free with full-flavoured epithets against sluts in general; who is
like a tigress over her last unmarried daughter, and, when crippled
and disabled, still insists on keeping the keys, which she delivers up
when wanted only with a snarl and a suspicious caution. She has been
one of the race of active housekeepers, and has prided herself on her
exceptional ability that way for so long that she cannot bear to
yield, even when she can no longer do any good; so she sits in her
easy chair, like old Pope and Pagan in _Pilgrim's Progress_, and gnaws
her fingers at the younger world which passes her by. She is an
infliction to her daughter for all the years of her life, and to the
last keeps her in leading-strings, tied up as tight as the sinewy old
hands can knot them; treating her always as an irresponsible young
thing who needs both guidance and control, though the girl has passed
into the middle-aged woman by now, shuffling through life a poor
spiritless creature who has faded before she has fully blossomed, and
who dies like a fruit that has dropped from the tree before it has
ripened.
Twin sister to this kind is the grim female become ancient; the gaunt
old lady with a stiff backbone, who sits upright and walks with a firm
tread like a man; a leathery old lady, who despises all your weak
slips of girls that have nerves and headaches and cannot walk their
paltry mile without fatigue; a desiccated old lady, large-boned and
lean, without an ounce of superfluous fat about her, with keen eyes
yet, with which she boasts that she can thread a needle and read small
print by candlelight; an indestructible old lady, who looks as if
nothing short of an earthquake would put an end to her. The friend of
her youth is now a stout, soft, helpless old lady, much bedraped in
woollen shawls, given to frequent sippings of brandy and water, and
ensconced in the chimney corner like a huge clay figure set to dry.
For her the indestructible old lady has the supremest contempt,
heightened in intensity by a vivid remembrance of the time when they
were friends and rivals. Ah, poor Laura, she says, straightening
herself; she was always a poor creature, and see what she is now! To
those who wait long enough the wheel always comes round, she thinks;
and the days when Laura bore away the bell from her for grace and
sweetness and loveableness generally are avenged now, when the one is
a mere mollusc and the other has a serviceable backbone that will last
for many a year yet.
Then there is the musical old lady, who is fond of playing small
anonymous pieces of a jiggy character full of queer turns and shakes,
music that seems all written in demi-semi-quavers, and that she gives
in a tripping, catching way, as if the keys of the piano were hot.
Sometimes she will sing, as a great favour, old-world songs which are
almost pathetic for the thin and broken voice that chirrups out the
sentiment with which they abound; and sometimes, as a still greater
favour, she will stand up in the dance, and do the poor uncertain
ghosts of what were once steps, in the days when dancing was dancing
and not the graceless lounge it is now. But her dancing-days are over,
she says, after half-a-dozen turns; though, indeed, sometimes she
takes a frisky fit and goes in for the whole quadrille:--and pays for
it the next day.
The very dress of old ladies is in itself a study and a revelation of
character. There are the beautiful old women who make themselves like
old pictures by a profusion of soft lace and tender greys; and the
stately old ladies who affect rich rustling silks and sombre velvet;
and there are the original and individual old ladies, who dress
themselves after their own kind, like Mrs. Basil Montagu, Miss Jane
Porter, and dear Mrs. Duncan Stewart, and have a _cachet_ of their own
with which fashion has nothing to do. And there are the old women who
wear rusty black stuffs and ugly helmet-like caps; and those who
affect uniformity and going with the stream, when the fashion has
become national--and these have been much exercised of late with the
strait skirts and the new bonnets. But Providence is liberal and
milliners are fertile in resources. In fact, in this as in all other
sections of humanity, there are those who are beautiful and wise, and
those who are foolish and unlovely; those who make the best of things
as they are, and those who make the worst, by treating them as what
they are not; those who extract honey, and those who find only poison.
For in old age, as in youth, are to be found beauty, use, grace and
value, but in different aspects and on another platform. And the folly
is when this difference is not allowed for, or when the possibility of
these graces is denied and their utility ignored.
_VOICES._
Far before the eyes or the mouth or the habitual gesture, as a
revelation of character, is the quality of the voice and the manner of
using it. It is the first thing that strikes us in a new acquaintance,
and it is one of the most unerring tests of breeding and education.
There are voices which have a certain truthful ring about them--a
certain something, unforced and spontaneous, that no training can
give. Training can do much in the way of making a voice, but it can
never compass more than a bad imitation of this quality; for the very
fact of its being an imitation, however accurate, betrays itself like
rouge on a woman's cheeks, or a wig, or dyed hair. On the other hand,
there are voices which have the jar of falsehood in every tone, and
which are as full of warning as the croak of the raven or the hiss of
the serpent. These are in general the naturally hard voices which make
themselves caressing, thinking by that to appear sympathetic; but the
fundamental quality strikes up through the overlay, and a person must
be very dull indeed who cannot detect the pretence in that slow,
drawling, would-be affectionate voice, with its harsh undertone and
sharp accent whenever it forgets itself.
But without being false or hypocritical, there are voices which puzzle
as well as disappoint us, because so entirely inharmonious with the
appearance of the speaker. For instance, there is that thin treble
squeak which we sometimes hear from the mouth of a well-grown portly
man, when we expected the fine rolling utterance which would have been
in unison with his outward seeming. And, on the other side of the
scale, where we looked for a shrill head-voice or a tender musical
cadence, we get that hoarse chest-voice with which young and pretty
girls sometimes startle us. This voice is in fact one of the
characteristics of the modern girl of a certain type; just as the
habitual use of slang is characteristic of her, or that peculiar
rounding of the elbows and turning out of the wrists--which gestures,
like the chest-voice, instinctively belong to men only and have to be
learned before they can be practised by women.
Nothing betrays feeling so much as the voice, save perhaps the eyes;
and these can be lowered, and so far their expression hidden. In
moments of emotion no skill can hide the fact of disturbed feeling by
the voice; though a strong will and the habit of self-control can
steady it when else it would be failing and tremulous. But not the
strongest will, nor the largest amount of self-control, can keep it
natural as well as steady. It is deadened, veiled, compressed, like a
wild creature tightly bound and unnaturally still. One feels that it
is done by an effort, and that if the strain were relaxed for a moment
the wild creature would burst loose in rage or despair--and that the
voice would break into the scream of passion or quiver down into the
falter of pathos. And this very effort is as eloquent as if there had
been no holding down at all, and the voice had been left to its own
impulse unchecked.
Again, in fun and humour, is it not the voice even more than the face
that is expressive? The twinkle of the eye, the hollow in the under
lip, the dimples about the mouth, the play of the eyebrow, are all
aids certainly; but the voice! The mellow tone that comes into the
utterance of one man; the surprised accents of another; the fatuous
simplicity of a third; the philosophical acquiescence of a fourth when
relating the most outrageous impossibilities--a voice and manner
peculiarly Transatlantic, and indeed one of the American forms of
fun--do we not know all these varieties by heart? have we not veteran
actors whose main point lies in one or other of these varieties? and
what would be the drollest anecdote if told in a voice which had
neither play nor significance? Pathos too--who feels it, however
beautifully expressed so far as words may go, if uttered in a dead and
wooden voice without sympathy? But the poorest attempts at pathos will
strike home to the heart if given tenderly and harmoniously. And just
as certain popular airs of mean association can be made into church
music by slow time and stately modulation, so can dead-level
literature be lifted into passion or softened into sentiment by the
voice alone.
We all know the effect, irritating or soothing, which certain voices
have over us; and we have all experienced that strange impulse of
attraction or repulsion which comes from the sound of the voice alone.
And generally, if not absolutely always, the impulse is a true one,
and any modification which increased knowledge may produce is never
quite satisfactory. Certain voices grate on our nerves and set our
teeth on edge; and others are just as calming as these are irritating,
quieting us like a composing draught, and setting vague images of
beauty and pleasantness afloat in our brains.
A good voice, calm in tone and musical in quality, is one of the
essentials for a physician--the 'bedside voice' which is nothing if
not sympathetic by constitution. Not false, not made up, not sickly,
but tender in itself, of a rather low pitch, well modulated and
distinctly harmonious in its notes, it is the very opposite of the
orator's voice, which is artificial in its management and a made
voice. Whatever its original quality may be, the orator's voice bears
the unmistakeable stamp of art and is artificial. It may be admirable;
telling in a crowd; impressive in an address; but it is overwhelming
and chilling at home, partly because it is always conscious and never
self-forgetting.
An orator's voice, with its careful intonation and accurate accent,
would be as much out of place by a sick-bed as Court trains and
brocaded silk for the nurse. There are certain men who do a good deal
by a hearty, jovial, fox-hunting kind of voice--a voice a little
thrown up for all that it is a chest-voice--a voice with a certain
undefined rollick and devil-may-care sound in it, and eloquent of a
large volume of vitality and physical health. That, too, is a good
property for a medical man. It gives the sick a certain fillip, and
reminds them pleasantly of health and vigour. It may have a mesmeric
kind of effect upon them--who knows?--so that it induces in them
something of its own state, provided it be not overpowering. But a
voice of this kind has a tendency to become insolent in its assertion
of vigour, swaggering and boisterous; and then it is too much for
invalided nerves, just as mountain-winds or sea-breezes would be too
much, and the scent of flowers or of a hayfield oppressive.
The clerical voice again, is a class-voice--that neat, careful,
precise voice, neither wholly made nor yet natural--that voice which
never strikes one as hearty nor as having a really genuine utterance,
but which is not entirely unpleasant if one does not require too much
spontaneity. The clerical voice, with its mixture of familiarity and
oratory as that of one used to talk to old women in private and to
hold forth to a congregation in public, is as distinct in its own way
as the mathematician's handwriting; and any one can pick out blindfold
his man from a knot of talkers, without waiting to see the square-cut
collar and close white tie. The legal voice is different again; but
this is rather a variety of the orator's than a distinct species--a
variety standing midway between that and the clerical, and affording
more scope than either.
The voice is much more indicative of the state of the mind than many
people know of or allow. One of the first symptoms of failing brain
power is in the indistinct or confused utterance; no idiot has a clear
nor melodious voice; the harsh scream of mania is proverbial; and no
person of prompt and decisive thought was ever known to hesitate nor
to stutter. A thick, loose, fluffy voice too, does not belong to the
crisp character of mind which does the best active work; and when we
meet with a keen-witted man who drawls, and lets his words drip
instead of bringing them out in the sharp incisive way that should be
natural to him, we may be sure there is a flaw somewhere, and that he
is not 'clear grit' all through.
We all have our company voices, as we all have our company manners;
and, after a time, we get to know the company voices of our friends,
and to understand them as we understand their best dresses and state
service. The person whose voice absolutely refuses to put itself into
company tone startles us as much as if he came to a state dinner in a
shooting-jacket. This is a different thing from the insincere and
flattering voice, which is never laid aside while it has its object to
gain, and which affects to be one thing when it means another. The
company voice is only a little bit of finery, quite in its place if
not carried into the home, where however, silly men and women think
they can impose on their house-mates by assumptions which cannot stand
the test of domestic ease. The lover's voice is of course _sui
generis_; but there is another kind of voice which one sometimes hears
that is quite as enchanting--the rich, full, melodious voice which
irresistibly suggests sunshine and flowers, and heavy bunches of
purple grapes, and a wealth of physical beauty at all four corners.
Such a voice is Alboni's; such a voice we can conceive Anacreon's to
have been; with less lusciousness and more stateliness, such a voice
was Walter Savage Landor's. His was not an English voice; it was too
rich and accurate; yet it was clear and apparently thoroughly
unstudied, and was the very perfection of art. There was no greater
treat of its kind than to hear Landor read Milton or Homer.
Though one of the essentials of a good voice is its clearness, there
are certain lisps and catches which are pretty, though never
dignified; but most of them are painful to the ear. It is the same
with accents. A dash of brogue; the faintest suspicion of the Scotch
twang; even a little American accent--but very little, like red-pepper
to be sparingly used, as indeed we may say with the others--gives a
certain piquancy to the voice. So does a Continental accent generally;
few of us being able to distinguish the French accent from the German,
the Polish from the Italian, or the Russian from the Spanish, but
lumping them all together as 'a foreign accent' broadly. Of all the
European voices the French is perhaps the most unpleasant in its
quality, and the Italian the most delightful. The Italian voice is a
song in itself; not the sing-song voice of an English parish
schoolboy, but an unnoted bit of harmony. The French voice is thin,
apt to become wiry and metallic; a head-voice for the most part, and
eminently unsympathetic; a nervous, irritable voice, that seems more
fit for complaint than for love-making; and yet how laughing, how
bewitching it can make itself!--never with the Italian roundness, but
_câlinante_ in its own half-pettish way, provoking, enticing,
arousing. There are some voices which send you to sleep and others
which stir you up; and the French voice is of the latter kind when
setting itself to do mischief and work its own will.
Of all the differences lying between Calais and Dover, perhaps nothing
strikes the traveller more than the difference in the national voice
and manner of speech. The sharp, high-pitched, stridulous voice of the
French, with its clear accent and neat intonation, is exchanged for
the loose, fluffy utterance of England, where clear enunciation is
considered pedantic; where brave men cultivate a drawl and pretty
women a deep chest-voice; where well-educated people think it no shame
to run all their words into each other, and to let consonants and
vowels drip out like so many drops of water, with not much more
distinction between them; and where no one knows how to educate his
organ artistically, without going into artificiality and affectation.
And yet the cultivation of the voice is an art, and ought to be made
as much a matter of education as a good carriage or a legible
handwriting. We teach our children to sing, but we never teach them to
speak, beyond correcting a glaring piece of mispronunciation or so. In
consequence of which we have all sorts of odd voices among us--short
yelping voices like dogs; purring voices like cats; croakings and
lispings and quackings and chatterings; a very menagerie in fact, to
be heard in a room ten feet square, where a little rational
cultivation would have reduced the whole of that vocal chaos to order
and harmony, and would have made what is now painful and distasteful
beautiful and seductive.
_BURNT FINGERS._
An old proverb says that a burnt child dreads the fire. If so, the
child must be uncommonly astute, and with a power of reasoning by
analogy in excess of impulsive desire rarely found either in children
or adults. As a matter of fact, experience goes a very little way
towards directing folks wisely. People often say how much they would
like to live their lives over again with their present experience.
That means, they would avoid certain specific mistakes of the past, of
which they have seen and suffered from the issue. But if they retained
the same nature as now, though they might avoid a few special
blunders, they would fall into the same class of errors quite as
readily as before, the gravitation of character towards circumstance
being always absolute in its direction.
Our blunders in life are not due to ignorance so much as to
temperament; and only the exceptionally wise among us learn to correct
the excesses of temperament by the lessons of experience. To the mass
of mankind these lessons are for the time only, and prophesy nothing
of the future. They hold them to have been mistakes of method, not of
principle, and they think that the same lines more carefully laid
would lead to a better superstructure in the future, not seeing that
the fault was organic and in those very initial lines themselves. No
impulsive nor wildly hopeful person, for instance, ever learns by
experience, so long as his physical condition remains the same. No one
with a large faculty of faith--that is, credulous and easily imposed
on--becomes suspicious or critical by mere experience. How much soever
people of this kind have been taken in, in times past, they are just
as ready to become the prey of the spoiler in times to come; and it
would be sad, if it were not so silly, to watch how inevitably one
half of the world gives itself up as food whereon the roguery of the
other half may wax fat.
The person of facile confidence, whose secrets have been blazed abroad
more than once by trusted friends, makes yet another and another safe
confidant--quite safe this time; one of whose fidelity there is no
doubt--and learns when too late that one _panier percé_ is very like
another _panier percé_. The speculating man, without business faculty
or knowledge, who has burnt his fingers bare to the bone with handling
scrip and stock, thrusts them into the fire again so soon as he has
the chance. The gambler blows his fingers just cool enough to shuffle
the cards for this once only, sure that this time hope will tell no
flattering tale, that ravelled ends will knit themselves up into a
close and seemly garment, and heaven itself work a miracle in his
favour against the law of mathematical certainty. In fact we are all
gamblers in this way, and play our hazards for the stakes of faith and
hope. We all burn our fingers again and again at some fire or another;
but experience teaches us nothing; save perhaps a more hopeless,
helpless resignation towards that confounded ill-luck of ours, and a
weary feeling of having known it all before when things fall out amiss
and we are blistered in the old flames.
In great matters this persistency of endeavour is sublime, and gets a
wealth of laurel crowns and blue ribands; but in little things it is
obstinacy, want of ability to profit by experience, denseness of
perception as to what can and what cannot be done; and the apologue of
Bruce's spider gets tiresome if too often repeated. The most
hopelessly inapt people at learning why they burnt their fingers last
time, and how they will burn them again, are those who, whatever their
profession, are blessed or cursed with what is called the artistic
temperament. A man will ruin himself for love of a particular place;
for dislike of a certain kind of necessary work; for the prosecution
of a certain hobby. Is he not artistic? and must he not have all the
conditions of his life exactly square with his desires? else how can
he do good work? So he goes on burning his fingers through
self-indulgence, and persists in his unwisdom to the end of his life.
He will paint his unsaleable pictures or write his unreadable books;
his path is one in which the money-paying public will not follow; but
though his very existence depends on the following of that paying
public, he will not stir an inch to meet it, but keeps where he is
because he likes the particular run of his hedgerows; and spends his
days in thrusting his hand into the fire of what he chooses to call
the ideal, and his nights in abusing the Philistinism of the world
which lets him be burnt.
And what does any amount of experience do for us in the matter of
friendship or love? As the world goes round, and our credulous morning
darkens into a more sceptical twilight, we believe as a general
principle--a mere abstraction--that all new friends are just so much
gilt gingerbread; and that a very little close holding and hard
rubbing brings off the gilt, and leaves nothing but a slimy, sticky
mess of little worth as food and of none as ornament. And yet, if of
the kind to whom friendship is necessary for happiness, we rush as
eagerly into the new affection as if we had never philosophized on the
emptiness of the old, and believe as firmly in the solid gold of our
latest cake as if we had never smeared our hands with one of the same
pattern before. So with love. A man sees his comrades fluttering like
enchanted moths about some stately man-slayer, some fair and shining
light set like a false beacon on a dangerous cliff to lure men to
their destruction. He sees how they singe and burn in the flame of her
beauty, but he is not warned. If one's own experience teaches one
little or nothing, the experience of others goes for even less, and no
man yet was ever warned off the destructive fire of love because his
companions had burnt their fingers there before him and his own are
sure to follow.
It is the same with women; and in a greater degree. They know all
about Don Juan well enough. They are perfectly well aware how he
treated A. and B. and C. and D. But when it comes to their own turn,
they think that this time surely, and to them, things will be
different and he will be in earnest. So they slide down into the
alluring flame, and burn their fingers for life by playing with
forbidden fire. But have we not all the secret belief that we shall
escape the snares and pitfalls into which others have dropped and
among which we choose to walk? that fire will not burn our fingers, at
least so very badly, when we thrust them into it? and that, by some
legerdemain of Providence, we shall be delivered from the consequences
of our own folly, and that two and two may be made to count five in
our behalf? Who is taught by the experience of an unhappy marriage,
say? No sooner has a man got himself free from the pressure of one
chain and bullet, than he hastens to fasten on another, quite sure
that this chain will be no heavier than the daintiest little thread of
gold, and this bullet as light and sweet as a cowslip-ball. Everything
that had gone wrong before will come right this time; and the hot bars
of close association with an uncomfortable temper and unaccommodating
habits will be only like a juggling trick, and will burn no one's
heart or hands.