of woman. Bold as the assumption sounds, it is quietly assumed that
every woman is naturally musical. Music is the great accomplishment, and
the logic of her schools proves to demonstration that every girl has
fingers and an ear. In a wonderful number of cases the same logic proves
that girls have a voice. Anyhow, the assumption moulds the very course
of female existence. The morning is spent in practicing, and the evening
in airing the results of the practice. There are country-houses where
one only rushes away from the elaborate Thalberg of midnight to be
roused up at dawn by the Battle of Prague on the piano in the
school-room over-head. Still we all reconcile ourselves to this
perpetual rattle, because we know that a musical being has to be
educated into existence, and that a woman is necessarily a musical
being. A glance, indeed, at what we may call the life of the piano
explains the necessity.
Music is pre-eminently the social art; no art draws people so
conveniently together, no art so lends itself to conversation, no art is
in a maidenly sense at once so agreeable, so easy to acquire, and so
eminently useful. A flirtation is never conducted under greater
advantages than amid the deafening thunders of a grand finale; the
victim doomed to the bondage of turning over is chained to the
fascination of fine arms and delicate hands. Talk, too, may be conducted
without much trouble over music on the small principles of female
criticism. "Pretty" and "exquisite" go a great way with the Italian and
the Romantic schools; "sublime" does pretty universally for the German.
The opera is, of course, the crown and sum of things, the most charming
and social of lounges, the readiest of conversational topics. It must be
a very happy Guardsman indeed who cannot kindle over the Flower-song or
the Jewel-scene. And it is at the opera that woman is supreme. The
strange mingling of eye and ear, the confused appeal to every sensuous
faculty, the littleness as well as the greatness of it all, echo the
conclusion within woman herself.
Moreover there is no boredom--no absolute appeal to thought or deeper
feeling. It is in good taste to drop in after the first act, and to
leave before the last. It is true that an opera is supposed to be the
great creation of a great artist, and an artist's work is presumed to
have a certain order and unity of its own; but woman is the Queen of
Art, and it is hard if she may not display her royalty by docking the
Fidelio of its head and its tail. But, if woman is obliged to content
herself with mutilating art in the opera or the concert-room, she is
able to create art itself over her piano. A host of Claribels and
Rosalies exist simply because woman is a musical creature. We turn over
the heap of rubbish on the piano with a sense of wonder, and ask,
without hope of an answer, why nine-tenths of our modern songs are
written at all, or why, being written, they can find a publisher.
But the answer is a simple one, after all; it is merely that aesthetic
creatures, that queens of art and of song, cannot play good music and
can play bad.
There is not a publisher in London who would not tell us that the
patronage of musical women is simply a patronage of trash. The fact is
that woman is a very practical being, and she has learned by experience
that trash pays better than good music for her own special purposes; and
when these purposes are attained she throws good music and bad music
aside with a perfect impartiality. It is with a certain feeling of
equity, as well as of content, that the betrothed one resigns her sway
over the keys. She has played and won, and now she holds it hardly fair
that she should interfere with other people's game. So she lounges into
a corner, and leaves her Broadwood to those who have practical work to
do. Her _role_ in life has no need of accomplishments, and as for the
serious study of music as an art, as to any real love of it or loyalty
to it, that is the business of "professional people," and not of British
mothers. Only she would have her girls remember that nothing is in
better taste than for young people to show themselves artistic.
Music only displays on the grand scale the laws which in less obtrusive
form govern the whole aesthetic life of woman. Painting, for instance,
dwindles in her hands into the "sketch;" the brown sands in the
foreground, the blue wash of the sea, and the dab of rock behind. Not a
very lofty or amusing thing, one would say at first sight; but, if one
thinks of it, an eminently practical thing, rapid and easy of execution,
not mewing the artist up in solitary studio, but lending itself
gracefully to picnics and groups of a picturesque sort on cliff and
boulder, and whispered criticism from faces peeping over one's shoulder.
Serious painting woman can leave comfortably to Academicians and
rough-bearded creatures of the Philip Firmin type, though even here she
feels, as she glances round the walls of the Academy, that she is
creating art as she is creating music. She dwells complacently on the
home tendencies of modern painting, on the wonderful succession of
squares of domestic canvas, on the nursemaid carrying children up
stairs in one picture, on the nursemaid carrying children down stairs in
the next. She has her little crow of triumph over the great artist who
started with a lofty ideal, and has come down to painting the red
stockings of little girls in green-baize pews, or the wonderful
counterpanes and marvellous bed-curtains of sleeping innocents. She
knows that the men who are forced to paint these things growl contempt
over their own creations, but the very growl is a tribute to woman's
supremacy. It is a great thing when woman can wring from an artist a
hundred "pot-boilers," while man can only give him an order for a single
"Light of the World."
One field of art, indeed, woman claims for her own. Man may build
churches as long as he leaves woman to decorate them. A crowning
demonstration of her aesthetic faculties meet us on every festival in
wreath and text and monogram, in exquisitely moulded pillars turned into
grotesque corkscrews, in tracery broken by strips of greenery, in paper
flowers and every variety of gilt gingerbread. But it may be questioned
whether art is the sole aim of the ecclesiastical picnic out of which
decorations spring. The chatty groups dotted over the aisle, the
constant appeals to the curate, the dainty little screams and giggles as
the ladder shakes beneath those artistic feet, the criticism of cousins
who have looked in quite accidentally for a peep, the half-consecrated
flirtations in the vestry, ally art even here to those practical
purposes which aesthetic woman never forgets. Were she, indeed, once to
forget them, she might become a Dr. Mary Walker; she might even become a
George Sand. In other words, she might find herself an artist, loving
and studying art for its own sake, solitary, despised, eccentric, and
blue. From such a destiny aesthetic woman turns scornfully away.
WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?
This is a question which one half the world is asking the other half,
with very wild answers as the result. Woman's work seems to be in these
days everything that it was not in times past, and nothing that it was.
Professions are undertaken and careers invaded which were formerly held
sacred to men, while things are left undone which, for all the
generations that the world has lasted, have been naturally and
instinctively assigned to women to do. From the savage squaw gathering
fuel or drawing water for the wigwam, to the lady giving up the keys to
her housekeeper, housekeeping has been considered one of the primary
functions of women. The man to provide, the woman to dispense; the man
to do the rough initial work of bread-winning, whether as a half-naked
barbarian hunting live meat, or as a city clerk painfully scoring lines
of rugged figures, the woman to cook the meat when got, and to lay out
to the best advantage for the family the quarter's salary gained by
casting up ledgers, and writing advices and bills of lading.
Take human society in any phase we like, we must come down to these
radical conditions; and any system which ignores this division of labor,
and confounds these separate functions, is of necessity imperfect and
wrong. We have nothing whatever to say against the professional
self-support of women who have no men to work for them, and who must
therefore work for themselves in order to live. In what direction soever
they can best make their way, let them take it. Brains and intellectual
gifts are of no sex and no condition, and it is far more important that
good work should be done than that it should be done by this or that
particular set of workers.
But we are speaking of the home duties of married women, and of those
girls who have no need to earn their daily bread, and who are not so
specially gifted as to be driven afield by the irrepressible power of
genius. We are speaking of women who cannot help in the family income,
but who can both save and improve in the home; women whose lives now are
one long day of idleness, _ennui_, and vagrant imagination, because they
despise the activities into which they were born, while seeking outlets
for their energies impossible to them both by nature and social
restrictions.
It is strange to see into what unreasonable disrepute active
housekeeping--woman's first natural duty--has fallen in England. Take a
family with four or five hundred a year--and we know how small a sum
that is for "genteel humanity" in these days--the wife who will be an
active housekeeper, even with such an income, will be an exception to
the rule; and the daughters who will be anything more than drawing-room
dolls waiting for husbands to transfer them to a home of their own,
where they may be as useless as they are now, will be rarer still. For
things are getting worse, not better, and our young women are less
useful even than their mothers; while these last do not, as a rule, come
near the good housekeeping ladies of olden times, who knew every secret
of domestic economy, and made a point of honor of a wise and pleasant
"distribution of bread."
The usual method of London housekeeping, even in the second ranks of the
middle-classes, is for the mistress to give her orders in the kitchen in
the morning, leaving the cook to pass them on to the tradespeople when
they call. If she is not very indolent, and if she has a due regard for
neatness and cleanliness, she may supplement her kitchen commands by
going up stairs through some of the bedrooms; but after a kind word of
advice to the housemaid if she is sweet-tempered, or a harsh word of
censure if she is of the cross-grained type, her work in that department
will be done, and her duties for the day are at an end. There is none of
the clever marketing by which fifty per cent. is saved in the outlay if
a woman knows what she is about, and how to buy; none of the personal
superintendence so encouraging to servants when genially performed, and
rendering slighted work impossible; none of that "seeing to things"
herself, or doing the finer parts of the work with her own hands, which
used to form part of a woman's unquestioned duty. She gives her orders,
weighs out her supplies, then leaves the maids to do the best they know
or the worst they will, according to the degree in which they are
supplied with faculty or conscience. Many women boast that their
housekeeping takes them perhaps an hour, perhaps half an hour, in the
morning, and no more; and they think themselves clever and commendable
in proportion to the small amount of time given to their largest family
duty. This is all very well where the income is such as to secure
first-class servants--professors of certain specialities of knowledge,
and far in advance of the mistress; but how about the comfort of the
house with this hasty generalship, when the maids are mere scrubs who
would have to go through years of training before they were worth their
salt? It may be very well too in large households governed by general
system, and not by individual ruling; but where the service is scant and
poor, it is a stupidly uncomfortable as well as a wasteful way of
housekeeping. It is analogous to English cookery--a revolting poverty of
result with flaring prodigality of means; all the pompous paraphernalia
of tradespeople, and their carts, and their red-books for orders, with
nothing worth the trouble of booking, and everything of less quantity
and lower quality than might be if personal pains were taken, which is
always the best economy practicable.
What is there in practical housekeeping less honorable than the ordinary
work of middle-class gentlewomen? and why should women shrink from doing
for utility, and for the general comfort of the family, what they would
do at any time for vanity or idleness? No one need go into extremes, and
wish our middle-class gentlewomen to become Cinderellas sitting among
the kitchen ashes, Nausicaaes washing linen, or Penelopes spending their
lives in needlework only. But, without undertaking anything unpleasant
to her senses or degrading to her condition, a lady might do hundreds of
things that are now left undone in a house altogether, or are given up
to the coarse handling of servants, and domestic life would gain
infinitely in consequence.
What degradation, for instance, is there in cookery? and how much more
home happiness would there not be if wives would take in hand that great
cold-mutton question! But women are both selfish and small on this
point. Born for the most part with very feebly developed gustativeness,
they affect to despise the stronger instinct in men, and think it low
and sensual if they are expected to give any special attention to the
meals of the man who provides the meat. This contempt for good living is
one cause of the ignorance there is among them of how to secure good
living. Those horrible traditions of "plain roast and boiled" cling
about them as articles of culinary faith; and because they have reached
no higher knowledge for themselves, they decide that no one else shall
go beyond them.
For one middle-class gentlewoman who understands anything about cookery,
or who really cares for it as a scientific art or domestic necessity,
there are ten thousand who do not; yet our mothers and grandmothers were
not ashamed to be known as deft professors, and homes were happier in
proportion to the respect paid to the stewpan and the stockpot. And
cookery is more interesting now than it was then, because more advanced,
more scientific, and with improved appliances; and, at the same time, it
is of confessedly more importance. It may seem humiliating, to those who
go in for spirit pure and simple, to speak of the condition of the soul
as in any way determined by beef and cabbage; but it is so,
nevertheless, the connection between food and virtue, food and thought,
being a very close one; and the sooner wives recognise this connection
the better for them and for their husbands.
The clumsy savagery of a plain cook, or the vile messes of a fourth-rate
confectioner, are absolute sins in a house where a woman has all her
senses, and can, if she will, attend personally to the cooking. Many
things pass for crimes which are really not so bad as this. But how
seldom now do we find a house where the lady does look after the
cooking, where clean hands and educated brains are put to active service
for the good of others! The trouble would be too great in our fine-lady
days, even if there was the requisite ability; but there is as little
ability as there is energy, and the plain cook with her savagery, or the
fourth-rate confectioner with his rancid pastry, have it all their own
way, according to the election of economy or ostentation.
If by chance one stumbles on a household where the woman does not
disdain housewifely work, and specially the practical superintendence of
the kitchen, there we may be sure we shall find cheerfulness and
content. There seems to be something in the life of a practical
housekeeper that answers to the needs of a woman's best nature, and that
makes her pleasant and good-tempered. Perhaps it is the consciousness
that she is doing her duty--of itself a wonderful sweetener of the
nature; perhaps the greater amount of bodily exercise keeps the liver in
good tone; whatever the cause, sure it is that the homes of the active
housekeepers are more harmonious than those of the feckless and
do-nothing sort. Yet the snobbish half of the middle-classes holds
housewifely work as degrading, save in the trumpery pretentiousness of
"giving orders."
A woman may sit in a dirty drawing-room which the slipshod maid has not
had time to clean, but she must not take a duster in her hands and
polish the legs of the chairs; there is no disgrace in the dirt, only in
the duster. She may do fancy work of no earthly use, but she must not be
caught making a gown. Indeed very few women could make one, and as few
will do plain needlework. They will braid and embroider, "cut holes, and
sew them up again," and spend any amount of time and money on beads and
wools for messy draperies which no one wants; the end, being finery,
sanctions the toil and refines it; but they will not do things of any
practical use, or if they are compelled by the exigencies of
circumstances, they think themselves petty martyrs, and badly used by
the fates.
The whole scheme of woman's life at this present time is untenable and
unfair. She wants to have all the pleasures and none of the
disagreeables. Her husband goes to the city, and does monotonous and
unpleasant work there; but his wife thinks herself in very evil case if
asked to do monotonous housework at home. Yet she does nothing more
elevating or more advantageous. Novel-reading, fancy-work, visiting,
letter-writing, sum up her ordinary occupations; and she considers these
more to the point than practical housekeeping. In fact it becomes a
serious question what women think themselves sent into the world for,
what they hold themselves designed by God to be or to do. They grumble
at having children, and at the toil and anxiety which a family entails;
they think themselves degraded to the level of servants if they have to
do any practical housework whatever; they assert their equality with
man, and express their envy of his life, yet show themselves incapable
of learning the first lesson set to men, that of doing what they do not
like to do. What, then, do they want? What do they hold themselves made
for?
Certainly some of the more benevolent sort carry their energies out of
doors, and leave such prosaic matters as savory dinners and fast
shirt-buttons for committees and charities, where they get excitement
and _kudos_ together. Others give themselves up to what they call
keeping up society, which means being more at home in every person's
house than their own; and some do a little weak art, and others a little
feeble literature; but there are very few indeed who honestly buckle to
the natural duties of their position, and who bear with the tedium of
home work as men bear with the tedium of office work. The little
royalty of home is the last place where a woman cares to shine, and the
most uninteresting of all the domains she seeks to govern. Fancy a
high-souled creature, capable of aesthetics, giving her mind to soup or
the right proportion of chutnee for the curry! Fancy, too, a brilliant
creature foregoing an evening's conversational glory abroad for the sake
of a prosaic husband's more prosaic dinner! He comes home tired from
work, and desperately in need of a good dinner as a restorative; but the
plain cook gives him cold meat and pickles, or an abomination which she
calls hash, and the brilliant creature, full of mind, thinks the desire
for anything else rank sensuality.
It seems a little hard, certainly, on the unhappy fellow who works at
the mill for such a return; but women believe that men are made only to
work at the mill that they may receive the grist accruing, and be kept
in idleness and uselessness all their lives. They have no idea of
lightening the labor of that mill-round by doing their own natural work
cheerfully and diligently. They will do everything but what they ought
to do; they will make themselves doctors, committee-women, printers,
what not, but they won't learn cooking, and they won't keep their own
houses. There never was a time when women were less the helpmates of men
than they are at present; when there was such a wide division between
the interests and the sympathies of the sexes in the endeavor, on the
one side, to approximate their pursuits.
There is a great demand made now for more work for woman, and wider
fields for her labor. We confess we should feel a deeper interest in the
question if we saw more energy and conscience put into the work lying to
her hand at home, and we hold that she ought to perform perfectly the
duties instinctive to her sex before claiming those hitherto held remote
from her natural condition. Much of this demand, too, springs from
restlessness and dissatisfaction; little, if any, from higher
aspirations or nobler unused energies. Indeed, the nobler the woman the
more thoroughly she will do her own proper work, in the spirit of old
George Herbert's well-worn line, and the less she will feel herself
above her work. It is only the weak who cannot raise their circumstances
to the level of their thoughts; only the poor who cannot enrich their
deeds by their thoughts.
That very much of this demand for more power of work comes from
necessity and the absolute need of bread, we know; and that the demand
will grow louder as marriage becomes scarcer, and there are more women
left adrift in the world without the protection and help of men, we also
know. But this belongs to another part of the subject. What we want to
insist on now is the pitiable ignorance and shiftless indolence of most
middle-class housekeepers; and we would urge on woman the value of a
better system of life at home, before laying claim to the discharge of
extra-domestic duties abroad.
PAPAL WOMAN.
The wonderful instinct which has always guided the Papacy in
distinguishing between forces that it may safely oppose and forces
before which it must surrender, has just received a startling
illustration in a scene reported to have taken place at the Vatican a
few days ago. Rome may refuse all compromise with Italy, but even Rome
shrinks from encountering the hostility of woman. The Brief of October
last sounded, indeed, marvellously like a declaration of war; even in a
Pope it argued no little resolution to denounce the "license of the
female toilet," the "fantastic character of woman's head-dress," and the
"scandalous indecency" of woman's attire. More worldly critics would
hardly have ventured to describe a piquant chignon or a suggestive
boddice as "a propaganda of the devil;" it will be long, at any rate,
before censors of this class will meet with the reward of a deputation
and a testimonial from the fair objects of their criticism.
St. Peter, however, we are adroitly reminded, after his miraculous
delivery from prison by an angel, found an asylum among women; and,
fresh from his troubles with the red-shirts of Monte Rotondo, the
successor of St. Peter seems to have found himself wonderfully at home
among the flounces that thronged the other day to his public audience at
the Vatican. A hundred ladies--the presence amongst whom of a number of
English Catholics gives us a national interest in the scene--came
forward to express their gratitude for the censures of the Papal Briefs,
and the adhesion of their sex to the orthodox doctrines of the toilet.
The speech in which one of the fair deputation expressed the sentiments
of her fellows has been unfortunately suppressed, but the letter of Pope
Pius to the Bishop of Orleans explains the secret of this dramatic
reconciliation, and the terms of the Concordat which has been arranged
between Woman and the Papacy.
A common danger has driven the two Powers to this fresh alliance. If
Garabaldi threatens the supremacy of the Holy See, the educational
reforms of M. Duruy menace the domestic tyranny of woman. Woman sees
herself in peril of deposition at home by the same spirit of democratic
and intellectual equality which would drive the Pope from the Vatican.
In presence of such a peril, mutual concession becomes easy, and the
fair votaries pardon all references to their "propaganda of the devil"
in consideration of a Papal assault on the "cynical writers who are
desirous of attacking woman."