are well provided with the means of life, their social position is
such that the most refined and cultured society is open to them,
and they have seen the wisdom and justice of giving their children
the advantages of excellent education. In fact, the surroundings of
Miss Strongith’will’s life have been in every way conducive to the
cultivation of her individuality. She has enjoyed the friendship of men
and women of culture, and has had the advantage of contrasting them
with the commonplace and the uncultured. She has had the invaluable
opportunity of travelling in foreign countries not merely holiday
scampers through Continental towns, but sojourns for months at a time
in the very centres of the social, artistic, and intellectual life of
several countries, into which she has been admitted on intimate terms.
She has thus learnt to regard the world in a cosmopolitan spirit, to
look upon life in a large way. She has been forced to think for herself
by the very eclecticism of her training, but this very cosmopolitanism,
while enlarging her mind, has narrowed her heart to individuals. It has
made her difficult to please, and impatient of any attempt to coerce
her affections. It has deprived her of a husband.
[Illustration]
Miss Strongith’will would be very indignant—very angry—if any one
suggested that she ever wanted a husband; not that she has anything
but respect and admiration for the domestic affections, for the
peaceful beauties of home, for the lovely relations of parents and
children, brothers and sisters. But she would resent the implication
that she could not have been married had she so desired. As a matter
of fact, she has had love affairs and offers of marriage; but those
which she had before experience and critical judgment had tempered
her susceptibility, were of the ineligible order—the medical student
with a practice in prospect, the briefless barrister, the young artist
who ought to be “on the line,” if only the Academicians were not so
jealous, and so on. But these were in the days when a dance would lure
her from any studies, when she was not above being flattered by the
attentions of a “nice young man,” and before she had realised that
“life is earnest, life is real, life is not an empty dream.” Now,
however, she has become serious and superior, and the ordinary young
man who flirts and dances and plays tennis is as nought to her. Men
interest her, she says, intellectually, and only according to the
measure of their mental powers or artistic sensibilities does she value
their companionship. Let no man dare to talk frivolously to her; she
would resent it as an insult to her understanding. If he attempted to
pay conventional compliments, he would receive such a snub as should
serve him for a lifetime, and put a check on the honeyed side of his
tongue for evermore.
But Miss Strongith’will is not a stone, she is full of humanity, full
of sympathy for those who suffer and those who struggle for existence
or strive to realise lofty aspirations. She is only hard upon women
who lower their natures for the love of men, who submit to martyrdom,
or turn sour because they have been disappointed in love. She contends
that love is not, as Byron has it, “woman’s whole existence,” but
that, as the poet says with regard to man, it is of her life “a thing
apart”—a beautiful thing that adorns her life and makes it more lovely,
but not absolutely necessary as an active influence. But it could
hardly be that a woman who thinks and theorises about love has never
felt its magic spell, that she has never known the beautiful joy of
loving and of being loved. Miss Strongith’will’s individualism is
opposed to any outward show of emotion, and an ordinary acquaintance,
even a friend, would never quite penetrate to her heart’s secrets. She
never talks of her love affair—her great love affair, I mean, which
changed the girl to woman, and made her herself. But I know something
of what it was to her, what she suffered with the disappointment.
He was not an ordinary lover, he was not an ordinary man. He was a
visionary, a poet, a dreamer, with a genius for planning great works
and achieving none. He was full of ideas, vague, beautiful ideas which
remained abstract, but never took concrete form. He would conceive
lovely lyrics, imagine glorious epics, dream splendid dramas—and
write a few columns for the newspapers. He was always going to do
something, but time went by, and he did nothing, that is, nothing
worthy of his undoubted abilities. He started life with brilliant
promise, and probably had he known Miss Strongith’will in the days of
his promise, he might have given the world something to remember, but
he was naturally indolent and terribly sensitive, he hated the actual
labour of writing, and the process of materialising his imagination,
of reducing his ideas to words, destroyed their charm for him. He would
revel in a fancy, but he could never satisfy himself in giving it form
and expression, and he would not expose to unsympathetic criticism his
dreams and fancies in forms which did not fully realise them. Thus he
was frittering away his time, his opportunities, and such talents as
were his when he met Miss Strongith’will.
He had just written enough in his time to reveal latent possibilities
of literary achievement, and his poetic temperament appealed to her
imagination. It touched her sentimentally as she had never been touched
before, at the same time that it stirred her intellectually. She felt
that here was a man with talent, but without the requisite impulse
of industry; what if she should make him achieve something noble and
endurable? Like Keats, he declared himself for a life of sensations
rather than of thoughts. She would try and help him to combine both
sensation and thought, with the result that he should produce poems
worthy to live. His intellectual inertness should be corrected by her
strength of mind. He should yet be great through her sympathy, her
aid, her love. For she loved him; his very frailty of temperament,
his acute sensitiveness, his lack of self-reliance, all appealed to
her strong nature, and she gave him that love which is all the deeper
because it feels bound to protect its object. But his imagination was
not satisfied by love of this order, it was not sufficiently romantic,
his temperament needed passionate response rather than intellectual
aid. She loved him entirely in her womanly way, and according to the
utmost possibilities of her nature, in which, however the intellectual
element dominated the emotional, whereas in her lover’s nature it
was the reverse. So, while he grew impatient and weary, she began to
realise a sense of disappointment.
For a long time she hoped against hope that he was really worthy of the
love she gave him, that he would do something to make the world respect
him; but he had encouraged his nature to yearn for an ideal love, which
should mean complete mutual self-surrender, the making of two lives
one. The idea of female individualism he admitted was just, but it did
not suit him, the substitution of intellectual sympathy and serene
sentiment for that passionate love which must absorb every function of
soul and body, left his life still unfulfilled. Literary achievement
and fame could not fill it, only woman’s love could do that, only the
love that maintains no distinct individuality, the love that gives
and takes all. Aspasia would have suited him, as Walter Savage Landor
draws her. “We cannot love without imitating,” she says, “and we are as
proud in the loss of our originality as of our freedom.” But this was
not Miss Strongith’will’s way of loving; to lose any measure of one’s
individuality even in love was, in her eyes, to be degraded. Yet she
loved deeply in her way, and when her impressionable, idealist lover,
without any thought of inconstancy, took his love to another, whose
nature he deemed more in sympathy with his own, Miss Strongith’will
suffered a bitter blow and a deep wound.
She uttered no complaint, however, and few ever knew that she had
been in love, much less that she had found it disappointing. But the
experience seemed to open out her life, she saw clearer, her knowledge
of human motives and feelings was widened, and she felt more than
ever that woman can live individually and independently. She did not,
however, perceive that she had met her disappointment through not
attempting to weld her own individuality with that of the man she had
loved without understanding. But after that she believed implicitly
in herself, and determined to follow her own pursuits, to live as
independently as if she were a man, and, thrown on her own resources,
compelled to earn her own living, a duty she considers every woman owes
to herself.
What would be Miss Strongith’will’s views on individualism were she a
happy wife and the mother of a large family, whether she would still
consider that a woman has the right to live exclusively according to
her own tastes and inclinations, I cannot tell; I think she would find
it rather difficult in practice. As it is, however, Miss Strongith’will
is happily situated, for she is the beloved of her immediate family,
among whom she is regarded as a superior being who ought to have her
own way in everything.
She is the oracle of the house, and she rules accordingly. Perhaps her
constant habit of self-reliance has made her a little dogmatic and
impatient of contradiction. She has the courage of her own opinions,
and the pugnacity of them. It is not wise to differ from them unless
you be prepared to pummel her with logic and authority. Then you
may have a chance with her in argument, but with all her strength
of will and self-reliance, she is a very woman, and her reason will
often be none but a woman’s reason, “I think it so, because I think
it so.” She “sees life steadily,” and if she does not see it quite
whole, she certainly has a good view of it, and from her coign of
vantage she perceives the devious ways of women who have no vocation.
Therefore, she devotes herself to art as a profession, with just the
same enthusiasm as a man of fortune strives in the City to increase his
banking account. She has not the stimulus of necessity, but she feels a
certain triumphant satisfaction in doing what she is not obliged to do.
She has artistic aspirations, why should she not pursue them with
as much avidity as if her livelihood depended upon her success?
Why, she argues, should a woman only take to professional work when
she cannot depend upon men to work for her? And why should she be
accused of taking the bread out of poorer women’s mouths because
she sells pictures, when her father or husband is able and willing
to give her as much as she wants? No, Miss Strongith’will realises
the sordid fact that money is the chief incentive to all work, and
that work is valued according to its price; therefore she claims
the right for women to work for money according to their instincts,
abilities, and inclinations, without exciting any more remark than
a man would who worked under similar circumstances. But though Miss
Strongith’will asserts woman’s right to independence and the courage of
her individuality, she is none the less womanly, none the less gentle
and steadfastly affectionate to those she knows intimately, and those
who understand her. Would she have been more so had she been happily
married, so that her own individuality had blended harmoniously with
that of the man she loved, and had become greater for motherhood? That
is the question.
_THE SUBMISSIVE WOMAN_
I remember, when I was a little boy, a beautiful young woman and a very
handsome man coming to my father’s house, and these were husband and
wife. And I looked upon him with a sort of worshipful wonder, for they
told me he was a brave soldier, and had fought gloriously in battles.
At that period of my life my young imagination was quickened by every
story of adventure, and the only books or pictures that appealed to me
were those that told of battle, or of the doughty deeds of soldiers and
sailors. The sword seemed to me then far mightier than the pen, which
latter I regarded merely as an instrument of scholastic torture.
Imagine my great pride and joy, therefore, when this real live hero
talked to me as familiarly as any schoolboy of my own age, and when,
looking over some pictures of the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny, which
were among my treasures, he told me how he had stormed the heights of
Alma and captured Sebastopol, how he had relieved Lucknow, and blown
thousands of mutinous Sepoys from the guns. I listened to him with
all my sense and spirit. How graphically he described the fights,
remembering every detail, even to the name of the little bugler who
sounded the “cease firing,” and the exact expression of the Sepoys the
moment before the guns were fired that should blow them to eternity! I
drank it all in, and thought there never was such a great man in the
world as Captain Marshall Meek. No wonder that his sweet and gentle
wife cast such constant looks of affectionate pride upon him. She was
indeed a fortunate woman to be the wife of such a hero, and I regarded
her with boyish enthusiasm, because of her heroic husband’s reflected
light. To me they were the most romantic couple I had ever met, for
they embodied beauty and chivalry—such as I had read and dreamt of.
They might have been Lancelot and Guinevere for me and they remained
impressed upon my young memory, she as the beautiful daughter of a
distinguished family, he as an ideal soldier, handsome and brave.
I did not see them again till I had reached man’s estate, and then
they came once more to my father’s house. But what a change had the
years wrought! He was now a shaky, middle-aged man, with alternate
intervals of boisterous merriment and ill-temper, and only the
reminiscent suggestion of his old gallant bearing and good looks;
while she was an absolute wreck of her former self. Her fair, plump
features were now sallow and shrunk, her bright, gentle countenance
told of nothing but sorrow, suffering, and anxiety; her full, elegant
figure had become attenuated beyond recognition. The old regard of
proud affection had given place to a haunted, restless look of fear, of
expectancy of something terrible. Yes, a few years had transformed the
gallant soldier into a confirmed drunkard and bully, and the poor wife
into his abject slave.
It was a pitiful story. He had had a sunstroke in India—the original
excuse of so many drunkards—and a craving for stimulant had succeeded.
Stronger and stronger grew the craving, weaker and weaker the power of
resistance, until the habit of drink became so strong that the case
was quite a scandal. “Conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman,”
was the official designation given to the offence for which he was
cashiered from the army, and social ruin was the result. And down
with the disgraced man went the wife and children. Society always
generalises, and the stain of a name clings to the innocent bearers of
it. Of course people pitied poor Mrs. Meek, but with such a husband
who could visit her? So, with ruined career, with name disgraced, with
shattered constitution, Captain Marshall Meek brought his family home
to England, and by undue extravagance and gambling speedily exhausted
the income his wife had brought him as dowry. His social disgrace
seemed to have made him desperate—his weakness for drink certainly
rendered him insensible to all the finer feelings of manhood, and he
spared his wife no humiliation.
[Illustration]
She was the daughter of a proud and distinguished man, who had won
his baronetcy by splendid services to the State, whose father and
grandfather before him had won honourable reward from a grateful
country. The men and women of her family were proud and spirited to an
unusual degree, and when she went to them, socially and financially
beggared, to ask assistance for her children, they answered her that
she must separate herself from her drunken and disgraceful husband, and
then they would see what could be done for her.
But Mrs. Meek was wife before everything; whatever her husband had
done, however he might drag her and their children down, whatever he
might make her suffer in body and spirit, she was still his wife, and
as she had vowed at the altar to love, honour, and obey, so would she
strive to fulfil her vows. Therefore pitying and forgiving those of her
kinsfolk who had urged her to what she considered the breaking of the
marriage vow, she gave up all hope of their assistance, and determined
to try and eke out what little was left of her fortune as best she
could. Her pride had been sadly humbled, but she still had a remnant of
independence. She still hoped to redeem her husband’s reputation, and
woo him from the injurious ways of drink.
It was at this period that I met again the hero and heroine who had
so captivated my boyish fancy, and never shall I forget the shock of
recognition. They seemed to have been transformed by some sort of
metempsychosis-while-you-wait process. The Captain’s old buoyancy had
given place to irritability pretending to be joviality—a miserable
sham, practised exclusively for company. And this seemed to alarm his
wife far more than his outbursts of drunken passion, for then she knew
that the bully was uppermost, while the cunning of his pretended humour
puzzled her, and kept her upon tenter-hooks, fearing what he might say
or do.
It was a miserable life for her, poor thing. She, who had lived her
youth in luxury, and her early married life in comfort and amid
brilliant social surroundings, was now compelled to endure every
degradation that genteel poverty and social vagabondage could inflict.
They were very poor, yet her good-for-nothing husband insisted upon
an outward show of gentility which he had not the grace to support.
He would drink in private and in public, he would debase his manhood,
and bully his long-suffering wife, but he would drain the very scanty
family purse to preserve a pretence of social position. The children
were growing up, but little were they heeded, except as servants and
errand-boys. Education befitting the sons and daughters of an “officer
and gentleman” was out of the question; all the cash that could be
squeezed out of the domestic exchequer was appropriated by the Captain
for his personal expenses, his clothes, and his drink. Poor Mrs. Meek
had to find clothing for the boys and girls as best she might, just
as she had to keep the household going. For herself, one or two black
silk dresses which had seen better days served her through years of
humiliation. She had lost the semblance of gentility, and only tried
to make herself look a little smarter when her husband rated her for
forgetting her position. Her position, indeed!
And she submitted to all this humiliation, she allowed herself and
her children to be dragged down lower and lower, she offended beyond
reconciliation the rich, proud relatives who could have helped her,
because they expressed their just resentment against her husband and
their indignation at her obstinate martyrdom, all simply for love
of this man who was quite unworthy of it. She had never heard of
Individualism; the thought of a woman having a free soul, with an
independent life of her own to work out, had probably never entered
her head. She was one of those women who think that the whole duty of
woman is towards her husband, be he good or bad, tender or cruel,
devoted or selfish. That he has broken his marriage vows does not
relieve her of the obligation of hers—she must be faithful to the end.
And so Mrs. Meek suppressed her independent womanhood for the sake
of a worthless man. There was no question of clinging to an ideal of
her girlhood, that was broken long since, and Mrs. Meek was not an
idealising woman; she saw things as they were, but she thought it
was her duty to try and soften their brutality. If there was little
of the old love remaining, there was the old slavish devotion, and
the submission of her individuality to his caprice. She retained the
mediæval notion that the husband was the wife’s lord and master, and
when misfortunes, albeit of his own making, came upon him and involved
her, she considered that it was all the more obligatory for her to
unself herself, so as to give him the more consideration. She had
joined her lot to his for better or for worse, and, as she would not
have thought of leaving him had it been better, she would not desert
him when fortune was at its worst. Let him humiliate her as he would,
she would be a martyr in the sacred cause of wifely devotion.
There are some women who must be martyrs at all cost, if not in
earnest, then in make-believe. Generally there is more folly and
egotism in their martyrdom than high-minded purpose, but sometimes
there is a touch of the genuine angel. Now, I never met a more
serious martyr than Mrs. Marshall Meek, and if there was a good deal
of the fool about her self-sacrifice, there was something, too, of
the angel—no ordinary woman could have been so absolutely without
resentment with so much just cause. Whatever she suffered, and Heaven
knows she must have suffered as few women in her station of life are
called upon to suffer, never was she known to utter complaint. No
indignity, no deprivation, could provoke her to reproach her husband;
and when I have heard her sons and daughters grumble at their position,
she would always chide them gently, and expect pity for their father’s
misfortunes. For herself she sought none. God in His own good time
would pity her, she would say, till then it was her duty to submit
patiently.
But was this just either to herself or her children? For herself, it
must rest with her own conscience whether she has made the best use
of her life, debasing her soul to the service of a worthless man,
be he husband a thousand times over. But for her children, has she
not grossly abused her responsibilities? She has sacrificed them to
a father who has squandered the most brilliant opportunities, and
degraded all their lives. Had she agreed to the wishes of her relatives
to separate judicially from her worthless husband, whose downward
course she was powerless to stay, she might have restored her children
to their proper social position, and secured to them all the advantages
of education. But she allowed herself to become estranged from those
who could have helped her, and to beg for alms from friends whose
purses were of less capacity than their hearts. And, oh! the terrible
struggles of her life, the humiliation, the injustice, the pity of it.
Then when the inevitable _delirium tremens_ cut off, in what should
have been its prime, a life once so full of promise so grievously
unfulfilled, it was all too late to repair the terrible mischief done.
The children, who had been dragged up anyhow, lived anyhow, and were
married anyhow to those who dragged them down still lower in the social
scale. And their mother, the widowed martyr to her sense of wifely
duty, ignored by proud and offended relatives, neglected by children
whose gratitude she had never encouraged, and, weary of all, has
hidden herself away in some obscure lodging to await, as patiently and
submissively as she has lived, the coming of easeful death.
And there will always be women like this to soften men’s lives by their
own self-submission; but, thank goodness, there be also women who know
how to live their own lives, and to stimulate, as well as smooth, the
lives of men.
_THE “AWFULLY JOLLY” GIRL_
Mabel Flirtington is still in the age of gigglehood, a period of life
through which every well-regulated girl must pass. If a girl cannot
enjoy a good giggle, there must be something very much the matter, she
must be suffering severe personal affliction of some kind or another,
or, may be, she is a changeling, or perchance the stars went wrong at
her birth. A positively serious young girl is an anomaly; she cannot
be tolerated. Youth is naturally joyous, and, if the girl be mother
to the woman, what a depressing maturity will be that of the girl who
cannot giggle. I say this because I have frequently heard _passée_
women and disagreeable men speak contemptuously of the “giggling girl,”
and with great injustice. I reverence youth myself, and in this I imply
no disrespect to old age, which, when it is delightful, is delightful
indeed, though old people are not always companionable. Young people,
on the contrary, have not had time to lose their illusions or to
suffer all the ills that age is heir to. Nor, on the other hand, have
they acquired the wisdom, charity, and experience of years; therefore
they offer the charms of simplicity, frankness, and enthusiasm. Their
companionship is a refreshment, and I am prepared to endorse all that
the poets have written in eulogy of youth.