includes men as well; and women continually take advantage of their
position to insult the stronger sex by saying to them things which can
be neither answered nor resented. A woman can with the quietest face
and the gentlest voice imaginable insinuate that you have just cheated
at cards; she can give you the lie direct as coolly as if she were
correcting a misprint; and you cannot defend yourself. To brawl with
her would be unpardonable; to contradict her is useless; and the sense
of society does not allow you to show her any active displeasure.
In this instance the weaker creature is the stronger, and the more
defenceless is the safer. You have only the rather questionable
consolation of knowing that you are not singular in your discomfiture,
and that when she has made an end of you she will probably have a turn
with your betters, and make them too, dance to her piping, whether
they like the tune or not. At all events, if she humiliates you she
humiliates her sisters still more; and with the knowledge that, hardly
handled as you have been, others are yet more severely dealt with, you
must learn to be content, and to practise as much of that grim kind of
patience, which suffers keenly and bears silently, as your nature will
permit.
_GRIM FEMALES._
Almost all histories and mythologies embody the idea of a race of grim
females. Whether as fabulous and complex monsters, like the Sphinx and
the Harpies, or in the more human forms of the Fates and the Furies,
unsexed women have been universally recognized as forming part of the
system of nature and to be accepted among the stranger manifestations
of human life. Yet it is hard to understand why they should exist at
all. As moral 'sports,' they are so far interesting to the
psychologists; but, as women with definite duties and fixed functions,
nothing can be less admirable. They are even worse than effeminate
men--which is saying everything.
The grim female must be carefully distinguished from the masculine
woman; for they are by no means essentially the same, though the types
may run into each other, and sometimes do. But the masculine woman, if
not grim but only Amazonian, has often much that is fine and beautiful
in her, as we see in her great prototype Pallas Athene; but the grim
female _pur sang_ is never noble, never beautiful; and the only
meaning of her existence--the only mission she seems sent into the
world to fulfil--is that of serving as a warning to the young what to
avoid.
The grim female is not necessarily an old maid, as would appear likely
at first sight. We find her of all conditions indifferently--as maid,
wife, widow, as mother and childless alike--and we do not find that
her condition in any way affects her character. If born grim, she
remains grim to the end; and neither marriage nor motherhood modifies
her. The grim female of novelists is generally an old maid; but she is
a caricature, painted in the broadest lines and copied from the
outsides of things. She is emphatically an odd woman; odd in her
dress, her mode, her state. She wears a flapping cap, skimpy skirts
and rusty brown mittens on her bony hands. She has a passionate
aversion against men and matrimony; and she lives queerly behind a
barricaded house-door, with a small slavey, or an elderly female
afflicted with deafness, to do her work and bear the brunt of her
temper. But she is always odd, unmarried, unfashionable and unlike
everybody else, and could never be mistaken for an ordinary woman from
the first phrase which stamps her personality on the page to the last
paragraph of her fictitious existence.
Now the grim female of real life may be one of the most conventional
of her sex, and in fact, she generally is one of the most conventional
of her sex. She is one who rules her household with a rod of iron
carefully wrought after the pattern of her neighbours' rods, and to
whom a dish set awry, or the second-best china instead of the best,
counts for as great a moral delinquency in her servants as a breach of
all the Ten Commandments together. She is a woman who regards being
out of the fashion, or being foremost in the fashion, as equally
reprehensible, and to whom dress is among the most important matters
of life. Wherefore she is notorious for a certain grim grandeur of
style, as one who respects herself by her clothes, and is known among
other women as possessing handsome lace and costly velvet in
profusion. Are not lace and velvet _de rigueur_ for women of
condition? and what is the grim female but the embodiment of the
'rigour of the game' in all matters? Therefore she clothes herself
sumptuously, without elegance or taste; and would as soon be seen
abroad in her dressing-gown and slippers as without her characteristic
heavy velvet or rustling silk. But the artist's little wife, in her
fresh muslin and nice admixture of colours, sails round her for grace
and beauty at about one-twentieth part of what the grim female's
stately ugliness has cost.
One characteristic of the grim female is her want of womanly passion
for children. She may have so much maternal instinct, perverted, as to
be on friendly terms with a dog or two, a cat, or may be a cockatoo;
but she has no real affection for children, no comprehension of
child-nature, and the 'sublime nonsense' of the nursery is a thing
unknown to her from first to last. If she have children of her
own, she treats them in a hard wooden way that has nothing of the
ideal mother about it. She generally sees that they are properly cared
for, because she is a disciplinarian; but, though she is inexorable on
the score of cold baths and 'no trash,' she never condescends to the
weakness of love. If her little ones are sick, they are set aside and
dosed until they are well; if they are naughty, they are punished; but
they never know those moments of tender indulgence which help them
over a period of indisposition not severe enough for actual doctoring,
yet throwing them out of gear and inducing a spell of what ignorance
calls naughtiness. Rhadamanthus was a weakling compared to the grim
female in the nursery; and what she is in her nursery she continues to
be in the schoolroom, and the drawing-room to follow. Her children are
always causes of annoyance to the grim female, and the first stirrings
of individuality, the first half-unconscious trials of their young
strength, are offences she cannot away with. Children and inferiors
are they in her eyes, even when grown up and married; and she exacts
from them the humility and deference of their lower condition. Hence
she is one to whom the present generation is undeniably worse than the
past; one who groans over the follies and shortcomings of the times
and who thinks that good conduct died out with her own youth, and that
it is not likely, by the look of things, to be restored. In fact,
youth itself is the root and basis of offence; and if she coerces
children, she tyrannizes over girls and snubs young men, with
inexorable impartiality.
The grim female is not necessarily a strong-minded woman, nor a
learned woman, like those who wear spectacles, go to scientific
meetings and are great in the classics and the 'ologies. She may be of
the emancipated class; it all depends on chance; and a grim female,
when of the emancipated, is a very formidable person indeed. But she
is not necessarily one of these. On the contrary, part of her very
grimness comes from her intense conservatism and uncompromising
conventionality. Nothing is so abhorrent to her as innovation or
novelty in any shape. She does not hold with any one out of the
narrowest groove of respectable belief, in what direction soever the
diverging line may go. A Romanist or a Baptist, a Jew or an infidel,
it is all one to her; each is equally dreadful to her, and each is
eternally foredoomed. She is of the orthodox Church without fal-lals;
as far removed from Ritualism as she is from ranting, and demanding
for herself that infallibity of judgment and absolute possession of
the truth which she denies to the Pope and all his Cardinals. Beware
how you broach new doctrines in her presence. She has been known
before now to abjure her nearest relations for no greater moral lapse
than a weak belief in globules; while, as for anything like graver
aberrations, say on the ape theory or on the plurality of races, on
development in religions or on a republican form of government,
she has no toleration whatever. If the Smithfield fires existed at the
present day, the grim female would be the first to light the faggots.
It is all the same if she belongs to any Dissenting persuasion; part
of her grimness coming from her intolerance, and her own beliefs being
simply the springboard on which she stands.
Many causes produce the grim female. It may be that she is grim from
social pride as well as from natural hardness. If she has been used to
live with people whom, rightly or wrongly, she considers her
inferiors, she will probably queen it over them in a very
unmistakeable manner. The prelatic blood is renowned for this sort of
thing; and a bishop's daughter, or an archbishop's grand-daughter, or
Mrs. Proudie, prelatic by marriage only, if of the grim class, is one
of the grimmest of her class. The halo of sanctity round the mitre and
the crozier will be greater in her eyes than even the glitter of the
strawberry leaves; and she holds herself consecrated by her birth or
marriage to the understanding of every moral question, and specially
to the final settlement of every tough theological position. Or she
may be grim because of her isolation and meagre intercourse with the
world at large; such as she is found in the remoter districts. This
kind comes into the exceptional or novelist's class, and is often more
masculine than grim. These are the women who hunt and fish and shoot
like men, and who may be found in all weathers wandering alone
about the mountains in short petticoats and spatterdashes--women who
affect to be essentially mannish in person, habits and attire, and who
may be quite jolly easy-going fellows in their own way, or else grim
and trenchant, as nature or the fit takes them. This is a kind not at
all uncommon in country places among the higher class of resident
ladies--ladies who are so highly placed locally that they can afford
to disregard public opinion, and who are so independent by disposition
that they naturally go off to the manly side, and make themselves bad
imitations, as the best they can do.
The grim female tries her strength with all newcomers. She is like one
of the giants or black knights of old romance, who lived in castles or
caves, whence they pounced on all passers-by, and either wrung their
necks if they conquered or retreated howling if discomfited. This is
what the grim female does in her degree. She dashes on all who are
presented to her, and has a passage of arms as the first act of the
new drama. If her opponents yield out of timidity or good-breeding, or
perhaps from not understanding the warlike nature of the encounter,
she puts her foot on them forthwith, and ignominiously crushes them;
if they defy her, and give her back blow for blow, ten to one she cuts
them and becomes their enemy for ever after. For she has not breadth
enough to be magnanimous, and the one thing she never forgives is
successful opposition. Very grim is she in the presence of human
weakness, moral and physical. Woe to that unhappy maid of hers
who has slipped on the narrow path of prudence! She will be turned out
to perish with no more compunction than if she were a black-beetle to
be swept out of the way.
As a nurse the grim female is precise, punctual, obedient to orders,
but inexorable. She would give the patient a fit of nervous hysterics
which would throw him back for a week, rather than allow him five
minutes' grace in the matter of a painful operation or a nauseous
draught. Without variableness or weakness herself, she cannot endure
it in others, and whosoever comes under her hand must be content to
remain in shape, and to keep himself well braced up to the utmost
rigidity of duty. If she had to lose an arm or a leg, she would go to
her trouble like a Trojan; and why not others? She would merely
tighten her lips and hold her breath, and then would sit down to let
herself be hacked and mangled without a groan or a word. To judge by
the notice given of her in her sister's life, Emily Brontë was of the
grim class, and about the grimmest for her age and state that could
well be found. Had she lived, and lived unsoftened, she would have
been one unbroken mass of iron and granite, without a soft spot
anywhere. Her very love was fiercer than other women's hate; her
strength was more terrible than a man's anger; her passions were as
fiery as furnace flames. Of all the examples we could cite, she seems
about the fittest for our model.
A grim female has no mercy. She may be just, but if so, it is in a
hard uncompromizing way that makes her justice worse than others'
partiality. For justice can be sympathetic, even if unwavering; and
the grim female is never sympathetic, how painful soever the work on
hand and the sentence to be executed. Neither is she gay; for she is
not plastic enough to be either one or the other. She is run into an
iron mould, where her nature is compressed as in a vice; and she
allows of no expansion, no lipping over, no bursting of bonds anyhow.
What would become of us if all our women were like her? Without any of
the feminine little weaknesses at which we have our laugh yet which we
do not wholly dislike--without any of the pretty coaxing ways which we
know warp our better judgment and take us out of the strict course;
and yet how pleasant that warping process is!--without any even of the
transient petulances which give so much light and shade to a woman's
character, the grim female stands like an old-world Gorgon, turning
living flesh and blood to stone. When we look at her we are inclined
to forgive all the smallness and silliness which sometimes vex us in
the ordinary woman, and to think that there are worse things than the
love of dress for which we so often reproach our wives and daughters;
that flirting, which is reprehensible no doubt, might be exchanged for
something even more reprehensible; and that vanity, of the giggling,
coquettish kind, though to be steadily discouraged and sternly
reproved, is not quite the worst feminine thing after all. Surely not!
A grim female who cannot flirt nor giggle nor cry, nor yet kiss and
make up again when scolded, is far away a worse kind of thing than a
feather-headed little puss who is always doing wrong by reason of her
foolish brain, but who manages somehow to pull herself right because
of her loving heart. Weak women, vain women, affected women, and the
whole class of silly women, whatever the speciality of silliness
exhibited, are tiresome enough, heaven knows; but, unsatisfactory as
they are, they are better than the grim female--that woman of no sex,
born without softness or sympathy and living without pity and without
love.
_MATURE SIRENS._
Nothing is more incomprehensible to girls than the love and admiration
sometimes given to middle-aged women. They cannot understand it; and
nothing but experience will ever make them understand it. In their
eyes, a woman is out of the pale of personal affection altogether when
she has once lost that shining gloss of youth, that exquisite
freshness of skin and suppleness of limb, which to them, in the
insolent plenitude of their unfaded beauty, constitute the chief
claims to admiration of the one sex from the other. And yet they
cannot conceal from themselves that the pretty maid of eighteen is
often deserted for the handsome woman of forty, and that the patent
witchery of their own youth and brilliant colouring goes for nothing
against the mysterious charms of a mature siren. What can they say to
such an anomaly? There is no good in going about the world
disdainfully wondering how on earth a man could ever have taken up
with such an antiquated creature!--suggestively asking their male
friends what could he see in a woman of her age, old enough to be his
mother? There the fact stands; and facts are stubborn things. The
eligible suitor who has been coveted by more than one golden-haired
girl has married a woman twenty years her senior, and the middle-aged
siren has quietly carried off the prize which nymphs in their teens
have frantically desired to win. What is the secret? How is it done?
The world, even of silly girls, has got past any belief in spells and
talismans, such as Charlemagne's mistress wore, and yet the man's
fascination seems to them quite as miraculous and almost as unholy as
if it had been brought about by the black art. But if they had any
analytical power they would understand the _diablerie_ of the mature
siren clearly enough; for it is not so difficult to understand when
one puts one's mind to it.
In the first place, a woman of ripe age has a knowledge of the world,
and a certain suavity of manner and moral flexibility, wholly wanting
to the young. Young girls are for the most part all angles--harsh in
their judgments, stiff in their prejudices, narrow in their
sympathies. They are full of combativeness and self-assertion if they
belong to one type of young people, or they are stupid and shy if they
belong to another type. They are talkative with nothing to say, and
positive with nothing known; or they are monosyllabic dummies who
stammer out Yes or No at random, and whose brains become hopelessly
confused at the first sentence with which the stranger, to whom they
have just been introduced, attempts to open a conversation. They are
generally without pity; their want of experience making them hard
towards sorrows which they do not understand--let us charitably hope
also making them ignorant of the pain they inflict. That famous
article in the _Times_ on the cruelty of young girls, _àpropos_ of
Constance Kent's confession, though absurdly exaggerated, had in it
the core of truth which gives the sting to such papers, which makes
them stick, and which is the real cause of the outcry they create.
Girls are cruel; there is no question about it. If passive rather than
active, they are simply indifferent to the sufferings of others; if of
a more active temperament, they find a positive pleasure in giving
pain. A girl will say horribly cruel things to her dearest friend,
then laugh at her because she cries. Even her own mother she will hurt
and humiliate if she can; while, as for any unfortunate aspirant not
approved of, were he as tough-skinned as a rhinoceros she would find
means to make him wince. But all this acerbity is toned down in the
mature woman. Experience has enlarged her sympathies, and knowledge of
suffering has softened her heart to the sufferings of others. Her
lessons of life too, have taught her tact; and tact is one of the most
valuable lessons that a man or woman can learn. She sees at a glance
the weak points and sore places in her companion, and she avoids them;
or if she passes over them, it is with a hand so soft and tender, a
touch so soothing, that she calms instead of irritating. A girl would
have come down on those weak places heavily, and would have torn
off the bandages from the sore ones, jesting at scars because she
herself had never felt a wound, and deriding the sybaritism of
diachylon because ignorant of the anguish it conceals.
Furthermore, the mature siren is thoughtful for others. Girls are
self-asserting and aggressive. Life is so strong in them, and the
instinct which prompts them to try their strength with all comers and
to get the best of everything everywhere, is so irrepressible, that
they are often disagreeable because of that instinctive selfishness,
that craving, natural to the young, of taking all and giving back
nothing. But the mature siren knows better than this. She knows that
social success entirely depends on what each of us can throw into the
common fund of society; that the surest way to win consideration for
ourselves is to be considerate for others; that sympathy begets
liking, and self-suppression leads to exaltation; and that if we want
to gain love we must first show how well we can give it. Her tact
then, and her sympathy, her moral flexibility and quick comprehension
of character, her readiness to give herself to others, are some of the
reasons, among others, why the society of a cultivated agreeable woman
of a certain age is sought by those men to whom women are more than
mere mistresses or toys. Besides, she is a good conversationalist. She
has no pretensions to any special or deep learning--for, if pedantic,
she is spoilt as a siren at any age--but she knows a little about most
things; at all events, she knows enough to make her a pleasant
companion in a _tête-à-tête_ or at a dinner-table, and to enable her
to keep up the ball when thrown. And men like to talk to intelligent
women. They do not like to be taught nor corrected by them, but they
like that quick sympathetic intellect which follows them readily, and
that amount of knowledge which makes a comfortable cushion for their
own. And a mature siren who knows what she is about would never do
more than this, even if she could.
Though the mature siren rests her claims to admiration on more than
mere personal charms, and appeals to something beyond the senses, yet
she is personable and well preserved, and, in a favourable light,
looks nearly as young as ever. So the men say who knew her when she
was twenty; who loved her then, and have gone on loving her, with a
difference, despite the twenty years which lie between this and then.
Girls, indeed, despise her charms because she is no longer young; and
yet she may be even more beautiful than youth. She knows all the
little niceties of dress, and, without going into the vulgar trickery
of paint and dyes--which would make her hideous--is up to the best
arts of the toilet by which every point is made to tell and every
minor beauty is given its fullest value. For part of the art and
mystery of sirenhood is an accurate perception of times and
conditions, and a careful avoidance of that suicidal mistake of which
_la femme passée_ is so often guilty--namely, setting herself in
confessed rivalry with the young by trying to look like them, and
so losing the good of what she has retained, and betraying the ravages
of time by the contrast.
The mature siren is wiser than this. She knows exactly what she has
and what she can do; and before all things avoids whatever seems too
youthful for her years; and this is one reason why she is always
beautiful, because always in harmony. Besides, she has very many good
points, many positive charms still left. Her figure is still good--not
slim and slender certainly, but round and soft, and with that slower,
riper, lazier grace which, quite different from the antelope-like
elasticity of youth, is in its own way as lovely. If her hair has lost
its maiden luxuriance she makes up with crafty arrangements of lace,
which are more picturesque than the fashionable wisp of hay-like ends
tumbling half-way to the waist. She has still her white and shapely
hands with their pink filbert-like nails; still her pleasant smile and
square small teeth--those one or two new, matching so perfectly with
the old as to be undiscoverable! Her eyes are bright yet, and if the
upper muscles are a little shrunk, the consequent apparent enlargement
of the orbit only makes them more expressive; her lips are not yet
withered; her skin is not wrinkled. Undeniably, when well-dressed and
in a favourable light, the mature siren is as beautiful in her own way
as the girlish belle; and the world knows it and acknowledges it.
That mature sirens can be passionately loved, even when very
mature, history gives us more than one example; and the first name
that naturally occurs to one's mind is that of the too famous Ninon de
l'Enclos. And Ninon, if a trifle mythical, was yet a fact and an
example. But not going quite to Ninon's age, we often see women of
forty and upwards who are personally charming, and whom men love with
as much warmth and tenderness as if they were in the heyday of
life--women who count their admirers by dozens, and who end by making
a superb marriage, and having quite an Indian summer of romance and
happiness. The young laugh at this idea of the Indian summer for a
bride of forty-five; but it is true; for neither romance nor
happiness, neither love nor mental youth, is a matter of years; and
after all we are only as old as we feel, and certainly no older than
we look.