to the love of man and woman naturally terminating in marriage. A woman
cares for the love of her own sex, for the love of her employees, for
the love of her friends, her circle, her society, be it a large or a
small body. Men say women have a passion for admiration, an appetite
for flattery, a thirst for applause. True, true enough! But all these
cravings are but forms of the great craving for love which lives at
the root of all. One who loves _does_ admire, _does_ flatter, _does_
applaud. These are some of the almost invariable signs and signals
of love, and the instinct of the woman leads her to seek these signs
and signals, although her reason whispers that they are false lights,
mere _igni fatui_ poorly counterfeiting the real sun and moon of her
existence, and very likely to lead her into a dark and dismal bog,
whence she issues mired and torn and weary.
It is not well to accept these shams, even though we bitterly tell
ourselves that since we cannot have the real thing we will take what
at least resembles it. If a person cannot have diamonds, she had
better not try to persuade herself or the world that Rhinestones are
just as good, although she may choose to wear them; but, just as
there are women who _will_ glitter, though it be in Rhinestones, so
there are women, and probably the majority of the sex, who will have
that ornament more precious than diamonds--that crown of love which
proclaims its wearer a queen indeed, and if it be but a pinchbeck and
tinsel crown she will wear it all the same, although her own aching
heart cry incessantly:
“It is no crown. I am no queen. My kingdom has gone from me, and I am
desolate.”
Well, to come back rather tardily to our mutton--to the discussion of
woman’s helplessness in her relations with the other sex.
She hates to do or say anything to forfeit her position in any man’s
estimation. Of course she does not expect or wish her broker, her
lawyer, her pastor, or her political antagonist, or her intellectual
opponent to be “in love” with her, in the ordinary meaning of the
phrase, but she does want, probably unconsciously to herself, that
he should feel attracted to her; that he should like, admire, speak
kindly, perhaps tenderly, of her to other persons; that he should
be sorry to see her go and glad to have her come again. All this
natural and instinctive desire underlies her whole conversation and
conduct, weakens the strength of her opposition to what her intuitions
warn her is false or dangerous, softens her phraseology and not very
infrequently prompts her to say in the end:
“Very well, you know best. I will do what you say,” when the indignant
common sense at the back of her mind is clamoring:
“That’s nonsense! It isn’t at all as you say! I shall lose my money, or
my case, or my success, if I do thus and so!”
Every woman knows that, though she be wise as Minerva, pure as Diana,
regal as Juno, or even beautiful as Venus, if she wearies a man, if she
claims the time and attention he wants to bestow upon his business, his
pleasure, or more especially upon himself, he ceases to wish for her
presence--in fact, he grows tired of her--and in the end feels her to
be a bore, and avoids her. I suppose most women would rather die than
to know they were thus regarded by any number, perhaps any one, of the
men of their acquaintance, and if they feel themselves in proximity to
any such position they will hastily sacrifice any theory, any scheme or
any advantage, and withdraw from the position their reason bids them
hold with tenacity.
And here, of course, is the point I have intended to make. The woman’s
need of love, of liking or of approval from man is a terrible element
of weakness in her nature. She is her own enemy. She is made helpless
by her own best and sweetest characteristic. The motto of her career
is, after all, no more than this, although the motto must be expanded
to its very widest and most general limits:
“All for love, and the world well lost!”
XXV.
AND SO THEY MARRY NEITHER KNOWING THE OTHER.
People always have been asking each other conundrums and riddles and
puzzles of various kinds ever since the world began. It seems to be
an instinct of the human family, and almost always of a disagreeable
nature. We are told that Samson, by way of making things pleasant
during his wedding festivities, asked a riddle of his “best man” and
ushers, with a sort of wager attached to it. If they guessed it within
the week the bridegroom was to give each of them a new suit of clothes,
and if they did not each of them was to give him one. It is a very
entertaining story throughout, but not in place just here except as it
is the earliest recorded instance of a conundrum. It was not fairly
guessed, and the result was a good deal of family unpleasantness, a
divorce and the deaths of several hundred persons, including the bride
and all her family.
Then comes the Sphinx with her stupid little riddle about the animal
that in the morning walks on four legs, at noon on two and in the
evening on three. It is a very poor affair, looked at as a riddle, but
pretty serious when one remembers that Madam Sphinx was in the habit of
devouring those who “gave it up.” What an advance the world has made,
to be sure, since the days of Œdipus and the Sphinx! Nowadays instead
of being devoured if you do not guess a conundrum, some one kindly
explains it to you, and you have the opportunity to smile satirically
and blandly while saying: “Oh, really! Is that all?”
For my part I never try to guess conundrums, the other course is so
much more amusing.
But as in most other things, nature excels man in this sort of
puzzle making, and the best of it is, from her point of view, that
she can inflict her own penalties for the failure to give a correct
answer, and we are quite powerless to resist her decrees. Perhaps the
completest puzzle of all those in the dear old lady’s abundant store,
and one that has never, so far as I know, been successfully answered
by any son of Adam or daughter of Eve, is a series of questions
relating to the due relation of the sexes to each other, with minor
queries as to the nature of woman and the nature of man, asked in each
case of some member of the opposite sex. The beauty of it is, that
the questions are so fascinating that both man and woman insist upon
studying them, and unwarned by the example of others they put so much
of their time and life and interest into the matter that when the day
comes that they must “give it up” they are too weary of all life’s
problems to care to take up another.
Oh, the mistakes that men and women make with regard to each other! Oh,
the fatal shipwreck they encounter in trying to personally test their
theories as to the true solution of the puzzle upon which all their
forefathers and foremothers have broken their teeth, and yet never come
at the kernel of the nut!
And with what gallant confidence each new aspirant comes before the
Sphinx and says: “I can guess your charming riddle, although these
others have failed. I understand the nature of at least one woman or
one man, and I will stake my whole life upon giving the correct answer.”
The Sphinx smiles--and that cold, satiric, incomprehensible smile was
caught most cleverly long since by the Egyptian sculptors, and fixed
upon the immortal stone which after the lapse of ages tells its story
more clearly than words can put it.
The Sphinx, as those great artists knew, is the prototype of nature in
her conundrum-asking mood--the subtle amusement, the bitter satire,
the veiled and conscious power of the great mother as she plays with
her children, like a tigress with her cubs, is all there. She is but a
sportive mother at the best, that old nature! She flings her children
into the water to teach them to swim for their lives. If they have
nerve and strength to strike out vigorously, they are safe, but if they
are weak or timid or make mistakes, why, she lets them drown as not
worth saving. In the old story of Saturn and Ops, the children were
devoured by the parents, and earth and nature are both one. And so the
poor little wretches go on century after century sinking or swimming,
as the case may be, always trying to get the better of nature, and very
seldom succeeding even when they plume themselves upon having done so.
Look at the manner in which men and women practically reply to the
query as to which member of the opposite sex is the one best adapted
for a lifelong companionship, this being, as we all know, one of the
most important of nature’s conundrums. Every one of us at some period
or other has found it propounded to us, and probably every one of us
has decided it in a manner differing from that we should have selected
had we better understood the matter.
A man sees a woman at some social gathering, it matters not if it is at
the reception of a duchess, or a queen of society in our own country,
or if it is at a “sociable” or a dance in some little country town.
Nature is pre-eminently “no respecter of persons,” and works in the one
case precisely as she does in the other. The girl is well dressed, gay,
smiling and evidently pleased with the young man’s attentions. They
pass an hour together and part with mutual good will. A dozen or so of
such interviews, a few calls at the family dwelling, a ride, a drive, a
walk or two, and he is prepared to offer himself and she to accept him.
If any one having the right demands of him the _raison d’être_, the
solid foundation of his selection and consequent engagement, he replies
that is all right, that he understands Fanny thoroughly, and is quite
sure she will make him happy. As to whether he is quite sure to make
her happy, it is usually the last thing he thinks about. “What sort
of a girl is she?” asks the mother of the happy youth, recalling the
mistake she made.
“Oh, she’s a jolly girl; as jolly a girl as ever you saw,” replies the
wise young man judicially. “She is as light-hearted as a bird, always
full of fun and laughter, always ready for anything proposed in the way
of amusement, good-natured and obliging, great taste in dress, and as
neat as a pin--in fact, she is just the kind of a girl I like, and can
get on with. I hate these prim, mopish, proper sort of girls who are
always getting tired and faint and frightened of everything, from a
spider to a cow, and mustn’t get their feet wet, and all that.”
So they marry, and he finds that he knew as little about his wife as
she did about him. The high spirits and constant cheerful alacrity in
matters of amusement were the gift of youth and health, and shade with
beautiful ease into peevishness, discontent, and a restless desire
for new amusements and distractions. The constant attentions of the
suitor give place to the indifference and carelessness of the husband,
and the disappointed wife utters complaints long and loud that he is
by no means the devoted slave she was led to believe him. He retorts
that if she were as cheerful and amiable, as well dressed and trim
as he once had known her, he should be as much in love--it is he who
is disappointed, and has a right to complain, etc. The matrimonial
question as to “scissors” is well started, and goes on until one or the
other gets flung into the well, or perhaps flings himself or herself
into some Dead Sea of despair.
But after all, a man’s failure to comprehend the real character of
the woman he selects as wife is not nearly so disastrous as the
corresponding failure of the woman to understand the man before she
commits her life to his keeping. The Sphinx gives to the one a cruel
blow of her lion-like paw, but the other she devours bodily, leaving
but the crushed semblance, the simulacrum, as the ancients used to say,
of the bright and hopeful creature who dared try to answer her fatal
riddle.
Say what we will of the equality of the sexes, and the ability of woman
to hold her own in the battle of life, the fact remains that when and
if a woman loses she loses a great deal more than the man. A woman
plays for heavier stakes than the man, and is so reckless in her game
that she never pauses until she has flung her all upon the board. Take
a case: A woman meets a man who at once devotes himself to her, and
both by word and deed professes to hold his life as of no value except
as it may be devoted to her service.
Now no woman who lives is insensible to the delicate flattery of such a
profession--no woman so strong or so self-reliant as not to be pleased
and attracted by what seems the sincere and thorough devotion of a man
who is admired and sought by other women, and is able to hold his own
among other men. Even if she is happy and prosperous and surrounded
by other friends, a man who so addresses her, or without any spoken
words so comports himself, is sure to win a favorable place in her
regard; but if, alas, the woman is lonely and tired and oppressed with
the weight of duties and obligations too heavy for her strength, and
which no one helps her to carry, then if one of these plausible and
much professing men comes along, and in every look and motion and act
says: “Oh, how I long to help you and to comfort you, and to take all
that heavy burden off your shoulders!” she listens, raises her eyes to
heaven in thanksgiving for such unlooked-for succor, and gladly, yes,
eagerly, gives herself and all she has and all she hopes and fears and
loves into his hands. She throws her entire fortune upon the table.
She stakes body, soul, mind, the memories of the past and hopes of the
future upon this single turn of the wheel. She exclaims to listening
Fate: “I have solved your riddle! I have found the answer to your
conundrum of life! I have at last met with the answer to your terrible
enigma, O Fate!” They marry; for the cruel game is not made absolute
until this bond is riveted. While a woman is betrothed her good angel
may possibly come to the rescue, and give her some warning by which she
may escape with no more than a heavy blow and an undying scar; but
when once she is married there is but one door of escape besides death,
and it is a question which is the more cruel.
Few men, whatever may be their disposition, are the same after marriage
that they are before. In the very best specimen of the sex there is a
perhaps unconscious desire and effort to appear better than he really
is during the period of courtship. He exercises a perpetual restraint
upon the coarser and more violent traits of his nature. He sacrifices
his convenience, his comfort, his tastes and inclinations to those of
the object of his pursuit. He likes to walk, and she prefers driving;
he drives. He loves to be out-of-doors, she prefers a shaded parlor;
he sits in the parlor. He dotes upon athletics and she likes to hear
poetry; he reads poetry, and so on. I do not say that the girl or woman
is right to accept or to exact all this self-sacrifice. I will, indeed,
allow that she is apt to become selfish, and perhaps unreasonable, but
at this period of the game she is blindfolded, both by fate and by the
man, who never once speaks candidly and honestly to her, but is always
insisting that her wishes are dearer to him than his own and that to
do what he does not like to do, and give up all that he does like, is
precisely what he enjoys and wishes.
The woman believes him, and accepts the rôle of despot, which is thus
forced upon her, and she wonders that she is not even mistress of her
own life, cannot arrange her hours, or her pursuits, or the dainty
environments of her home as she has always done heretofore. She thought
to find shelter in a tower of strength, and she finds herself captive
in a squalid and hateful prison, while he who was to have been her
devoted knight and _preux chevalier_, becomes at once her jailer and
her fellow-captive.
All this because, poor woman, she failed to correctly guess the riddle
propounded to her by that unknown power which we call nature or fate,
or by way of parable, the Sphinx. The riddle of human character! Did
anybody ever fully solve it? Many of us have tried, but can any one
of us say with conviction that we have succeeded? For even at the
last--even after the man whom we at first considered has discovered
that he has not married the woman he supposed, and after, in the latter
case, the woman has found out her own woeful mistake--can we set it
down as certain that either one of them finally reads the other’s
character aright?
I firmly believe not. At first each saw virtues that either were
too evanescent or too much matter of pretense to be of any lasting
service, and when these had vanished each discovered faults and
disagreeabilities, and perhaps vices, that seemed to comprise the whole
character; but after all, does not truth lie in the middle here, as in
most other cases? Neither man nor woman is quite as good as we at first
imagined, or quite as bad as we afterward concluded--in fact, we never
quite understand from first to last; we never get the true answer to
the conundrum.
The Sphinx has the best of it every time.
XXVI.
WOMAN IN HER MOOD.
Why? is a question asked, in infinite variations, of women and about
them. And the woman’s answer, as likely as not, is the proverbial
woman’s reason--“Oh, because.” It is for this men call us illogical,
inconsistent, inscrutable, and sometimes we admit, with ingenuous
frankness, that we can’t quite understand ourselves.
Perhaps not, and yet I believe that about this mystery, like most other
mysteries, there is a great deal of fiction and nonsense. Take every
woman in her humor, and she is not such a complex being, after all.
Woman’s caprice is man’s opportunity--that is, when he has the wit to
seize it, which is by no means the rule--and as to her being a puzzle,
or a bore, to herself, such a thing, even if true, would be quite
unnecessary if she would but keep a judicious eye upon her own moods
and tenses.
Now, let no gentle reader tremble lest I give away the secrets of the
soul’s prison house and betray our sex’s natural defenses into the
hands of the enemy--or, in other words, to some masculine reader who
may have the intrepid curiosity to explore this page. No, indeed, not
for the world. All I desire to do is to glance at the sources of those
whims, humors and fickle fancies which, no doubt, are often determining
factors in a woman’s life. And having accounted for these, as well as
may be, I should like, if possible, to analyze them sufficiently to
distinguish honest impulse from caprice, and to separate earnestness
from _ennui_.
It is all very well to say that nature has made woman a _giourette_ and
that changing her mind is her inalienable prerogative. Fallacy! The
truth is that--to reverse the old law--the woman of vapors is not born,
but made. The process begins like the Chinese custom of compressing
the feet in early childhood. From first to last she is removed by
conventionality further and further from the healthy conditions of
nature, in the matter of sleeping, for example, which, when you come
to think of it, constitutes about one-third of our entire existence.
The boys usually sleep alone, and perhaps have each a separate room
while, partly to provide for this comfort of their brothers, and partly
from mere custom, the girls are packed away two or three together, or,
worse still, put to bed with their elders. Then, as they grow up, their
tender little bodies are so handicapped and weighted down by all the
formidable paraphernalia of the modern feminine wardrobe--the tight,
high-heeled shoes, the heavy draggling skirts, the taut elastics, the
innumerable pins, and heaven only knows what other devices of wire,
bone, buckram and steel--that not a muscle can enjoy its free, flexible
movement, while the nerves are “set on edge,” and every movement is
painfully distorted. Of course, a cramped body breeds warped ideas
and a narrow mind. Then, the physical freedom, exercise, amusements
and recuperative hygiene under which men develop and thrive, are
for the most part denied to women, if only by reason of costume
and conventionality. Even the out-door sports, which a broadening
civilization at last consents to regard as not unbecoming ladies, they
can seldom enjoy independently and by themselves. The Turkish and
Russian baths are mostly for the luxurious few who can afford them as
home accessories. Such solace as tobacco may afford is forbidden them,
although every argument in its favor for men would apply with tenfold
force to the mercurial and high-strung temperament of womankind.
Under these conditions, is it any wonder if a woman is “uncertain, coy
and hard to please;” that she should sometimes say no when she means
yes, or that she should reconsider a thing two or three times with
baffling suddenness and with diametrically opposite conclusions? The
fact is, she is chained to the traditional rock of physical discomfort
and moral oppression, and welcomes with desperate eagerness the first
knight errant who shows a disposition to set her free. When such an
opportunity does come along, and she has the courage or recklessness to
accept it, regardless of worldly considerations, she is pointed out as
an extreme case of the whimsical folly known to be characteristic of
her sex.
Most Europeans who visit this country, as Messrs. Max O’Rell and
Paul Bourget have done, with the gracious purpose of telling us
all about ourselves, declare that here is the earthly paradise of
womankind. _Cherchez la femme_ with us, they say, and you find her
upon a pedestal, _fêted_ and caressed, the object of something like a
chivalric devotion.
They might have added that too often she is spoiled. Really, to be
killed with kindness is not an enviable destiny. We have just been
considering the case of those who are crochety merely from physical
exasperation and the petty material annoyances of life. There is
another class, perhaps larger still, whose morbid moods arise from
conditions exactly the reverse--that is to say--from an excess of
effete comfort, if not of idle luxury, and a woeful lack of both
physical and mental occupation. These are the easy prey of the demon
_Ennui_.
The philosopher (pessimistic) hath said want and _ennui_ are the two
poles of human life. The further we are removed from the one, the
nearer we approach the other. A woman with every material want provided
for, with nothing to “worry” about and everything to enjoy, and whose
future is one long unbroken perspective of flowery ease, is indeed
to be pitied. Having no real emotions to exaggerate, she falls back
upon imaginary ones, and these, when once allowed to gain control,
are the most tyrannical of evil genii. They drive a woman, through
the very defects of her qualities of heart and impulse, to the most
extreme inconsistencies. They induce fits of morbid personal vanity, in
which _il faut souffrir pour être belle_ and then suffer more because
beauty is not attained--or, being attained, is ineffective. They make
her a ridiculous _malade imaginaire_. They awaken a supersensitive
conscience, or perhaps violent religious fervor, which expresses itself
in all sorts of misdirected charities and superfluous zeal. Again,
these sham emotions find expression in a series of capricious yet
demonstrative friendships with individuals of her own sex--friendships
as short-lived and tempestuous as they are capricious. These, and a
hundred similar humors, are bred of _ennui_, pure and simple. And
herein, if I may venture to suggest it without indiscretion, lies the
clew to the restlessness and impatience which are summed up at the
present day under the general head of “the new womanhood.”
But, caprice and _ennui_ aside, it is in love that the innate and
incorrigible humors, the legendary inconsistency and caprice of
womanhood most strikingly assert themselves. “She is a woman, therefore
to be wooed,” and according to the mere accidents of the wooing, or
because the sky is so blue on a certain day, she takes long chances
with fate. Many a modern marriage, not particularly unhappy in itself,
is dissolved as it was contracted--with insouciant good will, or
at worst indifference, on both sides. Other marriages, ill devised
and thoroughly wretched, are stuck to through thick and thin merely
from bravado or false pride. What a confessional it would be if men
and women were to tell with frank unreserve their precise reasons
for marrying! Many, of course, have an eye to material welfare and
advancement. Some men marry from a sense of duty, and not a few women
from mere curiosity.