who have outrun the constable and outwitted their creditors at one and
the same time? How lecture women who flirt over the borders on the
week days, but pay handsomely for their sittings on Sundays, on the
crown with which Solomon endowed the lucky husband of the virtuous
woman? He may wish to do all this; but his wife and children, and the
supreme need of food and firing, step in between him and the higher
functions of his calling; and he owns himself forced to accept the
world as he finds it, sins and shortcomings with the rest, and to take
heed lest he be eaten up by over-zeal or carried into personal
darkness by his desire for his people's light.
Sometimes the poor man is in thrall to some one in particular rather
than to his flock as a body; and there are times when this dominant
power is a woman; in which case the many contrarieties besetting his
position may be multiplied _ad infinitum_. Nothing can exceed the
miserable subjection of a clergyman given over to the tender mercies
of a feminine despot. She knows everything, and she governs as much as
she knows. She makes herself the arbiter of his whole life, from his
conscience to his children's boots, and he can call neither his soul
nor his home his own. She prescribes his doctrine, and takes care to
let him know when he has transgressed the rules she has laid down for
his guidance. She treats the hymns as part of her personal
prerogative, and is violently offended if those having a ritualistic
tendency are sung, or if those are taken whereof the tunes are too
jaunty or the measure is too slow. The unfortunate man feels under her
eye during the whole of the service, like a schoolboy under the eye of
his preceptress; and he dare not even begin the opening sentences
until she has rustled up the aisle and has said her private prayer
quite comfortably. She holds over his head the terror of vague threats
and shadowy misfortunes should he cross her will; but at the same time
he does not find that running in her harness brings extra grist to his
mill, nor that his way is the smoother because he treads in the
footsteps she has marked out for him.
Sometimes she takes a craze against a voluntary; sometimes she objects
to any approach to chanting; and if certain recalcitrants of the
congregation, in possession of the harmonium, insist on their own
methods against hers, she writes home to the Society and complains of
the thin edge of the wedge and the Romanizing tendencies of her
spiritual adviser. In any case she is a fearful infliction; and a
church ruled by a female despot is about the most pitiable instance we
know of insolent tyranny and broken-backed dependence.
But the clergymen serving these transmarine stations are not often
themselves men of mark nor equal to their contemporaries at home. They
are often sickly, which means a low amount of vital energy; oftener
impecunious, which presupposes want of grip and precludes real
independence. They are men whose career has been somehow arrested; and
their natures have suffered in the blight that has befallen their
hopes. Their whole life is more or less a compromise, now with
conscience, now with character; and they have to wink at evils which
they ought to denounce, and bear with annoyances which they ought to
resent. In most cases they are obliged to eke out their scanty incomes
by taking pupils; and here again the millstone round their necks is
heavy, and they have to pay a large moral percentage on their
pecuniary gains. If their pupils are of the age when boys begin to
call themselves men, they have to keep a sharp look-out on them; and
they suffer many things on the score of responsibility when that
look-out is evaded, as it necessarily must be at times. As the
characteristic quality of small societies is gossip, and as gossip
always includes exaggeration, the peccadilloes of the young fellows
are magnified into serious sins, and then bound as a burden on the
back of the poor cleric in thrall to the idle imaginings of men and
the foolish fears of women. One black sheep in the pupilary flock will
do more damage to the reputation of the unhappy pastor who has them in
hand than a dozen shining lights will do him good. Morality is assumed
to be the free gift of the tutor to the pupil; and if the boy is bad
the man is to blame for not having made that free-gift betimes.
Look at it how we will, the clergyman in charge of these foreign
congregations has no very pleasant time of it. In a sense
expatriated; his home ties growing daily weaker; his hope of home
preferment reduced to _nil_; his liberty of conscience a dream of the
past; and all the mystical power of his office going down in the
conflict caused by the need of pew-rents, submission to tyrants, and
dependence on the Home Society, he lives from year to year bemoaning
the evil chances which have flung him on this barren, shifting,
desolate strand, and becoming less and less fitted for England and
English parochial work--that castle in the air, quiet and secure,
which he is destined never to inhabit. He is touched too in part by
the atmosphere of his surroundings; and to a congregation without
duties a clergyman with views more accommodating than severe comes
only too naturally as the appropriate pastor. The whole thing proves
that thraldom to the means of living, or rather to the persons
representing those means, damages all men alike--those in cassock and
gown as well as those in slop and blouse--and that lay influence can,
in certain circumstances, be just as tyrannical over the clerical
conscience as clerical influence is apt to be tyrannical over lay
living.
_OLD FRIENDS._
We know all that can be said in laudation of old friends--the people
whose worth has been tried and their constancy proved--who have come
when you have called and danced when you have piped--been faithful in
sunshine and shadow alike--not envious of your prosperity nor
deserting you in your adversity--old friends who, like old wine, have
lost the crudity of newness, have mellowed by keeping, and have
blended the ripeness of age with the vigour of youth. It is all true
in certain circumstances and under certain conditions; but the old
friend of this ideal type is as hard to find as any other ideal; while
bad imitations abound, and life is rendered miserable by them.
There are old friends who make the fact of old friendship a basis for
every kind of unpleasantness. Their opinion is not asked, but they
volunteer it on all occasions, and are sure to give it in the manner
which galls you most and which you can least resent. They snub you
before your latest acquaintances--charming people of good status with
whom you especially desire to stand well; and break up your
pretensions of present superiority by that sledge-hammer of old
friendship which knows you down to the ground and will stand no
nonsense. The more formal and fastidious your company, the more they
will rasp your nerves by the coarse familiarity of their address; and
they know no greater pleasure than to put you in a false position by
pretending to keep you in your true place. They run in on you at all
times; and you have neither an hour undisturbed nor a pursuit
uninterrupted, still less a circumstance of your life kept sacred from
them. The strictest orders to your servant are ignored; and they push
past any amount of verbal barriers with the irresistible force of old
friendship to which nothing can be denied. Whatever you are doing you
can just see them, they say, smiling; and they have neither conscience
nor compassion when they come and eat up your time, which is your
money, for the gratification of hearing themselves talk and of
learning how you are getting on. They do not scruple to ask about your
affairs direct questions to which you must perforce give an answer;
silence or evasion betraying the truth as much as assent; and they
will make you a present of their mind on the matter, which, though to
the last degree condemnatory, you are expected to accept with becoming
gratitude and humility.
If you have known them in your early boyhood, when you were all
uncivilized hail-fellows together, they refuse to respect your maturer
dignity, and will Tom and Dick and Harry you to the end, though you
sit in a horsehair wig on the bench, while your old friend, once your
class-mate of the country grammar school where you both got your
rudiments, is only a city clerk, badly paid and married to his
landlady's daughter.
To women this kind of return from the grave of the past is a dreadful
infliction and oftentimes a danger. The playfellows of the romping
hoydenish days dash home, bearded and bronzed, from Australia or
California; stride into the calm circle of refined matronhood with the
old familiar manner and using the old familiar terms; ask Fan or Nell
if she remembers this or that adventure on the mountain-side? by the
lake? in the wood?--topping their query by a meaning laugh as if more
remained behind than was expedient to declare. They slap the dignified
husband on the back, and call him a d----d lucky dog; telling him
that they envy him his catch, and would gladly stand in his shoes if
they could. It was all that cross-cornered cursed fate of theirs which
sent them off to Australia or California; else he, the dignified
husband, would never have had the chance--hey, Fan? And they wink when
they say it, as if they had good grounds to go on. The wife is on
thorns all the time these hateful visits last. She wonders how she
could ever have been on romping terms with such a horror, even in her
youngest days; and feels that she shall hate her own name for ever,
after hearing it mouthed and bawled by her old friend with such
aggressive familiarity. The husband, if jealous by nature, begins to
look sullen and suspicious. Even if he is not jealous, but only
reserved and conventional, he does not like what he sees, still less
what he hears; and is more than half inclined to think he has made a
mistake, and that the Fan or Nell of his bosom would have been better
mated with the old friend from the backwoods than with him.
The old friends who turn up in this way at all corners of your life
are sure to be needy, and hold their old friendship as a claim on your
balance at the bank. They stick closer to you than a brother, and you
are expected to stick as close to them; and, as a sign thereof, to
provide for their necessities as so much interest on the old account
of affection still running. If you shrink from them and try to shunt
them quietly, they go about the world proclaiming your ingratitude,
and trumpeting forth their deserts and your demerits. They deride your
present success, which they call stuck-up and mushroom; telling all
the minor miseries of your past, when your father found it hard to
provide suitably for his large family, and their mother had more than
once to give yours a child's frock and pinafore in pity for your rags.
They generally contrive to make a division in your circle; and you
find some of your new friends look coldly on you because it is said
you have been ungrateful to your old. The whole story may be a myth,
the mere coinage of vanity and disappointment; but when did the world
stop to prove the truth before it condemned?
There is no circumstance so accidental, no kindness so trivial, that
it cannot be made to constitute a claim to friendship for life and
all that friendship includes--intimacy before the world; pecuniary
help when needed; no denial of time; no family secrets; unvarying
inclusion in all your entertainments; personal participation in all
your successes; liberty to say unpleasant things without offence and
to interfere in your arrangements; and the right to take at least one
corner of your soul, and that not a small one, which is not to be your
own but your old friends'. Have they, by the merest chance, introduced
you to your wife the beautiful heiress, to your husband the good
match?--the world echoes with the news, and the echoes are never
suffered to die out. It is told everywhere, and always as if your
happy marriage were the object they had had in view from the earliest
times--as if they had lived and worked for a consummation which in
reality came about by the purest accident. Have they been helpful and
friendly when your first child was born, or nursery sickness was in
your house?--you are bought for life, you and your offspring; unless
you have had the happy thought of making them sponsors, when they
learn the knack of disappearing from your immediate circle, and of
only turning up on those formal occasions which do not admit of making
presents. Did they introduce you to your first employer?--your
subsequent success is the work of their hands, and they bear your fame
on their shoulders like complacent Atlases balancing the world.
They go about cackling to every one who will listen to them how they
got your first essay into print; how they mentioned your name to the
Commissioners, and how, in consequence, the Commissioners gave you
that place whence dates your marvellous rise in life; how they advised
your father to send you to sea and so to make a man of you, and thus
were the indirect cause of your K.C.B.-ship. But for them you would
have been a mere nobody, grubbing in a dingy City office to this day.
They gave you your start, and you owe all you are to them. And if you
fail to honour their draft on your gratitude to the fullest amount,
they proclaim you a defaulter to the most sacred claims and the most
pious feelings of humanity. You point the moral of the base
ingratitude of man, and are a text on which they preach the sermon of
non-intervention in the affairs of others. Let drowning men sink; let
the weak go to the wall; and on no account let any one trouble himself
about the welfare of old friends, if this is to be the reward.
Henceforth, you are morally branded, and your old friend takes care
that the iron shall be hot. There is no service, however trifling, but
can be made a yoke to hang round your neck for life; and the more you
struggle against it the more it galls you. Your best plan of bearing
it is with the patience which laughs and lets things slide. If
however, you are resolute in repudiation, you must take the sure
result without wincing.
To these friends of your own add the friends of the family--those
uncomfortable adhesives who cling to you like so many octopods,
and are not to be shaken off by any means known to you. They claim
you as their own--something in which they have the rights of
part-proprietorship--because they knew you when you were in your
cradle, and had bored your parents as they want to bore you. It is of
no use to say that circumstances are of less weight than character.
You and they may stand at opposite poles in thought, in aspiration, in
social condition, in habits. Nevertheless they insist on it that the
bare fact of longtime acquaintance is to be of more value than all
these vital discrepancies; and you find yourself saddled with friends
who are utterly uncongenial to you in every respect, because your
father once lived next door to them in the country town where you were
born, and spent one evening a week in their society playing long whist
for threepenny points. You inherit your weak chest and your snub nose,
gout in your blood and a handful of ugly skeletons in your cupboard;
these are things you cannot get rid of; things which come as part of
the tangled yarn of your life and are the inalienable misfortunes of
inheritance; but it is too bad to add family friends whom of your own
accord you would never have known; and to have them seated as Old Men
of the Sea on your neck, never to be shaken off while they live.
In fact, this whole question of friendship wants revision. The general
tendency is to make it too stringent in its terms, and too
indissoluble in its fastenings. If the present should not make one
forget the past, neither should the past tyrannize over the present.
Old friends may have been pleasant enough in their day, but a day is
not for ever, and they are hurtful and unpleasant now, under new
conditions and in changed circumstances. They disturb the harmony of
our surroundings, and no one can feel happy in discord.
They themselves too, change; we all do, as life goes on and experience
increases; and it is simply absurd to bring the old fashions of early
days into the new relations of later times. We are not the Tom, Dick,
and Harry of our boyhood in any essential save identity of person;
neither are they the Bill and Jim they were. We have gone to the
right, they to the left; and the gap between us is wider and deeper
than that of mere time. Of what use then, to try to galvanize the dead
past into the semblance of vitality? Each knows in his heart that it
is dead; and the only one who wishes to galvanize it into simulated
life is the one who will somehow benefit by the discomfort and
abasement of the other. For our own part, we think one of the most
needful things to learn on our way through the world is, that the dead
are dead, and that silent burial is better than spasmodic galvanism.
_POPULAR WOMEN._
The three chief causes of personal popularity among women are, the
admiration which is excited, the sympathy which is given, or the
pleasure that can be bestowed. We put out of court for our present
purpose the popularity which accompanies political power or
intellectual strength, this being due to condition, not quality, and
therefore not of the sort we mean. Besides, it belongs to men rather
than to women, who seldom have any direct power that can advance
others, and still seldomer intellectual strength enough to obtain a
public following because of their confessed supremacy. The popular
women we mean are simply those met with in society--women whose
natural place is the drawing-room and whose sphere is the well-dressed
world--women who are emphatically ladies, and who understand _les
convenances_ and obey them, even if they take up a cause, practise
philanthropy or preach philosophy. But the popular woman rarely does
take up a cause or make her philanthropy conspicuous and her
philosophy audible. Partizanship implies angles; and she has no
angles. If of the class of the admired, she is most popular who is
least obtrusive in her claims and most ingenuous in ignoring her
superiority. A pretty woman, however pretty, if affected, vain, or apt
to give herself airs, may be admired but is never popular. The men
whom she snubs sneer at her in private; the women whom she eclipses as
well as snubs do more than sneer; those only to whom she is gracious
find her beauty a thing of joy; but as she is distractingly eclectic
in her favouritism she counts as many foes as she has friends; and
though those who dislike her cannot call her ugly, they can call her
disagreeable, and do. But the pretty woman who wears her beauty to all
appearance unconsciously, never suffering it to be aggressive to other
women nor wilfully employing it for the destruction of men, who is
gracious in manner and of a pleasant temper, who is frank and
approachable, and does not seem to consider herself as something
sacred and set apart from the world because nature made her lovelier
than the rest--she is the woman whom all unite in admiring, the
popular person _par excellence_ of her set.
The popular pretty woman is one who, take her as a young wife (and she
must be married), honestly loves her husband, but does not thrust her
affection into the face of the world, and never flirts with him in
public. Indeed, she flirts with other men just enough to make time
pass pleasantly, and enjoys a rapid waltz or a lively conversation as
much as when she was seventeen and before she was appropriated. She
does not think it necessary to go about morally ticketed; nor does she
find it vital to her dignity nor to her virtue to fence herself round
with coldness or indifference to the multitude by way of proving her
loyalty to one. Still, as it is notorious that she does love her
husband, and as every one knows that he and she are perfectly content
with each other and therefore not on the look-out for supplements, the
men with whom she has those innocent little jokes, those transparent
secrets, those animated conversations, that confessed friendship and
good understanding, do not make mistakes; and the very women belonging
to them forget to be censorious, even though this other, this popular
woman, is so much admired.
This popular woman is a mother too, and a fond one. Hence she can
sympathize with other mothers, and expatiate on their common
experiences in the confidential chat over five o'clock tea, as all
fond mothers do and should. She keeps a well-managed house, and is
notorious for the amount of needlework she gets through; and of which
she is prettily proud; not being ashamed to tell you that the dress
you admire so much was made by her own hands, and she will give your
wife the pattern if she likes; while she boasts of even rougher
upholstery work which she and her maid and her sewing-machine have got
through with despatch and credit. She gives dinners with a _cachet_ of
their own--dinners which have evidently been planned with careful
thought and study; and she is not above her work as mistress and
organizer of her household. Yet she finds time to keep abreast with
the current literature of the day, and never has to confess to
ignorance of the ordinary topics of conversation. She is not a woman
of extreme views about anything. She has not signed improper papers
and she does not discuss improper questions; she does not go in for
woman's rights; she has a horror of facility of divorce; and she sets
up for nothing--being neither an Advanced Woman desirous of usurping
the possessions and privileges of men, nor a Griselda who thinks her
proper place is at the feet of men, to take their kicks with patience
and their caresses with gratitude, as is becoming in an inferior
creature. She does not dabble in politics; and though she likes to
make her dinners successful and her evenings brilliant, she by no
means assumes to be a leader of fashion nor to impose laws on her
circle. She likes to be admired, and she is always ready to let
herself be loved. She is always ready too, to do any good work that
comes in her way; and she finds time for the careful overlooking of a
few pet charities about which she makes no parade, just as she finds
time for her nursery and her needlework. And, truth to tell, she
enjoys these quiet hours, with only her children to love her and her
poor pensioners to admire her, quite as much as she enjoys the
brilliant receptions where she is among the most popular and the most
beautiful.
Her nature is gentle, her affections are large, her passions small.
She may have prejudices, but they are prejudices of a mild kind,
mainly on the side of modesty and tenderness and the quietude of true
womanhood. She is woman throughout, without the faintest dash of the
masculine element in mind or manners; and she aspires to be nothing
else. She carries with her an atmosphere of happiness, of content, of
spiritual completeness, of purity which is not prudery. Her life is
filled with a variety of interests; consequently she is never peevish
through monotony, nor yet, on the other hand, is she excited, hurried,
storm-driven, as those who give themselves up to 'objects,' and
perfect nothing because they attempt too much. She is popular, because
she is beautiful without being vain; loving without being sentimental;
happy in herself, yet not indifferent to others; because she
understands her drawing-room duties as well as her domestic ones, and
knows how to combine the home life with social splendour. This is the
best type of the popular pretty woman to whom is given admiration, and
against whom no one has a stone to fling nor a slander to whisper; and
this is the ideal woman of the English upper-class home, of whom we
still raise a few specimens, just to show what women may be if they
like, and what sweet and lovely creatures they are when they are
content to be as nature designed them.