and humiliate; things which pain
+and humiliate some more than would a positive disgrace. For some women
+are distressingly sensitive about these little matters. Their lives
+are made up of trifles, and a failure in a trifle is a failure in
+their object of life.
+
+Women can do each other no end of despite in a small way in society,
+not to speak of mischief of a graver kind. A hostess who has a grudge
+against one of her more famous lady-guests can always ensure her
+a disappointing evening under cover of doing her supreme honour and
+paying her extra attention. If she sees the enemy engaged in a
+pleasant conversation with one of the male stars, down she swoops, and
+in the sweetest manner possible carries her off to another part of the
+room, to introduce her to some school-girl who can only say yes or no
+in the wrong places--'who is dying for the honour of talking to you,
+my dear;' or to some unfledged stripling who blushes and grows hot and
+cannot stammer out two consecutive sentences, but who is presented as
+a rising genius and to be treated with the consideration due to his
+future. As her persecution is done under the guise of extra
+friendliness, the poor victim cannot cry out, nor yet resist; but she
+knows that whenever she goes to Mrs. So and So's she will be seated
+next the stupidest man at table, and prevented from talking to any one
+she likes in the evening; and that every visit to that lady is made in
+some occult manner unpleasant to her. And yet what has she to complain
+of? She cannot complain in that her hostess trusts to her for help in
+the success of her entertainment, and moves her about the room as a
+perambulating attraction which she has to dispense fairly among her
+guests, lest some should be jealous of the others. She may know that
+the meaning is to annoy; but who can act on meaning as against manner?
+How crooked soever the first may be, if the last is straight the case
+falls to the ground, and there is no room for remonstrance.
+
+Often women flirt as much to annoy other women as to attract men
+or amuse themselves. If a wife has crossed swords with a friend, and
+the husband is in any way endurable, let her look out for retaliation.
+The woman she has offended will take her revenge by flirting more or
+less openly with the husband, all the while loading the enemy with
+flattery if she be afraid of her, or snubbing her without much
+disguise if she feel herself the stronger. The wife cannot help
+herself, unless things go too far for public patience. A jealous woman
+without proof is the butt of her society, and brings the whole world
+of women like a nest of wasps about her ears. If wise, she will ignore
+what she cannot laugh at; if sensitive, she will fret; if vindictive,
+she will repay. Nine times out of ten she does the last, and, may be,
+with interest; and so goes on the duel, though all the time the
+fighters appear to be intimate friends and on the best possible terms
+together.
+
+But the range of these feminine amenities is not confined to women; it
+includes men as well; and women continually take advantage of their
+position to insult the stronger sex by saying to them things which can
+be neither answered nor resented. A woman can with the quietest face
+and the gentlest voice imaginable insinuate that you have just cheated
+at cards; she can give you the lie direct as coolly as if she were
+correcting a misprint; and you cannot defend yourself. To brawl with
+her would be unpardonable; to contradict her is useless; and the sense
+of society does not allow you to show her any active displeasure.
+In this instance the weaker creature is the stronger, and the more
+defenceless is the safer. You have only the rather questionable
+consolation of knowing that you are not singular in your discomfiture,
+and that when she has made an end of you she will probably have a turn
+with your betters, and make them too, dance to her piping, whether
+they like the tune or not. At all events, if she humiliates you she
+humiliates her sisters still more; and with the knowledge that, hardly
+handled as you have been, others are yet more severely dealt with, you
+must learn to be content, and to practise as much of that grim kind of
+patience, which suffers keenly and bears silently, as your nature will
+permit.
+
+
+
+
+_GRIM FEMALES._
+
+
+Almost all histories and mythologies embody the idea of a race of grim
+females. Whether as fabulous and complex monsters, like the Sphinx and
+the Harpies, or in the more human forms of the Fates and the Furies,
+unsexed women have been universally recognized as forming part of the
+system of nature and to be accepted among the stranger manifestations
+of human life. Yet it is hard to understand why they should exist at
+all. As moral 'sports,' they are so far interesting to the
+psychologists; but, as women with definite duties and fixed functions,
+nothing can be less admirable. They are even worse than effeminate
+men--which is saying everything.
+
+The grim female must be carefully distinguished from the masculine
+woman; for they are by no means essentially the same, though the types
+may run into each other, and sometimes do. But the masculine woman, if
+not grim but only Amazonian, has often much that is fine and beautiful
+in her, as we see in her great prototype Pallas Athene; but the grim
+female _pur sang_ is never noble, never beautiful; and the only
+meaning of her existence--the only mission she seems sent into the
+world to fulfil--is that of serving as a warning to the young what to
+avoid.
+
+The grim female is not necessarily an old maid, as would appear likely
+at first sight. We find her of all conditions indifferently--as maid,
+wife, widow, as mother and childless alike--and we do not find that
+her condition in any way affects her character. If born grim, she
+remains grim to the end; and neither marriage nor motherhood modifies
+her. The grim female of novelists is generally an old maid; but she is
+a caricature, painted in the broadest lines and copied from the
+outsides of things. She is emphatically an odd woman; odd in her
+dress, her mode, her state. She wears a flapping cap, skimpy skirts
+and rusty brown mittens on her bony hands. She has a passionate
+aversion against men and matrimony; and she lives queerly behind a
+barricaded house-door, with a small slavey, or an elderly female
+afflicted with deafness, to do her work and bear the brunt of her
+temper. But she is always odd, unmarried, unfashionable and unlike
+everybody else, and could never be mistaken for an ordinary woman from
+the first phrase which stamps her personality on the page to the last
+paragraph of her fictitious existence.
+
+Now the grim female of real life may be one of the most conventional
+of her sex, and in fact, she generally is one of the most conventional
+of her sex. She is one who rules her household with a rod of iron
+carefully wrought after the pattern of her neighbours' rods, and to
+whom a dish set awry, or the second-best china instead of the best,
+counts for as great a moral delinquency in her servants as a breach of
+all the Ten Commandments together. She is a woman who regards being
+out of the fashion, or being foremost in the fashion, as equally
+reprehensible, and to whom dress is among the most important matters
+of life. Wherefore she is notorious for a certain grim grandeur of
+style, as one who respects herself by her clothes, and is known among
+other women as possessing handsome lace and costly velvet in
+profusion. Are not lace and velvet _de rigueur_ for women of
+condition? and what is the grim female but the embodiment of the
+'rigour of the game' in all matters? Therefore she clothes herself
+sumptuously, without elegance or taste; and would as soon be seen
+abroad in her dressing-gown and slippers as without her characteristic
+heavy velvet or rustling silk. But the artist's little wife, in her
+fresh muslin and nice admixture of colours, sails round her for grace
+and beauty at about one-twentieth part of what the grim female's
+stately ugliness has cost.
+
+One characteristic of the grim female is her want of womanly passion
+for children. She may have so much maternal instinct, perverted, as to
+be on friendly terms with a dog or two, a cat, or may be a cockatoo;
+but she has no real affection for children, no comprehension of
+child-nature, and the 'sublime nonsense' of the nursery is a thing
+unknown to her from first to last. If she have children of her
+own, she treats them in a hard wooden way that has nothing of the
+ideal mother about it. She generally sees that they are properly cared
+for, because she is a disciplinarian; but, though she is inexorable on
+the score of cold baths and 'no trash,' she never condescends to the
+weakness of love. If her little ones are sick, they are set aside and
+dosed until they are well; if they are naughty, they are punished; but
+they never know those moments of tender indulgence which help them
+over a period of indisposition not severe enough for actual doctoring,
+yet throwing them out of gear and inducing a spell of what ignorance
+calls naughtiness. Rhadamanthus was a weakling compared to the grim
+female in the nursery; and what she is in her nursery she continues to
+be in the schoolroom, and the drawing-room to follow. Her children are
+always causes of annoyance to the grim female, and the first stirrings
+of individuality, the first half-unconscious trials of their young
+strength, are offences she cannot away with. Children and inferiors
+are they in her eyes, even when grown up and married; and she exacts
+from them the humility and deference of their lower condition. Hence
+she is one to whom the present generation is undeniably worse than the
+past; one who groans over the follies and shortcomings of the times
+and who thinks that good conduct died out with her own youth, and that
+it is not likely, by the look of things, to be restored. In fact,
+youth itself is the root and basis of offence; and if she coerces
+children, she tyrannizes over girls and snubs young men, with
+inexorable impartiality.
+
+The grim female is not necessarily a strong-minded woman, nor a
+learned woman, like those who wear spectacles, go to scientific
+meetings and are great in the classics and the 'ologies. She may be of
+the emancipated class; it all depends on chance; and a grim female,
+when of the emancipated, is a very formidable person indeed. But she
+is not necessarily one of these. On the contrary, part of her very
+grimness comes from her intense conservatism and uncompromising
+conventionality. Nothing is so abhorrent to her as innovation or
+novelty in any shape. She does not hold with any one out of the
+narrowest groove of respectable belief, in what direction soever the
+diverging line may go. A Romanist or a Baptist, a Jew or an infidel,
+it is all one to her; each is equally dreadful to her, and each is
+eternally foredoomed. She is of the orthodox Church without fal-lals;
+as far removed from Ritualism as she is from ranting, and demanding
+for herself that infallibity of judgment and absolute possession of
+the truth which she denies to the Pope and all his Cardinals. Beware
+how you broach new doctrines in her presence. She has been known
+before now to abjure her nearest relations for no greater moral lapse
+than a weak belief in globules; while, as for anything like graver
+aberrations, say on the ape theory or on the plurality of races, on
+development in religions or on a republican form of government,
+she has no toleration whatever. If the Smithfield fires existed at the
+present day, the grim female would be the first to light the faggots.
+It is all the same if she belongs to any Dissenting persuasion; part
+of her grimness coming from her intolerance, and her own beliefs being
+simply the springboard on which she stands.
+
+Many causes produce the grim female. It may be that she is grim from
+social pride as well as from natural hardness. If she has been used to
+live with people whom, rightly or wrongly, she considers her
+inferiors, she will probably queen it over them in a very
+unmistakeable manner. The prelatic blood is renowned for this sort of
+thing; and a bishop's daughter, or an archbishop's grand-daughter, or
+Mrs. Proudie, prelatic by marriage only, if of the grim class, is one
+of the grimmest of her class. The halo of sanctity round the mitre and
+the crozier will be greater in her eyes than even the glitter of the
+strawberry leaves; and she holds herself consecrated by her birth or
+marriage to the understanding of every moral question, and specially
+to the final settlement of every tough theological position. Or she
+may be grim because of her isolation and meagre intercourse with the
+world at large; such as she is found in the remoter districts. This
+kind comes into the exceptional or novelist's class, and is often more
+masculine than grim. These are the women who hunt and fish and shoot
+like men, and who may be found in all weathers wandering alone
+about the mountains in short petticoats and spatterdashes--women who
+affect to be essentially mannish in person, habits and attire, and who
+may be quite jolly easy-going fellows in their own way, or else grim
+and trenchant, as nature or the fit takes them. This is a kind not at
+all uncommon in country places among the higher class of resident
+ladies--ladies who are so highly placed locally that they can afford
+to disregard public opinion, and who are so independent by disposition
+that they naturally go off to the manly side, and make themselves bad
+imitations, as the best they can do.
+
+The grim female tries her strength with all newcomers. She is like one
+of the giants or black knights of old romance, who lived in castles or
+caves, whence they pounced on all passers-by, and either wrung their
+necks if they conquered or retreated howling if discomfited. This is
+what the grim female does in her degree. She dashes on all who are
+presented to her, and has a passage of arms as the first act of the
+new drama. If her opponents yield out of timidity or good-breeding, or
+perhaps from not understanding the warlike nature of the encounter,
+she puts her foot on them forthwith, and ignominiously crushes them;
+if they defy her, and give her back blow for blow, ten to one she cuts
+them and becomes their enemy for ever after. For she has not breadth
+enough to be magnanimous, and the one thing she never forgives is
+successful opposition. Very grim is she in the presence of human
+weakness, moral and physical. Woe to that unhappy maid of hers
+who has slipped on the narrow path of prudence! She will be turned out
+to perish with no more compunction than if she were a black-beetle to
+be swept out of the way.
+
+As a nurse the grim female is precise, punctual, obedient to orders,
+but inexorable. She would give the patient a fit of nervous hysterics
+which would throw him back for a week, rather than allow him five
+minutes' grace in the matter of a painful operation or a nauseous
+draught. Without variableness or weakness herself, she cannot endure
+it in others, and whosoever comes under her hand must be content to
+remain in shape, and to keep himself well braced up to the utmost
+rigidity of duty. If she had to lose an arm or a leg, she would go to
+her trouble like a Trojan; and why not others? She would merely
+tighten her lips and hold her breath, and then would sit down to let
+herself be hacked and mangled without a groan or a word. To judge by
+the notice given of her in her sister's life, Emily Brontë was of the
+grim class, and about the grimmest for her age and state that could
+well be found. Had she lived, and lived unsoftened, she would have
+been one unbroken mass of iron and granite, without a soft spot
+anywhere. Her very love was fiercer than other women's hate; her
+strength was more terrible than a man's anger; her passions were as
+fiery as furnace flames. Of all the examples we could cite, she seems
+about the fittest for our model.
+
+A grim female has no mercy. She may be just, but if so, it is in a
+hard uncompromizing way that makes her justice worse than others'
+partiality. For justice can be sympathetic, even if unwavering; and
+the grim female is never sympathetic, how painful soever the work on
+hand and the sentence to be executed. Neither is she gay; for she is
+not plastic enough to be either one or the other. She is run into an
+iron mould, where her nature is compressed as in a vice; and she
+allows of no expansion, no lipping over, no bursting of bonds anyhow.
+
+What would become of us if all our women were like her? Without any of
+the feminine little weaknesses at which we have our laugh yet which we
+do not wholly dislike--without any of the pretty coaxing ways which we
+know warp our better judgment and take us out of the strict course;
+and yet how pleasant that warping process is!--without any even of the
+transient petulances which give so much light and shade to a woman's
+character, the grim female stands like an old-world Gorgon, turning
+living flesh and blood to stone. When we look at her we are inclined
+to forgive all the smallness and silliness which sometimes vex us in
+the ordinary woman, and to think that there are worse things than the
+love of dress for which we so often reproach our wives and daughters;
+that flirting, which is reprehensible no doubt, might be exchanged for
+something even more reprehensible; and that vanity, of the giggling,
+coquettish kind, though to be steadily discouraged and sternly
+reproved, is not quite the worst feminine thing after all. Surely not!
+A grim female who cannot flirt nor giggle nor cry, nor yet kiss and
+make up again when scolded, is far away a worse kind of thing than a
+feather-headed little puss who is always doing wrong by reason of her
+foolish brain, but who manages somehow to pull herself right because
+of her loving heart. Weak women, vain women, affected women, and the
+whole class of silly women, whatever the speciality of silliness
+exhibited, are tiresome enough, heaven knows; but, unsatisfactory as
+they are, they are better than the grim female--that woman of no sex,
+born without softness or sympathy and living without pity and without
+love.
+
+
+
+
+_MATURE SIRENS._
+
+
+Nothing is more incomprehensible to girls than the love and admiration
+sometimes given to middle-aged women. They cannot understand it; and
+nothing but experience will ever make them understand it. In their
+eyes, a woman is out of the pale of personal affection altogether when
+she has once lost that shining gloss of youth, that exquisite
+freshness of skin and suppleness of limb, which to them, in the
+insolent plenitude of their unfaded beauty, constitute the chief
+claims to admiration of the one sex from the other. And yet they
+cannot conceal from themselves that the pretty maid of eighteen is
+often deserted for the handsome woman of forty, and that the patent
+witchery of their own youth and brilliant colouring goes for nothing
+against the mysterious charms of a mature siren. What can they say to
+such an anomaly? There is no good in going about the world
+disdainfully wondering how on earth a man could ever have taken up
+with such an antiquated creature!--suggestively asking their male
+friends what could he see in a woman of her age, old enough to be his
+mother? There the fact stands; and facts are stubborn things. The
+eligible suitor who has been coveted by more than one golden-haired
+girl has married a woman twenty years her senior, and the middle-aged
+siren has quietly carried off the prize which nymphs in their teens
+have frantically desired to win. What is the secret? How is it done?
+The world, even of silly girls, has got past any belief in spells and
+talismans, such as Charlemagne's mistress wore, and yet the man's
+fascination seems to them quite as miraculous and almost as unholy as
+if it had been brought about by the black art. But if they had any
+analytical power they would understand the _diablerie_ of the mature
+siren clearly enough; for it is not so difficult to understand when
+one puts one's mind to it.
+
+In the first place, a woman of ripe age has a knowledge of the world,
+and a certain suavity of manner and moral flexibility, wholly wanting
+to the young. Young girls are for the most part all angles--harsh in
+their judgments, stiff in their prejudices, narrow in their
+sympathies. They are full of combativeness and self-assertion if they
+belong to one type of young people, or they are stupid and shy if they
+belong to another type. They are talkative with nothing to say, and
+positive with nothing known; or they are monosyllabic dummies who
+stammer out Yes or No at random, and whose brains become hopelessly
+confused at the first sentence with which the stranger, to whom they
+have just been introduced, attempts to open a conversation. They are
+generally without pity; their want of experience making them hard
+towards sorrows which they do not understand--let us charitably hope
+also making them ignorant of the pain they inflict. That famous
+article in the _Times_ on the cruelty of young girls, _àpropos_ of
+Constance Kent's confession, though absurdly exaggerated, had in it
+the core of truth which gives the sting to such papers, which makes
+them stick, and which is the real cause of the outcry they create.
+
+Girls are cruel; there is no question about it. If passive rather than
+active, they are simply indifferent to the sufferings of others; if of
+a more active temperament, they find a positive pleasure in giving
+pain. A girl will say horribly cruel things to her dearest friend,
+then laugh at her because she cries. Even her own mother she will hurt
+and humiliate if she can; while, as for any unfortunate aspirant not
+approved of, were he as tough-skinned as a rhinoceros she would find
+means to make him wince. But all this acerbity is toned down in the
+mature woman. Experience has enlarged her sympathies, and knowledge of
+suffering has softened her heart to the sufferings of others. Her
+lessons of life too, have taught her tact; and tact is one of the most
+valuable lessons that a man or woman can learn. She sees at a glance
+the weak points and sore places in her companion, and she avoids them;
+or if she passes over them, it is with a hand so soft and tender, a
+touch so soothing, that she calms instead of irritating. A girl would
+have come down on those weak places heavily, and would have torn
+off the bandages from the sore ones, jesting at scars because she
+herself had never felt a wound, and deriding the sybaritism of
+diachylon because ignorant of the anguish it conceals.
+
+Furthermore, the mature siren is thoughtful for others. Girls are
+self-asserting and aggressive. Life is so strong in them, and the
+instinct which prompts them to try their strength with all comers and
+to get the best of everything everywhere, is so irrepressible, that
+they are often disagreeable because of that instinctive selfishness,
+that craving, natural to the young, of taking all and giving back
+nothing. But the mature siren knows better than this. She knows that
+social success entirely depends on what each of us can throw into the
+common fund of society; that the surest way to win consideration for
+ourselves is to be considerate for others; that sympathy begets
+liking, and self-suppression leads to exaltation; and that if we want
+to gain love we must first show how well we can give it. Her tact
+then, and her sympathy, her moral flexibility and quick comprehension
+of character, her readiness to give herself to others, are some of the
+reasons, among others, why the society of a cultivated agreeable woman
+of a certain age is sought by those men to whom women are more than
+mere mistresses or toys. Besides, she is a good conversationalist. She
+has no pretensions to any special or deep learning--for, if pedantic,
+she is spoilt as a siren at any age--but she knows a little about most
+things; at all events, she knows enough to make her a pleasant
+companion in a _tête-à-tête_ or at a dinner-table, and to enable her
+to keep up the ball when thrown. And men like to talk to intelligent
+women. They do not like to be taught nor corrected by them, but they
+like that quick sympathetic intellect which follows them readily, and
+that amount of knowledge which makes a comfortable cushion for their
+own. And a mature siren who knows what she is about would never do
+more than this, even if she could.
+
+Though the mature siren rests her claims to admiration on more than
+mere personal charms, and appeals to something beyond the senses, yet
+she is personable and well preserved, and, in a favourable light,
+looks nearly as young as ever. So the men say who knew her when she
+was twenty; who loved her then, and have gone on loving her, with a
+difference, despite the twenty years which lie between this and then.
+Girls, indeed, despise her charms because she is no longer young; and
+yet she may be even more beautiful than youth. She knows all the
+little niceties of dress, and, without going into the vulgar trickery
+of paint and dyes--which would make her hideous--is up to the best
+arts of the toilet by which every point is made to tell and every
+minor beauty is given its fullest value. For part of the art and
+mystery of sirenhood is an accurate perception of times and
+conditions, and a careful avoidance of that suicidal mistake of which
+_la femme passée_ is so often guilty--namely, setting herself in
+confessed rivalry with the young by trying to look like them, and
+so losing the good of what she has retained, and betraying the ravages
+of time by the contrast.
+
+The mature siren is wiser than this. She knows exactly what she has
+and what she can do; and before all things avoids whatever seems too
+youthful for her years; and this is one reason why she is always
+beautiful, because always in harmony. Besides, she has very many good
+points, many positive charms still left. Her figure is still good--not
+slim and slender certainly, but round and soft, and with that slower,
+riper, lazier grace which, quite different from the antelope-like
+elasticity of youth, is in its own way as lovely. If her hair has lost
+its maiden luxuriance she makes up with crafty arrangements of lace,
+which are more picturesque than the fashionable wisp of hay-like ends
+tumbling half-way to the waist. She has still her white and shapely
+hands with their pink filbert-like nails; still her pleasant smile and
+square small teeth--those one or two new, matching so perfectly with
+the old as to be undiscoverable! Her eyes are bright yet, and if the
+upper muscles are a little shrunk, the consequent apparent enlargement
+of the orbit only makes them more expressive; her lips are not yet
+withered; her skin is not wrinkled. Undeniably, when well-dressed and
+in a favourable light, the mature siren is as beautiful in her own way
+as the girlish belle; and the world knows it and acknowledges it.
+
+That mature sirens can be passionately loved, even when very
+mature, history gives us more than one example; and the first name
+that naturally occurs to one's mind is that of the too famous Ninon de
+l'Enclos. And Ninon, if a trifle mythical, was yet a fact and an
+example. But not going quite to Ninon's age, we often see women of
+forty and upwards who are personally charming, and whom men love with
+as much warmth and tenderness as if they were in the heyday of
+life--women who count their admirers by dozens, and who end by making
+a superb marriage, and having quite an Indian summer of romance and
+happiness. The young laugh at this idea of the Indian summer for a
+bride of forty-five; but it is true; for neither romance nor
+happiness, neither love nor mental youth, is a matter of years; and
+after all we are only as old as we feel, and certainly no older than
+we look.
+
+All women do not harden by time, nor wither, nor yet corrupt. Some
+merely ripen and mellow and get enriched by the passage of the years,
+retaining the most delicate womanliness--we had almost said
+girlishness into quite old age, blushing as swiftly under their grey
+hairs, while shrinking from anything coarse or vulgar or impure as
+sensitively, as when they were girls. _La femme à quarante ans_ is the
+French term for the opening of the great gulf beyond which love cannot
+pass; but human history disproves this date, and shows that the heart
+can remain fresh and the person lovely long after the age fixed for
+the final adieu to admiration--that the mature siren can be adored
+by her own contemporaries when the rising generation regard her
+as nothing better than a chimney-corner fixture. Mr. Trollope
+recognized the claims of the mature siren in his _Orley Farm_ and
+_Miss Mackenzie_; and no one can deny the intense naturalness of the
+characters and the interest of the stories.
+
+Another point which tells with the mature woman is, that she is not
+jealous nor exacting. She knows the world, and takes what comes with
+that philosophy which springs from knowledge. If she be of an enjoying
+nature--and she cannot be a siren else--she accepts such good as
+floats to the top, neither looking too deep into the cup nor
+speculating on the time when she shall have drained it to the dregs.
+Men feel safe with her. If they have entered on a tender friendship
+with her, they know that there will be no scene, no tears, no
+upbraidings, when an inexorable fate comes in to end their pleasant
+little drama, with the inevitable wife as the scene-shifter. The
+mature siren knows so well that fate and the wife must break in
+between her and her friend, that she is resigned from the first to
+what is foredoomed, and thus accepts her bitter portion, when it
+comes, with dignity and in silence. Where younger women would fall
+into hysterics and make a scene, perhaps go about the world taking
+their revenge in slander, the middle-aged woman holds out a friendly
+hand and takes the back seat gallantly, never showing by word nor look
+that she has felt her deposition. She becomes the best friend of the
+new household; and if any one is jealous, ten to one it is the
+husband who is jealous of her love for his wife. Of course it may be
+the wife herself, who cannot see what her husband can find to admire
+so much in Mrs. A., and who pouts at his extraordinary predilection for
+her, though of course she would scorn to be jealous--as, indeed, she
+has no cause. For even a mature siren, however delightful she may be,
+is not likely to come before a young wife in the heart of a young
+husband. Though the French paint the love of a woman of forty as
+pathetic, because slightly ridiculous and certainly hopeless, yet they
+arrange their theory of social life so that a youth is generally
+supposed to make his first love of a married woman many years his
+elder, while a mature siren finds her last love in a youth.
+
+We have not come to this yet in England, either in theory or practice;
+and it is to be hoped that we never shall come to it. Mature sirens
+are all very well for men of their own age, and it is pleasant to see
+them still loved and admired, and to recognize in them the claims of
+women to something higher than mere personal passion; but the case
+would be very different if they became ghoulish seducers of the young,
+and kept up the habit of love by entangling boyish hearts and
+blighting youthful lives. As they are now, they form a charming
+element in society, and are of infinite use to the world. They are the
+ripe fruit in the garden where else everything would be green and
+immature--the last days of the golden summer set against the
+disappointing backwardness of spring and before the chills of
+autumn have come. They contain in themselves the advantages of two
+distinct epochs, and while possessing as much personal charm as youth,
+possess also the gains which come by experience and maturity. They
+keep things together as the young could not do; and no gathering of
+friends is perfect which has not one or two mature sirens to give the
+tone, and prevent excesses. They soften the asperities of high-handed
+boys and girls, which else would be too biting; and they set people at
+ease, and make them in good humour with themselves, by the courtesy
+with which they listen to them and the patience with which they bear
+with them. Even the very girls who hate them fiercely as rivals love
+them passing well as half maternal, half sisterly, companions; and the
+first person to whom they would carry their sorrows would be a mature
+siren, quite capable for her own part of having caused them.
+
+It would be hard indeed if the loss of youth did not bring with it
+some compensations; but the mature siren suffers less from that loss
+than any other kind of woman. Indeed, she seems to have a private
+elixir of her own which is not quite drained dry when she dies,
+beloved and regretted, at threescore years and ten; leaving behind her
+one or two old friends who were once her ardent lovers, and who still
+cherish her memory as that of the finest and most fascinating woman
+they ever knew--something which the present generation is utterly
+incapable of repeating.
+
+
+
+
+_PUMPKINS._
+
+
+Pumpkins are among the most imposing of all groundling growths. They
+have fine showy flowers, handsome leaves, roving stems, and they bear
+solid-looking fruit of a goodly size and gorgeous colour. To see them
+spreading over their domain with such rapid luxuriance, one would
+imagine them among the best things growing; but a critical examination
+proves their flesh to be about three parts water, while as for their
+stalks, they are of so pithless a nature that they can only creep
+along the earth, unable to stand upright without support;--which tells
+something against the pumpkin's claim for extra consideration. Still,
+their showy largeness attracts the eye, and not a few of us believe in
+pumpkins, and admire both their mode of growth and the fruit
+resulting. In like manner the human pumpkins--those beings of imposing
+presence and loud self-assertion--get themselves believed in by the
+simple; and, as occasions by which their watery and fibreless nature
+is revealed do not arise every day, they are for the most part
+accepted for the substantialities they assume to be, and the world is
+deceived by appearances as it ever has been.
+
+These human pumpkins abound everywhere. In all states and professions,
+and in both sexes, we find them flourishing magnificently on the face
+of the earth, taking the lead in their society and setting themselves
+out as the finest fellows to be found in their respective gardens.
+Among them are the men of the Bombastes type, so dear to the older
+playwrights; braggadocios of the kill 'em and eat 'em school, who were
+such terrible fellows to look at and listen to, though only pumpkins
+of a singularly innocuous nature when stoutly squeezed and analyzed;
+fire-eaters of the juggling kind, with special care taken that the
+fire shall be harmless and that the danger shall lie only in the fear
+of the spectators. Now that duelling has gone out of fashion, and
+discharged captains who have signalized themselves in war are rare,
+our old swashbuckler type of pumpkins has gone out both in fact and
+fiction, on the stage and off it. To be sure we have a few travellers
+of slightly apocryphal courage, and more than doubtful accuracy, whose
+books of perilous adventure and breathless dangers are to us what
+Bombastes and Bobadil were to our fathers; and we have Major
+Wellington de Boots with his military swagger and his hare's heart.
+But he is a very weak imitation of the old fire-eater; and, on the
+whole, this special family of the pumpkins has dwindled into
+insignificance, and their place knows them no more.
+
+Then there is the pumpkin after the cut of the Prince Regent--the man
+of deportment, big, handsome, showy, and specially noticeable for
+a loud voice, a broad chest, and an indescribable air of superiority
+and command; the man who has studied bowing as one of the fine arts,
+who walks with a swagger, and even now tips his curly-brimmed hat
+slightly to the side. This is the kind of man who influences women.
+Bombastes frightens the nervous and inexperienced of his own sex, but
+the man of deportment partly fascinates and partly overawes the other.
+They take him at his own valuation, and have not skill enough to find
+out the flaw in the summing up until perhaps it is too late, when they
+have come so near to him that they are able to appraise him for
+themselves, and have learnt by bitter experience of what unsound
+materials he is made. And then let him look out. There is nothing
+women resent so much as pumpkin manhood--nothing which humiliates them
+more in their own esteem than to discover that they have been taken in
+by appearances, and that what they had believed in as solid wood turns
+out to be only squash.
+
+Women like to rely on men, and dread nothing so much as weakness and
+vacillation in their male protectors; save indeed those grim and bulky
+females in whom Hood so much delighted, who take small men _vi et
+armis_, and subjugate them body and soul, like two-legged poodles
+trained to fetch and carry at the word of command. But these are
+exceptions; the average woman prizing strength rather than poodle-like
+docility. The pumpkin of the Prince Regent cut is generally
+notorious for laying down the law on all points. His voice is so loud
+and his manner of speech so dictatorial, that no one dreams of
+doubting still less of contradicting him, but everybody takes him as
+he represents himself to be--a man of prompt decision, of boundless
+resources, a granitic tower of strength to be leant against in all
+emergencies without the slightest fear of failure; a man who is not
+only sufficient for himself but strong enough to bear the weaknesses
+of others. He is famous for giving advice--advice of a vague, rapid,
+sprawling kind, never quite exact to the circumstances, never quite
+practical nor to the point--large advice, general in scope but
+wonderfully positive in tone, and, until you analyze, grandly imposing
+in effect. Nail him to the point; ask his advice seriously on any
+question where the responsibility of counsel will rest with him; place
+yourself in his hands where the consequences of failure will touch him
+as well as you; and then see to what meagre dimensions your goodly
+gourd will shrink. The confident assertion drops into a weak
+hesitation; the arrogant dictum melts into a timid refusal to take
+such a serious responsibility on himself; you have pricked your
+windbag, bisected your pumpkin, and henceforth you know the precise
+weight of substance remaining. Yet mankind sees him exactly where he
+was before, and he will go about the world in his large, loud way,
+saying to every one that if you had followed his advice you would have
+succeeded--supposing you have failed; or, if you have succeeded,
+he will take all the credit to himself, and say it was he who guided
+you and showed you how to go in and win. For himself, and his own
+affairs, he has no more moral stamina than he had leadership for you
+and yours. The least reverse knocks him over. Care or sorrow, when it
+touches him, shrivels him up as completely as frost shrivels up the
+pumpkin. In every circumstance requiring promptitude, coolness, keen
+perception, just decision, our swaggering man of froth fails
+ignominiously; and one hour of real pressure proves incontestably that
+he was only a pumpkin of imposing presence, good neither as meat nor
+staff when the time of trial came.
+
+Very often the pumpkin has a wife whose fibre is as close as his is
+loose, and whose nature is as tough as his is soft; a hard-eyed,
+thin-lipped, tenacious woman, who speaks little and boasts not at all,
+but who does all she wishes to do, and whose iron will pins her
+pumpkin to the wall as the spear of the Bushman pins the elephant or
+the rhinoceros. It is very curious to see how a blatant blustering man
+who is so loud and confident abroad, knocks under at home; and how the
+high-crested deportment which carries things with such a lofty bearing
+out of doors droops into the meek submission of the henpecked husband
+so soon as the house-door closes on him, and he is subjected to the
+pitiless analysis of home. There is no question of flourish then; and
+if by chance the ambitious crest should make an effort to display
+itself, the wife knows how to lower it by a few decisive words of a
+keen-edged kind, and her pumpkin is made to feel sharply enough the
+difference existing between fibre and pulp. It is almost melancholy to
+see one of these fine flourishing fellows so subdued. Pumpkin as he
+may be, it is not pleasant to see him so cut down in his pride; and
+involuntarily one's sympathies go with him rather than with that
+tenacious, hard-mouthed wife of his, who would be none the worse
+perhaps for a little of her husband's essential softness and with less
+than her own hardness.
+
+How often too, these big fellows have no physical stamina as well as
+but very shaky moral fibre! A small, wiry light-weight will do twice
+as much as they; not, of course, where muscle only is wanted, but
+where the question is of endurance. Large heavy men knock up far
+sooner than the light-weights; and though size and weight count for
+something at certain times and on occasions, fibre and tenacity go for
+more in the long run. In the Crimea, the men who first dropped off
+from exposure and privation were the magnificently-built
+Guardsmen--men apparently bred and fed to the highest point of
+physical perfection; while the undersized little liners, who had
+nothing to be admired in them, stood the strain gamely, and were brisk
+and serviceable when the others were either dead or in hospital. So
+far as we have gone yet, we have not solved the problem of how to
+combine toughness and bigness, solidity and size, but for the
+most part fail in the one in proportion as we succeed in the other.
+
+Many of the dark-skinned races are what we may call emotional
+pumpkins. Their flashing black eyes and swarthy skins seem to be
+instinct with passion; they look like living furnaces filled with
+flames and molten metal, terrible fellows, dangerous to meddle with
+and almost impossible to subdue. But nine times out of ten we find
+them to be marvellously meek persons, timid, amenable to law, unable
+to give offence and incapable of taking it--lambs masquerading in
+tiger-skins. A fair-faced Anglo-Saxon, with his sensitive blush,
+good-humoured smile and light blue eyes, has more pluck and pith in
+him than a whole brigade of certain of these dark-skinned men. He has
+less ferocity perhaps than they when they are thoroughly roused,
+though our good-humoured Anglo-Saxon is by no means destitute of
+ferocity on occasions when his blood is up; but his is ferocity of the
+quarter-staff and bludgeon stand-up fight kind--the ferocity of
+strength fairly put out against an adversary, not the tigerish cruelty
+which is almost always found when moral weakness and physical
+submission have a momentary triumph and reaction. Cowardly men are
+like women in their revenge when once they get the upper hand; and
+their revenge is more cruel than that of the habitually brave man who,
+after a fair fight, overthrows his opponent. Some of the dark-skinned
+races look the very ideal of the melodramatic ruffian--operatic
+brigands painted with broad black lines, and up to any amount of
+deeds of daring and of crime; but they are only pumpkins at the core.
+We need not go so far as Calcutta to find them; we get examples nearer
+home, both in Houndsditch and in Rome; for both Jews and Italians are
+soft-cored men in spite of their passionate outsides, and both would
+be better for an extra twist and toughness in their fibres.
+
+Intellectual pumpkins are as common as those of the more specially
+physical kind. You meet with philosophers and 'thinkers'--perhaps they
+are poets, perhaps politicians--who flourish out a vague big
+declamation which, when you reduce it to its essence, you find to be a
+platitude worth nothing; whipped cream, without any foundation of
+solid pudding. If they are of the philosophic sort, they quote you
+Fichte and Hegel, to the bewilderment of your brains unless you have
+gone into the metaphysical maze on your own account; but they might
+have put all they have said into half a dozen words of three letters,
+like a child's first reading lesson. The flourish imposes, and people
+who cannot analyze take the whipped cream for solid pudding, and think
+that platitudes dressed in the garb of Fichte and Hegel are utterances
+worthy of deep respect and admiring wonder.
+
+All the professions which talk, either by word of mouth or in print,
+are specially given to this manifestation of pumpkinhood. Preachers
+and authors sprawl and flourish over their small inheritance with a
+tremendous assumption of vital force and vigorous growth; and
+weak hands, with weaker heads, find support and shelter in their
+foliage. Poets too, with a knack for turning out large moulds in which
+they have run very small ideas, are pumpkins dear to the feminine
+mind. Have we not our Tupper? had we not our 'Satan' Montgomery? and a
+few others whom we might catalogue if we cared for the task, each with
+his multifarious female following and his spiritual harem of ardent
+admirers? All artists--that is, the men who create, or rather who
+assume to create--are liable to be proved pumpkins when called on to
+show themselves solid wood. They talk grandly enough, but when they
+have to translate their words into deeds, too often the noble aims and
+immortal efforts they have been advocating tail off into pulp and
+water, and we have botches and pot-boilers instead of masterpieces and
+high art. Perhaps we may take it as a rule that all doers who talk
+much and boast grandly are of the pumpkin order, and that art, like
+nature, elaborates best in silence.
+
+Strong-visaged women are often pure pumpkins with a very rough and
+corrugated outside. It is astonishing how soon they break down, and
+for all their stern and powerful looks sink under burdens under which
+a frail little creature, as light as thistledown, will glide along
+quite easily. Women with black brows and harsh voices--brigandesses by
+appearance, or like the typical Herodias of unimaginative artists--are
+often the gentlest and most pithless of their sex, and may be seen
+acting quite compassionately towards their infants, or vindicating
+their womanhood by meekly sewing on their husbands' buttons and
+weeping at their rebukes; while a fair, silver-tongued, languid lady,
+as soft as if she were made of nothing harder than the traditional
+cream and rose-leaves, will give up her babies as a prey to unfeeling
+nurses and let her husband go buttonless and in rags, while she
+lounges before the fire indifferent to his wrath and callous to his
+wrongs. There is many a house mistress who looks as if she could use
+her fists when annoyed, who is absolutely afraid of her servants; and
+the maid is always the mistress when the one is fibre and the other
+pulp.
+
+Heaven be praised that the strong-visaged women are not 'clear grit'
+all through. If they were as hard as they look, the world would go but
+queerly, and society would have to make new laws for the protection of
+its weaker male members. But nature is merciful as well as sportive,
+and while she amuses herself by creating pumpkins of formidable
+aspect, takes care that the core shall not always correspond to the
+rind. Like the Athenian images of the satyr which enclosed a god, the
+black-browed brigandesses and the men of magnificent deportment are
+sometimes impostors of a quite amiable kind; and when you have once
+learnt by heart the false analogies of form, you will cease to fear
+your typical Herodias, to be impressed by your copy of the Prince
+Regent, or to be influenced by your wordy Hegelian talking platitudes
+in the philosophic dialect.
+
+
+
+
+_WIDOWS._
+
+
+There are widows and widows; there are those who are bereaved and
+those who are released; those who lose their support and those whose
+chains are broken; those who are sunk in desolation and those who wake
+up into freedom. Of the first we will not speak. Theirs is a sorrow
+too sacred to be publicly handled even with sympathy; but the second
+demand no such respectful reticence. The widow who is no sooner
+released from one husband than she plots for another, and the widow
+who leaps into liberty over the grave of a gaoler, not a lover, are
+fair game enough. They have always been favourite subjects whereon
+authors may exercise their wits; and while men are what they
+are--laughing animals apt to see the humour lying in incongruity, and
+with a spice of the devil to sharpen that same laughter into
+satire--they will remain favourite subjects, tragic as the state is
+when widowhood is deeper than mere outward condition.
+
+There are many varieties of the widow and all are not beautiful. For
+one, there is the widow who is bent on re-marrying whether men like it
+or not; that thing of prey who goes about the world seeking whom
+she may devour; that awful creature who bears down on her victims with
+a vigour in her assaults which puts to flight the popular fancy about
+the weaker sex and the natural distribution of power. No hawk poised
+over a brood of hedge birds, no shark cruising steadily towards a
+shoal of small fry, no piratical craft sailing under a free flag and
+accountable to no law save success, was ever more formidable to the
+weaker things pursued than is the hawk widow to men when she is bent
+on re-marrying. She knows so much!--there is not a manoeuvre by which
+a victory can be stolen that she has not mastered and she is not
+afraid of even the most desperate measures. When she has once struck,
+he would be a clever man and a strong one who should escape her.
+Generally left but meagrely provided for in worldly goods--else her
+game would not be difficult--she makes up for her financial poverty by
+her wealth of bold resources, and by the courage with which she takes
+her own fortunes in hand and, with her own, those of her more eligible
+masculine associates. She is a woman of purpose and lives for an end;
+and that end is remarriage, with the most favourable settlement that
+can be obtained by her lawyer from his. If fate has dealt hardly by
+her--though, may be, compassionately by her successive spouses--and
+has landed her in the widowed state twice or thrice, she is in nowise
+daunted and as little abashed. She merely refits after a certain time
+of anchorage, and goes out into the open again for a repetition
+of her chance. She has no notion of a perpetuity of weeds, and, though
+she may have cleared her half century with a margin besides, thinks
+the suggestive orange-blossoms of the bride infinitely more desirable
+than the fruitless heliotrope of the widow. If one husband is taken,
+she remembers the old proverb, and reflects on the many, quite as
+good, who are left potentially subject to her choice. And somehow she
+manages. It has been said that any woman can marry any man if she
+determines to do so, and follows on the line of her determination with
+tenacity and common-sense.
+
+The hawk widow exemplifies the truth of this saying. She determines
+upon marriage; and she usually succeeds; the question being one of
+victim only, not of sacrifice. One has to fall to her share; there is
+no help for it; and the whole contest is, which shall it be? which is
+strongest to break her bonds? which craftiest to slip out of them?
+which most resolute not to bear them from the beginning? This the
+straggling covey must settle among themselves the best way they can.
+When the hawk pounces down upon its quarry, it is _sauve qui peut_!
+But all cannot be saved. One has to be caught; and the choice is
+determined partly by chance and partly by relative strength. When the
+widow of experience and resolve bears down on _her_ prey, the result
+is equally certain. Floundering avails nothing; struggling and
+splashing are just as futile; one among the crowd has to come to the
+slaughter, like Mrs. Bond's ducks, and to assist at his own
+immolation. The best thing he can do is to make a handsome surrender,
+and to let the world of men and brothers believe he rather likes his
+position than not.
+
+But there are pleasanter types of the re-marrying widow than this.
+There is the widow of the Wadman kind, who has outlived her grief and
+is not disinclined to a repetition of the matrimonial experiment, if
+asked humbly by an experimenter after her own heart. But she must be
+asked humbly that she may grant in a pretty, tender, womanly way--if
+not quite so timidly as a girl, yet as becomingly in her degree, and
+with that peculiar fascination which nothing but the combination of
+experience and modesty can give. The widow of the Wadman kind is no
+creature of prey, neither shark nor hawk; at the worst she is but a
+cooing dove, making just the sweetest little noise in the world, the
+tenderest little call to indicate her whereabouts, and to show that
+she is lonely and feels a-cold. She sits close, waiting to be found,
+and does not ramp and dash about like the hawk sisterhood; neither
+does she pretend that she is unwilling to be found, still less deny
+that a soft warm nest, well lined and snugly sheltered, is better than
+a lonely branch stretching out comfortless and bare into the bleak
+wide world. She, too, is almost sure to get what she wants, with the
+advantage of being voluntarily chosen and not unwillingly submitted
+to.
+
+This is the kind of woman who is always mildly but thoroughly
+happy in her married life; unless indeed her husband should be a
+brute, which heaven forefend. She lives in peace and bland contentment
+while the fates permit, and when he dies she buries him decently and
+laments him decorously; but she thinks it folly to spend her life in
+weeping by the side of his cold grave, when her tears can do no good
+to either of them. Rather she thinks it a proof of her love for him,
+and the evidence of how true was her happiness, that she should elect
+to give him a successor. Her blessed experience in the past has made
+her trustful of the future; and because she has found one man faithful
+she thinks that all are Abdiels. As a rule, this type of woman does
+find men pleasant; and by her own nature she ensures domestic
+happiness. She is always tenderly, and never passionately, in love,
+even with the husband she has loved the best. She gives in to no
+excesses to the right nor to the left. Her temperament is of that
+serene moonlight kind which does not fatigue others nor wear out its
+possessor. Without ambition or the power to fling herself into any
+absorbing occupation, she lives only to please and be pleased at home;
+and if she be not a wife, wearing her light fetters lovingly and proud
+that she is fettered, she is nothing. As some women are born mothers
+and others are born nuns, so is the Wadman woman a born wife, and
+shines in no other character nor capacity. But in this she excels; and
+knowing this, she sticks to her _rôle_, how frequently so ever
+the protagonist may be changed.
+
+There are widows, however, who have no thought nor desire for
+remaining anything but widows--who have gained the worth of the world
+in their condition, 'Jeune, riche, et veuve--quel bonheur!' says the
+French wife, eyeing 'mon mari' askance. Can the most exacting woman
+ask for more? And truly such a one is in the most enviable position
+possible to a woman, supposing always that she has not lost in her
+husband the man she loved. If she has lost only the man who sat by
+right at the same hearth with herself--perhaps the man who quarrelled
+with her across the ashes--she has lost her burden and gained her
+release.
+
+The cross of matrimony lies heavy on many a woman who never takes the
+world into her confidence, and who bears in absolute silence what she
+has not the power to cast from her. Perhaps her husband has been a man
+of note, a man of learning, of elevated station, a political or a
+philanthropic power. She alone knew the fretfulness, the petty
+tyranny, the miserable smallness at home of the man of large repute
+whom his generation conspired to honour, and whose public life was a
+mark for the future to date by. When he died the press wrote his
+eulogy and his elegy; but his widow, when she put on her weeds, sang
+softly in her own heart a pæan to the great King of Freedom, and
+whispered to herself Laudamus with a sigh of unutterable relief.
+To such a woman widowhood has no sentimental regrets. She has come
+into possession of the goods for which perhaps she sold herself; she
+is young enough to enjoy the present and to project a future; she has
+the free choice of a maid and the free action of a matron, as no other
+woman has. She may be courted and she need not be chaperoned, nor yet
+forced to accept. Experience has mellowed and enriched her; for though
+the asperities of her former condition were sharp while they lasted,
+they have not permanently roughened nor embittered her. Then the sense
+of relief gladdens, while the sense of propriety subdues, her; and the
+delicate mixture of outside melancholy, tempered with internal warmth,
+is wonderfully enticing. Few men know how to resist that gentle
+sadness which does not preclude the sweetest sympathy with pleasures
+in which she may not join--with happiness which is, alas! denied her.
+It gives an air of such profound unselfishness; it asks so mutely, so
+bewitchingly, for consolation!
+
+Even a hard man is moved at the sight of a pretty young widow in the
+funereal black of her first grief, sitting apart with a patient smile
+and eyes cast meekly down, as one not of the world though in it. Her
+loss is too recent to admit of any thought of reparation; and yet what
+man does not think of that time of reparation? and if she be more than
+usually charming in person and well dowered in purse, what man does
+not think of himself as the best repairer she could take? Then, as
+time goes on and she glides gracefully into the era of mitigated
+grief, how beautiful is her whole manner, how tasteful her attire! The
+most exquisite colours of the prismatic scale look garish beside her
+dainty tints, and the untempered mirth of happy girls is coarse beside
+her subdued admission of moral sunshine. Greys as tender as a dove's
+breast; regal purples which have a glow behind their gloom; stately
+silks of sombre black softly veiled by clouds of gauzy white or
+brightened with the 'dark light' of sparkling jet--all speak of
+passing time and the gradual blooming of the spring after the sadness
+of the winter; all symbolize the flowers which are growing on the sod
+that covers the dear departed; all hint at a melting of the funereal
+gloom into the starlight of a possible bridal. She begins too to take
+pleasure in the old familiar things of life. She steals into a quiet
+back seat at the Opera; she just walks through a quadrille; she sees
+no harm in a fête or flower-show, if properly companioned. Winter does
+not last for ever; and a life-long mourning is a wearisome prospect.
+So she goes through her degrees in accurate order, and comes out at
+the end radiant.
+
+For when the faint shadows cast by the era of mitigated grief fade
+away, she is the widow _par excellence_--the blooming widow, young,
+rich, gay, free; with the world on her side, her fortune in her hand,
+the ball at her foot. She is the freest woman alive; freer even than
+any old maid to be found. Freedom, indeed, comes to the old maid
+when too late to enjoy it; at least in certain directions; for while
+she is young she is necessarily in bondage, and when parents and
+guardians leave her at liberty, the world and Mrs. Grundy take up the
+reins and hold them pretty tight. But the widow is as thoroughly
+emancipated from the conventional bonds which confine the free action
+of a maid as she is from those which fetter the wife; and only she
+herself knows what she has lost and gained. She bore her yoke well
+while it pressed on her. It galled her but she did not wince; only
+when it was removed, did she become fully conscious of how great had
+been the burden, from her sense of infinite relief through her
+freedom. The world never knew that she had passed under the harrow;
+probably therefore it wonders at her cheerfulness, with the dear
+departed scarce two years dead; and some say how sweetly resigned she
+is, and others how unfeeling. She is neither. She is simply free after
+having lived in bondage; and she is glad in consequence. But she is
+dangerous. In fact, she is the most dangerous of all women to men's
+peace of mind. She does not want to marry again--does not mean to
+marry again for many years to come, if ever; granted; but this does
+not say that she is indifferent to admiration or careless of men's
+society. And being without serious intentions herself, she does not
+reflect that she may possibly mislead and deceive others who have no
+such cause as she has to beware of the pleasant folly of love and its
+results.
+
+In the exercise of her prerogative as a free woman, able to cultivate
+the dearest friendships with men and fearlessly using her power, she
+entangles many a poor fellow's heart which she never wished to engage
+more than platonically, and crushes hopes which she had not the
+slightest intention to raise. Why cannot men be her friends? she asks,
+with a pretty, pleading look--a tender kind of despair at the
+wrong-headedness of the stronger sex. But, tender as she is, she does
+not easily yield even when she loves. The freedom she has gone through
+so much to gain she does not rashly throw away; and if ever the day
+comes when she gives it up into the keeping of another--and for all
+her protestations it comes sometimes--the man to whom she succumbs may
+congratulate himself on a victory more flattering to his vanity, and
+more complete in its surrender of advantages, than he could have
+gained over any other woman. Belle or heiress, of higher rank or of
+greater fame than himself, no unmarried woman could have made such a
+sacrifice in her marriage as did this widow of means and good looks,
+when she laid her freedom, her joyous present and potential future, in
+his hand. He will be lucky if he manages so well that he is never
+reproached for that sacrifice--if his wife never looks back
+regretfully to the time when she was a widow--if there are no longing
+glances forward to possibilities ahead, mingled with sighs at the
+difficulty of retracing a step when made. On the whole, if a woman can
+live without love, or with nothing stronger than a tender
+sentimental friendship, widowhood is the most blissful state she can
+attain. But if she be of a loving nature and fond of home, finding her
+own happiness in the happiness of others and indifferent to
+freedom--thinking, indeed, that feminine freedom is only another word
+for desolation--she will be miserable until she has doubled her
+experience and carried on the old into the new.
+
+
+
+
+_DOLLS._
+
+
+The love of dolls is instinctive with girl children; and a nursery
+without some of these silent simulacra for the amusement of the little
+maids is a very lifeless affair. But outside the nursery door dolls
+are stupid things enough; and, whether improvised of wisped-up bundles
+of rags or made of the costliest kind of composition, they are at the
+best mere pretences for the pastime of babies, not living creatures to
+be loved nor artistic creations to be admired. Certainly they are
+pretty in their own way, and some are made to simulate human actions
+quite cleverly; and one of their charms with children is that they can
+be treated like sentient beings without a chance of retaliation. They
+can be scolded for being naughty; put to bed in broad daylight for a
+punishment; seated in the corner with their impassive faces turned to
+the wall, just as the little ones themselves are dealt with; the doll
+all the time smiling exactly as it smiled before, its round blue beads
+staring just as they stared before; neither scolding nor cornering
+making more impression on its sawdust soul than do little missy's sobs
+and tears when nurse is cross and dolly is her only friend. But
+the child has had its hour of play and make-believe sentiment of
+companionship and authority; and so, if the doll can do no good of
+itself, it can at least be the occasion of pleasantness to others.
+
+Now there are women who are dolls in all but the mere accident of
+material. The doll proper is a simple structure of wax or wood, 'its
+knees and elbows glued together;' and the human doll is a complex
+machine of flesh and blood. But, saving such structural differences,
+these women are as essentially dolls as those in the bazaar which open
+and shut their eyes at the word of command enforced by a wire, and
+squeak when you pinch them in the middle. There are women who seem
+born into the world only as the playthings and make-believes of human
+life. As impassive as the waxen creatures in the nursery, no
+remonstrance touches them and no experience teaches them. Their final
+cause seems to be to look pretty, to be always in perfect drawing-room
+order, and to be the occasions by which their friends and companions
+are taught patience and self-denial. And they perfectly fulfil their
+destiny; which may be so much carried to their credit. A doll woman is
+hopelessly useless and can do nothing with her brains or her hands. In
+distress or sickness she can only sit by you and look as sorrowful as
+her round smooth face will permit; but she has not a helping
+suggestion to make, not a fraction of practical power to put forth.
+
+When a man has married a doll wife he has assigned himself to absolute
+loneliness or a double burden. He cannot live with his pretty toy in
+any more reality of sympathy than does a child with her puppet. He can
+tell her nothing of his affairs, nothing of his troubles nor of his
+thoughts, because she can impart no new idea, even from the woman's
+point of view, not from want of heart but from want of brains to
+understand another's life. Is she not a doll? and does not the very
+essence of her dollhood lie in this want of perceptive faculty both
+for things and feelings? What are the hot flushes of passion, the
+bitter tears of grief, the frenzy of despair, to her? She sees them;
+and she wonders that people can be so silly as to make themselves and
+her so uncomfortable; but of the depth of the anguish they express she
+knows no more than does her waxen prototype when little missy sobs
+over it in her arms and confides her sorrows to its deaf ears.
+Whatever anxieties oppress her husband, he must keep them to himself,
+he cannot share them with her; and the last shred of his credit, like
+the last effort of his strength, must be employed in maintaining his
+toy wife in the fool's paradise where alone she can make her
+habitation. Many a man's back has broken under the strain of such a
+burden; and many a ruined fortune might have been held together and
+repaired when damaged, had it not been for the exigencies and
+necessities of the living doll, who had to be spared all want or
+inconvenience at the cost of everything else. How many men are
+groaning in spirit at this moment over the infatuation that made them
+sacrifice the whole worth of life for the sake of a pretty face and a
+plastic manner!
+
+The doll woman is as helpless practically as she is useless morally.
+If she is in personal danger, she either faints or becomes dazed,
+according to her physiological conditions. Sometimes she is hysterical
+and frantic, and then she is actively troublesome. In general,
+however, she is just so much dead weight on hand, to be thought for as
+well as protected; a living corpse to be carried on the shoulders of
+those who are struggling for their own lives. She can foresee no
+possibilities, measure no distances, think of no means of escape.
+Never quick nor ready, pressure paralyzes such wits as she possesses;
+and it is not from selfishness so much as from pure incapacity to help
+herself or to serve others that the poor doll falls down in a helpless
+heap of self-surrender, and lets her very children perish before her
+eyes without making an effort to protect them.
+
+As a mother indeed, the doll woman is perhaps more unsatisfactory than
+in any other character. She gives up her nursery into the absolute
+keeping of her nurse, and does not attempt to control nor to
+interfere. This again, is not from want of affection, but from want of
+capacity. In her tepid way she has a heart, if only half-vitalized
+like the rest of her being; and she is by no means cruel. Indeed, she
+has not force enough to be cruel nor wicked anyhow; her worst
+offence being a passive kind of selfishness, not from greed but from
+inactivity, by which she is made simply useless for the general good.
+As for her children, she understands neither their moral nature nor
+their physical wants; and beyond a universal 'Oh, naughty!' if the
+little ones express their lives in the rampant manner proper to young
+things, or as a universal 'Oh, let them have it!' if there is a howl
+over what is forbidden or unwise, she has no idea of discipline or
+management. If they teaze her, they are sent away; if they are
+naughty, they are whipped by papa or nurse; if they are ill, the
+doctor is summoned and they have medicine as he directs; but none of
+the finer and more intimate relations usual between mother and child
+exist in the home of the doll mother. The children are the property of
+the nurse only; unless indeed the father happens to be a specially
+affectionate and a specially domestic man, and then he does the work
+of the mother--at the best clumsily, but at the worst better than the
+doll could have done it.
+
+Very shocking and revolting are all the more tragic facts of human
+life to the smooth-skinned easy-going doll. When it comes to her own
+turn to bear pain, she wonders how a good God can permit her to
+suffer. Had she brains enough to think, the great mystery of pain
+would make her atheistical in her angry surprise that she should be so
+hardly dealt with. As dolls have a constitutional immunity from
+suffering, her first initiation into even a minor amount of
+anguish is generally a tremendous affair; and though it may be pain of
+a quite natural and universal character, she is none the less
+indignant and astonished at her portion. She invariably thinks herself
+worse treated than her sisters, and cannot be made to understand that
+others suffer as much as, and more than, herself. As she has always
+shrunk from witnessing trouble of any kind, and as what she may have
+seen has passed over her mind without leaving any impression, she
+comes to her own sorrows totally inexperienced; and one of the most
+pitiable sights in the world is that of a poor doll woman writhing in
+the grasp of physical agony, and broken down or rendered insanely
+impatient by what other women can bear without a murmur.
+
+When she is in the presence of the moral tragedies of life, she is as
+lost and bewildered as she is with the physical. All sin and crime are
+to her odd and inexplicable. She cannot pity the sinner, because she
+cannot understand the temptation; and she cannot condemn from any
+lofty standpoint, because she has not mind enough to see the full
+meaning of iniquity. It is simply something out of the ordinary run of
+her life, and the doll naturally dislikes disturbance, whether of
+habit or of thought. Yet if a noted criminal came and sat down by her,
+she would probably whisper to her next friend, 'How shocking!' but she
+would simper when he spoke, and perhaps in her heart feel flattered by
+the attention of even so doubtful a notoriety. If she be a doll
+with a bias towards naughtiness, the utmost limit to which she can go
+is a mild kind of curiosity about the outsides of things--the mere
+husk and rind of the forbidden fruit--such as wondering how such and
+such people look who have done such dreadful things; and what they
+felt the next morning; and how could they ever come to think of such
+horrors! She would be more interested in hearing about the dress and
+hair and eyes of the female plaintiff or defendant in a famous cause
+than many other women would be; but she would not give herself the
+trouble to read the evidence, and she would take all her opinions
+secondhand. But whether the colour of the lady's gown was brown or
+blue, and whether she wore her hair wisped or plaited, would be
+matters in which she would take as intense an interest as is possible
+to her.
+
+The utmost limit to which enthusiasm can be carried with her is in the
+matter of dress and fashion; and the only subject that thoroughly
+arouses her is the last new colour, or the latest eccentricity of
+costume. Talk to her of books, and she will go to sleep; even novels,
+her sole reading, she forgets half an hour after she has turned the
+last page; while of any other kind of literature she is as profoundly
+ignorant as she is of mathematics; but she can discuss the mysteries
+of fashion with something like animation, these being to her what the
+wire is to the eyes of the dolls in the bazaar. Else she has no power
+of conversation. At the head of her own table she sits like a
+pretty waxen dummy, and can only simper out a few commonplaces, or
+simper without the commonplaces, satisfied if she is well appointed
+and looks lovely, and if her husband seems tolerably contented with
+the dinner. She is more in her element at a ball, where she is only
+asked to dance and not wanted to talk; but her ball-room days do not
+last for ever, and when they are over she has no available retreat.
+
+If a rich doll woman is a mistake, a poor one who has been rich is
+about the greatest infliction that can be laid on a suffering
+household. Not all the teaching of experience can make wax and glue
+into flesh and blood, and nothing can train the human doll into a
+dignified or a capable womanhood. She still dresses in faded
+finery--which she calls keeping up appearances; and still has
+pretensions which no 'inexorable logic of facts' can destroy. She
+spends her money on sweets and ribbons and ignores the family need for
+meat and calico; and she sits by the fireside dozing over a trashy
+novel, while her children are in rags and her house is given over to
+disorder. But then she has a craze for the word 'lady-like,' and
+thinks it synonymous with ignorance and helplessness. She abhors the
+masculine-minded woman who helps her--sister, cousin, daughter--so far
+as she can abhor anything; but she is glad to lean on her strength,
+despite this abhorrence, and, while grumbling at her masculinity, does
+not disdain to take advantage of her power. The doll is only passively
+disagreeable though; and for all that she carps under her breath,
+will remain in any position in which she is placed. She will not act,
+but she will let you act unhindered; which is something gained when
+you have to deal with fools.
+
+This quiescence of hers passes with the world for plasticity and
+amiability; it is neither; it is simply indolence and want of
+originating force. While she is young, she is nice enough to those who
+care only for a pretty face and a character founded on negatives; but
+when a man's pride of life has gone, and he has come into the phase of
+weakness, or under the harrow of affliction, or into the valley of the
+shadow of death, then she becomes in sorrowful truth the chain and
+bullet which make him a galley-slave for the remainder of his days,
+and which sign him to drudgery and despair.
+
+As an old woman the doll has not one charm. She has learned none of
+that handiness, come to none of that grand maternal power of helping
+others, which should accompany maturity and age and has still to be
+thought for and protected, to the exclusion of the younger and
+naturally more helpless, as when she was young herself, and beautiful
+and fascinating, and men thought it a privilege to suffer for her
+sake. Nine times out of ten she has lost her temper as well as her
+complexion, and has become peevish and unreasonable. She gets fat and
+rouges; but she will not consent to get old. She takes to false hair,
+dyes, padded stays, arsenic or 'anti-fat,' and to artful contrivances
+of every description; but alas! there is no 'dolly's hospital' for her
+as there used to be for her battered old prototype in the nursery
+lumber-closet; and, whether she likes it or not, she has to succumb to
+the inevitable decree, and to become faded, worn out, unlovely, till
+the final _coup de grâce_ is given and the poor doll is no more. Poor,
+weak, frivolous doll! it requires some faith to believe
+that she is of any good whatsoever in this overladen life of ours; but
+doubtless she has her final uses, though it would puzzle a Sanhedrim
+of wise men to discover them. Perhaps in the great readjustment of the
+future she may have her place and her work assigned to her in some
+inter-stellar Phalansterie; when the meaning of her helpless earthly
+existence shall be made manifest and its absurd uselessness atoned for
+by some kind of celestial 'charing.'
+
+
+
+
+_CHARMING WOMEN._
+
+
+There are certain women who are invariably spoken of as charming. We
+never hear any other epithet applied to them. They are not said to be
+pretty, nor amiable, nor clever, though they may be all three, but
+simply charming; which we may take as a kind of verbal amalgam--the
+concentration and concretion of all praise. The main feature about
+these charming women is their intense feminality. There is no blurring
+of the outlines here; no confusion of qualities admirable enough in
+themselves but slightly out of place considering the sex; no Amazonian
+virtues which leave one in doubt as to whether we have not before us
+Achilles in petticoats rather than a true Pyrrha or a more tender
+Deidamia.
+
+A charming woman is woman all over--one who places her glory in being
+a woman and has no desire to be anything else. She is a woman rather
+than a human being, and a lady rather than a woman. One of her
+characteristics is the exquisite grace of her manner which so sweetly
+represents the tender nature within. She has not an angle anywhere. If
+she were to be expressed geometrically, Hogarth's Line of Beauty
+is the sole figure that could be used for her. She is flowing,
+graceful, bending in mind as in body; she is neither self-asserting
+nor aggressive, neither rigid nor narrow; she is a creature who glides
+gracefully through life, and adjusts herself to her company and her
+circumstances in a manner little less than marvellous; working her own
+way without tumult or sharpness; creeping round the obstacles she
+cannot overthrow, and quietly wearing down more friable opposition
+with that gentle persistency which does so much more than turmoil and
+disturbance.
+
+Even if enthusiastic--which she is for art, either as music, as
+painting, or yet as poetry--she is enthusiastic in such a sweet and
+graceful way that no one can be offended by a fire which shines and
+does not burn. There is no touch of scorn about her and no assumption
+of superior knowledge. She speaks to you, poor ignorant Philistine,
+with the most flattering conviction that you follow her in all her
+flights; and when she comes out, quite naturally, with her pretty
+little bits of recondite lore or professional technicalities, you
+cannot be so boorish as to ask for an explanation of these trite
+matters which she makes so sure you must understand. Are you not an
+educated person with a soul to be saved? can you then be ignorant of
+things with which every one of culture is familiar? She discourses
+confidentially of musicians and painters unknown to fame, and speaks
+as if she knew the secret doings of the Conservatoire and the R. A.
+council-chamber alike. The models and the methods, the loves and
+the hates, of the artistic world are to her things of every-day life,
+and you cannot tell her that she is shooting her delicate shafts wide
+of the mark, and that you know no more of what she means than if she
+were talking in the choicest Arabic.
+
+If she has been abroad--and she generally has been more or less--she
+will pour out her tender little rhapsodies about palazzi and musei of
+which you have never heard, but every room of which she assumes you
+know by heart; and she will speak of out-of-the-way churches, and grim
+old castles perched upon vine-clad mounts, as if you were as well
+acquainted with them as with your native hamlet. She will bring into
+her discourse all manner of Italian technicalities, as if you
+understood the subject as well as she herself understands it; though
+your learning is limited to a knowledge of how much has been done in
+jute and tallow this last half year, or how many pockets of hops went
+off in the market last week. If she has a liking for high life and
+titles--and what charming woman has not?--she will mention the names
+of all manner of counts and dukes and monsignori unknown to English
+society, as though they were her brothers; but if you were to
+interrupt the gentle ripple of her speech with such rude breakwaters
+as 'who?' and 'what?' the charming woman would think you a horrid
+bore--and no man would willingly face that humiliation. One may be a
+rhinoceros in one's own haunts, but, as the fable tells us, even
+rhinoceroses are ashamed of their parentage when among gazelles.
+
+Never self-asserting, never contradictory, only sweetly and tenderly
+putting you right when you blunder, the charming woman nevertheless
+always makes you feel her superiority. True, she lays herself as it
+were at your feet and gives you a thousand delicate flatteries--indeed
+among her specialities is that of being able to set you on good terms
+with yourself by her art of subtle flattery; but despite her own
+self-abasement and your exaltation you cannot but feel her
+superiority; and, although she is too charming to acknowledge what
+would wound your pride, you know that she feels it too, and tries to
+hide it. All of which has the effect of making you admire her still
+more for her grace and tact.
+
+The charming woman is generally notoriously in love with her husband,
+who is almost always inferior to her in birth, acquirements, manner,
+appearance. This Titania-like affection of hers only shows her
+feminine qualities of sacrifice and wifely devotion to greater
+advantage, and makes other men envy more ferociously the lucky fellow
+who has drawn such a prize. The husband of a charming woman is indeed
+lucky in the world's esteem; no man more so. Though he may be one of
+the most ordinary, perhaps unpleasant, fellows you know, with a sour
+face, an underbred air, and by no means famous in his special sphere,
+his wife speaks of him enthusiastically as so good, so clever, so
+delightful! No one knows how good he is, she says; though of
+course he has his little peculiarities of temper and the rest of it,
+and perhaps every one would not bear with them as she does. But then
+she knows him, and knows his wonderful worth and value! If they are
+not seen much together, that comes from causes over which they have no
+control, not from anything like disinclination to each other's
+society. Certainly, for so happy a marriage, it is a little surprising
+how very seldom they are together; and how all her friends are hers
+only and not his, and how much she goes into society without him. On
+the whole, counting hours, they live very much more apart than united;
+but that is the misfortune of his career, of his health, or of hers--a
+misfortune due to any cause but that of diversity of tastes,
+inharmoniousness of pursuits, or lack of love.
+
+Full of home affection and the tenderest sentiment as she is, the
+charming woman does sometimes the oddest-looking things, which a rough
+little domestic creature without graceful pretensions would not dream
+of doing. Her child is lying dangerously ill, perhaps dying, and she
+appears at the grand ball of the season, subdued certainly--how well
+that sweet melancholy becomes her!--but always graceful, always
+thoughtful for others, and attentive to the minutest detail of her
+social duties. And though indeed, she will tell you, she does not know
+how she got dressed at all, because of the state of cruel anxiety in
+which she is, yet she is undeniably the best dressed woman in the room
+and the most carefully appointed. It is against her own will that
+she is there, you may be sure; but she has been forced to sacrifice
+herself, and tear herself away for an hour. The exigencies of society
+are so merciless!--the world is such a terrible Juggernaut! she says,
+raising her eyes with plaintive earnestness to yours in the
+breathing-times of the waltz.
+
+She has another trial if her husband is ordered out to Canada or the
+West Indies. Dearly as she loves him, and though she is heart-broken
+at the idea of the separation, yet her health cannot stand the
+climate; and she must obey her doctor's orders. She is so delicate,
+you know--all charming women are delicate--and the doctor tells her
+she could not live six months either in Toronto or Port Royal. If her
+lord and master had to go on diplomatic service to St. Petersburg or
+Madrid, she might be able to stand the climate then; but that is
+different. A dull station, without any of her favourite pleasures,
+would be more than she could bear; so she remains behind, goes out
+into society, and writes her husband tender and amusing letters once a
+month.
+
+The charming woman is the gentlest of her sex. She would not do a
+cruel thing nor say an unkind word for the world. When she tells you
+the unpleasant things which ill-natured people have said of your
+friends or hers, she tells them in the sweetest and dearest way
+imaginable. She is so sure there is not a syllable of truth in it all;
+and what a shame it is that people should be so ill-natured! In the
+gentle tone of sympathy and deprecation peculiar to her, she
+gives you all the ugly and uncomfortable reports which have come to
+her, and of which you have never heard a breath until this moment. Yet
+it is you who are stupid, not she who is initiative, for she tells
+them to you as if they were of patent notoriety to the whole world;
+only she does not believe them, remember! She takes the most
+scrupulous care to deny and defend as she retails, and you cannot
+class her with the tribe of the ill-natured whom she censures,
+setting, as she does, the whole strength of her gentle words and
+generous disbelief in opposition to these ugly rumours. Yet you wish
+she had not told you. Her disclaimers spring so evidently from the
+affectionate amiability of her own mind, which cannot bear to think
+evil, that they have not much effect upon you. The excuse dies away
+from your memory, but the ill-savoured report roots; and you feel that
+you have lost your respect for your former friends for ever; or, if
+they were only hers, then, that nothing should tempt you to know them.
+There is no smoke without some fire, you think; and the charming woman
+cannot possibly have kindled the flame herself out of sticks and
+leaves and rubbish of her own collecting. But how sweet and charitable
+she was when she told you! how much you love her for her tenderness of
+nature! what a guileless and delightful creature she is!
+
+The charming woman is kind and graceful, but she does not command the
+stronger virtues. She flatters sweetly, but, it must be
+confessed, she fibs as sweetly. She sometimes owns to this, but only
+to fibs that do more good than harm--fibs into the utterance of which
+she is forced for the sake of peace and to avoid mischief. It is a
+feminine privilege, she says; and men agree with her. Truth at all
+times--bold, uncompromising, stern-faced truth--is coarse and
+indelicate she says; a masculine quality as little fitted for women as
+courage or great bodily strength. Her husband knows that she fibs; her
+friends at times find her out too; but though the women throw it at
+her as an accusation, the men accept it as a quality without which she
+would be less the charming woman that she is; and not only forgive it,
+but like her the better for the grace and tact and suppleness she
+displays in the process of manufacture. Hers are not the severer
+virtues, but the gentler, the more insinuating; and absolute
+truth--truth at any price and on all occasions--does not come into the
+list.
+
+Charming women, with their plastic manners and non-aggressive force,
+always have their own way in the end. They are the women who influence
+by unseen methods and who shrink from any open display of power. They
+know that their _métier_ is to soothe men, to put them on good terms
+with themselves, and so to get the benefit of the good humour they
+induce; and they dread nothing so much as a contest of wills. They
+coax and flatter for their rights, and consequently they are given
+privileges in excess of their rights; whereas the women who take
+their rights, as things to which they are entitled without favour,
+lose them and their privileges together. This art of self-abasement
+for future exaltation is one which it is given only to few to carry to
+perfection, but no woman is really charming without it. In fact it is
+part of her power; and she knows it. Though charming women are
+decidedly the favourites with men, they are careful to keep on good
+terms with their own sex; and in society you may often see them almost
+ostentatiously surrounded by women only, whom they take pains to
+please or exert themselves to amuse, but whom they throw into the
+shade in the most astonishing way.
+
+Whatever these really charming women are, or do, or wear, is exactly
+the right thing; and every other woman fails in proportion to the
+distance she is removed from this model. When a charming woman is
+dressed richly, the simpler costumes of her friends look poor and
+mean; when she is _à la bergère_, the Court dresses about her are
+vulgar; when she is gay, quietness is dullness; when she is quiet,
+laughter is coarse. And there is no use in trying to imitate her. She
+is the very Will-o'-the-wisp of her circle, and no sooner shows her
+light here than she flits away there; she has no sooner set one
+fashion, which her admiring friends have adopted with infinite pains
+and trouble, than she has struck out a new one which renders all the
+previous labour in vain. This is part of her very essence; and the
+originality which is simply perfection that cannot be repeated, and
+not eccentricity that no one will imitate, comes in as one of the
+finest and most potent of her charms. When she lends her patterns to
+her friends, or tells them this or that little secret, she laughs in
+her heart, knowing that she has shown them a path they cannot possibly
+follow and raised up a standard to which they cannot attain. And even
+should they do either, then she knows that, by the time they have
+begun to get up to her, she will be miles away, and that no art
+whatever can approximate them to her as she is. What she was she
+tosses among them as a worn-out garment; what she is they cannot be.
+She remains still the unapproachable, the inimitable, the charming
+woman _par excellence_ of her set, whom none can rival.
+
+
+
+
+_APRON-STRINGS._
+
+
+Among other classifications, the world of men and women may be divided
+into those who wear aprons and those who are tied to the strings
+thereof--those who determine the length of the tether and those who
+are bound to browse within its circuit--those who hold the reins and
+those who go bitted. All men and women are fond of power, but there is
+a wide difference in the ways in which they use it. To men belong the
+grave political tyrannies at which nations revolt and history is
+outraged, to women the small conventional laws framed against
+individual liberty by Mrs. Grundy and society; men rule with rods of
+iron and drive with whips of steel, women shorten the tether and tie
+up close to apron-strings; men coerce, women forbid. In fact, the
+difference is just that which lies between action and negation,
+compulsion and restraint; between the masculine jealousy of equality
+and the feminine fear of excess. If men debar women from all entrance
+into their larger sphere, women try to dwarf men's lives to their own
+measure, and not a few hold themselves aggrieved when they fail. They
+think that everything which is impossible to them should be
+forbidden to others, and they maintain that to be a lamentable extreme
+which is simply in excess of their own powers. Not content with
+supremacy in the home which is their own undisputed domain, nor
+satisfied with binding on men the various rules distinguishing life in
+the drawing-room, the dining-room and the breakfast-parlour, they
+would, if they could, carry their code outside, and sweep into its
+narrow net the club-house and the mess-table, the billiard-room and
+the race-course, and wherever else men congregate together--delivered
+from the bondage of feminine conventionalities.
+
+For almost all women have an uneasy feeling when their men are out of
+sight, enjoying themselves in their own way. They fear on all
+sides--both bodily harm and moral evil; and regard men's rougher
+sports and freer thoughts as a hen regards her wilful ducklings when
+they take to the water in which she would be drowned, and leave her
+high and dry lamenting their danger and self-destruction. The man they
+love best for his manliness they would, in their loving cowardice, do
+their utmost to make effeminate; and, while adoring him for all that
+makes him bold and strong in thought as well as in frame, they would
+tie him up to their apron-strings, and keep him there till he became
+as soft and narrow as themselves. Not that they would wish to do so;
+if you asked them they would tell you quite the contrary. But this
+would be the result if they had their own way, their love being
+at all times more timid than confident.
+
+To home-staying women, a brilliant husband courted by the world and
+loving what courts him, is a painful cross to bear, however much he
+may be beloved--the pain, in fact, being proportionate to the love.
+Perhaps no life exemplifies this so much as Moore's. Poor "Bessy"
+suffered many things because of the looseness of the apron-string by
+which her roving husband was tied, and the length of the tether which
+he allowed himself. _Farfallone amoroso_ as he was, his incessant
+flutterings out of range and reach caused her many a sad hour; and in
+after years she was often heard to say that the happiest time of her
+life was when his mind had begun to fail, for then she had him all to
+herself and no one came in between them--no great world swept him away
+to be the idol of a _salon_, and left her alone at home casting up her
+accounts with life and love, and quaking at the result that came out.
+When the brilliancy and the idolatry came to an end, then her turn
+began; and she tied up her dulled and faltering idol close to her side
+for ever after, and was happier to have him there helpless,
+affectionate, dependent and imbecile than when he was at his
+brightest--and a rover.
+
+Many a wife has felt the same when sickness has broken down the strong
+man's power to a weakness below her own, and made her, so long the
+inferior, now the more powerful of the two, and the supreme. She
+gathers up the reins with that firm, tight hand peculiar to
+women, and ties her master to her apron-string so that he cannot
+escape. It is quite a matter of pride with her that she has got him
+into such good order. He obeys her so implicitly about his medicines,
+and going to bed early, and wrapping himself up, and avoidance of
+draughts and night-air, that she feels all the reflected glory of one
+who has conquered a hero. The Samson who used to defy the elements and
+break her careful strings like bands of tow, has at last laid his head
+in her lap and suffered himself to be covered by her apron. It is
+worth while to have had the anxiety and loss of his illness for the
+sake of the submission resulting; and she generally ends by gaining a
+hold over him which he can never shake off again.
+
+It is pitiful though, to see the stronger life thus dwarfed and bound.
+But women like it; and while the need for it lasts men must submit.
+The danger is lest the habit of the apron-string should become
+permanent; for it is so perilously pleasant to be petted and made much
+of by women, that few men can resist the temptation when it offers;
+and many have been ruined for the remainder of their days by an
+illness which gave them up into the keeping of wife and sisters--those
+fireside Armidas who will coddle all the real manliness out of their
+finest heroes, if they are let. If this kind of thing occurs at the
+break of life, the _mezzo cammino_ between maturity and age, it is
+doubly difficult to throw off; and many a man who had good years
+of vigour and strength, before him if he had been kept up to the mark,
+sinks all at once into senility because his womankind got frightened
+at that last small attack of his, and thought the best way to preserve
+him from another was to weaken him by over-care out of all wish for
+dangerous exposure.
+
+Perhaps the greatest misfortune that can befall a man is to have been
+an only son brought up by a timid widow mother. It is easy to see at a
+glance, among a crowd of boys, who has been educated under exclusively
+feminine influence. The long curled shining hair, the fantastic
+tunic--generally a kind of hybrid between a tunic and a frock--the
+lavish use of embroidery, the soft pretty-behaved manner, the clean
+unroughened hands, all mark the boy of whom his mother has so often
+wished that he had been a girl, and whom she has made as much like a
+girl as possible. His intellectual education has been as unboylike as
+his daily breeding. Mothers' boys are taught to play the piano, to
+amuse themselves with painting, or netting, or perhaps a little
+woolwork in the evenings--anything to keep them quietly seated by the
+family table, without an outbreak of boyish restlessness or
+inconvenient energy; but they are never taught to ride, to hunt, to
+shoot, to swim, to play at cricket, football, nor billiards, unless a
+stalwart uncle happens to be about who takes the reins in his own hand
+at times, and insists on having a word to say to his nephew's
+education.
+
+There is danger in all, and evil in some, of these things; and
+women cannot bear that those they love should run the risk of either.
+Wherefore their boys are modest and virtuous truly, but they are not
+manly; and when they go out into the world, as they must sooner or
+later, they are either laughed at for their priggishness, or they go
+to the bad by the very force of reaction. The mother has allowed them
+to learn nothing that will be of solid use to them, and they enter the
+great arena wholly unprepared either to fight or to resist, to push
+their own way or to take their own part. They have been kept tied up
+to the apron-string to the last moment, and only when absolutely
+forced by the necessity of events will she cut the knot and let them
+go free. But she holds on to the last moment. Even when the time comes
+for college-life and learning, she often goes with her darling, and
+takes lodgings in the town, that she may be near at hand to watch over
+his health and morals, and continue her careful labours for his
+destruction.
+
+The chances are that a youth so brought up never becomes a real man,
+nor worth his salt anyhow. He is a prig if he is good, a debauchee of
+the worst kind if he kicks over the traces at all. He is more likely
+the first, carrying the mark of the apron-string round his wrist for
+life. Like a tame falcon used to the hood and the perch and the lure
+home, no matter what the temptation of the quarry afield, he is
+essentially a domestic man, at ease only in the society of women; a
+fussy man; a small-minded man; delicate in health; with a dread
+of strong measures, physical, political, or intellectual; a crotchety
+man given to passing quackeries; but not a man fit for man's society
+nor for man's work. When there are many boys, instead of only one, in
+a widow's family, the opposite of all this is the case. So soon as
+they have escaped from the nursery, they have escaped from all control
+whatsoever; and if one wants to realize a puerile pandemonium of dirt,
+discomfort, noise and general disorganization, the best place in the
+world is the household of a feeble-spirited mother of many sons where
+there is no controlling masculine influence.
+
+Daughters, who are naturally and necessarily tied up to the mother's
+apron-string, suffer occasionally from too tight a strain; though
+certainly it is not the fault of the present day that girls are too
+closely fettered, too home-staying or subdued. Still, every now and
+then one comes across a matron who has crushed all individuality out
+of her family, and whose grown-up daughters are still children to her
+in moral go-carts and intellectual leading-strings. They may be the
+least attractive of their sex, but a mother of this kind has one fixed
+delusion respecting them--namely, that the world is full of wolves
+eager to devour her lambs, and that they are only safe when close to
+the maternal apron and browsing within an inch of the tether stake.
+These are the girls who become hopeless old maids. Men have an
+instinctive dread of the maternal apron-string. They do not want to
+marry a mother as well as a wife, and to live under a double
+dominion and a reduplicated opposition.
+
+It is all very well to say that a girl so brought up is broken in
+already, and therefore more likely to make a good wife than many
+others, seeing that it is only a transfer of obedience. That may do
+for slaves who cannot be other than slaves whoever is the master; but
+it does not do for women who, seeing their friends freer than
+themselves, reflect with grief and longing that, had fate so ordered
+it, they might have been free too. The chances here, as with the
+mothers' boys, are, that the girl kept too close to the apron-string
+during her spinsterhood goes all abroad so soon as she gets on the
+free ground of matrimony, and lets her liberty run into license. Or
+she keeps her old allegiance to her mother intact, and her husband is
+never more than the younger branch at best. Most likely he is a
+usurper, whom it is her duty to disobey in favour of the rightful
+ruler when they chance to come into collision.
+
+If women had their will, all national enterprise would be at an end.
+There would be no Arctic Expeditions, no Alpine Clubs, no dangerous
+experiments in science, no firearms at home, no volunteering--in their
+own family at least. All the danger would be done by the husbands and
+brothers and sons of other women, but each would guard her own. For
+women cannot go beyond the individual; and the loss of one of their
+own, by misadventure, weighs more with them than the necessity of
+keeping up the courage and hardihood of the nation. Nor do they
+see the difference between care and coddling, refinement and
+effeminacy; consequently, men are obliged to resist their influence,
+and many cut the apron-string altogether, because delicate fingers
+will tie the knots too tight. They do not remember that the influence
+to which men yield as a voluntary act of their own grace is a very
+different thing from obedience to the open denial, the undisguised
+interference and restraint, which some women like to show. Men respect
+the higher standard of morality kept up by women; they obey the major
+and the minor laws of refinement which are framed for home life and
+for society; and they confess that, without woman's influence, they
+would soon degenerate into mere savages and be no better than so many
+Choctaws before a generation was over; but they do not like being
+pulled up short, especially in public, and hounded into the safe
+sheepfold for all the world to see them run. And they resent the
+endeavour. And the world resents it too, and feels that something is
+wrong when a woman shows that she has the whip hand, and that she can
+treat her husband like a petted child or bully him like a refractory
+one; that she has him tied to her apron-strings and tethered to the
+stake of her will. But there is more of this kind of thing in families
+than the world at large always knows of; and many a fine, stalwart
+fellow who holds his own among men, who is looked up to at his
+club and respected in his office for his courage, decision and
+self-reliance, sinks into mere poodledom at home, where his wife has
+somehow managed to get hold of the leading-strings, and has taught him
+that the only way to peace is by submission and obedience.
+
+
+
+
+_FINE FEELINGS._
+
+
+There are people who pride themselves on the possession of what it
+pleases them to call fine feelings. Perhaps, if we were all diligent
+to call spades spades, these same fine feelings would come under a
+less euphemistic heading; but, as things are, we may as well adopt the
+softening gloze that is spread over the whole of our language, and
+call them by a pretty name with the rest. People who possess fine
+feelings are chiefly remarkable for the ease with which they take
+offence; it being indeed impossible, even for the most wary of their
+associates, to avoid giving umbrage in some shape, and generally when
+least intended and most innocently minded. Nothing satisfies them. No
+amount of attention, short of absolute devotion and giving them the
+place of honour everywhere, sets them at ease with themselves or keeps
+them in good-humour. If you ask them to your house, you must not dream
+of mixing them up with the rest. Though you have done them an honour
+in asking them at all, you must give them a marked position and bear
+them on your hands for the evening. They must be singled out from the
+herd and specially attended to; introduced to the nicest people;
+made a fuss with and taken care of; else they are offended, and feel
+they have been slighted--their sensitiveness or fine feelings being a
+kind of Chat Moss which will swallow up any quantity of _petits soins_
+that may be thrown in, and yet never be filled. If they are your
+intimate friends, you have to ask them on every occasion on which you
+receive. They make it a grievance if they hear that you have had even
+a dinner party without inviting them, though your space is limited and
+you had them at your last gathering. Still, if it comes to their ears
+that you have had friends and did not include them, they will come
+down on you to a dead certainty if they are of the franker kind, and
+ask you seriously, perhaps pathetically, how they have offended you?
+If they are of the sullen sort they will meet you coldly, or pass you
+by without seeing you; and will either drift into a permanent
+estrangement or come round after a time, according to the degree of
+acidity in their blood and the amount of tenacity in their character.
+They have lost their friends many times for no worse offence than
+this.
+
+They are as punctilious too, as they are exacting. They demand visit
+for visit, invitation for invitation, letter for letter. Though you
+may be overwhelmed with serious work, while they have no weightier
+burden strapped to their shoulders than their social duties and social
+fineries, yet you must render point for point with them, keeping an
+exact tally with not a notch too many on their side, if you want
+to retain their acquaintance at all. And they must be always invited
+specially and individually, even to your open days; else they will not
+come at all; and their fine feelings will be hurt. They suffer no
+liberties to be taken with them and they take none with others;
+counting all frock-coat friendliness as taking liberties, and holding
+themselves refined and you coarse if you think that manners _sans
+façon_ are pleasanter than those which put themselves eternally into
+stays and stiff buckram, and are never in more undress than a Court
+suit. They will not go into your house to wait for you, however
+intimate they may be; and they would resent it as an intrusion,
+perhaps an impertinence, if you went into theirs in their absence. If
+you are at luncheon when they call, they stiffly leave their cards and
+turn away; though you have the heartiest, jolliest manner of
+housekeeping going, and keep a kind of open house for luncheon
+casuals. They do not understand heartiness or a jolly manner of
+housekeeping; open houses are not in their line and they will not be
+luncheon casuals; so they turn away grimly, and if you want to see
+them you have to send your servant panting down the street after them,
+when, their dignity being satisfied, their sensitiveness smoothed down
+and their fine feelings reassured, they will graciously turn back and
+do what they might have done at first without all this fuss and fume.
+
+When people who possess fine feelings are poor, their
+sensitiveness is indeed a cross both for themselves and their friends
+to bear. If you try to show them a kindness or do them a service, they
+fly out at you for patronizing them, and say you humiliate them by
+treating them as paupers. You may do to your rich acquaintances a
+hundred things which you dare not attempt with your poor friends
+cursed with fine feelings; and little offices of kindness, which pass
+as current coin through society, are construed into insults with them.
+Difficult to handle in every phase, they are in none more dangerous to
+meddle with than when poor, though they are as bad if they have become
+successful after a period of struggle. Then your attention to them is
+time-serving, bowing to the rising sun, worshipping the golden calf,
+&c. Else why did you not seek them out when they were poor? Why were
+you not cap in hand when they went bare-headed? Why have you waited
+until they were successful before you recognized their value?
+
+It is funny to hear how bitter these sensitive folks are when they
+have come out into the sunlight of success after the dark passage of
+poverty; as if it had been possible to dig them out of their obscurity
+when their name was still to make--as if the world could recognize its
+prophets before they had spoken. But this admission into the
+penetralia after success is a very delicate point with people of fine
+feelings, supposing always the previous struggle to have been hard;
+and even if there has been no struggle to speak of, then there are
+doubts and misgivings as to whether they are liked for themselves
+or not, and morbid speculations on the stability and absolute value of
+the position they hold and the attentions they receive, and endless
+surmises of what would be the result if they lost their fame or wealth
+or political power or social standing--or whatever may be the hook
+whereon their success hangs, and their fine feelings are impaled. The
+act of wisdom most impossible to be performed by these self-torturers
+is the philosophic acceptance of life as it is and of things as they
+fall naturally to their share.
+
+Women remarkable for fine feelings are also remarkable for that uneasy
+distrust, that insatiable craving which continually requires
+reassuring and allaying. As wives or lovers they never take a man's
+love, once expressed and loyally acted on, as a certainty, unless
+constantly repeated; hence they are always pouting or bemoaning their
+loveless condition, getting up pathetic scenes of tender accusation or
+sorrowful acceptance of coolness and desertion, which at the first may
+have a certain charm to a man because flattering to his vanity, but
+which pall on him after a short time, and end by annoying and
+alienating him; thus bringing about the very catastrophe which was
+deprecated before it existed.
+
+Another characteristic with women of fine feelings is their inability
+to bear the gentlest remonstrance, the most shadowy fault-finding. A
+rebuke of any gravity throws them into hysterics on the spot; but even
+a request to do what they have not been in the habit of doing, or to
+abstain from doing that which they have used themselves to do, is
+more than they can endure with dry-eyed equanimity. You have to live
+with them in the fool's paradise of perfectness, or you are made to
+feel yourself an unmitigated brute. You have before you the two
+alternatives of suffering many things which are disagreeable and which
+might easily be remedied, or of having your wife sobbing in her own
+room and going about the house with red eyes and an expression of
+exasperating patience under ill-treatment, far worse to bear than the
+most passionate retaliation. Indeed women may be divided broadly into
+those who cry and those who retort when they are found fault with;
+which, with a side section of those wooden women who 'don't care,'
+leaves a very small percentage indeed of those who can accept a rebuke
+good-temperedly, and simply try to amend a failing or break off an
+unpleasant habit, without parade of submission and sweet Griseldadom
+unjustly chastised, but kissing the rod with aggravating meekness.
+
+For there are women who can make their meekness a more potent weapon
+of offence than any passion or violence could give. They do not cry,
+neither do they complain, but they exaggerate their submission till
+you are driven half mad under the slow torture they inflict. They look
+at you so humbly; they speak to you in so subdued a voice, when they
+speak to you at all, which is rarely and never unless first addressed;
+they avoid you so pointedly, hurrying away if you are going to meet
+them about the house, on the pretext of being hateful to your
+sight and doing you a service by ridding you of their presence; they
+are so ostentatiously careful that the thing of which you mildly
+complained under some circumstances shall never happen again under any
+circumstances, that you are forced at last out of your entrenchments,
+and obliged to come to an explanation. You ask them what is amiss? or,
+what do they mean by their absurd conduct? and they answer you
+'Nothing,' with an injured air or affected surprise at your query.
+What have they done that you should speak to them so harshly? They are
+sure they have done all they could to please you, and they do not know
+what right you have to be vexed with them again. They have kept out of
+your way and not said a word to annoy you; they have only tried to
+obey you and to do as you ordered, and yet you are not satisfied! What
+can they do to please you? and why is it that they never can please
+you whatever they do? You get no nearer your end by this kind of
+thing; and the only way to bring your Griselda to reason is by having
+a row; when she will cry bitterly, but finally end by kissing and
+making up. You have to go through the process. Nothing else, save a
+sudden disaster or an unexpected pleasure of large dimensions, will
+save you from it; but as we cannot always command earthquakes nor
+godsends, and as the first are dangerous and the last costly, the
+short and easy method remaining is to have a decisive 'understanding,'
+which means a scene and a domestic tempest with smooth sailing till
+the next time.
+
+Sometimes fine feelings are hurt by no greater barbarity than that
+which is contained in a joke. People with fine feelings are seldom
+able to take a joke; and you will hear them relating, with an injured
+accent and as a serious accusation, the merest bit of nonsense you
+flung off at random, with no more intention of wounding them than had
+the merchant the intention of putting out the Efreet's eye when he
+flung his date-stones in the desert. As you cannot deny what you have
+said, they have the whip-hand of you for the moment; and all you can
+hope for is that the friend to whom they detail their grievance will
+see through them and it, and understand the joke if they cannot. Then
+there are fine feelings which express themselves in exceeding
+irritation at moral and intellectual differences of opinion--fine
+feelings bound up in questions of faith and soundness of doctrine,
+having taken certain moral and theological views under their especial
+patronage and holding all diversity of judgment therefrom a personal
+offence. The people thus afflicted are exceedingly uncomfortable folks
+to deal with, and manage to make every one else uncomfortable too. You
+hurt their feelings so continually and so unconsciously, that you
+might as well be living in a region of steel-traps and spring-guns,
+and set to walk blindfold among pitfalls and water-holes. You fling
+your date-stone here too, quite carelessly and thinking no evil,
+and up starts the Efreet who swears you have injured him intentionally.
+You express an opinion without attaching any particular importance
+to it, but you hurt the fine feelings which oppose it, and unless you
+wish to have a quarrel you must retract or apologize. As the worst
+temper always carries the day, and as fine feelings are only bad tempers
+under another name, you very probably do apologize; and so the matter
+ends.
+
+Other people show their fineness of feeling by their impatience of
+pain and the tremendous grievance they think it that they should
+suffer as others--they say, so much more than others. These are the
+people who are great on the theory of nervous differences, and who
+maintain that their cowardice and impatience of suffering means an
+organization like an Æolian harp for sensibility. The oddest part of
+the business is the sublime contempt which these sensitives have for
+other persons' patience and endurance, and how much more refined and
+touching they think their own puerile sensibility. But this is a
+characteristic of humanity all through; the masquerading of evil under
+the name of good being one of the saddest facts of an imperfect nature
+and a confused system of morals. If all things showed their faces
+without disguise, we should have fine feelings placed in a different
+category from that in which they stand at this moment, and the world
+would be the richer by just so much addition of truth.
+
+
+
+
+_SPHINXES._
+
+
+There are people to whom mystery is the very breath of life and the
+main element of their existence. Without it they are insignificant
+nobodies; by its aid they are magnified into vague and perhaps awful
+potentialities. They are the people who take the Sphinx for their
+model, and like her, speak darkly and in parables; making secrets of
+every-day matters which would be patent to the whole world in their
+simplicity, but which, by the magic of enigmatic handling, become
+riddles that the curious would give their lives to unravel.
+
+Nothing with these people is confessed and above board, and nothing is
+shown openly so that you may look at it all round and judge for
+yourself what it is like and what it is worth. The utmost they do is
+to uncover just a corner of something they keep back in the bulk,
+tantalizing you with glimpses that bewilder and mislead; or they will
+dangle before you the end of a clue which they want you to take up and
+follow, making you believe that you will be guided thereby into the
+very heart of a mystery, and that you will find a treasure hidden in
+the centre of the maze which will abundantly repay you for the
+trouble of hunting it out. Nine times out of ten you will find nothing
+but a scarecrow of no more value than the rags of which it is
+composed--if even you find that. They are the people who repeat to you
+the most trivial things you may have said, and who remind you of the
+most unimportant things you may have done, years ago, all of which you
+have totally forgotten; but they will speak of them in a mysterious
+manner, as if they had been matters of vital meaning at the
+time--things which would open, if followed up, a page in your private
+history that it were better should be forgotten. As it is a question
+of memory, you cannot deny point-blank what they affirm; and as we all
+have pages of private history which we would rather not hear read
+aloud at the market-cross, you are obliged to accept their highly
+suggestive recollections with a queer feeling of helplessness and
+being somehow in their power--not knowing how much they are really
+acquainted with your secret affairs, nor whether the signal they have
+flashed before your eyes is a feint or a revelation.
+
+Of the same sort, with a difference, are those who are always going to
+tell you something some day--people burdened with a perennial mystery
+which never sees the light. You are for ever tormented with these folks'
+possibilities of knowledge. You turn over in your own mind every
+circumstance that you think they could have got hold of; you cunningly
+subject all your common friends to crafty cross-examination; you go,
+link by link, through the whole chain connecting you with them; but
+you can find nothing that leads to the mere outskirts of the mystery.
+You can make nothing of it; and your sphinx goes on to the end promising
+some day to tell you something which dies with him untold. Your only
+consolation is the inner conviction that there was nothing to tell
+after all.
+
+Then there are sphinxes of a more personal kind--people who keep their
+affairs a profound secret from every one, who wash all their dirty
+linen scrupulously at home and double-lock the door of the cupboard
+where the family skeleton lives. They are dungeons of silence,
+unfathomable abysses of reserve. You never know more of them, mind nor
+estate, than what you can learn from the merest outside of things.
+Look back, and you cannot recollect that you have ever heard them
+speak of their family or of their early days; and you are not
+acquainted with a living soul with whom they are connected. You may
+visit them for years without knowing that such and such a friend is
+their cousin, or maybe their sister. If they are unmarried men, they
+have no address save at their club; and neither you nor their most
+intimate friends have an idea where they sleep. For all you know to
+the contrary they may be married, with a fine flourishing family
+snugly stowed away in some suburban villa, where perhaps they live
+under another name, or with the omission or addition of a title that
+effectually masks their real individuality. If this is their
+special manifestation of sphinxhood, they take as many precautions
+against being identified as a savage when out on a scouting
+expedition. They obliterate all traces of themselves so soon as they
+leave their office in the City, and take it as a terrible misfortune
+if the truth is ever discovered; though there is nothing disgraceful
+in their circumstances, and their wives and children are healthy and
+presentable.
+
+Most of us have been startled by the sudden discovery, in our own
+circle of friends, of the wife and children of some member of our
+society hitherto supposed to be a bachelor and unshackled. All the
+time that we have been joking him on his celibacy and introducing him
+to various young ladies likely to make good wives if properly taught,
+he has been living in the holy estate a little way out of town, where
+he is at last stumbled on by some OEdipus who tells the secret to all
+the world and blows the mystery to the winds. We may be very sure that
+the officious OEdipus in question gets no thanks for his pains, and
+that the sphinx he has unmasked would rather have gone on living in
+congenial secrecy with his unacknowledged family in that remote
+suburban villa, than be forced into publicity and recognition. Leading
+two lives and personating two men--the one as imagined by his friends,
+the other as known to his belongings--was a kind of existence he liked
+infinitely better than the commonplace respectability of being _en
+évidence_ throughout.
+
+With certain sphinxes, no one but the officials concerned ever
+knows what they have done, where they have served, what laurels they
+have gained. It comes out quite by accident that they were in the
+Crimea, where, like Jack Poyntz in _School_, they were heroes in their
+own way, though they don't talk about it; or that they performed
+prodigies of valour in the Indian Mutiny and obtained the Victoria
+Cross, which they never wear. This kind has at least the merit of
+being unboastful; keeping their virtues hidden like the temple which
+the real sphinx held between her paws, and to which only those had
+access who knew the secret of the way. But though it is hateful to
+hear a man blowing his own trumpet in season and out of season, yet it
+is pleasant to know the good deeds of one's neighbours, and to have
+the power of admiring what is worthy of admiration. Besides, modesty
+and mystery are not the same things; and there is a mean to be found
+between the secrecy of a sphinx making riddles of commonplace matters,
+and the cackle of a hen when she has laid an egg for the family
+breakfast.
+
+The monetary or financial sphinx is one of the oddest of the whole
+tribe and one of the most mysterious. There are people who live on
+notoriously small incomes--such as the widows, say, of naval or
+military men, whose pensions are printed in blue-books and of whose
+yearly receipts the world can take exact cognizance--yet who dress in
+velvet and satin, perpetually go about in cabs and hired carriages,
+and are never without money to spend, though always complaining
+of poverty. How these financial sphinxes manage surpasses the
+understanding of every one; and by what royal road they arrive at the
+power of making two do the work of four is hidden from the ordinary
+believers in Cocker. You know their ostensible income; indeed, they
+themselves put it at so much; but they keep up a magnificent
+appearance on a less sum than that on which you would go shabby and
+dilapidated. When you ask them how it is done, they answer, 'by
+management.' Anything can be done by management, they say, by those
+who have the gift; which you feel to be an utterance of the sphinx--a
+dark saying the key to which has not yet been forged.
+
+You calculate to the best of your ability, and you know that you are
+sound in your arithmetic; but, do what you will, you can never come to
+the rule by which five hundred a year can be made to compass the
+expenditure of a thousand. If you whisper secret supplies, concealed
+resources, your sphinx will not so much as wink her eyelid. How she
+contrives to make her ostensible five hundred do the work of a
+thousand--how she gets velvet and satin for the value of cotton and
+stuff, and how, though always complaining of poverty, she keeps
+unfailingly flush of cash--how all this is done is her secret, and she
+holds it sacred. And you may be quite sure of one thing--it is a
+secret she will never share with you nor any one else.
+
+The rapidly-working _littérateur_ is another sphinx worth
+studying as a curiosity--we might say, indeed, a living miracle. There
+he stands, a jovial, self-indulgent, enjoying man, out in society
+every night in the week; by no means abstinent from champagne, and as
+little given to early rising as he is to consumption of the midnight
+oil. But he gets through a mass of work which would be respectable in
+a mere copyist, and which is little less than miraculous in an
+original producer. How he thinks, when he finds time to make up his
+plots, to work out his characters, even to correct his proofs, are
+riddles unanswerable by all his friends. Taking the mere mechanical
+act alone, he must write faster than any living man has ever been
+known to write, to get through all that goes under his name. And when
+is it done? Literary sphinxes of this kind go about unchallenged;
+indeed, they are very much about, and to be beheld everywhere; and one
+looks at them with respect, not knowing of what material they are
+made, nor of what mysterious gifts they are the possessors. Novels,
+plays, essays, poems, come pouring forth in never slackening supply.
+The railway stations and all hoardings are made gorgeous by the
+announcement of their feats set out in red and blue and yellow. No
+sooner has one blaze of triumph burnt itself out than another blaze of
+triumph flares up; and nothing but death or a rich inheritance seems
+likely to stop their mysterious fecundity. How is it done? That is the
+secret of the literary sphinx, to which the admiring and amazed
+brotherhood is anxiously seeking some clue; but up to the present hour
+it has been kept jealously guarded and no solution has been arrived
+at.
+
+There is another form of the literary sphinx in the Nobodies and Anons
+who speak from out the darkness and let no man see whence the voice
+proceeds. They are generally tracked to their lair sooner or later,
+and the sphinx's head turns out to be only a pasteboard mask behind
+which some well-known Apuleian hid himself for a while, working much
+amazement among the wondering crowd while the clasps held good, but
+losing something of that fervid worship when the reality became known.
+Others, again, of these Anons have, like Junius, kept their true abode
+hidden and their name a mystery still, though there be some who swear
+they have traced the footsteps and know exactly where the sphinx
+lives, and what is the name upon his frontlet, and of what race and
+complexion he is without his mask. It may be so. But as every
+discoverer has a track of his own, and as each swears that his sphinx
+is the real one and no other, the choice among so many becomes a
+service of difficulty; and perhaps the wisest thing to do is to
+suspend judgment until the literary sphinx of the day chooses to
+reveal himself by the prosaic means of a title-page, with his name as
+author printed thereon and his place of abode jotted down at the foot
+of the preface.
+
+
+
+
+_FLIRTING._
+
+
+There are certain things which can never be accurately
+described--things so shadowy, so fitful, so dependent on the mood of
+the moment, both in the audience and the actor, that analysis and
+representation are equally at fault. And flirting is one of them. What
+is flirting? Who can define or determine? It is more serious than
+talking nonsense and not so serious as making love; it is not chaff
+and it is not feeling; it means something more than indifference and
+yet something less than affection; it binds no one; it commits no one
+though it raises expectations in the individual and sets society on
+the look-out for results; it is a plaything in the hands of the
+experienced but a deadly weapon against the breast of the unwary; and
+it is a thing so vague, so protean, that the most accurate measurer of
+moral values would be puzzled to say where it exactly ends and where
+serious intentions begin.
+
+But again we ask: What is flirting? What constitutes its essence? What
+makes the difference between it and chaff on the one hand, and it and
+love-making on the other? Has it a cumulative power, and,
+according to the old saying of many a pickle making a mickle, does a
+long series of small flirtings make up a concrete whole of love? or is
+it like an unmortared heap of bricks, potential utilities if
+conditions were changed, but valueless as things are? The man who
+would be able to reduce flirting to a definite science, who could
+analyze its elements and codify its laws, would be doing infinite
+service to his generation; but we fear that this is about as difficult
+as finding the pot of gold under the end of a rainbow, or catching
+small birds with a pinch of salt.
+
+Every one has his or her ideas of what constitutes flirting;
+consequently every one judges of that pleasant exercise according to
+individual temperament and experience. Faded flowers, who see
+impropriety in everything they are no longer able to enjoy, say with
+more or less severity that Henry and Angelina are flirting if they are
+laughing while whispering together in an alcove, probably the most
+innocent nonsense in the world; but the fact that they are enjoying
+themselves in their own way, albeit a silly one, is enough for the
+faded flower to think they are after mischief, flirting being to her
+mind about the worst bit of mischief that a fallen humanity can
+perpetrate. The watchful mother, intent on chances, says that dancing
+together oftener than is necessary for good breeding and just the
+amount of attention demanded by circumstances, is flirting; timid
+girls newly out, and not yet used to the odd ways of men, think
+they are being flirted with outrageously if their partner fires off
+the meekest little compliment at them, or looks at them more tenderly
+than he would look at a cabbage; but bolder spirits of both sexes
+think nothing worthy of the name which does not include a few
+questionable familiarities, and an equivoke or two, more or less
+risky. With some, flirting is nothing but the passing fun of the
+moment; with others, it is the first lesson of the great unopened book
+and means the beginning of the end; with some, it is not even angling
+with intent; with others, it is deep-sea fishing with a broad,
+boldly-made net, and taking all fish that come in as good for sport if
+not for food.
+
+Flirts are of many kinds as well as of all degrees. There are quiet
+flirts and demonstrative flirts; flirts of the subtle sort whose
+practice is made by the eyes alone, by the manner, by the tender
+little sigh, by the bend of the head and the wave of the hand, to give
+pathos and point to the otherwise harmless word; and flirts of the
+open and rampant kind, who go up quite boldly towards the point, but
+who never reach it, taking care to draw back in time before they
+fairly cross the border. This is the kind which, as the flirt male,
+does incalculable damage to the poor little fluttering dove to whom it
+is as a bird of prey, handsome, bold, cruel; but this is the kind
+which has unlimited success, using as it does that immense moral
+leverage we call 'tantalizing'--for ever rousing hopes and exciting
+expectations, and luring a woman on as an _ignis fatuus_ lures us
+on across the marsh, in the vain belief that it will bring us to our
+haven at last.
+
+Akin to this kind are those male flirts who are great in the way in
+which they manage to insinuate things without committing themselves to
+positive statements. They generally contrive to give the impression of
+some mysterious hindrance by which they are held back from full and
+frank confession. They hint at fatal bonds, at unfortunate
+attachments, at a past that has burnt them up or withered them up, at
+any rate that has prevented their future from blossoming in the
+direction in which they would fain have had it blossom and bear fruit.
+They sketch out vaguely the outlines of some thrilling romance; a few,
+of the Byronic breed, add the suspicion of some dark and melancholy
+crime as a further romantic charm and personal obstacle; and when they
+have got the girl's pity, and the love that is akin to pity, then they
+cool down scientifically, never creating any scandal, never making any
+rupture, never coming to a moment when awkward explanations can be
+asked, but cooling nevertheless, till the thing drops of its own
+accord and dies out from inanition; when they are free to carry their
+sorrows and their mysteries elsewhere. Some men spend their lives in
+this kind of thing, and find their pleasure in making all the women
+they know madly or sentimentally in love with them; and if by chance
+any poor moth who has burned her wings makes too loud an outcry,
+the tables are turned against her dexterously, and she is held up to
+public pity--contempt would be a better word--as one who has suffered
+herself to love too well and by no means wisely, and who has run after
+a Lothario by no means inclined to let himself be caught.
+
+Then there are certain men who flirt only with married women, and
+others who flirt only with girls; and the two pastimes are as
+different as tropical sunlight and northern moonshine. And there are
+some who are 'brothers,' and some who are 'fathers' to their young
+friends--suspicious fathers on the whole, not unlike Little Red
+Ridinghood's grandmother the wolf, with perilously bright eyes, and
+not a little danger to Red Ridinghood in the relationship, how
+delightful soever it may be to the wolf. Some are content with
+cousinship only--which however breaks down quite sufficient fences;
+and some are 'dearest friends,' no more, and find that an exceedingly
+useful centre from which to work onward and outward. For, if any peg
+will do on which to hang a discourse, so will any relationship or
+adoption serve the ends of flirting, if it be so willed.
+
+But what is flirting? Is sitting away in corners, talking in low
+voices and looking personally affronted if any unlucky outsider comes
+within earshot, flirting? Not necessarily. It is just possible that
+Henry may be telling Angelina all about his admiration for her sister
+Grace; or Angelina may be confessing to Henry what Charley said to
+her last night;--which makes her lower her eyes as she is doing now,
+and play with the fringe of her fan so nervously. May be, if not
+likely. So that sitting away in corners and whispering together is not
+necessarily flirting, though it may look like it. Is dancing all the
+'round' dances together? This goes for decided flirting in the code of
+the ball-room. But if the two keep well together? If they are really
+fond of dancing, as one of the fine arts combining science and
+enjoyment, they would dance with each other all night, though outside
+the 'marble halls' they might be deadly enemies--Montagues and
+Capulets, with no echo of Romeo and Juliet to soften their mutual
+dislike. So that not even dancing together oftener than is absolutely
+necessary is unmistakeable evidence, any more than is sitting away in
+corners, seeing that equal skill and keeping well in step are reasons
+enough for perpetual partnership, making all idea of flirtation
+unnecessary. In fact, there is no outward sign nor symbol of flirting
+which may not be mistaken and turned round, because flirting is so
+entirely in the intention and not in the mere formula, that it becomes
+a kind of phantasm, a Proteus, impossible to seize or to depict with
+accuracy.
+
+One thing however, we can say--taking gifts and attentions, offered
+with evident design and accepted with tacit understanding, may be
+certainly held as constituting an important element of flirting. But
+this is flirting on the woman's side. And here you are being
+continually taken in. Your flirt of the cunningly simple kind,
+who smiles so sweetly and seems so flatteringly glad to see you when
+you come, who takes all your presents and acted expressions of love
+with the most bewitching gratitude and effusion, even she, so simple
+as she seems to be, slips the thread and will not be caught if she
+does not wish to be caught. At the decisive moment when you think you
+have secured her, she makes a bound and is away; then turns round,
+looks you in the face, and with many a tear and pretty asseveration
+declares that she never understood you to mean what you say you have
+meant all along; and that you are cruel to dispel her dream of a
+pleasant and harmless friendship, and very wicked indeed because you
+press her for a decision. Yes; you are cruel, because you have
+believed her honest; cruel, because you did not see through the veil
+of flattery and insincerity in which she clothed her selfishness;
+cruel, because she was false. This is the flirt's logic when brought
+to book, and forced to confess that her pretended love was only
+flirting, and that she led you on to your destruction simply because
+it pleased her vanity to make you her victim.
+
+Then there are flirts of the open and rollicking kind, who let you go
+far, very far indeed, when suddenly they pull up and assume an
+offended air as if you had wilfully transgressed known and absolute
+boundaries--girls and women who lead you on, all in the way of good
+fellowship, to knock you over when you have got just far enough to
+lose your balance. That is their form of the art. They like to
+see how far they can make a man forget himself, and how much stronger
+their own delusive enticements are than prudence, experience and
+common-sense. And there are flirts of the artful and 'still waters'
+kind, something like the male flirts spoken of just now; sentimental
+little pusses--perhaps pretty young wives with uncomfortable husbands,
+whose griefs have by no means soured nor scorched, but just mellowed
+and refined, them. Or they may be of the sisterly class; creatures so
+very frank, so very sisterly and confiding and unsuspicious of evil,
+that really you scarcely know how to deal with them at all. And there
+are flirts of the scientific kind; women who have studied the art
+thoroughly; and who are adepts in the use of every weapon known--using
+each according to circumstances and the nature of the victim, and
+using each with deadly precision. From such may a kind Providence
+deliver us! As the tender mercies of the wicked, so are the scientific
+flirts--the women and the men who play at bowls with human hearts, for
+the stakes of a whole life's happiness on the one side and a few weeks
+of gratified vanity on the other.
+
+It used to be an old schoolboy maxim that no real gentleman could be
+refused by a lady, because no real gentleman could presume beyond his
+line of encouragement. _À fortiori_, no lady would or could give more
+encouragement than she meant. What are we to say then of our flirts if
+this maxim be true? Are they really 'no gentlemen' and 'no ladies,'
+according to the famous formula of the kitchen? Perhaps it would
+be said so if gentlehood meant now, as it meant centuries ago, the
+real worth and virtue of humanity. For flirting with intent is a
+cruel, false, heartless amusement; and time was when cruelty and
+falsehood were essentially sins which vitiated all claims to
+gentlehood. And yet the world would be very dull without that innocent
+kind of nonsense which often goes by the name of flirting--that
+pleasant something which is more than mere acquaintanceship and less
+than formal loverhood--that bright and animated intercourse which
+makes the hours pass so easily, yet which leaves no bitter pang of
+self-reproach--that indefinite and undefinable interest by which the
+one man or the one woman becomes a kind of microcosm for the time, the
+epitome of all that is pleasant and of all that is lovely. The only
+caution to be observed is:--Do not go too far.
+
+
+
+
+_SCRAMBLERS._
+
+
+There are people who are never what Northern housewives call
+'straight'--people who seem to have been born in a scramble, who live
+in a scramble, and who, when their time comes, will die in a scramble,
+just able to scrawl their signature to a will that ought to have been
+made years ago, and that does not embody their real intentions now.
+Emphatically the Unready, they are never prepared for anything,
+whether expected or unexpected; they make no plans more stable than
+good intentions; and they neither calculate nor foresee. Everything
+with them is hurry and confusion; not because they have more to do
+than other people, but because they do it more loosely and less
+methodically--because they have not learnt the art of dovetailing nor
+the mystery of packing. Consequently half their pleasures and more
+than half their duties slip through their fingers for want of the
+knack of compact holding; and their lives are passed in trying to pick
+up what they have let drop and in frantic endeavours to remedy their
+mistakes. For scramblers are always making mistakes and going through
+an endless round of forgetting. They never remember their
+engagements, but accept in the blandest and frankest way imaginable
+two or more invitations for the same day and hour, and assure you
+quite seriously when, taught by experience, you push them hard and
+probe them deep, that they have no engagement whatever on hand and are
+certain not to fail you. In an evil hour you trust to them. When the
+day comes they suddenly wake to the fact that they had accepted Mrs.
+So-and-So's invitation before yours; and all you get for your empty
+place and your careful arrangements ruthlessly upset, is a hurried
+note of apology which comes perhaps in the middle of dinner, perhaps
+sometime next day, when too late to be of use.
+
+If they forget their own engagements they also ignore yours, no matter
+how distinctly you may have tabulated them; and are sure to come
+rattling to your house on the day when you said emphatically you were
+engaged and could not see them. If you keep to your programme and
+refuse to admit them, more likely than not you affront them.
+Engagements being in their eyes moveable feasts, which it does not in
+the least degree signify whether they keep on the date set down or
+not, they cannot understand your rigidity of purpose; and were it not
+that as a tribe they are good-natured, and too fluid to hold even
+annoyance for any length of time, you would in all probability have a
+quarrel fastened on you because your scrambling friends chose to make
+a calendar for themselves and to insist on your setting your diary by
+it.
+
+As they ignore your appointed hours, so do they forget your
+street and number. They always stick to your first card, though you
+may have moved many times since it was printed, duly apprizing them of
+each change as it occurred. That does not help you, for they never
+note the changes of their friends' addresses, but keep loyally to the
+first. It all comes to the same in the end, they say, and the postman
+is cleverer than they. But they do not often trouble their friends
+with letters on their own account, for they have a speciality for not
+answering such as are written to them. When they do by chance answer
+them, they never reply to the questions asked nor give the news
+demanded. They do not even reply to invitations like other people, but
+leave you to infer from their silence the acceptance or rejection they
+are meditating. When they in their turn invite you, they generally
+puzzle you by mismatching the day of the week with the date of the
+month, leaving you tormented with doubt which you are to go by; and
+they forget to give you the hour. Besides this, they write an
+illegible hand; and they are famous for the blots they make and the
+Queen's heads they omit.
+
+A scrambling wife is no light cross to a man who values order and
+regularity as part of his home life. She may be, and probably is, the
+best-tempered creature in the world--a peevish scrambler would be too
+unendurable--but a fresh face, bright eyes and a merry laugh do not
+atone for never-ending disorder and discomfort. This kind of thing
+does not depend on income and is not to be remedied by riches. The
+households where my lady has nothing to do but let her maid keep
+her to the hours she herself has appointed are just as uncomfortable
+in their way as poorer establishments, if my lady is a scrambler, and
+cannot be taught method and the value of holding on by the forelock.
+Sometimes my lady gets herself into such an inextricable coil of
+promises and engagements, all crossing each other, that in despair she
+takes to her bed and gives herself out as ill, and so cuts what she
+cannot untie. People wonder at her sudden indisposition, looking as
+she did only yesterday in the bloom of health; and they wonder at her
+radiant reappearance in a day or two without a trace of even languor
+upon her. They do not know that her retirement was simply a version of
+the famous rope trick, and that, like the Brothers Davenport, she went
+into the dark to shake herself free of the cords with which she had
+suffered herself to be bound. It is a short and easy method certainly,
+but it has rather too much of the echo of 'Wolf' in it to bear
+frequent repetition.
+
+In houses of a lower grade, where the lady is her own housekeeper, the
+habit of scrambling of course leads to far greater and more manifest
+confusion. The servants catch from the mistress the trick of
+overstaying time; and punctuality at last comes to mean an elastic
+margin, where fixed duties and their appointed times appear
+cometically at irregular intervals. The cook is late with dinner; the
+coachman begins to put-to a little after the hour he was ordered
+to be at the door; but they know that, however late they are, the
+chances are ten to one their mistress will not be ready for them, and
+that in her heart she will be grateful to them for the shelter their
+own unpunctuality affords her. This being so, they take their time and
+dawdle at their pleasure; thus adding to the pressure which always
+comes at the end of the scrambler's day, when everything is thrown
+into a chaotic mass and nothing comes out straight or complete.
+
+Did any one ever know a scrambling woman ready at the moment in her
+own house? That she should be punctual to any appointment out of her
+house is, of course, not to be thought of; but she makes an awkward
+thing of it sometimes at home. Her guests are often all assembled, and
+the dinner hour has struck, before she has torn off one gown and
+dragged on another. What she cannot tie she pins; and her pins are
+many and demonstrative. She wisps up her hair, not having left herself
+time to braid it; and the consequence is that before she has been half
+an hour in the room ends and tails are sure to stray playfully from
+their fastenings and come tumbling about her ears. Her jewels are
+mismatched, her colours ill-assorted, her belt is awry, her bouquet
+falling to pieces. She rushes into the drawing-room in her morning
+slippers, smiling and good-tempered, with a patch-work look about
+her--something forgotten in her attire that makes her whole appearance
+shaky and unfinished--fastening her last button or clasping on
+her first bracelet. She is full of regrets and excuses delivered in
+her joyous, buoyant manner, or in a voice so winning, an accent so
+coaxing, that you cannot be annoyed. Besides, you leave the annoyance
+to her husband, who is sure to have in reserve a pickle quite
+sufficiently strong for the inevitable rod, as the poor scrambler
+knows too well. All you can do is to accept her apologies with a good
+grace, and to carry away with you a vivid recollection of an awkward
+half-hour, a spoilt dinner, and a scrambling hostess all abroad and
+out of time, sweeping through the room very heated, very
+good-tempered, only half-dressed and chronically out of breath.
+
+Scramblers can never learn the value of money, neither for themselves
+nor for others. They are famous for borrowing small sums which they
+forget to return; but, to do them justice, they are just as willing to
+lend what they never dream of asking for again. Long ago they caught
+hold of the fact that money is only a circulating medium, and they
+have added an extra speed to the circulation at which slower folk
+stand aghast. To be sure, the practical results of their theory are
+not very satisfactory, and the confusion between the possessive
+pronouns which distinguishes their financial catechism is apt to lead
+to unpleasant issues.
+
+Scrambling women are especially notorious for the way in which they
+set themselves afloat without sufficient means to carry them on;
+finding themselves stranded in mid-career because they have made
+no calculations and have forgotten the rule of subtraction. They find
+themselves at a small Italian town, say, where the virtues of the
+British banking system are unknown, and where their letters of credit
+and circular notes are not worth more than the value of the paper they
+are written on. More than one British matron of respectable condition
+and weak arithmetic has found herself in such a plight as this, with
+her black-eyed landlord perfectly civil and well-bred, but as firm as
+a rock in his resolution that the Signora shall not depart out of his
+custody till his little account is paid--a plight out of which she has
+to scramble the best way she can, with the loss perhaps of a little
+dignity and of more repute--at least in the locality where her solid
+scudi gave out and her precious paper could not be cashed. This is the
+same woman who offers an omnibus conductor a sovereign for a
+three-penny fare; who gives the village grocer a ten-pound note for a
+shilling's-worth of sugar; and who, when she comes up to London for a
+day's shopping, and has got her last parcel made up and ready to be
+put into her cab, finds she has not left herself half enough money to
+pay for it--with a shopman whose faith in human nature is by no means
+lively, and who only last week was bitten by a lady swindler of
+undeniable manners and appearance, and not very unlike herself. She
+has been known too, to go into a confectioner's and, after having made
+an excellent luncheon, to find to her dismay that she has left
+her purse in the pocket of her other dress at home, and that she has
+not six-pence about her. In fact there is not an equivocal position in
+which forgetfulness, want of method, want of foresight, and all the
+other characteristics which make up scrambling in the concrete, can
+place her, in which she has not been at some time or other. But no
+experience teaches her; the scrambler she was born, the scrambler she
+will die, and to the last will tumble through her life, all her ends
+flying and deprecating excuses on her lips.
+
+Scramblers are notoriously great for making promises, and as notorious
+for not performing what they promise. Kindhearted as they are in
+general, and willing to do their friends a service--going out of their
+way indeed to proffer kindnesses quite beyond your expectations and
+the range of their duties towards you, and always undertaking works of
+supererogation; which works in fact lead to more than half their
+normal scramble--they forget the next hour the promise on which you
+have based your dearest hopes. Or, if they do not forget it, they find
+it is crowded out of time by a multitude of engagements and prior
+promises, of all of which they were innocently oblivious when they
+offered to do your business so frankly, and swore so confidently they
+would set about it now at once and get it out of hand without delay.
+The oath and the offer which you took to be as sure as the best
+chain-cable, you will find on trial to be only a rope of sand that
+could not bind so much as a bunch of tow together, still less
+hold the anchor of a life; and many a heart, sick with hope deferred
+and wrung with the disappointment which might have been so easily
+prevented, has been half broken before now from the anguish that has
+followed on the failure of the kindhearted scrambler to perform the
+promise voluntarily made, and the service earnestly pressed on a
+reluctant acceptor.
+
+This is the tragic side of the scrambler's career, the shadow thrown
+by almost every one of the class. For all the minor delinquencies of
+hurry and unpunctuality in social affairs it is not difficult to find
+full and ample forgiveness; but when it comes to untrustworthiness in
+graver matters, then the scrambler becomes a scourge instead of only
+an inconvenience. The only safe way of dealing with the class is to
+take them when we can get hold of them, and to accept them for what
+they are worth; but not to rely on them, and not to attempt any
+mortising of our own affairs with their promises. They are the froth
+and foam of society, pretty and pleasant enough in the sunlight as
+they splash and splutter about the rocks; but they are not the deep
+waters which bear the burden of our ships and by which the life of the
+world is maintained.
+
+
+
+
+_FLATTERY._
+
+
+Nothing is so delightful as flattery. To hear and believe pleasant
+fictions about oneself is a temptation too seductive for weak mortals
+to resist, as the typical legends of all mythologies and the private
+histories of most individuals show; in consequence of which, home
+truths, to one used to ideal portraiture, come like draughts of
+'bitter cup' to the dram-drinker. And flattery is dram-drinking; and
+yet not quite without good uses to balance its undeniable evil, if it
+be only exaggeration and not wholly falsehood; that is, if it assumes
+as a matter of course the presence of virtues potential to your
+character but not always active, and praises you for what you might be
+if you chose to live up to your best. Many a weak brother and weaker
+sister, and all children, can be heartened into goodness by a little
+dash of judicious praise or flattery where ponderous exhortation and
+grave reproof would fail; just as a heavily-laden horse can be coaxed
+up-hill when the whip and spur would lead to untimely jibbing. If, on
+the contrary, the flattery is of a kind that makes you believe
+yourself an exceptionally fine fellow when you are only 'mean
+trash'--a king of men when you are nothing better nor nobler than a
+moral nigger--making you satisfied with yourself when at your
+worst--then it is an unmitigated evil; for it then becomes
+dram-drinking of a very poisonous kind, which sooner or later does for
+your soul what unlimited blue ruin does for your body. But this is
+what we generally mean when we speak of flattery; and this is the kind
+which has such a deservedly bad name from moralists of all ages.
+
+The flatteries of men to women, and those of women to men, are very
+different in kind and direction. Men flatter women for what they
+are--for their beauty, their grace, their sweetness, their
+charmingness in general; while a woman will flatter a man for what he
+does--for his speech in the House last night, of which she understands
+little; for his book, of which she understands less; or for his
+pleading, of which she understands nothing at all. Not that this
+signifies much on either side. The most unintellectual little woman in
+the world has brains enough to look up in your face sweetly, and
+breathe out something that sounds like 'beautiful--charming--so
+clever,' vaguely sketching the outline of a hymn of praise to which
+your own vanity supplies the versicles. For you must have an
+exceptionally strong head if you can rate the sketch at its real value
+and see for yourself how utterly meaningless it is.
+
+You may be the most mystical poet of the day, suggesting to your
+acutest readers grave doubts as to your own power of comprehending
+yourself; or you may be the most subtle metaphysician, to follow
+whom in your labyrinth of reasoning requires perhaps the rarest
+order of brains to be met with; but you will nevertheless believe
+any narrow-browed, small-headed woman who tells you in a low sweet
+voice, with a gentle uplifting of her eyes and a suggestive curve
+of her lip, that she has found you both intelligible and charming,
+and that she quite agrees with you and shares your every sentiment.
+If she further tells you that all her life long she has thought in
+exactly the same way but was wholly unable to express herself, and
+that you have now supplied her want and translated into words her
+vague ideas, and if she says this with a reverential kind of
+effusiveness, you are done for, so far as your critical power goes;
+and should some candid friend, whom she has not flattered, tell you
+with brutal frankness that your bewitching little flatterer has
+neither the brains nor the education to understand you, you will set
+him down as a slanderer, spiteful and malignant, and call his candour
+envy because he has not been so lucky as yourself.
+
+The most subtle form of flattery is that which asks your advice with
+the pretence of needing it--your advice, particularly--yours above
+that of all other persons, as the wisest, best, most useful to be
+obtained. This too is a form that belongs rather to women in their
+relations with men than the converse; though sometimes men will
+pretend to want a woman's advice about their love affairs, and
+will perhaps make-believe to be guided by it. Not unfrequently,
+however, asking one woman's opinion and advice about another is a
+masked manner of love-making on its own account; though sometimes it
+may be done for flattery only, when there are reasons. Of course not
+all advice-asking is flattery; but when intended only to please and
+not meant to be genuine, it is perhaps one of the most potent
+instruments of the art to be met with.
+
+But if seeking advice be the most subtle form of flattery, the most
+intoxicating is that which pretends to moral elevation or reform by
+your influence. The reformation of a rake is a work which no woman
+alive could be found to resist if the rake offered it to her as his
+last chance of salvation; and to lead a pretty sinner back to the ways
+of picturesque virtue by his own influence only is a temptation to
+self-reliance which no man could refuse--a flattery which not Diogenes
+nor Zeno himself could see through. The pretensions of any one else
+would be laughed at cruelly enough; but this is one of the things
+where personal experience and critical judgment never go in harness
+together--one of the manifestations of flattery which would overcome
+the calmest and bewilder the wisest.
+
+Priests of all denominations are especially open to this kind of
+flattery; not only from pretty sinners who have gone openly out of the
+right line, but from quite comely and respectable maids and matrons
+who have lived blamelessly so far as the broad moral distinctions
+go, yet who have not lived the Awakened Life until roused thereunto by
+this peculiarly favoured minister. It is a tremendous trial of a man's
+discernment when such flattery is offered to him. How much of this
+pretended awakening is real? How much of this sudden spiritual insight
+is true, and not a mere phrasing, artfully adopted for pleasantness
+only? These are the cases where we most want that famous spear of
+Ithuriel to help us to a right estimate, for they are beyond the power
+of any ordinary man to determine.
+
+But if priests are subject to these delusions of flattery on the one
+hand, they know how to practise them on the other. Take away the
+flattery which, mingled with occasional rebuke, forms the great
+ministerial spur, and both Revivalism and Ritualism would flag like
+flowers without 'the gentle dews.' Scolded for their faults in dress,
+for their vanity, extravagance and other feminine vices, are not women
+also flattered as the favourites of heaven and of the Church? Are they
+not told that they are the lilies of the ecclesiastical garden? the
+divinely appointed missionaries for the preservation of virtue and
+godly truth in the world? without whom the coarser race of men would
+be given over to inconceivable spiritual evil, to infidelity and all
+immorality. We may be very sure of this, that if humanity, and
+especially feminine humanity, were not flattered as well as chastened,
+clerical influence would not last for a day.
+
+There is one kind of flattery which is common to both men and women,
+and that is the expressed preference of sex. Thus, when men want to
+flatter women, they say how infinitely they prefer their society to
+that of their own sex; and women will say the same to men. Or, if they
+do not say it, they will act it. See a set of women congregated
+together without the light of a manly countenance among them. They may
+talk to each other certainly; and one or two will sit away together
+and discuss their private affairs with animation; but the great mass
+of them are only half vitalized while waiting the advent of the men to
+rouse them into life and the desire to please. No man who goes up
+first from the dinner-table, and earlier than he was expected, can
+fail to see the change which comes over those wearied, limp,
+indifferent-looking faces and figures so soon as he enters the room.
+He is like the prince whose kiss woke up the Sleeping Beauty and all
+her court; and can any one say that this is not flattery of the most
+delightful kind? To be the Pygmalion even for a moment, and for the
+weakest order of soul-giving, is about the greatest pleasure that a
+man can know, if he be susceptible to the finer kinds of flattery.
+
+Some women indeed, not only show their preference for men, but openly
+confess it, and confess at the same time to a lofty contempt or
+abhorrence for the society of women. These are generally women who
+are, or have been, beauties; or who have literary and intellectual
+pretensions; or who despise babies and contemn housekeeping, and
+profess themselves unable to talk to other women because of their
+narrowness and stupidity. But for the most part they are women who, by
+their beauty or their position, have been used to receive extra
+attention from men; and thus their preference is not flattery so much
+as _exigence_. Women who have been in India, or wherever else they are
+in the minority in society, are of this kind; and nothing is more
+amazing to them when they first come home than the attentions which a
+certain style of Englishwoman pays to men, instead of demanding and
+receiving attentions from them.
+
+There are also those sweet, humble, caressing women who flatter you
+with every word and look, but whose flattery is nothing but a pretty
+dress put on for show and taken off when the show is done with.
+Anything serves for an occasion with these people. Why, the way in
+which certain unmarried women will caress a child before you is an
+implied flattery; and they know it. If only they would be careful to
+carry these pretty ante-nuptial ways into the home where nothing is to
+be gained by them but a humdrum husband's happiness! But too often the
+woman whose whole attitude was one of flattering devotion before her
+end was gained, gives up every shred of that which she had in such
+profusion, when she has attained her object, and lets the home go bare
+of that which was so beautiful and seductive in the ball-room and the
+flirting corner.
+
+Some men however, want more home flattery to keep them tolerably happy
+and up to the mark than any woman with a soul to be saved by truth can
+give. Poets and artists are of this kind--men who literally live on
+praise, without which they droop and can do nothing. With them it is
+absolutely necessary that the people with whom they are associated
+should be of appreciative and sympathetic natures; but the burden
+comes heavy when they want, as they generally do, so much more than
+this. For, in truth, they want flattery in excess of sympathy; and if
+they do not get it they hold themselves as the victims of an unkind
+fate, and fill the world with the echo of their woes. This is
+nine-tenths of the cause why great geniuses are so often unhappy in
+married life. They demand more incessant flattery than can be kept up
+by one woman, unless she has not only an exceptional power of love but
+also an exceptional power of self-suppression. They think that by
+virtue of their genius they are entitled to a Benjamin's mess of
+devotion double that given to other men; and when they get only
+Judah's share, they cry out that they are ill-used, and make the world
+think them ill-used as well.
+
+But though a little home flattery helps the home life immeasurably,
+and greases the creaking domestic wheels more than anything else can,
+a great deal is just the most pernicious thing that can be offered.
+The belief prevalent in some families that all the very small and
+commonplace members thereof are the world's wonders and greater
+than any one else--that no one is so clever as Harry, no one so pretty
+as Julia, that Amy's red hair is of a more brilliant gold than can be
+found elsewhere, and Edward's mathematical abilities about equal to
+Newton's--this belief, nourished and acted on, is sure to turn out an
+insufferable collection of prigs and self-conceited damsels who have
+to be brought down innumerable pegs before they find their own level.
+But we often see this; especially in country places where there is not
+much society to give a standard for comparative measurement; and we
+know that those fond parents and doting relations are blindly and
+diligently sowing seeds of bitterness for a future harvest of sorrow
+for their darlings. These young people must be made to suffer if they
+are to be of any good whatever in the world; and finding their level,
+after the exalted position which they have been supposed to fill so
+long, and being pelted with the unsavoury missiles of truth in
+exchange for all the incense of flattery to which they have been used,
+will be suffering enough. But it has to be gone through; this being
+one of the penalties to which the unwisdom of love so often subjects
+its objects.
+
+The flattery met with in society is not often very harmful save to
+coarse or specially simple natures. You must be either one or the
+other to be able to believe it. Lady Morgan was perhaps the most
+unblushing and excessive of the tribe of social flatterers; but that
+was her engine, the ladder by which she did a good part of her
+climbing. We must not confound with this kind of flattery the
+impulsive expression of praise or love which certain outspoken people
+indulge in to the last. You may as well try to dam up Niagara as to
+make some folks reticent of their thoughts and feelings. And when one
+of this kind sees anything that he or she likes, the praise has to
+come out, with superlatives if the creature be prone to exaggeration.
+But this is not flattery; it is merely a certain childlike
+expansiveness which lasts with some into quite old age. Unfortunately,
+very few understand this childlike expansiveness when they see it.
+Hence it subjects its possessor to misrepresentation and unfriendly
+jibes, so soon as his or her back is turned, and the explosion of
+exaggerated but perfectly sincere praise is discussed critically by
+the uninterested part of the audience.
+
+
+
+
+_LA FEMME PASSÉE._
+
+
+Without doubt it is a time of trial to all women, more or less painful
+according to individual disposition, when they first begin to grow old
+and lose their good looks. Youth and beauty make up so much of their
+personal value, so much of their natural final cause, that when these
+are gone many feel as if their whole career were at an end, and as if
+nothing were left to them now that they are no longer young enough to
+be loved as girls are loved, or pretty enough to be admired as mature
+sirens are admired. For women of a certain position have so little
+wholesome occupation, and so little ambition for anything save indeed
+that miserable thing called 'getting on in society,' that they cannot
+change their way of life with advancing years. Hence they do not
+attempt to find interest in things outside themselves, and independent
+of the personal attractiveness which in youth constituted their whole
+pleasure of existence.
+
+This is essentially the case with fashionable women, who have staked
+their all on appearance, and to whom good looks are of more account
+than noble deeds; and, accordingly, the struggle to remain young
+is a frantic one with them, and as degrading as it is frantic.
+
+With the ideal woman of middle age--that pleasant She with her calm
+face and soft manner, who unites the charms of both epochs, retaining
+the ready responsiveness of youth while adding the wider sympathies of
+experience--with her there has been no such struggle to make herself
+an anachronism. Consequently she remains beautiful to the last--far
+more beautiful than all the pastes and washes in Madame Rachel's shop
+could make her. Sometimes, if rarely in these latter days, we meet her
+in society, where she carries with her an atmosphere of her own--an
+atmosphere of honest, wholesome truth and love, which makes every one
+who enters it better and purer for the time. All children and all
+young persons love her, because she understands and loves them. For
+she is essentially a mother--that is, a woman who can forget herself;
+who can give without asking to receive; and who, without losing any of
+the individualism which belongs to self-respect, can yet live for and
+in the lives of others, and find her best joy in the well-being of
+those about her. There is no exaggerated sacrifice in this; it is
+simply the fulfilment of woman's highest duty--the expression of that
+grand maternal instinct which need not necessarily include the fact of
+personal maternity, but which, with all women worthy of the name, must
+find utterance in some line of unselfish action.
+
+The ideal woman of middle age understands the young because she has
+lived with them. If a mother, she has performed her maternal duties
+with cheerfulness and love. There has been no giving up her nursery to
+the care of a hired servant who is expected to do for so many pounds a
+year things which the tremendous instinct of a mother's love could not
+find strength to do. When she had children, she attended to them in
+great part herself, and learnt all about their tempers, their
+maladies, and the best methods of management. As they grew up she was
+still the best friend they had--the Providence of their young lives
+who gave them both care and justice, both love and guidance. Such a
+manner of life has forced her to forget herself. When her child lay
+ill, perhaps dying, she had no heart and no time to think of her own
+appearance, and whether this dressing-gown was more becoming than
+that: and what did the doctor think of her with her hair pushed back
+from her face?--and what a fright she must have looked in the morning
+light after her sleepless night of watching! The world and all its
+petty pleasures and paltry pains faded away in the presence of the
+stern tragedy of the hour; and not the finest ball of the season
+seemed to be worth a thought compared to the all-absorbing question of
+whether her child slept after his draught and whether he ate his food
+with better appetite. And such a life, in spite of all its cares, has
+kept her young as well as unselfish; we should rather say, young
+because unselfish. As she comes into the room with her daughters,
+her kindly face unpolluted by paint, her dress picturesque or
+fashionable according to her taste, but decent in form and consistent
+in tone with her age, it is often remarked that she looks more like
+the sister than the mother of her girls. This is because she is in
+harmony with her age, and has not therefore put herself in rivalry
+with them; and harmony is the very keystone of beauty. Her hair is
+thickly streaked with white; the girlish firmness and transparency of
+her skin have gone; the pearly clearness of her eye is clouded; the
+slender grace of line is lost--but for all that she is beautiful, and
+she is intrinsically young. What she has lost in outside material
+charm--in that mere _beauté du diable_ of youth--she has gained in
+character and expression; and by not attempting to simulate the
+attractiveness of a girl, she keeps what nature gave her--the
+attractiveness of middle age. And as every epoch has its own
+beauty--if women would but learn that truth--she is as beautiful now
+as a matron of fifty, because in harmony with her years, as she was
+when a maiden of sixteen.
+
+This is the ideal woman of middle age, met with even yet at times in
+society--the woman whom all men respect; whom all women envy, and
+wonder how she does it; and whom all the young adore, and wish they
+had for an elder sister or an aunt. And the secret of it all lies in
+truth, in love, in purity, and in unselfishness.
+
+Standing far apart from this sweet and wholesome idealization is _la
+femme passée_ of to-day--the reality as we meet with it at balls and
+fêtes and afternoon At Homes, ever foremost in the mad chase after
+pleasure, for which alone she seems to think she has been sent into
+the world. Dressed in the extreme of youthful fashion; her thinning
+hair dyed and crimped and fired till it is more like red-brown tow
+than hair; her flaccid cheeks ruddled; her throat whitened; her bust
+displayed with unflinching generosity--as if beauty is to be measured
+by cubic inches; her lustreless eyes blackened round the lids, to give
+the semblance of limpidity to the tarnished whites; perhaps the pupils
+dilated by belladonna; perhaps a false and fatal brilliancy for the
+moment given by opium, or by eau de cologne, of which she has a store
+in her carriage, and drinks as she passes from ball to ball; no kindly
+drapery of lace nor of gauze to conceal the breadth of her robust
+maturity, to soften the dreadful shadows of her leanness--there she
+stands, the wretched creature who will not consent to grow old, and
+who still affects to be a fresh coquettish girl when she is nothing
+but _la femme passée--la femme passée et ridicule_ into the bargain.
+
+There is not a folly for which even the thoughtlessness of youth is
+but a poor excuse into which she, in all the plenitude of her abundant
+experience, does not plunge. Wife and mother as she may be, she flirts
+and makes love as if an honourable issue were as open to her as to her
+young daughter; or as if she did not know to what end flirting
+and making love lead in all ages. If we watch the career of such a
+woman, we see how, by slow but very sure degrees, she is obliged to
+lower the standard of her adorers, and to take up at last with men of
+inferior social position, who are content to buy her patronage by
+their devotion. To the best men of her own class she can give nothing
+that they value; so she barters with snobs, who go into the
+transaction with their eyes open, and take the whole affair as a
+matter of exchange, and _quid pro quo_ rigidly exacted. Or she does
+really dazzle some very young and low-born man who is weak as well as
+ambitious, and who thinks the fugitive regard of a middle-aged woman
+of high rank something to be proud of and boasted about. That she is
+as old as his own mother--at this moment selling tapes behind a
+village counter, or gathering up the eggs in a country farm--tells
+nothing against the association with him; and the woman who began her
+career of flirtation with the son of a duke ends it with the son of a
+shopkeeper, having between these two terms spanned all the several
+degrees of degradation which lie between giving and buying. She cannot
+help herself; for it is part of the insignia of her artificial youth
+to have the reputation of a love-affair, or the pretence of one, even
+if the reality be a mere delusion. When such a woman as this is one of
+the matrons, and consequently one of the leaders of society, what can
+we expect from the girls? What worse example could be given to
+the young? When we see her with her own daughters we feel
+instinctively that she is the most disastrous adviser they could have;
+and when in the company of girls or young married women not belonging
+to her, we doubt whether we ought not to warn their natural guardians
+against allowing such association, for all that her standing in
+society is undeniable, and not a door is shut against her.
+
+What good in life does this kind of woman do? All her time is taken
+up, first in trying to make herself look twenty or thirty years
+younger than she is, and then in trying to make others believe the
+same. She has neither thought nor energy to spare from this, to her,
+far more important work than is feeding the hungry or nursing the
+sick, rescuing the fallen or soothing the sorrowful. The final cause
+of her existence seems to be the impetus she has given to a certain
+branch of trade manufacture--unless we add to this, the corruption of
+society. For whom, but for her, are the 'little secrets' which are
+continually being advertised as woman's social salvation--regardless
+of grammar? The 'eaux noire, brun, et châtain, which dyes the hair any
+shade in one minute;' the 'kohl for the eyelids;' the 'blanc de
+perle,' and 'rouge de Lubin'--which does not wash off; the 'bleu pour
+les veines;' the 'rouge of eight shades,' and 'the sympathetic blush,'
+which are cynically offered for the use and adoption of our mothers
+and daughters, find their chief patroness in the _femme passée_ who
+makes herself up--the middle-aged matron engaged in her frantic
+struggle against time, and obstinately refusing to grow old in spite
+of all that nature may say or do. Bad as the Girl of the Period is,
+this horrible travesty of her vices in the modern matron is even
+worse. Indeed, were it not for her, the girls would never have gone to
+such lengths as those to which they have gone; for elder women
+naturally have immense influence over younger ones, and if mothers
+were resolutely to set their faces against the follies of the day,
+daughters would and must give in. As it is, some go even ahead of the
+young, and, by example on the one hand and rivalry on the other, sow
+the curse of corruption broadcast where they were meant to have only a
+pure influence and to set a wise example. Were it not for those who
+still remain faithful--women who regard themselves as the trustees for
+humanity and virtue--the world would go to ruin forthwith; but so long
+as the five righteous are left we have hope and a certain amount of
+security for the future, when the present disgraceful madness of
+society shall have passed away.
+
+
+
+
+_SPOILT WOMEN._
+
+
+Like children and all soft things, women are soon spoilt if subjected
+to unwholesome conditions. Sometimes the spoiling comes from
+over-harshness, sometimes from over-indulgence; what we are speaking
+of to-day is the latter condition--the spoiling which comes from being
+petted and given way to and indulged, till they think themselves
+better than everybody else, and living under laws made specially for
+them. Men get spoilt too in the same manner; but for the most part
+there is a tougher fibre in them which resists the flabby influences
+of flattery and exaggerated attention better than can the morale of
+the weaker sex; besides, even arbitrary men meet with opposition in
+certain directions, and the most self-contented social autocrat knows
+that his adherents criticize though they dare not oppose.
+
+A man who has been spoilt by success and a gratified ambition, so that
+he thinks himself a small Alexander in his own way and able to conquer
+any obstacles which may present themselves, has a certain high-handed
+activity of will about him that does not interfere with his duties in
+life; he is not made fretful and impatient and exigeant as a
+woman is--as if he alone of all mankind ought to be exempt from
+misfortunes and annoyances; as if his friends must never die, his
+youth never fade, his circumstances run always smooth, protected by
+the care of others from all untoward hitch; as if time and tide, which
+wait for no one else, are bound to him as humble servants dutifully
+observant of his wishes. The useful art of finding his level, which he
+learnt at school and in his youth generally, keeps him from any very
+weak manifestation of being spoilt; save indeed, when he has been
+spoilt by women at home, nursed up by an adoring wife and a large
+circle of wife's sisters almost as adoring, to all of whom his
+smallest wishes are religious obligations and his faintest virtues
+godly graces, and who vie with each other which of them shall wait
+upon him most servilely, flatter him most outrageously, coax and
+coddle him most entirely, and so do him the largest amount of
+spiritual damage, and unfit him most thoroughly for the worth and work
+of masculine life. A man subjected to this insidious injury is simply
+ruined so far as any real manliness of nature goes. He is made into
+that sickening creature, 'a sweet being,' as the women call him--a
+woman's man with æsthetic tastes and a turn for poetry; full of
+highflown sentiment and morbid sympathies; a man almost as much woman
+as man, who has no backbone of useful ambition in him, but who puts
+his whole life into love, and who becomes at last emphatically not
+worth his salt.
+
+Bad as it is for men of the world to be kowtowed to by men, it is not
+so bad, because not so weakening, as the domestic idolatry which
+sometimes goes on when one man is the centre of a large family of
+women, and the only object upon which the natural feminine instinct
+can expend itself. No greater damage can be done to a man than is done
+by this kind of domestic idolatry. But, in truth, the evil is too
+pleasant to be resisted; and there is scarcely a man so far master of
+himself as to withstand the subtle intoxication, the sweet and
+penetrating poison, of woman's tender flattery and loving submission.
+To a certain extent he holds it so entirely the right thing, because
+it is natural and instinctive, that it is difficult to draw the line
+and map out exactly the division between right and wrong, pleasantness
+and harmfulness, and where loving submission ends and debasing
+slavishness begins.
+
+Spoilt women are spoilt mainly from a like cause: over-attention from
+men. A few certainly are to be found, as pampered daughters, with
+indulgent mammas and subservient aunts given up to ruining their young
+charges with the utmost despatch possible; but this is comparatively a
+rare form of the disease, and one which a little wholesome matrimonial
+discipline would soon cure. For it is seldom that a petted daughter
+becomes a spoilt wife--human affairs having that marvellous power of
+equation, that inevitable tendency to readjust the balance, which
+prevents the continuance of a like excess under different forms.
+Besides, a spoilt daughter generally makes such a supremely unpleasant
+wife that the husband has no inducement to continue the mistake, and
+therefore either lowers her tone by a judicious exhibition of
+snubbing, or, if she be aggressive as well as unpleasant, leaves her
+to fight with her shadows in the best way she can, glad for his own
+part to escape the strife she will not forego.
+
+The spoilt woman is impatient of anything like rivalry. She never has
+a female friend--certainly not one of her own degree, and not one at
+all in the true sense of the word. Friendship presupposes equality;
+and a spoilt woman knows no equality. She has been so long accustomed
+to consider herself as lady-paramount that she cannot understand it if
+any one steps in to share her honours and divide her throne. To praise
+the beauty of any other woman, to find her charming, and to pay her
+the attention due to a charming woman, is to insult our spoilt
+darling, and to slight her past forgiveness. If there is only one good
+thing, it must be given to her--the first seat, the softest cushion,
+the most protected situation; and she looks for the best of all things
+as if naturally consecrated from her birth to the sunshine of life,
+and as if the 'cold shade' which may do for others were by no means
+the portion allotted to her.
+
+It is almost impossible to make the spoilt woman understand the grace
+or the glory of sacrifice. By rare good fortune she may sometimes be
+found to possess an indestructible germ of conscience which
+sorrow and necessity can develop into active good; but only sometimes.
+The spoilt woman _par excellence_ understands only her own value, only
+her own merits and the absolutism of her own requirements; and
+sacrifice, self-abnegation, and the whole class of virtues belonging
+to unselfishness, are as much unknown to her as is the Decalogue in
+the original, or the squaring of the circle. The spoilt woman, as the
+wife of an unsuccessful husband or the mother of sickly children, is a
+pitiable spectacle. If obliged to sacrifice her usual luxuries, to
+make an old gown serve when a new one is desired, to sit up all night
+watching by the sick-bed, to witness the painful details of illness,
+perhaps of death, to meet hardship face to face and to bend her back
+to the burden of sorrow, she is at the first absolutely lost. Not the
+thing to be done, but her own discomfort in doing it, is the one
+master idea--not others' needs, but her own pain in supplying them, is
+the great grief of the moment. Many are the hard lessons set us by
+life and fate, but the hardest of all is that given to the spoilt
+woman when she is made to think for others rather than for herself,
+and is forced by the exigencies of circumstances to sacrifice her own
+ease for the greater necessities of her kind.
+
+All that large part of the true woman's nature which expresses itself
+in serving is an unknown function to the spoilt woman. She must be
+waited on, but she cannot in her turn serve even the one she loves.
+She is the woman who calls her husband from one end of the room
+to the other to put down her cup, rather than reach out her arm and
+put it down for herself; who, however weary he may be, will bid him
+get up and ring the bell, though it is close to her own hand, and her
+longest walk during the day has been from the dining-room to the
+drawing-room. It is not that she cannot do these small offices for
+herself, but that she likes the feeling of being waited on; and it is
+not for love, and the amiable if weak pleasure of attracting the
+notice of the beloved, but it is for the vanity of being a little
+somebody for the moment, and of playing off the small regality
+involved in the procedure, that she claims his attention. She would
+not return that attention. Unlike the Eastern women, who wait on their
+lords hand and foot, and who place their highest honour in their
+lowliest service, the spoilt woman of Western life knows nothing of
+the natural grace of womanly serving for love, for grace, or for
+gratitude.
+
+This kind of thing is peculiarly strong among the _demi-monde_ of the
+higher class, and among women who are of the _demi-monde_ by nature.
+The respect they cannot command by their virtues they demand in the
+simulation of manner; and perhaps no women are more tenacious of the
+outward forms of deference than those who have lost their claim to the
+vital reality. It is very striking to see the difference between the
+women of this type, the _petites maîtresses_ who require the utmost
+attention and almost servility from man, and the noble dignity of
+service which the pure woman can afford to give--which she finds
+indeed, that it belongs to the very purity and nobleness of her
+womanhood to give. It is the old story of the ill-assured position
+which is afraid of its own weakness, and the security which can afford
+to descend--the rule holding good for other things besides mere social
+place.
+
+Another characteristic of the spoilt woman is the changeableness and
+excitability of her temper. All suavity and gentleness and delightful
+gaiety and perfect manners when everything goes right, she startles
+you by her outburst of petulance when the first cross comes. If no man
+is a hero to his valet, neither is a spoilt woman a heroine to her
+maid; and the lady who has just been the charm of the drawing-room,
+upstairs in her boudoir makes her maid go through spiritual exercises
+to which walking among burning ploughshares is easy-going. A length of
+lace unstarched, a ribbon unsewed, a flower set awry, anything that
+crumples one of the myriad rose-leaves on which she lies, and the
+spoilt woman raves as much as if each particular leaf had become
+suddenly a bunch of thorns. If a dove were to be transformed to a hawk
+the change would not be more complete, more startling, than that which
+occurs when the spoilt woman of well-bred company manners puts off her
+mask to her maid, and shows her temper over trifles. Whoever else may
+suffer the grievances of life, she cannot understand that she also
+must be at times one of the sufferers with the rest; and if by
+chance the bad moment comes, the person accompanying it has a hard
+time of it.
+
+There are spoilt women also who have their peculiar exercises in
+thought and opinion, and who cannot suffer that any one should think
+differently from themselves, or find those things sacred which to them
+are accursed. They will hear nothing but what is in harmony with
+themselves; and they take it as a personal insult when men or women
+attempt to reason with them, or even hold their own without flinching.
+This kind is to be found specially among the more intellectual of a
+family or a circle--women who are pronounced clever by their friends,
+and who have been so long accustomed to think themselves clever that
+they have become spoilt mentally as others are personally, and fancy
+that minds and thoughts must follow in their direction, just as eyes
+and hands must follow and attend their sisters. The spoilt woman of
+the mental kind is a horrid nuisance generally. She is greatly given
+to large discourse. But discourse of a kind that leans all to one
+side, and that denies the right of any one to criticize, doubt, or
+contradict, is an intellectual Tower of Pisa under the shadow of which
+it is not pleasant to live.
+
+
+
+
+_DOVECOTS._
+
+
+Times must be very bad indeed if a faithful few are not still left to
+keep the sources of society sweet and wholesome. When corruption has
+gone through the whole mass and all classes are bad alike, everything
+comes to an end, and there is a general overthrow of national life;
+but while some are left pure and unspotted, we are not quite undone,
+and we may reasonably hope for better days in the future. In the midst
+of the reign of the Girl of the Period, with her slang and her
+boldness--of the fashionable woman, with her denial of duty and her
+madness for pleasure--we come every now and then upon a group of good
+girls of the real old English type; the faithful few growing up
+silently among us, but none the less valuable because they are silent
+and make no public display; doves who are content with life as they
+have it in the dovecot, and have no desire to be either eagles
+dwelling on romantic heights, or peacocks displaying their pride in
+sunny courts. We find these faithful few in town and country alike;
+but they are rifest in the country, where there is less temptation to
+go wrong than there is in the large towns, and where life is
+simpler and the moral tone undeniably higher. The leading feature of
+these girls is their love of home and of their own family, and their
+power of making occupation and happiness out of apparently meagre
+materials. If they are the elders, they find amusement and interest in
+their little brothers and sisters, whom they consider immensely funny
+and to whom they are as much girl-mothers as sisters; if they are the
+youngers, they idolize their baby nephews and nieces. For there is
+always a baby going on somewhere about these houses--babies being the
+great excitement of home-life, and the antiseptic element among women
+which keeps everything else pure. They are passionately attached to
+papa and mamma, whom they think the very king and queen of humanity,
+yet whom they do not call by even endearing slang names. It has never
+occurred to them to criticize them as ordinary mortals; and as they
+have not been in the way of learning the prevailing accent of
+disrespect, they have not shaken off that almost religious veneration
+for their parents which all young people naturally feel, if they have
+been well brought up and are not corrupted.
+
+The yoke in most middle-class country-houses is one fitting very
+loosely round all necks; and as they have all the freedom they desire
+or could use, the girls are not fretted by undue pressure, and are
+content to live in peace under such restraints as they have. They
+adore their elder brothers who are from home just beginning the great
+battle of life for themselves, and confidently believe them to be
+the finest fellows going, and the future great men of the day if only
+they care to put out those splendid talents of theirs, and take the
+trouble of plucking the prizes within their reach. They may have a
+slight reservation perhaps, in favour of the brother's friend, whom
+they place on a pedestal of almost equal height. But they keep their
+mental architecture a profound secret from every one, and do not
+suffer it to grow into too solid a structure unless it has some surer
+foundation than their own fancy. For, though doves are loving, they
+are by no means lovesick, and are too healthy and natural and quietly
+busy for unwholesome dreams. If one of them marries, they all unite in
+loving the man who comes in among them. He is adopted as one of
+themselves, and leaps into a family of idolizing sisters who pet him
+as their brother--with just that subtle little difference in their
+petting, in so much as it comes from sisters unaccustomed, and so has
+the charm of novelty without the prurient excitement of naughtiness.
+But this kind of thing is about the most dangerous to a man's moral
+nature that can befall him. Though pretty to see and undeniably
+pleasant to experience, and though perfectly innocent in every way,
+still, nothing enervates him so much as this idolatrous submission of
+a large family of women. In a widow's house, where there are many
+daughters and no sons, and where the man who marries one marries the
+whole family and is worshipped accordingly, the danger is of course
+increased tenfold; but if there are brothers and a father, the
+sister's husband, though affectionately cooed over, is not made quite
+such a fuss with, and the association is all the less hurtful in
+consequence.
+
+These girls lead a by no means stupid life, though it is a quiet one,
+and without any spasmodic events or tremendous cataclysms. They go a
+great deal among the village poor, and they teach at the
+Sunday-school, and attend the mothers' meetings and clothing-clubs and
+the like, and learn to get interested in their humbler friends, who
+after all are Christian sisters. They read their romances in real life
+instead of in three-volume novels, and study human nature as it is--in
+the rough certainly, but perhaps in more genuine form than if they
+learnt it only in what is called society. Then they have their
+pleasures, though they are of an unexciting kind and what fast girls
+would call awfully slow. They have their horses and their croquet
+parties, their lawn tennis and their archery meetings; they have
+batches of new music, and a monthly box from Mudie's--and they know
+the value of both; they go out to tea, and sometimes to dinner, in the
+neighbourhood; and they enjoy the rare county balls with a zest
+unknown to London girls who are out every night in the week. They have
+their village flower-shows, which the great families patronize in a
+free-and-easy kind of way, and which give occupation for weeks before
+and subject for talk for weeks after; their school feasts, where the
+pet parson of the district comes out with his best anecdotes, and
+makes mild jokes at a long distance from Sydney Smith; their
+periodical missionary meetings, where they have great guns from
+London, and where they hear unctuous stories about the saintliness of
+converted cannibals, and are required to believe in the power of
+change of creed to produce an ethnological miracle; they have their
+friends to stay with them--school-girl friends--with whom they
+exchange deep confidences, and go back over the old days--so old to
+their youth!--their brothers come down in the summer, and their
+brothers' friends come with them, and do a little spooning in the
+shrubbery. But there is more spooning done at picnics than anywhere
+else; and more offers are made there under the shadow of the old ruin,
+or in the quiet leafy nook by the river side, than at any other
+gathering time of the country. And as we are all to a certain extent
+what we are made by our environment, the doves take to these pleasures
+quite kindly and gratefully, as being the only ones known to them, and
+enjoy themselves in a simplicity of circumstances which would give no
+pleasure at all to girls accustomed to more highly-spiced
+entertainments.
+
+Doves know very little of evil. They are not in the way of learning
+it; and they do not care to learn it. The few villagers who are
+supposed to lead ill lives are spoken of below the breath, and
+carefully avoided without being critically studied. When the railway
+is to be carried past their quiet nest, there is an immense
+excitement as the report goes that a knot of strange men have been
+seen scattering themselves over the fields with their little white
+flags and theodolites, their measuring lines and levels. But when the
+army of navvies follows after, the excitement is changed to
+consternation, and a general sense of evil to come advancing
+ruthlessly towards them. The clergy of the district organize special
+services, and the scared doves keep religiously away from the place
+where the navvies are hutted. They think them little better than the
+savages about whom the Deputation tell them once or twice a year; and
+they create almost as much terror as an encampment of gipsies. They
+represent the lawless forces of the world and the unknown sins of
+strong men; and the wildest story about them is not too wild to be
+believed. The railway altogether is a great offence to the
+neighbourhood, and the line is assumed to destroy the whole scenic
+beauty of the place. There are lamentations over the cockneys it will
+bring down; over the high prices it will create, the immorality it
+will cause. Only the sons who are out in the world and have learnt how
+life goes on outside the dovecot, advocate keeping pace with the
+times; and a few of the stronger minded of the sisters listen to them
+with a timid admiration of their breadth and boldness, and think there
+may be two sides to the question after all. When the dashing captain
+and his fast wife suddenly appear in the village--as often happens in
+these remote districts--the doves are in a state of great moral
+tribulation. They are scandalized by Mrs. Highflyer's costume and
+complexion, and think her manners odd and doubtful; her slang shocks
+them; and when they meet her in the lanes, talking so loudly and
+laughing so shrilly with that horrid-looking man in a green cutaway,
+they feel as fluttered as their namesakes when a hawk is hovering over
+the farmyard. The dashing captain, who does not use a prayer-book at
+church, who stares at all the girls so rudely, and who has even been
+seen to wink at some of the prettier cottage girls, and his handsome
+wife with her equivocal complexion and pronounced fashions, who makes
+eyes at the curate, are never heartily adopted by the local magnates,
+though vouched for by some far-away backer; and the doves always feel
+them to be strange bodies among them, and out of their rightful
+element somehow. If things go quietly without an explosion, well and
+good; but if the truth bursts to the surface in the shape of a London
+detective, and the Highflyers are found to be no better than they
+should be, the consternation and half-awed wonderment at the existence
+of so much effrontery and villany in their atmosphere create an
+impression which no time effaces. The first clash of innocence with
+evil is an event in the life of the innocent the effect of which
+nothing ever destroys.
+
+The dovecot is rather dull in the winter, and the doves are somewhat
+moped; but even then they have the church to decorate, and the
+sentiment of Christmas to enliven them. The absent ones of the
+family too, return to the old hearth while they can; and as the great
+joy of the dovecot lies in the family union that is kept up, and in
+the family love which is so strong, the visits of those who no longer
+live at home bring a moral summer as warm and cheering as the physical
+sunshine. But they do not all assemble. For many of the doves marry
+men whose work lies abroad; these quiet country-houses being the
+favourite matrimonial hunting-grounds for colonists and Anglo-Indians.
+So that some are always absent whose healths are drunk in the
+traditional punch, while eyes grow moist as the names are given. Doves
+are not disinclined to marry men who have to go abroad, for all the
+passionate family love common to them. Travel is a golden dream to
+them in their still homes; but travel properly companioned. For even
+the most adventurous among them are not independent, as we mean when
+we speak of independence in women. They are essentially home-girls,
+family-girls, doves who cannot exist without a dovecot, however
+humble. The family is everything to them; and they are utterly unfit
+for the solitude which so many of our self-supporting women can accept
+quite resignedly. Not that they are necessarily useless even as
+breadwinners. They could work, if pushed to it; but it must be in a
+quiet womanly way, with the mother, the sister, the husband as the
+helper--with the home as the place of rest and the refuge. Their whole
+lines are laid in love and quietness; not by any means in inaction,
+but all centred within the home circle. If they marry, they find
+the love of their husband enough for them, and have no desire for
+other men's admiration. Their babies are all the world to them, and
+they do not think maternity an infliction, as so many of the miserably
+fashionable think it. They like the occupation of housekeeping, and
+feel pride in their fine linen and clean service, in their
+well-ordered table and neatly-balanced accounts. They are kind to
+their servants, who generally come from the old home, and whose
+families they therefore know; but they keep up a certain dignity and
+tone of superiority towards them in the midst of all their kindness,
+which very few town-bred mistresses can keep to town-bred maids. They
+have always been the aristocracy in their native place; and they carry
+through life the ineffaceable stamp which being 'the best' gives.
+
+Doves are essentially mild and gentle women; not queens of society
+even when they are pretty, because not caring for social success and
+therefore not laying themselves out for it; for if they please at home
+that is all they care for, holding love before admiration, and the
+esteem of one higher than the praise of many. If a fault is to be
+found with them it is that they have not perhaps quite enough salt for
+the general taste, used as it is to such highly-seasoned social food;
+but do we really want our women to have so very much character? Do not
+our splendid passionate creatures lead madly wretched lives and make
+miserably uncomfortable homes? and are not our glorious heroines
+better in pictures and in fiction than seated by the domestic fire, or
+checking the baker's bill? No doubt the quiet home-staying doves seem
+tame enough when we think of the gorgeous beings made familiar to us
+by romance, and history, which is more romantic still; but as our
+daily lives run chiefly in prose, our doves are better fitted for
+things as they are; and to men who want wives and not playthings, and
+who care for the peace of family life and the dignity of home, they
+are beyond price when they can be found and secured. So that, on the
+whole, we can dispense with the splendid creatures of character and
+the magnificent queens of society sooner than with the quiet and
+unobtrusive doves. And though they do spoil men most monstrously, they
+know where to draw the line, and while petting their own at home they
+keep strangers abroad at a distance, and make themselves respected as
+only modest and gentle women are respected by men.
+
+
+
+
+_BORED HUSBANDS._
+
+
+The curtain falls on joined hands when it does not descend on a
+tragedy; and novels for the most part end with a wreath of
+orange-blossoms and a pair of high-stepping greys, as the last act
+that claims to be recorded. For both novelists and playwrights assume
+that with marriage all the great events of life have ceased, and that,
+once wedded to the beloved object, there is sure to be smooth sailing
+and halcyon seas to the end of time. It sounds very cynical and
+shocking to question this pretty belief; but unfortunately for us who
+live in the world as it is and not as it is supposed to be, we find
+that even a union with the beloved object does not always ensure
+perfect contentment in the home, and that bored husbands are by no
+means rare.
+
+The ideal honeymoon is of course an Elysian time, during which nothing
+works rusty nor gets out of joint; and the ideal marriage is only a
+life-long honeymoon, where the happiness is more secure and the love
+deeper, if more sober; but the prose reality of one and the other has
+often a terrible dash of weariness in it, even under the most
+favourable conditions. Boredom begins in the very honeymoon
+itself. At first starting in married life there are many dangers to be
+encountered, not a shadow of which was seen in the wooing. There are
+odd freaks of temper turning up quite unexpectedly; there is the
+sense, so painful to some men, of being tied for life, of never being
+able to be alone again, never free and without responsibilities; there
+are misunderstandings to-day and the struggle for mastery
+to-morrow--the cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, which may prove to
+be the tempest that will destroy all; there is the unrest of
+travelling, and the awkwardness of unusual association, to help in the
+general discomfort; or, if the happy pair have settled down in a vale
+and a cottage for their month, there is the 'sad satiety' which all
+men feel after a time when they have had one companion only, with no
+outside diversion to cause a break. But the honeymoon at last draws to
+a close, and the relieved bridegroom gets back to his old haunts, to
+his work, his friends, and his club; and though he takes to all these
+things again with a difference, still they are helps and additions.
+This is the time of trial to a woman. If she gets over this pinch, and
+is sensible enough to understand that human nature cannot be kept up
+at high pressure, even in love, and that a man must sooner or later
+come down from romance to work-a-day prose, from the passionate lover
+to the cool and sober husband--if she can understand this, and settle
+into his pace, without fretting on the one hand or casting about
+for unhealthy distractions on the other--she will do well, and will
+probably make a pleasant home, and thereby diminish the boredom of
+life. But unfortunately, not every woman can do this; and it is just
+during this time of the man's transition from the lover to the friend
+that so many women begin to make shipwreck of their own happiness and
+his. They think to keep him a romantic wooer still, by their tears at
+his prosaic indifference to the little sentimentalities once so
+eagerly accepted and offered; they try to hold him close by their
+flattering but somewhat tiresome exactions; their jealousies--very
+pretty perhaps, and quite as flattering--are infinite, and as baseless
+as they are infinite; all of which is very nice up to a certain point
+and in the beginning of things, but all of which gets wearisome as
+time goes on, and a man wants both a little change and a little rest.
+But women do not see this; or seeing it, they cannot accept it as a
+necessary condition of things; wherefore they go on in their fatal
+way, and by the very unwisdom of their own love bore their husband out
+of his. Or they grow substantially cold because he is superficially
+cooler, and think themselves justified in ceasing to love him
+altogether because he takes their love for granted, and so has ceased
+to woo it.
+
+If they are jealous, or shy, or unsocial, as so many women are, they
+make life very heavy by their exclusiveness, and the monastic
+character they give the home. A man married to a woman of this
+kind is, in fact, a house prisoner, whose only free spaces lie beyond
+the four walls of home. His bachelor friends are shut out. They smoke;
+or entice him to drink more than his wife thinks is good for him; or
+they induce him to bet on the Derby; or to play for half-crowns at
+whist or billiards; or they lead him in some other way of offence
+abhorrent to women. So the bachelor friends are shouldered out; and
+when the husband wants to entertain them, he must invite them to his
+club--if he has one--and pay the penalty when he gets home. In a few
+years' time his wife will be glad to encourage her sons' young friends
+to the house, for the sake of the daughters on hand; but husbands and
+sons are in a different category, and there are few fathers who do not
+learn, as time goes on, how much the mother will allow that the wife
+refused.
+
+If bachelor friends are shouldered out of the house, all female
+friends are forbidden anything like an intimate footing, save those
+few whom the wife thinks specially devoted to herself and of whom she
+is not jealous. And these are very few. There are perhaps no women in
+the world so exclusive in their dealings with their husbands as are
+Englishwomen. A husband is bound to one woman only, no doubt; but the
+average wife thinks him also bound to have no affection whatever
+outside her and perhaps her family. If he meets an intelligent woman,
+pleasant to talk to, of agreeable manners and ready wit, and if
+he talks to her in consequence with anything like persistency or
+interest, he offends against the unwritten law; and his wife, whose
+utmost power of conversation consists in putting in a yes or no with
+tolerable accuracy of aim, thinks herself slighted and ill-used. She
+may be young and pretty, and dearly loved for her own special
+qualities; and her husband may not have a thought towards his new
+friend, or any other woman, in the remotest degree trenching on his
+allegiance to her; but the fact that he finds pleasure, though only of
+an intellectual and æsthetic kind, in the society of any other woman,
+that he feels an interest in her life, chooses her for his friend, or
+finds community of pursuits or sympathy in ideas, makes his wife by
+just so much a victim and aggrieved.
+
+And yet what a miserably monotonous home is that to which she would
+confine him! He is at his office all day, badgered and worried with
+various business complications, and he comes home tired, perhaps
+cross--even well-conducted husbands have that way sometimes. He finds
+his wife tired and cross too; so that they begin the evening together
+mutually at odds, she irritated by small cares and he disturbed by
+large anxieties. Or he finds her preoccupied and absorbed in her own
+pursuits, and quite disinclined to make any diversion for his sake. He
+asks her for some music; she used to be ready enough to sing and play
+to him in the old love-making days; but she refuses now. Either she
+has some needlework to do, which might have been done during the
+day when he was out, or baby is asleep in the nursery, and music in
+the drawing-room would disturb him--at all events she cannot sing or
+play to-night; and even if she does--he has heard all her pieces so
+often! If he is not a reading-man, those long, dull, silent evenings
+are very trying. She works, and drives him wild with the click of her
+needle; or she reads the last new novel, and he hates novels, and gets
+tired to death when she insists on telling him all about the story and
+the characters; or she chooses the evening for letter-writing, and if
+the noise of her pen scratching over the paper does not irritate him,
+perhaps it sends him to sleep, when at least he is not bored. But
+dull, objectless, and vacant as their evenings are, his wife would not
+hear of any help from without to give just that little fillip which
+would prevent boredom and not create ceremony. She would think her
+life had gone to pieces, and that only desolation was before her, if
+he hinted that his home was dull, and that though he loves her very
+dearly and wants no other wife but her, yet that her society
+only--_toujours perdrix_, without change or addition--is a little
+stupid, however nice the partridge may be, and that things would be
+bettered if Mrs. or Miss So-and-So came in sometimes, just to brighten
+up the hours. And if he were to make a practice of bringing home his
+men friends, she would probably let all parties concerned feel pretty
+distinctly that she considered the home her special sanctuary, and
+that guests whom she did not invite were intruders. She would
+perhaps go willingly enough to a ball or crowded _soirée_, or she
+might like to give one; but that intimate form of society, which is a
+mere enlargement of the home life, she dreads as the supplementing of
+deficiencies, and thinks her married happiness safer in boredom than
+in any diversion from herself as the sole centre of her husband's
+pleasure.
+
+Home life stagnates in England; and in very few families is there any
+mean between dissipation and this stagnation. We can scarcely wonder
+that so many husbands think matrimony a mistake as we have it in our
+insular arrangements; that they look back regretfully to the time when
+they were unfettered and not bored; or that their free friends, who
+watch them as wild birds watch their caged companions, curiously and
+reflectively, share their opinion. Wife and home, after all, make up
+but part of a man's life; they are not his all, and do not satisfy the
+whole of his social instinct; nor is any one woman the concentration
+of all womanhood to a man, leaving nothing that is beautiful, nor in
+its own unconjugal way desirable, on the outside. Besides, when with
+his wife a man is often as much isolated as when alone, for any real
+companionship there is between them. Few women take a living interest
+in the lives of men, and fewer still understand them. They expect the
+husband to sympathize with them in the kitchen gossip and the nursery
+chatter, the neighbours' doings and all the small household politics;
+but they are utterly unable to comprehend his pleasures, his
+thoughts, his duties, the responsibilities of his profession, or the
+bearings of any public question in which he takes a part.
+
+Even if this were not so, and granting that they could enter fully
+into his life and sympathize with him as intelligent equals, not only
+as compassionate saints or loving children, there would still be the
+need of novelty, and still the certainty of boredom without it. For
+human life, like all other forms of life, must have a due proportion
+of fresh elements continually added to keep it sweet and growing, else
+it becomes stagnant and stunted. And daily intercourse undeniably
+exhausts the moral ground. After the close companionship of years no
+one can remain mentally fresh to the other, unless indeed one or both
+be of the rarest order of mind and of a practically inexhaustible
+power of acquiring knowledge. Save these exceptional instances, we
+must all of necessity get worn out by constant intercourse. We know
+every thought, every opinion, and almost every square inch of
+information possessed; we have heard the old stories again and again,
+and know exactly what will lead up to them, and at what point they
+will begin; we have measured the whole sweep of mind, and have probed
+its depths; and though we may love and value what we have learnt, yet
+we want something new--fresh food for interest, though not necessarily
+a new love for the displacement of the old. But this is what very few
+Englishwomen can understand or will allow. They hold so intensely
+by the doctrine of unity that they are even jealous of a man's
+pursuits, if they think these take up any place in his mind which
+might also be theirs. They must be good for every part of his life;
+and the poorest of them all must be his only source of interest,
+suffering no other woman to share his admiration nor obtain his
+friendship, though this would neither touch his love nor interfere
+with their rights. Friendship is a hard saying to them, and one they
+cannot receive. Wherefore they keep a tight grasp on the marital
+collar, and suffer no relief of monotony by judicious loosening, nor
+by generous faith in integral fidelity. The practical result of which
+is that most men are horribly bored at home, and that the mass of them
+really suffer from the domestic stagnation to which national customs
+and the exclusiveness of women doom them so soon as they become family
+men. It must however, in fairness be added, that in general they
+obtain some kind of compensation; and that very few walk meekly in
+their bonds without at times slipping them off, with or without the
+concurrence of their wives.
+
+    END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
+
+      S. & H.
+
+    LONDON: PRINTED BY
+    SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
+    AND PARLIAMENT STREET
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's note:
+    Minor spelling and punctuation inconsistencies, mainly hyphenated
+    words, have been harmonized. In this version, the oe ligature is
+    represented by the separate characters oe, e.g. manoeuvre.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Girl of the Period and Other
+Social Essays, Vol. I (of 2), by Eliza Lynn Linton
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41735 ***