It is the vague restlessness, the fierce extravagance, the neglect of
home, the indolent fine-ladyism, the passionate love of pleasure which
characterises the modern woman, that saddens men and destroys in them
that respect which their very pride prompts them to feel. And it is
the painful conviction that the ideal woman of truth and modesty and
simple love and homely living has somehow faded away under the paint
and tinsel of this modern reality which makes us speak out as we
have done, in the hope--perhaps a forlorn one--that if she could be
made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she would, by the
very force of natural instinct and social necessity, order herself in
some accordance with the lost ideal, and become again what we once
loved and what we all regret.
_PINCHBECK._
Not many years ago no really refined gentlewoman would have worn
pinchbeck. False jewelry and imitation lace were touchstones with the
sex, and the woman who would condescend to either was assumed, perhaps
not quite without reason, to have lost something more than the mere
niceness of technical taste. This feeling ran through the whole of
society, and pinchbeck was considered as at once despicable and
disreputable. The successful speculator, sprung from nothing, who had
made his fortune during the war, might buy land, build himself a
mansion and set up a magnificent establishment, but he was never
looked on by the aboriginal gentry of the place as more than a lucky
adventurer; and the blue blood, perhaps nourishing itself on thin
beer, turned up its nose disdainfully at the claret and Madeira which
had been personally earned and not lineally inherited. This
exclusiveness was narrow in spirit and hard in individual working; and
yet there was a wholesome sentiment underlying its pride which made it
valuable in social ethics, if immoral on the score of natural equality
and human charity. It was the rejection of pretentiousness, however
gilded and glittering, in favour of reality, however poor and
barren; it was the condemnation of make-believe--the repudiation of
pinchbeck. It is not a generation since this was the normal attitude
of society towards its _nouveaux riches_ and Brummagem jewelry; but
time moves fast in these later days, and national sentiments change as
quickly as national fashions.
We are in the humour to rehabilitate all things, and pinchbeck has now
its turn with the rest. The lady of slender means who would refuse to
wear imitation lace and false jewelry is as rare as the country
society which would exclude the _nouveau riche_ because of his
newness, and not adopt him because of his riches. The whole anxiety
now is, not what a thing is, but how it looks--not its quality, but
its appearance. Every part of social and domestic life is dedicated to
the apotheosis of pinchbeck. It meets us at the hall-door, where
miserable stuccoed pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial
dignity on a wretched jerry-built little villa run up without regard
to one essential of home comfort or of architectural truth. It goes
with us into the cold, conventional drawing-room, where all is for
show and nothing for use, in which no one lives, and which is just the
mere pretence of a dwelling-room, set out to deceive the world into
the belief that its cheap finery is the expression of the every-day
life and circumstances of the family. It sits with us at the table,
which a confectioner out of a back street has furnished and where
everything, down to the very flowers, is hired for the occasion.
It glitters in the brooches and bracelets of the women, in the studs
and signet-rings of the men. It is in the hired broughams, the hired
waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers, the cheap
champagne, and the affectation of social consideration that meet us at
every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle-classes is
penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck; and for
one family that holds itself in the honour and simplicity of truth,
ten thousand lie, to the world and to themselves, in frippery and
pretence.
The greatest sinners in this are women. Men are often ostentatious,
often extravagant, and not unfrequently dishonest in that broad way of
dishonesty which is called living beyond their means--sometimes making
up the deficit by practices which end in the dock of the Old Bailey;
but, as a rule, they go in for the real thing in details, and their
pinchbeck is at the core rather than on the surface. Women, on the
contrary, give themselves up to a more general pretentiousness, and,
provided they can make a show, care very little about the means;
provided they can ring their metal on the counter, they ignore the
want of the hall-stamp underneath. Locality, dress, their
visiting-list and domestic appearances are the four things which they
demand shall be in accord with their neighbours'; and for these four
surfaces they will sacrifice the whole internal fabric. They will have
a showy-looking house, encrusted with base ornamentation and false
grandeur, though it lets in wind, rain and noise almost as if it
were made of mud or canvas, rather than a plain and substantial
dwelling-place, with comfort instead of stucco, and moderately thick
walls instead of porches and pilasters. Most of their time is
necessarily passed at home, but they will undergo all manner of house
discomfort resulting from this preference of cheap finery over solid
structure, rather than forego their 'genteel locality' and stereotyped
ornamentation. A family of daughters on the one side, diligent over
the 'Battle of Prague;' a nursery full of crying babies on the other;
more Battles of Prague opposite, diversified by a future Lind
practising her scales unweariedly; water-pipes bursting in the frost;
walls streaming in the thaw; the lower offices reeking and green with
damp; the upper rooms too insecure for unrestricted movement--all
these, and more miseries of the same kind, a woman given over to the
worship of pinchbeck willingly encounters rather than shift into a
locality relatively unfashionable to her sphere, but where she could
have substantiality and comfort for the same rent that she pays now
for flash and show.
In dress it is the same thing. She must look like her neighbours, no
matter whether they can spend pounds to her shillings, so runs up a
milliner's bill beyond what she ought to afford for the whole family
expenses. If others can buy gold, she can manage pinchbeck. Glass that
looks like jet, like filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is
every bit to her as good as the real thing; and if she cannot
compass Valenciennes and Mechlin, she can go to Nottingham and buy
machine-made imitations that will make quite as fine a show. How poor
soever she may be, she must hang herself about with ornaments made of
painted wood, of glass, of vulcanite; she must break out into spangles
and beads and chains and _benoîtons_, which are cheap luxuries and, as
she thinks, effective decorations. Flimsy silks make as rich a rustle
to her ear as the stateliest brocade; and cotton velvet delights the
soul that cannot aspire to Genoa. The love of pinchbeck is so deeply
ingrained in her that even if, in a momentary fit of aberration into
good taste, she condescends to a simple material about which there can
be neither disguise nor pretence, she must load it with that
detestable cheap finery of hers till she makes herself as vulgar in a
muslin as she was in a cotton velvet. The _simplex munditiis_, which
used to be held as a canon of feminine good taste, is now abandoned
altogether, and the more she can bedizen herself according to the
pattern of a Sandwich islander the more beautiful she thinks
herself--the more certain the fascination of the men and the greater
the jealousy of the women. This is the cause of all the tags and
streamers, the bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces there, the
puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off some dead girl's
head, wherewith the modern Englishwoman delights to make herself
hideous. It is pinchbeck throughout.
But we fear woman is past praying for in the matter of fashion; and
that she is too far given over to the abomination of pretence to be
called back to truth for any ethical reason whatsoever, or indeed by
anything short of high examples. And then, if simplicity became the
fashion, we should have our pinchbeck votaries translating that into
extremes as they do now with ornamentation; if my lady took to
plainness, they would go to nakedness.
Another bit of pinchbeck is the visiting-list--the cards of invitation
stuck against the drawing-room glass--with the grandest names and
largest fortunes put forward, irrespective of dates or tenses. The
chance contact with the people represented may be quite out of the
ordinary circumstances of life, but their names are paraded as if an
accident, which has happened once and may never occur again, were in
the daily order of events. They are brought to the front to make
others believe that the whole social substance is of the same quality;
that generals and admirals and lords and ladies are the common
elements of the special circle in which the family habitually moves;
that pinchbeck is good gold, and that 'composition' means marble.
Women are exceedingly tenacious of these pasteboard appearances. In a
house with its couple of female servants, where formal visitors are
very rare and invitations, save by friendly word of mouth, rarer
still, you may see a cracked china bowl or cheap mock _patera_ on the
hall table, to receive the cards which are assumed to come in the
thick showers usual with high people who have hall-porters and a
thousand names or more on their books. The pile gets horribly dusty to
be sure, and the upper layer turns by degrees from cream-colour to
brown; but antiquity is not held to weaken the force of grandeur. The
titled card left on a chance occasion more than a year ago still keeps
the uppermost place, still represents a perpetual renewal of
aristocratic visits and an unbroken succession of social triumphs.
Yellowed and soiled, it is none the less the trump-card of the list;
and while the outside world laughs and ridicules, the lady at home
thinks that no one sees through this puerile pretence, and that the
visiting-list is accepted according to the status of the fugleman at
the head. She is very happy if she can say that the pattern of her
dress, her cap, her bonnet, was taken from that of Lady So and So's;
and we may be quite sure that all personal contact with grand folks so
expresses itself and perpetuates the memory of the event, by such
imitation--at a distance. It is too good an occasion for the airing of
pinchbeck to be disregarded; consequently, for the most part it is
turned to this practical account. Whether the fashion be suited to the
material or to the other parts of the dress, is quite a secondary
consideration; it being of the essence of pinchbeck to despise both
fitness and harmony.
There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the appearance of social
influence, much cultivated by women of a certain activity of mind and
with more definite aims than all women have. This belongs to a
grade higher than the small pretences of which we have been
speaking--to women who have money, and so far have one reality, but
who have not, by their own birth or their husbands', the original
standing which would give them this social influence as of right. Some
make themselves notorious for their drawing-room patronage of artists,
which however does not include buying their pictures; others gather
round them scores of obscure authors, whose books they talk of but do
not read; a few, a short time since, were centres of spiritualistic
circles and got a queer kind of social influence thereby, so far as
Philistine desire to witness the 'manifestations' went; and one or two
are names of weight in the emancipated ranks, and take chiefly to what
they call 'working women.' These are they who attend Ladies'
Committees, where they talk bosh and pound away at utterly
uninteresting subjects as diligently as if what they said had any
point in it, and what they did any ultimate issue in probability or
common sense. But beyond the fact of having a large house, where their
several sets may assemble at stated periods, these would-be lady
patronesses are utterly impotent to help or to hinder; and their
patronage is just so much pinchbeck, not worth the trouble of
weighing.
In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless dissatisfaction with
what they are and ceaseless endeavour to appear something they are
not, our middle-class ladies are doing themselves and society
infinite mischief. They set the tone to the world below them; and the
small tradespeople and the servants, when they copy the vices of their
superiors, do not imitate her grace the duchess, but the doctor's wife
over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door, and the young ladies
everywhere, who all try to appear like women of rank and fortune, and
who are ashamed of nothing so much as of industry, truth and
simplicity. Hence the rage for cheap finery in the kitchen, just a
trifle more ugly and debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence
the miserable pretentiousness and pinchbeck fine-ladyism filtering
like poison through every pore of our society, to result God only
knows in what grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and
education will come to the front and endeavour to stay the plague
already begun. Chains and brooches may seem but small material causes
for important moral effects, but they are symbols; and, as symbols,
they are of deep national value.
No good will be done till we get back some of our fine old horror of
pinchbeck, and once more insist on Truth as the foundation of our
national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do
not land us here; and the progress of the arts and sciences must not
be brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the
semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances.
Women are always rushing about the world eager after everything but
their home business. Here is something for them to do--the
regeneration of society by means of their own energies; the bringing
people back to the dignity of truth and the beauty of simplicity; the
substitution of that self-respect which is content to appear what it
is, for the feeble pride which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot
get gold, which endeavours so hard to hide its real estate and to pass
for what it is not and never can be.
_AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD._
Amongst other queer anomalies in human nature is the difference that
lies between sectarian sins and personal immoralities, between the
intellectual untruth of a man's creed and the spiritual evil of his
own nature. Rigid Calvinism, for instance, which narrows the issues of
divine grace and shuts up the avenues of salvation from all but a
select few, is a sour and illiberal faith; and yet a rigid Calvinist,
simply continuing to believe in predestination and election as he was
taught from the beginning, may be a generous, genial, large-hearted
man. An inventor scheming out the deadliest projectile that has yet
been devised is not necessarily indifferent to human life on his own
account; nor is every American who talks tall talk about the glorious
destinies of his country and the infinite superiority of his
countrymen, as conceited personally as he is vainglorious nationally.
In fact, he may be a very modest fellow by his own fireside; and
though in his quality of American he is of course able to whip
universal creation, in his mere quality of man he is quite ready to
take the lower seat at the table and to give honour where honour is
due.
This kind of distinction between the faults of the sect and the
person, the nature and the cause, is very noticeable in women; and
especially in all things relating to themselves. Individually, many
among them are meek and long-suffering enough, and would be as little
capable of resenting a wrong as of revenging it. Being used from the
cradle to a good deal of snubbing, they take to it kindly as part of
the inevitable order of things, and kiss the chastening rod with
edifying humility; but, collectively, they are the most impatient of
rebuke, the most arrogant in moral attitude, and the most restive of
all created things sought to be led or driven. The woman who will bear
to hear of her personal faults without offering a word in
self-defence, and who will even say peccavi quite humbly if hard
pressed, fires up into illimitable indignation when told that her
foibles are characteristic of her sex, and that she is no worse than
nature meant her to be. Personally she is willing to confess that she
is only a poor worm grovelling in the dust--perhaps an exceptionally
poor worm, if of the kind given to spiritual asceticism--but by her
class she claims to be considered next door to an angel, and arrogates
to her sex virtues which she would blush to claim on her own behalf.
Men, as men, are all sorts of bad things, as every one knows. They are
selfish, cruel, tyrannical, sensual, unjust, bloodthirsty--where does
the list end? and human nature in the abstract is a bad thing
too, given over to lies and various deadly lusts; but women, as women,
are exempt from any special share in the general iniquity, and only
come under the ban with universal nature--with lambs and doves and
other pretty creatures--not quite perfection, because of the Fall
which spoilt everything, and yet very near it. As children of the rash
parents who corrupted the race they certainly suffer from the general
infection of sin that followed, but, as daughters contrasted with the
sons, they are so far superior to those evil-minded brethren of theirs
that their comparative virtues by sex override their positive vices by
race. As individuals, they are worms; as human beings, they are poor
sinful souls; but by their womanhood they are above rebuke.
Women have been so long wrapped in this pleasant little delusion about
the sacredness of their sex, and the perfections belonging thereto by
nature, that any attempt to show them the truth and convince them that
they too are guilty of the mean faults and petty ways common to a
fallen humanity--whereof certain manifestations are special to
themselves--is met with the profound scorn or shrill cries of
affronted womanhood. A man who speaks of their faults as they appear
to him, and as he suffers by them, is illiberal and unmanly, and the
rage of the more hysterically indignant would not be very far below
that of the Thracian Mænads, could they lay hands on the offending
Orpheus of the moment; but a woman who speaks from knowledge, and
touches the weak places and the sore spots known best to the
initiated, is a traitress even baser than the rude man who perhaps
knows no better.
The whole life and being of womanhood must be held sacred from
censure, exalted as it is by a kind of sentimental apotheosis that
will not bear reasoning about, to something very near divinity. Even
the follies of fashion must be exempt from both ridicule and rebuke,
on the ground of man's utter ignorance of the merits of the question;
for how should a poor male body know anything about trains or
crinolines, or the pleasure that a woman feels in making herself
ridiculous or indecent in appearance and a nuisance to her neighbours?
while, for anything graver than the follies of fashion, it is in a
manner high treason against the supremacy of the sex to assume that
they deserve either ridicule or rebuke. Besides, it is indelicate.
Women are made to be worshipped, not criticized; to be reverenced as
something mystically holy and incomprehensible by the grosser
masculine faculties; and it is indiscreet, to say the least of it,
when vile man takes it on himself to test the idol by the hard
mechanical tests of truth and common-sense, and to show the world how
much alloy is mingled with the gold.
This is in ethics what the Oriental's reserve about his harem is in
domestic life. The sacredness of a Mohammedan's womankind must be so
complete that they are even nameless to the coarser sex; and not,
'How is your wife?' 'How are your daughters?' but, 'How is your
house?' is the only accepted form of words by which Ali may ask Hassan
about the health of his Fatimas and Zuliekas. In much the same way our
women must be kept behind the close gilded gratings of affected
perfectness, and, above all things, never publicly discussed--much
less publicly condemned.
It is by no means a proof of wisdom, or of the power of logically
reasoning out a position and its consequences, that women should thus
demand to be treated as things superior to the faults and follies of
humanity at large. They are clamouring loudly, and with some justice,
for an equal share in the world's work and wages, and it is
wonderfully stupid in them to stand on their womanly dignity and their
quasi-sacredness, when told of their faults and measured according to
their shortcomings, not their pretensions. If they come down into the
arena to fight, they must fight subject to the conditions of the
arena. They must not ask for special rules to be made in their
behalf--for blunted weapons on the one side and impregnable defences
on the other. If they demand either mystic reverence or chivalric
homage they must be content with their own narrow but safe enclosure,
where they have nothing to do but to look at the turmoil below, and
accept with gratitude such portions of the good things fought for as
the men to whom they belong see fit to bring them. They cannot at one
and the same time have the good of both positions--the courtesy
claimed by weakness and the honour paid to prowess. If they mingle in
the _mêlée_ they must expect as hard knocks as the rest, and must
submit to be bullied when they hit foul and to be struck home when
they hit wide. If they do not like these conditions, let them keep out
of the fray altogether; but if they choose to mingle in it, no
hysterics of affronted womanhood, however loud the shrieks, will keep
them safe from hard knocks and rough treatment.
Time out of mind women have been credited with all the graces and
virtues possible in a world which 'the trail of the serpent' has
defiled. To be sure they have been cursed as well, as the causes of
most of the miseries of society from Eve's time to Helen's, and later
still. _Teterrima causa._ But the praise alone sticks, so far as their
own self-belief is concerned, and men, who create the curses, may
arrange them to their own liking. The poet says they are 'ministering
angels;' the very name of mother is to some men almost as holy as that
of God, and the most solemn oath a Frenchman can take in a private way
is not by his own honour, but by the name or the head or the life of
his mother.