soul, a trifle weak and vain in proportion; who knows what
evil-disposed person may not get influence over her and exercise it to
the detriment of all concerned? She has the power of making her will,
and, granting that she is proof against the fascinations of some
fortune-hunting scamp twenty years at the least her junior--may be
forty, who knows? do not men continually marry their grandmothers if
they are well paid for it?--and though every daughter's mamma is of
course normally superior to weakness of this kind, yet accidents will
happen where least expected. And even if there is no possible fear of
the fascinating scamp on the look-out for a widow with a jointure,
there are artful companions and intriguing maids who worm themselves
into confidence and ultimate power; sly professors of faiths dependent
on filthy lucre for their proof of divinity; and on the whole, all
things considered, dear mamma's purse and person are safest in the
custody of her children. So the poor lady, who was once the head of a
place, gives up all title to a home of her own, and spends her time
among her married daughters, in whose houses she is neither guest nor
mistress. She is only mamma; one of the family without a voice in the
family arrangements; a member of a community without a recognized
status; shunted; set aside; and yet with dangers of the most delicate
kind besetting her path in all directions. Nothing can be much more
unsatisfactory than such a position; and none much more difficult to
steer through, without renouncing the natural right of self-assertion
on the one hand, or certainly rasping the exaggerated susceptibilities
of touchy people on the other.
In general the shunted dowager has as little indirect influence as
direct power; and her opinion is never asked nor desired as a matter
of graceful acknowledgment of her maturer judgment. If she is appealed
to, it is in some family dispute between her son and daughter, where
her partizanship is sought only as a makeweight for one or other of
the belligerents. But, so far as she individually is concerned, she is
given to understand that she is rococo, out of date, absurd; that,
since she was young and active, things have entered on a new phase
where she is nowhere, and that her past experience is not of the
slightest use as things are nowadays. If she has still energy enough
left, so that she likes to have her say and do her will, she has to
pass under a continual fire of opposition. If she is timid,
phlegmatic, indolent, or peaceable, and with no fight in her, she is
quietly sat upon and extinguished.
Dear mamma is the best creature in the world so long as she is the
mere pawn on the young folks' domestic chess-board, to be placed
without an opposing will or sentiment of her own. She is the 'greatest
comfort' to her daughter; and even her son-in-law assents to her
presence, so long as she takes the children when required to do so,
does her share of the tending and more than her share of the giving,
but never presuming to administer nor to correct; so long as she is
placidly ready to take off all the bores; listen to the interminable
story-tellers; play propriety for the young people; make conversation
for the helplessly stupid or nervous; so long in fact as she will make
herself generally useful to others, demand nothing on her own account,
and be content to stand on the siding while the younger world whisks
up and down at express speed at its pleasure. Let her do more than
this--let her sometimes attempt to manage and sometimes object to be
managed--let her have a will of her own and seek to impose it--and
then 'dear mamma is so trying, so fond of interfering, so unable to
understand things;' and nothing but mysterious 'considerations' induce
either daughter or son-in-law to keep her.
No one seems to understand the heartache it must have cost her, and
that it must be continually costing her, to see herself so suddenly
and completely shunted. Only a year ago and she had pretensions of all
kinds. Time had dealt with her leniently, and no moment had come when
she had suddenly leaped a gulf and passed from one age to another
without gradations. She had drifted almost imperceptibly through the
various stages into a long term of mature sirenhood, remaining always
young and pretty to her husband. But now her widow's cap marks an era
in her life, and the loss of her old home a new and descending step in
her career. She is plainly held to have done with the world and all
individual happiness--all personal importance; plainly told that she
is now only an interposing cushion to soften the shock or ease the
strain for others. But she does not quite see it for her own part, and
after having been so long first--first in her society, in her home,
with her husband, with her children--it is a little hard on her that
she should have to sink down all at once into a mere rootless waif, a
kind of family possession belonging to every one in turn and the
common property of all, but possessing nothing of herself.
Of course dear mamma can make herself bitterly disagreeable if she
likes. She can taunt instead of letting herself be snubbed. She can
interfere where she is not wanted; give unpalatable advice; make
unpleasant remarks; tell stinging truths; and in all ways act up to
the reputation of the typical mother-in-law. But in general that is
only when she has kept her life in her own hands; has still her place
and her own home; remains the centre of the family and its recognized
head; with the dreadful power of making innumerable codicils and
leaving munificent bequests. If she has gone into the Learism of
living about among her daughters, it is scarce likely that she has
character enough to be actively disagreeable or aggressive.
On a first visit to a country-house it is sometimes difficult to
rightly localize the old lady on the sofa who goes in and out of the
room apparently without purpose, and who seems to have privileges but
no rights. Whose property is she? What is she doing here? She is dear
mamma certainly; but is she a personage or a dependent? Is she on a
visit like the rest of us? Is she the maternal lodger whose income
helps not unhandsomely? or, has she no private fortune, and so lives
with her son-in-law because she cannot afford to keep house on her own
account? She is evidently shunted, whatever her circumstances, and has
no _locus standi_ save that given by sufferance, convenience, or
affection. Naturally she is the last of the dowagers visiting at the
house. She may come before the younger women, from the respect due to
age; but her place is at the rear of all her own contemporaries; not
for the graceful fiction of hospitality, but because she is one of the
family and therefore must give precedence to strangers.
She is the movable circumstance of the home life. The young wife, of
course, has her fixed place and settled duties; the master is the
master; the guests have their graduated rights; but the shunted
dowager is peripatetic and elastic as well as shunted, and to be used
according to general convenience. If a place is vacant, which there is
no one else to fill, dear mamma must please to take it; if the party
is larger than there are places, dear mamma must please stay away. She
is assumed to have got over the age when pleasure means pleasure, and
to know no more of disappointment than of skipping. In fact, she is
assumed to have got over all individuality of every kind, and to be
able to sacrifice or to restrain as she may be required by the rest.
Perhaps one of her greatest trials lies in the silence she is obliged
to keep, if she would keep peace. She must sit still and see things
done which are gall and wormwood to her. Say that she has been
specially punctilious in habits, suave in bearing, perhaps a trifling
humbugging and flattering--she has to make the best of her daughter's
brusqueries and uncontrolled tempers, of her son-in-law's dirty boots,
and the new religion of outspokenness which both profess. Say that she
has been accustomed to speak her mind with the uncompromising boldness
of a woman owning a place and stake in the county--she has to curb the
natural indignation of her soul when her young people, wiser in their
generation or not so securely planted, make friends with all sorts and
conditions, are universally sweet to everybody, hunt after popularity
with untiring zest, and live according to the doctrine of angels
unawares. The ways of the house are not her ways, and things are not
ordered as she used to order them. People are invited with whom she
would not have shaken hands, and others are left out whose
acquaintance she would have specially affected. All sorts of
subversive doctrines are afloat, and the old family traditions are
sure to be set aside. She abhors the Ritualistic tendencies of her
son-in-law, or she despises his Evangelical proclivities; his politics
are not sound and his vote fatally on the wrong side; and she laments
that her daughter, so differently brought up, should have been won
over as she has been to her husband's views. But what of that? She is
only a dowager shunted and laid on the shelf; and what she likes or
dislikes does not weigh a feather in the balance, so long as her purse
and person are safe in the family, and her will securely locked up in
the solicitor's iron safe, with no likelihood of secret codicils
upstairs. On the whole then, there is a word to be said even for the
dreadful mother-in-law of general scorn; and, as the shunted dowager,
the poor soul has her griefs of no slight weight and her daily
humiliations bitter enough to bear.
_PRIVILEGED PERSONS._
We all number among our acquaintances certain privileged persons;
people who make their own laws without regard to the received canons
of society, and who claim exemption from some of the moral and most of
the conventional obligations which are considered binding on others.
The privileged person may be male or female; but is more often the
latter; sundry restraining influences keeping men in check which are
inoperative with women. Women indeed, when they choose to fall out of
the ranks and follow an independent path of their own, care very
little for any influences at all, the restraining power which will
keep them in line being yet an unknown quantity. As a woman then, we
will first deal with the privileged person.
One embodiment of the privileged person is she whose forte lies in
saying unpleasant things with praiseworthy coolness. She aims at a
reputation for smartness or for honesty, according to the character of
her intellect, and she uses what she gets without stint or sparing. If
clever, she is noted for her sarcastic speeches and epigrammatic
brilliancy; and her good things are bandied about from one to the
other of her friends; with an uneasy sense however, in the laughter
they excite. For every one feels that he who laughs to-day may have
cause to wince to-morrow, and that dancing on one's own grave is by no
means an exhilarating exercise.
No one is safe with her--not even her nearest and dearest; and she
does not care how deeply she wounds when she is about it. But her
victims rarely retaliate; which is the oddest part of the business.
They resign themselves meekly enough to the scalpel, and comfort
themselves with the reflection that it is only pretty Fanny's way, and
that she is known to all the world as a privileged person who may say
what she likes. It falls hard though, on the uninitiated and
sensitive, when they are first introduced to a privileged person with
a talent for saying smart things and no pity to speak of. Perhaps they
have learned their manners too well to retort in kind, if even they
are able; and so feel themselves constrained to bear the unexpected
smart, as the Spartan boy bore his fox. One sees them at times endure
their humiliation before folk with a courageous kind of stoicism which
would do honour to a better cause. Perhaps they are too much taken
aback to be able to marshal their wits for a serviceable
counter-thrust; all they can do is to look confused and feel angry;
but sometimes, if seldom, the privileged person with a talent for
sarcastic sayings meets with her match and gets paid off in her own
coin--which greatly offends her, while it rejoices those of her
friends who have suffered many things at her hands before. If she is
rude in a more sledge-hammer kind of way--rude through what it pleases
her to call honesty and the privilege of speaking her mind--her
attacks are easier to meet, being more openly made and less dependent
on quickness or subtlety of intellect to parry.
Sometimes indeed, by their very coarseness they defeat themselves.
When a woman of this kind says in a loud voice, as her final argument
in a discussion, 'Then you must be a fool,' as we have known a woman
tell her hostess, she has blunted her own weapon and armed her
opponent. All her privileges cannot change the essential constitution
of things; and, rudeness being the boomerang of the drawing-room which
returns on the head of the thrower, the privileged person who prides
herself on her honesty, and who is not too squeamish as to its use,
finds herself discomfited by the very silence and forbearance of her
victim. In either case however, whether using the rapier or the
sledge-hammer, the person privileged in speech is partly a nuisance
and partly a stirrer-up of society. People gather round to hear her,
when she has grappled with a victim worthy of her steel, and is using
it with effect. Yet unless her social status is such that she can
command a following by reason of the flunkeyism inherent in human
nature, she is sure to find herself dropped before her appointed end
has come. People get afraid of her ill-nature for themselves, and
tired of hearing the same things repeated of others. For even a clever
woman has her intellectual limits, and is forced after a time to
double back on herself and re-open the old workings. It is all very
well, people think, to read sharp satires on society in the abstract,
and to fit the cap as one likes. Even if it fits oneself, one can bear
the fool's crown with some small degree of equanimity in the hope that
others will not discover the fact; but when it comes to a hand-to-hand
attack, with bystanders to witness, and oneself reduced to an
ignominious silence, it is another matter altogether; and, however
sparkling the gifts of one's privileged friend, one would rather not
put oneself in the way of their exercise. So she is gradually shunned
till she is finally abandoned; what was once the clever impertinence
of a pretty person, or the frank insolence of a cherubic hoyden,
having turned by time into the acrid humour of a grim female who keeps
no terms with any one, and with whom therefore, no terms are kept. The
pretty person given to smart sayings with a sting in them and the
cherubic hoyden who allows herself the use of the weapon of honesty,
would do well to ponder on the inevitable end, when the only real
patent of their privileges has run out, and they have no longer youth
and beauty to plead in condonation for their bad breeding.
Another exercise of peculiar privilege is to be found in the matter of
flirting. Some women are able to flirt with impunity to an extent
which would simply destroy any one else. They flirt with the most
delicious frankness, yet for all practical purposes keep their place
in society undisturbed and their repute intact. They have the art of
making the best of two worlds, the secret of which is all their own,
yet which causes the weak to stumble and the rash to fall. They ride
on two horses at once, with a skill as consummate as their daring; but
the feeble sisters who follow after them slip down between, and come
to grief and public disaster as their reward. It is in vain to try to
analyze the terms on which this kind of privilege is founded. Say that
one pretty person takes the tone of universal relationship--that she
has an illimitable fund of sisterliness always at command for a host
of 'dear boys' of her own age; or, when a little older and drawing
near to the borders of mature sirenhood, that she is a kind of
oecumenical aunt to a large congregation of well-looking nephews--she
may steer safely through the shallows of this dangerous coast and land
at last on the _terra firma_ of a respected old age; but let another
try it, and she goes to the bottom like a stone. And yet the first has
pushed her privileges as far as they will go, while the second has
only played with hers; but the one comes triumphantly into port with
all colours flying, and the other makes shipwreck and is lost.
And why the one escapes and the other goes down is a mystery given to
no one to fathom. But so it is; and every student of society is aware
of this strange elasticity of privilege with certain pretty friends,
and must have more than once wondered at Mrs. Grundy's leniency to the
flagrant sinner on the right side of the square, coupled with her
severity to the lesser naughtiness on the left. The flirting form of
privilege is the most partial in its limitations of all; and things
which one fair patentee may do with impunity, retaining her garlands,
will cause another to be stripped bare and chastised with scorpions;
and no one knows why nor how the difference is made.
Another self-granted privilege is the licence some give themselves in
the way of taking liberties, and the boldness with which they force
your barriers. Indeed there is no barrier that can stand against these
resolute invaders. You are not at home, say, to all the world, but the
privileged person is sure you will see him or her, and forthwith
mounts your stairs with a cheerful conscience, carrying his welcome
with him--so he says. Admitted into your penetralia, the privileges of
this bold sect increase, being of the same order as the traditional
ell on the grant of the inch. They drop in at all times, and are never
troubled with modest doubts. They elect themselves your 'casuals,' for
whom you are supposed to have always a place at your table; and you
are obliged to invite them into the dining-room when the servant
sounds the gong and the roast mutton makes itself evident. They hear
you are giving an evening, and they tell you they will come,
uninvited; taking for granted that you intended to ask them, and
would have been sorry if you had forgotten. They tack themselves on to
your party at a fête and air their privileges in public--when the man
whom of all others you would like best for a son-in-law is hovering
about, kept at bay by the privileged person's familiar manner towards
yourself and your daughter.
Your friend would laugh at you if you hinted to him that he might by
chance be misinterpreted. He argues that every one knows him and his
ways; and acts as if he held a talisman by which the truth could be
read through the thickest crust of appearances. It would be well
sometimes if he had this talisman, for his familiarity is a
bewildering kind of thing to strangers on their first introduction to
a house where he has privileges; and it takes time, and some
misapprehension, before it is rightly understood. We do not know how
to catalogue this man who is so wonderfully at ease with our new
friends. We know that he is not a relation, and yet he acts as one
bound by the closest ties. The girls are no longer children, but his
manner towards them would be a little too familiar if they were half a
dozen years younger than they are; and we come at last to the
conclusion that the father owes him money, or that the wife had
been--well, what?--in the days gone by; and that he is therefore
master of the situation and beyond the reach of rebuke. All things
considered, this kind of privilege is dangerous, and to be carefully
avoided by parents and guardians. Indeed, every form of this patent
is dangerous; the chances being that sooner or later familiarity will
degenerate into contempt and a bitter rupture take the place of the
former excessive intimacy.
The neglect of all ordinary social observances is another reading of
the patent of privilege which certain people grant themselves. These
are the people who never return your calls; who do not think
themselves obliged to answer your invitations; who do not keep their
appointments; and who forget their promises. It is useless to reproach
them, to expect from them the grace of punctuality, the politeness of
a reply, or the faintest stirrings of a social conscience in anything.
They are privileged to the observance of a general neglect, and you
must make your account with them as they are. If they are
good-natured, they will spend much time and energy in framing
apologies which may or may not tell. If women, graceful, and liking to
be liked without taking much trouble about it, they will profess a
thousand sorrows and shames the next time they see you, and play the
pretty hypocrite with more or less success. You must not mind what
they do, they say pleadingly; no one does; they are such notoriously
bad callers no one ever expects them to pay visits like other people;
or they are so lazy about writing, please don't mind if they don't
answer your letters nor even your invitations: they don't mean to be
rude, only they don't like writing; or they are so dreadfully busy
they cannot do half they ought and are sometimes obliged to break
their engagements; and so on. And you, probably for the twentieth
time, accept excuses which mean nothing but 'I am a privileged
person,' and go on again as before, hoping for better things against
all the lessons of past experience. How can you do otherwise with that
charming face looking so sweetly into yours, and the coquettish little
hypocrisies played off for your benefit? If that charming face were
old or ugly, things would be different; but so long as women possess
_la beauté du diable_ men can do nothing but treat them as angels.
And so we come round to the root of the matter once more. The
privileged person, whose patent society has endorsed, must be a young,
pretty, charming woman. Failing these conditions, she is a mere
adventuress whose discomfiture is not far off; with these, her patent
will last just so long as they do. And when they have gone, she will
degenerate into a 'horror,' at whom the bold will laugh, the timid
tremble, and whose company the wise will avoid.
_MODERN MAN-HATERS._
Among the many odd social phenomena of the present day may be reckoned
the class of women who are professed despisers and contemners of men;
pretty misanthropes, doubtful alike of the wisdom of the past and the
distinctions of nature, but vigorously believing in a good time coming
when women are to take the lead and men to be as docile dogs in their
wake. To be sure, as if by way of keeping the balance even and
maintaining the sum of forces in the world in due equilibrium, a
purely useless and absurd kind of womanhood is more in fashion than it
used to be; but this does not affect either the accuracy or the
strangeness of our first statement; and the number of women now in
revolt against the natural, the supremacy of men is something
unparalleled in our history. Both before and during the first French
Revolution the _esprits forts_ in petticoats were agents of no small
account in the work of social reorganization going on; but hitherto
women, here in England, have been content to believe as they have been
taught, and to trust the men to whom they belong with a simple kind
of faith in their friendliness and good intentions, which reads now
like a tradition of the past.