women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are pretty,
and not recognising the effect of their beauty on men. Take a woman with
bewildering eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape, and fringed with
long lashes that 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
uplifting of the heavy lid, and the swift, full gaze that she gives
right into a man's eyes. She has practiced 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 ignorance 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 unsparingly
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 susceptible 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 you 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
thousands 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 affectation of their own
harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when they
practice their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most dangerous
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 condonation; and so long as the trick succeeds it will be
practiced.
Another affectation of the same family is the extreme 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 discarded; and youthful matrons not long out of
their teens assume a tone and ways that would about befit middle age
counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous even then
if the "Indian summer" was specially bright and warm.
Then there is the affectation pure and simple, which is the mere
affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the
mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of attitude that by consciousness
ceases to be grace, and the thousand little _minauderies_ and coquetries
of the sex known to us all. And there is the affectation which people of
a higher social sphere show when they condescend to those of low estate,
and talk and look as if they were not quite certain of their company,
and scarcely knew if they were 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 thoroughly
self-enjoying life from end to end; and the affectation of political
fervor in those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to save
Europe from universal revolution.
Go where we will, affectation of being something she is not meets us in
woman, like a ghost we cannot lay or a mist we cannot sweep away. In the
holiest and the most trivial things alike we find it penetrating
everywhere--even in church, and at her prayers, when the pretty
penitent, rising from her lengthy orison, lifts her eyes and looks about
her furtively to see who has noticed her self-abasement and to whom her
picturesque piety has commended itself.
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 core,
and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she would dare
to tell a lie.
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 things sweet and wholesome. But it is impossible to be
continually introducing 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 savor of the
virtuous to keep the whole from falling into utter corruption. This is
specially true of modern women. Certainly, some of them are as
unsatisfactory as any of their kind that 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.
Happily, we have noble women among us yet; women who believe in
something beside pleasure, and who do their work faithfully, wherever
it may lie; women who can and do sacrifice themselves for love and duty,
and who do not think they were sent into the world simply to run one mad
life-long race for wealth, for dissipation, or 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 such public occasions
for devotedness as the Crimean war occur, we can 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 and secresy 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, according 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 is undeniably the handsomest
woman of his acquaintance, and holds himself blessed when all men admire
and all women envy. But for his own sake rather than for hers. Pleasant
as her loveliness 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 possession is 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, is pretty or
ugly. Provided she is active and industrious, minds the house well, and
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 color or form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or a
squint. Given the great foundations of an honorable 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 solid virtues stand.
His balance at the banker's is a fact; his good name and credit with the
tradespeople is a fact; 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 the small-pox, which 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. Perhaps he is right. Certainly, some of the
happiest marriages among one's acquaintances are those where the wife
has not one perceptible physical charm, and where the whole force of her
magnetic value lies in 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 his regard and tenderness. To be the one sole
teacher and protector of such a gentle little creature seems to him the
most delicious and the best condition of married life; and he holds
Milton's famous lines to be expressive of the only fitting relation
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 complain, 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 statesman, he would like his wife to be able to
help him by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect. He believes
in the sex of minds, and holds only that work complete which has been
created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees how women have
helped on the leaders in troubled times; he knows that almost all great
men have owed something of their greatness to the influence of a mother
or a wife; he remembers how thoughts which had lain dumb in men's
brains for more than half their lifetime suddenly woke up into 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 upon 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, 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 a sufficiently rich alembic
with a residuum admitting of no kind of doubt. Venus herself without a
dowry would be only a pretty sea-side 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 difference 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
subsidence. 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 is not particular as to the strict order or economy of
the housekeeping, provided only she 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 orders; a
fourth, liberal breadth of nature; and each has his own ideal, not only
of nature but of person--to the exact shade of the hair, the color of
the eyes, and the oval of the face. But all agree in the great
fundamental 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 is true of individuals, it is especially
true of nations, each of which has its own ideal of woman varying
according to what is called the 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 or 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 who does; without reasoning faculties, but
with divine intuitions that are as good as revelations; without cool
judgment, but with the light of burning passions that guide her just as
well; thinking by her heart, yet carrying the most refined metaphysics
into her love; subtle; incomprehensible by the coarser brain of man; 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 shrewd, calculating,
unromantic woman, with a hard face and keen eyes, who for the most part
makes a good practical wife to her common-sense middle-aged husband, who
thinks 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 great 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 compound of hysterics and adultery; and if it pleases
them it need not displease us.
To the 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 especially 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 aesthetics, and
heart-uplifting love, yearning after the infinite with holes in her
stockings and her shoes down at heel. For what are coarse material
mendings to the aesthetic soul yearning after the infinite, and
worshipping at the feet of the prophet?
In Italy the ideal woman of modern times is the ardent patriot, full of
active energy, or physical force, and dauntless courage.
In Poland it is the patriot too, but of a more refined and etherealized
type, passively resenting 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
undeniably capable.
In Mohammedan countries generally it is a comely smooth-skinned Dudu,
patient and submissive, always in good humor with her master, economical
in house-living to suit the meanness, and gorgeous in occasional attire
to suit the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental; but by no means Dudu
ever asleep and unoccupied; for, if 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 neglect them unduly, they will have a bad time of it with Ali
Ben Hassan when the question comes of piastres and sequins, 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 German--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 aspiring 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 perhaps 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 business 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 man; and the great doctrine that her happiness does
somewhat depend 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-keeping 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 attitudes 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--in that we could sympathize--which they have begun, but 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 characterise the modern woman, that
saddens men, and destroys in them that respect which their very pride
prompts them to feel. And it is the painful 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 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 again what we
once loved and what we all regret.
WOMAN AND THE WORLD.
This, we are told in a tone of pathetic resignation, is a day of hard
sayings for women. It is, we will venture to add, a day when women have
to meet hard sayings with replies a little less superficial than the
conventional stare of outraged womanhood or the trivial retort on the
follies of men. Grant that woman's censors are as cynical and
hollow-hearted as you will, there can be no doubt that their criticisms
are simply the expression of a general uneasiness, and that that
uneasiness has some ground to go upon. It is possible that observers
across the water may be cynical in denouncing the "magnificent
indecency" of the heroines of New York. It is possible that the
schoolmasters of Berlin may be cynical in calling public opinion to
their aid against the degrading exhibitions of the Prussian capital. It
is possible that the thunders of the Vatican are merely an instance of
Papal cynicism. It is possible that the protest of the Bishop of Orleans
is as hollow-hearted as the protests of censors nearer home. But such a
world-wide outbreak of cynicism without a cause is a somewhat improbable
event, and the improbability is increased when we remark the silent
acquiescence of the women of America and the Continent in the justice of
these censures.
It is only the British mother who ventures to protest. Now, we
Englishmen have always felt a sort of national pride in the British
mother. It has been a part of our patriotic self-satisfaction to pique
ourselves on her icy decorum, on the merciless severity of her virtue.
Colorless, uninteresting, limited as Continental critics pronounced her
to be, we cherished her the more as something specially our own, and
regarded the Channel as a barrier providentially invented for the
isolation of her spotless prudery. It was peculiarly gratifying to
suppose that on the other side of it there were no British homes, no
British maidens, no British mothers. And it must be owned that the
British mother took her cue admirably. She owned, with a sigh of
complacency, that she was not as other women. She shuddered at foreign
morals, and tabooed French novels. She shook all life and individuality
out of her girls as un-English and Continental. She denounced all
aspirations after higher and larger spheres of effort as unfeminine.
Such a type of woman was naturally dull enough, but it fairly came up to
its own standard; and if its respectability was prudery, it still
earned, and had a right to claim, man's respect. The amusing thing is
the persistence in the claim when the type has passed away.
The British spouse has bloomed into the semi-detached wife, with a
husband always conveniently in the distance, and a cicisbeo as
conveniently in the corner. The British mother has died into the faded
matrimonial schemer, contemptuous of younger sons. The innocent simper
of the British maiden has developed into the loud laugh and the horsey
slang of the girl of the season. But maiden and matron are still on one
point faithful to the traditions of their grandmothers, and front all
censorious comers with a shrug of their shoulder-straps and a flutter of
indignant womanhood. And maiden and matron still claim their insular
exemption from the foibles of their sex. The Pope may do what he will
with the women of Italy, and Monseigneur of Orleans may deal stern
justice out to the women of France; Continental immorality is in the
nature of things; but there is something else that is in the nature of
things too, and before the impeccable majesty of British womanhood every
critic must stand abashed.