seldom learn to hold them back. With an honest intention, and a strong
desire to see right done, it is difficult to avoid putting our hands
into fires with which we have no business. While we are young and
ardent, it seems to us as if we have distinct business with all fraud,
injustice, folly, wilfulness, which we believe a few honest words of
ours will control and annul; but nine times out of ten we only burn
our own hands, while we do not in the least strengthen those of the
right nor weaken those of the wrong. We may say the same of
good-natured people. There was never a row of chestnuts roasting at
the fire for which your good-natured oaf will not stretch out his hand
at the bidding and for the advantage of a friend. Experience teaches
the poor oaf nothing; not even that fire burns. To put his name at the
back of a bill, just as a mere form; to lend his money, just for a few
days; or to do any other sort of self-immolating folly, on the
faithful promise that the fire will not burn nor the knife cut--it all
comes as easy to men of the good-natured sort as their alphabet.
Indeed it is their alphabet, out of which they spell their own ruin;
but so long as the impressionable temperament lasts--so long as the
liking to do a good-natured action is greater than caution, suspicion,
or the power of analogical reasoning--so long will the oaf make
himself the catspaw of the knave, till at last he has left himself no
fingers wherewith to pluck out the chestnuts for himself or another.
The first doubt of young people is always a source of intense
suffering. Hitherto they have believed what they saw and all they
heard; and they have not troubled themselves with motives nor facts
beyond those given to them and lying on the surface. But when they
find out for themselves that seeming is not necessarily being, and
that all people are not as good throughout as they thought them, then
they suffer a moral shock which often leads them into a state of
practical atheism and despair. Many young people give up altogether
when they first open the book of humanity and begin to read beyond the
title-page; and, because they have found specks in the cleanest parts,
they believe that nothing is left pure. They are as much bewildered as
horror-struck, and cannot understand how any one they have loved and
respected should have done this or that misdeed. Having done it, there
is nothing left to love nor respect further. It is only by degrees
that they learn to adjust and apportion, and to understand that the
whole creature is not necessarily corrupt because there are a few
unhealthy places here and there. But in the beginning this first
scorching by the fire of experience is very painful and bad to bear.
Then they begin to think the knowledge of the world, as got from
books, so wonderful, so profound; and they look on it as a science to
be learned by much studying of aphorisms. They little know that not
the most affluent amount of phrase knowledge can ever regulate that
class of action which springs from a man's inherent disposition; and
that it is not facts which teach but self-control which prevents.
After very early youth we all have enough theoretical knowledge to
keep us straight; but theoretical knowledge does nothing without
self-knowledge, or its corollary, self-control. The world has never
yet got beyond the wisdom of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes; and Solomon's
advice to the Israelitish youth lounging round the gates of the Temple
is quite as applicable to young Hopeful coming up to London chambers
as it was to them. Teaching of any kind, by books or events, is the
mere brute weapon; but self-control is the intelligent hand to wield
it. To burn one's fingers once in a lifetime tells nothing against a
man's common-sense nor dignity; but to go on burning them is the act
of a fool, and we cannot pity the wounds, however sore they may be.
The Arcadian virtues of unlimited trust and hope and love are very
sweet and lovely; but they are the graces of childhood, not the
qualities of manhood. They are charming little finalities, which do
not admit of modification nor of expansion; and in a naughty world, to
go about with one's heart on one's sleeve, believing every one and
accepting everything to be just as it presents itself, is offering
bowls of milk to tigers, and meeting armed men with a tin sword. Such
universal trust can only result in a perpetual burning of one's
fingers; and a life spent in pulling out hot chestnuts from the fire
for another's eating is by no means the most useful nor the most
dignified to which a man can devote himself.
_DÉSOEUVREMENT._
Perhaps we ought to apologize for using a foreign label, but there is
no one English word which gives the full meaning of _désoeuvrement_.
Only paraphrases and accumulations would convey the many subtle shades
contained in it; and paraphrases and accumulations are inconvenient as
headings. But if we have not the word, we have a great deal of the
thing; for _désoeuvrement_ is an evil unfortunately not confined to
one country nor to one class; and even we, with all our boasted
Anglo-Saxon energy, have people among us as unoccupied and purposeless
as are to be found elsewhere. Certainly we have nothing like the
Neapolitan lazzaroni who pass their lives in dozing in the sun; but
that is more because of our climate than our condition, and if our
_désoeuvrés_ do not doze out of doors, it by no means follows that
they are wide awake within.
No state is more unfortunate than this listless want of purpose which
has nothing to do, which is interested in nothing, and which has no
serious object in life; and the drifting, aimless temperament, which
merely waits and does not even watch, is the most disastrous that a
man or woman can possess. Feverish energy, wearing itself out on
comparative nothings, is better than the indolence which folds its
hands and makes neither work nor pleasure; and the most microscopic
and restless perception is more healthful than the dull blindness
which goes from Dan to Beersheba, and finds all barren.
If even death itself is only a transmutation of forces--an active and
energizing change--what can we say of this worse than mental death?
How can we characterize a state which is simply stagnation? Not all of
us have our work cut out and laid ready for us to do; very many of us
have to seek for objects of interest and to create our own employment;
and were it not for the energy which makes work by its own force, the
world would still be lying in barbarism, content with the skins of
beasts for clothing and with wild fruits and roots for food. But the
_désoeuvrés_ know nothing of the pleasures of energy; consequently
none of the luxuries of idleness--only its tedium and monotony. Life
is a dull round to them of alternate vacancy and mechanical routine; a
blank so dead that active pain and positive sorrow would be better for
them than the passionless negation of their existence. They love
nothing; they hope for nothing; they work for nothing; to-morrow will
be as to-day, and to-day is as yesterday was; it is the mere passing
of time which they call living--a moral and mental hybernation broken
up by no springtime waking.
Though by no means confined to women only, this disastrous state is
nevertheless more frequently found with them than with men. It is
comparatively rare that a man--at least an Englishman--is born with so
little of the activity which characterizes manhood as to rest content
without some kind of object for his life, either in work or in
pleasure, in study or in vice. But many women are satisfied to remain
in an unending _désoeuvrement_, a listless supineness that has not
even sufficient active energy to fret at its own dullness.
We see this kind of thing especially in the families of the poorer
class of gentry in the country. If we except the Sunday school and
district visiting, neither of which commends itself as a pleasant
occupation to all minds--both in fact needing a little more active
energy than we find in the purely _désoeuvré_ class--what is there for
the unmarried daughters of a family to do? There is no question of a
profession for any of them. Ideas travel slowly in country places, and
root themselves still more slowly, even yet; and the idea of woman's
work for ladies is utterly inadmissible by the English gentleman who
can leave a modest sufficiency to his daughters--just enough to live
on in the old house and in the old way, without a margin for luxuries,
but above anything like positive want. There is no possibility then of
an active career in art or literature; of going out as a governess, as
a hospital nurse, or as a Sister. There is only home, with the
possible and not very probable chance of marriage as the vision of
hope in the distant future. And that chance is very small and very
remote; for the simple reason--there is no one to marry.
There are the young collegians who come down in reading parties; the
group of Bohemian artists, if the place be picturesque and not too far
from London; the curate; and the new doctor, fresh from the hospitals,
who has to make his practice out of the poorer and more outlying
_clientèle_ of the old and established practitioners of the place. But
collegians do not marry, and long engagements are proverbially
hazardous; Bohemian artists are even less likely than they to trouble
the surrogate; and the curate and the doctor can at the best marry
only one apiece of the many who are waiting. The family keeps neither
carriages nor horses, so that the longest tether to which life can be
carried, with the house for the stake, is simply the three or four
miles which the girls can walk out and back. And the visiting list is
necessarily comprised within this circle. There is then, absolutely
nothing to occupy nor to interest. The whole day is spent in playing
over old music, in needlework, in a little desultory reading, such as
is supplied by the local book society; all without other object than
that of passing the time. The girls have had nothing like a thorough
education in anything; they are not specially gifted, and what brains
they have are dormant and uncultivated. There is not even enough
housework to occupy their time, unless they were to send away the
servants. Besides, domestic work of an active kind is vulgar, and
gentlemen and gentlewomen do not allow their daughters to do it. They
may help in the housekeeping; which means merely giving out the week's
supplies on Monday and ordering the dinner on other days, and which is
not an hour's occupation in the week; and they can do a little amateur
spudding and raking among the flower-beds when the weather is fine, if
they care for the garden; and they can do a great deal of walking if
they are strong; and this is all that they can do. There they are,
four or five well-looking girls perhaps, of marriageable age, fairly
healthy and amiable, and with just so much active power as would carry
them creditably through any work that was given them to do, but with
not enough originative energy to make them create work for themselves
out of nothing.
In their quiet uneventful sphere, with the circumscribed radius and
the short tether, it would be very difficult for any women but those
few who are gifted with unusual energy to create a sufficient human
interest; to ordinary young ladies it is impossible. They can but
make-believe, even if they try--and they don't try. They can but raise
up shadows which they would fain accept as living creatures if they
give themselves the trouble to evoke anything at all, and they don't
give themselves the trouble. They simply live on from day to day in a
state of mental somnolency--hopeless, _désoeuvrées_, inactive; just
drifting down the smooth slow current of time, with not a ripple nor
an eddy by the way.
Quiet families in towns, people who keep no society and live in a
self-made desert apart though in the midst of the very vortex of life,
are alike in the matter of _désoeuvrement_; and we find exactly the
same history with them as we find with their country cousins, though
apparently their circumstances are so different. They cannot work and
they may not play; the utmost dissipation allowed them is to look at
the outside of things--to make one of the fringe of spectators lining
the streets and windows on a show day, and this but seldom; or to go
once or twice a year to the theatre or a concert. So they too just
lounge through their life, and pass from girlhood to old age in utter
_désoeuvrement_ and want of object. Year by year the lines about their
eyes deepen, their smile gets sadder, their cheeks grow paler; while
the cherished secret romance which even the dullest life contains gets
a colour of its own by age, and a firmness of outline by continual
dwelling on, which it had not in the beginning. Perhaps it was a dream
built on a tone, a look, a word--may be it was only a half-evolved
fancy without any basis whatever--but the imagination of the poor
_désoeuvrée_ has clung to the dream, and the uninteresting dullness of
her life has given it a mock vitality which real activity would have
destroyed.
This want of healthy occupation is the cause of half the hysterical
reveries which it is a pretty flattery to call constancy and an
enduring regret; and we find it as absolutely as that heat follows
from flame, that the mischievous habit of bewailing an irrevocable
past is part of the _désoeuvrée_ condition in the present. People who
have real work to do cannot find time for unhealthy regrets, and
_désoeuvrement_ is the most fertile source of sentimentality to be
found.
The _désoeuvrée_ woman of means and middle age, grown grey in her want
of purpose and suddenly taken out of her accustomed groove, is perhaps
more at sea than any others. She has been so long accustomed to the
daily flow of certain lines that she cannot break new ground and take
up with anything fresh, even if it be only a fresh way of being idle.
Her daughter is married; her husband is dead; her friend who was her
right hand and manager-in-chief has gone away; she is thrown on her
own resources, and her own resources will not carry her through. She
generally falls a prey to her maid, who tyrannizes over her, and a
phlegmatic kind of despair, which darkens the remainder of her life
without destroying it. She loses even her power of enjoyment, and gets
tired before the end of the rubber which is the sole amusement in
which she indulges. For _désoeuvrement_ has that fatal reflex action
which everything bad possesses, and its strength is in exact ratio
with its duration.
Women of this class want taking in hand by the stronger and more
energetic. Many even of those who seem to do pretty well as
independent workers, men and women alike, would be all the better for
being farmed out; and _désoeuvrées_ women especially want extraneous
guidance, and to be set to such work as they can do, but cannot make.
An establishment which would utilize their faculties, such as they
are, and give them occupation in harmony with their powers, would be a
real salvation to many who would do better if they only knew how, and
would save them from stagnation and apathy. But society does not
recognize the existence of moral rickets, though the physical are
cared for; consequently it has not begun to provide for them as moral
rickets, and no Proudhon has yet managed to utilize the _désoeuvrés_
members of the State. When they do find a place of retreat and
adventitious support, it is under another name.
The retired man of business, utterly without object in his new
conditions, is another portrait that meets us in country places. He is
not fit for magisterial business; he cannot hunt nor shoot nor fish;
he has no literary tastes; he cannot create objects of interest for
himself foreign to the whole experience of his life. The idleness
which was so delicious when it was a brief season of rest in the midst
of his high-pressure work, and the country which was like Paradise
when seen in the summer only and at holiday time, make together just
so much blank dullness now that he has bound himself to the one and
fixed himself in the other. When he has spelt over every article in
the _Times_, pottered about his garden and his stables, and irritated
both gardener and groom by interfering in what he does not understand,
the day's work is at an end. He has nothing more to do but eat his
dinner and sip his wine, doze over the fire for a couple of hours, and
go to bed as the clock strikes ten.
This is the reality of that long dream of retirement which has been
the golden vision of hope to many a man during the heat and burden of
the day. The dream is only a dream. Retirement means _désoeuvrement_;
leisure is tedium; rest is want of occupation truly, but want of
interest, want of object, want of purpose as well; and the prosperous
man of business, who has retired with a fortune and broken energies,
is bored to death with his prosperity, and wishes himself back to his
desk or his counter--back to business and something to do. He wonders,
on retrospection, what there was in his activity that was distasteful
to him; and thinks with regret that perhaps, on the whole, it is
better to wear out than to rust out; that _désoeuvrement_ is a worse
state than work at high pressure; and that life with a purpose is a
nobler thing than one which has nothing in it but idleness:--whereof
the main object is how best to get rid of time.
_THE SHRIEKING SISTERHOOD._
We by no means put it forward as an original remark when we say that
Nature does her grandest works of construction in silence, and that
all great historical reforms have been brought about either by long
and quiet preparation, or by sudden and authoritative action. The
inference from which is, that no great good has ever been done by
shrieking; that much talking necessarily includes a good deal of
dilution; and that fuss is never an attribute of strength nor
coincident with concentration. Whenever there has been a very deep and
sincere desire on the part of a class or an individual to do a thing,
it has been done not talked about; where the desire is only
halfhearted, where the judgment or the conscience is not quite clear
as to the desirableness of the course proposed, where the chief
incentive is love of notoriety and not the intrinsic worth of the
action itself--personal _kudos_, and not the good of a cause nor the
advancement of humanity--then there has been talk; much talk;
hysterical excitement; a long and prolonged cackle; and heaven and
earth called to witness that an egg has been laid wherein lies the
germ of a future chick--after proper incubation.
Necessarily there must be much verbal agitation if any measure is to
be carried the fulcrum of which is public opinion. If you have to stir
the dry bones you must prophesy to them in a loud voice, and not leave
off till they have begun to shake. Things which can only be known by
teaching must be spoken of, but things which have to be done are
always better done the less the fuss made about them; and the more
steadfast the action, the less noisy the agent. Purpose is apt to
exhale itself in protestations, and strength is sure to exhaust itself
by a flux of words. But at the present day what Mr. Carlyle called the
Silences are the least honoured of all the minor gods, and the babble
of small beginnings threatens to become intolerable. We all 'think
outside our brains,' and the result is not conducive to mental vigour.
It is as if we were to set a plant to grow with its heels in the air,
and then look for roots, flowers and fruit, by the process of
excitation and disclosure.
One of our quarrels with the Advanced Women of our generation is the
hysterical parade they make about their wants and their intentions. It
never seems to occur to them that the best means of getting what they
want is to take it, when not forbidden by the law--to act, not to
talk; that all this running hither and thither over the face of the
earth, this feverish unrest and loud acclaim are but the dilution of
purpose through much speaking, and not the right way at all; and that
to hold their tongues and do would advance them by as many leagues as
babble puts them back. A small knot of women, 'terribly in earnest,'
could move multitudes by the silent force of example. One woman alone,
quietly taking her life in her own hands and working out the great
problem of self-help and independence practically, not merely stating
it theoretically, is worth a score of shrieking sisters frantically
calling on men and gods to see them make an effort to stand upright
without support, with interludes of reproach to men for the want of
help in their attempt. The silent woman who quietly calculates her
chances and measures her powers with her difficulties so as to avoid
the probability of a fiasco, and who therefore achieves a success
according to her endeavour, does more for the real emancipation of her
sex than any amount of pamphleteering, lecturing, or petitioning by
the shrieking sisterhood can do. Hers is deed not declamation; proof
not theory; and it carries with it the respect always accorded to
success.
And really if we think of it dispassionately, and carefully dissect
the great mosaic of hindrances which women say makes up the pavement
of their lives, there is very little which they may not do if they
like--and can. They have already succeeded in reopening for themselves
the practice of medicine, for one thing; and this is an immense
opportunity if they know how to use it. A few pioneers, unhelped for
the most part, steadily and without shrieking, stormed the barricades
of the hospitals and dissecting-rooms; heroically bearing the shower
of hard-mouthed missiles with which they were pelted, and
successfully forcing their way notwithstanding. But the most
successful of them are those who held on with least excitement and who
strove more than they declaimed; while others, by constitution
belonging to the shrieking sisterhood, have comparatively failed, and
have mainly succeeded in making themselves ridiculous. After some
pressure but very little cackle--for here too the work was wanted, the
desire real, and the workers in earnest--female colleges on a liberal
and extended system of education have been established, and young
women have now an opportunity of showing what they can do in brain
work.
It is no longer by the niggardliness of men and the fault of an
imperfect system if they prove intellectually inferior to the stronger
sex; they have their dynamometer set up for them, and all they have to
do is to register their relative strength--and abide the issue. All
commerce, outside the Stock Exchange, is open to them equally with
men; and there is nothing to prevent their becoming merchants, as they
are now petty traders, or setting up as bill-brokers, commission
agents, or even bankers--which last profession, according to a
contemporary, they have actually adopted in New York, some ladies
there having established a bank, which, so far as they have yet gone,
they are said to conduct with deftness and ready arithmetic.
In literature they have competitors in men, but no monopolists.
Indeed, they themselves have become almost the monopolists of the
whole section of light literature and fiction; while nothing but
absolute physical and mental incapacity prevents their taking the
charge of a journal, and working it with female editor, sub-editor,
manager, reporters, compositors, and even news-girls to sell the
second edition at omnibus doors and railway stations. If a set of
women chose to establish a newspaper and work it amongst themselves,
no law could be brought to bear against them; and if they made it as
philosophical as some, or as gushing as others, they might enter into
a formidable rivalry with the old-established. They would have a fair
hearing, or rather reading; they would not be 'nursed' nor hustled,
and they would get just as much success as they deserved. To be sure,
they do not yet sit on the Bench nor plead at the Bar. They are not in
Parliament, and they are not even voters; while, as married women with
unfriendly husbands and no protection-order, they have something to
complain of, and wrongs which are in a fair way of being righted if
the shrieking sisterhood does not frighten the world prematurely. But,
despite these restrictions, they have a very wide circle wherein they
can display their power, and witch the world with noble deeds, if they
choose--and as some have chosen.