exactly defined, being one of those uncertain conditions which each
mind must determine for itself. But there is a line, wheresoever we
may choose to set it; and it is just this fine dividing mark which
women are so apt to overrun. For women, as a rule, are nothing if not
extreme. Whether as saints or sinners, they carry a principle to its
outside limits; and of all partizans they are the most thoroughgoing,
whether it be to serve God or the devil, liberty or bigotry, Bible
Communism or Calvinistic Election. Sometimes they are just as extreme
in their absolute negation of force, and in the narrowness of the
limits within which they would confine all human expression either by
word or deed--and especially all expression of feminine life. These
are the women who carry womanly gentleness into the exaggeration of
self-abasement, and make themselves mere footstools for the stronger
creature to kick about at his pleasure; the weak sisters who think all
self-reliance unfeminine, and any originality of thought or character
an offence against the ordained inferiority of their sex. They
are the parasitic plants of the human family, living by and on the
strength of others; growths unable to stand alone, and, when deprived
of their adventitious support, falling to the ground in a ruin perhaps
worse than death.
It is sad to see one of these weak sisters when given up to herself
after she has lived on the strength of another. As a wife, she was
probably a docile, gentle kind of Medora--at least on the outside; for
we must not confound weakness with amiability--suffering many things
because of imperfect servants and unprofitable tradesmen, maybe
because of unruly children and encroaching friends, over none of whom
she had so much moral power as enabled her to hold them in check; but
on the whole drifting through her days peacefully enough, and, though
always in difficulties, never quite aground. She had a tower of
strength in her husband, on whom she leaned for assistance in all she
undertook, whether it were to give a dose of Dalby to the child, or a
scolding to the maid, or to pronounce upon the soundness of two rival
sects each touting for her soul. While he lived she obeyed his
counsel--not always without a futile echo of discontent in her own
heart--and copied his opinions with what amount of accuracy nature had
bestowed on her; though it must be confessed more often making a
travesty than a facsimile, according to the trick of inferior
translators, and not necessarily better pleased with his opinions than
with his counsels. For your weak sister is frequently peevish,
and though unable to originate is not always ready to obey cheerfully;
cheerfulness indeed being for the most part an attribute of power.
Still, there stood her tower of strength, and while it stood, she, the
parasite growing round it, did well enough, and flourished with a
pleasant semblance of individual life into the hollowness of which it
was no one's business to inquire. But when the tower fell, where was
the ivy? The husband taken away, what became of the wife?--he who had
been the life and she only the parasite. Abandoned to the poor
resources of her own judgment she is like one suddenly thrown into
deep water, not knowing how to swim. She has no judgment. She has been
so long accustomed to rely on the mind of another, that her will is
paralyzed for want of use. She is any one's tool, any one's echo, and
worse than that, if left to herself she is any one's victim. All she
wants is to be spared the hardship of self-reliance and to be directed
free of individual exertion. She is utterly helpless--helpless to act,
to direct, to decide; and it depends on the mere chance of
proprietorship whether her slavery shall be degradation or protection,
ruin or safety. For she will be a slave, whosoever may be her
proprietor; being the pabulum of which slaves and victims are
naturally formed. The old age of Medora is Mrs. Borradaile, who, if
her husband had lived, would have probably ended her life in an
honourable captivity and a well-directed subserviency.
We often see this kind of helpless weakness in the daughter of a man
of overbearing will, or of a termagant mother fond of managing and
impatient of opposition. During the plastic time of her life, when
education might perhaps have developed a sufficient amount of mental
muscle, and a course of judicious moulding might have fairly set her
up, she is snubbed and suppressed till all power is crushed out of
her. She is taught the virtue of self-abnegation till she has no self
to abnegate; and the backbone of her individuality is so incessantly
broken that at last there is no backbone left in her to break. She has
become a mere human mollusc which, when it loses its native shell,
drifts helplessly at the mercy of chance currents into the maw of any
stronger creature that may fancy it for his prey. One often sees these
poor things left orphans and friendless at forty or fifty years of
age. They have lived all their lives in leading-strings, and now are
utterly unable to walk alone. They are infants in all knowledge of the
world, of business, of human life; their youth is gone, and with it
such beauty and attractiveness as they might have had, so that men who
liked them when fresh and gentle at twenty do not care to accept their
wrinkled helplessness at forty. They have been kept in and kept down,
and so have made no friends of their own; and then, when the
strong-willed father dies and the termagant mother goes to the place
where the wicked cease from troubling, the mollusc these have hitherto
protected is left defenceless and alone. If she has money, her
chances of escape from the social sharks always on the look-out for
fat morsels are very small indeed. It is well if she falls into no
worse hands than those of legitimate priests of either section,
whether enthusiastic for chasubles or crazy for missions; and if her
money is put to no baser use than supplying church embroidery for some
Brother Ignatius at home, or blankets for converted Africans in the
tropics. It might go into Agapemones, into spiritual Athenæums, into
Bond Street back-parlours, where it certainly would do no good, take
it any way one would; for, as it must go into some side-channel dug by
stronger hands than hers, the question is, into which of the
innumerable conduits offered for the conveyance of superfluous means
shall it be directed?
This is the woman who is sure to go in for religious excess of one
kind or another, and for whom therefore, a convent with a sympathetic
director is a godsend past words to describe. She is unfit for the
life of the world outside. She has neither strength to protect
herself, nor beauty to win the loving protection of men; she cannot be
taken as a precious charge, but she will be made a pitiable victim;
and, though matins and vespers come frightfully often, surely the
narrow safety of a convent-cell is a better fate for her than the
publicity of the witness-box at the Old Bailey! As she must have a
master, her condition depends on what master she has; and the
whole line of her future is ruled according to the fact whether she is
directed or 'exploited,' and used to serve noble ends or base ones.
As a mother, the weak sister is even more unsatisfactory than as a
spinster left to herself with funds which she can manipulate at
pleasure. She is affectionate and devoted; but of what use are
affection and devotion without guiding sense or judgment? Even in the
nursery, and while the little ones need only physical care, she is
more obstructive than helpful, never having so much self-reliance nor
readiness of wit as to dare a remedy for one of those sudden maladies,
incidental to children, which are dangerous just in proportion to the
length of time they are allowed to run unchecked. And if she should by
chance remember anything of therapeutic value, she has no power to
make her children take what they don't like to take, nor do what they
don't like to do. In the horror of an accident she is lost. If her
child were to cut an artery, she would take it up into her lap
tenderly enough, but she would never dream of stopping the flow; if it
swallowed poison, she would send for the doctor who lives ten miles
away; and if it set itself on fire, she would probably rush with it
into the street, for the chance of assistance from a friendly
passer-by. She never has her senses under serviceable command; and her
action in a moment of danger generally consists in unavailing pity or
in obstructive terror, but never in useful service nor in valuable
suggestion.
But if useless in her nursery while her children are young, she is
even more helpless as they get older; and the family of a weak woman
grows up, unassisted by counsel or direction, just as the old Adam
wills and the natural bent inclines. Her girls may be loud and fast,
her sons idle and dissipated, but she is powerless to correct or to
influence. If her husband does not take the reins into his own hands,
or if she be a widow, the young people manage matters for themselves
under the perilous guidance of youthful passions and inexperience. And
nine times out of ten they give her but a rough corner for her own
share. They have no respect for her, and, unless more generously
compassionate than young people usually are, scarcely care to conceal
the contempt they cannot help feeling. What can she expect? If she was
not strong enough to root out the tares while still green and tender,
can she wonder at their luxuriant growth about her feet now? She, like
every one else, must learn the sad meaning of retribution, and how the
weakness which allowed evil to flourish unsubdued has to share in its
consequences and to suffer for its sin.
Unsatisfactory in her home, the weak sister does not do much better in
society. She is there the embodiment of restriction. She can bear
nothing that has any flavour or colour in it. Topics of broad human
interest are forbidden in her presence because they are vulgar,
improper, unfeminine. She takes her stand on her womanhood, and makes
that womanhood to be something apart from humanity in the gross.
There must be no cakes and ale for others if she be virtuous; and
spades are not to be called spades when she is by to hear. She is the
limit beyond which no one must go, under pain of such displeasure as
the weak sister can show. And, weak as she is in many things, she can
compass a certain strength of displeasure; she can condemn,
persistently if not passionately.
Nothing is more curious than the way in which the weak sister
exercises this power of condemnation, and nothing much more wide than
its scope. If incapable of yielding to certain temptations, because
incapable of feeling them, she has no pity for those who have not been
able to resist; yet, on the other hand, she cannot comprehend the
vigour of those who withstand such influences as conquer her. If she
be under the shadow of family protection, safe in the power of those
who know how to hold her in all honour and prosperity, she cannot
forgive the poor weak waif--no weaker than herself!--who has been
caught up in the outside desert of desolation, and made to subserve
evil ends. Yet, on the other hand, for the woman who is able to think
and act for herself she has a kind of superstitious horror; and she
shrinks from one who has made herself notorious, no matter what the
mode or method, as from something tainted, something unnatural and
unwomanly. She has even grave doubts respecting the lawfulness of
doing good if the manner of it gets into the papers and names are
mentioned as well as things; and though the fashion of the day favours
feminine notoriety in all directions, she holds by the instinct of her
temperament, and languidly maintains that woman is the cipher to which
man alone gives distinctive value. Griselda and Medora are the types
to her of womanly perfection; and the only strength she tolerates in
her own sex is the strength of endurance and the power of patience.
She has no doubt in her own mind that the ordained purpose of woman is
to be convenient for the high-handedness and brutality of man; and any
woman who objects to this theory, and demands a better place for
herself, is flying in the face of Providence and forfeiting one of the
distinctive privileges of her sex. For the weak sister thinks, like
some others, that it is better to be destroyed by orthodox means than
to be saved by heterodox ones; and that if good Christians uphold
moral suttee, they are only pagans and barbarians who would put out
the flames and save the victim from the burning. So far she is
respectable, in that she has a distinct theory about something; but it
is wonderfully eloquent of her state that it should only be the theory
of Griseldadom as womanly perfection, and the beauty to be found in
the moral of Cinderella sitting supinely among the ashes, and
forbidden to own even the glass-slipper that belonged to her.
Fortunately for the world, the weak sister and her theories do not
rule. Indeed we are in danger of going too much the other way in
these times, and the revolt of our women against undue slavery goes
very near to a revolt against wise submission. Still, women who are to
be the mothers of men ought to have some kind of power, if the men are
to be worth their place in the world; and if we want creatures with
backbones we must not give our strength to rearing a race of molluscs.
_PINCHING SHOES._
There are two ways of dealing with pinching shoes. The one is to wear
them till you get accustomed to the pressure, and so to wear them
easy; the other is to kick them off and have done with them
altogether. The one is founded on the accommodating principle of human
nature by which it is enabled to fit itself to circumstances, the
other is the high-handed masterfulness whereby the earth is subdued
and obstacles are removed; the one is emblematic of Christian
patience, the other of Pagan power. Both are good in certain states
and neither is absolutely the best for all conditions. There are some
shoes indeed, which, do what we will, we can never wear easy. We may
keep them well fixed on our feet all our life, loyally accepting the
pressure which fate and misfortune have imposed on us; but we go lame
and hobbled in consequence, and never know what it is to make a free
step, nor to walk on our way without discomfort. Examples abound; for
among all the pilgrims toiling more or less painfully through life to
death, there is not one whose shoes do not pinch him somewhere, how
easy soever they may look and how soft soever the material of which
they may be made. Even those proverbial possessors of roomy
shoes, the traditional King and Princess, have their own little
private bedroom slippers which pinch them, undetected by the gaping
multitude who measure happiness by lengths of velvet and weight of
gold embroidery; and the envied owners of the treasure which all seek
and none find might better stand as instances of sorrow than of
happiness--examples of how badly shod poor royalty is, and how, far
more than meaner folk, it suffers from the pinching of its regal
shoes.
The uncongeniality of a profession into which a man may have been
forced by the injudicious overruling of his friends, or by the
exigencies of family position and inherited rights, is one form of the
pinching shoe by no means rare to find. And here, again, poor royalty
comes in for a share of the grip on tender places, and the consequent
hobbling of its feet. For many an hereditary king was meant by nature
to be nothing but a plain country gentleman at the best--perhaps even
less; many, like poor 'Louis Capet,' would have gone to the end quite
happily and respectably if only they might have kicked off the
embroidered shoes of sovereignty and betaken themselves to the
highlows of the herd--if only they might have exchanged the sceptre
for the turning-lathe, the pen or the fowling-piece. 'Je déteste mon
métier de roi,' Victor Emmanuel is reported to have said to a
republican friend who sympathized with the monarch's well-known tastes
in other things beside his hatred of the kingly profession; and
history repeats this frank avowal in every page. But the purple is as
hard to be got rid of as Deianeira's robe; for the most part carrying
the skin along with it and trailed through a pool of blood in the act
of transfer--which is scarcely what royalty, oppressed with its own
greatness, and willing to rid itself of sceptre and shoes that it may
enjoy itself in list-slippers after a more bourgeoise fashion, would
find in accordance with its wishes.
Lower down in the social scale we find the same kind of misfit between
nature and position as a very frequent occurrence--pinching shoes,
productive of innumerable corns and tender places, being many where
the feet represent the temperament and the shoes are the profession.
How often we see a natural 'heavy' securely swathed in cassock and
bands, and set up in the pulpit of the family church, simply because
the tithes were large and the advowson was part of the family
inheritance. But that stiff rectorial shoe of his will never wear
easy. The man's secret soul goes out to the parade-ground and the
mess-table. The glitter and jingle and theatrical display of a
soldier's life seem to him the finest things in the whole round of
professions, and the quiet uneventful life of a village pastor is of
all the most abhorrent. He wants to act, not to teach. Yet there he
is, penned in beyond all power of breaking loose on this side the
grave; bound to drone out muddled sermons half an hour long and
eminently good for sleeping draughts, instead of shouting terse
and stirring words of command which set the blood on fire to hear;
bound to rout the shadowy enemy of souls with weapons he can neither
feel nor use, instead of prancing off at the head of his men, waving
his drawn sword above his head in a whirlwind of excitement and
martial glory, to rout the tangible enemies of his country's flag. He
loves his wife and takes a mild parsonic pleasure in his roses; he
energizes his schools and beats up recruits for his parish penny
readings; he lends his pulpit to missionary delegates and takes the
chair at the meeting for the conversion of Jews; he does his duty,
poor man, so far as he knows how and so far as nature gave him the
power; but his feet are in pinching shoes all his life long, and no
amount of walking on the clerical highway can ever make them pleasant
wearing. Or he may have a passionate love for the sea, and be mewed up
in a lawyer's musty office where his large limbs have not half enough
space for their natural activity; where he is perched for twelve hours
out of the twenty-four on a high stool against a desk instead of
climbing cat-like up the ropes; and where he is set to engross a
longwinded deed of conveyance, or to make a fair copy of a bill of
costs, instead of bearing a hand in a gale and saving his ship by
pluck and quickness. He could save a ship better than he can engross a
deed; while, as for law, he cannot get as much of that into his heavy
brain as would enable him to advise a client on the simplest case of
assault; but he knows all the differences of rig, and the whole
code of signals, and can tell you to a nicety about the flags of all
nations, and the name and position of every spar and stay and sheet,
and when to reef and when to set sail, with any other nautical
information to be had from books and a chance cruise as far as the
Nore. That pen behind his ear never ceases to gall and fret; his shoe
never ceases to pinch; and to the last day of his life the high stool
in the lawyer's office will be a place of penance and the sailor's
quarter-deck the lost heaven of his ambition.
No doubt, by the time the soldier wrongly labelled as a parson or the
sailor painfully working the legal treadmill, comes to the end of his
career, the old shoe which has pinched him so long will be worn
comparatively easy. The gradual decay of manly vigour, and the slow
but sure destruction of strong desires, reduce one's feet at last to
masses of accommodating pulp; but what suffering we go through before
this result can be attained!--what years of fruitless yearning, of
fierce despair, of pathetic self-suppression, of jarring discord
between work and fitness, pound all the life out of us before our
bones become like wax and pinching shoes are transformed to
easy-fitting slippers! For itself alone, not counting the beyond to
which the hope clings, it would scarcely seem that such a life were
worth the living.
Another pinching shoe is to be found in climate and locality. A man
hungering for the busy life of the city has to vegetate in the
rural districts, where the days drop one after the other like leaden
bullets, and time is only marked by an accession of dulness. Another,
thirsting for the repose of the country, has to jostle daily through
Cheapside. To one who thinks Canadian salmon-fishing the supreme of
earthly happiness, fate gives the chance of chasing butterflies in
Brazil; to another who holds 'the common objects of the seashore' of
more account than silver and gold, an adverse fortune assigns a
station in the middle of a plain as arid as if the world had been made
without water; and a third, who cares for nothing but the free
breathing of the open moors or the rugged beauty of the barren fells,
is dropped down into the heart of a narrow valley where he cannot see
the sun for the trees. At first this matter of locality seems to be
but a very small grip on the foot, not worth a second thought; but it
is one of a certain cumulative power impossible to describe, though
keen enough to him who suffers; and the pinching shoe of uncongenial
place is quite as hard to bear as that of uncongenial work.
Again, a man to whom intellectual companionship means more than it
does to many is thrown into a neighbourhood where he cannot hope to
meet with comprehension, still less with sympathy. He is a
Freethinker, and the neighbourhood goes in for the strictest Methodism
or the highest ultra-Ritualism; he is a Radical, and he is in the very
focus of county Toryism, where the doctrine of equality and the
rights of man is just so much seditious blasphemy, while the British
Constitution is held as a direct emanation from divine wisdom second
only to the Bible; or he is a Tory to the backbone--and his backbone
is a pretty stiff one--and he is in the midst of that blatant kind of
Radicalism which thinks gentlehood a remnant of the dark ages, and
confounds good breeding with servility, and loyalty to the Crown with
oppression of the people. Surrounded by his kind, he is as much alone
as if in the middle of a desert. An Englishman among Englishmen, he
has no more mental companionship than if he were in a foreign country
where he and his neighbour spoke different tongues, and each had a set
of signs with not two agreeing. And this kind of solitude makes a
pinching shoe to many minds; though to some of the more self-centred
or defying kind it is bearable enough--perhaps even giving a sense of
roominess which closer communion would destroy.
Of course one of the worst of our pinching shoes is matrimony, when
marriage means bondage and not union. The mismated wife or husband
never leaves off, willingly or unwillingly, squeezing the tender
places; and the more the pressure is objected to the worse the pain
becomes. And nothing can relieve it. A country gentleman, hating the
dust and noise of London, with all his interest in his county position
and all his pleasure in his place, and a wife whose love lies in
Queen's balls and opera-boxes, and to whom the country is simply a
slice out of Siberia wherever it may be; a hearty hospitable man,
liking to see his table well filled, and a wife with a weak digestion,
irritable nerves and a morbid horror of society; a pushing and
ambitious man, with a loud voice and an imposing presence, and a
shrinking fireside woman, who asks only to glide unnoticed through the
crowd and to creep noiselessly from her home to her grave--are not all
these shod with pinching shoes, which, do what they will, go on
pinching to the end, and which nothing short of death or the Sir James
Hannen of the time can remove? The pinching shoe of matrimony pinches
both sides equally--excepting indeed, one of the two is specially
phlegmatic or pachydermatous, and then the grip is harmless; but, as a
rule, the ring-fence of marriage doubles all conditions, and when A.
walks hobbled, B. falls lame, and both suffer from the same misfit.
However, the only thing to do is to bear and wear till the
upper-leather yields or till the foot takes the required shape; but
there is an eternity of pain to be gone through before either of these
desirable ends comes about; and the instinct which dreads pain, and
questions its necessity, is by no means a false one. For all that, we
must wear our pinching shoes of matrimony till death or the Divorce
Court pulls them from our feet; which points to the need of being more
careful than we usually are about the fit beforehand.