but the little woman, who breaks the whole code of laws and defies all
their defenders--the pert, smart, pretty little woman, who laughs in
your face, and goes straight ahead if you try to turn her to the right
hand or to the left, receiving your remonstrances with the most sublime
indifference, as if you were talking a foreign language she could not
understand. She carries everything before her, wherever she is. You may
see her stepping over barriers, slipping under ropes, penetrating to the
green benches with a red ticket, taking the best places on the platform
over the heads of their rightful owners, settling herself among the
reserved seats without an inch of pasteboard to float her. You cannot
turn her out by main force. British chivalry objects to the public
laying on of hands in the case of a woman, even when most recalcitrant
and disobedient; more particularly if a small and fragile-looking woman.
So that, if it is only a usurpation of places especially masculine, she
is allowed to retain what she has got amid the grave looks of the
elders--not really displeased though at a flutter of her ribbons among
them--and the titters and nudges of the young fellows.
If the battle is between her and another woman, they are left to fight
it out as they best can, with the odds laid heavily on the little one.
All this time there is nothing of the tumult of contest about her. Fiery
and combative as she generally is, when breaking the law in public
places she is the very soul of serene daring. She shows no heat, no
passion, no turbulence; she leaves these as extra weapons of defence to
women who are assailable. For herself she requires no such aids. She
knows her capabilities and the line of attack that best suits her, and
she knows, too, that the fewer points of contact she exposes the more
likely she is to slip into victory; the more she assumes, and the less
she argues, the slighter the hold she gives her opponents. She is
either perfectly good-humored or blankly innocent; she either smiles you
into indulgence or wearies you into compliance by the sheer hopelessness
of making any impression on her. She may, indeed, if of the very
vociferous and shrill-tongued kind, burst out into such a noisy
demonstration that you are glad to escape from her, no matter what
spoils you leave on her hands; just as a mastiff will slink away from a
bantam hen all heckled feathers and screeching cackle, and tremendous
assumption of doing something terrible if he does not look out. Any way
the little woman is unconquerable; and a tiny fragment of humanity at a
public show, setting all rules and regulations at defiance, is only
carrying out in the matter of benches the manner of life to which nature
has dedicated her from the beginning.
As a rule, the little woman is brave. When the lymphatic giantess falls
into a faint or goes off into hysterics, she storms, or bustles about,
or holds on like a game terrier, according to the work on hand. She will
fly at any man who annoys her, and bears herself as equal to the biggest
and strongest fellow of her acquaintance. In general she does it all by
sheer pluck, and is not notorious for subtlety or craft. Had Delilah
been a little woman she would never have taken the trouble to shear
Samson's locks. She would have defied him with all his strength
untouched on his head, and she would have overcome him too. Judith and
Jael were both probably large women. The work they went about demanded a
certain strength of muscle and toughness of sinew; but who can say that
Jezebel was not a small, freckled, auburn-haired Lady Audley of her
time, full of the concentrated fire, the electric force, the passionate
recklessness of her type? Regan and Goneril might have been beautiful
demons of the same pattern; we have the example of the Marchioness de
Brinvilliers as to what amount of spiritual deviltry 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-colored
complexions; as catalogued properties according to the ideal, they would
be placed in the list of the natural criminals and lawbreakers, while in
reality they are about as meek and docile a set of women as are to be
found within the four seas. Pit a fiery little Welsh woman or a petulant
Parisienne against the most regal and Junonic amongst them, and let them
try conclusions in courage, in energy, or in audacity; the Israelitish
Juno will go down before either of the small Philistines, and the
fallacy of weight and color in the generation of power will be shown
without the possibility of denial. Even in those old days of long ago,
when human characteristics were embodied and deified, we do not find
that the white-armed, large-limbed Here, though queen by right of
marriage, lorded it over her sister goddesses by any superior energy or
force of nature. On the contrary, she was rather a heavy-going person,
and, unless moved to anger by her husband's numerous infidelities, took
her Olympian life placidly enough, and once or twice got cheated in a
way that did no great credit to her sagacity. A little Frenchwoman would
have sailed around 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 the accredited interpreters as well, endowed with
magic powers, admitted to a share in the councils of men, brave in war,
active in peace, these fair-haired Scandinavian women were the fit
comrades of their men, the fit wives and mothers of the Berserkers and
the Vikings. They had no tame or easy life of it, if all we hear of them
is true. To defend the farm and the homestead during their husbands'
absence, and to keep themselves intact against all bold rovers to whom
the Tenth Commandment was an unknown law; to dazzle and bewilder by
magic arts when they could not conquer by open strength; to unite craft
and courage, deception and daring, loyalty and independence, demanded
no small amount of opposing qualities. But the Steingerdas and Gudrunas
were generally equal to any emergency of fate or fortune, and slashed
their way through the history of their time more after the manner of men
than women; supplementing their downright blows by side thrusts of
craftier cleverness when they had to meet power with skill, and were
fain to overthrow brutality by fraud. The Norse women were certainly as
largely framed as they were mentally energetic, and as crafty as either;
but we know of no other women who unite the same characteristics, and
are at once cunning, strong, brave and true.
On the whole, then, the little women have the best of it. More petted
than their bigger sisters, and infinitely more powerful, they have their
own way in part because it really does not seem worth while to contest a
point with such little creatures. There is nothing that wounds a man's
self-respect in any victory they may get or claim. Where there is
absolute inequality of strength, there can be no humiliation in the
self-imposed defeat of the stronger; and as it is always more pleasant
to have peace than war, and as big men for the most part rather like
than not to put their necks under the tread of tiny feet, the little
woman goes on her way triumphant to the end, breaking all the laws she
does not like, and throwing down all the barriers that impede her
progress, perfectly irresistible and irrepressible in all circumstances
and under any condition.
PINCHBECK.
Not many years ago no really refined gentlewoman would have worn
pinchbeck. False jewelry and imitation lace were touchstones with the
sex, and the woman who would condescend to either was assumed, perhaps
not quite without reason, to have lost something more than the mere
perception 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 as more than a lucky adventurer by the aboriginal gentry of the
place; and the blue blood, perhaps nourishing itself on thin beer,
turned up its nose disdainfully at the claret and madeira which had been
personally earned and not lineally inherited. This exclusiveness was
narrow in spirit, and hard in individual working; and yet there was a
wholesome sentiment underlying its pride which made it valuable in
social ethics, if immoral on the score of natural equality and human
charity. It was the rejection of pretentiousness, however gilded and
glittering, in favor of reality, however poor and barren; it was the
condemnation of make-believes--the repudiation of pinchbeck. It is not a
generation since this was the normal attitude of society towards its
_nouveaux riches_ and Brummagem jewelry; but time moves fast in these
later days, and national sentiments change as quickly as national
fashions.
We are in the humor to rehabilitate all things, and pinchbeck has now
its turn with the rest. The lady of slender means who would refuse to
wear imitation lace and false jewelry is as rare as the country society
which would exclude the _nouveau riche_ because of his newness, and not
adopt him because of his riches. The whole anxiety now is, not what a
thing is, but how it looks--not its quality, but its appearance. Every
part of social and domestic life is dedicated to the apotheosis of
pinchbeck. It meets us at the hall door, where miserable make-believes
of stuccoed pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial dignity on a
wretched little villa, run up without regard to one essential of home
comfort or of architectural truth. It goes with us into the cold,
conventional drawing-room, where all is for show, nothing for use, where
no one lives, and which is just the mere pretence of a dwelling-room,
set out to deceive the world into the belief that its cheap finery is
the expression of the every-day life and circumstances of the family. It
sits with us at the table, which a confectioner out of a back street has
furnished, and where everything, down to the very flowers, is hired for
the occasion. It glitters in the brooches and bracelets of the women, in
the studs and signet-rings of the men; it is in the hired broughams,
the hired waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers, the
cheap champagne, and the affectation of social consideration that meet
us at every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle classes
is penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck, and for
one family that holds itself in the honor and simplicity of truth, ten
thousand lie, to the world and to themselves, in frippery and pretence.
The greatest sinners in this are women. Men are often ostentatious,
often extravagant, and not unfrequently dishonest in that broadway of
dishonesty which is called living beyond their means--sometimes making
up the deficit by practices which end in the dock of the Old Bailey;
but, as a rule, they go in for the real thing in details, and their
pinchbeck is at the core rather than on the surface. Women, on the
contrary, give themselves up to a more general pretentiousness, and,
provided they can make a show, care very little about the means;
provided they can ring their metal on the counter, they ignore the want
of the hall-stamp underneath. Locality, dress, their visiting-list, and
domestic appearances are the four things which they demand shall be in
accord with their neighbor's; and for these four surfaces they will
sacrifice the whole internal fabric. They will have a showy-looking
house, encrusted with base ornamentation and false grandeur, though it
lets in wind, rain, and sound almost as if it were made of mud or
canvas, rather than a plain and substantial dwelling-place, with comfort
instead of stucco, and moderately thick walls instead of porches and
pilasters. Most of their time is necessarily passed at home, but they
undergo all manner of house discomfort resulting from this preference of
cheap finery over solid structure, rather than forego their "genteel
locality" and stereotyped ornamentation. A family of daughters on the
one side, diligent over the "Battle of Prague;" a nursery full of crying
babies on the other; more Battles of Prague opposite, diversified by a
future Lind practicing her scales unweariedly; water-pipes bursting in
the frost, walls streaming in the thaw, the lower offices reeking and
green with damp, and the upper rooms too insecure for unrestricted
movement--all these, and more miseries of the same kind, she 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 pinchbeck.
In dress it is the same thing. She must look like her neighbors, no
matter whether they can spend pounds to her shillings, and run up a
milliner's bill beyond what she can afford for the whole family living.
If they can buy gold, she can manage pinchbeck; glass that looks like
jet, like filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is every bit to
her as good as the real thing; and if she cannot compass Valenciennes
and Mechlin, she can go to Nottingham and buy machine-made imitations
that will make quite as fine a show. How poor soever she may be, she
must hang herself about with ornaments made of painted wood, glass, or
vulcanite; she must break out into spangles and beads and chains and
_benoitons_, which are cheap luxuries, and, as she thinks, effective.
Flimsy silks make as rich a rustle to her ear as the stateliest brocade,
and cotton-velvet delights the soul that cannot aspire to Genoa. The
love of pinchbeck is so deeply ingrained in her that even if, in a
momentary fit of aberration into good taste, she condescends to a simple
material about which there can be neither disguise nor pretence, she
must load it with that detestable cheap finery of hers till she makes
herself as vulgar in a muslin as she was in a cotton velvet.
The _simplex munditiis_, which used to be held as a canon of feminine
good taste, is now abandoned altogether, and the more she can bedizen
herself according to the pattern of a Sandwich islander the more
beautiful she thinks herself, the more certain the fascination of the
men, and the greater the jealousy of the women. This is the cause of all
the tags and streamers, the bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces
there, the puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off some dead
girl's head, wherewith the modern Englishwoman delights to make herself
hideous. It is pinchbeck throughout. But we fear she 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 thickness is of the same quality; that
generals and admirals and sirs and ladies are the common elements of the
special circle in which the family habitually moves; that pinchbeck is
good gold, and that stucco means marble. Women are exceedingly tenacious
of these pasteboard appearances.
In a house with its couple of female servants, where formal visitors are
very rare, and invitations, save by friendly word of mouth, rarer still,
you may see a cracked china bowl or cheap mock _patera_ on the hall
table, to receive the cards which are assumed to come in the thick
showers usual with high people who have hall-porters, and a thousand
names or more on their books. The pile gets horribly dusty to be sure,
and the upper layer turns by degrees from cream-color to brown; but
antiquity is not held to weaken the force of grandeur. The titled card
left on a chance occasion more than a year ago still keeps the uppermost
place, still represents a perpetual renewal of aristocratic visits, and
an unbroken succession of social triumphs. Yellowed and soiled, it is
none the less the trump-card of the list; and while the outside world
laughs and ridicules, the lady at home thinks that no one sees through
this puerile pretence, and that the visiting-list is accepted according
to the status of the fugleman at the head. She is very happy if she can
say that the pattern of her dress, her cap, her bonnet, was taken from
that of Lady So and So; and we may be quite sure that all personal
contact with grand folks does so express itself, and perpetuate 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, and,
consequently, for the most part is turned to this practical account.
Whether the fashion will be suited to the material, or to the other
parts of the dress, is quite a secondary consideration, it being of the
essence of pinchbeck to despise both fitness and harmony.
There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the appearance of social
influence, much cultivated by women of a certain activity of mind, and
with more definite aims than all women have. This belongs to a grade one
step higher than the small pretences we have been speaking of--to women
who have money, and so far have one reality, but who have not, by their
own birth or their husband's, the original standing which would give
them this influence as of right. Some make themselves notorious for
their drawing-room patronage of artists, which, however, does not often
include buying their pictures; others gather around them scores of
obscure authors, whose books they talk of, if they do not read; a few, a
short time since, were centres of spiritualistic circles, and got a
queer kind of social influence thereby, so far as Philistine desire to
witness the "manifestations" went; and one or two are names of weight in
the emancipated ranks, and take chiefly to what they call "working
women." These are they who attend Ladies' Committees, where they talk
bosh, and pound away at utterly uninteresting subjects, as diligently as
if what they said had any point in it, and what they did any ultimate
issue in probability or common sense. But beyond the fact of having a
large house, where their several sets may assemble at stated periods,
these would-be lady patronesses are utterly impotent to help or hinder;
and their patronage is just so much pinchbeck, not worth the trouble of
weighing.
In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless dissatisfaction with
what they are, and ceaseless endeavour to appear something they are not,
our middle-class ladies are doing themselves and society infinite
mischief. They set the tone to the world below them, and the small
tradespeople and the servants, when they copy the vices of their
superiors, do not imitate her grace the duchess, but the doctor's wife
over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door, and the young ladies
everywhere, who all try to appear women of rank and fortune, and who are
ashamed of nothing as much as of industry, truth and simplicity. Hence
the rage for cheap finery in the kitchen, just a trifle more ugly and
debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence the miserable
pretentiousness, and pinchbeck fine-ladyism, filtering like poison
through every pore of our society, to result God only knows in what
grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and education will come to
the front, and endeavour to stay the plague already begun.
Chains and brooches may seem but small material causes for important
moral effects, but they are symbols; and, as symbols, of deep national
value. No good will be done till we get back some of our fine old horror
of pinchbeck, and once more insist on truth as the foundation of our
national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do
not land us here; and the progress of the arts and society must not be
brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the
semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women
are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home
business. Here is something for them to do--the regeneration of society
by means of their own energies; the bringing people back to the dignity
of truth and the beauty of simplicity; and 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, and which
endeavors so hard to hide its real estate, and to pass for what it is
not and never could be.
PUSHING WOMEN.
The achievements of Anglo-Saxon energy present a rich mine of material
to the bookmaker. We are justly proud of our self-made men--of our
Chancellors who have risen from the barber's-shop to the Woolsack, of
our low-born inventors who have fought their way to scientific
recognition, of our merchant princes who have begun life with a capital
of one half-crown. The story of the man who has raised himself to
eminence by his own exertions, in the face of overwhelming disadvantages
and obstacles, is a thrice-told tale, thanks to Mr. Smiles and other
biographers. But our admiration has been almost exclusively drawn to
these signal examples of pushing _men_. The analogous exploits of the
fair sex remain comparatively unchronicled. No one has hitherto
published a book about Self-made Women. Yet this branch of the subject
would be very interesting, and even instructive. Of course the
opportunity for the display of energy in pushing is, in the case of
woman, much more limited. She cannot push at the Bar or in the Church,
or in business. Her sphere for pushing is practically narrowed down to
one department of human life--society. But within the limits of that
sphere she exhibits very remarkable proofs of this peculiar form of
activity. Moreover, pushing is a feature so peculiarly characteristic of
the English, as distinct from the Continental _salon_, that no attempt
to place a picture of the Englishwoman in her totality before her
foreign critics would be complete without it.