never hear any other epithet applied to them. They are not said to be
pretty, nor amiable, nor clever, though they may be all three, but
simply charming; which we may take as a kind of verbal amalgam--the
concentration and concretion of all praise. The main feature about
these charming women is their intense feminality. There is no blurring
of the outlines here; no confusion of qualities admirable enough in
themselves but slightly out of place considering the sex; no Amazonian
virtues which leave one in doubt as to whether we have not before us
Achilles in petticoats rather than a true Pyrrha or a more tender
Deidamia.
A charming woman is woman all over--one who places her glory in being
a woman and has no desire to be anything else. She is a woman rather
than a human being, and a lady rather than a woman. One of her
characteristics is the exquisite grace of her manner which so sweetly
represents the tender nature within. She has not an angle anywhere. If
she were to be expressed geometrically, Hogarth's Line of Beauty
is the sole figure that could be used for her. She is flowing,
graceful, bending in mind as in body; she is neither self-asserting
nor aggressive, neither rigid nor narrow; she is a creature who glides
gracefully through life, and adjusts herself to her company and her
circumstances in a manner little less than marvellous; working her own
way without tumult or sharpness; creeping round the obstacles she
cannot overthrow, and quietly wearing down more friable opposition
with that gentle persistency which does so much more than turmoil and
disturbance.
Even if enthusiastic--which she is for art, either as music, as
painting, or yet as poetry--she is enthusiastic in such a sweet and
graceful way that no one can be offended by a fire which shines and
does not burn. There is no touch of scorn about her and no assumption
of superior knowledge. She speaks to you, poor ignorant Philistine,
with the most flattering conviction that you follow her in all her
flights; and when she comes out, quite naturally, with her pretty
little bits of recondite lore or professional technicalities, you
cannot be so boorish as to ask for an explanation of these trite
matters which she makes so sure you must understand. Are you not an
educated person with a soul to be saved? can you then be ignorant of
things with which every one of culture is familiar? She discourses
confidentially of musicians and painters unknown to fame, and speaks
as if she knew the secret doings of the Conservatoire and the R. A.
council-chamber alike. The models and the methods, the loves and
the hates, of the artistic world are to her things of every-day life,
and you cannot tell her that she is shooting her delicate shafts wide
of the mark, and that you know no more of what she means than if she
were talking in the choicest Arabic.
If she has been abroad--and she generally has been more or less--she
will pour out her tender little rhapsodies about palazzi and musei of
which you have never heard, but every room of which she assumes you
know by heart; and she will speak of out-of-the-way churches, and grim
old castles perched upon vine-clad mounts, as if you were as well
acquainted with them as with your native hamlet. She will bring into
her discourse all manner of Italian technicalities, as if you
understood the subject as well as she herself understands it; though
your learning is limited to a knowledge of how much has been done in
jute and tallow this last half year, or how many pockets of hops went
off in the market last week. If she has a liking for high life and
titles--and what charming woman has not?--she will mention the names
of all manner of counts and dukes and monsignori unknown to English
society, as though they were her brothers; but if you were to
interrupt the gentle ripple of her speech with such rude breakwaters
as 'who?' and 'what?' the charming woman would think you a horrid
bore--and no man would willingly face that humiliation. One may be a
rhinoceros in one's own haunts, but, as the fable tells us, even
rhinoceroses are ashamed of their parentage when among gazelles.
Never self-asserting, never contradictory, only sweetly and tenderly
putting you right when you blunder, the charming woman nevertheless
always makes you feel her superiority. True, she lays herself as it
were at your feet and gives you a thousand delicate flatteries--indeed
among her specialities is that of being able to set you on good terms
with yourself by her art of subtle flattery; but despite her own
self-abasement and your exaltation you cannot but feel her
superiority; and, although she is too charming to acknowledge what
would wound your pride, you know that she feels it too, and tries to
hide it. All of which has the effect of making you admire her still
more for her grace and tact.
The charming woman is generally notoriously in love with her husband,
who is almost always inferior to her in birth, acquirements, manner,
appearance. This Titania-like affection of hers only shows her
feminine qualities of sacrifice and wifely devotion to greater
advantage, and makes other men envy more ferociously the lucky fellow
who has drawn such a prize. The husband of a charming woman is indeed
lucky in the world's esteem; no man more so. Though he may be one of
the most ordinary, perhaps unpleasant, fellows you know, with a sour
face, an underbred air, and by no means famous in his special sphere,
his wife speaks of him enthusiastically as so good, so clever, so
delightful! No one knows how good he is, she says; though of
course he has his little peculiarities of temper and the rest of it,
and perhaps every one would not bear with them as she does. But then
she knows him, and knows his wonderful worth and value! If they are
not seen much together, that comes from causes over which they have no
control, not from anything like disinclination to each other's
society. Certainly, for so happy a marriage, it is a little surprising
how very seldom they are together; and how all her friends are hers
only and not his, and how much she goes into society without him. On
the whole, counting hours, they live very much more apart than united;
but that is the misfortune of his career, of his health, or of hers--a
misfortune due to any cause but that of diversity of tastes,
inharmoniousness of pursuits, or lack of love.
Full of home affection and the tenderest sentiment as she is, the
charming woman does sometimes the oddest-looking things, which a rough
little domestic creature without graceful pretensions would not dream
of doing. Her child is lying dangerously ill, perhaps dying, and she
appears at the grand ball of the season, subdued certainly--how well
that sweet melancholy becomes her!--but always graceful, always
thoughtful for others, and attentive to the minutest detail of her
social duties. And though indeed, she will tell you, she does not know
how she got dressed at all, because of the state of cruel anxiety in
which she is, yet she is undeniably the best dressed woman in the room
and the most carefully appointed. It is against her own will that
she is there, you may be sure; but she has been forced to sacrifice
herself, and tear herself away for an hour. The exigencies of society
are so merciless!--the world is such a terrible Juggernaut! she says,
raising her eyes with plaintive earnestness to yours in the
breathing-times of the waltz.
She has another trial if her husband is ordered out to Canada or the
West Indies. Dearly as she loves him, and though she is heart-broken
at the idea of the separation, yet her health cannot stand the
climate; and she must obey her doctor's orders. She is so delicate,
you know--all charming women are delicate--and the doctor tells her
she could not live six months either in Toronto or Port Royal. If her
lord and master had to go on diplomatic service to St. Petersburg or
Madrid, she might be able to stand the climate then; but that is
different. A dull station, without any of her favourite pleasures,
would be more than she could bear; so she remains behind, goes out
into society, and writes her husband tender and amusing letters once a
month.
The charming woman is the gentlest of her sex. She would not do a
cruel thing nor say an unkind word for the world. When she tells you
the unpleasant things which ill-natured people have said of your
friends or hers, she tells them in the sweetest and dearest way
imaginable. She is so sure there is not a syllable of truth in it all;
and what a shame it is that people should be so ill-natured! In the
gentle tone of sympathy and deprecation peculiar to her, she
gives you all the ugly and uncomfortable reports which have come to
her, and of which you have never heard a breath until this moment. Yet
it is you who are stupid, not she who is initiative, for she tells
them to you as if they were of patent notoriety to the whole world;
only she does not believe them, remember! She takes the most
scrupulous care to deny and defend as she retails, and you cannot
class her with the tribe of the ill-natured whom she censures,
setting, as she does, the whole strength of her gentle words and
generous disbelief in opposition to these ugly rumours. Yet you wish
she had not told you. Her disclaimers spring so evidently from the
affectionate amiability of her own mind, which cannot bear to think
evil, that they have not much effect upon you. The excuse dies away
from your memory, but the ill-savoured report roots; and you feel that
you have lost your respect for your former friends for ever; or, if
they were only hers, then, that nothing should tempt you to know them.
There is no smoke without some fire, you think; and the charming woman
cannot possibly have kindled the flame herself out of sticks and
leaves and rubbish of her own collecting. But how sweet and charitable
she was when she told you! how much you love her for her tenderness of
nature! what a guileless and delightful creature she is!
The charming woman is kind and graceful, but she does not command the
stronger virtues. She flatters sweetly, but, it must be
confessed, she fibs as sweetly. She sometimes owns to this, but only
to fibs that do more good than harm--fibs into the utterance of which
she is forced for the sake of peace and to avoid mischief. It is a
feminine privilege, she says; and men agree with her. Truth at all
times--bold, uncompromising, stern-faced truth--is coarse and
indelicate she says; a masculine quality as little fitted for women as
courage or great bodily strength. Her husband knows that she fibs; her
friends at times find her out too; but though the women throw it at
her as an accusation, the men accept it as a quality without which she
would be less the charming woman that she is; and not only forgive it,
but like her the better for the grace and tact and suppleness she
displays in the process of manufacture. Hers are not the severer
virtues, but the gentler, the more insinuating; and absolute
truth--truth at any price and on all occasions--does not come into the
list.
Charming women, with their plastic manners and non-aggressive force,
always have their own way in the end. They are the women who influence
by unseen methods and who shrink from any open display of power. They
know that their _métier_ is to soothe men, to put them on good terms
with themselves, and so to get the benefit of the good humour they
induce; and they dread nothing so much as a contest of wills. They
coax and flatter for their rights, and consequently they are given
privileges in excess of their rights; whereas the women who take
their rights, as things to which they are entitled without favour,
lose them and their privileges together. This art of self-abasement
for future exaltation is one which it is given only to few to carry to
perfection, but no woman is really charming without it. In fact it is
part of her power; and she knows it. Though charming women are
decidedly the favourites with men, they are careful to keep on good
terms with their own sex; and in society you may often see them almost
ostentatiously surrounded by women only, whom they take pains to
please or exert themselves to amuse, but whom they throw into the
shade in the most astonishing way.
Whatever these really charming women are, or do, or wear, is exactly
the right thing; and every other woman fails in proportion to the
distance she is removed from this model. When a charming woman is
dressed richly, the simpler costumes of her friends look poor and
mean; when she is _à la bergère_, the Court dresses about her are
vulgar; when she is gay, quietness is dullness; when she is quiet,
laughter is coarse. And there is no use in trying to imitate her. She
is the very Will-o'-the-wisp of her circle, and no sooner shows her
light here than she flits away there; she has no sooner set one
fashion, which her admiring friends have adopted with infinite pains
and trouble, than she has struck out a new one which renders all the
previous labour in vain. This is part of her very essence; and the
originality which is simply perfection that cannot be repeated, and
not eccentricity that no one will imitate, comes in as one of the
finest and most potent of her charms. When she lends her patterns to
her friends, or tells them this or that little secret, she laughs in
her heart, knowing that she has shown them a path they cannot possibly
follow and raised up a standard to which they cannot attain. And even
should they do either, then she knows that, by the time they have
begun to get up to her, she will be miles away, and that no art
whatever can approximate them to her as she is. What she was she
tosses among them as a worn-out garment; what she is they cannot be.
She remains still the unapproachable, the inimitable, the charming
woman _par excellence_ of her set, whom none can rival.
_APRON-STRINGS._
Among other classifications, the world of men and women may be divided
into those who wear aprons and those who are tied to the strings
thereof--those who determine the length of the tether and those who
are bound to browse within its circuit--those who hold the reins and
those who go bitted. All men and women are fond of power, but there is
a wide difference in the ways in which they use it. To men belong the
grave political tyrannies at which nations revolt and history is
outraged, to women the small conventional laws framed against
individual liberty by Mrs. Grundy and society; men rule with rods of
iron and drive with whips of steel, women shorten the tether and tie
up close to apron-strings; men coerce, women forbid. In fact, the
difference is just that which lies between action and negation,
compulsion and restraint; between the masculine jealousy of equality
and the feminine fear of excess. If men debar women from all entrance
into their larger sphere, women try to dwarf men's lives to their own
measure, and not a few hold themselves aggrieved when they fail. They
think that everything which is impossible to them should be
forbidden to others, and they maintain that to be a lamentable extreme
which is simply in excess of their own powers. Not content with
supremacy in the home which is their own undisputed domain, nor
satisfied with binding on men the various rules distinguishing life in
the drawing-room, the dining-room and the breakfast-parlour, they
would, if they could, carry their code outside, and sweep into its
narrow net the club-house and the mess-table, the billiard-room and
the race-course, and wherever else men congregate together--delivered
from the bondage of feminine conventionalities.
For almost all women have an uneasy feeling when their men are out of
sight, enjoying themselves in their own way. They fear on all
sides--both bodily harm and moral evil; and regard men's rougher
sports and freer thoughts as a hen regards her wilful ducklings when
they take to the water in which she would be drowned, and leave her
high and dry lamenting their danger and self-destruction. The man they
love best for his manliness they would, in their loving cowardice, do
their utmost to make effeminate; and, while adoring him for all that
makes him bold and strong in thought as well as in frame, they would
tie him up to their apron-strings, and keep him there till he became
as soft and narrow as themselves. Not that they would wish to do so;
if you asked them they would tell you quite the contrary. But this
would be the result if they had their own way, their love being
at all times more timid than confident.
To home-staying women, a brilliant husband courted by the world and
loving what courts him, is a painful cross to bear, however much he
may be beloved--the pain, in fact, being proportionate to the love.
Perhaps no life exemplifies this so much as Moore's. Poor "Bessy"
suffered many things because of the looseness of the apron-string by
which her roving husband was tied, and the length of the tether which
he allowed himself. _Farfallone amoroso_ as he was, his incessant
flutterings out of range and reach caused her many a sad hour; and in
after years she was often heard to say that the happiest time of her
life was when his mind had begun to fail, for then she had him all to
herself and no one came in between them--no great world swept him away
to be the idol of a _salon_, and left her alone at home casting up her
accounts with life and love, and quaking at the result that came out.
When the brilliancy and the idolatry came to an end, then her turn
began; and she tied up her dulled and faltering idol close to her side
for ever after, and was happier to have him there helpless,
affectionate, dependent and imbecile than when he was at his
brightest--and a rover.
Many a wife has felt the same when sickness has broken down the strong
man's power to a weakness below her own, and made her, so long the
inferior, now the more powerful of the two, and the supreme. She
gathers up the reins with that firm, tight hand peculiar to
women, and ties her master to her apron-string so that he cannot
escape. It is quite a matter of pride with her that she has got him
into such good order. He obeys her so implicitly about his medicines,
and going to bed early, and wrapping himself up, and avoidance of
draughts and night-air, that she feels all the reflected glory of one
who has conquered a hero. The Samson who used to defy the elements and
break her careful strings like bands of tow, has at last laid his head
in her lap and suffered himself to be covered by her apron. It is
worth while to have had the anxiety and loss of his illness for the
sake of the submission resulting; and she generally ends by gaining a
hold over him which he can never shake off again.
It is pitiful though, to see the stronger life thus dwarfed and bound.
But women like it; and while the need for it lasts men must submit.
The danger is lest the habit of the apron-string should become
permanent; for it is so perilously pleasant to be petted and made much
of by women, that few men can resist the temptation when it offers;
and many have been ruined for the remainder of their days by an
illness which gave them up into the keeping of wife and sisters--those
fireside Armidas who will coddle all the real manliness out of their
finest heroes, if they are let. If this kind of thing occurs at the
break of life, the _mezzo cammino_ between maturity and age, it is
doubly difficult to throw off; and many a man who had good years
of vigour and strength, before him if he had been kept up to the mark,
sinks all at once into senility because his womankind got frightened
at that last small attack of his, and thought the best way to preserve
him from another was to weaken him by over-care out of all wish for
dangerous exposure.
Perhaps the greatest misfortune that can befall a man is to have been
an only son brought up by a timid widow mother. It is easy to see at a
glance, among a crowd of boys, who has been educated under exclusively
feminine influence. The long curled shining hair, the fantastic
tunic--generally a kind of hybrid between a tunic and a frock--the
lavish use of embroidery, the soft pretty-behaved manner, the clean
unroughened hands, all mark the boy of whom his mother has so often
wished that he had been a girl, and whom she has made as much like a
girl as possible. His intellectual education has been as unboylike as
his daily breeding. Mothers' boys are taught to play the piano, to
amuse themselves with painting, or netting, or perhaps a little
woolwork in the evenings--anything to keep them quietly seated by the
family table, without an outbreak of boyish restlessness or
inconvenient energy; but they are never taught to ride, to hunt, to
shoot, to swim, to play at cricket, football, nor billiards, unless a
stalwart uncle happens to be about who takes the reins in his own hand
at times, and insists on having a word to say to his nephew's
education.
There is danger in all, and evil in some, of these things; and
women cannot bear that those they love should run the risk of either.
Wherefore their boys are modest and virtuous truly, but they are not
manly; and when they go out into the world, as they must sooner or
later, they are either laughed at for their priggishness, or they go
to the bad by the very force of reaction. The mother has allowed them
to learn nothing that will be of solid use to them, and they enter the
great arena wholly unprepared either to fight or to resist, to push
their own way or to take their own part. They have been kept tied up
to the apron-string to the last moment, and only when absolutely
forced by the necessity of events will she cut the knot and let them
go free. But she holds on to the last moment. Even when the time comes
for college-life and learning, she often goes with her darling, and
takes lodgings in the town, that she may be near at hand to watch over
his health and morals, and continue her careful labours for his
destruction.
The chances are that a youth so brought up never becomes a real man,
nor worth his salt anyhow. He is a prig if he is good, a debauchee of
the worst kind if he kicks over the traces at all. He is more likely
the first, carrying the mark of the apron-string round his wrist for
life. Like a tame falcon used to the hood and the perch and the lure
home, no matter what the temptation of the quarry afield, he is
essentially a domestic man, at ease only in the society of women; a
fussy man; a small-minded man; delicate in health; with a dread
of strong measures, physical, political, or intellectual; a crotchety
man given to passing quackeries; but not a man fit for man's society
nor for man's work. When there are many boys, instead of only one, in
a widow's family, the opposite of all this is the case. So soon as
they have escaped from the nursery, they have escaped from all control
whatsoever; and if one wants to realize a puerile pandemonium of dirt,
discomfort, noise and general disorganization, the best place in the
world is the household of a feeble-spirited mother of many sons where
there is no controlling masculine influence.
Daughters, who are naturally and necessarily tied up to the mother's
apron-string, suffer occasionally from too tight a strain; though
certainly it is not the fault of the present day that girls are too
closely fettered, too home-staying or subdued. Still, every now and
then one comes across a matron who has crushed all individuality out
of her family, and whose grown-up daughters are still children to her
in moral go-carts and intellectual leading-strings. They may be the
least attractive of their sex, but a mother of this kind has one fixed
delusion respecting them--namely, that the world is full of wolves
eager to devour her lambs, and that they are only safe when close to
the maternal apron and browsing within an inch of the tether stake.
These are the girls who become hopeless old maids. Men have an
instinctive dread of the maternal apron-string. They do not want to
marry a mother as well as a wife, and to live under a double
dominion and a reduplicated opposition.