amiable, reminded me the other day that Madame de Girardin had said,
that out of a hundred women, you would find but two stupid ones. If
England possessed, or had ever had a Madame de Girardin, we might
possibly read in some book, that out of a hundred English women, you
will find two witty. But this does not prevent John Bull from getting
on in the world. Very much the contrary: England made all her great
conquests at a time when her women were treated with about as much
consideration as the inmates of an Eastern harem, and it is to this
masculine independence, this indifference towards women, that the
success of the English may partly be ascribed. Our mothers in France
are matchless; but they tie us to their apron-strings too much: they
make us more supple and more amiable, but they enervate us. From our
mother's yoke we pass, after a short liberty, more or less capable of
improving us, to that of our wives. I will repeat it, cry it upon the
house-tops: from the cradle to the tomb we allow ourselves to be led
like lambs by women. The chains are charming, the servitude is of the
sweetest! that I do not wish to deny; but servitude it is none the
less; and if we are to go and found colonies, empires, in Africa,
China, and I don't know where else, we must have pioneers, and it is
not the fine young fellows, of whom the mothers of the present day are
so proud and so careful, that will go and transplant our civilisation
outside our dear fair country.
The Englishman leaves his mother without more emotion or more ceremony
than we should show in taking leave of our landlord. If he be married,
he announces to his wife that he has decided to set out next week for
Australia. She gets his trunks packed, an operation less lengthy in
England than in France, and off they go.
In our country, a woman follows her husband by law; here she follows
him by instinct. In France, woman is a dream; in England she is a
necessity, a habit.
Condé and Turenne were led by women; Wellington and Nelson ill-treated
their wives.
Corneille's heroines are Roman women, with hearts of gold, and wills
of iron, full of sublime devotion. Shakespeare's heroines are, for the
most part, slaves or simpletons: Juliet is a spoilt child, Desdemona a
kind of submissive odalisque, Beatrice a pretty prattle, and Ophelia a
goose.
"Madam," said a polite prince of the House of Wasa to his wife, "we
married you that you might give us children, not advice." A remark
worthy of Napoleon I. The Englishman says the same thing to his wife.
So Mrs. John Bull gives her husband plenty of children, but very
little advice.
But things are altering. Thanks to the higher education that is being
administered to young Englishwomen; thanks to Girton College, Newnham
College, the High Schools, and other institutions that are being
founded day by day, with the object of stripping woman of the
attributes that render her so attractive in our sight, all that has
been said and repeated about the reserve, the modesty, the innocence
of the Englishwoman, the virtues that made of her a model wife and
housekeeper, all this, I say, will soon be quite out of date.
Formerly girls were sent to receive their education at the hands of
some good women who did not teach them much, I am prepared to admit,
but who did not fail to fit them to be good wives, good mothers, and
good housekeepers. Now they are taught Latin and Greek, mathematics
and natural philosophy, political economy and medicine, yes, medicine,
and no one knows what besides. They wear men's hats known as
wide-awakes (much too wide awake to please most of us), and masculine
looking coats, and they stare you in the face in manly fashion. When
are the trousers coming?
Take care, friend John, you are on a downward and dangerous path. I
see you presiding over meetings of blue-stockings and hear you adding
your voice to theirs in their demand for women's rights. It seems to
me that it is your future happiness that you stake. You will have a
wife who will know the differential and integral calculus, but will be
all unskilled in the art of making those nice puddings and pies you
like so much. No more warm slippers awaiting you by the fender;
instead of the song of the kettle on the hob, that sweet household
melody, you will hear the litany of the Rights of Woman; no more
kisses on your wife's half-closed eyelids, she will wear spectacles.
You will be able to console yourself, by taking refuge in your club,
and grumbling there to your heart's content, or by going to a
restaurant and, at the price of a tip, buying the right of blowing up
the waiter. But remember that, to have a good grumble in, there's no
place like home; and if your dinner is not to your liking, why, you
can blow up your wife for nothing.
* * * * *
Some English ladies are moving heaven and earth to get Parliament to
pass an Act which will allow them to vote. They will, perhaps, one day
go so far as to demand seats in the House of Commons.
What is to be done with the women? Owing to the emigration of the men,
this is indeed a problem that England will ere long have to solve in
one way or another.
"The emigration of two or three hundred thousand of our women would be
a great boon to us," said Lord Shaftesbury the other day; "it would
even be the greatest blessing that could happen to England." The wish
is not a gallant one, but it is sensible and practical.
It is even calculated that, if this wish could be realised, the number
of women that would remain, would still surpass by 500,000 the number
of her Britannic Majesty's male subjects.
Now, supposing that one day or the other every man enters the holy
estate of matrimony, the above figures prove that, in this realm,
about 800,000 ladies are condemned to a condition of single
blessedness. Miss Miller, Miss Cobbe, and other leaders of the
Sisterhood of St. Catharine would quickly remedy this sad state of
things, if they were allowed to vote, and one day to change the
_Parlement_ into _Bavardement_.
Miss Cobbe, the destroying angel of Man's rights, exclaimed at a
meeting held in London, on the 13th of June, 1884, that "she regretted
that she could not fight and pull down park railings to accomplish her
object."
This is promising, is it not?
At the same meeting, Miss Miller announced her intention of paying no
more taxes.[5] "I will force the tax collector," she said, "to break
into my house and sell my goods by auction, when I shall have a
gathering of friends to protest against the injustice done to women,
with the full intention of making my resistance more forcible and
myself more disagreeable and troublesome to the authorities every
year."
[5] To the great amusement of the peaceful inhabitants of
London, this lady has just carried out her threats. You will,
however, be glad to hear that her friends managed to restore to
her the distrained goods, so that the little performance did not
tell much on the lady's purse.
This is energy worthy of a better cause.
It is needless to add that such ladies are mostly unclaimed blessings,
and that none of them set up as professional beauties. When a woman
is beautiful, she is generally content with playing a woman's part;
when she is a mother, this sublime _rôle_ is sufficient for her. These
tedious persons embrace the thankless career of advocates of woman's
rights, because they have never found anything better to embrace. And
these excellent ladies must not put it into their heads that they have
created the part, for it existed in the days of Aristophanes:
Praxagora was neither more nor less ridiculous than the present
champions of Women's rights.
It would be the reverse of generous for a man to reproach a woman with
being an old maid. When a man does not marry, it is for want of an
inclination; when a woman does not marry, it is for want of an
invitation.
However that may be, the old maid is a social failure, and, in
England, almost a social evil. At all events, she is a social
nuisance, when she sets up as an institution, a system, and claims the
right of being placed at the helm _ex-officio_.
It is quite right that the old maid should be respected, when she
consents to remain an obscure heroine, and to devote to doing good the
energies that it is not her lot to be able to devote to the sacred
duties of a wife and mother; let her be tolerated when she pounces
upon her fellow-creatures, in their houses, in omnibuses, and in
trains, to try to convert them; let her be pitied, when she is reduced
to the necessity of wasting her treasures of love on her cat and her
parrot. But when she talks of devoting her spare energies to striking
terror into the breast of man, it is high time that some Member of
Parliament should see if there is no possibility of passing a bill
through the House (before she gets in) to dispose of her, as widows
are disposed of in Malabar.
XI.
Women at Home--Daughters, Wives, Widows, and Mothers--Comparisons--The
Hospitality of Mrs. John Bull--Provincial Life.
The young girl is the heroine of English society. Free and accessible,
she is more attractive as a woman, but perhaps less tempting as a
future wife, than the timid and sweet young French girl.
She walks out alone, travels alone, and gives you a shake of the hand
that is enough to put your shoulder-blade out of joint.
Her favourite occupations are walking and riding, and the game of
lawn-tennis, which develops her form and her taste for flirtation. She
carries her head erect, her shoulders square, and, as you look at the
pump-handle swing of her arms, you feel that if occasion required, she
would be able to defend herself and give the man, who treated her with
disrespect, a sound box on the ears.
Her frank and fearless bearing is her surest protection: it is the
bearing of confidence and security.
The young married woman is much more fascinating in France than in
England.
The Frenchwoman gains her liberty when she marries, the Englishwoman
loses hers. The latter becomes a minor for the rest of her days, from
the moment she has pronounced the fatal _I will_. The former is, on
the contrary, emancipated by these magic words.
If the Frenchwoman has her own way in the household, she has very
often richly earned it. It is, unfortunately, not rare to see parents
offer to their child, as a companion of her joys and sorrows, a man of
forty, bald and unwieldy, who, after having run through health,
fortune, and all the romance he ever had about him, is willing to
bestow the rest upon her in exchange for her dot, her youth, her
beauty, and her virtues. It is a fact, though a sad one, that the
husband a French mother most ardently desires for her daughter, is a
staid, serious man, a man of experience, a notary, for instance. The
notary is quoted very high in the French matrimonial market.
It is a man of sound, ripe qualities, Madame, that you want for your
daughter. Ripe! sleepy, you mean, no doubt. And your charming
daughter, who has perhaps woven her little romance, built her bright
castles in Spain, as she danced with some handsome young cavalier of
twenty-five, accepts your choice without a murmur. He is still brisk,
he is well preserved, you say to yourself: a quiet, steady man, who
will have only my daughter's happiness at heart. But, Madame, does it
never occur to you that the idea of the fair young head of a girl of
eighteen, pillowed beside that bald or grey one, is nothing short of
revolting? When will you cease preaching to your daughters the theory
that a husband is a stupid animal, created and sent into the world to
buy dresses and diamonds, and that it is seldom he is in a position to
acquit himself properly in this respect at the age of twenty-five? A
husband of forty who places diamonds in his wife's ears, that may be
very nice; but a husband of twenty-five who lodges lovely kisses in
his wife's neck, that is much nicer still. Give your daughters liberty
to make their own choice, as is done in England, and you will soon see
the kind of article they prefer. Give your charming girls to fine
young men who love them; and, hand in hand, they will bravely fight
the battle of life, bring up numerous families of robust children to
brighten your declining years, and will grow old together, always
young and handsome in each other's eyes, as on the day of their
betrothal.
In England, a woman marries whom she likes. This system is not
without its drawbacks. Thus the sister of a well-known titled lady has
become a simple baker's wife; and not long ago, I read in the papers
that a baronet's daughter, who had married one of her father's grooms,
sought to be separated from her husband, because he did not exactly
treat her with the kindness he had always shown to his master's
horses.
Every rule has its exception, every medal its reverse side; but this
does not prove the rule to be a bad one, or the medal to be made of
base alloy. The liberty and confidence accorded, in England, to youth
and even to childhood, are much better calculated to instil into them
the sentiments of independence, self-respect, and responsibility, than
the system of watchfulness and mistrust, in which French children,
whether at home or in school, are brought up. When I spoke of youth
and childhood, I might have added that even the very babies have their
liberty; for, in England, they are not swathed and transformed into
little mummy-like bundles; their heads are left uncovered, their limbs
unconfined, they can stretch and kick to their heart's content. Up to
four or five years of age, they wear no long stockings, but their
little calves are allowed to grow brown and hardy with exposure to the
summer's sun and winter's wind; yet, I am not aware that the English
are less straight about the legs or more bald about the head, than the
French, whom I would remind that Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote, "The
countries in which the children are swathed, are the ones which swarm
with hunchbacks, and cripples of every description."
Air, air, more air! is the constant cry of our children.
* * * * *
English girls rarely marry before they are twenty-two or -three years
old; many make very good marriages, when they are close upon thirty.
In this country, marriages are not knocked up in a few days, nor in a
few months. A young man of about twenty will engage himself to a girl
of eighteen, and the lovers remain thus engaged for two, three, and
four years.
For the young girl, it is a delightful time. During her engagement,
she enjoys almost all the pleasures of matrimony, knows none of its
cares; moreover she is free. It is no wonder she often does her best
to make the pleasure last as long as possible. She had rather murmur
sweet nothings with her lover, than shut herself up with him in a
semi-detached, and murmur against the price of coals and butter.
The day she marries, she is said to be settled, that is, established,
extinguished.
I do not wish to imply that, in an English household, the wife does
not find happiness awaiting her; nothing is further from my meaning.
On the contrary, I should say that she could enter upon her new life
with more confidence than her French sister, because the
responsibility she assumes is smaller, and because she has invariably
been taught how to keep house.
In France, the wife is the confidante, and, I say it to her honour,
the mistress of her husband. In England, she is only the mistress of
the household, the housekeeper.
In France, it is generally the wife of a tradesman who has charge of
his books and his cash-box, and never were either intrusted to better
guardianship than that of the goddess of order and economy that men
call _la Française_. If she happens to lose her husband, she is
capable of carrying on the business without him, and I could name a
great number of important houses of business that are managed by
widows--the famous BON MARCHÉ among others. The emancipation of woman,
in France, is proclaimed by the frequency of the inscription _Mdlle.
So-and-so_, and _Mdme. Vve. So-and-so_, over the shop doors. It is
independence.
In England, a wife knows nothing of her husband's affairs--not more
than a clerk knows of the affairs of his employer, and it would often
be hard for her to say whether he is on the road to riches or to ruin.
At the death of her husband, an Englishwoman, who has not enough to
live on, becomes a governess, a lady companion, a housekeeper, or a
nurse. It is servitude.
An Englishman gives his wife so much a month for the expenses of the
house, and a certain sum for her dress: her wages. It is without much
astonishment she learns one fine morning that her husband is about to
take her to a sumptuous new home, or that circumstances, over which
she has no control, make it expedient that the removal of their goods,
by the back door, shall take place next evening: she follows the
furniture.
The Bohemian temperament of the Englishman contrasts strangely with
his habits of industry and his reserve: it is a curious blending of
the ant and the grasshopper.
The Frenchman has but one aim, as he works: to put by some money that
shall bring him in a little income, and allow him to retire from toil.
The Englishman spends as he goes. The workman and the peasant, though
they earned two pounds a day, would be satisfied with the provision
made for them by the parish, should they outlive their working days.
The English house shows that its inmates take little thought for the
morrow: few cupboards, no wine cellars. I speak of London houses, with
rents rising to £100 a-year. The Englishman orders in a dozen of wine
at a time, and keeps it in his sideboard. In France, the ordinary
provincial house is a veritable ant's store. Even the modest cobbler
has a dark dry corner, where he can put his hand upon a dusty bottle
of old Bordeaux the day that he has one of his family to nurse, or an
old friend to feast. The cellar is to the Frenchman what the
linen-press is to the Frenchwoman, a sanctuary.
* * * * *
I am constantly hearing on all sides complaints of the stagnation of
business. The farmers make loud lamentations: the earth refuses to
yield them her increase, and they can no longer make a living on
British soil.
Here is a great social problem that I should not care to undertake to
solve. However, from the few observations that I have made, it seems
to me that many English farmers have not to seek very far to find the
cause of their want of success.
The farmer's wife of other days was a worthy unpretentious woman, who
looked to everything connected with the farm, rose at five in the
morning, superintended the servants, did her own dairy work, and did
not even disdain to feed the pigs. The farmer's wife of the present
day is often a lady who, under pretext of not being able to pay
frequent visits to her friends, keeps open house and does the honours
of the farm with a grace and liberality worthy of the princely
hospitality of an English country-seat. She rises at nine, or has her
breakfast taken to her bedside; she has horses and carriages, ponies
for the children, wagonettes for pleasure parties, all the
accoutrements of an English nobleman's house. Her time is passed in
picnics, drives, visits, and receptions. She aims at keeping pace with
the squire's wife, but has this difficulty to contend with, that
whereas the squire takes up his rents whether farming be paying or
not, the farmer must pay them, let the year be a good or a bad one.
The tradesmen's wives outshine the women of the upper classes in the
luxury of their toilette. They are caricatures loaded with chains,
necklets, lockets, long earrings and feathers, as many as they can
carry. These ladies must be impatiently awaiting the day when liberty
or fashion will allow them to wear two hats at once, and rings in
their noses. These walking feather-brooms form a curious contrast with
the pretty little Princesse bonnets and simple attire of the English
ladies of good society.
My conscience almost reproaches me for having found fault with the
kind of existence led by many farmers' wives, for I think I may safely
affirm that to their hospitality I owe the most delightful hours of
_jucunda oblivia vitæ_ that I have ever passed in my life. O
conscience!
* * * * *
Just as extensive and varied as are the possessions of John Bull,
Esquire, just so restricted is the domain of his wife.
When she has given her husband her heart and its few little
dependencies, her assets are reduced to the incontestable qualities
with which nature, as a generous mother, has gifted her. It is true
that since the passing of the Married Women's Property Act, she has a
right to possess property; but if she sets the least store by her
peace of mind and the tranquillity of the household, she quickly gives
up to her husband the rights which he considers as already his own in
his quality of husband. You see, he takes a wife _for better, for
worse_, and if he is no fool, he manages that it shall be for better.
It is very simple.
The Englishman is an astute diplomatist; he knows how to rob the enemy
of the sinew of war, and consequently of all liberty of action. He
knows, too, how to make his wife understand in order that she may take
great care of him, that his will is only to be made in her favour, if
she has served him well.
A well-known American lady said not long ago, that of all the ways of
earning a living, marriage was the hardest, most thankless, and least
lucrative for a woman. In justice, I should add, however, that for one
reason or another this lady had never tried it.
I know of an Englishman who, about fifty years ago succeeded in
winning the hand of a rich girl, and supplanting a lover to whom she
had previously plighted her troth. After having passed his life in
reproaching his wife for her infidelity ... to the man she had jilted
for him, this domestic tyrant vouchsafed to depart this life last
year, and a few years of widowhood and peace seemed in store for his
wife. But alas! when the will of this love of a husband was examined,
it turned out that though there was no mistake about the widowhood,
the peace was not so clear. He left everything to his son, that is to
say, his own fortune and that of his wife which he had taken
possession of, and was not even polite enough to restore to her. At
the same time he charged his son to pay that lady £100 per annum, as
long as she remained a widow: liberal treatment, was it not? ... for a
faithful old servant. As for the supposition that it could enter into
the head of the good woman to marry again, it was a joke in very
doubtful taste on the part of the worthy defunct. She is at present in
her seventy-third year. Her son is fast ruining himself on the Stock
Exchange and the turf, so that her pittance of £100 a year is not so
safe as it might be. But, whatever may happen, there is no danger that
the poor lady, urged by despair, will go and drown herself; she would
be too much afraid of rejoining her husband.
If you would study John Bull as a will maker, open the _Illustrated
London News_, which gives testamentary news every Friday. The dearly
beloved wife--this is the formula--will often be the object of your
lively compassion.
If one may trust epitaphs, there are widows who seem, however, far
from having cause of complaint against their poor defuncts.
I read on a handsome monument in Kensal Green Cemetery:
"Here lies John Davies,
The friend of the friendless,
The most tender of husbands."
And lower down, on the same stone:
"Here lies Thomas Millard,
The friend of the friendless,
and the
Tender husband of the Widow of John Davies
above mentioned."
I religiously pay a visit to Kensal Green Cemetery every year. I am
still young, and I live in hopes of seeing the complete list of the
tender husbands of this exemplary widow.
* * * * *
A French widow remains the head of the family: her authority is
unquestioned.
On the death of her husband, the English widow becomes a dowager: she
abdicates the little power she ever possessed in favour of her eldest
son. She has rarely been initiated into the affairs of her husband,
therefore it seems quite natural to her that her son, a man, should
take the reins of government into his own hands.