THE
GIEL OF THE PEEIOD
VOL. I.
►
M
[Repetnted, hy permission, from the Saturday Review]
THE
GIRL OF THE PERIOD
AND OTHER
^ociaf (&66ap0
BY
E. LYNN LINTON
AUTHOR OF 'THE ATOXE.MEXT OF LEAJVI DUNDAS' ' UXDER WHICH LORD?'
' THE REBEL OF THE PAMH^Y ' ' lONE ' ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STHEBT
yublisbcrs in ^?rbinarn to Witt UTajcstg Ibc Qnten
1883
[All rights re.iprveil]
LONDON : PRINTED UY
-POTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUAUK
AND PARLIAXIF.XT STUEET
TO
ALL GOOD GIRLS
AND
TRUE WOMEN
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2009 with funding from
Duke University Libraries
http://www.archive.org/details/girlofperiodothe01lint
PREFACE.
So MANY false reports followed the appearance of
these essays, that I am grateful to the authorities
of the Saturday Review for their present permission
to republish them under my own name, even though
the best of the day has a little gone by, and other
forms of folly have been flying about since these
were shot at. The essays hit sharply enough at the
time, and caused some ill-blood. ' The Girl of the
Period ' was especially obnoxious to many to whom
women were the Sacred Sex above criticism and
beyond rebuke ; and I had to pay pretty smartly
in private life, by those who knew, for what they
termed a libel and an untruth. With these passion-
ate repudiators on the one hand, on the other were
some who, trading on the enforced anonymity of the
paper, took spurious credit to themselves for the
authorship. I was twice introduced to the 'Writer
of the "Girl of the Period." ' The first time he was
a clergyman who had boldly told my friends that he
had written the paper ; the second, she was a lady of
VOL. I. a
viu PREFACE.
rank well known in London society, and to this
hour believed by her own circle to have written this
and other of the articles included in the present
collection. I confess that, whether for praise or
blame, I am glad to be able at last to assume the
full responsibility of my own work.
In re-reading these papers I am more than ever
convinced that I have struck the right chord of
condemnation, and advocated the best virtues and
most valuable characteristics of women. I neither
soften nor retract a line of what I have said. One of
the modern phases of womanhood — hard, unloving,
mercenary, ambitious, without domestic faculty and
devoid of healthy natural instincts — is still to me a
pitiable mistake and a grave national disaster. And
I think now, as I thought when I wrote these papers,
that a public and professional life for women is in-
compatible with the discharge of their highest duties
or the cultivation of their noblest qualities. I think
now, as I thought then, that the sphere of human
action is determined by the fact of sex, and that
there does exist both natural limitation and natural
direction. This creed, which summarizes all that I
liave said in extenso^ I repeat with emphasis, and
maintain with the conviction of long years of ex-
perience.
E. Lynn Linton.
1883.
CONTENTS
THE FIRST VOLUME
PAGE
THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD ....... 1
MODERN MOTHERS (l.) . . . . . . . . 10
MODERN MOTHERS (ll.) 19
PAYING one's shot 27
WHAT IS woman's WORKI 37
little women 48
IDEAL WOMEN 58
PINCHBECK 69
AFFRONTED W^OMANHOOD 79
FEMININE AFFECTATIONS 88
INTERFERENCE 99
THE FASHIONABLE WOMAN 109
SLEEPING DOGS 119
BEAUTY AND BRAINS 128
NYMPHS 137
MESALLIANCES 147
X CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
PAGE
WEAK SISTERS . .157
PINCHING SHOES . . .» . . . . . . 167
SUPERIOR BEINGS 17(3
FEMININE AMENITIES 184
GRIM FEMALES . . . . . . . . ,193
MATURE SIRENS 203
PUMPKINS . . . . . . . . . .213
WIDOWS . 223
DOLLS 234
CHARMING WOMEN ' . . . 244
APRON-STRINGS 254
FINE FEELINGS 264
SPHINXES 273
FLIRTING . . . 281
SCRAMBLERS . . . . . . . . . . 290
FLATTERY .......... 299
LA FEMME PASSEE 309
SPOILT WOMEN 317
DOVECOTS . ......... 325
BORED HUSBANDS . . . , . . . . . 335
ESSAYS
UPON
SOCIAL SUBJECTS.
THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD.
Time was when the phrase, ^a fair young English
girl/ meant the ideal of womanhood ; to us, at least,
of home birth and breedmg. It meant a creature
generous, capable, modest ; something franker than a
Frenchwoman, more to be trusted than an Italian, as
brave as an American but more refined, as domestic
as a German and more graceful. It meant a girl who
could be trusted alone if need be, because of the
innate purity and dignity of her nature, but who was
neither bold in bearing nor masculme in mind ; a
girl who, when she married, would be her husband's
friend and companion, but never his rival ; one who
would consider his interests as identical with her
own, and not hold him as just so much fair game for
spoil ; who would make his house his true home and
place of rest, not a mere passage-place for vanity and
VOL. I. B
2 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
ostentation to pass through ; a tender mother, an
industrious housekeeper, a judicious mistress.
We prided ourselves as a nation on our women.
We thought we had the pick of creation in this fair
young English girl of ours, and envied no other
men their own. We admired the languid grace and
subtle fire of the South ; the docility and childlike
aflPectionateness of the East seemed to us sweet and
simple and restful ; the vivacious sparkle of the trim
and sprightly Parisienne was a pleasant little excite-
ment when we met with it in its own domain ; but
our allegiance never wandered from our brown-haired
girls at home, and our hearts were less vagrant than
our fancies. This was in the old time, and when
English girls were content to be what God and
nature had made them. Of late years we have
changed the pattern, and have given to the world a
race of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal
as if we had created another nation altogether. The
Girl of the Period, and the fair young English girl
of the past, have nothing in common save ancestry
and their mother- tongue ; and even of this last the
modern version makes almost a new language,
through the copious additions it has received from
the current slang of the day.
The Girl of the Period is a creature who dyes
her hair and paints her face, as the first articles of her
personal religion — a creature whose sole idea of life is
fun; whose sole aim is unbounded luxury; and whose
dress is the chief object of such thought and intellect
THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD. 3
as she possesses. Her main endeavour is to outvie
her neighbours in the extravagance of fashion. No
matter if, in the time of crinolines, she sacrifices
decency ; in the time of trains, cleanliness ; in the
time of tied-back skirts, modesty ; no matter either,
if she makes herself a nuisance and an inconvenience
to every one she meets ; — the Girl of the Period has
done away with such moral muffishness as considera-
tion for others, or regard for counsel and rebuke. It
was all very well in old-fashioned times, when fathers
and mothers had some authority and were treated
with respect, to be tutored and made to obey, but
she is far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in
mid-career by these slow old morals ; and as she
lives to please herself, she does not care if she dis-
pleases every one else.
Nothing is too extraordinary and nothing too
exaggerated for her vitiated taste ; and things which
in themselves would be useful reforms if let alone
become monstrosities w^orse than those which they
have displaced so soon as she begins to manipulate
and improve. If a sensible fashion lifts the gown
out of the mud, she raises hers midway to her knee.
If the absurd structure of wire and buckram, once
called a bonnet, is modified to something that shall
protect the wearer's face without putting out the
eyes of her companion, she cuts hers down to four
straws and a rosebud, or a tag of lace and a bunch of
glass beads. If there is a reaction against an excess
of Rowland's Macassar, and hair shiny and sticky
B 2
4 SATUEDAY M0P.^^1S^GS.
with grease is thought less nice than if left clean and
healthily crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks hers
out on end like certam savages in Africa, or lets it
wander down her back like Madge Wildfire's, and
thmks herself all the more beautiful the nearer she
approaches in look to a negress or a maniac.
With purity of taste she has lost also that far
more precious purity and delicacy of perception
which sometimes mean more than appears on the
surface. What the demi'inonde does in its frantic
efforts to excite attention, she also does in imitation.
If some fashionable devergondee en evidence is re-
ported to have come out with her dress below her
shoulder-blades, and a gold strap for all the sleeve
thought necessary, the Girl of the Period follows
suit next day ; and then she wonders that men some-
times mistake her for her prototype, or that mothers
of gh4s not quite so far gone as herself refuse her as
a companion for their daughters. She has blunted
the fine edges of feeling so much that she cannot
understand why she should be condemned for an
imitation of form which does not include imitation
of fact. She cannot be made to see that modesty of
appearance and virtue in deed ought to be inseparable;
and that no good girl can afford to appear bad,
under pain of receiving the contempt awarded to the
bad.
This imitation of the demi-monde in dress leads to
something m manner and feeling, not quite so pro-
nounced perhaps, but far too like to be honourable to
THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD. 5
herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to
slang, bold talk and general fastness ; to the love of
pleasure and indifference to duty ; to the desire of
money before either love or happiness ; to useless-
ness at home, dissatisfaction with the monotony of
ordinary life, horror of all useful work ; in a word,
to the worst forms of luxury and selfishness — to the
most fatal effects arising from want of high principle
and absence of tender feeling.
The Girl of the Period envies the queens of the
demi-monde far more than she abhors them. She
sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously ap-
pointed, and she knows them to be flattered, feted,
and courted with a certam disdainful admiration of
which she catches only the admiration while she
ignores the disdain. They have all that for which
her soul is hungering ; and she never stops to
reflect at what a price they have bought their gains,
and what fearful moral penalties they pay for their
sensuous pleasures. She sees only the coarse gild-
ing on the base token, and shuts her eyes to the
hideous figure in the midst and the foul legend
written round the edge. It is this envy of the plea-
sures, and indifference to the sins, of these women
of the demi-monde which is doing such iufinite mis-
chief to the modern girl. They brush too closely
by each other, if not in actual deeds, yet in aims
and feelings ; for the luxury which is bought by
vice mth the one is that thing of aU in life most
passionately desired by the other, though she is not
6' SATURDAY MORNINGS.
yet prepared to pay quite the same price. Un-
fortunately, she has already paid too much — all that
once gave her distinctive national character.
No one can say of the modern English girl that
she is tender, loving, retiring or domestic. The
old fault so often found by keen- sighted French-
women, that she was so fatally romanesqae^ so prone
to sacrifice appearances and social advantages for
love, will never be set against the Girl of the Period.
Love indeed is the last thing she thinks of, and
the least of the dano^ers besettino^ her. Love in a
cottage — that seductive dream which used to vex
the heart and disturb the calculations of the prudent
mother — is now a myth of past ages. The legal
barter of herself for so much money, representing
so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure — that
is her idea of marriage ; the only idea worth enter-
taming. For all seriousness of thought respecting
the duties or the consequences of marriage, she has
not a trace. If children come, they find but a step-
mother's cold welcome from her ; and if her husband
thinks that he has married anything that is to belong
to him — a tacens et placens uxor pledged to make him
happy — the sooner he wakes from his hallucination
and understands that he has simply married some one
who will condescend to spend his money on herself,
and who will shelter her indiscretions behind the shield
of his name, the less severe will be his disappoint-
ment. She has married his house, his carriage, his
balance at the banker's, his title ; and he himself is
THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD. 7
just the inevitable condition clogging the wheel of
her fortune ; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated with
more or less patience as may chance. For it is only
the old-fashioned sort, not Girls of the Period pur
sang^ who marry for love, or put the husband before
the banker. But the Girl of the Period does not
marry easily. Men are afraid of her ; and with
reason. They may amuse themselves with her for
an evening, but they do not readily take her for life.
Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a poor copy
of the real thing ; and the real thing is far more
amusing than the copy, because it is real. Men can
get that whenever they like ; and when they go into
their mothers' drawing-rooms, with their sisters and
their sisters' friends, they want something of quite a
different flavour. Toujours perdrix is bad providing
all the world over ; but a continual weak imitation
of toujours perdrix is worse.
If we must have only one kind of thing, let us
have it genuine, and the queens of St. John's Wood
in their unblushing honesty rather than their imita-
tors and make-believes in Bayswater and Belgravia.
For, at whatever cost of shocked self-love or pained
modesty it may be, it cannot be too plainly told to
the modern English girl that the net result of her
present manner of life is to assimilate her as nearly
as possible to a class of women Avhom we must not
call by their proper — or improper — name. And we
are willing to believe that she has still some modesty
of soul left hidden under all this effrontery of fashion.
8 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
and that, if she could be made to see herself as she
appears to the eyes of men, she would mend her ways
before too late.
It is terribly significant of the present state of
things when men are free to write as they do of the
women of their own nation. Every word of censure
flung against them is two-edged, and wounds those
who condemn as much as those who are condemned ;
for surely it need hardly be said that men hold
nothing so dear as the honour of their women, and
that no one living would wilhngly lower the repute of
his mother or his sisters. It is only when these have
placed themselves beyond the pale of masculine re-
spect that such things could be written as are written
now. When women become again what they were
once they mil gather round them the love and
homage and chivalrous devotion which were then an
Englishwoman's natural inheritance.
The marvel in the present fashion of life among
women is, how it holds its ground in spite of the
disapprobation of men. It used to be an old-thne
notion that the sexes were made for each other, and
that it was only natural for them to please each
other, and to set themselves out for that end. But
the Girl of the Period does not please men. She
pleases them as little as she elevates them ; and how
little she does that, the class of women she has taken
as her models of itself testifies. All men whose
opinion is worth having prefer the simple and
genuine girl of the past, with her tender little ways
THE GIEL OF THE PERIOD. 9
and pretty bashful modesties, to this loud and ram-
pant modernization, with her false red hair and
painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and
by preference leading the conversation to doubtful
subjects. She thinks she is piquante and exciting
when she thus makes herself the bad copy of a worse
original ; and she will not see that though men laugh
with her they do not respect her, though they flirt
with her they do not marry her ; she will not believe
that she is not the kind of thing they want, and that
she is acting against nature and her own interests
when she disregards their advice and offends theu'
taste. We do not understand how she makes out her
account, viewing her life from any side ; but all we
can do is to wait patiently until the national madness
has passed, and our women have come back again to
the old English ideal, once the most beautiful, the
most modest, the most essentially womanly in the
world.
10 SATURDAY MORNINGS,
MODERN MOTHERS.
No human aifection has been so passionately praised
as maternal love, and none is supposed to be so holy
or so strong. Even the poetic aspect of that instinct
which inspires the young with their dearest dreams
does not rank so high as this ; and neither lover's
love nor conjugal love, neither filial affection nor
fraternal, comes near the sanctity or grandeur of the
maternal instinct. But all women are not equally
rich in this great gift ; and, to judge by appearances,
English women are at this moment wonderfully poor.
It may seem a harsh thing to say, but it is none the
less true : — society has put maternity out of fashion,
and the nursery is nme times out of ten a place of
punishment, not of pleasure, to the modern mother.
Two points connected with this subject are of
growing importance at this present time — the one is
the increasing disinclination of married women to be
mothers at all ; the other, the large number of those
who, being mothers, will not, or cannot, nurse their
own children. In the mad race after pleasure and
MODERN MOTHERS. 11
excitement now going on through English society
the tender duties of motherhood have become simply
disagreeable restraints, and the old feeling of the
blessing attending the quiver fall is exchanged for
one the very reverse. With some of the more intel-
lectual and less instinctive sort, maternity is looked
on as a kind of degradation ; and women of this
stamp, sensible enough in everything else, talk im-
patiently among themselves of the base necessities
laid on them by men and nature, and how hateful to
them is everything connected with their characteristic
duties.
This wild revolt against nature, and specially
this abhorrence of maternity, is carried to a still
greater extent by American women; with grave
national consequences resulting ; but though we have
not yet reached the Transatlantic limit, the state
of feminine feeling and physical condition among
ourselves will disastrously affect the future unless
something can be done to bring our women back to a
healthier tone of mind and body. No one can object
to women declining marriage altogether in favour of
a voluntary self-devotion to some project or idea ;
but, when married, it is a monstrous doctrine to
hold that they are in any way degraded by the con-
sequences, and that natural functions are less honour-
able than social excitements. The world can get on
without balls and morning calls ; it can get on too
without amateur art and incorrect music ; but not
without wives and mothers : and those times in a
12 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
nation's history when women have been social orna-
ments rather than family home- stays have ever
been times of national decadence and of moral
failm'e.
Part of this o^rowino: disinclination is due to the
enormous expense incurred now by havmg children.
As women have ceased to take any active share m
their own housekeeping, whether in the kitchen or
the nursery, the consequence is an additional cost for
service, which is a serious item in the yearly accounts.
Women who, if they lived a rational life, could and
would nurse their children, now require a wet-nurse,
or the services of an experienced woman who can
' bring up by hand,' as the phrase is ; women
who once would have had one nursemaid now have
two ; and women who, had they lived a generation
ago, would have had none at all, must in their turn
have a wretched young creature without thought or
knowledge, into whose questionable care they dehver
what should be the most sacred obligation and the
most jealously-guarded charge they possess.
It is rare if, in any section of society where hired
service can be had, mothers give more than a super-
ficial personal superintendence to nursery or school-
room — a superintendence about as thorough as their
housekeeping, and as efficient. The one set of duties
is quite as unfashionable as the other ; and money is
held to relieve from the service of love as entirely as
it relieves from the need of labour. And yet, side
by side with this personal relinquishment of natural
MODERN MOTHERS. ' 13
duties, has grown up, perhaps as an instinctive com-
pensation, an amount of expensive management
specially remarkable. There never was a time when
children were made of so much individual importance
in the family, yet were in so little direct relation
with the mother — never a time when maternity did
so little and social organization so much. Juvenile
parties ; the kind of moral obligation apparently felt
by all parents to provide heated and unhealthy
amusements for their boys and girls during the
holidays ; extravagance in dress, following the same
extravao^ance amono^ the mothers : the increasino*
cost of education ; the fuss and turmoil generally
made over them — all render children real burdens in
a house where money is not too plentiful, and where
every child that comes is not only an additional
mouth to feed and an additional body to clothe, but
a subtractor by just so much from the family fund of
pleasure. Even where there is no lack of money, the
unavoidable restraints of the condition, for at least
some months, more than counterbalance any senti-
mental delight to be found in maternity. For, before
all other things in life, maternity demands unselfish-
ness in women ; and this is just the one virtue of
which women have least at this present time —
just the one reason why motherhood is at a discount,
and children are regarded as inflictions instead of
blessings.
Few middle-class women are content to bring up
their children with the old-fashioned simplicity of
14 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
former times, and to let them share and share alike
in the family, with only so much difference in their
treatment as is required by their difference of state ;
fewer still are willing to take on themselves the
labour and care which must come with children in
the easiest-going household, and so to save in the
expenses by their own work. The shabbiest little
wife, with her two financial ends always gaping and
never meeting, must have her still shabbier little
drudge to wheel her perambulator, so as to give her
an air of fine-ladyhood and being too good for such
work ; and the most indolent housekeeper, whose
superintendence of domestic matters takes her just
half an hour, cannot find time to go into the gardens
or the square with nurse and the children, so that
she may watch over them herself and see that they
are properly cared for.
In France, where it is the fashion for mother
and bonne to be together both out of doors and at
home, at least the children are not neglected nor
ill-treated, as is too often the case with us ; and
if they are improperly managed, according to our
ideas, the fault is in the system, not in the want of
maternal supervision. Here it is a very rare case
indeed when the mother accompanies the nurse and
children ; and those days when she does are nursery
gala-days to be talked of and remembered for weeks
after. As the little ones grow older, she may occa-
sionally take them with her when she visits her more
intimate friends ) but this is for her own pleasure,
MODERN MOTHERS. 15
not their good ; and going with them to see that they
are properly cared for has nothing to do with the
matter.
It is to be supposed that each mother has a
profomid belief in her own nurse, and that when she
condemns the neglect and harshness shown to other
children by the servants in charge, she makes a
mental reservation in favour of her own, and is very
sure that nothing improper nor cruel takes iplace in
her nursery. Her children do not comjDlam ; and she
always tells them to come to her when anything is
amiss. On which negative evidence she satisfies her
soul, and makes sure that all is right because she is
too neglectful to see if anything is wrong. She does
not remember that her children do not complain
because they dare not. Dear and beautiful as all
mammas are to the small fry in the nursery, they are
always in a certain sense Junos sitting on the top of
Mount Olympus, making occasional gracious and
benign descents, but practically too far removed for
useful interference ; while nurse is an ever-present
power, capable of sly pinches and secret raids, as well
as of more open oppression — a power, therefore, to
be propitiated, if only with the grim subservience of
a Yezidi too much afraid of the Evil One to oppose
him. Wherefore nurse is propitiated, failing the pro-
tection of the glorified creature just gone to her grand
dinner in a cloud of lace and a blaze of jewels ; and
the first lesson taught the youthful Christian in short
frocks or knickerbockers is not to carry tales down
16 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
stairs, and by no means to let mamma know what
nurse desires should be kept secret.
A great deal of other evil, beside these sly begin-
nings of deceit, is taught in the nursery ; a great
deal of vulgar thought, of superstitious fear, of class
coarseness. As, indeed, how must it not be when
we think of the early habits and education of the
women taken into the nursery to give the first strong
indelible impressions to the young souls under their
care? Many a man with a ruined constitution, and
many a woman with shattered nerves, can trace back
the beginning of their sorrow to those neglected
childish days when nurse had it all her own way
because mamma never looked below the surface, and
w^as satisfied with what was said instead of seeing
for herself what was done. It is an odd state of
society which tolerates this transfer of a mother's
holiest and most important duty into the hands of
a mere stranger, hired by the month, and never
thoroughly known.
Where the organization of the family is of the
patriarchal kind — old retainers marrying and multi-
plying about the central home, and carrying on a
warm personal attachment from generation to gene-
ration — this transfer of maternal care has not such
bad effects ; but in our present way of life, without
love or real relationship between masters and ser-
vants, and where service is rendered for just so much
money down and for nothing more noble, it is a
hideous system, and one that makes the modern
MODERN MOTHERS. 17
mother utterly inexplicable. We wonder where her
mere instincts can be, not to speak of her reason, her
love, her conscience, her pride. Pleasure and self-
indulgence have indeed gained tremendous power, in
these later days, when they can thus break down the
force of the strono^est law of nature — a law strons!:er
even than that of self-preservation.
Folly is the true capillary attraction of the moral
world, and penetrates every stratum of society ; and
the folly of extravagant attire in the drawing-room is
reproduced in the nursery. Not content with bewil-
dering men's minds and emptying their husbands'
purses for the enhancement of their own charms,
women do the same by their children ; and the mother
who leaves the health and mmd and temper and
purity of her offspring in the keeping of a hired
nurse takes especial care of the colour and cut of the
frocks and petticoats. And there is always the same
strain after show, and the same endeavour to make a
little look a mickle. The children of five hundred a
year must look like those of a thousand ; and those
of a thousand must rival the tenue of little lords and
ladies born in the purple ; while the amount of money
spent on clothes in the tradesman class is a matter of
real amazement to those let into the secret. Simplicity
of diet, too, is going out with simplicity of dress, with
simplicity of habits generally ; and stimulants and
concentrated food are now the rule in the nursery,
where they mar as many constitutions as they make.
More than one child of whom we have had personal
VOL. I. C
18 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
knowledge has yielded to disease induced by too
stimulating and too heating a diet ; but artificial
habits demand corresponding artificiality of food, and
so the candle burns at both ends instead of one.
Again, as for the increasing inability of educated
women to nurse their children, even if desirous of
doing so, that also is a bodily condition brought
about by an unwholesome and unnatural state of life.
Late hours, high living, heated blood, and constantly
breathing a vitiated atmosphere are the causes of this
alarming physical defect. But it would be too much
to expect that women should forego their pleasurable
indulgences, or do anything disagreeable to their
senses, for the sake of their ofi'spring. They are not
famous for looking far ahead on any matter ; but to
expect them to look beyond themselves, and their
own present generation, is to expect the great miracle
that never comes.
19
MODERN MOTHERS,
IL
There was once a superstition among us that mothers
were of use in the world ; that they had their functions
and duties, without which society would not prosper
nor hold together ; and that much of the well-beino*
of humanity, present and future, depended on them.
Mothers in those bygone days were by no means
effete personages or a worn-out institution, but livino-
powers exercising a real and pervading influence ;
and they were credited with an authority which they
did not scruple to use when required.
One of the functions recognized as specially
belonging to them was that of guarding their youno-
people from the consequences of their own ignorance
— keeping them from dangers both physical and moral
until wise enough to take care of themselves, and
supplementing by their own experience the want of it
in their children. Another was that of preserving the
tone of society on a high level, and supplying the
antiseptic element by which the rest was kept pure ;
as, for example, insisting that the language used and
C 2
20 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
the subjects discussed before them were such as
should not offend the modesty of virtuous women ;
that the people with whom they were required to
associate should be moderately honest and well con-
ducted ; and, in short, as mothers, discountenancing
everything in other men and women which they
would not like to see imitated by their own sons and
daughters.
This was one of the fond superstitions of an elder
time. For ourselves, we boast of our freedom from
superstition in these later days ; of our proud renun-
ciation of restraints and habits which were deemed
beneficial by our forefathers ; of our indifference to
forms and hatred of humbug ; and of all that tends
to fetter what is called individualism. Hence we
have found that we can go on without safeguards
for our young ; that society does not want its matrons
as the preservative ingredient for keeping it pure ;
and that the world is all the merrier for the loosening
of bonds which once it was the duty of women to
draw closer. In fact, mothers have gone out, sur-
viving only in the form of chaperons.
More or less on the search for her own pleasure —
if by any possibility of artifice she can be taken for
less than sixty, still ready for odd snatches of flirting
as she can find occasion — or, with her faculties con-
centrated on the chance of winning the rubber by
indifferent play — the chaperon's charge is not a very
onerous one ; and her daughters know as well as she
does that her presence is a blind rather than a pro-
MODERN MOTHERS, 21
tection. They are with mamma as a form of speech ;
but they are left to themselves as a matter of fact.
Any one who is in the confidence of young people of
either sex knows a little of what goes on in the dark
corners and on the steps of the stairs — a favourite
anchorage for the loosely chaperoned in private houses
where two hundred are invited and only a hundred
can find room. But then the girls are ^ with mamma,'
and the young men are contented souls who take
what they can get without making wry faces.
Mamma, occupied in her own well- seasoned co-
quetries, or absorbed in the chances of her deep
' finesse ' and the winning trick, lets the girls take
care of themselves, and would think it an intolerable
impertinence should a friend hint to her that her
place of chaperon included vigilant personal guardian-
ship, and that she would do better to keep her
daughters in her own charge than leave them to
themselves.
It is all very well for the advocates of youthful
innocence to affect to resent the slur supposed to
be cast on girlhood by the advocacy of this closer
guardianship ; or for those who do not know the
world to make their ignorance the measure of
another's knowledge, and to deny what they have
not proved for themselves. Those who do know the
world know what they say when they deprecate the
excessive freedom which is too often granted to
unmarried girls ; and their warning is fully justified
by experience when they call mothers back to their
22 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
duty of stricter watchfulness. If indeed the young
are capable of self-j)rotection, then we grant with
them that mothers are a mistake : — Let them abdicate
without more ado. If license is more desirable than
modesty, and liberty better than reticence, the girls
may as well be left, as practically they are already,
free from the mother's guardianship:* ; but if we have
a doubt that way, we may as well give it the benefit
of consideration, and think a little on the subject
before going further on the present line.
From the first the mother, in the well-to-do
classes, acts too much the part of the hen ostrich
with her eggs. She trusts to the kindly influences
of external circumstances rather than to her own care
to make the hatching successful. ^N^urses, governesses,
schools, in turn relieve her of the irksome duties of
maternity. She sees her little ones at their stated
hour, and for the other twenty- three leaves them to
receive their first indelible impress from a class which
she is never tired of disj)araging.
As the children grow older the women by whom
they are moulded become higher in the social and
intellectual scale, but they are no more than before
subordinated to the mother's personal supervision.
She, for h^r part, cares only that her girls shall
be taught the correct shibboleth of their station ;
and for the rest, if she thinks at all, she cradles
herself in a generous trust in the goodness of human
nature, or the incorruptibility of her brood beyond
that of any other woman's brood. When they come
MODERN MOTHERS. 23
under her own immediate hand, ' finished ' and ready-
to be introduced, she knows about as much of them
as she knows of her neighbours' girls m the next
square ; and in nme cases out of ten the sole duties
towards them which are undertaken by her are shirked
when possible, as a i:orvee which she is too wise to
bear unnecessarily. When she can, she shuffles them
off on some kind neighbourly hands, and lets her
daughters ' go about ' with the first person who offers,
glad to have a little breathing time on her own side,
and with always that generous trust in providence
and vicarious protection which has marked her
maternal career throughout.
In the lower half of the middle class the liberty
allowed to young girls grows yearly more and more
unchecked. They walk alone, travel alone, visit
alone ; and the gravest evils have been known to
arise from the habit which modern mothers have of
sending their daughters of sixteen and upwards
unaccompanied in London to colleges and classes.
Mamma has grown stout and lazy, and has always
some important matter on hand that keeps her at
home, half asleep in the easy-chair, while the girls
go to and fro, and take the exercise befitting their
youthful energies. Of course no harm can befall
them. They are her daughters, and the warnings
given by the keener- eyed, who have had experience,
are mere inventions of the enemy and slanders against
the young. So they parade the streets, dressed in
the most startling and meretricious costumes of the
24 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
period ; and that fatal doctrine of self-protection counts
its victims by the score as the consequence.
The world is fond of throwing the blame of
any misfortune that may arise, now on the girl,
now on the man concerned ; but in honest fact that
blame really belongs to the mothers who let their
daughters run about the world without guide or
guard. A work was given to them by nature and
love to do which they have neglected, a duty which
they have discarded. Whoever chooses may chape=
ron, accompany, mould their daughters, so long as
they are freed from the trouble ; and their dependence
on the natural virtue of humanity and the beneficence
of circumstance runs exactly parallel with their own
indolence and neglect.
In preserving the tone of society pure the modern
mother is as far removed from the for.mer ideal as she
is i'Q the duty of takmg care of her girls. Too often
she is found making herself prominent in support of
the most objectionable movements ; or, when doubtful
questions are discussed in mixed society, she forgets
that regard for the purity of her daughters should
keep her silent, even if her own self-respect were
too weak to restrain her. When the conscienceless
world, living without a higher aim than that of success
and what is known by gettmg on, condones all kinds
of moral obliquity for the sake of financial prosperity
and social position, do Vv^e find that, as a rule, mothers
and matrons protest against opening their houses to
this gilded rascality ? If they did — if they made
MODERN MOTHERS. 25
demerit and not poverty the cause of exclusion, virtue
and not success the title to reception— there would be
some check to the corruption which is so insolently
rampant now.
WoDien have this power in their own hands,
more especially those women who are mothers. If
they would only set themselves to check the incli-
nation for loose talk and doubtful discussions which
is characteristic of the present moment, they could
put an end to it without delay. So also they
might stop in less than a year the torrent of slang
with which Young England floods its daily speech ;
and by setting themselves against the paint and dye
and meretricious make-up generally of the modern
girl, they might bring next quarter's fashions back
to modesty and simplicity.
Women are. apt to murmur at their lot as one
without influence, variety, stirring purpose, space for
action. But it is, on the contrary, a lot full of dignity
and importance if properly regarded and fitly under-
taken. If they do not lead armies, they make the
characters of the men who lead and are led. If they
are not State Ministers nor Parliamentary orators,
they raise by their nobleness or degrade by their want
of delicacy and refinement the souls and minds of the
men who are. If they are not in the throng and
press of active life, they can cheer others on to high
aims, or basely reward the baser methods of existence.
As mothers they are the artificers who give the initial
touch that lasts for life ; and as women they complete
26 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
what tlie mother began. Society is moulded mainly
by tliem, and tbey bring up their daughters on their
own pattern.
It is surely weak and silly then to blame society
for its ignoble tone, or the young for their disorders.
All men want the corrective influence of social
opinion, and it is chiefly women who create that
opinion. Youth, too, will ever be disorderly if it
gets the chance, and the race has not yet been born
that carries old heads on young shoulders. It is for the
mothers to suj^plement by their own wisdom the gaps
left by the mexperience and ignorance of youth ; it is
for the mothers to guide aright the steps that are apt,
without that guidance, to run astray, and to guard
against passions, emotions, desires, which, if left to
themselves, bring only evil and disaster, but which,
guarded and directed, may be turned to the best ends.
For ourselves, we deeply regret to see the rapid e:^-
tinction of motherhood in its best sense, and decline
to accept this modern loose-handed chaperon age as
its worthy substitute. We repudiate the plea of the
insubordination of the young so often put forward
in defence of the new state of things, for it is simply
nonsense. The young are what the mothers make
them, just as society is what the matrons allow it to
be ; and if these mothers and matrons did their duty,
we should hear no more of the wilfulness of the one
or the shameless vagaries of the other. The remedy
for each lies in their own hands only.
27
PAYING ONIJ'S SHOT.
It Avould save mucli useless striving and needless dis-
appointment if the necessity of paying one's shot
were honestly accepted as absolute — if it were under-
stood, once for all, that society, like other manifesta-
tions of humanity, is managed on the principle of
exchange and barter, and equivalents demanded for
value received. The benevolence which gives out of
its own impulse, with no hope of reward save in the
wellbeing of the recipient, has no place in the drawing-
room code of morals. We may keep a useless
creatare from starving at the cost of so much of our
substance ^9^r diem, for the sole remuneration of
thanks and the consciousness of an equivocal act of
charity ; but who among us opens his doors, or gives
a seat at his table, to drawmg-room paupers unable
to pay their shot ? who cares to cultivate the ac-
quaintance of men or women who are unable to make
him any return ? It is not necessary that this
return should be in kind — a dinner for a dinner, a
champagne supper for a champagne sapper, and balls
with waxed floors for balls with stretched linen ; but
28 SATURDAY MORNINGS,
shot must be paid in some form, whether in kind or
not, and the social pauper who cannot pay his quota
is Lazarus excluded from the feast. This is a hard
saying, but it is a true one. We often hear worthy
people who do not understand this law complain that
they are neglected — left out of wedding breakfasts —
passed over in dinner invitations — and that they find
it difficult to keep acquaintances when made. But
the fact is, these poor creatures who know so much
about the cold-shoulder of society are simply those
who cannot pay their shot, according to the currency
of the class to which they aspire ; and so by degrees
they get winnowed through the meshes, and fall to a
level where their funds will suffice to meet all de-
mands, triumphantly. For the rejected of one level
are not necessarily the rejected of all, and the base
metal of one currency is sound coinage in another.
People who would find it impossible to enter
a drawing-room in Grosvenor Square may have
all Bloom sbury at their command ; and what was
caviare to My Lord will be ambrosia to his valet —
all depending on the amount of the shot to be
paid and the relative value of coinage wherewith to
pay it.
The most simple form of payment is of course by
the elemental process of reciprocity in kmd ; a dinner
for a dinner and a supper for a supper : — a form as
purely instinctive as an eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth — the lex talionis of early jurisprudence
administered among wine- cups instead of in the
PAYING ONES SHOT. 29
sliambles. But there are other niodes of payment as
efficient if less evident, and as imperative if more
subtle. For instance, women pay their shot — when
they pay it individually, and not through the
vicarious merits of their masculine relations — by
dressing well and looking nice ; some by being
pretty ; some by being fashionable ; a few by brilliant
talk ; while all ought to add to their private speciality
the generic virtue of pleasant manners. If they are
not pretty, pleasant, well-dressed nor well-connected,
and if they have no masculine pegs of power by which
they can be hooked on to the higher lines, they are let
to drop through the social meshes without an effort
made to retain them, as little fishes swim away un-
opposed through the loops which hold the bigger ones.
These things are their social duties — the final cause of
their drawing-room existence ; and if they fail in them
they fail in the purpose for which they were created
socially, and may die out as soon as convenient.
They have other duties, of course, and doubtless of
far higher moment and greater worth ; but the
question now is only of their drawing-room duties —
of the qualities which secure their recognition in
society — of the special coinage in which they must
pay their shot if they would assist at the great
banquet of social life. A dowdy, humdrum, well-
principled woman, whose toilette looks as if it had
been made with the traditionary pitchfork, and whose
powers of conversation do not go beyond the
strength of Cobwebs to Catch Flies, or MangnaWs
30 SATURDAY MORNIXGS.
Questions^ may be an admirable wife, the painstaking
mother of future honest citizens, invaluable by a s^ick-
bed, beyond price in the nursery, a pattern of all
household economies, a woman absolutely faultless in
her sphere — and that sphere a very sweet and lovely
one. But her virtues are not those by which she
can pay her shot in society ; and the motherly good-
ness, of so much account in a dressing-jacket and
list -slippers, is put out of court when the fee to be
paid is liveliness of manner or elegance of appearance.
Certainly, worthy women who dress ill and look
ungraceful, and whose conversation is about up to
the mark of their children's easy- spelling-books, are
plentiful in society — unfortunately for those bracketed
with them for two hours' penance ; but in most cases
they have their shot paid for them by the wealth, the
importance, the repute, or the desirableness of their
relations. They may pay it themselves by their own
wealth and consequent liberal tariff of reciprocity;
but this is rare ; the possession of personal superiority
of any kind for the most part acting as a moral
stimulus with women whom the superiority of their
male belongmgs does not touch. And, by the way, it
is rather hard lines that so many celebrated men have
such dowdy wives. Artists, poets, self-made men of
all kinds often fail in this special article ; and, while
they themselves have caught the tone of the circle to
which they have risen, and pay their shot by manner
as well as by repute, their wives lag behind among
the ashes of the past, like Cinderellas before the advent
PAYING ONES SHOT. 31
of the fairy godmother. How many of them are
carried through society as clogs or excrescences
which a polite world is bound to tolerate with more
or less equanimity, according to the amount of sen-
sitiveness bestowed by nature and cultivated by art !
Sometimes, however, self-made men and their wives
are wise in their generation and understand the
terms on which society receives its members ; in
which case the marital Reputation goes to the front
alone, and the conjugal Cinderella rests tranquilly in
the rear.
Notoriety of all kinds, short of murder or forgery,
is one way of paying one's shot, specially into the
coffers of the Leo Hunters, of whom there are many.
It is shot paid to the general fund when one has seen
an accident— better still, if one has been in it. Many
a man has owed a rise in his scale of dinners to a
railway smash; and to have been nearly burnt to
death, to have escaped by a miracle from drownino-,
to have been set on by footpads or to have been
visited by burglars, is worth a round of At Homes,
because of the ready cash of a real adventure. To be
connected more or less remotely with the fashionable
tragedy of the hour is paying one's shot handsomely.
To have been on speaking terms with the latest re-
spectable scoundrel unmasked, or to have had dealings,
sufficiently remote to have been cleanly, with the
newest villainy, will be accepted as shot while the
public interest in the matter lasts. A chance visit to
ultra-grandees — grandees in ratio to the ordinary
32 SATURDAY MOENINGS.
sphere — is shot paid with an air. A bad illness, or
the attendance on one, with the apparently unconscious
heroism of the details, comes in as part of the social
fine; especially if the person relating his or her expe-
rience has the knack of epigram or exaggeration, while
still keeping local colour and verisimilitude intact.
Interesting people who have been abroad and seen
things have good counters for a dinner-]3arty; paying
their shot for themselves and their hosts too, who put
them forward as their contribution to the funds of the
commonwealth, with certainty of acceptance. Some
pay their shot by their power of procuring orders
and free admissions. They know the manager of
this theatre or the leading actor of that; they are
acquainted with the principal members of the hang-
ing committees, and are therefore great in private
views; they are always good for a gratuitous treat
to folks who can afford to pay twice the sum de-
manded for their day's pleasure. Such people may
be stupid, ungainly, not specially polished, in grain
unpleasant; but they circulate in society because
they pay their shot and give back equivalents for
value received. A country-house, where there is a
good tennis-ground and a blushing bed of straw-
berries, is coinage that will carry the possessor very
far ahead through London society ; and by the same
law you will find healthy, well-conditioned country
folk tolerate undeniable little snobs of low calibre
because of that sixteen-roomed house in Tyburnia, a
visit to which represents so many concerts, so many
PAYING ONE'S SHOT. 33
theatres, a given number of exhibitions, and a cert am
quantity of operas and parties. Had those un-
deniable little snobs no funds wherewith to pay
their shot, they would have had no place kept for
them among the rose-trees and the strawberry- beds ;
but, bringing their quota as they do, they take their
seat with the rest and are helped in their turn.
In fact, humiliating to our self-love as it may be,
the truth is, we are all valued socially, not for our-
selves integrally, not for the mere worth of the naked
soul, but for the kind of shot that we pay — for the
advantao;e or amusement to others that we can brino;
— for something in ourselves which renders us de-
sirable as companions — ^or for something belonging
to our condition which makes us remunerative as
guests. If we have no special qualification, if we
neither look nice nor talk well, neither bring glory
nor confer pleasure, we must expect to be shunted to
the side in favour of others who are up to the right
mark and who give as much as they receive. If this
truth were once fully established as a matter of social
science, a great advance would be made ; for nothmg
helps people so much as to clear a subject of what fog
may lie about it. And as the tendency of the age is
to discover the fixed laws which regulate the mutable
affairs of man, it would be just as well to extend the
inquiry from the jury-box to the dinner-table, and
from the blue-book to the visiting-list. Why is it
that some people struggle all their lives to get a
footing in society, yet die as they have lived — social
VOL. I. D
34 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
Sisyphuses, never accomplishing their perpetually- re-
curring task ? There must be a reason for it, seeing
that nothing is ruled by blind chance, though much
seems to lie outside the independent will of the indi-
vidual. Enlighten these worthy people's minds on
the unwritten laws of invitation, and show them
that — thoroughly honest souls and to be trusted
with untold gold or with their neighbour's pretty
wife, which is perhaps a harder test, as they may
be — they are by no means to be trusted with the
amusement of a couple of companions at a dinner-
table. Show them that, how rich soever they may
be in the rough gold of domestic morality, they are
bankrupts in the small-change which alone passes
current in society — and, if invited where they aspire
to be, they would be taken on as pauper cousins
unable to pay their footing and good for neither
meat nor garnish. Let them learn how to pay
their shot, and their difficulties would vanish. They
would leave off repeating the fable of Sisyphus, and
attain completion of endeavour. No one need say
this is a hard or a selfish doctrine, for we all follow
it in practice. Among the people we invite to our
houses are some whom we do not specially like, but
whom we must ask because of shot paid in kind.
There are people who may be personally disagreeable,
ill- educated, uninteresting, ungainly, but whom we
cannot cut because of the relations in which we stand
towards them, and who take their place by right,
because they pay their shot with punctuality. There
PAYING ONE'S SHOT. 35
are others whom we ask because of liking or de-
sirability, and shot paid in some specific form of
pleasantness, as in beauty, fashion, good manner,
notoriety ; but there are none absolutely barren of
all gifts of pleasantness to the guests, of reflected
honour to ourselves, and of social small-change
according to the currency. We do not go mto the
byways and hedges to pick up drawing-room tatter-
demalions who bring nothing with them and are
simply so much dead-weight on the rest, occupying
so much valuable space and consuming so much vital
energy. The law of reciprocity may be hard on
the strivers who are ignorant of its inexorable pro-
visions ; but it is a wholesome law, like other rules and
enactments agamst remediable pauperism. And were
we once thoroughly to understand that, if we would
sit securely at the table we must put something of
value into the pool — that we must possess advan-
tageous circumstances, or personal desirabilities, as
the shot to be paid for our place — the art of society
would be better cultivated than it is now, and the
classification of guests would be carried out with
greater judgment. Surely, if the need of being
gracious in manner, sprightly in talk, and of pleasant
appearance generally — all cultivable qualities, and to
be learned if not born in us by nature — were ac-
cepted as an absolute necessity, without which we
must expect to be overlooked and excluded, drawing-
rooms would be far brighter and dinner- tables far
pleasanter than they are at present ; to the advantage
36 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
of all concerned! And, after all, society is a great
thino; in human life. If not equal in importance to
the family, or to political virtue, it has its own special
value ; and whatever adds to its better organization
is a gain in every sense.
37
WHAT IS WOMAJS^'S WORK?
This is a question which one half the world is at
this moment asking the other half ; with very wild
answers as the result. Woman's work seems to be
in these days everything that it was not in times
past, and nothing that it was. Professions are
undertaken and careers invaded which were formerly
held sacred to men ; while things are left undone
which, for all the generations that the world has
lasted, have been naturally and instinctively assigned
to women to do. From the savage squaw gathering
fuel or drawing water for the wigwam, to the lady
giving up the keys to her housekeeper, housekeeping
has been considered one of the primary functions of
women. The man to provide — the woman to dis-
pense ; the man to do the rough initial work of
bread-winnmg, whether as a half-naked barbarian
hunting live meat or as a City clerk painfully
scorino^ lines of ruo'o;ed fio'ures — the woman to
cook the meat when got, and to lay out to the
best advantage for the family the quarter's salary
gained by casting up ledgers and writing advices
and bills of lading. Take human society in any
38 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
phase we like, we must come doT^Ti to these radical
conditions ; and any system which ignores this
division of labour, and confounds these separate
functions, is of necessity imperfect and wrong. We
have nothing whatever to say against the professional
self-support of women who have no men to work for
them, and who must therefore work for themselves
in order to live. In what direction soever they can
best make their way, let them take it. Brains and
intellectual gifts are of no sex and no condition, and it
is far more important that good work should be done
than that it should be done by this or that particular
set of workers. But we are speaking of the home
duties of married women, and of those girls who
have no need to earn their daily bread, and who are
not so specially gifted as to be driven afield by the
irrepressible power of genius. We are speaking of
women who cannot help in the family income, but who
might both save and improve in the home ; women
whose lives are one long day of idleness, ennui and
vagrant imagination, because they despise the activi-
ties into which they were born, while seeking outlets
for their energies impossible to them both by functional
and social restrictions.
It is strange to see into what unreasonable disre-
pute active housekeeping — woman's first social duty
—has fallen in England. Take a family with four
or five hundred a year — and we know how small
a sum that is for ' genteel humanity ' in these days —
the wife who is an active housekeeper, even with
WHAT IS WOMAN'S WOEK ? 39
such an income, is an exception to the rule ; and the
daughters who are anything more than drawing-
room dolls waiting for husbands to transfer them to
a home of their own, where they may be as useless
as they are now, are rarer still. For things are
getting worse, not better, and our young women are
less useful even than were their mothers ; while these
last do not, as a rule, come near the housekeeping
ladies of olden times, who knew every secret of
domestic economy and made a wise and pleasant
' distribution of bread ' their grand point of honour.
The usual method of London housekeeping, even in
the second ranks of the middle- classes, is for the
mistress to give her orders in the kitchen in the
morning, leavmg the cook to pass them on to the
tradespeople when they call. If she be not very
indolent, and if she have a due regard for neatness
and cleanliness, she may supplement her kitchen
commands by going up stairs through some of the
bedrooms ; but after a kmd word of advice to the
housemaid if she be sweet-tempered, or a harsh note
of censure if she be of the cross-grained type, her
work in that department will be done, and her duties
for the day are at an end. There is none of the clever
marketing by which fifty per cent, is saved in the
outlay, if a woman knows what she is about and
how to buy ; none of that personal superintendence,
so encouraging to servants when genially performed,
which renders slighted work impossible ; none of that
' seeing to things ' herself, or doing the finer parts
40 SATURDAY M0ENING3.
of the work with her own hands, which used to form
part of a woman's unquestioned duty. She gives her
orders, weighs out her supplies, then leaves the
maids to do the best they know or the worst they
will, according to the degree in which they are sup-
plied with faculty or conscience. Many women boast
that their housekeeping takes them perhaps an hour,
perhaps half an hour, in the morning, and no more ;
and they think themselves clever and commendable
in proportion to the small amount of time given to
their largest family duty. This is all very well where
the income is such as to secure iirst-class servants —
professors of certain specialities of knowledge and
far in advance of the mistress ; but how about the
comfort of the house under this hasty generalship,
when the maids are mere scrubs who ought to go
through years of training if they are ever to be worth
their salt ? It may be very well too in large house-
holds governed by general system, and not by in-
dividual ruling ; but where the service is scant and
poor, it is a stupid, uncomfortable, as well as wasteful
way of housekeeping. It is analogous to English
cookery — a revolting poverty of result with flaring
prodigality of means ; all the pompous paraphernalia
of tradespeople and their carts and their red-books
for orders, with nothing worth the trouble of booking ;
and everything of less quantity and lower quality
than would be if personal pains were taken — which is
always the best economy.
What is there in practical housekeeping less
^TIAT IS WOMAN'S WOEK ? 41
honourable than the ordinary work of middle- class
gentlewomen ? and why should women shrink from
doing for utility, and for the general comfort of the
family, what they would do at any time for vanity or
idleness ? No one need go into extremes, and wish
our nnddle-class o'entle women to become exao'o;erated
Marthas occupied only with much serving, Nausicaas
washing linen, or ' wise Penelopes ' spending their lives
in needlework alone. But, without undertaking any-
thing unpleasant to her senses or degrading to her
condition, a lady might do hundreds of things which
are now left undone in a house, or are given up to
the coarse handling of servants ; and domestic hfe
would gain in consequence. What degradation, for
instance, is there in cookery ? and how much more
home happiness would there not be if wives would
take in hand that great cold-mutton question ? But
women are both selfish and small on this point. Born
for the most part with feebly- developed gustativeness,
they affect to despise the stronger instinct in men,
and think it low and sensual if they are expected to
give special attention to the meals of the man who
provides the meat. This contempt for good cooking
is one cause of the io-norance there is amono; them of
how to secure good livmg. Those horrible traditions
of ' plain roast and boiled ' cling about them as
articles of culinary faith ,- and because they have
reached no higher knowledge for themselves, they
decide that no one else shall go beyond them. For
one middle-class gentlewoman who understands any-
42 SATURDAY MORNINGS.*
thing about cookery, or who really cares for it as a
scientific art or domestic necessity, there are ten
thousand who do not ; yet our mothers and grand-
mothers were not ashamed to be known as deft pro-
fessors, and homes were happier in proportion to the
respect paid to the stewpan and the stockpot. And
cookery is more interesting now than it was then,
because more advanced, more scientific, and with
improve! appliances ; and, at the same time, it is of
confessedly more importance.
It may seem humiliating, to those who go in for
spirit pure and simple, to speak of the condition of
the soul as in any way determined by beef and cab-
bage ; but it is so, nevertheless ; the connexion
between food and virtue, food and thought, being a
very close one. And the sooner wives recognize this
connexion the better for them and for their husbands.
The clumsy savagery of a plain cook, or the vile
messes of a fourth-rate confectioner, are absolute sins
in a house where a woman has all her senses, and
can, if she will, attend personally to the cooking.
Many things pass for crimes which are really not so
bad as this. But how seldom do we find a house
where the lady does look after the food of the family ;
where clean hands and educated brains are put to
active service for the good of others ! The trouble
would be too great in our fine-lady days, even if there
were the requisite ability ; but there is as little ability
as there is energy, and the plain cook with her
savagery and the fourth-rate confectioner with his
WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK? 43
rancid pastry, have it all tlieir own way, according
as the election is for economy or ostentation. If by
chance we stumble on a household where the woman
does not disdain housewifely work, and specially
does not disdain the practical superintendence of the
kitchen, there we are sure to find cheerfulness and
content.
There seems to be something in the life of a
practical housekeeper that answers to the needs of a
woman's best nature, and that makes her pleasant and
good-humoured. Perhaps it is the consciousness that
she is doing her duty — of itself a wonderful sweetener
of the temper ] perhaps the greater amount of bodily
exercise keeps her liver in good case ; whatever the
cause, sure it is that the homes of the active house-
keepers are more harmonious than those of the feckless
and do-nothing sort. Yet the snobbish half of the
middle-classes holds housewifely work as degrading,
save in the trumpery pretentiousness of ' giving
orders.' A woman may sit in a dirty drawing-room
which the slipshod maid has not had time to clean,
but she must not take a duster in her hands and polish
the leo:s of the chairs : — there is no disoTace in the
dirt, only m the duster. She may do fancy-work of
no earthly use, but she must not be caught making a
gown. Indeed very few women could make one, and
as few will do plain needlework. They will braid and
embroider, ' cut holes, and sew them up again,' and
spend any amount of time and money on beads and
wools for messy draperies which no one wants. The
44 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
end, being finery, sanctions the toil and refines it.
But they will not do things of practical use ; or, if
they are compelled by the exigencies of circumstances,
they think themselves martyrs and badly used by
the Fates.
The whole scheme of woman's life at this present
time is untenable and unfair. She wants to have all
the pleasures and none of the disagreeables. Her
husband goes to the City and does monotonous and
unpleasant work there ; but his wife thinks herself very
hardly dealt with if asked to do monotonous house-
work at home. Yet she does nothing more elevating
nor more advantageous. Novel-reading, fancy-work,
visiting and letter- writing, sum up her ordmary occu-
pations ; and' she considers these more to the point
than practical housekeeping. In fact it becomes
a serious question what women think themselves
sent into the world for — what they hold themselves
designed by God to be or to do. They grumble at
having children and at the toil and anxiety which a
family entails ; they thmk themselves degraded to
the level of servants if they have to do any practical
housework whatever ; they assert their equality with
man, and express their envy of his life, yet show
themselves incapable of learning the first lesson set
to men — that of doing what, they do not like to do.
What, then, do they want ? What do they hold
themselves made for ? Certainly some of the more
benevolent sort carry thsir energies out of doors, and
leave such prosaic matters as savoury dinners and
WHAT IS woman's WORK? 45
fast shirt -buttons for coramittees and charities, where
they get excitement and kudos together. Others give
themselves to what they call keeping up society,
which means being more at home in every person's
house than their own ; and some do a little weak
art, and others a little feeble literature ; but there
are very few indeed who honestly buckle to the
natural duties of their position, and who bear with
the tedium of home-work as men bear wdth the
tedium of office -work.
The little royalty of home is the last place where
a woman cares to shine, and the most uninterestino-
of all the domains she seeks to govern. Fancy a
high-souled creature, capable of aesthetics, giving her
mind to soup or the right proportion of chutnee
for the curry ! Fancy, too, a brilliant creature fore-
going an evening's conversational glory abroad for
the sake of a prosaic husband's more prosaic dinner !
He comes home tired from work, and desperately
in need of a good dinner as a restorative ; but the
plain cook gives him cold meat and pickles, or an
abomination which she calls hash, and the brilliant
creature, full of mind, thinks the desire for any-
thing else rank sensuality. It seems a little hard,
certainly, on the unhappy fellow who works at the
mill for such a return ; but women believe that
men are made only to work at the mill that they
may receive the grist accruing, and be kept in idle-
ness and uselessness all their lives. They have no
idea of lightening the labour of that mill-round by
46 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
doing tlieir own natural work cheerfully and dili-
gently. They will do everything but what they
ought to do. They will make themselves doctors,
committee-women, printers, what not ; but they will
not learn cooking, and they will not keep their own
houses. There never was a time when women were
less the helpmates of men than they are at present ;
when there was such a wide division between the
interests and the sympathies of the sexes coincident
with the endeavour, on the one -side, to approximate
their pursuits.
A great demand is being made now for more
work for woman and wider fields for her labour.
We confess we should feel a deeper interest in the
question if we saw more energy and conscience put
into the work lying to her hand at home ; and we
hold that she ought to perfectly perform the duties
which we may call instinctive to her sex before
claimino; those hitherto held remote from her natural
condition. Much of this demand sj)rings from rest-
lessness and dissatisfaction ; little, if any, from higher
aspirations or nobler energies unused. Indeed, the
nobler the woman the more thoroughly she will do
her own proper work, in the spirit of old George
Herbert's well-worn line ; and tlie less she will feel
herself above that work. It is only the weak who
cannot raise their circumstances to the level of their
thoughts ; only the poor in spirit who cannot enrich
their deeds by their motives.
• That very much of this demand for more power
WHAT IS woman's worvK? 47
of work comes from necessity and the absolute need
of bread, we know ; and that the demand will grow
louder as marriage becomes scarcer, and there are
more women adrift in the world without the pro-
tection and help of men, we also know. But this
belongs to another part of the subject. What we
want to insist on now is the pitiable ignorance and
shiftless indolence of most middle-class housekeepers ;
and what we would urge on woman is the value of
a better system of life at home before laying claim
to the discharofe of extra- domestic duties abroad.
48 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
LITTLE WOMEN.
The conventional idea of a brave, energetic, or a
supremely criminal, woman has always been that of a
tall, dark-hairecl, large-armed virago who might pass
as the younger brother of her husband, and about
whom nature seemed to have hesitated before deter-
mining whether to make her a man or a woman : —
a kind of debateable land, in fact, between the
two sexes, and almost as much the one as the
other. Helen Macgregor, Lady Macbeth, Catharine de
Medici, Mrs. Manning, and the old-fashioned mur-
deresses in novels, were all of the muscular, black-
brigand type, with more or less of regal grace super-
added according to circumstances ; and it would
have been thought nothing but a puerile fancy to
have supposed the contrary of those whose personal
description was not already known. Crime, indeed,
in art and fiction, was generally painted in very nice
proportion to the number of cubic inches embodied
and the depth of colour employed ; though we are
bound to add that the public favour ran towards
muscular heroines almost as much as towards
muscular murderesses, which to a certain extent
LITTLE WOMEN. 49
redressed the overweighted balance. Oar later novel-
ists, however, have altered the whole setting of the
palette. Instead of five foot ten of black and brown,
they have gone in for four foot nothing of pink and
yellow. Instead of tumbled masses of raven hair,
they have shining coils of purest gold. Instead of
hollow caverns whence flash unfathomable e^^es elo-
quent of every damnable passion, they have limpid
lakes of heavenly blue ; and their worst sinners are
in all respects fashioned as much after the outward
semblance of the ideal saint as they have skill to
design.
The original notion was a very good one, and the
revolution did not come before it was wanted ; but it
has been a little overdone of late, and we are threat-
ened with as great a surfeit of small-limbed yellow-
headed criminals as we have had of the black -haired
virago. One gets weary of the most perfect model in
time, if too constantly repeated ; as now, when we
have all begun to feel that the resources of the
angeFs face and demon's soul ha\e been more heavily
drawn on than is quite fair, and that, given ' heavy
braids of golden hair,' ' bewildering blue eyes,' ' a
small lithe frame,' and special delicacy of feet and
hands, we are booked for the companionship, through
three volumes, of a young person to whom Messalina
or Lucretia Borgia was a mere novice.
And yet there is a physiological truth in this
association of energy with smallness — perhaps, also,
with a certain tint of yellow hair, which, with a dash
VOL. I. E
50 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
of re J through it, is decidedly suggestive of nervous
force. Suggestiveness, indeed, does not go very far
in an argument ; but the frequent connexion of
energy and smallness in women is a thing which all
may verify in their own circles. In daily life, who
is the really formidable woman to encounter ? — the
black-browed, broad-shouldered giantess, with arms
almost as big in the girth as a man's? or the pert,
smart, trim little female, with ijo more biceps than a
ladybird, and of just about equal strength with a
sparrow? Nine times out of ten, the giantess with
the heavy shoulders and broad black eyebrows is a
timid, feeble-minded, good-tempered person, inca-
pable of anything harsher than a mild remonstrance
with her maid, or a gentle chastisement of her child-
ren. Nine times out of ten her husband has her in
hand in the most perfect working order, so that she
would swear the moon shone at midday if it were his
pleasure that she should make a fool of herself by
her submissiveness. One of the most obedient and
indolent of earth's daughters, she gives no trouble to
any one, save the trouble of rousing, excitmg and
settmg going ; while, as for the conception or execu-
tion of any naughty piece of self-assertion, she is as
utterly incapable of either as if she were a child un-
born, and demands nothing better than to feel the
pressure of the leading-strings, and to know exactly
by their strain where she is desu'ed to go and what
to do.
But the little woman is irrepressible. Too fragile
LITTLE WOMEN. 51
to come into the fighting section of humanity — a
puny creature whom one blow from a man's huge fist
could annihilate — absolutely fearless, and insolent
with the insolence which only those dare show who
know that retribution cannot follow — what can be
done with her ? She is afraid of nothing and to be
controlled by no one. Sheltered behind her weak-
ness as behind a triple shield of brass, the angriest
man dare not touch her, while she provokes him to a
combat in which his hands are tied. She gets her
own way in everything and everywhere. At home
and abroad she is equally dominant and irrepressible,
equally free from obedience and from fear. Who
breaks all the public order in sights and shows, and,
in spite of King, Kaiser, or Policeman X, goes where
it is expressly forbidden that she shall go ? Xot the
large-boned, muscular woman, whatever her tem-
perament ; unless, indeed, of the exceptionally
haughty type in distinctly inferior surroundings —
and then she can queen it royally enough and set
everything at most lordly defiance.
But in general the large-boned woman obeys the
orders given, because, while near enough to man to be
somewhat on a par with him, she is still undeniably
his inferior. She is too strong to shelter herself
behind her weakness, yet too weak to assert her
strength and def}^ her master on equal grounds. She
is like a flying fish — not one thing wholly ; and while
capable of the inconveniences of two lives is incapable
of the privileges of either. It is not she, for all her
E 2
52 SATURDAY MOENINGS.
well-developed frame and formidable looks, but the
little woman, who breaks the whole code of laws
and defies all their defenders — the pert, smart, pretty
little woman, who laughs in your face and goes
straight ahead if you try to turn her to the right
hand or to the left, receiving your remonstrances
with the most sublime indifference, as if you were
talking a foreign language she could not understand.
She carries everything before her, wherever she is.
You may see her stepping over barriers, slipping
under ropes, penetrating to the green benches with a
red ticket, taking the best places on the platform
over the heads of their rightful owners, settling
herself among the reserved seats without an inch of
pasteboard to float her. You cannot turn her out
by main force. British chivalry objects to the public
laying on of hands in the case of a woman, even
when most recalcitrant and disobedient ; more parti-
cularly if she be a small and fragile-looking woman.
So that, if it be only a usurpation of places specially
masculine, she is allowed to retain what she has got,
amid the grave looks of the elders — not really dis-
pleased at the flutter of her ribbons among them —
and the titters and nudges of the young fellows.
If the battle is between her and another woman,
they are left to fight it out as they best can, with
the odds laid heavily on the little one. All this time
there is nothing of the tumult of contest about her.
Fiery and combative as she generally is, when break-
ing the law in public places she is the very soul of
LITTLE WOMEN. 53
serene dariiig. She shows no heat, no passion, no tur-
bulence ; she leaves these as extra weapons of defence
to women who are assailable. For herself she re-
quires no such aids. She knows her capabilities and
the line of attack that best suits her, and she knows,
too, that the fewer points of contest she exposes the
more likely she is to slip into victory ; the more she
assumes and the less she argues, the slighter the
hold she gives her opponents. She is either per-
fectly good-humoured or blankly innocent ; she either
smiles you into indulgence or wearies you into com-
pliance by the sheer hopelessness of making any im-
pression on her. She may, indeed, if of the very voci-
ferous and shrill-tongued kind, burst out into such a
noisy demonstration as makes you glad to escape
from her, no matter what spoils you leave in her
hands ; just as a mastiff will slink away from a
bantam hen all heckled feathers and screeching
cackle and tremendous assumption of domg some-
thing terrible if he does not look out. Any way the
little woman is unconquerable ; and a tiny fragment
of humanity at a public show, setting all rules and
regulations at defiance, is only carrying out in the
matter of benches the manner of life to which nature
has dedicated her from the beo^inniner.
As a rule, the little woman is brave. When the
lymphatic giantess falls into a faint or goes off' into
hysterics, she storms, or bustles about, or holds on
like a game terrier, according to the work on hand.
She will fly at any man who annoys her, and she bears
54 SATURDAY MOHNINGS.
»
herself as equal to the biggest and strongest fellow
of her acquaintance. In general she does it all by
sheer pluck, and is not notorious for subtlety or craft.
Had Delilah been a little woman she would never
have taken the trouble to shear Samson's locks. She
would have stood up against him with all his strength
untouched on his head, and she would have overcome
him too. Judith and Jael were both probably large
women. The work they went about demanded a
certain strenD;th of muscle and tous^hness of sinew :
but who can say that Jezebel was not a small,
freckled, auburn-haired Lady Audley of- her time,
fall of the concentrated fire, the electric force, the
passionate recklessness of her type ? Regan and
Goneril might have been beautiful demons of the
same pattern ; we have the example of the Mar-
chioness de Brinvilliers as to what amount of spiritual
devilry can exist with the face and manner of an
angel direct from heaven ; and perhaps Cordelia was
a tall dark -haired girl, with a pair of brown eyes,
and a long nose sloping downwards.
Look at modern Jewesses, with their flashing
Oriental orbs, their night-black tresses and the
dusky shadows of their olive -coloured complexions.
As catalogued properties according to the ideal, they
would be placed in the list of the natural criminals and
law-breakers, while in reality they are about as meek
and docile a set of women as are to be found within
the four seas. Pit a fiery little Welsh woman or
a petulant Parisienne against the most regal and
LITTLE WOMEN. 55
Junonic amongst them, and let them try conclusions
in courage, in energy, in audacity ; the Israelitish
Juno will go down before either of the small Philis-
tines, and the fallacy of weight and colour in the
generation of power will be shown without the
possibility of denial.
Even in those old days of long ago, when human
characteristics were embodied and deified, we do not
find that the white-armed laro:e-limbed Hera, thou^j^h
queen by right of marriage, lorded it over her sister
goddesses by any superior energy or force of nature.
On the contrary, she was rather a heavy-going person,
and, unless moved to anger by her husband's nume-
rous infidelities, took her Olympian life placidly
enough, and once or twice got cheated in a way that
did no great credit to her sagacity. A little French-
woman would have sailed round her easily ; and as
it was, shrewish though she was in her speech when
provoked, her husband not only deceived but chastised
her, and reduced her to penitence and obedience as
no little woman would have suffered herself to be
reduced.
There is one celebrated race of women who were
probably the powerfully -built, large-limbed creatures
they are assumed to have been, and as brave and
energetic as they were strong and big — the Norse
women of the sagas, who, for good or evil, seem to
have been a very influential element in the old
Northern life. Prophetesses ; physicians ; dreamers of
dreams and accredited interpreters as well ; endowed
56 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
with magic powers ; admitted to a share in the
councils of men ; brave in war ; active in peace ;
these fair-haired Scandinavian women were the fit
comrades of their men, the fit wives and mothers of
the Berserkers and the A^ikings. They had no tame
nor easy life of it, if all we hear of them be true. To
defend the farm and the homestead during their
husbands' absence, and to keep these and themselves
intact against all bold rovers to whom the Tenth
Commandment was an unknown law ; to dazzle and
bewilder by magic arts when they could not conquer
by open strength ; to unite craft and courage, de-
ception and daring, loyalty and independence, de-
manded no small amount of opposing qualities. But
the Steingerdas and Gudrunas were generally equal
to any emergency of fate or fortune, and slashed
their way through the history of their time more
after the manner of men than of women ; supple-
menting their downright blows by side thrusts of
craftier cleverness when they had to meet power with
skill and were fain to overthrow brutality by fraud.
The Norse women were certainly as largely framed
as they were mentally energetic, and as crafty as
either ; but we know of no other women who unite
the same characteristics and are at once cunning,
strong, brave and true.
On the whole, then, the little women have the
best of it. More petted than their bigger sisters,
and infinitely more powerful, they have their oAvn
way in part because it really does not seem worth
LITTLE WOMEN. 57
while to contest a point with such little creatures.
There is nothing that wounds a man's self-respect
in any victory they may get or claim. Where there
is absolute inequality of strength, there can be no
humiliation in the self-imposed defeat of the stronger ;
and as it is always more pleasant to have peace than
war, and as big men for the most part rather like
than not to put their necks under the tread of tiny
feet, the little woman goes on her way triumphant
to the end ; breaking all the laws she does not like
and throwing down all the barriers which impede her
progress ; irresistible and irrepressible in all circum-
stances and under any conditions.
58 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
IDEAL WOMEN,
It is often objected against fault-finders, writers
or others, that they destroy but do not build up ;
that while industriously blaming errors they take
good care not to praise the counteracting virtues ;
that in their zeal against the vermin of which they
are seeking to sweep the house clean they forget the
nobler creatures which do the good work of keeping
thmgs sweet and wholesome. But it is impossible to
be continually mtroducing the saving clause, ' all are
not so bad as these.' The seven thousand righteous
who have not bowed the knee to Baal are understood
to exist in all communities ; and, vicious as any
special section may be, there must always be the
hidden salt and savour of the virtuous to keep the
whole from falling into utter corruption.
This is specially true of modern women. Cer-
tainly some of them are as unsatisfactory as any of
their kind who have ever appeared on earth before ;
but it would be very queer logic to infer therefore that
all are bad alike, and that our modern womanhood is
as ill off as the Cities of the Plain, which could not
be saved for want of the ten just men to save them.
IDEAL WOMEN. 59
Happily, we have noble women among us yet ;
women who believe in something besides pleasure, and
who do their work faithfully, wherever it may lie ;
women who can and do sacrifice themselves for love
and duty, and ^ho do not think they were sent into
the world simply to run one mad life-long race for
wealth, for dissipation, for distinction. But the life
of such women is essentially in retirement ; and
though the lesson they teach is beautiful, yet its
influence is necessarily confined, because of the narrow
sphere of the teacher. When public occasions for
devotedness occur, we in some sort measure the
extent to which the self-sacrifice of women can be
carried ; but in general their noblest virtues come
out only in the quiet sacredness of home, and the
most heroic lives of patience and well-doing go on in
seclusion, uncheered by sympathy and unrewarded
by applause.
Still, it is impossible to write of one absolute
womanly ideal — one single type that shall satisfy
every man's fancy ; for, naturally, what would be
perfection to one is imperfection to another, accord-
ing to the special bent of the individual mind. Thus
one man's ideal of womanly perfection is in beauty,
mere physical outside beauty ; and not all the virtues
under heaven could warm him into love with red
hair or a snub nose. He is entirely happy if his
wife be undeniably the handsomest woman of his ac-
quaintance, and holds himself blessed when all men
admire and all women envy. But he is blessed for
60 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
his own sake rather than for hers. Pleasant as her
lovelmess is to look on, it is pleasanter to know that
he is the possessor of it. The ' handsomest woman
in the room' comes into the same category as the
finest picture or the most thoroughbred horse within
his sphere ; and if the degree of pride in his posses-
sion be different, the kind is the same. And so in
minor proportions — from the most beautiful woman
'^ (of all, to simply beauty as a sine qua non^ whatever
else may be wanting. One other thing only is as
absolute as this beauty, and that is its undivided
possession.
Another man's ideal is a good housekeeper and a
careful mother ; and he does not care a rush whether
his wife, if she is these, be pretty or ugly. Provided
she is active and industrious, minds the house
well, brings up the children as they ought to be
brought up, has good principles, is trustworthy and
even-tempered, he is not particular as to colour or
form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or
a squint. Given the broad foundations of an honour-
able home, and he will forego the lath and plaster of
personal appearance which will not bear the wear
and tear of years and their troubles. The soHd
virtues stand. His balance at the banker's is a fact ;
his good name and credit with the tradespeople are
facts ; so is the comfort of his home ; so are the health,
the morals, the education of his children. All these
are the true realities of life to him ; but the beauty
which changes to deformity by small-pox, which
IDEAL WOMEN. 61
fades under dyspepsia, grows stale by habit, and is
worn threadbare by the end of twenty years, is only
a skin-deep grace which he does not value. Per-
haps he is right. Certainly, some of the happiest
marriages amongst one's acquaintances are those
where the wife has not one perceptible physical
charm, and where the whole force of her magnetic
value lies m what she is, not in how she looks.
Another man wants a tender, adoring, fair-haired
seraph, who will worship him as a demigod and
accept him as her best revelation of strength and
wisdom. The more dependent she is, the better he
will love her ; the less of conscious thought, of
active will, of originative power she has, the greater
will be his regard and tenderness. To be the one
sole teacher and protector of such a gentle little
creature seems to him the most delicious joy and the
best condition of married life ; and he holds Milton's
famous lines to be expressive of the only fitting rela-
tions between men and women. The adoring seraph
is his ideal ; Griselda, Desdemona, Lucy Ashton,
are his highest culminations of womanly grace ; and
the qualities which appeal the most powerfully to
his generosity are the patience which will not com-
plam, the gentleness that cannot resent, and the love
which nothing can chill.
Another man wants a cultivated intelligence in
his ideal. As an author, an artist, a student, a states-
man, he would like his wife to be able to help him
by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect. He
62 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
believes in the sex of minds, and holds no work
complete which has not been created by the one and
perfected by the other. He sees how women have
helped on the leaders in troublous times ; he knows
that almost all great men have owed something of
their o;reatness to the influence of a mother or a wife ;
he remembers how thoughts which had lain dumb
and dormant in men's brains for more than half then'
lifetime have suddenly wakened up mto speech and
activity by the influence of a woman great enough to
call them forth. The adoring seraph would be an
encumbrance and nothing better than a child on his
hands ; and the soul which had to be awakened and
directed by him would run great chance of remaining
torpid and inactive all its days. He has his own life
to lead and round off ; and, so far from wishing to
influence another's, he wants to be helped for himself.
Another man cares only for the birth and social
position of the woman to whom he gives his name
and affection. To another yellow gold stands higher
than blue blood, and ' my wife's father ' may have
been a rag-picker, so long as rag-picking had been
distilled in a sufficiently rich alembic leaving a resi-
duum admittmg no kind of doubt. Venus herself
without a dowry would be only a pretty seaside girl
with a Newtown pippin in her hand ; but Miss
Kilmansegg would be something worth thinking of,
if but little worth looking at.
One man delights in a smart, vivacious little
woman of the irrepressible kind. It makes no dif-
IDEAL WOME?^. 63
ference to him how petulant she is, how full of fire
and fury ; the most passionate bursts of temper
simply amuse him, like the anger of a canary-bird,
and he holds it fine fun to watch the small virago in
her tantrums, and to set her going again when he
thinks she has been a long enough time in subsi-
dence. His ideal of woman is an amusing little
plaything, with a great facility for being put up, and
a dash of viciousness to give it piquancy. Another
wants a sweet and holy saint whose patient humility
springs from principle rather than from fear ; another
likes a blithe- tempered, healthy girl with no nonsense
about her, full of fun and ready for everything, and he
is not particular as to the strict order or economy of
the housekeeping, provided only his wife is at all times
willing to be his pleasant playmate and companion.
Another delights in something very quiet, very silent,
very home- staying. One must have first-rate music
in his ideal woman; another, unimpeachable taste ;
a third, strict order ; a fourth, Hberal breadth of
nature ; and each has his own ideal, not only of
nature but of person — to the exact shade of the hair
the colour of the eyes and the oval of the face. But
all agree in the great fandamental requirements of
truth and modesty and love and unselfishness ; for
though it is impossible to write of one womanly ideal
as an absolute, it is very possible to detail the virtues
which ought to belong to all alike.
If this diversity of ideals be true of individuals, it
is especially true of nations, each of which has its
CA SATURDAY MORNINGS.
own ideal woman varying according to what is called
tlie genius of the country. To the Frenchman, if we
are to believe Michelet and the novelists, it is a
feverish little creature, full of nervous energy but
without muscular force ; of frail health and feeble
organization ; a prey to morbid fancies which she has
no strength to control nor yet to resist ; now weeping
away her life in the pain of finding that her husband —
a man gross and material because husband — does not
understand her, now sighing over her delicious sins
in the arms of the lover w^ho does ; without reason-
ing faculties but with divine intuitions w^hich are as
o-ood as revelations; without cool judgment but with
the lio-ht of burning passions which guide her just as
well ; thinking by her heart and carrying the most
refined metaphysics into her love ; subtle ; incompre-
hensible by the coarser brains of men and women who
are only honest ; a creature born to bewilder and to
be misled, to love and to be adored, to madden men
and to be destroyed by them.
It does not much signify that the reality is a
shrew^d, calculating, unromantic woman, with a hard
face and keen eyes, wdio for the most part makes a
good practical wife to her common- sense middle-aged
husband, who thmks more of her social position than
of her feelings, more of her children than of her
lovers, more of her purse than of her heart, and whose
oTcat object of life is a daily struggle for centimes.
It pleases the French to idealize their eminently
practical and worldly-wise women into this queer
IDEAL WOMEN. 65
compound of hysterics and adultery; and if it pleases
tliem it need not displease us. To tlie German his
ideal is of two kinds — one, his Martha, the domestic
broad-faced Hausmutter^ who cooks good dinners at
small cost, and mends the family linen as religiously
as if this were the Eleventh Commandment specially
appointed for feminine fingers to keep, the poetic
culmination of whom is Charlotte cutting bread and
butter ; the other, his Mary, his Bettina, full of mind
and esthetics and heart-uplifting love, yearning after
the infinite with holes in her stockings and her shoes
down at heel. For what are coarse material mendino-s
to the aesthetic soul yearning after the Infinite and
worshipping at the feet of the prophet ?
In Italy the ideal woman of late times was the
ardent patriot, full of active energy, of physical force,
of dauntless courage. In Poland it is the patriot
too, but of a more refined and etherealized type,
passively resentmg Tartar tyranny by the subtlest
feminine scorn, and living in perpetual music and
mourning. In Spain it is a woman beautiful and
impassioned, with the slight drawback of needing a
world of looking after, of which the men are undeni-
ably capable. In Mohammedan countries generally
it is a comely smooth- skinned Dudii, patient and sub-
missive, always in good humour with her master,
economical in house-living to please the meanness,
and gorgeous in occasional attire to gratify the
ostentation, of the genuine Oriental ; but by no
means Dudii ever asleep and unoccupied. For, if
VOL. I, F
ee SATURDAY xMORNINGS.
not allowed to take part in active outside life, the
Eastern's wife or wives have their home duties and
their maternal cares like all other women, and find
to their cost that, if they unduly neglect them, they
will have a bad time of it with Ali Ben Hassan when
the question comes of piastres and sequms, and the
dogs of Jews who demand payment, and the pigs
of Christians who follow suit.
The American ideal is of two kinds, like the Grer-
man — the one, the clever manager, the woman with
good executive faculty in the matters of buckwheat
cakes and oyster gumbo, as is needed in a country
so poorly provided with ' helps ; ' the other, the aspir-
ing soul who puts her aspirations into deeds, and
goes out into the world to do battle with the sins of
society as editress, preacher, stump-orator and the
like. It must be rather embarrassing to some men
that this special manifestation of the ideal woman at
times advocates miscegenation and free love ; but per-
haps we of the narrow old conventional type are not
up to the right mark yet, and have to wait until our
own women are thoroughly emancipated before we
can rightly appreciate these questions. At all events,
if this kind of thing pleases the Americans, it is no
more our busmess to interfere with them than with
the French compound ; and if miscegenation and
free love seem to them the right manner of life, let
them follow it.
In all countries, then, the ideal woman changes,
chameleon-like, to suit the taste of men ; and the
IDEAL WOMEN. 67
great doctrine that her happiness does somewhat
dejDend on his liking is part of the very foundation of
her existence. According to his will she is bond or
free, educated or ignorant, lax or strict, house-keep-
ing or roving ; and though we advocate neither the
bondage nor the ignorance, yet we do hold to the
principle that, by the laws which regulate all human
communities everywhere, she is bound to study the
wishes of man and to mould her life in harmony
with his liking. No society can get on in which
there is total independence of sections and members,
for society is built up on the mutual dependence of
all its sections and all its members. Hence the
defiant attitude which women have lately assumed,
and their indifference to the wishes and remonstrances
of men, cannot lead to any good results whatever.
It is not the revolt of slaves against their tyrants
which they have begun — in that we could sympa-
thize — but it is a revolt against their duties.
And this it is which makes the present state of
things so deplorable. It is the vague restlessness,
the fierce extravagance, the neglect of home, the
indolent fine-ladyism, the passionate love of pleasure
which characterises the modern woman, that saddens
men and destroys in them that respect which their
very pride prompts them to feel. And it is the pain-
fid conviction that the ideal woman of truth and
modesty and simple love and homely living has
somehow faded away under the paint and tinsel of
this modern reality which makes us speak out as we
F 2
68 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
have done, in the hope — perhaps a forlorn one — that
if she could be made to thoroughly understand what
men think of her, she would, by the very force of
natural instinct and social necessity, order herself in
some accordance with the lost ideal, and become
agam what we once loved and what we all regret.
69
PINCHBECK.
Not many years ago no really refined gentlewoman
would have worn pinclibeck. False jewelry and
imitation lace were touchstones with the sex, and the
woman who would condescend to either was assumed,
perhaps not quite without reason, to have lost some-
thinof more than the mere niceness of technical taste.
This feeling ran through the whole of society,
and pinchbeck was considered as at once despicable
and disreputable. The successful speculator, sprung
from nothing, who had made his fortune during the
war, might buy land, build himself a mansion and
set up a magnificent establishment, but he was never
looked on by the aboriginal gentry of the place as
more than a lucky adventurer ; and the blue blood,
perhaps nourishing itself on thin beer, turned up its
nose disdainfully at the claret and Madeira which had
been personally earned and not lineally inherited.
This exclusiveness was narrow in spirit and hard
in individual working ; and yet there was a whole-
some sentiment underlying its pride \Yliicli made it
valuable in social ethics, if immoral on the score
of natural equality and human charity. It was the
rejection of pretentiousness, however gilded and
70 SATURDAY MORNIKGS.
glittering, in favour of reality, however poor and
barren ; it was the condemnation of make-believe — the
repudiation of pinchbeck. It is not a generation since
this was the normal attitude of society towards its
nouveaiLX riches and Brummagem jewelry ; but time
moves fast in these later days, and national senti-
ments change as quickly as national fashions.
We are in the humour to rehabilitate all things,
and pinchbeck has now its turn with the rest. The
lady of slender means who would refuse to wear
imitation lace and false jewelry is as rare as the
country society which would exclude the nouveaii
riche because of his newness, and. not adopt him
because of his riches. The whole anxiety now is, not
what a thing is, but how it looks — not its quality, but
its appearance. Every part of social and domestic
life is dedicated to the apotheosis of pinchbeck. It
meets us at the hall- door, where miserable stuccoed,
pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial dignity
on a wretched jerry-built little villa run up without
regard to one essential of home comfort or of archi-
tectural truth. It goes with us into the cold, conven-
tional drawing-room, where all is for show and nothing
for use, in which no one lives, and which is just the
mere pretence of a dwellmg-room, set out to deceive
the world into the belief that its cheap finery is the
expression of the every-day life and circumstances of
the family. It sits with us at the table, which a
confectioner out of a back street Las furnished and
where everything, down to the very flowers, is hired
PINCHBECK. 71
for the occasion. It glitters in the brooches and
bracelets of the women, in the studs and signet-rings
of the men. It is in the hired broughams, the hired
waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers,
the cheap champagne, and the affectation of social
consideration that meet us at every turn. The whole
of the lower section of the middle- classes is penetrated
through and through with the worship of pinchbeck ;
and for one family that holds itself in the honour and
simplicity of truth, ten thousand lie, to the world
and to themselves, in frippery and pretence.
The iH'eatest sinners in this are women. Men are
often ostentatious, often extravagant, and not un-
frequently dishonest in that broad way of dishonesty
which is called living beyond their means — sometimes
making up the deficit by practices which end in the
dock of the Old Bailey ; but, as a rule, they go in
for the real thing in details, and their pinchbeck is at
the core rather than on the surface. Women, on the
contrary, give themselves up to a more general pre-
tentioQsness, and, provided they can make a show,
care very little about the means ; provided they can
ring their metal on the counter, they ignore the want
of the hall- stamp underneath. Locality, dress, their
'visiting-list and domestic appearances are the four
things which they demand shall be in accord with
their neighbours' ; and for these four surfaces they
will sacrifice the Avhole internal fabric. They will
have a showy-looking house, encrusted with base
ornamentation and false grandeur, though it lets in
72 SATUKDAY MORNINGS.
wind, rain and noise almost as if it were made
of mild or canvas, rather than a plain and sub-
stantial dwelling-place, with comfort instead of
stucco, and moderately thick walls instead of porches
and pilasters. Most of their time is necessarily
passed at home, but they will undergo all manner of
house discomfort resulting from this preference of
cheap finery over solid structure, rather than forego
their ' genteel locality ' and stereotyped ornamenta-
tion. A family of daughters on the one side, diligent
over the ' Battle of Prague ; ' a nursery full of crying
babies on the other ; more Battles of Prague opposite,
diversified by a future Lind practising her scales un-
weariedly ; water-pipes bursting in the frost ; walls
streaming in the thaw ; the lower offices reeking and
green with damp ; the upper rooms too insecure
for unrestricted movement — all these, and more
miseries of the same kind, a woman given over to the
worship of pinchbeck willingly encounters rather than
shift into a locality relatively unfashionable to her
sphere, but where she could have substantiality and
comfort for the same rent that she pays now for flash
and show.
In dress it is the same thing". She must look like
her neighbours, no matter whether they can spend
pounds to her shillings, so runs up a milliner's bill
beyond what she ought to afi'ord for the whole
family expenses. If others can buy gold, she can
manage pinchbeck. Glass that looks like jet, like
filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is every
PINCHBECK. 73
bit to lier as good as the real thing ; and if she
cannot compass Valenciennes and Mechlin, she can go
to Nottingham and buy machine-made imitations that
will make quite as fine a show. How poor soever
she may be, she must hang herself about with orna-
ments made of painted wood, of glass, of vulcanite ;
she must break out into spangles and beads and chains
and henoitons, which are cheap luxuries and, as she
thinks, effective decorations. Flimsy silks make as rich
a rustle to her ear as the stateliest brocade ; and cotton
velvet delights the soul that cannot aspire to Genoa.
The love of pinchbeck is so deeply ingramed in her
that even if, in a momentary fit of aberration into
good taste, she condescends to a simple material
about which there can be neither disguise nor pre-
tence, she must load it with that detestable cheap
finery of hers till she makes herself as vulgar in a
muslin as she was in a cotton velvet. The simjolex
munditiis^ which used to be held as a canon of
feminine good taste, is now abandoned altogether,
and the more she can bedizen herself according to the
j)attern of a Sandwich islander the more beautiful
she thinks herself — the more certain the fascination of
the men and the greater the jealousy of the women.
This is the cause of all the tags and streamers, the
bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces there, the
puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off
some dead girl's head, wherewith the modern English-
woman delights to make herself hideous. It is pinch-
beck througho u t .
74 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
But we fear woman is past praying for in the
matter of fashion ; and that she is too far given over
to the abomination of pretence to be called back to
truth for any ethical reason whatsoever, or indeed by
anything short of high examples. And then, if
simplicity became the fashion, we should have our
pinchbeck votaries translating that into extremes as
they do now with ornamentation ; if my lady took
to plainness, they would go to nakedness.
Another bit of pinchbeck is the visiting-list — the
cards of invitation stuck against the drawing-room
glass — with the grandest names and largest fortunes
put forward, irrespective of dates or tenses. The
chance contact with the people represented may be
quite out of the ordinary circumstances of life, but
their names are paraded as if an accident, which has
happened once and may never occur again, were in
the daily order of events. They are brought to the
front to make others believe that the whole social
substance is of the same quality ; that generals and
admirals and lords and ladies are the common
elements of the special circle in which the family
habitually moves ; that pinchbeck is good gold, and
that ' composition ' means marble. Women are ex-
ceedingly tenacious of these pasteboard appearances.
In a house with its couple of female servants, where
formal visitors are very rare and invitations, save
by friendly word of mouth, rarer still, you may see
a cracked china bowl or cheap mock patera on the
hall table, to receive the cards which are assumed to
PINCHBECK. 75
come in the thick showers usual with high people
who have hall- porters and a thousand names or more
on their books. The pile gets horribly dusty to be
sure, and the upper layer turns by degrees from
cream -colour to brown ; but antiquity is not held to
weaken the force of grandeur. The titled card left
on a chance occasion more than a year ago still keeps
the uppermost place, still represents a perpetual
renewal of aristocratic visits and an unbroken suc-
cession of social triumphs. Yellowed and soiled, it
is none the less the trump -card of the list ; and
while the outside world laughs and ridicules, the lady
at home thinks that no one sees through this puerile
pretence, and that the visiting-list is accepted accord-
ding to the status of the fugleman at the head. She
is very happy if she can say that the pattern of her
dress, her cap, her bonnet, was taken from that of
Lady So and So's ; and w^e may be quite sure that
all personal contact with grand folks so expresses
itself and perpetuates the memory of the event, by
such imitation — at a distance. It is too good an
occasion for the airing of pinchbeck to be disregarded ;
consequently, for the most part it is turned to this
practical account. Whether the fashion be suited to
the material or to the other parts of the dress, is
quite a secondary consideration ; it being of the essence
of pinchbeck to despise both fitness and harmony.
There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the
appearance of social influence, much cultivated by
women of a certain activity of mind and with more
76 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
definite aims than all women have. This belongs to
a grade higher than the small pretences of which we
have been speaking — to women who have money, and
so far have one reality, but who have not, by their
own birth or their husbands', the orio;inal standmo;
which would give them this social influence as of right.
Some make themselves notorious for their drawino;.
room patronage of artists, which however does not
include buying their pictures ; others gather round
them scores of obscure authors, whose books they talk
of but do not read ; a few, a short time since, were
centres of spiritualistic circles and got a queer kind
of social influence thereby, so far as Philistine desire
to witness the ' manifestations ' went ; and one or two
are names of weight in the emancipated ranks, and
take chiefly to what they call ' working women.'
These are they who attend Ladies' Committees, where
they talk bosh and pound away at utterly unmterest-
ing subjects as diligently as if what they said had
any point in it, and what they did any ultimate
issue in probability or common sense. But beyond
the fact of having a large house, where their several
sets may assemble at stated periods, these would-be
lady patronesses are utterly impotent to help or to
hinder ; and their patronage is just so much pinch-
beck, not worth the trouble of weiofhinof.
In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless
dissatisfaction with what they are and ceaseless
endeavour to a23pear something they are not, our
middle-class ladies are doing themselves and society
PINCHBECK. 77
infinite mischief. Tbey set the tone to the world
below them ; and the small tradespeople and the
servants, when they copy the vices of their superiors,
do not imitate her grace the duchess, but the doctor's
wife over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door,
and the young ladies everywhere, who all try to
appear like women of rank and fortune, and who are
ashamed of nothing so much as of industry, truth and
simplicity. Hence the rage for cheap finery in the
kitchen, just a trifle more ugly and debased than that
worn in the drawing-room ; hence the miserable
pretentiousness and pinchbeck fine-ladyism filtermg
like poison through every pore of our society, to
result God only knows in what grave moral cataclysm,
unless women of mind and education will come to the
front and endeavour to stay the plague already
begun. Chains and brooches may seem but small
material causes for important moral efi'ects, but they
are symbols ; and, as "symbols, they are of deep
national value.
No good will be done till we get back some of our
fine old horror of pinchbeck, and once more insist on
Truth as the foundation of our national life. Educa-
tion and refinement will be of no avail if they do not
land us here ; and the progress of the arts and
sciences must not be brought to mean chiefly the
travesty of civilized ladies into the semblance of
savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances.
Women are always rushing about the world eao-er
after everything but their home business. Here is
78 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
something for tliem to do — the regeneration of society
by means of their own energies ; the bringing people
back to the dignity of truth and the beauty of
simphcity ; the substitution of that self-respect which
is content to appear what it is, for the feeble pride
which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot get
gold, which endeavours so hard to hide its real estate
and to pass for what it is not and never can be.
AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD.
Amongst other queer anomalies in human nature
is the difference that lies between sectarian sins and
personal immoralities, between the intellectual un-
truth of a man's creed and the spiritual evil of his
own nature. Kigid Calvinism, for instance, which
narrows the issues of divine grace and shuts up the
avenues of salvation from all but a select few, is a
sour and illiberal faith ; and yet a rigid Calvinist,
simply continuing to believe in predestination and
election as he was taught from the beginning, may be
a generous, genial, large-hearted man. An inventor
scheming out the deadliest projectile that has yet
been devised is not necessarily indifferent to human
life on his own account ; nor is every American who
talks tall talk about the glorious destinies of his coun-
try and the infinite superiority of his countrymen, as
conceited personally as he is vamglorious nationally.
In fact, he may be a very modest fellow by his own
fireside ; and though in his quality of American he is
of course able to whip universal creation, in his mere
quality of man he is quite ready to take the lower seat
at the table and to give honour where honour is due.
80 SATURDAY MOEXIXGS.
This kind of distinction between the faults of the
sect and the person, the nature and the cause, is very
noticeable in women ; and especially in all things
relatino- to themselves. Individually, many among
them are meek and long-suffering enough, and would
be as little capable of resenting a wrong as of
revencdno" it. Being used from the cradle to a good
deal of snubbing, they take to it kindly as part of
the inevitable order of things, and kiss the chasten-
ing rod with edifying humility ; but, collectively,
they are the most impatient of rebuke, the most arro-
S^ant in moral attitude, and the most restive of all
created things sought to be led or driven. The
woman who will bear to hear of her personal faults
without offering a word in self-defence, and who will
even say peccavi quite humbly if hard pressed, fires
up into illimitable indignation when told that her
foibles are characteristic of her sex, and that she is no
worse than nature meant her to be. Personally she
is willino- to confess that she is only a poor worm
grovelling in the dust — perhaps an exceptionally
poor worm, if of the kind given to spiritual asceti-
cism — but by her class she claims to be considered
next door to an angel, and arrogates to her sex
virtues which she would blush to claim on her own
behalf.
Men, as men, are all sorts of bad things, as
every one knows. They are selfish, cruel, tyrannical,
sensual, unjust, bloodthirsty — where does the list
end ? and human nature in the abstract is a bad
AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD. 81
thing too, given over to lies and various deadly
lusts ; but women, as women, are exempt from any
special share in the general miquity, and only come
under the ban with universal nature — with lambs and
doves and other pretty creatures — not quite perfection,
because of the Fall which spoilt everything, and yet
very near it. As children of the rash parents who
corrupted the race they certainly suffer from the
general infection of sin that followed, but, as
daughters contrasted with the sons, they are so far
superior to those evil-minded brethren of theirs that
their comparative virtues by sex override their posi-
tive vices by race. As individuals, they are worms ;
as human beings, they are poor smful souls ; but by
their womanhood they are above rebuke.
Women have been so long wrapped in this
pleasant little delusion about the sacredness of their
sex, and the perfections belonging thereto by nature,
that any attem^jt to show them the truth and con-
vince them that they too are guilty of the mean
faults and petty ways common to a fallen humanity
— whereof certain manifestations are special to them-
selves — is met with the profound scorn or shrill cries
of affronted womanhood. A man who sjDeaks of their
faults as they appear to him, and as he suffers by
them, is illiberal and unmanly, and the rage of the
more hysterically indignant would not be very far
below that of the Thracian MaBnads, could they lay
hands on the offending Orpheus of the moment ; hut
a woman who speaks from knowledge, and touches the
VOL. I. G
82 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
weak places and the sore spots known best to the
initiated, is a traitress even baser than the rude man
who perhaps knows no better.
The whole life and being of womanhood must
be held sacred from censure, exalted as it is by a
kind of sentimental apotheosis that will not bear
reasoning about, to something very near divinity.
Even the follies of fashion must be exempt from
both ridicule and rebuke, on the ground of man's
utter ignorance of the merits of the question ; for
how should a poor male body know anything about
trains or crinolines, or the pleasure that a woman
feels in making herself ridiculous or indecent in
appearance and a nuisance to her neighbours? while,
for anything graver than the follies of fashion, it
is in a manner high treason against the supremacy
of the sex to assume that they deserve either ridicule
or rebuke. Besides, it is indelicate. Women are
made to be worshipped, not criticized ; to be rever-
enced as something mystically holy and incompre-
hensible by the grosser masculine faculties ; and it
is indiscreet, to say the least of it, when vile man
takes it on himself to test the idol by the hard
mechanical tests of truth and common -sense, and to
show the world how much alloy is mingled with the
gold.
This is in ethics what the Oriental's reserve
about his harem is in domestic life. The sacred-
ness of a Mohammedan's womankind must be so
complete that they are even nameless to the coarser
AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD. 83
sex ; and not, ' How ^.s your wife ? ' '■ How are your
daughters ? ' but, ' How is your house ? ' is the only
accepted form of words by which Ali may ask Hassan
about the health of his Fatimas and Zuliekas. In
much the same way our women must be kept behind
the close gilded gratings of aiFected perfectness, and,
above all things, never publicly discussed — much less
publicly condemned.
It is by no means a proof of wisdom, or of the
power of logically reasoning out a position and its
consequences, that women should thus demand to be
treated as things superior to the faults and follies of
humanity at large. They are clamouring loudly, and
with some justice, for an equal share in the world's
work and wages, and it is wonderfully stupid in them
to stand on their womanly dignity and their quasi-
sacredness, when told of their faults and measured
according to their shortcomings, not their pretensions.
If they come down into the arena to fight, they must
fight subject to the conditions of the arena. They
must not ask for special rules to be made in their
behalf — for blunted weapons on the one side and
impregnable defences on the other. If they demand
either mystic reverence or chivalric homage they
must be content with their own narrow but safe
enclosure, where they have nothing to do but to look
at the turmoil below, and accept with gratitude such
portions of the good things fought for as the men to
whom they belong see fit to bring them. They can-
not at one and the same time have the good of both
G 2
84 SATURDAY M0R^'1^TTS
positions — the courtesy claimed by weakness and tlie
honour paid to prowess. If they mingle in the melee
they mnst expect as hard knocks as the rest, and
must submit to be bullied when they hit foul and to
be struck home when they hit wide. If they do not
like these conditions, let them keep out of the fray
altogether ; but if they choose to mingle in it, no
hysterics of affronted womanhood, however loud the
shrieks, will keep them safe from hnrd knocks and
rough treatment.
Time out of mind women have been credited with
all the graces and virtues possible in a world which
' the trail of the serpent ' has defiled. To be sure
they have been cursed as well, as the causes of most
of the miseries of society from Eve's time to Helen's,
and later still. Teterrima causa. But the praise
alone sticks, so far as their own self-belief is con-
cerned, and men, who create the curses, may arrange
them to their own liking. The poet says they are
* ministering angels ; ' the very name of mother is to
some men almost as holy as that of God, and the
most solemn oath a Frenchman can take in a private
wa}^ is not by his own honour, but by the name or
the head or the life of his mother.
As wives — well, save in the old nursery doggrel
which sets forth that they are made of ' all that's
good if well understood ' — as wives certamly they
get not a few ungentle rubs. But then only a
husband knows where the shoe pinches, and if he
blasphemes during the wearing of it, on his own
AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD. 85
head be tlie guilt as is already the punishment.
As maidens they are confessedly the most sacred
manifestation of humanity, and to be approached
with the reverence rightfully due to the holiest
thing we know ; while in the new spiritualistic
world we are told to look for the time when the
moral supremacy of woman shall be the recognized
law of human life and the reign of violence and
tears and all iniquity shall therefore be at an end.
Thus the moral loveliness of collective womanhood
is a dogma which men are taught from their boyhood
as an article of faith if not a matter of experience,
and women naturally keep them up to the mark —
theoretically, at all events. Yet for all this lip-
homao^e, of which so much account is made, women
are often ill-used and brutalized, and m spite of their
superior pretensions as often fall below men m every
quality but that of patience. And patience is emi-
nently the virtue of weakness, and therefore woman's
cardinal grace ; speaking broadly and allowing for
exceptions. But what women do not see is that all
this poetic flattery comes originally from the idealiz-
ing passion of men, and that, left to themselves, with
only each other for critics and analyzers, they would
soon find themselves stripped of their superfluous
moral finery and reduced to the bare core of un-
compromising truth. And this would be the best
thing for them in the end. If they could but rise
superior to the weakness of flattery, chey would rise
beyond the power of much that now degrades them.
86 SATUEDAY MORNINGS.
If they would bat honestly consider the question ot
their own shortcomings when told where they fail,
and what they cannot do, and what they will be
sure to make a mess of if they attempt, they would
prove their title to man's respect far more than they
prove it now by the shrill cries and indignant remon-
strances of affronted womanhood.
This is the day of trial for many thmgs — among
others, for the capacity of women for an enlarged
sphere of action and more public exercise of power.
Do women think they show their fitness for nobler
duties than those already assigned them, by their im-
patience under censure, which is, after all, but one
mode of teachmg ? Are they qualifying themselves
to act in concert with men, by assuming an absolute
moral supremacy which it is a kmd of sacrilege to
deny ? If they think they are on the right road as at
present followed, let them go on in heaven's name.
When they have wandered sufficiently far perhaps
they will have sense enough to turn back, and see for
themselves what mistakes they have made and might
have avoided, had they had the wisdom of self-know-
ledge in only a small degree. Certainly, so long as
womanhood is held to confer, ^j>t'r sc, a special and un-
assailable divinity, so long will women be rendered
comparatively incapable of the best work through
vanity, through ignorance^ and through impatience of
the teaching that comes by rebuke. Nothing is so
damaging in the long run as exaggerated pretensions ;
for by-and-by, after a certain period of uncritical
AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD. 87
homage, the world is sure to believe that the silver
veil which it has so long respected hides deformity, not
divinity, and that what is too sacred for public use is
too poor for public honour. If the faults of women are
not to be discussed, nor their follies condemned,
because womanhood is a sacred thing and a man
naturally respects his mother and sisters, then women
must be content to live in a moral harem, where they
will be safe from both the gaze and the censure of the
outside world ; they must not come down into the
battle-fields and the workshops, where they forfeit all
claim to protection and have to accept the man's law
of ' no favour.' It must be one thing or the other.
Either their merits must be weighed and their capacity
assayed in reference to the place they want to take —
and in doing this their faults must be boldly and dis-
tmctly discussed — or they must be content with their
present condition ; and, with the mystic sanctity of
their womanhood, they must accept also its moral
seclusion — belonging, by their very nature, to things
too sacred for criticism and too perfect for censure. It
rests with themselves to decide which it is to be.
88 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
FEMININE AFFECTATIONS,
The old form of feminine affectation used to be that
of a die-away fine lady afflicted with a mysterious
malady known by the name of the vapours, or one,
no less obscure, called the spleen. Sometimes it was
an etherealized being who had no capacity for homely
things, but who passed her life in an atmosphere of
poetry and music, for the most part expressing her
vague ideas in haltmg rhymes which gave more
satisfaction to herself than to her friends. She was
probably an Italian scholar and could quote Pet-
rarch and Tasso, and did quote them pretty often ;
she might even be a Delia Cruscan by honourable
election, with her own peculiar wreath of laurel and
her own silver lyre ; any way she was ' a sister of
the Muses/ and had something to do with Apollo
or Minerva, whom she was sure to call Phcebus or
Pallas Athene, as being the more poetical name of the
two. Probably she had dealings with Diana too — for
this kind of woman does not in any age affect the
^seaborn,' save in a hazy sentimental way that bears
no fruits — a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit
of counterpoint being to her worth all the manly
FEMININE AFFECTATIONS. 89
love or fireside home delio;hts that the world can
give. What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers
or the rosy kisses of babies' lips compared to the
pleasures of being a sister of the Muses and one of
the beloved of Apollo ! The Delia Cruscan of
former days, or her modern avatar, will tell you that
music and poetry are godlike and bear the soul away
to heaven, but that the nursery is a prison and babies
are no dearer gaolers than any other ; and that
household duties disgrace tlie aspiring soul mounting
to the empyrean. This was the Ethereal Being of
last generation — the Blue-stocking, as a poetess in
white satin, with her eyes turned up to heaven and
her hair in dishevelled cascades about her neck. She
dropped her mantle as she finally departed ; and we
still have the Delia Cruscan essence, if not in the
precise form of earlier times. We still have ethereal
beings who, as the practical outcome of their ether-
ealization, rave about music and poetry and aesthetics
and culture, and horribly neglect their babies and the
weekly bills.
A favourite form of feminine affectation among
certain opposers of the prevalent fast type is in an
intense womanliness — an aggravating intensity of
womanliness — that makes one long for a little rough-
ness, just to take ofi" the cloying excess of sweet-
ness. This kind is generally found with large eyes,
dark in the lids and hollow in the orbit, by which a
certain spiritual expression is given to the face — a
certain look of being consumed by the hidden fire of
90 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
lofty thought, that is very effective. It does not
destroy the effectiveness that the real cause of the
darkened lids and cavernous orbits is most probably
internal disease, when not antimony. Eyes of this
sort stand for spirituality and loftiness of thought
and intense womanliness of nature : and, as all men
are neither chemists nor doctors, the simulation does
quite as well as truth.
The main characteristic of these women is self-
consciousness. They live before a moral mirror,
and pass their time in attitudinizing to what they
think the best advantage. They can do nothing
simply, nothing spontaneously and without the
fullest consciousness as to how they do it, and
how they look while they are doing it. In every
action of their lives they see themselves as pic-
tures, as characters in a novel, as impersonations of
poetic images or thoughts. If they give you a glass
of water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth
and Beauty ministering to Strength or Age, as the
case may be ; if they bring you a photographic
album, they are Titian's Daughter carrying her
casket, a trifle modernized ; if they hold a child in
their arms, they are Madonnas, and look unutterable
maternal love though they never saw the little crea-
ture before, and care for it no more than for the
puppy in the mews ; if they do any small personal
office, or attempt to do it — making believe to tie a
shoestring, comb out a curl, fasten a button — they
are Charities in graceful attitudes, and expect you to
FEMININE AFFECTATIONS. 91
think them both charitable and graceful. Nine times
out of ten they can neither tie the string nor fasten
the button with ordinary deftness— for they have
a trick of using only the ends of their fingers when
they do anything with their hands, as being more
graceful and fitting in better, than would a firmer
grasp, wdth the delicate womanliness of the character ;
and the less sweet and more commonplace woman
who does not attitudinize morally and never parades
her womanliness, beats them out of the field for real,
helpfulness, and is the Charity which the other only
plays at being.
This kind too affects, in theory, wonderful sub-
missiveness to man. It upholds Griselda as the
type of feminine perfection, and — still in theory —
between independence and being tyrannized over,
goes in for the tyranny. ' I would rather my hus-
band beat me than let me do too much as I liked,'
said one before she married, who, after she was
married, managed to get entire possession of the
domestic reins and took good care that her nominal
lord should be her practical slave. For, notwithstand-
ing the sweet submissiveness of her theory, the
intensely womanly woman has the most astonishing
knack of getting her own way and imposing her ow^n
will on others. The real tyrant among w^omen is
not the one who flounces and splutters and de-
clares that nothing shall make her obey, but this
soft-mannered, large-eyed, intensely w^omanly person
who says that Griselda is her ideal and that the
92 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
whole duty of woman lies in unquestioning obedience
to man.
In contrast with this special affectation is the
mannish woman — the woman vdio wears a double-
breasted coat with big buttons, of which she flings
back the lappels with an air, understanding the
suggestiveness of a wide chest and the need of un-
checked breathing ; who wears unmistakeiible shirt-
fronts, linen collars, vests and plain ties, like a man ;
who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man ;
who even nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in
spite of her petticoats, and makes believe that the
attitude is comfortable because it is manlike. If the
excessively womanly woman is affected in her
sickly sweetness, the mannish woman is affected in
her breadth and roughness. She adores dogs and
horses, which she places far above children of all
ages. She boasts of how good a marksman she is —
she does not call herself markswoman — and how she
can hit right and left and brmg down both birds
flying. When she drinks wine she holds the stem
of the glass between her first two fingers, hollows
her underlip, and, throwing her head well back, tosses
off the whole at a draught — she would disdain the
lady-like sip or the closer gesture of ordinary women.
She is great in cheese and bitter-beer, in claret-cup
and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities
of sweets or of effervescing wines. She rounds her
elbows a'nd turns her wrist outward, as men round
their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is
FEMININE AFFECTATIONS. 93
fond of carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers
with the plane and saw. For charms to her watch-
chain she Avears a cork-screw, a gimlet, a big knife
and a small foot-rule ; and in contrast with the
intensely womanly woman, who uses the tips of her
fingers only, the mannish woman when she does
anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to
thread a needle would thread it as much by her
palm as by her fingers. All of which is aiFectation
— from first to last affectation ; a mere assumption
of virile fashions utterly inharmonious to the whole
being, physical and mental, of a woman.
Then there is the affectation of the woman who
has taken propriety and orthodoxy under her special
protection, and who regards it as a personal insult
when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the
exact limits of her mental sphere. This is the
woman who assumes to be the antiseptic element in
society ; who makes believe that without her the
world and human nature would go to the dogs and
plunge headlong into the abyss of sin and destruc-
tion forthwith ; and that not all the grand heroism
of man, not all his thought and energy and high
endeavour and patient seeking after truth would
serve his turn or the world's if she did not spread
her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the
boundary lines within which she would confine the
range of thought and speculation. She knows that
this assumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affec-
tation, and that other mdnds have as much right to
94 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
their own boundary lines as that which she daims
for herself : but it seems to her pretty to assume
that woman generally is the consecrated beadle of
thought and morality, and that she, of all women, is
most specially consecrated. As an offshoot of this
kind stands the affectation of simplicity — the woman
whose mental attitude is self- depreciation, and who
poses herself as a mere nobody when the world is
ringing with her praises. ' Is it possible that your
Grace has ever heard of me ? ' said one of this class
with prettily affected naivete at a time when all
England was astir about her, and when colours and
fashions went by her name to make them take with
the public at large. Xo one knew better than the
fair ingenue in question how far and wide her fame
had spread ; but she thought it looked modest and
simple to assume ignorance of her own value, and to
declare that she was but a creeping worm when all
the world knew that she was a soaring butterfly.
There is a certain like kind of affectation very
common among pretty women ; and this is the
affectation of not knowing that they are pretty, and
not recognizing the effect of their beauty on men.
Take a w^oman with bewildering eyes, say, of a mad-
dening size and shape and fringed with long lashes
which distract you to look at ; the creature knows that
her eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that
fire burns and that ice melts ; she knows the effect
of that trick she has with them — the sudden uplift-
ing of the heavy lid and the swift, full gaze that she
FEMININE AFFECTATIONS. 95
gives right into a man's eyes. She has practised it
often in the glass, and knows to a mathematical
nicety the exact height to which the lid must be
raised and the exact fixity of the gaze. She knows
the whole meaning of the look and the stirring of
men's blood that it creates ; but if you speak to her
of the effect of her trick, she puts on an air of
extremest innocence, and protests her entire ignor-
ance as to anything her eyes may say or mean ; and
if you press her hard she will look at you in the
same way for your own benefit, and deny at the
very moment of offence. Various other tricks has
she with those bewildering eyes of hers— each more
perilous than the other to men's peace ; and all un-
sparingly employed, no matter what the result. For
this is the woman who flirts to the extreme limits,
then suddenly draws up and says she meant nothing.
Step by step she has led you on, with looks and
smiles and pretty doubtful phrases always suscep-
tible of two meanings —the one for the ear by mere
word, the other for the heart by the accompaniments
of look and manner, which are intangible ; step by
step she has drawn yoa deeper and deeper into the
maze where she has gone before as your decoy ;
then, when she has you safe, she raises her eyes for
the last time, complains that you have mistaken her
cruelly and that she has meant nothing more than
any one else might mean ; and what can she do to
repair her mistake ? Love you ? marry you ? No ;
she is engaged to your rival, who counts his thou-
96 SATURDAY MOENINGS.
sands to your hundreds ; and what a pity that you
had not seen this all along and that you should have
so misunderstood her ! Besides, what is there about
her that you or any one should love ?
Of all the many affectations of women, this affec-
tation of their own harmlessness when beautiful,
and of their innocence of design when they practise
their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most
dane:erous and the most disastrous. But what can
one say to them? The very fact that they are
dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his
perception until too late. That men love though
they suffer is the woman's triumph, guilt and con-
donation ; and so long as the trick succeeds it will
be practised.
Another affectation of the same family is the ex-
treme friendliness and familiarity which some women
adopt in their manners towards men. Young girls
affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own
age, or a year or so older ; and they, too, when their
wiser elders remonstrate, declare they mean nothing,
and how hard it is that they may not be natural!
This form of affectation, once begun, continues
through life ; being too convenient to be lightly dis-
carded ; and youthful matrons not long out of their
teens assume a tone and ways that would befit middle
age counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance
be dangerous even then if the ' Indian summer '
were specially bright and warm.
Then there is that affectation pure and simple
FEmNINE AFFECTATIONS. 97
which is the mere affectation of manner, such as is
shown in the drawling voice, the mincing gait, the ex-
treme gracefulness of attitude which by consciousness
ceases to be grace, and the thousand little minaudeines
and coquetries of the sex known to us all. And
there is the affectation which people of a higher
social sphere show Avhen they condescend to those of
low estate, and talk and look as if they are not quite
certain of their company, and scarcely know if they
are Christian or heathen, savage or civilized. And
there is the affectation of the maternal passion with
women who are never by any chance seen with their
children, but who speak of them as if they were never
out of their sight ; the affectation of wifely adoration
with women who are to be met about the world with
every man of their acquaintance rather than with
their lawful husbands ; the affectation of asceticism
in women who lead a self- enjoying life from end
to end ; and the affectation of political fervour in
those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to
save Europe from universal revolution.
Go where we will, the affectation of being some-
thing she is not meets us in woman, like a ghost we
cannot lay, a mist we cannot sweep away. In the
holiest and the most trivial things we find it pene-
trating everywhere — even in church and at her
prayers, when the pretty penitent, rising from her
lengthy orisons, lifts her eyes and furtively looks
about to see who has noticed her self-abasement and
to whom her picturesque piety has commended itself.
VOL. I. H
98 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
All sorts and patterns of good girls and pleasant
women are very dear and delightful ; but the pearl of
great price is the thoroughly natural and unaffected
woman — that is, the woman who is truthful to her
heart's core, and who would as little condescend to
act a pretence as she would dare to tell a lie.
99
INTERFERENCE.
About the strongest propensity in human nature,
apart from the purely personal instincts, is the pro-
pensity to interfere. We do not mean tyranny ; that
is another matter — tyranny being active while inter-
ference is negative — the one standing as the mascu-
line, the other as the feminine, form of the same
principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some
personal gain in view when it takes it in hand to force
people to do what they dishke to do ; while inter-
ference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply
prevents the exercise of free-will for the mere
pleasure to be had out of such prevention.
Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than
domestic ; but the curse of interference is seen most
distinctly within the four walls of home, where also
it is most felt. Yery many people spend their lives
in interfering with others — perpetually putting spokes
into wheels with the turning of which they have
nothing to do, and thrusting their fingers into pies
about the baking of which they are in no way con-
cerned ; and of these people we are bound to confess
that women make up the larger number and are the
H 2
100 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
greater sinners. To be sure there are some men —
small, fussy, finnicking fellows, with whom nature
has made the irreparable blunder of sex — who are
as troublesome in their endless interference as the
narrowest-minded and most meddling women of their
acquaintance ; but the feminine characteristics of men
are so exceptional that we need not take them into
serious calculation. For the most part, when men
do interfere in any manly sense at all, it is with such
things as they think they have a right to control —
say, with the wife's low dresses or the daughter's
too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent
because they are jealous of the repute, perhaps of the
beauty, of their womankind ; and, knowing what
other men say of such displays, or fearing their effect,
they stand between folly and slander to the best of
their ability. But this kmd of interference, noble or
ignoble as the cause may be, comes mto another class
of motives altogether and does not belong to that
kind of interference of which we are speaking.
Women, then, are the great interferers at home,
both with each other and with men. They do not
tell us what we are to do, beyond going to church
and subscribing to their favourite mission, so much
as they teU us what we are not to do. They do not
command so much as they forbid. And, of all women,
wives and daughters are the most given to handlmg
these check-strings and putting on these drag-chains.
Sisters, while young, are obliged to be less interfering,
under pain of a perpetual round of bickering ; for
INTERFERENCE. 101
brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of
creatures for the most part so loftily snubbed as
sisters ] while mothers nine times out of ten are laid
aside for all but sentimental purposes, so soon as the
son has ceased to be a boy and has learned to become
a man. The queenhood, therefore, of personal and
domestic interference lies with wives, and they know
how to use the prerogative they assume. Take an
unlucky man who smokes under protest — his wife not
liking to forbid the pleasure entirely, but always
grudging it and interfering with its exercise. Each
cigar represents a battle, deepening in intensity ac-
cording to the number. The first may have been had
with only a Hght skirmish — perhaps a mere threaten-
ing of an attack that passed away without coming to
actual onslaught ; the second brings up the artillery ;
while the third or fourth lets all the forces loose, and
sets the big guns thundering. She could understand
a man smoking one cigar in the day, she says, with a
gracious condescension to masculine weakness; but
when it comes to more she feels that she is called on
to interfere, and to do her best towards checking such
a reprehensible excess. It does not weaken her position
that she knows nothing of what she is talking about.
She never smoked a cigar herself, therefore does not
understand the uses nor the abuses of tobacco ; but
she holds herself pledged to interfere so soon as she
gets the chance ; and she redeems that pledge with
energy.
The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich
102 SATURDAY MOENINGS.
and an appetite to correspond, but about whom tbe
home superstition is that he has a feeble digestion
and must take care of his diet, has also to run the
gauntlet of his wife's interfering forces. He never
dines nor sups jollily with his friends without being
plucked at and reminded that salmon always dis-
agrees with him ; that champagne is sure to give
him a headache to-morrow ; and, ' My dear ! when
you know how bad salad is for you ! ' or, * How can
you eat that horrid pastry ? You will be so ill in
the night ! ' ' What ! more wine ? another glass of
whisky ? how foolish you are ! how wrong ! ' The
wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear
stimulants ; the husband is a strong, large-framed
man who can drink deep without feeling it ; but to
the excitable woman her feeble hmit is her husband's
measure, and when he has gone beyond the range of
her own short tether, she trots after him remonstrat-
ing, and thinks herself justified in interfering with
his further progress. For women cannot be brought
to understand the capacities of a man's life ; they
cannot be made to understand that what is bad
for themselves may not be bad for others, and that
their weakness ought not to be the gauge of a man's
strength.
A pale, chilly woman, afflicted with chronic bron-
chitis, who wears furs and velvets in May and fears
the east wind as much as an East Indian fears a tiger,
does her best to coddle her husband, father, sons,
in about the same ratio as she coddles herself They
INTERFERENCE. 103
must not go out without an overcoat ; they must
take an umbrella if the day is at all cloudy ; they
must not walk too far nor ride too hard ; and they
must be sure to be at home by a given hour.
When such women as these have to do with men just
on the boundary-line between the last days of vigour
and the first of old age, they put forward the time of
old age by many years. We see their men rapidly
sink into the softness and incapacity of senility, when
a more bracing life would have kept them good for
half-a-dozen years longer. But women do not care
for this. They like men to be their own companions
and dread rather than desire the masculine comrade-
ship which would keep them up to the mark of virile
independence ; for most women — but not all — would
rather have their husbands manly in a womanly way
than in a manly one, as being more within the com-
pass of their own sympathies and understanding.
The same kind of interference is very common
where the husband is a man of broad humour — one
who calls a spade a spade, with no circumlocution
about an agricultural implement. According to the
odd law of compensation which regulates so much of
human action, the wife of such a man is generally
one of the ultra-refined kind, who thinks herself
consecrated the enduring censor of her husband's
speech. As this is an example most frequently to be
found in middle life and where there are children
belonging to the establishment, the word of warning
is generally ' papa ! ' — said with reproach or resent-
104 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
ment, according to circumstances — which has, of
course, the effect of drawing the attention of the
young people to the paternal breadth of speech, and
of fixing that special breach of decorum on their
memory. Sometimes the wife has sufficient self-
restraint not to give the word of warning in public,
but can nurse her displeasure for a more convenient
season ; but so soon as they are alone the miser-
able man has to pass under the harrow, as only
husbands with wives of a chastising spirit can pass
under it, and his life is made a burden to him
because of that unlucky anecdote told with such
verve a few hours ago, and received with such shouts
of pleasant laughter. Perhaps the anecdote was just
a trifle doubtful ; granted ; but what does the wife
take by her remonstrance? Most probably a quarrel;
possibly a good-natured jyeccavi for the sake of being
let off the continuance of the sermon ; perhaps a
yawn ; most certainly not reform. If the man be a
man of free speech and broad humour by nature and
liking, he will remain so to the end ; and what the
censorship of society leaves untouched, the inter-
ference of a wife will not control.
Children come in for an enormous share of inter-
ference, which is not direction nor discipline, but
simple interference for its own sake. There are mothers
who meddle with every expression of individuality
in their young people, quite irrespective of moral
tendency, or whether the occasion is trivial or impor-
tant. In the fancies, the pleasures, the minor details
INTERFERENCE. 105
of dress in their children, there is always that intrud-
ing maternal finger upsetting the arrangements of the
poor little pie as vigorously as if thrones and altars
depended on the result. Not a game of any kind
can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn instead of a
pink, without maternal interference; so that the
bloom is rubbed off every enjoyment, and life becomes
reduced to a kind of goose-step, with mamma for the
drill-sergeant prescribing the inches to be marked.
Sisters, too, do a great deal of this kind of thing
among each other ; as all those who are intimate in
houses where there are large families of unmarried
girls must have seen. The nudges, the warning
looks, the deprecatmg ' Amy's ! ' and ' Oh, Lucy's 1 '
and ' Hush, Rose's ! ' by which some seek to act as
household police over the others, are patent to all
who use their senses. In some houses the younger
sisters seem to have been born chiefly as training
grounds for the elders, whereon they may exercise
their powers of interference ; and a hard time they
have of it. If Emma goes to her embroidery, Ellen
tells her she ought to practise her singing ; if Jane is
reading, Mary recommends sewmg as a more profit-
able use of precious time ; if Amy is at her easel, Ada
wants to turn her round to the piano. It is quite the
exception where four or five sisters leave each other
free to do as each likes, and do not take to drilHng
and interference as part of the daily programme.
Something of the reluctance to domestic service,
so painfully apparent among the better class of
106 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
working women, is due to this spirit of interference
with women. The lady who wrote about the caps and
gOAATis of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of dress,
down to the very material of their gloves, was an
instance of this spirit. For, when we come to analyze
it, what does it really signify to us how our servants
dress, so long as they are clean and decent and do
not let their garments damage our goods ? Fashion
is almost always ridiculous, and women, as a rule,
care more for dress than they care for anything else ;
and if the kitchen apes the parlour, and Phyllis gives
as much thought to her new linsey as my lady gives
to her new velvet, we cannot wonder at it, nor need
we hold up our hands in horror at the depravity of
the smaller person. Does one flight of stairs transpose
morality ? If it does not, there is no real ethical reason
why my lady should interfere with poor Phyllis' s
enjoyment in her igly little vanities, when she herself
will not be interfered with — though press and pulpit
both try to turn her out of her present path into the
way which all ages have thought the best for her and
the one naturally appointed. It is a thing that will
not bear reasoning on, being simply a form of the old
^ who will guard the guardian ? ' Who will direct
the directress ? and to whose interference will the
interferer submit ?
There are two causes for this excessive love of
interference among women. The one is the narrow-
ness of their lives and objects, by which insignificant
things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes ;
INTERFERENCE. 107
the otlier, tlieir belief that they are the only saviours
of society, and that without them man would become
hopelessly corrupt. And to a certain extent this
.belief is true ; but surely with restrictions ! Because
the clearer moral sense and greater physical weakness
of women restrain men's fiercer passions and force
them to be gentle and considerate, women are not,
therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine life into whose
hands is given the paying out of just so much rope
as they think fit for the occasion. They would do
better to look to their own tackle before settling so
exactly the run of others ; and if ever their desired
time of equality is to come, it must come through
mutual independence, not through womanly inter-
ference, and as much liberality and breadth given
as demanded: — which, so far as humanity has gone
hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of squar-
ing accounts.
Grant that women are the salt of the earth and
the great antiseptic element in society, still that does
not reduce everything else to the verge of corruption
which they alone prevent. Yet they evidently think
that it is so, and that they are each and all the keepers
of keys which give them a special entrance to the
temple of morality, and by which they are able to
exclude or admit the grosser body of men. Hence they
interfere and restrict and pay out just so much rope,
and measure off just so much gambolling ground, as
they think fit ; then think vile man a horribly wicked
invention when he takes things into his own hand
108 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
and goes beyond their boundary -lines. It is all done
in good if in a very narrow faith — that we admit
wilhngly ; but we would call their attention to the
difference there is between influence and interference ;
which is just the difference between their ideal duty
and their daily practice — between being the salt of
the earth and the blister of the home.
We think it only justice to put in a word for
those poor henpecked fellows of husbands at a time
when the whole cry is for Woman's Eights, which
seems to mean chiefly her right of making man
knuckle under on all occasions and of making one
will serve for two lives — and that will hers. We
assure her that she would get her own way in large
matters much more easily if she would leave men
more liberty in small ones, and not teaze them by
interfering: in thino-s which do. not concern her and
have only reference to themselves.
109
TEE FASHIONABLE WOMAN,
Among the many odd products of a mature civiliza-
tion, the fashionable woman is one of the oddest.
From first to last she is an amazing spectacle ; and
if we take human life in any earnestness at all,
whether individually, as the passage to an eternal
existence the condition of which depends on what we
are here, or collectively, as the highest thing we
know, we can only look in blank astonishment at the
fashionable woman and her career. She is the one
sole capable member of the human farxiily without
duties and without useful occupation ; the one sole
being who might be swept out of existence altogether,
without deranging the nice arrangement of things, or
upsetting the balance of inter-dependent forces. We
know of no other organic creation of which this could
be said ; but the fashionable woman is not as other
creatures, being, fortunately, sui generis, and of a type
not existing elsewhere. If we take the mere ordering
of her days and the employment of her time as the
sign of her mental state, we may perhaps measure to a
certain extent, but not fully, the depth of inanity into
which she has fallen and the immensity of her folly.
110 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
Considering her as a being with the potentiality of
reason, of usefulness, of thought, the actual result
is surely the saddest and the strangest thing under
heaven !
She goes to bed at dawn and does not attempt
to rise till noon. For the most part she break-
fasts in bed, and then amuses herself with a cursory
glance at the morning paper, if she have sufficient
energy for so great a mental exertion ; if she have
not, she lies for another hour or two in that half-
slumberous state which is so destructive to mind and
body, weakening as it does both fibre and resolution,
both muscle and good principle. At last she lan-
guidly rises, to be dressed in time for luncheon and
her favoured intimates — the men who have the entree
at sacred hours when the world in general is for-
bidden. Some time later she dresses again for
her drive — for the first part of the day's serious
business ; for paying visits and leaving cards ; for
buying jewelry and dresses, and ordering all sorts
of unnecessary things at her milliner's ; for this
grand lady's ordinary ' day,' and that grand lady's
extraordinary At Home ; for her final slow parade in
the Park, where she sees her friends as in an open
air drawing-room, makes private appointments, carries
on flirtations, and hears and retails gossip and scandal
of a full flavour. Then she goes home to dress for
tea in a ' lovely gown ' of suggestive piquancy ; to be
followed by dinner, the opera or a concert, a soiree,
or perhaps a ball or two ; whence she returns towards
THE FASHIONABLE WOMAN. Ill
morning, flushed with excitement or worn out with
fatigue, feverish or nervous, as she has had pleasure
and success or disappointment and annoyance.
This is her outside life ; and this is no fancy-
picture and no exaggeration. After a certain time of
such an existence, can we wonder if her complexion
fades and her eyes grow dim ? if that inexpressible
air of haggard weariness creeps over her, which ages
even a young girl and makes a mature woman sub-
stantially an old one ? It is then that she has
recourse to those foul and fatal expedients of which
we have heard more than enough in these latter days.
She will not try simplicity of living, natural hours,
wholesome occupation, unselfish endeavour, but
rushes off for help to paints and cosmetics, to stimu-
lants and drugs, and attempts to restore the tarnished
freshness of her beauty by the very means which
further corrode it. Every now and then, for very
weariness when not for idleness, she feigns herself
sick and has her favourite physician to attend her.
In fact the funniest thing about her is the ease with
which she takes to her bed on the slightest provoca-
tion, and the strange pleasure she seems to find in
what is a penance to most women.
You meet her in a heated, crowded, noisy room,
looking just as she always looks, whatever her
normal state of health may be ; and in answer to
your inquiries she tells you she has only two hours
ago left her bed to come here, having been confined
to her room for a week, with Dr. Blank in close
112 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
attendance. If you are an intimate female friend she
will whisper you the name of her malady, which is
sure to be something terrific, and which, if true,
would have kept her a real invalid for months instead
of days ; but if you are only a man she will make
herself out to have been verv ill indeed in a more
t/
mysterious way, and leave you to wonder at the
extraordinary physique of fashionable women, which
enables them to live on the most friendly touch-and-
go terms with death, and to overcome mortal maladies
by an effort of the will and the delights of a ducal
ball. The favourite physician has a hard time of it
with these ladies ; and the more popular he is the
harder his work. It is well for his generation when
he is a man of honour and integrity, and knows how
to add self-respect and moral power to the qualities
which have made him the general favourite. For
his influence over women is almost unlimited — like
nothino; so much as that of the handsome Abbe of
the Regency or the fascinating Monsignore of Rome ;
and if he chooses to abuse it and turn it to evil
issues, he can. And, however great the merit in him
that he does not, it does not lessen the demerit of the
woman that he could.
Sometimes the fashionable woman takes up with
the clergyman instead of the physician, and coquets
with religious exercises rather than with drugs ; but
neither clergyman nor physician can change her mode
of hfe nor give her truth nor common- sense. Some-
times there is a fluttering show of art- patronage.
THE FASHIONABLE WOMAN. 113
and the fashionable woman has a handsome painter
or well-bred musician in her train, whom she pets
publicly and patronizes graciously. Sometimes it
is a young poet or a rising novelist, considerably
honoured by the association, who dedicates his next
novel to her, or writes verses in her praise, with such
fervency of gratitude as sets the base Philistines on
the scent of the secret — perhaps guessing not far
amiss. For the fashionable woman has always some
love-affair on hand, more or less platonic according to
her own temperament or the boldness of the man — a
love-aflPair in which the smallest ingredient is love ; a
love-aflPair which is vanity, idleness, a dissolute imagi-
nation and contempt of such prosaic things as
morals ; a love- aif air not even to be excused by the
tragic frenzy of earnest passion, and which may be
guilty and yet not true.
The physical effects of such a life as this are as
bad as the mental, and both are as bad as the worst
can make them. A feverish, overstrained condition of
health either prevents the fashionable woman from
being a mother at all, or makes her the mother of
nervous, sickly children. Many a woman of high rank
is at thi s moment paying bitterly for the disappoint-
ment of which she herself, in her illimitable folly, has
been the sole and only cause. And, whether women
like to hear it or not, it is none the less a truth that
part of the reason for their being born at all is that
^hey may in their turn bear children. The unnatural
feeling against maternity existing among fashionable
VOL. I. I
114 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
women is one of the worst mental signs of their state,
as their frequent inability to be mothers is one of the
worst physical results. This is a condition of things
which no false modesty nor timid reserve should keep
in the background, for it is a question of national
importance, and will soon become one of national
disaster unless checked by a healthier current and
more natural circumstances.
Dress, dissipation and flirting make up the ques-
tionable lines which enclose the life of the fashionable
woman, and which enclose nothing useful, nothing
good, nothing deep nor true nor holy. Her piety is a
pastime ; her art the poorest pretence ; her pleasure
consists only in hurry and excitement alternating with
debasing sloth, in heartless coquetry or in lawless
indulgence, as nature made her more vain or more
sensual. As a wife she fulfils no wifely duty in any
grand or loving sense, for the most part regarding
her husband only as a banker or an adjunct, accord-
ing to the terms of her marriage settlement ; as a
mother she is a stranger to her children, to whom
nurse and governess supply her place and give such
poor makeshift for maternal love as they are enabled or
inclined. In no domestic relation is she of the smallest
value, and of none in any social circumstance beside
the adorning of a room— if she be pretty — and the help
she gives to trade through her expenditure. She
lives only in the gaslight, and her nature at last
becomes as artificial as her habits.
As years go on, and she changes from the acknow-
THE FASHIONABLE WOMAN. 115
ledged belle to la femme j^cissee, she goes through a
period of frantic endeavour to retain her youth ; and
even when time has clutched her with too firm a hand
to be shaken off, and she begins to feel the infirmities
which she still puts out all her strength to conceal, even
then she grasps at the departing shadow and fresh
daubs the crumbling ruin, in the belief that the world's
eyes are dim and that stucco may pass for marble for
another year or two longer. Or she becomes a Bel-
gravian mother, with daughters to sell to the highest
bidder ; and then the aim of her life is to secure the
purchaser. Her daughters are never objects of real
love with the fashionable woman. They are essen-
tially her rivals, and the idea of carrying on her life
in theirs, of forgetting herself in them, occurs to her
only as a forecast of death. She shrinks even from
her sons, as livmg evidences of the lapse of time
which she cannot deny, and awkward memoria technica
for fixing dates ; and there is not a home presided
over by a fashionable woman where the family is
more than a mere name, a mere social convention
loosely held together by circumstances, not by
love.
Closing such a life as this comes the unhonoured
end, when the miserable made-up old creature totters
down into the grave where paint and padding, and
glossy plaits cut from some fresh young head, are of no
more avail ; and where death, which makes all things
real, reduces her life of lies to the nothingness it
has been from the beo'lnnms;. What does she leave
I 2
116 SATUKDAY MORNINGS.
behind her ? A memory by which her children may
order their own lives in proud assurance that so they
will order them best for virtue and for honour ? Or a
memory which speaks to them of time misused, of
duties unfulfilled, of love discarded for pleasure, and
of a life -long sacrifice of all things good and pure for
selfishness ?
We all know examples of the worldly old woman
clinging batlike to the last to the old roofs and rafters ;
^and we all know how heartily we despise her, and
how we ridicule her in our hearts, if not by our words.
If the reigTimg queens of fashion, at present young
and beautiful, would but remember that they are only
that worldly old woman in embryo, and that in a
very few years they will be her exact likeness, unhap-
pily repeated for the scorn of the world once more to
follow ! The traditional skeleton at the feast had a
wonderfully wise meaning, crude and gross as it was
in form. . For though its memento mori, too constantly
before us, would either sadden or brutalize, as we
were thoughtful or licentious, yet it is good to see
the end of ourselves, and to study the meaning and
lesson of our lives in those of our prototypes and
elder likenesses.
The pleasures of the world are, as we all know,
very potent and very alluring, but nothing can
be more unsatisfymg if taken as the main purpose
of life. While we are youno\ the mere stirrino-
of the blood stands instead of anythmg more real ;
but' as we go on, and the pulse flags and pleasur-
THE FASHIONABLE WOMAN. 117
able occasions get rare and more rare, we find that
we have been like the Prodigal Son, and that our food
and his have been out of much the same trough, and
come in the main to much the same thing.
This is an age of extraordinary wealth and of
corresponding extraordinary luxury; of unparalleled
restlessness, which is not the same thing as activity or
energy, but which is the kind of restlessness that
disdains all quiet and repose, as unendurable stagna-
tion. Hence the fashionable woman of the day is one
of extremes in her own line also ; and the idleness, the
heartlessness, the self-indulgence, the want of high
morality, and the insolent luxury at all times charac-
teristic of her were never displayed with more cynical
effrontery than at present, and never called for more
severe condemnation.
The fashionable women of Greece and Rome,
of Italy and France, have left behind them names
which the world has made typical of the vices
naturally engendered by idleness and luxury. But
do we wish that our women should become sub-
jects for an English Juvenal ? that fashion should
create a race of Laises and Messalinas, of Lucrezia
Borgias and Madame du Barrys, out of the stock
which once gave us Lucy Hutchinson and Elizabeth
Fry ? Once the name of Enghshwoman carried
with it a grave and noble echo as the name of
women known for their gentle bearing and their blame-
less honour — of women who loved their husbands,
and brought up about their own knees the children
118 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
they were not reluctant to bear and not ashamed to
love. Now, it too often means a girl of the period, a
frisky matron, a fashionable woman — a thing of paints
and pads, consorting with dealers of no doubtful
calling for the purchase of what she grimly calls
'beauty,' makmg pleasure her only good and the
world her highest god. It too often means a woman
who is not ashamed to supplement her husband with
a lover, but who is unwilling to become the honest
mother of that husband's children. It too often
means a hybrid creature, perverted out of the natural
way altogether, affecting the license but ignorant of
the strength of a man ; as girl or woman alike value-
less so far as her highest natural duties are concerned ;
and talking largely of liberty while showing at every
turn how much she fails in that co -essential of liberty
— knowledge how to use it.
119
SLEEPING DOGS.
There is a capital old proverb, often quoted but not
so often acted on, called ' Let sleeping dogs lie ; ' a
proverb which, if we were to abide by its injunction,
would keep us out of many a mess that we get into
now, because we cannot let well alone. Certainly we
fall into trouble sometimes, or rather we drift into it
— we allow it to gather round us — for want of a
frank explanation to clear off small misunderstand-
ings. At least novelists say so, and then make a
great point of the anguish endured by Henry and
Angelina for three mortal volumes, because they were
too stuj)id to ask the reason why the one looked cold
the other evening at the duchess's ball, and the other
looked shy the next morning in the park. But then
novelists, poor souls, are driven to such extravagant
expedients for motives and matter, that we can
scarcely take them as rational exponents of real life
in any way ; though the very meaning and final
cause of their profession is to depict human nature
as it is, and to show the reflex action of character
and circumstances somewhat according to the pattern
set out in the actual world. But, leavino- novelists
120 " SATURDAY MORNINGS.
alone, on the whole we find m real life that if speech
is silvern, silence is essentially golden, and that more
harm is done by saying too much than by saying too
little ; above all, that infinite mischief arises by not
letting sleeping dogs lie.
People are so wonderfully anxious to stir up the
dregs of everything, they can never let things rest.
Take a man or woman who has done something
queer that gets noised abroad, and who is coldly
looked on m consequence by those who believe the
worst reports which arise as interpretations. Now
the wisest thing undoubtedly is to bear this coldness
as the righteous punishment of that folly, and to
trust for rehabilitation to the mysterious process
called ' living it down.' If there has been absolutely
no sinfulness to speak of, nothing but a little im-
prudence and a big glossary of scandalous explana-
tion, a little precipitancy and a great deal of ill-
nature, by all means wake up the sleeping dog and
set him howling through the streets. He may do
good, seeing that truth would be your friend. But
if there be a core of ugly fact, even if it be not quite
so ugly as the envelope which rumour has wrapped
round it, then fall back on the dignity of ' living it
down,' and let the dog lie sleeping and muzzled.
There is another, but an unsavoury saying, which
advises against the stirring up of evil odours ; but
this is just what imprudent, high-spirited people will
not understand. They will take their own way in
spite of society and all its laws ; they will kick over
SLEEPING DOGS. 121
the traces when it suits them ; they will do this and
that of which the world says authoritatively, ' Xo,
you shall not do it ; ' and then, when the day of
wrath arrives, and down conies the whip on the
offending back, they shriek piteously and wake up
all the dogs in the town in the ' investigation of their
case.' And a queer kennel enough they turn out
sometimes ! They would have done better to put
up with their social thrashing than to have set the
bloodhounds of ' investigation ' on their heels.
Actions for libel often do this kind of thmg, as
every one may read for himself. Many a man who
gets his farthing damages had better have borne the
surly growl of the only half- roused dog, than have
retaliated, and so waked him up. The farthing
damages, representing say a cuff on the head or a
kick in the ribs, or a milder ' Lie down, sir ! ' may
be very pleasant to the feelings of the yelped -at, as
so much revenge exacted — Shylock's pound of flesh,
without the blood. But what about the conse-
quences ? what about the disclosure of your secret
follies and the uncovering of the foundations on
which the libel rested ? The foundations remain
immoveable to the end of time if the superstructure
be disroofed, and the sleeping dog is awakened, never
to be set at rest again while he has a tooth in his
head that can bite.
One of the arts of peaceful living at home is
contained in the power of letting sleepmg dogs lie.
Papa is surly — it is a way papas have — or mamma is
122 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
snappish, as even the best of mammas are at times
when the girls are tiresome and will flirt with
ineligible younger brothers, or when the boys, who
must marry money, are paying attention to dowerless
beauty instead. Well, the family horizon is overcast,
and the black dog keeps the gate of the family
mansion. Better let it lie there asleep, if it will but
remain so. It is not pleasant to have it there
certainly, but it would be worse to rouse it into
activity and to have a general yelping through the
house.
Sometimes, indeed, in a family given to tears
and caresses and easily excited feelings, a frank
challenge as to reasons why is answered by a tem-
porary storm, followed by a scene of effusion and
attendrissementj and the black dog is not awakened,
but banished, by the rousing he has got. This is a
method that can be tried when you have perfect
knowledge and command of your material ; else it is
a dangerous, and nine times out of ten would be an
unsuccessful, experiment. It is nearly always unsuc-
cessful with husbands and wives, who often sulk, but
rarely for causes needing explanation. Angelina
knows quite well that she danced too often the other
night with that fascinating young Lovelace for whom
her Henry has a special, and not quite groundless,
aversion. She may put on as many airs of injured
innocence as she likes, and affect to consider herself
an ill-used wife suffering grievous things because of
her husband's displeasure and the black dog of sulks
SLEEPING DOGS. 123
accompanying ; but she knows as well as her Henry
himself where her sin lies, and to kick at the black
dog would only be to set him loose upon her, and be
well barked at if not worried for her pains. The
wiser course would be to muzzle him by ignoring his
presence ; and so in almost all cases of domestic dog,
however black.
A sleeping dog of another kind, which it would
be well if women would always leave at rest, is the
potential passion of a man who is a cherished friend
but an impossible lover. Certain slow-going men
are able to maintain for life a strong but strictly
platonic attachment for certam women. If any
warmer impulse or more powerful feeling give
threatening notice of arising, it is kept in due sub-
jection and a wholesome state of coolness, perhaps
by its very hopelessness even if returned, perhaps
by the fear or the knowledge that it would be ill-
received, and that the only passport to the pleasant
friendship so delighted in is in this calm and sober
platonism. This is all very well so long as the
woman minds what she is about ; for the passionless
attachment of a man depends mainly on her desire
to keep things in their present place, and on her
power of holdmg to the line to be observed. If she
oversteps this line, if she wakens up that sleeping
dog of passion, it is all over with her and platonism.
What was once a pleasant truth would now be a
burning satire ; for friendship routed by love can
never take service under its old banners again.
124 SATURDAY MOENTNGS.
And yet this is what women are continually
doing. They are always complaining that men are
not their friends, and that they are only selfish and
self-seeking in their relations with them ; yet no
sooner do they possess a man friend who is nothing
else than they try their utmost to convert him into
a lover, and are not too well pleased if they do not
succeed — which might by chance sometimes happen
like any other rare occurrence, but not often. And
yet success ruins everything. It takes away the
friend and does not give an available lover ; it de-
stroys the existing good and substitutes nothing
better. If the woman be of the fishpond type, whose
heart Thackeray wanted to ' drag,' she simply turns
round upon the unhappy victim with one of the
' looks that kill ; ' if she be more weak than vain
and less designing than impulsive, she regrets the
momentary infatuation which has lost her her friend ;
but in any case she has lost him — by her own folly,
not by inevitable misfortune.
Just as easy is it to rouse the sleeping dogs of
hatred, of jealousy, of envy. You have a tepid well-
controlled dislike to some one ; and you know that
he knows it. For feelings are eloquent, even when
dumb, and express themselves in a thousand ways
independent of words. You do not care much about
your dislike — you do not nurse it nor feed it in any
way, and are rather content than not to let it lie
dormant, and so far harmless. But your imloved
friend cannot let well alone. He will be always
SLEEPING DOGS. 125
treading on your corns and touching you on the raw.
That unhicky speculation you made ; your play that
was damned ; the election you lost ; the decision
that was given against you, with costs — whenever
you see him he is sure to introduce some topic that
rubs you the wrong way, till at last the sleeping dog
gets fairly roused, and what was merely a well-
ordered dislike bursts out into a frantic and unofo-
vernable hatred. It has been his own doing. Just
as in the case of the platonic friend transformed into
the passionate lover by the woman's wiles, so the dis-
like that gave you no trouble — become now the hatred
which is a real curse to your existence — results from
your friend's incessant rousing up of sleeping passions.
Young people are much given to this kind of thing.
There is an impish tendency in most girls, and in all
boys, that makes teazing a matter of exquisite delight
to them. If they know of any sleeping dog which an
elder carries about under his cloak, they are never so
happy as when they are rousing it to activity, though
their own backs may get bitten in the fray. Let a
youngster into the secret of a weakness, a sore, and
if he can resist the temptation of torturing you as the
result of his knowledge he may lay claim to a virtue
almost unknown in boyish morals. But he some-
times pays dearly for his fun. More than one life-
long dislike, culminating in a disastrous codicil or
total omission from the body of the will, has been the
return-blow for a course of boyish teazings which a
testy old uncle or huffish maiden aunt has had to
126 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
undergo. The punishment may be severe and unjust ;
but the provocation was great ; and revenge is a
human, if indefensible, instinct common to all classes.
Fathers and mothers themselves are not always
sacred ground, nor are their special dogs suffered to
lie sleeping undisturbed ; and perhaps the favouritism
and comparative coldness patent in almost every
family may be traced back to the propensity for
soothing or for rousing those parental beasts. For
even fathers and mothers have personal feelings in
excess of their instincts, and they, no more than any
one else, like to be put through their paces by the
impish vivacity of youth, and made to dance accord-
ing to the piping of an irreverent lad or saucy girl.
If they have dogs, they do not want their children to
pry into their kennels and whistle them out at their
pleasure ; and those who do so most will naturally
get worst off in the great division of family love ' Let
sleeping dogs lie,' certainly, as a rule for private life.
Historically, the saying does not hold good. For
if the great leaders of thought and reform had not
roused up the sleeping dogs of their day, and made
them give tongue for all after ages to hear, we should
be but poorly off at this present time. Many of our
liberties have been got only by diligently prodding
up that very sleepy dog, the public, till he has been
forced to show his teeth ; and history is full of
instances of how much has been done, all the world
over and m every age, by the like means. Sometimes
the prodded dog flies at the wrong throat on the
SLEEPING DOGS. 127
other side, as we have had a few notable instances of
late; and then it would have been wiser to leave
him quietly sleeping in the shade, whether at
Mentana or elsewhere ; to rouse for rending being
a poor amusement at the best, and an eminently
unprofitable use of leather.
128 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
BEAUTY AND BRAINS.
That lovely woman fulfils only half lier mission
when she is unpersonable instead of beautiful, all
young men, and all pretty girls secure in the
consciousness of their own perfections, will agree.
Indeed, it is cruel to hear the way in which ingenuous
youths despise ugly girls, however clever, whose
charm lies in their cleverness only, with a counter-
action in their plamness. To hear them, one would
think that hardness of feature was, like poverty, a
crime voluntarily perpetrated, and that contempt was
a righteous retribution for the offence. Yet their
preference, though so cruelly expressed, is to a
certain extent the right thing. When we are young,
the beauty of women has a supreme attraction
beyond all other possessions or qualities ; and there
are self-evident reasons why it should be so. It is
only as we grow older that we know the value of
brains, and, while still admiring beauty — as indeed
who does not ? — admire it as one passing by on the
other side — as a grace to look at, but not to hold,
unless accompanied by something more lasting.
This is in the middle term of a man's life. Old
BEAUTY AND BRAINS. 129
age, perhaps with the unconscious yearning of regret,
goes back to the love of youth and beauty for their
own sake ; extremes meeting here as in almost all
other circumstances. The danger is when a young
man, obeying the natural impulse of his age and
state, marries beauty only, with nothing more
durable beneath. The mind sees what it brings, and
we love the ideal we create rather than the reality
that exists. A pretty face, the unworn nerves of
youth, the freshness of hope that has not yet been
soured by disappointment nor chilled by experience,
a neat stroke at croquet and a merry laugh easily
excited, make a girl a goddess to a boy who is what
he himself calls in love and his friends ' spoony.'
She may be narrow, selfish, spoilt, unfit to bear the
burdens of life and unable to meet her trials
patiently ; she may be utterly unpractical and silly
— one of those who never mature but only grow old
— without judgment, forethought, common-sense or
courage ; but he sees nothing of all this. To him
she is perfect ; the 'j oiliest girl in the world,' if he be
slangy, or the 'dearest,' if he be affectionate ; and he
neither sees nor heeds her potential faults.
It is only when she has stepped down from her
pedestal to the level of the home-threshold that he
finds out she is but a woman after all, and perhaps an
exceptionally weak and peevish one. Then he knows
that he would have done better for himself had he
married that plain brave-hearted girl who would have
had him to a dead certainty if he had asked her, but
VOL. I. K
130 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
whom he so unmercifully laughed at when he was
making love to his fascinating charmer. As years
go on and reduce the Hebe and Hecate of eighteen to
much the same kind of woman at forty — with perhaps
the advantage on Hecate's side if of the sort that
ripens well and improves by keeping — the man feels
that he has been a fool after the manner of Bunyan's
Passion ; that he has eaten up his present in the
past, and had all his good things at once. If he had
but looked at the future and been able to wait !
But in those days he wanted beauty that does not
last, and cared nothing for brains which do ; and so,
having made his election he must abide by it, and
eat bitter bread from the yeast of his own brewing.
Many a man has cursed, his whole life long, the
youthful infatuation that made him marry a pretty
fool. Take the case of a rising politician whose fair-
faced wife is either too stupid to care about his
position, or who imperils it by her folly. If amiable
and affectionate, and in her own silly little way ambi-
tious, she does him incalculable mischief by exag-
geration, and by saying and domg exactly the things
which are most damaging to him; if stupid, she is just
so much deadweight that he has to carry with him
while swimming up the stream. She is very lovely
certainly, and people crowd her drawing-room to look
at her ; but a plain -featured, sensible, shrewd woman,
with no beauty to speak of but with tact and clever-
ness, would have helped him in his career far better
than does his brainless Venus. He finds this out
BEAUTY AND BRAINS. 131
when it is too late to change M. for N. in the mar-
riage service.
The successful men of small beginnings are greatly
liable to this curse of wifely hindrance. A barrister
once briefless and now in silk — an artist once ob-
scure and now famous — who in the days of impe-
cuniosity and Bohemianism married the landlady's
pretty daughter and towards the meridian of life find
themselves in the front ranks of la haute volee with a
wife who drops her h's and multiplies her s's, know
the full bitterness of the bread baked from that hasty
brewing. Each woman may have been beautiful in
her youth, and each man may have loved his own
very passionately; but if she have nothing to sup-
plement her beauty — if she have no brains to fall back
on, by which she can be educated up to her husband's
present social position as the wife of his successful
maturity — she is a mistake. Dickens was quite right
to kill off pretty childish Dora in ' David Copperfield.'
If she had lived she would have been like Flora in
^ Bleak House,' who indeed was Dora grown old but
not matured ; with all the grace and beauty of her
youth gone, and nothing else to take their place.
Men do not care for brains m excess in women.
They like a sympathetic intellect which can follow
and seize their thoughts as quickly as they are
uttered ; but they do not much care for any clear or
specific knowledge of facts. Even the most philo-
sophic among them would rather not be set right in
a classical quotation, an astronomical calculation, or
K 2
132 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
the exact bearing of a political question by a lovely
being in tarlatane whom he was graciously unbending
to instruct. Neither do they want anything very
strong-minded. To most men, indeed, the feminine
strono'-mindedness that can discuss immoral problems
without blushing is a quality as unwomanly as a well-
developed biceps or a ' shoulder- of-mutton ' fist. It is
sympathy, not antagonism — it is companionship, not
rivalry, still less supremacy, that they like in women ;
and some women with brains as well as learning — for
the two are not the same thing — understand this,
and keep their blue stockings well covered by their
petticoats. Others, enthusiasts for freedom of thought
and intellectual rights, show theirs defiantly ; and
meet with their reward. Men shrink from them.
Even clever men, able to meet them on their own
ground, do not feel drawn to them ; while all but
hi o-h- class minds are humiliated by their learning and
dwarfed by their moral courage. And no man likes
to feel humiliated or dwarfed in the presence of a
woman, and because of her superiority.
But the brains most useful to women, and most
befitting their work in life, are those which show
themselves in common-sense, in good judgment, and
that kind of patient courage which enables them to
bear small crosses and great trials alike with dignity
and good temper. Mere mtellectual culture, how-
ever valuable it may be in itself, does not equal
the worth of this kind of moral power ; for as the
true domain of woman is the home, and her way of
BEAUTY AND BRAINS. 133
ordering her domestic life the best test of her facul-
ties, mere intellectual culture does not help in this ;
and, in fact, is often a hindrance rather than a help.
What good is there in one's wife being an accom-
plished mathematician, a sound scholar, a first-rate
musician, a deeply-read theologian, if she cannot
keep the accounts square, knows nothmg of the
management of children, lets herself be cheated by
the servants and the tradespeople, has not her eyes
opened to dirt and disorder, and gives way to a
fretful temper on the smallest provocation ?
The pretty fool who spends half her time in
trying on new dresses and studying the efi'ect of
colours, and who knows nothing beyond the last
new novel and the latest plate of fashions, is not a
more disastrous wife than the woman of profound
learning whose education has taught her nothing
practical. They stand at the opposite ends of the
same scale, and neither end gives the true position of
women. Indeed, if one must have a fool in one's
house, the pretty one would be the best, as, at the
least, pleasant to look at ; which is something gained.
The intellectual fool, with her head always in
books and ' questions,' and her children dropping ofi*
like sheep for the want of womanly care, is something
more than flesh and blood can tolerate. The pretty
fool cannot help herself. If nature proved herself but
a stepmother to her, and left out the best part of her
wits while taking such especial care of her face, it is
no fault of hers : but the intellectual fool is a case of
134 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
maladministration of powers, for which she alone is
responsible ; and in this particular alternative between
beauty and brains, without a shadow of doubt we
would go in for beauty.
Ball-rooms and dinner-tables are the two places
where certain women most shine. In the ball-room
Hebe is the queen, and has it all her own way
without fear of rivals. A very few men who care for
dancing for its own sake will certainly dance with
Hecate if she is light on hand, keeps accurate time,
and manages her feet with scientific precision ; but
to the ruck of youths, Hebe, who jerks herself into
step every second round, but whose lovely face and
perfect figure make up for everything, is the partner
they all besiege. Only to those exceptional few who
regard dancing as a serious art would she be a bore
with her three jumps and a hop ; while Hecate,
waltzing like an angel, would be divine, in spite of
her high cheek-bones and hght green eyes a fieur de
tete. But at a dinner-table, where a man likes to talk
between the dishes, a sympathetic listener with
pleasant manners, to whom he can au' his stalest
stories and recount his personal experiences, is pre-
ferable to the prettiest girl if a simpleton, only able
to show her small white teeth in a silly smile, and
say ' yes ' and ' indeed ' in the wrong places. The
ball-room may be taken to represent youth; the
dinner- table maturity. The one is the apotheosis of
mere beauty, in clouds of millinery glory and a
heaven of flirting ; the other is solid enjojrment, with
BEAUTY AND BRAINS. 135
brains to talk to by the side and beauty to look at
opposite, in just the disposition that makes life perfect.
A well-ordered dinner-table is a social microcosm;
and, being so, this is the blue riband of the arrange-
ment.
Every woman is bound to make the best of her-
self. The strong-minded women who hold themselves
superior to the obligations of dress and manner and
all the pleasant little artificial graces belonging to an
artificial civilization, and who think any sacrifice
made to appearance just so much waste of power, are
awful creatures, ignorant of the real meaning of their
sex — social Graiae wanting in every charm of woman-
hood, and to be diligently shunned by the wary.
This making the best of themselves is a very dif-
ferent thing from making dress and personal vanity
the first considerations in life. Where women in
general fail is in the exaggerations into which they
fall on this and on almost every other question. They
are apt to be either demireps or devotees ; frights or
flirts ; fashionable to an extent that lands them in
illimitable folly and drags their husbands' names
through the mire, or they are so dowdy that they
disgrace a well-ordered drawing-room, and among
nicely-dressed women stand out as living sermons on
slovenliness. If they are clever, they are too com-
monly blue- stockings, and let the whole household
go by the board for the sake of their fruitless studies ;
and if they are domestic and good managers they sink
into mere servants, never opening a book save their
136 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
daily ledger, and having no thought beyond the
cheesemonger's bill and the butcher's prices. They
want that fine balance, that accurate self- measurement
and knowledge of results, which goes by the name
of common- sense and is the best manifestation of
brains they can give, and the thing which men most
prize. It is the most valuable working form of
intellectual power, and has most endurance and
vitality ; and it is the form which helps a man on in
life, when he has found it in his wife, quite as much
as money or a good connexion.
So that, on the whole, brains are before beauty
in the solid things of life. For admiration and per-
sonal love and youthful enjoyment, beauty of course
is supreme ; but as we cannot be always young nor
always apt for pleasure, it is as well to provide for
the days when the daughters of music shall be
brought low and the years draw nigh which have
no pleasure in them.
137
JSYMPHS,
Between the time of the raw school-girl and that of
the finished young lady is the short season of the
nymph, when the physical enjoyment of life is per-
haps at its keenest, and a girl is not afraid to use her
limbs as nature meant her to use them, nor ashamed
to take pleasure in her youth and strength. This is
the time when a sharp run down a steep hill, with
the chance of a tumble midway, is an exercise by no
means objected to ; when clambering over gates,
sciles, and even crabbed stone-walls is not refused
because of the undignified display of ankle which
the adventure mvolves ; when leaping a ditch comes
in as one of the ordinary accidents of a marshland
walk ; and when the fun of riding is infinitely en-
hanced if the horse be only half broken or bare-
backed.
The nymph — an out-of-door, breezy, healthy girl,
more after the pattern of the Greek Oread than the
Amazon — is found only in the country ; and for
the most part only in the remoter districts of the
country. In the town she degenerates into fastness,
according to the law which makes evil merely the
138 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
misdirection of force, as dirt is only matter in the
wrong place. But among the momitains, in the
secluded midland villages, or out on the thinly-
populated moorland tracts, the nymph may be found
in the full perfection of her nature. And a very
beautiful kind of nature it is ; though it is to be
feared that certain ladies of the stricter sort would
call her ' tomboy,' and that those of a still narrower
way of thought, unable to distinguish between un-
conventionality and vulgarity, would hold her to be
decidedly vulgar — which she is not — and would
wonder at her mother for ' lettino: her q:o on so.'
You fall upon the nymph at all hours and in all
seasons. Indeed, she boasts that no weather ever
keeps her indoors, and prefers a little roughness of
the elements to anything too luscious or sentimental.
A fresh wind, a sharp frost, a blinding fall of snow,
or a pelting shower of rain are all high jmks to the
nymph, to whom it is rare fun to come in like a
water-dog, dripping from every hair, or shaking the
snow in masses from her hat and cloak. She prefers
this kind of thing to the suggestive beauty of the
moonlight or the fervid heats of summer ; and
thinks a long walk in the crisp sharp frost, with the
leaves crackling under her feet, worth all the night-
ingales in the wood. And yet she loves the spring
and summer too, for the sake of the flowers and the
birds and the beasts and the insects they bring forth ;
for the nymph is almost always a naturalist of the
perceptive and self-taught kind, and has a marvellous
NYMPHS. 139
faculty for finding out nests and rare habitats, and
for tracking unusual trails to the hidden home.
There is no prettier sight among girls than the
nj-mph when thoroughly at her ease, and enjoying
herself in her own peculiar way. That wonderful
grace of unconsciousness which belongs to savages
and animals belongs to her also, and she moves with
a supple freedom which affectation or shyness would
equally destroy. To see her running down a green
field, with the sunlight falling on her ; her light dress
blown into coloured clouds by the wind; her step
a little too long for the correct town-walk but
so firmly planted and yet so light, so swift, so
even!— her cheeks freshly flushed by exercise; her
eyes bright and fearless; her white teeth shown
below her upper lip as she comes forward with a
rmging laugh, carrying a young bird which she has
just caught, or a sheaf of wild flowers for which she
has been periUing her neck, is to see a beautiful and
gracious picture which you remember with pleasure
all your life after. Or you meet her quite alone on a
wide bleak moor, with her hat in her hand and her
hair blowing across her face, looking for plovers' eggs,
or ferns and orchids down in the damp hollows. She
IS by no means dressed according to the canons of
Le Follet, and yet she always manages to have some-
thmg picturesque about her— something that would
dehght an artist's taste, and that is in perfect har-
mony with herself and her surroundings— which she
wears with profound ignorance as to how well it
140 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
suits her — or at most with only an instinctive know-
ledge that it is the right thing for her. She may be
shy as she meets you ; if she is passing out of the
nymph state into that of conscious womanhood, she
will be shy ; but if still a nymph with no disturbing
influences at work, she will probably look at you
with a fixed, perplexing, half-provoking look of
fi:*ank curiosity which you can neither notice nor
take advantage of ; the trammels of conventional life
fettering one side heavily, if not the other.
Shocking as it is to say, the nymph may some-
times be met on the top of a haycart, and certainly
in the hayfield, where she is engaged in scattering
the ' cocks,' if not in raising them; and where even
the haymakers themselves — and they are not a
notably romantic race — -do not grumble at the extra
trouble she gives them, because of her evident de-
light in her misdeeds. Besides, she has a bright
word for them as she passes ; for the nymph has
democratic tendencies, and is fi:'ank and ^ aff'able ' to
all classes alike. She needs to be a little looked after
in this direction, not for mischief but for manners ;
for, if not judiciously checked, she may become in
time coarse. There are seamy sides to everything,
and the nymph does not escape the general law.
If the nymph condescends to any game at all, it
is croquet, at which she is inexorably severe. She
knows nothing of the little weakness which makes
her elder sisters overlook the patent spooning of the
favourite curate, even though he is opposed to them
NYMPHS. ]41
— nothing of the tender favouritism which pushes on
an awkward partner by deeds of helping outside the
law. The nymph, who has no weakness nor tender-
ness of that kind, knows only the game ; and the
game has not elastic boundaries. Therefore she is
inflexible in her justice to one side and the other. Is
it not the game ? she says when reproached with
being disagreeable and unamiable.
But even croquet is slow to the nymph, who has
been known to handle a bat not discreditably, and
who is an adept at firing at a mark with real j)Owder
and ball. If she lives near a lake, a river, or the
sea, she is first-rate at boating, can feather her oar
and back water with the skill of a veteran oarsman,
and can reef a sail or steer close without the sliolitest
hesitation or nervousness. She is .also a famous
swimmer, and takes the water like a duck ; and at an
ordinary summer seaside resort, if by chance she ever
profanes herself by showing ofi" there, she attracts a
crowd of beach -loungers to watch her feats far outside
the safe barrier of the bathing-machines. She is a
great walker, wherever she lives. If a mountaineer,
she is a clever cragswoman, making it a point of
honour to go to the top of the most difficult and
dangerous mountains in her neighbourhood, and
coaxing her brothers to let her join them and their
friends in expeditions which require both nerve and
strength.
Her greatest sphere of social glory is a picnic,
where she always heads the exploring party, clam-
142 SATUKDAY MORNINGS.
bering up the rocks of the waterfall, or divmg
down mto the close- smelling caves, or scaling the
crumbling walls of the ruin before any one else can
come up to her. She is specially happy at old ruins,
where she flits m and out among the broken columns
and under the mouldering arches, like a spirit of the
place unduly disturbed. Sometimes she climbs up
by unseen means, till she reaches a point where it
makes one dizzy to see her ; and sometimes she
startles her company by the sudden bleatmg of
a sheep, or the wild hoot of an owl. For she can
imitate the sounds of animals for the most part with
wonderful accuracy ; though she can also smg simple
ballads without music, with sweetness and correct-
ness. She is fond of all animals and fears none.
She will pass through a field thronged with wild-
lookino' cattle without the least hesitation ; and
makes friends even with the yelping farm- dogs which
come snapping and snarling at her heels. In winter
she feeds the wood-birds by flocks, and always takes
care that the horses have a handful of corn or a
carrot when she goes to see them, and that the cows
are the better for her visit by a bunch of lucerne or
a fat fresh cabbage-leaf. The home-beasts show
their pleasure when they hear her fleet footstep on
the paved yard ; and her favourite pony whinnies to
her in a peculiar voice as she passes his stable door.
These are her friends, and their love for her is her
reward.
In her early days the nymph was notorious for
NYMPHS. 143
her dilapidated attire, perplexing mother and nurse to
mend, or to understand why or how it had come about.
But as her favourite hiding-place was in a forked
branch midway up an old tree in the shrubbery, or
a natural arbour which she had cut out for herself in
the very heart of the underwood, it was scarcely to
be wondered at if cloth and cotton testified to the
severity of her retreats. She has still mysterious
rents in her skirts, got no one knows how ; and her
mother still laments over her aptitude for rags, and
wishes she could be brought to see the beauty of
unstained apparel. She is given to early rising —
to fits indeed of rising at some wild hour in the
morning, for walks before breakfast and the like
innocent insanities. Sometimes she takes it in hand
to educate herself in certain stoicisms, and goes
without butter at breakfast or without breakfast
altogether, if she thinks that thereby she will grow
stronger or less inclined to self-indulgence. For
drink she will never touch wine nor beer ; but she
likes new milk, and is great in her capacity for water.
The nymph is almost always of the middle -classes.
It is next to impossible indeed that she should be
found in the higher ranks, where girls are not left
to themselves, and where no one lives in far-away
country places out of the reach of public opinion and
beyond the range of public overlooking. Some years
ago, before the railroads and monster hotels had made
the mountain districts like Hampstead or Richmond
on a Sunday afternoon, the nymph was to be found in
144 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
great abundance down in Cumberland and Westmore-
land. By the more remote lakes, like Buttermere and
Hawes Water, and in the secluded valleys running up
from the larger lakes, you would come upon square
stuccoed houses, generally abominably ugly, where
the nymph was mistress of the situation. She might
be met riding about alone in a flapping straw hat, long
before hats were fashionable headgear for women, and
in a blue baize skirt for all the riding-habit thought
necessary ; or she might be encountered on the wild
fell sides, or on the mountain heights, or in her boat
sculling among the lonely lake islets, or gathering
water-lilies in the bays. In the desolate stretch of
moorland country to the north of Skiddaw the whole
female population a few years ago was of the nymph
kind ; but railroads and the penny-post, cheap trains,
fashion and fine-ladyism have penetrated even into
the heart of the wild mountains, and now the nymph
there is only a transitional development — not, as
formerly, a fixed type.
The nymph is the very reverse of a flirt. She has
no inclination that way, and looks shy and awkward
at the men who pay her compliments or attempt any-
thing like sentimentality. But she is not superior to
boys, who are her chosen companions and favourites.
A bold, brave boy, who just overtops her in skill and
daring, is her delight ; but anything over twenty is
^ awfully old,' while forty and sixty are so remote
that the lines blur and blend together and have no
distinction. By-and-by the nymph becomes a staid
NYMPHS. 145
young woman, and marries. If she goes into a close
town and has children, very often her vigorous health
gives way, and we see her in a few years nervous,
emaciated, consumptive, and with a pitiful yearning
for ' home ' more pathetic than all the rest. But if
she remams where she is, in the fresh pure air of her
native place, she retains her youth and strength long
after the age when ordinary women lose theirs, and
her children are celebrated as magnificent specimens
of the future generation.
We often see in country places matrons of over
forty who are still like young women, both in looks
and bearing, both in mental innocence and physical
power. They have the shy and innocent look of
girls ; they blush like girls ; they know less evil
than almost any town -bred girl of eighteen, mothers
of stalwart youths though they may be ; they can
walk and laugh and take pleasure in their lives like
girls ; and their daughters find them as much sisters
as mothers. It is not quite the same thing if they
do not marry ; for among the saddest sights of social
life is that terrible fading and withering away of
comely, healthy, vigorous young country girls, who
slowly pass from nymphs, full of grace and beauty,
of happiness and power, to antiquated virgins, soured,
useless, debilitated and out of nature. Of these, too,
there are plenty in country places ; but perhaps some
scheme will be some day set afoot which shall re-
dress the overweighted balance and bring to the
VOL. I. L
146 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
service of the future some of the healthiest and best
of our women. Meanwhile the fresh, innocent,
breez}^ nymph is a charming study ; and may the
time be far distant which shall see her tamed and
civilized out of existence altogether !
147
MESALLIANCES.
The French system of parents arranging the mar-
riao'e of their children without the consent of the orirl
being even asked, but assumed as granted, is not so
wholly monstrous as many people in England believe.
It seem.s to be founded on the idea that, given a
young girl who has been kept shut up from all possi-
bility of forming the most shadowy attachment for any
man whatsoever, and present to her as her husband a
sufficiently well-endowed and nice-looking man, with
whom come hberty, pretty dresses, balls, admiration
and social standing, and the chances are she will
love him and live with him in tolerable harmony to
the end of the chapter. And this idea is by no means
wholly beside the truth, as we find it in practice.
The parents, who are better judges of character and
circumstance than the daughter can possibly be, are
supposed to take care that their future son-in-law is
up to their standard, whatever that may be, and that
the connexion is not of a kind to bring discredit on
their house ; and on this and the joint income, as
the solid bases, they build the not very unreasonable
hypothesis that one man is as good as another for
148 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
the satisfaction of a quite untouched and virginal
fancy, and that suitable external conditions go fur-
ther and last longer than passion. They trust to
the force of instinct to make all square with the affec-
tions, while they themselves arrange for the smooth
running of the social circumstances ; and they are
not far out in their calculations.
The young people of the two lonely lighthouse
islands, who made love to each other through tele-
scopes, are good examples of the way in which in-
stinct simulates the impulse which calls itself love
when there are two or three instead of one to look
at. For we may be quite sure that had the lighthouse
island youth been John instead of James, fair instead
of dark, garrulous instead of reticent, short and fat
instead of tall and slender, the lighthouse island girl
would have loved him all the same, and would have
quite believed that this man was the only man she
ever could have loved, and that her instinctive gravi-
tation was her free choice.
The French system of marriage, then, based on
this accommodating instinct, works well for women
who are not strongly individual, not inconstant by
temperament, and not given to sentimentality. But,
seeing that all women are not merely negative, and
that passions and affections do sometimes assert
themselves inconveniently, the system has had the
effect of making society lenient to the little follies
of married women, unless too strongly pronounced —
partly because the human heart insists on a certain
^lESALLIANCES. 149
amount of free-will, which fact must be recognized —
but partly, we must remember, because of the want
of the young-lady element in society. In England,
where our girls are let loose early, we have free-
trade in flirting ; consequently, we think that all that
sort of thing ought to be done before marriage, and
that, when once a woman has made her choice and
put her neck under the yoke, she ought to stick
to her bargain and loyally fulfil her self-imposed
engagement.
One consequence of this free-trade in flirting and
this large amount of personal liberty is that love-
marriages are more frequent with us than with the
French, with whom mdeed, in the higher classes,
they are next to impossible ; and, unfortunately, the
corollary to this is that love -marriages are too often
mesalliances. There is of course no question, ethi-
cally, between virtuous vulgarity and refined vice.
A groom who smells of the stable and speaks broad
Somersetshire or racier Cumberland, but who is brave,
faithful, honest, incapable of a lie or of meanness in
any form, is a better man than the best-bred gentle-
man whose life is as vicious as his bearing is unexcep-
tionable. The most undeniable taste in dress, and the
most correct pronunciation, would scarcely reconcile
us to cruelty, falsehood, or cowardice ; and yet we do
not know a father who would prefer to give his girl to
the groom, rather than the gentleman, and who would
think horny-handed virtue, dressed in fustian and
smelling of the stable, the fitter husband of the two.
150 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
If we take the same case out of our own time and
circumstances, we have no doubt as to the choice to
be made. It seems to us a very little matter that
honest Charicles should tell his love to Aglae in the
broad Doric tongue instead of in the polished Athe-
nian accents to which she was accustomed ; that he
should wear his chiton a hand's breadth too long or
a span too short ; that his chlamys should be flung
across his brawny chest in a way which the young
bloods of the time thought ungraceful ; or that, as
he assisted at a symposium, he should not hold the
rhyton at quite the proper angle, but in a fashion at
which the refined Cleon laughed as he nudged his
neighbour. Yet all these conventional solecisms, of
no account whatever now, would have weighed
heavily against poor Charicles when he went to de-
mand Aglae' s hand ; and the balance would probably
have gone down in favour of that scampish Cleon,
who was an Athenian of the Athenians, perfect in all
the graces of the age, but not to be compared to
his rival in anything that makes a man noble or
respectable. We, who read only from a distance,
think that Aglae' s father made a mistake, and that
the honester man would have been the better choice
of the two.
It is only when we bring the same circumstances
home to ourselves that we realize the immense im-
portance of the social element ; and how, in this
complex life of ours, we are unable to move in a
single line independent of all it touches. Imagme a
MESALLIANCES. 151
fine old county family with a son-in-law who ate
peas with his knife, said ' you was ' and ' they is,'
and came down to dinner in a shooting-jacket and a
blue bird's-eye tied in a wisp about his throat ! He
might be the possessor of all imaginable virtues, and,
if occasion required, a very hero and a preux cheva-
lier, however rough ; but occasions in which a man
can be a hero or a preua^ chevalier are rare, whereas
dinner comes every day, and the senses are never
shut. The core within a conventionally ungainly
envelope may be as sound as is possible to a corrupt
humanity, but social life requires manners as well as
principles ; and though eating peas with a knife is
not so bad as telling falsehoods, still we should all
agree in saying. Give us truth that does not eat peas
with its knife ; let us have honesty in a dress coat
and pureheartedness in a clean shirt, seeing that
there is no absolute necessity why these several
things should be disunited.
Love-marriages, made against the will of the
parents before the character is formed and while the
obligations of society are still unrealized, are gene-
rally mesalliances founded on passion and fancy only.
A man and woman of mature age who know what
they want may make a mesalliance, but it is made
with a full understanding and deliberate choice ; and,
if the thing turns out badly, they can blame theui-
selves less for precipitancy than for wrong calcula-
tion. The man of fifty who marries his cook knows
what he most values in women. It is not manners
152 SATURDAY MOENINGS.
and it is not accomplishments j perhaps it is useful-
ness, perhaps good-temper ; at all events it is some-
thing that the cook has and that the ladies of his
acquaintance have not, and he is content to take the
disadvantages of his choice with its advantages. But
the boy who runs away with his mother's maid
neither calculates nor sees any disadvantages. He
marries a pretty girl because her beauty has touched
his senses ; or he is got hold of by an artful woman
who has bamboozled and seduced him. It is only
when his passion has worn off that he wakes to the
full consequences of his mistake, and understands
then how right his parents were when they cashiered
his pretty Jane so soon as they became aware of
what was going on, and sent that artful Sarah to the
right about — -just a week too late.
It is the same with girls ; but in a far greater
extent. If a youth's mesalliance is a millstone round
his neck for life, a girl's is simply destruction. The
natural instinct with all women is to marry above
themselves; and we know on what physiological
basis this instinct stands, and what useful racial ends
it serves. And the natural instinct is as true in its
social as in its physiological expression. A woman's
honour is m her husband ; her status, her social life,
are determined by his ; and even the few women
who, having made a bad marriage, have nerve and
character enough to set themselves free from the
personal association, are never able to thoroughly
regain their maiden place. There is always some-
MESALLIANCES. 153
thing about them which clogs and fetters them; always
a kind of doubtful and depressing aura that sur-
rounds and influences them. If they have not strength
to free themselves, they never cease to feel the mis-
take they have made, until the old sad process of
deo-eneration is accomplished, and the ' grossness of
his nature' has had strength to drag her down.
After a time, if her ladyhood has been of a super-
ficial kind only, a woman who has married beneath
herself may ease down into her groove and be like
the man she has married ; if, however, she has suffi-
cient force to resist outside influences she will not
sink, and she will never cease to sufi'er. She has
sinned against herself, her class and her natural
instincts ; and has done substantially a worse thing
than has the boy who married his mother's maid.
Society understands this, and not unjustly if harshly
punishes the one while it lets the other go scot-
free ; so that the woman who makes a mesalliance
sufl'ers on every side, and destroys her life almost as
much as the woman who goes wrong.
AH this is as evident to parents and elders as
that the sun shines. They understand the impera-
tive needs of social life, and they know how fleeting
are the passions of youth and how they fade by time
and use and inharmonious conditions ; and they feel
that their first duty to their children is to prevent a
mesalliance which has nothing, and can have nothing,
but passion for its basis. But novelists and poets
are against the hard dull dictates of worldly wisdom,
154 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
and join in the apotheosis of love at any cost — all for
love and the world well lost ; love in a cottage, with
nightingales and honeysuckles as the chief means of
paying the rent ; Libussa and her ploughman ; the
prmcess and the swineherd, &c. And the fathers
who stand out against the ruin of their girls by
means of estimable men of inferior condition and
with not enough to hve on, are stony-hearted and
cruel, while the daughters who take to cold poison in
the back -garden, if they cannot compass a secret
honeymoon or an open flight, have all the world's
sympathy and none of its censure. The cruel parent
is the favourite whipping-boy of poetry and fiction ;
and yet which is likely to be the better guide — ■
reason or passion ? experience or ignorance ? calcula-
tion or impulse? maturity which can judge or
youth which can only feel ? There would be no
hesitation in any other case than that of love ; but
■^he love-instinct is generally considered to be supe-
rior to every other consideration, and has to be
obeyed as a divme voice, no matter at what cost or
consequence.
The ideal of life, accordmg to some, is founded on
early marriages. But men are slower in the final
setting of their character than women, and one never
knows how a young fellow of twenty or so will turn
out. If he is devout now, he may be an infidel at
forty; if, under home influences, he is temperate
and pure, when these are withdrawn he may become
MESALLIANCES. 155
a rake of the fastest kind. His temper, morals, busi-
ness power, ability to resist temptation, all are as yet
inchoate and undefined ; nothing is sure ; and the
gu'l's fancy that makes him perfect in proportion to
his good looks, is a mere instinct determined by
chance association.
A girl, too, has more character than she shows
in her girlhood. Though she sets sooner than men,
she does not set unalterably, and marriage and ma-
ternity bring out the depths of her nature as nothing
else can. It is only common- sense, then, to jnarry
her to a man whose character is already somewhat
formed, rather than to one who is still fluid and
floating.
It is all very weU to talk of fighting the battle
of life together, and welding together by time. Many
a man has been ruined by these metaphors. The
theory, partly true and partly pretty, is good enough
m its degree ; and, indeed, so far as the weldings
goes, we weld together in almost all things by time.
We wear our shoe till we wear it into shape and
it ceases to pinch us ; but, in the process, we go
through a vast deal of pain, and are liable to make
corns which last long after the shoe itself fits easily.
We do not advocate the French system of marrying
ofl* our girls according to our own ideas of suitable-
ness, and without consulting them ; but we not the
less think that, of all fatal social mistakes, mesalliances
are the most fatal, and, in the case of women, to be
156 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
avoided and prevented at any cost short of a broken
heart or a premature death. And even death would
sometimes be better than the life-long misery, the
enduring shame and humiliation, of certain mesalli'
ances.
157
WEAK SISTERS.
The line at which a virtue becomes a vice through
excess can never be exactly defined, being one of
those uncertain conditions which each mind must
determine for itself. But there is a line, wheresoever
we may choose to set it ; and it is just this fine
dividing mark which women are so apt to overrun.
For women, as a rule, are nothing if not extreme.
Whether as saints or sinners, they carry a principle
to its outside limits ; and of all partizans they are
the most thoroughgoing, whether it be to serve God
or the devil, liberty or bigotry, Bible Communism or
Calvinistic Election. Sometimes they are just as
extreme in their absolute negation of force, and in
the narrowness of the limits within which they would
confine all human expression either by word or deed
— and especially all expression of feminine life. These
are the women who carry womanly gentleness into
the exaggeration of self-abasement, and make them-
selves mere footstools for the stronger creature to
kick about at his pleasure ; the weak sisters who
think all self-reliance unfeminine, and any originality
of thought or character an offence against the or-
158 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
dained inferiority of their sex. They are the parasitic
plants of the human family, living by and on the
strength of others ; growths miable to stand alone,
and, when deprived of their adventitious support,
falling to the ground in a ruin perhaps worse than
death.
It is sad to see one of these weak sisters when
given up to herself after she has lived on the strength
of another. As a wife, she was probably a docile,
gentle kind of Medora — at least on the outside ; for
we must not confound weakness with amiability —
suffering many things because of imperfect servants
and unprofitable tradesmen, maybe because of unruly
children and encroaching friends, over none of whom
she had so much moral power as enabled her to
hold them in check : but on the whole driftins:
through her days peacefully enough, and, though
always in difficulties, never quite aground. She had
a tower of strength in her husband, on whom she
leaned for assistance in all she undertook, whether it
were to give a dose of Dalby to the child, or a scold-
ing to the maid, or to pronounce upon the soundness
of two rival sects each touting for her soul. While
he lived she obeyed his counsel — not always without
a futile echo of discontent in her own heart — and
copied his opinions with what amount of accuracy
nature had bestowed on her ; though it must be con-
fessed more often making a travesty than a facsimile,
according to the trick of inferior translators, and not
necessarily better pleased with his opinions than with
WEAK SISTERS. 159
his counsels. For your weak sister is frequently
peevish, and though unable to originate is not always
ready to obey cheerfully ; cheerfulness indeed being
for the most part an attribute of power.
Still, there stood her tower of strength, and while
it stood, she, the parasite growing round it, did well
enough, and flourished with a pleasant semblance of
individual life into the hollowness of which it was no
one's business to inquu-e. But when the tower fell,
where was the ivy ? The husband taken away, what
became of the wife? — he who had been the life and she
only the parasite. Abandoned to the poor resources
of her own judgment she is like one suddenly thrown
into deep water, not knowing how to swim. She has
no judgment. She has been so long accustomed to
rely on the mind of another, that her will is paralyzed
for want of use. She is any one's tool, any one's echo,
and worse than that, if left to herself she is any one's
victim. All she wants is to be spared the hardship
of self-reliance and to be directed free of individual
exertion. She is utterly helpless — helpless to act, to
direct, to decide ; and it depends on the mere chance
of proprietorship whether her slavery shall be degrada-
tion or protection, ruin or safety. For she will be a
slave, whosoever may be her proprietor ; being the
pabulum of which slaves and victims are naturally
formed. The old age of Medora is Mrs. Borradaile,
who, if her husband had lived, would have probably
ended her life in an honourable captivity and a well-
directed subserviency.
160 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
We often see this kind of helpless weakness in
the daughter of a man of overbearing will, or of a
termagant mother fond of managing and impatient of
opposition. During the plastic time of her life, when
education might perhaps have developed a sufficient
amount of mental muscle, and a course of judicious
moulding might have fairly set her up, she is snubbed
and suppressed till all power is crushed out of her.
She is taught the virtue of self-abnegation till she has
no self to abnegate ; and the backbone of her in-
dividuality is so incessantly broken that at last there
is no backbone left m her to break. She has become
a mere human mollusc which, when it loses its native
shell, drifts helplessly at the mercy of chance currents
into the maw of any stronger creature that may fancy
it for his prey. One often sees these poor things
left orphans and friendless at forty or fifty years of
ao-e. They have lived all their lives in leading-strings,
and now are utterly unable to walk alone. They are
infants in all knowledge of the world, of business, of
human life ; their youth is gone, and with it such
beauty and attractiveness as they might have had,
so that men who liked them when fresh and
gentle at twenty do not care to accept their wrinkled
helplessness at forty. They have been kept in and
kept down, and so have made no friends of their
own ; and then, when the strong willed father dies"
and the termagant mother goes to the place where
the wicked cease from troubling, the mollusc these
have hitherto protected is left defenceless and alone.
WEAK SISTERS. 161
If she has money, her chances of escape from the
social sharks always on the look-out for fat morsels
are very small mdeed. It is well if she falls into no
worse hands than those of legitimate priests of either
section, whether enthusiastic for chasubles or crazy
for missions ; and if her money is put to no baser
use than supplying church embroidery for some
Brother Ignatius at home, or blankets for converted
Africans in the tropics. It might go into Agape=
mones, into spiritual Athen^ums, into Bond Street
back-parlours, where it certainly would do no good,
take it any way one would ; for, as it must go into
some side-channel dug by stronger hands than hers,
the question is, into which of the innumerable con-
duits oifered for the conveyance of superfluous means
shall it be directed ?
This is the woman who is sure to q-q in for
religious excess of one kind or another, and for
w^hom therefore, a convent with a sympathetic
director is a godsend past words to describe. She is
unfit for the life of the world outside. She has
neither strength to protect herself, nor beauty to
win the loving protection of men ; she cannot be
taken as a precious charge, but she will be made a
pitiable victim ; and, though matins and vespers
come frightfully often, surely the narrow safety of a
convent- cell is a better fate for her than the publicity
of the witness-box at the Old Bailey! As she must
have a master, her condition depends on what master
VOL. I. M
162 SATUEDAY MORNINGS.
she has ; and the whole line of her future is ruled
accordinof to the fact whether she is directed or ' ex-
ploited,' and used to serve noble ends or base ones.
As a mother, the weak sister is even more
unsatisfactory than as a spinster left to herself with
funds which she can manipulate at pleasure. She
is affectionate and devoted ; but of what use are
affection and devotion without guiding sense or
judgment ? Even m the nursery, and while the
little ones need only physical care, she is more
obstructive than heljDful, never having so much self-
reliance nor readiness of wit as to dare a remedy for
one of those sudden maladies, mcidental to children,
which are dangerous just in proportion to the length
of time they are allowed to run unchecked. And if she
should by chance remember anything of therapeutic
value, 'she has no power to make her children take
what they don't like to take, nor do what they don't
like to do. In the horror of an accident she is lost.
If her child were to cut an artery, she would take
it up into her lap tenderly enough, but she would
never dream of stopping the flow ; if it swallowed
poison, she would send for the doctor who lives ten
miles away ; and if it set itself on fire, she would
probably rush with it into the street, for the chance
of assistance from a friendly passer-by. She never
has her senses under serviceable command ; and her
action in a moment of danger generally consists in
unavailing pity or in obstructive terror, but never in
useful service nor in valuable suggestion.
WEAK SISTERS. 163
But if useless in her nursery while her children
are young, she is even more helpless as they get
older ; and the family of a weak woman grows up,
unassisted by counsel or direction, just as the old
Adam wills and the natural bent inclines. Her sfirls
may be loud and fast, her sons idle and dissipated,
but she is powerless to correct or to influence. If her
husband does not take the reins into his own hands,
or if she be a widow, the young people manage matters
for themselves under the perilous guidance of youth-
ful passions and inexperience. And nine times out
of ten they give her but a rough corner for her own
share. They have no respect for her, and, unless
more generously compassionate than young people
nsually are, scarcely care to conceal the contempt
they cannot help feeling. What can she expect ?
If she was not strono; enouo;h to root out the tares
while still green and tender, can she wonder at their
luxuriant growth about her feet now ? She, like
every one else, must learn the sad meaning of retri-
bution, and how the weakness which allowed evil
to flourish unsubdued has to share in its conse-
quences and to suffer for its sin.
Unsatisfactory m her home, the weak sister does
not do much better in society. She is there the
embodiment of restriction. She can bear nothing
that has any flavour or colour in it. Topics of
broad human interest are forbidden in her presence
because they are vulgar, improper, unfeminine. She
takes her stand on her womanhood, and makes that
M 2
164 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
womanhood to be something apart from humanity in
the gross. There must be no cakes and ale for
others if she be virtuous ; and spades are not to be
called spades when she is by to hear. She is the
limit beyond which no one must go, under pam of
such displeasure as the weak sister can show. And,
weak as she is in many things, she can compass a
certain strength of displeasure ; she can condemn,
persistently if not passionately.
Nothing is more curious than the way in which
the weak sister exercises this power of condemnation,
and nothing much more wide than its scope. If
incapable of yielding to certain temptations, because
incapable of feeling them, she has no pity for those
who have not been able to resist ; yet, on the other
hand, she cannot comprehend the vigour of those who
withstand such influences as conquer her. If she
be under the shadow of family protection, safe in
the power of those who know how to hold her in all
honour and prosperity, she cannot forgive the poor
weak waif — no weaker than herself ! — who has
been caught up in the outside desert of desolation,
and made to subserve evil ends. Yet, on the other
hand, fm^ the woman who is able to think and act
for herself she has a kind of superstitious horror ;
and she shrinks from one who has made herself
notorious, no matter what the mode or method, as
from something tainted, something unnatural and
unwomanly. She has even grave doubts respect-
"ng the lawfulness of doing good if the manner of
WEAK SISTERS. 165
it gets into the papers and names are mentioned as
well as things ; and though the fashion of the day
favours feminine notoriety in all directions, she holds
by the mstinct of her temperament, and languidly
maintams that woman is the cipher to which man
alone gives distinctive value. Griselda and Medora
are the types to her of womanly perfection ; and the
only strength she tolerates in her own sex is the
strength of endurance and the power of patience.
She has no doubt in her own mind that the ordained
purpose of woman is to be convenient for the high-
handedness and brutality of man ; and any woman
who objects to this theory, and demands a better
place for herself, is flying in the face of Providence
and forfeiting one of the distinctive privileges of her
sex. For the weak sister thinks, like some others,
that it is better to be destroyed by orthodox means
than to be saved by heterodox ones ; and that if good
Christians uphold moral suttee, they are only pagans
and barbarians who would put out the flames and
save the victim from the burning. So far she is
respectable, in that she has a distinct theory about
something ; but it is wonderfully eloquent of her
state that it should only be the theory of Griseldadom
as womanly perfection, and the beauty to be found
in the moral of Cinderella sitting supmely among
the ashes, and forbidden to own even the giass-
pper that belonged to her. Fortunately for the
world, the weak sister and her theories do not rule.
Indeed we are in dano-er of o-oino; too much the
166 SATUKDAY MOKNINGS.
other way in these times, and the revolt of our
women against undue slav^ery goes very near to a
revolt against wise submission. Still, women who
are to be the mothers of men ought to have some
kind of power, if the men are to be worth their place
in the world ; and if we want creatures with back-
bones we must not give our strength to rearing a
race of molluscs.
167
PINCHING SHOES,
There are two ways of dealing with pinching shoes.
The one is to wear them till you get accustomed to
the pressure, and so to wear them easy ; the other is
to kick them off and have done with them altoofether.
The one is founded on the accommodating principle
of human nature by which it is enabled to fit itself to
circumstances, the other is the high-handed master-
fulness whereby the earth is subdued and obstacles
are removed ; the one is emblematic of Christian
patience, the other of Pagan power. Both are good
in certain states and neither is absolutely the best
for all conditions. There are some shoes indeed,
which, do what we will, we can never wear easy.
We may keep them well fixed on our feet all our life,
loyally accepting the pressure which fate and misfor-
tune have imposed on us ; but we go lame and
hobbled in consequence, and never know what it is
to make a free step, nor to walk on our way without
discomfort. Examples abound ; for among all the
pilgrims toiling more or less painfully through life to
death, there is not one whose shoes do not pinch him
somewhere, how easy soever they m.ay look and how
soft soever the material of which they may be made.
168 SATURDAY MOENINGS.
Even those proverbial possessors of roomy shoes, the
traditional King and Princess, have their own little
private bedroom slippers which pinch them, unde-
tected by the gaping multitude who measure happi-
ness by lengths of velvet and weight of gold em-
broidery ; and the envied owners of the treasure
which all seek and none find might better stand as
instances of sorrow than of happiness — examples of
how badly shod poor royalty is, and how, far more
than meaner folk, it sufi*ers from the pinching of its
regal shoes.
The uncongeniality of a profession into which a
man may have been forced by the injudicious over-
ruling of his friends, or by the exigencies of family
position and inherited rights, is one form of the
pinchmg shoe by no means rare to find. And here,
again, poor royalty comes in for a share of the grip on
tender places, and the consequent hobbling of its feet.
For many an hereditary king was meant by nature
to be nothing but a plain country gentleman at the
best — perhaps even less ; many, like poor ' Louis
Capet,' would have gone to the end quite happily and
respectably if only they might have kicked off the
embroidered shoes of sovereignty and betaken them-
selves to the highlows of the herd — if only they
might have exchanged the sceptre for the turning-
lathe, the pen or the fowling-piece. ' Je deteste mon
metier de roi,' Victor Emmanuel is reported to have
siad to a republican friend who sympathized with
the monarch's well-known tastes in other thino-s
PINCHING SHOES. 169
beside his hatred of the kingly profession ; ^nd
history repeats this frank avowal in every page. But
the purple is as hard to be got rid of as Deianen-a's
robe ; for the most part carrying the skin along with
it and trailed through a pool of blood in the act of
transfer — which is scarcely what royalty, oppressed
with its own greatness, and willing to rid itself of
sceptre and shoes that it may enjoy itself in list-
slippers after a more bourgeoise fashion, would find
in accordance with its wishes.
Lower down in the social scale we find the
same kind of misfit between nature and position
as a very frequent occurrence — pinching shoes,
productive of innumerable corns and tender places,
being many where the feet represent the temperament
and the shoes are the profession. How often we see
a natural ' heavy ' securely swathed in cassock and
bands, and set up in the pulpit of the family
church, simply because the tithes were large and the
advowson was part of the family inheritance. But
that stiff rectorial shoe of his will never wear easy.
The man's secret soul goes out to the parade-
ground and the mess-table. The glitter and jingle
and theatrical display of a soldier's life seem to
him the finest thmgs in the whole round of pro-
fessions, and the quiet uneventful life of a village
pastor is of all the most abhorrent. He wants to act^
not to teach. Yet there he is, penned in beyond all
power of breaking loose on this side the grave ;
bound to drone out muddled sermons half an hour
long and eminently good for sleeping draughts, instead
170 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
of shouting terse and stirring words of command which
set the blood on fire to hear ; bound to rout the
shadowy enemy of souls with weapons he can neither
feel nor use, instead of prancing off at the head of
his men, waving his drawn sword above his head in
a whirlwind of excitement and martial glory, to rout
the tangible enemies of his country's flag. He loves
his wife and takes a mild parsonic pleasure in his
roses ; he energizes his schools and beats up recruits
for his parish penny readings ; he lends his pulpit
to missionary delegates and takes the chair at the
meeting for the conversion of Jews ; he does his
duty, poor man, so far as he knows how and so far
as nature gave him the power ; but his feet are in
pinching shoes all his life long, and no amount of
walking on the clerical highway can ever make them
pleasant wearing. Or he may have a passionate love
for the sea, and be mewed up in a lawyer's musty
office where his laro'e limbs have not half enouofh
space for their natural activity ; where he is perched
for twelve hours out of the twenty-four on a high stool
against a desk instead of climbing cat-like up the
ropes ; and where he is set to engross a longwinded
deed of conveyance, or to make a fair copy of a bill
of costs, instead of bearing a hand in a gale and
saving his ship by pluck and quickness. He could
save a ship better than he can engross a deed ; while,
as for law, he cannot get as much of that into his
heavy brain as would enable him to advise a client on
the simplest case of assault ; but he knows all the
PINCHING SHOES. 171
cliiFerences of rig, and the whole code of signals, and
can tell you to a nicety about the flags of all nations,
and tlie name and position of every spar and stay and
sheet, and when to reef and when to set sail, with any
other nautical information to be had from books and
a chance cruise as far as the Nore. That pen behind
his ear never ceases to gall and fret ; his shoe never
ceases to pinch ; and to the last day of his life the
high stool in the lawyer's office will be a place of
penance and the sailor's quarter-deck the lost heaven
of his ambition.
No doubt, by the time the soldier wrongly la-
belled as a parson or the sailor painfully working
the legal treadmill, comes to the end of his career,
the old shoe which has pinched him so long will be
worn comparatively easy. The gradual decay of
manly vigour, and the slow but sure destruction of
strong desires, reduce one's feet at last to masses of
accommodating pulp ; but what suffering we go
throuo^h before this result can be attamed ! — what
years of fruitless yearning, of fierce despair, of pa-
thetic self-suppression, of jarring discord between
work and fitness, pound all the life out of us
before our bones become like wax and pinching
shoes are transformed to easy-fitting slippers ! For
itself alone, not counting the beyond to which the
hope clings, it would scarcely seem that such a life
were worth the livmg.
Another pinching shoe is to be found in climate
and locality. A man hungering for the busy life of
172 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
the city has to vegetate in the rural districts, where
the days drop one after the other like leaden bullets,
and time is only marked by an accession of dulness.
Another, thirsting for the repose of the country,
has to jostle daily through Cheapside. To one
who thinks Canadian salmon-fishing the supreme of
earthly happiness, fate gives the chance of chasing
butterflies in Brazil ; to another who holds ' the
common objects of the seashore ' of more account
than silver and gold, an adverse fortune assigns a
station in the middle of a plain as arid as if the
world had been made without water ; and a third,
who cares for nothing but the free breathing of the
open moors or the rugged beauty of the barren fells,
is dropped down into the heart of a narrow valley
where he cannot see the sun for the trees. At first
this matter of locality seems to be but a very small
grip on the foot, not worth a second thought ; but it
is one of a certain cumulative power impossible to
describe, though keen enough to him who suffers ;
and the pinching shoe of uncongenial place is quite
as hard to bear as that of uncongenial work.
Again, a man to w liom intellectual companionship
means more than it does to many is thrown into a
neighbourhood wdiere he cannot- hope to meet with
comprehension, still less with sympathy. He is a
Freethinker, and the neighbourhood goes in for the
strictest Methodism or the highest ultra-Ritualism ;
he is a Radical, and he is in the very focus of county
Toryism, where the doctrine of equality and the
PINCHING SHOES. 173
rights of man is just so much seditious blasphemy,
while the British Constitution is held as a direct
emanation from divine wisdom second only to the
Bible ; or he is a Tory to the backbone — and his
backbone is a pretty stiff one — and he is in the
midst of that blatant kind of Radicalism which
thinks gentlehood a remnant of the dark ages, and
confounds good breeding with servility, and loyalty
to the Crown with oppression of the people. Sur-
rounded by his kind, he is as much alone as if in the
middle of a desert. An Englishman among English-
men, he has no more mental companionship than if
he were in a foreign country where he and his neigh-
bour spoke different tongues, and each had a set of
signs with not two agreeing. And this kind of
solitude makes a pinching shoe to many minds ;
though to some of the more self-centred or defying kind
it is bearable enough — perhaps even giving a sense
of roominess which closer communion would destroy.
Of course one of the worst of our pinching shoes
is matrimony, when marriage means bondage and
not union. The mismated wife or husband never
leaves off, willingly or unwillingly, squeezing the
tender places ; and the more the pressure is objected
to the worse the pain becomes. And nothing can
relieve it. A country gentleman, hating the dust
and noise of London, with all his interest in his
county position and all his pleasure in his place, and
a wife whose love lies in Queen's balls and opera-
boxes, and to whom the country is simply a slice
174 SATURDAY MOR]SlNGS.
out of Siberia wherever it may be ; a hearty hospit-
able man, hking to see his table well filled, and a
wife with a weak digestion, irritable nerves and a
morbid horror of society ; a pushing and ambitious
man, with a loud voice and an imposing presence,
and a shrinking fireside woman, who asks only to
glide unnoticed through the crowd and to creep
noiselessly from her home to her grave — are not all
these shod with pinching shoes, which, do what they
will, go on pinching to the end, and which nothing
short of death or the Sir James Hannen of the time
can remove ? The pinching shoe of matrimony
pinches both sides equally — excepting indeed, one
of the two is specially phlegmatic or pachyder-
matous, and then the grip is harmless ; but, as a
rule, the ring-fence of marriage doubles all con-
ditions, and when A. walks hobbled, B. falls lame,
and both suffer from the same misfit. However, the
only thing to do is to bear and wear till the upper-
leather ^delds or till the foot takes the required
shape ) but there is an eternity of pain to be gone
throuo^h before either of these desirable ends comes
about ; and the instinct which dreads pain, and
questions its necessity, is by no means a false one.
For all that, we must wear our pinching shoes of
matrimony till death or the Divorce Court pulls
them from our feet ; which points to the need of
being more careful than we usually are about the fit
beforehand.
Poverty has a whole rack full of pinching shoes
very hard to get accustomed to, and as bad to dance
PINCHING SHOES. 175
in lightly as were the fiery slippers of the naughty
little girl in the German fairy-tale. Given a large
heart, generous instincts and an empty purse, and we
have the conditions of a real tragedy, both individual
and social. For poverty does not mean only that ele-
mental want of food and clothing which we generally
associate with its name. Poverty may have two
thousand a year as well as only a mouldy crust and
three shillings a week from the parish ; and poverty
cursing its sore feet in a brougham is quite as
common as poverty, full of corns and callosities,
blaspheming behind a costermonger's barrow. The
shoe may pinch horribly, though there is no question
of hunger or the ' twopenny rope ; ' for it is all a
matter of relative degree, and the means wherewith
to meet wants. But as poverty is not one of those
fixed conditions of human life which no human
power can remove, we have not perhaps quite so much
sympathy with its grips and pinches as in other
things less remediable. For while there is work still
undone in the world, there is gain still to be had.
The man whose energies stagnate now m a dry
channel can, if he will, turn them into one more
fertile ; and if he is making but a poor business out
of meal, it is his own fault if he does not try to
make a better out of malt. Where the shoe pinches
hardest is in places which we cannot protect and
with a grip which we cannot prevent ; but we cannot
say this of poverty as a necessary and inalienable
condition, and sympathy is so much waste when
circumstances can be changed by energy or will.
176 SATURDAY MOKNi:sGS.
SUPERIOR BEIXGS,
Every now and then one comes across the path of a
Superior Being — a being who seems to imagine itself
made out of a different kind of clay from that which
forms the coarser ruck of humanity, and whose pre-
sence crushes us with a sense of our own inferiority,
exasperating or humiliating, according to the amount
of natural pride bestowed upon us. The superior
being is of either sex and of all denominations ; and
its superiority comes from many causes — bemg some-
times due to a wider grasp of intellect, sometimes
to a loftier standard of morals, sometimes to better
birth or a longer purse, and very often to the simple
conceit of itself which simulates superiority and
believes in its own apery. The chief characteristic
of the superior being is that exalted pity for in-
feriority which springs from the consciousness of
excellence. In fact, one of the main elements of
superiority consists in this sublime consciousness
of private exaltation, and the immense interval that
separates it from the grosser condition it surveys.
Kivalry is essentially angry and contentious, but
confessed superiority can afford to be serene and
SUPERIOR BEINGS. 177
compassionate. The little people who live in that
meagre sphere of theirs, mental and social, with
which not one point of its own extended circle
comes in contact, are deserving of all pity and are
below anything like active displeasure. That they
should be content with such a meagre sphere seems
inconceivable to the superior being, as it contem-
plates its own enlarged horizon with the complacency
j)roper to a dweller in vastness. Or it may be that
its own world is narrow ; and its superiority will
then be that it is high, safe, exclusive, while its pity
will flow down for those poor wayfarers who wander
afield in broad latitudes, and know nothing of the
pleasure found in reserved places. In any case the
region in which a superior bemg dwells is better
than the region in which any other person dwells.
Take a superior being who has made up a private
account with truth, and who has, in his own mind at
least, unlocked the gate of the great mysteries of life,
and got to the back of that eternal Why ? for ever
confrontmg us. It does not in the least degree sig-
nify how the key is labelled. It may be High Church
or Low Church, Swedenborgianism or Positivism.
The name has nothing to do with the thino". It
is the contented certainty of having unlocked that
great gate at which others are hammering in vain
which confers the superiority, and how the thino- has
been done does not affect the result. Neither does
it disturb the equanimity of the superior being when
he meets with opposing superior beings who have
VOL. I. X
178 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
also made up their private accounts with truth, but
in quite another handwriting and with a different
sum-total at the bottom of the page ; who have also
unlocked the gate of the great mysteries, but with a
key of contradictory wards, while the gate itself is of
another order of architecture altogether. But then
nothing ever does disturb the equanimity of the
superior being ; for, as he is above all rivalry, so is
he beyond all teachuig. The meeting of two superior
bemgs of hostile creed is like the meeting of the two
blind kings in the story, each claiming the crown
for his own and both ignorant of the very existence
of a rival. It may be that the superior being has
soared away into the cold region of spiritual negation,
whence he regards the praying and praising multi-
tudes who go to church and believe in Providence
as grown people regard children who still believe in
ghosts and fairies. Or it may be that he has plunged
into the phosphorescent atmosphere of mysticism and
an all -pervading superstition ; and then all who hold
by scientific law, and who think the test of common
sense not absolutely valueless, are Sadducees who
know nothing of the glorious liberty of the light,
but who prefer to live in darkness and to make them-
selves the agents of the great Lord of Lies.
Sometimes the superior being goes in for the
doctrine of love and impulse, as against reason or
experience, holding the physiologist and political
economist as creatures absolutely devoid of feeling ;
and sometimes his superiority is shown in the appli-
SUPERIOR BEINGS. ' 179
cation of the hardest material laws to the most subtle
and delicate manifestations of the mind. But on
which side soever he ranks himself — as a spirituaUst
to whom reason and matter are stumbling-blocks and
accursed, or as a materialist denying the existence of
spiritual influences at all — he is equally secure of his
own superiority and serene in his own conceit. That
there should be two sides to any question never
seems to strike him ; and that a man of another
creed should have as much right as himself to a
hearing and consideration is the one hard sayino-
impossible for him to receive. With a light and
airy manner of playful contempt — sometimes with a
heavy and Johnsonian scorn that keeps no terms
with an opponent — the superior being meets all your
arguments or batters down all your objections ; some-
times, indeed, he will not condescend even so far as
this, but when you express your adverse opinion just
lifts up his eyebrows ^^-ith a good-humoured kind of
surprise at your mental state, but lets you see that
he thinks you too hopeless, and himself too superior,
to waste powder and shot upon you. It is of the
nature of things that there should be moles and that
there should be eagles ; so much the worse for the
moles, who must be content to remain blind, not
seeing things patent to the nobler vision.
The superior being is sometimes a person who is
above all the passions and weaknesses of ordinary
men ; a philosopher, or an etherealized woman dwell-
ing on serene Olympian heights which no clouds
180 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
obscure and where no earth-fogs rise. The passions
which shake the human soul, as tempests shake the
forest trees, and warp men's lives according to the
run of their own lines, are unknown to these Olym-
pian personages who cannot understand their power.
They look on these tempestuous souls with a curious
analytical gaze, speculating on the geography of their
Gethsemane, and wondering why they cannot keep
as calm and quiet as they themselves are. They sit
in scornful judgment on the mysterious impulses
regulating human nature — regulating and disturbing
— and think how perfect all things would be if only
passions and instincts were cut out of the great plan,
and men and women were left to the dommion of
pure reason. But they do not take mto account the
law of constitutional necessity, and they are utterly
unable to strike a balance between the good and evil
wrought both by the tempests of souls and by those
of nature. They only know that storms are incon-
venient, and that for themselves they have no need
of such convulsions to clear off stagnant humours ;
nor are they made of elements which kindle and ex-
plode at the contact of such or such materials. And
if they know nothing of all this, why then should
others ? If they can sit on Olympian heights serene
above all passion, why should not the whole world
sit with them, and fogs and fires, earthquakes and
deluges, be conditions unknown ?
When this kind of superior being is a woman,
there is something pretty in the sublime assumption of
SUPERIOR BEINGS. 181
her supremacy and the sweeping range of her condem-
nation. Sheltered from temptation and secure from
dangler, she looks out on life from the serene heic>:hts
of her safe place, and wonders how men can fail and
women fall before the power of trials of which she
knows only the name. Her circulation is languid
and her temperament phlegmatic ; and the burning
desire of life which sends the strong into danger,
perhaps into sin, is as much unknown to her as is
the fever of the tropics to a Laplander crouching in
his snow-hut. But she judges none the less positively
because of her ignorance ; and, as she looks into your
quivering face with her untroubled eyes, lets you
see plainly enough how she despises all the human
frailties under which you may have tripped and
stumbled. Sometimes she rebukes you loftily. Your
soul is sore with the consciousness of your sin, your
heart is weak with the pain of life ; but the superior
being tells you that repentance cannot undo the evil
that has been done, and that to feel pain is weak.
The superiority which some women assume over
men is very odd. It is like the grave rebuke of a
child, not knowing what it is that it rebukes. When
women take up their parable and censure men for
the wild or evil things they do, not understanding
how or why it has come about that they have done
them, and knowing as little of the inner causes as of
the outer, they are in the position of superior beings
talking unmitigated rubbish. To be sure, it is very
sweet and innocent rubbish, and has a lofty air about
182 SATURDAY MOENI^'GS.
it that redeems what else would be mere presump-
tion ; but there is no more practical worth in what
they say than there is in the child's rebuke when its
doll will not stand upright on sawdust legs, nor eat a
crumb of cake with waxen lips. This is one reason
why women of the order of superior beings have so
little influence over men ; they judge without know-
ledge and condemn without insight. If they could
thoroughly fathom man's nature, so as to understand
his difficulties, they would then have moral power if
their aims were higher than his, their principles more
lofty, their practice more pure. As it is, they have
next to none ; and the very men who seem to yield
most go only so far as to conceal what the superior
being disapproves of ; they do not change because of
her greater weight of doctrine.
Men show themselves as superior beings to women
on another count — intellectually, rather than morally.
While women rebuke men for their sins, men snub
women for their follies ; the one wields the spiritual,
the other the intellectual, weapon of castigation, and
both hold themselves superior, beyond all possibility
of rivalry, according to the chance of sex. The mas-
culine view of a subject always imposes itself on
women as something unattainable by the feminine
mind. Nine times out of ten it brings them to a
due sense of their own inferiority, save in the case
of the superior being, to whom of course the mas-
culine view counts for nothino; ao^ainst her own. But
even when women do not accept a man's opinions,
SUPERIOR BEINGS. 183
tliey instinctively recognize his greater value, his
greater breadth and strength. Perhaps they cry
out against his hardness, if he is a political econo-
mist and they are emotional ; or against his lower
morality if he goes in for universal charity and philo-
sophical latitudinarianism, and they are enthusiasts
with a clearly-defined faith and a belief in its infal-
libility. These are wide tracts of difference between
the two minds, not to be settled by the ipse dixit of
even a superior being ; but in general the superiority
of the man makes itself more felt than the superiority
of the woman. While one preaches, the other ridicules ;
and snubljino; does more than condemnation.
184 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
FEMININE AMENITIES.
A man's foes are those of his own household, and the
keenest enemies of women are women themselves.
No one can inflict such humiliation on a woman as
can a woman when she chooses ; for if the art of high-
handed snubbing belongs to men, that of subtle
wounding is peculiarly feminine, and is practised by
the best-bred of the sex. Women are always more
or less antagonistic to each other. They are gregarious
in fashions and emulative in follies, but they cannot
combine ; they never support their weak sisters ;
they shrink from those who are stronger than the
average ; and if they would speak the truth boldly,
they would confess to a radical contempt for each
other's intellect — which perhaps is the real reason
why the sect of the ' emancipated ' commands so
small a following.
Half a dozen ordinary men advocating ' emanci-
pation' doctrines would do more towards leavening
the whole bulk of womankind than any number
of first-class women. Where these do stand by
each other it is from instinctive or personal affec-
tion rather than from class solidarity. And this is
FEmNINE AMENITIES. 185
one of the most striking distinctions of sex, and one
cause, among others, why men have the upper hand,
and why they are able to keep it. Certainly there are
reasons, sufficiently good, why women do not more
readily coalesce ; and one is the immense difference
between the two extremes — the silly being too silly
to appreciate the wise, and the weak too weak to
bear the armour of the strong. There is more
difference between outsiders among women than there
is among men ; the feminine characteristic of ex-
aggeration making a gap which the medium or
average man fills. The ways of women with each
other more than all else show the great difference
between their morale and that of men. They flatter
and coax as men could not do, but they are also more
rude to each other than any man would be to his
fellow. It is amazing to see the things they can do
and will bear — things which no man would dream of
standing and which no man would dare to attempt.
This is because they are not taught to respect each
other, and because they have no fear of consequences.
If one woman is insulted by another, she cannot de-
mand satisfaction nor knock the offender down ; and
it is unladylike to swear and call names. She must
bear what she can repay only in kmd ; but, to do her
justice, she repays in a manner undeniably effective
and to the point.
There is nothing very pronounced about the
feminine modes of aggression and retaliation ] and
yet each is eloquent and sufficient for its purpose. It
186 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
may be only a stare, a shrug, a toss of the head ;
but women can throw an intensity of disdain into the
simplest gesture which answers the end perfectly.
The unabashed serenity and unflinching constancy
with which one woman can stare down another is in
itself an art that requires a certain amount of natural
genius, as well as carefal cultivation. She puts up
her eyeglass — not being shortsighted — and surveys
the enemy standing two feet from her, with a sublime
contempt for her whole condition, or with a still more
sublime ignoring of her sentient existence, that no
words could give. If the enemy be sensitive and
unused to the kind of thing, she is absolutely crushed,
destroyed for the time, and reduced to the most
pitiable state of self-abasement. If she be of a tougher
fibre, and has had some experience of feminine war-
fare, she returns the stare with a corresponding
amount of contempt or of obliviousness ; and from
that moment a contest is begun which never ceases
and which continually stains in bitterness. The stare
is the weapon of offence most in use among women,
and is specially favoured by the experienced against the
younger and less seasoned. It is one of the instinc-
tive arms native to the sex ; and we have only to watch
the introduction of two girls to each other to see this,
and to learn how even in youth is begun the exercise
which time and use raise to such deadly perfection.
In the conversations of women with each other we
again meet with examples of their peculiar amenities
to their own sex. They never refrain from showing
FEMININE AMENITIES. 187
how mucli they are bored ; they contradict flatly,
without the flimsiest veil of apology to hide their
rudeness ; and they interrupt ruthlessly, whatever
the subject in hand may be. One lady was giving
another a minute account of how the bride looked
yesterday when she was married to Mr. A., of some-
what formidable boudoir repute, with whom her
listener had had sundry tender passages which made
the mention of his marriage a notoriously sore subject.
' Ah ! I see you have taken that old silk which Madame
Josephine wanted to palm off on me last year,' said the
tortured listener brusquely breakmg into the narra-
tive without a lead of any kind. And the speaker
was silenced. In this case it was the interchano^e of
doubtful courtesies, wherein neither deserved pity ;
but to make a disparaging remark about a gown, in
revenge for turning the knife in a wound, was a
thoroughly feminine manner of retaliation, and one
that would not have touched a man. Such shafts
fall blunted against the rugged skin of the coarser
creature ; and the date or pattern of a bit of cloth
would not have told much against the loss of a
lover. But as most women passionately care for
dress, their toilet is one of their most vulnerable parts.
Ashamed to be unfashionable, they tolerate anything
in each other rather than shabbiness or eccentricity,
even when picturesque ; hence a sarcastic allusion to
the age of a few yards of silk as a set-off against a
grossly cruel stab was a return wound of considerable
depth cleverly given.
188 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
The introduction of the womankind belonmio^ to
a favourite male acquaintance of somewhat lower
social condition affords a splendid oj)portunity for
the display of feminine amenity. The presentation
cannot be refused, yet it is resented as an intrusion.
' Another daughter, Mr. C. ! You must have a dozen
daughters surely,' a peeress said disdainfully to a
commoner whom personally she liked, but whose
family she did not want to know. The poor man had
but two ; and this was the introduction of the second.
Yery painful to a high-spirited gentlewoman
must be the way in which a superior creature of this
kind receives her, if not of the same set as herself.
The husband of the inferior creature may be adored,
as men are adored by fashionable women who love
only themselves, and care only for their own plea-
sures. Artist, man of letters, beau sabreiir^ he is
the passing idol, the temporary toy, of a certain
circle ; and his wife has to be tolerated for his sake,
and because she is a lady and fit to be presented,
though an outsider. So they patronize her till the
poor woman's blood is on fire ; or they snub her
till she has no moral consistency left in her, and
is reduced to a mere mass of pulp. They keep her in
another room while they talk to her husband with
their other intimates ; or they admit her into their
circle, where she is made to feel like a Gentile among
the faithful, for either they leave her unnoticed alto-
gether or else speak to her on subjects quite apart
from the general conversation, as if she were inca-
FEMININE AMENITIES. 189
pable of understanding them on their own ground.
They ask her to dinner without her husband, and take
care that there is no one to meet her whom she would
like to see ; but they ask him when they are at their
grandest, and express their deep regret that his wife
(uninvited) cannot accompany him. They know
every turn and twist that can humiliate her if she has
pretensions which they choose to demolish. They
praise her toilet for its good taste in simplicity, when
she thinks she is one of the finest on an occasion on
which no one can be too fine. They tell her that pat-
tern of hers is perfect, and made just like the dear
duchess's famous dress last season, when she believes
that she has Madame Josephine's last, fi:-eshly im-
ported from Paris. They celebrate her dinner as the
very perfection of a refined family dinner without
parade or cost, though it has all been had from the
crack confectioner's, and though the bill for the en-
tertainment will cause many a day of family pinching.
These are the thmgs which women say to one another
when they wish to pain and humiliate ; things which
pain and humiliate some more than would a positive
disgrace. For some women are distressingly sensitive
about these little matters. Their lives are made up
of trifles, and a failure m a trifle is a failure in their
object of life.
Women can do each other no end of despite in a
small way in society, not to speak of mischief of a
graver kind. A hostess who has a grudge against
one of her more famous lady-guests can always ensure
190 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
her a disappointing evening under cover of doing her
supreme honour and paying her extra attention. If
she sees the enemy engaged in a pleasant conversation
with one of the male stars, down she swoops, and in
the sweetest manner possible carries her oiF to another
part of the room, to introduce her to some school-girl
who can only say yes or no in the wrong places — ' who
is dying for the honour of talking to you, my dear ; ^
or to some unfledged strij)ling who blushes and grows
hot and cannot stammer out two consecutive sen-
tences, but who is presented as a rising genius and
to be treated with the consideration due to his future.
As her persecution is done under the guise of extra
friendliness, the poor victim cannot cry out, nor yet
resist ; but she knows that whenever she goes to Mrs.
So and So's she will be seated next the stupidest man
at table, and prevented from talking to any one she
likes in the evening ; and that every vdsit to that lady
is made in some occult manner unpleasant to her.
And yet what has she to complain of ? She cannot
complain in that her hostess trusts to her for help m
the success of her entertainment, and moves her about
the room as a perambulating attraction which she has
to dispense fairly among her guests, lest some should
be jealous of the others. She may know that the
meaning is to annoy ; but who can act on meaning as
against manner ? How crooked soever the first may
be, if the last is straight the case falls to the ground,
and there is no room for remonstrance.
Often women flirt as much to annoy other women
FEMININE AMENITIES. 191
as to attract men or amuse themselves. If a wife has
crossed swords with a friend, and the husband is in
any way endurable, let her look out for retaliation.
The woman she has offended will take her revenge
by flirting more or less openly with the husband, all
the while loading the enemy with flattery if she be
afraid of her, or snubbing her without much diso-uise
if she feel herself the stronger. The wife cannot help
herself, unless things go too far for public patience.
A jealous woman without proof is the butt of her
society, and brings the whole world of women like a
nest of wasps about her ears. If wise, she will io-nore
Avhat she cannot laugh at ; if sensitive, she will fret ;
if vindictive, she will repay. Xme times out of ten
she does the last, and, may be, with interest ; and so
goes on the duel, though all the time the fighters
appear to be intimate friends and on the best possible
terms together.
But the range of these feminine amenities is
not confined to women ; it includes men as well ;
and women continually take advantage of their posi-
tion to insult the stronger sex by saying to them
things which can be neither answered nor resented.
A woman can with the quietest face and the gentlest
voice imaginable insinuate that you have just
cheated at cards ; she can give you the lie direct as
coolly as if she were correcting a misprint ; and you
cannot defend yourself. To brawl with her would be
unpardonable ; to contradict her is useless ; and the
sense of society does not allow you to show her any
192 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
active displeasure. In this instance the weaker crea-
ture is the stronger, and the more defenceless is the
safer. You have only the rather questionable con-
solation of knowing that you are not singular in your
discomfiture, and that when she has made an end of
you she will probably have a turn with your betters,
and make them too, dance to her piping, whether
they like the tune or not. At all events, if she
humiliates you she humiliates her sisters still more ;
and with the knowledge that, hardly handled as you
have been, others are yet more severely dealt with,
you must learn to be content, and to practise as much
of that grim kind of patience, which suffers keenly
and bears silently, as your nature will permit.
GRIM FEMALES.
Almost all histories and mythologies embody the
idea of a race of grim females. Whether as fabulous
and complex monsters, like the Sphmx and the
Harpies, or in the more human forms of the Fates
and the Furies, unsexed women have been uni-
versally recognized as forming part of the system of
nature and to be accepted among the stranger mani-
festations of human life. Yet it is hard to under-
stand why they should exist at all. As moral
'sports,' they are so far interesting to the psycho-
logists ; but, as women with definite duties and fixed
functions, nothing can be less admirable. They are
even worse than effeminate men — which is saying
everything.
The grim female must be carefully distinguished
from the masculine woman ; for they are by no
means essentially the same, though the types may
run into each other, and sometimes do. But the
masculine \^'oman, if not grim but only Amazonian,
has often much that is fine and beautiful in her,
as we see in her great prototype Pallas Athene ;
but the grim female pur sang is never noble, never
VOL. I.
194 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
beautiful ; and the only meaning of her existence —
the only mission she seems sent into the world to
fulfil — is that of serving as a warning to the young
what to avoid.
The grim female is not necessarily an old maid,
as would appear likely at first sight. We find her
of all conditions indifferently — as maid, wife, widow,
as mother and childless alike — and we do not find
that her condition in any way afi*ects her character.
If born grim, she remains grim to the end ; and
neither marriage nor motherhood modifies her. The
grim female of novelists is generally an old maid ;
but she is a caricature, painted in the broadest lines
and copied from the outsides of things. She is em-
phatically an odd woman ; odd in her dress, her
mode, her state. She wears a flapping cap, skimpy
skirts and rusty brown mittens on her bony hands.
She has a passionate aversion against men and matri-
mony ; and she lives queerly behind a barricaded
house- door, with a small slavey, or an elderly female
afilicted with deafness, to do her work and bear the
brunt of her temper. But she is always odd, un-
married, unfashionable and unlike everybody else, and
could never be mistaken for an ordinary woman fi'om
the first phrase which stamps her personality on the
page to the last paragraph of her fictitious existence.
Now the grim female of real life may be one of
the most conventional of her sex, and in fact, she
generally is one of the most conventional of her sex.
She is one who rules her household with a rod of
GRIM FEMALES. 195
iron carefully wrouglit after the pattern of lier
neighbours' rods, and to whom a dish set awry, or
the second-best china instead of the best, counts
for as great a moral delinquency in her servants as
a breach of all the Ten Commandments together.
She is a woman who regards being out of the fashion,
or being foremost in the fashion, as equally reprehen-
sible, and to whom dress is among the most important
matters of life. Wherefore she is notorious for a
certain grim grandeur of style, as one who respects
herself by her clothes, and is known among other
women as possessing handsome lace and costly velvet
in profusion. Are not lace and Yelvet de rigueur for
women of condition ? and what is the grim female
but the embodiment of the ' rigour of the game ' in
all matters ? Therefore she clothes herself sump-
tuously, without elegance or taste ; and would as soon
be seen abroad in her dressing-gown and slippers as
without her characteristic heavy velvet or rustling
silk. But the artist's little wife, in her fresh muslin
and nice admixture of colours, sails round her for
grace and beauty at about one-twentieth part of what
the grim female's stately ugliness has cost.
One characteristic of the grim female is her want
of womanly passion for children. She may have so
much maternal instinct, perverted, as to be on friendly
terms with a dog or two, a cat, or may be a cock-
atoo ; but she has no real affection for children, no
comprehension of child-nature, and the ^ sublime
nonsense ' of the nursery is a thing unknown to her
2
196 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
from first to last. If she have children of her own,
she treats them in a hard wooden way that has
nothing of the ideal mother about it. She generally
sees that they are properly cared for, because she is
a disciplinarian ; but, though she is mexorable on the
score of cold baths and ' no trash,' she never con-
descends to the weakness of love. If her little ones
are sick, they are set aside and dosed until they are
well ; if they are naughty, they are punished ; but
they never know those moments of tender indulgence
which help them over a period of indisposition not
severe enough for actual doctoring, yet throwing
them out of gear and inducing a spell of what
ignorance calls naughtiness. Rhadamanthus was a
weakling compared to the grim female in the nur-
sery ; and what she is in her nursery she continues
to be in the schoolroom, and the drawing-room to
follow. Her children are always causes of amioyance
to the grim female, and the first stirrings of indi-
viduality, the first half- unconscious trials of their
young strength, are ofi*ences she cannot away with.
Children and inferiors are they in her eyes, even when
grown up and married ; and she exacts from them
the humility and deference of their lower condition.
Hence she is one to whom the present generation is
undeniably worse than the past ; one who groans
over the follies and shortcomings of the times and
who thinks that good conduct died out with her own
youth, and that it is not likely, by the look of thmgs,
to be restored. In fact, youth itself is the root and
GRIM FEMALES. 197
basis of offence ; and if she coerces children, she
tyrannizes over girls and snubs young men, with
inexorable impartiality.
The grim female is not necessarily a strono--
minded woman, nor a learned woman, like those who
wear spectacles, go to scientific meetings and are
great in the classics and the 'ologies. She may be
of the emancipated class ; it all depends on chance ;
and a grim female, when of the emancipated, is a
very formidable person indeed. But she is not
necessarily one of these. On the contrary, part
of her very grimness comes from her intense
conservatism and uncompromising conventionality.
Nothing is so abhorrent to her as innovation or
novelty in any shape. She does not hold with any
one out of the narrowest groove of respectable be-
lief, in what direction soever the diverging line may
go. A Romanist or a Baptist, a Jew or an infidel,
it is all one to her ; each is equally dreadful to her,
and each is eternally foredoomed. She is of the ortho-
dox Church without fal-lals ; as far removed from
Rituahsm as she is from rantino;, and demandinof for
herself that infallibity of judgment and absolute pos-
session of the truth which she denies to the Pope
and all his Cardinals. Beware how you broach new
doctrines in her presence. She has been known
before now to abjure her nearest relations for no
greater moral lapse than a weak belief in globules ;
while, as for anything like graver aberrations, say on
the ape theory or on the plurality of races, on develop-
198 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
ment in religions or on a republican form of govern-
ment, she has no toleration whatever. If the Smith-
field fires existed at the present day, the grim female
would be the first to light the faggots. It is all the
same if she belongs to any Dissenting persuasion ;
part of her grimness coming from her intolerance,
and her own beliefs being simply the springboard on
which she stands.
Many causes produce the grim female. It may
be that she is grim from social pride as well as from
natural hardness. If she has been used to live with
people whom, rightly or wrongly, she considers her
inferiors, she will probably queen it over them in a
very unmistakeable manner. The prelatic blood is
renowned for this sort of thing ; and a bishop's
daughter, or an archbishop's grand-daughter, or Mrs.
Proudie, prelatic by marriage only, if of the grim class,
is one of the grimmest of her class. The halo of sanc-
tity round the mitre and the crozier will be greater in
her eyes than even the glitter of the strawberry leaves;
and she holds herself consecrated by her birth or
marriage to the understanding of every moral ques-
tion, and specially to the final settlement of every
tough theological position. Or she may be grim be-
cause of her isolation and meagre intercourse with the
world at large ; such as she is found in the remoter
districts. This kind comes into the exceptional or
novelist's class, and is often more masculine than
grim. These are the women who hunt and fish and
shoot like men, and who may be found in all weathers
GRIM FEMALES. 199
wandering alone about the mountains in short petti-
coats and spatterdashes — women who affect to be
essentially mannish in person, habits and attire, and
who may be quite jolly easy-going fellows in their
own way, or else grim and trenchant, as nature or
the fit takes them. This is a kind not at all un-
common in country places among the higher class of
resident ladies — ladies who are so highly placed
locally that they can afford to disregard public
opinion, and who are so independent by disposition
that they naturally go off to the manly side, and make
themselves bad imitations, as the best they can do.
The grim female tries her strength with all new-
comers. She is like one of the giants or black knights
of old romance, who lived in castles or caves, whence
they pounced on all passers-by, and either wrung
their necks if they conquered or retreated howling
if discomfited. This is what the grim female does
in her degree. She dashes on all who are presented
to her, and has a passage of arms as the first act of
the new drama. If her oj^ponents yield out of timi-
dity or good-breeding, or perhaps from not under-
standing the warlike nature of the encounter, she
puts her foot on them forthwith, and ignominiously
crushes them ; if they defy her, and give her back
blow for blow, ten to one she cuts them and becomes
then' enemy for ever after. For she has not breadth
enough to be magnanimous, and the one thing she
never forgives is successful opposition. Yery grim
is she in the presence of human weakness, moral and
200 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
physical. Woe to that unhappy maid of hers who
has slipped on the narrow path of prudence ! She
will be turned out to perish with no more com-
punction than if she were a black-beetle to be swept
out of the way.
As a nurse the grim female is precise, punctual,
obedient to orders, but inexorable. She would give
the patient a fit of nervous hysterics which would
throw him back for a week, rather than allow him five
minutes' grace in the matter of a painful operation
or a nauseous draught. Without variableness or
weakness herself, she cannot endure it in others, and
whosoever comes under her hand must be content to
remain in shape, and to keep himself well braced up
to the utmost rigidity of duty. If she had to lose
an arm or a leg, she would go to her trouble like a
Trojan ; and why not others? She would merely
tighten her lips and hold her breath, and then would
sit down to let herself be hacked and mangled with-
out a groan or a word. To judge by the notice
given of her in her sister's life, Emily Bronte was
of the grim class, and about the grimmest for her
age and state that could well be found. Had she
lived, and lived unsoftened, she would have been
one unbroken mass of iron and granite, without a
soft spot anywhere. Her very love was fiercer than
other women's hate ; her strength was more terrible
than a man's anger ; her passions were as fiery as
furnace flames. Of all the examples we could cite,
she seems about the fittest for our model.
GRBI FEMALES. 201
A grim female has no mercy. Slie may be just,
but if so, it is in a hard un compromizing way that
makes her justice worse than others' partiality. For
justice can be sympathetic, even if unwavering ; and
the grim female is never sympathetic, how painful
soever the work on hand and the sentence to be
executed. Neither is she gay ; for she is not plastic
enough to be either one or the other. She is run
into an iron mould, where her nature is compressed
as in a vice ; and she allows of no e:^pansion, no
lipping over, no bursting of bonds anyhow.
What would become of us if all our women were
like her ? Without any of the feminine little weak-
nesses at which we have our laugh yet which we
do not wholly dislike — without any of the pretty
coaxing ways which we know warp our better
judgment and take us out of the strict course ; and
yet how pleasant that warping process is ! — without
any even of the transient petulances which give so
much light and shade to a woman's character,
the grim female stands like an old-world Gorgon,
turnino' livino; flesh and blood to stone. When
we look at her we are inclined to forgive all the
smallness and silliness which sometimes vex us in
the ordinary woman, and to think that there are
worse things than the love of dress for which we
so often reproach our wives and daughters ; that
flirting, which is reprehensible no doubt, might
be exchanged for something even more repre-
hensible ; and that vanity, of the giggling, coquettish
202 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
kind, though to be steadily discouraged and sternly
reproved, is not quite the worst femmine thing after
all. Surely not ! A grim female who cannot flirt nor
giggle nor cry, nor yet kiss and make up again when
scolded, is far away a worse kind of thing than a
feather-headed little puss who is always doing wrong
by reason of her foolish brain, but who manages
somehow to pull herself right because of her loving
heart. Weak women, vain women, aflPected women,
and the whole class of silly women, whatever the
speciality of silliness exhibited, are tiresome enough,
heaven knows ; but, unsatisfactory as they are, they
are better than the grim female — that woman of no
sex, born without softness or sympathy and living
without pity and without love.
20;
MATURE SIRENS,
Nothing is more incomprehensible to girls than the
love and admiration sometimes given to middle-aged
women. They cannot understand it ; and nothing
but experience will ever make them understand it.
In their eyes, a woman is out of the pale of personal
alFection altogether when she has once lost that shin-
ing gloss of youth, that exquisite freshness of skin
and suppleness of limb, which to them, in the insolent
plenitude of their unfaded beauty, constitute the
chief claims to admiration of the one sex from the
other. And yet they cannot conceal from themselves
that the pretty maid of eighteen is often deserted for
the handsome woman of forty, and that the patent
witchery of their own youth and brilliant colouring
goes for nothing against the mysterious charms of
a mature siren. What can they say to such an
anomaly ? There is no good in going about the
world disdainfully wondering how on earth a man
could ever have taken up with such an antiquated
creature 1 — suggestively asking their male friends what
could he see in a woman of her age, old enough to be
his mother ? There the fact stands ; and facts are
204 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
stubborn things. The eligible suitor who has been
coveted by more than one golden-haired girl has
married a woman twenty years her senior, and the
middle-aged siren has quietly carried off the prize
which nymphs in their teens have frantically desired
to win. What is the secret ? How is it done ? The
world, even of silly girls, has got past any belief in
spells and talismans, such as Charlemagne's mistress
wore, and yet the man's fascination seems to them
quite as miraculous and almost as unholy as if it had
been brought about by the black art. But if they
had any analytical power they would understand the
diablerie of the mature siren clearly enough ; for it is
not so difficult to understand when one puts one's
mind to it.
In the first place, a woman of ripe age has a
knowledge of the world, and a certain suavity of
manner and moral flexibility, wholly wanting to the
young. Young girls are for the most part all angles
— harsh in their judgments, stiff in their prejudices,
narrow in their sympathies. They are full of com-
bativeness and self-assertion if they belong to one
type of young people, or they are stupid and shy if
they belong to another type. They are talkative with
nothing to say, and positive with nothing known ;
or they are monosyllabic dummies who stammer out
Yes or No at random, and whose brains become hope-
lessly confused at the first sentence with which the
stranger, to whom they have just been introduced,
attempts to open a conversation. They are generally
MATURE SIEENS. 205
without pity ; their want of experience making them
hard towards sorrows which they do not miderstand
— let us charitably hope also making them ignorant
of the pain they inflict. That famous article in the
Times on the cruelty of young girls, apropos of
Constance Kent's confession, though absurdly exag-
gerated, had in it the core of truth which gives the
sting to such papers, which makes them stick, and
which is the real cause of the outcry they create.
Girls are cruel ; there is no question about it.
If passive rather than active, they are simply in-
different to the sufferings of others ; if of a more
active temperament, they find a positive pleasure in
giving pain. A girl will say horribly cruel things
to her dearest friend, then laugh at her because
she cries. Even her own mother she will hurt and
humiliate if she can ; while, as for any unfortunate
aspirant not apj^roved of, were he as tough- skinned
as a rhmoceros she would find means to make
hioi wince. But all this acerbity is toned down
in the mature woman. Experience has enlarged her
sympathies, and knowledge of suffering has softened
her heart to the sufferings of others. Her lessons of
life too, have taught her tact ; and tact is one of
the most valuable lessons that a man or woman can
learn. She sees at a glance the weak points and
sore places in her companion, and she avoids them ;
or if she passes over them, it is with a hand so soft
and tender, a touch so soothing, that she calms m-
stead of irritating. A girl would have come down
206 SATUEDAY MOENINGS.
on those weak places heavily, and would have torn
off the bandages from the sore ones, jesting at scars
because she herself had never felt a wound, and de-
riding the sybaritism of diachylon because ignorant
of the anguish it conceals.
Furthermore, the mature siren is thoughtful for
others. Girls are self- asserting and aggressive. Life
is so strong in them, and the instinct which prompts
them to try their strength with all comers and to get
the best of everything everywhere, is so irre^Dressible,
that they are often disagreeable because of that in-
stinctive selfishness, that craving, natural to the
young, of taking all and giving back nothing. But
the mature siren knows better than this. She knows
that social success entirely depends on what each of us
can throw into the common fund of society ; that the
surest way to win consideration for ourselves is to be
considerate for others ; that sympathy begets liking,
and self-suppression leads to exaltation ; and that if
we want to gain love we must first show how well
we can give it. Her tact then, and her sympathy, her
moral flexibility and quick comprehension of character,
her readiness to give herself to others, are some of the
reasons, among others, why the society of a cultivated
agreeable woman of a certain age is sought by those
men to whom women are more than mere mistresses
or toys. Besides, she is a good conversationalist.
She has no pretensions to any special or deep learning
■^for, if pedantic, she is spoilt as a siren at any age
— but she knows a little about most things ; at all
MATURE SIRENS. 207
events, she knows enough to make her a pleasant
companion in a tete-a-tete or at a dinner- table, and to
enable her to keep up the ball when thrown. And
men like to talk to intelligent women. They do not
like to be taught nor corrected by them, but they
like that quick sympathetic intellect which follows
them readily, and that amount of knowledge which
makes a comfortable cushion for their own. And a
mature siren who knows what she is about would
never do more than this, even if she could.
Thouo:h the mature siren rests her claims to ad-
miration on more than mere personal charms, and
appeals to something beyond the senses, yet she is
personable and well preserved, and, in a favourable
light, looks nearly as young as ever. So the men
say who knew her when she was twenty ; who loved
her then, and have gone on loving her, with a differ-
ence, despite the twenty years which lie between this
and then. Girls, indeed, despise her charms because
she is no longer young ; and yet she may be even
more beautiful than youth. She knows all the little
niceties of dress, and, without going into the vulgar
trickery of paint and dyes — which would make her
hideous — is up to the best arts of the toilet by which
every point is made to tell and every minor beauty
is given its fullest value. For part of the art and
mystery of sirenhood is an accurate perception of
times and conditions, and a careful avoidance of that
suicidal mistake of which la femme jKissee is so often
guilty — namely, setting herself in confessed rivalry
208 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
with the young by trying to look hke them, and so
losing the good of what she has retained, and betray-
ing the ravages of time by the contrast.
The mature siren is wiser than this. She knows
exactly what she has and what she can do ; and before
all things avoids whatever seems too youthful for her
years; and this is one reason why she is always beau-
tiful, because always in harmony. Besides, she has
very many good points, many positive charms still
left. Her fio;ure is still ffood — not slim and slender
certainly, but round and soft, and with that slower,
riper, lazier grace which, quite different from the
antelope-like elasticity of youth, is in its own Avay as
lovely. If her hair has lost its maiden luxuriance
she makes up with crafty arrangements of lace,
which are more picturesque than the fashionable
wisp of hay-like ends tumbling half-way to the waist.
She has still her white and shapely hands with their
pink filbert-like nails ; still her pleasant smile and
square small teeth — those one or two new, matching
so perfectly with the old as to be undiscoverable !
Her eyes are bright yet, and if the upper muscles are
a little shrunk, the consequent apparent enlargement
of the orbit only makes them more expressive ; her
lips are not yet withered ; her skin is not wrinkled.
Undeniably, when well-dressed and in a favourable
lioiit, the mature siren is as beautiful in her own
way as the girlish belle ; and the world knows it
and acknowledges it.
That mature sirens can be passionately loved.
MATURE SIRENS. 209
even when very mature, history gives us more than
one example ; and the first name that naturally
occurs to one's mind is that of the too famous Ninon
de I'Enclos. And Ninon, if a trifle mythical, was
yet a fact and an example. But not gomg quite to
Ninon's age, we often see women of forty and upwards
who are personally charming, and whom men love
with as much warmth and tenderness as if they were
in the heyday of life — women who count their ad-
mirers by dozens, and who end by making a superb
marriage, and having quite an Indian summer of
romance and happiness. The young laugh at this
idea of the Indian summer for a bride of forty-five ;
but it is true ; for neither romance nor happmess,
neither love nor mental youth, is a matter of years ;
and after all we are only as old as we feel, and cer-
tainly no older than we look.
All women do not harden by time, nor wither,
nor yet corrupt. Some merely ripen and mellow and
get enriched by the passage of the years, retaining the
most delicate womanliness — we had almost said girl-
ishness — into quite old age, blushing as swiftly under
their grey hairs, while shrinking from anything coarse
or vulgar or impure as sensitively, as when they were
girls. La femme a quaranfe ans is the French term for
the opening of the great gulf beyond which love can-
not pass ; but human history disproves this date, and
shows that the heart can remain fresh and the person
lovely long after the age fixed for the final adieu
to admiration — that the mature siren can be adored
VOL. I. P
210 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
by her own contemporaries when the rismg genera-
tion regard her as nothing better than a chimney-
corner fixture. Mr. TroUope recognized the claims
of the mature siren in his Orley Farm and il//.s6'
Mackenzie ; and no one can deny the intense natural-
ness of the characters and the interest of the stories.
Another point which tells with the mature woman
is, that she is not jealous nor exacting. She knows
the world,, and takes what comes with that philosophy
which springs from knowledge. If she be of an en-
joying nature — and she cannot be a siren else — she
accepts such good as floats to the top, neither look-
ing too deep into the cup nor speculating on the time
when she shall have drained it to the dregs. Men
feel safe with her. If they have entered on a tender
friendship with her, they know that there will be no
scene, no tears, no upbraidings, when an inexorable
fate comes in to end their pleasant little drama, with
the inevitable wife as the scene -shifter. The mature
siren knows so well that fate and the wife must break
in between her and her friend, that she is resigned
from the first to what is foredoomed, and thus accepts
her bitter portion, when it comes, with dignity and in
silence. Where younger women would fall into
hysterics and make a scene, perhaps go about the
world taking their revenge in slander, the middle-
ao-ed woman holds out a friendly hand and takes the
back seat gallantly, never showing by word nor look
that she has felt her deposition. She becomes the
best friend of the new household ; and if any one is
MATURE SIRENS. 211
jealous, ten to one it is the husband who is jealous of
her love for his wife. Of course it may be the wife
herself, who cannot see what her husband can find to
admire so much m Mrs. A , and who pouts at his
extraordinary predilection for her, though of course
she would scorn to be jealous — as, indeed, she has no
cause. For even a mature siren, however delightful
she may be, is not likely to come before a young wife
in the heart of a young husband. Though the French
paint the love of a woman of forty as pathetic, be-
cause slightly ridiculous and certainly hopeless, yet
they arrange their theory of social life so that a
youth is generally supposed to make his first love
of a married woman many years his elder, while a
mature siren finds her last love in a youth.
We have not come to this yet in England, either
in theory or practice ; and it is to be hoped that we
never shall come to it. Mature sirens are all very
well for men of their own age, and it is pleasant to
see them still loved and admired, and to recognize in
them the claims of women to something higher than
mere personal passion ; bttt the case would be very
difierent if they became ghoulish seducers of the
young, and kept up the habit of love by entanglmg
boyish hearts and blightmg youthful lives. As they
are now, they form a charmmg element in society,
and are of mtinite use to the world. They are the
ripe fruit in the garden where else everything wotild
be green and immature — the last days of the golden
summer set against the disappointing backwardness
p 2
212 . SATURDAY MORNINGS.
of spring and before the chills of autumn have come.
They contain in themselves the advantages of two
distinct epochs, and while possessing as much per-
sonal charm as youth, possess also the gains which
come by experience and maturity. They keep things
together as the young could not do ; and no gather-
ing of friends is perfect which has not one or two
mature sirens to give the tone, and prevent ex-
cesses. They soften the asj)erities of high-handed
boys and girls, which else would be too biting ; and
they set people at ease, and make them in good
humour with themselves, by the courtesy with which
they listen to them and the patience with which they
bear with them. Even the very girls who hate them
fiercely as rivals love them passing well as half
maternal, half sisterly, companions ; and the first per-
son to whom they would carry their sorrows would
be a mature siren, quite capable for her own part of
having caused them.
It would be hard indeed if the loss of youth did
not bring with it some compensations ; but the ma-
ture siren suff*ers less from that loss than any other
kind of woman. Indeed, she seems to have a private
elixir of her own which is not quite drained dry when
she dies, beloved and regretted, at threescore years
and ten ; leaving behind her one or two old friends
who were once her ardent lovers, and who still cherish
her memory as that of the finest and most fascinating
woman they ever knew — something which the present
generation is utterly incapable of repeating.
213
PUMPKINS.
Pumpkins are among the most imposing of all ground-
ling growths. They have fine showy flowers, hand-
some leaves, roving stems, and they bear solid4ooking
fruit of a goodly size and gorgeous colour. To see
them spreading over their domain with such rapid
luxuriance, one would imagine them among the best
things growing ; but a critical examination proves
their flesh to be about three parts water, while as for
their stalks, they are of so pithless a nature that they
can only creep along the earth, unable to stand upright
without support ; — which tells somethmg against the
pumpkin's claim for extra consideration. Still, their
showy largeness attracts the eye, and not a few of us
believe in pumpkins, and admire both their mode of
growth and the fruit resulting. In like manner the
liuman pumpkins — those beings of imposing presence
and loud self-assertion — get themselves believed in
by the simple ; and, as occasions by which their
watery and fibreless nature is revealed do not arise
every day, they are for the most part acce]3ted for
the substantialities they assume to be, and the world
is deceived by appearances as it ever has been.
214 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
These human pumpkins aboun i everywhere. In
all states and professions, and in both sexes, we find
them flourishing magnificently on the face of the earth,
taking the lead in their society and setting them-
selves out as the finest fellows to be found in their
respective gardens. Among them are the men of the
Bombastes type, so dear to the older playwrights ;
brao^o'adocios of the kill 'em and eat 'em school, who
were such terrible fellows to look at and listen to,
though only pumpkms of a singularly innocuous na-
ture when stoutly squeezed and analyzed ; fire-eaters
of the juggling kind, with special care taken that the
fire shall be harmless and that the danger shall lie
only in the fear of the spectators. Now that duelling
has gone out of fashion, and discharged captains who
have signalized themselves in war are rare, our old
swashbuckler type of pumpkins has gone out both in
fact and fiction, on the stage and ofi* it. To be sure
we have a few travellers of slightly apocryphal cou-
rage, and more than doubtful accuracy, whose books
of perilous adventure and breathless dangers are to
us what Bombastes and Bobadil were to our fathers ;
and we have Major Wellington de Boots with his
military swagger and his hare's heart. But he is a
very weak imitation of the old fire-eater ; and, on the
whole, this special family of the pumpkins has dwin-
dled into insignificance, and their place knows them
no more.
Then there is the pumpkin after the cut of the
Prince Regent — the man of deportment, big, hand-
PUMPKINS. 215
some, showy, and specially noticeable for a loud
voice, a broad chest, and an indescribable air of su-
periority and command ; the man who has studied
bowino' as one of the fine arts, who walks with a
swagger, and even now tips his curly-brimmed hat
slightly to the side. This is the kind of man who
influences women. Bombastes frightens the nervous
and inexperienced of his own sex, but the man of de-
portment partly fascinates and partly overawes the
other. They take him at his own valuation, and
have not skill enough to find out the flaw in the
summing up until perhaps it is too late, when they
have come so near to him that they are able to ap-
praise him for themselves, and have learnt by bitter
experience of what unsound materials he is made.
And then let him look out. There is nothing women
resent so much as pumpkin manhood — nothing which
humiliates them more in their own esteem than to
discover that they have been taken in by appearances,
and that what they had believed in as solid wood
turns out to be only squash.
Women like to rely on men, and dread nothing
so much as weakness and vacillation in their male
protectors ; save indeed those grim and bulky fe-
males in whom Hood so much delighted, who take
small men vi et armis, and subjugate them body and
soul, like two-legged poodles trained to fetch and
carry at the word of command. But these are excep-
tions ; the average woman prizing strength rather
than poodle-like docility. The pumpkin of the Prince
216 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
Regent cut is generally notorious for laying down the
law on all points. His voice is so loud and his manner
of speech so dictatorial, that no one dreams of doubt-
ing still less of contradicting him, but everybody
takes him as he represents himself to be — a man of
prompt decision, of boundless resources, a granitic
tower of strength to be leant against in all emergen-
cies without the slightest fear of failure ; a man who
is not only sufficient for himself but strong enough
to bear the weaknesses of others. He is famous for
giving advice — advice of a vague, rapid, sprawling
kmd, never quite exact to the circumstances, never
quite practical nor to the point — large advice, general
in scope but wonderfully positive in tone, and, until
you analyze, grandly imposing in effect. Nail him
to the point ; ask his advice seriously on any ques-
tion where the responsibility of counsel will rest with
him ; place yourself in his hands where the conse-
quences of failure will touch him as well as you ; and
then see to what meagre dimensions your goodly
gourd will shrink. The confident assertion drops
into a weak hesitation ; the arrogant dictum melts into
a timid refusal to take such a serious responsibility
on himself ; you have pricked your windbag, bisected
your pumpkin, and henceforth you know the precise
weight of substance remaining. Yet mankind sees
him exactly where he was before, and he will go
about the world in his large, loud way, saying to
every one that if you had followed his advice you
would have succeeded — supposing you have failed ;
PUMPKINS. 217
or, if you have succeeded, he will take all the credit
to himself, and say it was he who guided you and
showed you how to go in and win. For himself, and
his own affairs, he has no more moral stamina than
he had leadership for you and yours. The least re-
verse knocks him over. Care or sorrow, when it
touches him, shrivels him up as completely as frost
shrivels up the pumpkin. In every circumstance re-
quiring promptitude, coolness, keen perception, just
decision, our swaggering man of froth fails ignomi-
niously ; and one hour of real pressure proves incon-
testably that he was only a pumpkin of imposing-
presence, good neither as meat nor staff when the
time of trial came.
Yery often the pumpkin has a wife whose fibre is
as close as his is loose, and whose nature is as tough
as his is soft ; a hard -eyed, thin-lipped, tenacious
woman, who speaks little and boasts not at all, but
who does all she wishes to do, and whose iron will
pins her pumpkin to the wall as the spear of the
Bushman pins the elephant or the rhinoceros. It is
very curious to see how a blatant blustering man
who is so loud and confident abroad, knocks under
at home ; and how the high- crested deportment
which carries things with such a lofty bearing out of
doors droops into the meek submission of the hen-
pecked husband so soon as the house-door closes on
him, and he is subjected to the pitiless analysis of
home. There is no question of flourish then ; and if
by chance the ambitious crest should make an effort
218 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
to display itself, the wife knows how to lower it by
a few decisive words of a keen-edged kind, and her
pumpkin is made to feel sharply enough the difference
existing between fibre and pulp. It is almost melan-
choly to see one of these fine flourishing fellows so
subdued. Pumpkin as he may be, it is not pleasant
to see him so cut down in his pride ; and invo-
luntarily one's sympathies go with him rather than
with that tenacious, hard-mouthed wife of his, who
would be none the worse perhaps for a little of her
husband's essential softness and with less than her
own hardness.
How often too, these big fellows have no physical
stamina as well as but very shaky moral fibre ! A
small, wiry light-weight will do twice as much as
they ; not, of course, where muscle only is wanted,
but where the question is of endurance. Large heavy
men knock up far sooner than the light-weights ; and
though size and weight count for something at certain
times and on occasions, fibre and tenacity go for more
in the long run. In the Crimea, the men who first
dropped ofi' from exposure and privation were the
magnificently -built Guardsmen — men apparently bred
and fed to the highest point of physical perfection ;
while the undersized little liners, who had nothing to
be admired in them, stood the strain gamely, and
were brisk and serviceable when the others were
either dead or in hospital. So far as we ha^^e gone
yet, we have not solved the problem of how to com-
bine toughness and bigness, solidity and size, but for
PUMPKINS. 219
the most part fail in the one in proportion as we snc-
ceed in the other.
Many of the dark-skinned races are what we may
call emotional pumpkins. Their flashing black eyes
and swarthy skins seem to be instinct with passion ;
they look like living furnaces filled with flames and
molten metal, terrible fellows, dangerous to meddle
with and almost impossible to subdue. But nine times
out of ten we find them to be marvellously meek
persons, timid, amenable to law, unable to give of-
fence and incapable of taking it — lambs masquerad-
ing in tiger-skins. A fair-faced Anglo-Saxon, with
his sensitive blush, good-humoured smile and light
blue eyes, has more pluck and pith in him than a
whole brigade of certain of these dark-skinned men.
He has less ferocity perhaps than they when they are
thoroughly roused, though our good-humoured An-
glo-Saxon is by no means destitute of ferocity on
occasions when his blood is up ; but his is ferocity of
the quarter- stafl' and bludgeon stand-up fight kind —
the ferocity of strength fairly put out against an adver-
sary, not the tigerish cruelty which is almost always
found when moral weakness and physical submission
have a momentary trium23h and reaction. Cowardly
men are like women in their revenge when once they
get the upper hand ; and their revenge is more cruel
than that of the habitually brave man who, after a
fair fight, overthrows his opponent. Some of the
dark-skinned races look the very ideal of the melo-
dramatic ruffian — operatic brigands painted with
220 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
broad black lines, and up to an}^ amount of deeds of
daring and of crime ; but they are only pumpkins at
the core. We need not go so far as Calcutta to find
them ; we get examples nearer home, both m Hounds -
ditch and in Rome ; for both Jews and Italians are
soft-cored men in spite of their passionate outsides,
and both would be better for an extra twist and
toughness in their fibres.
Intellectual pumpkins are as common as those of
the more specially physical kind. You meet with
philosophers and ' thmkers ' — perhaps they are poets,
perhaps politicians — ^who flourish out a vague big
declamation which, when you reduce it to its essence,
you find to be a platitude worth nothing ; whipped
cream, without any foundation of solid puddmg. If
they are of the philosophic sort, they quote you Fichte
and Hegel, to the bewilderment of your brains unless
you have gone into the metaphysical maze on your
own account ; but they might have put all they have
said into half a dozen words of three letters, like a
child's first readmg lesson. The flourish imjDoses,
and people who cannot analyze take the whipped
cream for solid puddmg, and think that platitudes
dressed in the garb of Fichte and Hegel are utterances
worthy of deep respect and admiring wonder.
All the professions which talk, either by word of
mouth or in print, are specially given to this mani-
festation of pumpkinhood. Preachers and authors
sprawl and flourish over their small inheritance with
a tremendous assumption of vital force and vigorous
PUMPKINS. 22l
growth ; and weak liancls, with weaker heads, find
support and shelter in their foliage. Poets too, with
a knack for turning oat large moulds in which they
have run very small ideas, are pumpkins dear to the
feminine mind. Have we not our Tupper ? had we
not our ' Satan ' Montgomery? and a few others whom
we might catalogue if we cared for the task, each with
his multifarious female following and his spiritual
harem of ardent admirers ? All artists — that is, the
men who create, or rather who assume to create — are
liable to be proved pumpkins when called on to show
themselves solid wood. They talk grandly enough,
but when they have to translate their words into
deeds, too often the noble aims and immortal efforts
they have been advocating tail off into pulp and
water, and we have botches and pot-boilers instead
of masterpieces and high art. Perhaps we may take
it as a rule that all doers who talk much and boast
grandly are of the pumpkin order, and that art, like
nature, elaborates best in silence.
Strong-visaged women are often pure pumpkins
with a very rough and corrugated outside. It is as-
tonishing how soon they break down, and for all their
stern and powerful looks sink under burdens under
which a frail little creature, as light as thistledown,
will glide along quite easily. Women with l)lack
brows and harsh voices — brigandesses by appearance,
or like the typical Herodias of unimaginative artists
— are often the gentlest and most pithless of their
sex, and may be seen acting quite compassionately
222 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
towards their infants, or vindicating their womanhood
by meekly sewing on their husbands' buttons and
weepmg at their rebukes ; while a fair, silver-tongued,
languid lady, as soft as if she were made of nothing
harder than the traditional cream and rose-leaves, will
give up her babies as a prey to unfeeling nurses and
let her husband go buttonless and in rags, while she
lounges before the fire indifferent to his wrath and
callous to his wrongs. There is many a house mis-
tress who looks as if she could use her fists when
annoyed, who is absolutely afraid of her servants ;
and the maid is always the mistress when the one is
fibre and the other pulp.
Heaven be praised that the strong- visaged women
are not ' clear grit ' all through. If they were as
hard as they look, the world would go but queerly,
and society would have to make new laws for the
protection of its weaker male members. But nature
is merciful as well as sportive, and while she amuses
herself by creating pumpkins of formidable aspect,
takes care that the core shall not always correspond
to the rind. Like the Athenian images of the satyr
which enclosed a god, the black-browed brigandesses
and the men of magnificent deportment are some-
times impostors of a quite amiable kind ; and when
you have once learnt by heart the false analogies
of form, you will cease to fear your typical He-
rodias, to be impressed by your copy of the Prince
liegent, or to be influenced by your wordy Hegelian
talking platitudes in the philosophic dialect.
123
WIDOWS,
There are widows and Avidows ; there are those
who are bereaved and those who are released ; those
who lose their support and those whose chains are
broken ; those who are sunk in desolation and those
who wake up into freedom. Of the first we will not
speak. Theirs is a sorrow too sacred to be publicly-
handled even with sympathy ; but the second de-
mand no such respectful reticence. The widow who
is no sooner released from one husband than she
plots for another, and the widow who leaps into
liberty over the grave of a gaoler, not a lover, are fair
game enough. They have always been favourite
subjects whereon authors may exercise their wits ;
and while men are what they are — laughing animals
apt to see the humour lying in incongruity, and with
a spice of the devil to sharpen that same laughter into
satire — they will remain favourite subjects, tragic as
the state is when widowhood is deeper than mere
outward condition.
There are many varieties of the widow and all
are not beautiful. For one, there is the widow who
is bent on re-marrying whether men like it or not ;
^24 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
that thing of prey who goes about the world seeking
whom she may devour ; that awful creature who
bears down on her victims with a vio-our in her
assaults which puts to flight the popular fancy about
the weaker sex and the natural distribution of power.
No hawk poised over a brood of hedge birds, no
shark cruising steadily towards a shoal of small fry,
no piratical craft sailing under a free flag and account-
able to no law save success, was ever more formidable
to the weaker things pursued than is the hawk
widow to men when she is bent on re-marrying. She
knows so much ! — there is not a manoeuvre by which
a victory can be stolen that she has not mastered and
she is not afraid of even the most desperate measures.
AVhen she has once struck, he would be a clever man
and a strong one who should escape her. Generally
left but meagrely provided for in worldly goods — else
her game would not be difficult — she makes up for
her financial poverty by her wealth of bold resources,
and by the courage with which she takes her own
fortunes in hand and, with her own, those of her
more eligible masculme associates. She is a woman
of purpose and lives for an end ; and that end is re-
marriage, with the most favourable settlement that
can be obtained by her lawyer from his. If fate has
dealt hardly by her — though, may be, compassionately
by her successive spouses — and has landed her in the
widowed state twice or thrice, she is in nowise daunted
and as little abashed. She merely refits after a certain
time of anchorage, and goes out into the open again
WIDOWS. 225
for a repetition of her chance. She has no notion
of a perpetuity of weeds, and, though she may have
cleared her half century with a margin besides, thinks
the suggestive orange-blossoms of the bride infinitely
more desirable than the fruitless heliotrope of the
widow. If one husband is taken, she remembers the
old proverb, and reflects on the many, quite as good,
who are left potentially subject to her choice. And
somehow she manages. It has been said that any
woman can marry any man if she determines to do
so, and follows on the line of her determination with
tenacity and common-sense.
The hawk widow exemplifies the truth of this
saying. She determines upon marriage ; and she
usually succeeds ; the question being one of victim
only, not of sacrifice. One has to fall to her share ;
there is no help for it ; and the whole contest is,
which shall it be ? which is strongest to break
her bonds ? which craftiest to slip out of them ?
which most resolute not to bear them from the
beginning ? This the straggling covey must settle
among themselves the best way they can. When
the hawk pounces down upon its quarry, it is sauve
qui pent \ But all cannot be saved. One has to be
caught ; and the choice is determined partly by chance
and partly by relative strength. When the widow
of experience and resolve bears down on her prey,
the result is equally certain. Floundering avails no-
thing ; struggling and splashing are just as futile ;
one among the crowd has to come to the slaughter,
VOL. I. Q
226 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
like Mrs. Bond's ducks, and to assist at his own
immolation. The best thing he can do is to make
a handsome surrender, and to let the world of men
and brothers believe he rather likes his position than
not.
But there are pleasanter types of the re-marr3^ing
widow than this. There is the widow of the Wad-
man kind, who has outlived her grief and is not dis-
inclined to a repetition of the matrimonial experiment,
if asked humbly by an experimenter after her own
heart. But she must be asked humbly that she may
grant in a pretty, tender, womanly way — if not quite
so timidly as a girl, yet as becomingly in her degree,
and with that peculiar fascination which nothing but
the combination of experience and modesty can give.
The widow of the Wadman kind is no creature of
prey, neither shark nor hawk ; at the worst she is but
a cooing dove, making just the sweetest little noise
in the world, the tenderest little call to indicate her
whereabouts, and to show that she is lonely and feels
a-cold. She sits close, waiting to be found, and does
not ramp and dash about like the hawk sisterhood ;
neitlier does she pretend that she is unwilling to be
found, still less deny that a soft warm nest, well
lined and snugly sheltered, is better than a lonely
branch stretching out comfortless and bare into the
bleak wide world. She, too, is almost sure to get
what she wants, with the advantage of being volun-
tarily chosen and not unwillingly submitted to.
This is the kind of woman who is always mildly
WIDOWS. 227
but thoroughly happy in her married life ; unless in-
deed her husband should be a brute, which heaven
forefend. She lives in peace and bland contentment
while the fates permit, and when he dies she buries
him decently and laments him decorously ; but she
thmks it folly to spend her life in weeping by the
side of his cold grave, when her tears can do no good
to either of them. Rather she thinks it a proof of
her love for him, and the evidence of how true was
her happiness, that she should elect to give him a
successor. Her blessed experience in the past has
made her trustful of the future ; and because she
has found one man faithful she thinks that all are
Abdiels. As a rule, this type of woman does find
men pleasant ; and by her own nature she ensures do-
mestic happiness. She is always tenderly, and never
passionately, in love, even with the husband she has
loved the best. She gives in to no excesses to the
right nor to the left. Her temperament is of that
serene moonlight kind which does not fatigue others
nor wear out its possessor. Without ambition or
the power to fling herself into any absorbing occupa-
tion, she lives only to please and be pleased at home ;
and if she be not a wife, wearing her light fetters
lovingly and proud that she is fettered, she is
nothing. As some women are born mothers and
others are born nuns, so is the Wadman woman a
born wife, and shines in no other character nor
capacity. But in this she excels ; aud knowing
d 2
228 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
this, she sticks to her role^ how frequently so ever
the protagonist may be changed.
There are widows, however, who have no thought
nor desire for remaining anything but widows — who
have gained the worth of the world in their condi-
tion, ' Jeune, riche, et veuve — quel bonheur ! '
says the French wife, eyemg ' mon mari ' askance.
Can the most exacting woman ask for more ? And
truly such a one is in the most enviable position
possible to a woman, supposing always that she
has not lost in her husband the man she loved. If
she has lost only the man who sat by right at the
same hearth with herself — perhaps the man who
quarrelled with her across the ashes— she has lost
her burden and gained her release.
The cross of matrimony lies heavy on many a
woman who never takes the world into her con-
fidence, and who bears in absolute silence what she
has not the power to cast from her. Perhaps her
husband has been a man of note, a man of learn-
ing, of elevated station, a political or a philanthropic
power. She alone knew the fretfulness, the petty
tyranny, the miserable smallness at home of the man
of large repute whom his generation conspired to
honour, and whose public life was a mark for the
future to date by. When he died the press wrote
his eulogy and his elegy ; but his widow, when
she put on her weeds, sang softly in her own heart
a paean to the great King of Freedom, and whis-
pered to herself Laudamus with a sigh of unut-
WIDOWS. 229
terable relief. To such a woman widowhood has no
sentimental regrets. She has come into possession
of the goods for which perhaps she sold herself;
she is young enough to enjoy the present and to pro-
ject a future ; she has the free choice of a maid and
the free action of a matron, as no other woman has.
She may be courted and she need not be chaperoned,
nor yet forced to accept. Experience has mellowed
and enriched her ; for though the asperities of her
former condition were sharp while they lasted, they
have not permanently roughened nor embittered her.
Then the sense of relief gladdens, while the sense of
propriety subdues, her ; and the delicate mixture of
outside melancholy, tempered with internal warmth,
is wonderfully enticing. Few men know how to
resist that gentle sadness which does not preclude
the sweetest sympathy with pleasures in which she
may not join — with happiness which is, alas ! denied
her. It gives an air of such profound unselfishness ;
it asks so mutely, so bewitchingly, for consolation !
Even a hard man is moved at the sight of a pretty
young widow in the funereal black of her first grief,
sitting apart with a patient smile and eyes cast meekly
down, as one not of the world though in it. Her
loss is too recent to admit of any thought of repara-
tion ; and yet what man does not think of that time of
reparation ? and if she be more than usually charm-
ing in person and well dowered in purse, what man
does not think of himself as the best repairer she
could take ? Then, as time goes on and she glides
230 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
gracefully into the era of mitigated grief, how beauti-
ful is her whole manner, how tasteful her attire !
The most exquisite colours of the prismatic scale
look garish beside her dainty tints, and the untem-
pered mirth of happy girls is coarse beside her
subdued admission of moral sunshine. Greys as
tender as a dove's breast ; regal purples which have
a glow behind their gloom ; stately silks of sombre
black softly veiled by clouds of gauzy white or
brightened with the ' dark light ' of sparkling jet —
all speak of passing time and the gradual bloommg
of the spring after the sadness of the winter ; all
symbolize the flowers which are growing on the sod
that covers the dear departed ; all hint at a melting
of the funereal gloom into the starlight of a possible
bridal. She begins too to take pleasure in the old
familiar things of life. She steals into a quiet back
seat at the Opera ; she just walks through a quad-
rille ; she sees no harm in a fete or flower-show, if
properly companioned. Winter does not last for
ever ; and a life -long mourning is a wearisome pro-
spect. So she goes through her degrees in accurate
order, and comes out at the end radiant.
For when the faint shadows cast by the era of
mitigated grief fade away, she is the widow par
excellence — the blooming widow, young, rich, gay,
free ; with the world on her side, her fortune in
her hand, the ball at her foot. She is the freest
woman alive ; freer even than any old maid to be
found. Freedom, indeed, comes to the old maid
WIDOWS. 231
when too late to enjoy it ; at least in certain direc-
tions ; for while she is young she is necessarily in
bondage, and when parents and guardians leave her
at liberty, the world and Mrs. Grundy take up the
reins and hold them pretty tight. But the widow is
as thoroughly emancipated from the conventional
bonds which confine the free action of a maid as she
is from those which fetter the wife ; and only she
herself knows what she has lost and gained. She
bore her yoke well while it pressed on her. It galled
her but she did not wince ; only when it was removed,
did she become fully conscious of how great had been
the burden, from her sense of infinite relief through her
freedom. The world never knew that she had passed
under the harrow ; probably therefore it wonders at
her cheerfulness, with the dear departed scarce two
years dead ; and some say how sweetly resigned she
is, and others how unfeeling. She is neither. She
is simply free after having lived in bondage ; and she
is glad in consequence. But she is dangerous. In
fact, she is the most dangerous of all women to men's
peace of mind. She does not want to marry again
— does not mean to marry agam for many years to
come, if ever; granted; but this does not say that
she is indifferent to admiration or careless of men's
society. And bemg without serious intentions her-
self, she does not reflect that she may possibly mislead
and deceive others who have no such cause as she
has to beware of the pleasant folly of love and its
results.
232 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
In the exercise of her prerogative as a free woman,
able to cultivate the dearest friendships with men and
fearlessly using her power, she entangles many a
poor fellow's heart which she never wished to engage
more than platonically, and crushes hopes which she
had not the sUghtest intention to raise. Why cannot
men be her friends ? she asks, with a pretty, plead-
ing look — a tender kind of despair at the wrong-
headedness of the stronger sex. But, tender as she
is, she does not easily yield even when she loves.
The freedom she has gone through so much to gain
she does not rashly throw away ; and if ever the day
comes when she gives it up into the keeping of
another — and for all her protestations it comes some-
times — the man to whom she succumbs may con-
gratulate himself on a victory more flattermg to his
vanity, and more complete in its surrender of ad-
vantages, than he could have gained over any other
woman. Belle or heiress, of higher rank or of greater
fame than himself, no unmarried woman could have
made such a sacrifice in her marriage as did this
widow of means and good looks, when she laid her
freedom, her joyous present and potential future, in
his hand. He will be lucky if he manages so well
that he is never reproached for that sacrifice — if his
wife never looks back regretfully to the time when
she was a widow — if there are no longing glances
forward to possibilities ahead, mingled with sighs
at the difficulty of retracing a step when made. On
the whole, if a woman can live without love, or with
WIDOWS. 233
nothing stronger than a tender sentimental friend-
ship, widowhood is the most blissful state she can
attain. But if she be of a loving nature and fond of
home, finding her own happiness in the happiness of
others and indiiFerent to freedom — thinking, indeed,
that feminine freedom is only another word for deso-
lation — she will be miserable until she has doubled
her experience and carried on the old into the new.
234 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
DOLLS,
The love of dolls is instinctive with girl children ;
and a nursery without some of these silent simulacra
for the amusement of the little maids is a very lifeless
affair. But outside the nursery door dolls are stupid
thmgs enough ; and, whether improvised of wisped-
up bundles of rags or made of the costhest kind of
composition, they are at the best mere pretences for
the pastime of babies, not living creatures to be loved
nor artistic creations to be admired. Certainly they
are pretty in their own way, and some are made to
simulate human actions quite cleverly; and one of
thek charms with children is that they can be treated
like sentient beings without a chance of retaliation.
They can be scolded for being naughty ; put to bed
in broad daylight for a punishment ; seated in the
corner with their impassive faces turned to the wall,
just as the little ones themselves are dealt with;
the doll all the time smilmg exactly as it smiled
before, its round blue beads staring just as they
stared before ; neither scolding nor cornering making
more impression on its sawdust soul than do little
missy's sobs and tears when nurse is cross and
DOLLS. 235
dolly is her only friend. But the child has had its
hour of play and make-believe sentiment of com-
panionship and authority ; and so, if the doll can do
no good of itself, it can at least be the occasion of
pleasantness to others.
Now there are women who are dolls in all but
the mere accident of material. The doll proper is a
simple structure of wax or wood, 'its knees and
elbows glued together;' and the human doll is a
complex machine of flesh and blood. But, saving
such structural differences, these women are as essen-
tially dolls as those in the bazaar which open and
shut their eyes at the word of command enforced by
a wire, and squeak when you pinch them in the
middle. There are women who seem born into the
world only as the playthings and make-believes of
human life. As impassive as the waxen creatures in
the nursery, no remonstrance touches them and no
experience teaches them. Their final cause seems to
be to look pretty, to be always in perfect drawing-
room order, and to be the occasions by which their
friends and companions are taught patience and self-
denial. And they perfectly fulfil their destmy ; which
may be so much carried to their credit. A doll
woman is hopelessly useless and can do nothing with
her brains or her hands. In distress or sickness she
can only sit by you and look as sorrowful as her
round smooth face will permit ; but she has not a
helping suggestion to make, not a fraction of practical
power to put forth.
236 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
When a man has married a doll wife he has
assigned himself to absolute loneliness or a double
burden. He cannot live with his pretty toy in any
more reality of sympathy than does a child with
her puppet. He can tell her nothing of his affairs,
nothing of his troubles nor of his thoughts, because
she can impart no new idea, even from the woman's
point of view, not from want of heart but from
want of brains to understand another's life. Is she
not a doll ? and does not the very essence of her
dollhood lie in this want of perceptive faculty both
for things and feelings? What are the hot flushes of
passion, the bitter tears of grief, the frenzy of despair,
to her ? She sees them ; and she wonders that people
can be so silly as to make themselves and her so
uncomfortable ; but of the depth of the anguish they
express she knows no more than does her waxen
prototype when little missy sobs over it in her arms
and confides her sorrows to its deaf ears. Whatever
anxieties oppress her husband, he must keep them to
himself, he cannot share them with her ; and the last
shred of his credit, like the last effort of his strength,
must be employed in maintaining his toy wife in the
fool's paradise where alone she can make her habi-
tation. Many a man's back has broken under the
strain of such a burden ; and many a ruined fortune
might have been held together and repaired when
damaged, had it not been for the exigencies and
necessities of the liviug doll, who had to be spared
all want or inconvenience at the cost of everything
DOLLS. 237
else. How many men are groaning in spirit at this
moment over the infatuation that made them sacrifice
the whole worth of life for the sake of a pretty face
and a plastic manner !
The doll woman is as helpless practically as she
is useless morally. If she is in personal danger, she
either faints or becomes dazed, according to her
physiological conditions. Sometimes she is hyste-
rical and frantic, and then she is actively trouble-
some. In general, however, she is just so much dead
weight on hand, to be thought for as well as pro-
tected; a living corpse to be carried on the shoulders
of those who are struggling for their own lives. She
can foresee no possibilities, measure no distances,
think of no means of escape. Never quick nor ready,
pressure paralyzes such wits as she possesses ; and it
is not from selfishness so much as from pure incapa-
city to help herself or to serve others that the poor
doll falls down in a helpless heap of self- surrender,
and lets her very children perish before her eyes
without making an effort to protect them.
As a mother indeed, the doll woman is perhaps
more unsatisfactory than in any other character. She
gives up her nursery into the absolute keeping of her
nurse, and does not attempt to control nor to interfere.
This again, is not from want of affection, but from
want of capacity. In her tepid way she has a heart,
if only half- vitalized like the rest of her being ; and
she is by no means cruel. Indeed, she has not force
enough to be cruel nor wicked anyhow ; her worst
238 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
offence being a passive kind of selfishness, not from
greed but from inactivity, by which she is made
simply useless for the general good. As for her
children, she understands neither their moral nature
nor their physical wants ; and beyond a universal
' Oh, naughty ! ' if the little ones express their lives
in the rampant manner proper to young things, or
as a universal ' Oh, let them have it ! ' if there is a
howl over what is forbidden or unwise, she has no
idea of discipline or management. If they teaze her,
they are sent away; if they are naughty, they are
whipped by papa or nurse ; if they are ill, the doctor
is summoned and they have medicine as he directs ;
but none of the finer and more intimate relations
usual between mother and child exist in the home of
the doll mother. The children are the property of
the nurse only ; unless indeed the father happens to
be a specially afi*ectionate and a specially domestic
man, and then he does the work of the mother — at
the best clumsily, but at the worst better than the
doll could have done it.
Very shocking and revolting are all the more
tragic facts of human life to the smooth- skinned easy-
going doll. When it comes to her own turn to bear
pain, she wonders how a good God can permit her
to suffer. Had she brains enough to think, the great
mystery of pain would make her atheistical in her
angry surprise that she should be so hardly dealt
with. As dolls have a constitutional immunity from
suffering, her first initiation into even a minor amount
DOLLS. 239
of anguish is generally a tremendous affair; and
though it may be pain of a quite natural and uni-
versal character, she is none the less indignant and
astonished at her portion. She invariably thinks
herself worse treated than her sisters, and cannot be
made to understand that others suffer as much as,
and more than, herself As she has always shrunk
from witnessing trouble of any kind, and as what
she may have seen has passed over her mind without
leaving any impression, she comes to her own sorrows
totally inexperienced ; and one of the most pitiable
sights in the world is that of a poor doll woman
writhing in the grasp of physical agony, and broken
down or rendered insanely impatient by what other
women can bear without a murmur.
When she is in the presence of the moral tra-
gedies of life, she is as lost and bewildered as she
is with the physical. All sin and crime are to her
odd and inexplicable. She cannot j)ity the sinner,
because she cannot understand the temptation ; and
she cannot condemn from any lofty standpoint,
because she has not mind enough to see the full
meaning of iniquity. It is simply something out of
the ordinary run of her life, and the doll naturally
dislikes disturbance, whether of habit or of thought.
Yet if a noted criminal came and sat down by her,
she would probably whisper to her next friend,
*How shocking!' but she would simper when he
spoke, and perhaps in her heart feel flattered by the
attention of even so doubtful a notoriety. If she be
240 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
a doll with a bias towards naughtiness, the utmost
limit to which she can go is a mild kind of curiosity
about the outsides of things — the mere husk and
rind of the forbidden fruit — such as wondering how
such and such people look who have done such
dreadful things ; and what they felt the next morn-
ing ; and how could they ever come to think of such
horrors ! She would be more interested in hearing
about the dress and hair and eyes of the female
plaintiff or defendant in a famous cause than many
other women would be; but she would not give
herself the trouble to read the evidence, and she
would take all her opinions secondhand. But whether
the colour of the lady's gown was brown or blue,
and whether she wore her hair wisped or plaited,
would be matters in which she would take as mtense
an interest as is possible to her.
The utmost limit to which enthusiasm can be
carried with her is in the matter of dress and
fashion ; and the only subject that thoroughly
arouses her is the last new colour, or the latest
eccentricity of costume. Talk to her of books, and
she will go to sleep ; even novels, her sole reading,
she forgets half an hour after she has turned the
last page ; while of any other kind of literature she
is as profoundly ignorant as she is of mathematics ;
but she can discuss the mysteries of fashion with
something like animation, these being to her what
the wire is to the eyes of the dolls in the bazaar.
Else she has no power of conversation. At the head
DOLLS. 241
of her own table she sits like a pretty waxen dummy,
and can only simper out a few commonplaces, or
simper without the commonplaces, satisfied if she is
well appointed and looks lovely, and if her husband
seems tolerably contented with the dinner. She is
more in her element at a ball, where she is only asked
to dance and not wanted to talk ; but her ball-room
days do not last for ever, and when they are over
she has no available retreat.
If a rich doll woman is a mistake, a poor one who
has been rich is about the greatest infliction that can
be laid on a sufFerinsf household. Not all the teach-
ing of experience can make wax and glue into flesh
and blood, and nothing can train the human doll into
a dignified or a capable womanhood. She still dresses
in faded finery — which she calls keeping up appear-
ances ; and still has pretensions which no ' inexorable
logic of facts' can destroy. She spends her money
on sweets and ribbons and ignores the family need
for meat and calico; and she sits by the fireside
dozing over a trashy novel, while her children are in
rags and her house is given over to disorder. But
then she has a craze for the word ' lady-like,' and thinks
it synonymous with ignorance and helplessness. She
abhors the masculine-minded woman who helps her
— sister, cousin, daughter — so far as she can abhor
anything ; but she is glad to lean on her strength,
despite this abhorrence, and, while grumbling at her
masculinity, does not disdain to take advantage of
her power. The doll is only passively disagreeable
VOL. I. K
242 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
though ; and for all that she carps under her breath,
will rem am in any position in which she is placed.
She will not act, but she will let you act unhindered ;
which is something gained when you have to deal
with fools.
This quiescence of hers passes with the world for
plasticity and amiability; it is neither; it is simply
indolence and want of originating force. While she
is young, she is nice enough to those who care only
for a pretty face and a character founded on negatives ;
but when a man's pride of life has gone, and he has
come into the phase of weakness, or under the harrow
of affliction, or into the valley of the shadow of death,
then she becomes in sorrowful truth the chain and
bullet which make him a galley-slave for the re-
mainder of his days, and which sign him to drudgery
and despair.
As an old woman the doll has not one charm.
She has learned none of that handiness, come to none
of that grand maternal power of helping others, which
should accompany maturity and age and has still to
be thought for and protected, to the exclusion of the
younger and naturally more helpless, as when she
was young herself, and beautiful and fascinating, and
men thought it a privilege to suffer for her sake.
Nine times out of ten she has lost her temper as well
as her complexion, and has become peevish and un-
reasonable. She gets fat and rouges ; but she will
not consent to get old. She takes to false hair, dyes,
padded stays, arsenic or ' anti-fat,' and to artful con-
DOLLS. 243
trivances of every description ; but alas ! there is no
'dolly's hospital' for her as there used to be for her
battered old prototype in the nursery lumber- closet ;
and, whether she likes it or not, she has to succumb
to the inevitable decree, and to become faded, worn
out, unlovely, till the final coup de grace is given
and the poor doll is no more. Poor, weak, frivolous
doll ! it requires some faith to believe that she is of
any good whatsoever in this overladen life of ours ;
but doubtless she has her final uses, though it would
puzzle a Sanhedrim of wise men to discover them.
Perhaps in the great readjustment of the future she
may have her place and her work assigned to her in
some inter-stellar Phalansterie ; when the meaning of
her helpless earthly existence shall be made manifest
and its absurd uselessness atoned for by some kind of
celestial ' charing.'
R 2
244 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
CHARMING WOMEN.
There are certain women who are invariably spoken
of as charming. We never hear any other epithet
applied to them. They are not said to be pretty, nor
amiable, nor clever, though they may be all three, but
simply charming ; which we may take as a kind of
verbal amalgam — the concentration and concretion of
all praise. The main feature about these charming
women is their intense feminality. There is no blur-
ring of the outlines here ; no confusion of qualities
admirable enough in themselves but slightly out of
place considering the sex; no Amazonian virtues
which leave one in doubt as to whether we have not
before us Achilles in petticoats rather than a true
Pyrrha or a more tender Deidamia.
A charming woman is woman all over — one who
places her glory in being a woman and has no desire
to be anything else. She is a woman rather than a
human being, and a lady rather than a woman. One
of her characteristics is the exquisite grace of her
manner which so sweetly represents the tender nature
within. She has not an angle anywhere. If she were
to be expressed geometrically, Hogarth's Line of
CHARMING WOMEN. 245
Beauty is the sole figure that could be used for her.
She is flowing, graceful, bending in mind as in body ;
she is neither self- asserting nor aggressive, neither
rigid nor narrow ; she is a creature who glides grace-
fully through life, and adjusts herself to her company
and her circumstances in a manner little less than
marvellous ; working her own way without tumult
or sharpness ; creeping round the obstacles she can-
not overthrow, and quietly wearing down more friable
opposition with that gentle persistency which does so
much more than turmoil and disturbance.
Even if enthusiastic— which she is for art, either
as music, as painting, or yet as poetry — she is en-
thusiastic in such a sweet and graceful way that no
one can be offended by a fire which shines and does
not burn. There is no touch of scorn about her and
no assumption of superior knowledge. She speaks to
you, poor ignorant Philistine, with the most flattering
conviction that you follow her in all her flights ;
and when she comes out, quite naturally, with her
pretty little bits of recondite lore or professional tech-
nicalities, you cannot be so boorish as to ask for an
explanation of these trite matters which she makes
so sure you must understand. Are you not an
educated person with a soul to be saved? can you
then be ignorant of things with which every one of
culture is familiar ? She discourses confidentially
of musicians and painters unknown to fame, and
speaks as if she knew the secret doings of the Con-
servatoire and the R.A. council -chamber alike. The
246 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
models and the methods, the loves and the hates, of
the artistic world are to her things of everyday life,
and you cannot tell her that she is shooting her
delicate shafts wide of the mark, and that you know
no more of what she means than if she were talking:
in the choicest Arabic.
If she has been abroad — and she generally has
been more or less — she will pour out her tender
little rhapsodies about palazzi and musei of which
you have never heard, but every room of which she
assumes you know by heart ; and she will speak
of out-of-the-way churches, and grim old castles
perched upon vine- clad mounts, as if you were as
well acquainted with them as with your native ham-
let. She will bring into her discourse all manner of
Italian technicalities, as if you understood the sub-
ject as well as she herself understands it ; though
your learning is limited to a knowledge of how much
has been done in jute and tallow this last half year,
or how many pockets of hops went off in the market
last week. If she has a liking for high life and titles
— and what charming woman has not? — she will
mention the names of all manner of counts and dukes
and monsignori unknown to English society, as
though they were her brothers ; but if you were to
interrupt the gentle ripple of her speech with such
rude breakwaters as ' who ?' and ' what ?' the charm-
ing woman would thmk you a horrid bore — and no
man would willingly face that humiliation. One may
be a rhinoceros in one's own haunts, but, as the fable
CHARMING WOMEN. 247
tells us, even rhinoceroses are ashamed of their
parentage when among gazelles.
Never self-asserting, never contradictory, only
sweetly and tenderly putting you right when you
blunder, the charming woman nevertheless always
makes you feel her superiority. True, she lays her-
self as it were at your feet and gives you a thousand
delicate flatteries — indeed among her specialities is
that of being able to set you on good terms with
yourself by her art of subtle flattery ; but despite
her own self-abasement and your exaltation you
cannot but feel her superiority; and, although she is
too charmino; to acknowleds^e what would wound
your pride, you know that she feels it too, and tries
to hide it. All of which has the effect of snaking
you admire her still more for her gTace and tact.
The charming woman is generally notoriously in
love with her husband, who is almost always inferior
to her in birth, acquirements, manner, appearance.
This TitaniaJike affection of hers only shows her
feminine qualities of sacrifice and wifely devotion to
greater advantage, and makes other men envy more
ferociously the lucky fellow who has drawn such a
prize. The husband of a charming woman is indeed
lucky in the world's esteem ; no man more so. Though
he may be one of the most ordinary, perhaps unplea-
sant, fellows you know, with a sour face, an underbred
air, and by no means famous in his special sphere,
his wife speaks of him enthusiastically as so good, so
clever, so delightful ! No one knows how good he
248 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
is, she says ; though of course he has his little
peculiarities of temper and the rest of it, and perhaps
every one would not bear with them as she does. But
then she knows him, and knows his wonderful worth
and value ! If they are not seen much together, that
comes from causes over which they have no control,
not from anything like disinclination to each other's
society. Certainly, for so happy a marriage, it is a
little surprising how very seldom they are together ;
and how all her friends are hers only and not his, and
how much she goes into society without him. On
the whole, counting hours, they live very much more
apart than united ; but that is the misfortune of his
career, of his health, or of hers — a misfortune due to
any cause but that of diversity of tastes, inharmoni-
ousness of pursuits, or lack of love.
Full of home affection and the tenderest sentiment
as she is, the charming woman does sometimes the
oddest-looking things, which a rough little domestic
creature without graceful pretensions would not dream
of doing. Her child is lying dangerously ill, perhaps
dying, and she appears at the grand ball of the season,
subdued certainly — how well that sweet melancholy
becomes her ! — but always graceful, always thought-
ful for others, and attentive to the minutest detail
of her social duties. And though indeed, she Avill
tell you, she does not know how she got dressed
at all, because of the state of cruel anxiety in which
she is, yet she is undeniably the best dressed woman
in the room and the most carefully appointed. It
CHARMING WOMEN. 249
is against her own will that she is there, you may
be sure ; but she has been forced to sacrifice herself,
and tear herself away for an hour. The exigencies of
society are so merciless ! — the world is such a terrible
Juggernaut ! she says, raising her eyes with plaintive
earnestness to yours in the breathing- times of the
waltz.
She has another trial if her husband is ordered
out to Canada or the West Indies. Dearly as she
loves him, and though she is heart-broken at the idea
of the separation, yet her health cannot stand the
climate ; and she must obey her doctor's orders. She
is so delicate, you know — all charming women are
delicate— and the doctor tells her she could not live
six months either in Toronto or Port Royal. If her
lord and master had to go on diplomatic service to
St. Petersburg or Madrid, she might be able to stand
the climate then; but that is different. A dull
station, without any of her favourite pleasures, would
be more than she could bear ; so she remains behind,
goes out into society, and writes her husband tender
and amusing letters once a month.
The charming woman is the gentlest of her sex.
She would not do a cruel tiling nor say an unkind word
for the world. When she tells you the unpleasant
things which ill-natured people have said of your
friends or hers, she tells them in the sweetest and
dearest way imaginable. She is so sure there is not a
syllable of truth in it all ; and what a shame it is that
people should be so ill-natured ! In the gentle tone
250 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
of sympathy and deprecation peculiar to her, she gives
you all the ugly and uncomfortable reports which have
come to her, and of which you have never heard a
breath until this moment. Yet it is you who are
stupid, not she who is initiative, for she tells them
to you as if they were of patent notoriety to the
whole world ; only she does not believe them, re-
member! She takes the most scrupulous care to
deny and defend as she retails, and you cannot
class her with the tribe of the ill-natured whom she
censures, setting, as she does, the whole strength of
her gentle words and generous disbelief in opposi-
tion to these ugly rumours. Yet you wish she had
not told you. Her disclaimers spring so evidently
from the affectionate amiability of her own mind,
which cannot bear to think evil, that they have not
much effect upon you. The excuse dies away from
your memory, but the ill- savoured report roots ; and
you feel that you have lost your respect for your
former friends for ever ; or, if they were only hers,
then, that nothing should tempt you to know them.
There is no smoke without some fire, you think ; and
the charming woman cannot possibly have kindled the
flame herself out of sticks and leaves and rubbish of
her own collecting. But how sweet and charitable
she was when she told you ! how much you love her
for her tenderness of nature! what a guileless and
delightful creature she is !
The charming woman is kind and graceful, but
she does not command the stronger virtues. She
CHARMING WOMEN. 251
flatters sweetly, but, it must be confessed, she fibs as
sweetly. She sometimes owns to this, but only to
fibs that do more good than harm — fibs into the
utterance of which she is forced for the sake of peace
and to avoid mischief It is a feminine privilege, she
says ; and men agree with her. Truth at all times —
bold, uncompromising, stern-faced truth — is coarse
and indelicate she says ; a masculine quality as little
fitted for women as courage or great bodily strength.
Her husband knows that she fibs ; her friends at
tiuies find her out too ; but though the women throw
it at her as an accusation, the men accept it as a
quality without which she would be less the charming
woman that she is ; and not only forgive it, but like
her the better for the grace and tact and suppleness
she displays in the process of manufacture. Hers are
not the severer virtues, but the gentler, the more
insinuating ; and absolute truth — truth at any price
and on all occasions — does not come into the list.
Charming women, with their plastic manners and
non-aggressive force, always have their own way in
the end. They are the women who influence by
unseen methods and who shrink from any open dis-
play of power. They know that their metier is to
soothe men, to put them on good terms with them-
selves, and so to get the benefit of the good humour
they induce ; and they dread nothing so much as a
contest of wills. They coax and flatter for their
rights, and consequently they are given privileges in
excess of their rio-hts ; whereas the women who take
252 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
their rights, as things to which they are entitled
without favour, lose them and their privileges together.
This art of self-abasement for future exaltation is one
which it is given only to few to carry to perfection,
but no woman is really charming without it. In fact
it is part of her power ; and she knows it. Though
charming women are decidedly the favourites with
men, they are careful to keep on good terms with
their own sex ; and in society you may often see
them almost ostentatiously surrounded by women
only, whom they take pains to please or exert them-
selves to amuse, but whom they throw into the shade
in the most astonishing way.
Whatever these really charming women are, or do,
or wear, is exactly the right thing ; and every other
woman fails in proportion to the distance she is
removed from this model. When a charmino^ woman
is dressed richly, the simpler costumes of her friends
look poor and mean ; when she is a la bergere, the
Court dresses about her are vulgar ; when she is gay,
quietness is dullness ; when she is quiet, laughter is
coarse. And there is no use in trying to imitate her.
She is the very Will-o'-the-wisp of her circle, and no
sooner shows her light here than she flits away there ;
she has no sooner set one fashion, which her admiring
friends have adopted with infinite pains and trouble,
than she has struck out a new one which renders all
the previous labour in vain. This is part of her very
essence ; and the originality which is simply perfec-
tion that cannot be repeated, and not eccentricity that
CHARMING WOMEN. 253
no one \vill imitate, comes in as one of the finest and
most potent of her charms. When she lends her
patterns to her friends, or tells them this or that little
secret, she laughs in her heart, knowing that she has
shown them a path they cannot possibly follow and
raised up a standard to which they cannot attain.
And even should they do either, then she knows that,
by the time they have begun to get up to her, she will
be miles away, and that no art whatever can approxi-
mate them to her as she is. What she was she tosses
among them as a worn-out garment ; what she is they
cannot be. She remains still the unapproachable, the
inimitable, the charming woman par excellence of her
set, whom none can rival.
254 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
APRON-STRimS,
Among other classifications, the world of men and
women may be divided into those who wear aprons
and those who are tied to the strings thereof — those
who determine the length of the tether and those
who are bound to browse within its circuit — those
who hold the reins and those who go bitted. All
men and women are fond of power, but there is a
wide difference in the ways in which they use it.
To men belong the grave political tyrannies at which
nations revolt and history is outraged, to women the
small conventional laws framed against individual
liberty by Mrs. Grundy and society ; men rule with
rods of iron and drive with whips of steel, women
shorten the tether and tie up close to apron-strings ;
men coerce, women forbid. In fact, the difference
is just that which lies between action and negation,
compulsion and restraint ; between the masculine
jealousy of equality and the feminine fear of excess.
If men debar women from all entrance into their
larger sphere, women try to dwarf men's lives to
their own measure, and not a few hold themselves
aggrieved when they fail. They think that every-
APRON-STRINGS. 255
thing which is impossible to them should be forbidden
to others, and they maintain that to be a lamentable
extreme which is simply in excess of their own
powers. Not content with supremacy in the home
which is their own undisputed domain, nor satisfied
with binding on men the various rules distinguishing
life in the drawing-room, the dining-room and the
breakfast-parlour, they would, if they could, carry
their code outside, and sweep into its narrow net
the club-house and the mess-table, the billiard-room
and the race-course, and wherever else men congregate
together — delivered from the bondage of feminine
conventionalities .
For almost all women have an uneasy feeling
when their men are out of sight, enjoying them-
selves in their own way. They fear on all sides —
both bodily harm and moral evil ; and regard men's
rougher sports and freer thoughts as a hen regards
her wilful ducklings when they take to the water
in which she would be drowned, and leave her hisrh
and dry lamenting their danger and self-destruc-
tion. The man they love best for his manliness
they would, in their loving cowardice, do their ut-
most to make effeminate ; and, while adoring him
for all that makes him bold and strong in thought
as well as in frame, they would tie him up to their
apron-strings, and keep him there till he became as
soft and narrow as themselves. Not that they would
wish to do so ; if you asked them they would tell
you quite the contrary. But this would be the
256 SATURDAY MOENINGS.
result if they had their own way, their love being
at all times more timid than confident.
To home-staying women, a brilliant husband
courted by the world and loving what courts him,
is a painful cross to bear, however much he may be
beloved — the pain, in fact, being proportionate to the
love. Perhaps no life exemplifies this so much as
Moore's. Poor "Bessy" sufiered many things be-
cause of the looseness of the apron- string by which
her roving husband was tied, and the length of the
tether which he allowed himself. Farfallone amoroso
as he was, his incessant flutterings out of range and
reach caused her many a sad hour ; and in after
years she was often heard to say that the happiest
time of her life was when his mind had begun to fail,
for then she had him all to herself and no one came
in between them — no great world swept him away
to be the idol of a salon^ and left her alone at home
casting up her accounts Avith life and love, and quak-
ing at the result that came out. When the brilliancy
and the idolatry came to an end, then her turn began ;
and she tied up her dulled and faltering idol close to
her side for ever after, and was happier to have him
there helpless, affectionate, dependent and imbecile
than when he was at his brightest — and a rover.
Many a wife has felt the same when sickness has
broken down the strong man's power to a weakness
below her own, and made her, so long the inferior,
now the more powerful of the two, and the supreme.
She gathers up the reins with that firm, tight hand
APRON-STRINGS. 257
peculiar to women, and ties her master to her apron-
string so that he cannot escape. It is quite a matter
of pride with her that she has got him into such good
order. He obeys her so implicitly about his medi-
cines, and going to bed early, and wrapping himself
up, and avoidance of draughts and night-air, that
she feels all the reflected glory of one who has con-
quered a hero. The Samson who used to defy the
elements and break her careful strings like bands of
tow, has at last laid his head in her lap and suffered
himself to be covered by her apron. It is worth
while to have had the anxiety and loss of his illness
for the sake of the submission resulting ; and she
generally ends by gaining a hold over him which he
can never shake off again.
It is pitiful though, to see the stronger life thus
dwarfed and bound. But women hke it ; and while
the need for it lasts men must submit. The danger
is lest the habit of the apron- string should become
permanent ; for it is so perilously pleasant to be
petted and made much of by women, that few
men can resist the temptation when it offers ; and
many have been rumed for the remainder of their
days by an illness which gave them up into the
keeping of wife and sisters — those fireside Armidas
who wiU coddle all the real manliness out of their
finest heroes, if they are let. If this kind of thing
occurs at the break of life, the mezzo cammino
between maturity and age, it is doubly difficult
to throw off; and many a man who had good
VOL. I. S
258 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
years of vigour and strength before him if he had
been kept up to the mark, sinks all at once into
senility because his womankmd got frightened at that
last small attack of his, and thought the best way to
preserve him from another was to weaken him by
over- care out of all wish for dangerous exposure.
Perhaps the greatest misfortune that can befall a
man is to have been an only son brought up by a
timid widow mother. It is easy to see at a glance,
among a crowd of boys, who has been educated
under exclusively feminine influence. The long curled
shining hair, the fantastic tunic — generally a kind
of hybrid between a tunic and a frock — the lavish
use of embroidery, the soft pretty- behaved manner,
the clean unroughened hands, all mark the boy of
whom his mother has so often wished that he had
been a girl, and whom she has made as much like a girl
as possible. His intellectual education has been as
unboylike as his daily breeding. Mothers' boys are
taught to play the piano, to amuse themselves with
painting, or netting, or perhaps a little woolwork in
the evenings — anything to keep them quietly seated
by the family table, without an outbreak of boyish
restlessness or inconvenient energy ; but they are
never taught to ride, to hunt, to shoot, to swim,
to play at cricket, football, nor billiards, unless a
stalwart uncle happens to be about who takes the
reins in his own hand at times, and insists on having
a word to say to his nephew's education.
There is danger in all, and evil in some, of
APRON-STRINGS. 259
these things ; and women cannot bear that those
they love should run the risk of either. Wherefore
their boys are modest and virtuous truly, but they
are not manly ; and when they go out into the
world, as they must sooner or later, they are either
laughed at for their priggishness, or they go to the
bad by the very force of reaction. The mother has
allowed them to learn nothing that will be of
solid use to them, and they enter the great arena
wholly unprepared either to fight or to resist, to push
their own way or to take their own part. They
have been kept tied up to the apron- string to the
last moment, and only when absolutely forced by the
necessity of events will she cut the knot and let
them go free. But she holds on to the last moment.
Even when the time comes for college-life and
learning, she often goes with her darling, and takes
lodgings in the town, that she may be near at hand
to watch over his health and morals, and continue
her careful labours for his destruction.
The chances are that a youth so brought up never
becomes a real man, nor worth his salt anyhow. He
is a prig if he is good, a debauchee of the worst kind
if he kicks over the traces at all. He is more likely
the first, carrying the mark of the apron- string round
his wrist for life. Like a tame falcon used to the
hood and the perch and the lure home, no matter
what the temptation of the quarry afield, he is essen-
tially a domestic man, at ease only in the society of
women ; a fussy man ; a small-minded man ; delicate
s 2
260 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
in health; with a dread of strong measures, physical,
political, or intellectual ; a crotchety man given to
passing quackeries ; but not a man fit for man's
society nor for man's work. When there are many
boys, instead of only one, in a widow's family, the
opposite of all this is the case. So soon as they have
escaped from the nursery, they have escaped from all
control whatsoever ; and if one wants to realize a
puerile pandemonium of dirt, discomfort, noise and
general disorganization, the best place in the world
is the household of a feeble- spirited mother of many
sons where there is no controlling masculine in-
fluence.
Daughters, who are naturally and necessarily tied
up to the mother's apron- string, suffer occasionally
from too tight a strain ; though certainly it is not
the fault of the present day that girls are too closely
fettered, too home- staying or subdued. Still, every
now and then one comes across a matron who has
crushed all individuality out of her family, and whose
grown-up daughters are still children to her in moral
go-carts and intellectual leading-strings. They may be
the least attractive of their sex, but a mother of this
kind has one fixed delusion respecting them — namely,
that the world is full of wolves eager to devour her
lambs, and that they are only safe when close to the
maternal apron and browsing within an inch of the
tether stake. These are the girls who become hope-
less old maids. Men have an instinctive dread of the
maternal apron- string. They do not want to marry
APRON-STBINGS. 261
a mother as well as a wife, and to live under a
double dominion and a reduplicated' opposition.
It is all very well to say that a girl so brought
up is broken in already, and therefore more likely to
make a good wife than many others, seeing that it
is only a transfer of obedience. That may do for
slaves who cannot be other than slaves whoever is
the master ; but it does not do for women who, seeing
their friends freer than themselves, reflect with grief
and longing that, had fate so ordered it, they might
have been free too. The chances here, as with the
mothers' boys, are, that the girl kept too close to the
apron- string during her spinsterhood goes all abroad
so soon as she gets on the free ground of matrimony,
and lets her liberty run into license. Or she keeps
her old allegiance to her mother intact, and her
husband is never more than the younger branch at
best. Most likely he is a usurper, whom it is her
duty to disobey in favour of the rightful ruler when
they chance to come into collision.
If women had their will, aU national enterprise
would be at an end. There would be no Arctic
Expeditions, no Alpine Clubs, no dangerous experi-
ments in science, no firearms at home, no volun-
teering — in their own family at least. All the danger
would be done by the husbands and brothers and
sons of other women, but each would guard her own.
For women cannot go beyond the mdividual ; and the
loss of one of their own, by misadventure, weighs
more with them than the necessity of keeping up
262 SATURDAY I^[OflNINGS.
the courage and hardihood of the nation. Nor do
they see the diff^ence between care and coddling,
refinement and effeminacy ; consequently, men are
obliged to resist their influence, and many cut the
apron- string altogether, because delicate fingers will
tie the knots too tight. They do not remember that
the influence to which men yield as a voluntary act
of their own grace is a very different thmg from
obedience to the open denial, the undisguised inter-
ference and restramt, which some women like to show.
Men respect the higher standard of morality kept up
by women ; they obey the major and the minor laws
of refinement which are framed for home life and
for society ; and they confess that, without woman's
influence, they would soon degenerate into mere
savages and be no better than so many Choctaws
before a generation was over ; but they do not like
being pulled up short, especially in pubhc, and
hounded into the safe sheepfold for all the world to
see them run. And they resent the endeavour. And
the world resents it too, and feels that something is
wrong when a woman shows that she has the whip
hand, and that she can treat her husband like a petted
child or bully hun like a refractory one ; that she
has him tied to her apron-strings and tethered to the
stake of her will. But there is more of this kind of
thing in families than the world at large always
knows of; and many a fine, stalwart fellow who
holds his own among men, who is looked up to at
ApnoN-STRmGs. 263
his club and respected in his office for his courage,
decision and self-reliance, sinks into mere poodledom
at home, where his wife has somehow managed to
get hold of the leading-strings, and has taught him
that the only way to peace is by submission and
obedience.
264 SATUEDAY MORNINGS.
FINE FEELINGS.
There are people who pride themselves on the pos-
session of what it pleases them to call fine feelings.
Perhaps, if we were all diligent to call spades spades,
these same fine feelings would come under a less
euphemistic heading ; but, as thmgs are, we may as
well adopt the softening gloze that is spread over the
whole of our language, and call them by a pretty
name with the rest. People who possess fine feelings
are chiefly remarkable for the ease with which they
take oflPence ; it being indeed impossible, even for the
most wary of their associates, to avoid giving umbrage
in some shape, and generally when least intended and
most innocently minded. Nothing satisfies them.
No amount of attention, short of absolute devotion
and giving them the place of honour everywhere,
sets them at ease with themselves or keeps them in
good-humour. If you ask them to your house, you
must not dream of mixing them up with the rest.
Though you have done them an honour in askmg
them at all, you must give them a marked position
and bear them on your hands for the evening. They
must be singled out fi:om the herd and specially
FINE FEELINGS. 2Qb
attended to ; introduced to the nicest people ; made
a fuss with and taken care of ; else they are offended,
and feel they have been slighted — their sensitiveness
or fine feelings being a kind of Chat Moss which will
swallow up any quantity of petits soins that may be
thrown in, and yet never be filled. If they are your
intimate friends, you have to ask them on every
occasion on which you receive. They make it a
grievance if they hear that you have had even a
dinner party without inviting them, though your
space is limited and you had them at your last
gathering. Still, if it comes to their ears that you
have had friends and did not include them, they will
come down on you to a dead certainty if they are
of the franker kind, and ask you seriously, perhaps
pathetically, how they have offended you ? If they
are of the sullen sort they will meet you coldly,
or pass you by without seeing you ; and will either
drift into a permanent estrangement or come round
after a time, according to the degree of acidity m their
blood and the amount of tenacity in their character.
They have lost their friends many times for no worse
offence than this.
They are as punctilious too, as they are exacting.
They demand visit for visit, invitation for invitation,
letter for letter. Though you may be overwhelmed
with serious work, while they have no weightier
burden strapped to their shoulders than their social
duties and social fineries, yet you must render point
for point with them, keeping an exact tally with not
266 SATUKDAY- MOKNINGS.
a notch too many on their side, if you want to retain
their acquaintance at all. And they must be always
invited s]Decially and individually, even to your
open days ; else they will not come at all ; and their
fine feelings will be hurt. They sufi*er no liberties
to be taken with them and they take none with
others ; counting all frock-coat friendliness as taking
liberties, and holding themselves refined and you
coarse if you think that manners sans facon are
pleasanter than those which put themselves eternally
into stays and stifi* buckram, and are never in more
undress than a Court suit. They will not go into
your house to wait for you, however intimate they
may be ; and they would resent it as an intrusion,
perhaps an impertinence, if you went into theirs in
their absence. If you are at luncheon when they
call, they stiffly leave thefr cards and turn away ;
though you have the heartiest, j oiliest manner of
housekeeping going, and keep a kind of open house
for luncheon casuals. They do not understand
heartiness or a jolly manner of housekeeping ; open
houses are not in their line and they will not be
luncheon casuals ; so they turn away grimly, and if
you want to see them you have to send your servant
panting down the street after them, when, their
dignity being satisfied, their sensitiveness smoothed
down and their fine feehngs reassured, they will
graciously turn back and do what they might have
done at first without all this fuss and fume.
When people who possess fine feelings are poor,
FINE FEELINGS. 267
their sensitiveness is indeed a cross both for them-
selves and their friends to bear. If yon try to show
them a kindness or do them a service, they fly ont at
you for patronizing them, and say you humiliate them
by treating them as paupers. You may do to your
rich acquaintances a hundred things which you dare
not attempt with your poor friends cursed with fine
feelings ; and little offices of kindness, which pass
as current coin through society, are construed into
insults with them. Difficult to handle in every phase,
they are in none more dangerous to meddle with
than when poor, though they are as bad if they have
become successful after a period of struggle. Then
your attention to them is time-serving, bowing to the
rising sun, worshipping the golden calf, &c. Else
why did you not seek them out when they were
poor ? Why were you not cap in hand when they
went bare-headed ? Why have you waited until they
were successful before you recognized then' value ?
It is fiinny to hear how bitter these sensitive folks
are when they have come out into the sunlight of
success after the dark passage of poverty ; as if it had
been possible to dig them out of their obscurity when
their name was still to make — as if the world could
recognize its prophets before they had spoken. But
this admission into the penetralia after success is a
very delicate point with people of fine feelings, sup-
posing always the previous struggle to have been hard ;
and even if there has been no struggle to speak of, then
there are doubts and misgivings as to whether they are
268 SATURDAY MOENINGS.
liked for themselves or not, and morbid speculations on
the stability and absolute value of the position they
hold and the attentions they receive, and endless sur-
mises of what would be the result if they lost their
fame or wealth or political power or social standing —
or whatever may be the hook whereon their success
hangs, and their fine feelings are impaled. The act
of wisdom most impossible to be performed by these
self-torturers is the philosophic acceptance of life as it
is and of things as they fall naturally to their share.
Women remarkable for fine feelings are also
remarkable for that uneasy distrust, that insatiable
craving which continually requu^es reassuring and
allaying. As wives or lovers they never take a
man's love, once expressed and loyally acted on, as a
certainty, unless constantly repeated ; hence they are
always pouting or bemoaning their loveless condition,
getting up pathetic scenes of tender accusation or
sorrowful acceptance of coolness and desertion, which
at the first may have a certain charm to a man because
flattering to his vanity, but which pall on him after
a short time, and end by annoying and alienatmg
him; thus bringing about the very catastrophe which
was deprecated before it existed.
Another characteristic with women of fine feelings
is their inability to bear the gentlest remonstrance,
the most shadowy fault-finding. A rebuke of any
gravity throws them into hysterics on the spot ; but
even a request to do what they have not been in
the habit of doing, or to abstain from doing that
FINE FEELINGS. 269
which they have used themselves to do, is more
than they can endure with dry-eyed equanimity.
You have to live with them in the fool's paradise
of perfectness, or you are made to feel yourself an
unmitigated brute. You have before you the two
alternatives of suffering many things which are dis-
agreeable and which might easily be remedied, or
of having your wife sobbing in her own room
and going about the house with red eyes and an
expression of exasperating patience under ill-treat-
ment, far worse to bear than the most passionate
retahation. Indeed women may be divided broadly
into those who cry and those who retort when they
are found fault with ; which, with a side section of those
wooden women who ^ don't care,' leaves a very small
percentage indeed of those who can accept a rebuke
good-temperedly, and simply try to amend a failing
or break off an unpleasant habit, without parade of
submission and sweet Griseldadom unjustly chastised,
but kissing the rod with aggravating meekness.
For there are women who can make their meek-
ness a more potent weapon of offence than any
passion or violence could give. They do not cry,
neither do they complain, but they exaggerate
their submission till you are driven half mad under
the slow torture they inflict. They look at you so
humbly ; they speak to you in so subdued a voice,
when they speak to you at all, which is rarely and
never unless first addressed ; they avoid you so
pointedly, hurrying away if you are going to meet
270 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
them about the house, on the pretext of being hateful
to your sight and doing you a service by ridding you
of their presence ; they are so ostentatiously careftil
that the thing of which you mildly complained under
some circumstances shall never happen again imder
any circumstances, that you are forced at last out
of your entrenchments, and obliged to come to an
explanation. You ask them what is amiss ? or,
what do they mean by their absurd conduct ? and
they answer you ' Nothing,' with an injured au' or
affected suq^rise at your query. What have they
done that you should speak to them so harshly ?
They are sure they have done all they could to please
you, and they do not know what right you have to
be vexed with them agam. They have kept out of
your way and not said a word to annoy you ; they
have only tried to obey you and to do as you ordered,
and yet you are not satisfied ! ^Tiat can they do to
please you ? and why is it that they never can please
yoti whatever they do ? You get no nearer your end
by this kind of thing ; and the only way to bring
your Griselda to reason is by having a row : when
she will cry bittery, but finally end by kissing and
making up. You have to go through the process.
Xothing else, save a sudden disaster or an tmex-
pected pleasure of large dimensions, will save you
from it ; but as we cannot always command earth-
quakes nor godsends, and as the first are dangerous
and the last costly, the short and easy method
remaining is to have a decisive * understanding,^
FINE FEELINGS. 271
which means a scene and a domestic tempest with
smooth sailing till the next time.
Sometimes fine feelings are hurt by no greater
barbarity than that which is contained in a joke.
People with fine feelings are seldom able to take a
joke ; and you will hear them relating, with an in-
jured accent and as a serious accusation, the merest
bit of nonsense you flung off at random, with no more
intention of wounding them than had the merchant
the intention of putting out the Efreet's eye when he
flung his date-stones in the desert. As you cannot
deny what you have said, they have the whip-hand
of you for the moment ; and all you can hope for is
that the friend to whom they detail their grievance
will see through them and it, and understand the
joke if they cannot. Then there are fine feelings
which express themselves in exceeding irritation at
moral and intellectual diff'erences of opinion — fine
feelings bound up in questions of faith and sound-
ness of doctrine, having taken certain moral and
theological views under their especial patronage and
holding all diversity of judgment therefrom a personal
ofi'ence. The people thus afilicted are exceedingly
uncomfortable folks to deal with, and manage to
make every one else uncomfortable too. You hurt
their feelings so continually and so unconsciously,
that you might as well be living in a region of steel -
traps and spring-guns, and set to walk blindfold
among pitfalls and water-holes. You fling your
date-stone here too, quite carelessly and thinking no
272 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
e\al, and up starts the Efreet who swears you have
injured him intentionally. You express an opinion
without attaching any particular importance to it,
but you hurt the fine feelings which oppose it, and
unless you wish to have a quarrel you must retract
or apologize. As the worst temper always carries
the day, and as fine feelings are only bad tempers
under another name, you very probably do apologize ;
and so the matter ends.
Other people show their fineness of feeling by
their impatience of pain and the tremendous griev-
ance they think it that they should suffer as others
— they say, so much more than others. These are
the people who are great on the theory of nervous
differences, and who maintain that their cowardice and
impatience of suffering means an organization like an
iEolian harp for sensibility. The oddest part of the
business is the sublime contempt which these sensi-
tives have for other persons' patience and endurance,
and how much more refined and touching they think
their own puerile sensibility. But this is a charac-
teristic of humanity all through ; the masquerading
of evil under the name of good being one of the
saddest facts of an imperfect nature and a confused
system of morals. If all things showed their faces
without disguise, we should have fine feelings placed
in a different category from that in which they stand
at this moment, and the world would be the richer by
just so much addition of truth.
273
SPHINXES.
There are people to whom mystery is the very
breath of life and the main element of their exist-
ence. Without it they are insignificant nobodies ;
by its aid they are magnified into vague and perhaps
awful potentialities. They are the people who take
the Sphinx for their model, and like her, speak
darkly and in parables ; making secrets of every- day
matters which would be patent to the whole world
in their simplicity, but which, by the magic of enig-
matic handling, become riddles that the curious would
give their lives to unravel.
Nothing mth these people is confessed and above
board, and nothing is shown openly so that you may
look at it all round and judge for yourself what it is
like and what it is worth. The utmost they do is to
uncover just a corner of something they keep back m
the bulk, tantalizing you with glimpses that bewilder
and mislead ; or they will dangle before you the end
of a clue which they want you to take up and follow,
making you believe that you will be guided thereby
into the very heart of a mystery, and that you will
find a treasure hidden in the centre of the maze which
VOL. I. T
274 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
will abundantly repay you for the trouble of hunting it
out. Nine times out of ten you will find nothing but a
scarecrow of no more value than the rags of which it
is composed — if even you find that. They are the
people who repeat to you the most trivial things you
may have said, and who remind you of the most
unimportant thuigs you may have done, years ago,
all of which you have totally forgotten; but they
will speak of them in a mysterious manner, as if
they had been matters of vital meanmg at the time
— things which would open, if followed up, a page
in your private history that it were better should be
forgotten. As it is a question of memory, you can-
not deny pomt- blank what they afiirm ; and as we
all have pages of private history which we would
rather not hear read aloud at the market-cross, you
are obliged to accept their highly suggestive recol-
lections with a queer feeling of helplessness and being
somehow in their power — not knowing how much
they are really acquainted with your secret afi*airs,
nor whether the signal they have flashed before your
eyes is a feint or a revelation.
Of the same sort, with a difference, are those who
are always going to tell you something some day —
people burdened with a perennial mystery which
never sees the light. You are for ever tormented
with these folks' possibilities of knowledge. You
turn over in your own mind every cu^cumstance that
you think they could have got hold of; you cun-
nino-ly subject all your common friends to crafty
SPHINXES. 275
cross-examination ; yon go, link by link, through
the whole chain connecting you with them ; but you
can find nothins; that leads to the mere outskirts of
the mystery. You can make nothing of it ; and your
sphinx goes on to the end promising some day to tell
you something which dies with him untold. Your
only consolation is the inner conviction that there
was nothing to tell after all.
Then there are sphinxes of a more personal kind — -
people who keep their affairs a profound secret from
every one, who wash all their dirty linen scru-
pulously at home and double-lock the door of the
cupboard where the fanaily skeleton lives. They are
dungeons of silence, unfathomable abysses of reserve.
You never know more of them, mind nor estate, than
what you can learn from the merest outside of things.
Look back, and you cannot recollect that you have
ever heard them speak of their family or of their
early days ; and you are not acquainted with a living
soul with whom they are connected. You may visit
them for years without knowing that such and such
a friend is their cousin, or maybe their sister. If
they are unmarried men, they have no address save
at their club ; and neither you nor then* most inti-
mate friends have an idea where they sleep. For
all you know to the contrary they may be married,
with a fine flourishing family snugly stowed away in
some suburban villa, where perhaps they live under
another name, or with the omission or addition of a
title that effectually masks their real individuality.
T 2
276 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
If this is their special manifestation of sphinxhood,
they take as many precautions against being identified
as a savage when out on a scouting expedition. They
obhterate all traces of themselves so soon as they
leave their office in the City, and take it as a terrible
misfortune if the truth is ever discovered; though
there is nothing disgraceful in their circumstances, and
their wives and children are healthy and presentable.
Most of us have been startled by the sudden
discovery, in our own circle of friends, of the wife
and children of some member of our society hitherto
supposed to be a bachelor and unshackled. All the
time that we have been joking him on his celibacy
and introducing him to various young ladies likely
to make good wives if properly taught, he has been
living in the holy estate a little way out of town,
where he is at last stumbled on by some CEdipus
who tells the secret to all the world and blows
the mystery to the winds. We may be very sure
that the officious OEdipus in question gets no
thanks for his pains, and that the sphinx he has
unmasked would rather have gone on living in con-
genial secrecy with his unacknowledged family in
that remote suburban villa, than be forced into pub-
licity and recognition. Leading two lives and per-
sonating two men— the one as imagined by his friends,
the other as known to his belongings — was a kind of
existence he liked infinitely better than the common-
place respectability of being en evidence throughout.
With certain sphinxes, no one but the officials
SPHINXES. 277
concerned ever knows what they have done, where
they have served, what laurels they have gained. It
comes out quite by accident that they were in the
Crimea, where, like Jack Poyntz in School^ they were
heroes in their own way, though they don't talk
about it ; or that they performed prodigies of valour
in the Indian Mutiny and obtained the Victoria
Cross, which they never wear. This kind has at
least the merit of being unboastful ; keeping their
virtues hidden like the temple which the real sphinx
held between her paws, and to which only those had
access who knew the secret of the way. But though
it is hateful to hear a man blowing his own trumpet
in season and out of season, yet it is pleasant to
know the good deeds of one's neighbours, and to
have the power of admiring what is worthy of admi-
ration. Besides, modesty and mystery are not the
same things ; and there is a mean to be found between
the secrecy of a sphinx making riddles of common-
place matters, and the cackle of a hen when she has
laid an Qgg for the family breakfast.
The monetary or financial sphmx is one of
the oddest of the whole tribe and one of the most
mysterious. There are people who live on noto-
riously small incomes — such as the widows, say, of
naval or military men, whose pensions are printed
in blue-books and of whose yearly receipts the
world can take exact cognizance — yet who dress in
velvet and satin, perpetually go about in cabs and
hired carriages, and are never without money to
278 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
spend, though always complaining of poverty. How
these financial sphinxes manage surpasses the under-
standing of every one ; and by what royal road they
arrive at the power of making two do the work of
four is hidden from the ordinary believers in Cocker.
You know their ostensible income ; indeed, they
themselves put it at so much ; but they keep up a
magnificent appearance on a less sum than that on
which you would go shabby and dilapidated. When
you ask them how it is done, they answer, ' by man-
agement.' Anything can be done by management,
they say, by those who have the gift ; which you feel
to be an utterance of the sphinx — a dark saying
the key to which has not yet been forged.
You calculate to the best of your ability, and
you know that you are sound in your arithmetic;
but, do what you will, you can never come to the
rule by which five hundred a year can be made to
compass the expenditure of a thousand. If you
whisper secret supplies, concealed resources, your
sphinx will not so much as wink her eyelid. How
she contrives to make her ostensible five hundred
do the work of a thousand- — how she gets velvet
and satin for the value of cotton and stufi", and
how, though always complaining of poverty, she
keeps unfailingly flush of cash — how all this is done
is her secret, and she holds it sacred. And you may
be quite sure of one thing — it is a secret she will
never share with you nor any one else.
The rapidly- working litlemteiir is another sphinx
SPHINXES. 279
worth studying as a curiosity — we might say, in-
deed, a living miracle. There he stands, a jovial,
self-indulgent, enjoying man, out in society every
night in the week ; by no means abstinent from
champagne, and as little given to early rising as he
is to consumption of the midnight oil. But he gets
through a mass of work which would be respectable
in a mere copyist, and which is little less than
miraculous in an original producer. How he thinks,
when he finds time to make up his plots, to work out
his characters, even to correct his proofs, are riddles
unanswerable by all his friends. Taking the mere
mechanical act alone, he must write faster than any
living man has ever been known to write, to get
through all that goes under his name. And when is
it done ? Literary sphinxes of this kind go about
unchallenged ; indeed, they are very much about,
and to be beheld everywhere ; and one looks at them
with respect, not knowing of what material they are
made, nor of what mysterious gifts they are the
possessors. Novels, plays, essays, poems, come
pouring forth in never slackening supply. The rail-
way stations and all hoardings are made gorgeous
by the announcement of their feats set out in red
and blue and yellow. Xo sooner has one blaze
of triumph burnt itself out than another blaze of
triumph flares up ; and nothing but death or a rich
inheritance seems likely to stop their mysterious
fecundity. How is it done ? That is the secret of
the literary sphinx, to wliich the admiring and
280 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
amazed brotherhood is anxiously seeking some ckie ;
but up to the present hour it has been kept jealously
guarded and no solution has been arrived at.
There is another form of the literary sphinx in the
Nobodies and Anons who speak from out the dark-
ness and let no man see whence the voice proceeds.
They are generally tracked to their lair sooner or
later, and the sphinx's head turns out to be only
a pasteboard mask behind which some well-known
Apuleian hid himself for a while, working much
amazement among the wondering crowd while the
clasps held good, but losing something of that fervid
worship when the reality became known. Others,
again, of these Anons have, like Junius, kept their
true abode hidden and their name a mystery still,
though there be some who swear they have traced
the footsteps and know exactly where the sphinx
lives, and what is the name upon his frontlet, and of
what race and complexion he is without his mask.
It may be so. But as every discoverer has a track
of his own, and as each swears that his sphinx is
the real one and no other, the choice among so
many becomes a sersdce of difficulty ; and perhaps
the wisest thing to do is to suspend judgment until
the literary sphinx of the day chooses to reveal him-
self by the prosaic means of a title-page, with his
name as author printed thereon and his place of
abode jotted down at the foot of the j)reface.
!81
FLIRTING.
There are certain things which can never be accu-
rately described — things so shadowy, so fitful, so
dependent on the mood of the moment, both in the
audience and the actor, that analysis and representa-
tion are equally at fault. And flirting is one of them.
What is flirting ? Who can define or determine ?
It is more serious than talkino- nonsense and not so
serious as making love ; it is not chaff and it is not
feelino; ; it means somethino; more than indifference
and yet something less than affection ; it binds no
one ; it commits no one though it raises expectations
in the individual and sets society on the look-out for
results ; it is a plaything in the hands of the ex-
perienced but a deadly weapon against the breast of
the unwary ; and it is a thing so vague, so protean,
that the most accurate measurer of moral values
would be puzzled to say where it exactly ends and
where serious intentions begin.
But again we ask : What is flirting ? What con-
stitutes its essence ? What makes the difference
between it and chaff on the one hand, and it and
love-making on the other ? Has it a cumulative
282 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
power, and, according to tlie old saying of many a
pickle making a mickle, does a long series of small
flirtings make up a concrete whole of love ? or is
it like an unmor tared heap of bricks, potential utilities
if conditions were chano-ed, but valueless as thino-s
are ? The man who would be able to reduce
flirting to a definite science, who could analyze its
elements and codify its laws, would be doing infinite
service to his generation ; but we fear that this is
about as difl&cult as finding the pot of gold under
the end of a rainbow, or catching small birds with a
pinch of salt.
Every one has his or her ideas of what con-
stitutes flirting ; consequently every one judges of
that pleasant exercise according to individual tem-
perament and experience. Faded flowers, who see
impropriety in everything they are no longer able
to enjoy, say with more or less severity that Henry
and Angelina are flirting if they are laughing while
whispering together in an alcove, probably the
most innocent nonsense in the world ; but the fact
that they are enjoying themselves in their own way,
albeit a silly one, is enough for the faded flower to
think they are after mischief, flirting being to her
mind about the worst bit of mischief that a fallen
humanity can perpetrate. The watchful mother,
intent on chances, says that dancing together oftener
than is necessary for good breeding and just the
amount of attention demanded by circumstances, is
flirting ; timid girls newly out, and not yet used to
FLIRTING. 283
the odd ways of men, think they are being flirted
with outrageously if their partner fires off the
meekest little compliment at them, or looks at them
more tenderly than he would look at a cabbage ; but
bolder spirits of both sexes think nothing worthy of
the name which does not include a few questionable
familiarities, and an equivoke or two, more or less
risky. With some, flirting is nothing but the
passing fun of the moment ; with others, it is the
first lesson of the great unopened book and means
the beginning of the end ; with some, it is not even
angling with intent ; with others, it is deep-sea
fishing with a broad, boldly-made net, and taking all
fish that come in as good for sport if not for food.
Flirts are of many kinds as well as of all degrees.
There are quiet flirts and demonstrative flirts ; flirts
of the subtle sort whose practice is made by the eyes
alone, by the manner, by the tender little sigh, by
the bend of the head and fche wave of the hand, to
give pathos and point to the otherwise harmless
word ; and flirts of the open and rampant kind, who
go up quite boldly towards the point, but who never
reach it, taking care to draw back in time before they
fairly cross the border. This is the kind which, as
the flirt male, does incalculable damage to the poor
little fluttering dove to whom it is as a bird of
prey, handsome, bold, cruel ; but this is the kind
which has unlimited success, using as it does that
immense moral leverage we call ' tantalizing ' — for
ever rousing hopes and exciting expectations, and
284 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
luring a woman on as an ignis fatuus lures us on
across the marsh, in the vain belief that it will bring
us to our haven at last.
Akin to this kind are those male flirts who are
great in the way in which they manage to insinuate
things without committing themselves to positive
statements. They generally contrive to give the
impression of some mysterious hindrance by which
they are held back from full and frank confession.
They hint at fatal bonds, at unfortunate attachments,
at a past that has burnt them up or withered them
up, at any rate that has prevented their future from
blossoming in the direction in which they would
fain have had it blossom and bear fruit. They
sketch out vaguely the outlines of some thrilling
romance ; a few, of the Byronic breed, add the
suspicion of some dark and melancholy crime as a
further romantic charm and personal obstacle ; and
when they have got the gu4's pity, and the love
that is akin to pity, then they cool down scientifically,
never creating any scandal, never making any ru|)-
ture, never coming to a moment when awkward ex-
planations can be asked, but cooling nevertheless, till
the thing drops of its own accord and dies out
from inanition ; when they are free to carry their
sorrows and their mysteries elsewhere. Some men
spend their lives in this kind of thing, and find
their pleasure in making all the women they know
madly or sentimentally in love with them ; and if by
chance any poor moth who has burned her wings
FLIRTING. 285
makes too loud an outcry, the tables are turned
against her dexterously, and she is held up to public
pity — contempt would be a better word — as one who
has suffered herself to love too well and by no means
wisely, and who has run after a Lothario by no
means inclined to let himself be caught.
Then there are certain men who flirt only with
married women, and others who flirt only with
gMs ; and the two pastimes are as difl'erent as
tropical sunlight and northern moonshme. And
there are some who are ' brothers,' and some who
are ' fathers ' to their young friends — suspicious
fathers on the whole, not unlike Little Ked Riduao--
hood's grandmother the wolf, with perilously bright
eyes, and not a little danger to Eed Ridinghood
in the relationship, how delightful soever it may be
to the wolf. Some are content with cousinship only
— which however breaks down quite suflicient fences ;
and some are 'dearest friends,' no more, and find that
an exceedingly useful centre from which to work
onward and outward. For, if any peg will do on
which to hang a discourse, so will any relationship or
adoption serve the ends of flirting, if it be so willed.
But what is flirting ? Is sittmg away in corners,
talking in low voices and looking personally
afl:ronted if any unlucky outsider comes withm
earshot, flirting ? Xot necessarily. It is just pos-
sible that Henry may be telling Angelina all about
his admiration for her sister Grace ; or Angelina may
be confessing to Henry what Charley said to her
286 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
last night ; — which makes her lower her eyes as she
is doing now, and play with the fringe of her fan so
nervously. May be, if not likely. So that sittmg
away in corners and whispering together is not
necessarily flirting, though it may look like it. Is
dancino' all the ' round ' dances too-ether ? This
goes for decided flirting in the code of the ball-room.
But if the two keep well together ? If they are
really fond of dancing, as one of the fine arts com-
bmmg science and enjoyment, they would dance with
each other all night, though outside the ' marble
halls ' they might be deadly enemies — Montagues and
Capulets, with no echo of Komeo and Juliet to soften
their mutual dislike. So that not even dancmg
together oftener than is absolutely necessary is un-
mistakeable evidence, any more than is sitting away
in corners, seeing that equal skill and keeping well in
step are reasons enough for perjDetual partnership,
making all idea of flirtation unnecessary. In fact,
there is no outward sign nor symbol of flirting which
may not be mistaken and turned round, because
flirting is so entirely in the intention and not in the
mere formula, that it becomes a kind of phantasm, a
Proteus, impossible to seize or to depict with accuracy.
One thing however, we can say — taking gifts and
attentions, oflered with evident design and accepted
with tacit understanding, may be certainly held as
constituting an important element of flirting. But
this is flirting on the woman's side. And here you
are being continually taken in. Your flirt of the
FLIRTING. 287
cunningly simple kind, who smiles so sweetly and
seems so flatteringly glad to see you when you come,
who takes all your presents and acted expressions of
love with the most bewitchino- PTatitude and effusion,
even she, so simple as she seems to be, slips the
thread and will not be caught if she does not wish to
be caught. At the decisive moment when you think
you have secured her, she makes a bound and is
away ; then turns round, looks you m the face, and
with many a tear and pretty asseveration declares
that she never understood you to mean what you say
you have meant all along ; and that you are cruel to
dispel her dream of a pleasant and harmless friend-
ship, and very wicked indeed because you press her
for a decision. Yes ; you are cruel, because you have
believed her honest ; cruel, because you did not see
through the veil of flattery and insincerity in which
she clothed her selfishness ; cruel, because she was
false. This is the flirt's logic when brought to book,
and forced to confess that her pretended love was
only flirting, and that she led you on to your de-
struction simply because it pleased her vanity to make
you her victim.
Then there are flirts of the open and rollickmg
kind, who let you go far, very far indeed, when sud-
denly they pull up and assume an offended air as if
you had wilfully transgressed known and absolute
boundaries — girls and women who lead you on, all in
the way of good fellowship, to knock you over when
you have got just far enough to lose your balance.
288 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
That is their form of the art. They like to see how
far they can make a man forget himself, and how
much stronger their own delusive enticements are
than prudence, experience and common- sense. And
there are flirts of the artful and ' still waters ' kind,
somethmg like the male flirts spoken of just now ;
sentimental little pusses — perhaps pretty young wives
with uncomfortable husbands, whose griefs have by
no means soured nor scorched, but just mellowed and
refined, them. Or they may be of the sisterly class ;
creatures so very frank, so very sisterly and confiding
and unsuspicious of evil, that really you scarcely know
how to deal with them at all. And there are flirts of
the scientific kind ; women who have studied the art
thoroughly ; and who are adepts in the use of every
weapon known — using each according to circum-
stances and the nature of the victim, and using each
with deadly precision. From such may a kind Pro-
vidence deliver us ! As the tender mercies of the
wicked, so are the scientific flirts — the women and
the men who play at bowls with human hearts, for
the stakes of a whole life's happiness on the one side
and a few weeks of gratified vanity on the other.
It used to be an old schoolboy maxim that no
real gentleman could be refused by a lady, because
no real gentleman could presume beyond his line of
encouragement. A fortiori^ no lady would or could
give more encouragement than she meant. What are
we to say then of our flirts if this maxim be true ?
Are they really ' no gentlemen ' and ' no ladies,'
FLIRTING. 289
accordino; to the famous formula of the kitchen ?
Perhaps it would be said so if gentlehood meant now,
as it meant centuries ago, the real worth and virtue
of humanity. For flirting with intent is a cruel,
false, heartless amusement ; and time was when
cruelty and falsehood were essentially sins which
vitiated all claims to gentlehood. And yet the
world would be very dull without that innocent kind
of nonsense which often goes by the name of flirting
— that pleasant something which is more than mere
acquaintanceship and less than formal loverhood —
that bright and animated intercourse which makes
the hours pass so easily, yet which leaves no bitter
pang of self-reproach — that indefinite and undefinable
interest by which the one man or the one woman
becomes a kind of microcosm for the time, the epi-
tome of all that is pleasant and of all that is lovely.
The only caution to be observed is : — Do not go too
far.
VOL. I. U
290 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
SCRAMBLERS,
There are people who are never what Northern
housewives call ' straight ' — people who seem to have
been born in a scramble, who live in a scramble, and
who, when their time comes, will die in a scramble,
just able to scrawl their signature to a will that ought
to have been made years ago, and that does not
embody their real mtentions now. Emphatically the
Unready, they are never prepared for anything,
whether expected or unexpected ; they make no plans
more stable than good intentions ; and they neither
calculate nor foresee. Everything with them is hurry
and confusion ; not because they have more to do than
other people, but because they do it more loosely and
less methodically — because they have not learnt the
art of dovetailing nor the mystery of packing. Conse-
quently half their pleasures and more than half their
duties slip through their fingers for want of the knack
of compact holding ; and their lives are passed in try-
ing to pick up what they have let drop and in frantic
endeavours to remedy their mistakes. For scramblers
are always making mistakes and going through an
endless round of forgetting. They never remember
SCRAMBLERS. 291
their engagements, but accept in the blandest and
frankest way imaginable two or more invitations for
the same day and hour, and assure you quite seriously
when, taught by experience, you push them hard and
probe them deep, that they have no engagement what-
ever on hand and are certain not to fail you. In an
evil hour you trust to them. When the day comes
they suddenly wake to the fact that they had accepted
Mrs. So-and-So's invitation before yours; and all you
get for your empty place and your careful arrange-
ments ruthlessly upset, is a hurried note of apology
which comes perhaps in the middle of dinner, perhaps
sometime next day, when too late to be of use.
If they forget their own engagements they also
ignore yours, no matter how distinctly you may have
tabulated them ; and are sure to come rattling to your
house on the day when you said emphatically you
were engaged and could not see them. If you keep
to your programme and refuse to admit them, more
likely than not you affront them. Engagements
being in their eyes moveable feasts, which it does not
in the least degree signify whether they keep on the
date set down or not, they cannot understand your
rigidity of purpose ; and were it not that as a tribe
they are good-natured, and too fluid to hold even
annoyance for any length of time, you would in all pro-
bability have a quarrel fastened on you because your
scrambling friends chose to make a calendar for them-
selves and to insist on your setting your diary by it.
As they ignore your appointed hours, so do they
TJ 2
292 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
forget your street and number. They always stick to
your first card, though you may have moved many
times since it was printed, duly apprizing them of each
change as it occurred. That does not help you, for
they never note the changes of their friends' addresses,
but heep loyally to the first. It all comes to the same
in the end, they say, and the postman is cleverer than
they. But they do not often trouble their friends
with letters on their own account, for they have a
speciality for not answering such as are written to
them. When they do by chance answer them, they
never reply to the questions asked nor give the news
demanded. They do not even reply to invitations like
other people, but leave you to infer from their silence
the acceptance or rejection they are meditating. When
they in their turn invite you, they generally puzzle
you by mismatching the day of the week with the
date of the month, leaving you tormented with doubt
which you are to go by ; and they forget to give you
the hour. Besides this, they write an illegible hand ;
and they are famous for the blots they make and the
Queen's heads they omit.
A scrambling wife is no light cross to a man who
values order and regularity as part of his home life.
She may be, and probably is, the best- tempered
creature in the world — a peevish scrambler would be
too unendurable — but a fresh face, bright eyes and a
merry laugh do not atone for never-ending disorder
and discomfort. This kind of thing does not depend
on income and is not to be remedied by riches. The
SCRAMBLERS. 293
households w^iere my lady has nothing to do but let
her maid keep her to the hours she herself has
appointed are just as uncomfortable in their way as
poorer establishments, if my lady is a scrambler, and
cannot be tauo^ht method and the value of holdino^ on
by the forelock. Sometimes my lady gets herself into .
such an inextricable coil of promises and engage-
ments, all crossing each other, that in despair she
takes to her bed and gives herself out as ill, and so
cuts what she cannot untie. People wonder at her
sudden indisposition, looking as she did only yester-
day in the bloom of health ; and they wonder at her
radiant reappearance in a day or two without a trace
of even languor upon her. They do not know that
her retirement was simply a version of the famous
rope trick, and that, like the Brothers Davenport, she
went into the dark to shake herself free of the cords
with which she had suffered herself to be bound. It
is a short and easy method certainly, but it has rather
too much of the echo of ' Wolf ' in it to bear frequent
repetition.
In houses of a lower grade, where the lady is
her own housekeeper, the habit of scrambling of
course leads to far greater and more manifest con-
fusion. The servants catch from the mistress the
trick of overstaying time ; and punctuality at last
comes to mean an elastic margin, where fixed duties
and their appointed times appear cometically at
irregular intervals. The cook is late with dinner ;
the coachman begins to put-to a little after the hour
294 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
he was ordered to be at the door ; but they know
that, however late they are, the chances are ten to one
their mistress will not be ready for them, and that
in her heart she will be grateful to them for the shelter
their own unpunctuality affords her. This being so,
they take their time and dawdle at their pleasure ;
thus adding to the pressure which always comes at the
end of the scrambler's day, when everything is thrown
into a chaotic mass and nothins; comes out straio;ht
or complete.
Did any one ever know a scrambling woman
ready at the moment in her own house ? That
she should be punctual to any appointment out of
her house is, of course, not to be thought of ; but
she makes an awkward thing of it sometimes at
home. Her guests are often all assembled, and the
dinner hour has struck, before she has torn off one
gown and dragged on another. What she cannot tie
she pins ; and her pins are many and demonstrative.
She wisps up her hair, not having left herself time to
braid it ; and the consequence is that before she has
been half an hour in the room ends and tails are sure
to stray playfully from their fastenings and come
tumbling about her ears. Her jewels are mis-
matched, her colours ill-assorted, her belt is awry,
her bouquet falling to pieces. She rushes into the
drawing-room in her morning slippers, smiling and
good-tempered, with a patch- work look about her — ■
something forgotten in her attire that makes her
whole appearance shaky and unfinished — fastening
SCBAMBLEES. 295
her last button or clasping on her first bracelet. She
is full of regrets and excuses delivered in her joyous,
buoyant manner, or in a voice so winning, an accent
so coaxing, that you cannot be annoyed. Besides,
you leave the annoyance to her husband, who is sure
to have in reserve a pickle quite sufficiently strong
for the inevitable rod, as the poor scrambler knows
too well. All you can do is to accept her apologies
with a good grace, and to carry away with you a
vivid recollection of an awkward half-hour, a spoilt
dinner, and a scrambling hostess all abroad and out
of time, sweeping through the room very heated, very
good-tempered, only half-dressed and chronically out
of breath.
Scramblers can never learn the value of money,
neither for themselves nor for others. They are
famous for borrowing small sums which they forget
to return ; but, to do them justice, they are just as
willing to lend what they never dream of asking for
again. Long ago they caught hold of the fact that
money is only a circulating medium, and they have
added an extra speed to the circulation at which
slower folk stand aghast. To be sure, the practical
results of their theory are not very satisfactory, and
the confusion between the possessive pronouns which
distinguishes their financial catechism is apt to lead
to unpleasant issues.
Scrambling women are especially notorious for
the way in which they set themselves afloat with-
out sufficient means to carry them on; finding
296 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
themselves stranded in mid-career because they have
made no calculations and have forgotten the rule
of subtraction. They find themselves at a small
Italian town, say, where the virtues of the British
banking system are unknown, and where their
letters of credit and circular notes are not worth
more tlian the value of the paper they are written
on. More than one British matron of respectable
condition and weak arithmetic has found herself
in such a plight as this, with her black -eyed land-
lord perfectly civil and well-bred, but as firm as
a rock in his resolution that the Signora shall not
depart out of his custody till his little account is
paid — a plight out of which she has to scramble the
best way she can, with the loss perhaps of a little
dignity and of more repute — at least in the locality
where her solid scudi gave out and her precious paper
could not be cashed. This is the same woman who
offers an omnibus conductor a sovereign for a three-
penny fare ; who gives the village grocer a ten-pound
note for a shilling's-worth of sugar ; and who, when
she comes up to London for a day's shopping, and has
got her last parcel made up and ready to be put into
her cab, finds she has not left herself half enough
money to pay for it — with a shopman whose faith
in human nature is by no means lively, and who only
last week was bitten by a lady swindler of undeniable
manners and appearance, and not very unlike herself.
She has been known too, to go into a confectioner's
and, after havino; made an excellent luncheon, to find
SCRAMBLERS. 297
to her dismay that she has left her purse in the pocket
of her other dress at home, and that she has not six-
pence about her. In fact there is not an equivocal
position in which forgetfulness, want of method, want
of foresight, and all the other characteristics which
make up scrambling in the concrete, can place her, in
which she has not been at some time or other. But
no experience teaches her ; the scrambler she was
born, the scrambler she will die, and to the last will
tumble through her life, all her ends flying and
deprecating excuses on her lips.
Scramblers are notoriously great for making pro-
mises, and as notorious for not performing what they
promise. Kindhearted as they are in general, and
willing to do their friends a service — going out of
their way indeed to proiFer kindnesses quite beyond
your expectations and the range of their duties to-
wards you, and always undertaking works of super-
erogation ; which works in fact lead to more than half
their normal scramble — they forget the next hour the
promise on which you have based your dearest hopes.
Or, if they do not forget it, they find it is crowded
out of time by a multitude of engagements and prior
promises, of all of which they were innocently oblivi-
ous when they offered to do your business so frankly,
and swore so confidently they would set about it now
at once and get it out of hand without delay. The
oath and the off'er which you took to be as sure as
the best chain-cable, you will find on trial to be only
a rope of sand that could not bind so much as a
298 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
bunch of tow together, still less hold the anchor of a
life ; and many a heart, sick with hope deferred and
wrung with the disappointment which might have'
been so easily prevented, has been half broken before
now from the anguish that has followed on the failure
of the kindhearted scrambler to perform the promise
voluntarily made, and the service earnestly pressed
on a reluctant acceptor.
This is the tragic side of the scrambler's career,
the shadow thrown by almost every one of the class.
For all the minor delinquencies of hurry and un-
punctuality in social affairs it is not difficult to find
full and ample forgiveness ; but when it comes to
un trustworthiness in graver matters, then the
scrambler becomes a scourge instead of only an in-
convenience. The only safe way of dealing with the
class is to take them when we can get hold of them,
and to accept them for what they are worth ; but not
to rely on them, and not to attempt any mortising
of our own affairs with their promises. They are
the froth and foam of society, pretty and pleasant
enough in the sunlight as they splash and splutter
about the rocks ; but they are not the deep waters
which bear the burden of our ships and by which
the life of the world is maintained.
299
FLATTERY.
Nothing is so delightful as flattery. To hear and
believe pleasant fictions about oneself is a temptation
too seductive for weak mortals to resist, as the
typical legends of all mythologies and the private
histories of most individuals show ; in consequence
of which, home truths, to one used to ideal por-
traiture, come like draughts of ' bitter cup ' to the
dram-drinker. And flattery is dram-drinking ; and
yet not quite without good uses to balance its un-
deniable evil, if it be only exaggeration and not
wholly falsehood ; that is, if it assumes as a matter of
course the presence of virtues potential to your cha=
racter but not always active, and praises you for what
you might be if you chose to live up to your best.
Many a weak brother and weaker sister, and all
children, can be heartened into goodness by a little
dash of judicious praise or flattery where ponderous
exhortation and grave reproof would fail ; just as
a heavily-laden horse can be coaxed up-hill when
the whip and spur would lead to untimely jibbing.
If, on the contrary, the flattery is of a kind that
makes you believe yourself an exceptionally fine
300 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
fellow when you are only ^ mean trash ' — a king of
men when you are nothing better nor nobler than a
moral nigger — making you satisfied with yourself
when at your worst — then it is an unmitigated evil ;
for it then becomes dram-drinking of a very poisonous
kind, which sooner or later does for your soul what
unlimited blue ruin does for your body. But this is
what we generally mean when we speak of flattery ;
and this is the kind which has such a deservedly bad
name from moralists of all ages.
The flatteries of men to women, and those of
women to men, are very diflferent in kind and direc-
tion. Men flatter women for what they are — for their
beauty, their grace, their sweetness, their charming-
ness in general ; while a woman will flatter a man for
what he does— for his speech in the House last night,
of which she understands little ; for his book, of
which she understands less ; or for his pleading, of
which she understands nothing at all. Not that this
signifies much on either side. The most unintellectual
little woman in the world has brains enough to look
up in your face sweetly, and breathe out something
that sounds like ' beautiful — charming — so clever,'
vaguely sketching the outline of a hymn of praise to
which your own vanity supplies the versicles. For
you must have an exceptionally strong head if you
can rate the sketch at its real value and see for your-
self how utterly meaningless it is.
You may be the most mystical poet of the day,
suggesting to your acutest readers grave doubts as
FLATTERY. 301
to your own power of comprehending yourself , or
you may be the most subtle metaphysician, to follow
whom in your labyrinth of reasoning requires per-
haps the rarest order of brains to be met with ;
but you will nevertheless believe any narroAv-
browed, small-headed woman who tells you in a
low sweet voice, with a gentle uplifting of her eyes
and a suggestive curve of her lip, that she has
found you both intelligible and charm mg, and that
she quite agrees with you and shares your every
sentiment. If she further tells you that all her
life long she has thought in exactly the same way
but was wholly unable to express herself, and that
you have now supplied her want and translated into
words her vague ideas, and if she says this with a
reverential kind of eiFusiveness, you are done for, so
far as 3^our critical power goes ; and should some
candid friend, whom she has not flattered, tell you
with brutal frankness that your bewitching little
flatterer has neither the brains nor the education to
understand you, you will set him down as a slanderer,
spiteful and malignant, and call his candour envy
because he has not been so lucky as yourself.
The most subtle form of flatter}^ is that which
asks your advice with the pretence of needmg it —
your advice, particularly — yours above that of all
other persons, as the wisest, best, most useful to be
obtamed. This too is a form that belongs rather
to women in their relations with men than the con-
verse ; though sometimes men will pretend to want
302 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
a woman's advice about their love affairs, and will
perhaps make-believe to be guided by it. Xot un-
frequently, however, asking one woman's opinion and
advice about another is a masked manner of love-
making on its own account ; though sometimes it
may be done for flattery only, when there are reasons.
Of course not all advice-asking is flattery ; but when
intended only to please and not meant to be genuine,
it is perhaps one of the most potent instruments of
the art to be met with.
But if seeking advice be the most subtle form
of flattery, the most intoxicatmg is that which pre-
tends to moral elevation or reform by your influ-
ence. The reformation of a rake is a work which no
woman alive could be found to resist if the rake
offered it to her as his last chance of salvation ; and
to lead a pretty sinner back to the ways of pictu-
resque virtue by his own influence only is a tempta-
tion to self-reliance which no man could refuse — a
flattery which not Diogenes nor Zeno himself could
see through. The pretensions of any one else would
be laughed at cruelly enough ; but this is one of the
things where personal experience and critical judg-
ment never go in harness together — one of the
manifestations of flattery which would overcome the
calmest and bewilder the wisest.
Priests of all denominations are especially open
to this kind of flattery ; not only from pretty sinners
who have gone openly out of the right line, but
from quite comely and respectable maids and ma-
FLATTERY. 303
trons who have lived blamelessly so far as the
broad moral distinctions go, yet who have not lived
the Awakened Life until roused thereunto by this
peculiarly favoured minister. It is a tremendous
trial of a man's discernment when such flattery is
offered to him. How much of this pretended awaken-
ing is real ? How much of this sudden spiritual
insight is true, and not a mere phrasing, artfully
adopted for pleasantness only ? These are the cases
where we most want that famous spear of Ithuriel
to help us to a right estimate, for they are beyond
the power of any ordinary man to determine.
But if priests are subject to these delusions of flat-
tery on the one hand, they know how to practise them
on the other. Take away the flattery which, mingled
with occasional rebuke, forms the great ministerial
spur, and both Revivalism and Ritualism would flag
like flowers without ' the gentle dews.' Scolded for
their faults in dress, for their vanity, extravagance
and other feminine vices, are not women also flattered
as the favourites of heaven and of the Church ? Are
they not told that they are the lilies of the eccle-
siastical garden ? the divinely appointed missionaries
for the preservation of virtue and godly truth in the
world ? without whom the coarser race of men would
be given over to inconceivable spiritual evil, to infi-
delity and all immorality. We may be very sure of
this, that if humanity, and especially femmine hu-
manity, were not flattered as well as chastened, clerical
influence would not last for a day.
;-i04 SATURDAY IMORNINGS.
There is one kind of flattery which is common to
both men and women, and that is the expressed pre-
ference of sex. Thus, when men want to flatter
women, they say how infinitely they prefer their
society to that of their own sex ; and women will
say the same to men. Or, if they do not say it, they
will act it. See a set of women congregated together
without the light of a manly countenance among
them. They may talk to each other certainly ; and
one or two will sit away together and discuss their
private afi*airs with animation ; but the great mass of
them are only half vitalized while waiting the advent
of the men to rouse them into life and the desire to
please. No man who goes up first from the dinner-
table, and earlier than he was expected, can fail to see
the change which comes over those wearied, limp, in-
difl*erent-looking faces and figures so soon as he enters
the room. He is like the prince whose kiss woke up
the Sleeping Beauty and all her court ; and can any
one say that this is not flattery of the most delightful
kind ? To be the Pygmalion even for a moment, and
for the weakest order of soul-giving, is about the
greatest pleasure that a man can know, if he be sus-
ceptible to the finer kinds of flattery.
Some women indeed, not only show their pre-
ference for men, but openly confess it, and confess
at the same time to a lofty contempt or abhorrence
for the society of women. These are generally
women who are, or have been, beauties ; or who
have literary and intellectual pretensions ; or who
FLATTERY. 305
despise babies and contemn housekeeping, and profess
themselves unable to talk to other women because
of their narrowness and stupidity. But for the
most part they are women who, by their beauty or
their position, have been used to receive extra atten-
tion from men ; and thus their preference is not flat-
tery so much as exigence. Women who have been
in India, or wherever else they are in the minority
in society, are of this kind ; and nothing is more
amazing to them when they first come home than
tlie attentions which a certain style of Englishwoman
pays to men, instead of demandmg and receiving
attentions from them.
There are also those sweet, humble, caressing
women who flatter you with every word and look,
but whose flattery is nothing but a pretty dress
put on for show and taken ofl* when the show is done
with. Anything serves for an occasion with these
people. Why, the way in which certain unmarried
women will caress a child before you is an implied
flattery ; and they know it. If only they would be
careful to carry these pretty ante-nuptial ways into
the home where nothing is to be gained by them but
a humdrum husband's hapf)iness ! But too often the
woman whose whole attitude was one of flattering
devotion before her end was gained, gives up every
shred of that which she had in such profusion, when
she has attained her object, and lets the home go
bare of that which was so beautiful and seductive in
the ball-room and the flirtmg corner.
VOL. I. X
306 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
Some men however, want more home flattery to
keep them tolerably happy and up to the mark than
any woman with a soul to be saved by truth can give.
Poets and artists are of this kind — men who literally
live on praise, without which they droop and can do
nothing. With them it is absolutely necessary that
the people with whom they are associated should be
of appreciative and sympathetic natures ; but the
burden comes heavy when they want, as they gene-
rally do, so much more than this. For, in truth,
they want flattery in excess of sympathy ; and if
they do not get it they hold themselves as the victims
of an unkind fate, and fill the world with the echo of
their woes. This is nine-tenths of the cause why
great geniuses are so often unhappy in married life.
They demand more incessant flattery than can be
kept up by one woman, unless she has not only an
exceptional power of love but also an exceptional
power of self-suj^pression. They think that by virtue
of their genius they are entitled to a Benjamin's mess
of devotion double that given to other men ; and
when they get only Judah's share, they cry out that
they are ill-used, and make the world think them ill-
used as well.
But though a little home flattery helps the home
life immeasurably, and greases the creaking domestic
wheels more than anythmg else can, a great deal is
just the most pernicious thing that can be offered.
The belief prevalent m some families that all the
very small and commonplace members thereof are the
FLATTERY. 307
world's wonders and greater than any one else — that
no one is so clever as Harry, no one so pretty as Julia,
that Amy's red hair is of a more brilliant gold than
can be found elsewhere, and Edward's mathematical
abilities about equal to iSTewton's — this belief, nou-
rished and acted on, is sure to turn out an insufferable
collection of prigs and self- conceited damsels who have
to be brought down innumerable pegs before they
find their own level. But we often see this ; espe-
cially in country places where there is not much
society to give a standard for comparative measure-
ment ; and we know that those fond j)arents and
doting relations are blindly and diligently sowing-
seeds of bitterness for a future harvest of sorrow for
their darlings. These young people must be made to
suffer if they are to be of any good whatever in the
world ; and finding their level, after the exalted posi-
tion which they have been supposed to fill so long,
and being pelted with the unsavoury missiles of truth
in exchange for all the incense of flattery to which
they have been used, will be suffermg enough. But
it has to be gone through ; this being one of the
penalties to which the unwisdom of love so often
subjects its objects.
The flattery met with in society is not often very
harmful save to coarse or specially simple natures.
You must be either one or the other to be able to
believe it. Lady Morgan was perhaps the most un-
blushing and excessive of the tribe of social flatterers;
but that was her engine, the ladder by which she did
X 2
308 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
a good part of her climbing. We must not confound
with this kind of flattery the impulsive expression of
praise or love which certain outspoken people indulge
m to the last. You may as well try to dam up
Niagara as to make some folks reticent of then'
thouoiits and feelino-s. And when one of this kind
sees anything that he or she likes, the praise has
to come out, with superlatives if the creature be
prone to exaggeration. But this is not flattery; it
is merely a certam childlike expansiveness which
lasts with some into quite old age. Unfortunately,
very few understand this childlike expansiveness
when they see it. Hence it subjects its possessor
to misrepresentation and unfriendly jibes, so soon as
his or her back is turned, and the explosion of
exaggerated but perfectly smcere praise is discussed
critically by the uninterested part of the audience.
309
LA FEMME PASSES.
Without doubt it is a time of trial to all women,
more or less painful according to individual disposi-
tion, when they first begin to grow old and lose
their good looks. Youth and beauty make up so
much of their personal value, so much of their
natural final cause, that when these are gone many
feel as if their whole career were at an end, and as if
nothing were left to them now that they are no
longer young enough to be loved as girls are loved,
or pretty enough to be admired as mature sirens are
admired. For \7omen of a certain position have so
little wholesome occupation, and so little ambition
for anything save indeed that miserable thmg called
' getting on in society,' that they cannot change
their way of life with advancing years. Hence they
do not attempt to find interest in tilings outside
themselves, and indej)endent of the personal attrac-
tiveness which in youth constituted their whole
pleasure of existence.
This is essentially the case with fashionable
women, who have staked their all on appearance,
and to whom good looks are of more account than
310 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
noble deeds ; and, accordingly, the struggle to re-
main young is a frantic one with them, and as de-
grading as it is frantic.
With the ideal woman of middle age-^that
pleasant She with her calm face and soft manner,
who unites the charms of both epochs, retaining the
ready responsiveness of youth while adding the wider
sympathies of experience — ^with her there has been no
such struo^o^le to make herself an anachronism. Con-
sequently she remams beautiful to the last — far more
beautiful than all the pastes and washes in Madame
Rachel's shop could make her. Sometimes, if rarely
in these latter days, we meet her in society, where
she carries with her an atmosphere of her own — an
atmosphere of honest, wholesome truth and love,
which makes every one who enters it better and
purer for the time. All children and all young
persons love her, because she understands and loves
them. For she is essentially a mother — that is, a
woman who can forget herself; who can give without
asking to receive ; and who, without losing any of
the individualism which belongs to self-respect, can
yet live for and in the lives of others, and find her
best joy in the well-being of those about her. There
is no exaggerated sacrifice in this ; it is simply the
fulfilment of woman's highest duty — the expression
of that grand maternal instinct which need not
necessarily include the fact of personal maternity,
but which, with all women worthy of the name, must
find utterance in some line of unselfish action.
LA FEMME PASSIVE. 311
The ideal woman of middle age understands the
young because she has lived with them. If a mother,
she has performed her maternal duties with cheer-
fulness and love. There has been no giving up
her nursery to the care of a hired servant who is
expected to do for so many pounds a year things
which the tremendous instinct of a mother's love
could not find strength to do. When she had
children, she attended to them in great part herself,
and learnt all about their tempers, their maladies,
and the best methods of management. As they grew
up she was still the best friend they had — the Provi-
dence of their young lives who gave them both care
and justice, both love and guidance. Such a manner
of life has forced her to forget herself. When her
child lay ill, perhaps dpng, she had no heart and no
time to think of her own appearance, and whether
this dressing-gown was more becoming than tliat ;
and what did the doctor thmk of her with her hair
pushed back from her face ? — and what a fright she
must have looked in the morning light after her
sleepless night of watching ! The world and all its
petty pleasures and paltry pains faded away in the
presence of the stern tragedy of the hour ; and not
th^ finest ball of the season seemed to be worth a
thought compared to the all-absorbing question of
whether her child slept after his draught and whe-
ther he ate his food with better appetite. And such
a life, in spite of all its cares, has kept her young as
well as unselfish ; we should rather say, young be-
312 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
cause unselfish. As she comes into the room with
her daughters, her kindly face unpolluted by paint,
her dress picturesque or fashionable according to her
taste, but decent in form and consistent in tone with
her age, it is often remarked that she looks more like
the sister than the mother of her girls. This is
because she is in harmony with her age, and has not
therefore put herself in rivalry with them ; and har-
mony is the very keystone of beauty. Her hair is
thickly streaked with white ; the girlish firmness and
transparency of her skin have gone ] the pearly clear-
ness of her eye is clouded ; the slender grace of line
is lost — but for all that she is beautiful, and she is
intrinsically young. What she has lost in outside
material charm — in that mere heaute du diahle of
youth — she has gained in character and expression ;
and by not attempting to simulate the attractiveness
of a girl, she keeps what nature gave her — the attrac-
tiveness of middle age. And as every epoch has its
own beauty — if women would but learn that truth —
she is as beautiful now as a matron of fifty, because
in harmony with her years, as she was when a
maiden of sixteen.
This is the ideal woman of middle age, met with
even yet at tijnes in society — the woman whom all
men respect ; whom all women envy, and wonder
how she does it ; and whom all the young adore, and
wish they had for an elder sister or an aunt. And
the secret of it all lies in truth, in love, in purity,
and in unselfishness.
LA FEMME PASSEE. 313
Standing far apart from this sweet and wholesome
idealization is la femme ijctssee of to-day — the reality
as we meet with it at balls and fetes and afternoon
At Homes, ever foremost in the mad chase after
pleasure, for which alone she seems to think she has
been sent into the world. Dressed m the extreme
of youthful fashion ; her thinnmg hair dyed and
crimped and fired till it is more like red- brown tow
than hair ; her flaccid cheeks ruddled ; her throat
whitened ; her bust displayed with unflinching
generosity— as if beauty is to be measured by cubic
inches ; her lustreless eyes blackened round the lids,
to give the semblance of limpidity to the tarnished
whites ; perhaps the pupils dilated by belladonna ;
perhaps a false and fatal brilliancy for the moment
given by opium, or by eau de cologne, of which she
has a store in her carriage, and drinks as she passes
from ball to ball ; no kindly drapery of lace nor of
gauze to conceal the breadth of her robust maturity,
to soften the dreadful shadows of her leanness — there
she stands, the wretched creature who will not con-
sent to grow old, and who still aiFects to be a fresh
coquettish girl when she is nothing but la femme
passee — la femme passee et ridicule into the bargain.
There is not a folly for which even the thought-
lessness of youth is but a poor excuse into which
she, in all the plenitude of her abundant expe-
rience, does not plunge. Wife and mother as she
may be, she flirts and makes love as if an honourable
issue were as open to her as to her young daughter ;
314 SATURDAY MOENINGS.
or as if she did not know to what end (lirting and
making love lead in all ages. If we watch the career
of such a woman, we see how, by slow but very sure
degrees, she is obliged to lower the standard of her
adorers, and to take up at last with men of inferior
social position, who are content to buy her patronage
by their devotion. To the best men of her own
class she can give nothing that they value ; so she
barters with snobs, who go into the transaction with
their eyes open, and take the whole affair as a matter
of exchange, and quid ijro quo rigidly exacted. Or
she does really dazzle some very young and low-born
man who is weak as well as ambitious, and who
thinks the fugitive regard of a middle-aged woman of
high rank something to be proud of and boasted
about. That she is as old as his own mother — at
this moment selling tapes behind a village counter,
or gathering up the eggs in a country farm — tells
nothing against the association with him ; and the
woman who began her career of flirtation with the
son of a duke ends it with the son of a shopkeeper,
having between these two terms spanned all the
several degrees of degradation which lie between
givmg and buying. She cannot help herself ; for it
is part of the insignia of her artificial youth to have
the reputation of a love-affair, or the pretence of one,
even if the reality be a mere delusion. When such a
woman as this is one of the matrons, and conse-
quently one of the leaders of society, what can we
expect from the girls? What worse example could"
LA FEMME PASSES. 315
be given to the young ? When we see her with her
own daughters we feel instinctively that she is the
most disastrous adviser they could have ; and when
in the company of girls or young married women
not belonging to her, we doubt whether we ought
not to warn their natural guardians against allowing
such association, for all that her standing in society
is undeniable, and not a door is shut against her.
What good in life does this kind of woman do ?
All her time is taken up, first in trying to make
herself look twenty or thirty years younger than she
is, and then in trymg to make others believe the
same. She has neither thought nor energy to spare
from this, to her, far more important work than is
feeding the hungry or nursing the sick, rescuing
the fallen or soothing the sorrowful. The final
cause of her existence seems to be the impetus she
has given to a certain branch of trade manufacture —
unless we add to this, the corruption of society. For
whom, but for her, are the ' little secrets ' which are
contmually being advertised as woman's social salva-
tion — regardless of grammar ? The ' eaux noire,
brun, et chatain, which dyes the hair any shade in
one minute ; ' the ' kohhl for the eyelids ; ' the
' blanc de perle,' and 'rouge de Lubin ' — which does
not wash off ; the ' bleu pour les veines ; ' the ' rouge
of eight shades/ and ' the sympathetic blush,' which
are cynically offered for the use and adoption of our
mothers and daughters, find their chief patroness in
the femme passee who makes herself up — the middle-
316 SA.TURDAY MOENINGS.
aged matron engaged in her frantic struggle against
time, and obstinately refusing to grow old in spite of
all that nature may say or do. Bad as the Girl of
the Period is, this horrible travesty of her vices
in the modern matron is even worse. Indeed, were
it not for her, the girls would never have gone to
such lengths as those to which they have gone ; for
elder women naturally have immense mfluence over
younger ones, and if mothers were resolutely to set
their faces against the follies of the day, daughters
would and must give in. As it is, some go even
ahead of the young, and, by example on the one hand
and rivalry on the other, sow the curse of corruption
broadcast where they were meant to have only a pure
influence and to set a wise example. Were it not for
those who still remain faithful — women who regard
themselves as the trustees for humanity and virtue —
the world would go to ruin forthwith ; but so long
as the five righteous are left we have hope and a
certain amount of security for the future, when the
present disgraceful madness of society shall have
passed away.
sn
SPOILT WOMEN.
Like cliildren and all soft things, women are soon
spoilt if subjected to an wholesome conditions. Some-
times the spoilmg comes from over-harshness, some-
times from over-indulgence ; what we are speaking
of to-day is the latter condition — the spoiling which
comes from being petted and given way to and
indulged, till they think themselves better than
everybody else, and living under laws made spe-
cially for them. Men get spoilt too in the same
manner ; but for the most part there is a tougher
fibre in them which resists the flabby influences of
flattery and exaggerated attention better than can the
morale of the weaker sex ; besides, even arbitrary
men meet with opposition in certain directions, and
the most self- contented social autocrat knows that
his adherents criticize though they dare not oppose.
A man who has been spoilt by success and a
gratified ambition, so that he thmks himself a small
Alexander in his own way and able to conquer any
obstacles which may present themselves, has a certain
high-handed activity of will about him that does not
interfere with his duties in life ; he is not made fretful
318 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
and impatient and exigeant as a woman is — as if he
alone of all mankind ought to be exempt from mis-
fortunes and annoyances ; as if his friends must never
die, his youth never fade, his circumstances run always
smooth, protected by the care of others from all un-
toward hitch; as if time and tide, which wait for
no one else, are bound to him as humble servants
dutifully observant of his wishes. The useful art of
finding his level, which he learnt at school and in
his youth generally, keeps him from any very weak
manifestation of being spoilt ; save indeed, when he
has been spoilt by women at home, nursed up by an
adoring wife and a large circle of wife's sisters almost
as adormg, to all of whom his smallest wishes are
religious obligations and his faintest virtues godly
graces, and who vie with each other which of them
shall wait upon him most servilely, flatter him most
outrageously, coax and coddle him most entirely, and
so do him the largest amount of spiritual damage,
and unfit him most thoroughly for the worth and
work of masculine life. A man subjected to this
insidious injury is simply ruined so far as any real
manlmess of nature goes. He is made into that
sickening creature, ' a sweet being,' as the women
call him — a woman's man with sesthetic tastes and a
turn for poetry ; full of highflown sentiment and
morbid sympathies ; a man almost as much woman
as man, who has no backbone of useful ambition in
him, but who puts his whole life into love, and who
becomes at last emphatically not worth his salt.
SPOILT WOMEN. 319
Bad as it is for men of the world to be kow-
towed to by men, it is not so bad, because not so
weakening, as the domestic idolatry which sometimes
goes on when one man is the centre of a large family
of women, and the only object upon which the natural
feminine instinct can expend itself. No greater damage
can be done to a man than is done by this kind of
domestic idolatry. But, in truth, the evil is too
pleasant to be resisted ; and there is scarcely a man
so far master of himself as to withstand the subtle
intoxication, the sweet and penetrating poison, of
woman's tender flattery and loving submission. To
a certain extent he holds it so entirely the right
thing, because it is natural and instinctive, that it
is difficult to draw the line and map out exactly the
division between right and wrong, pleasantness and
harmfulness, and where loving submission ends and
debasing slavishness begins.
Spoilt women are spoilt mauily from a like cause :
over- attention from men. A few certainly are to
be found, as pampered daughters, with indulgent
mammas and subservient aunts given up to ruining
their young charges with the utmost despatch pos-
sible ; but this is comparatively a rare form of the
disease, and one which a little wholesome matrimonial
discipline would soon cure. For it is seldom that a
petted daughter becomes a spoilt wife — human affairs
havino- that marvellous power of equation, that in-
evitable tendency to readjust the balance, which pre-
vents the continuance of a like excess under different
320 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
forms. Besides, a spoilt daughter generally makes
such a supremely unpleasant wife that the husband
has no inducement to continue the mistake, and there-
fore either lowers her tone by a judicious exhibition
of snubbing, or, if she be aggressive as well as un-
pleasant, leaves her to fight with her shadows in the
best way she can, glad for his own part to escape the
strife she will not forego.
The spoilt woman is impatient of anything like
rivalry. She never has a female friend — certainly not
one of her own degree, and not one at all in the true
sense of the word. Friendship presupposes equality ;
and a spoilt woman knowns no equality. She has been
so long accustomed to consider herself as lady-para-
mount that she cannot iniderstand it if any one steps in
to share her honours and divide her throne. To praise
the l)eauty of any other woman, to find her charming,
and to pay her the attention due to a charming woman,
is to msult our spoilt darling, and to slight her past
forgiveness. If there is only one good thing, it must
be given to her — the first seat, the softest cushion, the
most protected situation ; and she looks for the best
of all things as if naturally consecrated from her birth
to the sunshine of life, and as if the ' cold shade ' which
may do for others were by no means the portion
allotted to her.
It is almost impossible to make the spoilt woman
understand the grace or the glory of sacrifice. By
rare good fortune she may sometimes be found to
possess an indestructible germ of conscience which
SPOILT WOMEN. 321
sorrow and necessity can develope into active good ;
but only sometimes. The spoilt woman j^ar excellence
understands only her own value, only her own merits
and the absolutism of her own requirements ; and
sacrifice, self-abnegation, and the whole class of virtues
belonging to unselfishness, are as much unknown
to her as is the Decalogue m the original, or the
squaring of the circle. The spoilt woman, as the
wife of an unsuccessful husband or the mother of
sickly children, is a pitiable spectacle. If obhged
to sacrifice her usual luxuries, to make an old gown
serve when a new one is desired, to sit up all night
watching by the sick-bed, to witness the painful details
of illness, perhaps of death, to meet hardship face to
face and to bend her back to the burden of sorrow,
she is at the first absolutely lost. Not the tiling to
be done, but her own discomfort in doing it, is the one
master idea — not others' needs, but her own pain in
supplying them, is the great grief of the moment.
Many are the hard lessons set us by life and fate, but
the hardest of all is that given to the spoilt woman
when she is made to think for others rather than for
herself, and is forced by the exigencies of circum-
stances to sacrifice her own ease for the greater
necessities of her kind.
All that large part of the true woman's nature
which expresses itself in serving is an unknown
function to the spoilt woman. She must be waited
on, but she cannot in her turn serve even the one she
loves. She is the woman who calls her husband from
VOL. T. ' Y
322 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
one end of the room to the other to put down her cup,
rather than reach out her arm and put it down for
herself; who, however weary he may be, will bid him
get up and ring the bell, though it is close to her
own hand, and her longest walk during the day has
been from the dining-room to the drawmg-room. It
is not that she cannot do these small offices for her-
self, but that she likes the feeling of bemg waited
on ; and it is not for love, and the amiable if weak
pleasure of attracting the notice of the beloved, but
it is for the vanity of being a little somebody for the
moment, and of pla3mig off the small regality involved
in the procedure, that she claims his attention. She
would not return that attention. Unlike the Eastern
women, who wait on their lords hand and foot, and
who place their highest honour in their lowliest ser-
vice, the spoilt woman of Western life knows notliing
of the natural grace of womanly serving for love, for
grace, or for gratitude.
This kind of thing is peculiarly strong among the
demi-monde of the higher class, and among women
who are of the demi-monde by nature. The respect
they cannot command by their virtues they demand
in the simulation of manner ; and perhaps no women
are more tenacious of the outward forms of deference
than those who have lost their claim to the vital
reality. It is very striking to see the difference be-
tween the women of this type, the petites mattresses
ayIio require the utmost attention and almost ser-
vility from man, and the noble dignity of service
SPOILT WOMEN. 323
wliich the pure woman can afford to give — which
she finds indeed, that it belongs to the very purity
and nobleness of her womanhood to give. It is the
old story of the ill- assured position which is afraid of
its own weakness, and the security which can afford
to descend — the rule holding good for other things
besides mere social place.
Another characteristic of the spoilt woman is the
changeableness and excitability of her temper. All
suavity and gentleness and delightful gaiety and
perfect manners when everything goes right, she
startles you by her outburst of petulance when the
first cross comes. If no man is a hero to liis valet,
neither is a spoilt woman a heroine to her maid ; and
the lady who has just been the charm of the drawing-
room, upstairs in her boudoir makes her maid go
through spiritual exercises to which walking among
burning ploughshares is easy-going. A length of
lace unstarched, a ribbon unsewed, a flower set awry,
anything that crumples one of the myriad rose-leaves
on which she lies, and the spoilt woman raves as
much as if each particular leaf had become suddenly
a bunch of thorns. If a dove were to be trans-
formed to a hawk the change would not be more
complete, more startling, than that which occurs when
the spoilt woman of well-bred company manners puts
ofi* her mask to her maid, and shows her temper over
trifles. Whoever else may sufi'er the grievances of
life, she cannot understand that she also must be at
times one of the sufferers with the rest; and if by
T 2
324 SATUEDAY MOHNINGS.
chance the bad moment comes, the person accom-
panying it has a hard time of it.
There are spoilt women also who have their
peculiar exercises in thought and opinion, and who
cannot suffer that any one should think differently
from themselves, or find those things sacred which
to them are accursed. They will hear nothing but
what is in harmony with themselves ; and they take
it as a personal insult when men or women attempt
to reason with them, or even hold then' own without
flinching. This kind is to be found specially among
the more intellectual of a family or a circle — women
who are pronounced clever by their friends, and who
have been so long accustomed to think themselves
clever that they have become spoilt mentally as others
are personally, and fancy that minds and thoughts
must follow m their direction, just as eyes and
hands must follow and attend their sisters. The
spoilt woman of the mental kind is a horrid nuisance
generally. She is greatly given to large discourse.
But discourse of a kind that leans all to one side,
and that denies the right of any one to criticize,
doubt, or contradict, is an intellectual Tower of Pisa
under the shadow of which it is not pleasant to live.
;25
DOVECOTS.
Times must be very bad indeed if a faithful few are
not still left to keep the sources of society sweet and
wholesome. When corruption has gone through the
whole mass and all classes are bad alike, everything
comes to an end, and there is a general overthrow of
national life ; but while some are left pure and un-
spotted, we are not quite undone, and we may rea-
sonably hope for better days in the future. In the
midst of the reign of the Girl of the Period, with her
slang and her boldness — of the fashionable woman,
with her denial of duty and her madness for plea-
sure — we come every now and then upon a group of
good girls of the real old English type ; the faithful
few growing up silently among us, but none the less
valuable because they are silent and make no public
display ; doves who are content with life as they
have it in the dovecot, and have no desire to be either
eagles dwelling on romantic heights, or peacocks dis-
playing their pride in sunny courts. We find these
faithful few in town and country alike ; but they are
rifest in the country, where there is less temptation
to go wrong than there is in the large towns, and
326 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
where life is simpler and the moral tone undeniably
higher. The leading feature of these girls is their
love of home and of their own family, and their power
of making occupation and happiness out of apparently
meagre materials. If they are the elders, they find
amusement and interest in their little brothers and
sisters, whom they consider immensely funny and
to whom they are as much girl-mothers as sisters ; if
they are the youngers, they idolize their baby nephews
and nieces. For there is always a baby going on some-
where about these houses — babies being the great ex-
citement of home-life, and the antiseptic element among
women which keeps everything else pure. They are
passionately attached to papa and mamma, whom they
think the very king and queen of humanity, yet whom
they do not call by even endearing slang names. It
has never occurred to them to criticize them as ordi-
nary mortals ; and as they have not been in the way
of learning the prevailing accent of disrespect, they
have not shaken off that almost religious veneration
for their parents which all young people naturally
feel, if they have been well brought up and are not
corrupted.
The yoke in most middle class country-houses is
one fitting very loosely round all necks ; and as they
have all the freedom they desire or could use, the
girls are not fretted by undue pressure, and are con-
tent to live m peace under such restraints as they
have. They adore their elder brothers who are from
home just beginning the great battle of life for them-
DOVECOTS. 327
selves, and confidently believe them to be the finest
fellows going, and the future great men of the day if
only they care to put out those splendid talents of
theirs, and take the trouble of plucking the prizes
within then' reach. They may have a slight reserva-
tion perhaps, in favour of the brother's friend, whom
they place on a pedestal of almost equal height. But
they keep their mental architecture a profound secret
from every one, and do not suffer it to grow into too
sohd a structure unless it has some surer foundation
than their own fancy. For, though doves are loving,
they are by no means lovesick, and are too healthy
and natural and quietly busy for unwholesome dreams.
If one of them marries, they all unite in loving the
man who comes in among them. He is adopted as
one of themselves, and leaps into a family of idolizing
sisters who pet liim as their brother — with just that
subtle little difference in their petting, in so much
as it comes from sisters unaccustomed, and so has the
charm of novelty without the prurient excitement of
naughtiness. But this kind of thing is about the
most dangerous to a man's moral nature that can
befall him. Though pretty to see and undeniably
pleasant to experience, and though perfectly innocent
in every way, still, nothing enervates him so much as
this idolatrous submission of a large family of women.
In a widow's house, where there are many daughters
and no sons, and where the man who marries one
marries the whole family and is worshipped accord-
ingly, the danger is of course increased tenfold ; but
328 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
if there are brothers and a father, the sister's hus-
band, though affectionately cooed over, is not made
quite such a fuss with, and the association is all the
less hurtful in consequence.
These girls lead a by no means stupid life, though
it is a quiet one, -and without any spasmodic events
or tremendous cataclysms. They go a great deal
among the village poor, and they teach at the
Sunday-school, and attend the mothers' meetings and
clothing- clubs and the like, and learn to get interested
in their humbler friends, who after all are Christian
sisters. They read their romances in real life instead
of in three-volume novels, and study human nature
as it is — in the. rough certainly, but perhaps in more
genuine form than if they learnt it only in what is
called society. Then they have their pleasures,
though they are of an unexciting kmd and what fast
girls would call awfully slow. They have their
horses and their croquet parties, their lawn tennis
and their archery meetings ; they have batches of
new music, and a monthly box from Mudie's — and
they know the value of both ; they go out to tea,
and sometimes to dinner, in the neighbourhood ; and
they enjoy the rare county balls with a zest un-
known to London girls who are out every night
in the week. They have their village flower-shows,
which the great families patronize in a free-and-easy
kind of way, and which give occupation for weeks
before and subject for talk for weeks after ; their
school feasts, where the pet parson of the district
DOVECOTS. 329
comes out with his best anecdotes, and makes mild
jokes at a long distance from Sydney Smith ; their
periodical missionary meetings, where they have
great guns from London, and where they hear
unctuous stories about the saintliness of converted
cannibals, and are required to believe m the power of
change of creed to produce an ethnological miracle ;
they have their friends to stay with them — school-
girl friends — with whom they exchange deep con-
fidences, and go back over the old days — so old
to their youth ! — their brothers come down in the
summer, and their brothers' friends come with them,
and do a little spooning in the shrubbery. But there
is more spooning done at picnics than anywhere else ;
and more offers are made there under the shadow of
the old ruin, or in the quiet leafy nook by the river
side, than at any other gathering time of the country.
And as we are all to a certain extent what we are
made by our environment, the doves take to these
pleasures quite kindly and gratefully, as being the
only ones known to them, and enjoy themselves in a
simplicity of circumstances which would give no
pleasure at all to girls accustomed to more highly-
spiced entertainments.
Doves know very little of evil. They are not in
the way of learning it ; and they do not care to
learn it. The few villagers who are supposed to lead
ill lives are spoken of below the breath, and carefully
avoided without being critically studied. When the
railway is to be carried past their quiet nest, there is an
330 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
immense excitement as tlie report goes that a knot of
strange men have been seen scattering themselves over
the fields with their little white flags and theodolites,
their measuring lines and levels. But when the army
of navvies follows after, the excitement is changed to
consternation, and a general sense of evil to come
advancing ruthlessly towards them. The clergy of
the district organize special services, and the scared
doves keep religiously away from the place where the
navvies are hutted. They think them little better
than the savages about whom the Deputation tell
them once or twice a year ; and they create almost as
much terror as an encampment of gipsies. They
represent the lawless forces of the world and the
unknown sins of strong men ; and the wildest story
about them is not too wild to be believed. The
railway altogether is a great offence to the neighbour-
hood, and the line is assumed to destroy the whole
scenic beauty of the place. There are lamentations
over the cockneys it will bring down ; over the high
prices it will create, the immorality it will cause.
Only the sons who are out in the world and have
learnt how life goes on outside the dovecot, advocate
keeping pace with the tunes ; and a few of the stronger
minded of the sisters listen to them with a timid
admiration of their breadth and boldness, and think
there may be two sides to the question after all.
When the dashing captain and his fast wife suddenly
appear in the village — as often happens in these
remote districts — the doves are in a state of great
DOVECOTS. 66 i
moral tribulation. They are scandalized by Mrs.
Highflyer's costume and complexion, and think her
manners odd and doubtful ; her slang shocks them ;
and when they meet her in the lanes, talking so
loudly and laughing so shrilly with that horrid-
looking man in a green cutaway, they feel as fluttered
as their namesakes when a hawk is hovering over the
farmyard. The dashing captain, who does not use
a prayer-book at church, who stares at all the girls
so rudely, and who has even been seen to wink at
some of the prettier cottage girls, and his handsome
wife with her equivocal comj)lexion and pronounced
fashions, who makes eyes at the curate, are never
heartily adopted by the local magnates, though
vouched for by some far-away backer ; and the doves
always feel them to be strange bodies among them,
and out of their rightful element somehow. If things
go quietly without an explosion, well and good ; but
if the truth bursts to the surface in the shape of a
London detective, and the Highflyers are found to be
no better than they should be, the consternation and
half- awed wonderment at the existence of so much
efi*rontery and villany in their atmosphere create an
impression which no time efl*aces. The first clash of
innocence with evil is an event in the life of the
innocent the efi*ect of which nothing ever destroys.
The dovecot is rather dull in the winter, and the
doves are somewhat moped ; but even then they
have the church to decorate, and the sentiment of
Christmas to enliven them. The absent ones of the
332 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
family too, return to the old heartln while they can ;
and as the great joy of the dovecot lies in the family
union that is kept up, and in the family love which
is so strong, the visits of those who no longer live at
home bring a moral summer as warm and cheering as
the physical sunshine. But they do not all assemble.
For many of the doves marry men whose work lies
abroad ; these quiet country-houses being the favourite
matrimonial hunting-grounds for colonists and Anglo-
Indians. So that some are always absent whose
healths are drunk in the traditional punch, while
eyes grow moist as the names are given. Doves are
not disinclined to marry men who have to go abroad,
for all the passionate family love common to them.
Travel is a golden dream to them in their still homes ;
but travel properly companioned. For even the
most adventurous among them are not independent,
as we mean when we speak of independence in
women. They are essentially home-girls, family-
girls, doves who cannot exist without a dovecot,
however humble. The family is everything to them ;
and they are utterly unfit for the solitude which so
many of our self-supporting women can accept quite
resignedly. Not that they are necessarily useless even
as breadwmners. They could work, if pushed to it ;
but it must be in a quiet womanly way, with the
mother, the sister, the husband as the helper — with
the home as the place of rest and the refuge. Their
whole lines are laid in love and quietness ; not by
any means in inaction, but all centred within the
DOVECOTS. 333
home circle. If they marry, they find the love of
their husband enough for them, and have no desire
for other men's admiration. Their babies are all the
world to them, and they do not think maternity an
infliction, as so many of the miserably fashionable
thuik it. They like the occupation of housekeeping,
and feel pride in their fine linen and clean service, in
their well-ordered table and neatly-balanced accounts.
They are kind to their servants, who generally come
from the old home, and whose families they therefore
know ; but they keep up a certain dignity and tone
of superiority towards them in the midst of all their
kindness, which veiy few town-bred mistresses can
keep to town-bred maids. They have always been
the aristocracy in their native place ; and they carry
thi'ough life the meffaceable stamp wliich being ' the
best ' gives.
Doves are essentially mild and gentle women ;
not queens of society even when they are pretty,
because not caring for social success and therefore
not laying themselves out for it ; for if they please
at home that is all they care for, holdmg love before
admiration, and the esteem of one higher than the
praise of many. If a fault is to be found with them
it is that they have not perhaps quite enough
salt for the general taste, used as it is to such
highly-seasoned social food ; but do we really want
our women to have so very much character ? Do
not our splendid passionate creatures lead madly
wretched lives and make miserably uncomfortable
334 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
homes ? and are not our glorious heroines better in
pictures and in fiction than seated by the domestic fire,
or checking the baker's bill ? No doubt the quiet
home -staying doves seem tame enough when we
think of the gorgeous beings made fiimiliar to us by
romance, and history, which is more romantic still ;
but as our daily lives run chiefly in prose, our doves
are better fitted fi)r things as they are ; and to men
who want wives and not playthings, and who care for
the jDcace of family life and the dignity of home, they
are beyond price when they can be fomid and secured.
So that, on the whole, we can dispense with the
sj)lendid creatures of character and the magnificent
queens of society sooner than with the quiet and unob-
trusive doves. And though they do spoil men most
monstrously, they know where to draw the line, and
while petting their own at home they keep strangers
abroad at a distance, and make themselves respected
as only modest and gentle women are respected by
men.
335
BORED HUSBANDS,
The curtain fiills on joined hands when it does not
descend on a tragedy ; and novels for the most part
end with a wreath of orange-blossoms and a pair of
high-stepping greys, as the last act that claims to be
recorded. For both novelists and playwrights assume
that with marriage all the great events of life have
ceased, and that, once wedded to the beloved object,
there is sure to be smooth sailing and halcyon seas
to the end of time. It sounds very cynical and
shocking to question this pretty belief ; but unfor-
tunately for us who live in the world as it is and
not as it is supposed to be, we find that even a union
with the beloved object does not always ensure per-
fect contentment in the home, and that bored hus-
bands are by no means rare.
The ideal honeymoon is of course an Elysian
time, during which nothing works rusty nor gets out
of joint; and the ideal marriage is only a life-long
honeymoon, where the happiness is more secure and
the love deeper, if more sober ; but the prose reality
of one and the other has often a terrible dash of
weariness in it, even under the most favourable con-
336 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
clitions. Boredom begins in the very honeymoon
itself. At first starting in married life there are many
dangers to be encountered, not a shadow of which
was seen in the wooing. There are odd freaks of
temper turmng up quite unexpectedly ; there is the
sense, so painful to some men, of being tied for life,
of never being able to be alone again, never free and
without responsibilities ; there are misunderstandings
to-day and the struggle for mastery to-morrow^ —
the cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, which may
prove to be the tempest that will destroy all ; there
is the unrest of travelling, and the awkwardness of
unusual association, to help in the general discom-
fort ; or, if the happy pair have settled down in a
vale and a cottage for their month, there is the ' sad
satiety ' which all men feel after a time when they
have had one companion only, with no outside diver-
sion to cause a break. Bat the honeymoon at last
draws to a close, and the relieved bridegroom gets
back to his old haunts, to his work, his friends, and
his club ; and though he takes to all these things
again with a difference, still they are helps and
additions. This is the time of trial to a woman. If
she gets over this pinch, and is sensible enough to
understand that human nature cannot be kept up at
high pressure, even in love, and that a man must
sooner or later come down from romance to work-a-
day prose, from the passionate lover to the cool and
sober husband — if she can understand this, and
settle into his pace, without fretting on the one hand
BOEED HUSBANDS. 337
or casting about for unliealtliy distractions on the
other — she will do well, and will probably make a
pleasant home, and thereby diminish the boredom of
life. But unfortunately, not every woman can do
this ; and it is just during this time of the man's
transition from the lover to the friend that so many
women begin to make shipwreck of their own happi-
ness and his. They think to keep him a romantic
wooer still, by their tears at his prosaic indifference
to the little sentimentalities once so eagerly accepted
and offered ; they try to hold him close by their
flattering but somewhat tiresome exactions ; their
jealousies — very pretty perhaps, and quite as
flattermg — are infinite, and as baseless as they are
infinite ; all of which is very nice up to a certain
point and in the beginning of things, but all of
which gets wearisome as tune goes on, and a man
wants both a little change and a little rest. But
women do not see this ] or seeing it, they cannot
accept it as a necessary condition of things ; where-
fore they go on in their fatal way, and by the very
unwisdom of their own love bore their husband out
of his. Or they grow substantially cold because
he is superficially cooler, and thmk themselves
justified in ceasing to love him altogether because
he takes their love for granted, and so has ceased to
woo it.
If they are jealous, or shy, or unsocial, as so
many women are, they make life very heavy by their
exclusiveness, and the monastic character they give
VOL. I. Z
338 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
the home. A man married to a woman of this kind
is, in fact, a house prisoner, whose only free spaces
lie beyond the four walls of home. His bachelor
friends are shut out. They smoke ; or entice him to
drink more than his wife thinks is good for him ;
or they induce him to bet on the Derby ; or to
play for half-crowns at whist or billiards ; or they
lead him in some other way of offence abhorrent
to women. So the bachelor friends are shouldered
out ; and when the husband wants to entertain them,
he must invite them to his club — if he has one —
and pay the penalty when he gets home. In a few
years' time his wife will be glad to encourage her
sons' young friends to the house, for the sake of the
daucfhters on hand ; but husbands and sons are in a
different category, and there are few fathers who do
not learn, as time goes on, how much the mother
will allow that the wife refused.
If bachelor friends are shouldered out of the house,
all female friends are forbidden anything like an
intimate footing, save those few whom the wife
thinks specially devoted to herself and of whom she
is not jealous. And these are very few. There are
perhaps no women in the world so exclusive in their
dealinf^rs with their husbands as are Eno;lishwomen.
A husband is bound to- one woman only, no doubt ;
but the average wife thinks him also bound to have
no affection whatever outside her and perhaps her
family. If he meets an intelligent woman, pleasant
to talk to, of agreeable manners and ready wit, and
BORED HUSBANDS. oo'J
if he talks to her in consequence with anything like
persistency or interest, he offends against the un-
written law ; and his wife, whose utmost power of
conversation consists in putting in a yes or no with
tolerable accuracy of aim, thinks herself slighted and
ill-used. She may be young and pretty, and dearly
loved for her own special qualities ; and her husband
may not have a thought towards his new friend, or
any other woman, in the remotest degree trenching
on his allegiance to her ; but the fact that he finds
pleasure, though only of an intellectual and aesthetic
kind, in the society of any other woman, that he feels
an mterest in her life, chooses her for his friend, or
finds community of pursuits or sympathy in ideas,
makes his wife by just so much a victim and aggrieved.
And yet what a miserably monotonous home is
that to which she would confine him ! He is at his
office all day, badgered and worried with various
business complications, and he comes home tired,
perhaps cross — even well-conducted husbands have
that way sometimes. He finds his wife tired and
cross too ; so that they begin the evening together
mutually at odds, she irritated by small cares and
he disturbed by large anxieties. Or he finds her
preoccupied and absorbed in her own pursuits, and
quite disinclined to make any diversion for his sake.
He asks her for some music ; she used to be ready
enough to smg and play to him in the old love-
making days ; but she refuses now. Either she has
some needlework to do, which might have been done
340 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
during the day when he was out, or baby is asleep in
the nursery, and music in the drawing-room would
disturb him — at all events she cannot sing or play
to-night ; and even if she does — he has heard all her
pieces so often ! If he is not a reading-man, those
long, dull, silent evenings are very trying. She
works, and drives him wild with the click of her
needle ; or she reads the last new novel, and he
hates novels, and gets tired to death when she
insists on telling him all about the story and the
characters ; or she chooses the evening for letter-
writing, and if the noise of her pen scratching over
the paper does not irritate him, perhaps it sends him
to sleep, when at least he is not bored. But dull,
objectless, and vacant as their evenings are, his wife
would not hear of any help from without to give just
that little fillip which would prevent boredom and
not create ceremony. She would think her life had
gone to pieces, and that only desolation was before
her, if he hinted that his home was dull, and that
though he loves her very dearly and wants no other
wife but her, yet that her society onl}; — toujours
Ijerdrix^ without change or addition — is a Uttle
stupid, however nice the partridge may be, and that
things would be bettered if Mrs. or Miss So-and-So
came m sometimes, just to brighten up the hours.
And if he were to make a practice of bringing home
his men friends, she would probably let all parties
concerned feel pretty distinctly that she considered
the home her special sanctuary, and that guests
BOKED HUSBANDS. 341
whom she did not mvite were intruders. She would
perhaps go willingly enough to a ball or crowded
soiree^ or she might like to give one ; but that
intimate form of society, which is a mere enlarge-
ment of the home life, she dreads as the supplement-
ing of deficiencies, and thinks her married happiness
safer in boredom than in any diversion from herself
as the sole centre of her husband's pleasure.
Home life stagnates in England ; and in very
few families is there any mean between dissipation
and this stagnation. We can scarcely wonder that
so many husbands think matrimony a mistake as we
have it in our insular arrangements ; that they look
back regretfully to the time when they were unfet-
tered and not bored ; or that their free friends, who
watch them as wild birds watch their caged com-
panions, curiously and reflectively, share their
opinion. Wife and home, after all, make up but
part of a man's life ; they are not his all, and do not
satisfy the whole of his social instinct ; nor is any one
woman the concentration of all womanhood to a man,
leaving nothmg that is beautiful, nor in its own un-
conjugal way desirable, on the outside. Besides, when
with his wife a man is often as much isolated as when
alone, for any real companionship there is between
them. Few women take a living interest in the lives
of men, and fewer still understand them. They expect
the husband to sympathize with them in the kitchen
gossip and the nursery chatter, the neighbours' doings
and all the small household politics ; but they are
342 SATURDAY MORNINGS.
utterly unable to comprehend his pleasures, his
thoughts, his duties, the responsibilities of his pro-
fession, or the bearings of any public question in
which he takes a part.
Even if this were not so, and granting that they
could enter fully into his life and sympathize with
him as intelligent equals, not only as compassionate
saints .or loving children, there would still be the
need of novelty, and still the certainty of boredom
without it. For human life, like all other forms of
life, must have a due proportion of fresh elements
continually added to keep it sweet and growing, else
it becomes stagnant and stunted. And daily inter-
course undeniably exhausts the moral ground. After
the close companionship of years no one can remain
mentally fresh to the other, unless indeed one or both
be of the rarest order of mind and of a practically
inexhaustible power of acquiring knowledge. Save
these exceptional instances, we must all of necessity
get worn out by constant intercourse. We know
every tiiought, every opinion, and almost every
square inch of information possessed ; we have heard
the old stories again and again, and know exactly
what will lead up to them, and at what point they
will begin ; we have measured the whole sweep of
mind, and have probed its depths ; and though we
may love and value what we have learnt, yet we want
something new — fresh food for interest, though not
necessarily a new love for the displacement of the old.
But this is what very few Englishwomen can under-
BORED HUSBANDS. 343
stand or will allow. They hold so intensely by the
doctrine of unity that they are even jealous of a man's
pursuits, if they think these take up any place in his
mind which might also be theirs. They must be
good for every part of his life ; and the poorest of
them all must be his only source of interest, suffering
no other woman to share his admiration nor obtain
his friendship, though this would neither touch his
love nor interfere with their rights. Friendship is a
hard saymg to them, and one they cannot receive.
Wherefore they keep a tight grasp on the marital
collar, and suffer no relief of monotony by judicious
loosening, nor by generous faith in integral fidelity.
The practical result of which is that most men are
horribly bored at home, and that the mass of them
really suffer from the domestic stagnation to which
national customs and the exclusiveness of women
doom them so soon as they become family men. It
mast however, in fairness be added, that in general
they obtain some kind of compensation j and that
very few walk meekly in their bonds without at
times slipping them off, with or without the con-
currence of their wives.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
S. & H,
LOSDON : PRINTED BY
SrOTTISWOODE AND CO . NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
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