at her ease, and enjoying herself in her own peculiar way. That
wonderful grace of unconsciousness which belongs to savages and
animals belongs to her also, and she moves with a supple freedom which
affectation or shyness would equally destroy. To see her running down
a green field, with the sunlight falling on her; her light dress blown
into coloured clouds by the wind; her step a little too long for the
correct town-walk--but so firmly planted and yet so light, so swift,
so even!--her cheeks freshly flushed by exercise; her eyes bright and
fearless; her white teeth shown below her upper lip as she comes
forward with a ringing laugh, carrying a young bird which she has just
caught, or a sheaf of wild flowers for which she has been perilling
her neck, is to see a beautiful and gracious picture which you
remember with pleasure all your life after. Or you meet her quite
alone on a wide bleak moor, with her hat in her hand and her hair
blowing across her face, looking for plovers' eggs, or ferns and
orchids down in the damp hollows. She is by no means dressed according
to the canons of _Le Follet_, and yet she always manages to have
something picturesque about her--something that would delight an
artist's taste, and that is in perfect harmony with herself and her
surroundings--which she wears with profound ignorance as to how well
it suits her--or at most with only an instinctive knowledge that
it is the right thing for her. She may be shy as she meets you; if she
is passing out of the nymph state into that of conscious womanhood,
she will be shy; but if still a nymph with no disturbing influences at
work, she will probably look at you with a fixed, perplexing,
half-provoking look of frank curiosity which you can neither notice
nor take advantage of; the trammels of conventional life fettering one
side heavily, if not the other.
Shocking as it is to say, the nymph may sometimes be met on the top of
a haycart, and certainly in the hayfield, where she is engaged in
scattering the 'cocks,' if not in raising them; and where even the
haymakers themselves--and they are not a notably romantic race--do not
grumble at the extra trouble she gives them, because of her evident
delight in her misdeeds. Besides, she has a bright word for them as
she passes; for the nymph has democratic tendencies, and is frank and
'affable' to all classes alike. She needs to be a little looked after
in this direction, not for mischief but for manners; for, if not
judiciously checked, she may become in time coarse. There are seamy
sides to everything, and the nymph does not escape the general law.
If the nymph condescends to any game at all, it is croquet, at which
she is inexorably severe. She knows nothing of the little weakness
which makes her elder sisters overlook the patent spooning of the
favourite curate, even though he is opposed to them--nothing of
the tender favouritism which pushes on an awkward partner by deeds of
helping outside the law. The nymph, who has no weakness nor tenderness
of that kind, knows only the game; and the game has not elastic
boundaries. Therefore she is inflexible in her justice to one side and
the other. Is it not the game? she says when reproached with being
disagreeable and unamiable.
But even croquet is slow to the nymph, who has been known to handle a
bat not discreditably, and who is an adept at firing at a mark with
real powder and ball. If she lives near a lake, a river, or the sea,
she is first-rate at boating, can feather her oar and back water with
the skill of a veteran oarsman, and can reef a sail or steer close
without the slightest hesitation or nervousness. She is also a famous
swimmer, and takes the water like a duck; and at an ordinary summer
seaside resort, if by chance she ever profanes herself by showing off
there, she attracts a crowd of beach-loungers to watch her feats far
outside the safe barrier of the bathing-machines. She is a great
walker, wherever she lives. If a mountaineer, she is a clever
cragswoman, making it a point of honour to go to the top of the most
difficult and dangerous mountains in her neighbourhood, and coaxing
her brothers to let her join them and their friends in expeditions
which require both nerve and strength.
Her greatest sphere of social glory is a picnic, where she always
heads the exploring party, clambering up the rocks of the
waterfall, or diving down into the close-smelling caves, or scaling
the crumbling walls of the ruin before any one else can come up to
her. She is specially happy at old ruins, where she flits in and out
among the broken columns and under the mouldering arches, like a
spirit of the place unduly disturbed. Sometimes she climbs up by
unseen means, till she reaches a point where it makes one dizzy to see
her; and sometimes she startles her company by the sudden bleating of
a sheep, or the wild hoot of an owl. For she can imitate the sounds of
animals for the most part with wonderful accuracy; though she can also
sing simple ballads without music, with sweetness and correctness. She
is fond of all animals and fears none. She will pass through a field
thronged with wild-looking cattle without the least hesitation; and
makes friends even with the yelping farm-dogs which come snapping and
snarling at her heels. In winter she feeds the wood-birds by flocks,
and always takes care that the horses have a handful of corn or a
carrot when she goes to see them, and that the cows are the better for
her visit by a bunch of lucerne or a fat fresh cabbage-leaf. The
home-beasts show their pleasure when they hear her fleet footstep on
the paved yard; and her favourite pony whinnies to her in a peculiar
voice as she passes his stable door. These are her friends, and their
love for her is her reward.
In her early days the nymph was notorious for her dilapidated
attire, perplexing mother and nurse to mend, or to understand why or
how it had come about. But as her favourite hiding-place was in a
forked branch midway up an old tree in the shrubbery, or a natural
arbour which she had cut out for herself in the very heart of the
underwood, it was scarcely to be wondered at if cloth and cotton
testified to the severity of her retreats. She has still mysterious
rents in her skirts, got no one knows how; and her mother still
laments over her aptitude for rags, and wishes she could be brought to
see the beauty of unstained apparel. She is given to early rising--to
fits indeed of rising at some wild hour in the morning, for walks
before breakfast and the like innocent insanities. Sometimes she takes
it in hand to educate herself in certain stoicisms, and goes without
butter at breakfast or without breakfast altogether, if she thinks
that thereby she will grow stronger or less inclined to
self-indulgence. For drink she will never touch wine nor beer; but she
likes new milk, and is great in her capacity for water.
The nymph is almost always of the middle-classes. It is next to
impossible indeed that she should be found in the higher ranks, where
girls are not left to themselves, and where no one lives in far-away
country places out of the reach of public opinion and beyond the range
of public overlooking. Some years ago, before the railroads and
monster hotels had made the mountain districts like Hampstead or
Richmond on a Sunday afternoon, the nymph was to be found in
great abundance down in Cumberland and Westmoreland. By the more
remote lakes, like Buttermere and Hawes Water, and in the secluded
valleys running up from the larger lakes, you would come upon square
stuccoed houses, generally abominably ugly, where the nymph was
mistress of the situation. She might be met riding about alone in a
flapping straw hat, long before hats were fashionable headgear for
women, and in a blue baize skirt for all the riding-habit thought
necessary; or she might be encountered on the wild fell sides, or on
the mountain heights, or in her boat sculling among the lonely lake
islets, or gathering water-lilies in the bays. In the desolate stretch
of moorland country to the north of Skiddaw the whole female
population a few years ago was of the nymph kind; but railroads and
the penny-post, cheap trains, fashion and fine-ladyism have penetrated
even into the heart of the wild mountains, and now the nymph there is
only a transitional development--not, as formerly, a fixed type.
The nymph is the very reverse of a flirt. She has no inclination that
way, and looks shy and awkward at the men who pay her compliments or
attempt anything like sentimentality. But she is not superior to boys,
who are her chosen companions and favourites. A bold, brave boy, who
just overtops her in skill and daring, is her delight; but anything
over twenty is 'awfully old,' while forty and sixty are so remote that
the lines blur and blend together and have no distinction. By-and-by
the nymph becomes a staid young woman, and marries. If she goes
into a close town and has children, very often her vigorous health
gives way, and we see her in a few years nervous, emaciated,
consumptive, and with a pitiful yearning for 'home' more pathetic than
all the rest. But if she remains where she is, in the fresh pure air
of her native place, she retains her youth and strength long after the
age when ordinary women lose theirs, and her children are celebrated
as magnificent specimens of the future generation.
We often see in country places matrons of over forty who are still
like young women, both in looks and bearing, both in mental innocence
and physical power. They have the shy and innocent look of girls; they
blush like girls; they know less evil than almost any town-bred girl
of eighteen, mothers of stalwart youths though they may be; they can
walk and laugh and take pleasure in their lives like girls; and their
daughters find them as much sisters as mothers. It is not quite the
same thing if they do not marry; for among the saddest sights of
social life is that terrible fading and withering away of comely,
healthy, vigorous young country girls, who slowly pass from nymphs,
full of grace and beauty, of happiness and power, to antiquated
virgins, soured, useless, debilitated and out of nature. Of these,
too, there are plenty in country places; but perhaps some scheme will
be some day set afoot which shall redress the overweighted balance and
bring to the service of the future some of the healthiest and
best of our women. Meanwhile the fresh, innocent, breezy nymph is a
charming study; and may the time be far distant which shall see her
tamed and civilized out of existence altogether!
_MÉSALLIANCES._
The French system of parents arranging the marriage of their children
without the consent of the girl being even asked, but assumed as
granted, is not so wholly monstrous as many people in England believe.
It seems to be founded on the idea that, given a young girl who has
been kept shut up from all possibility of forming the most shadowy
attachment for any man whatsoever, and present to her as her husband a
sufficiently well-endowed and nice-looking man, with whom come
liberty, pretty dresses, balls, admiration and social standing, and
the chances are she will love him and live with him in tolerable
harmony to the end of the chapter. And this idea is by no means wholly
beside the truth, as we find it in practice. The parents, who are
better judges of character and circumstance than the daughter can
possibly be, are supposed to take care that their future son-in-law is
up to their standard, whatever that may be, and that the connexion is
not of a kind to bring discredit on their house; and on this and the
joint income, as the solid bases, they build the not very unreasonable
hypothesis that one man is as good as another for the satisfaction
of a quite untouched and virginal fancy, and that suitable external
conditions go further and last longer than passion. They trust to the
force of instinct to make all square with the affections, while they
themselves arrange for the smooth running of the social circumstances;
and they are not far out in their calculations.
The young people of the two lonely lighthouse islands, who made love
to each other through telescopes, are good examples of the way in
which instinct simulates the impulse which calls itself love when
there are two or three instead of one to look at. For we may be quite
sure that had the lighthouse island youth been John instead of James,
fair instead of dark, garrulous instead of reticent, short and fat
instead of tall and slender, the lighthouse island girl would have
loved him all the same, and would have quite believed that this man
was the only man she ever could have loved, and that her instinctive
gravitation was her free choice.
The French system of marriage, then, based on this accommodating
instinct, works well for women who are not strongly individual, not
inconstant by temperament, and not given to sentimentality. But,
seeing that all women are not merely negative, and that passions and
affections do sometimes assert themselves inconveniently, the system
has had the effect of making society lenient to the little follies of
married women, unless too strongly pronounced--partly because the
human heart insists on a certain amount of free-will, which fact
must be recognized--but partly, we must remember, because of the want
of the young-lady element in society. In England, where our girls are
let loose early, we have free-trade in flirting; consequently, we
think that all that sort of thing ought to be done before marriage,
and that, when once a woman has made her choice and put her neck under
the yoke, she ought to stick to her bargain and loyally fulfil her
self-imposed engagement.
One consequence of this free-trade in flirting and this large amount
of personal liberty is that love-marriages are more frequent with us
than with the French, with whom indeed, in the higher classes, they
are next to impossible; and, unfortunately, the corollary to this is
that love-marriages are too often _mésalliances_. There is of course
no question, ethically, between virtuous vulgarity and refined vice. A
groom who smells of the stable and speaks broad Somersetshire or
racier Cumberland, but who is brave, faithful, honest, incapable of a
lie or of meanness in any form, is a better man than the best-bred
gentleman whose life is as vicious as his bearing is unexceptionable.
The most undeniable taste in dress, and the most correct
pronunciation, would scarcely reconcile us to cruelty, falsehood, or
cowardice; and yet we do not know a father who would prefer to give
his girl to the groom, rather than the gentleman, and who would think
horny-handed virtue, dressed in fustian and smelling of the stable,
the fitter husband of the two.
If we take the same case out of our own time and circumstances, we
have no doubt as to the choice to be made. It seems to us a very
little matter that honest Charicles should tell his love to Aglaë in
the broad Doric tongue instead of in the polished Athenian accents to
which she was accustomed; that he should wear his chiton a hand's
breadth too long or a span too short; that his chlamys should be flung
across his brawny chest in a way which the young bloods of the time
thought ungraceful; or that, as he assisted at a symposium, he should
not hold the rhyton at quite the proper angle, but in a fashion at
which the refined Cleon laughed as he nudged his neighbour. Yet all
these conventional solecisms, of no account whatever now, would have
weighed heavily against poor Charicles when he went to demand Aglaë's
hand; and the balance would probably have gone down in favour of that
scampish Cleon, who was an Athenian of the Athenians, perfect in all
the graces of the age, but not to be compared to his rival in anything
that makes a man noble or respectable. We, who read only from a
distance, think that Aglaë's father made a mistake, and that the
honester man would have been the better choice of the two.
It is only when we bring the same circumstances home to ourselves that
we realize the immense importance of the social element; and how, in
this complex life of ours, we are unable to move in a single line
independent of all it touches. Imagine a fine old county family
with a son-in-law who ate peas with his knife, said 'you was' and
'they is,' and came down to dinner in a shooting-jacket and a blue
bird's-eye tied in a wisp about his throat! He might be the possessor
of all imaginable virtues, and, if occasion required, a very hero and
a _preux chevalier_, however rough; but occasions in which a man can
be a hero or a _preux chevalier_ are rare, whereas dinner comes every
day, and the senses are never shut. The core within a conventionally
ungainly envelope may be as sound as is possible to a corrupt
humanity, but social life requires manners as well as principles; and
though eating peas with a knife is not so bad as telling falsehoods,
still we should all agree in saying, Give us truth that does not eat
peas with its knife; let us have honesty in a dress coat and
pureheartedness in a clean shirt, seeing that there is no absolute
necessity why these several things should be disunited.
Love-marriages, made against the will of the parents before the
character is formed and while the obligations of society are still
unrealized, are generally _mésalliances_ founded on passion and fancy
only. A man and woman of mature age who know what they want may make a
_mésalliance_, but it is made with a full understanding and deliberate
choice; and, if the thing turns out badly, they can blame themselves
less for precipitancy than for wrong calculation. The man of fifty who
marries his cook knows what he most values in women. It is not manners
and it is not accomplishments; perhaps it is usefulness, perhaps
good-temper; at all events it is something that the cook has and that
the ladies of his acquaintance have not, and he is content to take the
disadvantages of his choice with its advantages. But the boy who runs
away with his mother's maid neither calculates nor sees any
disadvantages. He marries a pretty girl because her beauty has touched
his senses; or he is got hold of by an artful woman who has bamboozled
and seduced him. It is only when his passion has worn off that he
wakes to the full consequences of his mistake, and understands then
how right his parents were when they cashiered his pretty Jane so soon
as they became aware of what was going on, and sent that artful Sarah
to the right about--just a week too late.
It is the same with girls; but in a far greater extent. If a youth's
_mésalliance_ is a millstone round his neck for life, a girl's is
simply destruction. The natural instinct with all women is to marry
above themselves; and we know on what physiological basis this
instinct stands, and what useful racial ends it serves. And the
natural instinct is as true in its social as in its physiological
expression. A woman's honour is in her husband; her status, her social
life, are determined by his; and even the few women who, having made a
bad marriage, have nerve and character enough to set themselves free
from the personal association, are never able to thoroughly regain
their maiden place. There is always something about them which
clogs and fetters them; always a kind of doubtful and depressing aura
that surrounds and influences them. If they have not strength to free
themselves, they never cease to feel the mistake they have made, until
the old sad process of degeneration is accomplished, and the
'grossness of his nature' has had strength to drag her down. After a
time, if her ladyhood has been of a superficial kind only, a woman who
has married beneath herself may ease down into her groove and be like
the man she has married; if, however, she has sufficient force to
resist outside influences she will not sink, and she will never cease
to suffer. She has sinned against herself, her class and her natural
instincts; and has done substantially a worse thing than has the boy
who married his mother's maid. Society understands this, and not
unjustly if harshly punishes the one while it lets the other go
scot-free; so that the woman who makes a _mésalliance_ suffers on
every side, and destroys her life almost as much as the woman who goes
wrong.
All this is as evident to parents and elders as that the sun shines.
They understand the imperative needs of social life, and they know how
fleeting are the passions of youth and how they fade by time and use
and inharmonious conditions; and they feel that their first duty to
their children is to prevent a _mésalliance_ which has nothing, and
can have nothing, but passion for its basis. But novelists and poets
are against the hard dull dictates of worldly wisdom, and join in
the apotheosis of love at any cost--all for love and the world well
lost; love in a cottage, with nightingales and honeysuckles as the
chief means of paying the rent; Libussa and her ploughman; the
princess and the swineherd, &c. And the fathers who stand out against
the ruin of their girls by means of estimable men of inferior
condition and with not enough to live on, are stony-hearted and cruel,
while the daughters who take to cold poison in the back-garden, if
they cannot compass a secret honeymoon or an open flight, have all the
world's sympathy and none of its censure. The cruel parent is the
favourite whipping-boy of poetry and fiction; and yet which is likely
to be the better guide--reason or passion? experience or ignorance?
calculation or impulse? maturity which can judge or youth which can
only feel? There would be no hesitation in any other case than that of
love; but the love-instinct is generally considered to be superior to
every other consideration, and has to be obeyed as a divine voice, no
matter at what cost or consequence.
The ideal of life, according to some, is founded on early marriages.
But men are slower in the final setting of their character than women,
and one never knows how a young fellow of twenty or so will turn out.
If he is devout now, he may be an infidel at forty; if, under home
influences, he is temperate and pure, when these are withdrawn he may
become a rake of the fastest kind. His temper, morals, business
power, ability to resist temptation, all are as yet inchoate and
undefined; nothing is sure; and the girl's fancy that makes him
perfect in proportion to his good looks, is a mere instinct determined
by chance association.
A girl, too, has more character than she shows in her girlhood. Though
she sets sooner than men, she does not set unalterably, and marriage
and maternity bring out the depths of her nature as nothing else can.
It is only common-sense, then, to marry her to a man whose character
is already somewhat formed, rather than to one who is still fluid and
floating.
It is all very well to talk of fighting the battle of life together,
and welding together by time. Many a man has been ruined by these
metaphors. The theory, partly true and partly pretty, is good enough
in its degree; and, indeed, so far as the welding goes, we weld
together in almost all things by time. We wear our shoe till we wear
it into shape and it ceases to pinch us; but, in the process, we go
through a vast deal of pain, and are liable to make corns which last
long after the shoe itself fits easily. We do not advocate the French
system of marrying off our girls according to our own ideas of
suitableness, and without consulting them; but we not the less think
that, of all fatal social mistakes, _mésalliances_ are the most fatal,
and, in the case of women, to be avoided and prevented at any
cost short of a broken heart or a premature death. And even death
would sometimes be better than the life-long misery, the enduring
shame and humiliation, of certain _mésalliances_.
_WEAK SISTERS._