always be careful--to keep that half step in the rear which alone
reconciles men to her superiority of wit. She must not shine so much
by her own light as by contact with theirs; and her most brilliant
sallies ought to convey the impression of being struck out by them
rather than of being elaborated by herself alone--suggested by what
had gone before, if improved on for their advantage. Else she offends
masculine self-love, never slow to take fire, and gains an element of
hardness and self-assertion incompatible with her character of
favourite. Not that men dislike all kinds of self-assertion. The
irrepressible little woman with her trim waist and jaunty air, pert,
pretty, defiant, who laughs in the face of the burly policeman able to
crush her between his finger and thumb, and to whom ropes and barriers
are things to be skipped over or dived under, as the case may be--she
who is all cackle and self-assertion like a little bantam, is also
most frequently a men's favourite, and encouraged in her saucy
forwardness.
Then there is the graceful, fragile, swan-necked woman, who, a
generation ago, would have been one of the Della Cruscan school, all
poetry and music and fine feelings, and of a delicacy so refined that
broad-browed Nature herself had to be veiled and toned down to the
subdued key proper for the graceful creature to accept--but nowadays
this graceful creature plunges boldly into the midst of the most
tremendous realism, is an ardent advocate for woman's rights, and
perhaps goes out 'on the rampage,' on platforms and the like to
advocate doctrines as little in harmony with the kind of being she is
as would be a diet of horseflesh and brandy. She gets her following;
and men who do not agree with her delight to set her off on her
favourite topics, just as women like to see their little girls play
with their dolls and repeat to the harmless dummy the experiences
which have been real to themselves.
These two classes of self-assertion are mere plays which amuse men;
but when it comes to a reality, and is no longer a play--when a man is
made to feel small, useless, insignificant by the side of a woman--he
meets them with something he neither likes nor easily forgives; and if
such a woman had the beauty of Venus, she would not be a men's
favourite of the right sort; though some of course would admire her
and do their best to spoil and make a fool of her.
A men's favourite of the right sort must, among other things, be well
up in the accidence of flirting, and know how to take it at exactly
its proper value. She must be able to accept broad compliments, or
more subtle love-making, without either too serious an acceptance or
too grave a deprecation. This is a great art, and one that, more than
any other, puts men at their ease and sets the machinery of pleasant
intercourse in harmonious action. Never to show whether she is really
hit or not; never to give a fop occasion for a boast nor an enemy room
for a pitying sneer; to take everything in good part and to be as
quick in giving as in receiving; never to be off her guard; never to
throw away her arms; to conceal any number of foxes that may be
gnawing at her beneath her cloak--this kind of flirting, in which most
men's favourites are adepts, is an art that reaches almost the
dimensions of a science. And it is just that in which your very
intense, your very earnest and sincere, women are utter failures. They
know nothing of badinage, but take everything _au grand sérieux_; and
when you mean to be simply playful and complimentary, imagine you in
tragic earnest, and think themselves obliged to frown down a
compliment as a liberty; or else they accept it with a passionate
pleasure that shows how deeply it has struck.
These intense and very sincere women are not as a rule men's
favourites, unless they have other qualities of such a pleasant and
seductive kind as to excuse the enormous blunder they make of wearing
their hearts on their sleeves for drawing-room daws to peck at, and
the still greater blunder of confounding love-making with love. They
may be, and if they have nice manners and are good-tempered they
probably are, of the race of popular women; that is, liked by both men
and women; but they are not men's favourites _par excellence_, who
moreover are never liked by women at all.
Women are quite right in one thing, hard as it seems to say it:--men's
favourites, whom women dislike and distrust, are not usually good for
much morally. They are often false, insincere, superficial, and
possibly with a very low aim in life. And the men know all this, but
forgive it for the sake of the pleasantness and charm which is the
grace that shadows, or rather brightens, all the rest; having
oftentimes indeed a half-contemptuous tolerance for the sins of their
favourites as not expecting anything better from them. Grant that they
are false, that they sail perilously near the wind, are shifty and
untrustworthy--what of that? They are not favourites because of their
good qualities, only because of their pleasant ones; because of that
subtle _je ne sais quoi_ of old writers which stands one in such good
stead when one is at a loss for an analysis, and which is the only
term that expresses the strong yet indefinite charm which certain
women possess for men. It is not beauty; it is not necessarily
cleverness taken in the sense of education, though it must be a
keenness if not depth of intellect, and smartness if not the power of
reasoning; it certainly is not goodness; it is not always youth, nor
yet warmth of feeling--though all these things come in as
characteristics in their turn; but it is companionship and the power
of amusing. Still, what is it that creates this power, this
companionship? A smart, pert, flippant little minx, as women call her,
with a shrill voice and a saucy air, may be the men's favourite of one
set; a refined, graceful woman, speaking softly, and with pleading
eyes, may be the favourite of another; a third may be a blunt,
off-handed young person, given to speaking her mind so that there
shall be no mistake; a fourth may be a silent and seemingly a shy
woman, fond of sitting out in retired places, and with a reputation
for flirting of a quiet kind that sets the woman's fingers tingling.
There is no settled rule anyhow, and all kinds have their special
sphere of shining, according to circumstances. But whatever they may
be, they are useful in their generation and valuable for such work as
they have to do. Society is a miserably dull affair to men when there
are no favourites of any sort; where the womanhood in the room is of
the kind that herds together as if for protection, and looks askance
over its shoulder at the wolves in coats and beards who prowl about
the sheepfold of petticoats; where conversation is monosyllabic in
form and restricted in substance; where pleasant men who talk are
considered dangerous, and fascinating women who answer immoral; where
the matrons are grim and the maidens still in the bread-and-butter
stage of existence; and where young wives take matrimonial fidelity to
mean making themselves disagreeable to every man but their husband, on
the plea that one never knows what may happen, and that you cannot go
on with what you never begin.
_WOMANLINESS._
There are certain words, suggestive rather than descriptive, the value
of which lies in their very vagueness and elasticity of
interpretation, by which each mind can write its own commentary, each
imagination sketch out its own illustration. And one of these is
Womanliness; a word infinitely more subtle in meaning, with more
possibilities of definition, more light and shade, more facets, more
phases, than the corresponding word manliness. This indeed must
necessarily be so, since the character of women is so much more varied
in colour and more delicate in its many shades than that of men.
We call it womanliness when a lady of refinement and culture overcomes
the natural shrinking of sense, and voluntarily enters into the
circumstances of sickness and poverty, that she may help the suffering
in their hour of need; when she can bravely go through some of the
most shocking experiences of humanity for the sake of the higher law
of charity; and we call it womanliness when she removes from herself
every suspicion of grossness, coarseness, or ugliness, and makes her
life as dainty as a picture, as lovely as a poem. She is womanly when
she asserts her own dignity; womanly when her highest pride is the
sweetest humility, the tenderest self-suppression; womanly when she
protects the weaker; womanly when she submits to the stronger. To bear
in silence and to act with vigour; to come to the front on some
occasions, to efface herself on others, are alike the characteristics
of true womanliness; as is also the power to be at once practical and
æsthetic, the careful worker-out of minute details and the upholder of
a sublime idealism--the house-mistress dispensing bread and the
priestess serving in the temple. In fact, it is a very Proteus of a
word, and means many things by turns; but it never means anything but
what is sweet, tender, gracious and beautiful. Yet, protean as it is
in form, its substance has hitherto been considered simple enough, and
its limits have been very exactly defined; and we used to think we
knew to a shade what was womanly and what was unwomanly--where, for
instance, the nobleness of dignity ended and the hardness of
self-assertion began; while no one could mistake the heroic sacrifice
of self for the indifference to pain and the grossness belonging to a
coarse nature:--which last is as essentially unwomanly as the first is
one of the finest manifestations of true womanliness. But if this
exactness of interpretation belonged to past times, the utmost
confusion prevails at present; and one of the points on which society
is now at issue in all directions is just this very question--What is
essentially unwomanly? and, what are the only rightful functions of
true womanliness? Men and tradition say one thing, certain women say
another thing; and if what these women say is to become the rule,
society will have to be reconstructed _ab initio_, and a new order of
human life must begin. We have no objection to this, provided the new
order is better than the old, and the modern phase of womanhood more
beautiful, more useful to the community at large, more elevating to
general morality than was the ancient. But the whole matter hangs on
this proviso; and until it can be shown for certain that the latter
phase is to be undeniably the better we will hold by the former.
There are certain old--superstitions must we call them?--in our ideas
of women, with which we should be loth to part. For instance, the
infinite importance of a mother's influence over her children, and the
joy that she herself took in their companionship--the pleasure that it
was to her to hold a baby in her arms--her delight and maternal pride
in the beauty, the innocence, the quaint ways, the odd remarks, the
half-embarrassing questions, the first faint dawnings of reason and
individuality, of the little creatures to whom she had given life and
who were part of her very being--that pleasure and maternal pride were
among the characteristics we used to ascribe to womanliness; as was
also the mother's power of forgetting herself for her children, of
merging herself in them as they grew older, and finding her own best
happiness in theirs. But among the advanced women who despise the
tame teachings of what was once meant by womanliness, maternity is
considered a bore rather than a blessing; the children are shunted to
the side when they come; and ignorant undisciplined nurses are
supposed to do well for wages what mothers will not do for love.
Also we held it as womanliness when women resolutely refused to admit
into their presence, to discuss or hear discussed before them, impure
subjects, or even doubtful ones; when they kept the standard of
delicacy, of purity, of modesty, at a high level, and made men
respect, even if they could not imitate. Now the running between them
and men whose delicacy has been rubbed off long ago by the intimate
contact of coarse life is very close; and some of them go even beyond
those men whose lives have been of a quiet and unexperimental kind.
Nothing indeed, is so startling to a man who has not lived in personal
and social familiarity with certain subjects, and who has retained the
old chivalrous superstitions about the modesty and innocent ignorance
of women, as the easy, unembarrassed coolness with which his fair
neighbour at a dinner-table will dash off into thorny paths, managing
between the soup and the grapes to run through the whole gamut of
improper subjects.
It was also an old notion that rest and quiet and peace were natural
characteristics of womanliness; and that life had been not unfairly
apportioned between the sexes, each having its own distinctive duties
as well as virtues, its own burdens as well as its own pleasures. Man
was to go out and do battle with many enemies; he was to fight with
many powers; to struggle for place, for existence, for natural rights;
to give and take hard blows; to lose perhaps this good impulse or that
noble quality in the fray--the battle-field of life not being that
wherein the highest virtues take root and grow. But he had always a
home where was one whose sweeter nature brought him back to his better
self; a place whence the din of battle was shut out; where he had time
for rest and spiritual reparation; where a woman's love and gentleness
and tender thought and unselfish care helped and refreshed him, and
made him feel that the prize was worth the struggle, that the home was
worth the fight to keep it. And surely it was not asking too much of
women that they should be beautiful and tender to the men whose whole
life out of doors was one of work for them--of vigorous toil that they
might be kept in safety and luxury. But to the advanced woman it seems
so; consequently the home as a place of rest for the man is becoming
daily more rare. Soon, it seems to us, there will be no such thing as
the old-fashioned home left in England. Women are swarming out at all
doors; running hither and thither among the men; clamouring for arms
that they may enter into the fray with them; anxious to lay aside
their tenderness, their modesty, their womanliness, that they may
become hard and fierce and self-asserting like them; thinking it a
far higher thing to leave the home and the family to take care of
themselves, or under the care of some incompetent hireling, while they
enter on the manly professions and make themselves the rivals of their
husbands and brothers.
Once it was considered an essential of womanliness that a woman should
be a good house-mistress, a judicious dispenser of the income, a
careful guide to her servants, a clever manager generally. Now
practical housekeeping is a degradation; and the free soul which
disdains the details of housekeeping yearns for the intellectual
employment of an actuary, of a law clerk, of a banker's clerk. Making
pills is held to be a nobler employment than making puddings; while,
to distinguish between the merits of Egyptians and Mexicans, the
Turkish loan and the Spanish, is considered a greater exercise of mind
than to know fresh salmon from stale and how to lay in household
stores with judgment. But the last is just as important as the first,
and even more so; for the occasional pill, however valuable, is not so
valuable as the daily pudding, and not all the accumulations made by
lucky speculation are of any use if the house-bag which holds them has
a hole in it.
Once women thought it no ill compliment that they should be considered
the depositaries of the highest moral sentiments. If they were not
held the wiser nor the more logical of the two sections of the human
race, they were held the more religious, the more angelic, the better
taught of God, and the nearer to the way of grace. Now they repudiate
the assumption as an insult, and call that the sign of their
humiliation which was once their distinguishing glory. They do not
want to be patient, self-sacrifice is only a euphemism for slavish
submission to manly tyranny; the quiet peace of home is miserable
monotony; and though they have not come to the length of renouncing
the Christian virtues theoretically, their theory makes but weak
practice, and the womanliness integral to Christianity is by no means
the rule of life of modern womanhood. But the oddest part of the
present odd state of things is the curious blindness of women to what
is most beautiful in themselves. Granting even that the world has
turned so far upside down that the one sex does not care to please the
other, still, there is a good of itself in beauty, which some of our
modern women seem to overlook. And of all kinds of beauty that which
is included in what we mean by womanliness is the greatest and the
most beautiful.
A womanly woman has neither vanity nor hardness. She may be
pretty--most likely she is--and she may know it; for, not being a
fool, she cannot help seeing it when she looks at herself in the
glass; but knowing the fact is not being conscious of the possession,
and a pretty woman, if of the right ring, is not vain, though she
prizes her beauty as she ought. And she is as little hard as vain. Her
soul is not given up to ribbons, but neither is she indifferent to
externals, dress among them. She knows that part of her natural
mission is to please and be charming, and she knows that dress sets
her off, and that men feel more enthusiastically towards her when she
is looking fresh and pretty than when she is a dowdy and a fright.
And, being womanly, she likes the admiration of men, and thinks their
love a better thing than their indifference. If she likes men she
loves children, and never shunts them as nuisances, nor frets when
forced to have them about her. She knows that she was designed by the
needs of the race and the law of nature to be a mother; sent into the
world for that purpose mainly; and she knows that rational maternity
means more than simply giving life and then leaving it to others to
preserve it. She has no newfangled notions about the animal character
of motherhood, nor about the degrading character of housekeeping. On
the contrary, she thinks a populous and happy nursery one of the
greatest blessings of her state; and she puts her pride in the perfect
ordering, the exquisite arrangements, the comfort, thoughtfulness and
beauty of her house. She is not above her _métier_ as a woman; and she
does not want to ape the manliness she can never possess.
She has always been taught that, as there are certain manly virtues,
so are there certain feminine ones; and that she is the most womanly
among women who has those virtues in greatest abundance and in the
highest perfection. She has taken it to heart that patience,
self-sacrifice, tenderness, quietness, with some others, of which
modesty is one, are the virtues more especially feminine; just as
courage, justice, fortitude, and the like, belong to men.
Passionate ambition, virile energy, the love of strong excitement,
self-assertion, fierceness, an undisciplined temper, are all qualities
which detract from her ideal of womanliness, and which make her less
beautiful than she was meant to be. Consequently she has cultivated
all the meek and tender affections, all the unselfishness and thought
for others which have hitherto been the distinctive property of her
sex, by the exercise of which they have done their best work and
earned their highest place. She thinks it no degradation that she
should take pains to please, to soothe, to comfort the man who, all
day long, has been doing irksome work that her home may be beautiful
and her life at ease. She does not think it incumbent on her, as a
woman of spirit, to fly out at an impatient word; to answer back a
momentary irritation with defiance; to give back a Roland to his
Oliver. Her womanliness inclines her to loving forbearance, to
patience under difficulties, to unwearied cheerfulness under such
portion of the inevitable burden as may have been laid on her. She
does not hold herself predestined by nature to receive only the best
of everything, and deem herself affronted where her own especial cross
is bound on her shoulders. Rather, she understands that she too must
take the rough with the smooth; but that, as her husband's way in
life is rougher than hers, his trials are greater, his burden is
heavier, it is her duty--and her privilege--to help him all she can
with her tenderness and her love; and to give back to him at home, if
in a different form, some of the care he has expended while abroad to
make her path smooth.
In a word, the womanly woman whom we all once loved and in whom we
have still a kind of traditional belief, is she who regards the wishes
of men as of some weight in female action; who holds to love rather
than opposition; to reverence, not defiance; who takes more pride in
the husband's fame than in her own; who glories in the protection of
his name, and in her state as wife; who feels the honour given to her
as wife and matron far dearer than any she may earn herself by
personal prowess; and who believes in her consecration as a helpmeet
for man, not in a rivalry which a few generations will ripen into a
coarse and bitter enmity.
_SOMETHING TO WORRY._
A humane condescension to instinct has lately supplied ladies' lapdogs
with an ingenious instrument of mock torture, in the shape of an
india-rubber head which hops about the room on the smallest
persuasion, and squeaks shrilly when caught and worried. The animal
has thus the pleasure of mauling something which seems to suffer from
the process; while in reality it hurts nothing, but expends its
tormenting energy on a quite unfeeling creature, whose _raison d'être_
it is to be worried and made to squeak. It would be well for some of
us if those people who must have something to worry would be content
with a creature analogous to the lapdog's india-rubber head. It would
do just as well for them, and it would save us who feel a great deal
of real pain. Tippoo Sahib was a wise man when he caused his automaton
to be made, in which a tiger seemed to be tearing at the prostrate
figure of a wooden European, and the group gave out mingled growls and
groans at the turning of a handle in its side. It might have been a
dismal fancy perhaps; but the fancy was better than the reality, and
did quite as well for the purpose, which was that the monarch should
keep himself in good humour by the charm of something to worry.