THE
GIRL OF THE PERIOD
ETC.
VOL. I.
[REPRINTED, _by permission, from the_ SATURDAY REVIEW]
THE
GIRL OF THE PERIOD
AND OTHER
Social Essays
BY
E. LYNN LINTON
AUTHOR OF 'THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS' 'UNDER WHICH LORD?'
'THE REBEL OF THE FAMILY' 'IONE' ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
[Illustration]
LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1883
[_All rights reserved_]
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
Dedicated
TO
ALL GOOD GIRLS
AND
TRUE WOMEN
PREFACE.
So many false reports followed the appearance of these essays, that I
am grateful to the authorities of the _Saturday Review_ for their
present permission to republish them under my own name, even though
the best of the day has a little gone by, and other forms of folly
have been flying about since these were shot at. The essays hit
sharply enough at the time, and caused some ill-blood. 'The Girl of
the Period' was especially obnoxious to many to whom women were the
Sacred Sex above criticism and beyond rebuke; and I had to pay pretty
smartly in private life, by those who knew, for what they termed a
libel and an untruth. With these passionate repudiators on the one
hand, on the other were some who, trading on the enforced anonymity of
the paper, took spurious credit to themselves for the authorship. I
was twice introduced to the 'Writer of the "Girl of the Period."' The
first time he was a clergyman who had boldly told my friends that he
had written the paper; the second, she was a lady of rank well
known in London society, and to this hour believed by her own circle
to have written this and other of the articles included in the present
collection. I confess that, whether for praise or blame, I am glad to
be able at last to assume the full responsibility of my own work.
In re-reading these papers I am more than ever convinced that I have
struck the right chord of condemnation, and advocated the best virtues
and most valuable characteristics of women. I neither soften nor
retract a line of what I have said. One of the modern phases of
womanhood--hard, unloving, mercenary, ambitious, without domestic
faculty and devoid of healthy natural instincts--is still to me a
pitiable mistake and a grave national disaster. And I think now, as I
thought when I wrote these papers, that a public and professional life
for women is incompatible with the discharge of their highest duties
or the cultivation of their noblest qualities. I think now, as I
thought then, that the sphere of human action is determined by the
fact of sex, and that there does exist both natural limitation and
natural direction. This creed, which summarizes all that I have said
_in extenso_, I repeat with emphasis, and maintain with the conviction
of long years of experience.
E. LYNN LINTON.
1883.
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
PAGE
THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD 1
MODERN MOTHERS (I.) 10
MODERN MOTHERS (II.) 19
PAYING ONE'S SHOT 27
WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK? 37
LITTLE WOMEN 48
IDEAL WOMEN 58
PINCHBECK 69
AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD 79
FEMININE AFFECTATIONS 88
INTERFERENCE 99
THE FASHIONABLE WOMAN 109
SLEEPING DOGS 119
BEAUTY AND BRAINS 128
NYMPHS 137
MÉSALLIANCES 147
WEAK SISTERS 157
PINCHING SHOES 167
SUPERIOR BEINGS 176
FEMININE AMENITIES 184
GRIM FEMALES 193
MATURE SIRENS 203
PUMPKINS 213
WIDOWS 223
DOLLS 234
CHARMING WOMEN 244
APRON-STRINGS 254
FINE FEELINGS 264
SPHINXES 273
FLIRTING 281
SCRAMBLERS 290
FLATTERY 299
LA FEMME PASSÉE 309
SPOILT WOMEN 317
DOVECOTS 325
BORED HUSBANDS 335
ESSAYS
UPON
SOCIAL SUBJECTS.
_THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD._
Time was when the phrase, 'a fair young English girl,' meant the ideal
of womanhood; to us, at least, of home birth and breeding. It meant a
creature generous, capable, modest; something franker than a
Frenchwoman, more to be trusted than an Italian, as brave as an
American but more refined, as domestic as a German and more graceful.
It meant a girl who could be trusted alone if need be, because of the
innate purity and dignity of her nature, but who was neither bold in
bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be
her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival; one who would
consider his interests as identical with her own, and not hold him as
just so much fair game for spoil; who would make his house his true
home and place of rest, not a mere passage-place for vanity and
ostentation to pass through; a tender mother, an industrious
housekeeper, a judicious mistress.
We prided ourselves as a nation on our women. We thought we had the
pick of creation in this fair young English girl of ours, and envied
no other men their own. We admired the languid grace and subtle fire
of the South; the docility and childlike affectionateness of the East
seemed to us sweet and simple and restful; the vivacious sparkle of
the trim and sprightly Parisienne was a pleasant little excitement
when we met with it in its own domain; but our allegiance never
wandered from our brown-haired girls at home, and our hearts were less
vagrant than our fancies. This was in the old time, and when English
girls were content to be what God and nature had made them. Of late
years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the world a race
of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal as if we had created
another nation altogether. The Girl of the Period, and the fair young
English girl of the past, have nothing in common save ancestry and
their mother-tongue; and even of this last the modern version makes
almost a new language, through the copious additions it has received
from the current slang of the day.
The Girl of the Period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her
face, as the first articles of her personal religion--a creature whose
sole idea of life is fun; whose sole aim is unbounded luxury; and
whose dress is the chief object of such thought and intellect as
she possesses. Her main endeavour is to outvie her neighbours in the
extravagance of fashion. No matter if, in the time of crinolines, she
sacrifices decency; in the time of trains, cleanliness; in the time of
tied-back skirts, modesty; no matter either, if she makes herself a
nuisance and an inconvenience to every one she meets;--the Girl of the
Period has done away with such moral muffishness as consideration for
others, or regard for counsel and rebuke. It was all very well in
old-fashioned times, when fathers and mothers had some authority and
were treated with respect, to be tutored and made to obey, but she is
far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in mid-career by these slow
old morals; and as she lives to please herself, she does not care if
she displeases every one else.
Nothing is too extraordinary and nothing too exaggerated for her
vitiated taste; and things which in themselves would be useful reforms
if let alone become monstrosities worse than those which they have
displaced so soon as she begins to manipulate and improve. If a
sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the mud, she raises hers midway
to her knee. If the absurd structure of wire and buckram, once called
a bonnet, is modified to something that shall protect the wearer's
face without putting out the eyes of her companion, she cuts hers down
to four straws and a rosebud, or a tag of lace and a bunch of glass
beads. If there is a reaction against an excess of Rowland's Macassar,
and hair shiny and sticky with grease is thought less nice than
if left clean and healthily crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks
hers out on end like certain savages in Africa, or lets it wander down
her back like Madge Wildfire's, and thinks herself all the more
beautiful the nearer she approaches in look to a negress or a maniac.
With purity of taste she has lost also that far more precious purity
and delicacy of perception which sometimes mean more than appears on
the surface. What the _demi-monde_ does in its frantic efforts to
excite attention, she also does in imitation. If some fashionable
_dévergondée en évidence_ is reported to have come out with her dress
below her shoulder-blades, and a gold strap for all the sleeve thought
necessary, the Girl of the Period follows suit next day; and then she
wonders that men sometimes mistake her for her prototype, or that
mothers of girls not quite so far gone as herself refuse her as a
companion for their daughters. She has blunted the fine edges of
feeling so much that she cannot understand why she should be condemned
for an imitation of form which does not include imitation of fact. She
cannot be made to see that modesty of appearance and virtue in deed
ought to be inseparable; and that no good girl can afford to appear
bad, under pain of receiving the contempt awarded to the bad.
This imitation of the _demi-monde_ in dress leads to something in
manner and feeling, not quite so pronounced perhaps, but far too like
to be honourable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It
leads to slang, bold talk and general fastness; to the love of
pleasure and indifference to duty; to the desire of money before
either love or happiness; to uselessness at home, dissatisfaction with
the monotony of ordinary life, horror of all useful work; in a word,
to the worst forms of luxury and selfishness--to the most fatal
effects arising from want of high principle and absence of tender
feeling.
The Girl of the Period envies the queens of the _demi-monde_ far more
than she abhors them. She sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously
appointed, and she knows them to be flattered, fêted, and courted with
a certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only the
admiration while she ignores the disdain. They have all that for which
her soul is hungering; and she never stops to reflect at what a price
they have bought their gains, and what fearful moral penalties they
pay for their sensuous pleasures. She sees only the coarse gilding on
the base token, and shuts her eyes to the hideous figure in the midst
and the foul legend written round the edge. It is this envy of the
pleasures, and indifference to the sins, of these women of the
_demi-monde_ which is doing such infinite mischief to the modern girl.
They brush too closely by each other, if not in actual deeds, yet in
aims and feelings; for the luxury which is bought by vice with the one
is that thing of all in life most passionately desired by the other,
though she is not yet prepared to pay quite the same price.
Unfortunately, she has already paid too much--all that once gave her
distinctive national character.
No one can say of the modern English girl that she is tender, loving,
retiring or domestic. The old fault so often found by keen-sighted
Frenchwomen, that she was so fatally _romanesque_, so prone to
sacrifice appearances and social advantages for love, will never be
set against the Girl of the Period. Love indeed is the last thing she
thinks of, and the least of the dangers besetting her. Love in a
cottage--that seductive dream which used to vex the heart and disturb
the calculations of the prudent mother--is now a myth of past ages.
The legal barter of herself for so much money, representing so much
dash, so much luxury and pleasure--that is her idea of marriage; the
only idea worth entertaining. For all seriousness of thought
respecting the duties or the consequences of marriage, she has not a
trace. If children come, they find but a stepmother's cold welcome
from her; and if her husband thinks that he has married anything that
is to belong to him--a _tacens et placens uxor_ pledged to make him
happy--the sooner he wakes from his hallucination and understands that
he has simply married some one who will condescend to spend his money
on herself, and who will shelter her indiscretions behind the shield
of his name, the less severe will be his disappointment. She has
married his house, his carriage, his balance at the banker's, his
title; and he himself is just the inevitable condition clogging
the wheel of her fortune; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated with
more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the old-fashioned
sort, not Girls of the Period _pur sang_, who marry for love, or put
the husband before the banker. But the Girl of the Period does not
marry easily. Men are afraid of her; and with reason. They may amuse
themselves with her for an evening, but they do not readily take her
for life. Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a poor copy of
the real thing; and the real thing is far more amusing than the copy,
because it is real. Men can get that whenever they like; and when they
go into their mothers' drawing-rooms, with their sisters and their
sisters' friends, they want something of quite a different flavour.
_Toujours perdrix_ is bad providing all the world over; but a
continual weak imitation of _toujours perdrix_ is worse.
If we must have only one kind of thing, let us have it genuine, and
the queens of St. John's Wood in their unblushing honesty rather than
their imitators and make-believes in Bayswater and Belgravia. For, at
whatever cost of shocked self-love or pained modesty it may be, it
cannot be too plainly told to the modern English girl that the net
result of her present manner of life is to assimilate her as nearly as
possible to a class of women whom we must not call by their proper--or
improper--name. And we are willing to believe that she has still some
modesty of soul left hidden under all this effrontery of fashion,
and that, if she could be made to see herself as she appears to the
eyes of men, she would mend her ways before too late.
It is terribly significant of the present state of things when men are
free to write as they do of the women of their own nation. Every word
of censure flung against them is two-edged, and wounds those who
condemn as much as those who are condemned; for surely it need hardly
be said that men hold nothing so dear as the honour of their women,
and that no one living would willingly lower the repute of his mother
or his sisters. It is only when these have placed themselves beyond
the pale of masculine respect that such things could be written as are
written now. When women become again what they were once they will
gather round them the love and homage and chivalrous devotion which
were then an Englishwoman's natural inheritance.
The marvel in the present fashion of life among women is, how it holds
its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men. It used to be an
old-time notion that the sexes were made for each other, and that it
was only natural for them to please each other, and to set themselves
out for that end. But the Girl of the Period does not please men. She
pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how little she does
that, the class of women she has taken as her models of itself
testifies. All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and
genuine girl of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty
bashful modesties, to this loud and rampant modernization, with her
false red hair and painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and
by preference leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. She
thinks she is piquante and exciting when she thus makes herself the
bad copy of a worse original; and she will not see that though men
laugh with her they do not respect her, though they flirt with her
they do not marry her; she will not believe that she is not the kind
of thing they want, and that she is acting against nature and her own
interests when she disregards their advice and offends their taste. We
do not understand how she makes out her account, viewing her life from
any side; but all we can do is to wait patiently until the national
madness has passed, and our women have come back again to the old
English ideal, once the most beautiful, the most modest, the most
essentially womanly in the world.
_MODERN MOTHERS._
I.
No human affection has been so passionately praised as maternal love,
and none is supposed to be so holy or so strong. Even the poetic
aspect of that instinct which inspires the young with their dearest
dreams does not rank so high as this; and neither lover's love nor
conjugal love, neither filial affection nor fraternal, comes near the
sanctity or grandeur of the maternal instinct. But all women are not
equally rich in this great gift; and, to judge by appearances, English
women are at this moment wonderfully poor. It may seem a harsh thing
to say, but it is none the less true:--society has put maternity out
of fashion, and the nursery is nine times out of ten a place of
punishment, not of pleasure, to the modern mother.
Two points connected with this subject are of growing importance at
this present time--the one is the increasing disinclination of married
women to be mothers at all; the other, the large number of those who,
being mothers, will not, or cannot, nurse their own children. In the
mad race after pleasure and excitement now going on through
English society the tender duties of motherhood have become simply
disagreeable restraints, and the old feeling of the blessing attending
the quiver full is exchanged for one the very reverse. With some of
the more intellectual and less instinctive sort, maternity is looked
on as a kind of degradation; and women of this stamp, sensible enough
in everything else, talk impatiently among themselves of the base
necessities laid on them by men and nature, and how hateful to them is
everything connected with their characteristic duties.
This wild revolt against nature, and specially this abhorrence of
maternity, is carried to a still greater extent by American women;
with grave national consequences resulting; but though we have not yet
reached the Transatlantic limit, the state of feminine feeling and
physical condition among ourselves will disastrously affect the future
unless something can be done to bring our women back to a healthier
tone of mind and body. No one can object to women declining marriage
altogether in favour of a voluntary self-devotion to some project or
idea; but, when married, it is a monstrous doctrine to hold that they
are in any way degraded by the consequences, and that natural
functions are less honourable than social excitements. The world can
get on without balls and morning calls; it can get on too without
amateur art and incorrect music; but not without wives and mothers;
and those times in a nation's history when women have been social
ornaments rather than family home-stays have ever been times of
national decadence and of moral failure.
Part of this growing disinclination is due to the enormous expense
incurred now by having children. As women have ceased to take any
active share in their own housekeeping, whether in the kitchen or the
nursery, the consequence is an additional cost for service, which is a
serious item in the yearly accounts. Women who, if they lived a
rational life, could and would nurse their children, now require a
wet-nurse, or the services of an experienced woman who can 'bring up
by hand,' as the phrase is; women who once would have had one
nursemaid now have two; and women who, had they lived a generation
ago, would have had none at all, must in their turn have a wretched
young creature without thought or knowledge, into whose questionable
care they deliver what should be the most sacred obligation and the
most jealously-guarded charge they possess.
It is rare if, in any section of society where hired service can be
had, mothers give more than a superficial personal superintendence to
nursery or schoolroom--a superintendence about as thorough as their
housekeeping, and as efficient. The one set of duties is quite as
unfashionable as the other; and money is held to relieve from the
service of love as entirely as it relieves from the need of labour.
And yet, side by side with this personal relinquishment of natural
duties, has grown up, perhaps as an instinctive compensation, an
amount of expensive management specially remarkable. There never was a
time when children were made of so much individual importance in the
family, yet were in so little direct relation with the mother--never a
time when maternity did so little and social organization so much.
Juvenile parties; the kind of moral obligation apparently felt by all
parents to provide heated and unhealthy amusements for their boys and
girls during the holidays; extravagance in dress, following the same
extravagance among the mothers; the increasing cost of education; the
fuss and turmoil generally made over them--all render children real
burdens in a house where money is not too plentiful, and where every
child that comes is not only an additional mouth to feed and an
additional body to clothe, but a subtractor by just so much from the
family fund of pleasure. Even where there is no lack of money, the
unavoidable restraints of the condition, for at least some months,
more than counterbalance any sentimental delight to be found in
maternity. For, before all other things in life, maternity demands
unselfishness in women; and this is just the one virtue of which women
have least at this present time--just the one reason why motherhood is
at a discount, and children are regarded as inflictions instead of
blessings.
Few middle-class women are content to bring up their children with the
old-fashioned simplicity of former times, and to let them share
and share alike in the family, with only so much difference in their
treatment as is required by their difference of state; fewer still are
willing to take on themselves the labour and care which must come with
children in the easiest-going household, and so to save in the
expenses by their own work. The shabbiest little wife, with her two
financial ends always gaping and never meeting, must have her still
shabbier little drudge to wheel her perambulator, so as to give her an
air of fine-ladyhood and being too good for such work; and the most
indolent housekeeper, whose superintendence of domestic matters takes
her just half an hour, cannot find time to go into the gardens or the
square with nurse and the children, so that she may watch over them
herself and see that they are properly cared for.
In France, where it is the fashion for mother and _bonne_ to be
together both out of doors and at home, at least the children are not
neglected nor ill-treated, as is too often the case with us; and if
they are improperly managed, according to our ideas, the fault is in
the system, not in the want of maternal supervision. Here it is a very
rare case indeed when the mother accompanies the nurse and children;
and those days when she does are nursery gala-days to be talked of and
remembered for weeks after. As the little ones grow older, she may
occasionally take them with her when she visits her more intimate
friends; but this is for her own pleasure, not their good; and
going with them to see that they are properly cared for has nothing to
do with the matter.
It is to be supposed that each mother has a profound belief in her own
nurse, and that when she condemns the neglect and harshness shown to
other children by the servants in charge, she makes a mental
reservation in favour of her own, and is very sure that nothing
improper nor cruel takes place in _her_ nursery. Her children do not
complain; and she always tells them to come to her when anything is
amiss. On which negative evidence she satisfies her soul, and makes
sure that all is right because she is too neglectful to see if
anything is wrong. She does not remember that her children do not
complain because they dare not. Dear and beautiful as all mammas are
to the small fry in the nursery, they are always in a certain sense
Junos sitting on the top of Mount Olympus, making occasional gracious
and benign descents, but practically too far removed for useful
interference; while nurse is an ever-present power, capable of sly
pinches and secret raids, as well as of more open oppression--a power,
therefore, to be propitiated, if only with the grim subservience of a
Yezidi too much afraid of the Evil One to oppose him. Wherefore nurse
is propitiated, failing the protection of the glorified creature just
gone to her grand dinner in a cloud of lace and a blaze of jewels; and
the first lesson taught the youthful Christian in short frocks or
knickerbockers is not to carry tales down stairs, and by no means
to let mamma know what nurse desires should be kept secret.
A great deal of other evil, beside these sly beginnings of deceit, is
taught in the nursery; a great deal of vulgar thought, of
superstitious fear, of class coarseness. As, indeed, how must it not
be when we think of the early habits and education of the women taken
into the nursery to give the first strong indelible impressions to the
young souls under their care? Many a man with a ruined constitution,
and many a woman with shattered nerves, can trace back the beginning
of their sorrow to those neglected childish days when nurse had it all
her own way because mamma never looked below the surface, and was
satisfied with what was said instead of seeing for herself what was
done. It is an odd state of society which tolerates this transfer of a
mother's holiest and most important duty into the hands of a mere
stranger, hired by the month, and never thoroughly known.
Where the organization of the family is of the patriarchal kind--old
retainers marrying and multiplying about the central home, and
carrying on a warm personal attachment from generation to
generation--this transfer of maternal care has not such bad effects;
but in our present way of life, without love or real relationship
between masters and servants, and where service is rendered for just
so much money down and for nothing more noble, it is a hideous system,
and one that makes the modern mother utterly inexplicable. We
wonder where her mere instincts can be, not to speak of her reason,
her love, her conscience, her pride. Pleasure and self-indulgence have
indeed gained tremendous power, in these later days, when they can
thus break down the force of the strongest law of nature--a law
stronger even than that of self-preservation.
Folly is the true capillary attraction of the moral world, and
penetrates every stratum of society; and the folly of extravagant
attire in the drawing-room is reproduced in the nursery. Not content
with bewildering men's minds and emptying their husbands' purses for
the enhancement of their own charms, women do the same by their
children; and the mother who leaves the health and mind and temper and
purity of her offspring in the keeping of a hired nurse takes especial
care of the colour and cut of the frocks and petticoats. And there is
always the same strain after show, and the same endeavour to make a
little look a mickle. The children of five hundred a year must look
like those of a thousand; and those of a thousand must rival the
_tenue_ of little lords and ladies born in the purple; while the
amount of money spent on clothes in the tradesman class is a matter of
real amazement to those let into the secret. Simplicity of diet, too,
is going out with simplicity of dress, with simplicity of habits
generally; and stimulants and concentrated food are now the rule in
the nursery, where they mar as many constitutions as they make. More
than one child of whom we have had personal knowledge has yielded
to disease induced by too stimulating and too heating a diet; but
artificial habits demand corresponding artificiality of food, and so
the candle burns at both ends instead of one.
Again, as for the increasing inability of educated women to nurse
their children, even if desirous of doing so, that also is a bodily
condition brought about by an unwholesome and unnatural state of life.
Late hours, high living, heated blood, and constantly breathing a
vitiated atmosphere are the causes of this alarming physical defect.
But it would be too much to expect that women should forego their
pleasurable indulgences, or do anything disagreeable to their senses,
for the sake of their offspring. They are not famous for looking far
ahead on any matter; but to expect them to look beyond themselves, and
their own present generation, is to expect the great miracle that
never comes.
_MODERN MOTHERS._
II.
There was once a superstition among us that mothers were of use in the
world; that they had their functions and duties, without which society
would not prosper nor hold together; and that much of the well-being
of humanity, present and future, depended on them. Mothers in those
bygone days were by no means effete personages or a worn-out
institution, but living powers exercising a real and pervading
influence; and they were credited with an authority which they did not
scruple to use when required.
One of the functions recognized as specially belonging to them was
that of guarding their young people from the consequences of their own
ignorance--keeping them from dangers both physical and moral until
wise enough to take care of themselves, and supplementing by their own
experience the want of it in their children. Another was that of
preserving the tone of society on a high level, and supplying the
antiseptic element by which the rest was kept pure; as, for example,
insisting that the language used and the subjects discussed
before them were such as should not offend the modesty of virtuous
women; that the people with whom they were required to associate
should be moderately honest and well conducted; and, in short, as
mothers, discountenancing everything in other men and women which they
would not like to see imitated by their own sons and daughters.
This was one of the fond superstitions of an elder time. For
ourselves, we boast of our freedom from superstition in these later
days; of our proud renunciation of restraints and habits which were
deemed beneficial by our forefathers; of our indifference to forms and
hatred of humbug; and of all that tends to fetter what is called
individualism. Hence we have found that we can go on without
safeguards for our young; that society does not want its matrons as
the preservative ingredient for keeping it pure; and that the world is
all the merrier for the loosening of bonds which once it was the duty
of women to draw closer. In fact, mothers have gone out, surviving
only in the form of chaperons.
More or less on the search for her own pleasure--if by any possibility
of artifice she can be taken for less than sixty, still ready for odd
snatches of flirting as she can find occasion--or, with her faculties
concentrated on the chance of winning the rubber by indifferent
play--the chaperon's charge is not a very onerous one; and her
daughters know as well as she does that her presence is a blind rather
than a protection. They are with mamma as a form of speech; but
they are left to themselves as a matter of fact. Anyone who is in the
confidence of young people of either sex knows a little of what goes
on in the dark corners and on the steps of the stairs--a favourite
anchorage for the loosely chaperoned in private houses where two
hundred are invited and only a hundred can find room. But then the
girls are 'with mamma,' and the young men are contented souls who take
what they can get without making wry faces. Mamma, occupied in her own
well-seasoned coquetries, or absorbed in the chances of her deep
'finesse' and the winning trick, lets the girls take care of
themselves, and would think it an intolerable impertinence should a
friend hint to her that her place of chaperon included vigilant
personal guardianship, and that she would do better to keep her
daughters in her own charge than leave them to themselves.
It is all very well for the advocates of youthful innocence to affect
to resent the slur supposed to be cast on girlhood by the advocacy of
this closer guardianship; or for those who do not know the world to
make their ignorance the measure of another's knowledge, and to deny
what they have not proved for themselves. Those who do know the world
know what they say when they deprecate the excessive freedom which is
too often granted to unmarried girls; and their warning is fully
justified by experience when they call mothers back to their duty
of stricter watchfulness. If indeed the young are capable of
self-protection, then we grant with them that mothers are a
mistake:--Let them abdicate without more ado. If license is more
desirable than modesty, and liberty better than reticence, the girls
may as well be left, as practically they are already, free from the
mother's guardianship; but if we have a doubt that way, we may as well
give it the benefit of consideration, and think a little on the
subject before going further on the present line.
From the first the mother, in the well-to-do classes, acts too much
the part of the hen ostrich with her eggs. She trusts to the kindly
influences of external circumstances rather than to her own care to
make the hatching successful. Nurses, governesses, schools, in turn
relieve her of the irksome duties of maternity. She sees her little
ones at their stated hour, and for the other twenty-three leaves them
to receive their first indelible impress from a class which she is
never tired of disparaging.
As the children grow older the women by whom they are moulded become
higher in the social and intellectual scale, but they are no more than
before subordinated to the mother's personal supervision. She, for her
part, cares only that her girls shall be taught the correct shibboleth
of their station; and for the rest, if she thinks at all, she cradles
herself in a generous trust in the goodness of human nature, or the
incorruptibility of her brood beyond that of any other woman's brood.
When they come under her own immediate hand, 'finished' and ready
to be introduced, she knows about as much of them as she knows of her
neighbours' girls in the next square; and in nine cases out of ten the
sole duties towards them which are undertaken by her are shirked when
possible, as a _corvée_ which she is too wise to bear unnecessarily.
When she can, she shuffles them off on some kind neighbourly hands,
and lets her daughters 'go about' with the first person who offers,
glad to have a little breathing time on her own side, and with always
that generous trust in providence and vicarious protection which has
marked her maternal career throughout.
In the lower half of the middle class the liberty allowed to young
girls grows yearly more and more unchecked. They walk alone, travel
alone, visit alone; and the gravest evils have been known to arise
from the habit which modern mothers have of sending their daughters of
sixteen and upwards unaccompanied in London to colleges and classes.
Mamma has grown stout and lazy, and has always some important matter
on hand that keeps her at home, half asleep in the easy-chair, while
the girls go to and fro, and take the exercise befitting their
youthful energies. Of course no harm can befall them. They are _her_
daughters, and the warnings given by the keener-eyed, who have had
experience, are mere inventions of the enemy and slanders against the
young. So they parade the streets, dressed in the most startling and
meretricious costumes of the period; and that fatal doctrine of
self-protection counts its victims by the score as the consequence.
The world is fond of throwing the blame of any misfortune that may
arise, now on the girl, now on the man concerned; but in honest fact
that blame really belongs to the mothers who let their daughters run
about the world without guide or guard. A work was given to them by
nature and love to do which they have neglected, a duty which they
have discarded. Whoever chooses may chaperon, accompany, mould their
daughters, so long as they are freed from the trouble; and their
dependence on the natural virtue of humanity and the beneficence of
circumstance runs exactly parallel with their own indolence and
neglect.
In preserving the tone of society pure the modern mother is as far
removed from the former ideal as she is in the duty of taking care of
her girls. Too often she is found making herself prominent in support
of the most objectionable movements; or, when doubtful questions are
discussed in mixed society, she forgets that regard for the purity of
her daughters should keep her silent, even if her own self-respect
were too weak to restrain her. When the conscienceless world, living
without a higher aim than that of success and what is known by getting
on, condones all kinds of moral obliquity for the sake of financial
prosperity and social position, do we find that, as a rule, mothers
and matrons protest against opening their houses to this gilded
rascality? If they did--if they made demerit and not poverty the
cause of exclusion, virtue and not success the title to
reception--there would be some check to the corruption which is so
insolently rampant now.
Women have this power in their own hands, more especially those women
who are mothers. If they would only set themselves to check the
inclination for loose talk and doubtful discussions which is
characteristic of the present moment, they could put an end to it
without delay. So also they might stop in less than a year the torrent
of slang with which Young England floods its daily speech; and by
setting themselves against the paint and dye and meretricious make-up
generally of the modern girl, they might bring next quarter's fashions
back to modesty and simplicity.
Women are apt to murmur at their lot as one without influence,
variety, stirring purpose, space for action. But it is, on the
contrary, a lot full of dignity and importance if properly regarded
and fitly undertaken. If they do not lead armies, they make the
characters of the men who lead and are led. If they are not State
Ministers nor Parliamentary orators, they raise by their nobleness or
degrade by their want of delicacy and refinement the souls and minds
of the men who are. If they are not in the throng and press of active
life, they can cheer others on to high aims, or basely reward the
baser methods of existence. As mothers they are the artificers who
give the initial touch that lasts for life; and as women they
complete what the mother began. Society is moulded mainly by them,
and they bring up their daughters on their own pattern.
It is surely weak and silly then to blame society for its ignoble
tone, or the young for their disorders. All men want the corrective
influence of social opinion, and it is chiefly women who create that
opinion. Youth, too, will ever be disorderly if it gets the chance,
and the race has not yet been born that carries old heads on young
shoulders. It is for the mothers to supplement by their own wisdom the
gaps left by the inexperience and ignorance of youth; it is for the
mothers to guide aright the steps that are apt, without that guidance,
to run astray, and to guard against passions, emotions, desires,
which, if left to themselves, bring only evil and disaster, but which,
guarded and directed, may be turned to the best ends. For ourselves,
we deeply regret to see the rapid extinction of motherhood in its best
sense, and decline to accept this modern loose-handed chaperon age as
its worthy substitute. We repudiate the plea of the insubordination of
the young so often put forward in defence of the new state of things,
for it is simply nonsense. The young are what the mothers make them,
just as society is what the matrons allow it to be; and if these
mothers and matrons did their duty, we should hear no more of the
wilfulness of the one or the shameless vagaries of the other. The
remedy for each lies in their own hands only.
_PAYING ONE'S SHOT._
It would save much useless striving and needless disappointment if the
necessity of paying one's shot were honestly accepted as absolute--if
it were understood, once for all, that society, like other
manifestations of humanity, is managed on the principle of exchange
and barter, and equivalents demanded for value received. The
benevolence which gives out of its own impulse, with no hope of reward
save in the well-being of the recipient, has no place in the
drawing-room code of morals. We may keep a useless creature from
starving at the cost of so much of our substance _per diem_, for the
sole remuneration of thanks and the consciousness of an equivocal act
of charity; but who among us opens his doors, or gives a seat at his
table, to drawing-room paupers unable to pay their shot? who cares to
cultivate the acquaintance of men or women who are unable to make him
any return? It is not necessary that this return should be in kind--a
dinner for a dinner, a champagne supper for a champagne supper, and
balls with waxed floors for balls with stretched linen; but shot
must be paid in some form, whether in kind or not, and the social
pauper who cannot pay his quota is Lazarus excluded from the feast.
This is a hard saying, but it is a true one. We often hear worthy
people who do not understand this law complain that they are
neglected--left out of wedding breakfasts--passed over in dinner
invitations--and that they find it difficult to keep acquaintances
when made. But the fact is, these poor creatures who know so much
about the cold-shoulder of society are simply those who cannot pay
their shot, according to the currency of the class to which they
aspire; and so by degrees they get winnowed through the meshes, and
fall to a level where their funds will suffice to meet all demands,
triumphantly. For the rejected of one level are not necessarily the
rejected of all, and the base metal of one currency is sound coinage
in another. People who would find it impossible to enter a
drawing-room in Grosvenor Square may have all Bloomsbury at their
command; and what was caviare to My Lord will be ambrosia to his
valet--all depending on the amount of the shot to be paid and the
relative value of coinage wherewith to pay it.
The most simple form of payment is of course by the elemental process
of reciprocity in kind; a dinner for a dinner and a supper for a
supper:--a form as purely instinctive as an eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth--the _lex talionis_ of early jurisprudence administered
among wine-cups instead of in the shambles. But there are other
modes of payment as efficient if less evident, and as imperative if
more subtle. For instance, women pay their shot--when they pay it
individually, and not through the vicarious merits of their masculine
relations--by dressing well and looking nice; some by being pretty;
some by being fashionable; a few by brilliant talk; while all ought to
add to their private speciality the generic virtue of pleasant
manners. If they are not pretty, pleasant, well-dressed nor
well-connected, and if they have no masculine pegs of power by which
they can be hooked on to the higher lines, they are let to drop
through the social meshes without an effort made to retain them, as
little fishes swim away unopposed through the loops which hold the
bigger ones. These things are their social duties--the final cause of
their drawing-room existence; and if they fail in them they fail in
the purpose for which they were created socially, and may die out as
soon as convenient. They have other duties, of course, and doubtless
of far higher moment and greater worth; but the question now is only
of their drawing-room duties--of the qualities which secure their
recognition in society--of the special coinage in which they must pay
their shot if they would assist at the great banquet of social life. A
dowdy, humdrum, well-principled woman, whose toilette looks as if it
had been made with the traditionary pitchfork, and whose powers of
conversation do not go beyond the strength of _Cobwebs to Catch
Flies_, or _Mangnall's Questions_, may be an admirable wife,
the painstaking mother of future honest citizens, invaluable by a
sick-bed, beyond price in the nursery, a pattern of all household
economies, a woman absolutely faultless in her sphere--and that sphere
a very sweet and lovely one. But her virtues are not those by which
she can pay her shot in society; and the motherly goodness, of so much
account in a dressing-jacket and list-slippers, is put out of court
when the fee to be paid is liveliness of manner or elegance of
appearance. Certainly, worthy women who dress ill and look ungraceful,
and whose conversation is about up to the mark of their children's
easy-spelling-books, are plentiful in society--unfortunately for those
bracketed with them for two hours' penance; but in most cases they
have their shot paid for them by the wealth, the importance, the
repute, or the desirableness of their relations. They may pay it
themselves by their own wealth and consequent liberal tariff of
reciprocity; but this is rare; the possession of personal superiority
of any kind for the most part acting as a moral stimulus with women
whom the superiority of their male belongings does not touch. And, by
the way, it is rather hard lines that so many celebrated men have such
dowdy wives. Artists, poets, self-made men of all kinds often fail in
this special article; and, while they themselves have caught the tone
of the circle to which they have risen, and pay their shot by manner
as well as by repute, their wives lag behind among the ashes of the
past, like Cinderellas before the advent of the fairy godmother.
How many of them are carried through society as clogs or excrescences
which a polite world is bound to tolerate with more or less
equanimity, according to the amount of sensitiveness bestowed by
nature and cultivated by art! Sometimes, however, self-made men and
their wives are wise in their generation and understand the terms on
which society receives its members; in which case the marital
Reputation goes to the front alone, and the conjugal Cinderella rests
tranquilly in the rear.