already, and therefore more likely to make a good wife than many
others, seeing that it is only a transfer of obedience. That may do
for slaves who cannot be other than slaves whoever is the master; but
it does not do for women who, seeing their friends freer than
themselves, reflect with grief and longing that, had fate so ordered
it, they might have been free too. The chances here, as with the
mothers' boys, are, that the girl kept too close to the apron-string
during her spinsterhood goes all abroad so soon as she gets on the
free ground of matrimony, and lets her liberty run into license. Or
she keeps her old allegiance to her mother intact, and her husband is
never more than the younger branch at best. Most likely he is a
usurper, whom it is her duty to disobey in favour of the rightful
ruler when they chance to come into collision.
If women had their will, all national enterprise would be at an end.
There would be no Arctic Expeditions, no Alpine Clubs, no dangerous
experiments in science, no firearms at home, no volunteering--in their
own family at least. All the danger would be done by the husbands and
brothers and sons of other women, but each would guard her own. For
women cannot go beyond the individual; and the loss of one of their
own, by misadventure, weighs more with them than the necessity of
keeping up the courage and hardihood of the nation. Nor do they
see the difference between care and coddling, refinement and
effeminacy; consequently, men are obliged to resist their influence,
and many cut the apron-string altogether, because delicate fingers
will tie the knots too tight. They do not remember that the influence
to which men yield as a voluntary act of their own grace is a very
different thing from obedience to the open denial, the undisguised
interference and restraint, which some women like to show. Men respect
the higher standard of morality kept up by women; they obey the major
and the minor laws of refinement which are framed for home life and
for society; and they confess that, without woman's influence, they
would soon degenerate into mere savages and be no better than so many
Choctaws before a generation was over; but they do not like being
pulled up short, especially in public, and hounded into the safe
sheepfold for all the world to see them run. And they resent the
endeavour. And the world resents it too, and feels that something is
wrong when a woman shows that she has the whip hand, and that she can
treat her husband like a petted child or bully him like a refractory
one; that she has him tied to her apron-strings and tethered to the
stake of her will. But there is more of this kind of thing in families
than the world at large always knows of; and many a fine, stalwart
fellow who holds his own among men, who is looked up to at his
club and respected in his office for his courage, decision and
self-reliance, sinks into mere poodledom at home, where his wife has
somehow managed to get hold of the leading-strings, and has taught him
that the only way to peace is by submission and obedience.
_FINE FEELINGS._
There are people who pride themselves on the possession of what it
pleases them to call fine feelings. Perhaps, if we were all diligent
to call spades spades, these same fine feelings would come under a
less euphemistic heading; but, as things are, we may as well adopt the
softening gloze that is spread over the whole of our language, and
call them by a pretty name with the rest. People who possess fine
feelings are chiefly remarkable for the ease with which they take
offence; it being indeed impossible, even for the most wary of their
associates, to avoid giving umbrage in some shape, and generally when
least intended and most innocently minded. Nothing satisfies them. No
amount of attention, short of absolute devotion and giving them the
place of honour everywhere, sets them at ease with themselves or keeps
them in good-humour. If you ask them to your house, you must not dream
of mixing them up with the rest. Though you have done them an honour
in asking them at all, you must give them a marked position and bear
them on your hands for the evening. They must be singled out from the
herd and specially attended to; introduced to the nicest people;
made a fuss with and taken care of; else they are offended, and feel
they have been slighted--their sensitiveness or fine feelings being a
kind of Chat Moss which will swallow up any quantity of _petits soins_
that may be thrown in, and yet never be filled. If they are your
intimate friends, you have to ask them on every occasion on which you
receive. They make it a grievance if they hear that you have had even
a dinner party without inviting them, though your space is limited and
you had them at your last gathering. Still, if it comes to their ears
that you have had friends and did not include them, they will come
down on you to a dead certainty if they are of the franker kind, and
ask you seriously, perhaps pathetically, how they have offended you?
If they are of the sullen sort they will meet you coldly, or pass you
by without seeing you; and will either drift into a permanent
estrangement or come round after a time, according to the degree of
acidity in their blood and the amount of tenacity in their character.
They have lost their friends many times for no worse offence than
this.
They are as punctilious too, as they are exacting. They demand visit
for visit, invitation for invitation, letter for letter. Though you
may be overwhelmed with serious work, while they have no weightier
burden strapped to their shoulders than their social duties and social
fineries, yet you must render point for point with them, keeping an
exact tally with not a notch too many on their side, if you want
to retain their acquaintance at all. And they must be always invited
specially and individually, even to your open days; else they will not
come at all; and their fine feelings will be hurt. They suffer no
liberties to be taken with them and they take none with others;
counting all frock-coat friendliness as taking liberties, and holding
themselves refined and you coarse if you think that manners _sans
façon_ are pleasanter than those which put themselves eternally into
stays and stiff buckram, and are never in more undress than a Court
suit. They will not go into your house to wait for you, however
intimate they may be; and they would resent it as an intrusion,
perhaps an impertinence, if you went into theirs in their absence. If
you are at luncheon when they call, they stiffly leave their cards and
turn away; though you have the heartiest, jolliest manner of
housekeeping going, and keep a kind of open house for luncheon
casuals. They do not understand heartiness or a jolly manner of
housekeeping; open houses are not in their line and they will not be
luncheon casuals; so they turn away grimly, and if you want to see
them you have to send your servant panting down the street after them,
when, their dignity being satisfied, their sensitiveness smoothed down
and their fine feelings reassured, they will graciously turn back and
do what they might have done at first without all this fuss and fume.
When people who possess fine feelings are poor, their
sensitiveness is indeed a cross both for themselves and their friends
to bear. If you try to show them a kindness or do them a service, they
fly out at you for patronizing them, and say you humiliate them by
treating them as paupers. You may do to your rich acquaintances a
hundred things which you dare not attempt with your poor friends
cursed with fine feelings; and little offices of kindness, which pass
as current coin through society, are construed into insults with them.
Difficult to handle in every phase, they are in none more dangerous to
meddle with than when poor, though they are as bad if they have become
successful after a period of struggle. Then your attention to them is
time-serving, bowing to the rising sun, worshipping the golden calf,
&c. Else why did you not seek them out when they were poor? Why were
you not cap in hand when they went bare-headed? Why have you waited
until they were successful before you recognized their value?
It is funny to hear how bitter these sensitive folks are when they
have come out into the sunlight of success after the dark passage of
poverty; as if it had been possible to dig them out of their obscurity
when their name was still to make--as if the world could recognize its
prophets before they had spoken. But this admission into the
penetralia after success is a very delicate point with people of fine
feelings, supposing always the previous struggle to have been hard;
and even if there has been no struggle to speak of, then there are
doubts and misgivings as to whether they are liked for themselves
or not, and morbid speculations on the stability and absolute value of
the position they hold and the attentions they receive, and endless
surmises of what would be the result if they lost their fame or wealth
or political power or social standing--or whatever may be the hook
whereon their success hangs, and their fine feelings are impaled. The
act of wisdom most impossible to be performed by these self-torturers
is the philosophic acceptance of life as it is and of things as they
fall naturally to their share.
Women remarkable for fine feelings are also remarkable for that uneasy
distrust, that insatiable craving which continually requires
reassuring and allaying. As wives or lovers they never take a man's
love, once expressed and loyally acted on, as a certainty, unless
constantly repeated; hence they are always pouting or bemoaning their
loveless condition, getting up pathetic scenes of tender accusation or
sorrowful acceptance of coolness and desertion, which at the first may
have a certain charm to a man because flattering to his vanity, but
which pall on him after a short time, and end by annoying and
alienating him; thus bringing about the very catastrophe which was
deprecated before it existed.
Another characteristic with women of fine feelings is their inability
to bear the gentlest remonstrance, the most shadowy fault-finding. A
rebuke of any gravity throws them into hysterics on the spot; but even
a request to do what they have not been in the habit of doing, or to
abstain from doing that which they have used themselves to do, is
more than they can endure with dry-eyed equanimity. You have to live
with them in the fool's paradise of perfectness, or you are made to
feel yourself an unmitigated brute. You have before you the two
alternatives of suffering many things which are disagreeable and which
might easily be remedied, or of having your wife sobbing in her own
room and going about the house with red eyes and an expression of
exasperating patience under ill-treatment, far worse to bear than the
most passionate retaliation. Indeed women may be divided broadly into
those who cry and those who retort when they are found fault with;
which, with a side section of those wooden women who 'don't care,'
leaves a very small percentage indeed of those who can accept a rebuke
good-temperedly, and simply try to amend a failing or break off an
unpleasant habit, without parade of submission and sweet Griseldadom
unjustly chastised, but kissing the rod with aggravating meekness.
For there are women who can make their meekness a more potent weapon
of offence than any passion or violence could give. They do not cry,
neither do they complain, but they exaggerate their submission till
you are driven half mad under the slow torture they inflict. They look
at you so humbly; they speak to you in so subdued a voice, when they
speak to you at all, which is rarely and never unless first addressed;
they avoid you so pointedly, hurrying away if you are going to meet
them about the house, on the pretext of being hateful to your
sight and doing you a service by ridding you of their presence; they
are so ostentatiously careful that the thing of which you mildly
complained under some circumstances shall never happen again under any
circumstances, that you are forced at last out of your entrenchments,
and obliged to come to an explanation. You ask them what is amiss? or,
what do they mean by their absurd conduct? and they answer you
'Nothing,' with an injured air or affected surprise at your query.
What have they done that you should speak to them so harshly? They are
sure they have done all they could to please you, and they do not know
what right you have to be vexed with them again. They have kept out of
your way and not said a word to annoy you; they have only tried to
obey you and to do as you ordered, and yet you are not satisfied! What
can they do to please you? and why is it that they never can please
you whatever they do? You get no nearer your end by this kind of
thing; and the only way to bring your Griselda to reason is by having
a row; when she will cry bitterly, but finally end by kissing and
making up. You have to go through the process. Nothing else, save a
sudden disaster or an unexpected pleasure of large dimensions, will
save you from it; but as we cannot always command earthquakes nor
godsends, and as the first are dangerous and the last costly, the
short and easy method remaining is to have a decisive 'understanding,'
which means a scene and a domestic tempest with smooth sailing till
the next time.
Sometimes fine feelings are hurt by no greater barbarity than that
which is contained in a joke. People with fine feelings are seldom
able to take a joke; and you will hear them relating, with an injured
accent and as a serious accusation, the merest bit of nonsense you
flung off at random, with no more intention of wounding them than had
the merchant the intention of putting out the Efreet's eye when he
flung his date-stones in the desert. As you cannot deny what you have
said, they have the whip-hand of you for the moment; and all you can
hope for is that the friend to whom they detail their grievance will
see through them and it, and understand the joke if they cannot. Then
there are fine feelings which express themselves in exceeding
irritation at moral and intellectual differences of opinion--fine
feelings bound up in questions of faith and soundness of doctrine,
having taken certain moral and theological views under their especial
patronage and holding all diversity of judgment therefrom a personal
offence. The people thus afflicted are exceedingly uncomfortable folks
to deal with, and manage to make every one else uncomfortable too. You
hurt their feelings so continually and so unconsciously, that you
might as well be living in a region of steel-traps and spring-guns,
and set to walk blindfold among pitfalls and water-holes. You fling
your date-stone here too, quite carelessly and thinking no evil,
and up starts the Efreet who swears you have injured him intentionally.
You express an opinion without attaching any particular importance
to it, but you hurt the fine feelings which oppose it, and unless you
wish to have a quarrel you must retract or apologize. As the worst
temper always carries the day, and as fine feelings are only bad tempers
under another name, you very probably do apologize; and so the matter
ends.
Other people show their fineness of feeling by their impatience of
pain and the tremendous grievance they think it that they should
suffer as others--they say, so much more than others. These are the
people who are great on the theory of nervous differences, and who
maintain that their cowardice and impatience of suffering means an
organization like an Æolian harp for sensibility. The oddest part of
the business is the sublime contempt which these sensitives have for
other persons' patience and endurance, and how much more refined and
touching they think their own puerile sensibility. But this is a
characteristic of humanity all through; the masquerading of evil under
the name of good being one of the saddest facts of an imperfect nature
and a confused system of morals. If all things showed their faces
without disguise, we should have fine feelings placed in a different
category from that in which they stand at this moment, and the world
would be the richer by just so much addition of truth.
_SPHINXES._
There are people to whom mystery is the very breath of life and the
main element of their existence. Without it they are insignificant
nobodies; by its aid they are magnified into vague and perhaps awful
potentialities. They are the people who take the Sphinx for their
model, and like her, speak darkly and in parables; making secrets of
every-day matters which would be patent to the whole world in their
simplicity, but which, by the magic of enigmatic handling, become
riddles that the curious would give their lives to unravel.
Nothing with these people is confessed and above board, and nothing is
shown openly so that you may look at it all round and judge for
yourself what it is like and what it is worth. The utmost they do is
to uncover just a corner of something they keep back in the bulk,
tantalizing you with glimpses that bewilder and mislead; or they will
dangle before you the end of a clue which they want you to take up and
follow, making you believe that you will be guided thereby into the
very heart of a mystery, and that you will find a treasure hidden in
the centre of the maze which will abundantly repay you for the
trouble of hunting it out. Nine times out of ten you will find nothing
but a scarecrow of no more value than the rags of which it is
composed--if even you find that. They are the people who repeat to you
the most trivial things you may have said, and who remind you of the
most unimportant things you may have done, years ago, all of which you
have totally forgotten; but they will speak of them in a mysterious
manner, as if they had been matters of vital meaning at the
time--things which would open, if followed up, a page in your private
history that it were better should be forgotten. As it is a question
of memory, you cannot deny point-blank what they affirm; and as we all
have pages of private history which we would rather not hear read
aloud at the market-cross, you are obliged to accept their highly
suggestive recollections with a queer feeling of helplessness and
being somehow in their power--not knowing how much they are really
acquainted with your secret affairs, nor whether the signal they have
flashed before your eyes is a feint or a revelation.
Of the same sort, with a difference, are those who are always going to
tell you something some day--people burdened with a perennial mystery
which never sees the light. You are for ever tormented with these folks'
possibilities of knowledge. You turn over in your own mind every
circumstance that you think they could have got hold of; you cunningly
subject all your common friends to crafty cross-examination; you go,
link by link, through the whole chain connecting you with them; but
you can find nothing that leads to the mere outskirts of the mystery.
You can make nothing of it; and your sphinx goes on to the end promising
some day to tell you something which dies with him untold. Your only
consolation is the inner conviction that there was nothing to tell
after all.
Then there are sphinxes of a more personal kind--people who keep their
affairs a profound secret from every one, who wash all their dirty
linen scrupulously at home and double-lock the door of the cupboard
where the family skeleton lives. They are dungeons of silence,
unfathomable abysses of reserve. You never know more of them, mind nor
estate, than what you can learn from the merest outside of things.
Look back, and you cannot recollect that you have ever heard them
speak of their family or of their early days; and you are not
acquainted with a living soul with whom they are connected. You may
visit them for years without knowing that such and such a friend is
their cousin, or maybe their sister. If they are unmarried men, they
have no address save at their club; and neither you nor their most
intimate friends have an idea where they sleep. For all you know to
the contrary they may be married, with a fine flourishing family
snugly stowed away in some suburban villa, where perhaps they live
under another name, or with the omission or addition of a title that
effectually masks their real individuality. If this is their
special manifestation of sphinxhood, they take as many precautions
against being identified as a savage when out on a scouting
expedition. They obliterate all traces of themselves so soon as they
leave their office in the City, and take it as a terrible misfortune
if the truth is ever discovered; though there is nothing disgraceful
in their circumstances, and their wives and children are healthy and
presentable.
Most of us have been startled by the sudden discovery, in our own
circle of friends, of the wife and children of some member of our
society hitherto supposed to be a bachelor and unshackled. All the
time that we have been joking him on his celibacy and introducing him
to various young ladies likely to make good wives if properly taught,
he has been living in the holy estate a little way out of town, where
he is at last stumbled on by some OEdipus who tells the secret to all
the world and blows the mystery to the winds. We may be very sure that
the officious OEdipus in question gets no thanks for his pains, and
that the sphinx he has unmasked would rather have gone on living in
congenial secrecy with his unacknowledged family in that remote
suburban villa, than be forced into publicity and recognition. Leading
two lives and personating two men--the one as imagined by his friends,
the other as known to his belongings--was a kind of existence he liked
infinitely better than the commonplace respectability of being _en
évidence_ throughout.
With certain sphinxes, no one but the officials concerned ever
knows what they have done, where they have served, what laurels they
have gained. It comes out quite by accident that they were in the
Crimea, where, like Jack Poyntz in _School_, they were heroes in their
own way, though they don't talk about it; or that they performed
prodigies of valour in the Indian Mutiny and obtained the Victoria
Cross, which they never wear. This kind has at least the merit of
being unboastful; keeping their virtues hidden like the temple which
the real sphinx held between her paws, and to which only those had
access who knew the secret of the way. But though it is hateful to
hear a man blowing his own trumpet in season and out of season, yet it
is pleasant to know the good deeds of one's neighbours, and to have
the power of admiring what is worthy of admiration. Besides, modesty
and mystery are not the same things; and there is a mean to be found
between the secrecy of a sphinx making riddles of commonplace matters,
and the cackle of a hen when she has laid an egg for the family
breakfast.
The monetary or financial sphinx is one of the oddest of the whole
tribe and one of the most mysterious. There are people who live on
notoriously small incomes--such as the widows, say, of naval or
military men, whose pensions are printed in blue-books and of whose
yearly receipts the world can take exact cognizance--yet who dress in
velvet and satin, perpetually go about in cabs and hired carriages,
and are never without money to spend, though always complaining
of poverty. How these financial sphinxes manage surpasses the
understanding of every one; and by what royal road they arrive at the
power of making two do the work of four is hidden from the ordinary
believers in Cocker. You know their ostensible income; indeed, they
themselves put it at so much; but they keep up a magnificent
appearance on a less sum than that on which you would go shabby and
dilapidated. When you ask them how it is done, they answer, 'by
management.' Anything can be done by management, they say, by those
who have the gift; which you feel to be an utterance of the sphinx--a
dark saying the key to which has not yet been forged.