for himself. Many a man who gets his farthing damages had better have
borne the surly growl of the only half-roused dog, than have
retaliated, and so waked him up. The farthing damages, representing
say a cuff on the head or a kick in the ribs, or a milder 'Lie down,
sir!' may be very pleasant to the feelings of the yelped-at, as so
much revenge exacted--Shylock's pound of flesh, without the blood. But
what about the consequences? what about the disclosure of your secret
follies and the uncovering of the foundations on which the libel
rested? The foundations remain immoveable to the end of time if the
superstructure be disroofed, and the sleeping dog is awakened, never
to be set at rest again while he has a tooth in his head that can
bite.
One of the arts of peaceful living at home is contained in the power
of letting sleeping dogs lie. Papa is surly--it is a way papas
have--or mamma is snappish, as even the best of mammas are at
times when the girls are tiresome and will flirt with ineligible
younger brothers, or when the boys, who must marry money, are paying
attention to dowerless beauty instead. Well, the family horizon is
overcast, and the black dog keeps the gate of the family mansion.
Better let it lie there asleep, if it will but remain so. It is not
pleasant to have it there certainly, but it would be worse to rouse it
into activity and to have a general yelping through the house.
Sometimes, indeed, in a family given to tears and caresses and easily
excited feelings, a frank challenge as to reasons why is answered by a
temporary storm, followed by a scene of effusion and _attendrissement_,
and the black dog is not awakened, but banished, by the rousing he has
got. This is a method that can be tried when you have perfect knowledge
and command of your material; else it is a dangerous, and nine times
out of ten would be an unsuccessful, experiment. It is nearly always
unsuccessful with husbands and wives, who often sulk, but rarely
for causes needing explanation. Angelina knows quite well that she
danced too often the other night with that fascinating young Lovelace
for whom her Henry has a special, and not quite groundless, aversion.
She may put on as many airs of injured innocence as she likes, and
affect to consider herself an ill-used wife suffering grievous things
because of her husband's displeasure and the black dog of sulks
accompanying; but she knows as well as her Henry himself where her sin
lies, and to kick at the black dog would only be to set him
loose upon her, and be well barked at if not worried for her pains.
The wiser course would be to muzzle him by ignoring his presence;
and so in almost all cases of domestic dog, however black.
A sleeping dog of another kind, which it would be well if women would
always leave at rest, is the potential passion of a man who is a
cherished friend but an impossible lover. Certain slow-going men are
able to maintain for life a strong but strictly platonic attachment
for certain women. If any warmer impulse or more powerful feeling give
threatening notice of arising, it is kept in due subjection and a
wholesome state of coolness, perhaps by its very hopelessness even if
returned, perhaps by the fear or the knowledge that it would be
ill-received, and that the only passport to the pleasant friendship so
delighted in is in this calm and sober platonism. This is all very
well so long as the woman minds what she is about; for the passionless
attachment of a man depends mainly on her desire to keep things in
their present place, and on her power of holding to the line to be
observed. If she oversteps this line, if she wakens up that sleeping
dog of passion, it is all over with her and platonism. What was once a
pleasant truth would now be a burning satire; for friendship routed by
love can never take service under its old banners again.
And yet this is what women are continually doing. They are always
complaining that men are not their friends, and that they are only
selfish and self-seeking in their relations with them; yet no sooner
do they possess a man friend who is nothing else than they try their
utmost to convert him into a lover, and are not too well pleased if
they do not succeed--which might by chance sometimes happen like any
other rare occurrence, but not often. And yet success ruins
everything. It takes away the friend and does not give an available
lover; it destroys the existing good and substitutes nothing better.
If the woman be of the fishpond type, whose heart Thackeray wanted to
'drag,' she simply turns round upon the unhappy victim with one of the
'looks that kill;' if she be more weak than vain and less designing
than impulsive, she regrets the momentary infatuation which has lost
her her friend; but in any case she has lost him--by her own folly,
not by inevitable misfortune.
Just as easy is it to rouse the sleeping dogs of hatred, of jealousy,
of envy. You have a tepid well-controlled dislike to some one; and you
know that he knows it. For feelings are eloquent, even when dumb, and
express themselves in a thousand ways independent of words. You do not
care much about your dislike--you do not nurse it nor feed it in any
way, and are rather content than not to let it lie dormant, and so far
harmless. But your unloved friend cannot let well alone. He will be
always treading on your corns and touching you on the raw. That
unlucky speculation you made; your play that was damned; the election
you lost; the decision that was given against you, with
costs--whenever you see him he is sure to introduce some topic that
rubs you the wrong way, till at last the sleeping dog gets fairly
roused, and what was merely a well-ordered dislike bursts out into a
frantic and ungovernable hatred. It has been his own doing. Just as in
the case of the platonic friend transformed into the passionate lover
by the woman's wiles, so the dislike that gave you no trouble--become
now the hatred which is a real curse to your existence--results from
your friend's incessant rousing up of sleeping passions.
Young people are much given to this kind of thing. There is an impish
tendency in most girls, and in all boys, that makes teazing a matter
of exquisite delight to them. If they know of any sleeping dog which
an elder carries about under his cloak, they are never so happy as
when they are rousing it to activity, though their own backs may get
bitten in the fray. Let a youngster into the secret of a weakness, a
sore, and if he can resist the temptation of torturing you as the
result of his knowledge he may lay claim to a virtue almost unknown in
boyish morals. But he sometimes pays dearly for his fun. More than one
life-long dislike, culminating in a disastrous codicil or total
omission from the body of the will, has been the return-blow for a
course of boyish teazings which a testy old uncle or huffish maiden
aunt has had to undergo. The punishment may be severe and unjust;
but the provocation was great; and revenge is a human, if
indefensible, instinct common to all classes.
Fathers and mothers themselves are not always sacred ground, nor are
their special dogs suffered to lie sleeping undisturbed; and perhaps
the favouritism and comparative coldness patent in almost every family
may be traced back to the propensity for soothing or for rousing those
parental beasts. For even fathers and mothers have personal feelings
in excess of their instincts, and they, no more than any one else,
like to be put through their paces by the impish vivacity of youth,
and made to dance according to the piping of an irreverent lad or
saucy girl. If they have dogs, they do not want their children to pry
into their kennels and whistle them out at their pleasure; and those
who do so most will naturally get worst off in the great division of
family love. 'Let sleeping dogs lie,' certainly, as a rule for private
life.
Historically, the saying does not hold good. For if the great leaders
of thought and reform had not roused up the sleeping dogs of their
day, and made them give tongue for all after ages to hear, we should
be but poorly off at this present time. Many of our liberties have
been got only by diligently prodding up that very sleepy dog, the
public, till he has been forced to show his teeth; and history is full
of instances of how much has been done, all the world over and in
every age, by the like means. Sometimes the prodded dog flies at the
wrong throat on the other side, as we have had a few notable
instances of late; and then it would have been wiser to leave him
quietly sleeping in the shade, whether at Mentana or elsewhere; to
rouse for rending being a poor amusement at the best, and an eminently
unprofitable use of leather.
_BEAUTY AND BRAINS._
That lovely woman fulfils only half her mission when she is
unpersonable instead of beautiful, all young men, and all pretty girls
secure in the consciousness of their own perfections, will agree.
Indeed, it is cruel to hear the way in which ingenuous youths despise
ugly girls, however clever, whose charm lies in their cleverness only,
with a counteraction in their plainness. To hear them, one would think
that hardness of feature was, like poverty, a crime voluntarily
perpetrated, and that contempt was a righteous retribution for the
offence. Yet their preference, though so cruelly expressed, is to a
certain extent the right thing. When we are young, the beauty of women
has a supreme attraction beyond all other possessions or qualities;
and there are self-evident reasons why it should be so. It is only as
we grow older that we know the value of brains, and, while still
admiring beauty--as indeed who does not?--admire it as one passing by
on the other side--as a grace to look at, but not to hold, unless
accompanied by something more lasting.
This is in the middle term of a man's life. Old age, perhaps with
the unconscious yearning of regret, goes back to the love of youth and
beauty for their own sake; extremes meeting here as in almost all
other circumstances. The danger is when a young man, obeying the
natural impulse of his age and state, marries beauty only, with
nothing more durable beneath. The mind sees what it brings, and we
love the ideal we create rather than the reality that exists. A pretty
face, the unworn nerves of youth, the freshness of hope that has not
yet been soured by disappointment nor chilled by experience, a neat
stroke at croquet and a merry laugh easily excited, make a girl a
goddess to a boy who is what he himself calls in love and his friends
'spoony.' She may be narrow, selfish, spoilt, unfit to bear the
burdens of life and unable to meet her trials patiently; she may be
utterly unpractical and silly--one of those who never mature but only
grow old--without judgment, forethought, common-sense or courage; but
he sees nothing of all this. To him she is perfect; the 'jolliest girl
in the world,' if he be slangy, or the 'dearest,' if he be
affectionate; and he neither sees nor heeds her potential faults.
It is only when she has stepped down from her pedestal to the level of
the home-threshold that he finds out she is but a woman after all, and
perhaps an exceptionally weak and peevish one. Then he knows that he
would have done better for himself had he married that plain
brave-hearted girl who would have had him to a dead certainty if he
had asked her, but whom he so unmercifully laughed at when he was
making love to his fascinating charmer. As years go on and reduce the
Hebe and Hecate of eighteen to much the same kind of woman at
forty--with perhaps the advantage on Hecate's side if of the sort that
ripens well and improves by keeping--the man feels that he has been a
fool after the manner of Bunyan's Passion; that he has eaten up his
present in the past, and had all his good things at once. If he had
but looked at the future and been able to wait! But in those days he
wanted beauty that does not last, and cared nothing for brains which
do; and so, having made his election he must abide by it, and eat
bitter bread from the yeast of his own brewing.
Many a man has cursed, his whole life long, the youthful infatuation
that made him marry a pretty fool. Take the case of a rising
politician whose fair-faced wife is either too stupid to care about
his position, or who imperils it by her folly. If amiable and
affectionate, and in her own silly little way ambitious, she does him
incalculable mischief by exaggeration, and by saying and doing exactly
the things which are most damaging to him; if stupid, she is just so
much deadweight that he has to carry with him while swimming up the
stream. She is very lovely certainly, and people crowd her
drawing-room to look at her; but a plain-featured, sensible, shrewd
woman, with no beauty to speak of but with tact and cleverness, would
have helped him in his career far better than does his brainless
Venus. He finds this out when it is too late to change M. for N.
in the marriage service.
The successful men of small beginnings are greatly liable to this
curse of wifely hindrance. A barrister once briefless and now in
silk--an artist once obscure and now famous--who in the days of
impecuniosity and Bohemianism married the landlady's pretty daughter
and towards the meridian of life find themselves in the front ranks of
_la haute volée_ with a wife who drops her h's and multiplies her s's,
know the full bitterness of the bread baked from that hasty brewing.
Each woman may have been beautiful in her youth, and each man may have
loved his own very passionately; but if she have nothing to supplement
her beauty--if she have no brains to fall back on, by which she can be
educated up to her husband's present social position as the wife of
his successful maturity--she is a mistake. Dickens was quite right to
kill off pretty childish Dora in 'David Copperfield.' If she had lived
she would have been like Flora in 'Bleak House,' who indeed was Dora
grown old but not matured; with all the grace and beauty of her youth
gone, and nothing else to take their place.
Men do not care for brains in excess in women. They like a sympathetic
intellect which can follow and seize their thoughts as quickly as they
are uttered; but they do not much care for any clear or specific
knowledge of facts. Even the most philosophic among them would rather
not be set right in a classical quotation, an astronomical
calculation, or the exact bearing of a political question by a
lovely being in tarlatane whom he was graciously unbending to
instruct. Neither do they want anything very strong-minded. To most
men, indeed, the feminine strong-mindedness that can discuss immoral
problems without blushing is a quality as unwomanly as a
well-developed biceps or a 'shoulder-of-mutton' fist. It is sympathy,
not antagonism--it is companionship, not rivalry, still less
supremacy, that they like in women; and some women with brains as well
as learning--for the two are not the same thing--understand this, and
keep their blue stockings well covered by their petticoats. Others,
enthusiasts for freedom of thought and intellectual rights, show
theirs defiantly; and meet with their reward. Men shrink from them.
Even clever men, able to meet them on their own ground, do not feel
drawn to them; while all but high-class minds are humiliated by their
learning and dwarfed by their moral courage. And no man likes to feel
humiliated or dwarfed in the presence of a woman, and because of her
superiority.
But the brains most useful to women, and most befitting their work in
life, are those which show themselves in common-sense, in good
judgment, and that kind of patient courage which enables them to bear
small crosses and great trials alike with dignity and good temper.
Mere intellectual culture, however valuable it may be in itself, does
not equal the worth of this kind of moral power; for as the true
domain of woman is the home, and her way of ordering her domestic
life the best test of her faculties, mere intellectual culture does
not help in this; and, in fact, is often a hindrance rather than a
help. What good is there in one's wife being an accomplished
mathematician, a sound scholar, a first-rate musician, a deeply-read
theologian, if she cannot keep the accounts square, knows nothing of
the management of children, lets herself be cheated by the servants
and the tradespeople, has not her eyes opened to dirt and disorder,
and gives way to a fretful temper on the smallest provocation?
The pretty fool who spends half her time in trying on new dresses and
studying the effect of colours, and who knows nothing beyond the last
new novel and the latest plate of fashions, is not a more disastrous
wife than the woman of profound learning whose education has taught
her nothing practical. They stand at the opposite ends of the same
scale, and neither end gives the true position of women. Indeed, if
one must have a fool in one's house, the pretty one would be the best,
as, at the least, pleasant to look at; which is something gained.
The intellectual fool, with her head always in books and 'questions,'
and her children dropping off like sheep for the want of womanly care,
is something more than flesh and blood can tolerate. The pretty fool
cannot help herself. If nature proved herself but a stepmother to her,
and left out the best part of her wits while taking such especial care
of her face, it is no fault of hers; but the intellectual fool is a
case of maladministration of powers, for which she alone is
responsible; and in this particular alternative between beauty and
brains, without a shadow of doubt we would go in for beauty.
Ball-rooms and dinner-tables are the two places where certain women
most shine. In the ball-room Hebe is the queen, and has it all her own
way without fear of rivals. A very few men who care for dancing for
its own sake will certainly dance with Hecate if she is light on hand,
keeps accurate time, and manages her feet with scientific precision;
but to the ruck of youths, Hebe, who jerks herself into step every
second round, but whose lovely face and perfect figure make up for
everything, is the partner they all besiege. Only to those exceptional
few who regard dancing as a serious art would she be a bore with her
three jumps and a hop; while Hecate, waltzing like an angel, would be
divine, in spite of her high cheek-bones and light green eyes _à fleur
de tête_. But at a dinner-table, where a man likes to talk between the
dishes, a sympathetic listener with pleasant manners, to whom he can
air his stalest stories and recount his personal experiences, is
preferable to the prettiest girl if a simpleton, only able to show her
small white teeth in a silly smile, and say 'yes' and 'indeed' in the
wrong places. The ball-room may be taken to represent youth; the
dinner-table maturity. The one is the apotheosis of mere beauty, in
clouds of millinery glory and a heaven of flirting; the other is solid
enjoyment, with brains to talk to by the side and beauty to look
at opposite, in just the disposition that makes life perfect. A
well-ordered dinner-table is a social microcosm; and, being so, this
is the blue riband of the arrangement.
Every woman is bound to make the best of herself. The strong-minded
women who hold themselves superior to the obligations of dress and
manner and all the pleasant little artificial graces belonging to an
artificial civilization, and who think any sacrifice made to
appearance just so much waste of power, are awful creatures, ignorant
of the real meaning of their sex--social Graiæ wanting in every charm
of womanhood, and to be diligently shunned by the wary.
This making the best of themselves is a very different thing from
making dress and personal vanity the first considerations in life.
Where women in general fail is in the exaggerations into which they
fall on this and on almost every other question. They are apt to be
either demireps or devotees; frights or flirts; fashionable to an
extent that lands them in illimitable folly and drags their husbands'
names through the mire, or they are so dowdy that they disgrace a
well-ordered drawing-room, and among nicely-dressed women stand out as
living sermons on slovenliness. If they are clever, they are too
commonly blue-stockings, and let the whole household go by the board
for the sake of their fruitless studies; and if they are domestic and
good managers they sink into mere servants, never opening a book save
their daily ledger, and having no thought beyond the cheesemonger's
bill and the butcher's prices. They want that fine balance, that
accurate self-measurement and knowledge of results, which goes by
the name of common-sense and is the best manifestation of brains
they can give, and the thing which men most prize. It is the most
valuable working form of intellectual power, and has most endurance
and vitality; and it is the form which helps a man on in life, when
he has found it in his wife, quite as much as money or a good connexion.
So that, on the whole, brains are before beauty in the solid things of
life. For admiration and personal love and youthful enjoyment, beauty
of course is supreme; but as we cannot be always young nor always apt
for pleasure, it is as well to provide for the days when the daughters
of music shall be brought low and the years draw nigh which have no
pleasure in them.
_NYMPHS._
Between the time of the raw school-girl and that of the finished young
lady is the short season of the nymph, when the physical enjoyment of
life is perhaps at its keenest, and a girl is not afraid to use her
limbs as nature meant her to use them, nor ashamed to take pleasure in
her youth and strength. This is the time when a sharp run down a steep
hill, with the chance of a tumble midway, is an exercise by no means
objected to; when clambering over gates, stiles, and even crabbed
stone-walls is not refused because of the undignified display of ankle
which the adventure involves; when leaping a ditch comes in as one of
the ordinary accidents of a marshland walk; and when the fun of riding
is infinitely enhanced if the horse be only half broken or barebacked.
The nymph--an out-of-door, breezy, healthy girl, more after the
pattern of the Greek Oread than the Amazon--is found only in the
country; and for the most part only in the remoter districts of the
country. In the town she degenerates into fastness, according to the
law which makes evil merely the misdirection of force, as dirt is
only matter in the wrong place. But among the mountains, in the
secluded midland villages, or out on the thinly-populated moorland
tracts, the nymph may be found in the full perfection of her nature.
And a very beautiful kind of nature it is; though it is to be feared
that certain ladies of the stricter sort would call her 'tomboy', and
that those of a still narrower way of thought, unable to distinguish
between unconventionality and vulgarity, would hold her to be
decidedly vulgar--which she is not--and would wonder at her mother for
'letting her go on so.'
You fall upon the nymph at all hours and in all seasons. Indeed, she
boasts that no weather ever keeps her indoors, and prefers a little
roughness of the elements to anything too luscious or sentimental. A
fresh wind, a sharp frost, a blinding fall of snow, or a pelting
shower of rain are all high jinks to the nymph, to whom it is rare fun
to come in like a water-dog, dripping from every hair, or shaking the
snow in masses from her hat and cloak. She prefers this kind of thing
to the suggestive beauty of the moonlight or the fervid heats of
summer; and thinks a long walk in the crisp sharp frost, with the
leaves crackling under her feet, worth all the nightingales in the
wood. And yet she loves the spring and summer too, for the sake of the
flowers and the birds and the beasts and the insects they bring forth;
for the nymph is almost always a naturalist of the perceptive and
self-taught kind, and has a marvellous faculty for finding out
nests and rare habitats, and for tracking unusual trails to the hidden
home.