It is universally conceded that our great-grandmothers were women of
the most precise life and austere manners. The girls nowadays display
a shocking freedom; but they were partly led into it by the relative
laxity of their mothers, who, in their turn, gave great anxiety to a
still earlier generation. To hear all the "Ahs" and the "Well, I
nevers" of the middle-aged, one would fancy that propriety of conduct
was a thing of the past, and that never had there been a "gaggle of
girls" (the phrase belongs to Dame Juliana Berners) so wanton and
rebellious as the race of 1895. Still, there must be a fallacy
somewhere. If each generation is decidedly wilder, more independent,
more revolting, and more insolent than the one before, how exceedingly
good people must have been four or five generations ago! Outside the
pages of the people so sweetly advertised as "sexual female
fictionists," the girls of to-day do not strike one as extremely bad.
Some of them are quite nice; the average is not very low. How lofty,
then, must have been the standard one hundred years ago, to make room
for such a steady decline ever since! Poor J. K. S. wrote:--
"If all the harm that's been done by men
Were doubled and doubled and doubled again,
And melted and fused into vapour, and then
Were squared and raised to the power of ten,
There wouldn't be nearly enough, not near,
To keep a small girl for a tenth of a year."
This is the view of a cynic. To the ordinary observer, the "revolting
daughters," of whom we hear so much, do not revolt nearly enough to
differentiate them duly from their virtuous great-grandmothers.
We fear that there was still a good deal of human nature in girls a
hundred, or even two hundred, years ago. That eloquent and animated
writer, the author of _The Whole Duty of Man_, published in the reign
of Charles II, a volume which, if he had had the courage of his
opinions, he would have named _The Whole Duty of Woman_. Under the
tamer title of _The Ladies' Calling_ it achieved a great success. In
the frontispiece to this work a doleful dame, seated on what seems to
be a bare altar in an open landscape, is raising one hand to grasp a
crown dangled out of her reach in the clouds, and in the other, with
an air of great affectation is lifting her skirt between finger and
thumb. A purse, a coronet, a fan, a mirror, rings, dice, coins, and
other useful articles lie strewn at her naked feet; she spurns them,
and lifts her streaming eyes to heaven. This is the sort of picture
which does its best to prevent the reader from opening the book; but
_The Ladies' Calling_, nevertheless, is well worth reading. It excites
in us a curious wish to know more exactly what manner of women it was
addressed to. How did the great-grandmothers of our great-grandmothers
behave? When we come to think of it, how little we know about them!
The customary source of information is the play-book of the time.
There, indeed, we come across some choice indications of ancient
woman's behaviour. Nor did the women spare one another. The woman
dramatists outdid the men in attacking the manners of their sex, and
what is perhaps the most cynical comedy in all literature was written
by a woman. It will be some time before the Corinnas of _The Yellow
Book_ contrive to surpass _The Town Fop_ in outrageous frankness. Our
ideas of the fashions of the seventeenth century are, however, taken
too exclusively, if they are taken from these plays alone. We conceive
every fine lady to be like Lady Brute, in _The Provok'd Wife_, who
wakes about two o'clock in the afternoon, is "trailed" to her great
chair for tea, leaves her bedroom only to descend to dinner, spends
the night with a box and dice, and does not go to bed until the dawn.
Comedy has always forced the note, and is a very unsafe (though
picturesque) guide to historic manners. Perhaps we obtain a juster
notion from the gallant pamphlets of the age, such as _The Lover's
Watch_ and _The Lady's Looking-Glass_; yet these were purely intended
for people whom we should nowadays call "smart," readers who hung
about the outskirts of the Court.
For materials, then, out of which to construct a portrait of the
ordinary woman of the world in the reign of Charles II, we are glad to
come back to our anonymous divine. His is the best-kept secret in
English literature. In spite of the immense success of _The Whole Duty
of Man_, no one has done more than conjecture, more or less vaguely,
who he may have been. He wrote at least five works besides his most
famous treatise, and in preparing each of these for the press he took
more pains than Junius did a century later to conceal his identity.
The publisher of _The Ladies' Calling_, for example, assures us that
he knows no more than we do. The MS. came to him from an unknown
source and in a strange handwriting, "as from the Clouds dropt into my
hands." The anonymous author made no attempt to see proofs of it, nor
claimed his foundling in any way whatever. In his _English Prose
Selections_, the recent third volume of which covers the ground we are
dealing with, Mr. Craik, although finding room for such wretched
writers as Bishop Cumberland and William Sherlock, makes no mention of
the author of _The Whole Duty_. That is a curious oversight. There was
no divine of the age who wielded a more graceful pen. Only the
exigencies of our space restrain us from quoting the noble praise of
the Woman-Confessor in the preface to _The Ladies' Calling_. It begins
"Queens and Empresses knew then no title so glorious"; and the reader
who is curious in such matters will refer to it for himself.
The women of this time troubled our author by their loudness of
speech. There seems some reason to believe that with the Restoration,
and in opposition to the affected whispering of the Puritans, a
truculent and noisy manner became the fashion among Englishwomen. This
was, perhaps, the "barbarous dissonance" that Milton deprecated; it
is, at all events, so distasteful to the writer of _The Ladies'
Calling_ that he gives it an early prominence in his exhortation. "A
woman's tongue," he says, "should be like the imaginary music of the
spheres, sweet and charming, but not to be heard at distance."
Modesty, indeed, he inculcates as the first ornament of womanhood, and
he intimates that there was much neglect of it in his day. We might
fancy it to be Mrs. Lynn Linton speaking when, with uplifted hands, he
cries, "Would God that they would take, in exchange for that virile
Boldness, which is now too common among many even of the best Rank,"
such a solidity and firmness of mind as will permit them to succeed
in--keeping a secret! Odd to hear a grave and polite divine urging the
ladies of his congregation not to "adorn" their conversation with
oaths and imprecations, of which he says, with not less truth than
gallantry, that "out of a woman's mouth there is on this side Hell no
noise that can be more amazingly odious." The revolting daughters of
to-day do not curse and swear; at all events, they do not swear in
print, where only we have met the shrews. On the other hand, they
smoke, a contingency which does not seem to have occurred to the
author of _The Ladies' Calling_, who nowhere warns the sisterhood
against tobacco. The gravity of his indictment of excess in wine, not
less than the evidence of such observers as Pepys, proves to us that
drunkenness was by no means rare even among women of quality.
There never, we suppose, from the beginning of the world was a
man-preacher who did not warn the women of his congregation against
the vanity of fair raiment. The author of _The Ladies' Calling_ is no
exception; but he does his spiriting in a gentlemanlike way. The
ladies came to listen to him bedizened with jewels, with all the
objects which lie strewn at the feet of his penitent in the
frontispiece. He does not scream to them to rend them off. He only
remonstrates at their costliness. In that perfectly charming record of
a child's mind, the Memoir of Marjorie Fleming, the delicious little
wiseacre records the fact that her father and mother have given a
guinea for a pineapple, remarking that that money would have sustained
a poor family during the entire winter. We are reminded of that when
our divine tells his auditors that "any one of the baubles, the
loosest appendage of the dress, a fan, a busk, perhaps a black patch,
bears a price that would warm the empty bowels of a poor starving
wretch." This was long before the days of very elaborate and expensive
patches, which were still so new in Pepys's days that he remarked on
those of Mr. Penn's pretty sister when he saw her in the new coach,
"patched and very fine." Our preacher is no ranter, nor does he shut
the door of mercy on entertainments; all he deprecates is their
excess. His penitents are not forbidden to spend an afternoon at the
theatre, or an evening in dancing or at cards; but they are desired to
remember that, delightful as these occupations are, devotion is more
delightful still.
The attitude of the author to gaming is curious. "I question not the
lawfulness of this recreation," he says distinctly; but he desires his
ladies not to make cards the business of their life, and especially
not to play on Sundays. It appears that some great ladies, in the
emptiness of their heads and hearts, took advantage of the high pews
then always found in churches to play ombre or quadrille under the
very nose of the preacher. This conduct must have been rare; the
legends of the age prove that it was not unknown. The game might be
concealed from every one if it was desisted from at the moment of the
sermon, and in many cases the clergyman was a pitiful, obsequious
wretch who knew better than to find fault with the gentlefolks "up at
the house." It was not often that a convenient flash of lightning came
in the middle of service to kill the impious gamester in his pew, as
happened, to the immense scandal and solemnization of everybody, at
Withycombe, in Devonshire.
On the whole, it is amusing to find that the same faults and the same
dangers which occupy our satirists to-day were pronounced imminent for
women two hundred years ago. The ladies of Charles II's reign were a
little coarser, a little primmer, a good deal more ignorant than those
of our age. Their manners were on great occasions much better, and on
small occasions much worse, than those of their descendants of 1895;
but the same human nature prevailed. The author of _The Ladies'
Calling_ considered that the greatest danger of his congregation lay
in the fact that "the female Sex is eminent for its pungency in the
sensible passion of love"; and, although we take other modes of saying
it, that is true now.
_Edmund Gosse._