those ill-conditioned people who must have something to worry, and who
are only happy with a grievance. No fortune, no fair possessions of
love nor beauty, nor what one would think must be the sources of
intense happiness, are spells to exorcise the worrying spirit--opiates
to allay the worrying fever. If in the midst of all they have to make
them blessed among the sons of men, there hops the squeaking ball, in
an instant every good thing belonging to them is forgotten, and there
is nothing in heaven and earth but that one obtruding grievance, that
one intolerable annoyance. Nothing is too small for them to make into
a gigantic evil and be offended at accordingly. They will not endure
with patience the minutest, nor the most inevitable, of the crosses of
life--things which every one has to bear alike; which no one can help;
and concerning which the only wisdom is to meet them with
cheerfulness, tiding over the bad time as quietly as possible till
things take a turn. Not they. They know the luxury of having something
to complain of; and they like to feel wronged. The wind is in the east
and they are personally injured; the rain has come on a pleasure day,
or has not come in a seed-sowing week, and they fret grimly and make
every one about them uncomfortable, as if the weather were a thing to
be arranged at will, and a disappointing day were the result of wilful
mismanagement. Life is a burden to them and all about them because the
climate is uncertain and the elements are out of human control. They
make themselves the most wretched of martyrs too, if they are in a
country they do not like; and they never do like the country they are
in. If down in a valley, they are suffocated; if in the plains or on a
table-land, they hate monotony and long for undulations; if they are
in a wooded district, they dread the damp and worry about the autumn
exhalations; if on a moor, who can live without green hills and
hedgerow birds? They are sorely exercised concerning clay and gravel;
and they find as many differences in the London climate within a
half-hour's walk as those who do not worry would find between St.
Andrews and Mentone. But they are no nearer the right thing wherever
they go; and the people belonging to them may as well bear the worry
at Brompton as at Hampstead, in Cumberland as in Cornwall, and so save
both trouble and expense.
These worrying folk never let a thing alone. If they have once found a
victim they keep him; crueller in this than cats and tigers which play
with their prey only for a time, but finally give the _coup de grâce_
and devour it, bones and all. But worrying folk never have done with
their prey, be it person or thing, and have an art of persistence--a
way of establishing a raw--that drives their poor victims into
temporary insanity. This persistency indeed, and the total
indifference to the maddening effect they produce, are the oddest
parts of the performance. They begin again for the twentieth time,
just where they left off; as fresh as if they had not done it all
before, and as eager as if you did not know exactly what was coming.
And it makes no kind of difference to them that their worrying has no
effect, and that things go on exactly as before--exactly as they would
have done had there been no fuss about them at all.
Granting however, that the old proverb about constant dropping and
inevitable wearing is fulfilled, and that worrying accomplishes its
end, it had better have been let alone; for no one was ever yet
worried into compliance with an uncongenial or abandonment of a
favourite habit, who did not make the worrier wish more than once that
he had let matters remain where he had found them. Imbued with the
unfortunate belief that all things and persons are to be ordered to
their liking, the worriers think themselves justified in flying at the
throat of everything they dislike, and in making their dislikes
peculiar grievances. The natural inclination of boys to tear their
clothes and begrime their hands, to climb up ladders at the peril of
their necks, and to make themselves personally unpleasant to every
sense, is a burden laid specially on them, if they chance to be the
parents of vigorous and robust youth. The cares of their family are
greater than the cares of any other family; and no one understands
what they go through, though every one is told pretty liberally. Hint
at the sufferings of others, and they think you unfeeling and
unsympathetic; try to cheer them, and you affront them; unless you
would offend them for life, you must listen patiently to the
repetition of their miseries continually twanged on one string, and
feign the commiseration you cannot feel.
It is impossible for these people to go through life in amity with all
men. They may be very good Christians theoretically; most likely they
are; according to the law of compensation by which theory and practice
so seldom go together; but the elementary doctrines of peace and
goodwill are beyond their power of translation into deeds. They have
always some one who is Mordecai to them; some one connected with them,
whose habits, nature, whose very being is a decided offence, and whom
therefore they worry without mercy. You never know these people to be
without a grievance. It may be husband or brother, friend or servant,
as it happens; but there is sure to be some one whose existence puts
them out of tune, and on whom therefore they revenge the discord by
continual worrying. Yet they would be miserable if their grievance
were withdrawn, leaving them for the time without a victim. It would
be only for a time indeed; for the exit of one would be the signal for
the entrance of another. The millennium to these people would be
intolerable dullness; and if they were translated into heaven itself,
they would of a certainty travesty the child's desire, and ask for a
little devil to worry, if not to play with. Women are sad sinners in
this way. Men who stay at home and potter about get like them, but
women, who are naturally nervous, and whose lives are spent in small
things, are generally more worrying than men; at least in daily life
and at home. Indeed, the woman who is more cheerful and hopeful than
easily depressed, and who does not worry any one, is the exception
rather than the rule, and to be prized as one would prize any other
rarity.
Children come in for a good deal of domestic worrying; and under
pretence of good management and careful education are used as mamma's
squeaking heads, which lie ever handy for a chase. Any one who has
been in a family where the mother is of a naturally worrying temper,
and where a child has a peculiarity, can appreciate to the full what
the propensity is. With substantial love at heart, the mother leads
the wretched little creature a life worse than that of the typical
dog; and makes of its peculiarity, whatever that may be, a personal
offence which she is justified in resenting and never leaving alone.
And if it be so with her children, much more is it with her husband,
for whom her tenderness is naturally less. Though concerning him she
evidently does not know her own mind; for when she has worried into
his grave the man who all his life was such a trial to her, such a
cross, perhaps such a brute, she puts on widow's weeds of the deepest
hue, and worries her sons and daughters with her uncomfortable
reaction in favour of 'poor papa,' whose virtues come to the front
with a bound. Or may be she continues the old song in a different key,
substituting compassion and a sublime forgiveness in place of her
former annoyance, but harping all the same on the old strain and
rasping the old sores.
Infelicitous at home, these worrying people are almost more than flesh
and blood can bear as travelling companions abroad. Always sure that
the train is going to start and leave them behind; that their landlord
is a robber and in league with brigands; that they will be dashed down
the precipice which tens of thousands have passed in safety before;
worrying about the luggage; and where is that trunk? and are you
_sure_ you saw the portmanteau safe? and have you the keys? and the
custom-house officers will find that bottle of eau-de-cologne and
charge both fine and duty for it; and have you changed the money? and
are you sure you have enough? and what are the fares? and you have
been cheated; and what a bill for only one breakfast and one
night!--and so on.
The person who undertakes a journey with constitutional worriers ought
to have nerves of iron and a head of ice. They will leave nothing to
the care of ordinary rule, let nothing go by faith. The luggage is
always being lost, according to them; accidents are certain to happen
half a dozen times a day; and the beds are invariably damp. Their
mosquito bites are worse than any other person's; and no one is
plagued with small beasts as they are. They worry all through the
journey, till you wish yourself dead twenty times at least before the
month is out; and when they come home, they tell their friends they
would have enjoyed themselves immensely had they been allowed, but
they were so much annoyed and worried they lost half the pleasure of
the trip. So it will be to the end of time. As children, fretful; as
boys and girls, impatient and ill-tempered; as men and women,
worrying, interfering, restless; as old people, peevish and
exacting--they will die as they have lived; and the world about them
will draw a deep breath of relief when the day of their departure
comes, and will feel their atmosphere so much the lighter for their
loss. Poor creatures! They are conscious of not being loved as they
love, and as perhaps theoretically, they deserve to be loved; but it
would be impossible, even by a surgical operation, to make them
understand the reason why; and that it is their own habit of
incessantly worrying which has chilled the hearts of their friends,
and made them such a burden to others that their removal is a release
and their absence the promise of a life of peace.
_SWEETS OF MARRIED LIFE._
Marriage, which most girls consider the sole aim of their existence
and the end of all their anxieties, is often the beginning of a set of
troubles which none among them expect, and which, when they come, very
few accept with the dignity of patience or the reasonableness of
common sense. Hitherto the man has been the suitor, the wooer. It has
been his _métier_ to make love; to utter extravagant professions; to
talk poetry and romance of an eminently unwearable kind; and to swear
that feelings, which by the very nature of things it is impossible to
maintain at their present state of fever heat, will be as lasting as
life itself and never know subsidence nor diminution. And girls
believe all that their lovers tell them. They believe in the
absorption of the man's whole life in the love which at the most
cannot be more than a part of his life; they believe that things will
go on for ever as they have begun, and that the fire and fervour of
passion will never cool down to the more manageable warmth of
friendship. And in this belief of theirs lies the rock on which not a
few make such pitiful shipwreck of their married happiness. They
expect their husbands to remain always lovers. Not lovers only in the
best sense, which of course all happy husbands are to the end of time,
but lovers as in the old fond, foolish, courting days. They expect a
continuance of the romance, the poetry, the exaggeration, the _petits
soins_, the microscopic attentions, the absorption of thought and
interest, the centralization of his happiness in her society, just as
in the days when she was still to be won, or, a little later, when,
being won, she was new in the wearing. And as we said before, a wife's
first trial, and her greatest, is when her husband begins to leave off
this kind of fervid love-making and settles down into the tranquil
friend.
As with children so is it in the nature of most women to require
continual assurances. Very few believe in a love which is not
frequently expressed; while the ability to trust in the vital warmth
of an affection that has lost its early feverishness is the mark of a
higher wisdom than most of them possess. To make them thoroughly happy
a man must be always at their feet; and they are jealous of
everything--even of his work--that takes him away from them, or gives
him occasion for thought and interest outside themselves. They are
rarely able to rise to the height of married friendship; and if they
belong to a reticent and quiet-going man--a man who says 'I love you'
once for all, and then contents himself with living a life of loyalty
and kindness and not talking about it--they fret at what they call
his coldness, and feel themselves shorn of half their glory and more
than half their dues. They refuse to believe in that which is not
daily repeated. They want the incense of flattery, the excitement of
love-making; and if these desires are not ministered to by their
husbands, the danger is that they will get some one else to
'understand' them and feed the sentimentality which dies of inanition
in the quiet serenity of home. Moonlights; a bouquet of the earliest
flowers carefully arranged and tenderly presented; the changing lights
on the mountain tops; the exquisite song of the nightingale at two
o'clock in the morning; all the rest of those vague and suggestive
delights which once made the meeting-places of souls, and furnished
occasion for delicious ravings, become by time and use and the wearing
realities of business and the crowding pressure of anxieties, puerile
and annoying to the ordinary Englishman, who is not a poet by nature.
When all the world was young by reason of his own youth, and the fever
of the love-making time was on him, he was quite as romantic as his
wife. But now he is sobering down; life is fast becoming a very
prosaic thing to him; work is taking the place of pleasure, ambition
of romance; he pooh-poohs her fond remembrances of bygone follies, and
prefers his pipe in the warm library to a station by the open window,
watching the sunset because it looks as it did on _that_ evening, and
shivering with incipient catarrh. All this is very dreadful to her;
women, unfortunately for themselves, remaining young and keeping hold
much longer than do men.
The first defection of this kind is a pang the young wife never
forgets. But she has many more and yet more bitter ones, when the
defection takes a personal shape, and some pretty little attention is
carelessly received without its due reward of loving thanks. Perhaps
some usual form of caress is omitted in the hurry of the morning's
work; or some gloomy anticipation of professional trouble makes him
oblivious of her presence; or, fretted by her importunate attentions,
he buries himself in a book, more to escape being spoken to than for
the book's own merits.
Many a woman has gone into her own room and had a 'good cry' because
her husband called her by her baptismal name, and not by some absurd
nickname invented in the days of their folly; or because, pressed for
time, he hurried out of the house without going through the
established formula of leave-taking. The lover has merged in the
husband; security has taken the place of wooing; and the woman does
not take kindly to the transformation. Sometimes she plays a dangerous
game, and tries what flirting with other men will do. If her scheme
does not answer, and her husband is not made jealous, she is revolted,
and holds herself that hardly-used being, a neglected wife. She cannot
accept as a compliment the quiet trust which certain cool-headed men
of a loyal kind place in their wives; and her husband's tolerance of
her flirting manner--which he takes to be manner only, with no evil in
it, and with which, though he may not especially like it, he does not
interfere--seems to her indifference rather than tolerance. Yet the
confidence implied in this forbearance is in point of fact a
compliment worth all the pretty nothings ever invented; though this
hearty faith is just the thing which annoys her, and which she
stigmatizes as neglect. If she were to go far enough she would find
out her mistake. But by that time she would have gone too far to
profit by her experience.
Nothing is more annoying than that display of affection which some
husbands and wives show to each other in society. That familiarity of
touch, those half-concealed caresses, those absurd names, that
prodigality of endearing epithets, that devoted attention which they
flaunt in the face of the public as a kind of challenge to the world
at large to come and admire their happiness, is always noticed and
laughed at; and sometimes more than laughed at. Yet to some women this
parade of love is the very essence of married happiness and part of
their dearest privileges. They believe themselves admired and envied
when they are ridiculed and scoffed at; and they think their husbands
are models for other men to copy when they are taken as examples for
all to avoid.
Men who have any real manliness however, do not give in to this kind
of thing; though there are some, as effeminate and gushing as women
themselves, who like this sloppy effusiveness of love and carry it on
into quite old age, fondling the ancient grandmother with grey hair as
lavishly as they had fondled the youthful bride, and seeing no want of
harmony in calling a withered old dame of sixty and upwards by the pet
names by which they had called her when she was a slip of a girl of
eighteen. The continuance of love from youth to old age is very
lovely, very cheering; but even 'John Anderson my Jo' would lose its
pathos if Mrs. Anderson had ignored the difference between the raven
locks and the snowy brow.
All that excess of flattering and petting of which women are so fond
becomes a bore to a man if required as part of the daily habit of
life. Out in the world as he is, harassed by anxieties of which she
knows nothing, home is emphatically his place of rest--where his wife
is his friend who knows his mind; where he may be himself without the
fear of offending, and relax the strain that must be kept up out of
doors; where he may feel himself safe, understood, at ease. And some
women, and these by no means the coldest nor the least loving, are
wise enough to understand this need of rest in the man's harder life,
and, accepting the quiet of security as part of the conditions of
marriage, content themselves with the undemonstrative love into which
the fever of passion has subsided. Others fret over it, and make
themselves and their husbands wretched because they cannot believe in
that which is not for ever paraded before their eyes.
Yet what kind of home is it for the man when he has to walk as if on
egg-shells, every moment afraid of wounding the susceptibilities of a
woman who will take nothing on trust, and who has to be continually
assured that he still loves her, before she will believe that to-day
is as yesterday? Of one thing she may be certain; no wife who
understands what is the best kind of marriage demands these continual
attentions, which, voluntary offerings of the lover, become enforced
tribute from the husband. She knows that as a wife, whom it is not
necessary to court nor flatter, she has a nobler place than that which
is expressed by the attentions paid to a mistress.
Wifehood, like all assured conditions, does not need to be buttressed
up; but a less certain position must be supported from the outside,
and an insecure self-respect, an uncertain holding, must be
perpetually strengthened and reassured. Women who cannot live happily
without being made love to are more like mistresses than wives, and
come but badly off in the great struggles of life and the cruel
handling of time. Placing all their happiness in things which cannot
continue, they let slip that which lies in their hands; and in their
desire to retain the romantic position of lovers lose the sweet
security of wives. Perhaps, if they had higher aims in life than those
with which they make shift to satisfy themselves, they would not let
themselves sink to the level of this folly, and would understand
better than they do now the worth of realities as contrasted with
appearances. And yet we cannot but pity the poor, weak, craving souls
who long so pitifully for the freshness of the morning to continue far
into the day and evening--who cling so tenaciously to the fleeting
romance of youth. They are taken by the glitter of things--love-making
among the rest; and the man who is showiest in his affection, who can
express it with most colour, and paint it, so to speak, with the
minutest touches, is the man whose love seems to them the most
trustworthy and the most intense. They make the mistake of confounding
this show with the substance, of trusting to pictorial expression
rather than to solid facts. And they make that other mistake of
cloying their husbands with half-childish caresses which were all very
well in the early days, but which become tiresome as time goes on and
the gravity of life deepens. And then, when the man either quietly
keeps them off or more brusquely repels them, they are hurt and
miserable, and think the whole happiness of their lives is dead, and
all that makes marriage beautiful at an end.
What is to be done to balance things evenly in this unequal world of
sex? What indeed, is to be done at any time to reconcile strength with
weakness, and to give each its due? One thing at least is sure. The
more thoroughly women learn the true nature of men, the fewer mistakes
they will make and the less unhappiness they will create for
themselves; and the more patient men are with the hysterical
excitability, the restless craving, which nature, for some purpose at
present unknown, has made the special temperament of women, the fewer
_femmes incomprises_ there will be in married homes and the larger the
chance of married happiness. All one's theories of domestic life come
down at last to the give-and-take system, to bearing and forbearing,
and meeting half way idiosyncrasies which one does not personally
share.
_SOCIAL NOMADS._
As there are wandering tribes which neither build houses nor pitch
their tents in one place, so there are certain social nomads who never
seem to have a home of their own, and who do not make one for
themselves by remaining long in any other person's. They are always
moving about and are to be met everywhere; at all sea-side places; at
all show places; in Switzerland, France, Italy and Germany; where they
live chiefly in _pensions_ at moderate charges, or in meagre lodgings
affiliated to a populous _table d'hôte_ much frequented by the
English. For one characteristic of social nomads is the strange way in
which they congregate together, expatiating on the delights of life
abroad, while seeing nothing but the outside of things from the centre
of a dense Britannic circle.
Another characteristic is their chronic state of impecuniosity, and
the desire of looking like the best on a fixed income of slender
dimensions. Hence they are obliged to organize their expenditure on a
very narrow basis, and therefore live in boarding-houses, _pensions_,
or wherever good-sized rooms, a sufficient table, and a constant
current of society are to be had at small individual cost. As they
are people who travel much, they can speak two or three languages, but
only as those who have learnt by ear and not by book. They know
nothing of foreign literature, and but little of their own, save
novels and the class which goes by the name of 'light.' Indeed all the
reading they accomplish is confined to newspapers, magazines and
novels. But at home, and among those who have not been to Berlin, who
have never seen Venice, and to whom Paris is a dream still to be
realized, they assume an intimate acquaintance with both the
literature and the politics of the Continent--especially the
politics--and laugh at the English press for its blindness and
onesidedness. They happen to know beyond all doubt how this
Correspondent was bought over with so much money down; how that one is
in the toils of such or such a Minister's wife; why a third got his
appointment; how a fourth keeps his; and they could, if they chose,
give you chapter and verse for all they say.
If they chance to have been in India some twenty or thirty years ago,
they will tell you why the Mutiny took place, and how the change of
Government works; and they can put their fingers on all the sore
places of the Empire, beginning with the distribution of patronage and
ending with the deficiency of revenue, as aptly as if they were on the
spot and had the confidence of the ruling officials. But in spite of
these little foibles they are amusing companions as a rule, if
shallow and radically ill-informed; and as it is for their own
interest to be good company, they have cultivated the art of
conversation to the highest pitch of which they are capable, and can
entertain if not instruct. When they aim at instruction indeed, they
are pretty sure to miss the mark; and the social nomad who lays down
the law on foreign statesmen and politics, and who speaks from
personal knowledge, is just the one authority not to be accepted.
Always living in public, yet having to fight, each for his own hand,
the manners of social nomads in _pensions_ are generally a strange
mixture of suavity and selfishness; and the small intrigues and crafty
stratagems going on among them for the possession of the favourite
seat in the drawing-room, the special attention of the head-waiter at
table, the earliest attendance of the housemaid in the morning, is in
strange contrast with the ready smiles, the personal flatteries, the
affectation of sympathetic interest kept for show. But every social
nomad knows how to appraise this show at its just value, and can weigh
it in the balance to a grain. He does not much prize it; for he knows
one characteristic of these communities to be that everybody speaks
against everybody else, and that all concur in speaking against the
management.