man of broad humour--one who calls a spade a spade, with no
circumlocution about an agricultural implement. According to the odd
law of compensation which regulates so much of human action, the wife
of such a man is generally one of the ultra-refined kind, who thinks
herself consecrated the enduring censor of her husband's speech. As
this is an example most frequently to be found in middle life and
where there are children belonging to the establishment, the word of
warning is generally 'papa!'--said with reproach or resentment,
according to circumstances--which has, of course, the effect of
drawing the attention of the young people to the paternal breadth of
speech, and of fixing that special breach of decorum on their memory.
Sometimes the wife has sufficient self-restraint not to give the word
of warning in public, but can nurse her displeasure for a more
convenient season; but so soon as they are alone the miserable man has
to pass under the harrow, as only husbands with wives of a chastising
spirit can pass under it, and his life is made a burden to him because
of that unlucky anecdote told with such verve a few hours ago, and
received with such shouts of pleasant laughter. Perhaps the anecdote
was just a trifle doubtful; granted; but what does the wife take by
her remonstrance? Most probably a quarrel; possibly a good-natured
_peccavi_ for the sake of being let off the continuance of the sermon;
perhaps a yawn; most certainly not reform. If the man be a man of free
speech and broad humour by nature and liking, he will remain so to the
end; and what the censorship of society leaves untouched, the
interference of a wife will not control.
Children come in for an enormous share of interference, which is not
direction nor discipline, but simple interference for its own sake.
There are mothers who meddle with every expression of individuality in
their young people, quite irrespective of moral tendency, or whether
the occasion is trivial or important. In the fancies, the pleasures,
the minor details of dress in their children, there is always
that intruding maternal finger upsetting the arrangements of the poor
little pie as vigorously as if thrones and altars depended on the
result. Not a game of any kind can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn
instead of a pink, without maternal interference; so that the bloom is
rubbed off every enjoyment, and life becomes reduced to a kind of
goose-step, with mamma for the drill-sergeant prescribing the inches
to be marked. Sisters, too, do a great deal of this kind of thing
among each other; as all those who are intimate in houses where there
are large families of unmarried girls must have seen. The nudges, the
warning looks, the deprecating 'Amy's!' and 'Oh, Lucy's!' and 'Hush,
Rose's!' by which some seek to act as household police over the
others, are patent to all who use their senses. In some houses the
younger sisters seem to have been born chiefly as training grounds for
the elders, whereon they may exercise their powers of interference;
and a hard time they have of it. If Emma goes to her embroidery, Ellen
tells her she ought to practise her singing; if Jane is reading, Mary
recommends sewing as a more profitable use of precious time; if Amy is
at her easel, Ada wants to turn her round to the piano. It is quite
the exception where four or five sisters leave each other free to do
as each likes, and do not take to drilling and interference as part of
the daily programme.
Something of the reluctance to domestic service, so painfully apparent
among the better class of working women, is due to this spirit of
interference with women. The lady who wrote about the caps and gowns
of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of dress, down to the very
material of their gloves, was an instance of this spirit. For, when we
come to analyze it, what does it really signify to us how our servants
dress, so long as they are clean and decent and do not let their
garments damage our goods? Fashion is almost always ridiculous, and
women, as a rule, care more for dress than they care for anything
else; and if the kitchen apes the parlour, and Phyllis gives as much
thought to her new linsey as my lady gives to her new velvet, we
cannot wonder at it, nor need we hold up our hands in horror at the
depravity of the smaller person. Does one flight of stairs transpose
morality? If it does not, there is no real ethical reason why my lady
should interfere with poor Phyllis's enjoyment in her ugly little
vanities, when she herself will not be interfered with--though press
and pulpit both try to turn her out of her present path into the way
which all ages have thought the best for her and the one naturally
appointed. It is a thing that will not bear reasoning on, being simply
a form of the old 'who will guard the guardian?' Who will direct the
directress? and to whose interference will the interferer submit?
There are two causes for this excessive love of interference among
women. The one is the narrowness of their lives and objects, by which
insignificant things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes;
the other, their belief that they are the only saviours of society,
and that without them man would become hopelessly corrupt. And to a
certain extent this belief is true; but surely with restrictions!
Because the clearer moral sense and greater physical weakness of women
restrain men's fiercer passions and force them to be gentle and
considerate, women are not, therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine
life into whose hands is given the paying out of just so much rope as
they think fit for the occasion. They would do better to look to their
own tackle before settling so exactly the run of others; and if ever
their desired time of equality is to come, it must come through mutual
independence, not through womanly interference, and as much liberality
and breadth given as demanded:--which, so far as humanity has gone
hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of squaring accounts.
Grant that women are the salt of the earth and the great antiseptic
element in society, still that does not reduce everything else to the
verge of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet they evidently think
that it is so, and that they are each and all the keepers of keys
which give them a special entrance to the temple of morality, and by
which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser body of men. Hence
they interfere and restrict and pay out just so much rope, and measure
off just so much gambolling ground, as they think fit; then think vile
man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things into his own
hand and goes beyond their boundary-lines. It is all done in good if
in a very narrow faith--that we admit willingly; but we would call
their attention to the difference there is between influence and
interference; which is just the difference between their ideal duty
and their daily practice--between being the salt of the earth and the
blister of the home.
We think it only justice to put in a word for those poor henpecked
fellows of husbands at a time when the whole cry is for Woman's
Rights, which seems to mean chiefly her right of making man knuckle
under on all occasions and of making one will serve for two lives--and
that will hers. We assure her that she would get her own way in large
matters much more easily if she would leave men more liberty in small
ones, and not teaze them by interfering in things which do not concern
her and have only reference to themselves.
_THE FASHIONABLE WOMAN._
Among the many odd products of a mature civilization, the fashionable
woman is one of the oddest. From first to last she is an amazing
spectacle; and if we take human life in any earnestness at all,
whether individually, as the passage to an eternal existence the
condition of which depends on what we are here, or collectively, as
the highest thing we know, we can only look in blank astonishment at
the fashionable woman and her career. She is the one sole capable
member of the human family without duties and without useful
occupation; the one sole being who might be swept out of existence
altogether, without deranging the nice arrangement of things, or
upsetting the balance of inter-dependent forces. We know of no other
organic creation of which this could be said; but the fashionable
woman is not as other creatures, being, fortunately, _sui generis_,
and of a type not existing elsewhere. If we take the mere ordering of
her days and the employment of her time as the sign of her mental
state, we may perhaps measure to a certain extent, but not fully, the
depth of inanity into which she has fallen and the immensity of her
folly. Considering her as a being with the potentiality of
reason, of usefulness, of thought, the actual result is surely the
saddest and the strangest thing under heaven!
She goes to bed at dawn and does not attempt to rise till noon. For
the most part she breakfasts in bed, and then amuses herself with a
cursory glance at the morning paper, if she have sufficient energy for
so great a mental exertion; if she have not, she lies for another hour
or two in that half-slumberous state which is so destructive to mind
and body, weakening as it does both fibre and resolution, both muscle
and good principle. At last she languidly rises, to be dressed in time
for luncheon and her favoured intimates--the men who have the _entrée_
at sacred hours when the world in general is forbidden. Some time
later she dresses again for her drive--for the first part of the day's
serious business; for paying visits and leaving cards; for buying
jewelry and dresses, and ordering all sorts of unnecessary things at
her milliner's; for this grand lady's ordinary 'day,' and that grand
lady's extraordinary At Home; for her final slow parade in the Park,
where she sees her friends as in an open air drawing-room, makes
private appointments, carries on flirtations, and hears and retails
gossip and scandal of a full flavour. Then she goes home to dress for
tea in a 'lovely gown' of suggestive piquancy; to be followed by
dinner, the opera or a concert, a _soirée_, or perhaps a ball or two;
whence she returns towards morning, flushed with excitement or
worn out with fatigue, feverish or nervous, as she has had pleasure
and success or disappointment and annoyance.
This is her outside life; and this is no fancy picture and no
exaggeration. After a certain time of such an existence, can we wonder
if her complexion fades and her eyes grow dim? if that inexpressible
air of haggard weariness creeps over her, which ages even a young girl
and makes a mature woman substantially an old one? It is then that she
has recourse to those foul and fatal expedients of which we have heard
more than enough in these latter days. She will not try simplicity of
living, natural hours, wholesome occupation, unselfish endeavour, but
rushes off for help to paints and cosmetics, to stimulants and drugs,
and attempts to restore the tarnished freshness of her beauty by the
very means which further corrode it. Every now and then, for very
weariness when not for idleness, she feigns herself sick and has her
favourite physician to attend her. In fact the funniest thing about
her is the ease with which she takes to her bed on the slightest
provocation, and the strange pleasure she seems to find in what is a
penance to most women.
You meet her in a heated, crowded, noisy room, looking just as she
always looks, whatever her normal state of health may be; and in
answer to your inquiries she tells you she has only two hours ago left
her bed to come here, having been confined to her room for a week,
with Dr. Blank in close attendance. If you are an intimate female
friend she will whisper you the name of her malady, which is sure to
be something terrific, and which, if true, would have kept her a real
invalid for months instead of days; but if you are only a man she will
make herself out to have been very ill indeed in a more mysterious
way, and leave you to wonder at the extraordinary physique of
fashionable women, which enables them to live on the most friendly
touch-and-go terms with death, and to overcome mortal maladies by an
effort of the will and the delights of a ducal ball. The favourite
physician has a hard time of it with these ladies; and the more
popular he is the harder his work. It is well for his generation when
he is a man of honour and integrity, and knows how to add self-respect
and moral power to the qualities which have made him the general
favourite. For his influence over women is almost unlimited--like
nothing so much as that of the handsome Abbé of the Regency or the
fascinating Monsignore of Rome; and if he chooses to abuse it and turn
it to evil issues, he can. And, however great the merit in him that he
does not, it does not lessen the demerit of the woman that he could.
Sometimes the fashionable woman takes up with the clergyman instead of
the physician, and coquets with religious exercises rather than with
drugs; but neither clergyman nor physician can change her mode of life
nor give her truth nor common-sense. Sometimes there is a fluttering
show of art-patronage, and the fashionable woman has a handsome
painter or well-bred musician in her train, whom she pets publicly and
patronizes graciously. Sometimes it is a young poet or a rising
novelist, considerably honoured by the association, who dedicates his
next novel to her, or writes verses in her praise, with such fervency
of gratitude as sets the base Philistines on the scent of the
secret--perhaps guessing not far amiss. For the fashionable woman has
always some love-affair on hand, more or less platonic according to
her own temperament or the boldness of the man--a love-affair in which
the smallest ingredient is love; a love-affair which is vanity,
idleness, a dissolute imagination and contempt of such prosaic things
as morals; a love-affair not even to be excused by the tragic frenzy
of earnest passion, and which may be guilty and yet not true.
The physical effects of such a life as this are as bad as the mental,
and both are as bad as the worst can make them. A feverish,
overstrained condition of health either prevents the fashionable woman
from being a mother at all, or makes her the mother of nervous, sickly
children. Many a woman of high rank is at this moment paying bitterly
for the disappointment of which she herself, in her illimitable folly,
has been the sole and only cause. And, whether women like to hear it
or not, it is none the less a truth that part of the reason for their
being born at all is that they may in their turn bear children. The
unnatural feeling against maternity existing among fashionable
women is one of the worst mental signs of their state, as their
frequent inability to be mothers is one of the worst physical results.
This is a condition of things which no false modesty nor timid reserve
should keep in the background, for it is a question of national
importance, and will soon become one of national disaster unless
checked by a healthier current and more natural circumstances.
Dress, dissipation and flirting make up the questionable lines which
enclose the life of the fashionable woman, and which enclose nothing
useful, nothing good, nothing deep nor true nor holy. Her piety is a
pastime; her art the poorest pretence; her pleasure consists only in
hurry and excitement alternating with debasing sloth, in heartless
coquetry or in lawless indulgence, as nature made her more vain or
more sensual. As a wife she fulfils no wifely duty in any grand or
loving sense, for the most part regarding her husband only as a banker
or an adjunct, according to the terms of her marriage settlement; as a
mother she is a stranger to her children, to whom nurse and governess
supply her place and give such poor makeshift for maternal love as
they are enabled or inclined. In no domestic relation is she of the
smallest value, and of none in any social circumstance beside the
adorning of a room--if she be pretty--and the help she gives to trade
through her expenditure. She lives only in the gaslight, and her
nature at last becomes as artificial as her habits.
As years go on, and she changes from the acknowledged belle to
_la femme passée_, she goes through a period of frantic endeavour to
retain her youth; and even when time has clutched her with too firm a
hand to be shaken off, and she begins to feel the infirmities which
she still puts out all her strength to conceal, even then she grasps
at the departing shadow and fresh daubs the crumbling ruin, in the
belief that the world's eyes are dim and that stucco may pass for
marble for another year or two longer. Or she becomes a Belgravian
mother, with daughters to sell to the highest bidder; and then the aim
of her life is to secure the purchaser. Her daughters are never
objects of real love with the fashionable woman. They are essentially
her rivals, and the idea of carrying on her life in theirs, of
forgetting herself in them, occurs to her only as a forecast of death.
She shrinks even from her sons, as living evidences of the lapse of
time which she cannot deny, and awkward _memoria technica_ for fixing
dates; and there is not a home presided over by a fashionable woman
where the family is more than a mere name, a mere social convention
loosely held together by circumstances, not by love.
Closing such a life as this comes the unhonoured end, when the
miserable made-up old creature totters down into the grave where paint
and padding, and glossy plaits cut from some fresh young head, are of
no more avail; and where death, which makes all things real, reduces
her life of lies to the nothingness it has been from the beginning.
What does she leave behind her? A memory by which her children
may order their own lives in proud assurance that so they will order
them best for virtue and for honour? Or a memory which speaks to them
of time misused, of duties unfulfilled, of love discarded for
pleasure, and of a life-long sacrifice of all things good and pure for
selfishness?
We all know examples of the worldly old woman clinging batlike to the
last to the old roofs and rafters; and we all know how heartily we
despise her, and how we ridicule her in our hearts, if not by our
words. If the reigning queens of fashion, at present young and
beautiful, would but remember that they are only that worldly old
woman in embryo, and that in a very few years they will be her exact
likeness, unhappily repeated for the scorn of the world once more to
follow! The traditional skeleton at the feast had a wonderfully wise
meaning, crude and gross as it was in form. For though its _memento
mori_, too constantly before us, would either sadden or brutalize, as
we were thoughtful or licentious, yet it is good to see the end of
ourselves, and to study the meaning and lesson of our lives in those
of our prototypes and elder likenesses.
The pleasures of the world are, as we all know, very potent and very
alluring, but nothing can be more unsatisfying if taken as the main
purpose of life. While we are young, the mere stirring of the blood
stands instead of anything more real; but as we go on, and the pulse
flags and pleasurable occasions get rare and more rare, we find
that we have been like the Prodigal Son, and that our food and his
have been out of much the same trough, and come in the main to much
the same thing.
This is an age of extraordinary wealth and of corresponding
extraordinary luxury; of unparalleled restlessness, which is not the
same thing as activity or energy, but which is the kind of
restlessness that disdains all quiet and repose, as unendurable
stagnation. Hence the fashionable woman of the day is one of extremes
in her own line also; and the idleness, the heartlessness, the
self-indulgence, the want of high morality, and the insolent luxury at
all times characteristic of her were never displayed with more cynical
effrontery than at present, and never called for more severe
condemnation.
The fashionable women of Greece and Rome, of Italy and France, have
left behind them names which the world has made typical of the vices
naturally engendered by idleness and luxury. But do we wish that our
women should become subjects for an English Juvenal? that fashion
should create a race of Laïses and Messalinas, of Lucrezia Borgias and
Madame du Barrys, out of the stock which once gave us Lucy Hutchinson
and Elizabeth Fry? Once the name of Englishwoman carried with it a
grave and noble echo as the name of women known for their gentle
bearing and their blameless honour--of women who loved their husbands,
and brought up about their own knees the children they were not
reluctant to bear and not ashamed to love. Now, it too often means a
girl of the period, a frisky matron, a fashionable woman--a thing of
paints and pads, consorting with dealers of no doubtful calling for
the purchase of what she grimly calls 'beauty,' making pleasure her
only good and the world her highest god. It too often means a woman
who is not ashamed to supplement her husband with a lover, but who is
unwilling to become the honest mother of that husband's children. It
too often means a hybrid creature, perverted out of the natural way
altogether, affecting the license but ignorant of the strength of a
man; as girl or woman alike valueless so far as her highest natural
duties are concerned; and talking largely of liberty while showing at
every turn how much she fails in that co-essential of liberty--knowledge
how to use it.
_SLEEPING DOGS._
There is a capital old proverb, often quoted but not so often acted
on, called 'Let sleeping dogs lie;' a proverb which, if we were to
abide by its injunction, would keep us out of many a mess that we get
into now, because we cannot let well alone. Certainly we fall into
trouble sometimes, or rather we drift into it--we allow it to gather
round us--for want of a frank explanation to clear off small
misunderstandings. At least novelists say so, and then make a great
point of the anguish endured by Henry and Angelina for three mortal
volumes, because they were too stupid to ask the reason why the one
looked cold the other evening at the duchess's ball, and the other
looked shy the next morning in the park. But then novelists, poor
souls, are driven to such extravagant expedients for motives and
matter, that we can scarcely take them as rational exponents of real
life in any way; though the very meaning and final cause of their
profession is to depict human nature as it is, and to show the reflex
action of character and circumstances somewhat according to the
pattern set out in the actual world. But, leaving novelists
alone, on the whole we find in real life that if speech is silvern,
silence is essentially golden, and that more harm is done by saying
too much than by saying too little; above all, that infinite mischief
arises by not letting sleeping dogs lie.
People are so wonderfully anxious to stir up the dregs of everything,
they can never let things rest. Take a man or woman who has done
something queer that gets noised abroad, and who is coldly looked on
in consequence by those who believe the worst reports which arise as
interpretations. Now the wisest thing undoubtedly is to bear this
coldness as the righteous punishment of that folly, and to trust for
rehabilitation to the mysterious process called 'living it down.' If
there has been absolutely no sinfulness to speak of, nothing but a
little imprudence and a big glossary of scandalous explanation, a
little precipitancy and a great deal of ill-nature, by all means wake
up the sleeping dog and set him howling through the streets. He may do
good, seeing that truth would be your friend. But if there be a core
of ugly fact, even if it be not quite so ugly as the envelope which
rumour has wrapped round it, then fall back on the dignity of 'living
it down,' and let the dog lie sleeping and muzzled.
There is another, but an unsavoury saying, which advises against the
stirring up of evil odours; but this is just what imprudent,
high-spirited people will not understand. They will take their own way
in spite of society and all its laws; they will kick over the
traces when it suits them; they will do this and that of which the
world says authoritatively, 'No, you shall not do it;' and then, when
the day of wrath arrives, and down comes the whip on the offending
back, they shriek piteously and wake up all the dogs in the town in
the 'investigation of their case.' And a queer kennel enough they turn
out sometimes! They would have done better to put up with their social
thrashing than to have set the bloodhounds of 'investigation' on their
heels.