conceit in the mystery which hangs about the institutions which we prize
as specially national. We feel that a Briton is still equal to three
Frenchmen, so long as the three Frenchmen confess with a shrug that the
Briton is wholly unintelligible. The blunders of Dr. Doellinger, the
baffled wonderment with which every foreigner retires from the study of
it, only endear to us the more the Church of England. This was perhaps
the reason, besides the inherent marvel of the matter, why we passed so
lightly over M. Esquiroz and his late ecclesiastical researches. It was
humiliating to English pride to have to confess that a Frenchman had
unveiled to the world of Paris the hitherto sacred mysteries of the
perpetual curate and of the tithe rent-charge.
The enemy was clearly at the gates of the central fortress of British
insularism; even an American bishop was tempted to strive to understand
Westminster Abbey; and a dismal rumor prevailed that nothing hindered
the Ecclesiastical Commissioners from revealing the nature and purpose
of their existence but the fact that, after prolonged inquiry, they
found it impossible to understand them themselves. It was time, we felt,
to abandon these mere outposts of the unintelligible to the aggressions
of an impertinent curiosity, and to retire to the citadel. There,
happily, we are safe. Even the unhallowed inquisitiveness of M. Esquiroz
recoils baffled from the parson's wife. Disdainful of all artificial
adjuncts of mystery, to all appearance a woman like other women, packing
her little sick-baskets, balancing the coal-club accounts, teaching in
her Sunday-school, the centre of religion, of charity, and of
tittle-tattle, woman in orders fronts calmly the inquirer, a being
fearfully and wonderfully English, unknowable and unknown.
No one who saw for the first time the calm, colorless serenity of the
parson's wife would discover in her existence the result of a life-long
disappointment. But the parson on whose arm she leans commonly
represents to his spouse simply the descent from the ideal to the real,
the step from the sublime to the prosaic, if not the ridiculous. There
was a moment in her life when the vestry-door closed upon a world of
hallowed wonder, when the being who appeared in white robes, "mystic,
wonderful," was a being not as other men are, a being whose hours were
spent in study, in meditation, in charity, a being of beautiful sermons
and spotless neckties. The flirtation with him, so impatiently longed
for, was not as other men's flirtations; there was a tinge of sacredness
about his very frivolity, and a soft touch of piety in his sentiment. To
share such a life, to commune hourly with a spirit so semi-angelic,
seemed an almost religious ambition. The spirit of a Crusader,
half-heaven, half-earth, fired the gentle breast of the besieger till
Jerusalem was won.
Then came the hour of disenchantment. The mysterious object of
adoration, seen on his own hearth-rug, melted into the mass of men. The
spiritual idealist was cross over an ill-cooked dinner, and as
commonplace at breakfast as his _Times_. The discourses, so lately
utterances from heaven, dwindled into copies or compilations from other
heavenly utterers. The life of a Lady Bountiful turned out a dull
routine of mothers' meetings and Sunday-schools. The ideal poor,
grateful and resigned, proved cross and greedy old harridans. The world
of peace, of nobleness, of serenity, died into a parish of bustle and
scandal and worry. Out of this wreck of hope arises the parson's wife.
Disillusionment is her ordination for a clerical position none the less
real that it is without parallel in the ecclesiastical history of the
world.
She takes her part with all the decision of genius. Her first step is to
restore the Temple she has broken down, to set up again the Dagon who
lies across the threshold. If not for herself, at any rate for the world
and for her children, she re-creates the priest she once dreamt of in
the commonplace parson whom she has actually wedded. Conscious as she is
of the inner nature of the idling apartment where he lounges through the
morning, she impresses on the household the necessity of quiet while its
master is in his "study." By the daily addition of skillful but minute
touches, she paints him to the world as an ideal of piety and of
learning. She takes bills and letters off his hands, that his mind may
not be disturbed from more serious subjects. She enforces a sacred
silence throughout the house during the solemn hours while the sermon is
being compiled. She sews the sacred sheets together, and listens while
the discourse is recited for her approval. She listens again with an
interest as fresh as ever when it is preached. She marks the text in her
Bible, and sees that the children mark it too.
As the first subject of his theological realm, she sets an example which
other subjects are to follow. They, like her, mingle their contempt for
the parson's business abilities and voluble talk with a hushed reverence
for his esoteric knowledge of subjects inaccessible to common men. They,
like her, manage to combine a perfect readiness to snub him and his
opinions on all earthly topics, with an equal readiness to listen to
him, as to a divine oracle, on the topics of grace and free-will.
Insensibly the subtle distinction tells on the parson himself. He is
conscious, perhaps pleasantly conscious, that he is seen through the
glass of his wife, and seen therefore darkly. He retires within the
domestic veil. He learns to avoid common subjects--subjects, that is,
where the world holds itself at liberty to criticise him. He retires to
fields where he is above criticism. He believes at last in the vamped-up
sermons in which his wife persists in believing. He accepts the position
of an oracle on sacred topics which his wife has made for him. In a
word, the parson's wife has created the British parson.
It is hard to say how far the creator believes in her own creation. In
persuading others, she probably succeeds to a great extent in persuading
herself. At any rate she accepts willingly enough the consequences of a
position which leaves her the master of the parish. In the bulk of cases
the parson is simply the Mikado, the nominal ruler, lapped in soft ease,
and exempt from the worry of the world about him. Woman is the parochial
Tycoon, the constitutional premier who does not rule, but governs. She
is the hidden centre and force of the whole parochial machinery--the
organist, the chief tract distributor, the president of the Dorcas
society, the despot of the penny bank and the coal-club, the head of the
sewing-class, the supervisor of district-visitors, the universal referee
as to the character of mendicant Joneses and Browns. In other words, the
parson's wife has revived an Apostolic Order which but for her would
have died away; she has restored the primitive Diaconate.
Woman is the true parochial deacon, and not the bashful young gentleman
fresh from Oxford, who wears his stole over one shoulder rather than
over two. It is the parson's wife who "serves tables" nowadays; and the
results on parochial activity are in some ways remarkable enough. In the
first place, men are fairly driven from the field. If a layman wishes to
help in a parish he finds himself lost in a world of women. It is only
those semi-clerical beings who seem to unite with a singular grace all
the weaknesses of both the sexes who persist in the attempt. Then, too,
all the ideas of the parochial world become feminine; the parish buzzes
with woman's hatred of the Poor-laws, and contempt for economic
principles and hard-hearted statisticians.
Mendicancy flies from the workhouse and the stone-yard to entrench
itself against Guardians and relieving-officers among the soup-kitchens
and the coal-tickets of feminine almsgiving. The parson, after a faint
protest of common sense, surrenders at discretion, and flings all
experience to the winds. One wife turns her husband into a fount of
begging letters. Another forces him to set up manufactories for all the
lucifer-match girls of the parish. Woman's imaginativeness, woman's
fancy, woman's indifference to fact exhausts itself in "sensational
cases," and revels in starvation and death. But we must turn to a
brighter side of her activity. Ritualism is the great modern result of
the parson's wife, though, with a base ingratitude to the rock from
which they were hewn, Ritualists hoist the standard of clerical
celibacy. Woman has long since made her parson; now (as of old with her
doll) her pleasure is to dress him. A new religious atmosphere surrounds
her life when the very work of her hands becomes hallowed in its
purpose. The old crotchet and insertion--we use words to us more
mysterious than intelligible--become flat, stale, and unprofitable by
the side of the book-marker and the colored stole; and a flutter of
excitement stirs even the stillness of a life which is sometimes
offensively still at the sight of the new chasuble with "aunt's real
lace, you know, dear," sewn about it.
However gray an existence may be, and the tones of a life like this are
naturally subdued, it still cherishes within a warmth and poetry of its
own; and the poetry of the parson's wife breaks out in vestments and
decorations. Nothing brings out more vividly the fact that Mrs. Proudie
_is_ the Church of England than that her reaction against the prose of
existence is shaking--so the Protestant Alliance tells us--the Church of
England to its foundations. The real disturber of the Church peace, the
real assertor of Catholic principles, or (for those who prefer a middle
phrase to either of these contending statements) the real defendant in
the Court of Arches, is not Mr. Mackonochie, but the parson's wife.
Mrs. Proudie, we repeat, is the Church of England; but if it is
difficult to estimate the results of her position upon the spouse of her
bosom and the parish which she rules, it is still harder to estimate its
results upon herself. Her outer manner seems, indeed, to reflect what we
have ventured to call the gray tones of her life, and a certain
weariness of routine breaks out even in the mechanical precision of her
existence. Power, in the parochial as in the domestic circle, is bought
by her at the cost of a perpetual self-abnegation, and it is a little
hard to be always hiding the hand that pulls the strings. We may excuse
a little forgetfulness in a wife when her daily sacrifice is wholly
forgotten in the silver teapot and the emblazoned memorial which
proclaim the borrowed glories of her spouse.
Sometimes there may be a little justification for the complaint of the
British priestess that the priest alone should be crowned with laurel.
But, if she is ecclesiastically forgotten, it must be remembered that
her position receives a shy and timid recognition from society. She is
credited with a quasi-clerical character, and regarded as having
received a sort of semi-ordination. The Church, indeed, assigns her no
parochial precedence; but public opinion, if it sets her beneath her
husband, places her above all other ecclesiastical agencies. Tacitly she
is allowed to have the right to speak of "_our_ curates." Then, again,
society assigns her a sort of mediatorial position between the Church
and the world; she is the point of transition between the clergy and
their flocks. It is through her that the incense of congregational
flattery is suffered to mount up to the idol who may not personally
inhale it; and it is through her that the parson can intimate his
opinion, and scatter his hints on a number of social subjects too
trivial for his personal intervention.
It is impossible, indeed, to express in words the delicate shades of her
social position, or, what is yet more remarkable, the relation to her
sister-world of woman. There can be no doubt that, taken all in all,
women are a little proud of the parson's wife. She is, as it were, the
tithe of their sex, taken and consecrated for the rest. The dignity of
her position in close proximity to the very priesthood itself extends,
by the subtle gradation of sisters of mercy, district-visitors, and
tract-distributors, to women in the mass. Her influence is a quiet
protest against the injustice of the present religions of the world in
excluding woman from those ministerial functions with which Paganism
invested her. It is an odd transition from the quiet parson's wife to
the priestess of Delphi; but while the parson's wife exists there is at
any rate a persistence in the claim of woman's right to resume her
tripod again.
It is the quiet consciousness of this, of her spiritual headship of her
sex, of her mystic and unexpressed but real ecclesiastical position,
quite as much as the weariness of her daily routine, which displays
itself in the bearing of the parson's wife. She is not quite as other
women are, any more than he is as other men. Her dress is--at any rate,
in theory it ought to be--a shade quieter, her bonnets a little less
modern, her manner a trifle more reserved, her mirth hardly as
unrestrained as those of the rest of her sex. Her talk, without being
clerical, takes a quiet clerical tinge. She has her little scandal about
the archdeacon and her womanly abhorrence of that horrid Colenso. She
knows Early English from Middle Pointed, and interprets Ritualistic
phrases into intelligible vocables. Like the curate, she dances only in
family circles, and then dances after a discreet and ecclesiastical
sort. She has no objection to cards, but she plays only for love. She
sings solos from the _Messiah_ and _St. Paul_.
An existence simple, kindly enough in its way, penetrating society no
doubt with a thousand good influences, but yet, we must own, hardly very
interesting to the priestess who lives it. Altogether, when we get
beyond the purple and gold of our rulers, we congratulate ourselves on
being free from the tedium and weariness and perpetual self-restraint of
their lofty position. And even the curate who has lately raised his
faint protest against what he calls "feminine domination" may remember
in charity that while croquet and flirtation remain to him, his
existence, slavery though he deem it, is a slavery far freer, blither,
and more lively than that of the curate's wife.
WOMAN AND HER CRITICS.
We men boast, as Homer said, to be braver than our fathers; but, as a
sort of compensation, our women are far more sensitive than their
grandmothers. Phyllis has ceased to laugh at Mr. Spectator's criticisms
on her fan and her patches; but then it may be doubted whether Phyllis
ever did laugh very heartily at Mr. Spectator. Women have run through
all the list of moral and intellectual qualities in their time, but we
do not remember an instance of a really humorous woman. Witty women
there have been, and no doubt are still in plenty, but the world has
still to welcome its feminine Addison.
The higher a man's nature, the keener seems his enjoyment of his own
irony and mockery of his own foibles; but did any woman ever seriously
sit down to write a "Roundabout Paper?" Women, we are generally told,
are "especially self-conscious;" in fact, the whole theory of women,
philosophically stated, from the shyness of the miss in her 'teens to
the audacious flirtation of a heroine of the season, rests wholly on the
assumed basis of "self-consciousness." But it is self-consciousness of a
very peculiar and feminine sort--a consciousness, not of themselves in
themselves, but of the reflection of themselves, in others, of the
impression they make on the world around. Woman, we suspect, lives
always before her glass, and makes a mirror of existence. But for
downright self-analysis, we repeat, she has little or no taste. A female
Montaigne, a female Thackeray, would be a sheer impossibility.
We have been led, as the _Spectator_ would have said, into these
reflections by the chorus of shrill indignation with which the world of
woman encounters the slightest comment of extraneous critics. The censor
is at once told flatly that he knows nothing of woman. He is a bachelor,
he is blighted in love, he is envious, spiteful; he is blind, deaf,
dumb. All this goes without saying, as the French have it, but he is
certainly ignorant. The truth is, it is woman who knows nothing of
herself. It is only self-analysis which reveals to us our inner
anomalies, our ridiculous self-contrasts; it is humor which recognises
and amuses itself with their existence. But it is just the absence of
this sense of anomaly in her nature or her life that is the charm of
woman.
Christmas has been bringing us, among its other festivities, a few of
those delightful amusements called private theatricals; and in private
theatricals all are agreed with Becky Sharpe, that woman reigns supreme.
We were present the other day at an entertaining little comedy of this
kind, where the whole interest of the piece was absorbed by a
fascinating widow and an intriguing attorney, and where both these parts
were sustained with singular ability and success. The amateur who played
the lawyer seized the general idea of his _role_ with perfect accuracy;
in four minutes it was admirably rendered to his audience, but in four
minutes it was exhausted. The preliminary cough, the constant angularity
of attitude in the midst of perpetual fidget, the indicative finger from
which the legal remarks seemed to pop off as from a pocket-pistol, were
grasped at once, and remained unvaried, undeveloped to the close. The
very ability with which the actor rendered the inner unity of legal
existence, the very fidelity with which he represented the lawyer as a
class, denied to him the subtle charm of the only unity which life as a
representation exhibits--the charm of a unity of outer impression
arising out of perpetual inner variety.
His feminine rival won her laurels just because she made no attempt to
grasp any general idea at all, but abandoned herself freely to the
phases of the character as it encountered the various other characters
of the piece. Whether as the frivolous widow or the daring coquette, as
the practical woman of business or the unprotected female, as the flirt
in her wildest extravagance or the wife in her most melting moods, she
aimed at no artistic unity beyond the general unity of sex. She remained
simply woman, and all this prodigious versatility was, as the audience
observed, "so charmingly natural," just because it is woman's life. "On
the stage," if we may venture to apply the lines about Garrick:--
On the stage she is natural, simple, affecting--
It is only that when she is off she is acting.
In actual fact she is acting whether off the boards or on, but the mere
existence in outer impressions, in the unity of a constant admiration,
which critics applaud as natural on the stage, they are unreasonably
hard upon in general society.
A man on the boards is doing an unusual and exceptional thing, and as a
rule the very effort he makes to do it only enhances his failure; but a
woman on the boards is only doing, under very favorable circumstances,
what she does every day with less notice and applause. There can be no
wonder if she is "charmingly natural," but this naturalness depends, as
we have seen, on the entire absence of what in men is called
self-consciousness--that is, the sense of anomaly. When a critic then
ventures to open this inner existence, and to give woman a peep at
herself, we cannot be astonished at the scream of indignation which
greets his efforts. But we may be permitted to repeat that the scream
proves, not that he knows nothing of woman, but that woman knows nothing
of herself.
We are afraid, however, that all this feminine resentment points to a
radical defect in the mind of woman, which she is alternately proud to
acknowledge and resolute to deny. Frenchmen of the Thiers sort have a
trick to which they give the amusing name of logic; they present their
reader with a couple of alternatives which they assert divide the
universe, and bid you choose "of these two one." But any ordinary woman
presents to the observer a hundred distinct alternatives, and defies him
to choose any one in particular. There is no special reason, then, for
astonishment at the coolness with which she sets herself up one moment
as a "deductive creature," as one who attains the highest flights of
knowledge by intuition rather than by reason, and the next poses herself
as the one specially rational being in her household, and waits
patiently till her husband is reasonable too.
We are sometimes afraid that neither one nor the other of these theories
will hold water, and feel inclined to agree with one of the most
brilliant of her sex that, if woman loves with her head, she thinks with
her heart. As a rule, certainly, she judges through her affections. She
does not praise nor blame; she loves or hates. The one thing she cannot
understand is a purely intellectual criticism, the sort of morbid
anatomy of the mind which treats its subject as a mere dead thing simply
useful for demonstration. Very naturally, she attributes the same spirit
of affectional intelligence to her critics as to herself; and when they
unravel a few of her inconsistencies, amuse themselves with a few
follies, or even venture to point out a few faults, she brands them as
"hating" or "despising" woman. Point, too, is given to the charge by the
fact that these affections through which she lives are from their very
nature incapable of dealing with qualities, and naturally transform them
into persons. A woman does not love her lover's courage or truth or
honor; she loves her lover. If she prizes his qualities at all it is
simply because they are inherent in him, and so she gives herself very
little trouble to distinguish between his bad qualities and his good
ones. She considers herself bound to defend his characteristics in the
mass, and if she seem to give up his extravagance or his rakishness, it
is only with a secret determination that this concession to the world
shall be balanced by an increase of adoration at home.
As she deals with mankind, so she expects mankind, and especially the
mankind of criticism, to deal with her. It is in vain that her censor
replies that he only blamed her bonnet-strings or attacked the color of
her shoe-tie. Woman's answer is that he has attacked woman. This folly,
that absurdity, are in woman's mind herself, and their assailant is her
own personal antagonist. "Love me all in all or not at all" is a woman's
song, not in Mr. Tennyson's _Idyl_ only, but all the world over. The
discriminating admiration, the constitutional obedience which still
claims to preserve a certain reticence and caution in its loyalty, are
more alien to woman's feelings than the refusal of all worship, all
obedience whatever. "Picking her to pieces" is the phrase in which she
describes the critical process against which she revolts, and it is a
phrase which, in a woman's mouth, is the prelude to the bitterest
warfare.
There is a more amiable, if a hardly more intelligent, trait in woman's
character which renders her singularly averse to all criticism. Men can
hardly be described as loyal to men. Whether it be their exaggerated
self-esteem, their individuality, or their reason, it is certain that
they do not imagine the honor of their sex to be concerned in the
conduct of each particular member of it. The lawyer laughs over a
little gentle fun when it is poked at his neighbor the vicar, and the
parson has his amusement out of the exposure of the foibles of his
friend the attorney. What they never dream of is the flinging over each
other's defects the general cloak of manhood, and rallying at every
smile of criticism under the general banner of the sex.