they have collaterals of respectable name and standing; cousins in
Government offices; dead uncles of good military rank; perhaps a
father, dead or alive, with a quite unexceptionable position; but you
never see them with their natural belongings, and no one thinks of
visiting them at their own homes. They are sure to have a mother in
bad health, who never goes out and never sees any one; and if you
should by chance come across her, you find a shabby, painful, peevish
woman who seems at odds with life altogether, and who is as unlike her
showy daughter as a russet wren is unlike a humming-bird. The
drawing-room epiphyte introduces mamma, when necessary, with a
creditable effort at indifference, not to say content, with her
conditions; but if you can read signs, you know what she is feeling
about that suit of rusty black, and how little she enjoys the
rencounter.
Sometimes she has a brother, of whom she never speaks unless obliged,
and of whose occupation and whereabouts, when asked, she gives only
the vaguest account. He has an office in the City; or he has gone
abroad; or he is in the navy and she forgets the name of his ship;
but, whatever he is, you can get no clue more distinct than this. If
you should chance to see him, you get a greater surprise than you had
when you met the mother; and you wonder, with a deeper wonder, how
such a sister should have sprung from the same stock as that which
produced such a brother. Sometimes however, the brother is as
presentable as the sister; in which case he probably follows much the
same course as herself, and hangs on to the skirts of those of the
Upper Ten who recognize him--preferring to idle away his life and
energy as a well-dressed epiphyte of greatness rather than live the
life of a man in a lower social sphere. But, as a rule, stray damsels
have neither brothers nor sisters visible to the world, and only a
widowed mother in the background, whose health is bad and who does not
go out.
The ulterior object of the ladies who patronize these pretty epiphytes
is to get them married; partly from personal kindness, partly from the
pleasure all women have in bringing about a marriage that does not
interfere with themselves. But they seldom accomplish this object. Who
is to marry the epiphyte? The men of the society into which she has
been brought from the outside have their own ambitions to realize.
They want money, or land, or a good family connexion, to make the
sacrifice an equal bargain and to gild the yoke of matrimony with
becoming splendour. And the drawing room epiphyte has nothing to offer
as her contribution but a fine pair of eyes, a good-natured manner,
and a pretty taste for music. To marry well among the society in which
she finds herself is therefore almost impossible. And her tastes have
been so far formed as to render a marriage into lower circumstances
almost as impossible on the other side.
Besides, what could she do as the wife of a clergyman, say on three
hundred a year, with a poor parish to look after and an increasing
tribe of babies to feed and clothe? Her clear high notes, her splendid
register, her brilliant touch, will not help her then; and the taste
with which she makes up half-worn silk gowns, and transforms what was
a rag into an ornament, will not do much towards finding the necessary
boots and loaves which keep her sisters awake at night wondering how
they are to be got. She has been taught nothing of the art of home
life, if she has learnt much of that of the drawing-room. She cannot
cook, nor make a little go a long way by the cunning of good
management and a well-masked economy; she cannot do serviceable
needlework, though she may be great in fancy work, and quite a genius
in millinery; and the habit of having plenty of servants about her has
destroyed the habit of turning her hand to anything like energetic
self-help. Epiphyte as she is, penniless stray damsel more than half
maintained by the kindness of her grand friends, she has to keep up
the sham of appearances before those friends' domestics. And as
ladyhood in England is chiefly measured by a woman's uselessness, and
to do anything in the way of rational work would be a spot on her
ermine, the poor epiphyte of the drawing-room, with mamma in rusty
black in those shabby lodgings of theirs, learns in self-defence to
practise all the foolish helplessness of her superiors; and, to retain
the respect of the servants, loses her own.
What is she then but one of those misplaced beings who are neither of
one sphere nor of another? She is not of the _grandes dames_ on her
own account, yet she lives in their houses as one among them. She is
not a woman who can make the best of things; who, notable and
industrious, and by her clever contrivances of saving and substitution
is able to order a home comfortably on next to nothing; and yet she
has no solid claim to anything but the undercut of the middle classes,
and no right to expect more than the most ordinary marriage. She is
nothing. Ashamed and unable to work, she has to accept gratuities
which are not wages. Waiting on Providence and floated by her friends,
she wanders though society ever on the look-out for chances. Each new
acquaintance is a fresh hope, and every house that opens to her
contains the potentiality of final success. To be met everywhere is
the ultimate point of her ambition with respect to means; the end kept
steadily, if fruitlessly, in view, is that satisfying settlement which
shall take her out of the category of a hanger-on and give her a
_locus standi_ of her own. But it does not come.
Year by year we meet the drawing-room epiphyte in the old haunts--at
Brighton; at Ryde; at half-a-dozen good houses in London; on a visit
to the friends who make much of her one day and snub her the next--but
she does not 'go off.' She is pretty, she is agreeable, she is well
dressed, she is accomplished; but she does not find the husband for
whom all this is offered as the equivalent. Year by year she grows
fatter or thinner as her constitution expands into obesity or shrivels
into leanness; the lines about her fine eyes deepen; the powder is a
little thicker on her cheeks; and there are more than shrewd
suspicions of a touch of rouge or of antimony, with a judicious
application of patent hair-restorer to lift up the faded tints.
Fighting desperately with that old enemy Time, she disputes line by
line the tribute he claims; and succeeds so far as to continue a good
make-up for a year or two after other women of her own age have given
in and consented to look their years. But the drawing-room epiphyte is
nothing if she is not young--which is synonymous with power to
interest and amuse. Her friends, the great ladies who hold
drawing-rooms and gather society in shoals, want points of colour in
their rooms as well as serviceable foils. The apple-pie that was all
made of quinces was a failure, wanting the homely _couche_ from which
the savour of the more fragrant fruit might be thrown up. On the other
hand there are social meetings which are like apple-pies without any
quince at all; and then the epiphyte is invaluable, and her music
worth as much in its degree as if she were a prima donna, each of
whose notes ranked as gold. So that when she ceases to be young, when
she loses her high notes and has gout in her fingers, she fails in her
only _raison d'être_, and her occupation is gone. Hence her hard
struggles with the old enemy, and her half-heroic, half-tragic
determination not to give in while a shred of force remains.
On the day when she collapses into an old woman she is lost. She has
nothing for it then but to withdraw from the brilliant drawing-rooms
she has so long haunted into dingy lodgings in a back street, and live
as her mother lived before her. Forgotten by the world which she has
spent her life in waiting on, she has leisure to reflect on the
relative values of things, and to lament, as she probably will, that
she gave living grain for gilded husks; that she exchanged the
realities of love and home, which might have been hers had she been
contented to accept them on a lower social scale, for the barren
pleasures of the day and the delusive hope of marrying well in a
sphere where she had no solid foothold. She had her choice, like
others; but she chose to throw for high stakes at heavy odds, and in
so doing let slip what she originally held. The bird in the hand might
have been of a homely kind enough; still, it was always the bird;
while the two golden pheasants in the bush flew away unsalted, and
left her only their shadows to run after.
On the whole then, we incline to the belief that the drawing-room
epiphyte is a mistake, and that those stray damsels who wander about
society unattended by any natural protector and always more or less in
the character of adventuresses, would do better to keep to the sphere
determined by parental circumstances than to let themselves be taken
into one which does not belong to them and which they cannot hold.
And furthermore it seems to us that, irrespective of its present
instability and future fruitlessness, the position of a drawing-room
epiphyte is one which no woman of sense would accept, and to which no
woman of spirit would submit.
_THE EPICENE SEX._
There has always been in the world a kind of women whom one scarcely
knows how to classify as to sex; men by their instincts, women by
their form, but neither men nor women as we regard either in the
ideal. In early times they were divided into two classes; the Amazons
who, donning helmet and cuirass, went to the wars that they might be
with their lovers, or perhaps only for an innate liking for rough
work; and the tribe of ancient women, so withered and so wild, who
should be women yet whose beards forbade men so to account them, and
for whom public opinion usually closed the controversy by declaring
that they were witches--that is, creatures so unlike the rightful
woman of nature that only the devil himself was supposed to be
answerable for them. These particular manifestations have long since
passed away, and we have nowadays neither Amazons learning the
goose-step in our barrack-yards, nor witches brewing hell-broth on
Scottish moors; but we have the Epicene Sex all the same--women who
would defy the acutest social Cuvier among us to classify, but who
are growing daily into more importance and making continually fresh
strides in their unwholesome way.
Possessed by a restless discontent with their appointed work, and
fired with a mad desire to dabble in all things unseemly, which they
call ambition; blasphemous to the sweetest virtues of their sex, which
until now have been accounted both their own pride and the safeguard
of society; holding it no honour to be reticent, unselfish, patient,
obedient, but swaggering to the front, ready to try conclusions in
aggression, in selfishness, in insolent disregard of duty, in cynical
abasement of modesty, with the hardest and least estimable of the men
they emulate;--these women of the doubtful gender have managed to drop
all their own special graces while unable to gather up any of the more
valuable virtues of men. They are no more philosophical than the most
inconsequent sister who judges all things according to her feelings,
and commends or condemns principles as she happens to like or dislike
the persons advocating them; and they are as hysterical and
intemperate in their political cries as if the whole world wagged by
impulse only. They are no more magnanimous under rebuke than the
stanchest advocate of the sacredness of sex, but resent all hostile
criticism as passionately, and from grounds as merely personal, as if
they were still shrouded from public blame by the safety of their
privacy; and they are as little useful in their blatant energy as when
they spent their days in working monstrous patterns in crude-coloured
wools, or found spiritual satisfaction in cutting holes in strips of
calico to sew up again with a new stitch. They have committed the
mistake of abandoning such work as they can do well, while trying to
manipulate things which they touch only to spoil; they have ceased to
be women and not learnt to be men; they have thrown aside beauty and
not put on strength.
The latest development of the impulses which animate the epicene sex
has taken its expression in after-dinner oratory. If we were as
malicious to women as those whose follies we rebuke would have the
world believe, we should encourage them to fight it out with womanly
modesty and the world's esteem on this line. Their worst enemies could
not wish to see them inflict on themselves a greater annoyance than
the obligation of getting on their legs after the cheese has been
removed, to turn on a stream of verbal insipidity for a quarter of an
hour at a stretch. Only men who have something to say on the subject
that may be on hand, and so are glad of every opportunity for
elucidation or advocacy, or men who are eaten up with vanity, take
pleasure in speechifying after dinner. Its uselessness is apparent;
its mock hilarity is ghastly; even at political 'banquets,' when words
are supposed to have some deep meaning, we get very little substance
in it; while all the funny part of the business is the dreariest
comedy, the unreality of which brings it close to tragedy.
If anything were wanting to show how much vanity prompts a certain
class of women in their ways and works, and how tremendous is their
passion for notoriety and personal display, it would be this
assumption of the functions of the post-prandial orator. Indeed they
have taken greatly of late to public speaking all round; and some
among them seem only easy when they are standing before a crowd, to be
admired if they are pretty, applauded if they are pert, and, in any
case, the centre of attraction for the moment. We do not look forward
with pleasure to the time when ladies will rise after their champagne
and port, with flushed cheeks and eyes more bright than beautiful,
steadying themselves adroitly against the back of their chairs, and
rolling out either those interminable periods with no nominatives and
no climax under which we have all so often suffered, or spasmodically
jerking forth a few unconnected sentences of which the sole merit is
their brevity. In the beginning of things, when the wedge has to be
introduced, only the best of its kind puts itself forward; and
doubtless the ladies who have already varied the usual dull routine of
after-dinner oratory by their livelier utterances have done the thing
comparatively well, and avoided a breakdown; but we own that we
tremble at the thought of the flood of feminine eloquence which will
be let loose if the fashion spreads.
Fancy the heavy British matron rearing her ample shoulders above the
board, as she lays down the law on the duties of men towards
women--especially sons-in-law--and the advantage to all concerned if
wives are liberally dealt with in the matter of housekeeping money,
and let to go their own way without marital hindrance. Or think of the
woman's-rights woman, with her hybrid costume and her hard face,
showing society how it can be saved from destruction only by throwing
the balance of power into the hands of women--by the nobler and
brighter instincts of the oppressed sex swamping that rude, rough,
masculine element which has so long mismanaged matters. Or even think
of the coquettish and alluring little woman getting up before a crowd
of men and firing off the neatest and smartest park of verbal
artillery possible, every shot of which tells and is applauded to the
echo. How will men take it all? For ourselves, having too sincere a
respect for women as they ought to be, and as nature meant them to be,
we do not wish to see them turned into social buffoons, the mark for
jeering comments and angry hisses when what they say displeases their
hearers, told to 'sit down,' and 'shut up,' with entreaties to some
strong man to 'take them out of that and carry them home to the
nursery,' by a hundred voices roughened with drink and shouting. But
if women expect that hostile feelings and opinions will be tamed or
altogether suppressed in their honour because they choose to thrust
themselves where they have no business, they will find out their
mistake, perhaps when too late. If they abandon their safe cover and
come out into the open, they must look to be hit like the rest. We
cannot too often repeat that if they will mingle in the specialities
of men's lives, they must put up with men's treatment and not cry out
when they are struck home. In deference to them plain-speaking has
been banished from the drawing rooms of society; but it is too much to
expect men to sit in their own places under heavy boredom or fatuous
gabble without wincing; and it is childish to ask us to make a
free-gift of our truth and time to women who outrage one and waste the
other. On the other hand the cheers which would follow if they hit the
humour of the hour, or if, being specially pretty or specially smart,
they afforded so much more than the ordinary excitement to the guests,
would to our minds be just as offensive as the rougher truth, and
perhaps more so. The leering approbation of men never over-nice in
thought and now heated with wine, such as are always to be found at
public dinners, is an infliction from which we should have imagined
any woman with purity or self-respect would have shrunk with shame and
dismay. But women who take to after-dinner speeches cannot be either
nervous or fastidious.
Perhaps it is expecting too much of women of this kind if we ask them
to consider themselves in relation to men's liking. They profess to
despise the masculine animal they are so fond of imitating, and to be
careless of his liking; holding it a matter of supreme indifference
whether they are to his taste or not. But it may be as well to say
plainly that the disgust which we may presume the normal healthy woman
feels for men who paint and pad and wear stays and work Berlin
work--men who give their minds to chignons and costumes; who spy after
their maids' love-letters, and watch their boys as cats watch
mice--men who occupy themselves with domestic details they should know
nothing about; who look after the baby's pap-boat and the cinders in
the dust-heap, and can call the various articles of household linen by
their proper names--the disgust which the womanly woman feels for them
is exactly that which the manly man feels for the epicene sex.
Hard, unblushing, unloving women whose ideal of happiness lies in
swagger and notoriety; who hate home life and despise home virtues;
who have no tender regard for men and no instinctive love for
children; who despise the modesty of sex as they deny its natural
fitness--these women have worse than no charm for men, and their place
in the human family seems altogether a mistake. If there were any
special work which they could do better than manly men or feminine
women, we could understand their economic uses, and accept them as
eminently unlovely outgrowths of a natural law, but at least as
necessary and natural. But they are not wanted. They simply disgust
men and mislead women; and those women whom they do not mislead in
their own they often influence too strongly in the other direction by
way of reaction, rendering them sickly in their sweetness, and weak
rather than womanly. If the interlacing margins of certain things are
lovely, as colours which blend together are more harmonious than those
which are crudely distinct, it is not so with the interlacing margin
of sex. Let men be men, and women women, sharply, unmistakably
defined; but to have an ambiguous sex which is neither the one nor the
other, possessing the coarser passions and instincts of men without
their strength or better judgment, and the position and privileges of
women without their tenderness, their sense of duty, or their modesty,
is a state of things that we should like to see abolished by public
opinion, which alone can touch it.
_WOMEN'S MEN._
If songs are the expressions of a nation's political temper, novels
show the current of its social morality, and what the learned would
call its psychological condition. When French novelists devote half
their stories to the analysis of those feelings which end in breaking
the seventh commandment, and the other half to the gradual evolution
of the evidence which leads to the detection of a secret murderer, we
may safely assume, on the one hand, that the marriage law presses
heavily, and, on the other, that the national intellect is of that
ingenious kind which takes pleasure in puzzles, and is best
represented by the familiar examples of dovetailing and mosaic work.
When too, we see that their common feminine type is a creature given
over as a prey to nervous fancies and an exalted imagination, of a
feverish temperament and a general obscuration of plain morality in
favour of a subtilizing and misleading kind of thing which she calls
her _besoin d'âme_, we may be sure that this is the type most approved
by both writer and readers, and that anything else would be
unwelcome.
The French novelist who should describe, as his central figure, a
self-disciplined, straightforward, healthy young woman, honestly in
love with her husband, rationally fond of her children, not given to
dangerous musings about the need of her soul for an elective affinity
outside her marriage bond, nor spending her hours in speculating on
the philosophy of necessity as represented by Léon or Alphonse; who
should make her absolutely impervious to the sickly sentimentalism of
the inevitable _célibat_, and neither palter with peril nor lament
that sin should be sinful when it is so pleasant; who should paint
domestic morality as we know it exists in France no less than in
England, and trust for his interest to the quiet pathos of unfriendly
but cleanly circumstances, would be hard put to it to make his heroine
attractive and his story popular; and his readers would not be counted
by tens of thousands, as were those who gloated over the sins of
_Madame Bovary_ and the prurience of _Fanny_. The Scandinavian type of
woman again, strong-armed, independent, athletic, practical, would not
go down with the French reading public; wherefore we may assume that
the _Parisienne_, as we know her in romance--feverish, subtil,
casuistic, self-deluding, and always ready to sacrifice duty to
sentiment--is the woman best liked by the people to whom she is
offered, and that the novelist but repeats and represents the wish of
his readers.
So, too, when our own novelists carry their stock puppets through the
nine hundred pages held to be necessary for the due display of their
follies and disasters, we may be sure that they are of the kind which
finds favour in the eyes of the ordinary English reader; that the
girls are the girls who please young men or do not alarm mothers, and
that the men are the men in whom women delight, and think the ideals
of their sex. If, as it is said, the delineation of her hero is the
touchstone of a woman's literary power, it must be confessed that the
touchstone discloses, for the most part, a very feeble amount of
literary power, and that the female mind has but a small perception of
all that relates to man's needs and nature.