paying one's shot, specially into the coffers of the Leo Hunters, of
whom there are many. It is shot paid to the general fund when one has
seen an accident--better still, if one has been in it. Many a man has
owed a rise in his scale of dinners to a railway smash; and to have
been nearly burnt to death, to have escaped by a miracle from
drowning, to have been set on by footpads or to have been visited by
burglars, is worth a round of At Homes, because of the ready cash of a
real adventure. To be connected more or less remotely with the
fashionable tragedy of the hour is paying one's shot handsomely. To
have been on speaking terms with the latest respectable scoundrel
unmasked, or to have had dealings, sufficiently remote to have
been cleanly, with the newest villainy, will be accepted as shot
while the public interest in the matter lasts. A chance visit to
ultra-grandees--grandees in ratio to the ordinary sphere--is shot
paid with an air. A bad illness, or the attendance on one, with the
apparently unconscious heroism of the details, comes in as part of the
social fine; especially if the person relating his or her experience
has the knack of epigram or exaggeration, while still keeping local
colour and verisimilitude intact. Interesting people who have been
abroad and seen things have good counters for a dinner-party; paying
their shot for themselves and their hosts too, who put them forward as
their contribution to the funds of the commonwealth, with certainty of
acceptance. Some pay their shot by their power of procuring orders and
free admissions. They know the manager of this theatre or the leading
actor of that; they are acquainted with the principal members of the
hanging committees, and are therefore great in private views; they are
always good for a gratuitous treat to folks who can afford to pay
twice the sum demanded for their day's pleasure. Such people may be
stupid, ungainly, not specially polished, in grain unpleasant; but
they circulate in society because they pay their shot and give back
equivalents for value received. A country-house, where there is a good
tennis-ground and a blushing bed of strawberries, is coinage that will
carry the possessor very far ahead through London society; and by the
same law you will find healthy, well-conditioned country folk tolerate
undeniable little snobs of low calibre because of that sixteen-roomed
house in Tyburnia, a visit to which represents so many concerts, so
many theatres, a given number of exhibitions, and a certain
quantity of operas and parties. Had those undeniable little snobs no
funds wherewith to pay their shot, they would have had no place kept
for them among the rose-trees and the strawberry-beds; but, bringing
their quota as they do, they take their seat with the rest and are
helped in their turn.
In fact, humiliating to our self-love as it may be, the truth is, we
are all valued socially, not for ourselves integrally, not for the
mere worth of the naked soul, but for the kind of shot that we
pay--for the advantage or amusement to others that we can bring--for
something in ourselves which renders us desirable as companions--or
for something belonging to our condition which makes us remunerative
as guests. If we have no special qualification, if we neither look
nice nor talk well, neither bring glory nor confer pleasure, we must
expect to be shunted to the side in favour of others who are up to the
right mark and who give as much as they receive. If this truth were
once fully established as a matter of social science, a great advance
would be made; for nothing helps people so much as to clear a subject
of what fog may lie about it. And as the tendency of the age is to
discover the fixed laws which regulate the mutable affairs of man, it
would be just as well to extend the inquiry from the jury-box to the
dinner-table, and from the blue-book to the visiting-list. Why is it
that some people struggle all their lives to get a footing in society,
yet die as they have lived--social Sisyphuses, never accomplishing
their perpetually-recurring task? There must be a reason for it,
seeing that nothing is ruled by blind chance, though much seems
to lie outside the independent will of the individual. Enlighten
these worthy people's minds on the unwritten laws of invitation, and
show them that--thoroughly honest souls and to be trusted with untold
gold or with their neighbour's pretty wife, which is perhaps a harder
test, as they may be--they are by no means to be trusted with the
amusement of a couple of companions at a dinner-table. Show them that,
how rich soever they may be in the rough gold of domestic morality,
they are bankrupts in the small-change which alone passes current in
society--and, if invited where they aspire to be, they would be taken
on as pauper cousins unable to pay their footing and good for neither
meat nor garnish. Let them learn how to pay their shot, and their
difficulties would vanish. They would leave off repeating the fable of
Sisyphus, and attain completion of endeavour. No one need say this is
a hard or a selfish doctrine, for we all follow it in practice. Among
the people we invite to our houses are some whom we do not specially
like, but whom we must ask because of shot paid in kind. There are
people who may be personally disagreeable, ill-educated,
uninteresting, ungainly, but whom we cannot cut because of the
relations in which we stand towards them, and who take their place by
right, because they pay their shot with punctuality. There are
others whom we ask because of liking or desirability, and shot paid in
some specific form of pleasantness, as in beauty, fashion, good
manner, notoriety; but there are none absolutely barren of all gifts
of pleasantness to the guests, of reflected honour to ourselves, and
of social small-change according to the currency. We do not go into
the byways and hedges to pick up drawing-room tatterdemalions who
bring nothing with them and are simply so much deadweight on the rest,
occupying so much valuable space and consuming so much vital energy.
The law of reciprocity may be hard on the strivers who are ignorant of
its inexorable provisions; but it is a wholesome law, like other rules
and enactments against remediable pauperism. And were we once
thoroughly to understand that, if we would sit securely at the table
we must put something of value into the pool--that we must possess
advantageous circumstances, or personal desirabilities, as the shot to
be paid for our place--the art of society would be better cultivated
than it is now, and the classification of guests would be carried out
with greater judgment. Surely, if the need of being gracious in
manner, sprightly in talk, and of pleasant appearance generally--all
cultivable qualities, and to be learned if not born in us by
nature--were accepted as an absolute necessity, without which we must
expect to be overlooked and excluded, drawing-rooms would be far
brighter and dinner-tables far pleasanter than they are at present; to
the advantage of all concerned! And, after all, society is a
great thing in human life. If not equal in importance to the family,
or to political virtue, it has its own special value; and whatever
adds to its better organization is a gain in every sense.
_WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?_
This is a question which one half the world is at this moment asking
the other half; with very wild answers as the result. Woman's work
seems to be in these days everything that it was not in times past,
and nothing that it was. Professions are undertaken and careers
invaded which were formerly held sacred to men; while things are left
undone which, for all the generations that the world has lasted, have
been naturally and instinctively assigned to women to do. From the
savage squaw gathering fuel or drawing water for the wigwam, to the
lady giving up the keys to her housekeeper, housekeeping has been
considered one of the primary functions of women. The man to
provide--the woman to dispense; the man to do the rough initial work
of bread-winning, whether as a half-naked barbarian hunting live meat
or as a City clerk painfully scoring lines of rugged figures--the
woman to cook the meat when got, and to lay out to the best advantage
for the family the quarter's salary gained by casting up ledgers and
writing advices and bills of lading. Take human society in any
phase we like, we must come down to these radical conditions; and any
system which ignores this division of labour, and confounds these
separate functions, is of necessity imperfect and wrong. We have
nothing whatever to say against the professional self-support of women
who have no men to work for them, and who must therefore work for
themselves in order to live. In what direction soever they can best
make their way, let them take it. Brains and intellectual gifts are of
no sex and no condition, and it is far more important that good work
should be done than that it should be done by this or that particular
set of workers. But we are speaking of the home duties of married
women, and of those girls who have no need to earn their daily bread,
and who are not so specially gifted as to be driven afield by the
irrepressible power of genius. We are speaking of women who cannot
help in the family income, but who might both save and improve in the
home; women whose lives are one long day of idleness, _ennui_ and
vagrant imagination, because they despise the activities into which
they were born, while seeking outlets for their energies impossible to
them both by functional and social restrictions.
It is strange to see into what unreasonable disrepute active
housekeeping--first social duty--has fallen in England. Take a family
with four or five hundred a year--and we know how small a sum that is
for 'genteel humanity' in these days--the wife who is an active
housekeeper, even with such an income, is an exception to the
rule; and the daughters who are anything more than drawing-room dolls
waiting for husbands to transfer them to a home of their own, where
they may be as useless as they are now, are rarer still. For things
are getting worse, not better, and our young women are less useful
even than were their mothers; while these last do not, as a rule, come
near the housekeeping ladies of olden times, who knew every secret of
domestic economy and made a wise and pleasant 'distribution of bread'
their grand point of honour. The usual method of London housekeeping,
even in the second ranks of the middle-classes, is for the mistress to
give her orders in the kitchen in the morning, leaving the cook to
pass them on to the tradespeople when they call. If she be not very
indolent, and if she have a due regard for neatness and cleanliness,
she may supplement her kitchen commands by going up stairs through
some of the bedrooms; but after a kind word of advice to the housemaid
if she be sweet-tempered, or a harsh note of censure if she be of the
cross-grained type, her work in that department will be done, and her
duties for the day are at an end. There is none of the clever
marketing by which fifty per cent. is saved in the outlay, if a woman
knows what she is about and how to buy; none of that personal
superintendence, so encouraging to servants when genially performed,
which renders slighted work impossible; none of that 'seeing to
things' herself, or doing the finer parts of the work with her
own hands, which used to form part of a woman's unquestioned duty. She
gives her orders, weighs out her supplies, then leaves the maids to do
the best they know or the worst they will, according to the degree in
which they are supplied with faculty or conscience. Many women boast
that their housekeeping takes them perhaps an hour, perhaps half an
hour, in the morning, and no more; and they think themselves clever
and commendable in proportion to the small amount of time given to
their largest family duty. This is all very well where the income is
such as to secure first-class servants--professors of certain
specialities of knowledge and far in advance of the mistress; but how
about the comfort of the house under this hasty generalship, when the
maids are mere scrubs who ought to go through years of training if
they are ever to be worth their salt? It may be very well too in large
households governed by general system, and not by individual ruling;
but where the service is scant and poor, it is a stupid,
uncomfortable, as well as wasteful way of housekeeping. It is
analogous to English cookery--a revolting poverty of result with
flaring prodigality of means; all the pompous paraphernalia of
tradespeople and their carts and their red-books for orders, with
nothing worth the trouble of booking; and everything of less quantity
and lower quality than would be if personal pains were taken--which is
always the best economy.
What is there in practical housekeeping less honourable than the
ordinary work of middle-class gentlewomen? and why should women shrink
from doing for utility, and for the general comfort of the family,
what they would do at any time for vanity or idleness? No one need go
into extremes, and wish our middle-class gentlewomen to become
exaggerated Marthas occupied only with much serving, Nausicaas washing
linen, or 'wise Penelopes' spending their lives in needlework alone.
But, without undertaking anything unpleasant to her senses or
degrading to her condition, a lady might do hundreds of things which
are now left undone in a house, or are given up to the coarse handling
of servants; and domestic life would gain in consequence. What
degradation, for instance, is there in cookery? and how much more home
happiness would there not be if wives would take in hand that great
cold-mutton question? But women are both selfish and small on this
point. Born for the most part with feebly-developed gustativeness,
they affect to despise the stronger instinct in men, and think it low
and sensual if they are expected to give special attention to the
meals of the man who provides the meat. This contempt for good cooking
is one cause of the ignorance there is among them of how to secure
good living. Those horrible traditions of 'plain roast and boiled'
cling about them as articles of culinary faith; and because they have
reached no higher knowledge for themselves, they decide that no one
else shall go beyond them. For one middle-class gentlewoman who
understands anything about cookery, or who really cares for it as
a scientific art or domestic necessity, there are ten thousand who do
not; yet our mothers and grandmothers were not ashamed to be known as
deft professors, and homes were happier in proportion to the respect
paid to the stewpan and the stockpot. And cookery is more interesting
now than it was then, because more advanced, more scientific, and with
improved appliances; and, at the same time, it is of confessedly more
importance.
It may seem humiliating, to those who go in for spirit pure and
simple, to speak of the condition of the soul as in any way determined
by beef and cabbage; but it is so, nevertheless; the connexion between
food and virtue, food and thought, being a very close one. And the
sooner wives recognize this connexion the better for them and for
their husbands. The clumsy savagery of a plain cook, or the vile
messes of a fourth-rate confectioner, are absolute sins in a house
where a woman has all her senses, and can, if she will, attend
personally to the cooking. Many things pass for crimes which are
really not so bad as this. But how seldom do we find a house where the
lady does look after the food of the family; where clean hands and
educated brains are put to active service for the good of others! The
trouble would be too great in our fine-lady days, even if there were
the requisite ability; but there is as little ability as there is
energy, and the plain cook with her savagery and the fourth-rate
confectioner with his rancid pastry, have it all their own way,
according as the election is for economy or ostentation. If by chance
we stumble on a household where the woman does not disdain housewifely
work, and specially does not disdain the practical superintendence of
the kitchen, there we are sure to find cheerfulness and content.
There seems to be something in the life of a practical housekeeper
that answers to the needs of a woman's best nature, and that makes her
pleasant and good-humoured. Perhaps it is the consciousness that she
is doing her duty--of itself a wonderful sweetener of the temper;
perhaps the greater amount of bodily exercise keeps her liver in good
case; whatever the cause, sure it is that the homes of the active
housekeepers are more harmonious than those of the feckless and
do-nothing sort. Yet the snobbish half of the middle-classes holds
housewifely work as degrading, save in the trumpery pretentiousness of
'giving orders.' A woman may sit in a dirty drawing room which the
slipshod maid has not had time to clean, but she must not take a
duster in her hands and polish the legs of the chairs:--there is no
disgrace in the dirt, only in the duster. She may do fancy-work of no
earthly use, but she must not be caught making a gown. Indeed very few
women could make one, and as few will do plain needlework. They will
braid and embroider, 'cut holes, and sew them up again,' and spend any
amount of time and money on beads and wools for messy draperies which
no one wants. The end, being finery, sanctions the toil and
refines it. But they will not do things of practical use; or, if they
are compelled by the exigencies of circumstances, they think
themselves martyrs and badly used by the Fates.
The whole scheme of woman's life at this present time is untenable and
unfair. She wants to have all the pleasures and none of the
disagreeables. Her husband goes to the City and does monotonous and
unpleasant work there; but his wife thinks herself very hardly dealt
with if asked to do monotonous housework at home. Yet she does nothing
more elevating nor more advantageous. Novel-reading, fancy-work,
visiting and letter-writing, sum up her ordinary occupations; and she
considers these more to the point than practical housekeeping. In fact
it becomes a serious question what women think themselves sent into
the world for--what they hold themselves designed by God to be or to
do. They grumble at having children and at the toil and anxiety which
a family entails; they think themselves degraded to the level of
servants if they have to do any practical housework whatever; they
assert their equality with man, and express their envy of his life,
yet show themselves incapable of learning the first lesson set to
men--that of doing what they do not like to do. What, then, do they
want? What do they hold themselves made for? Certainly some of the
more benevolent sort carry their energies out of doors, and leave such
prosaic matters as savoury dinners and fast shirt-buttons for
committees and charities, where they get excitement and _kudos_
together. Others give themselves to what they call keeping up society,
which means being more at home in every person's house than their own;
and some do a little weak art, and others a little feeble literature;
but there are very few indeed who honestly buckle to the natural
duties of their position, and who bear with the tedium of home-work as
men bear with the tedium of office-work.
The little royalty of home is the last place where a woman cares to
shine, and the most uninteresting of all the domains she seeks to
govern. Fancy a high-souled creature, capable of æsthetics, giving her
mind to soup or the right proportion of chutnee for the curry! Fancy,
too, a brilliant creature fore-going an evening's conversational glory
abroad for the sake of a prosaic husband's more prosaic dinner! He
comes home tired from work, and desperately in need of a good dinner
as a restorative; but the plain cook gives him cold meat and pickles,
or an abomination which she calls hash, and the brilliant creature,
full of mind, thinks the desire for anything else rank sensuality. It
seems a little hard, certainly, on the unhappy fellow who works at the
mill for such a return; but women believe that men are made only to
work at the mill that they may receive the grist accruing, and be kept
in idleness and uselessness all their lives. They have no idea of
lightening the labour of that mill-round by doing their own
natural work cheerfully and diligently. They will do everything but
what they ought to do. They will make themselves doctors,
committee-women, printers, what not; but they will not learn cooking,
and they will not keep their own houses. There never was a time when
women were less the helpmates of men than they are at present; when
there was such a wide division between the interests and the
sympathies of the sexes coincident with the endeavour, on the one
side, to approximate their pursuits.
A great demand is being made now for more work for woman and wider
fields for her labour. We confess we should feel a deeper interest in
the question if we saw more energy and conscience put into the work
lying to her hand at home; and we hold that she ought to perfectly
perform the duties which we may call instinctive to her sex before
claiming those hitherto held remote from her natural condition. Much
of this demand springs from restlessness and dissatisfaction; little,
if any, from higher aspirations or nobler energies unused. Indeed, the
nobler the woman the more thoroughly she will do her own proper work,
in the spirit of old George Herbert's well-worn line; and the less she
will feel herself above that work. It is only the weak who cannot
raise their circumstances to the level of their thoughts; only the
poor in spirit who cannot enrich their deeds by their motives.
That very much of this demand for more power of work comes from
necessity and the absolute need of bread, we know; and that the demand
will grow louder as marriage becomes scarcer, and there are more women
adrift in the world without the protection and help of men, we also
know. But this belongs to another part of the subject. What we want to
insist on now is the pitiable ignorance and shiftless indolence of
most middle-class housekeepers; and what we would urge on woman is the
value of a better system of life at home before laying claim to the
discharge of extra-domestic duties abroad.
_LITTLE WOMEN._
The conventional idea of a brave, energetic, or a supremely criminal,
woman has always been that of a tall, dark-haired, large-armed virago
who might pass as the younger brother of her husband, and about whom
nature seemed to have hesitated before determining whether to make her
a man or a woman:--a kind of debateable land, in fact, between the two
sexes, and almost as much the one as the other. Helen Macgregor, Lady
Macbeth, Catharine de Medici, Mrs. Manning, and the old-fashioned
murderesses in novels, were all of the muscular, black-brigand type,
with more or less of regal grace super-added according to
circumstances; and it would have been thought nothing but a puerile
fancy to have supposed the contrary of those whose personal
description was not already known. Crime, indeed, in art and fiction,
was generally painted in very nice proportion to the number of cubic
inches embodied and the depth of colour employed; though we are bound
to add that the public favour ran towards muscular heroines almost as
much as towards muscular murderesses, which to a certain extent
redressed the overweighted balance. Our later novelists, however, have
altered the whole setting of the palette. Instead of five foot ten of
black and brown, they have gone in for four foot nothing of pink and
yellow. Instead of tumbled masses of raven hair, they have shining
coils of purest gold. Instead of hollow caverns whence flash
unfathomable eyes eloquent of every damnable passion, they have limpid
lakes of heavenly blue; and their worst sinners are in all respects
fashioned as much after the outward semblance of the ideal saint as
they have skill to design.
The original notion was a very good one, and the revolution did not
come before it was wanted; but it has been a little overdone of late,
and we are threatened with as great a surfeit of small-limbed
yellow-headed criminals as we have had of the black-haired virago. One
gets weary of the most perfect model in time, if too constantly
repeated; as now, when we have all begun to feel that the resources of
the angel's face and demon's soul have been more heavily drawn on than
is quite fair, and that, given 'heavy braids of golden hair,'
'bewildering blue eyes,' 'a small lithe frame,' and special delicacy
of feet and hands, we are booked for the companionship, through three
volumes, of a young person to whom Messalina or Lucrezia Borgia was a
mere novice.
And yet there is a physiological truth in this association of energy
with smallness--perhaps, also, with a certain tint of yellow hair,
which, with a dash of red through it, is decidedly suggestive of
nervous force. Suggestiveness, indeed, does not go very far in an
argument; but the frequent connexion of energy and smallness in women
is a thing which all may verify in their own circles. In daily life,
who is the really formidable woman to encounter?--the black-browed,
broad-shouldered giantess, with arms almost as big in the girth as a
man's? or the pert, smart, trim little female, with no more biceps
than a ladybird, and of just about equal strength with a sparrow? Nine
times out of ten, the giantess with the heavy shoulders and broad
black eyebrows is a timid, feeble-minded, good-tempered person,
incapable of anything harsher than a mild remonstrance with her maid,
or a gentle chastisement of her children. Nine times out of ten her
husband has her in hand in the most perfect working order, so that she
would swear the moon shone at midday if it were his pleasure that she
should make a fool of herself by her submissiveness. One of the most
obedient and indolent of earth's daughters, she gives no trouble to
any one, save the trouble of rousing, exciting and setting going;
while, as for the conception or execution of any naughty piece of
self-assertion, she is as utterly incapable of either as if she were a
child unborn, and demands nothing better than to feel the pressure of
the leading-strings, and to know exactly by their strain where she is
desired to go and what to do.