gray and arid scepticism of a groping archaeology. She frowns down any
suggestion of the improbability of a pretty story, she believes in the
poison-sucking devotion of Queen Eleanor, she shrugs her shoulders
impatiently at a whisper of Queen Mary's wig. Every kitchen becomes a
torture-chamber, every drain a subterranean passage. But resolute as she
is on this point of the poetry of the past, on all other questions she
is the most docile of pupils. Her interest, her listening power, her
curiosity, is inexhaustible. If she has a passion, indeed, it is for
Early English. But she has a proper awe for Romanesque, and a singular
interest in Third Pointed. She is ruthless in insisting on her victim's
spelling out every word of a brass in Latin that she cannot understand,
and which he cannot translate. She collects little fragments of Roman
brick, and wraps them up in tissue-paper for preservation at home like
bride-cake. She is severe on restoration, and merciless on whitewash.
She plunges, in fact, gallantly into the spirit of the thing, but she
gracefully denudes it of its bareness and pedantry. Her bugle sings
truce at midday for luncheon. She couches in the deep grass of the abbey
ruins, and gathers in picturesque groups beneath castle walls. A flutter
of silks, a ripple of feminine laughter, distract the audience from
graver disquisitions. It is difficult to discuss the exact date of a
moulding when soda-water bottles are popping beneath one's antiquarian
nose.
After all, archaeologists are men, and sandwiches are sandwiches. It is
at that moment perhaps that the Fading Flower is at her best. Her waning
attractions are heightened artistically by the background of old fogies.
Her sentiment blends with the poetry of the ruins around. The young
squire, the young parson, who have been yawning under the prose of
Dryasdust, find refreshment in the gay prattle of archaeological woman.
The sun too is overpowering, and a pretty woman leaning on one's arm in
the leafy recesses of a ruined castle is sometimes more overpowering
than the sun. There is much in the romance of the occasion. There is a
little perhaps in the champagne. At any rate the Fading Flower blooms
often into matronly life under the kindly influences of archaeological
meetings, and antiquarian studies flourish gaily under the patronage of
woman.
There is a certain melancholy in tracing further the career of the
Fading Flower. We long to arrest it at each of these picturesque stages,
as we long to arrest the sunset in its lovelier moments of violet and
gold. But the sunset dies into the gray of eve, and woman sets with the
same fatal persistency. The evanescent tints fade into the gray. Woman
becomes hard, angular, colorless. Her floating sentiment, so graceful in
its mobility, curdles into opinions. Her conversation, so charmingly
impalpable, solidifies into discussion. Her character, like her face,
becomes rigid and osseous. She entrenches herself in the 'ologies. She
works pinafores for New-Zealanders in the May Meetings, and appears in
wondrous bonnets at the Church Congress. She adores Mr. Kingsley because
he is earnest, and groans over the triviality of the literature of the
day. She takes up the grievances of her sex, and badgers the puzzled
overseer who has omitted to place her name on the register. She
pronounces old men fogies, and young men intolerable. She throws out
dark hints of her intention to compose a great work which shall settle
everything. Then she bursts into poetry, and pens poems of so fiery a
passion that her family are in consternation lest she should elope with
the half-pay officer who meets her by moonlight on the pier. Then she
plunges into science, and cuts her hair short to be in proper trim for
Professor Huxley's lectures.
For awhile she startles her next neighbor at dinner with speculations on
molluscs, and questions as to the precise names of the twelve hundred
new species of fish that Professor Agassiz has caught in the river
Orinoco. There is a more terrible stage when she becomes heretical,
subscribes to the support of Mr. Tonneson and pities the poor Bishop of
Natal. But from this she is commonly saved by the deepening of eve.
Little by little all this restless striving against the monotony of her
existence dies down into calm. The gray of life hushes the Fading Flower
into the kindly aunt, the patient nurse, the gentle friend of the poor.
It is hard to recognise the proud beauty, the vivacious flirt, the
sentimental poetess of days gone by in the practical little woman who
watches by Harry's sick-bed or hurries off with blankets and broth down
the lane. In some such peace the Fading Flower commonly finds her
rest--a peace unromantic, utilitarian, and yet not perhaps unbeautiful.
She has found--as she tells us--her work at last; and yet in the life
that seems so profitless she has been doing a work after all. She has at
any rate vindicated her sex against the charge of what Mr. Arnold calls
Hebraism. She has displayed in Hellenic roundness the completeness of
the nature of woman.
Compared with the quick transitions, with the endless variety of her
life, the life of man seems narrow and poor. There is hardly a phase of
human thought, of human action, which she has not touched, and she has
never touched but to adorn. If she has faded, she has revealed a new
power and beauty and fragrance at each stage in her decay. Nothing in
her life has proved so becoming as her leaving it. The song of
ingenuity, of triumph, of defence, which has run along the course of her
decline, softens at its close into a swan-song of peace and gentleness
and true womanhood.
LA FEMME PASSEE.
Without doubt it is a time of trial to all women, more or less painful
according to individual disposition, when they first begin to grow old
and lose their good looks. Youth and beauty make up so much of their
personal value, so much of their natural _raison d'etre_, that when
these are gone many feel as if their whole career was at an end, and as
if nothing was left to them now that they are no longer young enough to
be loved as girls are loved, or pretty enough to be admired as once they
were admired. For women of a certain position have so little wholesome
occupation, and so little ambition for anything, save, indeed, that
miserable thing called "getting on in society," that they cannot change
their way of life with advancing years; they do not attempt to find
interest in things outside themselves, and independent of the mere
personal attractiveness which in youth constituted their whole pleasure
of existence. This is essentially the case with fashionable women, who
have staked their all on appearance, and to whom good looks are of more
account than noble deeds; and, accordingly, the struggle to remain young
is a frantic one with them, and as degrading as it is frantic.
With the ideal woman of middle age--that pleasant woman, with her happy
face and softened manner, who unites the charms of both epochs,
retaining the ready responsiveness of youth while adding the wider
sympathies of experience--with her there has never been any such
struggle to make herself an anachronism. Consequently she remains
beautiful to the last, far more beautiful than all the paste and washes
in Madame Rachel's shop could make her. Sometimes, if rarely in these
latter days, we meet her in society, where she carries with her an
atmosphere of her own--an atmosphere of honest, wholesome truth and
love, which makes every one who enters it better and purer for the time.
All children and all young persons love her, because she understands and
loves them. For she is essentially a mother--that is, a woman who can
forget herself, who can give without asking to receive, and who, without
losing any of the individualism which belongs to self-respect, can yet
live for and in the lives of others, and find her best joy in the
well-being of those about her. There is no servility, no exaggerated
sacrifice in this; it is simply the fulfillment of woman's highest
duty--the expression of that grand maternal instinct which need not
necessarily include the fact of personal maternity, but which must find
utterance in some line of unselfish action with all women worthy of the
name.
The ideal woman of middle age understands the young because she has
lived with them. If a mother, she has performed her maternal duties with
cheerfulness and love. There has been no giving up her nursery to the
care of a hired servant who is expected to do for twenty pounds a year
what the tremendous instinct of a mother's love could not find strength
to do. When she had children, she attended to them in great part
herself, and learnt all about their tempers, their maladies, and the
best methods of management; as they grew up she was still the best
friend they had, the Providence of their young lives who gave them both
care and justice, both love and guidance. Such a manner of life has
forced her to forget herself. When her child lay ill, perhaps dying, she
had no heart and no time to think of her own appearance, and whether
this dressing-gown was more becoming than that; and what did the doctor
think of her with her hair pushed back from her face; and what a fright
she must have looked in the morning light after her sleepless night of
watching. The world and all its petty pleasures and paltry pains faded
away in the presence of the stern tragedy of the hour; and not the
finest ball of the season seemed to be worth a thought compared to the
all-absorbing question whether her child slept after his draught and
whether he ate his food with better appetite.
And such a life, in spite of all its cares, has kept her young as well
as unselfish; we should rather say, young because unselfish. As she
comes into the room with her daughters, her kindly face unpolluted by
paint, her dress picturesque or fashionable according to her taste, but
decent in form and consistent in tone with her age, it is often
remarked that she looks more like their sister than their mother. This
is because she is in harmony with her age, and has not, therefore, put
herself in rivalry with them; and harmony is the very keystone of
beauty. Her hair may be streaked with white, the girlish firmness and
transparency of her skin has gone, the pearly clearness of her eye is
clouded, and the slender grace of line is lost, but for all that she is
beautiful, and she is intrinsically young. What she has lost in outside
material charm--in that mere _beaute da diable_ of youth--she has gained
in character and expression; and, not attempting to simulate the
attractiveness of a girl, she keeps what nature gave her--the
attractiveness of middle age. And as every epoch has its own beauty, if
woman would but learn that truth, she is as beautiful now as a matron of
fifty, because in harmony with her years, and because her beauty has
been carried on from matter to spirit, as she was when a maiden of
sixteen. This is the ideal woman of middle age, met with even yet at
times in society--the woman whom all men respect, whom all women envy,
and wonder how she does it, and whom all the young adore, and wish they
had for an elder sister or an aunt. And the secret of it all lies in
truth, in love, in purity, and in unselfishness.
Standing far in front of this sweet and wholesome idealization is _la
femme passee_ of to-day--the reality as we meet with it at balls and
fetes and afternoon at homes, ever foremost in the mad chase after
pleasure, for which alone she seems to think she has been sent into the
world. Dressed in the extreme of youthful fashion, her thinning hair
dyed and crimped and fired till it is more like red-brown tow than hair,
her flaccid cheeks ruddled, her throat whitened, her bust displayed with
unflinching generosity, as if beauty was to be measured by cubic inches,
her lustreless eyes blackened round the lids, to give the semblance of
limpidity to the tarnished whites--perhaps the pupil dilated by
belladonna, or perhaps a false and fatal brilliancy for the moment given
by opium, or by eau de cologne, of which she has a store in her
carriage, and drinks as she passes from ball to ball; no kindly drapery
of lace or gauze to conceal the breadth of her robust maturity, or to
soften the dreadful shadows of her leanness--there she stands, the
wretched creature who will not consent to grow old, and who will still
affect to be like a fresh coquettish girl when she is nothing but _la
femme passee, la femme passee et ridicule_ into the bargain.
There is not a folly for which even the thoughtlessness of youth is but
a poor excuse into which she, in all the plenitude of her abundant
experience, does not plunge. Wife and mother as she may be, she flirts
and makes love as if an honorable issue was as open to her as to her
daughter, or as if she did not know to what end flirting and making love
lead in all ages. If we watch the career of such a woman, we see how, by
slow but very sure degrees, she is obliged to lower the standard of her
adorers, and to take up at last with men of inferior social position,
who are content to buy her patronage by their devotion. To the best men
of her own class she can give nothing that they value; so she barters
with snobs, who go into the transaction with their eyes open, and take
the whole affair as a matter of exchange, and _quid pro quo_ rigidly
exacted. Or she does really dazzle some very young and low born man who
is weak as well as ambitious, and who thinks the fugitive regard of a
middle-aged woman of high rank something to be proud of and boasted
about. That she is as old as his own mother--at this moment selling
tapes behind a village counter, or gathering up the eggs in a country
farm--tells nothing against the association with him; and the woman who
began her career of flirtation with the son of a duke ends it with the
son of a shopkeeper, having between these two terms spanned all the
several degrees of degradation which lie between giving and buying.
She cannot help herself; for it is part of the insignia of her
artificial youth to have the reputation of a love affair, or the
pretence of one, if even the reality is a mere delusion. When such a
woman as this is one of the matrons, and consequently one of the leaders
of society, what can we expect from the girls? What worse example could
be given to the young? When we see her with her own daughters we feel
instinctively that she is the most disastrous adviser they could have;
and when in the company of girls or young married women not belonging to
her, we doubt whether we ought not to warn their natural guardians
against allowing such associations, for all that her standing in society
is undeniable, and not a door is shut against her. We may have no
absolutely tangible reason to give for our distaste beyond the
self-evident facts that she paints her face and dyes her hair, dresses
in a very _decollete_ style, and affects a girlish manner that is out of
harmony with her age and condition. But though we cannot formularize
reasons, we have instincts; and sometimes instinct sees more clearly
than reason.
What good in life does this kind of woman do? All her time is taken up,
first, in trying to make herself look twenty or thirty years younger
than she is, and then in trying to make others believe the same; and she
has neither thought nor energy to spare from this, to her, far more
important work than is feeding the hungry or nursing the sick, rescuing
the fallen or soothing the sorrowful. The final cause of her existence
seems to be the impetus she has given to a certain branch of trade
manufacture--unless we add to this, the corruption of society. For whom,
but for her, are the "little secrets" which are continually being
advertised as woman's social salvation--regardless of grammar! The "eaux
noire, brun, et chatain, which dyes the hair any shade in one minute;"
the "kohhl for the eyelids;" the "blanc de perle," and "rouge de
Lubin"--which does not wash off; the "bleu pour les veines;" the "rouge
of eight shades," and "the sympathetic blush," which are cynically
offered for the use and adoption of our mothers and daughters, find
their chief patroness in the _femme passee_ who makes herself up--the
middle-aged matron engaged in her frantic struggle against time, and
obstinately refusing to grow old in spite of all that nature may say or
do.
Bad as the girl of the period often is, this horrible travesty of her
vices in the modern matron is even worse. Indeed, were it not for her,
the girls would never have gone to such lengths as those to which they
have gone; for elder women have naturally immense influence over younger
ones, and if mothers were to set their faces resolutely against the
follies of the day, daughters would and must give in. As it is, they go
even ahead of the young, and by example on the one hand and rivalry on
the other, sow the curse of corruption broadcast where they were meant
to have only a pure influence and to set a wise example. Were it not for
those who still remain faithful, women who regard themselves as
appointed by God the trustees for humanity and virtue, the world would
go to ruin forthwith; but so long as the five righteous are left we have
hope, and a certain amount of security for the future, when the present
disgraceful madness of society shall have subsided.
PRETTY PREACHERS.
To beings of the rougher sex--let us honestly confess it--one of the
most charming of those ever-recurrent surprises which the commonest
incidents of the holidays never fail to afford is the surprise of
finding themselves at church. Whatever the cause may be, whether we owe
our new access of devotion to the early breakfast and the boredom of a
bachelor morning, or to the moral compulsion of the cunning display of
prayer-books and hymnals in the hall, or to the temptation of that
chattiest and gayest of all walks--the walk to church--or to an uneasy
conscience that spurs us to set a good example to the coachman, or to a
sheer impulse of courtesy to the rector, certain it is that a week after
we have been lounging at the club-window, and wondering how all the good
people get through their Sunday morning, we find ourselves safely boxed
in the family pew, and chorusing the family "Amen!"
No doubt much of our new temper springs simply from the change of scene,
and if the first week in the country were a time for self-analysis we
might amuse ourselves with observing what a sudden simplicity of taste
may be gained simply by a rush from town. There is a pleasant irony in
being denounced from pulpit and platform as jaded voluptuaries, and
then finding ourselves able to trample through coppices and plunge into
cowsheds as if we had never seen a cowshed or a coppice before. But
there is more than the pleasure of surprise in the peculiar rural
development of attendance at church. Piety brings its own reward. We
find ourselves invested with a new domestic interest, and brought into
far closer and warmer domestic relations. Mamma looks a great deal more
benignant than usual, and the girls lean on one's arm with a more
trustful confidence and a deeper sympathy.
A new bond of family union has been found in that victory of the pew
over the club-window. But earthly pleasure is always dashed with a
little disappointment, and one drop of bitterness lingers in the cup of
joy. If only Charlie and papa would remain awake during the sermon! They
are so good in the Psalms, so attentive through the Lessons, so sternly
responsive to each Commandment, that it is sad to see them edging
towards the comfortable corners with the text, and fast asleep under the
application. Then, too, there is so little hope of reform, not merely
because on this point men are utterly obdurate, but because it is
impossible for their reformers even to understand their obduracy. For
with both the whole question is a pure question of sympathy. Men sleep
under sermons because the whole temper of their minds, as they grow into
a larger culture, drifts further and further from the very notion of
preaching. Inquiry, quiet play of thought, a somewhat indolent
appreciation of the various sides of every subject, an appetite for
novelty, a certain shrinking from the definite, a certain pleasure in
the vague--these characteristics of modern minds are hardly
characteristics of the pulpit. There are, of course, your drawing-room
spouters, who can reel off an artistic or poetic or critical discourse
of any length on the rug. But, as a rule, men neither like to pump upon
their kind nor to be pumped upon. They like a quiet, genial talk which
turns over everything and settles nothing. They like to put their case,
to put their objection, but they like both to be brief and tentative. As
a rule they talk with their guard up, and say nothing about their deeper
thoughts or feelings. They vote a man who airs his emotions to be as
great a bore as the man with a dogma, or the man with a hobby. A sermon,
therefore, from the very necessities of its structure, is the very type
of the sort of talk that revolts men most.
On the other hand, women really enjoy preaching. Mamma's reply to the
natural inquiry as to the goodness of the sermon--"My dear, all sermons
are good"--is something more than a matronly snub, it is the inner
conviction of woman. She likes, not merely a talk, but a good long talk.
She likes being abused. She likes being dogmatized over and
intellectually trampled on. In fact, she has very little belief in the
intellect. But then she has an immense faith in the heart. She lives in
a world of affections and sympathies. She has her little tale of passion
in the past that she tells over to herself in the dusk of the autumn
evening. She believes that the world at large is moved by those impulses
of love and dislike that play so great a part in her own. And then, too,
she has her practical house-keeping side, and likes her religion done up
in neat little parcels of "heads" and "considerations" and
"applications," and handed over the counter for immediate use. And so
while papa quarrels with the rector's forty minutes, his indiscriminate
censure of a world utterly unknown to him, his declamation against Pusey
or Colenso, or while Charlie laughs over his rhetoric and his sentiment,
woman listens a little sadly and wearily, and longs for a golden age
when husbands will love sermons and men understand clergymen.
It is just from this theological deadlock that we are freed by the
Pretty Preacher. If the world laughs at the Reverend Olympia Brown, it
is not because she preaches, but because she prisons herself in a
pulpit. The sure evidence that woman is to become the preacher of the
future is that woman is the only preacher men listen to. It is hard to
imagine any bribe short of the National Debt that would have induced us
to listen through the dog-days of the last few weeks to the panting
rhetoric of Mr. Spurgeon. But it is harder to imagine the bribe that
would have roused us to flight as we lay beneath the plane-tree, and
listened to the cool ripple of the Pretty Preacher. Of course it is a
mere phase in the life of woman, a short interval between the dawn and
the night. There is an exquisite piquancy in the raw, shy epigrams of
the abrupt little dogmatist who is just out of her teens. Her very want
of training and science gives a novelty to her hits that makes her
formidable in the ring. No doubt, too, as we have owned before, there is
a faint and delicate attraction about the Fading Flower of later years
that at certain times and places makes it not impossible to sit under
her.