training grounds for the elders, whereon they may exercise their powers
of interference; and a hard time they have of it. If Emma goes to her
embroidery, Ellen tells her she ought to practice her singing; if Jane
is reading, Mary recommends sewing as a more profitable use of precious
time; if Amy is at her easel, Ada wants to turn her round to the piano.
It is quite the exception where four or five sisters leave each other
free to do as each likes, and do not take to drilling and interference
as part of the daily programme. Something of the reluctance to domestic
service so painfully apparent among the better class of working women is
due to this spirit of interference with women. The lady who wrote about
the caps and gowns of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of dress, down
to the very material of their gloves, was an instance of this spirit.
For, when we come to analyse it, what does it really signify to us how
our servants dress, so long as they are clean and decent, and do not let
their garments damage our goods? Fashion is almost always ridiculous,
and women as a rule care more for dress than they care for anything
else; and if the kitchen apes the parlor, and Phyllis gives as much
thought to her new linsey as my lady gives to her new velvet, we cannot
wonder at it, nor need we hold up our hands in horror at the depravity
of the smaller person. Does one flight of stairs transpose morality? If
it does not, there is no real ethical reason why my lady should
interfere with poor Phyllis's enjoyment in her ugly vanities, when she
herself will not be interfered with, though press and pulpit both try to
turn her out of her present path into one that all ages have thought the
best for her, and the one divinely appointed. It is a thing that will
not bear reasoning on, being simply a form of the old "who will guard
the guardian?" Who will direct the directress? and to whose interference
will the interferer submit?
There are two causes for this excessive love of interference among
women. The one is the narrowness of their lives and objects, by which
insignificant things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes; the
other, their belief that they are the only saviors of society, and that
without them man would become hopelessly corrupt. And to a certain
extent this belief is true, but surely with restrictions. Because the
clearer moral sense and greater physical weakness of women restrain
men's fiercer passions, and force them to be gentle and considerate,
women are not, therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine life, into
whose hands is given the paying out of just so much rope as they think
fit for the occasion. They would do better to look to their own tackle
before settling so exactly the run of others'; and if ever their desired
time of equality is to come, it must come through mutual independence,
not through womanly interference, and as much liberality and breadth
must be given as is demanded--which, so far as humanity has gone
hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of squaring accounts.
Grant that women are the salt of the earth, and the great antiseptic
element in society, still that does not reduce everything else to the
verge of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet by their lives they
evidently think that it is so, and that they are each and all the
keepers of keys which give them a special entrance to the temple of
morality, and by which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser
body of men. Hence they interfere and restrict and pay out just so much
rope, and measure off just so much gambolling ground, as they think fit;
they think vile man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things
into his own hand, and goes beyond their boundary-lines. It is all done
in good if in a very narrow faith--that we admit willingly; but we would
call their attention to the difference there is between influence and
interference, which is just the difference between their ideal duty and
their daily practice--between being the salt of the earth and the
blister of the home. We think it only justice to put in a word for those
poor henpecked fellows of husbands at a time when the whole cry is for
Woman's Rights, which seems to mean chiefly her right of making man
knuckle under on all occasions, and of making one will serve for two
lives. We assure her that she would get her own way in large matters
much more easily if she would leave men more liberty in small ones, and
not teaze them by interfering in things which do not concern her, and
have only reference to themselves.
PLAIN GIRLS.
It is beyond all question the tendency of modern society to regard
marriage as the great end and justification of a woman's life. This is
perhaps the single point on which practical and romantic people, who
differ in so many things, invariably agree. Poets, novelists, natural
philosophers, fashionable and unfashionable mothers, meet one another on
the broad common ground of approving universal matrimony; and women from
their earliest years are dedicated to the cultivation of those feminine
accomplishments which are supposed either to be most seductive before
marriage in a drawing-room, or most valuable after marriage in the
kitchen and housekeeper's-room.
It is admitted to be a sort of half necessity in any interesting work of
fiction that its plots, its adventures, and its catastrophes should all
lead up to the marriage of the principal young lady. Sometimes, as in
the case of the celebrated Lilly Dale, the public tolerates a bold
exception to the ordinary rule, on account of the extreme piquancy of
the thing; but no wise novelist ventures habitually to disregard the
prevalent opinion that the heroine's mission is to become a wife before
the end of the third volume. The one ideal, accordingly, which romance
has to offer woman is marriage; and most novels thus make life end with
what really is only its threshold and beginning. The Bible no doubt says
that it is not good for man to live alone. What the Bible says of man,
public opinion as unhesitatingly asserts of woman; and a text that it is
not good for woman to live alone either, though not canonical, is
silently added by all domestic commentators to the Scriptural original.
Those who pretend to be best acquainted with the order of nature and the
mysterious designs of Providence assure us with confidence that all this
is as it should be; that woman is not meant to grow and flourish singly,
but to hang on man, and to depend on him, like the vine upon the elm. If
we remember right, M. Comte entertains opinions which really come to
pretty much the same thing. Woman is to be maintained in ease and luxury
by the rougher male animal, it being her duty in return to keep his
spiritual nature up to the mark, to quicken and to purify his
affections, to be a sort of drawing-room religion in the middle of
every-day life, to serve as an object of devotion to the religious
Comtist, and to lead him through love of herself up to the love of
humanity in the abstract.
One difficulty presented by this matrimonial view of woman's destiny is
to know what, under the present conditions in which society finds itself
placed, is to become of plain girls. Their mission is a subject which no
philosopher as yet has adequately handled. If marriage is the object of
all feminine endeavors and ambitions, it certainly seems rather hard
that Providence should have condemned plain girls to start in the race
at such an obvious disadvantage. Even under M. Comte's system, which
provides for almost everything, and which, in its far-sightedness and
thoughtfulness for our good, appears almost more benevolent than
Providence, it would seem as if hardly sufficient provision had been
made for them.
It must be difficult for any one except a really advanced Comtist to
give himself up to the worship of a thoroughly plain girl. Filial
instinct might enable us to worship her as a mother, but even the
noblest desire to serve humanity would scarcely be enough to keep a
husband or a lover up to his daily devotions in the case of a plain girl
with sandy hair and a freckled complexion. The boldest effort to rectify
the inequalities of the position of plain girls has been made of late
years by a courageous school of female writers of fiction. Everything
has been done that could be done to persuade mankind that plain girls
are in reality by far the most attractive of the lot. The clever
authoress of "Jane Eyre" nearly succeeded in the forlorn attempt for a
few years; and plain girls, with volumes of intellect speaking through
their deep eyes and from their massive foreheads, seemed for a while, on
paper at least, to be carrying everything before them.
The only difficulty was to get the male sex to follow out in practice
what they so completely admired in Miss Bronte's three-volume novels.
Unhappily, the male sex, being very imperfect and frail, could not be
brought to do it. They recognized the beauty of the conception about
plain girls, they were very glad to see them married off in scores to
heroic village doctors, and they quite admitted that occasional young
noblemen might be represented in fiction as becoming violently attached
to young creatures with inky fingers and remarkable minds.
But no real change was brought about in ordinary life. Man, sinful man,
read with pleasure about the triumphs of the sandy-haired girls, but
still kept on dancing with and proposing to the pretty ones. And at last
authoresses were driven back on the old standard of beauty. At present,
in the productions both of masculine and feminine workmanship, the
former view of plain girls has been resumed. They are allowed, if
thoroughly excellent in other ways, to pair off with country curates and
with devoted missionaries; but the prizes of fiction, as well as the
prizes of reality, fall to the lot of their fairer and more fortunate
sisters.
Champions of plain girls are not, however, wanting who boldly take the
difficulty by the horns, and deny _in toto_ the fact that in matrimony
and love the race is usually to the beautiful. Look about you, they tell
us, in the world, and you will as often as not find beauties fading on
their stalks, and plain girls marrying on every side of them. And no
doubt plain girls do marry very frequently. Nobody, for instance, with
half an eye can fail to be familiar with the phenomenon, in his own
circle, of astonishingly ugly married women. It does not, however,
follow that plain girls are not terribly weighted in the race.
There are several reasons why women who rely on their beauty remain
unmarried at the last, but the reason that their beauty gives them no
advantage is certainly not one. The first reason perhaps is that
beauties are inclined to be fastidious and capricious. They have no
notion of following the advice of Mrs. Hannah More, and being contented
with the first good, sensible, Christian lover who falls in their way;
and they run, in consequence, no slight risk of overstaying their
market. They go in for a more splendid sort of matrimonial success, and
think they can afford to play the more daring game.
Plain girls are providentially preserved from these temptations. At the
close of a well-spent life they can conscientiously look back on a
career in which no reasonable opportunity was neglected, and say that
they have not broken many hearts, or been sinfully and distractingly
particular. And there is the further consideration to be remembered in
the case of plain girls, that fortune and rank are nearly as valuable
articles as beauty, and lead to a fair number of matrimonial alliances.
The system of Providence is full of kindly compensations, and it is a
proof of the universal benevolence we see about us that so many
heiresses should be plain. Plain girls have a right to be cheered and
comforted by the thought. It teaches them the happy lesson that beauty,
as compared with a settled income, is skin-deep and valueless; and that
what man looks for in the companion of his life is not so much a bright
cheek or a blue eye, as a substantial and useful amount of this world's
wealth.
Plain girls again expect less, and are prepared to accept less, in a
lover. Everybody knows the sort of useful, admirable, practical man who
sets himself to marry a plain girl. He is not a man of great rank, great
promise, or great expectations. Had it been otherwise, he might possibly
have flown at higher game, and set his heart on marrying female
loveliness rather than homely excellence. His choice, if it is nothing
else, is an index of a contented and modest disposition. He is not vain
enough to compete in the great race for beauties. What he looks for is
some one who will be the mother of his children, who will order his
servants duly, and keep his household bills; and whose good sense will
teach her to recognise the sterling qualities of her husband, and not
object to his dining daily in his slippers. This is the sort of partner
that plain girls may rationally hope to secure, and who can say that
they ought not to be cheerful and happy in their lot? For a character of
this undeniable sobriety there is indeed a positive advantage in a plain
girl as a wife. It should never be forgotten that the man who marries a
plain girl never need be jealous. He is in the Arcadian and fortunate
condition of a lover who has no rivals. A sensible unambitious nature
will recognize in this a solid benefit. Plain girls rarely turn into
frisky matrons, and this fact renders them peculiarly adapted to be the
wives of dull and steady mediocrity.
Lest it should be supposed that the above calculation of what plain
girls may do leaves some of their power and success still unaccounted
for, it is quite right and proper to add that the story of plain girls,
if it were carefully written, would contain many instances, not merely
of moderate good fortunes, but of splendid and exceptional triumph. Like
_prima donnas_, opera-dancers, and lovely milliners, plain girls have
been known to make extraordinary hits, and to awaken illustrious
passions. Somebody ought to take up the subject in a book, and tell us
how they did it.
This is the age of Golden Treasuries. We have Golden Treasuries of
English poets, of French poets, of great lawyers, of famous battles, of
notable beauties, of English heroes, of successful merchants, and of
almost every sort of character and celebrity that can be conceived. What
is wanted is a Golden Treasury containing the narrative of the most
successful plain girls. This book might be called the Book of Ugliness,
and we see no reason why, to give reality to the story, the portraits of
some of the most remarkable might not be appended. Of course, if ever
such a volume is compiled, it will be proved to demonstration that plain
girls have before now arrived at great matrimonial honor and renown.
There is, for example, the sort of plain girl who nurses her hero
(perhaps in the Crimea) through a dangerous attack of illness, and
marries him afterwards. There is the class of those who have been
married simply from a sense of duty. There is the class that
distinguishes itself by profuse kindness to poor cottagers, and by
reading the Bible to blind old women; an occupation which as we know,
from the most ordinary works of fiction, leads directly to the
promptest and speediest attachments on the part of the young men who
happen to drop in casually at the time. The catalogue of such is perhaps
long and famous. Yet, allowing for all these, allowing for everything
else that can be adduced in their favor, we cannot help returning to the
position that plain girls have an up-hill battle to fight. No doubt it
ought not to be so.
Cynics tell us that six months after a man is married it makes very
little difference to him whether his wife's nose is Roman, aquiline, or
retrousse; and this may be so. The unfortunate thing is that most men
persist in marrying for the sake of the illusion of the first six
months, and under the influence of the ante-nuptial and not the
post-nuptial sentiments; and as the first six months with a plain girl
are confessedly inferior in attraction, the inference is clear that they
do in effect attract less. Plainness or loveliness apart, a very large
number of womankind have no reason to expect any very happy chance in
married life; and if marriage is to be set before all women as the one
ideal, a number of feminine lives will always turn out to have been
failures.
It may be said that it is hopeless to attempt on this point to alter the
sentiments of the female sex, or indeed the general verdict of society.
We do not quite see the hopelessness. A considerable amount of the
matrimonial ideas of young women are purely the result of their
education, and of the atmosphere in which they have been brought up;
and, by giving a new direction to their early training, it might not be
altogether so quixotical to believe that we should alter all that is the
result of the training. At any rate it has become essential for the
welfare of women that they should, as far as possible, be taught that
they may have a career open to them even if they never marry; and it is
the duty of society to try to open to them as many careers of the sort
as are not incompatible with the distinctive peculiarities of a woman's
physical capacity.
It may well be that society's present instincts as regards woman are at
bottom selfish. The notion of feminine dependence on man, of the want of
refinement in a woman who undertakes any active business or profession,
and of the first importance of woman's domestic position, when carried
to an extreme, are perhaps better suited to the caprice and fanciful
fastidiousness of men than to the real requirements, in the present age,
of the other sex. The throng of semi-educated authoresses who are now
flocking about the world of letters is a wholesome protest against such
exclusive jealousy. The real objection to literary women is that women,
with a few notable exceptions, are not yet properly educated to write
well, or to criticise well what others write. Remove this objection by
improving the curriculum of feminine education, and there is hardly any
other. There is none certainly of sufficient consequence to outweigh the
real need which is felt of giving those women something to live for
(apart from and above ordinary domestic and philanthropic duties), whose
good or evil fortune it is not to be marked out by Heaven for a married
life.
A WORD FOR FEMALE VANITY.
If any human weakness has a right to complain of the ingratitude with
which the world treats it, it is certainly vanity. It gets through more
good work, and yet comes in for more hearty abuse, than all our other
weaknesses put together. Preachers and moralists are always having hits
at it, and in that philosophical study and scientific vivisection of
character which two friends are always so ready to practice at the
expense of a third, and which weak-minded people confound with scandal,
to no foible is the knife so pitilessly applied as to vanity. What makes
this rigor seem all the more cruel and unnatural is that vanity never
gets so little quarter as from those who ought, one would think, to be
on the best possible terms with her. She is never justified of her
children, and, like Byron's unhappy eagle, "nurses the pinion that
impels the steel" against her. Yet it is difficult to see how the world
could get on without the weakness thus universally assailed, and what
preachers and moralists would do if they had their own way.
In the more important--or, we should rather say, in the larger--concerns
of life vanity could perhaps be dispensed with. Where there is much at
stake, other agencies come into play to keep the machinery of the world
in motion, though, even as regards these, it is a question how many
great poems, great speeches, great actions, which have profoundly
influenced the destinies of mankind, would have been lost to the world
if there had been none but great motives at work to produce them. Great
motives usually get the credit--that is, when we are dealing with
historical characters, not dissecting a friend, in whose case it is
necessary to guard against our natural proneness to partiality; but
little motives often do the largest share of the work. It is proper, for
instance, and due to our own dignity and self-respect to say, that the
world owes _Childe Harold_ to a great poet's inspired yearning for
immortality. Still, we fear, there is room for a doubt whether the world
would ever have seen _Childe Harold_ if the great poet had not happened
to be also a morbidly vain and, in some respects, remarkably small man.
But even if we assume that the big affairs of life may be left to big
motives, and do not require such a little motive as vanity to help them,
these are, after all, few and far between.
For one action that may safely be left to yearnings for immortality, or
ambition, or love, or something equally lofty and grand, there are
thousands which society must get done somehow, and which it gets done
pleasantly and comfortably only because, by a charmingly convenient
illusion, the vanity of each agent makes him attach a peculiar
importance to them. There is no act so trivial, or to all appearance so
unworthy of a rational being, that the magic of vanity cannot throw a
halo of dignity over it, and persuade the agent that it is mainly by his
exertions that society is kept together, as Moliere's dancing-master
reasoned that the secret of good government is the secret of good
dancing--namely, how to avoid false steps. And it is this genial
promoter of human happiness, this all-powerful diffuser of social
harmony, this lubricating oil without which the vast and complex
machinery of life could never work, that man, in his ignorant
ingratitude, dares to denounce.
We should like to ask one of these thoughtless revilers of vanity
whether it has ever been his misfortune to meet a woman without it. He
would probably try to escape by declaring that a woman without vanity is
a purely imaginary being, if not a contradiction in terms; and we admit
that there is something to be said in favor of this view. Nothing is
more astonishing to the male philosopher than the odd way in which, from
some stray corner of character where he would have least thought of
looking for it, female vanity now and then suddenly pops out upon him.
He fancied that he knew a woman well, that he had studied her character
and mastered all its strong and weak points, when, by some accident or
at some unguarded moment, he suddenly strikes a rich, deep, vein of
vanity of the existence of which he never had the remotest suspicion. He
may perhaps have known that she was not without vanity on certain
points, but for these he had discovered, or had fancied he had
discovered, some sort of reason. We do not necessarily mean, by reason,
any cause that seemed to justify or, on any consistent principle, to
account for the fact. As we have already remarked, it is the peculiarity
of vanity that it often flourishes most vigorously, and puts forth a
plentiful crop, where there does not seem to be even a layer of soil for
it.
Both men and women are occasionally most vain of their weakest points,
perhaps by a merciful provision of nature similar to that by which a sow
always takes most kindly to the weakest pig in the litter. Lord
Chesterfield, when paternally admonishing his son as to the proper
management of women, lays down as a general indisputable axiom that they
are all, as a matter of course, to be flattered to the top of their
bent; but he adds, as a special rule, that a very pretty or a very ugly
woman should be flattered, not about her personal charms, but about her
mental powers. It is only in the case of a moderately good-looking woman
that the former should be singled out for praise. A very pretty woman
takes her beauty as a matter of course, and would rather be flattered
about the possession of some advantage to which her claim is not so
clear, while a very ugly woman distrusts the sincerity of flattery about
her person.