merely ripen and mellow and get enriched by the passage of the years,
retaining the most delicate womanliness--we had almost said
girlishness into quite old age, blushing as swiftly under their grey
hairs, while shrinking from anything coarse or vulgar or impure as
sensitively, as when they were girls. _La femme à quarante ans_ is the
French term for the opening of the great gulf beyond which love cannot
pass; but human history disproves this date, and shows that the heart
can remain fresh and the person lovely long after the age fixed for
the final adieu to admiration--that the mature siren can be adored
by her own contemporaries when the rising generation regard her
as nothing better than a chimney-corner fixture. Mr. Trollope
recognized the claims of the mature siren in his _Orley Farm_ and
_Miss Mackenzie_; and no one can deny the intense naturalness of the
characters and the interest of the stories.
Another point which tells with the mature woman is, that she is not
jealous nor exacting. She knows the world, and takes what comes with
that philosophy which springs from knowledge. If she be of an enjoying
nature--and she cannot be a siren else--she accepts such good as
floats to the top, neither looking too deep into the cup nor
speculating on the time when she shall have drained it to the dregs.
Men feel safe with her. If they have entered on a tender friendship
with her, they know that there will be no scene, no tears, no
upbraidings, when an inexorable fate comes in to end their pleasant
little drama, with the inevitable wife as the scene-shifter. The
mature siren knows so well that fate and the wife must break in
between her and her friend, that she is resigned from the first to
what is foredoomed, and thus accepts her bitter portion, when it
comes, with dignity and in silence. Where younger women would fall
into hysterics and make a scene, perhaps go about the world taking
their revenge in slander, the middle-aged woman holds out a friendly
hand and takes the back seat gallantly, never showing by word nor look
that she has felt her deposition. She becomes the best friend of the
new household; and if any one is jealous, ten to one it is the
husband who is jealous of her love for his wife. Of course it may be
the wife herself, who cannot see what her husband can find to admire
so much in Mrs. A., and who pouts at his extraordinary predilection for
her, though of course she would scorn to be jealous--as, indeed, she
has no cause. For even a mature siren, however delightful she may be,
is not likely to come before a young wife in the heart of a young
husband. Though the French paint the love of a woman of forty as
pathetic, because slightly ridiculous and certainly hopeless, yet they
arrange their theory of social life so that a youth is generally
supposed to make his first love of a married woman many years his
elder, while a mature siren finds her last love in a youth.
We have not come to this yet in England, either in theory or practice;
and it is to be hoped that we never shall come to it. Mature sirens
are all very well for men of their own age, and it is pleasant to see
them still loved and admired, and to recognize in them the claims of
women to something higher than mere personal passion; but the case
would be very different if they became ghoulish seducers of the young,
and kept up the habit of love by entangling boyish hearts and
blighting youthful lives. As they are now, they form a charming
element in society, and are of infinite use to the world. They are the
ripe fruit in the garden where else everything would be green and
immature--the last days of the golden summer set against the
disappointing backwardness of spring and before the chills of
autumn have come. They contain in themselves the advantages of two
distinct epochs, and while possessing as much personal charm as youth,
possess also the gains which come by experience and maturity. They
keep things together as the young could not do; and no gathering of
friends is perfect which has not one or two mature sirens to give the
tone, and prevent excesses. They soften the asperities of high-handed
boys and girls, which else would be too biting; and they set people at
ease, and make them in good humour with themselves, by the courtesy
with which they listen to them and the patience with which they bear
with them. Even the very girls who hate them fiercely as rivals love
them passing well as half maternal, half sisterly, companions; and the
first person to whom they would carry their sorrows would be a mature
siren, quite capable for her own part of having caused them.
It would be hard indeed if the loss of youth did not bring with it
some compensations; but the mature siren suffers less from that loss
than any other kind of woman. Indeed, she seems to have a private
elixir of her own which is not quite drained dry when she dies,
beloved and regretted, at threescore years and ten; leaving behind her
one or two old friends who were once her ardent lovers, and who still
cherish her memory as that of the finest and most fascinating woman
they ever knew--something which the present generation is utterly
incapable of repeating.
_PUMPKINS._
Pumpkins are among the most imposing of all groundling growths. They
have fine showy flowers, handsome leaves, roving stems, and they bear
solid-looking fruit of a goodly size and gorgeous colour. To see them
spreading over their domain with such rapid luxuriance, one would
imagine them among the best things growing; but a critical examination
proves their flesh to be about three parts water, while as for their
stalks, they are of so pithless a nature that they can only creep
along the earth, unable to stand upright without support;--which tells
something against the pumpkin's claim for extra consideration. Still,
their showy largeness attracts the eye, and not a few of us believe in
pumpkins, and admire both their mode of growth and the fruit
resulting. In like manner the human pumpkins--those beings of imposing
presence and loud self-assertion--get themselves believed in by the
simple; and, as occasions by which their watery and fibreless nature
is revealed do not arise every day, they are for the most part
accepted for the substantialities they assume to be, and the world is
deceived by appearances as it ever has been.
These human pumpkins abound everywhere. In all states and professions,
and in both sexes, we find them flourishing magnificently on the face
of the earth, taking the lead in their society and setting themselves
out as the finest fellows to be found in their respective gardens.
Among them are the men of the Bombastes type, so dear to the older
playwrights; braggadocios of the kill 'em and eat 'em school, who were
such terrible fellows to look at and listen to, though only pumpkins
of a singularly innocuous nature when stoutly squeezed and analyzed;
fire-eaters of the juggling kind, with special care taken that the
fire shall be harmless and that the danger shall lie only in the fear
of the spectators. Now that duelling has gone out of fashion, and
discharged captains who have signalized themselves in war are rare,
our old swashbuckler type of pumpkins has gone out both in fact and
fiction, on the stage and off it. To be sure we have a few travellers
of slightly apocryphal courage, and more than doubtful accuracy, whose
books of perilous adventure and breathless dangers are to us what
Bombastes and Bobadil were to our fathers; and we have Major
Wellington de Boots with his military swagger and his hare's heart.
But he is a very weak imitation of the old fire-eater; and, on the
whole, this special family of the pumpkins has dwindled into
insignificance, and their place knows them no more.
Then there is the pumpkin after the cut of the Prince Regent--the man
of deportment, big, handsome, showy, and specially noticeable for
a loud voice, a broad chest, and an indescribable air of superiority
and command; the man who has studied bowing as one of the fine arts,
who walks with a swagger, and even now tips his curly-brimmed hat
slightly to the side. This is the kind of man who influences women.
Bombastes frightens the nervous and inexperienced of his own sex, but
the man of deportment partly fascinates and partly overawes the other.
They take him at his own valuation, and have not skill enough to find
out the flaw in the summing up until perhaps it is too late, when they
have come so near to him that they are able to appraise him for
themselves, and have learnt by bitter experience of what unsound
materials he is made. And then let him look out. There is nothing
women resent so much as pumpkin manhood--nothing which humiliates them
more in their own esteem than to discover that they have been taken in
by appearances, and that what they had believed in as solid wood turns
out to be only squash.
Women like to rely on men, and dread nothing so much as weakness and
vacillation in their male protectors; save indeed those grim and bulky
females in whom Hood so much delighted, who take small men _vi et
armis_, and subjugate them body and soul, like two-legged poodles
trained to fetch and carry at the word of command. But these are
exceptions; the average woman prizing strength rather than poodle-like
docility. The pumpkin of the Prince Regent cut is generally
notorious for laying down the law on all points. His voice is so loud
and his manner of speech so dictatorial, that no one dreams of
doubting still less of contradicting him, but everybody takes him as
he represents himself to be--a man of prompt decision, of boundless
resources, a granitic tower of strength to be leant against in all
emergencies without the slightest fear of failure; a man who is not
only sufficient for himself but strong enough to bear the weaknesses
of others. He is famous for giving advice--advice of a vague, rapid,
sprawling kind, never quite exact to the circumstances, never quite
practical nor to the point--large advice, general in scope but
wonderfully positive in tone, and, until you analyze, grandly imposing
in effect. Nail him to the point; ask his advice seriously on any
question where the responsibility of counsel will rest with him; place
yourself in his hands where the consequences of failure will touch him
as well as you; and then see to what meagre dimensions your goodly
gourd will shrink. The confident assertion drops into a weak
hesitation; the arrogant dictum melts into a timid refusal to take
such a serious responsibility on himself; you have pricked your
windbag, bisected your pumpkin, and henceforth you know the precise
weight of substance remaining. Yet mankind sees him exactly where he
was before, and he will go about the world in his large, loud way,
saying to every one that if you had followed his advice you would have
succeeded--supposing you have failed; or, if you have succeeded,
he will take all the credit to himself, and say it was he who guided
you and showed you how to go in and win. For himself, and his own
affairs, he has no more moral stamina than he had leadership for you
and yours. The least reverse knocks him over. Care or sorrow, when it
touches him, shrivels him up as completely as frost shrivels up the
pumpkin. In every circumstance requiring promptitude, coolness, keen
perception, just decision, our swaggering man of froth fails
ignominiously; and one hour of real pressure proves incontestably that
he was only a pumpkin of imposing presence, good neither as meat nor
staff when the time of trial came.
Very often the pumpkin has a wife whose fibre is as close as his is
loose, and whose nature is as tough as his is soft; a hard-eyed,
thin-lipped, tenacious woman, who speaks little and boasts not at all,
but who does all she wishes to do, and whose iron will pins her
pumpkin to the wall as the spear of the Bushman pins the elephant or
the rhinoceros. It is very curious to see how a blatant blustering man
who is so loud and confident abroad, knocks under at home; and how the
high-crested deportment which carries things with such a lofty bearing
out of doors droops into the meek submission of the henpecked husband
so soon as the house-door closes on him, and he is subjected to the
pitiless analysis of home. There is no question of flourish then; and
if by chance the ambitious crest should make an effort to display
itself, the wife knows how to lower it by a few decisive words of a
keen-edged kind, and her pumpkin is made to feel sharply enough the
difference existing between fibre and pulp. It is almost melancholy to
see one of these fine flourishing fellows so subdued. Pumpkin as he
may be, it is not pleasant to see him so cut down in his pride; and
involuntarily one's sympathies go with him rather than with that
tenacious, hard-mouthed wife of his, who would be none the worse
perhaps for a little of her husband's essential softness and with less
than her own hardness.
How often too, these big fellows have no physical stamina as well as
but very shaky moral fibre! A small, wiry light-weight will do twice
as much as they; not, of course, where muscle only is wanted, but
where the question is of endurance. Large heavy men knock up far
sooner than the light-weights; and though size and weight count for
something at certain times and on occasions, fibre and tenacity go for
more in the long run. In the Crimea, the men who first dropped off
from exposure and privation were the magnificently-built
Guardsmen--men apparently bred and fed to the highest point of
physical perfection; while the undersized little liners, who had
nothing to be admired in them, stood the strain gamely, and were brisk
and serviceable when the others were either dead or in hospital. So
far as we have gone yet, we have not solved the problem of how to
combine toughness and bigness, solidity and size, but for the
most part fail in the one in proportion as we succeed in the other.
Many of the dark-skinned races are what we may call emotional
pumpkins. Their flashing black eyes and swarthy skins seem to be
instinct with passion; they look like living furnaces filled with
flames and molten metal, terrible fellows, dangerous to meddle with
and almost impossible to subdue. But nine times out of ten we find
them to be marvellously meek persons, timid, amenable to law, unable
to give offence and incapable of taking it--lambs masquerading in
tiger-skins. A fair-faced Anglo-Saxon, with his sensitive blush,
good-humoured smile and light blue eyes, has more pluck and pith in
him than a whole brigade of certain of these dark-skinned men. He has
less ferocity perhaps than they when they are thoroughly roused,
though our good-humoured Anglo-Saxon is by no means destitute of
ferocity on occasions when his blood is up; but his is ferocity of the
quarter-staff and bludgeon stand-up fight kind--the ferocity of
strength fairly put out against an adversary, not the tigerish cruelty
which is almost always found when moral weakness and physical
submission have a momentary triumph and reaction. Cowardly men are
like women in their revenge when once they get the upper hand; and
their revenge is more cruel than that of the habitually brave man who,
after a fair fight, overthrows his opponent. Some of the dark-skinned
races look the very ideal of the melodramatic ruffian--operatic
brigands painted with broad black lines, and up to any amount of
deeds of daring and of crime; but they are only pumpkins at the core.
We need not go so far as Calcutta to find them; we get examples nearer
home, both in Houndsditch and in Rome; for both Jews and Italians are
soft-cored men in spite of their passionate outsides, and both would
be better for an extra twist and toughness in their fibres.
Intellectual pumpkins are as common as those of the more specially
physical kind. You meet with philosophers and 'thinkers'--perhaps they
are poets, perhaps politicians--who flourish out a vague big
declamation which, when you reduce it to its essence, you find to be a
platitude worth nothing; whipped cream, without any foundation of
solid pudding. If they are of the philosophic sort, they quote you
Fichte and Hegel, to the bewilderment of your brains unless you have
gone into the metaphysical maze on your own account; but they might
have put all they have said into half a dozen words of three letters,
like a child's first reading lesson. The flourish imposes, and people
who cannot analyze take the whipped cream for solid pudding, and think
that platitudes dressed in the garb of Fichte and Hegel are utterances
worthy of deep respect and admiring wonder.
All the professions which talk, either by word of mouth or in print,
are specially given to this manifestation of pumpkinhood. Preachers
and authors sprawl and flourish over their small inheritance with a
tremendous assumption of vital force and vigorous growth; and
weak hands, with weaker heads, find support and shelter in their
foliage. Poets too, with a knack for turning out large moulds in which
they have run very small ideas, are pumpkins dear to the feminine
mind. Have we not our Tupper? had we not our 'Satan' Montgomery? and a
few others whom we might catalogue if we cared for the task, each with
his multifarious female following and his spiritual harem of ardent
admirers? All artists--that is, the men who create, or rather who
assume to create--are liable to be proved pumpkins when called on to
show themselves solid wood. They talk grandly enough, but when they
have to translate their words into deeds, too often the noble aims and
immortal efforts they have been advocating tail off into pulp and
water, and we have botches and pot-boilers instead of masterpieces and
high art. Perhaps we may take it as a rule that all doers who talk
much and boast grandly are of the pumpkin order, and that art, like
nature, elaborates best in silence.
Strong-visaged women are often pure pumpkins with a very rough and
corrugated outside. It is astonishing how soon they break down, and
for all their stern and powerful looks sink under burdens under which
a frail little creature, as light as thistledown, will glide along
quite easily. Women with black brows and harsh voices--brigandesses by
appearance, or like the typical Herodias of unimaginative artists--are
often the gentlest and most pithless of their sex, and may be seen
acting quite compassionately towards their infants, or vindicating
their womanhood by meekly sewing on their husbands' buttons and
weeping at their rebukes; while a fair, silver-tongued, languid lady,
as soft as if she were made of nothing harder than the traditional
cream and rose-leaves, will give up her babies as a prey to unfeeling
nurses and let her husband go buttonless and in rags, while she
lounges before the fire indifferent to his wrath and callous to his
wrongs. There is many a house mistress who looks as if she could use
her fists when annoyed, who is absolutely afraid of her servants; and
the maid is always the mistress when the one is fibre and the other
pulp.
Heaven be praised that the strong-visaged women are not 'clear grit'
all through. If they were as hard as they look, the world would go but
queerly, and society would have to make new laws for the protection of
its weaker male members. But nature is merciful as well as sportive,
and while she amuses herself by creating pumpkins of formidable
aspect, takes care that the core shall not always correspond to the
rind. Like the Athenian images of the satyr which enclosed a god, the
black-browed brigandesses and the men of magnificent deportment are
sometimes impostors of a quite amiable kind; and when you have once
learnt by heart the false analogies of form, you will cease to fear
your typical Herodias, to be impressed by your copy of the Prince
Regent, or to be influenced by your wordy Hegelian talking platitudes
in the philosophic dialect.
_WIDOWS._
There are widows and widows; there are those who are bereaved and
those who are released; those who lose their support and those whose
chains are broken; those who are sunk in desolation and those who wake
up into freedom. Of the first we will not speak. Theirs is a sorrow
too sacred to be publicly handled even with sympathy; but the second
demand no such respectful reticence. The widow who is no sooner
released from one husband than she plots for another, and the widow
who leaps into liberty over the grave of a gaoler, not a lover, are
fair game enough. They have always been favourite subjects whereon
authors may exercise their wits; and while men are what they
are--laughing animals apt to see the humour lying in incongruity, and
with a spice of the devil to sharpen that same laughter into
satire--they will remain favourite subjects, tragic as the state is
when widowhood is deeper than mere outward condition.
There are many varieties of the widow and all are not beautiful. For
one, there is the widow who is bent on re-marrying whether men like it
or not; that thing of prey who goes about the world seeking whom
she may devour; that awful creature who bears down on her victims with
a vigour in her assaults which puts to flight the popular fancy about
the weaker sex and the natural distribution of power. No hawk poised
over a brood of hedge birds, no shark cruising steadily towards a
shoal of small fry, no piratical craft sailing under a free flag and
accountable to no law save success, was ever more formidable to the
weaker things pursued than is the hawk widow to men when she is bent
on re-marrying. She knows so much!--there is not a manoeuvre by which
a victory can be stolen that she has not mastered and she is not
afraid of even the most desperate measures. When she has once struck,
he would be a clever man and a strong one who should escape her.
Generally left but meagrely provided for in worldly goods--else her
game would not be difficult--she makes up for her financial poverty by
her wealth of bold resources, and by the courage with which she takes
her own fortunes in hand and, with her own, those of her more eligible
masculine associates. She is a woman of purpose and lives for an end;
and that end is remarriage, with the most favourable settlement that
can be obtained by her lawyer from his. If fate has dealt hardly by
her--though, may be, compassionately by her successive spouses--and
has landed her in the widowed state twice or thrice, she is in nowise
daunted and as little abashed. She merely refits after a certain time
of anchorage, and goes out into the open again for a repetition
of her chance. She has no notion of a perpetuity of weeds, and, though
she may have cleared her half century with a margin besides, thinks
the suggestive orange-blossoms of the bride infinitely more desirable
than the fruitless heliotrope of the widow. If one husband is taken,
she remembers the old proverb, and reflects on the many, quite as
good, who are left potentially subject to her choice. And somehow she
manages. It has been said that any woman can marry any man if she
determines to do so, and follows on the line of her determination with
tenacity and common-sense.
The hawk widow exemplifies the truth of this saying. She determines
upon marriage; and she usually succeeds; the question being one of
victim only, not of sacrifice. One has to fall to her share; there is
no help for it; and the whole contest is, which shall it be? which is
strongest to break her bonds? which craftiest to slip out of them?
which most resolute not to bear them from the beginning? This the
straggling covey must settle among themselves the best way they can.
When the hawk pounces down upon its quarry, it is _sauve qui peut_!
But all cannot be saved. One has to be caught; and the choice is
determined partly by chance and partly by relative strength. When the
widow of experience and resolve bears down on _her_ prey, the result
is equally certain. Floundering avails nothing; struggling and
splashing are just as futile; one among the crowd has to come to the
slaughter, like Mrs. Bond's ducks, and to assist at his own
immolation. The best thing he can do is to make a handsome surrender,
and to let the world of men and brothers believe he rather likes his
position than not.