THE
GIRL OF THE PERIOD
ETC.
VOL. II.
[REPRINTED, _by permission, from the_ SATURDAY REVIEW]
THE
GIRL OF THE PERIOD
AND OTHER
Social Essays
BY
E. LYNN LINTON
AUTHOR OF 'THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS' 'UNDER WHICH LORD?'
'THE REBEL OF THE FAMILY' 'IONE' ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II.
[Illustration:]
LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1883
[_All rights reserved_]
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
PAGE
GUSHING MEN 1
SWEET SEVENTEEN 9
THE HABIT OF FEAR 19
OLD LADIES 28
VOICES 37
BURNT FINGERS 46
DÉSOEUVREMENT 55
THE SHRIEKING SISTERHOOD 64
OTHERWISE-MINDED 72
LIMP PEOPLE 82
THE ART OF RETICENCE 91
MEN'S FAVOURITES 100
WOMANLINESS 109
SOMETHING TO WORRY 119
SWEETS OF MARRIED LIFE 127
SOCIAL NOMADS 136
GREAT GIRLS 145
SHUNTED DOWAGERS 155
PRIVILEGED PERSONS 164
MODERN MAN-HATERS 173
VAGUE PEOPLE 181
ARCADIA 190
STRANGERS AT CHURCH 199
IN SICKNESS 208
ON A VISIT 217
DRAWING-ROOM EPIPHYTES 227
THE EPICENE SEX 235
WOMEN'S MEN 243
HOTEL LIFE IN ENGLAND 252
OUR MASKS 261
HEROES AT HOME 268
SEINE-FISHING 276
THE DISCONTENTED WOMAN 285
ENGLISH CLERGYMEN IN
FOREIGN WATERING-PLACES 293
OLD FRIENDS 302
POPULAR WOMEN 310
CHOOSING OR FINDING 319
LOCAL FÊTES 327
ESSAYS
UPON
SOCIAL SUBJECTS.
_GUSHING MEN._
The picture of a gushing creature all heart and no brains, all impulse
and no ballast, is familiar to most of us; and we know her, either by
repute or by personal acquaintance, as well as we know our alphabet.
But we are not so familiar with the idea of the gushing man. Yet
gushing men exist, if not in such numbers as their sisters, still in
quite sufficient force to constitute a distinct type. The gushing man
is the furthest possible removed from the ordinary manly ideal, as
women create it out of their own imaginations. Women like to picture
men as inexorably just, yet tender; calm, grave, restrained, yet full
of passion well mastered; Greathearts with an eye cast Mercywards if
you will, else unapproachable by all the world; Goethes with one weak
corner left for Bettina, where love may queen it over wisdom, but in
all save love strong as Titans, powerful as gods, unchangeable as
fate. They forgive anything in a man who is manly according to their
own pattern and ideas. Even harshness amounting to brutality is
condoned if the hero have a jaw of sufficient squareness, and mighty
passions just within the limits of control--as witness _Jane Eyre's_
Rochester and his long line of unpleasant followers. But this
harshness must be accompanied by love. Like the Russian wife who wept
for want of her customary thrashing, taking immunity from the stick to
mean indifference, these women would rather have brutality with love
than no love at all.
But a gushing man, as judged by men among men, is a being so foreign
to the womanly ideal that very few understand him when they do see
him. And they do not call him gushing. He is frank, enthusiastic,
unworldly, aspiring; perhaps he is labelled with that word of power,
'high-souled;' but he is not gushing, save when spoken of by men who
despise him. For men have an intense contempt for him. A woman who has
no ballast, and whose self-restraint goes to the winds on every
occasion, is accepted for what she is worth, and but little
disappointment and less annoyance is felt for what is wanting. Indeed,
men in general expect so little from women that their follies count as
of course and only what might be looked for. They are like marriage,
or the English climate, or a lottery ticket, or a dark horse heavily
backed, and have to be taken for better or worse as they may turn out,
with the violent probability that the chances are all on the side of
the worse.
But the gushing man is inexcusable. He is a nuisance or a
laughing-stock; and as either he is resented. In his club, at the
mess-table, in the city, at home, wherever he may be and whatever he
may be about, he is always plunging headlong into difficulties and
dragging his friends with him; always quarrelling for a straw; putting
himself grossly in the wrong and vehemently apologizing afterwards;
hitting wild at one moment and down on his knees the next, and as
absurd in the one attitude as he is abject in the other. He falls in
love at first sight and makes a fool of himself on unknown ground
while with men he is ready to swear eternal friendship or undying
enmity before he has had time to know anything whatever about the
object of his regard or his dislike. In consequence he is being
perpetually associated with shaky names and brought into questionable
positions. He is full of confidence in himself on every occasion, and
is given to making the most positive assertions on things he knows
nothing about; when afterwards he is obliged to retract and to own
himself mistaken. But he is just as full of self-abasement when, like
vaulting ambition, he has overleaped himself and fallen into mistakes
and failures unawares. He makes rash bets about things of which he has
the best information; so he says; and will not be staved off by those
who know what folly he is committing, but insists on writing himself
down after Dogberry at the cost of just so much. He backs the worst
player at billiards on the strength of a chance hazard, and bets on
the losing hand at whist. He goes into wild speculations in the city,
where he is certain to land a pot of money according to his own
account and whence he comes with empty pockets, as you foretold and
warned. He takes up with all manner of doubtful schemes and yet more
doubtful promoters; but he will not be advised. Is he not gushing? and
does not the quality of gushingness include an Arcadian belief in the
virtue of all the world?
The gushing man is the very pabulum of sharks and sharpers; and it is
he whose impressibility and gullible good-nature supply wind for the
sails of half the rotten schemes afloat. Full of faith in his fellows,
and of belief in a brilliant future to be had by good luck and not by
hard work, he cannot bring himself to doubt either men or measures;
unless indeed his gushingness takes the form of suspicion, and then he
goes about delivering himself of accusations not one of which he can
substantiate by the weakest bulwark of fact, and doubting the
soundness of investments as safe as the Three per Cents.
In manner the gushing man is familiar and caressing. He may be
patronizing or playful according to the bent of his own nature. If the
first, he will call his superior, My dear boy, and pat him on the back
encouragingly; if the second, he will put his arm schoolboy fashion
round the neck of any man of note who has the misfortune of his
intimacy, and call him Old fellow, or Governor, or _rex meus_, as he
is inclined. With women his familiarity is excessively offensive. He
gives them pet names, or calls to them by their Christian names from one
end of the room to the other, and pats and paws them in all fraternal
affectionateness, after about the same length of acquaintanceship
as would bring other men from the bowing stage to that of shaking
hands. His manners throughout are enough to compromise the toughest
reputation; and one of the worst misfortunes that can befall a
woman whose circumstances lay her specially open to slander and
misrepresentation is to include among her friends a gushing man of
energetic tendencies, on the look-out to do her a good turn if he can,
and anxious to let people see on what familiar terms he stands with
her. He means nothing in the least degree improper when he puts his
arm round her waist, calls her My dear and even Darling in a loud
voice for all the world to hear; or when he seats himself at her table
before folk to write her private messages, which he makes believe to
be of so much importance that they must not be spoken aloud, and which
are of no importance at all. He is only familiar and gushing; and he
would be the first to cry out against the evil imagination of the
world which saw harm in what he does with such innocent intent.
The gushing man has one grave defect--he is not safe nor secret. From
no bad motive, but just from the blind propulsion of gushingness, he
cannot keep a secret, and he is sure to let out sooner or later all
he knows. He holds back nothing of his friends nor of his own--not
even when his honour is engaged in the trust; being essentially
loose-lipped, and with his emotional life always bubbling up through
the thin crust of conventional reserve. Not that he means to be
dishonourable; he is only gushing and unrestrained. Hence every friend
he has knows all about him. His latest lover learns the roll-call of
all his previous loves; and there is not a man in his club, with whom
he is on speaking terms, who does not know as much. Women who trust
themselves to gushing men simply trust themselves to broken reeds; and
they might as well look for a sieve that will hold water as expect a
man of the sieve nature to keep their secret, whatever it may cost
them and him to divulge it.
As a theorist the gushing man is for ever advocating untenable
opinions and taking up with extreme doctrines, which he announces
confidently and out of which he can be argued by the first opponent he
encounters. The facility with which he can be bowled over on any
ground--he calls it being converted--is in fact one of his most
striking characteristics; and a gushing man rushes from the school of
one professor to that of another, his zeal unabated, no matter how
many his reconversions. He is always finding the truth, which he never
retains; and the loudest and most active in damning a cast-off
doctrine is the gushing man who has once followed it. As a leader, he
is irresistible to both boys and women. His enthusiastic,
unreflecting, unballasted character finds a ready response in the
youthful and feminine nature; and he is the idol of a small knot of
ardent worshippers, who believe in him as the logical and
well-balanced man is never believed in. He takes them captive by a
community of imagination, of impulsiveness, of exaggeration; and is
followed just in proportion to his unfitness to lead.
This is the kind of man who writes sentimental novels, with a good
deal of love laced with a vague form of pantheism or of weak
evangelical religion, to suit all tastes; or he is great in a certain
kind of indefinite poetry which no one has yet been found to
understand, save perhaps, a special Soul Sister, which is the subdued
version among us of the more suggestive Spiritual Wife. He adores the
feminine virtues, which he places far beyond all the masculine ones;
and expatiates on the beauty of the female character which he thinks
is to be the rule of the future. Perhaps though, he goes off into
panegyrics on the Vikings and the Berserkers; or else plunges boldly
into the mists of the Arthurian era, and gushes in obsolete English
about chivalry and the Round Table, Sir Launcelot and the Holy Graal,
to the bewilderment of his entranced audience to whom he does not
supply a glossary. In religion he is generally a mystic and always in
extremes. He can never be pinned down to logic, to facts, to reason;
and to his mind the golden mean is the sin for which the Laodicean
Church was cursed. Feeling and emotion and imagination do all the
work of the world according to him; and when he is asked to reason and
to demonstrate, he answers, with the lofty air of one secure of the
better way, that he Loves, and that Love sees further and more clearly
than reason.
As the strong-minded woman is a mistake among women, so is the gushing
man among men. Fluid, unstable, without curb to govern or rein to
guide, he brings into the masculine world all the mental frailties of
the feminine, and adds to them the force of his own organization as a
man. Whatever he may be he is a disaster; and at all times is
associated with failure. He is the revolutionary leader who gets up
abortive risings--the schemer whose plans run into sand--the poet
whose books are read only by schoolgirls, or lie on the publisher's
shelves uncut, as his gushingness bubbles over into twaddle or exhales
itself in the smoke of obscurity--the fanatic whose faith is more
madness than philosophy--the man of society who is the butt of his
male companions and the terror of his lady acquaintances--the father
of a family which he does his best, unintentionally, to ruin by
neglect, which he calls nature, or by eccentricity of training, which
he calls faith--and the husband of a woman who either worships him in
blind belief, or who laughs at him in secret, as heart or head
preponderates in her character. In any case he is a man who never
finds the fitting time or place; and who dies as he has lived, with
everything about him incomplete.
_SWEET SEVENTEEN._
A vast amount of poetry has always been thrown round that special time
of a woman's life when,
Standing with reluctant feet
Where the brook and river meet,
she is no longer a child and yet not quite a woman--that transition
time between the closed bud and the full-blown flower which we in
England express by the term, among others, of Sweet Seventeen. Without
meaning to be sentimental, or to envelope things in a golden haze
wrought by the imagination only and nowhere to be found in fact, we
cannot deny the peculiar charm which belongs to a girl of this age, if
she is nice, and neither pert nor silly. Besides, it is not only what
she is that interests us, but what she will be; for this is the time
when the character is settling into its permanent form, so that the
great thought of every one connected with her is, How will she turn
out? Into what kind of woman will the girl develop? and, What kind of
life will she make for herself?
Certainly Sweet Seventeen may be a most unlovely creature, and in
fact she often is; a creature hard and forward, having lost the
innocence and obedience of childhood and having gained nothing yet of
the tact and grace of womanhood; a creature whose hopes and thoughts
are all centred on the time when she shall be brought out and have her
fling of flirting and fine dresses with the rest. Or she may be only a
gauche and giggling schoolgirl, with a mind as narrow as her life,
given up to the small intrigues and scandals of the dormitory and the
playground--a girl who scamps her lessons and cheats her masters;
whose highest efforts of intellect are shown in the cleverness with
which she can break the rules of the establishment without being found
out; who thinks talking at forbidden times, peeping through forbidden
windows, giving silly nicknames to her companions and teachers, and
telling silly secrets with less truth than ingenuity in them, the
greatest fun imaginable, and all the greater because of the spice of
rebellion and perversity with which her folly is dashed. Or she may be
a mere tomboy, regretting her sex and despising its restraints;
cultivating schoolboy slang and aping schoolboy habits; ridiculing her
sisters and disliked by her companions, while thinking girlhood a bore
and womanhood a mistake in exact proportion to its feminality. Or she
may be a budding miss, shy and awkward, with no harm in her and as
little good--a mere sketch of a girl, without a leading line as yet
made out or the dominant colour so much as indicated.
Sometimes she is awkward in another way, being studious and
preoccupied--when she passes for odd and original, and is partly
feared, partly disliked, and wholly misunderstood by her own young
world; and sometimes she has a cynical contempt for men and beauty and
pleasure and dress, when she will make herself ridiculous by her
revolt against all the canons of good taste and conventionality. But
after her _début_ in tattered garments of severe colours and ungainly
cut, she will probably end her days as a frantic Fashionable, the
salvation of whose soul depends on the faultless propriety of her
wardrobe. The eccentricities of Sweet Seventeen not unfrequently
revenge themselves by an exactly opposite extravagance of maturity.
But though there are enough and to spare of girls according to all
these patterns, the Sweet Seventeen of one's affections is none of
them. And yet she is not always the same, but has her different
presentations, her varying facets, which give her variety of charm and
beauty.
The best and loveliest thing about Sweet Seventeen is her sense of
duty--for the most part a new sense. She no longer needs to be told
what to do; she has not to be kept to her tasks by the fear of
authority nor the submissive grace of obedience; but of her own free
will, because understanding that it is her duty and that duty is a
holier thing than self-will, she conscientiously does what she does
not like to do, and cheerfully gives up what she desires without being
driven or exhorted. She has generally before her mind some favourite
heroine in a girl's novel, who goes through much painful discipline
and comes out all the brighter for it in the end; and she makes noble
resolves of living as worthily as her model. She comforts her soul
too, with passages from Longfellow and Tennyson and the 'Christian
Year,' and learns long extracts from 'Evangeline' and the 'Idyls;'
poetry having an almost magical influence over her, nearly as powerful
as the Sunday sermons to which she listens so devoutly and tries so
patiently to understand. For the first time she wakes to a dim sense
of her own individuality, and confesses to herself that she has a life
of her own, apart from and extraneous to her mere family membership.
She is not only the sister or the daughter living with and for her
parents or her brothers and sisters, but she is also herself, with a
future of her own not to be shared with them, not to be touched by
them. And she begins to have vague dreams of this future and its
hero--dreams that are as much of fairyland as if they were of the
young prince coming over the sea in a golden boat to find the princess
in a tower of brass waiting for him.
Quite impersonal, and with a hero only in the clouds, nevertheless
these dreams are suggested by the special circumstances of her life,
by her favourite books or the style of society in which she has been
placed. The young prince is either a beautiful and high-souled
clergyman--not unlike the young vicar or the new curate, but
infinitely more beautiful--an apostle in the standing collar and
single-breasted coat of the nineteenth century; or he is an artist in
a velvet blouse and with flowing hair, living in a world of beauty
such as no Philistine can imagine; or he is a gallant sailor, with
blue eyes and a loose necktie, looking up to heaven in a gale, and
thinking of his mother and sisters at home and of the one still more
beloved, when he certainly ought to be thinking of tarry ropes and
coarse sailcloth; or he is a magnificent young officer heading his men
at a charge, and looking supremely well got up and handsome. This is
the kind of _futur_ she dreams of when she dreams at all, which is not
often. The reality of her mature life is perhaps a stolid square-set
squire, or a prosaic city merchant without the thinnest thread of
romance in his composition; while her own life, which was to be such a
lovely poem of graceful usefulness and heroic beauty, sinks into the
prosaic routine of housekeeping and society, the sigh after the
vanished ideal growing fainter and fainter as the weight of fact grows
heavier.
Married men are all sacred to Sweet Seventeen when she is a good girl;
so are engaged men. For the matter of that, she believes that nothing
could induce her to marry either a widower or one who had been already
engaged, as nothing could induce her to marry any man under five foot
eleven, or with a snub nose or sandy whiskers. Sweet Seventeen has in
general the most profound aversion for boys. To be sure she may have
her favourites--very few and very seldom; but she mostly thinks them
stupid or conceited, and impartially resents either their awkward
attentions to herself or their assumptions of superiority. An
abnormally clever boy--the Poet-Laureate or George Stephenson of his
generation--is her detestation, because he is odd and unlike every one
else; while the one that she dislikes least among them is the school
hero, who is first in the sports and takes all the prizes, and who
goes through life loved by every one and never famous.
For her several brothers she has a range of entirely different
feelings. Her younger schoolboy brothers she regards as the torments
of her existence, whose unkempt hair, dirty boots and rude manners are
her special crosses, to be borne with patience, tempered by an active
endeavour after reform. But the more advanced, and those who are older
than herself, are her loves for whom she has an enthusiastic
admiration, and whose future she believes in as something specially
brilliant and successful. If only slightly older or younger than
herself, she impresses them powerfully with the sentiment of her
superiority, and patronizes them--kindly enough; but she makes them
feel the ineffable supremacy of her sex, and how that she by virtue of
her womanhood is a glorified creature beside them--an Ariel to their
Caliban.
Now too, she begins to speak to her mother on more equal terms; to
criticize her dress, and to make her understand that she considers her
old-fashioned and inclined to be dowdy. She ties her bonnet-strings
for her; arranges her cap; smartens up her old dress and compels her
to buy a new one; and, while considering her immeasurably ancient,
likes her to look nice, and thinks her in her own way beautiful.
Sometimes she opposes and quarrels with her, if the mother has less
tact than arbitrariness. But this is not her natural state; for one of
the characteristics of Sweet Seventeen is her love for her mother and
her need of better counsel and guidance; so that if she comes into
opposition with her it is only through extreme pain, and the bitter
teaching of tyranny and injustice. This is just the age indeed, when
the mother's influence is everything to a girl; and when a silly, an
unjust, or an unprincipled woman is the very ruin of her life. But
with a low or evil-natured mother we seldom see a Sweet Seventeen
worth the trouble of writing about: which shows at least one
thing--the importance of the womanly influence at such a time, and how
so much that we blame in our modern girls lies to the account of their
mothers.
Great tact is required with Sweet Seventeen in such society as is
allowed her; care to bring her out a little without obtruding her on
the world, without making her forward and consequential, and without
attracting too much attention to her. She is no longer a child to be
shut away in the nursery, but she is not yet entitled to the place and
consideration of a member of society. And yet it would be cruel to
debar her wholly from all that is going on in the house. To be sure
there is the governess, as well as mamma, to look after her manners
and to give her rope enough and not too much; but by the time a girl
is seventeen a governess has ceased to be the autocrat _ex officio_,
and she obeys her or not according to their respective strengths.
Still, the governess or mamma is for the most part at her elbow; and
Sweet Seventeen, if well brought up, is left very little to her own
guidance, and sees the world only through half-opened doors.
Girls of this age are often wonderfully sad, and full of a kind of
wondering despair at the sin and misery they are beginning to learn.
They take up extreme views in religion and talk largely on the
nothingness of pleasure and the emptiness of the world; and many fair
young creatures whom their elders, laden with sorrowful experience,
think full of hope and joy, are ready to give up all the pleasure of
life, and to lay down life itself, for very disgust of that of which
they know nothing. They delight in sorrowful lamentations and
sentimental regrets put into rhyme; and one of the funniest things in
the world is to see a girl dancing with the merriest in the evening,
and to hear her talking broken-hearted pessimism in the morning. It is
merely an example of the old proverb about the meeting of extremes;
vacuity leading to the same results as experience.
But however she takes this unknown life, it is always in an unreal and
romantic aspect. Some of more robust mind delight in the bolder
stories of Greece and Rome, and wish they had played a part in the
sensational heroism of those grand old times; while others go to
Venice, and make pictures for themselves out of the gliding gondolas
and the mysterious Council of Ten, the lovely ladies with grim old
fathers and high-handed brothers acting as gaolers, and the handsome
cavaliers serenading them in the moonlight. That is their idea of
love. They have no perception of anything warmer. It is all romance
and poetry, and tender glances from afar, and long and patient wooing
under difficulties and a little danger, with scarce a word spoken, and
nothing more expressive than a flower furtively given, or a fleeting
pressure of the finger tips. They know nothing else and expect nothing
else. Their cherry is without stone, their bird without bone, their
orange without rind, as in the old song; and they imagine a love as
unreal as all the rest.
When thrown into actualities, though--say when left motherless, and
the eldest girl of perhaps a large family with a father to comfort and
a young brood to see after--Sweet Seventeen is often very beautiful in
her degree, and rises grandly to her position. Sometimes the burden of
her responsibilities is too much for her tender shoulders, and she is
overweighted, and fails. Sometimes too she is tyrannical and selfish
in such a position, and uses her power ill; and sometimes she is
careless and good-humoured, when they all scramble up together,
through confusion, dirt and disorder, till the close time is over, and
they scatter themselves abroad. Sometimes she is a martyr, and makes
herself and every one else uncomfortable by the perpetual
demonstration of her martyrdom, and how she considers herself
sacrificed and put upon. Indeed she is not unfrequently a martyr from
other causes than heavy duties, being fond of adopting unworkable
views which cannot run in the family groove anyhow. If she falls upon
this rock she is in her glory; youth being marvellously proud of
voluntary crucifixion, and thinking itself especially ill-used because
it must be made conformable and is prevented from making itself
ridiculous.
But Sweet Seventeen is intolerant of all moral differences. What she
holds to be right is the absolute, the one sole and only just law; and
she thinks it tampering with sin to allow that any one else has an
equal right with herself to a contrary opinion. But on the whole she
is a pleasant, loveable interesting creature; and one's greatest
regret about her is that she is so often in the hands of unsuitable
guides, and that her powers and noble impulses get so stunted and
shadowed by the commonplace training which is her general lot, and the
low aims of life which are the only ones held out to her.
_THE HABIT OF FEAR._
The mind, like the body, contracts tricks and habits which in time
become automatic and involuntary--habits of association, tricks of
repetition, of which the excess is monomania, but which, without
attaining to quite that extreme, become more or less masters of the
brain and directors of the thoughts. And, of all these tricks of the
mind, the habit of fear is the most insidious and persistent. It is
seldom that any one who has once given in to it is able to clear
himself of it again. However unreasonable it may be, the trick clings,
and it would take an exceptionally strong intellect to be convinced of
its folly and learn the courage of common-sense. But this is just the
intellect which does not allow itself to contract the habit in the
beginning; a coward being for the most part a washy, weak kind of
being, with very little backbone anyhow. We do not mean by this fear
that which is physical and personal only, though this is generally the
sole idea which people have of the word; but moral and mental
cowardice as well. Personal fear indeed, is common enough, and as
pitiable as it is common; and we are ashamed to say that it is not
confined to women, though naturally it is more predominant with them
than with men.
As for women, the tyranny of fear lies very heavy on them, taking the
flavour out of many a life which else would be perfectly happy; being
often the only bitter drop in a cup full of sweetness. But how bitter
that drop is!--bitter enough to destroy all the sweetness of the rest.
Some women live in the perpetual presence of dread, both mental and
personal. It surrounds them like an atmosphere; it clothes them like a
garment; day by day, and from night to morning, it dogs their steps
and sits like a nightmare on their hearts; it is their very root work
of sensation, and they could as soon live without food as live without
fear.
Ludicrous as many of their terrors are, we still cannot help pitying
these poor self-made martyrs of imaginary danger. Take that most
familiar of all forms of fear among women, the fear of burglars, and
let us imagine for a moment the horror of the life which is haunted by
a nightly dread--by a terror that comes with as unfailing regularity
as the darkness--and measure, if we can, the amount of anguish that
must be endured before death comes to take off the torture. There are
many women to whom night is simply this time of torture, never
varying, never relieved. They dare not lock their doors, because then
they would be at the mercy of the man who sooner or later is to come
in at the window; and if they hear the boards creak or the furniture
crack they are in agonies because of the man who they are sure is in
the house, and who will come in at the door. They cannot sleep if they
have not looked all about the room--under the bed, behind the
curtains, into the closet, where perhaps a dress hanging a little
fantastically gives them a nervous start that lasts for the night.
But though they search so diligently they would probably faint on the
spot if they so much as saw the heels of the housebreaker they are
looking for. Yet you cannot reason with these poor creatures. You
cannot deny the fact that burglars have been found before now secreted
in bedrooms; and you cannot pooh-pooh the murders and housebreakings
which are reported in the newspapers; so you have nothing to say to
their argument that things which have happened once may happen again,
and that there is no reason why they specially should be exempt from a
misfortune to which others have been subjected. But you feel that
their terrors are just so much pith and substance taken out of their
strength; and that if they could banish the fear of burglars from
their minds they would be so much the more valuable members of
society, while the exorcism of their dismal demon would be so much the
better for themselves.
It is the same in everything. If they are living in the country, and
go up to London lodgings, they take the ground floor for fear of fire
and being burnt alive in their beds. If they go from London to the
country they see an escaped convict or a murderer in every ragged
reaper asking for work, or every tramp that begs for broken victuals
at the door. The country to them is full of dangers. In the shooting
season they are sure they will be shot if they go near a wood or a
turnip-field. They think they will be gored to death if they meet a
meek-eyed cow going placidly through the lane to her milking; and you
might as well try to march them up to the cannon's mouth as induce
them to cross a field where cattle are grazing. If they are driving,
and the horses are going at full trot, they say they are running away
and clutch the driver's arm nervously. As travellers they are in a
state of not wholly unreasonable apprehension the whole time the
railway journey lasts. They wait at Folkestone for days for a smooth
crossing; and when they are on board they call a breeze a gale, and
make sure they are bound for the bottom if the sea chops enough to
rock the boat so much as a cradle. If they go over a Swiss pass they
say their prayers and shut their eyes till it is over; and they are
horribly afraid of banditti on every foot of Italian ground, besides
firmly believing in the complicity with brigands of all the innkeepers
and _vetturini_.
Their fear extends to all who belong to them, for whom they conjure up
scenes of deadly disaster so soon as they are out of sight. Their
fancy is faceted, like the eyes of a fly, and they worry themselves
and every one else by exaggerating every chance of danger into a
certainty of destruction. When an epidemic is abroad, they are sure
all the children will take it; and if they have taken it, they are
sure they will never get over it. In illness indeed, those people who
have allowed themselves to fall into the habit of fear are especially
full of foreboding; not because they are more loving, more sympathetic
than others, but because they are more timid and less hopeful. If you
believe them, no one will recover who is in any way seriously
attacked; and the smallest ailment in themselves or their friends is
the sure forerunner of a mortal sickness. They make no allowance for
the elastic power of human nature; and they dislike hope and courage
in others, thinking you unfeeling in exact proportion to your
cheerfulness.
Morally this same habit of fear deteriorates, because it weakens and
narrows, the whole nature. So far from following Luther's famous
advice--Sin boldly and leave the rest to God--their sin is their very
fear, their unconquerable distrust. These are the people who regard
our affections as snares and all forms of pleasure as so many waymarks
on the road to perdition--who would narrow the circle of human life to
the smallest point both of feeling and action, because of the sin in
which, according to them, the whole world is steeped. They see guilt
everywhere, but innocence not at all. Their minds are set to the trick
of terror; and fear of the power of the devil and the anger of God
weighs on them like an iron chain from which there is no release.
This is not so much from delicacy of conscience as from simple moral
cowardice; for you seldom find these very timid people lofty-minded or
capable of any great act of heroism. On the contrary, they are
generally peevish and always selfish; self-consideration being the
tap-root of their fears, though the cause is assigned to all sorts of
pretty things, such as acute sensibilities, keen imagination, bad
health, tender conscience, delicate nerves--to anything in fact but
the real cause, a cowardly habit of fear produced by continual moral
selfishness, by incessant thought of and regard for themselves.
Nothing is so depressing as the society of a timid person, and nothing
is so infectious as fear. Live with any one given up to an eternal
dread of possible dangers and disasters, and you can scarcely escape
the contagion, nor, however brave you may be, maintain your
cheerfulness and faculty of faith. Indeed, as timid folks crave for
sympathy in their terrors--that very craving being part of their
malady of fear--you cannot show them a cheerful countenance under pain
of offence, and seeming to be brutal in your disregard of what so
tortures them. Their fears may be simply absurd and irrational, yet
you must sympathize with them if you wish even to soothe; argument or
common-sense demonstration of their futility being so much mental
ingenuity thrown away.
Fear breeds suspicion too, and timid people are always suspecting ill
of some one. The deepest old diplomatist who has probed the folly and
evil of the world from end to end, and who has sharpened his wits at
the expense of his trust, is not more full of suspicion of his kind
than a timid, superstitious, world-withdrawn man or woman given up to
the tyranny of fear. Every one is suspected more or less, but chiefly
lawyers, servants and all strangers. Any demonstration of kindness or
interest at all different from the ordinary jogtrot of society fills
them with undefined suspicion and dread; and, fear being in some
degree the product of a diseased imagination, the 'probable' causes
for anything they do not quite understand would make the fortune of a
novel-writer if given him for plots. If any one wants to hear
thrilling romances in course of actual enactment, let him go down
among remote and quiet-living country people, and listen to what they
have to say of the chance strangers who may have established
themselves in the neighbourhood, and who, having brought no letters of
introduction, are not known by the aborigines. The Newgate Calendar or
Dumas' novels would scarcely match the stories which fear and
ignorance have set afoot.
Fearful folk are always on the brink of ruin. They cannot wait to see
how things will turn before they despair; and they cannot hope for the
best in a bad pass. They are engulfed in abysses which never open, and
they die a thousand deaths before the supreme moment actually arrives.
The smallest difficulties are to them like the straws placed
crosswise over which no witch could pass; the beneficent action of
time, either as a healer of sorrow or a revealer of hidden mercies, is
a word of comfort they cannot accept for themselves, how true soever
it may be for others; the doctrine that chances are equal for good as
well as for bad is what they will not understand; and they know of no
power that can avert the disaster, which perhaps is simply a
possibility not even probable, and which their own fears only have
arranged. If they are professional men, having to make their way, they
are for ever anticipating failure for to-day and absolute destruction
for to-morrow; and they bemoan the fate of the wife and children sure
to be left to poverty by their untimely decease, when the chances are
ten to one in favour of the apportioned threescore and ten years. Life
is a place of suffering here and a place of torment hereafter; yet
they often wish to die, reversing Hamlet's decision by thinking the
mystery of unknown ills preferable to the reality of those they have
on hand.
Over such minds as these the vaticinations of such a prophet as Dr.
Cumming have peculiar power; and they accept his gloomy
interpretations of the Apocalypse with a faith as unquestioning as
that with which they accept the Gospels. They have a predilection
indeed for all terrifying prophecies, and cast the horoscope of the
earth and foretell the destruction of the universe with marvellous
exactitude. Their minds are set to the trick of foreboding, and they
live in the habit of fear, as others live in the habit of hope, of
resignation, or of careless good-humour and indifference. There is
nothing to be done with them. Like drinking, or palsy, or a nervous
headache, or a congenital deformity, the habit is hopeless when once
established; and those who have begun by fear and suspicion and
foreboding will live to the end in the atmosphere they have created
for themselves. The man or woman whose mind is once haunted by the
nightly fear of a secreted burglar will go on looking for his heels so
long as eyesight and the power of locomotion continue; and no failure
in past Apocalyptic interpretations will shake the believer's faith in
those of which the time for fulfilment has not yet arrived. It is a
trick which has rooted, a habit that has crystallized by use into a
formation; and there it must be left, as something beyond the power of
reason to remedy or of experience to destroy.
_OLD LADIES._
The world is notoriously unjust to its veterans, and above all it is
unjust to its ancient females. Everywhere, and from all time, an old
woman has been taken to express the last stage of uselessness and
exhaustion; and while a meeting of bearded dotards goes by the name of
a council of sages, and its deliberations are respected accordingly, a
congregation of grey-haired matrons is nothing but a congregation of
old women, whose thoughts and opinions on any subject whatsoever have
no more value than the chattering of so many magpies. In fact the poor
old ladies have a hard time of it; and if we look at it in its right
light, perhaps nothing proves more thoroughly the coarse flavour of
the world's esteem respecting women than this disdain which they
excite when they are old. And yet what charming old ladies one has
known at times!--women quite as charming in their own way at seventy
as their grand-daughters are at seventeen, and all the more so because
they have no design now to be charming, because they have given up the
attempt to please for the reaction of praise, and long since have
consented to become old though they have never drifted into
unpersonableness nor neglect. While retaining the intellectual
vivacity and active sympathies of maturity, they have added the
softness, the mellowness, the tempering got only from experience and
advancing age. They are women who have seen and known and read a great
deal; and who have suffered much; but whose sorrows have neither
hardened nor soured them--but rather have made them even more
sympathetic with the sorrows of others, and pitiful for all the young.
They have lived through and lived down all their own trials, and have
come out into peace on the other side; but they remember the trials of
the fiery passage, and they feel for those who have still to bear the
pressure of the pain they have overcome. These are not women much met
with in society; they are of the kind which mostly stays at home and
lets the world come to them. They have done with the hurry and glitter
of life, and they no longer care to carry their grey hairs abroad.
They retain their hold on the affections of their kind; they take an
interest in the history, the science, the progress of the day; but
they rest tranquil and content by their own fireside, and they sit to
receive, and do not go out to gather.
The fashionable old lady who haunts the theatres and drawing-rooms,
bewigged, befrizzled, painted, ghastly in her vain attempts to appear
young, hideous in her frenzied clutch at the pleasures melting from
her grasp, desperate in her wild hold on a life that is passing away
from her so rapidly, knows nothing of the quiet dignity and happiness
of her ancient sister who has been wise enough to renounce before she
lost. In her own house, where gather a small knot of men of mind and
women of character, where the young bring their perplexities and the
mature their deeper thoughts, the dear old lady of ripe experience,
loving sympathies and cultivated intellect holds a better court than
is known to any of those miserable old creatures who prowl about the
gay places of the world, and wrestle with the young for their crowns
and garlands--those wretched simulacra of womanhood who will not grow
old and who cannot become wise. She is the best kind of old lady
extant, answering to the matron of classic times--to the Mother in
Israel before whom the tribes made obeisance in token of respect; the
woman whose book of life has been well studied and closely read, and
kept clean in all its pages. She has been no prude however, and no
mere idealist. She must have been wife, mother and widow; that is, she
must have known many things of joy and grief and have had the
fountains of life unsealed. However wise and good she may be, as a
spinster she has had only half a life; and it is the best half which
has been denied her. How can she tell others, when they come to her in
their troubles, how time and a healthy will have wrought with her, if
she has never passed through the same circumstances? Theoretic comfort
is all very well, but one word of experience goes beyond volumes of
counsel based on general principles and a lively imagination.
One type of old lady, growing yearly scarcer, is the old lady whose
religious and political theories are based on the doctrines of
Voltaire and Paine's _Rights of Man_--the old lady who remembers Hunt
and Thistlewood and the Birmingham riots; who talks of the French
Revolution as if it were yesterday; and who has heard so often of the
Porteus mob from poor papa that one would think she had assisted at
the hanging herself. She is an infinitely old woman, for the most part
birdlike, chirrupy, and wonderfully alive. She has never gone beyond
her early teaching, but is a fossil radical of the old school; and she
thinks the Gods departed when Hunt and his set died out. She is an
irreligious old creature, and scoffs with more cleverness than grace
at everything new or earnest. She would as lief see Romanism rampant
at once as this newfangled mummery they call Ritualism; and Romanism
is her version of the unchaining of Satan. As for science--well, it is
all very wonderful, but more wonderful she thinks than true; and she
cannot quite make up her mind about the spectroscope or protoplasm. Of
the two, protoplasm commends itself most to her imagination, for
private reasons of her own connected with the Pentateuch; but these
things are not so much in her way as Voltaire and Diderot, Volney and
Tom Paine, and she is content to abide by her ancient cairns and to
leave the leaping-poles of science to younger and stronger hands.
This type of old lady is for the most part an ancient spinster, whose
life has worn itself away in the arid deserts of mental doubt and
emotional negation. If she ever loved it was in secret, some
thin-lipped embodied Idea long years ago. Most likely she did not get
even to this unsatisfactory length, but contented herself with books
and discussions only. If she had ever honestly loved and been loved,
perhaps she would have gone beyond Voltaire, and have learned
something truer than a scoff.
The old lady of strong instinctive affections, who never reflects and
never attempts to restrain her kindly weaknesses, stands at the other
end of the scale. She is the grandmother _par excellence_, and spends
her life in spoiling the little ones, cramming them with sugar-plums
and rich cake whenever she has the chance, and nullifying mamma's
punishments by surreptitious gifts and goodies. She is the dearly
beloved of our childish recollections; and to the last days of our
life we cherish the remembrance of the kind old lady with her beaming
smile, taking out of her large black reticule, or the more mysterious
recesses of her unfathomable pocket, wonderful little screws of paper
which her withered hands thrust into our chubby fists; but we can
understand now what an awful nuisance she must have been to the
authorities, and how impossible she made it to preserve anything like
discipline and the terrors of domestic law in the family.
The old lady who remains a mere child to the end; who looks very much
like a faded old wax doll with her scanty hair blown out into
transparent ringlets, and her jaunty cap bedecked with flowers and
gay-coloured bows; who cannot rise into the dignity of true
womanliness; who knows nothing useful; can give no wise advice: has no
sentiment of protection, but on the contrary demands all sorts of care
and protection for herself--she, simpering and giggling as if she were
fifteen, is by no means an old lady of the finest type. But she is
better than the leering old lady who says coarse things, and who, like
Béranger's immortal creation, passes her time in regretting her plump
arms and her well-turned ankle and the lost time that can never be
recalled, and who is altogether a most unedifying old person and by no
means nice company for the young.