femme passée_ of to-day--the reality as we meet with it at balls and
fêtes and afternoon At Homes, ever foremost in the mad chase after
pleasure, for which alone she seems to think she has been sent into
the world. Dressed in the extreme of youthful fashion; her thinning
hair dyed and crimped and fired till it is more like red-brown tow
than hair; her flaccid cheeks ruddled; her throat whitened; her bust
displayed with unflinching generosity--as if beauty is to be measured
by cubic inches; her lustreless eyes blackened round the lids, to give
the semblance of limpidity to the tarnished whites; perhaps the pupils
dilated by belladonna; perhaps a false and fatal brilliancy for the
moment given by opium, or by eau de cologne, of which she has a store
in her carriage, and drinks as she passes from ball to ball; no kindly
drapery of lace nor of gauze to conceal the breadth of her robust
maturity, to soften the dreadful shadows of her leanness--there she
stands, the wretched creature who will not consent to grow old, and
who still affects to be a fresh coquettish girl when she is nothing
but _la femme passée--la femme passée et ridicule_ into the bargain.
There is not a folly for which even the thoughtlessness of youth is
but a poor excuse into which she, in all the plenitude of her abundant
experience, does not plunge. Wife and mother as she may be, she flirts
and makes love as if an honourable issue were as open to her as to her
young daughter; or as if she did not know to what end flirting
and making love lead in all ages. If we watch the career of such a
woman, we see how, by slow but very sure degrees, she is obliged to
lower the standard of her adorers, and to take up at last with men of
inferior social position, who are content to buy her patronage by
their devotion. To the best men of her own class she can give nothing
that they value; so she barters with snobs, who go into the
transaction with their eyes open, and take the whole affair as a
matter of exchange, and _quid pro quo_ rigidly exacted. Or she does
really dazzle some very young and low-born man who is weak as well as
ambitious, and who thinks the fugitive regard of a middle-aged woman
of high rank something to be proud of and boasted about. That she is
as old as his own mother--at this moment selling tapes behind a
village counter, or gathering up the eggs in a country farm--tells
nothing against the association with him; and the woman who began her
career of flirtation with the son of a duke ends it with the son of a
shopkeeper, having between these two terms spanned all the several
degrees of degradation which lie between giving and buying. She cannot
help herself; for it is part of the insignia of her artificial youth
to have the reputation of a love-affair, or the pretence of one, even
if the reality be a mere delusion. When such a woman as this is one of
the matrons, and consequently one of the leaders of society, what can
we expect from the girls? What worse example could be given to
the young? When we see her with her own daughters we feel
instinctively that she is the most disastrous adviser they could have;
and when in the company of girls or young married women not belonging
to her, we doubt whether we ought not to warn their natural guardians
against allowing such association, for all that her standing in
society is undeniable, and not a door is shut against her.
What good in life does this kind of woman do? All her time is taken
up, first in trying to make herself look twenty or thirty years
younger than she is, and then in trying to make others believe the
same. She has neither thought nor energy to spare from this, to her,
far more important work than is feeding the hungry or nursing the
sick, rescuing the fallen or soothing the sorrowful. The final cause
of her existence seems to be the impetus she has given to a certain
branch of trade manufacture--unless we add to this, the corruption of
society. For whom, but for her, are the 'little secrets' which are
continually being advertised as woman's social salvation--regardless
of grammar? The 'eaux noire, brun, et châtain, which dyes the hair any
shade in one minute;' the 'kohl for the eyelids;' the 'blanc de
perle,' and 'rouge de Lubin'--which does not wash off; the 'bleu pour
les veines;' the 'rouge of eight shades,' and 'the sympathetic blush,'
which are cynically offered for the use and adoption of our mothers
and daughters, find their chief patroness in the _femme passée_ who
makes herself up--the middle-aged matron engaged in her frantic
struggle against time, and obstinately refusing to grow old in spite
of all that nature may say or do. Bad as the Girl of the Period is,
this horrible travesty of her vices in the modern matron is even
worse. Indeed, were it not for her, the girls would never have gone to
such lengths as those to which they have gone; for elder women
naturally have immense influence over younger ones, and if mothers
were resolutely to set their faces against the follies of the day,
daughters would and must give in. As it is, some go even ahead of the
young, and, by example on the one hand and rivalry on the other, sow
the curse of corruption broadcast where they were meant to have only a
pure influence and to set a wise example. Were it not for those who
still remain faithful--women who regard themselves as the trustees for
humanity and virtue--the world would go to ruin forthwith; but so long
as the five righteous are left we have hope and a certain amount of
security for the future, when the present disgraceful madness of
society shall have passed away.
_SPOILT WOMEN._
Like children and all soft things, women are soon spoilt if subjected
to unwholesome conditions. Sometimes the spoiling comes from
over-harshness, sometimes from over-indulgence; what we are speaking
of to-day is the latter condition--the spoiling which comes from being
petted and given way to and indulged, till they think themselves
better than everybody else, and living under laws made specially for
them. Men get spoilt too in the same manner; but for the most part
there is a tougher fibre in them which resists the flabby influences
of flattery and exaggerated attention better than can the morale of
the weaker sex; besides, even arbitrary men meet with opposition in
certain directions, and the most self-contented social autocrat knows
that his adherents criticize though they dare not oppose.
A man who has been spoilt by success and a gratified ambition, so that
he thinks himself a small Alexander in his own way and able to conquer
any obstacles which may present themselves, has a certain high-handed
activity of will about him that does not interfere with his duties in
life; he is not made fretful and impatient and exigeant as a
woman is--as if he alone of all mankind ought to be exempt from
misfortunes and annoyances; as if his friends must never die, his
youth never fade, his circumstances run always smooth, protected by
the care of others from all untoward hitch; as if time and tide, which
wait for no one else, are bound to him as humble servants dutifully
observant of his wishes. The useful art of finding his level, which he
learnt at school and in his youth generally, keeps him from any very
weak manifestation of being spoilt; save indeed, when he has been
spoilt by women at home, nursed up by an adoring wife and a large
circle of wife's sisters almost as adoring, to all of whom his
smallest wishes are religious obligations and his faintest virtues
godly graces, and who vie with each other which of them shall wait
upon him most servilely, flatter him most outrageously, coax and
coddle him most entirely, and so do him the largest amount of
spiritual damage, and unfit him most thoroughly for the worth and work
of masculine life. A man subjected to this insidious injury is simply
ruined so far as any real manliness of nature goes. He is made into
that sickening creature, 'a sweet being,' as the women call him--a
woman's man with æsthetic tastes and a turn for poetry; full of
highflown sentiment and morbid sympathies; a man almost as much woman
as man, who has no backbone of useful ambition in him, but who puts
his whole life into love, and who becomes at last emphatically not
worth his salt.
Bad as it is for men of the world to be kowtowed to by men, it is not
so bad, because not so weakening, as the domestic idolatry which
sometimes goes on when one man is the centre of a large family of
women, and the only object upon which the natural feminine instinct
can expend itself. No greater damage can be done to a man than is done
by this kind of domestic idolatry. But, in truth, the evil is too
pleasant to be resisted; and there is scarcely a man so far master of
himself as to withstand the subtle intoxication, the sweet and
penetrating poison, of woman's tender flattery and loving submission.
To a certain extent he holds it so entirely the right thing, because
it is natural and instinctive, that it is difficult to draw the line
and map out exactly the division between right and wrong, pleasantness
and harmfulness, and where loving submission ends and debasing
slavishness begins.
Spoilt women are spoilt mainly from a like cause: over-attention from
men. A few certainly are to be found, as pampered daughters, with
indulgent mammas and subservient aunts given up to ruining their young
charges with the utmost despatch possible; but this is comparatively a
rare form of the disease, and one which a little wholesome matrimonial
discipline would soon cure. For it is seldom that a petted daughter
becomes a spoilt wife--human affairs having that marvellous power of
equation, that inevitable tendency to readjust the balance, which
prevents the continuance of a like excess under different forms.
Besides, a spoilt daughter generally makes such a supremely unpleasant
wife that the husband has no inducement to continue the mistake, and
therefore either lowers her tone by a judicious exhibition of
snubbing, or, if she be aggressive as well as unpleasant, leaves her
to fight with her shadows in the best way she can, glad for his own
part to escape the strife she will not forego.
The spoilt woman is impatient of anything like rivalry. She never has
a female friend--certainly not one of her own degree, and not one at
all in the true sense of the word. Friendship presupposes equality;
and a spoilt woman knows no equality. She has been so long accustomed
to consider herself as lady-paramount that she cannot understand it if
any one steps in to share her honours and divide her throne. To praise
the beauty of any other woman, to find her charming, and to pay her
the attention due to a charming woman, is to insult our spoilt
darling, and to slight her past forgiveness. If there is only one good
thing, it must be given to her--the first seat, the softest cushion,
the most protected situation; and she looks for the best of all things
as if naturally consecrated from her birth to the sunshine of life,
and as if the 'cold shade' which may do for others were by no means
the portion allotted to her.
It is almost impossible to make the spoilt woman understand the grace
or the glory of sacrifice. By rare good fortune she may sometimes be
found to possess an indestructible germ of conscience which
sorrow and necessity can develop into active good; but only sometimes.
The spoilt woman _par excellence_ understands only her own value, only
her own merits and the absolutism of her own requirements; and
sacrifice, self-abnegation, and the whole class of virtues belonging
to unselfishness, are as much unknown to her as is the Decalogue in
the original, or the squaring of the circle. The spoilt woman, as the
wife of an unsuccessful husband or the mother of sickly children, is a
pitiable spectacle. If obliged to sacrifice her usual luxuries, to
make an old gown serve when a new one is desired, to sit up all night
watching by the sick-bed, to witness the painful details of illness,
perhaps of death, to meet hardship face to face and to bend her back
to the burden of sorrow, she is at the first absolutely lost. Not the
thing to be done, but her own discomfort in doing it, is the one
master idea--not others' needs, but her own pain in supplying them, is
the great grief of the moment. Many are the hard lessons set us by
life and fate, but the hardest of all is that given to the spoilt
woman when she is made to think for others rather than for herself,
and is forced by the exigencies of circumstances to sacrifice her own
ease for the greater necessities of her kind.
All that large part of the true woman's nature which expresses itself
in serving is an unknown function to the spoilt woman. She must be
waited on, but she cannot in her turn serve even the one she loves.
She is the woman who calls her husband from one end of the room
to the other to put down her cup, rather than reach out her arm and
put it down for herself; who, however weary he may be, will bid him
get up and ring the bell, though it is close to her own hand, and her
longest walk during the day has been from the dining-room to the
drawing-room. It is not that she cannot do these small offices for
herself, but that she likes the feeling of being waited on; and it is
not for love, and the amiable if weak pleasure of attracting the
notice of the beloved, but it is for the vanity of being a little
somebody for the moment, and of playing off the small regality
involved in the procedure, that she claims his attention. She would
not return that attention. Unlike the Eastern women, who wait on their
lords hand and foot, and who place their highest honour in their
lowliest service, the spoilt woman of Western life knows nothing of
the natural grace of womanly serving for love, for grace, or for
gratitude.
This kind of thing is peculiarly strong among the _demi-monde_ of the
higher class, and among women who are of the _demi-monde_ by nature.
The respect they cannot command by their virtues they demand in the
simulation of manner; and perhaps no women are more tenacious of the
outward forms of deference than those who have lost their claim to the
vital reality. It is very striking to see the difference between the
women of this type, the _petites maîtresses_ who require the utmost
attention and almost servility from man, and the noble dignity of
service which the pure woman can afford to give--which she finds
indeed, that it belongs to the very purity and nobleness of her
womanhood to give. It is the old story of the ill-assured position
which is afraid of its own weakness, and the security which can afford
to descend--the rule holding good for other things besides mere social
place.
Another characteristic of the spoilt woman is the changeableness and
excitability of her temper. All suavity and gentleness and delightful
gaiety and perfect manners when everything goes right, she startles
you by her outburst of petulance when the first cross comes. If no man
is a hero to his valet, neither is a spoilt woman a heroine to her
maid; and the lady who has just been the charm of the drawing-room,
upstairs in her boudoir makes her maid go through spiritual exercises
to which walking among burning ploughshares is easy-going. A length of
lace unstarched, a ribbon unsewed, a flower set awry, anything that
crumples one of the myriad rose-leaves on which she lies, and the
spoilt woman raves as much as if each particular leaf had become
suddenly a bunch of thorns. If a dove were to be transformed to a hawk
the change would not be more complete, more startling, than that which
occurs when the spoilt woman of well-bred company manners puts off her
mask to her maid, and shows her temper over trifles. Whoever else may
suffer the grievances of life, she cannot understand that she also
must be at times one of the sufferers with the rest; and if by
chance the bad moment comes, the person accompanying it has a hard
time of it.
There are spoilt women also who have their peculiar exercises in
thought and opinion, and who cannot suffer that any one should think
differently from themselves, or find those things sacred which to them
are accursed. They will hear nothing but what is in harmony with
themselves; and they take it as a personal insult when men or women
attempt to reason with them, or even hold their own without flinching.
This kind is to be found specially among the more intellectual of a
family or a circle--women who are pronounced clever by their friends,
and who have been so long accustomed to think themselves clever that
they have become spoilt mentally as others are personally, and fancy
that minds and thoughts must follow in their direction, just as eyes
and hands must follow and attend their sisters. The spoilt woman of
the mental kind is a horrid nuisance generally. She is greatly given
to large discourse. But discourse of a kind that leans all to one
side, and that denies the right of any one to criticize, doubt, or
contradict, is an intellectual Tower of Pisa under the shadow of which
it is not pleasant to live.
_DOVECOTS._
Times must be very bad indeed if a faithful few are not still left to
keep the sources of society sweet and wholesome. When corruption has
gone through the whole mass and all classes are bad alike, everything
comes to an end, and there is a general overthrow of national life;
but while some are left pure and unspotted, we are not quite undone,
and we may reasonably hope for better days in the future. In the midst
of the reign of the Girl of the Period, with her slang and her
boldness--of the fashionable woman, with her denial of duty and her
madness for pleasure--we come every now and then upon a group of good
girls of the real old English type; the faithful few growing up
silently among us, but none the less valuable because they are silent
and make no public display; doves who are content with life as they
have it in the dovecot, and have no desire to be either eagles
dwelling on romantic heights, or peacocks displaying their pride in
sunny courts. We find these faithful few in town and country alike;
but they are rifest in the country, where there is less temptation to
go wrong than there is in the large towns, and where life is
simpler and the moral tone undeniably higher. The leading feature of
these girls is their love of home and of their own family, and their
power of making occupation and happiness out of apparently meagre
materials. If they are the elders, they find amusement and interest in
their little brothers and sisters, whom they consider immensely funny
and to whom they are as much girl-mothers as sisters; if they are the
youngers, they idolize their baby nephews and nieces. For there is
always a baby going on somewhere about these houses--babies being the
great excitement of home-life, and the antiseptic element among women
which keeps everything else pure. They are passionately attached to
papa and mamma, whom they think the very king and queen of humanity,
yet whom they do not call by even endearing slang names. It has never
occurred to them to criticize them as ordinary mortals; and as they
have not been in the way of learning the prevailing accent of
disrespect, they have not shaken off that almost religious veneration
for their parents which all young people naturally feel, if they have
been well brought up and are not corrupted.
The yoke in most middle-class country-houses is one fitting very
loosely round all necks; and as they have all the freedom they desire
or could use, the girls are not fretted by undue pressure, and are
content to live in peace under such restraints as they have. They
adore their elder brothers who are from home just beginning the great
battle of life for themselves, and confidently believe them to be
the finest fellows going, and the future great men of the day if only
they care to put out those splendid talents of theirs, and take the
trouble of plucking the prizes within their reach. They may have a
slight reservation perhaps, in favour of the brother's friend, whom
they place on a pedestal of almost equal height. But they keep their
mental architecture a profound secret from every one, and do not
suffer it to grow into too solid a structure unless it has some surer
foundation than their own fancy. For, though doves are loving, they
are by no means lovesick, and are too healthy and natural and quietly
busy for unwholesome dreams. If one of them marries, they all unite in
loving the man who comes in among them. He is adopted as one of
themselves, and leaps into a family of idolizing sisters who pet him
as their brother--with just that subtle little difference in their
petting, in so much as it comes from sisters unaccustomed, and so has
the charm of novelty without the prurient excitement of naughtiness.
But this kind of thing is about the most dangerous to a man's moral
nature that can befall him. Though pretty to see and undeniably
pleasant to experience, and though perfectly innocent in every way,
still, nothing enervates him so much as this idolatrous submission of
a large family of women. In a widow's house, where there are many
daughters and no sons, and where the man who marries one marries the
whole family and is worshipped accordingly, the danger is of course
increased tenfold; but if there are brothers and a father, the
sister's husband, though affectionately cooed over, is not made quite
such a fuss with, and the association is all the less hurtful in
consequence.
These girls lead a by no means stupid life, though it is a quiet one,
and without any spasmodic events or tremendous cataclysms. They go a
great deal among the village poor, and they teach at the
Sunday-school, and attend the mothers' meetings and clothing-clubs and
the like, and learn to get interested in their humbler friends, who
after all are Christian sisters. They read their romances in real life
instead of in three-volume novels, and study human nature as it is--in
the rough certainly, but perhaps in more genuine form than if they
learnt it only in what is called society. Then they have their
pleasures, though they are of an unexciting kind and what fast girls
would call awfully slow. They have their horses and their croquet
parties, their lawn tennis and their archery meetings; they have
batches of new music, and a monthly box from Mudie's--and they know
the value of both; they go out to tea, and sometimes to dinner, in the
neighbourhood; and they enjoy the rare county balls with a zest
unknown to London girls who are out every night in the week. They have
their village flower-shows, which the great families patronize in a
free-and-easy kind of way, and which give occupation for weeks before
and subject for talk for weeks after; their school feasts, where the
pet parson of the district comes out with his best anecdotes, and
makes mild jokes at a long distance from Sydney Smith; their
periodical missionary meetings, where they have great guns from
London, and where they hear unctuous stories about the saintliness of
converted cannibals, and are required to believe in the power of
change of creed to produce an ethnological miracle; they have their
friends to stay with them--school-girl friends--with whom they
exchange deep confidences, and go back over the old days--so old to
their youth!--their brothers come down in the summer, and their
brothers' friends come with them, and do a little spooning in the
shrubbery. But there is more spooning done at picnics than anywhere
else; and more offers are made there under the shadow of the old ruin,
or in the quiet leafy nook by the river side, than at any other
gathering time of the country. And as we are all to a certain extent
what we are made by our environment, the doves take to these pleasures
quite kindly and gratefully, as being the only ones known to them, and
enjoy themselves in a simplicity of circumstances which would give no
pleasure at all to girls accustomed to more highly-spiced
entertainments.