Who was the wit who, to the usual misquotation from Buffon, _le style
c’est l’homme_, rejoined _mais ce n’est pas la femme_? The statement
has perhaps as much truth as is required from a witticism; it is half
true. Woman, unlike man, does not express all of herself. She has her
reticences, her euphemisms, and her asterisks. She will on no account
name all things by their names. It is one of the childish weaknesses
of men, she holds, to practise veracity to excess. Like children, they
cannot help blurting out the truth. But she, from diligent experiments
on her own person, has learnt that truth looks all the better for
having its nose powdered and its cheeks discreetly rouged. Readers of
George Sand’s “Histoire de ma Vie” are often baffled in tracing the
fine distinction between the woman and the make-up. Therein the work
is typical, illustrating as it does the general desire of women in
literature to look pretty—to look pretty in their mirror, for themselves,
for their own pleasure. Not, as is sometimes erroneously asserted, to
look pretty in the eyes of men or of a particular man. So one is amused
but scarcely convinced by Heine’s well-known remark that every woman who
writes has one eye on her paper and the other on some man—except the
Countess Hahn-Hahn, who had only one eye. Evidently the generalization
was invented just to spite the countess. Mme. de Sévigné’s letters to
her daughter are far better than those to Bussy-Rabutin. George Eliot
may have had one eye on Lewes when she did her best to spoil her novels
by scientific pedantry—which was sheer waste (let alone the damage to
the novels), as Lewes was, by all accounts, the ugliest man in London.
But on what man had Jane Austen an eye? One might ask the question about
our thousands of women novelists to-day, and at once see the refutation
of Heine in simple arithmetic; there would not be enough men to go
round. There is clearly no rule. Heine may have been thinking of George
Sand, already mentioned, whose eye—her “glad eye,” I fear it must be
called—revolved as she wrote upon a round dozen of men in turn.
But there is one department of women’s literature wherein the element
of doubt altogether vanishes. I mean the journals they publish, or get
published, for themselves. They cannot write here with their eye on some
man. Indeed, men, nice men (“nice” in the strict sense, approved in a
certain talk between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney), are rather
chary of even approaching such journals. They exhibit advertisements
of “undies,” corsets, and other things that used to be called feminine
mysteries, but are now entitled perhaps to the rank of notorieties which
make one instinctively stammer, “Oh, I beg your pardon,” and beat a
hasty retreat. So, it will at once be said, do all newspapers nowadays,
and that is true. Yet, somehow, one feels more indiscreet in lighting
upon them in the women’s journals than in the others. For one thing,
they seem to be more dainty and alluring by reason of more artistic
execution and glazed paper, so that they may satisfy the critical
eye of their proper wearers. And, for another, there is a difference
between the high-road of the newspaper, whereon a man willy-nilly must
travel, and the by-path of the women’s journal, where he is at best a
privileged intruder. If you ask, “Goosey, goosey, gander, whither shall I
wander?” there is a distinct difference between answering, “Upstairs and
downstairs,” and “in my lady’s chamber.”
All this, of course, as the judicious will have perceived, really means
that I am as interested as, I suppose, are most of my fellow-men in
all these curiously dainty and elegant ingenuities of women’s apparel,
and that I am only pretending to be shocked. (After all, in his
pursuit of veracity, even a man may occasionally powder his nose.) The
advertisers, bless them, know all about that. They know that the natural
man shares the naïve admiration which Pepys once expressed on seeing
Lady Castlemaine’s wonderful _lingerie_ and laces hanging out to dry
on a clothes-line in Whitehall. But the natural man generally finds it
convenient to be more reticent about it than Pepys.
The first number of the _Woman’s Supplement_, which has prompted these
reflections, suggests another: the perpetual wonder and delight of men
at the success with which women accommodate facts to their ideals.
We saw them, just now, doing this with their literature; we saw them
determined that, at all costs, this shall be pleasing and themselves
the most pleasing things in it; we saw the notable success of George
Sand in accommodating her historical to her ideal self. But they are as
successful with nature as with history. Just now, for example, sloping
shoulders are manifestly the ideal—sloping shoulders with the obviously
appropriate balloon sleeves, as in Mr. Bernard Lintott’s lady, or else
with no sleeves at all, as in M. Jean Doumergue’s. And part of the same
ideal is that the “figure” shall be anything but “full.” Now are women’s
shoulders naturally more sloping or their figures less full than they
used to be? These are puzzling questions, but not beyond conjecture, and,
for my part, I guess that the answer is No. Yet our women have easily
triumphed over nature and slope their shoulders with the uniformity of a
regiment sloping arms, while every woman with a full figure has quietly
become a _fausse maigre_.
While I am about it, let me echo the usual male protest. As the
_Supplement_ shows, women have not yet persuaded themselves to abandon
their detestable high heels. The consequence is that there threatens to
be no longer any such thing as a graceful gait. _Incessu patuit dea_
will soon have become an incomprehensible allusion. And that hideous
square patch which too often peeps above the back of the shoe? I suppose
it is just a practical device to strengthen the stocking in a part of
stress; but I hardly think really “nice” women can abide it. On the
whole, however, I subscribe cheerfully to the current opinion that
woman’s dress was never so charming as it is at present. That is probably
an illusion. The mysterious laws that regulate fashion mercifully
regulate also the capacity for enjoying it. And it is a mercy, too, that
the beauty of woman can triumph even over “old-fashioned” things. To our
modern eyes the fashions of the ’70’s and ’80’s were far from beautiful
in themselves—bunchy, humpy, without “line.” Yet, when they were playing
_Peter Ibbetson_, one saw some fair women in them—and was at once
reconciled, able in fact to see them with the eye of their period.