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   The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Girl of the Period Vol. 2, by Eliza Lynn Linton.
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<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41736 ***</div>

<p><a id="Page_i"></a></p>

<p class="p4 center"><span class="small">THE</span></p>

<p class="p2 center"><span class="large"><b>GIRL OF THE PERIOD</b></span></p>

<p class="p2 center"><span class="small">ETC.</span></p>

<p class="p2 center"><span class="large"><b>VOL. II.</b></span></p>

<p><a id="Page_ii"></a></p>
<p class="p2 center">[<span class="smcap">Reprinted</span>, <i>by permission, from the</i> <span class="smcap">Saturday Review</span>]</p>

<p><a id="Page_iii"></a></p>

<h1><span class="small">THE</span><br />
GIRL OF THE PERIOD</h1>

<p class="p2 center">AND OTHER</p>

<p class="p2 center gothic"><span class="xxlarge">Social Essays</span></p>

<p class="p4 center"><span class="small">BY</span><br />
<span class="xlarge">E. LYNN LINTON</span><br />
<span class="xsmall">AUTHOR OF 'THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS' 'UNDER WHICH LORD?'<br />
'THE REBEL OF THE FAMILY' 'IONE' ETC.</span></p>

<p class="p4 center">IN TWO VOLUMES<br />
<span class="large">VOL. II.</span></p>

<p>&nbsp;</p>
<div class="figcenter">
<img src="images/logo.jpg" width="150" height="175" alt="printer's logo" /></div>

<p class="p2 center"><span class="large">LONDON<br />
RICHARD BENTLEY &amp; SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET</span><br />
<span class="gothic medium">Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen</span><br />
<span class="large">1883</span></p>

<p class="p2 center">[<i>All rights reserved</i>]</p>

<p><a id="Page_iv"></a></p>

<p class="center small">LONDON: PRINTED BY<br />
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE<br />
AND PARLIAMENT STREET</p>

<p><a id="Page_v"></a></p>

<h2 class="p4">CONTENTS</h2>
<p class="center"><span class="small">OF</span></p>
<p class="p2 center"><span class="large">THE SECOND VOLUME.</span></p>
<hr class="c15" />

<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="5" summary="toc">
<tr>
  <td></td>
  <td><span class="small">PAGE</span></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">GUSHING MEN</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">SWEET SEVENTEEN</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">THE HABIT OF FEAR</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_19">19</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">OLD LADIES</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_28">28</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">VOICES</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_37">37</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">BURNT FINGERS</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_46">46</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">DÉS&OElig;UVREMENT</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_55">55</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">THE SHRIEKING SISTERHOOD</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_64">64</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">OTHERWISE-MINDED</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">LIMP PEOPLE</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_82">82</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">THE ART OF RETICENCE</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_91">91</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">MEN'S FAVOURITES</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_100">100</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">WOMANLINESS</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_109">109</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">SOMETHING TO WORRY</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">SWEETS OF MARRIED LIFE</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">SOCIAL NOMADS</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_136">136</a>
  <a id="Page_vi"></a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td class="tdl">GREAT GIRLS</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_145">145</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">SHUNTED DOWAGERS</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_155">155</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">PRIVILEGED PERSONS</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_164">164</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">MODERN MAN-HATERS</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_173">173</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">VAGUE PEOPLE</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_181">181</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">ARCADIA</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_190">190</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">STRANGERS AT CHURCH</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_199">199</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">IN SICKNESS</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_208">208</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">ON A VISIT</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_217">217</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">DRAWING-ROOM EPIPHYTES</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_227">227</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">THE EPICENE SEX</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">WOMEN'S MEN</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">HOTEL LIFE IN ENGLAND</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_252">252</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">OUR MASKS</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_261">261</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td class="tdl">HEROES AT HOME</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_268">268</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">SEINE-FISHING</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_276">276</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td class="tdl">THE DISCONTENTED WOMAN</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_285">285</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">ENGLISH CLERGYMEN IN<br />
    FOREIGN WATERING-PLACES</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_293">293</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">OLD FRIENDS</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_302">302</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">POPULAR WOMEN</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_310">310</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">CHOOSING OR FINDING</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_319">319</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdl">LOCAL FÊTES</td>
  <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_327">327</a></td>
</tr>
</table>

<p><a id="Page_1"></a></p>

<p class="p4 center"><span class="xlarge"><b>ESSAYS</b></span><br />
<span class="medium"><b>UPON</b></span><br />
<span class="xlarge"><b>SOCIAL SUBJECTS.</b></span></p>

<hr class="c15" />

<h2><i>GUSHING MEN.</i></h2>

<p>The picture of a gushing creature all heart and no
brains, all impulse and no ballast, is familiar to most
of us; and we know her, either by repute or by personal
acquaintance, as well as we know our alphabet.
But we are not so familiar with the idea of the
gushing man. Yet gushing men exist, if not in such
numbers as their sisters, still in quite sufficient force
to constitute a distinct type. The gushing man is
the furthest possible removed from the ordinary manly
ideal, as women create it out of their own imaginations.
Women like to picture men as inexorably
just, yet tender; calm, grave, restrained, yet full of
passion well mastered; Greathearts with an eye cast
Mercywards if you will, else unapproachable by all
the world; Goethes with one weak corner left for
Bettina, where love may queen it over wisdom, but
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">2</a></span>
in all save love strong as Titans, powerful as gods,
unchangeable as fate. They forgive anything in a
man who is manly according to their own pattern
and ideas. Even harshness amounting to brutality is
condoned if the hero have a jaw of sufficient squareness,
and mighty passions just within the limits of
control&mdash;as witness <i>Jane Eyre's</i> Rochester and his
long line of unpleasant followers. But this harshness
must be accompanied by love. Like the Russian
wife who wept for want of her customary thrashing,
taking immunity from the stick to mean indifference,
these women would rather have brutality with love
than no love at all.</p>

<p>But a gushing man, as judged by men among
men, is a being so foreign to the womanly ideal that
very few understand him when they do see him. And
they do not call him gushing. He is frank, enthusiastic,
unworldly, aspiring; perhaps he is labelled
with that word of power, 'high-souled;' but he is
not gushing, save when spoken of by men who
despise him. For men have an intense contempt for
him. A woman who has no ballast, and whose self-restraint
goes to the winds on every occasion, is
accepted for what she is worth, and but little disappointment
and less annoyance is felt for what is
wanting. Indeed, men in general expect so little
from women that their follies count as of course
and only what might be looked for. They are like
marriage, or the English climate, or a lottery ticket,
or a dark horse heavily backed, and have to be taken
for better or worse as they may turn out, with the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">3</a></span>
violent probability that the chances are all on the
side of the worse.</p>

<p>But the gushing man is inexcusable. He is a
nuisance or a laughing-stock; and as either he is resented.
In his club, at the mess-table, in the city,
at home, wherever he may be and whatever he
may be about, he is always plunging headlong into
difficulties and dragging his friends with him;
always quarrelling for a straw; putting himself
grossly in the wrong and vehemently apologizing
afterwards; hitting wild at one moment and down
on his knees the next, and as absurd in the one
attitude as he is abject in the other. He falls in
love at first sight and makes a fool of himself on
unknown ground while with men he is ready to
swear eternal friendship or undying enmity before
he has had time to know anything whatever about
the object of his regard or his dislike. In consequence
he is being perpetually associated with shaky
names and brought into questionable positions. He
is full of confidence in himself on every occasion,
and is given to making the most positive assertions
on things he knows nothing about; when afterwards
he is obliged to retract and to own himself mistaken.
But he is just as full of self-abasement when, like
vaulting ambition, he has overleaped himself and
fallen into mistakes and failures unawares. He makes
rash bets about things of which he has the best information;
so he says; and will not be staved off by
those who know what folly he is committing, but
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">4</a></span>
insists on writing himself down after Dogberry at
the cost of just so much. He backs the worst player
at billiards on the strength of a chance hazard, and
bets on the losing hand at whist. He goes into wild
speculations in the city, where he is certain to land
a pot of money according to his own account and
whence he comes with empty pockets, as you foretold
and warned. He takes up with all manner of doubtful
schemes and yet more doubtful promoters; but he
will not be advised. Is he not gushing? and does
not the quality of gushingness include an Arcadian
belief in the virtue of all the world?</p>

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

<p>In manner the gushing man is familiar and caressing.
He may be patronizing or playful according to
the bent of his own nature. If the first, he will
call his superior, My dear boy, and pat him on the
back encouragingly; if the second, he will put his
arm schoolboy fashion round the neck of any man of
note who has the misfortune of his intimacy, and
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">5</a></span>
call him Old fellow, or Governor, or <i>rex meus</i>, as he
is inclined. With women his familiarity is excessively
offensive. He gives them pet names, or calls
to them by their Christian names from one end of
the room to the other, and pats and paws them in
all fraternal affectionateness, after about the same
length of acquaintanceship as would bring other men
from the bowing stage to that of shaking hands.
His manners throughout are enough to compromise
the toughest reputation; and one of the worst misfortunes
that can befall a woman whose circumstances
lay her specially open to slander and misrepresentation
is to include among her friends a gushing man
of energetic tendencies, on the look-out to do her a
good turn if he can, and anxious to let people see on
what familiar terms he stands with her. He means
nothing in the least degree improper when he puts
his arm round her waist, calls her My dear and even
Darling in a loud voice for all the world to hear; or
when he seats himself at her table before folk to
write her private messages, which he makes believe
to be of so much importance that they must not be
spoken aloud, and which are of no importance at all.
He is only familiar and gushing; and he would be
the first to cry out against the evil imagination of
the world which saw harm in what he does with
such innocent intent.</p>

<p>The gushing man has one grave defect&mdash;he is not
safe nor secret. From no bad motive, but just from
the blind propulsion of gushingness, he cannot keep
a secret, and he is sure to let out sooner or later all
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">6</a></span>
he knows. He holds back nothing of his friends nor
of his own&mdash;not even when his honour is engaged in
the trust; being essentially loose-lipped, and with his
emotional life always bubbling up through the thin
crust of conventional reserve. Not that he means
to be dishonourable; he is only gushing and unrestrained.
Hence every friend he has knows all
about him. His latest lover learns the roll-call of all
his previous loves; and there is not a man in his
club, with whom he is on speaking terms, who does
not know as much. Women who trust themselves
to gushing men simply trust themselves to broken
reeds; and they might as well look for a sieve that
will hold water as expect a man of the sieve nature
to keep their secret, whatever it may cost them and
him to divulge it.</p>

<p>As a theorist the gushing man is for ever advocating
untenable opinions and taking up with extreme
doctrines, which he announces confidently and out
of which he can be argued by the first opponent
he encounters. The facility with which he can be
bowled over on any ground&mdash;he calls it being converted&mdash;is
in fact one of his most striking characteristics;
and a gushing man rushes from the school
of one professor to that of another, his zeal unabated,
no matter how many his reconversions. He is always
finding the truth, which he never retains; and the
loudest and most active in damning a cast-off doctrine
is the gushing man who has once followed it. As a
leader, he is irresistible to both boys and women.
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">7</a></span>
His enthusiastic, unreflecting, unballasted character
finds a ready response in the youthful and feminine
nature; and he is the idol of a small knot of ardent
worshippers, who believe in him as the logical and
well-balanced man is never believed in. He takes
them captive by a community of imagination, of impulsiveness,
of exaggeration; and is followed just in
proportion to his unfitness to lead.</p>

<p>This is the kind of man who writes sentimental
novels, with a good deal of love laced with a vague
form of pantheism or of weak evangelical religion,
to suit all tastes; or he is great in a certain kind of
indefinite poetry which no one has yet been found to
understand, save perhaps, a special Soul Sister, which
is the subdued version among us of the more suggestive
Spiritual Wife. He adores the feminine virtues,
which he places far beyond all the masculine ones; and
expatiates on the beauty of the female character which
he thinks is to be the rule of the future. Perhaps
though, he goes off into panegyrics on the Vikings
and the Berserkers; or else plunges boldly into the
mists of the Arthurian era, and gushes in obsolete
English about chivalry and the Round Table, Sir
Launcelot and the Holy Graal, to the bewilderment of
his entranced audience to whom he does not supply
a glossary. In religion he is generally a mystic and
always in extremes. He can never be pinned down
to logic, to facts, to reason; and to his mind the
golden mean is the sin for which the Laodicean
Church was cursed. Feeling and emotion and imagination
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">8</a></span>
do all the work of the world according to
him; and when he is asked to reason and to demonstrate,
he answers, with the lofty air of one secure
of the better way, that he Loves, and that Love sees
further and more clearly than reason.</p>

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

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">9</a></span></p>

<h2><i>SWEET SEVENTEEN.</i></h2>

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

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry"><div class="stanza">
<div class="line">Standing with reluctant feet</div>
<div class="line">Where the brook and river meet,</div>
</div></div></div>

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

<p>Certainly Sweet Seventeen may be a most unlovely
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">10</a></span>
creature, and in fact she often is; a creature
hard and forward, having lost the innocence and
obedience of childhood and having gained nothing
yet of the tact and grace of womanhood; a creature
whose hopes and thoughts are all centred on the time
when she shall be brought out and have her fling of
flirting and fine dresses with the rest. Or she may
be only a gauche and giggling schoolgirl, with a mind
as narrow as her life, given up to the small intrigues
and scandals of the dormitory and the playground&mdash;a
girl who scamps her lessons and cheats her masters;
whose highest efforts of intellect are shown in the
cleverness with which she can break the rules of the
establishment without being found out; who thinks
talking at forbidden times, peeping through forbidden
windows, giving silly nicknames to her companions
and teachers, and telling silly secrets with less truth
than ingenuity in them, the greatest fun imaginable,
and all the greater because of the spice of rebellion
and perversity with which her folly is dashed. Or she
may be a mere tomboy, regretting her sex and despising
its restraints; cultivating schoolboy slang and
aping schoolboy habits; ridiculing her sisters and
disliked by her companions, while thinking girlhood
a bore and womanhood a mistake in exact proportion
to its feminality. Or she may be a budding miss,
shy and awkward, with no harm in her and as little
good&mdash;a mere sketch of a girl, without a leading line
as yet made out or the dominant colour so much as
indicated.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">11</a></span>
Sometimes she is awkward in another way, being
studious and preoccupied&mdash;when she passes for odd
and original, and is partly feared, partly disliked, and
wholly misunderstood by her own young world;
and sometimes she has a cynical contempt for men
and beauty and pleasure and dress, when she will
make herself ridiculous by her revolt against all the
canons of good taste and conventionality. But after
her <i>début</i> in tattered garments of severe colours and
ungainly cut, she will probably end her days as a
frantic Fashionable, the salvation of whose soul
depends on the faultless propriety of her wardrobe.
The eccentricities of Sweet Seventeen not unfrequently
revenge themselves by an exactly opposite
extravagance of maturity. But though there are
enough and to spare of girls according to all these
patterns, the Sweet Seventeen of one's affections is
none of them. And yet she is not always the same,
but has her different presentations, her varying facets,
which give her variety of charm and beauty.</p>

<p>The best and loveliest thing about Sweet Seventeen
is her sense of duty&mdash;for the most part a new
sense. She no longer needs to be told what to do;
she has not to be kept to her tasks by the fear of
authority nor the submissive grace of obedience; but
of her own free will, because understanding that it is
her duty and that duty is a holier thing than self-will,
she conscientiously does what she does not like
to do, and cheerfully gives up what she desires without
being driven or exhorted. She has generally
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">12</a></span>
before her mind some favourite heroine in a girl's
novel, who goes through much painful discipline and
comes out all the brighter for it in the end; and she
makes noble resolves of living as worthily as her
model. She comforts her soul too, with passages
from Longfellow and Tennyson and the 'Christian
Year,' and learns long extracts from 'Evangeline'
and the 'Idyls;' poetry having an almost magical
influence over her, nearly as powerful as the Sunday
sermons to which she listens so devoutly and tries
so patiently to understand. For the first time she
wakes to a dim sense of her own individuality, and
confesses to herself that she has a life of her own,
apart from and extraneous to her mere family membership.
She is not only the sister or the daughter
living with and for her parents or her brothers and
sisters, but she is also herself, with a future of her
own not to be shared with them, not to be touched by
them. And she begins to have vague dreams of this
future and its hero&mdash;dreams that are as much of
fairyland as if they were of the young prince coming
over the sea in a golden boat to find the princess in a
tower of brass waiting for him.</p>

<p>Quite impersonal, and with a hero only in the
clouds, nevertheless these dreams are suggested by
the special circumstances of her life, by her favourite
books or the style of society in which she has been
placed. The young prince is either a beautiful and
high-souled clergyman&mdash;not unlike the young vicar
or the new curate, but infinitely more beautiful&mdash;an
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">13</a></span>
apostle in the standing collar and single-breasted coat
of the nineteenth century; or he is an artist in a
velvet blouse and with flowing hair, living in a world
of beauty such as no Philistine can imagine; or he is
a gallant sailor, with blue eyes and a loose necktie,
looking up to heaven in a gale, and thinking of his
mother and sisters at home and of the one still
more beloved, when he certainly ought to be thinking
of tarry ropes and coarse sailcloth; or he is a
magnificent young officer heading his men at a
charge, and looking supremely well got up and
handsome. This is the kind of <i>futur</i> she dreams of
when she dreams at all, which is not often. The
reality of her mature life is perhaps a stolid square-set
squire, or a prosaic city merchant without the
thinnest thread of romance in his composition;
while her own life, which was to be such a lovely
poem of graceful usefulness and heroic beauty, sinks
into the prosaic routine of housekeeping and society,
the sigh after the vanished ideal growing fainter and
fainter as the weight of fact grows heavier.</p>

<p>Married men are all sacred to Sweet Seventeen
when she is a good girl; so are engaged men. For
the matter of that, she believes that nothing could
induce her to marry either a widower or one who had
been already engaged, as nothing could induce her to
marry any man under five foot eleven, or with a
snub nose or sandy whiskers. Sweet Seventeen has
in general the most profound aversion for boys. To
be sure she may have her favourites&mdash;very few and
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">14</a></span>
very seldom; but she mostly thinks them stupid or
conceited, and impartially resents either their awkward
attentions to herself or their assumptions of
superiority. An abnormally clever boy&mdash;the Poet-Laureate
or George Stephenson of his generation&mdash;is
her detestation, because he is odd and unlike every
one else; while the one that she dislikes least among
them is the school hero, who is first in the sports
and takes all the prizes, and who goes through life
loved by every one and never famous.</p>

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

<p>Now too, she begins to speak to her mother on
more equal terms; to criticize her dress, and to make
her understand that she considers her old-fashioned and
inclined to be dowdy. She ties her bonnet-strings for
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">15</a></span>
her; arranges her cap; smartens up her old dress and
compels her to buy a new one; and, while considering
her immeasurably ancient, likes her to look nice, and
thinks her in her own way beautiful. Sometimes she
opposes and quarrels with her, if the mother has less
tact than arbitrariness. But this is not her natural
state; for one of the characteristics of Sweet Seventeen
is her love for her mother and her need of better
counsel and guidance; so that if she comes into
opposition with her it is only through extreme pain,
and the bitter teaching of tyranny and injustice.
This is just the age indeed, when the mother's influence
is everything to a girl; and when a silly, an
unjust, or an unprincipled woman is the very ruin of
her life. But with a low or evil-natured mother we
seldom see a Sweet Seventeen worth the trouble of
writing about: which shows at least one thing&mdash;the
importance of the womanly influence at such a time,
and how so much that we blame in our modern girls
lies to the account of their mothers.</p>

<p>Great tact is required with Sweet Seventeen in such
society as is allowed her; care to bring her out a little
without obtruding her on the world, without making
her forward and consequential, and without attracting
too much attention to her. She is no longer a child
to be shut away in the nursery, but she is not yet
entitled to the place and consideration of a member
of society. And yet it would be cruel to debar her
wholly from all that is going on in the house. To
be sure there is the governess, as well as mamma, to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">16</a></span>
look after her manners and to give her rope enough
and not too much; but by the time a girl is seventeen
a governess has ceased to be the autocrat <i>ex officio</i>,
and she obeys her or not according to their respective
strengths. Still, the governess or mamma is for the
most part at her elbow; and Sweet Seventeen, if well
brought up, is left very little to her own guidance,
and sees the world only through half-opened doors.</p>

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

<p>But however she takes this unknown life, it is
always in an unreal and romantic aspect. Some of
more robust mind delight in the bolder stories of
Greece and Rome, and wish they had played a part
in the sensational heroism of those grand old times;
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">17</a></span>
while others go to Venice, and make pictures for
themselves out of the gliding gondolas and the mysterious
Council of Ten, the lovely ladies with grim
old fathers and high-handed brothers acting as
gaolers, and the handsome cavaliers serenading them
in the moonlight. That is their idea of love. They
have no perception of anything warmer. It is all
romance and poetry, and tender glances from afar,
and long and patient wooing under difficulties and a
little danger, with scarce a word spoken, and nothing
more expressive than a flower furtively given, or a
fleeting pressure of the finger tips. They know
nothing else and expect nothing else. Their cherry
is without stone, their bird without bone, their
orange without rind, as in the old song; and they
imagine a love as unreal as all the rest.</p>

<p>When thrown into actualities, though&mdash;say when
left motherless, and the eldest girl of perhaps a large
family with a father to comfort and a young brood to
see after&mdash;Sweet Seventeen is often very beautiful in
her degree, and rises grandly to her position. Sometimes
the burden of her responsibilities is too much
for her tender shoulders, and she is overweighted,
and fails. Sometimes too she is tyrannical and
selfish in such a position, and uses her power ill;
and sometimes she is careless and good-humoured,
when they all scramble up together, through confusion,
dirt and disorder, till the close time is over,
and they scatter themselves abroad. Sometimes she
is a martyr, and makes herself and every one else
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">18</a></span>
uncomfortable by the perpetual demonstration of her
martyrdom, and how she considers herself sacrificed
and put upon. Indeed she is not unfrequently a
martyr from other causes than heavy duties, being
fond of adopting unworkable views which cannot run
in the family groove anyhow. If she falls upon this
rock she is in her glory; youth being marvellously
proud of voluntary crucifixion, and thinking itself
especially ill-used because it must be made conformable
and is prevented from making itself ridiculous.</p>

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

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">19</a></span></p>

<h2><i>THE HABIT OF FEAR.</i></h2>

<p>The mind, like the body, contracts tricks and habits
which in time become automatic and involuntary&mdash;habits
of association, tricks of repetition, of which
the excess is monomania, but which, without attaining
to quite that extreme, become more or less
masters of the brain and directors of the thoughts.
And, of all these tricks of the mind, the habit of fear
is the most insidious and persistent. It is seldom
that any one who has once given in to it is able to
clear himself of it again. However unreasonable it
may be, the trick clings, and it would take an exceptionally
strong intellect to be convinced of its
folly and learn the courage of common-sense. But
this is just the intellect which does not allow itself
to contract the habit in the beginning; a coward
being for the most part a washy, weak kind of being,
with very little backbone anyhow. We do not mean
by this fear that which is physical and personal only,
though this is generally the sole idea which people
have of the word; but moral and mental cowardice as
well. Personal fear indeed, is common enough, and
as pitiable as it is common; and we are ashamed to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">20</a></span>
say that it is not confined to women, though naturally
it is more predominant with them than with men.</p>

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

<p>Ludicrous as many of their terrors are, we still
cannot help pitying these poor self-made martyrs of
imaginary danger. Take that most familiar of all
forms of fear among women, the fear of burglars,
and let us imagine for a moment the horror of the
life which is haunted by a nightly dread&mdash;by a
terror that comes with as unfailing regularity as
the darkness&mdash;and measure, if we can, the amount
of anguish that must be endured before death comes
to take off the torture. There are many women to
whom night is simply this time of torture, never
varying, never relieved. They dare not lock their
doors, because then they would be at the mercy
of the man who sooner or later is to come in at the
window; and if they hear the boards creak or the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">21</a></span>
furniture crack they are in agonies because of the
man who they are sure is in the house, and who
will come in at the door. They cannot sleep if they
have not looked all about the room&mdash;under the bed,
behind the curtains, into the closet, where perhaps
a dress hanging a little fantastically gives them a
nervous start that lasts for the night.</p>

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

<p>It is the same in everything. If they are living
in the country, and go up to London lodgings, they
take the ground floor for fear of fire and being burnt
alive in their beds. If they go from London to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">22</a></span>
the country they see an escaped convict or a murderer
in every ragged reaper asking for work, or
every tramp that begs for broken victuals at the
door. The country to them is full of dangers. In
the shooting season they are sure they will be shot
if they go near a wood or a turnip-field. They think
they will be gored to death if they meet a meek-eyed
cow going placidly through the lane to her milking;
and you might as well try to march them up to
the cannon's mouth as induce them to cross a field
where cattle are grazing. If they are driving, and
the horses are going at full trot, they say they are
running away and clutch the driver's arm nervously.
As travellers they are in a state of not wholly unreasonable
apprehension the whole time the railway
journey lasts. They wait at Folkestone for days for
a smooth crossing; and when they are on board they
call a breeze a gale, and make sure they are bound
for the bottom if the sea chops enough to rock the
boat so much as a cradle. If they go over a Swiss
pass they say their prayers and shut their eyes till
it is over; and they are horribly afraid of banditti
on every foot of Italian ground, besides firmly believing
in the complicity with brigands of all the
innkeepers and <i>vetturini</i>.</p>

<p>Their fear extends to all who belong to them,
for whom they conjure up scenes of deadly disaster
so soon as they are out of sight. Their fancy
is faceted, like the eyes of a fly, and they worry
themselves and every one else by exaggerating every
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">23</a></span>
chance of danger into a certainty of destruction.
When an epidemic is abroad, they are sure all the
children will take it; and if they have taken it,
they are sure they will never get over it. In illness
indeed, those people who have allowed themselves
to fall into the habit of fear are especially full
of foreboding; not because they are more loving,
more sympathetic than others, but because they are
more timid and less hopeful. If you believe them,
no one will recover who is in any way seriously
attacked; and the smallest ailment in themselves or
their friends is the sure forerunner of a mortal sickness.
They make no allowance for the elastic power
of human nature; and they dislike hope and courage
in others, thinking you unfeeling in exact proportion
to your cheerfulness.</p>

<p>Morally this same habit of fear deteriorates,
because it weakens and narrows, the whole nature.
So far from following Luther's famous advice&mdash;Sin
boldly and leave the rest to God&mdash;their sin is their
very fear, their unconquerable distrust. These are the
people who regard our affections as snares and all
forms of pleasure as so many waymarks on the
road to perdition&mdash;who would narrow the circle of
human life to the smallest point both of feeling and
action, because of the sin in which, according to
them, the whole world is steeped. They see guilt
everywhere, but innocence not at all. Their minds
are set to the trick of terror; and fear of the power
of the devil and the anger of God weighs on them
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">24</a></span>
like an iron chain from which there is no release.
This is not so much from delicacy of conscience as
from simple moral cowardice; for you seldom find
these very timid people lofty-minded or capable of
any great act of heroism. On the contrary, they are
generally peevish and always selfish; self-consideration
being the tap-root of their fears, though the
cause is assigned to all sorts of pretty things, such
as acute sensibilities, keen imagination, bad health,
tender conscience, delicate nerves&mdash;to anything in
fact but the real cause, a cowardly habit of fear produced
by continual moral selfishness, by incessant
thought of and regard for themselves.</p>

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

<p>Fear breeds suspicion too, and timid people are
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">25</a></span>
always suspecting ill of some one. The deepest
old diplomatist who has probed the folly and evil
of the world from end to end, and who has
sharpened his wits at the expense of his trust, is
not more full of suspicion of his kind than a timid,
superstitious, world-withdrawn man or woman given
up to the tyranny of fear. Every one is suspected
more or less, but chiefly lawyers, servants and
all strangers. Any demonstration of kindness or
interest at all different from the ordinary jogtrot
of society fills them with undefined suspicion and
dread; and, fear being in some degree the product
of a diseased imagination, the 'probable' causes for
anything they do not quite understand would make
the fortune of a novel-writer if given him for plots.
If any one wants to hear thrilling romances in course
of actual enactment, let him go down among remote
and quiet-living country people, and listen to what
they have to say of the chance strangers who may
have established themselves in the neighbourhood,
and who, having brought no letters of introduction,
are not known by the aborigines. The Newgate
Calendar or Dumas' novels would scarcely match
the stories which fear and ignorance have set afoot.</p>

<p>Fearful folk are always on the brink of ruin.
They cannot wait to see how things will turn before
they despair; and they cannot hope for the best in a
bad pass. They are engulfed in abysses which never
open, and they die a thousand deaths before the
supreme moment actually arrives. The smallest
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">26</a></span>
difficulties are to them like the straws placed crosswise
over which no witch could pass; the beneficent
action of time, either as a healer of sorrow or a
revealer of hidden mercies, is a word of comfort they
cannot accept for themselves, how true soever it may
be for others; the doctrine that chances are equal
for good as well as for bad is what they will not understand;
and they know of no power that can avert
the disaster, which perhaps is simply a possibility
not even probable, and which their own fears only
have arranged. If they are professional men, having
to make their way, they are for ever anticipating
failure for to-day and absolute destruction for to-morrow;
and they bemoan the fate of the wife and
children sure to be left to poverty by their untimely
decease, when the chances are ten to one in favour
of the apportioned threescore and ten years. Life is
a place of suffering here and a place of torment hereafter;
yet they often wish to die, reversing Hamlet's
decision by thinking the mystery of unknown ills
preferable to the reality of those they have on hand.</p>

<p>Over such minds as these the vaticinations of
such a prophet as Dr. Cumming have peculiar power;
and they accept his gloomy interpretations of the
Apocalypse with a faith as unquestioning as that
with which they accept the Gospels. They have a
predilection indeed for all terrifying prophecies, and
cast the horoscope of the earth and foretell the destruction
of the universe with marvellous exactitude.
Their minds are set to the trick of foreboding, and
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">27</a></span>
they live in the habit of fear, as others live in the
habit of hope, of resignation, or of careless good-humour
and indifference. There is nothing to be
done with them. Like drinking, or palsy, or a
nervous headache, or a congenital deformity, the
habit is hopeless when once established; and those
who have begun by fear and suspicion and foreboding
will live to the end in the atmosphere they have
created for themselves. The man or woman whose
mind is once haunted by the nightly fear of a secreted
burglar will go on looking for his heels so long as
eyesight and the power of locomotion continue; and
no failure in past Apocalyptic interpretations will
shake the believer's faith in those of which the time
for fulfilment has not yet arrived. It is a trick which
has rooted, a habit that has crystallized by use into a
formation; and there it must be left, as something
beyond the power of reason to remedy or of experience
to destroy.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">28</a></span></p>

<h2><i>OLD LADIES.</i></h2>

<p>The world is notoriously unjust to its veterans, and
above all it is unjust to its ancient females. Everywhere,
and from all time, an old woman has been
taken to express the last stage of uselessness and exhaustion;
and while a meeting of bearded dotards
goes by the name of a council of sages, and its
deliberations are respected accordingly, a congregation
of grey-haired matrons is nothing but a congregation
of old women, whose thoughts and
opinions on any subject whatsoever have no more
value than the chattering of so many magpies. In
fact the poor old ladies have a hard time of it; and
if we look at it in its right light, perhaps nothing
proves more thoroughly the coarse flavour of the
world's esteem respecting women than this disdain
which they excite when they are old. And yet
what charming old ladies one has known at times!&mdash;women
quite as charming in their own way at
seventy as their grand-daughters are at seventeen,
and all the more so because they have no design now
to be charming, because they have given up the
attempt to please for the reaction of praise, and long
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">29</a></span>
since have consented to become old though they
have never drifted into unpersonableness nor neglect.
While retaining the intellectual vivacity and active
sympathies of maturity, they have added the softness,
the mellowness, the tempering got only from
experience and advancing age. They are women
who have seen and known and read a great deal; and
who have suffered much; but whose sorrows have
neither hardened nor soured them&mdash;but rather have
made them even more sympathetic with the sorrows
of others, and pitiful for all the young. They have
lived through and lived down all their own trials,
and have come out into peace on the other side; but
they remember the trials of the fiery passage, and
they feel for those who have still to bear the pressure
of the pain they have overcome. These are not
women much met with in society; they are of the
kind which mostly stays at home and lets the world
come to them. They have done with the hurry and
glitter of life, and they no longer care to carry their
grey hairs abroad. They retain their hold on the
affections of their kind; they take an interest in the
history, the science, the progress of the day; but
they rest tranquil and content by their own fireside,
and they sit to receive, and do not go out to gather.</p>

<p>The fashionable old lady who haunts the theatres
and drawing-rooms, bewigged, befrizzled, painted,
ghastly in her vain attempts to appear young, hideous
in her frenzied clutch at the pleasures melting from
her grasp, desperate in her wild hold on a life that is
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">30</a></span>
passing away from her so rapidly, knows nothing of
the quiet dignity and happiness of her ancient sister
who has been wise enough to renounce before she
lost. In her own house, where gather a small knot
of men of mind and women of character, where the
young bring their perplexities and the mature their
deeper thoughts, the dear old lady of ripe experience,
loving sympathies and cultivated intellect holds a
better court than is known to any of those miserable
old creatures who prowl about the gay places of the
world, and wrestle with the young for their crowns
and garlands&mdash;those wretched simulacra of womanhood
who will not grow old and who cannot become
wise. She is the best kind of old lady extant,
answering to the matron of classic times&mdash;to the
Mother in Israel before whom the tribes made
obeisance in token of respect; the woman whose
book of life has been well studied and closely read,
and kept clean in all its pages. She has been no
prude however, and no mere idealist. She must
have been wife, mother and widow; that is, she
must have known many things of joy and grief and
have had the fountains of life unsealed. However
wise and good she may be, as a spinster she has had
only half a life; and it is the best half which has
been denied her. How can she tell others, when
they come to her in their troubles, how time and a
healthy will have wrought with her, if she has never
passed through the same circumstances? Theoretic
comfort is all very well, but one word of experience
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">31</a></span>
goes beyond volumes of counsel based on general
principles and a lively imagination.</p>

<p>One type of old lady, growing yearly scarcer, is
the old lady whose religious and political theories are
based on the doctrines of Voltaire and Paine's <i>Rights of
Man</i>&mdash;the old lady who remembers Hunt and Thistlewood
and the Birmingham riots; who talks of the
French Revolution as if it were yesterday; and who
has heard so often of the Porteus mob from poor
papa that one would think she had assisted at the
hanging herself. She is an infinitely old woman, for
the most part birdlike, chirrupy, and wonderfully
alive. She has never gone beyond her early teaching,
but is a fossil radical of the old school; and she
thinks the Gods departed when Hunt and his set
died out. She is an irreligious old creature, and
scoffs with more cleverness than grace at everything
new or earnest. She would as lief see Romanism
rampant at once as this newfangled mummery they
call Ritualism; and Romanism is her version of the
unchaining of Satan. As for science&mdash;well, it is all
very wonderful, but more wonderful she thinks than
true; and she cannot quite make up her mind about
the spectroscope or protoplasm. Of the two, protoplasm
commends itself most to her imagination, for
private reasons of her own connected with the
Pentateuch; but these things are not so much in her
way as Voltaire and Diderot, Volney and Tom Paine,
and she is content to abide by her ancient cairns and
to leave the leaping-poles of science to younger and
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">32</a></span>
stronger hands. This type of old lady is for the
most part an ancient spinster, whose life has worn
itself away in the arid deserts of mental doubt and
emotional negation. If she ever loved it was in
secret, some thin-lipped embodied Idea long years
ago. Most likely she did not get even to this unsatisfactory
length, but contented herself with books
and discussions only. If she had ever honestly
loved and been loved, perhaps she would have gone
beyond Voltaire, and have learned something truer
than a scoff.</p>

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

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">33</a></span>
The old lady who remains a mere child to the
end; who looks very much like a faded old wax doll
with her scanty hair blown out into transparent
ringlets, and her jaunty cap bedecked with flowers
and gay-coloured bows; who cannot rise into the
dignity of true womanliness; who knows nothing
useful; can give no wise advice: has no sentiment
of protection, but on the contrary demands all sorts
of care and protection for herself&mdash;she, simpering and
giggling as if she were fifteen, is by no means an old
lady of the finest type. But she is better than the
leering old lady who says coarse things, and who,
like Béranger's immortal creation, passes her time in
regretting her plump arms and her well-turned ankle
and the lost time that can never be recalled, and who
is altogether a most unedifying old person and by no
means nice company for the young.</p>

<p>Then there is the irascible old lady, who rates
her servants and is free with full-flavoured epithets
against sluts in general; who is like a tigress over
her last unmarried daughter, and, when crippled
and disabled, still insists on keeping the keys,
which she delivers up when wanted only with a
snarl and a suspicious caution. She has been one
of the race of active housekeepers, and has prided
herself on her exceptional ability that way for so
long that she cannot bear to yield, even when she
can no longer do any good; so she sits in her easy
chair, like old Pope and Pagan in <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i>,
and gnaws her fingers at the younger world
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">34</a></span>
which passes her by. She is an infliction to her
daughter for all the years of her life, and to the last
keeps her in leading-strings, tied up as tight as the
sinewy old hands can knot them; treating her always
as an irresponsible young thing who needs both
guidance and control, though the girl has passed into
the middle-aged woman by now, shuffling through
life a poor spiritless creature who has faded before
she has fully blossomed, and who dies like a fruit that
has dropped from the tree before it has ripened.</p>

<p>Twin sister to this kind is the grim female become
ancient; the gaunt old lady with a stiff backbone,
who sits upright and walks with a firm tread like a
man; a leathery old lady, who despises all your weak
slips of girls that have nerves and headaches and
cannot walk their paltry mile without fatigue; a
desiccated old lady, large-boned and lean, without an
ounce of superfluous fat about her, with keen eyes yet,
with which she boasts that she can thread a needle
and read small print by candlelight; an indestructible
old lady, who looks as if nothing short of an
earthquake would put an end to her. The friend of
her youth is now a stout, soft, helpless old lady,
much bedraped in woollen shawls, given to frequent
sippings of brandy and water, and ensconced in the
chimney corner like a huge clay figure set to dry.
For her the indestructible old lady has the supremest
contempt, heightened in intensity by a vivid remembrance
of the time when they were friends and rivals.
Ah, poor Laura, she says, straightening herself; she
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">35</a></span>
was always a poor creature, and see what she is now!
To those who wait long enough the wheel always
comes round, she thinks; and the days when Laura
bore away the bell from her for grace and sweetness
and loveableness generally are avenged now, when
the one is a mere mollusc and the other has a serviceable
backbone that will last for many a year yet.</p>

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

<p>The very dress of old ladies is in itself a study
and a revelation of character. There are the beautiful
old women who make themselves like old pictures by
a profusion of soft lace and tender greys; and the
stately old ladies who affect rich rustling silks and
sombre velvet; and there are the original and individual
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">36</a></span>
old ladies, who dress themselves after their own
kind, like Mrs. Basil Montagu, Miss Jane Porter, and
dear Mrs. Duncan Stewart, and have a <i>cachet</i> of their
own with which fashion has nothing to do. And
there are the old women who wear rusty black stuffs
and ugly helmet-like caps; and those who affect
uniformity and going with the stream, when the
fashion has become national&mdash;and these have been
much exercised of late with the strait skirts and the
new bonnets. But Providence is liberal and milliners
are fertile in resources. In fact, in this as in all
other sections of humanity, there are those who are
beautiful and wise, and those who are foolish and
unlovely; those who make the best of things as
they are, and those who make the worst, by treating
them as what they are not; those who extract
honey, and those who find only poison. For in old
age, as in youth, are to be found beauty, use, grace
and value, but in different aspects and on another
platform. And the folly is when this difference is
not allowed for, or when the possibility of these
graces is denied and their utility ignored.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">37</a></span></p>

<h2><i>VOICES.</i></h2>

<p>Far before the eyes or the mouth or the habitual
gesture, as a revelation of character, is the quality of
the voice and the manner of using it. It is the first
thing that strikes us in a new acquaintance, and it is
one of the most unerring tests of breeding and education.
There are voices which have a certain truthful
ring about them&mdash;a certain something, unforced and
spontaneous, that no training can give. Training
can do much in the way of making a voice, but it can
never compass more than a bad imitation of this
quality; for the very fact of its being an imitation,
however accurate, betrays itself like rouge on a
woman's cheeks, or a wig, or dyed hair. On the
other hand, there are voices which have the jar of
falsehood in every tone, and which are as full of warning
as the croak of the raven or the hiss of the
serpent. These are in general the naturally hard
voices which make themselves caressing, thinking by
that to appear sympathetic; but the fundamental
quality strikes up through the overlay, and a person
must be very dull indeed who cannot detect the pretence
in that slow, drawling, would-be affectionate
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">38</a></span>
voice, with its harsh undertone and sharp accent
whenever it forgets itself.</p>

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

<p>Nothing betrays feeling so much as the voice,
save perhaps the eyes; and these can be lowered,
and so far their expression hidden. In moments of
emotion no skill can hide the fact of disturbed feeling
by the voice; though a strong will and the habit of
self-control can steady it when else it would be failing
and tremulous. But not the strongest will, nor
the largest amount of self-control, can keep it natural
as well as steady. It is deadened, veiled, compressed,
like a wild creature tightly bound and unnaturally
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">39</a></span>
still. One feels that it is done by an effort, and that
if the strain were relaxed for a moment the wild
creature would burst loose in rage or despair&mdash;and
that the voice would break into the scream of passion
or quiver down into the falter of pathos. And this
very effort is as eloquent as if there had been no
holding down at all, and the voice had been left to
its own impulse unchecked.</p>

<p>Again, in fun and humour, is it not the voice
even more than the face that is expressive? The
twinkle of the eye, the hollow in the under lip,
the dimples about the mouth, the play of the eyebrow,
are all aids certainly; but the voice! The
mellow tone that comes into the utterance of one
man; the surprised accents of another; the fatuous
simplicity of a third; the philosophical acquiescence
of a fourth when relating the most outrageous impossibilities&mdash;a
voice and manner peculiarly Transatlantic,
and indeed one of the American forms of fun&mdash;do
we not know all these varieties by heart? have
we not veteran actors whose main point lies in one or
other of these varieties? and what would be the
drollest anecdote if told in a voice which had neither
play nor significance? Pathos too&mdash;who feels it,
however beautifully expressed so far as words may
go, if uttered in a dead and wooden voice without
sympathy? But the poorest attempts at pathos will
strike home to the heart if given tenderly and harmoniously.
And just as certain popular airs of mean
association can be made into church music by slow
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">40</a></span>
time and stately modulation, so can dead-level literature
be lifted into passion or softened into sentiment
by the voice alone.</p>

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

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

<p>An orator's voice, with its careful intonation and
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">41</a></span>
accurate accent, would be as much out of place by a
sick-bed as Court trains and brocaded silk for the
nurse. There are certain men who do a good deal
by a hearty, jovial, fox-hunting kind of voice&mdash;a
voice a little thrown up for all that it is a chest-voice&mdash;a
voice with a certain undefined rollick and devil-may-care
sound in it, and eloquent of a large volume
of vitality and physical health. That, too, is a good
property for a medical man. It gives the sick a
certain fillip, and reminds them pleasantly of health
and vigour. It may have a mesmeric kind of effect
upon them&mdash;who knows?&mdash;so that it induces in
them something of its own state, provided it be not
overpowering. But a voice of this kind has a tendency
to become insolent in its assertion of vigour,
swaggering and boisterous; and then it is too much
for invalided nerves, just as mountain-winds or sea-breezes
would be too much, and the scent of flowers
or of a hayfield oppressive.</p>

<p>The clerical voice again, is a class-voice&mdash;that
neat, careful, precise voice, neither wholly made nor
yet natural&mdash;that voice which never strikes one as
hearty nor as having a really genuine utterance, but
which is not entirely unpleasant if one does not require
too much spontaneity. The clerical voice, with its
mixture of familiarity and oratory as that of one used
to talk to old women in private and to hold forth to
a congregation in public, is as distinct in its own
way as the mathematician's handwriting; and any
one can pick out blindfold his man from a knot of
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</a></span>
talkers, without waiting to see the square-cut collar
and close white tie. The legal voice is different again;
but this is rather a variety of the orator's than a distinct
species&mdash;a variety standing midway between
that and the clerical, and affording more scope than
either.</p>

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

<p>We all have our company voices, as we all have
our company manners; and, after a time, we get to
know the company voices of our friends, and to
understand them as we understand their best dresses
and state service. The person whose voice absolutely
refuses to put itself into company tone startles us as
much as if he came to a state dinner in a shooting-jacket.
This is a different thing from the insincere
and flattering voice, which is never laid aside while it
has its object to gain, and which affects to be one
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</a></span>
thing when it means another. The company voice is
only a little bit of finery, quite in its place if not
carried into the home, where however, silly men and
women think they can impose on their house-mates
by assumptions which cannot stand the test of domestic
ease. The lover's voice is of course <i>sui generis</i>;
but there is another kind of voice which one sometimes
hears that is quite as enchanting&mdash;the rich, full,
melodious voice which irresistibly suggests sunshine
and flowers, and heavy bunches of purple grapes, and
a wealth of physical beauty at all four corners. Such
a voice is Alboni's; such a voice we can conceive
Anacreon's to have been; with less lusciousness and
more stateliness, such a voice was Walter Savage
Landor's. His was not an English voice; it was too
rich and accurate; yet it was clear and apparently
thoroughly unstudied, and was the very perfection of
art. There was no greater treat of its kind than to
hear Landor read Milton or Homer.</p>

<p>Though one of the essentials of a good voice is its
clearness, there are certain lisps and catches which
are pretty, though never dignified; but most of them
are painful to the ear. It is the same with accents.
A dash of brogue; the faintest suspicion of the Scotch
twang; even a little American accent&mdash;but very little,
like red-pepper to be sparingly used, as indeed we
may say with the others&mdash;gives a certain piquancy to
the voice. So does a Continental accent generally;
few of us being able to distinguish the French accent
from the German, the Polish from the Italian, or the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</a></span>
Russian from the Spanish, but lumping them all
together as 'a foreign accent' broadly. Of all the
European voices the French is perhaps the most
unpleasant in its quality, and the Italian the most
delightful. The Italian voice is a song in itself; not
the sing-song voice of an English parish schoolboy,
but an unnoted bit of harmony. The French voice
is thin, apt to become wiry and metallic; a head-voice
for the most part, and eminently unsympathetic;
a nervous, irritable voice, that seems more fit for complaint
than for love-making; and yet how laughing,
how bewitching it can make itself!&mdash;never with the
Italian roundness, but <i>câlinante</i> in its own half-pettish
way, provoking, enticing, arousing. There are some
voices which send you to sleep and others which stir
you up; and the French voice is of the latter kind
when setting itself to do mischief and work its own
will.</p>

<p>Of all the differences lying between Calais and
Dover, perhaps nothing strikes the traveller more
than the difference in the national voice and manner
of speech. The sharp, high-pitched, stridulous voice
of the French, with its clear accent and neat intonation,
is exchanged for the loose, fluffy utterance of
England, where clear enunciation is considered pedantic;
where brave men cultivate a drawl and pretty
women a deep chest-voice; where well-educated people
think it no shame to run all their words into each
other, and to let consonants and vowels drip out like
so many drops of water, with not much more distinction
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">45</a></span>
between them; and where no one knows how to
educate his organ artistically, without going into
artificiality and affectation. And yet the cultivation
of the voice is an art, and ought to be made as much
a matter of education as a good carriage or a legible
handwriting. We teach our children to sing, but we
never teach them to speak, beyond correcting a glaring
piece of mispronunciation or so. In consequence
of which we have all sorts of odd voices among us&mdash;short
yelping voices like dogs; purring voices like
cats; croakings and lispings and quackings and chatterings;
a very menagerie in fact, to be heard in
a room ten feet square, where a little rational cultivation
would have reduced the whole of that vocal
chaos to order and harmony, and would have made
what is now painful and distasteful beautiful and
seductive.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</a></span></p>

<h2><i>BURNT FINGERS.</i></h2>

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

<p>Our blunders in life are not due to ignorance so
much as to temperament; and only the exceptionally
wise among us learn to correct the excesses of temperament
by the lessons of experience. To the mass of
mankind these lessons are for the time only, and
prophesy nothing of the future. They hold them to
have been mistakes of method, not of principle, and
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</a></span>
they think that the same lines more carefully laid
would lead to a better superstructure in the future,
not seeing that the fault was organic and in those
very initial lines themselves. No impulsive nor
wildly hopeful person, for instance, ever learns by
experience, so long as his physical condition remains
the same. No one with a large faculty of faith&mdash;that
is, credulous and easily imposed on&mdash;becomes
suspicious or critical by mere experience. How
much soever people of this kind have been taken in,
in times past, they are just as ready to become the
prey of the spoiler in times to come; and it would
be sad, if it were not so silly, to watch how inevitably
one half of the world gives itself up as food whereon
the roguery of the other half may wax fat.</p>

<p>The person of facile confidence, whose secrets
have been blazed abroad more than once by trusted
friends, makes yet another and another safe confidant&mdash;quite
safe this time; one of whose fidelity there is
no doubt&mdash;and learns when too late that one <i>panier
percé</i> is very like another <i>panier percé</i>. The speculating
man, without business faculty or knowledge,
who has burnt his fingers bare to the bone with
handling scrip and stock, thrusts them into the fire
again so soon as he has the chance. The gambler
blows his fingers just cool enough to shuffle the cards
for this once only, sure that this time hope will tell
no flattering tale, that ravelled ends will knit themselves
up into a close and seemly garment, and
heaven itself work a miracle in his favour against the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">48</a></span>
law of mathematical certainty. In fact we are all
gamblers in this way, and play our hazards for the
stakes of faith and hope. We all burn our fingers
again and again at some fire or another; but experience
teaches us nothing; save perhaps a more
hopeless, helpless resignation towards that confounded
ill-luck of ours, and a weary feeling of having known
it all before when things fall out amiss and we are
blistered in the old flames.</p>

<p>In great matters this persistency of endeavour is
sublime, and gets a wealth of laurel crowns and blue
ribands; but in little things it is obstinacy, want of
ability to profit by experience, denseness of perception
as to what can and what cannot be done; and the
apologue of Bruce's spider gets tiresome if too often
repeated. The most hopelessly inapt people at
learning why they burnt their fingers last time, and
how they will burn them again, are those who, whatever
their profession, are blessed or cursed with what
is called the artistic temperament. A man will ruin
himself for love of a particular place; for dislike of
a certain kind of necessary work; for the prosecution
of a certain hobby. Is he not artistic? and must he
not have all the conditions of his life exactly square
with his desires? else how can he do good work? So
he goes on burning his fingers through self-indulgence,
and persists in his unwisdom to the end of his life.
He will paint his unsaleable pictures or write his
unreadable books; his path is one in which the
money-paying public will not follow; but though his
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</a></span>
very existence depends on the following of that paying
public, he will not stir an inch to meet it, but keeps
where he is because he likes the particular run of his
hedgerows; and spends his days in thrusting his hand
into the fire of what he chooses to call the ideal, and
his nights in abusing the Philistinism of the world
which lets him be burnt.</p>

<p>And what does any amount of experience do for
us in the matter of friendship or love? As the
world goes round, and our credulous morning darkens
into a more sceptical twilight, we believe as a general
principle&mdash;a mere abstraction&mdash;that all new friends
are just so much gilt gingerbread; and that a very
little close holding and hard rubbing brings off the
gilt, and leaves nothing but a slimy, sticky mess of
little worth as food and of none as ornament. And
yet, if of the kind to whom friendship is necessary
for happiness, we rush as eagerly into the new
affection as if we had never philosophized on the
emptiness of the old, and believe as firmly in the solid
gold of our latest cake as if we had never smeared
our hands with one of the same pattern before. So
with love. A man sees his comrades fluttering like
enchanted moths about some stately man-slayer, some
fair and shining light set like a false beacon on a
dangerous cliff to lure men to their destruction. He
sees how they singe and burn in the flame of her
beauty, but he is not warned. If one's own experience
teaches one little or nothing, the experience
of others goes for even less, and no man yet was
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</a></span>
ever warned off the destructive fire of love because
his companions had burnt their fingers there before
him and his own are sure to follow.</p>

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

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</a></span>
People too, who burn their fingers in giving good
advice unasked, seldom learn to hold them back.
With an honest intention, and a strong desire to see
right done, it is difficult to avoid putting our hands
into fires with which we have no business. While
we are young and ardent, it seems to us as if we
have distinct business with all fraud, injustice, folly,
wilfulness, which we believe a few honest words of
ours will control and annul; but nine times out of
ten we only burn our own hands, while we do not in
the least strengthen those of the right nor weaken
those of the wrong. We may say the same of good-natured
people. There was never a row of chestnuts
roasting at the fire for which your good-natured oaf
will not stretch out his hand at the bidding and for
the advantage of a friend. Experience teaches the
poor oaf nothing; not even that fire burns. To put
his name at the back of a bill, just as a mere form;
to lend his money, just for a few days; or to do any
other sort of self-immolating folly, on the faithful
promise that the fire will not burn nor the knife cut&mdash;it
all comes as easy to men of the good-natured
sort as their alphabet. Indeed it is their alphabet,
out of which they spell their own ruin; but so long
as the impressionable temperament lasts&mdash;so long as
the liking to do a good-natured action is greater than
caution, suspicion, or the power of analogical reasoning&mdash;so
long will the oaf make himself the catspaw of
the knave, till at last he has left himself no fingers
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</a></span>
wherewith to pluck out the chestnuts for himself or
another.</p>

<p>The first doubt of young people is always a
source of intense suffering. Hitherto they have
believed what they saw and all they heard; and they
have not troubled themselves with motives nor facts
beyond those given to them and lying on the surface.
But when they find out for themselves that seeming
is not necessarily being, and that all people are not
as good throughout as they thought them, then they
suffer a moral shock which often leads them into a
state of practical atheism and despair. Many young
people give up altogether when they first open the book
of humanity and begin to read beyond the title-page;
and, because they have found specks in the cleanest
parts, they believe that nothing is left pure. They are
as much bewildered as horror-struck, and cannot understand
how any one they have loved and respected
should have done this or that misdeed. Having done
it, there is nothing left to love nor respect further.
It is only by degrees that they learn to adjust and
apportion, and to understand that the whole creature
is not necessarily corrupt because there are a few
unhealthy places here and there. But in the beginning
this first scorching by the fire of experience is very
painful and bad to bear. Then they begin to think
the knowledge of the world, as got from books, so
wonderful, so profound; and they look on it as a
science to be learned by much studying of aphorisms.
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</a></span>
They little know that not the most affluent amount
of phrase knowledge can ever regulate that class of
action which springs from a man's inherent disposition;
and that it is not facts which teach but
self-control which prevents.</p>

<p>After very early youth we all have enough
theoretical knowledge to keep us straight; but
theoretical knowledge does nothing without self-knowledge,
or its corollary, self-control. The world
has never yet got beyond the wisdom of Proverbs and
Ecclesiastes; and Solomon's advice to the Israelitish
youth lounging round the gates of the Temple is
quite as applicable to young Hopeful coming up to
London chambers as it was to them. Teaching of
any kind, by books or events, is the mere brute
weapon; but self-control is the intelligent hand to
wield it. To burn one's fingers once in a lifetime
tells nothing against a man's common-sense nor
dignity; but to go on burning them is the act of
a fool, and we cannot pity the wounds, however sore
they may be. The Arcadian virtues of unlimited
trust and hope and love are very sweet and lovely;
but they are the graces of childhood, not the qualities
of manhood. They are charming little finalities,
which do not admit of modification nor of expansion;
and in a naughty world, to go about with one's heart
on one's sleeve, believing every one and accepting
everything to be just as it presents itself, is offering
bowls of milk to tigers, and meeting armed men with
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</a></span>
a tin sword. Such universal trust can only result
in a perpetual burning of one's fingers; and a life
spent in pulling out hot chestnuts from the fire for
another's eating is by no means the most useful nor
the most dignified to which a man can devote himself.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">55</a></span></p>

<h2><i>DÉS&OElig;UVREMENT.</i></h2>

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

<p>No state is more unfortunate than this listless
want of purpose which has nothing to do, which is
interested in nothing, and which has no serious object
in life; and the drifting, aimless temperament, which
merely waits and does not even watch, is the most
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</a></span>
disastrous that a man or woman can possess. Feverish
energy, wearing itself out on comparative nothings,
is better than the indolence which folds its hands
and makes neither work nor pleasure; and the most
microscopic and restless perception is more healthful
than the dull blindness which goes from Dan to
Beersheba, and finds all barren.</p>

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

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</a></span>
Though by no means confined to women only,
this disastrous state is nevertheless more frequently
found with them than with men. It is comparatively
rare that a man&mdash;at least an Englishman&mdash;is born
with so little of the activity which characterizes manhood
as to rest content without some kind of object
for his life, either in work or in pleasure, in study or
in vice. But many women are satisfied to remain in
an unending <i>dés&oelig;uvrement</i>, a listless supineness that
has not even sufficient active energy to fret at its
own dullness.</p>

<p>We see this kind of thing especially in the families
of the poorer class of gentry in the country. If we
except the Sunday school and district visiting, neither
of which commends itself as a pleasant occupation to
all minds&mdash;both in fact needing a little more active
energy than we find in the purely <i>dés&oelig;uvré</i> class&mdash;what
is there for the unmarried daughters of a family
to do? There is no question of a profession for any
of them. Ideas travel slowly in country places, and
root themselves still more slowly, even yet; and
the idea of woman's work for ladies is utterly inadmissible
by the English gentleman who can leave a
modest sufficiency to his daughters&mdash;just enough to
live on in the old house and in the old way, without
a margin for luxuries, but above anything like positive
want. There is no possibility then of an active
career in art or literature; of going out as a governess,
as a hospital nurse, or as a Sister. There is only
home, with the possible and not very probable chance
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</a></span>
of marriage as the vision of hope in the distant future.
And that chance is very small and very remote; for
the simple reason&mdash;there is no one to marry.</p>

<p>There are the young collegians who come down
in reading parties; the group of Bohemian artists, if
the place be picturesque and not too far from London;
the curate; and the new doctor, fresh from the hospitals,
who has to make his practice out of the poorer
and more outlying <i>clientèle</i> of the old and established
practitioners of the place. But collegians do not marry,
and long engagements are proverbially hazardous;
Bohemian artists are even less likely than they to
trouble the surrogate; and the curate and the doctor
can at the best marry only one apiece of the many
who are waiting. The family keeps neither carriages
nor horses, so that the longest tether to which life
can be carried, with the house for the stake, is simply
the three or four miles which the girls can walk out
and back. And the visiting list is necessarily comprised
within this circle. There is then, absolutely
nothing to occupy nor to interest. The whole day is
spent in playing over old music, in needlework, in a
little desultory reading, such as is supplied by the
local book society; all without other object than that
of passing the time. The girls have had nothing
like a thorough education in anything; they are not
specially gifted, and what brains they have are dormant
and uncultivated. There is not even enough
housework to occupy their time, unless they were to
send away the servants. Besides, domestic work of
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</a></span>
an active kind is vulgar, and gentlemen and gentlewomen
do not allow their daughters to do it. They
may help in the housekeeping; which means merely
giving out the week's supplies on Monday and ordering
the dinner on other days, and which is not an
hour's occupation in the week; and they can do a
little amateur spudding and raking among the flower-beds
when the weather is fine, if they care for the
garden; and they can do a great deal of walking if
they are strong; and this is all that they can do.
There they are, four or five well-looking girls perhaps,
of marriageable age, fairly healthy and amiable, and
with just so much active power as would carry them
creditably through any work that was given them to
do, but with not enough originative energy to make
them create work for themselves out of nothing.</p>

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

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">60</a></span>
Quiet families in towns, people who keep no society
and live in a self-made desert apart though in
the midst of the very vortex of life, are alike in the
matter of <i>dés&oelig;uvrement</i>; and we find exactly the
same history with them as we find with their country
cousins, though apparently their circumstances are
so different. They cannot work and they may not
play; the utmost dissipation allowed them is to look
at the outside of things&mdash;to make one of the fringe
of spectators lining the streets and windows on a
show day, and this but seldom; or to go once or
twice a year to the theatre or a concert. So they
too just lounge through their life, and pass from
girlhood to old age in utter <i>dés&oelig;uvrement</i> and want
of object. Year by year the lines about their eyes
deepen, their smile gets sadder, their cheeks grow
paler; while the cherished secret romance which even
the dullest life contains gets a colour of its own by age,
and a firmness of outline by continual dwelling on,
which it had not in the beginning. Perhaps it was
a dream built on a tone, a look, a word&mdash;may be it
was only a half-evolved fancy without any basis whatever&mdash;but
the imagination of the poor <i>dés&oelig;uvrée</i> has
clung to the dream, and the uninteresting dullness of
her life has given it a mock vitality which real activity
would have destroyed.</p>

<p>This want of healthy occupation is the cause of
half the hysterical reveries which it is a pretty flattery
to call constancy and an enduring regret; and we
find it as absolutely as that heat follows from flame,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">61</a></span>
that the mischievous habit of bewailing an irrevocable
past is part of the <i>dés&oelig;uvrée</i> condition in the present.
People who have real work to do cannot find time
for unhealthy regrets, and <i>dés&oelig;uvrement</i> is the most
fertile source of sentimentality to be found.</p>

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

<p>Women of this class want taking in hand by the
stronger and more energetic. Many even of those
who seem to do pretty well as independent workers,
men and women alike, would be all the better for
being farmed out; and <i>dés&oelig;uvrées</i> women especially
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">62</a></span>
want extraneous guidance, and to be set to such work
as they can do, but cannot make. An establishment
which would utilize their faculties, such as they are,
and give them occupation in harmony with their
powers, would be a real salvation to many who
would do better if they only knew how, and would
save them from stagnation and apathy. But society
does not recognize the existence of moral rickets,
though the physical are cared for; consequently
it has not begun to provide for them as moral rickets,
and no Proudhon has yet managed to utilize the
<i>dés&oelig;uvrés</i> members of the State. When they do
find a place of retreat and adventitious support, it is
under another name.</p>

<p>The retired man of business, utterly without object
in his new conditions, is another portrait that meets
us in country places. He is not fit for magisterial
business; he cannot hunt nor shoot nor fish; he has
no literary tastes; he cannot create objects of interest
for himself foreign to the whole experience of his life.
The idleness which was so delicious when it was a
brief season of rest in the midst of his high-pressure
work, and the country which was like Paradise when
seen in the summer only and at holiday time, make
together just so much blank dullness now that he has
bound himself to the one and fixed himself in the
other. When he has spelt over every article in the
<i>Times</i>, pottered about his garden and his stables, and
irritated both gardener and groom by interfering in
what he does not understand, the day's work is at
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">63</a></span>
an end. He has nothing more to do but eat his
dinner and sip his wine, doze over the fire for a couple
of hours, and go to bed as the clock strikes ten.</p>

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

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">64</a></span></p>

<h2><i>THE SHRIEKING SISTERHOOD.</i></h2>

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

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">65</a></span>
Necessarily there must be much verbal agitation
if any measure is to be carried the fulcrum of which
is public opinion. If you have to stir the dry bones
you must prophesy to them in a loud voice, and not
leave off till they have begun to shake. Things
which can only be known by teaching must be spoken
of, but things which have to be done are always
better done the less the fuss made about them; and
the more steadfast the action, the less noisy the agent.
Purpose is apt to exhale itself in protestations, and
strength is sure to exhaust itself by a flux of words.
But at the present day what Mr. Carlyle called the
Silences are the least honoured of all the minor gods,
and the babble of small beginnings threatens to
become intolerable. We all 'think outside our brains,'
and the result is not conducive to mental vigour. It
is as if we were to set a plant to grow with its heels
in the air, and then look for roots, flowers and fruit,
by the process of excitation and disclosure.</p>

<p>One of our quarrels with the Advanced Women
of our generation is the hysterical parade they make
about their wants and their intentions. It never
seems to occur to them that the best means of getting
what they want is to take it, when not forbidden by
the law&mdash;to act, not to talk; that all this running
hither and thither over the face of the earth, this
feverish unrest and loud acclaim are but the dilution
of purpose through much speaking, and not the right
way at all; and that to hold their tongues and do
would advance them by as many leagues as babble
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">66</a></span>
puts them back. A small knot of women, 'terribly
in earnest,' could move multitudes by the silent force
of example. One woman alone, quietly taking her
life in her own hands and working out the great
problem of self-help and independence practically,
not merely stating it theoretically, is worth a score
of shrieking sisters frantically calling on men and
gods to see them make an effort to stand upright
without support, with interludes of reproach to men
for the want of help in their attempt. The silent
woman who quietly calculates her chances and
measures her powers with her difficulties so as to
avoid the probability of a fiasco, and who therefore
achieves a success according to her endeavour, does
more for the real emancipation of her sex than any
amount of pamphleteering, lecturing, or petitioning
by the shrieking sisterhood can do. Hers is deed not
declamation; proof not theory; and it carries with it
the respect always accorded to success.</p>

<p>And really if we think of it dispassionately, and
carefully dissect the great mosaic of hindrances which
women say makes up the pavement of their lives,
there is very little which they may not do if they
like&mdash;and can. They have already succeeded in reopening
for themselves the practice of medicine, for
one thing; and this is an immense opportunity if they
know how to use it. A few pioneers, unhelped for
the most part, steadily and without shrieking, stormed
the barricades of the hospitals and dissecting-rooms;
heroically bearing the shower of hard-mouthed missiles
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">67</a></span>
with which they were pelted, and successfully forcing
their way notwithstanding. But the most successful
of them are those who held on with least excitement
and who strove more than they declaimed; while
others, by constitution belonging to the shrieking
sisterhood, have comparatively failed, and have mainly
succeeded in making themselves ridiculous. After
some pressure but very little cackle&mdash;for here too
the work was wanted, the desire real, and the workers
in earnest&mdash;female colleges on a liberal and extended
system of education have been established, and young
women have now an opportunity of showing what
they can do in brain work.</p>

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

<p>In literature they have competitors in men, but
no monopolists. Indeed, they themselves have become
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">68</a></span>
almost the monopolists of the whole section of light
literature and fiction; while nothing but absolute
physical and mental incapacity prevents their taking
the charge of a journal, and working it with female
editor, sub-editor, manager, reporters, compositors,
and even news-girls to sell the second edition at
omnibus doors and railway stations. If a set of women
chose to establish a newspaper and work it amongst
themselves, no law could be brought to bear against
them; and if they made it as philosophical as some,
or as gushing as others, they might enter into a
formidable rivalry with the old-established. They
would have a fair hearing, or rather reading; they
would not be 'nursed' nor hustled, and they would
get just as much success as they deserved. To be
sure, they do not yet sit on the Bench nor plead at
the Bar. They are not in Parliament, and they are
not even voters; while, as married women with
unfriendly husbands and no protection-order, they
have something to complain of, and wrongs which are
in a fair way of being righted if the shrieking sisterhood
does not frighten the world prematurely. But,
despite these restrictions, they have a very wide
circle wherein they can display their power, and witch
the world with noble deeds, if they choose&mdash;and as
some have chosen.</p>

<p>Of the representative 'working-women' in England,
we find none who have shrieked on platforms
nor made an hysterical parade of their work. Quietly,
and with the dignity which comes by self-respect and
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">69</a></span>
the consciousness of strength, they have done what it
was in their hearts to do; leaving the world to find
out the value of their labours, and to applaud or
deride their independence. Mrs. Somerville asked no
man's leave to study science and make herself a
distinguished name as the result; nor did she find
the need of any more special organization than what
the best books, a free press and first-rate available
teaching offered. Miss Martineau dived with more
or less success into the forbidding depths of the
'dismal science,' at a time when political economy
was shirked by men and considered as essentially
unfeminine as top-boots and tobacco; and she was
confessedly an advanced Liberal when to be a high
Tory was part of the whole duty of woman. Miss
Nightingale undertook the care of wounded soldiers
without any more publicity than was absolutely
necessary for the organization of her staff, and with
not so much as one shriek. Rosa Bonheur laughed
at those who told her that animal painting was
unwomanly, and that she had better restrict herself
to flowers and heads, as became the <i>jeune demoiselle</i>
of conventional life; but she did not publish her
programme of independence, nor take the world into
her confidence and tell them of her difficulties and
defiance. The Lady Superintendents of our own
various sisterhoods have organized their communities
and performed their works of charity with very faint
blare of trumpets indeed; and we might enumerate
many more who have quietly lived the life of action
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">70</a></span>
and independence of which others have only raved,
and who have done while their sisters shrieked.
These are the women to be respected, whether we
sympathize with their line of action or not; having
shown themselves to be true workers, capable of
sustained effort, and therefore worthy of the honour
which belongs to strength and endurance.</p>

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

<p>Every young man yet untried is only in the
position of every woman; and, granting that he has
not the deadweight of precedent and prejudice against
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">71</a></span>
him, he yet has to win his spurs before he can wear
them. But women want theirs given to them without
winning; and moreover, ask to be taught how to
wear them when they have got them. They want to
be received as masters before they have served their
apprenticeship, and to be put into office without
passing an examination or submitting to competition.
They scream out for a clear stage and favour superadded;
and they ask men to shackle their own feet,
like Lightfoot in the fairy tale, that they may then
be handicapped to a more equal running. They do
not remember that their very demand for help vitiates
their claim to equality; and that if they were what
they assume to be, they would simply take without
leave asked or given, and work out their own social
salvation by the irrepressible force of a concentrated
will and in the silence of conscious strength.</p>

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

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">72</a></span></p>

<h2><i>OTHERWISE-MINDED.</i></h2>

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

<p>An otherwise-minded person, if a man, is almost
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">73</a></span>
always a tyrant and a bully, with decided opinions
as to his right of making all about him dance to
his piping&mdash;his piping never giving one of their own
measures. If a woman, she is probably a superior
being subjected to domestic martyrdom while intended
by nature for a higher intellectual life,&mdash;doomed
to the drudgery of housekeeping while
yearning for the æsthetic and panting after the ideal.
She is generally dignified in her bearing and of a
cold, unappeasable discontent. She neither scolds
nor wrangles, though sometimes, no rule being without
its exception, she is peevish and captious and
degenerates into the commonplace of the <i>Naggleton</i>
type. But in the main she bounds herself to the
expression of her otherwise-mindedness in a stately
if dogged manner, and shows a serene disdain for her
opponents, which is a trifle more offensive than her
undisguised satisfaction with herself. Nothing can
move her, nothing beat her off her holding; but
then she offers no points of attack. She is what she
is on principle; and what can you say to an opposition
dictated by motives all out of reach of your
own miserable little groundling ideas? Where you
advocate expediency, she maintains abstract principles;
if you are lenient to weaknesses, she is stern
to sin; if you would legislate for human nature as it
is, she will have nothing less than the standard of
perfection; and when you speak of the absolutism of
facts, she argues on the necessity of keeping the ideal
intact, no matter whether any one was ever known to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">74</a></span>
attain to it or not. But if she finds herself in different
company from your own looser kind&mdash;say with
Puritans of a strongly ascetic caste&mdash;then she veers
round to the other side, on the ground of fairness; and
for the benefit of fanatics propounds a slip-shod easygoing
morality which shuffles beyond your own lines.
This she calls keeping out of extremes and discouraging
exaggeration. This latter manifestation
however, is not very frequently the case with women:
the otherwise-minded among them being almost
always of the rigid and ascetic class who despise the
pleasant little vanities, the graceful frivolities, the
loveable frailties which make life easy and humanity
delightful, and who take their stand on the loftiest, the
most unelastic, not to say the grimmest, ethics. They
have had it borne in on them that they are to defy
Baal and withstand; consequently they do defy him,
and they do withstand, at all four corners stoutly.</p>

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

<p>Take one of the class at a lecture on the higher
branches of a science of which he has not so much
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">75</a></span>
as thoroughly mastered the roots, and wherein this
higher analysis offers certain new and perhaps
startling results. It would seem that the sole
thing possible to him who is ignorant of the matter
in hand is to listen and believe; but your otherwise-minded
critic is not content with the tame modesty
of humbleness. What if the subject be over his
head, cannot he crane his neck and look? has
he not common-sense to guide him? and may he
not criticize in the block what he cannot dissect in
detail? At the least he can look grave, and say
something about the danger of a little knowledge;
and fallen man's dangerous pride of intellect; and his
absolute and eternal ignorance; and the lecturer not
making his meaning clear&mdash;as how should he when he
probably does not understand his own subject nor
what he wanted to say?&mdash;and what becomes of accepted
truths if such things are to be received? Be
sure of this, that otherwise-mindedness must sling its
stone, whether it knows exactly what it is aiming at
or not. It not unfrequently happens that the stone is
after the pattern of a boomerang, and comes back on
the slinger's own pate with sounding effect, convicting
him of ignorance if of nothing worse, and a love
of opposition so great that it destroys both his
power of perceiving truth and the sense of his own
incapacity.</p>

<p>But the otherwise-minded is nothing if not
superior to his company; and truth is after all relative
as well as multiform, and needs continual nice
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">76</a></span>
adjustment to make it balance fairly. The great
representative assembly of humanity must have its
independent members below the gangway who vote
with no party; and if we were all on the right side
the devil's advocate would have no work to do; so
that even otherwise-mindedness on the wrong side has
its uses, and must not be wholly condemned. For
the world would fare badly without its natural borers
and hole-pickers, its finders-out of weak places, its
stone walls to resist assertion and advance; and ants
and worms make good mould for garden flowers.</p>

<p>The constitutionally otherwise-minded are the
worst partizans in the world and never take up a
cause heartily&mdash;never with more than one hand, that
they may leave the other free for a bit of intellectual
prestidigitation if need be, when their audience changes
its character and complexion. The only time when
they are devoted adherents is if their own family is
decidedly in the opposite ranks, when they come out
from among them with scrip and spear, and go over
to the enemy without failing a single button of the
uniform. This is specially true of young people and
of women; both of whom call their natural love of
opposition by the name of religious principle or
moral duty. Youths just fresh from the schools,
bent on the regeneration of mankind and thinking
that they can do in a few years what society has
been painfully labouring to accomplish ever since the
first savage clubbed his neighbour for stealing his
hoard of roots or carrying off his own private squaw,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">77</a></span>
are sure to be intensely otherwise-minded and to
understand nothing of harmonious working with the
old plant. Red Republicans under the family flag
of purple and orange; free-thinkers in the church
where the paternal High and Dry holds forth on
Sundays on the principle of the divine inspiration of
the English translation bound in calf and lettered
<i>cum privilegio</i>; Romanists worshipping saints and
relics in the very heart of the Peculiar People who
put no trust in man nor works&mdash;we know them all;
ardent, enthusiastic, uncompromising and horribly
aggressive; with the down just shading their smooth
young chins, and the great book of human life barely
turned at the page of adolescence. Yet this is a
form of otherwise-mindedness which, though we laugh
at and are often annoyed by it, we must treat gently
on the whole. We cannot be cruel to a fervour,
even when insolently expressed, which we know the
world will tame so soon, and which at the worst is
often better than the dead level of conformity; even
though its zeal is not unmixed with conceit, and a
burning desire for the world's good is not free from
a few slumbering embers of self-laudation and the
'last infirmity.'</p>

<p>In a house inhabited by the otherwise-minded&mdash;and
one member of a family is enough to set the
whole ruck awry&mdash;nothing is allowed to go smoothly
or by default; nothing can be done without endless
discussion; and all the well-oiled casters of compromise,
good-nature, 'it does not signify,' &amp;c., by
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">78</a></span>
which life runs easily in most places are rusted or
broken. At table there is an incessant cross-fire of
objections and of arguments, more or less intemperately
conducted and never coming to a satisfactory conclusion.
There are so many places too, which have
been rubbed sore by this perpetual chafing, that a
stranger to the secrets of the domestic pathology is
kept not only in a fever of annoyance, but in an
ague of dread, at the temper shown about trifles,
and the deadly offence that seems to lurk behind
quite ordinary topics of conversation. Not knowing
all that has gone before, he is not prepared for the
present uncomfortable aspect of things, and in fact is
like a boy reading algebra, understanding nothing
of what he sees, though the symbolizing letters are
familiar enough to him. The family quarrel about
everything; and when they do not quarrel they
argue. If one wants to do something that must be
done in concert, the others would die rather than
unite; and days, seasons and wishes can never be
got to work themselves into harmonious coalition.
When they are out 'enjoying themselves'&mdash;language
is arbitrary and the sense of words not always clear&mdash;they
cannot agree on anything; and you may
hear them fire off scornful squibs of otherwise-mindedness
across the rows of prize flowers or in the
intervals of one of Beethoven's sonatas. And if they
cannot find cause for disagreement on the merits of
the subject before them, they find it in each other.
For otherwise-mindedness is like the ragged little
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">79</a></span>
princess in the German fairy tale, who proved her
royal blood by being unable to sleep on the top of
seven feather-beds&mdash;German feather-beds&mdash;beneath
all of which one single bean had been placed as the
test of her sensibility. Give it but the chance of a
scuffle, the ghost of a coat-tail to tread on, an
imaginary chicken-bone among the down, and you
may be sure that the opportunity will not be lost.
When we are on the look-out for beans we shall find
them beneath even seven feather-beds; and when
shillelahs abound there will never be wanting the
trail of a coat-tail across the path. So we find when
we have to do with the otherwise-minded who will
not take things pleasantly, and can never be got to
see either beauty or value in their surroundings.
Let one of these have a saint for a wife, and he will
tell you saints are bores and sinners the only house-mates
to be desired. Let him change his state, and
this time pick up the sinner in longing for whom he
has so often vexed the poor saint's soul, and he will
find domestic happiness to consist in the companionship
of a seraph of the most exalted kind. If he
has Zenobia, he wants Griselda; if Semiramis, King
Cophetua's beggar-maid. The dear departed, who was
such a millstone in times past, becomes the emblem
of all that is lovely in humanity when a shaft has to
be thrown at the partner of times present; and the
marriage that was notoriously ill-assorted is painted
in gold and rose-colour throughout, and its discords
are mended up into a full score of harmony
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">80</a></span>
when the new wife or the new husband has to be
snubbed, for no other reason than the otherwise-mindedness
which cannot agree with what it has.</p>

<p>Children and servants come in for their share of
this uncomfortable temper which reverses the old
adage about the absent, and which, so far from making
these in the wrong, transfers the burden of blame to
those present and conveniently forgets its former
litany of complaint. No one would be more surprised
than those very absent if they heard themselves
upheld as possessors of all possible virtues
when, according to their memory, they had been
little better than concretions of wickedness and folly
in the days of their subjection to criticism. They
need not flatter themselves. Could they return, or
if they do return, to the old place, they will be sure
to return to the old conditions; and the praise
lavished on them when they are absent, by way of
rebuke to those unlucky ones on the spot, will be
changed for their benefit into the blame and the rebuke
familiar to them. In fact no circumstances whatever
touch the central quality of the otherwise-minded.
They must have something to bite, to grumble at, to
rearrange, at least in wish, if not in deed. If only
they had been consulted, nothing would have gone
wrong that has gone wrong; and 'I told you so' is
the shibboleth of their order. It is gall and wormwood
to them when they are obliged to agree, and
when, for very decency's sake, they must praise what
indeed offers no points to condemn. But even when
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">81</a></span>
they get caught in the trap of unanimity they contrive
to say something quite unnecessary about evils which
no one was thinking of, and which have nothing to
do with the case in point. 'But' is their mystic
word, their truncated form of the Tetragrammaton
which rules the universe; and whatever their special
private denomination, they all belong in bulk to the</p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry"><div class="stanza">
<div class="line">Sect whose chief devotion lies</div>
<div class="line">In odd perverse antipathies;</div>
<div class="line">In falling out with that or this,</div>
<div class="line">And finding somewhat still amiss.</div>
</div></div></div>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">82</a></span></p>

<h2><i>LIMP PEOPLE.</i></h2>

<p>Vice is bad and malignant wickedness is worse, but
beyond either in evil results to mankind is weakness;
which indeed is the pabulum by which vice is fed
and the agent by which malignity works. If every
one in this world had a backbone, there would not
be so much misery nor guilt as there is now;
for we must give each individual of the 'cruel
strong' a large following of weaker victims; and it
would be easy to demonstrate that the progress of
nations has always been in proportion to the number
of stiff backbones among them. Yet unfortunately
limp people abound, to the detriment of society and
to their own certain sorrow; molluscs, predestined to
be the food of the stronger, with no power of self-defence
nor of self-support, but having to be protected
against outside dangers if they are to be preserved at
all;&mdash;and perhaps when you have done all that you
can do, not safe even then, and most likely not worth
the trouble taken about them. Open the gates for
but a moment, and they are swept up by the first
passer-by. Let them loose from your own sustaining
hand, and they fall abroad in a mass of flabby helplessness,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">83</a></span>
unable to work, to resist, to retain&mdash;mere
heaps of moral protoplasm, pitiable as well as contemptible;
perhaps pitiable because so contemptible.
See one of these poor creatures left a widow, if
a woman&mdash;turned out of his office, if a man&mdash;and
then judge of the value of a backbone by the
miserable consequences of its absence. The widow
is simply lost in the wilderness of her domestic
solitude, as much so as would be a child if set in the
midst of a pathless moor with no one to guide him
to the safe highway. She may have money and she
may have relations, but she is as poor as if she had
nothing better than parish relief; and unless some
one will take her up and manage everything for her
conscientiously, she is as lonely as if she were an
exile in a strange land. She has been so long used
to lean on the stronger arm of her husband, that
she cannot stand upright now that her support has
been taken from her. Her servants make her their
prey; her children tyrannize over her and ignore
her authority; her boys go to the bad; her girls
get fast and loud; all her own meek little ideas of
modesty and virtue are rudely thrust to the wall;
and she is obliged to submit to a family disorder
which she neither likes nor encourages, but which
she has not the strength to oppose nor the wisdom
to direct. She may be the incarnation of all saintly
qualities in her own person, but by mere want of
strength she is the occasion by which a very pandemonium
is possible; and the worst house of a
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">84</a></span>
community is sure to be that of a quiet, gentle,
molluscous little widow, without one single vicious
proclivity but without the power to repress or even
to rebuke vice in others.</p>

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

<p>In no manner are limp people to be depended on;
their very central quality being fluidity, which is
a bad thing to rest on. Take them in their family
quarrels&mdash;and they are always quarrelling among
themselves&mdash;you think they must have broken with
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">85</a></span>
each other for ever; that surely they can never forget
or forgive all the insolent expressions, the hard
words, the full-flavoured epithets which they have
flung at one another; but the next time you meet
them they are quite good friends again, and going on
in the old fluid way as if no fiery storms had lately
troubled the domestic horizon. Perhaps they have
induced you to take sides; if so, you may look out,
for you are certain to be thrown over and to have the
enmity of both parties instead of only one. They are
much given to this kind of thing, and fond of making
pellets for you to shoot; when, after the shot, they
disclaim and disown you. They speak against each
other furiously, tell you all the family secrets and
make them worse and greater than they really are.
If you are credulous for your own part you take
them literally; and if highly moral, you probably
act on their accusations in a spirit of rhadamanthine
justice, and the absolute need of rewarding sin
according to its sinfulness. Beware; their accusations
are baseless as the wind, and acting on them
will lead to your certain discomfiture. The only
safe way with limp people is never to believe what
they say; or, if you are forced to believe, never to
translate your faith into deeds nor even words;
never to commit yourself to partizanship in any form
whatever. They do not intend it, in all probability,
but by very force of their weakness limp people are
almost invariably untruthful and treacherous. By
the force too, of this same weakness, they are incapable
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">86</a></span>
of anything like true friendship, and in fact
make the most dangerous friends to be found. They
are so plastic that they take the shape of every hand
which holds them; and if you do not know them
well, you may be deceived by their softness of touch,
and think them sympathetic because they are fluid.
They leave you full of promises to hold all you have
told them sacred, and before an hour is out they
have repeated to your greatest enemy every word
you have said. They had not the faintest intention
of doing so when they left you, but they 'slop
about,' as the Americans say; and sloppy folk
cannot hold secrets. The traitors of life are the
limp, much more than the wicked&mdash;people who let
things be wormed out of them rather than intentionally
betray them. They repent likely enough;
Judas hanged himself; but of what good is their
repentance when the mischief is done? Not all the
tears in the world can put out the fire when once
lighted, and to hang oneself because one has betrayed
another will make no difference save in the number
of victims which one's own weakness has created.</p>

<p>Limp men are invariably under petticoat government,
and it all depends on chance and the run
of circumstance whose petticoat is dominant. The
mother's, for a long period; then the sisters'. If
the wife's, there is sure to be war in the camp belonging
to the invertebrate commander; for such a
man creates infinitely more jealousy among his womankind
than the most discursive and the most unjust.
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">87</a></span>
He is a power, not to act, but to be used; and the
woman who can hold him with the firmest grasp has
necessarily the largest share of good things belonging.
She can close or draw his purse-strings at
pleasure. She can use his name and mask herself
behind his authority at pleasure. He is the undying
Jorkins who is never without a Spenlow to set him
well up in front; and we can scarcely wonder that
the various female Spenlows who shoot with his bow
and manipulate his circumstances are jealous of each
other to a frantic pitch&mdash;regarding his limpness, as
they do, as so much raw material from which they
can spin out their own strength.</p>

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

<p>Another characteristic of limp people is their
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">88</a></span>
curious ingratitude. Give them nine-tenths of your
substance, and they will turn against you if you
refuse them the remaining tenth. Lend them all the
money you can spare, and lend in utter hopelessness
of any future day of reckoning, but refrain once for
your own imperative needs, and they will leave your
house open-mouthed at your stinginess. To be
grateful implies some kind of retentive faculty; and
this is just what the limp have not. Another characteristic
of a different kind is the rashness with which
they throw themselves into circumstances which they
afterwards find they cannot bear. They never know
how to calculate their forces, and spend the latter
half of their life in regretting what they had spent
the former half in endeavouring to attain, or to get
rid of, as it might chance. If they marry A. they
wish they had taken B. instead; as house-mistresses
they turn away their servants at short notice after
long complaint, and then beg them to remain if by
any means they can bribe them to stay. They know
nothing of that clear incisive action which sets men
and women at ease with themselves, and enables
them to bear consequences, be they good or ill, with
dignity and resignation.</p>

<p>A limp backboneless creature always falls foul
of conditions, whatever they may be; thinking the
right side better than the left, and the left so
much nicer than the right, according to its own
place of standing for the moment; and what heads
plan and hands execute, lips are never weary of
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">89</a></span>
bemoaning. In fact the limp, like fretful babies, do
not know what they want, being unconscious that
the whole mischief lies in their having a vertebral
column of gristle instead of one of bone. They
spread themselves abroad and take the world into
their confidence&mdash;weep in public and rave in private&mdash;and
cry aloud to the priest and the Levite passing
by on the other side (maybe heavily laden for their
own share) to come over and help them, poor
sprawling molluscs, when no man but themselves
can set them upright.</p>

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

<p>Not difficult to press into the service of any
cause whatever, they are the very curse of all causes
which they assume to serve. They collapse at the
first touch of persecution, of misunderstanding, of
harsh judgment, and fall abroad in hopeless panic at
the mere tread of the coming foe. Always convinced
by the last speaker, facile to catch and impossible to
hold, they are the prizes, the decoy ducks, for which
contending parties fight, perpetually oscillating between
the maintenance of old abuses and the advocacy
of dangerous reforms; but the side to which
they have pledged themselves on Monday they forsake
on Tuesday under the plea of reconversion.
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">90</a></span>
Neither can they carry out any design of their own,
if their friends take it in hand to over-persuade
them.</p>

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

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">91</a></span></p>

<h2><i>THE ART OF RETICENCE.</i></h2>

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

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">92</a></span>
Any one not a born fool can resolve to keep
silence on certain points, but it takes a master-mind to
be able to talk, and yet not tell. Silence indeed, self-evident
and without disguise, though a safe method,
is but a clumsy one, and to be tolerated only in very
timid or very young people. "Le silence est le parti
plus sûr pour celui qui se défie de soi-même," says
Rochefoucauld. So is total abstinence for him who
cannot control himself. Yet we do not preach total
abstinence as the best order of life for a wise and
disciplined person, any more than we would put
strong ankles into leg-irons, or forbid a rational
man to handle a sword. Besides, silence may be as
expressive, as tell-tale even, as speech; and at the
best there is no science in shutting one's lips and
sitting mute; though indeed too few people have
got even so far as this in the art of reticence, but
tell everything they know so surely as water flows
through a sieve, and are safe just in proportion to
their ignorance.</p>

<p>But there is art, the most consummate art, in
appearing absolutely frank, yet never telling anything
which it is not wished should be known; in
being pleasantly chatty and conversational, yet never
committing oneself to a statement nor an opinion
which might be used against one afterwards&mdash;<i>ars
celare artem</i> being a true maxim in keeping one's own
counsel as well as in other things. It is only after a
long acquaintance with this kind of person that you
find out he has been substantially reticent throughout,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">93</a></span>
though apparently so frank. Caught by his easy
manner, his genial talk, his ready sympathy, you have
confided to him not only all that you have of your
own, but all that you have of other people's; and it
is only long after, when you reflect quietly, undisturbed
by the magnetism of his presence, that you
come to the knowledge of how reticent he has been in
the midst of his seeming frankness, and how little reciprocity
there has been in your confidences together.
You know such people for years, and you never really
know more of them at the end than you did in the
beginning. You cannot lay your finger on a fact
that would in any way place them in your power;
and though you did not notice it at the time, and do
not know how it has been done now, you feel that
they have never trusted you, and have all along
carefully avoided anything like confidence. But you
are at their mercy by your own rashness, and if they
do not destroy you it is because they are reticent for
you as well as towards you; perhaps because they
are good-natured; perhaps because they despise you
for your very frankness too much to hurt you; but
above all things not because they are unable. How
you hate them when you think of the skill with
which they took all that was offered to them, yet
never let you see they gave back nothing for their
own part&mdash;rather by the jugglery of manner made
you believe that they were giving back as much as
they were receiving! Perhaps it was a little ungenerous;
but they had the right to argue that if
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">94</a></span>
you could not keep your own counsel you would not
be likely to keep theirs, and it was only kind at the
time to let you hoodwink yourself so that you might
not be offended.</p>

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

<p>Of all personal qualities this art of reticence is the
most important and most valuable for a professional
man to possess. Lawyer or physician, he must be
able to hold all and hear all without betraying by
word or look&mdash;by injudicious defence no more than
by overt treachery&mdash;by anger at a malicious accusation
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">95</a></span>
no more than by a smile at an egregious
mistake. His business is to be reticent, not exculpatory;
to maintain silence, not set up a defence
nor yet proclaim the truth. To do this well requires
a rare combination of good qualities&mdash;among which
are tact and self-respect in about equal amount&mdash;self-command
and the power of hitting that fine line
which marks off reticence from deception. No man
was ever thoroughly successful as either a lawyer or
physician who did not possess this combination; and
with it even a modest amount of technical skill can
be made to go a long way.</p>

<p>Valuable in society, at home the reticent are so
many forms of living death. Eyes have they and
see not; ears and hear not; and the faculty of
speech seems to have been given them in vain.
They go out and they come home, and they tell you
nothing of all they have seen. They have heard all
sorts of news and seen no end of pleasant things, but
they come down to breakfast the next morning as
mute as fishes, and if you want it you must dig out
your own information bit by bit by sequential, categorical
questioning. Not that they are surly nor
ill-natured; they are only reticent. They are really
disastrous to those who are associated with them,
and make the worst partners in the world in business
or marriage; for you never know what is going on,
nor where you are, and you must be content to walk
blindfold if you walk with them. They tell you
nothing beyond what they are obliged to tell; take
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">96</a></span>
you into no confidence; never consult you; never
arrest their own action for your concurrence; and
the consequence is that you live with them in the
dark, for ever afraid of looming catastrophes, and
more like a captive bound to the car of their fortunes
than like the coadjutor with a voice in the manner of
the driving and the right to assist in the direction of
the journey. This is the reticence of temperament,
and we see it in children from quite an early age&mdash;those
children who are trusted by the servants, and
are their favourites in consequence, because they tell
no tales; but it is a disposition that may become
dangerous unless watched, and that is always liable
to degenerate into falsehood. For reticence is just
on the boundary of deception, and it needs but a
very little step to take one over the border.</p>

<p>That obtrusive kind of reticence which parades
itself&mdash;which makes mysteries and lets you see there
are mysteries&mdash;which keeps silence and flaunts it in
your face as an intentional silence brooding over
things you are not worthy to know&mdash;that silence
which is as loud as words, is one of the most irritating
things in the world and can be made one of the
most insulting. If words are sharp arrows, this kind
of dumbness is paralysis, and all the worse to bear
because it puts it out of your power to complain.
You cannot bring into court a list of looks and
shrugs, nor make it a grievance that a man held his
tongue while you raved, and to all appearance kept
his temper when you lost yours. Yet all of us who
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">97</a></span>
have had any experience that way know that his
holding his tongue was the very reason why you
raved, and that if he had spoken for his own share
the worst of the tempest would have been allayed.
This is a common manner of tormenting with reticent
people who have a moral twist; and to fling
stones at you from behind the shield of silence by
which they have sheltered themselves is a pastime
that hurts only one of the combatants. Reticence,
though at times one of the greatest social virtues we
possess, is also at times one of the most disastrous
personal conditions.</p>

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

<p>Many people think it a fine thing to live with
their most intimate friends as if they would one day
become their enemies, and never let even their
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">98</a></span>
deepest affections strike root so far down as confidence.
They rearrange La Bruyère's famous
maxim, 'L'on peut avoir la confiance de quelqu'un
sans en avoir le c&oelig;ur,' and take it quite the contrary
way; but perhaps the heart which gives itself,
divorced from confidence, is not worth accepting;
and reticence where there is love sounds almost a
contradiction in terms. Indeed, the certainty of
unlimited confidences where there is love is one of
the strongest of all the arguments in favour of
general reticence. For in nine cases out of ten you
tell your secrets and open your heart, not only to
your friend, but to your friend's wife, or husband, or
lover; and secondhand confidence is rarely held
sacred if it can be betrayed with impunity.</p>

<p>By an apparent contradiction, reticent people
who tell nothing are often the most charming letter-writers.
Full of chit-chat, of descriptions dashed off
with a warm and flowing pen, giving all the latest
news well authenticated and not scandalous, and
breathing just the right amount of affection according
to the circumstances of the correspondents&mdash;a
naturally eloquent person who has cultivated the art
of reticence writes letters unequalled for charm of
manner. The first impression of them is superb,
enchanting, enthralling, like the bouquet of old
wine; but, on reconsideration, what have they said?
Absolutely nothing. This charming letter, apparently
so full of matter, is an answer to a great,
good, honest outpour wherein you laid bare that
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">99</a></span>
foolish heart of yours and delivered up your soul for
anatomical examination; and you looked for a reply
based on the same lines. At first delighted, you are
soon chilled and depressed by such a return, and you
feel that you have made a fool of yourself, and that
your correspondent is laughing in his sleeve at your
insane propensity to gush. So must it be till that
good time comes when man shall have no need to
defend himself against his fellows; when confidence
shall not bring sorrow nor trust betrayal; and when
the art of reticence shall be as obsolete as the art of
fence, or the Socratic method.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">100</a></span></p>

<h2><i>MEN'S FAVOURITES.</i></h2>

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

<p>There is always war between the women who are
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">101</a></span>
gentlemen's favourites and those who are not; and if
the last dislike the first, the first despise the last,
and go out of their way to provoke them; a thing
not difficult to do when a woman gives her mind to
it. A gentlemen's favourite is generally attacked
on the score of her morality, not to speak of her
manners, which are pronounced as bad as they can
be; while, how pretty soever men may think her,
her own sex decry her, and pick her to pieces with
such effect that they do not leave her a single charm.
She is assumed to be incapable of anything like real
earnestness of feeling; of anything like true womanliness
of sentiment; to be ignorant of the higher
rules of modesty; to be fast or sly, according to her
speciality of style; and if you listen to her dissector
you will find in time that she has every fault incidental
to a frail humanity, while her noblest virtue
is in all probability a 'kind of good nature' which
does not count for much. In return, the favourite
sneers at the wallflower, whom she calls stupid and
spiteful, and whom she rejoices to annoy by the excess
of her popularity; nothing pleasing her so much
as to make herself look worse than she is in the way
of men's liking&mdash;except it be to carry off the one tup
lamb belonging to a wallflower, and brand him as
of her own multitudinous herd. The quarrel is a
deadly one as regards the combatants, but it has very
little effect on the 'ring;' for, notwithstanding the
faults and frailties of which they hear so much, the
men flock round the one and make her the public
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">102</a></span>
favourite of the set. But, as the valid result, probably
the prize match of the circle chooses a stupid
wallflower for life; and the favourite who has ridiculed
the successful prizeholder scores of times, and
who would give ten years of her life to be in her
place, has to swallow her confusion as she best can,
and accept her discomfiture as if she liked it.</p>

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

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">103</a></span>
There are two kinds of men's favourites&mdash;the
bright women who amuse them and the sympathetic
ones who love them. But these last are of a doubtful,
what country people call 'chancy,' kind; women
who show their feelings too openly, who fall in love
too seriously, or perhaps unasked altogether, being
more likely to irritate and repel than to charm. But
the bright, animated women who know how to talk
and do not preach; who say innocent things in an
audacious way and audacious things in an innocent
way; who are clever without pedantry; frank without
impudence; quick to follow a lead when shown
them; and who know the difference between badinage
and earnestness, flirting and serious intentions&mdash;these
are the women who are liked by men and whose
social success in no wise depends on their beauty.</p>

<p>Of one thing the clever woman who wants to be a
men's favourite must always be careful&mdash;to keep that
half step in the rear which alone reconciles men to
her superiority of wit. She must not shine so much
by her own light as by contact with theirs; and her
most brilliant sallies ought to convey the impression
of being struck out by them rather than of being
elaborated by herself alone&mdash;suggested by what had
gone before, if improved on for their advantage.
Else she offends masculine self-love, never slow to
take fire, and gains an element of hardness and
self-assertion incompatible with her character of
favourite. Not that men dislike all kinds of self-assertion.
The irrepressible little woman with her
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">104</a></span>
trim waist and jaunty air, pert, pretty, defiant, who
laughs in the face of the burly policeman able to
crush her between his finger and thumb, and to
whom ropes and barriers are things to be skipped
over or dived under, as the case may be&mdash;she who is
all cackle and self-assertion like a little bantam, is also
most frequently a men's favourite, and encouraged in
her saucy forwardness.</p>

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

<p>These two classes of self-assertion are mere plays
which amuse men; but when it comes to a reality,
and is no longer a play&mdash;when a man is made to feel
small, useless, insignificant by the side of a woman&mdash;he
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">105</a></span>
meets them with something he neither likes nor
easily forgives; and if such a woman had the beauty
of Venus, she would not be a men's favourite of the
right sort; though some of course would admire her
and do their best to spoil and make a fool of her.</p>

<p>A men's favourite of the right sort must, among
other things, be well up in the accidence of flirting,
and know how to take it at exactly its proper
value. She must be able to accept broad compliments,
or more subtle love-making, without either
too serious an acceptance or too grave a deprecation.
This is a great art, and one that, more than any
other, puts men at their ease and sets the machinery
of pleasant intercourse in harmonious action. Never
to show whether she is really hit or not; never to
give a fop occasion for a boast nor an enemy room
for a pitying sneer; to take everything in good part
and to be as quick in giving as in receiving; never
to be off her guard; never to throw away her arms;
to conceal any number of foxes that may be gnawing
at her beneath her cloak&mdash;this kind of flirting, in
which most men's favourites are adepts, is an art
that reaches almost the dimensions of a science.
And it is just that in which your very intense, your
very earnest and sincere, women are utter failures.
They know nothing of badinage, but take everything
<i>au grand sérieux</i>; and when you mean to be simply
playful and complimentary, imagine you in tragic
earnest, and think themselves obliged to frown down
a compliment as a liberty; or else they accept it with
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">106</a></span>
a passionate pleasure that shows how deeply it has
struck.</p>

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

<p>Women are quite right in one thing, hard as it
seems to say it:&mdash;men's favourites, whom women
dislike and distrust, are not usually good for much
morally. They are often false, insincere, superficial,
and possibly with a very low aim in life. And the
men know all this, but forgive it for the sake of the
pleasantness and charm which is the grace that
shadows, or rather brightens, all the rest; having
oftentimes indeed a half-contemptuous tolerance for
the sins of their favourites as not expecting anything
better from them. Grant that they are false, that
they sail perilously near the wind, are shifty and
untrustworthy&mdash;what of that? They are not
favourites because of their good qualities, only because
of their pleasant ones; because of that subtle
<i>je ne sais quoi</i> of old writers which stands one in
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">107</a></span>
such good stead when one is at a loss for an analysis,
and which is the only term that expresses the strong
yet indefinite charm which certain women possess
for men. It is not beauty; it is not necessarily
cleverness taken in the sense of education, though it
must be a keenness if not depth of intellect, and
smartness if not the power of reasoning; it certainly
is not goodness; it is not always youth, nor yet
warmth of feeling&mdash;though all these things come in
as characteristics in their turn; but it is companionship
and the power of amusing. Still, what is it
that creates this power, this companionship? A
smart, pert, flippant little minx, as women call her,
with a shrill voice and a saucy air, may be the men's
favourite of one set; a refined, graceful woman,
speaking softly, and with pleading eyes, may be the
favourite of another; a third may be a blunt, off-handed
young person, given to speaking her mind so
that there shall be no mistake; a fourth may be a
silent and seemingly a shy woman, fond of sitting
out in retired places, and with a reputation for flirting
of a quiet kind that sets the woman's fingers
tingling.</p>

<p>There is no settled rule anyhow, and all kinds
have their special sphere of shining, according to
circumstances. But whatever they may be, they are
useful in their generation and valuable for such work
as they have to do. Society is a miserably dull
affair to men when there are no favourites of any
sort; where the womanhood in the room is of the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">108</a></span>
kind that herds together as if for protection, and
looks askance over its shoulder at the wolves in
coats and beards who prowl about the sheepfold of
petticoats; where conversation is monosyllabic in
form and restricted in substance; where pleasant
men who talk are considered dangerous, and fascinating
women who answer immoral; where the
matrons are grim and the maidens still in the bread-and-butter
stage of existence; and where young
wives take matrimonial fidelity to mean making
themselves disagreeable to every man but their husband,
on the plea that one never knows what may
happen, and that you cannot go on with what you
never begin.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">109</a></span></p>

<h2><i>WOMANLINESS.</i></h2>

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

<p>We call it womanliness when a lady of refinement
and culture overcomes the natural shrinking of sense,
and voluntarily enters into the circumstances of sickness
and poverty, that she may help the suffering in
their hour of need; when she can bravely go through
some of the most shocking experiences of humanity
for the sake of the higher law of charity; and we
call it womanliness when she removes from herself
every suspicion of grossness, coarseness, or ugliness,
and makes her life as dainty as a picture, as lovely as
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">110</a></span>
a poem. She is womanly when she asserts her own
dignity; womanly when her highest pride is the
sweetest humility, the tenderest self-suppression;
womanly when she protects the weaker; womanly
when she submits to the stronger. To bear in silence
and to act with vigour; to come to the front on some
occasions, to efface herself on others, are alike the
characteristics of true womanliness; as is also the
power to be at once practical and æsthetic, the careful
worker-out of minute details and the upholder of a
sublime idealism&mdash;the house-mistress dispensing bread
and the priestess serving in the temple. In fact, it
is a very Proteus of a word, and means many things
by turns; but it never means anything but what is
sweet, tender, gracious and beautiful. Yet, protean
as it is in form, its substance has hitherto been considered
simple enough, and its limits have been very
exactly defined; and we used to think we knew to a
shade what was womanly and what was unwomanly&mdash;where,
for instance, the nobleness of dignity ended
and the hardness of self-assertion began; while no
one could mistake the heroic sacrifice of self for the
indifference to pain and the grossness belonging to a
coarse nature:&mdash;which last is as essentially unwomanly
as the first is one of the finest manifestations of true
womanliness. But if this exactness of interpretation
belonged to past times, the utmost confusion prevails
at present; and one of the points on which society is
now at issue in all directions is just this very question&mdash;What
is essentially unwomanly? and, what are
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">111</a></span>
the only rightful functions of true womanliness?
Men and tradition say one thing, certain women say
another thing; and if what these women say is to
become the rule, society will have to be reconstructed
<i>ab initio</i>, and a new order of human life must begin.
We have no objection to this, provided the new
order is better than the old, and the modern phase
of womanhood more beautiful, more useful to the
community at large, more elevating to general
morality than was the ancient. But the whole
matter hangs on this proviso; and until it can be
shown for certain that the latter phase is to be
undeniably the better we will hold by the former.</p>

<p>There are certain old&mdash;superstitions must we call
them?&mdash;in our ideas of women, with which we
should be loth to part. For instance, the infinite
importance of a mother's influence over her children,
and the joy that she herself took in their companionship&mdash;the
pleasure that it was to her to hold a baby
in her arms&mdash;her delight and maternal pride in the
beauty, the innocence, the quaint ways, the odd
remarks, the half-embarrassing questions, the first
faint dawnings of reason and individuality, of the
little creatures to whom she had given life and
who were part of her very being&mdash;that pleasure and
maternal pride were among the characteristics we
used to ascribe to womanliness; as was also the
mother's power of forgetting herself for her children,
of merging herself in them as they grew older,
and finding her own best happiness in theirs. But
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">112</a></span>
among the advanced women who despise the tame
teachings of what was once meant by womanliness,
maternity is considered a bore rather than a blessing;
the children are shunted to the side when they come;
and ignorant undisciplined nurses are supposed to do
well for wages what mothers will not do for love.</p>

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

<p>It was also an old notion that rest and quiet and
peace were natural characteristics of womanliness;
and that life had been not unfairly apportioned between
the sexes, each having its own distinctive
duties as well as virtues, its own burdens as well as
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">113</a></span>
its own pleasures. Man was to go out and do battle
with many enemies; he was to fight with many
powers; to struggle for place, for existence, for
natural rights; to give and take hard blows; to lose
perhaps this good impulse or that noble quality in
the fray&mdash;the battle-field of life not being that
wherein the highest virtues take root and grow.
But he had always a home where was one whose
sweeter nature brought him back to his better self;
a place whence the din of battle was shut out;
where he had time for rest and spiritual reparation;
where a woman's love and gentleness and tender
thought and unselfish care helped and refreshed
him, and made him feel that the prize was worth
the struggle, that the home was worth the fight to
keep it. And surely it was not asking too much of
women that they should be beautiful and tender to
the men whose whole life out of doors was one of
work for them&mdash;of vigorous toil that they might be
kept in safety and luxury. But to the advanced
woman it seems so; consequently the home as a
place of rest for the man is becoming daily more
rare. Soon, it seems to us, there will be no such
thing as the old-fashioned home left in England.
Women are swarming out at all doors; running
hither and thither among the men; clamouring for
arms that they may enter into the fray with them;
anxious to lay aside their tenderness, their modesty,
their womanliness, that they may become hard and
fierce and self-asserting like them; thinking it a far
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">114</a></span>
higher thing to leave the home and the family to
take care of themselves, or under the care of some
incompetent hireling, while they enter on the manly
professions and make themselves the rivals of their
husbands and brothers.</p>

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

<p>Once women thought it no ill compliment that
they should be considered the depositaries of the
highest moral sentiments. If they were not held
the wiser nor the more logical of the two sections of
the human race, they were held the more religious,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">115</a></span>
the more angelic, the better taught of God, and the
nearer to the way of grace. Now they repudiate the
assumption as an insult, and call that the sign of
their humiliation which was once their distinguishing
glory. They do not want to be patient, self-sacrifice
is only a euphemism for slavish submission to manly
tyranny; the quiet peace of home is miserable monotony;
and though they have not come to the length
of renouncing the Christian virtues theoretically,
their theory makes but weak practice, and the
womanliness integral to Christianity is by no means
the rule of life of modern womanhood. But the
oddest part of the present odd state of things is the
curious blindness of women to what is most beautiful
in themselves. Granting even that the world has
turned so far upside down that the one sex does not
care to please the other, still, there is a good of itself
in beauty, which some of our modern women seem to
overlook. And of all kinds of beauty that which is
included in what we mean by womanliness is the
greatest and the most beautiful.</p>

<p>A womanly woman has neither vanity nor hardness.
She may be pretty&mdash;most likely she is&mdash;and she
may know it; for, not being a fool, she cannot help
seeing it when she looks at herself in the glass; but
knowing the fact is not being conscious of the possession,
and a pretty woman, if of the right ring, is
not vain, though she prizes her beauty as she ought.
And she is as little hard as vain. Her soul is not
given up to ribbons, but neither is she indifferent to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">116</a></span>
externals, dress among them. She knows that part
of her natural mission is to please and be charming,
and she knows that dress sets her off, and that men
feel more enthusiastically towards her when she is
looking fresh and pretty than when she is a dowdy
and a fright. And, being womanly, she likes the
admiration of men, and thinks their love a better
thing than their indifference. If she likes men she
loves children, and never shunts them as nuisances,
nor frets when forced to have them about her. She
knows that she was designed by the needs of the
race and the law of nature to be a mother; sent into
the world for that purpose mainly; and she knows
that rational maternity means more than simply
giving life and then leaving it to others to preserve
it. She has no newfangled notions about the animal
character of motherhood, nor about the degrading
character of housekeeping. On the contrary, she
thinks a populous and happy nursery one of the
greatest blessings of her state; and she puts her
pride in the perfect ordering, the exquisite arrangements,
the comfort, thoughtfulness and beauty of
her house. She is not above her <i>métier</i> as a woman;
and she does not want to ape the manliness she can
never possess.</p>

<p>She has always been taught that, as there are
certain manly virtues, so are there certain feminine
ones; and that she is the most womanly among
women who has those virtues in greatest abundance
and in the highest perfection. She has taken it to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">117</a></span>
heart that patience, self-sacrifice, tenderness, quietness,
with some others, of which modesty is one, are
the virtues more especially feminine; just as courage,
justice, fortitude, and the like, belong to men.</p>

<p>Passionate ambition, virile energy, the love of
strong excitement, self-assertion, fierceness, an undisciplined
temper, are all qualities which detract
from her ideal of womanliness, and which make her
less beautiful than she was meant to be. Consequently
she has cultivated all the meek and tender
affections, all the unselfishness and thought for
others which have hitherto been the distinctive
property of her sex, by the exercise of which they
have done their best work and earned their highest
place. She thinks it no degradation that she should
take pains to please, to soothe, to comfort the man
who, all day long, has been doing irksome work that
her home may be beautiful and her life at ease. She
does not think it incumbent on her, as a woman of
spirit, to fly out at an impatient word; to answer back
a momentary irritation with defiance; to give back a
Roland to his Oliver. Her womanliness inclines her
to loving forbearance, to patience under difficulties,
to unwearied cheerfulness under such portion of the
inevitable burden as may have been laid on her.
She does not hold herself predestined by nature to
receive only the best of everything, and deem herself
affronted where her own especial cross is bound on
her shoulders. Rather, she understands that she too
must take the rough with the smooth; but that, as
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">118</a></span>
her husband's way in life is rougher than hers, his
trials are greater, his burden is heavier, it is her duty&mdash;and
her privilege&mdash;to help him all she can with
her tenderness and her love; and to give back to
him at home, if in a different form, some of the care
he has expended while abroad to make her path
smooth.</p>

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

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">119</a></span></p>

<h2><i>SOMETHING TO WORRY.</i></h2>

<p>A humane condescension to instinct has lately supplied
ladies' lapdogs with an ingenious instrument of
mock torture, in the shape of an india-rubber head
which hops about the room on the smallest persuasion,
and squeaks shrilly when caught and worried.
The animal has thus the pleasure of mauling something
which seems to suffer from the process; while
in reality it hurts nothing, but expends its tormenting
energy on a quite unfeeling creature, whose
<i>raison d'être</i> it is to be worried and made to squeak.
It would be well for some of us if those people who
must have something to worry would be content
with a creature analogous to the lapdog's india-rubber
head. It would do just as well for them, and
it would save us who feel a great deal of real pain.
Tippoo Sahib was a wise man when he caused his
automaton to be made, in which a tiger seemed to be
tearing at the prostrate figure of a wooden European,
and the group gave out mingled growls and groans
at the turning of a handle in its side. It might
have been a dismal fancy perhaps; but the fancy was
better than the reality, and did quite as well for the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">120</a></span>
purpose, which was that the monarch should keep
himself in good humour by the charm of something
to worry.</p>

<p>There are few pains in life greater than the companionship
of one of those ill-conditioned people who
must have something to worry, and who are only
happy with a grievance. No fortune, no fair possessions
of love nor beauty, nor what one would think
must be the sources of intense happiness, are spells
to exorcise the worrying spirit&mdash;opiates to allay the
worrying fever. If in the midst of all they have to
make them blessed among the sons of men, there
hops the squeaking ball, in an instant every good
thing belonging to them is forgotten, and there is
nothing in heaven and earth but that one obtruding
grievance, that one intolerable annoyance. Nothing
is too small for them to make into a gigantic evil
and be offended at accordingly. They will not
endure with patience the minutest, nor the most inevitable,
of the crosses of life&mdash;things which every
one has to bear alike; which no one can help; and
concerning which the only wisdom is to meet them
with cheerfulness, tiding over the bad time as quietly
as possible till things take a turn. Not they. They
know the luxury of having something to complain
of; and they like to feel wronged. The wind is in
the east and they are personally injured; the rain
has come on a pleasure day, or has not come in a
seed-sowing week, and they fret grimly and make
every one about them uncomfortable, as if the weather
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">121</a></span>
were a thing to be arranged at will, and a disappointing
day were the result of wilful mismanagement.
Life is a burden to them and all about them because
the climate is uncertain and the elements are out of
human control. They make themselves the most
wretched of martyrs too, if they are in a country
they do not like; and they never do like the country
they are in. If down in a valley, they are suffocated;
if in the plains or on a table-land, they hate
monotony and long for undulations; if they are in a
wooded district, they dread the damp and worry
about the autumn exhalations; if on a moor, who
can live without green hills and hedgerow birds?
They are sorely exercised concerning clay and gravel;
and they find as many differences in the London
climate within a half-hour's walk as those who do
not worry would find between St. Andrews and
Mentone. But they are no nearer the right thing
wherever they go; and the people belonging to them
may as well bear the worry at Brompton as at
Hampstead, in Cumberland as in Cornwall, and so
save both trouble and expense.</p>

<p>These worrying folk never let a thing alone.
If they have once found a victim they keep him;
crueller in this than cats and tigers which play with
their prey only for a time, but finally give the <i>coup
de grâce</i> and devour it, bones and all. But worrying
folk never have done with their prey, be it person
or thing, and have an art of persistence&mdash;a way of
establishing a raw&mdash;that drives their poor victims
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">122</a></span>
into temporary insanity. This persistency indeed,
and the total indifference to the maddening effect
they produce, are the oddest parts of the performance.
They begin again for the twentieth time, just where
they left off; as fresh as if they had not done it
all before, and as eager as if you did not know
exactly what was coming. And it makes no kind of
difference to them that their worrying has no effect,
and that things go on exactly as before&mdash;exactly as
they would have done had there been no fuss about
them at all.</p>

<p>Granting however, that the old proverb about
constant dropping and inevitable wearing is fulfilled,
and that worrying accomplishes its end, it had better
have been let alone; for no one was ever yet worried
into compliance with an uncongenial or abandonment
of a favourite habit, who did not make the worrier
wish more than once that he had let matters remain
where he had found them. Imbued with the unfortunate
belief that all things and persons are to be
ordered to their liking, the worriers think themselves
justified in flying at the throat of everything
they dislike, and in making their dislikes peculiar
grievances. The natural inclination of boys to tear
their clothes and begrime their hands, to climb up
ladders at the peril of their necks, and to make
themselves personally unpleasant to every sense, is a
burden laid specially on them, if they chance to be
the parents of vigorous and robust youth. The
cares of their family are greater than the cares of any
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">123</a></span>
other family; and no one understands what they go
through, though every one is told pretty liberally.
Hint at the sufferings of others, and they think you
unfeeling and unsympathetic; try to cheer them,
and you affront them; unless you would offend them
for life, you must listen patiently to the repetition of
their miseries continually twanged on one string,
and feign the commiseration you cannot feel.</p>

<p>It is impossible for these people to go through
life in amity with all men. They may be very good
Christians theoretically; most likely they are; according
to the law of compensation by which theory
and practice so seldom go together; but the elementary
doctrines of peace and goodwill are beyond their
power of translation into deeds. They have always
some one who is Mordecai to them; some one connected
with them, whose habits, nature, whose very
being is a decided offence, and whom therefore they
worry without mercy. You never know these people
to be without a grievance. It may be husband or
brother, friend or servant, as it happens; but there
is sure to be some one whose existence puts them out
of tune, and on whom therefore they revenge the
discord by continual worrying. Yet they would be
miserable if their grievance were withdrawn, leaving
them for the time without a victim. It would be
only for a time indeed; for the exit of one would be
the signal for the entrance of another. The millennium
to these people would be intolerable dullness;
and if they were translated into heaven itself, they
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">124</a></span>
would of a certainty travesty the child's desire, and
ask for a little devil to worry, if not to play with.
Women are sad sinners in this way. Men who stay
at home and potter about get like them, but women,
who are naturally nervous, and whose lives are spent
in small things, are generally more worrying than
men; at least in daily life and at home. Indeed, the
woman who is more cheerful and hopeful than easily
depressed, and who does not worry any one, is the
exception rather than the rule, and to be prized as
one would prize any other rarity.</p>

<p>Children come in for a good deal of domestic
worrying; and under pretence of good management
and careful education are used as mamma's squeaking
heads, which lie ever handy for a chase. Any one
who has been in a family where the mother is of a
naturally worrying temper, and where a child has a
peculiarity, can appreciate to the full what the propensity
is. With substantial love at heart, the
mother leads the wretched little creature a life worse
than that of the typical dog; and makes of its
peculiarity, whatever that may be, a personal offence
which she is justified in resenting and never leaving
alone. And if it be so with her children, much
more is it with her husband, for whom her tenderness
is naturally less. Though concerning him she
evidently does not know her own mind; for when
she has worried into his grave the man who all his
life was such a trial to her, such a cross, perhaps
such a brute, she puts on widow's weeds of the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">125</a></span>
deepest hue, and worries her sons and daughters
with her uncomfortable reaction in favour of 'poor
papa,' whose virtues come to the front with a bound.
Or may be she continues the old song in a different
key, substituting compassion and a sublime forgiveness
in place of her former annoyance, but harping
all the same on the old strain and rasping the old
sores.</p>

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

<p>The person who undertakes a journey with constitutional
worriers ought to have nerves of iron and
a head of ice. They will leave nothing to the care
of ordinary rule, let nothing go by faith. The
luggage is always being lost, according to them;
accidents are certain to happen half a dozen times a
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">126</a></span>
day; and the beds are invariably damp. Their
mosquito bites are worse than any other person's;
and no one is plagued with small beasts as they are.
They worry all through the journey, till you wish
yourself dead twenty times at least before the month
is out; and when they come home, they tell their
friends they would have enjoyed themselves immensely
had they been allowed, but they were so
much annoyed and worried they lost half the pleasure
of the trip. So it will be to the end of time.
As children, fretful; as boys and girls, impatient
and ill-tempered; as men and women, worrying,
interfering, restless; as old people, peevish and
exacting&mdash;they will die as they have lived; and the
world about them will draw a deep breath of relief
when the day of their departure comes, and will feel
their atmosphere so much the lighter for their loss.
Poor creatures! They are conscious of not being
loved as they love, and as perhaps theoretically, they
deserve to be loved; but it would be impossible,
even by a surgical operation, to make them understand
the reason why; and that it is their own habit
of incessantly worrying which has chilled the hearts
of their friends, and made them such a burden to
others that their removal is a release and their absence
the promise of a life of peace.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">127</a></span></p>

<h2><i>SWEETS OF MARRIED LIFE.</i></h2>

<p>Marriage, which most girls consider the sole aim of
their existence and the end of all their anxieties, is
often the beginning of a set of troubles which none
among them expect, and which, when they come,
very few accept with the dignity of patience or the
reasonableness of common sense. Hitherto the man
has been the suitor, the wooer. It has been his <i>métier</i>
to make love; to utter extravagant professions; to
talk poetry and romance of an eminently unwearable
kind; and to swear that feelings, which by the very
nature of things it is impossible to maintain at their
present state of fever heat, will be as lasting as life
itself and never know subsidence nor diminution.
And girls believe all that their lovers tell them.
They believe in the absorption of the man's whole
life in the love which at the most cannot be more
than a part of his life; they believe that things will
go on for ever as they have begun, and that the fire
and fervour of passion will never cool down to the
more manageable warmth of friendship. And in
this belief of theirs lies the rock on which not a few
make such pitiful shipwreck of their married happiness.
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">128</a></span>
They expect their husbands to remain always
lovers. Not lovers only in the best sense, which of
course all happy husbands are to the end of time,
but lovers as in the old fond, foolish, courting days.
They expect a continuance of the romance, the poetry,
the exaggeration, the <i>petits soins</i>, the microscopic
attentions, the absorption of thought and interest,
the centralization of his happiness in her society, just
as in the days when she was still to be won, or, a
little later, when, being won, she was new in the
wearing. And as we said before, a wife's first trial,
and her greatest, is when her husband begins to leave
off this kind of fervid love-making and settles down
into the tranquil friend.</p>

<p>As with children so is it in the nature of
most women to require continual assurances. Very
few believe in a love which is not frequently expressed;
while the ability to trust in the vital
warmth of an affection that has lost its early
feverishness is the mark of a higher wisdom than
most of them possess. To make them thoroughly
happy a man must be always at their feet; and
they are jealous of everything&mdash;even of his work&mdash;that
takes him away from them, or gives him
occasion for thought and interest outside themselves.
They are rarely able to rise to the height of married
friendship; and if they belong to a reticent and
quiet-going man&mdash;a man who says 'I love you'
once for all, and then contents himself with living a
life of loyalty and kindness and not talking about
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">129</a></span>
it&mdash;they fret at what they call his coldness, and feel
themselves shorn of half their glory and more than
half their dues. They refuse to believe in that
which is not daily repeated. They want the incense
of flattery, the excitement of love-making; and if
these desires are not ministered to by their husbands,
the danger is that they will get some one else to
'understand' them and feed the sentimentality
which dies of inanition in the quiet serenity of
home. Moonlights; a bouquet of the earliest flowers
carefully arranged and tenderly presented; the
changing lights on the mountain tops; the exquisite
song of the nightingale at two o'clock in
the morning; all the rest of those vague and suggestive
delights which once made the meeting-places
of souls, and furnished occasion for delicious ravings,
become by time and use and the wearing realities of
business and the crowding pressure of anxieties,
puerile and annoying to the ordinary Englishman,
who is not a poet by nature. When all the world
was young by reason of his own youth, and the
fever of the love-making time was on him, he was
quite as romantic as his wife. But now he is
sobering down; life is fast becoming a very prosaic
thing to him; work is taking the place of pleasure,
ambition of romance; he pooh-poohs her fond remembrances
of bygone follies, and prefers his pipe in
the warm library to a station by the open window,
watching the sunset because it looks as it did on
<i>that</i> evening, and shivering with incipient catarrh.
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">130</a></span>
All this is very dreadful to her; women, unfortunately
for themselves, remaining young and
keeping hold much longer than do men.</p>

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

<p>Many a woman has gone into her own room and
had a 'good cry' because her husband called her by
her baptismal name, and not by some absurd nickname
invented in the days of their folly; or because,
pressed for time, he hurried out of the house without
going through the established formula of leave-taking.
The lover has merged in the husband; security has
taken the place of wooing; and the woman does not
take kindly to the transformation. Sometimes she
plays a dangerous game, and tries what flirting with
other men will do. If her scheme does not answer,
and her husband is not made jealous, she is revolted,
and holds herself that hardly-used being, a neglected
wife. She cannot accept as a compliment the quiet
trust which certain cool-headed men of a loyal kind
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">131</a></span>
place in their wives; and her husband's tolerance of
her flirting manner&mdash;which he takes to be manner only,
with no evil in it, and with which, though he may
not especially like it, he does not interfere&mdash;seems to
her indifference rather than tolerance. Yet the confidence
implied in this forbearance is in point of fact
a compliment worth all the pretty nothings ever invented;
though this hearty faith is just the thing which
annoys her, and which she stigmatizes as neglect. If
she were to go far enough she would find out her
mistake. But by that time she would have gone too
far to profit by her experience.</p>

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

<p>Men who have any real manliness however, do
not give in to this kind of thing; though there are
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">132</a></span>
some, as effeminate and gushing as women themselves,
who like this sloppy effusiveness of love and
carry it on into quite old age, fondling the ancient
grandmother with grey hair as lavishly as they had
fondled the youthful bride, and seeing no want of
harmony in calling a withered old dame of sixty and
upwards by the pet names by which they had called
her when she was a slip of a girl of eighteen. The
continuance of love from youth to old age is very
lovely, very cheering; but even 'John Anderson my
Jo' would lose its pathos if Mrs. Anderson had
ignored the difference between the raven locks and
the snowy brow.</p>

<p>All that excess of flattering and petting of which
women are so fond becomes a bore to a man if
required as part of the daily habit of life. Out in
the world as he is, harassed by anxieties of which
she knows nothing, home is emphatically his place
of rest&mdash;where his wife is his friend who knows his
mind; where he may be himself without the fear of
offending, and relax the strain that must be kept up
out of doors; where he may feel himself safe, understood,
at ease. And some women, and these by no
means the coldest nor the least loving, are wise enough
to understand this need of rest in the man's harder
life, and, accepting the quiet of security as part of the
conditions of marriage, content themselves with the
undemonstrative love into which the fever of passion
has subsided. Others fret over it, and make themselves
and their husbands wretched because they
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">133</a></span>
cannot believe in that which is not for ever paraded
before their eyes.</p>

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

<p>Wifehood, like all assured conditions, does not
need to be buttressed up; but a less certain position
must be supported from the outside, and an insecure
self-respect, an uncertain holding, must be perpetually
strengthened and reassured. Women who cannot
live happily without being made love to are more
like mistresses than wives, and come but badly off in
the great struggles of life and the cruel handling of
time. Placing all their happiness in things which
cannot continue, they let slip that which lies in their
hands; and in their desire to retain the romantic
position of lovers lose the sweet security of wives.
Perhaps, if they had higher aims in life than those
with which they make shift to satisfy themselves,
they would not let themselves sink to the level of
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">134</a></span>
this folly, and would understand better than they do
now the worth of realities as contrasted with appearances.
And yet we cannot but pity the poor, weak,
craving souls who long so pitifully for the freshness
of the morning to continue far into the day and
evening&mdash;who cling so tenaciously to the fleeting
romance of youth. They are taken by the glitter of
things&mdash;love-making among the rest; and the man
who is showiest in his affection, who can express it
with most colour, and paint it, so to speak, with the
minutest touches, is the man whose love seems to
them the most trustworthy and the most intense.
They make the mistake of confounding this show
with the substance, of trusting to pictorial expression
rather than to solid facts. And they make that other
mistake of cloying their husbands with half-childish
caresses which were all very well in the early days,
but which become tiresome as time goes on and the
gravity of life deepens. And then, when the man
either quietly keeps them off or more brusquely
repels them, they are hurt and miserable, and think
the whole happiness of their lives is dead, and all
that makes marriage beautiful at an end.</p>

<p>What is to be done to balance things evenly in
this unequal world of sex? What indeed, is to be
done at any time to reconcile strength with weakness,
and to give each its due? One thing at least is sure.
The more thoroughly women learn the true nature of
men, the fewer mistakes they will make and the less
unhappiness they will create for themselves; and the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">135</a></span>
more patient men are with the hysterical excitability,
the restless craving, which nature, for some purpose at
present unknown, has made the special temperament
of women, the fewer <i>femmes incomprises</i> there will be
in married homes and the larger the chance of married
happiness. All one's theories of domestic life come
down at last to the give-and-take system, to bearing
and forbearing, and meeting half way idiosyncrasies
which one does not personally share.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">136</a></span></p>

<h2><i>SOCIAL NOMADS.</i></h2>

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

<p>Another characteristic is their chronic state of
impecuniosity, and the desire of looking like the best
on a fixed income of slender dimensions. Hence
they are obliged to organize their expenditure on a
very narrow basis, and therefore live in boarding-houses,
<i>pensions</i>, or wherever good-sized rooms, a
sufficient table, and a constant current of society are
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">137</a></span>
to be had at small individual cost. As they are
people who travel much, they can speak two or three
languages, but only as those who have learnt by ear
and not by book. They know nothing of foreign
literature, and but little of their own, save novels
and the class which goes by the name of 'light.'
Indeed all the reading they accomplish is confined to
newspapers, magazines and novels. But at home,
and among those who have not been to Berlin, who
have never seen Venice, and to whom Paris is a
dream still to be realized, they assume an intimate
acquaintance with both the literature and the politics
of the Continent&mdash;especially the politics&mdash;and laugh
at the English press for its blindness and onesidedness.
They happen to know beyond all doubt how
this Correspondent was bought over with so much
money down; how that one is in the toils of such or
such a Minister's wife; why a third got his appointment;
how a fourth keeps his; and they could, if
they chose, give you chapter and verse for all they
say.</p>

<p>If they chance to have been in India some twenty
or thirty years ago, they will tell you why the
Mutiny took place, and how the change of Government
works; and they can put their fingers on all
the sore places of the Empire, beginning with the
distribution of patronage and ending with the deficiency
of revenue, as aptly as if they were on the spot
and had the confidence of the ruling officials. But
in spite of these little foibles they are amusing
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">138</a></span>
companions as a rule, if shallow and radically ill-informed;
and as it is for their own interest to be
good company, they have cultivated the art of conversation
to the highest pitch of which they are
capable, and can entertain if not instruct. When
they aim at instruction indeed, they are pretty sure
to miss the mark; and the social nomad who lays
down the law on foreign statesmen and politics, and
who speaks from personal knowledge, is just the one
authority not to be accepted.</p>

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

<p>Still, life seems to go easily enough among them.
They are all well-dressed and for the most part have
their tempers under control. Some of the women
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">139</a></span>
play well, and some sing prettily. There are always
to be found a sufficient number of the middle-aged
of either sex to make up a whist-table, where the
game is sound and sometimes brilliant; and there
are sure to be men who play billiards creditably and
with a crisp, clean stroke worth looking at. And
there are very often lively women who make amusement
for the rest. But these are smartly handled
behind backs, though they are petted in public and
undeniably useful to the society at large.</p>

<p>The nomadic widow is by some odd fatality generally
the widow of an officer, naval or military, to
whose rank she attaches an almost superstitious
value, thinking that when she can announce herself
as the relict of a major or an admiral she has given
an unanswerable guarantee and smoothed away all
difficulties. She may have many daughters, but
more probably she has only one;&mdash;for where olive-branches
abound nomadism is more expensive than
housekeeping, and to live in one's own house is less
costly than to live in a boarding-house. But of this
one daughter the nomadic widow makes much to the
community; and especially calls attention to her
simplicity and absolute ignorance of the evils so
familiar to the girls of the present day. And she
looks as if she expects to be believed. Perhaps credence
is difficult; the young lady in question having
been for some years considerably in public, where
she has learnt to take care of herself with a skill
which, how much soever it may be deserving of
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">140</a></span>
praise, can scarcely claim to be called ingenuous.
She has need of this skill; for, apparently, she and
her mother have no male relations belonging to
them, and if flirtations are common with the nomadic
tribe, marriages are rare. Poor souls; one cannot
but pity them for all their labour in vain, all their
abortive hopes. For though there is more society in
the mode of life they have chosen than they would
have had if they had lived quietly down in the
village where they were known and respected, and
where, who knows? the fairy prince might one day
have alighted&mdash;there are very few chances; and marriages
among 'the inmates' are as rare as winter
swallows.</p>

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

<p>A lady nomad of this kind, especially one with a
daughter, is strictly orthodox and cultivates with
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">141</a></span>
praiseworthy perseverance the society of any clergyman
who may have wandered into the community of
which she is a member. She is punctual in church-going;
and the minister is flattered by her evident
appreciation of his sermons, and the readiness with
which she can remember certain points of last
Sunday's discourse. As a rule she is Evangelically
inclined, and is as intolerant of Romanism on the one
hand as of Rationalism on the other. She has seen
the evils of both, she says, and quotes the state of
Rome and of Heidelberg in confirmation. She is as
strict in morals as in orthodoxy, and no woman who
has got herself talked about, however innocently,
need hope for much mercy at her hands. Her
Rhadamanthine faculty has apparently ample occasion
for exercise, for her list of scandalous chronicles
is extensive; and if she is to be believed, she
and her daughter are almost the sole examples of
a pure and untainted womanhood afloat. She is as
rigid too, in all matters connected with her social
status; and brings up her daughter in the same way
of thinking. By virtue of the admiral or the major,
at peace in his grave, they are emphatically ladies;
and, though nomadic, impecunious, homeless, and
<i>tant soit peu</i> adventuresses, they class themselves as
of the cream of the cream, and despise those whose
rank is of the uncovenanted kind, and who are
gentry, may be, by the grace of God only without
any Act of Parliament to help.</p>

<p>Sometimes the lady nomad is a spinster, not
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">142</a></span>
necessarily <i>passée</i>, though obviously she cannot be in
her first youth; still she may be young enough to
be attractive, and adventurous enough to care to
attract. Women of this kind, unmarried, nomadic
and still young, work themselves into every movement
afoot. They even face the perils and discomforts
of war-time, and tell their friends at home that
they are going out as nurses to the wounded. That
dash of the adventuress, of which we have spoken
before, runs through all this section of the social
nomads; and one wonders why some uncle or cousin,
some aunt or family friend, does not catch them up
in time.</p>

<p>If not attractive nor passably young, these
nomadic spinsters are sure to be exceedingly odd.
Constant friction with society in its most selfish
form, the absence of home-duties, the want of the
sweetness and sincerity of home love, and the habit of
change, bring out all that is worst in them and kill
all that is best. They have nothing to hope for from
society and less to lose; it is wearisome to look
amiable and sweet-tempered when you feel bitter and
disappointed; and politeness is a farce where the
fact of the day is a fight. So the nomadic spinster
who has lived so long in this rootless way that she
has ceased even to make such fleeting friendships as
the mode of life affords&mdash;has ceased even to wear the
transparent mark of such thin politeness as is required&mdash;becomes
a 'character' notorious in proportion
to her candour. She never stays long in one
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">143</a></span>
establishment, and generally leaves abruptly because
of a misunderstanding with some other lady, or
maybe because some gentleman has unwittingly
affronted her. She and the officer's widow are
always on peculiarly unfriendly terms, for she resents
the pretensions of the officer's daughter, and calls
her a bold minx or a sly puss almost within hearing;
while she throws grave doubts on the widow herself,
and drops hints which the rest of the community
gather up like manna, and keep by them, to much
the same result as that of the wilderness. But the
nomadic spinster soon wanders away to another temporary
resting-place; and before half her life is done
she becomes as well known to the heads of the
various establishments in her line as the taxgatherer
himself, and dreaded almost as much.</p>

<p>Nomads are generally remarkable for not leaving
tracks behind them. You see them here and there,
and they are sure to turn up at Baden-Baden or at
Vichy, at Scarborough or at Dieppe, when you least
expect them; but you know nothing about them in
the interim. They are like those birds which hybernate
at some place of retreat no one yet ever found;
or like those which migrate, who can tell where?
They come and they go. You meet and part and
meet again in all manner of unlikely places; and it
seems to you that they have been over half the world
since you last met, you meanwhile having settled
quietly to your work, save for your summer holiday
which you are now taking, and which you are enjoying
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">144</a></span>
as the nomad cannot enjoy any change that
falls to his lot. He is sated with change; wearied
of novelty; yet unable to fix himself, however
much he may wish it. He has got into the habit of
change; and the habit clings even when the desire
has gone. Always hoping to be at rest, always intending
to settle as years flow on, he never finds the
exact place to suit him; only when he feels the end
approaching, and by reason of old age and infirmity
is a nuisance in the community where formerly he
was an acquisition, and where too all that once gave
him pleasure has now become an insupportable
burden and weariness&mdash;only then does he creep away
into some obscure and lonely lodging, where he drags
out his remaining days alone, and dies without the
touch of one loved hand to smooth his pillow, without
the sound of one dear voice to whisper to him
courage, farewell, and hope. The home he did not
plant when he might is impossible to him now, and
there is no love that endures if there is no home
in which to keep it. And so all the class of social
nomads find when dark days are on them, and
society, which cares only to be amused, deserts them
in their hour of greatest need.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">145</a></span></p>

<h2><i>GREAT GIRLS.</i></h2>

<p>Nothing is more distinctive among women than the
difference of relative age to be found between them.
Two women of the same number of years will be
substantially of different epochs of life&mdash;the one faded
in person, wearied in mind, fossilized in sympathy;
the other fresh both in face and feeling, with sympathies
as broad and keen as they were when she was
in her first youth; with a brain still as receptive, as
quick to learn, a temper still as easy to be amused, as
ready to love, as when she emerged from the school-room
to the drawing-room. The one you suspect of
understating her age by half-a-dozen years or more
when she tells you she is not over forty; the other
makes you wonder if she has not overstated hers by
just so much when she laughingly confesses to the
same age. The one is an old woman who seems as
if she had never been young, the other 'just a great
girl yet,' who seems as if she would never grow old;
and nothing is equal between them but the number
of days each has lived.</p>

<p>This kind of woman, so fresh and active, so intellectually
as well as emotionally alive, is never anything
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">146</a></span>
but a girl; never loses some of the sweetest
characteristics of girlhood. You see her first as a
young wife and mother, and you imagine she has left
the school-room for about as many months as she has
been married years. Her face has none of that untranslatable
expression, that look of robbed bloom,
which experience gives; in her manner is none of the
preoccupation so observable in most young mothers,
whose attention never seems wholly given to the thing
on hand, and whose hearts seem always full of a secret
care or an unimparted joy. Brisk and airy, braving
all weathers, ready for any amusement, interested in
the current questions of history and society, by some
wonderful faculty of organizing seeming to have all
her time to herself as if she had no house cares and
no nursery duties, yet these somehow not neglected,
she is the very ideal of a happy girl roving through
life as through a daisy field, on whom sorrow has not
yet laid its hand and to whose lot has fallen no Dead
Sea apple. And when one hears her name and style
for the first time as a matron, and sees her with two
or three sturdy little fellows hanging about her slender
neck and calling her mamma, one feels as if nature
had somehow made a mistake, and that our slim and
simple-mannered damsel had only made-believe to
have taken up the serious burdens of life, and was
nothing but a great girl after all.</p>

<p>Grown older she is still the great girl she was ten
years ago, if her type of girlishness is a little changed
and her gaiety of manner a little less persistent. But
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">147</a></span>
even now, with a big boy at Eton and a daughter
whose presentation is not so far off, she is younger
than her staid and melancholy sister, her junior by
many years, who has gone in for the Immensities and
the Worship of Sorrow, who thinks laughter the sign
of a vacant mind, and that to be interesting and
picturesque a woman must have unserviceable nerves
and a defective digestion. Her sister looks as if all
that makes life worth living for lies behind her, and
only the grave is beyond; she, the great girl, with her
bright face and even temper, believes that her future
will be as joyous as her present, as innocent as her
past, as full of love and as purely happy. She has
known some sorrows truly, and she has gained such
experience as comes only through the rending of the
heart-strings; but nothing that she has passed
through has seared nor soured her, and if it has
taken off just the lighter edge of her girlishness it
has left the core as bright and cheery as ever.</p>

<p>In person she is generally of the style called
'elegant' and wonderfully young in mere physical
appearance. Perhaps sharp eyes might spy out here
and there a little silver thread among the soft brown
hair; and when fatigued or set in a cross light, lines
not quite belonging to the teens may be traced about
her eyes and mouth; but in favourable conditions,
with her graceful figure advantageously draped and
her fair face flushed and animated, she looks just a
great girl, no more; and she feels as she looks. It is
well for her if her husband is a wise man, and more
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">148</a></span>
proud of her than he is jealous; for he must submit
to see her admired by all the men who know her,
according to their individual manner of expressing
admiration. But as purity of nature and singleness
of heart belong to her qualification for great girlishness,
he has no cause for alarm, and she is as safe
with Don Juan as with St. Anthony.</p>

<p>These great girls, as middle-aged matrons, are
often seen in the country; and one of the things
which most strikes a Londoner is the abiding youthfulness
of this kind of matron. She has a large
family, the elders of which are grown up, but she
has lost none of the beauty for which her youth was
noted, though it is now a different kind of beauty
from what it was then; and she has still the air and
manners of a girl. She blushes easily, is shy, and
sometimes apt to be a little awkward, though always
sweet and gentle; she knows very little of real life
and less of its vices; she is pitiful to sorrow, affectionate
to her friends who are few in number, and
strongly attached to her own family; she has no
theological doubts, no scientific proclivities, and the
conditions of society and the family do not perplex
her. She thinks Darwinism and protoplasm dangerous
innovations; and the doctrine of Free Love
with Mrs. Cady Staunton's development is something
too shocking for her to talk about. She lifts her
calm clear eyes in wonder at the wild proceedings of
the shrieking sisterhood, and cannot for the life of her
make out what all this tumult means, and what the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">149</a></span>
women want. For herself, she has no doubts whatever,
no moral uncertainties. The path of duty is as
plain to her as are the words of the Bible, and she
loves her husband too well to wish to be his rival or
to desire an individualized existence outside his. She
is his wife, she says; and that seems more satisfactory
to her than to be herself a Somebody in the full light
of notoriety, with him in the shade as her appendage.</p>

<p>If inclined to be intolerant to any one, it is to those
who seek to disturb the existing state of things, or
whose speculations unsettle men's minds; those who,
as she thinks, entangle the sense of that which is clear
and straightforward enough if they would but leave it
alone, and who, by their love of iconoclasm, run the risk
of destroying more than idols. But she is intolerant
only because she believes that when men put forth
false doctrines they put them forth for a bad purpose,
and to do intentional mischief. Had she not this
simple faith, which no philosophic questionings have
either enlarged or disturbed, she would not be the
great girl she is; and what she would have gained in
catholicity she would have lost in freshness. For
herself, she has no self-asserting power, and would
shrink from any kind of public action; but she likes
to visit the poor, and is sedulous in the matter of
tracts and flannel-petticoats, vexing the souls of the
sterner, if wiser, guardians and magistrates by her
generosity which they affirm only encourages idleness
and creates pauperism. She cannot see it in that
light. Charity is one of the cardinal virtues of
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">150</a></span>
Christianity; accordingly, charitable she will be, in
spite of all that political economists may say.</p>

<p>She belongs to her family, they do not belong to
her; and you seldom hear her say 'I went' or 'I did.'
It is always 'we;' which, though a small point,
is a significant one, showing how little she holds
to anything like an isolated individuality, and how
entirely she feels a woman's life to belong to and be
bound up in her home relations. She is romantic too,
and has her dreams and memories of early days; when
her eyes grow moist as she looks at her husband&mdash;the
first and only man she ever loved&mdash;and the past seems
to be only part of the present. The experience which
she must needs have had has served only to make her
more gentle, more pitiful, than the ordinary girl, who
is naturally inclined to be a little hard; and of all her
household she is the kindest and the most intrinsically
sympathetic. She keeps up her youth for the
children's sake she says; and they love her more like
an elder sister than the traditional mother. They
never think of her as old, for she is their constant
companion and can do all that they do. She is fond of
exercise; is a good walker; an active climber; a bold
horsewoman; a great promoter of picnics and open-air
amusements. She looks almost as young as her
eldest daughter differentiated by a cap and covered
shoulders; and her sons have a certain playfulness in
their love for her which makes them more her brothers
than her sons. Some of them are elderly men before
she has ceased to be a great girl; for she keeps her
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">151</a></span>
youth to the last by virtue of a clear conscience, a
pure mind and a loving nature. She is wise in her
generation and takes care of her health by means
of active habits, fresh air, cold water and a sparing
use of medicines and stimulants; and if the dear soul
is proud of anything it is of her figure, which she
keeps trim and elastic to the last, and of the clearness
of her complexion, which no heated rooms have
soddened, no accustomed strong waters have clouded
nor bloated.</p>

<p>Then there are great girls of another kind&mdash;women
who, losing the sweetness of youth, do not
get in its stead the dignity of maturity; who are
fretful, impatient, undisciplined, knowing no more of
themselves nor human nature than they did when
they were nineteen, yet retaining nothing of that
innocent simplicity, that single-hearted freshness and
joyousness of nature which one does not wish to see
disturbed even for the sake of a deeper knowledge.
These are the women who will not get old and who
consequently do not keep young; who, when they
are fifty, dress themselves in gauze and rosebuds, and
think to conceal their years by a judicious use of
many paint-pots and the liberality of the hairdresser;
who are jealous of their daughters, whom
they keep back as much and as long as they can, and
terribly aggrieved at their irrepressible six feet of
sonship; women who have a trick of putting up
their fans before their faces as if they were blushing;
who give you the impression of flounces and ringlets,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">152</a></span>
and who flirt by means of much laughter and a long-sustained
giggle; who talk incessantly, yet have said
nothing to the purpose when they have done; and
who simper and confess they are not strong-minded
but only 'awfully silly little things,' when you try
to lead the conversation into anything graver than
fashion and flirting. They are women who never
learn repose of mind nor dignity of manner; who
never lose their taste for mindless amusements, and
never acquire one for nature nor for quiet happiness;
and who like to have lovers always hanging about
them&mdash;men for the most part younger than themselves,
whom they call naughty boys and tap playfully
by way of rebuke. They are women unable to
give young girls good advice on prudence or conduct;
mothers who know nothing of children; mistresses
ignorant of the alphabet of housekeeping;
wives whose husbands are merely the bankers, and
most probably the bugbears, of the establishment;
women who think it horrible to get old and to
whom, when you talk of spiritual peace or intellectual
pleasures, you are as unintelligible as if you
were discoursing in the Hebrew tongue. As a class
they are wonderfully inept; and their hands are
practically useless, save as ring-stands and glove-stretchers.
For they can do nothing with them, not
even frivolous fancy-work. They read only novels;
and one of the marvels of their existence is what they
do with themselves in those hours when they are not
dressing, flirting, nor paying visits.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">153</a></span>
If they are of a querulous and nervous type,
their children fly from them to the furthest corners of
the house; if they are molluscous and good-natured,
they let themselves be manipulated up to a certain
point, but always on the understanding that they are
only a few years older than their daughters; almost
all these women, by some fatality peculiar to themselves,
having married when they were about ten
years old, and having given birth to progeny with
the uncomfortable property of looking at the least
half a dozen years older than they are. This accounts
for the phenomenon of a girlish matron of this kind,
dressed to represent first youth, with a sturdy black-browed
débutante by her side, looking, you would
swear to it, of full majority if a day. Her only
chance is to get that black-browed tell-tale married
out of hand; and this is the reason why so many
daughters of great girls of this type make such
notoriously early&mdash;and bad&mdash;matches; and why,
when once married, they are never seen in society
again.</p>

<p>Grandmaternity and girlishness scarcely fit in
well together, and rosebuds are a little out of place
when a nursery of the second degree is established.
There are scores of women fluttering through society
at this moment whose elder daughters have been
socially burked by the friendly agency of a marriage
almost as soon as, or even before, they were introduced,
and who are therefore, no longer witnesses
against the hairdresser and the paint-pots; and
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">154</a></span>
there are scores of these same marriageable daughters
eating out their hearts and spoiling their pretty faces
in the school-room a couple of years beyond their time,
that mamma may still believe the world takes her to
be under thirty yet&mdash;and young at that.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">155</a></span></p>

<h2><i>SHUNTED DOWAGERS.</i></h2>

<p>The typical mother-in-law is, as we all know, fair
game for every one's satire; and according to the
odd notions which prevail on certain points, a man is
assumed to show his love for his wife by systematic
disrespect to her mother, and to think that her new
affections will be knit all the closer the more loosely
he can induce her to hold her old ones. The mother-in-law,
according to this view of things, has every
fault. She interferes, and always at the wrong time
and on the wrong side; she makes a tiff into a
quarrel and widens a coolness into a breach; she is
self-opinionated and does not go with the times;
she treats her daughter like a child and her son-in-law
like an appendage; she spoils the elder children
and feeds the baby with injudicious generosity; she
spends too much on her dress, wears too many rings,
trumps her partner's best card and does not attend
to the 'call;'&mdash;and she is fat. But even the well
abused mother-in-law&mdash;the portly old dowager who
has had her day and is no longer pleasing in the eyes
of men&mdash;even she has her wrongs like most of us;
and if she sometimes asserts her rights more aggressively
than patiently, she has to put up with many
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">156</a></span>
disagreeable rubs for her own part; and female tempers
over fifty are not notorious for humility.</p>

<p>Take the case of a widow with means, whose
family is settled. Not a daughter to chaperone, not
a son to marry; all are so far happily off her hands,
and she is left alone. But what does her loneliness
mean? In the first place, while her grief for her
husband is yet new&mdash;and we will assume that she
does grieve for him&mdash;she has to turn out of the house
where she has been queen and mistress for the best
years of her life; to abdicate state and style in favour
of her son and her son's wife whom she is sure not
to like; and, however good her jointure may be, she
must necessarily find her new home one of second-rate
importance. Perhaps however, the family
objects to her having a home of her own. Dear
mamma must give up housekeeping and divide her
time among them all; but specially among her
daughters, being more likely to get on well with
their husbands than with her sons' wives.</p>

<p>Dear mamma has means, be it remembered.
Perhaps she is a good natured soul, a trifle weak
and vain in proportion; who knows what evil-disposed
person may not get influence over her and
exercise it to the detriment of all concerned? She
has the power of making her will, and, granting that
she is proof against the fascinations of some fortune-hunting
scamp twenty years at the least her junior&mdash;may
be forty, who knows? do not men continually
marry their grandmothers if they are well paid for
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">157</a></span>
it?&mdash;and though every daughter's mamma is of
course normally superior to weakness of this kind,
yet accidents will happen where least expected.
And even if there is no possible fear of the fascinating
scamp on the look-out for a widow with a jointure,
there are artful companions and intriguing maids
who worm themselves into confidence and ultimate
power; sly professors of faiths dependent on filthy
lucre for their proof of divinity; and on the whole,
all things considered, dear mamma's purse and
person are safest in the custody of her children. So
the poor lady, who was once the head of a place,
gives up all title to a home of her own, and spends
her time among her married daughters, in whose
houses she is neither guest nor mistress. She is only
mamma; one of the family without a voice in the
family arrangements; a member of a community
without a recognized status; shunted; set aside; and
yet with dangers of the most delicate kind besetting
her path in all directions. Nothing can be much
more unsatisfactory than such a position; and none
much more difficult to steer through, without renouncing
the natural right of self-assertion on the
one hand, or certainly rasping the exaggerated susceptibilities
of touchy people on the other.</p>

<p>In general the shunted dowager has as little
indirect influence as direct power; and her opinion
is never asked nor desired as a matter of graceful
acknowledgment of her maturer judgment. If she is
appealed to, it is in some family dispute between her
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">158</a></span>
son and daughter, where her partizanship is sought
only as a makeweight for one or other of the belligerents.
But, so far as she individually is concerned,
she is given to understand that she is rococo, out of
date, absurd; that, since she was young and active,
things have entered on a new phase where she is
nowhere, and that her past experience is not of the
slightest use as things are nowadays. If she has
still energy enough left, so that she likes to have her
say and do her will, she has to pass under a continual
fire of opposition. If she is timid, phlegmatic,
indolent, or peaceable, and with no fight in her, she
is quietly sat upon and extinguished.</p>

<p>Dear mamma is the best creature in the world so
long as she is the mere pawn on the young folks'
domestic chess-board, to be placed without an
opposing will or sentiment of her own. She is the
'greatest comfort' to her daughter; and even her son-in-law
assents to her presence, so long as she takes
the children when required to do so, does her share of
the tending and more than her share of the giving,
but never presuming to administer nor to correct;
so long as she is placidly ready to take off all the
bores; listen to the interminable story-tellers; play
propriety for the young people; make conversation
for the helplessly stupid or nervous; so long
in fact as she will make herself generally useful to
others, demand nothing on her own account, and
be content to stand on the siding while the younger
world whisks up and down at express speed at its
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">159</a></span>
pleasure. Let her do more than this&mdash;let her sometimes
attempt to manage and sometimes object to be
managed&mdash;let her have a will of her own and seek to
impose it&mdash;and then 'dear mamma is so trying, so
fond of interfering, so unable to understand things;'
and nothing but mysterious 'considerations' induce
either daughter or son-in-law to keep her.</p>

<p>No one seems to understand the heartache it
must have cost her, and that it must be continually
costing her, to see herself so suddenly and completely
shunted. Only a year ago and she had pretensions
of all kinds. Time had dealt with her leniently, and
no moment had come when she had suddenly leaped
a gulf and passed from one age to another without
gradations. She had drifted almost imperceptibly
through the various stages into a long term of mature
sirenhood, remaining always young and pretty to her
husband. But now her widow's cap marks an era in
her life, and the loss of her old home a new and descending
step in her career. She is plainly held to
have done with the world and all individual happiness&mdash;all
personal importance; plainly told that she
is now only an interposing cushion to soften the
shock or ease the strain for others. But she does
not quite see it for her own part, and after having
been so long first&mdash;first in her society, in her home,
with her husband, with her children&mdash;it is a little
hard on her that she should have to sink down all at
once into a mere rootless waif, a kind of family
possession belonging to every one in turn and the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">160</a></span>
common property of all, but possessing nothing of
herself.</p>

<p>Of course dear mamma can make herself bitterly
disagreeable if she likes. She can taunt instead of
letting herself be snubbed. She can interfere where
she is not wanted; give unpalatable advice; make
unpleasant remarks; tell stinging truths; and in all
ways act up to the reputation of the typical mother-in-law.
But in general that is only when she has
kept her life in her own hands; has still her place
and her own home; remains the centre of the family
and its recognized head; with the dreadful power of
making innumerable codicils and leaving munificent
bequests. If she has gone into the Learism of living
about among her daughters, it is scarce likely that
she has character enough to be actively disagreeable
or aggressive.</p>

<p>On a first visit to a country-house it is sometimes
difficult to rightly localize the old lady on the sofa
who goes in and out of the room apparently without
purpose, and who seems to have privileges but no
rights. Whose property is she? What is she doing
here? She is dear mamma certainly; but is she a
personage or a dependent? Is she on a visit like the
rest of us? Is she the maternal lodger whose income
helps not unhandsomely? or, has she no private
fortune, and so lives with her son-in-law because she
cannot afford to keep house on her own account?
She is evidently shunted, whatever her circumstances,
and has no <i>locus standi</i> save that given by
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">161</a></span>
sufferance, convenience, or affection. Naturally she is
the last of the dowagers visiting at the house. She
may come before the younger women, from the
respect due to age; but her place is at the rear
of all her own contemporaries; not for the graceful
fiction of hospitality, but because she is one of
the family and therefore must give precedence to
strangers.</p>

<p>She is the movable circumstance of the home
life. The young wife, of course, has her fixed place
and settled duties; the master is the master;
the guests have their graduated rights; but the
shunted dowager is peripatetic and elastic as well as
shunted, and to be used according to general convenience.
If a place is vacant, which there is no one
else to fill, dear mamma must please to take it; if the
party is larger than there are places, dear mamma
must please stay away. She is assumed to have got
over the age when pleasure means pleasure, and to
know no more of disappointment than of skipping.
In fact, she is assumed to have got over all individuality
of every kind, and to be able to sacrifice
or to restrain as she may be required by the
rest.</p>

<p>Perhaps one of her greatest trials lies in the
silence she is obliged to keep, if she would keep
peace. She must sit still and see things done which
are gall and wormwood to her. Say that she has
been specially punctilious in habits, suave in bearing,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">162</a></span>
perhaps a trifling humbugging and flattering&mdash;she has
to make the best of her daughter's brusqueries and
uncontrolled tempers, of her son-in-law's dirty boots,
and the new religion of outspokenness which both
profess. Say that she has been accustomed to speak
her mind with the uncompromising boldness of a
woman owning a place and stake in the county&mdash;she
has to curb the natural indignation of her soul when
her young people, wiser in their generation or not
so securely planted, make friends with all sorts and
conditions, are universally sweet to everybody, hunt
after popularity with untiring zest, and live according
to the doctrine of angels unawares. The ways
of the house are not her ways, and things are not
ordered as she used to order them. People are
invited with whom she would not have shaken
hands, and others are left out whose acquaintance
she would have specially affected. All sorts of
subversive doctrines are afloat, and the old family
traditions are sure to be set aside. She abhors the
Ritualistic tendencies of her son-in-law, or she despises
his Evangelical proclivities; his politics are
not sound and his vote fatally on the wrong side;
and she laments that her daughter, so differently
brought up, should have been won over as she has
been to her husband's views. But what of that?
She is only a dowager shunted and laid on the shelf;
and what she likes or dislikes does not weigh a
feather in the balance, so long as her purse and
person are safe in the family, and her will securely
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">163</a></span>
locked up in the solicitor's iron safe, with no likelihood
of secret codicils upstairs. On the whole then, there
is a word to be said even for the dreadful mother-in-law
of general scorn; and, as the shunted dowager,
the poor soul has her griefs of no slight weight and
her daily humiliations bitter enough to bear.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">164</a></span></p>

<h2><i>PRIVILEGED PERSONS.</i></h2>

<p>We all number among our acquaintances certain
privileged persons; people who make their own
laws without regard to the received canons of society,
and who claim exemption from some of the moral and
most of the conventional obligations which are considered
binding on others. The privileged person
may be male or female; but is more often the latter;
sundry restraining influences keeping men in check
which are inoperative with women. Women indeed,
when they choose to fall out of the ranks and follow
an independent path of their own, care very little for
any influences at all, the restraining power which will
keep them in line being yet an unknown quantity.
As a woman then, we will first deal with the
privileged person.</p>

<p>One embodiment of the privileged person is she
whose forte lies in saying unpleasant things with
praiseworthy coolness. She aims at a reputation for
smartness or for honesty, according to the character
of her intellect, and she uses what she gets without
stint or sparing. If clever, she is noted for her
sarcastic speeches and epigrammatic brilliancy; and
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">165</a></span>
her good things are bandied about from one to the
other of her friends; with an uneasy sense however,
in the laughter they excite. For every one feels that
he who laughs to-day may have cause to wince
to-morrow, and that dancing on one's own grave is
by no means an exhilarating exercise.</p>

<p>No one is safe with her&mdash;not even her nearest
and dearest; and she does not care how deeply
she wounds when she is about it. But her victims
rarely retaliate; which is the oddest part of the
business. They resign themselves meekly enough
to the scalpel, and comfort themselves with the
reflection that it is only pretty Fanny's way, and
that she is known to all the world as a privileged
person who may say what she likes. It falls hard
though, on the uninitiated and sensitive, when they
are first introduced to a privileged person with
a talent for saying smart things and no pity to
speak of. Perhaps they have learned their manners
too well to retort in kind, if even they are able; and
so feel themselves constrained to bear the unexpected
smart, as the Spartan boy bore his fox. One sees
them at times endure their humiliation before folk
with a courageous kind of stoicism which would do
honour to a better cause. Perhaps they are too
much taken aback to be able to marshal their wits
for a serviceable counter-thrust; all they can do is
to look confused and feel angry; but sometimes, if
seldom, the privileged person with a talent for
sarcastic sayings meets with her match and gets paid
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">166</a></span>
off in her own coin&mdash;which greatly offends her,
while it rejoices those of her friends who have suffered
many things at her hands before. If she is rude in a
more sledge-hammer kind of way&mdash;rude through
what it pleases her to call honesty and the privilege
of speaking her mind&mdash;her attacks are easier to meet,
being more openly made and less dependent on
quickness or subtlety of intellect to parry.</p>

<p>Sometimes indeed, by their very coarseness they
defeat themselves. When a woman of this kind says
in a loud voice, as her final argument in a discussion,
'Then you must be a fool,' as we have known a
woman tell her hostess, she has blunted her own
weapon and armed her opponent. All her privileges
cannot change the essential constitution of things;
and, rudeness being the boomerang of the drawing-room
which returns on the head of the thrower, the
privileged person who prides herself on her honesty,
and who is not too squeamish as to its use, finds
herself discomfited by the very silence and forbearance
of her victim. In either case however, whether
using the rapier or the sledge-hammer, the person
privileged in speech is partly a nuisance and partly a
stirrer-up of society. People gather round to hear
her, when she has grappled with a victim worthy of
her steel, and is using it with effect. Yet unless her
social status is such that she can command a following
by reason of the flunkeyism inherent in human
nature, she is sure to find herself dropped before her
appointed end has come. People get afraid of her
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">167</a></span>
ill-nature for themselves, and tired of hearing the
same things repeated of others. For even a clever
woman has her intellectual limits, and is forced after
a time to double back on herself and re-open the old
workings. It is all very well, people think, to read
sharp satires on society in the abstract, and to fit the
cap as one likes. Even if it fits oneself, one can bear
the fool's crown with some small degree of equanimity
in the hope that others will not discover the
fact; but when it comes to a hand-to-hand attack,
with bystanders to witness, and oneself reduced to an
ignominious silence, it is another matter altogether;
and, however sparkling the gifts of one's privileged
friend, one would rather not put oneself in the way
of their exercise. So she is gradually shunned till
she is finally abandoned; what was once the clever
impertinence of a pretty person, or the frank insolence
of a cherubic hoyden, having turned by time
into the acrid humour of a grim female who keeps
no terms with any one, and with whom therefore, no
terms are kept. The pretty person given to smart
sayings with a sting in them and the cherubic hoyden
who allows herself the use of the weapon of honesty,
would do well to ponder on the inevitable end, when
the only real patent of their privileges has run out,
and they have no longer youth and beauty to plead
in condonation for their bad breeding.</p>

<p>Another exercise of peculiar privilege is to be
found in the matter of flirting. Some women are
able to flirt with impunity to an extent which would
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">168</a></span>
simply destroy any one else. They flirt with the
most delicious frankness, yet for all practical purposes
keep their place in society undisturbed and
their repute intact. They have the art of making
the best of two worlds, the secret of which is all
their own, yet which causes the weak to stumble and
the rash to fall. They ride on two horses at once,
with a skill as consummate as their daring; but the
feeble sisters who follow after them slip down between,
and come to grief and public disaster as their
reward. It is in vain to try to analyze the terms on
which this kind of privilege is founded. Say that
one pretty person takes the tone of universal relationship&mdash;that
she has an illimitable fund of sisterliness
always at command for a host of 'dear boys' of her
own age; or, when a little older and drawing near to
the borders of mature sirenhood, that she is a kind of
&oelig;cumenical aunt to a large congregation of well-looking
nephews&mdash;she may steer safely through the
shallows of this dangerous coast and land at last on
the <i>terra firma</i> of a respected old age; but let another
try it, and she goes to the bottom like a stone.
And yet the first has pushed her privileges as far as
they will go, while the second has only played with
hers; but the one comes triumphantly into port with
all colours flying, and the other makes shipwreck
and is lost.</p>

<p>And why the one escapes and the other goes
down is a mystery given to no one to fathom. But
so it is; and every student of society is aware of this
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">169</a></span>
strange elasticity of privilege with certain pretty
friends, and must have more than once wondered at
Mrs. Grundy's leniency to the flagrant sinner on the
right side of the square, coupled with her severity to
the lesser naughtiness on the left. The flirting form
of privilege is the most partial in its limitations of
all; and things which one fair patentee may do with
impunity, retaining her garlands, will cause another
to be stripped bare and chastised with scorpions; and
no one knows why nor how the difference is made.</p>

<p>Another self-granted privilege is the licence some
give themselves in the way of taking liberties, and
the boldness with which they force your barriers.
Indeed there is no barrier that can stand against
these resolute invaders. You are not at home, say,
to all the world, but the privileged person is sure
you will see him or her, and forthwith mounts your
stairs with a cheerful conscience, carrying his welcome
with him&mdash;so he says. Admitted into your
penetralia, the privileges of this bold sect increase,
being of the same order as the traditional ell on the
grant of the inch. They drop in at all times, and
are never troubled with modest doubts. They elect
themselves your 'casuals,' for whom you are supposed
to have always a place at your table; and you
are obliged to invite them into the dining-room when
the servant sounds the gong and the roast mutton
makes itself evident. They hear you are giving an
evening, and they tell you they will come, uninvited;
taking for granted that you intended to ask them,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">170</a></span>
and would have been sorry if you had forgotten.
They tack themselves on to your party at a fête and
air their privileges in public&mdash;when the man whom of
all others you would like best for a son-in-law is
hovering about, kept at bay by the privileged person's
familiar manner towards yourself and your
daughter.</p>

<p>Your friend would laugh at you if you hinted to
him that he might by chance be misinterpreted. He
argues that every one knows him and his ways; and
acts as if he held a talisman by which the truth could
be read through the thickest crust of appearances. It
would be well sometimes if he had this talisman, for
his familiarity is a bewildering kind of thing to
strangers on their first introduction to a house where
he has privileges; and it takes time, and some misapprehension,
before it is rightly understood. We
do not know how to catalogue this man who is so
wonderfully at ease with our new friends. We know
that he is not a relation, and yet he acts as one
bound by the closest ties. The girls are no longer
children, but his manner towards them would be a
little too familiar if they were half a dozen years
younger than they are; and we come at last to the
conclusion that the father owes him money, or that the
wife had been&mdash;well, what?&mdash;in the days gone by;
and that he is therefore master of the situation and
beyond the reach of rebuke. All things considered,
this kind of privilege is dangerous, and to be carefully
avoided by parents and guardians. Indeed,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">171</a></span>
every form of this patent is dangerous; the chances
being that sooner or later familiarity will degenerate
into contempt and a bitter rupture take the place of
the former excessive intimacy.</p>

<p>The neglect of all ordinary social observances is
another reading of the patent of privilege which certain
people grant themselves. These are the people
who never return your calls; who do not think themselves
obliged to answer your invitations; who do not
keep their appointments; and who forget their promises.
It is useless to reproach them, to expect from
them the grace of punctuality, the politeness of a
reply, or the faintest stirrings of a social conscience
in anything. They are privileged to the observance
of a general neglect, and you must make your account
with them as they are. If they are good-natured,
they will spend much time and energy in
framing apologies which may or may not tell. If
women, graceful, and liking to be liked without
taking much trouble about it, they will profess a
thousand sorrows and shames the next time they see
you, and play the pretty hypocrite with more or less
success. You must not mind what they do, they say
pleadingly; no one does; they are such notoriously
bad callers no one ever expects them to pay visits
like other people; or they are so lazy about writing,
please don't mind if they don't answer your letters
nor even your invitations: they don't mean to be rude,
only they don't like writing; or they are so dreadfully
busy they cannot do half they ought and are
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">172</a></span>
sometimes obliged to break their engagements; and so
on. And you, probably for the twentieth time, accept
excuses which mean nothing but 'I am a privileged
person,' and go on again as before, hoping for better
things against all the lessons of past experience.
How can you do otherwise with that charming face
looking so sweetly into yours, and the coquettish
little hypocrisies played off for your benefit? If that
charming face were old or ugly, things would be
different; but so long as women possess <i>la beauté
du diable</i> men can do nothing but treat them as
angels.</p>

<p>And so we come round to the root of the matter
once more. The privileged person, whose patent
society has endorsed, must be a young, pretty,
charming woman. Failing these conditions, she is a
mere adventuress whose discomfiture is not far off;
with these, her patent will last just so long as they
do. And when they have gone, she will degenerate
into a 'horror,' at whom the bold will laugh, the
timid tremble, and whose company the wise will
avoid.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">173</a></span></p>

<h2><i>MODERN MAN-HATERS.</i></h2>

<p>Among the many odd social phenomena of the present
day may be reckoned the class of women who are
professed despisers and contemners of men; pretty
misanthropes, doubtful alike of the wisdom of the
past and the distinctions of nature, but vigorously
believing in a good time coming when women are to
take the lead and men to be as docile dogs in their
wake. To be sure, as if by way of keeping the
balance even and maintaining the sum of forces in
the world in due equilibrium, a purely useless and
absurd kind of womanhood is more in fashion than
it used to be; but this does not affect either the accuracy
or the strangeness of our first statement; and
the number of women now in revolt against the
natural, the supremacy of men is something unparalleled
in our history. Both before and during
the first French Revolution the <i>esprits forts</i> in petticoats
were agents of no small account in the work of
social reorganization going on; but hitherto women,
here in England, have been content to believe as
they have been taught, and to trust the men to whom
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">174</a></span>
they belong with a simple kind of faith in their friendliness
and good intentions, which reads now like a
tradition of the past.</p>

<p>With the advanced class of women, the modern
man-haters, one of the articles of their creed is to
regard men as their natural enemies from whom they
must both protect themselves and be protected; and
one of their favourite exercises is to rail at them as
both weak and wicked, both moral cowards and personal
bullies, with whom the best wisdom is to have
least intercourse, and on whom no woman who has
either common-sense or self-respect would rely. To
those who get the confidence of women many
startling revelations are made; but one of the most
startling is the fierce kind of contempt for men, and
the unnatural revolt against anything like control or
guidance, which animates the class of modern man-haters.
That husbands, fathers, brothers should be
thought by women to be tyrannical, severe, selfish,
or anything else expressive of the misuse of strength,
is perhaps natural and no doubt too often deserved;
but we confess it seems an odd inversion of relations
when a pretty, frail, delicate woman, with a narrow
forehead, accuses her broad-shouldered, square-browed
male companions of the meaner and more cowardly
class of faults hitherto considered distinctively feminine.
And when she says with a disdainful toss of
her small head, 'Men are so weak and unjust, I have
no respect for them!' we wonder where the strength
and justice of the world can have taken shelter, for, if
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">175</a></span>
we are to trust our senses, we can scarcely credit her
with having them in her keeping.</p>

<p>On the other hand, the man-hater ascribes to her
own sex every good quality under heaven; and, not
content with taking the more patient and negative
virtues which have always been allowed to women,
boldly bestows on them the energetic and active as
well, and robs men of their inborn characteristics
that she may deck her own sex with their spoils.
She grants, of course, that men are superior in physical
strength and courage; but she qualifies the
admission by adding that all they are good for is to
push a way for her in a crowd, to protect her at
night against burglars, to take care of her on a
journey, to fight for her when occasion demands, to
bear the heavy end of the stick always, to work
hard that she may enjoy and encounter dangers that
she may be safe. This is the only use of their
lives, so far as she is concerned. And to women of
this way of thinking the earth is neither the Lord's,
nor yet man's, but woman's.</p>

<p>Apart from this mere brute strength which has
been given to men mainly for her advantage, she
says they are nuisances and for the most part shams;
and she wonders with less surprise than disdain at
those of her sisters who have kept trust in them;
who still honestly profess to both love and respect
them; and who are not ashamed to own that they rely
on men's better judgment in all important matters of
life, and look to them for counsel and protection
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">176</a></span>
generally. The modern man-hater does none of
these things. If she has a husband she holds him as
her enemy <i>ex officio</i>, and undertakes home-life as a
state of declared warfare where she must be in antagonism
if she would not be in slavery. Has she
money? It must be tied up safe from his control; not
as a joint precaution against future misfortune, but
as a personal protection against his malice; for the
modern theory is that a husband will, if he can get it,
squander his wife's money simply for cruelty and to
spite her, though in so doing he may ruin himself as
well. It is a new reading of the old saying about being
revenged on one's face. Has she friends whom he,
in his quality of man of the world, knows to be unsuitable
companions for her, and such as he conscientiously
objects to receive into his house? His
advice to her to drop them is an unwarrantable interference
with her most sacred affections, and she
stands by her undesirable acquaintances, for whom
she has never particularly cared until now, with the
constancy of a martyr defending her faith. If it
would please her to rush into public life as the noisy
advocate of any nasty subject that may be on hand&mdash;his
refusal to have his name dragged through the
mire at the instance of her folly is coercion in its
worst form&mdash;the coercion of her conscience, of her
mental liberty; and she complains bitterly to her
friends among the shrieking sisterhood of the harsh
restrictions he places on her freedom of action. Her
heart is with them, she says; and perhaps she gives
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">177</a></span>
them pecuniary and other aid in private; but she
cannot follow them on to the platform, nor sign her
name to passionate manifestoes as ignorant as they
are unseemly; nor tout for signatures to petitions on
things of which she knows nothing, and the true bearing
of which she cannot understand; nor dabble in
dirt till she has lost the sense of its being dirt at all.
And, not being able to disgrace her husband that she
may swell the ranks of the unsexed, she is quoted by
the shriekers as one among many examples of the
subjection of women and the odious tyranny under
which they live.</p>

<p>As for the man, no hard words are too hard for
him. It is only enmity which animates him, only
tyranny and oppression which govern him. There is
no intention of friendly guidance in his determination
to prevent his wife from making a gigantic blunder&mdash;feeling
of kindly protection in the authority which
he uses to keep her from offering herself as a mark
for public ridicule and damaging discussion, wherein
the bloom of her name and nature would be swept
away for ever. It is all the base exercise of an unrighteous
power; and the first crusade to be undertaken
in these latter days is the woman's crusade
against masculine supremacy.</p>

<p>Warm partizan however, as she is of her own
sex, the modern man-hater cannot forgive the woman
we spoke of who still believes in old-fashioned distinctions;
who thinks that nature framed men for
power and women for tenderness, and that the fitting,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">178</a></span>
because the natural, division of things is protection
on the one side and a reasonable measure of&mdash;we
will not mince the word&mdash;obedience on the other.
For indeed the one involves the other. Women of
this kind, whose sentiment of sex is natural and
healthy, the modern man-hater regards as traitors
in the camp; or as slaves content with their slavery,
and therefore in more pitiable case than those who,
like herself, jangle their chains noisily and seek
to break them by loud uproar.</p>

<p>But even worse than the women who honestly
love and respect the men to whom they belong, and
who find their highest happiness in pleasing them
and their truest wisdom in self-surrender, are those
who frankly confess the shortcomings of their own
sex, and think the best chance of mending a fault
is first to understand that it is a fault. With these
worse than traitors no terms are to be kept; and the
man-haters rise in a body and ostracize the offenders.
To be known to have said that women are weak;
that their best place is at home; that filthy matters
are not for their handling; that the instinct of
feminine modesty is not a thing to be disregarded in
the education of girls nor the action of matrons; are
sins for which these self-accusers are accounted
'creatures' not fit for the recognition of the nobler-souled
man-hater. The gynecian war between these
two sections of womanhood is one of the oddest
things belonging to this odd condition of affairs.</p>

<p>This sect of modern man-haters is recruited from
three classes mainly&mdash;those who have been cruelly
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">179</a></span>
treated by men, and whose faith in one half of the
human race cannot survive their own one sad experience;
those restless and ambitious persons who are
less than women, greedy of notoriety, indifferent
to home life, holding home duties in disdain, with
strong passions rather than warm affections, with
perverted instincts in one direction and none worthy
of the name in another; and those who are the
born vestals of nature, whose organization fails in the
sweeter sympathies of womanhood, and who are unsexed
by the atrophy of their instincts as the other
class are by the perversion and coarsening of theirs.
By all these men are held to be enemies and oppressors;
and even love is ranked as a mere matter of
the senses, whereby women are first subjugated and
then betrayed.</p>

<p>The crimes of which these modern man-haters
accuse their hereditary enemies are worthy of Munchausen.
A great part of the sorry success gained
by the opposers of the famous Acts has been due to
the monstrous fictions which have been told of men's
dealings with the women under consideration. No
brutality has been too gross to be related as an absolute
truth, of which the name, address, and all possible
verification could be given, if desired. And
the women who have taken the lead in this matter
have not been afraid to ascribe to some of the
most honourable names in the opposite ranks words
and deeds which would have befouled a savage.
Details of every apocryphal crime have been passed
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">180</a></span>
from one credulous or malicious matron to the other,
over the five o'clock tea; and tender-natured women,
horror-stricken at what they heard, have accepted as
proofs of the ineradicable enmity of man to woman
these unfounded fables which the unsexed so positively
asserted among themselves as facts.</p>

<p>The ease of conscience with which the man-hating
propagandists have accepted and propagated
slanderous inventions in this matter has been remarkable,
to say the least of it; and were it not for the
gravity of the principles at stake, and the nastiness of
the subject, the stories of men's vileness in connexion
with this matter, would make one of the absurdest
jest-books possible, illustrative of the credulity,
the falsehood, and the ingenious imagination of
women. We do not say that women have no just
causes of complaint against men. They have; and
many. And so long as human nature is what it is,
strength will at times be brutal rather than protective,
and weakness will avenge itself with more craft
than patience. But that is a very different thing
from the sectional enmity which the modern man-haters
assert, and the revolt which they make it their
religion to preach. No good will come of such a
movement, which is in point of fact creating the ill-feeling
it has assumed. On the contrary, if women
will but believe that on the whole men wish to be
their friends and to treat them with fairness and
generosity, they will find the work of self-protection
much easier and the reconcilement of opposing
interests greatly simplified.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">181</a></span></p>

<h2><i>VAGUE PEOPLE.</i></h2>

<p>The core of society is compact enough, made up as
it is of those real doers of the world's work who are
clear as to what they want and who pursue a definite
object with both meaning and method. But outside
this solid nucleus lies a floating population of vague
people; nebulous people; people without mental
coherence or the power of intellectual growth; people
without purpose, without aim, who drift with any
current anywhere, making no attempt at conscious
steering and having no port to which they desire to
steer; people who are emphatically loose in their
mental hinges, and who cannot be trusted with any
office requiring distinct perception or exact execution;
people to whom existence is something to be
got through with as little trouble and as much
pleasure as may be, but who have not the faintest
idea that life contains a principle which each man
ought to make clear to himself and work out at any
cost, and to which he ought to subordinate and
harmonize all his faculties and his efforts. These
vague people of nebulous minds compose the larger
half of the world, and count for just so much dead
weight which impedes, or gives its inert strength to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">182</a></span>
the active agents, as it chances to be handled. They
are the majority who vote in committees and all
assemblies as they are influenced by the one or two
clear-minded leaders who know what they are about,
and who drive them like sheep by the mere force of
a definite idea and a resolute will.</p>

<p>Yet if there is nothing on which vague people
are clear, and if they are not difficult to influence as
the majority, there is much on which they are
positive as a matter of private conviction. In opposition
to the exhortation to be able to give a reason
for the faith that is in us, they can give no reason
for anything they believe, or fancy they believe.
They are sure of the result; but the logical method
by which that result has been reached is beyond their
power to remember or understand. To argue with
them is to spend labour and strength in vain, like
trying to make ropes out of sea-sand. Beaten off at
every point, they settle down again into the old
vapoury, I believe; and it is like fighting with ghosts
to attempt to convince them of a better way. They
look at you helplessly; assent loosely to your propositions;
but when you come to the necessary
deduction, they double back in a vague assertion that
they do not agree with you&mdash;they cannot prove you
wrong but they are sure that they are right; and
you know then that the collapse is hopeless. If this
meant tenacity, it would be so far respectable, even
though the conviction were erroneous; but it is the
mere unimpressible fluidity of vagueness, the impossibility
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">183</a></span>
of giving shape and coherence to a floating
fog or a formless haze.</p>

<p>Vague as to the basis of their beliefs, they are
vaguer still as to their facts. These indeed are like a
ladder of which half the rungs are missing. They
never remember a story and they cannot describe
what they have seen. Of the first they are sure to
lose the point and to entangle the thread; of the last
they forget all the details and confound both sequence
and position. As to dates, they are as if lost in a wood
when you require definite centuries, years, months;
but they are great in the chronological generosity of
'about,' which is to them what the Middle Ages and
Classic Times are to uncertain historians. It is as
much as they can do to remember their own birthday;
but they are never sure of their children's; and
generally mix up names and ages in a manner that
exasperates the young people like a personal insult.</p>

<p>With the best intentions in the world they do
infinite mischief. They detail what they think they
have heard of their neighbours' sayings and doings;
but as they never detail anything exactly, nor twice
alike, by the time they have told the story to half a
dozen friends they have given currency to half a
dozen different chimeras which never existed save in
their own woolly imaginations. No repute is safe
with them, even though they may be personally good-natured
and anxious not to do any one harm; for
they are so vague that they are always setting afloat
exaggerations which are substantially falsehoods;
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">184</a></span>
and if you tell them the most innocent fact of any one
you would not injure for worlds&mdash;say your daughter
or your dearest friend&mdash;they are sure to repeat it
with additions and distortions, till they have made
it into a Frankenstein which no one now can subdue.</p>

<p>Beside this mental haziness, which neither sees
nor shapes a fact correctly, vague people are loose
and unstable in their habits. They know nothing of
punctuality at home nor abroad; and you are never
sure that you will not stumble on them at meal-times
at what time soever you may call. But worse than
this, your own meal-times, or any other times, are
never safe from them. They float into your house
uncertainly, vaguely, without purpose, with nothing
to say and nothing to do, and for no reason that you
can discover. And when they come they stay; and
you cannot for the life of you find out what they
want, nor why they have come at all. They invade
you at all times; in your busy hours; on your
sacred days; and sit there in a chaotic kind of
silence, or with vague talk which tires your brains
to bring to a focus. But they are too foggy to understand
anything like a delicate hint, and if you want
to get rid of them, you must risk a quarrel and
effectively shoulder them out. They will be no loss.
They are so much driftweed in your life, and you
can make no good of them for yourself nor others.</p>

<p>Even when they undertake to help you, they do
you more harm than good by the hazy way in which
they understand, and the inexactness with which
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">185</a></span>
they carry out, your wishes. They volunteer to get
you by favour the thing you want and cannot find
in the general way of business&mdash;say, something of a
peculiar shade of olive-green&mdash;and they bring you
in triumph a brilliant cobalt. They know the very
animal you are looking for, they say, with a confidence
that impresses you, and they send to your
stable a grey horse to match your bay pony; and if
you trust to their uncontrolled action in your affairs,
you find yourself committed to responsibilities you
cannot meet and whereby you are brought to the
verge of destruction.</p>

<p>They do all this mischief, not for want of goodwill
but for want of definiteness of perception; and
are as sorry as you are when they make 'pie' and
not a legible sheet. Their desire is good, but a vague
desire to help is equal to no help at all; or even
worse&mdash;it is a positive evil, and throws you wrong
by just so much as it attempts to set you straight.
They are as unsatisfactory if you try to help them.
They are in evil case, and you are philanthropically
anxious to assist them. You think that one vigorous
push would lift the car of their fortunes out of the
rut in which it has stuck; and you go to them with
the benevolent design of lending your shoulder as
the lever. You question them as to the central fact
which they wish changed; for you know that in
most cases misfortunes crystallize round one such
evil centre, which, being removed, the rest would go
well. But your vague friends can tell you nothing.
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">186</a></span>
They point out this little superficial inconvenience,
that small remediable annoyance, as the utmost they
can do in the way of definiteness; but when you
want to get to the core, you find nothing but a cloudy
complaint of general ill-will, or a universal run of
untoward circumstances with which you cannot
grapple. To cut off the hydra's heads was difficult
enough; but could even Hercules have decapitated
the Djinn who rose in a volume of smoke from the
fisherman's jar?</p>

<p>It is the same in matters of health. Only medical
men know to the full the difficulty of dealing with
vague people when it is necessary that these should be
precise. They can localize no pain, define no sensations.
If the doctor thinks he has caught hold of one
leading symptom, it fades away as he tries to examine
it; and, probe as he may, he comes to nothing more
definite than a pervading sense of discomfort, which
he must resolve into its causes as he best can. So
with their suspicions; and vague people are often
strangely suspicious and distrustful. They tell you
in a loose kind of way that such or such a man is a
rogue, such or such a woman no better than she
should be. You ask them for their data&mdash;they have
none; you suggest that they are mistaken, or at least
that they should hold themselves as mistaken until
they can prove the contrary, and you offer your
version of the reputations aspersed&mdash;your vague
friends listen to you amiably, then go back on their
charge and say, 'I am sure of it'&mdash;which ends the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">187</a></span>
conversation. They rely on their impression as
other people rely on known facts; and a foggy belief
is to them what a mathematical demonstration is to
the exact.</p>

<p>In business matters they are simply maddening.
They never have the necessary papers; they do not
answer letters; they confuse your questions and
reply at random or not at all; and they forget all
dates and details. When they go to their lawyer on
business they leave certificates and drafts behind
them locked up where no one can get at them; or if
they send directions and the keys, they tell the
servant to look for an oblong blue envelope in the
right-hand drawer, when they ought to have said a
square white parcel in the left. They give you vague
commissions to execute; and you have to find your
way in the fog to the best of your ability. They
say they want something like something else you
have never seen, and they cannot give an address
more exact than 'somewhere in Oxford Street.'
They think the man's name is Baker, or something
like that. Perhaps it is Flower; but the suggestion
of ideas ought to be intelligible to you, and is quite
near enough for them. They ask you to meet them
when they come up to London, but they do not give
you either the station or the train. You have to
make a guess as near as you can; and when you
reproach them, they pay you the compliment of
saying you are so clever, it was not necessary for
them to explain.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">188</a></span>
If they have any friends out in Australia or India,
they inquire of you, just returned, if you happened
to meet them? When you ask, Where were they
stationed?&mdash;they say they do not know; and when
you suggest that Madras and Calcutta are not in the
same Presidencies, that India is a large place and
Australia not quite like an English county, they look
helpless and bewildered, and drift away into the
vague geography familiar to them, 'somewhere in
India,' 'somewhere in Australia,' and 'I thought
you might have met them.' For geography, like
history, is one of the branches of the tree of knowledge
they have never climbed, and the fruits thereof
are as though they were not.</p>

<p>But apart from the personal discomforts to which
vague people subject themselves, and the absurdities
of which they are guilty, one cannot help speculating
on the spiritual state of folks to whom nothing is
precise, nothing definite, and no question of faith
clearly thought out. To be sure they may be great
in the realm of conviction; but so is the African
savage when he hears the ghosts of his ancestors
pass howling in the woods; so is the Assassin of the
Mountain, when he sees heaven open as he throws
himself on the spears of his enemies in an ecstacy of
faith, to be realized by slaughter and suicide. Convictions
based on imagination, unsupported by facts
or proofs, are as worthless in a moral as in a logical
point of view; but the vague have nothing better;
and whether as politicians or as pietists, though they
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">189</a></span>
are warm partizans they are but feeble advocates,
fond of flourishing about large generalities, but impossible
to be pinned to any point and unable to defend
any position. To those who must have something
absolute and precise, however limited&mdash;one inch of
firmly-laid foundation on which to build up the
superstructure&mdash;it is a matter of more wonder than
envy how the vague are content to live for ever in a
haze which has no clearness of outline, no definiteness
of detail, and how they can make themselves
happy in a name&mdash;calling their fog faith, and therewith
counting themselves blessed.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">190</a></span></p>

<h2><i>ARCADIA.</i></h2>

<p>Perhaps the largest amount of simple pleasure possible
to adult life is to be found in the first weeks of
the summer's holiday, when the hard-worked man of
business leaves his office and all its anxieties behind
him, and goes off to the sea-side or the hills for a
couple of months' relaxation. Everything is so fresh
to him, it is like the renewal of his boyhood; and if
he happens to have chosen a picturesque place, where
the houses stand well and make that ornate kind of
landscape to be found in show-places, he wonders
how it is that people who can stay here ever leave,
or tire of the beauties that are so delightful to him.
Yet he hears of this comfortable mansion, with its
park and well-appointed grounds, waiting for an
occupant; he is told of that fairyland cottage, embowered
in roses and jessamine, with a garden gay
and redolent with flowers, to be had for a mere song;
and he finds to his surprise that the owners of these
choice corners of Arcadia are only anxious to escape
from what he would, if he could, be only anxious to
retain.</p>

<p>In his first days this restlessness, this discontent,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">191</a></span>
is simply inconceivable. What more do they want
than what they have? Why, that field lying there
in the sunshine, dotted about with dun-coloured
cows which glow like glorified Cuyps in the evening
red, and backed by rock and tree and tumbling cascade,
would be enough to make him happy. He
could never weary of such a lovely bit of home
scenery; and if to this he adds a view of the sea, or
the crags and purple shadows of a mountain, he has
wherewith to make him blessed for the remainder of
his life. So he thinks while the smoke of London
and the sulphur of the Metropolitan still cling about
his throat, and the roar of the streets has not quite
died out of his ears.</p>

<p>The woods are full of flowers and the rarer kind
of insects, and he is never sated with the sea. There
is the trout stream as clear as crystal, where he is
sure of a rise if he waits long enough; the moors,
where he may shoot if he can put up a bird to shoot
at, are handy; and there is no end to the picturesque
bits just made for his sketch-book. Whatever his
tastes may make him&mdash;naturalist, sailor, sportsman,
artist&mdash;he has ample scope for their exercise; and ten
or eleven months' disuse gives him a greater zest now
that his playtime has come round again. At every
turn he falls upon little scenes which give him an odd
pleasure, as if they belonged to another life&mdash;things
he has seen in old paintings, or read of in quaint
books, long ago. Here go by two countrywomen,
whose red and purple dresses are touched by the sun
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">192</a></span>
with startling effect, as they wind up the grey hillside
road; there clatters past on horseback a group
of market-girls with flapping straw hats, and carrying
their baskets on their arms as if they were a set of
Gainsborough's models come back to life, who turn
their dark eyes and fresh comely faces to the London
man with frank curiosity as they canter on and
smother him with dust. Now he passes through the
midst of a village fair, where youths are dancing in a
barn to the sound of a cracked fiddle, and where,
standing under an ivied porch, a pretty young
woman unconsciously makes a picture as she bends
down to fill a little child's held-up pinafore with
sweets and cakes. The idyl here is so complete that
the contemplation of pence given for the accommodation
of the barn, or the calculation of shillings to
be spent in beer afterwards, or the likelihood that the
little one had brought a halfpenny in its chubby fist
for the good things its small soul coveted, does not
enter his mind.</p>

<p>The idea of base pelf in a scene so pure and innocent
would be a kind of high treason to the poetic
instinct; so the London man instinctively feels, glad
to recognize the ideal he is mainly responsible for
making. How can it be otherwise? A heron is
fishing in the river; a kingfisher flashes past; swallows
skim the ground or dart slanting above his
head; white-sailed boats glide close inshore; a
dragon-fly suns itself on a tall plumed thistle; young
birds rustle in and out of the foliage; distant cattle
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">193</a></span>
low; cottage children laugh; everywhere he finds
quiet, peace, absolute social repose, the absence of
disturbing passions; and it seems to him that all
who live here must feel the same delightful influences
as those which he is feeling now, and be as innocent
and virtuous as the place is beautiful and quiet.</p>

<p>But the charm does not last. Very few of us
retain to the end of our holidays the same enthusiastic
delight in our Arcadia that we had in the beginning.
Constant change of Arcadias keeps up the
illusion better; and with it the excitement; but a
long spell in one place, however beautiful&mdash;unless
indeed, it lasts so long that one becomes personally
fond of the place and interested in the people&mdash;is
almost sure to end in weariness. At first the modern
pilgrim is savagely disinclined to society and his
kind. All the signs and circumstances of the life he
has left behind him are distasteful. He likes to
watch the fishing-boats, but he abhors the steamers
which put into his little harbour, and the excursionists
who come by them he accounts as heathens and
accursed. Trains, like steamers, are signs of a reprobate
generation and made only for evildoers. He
has no reverence for the post, and his soul is not rejoiced
at the sight of letters. Even his daily paper
is left unopened, and no change of Ministry counts
as equal in importance with the picturesque bits he
wishes to sketch, or the rare ferns and beetles to be
found by long rambles and much diligence. By
degrees the novelty wears off. His soul yearns
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">194</a></span>
after the life he has left, and he begins to look for the
signs thereof with interest, not to say pleasure. He
watches the arrival of the boat, or he strolls up to
the railway station and speculates on the new comers
with benevolence. If he sees a casual acquaintance,
he hails him with enthusiastic cordiality; and in his
extremity is reduced to fraternize with men 'not in
his way.' He becomes peevish at the lateness of the
mail, and he reads his <i>Times</i> from beginning to end,
taking in even the agony column and the advertisements.
He finds his idyllic pictures to be pictures,
and nothing more. His Arcadians are no better
than their neighbours; and, as for the absence of
human passions&mdash;they are merely dwarfed to the dimensions
of the life, and are as relatively strong here as
elsewhere. The inhabitants of those flowery cottages
quarrel among each other for trifles which he would
have thought only children could have noticed; and
they gossip to an extent of which he in his larger
metropolitan life has no experience.</p>

<p>If he stays a few weeks longer than is the custom
of visitors, he is as much an object of curiosity and
surmise as if he were a man of another hemisphere;
and he may think himself fortunate if vague reports
do not get afloat touching his honesty, his morality,
or his sanity. Nine times out of ten, if a personage
at home, he is nobody here. He may be
sure that, however great his name in art and literature,
it will not be accounted to him for honour&mdash;it
will only place him next to a well-conditioned
mountebank; political fame, patent to all the world,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">195</a></span>
rank which no one can mistake, and money which
all may handle, alone going down in remote country
places and carrying esteem along with them. If a
wise man, he will forgive the uncharitable surmises
and the contempt of which he is the object, knowing
the ignorance of life as well as the purposeless
vacuity from which they spring; but they are not
the less unpleasant, and to understand a cause is
not therefore to rejoice in the effect.</p>

<p>As time goes on, he finds Arcadian poverty of
circumstance gradually becoming unbearable. He
misses the familiar conveniences and orderly arrangements
of his London life. He has a raging tooth,
and there is no dentist for miles round; he falls sick,
or sprains his ankle, and the only doctor at hand is a
half tipsy vet., or perhaps an old woman skilled in
herbs, or a bone-setter with a local reputation. His
letters go astray among the various hands to which
they are entrusted; his paper is irregular; <i>Punch</i> and
his illustrated weeklies come a day late, with torn
covers and greasy thumbmarks testifying to the love
of pictorial art which encountered them by the way.
He finds that he wants the excitement of professional
life and the changeful action of current
history. He feels shunted here, out of the world, in
a corner, set aside, lost. The rest is still delicious;
but he misses the centralized interest of metropolitan
life, and catches himself hankering after the old intellectual
fleshpots with the fervour of an exile, counting
the days of his further stay.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">196</a></span>
And then at last this rest, which has been so
sweet, becomes monotony, and palls on him. One
trout is very like another trout, barring a few ounces
of weight. When he has expatiated on his first find
of moon-fern, and dug it up carefully by the roots for
his own fernery at Bayswater, he is slightly disgusted
to come upon many tufts of moon-fern, and to know
that it is not so very rare hereabouts after all, and
that he cannot take away half he sees. Then too,
he begins to understand the true meaning of the
pictures, Gainsborough and others, which were so
quaintly beautiful to him in the early days. The
idyllic youths dancing in the beerhouse barn are
clumsy louts who are kept from the commission of
great offences mainly because they have no opportunity
for dramatic sins; but they indemnify themselves
by petty agricultural pilferings, and they get
boozy on small beer. The pretty market-girls cantering
by, are much like other daughters of Eve
elsewhere, save that they have more familiarity with
certain facts of natural life than good girls in town
possess, and are a trifle more easy to dupe. On the
whole, he finds human nature much the same in
essentials here as in London&mdash;Arcadia being the
poorer of the two, inasmuch as it wants the sharpness,
the deftness, the refinement of bearing given
by much intercourse and the more intimate contact
of classes.</p>

<p>By the time his holidays are over, our London
man goes back to his work invigorated in body, but
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">197</a></span>
quite sufficiently sated in mind to return with pleasure
to his old pursuits. He walks into the office decidedly
stouter than when he left, much sunburnt, and
unfeignedly glad to see them all again. It pleases
him to feel like MacGregor on his native heath once
more; though his native heath is only a dingy
office in the E.C. district, with a view of his rival's
chimney-pots. Still it is pleasant; and to know
that he is recognized as Mr. So-and-So of the City,
a safe man and with a character to lose, is more
gratifying to his pride than to have his quality
and standing discussed in village back-parlours and
tap-rooms, and the question whether he is a man
whom Arcadia may trust, gravely debated by boors
whose pence are not as his pounds. He speaks with
rapture of his delightful holiday, and extols the
virtues of Arcadia and the Arcadians as warmly as
if he believed in them. Perhaps he grumbles ostentatiously
at his return to harness; but in his heart he
knows it to be the better life; for, delicious as it is
to sit in the sun eating lotuses, it is nobler to weed
out tares and to plant corn.</p>

<p>The peace to which we are all looking is not to
be had in a Highland glen nor a Devonshire lane;
and beautiful as are the retreats and show-places to
which men of business rush for rest and refreshment&mdash;peaceful
as they are to look at, and happy as it
seems to us their inhabitants must be&mdash;it is all only
a matter of the eye. They are Arcadias, if one likes
to call them so; but while a man's powers remain to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">198</a></span>
him they are halting-places only, not homes; and he
who would make them his home before his legitimate
time, would come to a weariness which should cause
him to regret bitterly and often the collar which had
once so galled him, and the work at the hardness of
which he had so often growled.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">199</a></span></p>

<h2><i>STRANGERS AT CHURCH.</i></h2>

<p>If nothing is sacred to a sapper, neither is anything
sacred to temper, ostentation, vanity; and church
as little as any place else. In those thronged show-places
which have what is called a summer season,
church is the great Sunday entertainment; and when
the service is of an ornate kind, and the strangers'
seats are chairs placed at the west end, where in old
times the village choir or the village schoolboys used
to be, a great deal of human life goes on among the occupants;
and there are certain displays of temper and
feeling which make you ask yourself whether these
strangers think it a religious service, or an operatic, at
which they have come to assist, and whether what you
see about you is quite in consonance with the spirit of
the place or not. If the church is one that presents
scenic attractions in the manner in which the service
is conducted, there is a run on the front middle seats,
as if the ceremonies to be performed were so much
legerdemain or theatrical spectacle, of which you
must have a good view if you are to have your
money's worth; and the more knowing of the
strangers take care to be early in the field, and to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">200</a></span>
establish themselves comfortably before the laggards
come up. And when the best places are all filled,
and the laggards do come up, then the human comedy
begins.</p>

<p>Here trip in a couple of giggling girls, greatly
conscious of their youth and good looks, but still
more conscious of their bonnets. They look with
tittering dismay at the crowded seats all along the
middle, and when the verger makes them understand
that they must go to the back of the side aisle,
where they can be seen by no one but will only be
able to hear the service and say their prayers, they
hesitate and whisper to each other before they finally
go up, feeling that the great object for which they
came to church has failed them, and they had better
have stayed away and taken their chance on the
parade. When they speak of it afterwards, they say
it was 'awfully slow sitting there;' and they determine
to be earlier another time.</p>

<p>There sweep in a triad of superbly dressed women
with fans and scent-bottles, who disdainfully decline
the back places which the same verger, with a fine
sense of justice and beginning to fail a little in
temper, inexorably assigns them. They too confer
together, but by no means in whispers; and finally
elect to stand in the middle aisle, trusting to their
magnificence and quiet determination to get 'nice
places' in the pewed sittings. They are fine ladies
who look as if they were performing an act of condescension
by coming at all without special privileges
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">201</a></span>
and separation from the vulgar; as if they had an
inherent right to worship God in a superior and
aristocratic manner, and were not to be confounded
with the rest of the miserable sinners who ask for
mercy and forgiveness. They are accustomed to the
front seats everywhere; so why not in the place
where they say sweetly they are 'nothing of themselves,'
and pray to be delivered 'from pride, vainglory,
and hypocrisy'? That old lady, rouged and
dyed and dressed to represent the heyday of youth,
who also is supposed to come to church to say her
prayers and confess her sins, looks as if she would
be more at home at the green tables at Homburg
than in an unpretending chair of the strangers'
quarter in the parish church. But she finds her
places in her Prayer-book, if after a time and with
much seeking; and when she nods during the sermon,
she has the good-breeding not to snore. She too,
has the odd trick of looking like condescension when
she comes in, trailing her costly silks and laces
behind her; and by her manner she leaves on you
the impression that she was a beauty in her youth;
has been always used to the deference and admiration
of men; to servants and a carriage and purple and fine
linen; that all of you, whom she has the pleasure
of surveying through her double eyeglass, are nobodies
in comparison with her august self; and that
she is out of place among you. She makes her
demonstration, like the rest, when she finds that
the best seats are already filled and that no one
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">202</a></span>
offers to stir that she may be well placed; and if she
is ruthlessly relegated to the back, and stays there, as
she does sometimes, your devotions are rendered
uncomfortable by the unmistakable protest conveyed
in her own. Only a few humble Christians in
fashionable attire take those back places contentedly,
and find they can say their prayers and sing
their hymns with spiritual comfort to themselves,
whether they are shut out from a sight of the
decorations on the altar and the copes and stoles of
the officiating ministers, or are in full view of the
same. But then humble Christians in fashionable
attire are rare; and the old difficulty about the camel
and the needle's eye, remains.</p>

<p>Again, in the manner of following the services
you see the oddest diversity among the strangers at
church. The regular congregation has by this time
got pretty well in step together, and stands up or
sits down, speaks or keeps silence, with some kind of
uniformity; even the older men having come to
tolerate innovations which at first split the parish
into factions. But the strangers, who have come
from the north and from the south, from the east and
from the west, have brought their own views and
habits, and take a pride in making them manifest.
Say that the service is only moderately High&mdash;that is,
conducted with decency and solemnity but not going
into extremes; your left-hand neighbour evidently
belongs to one of the ultra-Ritualistic congregations,
and disdains to conceal her affiliation. If she be a
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">203</a></span>
tall woman, and therefore conspicuous, her genuflexions
are more profound than any other person's;
and her sudden and automatic way of dropping on
her knees, and then getting up again as if she were
worked by wires, attracts the attention of all about
her. She crosses herself at various times; and ostentatiously
forbears to use her book save at certain
congregational passages. She regards the service as
an act of priestly sacrifice and mediation, and her
own attitude therefore is one of acceptance, not
participation.</p>

<p>Your neighbour on your right is a sturdy Low
Churchman, who sticks to the ways of his father and
flings hard names at the new system. He makes his
protest against what he calls 'all this mummery'
visibly, if not audibly. He sits like a rock during
the occasional intervals when modern congregations
rise; and he reads his Prayer-book with unshaken
fidelity from first to last, making the responses,
which are intoned by the choir and the bulk of
the congregation, in a loud and level voice, and even
muttering <i>sotto voce</i> the clergyman's part after him.
In the creed, when the Ritualistic lady bends both
her knees and almost touches the ground, he simply
bobs his head, as if saluting Robinson or Jones;
and during the doxology, where she repeats the
obeisance, and looks as if she were speaking confidentially
to the matting, he holds up his chin and
stares about him. She, the pronounced Ritualist,
knows all the hymns by heart and joins in them
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">204</a></span>
like one well accustomed; but he, the Evangelist,
stumbles over the lines, with his <i>pince-nez</i> slipping
off his nose, satisfied if he catches a word here and
there so as to know something of his whereabouts.
She sings correctly all through; but he can do no
more than put in a fancy note on occasions, and perhaps
come in with a flourish at the end. There
are many such songsters at church who think
they have done all that can be demanded of them in
the way of congregational harmony if they hit the
last two notes fairly, and join the pack at the Amen.</p>

<p>Sometimes the old-fashioned worshippers get put
into the front row, and there, without prayer-stool
or chair-back against which to steady themselves,
find kneeling an impossibility; so they either sit
with their elbows on their knees, or betray associations
with square pews and comfortable corners at home,
by turning their backs to the altar, and burying their
faces in their rush-bottomed seats. The Ritualist
would have knelt as straight as an arrow and without
quivering once all through.</p>

<p>People are generally supposed to go to church
for devotion, but, if they do, devotion and vanity are
twin sisters. Look at the number of pretty hands
which find it absolutely necessary to take off their
gloves, and which are always wandering up to the
face in becoming gestures and with the right curve.
Or, if the hands are only mediocre, the rings are
handsome; and diamonds sparkle as well in a
church as anywhere else. And though one vows
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">205</a></span>
to renounce the lusts of the world as well as of the
flesh, there is no use in having diamonds if one's
neighbours don't see them. Look too, at the pretty
faces which know so well the effect produced by a
little paint and powder beneath a softening mask of
thin white lace. Is this their best confession of sin?
And again, those elaborate toilets in which women
come to pray for forgiveness and humility; are they
for the honour of God? It strikes us that the honour
of God has very little to do with that formidable,
and may be unpaid, milliner's bill, but the admiration
of men and the envy of other women a great deal.
The Pope is wise to make all ladies go to his religious
festivals without bonnets and in rigid black. It
narrows the margin of coquetry somewhat, if it does
not altogether remove it. But dress ever was, and
ever will be, as webs spread in the way of woman's
righteousness; and we have no doubt that Eve frilled
her apron of fig-leaves before she had worn it a day.</p>

<p>All sorts of characters throng these strangers'
seats; and some are typical. There are the men of
low stature and awkward bearing, with stubbly chins,
who stand in constrained positions and wear no
gloves. They look like grooms; they may be clerks;
but they are the men on whom <i>Punch</i> has had his
eye for many years now, when he portrays the British
snob and diversifies him with the more modern cad.
Then there are the well-dressed, well set-up gentlemen
of military appearance, who carry their umbrellas
under their arms as if they were swords, and are
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">206</a></span>
evidently accustomed to have their own will and
command other people's; and the men who look like
portraits of Montague Tigg, in cheap kid gloves and
suspicious jewelry, who pray into their hats, or make
believe to pray, while their bold eyes rove all about,
fixing themselves most pertinaciously on the old lady
with the diamonds and the giggling young ones with
the paint. There is the bride in a white bonnet and
light silk dress, who carries an ivory-backed Church
Service with the most transparent attempts at unconsciousness,
and the bridegroom who lounges after her
and looks sheepish; sometimes it is the bride who
straggles bashfully, and the groom who boldly leads
the way. There is the young widow with new weeds;
the sedate mother of many daughters; paterfamilias,
with his numerous olive-branches, leading on his arm
the exuberant wife of his bosom flushed with coming
up the hill; the walking tourist, whose respect for
Sunday goes to the length of a clean collar and a
clothes-brush; and the female traveller, economical
of luggage, who wears her waterproof and sea-side
hat, and is independent and not ashamed. There
are the people who come for simple distraction,
because Sunday is such a dull day in a strange place,
and there is nothing else to do; and those who come
because it is respectable and the right thing, and they
are accustomed to it; those who come to see and be
seen; and those&mdash;the select few, the simple yearning
souls&mdash;who come because they do honestly feel the
church to be the very House of God, and that prayer
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">207</a></span>
with its confession of sin helps them to live better
lives. But, good or bad, vain or simple, arrogant or
humble, they all sweep out when the last word is
said, and the cottagers and small townsfolk stand at
their doors to see them pass&mdash;'the quality coming
out of church' counting as <i>their</i> Sunday sight. The
women get ideas in millinery from the show, and
discuss with each other what is worn this year, and
how ever can they turn their old gowns into garments
that shall imitate the last effort of a Court milliner's
genius&mdash;the result of many sleepless nights? Fine
ladies ridicule these clumsy apings of their humble
sisters, and long for the old sumptuary laws to be in
force on all below them; but if Sunday is the field-day
and church the parade-ground of the strangers,
we cannot wonder if the natives try to participate in
the amusement. If Lady Jane likes to confess her
shame and humiliation on a velvet cushion and in
silk attire, can we reasonably blame Joan that her soul
hankers after a hassock of felt, and a penance-sheet
of homespun cut according to my lady's pattern?</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">208</a></span></p>

<h2><i>IN SICKNESS.</i></h2>

<p>Life not being holiday-making throughout, we have
to allow for the bad half-hours that must come to us;
and, if we are wise, we make provision to pass them
with as little annoyance as possible. And of all the
bad half-hours to which we are destined, those to be
spent in sickness need the greatest amount of care to
render them endurable. Without going to the length
of Michelet's favourite theory, which sees in every
woman nothing but an invalid more or less severely
afflicted according to individual temperament, but
always under the influence of diseased nerves and
controlled by sickly fancies, there is no doubt that
women suffer very much more than men; while their
patience under physical ailments is one of the traditional
graces with which they are credited. Where
men fume and fret at the interruption to their lives
brought about by a fit of illness, calculating anxiously
the loss they are sustaining during the forced inaction
of their convalescence, women submit resignedly, and
make the best of the inevitable. With that clear
sense of Fate characteristic of them, they do not fight
against the evil which they know has to be borne,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">209</a></span>
but wisely try to lighten it by such wiles and arts
as are open to them, and set themselves to adorn the
cross they must endure. One thing indeed, makes
invalidism less terrible to them than to men; and that
is their ability to perform their home duties, if not
quite as efficiently as when they are up and about, yet
well enough for all practical purposes in the conduct
of the family. The woman who gives her mind to it
can keep her house in smooth working gear by dictation
from her sick couch; and what she cannot
actively overlook she can arrange. So far this removes
the main cause of irritation with which the man must
battle in the best way he can, when his business
comes to a stand-still; or is given up into the hands
of but a makeshift kind of substitute taken at the
best; while he is laid on his back undergoing many
things from doctors for the good of science and the
final settling of doubtful pathological points.</p>

<p>Another reason why women are more patient than
men during sickness is that they can amuse themselves
better. One gets tired of reading all day long
with the aching eyes and weary brain of weakness; yet
how few things a man can do to amuse himself without
too great an effort, and without being dependent
on others! But women have a thousand pretty little
devices for whiling away the heavy hours. They can
vary their finger-work almost infinitely, and they find
real pleasure in a new stitch or a stripe of a
different colour and design from the last. In
the contempt in which needlework in all its forms
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">210</a></span>
is held by the advanced class of women, its use
during the period of convalescence, when it helps
the lagging time as nothing else can, is forgotten.
Yet it is no bad wisdom to remember that
the day of sickness will probably come some time to
us all; and to lay in stores of potential interest and
cheerfulness against that day is a not unworthy use
of power. Certain it is that this greater diversity
of small, unexciting, unfatiguing occupations enables
women to bear a tedious illness with comparative
patience, and helps to keep them more cheerful than
men.</p>

<p>But when the time shall have come for the perfect
development of the androgynous creature, who is as
yet only in the pupal state of her existence, women
will have lost these two great helps. Workers outside
the home like their husbands and brothers, like
them they will fume and fret when they are prevented
from following their bread-winning avocations; calculations
of the actual money loss they are sustaining
coming in to aggravate their bodily pains. And, as
the needle is looked on as one of the many symbols
of feminine degradation, in the good time coming
there will be none of that pretty trifling with silks
and ribbons which may be very absurd by the side of
important work, but which is invaluable as an invalid's
pastime. Consequently, what with the anguish
of knowing that her profession is neglected, and what
with the unenlivened tedium of her days, sickness
will be a formidable thing to women of the androgynous
type&mdash;and to the men belonging to them.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">211</a></span>
Again, care and tact are required to rob sickness
of its more painful features, and to render it not
too distressing to the home companions. A real
woman, with her instincts properly developed&mdash;among
them the instinct of admiration&mdash;knows how
to render even invalidism beautiful; and indeed,
with her power of improving occasions, she is never
more charming than as an invalid or a convalescent.
There is a certain refined beauty about her more
seductive than the robuster bloom of health. Her
whole being seems purified. The coarser elements of
humanity are obscured, passions are at rest, and all
those fretful, anxious strivings, which probably afflict
her when in the full swing of society, are put away
as if they had never been. She is forced to let life
glide, and her own mind follows the course of the
quieter flow. She knows too how to make herself
bewitching by the art which is not artifice so much
as the highest point to which her natural excellences
can be brought. If the radiance of health has gone,
she has the sweeter, subtler loveliness of fragility; if
her diamonds are laid aside, and all that glory of
dress which does so much for women is perforce
abandoned, the long, loose folds of falling drapery,
with their antique grace, perhaps suit her better,
and the fresh flowers on her table may be more suggestive
and delightful than artificial ones in her hair.</p>

<p>Many a drifting husband has been brought back
to his first enthusiasm by the illness of a wife who
knew how to turn evil things into good, and to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">212</a></span>
extract a charm even out of suffering. It is a turn
of the kaleidoscope; a recombination of the same
elements but in a new pattern and with fresh loveliness;
whereas the androgynous woman, with her
business worries and her honest, if impolitic, self-surrender
to hideous flannel wraps and all the uglinesses
of a sick room crudely pronounced, would have
added a terror to disease which probably would have
quenched his waning love for ever. For the androgynous
woman despises every approach to coquetry, as she
despises all the other insignia of feminine servitude.
It is not part of her life's duties to make herself pleasing
to men; and they must take her as they find her.
Where the true woman contrives a beauty and creates
a grace out of her very misfortune, the androgynous
holds to the doctrine of spades and the value of
the unvarnished truth. Where the one gives a little
thought to the most becoming colour of her ribbon
or the best arrangement of her draperies, the other
pushes the tangled locks off her face anyhow, and
makes herself an amorphous bundle of brown and
lemon colour. Her sole wish is to get the bad time
over. How it would be best got over does not trouble
her; and to beautify the inherently unlovely is beyond
her skill to compass. Hence her hours of sickness
go by in ugliness and idle fretting; while the true
woman finds graceful work to do that enlivens their
monotony, and in the continuance of her home
duties loses the galling sense of loss from which the
other suffers.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">213</a></span>
In sickness too, who but women can nurse? Men
make good nurses enough out in the bush, where
nothing better can be had; and a Californian 'pardner'
is tender enough in his uncouth way to his mate
stricken down with fever in the shanty, when he
comes in at meal-times and administers quinine and
brick tea with horny hands bleeding from cuts and
begrimed with mud. But this is not nursing in
the woman's sense. To be sure the strength of men
makes them often of value about an invalid. They
can lift and carry as women cannot; and the want
of a few nights' sleep does not make them hysterical.
Still they are nowhere as nurses, compared
with women; and the best of them are not up
to the thoughtful cares and pleasant attentions
which, as medical men know, are half the battle in
recovery. And this is work which suits women. It
appeals to their love of power and tenderness combined;
it gratifies the maternal instinct of protection
and self-sacrifice; and it pleasantly reverses the usual
order of things, and gives into their hands Hercules
twirling a distaff the wrong way, and fettered by the
length of his skirts.</p>

<p>The bread-winning wife knows nothing of all this.
To her, sickness in her household would be only a
degree less destructive than her own disablement,
if she were called on to nurse. She would not
be able to leave her office for such unremunerative
employment as soothing her children's feverish
hours or helping her husband over his. She would
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">214</a></span>
calculate, naturally enough, the difference of cost
between hired help and her own earnings; and
economy as well as inclination would decide the
question. But the poor fellow left all day long to
the questionable services of a hired nurse, or to the
clumsy honesty of some domestic Phyllis less deft
than faithful, would be a gainer by his wife's presence&mdash;granting
that she was a real woman and not an
androgyne&mdash;even if he lost the addition to their income
which her work might bring in; as he would rather,
when he came home from his work to her sick bed,
find her patient and cheerful, making the best of
things from the woman's point of view and with the
woman's power of adaptation, than be met with
anxious queries as to the progress of business; with
doubts, fears, perplexities; the office dragged into the
sick room, and unnecessary annoyance added to
unavoidable pain.</p>

<p>There is a certain kind of woman, sweet always,
who yet shows best when she is invalided. Cleared
for a while from the social tangles which perplex and
distress the sensitive, she is as if floated into a quiet
corner where she has time to think and leisure to be
her true self undisturbed; where she is able too, to
give more to her friends, if less to the world at large
than at other times. And she is always to be found.
The invalid-couch is the rallying point of the household,
and even the little children learn to regard it as
a place of privilege dearer than the stately drawing-room
of ordinary times. Her friends drop in, sure
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">215</a></span>
to find her at home and pleased by their coming; and
her afternoon teas with her half-dozen chosen
intimates have a character of their own, æsthetic and
delightful; partly owing to the quiet and subdued
tone that must perforce pervade them, partly to the
unselfishness that reigns on all sides. Every one
exerts himself to bring her things which may amuse
her, and she is loaded with presents of a graceful
kind&mdash;new books, early fruit, and a wealth of
flowers to which even her poorest friend adds his
bunch of violets, if nothing else. She is the
precious child of her circle, and but for her innate
sweetness would run a risk of being the spoilt one.
Clever men come and talk to her, give her cause of
thought, and knowledge to remember and be made
glad by for all time; her lady friends keep her abreast
of the outside doings of the world and their own
especial coteries, contributing the dramatic element
so dear to the feminine mind; every one tells her
all that is afloat on the sea of society, but only all
that is cheerful&mdash;no one brings her horrors, nor
disturbs the frail grace of her repose with petty
jealousies and tempers. Her atmosphere is pure and
serene, and the dainty loveliness of her surroundings
lends its charm to the rest.</p>

<p>To her husband she is even more beautiful than
in the early days; and all men feel for her that
chivalrous kind of tenderness and homage which the
true woman alone excites. The womanly invalid,
gentle, cheerful, full of interest for others, active in
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">216</a></span>
mind if prostrate in body, sympathetic and patient,
is for the time the queen of her circle, loved and
ministered to by all; and when she goes to Cannes
or San Remo to escape the cruelty of the English
winter, she carries with her a freight of good wishes
and regrets, and leaves a blank which nothing can
fill up until she returns with the summer roses to
take her place once more as the popular woman of
her society.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">217</a></span></p>

<h2><i>ON A VISIT.</i></h2>

<p>To most young people the social arrangement known
as going on a visit to friends at a distance is one of
the most charming things possible. Novelty being
to them the very breath of life, and hope and expectation
their normal mental condition, the mere fact of
change is in itself delightful; unless it happens to
be something so hopelessly dull as a visit single-handed
to an invalid grandmother, or the yearly probation
of a girl of the period, when obliged to put
herself under the charge of a wealthy maiden aunt
with strict principles and no games of any kind
allowed on the lawn. If the young ladies out on
a visit are however, moderately cheerful, they can
contrive to make amusement for themselves out
of anything short of such sober-tinted extremes as
these; and very often they effect more serious
matters than mere amusement, and their visit brings
them a love-affair or a marriage which changes the
whole tenor of their lives. At the worst, it has
shown them a new part of the country; given them
new patterns of embroidery; new fashions of hairdressing;
new songs and waltzes; and afforded an
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">218</a></span>
occasion for a large supply of pretty dresses&mdash;which
last to most young women, or indeed to most women
whether young or old, is a very effectual source of
pleasure.</p>

<p>The great charm and excitement of going on a
visit belongs naturally to the young of the middle
classes; among those of higher condition it is a
different matter altogether. When people take their
own servants with them and live in exactly the same
style as at home, they merely change the furniture of
their rooms and the view from the windows. The
same kind of thing goes on at Lord A.'s as at Lord
B.'s, in the Scottish Highlands or the Leicestershire
wolds. The quality of the hunting or shooting may
be different, but the whole manner of living is essentially
repetition; and the dead level of civilization is
not broken up by any very startling innovations
anywhere. But among the middle classes there
is greater variety; and the country clergyman's
daughter who goes on a visit to the London barrister's
family, plunges into a manner of life totally
different from that of her own home; the personal
habits of town and country still remaining quite distinct,
and the possibilities of action being on two
different plans altogether.</p>

<p>A London-bred woman goes down to the country
on a visit to a hale, hearty Hessian, her former school-fellow,
who tucks up her woollen gown midway to her
knees, wears stout boots of masculine appearance,
and goes quite comfortably through mud and mire,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">219</a></span>
across ploughed field and undrained farmyards&mdash;taking
cramped stiles and five-barred gates in her way as
obstacles of no more moment than was the mud or
the mire. Long years of use to this unfastidious
mode of existence have blinded her to the perception
that a woman, without being an invalid, may yet be
unable to do all that is so easy to her. So the
London lady is taken for a walk, say of five or six
miles, which to the vigorous Hessian is a mere unsatisfying
stroll, to be counted no more as serious exercise
than she would count a spoonful of <i>vol-au-vent</i>
as serious eating. To be sure the walk includes a
few muddy corners and the like, and Bond Street
boots do not bear the strain of stiff clay clods too
well; neither is a new gown of the fashionable
colour improved by being dragged through furze
bushes and bracken, and brushed against the
wet heads of field cabbages. Moreover, crossing
meadows tenanted by cattle that toss their heads
and look&mdash;and looking, in horned cattle, is a great
offence to our town-bred woman&mdash;is a service of
peril which alone would take all the strength out
of her nerves, and all the pleasure out of her walk;
but the hostess cannot imagine feelings which she
herself does not share, and the London lady is of
course credited with courage, because to doubt
it would be to cast a slur on her whole moral
character. The Hessian minds the beasts no more
than so many tree-stumps, but her friend sees a raging
bull in every milky mother that stares at her as she
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">220</a></span>
passes, and thinks something dreadful is going to
happen because the flies make the heifers swish their
tails and stamp. Then the dogs bark furiously as
they rush out of farmsteads and cottages; and the
newly dressed fields are not pleasant to cross nor skirt.
The visitor cares little for wild flowers, less for birds,
and all trees are pretty much alike to her; and this
long rude walk, accentuated with the true country
emphasis, has been too much for her. Her host
wonders at her evening lassitude and low spirits, and
fears that she finds it dull; and the robust hostess
anathematizes the demoralizing effects of Kensington,
and scornfully contrasts her present friend with her
past, when they were both schoolgirls together and
on a par in strength and endurance. 'She was like
other people then,' says the well-trained Hessian who
has kept herself in condition by daily exercise of a
severe character; 'and now see what a poor creature
she is! She can do nothing but work at embroidery
and crouch shivering over the fire.'</p>

<p>Sometimes however, it happens the other way,
and the lady guest, even though a Londoner, is the
stronger of the two. The wife has been broken down
by family cares and the one inevitable child too many;
the guest comes fresh, unworn, unmarried, still young.
The wife seldom goes beyond the garden, never
further than the village, and is knocked up if she has
done two miles; the guest can manage her six or
eight without fatigue. Hence she naturally becomes
the husband's walking companion during her visit, to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">221</a></span>
his frank delight and as frank regrets that his wife
cannot do as much. And the wife, though good-breeding
and natural kindness prevent her objecting to these
long walks, finds them hard lines all things considered.
Most probably she bitterly regrets having invited her
former friend, and mentally resolves never to ask her
again. She wanted her as a little amusement and relaxation
for herself. Her health is delicate and her
life dull, and she thought a female friend in the house
would cheer her up and be a help. But when she
finds that she has invited one who, without in the
least intending it and only by the force of circumstances,
sets her in unfavourable contrast with her
husband, we may be sure that it will not take much
argument to convince her that asking friends on a
visit is a ridiculous custom, and that people, especially
young ladies fond of long walks, are best at their own
homes.</p>

<p>In London there are two kinds of guests from the
country; the insatiable, and the indifferent&mdash;those
who wear out their hosts by their activity and those
who oppress them by their supineness. The Londoner
who has outlived all the excitement of the busy
city life wonders at the energy and enthusiasm of his
friend. Everything must be done, even to the Tower
and the Whispering Gallery, Madame Tussaud's and
the Agricultural Hall. There is not a second-rate
trumpery trifle which has been in the shop windows
for a year or more, that is not pored over, and if
possible, bought; and among the inflictions of the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">222</a></span>
host may be counted the crude taste of the guest, and
the childish flinging away of money on things absolutely
worthless. Or it may be that the guest has
come up stored with many maxims of worldly wisdom
and vague suspicion, and, determined not to be
taken in, attempts to bargain in shops where a second
price would be impossible, and where the host is
personally known.</p>

<p>With guests of superabundant energy a quiet
evening is out of the question. They go the round
of all the theatres, and fill in the gaps with the opera
and concerts. They have come up not to stay with
you, but to see London; and they fulfil their intention
liberally. Or they are indifferent and supine, and
not to be amused, do what you will. They think
everything a bore, or they are nervous and not up to
the mark. They beseech you not to ask any one to
dinner, and not to take them with you to any reception.
They are listless at the theatre and go to sleep
at the opera. At the Royal Academy the only
pictures they notice are those landscapes taken from
their own neighbourhood, or perhaps one by a local
artist known to them. All the finest works of the
year fall flat; and before you have seen half the exhibition,
they say they have had enough of it, and sit
down, plaintively offering to wait till you have done,
in the tone of a Christian martyr.</p>

<p>These are the people who are always complaining
of the dirt and smoke of London and the stuffiness
of the houses, as if they were personally injured and
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">223</a></span>
you personally responsible. They show a very decided
scorn for all London produce, natural or artificial,
and wonder how people can live in such a place.
They are sure to deride the prevailing fashions, whatever
they may be; while their own, of last season,
are exaggerated and excessive; but they refuse to
have the town touch laid on them during their stay,
and heroically follow the millinery gospel of their
local Worth, and measure you by themselves. They
show real animation only when they are going away,
and begin to wonder how they shall find things at
home, and whether Charles will meet them at the
station or send William instead. But when they
write to thank you for your hospitality, they tell you
they never enjoyed anything so much in their lives;
leaving you in a state of perplexity, as you remember
their boredom, and peevish complainings,
and evident relief in leaving, and compare your remembrance
with the warm expressions of pleasure
now before your eyes. All you can say is, that if
they were pleased they took an odd way of showing it.</p>

<p>There are people rash enough to have other
people's children on a visit; to take on themselves
the responsibility of their health and safety, when the
young guests are almost sure to fall ill by the change
of diet and the unwonted amount of indulgence
allowed, or to come into some trouble by the relaxing
of due supervision and control. They get a
touch of gastric fever, or they tumble into the pond;
and either bronchitis, or a fall from horseback, toppling
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">224</a></span>
over from a ladder, or coming to grief on the
swing, or some such accident, is generally the result
of an act which is either heroism or madness as one
may be inclined to regard it. For of all the inconveniences
attending visiting, those incidental to child-guests
are the most distressing. Yet there are
philanthropic friends who run these risks for the sake
of giving pleasure to a few young people. Whether
they deserve canonization for their kindness or censure
for their rashness we leave an open question.</p>

<p>As for a certain disturbance in health, that generally
comes to other than children from being on a
visit. Hours and style of food are sure to be somewhat
different from those of home; and the slight
constraint of the life, and the feverishness which this
induces, add to the disturbance. Occupations are
interrupted both to the guest and the host; and
some hosts think it necessary to make company for
the guest, and some guests are heavy on hand. Some
regard your house as a gaol and you as the gaoler,
and are afraid to initiate an independent action or to
call their souls their own; others treat you as a
landlord, and behave as if you kept an inn, making a
convenience of your household in the most unblushing
manner. Some are fastidious, and covertly snub
your wines, your table, and your whole arrangements;
others embarrass you by the fervour of their
admiration, as if they had come out of a hovel and
did not know the usages of civilized homes. Some
intrude themselves into every small household matter
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">225</a></span>
that goes on before them, and offer advice that is
neither wanted nor desired; and others will not
commit themselves to the most innocent opinion,
fearful lest they should be thought to interfere or
take sides. Some of the women dress at the husband;
some of the men flirt with the wife or make love to
the daughters surreptitiously; some loaf about or
play billiards all day long till you are tired of the
sound of their footsteps and the click of the balls;
other bury their heads in a book and are no better
than mummies lounging back in easy chairs; some
insist on going to the meet in a hard frost; others
will shoot in a downpour; and others again waste
your whole day over the chess-table, and will not stir
out at all. Some are so sensitive and fidgety that
they will not stay above a day or two, and are gone
before you have got into the habit of seeing them,
leaving you with the feeling of a whirlwind having
passed through your house; and others, when they
come, stick, and you begin to despair of dislodging
them.</p>

<p>On the other hand, there are houses where you
feel that you would wear out your welcome after the
third day, how long soever the distance you have
come; and there are others where you would offend
your hosts for life if you did not throw overboard
every other duty and engagement to remain for as
many weeks as they desire. In fact, paying visits
and inviting guests are both risky matters, and need
far more careful consideration than they generally
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">226</a></span>
receive. But when it happens that the thing is congenial
on both sides, that the guest slips into a vacant
place as it were, and neither bores nor is bored, then
paying a visit is as delightful as the young imagination
pictures it to be; and the peculiar closeness
and sweetness of intimacy it engenders is one of the
most enduring and charming circumstances incidental
to friendship. This however, is rare and exceptional;
as are most of the very good things of life.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">227</a></span></p>

<h2><i>DRAWING-ROOM EPIPHYTES.</i></h2>

<p>In every coterie we find certain stray damsels unattached;
young ladies of personable appearance and
showy accomplishments who go about the world
alone, and whose parents, never seen, are living in
some obscure lodgings where they pinch and screw to
furnish their daughter's bravery. Some one or two
great ladies of the set patronize these girls, take them
about a good deal, and ask them to all their drums
and at-homes. They are useful in their degree;
very good-natured; always ready to fetch and carry
in a confidential kind of way; to sing and play when
they are asked&mdash;and they sing and play with almost
professional skill; full of the small talk of the day,
and not likely to bore their companions with untimely
discussions on dangerous subjects, nor to
startle them with enthusiasm about anything. They
serve to fill a vacant place when wanted; and they
look nice and keep up the ball so far as their own
sphere extends. They are safe, too; and, though
lively and amusing, are never known to retail gossip
nor talk scandal in public.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">228</a></span>
Who are they? No one exactly knows. They
are Miss A. and Miss B., and they have collaterals of
respectable name and standing; cousins in Government
offices; dead uncles of good military rank;
perhaps a father, dead or alive, with a quite unexceptionable
position; but you never see them with
their natural belongings, and no one thinks of visiting
them at their own homes. They are sure to have
a mother in bad health, who never goes out and
never sees any one; and if you should by chance
come across her, you find a shabby, painful, peevish
woman who seems at odds with life altogether, and who
is as unlike her showy daughter as a russet wren is
unlike a humming-bird. The drawing-room epiphyte
introduces mamma, when necessary, with a creditable
effort at indifference, not to say content, with her
conditions; but if you can read signs, you know
what she is feeling about that suit of rusty black, and
how little she enjoys the rencounter.</p>

<p>Sometimes she has a brother, of whom she never
speaks unless obliged, and of whose occupation and
whereabouts, when asked, she gives only the vaguest
account. He has an office in the City; or he has gone
abroad; or he is in the navy and she forgets the name
of his ship; but, whatever he is, you can get no clue
more distinct than this. If you should chance to see
him, you get a greater surprise than you had when
you met the mother; and you wonder, with a deeper
wonder, how such a sister should have sprung from
the same stock as that which produced such a brother.
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">229</a></span>
Sometimes however, the brother is as presentable as
the sister; in which case he probably follows much
the same course as herself, and hangs on to the skirts
of those of the Upper Ten who recognize him&mdash;preferring
to idle away his life and energy as a well-dressed
epiphyte of greatness rather than live the life
of a man in a lower social sphere. But, as a rule,
stray damsels have neither brothers nor sisters visible
to the world, and only a widowed mother in the
background, whose health is bad and who does not
go out.</p>

<p>The ulterior object of the ladies who patronize
these pretty epiphytes is to get them married; partly
from personal kindness, partly from the pleasure all
women have in bringing about a marriage that does
not interfere with themselves. But they seldom
accomplish this object. Who is to marry the epiphyte?
The men of the society into which she has
been brought from the outside have their own ambitions
to realize. They want money, or land, or a good
family connexion, to make the sacrifice an equal bargain
and to gild the yoke of matrimony with becoming
splendour. And the drawing room epiphyte has
nothing to offer as her contribution but a fine pair of
eyes, a good-natured manner, and a pretty taste for
music. To marry well among the society in which
she finds herself is therefore almost impossible. And
her tastes have been so far formed as to render a
marriage into lower circumstances almost as impossible
on the other side.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">230</a></span>
Besides, what could she do as the wife of a clergyman,
say on three hundred a year, with a poor parish
to look after and an increasing tribe of babies to
feed and clothe? Her clear high notes, her splendid
register, her brilliant touch, will not help her
then; and the taste with which she makes up half-worn
silk gowns, and transforms what was a rag into
an ornament, will not do much towards finding the
necessary boots and loaves which keep her sisters
awake at night wondering how they are to be got.
She has been taught nothing of the art of home life,
if she has learnt much of that of the drawing-room.
She cannot cook, nor make a little go a long way by
the cunning of good management and a well-masked
economy; she cannot do serviceable needlework,
though she may be great in fancy work, and quite a
genius in millinery; and the habit of having plenty
of servants about her has destroyed the habit of turning
her hand to anything like energetic self-help.
Epiphyte as she is, penniless stray damsel more than
half maintained by the kindness of her grand friends,
she has to keep up the sham of appearances before
those friends' domestics. And as ladyhood in England
is chiefly measured by a woman's uselessness,
and to do anything in the way of rational work
would be a spot on her ermine, the poor epiphyte of
the drawing-room, with mamma in rusty black in
those shabby lodgings of theirs, learns in self-defence
to practise all the foolish helplessness of her superiors;
and, to retain the respect of the servants, loses her
own.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">231</a></span>
What is she then but one of those misplaced
beings who are neither of one sphere nor of another?
She is not of the <i>grandes dames</i> on her own account,
yet she lives in their houses as one among them. She
is not a woman who can make the best of things;
who, notable and industrious, and by her clever contrivances
of saving and substitution is able to order a
home comfortably on next to nothing; and yet she has
no solid claim to anything but the undercut of the
middle classes, and no right to expect more than the
most ordinary marriage. She is nothing. Ashamed
and unable to work, she has to accept gratuities
which are not wages. Waiting on Providence and
floated by her friends, she wanders though society
ever on the look-out for chances. Each new acquaintance
is a fresh hope, and every house that opens to
her contains the potentiality of final success. To be
met everywhere is the ultimate point of her ambition
with respect to means; the end kept steadily, if fruitlessly,
in view, is that satisfying settlement which
shall take her out of the category of a hanger-on and
give her a <i>locus standi</i> of her own. But it does not
come.</p>

<p>Year by year we meet the drawing-room epiphyte in
the old haunts&mdash;at Brighton; at Ryde; at half-a-dozen
good houses in London; on a visit to the friends who
make much of her one day and snub her the next&mdash;but
she does not 'go off.' She is pretty, she is agreeable,
she is well dressed, she is accomplished; but
she does not find the husband for whom all this
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">232</a></span>
is offered as the equivalent. Year by year she grows
fatter or thinner as her constitution expands into
obesity or shrivels into leanness; the lines about her
fine eyes deepen; the powder is a little thicker on
her cheeks; and there are more than shrewd suspicions
of a touch of rouge or of antimony, with a
judicious application of patent hair-restorer to lift up
the faded tints. Fighting desperately with that old
enemy Time, she disputes line by line the tribute he
claims; and succeeds so far as to continue a good
make-up for a year or two after other women of her
own age have given in and consented to look their
years. But the drawing-room epiphyte is nothing if
she is not young&mdash;which is synonymous with power
to interest and amuse. Her friends, the great ladies
who hold drawing-rooms and gather society in shoals,
want points of colour in their rooms as well as serviceable
foils. The apple-pie that was all made of
quinces was a failure, wanting the homely <i>couche</i>
from which the savour of the more fragrant fruit
might be thrown up. On the other hand there are
social meetings which are like apple-pies without any
quince at all; and then the epiphyte is invaluable,
and her music worth as much in its degree as if she
were a prima donna, each of whose notes ranked as
gold. So that when she ceases to be young, when
she loses her high notes and has gout in her fingers,
she fails in her only <i>raison d'être</i>, and her occupation
is gone. Hence her hard struggles with the
old enemy, and her half-heroic, half-tragic determination
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">233</a></span>
not to give in while a shred of force
remains.</p>

<p>On the day when she collapses into an old woman
she is lost. She has nothing for it then but to withdraw
from the brilliant drawing-rooms she has so
long haunted into dingy lodgings in a back street,
and live as her mother lived before her. Forgotten
by the world which she has spent her life in waiting
on, she has leisure to reflect on the relative values of
things, and to lament, as she probably will, that she
gave living grain for gilded husks; that she exchanged
the realities of love and home, which might
have been hers had she been contented to accept them
on a lower social scale, for the barren pleasures of the
day and the delusive hope of marrying well in a
sphere where she had no solid foothold. She had her
choice, like others; but she chose to throw for high
stakes at heavy odds, and in so doing let slip what
she originally held. The bird in the hand might have
been of a homely kind enough; still, it was always the
bird; while the two golden pheasants in the bush
flew away unsalted, and left her only their shadows
to run after.</p>

<p>On the whole then, we incline to the belief that
the drawing-room epiphyte is a mistake, and that
those stray damsels who wander about society unattended
by any natural protector and always more or
less in the character of adventuresses, would do better
to keep to the sphere determined by parental circumstances
than to let themselves be taken into one which
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">234</a></span>
does not belong to them and which they cannot
hold. And furthermore it seems to us that, irrespective
of its present instability and future fruitlessness,
the position of a drawing-room epiphyte is one which
no woman of sense would accept, and to which no
woman of spirit would submit.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">235</a></span></p>

<h2><i>THE EPICENE SEX.</i></h2>

<p>There has always been in the world a kind of women
whom one scarcely knows how to classify as to sex;
men by their instincts, women by their form, but
neither men nor women as we regard either in the
ideal. In early times they were divided into two
classes; the Amazons who, donning helmet and
cuirass, went to the wars that they might be with
their lovers, or perhaps only for an innate liking
for rough work; and the tribe of ancient women, so
withered and so wild, who should be women yet
whose beards forbade men so to account them, and
for whom public opinion usually closed the controversy
by declaring that they were witches&mdash;that is,
creatures so unlike the rightful woman of nature that
only the devil himself was supposed to be answerable
for them. These particular manifestations have
long since passed away, and we have nowadays
neither Amazons learning the goose-step in our
barrack-yards, nor witches brewing hell-broth on
Scottish moors; but we have the Epicene Sex all
the same&mdash;women who would defy the acutest social
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">236</a></span>
Cuvier among us to classify, but who are growing
daily into more importance and making continually
fresh strides in their unwholesome way.</p>

<p>Possessed by a restless discontent with their appointed
work, and fired with a mad desire to dabble
in all things unseemly, which they call ambition;
blasphemous to the sweetest virtues of their sex,
which until now have been accounted both their own
pride and the safeguard of society; holding it no
honour to be reticent, unselfish, patient, obedient,
but swaggering to the front, ready to try conclusions
in aggression, in selfishness, in insolent disregard of
duty, in cynical abasement of modesty, with the
hardest and least estimable of the men they emulate;&mdash;these
women of the doubtful gender have managed
to drop all their own special graces while unable to
gather up any of the more valuable virtues of men.
They are no more philosophical than the most inconsequent
sister who judges all things according to
her feelings, and commends or condemns principles
as she happens to like or dislike the persons advocating
them; and they are as hysterical and intemperate
in their political cries as if the whole world
wagged by impulse only. They are no more magnanimous
under rebuke than the stanchest advocate
of the sacredness of sex, but resent all hostile criticism
as passionately, and from grounds as merely
personal, as if they were still shrouded from public
blame by the safety of their privacy; and they are
as little useful in their blatant energy as when they
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">237</a></span>
spent their days in working monstrous patterns in
crude-coloured wools, or found spiritual satisfaction
in cutting holes in strips of calico to sew up again
with a new stitch. They have committed the mistake
of abandoning such work as they can do well,
while trying to manipulate things which they touch
only to spoil; they have ceased to be women and
not learnt to be men; they have thrown aside
beauty and not put on strength.</p>

<p>The latest development of the impulses which
animate the epicene sex has taken its expression in
after-dinner oratory. If we were as malicious to
women as those whose follies we rebuke would have
the world believe, we should encourage them to fight
it out with womanly modesty and the world's esteem
on this line. Their worst enemies could not wish to
see them inflict on themselves a greater annoyance
than the obligation of getting on their legs after the
cheese has been removed, to turn on a stream of
verbal insipidity for a quarter of an hour at a stretch.
Only men who have something to say on the subject
that may be on hand, and so are glad of every
opportunity for elucidation or advocacy, or men who
are eaten up with vanity, take pleasure in speechifying
after dinner. Its uselessness is apparent; its
mock hilarity is ghastly; even at political 'banquets,'
when words are supposed to have some
deep meaning, we get very little substance in it;
while all the funny part of the business is the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">238</a></span>
dreariest comedy, the unreality of which brings it
close to tragedy.</p>

<p>If anything were wanting to show how much
vanity prompts a certain class of women in their
ways and works, and how tremendous is their passion
for notoriety and personal display, it would be
this assumption of the functions of the post-prandial
orator. Indeed they have taken greatly of late to
public speaking all round; and some among them
seem only easy when they are standing before a
crowd, to be admired if they are pretty, applauded
if they are pert, and, in any case, the centre of attraction
for the moment. We do not look forward with
pleasure to the time when ladies will rise after their
champagne and port, with flushed cheeks and eyes
more bright than beautiful, steadying themselves
adroitly against the back of their chairs, and rolling
out either those interminable periods with no nominatives
and no climax under which we have all so
often suffered, or spasmodically jerking forth a few
unconnected sentences of which the sole merit is
their brevity. In the beginning of things, when the
wedge has to be introduced, only the best of its kind
puts itself forward; and doubtless the ladies who
have already varied the usual dull routine of after-dinner
oratory by their livelier utterances have done
the thing comparatively well, and avoided a breakdown;
but we own that we tremble at the thought
of the flood of feminine eloquence which will be let
loose if the fashion spreads.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">239</a></span>
Fancy the heavy British matron rearing her
ample shoulders above the board, as she lays down
the law on the duties of men towards women&mdash;especially
sons-in-law&mdash;and the advantage to all concerned
if wives are liberally dealt with in the matter
of housekeeping money, and let to go their own way
without marital hindrance. Or think of the woman's-rights
woman, with her hybrid costume and her hard
face, showing society how it can be saved from destruction
only by throwing the balance of power
into the hands of women&mdash;by the nobler and
brighter instincts of the oppressed sex swamping
that rude, rough, masculine element which has so
long mismanaged matters. Or even think of the
coquettish and alluring little woman getting up
before a crowd of men and firing off the neatest
and smartest park of verbal artillery possible, every
shot of which tells and is applauded to the echo.
How will men take it all? For ourselves, having
too sincere a respect for women as they ought to be,
and as nature meant them to be, we do not wish to
see them turned into social buffoons, the mark for
jeering comments and angry hisses when what they
say displeases their hearers, told to 'sit down,' and
'shut up,' with entreaties to some strong man to
'take them out of that and carry them home to the
nursery,' by a hundred voices roughened with drink
and shouting. But if women expect that hostile
feelings and opinions will be tamed or altogether
suppressed in their honour because they choose to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">240</a></span>
thrust themselves where they have no business, they
will find out their mistake, perhaps when too late.
If they abandon their safe cover and come out into
the open, they must look to be hit like the rest. We
cannot too often repeat that if they will mingle in
the specialities of men's lives, they must put up with
men's treatment and not cry out when they are
struck home. In deference to them plain-speaking
has been banished from the drawing rooms of society;
but it is too much to expect men to sit in
their own places under heavy boredom or fatuous
gabble without wincing; and it is childish to ask us
to make a free-gift of our truth and time to women
who outrage one and waste the other. On the other
hand the cheers which would follow if they hit the
humour of the hour, or if, being specially pretty or
specially smart, they afforded so much more than
the ordinary excitement to the guests, would to our
minds be just as offensive as the rougher truth, and
perhaps more so. The leering approbation of men
never over-nice in thought and now heated with
wine, such as are always to be found at public dinners,
is an infliction from which we should have
imagined any woman with purity or self-respect
would have shrunk with shame and dismay. But
women who take to after-dinner speeches cannot be
either nervous or fastidious.</p>

<p>Perhaps it is expecting too much of women of
this kind if we ask them to consider themselves
in relation to men's liking. They profess to despise
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">241</a></span>
the masculine animal they are so fond of imitating,
and to be careless of his liking; holding it a matter
of supreme indifference whether they are to his taste
or not. But it may be as well to say plainly that
the disgust which we may presume the normal
healthy woman feels for men who paint and pad and
wear stays and work Berlin work&mdash;men who give
their minds to chignons and costumes; who spy after
their maids' love-letters, and watch their boys as cats
watch mice&mdash;men who occupy themselves with domestic
details they should know nothing about; who
look after the baby's pap-boat and the cinders in the
dust-heap, and can call the various articles of household
linen by their proper names&mdash;the disgust which
the womanly woman feels for them is exactly that
which the manly man feels for the epicene sex.</p>

<p>Hard, unblushing, unloving women whose ideal
of happiness lies in swagger and notoriety; who hate
home life and despise home virtues; who have no
tender regard for men and no instinctive love for
children; who despise the modesty of sex as they
deny its natural fitness&mdash;these women have worse
than no charm for men, and their place in the human
family seems altogether a mistake. If there were
any special work which they could do better than
manly men or feminine women, we could understand
their economic uses, and accept them as eminently
unlovely outgrowths of a natural law, but at least as
necessary and natural. But they are not wanted.
They simply disgust men and mislead women; and
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">242</a></span>
those women whom they do not mislead in their own
they often influence too strongly in the other direction
by way of reaction, rendering them sickly in
their sweetness, and weak rather than womanly. If
the interlacing margins of certain things are lovely,
as colours which blend together are more harmonious
than those which are crudely distinct, it is not so
with the interlacing margin of sex. Let men be
men, and women women, sharply, unmistakably defined;
but to have an ambiguous sex which is neither
the one nor the other, possessing the coarser passions
and instincts of men without their strength or better
judgment, and the position and privileges of women
without their tenderness, their sense of duty, or their
modesty, is a state of things that we should like to
see abolished by public opinion, which alone can
touch it.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">243</a></span></p>

<h2><i>WOMEN'S MEN.</i></h2>

<p>If songs are the expressions of a nation's political
temper, novels show the current of its social morality,
and what the learned would call its psychological
condition. When French novelists devote half their
stories to the analysis of those feelings which end in
breaking the seventh commandment, and the other
half to the gradual evolution of the evidence which
leads to the detection of a secret murderer, we may
safely assume, on the one hand, that the marriage
law presses heavily, and, on the other, that the
national intellect is of that ingenious kind which
takes pleasure in puzzles, and is best represented by
the familiar examples of dovetailing and mosaic
work. When too, we see that their common feminine
type is a creature given over as a prey to nervous
fancies and an exalted imagination, of a feverish temperament
and a general obscuration of plain morality
in favour of a subtilizing and misleading kind of
thing which she calls her <i>besoin d'âme</i>, we may be
sure that this is the type most approved by both
writer and readers, and that anything else would be
unwelcome.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">244</a></span>
The French novelist who should describe, as
his central figure, a self-disciplined, straightforward,
healthy young woman, honestly in love with her
husband, rationally fond of her children, not given to
dangerous musings about the need of her soul for an
elective affinity outside her marriage bond, nor spending
her hours in speculating on the philosophy of
necessity as represented by Léon or Alphonse; who
should make her absolutely impervious to the sickly
sentimentalism of the inevitable <i>célibat</i>, and neither
palter with peril nor lament that sin should be sinful
when it is so pleasant; who should paint domestic
morality as we know it exists in France no less than
in England, and trust for his interest to the quiet
pathos of unfriendly but cleanly circumstances, would
be hard put to it to make his heroine attractive and
his story popular; and his readers would not be
counted by tens of thousands, as were those who
gloated over the sins of <i>Madame Bovary</i> and the
prurience of <i>Fanny</i>. The Scandinavian type of
woman again, strong-armed, independent, athletic,
practical, would not go down with the French reading
public; wherefore we may assume that the <i>Parisienne</i>,
as we know her in romance&mdash;feverish, subtil,
casuistic, self-deluding, and always ready to sacrifice
duty to sentiment&mdash;is the woman best liked by the
people to whom she is offered, and that the novelist
but repeats and represents the wish of his readers.</p>

<p>So, too, when our own novelists carry their
stock puppets through the nine hundred pages held
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">245</a></span>
to be necessary for the due display of their follies and
disasters, we may be sure that they are of the kind
which finds favour in the eyes of the ordinary English
reader; that the girls are the girls who please
young men or do not alarm mothers, and that the
men are the men in whom women delight, and think
the ideals of their sex. If, as it is said, the delineation
of her hero is the touchstone of a woman's literary
power, it must be confessed that the touchstone
discloses, for the most part, a very feeble amount of
literary power, and that the female mind has but a
small perception of all that relates to man's needs and
nature.</p>

<p>It is the rarest thing possible to find a flesh-and-blood
man in the pages of a woman's novel; far rarer
than to meet with a flesh-and-blood young lady in the
pages of a man's. They are all either prigs, ruffians,
or curled darlings; each of whom a man longs to
kick. They are goody men of such exalted morality
that Sir Galahad himself might take a lesson
from them. Or they are brutes with the well-worn
square jaw and beetling brow, who translate into the
milder action of modern life the savage's method of
wooing a woman by first knocking her senseless and
then carrying her off. Or they are impossible light-weights,
with small hands and artistic tendencies&mdash;men
who moon about a good deal, and are sure to
love the wrong woman in a helpless, drifting sort of
way, as if it were quite the right and manly thing to
do to let themselves fall under the dominion of a
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">246</a></span>
passion which a little resolution could overcome.
Sometimes, for a difference, these light-weights are
men of tremendous pluck and quality of muscle, able
to thrash a burly bargee twice their weight and development
with as much ease as a steel sword can cut
through one of pith. The female crowd of present
novel-writers repeat these four types with undeviating
constancy, so that we have learnt them all by
heart; and after the first outline indicative of their
attributes, we can tell who they are as certainly
as we can tell Minerva by her owl, St. Catharine
by her wheel, Jupiter by his thunderbolts, or St.
Sebastian by his arrows. But in what form soever
they elect to portray their hero, they are sure to
make his love for woman his best and his dominant
quality.</p>

<p>Few women know anything of the intricacies of a
man's life and emotion, save such as are connected
with love. Yet, though love is certainly the strongest
passion in youth, it is by no means all powerful in
maturity and middle age. But the lady's hero of fifty
and upwards is as much under the influence of his
erotic fancies as if he were a boy of eighteen; and life
holds nothing worth living for if he does not get the
woman with whom he has fallen in love. It seems
impossible for a woman to understand the loftier side
of a man's nature. She knows nothing, subjectively,
of the political aims, the love for abstract truth, the
desire for human progress, which take him out of the
narrow domestic sphere, and make him comparatively
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">247</a></span>
indifferent to the life of sense and emotion altogether.
And when she sees this she does not tolerate it.
When Newton used his lady's little finger for a
tobacco-stopper, he dug his grave in the female
garden of the soul; and women rarely appreciate
either Dr. Johnson or Dean Swift, because of the
absence in the one of anything like romantic tenderness
and its perversion in the other. All they care
for is that men shall be tender and true to them;
idealizing as lovers; as husbands constant and indulgent;
and for this they will condone any amount of
crookedness or meanness which does not make its
way into the home. If he is complying and caressing
there, he may be what fate and the foul fiend
like to make him elsewhere, so long as he is not
openly unfaithful and never gets drunk.</p>

<p>All the false glitter of the Corsair school is due
solely to the capacity for loving ascribed to the
heroes thereof. Though a man's name be 'linked
with one virtue and a thousand crimes,' the one
virtue, being love, outweighs the thousand crimes in
the estimation of women and of the more effeminate
kind of poets; and so long as the 'heart is framed
for softness,' it may be 'warped to wrong' without
doing any Conrad much injury with them. The
absolute rightness and justness of a man count for
little in comparison with his tenderness; and we know
of no woman whose ideal man would be one neither
a saint nor a lover.</p>

<p>The reason why the men of a softer civilization are
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">248</a></span>
in general so successful with the women of the harder
and more northerly countries is because of the comparative
softness of their manners and the larger
place which love and love-making hold among them.
All who know France know the Frenchman's jealous
hatred of Italian men; which hatred we share here in
England, only we add the Frenchman to the list. We
affect to despise the arts by which the men succeed
and the women are gained over; but we cannot deny
their potency, nor shut our eyes to the esteem in which
they are held by women. This is not saying that the
chivalrous habit of deference taught by civilization is
not a good thing in itself, but it is saying that it is
not worth the stronger and more essentially masculine
qualities. But to women the art of love-making
is worth all the other virtues in a lump; indeed, it
comprises them all, and without it the best are valueless.
It is the crown and glory of life&mdash;the one thing
to live for; and where it is not, there is no life
worthy of the name. Not that women are insensible
to the charms of public fame. If a man has made
himself a great reputation, he may throw the handkerchief
where he likes, and he will find plenty of
women to pick it up. In this case they are not too
rigid in their requirements; and if his ways are a
little hard and cold, they hold themselves indemnified
for the loss of personal tenderness by the glory which
surrounds a name which is now theirs. A woman
must be exceptionally silly if she cannot take comfort in
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">249</a></span>
her husband's public repute for her disappointment in
his private manners. But this is only with recognized
and fully successful heroes. As a rule, no amount of
manly virtues will excuse the want of the softer
graces; and the finest fellow that ever lived, the true
<i>anax andrôn</i> among men, must be content to be measured
by women merely according to his own estimate
of them, and the power which the passion of
love has over him.</p>

<p>Nothing surprises men more than the odd ignorance
of women concerning them; and half the unhappiness
in married life, at least in England, springs
from that ignorance. They cannot be made to understand
the differences between a man's nature and
requirements and their own; and they condemn all
that they cannot understand. In those few rational
homes where men's sports and gatherings, undisturbed
by the presence of petticoats, are not made
occasions for suspicion nor remonstrance, the stock of
love and happiness with which married life began is
more like the widow's cruse than elsewhere; but unfortunately
for both husbands and wives, these homes
are rare; while those are common where an extramural
game of billiards in the evening is occasion for
tears or pouting, and deadly offence is taken at club
dinners or a week's shooting. The consequence of
which is deceit or dissension; and sometimes both.</p>

<p>The woman's ideal man has none of these erratic
tendencies. His business done, he comes home with
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">250</a></span>
the docility of a well-bred pointer sent to heel, and finds
energy enough after his hard day's work for a variety
of caressing cares which make him more precious
in her eyes than all the tact, the temper, the judgment,
the uprightness he has manifested in his dealings
with the outside world. And the domesticity
which she claims from her husband she demands
from her son. Latchkeys are her abomination, and
the 'gas left burning' is as a beacon-light on the way
of destruction. She has the profoundest suspicion of
all the men whom her boy calls his friends. She
never knows into what mischief they may lead him;
but she is sure it is mischief if they keep him away
from his home in the evening. She would prescribe
the same social restraints and moral regimen for her
son as for her daughter, and she thinks the energies
of masculine nature require no wider field and no
looser rein. But though she likes those tame and
tender men whom she can tie up close to her apron-strings
and lovingly imprison in the narrow domain
of home, she succumbs without a struggle to the
square-jawed brute of the Rochester type, the man
who dominates her by the mere force of superior
strength; and she is not too severe on Don Juan, if
only she can flatter herself that she is the best loved&mdash;and
the last. That these are the men most liked
by women is shown both by their own novels and by
daily observation; and it seems to us that, among
the many subjects for extended study of late proposed
for women, a better acquaintance with men's
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">251</a></span>
minds, a higher regard for the nobler kind of man
and the ability to accept love as only one of many
qualities, and not always the strongest nor the most
praiseworthy of his impulses, would not be out of
place.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">252</a></span></p>

<h2><i>HOTEL LIFE IN ENGLAND.</i></h2>

<p>If any one wants to see human nature stripped of
certain conventional disguises and reduced to some of
its primitive elements, let him try a boarding-house
or family hotel for a while. If not always a profitable,
it is generally an amusing, exhibition of character;
and materials are never wanting to the student
of human life. The predominating quality of most
people will be found to be selfishness. There is a
kind of fighting for self that goes on which is very
funny, because concentrated on such mean objects.
Who shall have the most comfortable chair, the best
place at the window, the cosiest by the fire&mdash;such
are the favourite prizes to be gained by superior craft
or boldness; and the ladies chiefly interested have
recourse to a series of man&oelig;uvres to circumvent their
rivals, or steal a march on them unprepared, more
ingenious at times than well-bred. Then there is
the lady who appropriates the only footstool, and the
lady who disputes the appropriation and sometimes
'comes to words' on the same; the couple who
monopolize the bagatelle board, and the couple
waiting savagely for their turn, which comes only
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">253</a></span>
when the gong sounds for dinner or the sky clears
up for a walk. The quartet who settle themselves
to whist every evening as to a regular part of the
business of life, without caring to inquire whether
others would like to cut in or not, are more justified
in their exclusiveness; else it may happen that a
Club man who can make his bad cards beat his opponent's
good ones is mated with a partner who
inquires anxiously 'Is that the queen to beat?' then,
with the king in his hand, quietly drops the deuce,
and gives the adversaries the game. All these however,
are regarded with equally hostile feelings by the
rest of the community; and sharp sermons are administered
on the sin of selfishness by the bolder sort,
with the application too evident to be misunderstood.</p>

<p>At meal times the same kind of odd fighting for
self goes on. The table is set as for a dinner party;
but it is the hands of Esau and the voice of Jacob.
Instead of the silent waiting for one's turn, with the
quiet acceptance of fate in the shape of the butler and
his underlings, that belongs to a private dinner-table,
here, at the <i>table d'hôte</i>, there is an incessant call for
this or that out of time; an angry demand to be
served sooner or better than one's neighbours; a
greedy 'taking care of number one' at the head of
the table that excites as greedy apprehensions in
number two at the foot; a running fire of criticism
on the dishes&mdash;that does not help the illusion of the
private dinner-party; and, with people who live
much about in hotels, there is a continual comparison
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">254</a></span>
with this and that, here and there, always to the
disadvantage of the place and the thing under present
consideration.</p>

<p>Among the inmates are sure to be some who are
fastidious and peevish about their food; women who
come down late and complain that things are not as
fresh as when first served up; men who always want
fried fish when the management has provided boiled,
and boiled when the <i>menu</i> says fried; dyspeptic
bodies who cannot eat bread unless it is two days
old, and bodies defiant of dyspepsia who will not eat
it at all unless it is hot from the oven; plain feeders
who turn up their noses at the made dishes, and
dainty livers who call simple roast and boiled coarse.
And for all these societies the management has to
cater impartially; and probably miss the reward of
thanks at the end.</p>

<p>The feelings of people are expressed with the
same kind of defiant individualism as are their tastes.
There are the married people who make love to each
other in public, and the married people who make
anything but love; the women who sit and adore
their husbands like worshippers before a shrine, and
who like the world to be conscious of their devotion;
the men who call their wives pet names for the benefit
of the whole table, and even indulge in playful little
familiarities which make the girls toss their heads and
the young men laugh; and the happy pair who
quarrel without restraint, and say snappish and disagreeable
things to each other in audible voices, to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">255</a></span>
the embarrassment of all who hear them. There is
the rakish Lothario who neglects his own better half
and devotes himself to some other man's, with a
lofty disregard of appearances; and there is the
coquettish little wife who treats her husband very
much like a dog and very little like her lord, and who
carries on her flirtations in the most audacious manner
under his eyes, and apparently with his sanction.
And, having his sanction, she defies the world about
her to take umbrage at her proceedings.</p>

<p>As for flirtations indeed, these are always going
on in hotel life. Sometimes it is flirtation between
a single man and a single woman, against which no
one has a word to say on the score of propriety,
though some think it will never come to anything
and some think it will, and all scan curiously the
signs of progressive heating, or the process of cooling
off. Sometimes it is a more questionable matter;
the indiscreet behaviour of a young wife, unprotected
by her husband, who takes up furiously with some
stranger met at the <i>table d'hôte</i> by chance, and of
whose character or antecedents she is utterly ignorant.
This is the kind of things that sets the whole hotel
by the ears. Prim women ask severely, 'How long
has Mrs. So-and-So known Major Fourstars?' and
their faces, when told, are a sufficient commentary
on the text. Others, in seeming innocence, call them
by the same name, and express intense surprise
when informed they are not man and wife, but acquaintances
of only a week's standing. Others again
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">256</a></span>
say it is shameful to see them, and wonder why some
one does not write home to the poor husband, and
speak of doing that kind office themselves; and others
watch them with a cynical half-amused attention,
interpreting their actions by the broadest glossary,
and carefully guarding their wives or daughters from
any association with either of the offenders. Whatever
else fails, this kind of vulgar hotel intrigue is
always on hand at sea-side places and the like; sometimes
ending disastrously, sometimes dying out in
favour of a new flame, but always causing discomfort
while it lasts, and annoying every one connected
therewith save the sinners themselves.</p>

<p>The women who dress to excess are balanced by
the women who do not dress at all. The first are
the walking advertisements of fashion, the last might
be mistaken for the canvassers of old clothes' shops.
The one class oppress by their magnificence, the
other disgust by their dowdiness; and each ridicules
the other to the indifferent third party, who, holding
the scales of justice evenly, condemns both alike.
Then there are the ugly women who manifestly think
themselves attractive, and the pretty women who are
too conscious of their charms. To be sure there are
also ugly women who are content to know themselves
unpersonable, as there are pretty women who are
content to know that they are pretty, just as they
know that they are alive, but who think no more
about it, and never trouble themselves nor their
neighbours by their affectations. There are the dear
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">257</a></span>
motherly women beyond middle age, scant of breath
and incapable of exertion, who sit in the drawing-room,
placid and asthmatic, and to whom every one
pays an affectionate reverence; and there are the
elderly women who chirrup about like young things,
and skip up and down steep places with commendable
agility, and who are by no means disposed to let
old age have the victory for many a year to come.
There are the mothers who make their lumpish children
sick with a multiplicity of good things, and the
mothers who never give a moment's thought to the
comfort nor the well-being of theirs; the mothers who
fidget their little ones and every one else by their
over-anxiety, their over caution, their incessant preoccupation
and fear, and the mothers who let theirs
wander, and who take it quite comfortably if they
do not come in even at night-fall; the mothers who
prank their children out like Mayday Jacks and Jills,
and the mothers who let theirs go free in rags and
dirt, till you are puzzled to believe them better born
than the gutter. And with all this there is the plague
of the children themselves&mdash;the babies who cry all
night; the two-year-olds who scream all day; the
rampaging boys who haunt the stairs and passages
and who will slide down the banisters on a wet afternoon;
the clattering little troop playing at horses
before your bedroom door, while you are lying down
with a sick headache; and the irruption into the
drawing-room of the young barbarians who have no
nursery of their own.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">258</a></span>
Quite recent widows with fluffy heads and no
sign of their bereaved state, come to the hotel flanked
by those of a couple of years' standing, still dressed
in the deepest weeds, with the significant cap cherished
as a sacred symbol. Brisk young widows appeal to
men's admiration by their brightness, and languid
young widows excite sympathy by their despair.
Pretty young widows of small endowment, whose
chances you would back at long odds, are handicapped
against plain-featured widows, whose desolation you
know no one would ever ask to relieve were it not
for those Three per cents. with which they are
credited. And the widows of hotel life are always a
feature worth studying. There are many who do so
study them;&mdash;chiefly the old bachelor of well-preserved
appearance and active habits, who has constituted
himself the squire of dames to the establishment,
and who takes up first with one and then another of
the unprotected females as they appear, and escorts
them about the neighbourhood. He never makes
friends with men, but he is hand-in-glove with all the
pretty women; and his critical judgment on them
on their first appearance is considered final. As a
rule he does not care to attach himself so exclusively
to one, be she maid, wife, or widow, as to get himself
talked about; but sometimes he falls into the
clutches of a woman of more tenacity than he has
bargained for, and, man of irreproachable respectability
as he is, drifts into a flirtation which the hotel
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">259</a></span>
takes to mean an offer or an intrigue, according to
the state of the lady concerned. As the hotel-life
bachelor is generally a man of profound selfishness,
the discomfort that ensues does no great harm; and
it sometimes happens that it is diamond cut diamond,
which is a not unrighteous retribution.</p>

<p>For the most part the people haunting hotels and
living at <i>tables d'hôte</i> are not specially charming, but
among them may sometimes be met men and women
of broad views and liberal minds, cultivated and
thoughtful, whose association time ripens into friendship.
They stand out in bold relief among the
vulgar people who talk loud, stare hard, ask impertinent
questions, and discuss the dinners and the company
in a broad provincial accent; among the silent
people who sit gloomily at table as if oppressed with
debt or assisting at a funeral; among the betting-men
who flood the house at race-time, making it
echo with the jargon of the Turf and the stable;
among the quarrelsome people who snap and snarl at
every subject started, like dogs growling over a bone;
among the religious people who will testify in season
and out of season, and the political people who will
argue; the stupid people who have not two ideas,
and the ignorant people who do not understand anything
beyond the educational range of a child or a
peasant; the conventional people who oppress one
with their strained proprieties, and the doubtful
people of whom no one knows anything and every
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">260</a></span>
one suspects all. Among the <i>oi polloi</i> of hotel life
the really nice people shine conspicuous: and more
than one pleasant friendship which has lasted for life
has been begun over the soup and fish of a <i>table d'hôte</i>.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">261</a></span></p>

<h2><i>OUR MASKS.</i></h2>

<p>We should do badly, as things are ordered, if we
went about the world with our natural moral faces.
Even stopping short of the extravagance of betraying
our most important secrets, as in a Palace of
Truth, and frankly telling men and women that we
think them fools or bores, it is difficult for the most
honest person in society to do without something of a
mask in regard to minor matters. The old quarrel between
nature and art, and where the limits of each
should extend, has not yet got itself arranged; and it
is doubtful whether it will during the present dispensation.
It may be put to rights in some future
state of human development, when the spiritualists
will have it all their own way and tell us exactly
what we ought to do; but pending this forecast of the
millennium, we are obliged to have recourse to art
for the better concealment of our natural selves, and
especially, for the maintenance of that queer bundle
of compromises and conventions which we call
society.</p>

<p>The oddest consequence of the artificial state in
which we find ourselves obliged to live is that nature
looks like affectation, and that the highest art is the
most like nature of anything we know. It is in
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">262</a></span>
drawing-rooms as on the stage. A thoroughly inartificial
actor would be a mere dummy, just as in
the Greek theatre a man with his natural face would
have seemed mean and insignificant to the spectators
accustomed to fixed types of heroic size and set intention.
But he whose acting brings the house down
because of its truth to nature is he whose art has
been the most profoundly studied, and with whom
the concealment of art has therefore been the most
perfectly attained. So in society. A man of
thoroughly natural manners passes as either morose
or pert according to his mood&mdash;either stupid because
disinclined to exert himself, or obtrusive because in
the humour to talk. He means no offence, honest
body! but he makes himself disagreeable all the
same. Such a man is the pest of his club, and
the nuisance of every drawing-room he enters. It
matters little whether he is constitutionally boorish
or good-natured; he is natural; and his naturalness
comes like an ugly patch of frieze on the cloth of
gold with which the goddess of conventionality is
draped.</p>

<p>Natural women too, may be found at times&mdash;women
who demonstrate on small occasions, sincerely
no doubt, but excessively; women who skip like
young lambs when they are pleased and pout like
naughty children when they are displeased; who
disdain all those little arts of dress which conceal
defects and heighten beauties, and who are always at
war with the fashions of the day; who despise those
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">263</a></span>
conventional graces of manner which have come to
be part of the religion of society, contradicting point-blank,
softening no refusal with the expression of a
regret they do not feel, yawning in the face of the
bore, admiring with the <i>naïveté</i> of a savage whatever
is new to them or pleasing. Such women are not
agreeable companions, however devoid of affectation
they may be, however stanch adherents to truth
and things as they are, according to their boast. The
woman who has not a particle of untrained spontaneity
left in her and who has herself in hand on all
occasions, who gives herself to her company and
is always collected, graceful, and at ease, playing
her part without a trip, but always playing her part
and never letting herself drop into uncontrolled
naturalness&mdash;this is the woman whom men agree to
call, not only charming, but thoroughly natural as
well.</p>

<p>On the other hand, the untrained woman who
speaks just as she thinks, and who cares more to
express her own sensations than to study those of
her companions, is sneered at as silly or underbred,
as the current sets; or perhaps as affected; her transparency,
to which the world is not accustomed and
to which it does not wish to get accustomed, puzzling
the critics of their kind. Social naturalness, like
perfect theatrical representation, is everywhere the
result of the best art; that is, of the most careful
training. It simulates self-forgetfulness by the very
perfection of its self-control, while untrained nature
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">264</a></span>
is self-assertion at all corners, and is founded on the
imperious consciousness of personality.</p>

<p>All of us carry our masks into society. We
offer an eidolon to our fellow-creatures, showing our
features but not expressing our mind; and the one
whose eidolon, while betraying least of the being
within, reflects most of the beings without, is the
most popular and considered the most self-revealed.
We may take it as a certainty that we never
really know any one. We may know the broad outlines
of character; and we generally believe far more
than we have warranty for; but we rarely, if ever,
penetrate the inner circle wherein the man's real self
hides. If our friend is a person of small curiosity
and large self-respect, we may trust him not to commit
a base action; if he has a calm temperament,
with physical strength and without imagination, he
will not do a cowardly one; if he has the habit of
truth, he will not tell a lie on any paltry occasion;
if he is tenacious and secret, he will not betray his
cause nor his friend. But we know very little more
than this. Even with one's most familiar friend
there is always one secret door in the casket which
is never opened; and those which are thrown wide
apart are not those which lead to the most cherished
treasures. With the frankest or the shallowest there
are depths never sounded; what shall we say, then,
of those who have real profundity of character?</p>

<p>Who is not conscious of an ego that no man has
seen? In praise or blame we feel that we are not
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">265</a></span>
thoroughly known. There is something infinitely
pathetic in this dumb consciousness of an inner self,
an unrevealed truth, which bears us up through injustice
and makes us shrink from excessive praise. Our
very lovers love us for the least worthy part of us, or
for fancied virtues which we do not possess; and if
our worst enemies knew us as we are, they would
come round to the other side and shake hands over the
grave of their mistaken estimate. The mask hides the
reality in either case, for good or for ill; and we know
that if it could be removed, we should be judged differently.
For the matter of that it never can be
removed. The most transparent are judged according
to the temper of the spectator; and the mind
sees what it brings in our judgment of our fellows
as well as in other things.</p>

<p>But, apart from that inner nature, that hidden
part which so few people even imagine exists in each
other, the masks we wear in society cover histories,
sufferings, feelings, which would set the world aflame
if betrayed. No one who gets below the smooth
crust of conventional life can be ignorant of the
fierce lava flood that sometimes flows and rages
underneath. In those quiet drawing-rooms where
everything looks the embodiment of harmony, of
tranquil understanding, and where the absence of
mystery is the first thing felt, there are dramas at
the very time enacting of which only the exceptionally
observant catch the right cue. Ruin faces some
whose ship of good fortune seems sailing steadily on
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">266</a></span>
a halcyon sea; a hideous secret stands like a spectre
in the doorway of another. The domestic happiness
which these covenant between themselves to show in
the full sunshine to the world is no better than a
Dead Sea apple displayed for pride, for policy, and of
which those who eat alone know the extreme bitterness.
The grand repute which makes men honour
the name to the very echo, is a sham, and tottering
to its fall. Here the confessing religionist hides
by the fervour of his amens the scepticism which
he dares not show by the honesty of his negation;
there the respectable moralist denounces in his mask
the iniquities which he practises daily when he lays it
aside. To the right the masks of two loving friends
greet each other with smiles and large expressions of
affection, then part, to push the friendly falsehood
aside, and to whisper confidentially to the crowd
what scoundrelism they have mutually embraced; to
the left another couple of unreasoning foes want only
to see each other in unmasked simplicity to become
fast allies for life. The world and all it disguises
play sad mischief with human affections as well as
with truth.</p>

<p>Everything serves for a mask. A man's public
character makes one which is as impenetrable in its
disguise as any. The world takes one or two salient
points and subordinates every other characteristic to
these. It ignores all those subtle intricacies which
modify thought and action at every turn, producing
apparent inconsistency&mdash;but only apparent; and it
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">267</a></span>
boldly blocks out a mask of one or two dominant
lines as the representative of a nature protean because
complex. Any quality that makes itself seen from
behind this mask which popular opinion has created
out of a man's public character is voted as inconsistent,
or, it may be, insincere; and the richer the
nature the less it is understood. So it is with us all
in our degree:&mdash;a thought which might lead us to
gentler judgments on each other than it is the fashion
to cultivate, knowing as we do that we each wear a
mask which hides our real self from the world; and
that if this real self is less beautiful than our admirers
say, it is infinitely less hideous than our enemies
would make it to appear.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">268</a></span></p>

<h2><i>HEROES AT HOME.</i></h2>

<p>We may say what we like about the worthlessness of
the world and the solid charms of home, but the plain
fact, stripped of oratorical disguise, is that we mostly
give society the best we have and keep the worst of
ourselves for our own. The hero at home is not
half so fine a fellow as the hero in public, and cares
far less for his audience. Indeed, when looked at
under the domestic microscope, he is frequently found
to be eminently un-heroic&mdash;something of the nature
of a botch rather than nobility in undress and an
ideal brought down to the line of sight; which
would be the case if he and all things else were what
they seem, and if heroism, like fine gold, was good
all through. This is not saying that the hero in
public is a cheat. He has only turned the best of his
cloak outside, and hidden the seams and frays next
his skin. We know that every man's cloak must
have its seams and frays; and the vital question for
each man's life is, Who ought to see most of them,
strangers or friends? We fear it must be owned that,
whoever ought, it is our friends who do get the
worst of our wardrobe&mdash;the people we love, and for
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">269</a></span>
whom we would willingly die if necessary; whilst
strangers, for whom we have no kind of affection, are
treated to the freshest of the velvet and the brightest
of the embroidery. The man, say, who is
pre-eminently good company abroad, who keeps a
dinner-table alive with his quick wit and keen repartee,
and who has always on hand a store of unhackneyed
anecdotes, the latest <i>on dits</i>, and the newest information
not known to Reuter, but who hangs up his
fiddle at his own fireside and in the bosom of his
family is as silent as the vocal Memnon at midnight,
is not necessarily a cheat. He is an actor without a
part to play or a stage whereon to play it; a hero
without a flag; a bit of brute matter without an
energizing force.</p>

<p>The excitement of applause, the good wine and
the pleasant dishes, the bright eyes of pretty women,
the half-concealed jealousy of clever men, the sensation
of shining&mdash;all these things, which are spurs to
him abroad, are wanting at home; and he has not
the originating faculty which enables him to dispense
with these incentives. He is a first-class hero on his
own ground; but it would be a tremendous downfall
to his reputation were his admirers to see him as he
is off parade, without the pomps and vanities to show
him to advantage. He has just been the social hero
of a dinner; 'so bright, so lively, so delightful,' says
the hostess enthusiastically, with a side blow to her
own proprietor, who perhaps is pleasant enough by
the domestic hearth but only a dumb dog in public.
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">270</a></span>
The party has been 'made' by him, rescued from
universal dullness by his efforts alone; and every
woman admires him as he leaves in a polite blaze of
glory, and only wishes he could be secured for her
own little affair next week. So he takes his departure,
a hero to the last, with a happy thought for
every one and a bright word all round. The hall-door
closes on him, and the hero sinks into the
husband. He is as much transformed as soon as he
steps inside his brougham as was ever Cinderella after
twelve, with her state coach and footmen gone to
pumpkin and green lizards. He likes his wife well
enough, as wives and liking go; but she does not
stir him up intellectually, and her applause is no
whetstone for his wit. Put the veriest chit of a girl
as bodkin between them and he will waken into life
again, and become once more the conversational hero,
because he is no longer wholly at home. His wife
probably does not like it, and she laughs, as wives
do, when she hears his praises from those who know
him only at his best, letting off his fireworks for the
applause of the crowd.</p>

<p>But then wives are proverbially unflattering in
their estimates of their husbands' heroics; and the
Truth that used to live at the bottom of a well has
changed her name and abode in these later times, and
has come to mean the partner of your joys, who
gives you her candid opinion at home. Still, your
good company abroad who sits like a mute Memnon
at home is not pleasant, though not necessarily a
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">271</a></span>
sham. Certainly he is no hero all through, but he
may be nothing worse than one of those unfortunates
whose intellect lives on drams and does not take
kindly to domestic pudding.</p>

<p>His wife does not approve of this hanging up of
the fiddle by his own fireside; yet she does the same
thing on her side, and is as little a heroine by the
domestic hearth as he is a hero. What his talk is to
him her beauty is to her; and for whom, let us ask,
does she make herself loveliest? For her husband,
or for a handful of fops and snobs each one of whom
individually is more indifferent to her than the other?
See her in society, a very Venus dressed by Worth
and Bond Street, if not by the Graces. Follow her
home, and see her as her maid sees her. The abundant
<i>chevelure</i>, which is the admiration of the men and
the envy of the women who believe in it, is taken off
and hung up like her great-grandfather's wig, leaving
her small round head covered by a wisp of ragged
ends broken and burnt by dyes and restorers; her
bloom of glycerine and powder is washed from her face,
showing the faded skin and betraying lines beneath;
the antimony is rubbed off her eyelids; the effects
of belladonna leave her now contracting pupils;
her perfectly moulded form is laid aside with her
dress; and the fair queen of the <i>salon</i>&mdash;the heroine of
gaslight loveliness&mdash;stands as a lay-figure with bare
tracts of possibilities whereon the artist may work, but
which tracts nature has forgotten or which she herself
has worked on so unmercifully as to have worn out.
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">272</a></span>
How many a heartache would be healed if only the
heroine, like the hero, could be followed to the sanctuary
of the dressing-room, and if the adored could appear
to the adorer as does the one to the maid the
other to the valet!</p>

<p>The tender, sympathetic, moist-eyed woman who
condoles so sweetly with your little troubles, and
whose affectionate compassion soothes you like the
trickling of sweet waters or the cooling breath of a
pleasant air, but who leaves her sick husband at home
to get through the weary hours as he best may, who
bullies her servants and scolds her children&mdash;she too,
is a heroine of a class that does not look well
when closely studied. The pretty young mother,
making play with her pretty young children in the
Park&mdash;a smiling picture of love and loveliness&mdash;when
followed home, turning into a fretful, self-indulgent
fine lady, flung wearily into an easy chair, sending
the children up to the nursery and probably seeing
them no more until Park hour to-morrow, when
their beautiful little <i>têtes d'ange</i> will enhance her own
loveliness in the eyes of men, and make her more
beautiful because making the picture more complete;
Mrs. Jellaby given up to universal philanthropy,
refusing a crust to the beggar at her own gate, but
full of tearful pity for the misery she has undertaken
to mitigate at Borioboolagha; Cr&oelig;sus scattering
showers of gold abroad, and applauded to the echo
when his name, with the donation following, is read
out at a public dinner, but looking after the cheese-parings
at home; the eloquent upholder of human
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">273</a></span>
equality in public, snubbing in private all who are
one degree below him in the social scale, and treating
his servants like dogs; the no less eloquent descanter
on the motto <i>Noblesse oblige</i>, when the house-door is
shut between him and the world, running honesty so
fine that it is almost undistinguishable from roguery&mdash;all
these heroes abroad show but shabbily at home,
and make their heroism within the four walls literally
a vanishing quantity.</p>

<p>People who live on the outside of the charmed
circle of letters, but who believe that the men and
women that compose it are of a different mould from
the rest of mankind, and who long to be permitted
to penetrate the rose-hedge and learn the facts of
Armida's garden for themselves, sometimes learn
them too clearly for their dreams to be ever possible
again. They have a favourite author&mdash;a poet, say,
or a novelist. If a poet, he is probably one whose
songs are full of that delicious melancholy which
makes them so divinely sad; an æsthetic poet; a
blighted being; a creature walking in the moonlight
among the graves and watering their flowers with his
tears:&mdash;if a novelist, he is one whose sprightly fancy
makes the dull world gay. A friend takes the worshipper
to the shrine where the idol is to be found;
in other words, they go to call on him at his own
house. The melancholy poet 'hidden in the light of
thought,' is a rubicund, rosy-gilled gentleman, brisk,
middle-aged, comfortable, respectable, particular as to
his wines, a connoisseur as to the merits of the <i>chef</i>, a
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">274</a></span>
<i>bon vivant</i> of the Horatian order, and in his talk prone
to personal gossip and feeble humour. The lively
novelist, on the other hand, is a taciturn, morose
kind of person, afflicted with perennial catarrh, ever
ready with an unpleasant suggestion, given to start
disagreeable topics of a grave, not to say depressing,
nature, perhaps a rabid politician incapable of a
give-and-take argument, or a pessimistic economist,
taking gloomy views of the currency and despondent
about our carrying trade.</p>

<p>As for the women, they never look the thing
they are reputed to be, save in fashion, and sometimes
in beauty. A woman who goes to public meetings
and makes speeches on all kinds of subjects, tough as
well as doubtful, presents herself in society with the
look of an old maid and the address of a shy schoolgirl.
A sour kind of essayist, who finds everything
wrong and nothing in its place, has a face like the
full moon and looks as if she fed on cream and butter.
A novelist who sails very near the wind, and on
whom the critics are severe by principle, is as quiet
as a Quakeress in her conversation and as demure as
a nun in her bearing; while a writer of religious
tracts has her gowns from Paris and gives small suppers
out of the proceeds. The public character and the
private being of almost every person in the world
differ widely from each other; and the hero of history
who is also the hero to his valet has yet to be found.</p>

<p>Some people call this difference inconsistency, and
some manysidedness; to some it argues unreality,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">275</a></span>
to others it is but the necessary consequence of a
complex human nature, and a sign that the mind
needs the rest of alternation just as much as the body.
We cannot be always in the same groove, never
changing our attitude nor object. Is it inconsistency
or supplement, contradiction or compensation? The
sterner moralists, and those whose minds dwell on
tares, say the former; those who look for wheat even
on the stony ground and among thorns assert the
latter. Anyhow, it is certain that those who desire
ideals and who like to worship heroes would do well
to content themselves with adoration at a long range.
Distance lends enchantment, and ignorance is bliss
in more cases than one. Heroism at home is something
like the delicacy of Brobdingnag, or the grandiosity
of Lilliput; and the undress of the domestic
hearth is more favourable to personal comfort than
to public glory. To keep our ideals intact we ought
to keep them unknown. Our goddesses should not
be seen eating beefsteaks and drinking stout; our
poets are their best in print, and social small-talk
does not come like truths divine mended from their
tongue; our sages and philanthropists gain nothing,
and may lose much, by being rashly followed to their
firesides. Yet a man's good work and brave word
are, in any case, part of his real self, though they
may not be the whole; and even if he is not true
metal all through, his gold, so far as it goes, counts
for more than its alloy, and his public heroism overtops
his private puerility.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">276</a></span></p>

<h2><i>SEINE-FISHING.</i></h2>

<p>Few braver or hardier men are to be found in England
than the Cornish fishermen. Their business, at
all times hazardous, is doubly so on a coast so
dangerous as theirs, where the charm of scenery is
bought at the expense of security. Isolated rocks
which are set up like teeth close round the jagged
cliffs and far out from shore, cropping up at intervals
anywhere between Penzance and Scilly; sunken rocks
which are more perilous because more treacherous;
strong currents which on the calmest day keep the
sea where they flow in perpetual turmoil; a singularly
tumultuous and changeable sea, where the
ground-swell of the Atlantic sweeps on in long
waves which break into a surf that would swamp
any boat put out, even when there is not a breath of
surface-wind stirring; for the most part a very narrow
channel to the coves, a mere water-path as one
may call it, beset by rocks which would break the
boats to splinters if they were thrown against them&mdash;all
these circumstances make the trade of the
Cornish fishermen exceptionally dangerous; but they
also make the men themselves exceptionally resolute
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">277</a></span>
and daring. They are true fighters with nature for
food; and, like the miners, they feel when they set
out to their work that they may never come back
from it alive.</p>

<p>No man can predict what the sea will be an hour
or two hence. Its character changes with each
fluctuation of the tide; and a calm and halcyon lake
may have become fierce and angry and tempest-tossed
when the ebb turns and the flow sets in.
There are times too, when a boat caught by the wind
and drifted into a current would be as helpless as a
cork in a mill-race; and when a whole fleet of fishing-boats
might be blown out to sea, with perhaps
half their number capsized. But, as a rule, having
learnt caution with their hardihood from the very
magnitude of the dangers which surround them, these
Cornish men suffer as little by shipwreck as do the
fishermen of safer bays; and though each cove has
its own sad story, and every rock its victim, the
worst cases of wreck have been those of larger vessels
which have mistaken lights, or steered too close in
shore, or been lost in the fogs that are so frequent
about the Land's End. Or they may have been
caught by the wind and the tide and driven dead on
to a lee shore; as so often happens in the bay between
Hartland and Padstow Points.</p>

<p>But the more cautious the men are the less
money they make; and though life is certainly more
than meat, life without meat at all, or with only an
insufficient quantity, is rather a miserable affair.
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">278</a></span>
The material well-being of the poor fellows who live
in those picturesque little coves which are the delight
and the despair of artists is not in a very satisfactory
condition. By the law of aggregation, unification,
whatever we like to call it&mdash;the law of the present
day by which individuals are absorbed into bodies
that work for wages for one master, instead of each
man working for himself for his own hand&mdash;the independent
fishermen are daily becoming fewer. Save
at Whitesand Bay, where there is a 'poor man's
seine' and 'a rich man's seine,' almost all the seine
nets belong now to companies or partnerships of
rich men; and in very few have the men themselves
any share.</p>

<p>Fishermen's seines are not well regarded by the
wealthy leaseholders of the cove and foreshore; and
the leaseholder has very large legal rights and powers
which it would be idle to blame him for exercising.
The cots are his, and the capstan is his, and the right
of landing is his; thus he can put on the screw
when he wants to have things his own way, and can
threaten evictions, and the withdrawal of the right
to the capstan and to the landing-place, if the men
will not go on his seine, but choose either a united
one of their own or independent drift or trawl nets.
Some, it is said, even object to the men fishing at all,
at any rate during the seine season; some have raised
the annual rent per boat for cove rights to three or
four times its old rate; and some go through a round
of surly suspicion and irritating supervision during
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">279</a></span>
the 'bulking' days, and higgle jealously over the
small share allowed to the hands in the catch. So
that, on the whole, the Cornish fisherman of the
smaller coves has not much to boast of beside his
courage and good heart, and a sturdy independence
and honesty specially noticeable.</p>

<p>We know of no more animated scene than seine-fishing.
From the first act to the last there is
a quaint old-world flavour about it inexpressibly
charming to people used to the prosaic life of
modern cities. The 'huers' who stand on the
hills watching for the first appearance of the 'school,'
and who make known what they see either by signals
or calling through a huge metal trumpet, the sound
of which no one who has once heard it can ever forget;
the smartness of the men dressing the seine-boats
which carry the huge net with all its appurtenances;
their quiet but eager watching for the school
to come within practicable distance&mdash;that is, into
sufficiently shoal water, and where the bottom is
fairly level (else the fish all escape from under the
net); the casting or shooting of the seine enclosing
the school, and then the 'tucking' or lifting the fish
from the sea to the boats&mdash;every stage is full of
interest; but this last is the prettiest of all.</p>

<p>Imagine a moonlight night&mdash;low water at midnight&mdash;when
the tucking begins. The boat cannot
come up to the ordinary landing, which is only a
roughly-paved causeway dipping by a gradual descent
into the sea; so those who would share in the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">280</a></span>
sport are fain to take the fisherman's path along the
cliff and drop into the boat off the rocks. These
rocks are never very safe. Even the men themselves,
trained to them as they are from boyhood, sometimes
slip on their slanting, broken, seaweed-covered surfaces,
when, if they cannot swim and are not helped,
all is over for them in this life; and for strangers
they are difficult at the best of times. But on an
obscurely lighted night, and after heavy rain, they
are doubly risky. The incoming wave lifts the boat
a few inches higher and nearer; and you must catch
the exact moment and make a spring before she
drifts off again with the ebb. The row across the
little bay is beautiful. The grey cliffs look solemn
and majestic in the pale light of the moon; the
shadows are deep and unfathomable; everywhere you
see black rocks standing out from the steely sea, and
little lines of breakers mark the place of the sunken
rocks. In the distance shine the magnificent Lizard
Lights, and the red and white revolving light of the
terrible Wolf Rock flashes on the horizon; the moon
touches the sea with silver, and the waves as they
rise and fall seem like molten metal in the heavy
sluggish rhythm of their flow. Only round the foot
of the cliffs and about the rocks they break into
spray that serves as high lights against the sombre
grey and black of the landscape. You pull across
to the opposite point, and then round into another
smaller bay where the cliffs rise sheer, and the seine
net is cast. You come into a little fleet of fishing-boats
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">281</a></span>
set round on the outside of a circle of corks,
within which is the master-boat, where all hands are
assembled pulling at the net, to draw it closer. It
is a stirring sight. Some dozen or more stalwart
fellows are hauling on the lines with the sailors'
cheery cry and the sailors' exuberant goodwill.
Every now and then the master's voice cries out
'Break! break my sons!' when they shorten hold
and go over to the other side of the boat, pulling
themselves gradually aslant again, till the same order
of 'Break! break!' shows that their purchase is too
slack. At last the net is hauled up close enough,
and then the fun begins.</p>

<p>All the boats engaged form a close circle round
the inner line of corks, which is now a little sea of
silver where the imprisoned pilchards beat and
flutter, producing a sound for which we have no
satisfactory onomatopoetic word. In moonlight this
little sea is silver; in torchlight it is of fire with
varied colours flashing through the redder gleams;
and in the dark it is a sea of phosphorescent light,
each mesh of the net, each fish, each seaweed illuminated
as if traced in flame. Every one is now busy.
The men dip in baskets, or maunds, expressly made
for this purpose, and ladle out the quivering fish by
hundreds into the boats. In a few moments they
are standing leg-deep in pilchards. Every one on
the spot is pressed into the service, and even a boat
manned by nothing more stalwart than one or two
half-sick and half-frightened women receives its
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">282</a></span>
orders; and 'Hold on ladies! all hands hold on to
the boat,' serves to keep one of the busiest of the
tucking-boats in equilibrium.</p>

<p>The men, for all their hearty work, are like a
party of schoolboys at play. Their humour may be
rough, but it is never meant to be rude; their goodwill
is sincere, for they have a share, however small,
in the success of the catch; and the more they tuck,
the more they will have for their wives and families
to live on through the winter. It is their harvest-time;
and they are as jocund as harvesters proverbially
are. There is no stint of volunteer labour
either. Men who have been working hard all day
on their own account go out at midnight to lend a
hand to their mates at the seine. Even though the
take is for a hard-fisted master who would count fins
if he could, and who would refuse his men a head
apiece if he thought his orders would be carried out,
they are all honestly glad. They remember the time
when a rich school was the wealth of the whole cove,
and when a string of fresh pilchards would be given
freely to any one coming to the cove at the time of
bulking, or, as we should call it, storing.</p>

<p>Still, whatever of economic value there may be
in this exploitation of labour, it has its mournful
side in the loss of individual value which it includes.
And no one can help feeling this who listens to the
talk of the elder fishermen, sorrowfully comparing
the old days of personal independence and generous
lordship with the present ones of wages and a wide-awake
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">283</a></span>
lesseeship, conscious of its legal rights and
determined to act on them.</p>

<p>When all the fish have been tucked there is
nothing for it but to row home again in the freshening
morning air. The tide is rising now, and the
moon is waning. The rocks look blacker, the grey
moss-grown cliffs more solemn, more mysterious, the
white surf breaking about them is higher and sharper
than when you set out; and the boom of the sea
thundering through cave and channel has a sound in
it that makes you feel as if land and your own bed
would be preferable to an open boat at the mercy of
the Atlantic surges. The tide has so far risen that
you can land nearer to the paved causeway than
before; but even now you have to wait for the flow
of the wave, then make a spring on to the black and
slimy rocks, which would be creditable to trained
gymnastic powers. So you go home, under the first
streaks of dawn, wet through and scaly, and smelling
abominably of fish dashed with a streak of tar for a
richer kind of compound.</p>

<p>The whole place however, will smell of fish to-morrow
and for many to-morrows. When the tucking-boats
are brought in, then the women take their
turn, and pack the pilchards in the fish-cellars or
salting-houses. Here they are said to be in 'bulk,'
all laid on their sides with their noses pointing outwards;
layers of salt alternating with layers of fish.
Their great market is Italy, where they serve as
favourite Lenten fare. The Italians believe them to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">284</a></span>
be smoked, and hence call them <i>fumados</i>. This word
the dear thick-headed British sailor has caught up,
according to his wont, and translated into 'fair
maids;' and 'fair maids'&mdash;pronounced firmads&mdash;is
the popular name of salted pilchards all through
Cornwall.</p>

<p>The pilchard fishery begins as early as June
or July; but then it is further out to sea, sometimes
twenty miles out. According to the old saying,</p>

<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry"><div class="stanza">
<div class="line">When the corn is in the shock</div>
<div class="line">The fish are at the rock;</div>
</div></div></div>

<p>harvest-time, which means from August to the end
of October, being the main season for pilchard-fishing
in shoal-water close at home. There are some
choice bits of picturesque life still left to us in faraway
places where the ordinary tourist has not penetrated;
but nothing is more picturesque than seine-fishing
in one of the wilder Cornish coves, when the
tucking goes on at midnight, either by moonlight or
torchlight, or only by the phosphorescent illumination
of the sea itself. No artist that we can remember
at this moment has yet painted it; but it is a
subject which would well repay careful study and
loving handling.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">285</a></span></p>

<h2><i>THE DISCONTENTED WOMAN.</i></h2>

<p>The discontented woman would seem to be becoming an
unpleasantly familiar type of character. A really contented
woman, thoroughly well pleased with her duties
and her destiny, may almost be said to be the exception
rather than the rule in these days of tumultuous revolt
against all fixed conditions, and vagrant energies
searching for interest in new spheres of thought and
action. It seems impossible to satisfy the discontented
woman by any means short of changing the whole
order of nature and society for her benefit. And even
then the chances are that she would get wearied of her
new work, and, like Alexander, would weep for more
worlds to rearrange according to her liking&mdash;with the
power to take or to leave the duties she had voluntarily
assumed, as she claims now the power of discarding
those which have been hers from the beginning.
As things are, nothing contents her; and
the keynote which shall put her in harmony with
existing conditions, or make her ready to bear the
disagreeable burdens which she has been obliged to
carry from Eve's time downward, has yet to be
found. If she is unmarried, she is discontented at the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">286</a></span>
want of romance in her life; her main desire is to
exchange her father's house for a home of her own;
her pride is pained at the prospect of being left an old
maid unsought by men; and her instincts rebel at
the thought that she may never know maternity, the
strongest desire of the average woman.</p>

<p>But if she is married, the causes of her discontent
are multiplied indefinitely, and where she was out of
harmony with one circumstance she is now in discord
with twenty. She is discontented on all sides; because
her husband is not her lover, and marriage is
not perpetual courtship; because he is so irritable
that life with him is like walking among thorns if she
makes the mistake of a hair's-breadth; or because he
is so imperturbably good-natured that he maddens
her with his stolidity, and cannot be made jealous
even when she flirts before his eyes. Or she is discontented
because she has so many household duties to
perform&mdash;the dinner to order, the books to keep, the
servants to manage; because she has not enough
liberty, or because she has too much responsibility;
because she has so few servants that she has to work
with her own hands, or because she has so many that
she is at her wit's end to find occupation for them
all, not to speak of discipline and good management.</p>

<p>As a mother, she is discontented at the loss of
personal freedom compelled by her condition; at the
physical annoyances and mental anxieties included
in the list of her nursery grievances. She would probably
fret grievously if she had no children at all,
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">287</a></span>
but she frets quite as much when they come. In the
former case she is humiliated, in the latter inconvenienced,
and in both discontented. Indeed, the way
in which so many women deliver up their children to
the supreme control of hired nurses proves practically
enough the depth of their discontent with maternity
when they have it.</p>

<p>If the discontented woman is rich, she speaks
despondingly of the difficulties included in the fit
ordering of large means; if she is poor, life has no
joys worth having when frequent change of scene is
unattainable, and the milliner's bill is a domestic
calamity that has to be conscientiously staved off by
rigorous curtailment. If she lives in London, she
laments the want of freedom and fresh air for the children,
and makes the unhappy father, toiling at his City
office from ten till seven, feel himself responsible for
the pale cheeks and attenuated legs which are probably
to be referred to injudicious diet and the frequency of
juvenile dissipations. But if she is in the country, then
all the charm of existence is centred in London and its
thoroughfares, and not the finest scenery in the world
is to be compared with the attractions of the shops in
Regent Street or the crowds thronging Cheapside.</p>

<p>This question of country living is one that presses
heavily on many a female mind; but we must believe
that, in spite of the plausible reasons so often assigned,
the chief causes of discontent are want of
employment and deadness of interest in the life that
lies around. The husband makes himself happy with
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">288</a></span>
his rod and gun, with his garden or his books, with
huntsmen or bricklayers, as his tastes lead him;
but the wife&mdash;we are speaking of the wife given over
to disappointment and discontent, for there are still,
thank Heaven, bright, busy, happy women both in
country and in town&mdash;sits over the fire in winter and
by the empty hearth in summer, and finds all barren
because she is without an occupation or an interest
within doors or without. Ask her why she does not
garden&mdash;if her circumstances are of the kind where
hands are scarce and even a lady's energies would do
potent service among the flower beds; and she will
tell you it makes her back ache, and she does not
know a weed from a flower, and would be sure to
pick up the young seedlings for chickweed and
groundsel. And if she is rich and has hands about
her who know their business and guard it jealously,
she takes shelter behind her inability to do actual
manual labour side by side with them.</p>

<p>Within doors active housekeeping is repulsive
to her; and though her servants may be quasi-savages,
she prefers the dirt and discomfort of idleness
to the domestic pleasantness to be had by her
own industry and practical assistance. Unless she
has a special call towards some particular party in
the Church, she does nothing in the parish, and seems
to think philanthropy and help to one's poorer neighbours
part of the ecclesiastical machinery of the country,
devolving on the Rectory alone. She gets bilious
through inaction and heated rooms, and then says the
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">289</a></span>
place disagrees with her and will be the death of her
before long. She cannot breathe among the mountains;
the moor and plain are too exposed; the sea
gives her a fit of melancholy whenever she looks at
it, and she calls it cruel, crawling, hungry, with a
passion that sounds odd to those who love it; she
hates the leafy tameness of the woods and longs for
the freer uplands, the vigorous wolds, of her early
days.</p>

<p>Wherever, in short, the discontented woman is, it
is just where she would rather not be; and she holds
fate and her husband cruel beyond words because she
cannot be transplanted into the exact opposite of her
present position. But mainly and above all she
desires to be transplanted to London. If you were to
get her confidence, she would perhaps tell you she
thinks the advice of that sister who counselled the
Lady of Groby to burn down the house, whereby her
husband would be compelled to take her to town, the
wisest and most to the purpose that one woman could
give to another. So she mopes and moons through
the days, finding no pleasure anywhere, taking no
interest in anything, viewing herself as a wifely
martyr and the oppressed victim of circumstances;
and then she wonders that her husband is always
ready to leave her company and that he evidently
finds her more tiresome than delightful. If she would
cultivate a little content she might probably change
the aspect of things even to finding the mountains
beautiful and the sea sublime; but dissatisfaction
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">290</a></span>
with her condition is the Nessus garment which
clings to the unhappy creature like a second self,
destroying all her happiness and the chief part of her
usefulness.</p>

<p>Women of this class say that they want more to
do, and a wider field for their energies than any of
those assigned to them by the natural arrangement of
personal and social duties. As administrators of the
fortune which man earns, and as mothers&mdash;that is, as
the directors, caretakers, and moulders of the future
generation&mdash;they have as important functions as those
performed by vestrymen and surgeons. But let that
pass for the moment; the question is not where they
ought to find their fitting occupation and their dearest
interests, but where they profess a desire to do so.
As it is, this desire for an enlarged sphere is one form
among many which their discontent takes; yet when
they are obliged to work, they bemoan their hardship
in having to find their own food, and think that men
should either take care of them gratuitously or make
way for them chivalrously. In spite of Scripture,
they find that the battle is to the strong and the race
to the swift; and they do not like to be overcome by
the one nor distanced by the other. Their idea of a
clear stage is one that includes favour to their own
side; yet they put on airs of indignation and profess
themselves humiliated when men pay the homage of
strength to their weakness and treat them as ladies
rather than as equals.</p>

<p>Elsewhere they complain when they are thrust to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">291</a></span>
the side by the superior force of the ungodly sex;
and think themselves ill-used if fewer hours of labour&mdash;and
that labour of what Mr. Carlyle called a 'slim'
and superficial kind&mdash;cannot command the market
and hold the field against the better work and more
continuous efforts of men. There is nothing of which
women speak with more bitterness than of the lower
rates of payment usually accorded to their work;
nothing wherein they seem to be so utterly incapable
of judging of cause and effect; or of taking to heart
the unchangeable truth that the best must necessarily
win in the long run, and that the first condition of
equality of payment is equality in the worth of the
work done. If women would perfect themselves in
those things which they do already before carrying
their efforts into new fields, we cannot but think
it would be better both for themselves and the
world.</p>

<p>Life is a bewildering tangle at the best, but the
discontented woman is not the one to make it
smoother. The craze for excitement and for unfeminine
publicity of life has possessed her, to the
temporary exclusion of many of the sweeter and
more modest qualities which were once distinctively
her own. She must have movement, action, fame,
notoriety; and she must come to the front on public
questions, no matter what the subject, to ventilate her
theories and show the quality of her brain. She must
be professional all the same as man, with M.D. after
her name; and perhaps, before long, she will want to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">292</a></span>
don a horsehair wig over her back hair, and address
'My Lud' on behalf of some interesting criminal
taken red-handed, or to follow the tortuous windings
of Chancery practice. When that time comes, and as
soon as the novelty has worn off, she will be sure to
complain of the hardness of the grind and the woes
of competition; and the obscure female apothecary
struggling for patients in a poor neighbourhood&mdash;the
unemployed lady lawyer waiting in dingy chambers
for the clients who never come&mdash;will look back with
envy and regret to the time when women were cared
for by men, protected and worked for, and had
nothing more arduous to do than attend to the house,
spend the money they did not earn and forbear to
add to the anxieties they did not share. Could they
get all the plums and none of the suet it would be
fine enough; but we question whether they will find
the battle of life as carried on in the lower ranks of
the hitherto masculine professions one whit more
ennobling or inspiriting than it is now in their own
special departments. Like the poor man who, being
well, wished to be better, and came to the grave as
the result, they do not know when they are well off;
and in their search for excitement, and their discontent
with the monotony, undutifulness and inaction
which they have created for themselves, they run
great danger of losing more than they can gain, and
of only changing the name, while leaving untouched
the real nature, of the disease under which they are
suffering.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">293</a></span></p>

<h2><i>ENGLISH CLERGYMEN IN FOREIGN WATERING-PLACES.</i></h2>

<p>Those persons who object to the influence of the
clergy in their parishes at home, and who dislike the
idea of being laid hold of by the ecclesiastical crook
and dragged perforce up steep ways and narrow paths,
ought to visit some of our little outlying settlements in
foreign parts. They might take a revengeful pleasure
in seeing how the tables there are turned against the
tyrants here, and how weak in the presence of his
transmarine flock is the expatriated shepherd whose
rod at home is oftentimes a rod of iron, and his crook
more compelling than persuasive. Of all men the most
to be pitied is surely the clergyman of one of those
small English settlements which are scattered about
France and Italy, Germany and Switzerland; and of
all men of education, and what is meant by the position
of a gentleman, he is the most in thraldom.</p>

<p>His very means of living depending on his congregation,
he must first of all please that congregation
and keep it in good humour. So, it may be
said, must a clergyman in London whose income is
from pew-rents and whose congregation are not his
parishioners. But London is large; the tempers and
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">294</a></span>
thoughts of men are as numerous as the houses;
there is room for all, and lines of affinity for all.
The Broad Churchman will attract his hearers, and
the Ritualist his, from out of the mass, as magnets
attract steel filings; and each church will be filled
with hearers who come there by preference. But in
a small and stationary society, in a congregation
already made and not specially attracted, yet by which
he has to live, the clergyman finds himself more the
servant than the leader, less the pastor than the thrall.
He must 'suit,' else he is nowhere, and his bread
and butter are vanishing points in his horizon; that
is, he must preach and think, not according to the
truth that is in him, but according to the views of
the most influential of his hearers, and in attacking
their souls he must touch tenderly their tempers.</p>

<p>These tempers are for the most part lions in the
way difficult to propitiate. The elementary doctrines of
Christianity must be preached of course, and sin must
be held up as the thing to avoid, while virtue must
be complimented as the thing to be followed, and a
spiritual state of mind must be discreetly advocated.
These are safe generalities; but the dangers of application
are many. How to preach of duties to a body
of men and women who have thrown off every
national and local obligation?&mdash;who have left their
estates to be managed by agents, their houses to be
filled by strangers, who have given up their share of
interest in the school and the village reading-room,
the poor and the parish generally&mdash;men and women
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">295</a></span>
who have handed themselves over to indolence and
pleasure-seeking, the luxurious enjoyment of a fine
climate, the pleasant increase of income to be got by
comparative cheapness of breadstuffs, and the abandonment
of all those outgoings roughly comprised
under the head of local duties and local obligations?&mdash;how,
indeed? They have no duties to be reminded
of in those moral generalizations which touch all and
offend none; and the clergyman who should go into
details affecting his congregation personally, who
should preach against sloth and slander, pleasure-seeking
and selfishness, would soon preach to empty
pews and be cut by his friends as an impertinent
going beyond his office.</p>

<p>His congregation too, composed of educated ladies
and gentlemen, is sure to be critical, and therefore all
but impossible to teach. If he inclines a hair's breadth
to the right or the left beyond the point at which
they themselves stand, he is held to be unsound. His
sermons are gravely canvassed in the afternoon conclaves
which meet at each other's houses to discuss the
excitement of the Sunday morning in the new arrivals
or the new toilets. Has he dwelt on the humanity
underlying the Christian faith? He is drifting into
Socinianism; and those whose inclinations go for
abstract dogmas well backed by brimstone say that
he does not preach the Gospel. Has he exalted the
functions of the minister, and tried to invest his office
with a spiritual dignity and power that would furnish
a good leverage over his flock? He is accused of
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">296</a></span>
sacerdotalism, and the free-citizen blood of his listening
Erastians is up and flaming. Does he, to avoid
these stumbling-blocks, wander into the deeper mysteries
and discourse on things which no man can
either explain or understand? He is accused of presumption
and profanity, and is advised to stick to the
Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount. If he
is earnest he is impertinent; if he is level he is cold.
Each member of his congregation, subscribing a
couple of guineas towards his support, feels as if he
or she had claims to that amount over the body and
soul and mind and powers of the poor parson in his
or her pay; and the claim is generally worked out in
snippets, not individually dangerous to life nor fortune,
but inexpressibly aggravating, and as depressing
as annoying. For the most part, the unhappy man is
safest when he sticks to broad dogma, and leaves personal
morality alone. And he is almost sure to be
warmly applauded when he has a shy at science, and
says that physicists are fools who assert more than
they can prove, because they cannot show why an
acorn should produce an oak, nor how the phenomena
of thought are elaborated. This throwing of date-stones
is sure to strike no listening djinn. The mass
of the congregations sitting in the English Protestant
churches built on foreign soil, know little and
care less about the physical sciences; but it gives
them a certain comfortable glow to think that they
are so much better than those sinful and presumptuous
men who work at bacteria and the spectroscope;
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">297</a></span>
and they hug themselves as they say, each man in his
own soul, how much nicer it is to be dogmatically
safe than intellectually learned.</p>

<p>Preaching personal morality indeed, with possible
private application, would be rather difficult in dealing
with a congregation not unfrequently made up of
doubtful elements. Take that pretty young woman and
her handsome <i>roué</i>-looking husband, who have come
no one knows whence and are no one knows what,
but who attend the services with praiseworthy punctuality,
spend any amount of money, and are being
gradually incorporated into the society of the place.
The parson may have had private hints conveyed to
him from his friends at home that, of the matrimonial
conditions between the two, everything is real save
the assumed 'lines.' But how is he to say so? They
have made themselves valuable members of his congregation,
and give larger donations than any one
else. They have got the good will of the leading
persons in the sacred community, and, having something
to hide, are naturally careful to please, and are
consequently popular. He can scarcely give form and
substance to the hints he has had conveyed to him;
yet his conscience cries out on the one side, if his
weakness binds him to silence on the other. In any
case, how can he make himself the Nathan to this
questionable David, and, holding forth on the need of
virtuous living, thunder out, 'Thou art the man!'?
Let him try the experiment, and he will find a hornet's
nest nothing to it.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">298</a></span>
How too, can he preach honesty to men, perhaps
his own churchwardens, who have outrun the constable
and outwitted their creditors at one and the
same time? How lecture women who flirt over the
borders on the week days, but pay handsomely for
their sittings on Sundays, on the crown with which
Solomon endowed the lucky husband of the virtuous
woman? He may wish to do all this; but his wife
and children, and the supreme need of food and firing,
step in between him and the higher functions of his
calling; and he owns himself forced to accept the
world as he finds it, sins and shortcomings with the
rest, and to take heed lest he be eaten up by over-zeal
or carried into personal darkness by his desire for his
people's light.</p>

<p>Sometimes the poor man is in thrall to some one
in particular rather than to his flock as a body; and
there are times when this dominant power is a
woman; in which case the many contrarieties besetting
his position may be multiplied <i>ad infinitum</i>. Nothing
can exceed the miserable subjection of a clergyman
given over to the tender mercies of a feminine
despot. She knows everything, and she governs as
much as she knows. She makes herself the arbiter of
his whole life, from his conscience to his children's
boots, and he can call neither his soul nor his home
his own. She prescribes his doctrine, and takes care
to let him know when he has transgressed the rules
she has laid down for his guidance. She treats the
hymns as part of her personal prerogative, and is
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">299</a></span>
violently offended if those having a ritualistic tendency
are sung, or if those are taken whereof the
tunes are too jaunty or the measure is too slow. The
unfortunate man feels under her eye during the whole
of the service, like a schoolboy under the eye of his
preceptress; and he dare not even begin the opening
sentences until she has rustled up the aisle and has
said her private prayer quite comfortably. She holds
over his head the terror of vague threats and shadowy
misfortunes should he cross her will; but at the same
time he does not find that running in her harness
brings extra grist to his mill, nor that his way is
the smoother because he treads in the footsteps she
has marked out for him.</p>

<p>Sometimes she takes a craze against a voluntary;
sometimes she objects to any approach to chanting;
and if certain recalcitrants of the congregation, in
possession of the harmonium, insist on their own
methods against hers, she writes home to the Society
and complains of the thin edge of the wedge and the
Romanizing tendencies of her spiritual adviser. In
any case she is a fearful infliction; and a church ruled
by a female despot is about the most pitiable instance
we know of insolent tyranny and broken-backed
dependence.</p>

<p>But the clergymen serving these transmarine stations
are not often themselves men of mark nor equal
to their contemporaries at home. They are often
sickly, which means a low amount of vital energy;
oftener impecunious, which presupposes want of
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">300</a></span>
grip and precludes real independence. They are
men whose career has been somehow arrested; and
their natures have suffered in the blight that has
befallen their hopes. Their whole life is more or
less a compromise, now with conscience, now with
character; and they have to wink at evils which
they ought to denounce, and bear with annoyances
which they ought to resent. In most cases they are
obliged to eke out their scanty incomes by taking
pupils; and here again the millstone round their
necks is heavy, and they have to pay a large moral
percentage on their pecuniary gains. If their pupils
are of the age when boys begin to call themselves
men, they have to keep a sharp look-out on them;
and they suffer many things on the score of responsibility
when that look-out is evaded, as it necessarily
must be at times. As the characteristic quality of
small societies is gossip, and as gossip always includes
exaggeration, the peccadilloes of the young fellows
are magnified into serious sins, and then bound as a
burden on the back of the poor cleric in thrall to the
idle imaginings of men and the foolish fears of women.
One black sheep in the pupilary flock will do more
damage to the reputation of the unhappy pastor who
has them in hand than a dozen shining lights will do
him good. Morality is assumed to be the free gift of
the tutor to the pupil; and if the boy is bad the man
is to blame for not having made that free-gift betimes.</p>

<p>Look at it how we will, the clergyman in charge
of these foreign congregations has no very pleasant
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">301</a></span>
time of it. In a sense expatriated; his home ties
growing daily weaker; his hope of home preferment
reduced to <i>nil</i>; his liberty of conscience a dream of
the past; and all the mystical power of his office
going down in the conflict caused by the need of
pew-rents, submission to tyrants, and dependence on
the Home Society, he lives from year to year bemoaning
the evil chances which have flung him on this
barren, shifting, desolate strand, and becoming less
and less fitted for England and English parochial
work&mdash;that castle in the air, quiet and secure, which
he is destined never to inhabit. He is touched too
in part by the atmosphere of his surroundings; and
to a congregation without duties a clergyman with
views more accommodating than severe comes only too
naturally as the appropriate pastor. The whole thing
proves that thraldom to the means of living, or rather
to the persons representing those means, damages all
men alike&mdash;those in cassock and gown as well as
those in slop and blouse&mdash;and that lay influence can,
in certain circumstances, be just as tyrannical over
the clerical conscience as clerical influence is apt to
be tyrannical over lay living.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">302</a></span></p>

<h2><i>OLD FRIENDS.</i></h2>

<p>We know all that can be said in laudation of old
friends&mdash;the people whose worth has been tried and
their constancy proved&mdash;who have come when you
have called and danced when you have piped&mdash;been
faithful in sunshine and shadow alike&mdash;not envious
of your prosperity nor deserting you in your adversity&mdash;old
friends who, like old wine, have lost the
crudity of newness, have mellowed by keeping, and
have blended the ripeness of age with the vigour of
youth. It is all true in certain circumstances and
under certain conditions; but the old friend of this
ideal type is as hard to find as any other ideal; while
bad imitations abound, and life is rendered miserable
by them.</p>

<p>There are old friends who make the fact of old
friendship a basis for every kind of unpleasantness.
Their opinion is not asked, but they volunteer it on
all occasions, and are sure to give it in the manner
which galls you most and which you can least resent.
They snub you before your latest acquaintances&mdash;charming
people of good status with whom you
especially desire to stand well; and break up your
pretensions of present superiority by that sledge-hammer
of old friendship which knows you down to
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">303</a></span>
the ground and will stand no nonsense. The more
formal and fastidious your company, the more they
will rasp your nerves by the coarse familiarity of
their address; and they know no greater pleasure
than to put you in a false position by pretending
to keep you in your true place. They run in
on you at all times; and you have neither an hour
undisturbed nor a pursuit uninterrupted, still less
a circumstance of your life kept sacred from them.
The strictest orders to your servant are ignored;
and they push past any amount of verbal barriers
with the irresistible force of old friendship to which
nothing can be denied. Whatever you are doing
you can just see them, they say, smiling; and they
have neither conscience nor compassion when they
come and eat up your time, which is your money,
for the gratification of hearing themselves talk and
of learning how you are getting on. They do not
scruple to ask about your affairs direct questions to
which you must perforce give an answer; silence or
evasion betraying the truth as much as assent; and
they will make you a present of their mind on the
matter, which, though to the last degree condemnatory,
you are expected to accept with becoming
gratitude and humility.</p>

<p>If you have known them in your early boyhood,
when you were all uncivilized hail-fellows together,
they refuse to respect your maturer dignity, and will
Tom and Dick and Harry you to the end, though
you sit in a horsehair wig on the bench, while your
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">304</a></span>
old friend, once your class-mate of the country grammar
school where you both got your rudiments, is
only a city clerk, badly paid and married to his landlady's
daughter.</p>

<p>To women this kind of return from the grave of
the past is a dreadful infliction and oftentimes a danger.
The playfellows of the romping hoydenish days dash
home, bearded and bronzed, from Australia or California;
stride into the calm circle of refined matronhood
with the old familiar manner and using the old
familiar terms; ask Fan or Nell if she remembers this
or that adventure on the mountain-side? by the lake?
in the wood?&mdash;topping their query by a meaning
laugh as if more remained behind than was expedient
to declare. They slap the dignified husband on the
back, and call him a d&mdash;&mdash;d lucky dog; telling him that
they envy him his catch, and would gladly stand in
his shoes if they could. It was all that cross-cornered
cursed fate of theirs which sent them off to Australia
or California; else he, the dignified husband, would
never have had the chance&mdash;hey, Fan? And they
wink when they say it, as if they had good grounds
to go on. The wife is on thorns all the time these
hateful visits last. She wonders how she could ever
have been on romping terms with such a horror,
even in her youngest days; and feels that she shall
hate her own name for ever, after hearing it mouthed
and bawled by her old friend with such aggressive
familiarity. The husband, if jealous by nature, begins
to look sullen and suspicious. Even if he is not
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">305</a></span>
jealous, but only reserved and conventional, he does
not like what he sees, still less what he hears; and
is more than half inclined to think he has made a
mistake, and that the Fan or Nell of his bosom would
have been better mated with the old friend from the
backwoods than with him.</p>

<p>The old friends who turn up in this way at all
corners of your life are sure to be needy, and hold
their old friendship as a claim on your balance at the
bank. They stick closer to you than a brother, and
you are expected to stick as close to them; and, as
a sign thereof, to provide for their necessities as so
much interest on the old account of affection still
running. If you shrink from them and try to shunt
them quietly, they go about the world proclaiming
your ingratitude, and trumpeting forth their deserts
and your demerits. They deride your present success,
which they call stuck-up and mushroom; telling all
the minor miseries of your past, when your father
found it hard to provide suitably for his large family,
and their mother had more than once to give yours a
child's frock and pinafore in pity for your rags. They
generally contrive to make a division in your circle;
and you find some of your new friends look coldly on
you because it is said you have been ungrateful to your
old. The whole story may be a myth, the mere coinage
of vanity and disappointment; but when did the
world stop to prove the truth before it condemned?</p>

<p>There is no circumstance so accidental, no kindness
so trivial, that it cannot be made to constitute
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">306</a></span>
a claim to friendship for life and all that friendship
includes&mdash;intimacy before the world; pecuniary
help when needed; no denial of time; no family
secrets; unvarying inclusion in all your entertainments;
personal participation in all your successes;
liberty to say unpleasant things without offence and
to interfere in your arrangements; and the right to
take at least one corner of your soul, and that not a
small one, which is not to be your own but your old
friends'. Have they, by the merest chance, introduced
you to your wife the beautiful heiress, to your
husband the good match?&mdash;the world echoes with
the news, and the echoes are never suffered to die
out. It is told everywhere, and always as if your
happy marriage were the object they had had in view
from the earliest times&mdash;as if they had lived and
worked for a consummation which in reality came
about by the purest accident. Have they been helpful
and friendly when your first child was born, or
nursery sickness was in your house?&mdash;you are bought
for life, you and your offspring; unless you have had
the happy thought of making them sponsors, when
they learn the knack of disappearing from your immediate
circle, and of only turning up on those formal
occasions which do not admit of making presents.
Did they introduce you to your first employer?&mdash;your
subsequent success is the work of their hands,
and they bear your fame on their shoulders like complacent
Atlases balancing the world.</p>

<p>They go about cackling to every one who will
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">307</a></span>
listen to them how they got your first essay into
print; how they mentioned your name to the Commissioners,
and how, in consequence, the Commissioners
gave you that place whence dates your marvellous
rise in life; how they advised your father to
send you to sea and so to make a man of you, and
thus were the indirect cause of your K.C.B.-ship. But
for them you would have been a mere nobody, grubbing
in a dingy City office to this day. They gave
you your start, and you owe all you are to them. And
if you fail to honour their draft on your gratitude to
the fullest amount, they proclaim you a defaulter to
the most sacred claims and the most pious feelings of
humanity. You point the moral of the base ingratitude
of man, and are a text on which they preach the
sermon of non-intervention in the affairs of others.
Let drowning men sink; let the weak go to the wall;
and on no account let any one trouble himself about
the welfare of old friends, if this is to be the reward.
Henceforth, you are morally branded, and your old
friend takes care that the iron shall be hot. There
is no service, however trifling, but can be made a
yoke to hang round your neck for life; and the more
you struggle against it the more it galls you. Your
best plan of bearing it is with the patience which
laughs and lets things slide. If however, you are
resolute in repudiation, you must take the sure result
without wincing.</p>

<p>To these friends of your own add the friends of
the family&mdash;those uncomfortable adhesives who cling
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">308</a></span>
to you like so many octopods, and are not to be shaken
off by any means known to you. They claim you as
their own&mdash;something in which they have the rights
of part-proprietorship&mdash;because they knew you when
you were in your cradle, and had bored your parents
as they want to bore you. It is of no use to say
that circumstances are of less weight than character.
You and they may stand at opposite poles in thought,
in aspiration, in social condition, in habits. Nevertheless
they insist on it that the bare fact of longtime
acquaintance is to be of more value than all
these vital discrepancies; and you find yourself
saddled with friends who are utterly uncongenial to
you in every respect, because your father once lived
next door to them in the country town where you
were born, and spent one evening a week in their
society playing long whist for threepenny points.
You inherit your weak chest and your snub nose,
gout in your blood and a handful of ugly skeletons
in your cupboard; these are things you cannot get
rid of; things which come as part of the tangled
yarn of your life and are the inalienable misfortunes
of inheritance; but it is too bad to add family friends
whom of your own accord you would never have
known; and to have them seated as Old Men of the
Sea on your neck, never to be shaken off while they
live.</p>

<p>In fact, this whole question of friendship wants
revision. The general tendency is to make it too
stringent in its terms, and too indissoluble in its
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">309</a></span>
fastenings. If the present should not make one
forget the past, neither should the past tyrannize over
the present. Old friends may have been pleasant
enough in their day, but a day is not for ever, and
they are hurtful and unpleasant now, under new conditions
and in changed circumstances. They disturb
the harmony of our surroundings, and no one can
feel happy in discord.</p>

<p>They themselves too, change; we all do, as life
goes on and experience increases; and it is simply
absurd to bring the old fashions of early days into
the new relations of later times. We are not the
Tom, Dick, and Harry of our boyhood in any
essential save identity of person; neither are they
the Bill and Jim they were. We have gone to the
right, they to the left; and the gap between us is
wider and deeper than that of mere time. Of what
use then, to try to galvanize the dead past into the
semblance of vitality? Each knows in his heart
that it is dead; and the only one who wishes to galvanize
it into simulated life is the one who will somehow
benefit by the discomfort and abasement of the
other. For our own part, we think one of the most
needful things to learn on our way through the world
is, that the dead are dead, and that silent burial is
better than spasmodic galvanism.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">310</a></span></p>

<h2><i>POPULAR WOMEN.</i></h2>

<p>The three chief causes of personal popularity among
women are, the admiration which is excited, the sympathy
which is given, or the pleasure that can be
bestowed. We put out of court for our present
purpose the popularity which accompanies political
power or intellectual strength, this being due to condition,
not quality, and therefore not of the sort we
mean. Besides, it belongs to men rather than to
women, who seldom have any direct power that can
advance others, and still seldomer intellectual strength
enough to obtain a public following because of their
confessed supremacy. The popular women we mean
are simply those met with in society&mdash;women whose
natural place is the drawing-room and whose sphere
is the well-dressed world&mdash;women who are emphatically
ladies, and who understand <i>les convenances</i> and
obey them, even if they take up a cause, practise
philanthropy or preach philosophy. But the popular
woman rarely does take up a cause or make her
philanthropy conspicuous and her philosophy audible.
Partizanship implies angles; and she has no angles.
If of the class of the admired, she is most popular
who is least obtrusive in her claims and most ingenuous
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">311</a></span>
in ignoring her superiority. A pretty
woman, however pretty, if affected, vain, or apt to
give herself airs, may be admired but is never popular.
The men whom she snubs sneer at her in private;
the women whom she eclipses as well as snubs do
more than sneer; those only to whom she is gracious
find her beauty a thing of joy; but as she is distractingly
eclectic in her favouritism she counts as
many foes as she has friends; and though those who
dislike her cannot call her ugly, they can call her
disagreeable, and do. But the pretty woman who
wears her beauty to all appearance unconsciously,
never suffering it to be aggressive to other women
nor wilfully employing it for the destruction of men,
who is gracious in manner and of a pleasant temper,
who is frank and approachable, and does not seem to
consider herself as something sacred and set apart
from the world because nature made her lovelier than
the rest&mdash;she is the woman whom all unite in admiring,
the popular person <i>par excellence</i> of her set.</p>

<p>The popular pretty woman is one who, take her
as a young wife (and she must be married), honestly
loves her husband, but does not thrust her affection
into the face of the world, and never flirts with him
in public. Indeed, she flirts with other men just
enough to make time pass pleasantly, and enjoys a
rapid waltz or a lively conversation as much as
when she was seventeen and before she was appropriated.
She does not think it necessary to go about
morally ticketed; nor does she find it vital to her
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">312</a></span>
dignity nor to her virtue to fence herself round with
coldness or indifference to the multitude by way of
proving her loyalty to one. Still, as it is notorious
that she does love her husband, and as every one
knows that he and she are perfectly content with
each other and therefore not on the look-out for
supplements, the men with whom she has those
innocent little jokes, those transparent secrets, those
animated conversations, that confessed friendship and
good understanding, do not make mistakes; and the
very women belonging to them forget to be censorious,
even though this other, this popular woman,
is so much admired.</p>

<p>This popular woman is a mother too, and a fond
one. Hence she can sympathize with other mothers,
and expatiate on their common experiences in the
confidential chat over five o'clock tea, as all fond
mothers do and should. She keeps a well-managed
house, and is notorious for the amount of needlework
she gets through; and of which she is prettily
proud; not being ashamed to tell you that the dress
you admire so much was made by her own hands,
and she will give your wife the pattern if she likes;
while she boasts of even rougher upholstery work
which she and her maid and her sewing-machine
have got through with despatch and credit. She
gives dinners with a <i>cachet</i> of their own&mdash;dinners
which have evidently been planned with careful
thought and study; and she is not above her work
as mistress and organizer of her household. Yet she
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">313</a></span>
finds time to keep abreast with the current literature
of the day, and never has to confess to ignorance of
the ordinary topics of conversation. She is not a
woman of extreme views about anything. She has
not signed improper papers and she does not discuss
improper questions; she does not go in for woman's
rights; she has a horror of facility of divorce; and
she sets up for nothing&mdash;being neither an Advanced
Woman desirous of usurping the possessions and
privileges of men, nor a Griselda who thinks her
proper place is at the feet of men, to take their kicks
with patience and their caresses with gratitude, as is
becoming in an inferior creature. She does not
dabble in politics; and though she likes to make her
dinners successful and her evenings brilliant, she by
no means assumes to be a leader of fashion nor to
impose laws on her circle. She likes to be admired,
and she is always ready to let herself be loved. She
is always ready too, to do any good work that comes
in her way; and she finds time for the careful overlooking
of a few pet charities about which she makes
no parade, just as she finds time for her nursery and
her needlework. And, truth to tell, she enjoys these
quiet hours, with only her children to love her and
her poor pensioners to admire her, quite as much as
she enjoys the brilliant receptions where she is among
the most popular and the most beautiful.</p>

<p>Her nature is gentle, her affections are large, her
passions small. She may have prejudices, but they are
prejudices of a mild kind, mainly on the side of modesty
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">314</a></span>
and tenderness and the quietude of true womanhood.
She is woman throughout, without the faintest dash
of the masculine element in mind or manners; and
she aspires to be nothing else. She carries with her
an atmosphere of happiness, of content, of spiritual
completeness, of purity which is not prudery. Her
life is filled with a variety of interests; consequently
she is never peevish through monotony, nor yet, on
the other hand, is she excited, hurried, storm-driven,
as those who give themselves up to 'objects,' and
perfect nothing because they attempt too much. She
is popular, because she is beautiful without being
vain; loving without being sentimental; happy in
herself, yet not indifferent to others; because she
understands her drawing-room duties as well as her
domestic ones, and knows how to combine the home
life with social splendour. This is the best type
of the popular pretty woman to whom is given
admiration, and against whom no one has a stone to
fling nor a slander to whisper; and this is the ideal
woman of the English upper-class home, of whom
we still raise a few specimens, just to show what
women may be if they like, and what sweet and
lovely creatures they are when they are content to
be as nature designed them.</p>

<p>Another kind of popular woman is the sympathetic
woman, the woman who gives instead of receiving.
This kind is of variable conditions. She
may be old, she may be ugly; in fact, she is more
often both than neither; but she is a universal
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">315</a></span>
favourite notwithstanding, and no woman is more
sought after nor less wearied of, although few can
say why they like her. She may be married; but
generally she is either a widow or an old maid; for,
if she be a wife, her sympathies for things abroad are
necessarily somewhat cramped by the pressure of
those at home;&mdash;and her sympathies are her claim to
popularity. She is sincere too, as well as sympathetic,
and she is safe. She holds the secrets of all her
friends; but no one suspects that any before himself
has confided in her. She has the art, or rather the
charm, of perpetual spiritual freshness, and all her
friends think in turn that the fountain has been
unsealed now for the first time. This is not artifice;
it is simply the property of deep and inexhaustible
sympathy. It is not necessary that she should be a
wise adviser to be popular. Her province is to listen
and to sympathize; to gather the sorrows and the
joys of others into her own breast, so as to soften
by sharing or heighten by reduplication. Most
frequently she is not over rigid in her notions of
moral prudence, and will let a lovesick girl talk of
her lover, even if the affair be hopeless and has been
forbidden; while she will do her best to soothe the
man who has had the misfortune to get crazed about
his friend's wife. She has been even known, under
pressure, to convey a message or a hint; and of the
two she is decidedly more pitiful to sorrow than
severe to wrong-doing. She is in all the misfortunes
and maladies of her friends. No death takes
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">316</a></span>
place without her bearing part of the mourning on
her own soul; but then no marriage is considered
complete in which she has not a share. She is called
on to help whenever there is work to be done, if
she be of the practical type; if of the mental, she
has merely to give up her own pleasures and her
time that she may look on and sympathize. Every
one likes her; every one takes to her at first sight;
no one is jealous of her; and the law of her life is to
spend and be spent for others. It not rarely happens
though, that she who does so much for those
others has to bear her own burden unassisted; and
that she sits at home surrounded by those spectres of
despair, those ghosts of sorrow, which she helps to
dispel from the homes of others. But she is not
selfish; and while she trudges along cheerfully
enough under the heavy end of her friend's crosses,
she asks no one to lay so much as a finger on her
own. In consequence of which no one imagines that
she ever suffers at all on her own account; and most
of her friends would take it as a personal affront were
she to turn the tables and ask for the smallest portion
of that of which she had given so much to others.
She is the moral anodyne of her circle; and when she
ceases to soothe, she abdicates the function assigned
to her by nature and dies out of her allotted uses.</p>

<p>Another kind of popular person is the woman
whose sympathies are more superficial, but whose
faculties are more brilliant; the woman who makes
herself agreeable, as it is called&mdash;that is, who can
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">317</a></span>
talk when she is wanted to talk; listen when she is
wanted to listen; take a prominent part and some
responsibility or keep her personality in the background,
according to circumstances and the need of
the moment; who is eminently a useful member of
society, and popular just in proportion to the pleasure
she can shed around her. But she offends no one,
even though she is notoriously sought after and
made much of; for she is good-natured to all, and
people are not jealous of those who do not flaunt
their successes and whom popularity does not make
insolent. The popular woman of this kind is always
ready to help in the pleasure of others. She is a fair-weather
friend, and shrinks with the most charming
frankness from those on whom dark days have fallen.
She is really very sorry when any of her friends fall
out from the ranks, and are left behind to the tender
mercies of those cruel camp-followers in the march of
life&mdash;sorrow or sickness; but she feels that her place
is not with them&mdash;rather with the singers and
players who are stepping along in front making
things pleasant for the main body. But if she cannot
stop to smooth the pillows of a dying-bed, nor soothe
the troubles of an aching heart, she can organize
delightful parties; set young people to congenial
games; take off bores on to her own shoulders, and
even utilize them for the neutralization of other
bores. She is good for the back seat or the front, as
is most convenient to others. She can shine at the
state-dinner where you want a serviceable show, or
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">318</a></span>
make a diversion in the quiet, not to say stupid,
conglomerate of fogies, where you want a lively
element to prevent universal stupor. She talks easily
and well, and even brilliantly when on her mettle,
but not so as to excite men's envy; and she has
no decided opinions. She is a chameleon, an opal,
changing ever in changing lights, and no one was
yet able to determine her central quality. All
that can be said of her is that she is good-natured
and amusing, clever, facile, and ever ready to assist
at all kinds of gatherings, which she has the knack
of making go, and which would have been slow
without her; that she knows every game ever invented,
and is good for every sort of festivity; that
she is always well-dressed, even-tempered, and in
(apparently) unwearied spirits and superb health;
but what she is at home, when the world is shut out,
never troubles the thoughts of any. She is to society
what the sympathetic woman is to the individual, and
the reward is much the same in both cases. But
unless the socially useful woman has been able to
secure the interest of the sympathetic one, the
chances are that, popular as she is now, she will be
relegated to the side when her time of brilliancy has
passed; and that, when her last hour comes, it will
find her without the comfort of a friend, forsaken
and forgotten. She is of the kind to whom <i>sic
transit</i> more especially applies; and if her life's food
has not been quite the husks, at all events it has not
been good meat nor fine meal.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">319</a></span></p>

<h2><i>CHOOSING OR FINDING.</i></h2>

<p>The controversy as to which is the better of the two
methods of marrying one's daughter, in use in France
and England respectively, has not yet been decided by
any preponderating evidence. Whether the parents&mdash;especially
the mother&mdash;ought to find a husband for
the daughter, or whether the girl, young and inexperienced
as she is, should seek one for herself, with
the chance of not knowing her own mind in the first
place, and of not understanding the real nature of the
man she chooses in the second&mdash;these are the two
principles contended for by the rival methods; and
the fight is still going on. The truth is, the worst
of either is so infinitely bad that there is nothing to
choose between them; and the same is true, inversely,
of the best. When things go well, the advocates of
the particular system involved sing their pæans, and
show how wise they were; when they go ill, the
opponents howl their condemnation, and say: We
told you so.</p>

<p>The French method is based on the theory that
a woman's knowledge of the world, and a mother's
intimate acquaintance with her daughter's special
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">320</a></span>
temper and requirements, are likely to be truer guides
in the choice of a husband than the callow fancy of a
girl. It is assumed that the former will be better
able than the latter to separate the reality from the
appearance, to winnow the grain from the chaff. She
will appraise at its true value a fascinating manner
with a shaky moral character at its back; and a handsome
face will go for little when the family lawyer
confesses the poverty of the family purse. To the girl,
a fluent tongue, flattering ways, a taking presence,
would have included everything in heaven and earth
that a man should be; and no dread of future poverty,
no evidence of the bushels of wild oats sown broadcast,
would have convinced her that Don Juan was a <i>mauvais
parti</i> and a scamp into the bargain. Again, the mother
usually knows her daughters' dispositions better than
the daughters themselves, and can distinguish between
idiosyncrasies and needs as no young people are able
to do. Laura is romantic, sentimental, imaginative;
but Laura cannot mend a stocking nor make a shirt,
nor do any kind of work requiring strength of grasp
or deftness of touch. She has no power of endurance,
no persistency of will, no executive ability; but she
falls in love with a younger son just setting out to
seek his fortunes in Australia; and, if allowed, she
marries him, full of enthusiasm and delight, and goes
out with him. In a year's time she is dead&mdash;literally
killed by hardship; or, if she has vitality enough to
survive the hard experience of roughing it in the
bush, she collapses into a wretched, haggard, faded
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">321</a></span>
woman, prematurely old, hopeless and dejected; the
miserable victim of circumstances sinking under a
burden too heavy for her to bear.</p>

<p>Now a French mother would have foreseen all
these dangers, and would have provided against
them. She would have known the unsubstantial
quality of Laura's romance, and the reality of her
physical weakness and incapacity. She would have
kept her out of sight and hearing of that fascinating
younger son just off to Australia to dig out his
rough fortunes in the bush, and would have quietly
assigned her to some conventional well-endowed man
of mature age&mdash;who might not have been a soul's
ideal, and whose rheumatism would have made him
chary of the moonlight&mdash;but who would have taken
care of the poor little frail body, dressed it in dainty
gowns and luxurious furs, given it a soft couch to lie
on and a luxurious carriage to drive in, and provided
it with food convenient and ease unbroken. And in
the end, Laura would have found that mamma had
known what was best for her; and that her ordinary-looking,
middle-aged caretaker was a better husband
for her than would have been that adventurous young
Adonis, who could have given her nothing better
than a shakedown of dried leaves, a deal box for an
arm-chair, and a cup of brick tea for the sparkling
wines of her youth.</p>

<p>It may be a humiliating confession to make, but
the old saying about poverty coming in at the door
and love flying out of the window holds true in all
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">322</a></span>
cases where there is not strength enough to rough it;
for the body holds the spirit captive, and, however
willing the one may be, the weakness of the other
conquers in the end.</p>

<p>On the other hand, Maria, square-set, defying,
adventurous, brave, as the wife of a rich man here in
England, would be as one smothered in rose leaves.
The dull monotony of conventional life would half
madden her; and her uncompromising temper would
break out in a thousand eccentricities, and make her
countless enemies. Let <i>her</i> go to the bush if you like.
She is of the stamp which bears heroes; and her sons
will be a stalwart race fit for the work before them.
The wise mother who had it in hand to organize the
future of her daughters would take care to find her a
man and a fortune that would utilize her energy and
courage; but Maria, if left to herself, might perhaps
fall in love with some cavalry officer of good family
and expectations, whose present dash would soon have
to be exchanged for the stereotyped conventionalities
of the owner of a place, where, as his wife, her utmost
limit of physical action would be riding to hounds
and taking off the prize for archery.</p>

<p>Such well-fitting arrangements as these are the
ideal of the French system; just as the union of two
hearts, the one soul finding its companion soul and
both living happily ever after, is the ideal of the
English system. Against the French lies the charge
of the cruel sale, for so much money, of a young
creature who has not been allowed a choice, scarcely
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">323</a></span>
even the right of rejection; against the English
the cruelty of suffering a girl's foolish fancy to
destroy her whole life, and the absurdity of treating
such a fancy as a fact. For the French there is the
plea of the enormous power of instinct and habit, and
that really it signifies very little to a girl what man
she marries; provided only that he is kind to her and
that she has not fallen in love with any one else;
seeing that she is sure to love the first presented. For
the English there is the counter plea of individual
needs and independent choice, and the theory that
women do not love by instinct but by sympathy.
The French make great account of the absolute
virginity in heart of the young girl they marry; and
few Frenchmen would think they had got the kind
of woman warranted if they married one who had
been engaged two or three times already&mdash;to whose
affianced lovers had been accorded the familiarities
which we in England hold innocent and as matters
of course. The English, in return, demand a more
absolute fidelity after marriage, and are generous
enough to a few false starts before. To them the
contract is more a matter of free choice than it is
in France; consequently failure in carrying out the
stipulations carries with it more dishonour. The
French, taking into consideration that the wife had
nothing to say to the bargain which gave her away,
are inclined to be more lenient when the theory of
instinctive love fails to work, and the individuality
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">324</a></span>
of the woman expresses itself in an after-preference;
always provided, of course, that the <i>bienséances</i> are
respected, and that no scandal is created.</p>

<p>Among the conflicting rights and wrongs of the
two systems it is very difficult to say which is the
better, which the wiser. If it seems a horrible thing
to marry a young girl without her consent, or without
any more knowledge of the man with whom she
is to pass her life than can be got by seeing him once
or twice in formal family conclave, it seems quite as
bad to let our women roam about the world at the
age when their instincts are strongest and their reason
weakest&mdash;open to the flatteries of fools and fops&mdash;the
prey of professed lady-killers&mdash;the objects of
lover-like attentions by men who mean absolutely
nothing but the amusement of making love&mdash;the
subjects for erotic anatomists to study at their pleasure.
Who among our girls after twenty carries an
absolutely untouched heart to the man she marries?
Her former predilection may have been a dream, a
fancy&mdash;still it was there; and there are few wives
who, in their little tiffs and moments of irritation, do
not feel, 'If I had married my first love, <i>he</i> would
not have treated me so.' Perhaps a wise man does
not care for a mere baseless thought; but all men are
not wise, and to some a spiritual condition is as real
as a physical fact. Others however, do not trouble
themselves for what has gone before if they can but
secure what follows after; but we imagine that most
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">325</a></span>
men would rather not know their wives' dreams;
and <i>cet autre</i>, however shadowy, is a rival not specially
desired by the average husband.</p>

<p>If the independence of life and free intercourse
between young men and maidens is in its degree
dangerous in England, what must it be in America,
where anything like chaperonage is unknown, and
where girls and boys flock together without a mamma
or a guardian among them? where engaged couples
live under the same roof for months at a time, also
without a mamma or a guardian? and where the
young men take the young women about on night
excursions alone, and no harm thought by any one?
Is human nature really different in America from
what it is in the Old World? Are Columbia's sons
in truth like Erin's of old time, so good or so cold?
It is a saying hard of acceptance to us who are accustomed
to regard our daughters as precious things to
be taken care of&mdash;if not quite so frail as the French
regard theirs, yet not too secure, and certainly not to
be left too much to themselves with only young men
for their guardians. They are our lambs, and we
look out for wolves. To be sure the comparative
paucity of women in the United States, and the conviction
which every girl has that she may pretty well
make her own choice, help to keep matters straight.
That is easy to be understood. There is no temptation
to eat green berries in an orchard full of ripe
fruit. But if this be true of America, then the converse
must be true of England, where the redundancy
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">326</a></span>
of women is one of the most patent facts of
the time, and where consequently they cannot so well
afford to indulge that pride of person which hesitates
among many before selecting one. In America this
pride of person of itself erects a barrier between the
wolves and the lambs; but where the very groundwork
of it is wanting, as in England, it behoves the
natural guardians to be on the watch, and to take
care of those who cannot take care of themselves.
Whether or not that care should be carried to the
extent to which French parents carry theirs&mdash;and
especially in the matter of making the marriage for
the daughter and not letting her make it for herself&mdash;we
leave an open question. Perhaps a little modification
in the practice of both nations would be the
best for all concerned. Without trusting quite so
much to instinct as the French, we might profitably
curtail a little more than we do the independent
choice of those who are too young and too ignorant
to know what they want, or what they have got
when they have chosen; and without letting their
young girls run all abroad without direction, the
French might, in turn, allow them some kind of
human preference, and not treat them as mere animals
bound to be grateful to the hand that feeds them, and
docile to the master who governs them.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">327</a></span></p>

<h2><i>LOCAL FÊTES.</i></h2>

<p>The efforts of country places in the matter of local
fêtes and shows are often beset with difficulties. The
great people, who have seen the best of everything in
Paris and London, give their money sparsely and
their energies with languor; or it may be that certain
of the more good-natured kill the whole affair
by their superabundant patronage, as nurses stifle
infants by over-care. The very poor can only participate
to the extent of pence when the thing is
organized; they can neither subscribe for the general
expenses nor give time to the arrangements; consequently
the burden rests on the shoulders of the
middle class, which in a small country neighbourhood
is represented by the well-to-do tradesmen, the
innkeepers, and the rival professionals. Once a year
or so the desire fastens on these people to get up a
local fête&mdash;say a flower-show, or games, or both
combined&mdash;as an evidence of local vitality; a claim
on the county newspaper for two or three columns of
description with all the names in full flanked by a
generous application of adjectives; an occasion for
mutual self-laudation; and a pleasing impression of
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">328</a></span>
the eyes of England being turned upon them. They
find their work cut out for them when they begin;
and before the end most of them wish they had never
been bitten by the mania of parochial ambition, but
had let the old place lie in its wonted stagnation
without attempting to stir it at the cost of so much
vexation and thankless trouble.</p>

<p>Jealousy and huffiness are the dominant characteristics
of small communities, as all people know
who have had dealings therewith. The question of
precedence affects more than the choice of the First
Lady in an assembly where there are no ladies to be
first, though there may be plenty of honest women;
and the men squabble for distinctive offices and the
recognition of services to the full as much as the
lawyer's wife squabbles with the doctor's, and both
with the wholesale grocer's, as to which of the three is
to be first taken down to supper and set at the head of
the table with the master of the house. One wants to
be the secretary, that he may display his power of fine
writing when he asks the resident nobility and gentry
for their subscriptions, and draws up the final report
for the press. Another thinks he should be made
chairman of the acting committee, because he imagines
he has the gift of eloquence, and he would like to use
the time of the association in airing his syntax. A
third puts in his claim to be elected one of the judges
of things he does not understand, because his son-in-law
is to be an exhibitor, and he would be glad to be
able to say a good word for him; and all decline
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">329</a></span>
those offices which have no outside show, where only
work is to be done and no credit gained. It requires
a considerable amount of tact and firmness to withstand
these clamorous vanities, to put the right men
in the right places, and yet not make enmities which
will last a lifetime. But if the thing is to succeed at
all, this is what must be done; and the little committee
must stick to its text of <i>pro bono publico</i> as
steadfastly as if the flower-show were a conqueror's
triumph, and the rules and regulations for its fit
management consular decrees.</p>

<p>When the eventful day arrives, every one feels
that the eyes of England are indeed turned hither-ward.
If the great people are languid, the meaner
folks are jocund, and the stewards are as proud as
the proudest ædiles of old Rome. Their knots of
coloured ribbon make new men of them for the time,
and justify the instinct which puts its trust in regalia.
They are sure to be on the ground from the
earliest hours in the morning; and though scoffers
might perhaps question the practical value of their
zeal, no one can doubt its heartiness. If it is fussy,
it is genuine; and as every one is fussy alike, they
cannot complain of one another. A band has been
lent by a neighbouring regiment, and the men come
radiant into the little town. It is delightful to see
the cordial condescension with which the trombone
and the cornet, the serpent and the drum shake
hands with their civilian friends; and how the fine
fellows in scarlet accept drinks quite fraternally from
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">330</a></span>
fustian and corderoy. For a full half-hour the town
is kept alive by the dazzle and resonance of these
musical heroes as they stand before the door of the
'public' which they have elected to patronize, and
lighten the pockets of the lieges by the successive
'go's' drained out of them. Then the church clock
chimes the appointed hour; the last flag is run up;
the finishing touch is given to the calico and the
moss; the last award has been affixed; and the
policeman stationed at the gate to keep order among
the little boys has tightened his belt and drawn on
his gloves ready for action. The band marches
through the town, drums beating and fifes playing,
and when the gates are opened as the clock is on the
stroke of twelve, they are all settled in their places
with their music handy, ready to salute the gentry
with the overture from <i>Zampa</i>, taken in false time.
The imposing effect however, is rather marred by
the friendly feelings of the public; for when jolly
farmers and small boys insist on sharing the benches
assigned to the red coats, the orchestra has necessarily
a patchwork kind of look that does not add to
its dignity.</p>

<p>The great people do their duty as they ought,
and come in their carriages; which make a show and
give an air of regality to the affair. Many of them
have had early high-priced tickets given to them in
consideration of their subscribed guineas; it being
held the right thing to do to give to those who can
afford to pay, trusting to the pence of the multitude
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">331</a></span>
for the rest. Nevertheless these great creatures
regard their presence there as a <i>corvée</i> which they
must fulfil, but at the least cost possible to themselves;
so they make up parties to meet at a certain
time, and endure the stewards, who talk fine and are
important, with the best philosophy granted them by
nature. When the second prices come, then the real
fun of the fair begins. The great people are uninterested.
The indifferently grown flowers which
are offered for prizes do not call forth their enthusiasm;
but the smaller folk think them superb, and
express their admiration with unstinted delight.
When the gardener of a neighbouring lord exhibits
a good specimen from his choicest plants, not for
competition but as a model for imitation, their
enthusiasm knows no bounds; and a fine alamanda
or a richly-coloured dracæna receives almost divine
honours. As a rule, the flowers in these local shows
are poor enough; but the fruit is often good and the
vegetables are magnificent. The highest efforts of
competition are usually devoted to onions and beans;
but potatoes come in for their due share, and the
summer celery is for the most part an instance of
misdirected power. The great houses carry off the
first prizes&mdash;the poor little cottage plots, cultivated at
odd hours under difficulties, not touching them in
value. The gentlemen say they give their prizes to
their gardeners; but that does not help the cottagers
who have spent time and money and hope in this
unequal struggle of pigmies with giants. In some
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">332</a></span>
places they divide the classes, and give prizes to the
gentlefolks apart, and to the cottagers by themselves.
In which case they fulfil the Scriptures literally, and
give most to those who already have most.</p>

<p>All the local oddities are sure to be at these fêtes.
There is the harmless imbecile, who wanders about
the roads with a peacock's feather in his battered old
cap, and who talks to himself when he cannot find
another listener; and there is the stalwart lady proprietor
who farms her own land and knows as much
about roots and beasts as the best of them. She is
reported to have thrashed her man in her time,
and is said to be a crack shot and the best roughrider
for miles round. There is the ruined yeoman
who came into a good property when he was a handsome
young fellow with the ball at his foot, but who
has drunk himself from affluence to penury, and from
sturdy health to palsy and delirium tremens, yet
who has always a kindly word from his betters,
having been no man's enemy but his own, and even at
his worst being a good fellow in a sort of way. There
is the farmer who is supposed capable of buying up
all the leaner gentry in a batch, but who, being a
misogynist, lives by himself in his rambling old
ruined Hall, with a hind to do the scullery maid's
work, and never a petticoat about the place. There
is the self-taught man of science whose quantities are
shaky when he tells you the names of his treasures,
but whose knowledge of local fossils, of rare plants,
of concealed antiquities, is true so far as it goes, if of
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">333</a></span>
too great importance in his estimate of things; and
side by side with him is the self-made poet, whose
verses are not always easy to scan and whose
thoughts are apt to express themselves mistily.
These and more are sure to be at the fête bringing;
their peculiarities as their quota, and giving that
indescribable but pleasant local flavour which is half
the interest of the thing.</p>

<p>There is a great deal of practical democracy in
these gatherings if the grand people stay into the
time of the second prices; which however, they generally
do not. If they do, then ragged coats jostle the
squire's glossy broadcloth, and rude boys crumple the
fresh silks and muslins of the ladies with the most
communistic unconcern. The shopgirl and farmer's
daughters come out in gorgeous array, with bonnets
and skirts, streamers and furbelows, of wonderful
construction; and their sisters of more cultivated
taste regard their exaggerated toilets as moral crimes.
But the poor things are happy in their ugly finery;
and, as millinery is by no means an exact science,
they may be pardoned if they adopt monstrosities on
their own account which a year or so ago had been
sanctioned by fashion. Sometimes Punch and Judy,
'as performed before the Queen and Prince Albert,'
helps on the enjoyment of the day, with the '&mdash;&mdash;'
softened out of respect for the clergyman. Sometimes
an acrobat lies down on the grass and twirls a huge
ball between his feet, which sets all the little boys
to do the like in imitation, and perhaps brings down
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">334</a></span>
many a maternal hand on fleshy places as the result.
In some localities a troop of little girls in scarlet and
white plait ribbons dance round a maypole and are
called inappropriately morris-dancers. Perhaps there
are fireworks at the end of all things; when the set
pieces will not light simultaneously in all their parts,
the catherine-wheels have the disastrous trick of
sticking, and only the Roman candles and the rockets
succeed as they should. But the gaping crowd is
vociferous and good-natured, and holds the whole
affair to have been splendid. There is a great deal of
coarse jollity among the men and women over the
failures and successes alike, and if the fête is in the
North there is sure to be more drink afloat than is
desirable. Headaches are the rule of the next morning,
with perhaps some things lost which can never be regained.
Yet, in spite of the inevitable abuses, these
local fêtes are things worthy of encouragement; and
perhaps if the great people would enter into them more
heartily, and remain on the ground longer, the lower
orders would behave themselves better all through,
and there would not be so much rowdyism at the end.
It does not seem to us that this would be an unendurable
sacrifice of time and personal dignity for the
pleasure and morality of the neighbourhood where
one lives.</p>

<p class="p2 center">THE END.</p>

<p class="p4 right">S. &amp; H.</p>

<p class="center"><span class="xsmall">LONDON: PRINTED BY<br />
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE<br />
AND PARLIAMENT STREET</span></p>

<hr class="c30" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">335</a></span></p>

<p class="p4 center"><span class="small">RICHARD BENTLEY &amp; SON'S</span><br />
<span class="xlarge">LIST OF ANNOUNCEMENTS</span><br />
<span class="small"><i>FOR THE NEW SEASON</i>.</span></p>

<hr class="c15" />

<p class="center small">
I.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> THE CROWN PRINCE OF AUSTRIA.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">TRAVELS in the EAST: including a Visit to the Holy Land, Egypt,
the Ionian Islands, &amp;c.</span> By <span class="smcap">His Imperial and Royal Highness the Crown Prince Rudolph</span>.
In royal 8vo. With Portrait and numerous Illustrations.</p>

<p class="center small">
II.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> R. P. A. KENNARD.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">A MEMOIR of RICHARD BETHELL, First Baron Westbury.</span> By
<span class="smcap">Richard P. A. Kennard</span>. In 1 vol. demy 8vo.</p>

<p class="center small">
III.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> MR. E. YATES.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">FIFTY YEARS of LONDON LIFE.</span> By <span class="smcap">Edmund Yates</span>. In demy
8vo. With Portraits.</p>

<p class="center small">
IV.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> MRS. LYNN LINTON.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">ESSAYS UPON SOCIAL SUBJECTS: The Girl of the Period, and other
Papers.</span> By <span class="smcap">Eliza Lynn Linton</span>, Author of 'Patricia Kemball,' &amp;c. In 2 vols, demy 8vo.
</p>

<p class="center small">
V.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> A. A. WATTS.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">ALARIC WATTS: the Narrative of his Life.</span> By his Son, <span class="smcap">Alaric
A. Watts</span>. In 2 vols, crown 8vo.</p>

<p class="center small">
VI.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> C. PHILLIPPS-WOLLEY.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">SAVAGE SVÂNETIA; or, Travels in the Heart of the Caucasus.</span> By
<span class="smcap">Clive Phillipps-Wolley</span>, F.R.G.S., Author of 'Sport in the Crimea,' &amp;c. In 2 vols, crown
8vo. With Fourteen Illustrations, engraved by <span class="smcap">George Pearson.</span></p>

<p class="center small">
VII.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> A. E. T. WATSON.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">RACECOURSE and COVERT-SIDE.</span> By <span class="smcap">Alfred E. T. Watson,</span> Author
of 'Hunting Sketches.' In demy 8vo. With Illustrations by <span class="smcap">John Sturgess</span>.</p>

<p class="center small">
VIII.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> THE AUTHOR OF 'DARTMOOR DAYS.'</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">A MEMOIR of the late REV. JOHN RUSSELL, of TORDOWN,
NORTH DEVON.</span> By the Rev. <span class="smcap">E. W. L. Davies</span>, Author of 'Wolf-Hunting in Brittany' &amp;c.
A Revised and Cheaper Edition, brought down to date. In 1 vol. crown 8vo.</p>

<p class="center small">
IX.<br />
ANONYMOUS.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">SOME PROFESSIONAL RECOLLECTIONS.</span> By<span class="smcap"> A Former Member
of the Council of the Incorporated Law Society</span>. In 1 vol. large crown 8vo. 9<i>s.</i></p>
<p class="left40">(<i>Now ready.</i>)</p>

<p class="center small">
X.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> 'KATHERINE LEE.'</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">In the ALSATIAN MOUNTAINS.</span> By '<span class="smcap">Katherine Lee</span>,' Author of
'A Western Wildflower' &amp;c. In 1 vol. large crown 8vo. With a Map and Two Illustrations.
9<i>s.</i></p>
<p class="left40">(<i>Now ready.</i>)</p>

<p class="center small">
XI.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> CHARLES WOOD.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">The CRUISE of the RESERVE SQUADRON, 1883.</span> By <span class="smcap">Charles W.
Wood</span>, Author of 'Through Holland' &amp;c. In 1 vol. crown 8vo. With nearly Sixty
Illustrations.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">336</a></span></p>

<p class="center small">
XII.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> MADAME CAMPAN.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">The PRIVATE LIFE of MARIE ANTOINETTE, QUEEN of FRANCE
and NAVARRE. With Sketches and Anecdotes of the Courts of Louis XIV., XV., and XVI.</span>
By <span class="smcap">Jeanne Louise Henriette Campan</span>, First Lady in Waiting to the Queen. An entirely
New and Revised Edition, with Additional Notes. In 2 vols, demy 8vo. 28<i>s.</i> Embellished with
Sixteen fine Illustrations on Steel:&mdash;</p>

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="ad">

<tr>
  <td class="tdr">I.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Portrait of Marie</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td class="tdr">V.</td>
  <td class="tdl">The death of</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td class="tdr">XII.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Portrait of</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">Antoinette, by</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">Louis XV.</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">the Princess</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">Mde. Le Brun.</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td class="tdr">VI.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Versailles.</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">de Lamballe.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdr">II.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Portrait of Marie</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td class="tdr">VII.</td>
  <td class="tdl">The Grand Trianon.</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td class="tdr">XIII.</td>
  <td class="tdl">The Arrest of</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">Antoinette, by</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td class="tdr">VIII.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Saint Cloud.</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">the Cardinal</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">Werthmüller.</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td class="tdr">IX.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Portrait of</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">de Rohan.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdr">III.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Portrait of Mdme.</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">Louis XVI.</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td class="tdr">XIV.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Compiègne.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">Campan.</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td class="tdr">X.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Portrait of</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td class="tdr">XV.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Marly.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td class="tdr">IV.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Potrait of</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">Louis XVII.</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td class="tdr">XVI.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Ecouën.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">Beaumarchais.</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td class="tdr">XI.</td>
  <td class="tdl">Portrait of</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdl">Madame Elizabeth.</td>
  <td>|</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
  <td>&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
</table>

<p class="center small">
XIII.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> LADY JACKSON.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">The COURT of the TUILERIES from the RESTORATION to the
FLIGHT of LOUIS PHILIPPE.</span> By <span class="smcap">Catherine Charlotte, Lady Jackson</span>. In 2 vols, large
crown 8vo. with Portraits, 24<i>s.</i></p>

<p class="center small">
XIV.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> MRS KEMBLE</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">The POETICAL WORKS of FRANCES ANNE (FANNY) KEMBLE.</span>
In 2 vols, crown 8vo.</p>

<p class="center small">
XV.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> PRINCE METTERNICH.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">The AUTOBIOGRAPHY of PRINCE METTERNICH.</span> Edited by his
Son, <span class="smcap">Prince Metternich</span>. The Papers classified and arranged by <span class="smcap">M. A. de Klinkowström</span>.
The Sixth and Concluding Volume. In demy 8vo.</p>

<p class="center small">
XVI.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> J. H. SKENE.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">LORD STRATFORD in the CRIMEA. Being Personal Reminiscences
of the Campaign when attached to the Suite of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.</span> By <span class="smcap">James Henry
Skene</span>, Author of 'The Frontier Lands of the Christian and the Turk.' In 1 vol. demy
8vo. 12<i>s.</i></p>
<p class="left40">(<i>Now ready.</i>)</p>

<p class="center small">
XVII.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> PROFESSOR FORREST.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">A MEMOIR of MOUNTSTUART ELPHINSTONE. To which are
appended Papers illustrative of the Political and Social State of India at the period.</span> Edited
by <span class="smcap">George W. Forrest</span>. In demy 8vo. with Plans.</p>

<p class="center small">
XVIII.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> CAPTAIN BULLOCH.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">The SECRET SERVICE of the CONFEDERATE STATES in
EUROPE.</span> By <span class="smcap">James D. Bulloch</span>, late Naval Representative of the Confederate States Government
in this Country. In 2 vols, demy 8vo. 21<i>s.</i></p>
<p class="left40">(<i>Now ready.</i>)</p>

<p class="center small">
XIX.<br />
<span class="smcap">Edited by</span> DR. ABBOTT.</p>
<div class="hang">
<p><span class="large">The HISTORY of GREECE.</span> From the German of Professor <span class="smcap">Max
Duncker</span>, by <span class="smcap">S. F. Alleyne</span>. In demy 8vo. (Uniform in size with 'The History of Antiquity.')</p>

<p>Professor <span class="smcap">Duncker's</span> History of Greece gives an account of Hellas and its civilisation from the
earliest times down to the overthrow of the Persians at Salamis and Platæa.</p>
<p><span class="smcap">Vol. I.</span>:&mdash;I. <span class="smcap">The Greeks in the Earliest Age.</span> II. <span class="smcap ">Their Conquest and Migrations.</span></p>
</div>

<p class="center small">
XX.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> CAPTAIN CLAUDE CONDER.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">HETH and MOAB. A Narrative of Exploration in Syria.</span> By Captain
<span class="smcap">Claude Regnier Conder</span>, R.E. In 1 vol. demy 8vo.</p>

<p class="center small">
XXI.<br />
<span class="smcap">By</span> MISS MITFORD.</p>
<p class="hang"><span class="large">RECOLLECTIONS of a LITERARY LIFE. With Selections from
her Favourite Poets and Prose Writers.</span> By <span class="smcap">Mary Russell Mitford</span>. A New Edition, in
1 vol. crown 8vo. with Portrait. 6s.</p>

<hr class="c30" />

<p class="center"><span class="large">London: RICHARD BENTLEY &amp; SON, New Burlington Street,</span><br />
<i>Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen</i>.</p>

<hr class="c15" />

<div class="transnote">
<p>Transcriber's note:<br />
Minor spelling and punctuation inconsistencies, mainly hyphenated words, have been harmonized.
Any lacking page numbers are those given to blank pages in the original text.
</p></div>

<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41736 ***</div>
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