corks, which is now a little sea of silver where the imprisoned
pilchards beat and flutter, producing a sound for which we have no
satisfactory onomatopoetic word. In moonlight this little sea is
silver; in torchlight it is of fire with varied colours flashing
through the redder gleams; and in the dark it is a sea of
phosphorescent light, each mesh of the net, each fish, each seaweed
illuminated as if traced in flame. Every one is now busy. The men dip
in baskets, or maunds, expressly made for this purpose, and ladle out
the quivering fish by hundreds into the boats. In a few moments they
are standing leg-deep in pilchards. Every one on the spot is pressed
into the service, and even a boat manned by nothing more stalwart than
one or two half-sick and half-frightened women receives its orders;
and 'Hold on ladies! all hands hold on to the boat,' serves to keep
one of the busiest of the tucking-boats in equilibrium.
The men, for all their hearty work, are like a party of schoolboys at
play. Their humour may be rough, but it is never meant to be rude;
their goodwill is sincere, for they have a share, however small, in
the success of the catch; and the more they tuck, the more they will
have for their wives and families to live on through the winter. It is
their harvest-time; and they are as jocund as harvesters proverbially
are. There is no stint of volunteer labour either. Men who have been
working hard all day on their own account go out at midnight to lend a
hand to their mates at the seine. Even though the take is for a
hard-fisted master who would count fins if he could, and who would
refuse his men a head apiece if he thought his orders would be carried
out, they are all honestly glad. They remember the time when a rich
school was the wealth of the whole cove, and when a string of fresh
pilchards would be given freely to any one coming to the cove at the
time of bulking, or, as we should call it, storing.
Still, whatever of economic value there may be in this exploitation of
labour, it has its mournful side in the loss of individual value which
it includes. And no one can help feeling this who listens to the talk
of the elder fishermen, sorrowfully comparing the old days of personal
independence and generous lordship with the present ones of wages and
a wide-awake lesseeship, conscious of its legal rights and determined
to act on them.
When all the fish have been tucked there is nothing for it but to row
home again in the freshening morning air. The tide is rising now, and
the moon is waning. The rocks look blacker, the grey moss-grown cliffs
more solemn, more mysterious, the white surf breaking about them is
higher and sharper than when you set out; and the boom of the sea
thundering through cave and channel has a sound in it that makes you
feel as if land and your own bed would be preferable to an open boat
at the mercy of the Atlantic surges. The tide has so far risen that
you can land nearer to the paved causeway than before; but even now
you have to wait for the flow of the wave, then make a spring on to
the black and slimy rocks, which would be creditable to trained
gymnastic powers. So you go home, under the first streaks of dawn, wet
through and scaly, and smelling abominably of fish dashed with a
streak of tar for a richer kind of compound.
The whole place however, will smell of fish to-morrow and for many
to-morrows. When the tucking-boats are brought in, then the women take
their turn, and pack the pilchards in the fish-cellars or
salting-houses. Here they are said to be in 'bulk,' all laid on their
sides with their noses pointing outwards; layers of salt alternating
with layers of fish. Their great market is Italy, where they serve as
favourite Lenten fare. The Italians believe them to be smoked, and
hence call them _fumados_. This word the dear thick-headed British
sailor has caught up, according to his wont, and translated into 'fair
maids;' and 'fair maids'--pronounced firmads--is the popular name of
salted pilchards all through Cornwall.
The pilchard fishery begins as early as June or July; but then it is
further out to sea, sometimes twenty miles out. According to the old
saying,
When the corn is in the shock
The fish are at the rock;
harvest-time, which means from August to the end of October, being the
main season for pilchard-fishing in shoal-water close at home. There
are some choice bits of picturesque life still left to us in faraway
places where the ordinary tourist has not penetrated; but nothing is
more picturesque than seine-fishing in one of the wilder Cornish
coves, when the tucking goes on at midnight, either by moonlight or
torchlight, or only by the phosphorescent illumination of the sea
itself. No artist that we can remember at this moment has yet painted
it; but it is a subject which would well repay careful study and
loving handling.
_THE DISCONTENTED WOMAN._
The discontented woman would seem to be becoming an unpleasantly
familiar type of character. A really contented woman, thoroughly well
pleased with her duties and her destiny, may almost be said to be the
exception rather than the rule in these days of tumultuous revolt
against all fixed conditions, and vagrant energies searching for
interest in new spheres of thought and action. It seems impossible to
satisfy the discontented woman by any means short of changing the
whole order of nature and society for her benefit. And even then the
chances are that she would get wearied of her new work, and, like
Alexander, would weep for more worlds to rearrange according to her
liking--with the power to take or to leave the duties she had
voluntarily assumed, as she claims now the power of discarding those
which have been hers from the beginning. As things are, nothing
contents her; and the keynote which shall put her in harmony with
existing conditions, or make her ready to bear the disagreeable
burdens which she has been obliged to carry from Eve's time downward,
has yet to be found. If she is unmarried, she is discontented at the
want of romance in her life; her main desire is to exchange her
father's house for a home of her own; her pride is pained at the
prospect of being left an old maid unsought by men; and her instincts
rebel at the thought that she may never know maternity, the strongest
desire of the average woman.
But if she is married, the causes of her discontent are multiplied
indefinitely, and where she was out of harmony with one circumstance
she is now in discord with twenty. She is discontented on all sides;
because her husband is not her lover, and marriage is not perpetual
courtship; because he is so irritable that life with him is like
walking among thorns if she makes the mistake of a hair's-breadth; or
because he is so imperturbably good-natured that he maddens her with
his stolidity, and cannot be made jealous even when she flirts before
his eyes. Or she is discontented because she has so many household
duties to perform--the dinner to order, the books to keep, the
servants to manage; because she has not enough liberty, or because she
has too much responsibility; because she has so few servants that she
has to work with her own hands, or because she has so many that she is
at her wit's end to find occupation for them all, not to speak of
discipline and good management.
As a mother, she is discontented at the loss of personal freedom
compelled by her condition; at the physical annoyances and mental
anxieties included in the list of her nursery grievances. She would
probably fret grievously if she had no children at all, but she frets
quite as much when they come. In the former case she is humiliated, in
the latter inconvenienced, and in both discontented. Indeed, the way
in which so many women deliver up their children to the supreme
control of hired nurses proves practically enough the depth of their
discontent with maternity when they have it.
If the discontented woman is rich, she speaks despondingly of the
difficulties included in the fit ordering of large means; if she is
poor, life has no joys worth having when frequent change of scene is
unattainable, and the milliner's bill is a domestic calamity that has
to be conscientiously staved off by rigorous curtailment. If she lives
in London, she laments the want of freedom and fresh air for the
children, and makes the unhappy father, toiling at his City office
from ten till seven, feel himself responsible for the pale cheeks and
attenuated legs which are probably to be referred to injudicious diet
and the frequency of juvenile dissipations. But if she is in the
country, then all the charm of existence is centred in London and its
thoroughfares, and not the finest scenery in the world is to be
compared with the attractions of the shops in Regent Street or the
crowds thronging Cheapside.
This question of country living is one that presses heavily on many a
female mind; but we must believe that, in spite of the plausible
reasons so often assigned, the chief causes of discontent are want of
employment and deadness of interest in the life that lies around. The
husband makes himself happy with his rod and gun, with his garden or
his books, with huntsmen or bricklayers, as his tastes lead him; but
the wife--we are speaking of the wife given over to disappointment and
discontent, for there are still, thank Heaven, bright, busy, happy
women both in country and in town--sits over the fire in winter and by
the empty hearth in summer, and finds all barren because she is
without an occupation or an interest within doors or without. Ask her
why she does not garden--if her circumstances are of the kind where
hands are scarce and even a lady's energies would do potent service
among the flower beds; and she will tell you it makes her back ache,
and she does not know a weed from a flower, and would be sure to pick
up the young seedlings for chickweed and groundsel. And if she is rich
and has hands about her who know their business and guard it
jealously, she takes shelter behind her inability to do actual manual
labour side by side with them.
Within doors active housekeeping is repulsive to her; and though her
servants may be quasi-savages, she prefers the dirt and discomfort of
idleness to the domestic pleasantness to be had by her own industry
and practical assistance. Unless she has a special call towards some
particular party in the Church, she does nothing in the parish, and
seems to think philanthropy and help to one's poorer neighbours part
of the ecclesiastical machinery of the country, devolving on the
Rectory alone. She gets bilious through inaction and heated rooms, and
then says the place disagrees with her and will be the death of her
before long. She cannot breathe among the mountains; the moor and
plain are too exposed; the sea gives her a fit of melancholy whenever
she looks at it, and she calls it cruel, crawling, hungry, with a
passion that sounds odd to those who love it; she hates the leafy
tameness of the woods and longs for the freer uplands, the vigorous
wolds, of her early days.
Wherever, in short, the discontented woman is, it is just where she
would rather not be; and she holds fate and her husband cruel beyond
words because she cannot be transplanted into the exact opposite of
her present position. But mainly and above all she desires to be
transplanted to London. If you were to get her confidence, she would
perhaps tell you she thinks the advice of that sister who counselled
the Lady of Groby to burn down the house, whereby her husband would be
compelled to take her to town, the wisest and most to the purpose that
one woman could give to another. So she mopes and moons through the
days, finding no pleasure anywhere, taking no interest in anything,
viewing herself as a wifely martyr and the oppressed victim of
circumstances; and then she wonders that her husband is always ready
to leave her company and that he evidently finds her more tiresome
than delightful. If she would cultivate a little content she might
probably change the aspect of things even to finding the mountains
beautiful and the sea sublime; but dissatisfaction with her condition
is the Nessus garment which clings to the unhappy creature like a
second self, destroying all her happiness and the chief part of her
usefulness.
Women of this class say that they want more to do, and a wider field
for their energies than any of those assigned to them by the natural
arrangement of personal and social duties. As administrators of the
fortune which man earns, and as mothers--that is, as the directors,
caretakers, and moulders of the future generation--they have as
important functions as those performed by vestrymen and surgeons. But
let that pass for the moment; the question is not where they ought to
find their fitting occupation and their dearest interests, but where
they profess a desire to do so. As it is, this desire for an enlarged
sphere is one form among many which their discontent takes; yet when
they are obliged to work, they bemoan their hardship in having to find
their own food, and think that men should either take care of them
gratuitously or make way for them chivalrously. In spite of Scripture,
they find that the battle is to the strong and the race to the swift;
and they do not like to be overcome by the one nor distanced by the
other. Their idea of a clear stage is one that includes favour to
their own side; yet they put on airs of indignation and profess
themselves humiliated when men pay the homage of strength to their
weakness and treat them as ladies rather than as equals.
Elsewhere they complain when they are thrust to the side by the
superior force of the ungodly sex; and think themselves ill-used if
fewer hours of labour--and that labour of what Mr. Carlyle called a
'slim' and superficial kind--cannot command the market and hold the
field against the better work and more continuous efforts of men.
There is nothing of which women speak with more bitterness than of the
lower rates of payment usually accorded to their work; nothing wherein
they seem to be so utterly incapable of judging of cause and effect;
or of taking to heart the unchangeable truth that the best must
necessarily win in the long run, and that the first condition of
equality of payment is equality in the worth of the work done. If
women would perfect themselves in those things which they do already
before carrying their efforts into new fields, we cannot but think it
would be better both for themselves and the world.
Life is a bewildering tangle at the best, but the discontented woman
is not the one to make it smoother. The craze for excitement and for
unfeminine publicity of life has possessed her, to the temporary
exclusion of many of the sweeter and more modest qualities which were
once distinctively her own. She must have movement, action, fame,
notoriety; and she must come to the front on public questions, no
matter what the subject, to ventilate her theories and show the
quality of her brain. She must be professional all the same as man,
with M.D. after her name; and perhaps, before long, she will want to
don a horsehair wig over her back hair, and address 'My Lud' on behalf
of some interesting criminal taken red-handed, or to follow the
tortuous windings of Chancery practice. When that time comes, and as
soon as the novelty has worn off, she will be sure to complain of the
hardness of the grind and the woes of competition; and the obscure
female apothecary struggling for patients in a poor neighbourhood--the
unemployed lady lawyer waiting in dingy chambers for the clients who
never come--will look back with envy and regret to the time when women
were cared for by men, protected and worked for, and had nothing more
arduous to do than attend to the house, spend the money they did not
earn and forbear to add to the anxieties they did not share. Could
they get all the plums and none of the suet it would be fine enough;
but we question whether they will find the battle of life as carried
on in the lower ranks of the hitherto masculine professions one whit
more ennobling or inspiriting than it is now in their own special
departments. Like the poor man who, being well, wished to be better,
and came to the grave as the result, they do not know when they are
well off; and in their search for excitement, and their discontent
with the monotony, undutifulness and inaction which they have created
for themselves, they run great danger of losing more than they can
gain, and of only changing the name, while leaving untouched the real
nature, of the disease under which they are suffering.
_ENGLISH CLERGYMEN IN FOREIGN WATERING-PLACES._
Those persons who object to the influence of the clergy in their
parishes at home, and who dislike the idea of being laid hold of by
the ecclesiastical crook and dragged perforce up steep ways and narrow
paths, ought to visit some of our little outlying settlements in
foreign parts. They might take a revengeful pleasure in seeing how the
tables there are turned against the tyrants here, and how weak in the
presence of his transmarine flock is the expatriated shepherd whose
rod at home is oftentimes a rod of iron, and his crook more compelling
than persuasive. Of all men the most to be pitied is surely the
clergyman of one of those small English settlements which are
scattered about France and Italy, Germany and Switzerland; and of all
men of education, and what is meant by the position of a gentleman, he
is the most in thraldom.
His very means of living depending on his congregation, he must first
of all please that congregation and keep it in good humour. So, it may
be said, must a clergyman in London whose income is from pew-rents and
whose congregation are not his parishioners. But London is large; the
tempers and thoughts of men are as numerous as the houses; there is
room for all, and lines of affinity for all. The Broad Churchman will
attract his hearers, and the Ritualist his, from out of the mass, as
magnets attract steel filings; and each church will be filled with
hearers who come there by preference. But in a small and stationary
society, in a congregation already made and not specially attracted,
yet by which he has to live, the clergyman finds himself more the
servant than the leader, less the pastor than the thrall. He must
'suit,' else he is nowhere, and his bread and butter are vanishing
points in his horizon; that is, he must preach and think, not
according to the truth that is in him, but according to the views of
the most influential of his hearers, and in attacking their souls he
must touch tenderly their tempers.
These tempers are for the most part lions in the way difficult to
propitiate. The elementary doctrines of Christianity must be preached
of course, and sin must be held up as the thing to avoid, while virtue
must be complimented as the thing to be followed, and a spiritual
state of mind must be discreetly advocated. These are safe
generalities; but the dangers of application are many. How to preach
of duties to a body of men and women who have thrown off every
national and local obligation?--who have left their estates to be
managed by agents, their houses to be filled by strangers, who have
given up their share of interest in the school and the village
reading-room, the poor and the parish generally--men and women who
have handed themselves over to indolence and pleasure-seeking, the
luxurious enjoyment of a fine climate, the pleasant increase of income
to be got by comparative cheapness of breadstuffs, and the abandonment
of all those outgoings roughly comprised under the head of local
duties and local obligations?--how, indeed? They have no duties to be
reminded of in those moral generalizations which touch all and offend
none; and the clergyman who should go into details affecting his
congregation personally, who should preach against sloth and slander,
pleasure-seeking and selfishness, would soon preach to empty pews and
be cut by his friends as an impertinent going beyond his office.
His congregation too, composed of educated ladies and gentlemen, is
sure to be critical, and therefore all but impossible to teach. If he
inclines a hair's breadth to the right or the left beyond the point at
which they themselves stand, he is held to be unsound. His sermons are
gravely canvassed in the afternoon conclaves which meet at each
other's houses to discuss the excitement of the Sunday morning in the
new arrivals or the new toilets. Has he dwelt on the humanity
underlying the Christian faith? He is drifting into Socinianism; and
those whose inclinations go for abstract dogmas well backed by
brimstone say that he does not preach the Gospel. Has he exalted the
functions of the minister, and tried to invest his office with a
spiritual dignity and power that would furnish a good leverage over
his flock? He is accused of sacerdotalism, and the free-citizen blood
of his listening Erastians is up and flaming. Does he, to avoid these
stumbling-blocks, wander into the deeper mysteries and discourse on
things which no man can either explain or understand? He is accused of
presumption and profanity, and is advised to stick to the Lord's
Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount. If he is earnest he is
impertinent; if he is level he is cold. Each member of his
congregation, subscribing a couple of guineas towards his support,
feels as if he or she had claims to that amount over the body and soul
and mind and powers of the poor parson in his or her pay; and the
claim is generally worked out in snippets, not individually dangerous
to life nor fortune, but inexpressibly aggravating, and as depressing
as annoying. For the most part, the unhappy man is safest when he
sticks to broad dogma, and leaves personal morality alone. And he is
almost sure to be warmly applauded when he has a shy at science, and
says that physicists are fools who assert more than they can prove,
because they cannot show why an acorn should produce an oak, nor how
the phenomena of thought are elaborated. This throwing of date-stones
is sure to strike no listening djinn. The mass of the congregations
sitting in the English Protestant churches built on foreign soil, know
little and care less about the physical sciences; but it gives them a
certain comfortable glow to think that they are so much better than
those sinful and presumptuous men who work at bacteria and the
spectroscope; and they hug themselves as they say, each man in his
own soul, how much nicer it is to be dogmatically safe than
intellectually learned.
Preaching personal morality indeed, with possible private application,
would be rather difficult in dealing with a congregation not
unfrequently made up of doubtful elements. Take that pretty young
woman and her handsome _roué_-looking husband, who have come no one
knows whence and are no one knows what, but who attend the services
with praiseworthy punctuality, spend any amount of money, and are
being gradually incorporated into the society of the place. The parson
may have had private hints conveyed to him from his friends at home
that, of the matrimonial conditions between the two, everything is
real save the assumed 'lines.' But how is he to say so? They have made
themselves valuable members of his congregation, and give larger
donations than any one else. They have got the good will of the
leading persons in the sacred community, and, having something to
hide, are naturally careful to please, and are consequently popular.
He can scarcely give form and substance to the hints he has had
conveyed to him; yet his conscience cries out on the one side, if his
weakness binds him to silence on the other. In any case, how can he
make himself the Nathan to this questionable David, and, holding forth
on the need of virtuous living, thunder out, 'Thou art the man!'? Let
him try the experiment, and he will find a hornet's nest nothing to
it.