If there is any individual who combines within himself the vices of an
entire species it is he. A mother-in-law has usually been thought a
rather satisfactory specimen of total depravity; it has been customary
to regard your sweetheart’s brother as tolerably vicious for a young
man; there is excellent authority for looking upon your business
partner as not wholly without merit as a nuisance—but your friend’s
friend is as far ahead of these in all that constitutes a healthy
disagreeableness as they themselves are in advance of the average
reptile or the conventional pestilence.
We do not propose to illustrate the great truth we have in hand by
instances; the experience of the reader will furnish ample evidence in
support of our proposition, and any narration of pertinent facts could
only quicken into life the dead ghosts of a thousand sheeted annoyances
to squeak and gibber through a memory studded thick with the tombstones
of happy hours murdered by your friend’s friend.
Also, the animal is too well known to need a description. Imagine a
thing in all essential particulars the exact reverse of a desirable
acquaintance, and you have his mental photograph. How your friend could
ever admire so hopeless and unendurable a bore is a problem you are
ever seeking to solve. Perhaps you may be assisted in it by a previous
solution of the kindred problem—how he could ever feel affection for
yourself? Perhaps your friend’s friend is equally exercised over that
question. Perhaps from his point of view _you_ are your friend’s
friend.
Le Diable est aux Vaches.
If it be that ridicule is the test of truth, as Shaftesbury is reported
to have said and didn’t, the doctrine of Woman Suffrage is the truest
of all faiths. The amount of really good ridicule that has been
expended upon this thing is appalling, and yet we are compelled to
confess that to all appearance “the cause” has been thereby shorn of no
material strength, nor bled of its vitality. And shall it be admitted
that this potent argument of little minds is as powerless as the
dullards of all ages have steadfastly maintained? Forbid it, Heaven!
the gimlet is as proper a gimlet as any in all Christendom, but the
timber is too hard to pierce! Grant ye that “the movement” is waxing
more wondrous with each springing sun, who shall say what it might not
have been but for the sharp hatcheting of us wits among its boughs? If
the doctor have not cured his patient by to-morrow he may at least
claim that without the physic the man would have died to-day.
And pray who shall search the vitals of a whale with a bodkin—who may
reach his jackknife through the superposed bubber? Pachyderm, thy name
is Woman! All the king’s horses and all the king’s men shall not bend
the bow that can despatch a clothyard shaft through thy pearly hide.
The male and female women who nightly howl their social and political
grievances into the wide ear of the universe are as insensible to the
prickings of ridicule as they are unconscious of logic. An intellectual
Goliah of Gath might spear them with an epigram like unto a weaver’s
beam, and the sting thereof would be as but the nipping of a red ant.
Apollo might speed among them his silver arrows, which erst heaped the
Phrygian shores with hecatombs of Argive slain, and they would but
complain of the mosquito’s beak. Your female reformer goes smashing
through society like a tipsy rhinoceros among the tulip beds, and all
the torrent of brickbats rained upon her skin is shed, as globules of
mercury might be supposed to run off the back of a dry drake.
One of the rarest amusements in life is to go about with an icicle
suspended by a string, letting it down the necks of the unwary. The
sudden shrug, the quick frightened shudder, the yelp of apprehension
are sources of a pure, because diabolical, delight. But these women—you
may practise your chilling joke upon one of them, and she will calmly
wonder where you got your ice, and will pen with deliberate fingers an
ungrammatical resolution denouncing congelation as tyrannical and
obsolete.
We despair of ever dispelling these creatures by pungent
pleasantries—of routing them by sharp censure. They are, apparently, to
go on practically unmolested to the end. Meantime we are cast down with
a mighty proneness along the dust; our shapely anatomy is clothed in a
jaunty suit of sackcloth liberally embellished with the frippery of
ashes; our days are vocal with wailing, our nights melodious with
snuffle!
Brethren, let us pray that the political sceptre may not pass from us
into the jewelled hands which were intended by nature for the clouting
of babes and sucklings.