that in which she emerges from obscurity, or, worse perhaps, from the
notoriety of commercial antecedents, and carried, by a vigorous push,
the outworks of fashionable society. The wife of a successful speculator
in cotton or guano, who is also the mistress of a comfortable mansion in
Bloomsbury, gradually becomes restless and dissatisfied with her
surroundings. It would be curious to trace the growth of this
discontent. Ambition is deeply rooted in the female bosom. Even
housemaids are actuated by an impulse to better themselves, and village
school-mistresses yearn for a larger sphere. Perhaps it is this instinct
to rise, so creditable to the sex, which compels a lady with a long
purse, and a name well known in the city, to enter the lists as an
aspirant to fashion. Perhaps her career is developed by a more gradual
process. Climbing social Alps is like climbing material Alps--for a time
the intervening heights shut out from view the grander peaks. It is not
till one has topped Peckham or Hackney that a more extended horizon
bursts on the eye, and one catches sight of the glittering summits of
Belgravia. Account for it as we may, the phenomenon of a woman in the
enjoyment of every comfort and luxury that wealth can give, but ready
to barter it all for a few crumbs of contemptuous notice from persons of
rank, is by no means uncommon. Probably the fashionable newspaper is a
great stimulus to pushing.
The rich vulgarian pores over _Court Circulars_ and catalogues of
aristocratic names till the fascination becomes irresistible, and the
desire to see her own name, purged of cotton or guano, figuring in the
same sheet grows to a monomania. But how is this to be done? Fortunately
for the purpose which she has in view, there exist in these latter days
amphibious beings, half trader, half fop, with one set of relations with
the world of commerce and another set of relations with the world of
fashion. The dandy, driven into the city by the stress of his fiscal
exigencies, forms a link between the East-end and the West. Among his
other functions is that of giving aid and counsel, not exactly gratis,
to any fair outsider who wants to "get into" society. For every
applicant he has but one bit of advice. She must spend money.
For a woman who is neither clever nor beautiful nor high-born, there is
but one way to proceed. She must bribe right and left. No rotten borough
absorbs more cash than the fashionable world. Its recognition is merely
a question of money. All its distinctions have their price. It exacts
from the pushing woman a thumping entrance-fee in the shape of a
sumptuous concert or ball. Nor is it only the first push which costs.
Every subsequent advance is as much a matter of purchase as a step in
the army.
There is a tariff of its honors, and any Belgravian actuary can
calculate to a nicety the price of a stare from a great lady, or a card
from a leader of fashion. This is the philosophy expounded by the
amphibious dandy to his civic pupil. The upshot is, that she must give
an entertainment, or a series of entertainments, on a scale of great
splendor. Of course the house in Bloomsbury must be exchanged for
another in a fashionable quarter. A more profuse style of living must be
adopted. Her equipages must be gorgeous, her flunkeys numerous and well
powdered. Above all, she must at once and for ever make a clean sweep of
all her old friends. Upon these conditions, and in consideration of a
_douceur_ for himself, he agrees to be her friend, and help her to push.
Then follows a delicate negotiation with one of those dowagers who
rather pique themselves on their good nature in standing sponsors to
pushing nobodies. She, too, makes her conditions. For the sake of the
elderly pet to whom she is indebted for her daily supply of scandal, she
consents to countenance his _protegee_. But she declines to ask her to
her own house. She will dine with her, provided the dinner is exquisite,
and two or three of her own cronies are included in the invitation. Last
and crowning condescension, she will ask the company for the proposed
concert or ball, provided the thing is done regardless of expense. It
would be hard to say which a cynic would think most charming--the
readiness to accept, or the inclination to impose, such conditions.
At last the great occasion arrives. Planted at the top of her staircase,
under the wing of her fashionable allies, the nominal giver of the
entertainment is duly stared at and glared at by a supercilious crowd,
who examine her with the same sort of languid interest which they devote
to a new animal at the Zoological. The greater number are "going on" to
another party. But the next morning brings balm for every mortification.
Her ball is blazoned in the fashionable journals, and the well-bred
reporter, while elaborately complimentary to the exotics, is discreetly
silent as to the supercilious stares. She does not exactly awake to find
herself famous, but at least she is no longer outside the Pale. At a
considerable outlay, she has got into what a connoisseur in shades of
fashion would call tenth-rate society. This is not much; still, it is a
beginning, and a beginning is everything to a pushing woman.
In the pushing woman of the transition period we behold a lady who has
got a certain footing in society, but who is straining every nerve, in
season and out of season, by hook and by crook, to improve her position.
Society within the Pale is divided into a great many "zones" or "sets."
It is like a target, with outer, middle, inner, and innermost circles.
The exterior circle, corresponding to "the black" in archery, consists
of persona, for the most part, with limited means and moderate ambition.
People who try to combine fashion with economy stick here, and advance
no further. Carpet-dances and champagneless suppers are typical of this
circle. Here mothers and daughters prey upon the inexperienced youth of
the Universities and green young officers, who are deluded for one
season by their pretensions to fashion, but who cut them the next.
Here, too, may be found persons whose social progress has been retarded
by foolish scruples about cutting their old friends. Between this band
of prowlers upon the outskirts of fashion and "the best set"--the golden
ring in the centre of the shield--are many intermediate circles, each
representing a different stage of distinction and exclusiveness. It is
the multiplicity of these invisible lines of demarcation which makes
pushing so laborious.
The world of fashion is not one homogeneous camp, but it is parcelled
out into a number of cliques and coteries. Into one after another of
these a pushing woman effects her entrance. She is always edging her way
into a new and better set. At every step there are obstacles to be
encountered, rivals to be jostled, fierce snubs to be endured. There is
something almost sublime in the spectacle of this untiring activity of
shoulder and elbow. The mere shoving--_vis consili expers_--would never
bring her near to her goal. An adept in the art of pushing does not rely
on sheer impudence alone. She has recourse to artificial aids and
appliances. A great deal of ingenuity is exhibited in the selection of
her self-propelling machinery. It is a good plan to acquire a name for
some one social speciality.
Private theatricals, for instance, or similar entertainments, may be
turned to excellent account. Exhibitions of this kind pique curiosity,
and people who come to stare remain to supper, and possibly return to
drop a card on the following afternoon. But, if you go in for this sort
of thing, you must resign yourself to certain inconveniences. Your
pretty drawing-room will be like Park Lane in a state of chronic
obstruction. The carpenter's work will interfere somewhat with your
comfort, and it is tiresome to be perpetually unhinging your doors and
pulling your windows out of their frames. The jealousies and bickerings
among the performers are another source of vexation. Miss A. declines to
sit as Rowena to Miss B.'s Rebecca; and the drawing-room Roscius
invariably objects to the part for which he is cast. Altogether, unless
you have a positive taste for carpentry and green-room squabbles, it is
better to steer clear of private theatricals.
Then there is the musical dodge. In skillful hands there is no better
leverage for pushing operations than drawing-room music. Every one knows
Lady Tweedledum and her amateur concerts. The fuss she makes about them
is prodigious. They are a cheap sort of entertainment, but they cost the
thrifty patroness of art a vast deal of trouble. She is always
organizing practices, arranging rehearsals, drawing up programmes, or
scouring London for musical recruits. She has been known to invade dingy
Government offices for a tenor, and to run a soprano to earth in distant
Bloomsbury. After all, her "music" is only so-so. You may hear better
any night at Even's or the Oxford. One has heard "Dal tuo stellato
soglio" before, and Niedermeyer insipidities are a little _fade_.
Sometimes, to complete the imposture, the names of Mendelssohn and
Mozart are invoked, and, under cover of doing honor to an immortal
composer, a chorus of young people assemble for periodical flirtation.
On the whole, it is wise not to attempt too much. Miss Quaver, with her
staccato notes and semi-professional _minauderies_, is not exactly a
queen of song. Nor does it give one any exquisite delight to hear Sir
Raucisonous Trombone give tongue in a French romance. The talented band
of the Piccadilly Troubadours, floundering through the overture to
_Zampa_, hardly satisfies a refined musical ear. But, however
indifferent in a musical point of view, from the point of view of the
fair projector the thing is a success. It serves as a trap to catch
duchesses, a device for putting salt on the tails of the popinjays of
fashion. One fine day Lady Tweedledum's pretended zeal for music
receives its crowning reward. The noise of it reaches august ears. An
act of gracious condescension follows. Her Ladyship has the supreme
delight of leading a scion of Royalty to a chair of state in her
drawing-room, to hear Sir Raucisonous bleat and Miss Quaver trill.
There are subtler means of pushing than amateur concerts and private
theatricals. There is the push vertical, as in the case of the
commercial lady; and there is also the push lateral. A good example of
the latter style of operation is afforded by the dowager who is
fortunate enough to have an eldest son to use as a pushing machine.
Handled with tact, a young heir, not yet cut adrift from the maternal
apron-string, may be turned to excellent account. There is, or was, a
sentimental ballad entitled, "I'll kiss him for his mother." One might
reverse the sentiment in the case of _Madame Mere_. Of her the dowagers
with daughters to marry sing in chorus, "I'll visit her for her son."
Civility to the mother is access to the son. A sharp tactician sees her
advantage, and works the precious relationship for her own private ends.
It is a mine of invitations of an eligible kind. By aid of it she
springs over barriers which it would otherwise take her years to
surmount, and is lifted into circles which by their unassisted efforts
she and her daughters would never reach. Scheming dowagers are glad to
have her at their balls when there is a chance of young Hopeful
following in her train, and her five o'clock tea is delightful when
there is a young millionaire to sip it with. Deprived of her decoy duck
she would soon lose ground, and be left to push her way in society with
uncomfortably reduced momentum.
Another capital instrument for pushing is a country-house. The mistress
of a fine old hall and a cypher of a husband is apt to take a peculiar
view of the duties of property. One might expect her to be content with
so dignified and enviable a lot, and to pass tranquil days in coddling
the cottagers, patronizing the rector's wife, and impressing her
crotchet on the national school. But no--she is bitten with the
tarantula of social success. She wants to "get on" in society. She must
push as vigorously as any trumpery adventuress in May Fair. A good old
name is dragged into the dirt inseparable from pushing. The family
portraits look disdainfully from their frames, and the ancestral oaks
hang their heads in shame. The company reflects the peculiar ambition of
the hostess. The neighboring squires are conspicuous by their absence.
The local small fry are of course ignored, though to the great lady of
the county, who cuts her in town, she is cringingly obsequious. The
visitors consist mainly of relays of youths, fast, foolish, and
fashionable, with now and then a stray politician or journalist thrown
in to give the party a _soupcon_ of intellect. The principle of
invitation is very simple. No one is asked who will not be of use in
town. Any brainless little fop, any effete dandy, is sure of a welcome,
provided he is known to certain circles and can help her to scramble
into a little more vogue.
One more instance of lateral pushing. A connection with literature may
be very effectively worked. The wives of poets, novelists, and
historians have great facilities for pushing if they care to use them.
Even the sleek parasite who fattens on a literature which he has done
nothing to adorn, and conceals his emptiness under the airs of Sir
Oracle, has been known to hoist his female belongings into the high
levels of society.
The last period in the career of a pushing woman is the triumphant. This
is when she has achieved fashion, and has virtually done pushing. There
is nothing left to push for. The Belgravian citadel has fairly
capitulated. Like Alexander weeping that there are no more worlds to
conquer, she may indulge a transient regret that there are no more
_salons_ left to penetrate. But rest is welcome after so harassing a
struggle. And with rest comes a sensible improvement in her character
and manners. The last stage of a pushing woman is emphatically better
than the first. It is curious to notice what a change for the better is
produced in her by the partial recovery of her self-respect. One might
almost call her a pleasant person. She can at last afford to be civil,
occasionally even good-natured. And this is only natural. In the thick
of a struggle which taxes her energies to the uttermost, there is no
time for courtesies and amenities. The better instincts of her nature
necessarily remain in abeyance. But they reassert themselves, unless she
be irretrievably spoilt, when the struggle is over.
At last she can afford to speak her true thoughts, consult her own
tastes, and receive her own friends, not another's, like a lady to the
manner born. And if this emancipation from a self-imposed thraldom is
not too long deferred, if it finds her at sixty with a relish for gaiety
still unslaked, she may yet be able to enjoy society herself and to
render it enjoyable to others. How many women there are of whom one
says, How pleasant they will be when they have done pushing! or have
pushed enough to allow themselves and others a little rest! One longs
for the time to arrive when they shall have kicked down the ladders by
which they have mounted, and effaced the trace of the rebuffs which they
have encountered. One longs to see them cleansed from the stains with
which their toilsome struggle has bespattered them, enjoying the ease
and tranquillity of the after-push. If "getting on in society" must
continue to be an object of female ambition, would it not be wise to
abate the nuisance by rendering the process somewhat more easy? Might
not some central authority be established to grant diplomas to pushing
women, which would admit them _per saltum_ to those select circles which
they go through so much dirt to reach?
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 vapors,
or one, no less obscure, called the spleen. Sometimes it was an
etherealized being who had no capacity for homely things, but who passed
her life in an atmosphere of poetry and music, for the most part
expressing her vague ideas in halting rhymes that gave more satisfaction
to herself than to her friends. She was probably an Italian scholar, and
could quote Petrarch and Tasso, and did quote them pretty often; she
might even be a Della Cruscan by honorable 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 and Minerva,
whom she was sure to call Pallas, as being more poetical. Probably she
had dealings with Diana too, for this kind of woman does not in any age
affect the "sea-born," save in a hazy sentimental way that bears no
fruits; a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit of counterpoint being to
her worth all the manly love or fireside home delights that the world
can give.
What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or the rosy kisses of
babies' lips compared to the pleasures of being a sister of the Muses,
and one of the beloved of Apollo? The Della Cruscan of former days, or
her modern avatar, will tell you that music and poetry are godlike and
bear the soul away to heaven, but that the nursery is a prison, and
babies no dearer gaolers than any other, and that household duties
disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the empyrean. This was the
Ethereal Being of the last generation--the Blue-stocking, as a poetess
in white satin, with her eyes turned up to heaven, and her hair in
dishevelled cascades about her neck. She dropped her mantle as she
finally departed; and we still have the Della Cruscan essence, if not in
the precise form of earlier times. We still have ethereal beings who, as
the practical outcome of their etherealization, rave about music and
poetry, and Halle and Ruskin, and horribly neglect their babies and the
weekly bills.
A favorite form of feminine affectation among certain opposers of the
prevalent fast type is in an intense womanliness, an aggravating
intensity of womanliness, that makes one long for a little roughness,
just to take off the cloying excess of sweetness. This kind is generally
found with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the orbit, by
which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face, a certain
look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty thought, that is very
effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness that the real cause of
the darkened lids and cavernous orbits, when not antimony, is most
probably internal disease; eyes of this sort stand for spirituality and
loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of nature, and, as all men
are neither chemists nor doctors, the simulation does quite as well as
truth.
The main characteristic of these women is self-consciousness. They live
before a moral mirror, and pass their time in attitudinizing to what
they think the best advantage. They can do nothing simply, nothing
spontaneously and without the fullest consciousness as to how they do
it, and how they look while they are doing it. In every action of their
lives they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a novel, as
impersonations of poetic images or thoughts. If they give you a glass of
water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth and Beauty ministering
to Strength or Age, as the case may be; if they bring you a photographic
album, they are Titian's Daughter carrying her casket, a trifle
modernized; if they hold a child in their arms, they are Madonnas, and
look unutterable maternal love, though they never saw the little
creature before, and care for it no more than for the puppy in the mews;
if they do any small personal office, or attempt to do it, making
believe to tie a shoestring, comb out a curl, fasten a button, they are
Charities in graceful attitudes, and expect you to think them both
charitable and graceful. Nine times out of ten they can neither tie a
string nor fasten a 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 altogether fitting in better than
would a firmer grasp with the delicate womanliness of the character;
and the less sweet and more commonplace woman who does not attitudinize
morally, and never parades her womanliness, beats them out of the field
for real helpfulness, and is the Charity which the other only plays at
being.
This kind, too, affects, in theory, wonderful submissiveness to man. It
upholds Griselda as the type of feminine perfection, and--still in
theory--between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in for the
tyranny. "I would rather my husband beat me than let me do too much as I
liked," said one before she married, who, after she was married, managed
to get entire possession of the domestic reins, and took good care that
her nominal lord should be her practical slave. For, notwithstanding the
sweet submissiveness of her theory, the intensely womanly woman has the
most astonishing knack of getting her own way and imposing her own will
on others. The real tyrant among women is not the one who flounces and
splutters, and declares that nothing shall make her obey, but the
self-mannered, large-eyed, and intensely womanly person, who says that
Griselda is her ideal, and that the whole duty of woman lies in
unquestioning obedience to man.
In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman--the
woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big buttons, of which she
flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness of
a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears
unmistakeable shirtfronts, linen collars, vests, and plain ties, like a
man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even
nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and
makes believe that the attitude is comfortable because it is manlike. If
the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness, the
mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores dogs
and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She boasts
of how good a marksman she is--she does not call herself markswoman--and
how she can hit right and left, and bring down both birds flying. When
she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass between her first two
fingers, hollows her underlip, and tosses it off, throwing her head well
back--she would disdain the ladylike sip or the closer gesture of
ordinary women. She is great in cheese and bitter beer, in claret cup
and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of
effervescing wines. She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward,
as men round their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of
carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw;
for charms to her watch-chain she wears a corkscrew, a gimlet, a big
knife, and a small foot-rule; and in entire contrast with the intensely
womanly woman, who uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman
when she does anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a
needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of
which is affectation--from first to last affectation; a mere assumption
of virile fashions utterly inharmonious to the whole being, physical
and mental, of a woman.
Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and
orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a personal
insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact limits of
her mental sphere. This is the woman who assumes to be the antiseptic
element in society, who makes believe that without her the world and
human nature would go to the dogs, and plunge headlong into the abyss of
sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand heroism of
man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavor and patient
seeking after truth, would serve his turn or the world's if she did not
spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the boundary lines
within which she would confine the range of thought and speculation. She
knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affectation,
and that other minds have as much right to their own boundary lines as
she claims for herself; but it seems to her pretty to assume that woman
generally is the consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that
she, of all women, is most specially consecrated.
As an offshoot of this kind stands the affectation of simplicity--the
woman whose mental attitude is self-depreciation, and who poses herself
as a mere nobody when the world is ringing with her praises. "Is it
possible that your Grace has ever heard of _me_?" said one of this class
with prettily affected _naivete_ at a time when all England was astir
about her, and when colors and fashions went by her name to make them
take with the public at large. No 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.