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+Project Gutenberg's Modern Women and What is Said of Them, by Anonymous
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Modern Women and What is Said of Them
+       A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868)
+
+Author: Anonymous
+
+Commentator: Lucia Gilbert Calhoun
+
+Release Date: October 18, 2008 [EBook #26948]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN WOMEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Lisa Reigel, and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net (This file was made using scans of
+public domain works from the University of Michigan Digital
+Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             MODERN WOMEN
+
+                                 AND
+
+                         WHAT IS SAID OF THEM
+
+
+                             A REPRINT OF
+
+                     A SERIES OF ARTICLES IN THE
+
+                           SATURDAY REVIEW
+
+
+                       WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
+
+                      MRS. LUCIA GILBERT CALHOUN
+
+
+                               NEW YORK
+                     _J. S. REDFIELD, PUBLISHER_
+                          140 FULTON STREET
+                                 1868
+
+
+
+
+      Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
+
+                           J. S. REDFIELD,
+
+In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the
+                    Eastern District of New York.
+
+
+                          EDWARD O. JENKINS,
+                      _PRINTER AND STEREOTYPER_,
+                       No. 20 North William St.
+
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT.
+
+
+The following papers on Woman were originally published in the columns
+of the London SATURDAY REVIEW. Some of them have already been reprinted
+in the literary and daily journals of this country, and they have
+excited no little discussion and comment among readers of both sexes.
+
+Whether agreeing or not with the writer, it is impossible not to concede
+the eminent ability with which the various subjects are handled. No
+series of essays has appeared in the English language for many years
+which has been so extensively reprinted and so generally read.
+
+The authorship of these papers has been attributed to different
+individuals, male and female; but it is more than probable that the
+writers whose names have been mentioned in this connection are precisely
+those who have had nothing whatever to do with them. It is not unlikely
+that, in due time, the publisher of this volume may be in possession of
+authentic information on this head, and that the name of the author may
+then appear on the title-page.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+           INTRODUCTION,                                 5
+
+       I.--THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD,                      25
+
+      II.--FOOLISH VIRGINS,                             34
+
+     III.--LITTLE WOMEN,                                43
+
+      IV.--PINCHBECK,                                   52
+
+       V.--PUSHING WOMEN,                               61
+
+      VI.--FEMININE AFFECTATIONS,                       73
+
+     VII.--IDEAL WOMEN,                                 83
+
+    VIII.--WOMAN AND THE WORLD,                         93
+
+      IX.--UNEQUAL MARRIAGES,                          101
+
+       X.--HUSBAND-HUNTING,                            109
+
+      XI.--PERILS OF "PAYING ATTENTION,"               118
+
+     XII.--WOMEN'S HEROINES,                           128
+
+    XIII.--INTERFERENCE,                               138
+
+     XIV.--PLAIN GIRLS,                                148
+
+      XV.--A WORD FOR FEMALE VANITY,                   157
+
+     XVI.--THE ABUSE OF MATCH-MAKING,                  167
+
+    XVII.--FEMININE INFLUENCE,                         177
+
+   XVIII.--PIGEONS,                                    188
+
+     XIX.--AMBITIOUS WIVES,                            198
+
+      XX.--PLATONIC WOMAN,                             206
+
+     XXI.--MAN AND HIS MASTER,                         215
+
+    XXII.--THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER,                   225
+
+   XXIII.--ENGAGEMENTS,                                235
+
+    XXIV.--WOMAN IN ORDERS,                            243
+
+     XXV.--WOMAN AND HER CRITICS,                      253
+
+    XXVI.--MISTRESS AND MAID, ON DRESS AND UNDRESS,    262
+
+   XXVII.--ÆSTHETIC WOMAN,                             272
+
+  XXVIII.--WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?                       281
+
+    XXIX.--PAPAL WOMAN,                                291
+
+     XXX.--MODERN MOTHERS,                             300
+
+    XXXI.--PRIESTHOOD OF WOMAN,                        309
+
+   XXXII.--THE FUTURE OF WOMAN,                        319
+
+  XXXIII.--COSTUME AND ITS MORALS,                     329
+
+   XXXIV.--THE FADING FLOWER,                          339
+
+    XXXV.--LA FEMME PASSÉE,                            347
+
+   XXXVI.--PRETTY PREACHERS,                           355
+
+  XXXVII.--SPOILT WOMEN,                               364
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+The "Woman Question" will not be put to silence. It demands an answer of
+Western legislators. It besets college faculties. It pursues veteran
+politicians to the fastnesses of so-called National Conventions. Under
+the sacred sounding-boards of New England pulpits has its voice been
+heard, and its unexpected ally, the London SATURDAY REVIEW, introduces
+it to the good society of English drawing-rooms. That this introduction
+comes in the form of diatribe and denunciation is a matter of the least
+moment. Judgment will finally rest, not on the conclusions of the
+special pleader, but on the strength of the case of the accused.
+
+Something, clearly, is wrong with fashionable women. They accept the
+thinnest gilt, the poorest pinchbeck, for gold. They care more for a
+dreary social pre-eminence than for home and children. They find in
+extravagance of living and a vulgar costliness of dress their only
+expression of a vague desire for the beauty and elegance of life. Is
+it, therefore, to be inferred that the race of noble women is dying out?
+St. Paul was hardly less severe than the London SATURDAY, if less
+explicit, in his condemnation of the fashionable women of his day, yet
+we look upon that day as heroic. Certainly neither London nor New York
+can rival the luxury of a rich Roman matron, yet it was not the luxury
+of her women which destroyed the empire, and Brutus's Portia was quite
+as truly a representative woman as the superb Messalina. John Knox
+thought that things were as bad as they could possibly be when he
+thundered at vice in high places; and if there had been a John Knox in
+the court of Charles the Second, he would have sighed for a return of
+the innocent days of his great-grandfather.
+
+On the whole, that hope which springs eternal suggests that the
+fashionable women of the reign of Victoria, and of our seventeenth
+President, are not essentially more discouraging than all the
+generations of the thoughtless fair who danced idly down forgotten
+pasts. Nay, we may even hope that they are better. If they will not
+actually think, yet the fatal contagion of the newspaper and the modern
+novel communicates to them an intellectual irritation which might
+almost stand for a mental process. If they have not ideas, they have
+notions of things, and however inexact and absurd these may be, they are
+better than emptiness.
+
+"Worse, decidedly worse," says our implacable critic; "when women were
+content with looking pretty before marriage, and with good housekeeping
+after, they were uninteresting certainly, but they were respectable. Now
+they dabble in all things; are weakly æsthetic, weakly scientific,
+weakly controversial, and wholly prosy, and contemptible." Dabbling is
+pitiful, certainly, and weakness has few allies, but let us do justice
+even to the weak dabblers. Æsthetic, or scientific, or controversial
+training has but recently been made possible to women. Their previous
+range of study had been very narrow. It is not strange that the least
+attainments should seem to them very profound and satisfactory, and the
+most manifest deductions pass for original conclusions. It is natural
+that their undisciplined faculties should grapple feebly with
+difficulties, and be quite unequal to argument. This is no reason for
+flinging the baffling volumes at their heads; better so educate their
+heads that the volumes shall no longer baffle.
+
+Scolded because they have not an idea beyond dress, laughed at when
+they try to think of something better, a word may certainly be said for
+the good temper and the patience even of the fashionable women, who
+would be wiser if they could.
+
+The fault is, we are assured, that these women take up books only to
+enhance their matrimonial value, and with no thought of the worth of
+study. Let us be just. What business or the professions are to most men,
+marriage is to most women. Men qualify themselves, if they can, for that
+competitive examination which is always going on, and which insures
+clients to the best lawyers, and business to the best merchant, and
+parishes to the best preacher. Women, compelled to wait at home for the
+wooing which changes their destiny, qualify themselves with attractions
+for that competitive examination which all marriageable young women feel
+that they undergo from every marriageable young man. Each has an eye to
+business. One does not feel that the motive in the one case is any
+higher than in the other.
+
+It is very bad, of course, that marriage should be a matter of business.
+It is, perhaps, the most tragic of all perversions. But, evidently, the
+evil is not to be abated by jeremiads, nor by lectures to young women,
+no, nor even by brilliant editorials. So long as women believe that
+inglorious ease is better than work, so long as they are taught that
+they are born to be the gentle dependents of a stronger being, so long
+as courage and capacity are held to be "strong-minded," so long as the
+range of employments for women is narrow, and the standard of wages
+lower than men's, so long they will seek in marriage a home, a larger
+liberty of action, an establishment, a servant who shall supply them
+with money and insure them ease without effort of their own.
+
+Men take the business opening which seems most congenial and most
+profitable. Women do the same thing, and their choice naturally falls
+upon marriage as altogether the most promising speculation of their very
+small list. The remedy seems to be to give women as thorough mental
+training as men receive, to make their training tend as directly to the
+business of earning their bread and their pretty feminine adornments,
+and for the same work to pay them the same wages. If it be objected that
+fashionable women will not work, let it be answered that work itself
+would be fashionable if it were held to be a dignity, and not a
+drudgery, and that the really fine and thoughtful leaders of society
+could easily establish the new order of things. In an aristocratic
+country, where labor is the badge of caste, it would be difficult to
+make it honorable. In a democracy like our own, it is the most
+contemptible snobbishness which frowns on the honest earning of money.
+
+The accusation of prodigal and senseless expenditure in dress must stand
+unrefuted. Sums which would adorn our cities with pleasure-gardens, with
+libraries, with galleries of art, are spent on perishable gauds that
+have not even beauty to commend them. Charities might be founded, lives
+be enriched with travel, all lands laid under contribution with the
+money that every year flows into Stewart's drawers, and the strong-boxes
+of fashionable dress-makers. But the jewelled prodigals who spend it are
+not more selfish, perhaps, than we plain folks who carp.
+
+Again, it is a mistake. They have the money. They mean to secure all the
+pleasure that money can buy. They have that feminine sensuousness which
+delights in color, and odor, and richness of fabric. Their sense of
+beauty is untaught. A little lower in the scale of civilization they
+would pierce their noses, and dye their finger-nails, and wear strings
+of glass beads. A little higher, they would sacrifice the splendid shawl
+to a rare marble, banish the chromo-lithograph, and turn the solitaire
+ear-drops into a lovely picture, and build a conservatory with the price
+of lace flounces. A little higher still, and we might have model
+lodging-houses, and foundling hospitals, and music in the squares given
+us by kindly women who had saved the money from milliner, and jeweller,
+and silk-mercer.
+
+But standing just where they are, clothes seem to these same undeveloped
+women the best things money can buy; and a lack of culture confuses them
+as to the attributes of clothes. Just now our fashionable women are
+bitterly reprehended for copying the dress of the "Anonymas," who
+establish the very pronounced fashions of Paris. Half of them do not
+know what model they have taken. The other half accept the various and
+tasteless costumes, not because they are devised by "Anonyma," but
+because they are striking. There is something in the commonplaceness of
+fashionable life which smothers all originality of thought, of action,
+even of device in costume; and the women who give most time and money to
+dress, to whom one would look for perfection in that mixed art, are
+almost invariably the women who are exact reproductions of their
+neighbors in this regard, as in their house-furnishing, their equipages,
+and their manners.
+
+Upon these splendidly monotonous fine ladies flashes the vision of
+"Anonyma," with her meretricious beauty, and her daring toilettes.
+Amenable to no social Mrs. Grundy, her love of dress develops itself in
+bold contrasts of color, in bizarre and showy ornaments, in picturesque,
+and often in grotesque and tawdry effects. But whatever the details, the
+whole is always striking. Our women longing for the new, accept the
+absurd; desiring the picturesque, take the bizarre, and eager for the
+elegant, content themselves with the costly.
+
+Nor does the fact that our present fashionable evening costume is
+immodest, of necessity impugn the modesty of the women who wear it. That
+they are wanting in fineness of perception must be admitted. But women
+of fashion accept without question the dictum of their modistes. La
+Belle Hamilton, the famous beauty of the reign of Charles the Second, so
+delicately modest and pure that she passed unbreathed upon by scandal
+through that most dissolute court, is painted in a costume that the
+fastest of New York belles would not venture to wear at the most
+fashionable of receptions. The gracious and self-sacrificing and womanly
+women of our revolution, wore dresses cut lower than those of their
+great-grand-daughters, as any portrait-gallery will show. The dress is
+indefensible, but let us not be too ready to condemn the wearer for
+worse sins than thoughtlessness and vanity.
+
+One doubts if there is a single Becky Sharp the less, (poor Becky!)
+since Thackeray gave such terrible immortality to their great prototype.
+The satirist is not the reformer. The satirized do not see themselves in
+the exaggerated type. They go their way, and thank God that they are not
+as these others. The critic of the London SATURDAY, beginning, perhaps,
+with the intention of telling sad and sober truth about a class, has
+ended with a list of the follies and faults of individuals, and these
+are set down with the keen and unconvincing clearness of the satirist.
+
+It is a good thing indeed, that any aspect of the "woman question"
+should claim place, week after week, in a leading English journal. It is
+a good thing that it has been thought wise to reprint these essays here.
+All this talk about the wrong ways of women suggests that there is a
+right way, as yet very much involved in the dust of discussion and the
+fogs of speculation. All these accusations against her folly imply a
+proportionate tribute to her possible wisdom, if once she can get a fair
+chance to be wise.
+
+What the reviewer urges against the effect of fashionable life on the
+intellect, cannot be gainsayed. But in America, at least, the injury to
+the young men is greater apparently than to the young women. At any
+evening party in New York, at any "Hop" in Newport or Saratoga, the
+faces of the men are of a lower type, their talk is more inane, their
+manners are more vulgar. The girls are empty enough, heaven knows! but
+they seem capable of better things, most of them. And they are not so
+wholly spoiled in character. I have found very fashionable girls capable
+of large sacrifices for love, or kindred, or obedience to some divine
+voice. This proves that they have only to be taught that there is
+something better than being very fashionable, to take it thankfully. But
+the men seemed sordid and selfish, and grown worldly-wise before their
+time.
+
+Yet it might make us both more just and more generous to remember that
+during our time of peril as a nation, these very ranks of purposeless
+men furnished us soldiers and money, and a cheerful faith in the cause,
+just as these very legions of idle women gave us workers and nurses.
+
+There is this cheer for American readers of these pages: What we have
+been told is our national sin of extravagance, the too pronounced
+character of our social life, the frivolity and ignorance of our women,
+the lack of a universal and high-toned society, we find not to be inborn
+defects peculiar to our system of government, and hopeless of change,
+but vices, also, of an old and cultivated and dignified nation.
+
+A cheerful optimist may well believe that we are in a transition state;
+that women, impatient of the old life which was without thought and
+culture and motive, in the blind struggle to something better have
+fallen for the time on something worse; that with the movement of the
+age toward mutual helpfulness, man to man, women will move not less
+steadily, if more slowly, and come gradually into truer relations with
+each other and with men. It will not hurt woman to be criticised. She
+has too long been assured of her angelhood, and denied her womanhood. It
+will not help her very greatly to be criticised as if she were being
+tomahawked. If they who come to scoff would but remain to teach! There
+has been much ungentle judgment of men by women, of women by men.
+Thoreau said, "Man is continually saying to Woman, 'Why are you not more
+wise?' Woman is continually saying to Man, 'Why are you not more
+loving?' Unless each is both wise and loving there can be no real
+growth."
+
+                                                         L. G. C.
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+MODERN WOMEN.
+
+
+
+
+THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD.
+
+
+Time was when the stereotyped phrase, "a fair young English girl," meant
+the ideal of womanhood; to us, at least, of home birth and breeding. It
+meant a creature generous, capable, and modest; something franker than a
+Frenchwoman, more to be trusted than an Italian, as brave as an
+American, but more refined, as domestic as a German and more graceful.
+It meant a girl who could be trusted alone if need be, because of the
+innate purity and dignity of her nature, but who was neither bold in
+bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be
+her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival; one who would
+consider their interests identical, and not hold him as just so much
+fair game for spoil; who would make his house his true home and place of
+rest, not a mere passage-place for vanity and ostentation to go through;
+a tender mother, an industrious house-keeper, a judicious mistress. We
+prided ourselves as a nation on our women. We thought we had the pick
+of creation in this fair young English girl of ours, and envied no other
+men their own.
+
+We admired the languid grace and subtle fire of the South; the docility
+and affectionateness of the East seemed to us sweet and simple and
+restful; the vivacious sparkle of the trim and sprightly Parisienne was
+a pleasant little excitement when we met with it in its own domain; but
+our allegiance never wandered from our brown-haired girls at home, and
+our hearts were less vagrant than our fancies. This was in the old time,
+and when English girls were content to be what God and nature had made
+them. Of late years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the
+world a race of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal as if we
+had created another nation altogether. The girl of the period, and the
+fair young English girl of the past, have nothing in common save
+ancestry and their mother-tongue: and even of this last the modern
+version makes almost a new language through the copious additions it has
+received from the current slang of the day.
+
+The girl of the period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her
+face, as the first articles of her personal religion; whose sole idea of
+life is plenty of fun and luxury; and whose dress is the object of such
+thought and intellect as she possesses. Her main endeavor in this is to
+outvie her neighbors in the extravagance of fashion. No matter whether,
+as in the time of crinolines, she sacrificed decency, or, as now in the
+time of trains, she sacrifices cleanliness; no matter either, whether
+she makes herself a nuisance and an inconvenience to every one she
+meets.
+
+The girl of the period has done away with such moral muffishness as
+consideration for others, or regard for counsel and rebuke. It was all
+very well in old-fashioned times, when fathers and mothers had some
+authority and were treated with respect, to be tutored and made to obey,
+but she is far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in mid-career by
+these slow old morals; and as she dresses to please herself, she does
+not care if she displeases every one else. Nothing is too extraordinary
+and nothing too exaggerated for her vitiated taste; and things which in
+themselves would be useful reforms if let alone become monstrosities
+worse than those which they have displaced so soon as she begins to
+manipulate and improve. If a sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the
+mud, she raises hers midway to her knee. If the absurd structure of wire
+and buckram, once called a bonnet, is modified to something that shall
+protect the wearer's face without putting out the eyes of her companion,
+she cuts hers down to four straws and a rosebud, or a tag of lace and a
+bunch of glass beads.
+
+If there is a reaction against an excess of Rowland's Macassar, and hair
+shiny and sticky with grease is thought less nice than if left clean and
+healthy crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks hers out on end like
+certain savages in Africa, or lets it wander down her back like Madge
+Wildfire's, and thinks herself all the more beautiful the nearer she
+approaches in look to a maniac or a negress. With purity of taste she
+has lost also that far more precious purity and delicacy of perception
+which sometimes mean more than appears on the surface. What the
+_demi-monde_ does in its frantic efforts to excite attention, she also
+does in imitation. If some fashionable _dévergondée en evidence_ is
+reported to have come out with her dress below her shoulder-blades, and
+a gold strap for all the sleeve thought necessary, the girl of the
+period follows suit next day; and then wonders that men sometimes
+mistake her for her prototype, or that mothers of girls not quite so far
+gone as herself refuse her as a companion for their daughters. She has
+blunted the fine edges of feeling so much that she cannot understand why
+she should be condemned for an imitation of form which does not include
+imitation of fact; she cannot be made to see that modesty of appearance
+and virtue ought to be inseparable, and that no good girl can afford to
+appear bad, under penalty of receiving the contempt awarded to the bad.
+
+This imitation of the _demi-monde_ in dress leads to something in manner
+and feeling, not quite so pronounced, perhaps, but far too like to be
+honorable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to slang,
+bold talk, and fastness; to the love of pleasure and indifference to
+duty; to the desire of money before either love or happiness; to
+uselessness at home, dissatisfaction with the monotony of ordinary life,
+and horror of all useful work; in a word, to the worst forms of luxury
+and selfishness, to the most fatal effects arising from want of high
+principle and absence of tender feeling.
+
+The girl of the period envies the queens of the _demi-monde_ far more
+than she abhors them. She sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously
+appointed, and she knows them to be flattered, fêted, and courted with a
+certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only the admiration
+while she ignores the disdain. They have all for which her soul is
+hungering, and she never stops to reflect at what a price they have
+bought their gains, and what fearful moral penalties they pay for their
+sensuous pleasures. She sees only the coarse gilding on the base token,
+and shuts her eyes to the hideous figure in the midst, and the foul
+legend written around the edge.
+
+It is this envy of the pleasures, and indifference to the sins, of these
+women of the _demi-monde_ which is doing such infinite mischief to the
+modern girl. They brush too closely by each other, if not in actual
+deeds, yet in aims and feelings; for the luxury which is bought by vice
+with the one is the thing of all in life most passionately desired by
+the other, though she is not yet prepared to pay quite the same price.
+Unfortunately, she has already paid too much, all, indeed, that once
+gave her distinctive national character. No one can say of the modern
+English girl that she is tender, loving, retiring, or domestic. The old
+fault so often found by keen-sighted Frenchwomen, that, she was so
+fatally _romanesque_, so prone to sacrifice appearances and social
+advantages for love, will never be set down to the girl of the period.
+Love, indeed, is the last thing she thinks of, and the least of the
+dangers besetting her. Love in a cottage, that seductive dream which
+used to vex the heart and disturb the calculations of prudent mothers,
+is now a myth of past ages. The legal barter of herself for so much
+money, representing so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure; that is
+her idea of marriage; the only idea worth entertaining.
+
+For all seriousness of thought respecting the duties or the consequences
+of marriage, she has not a trace. If children come, they find but a
+stepmother's cold welcome from her; and if her husband thinks that he
+has married anything that is to belong to him--a _tacens et placens
+uxor_ pledged to make him happy--the sooner he wakes from his
+hallucination and understands that he has simply married some one who
+will condescend to spend his money on herself, and who will shelter her
+indiscretions behind the shield of his name, the less severe will be his
+disappointment. She has married his house, his carriage, his balance at
+the banker's, his title; and he himself is just the inevitable condition
+clogging the wheels of her fortune; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated
+with more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the
+old-fashioned sort, not girls of the period _pur sang_, that marry for
+love, or put the husband before the banker.
+
+But she does not marry easily. Men are afraid of her; and with reason.
+They may amuse themselves with her for an evening, but they do not take
+her readily for life. Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a
+poor copy of the real thing; and the real thing is far more amusing than
+the copy, because it is real. Men can get that whenever they like; and
+when they go into their mother's drawing-rooms, to see their sisters and
+their sisters' friends, they want something of quite different flavor.
+_Toujours perdrix_ is bad providing all the world over; but a continual
+weak imitation of _toujours perdrix_ is worse. If we must have only one
+kind of thing, let us have it genuine; and the queens of St. John's Wood
+in their unblushing honesty, rather than their imitators and
+make-believes in Bayswater and Belgravia. For, at whatever cost of
+shocked self-love or pained modesty it may be, it cannot be too plainly
+told to the modern English girl that the net result of her present
+manner of life is to assimilate her as nearly as possible to a class of
+women whom we must not call by their proper--or improper--name. And we
+are willing to believe that she has still some modesty of soul left
+hidden under all this effrontery of fashion, and that, if she could be
+made to see herself as she appears to the eyes of men, she would mend
+her ways before too late.
+
+It is terribly significant of the present state of things when men are
+free to write as they do of the women of their own nation. Every word of
+censure flung against them is two-edged, and wounds those who condemn as
+much as those who are condemned; for surely it need hardly be said that
+men hold nothing so dear as the honor of their women, and that no one
+living would willingly lower the repute of his mother or his sisters. It
+is only when these have placed themselves beyond the pale of masculine
+respect that such things could be written as are written now; when they
+become again what they were once they will gather round them the love
+and homage and chivalrous devotion which were then an Englishwoman's
+natural inheritance. The marvel, in the present fashion of life among
+women, is how it holds its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men.
+It used to be an old-time notion that the sexes were made for each
+other, and that it was only natural for them to please each other, and
+to set themselves out for that end. But the girl of the period does not
+please men. She pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how
+little she does that, the class of women she has taken as her models of
+itself testifies.
+
+All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and genuine girl
+of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties,
+to this loud and rampant modernization, with her false red hair and
+painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and by preference
+leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. She thinks she is piquant
+and exciting when she thus makes herself the bad copy of a worse
+original; and she will not see that though men laugh with her they do
+not respect her, though they flirt with her they do not marry her; she
+will not believe that she is not the kind of thing they want, and that
+she is acting against nature and her own interests when she disregards
+their advice and offends their taste. We do not see how she makes out
+her account, viewing her life from any side; but all we can do is to
+wait patiently until the national madness has passed, and our women have
+come back again to the old English ideal, once the most beautiful, the
+most modest, the most essentially womanly in the world.
+
+
+
+
+FOOLISH VIRGINS.
+
+
+The heroines of the London season--the fillies, we mean, who have been
+entered for the great matrimonial stakes, and have been mentioned in the
+betting--have by this time exchanged the fast pleasures of the town for
+the vapid pastimes of the country. We do not of course concern ourselves
+with those poor simple girls who only repeat the lives and morals of
+old-fashioned English homes, and who are too respectable and too modest
+to be pointed at as the girls of the season. We speak of the fast
+sisterhood only. After three months of egregious dissipation they enter
+duly upon the next stage of their regular yearly alternations. Three
+months of headlong folly are succeeded by three months of deadly
+_ennui_. Action and reaction are always equal. The pains and weariness
+of moral crapulousness arise in nice proportion to the passion of the
+debauch. It is a dismal hour when we look on the withered leaves of last
+night's garland.
+
+The lovely and unlovely beings who are now living depressed days far
+from Belgravia and the Row have, it is true, but joyless orgies to look
+back upon. Their pleasures gave but a pinchbeck joviality after all,
+were but a thin lacker spread over mercenary cares and heart-aching
+jealousies--not the jealousies of passion, but the nipping vulgar
+vexation with which a shopkeeper trembles lest a customer should go to
+his rival over the way. Still there was excitement--the excitement of
+outdoing a rival in shamelessness of apparel, in reckless abandonment of
+manner, in the unblushing tolerance of impudent speech, in all the other
+elements of ignoble casino-emulation. Above all, there was the tickling
+excitement of knowing that all this was in some sort clandestine; that
+ostensibly, and on the surface, things looked as if they were all
+exhibiting human nature at its stateliest, most dignified, and most
+refined pitch. The consciousness that the thin surface only conceals
+some of the worst elements of character in full force and activity must
+give a pleasantly stinging sensation to an acutely cynical woman.
+However, this is all over for a time.
+
+For a time the half-dressed young Mænads of the season will be found
+clothed and in their right minds. And what sort of a right mind is it?
+We know the kind of preparation which they have had for the business of
+the season--for flirting, husband-hunting, waltzing, dressing so as to
+escape the regulations of the police, and the rest. For this their
+training has been perfect. But wise men agree that education should
+comprehend training for all the parts of life equally--for pleasure not
+less than for business, for hours of relaxation as well as for hours of
+strain and pressure, for leisure just as much as for active occupation.
+Education is supposed to arm us at every point. Nobody in this world was
+ever perfectly educated. Everybody has at least one side on which he is
+weak--one quarter where temptations are either not irresistible, or else
+are not recognised as alluring to what is wrong. But we all know that
+training, though never perfect, can make the difference between a
+decently right and happy life and a bad, corrupt half-life or no life.
+What does training do for the nimble-footed young beauties of the London
+ball-room? It makes them nimble-footed, we admit. And what else?
+
+The root-idea of the training of girls of the uppermost class in this
+country is perhaps the most absolutely shameless that ever existed
+anywhere out of Circassia or Georgia. It puts clean out of sight the
+notion that women are rational beings as well as animals, or that they
+are destined to be the companions of men who are, or ought to be, also
+something more than animals. It takes the mind into account only as an
+occasionally useful accident of body. The mind ought to be developed a
+little, and in such a way as to make the body more piquant and
+attractive. Like the candle inside a Chinese lantern, it may serve to
+light up and show to advantage the pretty devices outside. But the
+outside is the important thing, and the inside only incidental.
+Insipidity of mind is perhaps a trifle objectionable, because there are
+a few young men of property who dislike insipidity, and who therefore
+might be lost from the toils in consequence. It is a crotchet and an
+eccentricity in a man to desire a wife with a bright mind, but since
+there are such persons, it is just as well to pay a slight attention to
+the mind in odd moments when one is not engaged upon the more urgent
+business of the body. You don't know what may happen, and it is possible
+that the most eligible _parti_ of a season may dislike the idea of
+taking a female idiot to wife. Still it would be absurd to change the
+entire system of up-bringing for our girls merely because here and there
+a man has a distaste for a fool.
+
+The majority of men are incapable of gauging power of intellect and
+fineness of character. But the veriest blockhead and simpleton who ever
+lounged in a doorway or lisped in Pall Mall can tell a fine woman when
+he sees her, and is probably able to find pleasure and hope in the
+spectacle. It is these blockheads and simpletons who thus set the mode.
+They fix the standard of fashionable female education. Education, or the
+astounding modern conception of it, means preparation of girls for the
+marriage market. If a girl does not get well married, it were better for
+her and for her mother also if she had never been born, or had been cast
+with a millstone round her neck into the sea. Whom she marries--whether
+a man old enough to be her father, whether a pattern of imbecility,
+whether a man of a notoriously debauched character--this matters not a
+jot. Only let him have money. This being the conception of marriage, and
+marriage being the aim of all sagacious up-bringing, as most men
+unhappily are more surely taken on their animal than on their rational
+side, it is perfectly natural that you should strive to bring up a
+worthy family of attractive young animals. And let us pause upon this.
+
+If the idea which, even at its best, would be so deplorably imperfect,
+were rationally carried out, still it would not be so absolutely
+pestilent and debasing as it is. Physical education, rightly practiced,
+is a fine and indispensable process in right living. If the system had
+for its end the rearing of really robust and healthy creatures, it would
+mean something. On the contrary, however, anybody who makes a tour
+through fashionable rooms in the season may see that, in a vast quantity
+of cases, the heroines of the night are just as sorrily off in bodily
+stamina as they are for intellectual ideas and interests. Here we again
+encounter the fundamental blunder, that it is only the outside about
+which we need concern ourselves. Let a woman be well dressed (or
+judiciously undressed), have bright eyes, a whitish skin, rounded
+outlines, and that suffices. All this a wise English mother will
+certainly secure, just as a wise Chinese woman will take care to have
+tiny feet, plucked eyebrows, and black finger-nails.
+
+If you go into a nursery you will see the process already at work. The
+little girl, who would fain exercise her young limbs by manifold rude
+sprawlings and rushing hither and thither, and single combats with her
+brothers, is tricked out in ribbons and gay frocks, and bid sit still in
+solemn decorum. With every year of her growth this principle of
+attention to outside trickeries and fineries is more rigidly pursued.
+Less and less every year are the nerves and muscles, the restless
+activities of arms and legs, exercised and made to purvey new vigor to
+the life. The blood is allowed to grow stagnant. The life of the woman,
+even as mere animal, becomes poor and morbid and artificial. By dint of
+much attention and many devices, the outside of the body is maintained
+comely in the eyes of people whose notions of comeliness are thoroughly
+artificial and sophisticated. But how can there be any health with high
+eating, little exercise, above all, with the mind left absolutely vacant
+of all interests? The Belgravian mother does not even understand the
+miserable trade she has chosen. She is as poor a physical trainer as she
+is poor morally and intellectually.
+
+The truth is that in a human being, even from the physical point of
+view, it is rather a dangerous thing to ignore the intellect and the
+emotions. Nature resents being ignored. If you do not cultivate her, she
+will assuredly avenge herself. If you do not get wheat out of your piece
+of ground, she will abundantly give you tares. And there can be no other
+rule expressly invented for the benefit of fashionable young women.
+Their moral nature, if nobody ever taught them to keep an eager eye upon
+it, is soon overgrown, either with flaunting poison plants, or at best
+with dull gray moss. The parent dreams that the daughter's mind is all
+swept and garnished. Lo, there are seven or any other number of devils
+that have entered in and taken possession, more or less permanently. The
+human creature who has never been taught to take an interest in what is
+right and wholesome will, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, take an
+interest in what is wrong and unwholesome. You cannot keep minds in a
+state of vacuum. A girl, like anybody else, will obey the bent of the
+character which has been given either by the education of design or the
+more usual education of mere accidental experience. Everything depends,
+in the ordinary course of things, upon the general view of the aims and
+objects of life which you succeed, deliberately or by hazard, in
+creating.
+
+A girl is not taught that marriage has grave, moral and rational
+purposes, itself being no more than a means. On the contrary, it is
+always figured in her eyes as an end, and as an end scarcely at all
+connected with a moral and rational companionship. It is, she fancies,
+the gate to some sort of paradise whose mysterious joys are not to be
+analysed. She forgets that there are no such swift-coming spontaneous
+paradises in this world, where the future can never be anything more
+than the child of the present, indelibly stamped with every feature and
+line of its parent. This castle-building, however, is harmless. If it
+does not strengthen, still it does not absolutely impoverish or corrupt,
+characters. Of some castle-building one cannot say so much. Character
+_is_ assuredly corrupted by avaricious dreams of marriage as a road to
+material opulence and luxury. There is, indeed, no end to the depraved
+broodings which may come to an empty and undirected mind. If the
+emotions and the intellect are not tended and trained, they will run to
+an evil and evil-propagating seed. Rooted and incurable frivolty is the
+best that can come of it; corruption is the worst.
+
+People madly suppose that going to church, or giving an occasional
+blanket to a sick old woman, will suffice to implant a worthy conception
+of the aims of life. At this moment, some mothers are, perhaps,
+believing that the dull virtue of the country will in a few days redress
+the balance which had been too much discomposed by the rush and whirl of
+the town. As if one strong set of silly interests and emotions could be
+effaced at will by simple change of scene, without substitution of new
+interests and emotions. Excess of frivolous excitement is not repaired
+or undone by excess of mere blankness and nothingness. The dreariness of
+the virtue of the _villeggiatura_ is as noxious as the whirl of the
+mercenary and little virtuous period of the season. Teach young women
+from their childhood upwards that marriage is their single career, and
+it is inevitable that they should look upon every hour which is not
+spent in promoting this sublime end and aim as so much subtracted from
+life. Penetrated with unwholesome excitement in one part of their
+existence, they are penetrated with killing _ennui_ in the next.
+
+If mothers would only add to their account of marriage as the end of a
+woman's existence--which may be right or it may not--a definition of
+marriage as an association with a reasonable and reflective being, they
+would speedily effect a revolution in the present miserable system. To
+the business of finding a husband a young lady would then add the not
+less important business of making herself a rational person, instead of
+a more or less tastefully decorated doll with a passion for a great
+deal of money. She might awaken to the fact, which would at first
+startle her very much no doubt, that there is a great portion of a
+universe outside her own circle and her own mind. This simple discovery
+would of itself effect a revolution that might transform her from being
+an insipid idiot into a tolerably rational being. As it is, the universe
+to her is only a collection of rich bachelors in search of wives, and of
+odious rivals who are contending with her for one or more of these too
+wary prizes. All high social aims, fine broad humanizing ways of
+surveying life, are unknown to her, or else appear in her eyes as the
+worship of Mumbo Jumbo appears in the eyes of the philosopher. She
+thinks of nothing except her private affairs. She is indifferent to
+politics, to literature--in a word, to anything that requires thought.
+She reads novels of a kind, because novels are all about love, and love
+had once something to do with marriage, her own peculiar and absorbing
+business. Beyond this her mind does not stir. Any more positively gross
+state one cannot imagine. There are women who are by accident more
+degraded physically. _Mutatis mutandis_, there are none more degraded,
+morally and intellectually, than those whose minds are constantly bent
+upon marriage at any cost, and with anybody, however decrepit, however
+silly, and however evil, who can make a settlement.
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE WOMEN.
+
+
+The conventional idea of a brave, an energetic, or a supremely criminal
+woman is a tall, dark-haired, large-armed virago, who might pass as the
+younger brother of her husband, and about whom nature seemed to have
+hesitated before determining whether to make her a man or a woman--a
+kind of debatable land, in fact, between the two sexes, and almost as
+much one as the other. Helen Macgregor, Lady Macbeth, Catharine de'
+Medici, Mrs. Manning, and the old-fashioned murderesses in novels, are
+all of the muscular, black-brigand type, with more or less of regal
+grace superadded according to circumstances; and it would be thought
+nothing but a puerile fancy to suppose the contrary of those whose
+personal description is not already known. Crime, indeed, especially in
+art and fiction, has generally been painted in very nice proportion to
+the number of cubic inches embodied, and the depth of color employed;
+though we are bound to add that the public favor runs towards muscular
+heroines almost as much as towards muscular murderesses, which to a
+certain extent redresses the overweighted balance.
+
+Our later novelists, however, have altered the whole setting of the
+palette. Instead of five foot ten of black and brown, they have gone in
+for four foot nothing of pink and yellow; instead of tumbled masses of
+raven hair, they have shining coils of purest gold; instead of hollow
+caverns whence flash unfathomable eyes eloquent of every damnable
+passion, they have limpid lakes of heavenly blue; and their worst
+sinners are in all respects fashioned as much after the outward
+semblance of the ideal saint as can well be managed. The original notion
+was a very good one, and the revolution did not come before it was
+wanted; but it has been a little overdone of late, and we are threatened
+with as great a surfeit of small-limbed, yellow-headed criminals as we
+have had of the man-like black. One gets weary of the most perfect model
+in time, if too constantly repeated; as now, when we have all begun to
+feel that the resources of the angel's face and demon's soul have been
+more heavily drawn on than is quite fair, and that, given "heavy braids
+of golden hair," "bewildering blue eyes," "a small lithe frame," "a
+special delicacy of feet and hands," and we are booked for the
+companionship, through three volumes, of a young person to whom
+Messalina or Lucretia Borgia would be a mere novice.
+
+And yet there is a physiological truth in this association of energy
+with smallness; perhaps, also, with a certain tint of yellow hair,
+which, with a dash of red through it, is decidedly suggestive of nervous
+force. Suggestiveness, indeed, does not go very far in an argument; but
+the frequent connection of energy and smallness in women is a thing
+which all may verify in their own circles. In daily life, who is the
+really formidable woman to encounter?--the black-browed,
+broad-shouldered giantess, with arms almost as big in the girth as a
+man's? or the pert, smart, trim little female, with no more biceps than
+a ladybird, and of just about equal strength with a sparrow? Nine times
+out of ten, the giantess with the heavy shoulders and broad black
+eyebrows is a timid, feeble-minded, good tempered person, incapable of
+anything harsher than a mild remonstrance with her maid, or a gentle
+chastisement of her children. Nine times out of ten her husband has her
+in hand in the most perfect working order, so that she would swear the
+moon shone at midday if it were his pleasure that she should make a fool
+of herself in that direction. One of the most obedient and indolent of
+earth's daughters, she gives no trouble to any one, save the trouble of
+rousing, exciting, and setting her agoing; while, as for the conception
+or execution of any naughty piece of self-assertion, she is as utterly
+incapable as if she were a child unborn, and demands nothing better than
+to feel the pressure of the leading-strings, and to know exactly by
+their strain where she is desired to go and what to do.
+
+But the little woman is irrepressible. Too fragile to come into the
+fighting section of humanity, a puny creature whom one blow from a man's
+huge fist could annihilate, absolutely fearless, and insolent with the
+insolence which only those dare show who know that retribution cannot
+follow--what can be done with her? She is afraid of nothing, and to be
+controlled by no one. Sheltered behind her weakness as behind a triple
+shield of brass, the angriest man dare not touch her, while she provokes
+him to a combat in which his hands are tied. She gets her own way in
+everything, and everywhere. At home and abroad she is equally dominant
+and irrepressible, equally free from obedience and from fear. Who breaks
+all the public orders in sights and shows, and, in spite of king,
+kaiser, or policeman X, goes where it is expressly forbidden that she
+shall go? Not the large-boned, muscular woman, whatever her temperament;
+unless, indeed, of the exceptionally haughty type in distinctly inferior
+surroundings, and then she can queen it royally enough, and set
+everything at most lordly defiance. But in general the large-boned woman
+obeys the orders given, because, while near enough to man to be somewhat
+on a par with him, she is still undeniably his inferior. She is too
+strong to shelter herself behind her weakness, yet too weak to assert
+her strength and defy her master on equal grounds. She is like a
+flying-fish, not one thing wholly; and while capable of the
+inconveniences of two lives, is incapable of the privileges of either.
+
+It is not she, for all her well-developed frame and formidable looks,
+but the little woman, who breaks the whole code of laws and defies all
+their defenders--the pert, smart, pretty little woman, who laughs in
+your face, and goes straight ahead if you try to turn her to the right
+hand or to the left, receiving your remonstrances with the most sublime
+indifference, as if you were talking a foreign language she could not
+understand. She carries everything before her, wherever she is. You may
+see her stepping over barriers, slipping under ropes, penetrating to the
+green benches with a red ticket, taking the best places on the platform
+over the heads of their rightful owners, settling herself among the
+reserved seats without an inch of pasteboard to float her. You cannot
+turn her out by main force. British chivalry objects to the public
+laying on of hands in the case of a woman, even when most recalcitrant
+and disobedient; more particularly if a small and fragile-looking woman.
+So that, if it is only a usurpation of places especially masculine, she
+is allowed to retain what she has got amid the grave looks of the
+elders--not really displeased though at a flutter of her ribbons among
+them--and the titters and nudges of the young fellows.
+
+If the battle is between her and another woman, they are left to fight
+it out as they best can, with the odds laid heavily on the little one.
+All this time there is nothing of the tumult of contest about her. Fiery
+and combative as she generally is, when breaking the law in public
+places she is the very soul of serene daring. She shows no heat, no
+passion, no turbulence; she leaves these as extra weapons of defence to
+women who are assailable. For herself she requires no such aids. She
+knows her capabilities and the line of attack that best suits her, and
+she knows, too, that the fewer points of contact she exposes the more
+likely she is to slip into victory; the more she assumes, and the less
+she argues, the slighter the hold she gives her opponents. She is
+either perfectly good-humored or blankly innocent; she either smiles you
+into indulgence or wearies you into compliance by the sheer hopelessness
+of making any impression on her. She may, indeed, if of the very
+vociferous and shrill-tongued kind, burst out into such a noisy
+demonstration that you are glad to escape from her, no matter what
+spoils you leave on her hands; just as a mastiff will slink away from a
+bantam hen all heckled feathers and screeching cackle, and tremendous
+assumption of doing something terrible if he does not look out. Any way
+the little woman is unconquerable; and a tiny fragment of humanity at a
+public show, setting all rules and regulations at defiance, is only
+carrying out in the matter of benches the manner of life to which nature
+has dedicated her from the beginning.
+
+As a rule, the little woman is brave. When the lymphatic giantess falls
+into a faint or goes off into hysterics, she storms, or bustles about,
+or holds on like a game terrier, according to the work on hand. She will
+fly at any man who annoys her, and bears herself as equal to the biggest
+and strongest fellow of her acquaintance. In general she does it all by
+sheer pluck, and is not notorious for subtlety or craft. Had Delilah
+been a little woman she would never have taken the trouble to shear
+Samson's locks. She would have defied him with all his strength
+untouched on his head, and she would have overcome him too. Judith and
+Jael were both probably large women. The work they went about demanded a
+certain strength of muscle and toughness of sinew; but who can say that
+Jezebel was not a small, freckled, auburn-haired Lady Audley of her
+time, full of the concentrated fire, the electric force, the passionate
+recklessness of her type? Regan and Goneril might have been beautiful
+demons of the same pattern; we have the example of the Marchioness de
+Brinvilliers as to what amount of spiritual deviltry can exist with the
+face and manner of an angel direct from heaven; and perhaps Cordelia was
+a tall dark-haired girl, with a pair of brown eyes, and a long nose
+sloping downwards.
+
+Look at modern Jewesses, with their flashing Oriental orbs, their
+night-black tresses, and the dusky shadows of their olive-colored
+complexions; as catalogued properties according to the ideal, they would
+be placed in the list of the natural criminals and lawbreakers, while in
+reality they are about as meek and docile a set of women as are to be
+found within the four seas. Pit a fiery little Welsh woman or a petulant
+Parisienne against the most regal and Junonic amongst them, and let them
+try conclusions in courage, in energy, or in audacity; the Israelitish
+Juno will go down before either of the small Philistines, and the
+fallacy of weight and color in the generation of power will be shown
+without the possibility of denial. Even in those old days of long ago,
+when human characteristics were embodied and deified, we do not find
+that the white-armed, large-limbed Here, though queen by right of
+marriage, lorded it over her sister goddesses by any superior energy or
+force of nature. On the contrary, she was rather a heavy-going person,
+and, unless moved to anger by her husband's numerous infidelities, took
+her Olympian life placidly enough, and once or twice got cheated in a
+way that did no great credit to her sagacity. A little Frenchwoman would
+have sailed around her easily; and as it was, shrewish though she was in
+her speech when provoked, her husband not only deceived but chastised
+her, and reduced her to penitence and obedience as no little woman would
+have suffered herself to be reduced.
+
+There is one celebrated race of women who were probably the
+powerfully-built, large-limbed creatures they are assumed to have been,
+and as brave and energetic as they were strong and big--the Norse women
+of the sagas, who, for good or evil, seem to have been a very
+influential element in the old Northern life. Prophetesses, physicians,
+dreamers of dreams and the accredited interpreters as well, endowed with
+magic powers, admitted to a share in the councils of men, brave in war,
+active in peace, these fair-haired Scandinavian women were the fit
+comrades of their men, the fit wives and mothers of the Berserkers and
+the Vikings. They had no tame or easy life of it, if all we hear of them
+is true. To defend the farm and the homestead during their husbands'
+absence, and to keep themselves intact against all bold rovers to whom
+the Tenth Commandment was an unknown law; to dazzle and bewilder by
+magic arts when they could not conquer by open strength; to unite craft
+and courage, deception and daring, loyalty and independence, demanded
+no small amount of opposing qualities. But the Steingerdas and Gudrunas
+were generally equal to any emergency of fate or fortune, and slashed
+their way through the history of their time more after the manner of men
+than women; supplementing their downright blows by side thrusts of
+craftier cleverness when they had to meet power with skill, and were
+fain to overthrow brutality by fraud. The Norse women were certainly as
+largely framed as they were mentally energetic, and as crafty as either;
+but we know of no other women who unite the same characteristics, and
+are at once cunning, strong, brave and true.
+
+On the whole, then, the little women have the best of it. More petted
+than their bigger sisters, and infinitely more powerful, they have their
+own way in part because it really does not seem worth while to contest a
+point with such little creatures. There is nothing that wounds a man's
+self-respect in any victory they may get or claim. Where there is
+absolute inequality of strength, there can be no humiliation in the
+self-imposed defeat of the stronger; and as it is always more pleasant
+to have peace than war, and as big men for the most part rather like
+than not to put their necks under the tread of tiny feet, the little
+woman goes on her way triumphant to the end, breaking all the laws she
+does not like, and throwing down all the barriers that impede her
+progress, perfectly irresistible and irrepressible in all circumstances
+and under any condition.
+
+
+
+
+PINCHBECK.
+
+
+Not many years ago no really refined gentlewoman would have worn
+pinchbeck. False jewelry and imitation lace were touchstones with the
+sex, and the woman who would condescend to either was assumed, perhaps
+not quite without reason, to have lost something more than the mere
+perception of technical taste. This feeling ran through the whole of
+society, and pinchbeck was considered as at once despicable and
+disreputable. The successful speculator, sprung from nothing, who had
+made his fortune during the war, might buy land, build himself a
+mansion, and set up a magnificent establishment, but he was never looked
+on as more than a lucky adventurer by the aboriginal gentry of the
+place; and the blue blood, perhaps nourishing itself on thin beer,
+turned up its nose disdainfully at the claret and madeira which had been
+personally earned and not lineally inherited. This exclusiveness was
+narrow in spirit, and hard in individual working; and yet there was a
+wholesome sentiment underlying its pride which made it valuable in
+social ethics, if immoral on the score of natural equality and human
+charity. It was the rejection of pretentiousness, however gilded and
+glittering, in favor of reality, however poor and barren; it was the
+condemnation of make-believes--the repudiation of pinchbeck. It is not a
+generation since this was the normal attitude of society towards its
+_nouveaux riches_ and Brummagem jewelry; but time moves fast in these
+later days, and national sentiments change as quickly as national
+fashions.
+
+We are in the humor to rehabilitate all things, and pinchbeck has now
+its turn with the rest. The lady of slender means who would refuse to
+wear imitation lace and false jewelry is as rare as the country society
+which would exclude the _nouveau riche_ because of his newness, and not
+adopt him because of his riches. The whole anxiety now is, not what a
+thing is, but how it looks--not its quality, but its appearance. Every
+part of social and domestic life is dedicated to the apotheosis of
+pinchbeck. It meets us at the hall door, where miserable make-believes
+of stuccoed pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial dignity on a
+wretched little villa, run up without regard to one essential of home
+comfort or of architectural truth. It goes with us into the cold,
+conventional drawing-room, where all is for show, nothing for use, where
+no one lives, and which is just the mere pretence of a dwelling-room,
+set out to deceive the world into the belief that its cheap finery is
+the expression of the every-day life and circumstances of the family. It
+sits with us at the table, which a confectioner out of a back street has
+furnished, and where everything, down to the very flowers, is hired for
+the occasion. It glitters in the brooches and bracelets of the women, in
+the studs and signet-rings of the men; it is in the hired broughams,
+the hired waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers, the
+cheap champagne, and the affectation of social consideration that meet
+us at every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle classes
+is penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck, and for
+one family that holds itself in the honor and simplicity of truth, ten
+thousand lie, to the world and to themselves, in frippery and pretence.
+
+The greatest sinners in this are women. Men are often ostentatious,
+often extravagant, and not unfrequently dishonest in that broadway of
+dishonesty which is called living beyond their means--sometimes making
+up the deficit by practices which end in the dock of the Old Bailey;
+but, as a rule, they go in for the real thing in details, and their
+pinchbeck is at the core rather than on the surface. Women, on the
+contrary, give themselves up to a more general pretentiousness, and,
+provided they can make a show, care very little about the means;
+provided they can ring their metal on the counter, they ignore the want
+of the hall-stamp underneath. Locality, dress, their visiting-list, and
+domestic appearances are the four things which they demand shall be in
+accord with their neighbor's; and for these four surfaces they will
+sacrifice the whole internal fabric. They will have a showy-looking
+house, encrusted with base ornamentation and false grandeur, though it
+lets in wind, rain, and sound almost as if it were made of mud or
+canvas, rather than a plain and substantial dwelling-place, with comfort
+instead of stucco, and moderately thick walls instead of porches and
+pilasters. Most of their time is necessarily passed at home, but they
+undergo all manner of house discomfort resulting from this preference of
+cheap finery over solid structure, rather than forego their "genteel
+locality" and stereotyped ornamentation. A family of daughters on the
+one side, diligent over the "Battle of Prague;" a nursery full of crying
+babies on the other; more Battles of Prague opposite, diversified by a
+future Lind practicing her scales unweariedly; water-pipes bursting in
+the frost, walls streaming in the thaw, the lower offices reeking and
+green with damp, and the upper rooms too insecure for unrestricted
+movement--all these, and more miseries of the same kind, she willingly
+encounters rather than shift into a locality relatively unfashionable to
+her sphere, but where she could have substantiality and comfort for the
+same rent that she pays now for flash and pinchbeck.
+
+In dress it is the same thing. She must look like her neighbors, no
+matter whether they can spend pounds to her shillings, and run up a
+milliner's bill beyond what she can afford for the whole family living.
+If they can buy gold, she can manage pinchbeck; glass that looks like
+jet, like filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is every bit to
+her as good as the real thing; and if she cannot compass Valenciennes
+and Mechlin, she can go to Nottingham and buy machine-made imitations
+that will make quite as fine a show. How poor soever she may be, she
+must hang herself about with ornaments made of painted wood, glass, or
+vulcanite; she must break out into spangles and beads and chains and
+_benoîtons_, which are cheap luxuries, and, as she thinks, effective.
+Flimsy silks make as rich a rustle to her ear as the stateliest brocade,
+and cotton-velvet delights the soul that cannot aspire to Genoa. The
+love of pinchbeck is so deeply ingrained in her that even if, in a
+momentary fit of aberration into good taste, she condescends to a simple
+material about which there can be neither disguise nor pretence, she
+must load it with that detestable cheap finery of hers till she makes
+herself as vulgar in a muslin as she was in a cotton velvet.
+
+The _simplex munditiis_, which used to be held as a canon of feminine
+good taste, is now abandoned altogether, and the more she can bedizen
+herself according to the pattern of a Sandwich islander the more
+beautiful she thinks herself, the more certain the fascination of the
+men, and the greater the jealousy of the women. This is the cause of all
+the tags and streamers, the bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces
+there, the puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off some dead
+girl's head, wherewith the modern Englishwoman delights to make herself
+hideous. It is pinchbeck throughout. But we fear she is past praying for
+in the matter of fashion, and that she is too far given over to the
+abomination of pretence to be called back to truth for any ethical
+reason whatsoever, or indeed by anything short of high examples. And
+then, if simplicity became the fashion, we should have our pinchbeck
+votaries translating that into extremes as they do now with
+ornamentation; if my lady took to plainness, they would go to
+nakedness.
+
+Another bit of pinchbeck is the visiting-list--the cards of invitation
+stuck against the drawing-room glass--with the grandest names and
+largest fortunes put forward, irrespective of dates or tenses. The
+chance contact with the people represented may be quite out of the
+ordinary circumstances of life, but their names are paraded as if an
+accident, which has happened once and may never occur again, were in the
+daily order of events. They are brought to the front to make others
+believe that the whole social thickness is of the same quality; that
+generals and admirals and sirs and ladies are the common elements of the
+special circle in which the family habitually moves; that pinchbeck is
+good gold, and that stucco means marble. Women are exceedingly tenacious
+of these pasteboard appearances.
+
+In a house with its couple of female servants, where formal visitors are
+very rare, and invitations, save by friendly word of mouth, rarer still,
+you may see a cracked china bowl or cheap mock _patera_ on the hall
+table, to receive the cards which are assumed to come in the thick
+showers usual with high people who have hall-porters, and a thousand
+names or more on their books. The pile gets horribly dusty to be sure,
+and the upper layer turns by degrees from cream-color to brown; but
+antiquity is not held to weaken the force of grandeur. The titled card
+left on a chance occasion more than a year ago still keeps the uppermost
+place, still represents a perpetual renewal of aristocratic visits, and
+an unbroken succession of social triumphs. Yellowed and soiled, it is
+none the less the trump-card of the list; and while the outside world
+laughs and ridicules, the lady at home thinks that no one sees through
+this puerile pretence, and that the visiting-list is accepted according
+to the status of the fugleman at the head. She is very happy if she can
+say that the pattern of her dress, her cap, her bonnet, was taken from
+that of Lady So and So; and we may be quite sure that all personal
+contact with grand folks does so express itself, and perpetuate the
+memory of the event, by such imitation--at a distance. It is too good an
+occasion for the airing of pinchbeck to be disregarded, and,
+consequently, for the most part is turned to this practical account.
+Whether the fashion will be suited to the material, or to the other
+parts of the dress, is quite a secondary consideration, it being of the
+essence of pinchbeck to despise both fitness and harmony.
+
+There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the appearance of social
+influence, much cultivated by women of a certain activity of mind, and
+with more definite aims than all women have. This belongs to a grade one
+step higher than the small pretences we have been speaking of--to women
+who have money, and so far have one reality, but who have not, by their
+own birth or their husband's, the original standing which would give
+them this influence as of right. Some make themselves notorious for
+their drawing-room patronage of artists, which, however, does not often
+include buying their pictures; others gather around them scores of
+obscure authors, whose books they talk of, if they do not read; a few, a
+short time since, were centres of spiritualistic circles, and got a
+queer kind of social influence thereby, so far as Philistine desire to
+witness the "manifestations" went; and one or two are names of weight in
+the emancipated ranks, and take chiefly to what they call "working
+women." These are they who attend Ladies' Committees, where they talk
+bosh, and pound away at utterly uninteresting subjects, as diligently as
+if what they said had any point in it, and what they did any ultimate
+issue in probability or common sense. But beyond the fact of having a
+large house, where their several sets may assemble at stated periods,
+these would-be lady patronesses are utterly impotent to help or hinder;
+and their patronage is just so much pinchbeck, not worth the trouble of
+weighing.
+
+In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless dissatisfaction with
+what they are, and ceaseless endeavour to appear something they are not,
+our middle-class ladies are doing themselves and society infinite
+mischief. They set the tone to the world below them, and the small
+tradespeople and the servants, when they copy the vices of their
+superiors, do not imitate her grace the duchess, but the doctor's wife
+over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door, and the young ladies
+everywhere, who all try to appear women of rank and fortune, and who are
+ashamed of nothing as much as of industry, truth and simplicity. Hence
+the rage for cheap finery in the kitchen, just a trifle more ugly and
+debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence the miserable
+pretentiousness, and pinchbeck fine-ladyism, filtering like poison
+through every pore of our society, to result God only knows in what
+grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and education will come to
+the front, and endeavour to stay the plague already begun.
+
+Chains and brooches may seem but small material causes for important
+moral effects, but they are symbols; and, as symbols, of deep national
+value. No good will be done till we get back some of our fine old horror
+of pinchbeck, and once more insist on truth as the foundation of our
+national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do
+not land us here; and the progress of the arts and society must not be
+brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the
+semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women
+are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home
+business. Here is something for them to do--the regeneration of society
+by means of their own energies; the bringing people back to the dignity
+of truth and the beauty of simplicity; and the substitution of that
+self-respect which is content to appear what it is, for the feeble pride
+which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot get gold, and which
+endeavors so hard to hide its real estate, and to pass for what it is
+not and never could be.
+
+
+
+
+PUSHING WOMEN.
+
+
+The achievements of Anglo-Saxon energy present a rich mine of material
+to the bookmaker. We are justly proud of our self-made men--of our
+Chancellors who have risen from the barber's-shop to the Woolsack, of
+our low-born inventors who have fought their way to scientific
+recognition, of our merchant princes who have begun life with a capital
+of one half-crown. The story of the man who has raised himself to
+eminence by his own exertions, in the face of overwhelming disadvantages
+and obstacles, is a thrice-told tale, thanks to Mr. Smiles and other
+biographers. But our admiration has been almost exclusively drawn to
+these signal examples of pushing _men_. The analogous exploits of the
+fair sex remain comparatively unchronicled. No one has hitherto
+published a book about Self-made Women. Yet this branch of the subject
+would be very interesting, and even instructive. Of course the
+opportunity for the display of energy in pushing is, in the case of
+woman, much more limited. She cannot push at the Bar or in the Church,
+or in business. Her sphere for pushing is practically narrowed down to
+one department of human life--society. But within the limits of that
+sphere she exhibits very remarkable proofs of this peculiar form of
+activity. Moreover, pushing is a feature so peculiarly characteristic of
+the English, as distinct from the Continental _salon_, that no attempt
+to place a picture of the Englishwoman in her totality before her
+foreign critics would be complete without it.
+
+There are three periods in the career of a pushing woman. The first is
+that in which she emerges from obscurity, or, worse perhaps, from the
+notoriety of commercial antecedents, and carried, by a vigorous push,
+the outworks of fashionable society. The wife of a successful speculator
+in cotton or guano, who is also the mistress of a comfortable mansion in
+Bloomsbury, gradually becomes restless and dissatisfied with her
+surroundings. It would be curious to trace the growth of this
+discontent. Ambition is deeply rooted in the female bosom. Even
+housemaids are actuated by an impulse to better themselves, and village
+school-mistresses yearn for a larger sphere. Perhaps it is this instinct
+to rise, so creditable to the sex, which compels a lady with a long
+purse, and a name well known in the city, to enter the lists as an
+aspirant to fashion. Perhaps her career is developed by a more gradual
+process. Climbing social Alps is like climbing material Alps--for a time
+the intervening heights shut out from view the grander peaks. It is not
+till one has topped Peckham or Hackney that a more extended horizon
+bursts on the eye, and one catches sight of the glittering summits of
+Belgravia. Account for it as we may, the phenomenon of a woman in the
+enjoyment of every comfort and luxury that wealth can give, but ready
+to barter it all for a few crumbs of contemptuous notice from persons of
+rank, is by no means uncommon. Probably the fashionable newspaper is a
+great stimulus to pushing.
+
+The rich vulgarian pores over _Court Circulars_ and catalogues of
+aristocratic names till the fascination becomes irresistible, and the
+desire to see her own name, purged of cotton or guano, figuring in the
+same sheet grows to a monomania. But how is this to be done? Fortunately
+for the purpose which she has in view, there exist in these latter days
+amphibious beings, half trader, half fop, with one set of relations with
+the world of commerce and another set of relations with the world of
+fashion. The dandy, driven into the city by the stress of his fiscal
+exigencies, forms a link between the East-end and the West. Among his
+other functions is that of giving aid and counsel, not exactly gratis,
+to any fair outsider who wants to "get into" society. For every
+applicant he has but one bit of advice. She must spend money.
+
+For a woman who is neither clever nor beautiful nor high-born, there is
+but one way to proceed. She must bribe right and left. No rotten borough
+absorbs more cash than the fashionable world. Its recognition is merely
+a question of money. All its distinctions have their price. It exacts
+from the pushing woman a thumping entrance-fee in the shape of a
+sumptuous concert or ball. Nor is it only the first push which costs.
+Every subsequent advance is as much a matter of purchase as a step in
+the army.
+
+There is a tariff of its honors, and any Belgravian actuary can
+calculate to a nicety the price of a stare from a great lady, or a card
+from a leader of fashion. This is the philosophy expounded by the
+amphibious dandy to his civic pupil. The upshot is, that she must give
+an entertainment, or a series of entertainments, on a scale of great
+splendor. Of course the house in Bloomsbury must be exchanged for
+another in a fashionable quarter. A more profuse style of living must be
+adopted. Her equipages must be gorgeous, her flunkeys numerous and well
+powdered. Above all, she must at once and for ever make a clean sweep of
+all her old friends. Upon these conditions, and in consideration of a
+_douceur_ for himself, he agrees to be her friend, and help her to push.
+Then follows a delicate negotiation with one of those dowagers who
+rather pique themselves on their good nature in standing sponsors to
+pushing nobodies. She, too, makes her conditions. For the sake of the
+elderly pet to whom she is indebted for her daily supply of scandal, she
+consents to countenance his _protegée_. But she declines to ask her to
+her own house. She will dine with her, provided the dinner is exquisite,
+and two or three of her own cronies are included in the invitation. Last
+and crowning condescension, she will ask the company for the proposed
+concert or ball, provided the thing is done regardless of expense. It
+would be hard to say which a cynic would think most charming--the
+readiness to accept, or the inclination to impose, such conditions.
+
+At last the great occasion arrives. Planted at the top of her staircase,
+under the wing of her fashionable allies, the nominal giver of the
+entertainment is duly stared at and glared at by a supercilious crowd,
+who examine her with the same sort of languid interest which they devote
+to a new animal at the Zoological. The greater number are "going on" to
+another party. But the next morning brings balm for every mortification.
+Her ball is blazoned in the fashionable journals, and the well-bred
+reporter, while elaborately complimentary to the exotics, is discreetly
+silent as to the supercilious stares. She does not exactly awake to find
+herself famous, but at least she is no longer outside the Pale. At a
+considerable outlay, she has got into what a connoisseur in shades of
+fashion would call tenth-rate society. This is not much; still, it is a
+beginning, and a beginning is everything to a pushing woman.
+
+In the pushing woman of the transition period we behold a lady who has
+got a certain footing in society, but who is straining every nerve, in
+season and out of season, by hook and by crook, to improve her position.
+Society within the Pale is divided into a great many "zones" or "sets."
+It is like a target, with outer, middle, inner, and innermost circles.
+The exterior circle, corresponding to "the black" in archery, consists
+of persona, for the most part, with limited means and moderate ambition.
+People who try to combine fashion with economy stick here, and advance
+no further. Carpet-dances and champagneless suppers are typical of this
+circle. Here mothers and daughters prey upon the inexperienced youth of
+the Universities and green young officers, who are deluded for one
+season by their pretensions to fashion, but who cut them the next.
+Here, too, may be found persons whose social progress has been retarded
+by foolish scruples about cutting their old friends. Between this band
+of prowlers upon the outskirts of fashion and "the best set"--the golden
+ring in the centre of the shield--are many intermediate circles, each
+representing a different stage of distinction and exclusiveness. It is
+the multiplicity of these invisible lines of demarcation which makes
+pushing so laborious.
+
+The world of fashion is not one homogeneous camp, but it is parcelled
+out into a number of cliques and coteries. Into one after another of
+these a pushing woman effects her entrance. She is always edging her way
+into a new and better set. At every step there are obstacles to be
+encountered, rivals to be jostled, fierce snubs to be endured. There is
+something almost sublime in the spectacle of this untiring activity of
+shoulder and elbow. The mere shoving--_vis consilî expers_--would never
+bring her near to her goal. An adept in the art of pushing does not rely
+on sheer impudence alone. She has recourse to artificial aids and
+appliances. A great deal of ingenuity is exhibited in the selection of
+her self-propelling machinery. It is a good plan to acquire a name for
+some one social speciality.
+
+Private theatricals, for instance, or similar entertainments, may be
+turned to excellent account. Exhibitions of this kind pique curiosity,
+and people who come to stare remain to supper, and possibly return to
+drop a card on the following afternoon. But, if you go in for this sort
+of thing, you must resign yourself to certain inconveniences. Your
+pretty drawing-room will be like Park Lane in a state of chronic
+obstruction. The carpenter's work will interfere somewhat with your
+comfort, and it is tiresome to be perpetually unhinging your doors and
+pulling your windows out of their frames. The jealousies and bickerings
+among the performers are another source of vexation. Miss A. declines to
+sit as Rowena to Miss B.'s Rebecca; and the drawing-room Roscius
+invariably objects to the part for which he is cast. Altogether, unless
+you have a positive taste for carpentry and green-room squabbles, it is
+better to steer clear of private theatricals.
+
+Then there is the musical dodge. In skillful hands there is no better
+leverage for pushing operations than drawing-room music. Every one knows
+Lady Tweedledum and her amateur concerts. The fuss she makes about them
+is prodigious. They are a cheap sort of entertainment, but they cost the
+thrifty patroness of art a vast deal of trouble. She is always
+organizing practices, arranging rehearsals, drawing up programmes, or
+scouring London for musical recruits. She has been known to invade dingy
+Government offices for a tenor, and to run a soprano to earth in distant
+Bloomsbury. After all, her "music" is only so-so. You may hear better
+any night at Even's or the Oxford. One has heard "Dal tuo stellato
+soglio" before, and Niedermeyer insipidities are a little _fadé_.
+Sometimes, to complete the imposture, the names of Mendelssohn and
+Mozart are invoked, and, under cover of doing honor to an immortal
+composer, a chorus of young people assemble for periodical flirtation.
+On the whole, it is wise not to attempt too much. Miss Quaver, with her
+staccato notes and semi-professional _minauderies_, is not exactly a
+queen of song. Nor does it give one any exquisite delight to hear Sir
+Raucisonous Trombone give tongue in a French romance. The talented band
+of the Piccadilly Troubadours, floundering through the overture to
+_Zampa_, hardly satisfies a refined musical ear. But, however
+indifferent in a musical point of view, from the point of view of the
+fair projector the thing is a success. It serves as a trap to catch
+duchesses, a device for putting salt on the tails of the popinjays of
+fashion. One fine day Lady Tweedledum's pretended zeal for music
+receives its crowning reward. The noise of it reaches august ears. An
+act of gracious condescension follows. Her Ladyship has the supreme
+delight of leading a scion of Royalty to a chair of state in her
+drawing-room, to hear Sir Raucisonous bleat and Miss Quaver trill.
+
+There are subtler means of pushing than amateur concerts and private
+theatricals. There is the push vertical, as in the case of the
+commercial lady; and there is also the push lateral. A good example of
+the latter style of operation is afforded by the dowager who is
+fortunate enough to have an eldest son to use as a pushing machine.
+Handled with tact, a young heir, not yet cut adrift from the maternal
+apron-string, may be turned to excellent account. There is, or was, a
+sentimental ballad entitled, "I'll kiss him for his mother." One might
+reverse the sentiment in the case of _Madame Mère_. Of her the dowagers
+with daughters to marry sing in chorus, "I'll visit her for her son."
+Civility to the mother is access to the son. A sharp tactician sees her
+advantage, and works the precious relationship for her own private ends.
+It is a mine of invitations of an eligible kind. By aid of it she
+springs over barriers which it would otherwise take her years to
+surmount, and is lifted into circles which by their unassisted efforts
+she and her daughters would never reach. Scheming dowagers are glad to
+have her at their balls when there is a chance of young Hopeful
+following in her train, and her five o'clock tea is delightful when
+there is a young millionaire to sip it with. Deprived of her decoy duck
+she would soon lose ground, and be left to push her way in society with
+uncomfortably reduced momentum.
+
+Another capital instrument for pushing is a country-house. The mistress
+of a fine old hall and a cypher of a husband is apt to take a peculiar
+view of the duties of property. One might expect her to be content with
+so dignified and enviable a lot, and to pass tranquil days in coddling
+the cottagers, patronizing the rector's wife, and impressing her
+crotchet on the national school. But no--she is bitten with the
+tarantula of social success. She wants to "get on" in society. She must
+push as vigorously as any trumpery adventuress in May Fair. A good old
+name is dragged into the dirt inseparable from pushing. The family
+portraits look disdainfully from their frames, and the ancestral oaks
+hang their heads in shame. The company reflects the peculiar ambition of
+the hostess. The neighboring squires are conspicuous by their absence.
+The local small fry are of course ignored, though to the great lady of
+the county, who cuts her in town, she is cringingly obsequious. The
+visitors consist mainly of relays of youths, fast, foolish, and
+fashionable, with now and then a stray politician or journalist thrown
+in to give the party a _soupçon_ of intellect. The principle of
+invitation is very simple. No one is asked who will not be of use in
+town. Any brainless little fop, any effete dandy, is sure of a welcome,
+provided he is known to certain circles and can help her to scramble
+into a little more vogue.
+
+One more instance of lateral pushing. A connection with literature may
+be very effectively worked. The wives of poets, novelists, and
+historians have great facilities for pushing if they care to use them.
+Even the sleek parasite who fattens on a literature which he has done
+nothing to adorn, and conceals his emptiness under the airs of Sir
+Oracle, has been known to hoist his female belongings into the high
+levels of society.
+
+The last period in the career of a pushing woman is the triumphant. This
+is when she has achieved fashion, and has virtually done pushing. There
+is nothing left to push for. The Belgravian citadel has fairly
+capitulated. Like Alexander weeping that there are no more worlds to
+conquer, she may indulge a transient regret that there are no more
+_salons_ left to penetrate. But rest is welcome after so harassing a
+struggle. And with rest comes a sensible improvement in her character
+and manners. The last stage of a pushing woman is emphatically better
+than the first. It is curious to notice what a change for the better is
+produced in her by the partial recovery of her self-respect. One might
+almost call her a pleasant person. She can at last afford to be civil,
+occasionally even good-natured. And this is only natural. In the thick
+of a struggle which taxes her energies to the uttermost, there is no
+time for courtesies and amenities. The better instincts of her nature
+necessarily remain in abeyance. But they reassert themselves, unless she
+be irretrievably spoilt, when the struggle is over.
+
+At last she can afford to speak her true thoughts, consult her own
+tastes, and receive her own friends, not another's, like a lady to the
+manner born. And if this emancipation from a self-imposed thraldom is
+not too long deferred, if it finds her at sixty with a relish for gaiety
+still unslaked, she may yet be able to enjoy society herself and to
+render it enjoyable to others. How many women there are of whom one
+says, How pleasant they will be when they have done pushing! or have
+pushed enough to allow themselves and others a little rest! One longs
+for the time to arrive when they shall have kicked down the ladders by
+which they have mounted, and effaced the trace of the rebuffs which they
+have encountered. One longs to see them cleansed from the stains with
+which their toilsome struggle has bespattered them, enjoying the ease
+and tranquillity of the after-push. If "getting on in society" must
+continue to be an object of female ambition, would it not be wise to
+abate the nuisance by rendering the process somewhat more easy? Might
+not some central authority be established to grant diplomas to pushing
+women, which would admit them _per saltum_ to those select circles which
+they go through so much dirt to reach?
+
+
+
+
+FEMININE AFFECTATIONS.
+
+
+The old form of feminine affectation used to be that of a die-away fine
+lady afflicted with a mysterious malady known by the name of the vapors,
+or one, no less obscure, called the spleen. Sometimes it was an
+etherealized being who had no capacity for homely things, but who passed
+her life in an atmosphere of poetry and music, for the most part
+expressing her vague ideas in halting rhymes that gave more satisfaction
+to herself than to her friends. She was probably an Italian scholar, and
+could quote Petrarch and Tasso, and did quote them pretty often; she
+might even be a Della Cruscan by honorable election, with her own
+peculiar wreath of laurel and her own silver lyre; any way she was "a
+sister of the Muses," and had something to do with Apollo and Minerva,
+whom she was sure to call Pallas, as being more poetical. Probably she
+had dealings with Diana too, for this kind of woman does not in any age
+affect the "sea-born," save in a hazy sentimental way that bears no
+fruits; a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit of counterpoint being to
+her worth all the manly love or fireside home delights that the world
+can give.
+
+What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or the rosy kisses of
+babies' lips compared to the pleasures of being a sister of the Muses,
+and one of the beloved of Apollo? The Della Cruscan of former days, or
+her modern avatar, will tell you that music and poetry are godlike and
+bear the soul away to heaven, but that the nursery is a prison, and
+babies no dearer gaolers than any other, and that household duties
+disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the empyrean. This was the
+Ethereal Being of the last generation--the Blue-stocking, as a poetess
+in white satin, with her eyes turned up to heaven, and her hair in
+dishevelled cascades about her neck. She dropped her mantle as she
+finally departed; and we still have the Della Cruscan essence, if not in
+the precise form of earlier times. We still have ethereal beings who, as
+the practical outcome of their etherealization, rave about music and
+poetry, and Hallé and Ruskin, and horribly neglect their babies and the
+weekly bills.
+
+A favorite form of feminine affectation among certain opposers of the
+prevalent fast type is in an intense womanliness, an aggravating
+intensity of womanliness, that makes one long for a little roughness,
+just to take off the cloying excess of sweetness. This kind is generally
+found with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the orbit, by
+which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face, a certain
+look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty thought, that is very
+effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness that the real cause of
+the darkened lids and cavernous orbits, when not antimony, is most
+probably internal disease; eyes of this sort stand for spirituality and
+loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of nature, and, as all men
+are neither chemists nor doctors, the simulation does quite as well as
+truth.
+
+The main characteristic of these women is self-consciousness. They live
+before a moral mirror, and pass their time in attitudinizing to what
+they think the best advantage. They can do nothing simply, nothing
+spontaneously and without the fullest consciousness as to how they do
+it, and how they look while they are doing it. In every action of their
+lives they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a novel, as
+impersonations of poetic images or thoughts. If they give you a glass of
+water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth and Beauty ministering
+to Strength or Age, as the case may be; if they bring you a photographic
+album, they are Titian's Daughter carrying her casket, a trifle
+modernized; if they hold a child in their arms, they are Madonnas, and
+look unutterable maternal love, though they never saw the little
+creature before, and care for it no more than for the puppy in the mews;
+if they do any small personal office, or attempt to do it, making
+believe to tie a shoestring, comb out a curl, fasten a button, they are
+Charities in graceful attitudes, and expect you to think them both
+charitable and graceful. Nine times out of ten they can neither tie a
+string nor fasten a button with ordinary deftness, for they have a trick
+of using only the ends of their fingers when they do anything with their
+hands, as being more graceful, and altogether fitting in better than
+would a firmer grasp with the delicate womanliness of the character;
+and the less sweet and more commonplace woman who does not attitudinize
+morally, and never parades her womanliness, beats them out of the field
+for real helpfulness, and is the Charity which the other only plays at
+being.
+
+This kind, too, affects, in theory, wonderful submissiveness to man. It
+upholds Griselda as the type of feminine perfection, and--still in
+theory--between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in for the
+tyranny. "I would rather my husband beat me than let me do too much as I
+liked," said one before she married, who, after she was married, managed
+to get entire possession of the domestic reins, and took good care that
+her nominal lord should be her practical slave. For, notwithstanding the
+sweet submissiveness of her theory, the intensely womanly woman has the
+most astonishing knack of getting her own way and imposing her own will
+on others. The real tyrant among women is not the one who flounces and
+splutters, and declares that nothing shall make her obey, but the
+self-mannered, large-eyed, and intensely womanly person, who says that
+Griselda is her ideal, and that the whole duty of woman lies in
+unquestioning obedience to man.
+
+In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman--the
+woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big buttons, of which she
+flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness of
+a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears
+unmistakeable shirtfronts, linen collars, vests, and plain ties, like a
+man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even
+nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and
+makes believe that the attitude is comfortable because it is manlike. If
+the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness, the
+mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores dogs
+and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She boasts
+of how good a marksman she is--she does not call herself markswoman--and
+how she can hit right and left, and bring down both birds flying. When
+she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass between her first two
+fingers, hollows her underlip, and tosses it off, throwing her head well
+back--she would disdain the ladylike sip or the closer gesture of
+ordinary women. She is great in cheese and bitter beer, in claret cup
+and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of
+effervescing wines. She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward,
+as men round their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of
+carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw;
+for charms to her watch-chain she wears a corkscrew, a gimlet, a big
+knife, and a small foot-rule; and in entire contrast with the intensely
+womanly woman, who uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman
+when she does anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a
+needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of
+which is affectation--from first to last affectation; a mere assumption
+of virile fashions utterly inharmonious to the whole being, physical
+and mental, of a woman.
+
+Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and
+orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a personal
+insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact limits of
+her mental sphere. This is the woman who assumes to be the antiseptic
+element in society, who makes believe that without her the world and
+human nature would go to the dogs, and plunge headlong into the abyss of
+sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand heroism of
+man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavor and patient
+seeking after truth, would serve his turn or the world's if she did not
+spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the boundary lines
+within which she would confine the range of thought and speculation. She
+knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affectation,
+and that other minds have as much right to their own boundary lines as
+she claims for herself; but it seems to her pretty to assume that woman
+generally is the consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that
+she, of all women, is most specially consecrated.
+
+As an offshoot of this kind stands the affectation of simplicity--the
+woman whose mental attitude is self-depreciation, and who poses herself
+as a mere nobody when the world is ringing with her praises. "Is it
+possible that your Grace has ever heard of _me_?" said one of this class
+with prettily affected _naïveté_ at a time when all England was astir
+about her, and when colors and fashions went by her name to make them
+take with the public at large. No one knew better than the fair
+_ingénue_ in question how far and wide her fame had spread, but she
+thought it looked modest and simple to assume ignorance of her own
+value, and to declare that she was but a creeping worm when all the
+world knew that she was a soaring butterfly.
+
+There is a certain little kind of affectation very common among pretty
+women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are pretty,
+and not recognising the effect of their beauty on men. Take a woman with
+bewildering eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape, and fringed with
+long lashes that distract you to look at; the creature knows that her
+eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that fire burns and that ice
+melts; she knows the effect of that trick she has with them--the sudden
+uplifting of the heavy lid, and the swift, full gaze that she gives
+right into a man's eyes. She has practiced it often in the glass, and
+knows to a mathematical nicety the exact height to which the lid must be
+raised, and the exact fixity of the gaze. She knows the whole meaning of
+the look, and the stirring of men's blood that it creates; but if you
+speak to her of the effect of her trick, she puts on an air of extremest
+innocence, and protests her entire ignorance as to anything her eyes may
+say or mean: and if you press her hard she will look at you in the same
+way for your own benefit, and deny at the very moment of offence.
+
+Various other tricks has she with those bewildering eyes of hers--each
+more perilous than the other to men's peace; and all unsparingly
+employed, no matter what the result. For this is the woman who flirts to
+the extreme limits, then suddenly draws up and says she meant nothing.
+Step by step she has led you on, with looks and smiles, and pretty
+doubtful phrases always susceptible of two meanings, the one for the ear
+by mere word, the other for the heart by the accompaniments of look and
+manner, which are intangible; step by step she has drawn you deeper and
+deeper into the maze where she has gone before as your decoy; then, when
+she has you safe, she raises her eyes for the last time, complains that
+you have mistaken her cruelly, and that she has meant nothing more than
+any one else might mean; and what can she do to repair her mistake? Love
+you? marry you? No; she is engaged to your rival, who counts his
+thousands to your hundreds; and what a pity that you had not seen this
+all along, and that you should have so misunderstood her! Besides, what
+is there about her that you or any one should love?
+
+Of all the many affectations of women, this affectation of their own
+harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when they
+practice their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most dangerous
+and the most disastrous. But what can one say to them? The very fact
+that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his perception
+until too late. That men love though they suffer is the woman's triumph,
+guilt, and condonation; and so long as the trick succeeds it will be
+practiced.
+
+Another affectation of the same family is the extreme friendliness and
+familiarity which some women adopt in their manners towards men. Young
+girls affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a year
+or so older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate, declare
+they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may not be natural. This
+form of affectation, once begun, continues through life, being too
+convenient to be lightly discarded; and youthful matrons not long out of
+their teens assume a tone and ways that would about befit middle age
+counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous even then
+if the "Indian summer" was specially bright and warm.
+
+Then there is the affectation pure and simple, which is the mere
+affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the
+mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of attitude that by consciousness
+ceases to be grace, and the thousand little _minauderies_ and coquetries
+of the sex known to us all. And there is the affectation which people of
+a higher social sphere show when they condescend to those of low estate,
+and talk and look as if they were not quite certain of their company,
+and scarcely knew if they were Christian or heathen, savage or
+civilized. And there is the affectation of the maternal passion with
+women who are never by any chance seen with their children, but who
+speak of them as if they were never out of their sight; the affectation
+of wifely adoration with women who are to be met about the world with
+every man of their acquaintance rather than with their lawful husbands;
+the affectation of asceticism in women who lead a thoroughly
+self-enjoying life from end to end; and the affectation of political
+fervor in those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to save
+Europe from universal revolution.
+
+Go where we will, affectation of being something she is not meets us in
+woman, like a ghost we cannot lay or a mist we cannot sweep away. In the
+holiest and the most trivial things alike we find it penetrating
+everywhere--even in church, and at her prayers, when the pretty
+penitent, rising from her lengthy orison, lifts her eyes and looks about
+her furtively to see who has noticed her self-abasement and to whom her
+picturesque piety has commended itself.
+
+All sorts and patterns of good girls and pleasant women are very dear
+and delightful; but the pearl of great price is the thoroughly natural
+and unaffected woman--that is, the woman who is truthful to her core,
+and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she would dare
+to tell a lie.
+
+
+
+
+IDEAL WOMEN.
+
+
+It is often objected against fault-finders, writers or others, that they
+destroy but do not build up, that while industriously blaming errors
+they take good care not to praise the counteracting virtues, that in
+their zeal against the vermin of which they are seeking to sweep the
+house clean they forget the nobler creatures which do the good work of
+keeping things sweet and wholesome. But it is impossible to be
+continually introducing the saving clause, "all are not so bad as
+these." The seven thousand righteous who have not bowed the knee to Baal
+are understood to exist in all communities; and, vicious as any special
+section may be, there must always be the hidden salt and savor of the
+virtuous to keep the whole from falling into utter corruption. This is
+specially true of modern women. Certainly, some of them are as
+unsatisfactory as any of their kind that have ever appeared on earth
+before, but it would be very queer logic to infer, therefore, that all
+are bad alike, and that our modern womanhood is as ill off as the Cities
+of the Plain which could not be saved for want of the ten just men to
+save them.
+
+Happily, we have noble women among us yet; women who believe in
+something beside pleasure, and who do their work faithfully, wherever
+it may lie; women who can and do sacrifice themselves for love and duty,
+and who do not think they were sent into the world simply to run one mad
+life-long race for wealth, for dissipation, or for distinction. But the
+life of such women is essentially in retirement; and though the lesson
+they teach is beautiful, yet its influence is necessarily confined,
+because of the narrow sphere of the teacher. When such public occasions
+for devotedness as the Crimean war occur, we can in some sort measure
+the extent to which the self-sacrifice of women can be carried; but in
+general their noblest virtues come out only in the quiet and secresy of
+home, and the most heroic lives of patience and well-doing go on in
+seclusion, uncheered by sympathy and unrewarded by applause.
+
+Still, it is impossible to write of one absolute womanly ideal--one
+single type that shall satisfy every man's fancy; for, naturally, what
+would be perfection to one is imperfection to another, according to the
+special bent of the individual mind. Thus one man's ideal of womanly
+perfection is in beauty, mere physical outside beauty; and not all the
+virtues under heaven could warm him into love with red hair or a snub
+nose. He is entirely happy if his wife is undeniably the handsomest
+woman of his acquaintance, and holds himself blessed when all men admire
+and all women envy. But for his own sake rather than for hers. Pleasant
+as her loveliness is to look on, it is pleasanter to know that he is the
+possessor of it. The "handsomest woman in the room" comes into the same
+category as the finest picture or the most thoroughbred horse within his
+sphere, and if the degree of pride in his possession is different, the
+kind is the same. And so in minor proportions, from the most beautiful
+woman of all, to simply beauty as a _sine qua non_, whatever else may be
+wanting. One other thing only is as absolute as this beauty, and that is
+its undivided possession.
+
+Another man's ideal is a good housekeeper and a careful mother, and he
+does not care a rush whether his wife, if she is these, is pretty or
+ugly. Provided she is active and industrious, minds the house well, and
+brings up the children as they ought to be brought up, has good
+principles, is trustworthy, and even-tempered, he is not particular as
+to color or form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or a
+squint. Given the great foundations of an honorable home, and he will
+forego the lath and plaster of personal appearance which will not bear
+the wear and tear of years and their troubles. The solid virtues stand.
+His balance at the banker's is a fact; his good name and credit with the
+tradespeople is a fact; so is the comfort of his home; so are the
+health, the morals, the education of his children. All these are the
+true realities of life to him; but the beauty which changes to deformity
+by the small-pox, which fades under dyspepsia, grows stale by habit, and
+is worn threadbare by the end of twenty years, is only a skin-deep grace
+which he does not value. Perhaps he is right. Certainly, some of the
+happiest marriages among one's acquaintances are those where the wife
+has not one perceptible physical charm, and where the whole force of her
+magnetic value lies in what she is, not in how she looks.
+
+Another man wants a tender, adoring, fair-haired seraph, who will
+worship him as a demigod, and accept him as her best revelation of
+strength and wisdom. The more dependent she is, the better he will love
+her; the less of conscious thought, of active will, of originative power
+she has, the greater his regard and tenderness. To be the one sole
+teacher and protector of such a gentle little creature seems to him the
+most delicious and the best condition of married life; and he holds
+Milton's famous lines to be expressive of the only fitting relation
+between men and women. The adoring seraph is his ideal; Griselda,
+Desdemona, Lucy Ashton, are his highest culminations of womanly grace;
+and the qualities which appeal the most powerfully to his generosity are
+the patience which will not complain, the gentleness that cannot resent,
+and the love which nothing can chill.
+
+Another man wants a cultivated intelligence in his ideal. As an author,
+an artist, a student, a statesman, he would like his wife to be able to
+help him by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect. He believes
+in the sex of minds, and holds only that work complete which has been
+created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees how women have
+helped on the leaders in troubled times; he knows that almost all great
+men have owed something of their greatness to the influence of a mother
+or a wife; he remembers how thoughts which had lain dumb in men's
+brains for more than half their lifetime suddenly woke up into speech
+and activity by the influence of a woman great enough to call them
+forth. The adoring seraph would be an encumbrance, and nothing better
+than a child upon his hands; and the soul which had to be awakened and
+directed by him would run great chance of remaining torpid and inactive
+all its days. He has his own life to lead and round off, and so far from
+wishing to influence another's, wants to be helped for himself.
+
+Another man cares only for the birth and social position of the woman to
+whom he gives his name and affection; to another yellow gold stands
+higher than blue blood, and "my wife's father" may have been a
+rag-picker, so long as rag-picking had been a sufficiently rich alembic
+with a residuum admitting of no kind of doubt. Venus herself without a
+dowry would be only a pretty sea-side girl with a Newtown pippin in her
+hand; but Miss Kilmansegg would be something worth thinking of, if but
+little worth looking at. One man delights in a smart, vivacious little
+woman of the irrepressible kind. It makes no difference to him how
+petulant she is, how full of fire and fury; the most passionate bursts
+of temper simply amuse him, like the anger of a canary-bird, and he
+holds it fine fun to watch the small virago in her tantrums, and to set
+her going again when he thinks she has been a long enough time in
+subsidence. His ideal of woman is an amusing little plaything, with a
+great facility for being put up, and a dash of viciousness to give it
+piquancy.
+
+Another wants a sweet and holy saint whose patient humility springs
+from principle rather than from fear; another likes a blithe-tempered,
+healthy girl with no nonsense about her, full of fun and ready for
+everything, and is not particular as to the strict order or economy of
+the housekeeping, provided only she is at all times willing to be his
+pleasant playmate and companion. Another delights in something very
+quiet, very silent, very home-staying. One must have first-rate music in
+his ideal woman; another unimpeachable taste; a third, strict orders; a
+fourth, liberal breadth of nature; and each has his own ideal, not only
+of nature but of person--to the exact shade of the hair, the color of
+the eyes, and the oval of the face. But all agree in the great
+fundamental requirements of truth, and modesty, and love, and
+unselfishness; for though it is impossible to write of one womanly ideal
+as an absolute, it is very possible to detail the virtues which ought to
+belong to all alike.
+
+If this diversity of ideals is true of individuals, it is especially
+true of nations, each of which has its own ideal of woman varying
+according to what is called the genius of the country. To the Frenchman,
+if we are to believe Michelet and the novelists, it is a feverish little
+creature, full of nervous energy, but without muscular force; of frail
+health and feeble organization; a prey to morbid fancies which she has
+no strength to control or to resist; now weeping away her life in the
+pain of finding that her husband, a man gross and material because
+husband, does not understand her; now sighing over her delicious sins
+in the arms of the lover who does; without reasoning faculties, but
+with divine intuitions that are as good as revelations; without cool
+judgment, but with the light of burning passions that guide her just as
+well; thinking by her heart, yet carrying the most refined metaphysics
+into her love; subtle; incomprehensible by the coarser brain of man; a
+creature born to bewilder and to be misled, to love and to be adored, to
+madden men and to be destroyed by them.
+
+It does not much signify that the reality is a shrewd, calculating,
+unromantic woman, with a hard face and keen eyes, who for the most part
+makes a good practical wife to her common-sense middle-aged husband, who
+thinks more of her social position than of her feelings, more of her
+children than of her lovers, more of her purse than of her heart, and
+whose great object of life is a daily struggle for centimes. It pleases
+the French to idealize their eminently practical and worldly-wise women
+into this queer compound of hysterics and adultery; and if it pleases
+them it need not displease us.
+
+To the German his ideal is of two kinds--one, his Martha, the domestic
+broad-faced _Hausmutter_, who cooks good dinners at small cost, and
+mends the family linen as religiously as if this were the Eleventh
+Commandment especially appointed for feminine fingers to keep, the
+poetic culmination of whom is Charlotte cutting bread and butter; the
+other, his Mary, his Bettina, full of mind and æsthetics, and
+heart-uplifting love, yearning after the infinite with holes in her
+stockings and her shoes down at heel. For what are coarse material
+mendings to the æsthetic soul yearning after the infinite, and
+worshipping at the feet of the prophet?
+
+In Italy the ideal woman of modern times is the ardent patriot, full of
+active energy, or physical force, and dauntless courage.
+
+In Poland it is the patriot too, but of a more refined and etherealized
+type, passively resenting Tartar tyranny by the subtlest feminine scorn,
+and living in perpetual music and mourning.
+
+In Spain it is a woman beautiful and impassioned, with the slight
+drawback of needing a world of looking after, of which the men are
+undeniably capable.
+
+In Mohammedan countries generally it is a comely smooth-skinned Dudù,
+patient and submissive, always in good humor with her master, economical
+in house-living to suit the meanness, and gorgeous in occasional attire
+to suit the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental; but by no means Dudù
+ever asleep and unoccupied; for, if not allowed to take part in active
+outside life, the Eastern's wife or wives have their home duties and
+their maternal cares like all other women, and find to their cost that,
+if they neglect them unduly, they will have a bad time of it with Ali
+Ben Hassan when the question comes of piastres and sequins, and the dogs
+of Jews who demand payment, and the pigs of Christians who follow suit.
+
+The American ideal is of two kinds, like the German--the one, the clever
+manager, the woman with good executive faculty in the matters of
+buckwheat cakes and oyster gumbo, as is needed in a country so poorly
+provided with "helps;" the other, the aspiring soul who puts her
+aspirations into deeds, and goes out into the world to do battle with
+the sins of society as editress, preacher, stump orator, and the like.
+It must be rather embarrassing to some men that this special
+manifestation of the ideal woman at times advocates miscegenation and
+free love; but perhaps we of the narrow old conventional type are not up
+to the right mark yet, and have to wait until our own women are
+thoroughly emancipated before we can rightly appreciate these questions.
+At all events, if this kind of thing pleases the Americans, it is no
+more our business to interfere with them than with the French compound;
+and if miscegenation and free love seem to them the right manner of
+life, let them follow it.
+
+In all countries, then, the ideal woman changes, chameleon-like, to suit
+the taste of man; and the great doctrine that her happiness does
+somewhat depend on his liking is part of the very foundation of her
+existence. According to his will she is bond or free, educated or
+ignorant, lax or strict, house-keeping or roving; and though we advocate
+neither the bondage nor the ignorance, yet we do hold to the principle
+that, by the laws which regulate all human communities everywhere, she
+is bound to study the wishes of man, and to mould her life in harmony
+with his liking. No society can get on in which there is total
+independence of sections and members, for society is built up on the
+mutual dependence of all its sections and all its members. Hence the
+defiant attitudes which women have lately assumed, and their
+indifference to the wishes and remonstrances of men, cannot lead to any
+good results whatever. It is not the revolt of slaves against their
+tyrants--in that we could sympathize--which they have begun, but a
+revolt against their duties. And this it is which makes the present
+state of things so deplorable. It is the vague restlessness, the fierce
+extravagance, the neglect of home, the indolent fine-ladyism, the
+passionate love of pleasure which characterise the modern woman, that
+saddens men, and destroys in them that respect which their very pride
+prompts them to feel. And it is the painful conviction that the ideal
+woman of truth and modesty and simple love and homely living has somehow
+faded away under the paint and tinsel of this modern reality which makes
+us speak out as we have done, in the hope, perhaps a forlorn one, that
+if she could be made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she
+would, by the very force of natural instinct and social necessity, order
+herself in some accordance with the lost ideal, and become again what we
+once loved and what we all regret.
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN AND THE WORLD.
+
+
+This, we are told in a tone of pathetic resignation, is a day of hard
+sayings for women. It is, we will venture to add, a day when women have
+to meet hard sayings with replies a little less superficial than the
+conventional stare of outraged womanhood or the trivial retort on the
+follies of men. Grant that woman's censors are as cynical and
+hollow-hearted as you will, there can be no doubt that their criticisms
+are simply the expression of a general uneasiness, and that that
+uneasiness has some ground to go upon. It is possible that observers
+across the water may be cynical in denouncing the "magnificent
+indecency" of the heroines of New York. It is possible that the
+schoolmasters of Berlin may be cynical in calling public opinion to
+their aid against the degrading exhibitions of the Prussian capital. It
+is possible that the thunders of the Vatican are merely an instance of
+Papal cynicism. It is possible that the protest of the Bishop of Orleans
+is as hollow-hearted as the protests of censors nearer home. But such a
+world-wide outbreak of cynicism without a cause is a somewhat improbable
+event, and the improbability is increased when we remark the silent
+acquiescence of the women of America and the Continent in the justice of
+these censures.
+
+It is only the British mother who ventures to protest. Now, we
+Englishmen have always felt a sort of national pride in the British
+mother. It has been a part of our patriotic self-satisfaction to pique
+ourselves on her icy decorum, on the merciless severity of her virtue.
+Colorless, uninteresting, limited as Continental critics pronounced her
+to be, we cherished her the more as something specially our own, and
+regarded the Channel as a barrier providentially invented for the
+isolation of her spotless prudery. It was peculiarly gratifying to
+suppose that on the other side of it there were no British homes, no
+British maidens, no British mothers. And it must be owned that the
+British mother took her cue admirably. She owned, with a sigh of
+complacency, that she was not as other women. She shuddered at foreign
+morals, and tabooed French novels. She shook all life and individuality
+out of her girls as un-English and Continental. She denounced all
+aspirations after higher and larger spheres of effort as unfeminine.
+Such a type of woman was naturally dull enough, but it fairly came up to
+its own standard; and if its respectability was prudery, it still
+earned, and had a right to claim, man's respect. The amusing thing is
+the persistence in the claim when the type has passed away.
+
+The British spouse has bloomed into the semi-detached wife, with a
+husband always conveniently in the distance, and a cicisbeo as
+conveniently in the corner. The British mother has died into the faded
+matrimonial schemer, contemptuous of younger sons. The innocent simper
+of the British maiden has developed into the loud laugh and the horsey
+slang of the girl of the season. But maiden and matron are still on one
+point faithful to the traditions of their grandmothers, and front all
+censorious comers with a shrug of their shoulder-straps and a flutter of
+indignant womanhood. And maiden and matron still claim their insular
+exemption from the foibles of their sex. The Pope may do what he will
+with the women of Italy, and Monseigneur of Orleans may deal stern
+justice out to the women of France; Continental immorality is in the
+nature of things; but there is something else that is in the nature of
+things too, and before the impeccable majesty of British womanhood every
+critic must stand abashed.
+
+Unfortunately, we are no sooner awed with the marble silence of our
+Hermione than Hermione descends from her pedestal and falls a-talking
+like other people. Woman, in a word, protests; and protests are often
+very dangerous things to the protesters. Nothing, for instance, can seem
+more simple or more effective than the _tu quoque_ retort, and as it is
+familiar to feminine disputants, we are favored with it in every
+possible form. If the girl of the period is fast and frivolous, is the
+young man of the period any better? No sketch can be more telling than
+the picture which she is ready to draw of his lounging ways, his
+epicurean indolence, his boredom at home, his foppery abroad, the
+vacancy of his stare, the inanity of his talk, his incredible conceit,
+his life vibrating between the Club and the stable. She hits off with a
+charming vivacity the list of his accomplishments--his skill at
+flirtation, his matchless ability at croquet, his assiduity over _Bell's
+Life_, the cleverness of his book on the Derby. No sensible or
+well-informed girl, she tells us, can talk for ten minutes to this
+creature without weariness and disgust at his ignorance, his narrowness,
+his triviality; no modestly-dressed or decently-mannered girl can win
+the slightest share of his attentions. Married, he is as frivolous as
+before marriage; he selects the toilette of the _demi-monde_ as an
+agreeable topic of domestic conversation, he resents affection and
+proclaims home a bore, he grudges the birth of children as an additional
+expense, he stunts and degrades the education of his girls, he is the
+despot of his household and the dread of his family.
+
+The sketch is powerful enough in its way, but the conclusion which the
+fair artist draws is at least an odd one. We prepare ourselves to hear
+that woman has resolved to extirpate such a monster as this, or that she
+will remain an obstinate vestal till a nobler breed of wooers arises.
+What woman owns that she really does is to mould herself as much on the
+monster's model as she can. According to her own account, she puts
+nature's picture of herself into the hands of this imbecile, invites him
+to blur it as he will, and lets him write under the daub "_Ego feci._"
+As he cannot talk sense, she stoops to bandy chaff and slang. As he
+refuses to be attracted by modesty of dress and manner, she apes the
+dress and manner of the _demi-monde_. His indolence, his triviality, his
+worldliness become her own. As he finds home a bore, she too plunges
+into her round of dissipation; as he objects to children, she declines
+to be a mother; as he wishes to get the girls off his hands, she flings
+them at the head of the first comer.
+
+Now, if such a defence as this at all adequately represents the facts of
+the case, we can only say that the girl of the period must be a far
+lower creature than we have ever asserted her to be. A sensible girl
+stooping to slang, a modest girl flinging aside modesty, simply to
+conquer a fool and a fop, is a satire upon woman which none but a woman
+could have invented, and which we must confess to be utterly incredible
+to men. But the assumption upon which the whole of this mimetic theory
+is based is one well worthy of a little graver consideration.
+
+"Tell me how to improve the youth of France," said Napoleon one day to
+Madame de Campan. "Give them good mothers," was the reply. There are
+some things which even a Napoleon may be pardoned for feeling a little
+puzzled in undertaking, and Madame de Campan would no doubt have added
+much to the weight of her reply by a few practical words as to the
+machinery requisite for the supply of the article she recommended. But
+her request is now the cry of the world. The general uneasiness of which
+we have spoken before arises simply from the conviction that woman is
+becoming more and more indifferent to her actual post in the social
+economy of the world, and the criticisms in which it takes form, whether
+grave or gay, could all be summed up in Madame de Campan's request,
+"Give us good mothers."
+
+After all protests against limiting the sphere of the sex to a single
+function of their existence, public opinion still regards woman
+primarily in her relation to the generation to come. If it censures the
+sensible girl who stoops to slang, or the modest girl who stoops to
+indecency, it is because the sense and the modesty which they abandon is
+not theirs to hold or to fling away, but the heritage of the human race.
+But this seems to be less and less the feeling of woman herself. For
+good or for evil, or, perhaps more truly, for both good and evil, woman
+is becoming conscious every day of new powers, and longing for an
+independent sphere in which she can exert them. Marriage is aimed at
+with a passionate ardor unknown before, not as a means of gratifying
+affection, but as a means of securing independence.
+
+To the unmarried girl life is a sheer bondage, and there is no sacrifice
+too great to be left untried if it only promises a chance of
+deliverance. She learns to despise the sense, the information, the
+womanly reserve which fail to attract the deliverer. She has to sell
+herself to purchase her freedom; and she will take very strong measures
+to secure a purchaser. The fop, the fool, little knows the keen scrutiny
+with which the gay creature behind her fan is taking stock of his feeble
+preferences, is preparing to play upon his feebler aversions. Pitiful as
+he is, it is for him that she arranges her artillery on the
+toilette-table, the "little secrets," the powder bloom, the rouge
+"precipitated from the damask rose-leaf," the Styrian lotion that gives
+"beauty and freshness to the complexion, plumpness to the figure,
+clearness and softness to the skin." He has a faint flicker of liking
+for brunettes; she lays her triumphant fingers on her "walnut stain,"
+and darkens into the favorite tint. He loves plumpness, and her "Sinai
+Manna" is at hand to secure _embonpoint_. Belladonna flashes on him from
+her eyes, Kohl and antimony deepen the blackness of her eyebrows, "bloom
+of roses" blushes from her lips. She stoops to conquer, and it is no
+wonder that the fop and the fool go down.
+
+The freedom she covets comes with marriage, but it is a freedom
+threatened by a thousand accidents, and threatened, above all, by
+maternity. It is of little use to have bowed to slang and
+shoulder-straps, if it be only to tie oneself to a cradle. The nursery
+stands sadly in the way of the free development of woman; it clips her
+social enjoyment, it curtails her bonnet bills. "The slavery of nursing
+a child," one fair protester tells us, "only a mother knows." And so she
+invents a pretty theory about the damage done to modern constitutions by
+our port-drinking forefathers, and ceases to nurse at all. But even this
+is only partial independence; she pants for perfect freedom from the
+cares of maternity. Her tone becomes the tone of the household, and the
+spouse she has won growls over each new arrival. She is quite ready to
+welcome the growl. "Nature," a mother informs us, "turns restive after
+the birth of two or three children," and mothers turn restive with
+nature. "Whatever else you may do," she adds, "you will never persuade
+us into liking to have children," and, if we did, we should not greatly
+value the conversion. And so woman wins her liberty, and bows her
+emphatic reply to the world's appeal, "Give us good mothers," by
+declining to be a mother at all.
+
+By the sacrifice of womanliness, by the sacrifice of modesty, by
+flattering her wooer's base preferences before marriage, by encouraging
+his baser selfishness afterwards, by hunting her husband to the club and
+restricting her maternal energies to a couple of infants, woman has at
+last bought her freedom. She is no slave to a husband as her mother was,
+she is not buried beneath the cares of a family like her grandmother.
+She has changed all that, and the old world of home and domestic
+tenderness and parental self-sacrifice lies in ruins at her feet. She
+has her liberty; what will she do with it? As yet, freedom means simply
+more slang, more jewelry, more selfish extravagance, less modesty. As we
+meet her on the stairs, as we see the profuse display of her charms, as
+we listen to the flippant, vapid chatter, we turn a little sickened from
+woman stripped of all that is womanly, and cry to Heaven, as Madame de
+Campan cried to the Emperor--"Give us good mothers."
+
+
+
+
+UNEQUAL MARRIAGES.
+
+
+Acute ladies who concern themselves much with the superficial social
+currents of the time are beginning to perceive, or at least to think
+that they perceive, a fatal and growing tendency to _mésalliances_ on
+the part of men who ought to know better. They complain not merely of
+the doting old gentleman who has been a bachelor long enough to lose his
+wits, and so marries his cook or his housemaid, nor of the debauched
+young simpleton who takes a wife from a casino or the bar of a
+night-_café_. Actions of this sort are as common at one time as at
+another. Old fools and young fools maintain a pretty steady average.
+Their silly exploits are the issue, not of the tendencies of the age,
+but of their own individual and particular lack of wits. They do not
+affect the general direction of social feeling, nor have we any right to
+argue up from their preposterous connexions to the influences and
+conditions of the society of which they are only the abnormal and
+irregular growths. What people mean, when they talk of an increase in
+the number of men who marry beneath them, is that men otherwise sensible
+and respectable and sober-minded perpetrate the irregularity in
+something like cold blood, and with a measure of deliberation. Whether
+observers who have formed this opinion are right, or are only
+anticipating their own apprehensions and alarms, is difficult to
+ascertain. A good deal depends on the accidental range of the observer's
+own acquaintances, and still more on their candor or discreet reticence.
+
+Besides, how are we to know how far one generation is worse than
+generations which have gone before it? Men are, after due time, forgiven
+for this defiance of social usage, and women who were barely presentable
+in youth become presentable enough by the time they reach middle age.
+People may seem to us to be very equally and justly mated who
+five-and-twenty years ago were the town's talk. It is practically
+impossible, therefore, to compare the actual number of unequal marriages
+in our day with those of a generation back. People may have their ideas,
+but verification is not to be had. All we can do is to estimate the
+increase in the conditions which are likely to make men find wives in a
+rank below their own. If we look at these, there may be a good many
+reasons for believing that the apprehensions of the shrewd and alarmed
+observers are not without justification.
+
+When a wise man with a living or a name to make, or both, looks for a
+wife, he certainly does not desire a person who shall be troublesome and
+an impediment to him. He wants a cheerful, sensible, and decently
+thrifty person. He probably has no inclination for a bluestocking, nor
+for a lady with aggressive views on points of theology, nor for one who
+can beat him in political discussion. Strong intellectual power he can
+most heartily dispense with. But then, on the other hand, he has no
+fancy for sitting day after day at table with a vapid, flippant,
+frivolous, empty soul who can neither talk nor listen, who takes no
+interest in things herself, and cannot understand why other people
+should take interest in them, who is penetrated with feeble little
+egoisms. An aggressive woman with opinions about prevenient grace, or
+the advantages of female emigration, or the functions of the deaconess,
+would be far preferable to this. She would irritate, but she would not
+fill the soul with everlasting despair, as the pretty vapid creature
+does. To discuss predestination and election over dinner is not nice,
+but still less is it nice to have to make talk with a fool, and to be
+obliged to answer her according to her folly.
+
+As the education of modern girls of fashion chiefly aims at making them
+either very fast or very slow, it is not to be wondered at that men find
+it hard to realize their ideals among their equals in position. It is
+not merely that so many marriageable young ladies are ignorant. They are
+this, but they are more. They are exacting and pretentious, and
+uneducated in the worst sense, for they are ignorant how ignorant they
+are, or even that they are ignorant at all.
+
+Then there is a still more obvious, palpable, and impressive
+circumstance. A man with ordinary means looks with alarm on the too
+visible and too unbounded extravagance of the ladies from among whom he
+is expected to take a partner. The thought of the apparel, of the
+luxuries, of the attendants, of the restless moving about, to which they
+have been accustomed, fills him with deep consternation. He might
+perhaps deceive himself into thinking that he could get on very well
+with an empty-minded woman, but he cannot forget the stern facts of
+arithmetic, nor hoodwink himself as to what would be left out of his
+income after he had paid for dresses, servants, household charges,
+carriages, parties, opera-boxes, traveling, and all the rest.
+
+Besides the flippancy of so many women, and the extravagance of most
+women, arising from their inexperience of the trouble with which money
+is made and of the importance of keeping it after it has been made,
+there is something in the characteristics of modern social intercourse
+which makes men of a certain temper intensely anxious to avoid a sort of
+marriage which would, among other things, have the effect of committing
+them more deeply to this kind of intercourse. Such men shrink with
+affright from giving hostages to society for a more faithful compliance
+with its most dismal exactions. To them there is nothing more
+unendurable than the monotonous round of general hospitalities and
+ceremonials, ludicrously misnamed pleasure. A detestation of wearisome
+formalities does not imply any clownish or misanthropic reluctance to
+remember that those who feel it live in a world with other people, and
+that a thoroughly social life is the only just and full life.
+
+But there is all the difference between a really social life and a
+hollow phantasmic imitation of it. A person may have the pleasantest
+possible circle of friends, and may like their society above all things.
+This is one thing. But to have to mix much with numbers of thoroughly
+indifferent people, and in a superficial, hollow way, is a very
+different thing. Of course, men who take life just as it comes, who are
+not very sedulous about making the most of it in their own way, and are
+quite willing to do all that their neighbors do just because their
+neighbors do it, find no annoyance in this. Men cast in another mould
+find not only annoyance but absolute misery. They know also that
+marriage with a woman who is in the full tide of society means an
+infinite augmentation of this round of tiresome and thoroughly useless
+ceremonies. Add this consideration to the two other considerations of
+elaborate vapidness and unfathomable extravagance, and you have three
+tolerably good arguments why a man with large discourse of reason,
+looking before and after, should be slow to fasten upon himself bonds
+which threaten to prove so leaden.
+
+The faults of the women of his own position, however, are a very poor
+reason why he should marry a woman beneath his own position. A man must
+be very weak to believe that, because fine ladies are often inane and
+extravagant, therefore women who are not fine ladies must be wise,
+clever, prudent, and everything else that belongs to the type of
+companionable womanhood. The fact of the mistress being a blank does not
+prove that the maid would be a prize. It may be wise to avoid the one,
+but it is certainly folly to seek the other. Granting that the
+housemaid or the cook or the daughter of the coachman is virtuous,
+high-minded, refined, thoughtful, thrifty, and everything else that is
+desirable under the sun, all will fail to counterbalance the drawbacks
+that flow from the first inequality of position.
+
+The misguided husband believes that he is going to live a plain
+unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company
+with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never
+infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The
+lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his
+motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the
+express desire of avoiding visits, yet he no sooner gets what he wished
+than his success begins to make him miserable. What he expected to
+please him as a relief mortifies him as a slight. Even if he be
+unsympathetic enough in nature not to care much for the disapproval of
+his fellows, he will rapidly find that his wife is a good deal less of a
+philosopher in these points, and that, though he may relish his escape
+from the miseries of society, she will vigorously resent her exclusion
+from its supposed delights.
+
+Again, from another point of view, he is tolerably sure to find that the
+common opinion of society about unequal unions is not so unsound as he
+used scornfully to suppose it to be. The vapidity of a polite woman is
+bad, but the vapidity of a woman who is not polite is decidedly worse. A
+simpering unthinking woman with good manners is decidedly better than
+an unthinking woman with imperfect manners; and if polish can spoil
+nature among one set of people, certainly among another set nature may
+be as much spoilt by lack of polish. It does not follow, from a person
+being indifferently well-bred, that therefore she is profoundly wise and
+thoughtful and poetic, and capable of estimating the things of this
+world at their worth. Boys at college indulge in this too generous
+fallacy. For grown-up men there is less excuse. They ought to know that
+obscure uneducated women are all the more likely on that account to fall
+short of magnanimity, self-control, self-containing composure, than
+girls who have grown up with a background of bright and gracious
+tradition, however little their education may have done to stimulate
+them to make the foreground like it. To have a common past is the first
+secret of happy association--a past common in ideas, sentiments, and
+growth, if not common in external incidents.
+
+One reason why a cultivated man is wretched with a vapid woman is that
+she has not traveled over a yard of that ground of knowledge and feeling
+which has in truth made his nature what it is. But a woman in his own
+station is more likely to have shared a past of this sort than a woman
+of lower station. Mere community of general circumstances and
+surrounding does something. The obscure woman taken from inferior place
+has not the common past of culture, nor of circumstance either. The
+foolish man who has married away from his class trusts that somehow or
+other nature will repair this. He assumes, in a real paroxysm of folly,
+that obscurity is the fostering condition of a richness of character
+which could not be got by culture. He pays the price of his blindness.
+Untended nature is more likely to produce weeds than choice fruits, and
+the chances in such cases as this are beyond calculation in favor of his
+having got a weed--in other words, having wedded himself to a life of
+wrangling, gloom, and swift deterioration of character. This result may
+not be invariable, but it must be more usual than not.
+
+In the exceptional cases where a man does not repent of an unequal match
+of this sort, you will mostly find that the match was unequal only in
+externals, and that his character had been a very fit counterpart for
+that of a vulgar and uneducated woman before he made her his wife. This
+may lead one to think that there is something to be said for the woman
+in morganatic marriages. The men who do these things are not always, not
+even generally, philosophic men in search of an unsophisticated life,
+but unamiable, defiant persons, who only hate society either because it
+has failed to appreciate their qualities, or because they cannot be at
+the trouble to go through the ordinary amount of polite usage.
+
+
+
+
+HUSBAND-HUNTING.
+
+
+What we have said in another place about the odium which attaches to
+"match-making" naturally applies in a far greater degree to
+"husband-hunting." Practically the two words mean much the same thing,
+since the successful result of a husband-hunt is of course a match, and
+match-making, in the common acceptation of the term, involves a
+husband-hunt. This latter fact is somewhat curious. There is no reason
+in the nature of things why the word match-making should be associated
+only with the pursuit of the unmarried male. On the contrary, the theory
+of marriage has always been that it is the woman who has to be hunted
+down. It is curious to note under what completely different
+circumstances, and occasionally in what grotesque forms, the same theory
+has been found all over the world, both in civilized and savage life.
+Sometimes the bride is carried away bodily from her home, as if nothing
+short of physical force could make a woman quit her maiden state.
+Sometimes the panting bridegroom has to run her down--no slight task if
+the adorer happens to be stout, and the adored one coquettish and fleet
+of foot. In marriage, this custom prevails only, we believe, among the
+savages, but visitors to the Crystal Palace may see how modern
+civilization has adapted it to courtship in the popular pastime of
+kiss-in-the-ring.
+
+We have read of a savage tribe in which the bride is thought no better
+than she should be, if, on the day after the wedding, the bridegroom
+does not show signs of having been vigorously pinched and scratched.
+This custom, again, is perhaps represented in civilized life by the
+kissing and struggling which are supposed every Christmas to go on under
+the mistletoe. It is not unworthy of remark, as regards these two points
+of comparison between civilization and barbarism, that, as the woman
+gets more civilized, she seems more disposed to meet her pursuer
+halfway. In the game of kiss-in-the-ring, for instance, although the
+lady does not run after the gentleman, but, on the contrary, shows her
+maiden modesty by giving him as hard a chase as she can, she still
+delicately paves the way for osculation by throwing the
+pocket-handkerchief. And, in the Christmas fights under the mistletoe
+(if we may take Mr. Dickens as an authority), slapping, and even
+pinching in moderation, are considered allowable--perhaps we ought to
+say proper--on the lady's part; but scratching--serious scratching, we
+mean, which would make her admirer's face look next morning as if he had
+been taking liberties with a savage bird or a cat--is thought not merely
+unnecessary, but unfair.
+
+The difference between civilized and savage woman may perhaps help to
+indicate the reason why, now-a-days, match-making should, as a matter of
+fact, be associated with husband-hunting in spite of the theory that it
+is the woman who has to be hunted, not the man. Popular phraseology has
+an awkward trick of making people unconsciously countenance the theories
+against which they most vehemently protest. Husband-hunting is a far
+more generally obnoxious word than even the much-injured match-making,
+simply because it flies in the face of the pet theory which we have
+described. But, if the theory really hold good in modern practice, why
+should man, not woman, be recognised as the professional match-maker's
+victim and legitimate game? Why does not wife-hunting, the word which
+this theory entitles us to expect, take its proper place in society?
+Heiress-hunting, indeed, is well known, but this can scarcely be
+considered a form of wife-hunting, for it is not the woman who is the
+object of pursuit, but her money-bags. We have the word heiress-hunting
+for the very obvious reason that heiresses are recognised game. The word
+husband-hunting exists for the same reason.
+
+Are we to infer from the non-existence, or at any rate the
+non-appearance in good society, of the word wife-hunting, that the
+practice is anything but common--that, since a hunt necessarily implies
+pursuit on one side and flight on the other, a man cannot well be said
+to hunt a woman who is either engaged in hunting him, or else only too
+ready to meet him halfway? Are we gradually tending towards an advanced
+stage of civilization in which woman will be formally recognized as the
+pursuer, and man as the pursued? We are not bold enough to take under
+our protection a view so glaringly heterodox, but still we think it
+only common justice to point out that there are difficult problems in
+the present state of society which the view helps materially to solve.
+We fear, for instance, there can be no doubt that there is a good deal
+of truth in the Belgravian mother's lament that marriage is gradually
+ceasing to be considered "the thing" among the young men of the present
+day; that girls of good families and even good looks are taking to
+sisterhoods, and nursing-institutes, and new-fangled abominations,
+simply because there is no one to marry them.
+
+It is not merely that the young men are getting every day rarer; though,
+unless there is some system, like Pharaoh's, for putting male infants to
+death, what can become of them all is a mystery. India and the colonies
+may absorb a good many, though these places also do duty in the
+absorption of spinsterhood. But this will not account for the alarming
+fact, that in almost every ball-room, no matter whether in the country
+or in town, there are usually at least three crinolines to one
+tail-coat, and that dancing bachelors are becoming so scarce that it is
+a question whether hostesses ought not, for their own peace of mind, to
+connive at the introduction of the Oriental nautch. Yet even the
+alarming scarcity of marriageable men is not so serious an evil as their
+growing disinclination to marry.
+
+With the causes of this disinclination we are not now concerned. Some
+attribute it to the increase of luxurious and expensive habits among
+bachelors--habits specially fostered by "those hateful clubs;" some to
+the "snobbishness" which makes a woman consider it beneath her dignity
+to marry into an establishment less stylish than that which it has
+perhaps taken her father all his life to secure; some to the
+_demi-monde_--an explanation very like the theory that small-pox is
+caused by pustules. But, whatever may be the causes of the
+disinclination, there can be but little doubt that it exists, and the
+worst part of the matter is, that it is found among rich men no less
+than among poor. That really poor men should not wish to marry is, even
+the Belgravian mother must admit, an admirable arrangement of nature.
+But it is too bad that so many men-about-town should seem rich enough
+for yachting, or racing, or opera-boxes, or even diamond necklaces--for
+anything, in short, but a wife. The fact is, that in the eyes of poor
+men a wife is associated chiefly with handsome carriages, showy dresses,
+fine furniture, and other forbidden luxuries; and, inasmuch as there is
+not one law of association for the rich and another for the poor, this
+view spreads, until even rich men consider whether it is not possible to
+secure the luxuries without the wife.
+
+Now, since marriage is, on the whole, an institution with which society
+cannot very well dispense--at any rate not until some good substitute
+has been found for it--it is clear that rich men ought not to be allowed
+to treat it in this way. If modern civilization tends to beget a
+disinclination to marry, it ought also, on the principle of
+compensation, to provide some means for counteracting this tendency, or
+keeping it under control. Is the increase of husband-hunting--we ask the
+question in a respectful and, we trust, purely philosophical spirit of
+inquiry--calculated to supply this great and obvious want? What are its
+merits, in this respect, as compared with the old-fashioned theory that
+woman should be wooed, not woo? Even the most inveterate hater of
+husband-hunting must admit that, so far as the great end of matrimony is
+concerned, the two sexes nowadays stand to each other in a most
+unnatural relation. It is alike the mission of both to marry, but
+whereas women are honorably anxious to fulfill this mission, men, as we
+have already seen, are too ready to shirk it. Yet, by a strange
+inversion of the usual order of things, to the very sex which evades the
+mission is its furtherance and chief control entrusted.
+
+Besides, not only does woman take more kindly to the duty of matrimony
+than man--or at least nineteenth-century man--but she has comparatively
+nothing else to think about. A dozen occupations are open to him, but
+her one object in life, her whole being's end and aim, is to marry.
+Surely, if the art of marriage requires cultivation, it ought, like
+everything else, to be entrusted to those who can give their whole time
+to it, not to those who have so much else to do. Even when a bachelor is
+in a position to marry, and not unwilling to make the experiment, he is
+still far less fitted for the furtherance of matrimony than a woman. He,
+perhaps, meets a nice girl at a ball, is taken with her, and after a
+mild flirtation thinks, as he walks home in the moonlight, that she
+would make a charming wife. He dreams about her, and next morning at
+breakfast, as he pensively eats a pound of steak, resolves that on the
+same afternoon, or the next at the very latest, he will contrive an
+accidental meeting, or even find some excuse for a call. But then comes
+office-work, or the _Times_, or some other distraction, and later on
+perhaps a visit from some matter-of-fact friend with an unromantic taste
+for "bitter," or a weakness for the Burlington Arcade. One day slips
+away, and by the next the image of the evening's idol has waxed
+comparatively faint. At least it is not sufficiently vivid to inspire
+him with courage enough for a call, or a too suspicious-looking
+rencontre. In a week he bows to the image, as it is driven by, as coolly
+as if he had never had a thought of making his heart its shrine; and
+thus a golden opportunity for bringing together two young people, in
+whose auspicious union the whole community has an interest, has been
+cruelly thrown away.
+
+How different might the case have been if fashion had allowed the lady
+to take the initiative, instead of compelling her to sit idly at home!
+She has no office-work, nor _Times_, nor any business but that of
+bringing last night's flirtation to a practical issue. Assuming her to
+be satisfied as to the eligibility of her partner, there is nothing to
+prevent her giving her whole time and attention to his capture. She is
+as little likely to throw away any chance of an interview calculated to
+help in bringing about this result as he is to neglect an opportunity
+for winning the lawn sleeves or silk gown. Marriage is of as much
+importance to her as either of these to him. It is, perhaps, not
+impossible that the mere notion of a woman's thus taking the initiative
+in courtship may to some appear outrageously immodest. But with this
+point we have nothing to do, as we have been discussing the theory of
+husband-hunting, not with any reference to its modesty, but solely and
+exclusively in its connexion with the great question, how marriage is to
+be carried on. We put together the three facts that nineteenth-century
+civilization makes men indisposed to marry, that it gives women no
+object in life but marriage, and yet that it assigns the furtherance of
+marriage, which we assume to be an institution deserving of careful
+cultivation, not to those whose interest it is to promote it, but to
+those who are comparatively averse to it. Modest or immodest,
+husband-hunting obviously tends to remedy this misdirection and waste of
+force.
+
+We take this to be the right explanation--and we have endeavored to make
+it an impartial one--of the charge not uncommonly brought against the
+young ladies of the present day, that, as compared with their mothers
+and grandmothers, they are rather forward and fast, and that
+husband-hunting in their hands, is gradually being developed to an
+extent scarcely compatible with the old-fashioned theories about
+maidenly modesty and reserve. The change may be considered the effort of
+modern civilization to remedy an evil of its own creation. The tide
+advances in one direction because it recedes in another. If the men
+will not come forward, the women must. It is all very well for satirists
+to call this immodest, but even modesty could be more easily dispensed
+with than marriage. Besides, without quitting our position as impartial
+observers, we may point out that it is only fair to the professor of
+husband-hunting to remember that there are two kinds of immodesty, and
+that some actions are immodest merely because it is the custom to
+consider them so. It would, no doubt, be immodest for a young lady to
+ride through Hyde Park in man's fashion. Yet what is there in the nature
+of things to make a side-saddle more modest than any other? The Amazons
+were positive prudes, and would never have even spoken to man if they
+could have contrived to carry on society without him; yet they rode
+astraddle. And if fashion could make this practice feminine, why should
+it not some day do as much for husband-hunting?
+
+
+
+
+THE PERILS OF "PAYING ATTENTION."
+
+
+We have elsewhere asserted that the art of match-making requires
+cultivation. We are told, however, that, on the contrary, match-making
+is so zealously studied and skillfully pursued that it bids fair to be
+the great social evil of nineteenth-century civilization. The growing
+difficulty of procuring sons-in-law has called forth a corresponding
+increase in the skill required for capturing them, just as the wits of
+the detective are sharpened to keep pace with the expertness which the
+general spread of useful knowledge has conferred upon the thief.
+Eligible bachelors complain that scarcity of marrying men has much the
+same effect upon the match-making mother as scarcity of food upon the
+wolf. It makes her at once more ferocious and more cunning. Her
+invitations to croquet-parties and little dinners are so constant and so
+pressing that it is scarcely possible for her destined prey to refuse
+them all without manifest rudeness, and yet it is equally hard for him
+to go without being judiciously manoeuvred into "paying attention" to
+the one young lady who has been selected to make him happy for life.
+
+This chivalrous and graceful synonym for courtship in itself speaks
+volumes for the serious nature of the risk which he runs. The truly
+gallant assumption which underlies it, that an Englishman only "pays
+attention" to a woman when he has a solid businesslike offer of marriage
+to make her, not only puts a formidable weapon into the hands of the
+match-maker, but also leaves her victim without a most effectual means
+of protection. The national gallantry towards women upon which a
+Frenchman so plumes himself may be, as your true Briton declares, a poor
+sort of quality enough; a mere grimace and trick of the lips--not
+genuine stuff from the heart; having much the same relation to true
+chivalry that his _bière_ has to beer, or his _potage_ to soup. But at
+any rate it has this advantage, that it enables him to pay any amount of
+flowery compliments to a woman without risk of committing himself, or of
+being misunderstood.
+
+If an Englishman asks a young lady after her sore throat, or her invalid
+grandmother, and throws into his voice that tone of eager interest or
+tender sympathy which a polite Frenchman would assume as a matter of
+course, he is at once suspected of matrimonial designs upon her. He is
+obliged to be as formal and businesslike in his mode of address as the
+lawyer's clerk who added at the end of a too ardent love-letter the
+saving clause "without prejudice." We have heard of a young lady who
+confided to her bosom friend that she that morning expected a proposal,
+and, when closely pressed for her reasons, blushingly confessed that the
+night before a gentleman had twice asked her whether she was fond of
+poetry, and four times whether she would like to go into the
+refreshment-room.
+
+We do not mean to say that this tendency to look upon every "attention"
+as a preliminary step to an offer is entirely, or even principally, due
+to British want of gallantry. Our national theory of courtship and
+marriage has probably much more to do with it. We say "theory"
+advisedly, for our practice approaches every day nearer to that of the
+Continental nations whose mercenary view of the holy estate of matrimony
+we righteously abjure. Our system is, in fact, gradually becoming a
+clumsy compromise between the _mariage de convenance_ and the _mariage
+d'amour_, with most of the disadvantages, and very few of the
+advantages, of either. Theoretically, English girls are allowed to marry
+for love, and to choose whichever they like best of all the admiring
+swains whom they fascinate at croquet-parties or balls. Practically, the
+majority marry for an establishment, and only flirt for love. They leave
+the school-room, no doubt, with an unimpeachably romantic conception of
+a youthful bridegroom who combines good looks, great intellect, and
+fervent piety with a modest four thousand a year, paid quarterly.
+
+But they are not very long in finding out that the men whom they like
+best, as being about their own age or still young enough to sympathise
+with their tastes and enter heartily into all their notions of fun, are
+rarely such as are pronounced by parents and guardians to be eligible;
+and so, after one or two attacks, more or less serious, of love-fever,
+they tranquilly look out for an admirer who can place the proper number
+of servants and horses at their disposal, while they in return
+magnanimously decline to make discourteously minute inquiries as to the
+condition of his hair or teeth. A marriage made in this spirit, even
+where no pressure is put upon the young lady by parents or friends, and
+she is allowed full liberty of action, is open to all the charges
+ordinarily brought against the Continental _mariage de convenance_. Yet,
+on the other hand, it has not the advantage of being formally arranged
+beforehand by a couple of elderly people, who are in no hurry, and who
+have seen enough of the world to know thoroughly what they are about;
+nor, we may add, does it usually take place in time to avert some one or
+more of those troublesome flirtations with handsome, but penniless,
+ball-room heroes which are not always calculated to improve either
+temper or character.
+
+Still, whatever our practice may be, we nevertheless do homage to the
+theory that, in this favored country, young ladies choose whatever
+husbands they like best, and marry for love; and although this theory is
+in some respects a serious obstacle to marriage, and often stands
+cruelly in the way of people with weak nerves, it places a powerful
+weapon in the hands of the dauntless and determined match-maker. If
+young people are to marry for love, they must obviously have every
+facility afforded them for meeting and fascinating each other. It is
+this consideration which reconciles the philosopher to some of our least
+entertaining entertainments, although, at the same time, it makes so
+much of our hospitality an organized hypocrisy.
+
+It is, indeed, a hard fate to be obliged to leave your after-dinner
+cigar and George Eliot's last novel in order to drive four miles through
+wind and snow to a party which your hostess has given, not because she
+has good fare, or good music, or agreeable guests, or anything, in
+short, really calculated to amuse you, but simply and solely because she
+has a tribe of daughters who somehow must be disposed of. Yet even a man
+of the Sir Cornewall Lewis stamp, who thinks that this world would be a
+very tolerable place but for its amusements, may forgive her when he
+reflects that business, not pleasure, is at the bottom of the
+invitation. If marriage is to be kept up, we must either abandon our
+theory that young ladies are allowed to choose husbands for themselves,
+or we must give them every possible facility for exercising the choice.
+Bachelors must be dragged, on every available pretext, and without the
+slightest reference to the nominal ends of amusement or hospitality,
+from the novel or cigar, and made to run the gauntlet of female charms.
+
+From the Sir Cornewall Lewis point of view, with which nearly all
+Englishmen over thirty more or less sympathise, it is the only sound
+defence of many of our so-called entertainments that they are virtually
+daughter-shows--genteel auctions, without which a sufficiently brisk
+trade in matrimony could not possibly be carried on. The consciousness
+of this is doubtless in one way somewhat of an obstacle to flirtation,
+and gives the frisky matron a cruel advantage over her unmarried rival.
+A man must have oak and triple brass round his heart who can flirt
+perfectly at his ease when he knows that his "attentions" are not
+merely watched by vigilant chaperons, but are actually reduced to a
+matter of numerical calculation--that a certain number of dances, or
+calls, or polite speeches will justify a stern father or big brother in
+asking his "intentions."
+
+This application of arithmetic is, in some respects, as dangerous to
+courtship as to the Pentateuch. But, nevertheless, it gives the clever
+and courageous match-maker an advantage of which the eligible bachelor
+complains that she makes the most pitiless use. He finds himself
+manoeuvred into "paying the attentions" which society considers the
+usual prelude to a marriage, with a dexterity which it is all but
+impossible to evade. The lady is played into his hands with much the
+same sort of skill that a conjuror exhibits in forcing a card. There are
+perhaps a number of other ladies present, in promiscuous flirtation with
+whom he sees, at first glance, an obvious means of escape. But this hope
+speedily turns out a delusion. One lady is vigilantly guarded by a
+jealous betrothed; a second is a poor relation, or humble friend, who
+knows that she would never get another invitation to the house if she
+once interfered with her patron's plans; a third is too plain to be
+approached on any ordinary calculation of probabilities; a fourth is
+hopelessly dull; the rest are married, and if not actually themselves in
+the conspiracy--which, however, is as likely as not--are still carefully
+chosen for their freedom from the flirting propensities of the frisky
+matron. The destined victim finds, in short, that he must either
+deliberately resign himself to be bored to death, or boldly face the
+peril in store for him, and take his chance of evading or breaking the
+net. Nine men out of ten naturally choose the latter alternative, too
+often in that presumptuous spirit of self-confidence which is the
+match-maker's best ally.
+
+A bachelor is perhaps never in so great danger of being caught as when
+he has come to the conclusion that he sees perfectly through the
+mother's little game and merely means to amuse himself by carrying on a
+strictly guarded flirtation with the daughter. We mean, of course, on
+the assumption that the daughter is either a pretty or clever girl, with
+whom any sort of flirtation is in itself perilous. His danger is all the
+greater if it happens--and it is only fair to young-ladydom to admit
+that it often does happen--that the daughter has sufficient spirit and
+self-respect to repudiate all share in the maternal plot. Many a man has
+been half surprised, half piqued, into serious courtship by finding
+himself vigorously snubbed and rebuffed where he had been led to imagine
+that his slightest advances would be only too eagerly received. But, in
+any case, the match-maker knows that, if she can only bring the two
+people whom she wishes to marry sufficiently often into each other's
+society, the battle is half won. According to Lord Lytton, whom every
+one will admit to be an authority on the philosophy of flirtation,
+"proximity is the soul of love." And eligible bachelors complain that it
+becomes every day harder to avoid this perilous proximity, and the duty
+of "paying attention" which it implies, without being positively rude.
+
+We have not much consolation to offer the sufferers who prefer this
+complaint. As regards our own statement that the art of match-making
+requires cultivation, we did not mean by it to imply that match-making
+is not vigorously carried on. So long as there are mothers left with
+daughters to be married, so long will match-making continue to be
+pursued; and it must obviously be pursued all the more energetically to
+keep pace with the growing disinclination of bachelors among the upper
+and middle classes to face the responsibilities of married life. We
+meant that match-making does not receive the sort of cultivation which
+it seems to us fairly to deserve, when we consider the paramount
+importance of the object which it at least professes to have in view,
+and the delicate nature of the instruments and experiments with which it
+is concerned.
+
+We have not yet mustered up courage for the attempt to show what should
+be its proper cultivation; but we may safely say that so long as it is
+left in the hands of those who are influenced by merely mercenary or
+interested motives, and who watch the "attentions" of a bachelor, not in
+the spirit of a philosopher or a philanthropist, but in that of a
+Belgravian mother, it cannot be cultivated as a fine art. It can only be
+rescued from the unmerited odium into which it has fallen by being taken
+under the patronage of those who are in a position to practice it on
+purely artistic and disinterested grounds. In their hands, the now
+perilous process of "paying attention" would be studied and criticized
+in a new spirit. It might still, indeed, be treated arithmetically, as
+perhaps the most promising way of reducing it to the precision and
+certainty of an exact science. But still the problem would be to
+determine, not what is the least possible number of dances, calls, or
+compliments which may justify the intervention of a big brother or heavy
+father, but what number warrants the assumption that the flirtation has
+passed out of the frivolous into the serious stage. Three dances, for
+instance, may expose a man to being asked what are his "intentions,"
+where six dances need not imply that he really has any. The mercenary
+match-maker considers only the first point; our ideal match-maker would
+lay far more stress upon the second. But still, in any case, this
+growing tendency to treat the practice of "paying attention" in the
+spirit of exact science offers at least one ray of hope to those who
+complain that, do what they will, they cannot escape having to pay this
+dangerous tribute. The tendency must sooner or later bear fruit in a
+generally recognised code of courtship (whether written or unwritten
+does not much matter), prescribing the precise number and character of
+the "attentions"--in their adaptation to dancing, croquet-playing,
+cracker-pulling, and other conventional pretexts for flirtation--which
+virtually amount to an offer of marriage. This scheme, we may mention,
+is not wholly imaginary. There is somewhere or other a stratum of
+English society in which such a code already exists. At least we have
+seen a book of etiquette in which, among similar ordinances, it was laid
+down that to hand anything--say a flower or a muffin--to a lady with
+the left hand was equivalent to a proposal. The general introduction of
+a system of this kind, although it might shorten the lives of timid or
+forgetful men, would obviously confer an unspeakable boon upon the
+majority of the match-maker's present victims. They would not only know
+exactly how far to go with safety, but also how at once to recede. To
+offer, for instance, two pieces of muffin firmly and decidedly with the
+right hand would probably make up for offering one flower with the left,
+at least if there were no guardian or chaperon on the spot to take
+instant advantage of the first overture. But it would now perhaps be
+premature to enter into the details of a system which it may take a
+generation or so more of match-making to introduce.
+
+
+
+
+WOMEN'S HEROINES.
+
+
+A vigorous and pertinacious effort has of late years been made to
+persuade mankind that beauty in women is a matter of very little moment.
+As long as literature was more or less a man's vocation, an opposite
+tendency prevailed; and a successful novelist would as soon have thought
+of flying as of driving a team of ugly heroines through three volumes.
+The rapid and portentous increase of authoresses changed the current of
+affairs. As a rule, authoresses do not care much about lovely women; and
+they must naturally despise the miserable masculine weakness which is
+led captive by a pretty face, even if it be only upon paper. They can
+have no patience with such feebleness, and it may well seem to them to
+be a high and important mission to help to put it down.
+
+It became, accordingly, the fashion at one time among the feminine
+writers of fiction to make all their fascinating heroines plain girls
+with plenty of soul, and to show, by a series of thrilling love
+adventures, how completely in the long run the plain girls had the best
+of it. There is a regular type of ideal young lady in women's novels, to
+which we have at last become accustomed. She is not at all a perfect
+beauty. Her features are not as finely chiseled as a Greek statue; she
+is taller, we are invariably told, than the model height, her nose is
+_retroussé_; and "in some lights" an unfavorable critic might affirm
+that her hair was positively tawny. But there is a well of feeling in
+her big brown eyes, which, when united to genius, invariably bowls over
+the hero of the book. And the passion she excites is of that stirring
+kind which eclipses all others.
+
+Through the first two volumes the predestined lover flirts with the
+beauties who despise her, dances with them under her eye, and wears
+their colors in her presence. But at the end of the third an expressive
+glance tells her that all is right, and that big eyes and a big soul
+have won the race in a canter. Jane Eyre was perhaps the first
+triumphant success of this particular school of art. And Jane Eyre
+certainly opened the door to a long train of imitators. For many years
+every woman's novel had got in it some dear and noble creature,
+generally underrated, and as often as not in embarrassed circumstances,
+who used to capture her husband by sheer force of genius, and by
+pretending not to notice him when he came into the room. Some pleasant
+womanly enthusiasts even went further, and invented heroines with
+tangled hair and inky fingers. We do not feel perfectly certain that
+Miss Yonge, for instance, has not married her inky Minervas to nicer and
+more pious husbands, as a rule, than her uninky ones. The advantage of
+the view that ugly heroines are the most charming is obvious, if only
+the world could be brought to adopt it. It is a well-meant protest in
+favor of what may be called, in these days of political excitement, the
+"rights" of plain girls. It is very hard to think that a few more
+freckles or a quarter of an inch of extra chin should make all the
+difference in life to women, and those of them who are intellectually
+fitted to play a shining part in society or literature may be excused
+for rebelling against the masculine heresy of believing in beauty only.
+
+Whenever such women write, the constant moral they preach to us is that
+beauty is a delusion and a snare. This is the moral of Hetty in _Adam
+Bede_, and it is in the unsympathetic and cold way in which Hetty is
+described that one catches glimpses of the sex of the consummate author
+of the story. She is quite alive to Hetty's plump arms and pretty
+cheeks. She likes to pat her and watch her, as if Hetty were a cat, or
+some other sleek and supple animal. But we feel that the writer of _Adam
+Bede_ is eyeing Hetty all over from the beginning to the end, and
+considering in herself the while what fools men are. It would be unjust
+and untrue to say that George Eliot in all her works does not do ample
+justice, in a noble and generous way, to the power of female beauty. The
+heroines of _Romola_ and _Felix Holt_ prove distinctly that she does.
+But one may fairly doubt whether a man could have painted Hetty. When
+one sees the picture, one understands its truth; but men who draw pretty
+faces usually do so with more enthusiasm.
+
+A similar sort of protest may be found lurking in a great many women's
+novels against the popular opinion that man is the more powerful animal,
+and that a wife is at best a domestic appanage of the husband.
+Authoresses are never weary of attempts to set this right. They like to
+prove, what is continually true, that feminine charms are the lever that
+moves the world, and that the ideal woman keeps her husband and all
+about her straight. In religious novels woman's task is to exercise the
+happiest influence on the man's theological opinions. Owing to the
+errors he has imbibed from the study of a false and shallow philosophy,
+he sees no good in going to church twice on Sundays, or feels that he
+cannot heartily adopt all the expressions in the Athanasian creed. It is
+the heroine's mission to cure this mental malady; to point out to him,
+from the impartial point of view of those who have never committed the
+folly of studying Kant or Hegel, how thoroughly superficial Kant and
+Hegel are; and to remind him by moonlight, and in the course of
+spiritual flirtation on a balcony, of the unutterable truths in theology
+which only a woman can naturally discern. We are far from wishing to
+intimate that there is not a good deal of usefulness in such feminine
+points of view. The _argumentum ad sexum_, if not a logical, is often no
+doubt a practical one, and women are right to employ it whenever they
+can make it tell. And as it would be impossible to develop it to any
+considerable extent in a dry controversial work, authoresses have no
+other place to work it in except in a romance. What they do for religion
+in pious novels, they do for other things in productions of a more
+strictly secular kind.
+
+There is, for instance, a popular and prevalent fallacy that women ought
+to be submissive to, and governed by, their lords and masters. In
+feminine fiction we see a very wholesome reaction against this mistaken
+supposition. The hero of the female tale is often a poor, frivolous,
+easily led person. When he can escape from his wife's eye, he speculates
+heavily on Stock Exchange, goes in under the influence of evil advisers
+for any sort of polite swindling, and forgets, or is ill-tempered
+towards, the inestimable treasure he has at home. On such occasions the
+heroine of the feminine novel shines out in all her majesty. She is kind
+and patient to her husband's faults, except that when he is more than
+usually idiotic her eyes flash, and her nostrils dilate with a sort of
+grand scorn, while her knowledge of life and business is displayed at
+critical moments to save him from ruin. When every one else deserts him,
+she takes a cab into the city, and employs some clever friend, who has
+always been hopelessly in love with her--and for whom she entertains,
+unknown to her husband, a Platonic brotherly regard--to intervene in the
+nick of time, and to arrest her husband's fall.
+
+In a story called _Sowing the Wind_, which has recently been published,
+the authoress (for we assume, in spite of the ambiguous assertion on the
+title-page, that the pen which wrote it was not really a man's) goes to
+very great lengths. The hero, St. John Aylott, is always snubbing and
+lecturing Isola, whom he married when she was half a child, and whom he
+treats as a child long after she has become a great and glorious woman.
+He administers the doctrine of conjugal authority to her in season and
+out of season, and his object is to convert her into a loving feminine
+slave. Against this revolting theory her nature rebels. Though she
+preserves her wifely attachment to a man whom she has once thought
+worthy of better things, her respect dies away, and at last she openly
+defies him when he wants her, in contravention of her plain duty, not to
+adopt as her son a deserted orphan-boy. At this point her character
+stands out in noble contrast to his. She does adopt the boy, and brings
+him to live with her in spite of all; and when St. John is unnaturally
+peevish at its childish squalling, Isola bears his fretful
+animadversions with a patient dignity that touches the hearts of all
+about her.
+
+Any husband who can go on preaching about conjugal obedience through
+three volumes to a splendid creature who is his wife, must have
+something wrong about his mind. And something wrong about St. John's
+mind there ultimately proves to be. It flashes across Isola that this is
+the case, and before long her worst suspicions are confirmed. At last
+St. John breaks out into open lunacy, and dies deranged--a fate which is
+partly the cause, and partly the consequence, of his continual
+indulgence in such wild theories about the relations of man and wife. It
+is not every day that we have the valuable lesson of the rights of wives
+so plainly or so practically put before us, but when it is put before
+us, we recognize the service that may be conferred on literature and
+society by lady authors. To assert the great cause of the independence
+of the female sex is one of the ends of feminine fiction, just as the
+assertion of the rights of plain girls is another. Authoresses do not
+ask for what Mr. Mill wishes them to have--a vote for the borough, or
+perhaps a seat in Parliament. They do ask that young women should have a
+fair matrimonial chance, independently of such trivial considerations as
+good looks, and that after marriage they should have the right to
+despise their husbands whenever duty and common sense tell them it is
+proper to do so.
+
+The odd thing is that the heroines of whom authoresses are so fond in
+novels, are not the heroines whom other women like in real life. Even
+the popular authoresses of the day, who are always producing some lovely
+pantheress in their stories, and making her achieve an endless series of
+impossible exploits, would not care much about a lovely pantheress in a
+drawing-room or a country-house; and are not perhaps in the habit of
+meeting any. The fact is that the vast majority of women who write
+novels do not draw upon their observation for their characters so much
+as upon their imagination. In some respects this is curious enough, for
+when women observe, they observe acutely and to a good deal of purpose.
+Those of them, however, who take to the manufacture of fiction have
+generally done so because at some portion of their career they have been
+thrown back upon themselves. They began perhaps to write when
+circumstances made them feel isolated from the rest of their little
+world, and in a spirit of sickly concentration upon their own thoughts.
+
+A woman with a turn for literary work who notices that she is distanced,
+as far as success or admiration goes, by rivals inferior in mental
+capacity to herself, flies eagerly to the society of her own fancies,
+and makes her pen her greatest friend. It is the lot of many girls to
+pass their childhood or youth in a somewhat monotonous round of domestic
+duties, and frequently in a narrow domestic circle, with which, except
+from natural affection, they may have no great intellectual sympathy.
+The stage of intellectual fever through which able men have passed when
+they were young is replaced, in the case of girls of talent, by a stage
+of moral morbidity. At first this finds vent in hymns, and it turns in
+the end to novels. Few clever young ladies have not written religious
+poetry at one period or other of their history, and few that have done
+so, stop there without going further. It is a great temptation to
+console oneself for the shortcomings of the social life around, by
+building up an imaginary picture of social life as it might be, full of
+romantic adventures and pleasant conquests.
+
+In manufacturing her heroines, the young recluse author puts on paper
+what she would herself like to be, and what she thinks she might be if
+only her eyes were bluer, her purse longer, or men more wise and
+discerning. In painting the slights offered to her favorite ideal, she
+conceives the slights that might possibly be offered to herself, and the
+triumphant way in which she would (under somewhat more auspicious
+circumstances) delight to live them down and trample them under foot.
+The vexations and the annoyances she describes with considerable spirit
+and accuracy. The triumph is the representation of her own delicious
+dreams. The grand character of the imaginary victim is but a species of
+phantom of her ownself, taken, like the German's camel, from the depths
+of her own self-consciousness, and projected into cloudland. This is the
+reason why authoresses enjoy dressing up a heroine who is ill-used. They
+know the sensation of social martyrdom, and it is a gentle sort of
+revenge upon the world to publish a novel about an underrated martyr,
+whose merits are recognised in the end, either before or after her
+decease. They are probably not conscious of the precise work they are
+performing. They are not aware that their heroine represents what they
+believe they themselves would prove to be under impossible
+circumstances, provided they had only golden hair and a wider sphere of
+action.
+
+This is but another and a larger phase of a phenomenon which all of us
+have become familiar with who have ever had a large acquaintance with
+young ladies' poems. They all write about death with a pertinacity that
+is positively astounding. It is not that the young people actually want
+to die. But they like the idea that their family circle will find out,
+when it is too late, all the mistakes and injustices it has committed
+towards them, and that this world will perceive that it has been
+entertaining unawares an angel, just as the angel has taken flight
+upwards to another. The juvenile aspirant commences with revenging her
+wrongs in heaven, but it occurs to her before long that she can with
+equal facility have them revenged upon earth. Poetry gives way to prose,
+and hymnology to fiction. The element of self-consciousness, unknown to
+herself, still continues to prevail, and to color the character of the
+heroines she turns out. Of course great authoresses shake themselves
+free from it. Real genius is independent of sex, and first-rate writers,
+whether they are men or women, are not morbidly in love with an
+idealized portrait of themselves.
+
+But the poorer or less worthy class of feminine novelists seldom escape
+from the fatal influence of egotism. Women's heroines, except in the
+case of the best artists, are conceptions borrowed, not from without,
+but from within. The consequence is that there is a sameness about them
+which becomes at last distasteful. The conception of the injured wife or
+the glorified governess is one which was a novelty fifteen or twenty
+years ago, while it cannot be said any longer to be lively or
+entertaining. As literature has grown to be a woman's occupation, we are
+afraid that glorified governesses in fiction will, like the poor, be
+always with us, and continue to the end to run their bright course of
+universal victory. The most, perhaps, that can be hoped is that they
+will in the long run take the wind out of the sails of the glorified
+adulteresses and murderesses which at present seem the latest and most
+successful efforts of feminine art.
+
+
+
+
+INTERFERENCE.
+
+
+About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely
+personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. Not tyranny, which
+is another matter--tyranny being active while interference is negative;
+the one standing as the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of
+the same principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some personal gain in
+view when it takes in hand to force people to do what they do not like
+to do; while interference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply
+prevents the exercise of free will for the mere pleasure to be had out
+of such prevention. Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than
+domestic, but the curse of interference is seen most distinctly within
+the four walls of home, where also it is felt the most. Very many people
+spend their lives in interfering with others--perpetually putting spokes
+into wheels with which they have really nothing to do, and thrusting
+their fingers into pies about the baking of which they are not in any
+way concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women
+make up the larger number and are the greater sinners.
+
+To be sure there are some men--small, fussy, finicking fellows, with
+whom nature has made the irreparable blunder of sex--who are as
+troublesome in their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and
+most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the feminine
+characteristics of men are so exceptional that we need not take them
+into serious calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in
+any manly sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a
+right to control--say, with the wife's low dresses, or the daughter's
+too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are
+jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and
+knowing what men say of such displays, or fearing their effect, they
+stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But this
+kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes into
+another class of motives altogether, and does not belong to the kind of
+interference of which we are speaking.
+
+Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other and
+with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to church
+and subscribing to their favorite mission, so much as they tell us what
+we are not to do; they do not command so much as they forbid; and, of
+all women, wives and daughters are the most given to handling these
+check-strings and putting on these drag-chains. Sisters, while young,
+are obliged to be less interfering, under pain of a perpetual round of
+bickering; for brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of
+creatures for the most part as loftily snubbed as sisters are; while
+mothers are nine times out of ten laid aside for all but sentimental
+purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be a boy and has learned to
+become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of personal and domestic
+interference lies with wives, and they know how to use the prerogative
+they assume.
+
+Take an unlucky man who smokes under protest, his wife not liking to
+forbid the pleasure entirely, but always grudging it, and interfering
+with its exercise. Each segar represents a battle, deepening in
+intensity according to the number. The first may have been had with only
+a light skirmish perhaps, perhaps a mere threatening of an attack that
+passed away without coming to actual onslaught; the second brings up the
+artillery; while the third or fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets
+the biggest guns thundering. She could understand a man smoking one
+segar in the day, she says, with a gracious condescension to masculine
+weakness; but when it comes to more she feels that she is called on to
+interfere, and to do her best towards checking such a reprehensible
+excess. It does not weaken her position that she knows nothing of what
+she is talking about. She never smoked a segar herself, and therefore
+does not understand the uses or the abuses of tobacco; but she holds
+herself pledged to interfere as soon as she gets the chance, and she
+redeems the pledge with energy.
+
+The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite to
+correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that he has a feeble
+digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the gauntlet
+of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines or sups jollily with
+his friends without being plucked at and reminded that salmon always
+disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a headache
+to-morrow; and "My dear! when you know how bad salad is for you!" or,
+"How can you eat that horrid pastry! You will be so ill in the night!"
+"What! more wine? another glass of whisky? how foolish you are! how
+wrong!" The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear
+stimulants; the husband is a strong large-framed man who can drink deep
+without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit is her
+husband's measure, and as soon as he has gone beyond the range of her
+own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks herself
+justified in interfering with his progress. For women cannot be brought
+to understand the capacities of a man's life; they cannot be made to
+understand that what is bad for themselves may not be bad for others,
+and that their weakness ought not to be the gauge of a man's strength.
+
+A pale chilly woman afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears furs
+and velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East-Indian
+fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, father, and sons in
+about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must not go out
+without an overcoat; they must be sure to take an umbrella if the day is
+at all cloudy; they must not walk too far, nor ride too hard, and they
+must be sure to be at home by a certain hour. When such women as these
+have to do with men just on the boundary-line between the last days of
+vigor and the first of old age, they put forward the time of old age by
+many years. One sees their men rapidly sink into the softness and
+incapacity of senility, when a more bracing life would have kept them
+good for half-a-dozen years longer. But women do not care for this. They
+like men to be their own companions more than they care for any manly
+comradeship among each other; and most women--but not all--would rather
+have their husbands manly in a womanly way than in a manly one, as being
+more within the compass of their own sympathies and understanding.
+
+The same kind of interference is very common where the husband is a man
+of broad humor--one who calls a spade a spade, with no circumlocution
+about an agricultural implement. The wife of such a man is generally one
+of the ultra-refined kind, according to the odd law of compensation
+which regulates so much of human action, and thinks herself obliged to
+stand as the enduring censor of her husband's speech. As this is an
+example most frequently to be found in middle life, and where there are
+children belonging to the establishment, the word of warning is
+generally "papa!"--said with reproach or resentment, according to
+circumstances--which has, of course, the effect of drawing the attention
+of the young people to the paternal breadth of speech, and of fixing
+that special breach of decorum on their memory. Sometimes the wife has
+sufficient self-restraint not to give the word of warning in public, but
+can nurse her displeasure for a more convenient season; but as soon as
+they are alone, the miserable man has to pass under the harrow, as only
+husbands with wives of a chastising spirit can pass under it, and his
+life is made a burden to him because of that unlucky anecdote told with
+such verve a few hours ago, and received with such shouts of pleasant
+laughter. Perhaps the anecdote was just a trifle doubtful; granted; but
+what does the wife take by her remonstrance? Most probably a quarrel;
+possibly a good-natured _peccavi_ for the sake of being let off the
+continuance of the sermon; perhaps a yawn; most certainly not reform. If
+the man is a man of free speech and broad humor by nature and liking, he
+will remain so to the end; and what the censorship of society leaves
+untouched, the interference of a wife will not control.
+
+Children come in for an enormous share of interference, which is not
+direction, not discipline, but simple interference for its own sake.
+There are mothers who meddle with every expression of individuality in
+their young people, quite irrespective of moral tendency, or whether the
+occasion is trivial or important. In the fancies, the pleasures, the
+minor details of dress in their children, there is always that intruding
+maternal finger upsetting the arrangements of the poor little pie as
+vigorously as if thrones and altars depended on the result. Not a game
+of croquet can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn instead of a pink one,
+without maternal interference; so that the bloom is rubbed off every
+enjoyment, and life becomes reduced to a kind of goose-step, with mamma
+for the drill-sergeant prescribing the inches to be marked. Sisters,
+too, do a great deal of this kind of thing among each other; as all
+those who are intimate where there are large families of unmarried girls
+must have seen. The nudges, the warning looks, the deprecating "Amies!"
+and "Oh Lucies!" and "Hush Roses!" by which some seek to act as
+household police over the others, are patent to all who use their
+senses.
+
+In some houses the younger sisters seem to have been born chiefly as
+training grounds for the elders, whereon they may exercise their powers
+of interference; and a hard time they have of it. If Emma goes to her
+embroidery, Ellen tells her she ought to practice her singing; if Jane
+is reading, Mary recommends sewing as a more profitable use of precious
+time; if Amy is at her easel, Ada wants to turn her round to the piano.
+It is quite the exception where four or five sisters leave each other
+free to do as each likes, and do not take to drilling and interference
+as part of the daily programme. Something of the reluctance to domestic
+service so painfully apparent among the better class of working women is
+due to this spirit of interference with women. The lady who wrote about
+the caps and gowns of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of dress, down
+to the very material of their gloves, was an instance of this spirit.
+For, when we come to analyse it, what does it really signify to us how
+our servants dress, so long as they are clean and decent, and do not let
+their garments damage our goods? Fashion is almost always ridiculous,
+and women as a rule care more for dress than they care for anything
+else; and if the kitchen apes the parlor, and Phyllis gives as much
+thought to her new linsey as my lady gives to her new velvet, we cannot
+wonder at it, nor need we hold up our hands in horror at the depravity
+of the smaller person. Does one flight of stairs transpose morality? If
+it does not, there is no real ethical reason why my lady should
+interfere with poor Phyllis's enjoyment in her ugly vanities, when she
+herself will not be interfered with, though press and pulpit both try to
+turn her out of her present path into one that all ages have thought the
+best for her, and the one divinely appointed. It is a thing that will
+not bear reasoning on, being simply a form of the old "who will guard
+the guardian?" Who will direct the directress? and to whose interference
+will the interferer submit?
+
+There are two causes for this excessive love of interference among
+women. The one is the narrowness of their lives and objects, by which
+insignificant things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes; the
+other, their belief that they are the only saviors of society, and that
+without them man would become hopelessly corrupt. And to a certain
+extent this belief is true, but surely with restrictions. Because the
+clearer moral sense and greater physical weakness of women restrain
+men's fiercer passions, and force them to be gentle and considerate,
+women are not, therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine life, into
+whose hands is given the paying out of just so much rope as they think
+fit for the occasion. They would do better to look to their own tackle
+before settling so exactly the run of others'; and if ever their desired
+time of equality is to come, it must come through mutual independence,
+not through womanly interference, and as much liberality and breadth
+must be given as is demanded--which, so far as humanity has gone
+hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of squaring accounts.
+
+Grant that women are the salt of the earth, and the great antiseptic
+element in society, still that does not reduce everything else to the
+verge of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet by their lives they
+evidently think that it is so, and that they are each and all the
+keepers of keys which give them a special entrance to the temple of
+morality, and by which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser
+body of men. Hence they interfere and restrict and pay out just so much
+rope, and measure off just so much gambolling ground, as they think fit;
+they think vile man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things
+into his own hand, and goes beyond their boundary-lines. It is all done
+in good if in a very narrow faith--that we admit willingly; but we would
+call their attention to the difference there is between influence and
+interference, which is just the difference between their ideal duty and
+their daily practice--between being the salt of the earth and the
+blister of the home. We think it only justice to put in a word for those
+poor henpecked fellows of husbands at a time when the whole cry is for
+Woman's Rights, which seems to mean chiefly her right of making man
+knuckle under on all occasions, and of making one will serve for two
+lives. We assure her that she would get her own way in large matters
+much more easily if she would leave men more liberty in small ones, and
+not teaze them by interfering in things which do not concern her, and
+have only reference to themselves.
+
+
+
+
+PLAIN GIRLS.
+
+
+It is beyond all question the tendency of modern society to regard
+marriage as the great end and justification of a woman's life. This is
+perhaps the single point on which practical and romantic people, who
+differ in so many things, invariably agree. Poets, novelists, natural
+philosophers, fashionable and unfashionable mothers, meet one another on
+the broad common ground of approving universal matrimony; and women from
+their earliest years are dedicated to the cultivation of those feminine
+accomplishments which are supposed either to be most seductive before
+marriage in a drawing-room, or most valuable after marriage in the
+kitchen and housekeeper's-room.
+
+It is admitted to be a sort of half necessity in any interesting work of
+fiction that its plots, its adventures, and its catastrophes should all
+lead up to the marriage of the principal young lady. Sometimes, as in
+the case of the celebrated Lilly Dale, the public tolerates a bold
+exception to the ordinary rule, on account of the extreme piquancy of
+the thing; but no wise novelist ventures habitually to disregard the
+prevalent opinion that the heroine's mission is to become a wife before
+the end of the third volume. The one ideal, accordingly, which romance
+has to offer woman is marriage; and most novels thus make life end with
+what really is only its threshold and beginning. The Bible no doubt says
+that it is not good for man to live alone. What the Bible says of man,
+public opinion as unhesitatingly asserts of woman; and a text that it is
+not good for woman to live alone either, though not canonical, is
+silently added by all domestic commentators to the Scriptural original.
+
+Those who pretend to be best acquainted with the order of nature and the
+mysterious designs of Providence assure us with confidence that all this
+is as it should be; that woman is not meant to grow and flourish singly,
+but to hang on man, and to depend on him, like the vine upon the elm. If
+we remember right, M. Comte entertains opinions which really come to
+pretty much the same thing. Woman is to be maintained in ease and luxury
+by the rougher male animal, it being her duty in return to keep his
+spiritual nature up to the mark, to quicken and to purify his
+affections, to be a sort of drawing-room religion in the middle of
+every-day life, to serve as an object of devotion to the religious
+Comtist, and to lead him through love of herself up to the love of
+humanity in the abstract.
+
+One difficulty presented by this matrimonial view of woman's destiny is
+to know what, under the present conditions in which society finds itself
+placed, is to become of plain girls. Their mission is a subject which no
+philosopher as yet has adequately handled. If marriage is the object of
+all feminine endeavors and ambitions, it certainly seems rather hard
+that Providence should have condemned plain girls to start in the race
+at such an obvious disadvantage. Even under M. Comte's system, which
+provides for almost everything, and which, in its far-sightedness and
+thoughtfulness for our good, appears almost more benevolent than
+Providence, it would seem as if hardly sufficient provision had been
+made for them.
+
+It must be difficult for any one except a really advanced Comtist to
+give himself up to the worship of a thoroughly plain girl. Filial
+instinct might enable us to worship her as a mother, but even the
+noblest desire to serve humanity would scarcely be enough to keep a
+husband or a lover up to his daily devotions in the case of a plain girl
+with sandy hair and a freckled complexion. The boldest effort to rectify
+the inequalities of the position of plain girls has been made of late
+years by a courageous school of female writers of fiction. Everything
+has been done that could be done to persuade mankind that plain girls
+are in reality by far the most attractive of the lot. The clever
+authoress of "Jane Eyre" nearly succeeded in the forlorn attempt for a
+few years; and plain girls, with volumes of intellect speaking through
+their deep eyes and from their massive foreheads, seemed for a while, on
+paper at least, to be carrying everything before them.
+
+The only difficulty was to get the male sex to follow out in practice
+what they so completely admired in Miss Bronté's three-volume novels.
+Unhappily, the male sex, being very imperfect and frail, could not be
+brought to do it. They recognized the beauty of the conception about
+plain girls, they were very glad to see them married off in scores to
+heroic village doctors, and they quite admitted that occasional young
+noblemen might be represented in fiction as becoming violently attached
+to young creatures with inky fingers and remarkable minds.
+
+But no real change was brought about in ordinary life. Man, sinful man,
+read with pleasure about the triumphs of the sandy-haired girls, but
+still kept on dancing with and proposing to the pretty ones. And at last
+authoresses were driven back on the old standard of beauty. At present,
+in the productions both of masculine and feminine workmanship, the
+former view of plain girls has been resumed. They are allowed, if
+thoroughly excellent in other ways, to pair off with country curates and
+with devoted missionaries; but the prizes of fiction, as well as the
+prizes of reality, fall to the lot of their fairer and more fortunate
+sisters.
+
+Champions of plain girls are not, however, wanting who boldly take the
+difficulty by the horns, and deny _in toto_ the fact that in matrimony
+and love the race is usually to the beautiful. Look about you, they tell
+us, in the world, and you will as often as not find beauties fading on
+their stalks, and plain girls marrying on every side of them. And no
+doubt plain girls do marry very frequently. Nobody, for instance, with
+half an eye can fail to be familiar with the phenomenon, in his own
+circle, of astonishingly ugly married women. It does not, however,
+follow that plain girls are not terribly weighted in the race.
+
+There are several reasons why women who rely on their beauty remain
+unmarried at the last, but the reason that their beauty gives them no
+advantage is certainly not one. The first reason perhaps is that
+beauties are inclined to be fastidious and capricious. They have no
+notion of following the advice of Mrs. Hannah More, and being contented
+with the first good, sensible, Christian lover who falls in their way;
+and they run, in consequence, no slight risk of overstaying their
+market. They go in for a more splendid sort of matrimonial success, and
+think they can afford to play the more daring game.
+
+Plain girls are providentially preserved from these temptations. At the
+close of a well-spent life they can conscientiously look back on a
+career in which no reasonable opportunity was neglected, and say that
+they have not broken many hearts, or been sinfully and distractingly
+particular. And there is the further consideration to be remembered in
+the case of plain girls, that fortune and rank are nearly as valuable
+articles as beauty, and lead to a fair number of matrimonial alliances.
+The system of Providence is full of kindly compensations, and it is a
+proof of the universal benevolence we see about us that so many
+heiresses should be plain. Plain girls have a right to be cheered and
+comforted by the thought. It teaches them the happy lesson that beauty,
+as compared with a settled income, is skin-deep and valueless; and that
+what man looks for in the companion of his life is not so much a bright
+cheek or a blue eye, as a substantial and useful amount of this world's
+wealth.
+
+Plain girls again expect less, and are prepared to accept less, in a
+lover. Everybody knows the sort of useful, admirable, practical man who
+sets himself to marry a plain girl. He is not a man of great rank, great
+promise, or great expectations. Had it been otherwise, he might possibly
+have flown at higher game, and set his heart on marrying female
+loveliness rather than homely excellence. His choice, if it is nothing
+else, is an index of a contented and modest disposition. He is not vain
+enough to compete in the great race for beauties. What he looks for is
+some one who will be the mother of his children, who will order his
+servants duly, and keep his household bills; and whose good sense will
+teach her to recognise the sterling qualities of her husband, and not
+object to his dining daily in his slippers. This is the sort of partner
+that plain girls may rationally hope to secure, and who can say that
+they ought not to be cheerful and happy in their lot? For a character of
+this undeniable sobriety there is indeed a positive advantage in a plain
+girl as a wife. It should never be forgotten that the man who marries a
+plain girl never need be jealous. He is in the Arcadian and fortunate
+condition of a lover who has no rivals. A sensible unambitious nature
+will recognize in this a solid benefit. Plain girls rarely turn into
+frisky matrons, and this fact renders them peculiarly adapted to be the
+wives of dull and steady mediocrity.
+
+Lest it should be supposed that the above calculation of what plain
+girls may do leaves some of their power and success still unaccounted
+for, it is quite right and proper to add that the story of plain girls,
+if it were carefully written, would contain many instances, not merely
+of moderate good fortunes, but of splendid and exceptional triumph. Like
+_prima donnas_, opera-dancers, and lovely milliners, plain girls have
+been known to make extraordinary hits, and to awaken illustrious
+passions. Somebody ought to take up the subject in a book, and tell us
+how they did it.
+
+This is the age of Golden Treasuries. We have Golden Treasuries of
+English poets, of French poets, of great lawyers, of famous battles, of
+notable beauties, of English heroes, of successful merchants, and of
+almost every sort of character and celebrity that can be conceived. What
+is wanted is a Golden Treasury containing the narrative of the most
+successful plain girls. This book might be called the Book of Ugliness,
+and we see no reason why, to give reality to the story, the portraits of
+some of the most remarkable might not be appended. Of course, if ever
+such a volume is compiled, it will be proved to demonstration that plain
+girls have before now arrived at great matrimonial honor and renown.
+
+There is, for example, the sort of plain girl who nurses her hero
+(perhaps in the Crimea) through a dangerous attack of illness, and
+marries him afterwards. There is the class of those who have been
+married simply from a sense of duty. There is the class that
+distinguishes itself by profuse kindness to poor cottagers, and by
+reading the Bible to blind old women; an occupation which as we know,
+from the most ordinary works of fiction, leads directly to the
+promptest and speediest attachments on the part of the young men who
+happen to drop in casually at the time. The catalogue of such is perhaps
+long and famous. Yet, allowing for all these, allowing for everything
+else that can be adduced in their favor, we cannot help returning to the
+position that plain girls have an up-hill battle to fight. No doubt it
+ought not to be so.
+
+Cynics tell us that six months after a man is married it makes very
+little difference to him whether his wife's nose is Roman, aquiline, or
+retroussé; and this may be so. The unfortunate thing is that most men
+persist in marrying for the sake of the illusion of the first six
+months, and under the influence of the ante-nuptial and not the
+post-nuptial sentiments; and as the first six months with a plain girl
+are confessedly inferior in attraction, the inference is clear that they
+do in effect attract less. Plainness or loveliness apart, a very large
+number of womankind have no reason to expect any very happy chance in
+married life; and if marriage is to be set before all women as the one
+ideal, a number of feminine lives will always turn out to have been
+failures.
+
+It may be said that it is hopeless to attempt on this point to alter the
+sentiments of the female sex, or indeed the general verdict of society.
+We do not quite see the hopelessness. A considerable amount of the
+matrimonial ideas of young women are purely the result of their
+education, and of the atmosphere in which they have been brought up;
+and, by giving a new direction to their early training, it might not be
+altogether so quixotical to believe that we should alter all that is the
+result of the training. At any rate it has become essential for the
+welfare of women that they should, as far as possible, be taught that
+they may have a career open to them even if they never marry; and it is
+the duty of society to try to open to them as many careers of the sort
+as are not incompatible with the distinctive peculiarities of a woman's
+physical capacity.
+
+It may well be that society's present instincts as regards woman are at
+bottom selfish. The notion of feminine dependence on man, of the want of
+refinement in a woman who undertakes any active business or profession,
+and of the first importance of woman's domestic position, when carried
+to an extreme, are perhaps better suited to the caprice and fanciful
+fastidiousness of men than to the real requirements, in the present age,
+of the other sex. The throng of semi-educated authoresses who are now
+flocking about the world of letters is a wholesome protest against such
+exclusive jealousy. The real objection to literary women is that women,
+with a few notable exceptions, are not yet properly educated to write
+well, or to criticise well what others write. Remove this objection by
+improving the curriculum of feminine education, and there is hardly any
+other. There is none certainly of sufficient consequence to outweigh the
+real need which is felt of giving those women something to live for
+(apart from and above ordinary domestic and philanthropic duties), whose
+good or evil fortune it is not to be marked out by Heaven for a married
+life.
+
+
+
+
+A WORD FOR FEMALE VANITY.
+
+
+If any human weakness has a right to complain of the ingratitude with
+which the world treats it, it is certainly vanity. It gets through more
+good work, and yet comes in for more hearty abuse, than all our other
+weaknesses put together. Preachers and moralists are always having hits
+at it, and in that philosophical study and scientific vivisection of
+character which two friends are always so ready to practice at the
+expense of a third, and which weak-minded people confound with scandal,
+to no foible is the knife so pitilessly applied as to vanity. What makes
+this rigor seem all the more cruel and unnatural is that vanity never
+gets so little quarter as from those who ought, one would think, to be
+on the best possible terms with her. She is never justified of her
+children, and, like Byron's unhappy eagle, "nurses the pinion that
+impels the steel" against her. Yet it is difficult to see how the world
+could get on without the weakness thus universally assailed, and what
+preachers and moralists would do if they had their own way.
+
+In the more important--or, we should rather say, in the larger--concerns
+of life vanity could perhaps be dispensed with. Where there is much at
+stake, other agencies come into play to keep the machinery of the world
+in motion, though, even as regards these, it is a question how many
+great poems, great speeches, great actions, which have profoundly
+influenced the destinies of mankind, would have been lost to the world
+if there had been none but great motives at work to produce them. Great
+motives usually get the credit--that is, when we are dealing with
+historical characters, not dissecting a friend, in whose case it is
+necessary to guard against our natural proneness to partiality; but
+little motives often do the largest share of the work. It is proper, for
+instance, and due to our own dignity and self-respect to say, that the
+world owes _Childe Harold_ to a great poet's inspired yearning for
+immortality. Still, we fear, there is room for a doubt whether the world
+would ever have seen _Childe Harold_ if the great poet had not happened
+to be also a morbidly vain and, in some respects, remarkably small man.
+But even if we assume that the big affairs of life may be left to big
+motives, and do not require such a little motive as vanity to help them,
+these are, after all, few and far between.
+
+For one action that may safely be left to yearnings for immortality, or
+ambition, or love, or something equally lofty and grand, there are
+thousands which society must get done somehow, and which it gets done
+pleasantly and comfortably only because, by a charmingly convenient
+illusion, the vanity of each agent makes him attach a peculiar
+importance to them. There is no act so trivial, or to all appearance so
+unworthy of a rational being, that the magic of vanity cannot throw a
+halo of dignity over it, and persuade the agent that it is mainly by his
+exertions that society is kept together, as Molière's dancing-master
+reasoned that the secret of good government is the secret of good
+dancing--namely, how to avoid false steps. And it is this genial
+promoter of human happiness, this all-powerful diffuser of social
+harmony, this lubricating oil without which the vast and complex
+machinery of life could never work, that man, in his ignorant
+ingratitude, dares to denounce.
+
+We should like to ask one of these thoughtless revilers of vanity
+whether it has ever been his misfortune to meet a woman without it. He
+would probably try to escape by declaring that a woman without vanity is
+a purely imaginary being, if not a contradiction in terms; and we admit
+that there is something to be said in favor of this view. Nothing is
+more astonishing to the male philosopher than the odd way in which, from
+some stray corner of character where he would have least thought of
+looking for it, female vanity now and then suddenly pops out upon him.
+He fancied that he knew a woman well, that he had studied her character
+and mastered all its strong and weak points, when, by some accident or
+at some unguarded moment, he suddenly strikes a rich, deep, vein of
+vanity of the existence of which he never had the remotest suspicion. He
+may perhaps have known that she was not without vanity on certain
+points, but for these he had discovered, or had fancied he had
+discovered, some sort of reason. We do not necessarily mean, by reason,
+any cause that seemed to justify or, on any consistent principle, to
+account for the fact. As we have already remarked, it is the peculiarity
+of vanity that it often flourishes most vigorously, and puts forth a
+plentiful crop, where there does not seem to be even a layer of soil for
+it.
+
+Both men and women are occasionally most vain of their weakest points,
+perhaps by a merciful provision of nature similar to that by which a sow
+always takes most kindly to the weakest pig in the litter. Lord
+Chesterfield, when paternally admonishing his son as to the proper
+management of women, lays down as a general indisputable axiom that they
+are all, as a matter of course, to be flattered to the top of their
+bent; but he adds, as a special rule, that a very pretty or a very ugly
+woman should be flattered, not about her personal charms, but about her
+mental powers. It is only in the case of a moderately good-looking woman
+that the former should be singled out for praise. A very pretty woman
+takes her beauty as a matter of course, and would rather be flattered
+about the possession of some advantage to which her claim is not so
+clear, while a very ugly woman distrusts the sincerity of flattery about
+her person.
+
+It is not without the profoundest diffidence that we venture to dispute
+the opinion of such an authority on such a subject as Lord Chesterfield,
+but still we think that no woman is so hideous that she may not, if her
+vanity happens to take this turn, be told with perfect safety that she
+is a beauty. Her vanity is, indeed, not so likely to take this turn as
+it would be if she were really pretty. She will probably plume herself
+upon her abilities or accomplishments, and therefore Chesterfield's
+excellent fatherly advice was, on the whole, tolerably safe. But still,
+if any hereditary bias or unlucky accident--such, for instance, as that
+of being brought up among people with whom brains are nothing, and
+beauty everything--does give an ugly woman's vanity an impulse in the
+direction of good looks, no excess of hideousness makes it unsafe to
+extol her beauty. On the contrary, she is more likely to be imposed upon
+than a moderately good-looking woman, from her greater eagerness to
+clutch at every straw that may help to keep up the darling delusion. No
+philosopher is, accordingly, surprised at finding that a woman is vain
+where he can discover not the slightest rational foundation even for
+female vanity.
+
+But it certainly is surprising, now and then, to find how long the most
+intense female vanity will lie, in some out-of-the-way corner of
+character, hidden from the eye. Perhaps we ought to say, the male eye,
+for women seem to discover each other's weak points by a power of
+intuition that amounts almost to instinct. But a man is amazed to find
+that a woman whose vanity he believed himself to have tracked into all
+its channels has it, after all, most strongly in some channel of which
+he previously knew nothing. He has perhaps considered her a sensible
+matter-of-fact woman, vain perhaps, though not unpardonably, of her
+capacity for business and knowledge of the world, but singularly free
+from the not uncommon female tendency to believe that every man who sees
+her is in love with her; and he unexpectedly discovers that she has for
+years considered herself the object of a desperate passion on the part
+of the parish rector, a prosaic middle-aged gentleman of ample waistcoat
+and large family, and is a little uneasy about being left alone in the
+same room with the butler.
+
+Unexpected discoveries of some such kind as this not unnaturally
+popularize the theory already mentioned, that such a being as a woman
+without vanity does not exist--that, no matter how securely the weakness
+may lie hidden from observation, it does somewhere or other exist, and
+some day will out. But we are inclined, notwithstanding, to hold that,
+here and there, but happily very seldom, there are to be found women
+really without vanity; and most unpleasant women they seem to us, as a
+rule, to be. They get on tolerably well with their own sex, for they are
+rarely pretty or affected, and they have usually certain solid,
+serviceable qualities which make up for not being attractive by standing
+wear and tear. But in their relations with men--as soon, that is, as
+they have secured a husband, and fascination has therefore ceased to be
+a matter of business, a practical question of bread-and-butter, to be
+grappled with in the spirit in which they would, if necessary, go out
+charing, or keep a mangle--they are painfully devoid of that eagerness
+to please and that readiness to be pleased which, in the present
+imperfect state of civilization, are among woman's chief charms.
+
+Even men cannot, as a rule, get on very well without these qualities;
+but still to please is not man's mission in the sense in which it is
+generally considered to be woman's, and probably will continue to be
+considered, until Dr. Mary Walkers are not the exception, but the rule.
+One now and then has the misfortune to come upon a specimen of
+womanhood, good and solid enough perhaps, making a most exemplary and
+respectable wife and mother, but nevertheless dull, heavy, and
+unattractive to an extent that fills the wretched man who takes it in to
+dinner with desperation. And then to think that one ounce of vanity
+might have leavened this lump, and converted it, as by magic, into a
+pleasant, palatable, convivial compound, good everywhere, but especially
+good at the dinner-table! For, where vanity exists at all, it can
+scarcely fail to influence the natural desire of one sex to please the
+other; and a woman must be singularly devoid of all charms, physical and
+mental, if she fails when she is really anxious to please. That women
+should be fascinating, as they sometimes are, in spite of some
+positively painful deformity, is a proof of what such anxiety can alone
+accomplish.
+
+We must admit that we have to postulate, on behalf of the female vanity
+whose cause we are espousing, that it should not derive its inspiration
+solely from self-love. However anxious a woman may be to please, if her
+anxiety is on her own account, and simply to secure admiration, she must
+be a very Helen if her vanity continues attractive. She is lucky if it
+does not take the most odious of all forms, and, from always revolving
+round self and dwelling upon selfish considerations, degenerate into a
+habit of perpetual postures and stage tricks to gain applause. And this
+tendency naturally connects itself with the wish to please the opposite
+sex, its success being in inverse proportion to its strength. Just as
+one occasionally meets with men who are perfectly unaffected and
+sensible fellows in men's society, but whose whole demeanor becomes
+absurdly changed if any woman, though it be only the housemaid with a
+coal-scuttle, enters the room, so there are, more commonly, to be found
+women whose whole character seems to vary, as if by magic, according to
+the sex of the person whom they find themselves with. Before their own
+sex they are natural enough; before men they are eternally
+attitudinizing. We should be sorry to say that this repulsive form of
+vanity always takes its root in excessive self-love, but still a tinge
+of unselfishness seems to us the best antidote against it.
+
+It is marvellous with how much vanity, and that too of a tolerably
+ostentatious kind, a woman may be thoroughly agreeable even to her own
+sex, if her eagerness to please is accompanied by genuine kindliness, or
+is free from excessive selfishness. It may be easy enough to see that
+all her little courtesies and attentions are at bottom really
+attributable to vanity; that, when she does a kind act, she is thinking
+less of its effect upon your comfort and happiness than of its effect
+upon your estimate of her character. She would perhaps rather you got
+half the advantage with her aid than the whole advantage without it. Her
+motive is, primarily, vanity--clearly not kindness--however amicably
+they may in general work together. But still it is the kindness that
+makes the vanity flow into pleasant, friendly forms. In a selfish woman
+the very same vanity would degenerate into posturing or dressing. And,
+odd as it may seem, and as much as it may reflect upon the common sense
+of poor humanity, we believe that kind acts done out of genuine,
+unadulterated benevolence are less appreciated by the recipient than
+kind acts done out of benevolence stimulated by vanity. The latter are
+pleasant because they spring out of the desire to please, and soothe our
+self-love, whereas the former appeal to our self-interest.
+
+There are few things in this world more charming than the kindly
+courtesy of a pretty woman, not ungracefully conscious of her power to
+please, and showing courtesy because she enjoys the exercise of this
+power. Strictly speaking, she is acting less in your interest than in
+her own. Although she feels at once the pleasure of pleasing and the
+pleasure of doing a kindly action, the second is quite subordinate to
+the first, and is perhaps, more or less, sacrificed to it. Yet who is
+strong-minded enough to wish that the kindliness of a pretty woman
+should be dictated by simple benevolence, untinged by vanity? If we knew
+that her kindliness arose rather from a wish to benefit us than to
+conciliate our good opinion, it is perhaps possible that we should
+esteem her more, but we fear it is quite certain that we should like her
+less.
+
+Before we conclude, we ought perhaps to make one more postulate on
+behalf of female vanity, not less important than our postulate that it
+should be pleasantly tinged by unselfishness. To be agreeable, it must
+have fair foundation. A woman may be forgiven for over-estimating her
+charms, but there is no forgiveness on this side of the grave for a
+woman who recklessly credits herself with charms that do not exist. All
+the lavish cheques she draws upon her male neighbor's admiration are
+silently dishonored, and in half an hour after the moment they sit down
+to table together she is a hopeless bankrupt in his estimation, even
+though he may have courtesy and skill enough to conceal the collapse.
+
+As there are few, if any, pleasanter objects than a pretty woman,
+gracefully conscious of her beauty, and radiantly fulfilling its
+legitimate end, the power of pleasing, so are there few, if any, more
+unpleasant objects than a vain woman, ungracefully conscious of
+imaginary charms, and secretly disgusting those she strives to attract.
+An ugly woman who gives herself the airs of a beauty, or a silly woman
+who believes herself a genius, is not a spectacle upon which a man of
+healthy imagination and appetite likes to dwell. It is perhaps only in
+accordance with the theory that this life is a state of trial and
+probation that the tastes can be explained. Happily, it is not very
+common. Most women know their strong from their weak points, and marshal
+them on the whole well in the encounter with their lawful oppressor and
+great enemy, man. And until they have won the victory to which Dr. Mary
+Walker is now leading them on, may they never lack the female vanity
+which makes it one of their great objects in life to please!
+
+
+
+
+THE ABUSE OF MATCH-MAKING.
+
+
+It is a pity that when, by some train of ill-luck, a word of respectable
+parentage, and well brought up, is led astray, it cannot adopt
+Goldsmith's recipe and die. It has not even the more prosaic alternative
+of being made an honest word by marriage, and escaping the name under
+which it stooped to folly, and was betrayed. It drags on a dishonored
+life, with little or no chance of recovering its character, inflicting
+cruel disgrace upon the unlucky family of ideas, no matter what their
+own innocence and respectability, to which it happens to belong. Thus
+Casuistry, if not a very useful, was at least a perfectly harmless,
+member of society, and moved in the best circles, until in an evil hour
+she became too intimate with the unpopular Jesuits.
+
+A few years ago, when high feeding and sermonizing proved too much for
+the virtue of garotters, and, waxing fat, they not only kicked society,
+but danced hornpipes in hobnailed boots upon its head and stomach, even
+Philanthropy, at once the most fashionable and popular word of this
+century, was all but compromised by Sir Joshua Jebb and Sir George Grey.
+Baron Bramwell fortunately came to the rescue, and saved it from
+permanent loss of character. But still to this day the word is sometimes
+used in a sense by no means complimentary. If the battue-system
+continues long enough, "good sport" will become a synonym for
+cold-blooded clumsy butchery, and thus all sport whatsoever will be more
+or less discredited. The _faux pas_ of one member disgraces the whole
+family. A few men may be the lords of language, but the great majority
+are its slaves. They can no more disconnect the innocent idea from the
+soiled word that accompanies it than they can see a blue landscape
+through green glass. Let us hope that one of the first acts of Mr.
+Bright's millennial Parliament will be the establishment of a tribunal
+empowered to take a word when it arrives at this pitiable condition, and
+either in mercy knock it on the head altogether, or else formally
+readmit it into good society, and give it all the advantages of a fresh
+start.
+
+We take an early opportunity of inviting their special attention to the
+much-injured word "Match-making." The practice which it describes is not
+only harmless, but, in the present state of society, highly useful and
+meritorious. Yet there can be no doubt, that there is a powerful
+prejudice against it. Although all women--or rather, perhaps, as
+Thackeray said, all good women--are at heart match-makers, there are
+very few who own the soft impeachment. Many repudiate it with
+indignation. It is on the whole about as safe to charge a lady with
+Fenianism as facetiously to point out a young couple in her
+drawing-room, whose flirtation has a suspicious businesslike look about
+it, and to hint that she has deliberately brought them together with a
+view to matrimony. It may be true that she has no selfish interest
+whatever in the matter. The criminal conspiracy in which she so
+strenuously repudiates any concern is, after all, nothing worse than the
+attempt to make two people whom she likes, and who she thinks will suit
+each other, happy for life. By any other name such an action ought, one
+would think, to smell sweet in the nostrils of gods and men.
+
+But, whatever the gods think of it, men cannot forget that the practice,
+whether harmless or not, goes by the objectionable name of match-making.
+So the lady replies, not, perhaps, without the energy of conscious
+guilt, that "things of this sort are best left to themselves," and
+piously begs you to remember that marriages are made in Heaven, not in
+her drawing-room. The melancholy truth is that the gentle craft of
+match-making has been so vulgarized by course and clumsy professors, and
+its very name has in consequence been brought into such disrepute, that
+few respectable women have the courage openly to recognise it. They are
+haunted by visions of the typical match-maker who does work for
+fashionable novels and social satires, and who is a truly awful
+personage. To her alone of mortals is it given to inspire, like the
+Harpies, at once contempt and fear. Keen-eyed and hook-nosed, like a
+bird of prey, she glowers from the corner of crowded ball-rooms upon the
+unconscious heir, hunts him untiringly from house to house, marries him
+remorselessly to her eldest daughter, and then never loses sight of him
+till his spirit is broken, his old friends discarded, and his segar-case
+thrown away.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to say that this fearful being exists only in
+fiction. In real life she has not only to marry her daughters, but also,
+like other human beings, to eat, drink, sleep, and otherwise dispose of
+the twenty-four hours of the day. She cannot therefore very well devote
+herself, from morning to night, to the one occupation of heir-hunting,
+with the precision of a machine, or one of Bunyan's walking vices. But
+still there must be some truth even in a caricature, and a man sometimes
+finds a girl "thrown at his head," as the process is forcibly termed,
+with a coarse-mindedness quite worthy of the typical match-maker, though
+also with a clumsiness which she would heartily despise.
+
+He goes as a stranger to some place, and is astonished to find himself
+at once taken to the bosom and innermost confidence of people whose very
+name he never heard before, as if he were their oldest and most familiar
+friend. He is asked to dinner one day, to breakfast the next, and warmly
+assured that a place is always kept for him at lunch. Charmed and
+flattered to find his many merits so quickly discovered and thoroughly
+appreciated by strangers, he votes them the cleverest, most genial, most
+hospitable people he ever met; and everything goes on delightfully until
+he begins to think it odd that he should be constantly left alone with,
+and now and then delicately chaffed about, some _passée_, ill-favored
+woman, whom he no more connects with any thought of marriage than he
+would a female rhinoceros. And then slowly dawns upon him the cruel
+truth that his kind hosts have had their appreciation of his merits
+considerably sharpened by the fact that there is an ugly daughter or
+sister-in-law in the house whom they are sick to death of, whom they are
+always imploring "to marry or do something," and who, having for years
+ogled and angled for every marriageable pair of whiskers and pantoloons
+within ten miles, has gradually become so well known in the neighborhood
+that her one forlorn hope is to carry off some innocent stranger with a
+rush.
+
+"_Quere peregrinum, vicinia rauca reclamat;_" and if the _peregrinus_
+happens to be young and verdant, and, having just been given a good
+appointment, feels, with the Vicar of Wakefield, that one of the three
+greatest characters on earth is the father of a family, he is possibly
+hooked securely before he discovers his danger. He discovers it to find
+himself tied for life to a woman with whom he has not a sympathy in
+common, and for whom every day increases his disgust. And the people who
+have ruined his life have not even the sorry excuse that they wished to
+better hers. Their one thought was to get rid of her as speedily as
+possible, no matter to whom; and they would rather have had Bluebeard at
+a two-months' engagement than any other man at one of six. There is
+something so coarse and revolting, so brutal, in the notion of bringing
+two people together into such a relation as that of marriage on purely
+selfish grounds, and without the slightest regard to their future
+happiness, that any one who has seen the snare laid for himself or his
+friends may well shudder at the mere sound of match-making. Mezentius
+was more merciful, for of the two bodies which he chained together only
+one had life.
+
+The clumsy match-maker is a scarcely less dangerous, though a far more
+respectable, enemy to the gentle craft than the coarse one. She makes it
+ridiculous, while the latter makes it odious, and it is ridicule that
+kills. She is, perhaps, a well-meaning woman, who would be sorry to
+marry two people unless she thought them suited to each other; but the
+moment she has made up her mind that they ought to marry, she sets to
+work with a vigor which, unless she has a very young man to deal with,
+is almost sure to spoil her plans. This would not be surprising in a
+silly woman; but it is odd that the more energetic, and, in some
+respects, the more able a woman is, the more likely sometimes she is to
+fall into this error.
+
+A woman may be the life and soul of a dozen societies, write admirable
+letters, get half her male relatives into Government offices, and yet be
+the laughing-stock of the neighborhood for the absurd way in which she
+goes husband-hunting for her daughters. The very energy and ability
+which fit her for other pursuits disqualify her for match-making. She is
+too impatient and too fond of action to adopt the purely passive
+expectant attitude, the masterly inactivity, which is here the great
+secret of success. She is always feeling that something should be said
+or done to help on the business, and prematurely scares the shy or
+suspicious bird. Many a promising love-affair has been nipped in the bud
+simply because the too eager mother has drawn public attention to it
+before it was robust enough to face publicity, by throwing the two
+lovers conspicuously together, or by some unguarded remark.
+
+When one thinks of all that a man has to go through in the course of a
+love-affair--especially in a small society where everybody knows
+everybody--of all the chaffing and grinning, and significant interchange
+of glances when he picks up the daughter's fan, or hands the mother to
+her carriage, or laughs convulsively at the old jokes of the father, one
+is almost inclined to wonder how a Briton, of the average British
+stiffness and shyness, ever gets married at all. The explanation
+probably is, that he falls in love before he exactly knows what he is
+about, and, once in love, is of course gloriously blind and deaf to all
+obstacles between him and the adored one. But to subject a man to this
+trying ordeal, as the too eager match-maker does, before he is
+sufficiently in love to be proof against it, is like sending him into a
+snow-storm without a great-coat.
+
+The romantic match-maker is, in her way, as mischievous as the coarse or
+the clumsy one. She is usually a good sort of woman, but with decidedly
+more heart than head. She gets her notions of political economy from Mr.
+Dickens' novels, and holds that, whenever two nice young people of
+opposite sexes like each other, it is their business then and there to
+marry. If Providence cannot always, like Mr. Dickens, provide a rich
+aunt or uncle, it at least never sends mouths without hands to feed
+them. Let every good citizen help the young people to marry as fast as
+they can, and let there be lots of chubby cheeks and lots of Sunday
+plum-pudding to fill them. There is no arguing with a woman of this
+kind, and she is perhaps the most dangerous of all match-makers,
+inasmuch as she is usually herself a warm-hearted pleasant woman, and
+there is a courage and disinterestedness about her views very
+captivating to young heads. There is no safety but in flight. Even a
+bachelor of fair prudence and knowledge of the world is not safe in her
+hands. We mean on the assumption that he is not in a position to marry.
+If he is "an eligible," he cannot, of course, be considered safe
+anywhere. But otherwise he knows that match-makers of the unromantic
+worldly type will be only too glad to leave him alone.
+
+And having, perhaps, been accustomed on this account to feel that he may
+flirt in moderation with impunity, as a man with whom marriage is
+altogether out of the question, he is quite unprepared for the new and
+startling unconventional view which the romantic match-maker takes of
+him. He is horrified to find that, ignoring the usual considerations as
+to the length of his purse, she has discovered that he and the pretty
+girl with whom he danced three consecutive dances last night must have
+been made expressly for each other, and that she has somehow contrived,
+by the exercise of that freemasonry in love-affairs which is peculiar to
+women, to put the same ridiculous notion into the young lady's head. In
+fact, he suddenly finds to his astonishment that he must either
+propose--which is out of the question--or be considered a cold-blooded
+trifler with female hearts. And so he has nothing to do but pack up his
+portmanteau and beat an ignominious retreat, with an uncomfortable
+consciousness that his amiable hostess and pretty partner have a very
+poor opinion of him.
+
+It is rather hard, however, that these and other abuses, which we have
+not space to enumerate, of the great art of match-making should bring
+the art itself into odium and contempt. In all of them there is a
+violation of some one or more of what we take to be its three chief
+canons. First, the objects to be experimented upon should be pecuniarily
+in a position to marry. Secondly, care should be taken that they seem on
+the whole not unlikely to suit each other. Thirdly, the artist should be
+content, like a photographer, to bring the objects together, and leave
+the rest of the work mainly to nature. We confess that we feel painfully
+the unscientific vagueness of this last axiom, since so much turns upon
+the way in which the objects are brought together. But, as we only
+undertook to treat of the abuse of match-making, the reader must
+consider these maxims for its proper use to be thrown into the bargain
+_gratis_, and not therefore to be scrutinized severely. Some other day,
+if we can muster up courage enough for so delicate and arduous a task,
+we may perhaps attempt to show that, in the present state of society,
+the art of match-making deserves and requires cultivation, and how, in
+our humble opinion, this cultivation should be carried on.
+
+
+
+
+FEMININE INFLUENCE.
+
+
+All English ladies who are warmly devoted to the great cause of feminine
+authority have got their eyes just now upon the Empress of the French.
+It is understood in English domestic circles that the Empress has
+decided to go to Rome, and that the Emperor has decided on her staying
+at home, and the interest of the situation is generally thought to be
+intense. The ocean race between the yachts was nothing to it. Every
+woman of spirit has been betting heavily this Christmas upon the
+Empress, and praying mentally for the defeat of the Emperor, and every
+new telegram that bears upon the subject of the difficult controversy is
+scanned by hundreds of dovelike eyes every morning with indescribable
+eagerness.
+
+M. Reuter, who is a man probably, if he is not a joint-stock company, is
+believed not to be altogether an impartial historian; and it is felt in
+many drawing-rooms that what is wanted on this occasion, at the
+telegraph offices, is a sound and resolute Madame Reuter, to correct the
+deviations of M. Reuter's compass. In default of all trustworthy
+telegraphic intelligence, Englishwomen are compelled to fall back on
+their vivid imagination, and to construct a picture of what is
+happening from the depths of their own moral consciousness. And several
+things their moral consciousness tells them are clear and certain. The
+first is, that the Empress Eugénie is an injured and interesting victim.
+She has made a vow, under the very touching circumstances of measles in
+the Imperial nursery, to pay a visit to the Pope; and Cabinet Ministers
+like M. Lavalette, who throw suspicion on the binding nature of such a
+holy maternal obligation, are worse than "S. G. O." In the second place,
+she has set her heart upon going. Even if a vow were not binding, this
+is. It is mere nonsense to say that her pilgrimage would interfere with
+politics. A woman's fine tact is often of considerable use in politics,
+and the sight of the Prince Imperial in his mother's arms might exercise
+the most beneficial influence on the Pope's mind.
+
+Pio Nono has held out hitherto in the most inexplicable manner against
+the Prince Imperial's photograph, but he never could resist a sight of
+the original. And, thirdly, if a wife and a mother may not have her own
+way about going to see the Head of her own Church, when is she ever to
+have her way at all, and where is the line to be drawn? The next
+downward step in a husband's declension will be to prevent her from
+frequenting all religious exercises, or, still worse, from selecting her
+own balls and evening parties. This is what English ladies feel, and
+feel keenly. It is some consolation to them to learn that, if the
+Empress Eugénie is discomfited, she will not have been discomfited
+without a struggle. Of course there will be no evening reception on the
+New Year at the Tuileries. No lady with a proper sense of what was due
+to her own dignity would receive under such circumstances. But till the
+most authentic news arrive, it will still be possible to hope and to
+believe that victory will eventually, and in spite of all appearances,
+declare itself upon the side of right and of propriety, and that her
+Majesty will not be interfered with merely to satisfy the idle caprices
+of a Foreign Office.
+
+The question of the proper limits of feminine influence is one which
+such universal enthusiasm forces naturally on one's notice. Not even the
+most rigid cynic can deny that women ought to have some influence on the
+mind and judgment of the opposite sex, and the only difficulty is to
+know how far that influence ought to go. Every one will be ready to
+concede that sound reasoning is worth hearing, whether it comes from a
+woman or a man; and that, so far as a lady argues well, she has as much
+claim on our attention as Diotima had on the attention of Socrates.
+This, however, is not precisely the point which is so difficult to
+settle. The problem is to know how much influence a woman ought to have
+when she does not argue well; and further, what are the matters on which
+her opinion, whether it be based on argument or instinct, is of value.
+
+One of the most important subjects on which women have some, and always
+want to have a great deal of power, is religion. This is one part of the
+supposed mission of the Empress upon which feminine observers look with
+especial sympathy, and on which experienced masculine observers, on the
+other hand, look with some awe. The correspondents of the daily papers,
+whose pleasure and privilege it is to be able to instruct us in all the
+secrets of high life, have given us recently to understand that, for
+some time back, Her Majesty has been hard at work on the Emperor's soul.
+Every thoughtful woman likes to be at work on her husband's soul. Young
+ladies enjoy the prospect before they are married, and no novel is so
+thoroughly popular among them as one in which beauty is the instrument
+in the hands of Providence for the conversion of unbelief. And it is
+partly because the Empress Eugénie is discharging this high missionary
+duty, that she is an object of particular admiration just at this
+moment. When Englishwomen hear that she is very active in favor of the
+Pope, and couple this news with the fact that the Emperor's soul is
+uneasy, they sniff--if we may be forgiven the expression--the battle
+from afar. Their education in respect of theology and religious opinion
+is very different from that of men.
+
+They have been brought up to believe strongly and heartily what they
+have been told, and they do not understand the half-sceptical way of
+regarding such things which is the result of larger views and more
+liberal education. It appears to them a terrible thing that the men they
+care for should be hesitating and doubtful about subjects where they
+themselves have been trained only to believe one view possible. And they
+set to work in the true temper of missionaries, with profound eagerness
+and energy, and narrowness of grasp. Many genuine prayers and tears are
+worthily spent in the effort to tether some truant husband or a son to a
+family theological peg, and to prevent him from roving. And, up to a
+certain point, men continually give in. They find it easier and more
+comfortable to lower their arms, and not always to be maintaining a
+barren controversy. They have not the slightest wish to convince their
+affectionate feminine disputant, to take from her the sincere and
+positive dogmas on which her happiness is built, and to substitute for
+these a phase of doubt and difficulty for which her past intellectual
+life has not fitted her. Accordingly, they indulge in a thousand little
+hypocrisies of a more or less harmless kind.
+
+So long as women's education continues to differ from that of men as
+widely as it does in England, this flexibility on the part of the latter
+under the influence of the former is not always amiss. It is better that
+the husband should be yielding than that he should hold aloof from all
+that interests and moves the wife, as is the case in countries where the
+one sex may be seen professing to believe in nothing, while the other as
+implicitly believes in everything. It is, however, easy to conceive of
+cases in which this feminine influence that seems so innocent, is in
+reality injurious. It may perhaps be the business of the husband to take
+a public part in the affairs of his time. Conscience tells him that he
+should be sincere, uncompromising, logical, even to the point of
+disputing conclusions which good and pious people consider essential
+and important. Or he may be a religious preacher, or a religious
+reformer of his day, bound, in virtue of character, to maintain truth at
+the risk of being unpopular; or, it may be, to prosecute inquiries and
+reforms at the risk of shocking weaker brethren.
+
+There are many who could tell us from their experience how terribly at
+such a time they have been perplexed and hampered in their duty by the
+affectionate ignorance, the tears, and the piety of women. Protestant
+clergymen in particular are sometimes taunted with their conservative
+tendencies, their indifference to the new lights of science, or of
+history, and their disinclination to embark on perilous voyages in quest
+of truth. Part of their conservatism arises from the fact that their
+practical business is generally to teach what they do know, rather than
+to inquire into what they do not know. Part of it comes, as we suspect,
+from the fact that they are married. A wife is a sort of theological
+drag. It serves no doubt to keep some of us from rolling too rapidly
+down hill. It impedes equally the progress of others over ordinarily
+level ground.
+
+The importance of a social position to women is a thing which affects
+their influence upon men no less materially than does their religious
+sensibility. As a rule, they have no other means of measuring the
+consideration in which they are held by the world, or the success in
+life of those to whose fortunes they are linked, than by using a trivial
+and worthless social standard. Men, whose training is wider, estimate
+both their male and their female friends pretty fairly according to
+their merits. But the majority of women, from their youth up, seldom
+think of anybody without contrasting his or her social status with their
+own. Success signifies to them introduction to this or that feminine
+circle, admission to friendships from which they have been as yet
+excluded, and visiting cards of a more distinguished appearance than
+those which at present lie upon their table. They are unable to enjoy
+even the ordinary intercourse of society without an _arrière pensée_ as
+to their chance of landing themselves a step higher on the social
+ladder. From such absurdities the best and most refined women of course
+are free, but the mass of Englishwomen seldom meet without wondering who
+on earth each of the others is, and to which county family she belongs.
+
+Humorous as is the spectacle of a crowd of English ladies, each of whom
+is employed in eyeing the lady next her and asking who she is, and
+comical as the point of view appears to any one who reflects on the
+shortness of human life and the littleness of human character, the
+effect of these feminine weaknesses is one which no one can be sure of
+escaping. We are afraid that half of the Englishmen who are snobs are
+made so by Englishwomen. It is impossible for the female portion of any
+domestic circle to be perpetually dwelling on their own social
+aspirations without communicating the infection to, or even forcing it
+upon the male. Wives and daughters become dissatisfied with their
+husbands' or their fathers' friends. They want to meet and to associate
+with people whom it is a social credit to know, and who in turn may
+help them to know somebody beyond. Every fresh acquaintance of
+distinction, or of fashion, is a sort of milestone, showing the ground
+that has been travelled over by the family in the direction of their
+hopes. This sort of fever is very catching. But though men often catch
+it, they generally catch it from the other sex. And even when they are
+not impregnated with it themselves, the effect of feminine influence
+upon them is that they accept their lot with placidity, and acquiesce in
+the social struggle through which they are dragged.
+
+No man in his senses can wish or hope to order the social life of his
+belongings according to his own sober judgment. He is compelled to allow
+them a free rein in the matter, and to abstain from even expressing the
+astonishment he inwardly feels. Perhaps the world of women is a new
+world to him, and he feels incapable of regulating any of its movements;
+or perhaps, if he is wise, he is content with the reflection that little
+foibles do not altogether spoil real nobility of nature, and takes the
+bad side of a woman's education with the good. But there are innumerable
+matters in respect of which he cannot withdraw himself from the feminine
+influence about him. By degrees he comes to sympathize with the little
+social disappointments of his family group, and to take pleasure in
+their little social triumphs, which appear to be so productive of
+satisfaction and enjoyment to those to whom they fall. But the effect on
+his character is not usually wholesome. His eye is no longer single.
+Feminine influence has engrafted on his nature the defects of feminine
+character, without engrafting on it also its many virtues.
+
+Women usually fail in communicating to men their self-devotion, their
+gentleness, their piety; all that they manage to communicate amounts to
+little more than a respect for the observances of religion, and a
+nervous sensibility to social distinctions.
+
+While the mental development of women continues to be so little studied,
+it is not surprising that the intellectual influence of the sex should
+be almost _nil_, or that such a modicum of it as they possess should be
+exerted within a very narrow sphere. It is the fault, no doubt, of our
+systems of female education that the mental power of the cleverest women
+really comes in England to very little. In its highest form it amounts
+to a capacity for conversation on indifferent matters, a genius for
+music or some other fine art, a turn for talking about the poets of the
+day, and perhaps for imitating their style with ease, coupled, in
+exceptional cases, with a talent for guessing double acrostics. To be
+able to do all this, and to be charming and religious too, is the whole
+duty of young women.
+
+It would be difficult possibly to fit out an English young lady with the
+various practical accomplishments that are of use in matrimony, and to
+make her at the same time an intellectual equal of the other sex. But it
+would surely be possible to train her to understand more of the general
+current of the world's ideas, even if she could not devote herself to
+studying them in detail. What woman has now any notion of the broad
+outline of history of human thought? All philosophy is a sealed book to
+her. It is the same with theology and politics. She has not the wildest
+conception, as a rule, of the grounds on which people think who think
+differently from herself; and all through life she is content to play
+the part of a partisan or a devotee with perfect equanimity.
+
+While, however, feminine influence in intellectual subjects is, as it
+deserves to be, infinitesimal, in practice and in action women are proud
+of being recognized as useful and sound advisers. As outsiders and
+spectators they see a good deal of the game, have leisure to watch
+narrowly all that is going on about them, and a subtle instinct teaches
+them to tread delicately over all dangerous ground. It is curious how
+many enemies women make amongst themselves, and yet how many enemies
+they prevent men from making. They seem to have less of self-control or
+prudence as far as their own strong feelings and fortunes are concerned,
+than they have of tact and temper in managing the fortunes and
+enterprises of others.
+
+There can, for example, be no doubt whatever that the parson who aims at
+being a bishop before he dies ought to marry early. The great strokes of
+policy which bring him preferment or popularity are pretty sure to have
+been devised in moments of happy inspiration, or perhaps during the
+watches of the night, by a feminine brain. Good mothers make saints and
+heroes, says the proverb, and beyond a doubt wise wives make bishops.
+Their influence is not the less real because, unlike that of Mrs.
+Proudie, it is exerted chiefly behind the scenes. It is possibly because
+the influence possessed by women is so intangible, depending as it does
+less on the reason than on the sentiment, affection, and convenience of
+the other sex, that women are so jealous to assert and to protect it.
+
+
+
+
+PIGEONS.
+
+
+Every now and then, as the fashionable season comes round, in some
+corner of its space the daily press records a wholesale slaughter of the
+pigeon species. The world is informed of a series of sweepstakes, in
+which guardsmen and peers and foreigners of distinction take part. So
+many birds are shot at, so many are killed, so many get away. The
+quality of the birds and the skill of the shooters is specified. As the
+minutest details of the sport are interesting, we are even told who
+supplies the birds, and whether the day of their massacre was bright or
+cloudy. This is quite as it should be. The British public can never hear
+too much of the doings of its gilded youth. Sweet to it is sporting
+news, but "aristocratic sporting news" is sweeter still.
+
+And apart from this twofold source of interest, an element of deeper
+satisfaction mingles in the complacency with which it gloats over these
+pigeon holocausts. It is something to know that, in the last resort, we
+have these high-born and fashionable marksmen to protect our hearths and
+homes from the French invader and the irrepressible Beales. The nervous
+householder sleeps in his bed with a greater sense of security after
+reading of the awful havoc which Captain A. and the Earl of B. are
+making of the feathery tribe. In the accuracy of their aim he sees a
+guarantee of order, and of the maintenance of his glorious Constitution.
+Foreign menace and internal discord lose something of their terrors for
+him as often as his eyes light upon the significant little paragraph to
+which we have referred. Here is an item of intelligence for the haughty
+Prussian and the dashing Zouave to ponder. Here is something for the
+mole-like Fenian and the blatant Leaguesman to put in their pipes and
+smoke.
+
+The fate of the pigeons awaits all who would violate our shores, or
+light up the flame of sedition in the land. If, as some philosophers
+aver, the pigeon does not all die, but in some tranquil limbo flutters
+on in an eternity of innocent cooing, it must console the poor bird to
+reflect that, however cheap he may be held, he has not perished
+altogether in vain. To serve a useful purpose is the great economy of
+things, to point a warning, at the cost of one's heart's blood, to
+England's foes and traitors--to the plotter in Munster as well as the
+safer conspirator of the Parks--might content even a greater ambition
+than that which animates the gentle bosom of a fantail.
+
+But suppose some vindictive pouter to survive his less lucky comrades,
+and, escaping among the birds who are duly chronicled as "getting away,"
+to perch, full of resentment at the probable extinction of his species,
+in the fashionable quarter of London. He would there witness a grand act
+of retaliation. He would learn how Belgravia avenges Hornsey and
+Shepherd's Bush. He would see the very men from whom his relatives had
+received their quietus flying to their clubs for shelter, and calling on
+their goddesses of the _demi-monde_ to cover them. He would perceive, by
+an unerring instinct, that a contest was afoot in which the conditions
+of that suburban sweepstakes at which he had involuntarily assisted were
+exactly reversed. He would see those self-same sportsmen converted into
+the target, the flutterers of the dovecot themselves in a flutter. And
+he would be more than pigeon if he could repress a thrill of savage glee
+at the spectacle of the enemies of his race realizing by experience all
+the difference between shooting and being shot at.
+
+Suppose, further, that curious to watch the operations of "aristocratic
+sport," the intelligent bird, following the precedent of Edgar Poe's
+Raven, should alight, unseen and uninvited, on some object of art in a
+fashionable ballroom. Here he would find himself at once in the thick of
+the brilliant competition. He would see a row of lovely archers, backed
+by a second row of older and more experienced markswomen. And in the
+human pigeons now cowering before their combined artillery he would
+recognise the heroes so lately engaged in dispatching thousands of the
+feathered branch of the family to oblivion. At first sight it might
+strike an animal of his well-known gallantry that there was nothing so
+very terrible in their impending fate. To fall slain by bright eyes, and
+with the strains of Coote and Tinney lingering on the ear, to sigh out
+one's soul over a draught of seltzer and champagne or the sweet poison
+of a strawberry ice, might seem to the winged spectator a blissful
+ending.
+
+The doorway of the perfumed saloon might seem but the portal of a
+Mahomedan paradise, in which young and beautiful houris are deporting
+themselves under the guardian eye of the older and less beautiful
+houris. To the denizen of the air all, save the want of oxygen, might
+appear divine. But when he surveyed more closely that sexual row of
+sportswomen, he would know at once that he beheld the true avengers of
+his race. In their stony glare, in the cold glitter of their diamonds,
+in the ample proportions of their well-developed shoulders, in their
+sliding scale of manners, now adjusted to a sugary smile and now to a
+stare of annihilation, he would read a deadly purpose. Nor would the
+diversities of skill which this fringe of amazons exhibited in the use
+of their weapons escape his notice. He would see some whom success had
+made affable, and others whom failure had made desperate; some who
+covered their victim with an aim of pitiless precision, and others who
+spoilt their chances by bungling audacity. Conspicuous among them he
+would observe a giddy sexagenarian, whose random attempts to share in
+the sport made her the laughing-stock of the circle.
+
+And as he surveyed the _battue_ he would gradually discern its tactics.
+The beautiful beings in tulle he would feel, by instinct, were a lure
+and a decoy. Once within reach of their victims, these lovely
+skirmishers would be seen to inflict on them a sudden wound, leaving
+them to be despatched by the heavy reserve in _moire_ and lace. As he
+watched the terror which these formidable beings inspired, and the
+business-like manner in which they addressed themselves to their task,
+as he noticed the jaunty destroyers of his race succumbing one by one to
+fate, or ignominiously attempting to "get away," he would feel that the
+"irony of the situation" was complete. In a vague way he would grasp the
+fact--hitherto undreamt of in his dove's philosophy--that, if the pigeon
+is preyed upon by man, man in his turn is preyed upon by the dowager.
+
+There is, however, this difference between the fate of the pigeon and
+his human analogue, that, whereas the former is slain outright, the
+latter is often subjected to the prolonged agony of being plucked
+feather by feather. Not that he thinks it agony; on the contrary, he
+decidedly likes it, which is a wonderful proof of his simplicity, and
+the difference in people's tastes. But in order to pluck a human pigeon
+at leisure, you must first catch him. May is a good month for this
+operation. About now he begins to resort to the Opera and the park, and
+in the purlieus of either a fine specimen may be flashed. A clever
+sportswoman will get the earliest possible information about his
+movements. Much depends on forestalling her competitors.
+
+A youthful pigeon, just emerging from his minority, or freshly alighted
+from the grand tour, is easily captured. There are two principal
+contrivances for catching human pigeons. The first is the matrimonial
+snare. This is worked by the dowager, in concert with her daughter,
+somewhat on the following plan. The daughter throws herself, as if by
+chance, in the pigeon's way. The brilliancy of her charms naturally
+attracts him. Small-talk ensues, in which an extraordinary similarity
+between her tastes and his is casually revealed. The simple pigeon,
+suspecting nothing, is delighted to find so congenial a soul. Is he
+musical? she adores the divine art. A gourmand? she owns to the
+possession of a cookery-book. Ritualistic? it was but the other day that
+she was at St. Alban's. Turfy? He must throw his eyes over her book for
+the Derby. Even if his pet pastime, like the Emperor Domitian's, were
+killing flies, she would profess her readiness to join him in it. Or she
+tries another dodge, and, putting on the airs of a pretty monitress,
+asks him with tender interest to confide in her.
+
+The great point is never to lose sight of him; to follow him to balls,
+concerts, or races, to cleave to him like his shadow. Then, when he is
+fairly caught in the toils of her encircling sympathy, the elder and
+more experienced ally appears on the scene. Her task is to cut off his
+retreat. Upon her firmness and accuracy in calculating the resisting
+power of her pigeon, success depends. Seizing an opportunity when he is
+least prepared, she sternly informs him that the time for dalliance is
+over, that he has said and done things of a very marked kind, and that
+there is only one course open to him as a pigeon of honor. And under
+this sort of compulsion the simple creature, with his rent-roll,
+Consols, family diamonds, and all, hops with a fairly good grace into
+the matrimonial toils.
+
+The second contrivance to which he is apt to fall a victim is the
+infatuation trap. This is a much more elaborate machine, and is worked
+by one of those semi-attached couples who might sit to a new Hogarth for
+a new edition of _Marriage á la Mode_. The husband's part is very
+simple. It is to be as little in the way as possible, and to afford his
+sprightlier half every facility for pursuing her little game. The chief
+business devolves on the lady. It is her task to make the pigeon fall
+madly in love with her, and to keep him so, without overstepping the
+bounds of conventional propriety. Happily this can be managed nowadays
+without either elopement or scandal. Among the improvements of this
+mechanical age, it has been found possible to enlarge the limits of
+wedlock so as to include a third person.
+
+A life-long _tête-á-tête_, which was the old conception of marriage, is
+quite obsolete. It has given way to the triangular theory, by which a
+new element, in the shape of a parasitical adorer, has been introduced
+into the holy state. Matrimony, as reconstituted by fashionable
+scholiasts, comprises husband, wife, and, to relieve the tedium of the
+situation, a good-looking appendage of the male sex, who is an agreeable
+companion of the one and the devoted slave of the other. Each
+contributes to the harmony of the arrangement--the husband, a
+background; the wife, the charms of her presence; the adorer, cash.
+Whatever other experience it brings, marriage generally sharpens the
+appreciation of the value of money; sentiment is sweet, but it is an
+article of confectionery, for which its fair dispensers in the married
+ranks exact an equivalent.
+
+In trapping her victim, therefore, a sharp young matron is careful to
+let her choice fall on a plump specimen of the pigeon species--a pigeon
+with a long purse and little brains. Once reduced to a state of
+infatuation, almost anything may be done with him. The luxury of
+plucking him will employ her delicate fingers for a long time to come.
+He may be sponged upon to any extent. The one thing he can do really
+well is to pay. His yacht, his drag, his brougham, his riding-horses,
+his shooting-box, all are at her disposal. At his expense she dines at
+Greenwich; at his expense she views the Derby; at his expense she enjoys
+an opera-box. And in return for all this she has only to smile and
+murmur "_so_ nice," for the soft simpleton to fancy himself amply
+repaid. Then she exacts a great many costly presents, to say nothing of
+gloves, trinkets, and _bouquets_. It is curious to note how the code of
+propriety has altered in this particular.
+
+In old-fashioned novels the stereotyped dodge for compromising a lady's
+reputation is to force a present or a loan of money on her. Nowadays
+Lovelace's anxiety is just the other way--to keep the acquisitive
+propensity of his liege lady within tolerable bounds. It would be a
+great mistake to suppose that a woman can play this game without special
+gifts and aptitudes for it. It requires peculiar talents, and peculiar
+antecedents. First and foremost, she must have married a man whom she
+both dislikes and despises. And, further, she must be proof against the
+weakness which some of her sex exhibit, of growing fond of husbands who,
+without being Admirable Crichtons, treat them kindly and with
+forbearance. Next, she must have thrown overboard all the twaddle about
+domestic duties and responsibilities. If her child sickens of the
+measles just as she is starting for her bivouac in Norway, or a course
+of dinners in the Palais Royal, her duty is to call in the doctor and
+go. Weeks afterwards you will find the little darling picking up flesh,
+in mamma's absence, at some obscure watering-place. Then her temperament
+must be cool, calculating, and passionless in no ordinary degree, and
+this character is written in the hard lines of her mouth and the cold
+light of her fine eyes.
+
+Lastly, she must have, not a superstitious, but an intelligent regard
+for the world's opinion, or rather for the opinion of the influential
+part of it. No one has a nicer perception of the difference in the
+relative importance of stupid country gossip and ostracism from certain
+great houses in London. No one takes more pains to study appearances so
+long as they don't clash with her amusements. Indeed, you will generally
+find that her dear friend is a young lady of great simplicity and
+irreproachable principles, whom she admits just enough, but not too far,
+into her confidence, and who finds it worth while to enact the part, now
+of a blind, and now of a foil.
+
+If any one asserts that this treatment of the human pigeon is cruel, we
+can only reply, with a correspondent of the _Times_ who writes to rebuke
+the humanitarians who would rob a poor boa of his squealing rabbit--away
+with such cant! Is a married woman to be stinted of her "small
+pleasures" because prudes affect to think the means by which they are
+obtained unfeminine? As well might they think it unfeline in pussy to
+play with her mouse.
+
+The walking pigeon is as much intended for the prey of a stronger
+species as the pigeon that flies. The plucking which he receives at the
+hands of his fair manipulator is nothing to what he would get at the
+hands of his own sex, in the army, on the turf, or in the city. If the
+pigeon has reason to think himself lucky in faring no worse, the
+non-pigeon section of society has no less reason to be grateful for a
+new illustration of female character. Not that the mercenary development
+in some of our young matrons is altogether new. It is only an old
+domestic virtue, carried to an extreme--thrift, running into an engaging
+rapacity.
+
+
+
+
+AMBITIOUS WIVES.
+
+
+The recent death of Mrs. Proudie, who was so well known and so little
+loved by the readers of Mr. Trollope's novels, is one of those occasions
+which ought not to be allowed to pass away without being improved. To
+many men it will suggest many things. She was a type. As a type ought to
+be, she was perfect and full-blown. But her characteristics enter into
+other women in varying degrees, and with all sorts of minor colors. The
+Proudie element in wives and women is one of those unrecognised yet
+potent conditions of life which master us all, and yet are admitted and
+taken into calculation and account by none. It is in the nature of
+things that such an element should exist, and should be powerful in this
+peculiar and oblique way. We deny women the direct exercise of their
+capacities, and the immediate gratification of an overt ambition. The
+natural result is that they run to artifice, and that a good-natured
+husband is made the conductor between an ambitious wife and the outer
+world where the prizes of ambition are scrambled for. He is the wretched
+buffer through which the impetuous forces of his wife impinge upon his
+neighbors. That is to say, he leads an uneasy life between two ever
+colliding bodies, being equally misunderstood and equally reviled by
+either.
+
+This is the evil result of a state of things in which natural
+distinctions and conventional distinctions are a very long way from
+coinciding. The theory is that women are peaceful domestic beings, with
+no object beyond household cares, no wish nor will outside the objects
+of the man and his children, no active opinion or concern in the larger
+affairs of the State. Every man, on the other hand, is supposed to have
+views and principles about public topics, and to be anxious to make more
+or less of a figure in the enforcement of his views, to exercise in some
+shape an influence among his fellows, and to win renown of one sort or
+another. Of course if this division of the male and female natures
+covered the whole ground, society would be in a very well-balanced
+state, and things would go on very smoothly in consequence of the
+perfect equilibrium established by the exceeding contentedness of women
+and the constant activity and ambition of men.
+
+But a very small observation of life is quite enough to disclose how ill
+the facts correspond with the accepted hypothesis about them. We are
+constantly being told of some aspiring man that he is, in truth, no more
+than the representative of an aspiring wife. He would fain live his life
+in dignified or undignified serenity, and cares not a jot for a seat in
+the House of Commons, or for being made a bishop, or for any of those
+other objects which allure men out of a tranquil and independent
+existence. But he has a wife who does care for these things. She cannot
+be a member of Parliament or a bishop in her own person, but it is
+something to be the wife of somebody who can be these things.
+
+A part of the glory of the man is reflected upon the head of the woman.
+She receives her reward in a second-hand way, but still it is glory of
+its own sort. She becomes a leading lady in a provincial town, and
+during the season in town she is asked out to houses which she is very
+eager to get into, and of which she can talk with easily assumed
+familiarity when she returns to the provinces again. She is presented at
+Court too, and this makes her descend to the provincial plain with an
+aroma of Celestial dignity like that of Venus when she descended from
+Olympus. A bishop's wife is still more amply rewarded. Without being so
+imperious as the late Mrs. Proudie was, she has still a thousand of
+those opportunities for displaying power which are so dear to people who
+are fictitiously supposed to be too weak to care for power. Minor
+canons, incumbents, curates, and all their wives, pay her profound
+deference; or, if they do not, she can "put the screw on" in a gushing
+manner which is exceedingly effective.
+
+There are women, it is true, with souls above these light social
+matters. They do not particularly value the privilege of figuring as
+lady-patroness of a ball or bazaar, or the delights of trampling on a
+curate, or of being distantly adored by the wife of a minor canon. But
+they really have an interest in politics, or in some one or two special
+departments of that comprehensive subject. They would like to pass an
+Act of Parliament making it a capital offence for any guardian of the
+poor or relieving-officer to refuse to give the paupers as much as they
+should choose to ask for. Drainage is the strong point of some women.
+Sewage with them is the key to civilization.
+
+Perhaps most political women are actively interested in public affairs
+simply because they perceive that this is the most openly recognised
+sphere of influence and power; and what they yearn after is to be
+influential, and to stand on something higher than the ordinary level in
+the world, for no other reason than that it is higher than the ordinary
+level. Nobody has any right to find fault with this temper, provided the
+ladies who are possessed by it do not mistake mere domineering for the
+extraordinary elevation after which they aspire. It is through this
+temper, whether in one sex or the other, that the world is made better.
+If a certain number of men and women were not ambitious, what would
+become of the rest of us who possess our souls in patience and
+moderation?
+
+The only question is whether what we may call vicarious ambition, or
+aspirations by proxy, are particularly desirable forms of a confessedly
+useful and desirable sentiment. For the peace of mind of the man who is
+not ambitious, but is only pretending to be so, we may be pretty sure
+that the domestic stimulus has some drawbacks. We do not mean drawbacks
+after the manner of Mrs. Caudle. These show a coarse and vulgar
+conception of the goads which a man may have applied to him in his inner
+circle. There are moral and unheard reproofs. There is a consciousness
+in the mind of a man that his wife thinks him (with all possible
+affection and tenderness) rather a poor creature for not taking his
+position in the world. And if he happens to be a man of anything like
+fine sensibility, this will make him exceedingly uneasy.
+
+The uneasiness may then become sufficiently decided to make him willing
+to undergo any amount of labor and outlay, rather than endure the
+presence of this æthereal skeleton in the family closet. He is quite
+right. He could barely preserve his self-respect otherwise. But he is
+mistaken if he fancies that a single step or a single series of steps
+will demolish the skeleton entirely. One compliance with the ambition of
+his wife will speedily beget the necessity for another. It is notorious
+that a thoroughly aspiring man is never content without the prospect of
+scaling new heights. No more is an aspiring woman. Whether you are
+directly ambitious, as a man is, and for yourself, or indirectly and for
+somebody else, as a woman is, in either case the law is the same. New
+summits ever glitter in the distance. You have got your husband into the
+House of Commons. That glory suffices for a month.
+
+At the end of two months it seems a very dim glory indeed, and having
+long been at an end, it by this time sinks into the second place of a
+means. The sacrificial calf must next be made to speak. He must acquire
+a reputation. Here in a good many cases, we suspect, the process finally
+stops. A man may be got into the House, but the coveted exaltation of
+that atmosphere does not convert a quiet, peaceable, dull man into an
+orator. It does not give him ideas and the faculty of articulate speech.
+At this point, if he be wise, he draws the line. He endures the skeleton
+as best he may, or else his wife, quenching her ambition, resigns
+herself to incurable destiny, and learns to be content with the limits
+set by the fates to her lord's capacities. There are still certain
+fields open to her own powers, irrespective of what he is able to do.
+
+For example, she may open a _salon_, and there may exert unspeakable
+influence over all kinds of important people. This is not at present
+particularly congenial to English ground. As yet, the most vigorous
+intellectual people seem to have felt an active social life as something
+beneath them, and the highly social people have not been conspicuous for
+the activity of their intellectual life. The people who go so greatly to
+parties do not care for what they sum up, with an admirably
+comprehensive vagueness, as "intellect;" while, on the other hand,
+scholars and thinkers are wont to look on time given to society as
+something very like time absolutely wasted. In such a state of feeling,
+it is difficult for a clever woman to exercise much power.
+
+But, as other things improve, this unsocial feeling will dissolve.
+Clever men will see that a couple of hours spent with other clever men
+are not wasted just because a lady is of the party. Nobody would
+seriously maintain that this is so even now, but people are very often
+strongly under the influence of vague notions which they would never
+dream of seriously maintaining. When women get their rights, the
+_salon_ will become an institution. It will create a very fine field for
+the cultivation of their talents. And in proportion as it allows a woman
+to make a career for herself, it will bring relief to many excellent
+husbands who will then no longer have to make careers for them at the
+expense of overstraining their own too slender powers.
+
+It is possible, however, that even then the husband of an ambitious wife
+may not be fully contented. For people with any degree of weakness or
+incapacity in them are always more prone than their neighbors to
+littlenesses and meannesses, and a man who is not able to win much
+renown on his own account may possibly not be too well pleased to see
+his Wife surrounded by his intellectual betters. Indeed, he may even, if
+he is of a very mean nature indeed, resent the spectacle of her own
+predominance. It is some comfort to think that in such case the man's
+own temper will be his severest punishment.
+
+As a rule, however, it is pleasant to think that with ambition in women,
+which is not their peculiarity, is yoked tact, which is their
+peculiarity emphatically. Hence, therefore, wives who are ambitious for
+their lords have often the discretion to conceal their mood. They may
+rule with a hand of iron, but the hand is sagely concealed in a glove of
+velvet. A man may be the creature of his wife's lofty projects, and yet
+dream all the time that he is altogether chalking out his own course.
+
+George II. used to be humored in this way by Queen Caroline. Bishop
+Proudie, on the other hand, was ruled by his wife, and knew that he was
+a mere weapon in her hands; and, what was even worse than all, knew that
+the rest of mankind knew this. This must be uncommonly unpleasant, we
+should suppose. The middle position of the husband who only now and then
+suspects in a dreamy way that he is being prompted and urged on and
+directed by an ambitious wife, and has sense enough not to inflame
+himself with chimerical notions about the superiority and grandeur of
+the male sex--this perhaps is not so bad. If the tide of ambition runs
+rather sluggish in yourself, it is a plain advantage to have somebody at
+your side with enthusiasm enough to atone for the deficiency.
+
+It is impossible to tell how much good the world gets, which otherwise
+it would miss, simply out of the fact that women are discontented with
+their position. Now and then, it is understood, the husband who is thus
+made a mere conductor for the mental electricity of a wife who is too
+clever for him may feel a little bored, and almost wish that he had
+married a girl instead. But enthusiasm spreads, and in a general way the
+fervor of the wife who aspires to distinction proves catching to the
+husband. Some ladies are found to prefer this position to any other.
+They are full of power, and have abundance of room for energy, and yet
+they have no responsibility. They get their ample share of the spoil,
+and yet they do not bear the public heat and burden of the day. It is
+only the more martial souls among them for whom this is not enough.
+
+
+
+
+PLATONIC WOMAN.
+
+
+In the wearier hours of life, when the season is over, and the boredom
+of country visits is beginning to tell on the hardy constitutions that
+have weathered out crush and ball-room, there is usually a moment when
+the heroine of twenty summers bemoans the hardships of her lot. Her
+brother snuffed her out yesterday when she tried politics, and the
+clerical uncle who comes in with the vacation extinguished a well-meant
+attempt at theology by a vague but severe reference to the Fathers. If
+the afternoon is particularly rainy, and Mudie's box is exhausted, the
+sufferer possibly goes further, and rises into eloquent revolt against
+the decorums of life.
+
+There is indeed one career left to woman, but a general looseness of
+grammar, and a conscious insecurity in the matter of spelling, stand in
+the way of literary expression of the burning thoughts within her. All
+she can do is to moan over her lot and to take refuge in the works of
+Miss Hominy. There she learns the great theory of the equality of the
+sexes, the advancement of woman and the tyranny of man. If her head
+doesn't ache, and holds out for a few pages more, she is comforted to
+find that her aspirations have a philosophic character. She is able to
+tell the heavy Guardsman who takes her down to dinner and parries her
+observations with a joke that they have the sanction of the deepest of
+Athenian thinkers.
+
+It is, we suppose, necessary that woman should have her philosopher, but
+it must be owned that she has made an odd choice in Plato. No one would
+be more astonished than the severe dialectician of the Academy at the
+feminine conception of a sage of dreamy and poetic temperament, who
+spends half his time in asserting woman's rights, and half in inventing
+a peculiar species of flirtation. Platonic attachments, whatever their
+real origin may be, will scarcely be traced in the pages of Plato; and
+the rights of woman, as they are advocated in the Republic, are sadly
+deficient in the essential points of free love and elective affinity.
+
+The appearance of a real Platonic woman in the midst of a caucus of such
+female agitators as those who were lately engaged in stumping with
+singular ill success the American States of the West would, we imagine,
+give a somewhat novel turn to the discussion, and strip of a good deal
+of adoring admiration the philosopher in whom strong-minded woman has of
+late found a patron and friend. Plato is a little too logical and too
+fond of stating plain facts in plain words to suit the Miss Hominys who
+would put the legs of every pianoforte in petticoats, and if the
+Platonic woman were to prove as outspoken as her inventor, the
+conference would, we fear, come abruptly to an end. But if once the
+difficulty of decorum could be got over, some instruction and no little
+amusement might be derived from the inquiry which the discussion would
+open, as to how far the modern attitude of woman fulfils the dreams of
+her favorite philosopher.
+
+The institution of Ladies' Colleges is a sufficient proof that woman has
+arrived at Plato's conception of an identity of education for the two
+sexes. Professors, lecturers, class-rooms, note-books, the whole
+machinery of University teaching, is at her disposal. Logic and the
+long-envied classics are in the curriculum. Governesses are abolished,
+and the fair girl-graduates may listen to the sterner teachings of
+academical tutors. It is amusing to see how utterly discomfited the new
+Professor generally is when he comes in sight of his class. He feels
+that he must be interesting, but he is haunted above all with the sense
+that he must be proper. He remembers that when, in reply to the
+lady-principal's inquiry how he liked his class, he answered, with the
+strictest intellectual reference, that they were "charming," the stern
+matron suggested that another adjective would perhaps be more
+appropriate. He felt his whole moral sense as a teacher ebbing away.
+
+In the case of men he would insist on a thorough treatment of his
+subject, and would avoid sentiment and personal details as insults to
+their intelligence; but what is he to do with rows of pretty faces that
+grow black as he touches upon the dialect of Socrates, but kindle into
+life and animation when he depicts the sage's snub nose? Anecdotes,
+pretty stories, snatches of poetical quotation, slip in more and more
+as the students perceive and exercise their power. Men, too, are either
+intelligent or unintelligent, but the unhappy Professor at a Ladies'
+College soon perceives that he has to deal with a class of minds which
+are both at once. A luckless gentleman, after lecturing for forty
+minutes, found that the lecture had been most carefully listened to and
+reproduced in the note-books, but with the trifling substitution in
+every instance of the word "Phoenician" for "Venetian." Above all, he
+is puzzled with the profuse employment of these note-books.
+
+To the Platonic girl her note-book takes the place of the old-fashioned
+diary. It is scribbled down roughly at the lecture and copied out fairly
+at night. It used to be a frightful thought that every evening, before
+retiring to rest, the girl with whom one had been chatting intended
+seriously to probe the state of her heart and set down her affections in
+black and white; but it is hardly less formidable to imagine her
+refusing to lay her head on her pillow before she has finished her fair
+copy of the battle of Salamis. The universality of female studies, too,
+astounds the teacher who is fresh from the world of man; he stands
+aghast before a girl who is learning four languages at once, besides
+attending courses on logic, music, and the use of the globes. This
+omnivorous appetite for knowledge he finds to co-exist with a great
+weakness in the minor matters of spelling, and a profound indifference
+to the simplest rules of grammar. We do not wonder then at Professors
+being a little shy of Ladies' Colleges; nor is it less easy to see why
+the Platonic theory of education has taken so little with the girls
+themselves. After all, the grievance of which they complain has its
+advantages.
+
+The worst of bores is restrained by courtesy from boring you if you give
+him no cue for further conversation, and the plea of utter ignorance
+which an English girl can commonly advance on any subject is at any rate
+a defence against the worst pests of society. On the other hand, the
+ingenuous confession that she really knows nothing about it can be
+turned by a smile into a prelude to the most engaging conversation, and
+into an implied flattery of the neatest kind to the favored being whose
+superiority is acknowledged. Ignorance, in fact, of this winsome order
+is one of the stock weapons of the feminine armory.
+
+The man who looks philosophically back after marriage to discover why on
+earth he is married at all will generally find that the mischief began
+in the _naïve_ confession on the part of his future wife of a total
+ignorance which asked humbly for enlightenment. One of the grandest
+_coups_ we ever knew made in this way was effected by a desire on the
+part of a faded beauty to know the pedigree of a horse. The pride of her
+next neighbor at finding himself the possessor of knowledge on any
+subject on earth took the form of the most practical gratitude a man can
+show. But it is not before marriage only that woman finds her ignorance
+act as a charm. Husbands find pleasure in talking politics to their
+wives simply because, as they stand on the hearthrug, they are
+displaying their own mental superiority. An Englishman likes to be
+master of his own house, but he dearly loves to be schoolmaster.
+
+A Platonic woman as well-informed as her husband would deprive him of
+this daily source of domestic enjoyment; his lecture would be reduced to
+discussion, and to discussion in which he might be defeated. To rob him
+of his oracular infallibility might greatly improve the husband, but it
+would revolutionize the character of the home.
+
+It is difficult to see at first sight any analogy between the
+Puritanical form of flirtation which calls itself a Platonic attachment,
+and the provisions by which Plato excluded all peculiar love or
+matrimonial choice from his commonwealth. The likeness is really to be
+found in the resolve on which both are based to obtain all the
+advantages of social intercourse between the sexes without the
+interference of passion. In a well-regulated State, no doubt, passion is
+a bore, and this is just the aspect which it takes to a highly regulated
+woman. An outburst of affection on the part of her numerous admirers
+would break up a very pleasant circle, and put an end to some charming
+conversations. On the other hand, the quiet sense of some special
+relationship, the faint odor of a passion carefully sealed up, gives a
+piquancy and flavor to social friendship which mere association wants.
+Very frequently such a relation forms an admirable retreat from stormier
+experiences in the past, and the tender grace of a day that is dead
+hangs pleasantly enough over the days that remain.
+
+But the Platonic woman proper, in this sense, is the spinster of
+five-and-thirty. She is clever enough to know that the day for inspiring
+grand passions is gone by, but that there is still nothing ridiculous in
+mingling a little sentiment with her friendly relations. She moves in
+maiden meditation fancy free, but the vestal flame of her life is none
+the more sullied for a slight tinge of earthly color. It is a connection
+that is at once interesting, undefined, and perfectly safe. It throws a
+little poetry over life to know that one being is cherishing a perfectly
+moral and carefully toned-down attachment for another, which will last
+for years, but never exceed the bounds of a smile and a squeeze of the
+hand.
+
+Animals in the lowest scale of life are notoriously the hardest to kill,
+and it is just this low vitality, as it were, of Platonic attachment
+that makes it so perfectly indestructible. Its real use is in keeping up
+a sort of minute irrigation of a good deal of human ground which would
+be barren without it. These little tricklings of affection, so small as
+not to disturb one's sleep or to drive one to compose a single sonnet,
+keep up a certain consciousness of attraction, and beget a corresponding
+return of kindliness and good temper towards the world around. A woman
+who has once given up the hope of being loved is a nuisance to
+everybody. But the Platonic woman need never give up her hope of being
+loved; she has reduced affection to a minimum, but from its very
+minuteness there is little or no motive to snap the bond, and with time
+habit makes it indestructible.
+
+One Christian body, we believe--the Moravians--still carries out the
+principle of Plato's ideal state in giving woman no choice in the
+selection of a spouse. The elders arrange their matches as the wise men
+of the Republic were wont to do. A friend of ours once met six young
+women going out to some Northern settlement of the Moravians with a view
+to marriage. "What is your husband's name?" he asked one. "I don't know;
+I shall find out when I see him," she answered. But we have heard of
+only one State which realizes Plato's theory as to the equal
+participation of woman in man's responsibilities as well as in his
+privileges, and that is the kingdom of Dahomey. If women were to learn
+and govern like men, Plato argued, women must fight like men, and the
+Amazons of Dahomey fight like very terrible men indeed.
+
+But we have as yet heard of no military grievance on the part of injured
+woman. She has not yet discovered the hardship of being deprived of a
+commission, or denied the Victoria Cross. No Miss Faithful has
+challenged woman's right to glory by the creation of a corps of
+riflewomen. Even Dr. Mary Walker, though she could boast of having gone
+through the American war, went through it with a scalpel, and not with a
+sword. We are far from attributing this peaceful attitude of modern
+woman, inferior though it be to the Platonic ideal, to any undue
+physical sensitiveness to danger, or to inability for deeds of daring;
+we attribute it simply to a sense that there is a warfare which she is
+discharging already, and with the carrying on of which any more public
+exertions would interfere.
+
+Woman alone keeps up the private family warfare which in the earlier
+stages of society required all the energies of man. It is a field from
+which man has completely retired, and which would be left wholly vacant
+were it not occupied by woman. The stir, the jostling, the squabbling of
+social life, are all her own. We owe it to her that the family existence
+of England does not rot in mere inaction and peace. The guerilla warfare
+of house with house, the fierce rivalry of social circle with social
+circle, the struggle for precedence, the jealousies and envyings and
+rancors of every day--these are things which no man will take a proper
+interest in, and which it is lucky that woman can undertake for him. The
+Platonic woman of to-day may not march to the field or storm the breach,
+but she is unequalled in outmanoeuvring a rival, in forcing an
+entrance into society, in massacring an enemy's reputation, in carrying
+off matrimonial spoil. In war, then, as in education and the affections,
+modern woman has developed the spirit without copying the form of the
+Platonic ideal. After all superficial contrasts have been exhausted, she
+may still claim the patronage of the philosopher of Academe.
+
+
+
+
+MAN AND HIS MASTER.
+
+
+There are, it must be owned, few things on earth of less interest at
+first sight than a girl in her teens. She is a mere bundle of pale
+colorless virtues, a little shy, slightly studious, passively obedient,
+tamely religious. Her tastes are "simple"--she has no particular
+preference, that is, for anything; her aims incline mildly towards a
+future of balls to come; her rule of life is an hourly reference to
+"mamma." She is without even the charm of variety; she has been
+hot-pressed in the most approved finishing establishments, and is turned
+out the exact double of her sister or her cousin or her friend, with the
+same stereotyped manner, the same smattering of accomplishments, the
+same contribution to society of her little sum of superficial
+information. We wonder how it is that any one can take an interest in a
+creature of this sort, just as we wonder how any one can take an
+interest in the _Court Circular_. And yet there are few sentiments more
+pardonable, as there are none more national, than our interest in that
+marvellous document.
+
+A people which chooses to be governed by kings and queens has a right to
+realize the fact that kings and queens are human beings, that they
+shoot, drive, take the air like the subjects whom they govern. And if in
+some coming day we are to toss up our hats and shout ourselves hoarse
+for a sovereign who is still in his cradle, it is wise as well as
+natural that we should cultivate an interest in his babyhood, that we
+should hang on the vicissitudes of his teeth and his measles, that we
+should be curious as to the title of his spelling-book, and the exact
+score of his last game at cricket.
+
+It is precisely the same interest which attaches us to the loosely-tied
+bundle of virtues and accomplishments which we call a girl. We recognise
+in her our future ruler. The shy, modest creature who has no thought but
+a dance, and no will but mamma's, will in a few years be our master,
+changing our habits, moulding our tastes, bending our characters to her
+own. In the midst of our own drawing-room, in our pet easy-chair, we
+shall see that retiring figure quietly established, with downcast eyes,
+and hands busy with their crochet-needles, what Knox called, in days
+before a higher knowledge had dawned, "the Monstrous Regimen of Women."
+
+We are far from sharing the sentiments of the Scotch Reformer, and if we
+attempt here to seize a few of the characteristics of the rule against
+which he revolted, we hope to avoid his bitterness as carefully as his
+prolixity. What was a new thing in his day has become old in ours, and
+man learns perhaps somewhat too easily to acquiesce in "established
+facts." It is without a dream of revolt, and simply in a philosophical
+spirit, that we approach the subject. Indeed, it is a feeling of
+admiration rather than of rebellion which seizes us when we begin to
+reflect on the character of woman's sway, and on the simplicity of the
+means by which she creates and establishes it. A little love, a little
+listening, a little patience, a little persistence, and the game is won.
+
+How charmingly natural and unobjectionable, for instance, is the very
+first move in it--what we may venture to call, since we have to create
+the very terminology of our subject, the Isolation of Man. When Brown
+meets us in the street and hopes that his approaching marriage will make
+no difference in our friendship, and that we shall see as much of one
+another as before, we know that the phrases simply mean that our
+intimacy is at an end. There will be no more pleasant lounges in the
+morning, no more strolls in the park, no more evenings at the club.
+Woman has succeeded in so completely establishing this cessation of
+former friendships as a condition of the new married life that hardly
+any one dreams of thinking what an enormous sacrifice it is. There are
+very few men, after all, who are not dependent on their little group of
+intimates for the general drift of their opinions, the general temper of
+their mind and character of their lives. Their mutual advice, support,
+praise or dispraise, enthusiasm, abhorrence, likings, dislikings,
+constitute the atmosphere in which one lives.
+
+A good deal of real modesty lingers about an unmarried man; he feels far
+more confident in his own opinion if he knows it is Smith's opinion
+too, and his conception of life acquires all its definiteness from its
+being shared with half a dozen fairly reasonable fellows. It is no
+slight triumph that woman should not only have succeeded in enforcing
+the dissolution of this social tie as the first condition of married
+life, but that she has invested that dissolution with the air of an
+axiom which nobody dreams of disputing. The triumph is, as we said, won
+by the simplest agency--by nothing, in short, but a dexterous double
+appeal to human conceit. She is so weak, so frail, so helpless, so
+strange to this new world into which she has plunged from the realms of
+innocent girlhood, so utterly dependent on her husband, that a man sees
+at once that he has not a moment left for any one else.
+
+There is pleasure in the thought of all that delicate weakness appealing
+to our strength, of that innocent ignorance looking up to us for
+guidance through the wilderness of the world. Of course it will soon be
+over, and when the dear dependent has learnt to walk alone a little we
+can go back to the old faces and take our segar as before. But somehow
+the return never comes, or, if it does come, the old faces have grown
+far less enchanting to us. The truth is, we have tasted the second
+pleasure of married life--the pleasure of being an authority. All that
+shy appeal to us, all that confession of ignorance, has taught us what
+wonderfully wise fellows we are. We are far less inclined to wait for
+Smith's approval, or to take our tone from the group at the club-window.
+It is, to say the least, far pleasanter to be an authority at home.
+Gradually we find ourselves becoming oracular, having opinions on every
+subject that a leading article can give us one upon, correcting the
+Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Malt-tax and censuring Lord Stanley's
+policy towards the King of Ashantee. Life takes a new interest when we
+can put it so volubly into words. At the same time we feel that the
+interest is hardly shared by the world.
+
+Our old associates apparently fail to appreciate the change in us, or to
+listen to our disquisitions any more than they did of old; it is a
+comfort to feel that we have a home to retreat to, and that there is one
+there who will. To the subtle flattery, in short, of weakness and of
+ignorance, woman has now added the flattery of listening. To say little,
+to contribute hardly more than a cue now and then, but to be attentive,
+to be interested, to brighten at the proper moment, to laugh at the
+proper joke, to suggest the exact amount of difficulties which you
+require to make your oratorical triumph complete, and to join with an
+unreserved assent in its conclusion, that is the simple secret of the
+power of ninety-nine wives out of a hundred. It is a power which is far
+from being confined to the home. The most brilliant salons have always
+been created by dexterous listeners.
+
+A pleasant house is not a house where one is especially talked to, but
+where one discovers that one talks more easily than elsewhere. The tact
+is certainly invaluable which enables a woman to know the strong points
+of her guests, to lead up to their subjects, to supply points for
+conversation, and then to leave it quietly alone. But it is only a
+display on the grand scale of that particular faculty of silence which
+wins its quiet triumphs on every hearth-rug.
+
+The faculty, however, has other triumphs to win besides those in which
+it figures as a delicate administration of flattery to the vanity of
+men. It is the force which woman holds in reserve for the hour of
+revolt. For it must be owned that, pleasant as the tyranny is, men
+sometimes wake up to the fact that it is a tyranny, that in the most
+seductive way in the world they are being wheedled out of associations
+that are really dear to them, that their life is being cramped and
+confined, that their aims are being lowered. Then the newly-found
+eloquence exhausts itself in a declaration of revolt.
+
+Things cannot go on in this way, life cannot be ruined for caprices. It
+is needless, perhaps, to repeat the rhetoric of rebellion, and all the
+more needless because it shares the fate of all rhetoric in producing
+not the slightest impression on the mind to which it is addressed. The
+wife simply listens as before, though the listening is now far from
+encouraging to eloquence. She is perfectly patient, patient in her
+refusal to continue an irritating discussion, patient in bearing your
+little spurts of vexation; she listens quietly to-day, with the air of
+one who is perfectly prepared to listen quietly to-morrow. But even
+rhetoric has its limits, and now that the cues have ceased, a husband
+finds it a little difficult to keep up a discussion where he has to
+supply both arguments and replies.
+
+Moreover, the tact which managed in former days to place him in a highly
+pleasant position by the confession of weakness, now, by the very same
+silent avowal, places him in a decidedly unpleasant one. If a woman's
+air simply says at the end of it all, "I can't answer you, but I know I
+am right," a man has a lurking sense that his copious rhetoric has had a
+smack of the cowardly as well as of the tyrannical about it. And so,
+after a vigorous denunciation of some particular thing which his wife
+has done, a husband commonly finds himself no further than before; and
+the very instant that, from sheer weariness, he ceases, the wife usually
+steals out and does it again.
+
+There is something feline about this combination of perfect patience
+with quiet persistence--a combination which the Jesuits on a larger
+scale have turned into the characteristic of their order. It is
+especially remarkable when it breaks the bonds of silence, and takes the
+form of what in vulgar language is called "nagging." No form of torture
+which has as yet been invented, save, perhaps, the slow dropping of
+water on some highly sensitive part of the frame, can afford a parallel
+to this ingenious application of the principle of persistence.
+
+The absolute certainty that, when snub or scolding or refusal have died
+into silence, the word will be said again; the certainty that it will be
+said year after year, month after month, week after week; the
+irritation of expecting it, the irritation of hearing it, the irritation
+of expecting it again, tell on the firmest will in the world. In the
+long run the wife wins. The son goes to Harrow, though reason has proved
+a dozen times over that we can only afford the expense of Marlborough;
+the family gets its Alpine tour, though logic and unpaid bills
+imperatively dictate the choice of a quiet watering place. You yield,
+and you see that every one in the house knew that you would yield. There
+wasn't a servant who didn't know every turn of the domestic screw, or
+who took your resistance for more than the usual routine of the
+operation. "Time and I," said Philip of Spain, "against any two." It is
+no wonder if, fighting alone for prudence and economy, one is beaten by
+time and one's wife.
+
+We have no wish to dispute the enormous benefits to man of woman's
+supremacy, but we may fairly leave the statement of them to the numerous
+troup of poets who dispute with Mr. Tupper the theme of the affections.
+For ourselves, we may undertake, perhaps, the humbler task of pointing
+out very briefly some of the disadvantages which, as in all human
+things, counterbalance these benefits. In the first place, feminine rule
+is certainly not favorable to anything like largeness of mind or breadth
+of view. It creates, as we have seen, an excessive self-conceit and
+opinionativeness, and then it directs these qualities to very small ends
+indeed. Woman lives from her childhood in a world of petty details, of
+minute household and other cares, of bargains where the price of every
+yard ends in some fraction of a penny. The habit of mind which is formed
+by these and similar influences becomes the spirit of the house, a
+spirit admirable no doubt in many ways, but excessively small.
+
+The quarrels of a woman's life, her social warfare, her battles about
+precedence, her upward progress from set to set, have all the same stamp
+of Lilliput on them. But it is to these small details, these little
+pleasures and little anxieties and little disappointments and little
+ambitions, that a wife generally manages to bend the temper of her
+spouse. He gets gradually to share her indifference to large interests,
+to broad public questions. He imbibes little by little the most fatal of
+all kinds of selfishness, the selfishness of the home. It would be
+difficult, perhaps, to say how much of the patriotism of the Old World
+was owing to the inferior position of woman; but it is certain that the
+influence of woman tells fatally against any self-sacrificing devotion
+to those larger public virtues of which patriotism is one of the chief.
+Whether from innate narrowness of mind, or from defective training, or
+from the excessive development of the affections, family interests far
+outweigh, in the feminine estimation, any larger national or human
+considerations.
+
+If ever the suffrage is given to woman, it will be necessary to punish
+bribery with the treadmill, for no "person" will regard it as a crime to
+barter away her vote for a year's schooling for Johnny or a new frock
+for Maud. Nothing tells more plainly the difference between the Old
+World and the New than the constant returns home during war. We can
+hardly conceive Pericles or even Alcibiades applying for leave of
+absence on the ground of "private affairs." But then Pericles and
+Alcibiades had no home that they could set above the interests of the
+State.
+
+Lastly, from this narrow view bounded strictly by the limits and
+interests of the home comes, it may be feared, a vast deal of social and
+political bitterness and intolerance. Her very nature, her "deductive
+spirit," as Mr. Buckle puts it prettily for her, makes woman essentially
+a dogmatist. She has none of the larger intercourse with other minds and
+adverse circumstances which often creates the form, if not the spirit,
+of tolerance in the narrowest of men. Her very excellence and faith make
+her exactly what they made Queen Mary--a conscientious and therefore
+merciless persecutor.
+
+It is just this feminine narrowness, this feminine conscientiousness, in
+the clergy which unfits them for any position where justice or
+moderation is requisite. Justice is a quality unknown to woman, and
+against which she wages a fierce battle in the house and in the world.
+There are few husbands who have been made more just, more tolerant, more
+large-hearted and large-headed, by their wives; for justice lives in a
+drier light than that of the affections, and dry light is not a very
+popular mode of illumination under "the monstrous regimen of women."
+
+
+
+
+THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER.
+
+
+Proverbs, as a rule, are believed to contain amongst them somehow or
+other a quantity of truth. There is scarcely one proverb which has not
+got another proverb that flatly contradicts it, and between the two it
+would be very odd if there was not a great deal of sound sense
+somewhere. There is, however, one of the number which, as every candid
+critic must allow, is based on an egregious falsehood--the proverb,
+namely, which affirms, against all experience, that whatever is good for
+the goose is good for the gander. Viewing the goose as the type of
+woman, and the gander as the type of man, no adage could be more
+preposterous or untenable. Such a maxim flies dead in the very face of
+society, and is calculated to introduce disturbance into the orderly
+sequence and subordination of the sexes. Who first invented it, it is
+difficult to conceive, unless it was some rustic Mrs. Poyser, full of
+the consciousness of domestic power, and anxious to reverse in daily
+life the law of priority which obtained--as she must have seen--even in
+her own poultry-yard.
+
+There is one way of reading the proverb which perhaps renders it less
+monstrous; and if we confine ourselves to the view that "sauce" for the
+goose is also "sauce" for the gander, we escape from any of the
+philosophical difficulties in which the other version involves us. No
+doubt, when they are dead, goose and gander are alike, even in the way
+they are dressed, and there is no superiority on the part of either.
+Death makes all genders epicene. Except for one solitary text about
+silence in heaven for half an hour, which some cynical commentators have
+explained as indicating a temporary banishment from Paradise of one of
+the sexes, distinctions of this sort need not be supposed to continue
+after the present life. If we are to take the former reading, and to
+test it by what we know of life, nothing can be more unfounded, or more
+calculated to give a wrong impression as to the facts. Were it not too
+late, the proverb ought to be altered; and perhaps it is not absolutely
+hopeless to persuade Mr. Tupper to see to it.
+
+"What is good for the goose is bad for the gander," or "what is bad for
+the goose is good for the gander;" or, perhaps, "what is a sin in the
+goose is only the gander's way," would read quite as well, would not be
+so diametrically at variance with the ordinary rules of social life,
+and, accordingly, would be infinitely truer and more moral. Even Mr.
+Mill, who is the advocate of female emancipation and female suffrage,
+never has gone so far as to say that all women, as well as all men, are
+brothers. The female suffrage, as we know, is merely a question of time.
+Before very long, no doubt, there will be a feminine Reform Bill, during
+the course of which Mr. Disraeli will explain that the feminine
+franchise has always been the one idea of the Conservative party, and in
+which the compound housekeeper will occupy as prominent a position as
+the compound householder ever could have done. Nobody, however, has as
+yet absolutely asserted, we do not say the equality, for equality is an
+invidious term, but the indifference of the sexes. And this being so, it
+is strange that a proverb should be retained which is so opposed to
+every notion that passes current in the world.
+
+As the legislation of the world has hitherto been uniformly in the hands
+of men, it is not astonishing that it has always proceeded on the
+assumption of the absolute dependence of the weaker upon the stronger
+sex. Several thousand years of intellectual and political supremacy must
+have altered the type imperceptibly, and made the difference between the
+ordinary run of men and women far more marked than nature intended it
+originally to be. All theology, whether Christian or pagan, has been in
+the habit of representing woman as designed chiefly to be a sort of
+ornament and appendage to man; and the allegory of the creation of Eve,
+though Oriental in its tone, does nevertheless correspond to a vague
+feeling among even civilized nations that woman's mission is to fill up
+a gap in man's daily life.
+
+Nor are they merely the opinions and laws of the world which have
+moulded themselves on this basis. The whole imagination of the race has
+been fed upon the notion, until the relations between the two sexes have
+become the one thing on which fancy, sentiment, and hope are taught from
+childhood to dwell. It is not an extravagant inference to suppose that
+centuries of this imaginative and sentimental habit have ended by
+affecting the brain and the physical nature of humanity. Man has become
+a woman-caressing animal. The life of the two sexes is made to centre
+round the once fictitious, but now universal, idea that they cannot
+exist without one another.
+
+Goose and gander have lost their primitive conception of an individual
+and independent career, and are never happy unless they are permitted to
+go in pairs. Under less complex social conditions such interdependence
+led to no very intolerable results. Men and women formed a sort of
+convenient partnership, each contributing their quota of daily
+conveniences to the common fund. The chief protected his squaw--or, if
+he was a patriarch, his squaws--while the squaws ministered to his
+pleasures, cooked his food, milked--if Mr. Max Müller's idea of the
+Sanscrit is correct--his cows, and carried his babies on their backs.
+The husband found the venison and the maize, while his wife dressed it
+and helped to eat it. This mutual arrangement had at any rate the
+advantage of being accommodated to the physical differences of strength
+between the two halves of society.
+
+A little tyranny is the natural consequence of an unequal distribution
+of physical strength in all rude and barbarous states, and it was
+inevitable that woman should at such times have more than her share of
+labor and of patience imposed upon her. But it is evident that, as
+civilization has increased with the growth of population and of
+industrial interests, women no longer derive the same benefit from the
+social partnership as formerly. Some social philosophers still
+maintain, with M. Comte, that it is man's business to maintain woman,
+and to relieve her from the necessity of providing for her natural
+wants. But this theory seems Utopian and impracticable when we try to
+think of applying it to the world in which we live. Wealth is no longer
+distributed with the least reference to industrious and sober habits.
+
+The principle of accumulation has been admitted, and social bodies have
+encouraged and sanctioned it by allowing property to descend from one
+generation to another intact, the result of which is that the industry
+of the father is able to insure the perpetual idleness of his posterity.
+Large multitudes of poor producers are occupied in earning their own
+necessary sustenance, and cannot take on themselves without enormous
+difficulty the burden of supporting womankind, a burden which the richer
+classes scarcely feel. As by far the majority of women belong to the
+impoverished and laborious class, it is obvious they must either enter
+the labor-market themselves, or purchase support from the rich by
+sacrifices which are inconsistent with their personal dignity and the
+morality of the social body. As the imagination of humanity has been
+long since given up to sentiment and passion, it is only too clear that
+the more vicious alternative is the one oftenest embraced. Society,
+then, has come to this--that woman must still depend on man, while man
+no longer, except on his own terms, fulfills his part of the tacit
+bargain by maintaining woman.
+
+The first thing to be considered is what the public gains by keeping up
+the sentimental notion about woman's mission. It is her business, most
+of us think, to charm and to attract, partly in order that she may do
+man real good, and partly that she may add to the luxury, the
+refinement, and the happiness of life. With this view, society is very
+solicitous to keep her at a distance from everything that may spoil or
+destroy the bloom of her character and tastes. Few people go so far as
+to say that she ought not to work for her livelihood, if her
+circumstances render the effort necessary and prudent. As a fact, we see
+at once that such a proposition cannot be broadly supported, and that
+any attempt to enforce it would lead to endless misery and mischief.
+Poor women, for example, must work hard, or else their children and
+themselves will come to utter degradation.
+
+But though society abstains from committing itself to the doctrine of
+the enforced idleness of women, it takes refuge in a species of half
+measure, and restricts, as far as it can, by its legislative enactments
+or its own social code, the labors which women are to perform to the
+narrowest possible compass. A woman may work, but she must do nothing
+which is called unfeminine. She may get up linen, ply her needle, keep
+weaving-machines in motion, knit, sew, and in higher spheres in life
+teach music, French, and English grammar. She may be a governess, or a
+sempstress, or even within certain limits may enter the literary market
+and write books. This is the extreme boundary of her liberty, and
+somewhere about this point society begins to draw a rigid line.
+
+It earnestly discourages her from commercial occupations, except under
+the patronage of a husband who is to benefit by her exertions; she is
+not to be a counting-house clerk, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a parson.
+The great active avocations, all those that lead either to fame or
+fortune, are monopolized by men. Strong-minded women occasionally bore
+the public by complaining of and protesting against such restrictions;
+but, on the whole, the public is satisfied that it is convenient that
+they should be upheld. If we look at the matter from the point of view
+of the educated, or even the well-to-do classes, such a conclusion seems
+so reasonable that most of us can hardly induce ourselves to doubt its
+correctness. Women do a certain tangible amount of good to the world by
+being kept as a luxury and exotic. The most energetic and rebellious of
+them may feel angry to be told so, but it is the truth that it suits men
+in general to keep up a kind of hothouse bloom upon the characters of
+women. The society of soft, affectionate, unselfish creatures is
+decidedly good for man. It elevates his nature, it gives him a belief in
+what is pure and genuine, it alleviates the dust and turmoil of a busy
+career, and it enables him for so many hours of the day to refresh
+himself with the company of a being who is in some things a mediæval
+saint, and in some, a child.
+
+Whenever one contemplates the effect of more coarse experience of the
+world, more knowledge, and more rough and hard work on such a nature,
+one is invariably tempted to acquiesce in the view that it is good for
+man to have her in the state she is. One feels disposed to object to
+notions of female emancipation as profane. Education and science,
+thought and philosophy, like the winds of heaven, should never visit her
+cheek too roughly. The great thing is, to preserve in her that sort of
+luxurious unworldliness which represents the religious and refined
+element in the household to which she belongs. And a hundred things may
+be and have often been said about the advantage of making pure sentiment
+the foundation of all the relations that obtain between her and man.
+
+As Plato thought, man elevates himself by elevating and sentimentalizing
+his affections. All poetry and most literature is given up to this
+sentimentalizing or refining process. Nor can it be denied that the
+effect is to increase very much the capacity of happiness in all people
+who are born to be happy or to enjoy life. What would youth be without
+its imaginative emotions? We all know, and are taught to believe, that
+it would be something much poorer than it is.
+
+There is another side to the picture, and it is as well to contemplate
+it seriously, before we make up our minds to treat with undisguised
+contempt all the vagaries of those who wish definitely to alter the
+social condition of women. At present women are beautiful and delicate
+adjuncts of life. As Prometheus said of horses, they are the ornaments
+of wealth and luxury. They add perfume and refinement to existence. But,
+after all, it is an important question whether the conversion of women
+into this sort of drawing-room delicacy is not sacrificing the welfare
+of the many to the intellectual and social comfort of the few.
+
+The world pays a heavy price for having its imagination sentimentalized.
+One of the items in the bill is the disappointment of the thousands
+whose sensibilities are never destined to be satisfied. For every woman
+who marries happily, a large percentage never marry at all, or marry in
+haste and repent at leisure. It remains to be proved that it is wise to
+teach and train the sex to fix all their views in life and to stake all
+their fortunes on the chance of the one rare thing--a lucky matrimonial
+choice. If one could succeed in de-sentimentalizing society, one would
+take from a few the chief pleasure of living, but it is far from certain
+that the material welfare of the majority would not be proportionately
+increased. Half-measures would of course be of very little use.
+
+It would be a poor exchange to take from women all their reserve and
+innocence and refinement, without giving them free play in the world.
+They would be only coarse and wicked caricatures of what they are now.
+The change, to be tolerable, would have to be effectual and thorough. It
+would be necessary to change the whole current of their ideas, and the
+whole view of man about them also; to persuade the human race to fix its
+mind less on the difference of sexes, and to become less imaginative
+upon the subject. If so sweeping an alteration could be completely
+effected, perhaps it might be worth while to consider whether woman's
+absolute independence would not strengthen her character, and add
+permanently to the world's natural wealth.
+
+One thing is certain, that if woman is to continue for ever in her
+present condition, the moral and social condition of large numbers of
+human beings must remain hopeless. Their future appears dreary in the
+extreme. It is Utopian to expect that men and women will grow less and
+less self-indulgent, so long as the education they undergo from their
+earliest years renders them prone to every species of temptation. There
+are some things which make social philosophers hopeful and confident,
+but no social philosopher can ever do anything but despair of real
+progress if he is to take for granted that women are always to play the
+part in life which they at present play. The emancipation of the goose
+is an experiment, but it is not surprising that many enthusiasts should
+believe it to be an experiment well deserving of a trial.
+
+
+
+
+ENGAGEMENTS.
+
+
+A great writer has pathetically described the last days of a man under
+sentence of death. He has found appropriate expression for every phase
+of the protracted agony with characteristic richness and variety of
+language; we are made to taste each drop in the bitter cup--the remorse
+and the awful expectation, and the desperate clinging to deceitful
+straws of hope. Indeed it scarcely requires the eloquence of a
+first-rate writer to impress upon us the fact that it is very unpleasant
+to expect to be hanged. Every man's imagination is sufficient to realize
+some of the unpleasant consequences of such a state of mind; for though
+the number of persons who have encountered this particular experience is
+inconsiderable, most of us have gone through something more or less
+analogous--we have been significantly told to wait after school, or have
+paid visits to dentists, or have been candidates at competitive
+examinations, or have been engaged to be married. These and many other
+situations, though varying in the intrinsic pain or pleasure of the
+anticipated event, have thus much in common, that they are all states of
+abnormal suspense. The nerves are kept in a state of equal tension by
+the uncomfortable feeling that we are in for it, whatever the "it" may
+turn out to be.
+
+The first impression is simple; it resembles that felt by a man who has
+just slipped upon the side of a mountain, and knows that he is
+inevitably going to the bottom. He has not time to think whether he will
+fall upon snow or rocks, whether he will have merely a pleasant slide or
+be dashed into a thousand fragments; he does not make up his mind to be
+heroic or to be frightened; the one thought that flashes across his mind
+is that here at last is the situation which he has so often feebly
+pictured to himself; he will know all about it before he has time to
+reflect upon its pains or pleasures. People who have escaped drowning
+sometimes assert that they have remembered their whole lives in a few
+instants, though it does not quite appear how they can remember that
+they remembered the series of incidents without remembering the
+incidents themselves. But, so far as we have been able to collect
+evidence, the general rule in any sudden catastrophe is that which we
+have described. There is nothing but a dazzling flash of surprise, which
+almost excludes any decided judgment as to the painfulness or otherwise
+of the situation.
+
+If, then, we may venture to conjecture the frame of mind in which a lady
+or gentleman first enters upon an engagement, we should say that it was
+this sense of startled suspense. They feel as Guy Faux would have felt
+after lighting the train of gunpowder--that they have done something
+which they may probably never repeat in their lifetime, and every other
+emotion will be for the moment absorbed. But as engagements are
+generally more protracted than most of the critical situations we have
+mentioned, the surprise dies away, and the victims have time to look
+about them, and analyze more closely the emotions produced by their
+position. To do any justice to the complicated and varying frame of mind
+into which even an average lover may be thrown in the course of a few
+weeks would of course require the pen, not of men, but of angels. It
+would involve a condensation of a large fraction of all the poetry that
+has been written in the world, and no small part of the cynical
+criticism by which it has been opposed. But, taking for granted the mass
+of commonplaces which has been accumulated in the course of centuries,
+there are a few special modifications of the position under our present
+social arrangements which are more fitted for remark. The state of mind
+known as being in love is confined to no particular race or period, but
+the position of the engaged persons may vary indefinitely. In a good
+simple state of society, the gentleman pays down his money or his sheep
+or his oxen, and takes away the lady without any superfluous sentiment.
+Even in more civilized states, a marriage may be substantially a bargain
+carried out in a business-like spirit. However unsatisfactory such a
+mode of proceeding may be from certain points of view, it is at any rate
+intelligible; all parties to the contract understand their relative
+positions, and have a plain line of conduct traced for them.
+
+But in a modern English engagement the form is necessarily different,
+even when the substance of the arrangement is identical. For once in
+his experience a man feels called upon to accept that view of life for
+which novelists are unjustly condemned. We say unjustly, for it is
+inevitable that a novelist should frequently represent marriage as being
+the one great crisis of a man's history. It is not his function to give
+a complete theory of life, but to describe such scenes as are most
+interesting and most dramatic. He is quite justified in often writing as
+though two lovers should really think about nothing under heaven except
+their chances of union, and should be dismissed, when the happy event
+has once taken place, in a certainty of living very happily ever
+afterwards. He has no concern with the lover's briefs or sermons or
+operations on the Stock Exchange, which may really take up by far the
+greater part of the man's waking thoughts; and it would spoil the unity
+of his work if he were to dwell upon them proportionately. It would be
+as absurd to mistake the novelist's views for a complete one as to
+condemn it because it is incomplete. In novels which depend, as
+ninety-nine out of a hundred must depend, upon a love story, the
+importance of marriage, or at least the degree in which it occupies the
+thoughts of the characters, will necessarily be overstated. The engaged
+persons, however, find that, in the eyes of their friends, if not in
+their own, they are temporarily accepting the novelist's ideal. For the
+time they are considered exclusively as persons about to marry, and all
+their other relations in life retire into the background.
+
+The difficulty of the position depends upon the extent to which this
+conventional assumption diverges from the true facts of the case. The
+lady, for example, suffers less than the gentleman, because, in spite of
+Dr. Mary Walker and other martyrs to the cause of woman's rights, it is
+still true that marriage fills a larger space in her life than in that
+of the other sex. She can take up the character with a certain triumph,
+as of one who has more or less fulfilled her mission and passed from the
+ranks of the aspirants to those of the successful candidates for
+matrimony. At any rate, even if she takes a loftier view of feminine
+duties, there is nothing ridiculous about her position. She may busy
+herself about trousseaux or wedding-dresses or marriage-presents, with
+perfect satisfaction to herself and to the envy of her female friends.
+But her unfortunate accomplice, especially if he is of mature age, is in
+a far more uncomfortable position.
+
+Few men who have become immersed in any profession or business can act
+the character without an unpleasantly strong sense of being in a false
+position. There is nothing indeed intrinsically ludicrous about it; the
+chances are that the lover is doing a very sensible thing, and that his
+wisest friends approve of his conduct. Still it is undeniable that he
+moves about, to his own apprehension at least, in a universal atmosphere
+of ridicule. He feels that he is really a quiet hard-working young man,
+full of law it may be, or of plans for improving his parish, or of
+Parliamentary notices of motion. He can talk about his own topics with
+interest and intelligence, and may possibly be an authority in a small
+way. He is quite conscious, too, that there are many sides to his
+character which do not come out in his ordinary every-day business.
+Unluckily that is just the fact which his friends are apt to ignore.
+
+We soon learn to associate our acquaintance with the positions in which
+we have been accustomed to see them, and forget that they may have
+sentiments and faculties of which we know nothing. Consequently an
+engagement seems to imply an entire metamorphosis. Our friend, or his
+image in our minds, was a comparatively simple compound of two or three
+characters at most; whereas men generally have a far more complex
+organization. In business hours, perhaps, he was simply a machine for
+grinding out law, and at other times a lively talker and a good
+whist-player. No process of transmutation will convert either of those
+into the conventional lover, who can think of nothing but the object of
+his affections; the apparent incongruity is too violent not to produce a
+sense of the ludicrous; and our friend is bound in decency to make it as
+violent as possible. From which it follows that we laugh, and that he
+knows that we are laughing, at him. Intensely awkward congratulations
+are exchanged, according to two or three formulas which have been handed
+down from distant generations. If the congratulator is a married man, he
+hopes that his friend may enjoy as much happiness as he has found
+himself in the married state; if a bachelor, he assures him that,
+although unable hitherto to act up to his principles, he has always
+thought marriage the right thing. There are persons who can repeat one
+of these common forms with all the air of making an original
+observation, as there are men who can begin an oration by asserting that
+they are unaccustomed to public speaking; but, as a rule, it is said in
+such a way as to imply that the speaker, whilst admitting the absurdity
+of connecting the ideas of his friend and marriage, is willing to pay
+the necessary compliments, if he may do it as cheaply as possible.
+
+In short, until a man is engaged to be married, he scarcely knows how
+narrow a view his friends take of his character, and how easily they are
+amused at what is after all rather a commonplace proceeding. When his
+own friends look upon him so distinctly in the light of a joke, he of
+course cannot expect much quarter from the friends of the lady. He has a
+painful impression that he is coming out in a part for which he has had
+no practice, under the eyes of hostile critics. Every man thinks it only
+due to himself to criticise a friend's new purchases of horses or
+pictures or wines; if he did not find fault with them he would miss an
+opportunity of establishing his superior acumen. And of course the
+principle extends to lovers. There is probably a narrow circle who are
+bound officially to approve; but the unfortunate victim feels that,
+outside of it, every acquaintance of the lady will take pleasure in a
+keen observation of his defects, and he trembles accordingly. It is said
+(rather unfairly, perhaps) that shyness is a form of conceit; but the
+least self-conscious of mankind can hardly fail to feel uncomfortable
+when he is called upon to perform such a highflown part under so severe
+a scrutiny.
+
+Of course the torment is far greater in the case of a middle-aged
+professional gentleman, who is habitually employed upon some incongruous
+work, than to a youth in whom any sort of folly is graceful; but there
+can be few persons to whom the position is not to a certain extent
+irksome. When a man is married, or when he is a bachelor, he is allowed
+to be a rational being, taking rational views of life. He feels it
+rather hard that in the interval society insists upon his being in a
+state of temporary insanity, and then laughs at him because it doesn't
+look natural. He begins to long even for that climax of misery when, if
+the custom be not already dead, he will have to commit one of the most
+absurd actions of which a human being can be guilty--namely, making a
+speech in the morning, at an anomalous and dreary meal, exactly when his
+shamefacedness is at its highest pitch. That so many people survive
+engagements without any perceptible sourness of temper is some proof of
+the goodness of human nature, or of the fact that there are
+compensations in the state of being in love which go to neutralize the
+discomfort of being engaged.
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN IN ORDERS.
+
+
+There is, no doubt, something extremely flattering to our insular
+conceit in the mystery which hangs about the institutions which we prize
+as specially national. We feel that a Briton is still equal to three
+Frenchmen, so long as the three Frenchmen confess with a shrug that the
+Briton is wholly unintelligible. The blunders of Dr. Döllinger, the
+baffled wonderment with which every foreigner retires from the study of
+it, only endear to us the more the Church of England. This was perhaps
+the reason, besides the inherent marvel of the matter, why we passed so
+lightly over M. Esquiroz and his late ecclesiastical researches. It was
+humiliating to English pride to have to confess that a Frenchman had
+unveiled to the world of Paris the hitherto sacred mysteries of the
+perpetual curate and of the tithe rent-charge.
+
+The enemy was clearly at the gates of the central fortress of British
+insularism; even an American bishop was tempted to strive to understand
+Westminster Abbey; and a dismal rumor prevailed that nothing hindered
+the Ecclesiastical Commissioners from revealing the nature and purpose
+of their existence but the fact that, after prolonged inquiry, they
+found it impossible to understand them themselves. It was time, we felt,
+to abandon these mere outposts of the unintelligible to the aggressions
+of an impertinent curiosity, and to retire to the citadel. There,
+happily, we are safe. Even the unhallowed inquisitiveness of M. Esquiroz
+recoils baffled from the parson's wife. Disdainful of all artificial
+adjuncts of mystery, to all appearance a woman like other women, packing
+her little sick-baskets, balancing the coal-club accounts, teaching in
+her Sunday-school, the centre of religion, of charity, and of
+tittle-tattle, woman in orders fronts calmly the inquirer, a being
+fearfully and wonderfully English, unknowable and unknown.
+
+No one who saw for the first time the calm, colorless serenity of the
+parson's wife would discover in her existence the result of a life-long
+disappointment. But the parson on whose arm she leans commonly
+represents to his spouse simply the descent from the ideal to the real,
+the step from the sublime to the prosaic, if not the ridiculous. There
+was a moment in her life when the vestry-door closed upon a world of
+hallowed wonder, when the being who appeared in white robes, "mystic,
+wonderful," was a being not as other men are, a being whose hours were
+spent in study, in meditation, in charity, a being of beautiful sermons
+and spotless neckties. The flirtation with him, so impatiently longed
+for, was not as other men's flirtations; there was a tinge of sacredness
+about his very frivolity, and a soft touch of piety in his sentiment. To
+share such a life, to commune hourly with a spirit so semi-angelic,
+seemed an almost religious ambition. The spirit of a Crusader,
+half-heaven, half-earth, fired the gentle breast of the besieger till
+Jerusalem was won.
+
+Then came the hour of disenchantment. The mysterious object of
+adoration, seen on his own hearth-rug, melted into the mass of men. The
+spiritual idealist was cross over an ill-cooked dinner, and as
+commonplace at breakfast as his _Times_. The discourses, so lately
+utterances from heaven, dwindled into copies or compilations from other
+heavenly utterers. The life of a Lady Bountiful turned out a dull
+routine of mothers' meetings and Sunday-schools. The ideal poor,
+grateful and resigned, proved cross and greedy old harridans. The world
+of peace, of nobleness, of serenity, died into a parish of bustle and
+scandal and worry. Out of this wreck of hope arises the parson's wife.
+Disillusionment is her ordination for a clerical position none the less
+real that it is without parallel in the ecclesiastical history of the
+world.
+
+She takes her part with all the decision of genius. Her first step is to
+restore the Temple she has broken down, to set up again the Dagon who
+lies across the threshold. If not for herself, at any rate for the world
+and for her children, she re-creates the priest she once dreamt of in
+the commonplace parson whom she has actually wedded. Conscious as she is
+of the inner nature of the idling apartment where he lounges through the
+morning, she impresses on the household the necessity of quiet while its
+master is in his "study." By the daily addition of skillful but minute
+touches, she paints him to the world as an ideal of piety and of
+learning. She takes bills and letters off his hands, that his mind may
+not be disturbed from more serious subjects. She enforces a sacred
+silence throughout the house during the solemn hours while the sermon is
+being compiled. She sews the sacred sheets together, and listens while
+the discourse is recited for her approval. She listens again with an
+interest as fresh as ever when it is preached. She marks the text in her
+Bible, and sees that the children mark it too.
+
+As the first subject of his theological realm, she sets an example which
+other subjects are to follow. They, like her, mingle their contempt for
+the parson's business abilities and voluble talk with a hushed reverence
+for his esoteric knowledge of subjects inaccessible to common men. They,
+like her, manage to combine a perfect readiness to snub him and his
+opinions on all earthly topics, with an equal readiness to listen to
+him, as to a divine oracle, on the topics of grace and free-will.
+Insensibly the subtle distinction tells on the parson himself. He is
+conscious, perhaps pleasantly conscious, that he is seen through the
+glass of his wife, and seen therefore darkly. He retires within the
+domestic veil. He learns to avoid common subjects--subjects, that is,
+where the world holds itself at liberty to criticise him. He retires to
+fields where he is above criticism. He believes at last in the vamped-up
+sermons in which his wife persists in believing. He accepts the position
+of an oracle on sacred topics which his wife has made for him. In a
+word, the parson's wife has created the British parson.
+
+It is hard to say how far the creator believes in her own creation. In
+persuading others, she probably succeeds to a great extent in persuading
+herself. At any rate she accepts willingly enough the consequences of a
+position which leaves her the master of the parish. In the bulk of cases
+the parson is simply the Mikado, the nominal ruler, lapped in soft ease,
+and exempt from the worry of the world about him. Woman is the parochial
+Tycoon, the constitutional premier who does not rule, but governs. She
+is the hidden centre and force of the whole parochial machinery--the
+organist, the chief tract distributor, the president of the Dorcas
+society, the despot of the penny bank and the coal-club, the head of the
+sewing-class, the supervisor of district-visitors, the universal referee
+as to the character of mendicant Joneses and Browns. In other words, the
+parson's wife has revived an Apostolic Order which but for her would
+have died away; she has restored the primitive Diaconate.
+
+Woman is the true parochial deacon, and not the bashful young gentleman
+fresh from Oxford, who wears his stole over one shoulder rather than
+over two. It is the parson's wife who "serves tables" nowadays; and the
+results on parochial activity are in some ways remarkable enough. In the
+first place, men are fairly driven from the field. If a layman wishes to
+help in a parish he finds himself lost in a world of women. It is only
+those semi-clerical beings who seem to unite with a singular grace all
+the weaknesses of both the sexes who persist in the attempt. Then, too,
+all the ideas of the parochial world become feminine; the parish buzzes
+with woman's hatred of the Poor-laws, and contempt for economic
+principles and hard-hearted statisticians.
+
+Mendicancy flies from the workhouse and the stone-yard to entrench
+itself against Guardians and relieving-officers among the soup-kitchens
+and the coal-tickets of feminine almsgiving. The parson, after a faint
+protest of common sense, surrenders at discretion, and flings all
+experience to the winds. One wife turns her husband into a fount of
+begging letters. Another forces him to set up manufactories for all the
+lucifer-match girls of the parish. Woman's imaginativeness, woman's
+fancy, woman's indifference to fact exhausts itself in "sensational
+cases," and revels in starvation and death. But we must turn to a
+brighter side of her activity. Ritualism is the great modern result of
+the parson's wife, though, with a base ingratitude to the rock from
+which they were hewn, Ritualists hoist the standard of clerical
+celibacy. Woman has long since made her parson; now (as of old with her
+doll) her pleasure is to dress him. A new religious atmosphere surrounds
+her life when the very work of her hands becomes hallowed in its
+purpose. The old crotchet and insertion--we use words to us more
+mysterious than intelligible--become flat, stale, and unprofitable by
+the side of the book-marker and the colored stole; and a flutter of
+excitement stirs even the stillness of a life which is sometimes
+offensively still at the sight of the new chasuble with "aunt's real
+lace, you know, dear," sewn about it.
+
+However gray an existence may be, and the tones of a life like this are
+naturally subdued, it still cherishes within a warmth and poetry of its
+own; and the poetry of the parson's wife breaks out in vestments and
+decorations. Nothing brings out more vividly the fact that Mrs. Proudie
+_is_ the Church of England than that her reaction against the prose of
+existence is shaking--so the Protestant Alliance tells us--the Church of
+England to its foundations. The real disturber of the Church peace, the
+real assertor of Catholic principles, or (for those who prefer a middle
+phrase to either of these contending statements) the real defendant in
+the Court of Arches, is not Mr. Mackonochie, but the parson's wife.
+
+Mrs. Proudie, we repeat, is the Church of England; but if it is
+difficult to estimate the results of her position upon the spouse of her
+bosom and the parish which she rules, it is still harder to estimate its
+results upon herself. Her outer manner seems, indeed, to reflect what we
+have ventured to call the gray tones of her life, and a certain
+weariness of routine breaks out even in the mechanical precision of her
+existence. Power, in the parochial as in the domestic circle, is bought
+by her at the cost of a perpetual self-abnegation, and it is a little
+hard to be always hiding the hand that pulls the strings. We may excuse
+a little forgetfulness in a wife when her daily sacrifice is wholly
+forgotten in the silver teapot and the emblazoned memorial which
+proclaim the borrowed glories of her spouse.
+
+Sometimes there may be a little justification for the complaint of the
+British priestess that the priest alone should be crowned with laurel.
+But, if she is ecclesiastically forgotten, it must be remembered that
+her position receives a shy and timid recognition from society. She is
+credited with a quasi-clerical character, and regarded as having
+received a sort of semi-ordination. The Church, indeed, assigns her no
+parochial precedence; but public opinion, if it sets her beneath her
+husband, places her above all other ecclesiastical agencies. Tacitly she
+is allowed to have the right to speak of "_our_ curates." Then, again,
+society assigns her a sort of mediatorial position between the Church
+and the world; she is the point of transition between the clergy and
+their flocks. It is through her that the incense of congregational
+flattery is suffered to mount up to the idol who may not personally
+inhale it; and it is through her that the parson can intimate his
+opinion, and scatter his hints on a number of social subjects too
+trivial for his personal intervention.
+
+It is impossible, indeed, to express in words the delicate shades of her
+social position, or, what is yet more remarkable, the relation to her
+sister-world of woman. There can be no doubt that, taken all in all,
+women are a little proud of the parson's wife. She is, as it were, the
+tithe of their sex, taken and consecrated for the rest. The dignity of
+her position in close proximity to the very priesthood itself extends,
+by the subtle gradation of sisters of mercy, district-visitors, and
+tract-distributors, to women in the mass. Her influence is a quiet
+protest against the injustice of the present religions of the world in
+excluding woman from those ministerial functions with which Paganism
+invested her. It is an odd transition from the quiet parson's wife to
+the priestess of Delphi; but while the parson's wife exists there is at
+any rate a persistence in the claim of woman's right to resume her
+tripod again.
+
+It is the quiet consciousness of this, of her spiritual headship of her
+sex, of her mystic and unexpressed but real ecclesiastical position,
+quite as much as the weariness of her daily routine, which displays
+itself in the bearing of the parson's wife. She is not quite as other
+women are, any more than he is as other men. Her dress is--at any rate,
+in theory it ought to be--a shade quieter, her bonnets a little less
+modern, her manner a trifle more reserved, her mirth hardly as
+unrestrained as those of the rest of her sex. Her talk, without being
+clerical, takes a quiet clerical tinge. She has her little scandal about
+the archdeacon and her womanly abhorrence of that horrid Colenso. She
+knows Early English from Middle Pointed, and interprets Ritualistic
+phrases into intelligible vocables. Like the curate, she dances only in
+family circles, and then dances after a discreet and ecclesiastical
+sort. She has no objection to cards, but she plays only for love. She
+sings solos from the _Messiah_ and _St. Paul_.
+
+An existence simple, kindly enough in its way, penetrating society no
+doubt with a thousand good influences, but yet, we must own, hardly very
+interesting to the priestess who lives it. Altogether, when we get
+beyond the purple and gold of our rulers, we congratulate ourselves on
+being free from the tedium and weariness and perpetual self-restraint of
+their lofty position. And even the curate who has lately raised his
+faint protest against what he calls "feminine domination" may remember
+in charity that while croquet and flirtation remain to him, his
+existence, slavery though he deem it, is a slavery far freer, blither,
+and more lively than that of the curate's wife.
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN AND HER CRITICS.
+
+
+We men boast, as Homer said, to be braver than our fathers; but, as a
+sort of compensation, our women are far more sensitive than their
+grandmothers. Phyllis has ceased to laugh at Mr. Spectator's criticisms
+on her fan and her patches; but then it may be doubted whether Phyllis
+ever did laugh very heartily at Mr. Spectator. Women have run through
+all the list of moral and intellectual qualities in their time, but we
+do not remember an instance of a really humorous woman. Witty women
+there have been, and no doubt are still in plenty, but the world has
+still to welcome its feminine Addison.
+
+The higher a man's nature, the keener seems his enjoyment of his own
+irony and mockery of his own foibles; but did any woman ever seriously
+sit down to write a "Roundabout Paper?" Women, we are generally told,
+are "especially self-conscious;" in fact, the whole theory of women,
+philosophically stated, from the shyness of the miss in her 'teens to
+the audacious flirtation of a heroine of the season, rests wholly on the
+assumed basis of "self-consciousness." But it is self-consciousness of a
+very peculiar and feminine sort--a consciousness, not of themselves in
+themselves, but of the reflection of themselves, in others, of the
+impression they make on the world around. Woman, we suspect, lives
+always before her glass, and makes a mirror of existence. But for
+downright self-analysis, we repeat, she has little or no taste. A female
+Montaigne, a female Thackeray, would be a sheer impossibility.
+
+We have been led, as the _Spectator_ would have said, into these
+reflections by the chorus of shrill indignation with which the world of
+woman encounters the slightest comment of extraneous critics. The censor
+is at once told flatly that he knows nothing of woman. He is a bachelor,
+he is blighted in love, he is envious, spiteful; he is blind, deaf,
+dumb. All this goes without saying, as the French have it, but he is
+certainly ignorant. The truth is, it is woman who knows nothing of
+herself. It is only self-analysis which reveals to us our inner
+anomalies, our ridiculous self-contrasts; it is humor which recognises
+and amuses itself with their existence. But it is just the absence of
+this sense of anomaly in her nature or her life that is the charm of
+woman.
+
+Christmas has been bringing us, among its other festivities, a few of
+those delightful amusements called private theatricals; and in private
+theatricals all are agreed with Becky Sharpe, that woman reigns supreme.
+We were present the other day at an entertaining little comedy of this
+kind, where the whole interest of the piece was absorbed by a
+fascinating widow and an intriguing attorney, and where both these parts
+were sustained with singular ability and success. The amateur who played
+the lawyer seized the general idea of his _rôle_ with perfect accuracy;
+in four minutes it was admirably rendered to his audience, but in four
+minutes it was exhausted. The preliminary cough, the constant angularity
+of attitude in the midst of perpetual fidget, the indicative finger from
+which the legal remarks seemed to pop off as from a pocket-pistol, were
+grasped at once, and remained unvaried, undeveloped to the close. The
+very ability with which the actor rendered the inner unity of legal
+existence, the very fidelity with which he represented the lawyer as a
+class, denied to him the subtle charm of the only unity which life as a
+representation exhibits--the charm of a unity of outer impression
+arising out of perpetual inner variety.
+
+His feminine rival won her laurels just because she made no attempt to
+grasp any general idea at all, but abandoned herself freely to the
+phases of the character as it encountered the various other characters
+of the piece. Whether as the frivolous widow or the daring coquette, as
+the practical woman of business or the unprotected female, as the flirt
+in her wildest extravagance or the wife in her most melting moods, she
+aimed at no artistic unity beyond the general unity of sex. She remained
+simply woman, and all this prodigious versatility was, as the audience
+observed, "so charmingly natural," just because it is woman's life. "On
+the stage," if we may venture to apply the lines about Garrick:--
+
+     On the stage she is natural, simple, affecting--
+     It is only that when she is off she is acting.
+
+In actual fact she is acting whether off the boards or on, but the mere
+existence in outer impressions, in the unity of a constant admiration,
+which critics applaud as natural on the stage, they are unreasonably
+hard upon in general society.
+
+A man on the boards is doing an unusual and exceptional thing, and as a
+rule the very effort he makes to do it only enhances his failure; but a
+woman on the boards is only doing, under very favorable circumstances,
+what she does every day with less notice and applause. There can be no
+wonder if she is "charmingly natural," but this naturalness depends, as
+we have seen, on the entire absence of what in men is called
+self-consciousness--that is, the sense of anomaly. When a critic then
+ventures to open this inner existence, and to give woman a peep at
+herself, we cannot be astonished at the scream of indignation which
+greets his efforts. But we may be permitted to repeat that the scream
+proves, not that he knows nothing of woman, but that woman knows nothing
+of herself.
+
+We are afraid, however, that all this feminine resentment points to a
+radical defect in the mind of woman, which she is alternately proud to
+acknowledge and resolute to deny. Frenchmen of the Thiers sort have a
+trick to which they give the amusing name of logic; they present their
+reader with a couple of alternatives which they assert divide the
+universe, and bid you choose "of these two one." But any ordinary woman
+presents to the observer a hundred distinct alternatives, and defies him
+to choose any one in particular. There is no special reason, then, for
+astonishment at the coolness with which she sets herself up one moment
+as a "deductive creature," as one who attains the highest flights of
+knowledge by intuition rather than by reason, and the next poses herself
+as the one specially rational being in her household, and waits
+patiently till her husband is reasonable too.
+
+We are sometimes afraid that neither one nor the other of these theories
+will hold water, and feel inclined to agree with one of the most
+brilliant of her sex that, if woman loves with her head, she thinks with
+her heart. As a rule, certainly, she judges through her affections. She
+does not praise nor blame; she loves or hates. The one thing she cannot
+understand is a purely intellectual criticism, the sort of morbid
+anatomy of the mind which treats its subject as a mere dead thing simply
+useful for demonstration. Very naturally, she attributes the same spirit
+of affectional intelligence to her critics as to herself; and when they
+unravel a few of her inconsistencies, amuse themselves with a few
+follies, or even venture to point out a few faults, she brands them as
+"hating" or "despising" woman. Point, too, is given to the charge by the
+fact that these affections through which she lives are from their very
+nature incapable of dealing with qualities, and naturally transform them
+into persons. A woman does not love her lover's courage or truth or
+honor; she loves her lover. If she prizes his qualities at all it is
+simply because they are inherent in him, and so she gives herself very
+little trouble to distinguish between his bad qualities and his good
+ones. She considers herself bound to defend his characteristics in the
+mass, and if she seem to give up his extravagance or his rakishness, it
+is only with a secret determination that this concession to the world
+shall be balanced by an increase of adoration at home.
+
+As she deals with mankind, so she expects mankind, and especially the
+mankind of criticism, to deal with her. It is in vain that her censor
+replies that he only blamed her bonnet-strings or attacked the color of
+her shoe-tie. Woman's answer is that he has attacked woman. This folly,
+that absurdity, are in woman's mind herself, and their assailant is her
+own personal antagonist. "Love me all in all or not at all" is a woman's
+song, not in Mr. Tennyson's _Idyl_ only, but all the world over. The
+discriminating admiration, the constitutional obedience which still
+claims to preserve a certain reticence and caution in its loyalty, are
+more alien to woman's feelings than the refusal of all worship, all
+obedience whatever. "Picking her to pieces" is the phrase in which she
+describes the critical process against which she revolts, and it is a
+phrase which, in a woman's mouth, is the prelude to the bitterest
+warfare.
+
+There is a more amiable, if a hardly more intelligent, trait in woman's
+character which renders her singularly averse to all criticism. Men can
+hardly be described as loyal to men. Whether it be their exaggerated
+self-esteem, their individuality, or their reason, it is certain that
+they do not imagine the honor of their sex to be concerned in the
+conduct of each particular member of it. The lawyer laughs over a
+little gentle fun when it is poked at his neighbor the vicar, and the
+parson has his amusement out of the exposure of the foibles of his
+friend the attorney. What they never dream of is the flinging over each
+other's defects the general cloak of manhood, and rallying at every
+smile of criticism under the general banner of the sex.
+
+But woman, in front of the enemy, piques herself on her _solidarité_.
+Flirt or prude, prim or gay, foolish or wise, woman, once criticised,
+cries to her sisters, and is recognised and defended as woman. All
+feminine comment, all internal censure, is hushed before the foe. The
+tittle-tattle of the gossips, the social intrigues of the dowager, are
+adopted as frankly as the self-devotion of a Miss Nightingale. The door
+of refuge is flung open as widely for the foolish virgins as for the
+wise. All distinctions of age, of conduct, of intelligence, of rank are
+annihilated or forgotten in the presence of the enemy. Every fault is to
+be defended, every weakness to be held stoutly against his attacks. "No
+surrender" is the order of the day. It is only when the criticism of the
+outer world withdraws that woman's internal criticism recommences. This
+is, indeed, half the offence of outer assailants, that they suspend and
+injure the working of that inner discipline which woman exerts over
+woman. Mrs. Proudie, it has been said, is the Church.
+
+Women certainly present the only analogy in the present day to that
+claim of internal jurisdiction for which the Church struggled so
+gallantly in the middle ages. No one who sees the serried ranks with
+which she encounters all investigation from without would imagine the
+severity with which she administers justice within. Like the Westphalian
+Vehm-gericht, the mystery of feminine courts is only equalled by their
+terrible sentences. Mrs. Grundy on the seat of justice is a Rhadamanthus
+to whom criticism may fairly leave an erring sister. But all this in
+nowise weakens the firmness of woman's attitude before an outer foe. She
+claims absolute right to all hanging, drawing, and quartering on her
+domains. Like a feudal baron, she will yield to no man her stocks and
+her gallows. But to judge from the prim front of her squares, the
+cordial grasp of hand-in-hand with which they form to resist all
+masculine charges, no one would imagine the ruthless severity with which
+woman was breaking some poor drummer-boy inside.
+
+We are bound, however, to add, that in all our remarks we have only been
+nibbling at the outer rind of a great difficulty. Woman has
+characteristically fallen back on a grand principle, and has asserted
+her absolute immunity from all criticism whatever. It is not merely that
+this critic is deaf or that critic malignant, that one censor is
+ignorant and another basely envious of woman. All this special pleading
+is totally flung aside, and the defence stands on a basis of the most
+uncompromising sort. No man, it is asserted, can judge woman, because no
+man can understand her. She is the Sphinx of modern investigation, and
+man is not fated to be her OEdipus. We can conceive of few
+announcements more welcome, if it be only true.
+
+In an age when everything seems pretty well discovered, when one cannot
+preserve even a shred of mystery to cloak the bareness of one's life,
+when the very surface of the globe is all mapped out, and the mysterious
+griffins of untraversed deserts are vanishing from the map, it is an
+amazing relief to know that an unsolved, nay more, that an insoluble,
+mystery is standing on one's very hearth-rug. No wonder great
+philosophers have spent their lives in vain in looking for the riddle of
+existence, when they never dreamt of looking for it at home. Why woman
+is so peculiarly mysterious, why the laws of her nature are so specially
+unintelligible to a common world, we have not yet been informed. What is
+asserted is simply the fact of this mystery, and before that great fact
+criticism retires.
+
+All that remains for it is to pray and to wait, to hope for a revelation
+from within, since it is forbidden any exploration from without. Some
+prophetess, no doubt a veiled prophetess herself, will arise to lift the
+veil of her sex. Woman, let us hope, will at last unriddle woman. Smit
+by the sunbeams, or rather by the moonbeams, of self-discovery, the
+Sphinx of modern times will reveal in weird and superhuman music the
+mystery of her existence.
+
+
+
+
+MISTRESS AND MAID ON DRESS AND UNDRESS.
+
+
+No one with a soul to appreciate the extra-judicial utterances of Mr.
+Samuel Warren can have forgotten the memorable lament over the decline
+and fall of the fine old English maid-servant with which, some years
+ago, he introduced some cases of petty larceny to the notice of the
+grand-jurors of Hull. The alarm sounded with such touching eloquence
+from the judgment-seat was taken up last autumn, if we remember, by a
+venerable Countess, who, in an address to an assemblage of Cumbrian
+lasses, aspirants to the kitchen and the dairy, took occasion to read
+them a lecture on the duty of dressing with the simplicity befitting
+their station. Both the learned Recorder and the venerable Countess were
+animated by the best intentions. Their advice was excellent, and we
+sincerely trust that it may have induced the neat-handed Phyllis of the
+North to curb her immoderate taste for finery. These sporadic warnings
+seem likely to ripen at last into action.
+
+From a letter lately inserted in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, we learn that
+a "Clergyman's Wife" has long been brooding in silent indignation over
+"the present disgraceful style of dress among female servants." Her
+disgust finds vent in a manifesto to the mistresses of Great Britain,
+in which, after painting the evil in the darkest possible colors, she
+ends by suggesting a remedy for it. Dress, we are told, among "the lower
+orders of females," has arrived at a pitch which has wholly changed the
+aspect and character of our towns and country villages. Neither
+preachers nor good books can avail to stop it. Bad women are fearfully
+increased in number, good wives and mothers are getting rare. In
+consequence of the reckless expenditure of women upon their dress,
+husbands become drunkards, and murder too commonly follows. The remedy
+for this terrible state of things is to be found in the following
+"proposition:"--The ladies of England are to form an association,
+pledging themselves to adopt, each family for themselves, a uniform for
+their female servants, and to admit none into their service who refuse
+to wear it.
+
+The uniform is not to be old-fashioned or disfiguring, but merely neat,
+simple, and consequently becoming. The following ornaments are to be
+absolutely prohibited--"feathers, flowers, brooches, buckles or clasps,
+earrings, lockets, neck-ribbons and velvets, kid-gloves, parasols,
+sashes, jackets, Garibaldis, all trimming on dresses, crinoline, or
+steel of any kind." No dress to touch the ground. No pads, frisettes, no
+chignons, no hair-ribbons. Having swept away by a stroke of the pen all
+this mass of finery, a "Clergyman's Wife" goes on to make some
+"suggestions," which we quote for the edification of our lady readers:--
+
+"Morning dress: Lilac print, calico apron, linen collar. Afternoon
+dress: Some lighter print, muslin apron, linen collar and cuffs.
+Sundays: a neat alpaca dress, linen collar and cuffs, or frill tacked
+into the neck of the dress, a black apron, a black shawl, a medium straw
+bonnet with ribbons and strings of the same color, a bow of the same
+inside, and a slight cap across the forehead, thread or cotton gloves, a
+small cotton or alpaca umbrella to keep off sun and rain. The winter
+Sunday dress: Linsey dress, shepherd's plaid shawl, black straw bonnet.
+A plain brown or black turndown straw hat with a rosette of the same
+color, and fastened on with elastic, should be possessed by all servants
+for common use, and is indispensable for nursemaids walking out with
+children. Should servants be in mourning, the same neat style must be
+observed--no bugles, or beads, or crape flowers allowed."
+
+The first thing that strikes us in connection with this glib project is
+the enormous difficulty of carrying it into execution. It is easy, we
+all know, to call spirits from the vasty deep, but exceedingly difficult
+to induce them to obey the summons. It is easy, and to feminine
+ingenuity rather pleasant than otherwise, to devise sumptuary laws for
+the kitchen. But it is quite another thing to try to enforce them. By
+what coercive machinery is Betsy Jane to be forced into the detested
+uniform? We know how deeply the Anglo-Saxon mind resents any social
+"ticketing." Does a "Clergyman's Wife" suppose that the British
+housemaid is exempt from this little weakness common to her race? At any
+rate, we are convinced that she would never subside into a "lilac
+print" or a "neat alpaca" without a tremendous struggle. Her first
+weapon of defence would infallibly be a strike. It is absurd to suppose
+that she would cling to her flowers and parasol with less tenacity than
+cabby to his right of running over people in the dark.
+
+Now, is a "Clergyman's Wife" prepared to face the consequences of such a
+strike? Is she ready for an indefinite time to cook her own dinner, mend
+her own dresses, dust her own rooms, manage her own nursery? What if the
+vengeance of the housemaid menaced by the imposition of a "calico apron"
+or a "medium straw bonnet" should assume a darker form, and a system of
+domestic "rattening" should spread terror through the tranquil
+parsonages of England? Is she prepared to brave the system of
+intimidation by which a union of vindictive cooks and nursery-maids
+might assert their inherent rights to lockets and earrings? Has she the
+nerve to crush the secret plots of kitchen Fenianism? Ultimately, no
+doubt, her efforts might be crowned with success. When that happy time
+arrived, when "her suggestions were generally adopted," and the
+"requirements of ladies, especially those of fortune, were generally
+known" to comprise a uniform for the maid-servant, she might succeed in
+closing the market of domestic service to the flaunting abigail whose
+audacious finery renders her to the outward eye indistinguishable from
+her own daughters.
+
+But as that time would be long in coming, and probably would never
+arrive in her lifetime, she would have to face the discomforts of a
+long period of transition, during which she would have to rely on
+herself and her daughters for the discharge of the various operations of
+the household. Meantime we beg to suggest another way of effecting her
+purpose quite as easy, and much more effectual. Why not go in for an Act
+of Parliament, having for its object the total suppression of the
+instinct of vanity in the female bosom? Let it be enacted that, on and
+after the 1st of next April (the date would be appropriate), feathers,
+flowers, and the other abominations which she seeks to proscribe, shall
+be for ever abjured and disused by the fair sex. As the prelude to that
+full entry on her social and political rights which is nowadays claimed
+for woman, a proposal of this magnitude would commend itself, no doubt,
+to the philosophic section of the House of Commons.
+
+There is another feature in the manifesto of a "Clergyman's Wife" which
+calls for observation. She lays particular stress on securing the
+adhesion to her plan of "families of wealth and distinction," "ladies of
+position and fortune"--of the leaders of fashion, in short, wherever
+those mysterious but potent decoy-ducks are to be found. Its success
+depends on "making it fashionable to adopt the uniform," on making
+simplicity of dress among maid-servants the sole avenue to the "best
+situations." Now, as it is conceded that the "present disgraceful style
+of dress among servant girls" is the result of their ambition to imitate
+their superiors, it is worth while, in order to estimate both the amount
+of their responsibility for the said disgrace and the chances of
+success of the proposed reform, to glance from the style of dress in
+vogue in the kitchen to the style of dress in vogue in the drawing-room.
+
+Oddly enough, on the very day on which a "Clergyman's Wife" was
+permitted to ventilate her project in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, the
+public was favored with the latest intelligence on this point, in the
+columns of a fashionable contemporary. Paris, we all know, is the
+sovereign arbiter of dress to all "ladies of position and fortune" in
+this country, the center of an authority on all matters relating to the
+toilette, which radiates, through "families of distinction and wealth,"
+to those calm retreats where clergymen's wives, in chastely severe
+attire, exchange hospitalities with their neighbors. What is the
+fashionable style of dress in Paris at the present moment? The
+correspondent of our contemporary shall speak for himself. "We are
+living," he says, "in an age which seems to be reviving the classical
+period in the history of drapery. You see pretty nearly as much of the
+female _torso_ now as the Athenians did when the bas-reliefs of the
+Parthenon copied the modes of the Greeks so many hundred years ago, and
+when the multitude did not worship the drapery of the goddess only."
+
+After some piquant remarks on the style of dress in the theatres, he
+goes on to inform us how "in the more refined and virtuous society" the
+ladies are dressing this winter. "At a _fête_ graced by all that is
+elegant, refined, and aristocratic in Paris," he observed the duchess,
+the countess, and the baroness imitating the costly toilettes of the
+_demi-monde_, arrayed like one of them precisely, in the very height of
+fashion. We are favored with a minute account of one representative
+toilette in the room:--
+
+"The lady is of a noble Hungarian family, fair, with that dark brown
+reddish hair which is just going to begin to be golden, but never shines
+out. Pale oval face, heavy eyebrows, bright bronze eyes. Small festoons
+of hair over the brow, imprisoned by a golden metal band. Behind a
+Bismarck chignon. A mass of twisted hair, in a sort of Laocoon agony,
+was decorated with small insects (of course I don't mean anything
+impossible), glittering gem-like beetles from the Brazils. Three long
+curls hang from the imposing mass, and could be worn before or behind,
+and be made to perform--as I witnessed--all sorts of coquettish
+tricks. . . . Now for the dress. Well, there is nothing to describe till
+you get very nearly down to the waist. A pretty bit of lace on a band
+wanders over the shoulder; the back is bare very low down, and more of
+the bust is seen than even last year's fashions permitted. . . . You
+may, as far as I could observe, dress or half-dress just as you like;
+caprice has taken the place of uniform fashion. As the panorama of
+_grandes dames_ floats before my mind's eye, I come to the conclusion
+that I have seen more of those ladies than one could have hoped or
+expected in so brief a space of time."
+
+This, then, is, or shortly will be, in a tasteless and exaggerated form,
+the style of dress among those "ladies of distinction" whose
+co-operation a "Clergyman's Wife" fondly hopes to enlist in her scheme
+for purging the kitchen of its "disgraceful" finery. It is just possible
+that she has not heard of these things. Perhaps in the retirement of the
+parsonage, with her eyes intently fixed on the moral havoc which dress
+is causing among "the lower orders of females," she has assumed that the
+dress of the higher orders of females is irreproachably modest and
+correct. If so, we are sorry to have to dispel an illusion which would
+go far to justify the self-complacent tone of her lecture. But unless
+she is blissfully ignorant of contemporary fashions in any sphere more
+elevated than the kitchen, we are struck with astonishment at the
+hardihood of an appeal at the present moment to ladies of fashion.
+
+Is a being whose avowed object is to imitate as exactly as possible the
+cosmetic tricks of the _demi-monde_ likely to prove an influential ally
+in a crusade against cheap finery? Is a mistress whose head-gear
+resembles the art-trophy of an eccentric hair-dresser, and whose
+clothing is described as nothing to speak of "until you get very nearly
+down to the waist," the person to be especially selected to preach
+propriety of dress to her maid? Or is it that a "Clergyman's Wife"
+objects to overdress only, and not to underdress; and that, while she
+would repress with severity any attempt on the part of "females of the
+lower order" to adorn their persons, she looks with a tolerant eye,
+among "ladies of position and fortune," upon the nude? We are curious to
+know at what point in the social scale she would draw the line above
+which an unblushing exhibition of the female _torso_ is decent, and
+below which earrings and a parasol are immoral.
+
+As a matter of fact, so far from discouraging the passion for dress
+among their female dependents, ladies of position and fortune are apt to
+insist on their dressing smartly. They like to see some of their own
+lustre reflected on their attendants. A dowdy in sad-colored print or
+linsey is by no means to their taste. This has been well pointed out in
+a letter in which a "Maid-servant" replied, through the _Pall Mall
+Gazette_, to the project of reform proposed by a "Clergyman's Wife."
+Looking at the question from her own point of view, she described in
+plain words how, when she first went into service, she had wished to
+dress simply, but was quickly made to understand that she must either
+spend more of her wages on dress, or seek another situation. We believe
+that her experience would be endorsed by the great majority of her
+class. If a "Clergyman's Wife" would take the pains to inquire into the
+facts of the case, she would not be long in ascertaining from what
+quarter the signal for unbecoming finery among "females of the lower
+orders" really comes.
+
+The plain truth of the matter is, that a reform in the dress of "lower
+class females," and maid-servants in particular, can only be brought
+about in one way. The reaction in favor of a neat and simple style must
+come from above, and not from below; in the way of example, not of
+precept. When "ladies of position and fortune" cease to lavish their
+thousands on millinery, their copyists in the nursery and kitchen will
+cease to spend their wages on a similar object. When every one above the
+rank of a governess dresses in a manner suitable to her station,
+complaints will be no longer heard about "unbecoming" finery below
+stairs. The chief incentive to showy dress among the "lower orders of
+females" is unquestionably a desire to ape the extravagance of their
+betters. Remove that incentive, and the evil which a "Clergyman's Wife"
+so forcibly deplores will soon cure itself.
+
+We hope that she may be induced to turn her reforming zeal into another
+direction. Instead of indulging in childish projects for putting the
+Sunday-school, and the church singers, and maid-servants, and the lower
+orders of females generally into uniforms, let her attack the mischief
+at its root, and persuade the fine ladies of the earth to curtail their
+monstrous prodigality and immodest vagaries in dress. Let her add her
+warning voice to that of the Head of Latin Christianity, who has
+recently denounced this scandal of the age with the same perennial vigor
+that characterizes his anathemas on the Subalpine Government.
+
+
+
+
+ÆSTHETIC WOMAN.
+
+
+It is the peculiar triumph of woman in this nineteenth century that she
+has made the conquest of Art. Our grandmothers lived in the kitchen, and
+debased their finer faculties to the creation of puddings and pies. They
+spun, they knitted, they mended, they darned, they kept the accounts of
+the household, and scolded the maids. From this underground existence of
+barbaric ages woman has at last come forth into the full sunshine of
+artistic day; she has mounted from the kitchen to the studio, the
+sketching-desk has superseded the pudding-board, sonatas have banished
+the knitting-needle, poetry has exterminated weekly accounts. Woman, in
+a word, has realized her mission; it is her characteristic, she tells us
+through a chorus of musical voices, to represent the artistic element of
+the world, to be pre-eminently the æsthetic creature.
+
+Nature educates her, as Wordsworth sang long ago, into a being of her
+own, sensitive above all to beauty of thought and color, and sound and
+form. Delicate perceptions of evanescent shades and tones, lost to the
+coarser eye and ear of man, exquisite refinements of spiritual
+appreciation, subtle powers of detecting latent harmonics between the
+outer and the inner world of nature and the soul, blend themselves like
+the colors of the prism in the pure white light of woman's organization.
+And so the host of Woman, as it marches to the conquest of this world,
+flaunts over its legions the banner of art.
+
+In one of the occasional passages of real poetic power with which Walt
+Whitman now and then condescends to break the full tide of rhapsody over
+the eternities and the last patent drill, he describes himself as seeing
+two armies in succession go forth to the civil war. First passed the
+legions of Grant and M'Clellan, flushed with patriotic enthusiasm and
+hope of victory, and cheered onward by the shouts of adoring multitudes.
+Behind, silent and innumerable, march the army of the dead. Something,
+we must own, of the same contrast strikes us as we stand humbly aside to
+watch the æsthetic progress of woman.
+
+It is impossible not to feel a certain glow of enthusiastic sympathy as
+the vanguard passes by--women earnest in aim and effort, artists,
+nursing-sisters, poetesses, doctors, wives, musicians, novelists,
+mathematicians, political economists, in somewhat motley uniform and
+ill-dressed ranks, but full of resolve, independence, and
+self-sacrifice. If we were fighting folk we confess we should be half
+inclined to shout for the rights of woman, and to fall manfully into the
+rank. As it is, we wait patiently for the army behind, for the main
+body--woman herself. Woman fronts us as noisy, demonstrative, exacting
+in her æsthetic claims. Nothing can surpass the adroitness with which
+she uses her bluer sisters on ahead to clear the way for her gayer
+legions; nothing, at any rate, but the contempt with which she dismisses
+them when their work is done. Their office is to level the stubborn
+incredulity, to set straight the crooked criticisms, of sceptical man,
+and then to disappear. Woman herself takes their place. Art is
+everywhere throughout her host--for music, the highest of arts, is the
+art of all.
+
+The singers go before, the minstrels follow after, in the midst are the
+damsels playing on the timbrels. The sister Arts have their own
+representatives within the mass. Sketching boasts its thousands, and
+poetry its tens of thousands. A demure band of maidens blend piety with
+art around the standard of Church decoration. Perhaps it is his very
+regard for the first host--for its earnestness, for its real
+womanhood--that makes the critic so cynical over the second; perhaps it
+is his very love for art that turns to quiet bitterness as he sees art
+dragged at the heels of foolish virgins. For art _is_ dragged at their
+heels. Woman will have man love her for her own sake; but she loves art
+for the sake of man. Very truly, if with an almost sublime effrontery,
+she re-christens for her own special purposes the great studies that
+fired Raffaelle or Beethoven. She pursues them, she pays for them, not
+as arts, but as accomplishments. Their cultivation is the last touch
+added at her finishing school ere she makes her bow to the world. She
+orders her new duet as she orders her new bonnet, and the two purchases
+have precisely the same significance. She drops her piano and her
+paint-brush as she drops her coquetries and flirtations, when the fish
+is landed and she can throw the bait away. Or, what is worse, she keeps
+them alive as little social enjoyments, as reliefs to the tedium of
+domestic life, as something which fills up the weary hours when she is
+fated to the boredom of rural existence.
+
+A woman of business is counted a strange and remarkable being, we hardly
+know why. Looking coolly at the matter, it seems to us that all women
+are women of business; that their life is spent over the counter; that
+there is nothing in earth or heaven too sacred for their traffic and
+their barter. Love, youth, beauty, a British mother reckons them up on
+her fingers, and tells you to a fraction their value in the market. And
+the pale sentimental being at her side, after flooring one big fellow
+with a bit of Chopin, and another with a highly unintelligible verse of
+Robert Browning, poses herself shyly and asks through appealing eyes,
+"Am I not an æsthetic creature?"
+
+The answer to this question is best read, perhaps, in the musical aspect
+of woman. Bold as the assumption sounds, it is quietly assumed that
+every woman is naturally musical. Music is the great accomplishment, and
+the logic of her schools proves to demonstration that every girl has
+fingers and an ear. In a wonderful number of cases the same logic proves
+that girls have a voice. Anyhow, the assumption moulds the very course
+of female existence. The morning is spent in practicing, and the evening
+in airing the results of the practice. There are country-houses where
+one only rushes away from the elaborate Thalberg of midnight to be
+roused up at dawn by the Battle of Prague on the piano in the
+school-room over-head. Still we all reconcile ourselves to this
+perpetual rattle, because we know that a musical being has to be
+educated into existence, and that a woman is necessarily a musical
+being. A glance, indeed, at what we may call the life of the piano
+explains the necessity.
+
+Music is pre-eminently the social art; no art draws people so
+conveniently together, no art so lends itself to conversation, no art is
+in a maidenly sense at once so agreeable, so easy to acquire, and so
+eminently useful. A flirtation is never conducted under greater
+advantages than amid the deafening thunders of a grand finale; the
+victim doomed to the bondage of turning over is chained to the
+fascination of fine arms and delicate hands. Talk, too, may be conducted
+without much trouble over music on the small principles of female
+criticism. "Pretty" and "exquisite" go a great way with the Italian and
+the Romantic schools; "sublime" does pretty universally for the German.
+The opera is, of course, the crown and sum of things, the most charming
+and social of lounges, the readiest of conversational topics. It must be
+a very happy Guardsman indeed who cannot kindle over the Flower-song or
+the Jewel-scene. And it is at the opera that woman is supreme. The
+strange mingling of eye and ear, the confused appeal to every sensuous
+faculty, the littleness as well as the greatness of it all, echo the
+conclusion within woman herself.
+
+Moreover there is no boredom--no absolute appeal to thought or deeper
+feeling. It is in good taste to drop in after the first act, and to
+leave before the last. It is true that an opera is supposed to be the
+great creation of a great artist, and an artist's work is presumed to
+have a certain order and unity of its own; but woman is the Queen of
+Art, and it is hard if she may not display her royalty by docking the
+Fidelio of its head and its tail. But, if woman is obliged to content
+herself with mutilating art in the opera or the concert-room, she is
+able to create art itself over her piano. A host of Claribels and
+Rosalies exist simply because woman is a musical creature. We turn over
+the heap of rubbish on the piano with a sense of wonder, and ask,
+without hope of an answer, why nine-tenths of our modern songs are
+written at all, or why, being written, they can find a publisher.
+
+But the answer is a simple one, after all; it is merely that æsthetic
+creatures, that queens of art and of song, cannot play good music and
+can play bad.
+
+There is not a publisher in London who would not tell us that the
+patronage of musical women is simply a patronage of trash. The fact is
+that woman is a very practical being, and she has learned by experience
+that trash pays better than good music for her own special purposes; and
+when these purposes are attained she throws good music and bad music
+aside with a perfect impartiality. It is with a certain feeling of
+equity, as well as of content, that the betrothed one resigns her sway
+over the keys. She has played and won, and now she holds it hardly fair
+that she should interfere with other people's game. So she lounges into
+a corner, and leaves her Broadwood to those who have practical work to
+do. Her _rôle_ in life has no need of accomplishments, and as for the
+serious study of music as an art, as to any real love of it or loyalty
+to it, that is the business of "professional people," and not of British
+mothers. Only she would have her girls remember that nothing is in
+better taste than for young people to show themselves artistic.
+
+Music only displays on the grand scale the laws which in less obtrusive
+form govern the whole æsthetic life of woman. Painting, for instance,
+dwindles in her hands into the "sketch;" the brown sands in the
+foreground, the blue wash of the sea, and the dab of rock behind. Not a
+very lofty or amusing thing, one would say at first sight; but, if one
+thinks of it, an eminently practical thing, rapid and easy of execution,
+not mewing the artist up in solitary studio, but lending itself
+gracefully to picnics and groups of a picturesque sort on cliff and
+boulder, and whispered criticism from faces peeping over one's shoulder.
+Serious painting woman can leave comfortably to Academicians and
+rough-bearded creatures of the Philip Firmin type, though even here she
+feels, as she glances round the walls of the Academy, that she is
+creating art as she is creating music. She dwells complacently on the
+home tendencies of modern painting, on the wonderful succession of
+squares of domestic canvas, on the nursemaid carrying children up
+stairs in one picture, on the nursemaid carrying children down stairs in
+the next. She has her little crow of triumph over the great artist who
+started with a lofty ideal, and has come down to painting the red
+stockings of little girls in green-baize pews, or the wonderful
+counterpanes and marvellous bed-curtains of sleeping innocents. She
+knows that the men who are forced to paint these things growl contempt
+over their own creations, but the very growl is a tribute to woman's
+supremacy. It is a great thing when woman can wring from an artist a
+hundred "pot-boilers," while man can only give him an order for a single
+"Light of the World."
+
+One field of art, indeed, woman claims for her own. Man may build
+churches as long as he leaves woman to decorate them. A crowning
+demonstration of her æsthetic faculties meet us on every festival in
+wreath and text and monogram, in exquisitely moulded pillars turned into
+grotesque corkscrews, in tracery broken by strips of greenery, in paper
+flowers and every variety of gilt gingerbread. But it may be questioned
+whether art is the sole aim of the ecclesiastical picnic out of which
+decorations spring. The chatty groups dotted over the aisle, the
+constant appeals to the curate, the dainty little screams and giggles as
+the ladder shakes beneath those artistic feet, the criticism of cousins
+who have looked in quite accidentally for a peep, the half-consecrated
+flirtations in the vestry, ally art even here to those practical
+purposes which æsthetic woman never forgets. Were she, indeed, once to
+forget them, she might become a Dr. Mary Walker; she might even become a
+George Sand. In other words, she might find herself an artist, loving
+and studying art for its own sake, solitary, despised, eccentric, and
+blue. From such a destiny æsthetic woman turns scornfully away.
+
+
+
+
+WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?
+
+
+This is a question which one half the world is asking the other half,
+with very wild answers as the result. Woman's work seems to be in these
+days everything that it was not in times past, and nothing that it was.
+Professions are undertaken and careers invaded which were formerly held
+sacred to men, while things are left undone which, for all the
+generations that the world has lasted, have been naturally and
+instinctively assigned to women to do. From the savage squaw gathering
+fuel or drawing water for the wigwam, to the lady giving up the keys to
+her housekeeper, housekeeping has been considered one of the primary
+functions of women. The man to provide, the woman to dispense; the man
+to do the rough initial work of bread-winning, whether as a half-naked
+barbarian hunting live meat, or as a city clerk painfully scoring lines
+of rugged figures, the woman to cook the meat when got, and to lay out
+to the best advantage for the family the quarter's salary gained by
+casting up ledgers, and writing advices and bills of lading.
+
+Take human society in any phase we like, we must come down to these
+radical conditions; and any system which ignores this division of labor,
+and confounds these separate functions, is of necessity imperfect and
+wrong. We have nothing whatever to say against the professional
+self-support of women who have no men to work for them, and who must
+therefore work for themselves in order to live. In what direction soever
+they can best make their way, let them take it. Brains and intellectual
+gifts are of no sex and no condition, and it is far more important that
+good work should be done than that it should be done by this or that
+particular set of workers.
+
+But we are speaking of the home duties of married women, and of those
+girls who have no need to earn their daily bread, and who are not so
+specially gifted as to be driven afield by the irrepressible power of
+genius. We are speaking of women who cannot help in the family income,
+but who can both save and improve in the home; women whose lives now are
+one long day of idleness, _ennui_, and vagrant imagination, because they
+despise the activities into which they were born, while seeking outlets
+for their energies impossible to them both by nature and social
+restrictions.
+
+It is strange to see into what unreasonable disrepute active
+housekeeping--woman's first natural duty--has fallen in England. Take a
+family with four or five hundred a year--and we know how small a sum
+that is for "genteel humanity" in these days--the wife who will be an
+active housekeeper, even with such an income, will be an exception to
+the rule; and the daughters who will be anything more than drawing-room
+dolls waiting for husbands to transfer them to a home of their own,
+where they may be as useless as they are now, will be rarer still. For
+things are getting worse, not better, and our young women are less
+useful even than their mothers; while these last do not, as a rule, come
+near the good housekeeping ladies of olden times, who knew every secret
+of domestic economy, and made a point of honor of a wise and pleasant
+"distribution of bread."
+
+The usual method of London housekeeping, even in the second ranks of the
+middle-classes, is for the mistress to give her orders in the kitchen in
+the morning, leaving the cook to pass them on to the tradespeople when
+they call. If she is not very indolent, and if she has a due regard for
+neatness and cleanliness, she may supplement her kitchen commands by
+going up stairs through some of the bedrooms; but after a kind word of
+advice to the housemaid if she is sweet-tempered, or a harsh word of
+censure if she is of the cross-grained type, her work in that department
+will be done, and her duties for the day are at an end. There is none of
+the clever marketing by which fifty per cent. is saved in the outlay if
+a woman knows what she is about, and how to buy; none of the personal
+superintendence so encouraging to servants when genially performed, and
+rendering slighted work impossible; none of that "seeing to things"
+herself, or doing the finer parts of the work with her own hands, which
+used to form part of a woman's unquestioned duty. She gives her orders,
+weighs out her supplies, then leaves the maids to do the best they know
+or the worst they will, according to the degree in which they are
+supplied with faculty or conscience. Many women boast that their
+housekeeping takes them perhaps an hour, perhaps half an hour, in the
+morning, and no more; and they think themselves clever and commendable
+in proportion to the small amount of time given to their largest family
+duty. This is all very well where the income is such as to secure
+first-class servants--professors of certain specialities of knowledge,
+and far in advance of the mistress; but how about the comfort of the
+house with this hasty generalship, when the maids are mere scrubs who
+would have to go through years of training before they were worth their
+salt? It may be very well too in large households governed by general
+system, and not by individual ruling; but where the service is scant and
+poor, it is a stupidly uncomfortable as well as a wasteful way of
+housekeeping. It is analogous to English cookery--a revolting poverty of
+result with flaring prodigality of means; all the pompous paraphernalia
+of tradespeople, and their carts, and their red-books for orders, with
+nothing worth the trouble of booking, and everything of less quantity
+and lower quality than might be if personal pains were taken, which is
+always the best economy practicable.
+
+What is there in practical housekeeping less honorable than the ordinary
+work of middle-class gentlewomen? and why should women shrink from doing
+for utility, and for the general comfort of the family, what they would
+do at any time for vanity or idleness? No one need go into extremes, and
+wish our middle-class gentlewomen to become Cinderellas sitting among
+the kitchen ashes, Nausicaäs washing linen, or Penelopes spending their
+lives in needlework only. But, without undertaking anything unpleasant
+to her senses or degrading to her condition, a lady might do hundreds of
+things that are now left undone in a house altogether, or are given up
+to the coarse handling of servants, and domestic life would gain
+infinitely in consequence.
+
+What degradation, for instance, is there in cookery? and how much more
+home happiness would there not be if wives would take in hand that great
+cold-mutton question! But women are both selfish and small on this
+point. Born for the most part with very feebly developed gustativeness,
+they affect to despise the stronger instinct in men, and think it low
+and sensual if they are expected to give any special attention to the
+meals of the man who provides the meat. This contempt for good living is
+one cause of the ignorance there is among them of how to secure good
+living. Those horrible traditions of "plain roast and boiled" cling
+about them as articles of culinary faith; and because they have reached
+no higher knowledge for themselves, they decide that no one else shall
+go beyond them.
+
+For one middle-class gentlewoman who understands anything about cookery,
+or who really cares for it as a scientific art or domestic necessity,
+there are ten thousand who do not; yet our mothers and grandmothers were
+not ashamed to be known as deft professors, and homes were happier in
+proportion to the respect paid to the stewpan and the stockpot. And
+cookery is more interesting now than it was then, because more advanced,
+more scientific, and with improved appliances; and, at the same time, it
+is of confessedly more importance. It may seem humiliating, to those who
+go in for spirit pure and simple, to speak of the condition of the soul
+as in any way determined by beef and cabbage; but it is so,
+nevertheless, the connection between food and virtue, food and thought,
+being a very close one; and the sooner wives recognise this connection
+the better for them and for their husbands.
+
+The clumsy savagery of a plain cook, or the vile messes of a fourth-rate
+confectioner, are absolute sins in a house where a woman has all her
+senses, and can, if she will, attend personally to the cooking. Many
+things pass for crimes which are really not so bad as this. But how
+seldom now do we find a house where the lady does look after the
+cooking, where clean hands and educated brains are put to active service
+for the good of others! The trouble would be too great in our fine-lady
+days, even if there was the requisite ability; but there is as little
+ability as there is energy, and the plain cook with her savagery, or the
+fourth-rate confectioner with his rancid pastry, have it all their own
+way, according to the election of economy or ostentation.
+
+If by chance one stumbles on a household where the woman does not
+disdain housewifely work, and specially the practical superintendence of
+the kitchen, there we may be sure we shall find cheerfulness and
+content. There seems to be something in the life of a practical
+housekeeper that answers to the needs of a woman's best nature, and that
+makes her pleasant and good-tempered. Perhaps it is the consciousness
+that she is doing her duty--of itself a wonderful sweetener of the
+nature; perhaps the greater amount of bodily exercise keeps the liver in
+good tone; whatever the cause, sure it is that the homes of the active
+housekeepers are more harmonious than those of the feckless and
+do-nothing sort. Yet the snobbish half of the middle-classes holds
+housewifely work as degrading, save in the trumpery pretentiousness of
+"giving orders."
+
+A woman may sit in a dirty drawing-room which the slipshod maid has not
+had time to clean, but she must not take a duster in her hands and
+polish the legs of the chairs; there is no disgrace in the dirt, only in
+the duster. She may do fancy work of no earthly use, but she must not be
+caught making a gown. Indeed very few women could make one, and as few
+will do plain needlework. They will braid and embroider, "cut holes, and
+sew them up again," and spend any amount of time and money on beads and
+wools for messy draperies which no one wants; the end, being finery,
+sanctions the toil and refines it; but they will not do things of any
+practical use, or if they are compelled by the exigencies of
+circumstances, they think themselves petty martyrs, and badly used by
+the fates.
+
+The whole scheme of woman's life at this present time is untenable and
+unfair. She wants to have all the pleasures and none of the
+disagreeables. Her husband goes to the city, and does monotonous and
+unpleasant work there; but his wife thinks herself in very evil case if
+asked to do monotonous housework at home. Yet she does nothing more
+elevating or more advantageous. Novel-reading, fancy-work, visiting,
+letter-writing, sum up her ordinary occupations; and she considers these
+more to the point than practical housekeeping. In fact it becomes a
+serious question what women think themselves sent into the world for,
+what they hold themselves designed by God to be or to do. They grumble
+at having children, and at the toil and anxiety which a family entails;
+they think themselves degraded to the level of servants if they have to
+do any practical housework whatever; they assert their equality with
+man, and express their envy of his life, yet show themselves incapable
+of learning the first lesson set to men, that of doing what they do not
+like to do. What, then, do they want? What do they hold themselves made
+for?
+
+Certainly some of the more benevolent sort carry their energies out of
+doors, and leave such prosaic matters as savory dinners and fast
+shirt-buttons for committees and charities, where they get excitement
+and _kudos_ together. Others give themselves up to what they call
+keeping up society, which means being more at home in every person's
+house than their own; and some do a little weak art, and others a little
+feeble literature; but there are very few indeed who honestly buckle to
+the natural duties of their position, and who bear with the tedium of
+home work as men bear with the tedium of office work. The little
+royalty of home is the last place where a woman cares to shine, and the
+most uninteresting of all the domains she seeks to govern. Fancy a
+high-souled creature, capable of æsthetics, giving her mind to soup or
+the right proportion of chutnee for the curry! Fancy, too, a brilliant
+creature foregoing an evening's conversational glory abroad for the sake
+of a prosaic husband's more prosaic dinner! He comes home tired from
+work, and desperately in need of a good dinner as a restorative; but the
+plain cook gives him cold meat and pickles, or an abomination which she
+calls hash, and the brilliant creature, full of mind, thinks the desire
+for anything else rank sensuality.
+
+It seems a little hard, certainly, on the unhappy fellow who works at
+the mill for such a return; but women believe that men are made only to
+work at the mill that they may receive the grist accruing, and be kept
+in idleness and uselessness all their lives. They have no idea of
+lightening the labor of that mill-round by doing their own natural work
+cheerfully and diligently. They will do everything but what they ought
+to do; they will make themselves doctors, committee-women, printers,
+what not, but they won't learn cooking, and they won't keep their own
+houses. There never was a time when women were less the helpmates of men
+than they are at present; when there was such a wide division between
+the interests and the sympathies of the sexes in the endeavor, on the
+one side, to approximate their pursuits.
+
+There is a great demand made now for more work for woman, and wider
+fields for her labor. We confess we should feel a deeper interest in the
+question if we saw more energy and conscience put into the work lying to
+her hand at home, and we hold that she ought to perform perfectly the
+duties instinctive to her sex before claiming those hitherto held remote
+from her natural condition. Much of this demand, too, springs from
+restlessness and dissatisfaction; little, if any, from higher
+aspirations or nobler unused energies. Indeed, the nobler the woman the
+more thoroughly she will do her own proper work, in the spirit of old
+George Herbert's well-worn line, and the less she will feel herself
+above her work. It is only the weak who cannot raise their circumstances
+to the level of their thoughts; only the poor who cannot enrich their
+deeds by their thoughts.
+
+That very much of this demand for more power of work comes from
+necessity and the absolute need of bread, we know; and that the demand
+will grow louder as marriage becomes scarcer, and there are more women
+left adrift in the world without the protection and help of men, we also
+know. But this belongs to another part of the subject. What we want to
+insist on now is the pitiable ignorance and shiftless indolence of most
+middle-class housekeepers; and we would urge on woman the value of a
+better system of life at home, before laying claim to the discharge of
+extra-domestic duties abroad.
+
+
+
+
+PAPAL WOMAN.
+
+
+The wonderful instinct which has always guided the Papacy in
+distinguishing between forces that it may safely oppose and forces
+before which it must surrender, has just received a startling
+illustration in a scene reported to have taken place at the Vatican a
+few days ago. Rome may refuse all compromise with Italy, but even Rome
+shrinks from encountering the hostility of woman. The Brief of October
+last sounded, indeed, marvellously like a declaration of war; even in a
+Pope it argued no little resolution to denounce the "license of the
+female toilet," the "fantastic character of woman's head-dress," and the
+"scandalous indecency" of woman's attire. More worldly critics would
+hardly have ventured to describe a piquant chignon or a suggestive
+boddice as "a propaganda of the devil;" it will be long, at any rate,
+before censors of this class will meet with the reward of a deputation
+and a testimonial from the fair objects of their criticism.
+
+St. Peter, however, we are adroitly reminded, after his miraculous
+delivery from prison by an angel, found an asylum among women; and,
+fresh from his troubles with the red-shirts of Monte Rotondo, the
+successor of St. Peter seems to have found himself wonderfully at home
+among the flounces that thronged the other day to his public audience at
+the Vatican. A hundred ladies--the presence amongst whom of a number of
+English Catholics gives us a national interest in the scene--came
+forward to express their gratitude for the censures of the Papal Briefs,
+and the adhesion of their sex to the orthodox doctrines of the toilet.
+The speech in which one of the fair deputation expressed the sentiments
+of her fellows has been unfortunately suppressed, but the letter of Pope
+Pius to the Bishop of Orleans explains the secret of this dramatic
+reconciliation, and the terms of the Concordat which has been arranged
+between Woman and the Papacy.
+
+A common danger has driven the two Powers to this fresh alliance. If
+Garabaldi threatens the supremacy of the Holy See, the educational
+reforms of M. Duruy menace the domestic tyranny of woman. Woman sees
+herself in peril of deposition at home by the same spirit of democratic
+and intellectual equality which would drive the Pope from the Vatican.
+In presence of such a peril, mutual concession becomes easy, and the
+fair votaries pardon all references to their "propaganda of the devil"
+in consideration of a Papal assault on the "cynical writers who are
+desirous of attacking woman."
+
+The motive of the Papacy, in opposing a system of education which
+emancipates woman from the intellectual control of the priesthood and
+plunges her into the midst of the doubts and questionings of sceptical
+man, is of course plain enough. We feel no particular surprise when the
+attendance of girls at the public classes of a Professor is denounced as
+tending to "despoil woman of her native modesty, to drag her before the
+public, to turn her from domestic life and duties, to puff her up with
+vain and false science." It is the adhesion of woman to this view of the
+case which puzzles us a little at first. We recall her aspirations after
+a higher training, and her bitter contempt for the unhappy censors who
+venture to remind her of certain primary truths respecting puddings and
+pies.
+
+But the same problem meets us in other halls than those of the Vatican.
+Everywhere woman poses herself as a social martyr, as the victim of
+conventional bonds, as reduced to intellectual torpor by the refusal of
+intellectual facilities and intellectual distinctions, as excluded by
+sheer masculine tyranny from the larger sphere of thought and action
+which the world presents, as chained, like Prometheus, to the rock of
+home by necessity and force. It is only when some amiable enthusiast is
+taken in by all this admirable acting, and ventures to propose a plan
+for her deliverance, that one finds how wonderfully contented, after
+all, woman is with her bonds and her prison-house.
+
+The philosopher who comes forward with his pet theory of the
+enfranchisement of woman, who recognizes the necessity for loosening the
+matrimonial tie, for securing to woman her property and its
+responsibilities, for levelling all educational differences and
+abolishing all social distinctions between the sexes, only finds himself
+snubbed for his pains. He is calmly assured that home is the sphere of
+woman, and the care of a family the first of woman's duties; the
+domestic martyr of yesterday proves from Proverbs and the _Princess_
+that marriage is the completion of woman, and that her office is but to
+wed the "noble music" of her feminine nature to the "noble words" of the
+nature of her spouse.
+
+In a word, woman knows her own business a great deal better than her
+friends. She does not believe in the intellectual equality which she is
+always preaching about, and when M. Duruy offers it, a shriek of horror
+goes up from half the mothers of France. What she does believe is that,
+in seeking the educational Will-o'-the-Wisp, she may lose the solid
+pudding of domestic supremacy, and domestic supremacy is worth all the
+sciences in the world. Her position, as the Vatican suggests, is a
+religious, not an intellectual one, and her policy lies in an alliance
+with the priesthood, whose position is one with her own. So woman makes
+her submission to the Papacy, and the Pope snubs M. Duruy.
+
+It is amusing to see how limited, after all, a man's power, the power
+even of the stoutest of men, is in his own house, and to watch the
+simple process by which woman establishes the limitation. It consists
+simply in asserting a specially religious character for her sex. She is
+never tired of telling us that the sentiments and sympathies of the
+feminine breast have a greater affinity for divine things than the
+rougher masculine nature; that her instincts are purer, more poetic,
+more refined; that her moral nature has a certain bloom upon it which
+contact with the world has brushed off from ours; that while we coarser
+creatures are driven to reason out our spiritual conclusions, she
+arrives at them by an intuitive process reserved for the angelic nature
+and her own.
+
+And on the whole man accepts the claim. He is bribed perhaps into
+allowing it by his own desire to have something at home better and purer
+than himself. It is a startling thing perhaps to say, but in ninety-nine
+homes out of a hundred real humility of heart is to be found in the
+husband, not in the wife. The husband has very little belief in his own
+religion, in his unworldliness and spirituality; but he has an immense
+belief in the spirituality and the devotion of the being who fronts him
+over the breakfast-table. He does not profess to understand the
+character of her piety, her lore of sermons, the severity with which she
+visits the household after family prayers, or the extreme interest with
+which she peruses the geographical chapters of the Book of Joshua. But
+his incapacity to understand it is mixed with a certain awe. He never
+ventures to disturb, by "shadowed hint" of his own thoughts about the
+matter, the "simple views" of his spouse. He adroitly diverts the
+conversation of his dinner-table when it drifts near to the fatal
+pigeons of Colenso.
+
+Sometimes he bends to a little gentle deceit, and wins a smile of
+approval by turning up at an early Litany, or by bringing home the
+newest photograph of a colonial metropolitan. In one way or another he
+practically acknowledges, like King Cnut, that there is a bound to his
+empire. Over bonnet bills and butchers' bills he may exercise a certain
+nominal control. It is possible that years of struggle might enable him
+to alter by half an inch the length of his wife's skirt, if fashion had
+not shortened it in the interval. But over the whole domain of moral and
+religious thought and action he is absolutely powerless. Woman meets
+him, if he attempts any interference, as Christian martyrs have always
+met their persecutors, with outstretched neck and on her knees. She
+prays for his return to better thoughts, and the whole household knows
+she is praying for him. She listens to all his remonstrances, professes
+obedience on every point but the one he wants, and keeps her finger all
+the time on the particular page of Thomas à Kempis at which the
+remonstrance found her. Before such an adversary, there is no shame in a
+defeat.
+
+It is not that on all points of moral or religious life woman professes
+herself above criticism; to the criticisms of her religious teachers,
+for instance, we have seen her singularly obsequious. Woman and the
+priesthood in fact understand one another perfectly, and a tacit
+convention forces woman to submit to censures so long as those censures
+are reserved for one topic alone. To religion woman makes the sacrifice
+of her dress. It is not that she seriously intends to make the slightest
+amendments, or to withdraw before the exhortations of her spiritual
+guide into poke bonnets and print muslins. It is a sufficient mark of
+self-sacrifice if she listens patiently to a diatribe against butterfly
+bonnets, trains, or crinolines, or even thanks her pastor for
+describing evening costume as a "propaganda of the devil." The very
+minuteness, in fact, of censures such as these, is a flattering proof of
+the spiritual importance of even the most trivial details in the life of
+woman.
+
+When Father Ignatius informed mankind that the angels bent down from
+heaven to weep over the flirtations of Rotten Row, the smallest child on
+her pony felt her ride, and her chatter over her palings, invested with
+certain celestial importance. Criticisms, too, so strictly reserved for
+the outside of the platter, are an immense compliment to the inside, and
+it is something to listen to half an hour of spiritual reproof, and to
+be able to pass oneself triumphantly as a "Fair Soul" after all. There
+is nothing revolutionary in a mere border-skirmish, which leaves the
+field of woman's sway not an inch the narrower. It is another matter
+when M. Duruy calls on Hermione to come down from her pedestal of
+worship, and in the long run to abdicate. For equality of education
+would, of course, even if it did nothing else, make mince-meat of the
+spiritual pretensions of woman. It would be impossible to preserve a
+domestic Papacy with a more than papal weakness for dogmatism and
+infallibility, if woman is to come down into school and share the common
+training of men.
+
+If women are to be educated precisely as men are educated, they will
+share the reasonings, the scepticisms, the critical doubts of men. There
+will be no refuge for praying sisters in that world of "simple views"
+from which they come forth at present furnished with a social and
+domestic decalogue whose sacredness it is impious to doubt or to
+dispute. In other words, the power which woman now exercises will simply
+crumble to dust. Whether she might gain a power higher and more
+beneficial to the world and to herself, is a matter which we are not now
+discussing. What is perfectly certain is that such a power would not be
+the power she exercises now. The moral censorship of woman over woman,
+for example, would at once pass away. It rests on the belief that women
+have higher moral faculties than other beings, and that their treason to
+this higher form of moral humanity which is exhibited in womanhood is a
+treason of deeper dye than an offence against morality itself.
+
+An erring sister sins against something greater than goodness--she sins
+against the theory of woman, against the faith that woman is a creature
+who soars high above the weaknesses of man and the common nature of man.
+Long ages of self-assertion have penetrated woman with the conviction of
+her worth; she is the object of her own especial worship, and the sharp
+stinging justice she deals out to social offenders is not merely a proof
+of the spiritual nature of her rule, but the vindication of her
+self-idolatry. Again, she would forfeit the peculiar influence which she
+is every day exerting in a greater degree on the course of religion and
+the Church. The hypothesis of a superior spiritual nature in woman lies
+at the root, for instance, of the great modern institution of
+sisterhoods, and of the peculiar relation which is slowly attaching his
+Paula and his Eustochium to every Jerome of our day.
+
+But the main loss of power would lie in the family itself. It would be
+no longer possible to front the political dogmatist of the hearth-rug
+with a social and religious dogmatism as brusque and unreasonable as his
+own. The balance of power which woman has slowly built up in home would
+be roughly disturbed, and new forms of social and domestic life would
+emerge from the chaos of such a revolution. From sweeping changes of
+this sort the very temper of woman, her innate conservatism, her want of
+originative power, turns her away. It is more comfortable to bask in the
+glow of Papal sunshine, to figure in Allocutions from the Vatican as
+"the pure and shining light of the house, the glory of her husband, the
+education of her family, a bond of peace, an emblem of piety;" and to
+let Monsieur Duruy and his insidious Professors alone.
+
+
+
+
+MODERN MOTHERS.
+
+
+No human affection has been so passionately praised as maternal love,
+and none is supposed to be so holy or so strong. Even the poetic aspect
+of the instinct which inspires the young with their dearest dreams does
+not rank so high as this, and neither lover's love nor conjugal love,
+neither filial affection nor fraternal, comes near the sanctity or
+grandeur of the maternal instinct. But all women are not equally rich in
+this great gift; and, to judge by appearances, English women are at this
+moment particularly poor. It may seem a harsh thing to say, but it is
+none the less true--society has put maternity out of fashion, and the
+nursery is nine times out of ten a place of punishment, not of pleasure,
+to the modern mother.
+
+Two points connected with this subject are of growing importance at this
+present time--the one is the increasing disinclination of married women
+to be mothers at all; the other, the large number of those who, being
+mothers, will not, or cannot, nurse their own children. In the mad race
+after pleasure and excitement now going on all through English society
+the tender duties of motherhood have become simply disagreeable
+restraints, and the old feeling of the blessing attending the quiver
+full is exchanged for one expressive of the very reverse. With some of
+the more intellectual and less instinctive sort, maternity is looked on
+as a kind of degradation; and women of this stamp, sensible enough in
+everything else, talk impatiently among themselves of the base
+necessities laid on them by men and nature, and how hateful to them is
+everything connected with their characteristic duties.
+
+This wild revolt against nature, and specially this abhorrence of
+maternity, is carried to a still greater extent by American women, with
+grave national consequences resulting; but though we have not yet
+reached the Transatlantic limit, the state of the feminine feeling and
+physical condition among ourselves will disastrously affect the future
+unless something can be done to bring our women back to a healthier tone
+of mind and body. No one can object to women declining marriage
+altogether in favor of a voluntary self-devotion to some project or
+idea; but, when married, it is a monstrous doctrine to hold that they
+are in any way degraded by the consequences, and that natural functions
+are less honorable than social excitements. The world can get on without
+balls and morning calls, it can get on too without amateur art and
+incorrect music, but not without wives and mothers; and those times in a
+nation's history when women have been social ornaments rather than
+family home-stays have ever been times of national decadence and of
+moral failure.
+
+Part of this growing disinclination is due to the enormous expense
+incurred now by having children. As women have ceased to take any
+active share in their own housekeeping, whether in the kitchen or the
+nursery, the consequence is an additional cost for service, which is a
+serious item in the yearly accounts. Women who, if they lived a rational
+life, could and would nurse their children, now require a wet-nurse, or
+the services of an experienced woman who can "bring up by hand," as the
+phrase is; women who once would have had one nursemaid now have two; and
+women who, had they lived a generation ago, would have had none at all,
+must in their turn have a wretched young creature without thought or
+knowledge, into whose questionable care they deliver what should be the
+most sacred obligation and the most jealously-guarded charge they
+possess.
+
+It is rare if, in any section of society where hired service can be had,
+mothers give more than a superficial personal superintendence to nursery
+or school-room--a superintendence about as thorough as their
+housekeeping, and as efficient. The one set of duties is quite as
+unfashionable as the other, and money is held to relieve from the
+service of love as entirely as it relieves from the need of labor. And
+yet, side by side with this personal relinquishment of natural duties,
+has grown up, perhaps as an instinctive compensation, an amount of
+attention and expensive management specially remarkable. There never was
+a time when children were made of so much individual importance in the
+family, yet in so little direct relation with the mother--never a time
+when maternity did so little and social organization so much.
+
+Juvenile parties; the kind of moral obligation apparently felt by all
+parents to provide heated and unhealthy amusements for their boys and
+girls during the holidays; extravagance in dress, following the same
+extravagance among their mothers; the increasing cost of education; the
+fuss and turmoil generally made over them--all render them real burdens
+in a house where money is not too plentiful, and where every child that
+comes is not only an additional mouth to feed and an additional body to
+clothe, but a subtractor by just so much from the family fund of
+pleasure.
+
+Even where there is no lack of money, the unavoidable restraints of the
+condition, for at least some months in the year, more than
+counterbalance any sentimental delight to be found in maternity. For,
+before all other things in life, maternity demands unselfishness in
+women; and this is just the one virtue of which women have least at this
+present time--just the one reason why motherhood is at a discount, and
+children are regarded as inflictions instead of blessings.
+
+Few middle-class women are content to bring up their children with the
+old-fashioned simplicity of former times, and to let them share and
+share alike in the family, with only so much difference in their
+treatment as is required by their difference of state; fewer still are
+willing to share in the labor and care that must come with children in
+the easiest-going household, and so to save in the expenses by their own
+work. The shabbiest little wife, with her two financial ends always
+gaping and never meeting, must have her still shabbier little drudge to
+wheel her perambulator, so as to give her an air of fine-ladyhood and
+being too good for work; and the most indolent housekeeper, whose work
+is done in half an hour, cannot find time to go into the gardens or the
+square with nurse and the children, so that she may watch over them
+herself and see that they are properly cared for.
+
+In France, where it is the fashion for mother and _bonne_ to be together
+both out of doors and at home, at least the children are not neglected
+nor ill-treated, as is too often the case with us; and if they are
+improperly managed, according to our ideas, the fault is in the system,
+not in the want of maternal supervision. Here it is a very rare case
+indeed when the mother accompanies the nurse and children; and those
+days when she does are nursery gala-days, to be talked of and remembered
+for weeks after. As they grow older, she may take them occasionally when
+she visits her more intimate friends; but this is for her own pleasure,
+not their good, and is quite beside the question of going with them to
+see that they are properly cared for.
+
+It is to be supposed that each mother has a profound belief in her own
+nurse, and that when she condemns the neglect and harshness shown to
+other children by the servants in charge, she makes a mental reservation
+in favor of her own, and is very sure that nothing improper or cruel
+takes place in _her_ nursery. Her children do not complain, and she
+always tells them to come to her when anything is amiss; on which
+negative evidence she satisfies her soul, and makes sure that all is
+right, because she is too neglectful to see if anything is wrong. She
+does not remember that her children do not complain because they dare
+not.
+
+Dear and beautiful as all mammas are to the small fry in the nursery,
+they are always in a certain sense Junos sitting on the top of Mount
+Olympus, making occasional gracious and benign descents, but practically
+too far removed for useful interference; while nurse is an ever-present
+power, capable of sly pinches and secret raids, as well as of more open
+oppression--a power, therefore, to be propitiated, if only with the
+subservience of a Yezidi, too much afraid of the Evil One to oppose him.
+Wherefore nurse is propitiated, failing the protection of the glorified
+creature just gone to her grand dinner in a cloud of lace and a blaze of
+jewels; and the first lesson taught the youthful Christian in short
+frocks or knickerbockers is not to carry tales down stairs, and by no
+means to let mamma know what nurse desires should be kept secret.
+
+A great deal of other evil, beside these sly beginnings of deceit, is
+taught in the nursery; a great deal of vulgar thought, of superstitious
+fear, of class coarseness. As, indeed, how must it not be when we think
+of the early habits and education of the women taken into the nursery to
+give the first strong indelible impressions to the young souls under
+their care. Many a man with a ruined constitution, and many a woman
+with shattered nerves, can trace back the beginning of their sorrow to
+those neglected childish days of theirs when nurses had it all their own
+way because mamma never looked below the surface, and was satisfied with
+what was said instead of seeing for herself what was done. It is an odd
+state of society which tolerates this transfer of a mother's holiest and
+most important duty into the hands of a mere stranger, hired by the
+month, and never thoroughly known.
+
+Where the organization of the family is of the patriarchal kind--old
+retainers marrying and multiplying about the central home, and carrying
+on a warm personal attachment from generation to generation--this
+transfer of maternal care has not such bad effects; but in our present
+way of life, without love or real relationship between masters and
+servants, and where service is rendered for just so much money down, and
+for nothing more noble, it is a hideous system, and one that makes the
+modern mother utterly inexplicable. We wonder where her mere instincts
+can be, not to speak of her reason, her love, her conscience, her pride.
+Pleasure and self-indulgence have indeed gained tremendous power, in
+these later days, when they can thus break down the force of the
+strongest law of nature, a law stronger even than that of
+self-preservation.
+
+Folly is the true capillary attraction of the moral world, and
+penetrates every stratum of society; and the folly of extravagant attire
+in the drawing-room is reproduced in the nursery. Not content with
+bewildering men's minds, and emptying their husband's purses for the
+enhancement of their own charms, women do the same by their children,
+and the mother who leaves the health, and mind, and temper, and purity
+of her offspring in the keeping of a hired nurse takes especial care of
+the color and cut of the frocks and petticoats; and always with the same
+strain after show, and the same endeavor to make a little look a mickle.
+The children of five hundred a year must look like those of a thousand;
+and those of a thousand must rival the _tenue_ of little lords and
+ladies born in the purple; while the amount of money spent in the
+tradesman-class is a matter of real amazement to those let into the
+secret.
+
+Simplicity of diet, too, is going out with simplicity of dress, with
+simplicity of habits generally; and stimulants and concentrated food are
+now the rule in the nursery, where they mar as many constitutions as
+they make. More than one child of which we have had personal knowledge
+has yielded to disease induced by too stimulating and too heating a
+diet; but artificial habits demand corresponding artificiality of food,
+and so the candle burns at both ends instead of one. Again, as for the
+increasing inability of educated women to nurse their children, even if
+desirous of doing so, that also is a bodily condition brought about by
+an unwholesome and unnatural state of life. Late hours, high living,
+heated blood, and vitiated atmosphere are the causes of this alarming
+physical defect. But it would be too much to expect that women should
+forego their pleasurable indulgences, or do anything disagreeable to
+their senses, for the sake of their offspring. They are not famous for
+looking far ahead on any matter, but to expect them to look beyond
+themselves, and their own present generation, is to expect the great
+miracle that never comes.
+
+
+
+
+THE PRIESTHOOD OF WOMAN.
+
+
+If the female philosophers who plead for the emancipation of their sex
+would stoop from the sublimer heights of Woman's Rights to arguments of
+mere human expediency, we fancy they might find some of their critics
+disposed to listen in a more compliant mood. We can imagine a very good
+point being made out of the simple fact of waste, by some feminine
+advocate who would point out in a businesslike way how much more work
+the world might get through if only woman had fair play. Waste is always
+a pitiful and disagreeable thing, and the waste of whatever reserved
+power may lie at present unused in the breasts of half a million of old
+maids, for instance, is a thought which, with so much to be done around
+us, it is somewhat uncomfortable to dwell much upon. The argument, too,
+might be neatly enforced, just at present, by illustrations from a
+somewhat unexpected quarter.
+
+The Papacy seems determined to carry out its concordat with Woman. If we
+are to credit the latest rumors from the Vatican, Rome has grown
+impatient of the class who now present themselves at her doors as
+candidates for canonization, and has fallen back from the obscure
+Italian beggars and Cochin Chinese martyrs whom she has recently
+delighted to honor on the more illustrious names of Christopher Columbus
+and Joan of Arc. A little courage must have been needed for this retreat
+upon the past, for neither the great navigator nor the heroine found
+much support or appreciation in the prelates of their day; and the
+somewhat uncomfortable fact might be urged by the devil's advocate, in
+the case of the latter, that if Joan was sent to the martyr's stake, it
+was by a spiritual tribunal.
+
+On the other hand, there is the obvious desirableness of showing how
+perfectly at one the Papacy is with the spirit of the age in this double
+compliment to the two primary forces of modern civilization--the
+democratic force of the New World, and the feminine force of the Old.
+The beatification of the Maid of Orleans in its most simple aspect is
+the official recognition, by the Papacy, of the claims of her sex to a
+far larger sphere of human action than has as yet been accorded to them.
+Woman may fairly meet the domestic admonitions of Papal briefs by this
+newly discovered instance of extra-domestic holiness, and may front the
+taunts of cynical objectors with a saintly patron who was the first to
+break through the outer conventionalities of womanhood.
+
+But the figure of Joan of Arc is far more than a convenient answer to
+objections such as these; it is, as we have said, in itself a cogent
+argument for a better use of feminine energies. No life gives one such a
+notion as hers of the vast forces which lie hidden, and as it would seem
+wasted, in the present mass of women. It is impossible to be content
+with little projects of utilization such as those which throw open to
+her the telegraph-office or the printing-press, or even with the more
+ambitious claims for her admission to the Bench or the dissecting-room,
+when one gets a glimpse such as this of energies latent within the
+female breast which are strong enough to change the face of the world.
+
+It is difficult to suppose that the woman of our day is less energetic
+than the woman of the fifteenth century, or that her piano and her
+workbag sum up the whole of her possibilities any more than her
+spinning-wheel or her sheep-tending exhausted those of the Maid of
+Domremy. The ordinary occupations of woman strike us in this light as
+mere jets of vapor, useful indeed as a relief to the volcanic pressure
+within, but insufficient to remove the peril of an eruption. There must
+be some truth in the spasmodic utterances of the fevered sibyls who
+occasionally bare the female heart to us in three-volume novels, and the
+gaiety and frivolity of the life of woman is a mere mask for the wild,
+tossing emotions within. It is a standing danger, we own; and besides
+the danger there is, as we have said, the waste and the pity of it.
+
+A little closer examination, however, may suggest some doubt whether
+this waste of power is not more apparent than real. In the physical
+world, Mr. Grove has told us that the apparent destruction of a force is
+only its transformation into a force which is correlative to it; that
+motion, for instance, when lost is again detected in the new form of
+heat, and heat in that of light. But the theory is far from being true
+of the physical world only, and, had we space here, nothing would be
+easier than to trace the same correlation of forces through the moral
+nature of man. For waste, then, in the particular instance which is
+before us, we may perhaps substitute transformation.
+
+Professing herself the most rigid of conservatives, woman gives vent to
+this heroic energy for which the times offer no natural outlet in the
+radical modifications which she is continually introducing into modern
+society. We overlook the manifold ways in which she is acting on and
+changing the state of things around us, just because we are deceived by
+the apparent unity with which the whole sex advances toward marriage. We
+forget the large margin of those who fail in attaining their end, and we
+act as if the great mass of unmarried women simply represented a waste
+and lost force. And yet it is just this waste force which tells on
+society more powerfully than all.
+
+The energies which fail in finding a human object of domestic adoration
+become the devotional energies of the world. The force which would have
+made the home makes the Church. It is really amazing to watch, if we
+look back through the ages, the silent steady working of this feminine
+impulse, and to see how bit by bit it has recovered the ground of which
+Christianity robbed Woman. We wonder that no woman poet has ever turned,
+like Schiller, to the gods of old.
+
+In every heathen religion of the Western world woman occupied a
+prominent place. Priestess or prophetess, she stood in all ministerial
+offices on an equality with man. It was only the irruption of religions
+from the East, the faiths of Isis or Mithras, which swept woman from the
+temple. Christianity shared the Oriental antipathy to the ministerial
+service of woman; it banished her from altar and from choir; in darker
+times it drove her to the very porch of its shrines. The Church of after
+ages dealt with woman as the Empire dealt with its Cæsars; it was ready
+to grant her apotheosis, but only when she was safely out of the world.
+It gave her canonization, and it gives it to her still, but not the
+priesthood. No rout could seem more complete, but woman is never greater
+than when she is routed.
+
+The newly-instituted parson of to-day, brimming over with apostolic
+texts which forbid woman to speak in church, no sooner arrives at his
+parish than he finds himself in a spiritual world whose impulse and
+guidance is wholly in the hands of woman. Expel woman as you will,
+_tamen usque recurrit_. Woman is, in fact, the parish. Within, in her
+lowest spiritual form, as the parson's wife, she inspires and sometimes
+writes his sermons. Without, as the bulk of his congregation, she
+watches over his orthodoxy, verifies his texts, visits his schools, and
+harasses his sick. "Ah, Betsy!" said a sick woman to a wealthier sister
+the other day, "it's of some use being well off; you won't be obliged
+when you die to have a district-lady worriting you with a chapter." But
+the district-lady has others to "worrit" in life besides the sick.
+
+Mrs. Hannah More tells us exultantly in her journal how successful were
+her raids upon the parsons, and in what dread all unspiritual ministers
+stood of her visitations. And the same rigid censorship prevails in many
+quarters still. The preacher who thunders so defiantly against spiritual
+foes is trembling all the time beneath the critical eye that is watching
+him from the dim recesses of an unworldly bonnet, and the critical
+finger which follows him with so merciless an accuracy in his texts.
+Impelled, guided, censured by woman, we can hardly wonder if in nine
+cases out of ten the parson turns woman himself, and if the usurpation
+of woman's rights in the services of religion has been deftly avenged by
+the subjugation of the usurpers. Expelled from the Temple, woman has
+simply put her priesthood into commission, and discharges her
+ministerial duties by deputy.
+
+It was impossible for woman to remain permanently content with a
+position like this; but it is only of late that a favorable conjuncture
+of affairs has enabled her to quit it for a more obtrusive one. The
+great Church movement which the _Apologia_ has made so familiar to us in
+its earlier progress came some ten years ago to a stand. Some of its
+most eminent leaders had seceded to another communion, it had been
+weakened by the Gorham decision, and by its own internal dissensions.
+Whether on the side of dogma or ritual, it seemed to have lost for the
+moment its old impulse--to have lost heart and life.
+
+It was in this emergency that woman came to the front. She claimed to
+revive the old religious position which had been assigned to her by the
+monasticism of the middle ages, but to revive it under different
+conditions and with a different end. The mediæval Church had, indeed,
+glorified, as much as words could glorify, the devotion of woman; but
+once become a devotee, it had locked her in the cloister. As far as
+action on the world without was concerned, the veil served simply as a
+species of suicide, and the impulses of woman, after all the crowns and
+pretty speeches of her religious counsellors, found themselves bottled
+up within stout stone walls and as inactive as before. From this strait,
+woman, at the time we speak of, delivered herself by the organization of
+charity.
+
+In lines of a certain beauty, though somewhat difficult in their
+grammatical construction, she has been described as a ministering angel
+when pain and anguish wring the brow; and it was in her capacity of
+ministering angel that she now placed herself at the Church movement and
+advanced upon the world. It was impossible to lock these beneficent
+beings up, for the whole scope of their existence lay in the outer
+world; but every day, as it developed their ecclesiastical position,
+made even their admirers recognise the wise discretion of the middle
+ages. Long before the Ritualists themselves, they, with a feminine
+instinct, had discerned the value of costume. The district visitor, whom
+nobody had paid the smallest attention to in the common vestments of the
+world, became a sacred being as she donned the crape and hideous bonnet
+of the "Sister."
+
+Within the new establishment there was all the excitement of a perfectly
+novel existence, of time broken up as women like it to be broken up in
+perpetual services and minute obligation of rules, the dramatic change
+of name, and the romantic self-abnegation of obedience. The "Mother
+Superior" took the place of the tyrant of another sex who had hitherto
+claimed the submission of woman, but she was something more to her
+"children" than the husband or father whom they had left in the world
+without. In all matters, ecclesiastical as well as civil, she claimed
+within her dominions to be supreme. The quasi-sacerdotal dignity, the
+pure religious ministration which ages have stolen from her, was quietly
+reassumed. She received confessions, she imposed penances, she drew up
+offices of devotion. Wherever the community settled, it settled as a new
+spiritual power.
+
+If the clergyman of the parish ventured on advice or suggestion, he was
+told that the Sisterhood must preserve its own independence of action,
+and was snubbed home again for his pains. The Mother Superior, in fact,
+soon towered into a greatness far beyond the reach of ordinary parsons.
+She kept her own tame chaplain, and she kept him in very edifying
+subjection. From a realm completely her own, the influence of woman
+began now to tell upon the world without. Little colonies of Sisters
+planted here and there annexed parish after parish. Sometimes the
+parson was worried into submission by incessant calls of the most
+justifiable nature on his time and patience. Sometimes he was bribed
+into submission by the removal from his shoulders of the burden of alms.
+It was only when he was thoroughly tamed that he was rewarded by pretty
+stoles and gorgeous vestments.
+
+Astonished congregations saw their church blossom in purple and red, and
+frontal and hanging told of the silent energy of the group of Sisters.
+The parson found himself nowhere in his own parish; every detail managed
+for him, every care removed, and all independence gone. If it suited the
+ministering angels to make a legal splash, he found himself landed in
+the Law Courts. If they took it into their heads to seek another fold,
+every one assumed, as a matter of course, that their pastor would go
+too. At such a rate of progress the great object of woman's ambition
+must soon come in view, and the silent control over the priest will
+merge in the open claim to the priesthood.
+
+It may be in silent preparation for such a claim that the ecclesiastical
+hierarchy are taking, year by year, a more feminine position. The Houses
+of Convocation, for instance, present us with a lively image of what the
+bitterest censor of woman would be delighted to predict as the result of
+her admission to senatorial honors. There is the same interminable flow
+of mellifluous talk, the same utter inability to devise or to understand
+an argument, the same bitterness and hard words, the same skill in
+little tricks and diplomacies, the same practical incompetence, which
+have been denounced as characteristics of woman. The caution, the
+finesse, the sly decorum, the inability to take a large view of any
+question, the patience, the masterly inaction, the vicious outbreaks of
+temper which now and then break the inaction of a Bishop, may sometimes
+lead us to ask whether the Episcopal office is not one admirably suited
+for the genius of woman.
+
+But she must stoop to conquer heights like these, and it is probable
+with a view to a slow ascent towards them through the ages to come that
+she is now moulding the mind of the curate at her will. He, we have been
+told, is commonly the first lady of the parish; and what he now is in
+theory, a century hence may find him in fact. It would be difficult even
+now to detect any difference of sex in the triviality of purpose, the
+love of gossip, the petty interests, the feeble talk, the ignorance, the
+vanity, the love of personal display, the white hand dangled over the
+pulpit, the becoming vestment and the embroidered stole, which we are
+learning gradually to look upon as attributes of the British curate. So
+perfect, indeed, is the imitation that the excellence of her work may
+perhaps defeat its own purpose; and the lacquered imitation of woman,
+"dilettante, delicate-handed," as Tennyson saw and sang of him, may
+satisfy the world, and for long ages prevent any anxious inquiry after
+the real feminine Brummagem.
+
+
+
+
+THE FUTURE OF WOMAN.
+
+
+Woman is a thing of accident and spoilt in the making says the greatest
+of the schoolmen, but we are far from denying her right to vindicate
+something more than an accidental place in the world. After all that can
+be urged as to the glory of self-sacrifice, the greatness of silent
+devotion, or the compensations for her want of outer influence in the
+inner power which she exerts through the medium of the family and the
+home, there remains an odd sort of sympathy with the woman who asserts
+that she is every bit as good as her master, and that there is no reason
+why she should retire behind the domestic veil. Partly, of course, this
+arises from our natural sympathy with pluck of any sort; partly, too,
+there is the pleasure we feel in a situation which may be absurd, but
+which, at any rate, is novel and piquant; partly, there is an impatience
+with woman as she is, and a sort of lingering hope that something better
+is in store for her.
+
+The most sceptical, in fact, of woman's censors cannot help feeling a
+suspicion that, after all, strong-minded women may be in the right. As
+one walks home in the cool night-air it seems impossible to believe
+that girls are to go on for ever chattering the frivolous nonsense they
+do chatter, or living the absolutely frivolous lives they do live. And,
+of course, the impression that a good time is coming for them is
+immensely strengthened if one happens to have fallen in love. One's eyes
+have got a little sharpened to see the real human soul that stirs
+beneath all that sham life of idleness and vanity, but the vanity and
+the idleness vexes more than ever. If we come across Miss Hominy at such
+moments, we are extremely likely to find her a great deal less
+ridiculous than we fancied her, and to listen with a certain gravity to
+her plea for the enfranchisement of women.
+
+It is not that we go all lengths with her; we stare a little perhaps at
+the logical consequences on which she piques herself, and at the
+panorama of woman as she is to be which she spreads before us, at the
+consulting barrister waiting in her chambers and the lady advocate
+flourishing her maiden brief; our pulse throbs a little awkwardly at the
+thought of being tested by medical fingers and thumbs of such a delicate
+order, and we hum a few lines of the _Princess_ as Miss Hominy poses
+herself for a Lady Professor. Still we cannot help a half conviction
+that even this would be better than the present style of thing, the
+pretty face that kindles over the news of a fresh opera and gives you
+the latest odds on the Derby, the creature of head-achy mornings, of
+afternoons frittered on lounges, and bonnet-strings, of nights whirled
+away in hot rooms and chatter on stairs. There are moments, we repeat,
+when, looking at woman as she is, we could almost wish to wake the next
+morning into a world where all women were Miss Hominys.
+
+But when we do wake we find the world much what it was before, and
+pretty faces just as indolent and as provoking as they were, and a sort
+of ugly after-question cropping up in our minds whether we had exactly
+realized the meaning of our wish, or conceived the nature of a world in
+which all women were Miss Hominys. There is always a little difficulty
+in fancying the world other than we find it; but it is really worth a
+little trouble, before we enfranchise woman, to try to imagine the
+results of her enfranchisement, the Future of Woman. In the first place,
+it would amazingly reduce the variety of the world. As it is, we live in
+a double world, and enjoy the advantages of a couple of hemispheres. It
+is an immense luxury for men, when they are tired out with the worry and
+seriousness of life, to be able to walk into a totally different
+atmosphere, where nothing is looked at or thought about or spoken of in
+exactly the same way as in their own.
+
+When Mr. Gladstone, for instance, unbends (if he ever does unbend), and,
+weary of the Irish question, asks his pretty neighbor what she thinks of
+it, he gets into a new world at once. Her vague idea of the Irish
+question, founded on a passing acquaintance with Moore's Melodies and a
+wild regret after Donnybrook fair, may not be exactly adequate to the
+magnitude of the interests involved, but it is at any rate novel and
+amusing. It is not a House of Commons view of the subject, but then the
+great statesman is only too glad to be rid of the House of Commons.
+Thoughtful politicians may deplore that the sentimental beauty of
+Charles I. and the pencil of Vandyke have made every English girl a
+Malignant; but after one has got bored with Rushworth and Clarendon,
+there is a certain pleasure at finding a great constitutional question
+summarily settled by the height of a sovereign's brow.
+
+It is a relief too, now and then, to get out of the world of morals into
+the world of woman; out of the hard sphere of right and wrong into a
+world like Mr. Swinburne's, where judgment goes by the beautiful, and
+where red hair makes all the difference between Elizabeth and Mary of
+Scotland. Above all, there is the delightful consciousness of
+superiority. The happiness of the blessed in the next world consists,
+according to Sir John Mandeville, in their being able to behold the
+agonies of the lost; and half the satisfaction men have in their own
+sense and vigor and success would be lost if they could not enjoy the
+delicious view of the world where sense and energy go for nothing.
+
+Whether all this would be worth sacrificing simply to acquire a woman
+who could sympathize with, and support, a man in the stress and battle
+of life, is a question we do not pretend to decide; but it is certain
+that the enfranchisement of woman would be the passing of a social Act
+of Uniformity, and the loss of half the grace and variety of life. Here,
+as elsewhere, "the low sun makes the color," and the very excellences of
+Miss Hominy carry her aloft into regions of white light, where our
+eyes, even if dazzled, get a little tired with the monotony of the
+intellectual Haze.
+
+The result of such a change on woman herself would be something far
+greater and more revolutionary. It is not merely that, as in the case of
+men, she would lose the sense and comfort of another world of thought
+and action, and of its contrast with the world in which she lives; it is
+that she would lose her own world altogether. Conceive, for instance,
+woman obliged to take life in earnest, to study as men study, to work as
+men work. The change would be no mere modification, but the utter
+abolition of her whole present existence. The whole theory of woman's
+life is framed on the hypothesis of sheer indolence. She is often
+charming, but she is always idle. There is an immense ingenuity and a
+perfect grace about her idleness; the efforts, in fact, of generations
+of cultivated women have been directed, and successfully directed, to
+this special object of securing absolute indolence without either the
+inner tedium or the outer contempt which indolence is supposed to bring
+in its train.
+
+Woman can always say with Titus, "I have wasted a day," but the
+confession wears an air of triumph rather than regret. A world of
+trivial occupations, a whole system of social life, has been laboriously
+invented that the day might be wasted gracefully and without boredom. A
+little riding, a little reading, a little dabbling with the paint-brush,
+a little strumming on the piano, a little visiting, a little shopping,
+a little dancing, and a general trivial chat scattered over the whole,
+make up the day of an English girl in town. Transplant her into the
+country, and the task of frittering away existence, though it becomes
+more difficult, is faced just as gallantly as before. Mudie comes to the
+rescue with the back novels which she was too busy to get through in the
+season; there is the scamper from one country house to another, there
+are the flirtations to keep her hand in, the pets to be fed, the cousins
+to extemporize a mimic theatre, the curate--if worst comes to worst--to
+try a little ritualism upon. With these helps a country day, what with
+going to bed early and getting up late, may be frittered away as
+aimlessly as a day in town.
+
+Woman may fairly object, we think, to abolish at one fell swoop such an
+ingenious fabric of idleness as this. A revolution in the whole system
+of social life, in the whole conception and drift of feminine existence,
+is a little too much to ask. As it is, woman wraps herself in her
+indolence, and is perfectly satisfied with her lot. She assumes, and the
+world has at least granted the assumption, that her little hands were
+never made to do anything which any rougher hands can do for them. Man
+has got accustomed to serve as her hewer of wood and drawer of water,
+and to expect nothing from her but poetry and refinement. It is a little
+too much to ask her to go back to the position of the squaw, and to do
+any work for herself. But it is worse to ask her to remodel the world
+around her, on the understanding that henceforth duty and toil and
+self-respect are to take the place of frivolity and indolence and
+adoration.
+
+The great passion which knits the two sexes together presents a yet
+stronger difficulty. To men, busy with the work of the world, there is
+no doubt that, however delightful, love takes the form of a mere
+interruption of their real life. They allow themselves the interval of
+its indulgence, as they allow themselves any other holiday, simply as
+something in itself temporary and accidental; as life, indeed, grows
+more complex, there is an increasing tendency to reduce the amount of
+time and attention which men devote to their affections. Already the
+great philosopher of the age has pronounced that the passion of love
+plays far too important a part in human existence, and that it is a
+terrible obstacle to human progress.
+
+The general temper of the times echoes the sentence of Mr. Mill. The
+enthusiastic votary who has been pouring his vows at the feet of his
+mistress consoles himself, as he leaves her, with the thought that
+engagements cannot last for ever, and that he shall soon be able to get
+back to the real world of business and of life. He presses his beloved
+one, with all the eloquence of passion, to fix an early day for their
+union, but the eloquence has a very practical bearing. While Corydon is
+piping to Phyllis, he is anxious about the engagements he is missing,
+and the distance he is losing in the race for life. But Phyllis remains
+the nymph of passion and poetry and romance.
+
+Time has no meaning for her; she is not neglecting any work; she is
+only idle, as she always is idle. But love throws a new glory and a new
+interest around her indolence. The endless little notes with which she
+worries the Post-Office and her friends become suddenly sacred and
+mysterious. The silly little prattle hushes into confidential whispers.
+Every crush through the season, becomes the scene of a reunion of two
+hearts which have been parted for the eternity of twenty-four hours.
+Love, in fact, does not in the least change woman's life, or give it new
+earnestness or a fresh direction; but it makes it infinitely more
+interesting, and it heightens the enjoyment of wasting a day by a new
+sense of power. For that brief space of triumph Phyllis is able to make
+Corydon waste his day too. The more he writhes and wriggles under the
+compulsion, the more lingering looks he casts back on the work he has
+quitted, the greater her victory.
+
+He cannot decently confess that he is tired of the little comedy in
+which he takes so romantic a part, and certainly his fellow actress will
+not help him to the confession. By dint of acting it, indeed, she comes
+at last to a certain belief in her _rôle_. She really imagines herself
+to be very busy, to have sacrificed her leisure as well as her heart to
+the object of her devotion. She scolds him for his backwardness in not
+more thoroughly sacrificing his leisure to her. Work may be very
+important to him, but it is of less importance to the self-sacrificing
+being who hasn't had one moment to finish the third volume of the last
+sensational novel since she plighted her troth to this monster of
+ingratitude! Of course a man likes to be flattered, and does as much as
+he can in the way of believing in the little comedy too; in fact, it is
+all amazingly graceful and entertaining on the one side and on the
+other. Our only doubt is whether this graceful and entertaining mode of
+interrupting all the serious business of life will not be treated rather
+mercilessly by enfranchised woman. How will the enchantment of passion
+survive when the object of our adoration can only spare us an hour from
+her medical cases, or defers an interview because she is choked with
+fresh briefs? One of two results must clearly follow. Either the great
+Westminster philosopher is right, and love will play a far less
+important part than it has done in human affairs, or else it will
+concentrate itself, and take a far more intense and passionate character
+than it exhibits now.
+
+We can quite conceive that the very difficulty of the new relations may
+give them a new fire and vigor, and that the women of the future,
+looking back on the old months of indolent coquetry, may feel a certain
+contempt for souls which can fritter away the grandeur of passion as
+they fritter away the grandeur of life. But even the gain of passion
+will hardly compensate us for the loss of variety. All this playing with
+love has a certain pretty independence about it, and leaves woman's
+individuality where it found it. Passion must of necessity whirl both
+beings, in the unity of a common desire, into one. And so we get back to
+the old problem of the monotony of life. But it is just this monotonous
+identity to which civilization, politics, and society are all visibly
+tending. Railways will tunnel Alps for us, democracy will extinguish
+heroes, and raise mankind to a general level of commonplace
+respectability; woman's enfranchisement will level the social world, and
+leave between sex and sex the difference--even if it leaves that--of a
+bonnet.
+
+
+
+
+COSTUME AND ITS MORALS.
+
+
+Nothing is more decisively indicative of the real value or necessity of
+a thing than the fact that, while its presence is hardly noticeable, it
+is immediately missed and asked for when it disappears; and it is thus
+that the paramount importance of clothing asserts itself by the
+conspicuousness of its absence. Of course the first purpose of dress is,
+or should be, decency, and for this, quantity rather than quality is
+looked for. But, as with the little cloud no larger than a man's hand,
+so from the primary fig-leaf or first element of dress, how great things
+have arisen! In respect of amplification, dress may be said to have
+attained its maximum when men wore ruffs which nearly concealed their
+heads, and shoes a quarter of a yard longer than their feet; but
+"fashion" has its day, and now dress threatens to dwindle into something
+not far from its original or fig-leaf dimensions.
+
+Another perfectly legitimate object of dress is attractiveness, so that
+by its aid our persons may be set off to the best advantage; dress
+should also be individual and symbolic, so as to indicate clearly the
+position and character which we desire to obtain and hold. It is not of
+men's attire that we have now to speak; that has been settled for them
+by the tailors' strike, which practically ordained that he that was
+shabby should be shabby, or even shabbier still, and he that had allowed
+himself to be thrust into the straitened trousers and scanty coatee of
+last year should continue to exhibit his proportions long after the
+grotesqueness of his figure had been recognised even by himself.
+
+But it is of the dress of our women that we are compelled to testify,
+and it can hardly be denied that at the present moment it offends
+grievously in three particulars. It is inadequate for decency; it lacks
+that truthfulness which is, and should be, the base of all that is
+attractive and beautiful; and in its symbolism it is in the highest
+degree objectionable, for it not only aims at what is unreal and false,
+but it simulates that which is positively hateful and meretricious, so
+that it is difficult now for even a practised eye to distinguish the
+high-born maiden or matron of Belgravia from the Anonymas who haunt the
+drive and fill our streets.
+
+This indictment is, it may be said, a severe one; but if we examine, so
+far as male critics may venture to do, the costume of a fashionable
+woman of the day, it can hardly be said to be unjust. The apparent
+object of modern female dress is to assimilate its wearers as nearly as
+possible in appearance to women of a certain class--the class to which
+it was formerly hardly practicable to allude, and yet be intelligible to
+young ladies; but all that is changed, and the habits and customs of the
+women of the _demi-monde_ are now studied as if they were indeed
+curious, but exceptionally admirable also, and thus a study unseemly and
+unprofitable has begotten a spirit of imitation which has achieved a
+degrading success.
+
+"Our modest matrons meet," not "to stare the strumpet down," but to
+compare notes, to get hints, and to engage in a kind of friendly
+rivalry--in short, to pay that homage to Vice, and in a very direct way
+too, which Vice is said formerly to have paid to Virtue. Paint and
+powder are of course the first requisites for the end in view, and these
+adjuncts have to be laid on with such skill as the _débutante_ or her
+toilette-maid possesses, which is sometimes so small as to leave their
+handiwork disgustingly coarse and apparent.
+
+There are pearl-powder, violet-powder, rouge, bistre for the eyelids,
+belladonna for the eyes, whitelead and blacklead, yellow dye and mineral
+acids for the hair--all tending to the utter destruction of both hair
+and skin. The effect of this "diaphanous" complexion and "aurified" hair
+(we borrow the expressions) in a person intended by nature to be dark,
+or swarthy, is most comical; sometimes the whitelead is used so
+unsparingly that it has quite a blue tint, which glistens until the face
+looks more like a death's head anointed with phosphorus and oil for
+theatrical purposes than the head of a Christian gentlewoman. It may be
+interesting to know, and we have the information from high, because
+_soi-disant_ fashionable authority, that the reign of golden locks and
+blue-white visages is drawing to a close, and that it is to be followed
+by bronze complexions and blue-black hair--_à l'Africaine_ we presume.
+
+When fashionable Madame has, to her own satisfaction, painted and
+varnished her face, she then proceeds, like Jezebel, to tire her head,
+and, whether she has much hair or little, she fixes on to the back of it
+a huge nest of coarse hair generally well baked in order to free it from
+the parasites with which it abounded when it first adorned the person of
+some Russian or North-German peasant girl. Of course this gives an
+unnaturally large and heavy appearance to the cerebellar region; but
+nature is not exactly what is aimed at, still less refinement.
+
+If this style be not approved of, there is yet another fashion--namely,
+to cut the hair short in a crop, _créper_ it, curl it, frizzle it,
+bleach it, burn it, and otherwise torture it until it has about as much
+life in it as last year's hay; and then to shampoo it, rumple it, and
+tousle it, until the effect is to produce the aspect of a madwoman in
+one of her worst fits. This method, less troublesome and costly than the
+other, may be considered even more striking, so that it is largely
+adopted by a number of persons who are rather disreputable, and poor. As
+is well known, not all of the asinine tribe wear asses' ears;
+nevertheless some of these votaries of dress find their ears too long,
+or too large, or ill-placed, or, what comes to the same thing,
+inconveniently placed, but a prettier or better-shaped pair are easily
+purchased, admirably moulded in gutta-percha or some other plastic
+material; they are delicately colored, fitted up with earrings and a
+spring apparatus, and they are then adjusted on to the head, the
+despised natural ears being of course carefully hidden from view.
+
+It is long enough since a bonnet meant shelter to the face or protection
+to the head; that fragment of a bonnet which at present represents the
+head-gear, and which was some years ago worn on the back of the head and
+nape of the neck, is now poised on the front, and ornamented with birds,
+portions of beasts, reptiles, and insects. We have seen a bonnet
+composed of a rose and a couple of feathers, another of two or three
+butterflies or as many beads and a bit of lace, and a third represented
+by five green leaves joined at the stalks. A white or spotted veil is
+thrown over the visage, in order that the adjuncts that properly belong
+to the theatre may not be immediately detected in the glare of daylight;
+and thus, with diaphanous tinted face, large painted eyes, and
+stereotyped smile, the lady goes forth looking much more as if she had
+stepped out of the green room of a theatre, or from a Haymarket saloon,
+than from an English home.
+
+But it is in evening costume that our women have reached the minimum of
+dress and the maximum of brass. We remember a venerable old lady whose
+ideas of decorum were such that in her speech all above the foot was
+ankle, and all below the chin was chest; but now the female bosom is
+less the subject of a revelation than the feature of an exposition, and
+charms that were once reserved are now made the common property of every
+looker on. A costume which has been described as consisting of a smock,
+a waistband, and a frill seems to exceed the bounds of honest
+liberality, and resembles most perhaps the attire mentioned by Rabelais,
+"nothing before and nothing behind, with sleeves of the same." Not very
+long ago two gentlemen were standing together at the Opera. "Did you
+ever see anything like that?" inquired one, with a significant glance,
+directing the eyes of his companion to the uncovered bust of a lady
+immediately below. "Not since I was weaned," was the suggestive reply.
+We are not aware whether the speaker was consciously or unconsciously
+reproducing a well-known archiepiscopal _mot_.
+
+Though our neighbors are not strait-laced, so far as bathing-costume is
+concerned, they are less tolerant of the nude than we are in this
+highly-favored land. There was lately a story in one of the French
+papers that at a certain ball a lady was requested to leave the room
+because a chain of wrought gold, suspended from shoulder to shoulder,
+was the sole protection which it seemed to her well to wear on her
+bosom. To have made the toilette correspond throughout, the dress should
+have consisted of a crinoline skirt, which, though not so ornamental,
+would have been not less admirable and more effective.
+
+Of course there are women to whom nature has been niggardly in the
+matter of roundness of form, but even these need not despair; if they
+cannot show their own busts, they can show something nearly as good,
+since we read the following, which we forbear to translate:--"Autre
+excentricité. C'est l'invention des _poitrines adhérentes_ à l'usage
+des dames trop éthérées. Il s'agit d'un système en caoutchouc rose, qui
+s'adapte à la place vide comme une ventouse à, la peau, et qui suit les
+mouvements de la respiration avec une précision mathématique et
+parfaite."
+
+Of those limbs which it is still forbidden to expose absolutely, the
+form and contour can at least be put in relief by insisting on the
+skirts being gored and straightened to the utmost; indeed, some of the
+riding-habits we have seen worn are in this respect so contrived that,
+when viewed from behind, especially when the wearer is not of too
+fairy-like proportions, they resemble a pair of tight trousers rather
+than the full flowing robe which we remember as so graceful and becoming
+to a woman. It will be observed that the general aim of all these
+adventitious aids is to give an impression of earth and the fullness
+thereof, to appear to have a bigger cerebellum, a more sensuous
+development of limb, and a greater abundance of flesh than can be either
+natural or true; but we are almost at a loss how to express the next
+point of ambition with which the female mind has become inspired.
+
+The women who are not as those who love their lords wish to be--indeed,
+as we have heard, those who have no lords of their own to love--have
+conceived the notion that, by simulating an "interesting condition" (we
+select the phrase accepted as the most delicate), they will add to their
+attractions; and for this purpose an article of toilet--an india-rubber
+anterior bustle--called the _demi-temps_, has been invented, and is worn
+beneath the dress, nominally to make the folds fall properly, but in
+reality, as the name betrays, to give the appearance of a woman advanced
+in pregnancy.
+
+No person will be found to say that the particular condition, when real,
+is unseemly or ridiculous. What it is when assumed, and for such a
+purpose--whether it is not all that and something worse--we leave our
+readers to decide for themselves. It is said that one distinguished
+personage first employed crinoline in order to render more graceful her
+appearance while in this situation; but these ladies with their
+ridiculous _demi-temps_, without excuse as without shame, travesty
+nature in their own persons in a way which a low-comedy actress would be
+ashamed to do in a tenth-rate theatre. The name is French, let us hope
+the idea is also; and this reminds us of the title of a little piece
+lately played in Paris by amateurs for some charitable purpose--_Il n'y
+a plus d'enfants._ No; in France they may indeed say, "It is true _il
+n'y a plus d'enfants_, but then have we not invented the _demi-temps_?"
+
+And if each separate point of female attire and decoration is a sham, so
+the whole is often a deception and a fraud. It is not true that by
+taking thought one cannot add a cubit to one's stature, for ladies, by
+taking thought about it, do add, if not a cubit, at least considerably,
+to their height, which, like almost everything about them, is often
+unreal. With high heels, _toupé_, and hat, we may calculate that about
+four or five inches are altogether borrowed for the occasion. Thus it
+comes to be a grave matter of doubt, when a man marries, how much is
+real of the woman who has become his wife, or how much of her is her own
+only in the sense that she has bought, and possibly may have paid for
+it. To use the words of an old writer, "As with rich furred conies,
+their cases are far better than their bodies; and, like the bark of a
+cinnamon-tree, which is dearer than the whole bulk, their outward
+accoutrements are far more precious than their inward endowments."
+
+Of the wife elect, her bones, her debts, and her caprices may be the
+only realities which she can bestow on her husband. All the rest--hair,
+teeth, complexion, ears, bosom, figure, including the _demi-temps_--are
+alike an imposition and a falsehood. In such case we should recommend,
+for the sake of both parties, that during at least the wedding-tour, the
+same precautions should be observed as when Louis XV. travelled with
+"the unblushing Chateauroux with her bandboxes and rougepots at his
+side, so that at every new station a wooden gallery had to be run up
+between their lodgings."
+
+It may be said that in all this we are ungenerous and ungrateful, and
+that in discussing the costume of women we are touching on a question
+which pertains to women more than to men. But is that so? Are we not by
+thus exposing what is false, filthy, and meretricious, seeking to lead
+what was once dignified by the name of "the fair sex" from a course
+alike unbecoming and undignified to one more worthy of the sex and its
+attributes? Most men like to please women, and most women like to please
+men. For, as has been well said, "Pour plaire aux femmes il faut être
+considéré des hommes, et pour être considéré des hommes il faut savoir
+plaire aux femmes."
+
+We have a right to suppose that women do not adopt a fashion or a
+costume unless they suppose that it will add to their attractions in
+general, and possibly also please men in particular. This being so, it
+may be well to observe that these fashions do not please or attract men,
+for we know they are but the inventions of some vulgar, selfish
+_perruquier_ or _modiste_. We may add that if we want to study the nude
+we can do so in the sculpture galleries, or among the Tableaux Vivants,
+at our ease; and that for well-bred or well-educated and well-born
+women, or even for only fashionable and fast women, to approximate in
+their manners, habits, and dress to the members of the _demi-monde_ is a
+mistake, and a grievous one, if they wish to be really and adequately
+appreciated by men whose good opinion, if not more, they would desire to
+possess.
+
+
+
+
+THE FADING FLOWER.
+
+
+If there is any part of man's conduct which proves more conclusively
+than another the baseness of his ingratitude, it is his indifference to
+the Fading Flower. Woman may well wonder at the charm which prostrates
+the heavy Guardsman at the feet of the belle of the season. Even the
+most ardent of worshippers at such a shrine must, one would think,
+desire in their deity a little more sweetness and light. But the beauty
+of eighteen summers is trained to look on worship as simply her due, and
+to regard amiability as a mere superfluity. She knows she can summon an
+adorer by one beckon of her fan, and dismiss him by another. A bow will
+repay the most finished of pretty speeches, and conversation can be
+conducted at the least possible expense by the slight trouble of
+recollecting who was at Lady A.'s ball, and the yet slighter trouble of
+guessing who is likely to be at Lady C.'s.
+
+It is utterly needless to bestow any labor on society when society takes
+it as a crowning favor to be suffered simply to adore. There is a
+certain grandeur, therefore, of immobility about the English beauty, a
+statuesque perfection which no doubt has great merits of its own. But it
+must be owned that it is not amusing, and that it is only the intensity
+of our worship which saves us from feeling it to be dull. Beauty is apt
+to be a little heavy on the stairs. A shade of distress flits over the
+loveliest of faces if we stray for a moment beyond the happy
+hunting-grounds of the ball-room or the Opera, the last Academy or the
+next Horticultural. Beautiful beings are made, they feel, not to amuse,
+but to be amused. The one object of their enthusiasm is the "funny
+Bishop" who turns a great debate into a jest for the entertainment of
+his fair friends in the Ladies' Gallery. The object of their social
+preference is the young wit who lounges up to tell his last little
+story, and then, without boring them for a reply, lounges away again.
+The debt which they owe to society is simply the morning ride which
+keeps them blooming through the season. The debt which society owes to
+them is that eternal succession of gay nothings which keeps London in a
+whirl till the grouse are ready for the sacrifice. In a word, woman in
+her earlier stages is simply receptive.
+
+Light and sweetness come in with the Fading Flower. It is when the shy
+retreat of the elder sons makes way for the shyer approach of their
+younger brothers that woman becomes fragrant and intelligent. The old
+indifference quickens into a subdued vivacity; Hermione descends from
+her pedestal and warms into flesh and blood. She turns chatty, and her
+chat insensibly deepens into conversation. She discovers a new interest
+in life and in the last novel of the season. She ventures on the
+confines of poetry, and if she does not read Mr. Tennyson's _Lucretius_,
+she keeps his photograph in her album. She flings herself with a far
+greater ardor into the mysteries of croquet. She has been known to
+garden. As petal after petal floats down to earth she becomes artistic.
+She reads, she talks Mr. Ruskin. She has her own views on Venice and its
+Doges, her enthusiasm over Alps and artisans. The slow approach of
+autumn brings her to politics. She is deep in Mr. Disraeli's novels, and
+quotes Mr. Gladstone's Homer. She speculates on Charlie's chances for
+the county. She knows why the Home Secretary was absent from the last
+division. The drop of another petal warns her further afield. She is
+manly now; she comes in at breakfast with her hair about her ears, and a
+tale of the gallop she has had across country. She takes you over the
+farm, and laughs at your ignorance of pigs. She peeps into the
+odoriferous sanctum upstairs, and owns to a taste for cigarettes. She is
+slightly horsey, and knows to a pound the value of her mare. Another
+season, and she is interested in Church questions, and inquires what is
+the next "new thing" at St. Andrew's. She adores Lord Shaftesbury, or
+works frontals for St. Gogmagog. She collects for the Irish missions, or
+misses an _entrée_ on Eves. It is only as woman fades that we realize
+the versatility, the inexhaustible resources, of woman.
+
+The one scene, however, where the Fading Flower is perhaps seen at her
+best is the County Archæological Meeting. Of all rural delusions this is
+perhaps the pleasantest, and if the name is forbidding, the Fading
+Flower knows how little there is in a name. About half a dozen old
+gentlemen, of course, take the thing in grand earnest. It is beyond
+measure amusing to peep over the learned Secretary's shoulder, to see
+the gray heads wagging and the spectacles in full play over the list of
+promised papers, to watch the carefully planned details, the solemn
+array of morning meetings, the grave excursions from abbey to castle,
+from castle to church, the graver soirées where Dryasdust revels amidst
+armor and knicknackery. It is even more amusing to see the Fading Flower
+step in at the close of this learned preparation, and with a woman's
+alchemy turn all this dust to gold. A little happy audacity converts the
+morning meetings into convenient gatherings for the groups of the day,
+the excursion resolves itself into a refined picnic, the learned soirée
+becomes a buzzing conversazione.
+
+Those who look forward with interest to woman's entrance into our
+Universities may gather something of the results to be expected from
+such a step in the fields of rural archæology. Her very presence at the
+meeting throws an air of gentle absurdity over the whole affair. It is
+difficult for the driest of antiquaries to read a paper on Roman roads
+in the teeth of a charming being who sleeps to the close, and then
+awakes only to assure him it was "very romantic." But it must be
+confessed that the charming being has very little trouble with the
+antiquaries. Half the fun of the thing lies in the ease and grace of her
+taming of Dryasdust; the learned Professor dies at her touch into "a
+dear delightful old thing," and fetches and carries all day with a
+perfect obedience. It is a delightful change from town, a sort of
+glorified afternoon in a pastoral Zoological, this junketing among the
+queer unclubbable animals of science and history. There is a noble
+disdain of rheumatism in the ardor with which they plunge into the dark
+and mysterious vaults where their willful student insists, with Mr.
+Froude, that those poor monks snatched their damp and difficult slumber;
+and there is a noble disdain of truth in their suppression of the
+treacherous and unsentimental "beer-cellar" which trembles on their
+lips.
+
+Woman, in fact, carries her atmosphere of romantic credulity into the
+gray and arid scepticism of a groping archæology. She frowns down any
+suggestion of the improbability of a pretty story, she believes in the
+poison-sucking devotion of Queen Eleanor, she shrugs her shoulders
+impatiently at a whisper of Queen Mary's wig. Every kitchen becomes a
+torture-chamber, every drain a subterranean passage. But resolute as she
+is on this point of the poetry of the past, on all other questions she
+is the most docile of pupils. Her interest, her listening power, her
+curiosity, is inexhaustible. If she has a passion, indeed, it is for
+Early English. But she has a proper awe for Romanesque, and a singular
+interest in Third Pointed. She is ruthless in insisting on her victim's
+spelling out every word of a brass in Latin that she cannot understand,
+and which he cannot translate. She collects little fragments of Roman
+brick, and wraps them up in tissue-paper for preservation at home like
+bride-cake. She is severe on restoration, and merciless on whitewash.
+She plunges, in fact, gallantly into the spirit of the thing, but she
+gracefully denudes it of its bareness and pedantry. Her bugle sings
+truce at midday for luncheon. She couches in the deep grass of the abbey
+ruins, and gathers in picturesque groups beneath castle walls. A flutter
+of silks, a ripple of feminine laughter, distract the audience from
+graver disquisitions. It is difficult to discuss the exact date of a
+moulding when soda-water bottles are popping beneath one's antiquarian
+nose.
+
+After all, archæologists are men, and sandwiches are sandwiches. It is
+at that moment perhaps that the Fading Flower is at her best. Her waning
+attractions are heightened artistically by the background of old fogies.
+Her sentiment blends with the poetry of the ruins around. The young
+squire, the young parson, who have been yawning under the prose of
+Dryasdust, find refreshment in the gay prattle of archæological woman.
+The sun too is overpowering, and a pretty woman leaning on one's arm in
+the leafy recesses of a ruined castle is sometimes more overpowering
+than the sun. There is much in the romance of the occasion. There is a
+little perhaps in the champagne. At any rate the Fading Flower blooms
+often into matronly life under the kindly influences of archæological
+meetings, and antiquarian studies flourish gaily under the patronage of
+woman.
+
+There is a certain melancholy in tracing further the career of the
+Fading Flower. We long to arrest it at each of these picturesque stages,
+as we long to arrest the sunset in its lovelier moments of violet and
+gold. But the sunset dies into the gray of eve, and woman sets with the
+same fatal persistency. The evanescent tints fade into the gray. Woman
+becomes hard, angular, colorless. Her floating sentiment, so graceful in
+its mobility, curdles into opinions. Her conversation, so charmingly
+impalpable, solidifies into discussion. Her character, like her face,
+becomes rigid and osseous. She entrenches herself in the 'ologies. She
+works pinafores for New-Zealanders in the May Meetings, and appears in
+wondrous bonnets at the Church Congress. She adores Mr. Kingsley because
+he is earnest, and groans over the triviality of the literature of the
+day. She takes up the grievances of her sex, and badgers the puzzled
+overseer who has omitted to place her name on the register. She
+pronounces old men fogies, and young men intolerable. She throws out
+dark hints of her intention to compose a great work which shall settle
+everything. Then she bursts into poetry, and pens poems of so fiery a
+passion that her family are in consternation lest she should elope with
+the half-pay officer who meets her by moonlight on the pier. Then she
+plunges into science, and cuts her hair short to be in proper trim for
+Professor Huxley's lectures.
+
+For awhile she startles her next neighbor at dinner with speculations on
+molluscs, and questions as to the precise names of the twelve hundred
+new species of fish that Professor Agassiz has caught in the river
+Orinoco. There is a more terrible stage when she becomes heretical,
+subscribes to the support of Mr. Tonneson and pities the poor Bishop of
+Natal. But from this she is commonly saved by the deepening of eve.
+Little by little all this restless striving against the monotony of her
+existence dies down into calm. The gray of life hushes the Fading Flower
+into the kindly aunt, the patient nurse, the gentle friend of the poor.
+It is hard to recognise the proud beauty, the vivacious flirt, the
+sentimental poetess of days gone by in the practical little woman who
+watches by Harry's sick-bed or hurries off with blankets and broth down
+the lane. In some such peace the Fading Flower commonly finds her
+rest--a peace unromantic, utilitarian, and yet not perhaps unbeautiful.
+She has found--as she tells us--her work at last; and yet in the life
+that seems so profitless she has been doing a work after all. She has at
+any rate vindicated her sex against the charge of what Mr. Arnold calls
+Hebraism. She has displayed in Hellenic roundness the completeness of
+the nature of woman.
+
+Compared with the quick transitions, with the endless variety of her
+life, the life of man seems narrow and poor. There is hardly a phase of
+human thought, of human action, which she has not touched, and she has
+never touched but to adorn. If she has faded, she has revealed a new
+power and beauty and fragrance at each stage in her decay. Nothing in
+her life has proved so becoming as her leaving it. The song of
+ingenuity, of triumph, of defence, which has run along the course of her
+decline, softens at its close into a swan-song of peace and gentleness
+and true womanhood.
+
+
+
+
+LA FEMME PASSÉE.
+
+
+Without doubt it is a time of trial to all women, more or less painful
+according to individual disposition, when they first begin to grow old
+and lose their good looks. Youth and beauty make up so much of their
+personal value, so much of their natural _raison d'être_, that when
+these are gone many feel as if their whole career was at an end, and as
+if nothing was left to them now that they are no longer young enough to
+be loved as girls are loved, or pretty enough to be admired as once they
+were admired. For women of a certain position have so little wholesome
+occupation, and so little ambition for anything, save, indeed, that
+miserable thing called "getting on in society," that they cannot change
+their way of life with advancing years; they do not attempt to find
+interest in things outside themselves, and independent of the mere
+personal attractiveness which in youth constituted their whole pleasure
+of existence. This is essentially the case with fashionable women, who
+have staked their all on appearance, and to whom good looks are of more
+account than noble deeds; and, accordingly, the struggle to remain young
+is a frantic one with them, and as degrading as it is frantic.
+
+With the ideal woman of middle age--that pleasant woman, with her happy
+face and softened manner, who unites the charms of both epochs,
+retaining the ready responsiveness of youth while adding the wider
+sympathies of experience--with her there has never been any such
+struggle to make herself an anachronism. Consequently she remains
+beautiful to the last, far more beautiful than all the paste and washes
+in Madame Rachel's shop could make her. Sometimes, if rarely in these
+latter days, we meet her in society, where she carries with her an
+atmosphere of her own--an atmosphere of honest, wholesome truth and
+love, which makes every one who enters it better and purer for the time.
+All children and all young persons love her, because she understands and
+loves them. For she is essentially a mother--that is, a woman who can
+forget herself, who can give without asking to receive, and who, without
+losing any of the individualism which belongs to self-respect, can yet
+live for and in the lives of others, and find her best joy in the
+well-being of those about her. There is no servility, no exaggerated
+sacrifice in this; it is simply the fulfillment of woman's highest
+duty--the expression of that grand maternal instinct which need not
+necessarily include the fact of personal maternity, but which must find
+utterance in some line of unselfish action with all women worthy of the
+name.
+
+The ideal woman of middle age understands the young because she has
+lived with them. If a mother, she has performed her maternal duties with
+cheerfulness and love. There has been no giving up her nursery to the
+care of a hired servant who is expected to do for twenty pounds a year
+what the tremendous instinct of a mother's love could not find strength
+to do. When she had children, she attended to them in great part
+herself, and learnt all about their tempers, their maladies, and the
+best methods of management; as they grew up she was still the best
+friend they had, the Providence of their young lives who gave them both
+care and justice, both love and guidance. Such a manner of life has
+forced her to forget herself. When her child lay ill, perhaps dying, she
+had no heart and no time to think of her own appearance, and whether
+this dressing-gown was more becoming than that; and what did the doctor
+think of her with her hair pushed back from her face; and what a fright
+she must have looked in the morning light after her sleepless night of
+watching. The world and all its petty pleasures and paltry pains faded
+away in the presence of the stern tragedy of the hour; and not the
+finest ball of the season seemed to be worth a thought compared to the
+all-absorbing question whether her child slept after his draught and
+whether he ate his food with better appetite.
+
+And such a life, in spite of all its cares, has kept her young as well
+as unselfish; we should rather say, young because unselfish. As she
+comes into the room with her daughters, her kindly face unpolluted by
+paint, her dress picturesque or fashionable according to her taste, but
+decent in form and consistent in tone with her age, it is often
+remarked that she looks more like their sister than their mother. This
+is because she is in harmony with her age, and has not, therefore, put
+herself in rivalry with them; and harmony is the very keystone of
+beauty. Her hair may be streaked with white, the girlish firmness and
+transparency of her skin has gone, the pearly clearness of her eye is
+clouded, and the slender grace of line is lost, but for all that she is
+beautiful, and she is intrinsically young. What she has lost in outside
+material charm--in that mere _beauté da diable_ of youth--she has gained
+in character and expression; and, not attempting to simulate the
+attractiveness of a girl, she keeps what nature gave her--the
+attractiveness of middle age. And as every epoch has its own beauty, if
+woman would but learn that truth, she is as beautiful now as a matron of
+fifty, because in harmony with her years, and because her beauty has
+been carried on from matter to spirit, as she was when a maiden of
+sixteen. This is the ideal woman of middle age, met with even yet at
+times in society--the woman whom all men respect, whom all women envy,
+and wonder how she does it, and whom all the young adore, and wish they
+had for an elder sister or an aunt. And the secret of it all lies in
+truth, in love, in purity, and in unselfishness.
+
+Standing far in front of this sweet and wholesome idealization is _la
+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 was 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 pupil dilated by
+belladonna, or 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 or gauze to conceal the breadth of her robust maturity, or to
+soften the dreadful shadows of her leanness--there she stands, the
+wretched creature who will not consent to grow old, and who will still
+affect to be like 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 honorable issue was as open to her as to her
+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, if even the reality is 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 associations, for all that her standing in society
+is undeniable, and not a door is shut against her. We may have no
+absolutely tangible reason to give for our distaste beyond the
+self-evident facts that she paints her face and dyes her hair, dresses
+in a very _decolleté_ style, and affects a girlish manner that is out of
+harmony with her age and condition. But though we cannot formularize
+reasons, we have instincts; and sometimes instinct sees more clearly
+than reason.
+
+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; and 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 "kohhl 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 often 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 have naturally immense influence over younger
+ones, and if mothers were to set their faces resolutely against the
+follies of the day, daughters would and must give in. As it is, they 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
+appointed by God 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 subsided.
+
+
+
+
+PRETTY PREACHERS.
+
+
+To beings of the rougher sex--let us honestly confess it--one of the
+most charming of those ever-recurrent surprises which the commonest
+incidents of the holidays never fail to afford is the surprise of
+finding themselves at church. Whatever the cause may be, whether we owe
+our new access of devotion to the early breakfast and the boredom of a
+bachelor morning, or to the moral compulsion of the cunning display of
+prayer-books and hymnals in the hall, or to the temptation of that
+chattiest and gayest of all walks--the walk to church--or to an uneasy
+conscience that spurs us to set a good example to the coachman, or to a
+sheer impulse of courtesy to the rector, certain it is that a week after
+we have been lounging at the club-window, and wondering how all the good
+people get through their Sunday morning, we find ourselves safely boxed
+in the family pew, and chorusing the family "Amen!"
+
+No doubt much of our new temper springs simply from the change of scene,
+and if the first week in the country were a time for self-analysis we
+might amuse ourselves with observing what a sudden simplicity of taste
+may be gained simply by a rush from town. There is a pleasant irony in
+being denounced from pulpit and platform as jaded voluptuaries, and
+then finding ourselves able to trample through coppices and plunge into
+cowsheds as if we had never seen a cowshed or a coppice before. But
+there is more than the pleasure of surprise in the peculiar rural
+development of attendance at church. Piety brings its own reward. We
+find ourselves invested with a new domestic interest, and brought into
+far closer and warmer domestic relations. Mamma looks a great deal more
+benignant than usual, and the girls lean on one's arm with a more
+trustful confidence and a deeper sympathy.
+
+A new bond of family union has been found in that victory of the pew
+over the club-window. But earthly pleasure is always dashed with a
+little disappointment, and one drop of bitterness lingers in the cup of
+joy. If only Charlie and papa would remain awake during the sermon! They
+are so good in the Psalms, so attentive through the Lessons, so sternly
+responsive to each Commandment, that it is sad to see them edging
+towards the comfortable corners with the text, and fast asleep under the
+application. Then, too, there is so little hope of reform, not merely
+because on this point men are utterly obdurate, but because it is
+impossible for their reformers even to understand their obduracy. For
+with both the whole question is a pure question of sympathy. Men sleep
+under sermons because the whole temper of their minds, as they grow into
+a larger culture, drifts further and further from the very notion of
+preaching. Inquiry, quiet play of thought, a somewhat indolent
+appreciation of the various sides of every subject, an appetite for
+novelty, a certain shrinking from the definite, a certain pleasure in
+the vague--these characteristics of modern minds are hardly
+characteristics of the pulpit. There are, of course, your drawing-room
+spouters, who can reel off an artistic or poetic or critical discourse
+of any length on the rug. But, as a rule, men neither like to pump upon
+their kind nor to be pumped upon. They like a quiet, genial talk which
+turns over everything and settles nothing. They like to put their case,
+to put their objection, but they like both to be brief and tentative. As
+a rule they talk with their guard up, and say nothing about their deeper
+thoughts or feelings. They vote a man who airs his emotions to be as
+great a bore as the man with a dogma, or the man with a hobby. A sermon,
+therefore, from the very necessities of its structure, is the very type
+of the sort of talk that revolts men most.
+
+On the other hand, women really enjoy preaching. Mamma's reply to the
+natural inquiry as to the goodness of the sermon--"My dear, all sermons
+are good"--is something more than a matronly snub, it is the inner
+conviction of woman. She likes, not merely a talk, but a good long talk.
+She likes being abused. She likes being dogmatized over and
+intellectually trampled on. In fact, she has very little belief in the
+intellect. But then she has an immense faith in the heart. She lives in
+a world of affections and sympathies. She has her little tale of passion
+in the past that she tells over to herself in the dusk of the autumn
+evening. She believes that the world at large is moved by those impulses
+of love and dislike that play so great a part in her own. And then, too,
+she has her practical house-keeping side, and likes her religion done up
+in neat little parcels of "heads" and "considerations" and
+"applications," and handed over the counter for immediate use. And so
+while papa quarrels with the rector's forty minutes, his indiscriminate
+censure of a world utterly unknown to him, his declamation against Pusey
+or Colenso, or while Charlie laughs over his rhetoric and his sentiment,
+woman listens a little sadly and wearily, and longs for a golden age
+when husbands will love sermons and men understand clergymen.
+
+It is just from this theological deadlock that we are freed by the
+Pretty Preacher. If the world laughs at the Reverend Olympia Brown, it
+is not because she preaches, but because she prisons herself in a
+pulpit. The sure evidence that woman is to become the preacher of the
+future is that woman is the only preacher men listen to. It is hard to
+imagine any bribe short of the National Debt that would have induced us
+to listen through the dog-days of the last few weeks to the panting
+rhetoric of Mr. Spurgeon. But it is harder to imagine the bribe that
+would have roused us to flight as we lay beneath the plane-tree, and
+listened to the cool ripple of the Pretty Preacher. Of course it is a
+mere phase in the life of woman, a short interval between the dawn and
+the night. There is an exquisite piquancy in the raw, shy epigrams of
+the abrupt little dogmatist who is just out of her teens. Her very want
+of training and science gives a novelty to her hits that makes her
+formidable in the ring. No doubt, too, as we have owned before, there is
+a faint and delicate attraction about the Fading Flower of later years
+that at certain times and places makes it not impossible to sit under
+her.
+
+But the sphere of the Pretty Preacher lies really between these
+extremes. She is not at war with mankind, like the nymph of bread and
+butter; nor does mankind suspect her of subtle designs in her discourse
+as it suspects the elder homilist. Her talk is just as easy and graceful
+and natural as herself, and, moreover, it is always in season. She never
+suffers a serious reflection to interfere with the whirl of town. She
+quite sees the absurdity of a sermon at a five o'clock tea. No one is
+freer from the boredom of a long talk when there is a chance of a boat
+or a ride. But there are moments when one is too hot, or too tired, or
+too lazy for chat or exertion, and such moments are the moments of the
+Pretty Preacher. The first week of the holidays is especially her own.
+There is a physical pleasure in doing, thinking, saying nothing. The
+highest reach of human effort consists in disentangling a skein of silk
+for her, or turning over Doré's hideous sketches for the Idyls. At such
+a moment there is a freshness as of cool waters in the accents of the
+Pretty Preacher. She does not plunge into the deepest themes at once.
+She leads her listener gently on, up the slopes of art or letters or
+politics, to the higher peaks where her purely dogmatic mission begins.
+She is artistic, and she labors to wake the idler at her feet to higher
+views of beauty and art. She points out the tinting of the distant
+hills, she quotes Ruskin, she criticizes Millais. She crushes her
+auditor with a sense of his ignorance, of the base unpoetic view of
+things with which he lounged through the last Academy. What she longs
+for in English art is nobleness of purpose, and we smile bitter scorn in
+the sunshine at the ignoble artist who suffers a thought of his
+butcher's bills to penetrate into the studio. If we could only stretch
+the Royal Academicians beside us on the grass, what a thrill and an
+emotion would run through those elderly gentlemen as they listened to
+the indignation of the Pretty Preacher.
+
+But art shades off into literature, and literature into poetry. We are
+driven into a confession that we enjoy the frivolous articles that those
+horrid papers have devoted to her sex. Is there nothing, the Pretty
+Preacher asks us solemnly, to be said against our own? And the sun is
+hot, and we are speechless. It was shameful of us to put down the
+_Spanish Gipsy_, and let it return unfinished to Mudie's! Never did
+rebuke so fill us with shame at our want of imagination and of poesy.
+But already the Preacher has passed to politics, and is deep in Mr.
+Mill's prophecies of coming events. She is severe on the triviality of
+the House, or the quarrelsome debates of the past Session. She passes by
+our murmured excuse of the weather, and dwells with a temperate
+enthusiasm on the fact that the next will be a social Parliament. Do we
+know anything about the Poor-laws or Education or Trades'-societies?
+Have we subscribed to Mr. Mill's election? We plead poverty, but the
+miserable plea dies away on the contemptuous air.
+
+What our Pretty Preacher would like above all things would be to meet
+that dear Mr. Shaw Lefevre, and thank him for his efforts to protect
+woman. But she knows we are utterly heretical on the subject; she doubts
+very much whether we take in the _Victoria Magazine_. We listen as the
+Tory Mayor of Birmingham listened to Mr. Bright at his banquet. The
+politics are not ours, and the literature is not ours, and the art is
+not ours; but it is pleasant to lie in the sunshine and hear it all so
+charmingly put by the Pretty Preacher. We own that sermons have a little
+to say for themselves; above all, that the impossibility of replying to
+them has its advantages in a case like this. It would be absurd to
+discuss these matters with the Pretty Preacher, but it is delightful to
+look up and see the kindling little face and listen to the sermon.
+
+It is, however, as the theologian proper, as the moralist and divine,
+that we love her most. She arrives at this peak at last. As a rule, she
+chooses the tritest topics, but she gives them a novelty and grace of
+her own. Even Thackeray's old "Vanity of Vanities" wakes into new life
+as she dexterously couples it with the dances of the last season. We nod
+our applause from the grass as she denounces the worthlessness and
+frivolity of the life we lead. If the weather were cool enough we should
+at once vow, as she exhorts us, to be earnest and great and good. Above
+all, let us be noble. The Pretty Preacher is great on self-sacrifice.
+She sent two of her spoilt dresses to those poor people in the East-end,
+after listening to a whole sermon on their sufferings. The congregation
+at her feet feels a twinge of remorse at the thought of his inhumanity,
+and swears he will put down his segars and devote the proceeds to the
+emigration fund. Does he ever read Keble? There is a slight struggle in
+the unconverted mind, and a faint whisper that he now and then reads
+Tupper; but it is too hot to be flippant, or to do more than swear
+eternal allegiance to the _Christian Year_.
+
+The evening deepens, and the sermon deepens with it. It is one of the
+most disgusting points about the divine in the pulpit that he is always
+boasting of himself as a man like as we are, and of the sins he
+denounces as sins of his own. It is the special charm of the fair divine
+above us that she is eminently a being not as we are, but one serene,
+angelic, pure. It is the very vagueness of her condemnation that tells
+on us--the utter ignorance of what is so familiar to us that the
+vagueness betrays, the utter unskillfulness of the hits, and the purity
+that makes them so unskillful. It is only when she descends to
+particulars that we can turn round on the Pretty Preacher--only when a
+burning and impassioned invective against Cider Cellars suddenly softens
+into the plaintive inquiry, "But, oh, Charlie, dear, what _are_ the
+Cider Cellars?" So long as the preacher keeps in the sphere of the
+indefinite, we lie at her mercy, and hear the soft thunders roll
+resistlessly overhead.
+
+But then they are soft thunders. We feel almost encouraged, like Luther,
+to "sin boldly" when the absolving fingers brush lightly over our
+cousinly hair. Our censor, too, has faith in us, in our capacity and
+will for better things, and it is amazingly pleasant to have the
+assurance confirmed by a squeeze from the gentle theologian's hand. And
+so night comes down, and preacher and penitent stroll pleasantly home
+together, and mamma wonders where both can have been; and the Pretty
+Preacher lays her head on her pillow with the sweet satisfaction that
+her mission is accomplished, and that a reprobate soul--the soul, too,
+of such a gentlemanly and agreeable reprobate--is won.
+
+
+
+
+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 as if living under laws made specially for them
+alone. 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; and, besides, even arbitrary men meet with opposition in
+certain directions, and the most self-contented social autocrat knows
+that his humblest adherents criticise 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 is to be exempt from misfortune and
+annoyances; as if his friends must never die, his youth never fade, his
+circumstances run always smoothly, protected by the care of others from
+all untoward hitch; and as if time and tide, which wait for no one else,
+are to be 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, pet and 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 flowing hair and a turn for poetry,
+full of highflown sentiment, and morbidly excited sympathies; a man
+almost as much woman as man, who has no backbone of ambition in him, but
+who puts his whole life into love, just as women do, and who becomes at
+last emphatically not worth his salt.
+
+Bad as it is for a man to be _kowtowed_ 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 at certain extent it
+is 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 wholly to ruining their
+young charge 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 compensation, 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 is 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. One characteristic of the spoilt woman is
+her impatience 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 the lady-paramount that she cannot understand it if any one
+steps in to share her honors and divide her throne.
+
+To praise the beauty of any other woman, to find her charming, or 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 into 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 it comes to her to be
+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, 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 perfect 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 or two 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 attended to; and it is not
+for love--and the amiable if weak pleasure of attracting the notice of
+the beloved--it is just for the vanity of being a little somebody for
+the moment, and of playing off the small regality involved in the
+procedure. She would not return the attention.
+
+Unlike the Eastern women, who wait on their lords, hand and foot, and
+who place their highest honor 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 not of the _demi-monde_ by station, but 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 on burning ploughshares is the only fit analogy. A length of
+lace unstarched, a ribbon unsewed, a flower set awry, anything that
+crumples only 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 beset with thorns.
+
+If a dove was 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 criticise, doubt, or contradict, is
+an intellectual Tower of Pisa under the shadow of which it is not
+pleasant to live.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+Words in italics in the original are surrounded by _underscores_.
+
+The following words appear with and without hyphens. They have been left
+as in the original.
+
+     ball-room         ballroom
+     business-like     businesslike
+     hearth-rug        hearthrug
+     house-keeper      housekeeper
+     house-keeping     housekeeping
+     man-like          manlike
+     now-a-days        nowadays
+     over-head         overhead
+
+Variations in spelling have been left as in the original. Examples
+include the following:
+
+     center/centre
+     learned/learnt
+     spoiled/spoilt
+
+The following corrections have been made to the text:
+
+     Page xi: INTRODUCTION, 13[original has 5]
+
+     Page 48: slink away from a bantam[original has bantum] hen
+
+     Page 67: you[original has vou] go in for this sort
+
+     Page 129: sheer force of genius[original has genuis]
+
+     Page 161: some out-of-the-way[original has out-of-the way]
+     corner
+
+     Page 220: exhausts itself in a declaration[original has
+     delaration] of revolt
+
+     Page 269: ignorant of contemporary[original is split across
+     lines after con but hyphen is missing] fashions
+
+     Page 303: following the [original has the the] same
+     extravagance
+
+     Page 332: torture it until it[original has is] has about as
+     much life
+
+The following words use an oe ligature in the original:
+
+     manoeuvred
+     outmanoeuvring
+     Oedipus
+     Phoenician
+
+In the phrase, "white-armed, large-limbed Here", the original has
+macrons over both of the vowels in "Here".
+
+Ellipses match the original.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Modern Women and What is Said of Them, by Anonymous
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+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Modern Women and What is Said of Them, by Lucia Gilbert Calhoun.
+    </title>
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Modern Women and What is Said of Them, by Anonymous
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Modern Women and What is Said of Them
+       A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868)
+
+Author: Anonymous
+
+Commentator: Lucia Gilbert Calhoun
+
+Release Date: October 18, 2008 [EBook #26948]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN WOMEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Lisa Reigel, and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net (This file was made using scans of
+public domain works from the University of Michigan Digital
+Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class = "notebox"><p>Transcriber's Notes:</p>
+
+<p>Click on the page number to see an image of the page.</p>
+
+<p>More notes <a href="#TN">follow</a> the text.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="biggap"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii"></a>[<a href="./images/vii.png">vii</a>]</span></p>
+<h1>MODERN WOMEN</h1>
+
+<p class="p3">AND</p>
+
+<h2>WHAT IS SAID OF THEM</h2>
+
+<p class="gap">&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="p3">A REPRINT OF</p>
+
+<p class="p3">A SERIES OF ARTICLES IN THE</p>
+
+<p class="p2">SATURDAY REVIEW</p>
+
+<p class="smallgap">&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="p3">WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY</p>
+
+<h2><span class="smcap">Mrs. LUCIA GILBERT CALHOUN</span></h2>
+
+<p class="gap">&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>NEW YORK</h4>
+<h3><i>J. S. REDFIELD, PUBLISHER</i></h3>
+<h4>140 FULTON STREET</h4>
+<h4>1868</h4>
+
+
+<p class="gap"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii"></a>[<a href="./images/viii.png">viii</a>]</span></p>
+<p class="center">Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by<br />
+<br />
+J. S. REDFIELD,<br />
+<br />
+In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern<br />
+District of New York.<br /></p>
+
+<p class="gap">&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Edward O. Jenkins</span>,<br />
+<i>PRINTER AND STEREOTYPER</i>,<br />
+No. 20 North William St.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix"></a>[<a href="./images/ix.png">ix</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>ADVERTISEMENT.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The following papers on Woman were originally published in the columns
+of the London <span class="smcap">Saturday Review</span>. Some of them have already been reprinted
+in the literary and daily journals of this country, and they have
+excited no little discussion and comment among readers of both sexes.</p>
+
+<p>Whether agreeing or not with the writer, it is impossible not to concede
+the eminent ability with which the various subjects are handled. No
+series of essays has appeared in the English language for many years
+which has been so extensively reprinted and so generally read.</p>
+
+<p>The authorship of these papers has been attributed to different
+individuals, male and female; but it is more than probable that the
+writers whose names have been mentioned in this connection are precisely
+those who have had nothing whatever to do with them. It is not unlikely
+that, in due time, the publisher of this volume may be in possession of
+authentic information on this head, and that the name of the author may
+then appear on the title-page.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x"></a>[<a href="./images/x.png">x</a>]</span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi"></a>[<a href="./images/xi.png">xi</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="table">
+<table summary="Table of Contents" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Introduction,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_13">13</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">I.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">The Girl of the Period,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_25">25</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">II.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Foolish Virgins,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_34">34</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">III.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Little Women,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_43">43</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">IV.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Pinchbeck,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_52">52</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">V.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Pushing Women,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_61">61</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">VI.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Feminine Affectations,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_73">73</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">VII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Ideal Women,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_83">83</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">VIII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Woman and the World,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">IX.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Unequal Marriages,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_101">101</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">X.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Husband-Hunting,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_109">109</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XI.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Perils of "Paying Attention,"</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Women's Heroines,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_128">128</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XIII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Interference,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XIV.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Plain Girls,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_148">148</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XV.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">A Word for Female Vanity,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_157">157</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XVI.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">The Abuse of Match-Making,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_167">167</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XVII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Feminine Influence,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_177">177</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XVIII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Pigeons,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_188">188</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XIX.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Ambitious Wives,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_198">198</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XX.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Platonic Woman,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXI.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Man and his Master,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_215">215</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">The Goose and the Gander,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_225">225</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii"></a>[<a href="./images/xii.png">xii</a>]</span>XXIII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Engagements,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXIV.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Woman in Orders,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXV.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Woman and her Critics,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_253">253</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXVI.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc" style="padding-right: 5em;">Mistress and Maid, on Dress and Undress,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_262">262</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXVII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">&AElig;sthetic Woman,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_272">272</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXVIII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">What is Woman's Work?</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_281">281</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXIX.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Papal Woman,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_291">291</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXX.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Modern Mothers,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_300">300</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXI.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Priesthood of Woman,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_309">309</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">The Future of Woman,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_319">319</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXIII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Costume and its Morals,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_329">329</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXIV.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">The Fading Flower,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_339">339</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXV.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">La Femme Pass&eacute;e,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_347">347</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXVI.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Pretty Preachers,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_355">355</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXVII.&mdash;</td>
+  <td class="tdleftsc">Spoilt Women,</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_364">364</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a>[<a href="./images/13.png">13</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>INTRODUCTION.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The "Woman Question" will not be put to silence. It demands an answer of
+Western legislators. It besets college faculties. It pursues veteran
+politicians to the fastnesses of so-called National Conventions. Under
+the sacred sounding-boards of New England pulpits has its voice been
+heard, and its unexpected ally, the London <span class="smcap">Saturday Review</span>, introduces
+it to the good society of English drawing-rooms. That this introduction
+comes in the form of diatribe and denunciation is a matter of the least
+moment. Judgment will finally rest, not on the conclusions of the
+special pleader, but on the strength of the case of the accused.</p>
+
+<p>Something, clearly, is wrong with fashionable women. They accept the
+thinnest gilt, the poorest pinchbeck, for gold. They care more for a
+dreary social pre-eminence than for home and children. They find in
+extravagance of living and a vulgar costliness of dress their only
+expression of a vague <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a>[<a href="./images/14.png">14</a>]</span>desire for the beauty and elegance of life. Is
+it, therefore, to be inferred that the race of noble women is dying out?
+St. Paul was hardly less severe than the London <span class="smcap">Saturday</span>, if less
+explicit, in his condemnation of the fashionable women of his day, yet
+we look upon that day as heroic. Certainly neither London nor New York
+can rival the luxury of a rich Roman matron, yet it was not the luxury
+of her women which destroyed the empire, and Brutus's Portia was quite
+as truly a representative woman as the superb Messalina. John Knox
+thought that things were as bad as they could possibly be when he
+thundered at vice in high places; and if there had been a John Knox in
+the court of Charles the Second, he would have sighed for a return of
+the innocent days of his great-grandfather.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, that hope which springs eternal suggests that the
+fashionable women of the reign of Victoria, and of our seventeenth
+President, are not essentially more discouraging than all the
+generations of the thoughtless fair who danced idly down forgotten
+pasts. Nay, we may even hope that they are better. If they will not
+actually think, yet the fatal contagion of the newspaper and the modern
+novel communicates to them an intellectual irritation <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a>[<a href="./images/15.png">15</a>]</span>which might
+almost stand for a mental process. If they have not ideas, they have
+notions of things, and however inexact and absurd these may be, they are
+better than emptiness.</p>
+
+<p>"Worse, decidedly worse," says our implacable critic; "when women were
+content with looking pretty before marriage, and with good housekeeping
+after, they were uninteresting certainly, but they were respectable. Now
+they dabble in all things; are weakly &aelig;sthetic, weakly scientific,
+weakly controversial, and wholly prosy, and contemptible." Dabbling is
+pitiful, certainly, and weakness has few allies, but let us do justice
+even to the weak dabblers. &AElig;sthetic, or scientific, or controversial
+training has but recently been made possible to women. Their previous
+range of study had been very narrow. It is not strange that the least
+attainments should seem to them very profound and satisfactory, and the
+most manifest deductions pass for original conclusions. It is natural
+that their undisciplined faculties should grapple feebly with
+difficulties, and be quite unequal to argument. This is no reason for
+flinging the baffling volumes at their heads; better so educate their
+heads that the volumes shall no longer baffle.</p>
+
+<p>Scolded because they have not an idea beyond dress, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a>[<a href="./images/16.png">16</a>]</span>laughed at when
+they try to think of something better, a word may certainly be said for
+the good temper and the patience even of the fashionable women, who
+would be wiser if they could.</p>
+
+<p>The fault is, we are assured, that these women take up books only to
+enhance their matrimonial value, and with no thought of the worth of
+study. Let us be just. What business or the professions are to most men,
+marriage is to most women. Men qualify themselves, if they can, for that
+competitive examination which is always going on, and which insures
+clients to the best lawyers, and business to the best merchant, and
+parishes to the best preacher. Women, compelled to wait at home for the
+wooing which changes their destiny, qualify themselves with attractions
+for that competitive examination which all marriageable young women feel
+that they undergo from every marriageable young man. Each has an eye to
+business. One does not feel that the motive in the one case is any
+higher than in the other.</p>
+
+<p>It is very bad, of course, that marriage should be a matter of business.
+It is, perhaps, the most tragic of all perversions. But, evidently, the
+evil is not to be abated by jeremiads, nor by lectures to young women,
+no, nor even by brilliant editorials. So long as women believe that
+inglorious ease is better than <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a>[<a href="./images/17.png">17</a>]</span>work, so long as they are taught that
+they are born to be the gentle dependents of a stronger being, so long
+as courage and capacity are held to be "strong-minded," so long as the
+range of employments for women is narrow, and the standard of wages
+lower than men's, so long they will seek in marriage a home, a larger
+liberty of action, an establishment, a servant who shall supply them
+with money and insure them ease without effort of their own.</p>
+
+<p>Men take the business opening which seems most congenial and most
+profitable. Women do the same thing, and their choice naturally falls
+upon marriage as altogether the most promising speculation of their very
+small list. The remedy seems to be to give women as thorough mental
+training as men receive, to make their training tend as directly to the
+business of earning their bread and their pretty feminine adornments,
+and for the same work to pay them the same wages. If it be objected that
+fashionable women will not work, let it be answered that work itself
+would be fashionable if it were held to be a dignity, and not a
+drudgery, and that the really fine and thoughtful leaders of society
+could easily establish the new order of things. In an aristocratic
+country, where labor is the badge of caste, it would be difficult to
+make it honorable. In a democracy like our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a>[<a href="./images/18.png">18</a>]</span>own, it is the most
+contemptible snobbishness which frowns on the honest earning of money.</p>
+
+<p>The accusation of prodigal and senseless expenditure in dress must stand
+unrefuted. Sums which would adorn our cities with pleasure-gardens, with
+libraries, with galleries of art, are spent on perishable gauds that
+have not even beauty to commend them. Charities might be founded, lives
+be enriched with travel, all lands laid under contribution with the
+money that every year flows into Stewart's drawers, and the strong-boxes
+of fashionable dress-makers. But the jewelled prodigals who spend it are
+not more selfish, perhaps, than we plain folks who carp.</p>
+
+<p>Again, it is a mistake. They have the money. They mean to secure all the
+pleasure that money can buy. They have that feminine sensuousness which
+delights in color, and odor, and richness of fabric. Their sense of
+beauty is untaught. A little lower in the scale of civilization they
+would pierce their noses, and dye their finger-nails, and wear strings
+of glass beads. A little higher, they would sacrifice the splendid shawl
+to a rare marble, banish the chromo-lithograph, and turn the solitaire
+ear-drops into a lovely picture, and build a conservatory with the price
+of lace flounces. A little higher still, and we might have model
+lodging-houses, and foundling <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a>[<a href="./images/19.png">19</a>]</span>hospitals, and music in the squares given
+us by kindly women who had saved the money from milliner, and jeweller,
+and silk-mercer.</p>
+
+<p>But standing just where they are, clothes seem to these same undeveloped
+women the best things money can buy; and a lack of culture confuses them
+as to the attributes of clothes. Just now our fashionable women are
+bitterly reprehended for copying the dress of the "Anonymas," who
+establish the very pronounced fashions of Paris. Half of them do not
+know what model they have taken. The other half accept the various and
+tasteless costumes, not because they are devised by "Anonyma," but
+because they are striking. There is something in the commonplaceness of
+fashionable life which smothers all originality of thought, of action,
+even of device in costume; and the women who give most time and money to
+dress, to whom one would look for perfection in that mixed art, are
+almost invariably the women who are exact reproductions of their
+neighbors in this regard, as in their house-furnishing, their equipages,
+and their manners.</p>
+
+<p>Upon these splendidly monotonous fine ladies flashes the vision of
+"Anonyma," with her meretricious beauty, and her daring toilettes.
+Amenable to no social Mrs. Grundy, her love of dress develops <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a>[<a href="./images/20.png">20</a>]</span>itself in
+bold contrasts of color, in bizarre and showy ornaments, in picturesque,
+and often in grotesque and tawdry effects. But whatever the details, the
+whole is always striking. Our women longing for the new, accept the
+absurd; desiring the picturesque, take the bizarre, and eager for the
+elegant, content themselves with the costly.</p>
+
+<p>Nor does the fact that our present fashionable evening costume is
+immodest, of necessity impugn the modesty of the women who wear it. That
+they are wanting in fineness of perception must be admitted. But women
+of fashion accept without question the dictum of their modistes. La
+Belle Hamilton, the famous beauty of the reign of Charles the Second, so
+delicately modest and pure that she passed unbreathed upon by scandal
+through that most dissolute court, is painted in a costume that the
+fastest of New York belles would not venture to wear at the most
+fashionable of receptions. The gracious and self-sacrificing and womanly
+women of our revolution, wore dresses cut lower than those of their
+great-grand-daughters, as any portrait-gallery will show. The dress is
+indefensible, but let us not be too ready to condemn the wearer for
+worse sins than thoughtlessness and vanity.</p>
+
+<p>One doubts if there is a single Becky Sharp the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a>[<a href="./images/21.png">21</a>]</span>less, (poor Becky!)
+since Thackeray gave such terrible immortality to their great prototype.
+The satirist is not the reformer. The satirized do not see themselves in
+the exaggerated type. They go their way, and thank God that they are not
+as these others. The critic of the London <span class="smcap">Saturday</span>, beginning, perhaps,
+with the intention of telling sad and sober truth about a class, has
+ended with a list of the follies and faults of individuals, and these
+are set down with the keen and unconvincing clearness of the satirist.</p>
+
+<p>It is a good thing indeed, that any aspect of the "woman question"
+should claim place, week after week, in a leading English journal. It is
+a good thing that it has been thought wise to reprint these essays here.
+All this talk about the wrong ways of women suggests that there is a
+right way, as yet very much involved in the dust of discussion and the
+fogs of speculation. All these accusations against her folly imply a
+proportionate tribute to her possible wisdom, if once she can get a fair
+chance to be wise.</p>
+
+<p>What the reviewer urges against the effect of fashionable life on the
+intellect, cannot be gainsayed. But in America, at least, the injury to
+the young men is greater apparently than to the young women. At any
+evening party in New York, at any "Hop" <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a>[<a href="./images/22.png">22</a>]</span>in Newport or Saratoga, the
+faces of the men are of a lower type, their talk is more inane, their
+manners are more vulgar. The girls are empty enough, heaven knows! but
+they seem capable of better things, most of them. And they are not so
+wholly spoiled in character. I have found very fashionable girls capable
+of large sacrifices for love, or kindred, or obedience to some divine
+voice. This proves that they have only to be taught that there is
+something better than being very fashionable, to take it thankfully. But
+the men seemed sordid and selfish, and grown worldly-wise before their
+time.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it might make us both more just and more generous to remember that
+during our time of peril as a nation, these very ranks of purposeless
+men furnished us soldiers and money, and a cheerful faith in the cause,
+just as these very legions of idle women gave us workers and nurses.</p>
+
+<p>There is this cheer for American readers of these pages: What we have
+been told is our national sin of extravagance, the too pronounced
+character of our social life, the frivolity and ignorance of our women,
+the lack of a universal and high-toned society, we find not to be inborn
+defects peculiar to our system of government, and hopeless of change,
+but vices, also, of an old and cultivated and dignified nation.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a>[<a href="./images/23.png">23</a>]</span>
+A cheerful optimist may well believe that we are in a transition state;
+that women, impatient of the old life which was without thought and
+culture and motive, in the blind struggle to something better have
+fallen for the time on something worse; that with the movement of the
+age toward mutual helpfulness, man to man, women will move not less
+steadily, if more slowly, and come gradually into truer relations with
+each other and with men. It will not hurt woman to be criticised. She
+has too long been assured of her angelhood, and denied her womanhood. It
+will not help her very greatly to be criticised as if she were being
+tomahawked. If they who come to scoff would but remain to teach! There
+has been much ungentle judgment of men by women, of women by men.
+Thoreau said, "Man is continually saying to Woman, 'Why are you not more
+wise?' Woman is continually saying to Man, 'Why are you not more
+loving?' Unless each is both wise and loving there can be no real
+growth."</p>
+
+<p class="author">L. G. C.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a>[<a href="./images/24.png">24</a>]</span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a>[<a href="./images/25.png">25</a>]</span></p>
+<h3>THE</h3>
+
+<h1>MODERN WOMEN.</h1>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Time was when the stereotyped phrase, "a fair young English girl," meant
+the ideal of womanhood; to us, at least, of home birth and breeding. It
+meant a creature generous, capable, and modest; something franker than a
+Frenchwoman, more to be trusted than an Italian, as brave as an
+American, but more refined, as domestic as a German and more graceful.
+It meant a girl who could be trusted alone if need be, because of the
+innate purity and dignity of her nature, but who was neither bold in
+bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be
+her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival; one who would
+consider their interests identical, and not hold him as just so much
+fair game for spoil; who would make his house his true home and place of
+rest, not a mere passage-place for vanity and ostentation to go through;
+a tender mother, an industrious house-keeper, a judicious mistress. We
+prided ourselves as a nation on our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a>[<a href="./images/26.png">26</a>]</span>women. We thought we had the pick
+of creation in this fair young English girl of ours, and envied no other
+men their own.</p>
+
+<p>We admired the languid grace and subtle fire of the South; the docility
+and affectionateness of the East seemed to us sweet and simple and
+restful; the vivacious sparkle of the trim and sprightly Parisienne was
+a pleasant little excitement when we met with it in its own domain; but
+our allegiance never wandered from our brown-haired girls at home, and
+our hearts were less vagrant than our fancies. This was in the old time,
+and when English girls were content to be what God and nature had made
+them. Of late years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the
+world a race of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal as if we
+had created another nation altogether. The girl of the period, and the
+fair young English girl of the past, have nothing in common save
+ancestry and their mother-tongue: and even of this last the modern
+version makes almost a new language through the copious additions it has
+received from the current slang of the day.</p>
+
+<p>The girl of the period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her
+face, as the first articles of her personal religion; whose sole idea of
+life is plenty of fun and luxury; and whose dress is the object of such
+thought and intellect as she possesses. Her main endeavor in this is to
+outvie her neighbors in the extravagance of fashion. No matter whether,
+as in the time of crinolines, she sacrificed decency, or, as now in the
+time of trains, she sacrifices cleanliness; no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a>[<a href="./images/27.png">27</a>]</span>matter either, whether
+she makes herself a nuisance and an inconvenience to every one she
+meets.</p>
+
+<p>The girl of the period has done away with such moral muffishness as
+consideration for others, or regard for counsel and rebuke. It was all
+very well in old-fashioned times, when fathers and mothers had some
+authority and were treated with respect, to be tutored and made to obey,
+but she is far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in mid-career by
+these slow old morals; and as she dresses to please herself, she does
+not care if she displeases every one else. Nothing is too extraordinary
+and nothing too exaggerated for her vitiated taste; and things which in
+themselves would be useful reforms if let alone become monstrosities
+worse than those which they have displaced so soon as she begins to
+manipulate and improve. If a sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the
+mud, she raises hers midway to her knee. If the absurd structure of wire
+and buckram, once called a bonnet, is modified to something that shall
+protect the wearer's face without putting out the eyes of her companion,
+she cuts hers down to four straws and a rosebud, or a tag of lace and a
+bunch of glass beads.</p>
+
+<p>If there is a reaction against an excess of Rowland's Macassar, and hair
+shiny and sticky with grease is thought less nice than if left clean and
+healthy crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks hers out on end like
+certain savages in Africa, or lets it wander down her back like Madge
+Wildfire's, and thinks herself all the more beautiful the nearer she
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a>[<a href="./images/28.png">28</a>]</span>approaches in look to a maniac or a negress. With purity of taste she
+has lost also that far more precious purity and delicacy of perception
+which sometimes mean more than appears on the surface. What the
+<i>demi-monde</i> does in its frantic efforts to excite attention, she also
+does in imitation. If some fashionable <i>d&eacute;vergond&eacute;e en evidence</i> is
+reported to have come out with her dress below her shoulder-blades, and
+a gold strap for all the sleeve thought necessary, the girl of the
+period follows suit next day; and then wonders that men sometimes
+mistake her for her prototype, or that mothers of girls not quite so far
+gone as herself refuse her as a companion for their daughters. She has
+blunted the fine edges of feeling so much that she cannot understand why
+she should be condemned for an imitation of form which does not include
+imitation of fact; she cannot be made to see that modesty of appearance
+and virtue ought to be inseparable, and that no good girl can afford to
+appear bad, under penalty of receiving the contempt awarded to the bad.</p>
+
+<p>This imitation of the <i>demi-monde</i> in dress leads to something in manner
+and feeling, not quite so pronounced, perhaps, but far too like to be
+honorable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to slang,
+bold talk, and fastness; to the love of pleasure and indifference to
+duty; to the desire of money before either love or happiness; to
+uselessness at home, dissatisfaction with the monotony of ordinary life,
+and horror of all useful work; in a word, to the worst forms of luxury
+and selfishness, to the most <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a>[<a href="./images/29.png">29</a>]</span>fatal effects arising from want of high
+principle and absence of tender feeling.</p>
+
+<p>The girl of the period envies the queens of the <i>demi-monde</i> far more
+than she abhors them. She sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously
+appointed, and she knows them to be flattered, f&ecirc;ted, and courted with a
+certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only the admiration
+while she ignores the disdain. They have all for which her soul is
+hungering, and she never stops to reflect at what a price they have
+bought their gains, and what fearful moral penalties they pay for their
+sensuous pleasures. She sees only the coarse gilding on the base token,
+and shuts her eyes to the hideous figure in the midst, and the foul
+legend written around the edge.</p>
+
+<p>It is this envy of the pleasures, and indifference to the sins, of these
+women of the <i>demi-monde</i> which is doing such infinite mischief to the
+modern girl. They brush too closely by each other, if not in actual
+deeds, yet in aims and feelings; for the luxury which is bought by vice
+with the one is the thing of all in life most passionately desired by
+the other, though she is not yet prepared to pay quite the same price.
+Unfortunately, she has already paid too much, all, indeed, that once
+gave her distinctive national character. No one can say of the modern
+English girl that she is tender, loving, retiring, or domestic. The old
+fault so often found by keen-sighted Frenchwomen, that, she was so
+fatally <i>romanesque</i>, so prone to sacrifice appearances and social
+advantages for love, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a>[<a href="./images/30.png">30</a>]</span>will never be set down to the girl of the period.
+Love, indeed, is the last thing she thinks of, and the least of the
+dangers besetting her. Love in a cottage, that seductive dream which
+used to vex the heart and disturb the calculations of prudent mothers,
+is now a myth of past ages. The legal barter of herself for so much
+money, representing so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure; that is
+her idea of marriage; the only idea worth entertaining.</p>
+
+<p>For all seriousness of thought respecting the duties or the consequences
+of marriage, she has not a trace. If children come, they find but a
+stepmother's cold welcome from her; and if her husband thinks that he
+has married anything that is to belong to him&mdash;a <i>tacens et placens
+uxor</i> pledged to make him happy&mdash;the sooner he wakes from his
+hallucination and understands that he has simply married some one who
+will condescend to spend his money on herself, and who will shelter her
+indiscretions behind the shield of his name, the less severe will be his
+disappointment. She has married his house, his carriage, his balance at
+the banker's, his title; and he himself is just the inevitable condition
+clogging the wheels of her fortune; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated
+with more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the
+old-fashioned sort, not girls of the period <i>pur sang</i>, that marry for
+love, or put the husband before the banker.</p>
+
+<p>But she does not marry easily. Men are afraid of her; and with reason.
+They may amuse themselves with her for an evening, but they do not take
+her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a>[<a href="./images/31.png">31</a>]</span>readily for life. Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a
+poor copy of the real thing; and the real thing is far more amusing than
+the copy, because it is real. Men can get that whenever they like; and
+when they go into their mother's drawing-rooms, to see their sisters and
+their sisters' friends, they want something of quite different flavor.
+<i>Toujours perdrix</i> is bad providing all the world over; but a continual
+weak imitation of <i>toujours perdrix</i> is worse. If we must have only one
+kind of thing, let us have it genuine; and the queens of St. John's Wood
+in their unblushing honesty, rather than their imitators and
+make-believes in Bayswater and Belgravia. For, at whatever cost of
+shocked self-love or pained modesty it may be, it cannot be too plainly
+told to the modern English girl that the net result of her present
+manner of life is to assimilate her as nearly as possible to a class of
+women whom we must not call by their proper&mdash;or improper&mdash;name. And we
+are willing to believe that she has still some modesty of soul left
+hidden under all this effrontery of fashion, and that, if she could be
+made to see herself as she appears to the eyes of men, she would mend
+her ways before too late.</p>
+
+<p>It is terribly significant of the present state of things when men are
+free to write as they do of the women of their own nation. Every word of
+censure flung against them is two-edged, and wounds those who condemn as
+much as those who are condemned; for surely it need hardly be said that
+men hold nothing so dear as the honor of their women, and that no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a>[<a href="./images/32.png">32</a>]</span>one
+living would willingly lower the repute of his mother or his sisters. It
+is only when these have placed themselves beyond the pale of masculine
+respect that such things could be written as are written now; when they
+become again what they were once they will gather round them the love
+and homage and chivalrous devotion which were then an Englishwoman's
+natural inheritance. The marvel, in the present fashion of life among
+women, is how it holds its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men.
+It used to be an old-time notion that the sexes were made for each
+other, and that it was only natural for them to please each other, and
+to set themselves out for that end. But the girl of the period does not
+please men. She pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how
+little she does that, the class of women she has taken as her models of
+itself testifies.</p>
+
+<p>All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and genuine girl
+of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties,
+to this loud and rampant modernization, with her false red hair and
+painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and by preference
+leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. She thinks she is piquant
+and exciting when she thus makes herself the bad copy of a worse
+original; and she will not see that though men laugh with her they do
+not respect her, though they flirt with her they do not marry her; she
+will not believe that she is not the kind of thing they want, and that
+she is acting against nature and her own interests when she disregards
+their advice and offends their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a>[<a href="./images/33.png">33</a>]</span>taste. We do not see how she makes out
+her account, viewing her life from any side; but all we can do is to
+wait patiently until the national madness has passed, and our women have
+come back again to the old English ideal, once the most beautiful, the
+most modest, the most essentially womanly in the world.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a>[<a href="./images/34.png">34</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>FOOLISH VIRGINS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The heroines of the London season&mdash;the fillies, we mean, who have been
+entered for the great matrimonial stakes, and have been mentioned in the
+betting&mdash;have by this time exchanged the fast pleasures of the town for
+the vapid pastimes of the country. We do not of course concern ourselves
+with those poor simple girls who only repeat the lives and morals of
+old-fashioned English homes, and who are too respectable and too modest
+to be pointed at as the girls of the season. We speak of the fast
+sisterhood only. After three months of egregious dissipation they enter
+duly upon the next stage of their regular yearly alternations. Three
+months of headlong folly are succeeded by three months of deadly
+<i>ennui</i>. Action and reaction are always equal. The pains and weariness
+of moral crapulousness arise in nice proportion to the passion of the
+debauch. It is a dismal hour when we look on the withered leaves of last
+night's garland.</p>
+
+<p>The lovely and unlovely beings who are now living depressed days far
+from Belgravia and the Row have, it is true, but joyless orgies to look
+back upon. Their pleasures gave but a pinchbeck joviality after all,
+were but a thin lacker spread over mercenary cares and heart-aching
+jealousies&mdash;not the jealousies <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a>[<a href="./images/35.png">35</a>]</span>of passion, but the nipping vulgar
+vexation with which a shopkeeper trembles lest a customer should go to
+his rival over the way. Still there was excitement&mdash;the excitement of
+outdoing a rival in shamelessness of apparel, in reckless abandonment of
+manner, in the unblushing tolerance of impudent speech, in all the other
+elements of ignoble casino-emulation. Above all, there was the tickling
+excitement of knowing that all this was in some sort clandestine; that
+ostensibly, and on the surface, things looked as if they were all
+exhibiting human nature at its stateliest, most dignified, and most
+refined pitch. The consciousness that the thin surface only conceals
+some of the worst elements of character in full force and activity must
+give a pleasantly stinging sensation to an acutely cynical woman.
+However, this is all over for a time.</p>
+
+<p>For a time the half-dressed young M&aelig;nads of the season will be found
+clothed and in their right minds. And what sort of a right mind is it?
+We know the kind of preparation which they have had for the business of
+the season&mdash;for flirting, husband-hunting, waltzing, dressing so as to
+escape the regulations of the police, and the rest. For this their
+training has been perfect. But wise men agree that education should
+comprehend training for all the parts of life equally&mdash;for pleasure not
+less than for business, for hours of relaxation as well as for hours of
+strain and pressure, for leisure just as much as for active occupation.
+Education is supposed to arm us at every point. Nobody in this world was
+ever perfectly educated. Everybody <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a>[<a href="./images/36.png">36</a>]</span>has at least one side on which he is
+weak&mdash;one quarter where temptations are either not irresistible, or else
+are not recognised as alluring to what is wrong. But we all know that
+training, though never perfect, can make the difference between a
+decently right and happy life and a bad, corrupt half-life or no life.
+What does training do for the nimble-footed young beauties of the London
+ball-room? It makes them nimble-footed, we admit. And what else?</p>
+
+<p>The root-idea of the training of girls of the uppermost class in this
+country is perhaps the most absolutely shameless that ever existed
+anywhere out of Circassia or Georgia. It puts clean out of sight the
+notion that women are rational beings as well as animals, or that they
+are destined to be the companions of men who are, or ought to be, also
+something more than animals. It takes the mind into account only as an
+occasionally useful accident of body. The mind ought to be developed a
+little, and in such a way as to make the body more piquant and
+attractive. Like the candle inside a Chinese lantern, it may serve to
+light up and show to advantage the pretty devices outside. But the
+outside is the important thing, and the inside only incidental.
+Insipidity of mind is perhaps a trifle objectionable, because there are
+a few young men of property who dislike insipidity, and who therefore
+might be lost from the toils in consequence. It is a crotchet and an
+eccentricity in a man to desire a wife with a bright mind, but since
+there are such persons, it is just as well to pay a slight attention to
+the mind in odd moments when <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a>[<a href="./images/37.png">37</a>]</span>one is not engaged upon the more urgent
+business of the body. You don't know what may happen, and it is possible
+that the most eligible <i>parti</i> of a season may dislike the idea of
+taking a female idiot to wife. Still it would be absurd to change the
+entire system of up-bringing for our girls merely because here and there
+a man has a distaste for a fool.</p>
+
+<p>The majority of men are incapable of gauging power of intellect and
+fineness of character. But the veriest blockhead and simpleton who ever
+lounged in a doorway or lisped in Pall Mall can tell a fine woman when
+he sees her, and is probably able to find pleasure and hope in the
+spectacle. It is these blockheads and simpletons who thus set the mode.
+They fix the standard of fashionable female education. Education, or the
+astounding modern conception of it, means preparation of girls for the
+marriage market. If a girl does not get well married, it were better for
+her and for her mother also if she had never been born, or had been cast
+with a millstone round her neck into the sea. Whom she marries&mdash;whether
+a man old enough to be her father, whether a pattern of imbecility,
+whether a man of a notoriously debauched character&mdash;this matters not a
+jot. Only let him have money. This being the conception of marriage, and
+marriage being the aim of all sagacious up-bringing, as most men
+unhappily are more surely taken on their animal than on their rational
+side, it is perfectly natural that you should strive to bring up a
+worthy family of attractive young animals. And let us pause upon this.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a>[<a href="./images/38.png">38</a>]</span>
+If the idea which, even at its best, would be so deplorably imperfect,
+were rationally carried out, still it would not be so absolutely
+pestilent and debasing as it is. Physical education, rightly practiced,
+is a fine and indispensable process in right living. If the system had
+for its end the rearing of really robust and healthy creatures, it would
+mean something. On the contrary, however, anybody who makes a tour
+through fashionable rooms in the season may see that, in a vast quantity
+of cases, the heroines of the night are just as sorrily off in bodily
+stamina as they are for intellectual ideas and interests. Here we again
+encounter the fundamental blunder, that it is only the outside about
+which we need concern ourselves. Let a woman be well dressed (or
+judiciously undressed), have bright eyes, a whitish skin, rounded
+outlines, and that suffices. All this a wise English mother will
+certainly secure, just as a wise Chinese woman will take care to have
+tiny feet, plucked eyebrows, and black finger-nails.</p>
+
+<p>If you go into a nursery you will see the process already at work. The
+little girl, who would fain exercise her young limbs by manifold rude
+sprawlings and rushing hither and thither, and single combats with her
+brothers, is tricked out in ribbons and gay frocks, and bid sit still in
+solemn decorum. With every year of her growth this principle of
+attention to outside trickeries and fineries is more rigidly pursued.
+Less and less every year are the nerves and muscles, the restless
+activities of arms and legs, exercised and made to purvey new vigor to
+the life. The blood is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a>[<a href="./images/39.png">39</a>]</span>allowed to grow stagnant. The life of the woman,
+even as mere animal, becomes poor and morbid and artificial. By dint of
+much attention and many devices, the outside of the body is maintained
+comely in the eyes of people whose notions of comeliness are thoroughly
+artificial and sophisticated. But how can there be any health with high
+eating, little exercise, above all, with the mind left absolutely vacant
+of all interests? The Belgravian mother does not even understand the
+miserable trade she has chosen. She is as poor a physical trainer as she
+is poor morally and intellectually.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that in a human being, even from the physical point of
+view, it is rather a dangerous thing to ignore the intellect and the
+emotions. Nature resents being ignored. If you do not cultivate her, she
+will assuredly avenge herself. If you do not get wheat out of your piece
+of ground, she will abundantly give you tares. And there can be no other
+rule expressly invented for the benefit of fashionable young women.
+Their moral nature, if nobody ever taught them to keep an eager eye upon
+it, is soon overgrown, either with flaunting poison plants, or at best
+with dull gray moss. The parent dreams that the daughter's mind is all
+swept and garnished. Lo, there are seven or any other number of devils
+that have entered in and taken possession, more or less permanently. The
+human creature who has never been taught to take an interest in what is
+right and wholesome will, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, take an
+interest in what is wrong and unwholesome. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a>[<a href="./images/40.png">40</a>]</span>You cannot keep minds in a
+state of vacuum. A girl, like anybody else, will obey the bent of the
+character which has been given either by the education of design or the
+more usual education of mere accidental experience. Everything depends,
+in the ordinary course of things, upon the general view of the aims and
+objects of life which you succeed, deliberately or by hazard, in
+creating.</p>
+
+<p>A girl is not taught that marriage has grave, moral and rational
+purposes, itself being no more than a means. On the contrary, it is
+always figured in her eyes as an end, and as an end scarcely at all
+connected with a moral and rational companionship. It is, she fancies,
+the gate to some sort of paradise whose mysterious joys are not to be
+analysed. She forgets that there are no such swift-coming spontaneous
+paradises in this world, where the future can never be anything more
+than the child of the present, indelibly stamped with every feature and
+line of its parent. This castle-building, however, is harmless. If it
+does not strengthen, still it does not absolutely impoverish or corrupt,
+characters. Of some castle-building one cannot say so much. Character
+<i>is</i> assuredly corrupted by avaricious dreams of marriage as a road to
+material opulence and luxury. There is, indeed, no end to the depraved
+broodings which may come to an empty and undirected mind. If the
+emotions and the intellect are not tended and trained, they will run to
+an evil and evil-propagating seed. Rooted and incurable frivolty is the
+best that can come of it; corruption is the worst.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41"></a>[<a href="./images/41.png">41</a>]</span>
+People madly suppose that going to church, or giving an occasional
+blanket to a sick old woman, will suffice to implant a worthy conception
+of the aims of life. At this moment, some mothers are, perhaps,
+believing that the dull virtue of the country will in a few days redress
+the balance which had been too much discomposed by the rush and whirl of
+the town. As if one strong set of silly interests and emotions could be
+effaced at will by simple change of scene, without substitution of new
+interests and emotions. Excess of frivolous excitement is not repaired
+or undone by excess of mere blankness and nothingness. The dreariness of
+the virtue of the <i>villeggiatura</i> is as noxious as the whirl of the
+mercenary and little virtuous period of the season. Teach young women
+from their childhood upwards that marriage is their single career, and
+it is inevitable that they should look upon every hour which is not
+spent in promoting this sublime end and aim as so much subtracted from
+life. Penetrated with unwholesome excitement in one part of their
+existence, they are penetrated with killing <i>ennui</i> in the next.</p>
+
+<p>If mothers would only add to their account of marriage as the end of a
+woman's existence&mdash;which may be right or it may not&mdash;a definition of
+marriage as an association with a reasonable and reflective being, they
+would speedily effect a revolution in the present miserable system. To
+the business of finding a husband a young lady would then add the not
+less important business of making herself a rational person, instead of
+a more or less tastefully decorated doll <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42"></a>[<a href="./images/42.png">42</a>]</span>with a passion for a great
+deal of money. She might awaken to the fact, which would at first
+startle her very much no doubt, that there is a great portion of a
+universe outside her own circle and her own mind. This simple discovery
+would of itself effect a revolution that might transform her from being
+an insipid idiot into a tolerably rational being. As it is, the universe
+to her is only a collection of rich bachelors in search of wives, and of
+odious rivals who are contending with her for one or more of these too
+wary prizes. All high social aims, fine broad humanizing ways of
+surveying life, are unknown to her, or else appear in her eyes as the
+worship of Mumbo Jumbo appears in the eyes of the philosopher. She
+thinks of nothing except her private affairs. She is indifferent to
+politics, to literature&mdash;in a word, to anything that requires thought.
+She reads novels of a kind, because novels are all about love, and love
+had once something to do with marriage, her own peculiar and absorbing
+business. Beyond this her mind does not stir. Any more positively gross
+state one cannot imagine. There are women who are by accident more
+degraded physically. <i>Mutatis mutandis</i>, there are none more degraded,
+morally and intellectually, than those whose minds are constantly bent
+upon marriage at any cost, and with anybody, however decrepit, however
+silly, and however evil, who can make a settlement.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43"></a>[<a href="./images/43.png">43</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>LITTLE WOMEN.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The conventional idea of a brave, an energetic, or a supremely criminal
+woman is a tall, dark-haired, large-armed virago, who might pass as the
+younger brother of her husband, and about whom nature seemed to have
+hesitated before determining whether to make her a man or a woman&mdash;a
+kind of debatable land, in fact, between the two sexes, and almost as
+much one as the other. Helen Macgregor, Lady Macbeth, Catharine de'
+Medici, Mrs. Manning, and the old-fashioned murderesses in novels, are
+all of the muscular, black-brigand type, with more or less of regal
+grace superadded according to circumstances; and it would be thought
+nothing but a puerile fancy to suppose the contrary of those whose
+personal description is not already known. Crime, indeed, especially in
+art and fiction, has generally been painted in very nice proportion to
+the number of cubic inches embodied, and the depth of color employed;
+though we are bound to add that the public favor runs towards muscular
+heroines almost as much as towards muscular murderesses, which to a
+certain extent redresses the overweighted balance.</p>
+
+<p>Our later novelists, however, have altered the whole setting of the
+palette. Instead of five foot ten <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44"></a>[<a href="./images/44.png">44</a>]</span>of black and brown, they have gone in
+for four foot nothing of pink and yellow; instead of tumbled masses of
+raven hair, they have shining coils of purest gold; instead of hollow
+caverns whence flash unfathomable eyes eloquent of every damnable
+passion, they have limpid lakes of heavenly blue; and their worst
+sinners are in all respects fashioned as much after the outward
+semblance of the ideal saint as can well be managed. The original notion
+was a very good one, and the revolution did not come before it was
+wanted; but it has been a little overdone of late, and we are threatened
+with as great a surfeit of small-limbed, yellow-headed criminals as we
+have had of the man-like black. One gets weary of the most perfect model
+in time, if too constantly repeated; as now, when we have all begun to
+feel that the resources of the angel's face and demon's soul have been
+more heavily drawn on than is quite fair, and that, given "heavy braids
+of golden hair," "bewildering blue eyes," "a small lithe frame," "a
+special delicacy of feet and hands," and we are booked for the
+companionship, through three volumes, of a young person to whom
+Messalina or Lucretia Borgia would be a mere novice.</p>
+
+<p>And yet there is a physiological truth in this association of energy
+with smallness; perhaps, also, with a certain tint of yellow hair,
+which, with a dash of red through it, is decidedly suggestive of nervous
+force. Suggestiveness, indeed, does not go very far in an argument; but
+the frequent connection of energy and smallness in women is a thing
+which all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45"></a>[<a href="./images/45.png">45</a>]</span>may verify in their own circles. In daily life, who is the
+really formidable woman to encounter?&mdash;the black-browed,
+broad-shouldered giantess, with arms almost as big in the girth as a
+man's? or the pert, smart, trim little female, with no more biceps than
+a ladybird, and of just about equal strength with a sparrow? Nine times
+out of ten, the giantess with the heavy shoulders and broad black
+eyebrows is a timid, feeble-minded, good tempered person, incapable of
+anything harsher than a mild remonstrance with her maid, or a gentle
+chastisement of her children. Nine times out of ten her husband has her
+in hand in the most perfect working order, so that she would swear the
+moon shone at midday if it were his pleasure that she should make a fool
+of herself in that direction. One of the most obedient and indolent of
+earth's daughters, she gives no trouble to any one, save the trouble of
+rousing, exciting, and setting her agoing; while, as for the conception
+or execution of any naughty piece of self-assertion, she is as utterly
+incapable as if she were a child unborn, and demands nothing better than
+to feel the pressure of the leading-strings, and to know exactly by
+their strain where she is desired to go and what to do.</p>
+
+<p>But the little woman is irrepressible. Too fragile to come into the
+fighting section of humanity, a puny creature whom one blow from a man's
+huge fist could annihilate, absolutely fearless, and insolent with the
+insolence which only those dare show who know that retribution cannot
+follow&mdash;what can be done with her? She is afraid of nothing, and to be
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></a>[<a href="./images/46.png">46</a>]</span>controlled by no one. Sheltered behind her weakness as behind a triple
+shield of brass, the angriest man dare not touch her, while she provokes
+him to a combat in which his hands are tied. She gets her own way in
+everything, and everywhere. At home and abroad she is equally dominant
+and irrepressible, equally free from obedience and from fear. Who breaks
+all the public orders in sights and shows, and, in spite of king,
+kaiser, or policeman X, goes where it is expressly forbidden that she
+shall go? Not the large-boned, muscular woman, whatever her temperament;
+unless, indeed, of the exceptionally haughty type in distinctly inferior
+surroundings, and then she can queen it royally enough, and set
+everything at most lordly defiance. But in general the large-boned woman
+obeys the orders given, because, while near enough to man to be somewhat
+on a par with him, she is still undeniably his inferior. She is too
+strong to shelter herself behind her weakness, yet too weak to assert
+her strength and defy her master on equal grounds. She is like a
+flying-fish, not one thing wholly; and while capable of the
+inconveniences of two lives, is incapable of the privileges of either.</p>
+
+<p>It is not she, for all her well-developed frame and formidable looks,
+but the little woman, who breaks the whole code of laws and defies all
+their defenders&mdash;the pert, smart, pretty little woman, who laughs in
+your face, and goes straight ahead if you try to turn her to the right
+hand or to the left, receiving your remonstrances with the most sublime
+indifference, as if you were talking a foreign language she could not
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></a>[<a href="./images/47.png">47</a>]</span>understand. She carries everything before her, wherever she is. You may
+see her stepping over barriers, slipping under ropes, penetrating to the
+green benches with a red ticket, taking the best places on the platform
+over the heads of their rightful owners, settling herself among the
+reserved seats without an inch of pasteboard to float her. You cannot
+turn her out by main force. British chivalry objects to the public
+laying on of hands in the case of a woman, even when most recalcitrant
+and disobedient; more particularly if a small and fragile-looking woman.
+So that, if it is only a usurpation of places especially masculine, she
+is allowed to retain what she has got amid the grave looks of the
+elders&mdash;not really displeased though at a flutter of her ribbons among
+them&mdash;and the titters and nudges of the young fellows.</p>
+
+<p>If the battle is between her and another woman, they are left to fight
+it out as they best can, with the odds laid heavily on the little one.
+All this time there is nothing of the tumult of contest about her. Fiery
+and combative as she generally is, when breaking the law in public
+places she is the very soul of serene daring. She shows no heat, no
+passion, no turbulence; she leaves these as extra weapons of defence to
+women who are assailable. For herself she requires no such aids. She
+knows her capabilities and the line of attack that best suits her, and
+she knows, too, that the fewer points of contact she exposes the more
+likely she is to slip into victory; the more she assumes, and the less
+she argues, the slighter <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></a>[<a href="./images/48.png">48</a>]</span>the hold she gives her opponents. She is
+either perfectly good-humored or blankly innocent; she either smiles you
+into indulgence or wearies you into compliance by the sheer hopelessness
+of making any impression on her. She may, indeed, if of the very
+vociferous and shrill-tongued kind, burst out into such a noisy
+demonstration that you are glad to escape from her, no matter what
+spoils you leave on her hands; just as a mastiff will slink away from a
+bantam hen all heckled feathers and screeching cackle, and tremendous
+assumption of doing something terrible if he does not look out. Any way
+the little woman is unconquerable; and a tiny fragment of humanity at a
+public show, setting all rules and regulations at defiance, is only
+carrying out in the matter of benches the manner of life to which nature
+has dedicated her from the beginning.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, the little woman is brave. When the lymphatic giantess falls
+into a faint or goes off into hysterics, she storms, or bustles about,
+or holds on like a game terrier, according to the work on hand. She will
+fly at any man who annoys her, and bears herself as equal to the biggest
+and strongest fellow of her acquaintance. In general she does it all by
+sheer pluck, and is not notorious for subtlety or craft. Had Delilah
+been a little woman she would never have taken the trouble to shear
+Samson's locks. She would have defied him with all his strength
+untouched on his head, and she would have overcome him too. Judith and
+Jael were both probably large women. The work they went about demanded a
+certain <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></a>[<a href="./images/49.png">49</a>]</span>strength of muscle and toughness of sinew; but who can say that
+Jezebel was not a small, freckled, auburn-haired Lady Audley of her
+time, full of the concentrated fire, the electric force, the passionate
+recklessness of her type? Regan and Goneril might have been beautiful
+demons of the same pattern; we have the example of the Marchioness de
+Brinvilliers as to what amount of spiritual deviltry can exist with the
+face and manner of an angel direct from heaven; and perhaps Cordelia was
+a tall dark-haired girl, with a pair of brown eyes, and a long nose
+sloping downwards.</p>
+
+<p>Look at modern Jewesses, with their flashing Oriental orbs, their
+night-black tresses, and the dusky shadows of their olive-colored
+complexions; as catalogued properties according to the ideal, they would
+be placed in the list of the natural criminals and lawbreakers, while in
+reality they are about as meek and docile a set of women as are to be
+found within the four seas. Pit a fiery little Welsh woman or a petulant
+Parisienne against the most regal and Junonic amongst them, and let them
+try conclusions in courage, in energy, or in audacity; the Israelitish
+Juno will go down before either of the small Philistines, and the
+fallacy of weight and color in the generation of power will be shown
+without the possibility of denial. Even in those old days of long ago,
+when human characteristics were embodied and deified, we do not find
+that the white-armed, large-limbed H&#275;r&#275;, though queen by right of
+marriage, lorded it over her sister goddesses by any superior energy or
+force of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></a>[<a href="./images/50.png">50</a>]</span>nature. On the contrary, she was rather a heavy-going person,
+and, unless moved to anger by her husband's numerous infidelities, took
+her Olympian life placidly enough, and once or twice got cheated in a
+way that did no great credit to her sagacity. A little Frenchwoman would
+have sailed around her easily; and as it was, shrewish though she was in
+her speech when provoked, her husband not only deceived but chastised
+her, and reduced her to penitence and obedience as no little woman would
+have suffered herself to be reduced.</p>
+
+<p>There is one celebrated race of women who were probably the
+powerfully-built, large-limbed creatures they are assumed to have been,
+and as brave and energetic as they were strong and big&mdash;the Norse women
+of the sagas, who, for good or evil, seem to have been a very
+influential element in the old Northern life. Prophetesses, physicians,
+dreamers of dreams and the accredited interpreters as well, endowed with
+magic powers, admitted to a share in the councils of men, brave in war,
+active in peace, these fair-haired Scandinavian women were the fit
+comrades of their men, the fit wives and mothers of the Berserkers and
+the Vikings. They had no tame or easy life of it, if all we hear of them
+is true. To defend the farm and the homestead during their husbands'
+absence, and to keep themselves intact against all bold rovers to whom
+the Tenth Commandment was an unknown law; to dazzle and bewilder by
+magic arts when they could not conquer by open strength; to unite craft
+and courage, deception and daring, loyalty and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></a>[<a href="./images/51.png">51</a>]</span>independence, demanded
+no small amount of opposing qualities. But the Steingerdas and Gudrunas
+were generally equal to any emergency of fate or fortune, and slashed
+their way through the history of their time more after the manner of men
+than women; supplementing their downright blows by side thrusts of
+craftier cleverness when they had to meet power with skill, and were
+fain to overthrow brutality by fraud. The Norse women were certainly as
+largely framed as they were mentally energetic, and as crafty as either;
+but we know of no other women who unite the same characteristics, and
+are at once cunning, strong, brave and true.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, then, the little women have the best of it. More petted
+than their bigger sisters, and infinitely more powerful, they have their
+own way in part because it really does not seem worth while to contest a
+point with such little creatures. There is nothing that wounds a man's
+self-respect in any victory they may get or claim. Where there is
+absolute inequality of strength, there can be no humiliation in the
+self-imposed defeat of the stronger; and as it is always more pleasant
+to have peace than war, and as big men for the most part rather like
+than not to put their necks under the tread of tiny feet, the little
+woman goes on her way triumphant to the end, breaking all the laws she
+does not like, and throwing down all the barriers that impede her
+progress, perfectly irresistible and irrepressible in all circumstances
+and under any condition.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></a>[<a href="./images/52.png">52</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>PINCHBECK.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Not many years ago no really refined gentlewoman would have worn
+pinchbeck. False jewelry and imitation lace were touchstones with the
+sex, and the woman who would condescend to either was assumed, perhaps
+not quite without reason, to have lost something more than the mere
+perception of technical taste. This feeling ran through the whole of
+society, and pinchbeck was considered as at once despicable and
+disreputable. The successful speculator, sprung from nothing, who had
+made his fortune during the war, might buy land, build himself a
+mansion, and set up a magnificent establishment, but he was never looked
+on as more than a lucky adventurer by the aboriginal gentry of the
+place; and the blue blood, perhaps nourishing itself on thin beer,
+turned up its nose disdainfully at the claret and madeira which had been
+personally earned and not lineally inherited. This exclusiveness was
+narrow in spirit, and hard in individual working; and yet there was a
+wholesome sentiment underlying its pride which made it valuable in
+social ethics, if immoral on the score of natural equality and human
+charity. It was the rejection of pretentiousness, however gilded and
+glittering, in favor of reality, however poor and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></a>[<a href="./images/53.png">53</a>]</span>barren; it was the
+condemnation of make-believes&mdash;the repudiation of pinchbeck. It is not a
+generation since this was the normal attitude of society towards its
+<i>nouveaux riches</i> and Brummagem jewelry; but time moves fast in these
+later days, and national sentiments change as quickly as national
+fashions.</p>
+
+<p>We are in the humor to rehabilitate all things, and pinchbeck has now
+its turn with the rest. The lady of slender means who would refuse to
+wear imitation lace and false jewelry is as rare as the country society
+which would exclude the <i>nouveau riche</i> because of his newness, and not
+adopt him because of his riches. The whole anxiety now is, not what a
+thing is, but how it looks&mdash;not its quality, but its appearance. Every
+part of social and domestic life is dedicated to the apotheosis of
+pinchbeck. It meets us at the hall door, where miserable make-believes
+of stuccoed pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial dignity on a
+wretched little villa, run up without regard to one essential of home
+comfort or of architectural truth. It goes with us into the cold,
+conventional drawing-room, where all is for show, nothing for use, where
+no one lives, and which is just the mere pretence of a dwelling-room,
+set out to deceive the world into the belief that its cheap finery is
+the expression of the every-day life and circumstances of the family. It
+sits with us at the table, which a confectioner out of a back street has
+furnished, and where everything, down to the very flowers, is hired for
+the occasion. It glitters in the brooches and bracelets of the women, in
+the studs and signet-rings <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></a>[<a href="./images/54.png">54</a>]</span>of the men; it is in the hired broughams,
+the hired waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers, the
+cheap champagne, and the affectation of social consideration that meet
+us at every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle classes
+is penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck, and for
+one family that holds itself in the honor and simplicity of truth, ten
+thousand lie, to the world and to themselves, in frippery and pretence.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest sinners in this are women. Men are often ostentatious,
+often extravagant, and not unfrequently dishonest in that broadway of
+dishonesty which is called living beyond their means&mdash;sometimes making
+up the deficit by practices which end in the dock of the Old Bailey;
+but, as a rule, they go in for the real thing in details, and their
+pinchbeck is at the core rather than on the surface. Women, on the
+contrary, give themselves up to a more general pretentiousness, and,
+provided they can make a show, care very little about the means;
+provided they can ring their metal on the counter, they ignore the want
+of the hall-stamp underneath. Locality, dress, their visiting-list, and
+domestic appearances are the four things which they demand shall be in
+accord with their neighbor's; and for these four surfaces they will
+sacrifice the whole internal fabric. They will have a showy-looking
+house, encrusted with base ornamentation and false grandeur, though it
+lets in wind, rain, and sound almost as if it were made of mud or
+canvas, rather than a plain and substantial dwelling-place, with comfort
+instead of stucco, and moderately <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></a>[<a href="./images/55.png">55</a>]</span>thick walls instead of porches and
+pilasters. Most of their time is necessarily passed at home, but they
+undergo all manner of house discomfort resulting from this preference of
+cheap finery over solid structure, rather than forego their "genteel
+locality" and stereotyped ornamentation. A family of daughters on the
+one side, diligent over the "Battle of Prague;" a nursery full of crying
+babies on the other; more Battles of Prague opposite, diversified by a
+future Lind practicing her scales unweariedly; water-pipes bursting in
+the frost, walls streaming in the thaw, the lower offices reeking and
+green with damp, and the upper rooms too insecure for unrestricted
+movement&mdash;all these, and more miseries of the same kind, she willingly
+encounters rather than shift into a locality relatively unfashionable to
+her sphere, but where she could have substantiality and comfort for the
+same rent that she pays now for flash and pinchbeck.</p>
+
+<p>In dress it is the same thing. She must look like her neighbors, no
+matter whether they can spend pounds to her shillings, and run up a
+milliner's bill beyond what she can afford for the whole family living.
+If they can buy gold, she can manage pinchbeck; glass that looks like
+jet, like filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is every bit to
+her as good as the real thing; and if she cannot compass Valenciennes
+and Mechlin, she can go to Nottingham and buy machine-made imitations
+that will make quite as fine a show. How poor soever she may be, she
+must hang herself about with ornaments made of painted wood, glass, or
+vulcanite; she must break out into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></a>[<a href="./images/56.png">56</a>]</span>spangles and beads and chains and
+<i>beno&icirc;tons</i>, which are cheap luxuries, and, as she thinks, effective.
+Flimsy silks make as rich a rustle to her ear as the stateliest brocade,
+and cotton-velvet delights the soul that cannot aspire to Genoa. The
+love of pinchbeck is so deeply ingrained in her that even if, in a
+momentary fit of aberration into good taste, she condescends to a simple
+material about which there can be neither disguise nor pretence, she
+must load it with that detestable cheap finery of hers till she makes
+herself as vulgar in a muslin as she was in a cotton velvet.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>simplex munditiis</i>, which used to be held as a canon of feminine
+good taste, is now abandoned altogether, and the more she can bedizen
+herself according to the pattern of a Sandwich islander the more
+beautiful she thinks herself, the more certain the fascination of the
+men, and the greater the jealousy of the women. This is the cause of all
+the tags and streamers, the bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces
+there, the puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off some dead
+girl's head, wherewith the modern Englishwoman delights to make herself
+hideous. It is pinchbeck throughout. But we fear she is past praying for
+in the matter of fashion, and that she is too far given over to the
+abomination of pretence to be called back to truth for any ethical
+reason whatsoever, or indeed by anything short of high examples. And
+then, if simplicity became the fashion, we should have our pinchbeck
+votaries translating that into extremes as they do now with
+ornamentation; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></a>[<a href="./images/57.png">57</a>]</span>if my lady took to plainness, they would go to
+nakedness.</p>
+
+<p>Another bit of pinchbeck is the visiting-list&mdash;the cards of invitation
+stuck against the drawing-room glass&mdash;with the grandest names and
+largest fortunes put forward, irrespective of dates or tenses. The
+chance contact with the people represented may be quite out of the
+ordinary circumstances of life, but their names are paraded as if an
+accident, which has happened once and may never occur again, were in the
+daily order of events. They are brought to the front to make others
+believe that the whole social thickness is of the same quality; that
+generals and admirals and sirs and ladies are the common elements of the
+special circle in which the family habitually moves; that pinchbeck is
+good gold, and that stucco means marble. Women are exceedingly tenacious
+of these pasteboard appearances.</p>
+
+<p>In a house with its couple of female servants, where formal visitors are
+very rare, and invitations, save by friendly word of mouth, rarer still,
+you may see a cracked china bowl or cheap mock <i>patera</i> on the hall
+table, to receive the cards which are assumed to come in the thick
+showers usual with high people who have hall-porters, and a thousand
+names or more on their books. The pile gets horribly dusty to be sure,
+and the upper layer turns by degrees from cream-color to brown; but
+antiquity is not held to weaken the force of grandeur. The titled card
+left on a chance occasion more than a year ago still keeps the uppermost
+place, still represents a perpetual renewal of aristocratic <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></a>[<a href="./images/58.png">58</a>]</span>visits, and
+an unbroken succession of social triumphs. Yellowed and soiled, it is
+none the less the trump-card of the list; and while the outside world
+laughs and ridicules, the lady at home thinks that no one sees through
+this puerile pretence, and that the visiting-list is accepted according
+to the status of the fugleman at the head. She is very happy if she can
+say that the pattern of her dress, her cap, her bonnet, was taken from
+that of Lady So and So; and we may be quite sure that all personal
+contact with grand folks does so express itself, and perpetuate the
+memory of the event, by such imitation&mdash;at a distance. It is too good an
+occasion for the airing of pinchbeck to be disregarded, and,
+consequently, for the most part is turned to this practical account.
+Whether the fashion will be suited to the material, or to the other
+parts of the dress, is quite a secondary consideration, it being of the
+essence of pinchbeck to despise both fitness and harmony.</p>
+
+<p>There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the appearance of social
+influence, much cultivated by women of a certain activity of mind, and
+with more definite aims than all women have. This belongs to a grade one
+step higher than the small pretences we have been speaking of&mdash;to women
+who have money, and so far have one reality, but who have not, by their
+own birth or their husband's, the original standing which would give
+them this influence as of right. Some make themselves notorious for
+their drawing-room patronage of artists, which, however, does not often
+include buying their pictures; others gather <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></a>[<a href="./images/59.png">59</a>]</span>around them scores of
+obscure authors, whose books they talk of, if they do not read; a few, a
+short time since, were centres of spiritualistic circles, and got a
+queer kind of social influence thereby, so far as Philistine desire to
+witness the "manifestations" went; and one or two are names of weight in
+the emancipated ranks, and take chiefly to what they call "working
+women." These are they who attend Ladies' Committees, where they talk
+bosh, and pound away at utterly uninteresting subjects, as diligently as
+if what they said had any point in it, and what they did any ultimate
+issue in probability or common sense. But beyond the fact of having a
+large house, where their several sets may assemble at stated periods,
+these would-be lady patronesses are utterly impotent to help or hinder;
+and their patronage is just so much pinchbeck, not worth the trouble of
+weighing.</p>
+
+<p>In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless dissatisfaction with
+what they are, and ceaseless endeavour to appear something they are not,
+our middle-class ladies are doing themselves and society infinite
+mischief. They set the tone to the world below them, and the small
+tradespeople and the servants, when they copy the vices of their
+superiors, do not imitate her grace the duchess, but the doctor's wife
+over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door, and the young ladies
+everywhere, who all try to appear women of rank and fortune, and who are
+ashamed of nothing as much as of industry, truth and simplicity. Hence
+the rage for cheap finery in the kitchen, just a trifle <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></a>[<a href="./images/60.png">60</a>]</span>more ugly and
+debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence the miserable
+pretentiousness, and pinchbeck fine-ladyism, filtering like poison
+through every pore of our society, to result God only knows in what
+grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and education will come to
+the front, and endeavour to stay the plague already begun.</p>
+
+<p>Chains and brooches may seem but small material causes for important
+moral effects, but they are symbols; and, as symbols, of deep national
+value. No good will be done till we get back some of our fine old horror
+of pinchbeck, and once more insist on truth as the foundation of our
+national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do
+not land us here; and the progress of the arts and society must not be
+brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the
+semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women
+are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home
+business. Here is something for them to do&mdash;the regeneration of society
+by means of their own energies; the bringing people back to the dignity
+of truth and the beauty of simplicity; and the substitution of that
+self-respect which is content to appear what it is, for the feeble pride
+which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot get gold, and which
+endeavors so hard to hide its real estate, and to pass for what it is
+not and never could be.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></a>[<a href="./images/61.png">61</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>PUSHING WOMEN.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The achievements of Anglo-Saxon energy present a rich mine of material
+to the bookmaker. We are justly proud of our self-made men&mdash;of our
+Chancellors who have risen from the barber's-shop to the Woolsack, of
+our low-born inventors who have fought their way to scientific
+recognition, of our merchant princes who have begun life with a capital
+of one half-crown. The story of the man who has raised himself to
+eminence by his own exertions, in the face of overwhelming disadvantages
+and obstacles, is a thrice-told tale, thanks to Mr. Smiles and other
+biographers. But our admiration has been almost exclusively drawn to
+these signal examples of pushing <i>men</i>. The analogous exploits of the
+fair sex remain comparatively unchronicled. No one has hitherto
+published a book about Self-made Women. Yet this branch of the subject
+would be very interesting, and even instructive. Of course the
+opportunity for the display of energy in pushing is, in the case of
+woman, much more limited. She cannot push at the Bar or in the Church,
+or in business. Her sphere for pushing is practically narrowed down to
+one department of human life&mdash;society. But within the limits of that
+sphere she exhibits very remarkable proofs of this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></a>[<a href="./images/62.png">62</a>]</span>peculiar form of
+activity. Moreover, pushing is a feature so peculiarly characteristic of
+the English, as distinct from the Continental <i>salon</i>, that no attempt
+to place a picture of the Englishwoman in her totality before her
+foreign critics would be complete without it.</p>
+
+<p>There are three periods in the career of a pushing woman. The first is
+that in which she emerges from obscurity, or, worse perhaps, from the
+notoriety of commercial antecedents, and carried, by a vigorous push,
+the outworks of fashionable society. The wife of a successful speculator
+in cotton or guano, who is also the mistress of a comfortable mansion in
+Bloomsbury, gradually becomes restless and dissatisfied with her
+surroundings. It would be curious to trace the growth of this
+discontent. Ambition is deeply rooted in the female bosom. Even
+housemaids are actuated by an impulse to better themselves, and village
+school-mistresses yearn for a larger sphere. Perhaps it is this instinct
+to rise, so creditable to the sex, which compels a lady with a long
+purse, and a name well known in the city, to enter the lists as an
+aspirant to fashion. Perhaps her career is developed by a more gradual
+process. Climbing social Alps is like climbing material Alps&mdash;for a time
+the intervening heights shut out from view the grander peaks. It is not
+till one has topped Peckham or Hackney that a more extended horizon
+bursts on the eye, and one catches sight of the glittering summits of
+Belgravia. Account for it as we may, the phenomenon of a woman in the
+enjoyment of every comfort and luxury that wealth <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></a>[<a href="./images/63.png">63</a>]</span>can give, but ready
+to barter it all for a few crumbs of contemptuous notice from persons of
+rank, is by no means uncommon. Probably the fashionable newspaper is a
+great stimulus to pushing.</p>
+
+<p>The rich vulgarian pores over <i>Court Circulars</i> and catalogues of
+aristocratic names till the fascination becomes irresistible, and the
+desire to see her own name, purged of cotton or guano, figuring in the
+same sheet grows to a monomania. But how is this to be done? Fortunately
+for the purpose which she has in view, there exist in these latter days
+amphibious beings, half trader, half fop, with one set of relations with
+the world of commerce and another set of relations with the world of
+fashion. The dandy, driven into the city by the stress of his fiscal
+exigencies, forms a link between the East-end and the West. Among his
+other functions is that of giving aid and counsel, not exactly gratis,
+to any fair outsider who wants to "get into" society. For every
+applicant he has but one bit of advice. She must spend money.</p>
+
+<p>For a woman who is neither clever nor beautiful nor high-born, there is
+but one way to proceed. She must bribe right and left. No rotten borough
+absorbs more cash than the fashionable world. Its recognition is merely
+a question of money. All its distinctions have their price. It exacts
+from the pushing woman a thumping entrance-fee in the shape of a
+sumptuous concert or ball. Nor is it only the first push which costs.
+Every subsequent advance is as much a matter of purchase as a step in
+the army.</p>
+
+<p>There is a tariff of its honors, and any Belgravian <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></a>[<a href="./images/64.png">64</a>]</span>actuary can
+calculate to a nicety the price of a stare from a great lady, or a card
+from a leader of fashion. This is the philosophy expounded by the
+amphibious dandy to his civic pupil. The upshot is, that she must give
+an entertainment, or a series of entertainments, on a scale of great
+splendor. Of course the house in Bloomsbury must be exchanged for
+another in a fashionable quarter. A more profuse style of living must be
+adopted. Her equipages must be gorgeous, her flunkeys numerous and well
+powdered. Above all, she must at once and for ever make a clean sweep of
+all her old friends. Upon these conditions, and in consideration of a
+<i>douceur</i> for himself, he agrees to be her friend, and help her to push.
+Then follows a delicate negotiation with one of those dowagers who
+rather pique themselves on their good nature in standing sponsors to
+pushing nobodies. She, too, makes her conditions. For the sake of the
+elderly pet to whom she is indebted for her daily supply of scandal, she
+consents to countenance his <i>proteg&eacute;e</i>. But she declines to ask her to
+her own house. She will dine with her, provided the dinner is exquisite,
+and two or three of her own cronies are included in the invitation. Last
+and crowning condescension, she will ask the company for the proposed
+concert or ball, provided the thing is done regardless of expense. It
+would be hard to say which a cynic would think most charming&mdash;the
+readiness to accept, or the inclination to impose, such conditions.</p>
+
+<p>At last the great occasion arrives. Planted at the top of her staircase,
+under the wing of her fashionable <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></a>[<a href="./images/65.png">65</a>]</span>allies, the nominal giver of the
+entertainment is duly stared at and glared at by a supercilious crowd,
+who examine her with the same sort of languid interest which they devote
+to a new animal at the Zoological. The greater number are "going on" to
+another party. But the next morning brings balm for every mortification.
+Her ball is blazoned in the fashionable journals, and the well-bred
+reporter, while elaborately complimentary to the exotics, is discreetly
+silent as to the supercilious stares. She does not exactly awake to find
+herself famous, but at least she is no longer outside the Pale. At a
+considerable outlay, she has got into what a connoisseur in shades of
+fashion would call tenth-rate society. This is not much; still, it is a
+beginning, and a beginning is everything to a pushing woman.</p>
+
+<p>In the pushing woman of the transition period we behold a lady who has
+got a certain footing in society, but who is straining every nerve, in
+season and out of season, by hook and by crook, to improve her position.
+Society within the Pale is divided into a great many "zones" or "sets."
+It is like a target, with outer, middle, inner, and innermost circles.
+The exterior circle, corresponding to "the black" in archery, consists
+of persona, for the most part, with limited means and moderate ambition.
+People who try to combine fashion with economy stick here, and advance
+no further. Carpet-dances and champagneless suppers are typical of this
+circle. Here mothers and daughters prey upon the inexperienced youth of
+the Universities and green young officers, who are deluded for one
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></a>[<a href="./images/66.png">66</a>]</span>season by their pretensions to fashion, but who cut them the next.
+Here, too, may be found persons whose social progress has been retarded
+by foolish scruples about cutting their old friends. Between this band
+of prowlers upon the outskirts of fashion and "the best set"&mdash;the golden
+ring in the centre of the shield&mdash;are many intermediate circles, each
+representing a different stage of distinction and exclusiveness. It is
+the multiplicity of these invisible lines of demarcation which makes
+pushing so laborious.</p>
+
+<p>The world of fashion is not one homogeneous camp, but it is parcelled
+out into a number of cliques and coteries. Into one after another of
+these a pushing woman effects her entrance. She is always edging her way
+into a new and better set. At every step there are obstacles to be
+encountered, rivals to be jostled, fierce snubs to be endured. There is
+something almost sublime in the spectacle of this untiring activity of
+shoulder and elbow. The mere shoving&mdash;<i>vis consil&icirc; expers</i>&mdash;would never
+bring her near to her goal. An adept in the art of pushing does not rely
+on sheer impudence alone. She has recourse to artificial aids and
+appliances. A great deal of ingenuity is exhibited in the selection of
+her self-propelling machinery. It is a good plan to acquire a name for
+some one social speciality.</p>
+
+<p>Private theatricals, for instance, or similar entertainments, may be
+turned to excellent account. Exhibitions of this kind pique curiosity,
+and people who come to stare remain to supper, and possibly return to
+drop a card on the following afternoon. But, if <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></a>[<a href="./images/67.png">67</a>]</span>you go in for this sort
+of thing, you must resign yourself to certain inconveniences. Your
+pretty drawing-room will be like Park Lane in a state of chronic
+obstruction. The carpenter's work will interfere somewhat with your
+comfort, and it is tiresome to be perpetually unhinging your doors and
+pulling your windows out of their frames. The jealousies and bickerings
+among the performers are another source of vexation. Miss A. declines to
+sit as Rowena to Miss B.'s Rebecca; and the drawing-room Roscius
+invariably objects to the part for which he is cast. Altogether, unless
+you have a positive taste for carpentry and green-room squabbles, it is
+better to steer clear of private theatricals.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is the musical dodge. In skillful hands there is no better
+leverage for pushing operations than drawing-room music. Every one knows
+Lady Tweedledum and her amateur concerts. The fuss she makes about them
+is prodigious. They are a cheap sort of entertainment, but they cost the
+thrifty patroness of art a vast deal of trouble. She is always
+organizing practices, arranging rehearsals, drawing up programmes, or
+scouring London for musical recruits. She has been known to invade dingy
+Government offices for a tenor, and to run a soprano to earth in distant
+Bloomsbury. After all, her "music" is only so-so. You may hear better
+any night at Even's or the Oxford. One has heard "Dal tuo stellato
+soglio" before, and Niedermeyer insipidities are a little <i>fad&eacute;</i>.
+Sometimes, to complete the imposture, the names of Mendelssohn and
+Mozart are invoked, and, under <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></a>[<a href="./images/68.png">68</a>]</span>cover of doing honor to an immortal
+composer, a chorus of young people assemble for periodical flirtation.
+On the whole, it is wise not to attempt too much. Miss Quaver, with her
+staccato notes and semi-professional <i>minauderies</i>, is not exactly a
+queen of song. Nor does it give one any exquisite delight to hear Sir
+Raucisonous Trombone give tongue in a French romance. The talented band
+of the Piccadilly Troubadours, floundering through the overture to
+<i>Zampa</i>, hardly satisfies a refined musical ear. But, however
+indifferent in a musical point of view, from the point of view of the
+fair projector the thing is a success. It serves as a trap to catch
+duchesses, a device for putting salt on the tails of the popinjays of
+fashion. One fine day Lady Tweedledum's pretended zeal for music
+receives its crowning reward. The noise of it reaches august ears. An
+act of gracious condescension follows. Her Ladyship has the supreme
+delight of leading a scion of Royalty to a chair of state in her
+drawing-room, to hear Sir Raucisonous bleat and Miss Quaver trill.</p>
+
+<p>There are subtler means of pushing than amateur concerts and private
+theatricals. There is the push vertical, as in the case of the
+commercial lady; and there is also the push lateral. A good example of
+the latter style of operation is afforded by the dowager who is
+fortunate enough to have an eldest son to use as a pushing machine.
+Handled with tact, a young heir, not yet cut adrift from the maternal
+apron-string, may be turned to excellent account. There is, or was, a
+sentimental ballad entitled, "I'll <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></a>[<a href="./images/69.png">69</a>]</span>kiss him for his mother." One might
+reverse the sentiment in the case of <i>Madame M&egrave;re</i>. Of her the dowagers
+with daughters to marry sing in chorus, "I'll visit her for her son."
+Civility to the mother is access to the son. A sharp tactician sees her
+advantage, and works the precious relationship for her own private ends.
+It is a mine of invitations of an eligible kind. By aid of it she
+springs over barriers which it would otherwise take her years to
+surmount, and is lifted into circles which by their unassisted efforts
+she and her daughters would never reach. Scheming dowagers are glad to
+have her at their balls when there is a chance of young Hopeful
+following in her train, and her five o'clock tea is delightful when
+there is a young millionaire to sip it with. Deprived of her decoy duck
+she would soon lose ground, and be left to push her way in society with
+uncomfortably reduced momentum.</p>
+
+<p>Another capital instrument for pushing is a country-house. The mistress
+of a fine old hall and a cypher of a husband is apt to take a peculiar
+view of the duties of property. One might expect her to be content with
+so dignified and enviable a lot, and to pass tranquil days in coddling
+the cottagers, patronizing the rector's wife, and impressing her
+crotchet on the national school. But no&mdash;she is bitten with the
+tarantula of social success. She wants to "get on" in society. She must
+push as vigorously as any trumpery adventuress in May Fair. A good old
+name is dragged into the dirt inseparable from pushing. The family
+portraits look disdainfully from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></a>[<a href="./images/70.png">70</a>]</span>their frames, and the ancestral oaks
+hang their heads in shame. The company reflects the peculiar ambition of
+the hostess. The neighboring squires are conspicuous by their absence.
+The local small fry are of course ignored, though to the great lady of
+the county, who cuts her in town, she is cringingly obsequious. The
+visitors consist mainly of relays of youths, fast, foolish, and
+fashionable, with now and then a stray politician or journalist thrown
+in to give the party a <i>soup&ccedil;on</i> of intellect. The principle of
+invitation is very simple. No one is asked who will not be of use in
+town. Any brainless little fop, any effete dandy, is sure of a welcome,
+provided he is known to certain circles and can help her to scramble
+into a little more vogue.</p>
+
+<p>One more instance of lateral pushing. A connection with literature may
+be very effectively worked. The wives of poets, novelists, and
+historians have great facilities for pushing if they care to use them.
+Even the sleek parasite who fattens on a literature which he has done
+nothing to adorn, and conceals his emptiness under the airs of Sir
+Oracle, has been known to hoist his female belongings into the high
+levels of society.</p>
+
+<p>The last period in the career of a pushing woman is the triumphant. This
+is when she has achieved fashion, and has virtually done pushing. There
+is nothing left to push for. The Belgravian citadel has fairly
+capitulated. Like Alexander weeping that there are no more worlds to
+conquer, she may indulge a transient regret that there are no more
+<i>salons</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></a>[<a href="./images/71.png">71</a>]</span>left to penetrate. But rest is welcome after so harassing a
+struggle. And with rest comes a sensible improvement in her character
+and manners. The last stage of a pushing woman is emphatically better
+than the first. It is curious to notice what a change for the better is
+produced in her by the partial recovery of her self-respect. One might
+almost call her a pleasant person. She can at last afford to be civil,
+occasionally even good-natured. And this is only natural. In the thick
+of a struggle which taxes her energies to the uttermost, there is no
+time for courtesies and amenities. The better instincts of her nature
+necessarily remain in abeyance. But they reassert themselves, unless she
+be irretrievably spoilt, when the struggle is over.</p>
+
+<p>At last she can afford to speak her true thoughts, consult her own
+tastes, and receive her own friends, not another's, like a lady to the
+manner born. And if this emancipation from a self-imposed thraldom is
+not too long deferred, if it finds her at sixty with a relish for gaiety
+still unslaked, she may yet be able to enjoy society herself and to
+render it enjoyable to others. How many women there are of whom one
+says, How pleasant they will be when they have done pushing! or have
+pushed enough to allow themselves and others a little rest! One longs
+for the time to arrive when they shall have kicked down the ladders by
+which they have mounted, and effaced the trace of the rebuffs which they
+have encountered. One longs to see them cleansed from the stains with
+which their toilsome struggle has bespattered them, enjoying <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></a>[<a href="./images/72.png">72</a>]</span>the ease
+and tranquillity of the after-push. If "getting on in society" must
+continue to be an object of female ambition, would it not be wise to
+abate the nuisance by rendering the process somewhat more easy? Might
+not some central authority be established to grant diplomas to pushing
+women, which would admit them <i>per saltum</i> to those select circles which
+they go through so much dirt to reach?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></a>[<a href="./images/73.png">73</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>FEMININE AFFECTATIONS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The old form of feminine affectation used to be that of a die-away fine
+lady afflicted with a mysterious malady known by the name of the vapors,
+or one, no less obscure, called the spleen. Sometimes it was an
+etherealized being who had no capacity for homely things, but who passed
+her life in an atmosphere of poetry and music, for the most part
+expressing her vague ideas in halting rhymes that gave more satisfaction
+to herself than to her friends. She was probably an Italian scholar, and
+could quote Petrarch and Tasso, and did quote them pretty often; she
+might even be a Della Cruscan by honorable election, with her own
+peculiar wreath of laurel and her own silver lyre; any way she was "a
+sister of the Muses," and had something to do with Apollo and Minerva,
+whom she was sure to call Pallas, as being more poetical. Probably she
+had dealings with Diana too, for this kind of woman does not in any age
+affect the "sea-born," save in a hazy sentimental way that bears no
+fruits; a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit of counterpoint being to
+her worth all the manly love or fireside home delights that the world
+can give.</p>
+
+<p>What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or the rosy kisses of
+babies' lips compared to the pleasures <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></a>[<a href="./images/74.png">74</a>]</span>of being a sister of the Muses,
+and one of the beloved of Apollo? The Della Cruscan of former days, or
+her modern avatar, will tell you that music and poetry are godlike and
+bear the soul away to heaven, but that the nursery is a prison, and
+babies no dearer gaolers than any other, and that household duties
+disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the empyrean. This was the
+Ethereal Being of the last generation&mdash;the Blue-stocking, as a poetess
+in white satin, with her eyes turned up to heaven, and her hair in
+dishevelled cascades about her neck. She dropped her mantle as she
+finally departed; and we still have the Della Cruscan essence, if not in
+the precise form of earlier times. We still have ethereal beings who, as
+the practical outcome of their etherealization, rave about music and
+poetry, and Hall&eacute; and Ruskin, and horribly neglect their babies and the
+weekly bills.</p>
+
+<p>A favorite form of feminine affectation among certain opposers of the
+prevalent fast type is in an intense womanliness, an aggravating
+intensity of womanliness, that makes one long for a little roughness,
+just to take off the cloying excess of sweetness. This kind is generally
+found with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the orbit, by
+which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face, a certain
+look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty thought, that is very
+effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness that the real cause of
+the darkened lids and cavernous orbits, when not antimony, is most
+probably internal disease; eyes of this sort stand for spirituality and
+loftiness of thought and intense womanliness <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></a>[<a href="./images/75.png">75</a>]</span>of nature, and, as all men
+are neither chemists nor doctors, the simulation does quite as well as
+truth.</p>
+
+<p>The main characteristic of these women is self-consciousness. They live
+before a moral mirror, and pass their time in attitudinizing to what
+they think the best advantage. They can do nothing simply, nothing
+spontaneously and without the fullest consciousness as to how they do
+it, and how they look while they are doing it. In every action of their
+lives they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a novel, as
+impersonations of poetic images or thoughts. If they give you a glass of
+water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth and Beauty ministering
+to Strength or Age, as the case may be; if they bring you a photographic
+album, they are Titian's Daughter carrying her casket, a trifle
+modernized; if they hold a child in their arms, they are Madonnas, and
+look unutterable maternal love, though they never saw the little
+creature before, and care for it no more than for the puppy in the mews;
+if they do any small personal office, or attempt to do it, making
+believe to tie a shoestring, comb out a curl, fasten a button, they are
+Charities in graceful attitudes, and expect you to think them both
+charitable and graceful. Nine times out of ten they can neither tie a
+string nor fasten a button with ordinary deftness, for they have a trick
+of using only the ends of their fingers when they do anything with their
+hands, as being more graceful, and altogether fitting in better than
+would a firmer grasp with the delicate <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></a>[<a href="./images/76.png">76</a>]</span>womanliness of the character;
+and the less sweet and more commonplace woman who does not attitudinize
+morally, and never parades her womanliness, beats them out of the field
+for real helpfulness, and is the Charity which the other only plays at
+being.</p>
+
+<p>This kind, too, affects, in theory, wonderful submissiveness to man. It
+upholds Griselda as the type of feminine perfection, and&mdash;still in
+theory&mdash;between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in for the
+tyranny. "I would rather my husband beat me than let me do too much as I
+liked," said one before she married, who, after she was married, managed
+to get entire possession of the domestic reins, and took good care that
+her nominal lord should be her practical slave. For, notwithstanding the
+sweet submissiveness of her theory, the intensely womanly woman has the
+most astonishing knack of getting her own way and imposing her own will
+on others. The real tyrant among women is not the one who flounces and
+splutters, and declares that nothing shall make her obey, but the
+self-mannered, large-eyed, and intensely womanly person, who says that
+Griselda is her ideal, and that the whole duty of woman lies in
+unquestioning obedience to man.</p>
+
+<p>In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman&mdash;the
+woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big buttons, of which she
+flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness of
+a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears
+unmistakeable shirtfronts, linen collars, vests, and plain ties, like a
+man; who folds <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77"></a>[<a href="./images/77.png">77</a>]</span>her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even
+nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and
+makes believe that the attitude is comfortable because it is manlike. If
+the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness, the
+mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores dogs
+and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She boasts
+of how good a marksman she is&mdash;she does not call herself markswoman&mdash;and
+how she can hit right and left, and bring down both birds flying. When
+she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass between her first two
+fingers, hollows her underlip, and tosses it off, throwing her head well
+back&mdash;she would disdain the ladylike sip or the closer gesture of
+ordinary women. She is great in cheese and bitter beer, in claret cup
+and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of
+effervescing wines. She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward,
+as men round their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of
+carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw;
+for charms to her watch-chain she wears a corkscrew, a gimlet, a big
+knife, and a small foot-rule; and in entire contrast with the intensely
+womanly woman, who uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman
+when she does anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a
+needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of
+which is affectation&mdash;from first to last affectation; a mere assumption
+of virile fashions utterly inharmonious <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78"></a>[<a href="./images/78.png">78</a>]</span>to the whole being, physical
+and mental, of a woman.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and
+orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a personal
+insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact limits of
+her mental sphere. This is the woman who assumes to be the antiseptic
+element in society, who makes believe that without her the world and
+human nature would go to the dogs, and plunge headlong into the abyss of
+sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand heroism of
+man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavor and patient
+seeking after truth, would serve his turn or the world's if she did not
+spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the boundary lines
+within which she would confine the range of thought and speculation. She
+knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affectation,
+and that other minds have as much right to their own boundary lines as
+she claims for herself; but it seems to her pretty to assume that woman
+generally is the consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that
+she, of all women, is most specially consecrated.</p>
+
+<p>As an offshoot of this kind stands the affectation of simplicity&mdash;the
+woman whose mental attitude is self-depreciation, and who poses herself
+as a mere nobody when the world is ringing with her praises. "Is it
+possible that your Grace has ever heard of <i>me</i>?" said one of this class
+with prettily affected <i>na&iuml;vet&eacute;</i> at a time when all England was astir
+about her, and when <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79"></a>[<a href="./images/79.png">79</a>]</span>colors and fashions went by her name to make them
+take with the public at large. No one knew better than the fair
+<i>ing&eacute;nue</i> in question how far and wide her fame had spread, but she
+thought it looked modest and simple to assume ignorance of her own
+value, and to declare that she was but a creeping worm when all the
+world knew that she was a soaring butterfly.</p>
+
+<p>There is a certain little kind of affectation very common among pretty
+women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are pretty,
+and not recognising the effect of their beauty on men. Take a woman with
+bewildering eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape, and fringed with
+long lashes that distract you to look at; the creature knows that her
+eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that fire burns and that ice
+melts; she knows the effect of that trick she has with them&mdash;the sudden
+uplifting of the heavy lid, and the swift, full gaze that she gives
+right into a man's eyes. She has practiced it often in the glass, and
+knows to a mathematical nicety the exact height to which the lid must be
+raised, and the exact fixity of the gaze. She knows the whole meaning of
+the look, and the stirring of men's blood that it creates; but if you
+speak to her of the effect of her trick, she puts on an air of extremest
+innocence, and protests her entire ignorance as to anything her eyes may
+say or mean: and if you press her hard she will look at you in the same
+way for your own benefit, and deny at the very moment of offence.</p>
+
+<p>Various other tricks has she with those bewildering <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80"></a>[<a href="./images/80.png">80</a>]</span>eyes of hers&mdash;each
+more perilous than the other to men's peace; and all unsparingly
+employed, no matter what the result. For this is the woman who flirts to
+the extreme limits, then suddenly draws up and says she meant nothing.
+Step by step she has led you on, with looks and smiles, and pretty
+doubtful phrases always susceptible of two meanings, the one for the ear
+by mere word, the other for the heart by the accompaniments of look and
+manner, which are intangible; step by step she has drawn you deeper and
+deeper into the maze where she has gone before as your decoy; then, when
+she has you safe, she raises her eyes for the last time, complains that
+you have mistaken her cruelly, and that she has meant nothing more than
+any one else might mean; and what can she do to repair her mistake? Love
+you? marry you? No; she is engaged to your rival, who counts his
+thousands to your hundreds; and what a pity that you had not seen this
+all along, and that you should have so misunderstood her! Besides, what
+is there about her that you or any one should love?</p>
+
+<p>Of all the many affectations of women, this affectation of their own
+harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when they
+practice their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most dangerous
+and the most disastrous. But what can one say to them? The very fact
+that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his perception
+until too late. That men love though they suffer is the woman's triumph,
+guilt, and condonation; and so long as the trick succeeds it will be
+practiced.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81"></a>[<a href="./images/81.png">81</a>]</span>
+Another affectation of the same family is the extreme friendliness and
+familiarity which some women adopt in their manners towards men. Young
+girls affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a year
+or so older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate, declare
+they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may not be natural. This
+form of affectation, once begun, continues through life, being too
+convenient to be lightly discarded; and youthful matrons not long out of
+their teens assume a tone and ways that would about befit middle age
+counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous even then
+if the "Indian summer" was specially bright and warm.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is the affectation pure and simple, which is the mere
+affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the
+mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of attitude that by consciousness
+ceases to be grace, and the thousand little <i>minauderies</i> and coquetries
+of the sex known to us all. And there is the affectation which people of
+a higher social sphere show when they condescend to those of low estate,
+and talk and look as if they were not quite certain of their company,
+and scarcely knew if they were Christian or heathen, savage or
+civilized. And there is the affectation of the maternal passion with
+women who are never by any chance seen with their children, but who
+speak of them as if they were never out of their sight; the affectation
+of wifely adoration with women who are to be met about the world with
+every man of their acquaintance rather than with their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82"></a>[<a href="./images/82.png">82</a>]</span>lawful husbands;
+the affectation of asceticism in women who lead a thoroughly
+self-enjoying life from end to end; and the affectation of political
+fervor in those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to save
+Europe from universal revolution.</p>
+
+<p>Go where we will, affectation of being something she is not meets us in
+woman, like a ghost we cannot lay or a mist we cannot sweep away. In the
+holiest and the most trivial things alike we find it penetrating
+everywhere&mdash;even in church, and at her prayers, when the pretty
+penitent, rising from her lengthy orison, lifts her eyes and looks about
+her furtively to see who has noticed her self-abasement and to whom her
+picturesque piety has commended itself.</p>
+
+<p>All sorts and patterns of good girls and pleasant women are very dear
+and delightful; but the pearl of great price is the thoroughly natural
+and unaffected woman&mdash;that is, the woman who is truthful to her core,
+and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she would dare
+to tell a lie.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83"></a>[<a href="./images/83.png">83</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>IDEAL WOMEN.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is often objected against fault-finders, writers or others, that they
+destroy but do not build up, that while industriously blaming errors
+they take good care not to praise the counteracting virtues, that in
+their zeal against the vermin of which they are seeking to sweep the
+house clean they forget the nobler creatures which do the good work of
+keeping things sweet and wholesome. But it is impossible to be
+continually introducing the saving clause, "all are not so bad as
+these." The seven thousand righteous who have not bowed the knee to Baal
+are understood to exist in all communities; and, vicious as any special
+section may be, there must always be the hidden salt and savor of the
+virtuous to keep the whole from falling into utter corruption. This is
+specially true of modern women. Certainly, some of them are as
+unsatisfactory as any of their kind that have ever appeared on earth
+before, but it would be very queer logic to infer, therefore, that all
+are bad alike, and that our modern womanhood is as ill off as the Cities
+of the Plain which could not be saved for want of the ten just men to
+save them.</p>
+
+<p>Happily, we have noble women among us yet; women who believe in
+something beside pleasure, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84"></a>[<a href="./images/84.png">84</a>]</span>who do their work faithfully, wherever
+it may lie; women who can and do sacrifice themselves for love and duty,
+and who do not think they were sent into the world simply to run one mad
+life-long race for wealth, for dissipation, or for distinction. But the
+life of such women is essentially in retirement; and though the lesson
+they teach is beautiful, yet its influence is necessarily confined,
+because of the narrow sphere of the teacher. When such public occasions
+for devotedness as the Crimean war occur, we can in some sort measure
+the extent to which the self-sacrifice of women can be carried; but in
+general their noblest virtues come out only in the quiet and secresy of
+home, and the most heroic lives of patience and well-doing go on in
+seclusion, uncheered by sympathy and unrewarded by applause.</p>
+
+<p>Still, it is impossible to write of one absolute womanly ideal&mdash;one
+single type that shall satisfy every man's fancy; for, naturally, what
+would be perfection to one is imperfection to another, according to the
+special bent of the individual mind. Thus one man's ideal of womanly
+perfection is in beauty, mere physical outside beauty; and not all the
+virtues under heaven could warm him into love with red hair or a snub
+nose. He is entirely happy if his wife is undeniably the handsomest
+woman of his acquaintance, and holds himself blessed when all men admire
+and all women envy. But for his own sake rather than for hers. Pleasant
+as her loveliness is to look on, it is pleasanter to know that he is the
+possessor of it. The "handsomest woman in the room" comes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85"></a>[<a href="./images/85.png">85</a>]</span>into the same
+category as the finest picture or the most thoroughbred horse within his
+sphere, and if the degree of pride in his possession is different, the
+kind is the same. And so in minor proportions, from the most beautiful
+woman of all, to simply beauty as a <i>sine qua non</i>, whatever else may be
+wanting. One other thing only is as absolute as this beauty, and that is
+its undivided possession.</p>
+
+<p>Another man's ideal is a good housekeeper and a careful mother, and he
+does not care a rush whether his wife, if she is these, is pretty or
+ugly. Provided she is active and industrious, minds the house well, and
+brings up the children as they ought to be brought up, has good
+principles, is trustworthy, and even-tempered, he is not particular as
+to color or form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or a
+squint. Given the great foundations of an honorable home, and he will
+forego the lath and plaster of personal appearance which will not bear
+the wear and tear of years and their troubles. The solid virtues stand.
+His balance at the banker's is a fact; his good name and credit with the
+tradespeople is a fact; so is the comfort of his home; so are the
+health, the morals, the education of his children. All these are the
+true realities of life to him; but the beauty which changes to deformity
+by the small-pox, which fades under dyspepsia, grows stale by habit, and
+is worn threadbare by the end of twenty years, is only a skin-deep grace
+which he does not value. Perhaps he is right. Certainly, some of the
+happiest marriages among one's acquaintances are those where the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86"></a>[<a href="./images/86.png">86</a>]</span>wife
+has not one perceptible physical charm, and where the whole force of her
+magnetic value lies in what she is, not in how she looks.</p>
+
+<p>Another man wants a tender, adoring, fair-haired seraph, who will
+worship him as a demigod, and accept him as her best revelation of
+strength and wisdom. The more dependent she is, the better he will love
+her; the less of conscious thought, of active will, of originative power
+she has, the greater his regard and tenderness. To be the one sole
+teacher and protector of such a gentle little creature seems to him the
+most delicious and the best condition of married life; and he holds
+Milton's famous lines to be expressive of the only fitting relation
+between men and women. The adoring seraph is his ideal; Griselda,
+Desdemona, Lucy Ashton, are his highest culminations of womanly grace;
+and the qualities which appeal the most powerfully to his generosity are
+the patience which will not complain, the gentleness that cannot resent,
+and the love which nothing can chill.</p>
+
+<p>Another man wants a cultivated intelligence in his ideal. As an author,
+an artist, a student, a statesman, he would like his wife to be able to
+help him by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect. He believes
+in the sex of minds, and holds only that work complete which has been
+created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees how women have
+helped on the leaders in troubled times; he knows that almost all great
+men have owed something of their greatness to the influence of a mother
+or a wife; he remembers how thoughts which had lain dumb in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"></a>[<a href="./images/87.png">87</a>]</span>men's
+brains for more than half their lifetime suddenly woke up into speech
+and activity by the influence of a woman great enough to call them
+forth. The adoring seraph would be an encumbrance, and nothing better
+than a child upon his hands; and the soul which had to be awakened and
+directed by him would run great chance of remaining torpid and inactive
+all its days. He has his own life to lead and round off, and so far from
+wishing to influence another's, wants to be helped for himself.</p>
+
+<p>Another man cares only for the birth and social position of the woman to
+whom he gives his name and affection; to another yellow gold stands
+higher than blue blood, and "my wife's father" may have been a
+rag-picker, so long as rag-picking had been a sufficiently rich alembic
+with a residuum admitting of no kind of doubt. Venus herself without a
+dowry would be only a pretty sea-side girl with a Newtown pippin in her
+hand; but Miss Kilmansegg would be something worth thinking of, if but
+little worth looking at. One man delights in a smart, vivacious little
+woman of the irrepressible kind. It makes no difference to him how
+petulant she is, how full of fire and fury; the most passionate bursts
+of temper simply amuse him, like the anger of a canary-bird, and he
+holds it fine fun to watch the small virago in her tantrums, and to set
+her going again when he thinks she has been a long enough time in
+subsidence. His ideal of woman is an amusing little plaything, with a
+great facility for being put up, and a dash of viciousness to give it
+piquancy.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"></a>[<a href="./images/88.png">88</a>]</span>
+Another wants a sweet and holy saint whose patient humility springs
+from principle rather than from fear; another likes a blithe-tempered,
+healthy girl with no nonsense about her, full of fun and ready for
+everything, and is not particular as to the strict order or economy of
+the housekeeping, provided only she is at all times willing to be his
+pleasant playmate and companion. Another delights in something very
+quiet, very silent, very home-staying. One must have first-rate music in
+his ideal woman; another unimpeachable taste; a third, strict orders; a
+fourth, liberal breadth of nature; and each has his own ideal, not only
+of nature but of person&mdash;to the exact shade of the hair, the color of
+the eyes, and the oval of the face. But all agree in the great
+fundamental requirements of truth, and modesty, and love, and
+unselfishness; for though it is impossible to write of one womanly ideal
+as an absolute, it is very possible to detail the virtues which ought to
+belong to all alike.</p>
+
+<p>If this diversity of ideals is true of individuals, it is especially
+true of nations, each of which has its own ideal of woman varying
+according to what is called the genius of the country. To the Frenchman,
+if we are to believe Michelet and the novelists, it is a feverish little
+creature, full of nervous energy, but without muscular force; of frail
+health and feeble organization; a prey to morbid fancies which she has
+no strength to control or to resist; now weeping away her life in the
+pain of finding that her husband, a man gross and material because
+husband, does not understand her; now sighing over her delicious sins
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"></a>[<a href="./images/89.png">89</a>]</span>in the arms of the lover who does; without reasoning faculties, but
+with divine intuitions that are as good as revelations; without cool
+judgment, but with the light of burning passions that guide her just as
+well; thinking by her heart, yet carrying the most refined metaphysics
+into her love; subtle; incomprehensible by the coarser brain of man; a
+creature born to bewilder and to be misled, to love and to be adored, to
+madden men and to be destroyed by them.</p>
+
+<p>It does not much signify that the reality is a shrewd, calculating,
+unromantic woman, with a hard face and keen eyes, who for the most part
+makes a good practical wife to her common-sense middle-aged husband, who
+thinks more of her social position than of her feelings, more of her
+children than of her lovers, more of her purse than of her heart, and
+whose great object of life is a daily struggle for centimes. It pleases
+the French to idealize their eminently practical and worldly-wise women
+into this queer compound of hysterics and adultery; and if it pleases
+them it need not displease us.</p>
+
+<p>To the German his ideal is of two kinds&mdash;one, his Martha, the domestic
+broad-faced <i>Hausmutter</i>, who cooks good dinners at small cost, and
+mends the family linen as religiously as if this were the Eleventh
+Commandment especially appointed for feminine fingers to keep, the
+poetic culmination of whom is Charlotte cutting bread and butter; the
+other, his Mary, his Bettina, full of mind and &aelig;sthetics, and
+heart-uplifting love, yearning after the infinite with holes in her
+stockings and her shoes down <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90"></a>[<a href="./images/90.png">90</a>]</span>at heel. For what are coarse material
+mendings to the &aelig;sthetic soul yearning after the infinite, and
+worshipping at the feet of the prophet?</p>
+
+<p>In Italy the ideal woman of modern times is the ardent patriot, full of
+active energy, or physical force, and dauntless courage.</p>
+
+<p>In Poland it is the patriot too, but of a more refined and etherealized
+type, passively resenting Tartar tyranny by the subtlest feminine scorn,
+and living in perpetual music and mourning.</p>
+
+<p>In Spain it is a woman beautiful and impassioned, with the slight
+drawback of needing a world of looking after, of which the men are
+undeniably capable.</p>
+
+<p>In Mohammedan countries generally it is a comely smooth-skinned Dud&ugrave;,
+patient and submissive, always in good humor with her master, economical
+in house-living to suit the meanness, and gorgeous in occasional attire
+to suit the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental; but by no means Dud&ugrave;
+ever asleep and unoccupied; for, if not allowed to take part in active
+outside life, the Eastern's wife or wives have their home duties and
+their maternal cares like all other women, and find to their cost that,
+if they neglect them unduly, they will have a bad time of it with Ali
+Ben Hassan when the question comes of piastres and sequins, and the dogs
+of Jews who demand payment, and the pigs of Christians who follow suit.</p>
+
+<p>The American ideal is of two kinds, like the German&mdash;the one, the clever
+manager, the woman with good executive faculty in the matters of
+buckwheat cakes and oyster gumbo, as is needed in a country so <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91"></a>[<a href="./images/91.png">91</a>]</span>poorly
+provided with "helps;" the other, the aspiring soul who puts her
+aspirations into deeds, and goes out into the world to do battle with
+the sins of society as editress, preacher, stump orator, and the like.
+It must be rather embarrassing to some men that this special
+manifestation of the ideal woman at times advocates miscegenation and
+free love; but perhaps we of the narrow old conventional type are not up
+to the right mark yet, and have to wait until our own women are
+thoroughly emancipated before we can rightly appreciate these questions.
+At all events, if this kind of thing pleases the Americans, it is no
+more our business to interfere with them than with the French compound;
+and if miscegenation and free love seem to them the right manner of
+life, let them follow it.</p>
+
+<p>In all countries, then, the ideal woman changes, chameleon-like, to suit
+the taste of man; and the great doctrine that her happiness does
+somewhat depend on his liking is part of the very foundation of her
+existence. According to his will she is bond or free, educated or
+ignorant, lax or strict, house-keeping or roving; and though we advocate
+neither the bondage nor the ignorance, yet we do hold to the principle
+that, by the laws which regulate all human communities everywhere, she
+is bound to study the wishes of man, and to mould her life in harmony
+with his liking. No society can get on in which there is total
+independence of sections and members, for society is built up on the
+mutual dependence of all its sections and all its members. Hence the
+defiant <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92"></a>[<a href="./images/92.png">92</a>]</span>attitudes which women have lately assumed, and their
+indifference to the wishes and remonstrances of men, cannot lead to any
+good results whatever. It is not the revolt of slaves against their
+tyrants&mdash;in that we could sympathize&mdash;which they have begun, but a
+revolt against their duties. And this it is which makes the present
+state of things so deplorable. It is the vague restlessness, the fierce
+extravagance, the neglect of home, the indolent fine-ladyism, the
+passionate love of pleasure which characterise the modern woman, that
+saddens men, and destroys in them that respect which their very pride
+prompts them to feel. And it is the painful conviction that the ideal
+woman of truth and modesty and simple love and homely living has somehow
+faded away under the paint and tinsel of this modern reality which makes
+us speak out as we have done, in the hope, perhaps a forlorn one, that
+if she could be made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she
+would, by the very force of natural instinct and social necessity, order
+herself in some accordance with the lost ideal, and become again what we
+once loved and what we all regret.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93"></a>[<a href="./images/93.png">93</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>WOMAN AND THE WORLD.</h2>
+
+
+<p>This, we are told in a tone of pathetic resignation, is a day of hard
+sayings for women. It is, we will venture to add, a day when women have
+to meet hard sayings with replies a little less superficial than the
+conventional stare of outraged womanhood or the trivial retort on the
+follies of men. Grant that woman's censors are as cynical and
+hollow-hearted as you will, there can be no doubt that their criticisms
+are simply the expression of a general uneasiness, and that that
+uneasiness has some ground to go upon. It is possible that observers
+across the water may be cynical in denouncing the "magnificent
+indecency" of the heroines of New York. It is possible that the
+schoolmasters of Berlin may be cynical in calling public opinion to
+their aid against the degrading exhibitions of the Prussian capital. It
+is possible that the thunders of the Vatican are merely an instance of
+Papal cynicism. It is possible that the protest of the Bishop of Orleans
+is as hollow-hearted as the protests of censors nearer home. But such a
+world-wide outbreak of cynicism without a cause is a somewhat improbable
+event, and the improbability is increased when we remark the silent
+acquiescence of the women of America and the Continent in the justice of
+these censures.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94"></a>[<a href="./images/94.png">94</a>]</span>
+It is only the British mother who ventures to protest. Now, we
+Englishmen have always felt a sort of national pride in the British
+mother. It has been a part of our patriotic self-satisfaction to pique
+ourselves on her icy decorum, on the merciless severity of her virtue.
+Colorless, uninteresting, limited as Continental critics pronounced her
+to be, we cherished her the more as something specially our own, and
+regarded the Channel as a barrier providentially invented for the
+isolation of her spotless prudery. It was peculiarly gratifying to
+suppose that on the other side of it there were no British homes, no
+British maidens, no British mothers. And it must be owned that the
+British mother took her cue admirably. She owned, with a sigh of
+complacency, that she was not as other women. She shuddered at foreign
+morals, and tabooed French novels. She shook all life and individuality
+out of her girls as un-English and Continental. She denounced all
+aspirations after higher and larger spheres of effort as unfeminine.
+Such a type of woman was naturally dull enough, but it fairly came up to
+its own standard; and if its respectability was prudery, it still
+earned, and had a right to claim, man's respect. The amusing thing is
+the persistence in the claim when the type has passed away.</p>
+
+<p>The British spouse has bloomed into the semi-detached wife, with a
+husband always conveniently in the distance, and a cicisbeo as
+conveniently in the corner. The British mother has died into the faded
+matrimonial schemer, contemptuous of younger sons. The innocent simper
+of the British maiden has <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95"></a>[<a href="./images/95.png">95</a>]</span>developed into the loud laugh and the horsey
+slang of the girl of the season. But maiden and matron are still on one
+point faithful to the traditions of their grandmothers, and front all
+censorious comers with a shrug of their shoulder-straps and a flutter of
+indignant womanhood. And maiden and matron still claim their insular
+exemption from the foibles of their sex. The Pope may do what he will
+with the women of Italy, and Monseigneur of Orleans may deal stern
+justice out to the women of France; Continental immorality is in the
+nature of things; but there is something else that is in the nature of
+things too, and before the impeccable majesty of British womanhood every
+critic must stand abashed.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, we are no sooner awed with the marble silence of our
+Hermione than Hermione descends from her pedestal and falls a-talking
+like other people. Woman, in a word, protests; and protests are often
+very dangerous things to the protesters. Nothing, for instance, can seem
+more simple or more effective than the <i>tu quoque</i> retort, and as it is
+familiar to feminine disputants, we are favored with it in every
+possible form. If the girl of the period is fast and frivolous, is the
+young man of the period any better? No sketch can be more telling than
+the picture which she is ready to draw of his lounging ways, his
+epicurean indolence, his boredom at home, his foppery abroad, the
+vacancy of his stare, the inanity of his talk, his incredible conceit,
+his life vibrating between the Club and the stable. She hits off with a
+charming vivacity the list of his accomplishments&mdash;his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96"></a>[<a href="./images/96.png">96</a>]</span>skill at
+flirtation, his matchless ability at croquet, his assiduity over <i>Bell's
+Life</i>, the cleverness of his book on the Derby. No sensible or
+well-informed girl, she tells us, can talk for ten minutes to this
+creature without weariness and disgust at his ignorance, his narrowness,
+his triviality; no modestly-dressed or decently-mannered girl can win
+the slightest share of his attentions. Married, he is as frivolous as
+before marriage; he selects the toilette of the <i>demi-monde</i> as an
+agreeable topic of domestic conversation, he resents affection and
+proclaims home a bore, he grudges the birth of children as an additional
+expense, he stunts and degrades the education of his girls, he is the
+despot of his household and the dread of his family.</p>
+
+<p>The sketch is powerful enough in its way, but the conclusion which the
+fair artist draws is at least an odd one. We prepare ourselves to hear
+that woman has resolved to extirpate such a monster as this, or that she
+will remain an obstinate vestal till a nobler breed of wooers arises.
+What woman owns that she really does is to mould herself as much on the
+monster's model as she can. According to her own account, she puts
+nature's picture of herself into the hands of this imbecile, invites him
+to blur it as he will, and lets him write under the daub "<i>Ego feci.</i>"
+As he cannot talk sense, she stoops to bandy chaff and slang. As he
+refuses to be attracted by modesty of dress and manner, she apes the
+dress and manner of the <i>demi-monde</i>. His indolence, his triviality, his
+worldliness become her own. As he finds home a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97"></a>[<a href="./images/97.png">97</a>]</span>bore, she too plunges
+into her round of dissipation; as he objects to children, she declines
+to be a mother; as he wishes to get the girls off his hands, she flings
+them at the head of the first comer.</p>
+
+<p>Now, if such a defence as this at all adequately represents the facts of
+the case, we can only say that the girl of the period must be a far
+lower creature than we have ever asserted her to be. A sensible girl
+stooping to slang, a modest girl flinging aside modesty, simply to
+conquer a fool and a fop, is a satire upon woman which none but a woman
+could have invented, and which we must confess to be utterly incredible
+to men. But the assumption upon which the whole of this mimetic theory
+is based is one well worthy of a little graver consideration.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me how to improve the youth of France," said Napoleon one day to
+Madame de Campan. "Give them good mothers," was the reply. There are
+some things which even a Napoleon may be pardoned for feeling a little
+puzzled in undertaking, and Madame de Campan would no doubt have added
+much to the weight of her reply by a few practical words as to the
+machinery requisite for the supply of the article she recommended. But
+her request is now the cry of the world. The general uneasiness of which
+we have spoken before arises simply from the conviction that woman is
+becoming more and more indifferent to her actual post in the social
+economy of the world, and the criticisms in which it takes form, whether
+grave or gay, could all be summed up in Madame de Campan's request,
+"Give us good mothers."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98"></a>[<a href="./images/98.png">98</a>]</span>
+After all protests against limiting the sphere of the sex to a single
+function of their existence, public opinion still regards woman
+primarily in her relation to the generation to come. If it censures the
+sensible girl who stoops to slang, or the modest girl who stoops to
+indecency, it is because the sense and the modesty which they abandon is
+not theirs to hold or to fling away, but the heritage of the human race.
+But this seems to be less and less the feeling of woman herself. For
+good or for evil, or, perhaps more truly, for both good and evil, woman
+is becoming conscious every day of new powers, and longing for an
+independent sphere in which she can exert them. Marriage is aimed at
+with a passionate ardor unknown before, not as a means of gratifying
+affection, but as a means of securing independence.</p>
+
+<p>To the unmarried girl life is a sheer bondage, and there is no sacrifice
+too great to be left untried if it only promises a chance of
+deliverance. She learns to despise the sense, the information, the
+womanly reserve which fail to attract the deliverer. She has to sell
+herself to purchase her freedom; and she will take very strong measures
+to secure a purchaser. The fop, the fool, little knows the keen scrutiny
+with which the gay creature behind her fan is taking stock of his feeble
+preferences, is preparing to play upon his feebler aversions. Pitiful as
+he is, it is for him that she arranges her artillery on the
+toilette-table, the "little secrets," the powder bloom, the rouge
+"precipitated from the damask rose-leaf," the Styrian lotion that gives
+"beauty and freshness to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99"></a>[<a href="./images/99.png">99</a>]</span>complexion, plumpness to the figure,
+clearness and softness to the skin." He has a faint flicker of liking
+for brunettes; she lays her triumphant fingers on her "walnut stain,"
+and darkens into the favorite tint. He loves plumpness, and her "Sinai
+Manna" is at hand to secure <i>embonpoint</i>. Belladonna flashes on him from
+her eyes, Kohl and antimony deepen the blackness of her eyebrows, "bloom
+of roses" blushes from her lips. She stoops to conquer, and it is no
+wonder that the fop and the fool go down.</p>
+
+<p>The freedom she covets comes with marriage, but it is a freedom
+threatened by a thousand accidents, and threatened, above all, by
+maternity. It is of little use to have bowed to slang and
+shoulder-straps, if it be only to tie oneself to a cradle. The nursery
+stands sadly in the way of the free development of woman; it clips her
+social enjoyment, it curtails her bonnet bills. "The slavery of nursing
+a child," one fair protester tells us, "only a mother knows." And so she
+invents a pretty theory about the damage done to modern constitutions by
+our port-drinking forefathers, and ceases to nurse at all. But even this
+is only partial independence; she pants for perfect freedom from the
+cares of maternity. Her tone becomes the tone of the household, and the
+spouse she has won growls over each new arrival. She is quite ready to
+welcome the growl. "Nature," a mother informs us, "turns restive after
+the birth of two or three children," and mothers turn restive with
+nature. "Whatever else you may do," she adds, "you will never persuade
+us into liking to have children," and, if we did, we <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100"></a>[<a href="./images/100.png">100</a>]</span>should not greatly
+value the conversion. And so woman wins her liberty, and bows her
+emphatic reply to the world's appeal, "Give us good mothers," by
+declining to be a mother at all.</p>
+
+<p>By the sacrifice of womanliness, by the sacrifice of modesty, by
+flattering her wooer's base preferences before marriage, by encouraging
+his baser selfishness afterwards, by hunting her husband to the club and
+restricting her maternal energies to a couple of infants, woman has at
+last bought her freedom. She is no slave to a husband as her mother was,
+she is not buried beneath the cares of a family like her grandmother.
+She has changed all that, and the old world of home and domestic
+tenderness and parental self-sacrifice lies in ruins at her feet. She
+has her liberty; what will she do with it? As yet, freedom means simply
+more slang, more jewelry, more selfish extravagance, less modesty. As we
+meet her on the stairs, as we see the profuse display of her charms, as
+we listen to the flippant, vapid chatter, we turn a little sickened from
+woman stripped of all that is womanly, and cry to Heaven, as Madame de
+Campan cried to the Emperor&mdash;"Give us good mothers."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101"></a>[<a href="./images/101.png">101</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>UNEQUAL MARRIAGES.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Acute ladies who concern themselves much with the superficial social
+currents of the time are beginning to perceive, or at least to think
+that they perceive, a fatal and growing tendency to <i>m&eacute;salliances</i> on
+the part of men who ought to know better. They complain not merely of
+the doting old gentleman who has been a bachelor long enough to lose his
+wits, and so marries his cook or his housemaid, nor of the debauched
+young simpleton who takes a wife from a casino or the bar of a
+night-<i>caf&eacute;</i>. Actions of this sort are as common at one time as at
+another. Old fools and young fools maintain a pretty steady average.
+Their silly exploits are the issue, not of the tendencies of the age,
+but of their own individual and particular lack of wits. They do not
+affect the general direction of social feeling, nor have we any right to
+argue up from their preposterous connexions to the influences and
+conditions of the society of which they are only the abnormal and
+irregular growths. What people mean, when they talk of an increase in
+the number of men who marry beneath them, is that men otherwise sensible
+and respectable and sober-minded perpetrate the irregularity in
+something like cold blood, and with a measure of deliberation. Whether
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102"></a>[<a href="./images/102.png">102</a>]</span>observers who have formed this opinion are right, or are only
+anticipating their own apprehensions and alarms, is difficult to
+ascertain. A good deal depends on the accidental range of the observer's
+own acquaintances, and still more on their candor or discreet reticence.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, how are we to know how far one generation is worse than
+generations which have gone before it? Men are, after due time, forgiven
+for this defiance of social usage, and women who were barely presentable
+in youth become presentable enough by the time they reach middle age.
+People may seem to us to be very equally and justly mated who
+five-and-twenty years ago were the town's talk. It is practically
+impossible, therefore, to compare the actual number of unequal marriages
+in our day with those of a generation back. People may have their ideas,
+but verification is not to be had. All we can do is to estimate the
+increase in the conditions which are likely to make men find wives in a
+rank below their own. If we look at these, there may be a good many
+reasons for believing that the apprehensions of the shrewd and alarmed
+observers are not without justification.</p>
+
+<p>When a wise man with a living or a name to make, or both, looks for a
+wife, he certainly does not desire a person who shall be troublesome and
+an impediment to him. He wants a cheerful, sensible, and decently
+thrifty person. He probably has no inclination for a bluestocking, nor
+for a lady with aggressive views on points of theology, nor for one who
+can <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103"></a>[<a href="./images/103.png">103</a>]</span>beat him in political discussion. Strong intellectual power he can
+most heartily dispense with. But then, on the other hand, he has no
+fancy for sitting day after day at table with a vapid, flippant,
+frivolous, empty soul who can neither talk nor listen, who takes no
+interest in things herself, and cannot understand why other people
+should take interest in them, who is penetrated with feeble little
+egoisms. An aggressive woman with opinions about prevenient grace, or
+the advantages of female emigration, or the functions of the deaconess,
+would be far preferable to this. She would irritate, but she would not
+fill the soul with everlasting despair, as the pretty vapid creature
+does. To discuss predestination and election over dinner is not nice,
+but still less is it nice to have to make talk with a fool, and to be
+obliged to answer her according to her folly.</p>
+
+<p>As the education of modern girls of fashion chiefly aims at making them
+either very fast or very slow, it is not to be wondered at that men find
+it hard to realize their ideals among their equals in position. It is
+not merely that so many marriageable young ladies are ignorant. They are
+this, but they are more. They are exacting and pretentious, and
+uneducated in the worst sense, for they are ignorant how ignorant they
+are, or even that they are ignorant at all.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is a still more obvious, palpable, and impressive
+circumstance. A man with ordinary means looks with alarm on the too
+visible and too unbounded extravagance of the ladies from among whom he
+is expected to take a partner. The thought <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104"></a>[<a href="./images/104.png">104</a>]</span>of the apparel, of the
+luxuries, of the attendants, of the restless moving about, to which they
+have been accustomed, fills him with deep consternation. He might
+perhaps deceive himself into thinking that he could get on very well
+with an empty-minded woman, but he cannot forget the stern facts of
+arithmetic, nor hoodwink himself as to what would be left out of his
+income after he had paid for dresses, servants, household charges,
+carriages, parties, opera-boxes, traveling, and all the rest.</p>
+
+<p>Besides the flippancy of so many women, and the extravagance of most
+women, arising from their inexperience of the trouble with which money
+is made and of the importance of keeping it after it has been made,
+there is something in the characteristics of modern social intercourse
+which makes men of a certain temper intensely anxious to avoid a sort of
+marriage which would, among other things, have the effect of committing
+them more deeply to this kind of intercourse. Such men shrink with
+affright from giving hostages to society for a more faithful compliance
+with its most dismal exactions. To them there is nothing more
+unendurable than the monotonous round of general hospitalities and
+ceremonials, ludicrously misnamed pleasure. A detestation of wearisome
+formalities does not imply any clownish or misanthropic reluctance to
+remember that those who feel it live in a world with other people, and
+that a thoroughly social life is the only just and full life.</p>
+
+<p>But there is all the difference between a really social life and a
+hollow phantasmic imitation of it. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105"></a>[<a href="./images/105.png">105</a>]</span>A person may have the pleasantest
+possible circle of friends, and may like their society above all things.
+This is one thing. But to have to mix much with numbers of thoroughly
+indifferent people, and in a superficial, hollow way, is a very
+different thing. Of course, men who take life just as it comes, who are
+not very sedulous about making the most of it in their own way, and are
+quite willing to do all that their neighbors do just because their
+neighbors do it, find no annoyance in this. Men cast in another mould
+find not only annoyance but absolute misery. They know also that
+marriage with a woman who is in the full tide of society means an
+infinite augmentation of this round of tiresome and thoroughly useless
+ceremonies. Add this consideration to the two other considerations of
+elaborate vapidness and unfathomable extravagance, and you have three
+tolerably good arguments why a man with large discourse of reason,
+looking before and after, should be slow to fasten upon himself bonds
+which threaten to prove so leaden.</p>
+
+<p>The faults of the women of his own position, however, are a very poor
+reason why he should marry a woman beneath his own position. A man must
+be very weak to believe that, because fine ladies are often inane and
+extravagant, therefore women who are not fine ladies must be wise,
+clever, prudent, and everything else that belongs to the type of
+companionable womanhood. The fact of the mistress being a blank does not
+prove that the maid would be a prize. It may be wise to avoid the one,
+but it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106"></a>[<a href="./images/106.png">106</a>]</span>is certainly folly to seek the other. Granting that the
+housemaid or the cook or the daughter of the coachman is virtuous,
+high-minded, refined, thoughtful, thrifty, and everything else that is
+desirable under the sun, all will fail to counterbalance the drawbacks
+that flow from the first inequality of position.</p>
+
+<p>The misguided husband believes that he is going to live a plain
+unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company
+with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never
+infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The
+lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his
+motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the
+express desire of avoiding visits, yet he no sooner gets what he wished
+than his success begins to make him miserable. What he expected to
+please him as a relief mortifies him as a slight. Even if he be
+unsympathetic enough in nature not to care much for the disapproval of
+his fellows, he will rapidly find that his wife is a good deal less of a
+philosopher in these points, and that, though he may relish his escape
+from the miseries of society, she will vigorously resent her exclusion
+from its supposed delights.</p>
+
+<p>Again, from another point of view, he is tolerably sure to find that the
+common opinion of society about unequal unions is not so unsound as he
+used scornfully to suppose it to be. The vapidity of a polite woman is
+bad, but the vapidity of a woman who is not polite is decidedly worse. A
+simpering unthinking woman with good manners is decidedly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107"></a>[<a href="./images/107.png">107</a>]</span>better than
+an unthinking woman with imperfect manners; and if polish can spoil
+nature among one set of people, certainly among another set nature may
+be as much spoilt by lack of polish. It does not follow, from a person
+being indifferently well-bred, that therefore she is profoundly wise and
+thoughtful and poetic, and capable of estimating the things of this
+world at their worth. Boys at college indulge in this too generous
+fallacy. For grown-up men there is less excuse. They ought to know that
+obscure uneducated women are all the more likely on that account to fall
+short of magnanimity, self-control, self-containing composure, than
+girls who have grown up with a background of bright and gracious
+tradition, however little their education may have done to stimulate
+them to make the foreground like it. To have a common past is the first
+secret of happy association&mdash;a past common in ideas, sentiments, and
+growth, if not common in external incidents.</p>
+
+<p>One reason why a cultivated man is wretched with a vapid woman is that
+she has not traveled over a yard of that ground of knowledge and feeling
+which has in truth made his nature what it is. But a woman in his own
+station is more likely to have shared a past of this sort than a woman
+of lower station. Mere community of general circumstances and
+surrounding does something. The obscure woman taken from inferior place
+has not the common past of culture, nor of circumstance either. The
+foolish man who has married away from his class trusts that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108"></a>[<a href="./images/108.png">108</a>]</span>somehow or
+other nature will repair this. He assumes, in a real paroxysm of folly,
+that obscurity is the fostering condition of a richness of character
+which could not be got by culture. He pays the price of his blindness.
+Untended nature is more likely to produce weeds than choice fruits, and
+the chances in such cases as this are beyond calculation in favor of his
+having got a weed&mdash;in other words, having wedded himself to a life of
+wrangling, gloom, and swift deterioration of character. This result may
+not be invariable, but it must be more usual than not.</p>
+
+<p>In the exceptional cases where a man does not repent of an unequal match
+of this sort, you will mostly find that the match was unequal only in
+externals, and that his character had been a very fit counterpart for
+that of a vulgar and uneducated woman before he made her his wife. This
+may lead one to think that there is something to be said for the woman
+in morganatic marriages. The men who do these things are not always, not
+even generally, philosophic men in search of an unsophisticated life,
+but unamiable, defiant persons, who only hate society either because it
+has failed to appreciate their qualities, or because they cannot be at
+the trouble to go through the ordinary amount of polite usage.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109"></a>[<a href="./images/109.png">109</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>HUSBAND-HUNTING.</h2>
+
+
+<p>What we have said in another place about the odium which attaches to
+"match-making" naturally applies in a far greater degree to
+"husband-hunting." Practically the two words mean much the same thing,
+since the successful result of a husband-hunt is of course a match, and
+match-making, in the common acceptation of the term, involves a
+husband-hunt. This latter fact is somewhat curious. There is no reason
+in the nature of things why the word match-making should be associated
+only with the pursuit of the unmarried male. On the contrary, the theory
+of marriage has always been that it is the woman who has to be hunted
+down. It is curious to note under what completely different
+circumstances, and occasionally in what grotesque forms, the same theory
+has been found all over the world, both in civilized and savage life.
+Sometimes the bride is carried away bodily from her home, as if nothing
+short of physical force could make a woman quit her maiden state.
+Sometimes the panting bridegroom has to run her down&mdash;no slight task if
+the adorer happens to be stout, and the adored one coquettish and fleet
+of foot. In marriage, this custom prevails only, we believe, among the
+savages, but visitors to the Crystal Palace <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110"></a>[<a href="./images/110.png">110</a>]</span>may see how modern
+civilization has adapted it to courtship in the popular pastime of
+kiss-in-the-ring.</p>
+
+<p>We have read of a savage tribe in which the bride is thought no better
+than she should be, if, on the day after the wedding, the bridegroom
+does not show signs of having been vigorously pinched and scratched.
+This custom, again, is perhaps represented in civilized life by the
+kissing and struggling which are supposed every Christmas to go on under
+the mistletoe. It is not unworthy of remark, as regards these two points
+of comparison between civilization and barbarism, that, as the woman
+gets more civilized, she seems more disposed to meet her pursuer
+halfway. In the game of kiss-in-the-ring, for instance, although the
+lady does not run after the gentleman, but, on the contrary, shows her
+maiden modesty by giving him as hard a chase as she can, she still
+delicately paves the way for osculation by throwing the
+pocket-handkerchief. And, in the Christmas fights under the mistletoe
+(if we may take Mr. Dickens as an authority), slapping, and even
+pinching in moderation, are considered allowable&mdash;perhaps we ought to
+say proper&mdash;on the lady's part; but scratching&mdash;serious scratching, we
+mean, which would make her admirer's face look next morning as if he had
+been taking liberties with a savage bird or a cat&mdash;is thought not merely
+unnecessary, but unfair.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between civilized and savage woman may perhaps help to
+indicate the reason why, now-a-days, match-making should, as a matter of
+fact, be associated with husband-hunting in spite of the theory <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111"></a>[<a href="./images/111.png">111</a>]</span>that it
+is the woman who has to be hunted, not the man. Popular phraseology has
+an awkward trick of making people unconsciously countenance the theories
+against which they most vehemently protest. Husband-hunting is a far
+more generally obnoxious word than even the much-injured match-making,
+simply because it flies in the face of the pet theory which we have
+described. But, if the theory really hold good in modern practice, why
+should man, not woman, be recognised as the professional match-maker's
+victim and legitimate game? Why does not wife-hunting, the word which
+this theory entitles us to expect, take its proper place in society?
+Heiress-hunting, indeed, is well known, but this can scarcely be
+considered a form of wife-hunting, for it is not the woman who is the
+object of pursuit, but her money-bags. We have the word heiress-hunting
+for the very obvious reason that heiresses are recognised game. The word
+husband-hunting exists for the same reason.</p>
+
+<p>Are we to infer from the non-existence, or at any rate the
+non-appearance in good society, of the word wife-hunting, that the
+practice is anything but common&mdash;that, since a hunt necessarily implies
+pursuit on one side and flight on the other, a man cannot well be said
+to hunt a woman who is either engaged in hunting him, or else only too
+ready to meet him halfway? Are we gradually tending towards an advanced
+stage of civilization in which woman will be formally recognized as the
+pursuer, and man as the pursued? We are not bold enough to take under
+our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112"></a>[<a href="./images/112.png">112</a>]</span>protection a view so glaringly heterodox, but still we think it
+only common justice to point out that there are difficult problems in
+the present state of society which the view helps materially to solve.
+We fear, for instance, there can be no doubt that there is a good deal
+of truth in the Belgravian mother's lament that marriage is gradually
+ceasing to be considered "the thing" among the young men of the present
+day; that girls of good families and even good looks are taking to
+sisterhoods, and nursing-institutes, and new-fangled abominations,
+simply because there is no one to marry them.</p>
+
+<p>It is not merely that the young men are getting every day rarer; though,
+unless there is some system, like Pharaoh's, for putting male infants to
+death, what can become of them all is a mystery. India and the colonies
+may absorb a good many, though these places also do duty in the
+absorption of spinsterhood. But this will not account for the alarming
+fact, that in almost every ball-room, no matter whether in the country
+or in town, there are usually at least three crinolines to one
+tail-coat, and that dancing bachelors are becoming so scarce that it is
+a question whether hostesses ought not, for their own peace of mind, to
+connive at the introduction of the Oriental nautch. Yet even the
+alarming scarcity of marriageable men is not so serious an evil as their
+growing disinclination to marry.</p>
+
+<p>With the causes of this disinclination we are not now concerned. Some
+attribute it to the increase of luxurious and expensive habits among
+bachelors&mdash;habits <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113"></a>[<a href="./images/113.png">113</a>]</span>specially fostered by "those hateful clubs;" some to
+the "snobbishness" which makes a woman consider it beneath her dignity
+to marry into an establishment less stylish than that which it has
+perhaps taken her father all his life to secure; some to the
+<i>demi-monde</i>&mdash;an explanation very like the theory that small-pox is
+caused by pustules. But, whatever may be the causes of the
+disinclination, there can be but little doubt that it exists, and the
+worst part of the matter is, that it is found among rich men no less
+than among poor. That really poor men should not wish to marry is, even
+the Belgravian mother must admit, an admirable arrangement of nature.
+But it is too bad that so many men-about-town should seem rich enough
+for yachting, or racing, or opera-boxes, or even diamond necklaces&mdash;for
+anything, in short, but a wife. The fact is, that in the eyes of poor
+men a wife is associated chiefly with handsome carriages, showy dresses,
+fine furniture, and other forbidden luxuries; and, inasmuch as there is
+not one law of association for the rich and another for the poor, this
+view spreads, until even rich men consider whether it is not possible to
+secure the luxuries without the wife.</p>
+
+<p>Now, since marriage is, on the whole, an institution with which society
+cannot very well dispense&mdash;at any rate not until some good substitute
+has been found for it&mdash;it is clear that rich men ought not to be allowed
+to treat it in this way. If modern civilization tends to beget a
+disinclination to marry, it ought also, on the principle of
+compensation, to provide some means <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114"></a>[<a href="./images/114.png">114</a>]</span>for counteracting this tendency, or
+keeping it under control. Is the increase of husband-hunting&mdash;we ask the
+question in a respectful and, we trust, purely philosophical spirit of
+inquiry&mdash;calculated to supply this great and obvious want? What are its
+merits, in this respect, as compared with the old-fashioned theory that
+woman should be wooed, not woo? Even the most inveterate hater of
+husband-hunting must admit that, so far as the great end of matrimony is
+concerned, the two sexes nowadays stand to each other in a most
+unnatural relation. It is alike the mission of both to marry, but
+whereas women are honorably anxious to fulfill this mission, men, as we
+have already seen, are too ready to shirk it. Yet, by a strange
+inversion of the usual order of things, to the very sex which evades the
+mission is its furtherance and chief control entrusted.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, not only does woman take more kindly to the duty of matrimony
+than man&mdash;or at least nineteenth-century man&mdash;but she has comparatively
+nothing else to think about. A dozen occupations are open to him, but
+her one object in life, her whole being's end and aim, is to marry.
+Surely, if the art of marriage requires cultivation, it ought, like
+everything else, to be entrusted to those who can give their whole time
+to it, not to those who have so much else to do. Even when a bachelor is
+in a position to marry, and not unwilling to make the experiment, he is
+still far less fitted for the furtherance of matrimony than a woman. He,
+perhaps, meets a nice girl at a ball, is taken with her, and after a
+mild flirtation <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115"></a>[<a href="./images/115.png">115</a>]</span>thinks, as he walks home in the moonlight, that she
+would make a charming wife. He dreams about her, and next morning at
+breakfast, as he pensively eats a pound of steak, resolves that on the
+same afternoon, or the next at the very latest, he will contrive an
+accidental meeting, or even find some excuse for a call. But then comes
+office-work, or the <i>Times</i>, or some other distraction, and later on
+perhaps a visit from some matter-of-fact friend with an unromantic taste
+for "bitter," or a weakness for the Burlington Arcade. One day slips
+away, and by the next the image of the evening's idol has waxed
+comparatively faint. At least it is not sufficiently vivid to inspire
+him with courage enough for a call, or a too suspicious-looking
+rencontre. In a week he bows to the image, as it is driven by, as coolly
+as if he had never had a thought of making his heart its shrine; and
+thus a golden opportunity for bringing together two young people, in
+whose auspicious union the whole community has an interest, has been
+cruelly thrown away.</p>
+
+<p>How different might the case have been if fashion had allowed the lady
+to take the initiative, instead of compelling her to sit idly at home!
+She has no office-work, nor <i>Times</i>, nor any business but that of
+bringing last night's flirtation to a practical issue. Assuming her to
+be satisfied as to the eligibility of her partner, there is nothing to
+prevent her giving her whole time and attention to his capture. She is
+as little likely to throw away any chance of an interview calculated to
+help in bringing about this result as he is to neglect an opportunity
+for winning the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116"></a>[<a href="./images/116.png">116</a>]</span>lawn sleeves or silk gown. Marriage is of as much
+importance to her as either of these to him. It is, perhaps, not
+impossible that the mere notion of a woman's thus taking the initiative
+in courtship may to some appear outrageously immodest. But with this
+point we have nothing to do, as we have been discussing the theory of
+husband-hunting, not with any reference to its modesty, but solely and
+exclusively in its connexion with the great question, how marriage is to
+be carried on. We put together the three facts that nineteenth-century
+civilization makes men indisposed to marry, that it gives women no
+object in life but marriage, and yet that it assigns the furtherance of
+marriage, which we assume to be an institution deserving of careful
+cultivation, not to those whose interest it is to promote it, but to
+those who are comparatively averse to it. Modest or immodest,
+husband-hunting obviously tends to remedy this misdirection and waste of
+force.</p>
+
+<p>We take this to be the right explanation&mdash;and we have endeavored to make
+it an impartial one&mdash;of the charge not uncommonly brought against the
+young ladies of the present day, that, as compared with their mothers
+and grandmothers, they are rather forward and fast, and that
+husband-hunting in their hands, is gradually being developed to an
+extent scarcely compatible with the old-fashioned theories about
+maidenly modesty and reserve. The change may be considered the effort of
+modern civilization to remedy an evil of its own creation. The tide
+advances in one direction because it recedes in another. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117"></a>[<a href="./images/117.png">117</a>]</span>If the men
+will not come forward, the women must. It is all very well for satirists
+to call this immodest, but even modesty could be more easily dispensed
+with than marriage. Besides, without quitting our position as impartial
+observers, we may point out that it is only fair to the professor of
+husband-hunting to remember that there are two kinds of immodesty, and
+that some actions are immodest merely because it is the custom to
+consider them so. It would, no doubt, be immodest for a young lady to
+ride through Hyde Park in man's fashion. Yet what is there in the nature
+of things to make a side-saddle more modest than any other? The Amazons
+were positive prudes, and would never have even spoken to man if they
+could have contrived to carry on society without him; yet they rode
+astraddle. And if fashion could make this practice feminine, why should
+it not some day do as much for husband-hunting?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118"></a>[<a href="./images/118.png">118</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>THE PERILS OF "PAYING ATTENTION."</h2>
+
+
+<p>We have elsewhere asserted that the art of match-making requires
+cultivation. We are told, however, that, on the contrary, match-making
+is so zealously studied and skillfully pursued that it bids fair to be
+the great social evil of nineteenth-century civilization. The growing
+difficulty of procuring sons-in-law has called forth a corresponding
+increase in the skill required for capturing them, just as the wits of
+the detective are sharpened to keep pace with the expertness which the
+general spread of useful knowledge has conferred upon the thief.
+Eligible bachelors complain that scarcity of marrying men has much the
+same effect upon the match-making mother as scarcity of food upon the
+wolf. It makes her at once more ferocious and more cunning. Her
+invitations to croquet-parties and little dinners are so constant and so
+pressing that it is scarcely possible for her destined prey to refuse
+them all without manifest rudeness, and yet it is equally hard for him
+to go without being judiciously man&oelig;uvred into "paying attention" to
+the one young lady who has been selected to make him happy for life.</p>
+
+<p>This chivalrous and graceful synonym for courtship in itself speaks
+volumes for the serious nature of the risk which he runs. The truly
+gallant assumption <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119"></a>[<a href="./images/119.png">119</a>]</span>which underlies it, that an Englishman only "pays
+attention" to a woman when he has a solid businesslike offer of marriage
+to make her, not only puts a formidable weapon into the hands of the
+match-maker, but also leaves her victim without a most effectual means
+of protection. The national gallantry towards women upon which a
+Frenchman so plumes himself may be, as your true Briton declares, a poor
+sort of quality enough; a mere grimace and trick of the lips&mdash;not
+genuine stuff from the heart; having much the same relation to true
+chivalry that his <i>bi&egrave;re</i> has to beer, or his <i>potage</i> to soup. But at
+any rate it has this advantage, that it enables him to pay any amount of
+flowery compliments to a woman without risk of committing himself, or of
+being misunderstood.</p>
+
+<p>If an Englishman asks a young lady after her sore throat, or her invalid
+grandmother, and throws into his voice that tone of eager interest or
+tender sympathy which a polite Frenchman would assume as a matter of
+course, he is at once suspected of matrimonial designs upon her. He is
+obliged to be as formal and businesslike in his mode of address as the
+lawyer's clerk who added at the end of a too ardent love-letter the
+saving clause "without prejudice." We have heard of a young lady who
+confided to her bosom friend that she that morning expected a proposal,
+and, when closely pressed for her reasons, blushingly confessed that the
+night before a gentleman had twice asked her whether she was fond of
+poetry, and four times whether she would like to go into the
+refreshment-room.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120"></a>[<a href="./images/120.png">120</a>]</span>
+We do not mean to say that this tendency to look upon every "attention"
+as a preliminary step to an offer is entirely, or even principally, due
+to British want of gallantry. Our national theory of courtship and
+marriage has probably much more to do with it. We say "theory"
+advisedly, for our practice approaches every day nearer to that of the
+Continental nations whose mercenary view of the holy estate of matrimony
+we righteously abjure. Our system is, in fact, gradually becoming a
+clumsy compromise between the <i>mariage de convenance</i> and the <i>mariage
+d'amour</i>, with most of the disadvantages, and very few of the
+advantages, of either. Theoretically, English girls are allowed to marry
+for love, and to choose whichever they like best of all the admiring
+swains whom they fascinate at croquet-parties or balls. Practically, the
+majority marry for an establishment, and only flirt for love. They leave
+the school-room, no doubt, with an unimpeachably romantic conception of
+a youthful bridegroom who combines good looks, great intellect, and
+fervent piety with a modest four thousand a year, paid quarterly.</p>
+
+<p>But they are not very long in finding out that the men whom they like
+best, as being about their own age or still young enough to sympathise
+with their tastes and enter heartily into all their notions of fun, are
+rarely such as are pronounced by parents and guardians to be eligible;
+and so, after one or two attacks, more or less serious, of love-fever,
+they tranquilly look out for an admirer who can place the proper number
+of servants and horses at their disposal, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121"></a>[<a href="./images/121.png">121</a>]</span>while they in return
+magnanimously decline to make discourteously minute inquiries as to the
+condition of his hair or teeth. A marriage made in this spirit, even
+where no pressure is put upon the young lady by parents or friends, and
+she is allowed full liberty of action, is open to all the charges
+ordinarily brought against the Continental <i>mariage de convenance</i>. Yet,
+on the other hand, it has not the advantage of being formally arranged
+beforehand by a couple of elderly people, who are in no hurry, and who
+have seen enough of the world to know thoroughly what they are about;
+nor, we may add, does it usually take place in time to avert some one or
+more of those troublesome flirtations with handsome, but penniless,
+ball-room heroes which are not always calculated to improve either
+temper or character.</p>
+
+<p>Still, whatever our practice may be, we nevertheless do homage to the
+theory that, in this favored country, young ladies choose whatever
+husbands they like best, and marry for love; and although this theory is
+in some respects a serious obstacle to marriage, and often stands
+cruelly in the way of people with weak nerves, it places a powerful
+weapon in the hands of the dauntless and determined match-maker. If
+young people are to marry for love, they must obviously have every
+facility afforded them for meeting and fascinating each other. It is
+this consideration which reconciles the philosopher to some of our least
+entertaining entertainments, although, at the same time, it makes so
+much of our hospitality an organized hypocrisy.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122"></a>[<a href="./images/122.png">122</a>]</span>
+It is, indeed, a hard fate to be obliged to leave your after-dinner
+cigar and George Eliot's last novel in order to drive four miles through
+wind and snow to a party which your hostess has given, not because she
+has good fare, or good music, or agreeable guests, or anything, in
+short, really calculated to amuse you, but simply and solely because she
+has a tribe of daughters who somehow must be disposed of. Yet even a man
+of the Sir Cornewall Lewis stamp, who thinks that this world would be a
+very tolerable place but for its amusements, may forgive her when he
+reflects that business, not pleasure, is at the bottom of the
+invitation. If marriage is to be kept up, we must either abandon our
+theory that young ladies are allowed to choose husbands for themselves,
+or we must give them every possible facility for exercising the choice.
+Bachelors must be dragged, on every available pretext, and without the
+slightest reference to the nominal ends of amusement or hospitality,
+from the novel or cigar, and made to run the gauntlet of female charms.</p>
+
+<p>From the Sir Cornewall Lewis point of view, with which nearly all
+Englishmen over thirty more or less sympathise, it is the only sound
+defence of many of our so-called entertainments that they are virtually
+daughter-shows&mdash;genteel auctions, without which a sufficiently brisk
+trade in matrimony could not possibly be carried on. The consciousness
+of this is doubtless in one way somewhat of an obstacle to flirtation,
+and gives the frisky matron a cruel advantage over her unmarried rival.
+A man must have oak and triple brass round his heart who can flirt
+perfectly at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123"></a>[<a href="./images/123.png">123</a>]</span>his ease when he knows that his "attentions" are not
+merely watched by vigilant chaperons, but are actually reduced to a
+matter of numerical calculation&mdash;that a certain number of dances, or
+calls, or polite speeches will justify a stern father or big brother in
+asking his "intentions."</p>
+
+<p>This application of arithmetic is, in some respects, as dangerous to
+courtship as to the Pentateuch. But, nevertheless, it gives the clever
+and courageous match-maker an advantage of which the eligible bachelor
+complains that she makes the most pitiless use. He finds himself
+man&oelig;uvred into "paying the attentions" which society considers the
+usual prelude to a marriage, with a dexterity which it is all but
+impossible to evade. The lady is played into his hands with much the
+same sort of skill that a conjuror exhibits in forcing a card. There are
+perhaps a number of other ladies present, in promiscuous flirtation with
+whom he sees, at first glance, an obvious means of escape. But this hope
+speedily turns out a delusion. One lady is vigilantly guarded by a
+jealous betrothed; a second is a poor relation, or humble friend, who
+knows that she would never get another invitation to the house if she
+once interfered with her patron's plans; a third is too plain to be
+approached on any ordinary calculation of probabilities; a fourth is
+hopelessly dull; the rest are married, and if not actually themselves in
+the conspiracy&mdash;which, however, is as likely as not&mdash;are still carefully
+chosen for their freedom from the flirting propensities of the frisky
+matron. The destined victim finds, in short, that he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124"></a>[<a href="./images/124.png">124</a>]</span>must either
+deliberately resign himself to be bored to death, or boldly face the
+peril in store for him, and take his chance of evading or breaking the
+net. Nine men out of ten naturally choose the latter alternative, too
+often in that presumptuous spirit of self-confidence which is the
+match-maker's best ally.</p>
+
+<p>A bachelor is perhaps never in so great danger of being caught as when
+he has come to the conclusion that he sees perfectly through the
+mother's little game and merely means to amuse himself by carrying on a
+strictly guarded flirtation with the daughter. We mean, of course, on
+the assumption that the daughter is either a pretty or clever girl, with
+whom any sort of flirtation is in itself perilous. His danger is all the
+greater if it happens&mdash;and it is only fair to young-ladydom to admit
+that it often does happen&mdash;that the daughter has sufficient spirit and
+self-respect to repudiate all share in the maternal plot. Many a man has
+been half surprised, half piqued, into serious courtship by finding
+himself vigorously snubbed and rebuffed where he had been led to imagine
+that his slightest advances would be only too eagerly received. But, in
+any case, the match-maker knows that, if she can only bring the two
+people whom she wishes to marry sufficiently often into each other's
+society, the battle is half won. According to Lord Lytton, whom every
+one will admit to be an authority on the philosophy of flirtation,
+"proximity is the soul of love." And eligible bachelors complain that it
+becomes every day harder to avoid this perilous proximity, and the duty
+of "paying attention" which it implies, without being positively rude.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125"></a>[<a href="./images/125.png">125</a>]</span>
+We have not much consolation to offer the sufferers who prefer this
+complaint. As regards our own statement that the art of match-making
+requires cultivation, we did not mean by it to imply that match-making
+is not vigorously carried on. So long as there are mothers left with
+daughters to be married, so long will match-making continue to be
+pursued; and it must obviously be pursued all the more energetically to
+keep pace with the growing disinclination of bachelors among the upper
+and middle classes to face the responsibilities of married life. We
+meant that match-making does not receive the sort of cultivation which
+it seems to us fairly to deserve, when we consider the paramount
+importance of the object which it at least professes to have in view,
+and the delicate nature of the instruments and experiments with which it
+is concerned.</p>
+
+<p>We have not yet mustered up courage for the attempt to show what should
+be its proper cultivation; but we may safely say that so long as it is
+left in the hands of those who are influenced by merely mercenary or
+interested motives, and who watch the "attentions" of a bachelor, not in
+the spirit of a philosopher or a philanthropist, but in that of a
+Belgravian mother, it cannot be cultivated as a fine art. It can only be
+rescued from the unmerited odium into which it has fallen by being taken
+under the patronage of those who are in a position to practice it on
+purely artistic and disinterested grounds. In their hands, the now
+perilous process of "paying attention" would be studied and criticized
+in a new spirit. It might <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126"></a>[<a href="./images/126.png">126</a>]</span>still, indeed, be treated arithmetically, as
+perhaps the most promising way of reducing it to the precision and
+certainty of an exact science. But still the problem would be to
+determine, not what is the least possible number of dances, calls, or
+compliments which may justify the intervention of a big brother or heavy
+father, but what number warrants the assumption that the flirtation has
+passed out of the frivolous into the serious stage. Three dances, for
+instance, may expose a man to being asked what are his "intentions,"
+where six dances need not imply that he really has any. The mercenary
+match-maker considers only the first point; our ideal match-maker would
+lay far more stress upon the second. But still, in any case, this
+growing tendency to treat the practice of "paying attention" in the
+spirit of exact science offers at least one ray of hope to those who
+complain that, do what they will, they cannot escape having to pay this
+dangerous tribute. The tendency must sooner or later bear fruit in a
+generally recognised code of courtship (whether written or unwritten
+does not much matter), prescribing the precise number and character of
+the "attentions"&mdash;in their adaptation to dancing, croquet-playing,
+cracker-pulling, and other conventional pretexts for flirtation&mdash;which
+virtually amount to an offer of marriage. This scheme, we may mention,
+is not wholly imaginary. There is somewhere or other a stratum of
+English society in which such a code already exists. At least we have
+seen a book of etiquette in which, among similar ordinances, it was laid
+down that to hand anything&mdash;say a flower or a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127"></a>[<a href="./images/127.png">127</a>]</span>muffin&mdash;to a lady with
+the left hand was equivalent to a proposal. The general introduction of
+a system of this kind, although it might shorten the lives of timid or
+forgetful men, would obviously confer an unspeakable boon upon the
+majority of the match-maker's present victims. They would not only know
+exactly how far to go with safety, but also how at once to recede. To
+offer, for instance, two pieces of muffin firmly and decidedly with the
+right hand would probably make up for offering one flower with the left,
+at least if there were no guardian or chaperon on the spot to take
+instant advantage of the first overture. But it would now perhaps be
+premature to enter into the details of a system which it may take a
+generation or so more of match-making to introduce.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128"></a>[<a href="./images/128.png">128</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>WOMEN'S HEROINES.</h2>
+
+
+<p>A vigorous and pertinacious effort has of late years been made to
+persuade mankind that beauty in women is a matter of very little moment.
+As long as literature was more or less a man's vocation, an opposite
+tendency prevailed; and a successful novelist would as soon have thought
+of flying as of driving a team of ugly heroines through three volumes.
+The rapid and portentous increase of authoresses changed the current of
+affairs. As a rule, authoresses do not care much about lovely women; and
+they must naturally despise the miserable masculine weakness which is
+led captive by a pretty face, even if it be only upon paper. They can
+have no patience with such feebleness, and it may well seem to them to
+be a high and important mission to help to put it down.</p>
+
+<p>It became, accordingly, the fashion at one time among the feminine
+writers of fiction to make all their fascinating heroines plain girls
+with plenty of soul, and to show, by a series of thrilling love
+adventures, how completely in the long run the plain girls had the best
+of it. There is a regular type of ideal young lady in women's novels, to
+which we have at last become accustomed. She is not at all a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129"></a>[<a href="./images/129.png">129</a>]</span>perfect
+beauty. Her features are not as finely chiseled as a Greek statue; she
+is taller, we are invariably told, than the model height, her nose is
+<i>retrouss&eacute;</i>; and "in some lights" an unfavorable critic might affirm
+that her hair was positively tawny. But there is a well of feeling in
+her big brown eyes, which, when united to genius, invariably bowls over
+the hero of the book. And the passion she excites is of that stirring
+kind which eclipses all others.</p>
+
+<p>Through the first two volumes the predestined lover flirts with the
+beauties who despise her, dances with them under her eye, and wears
+their colors in her presence. But at the end of the third an expressive
+glance tells her that all is right, and that big eyes and a big soul
+have won the race in a canter. Jane Eyre was perhaps the first
+triumphant success of this particular school of art. And Jane Eyre
+certainly opened the door to a long train of imitators. For many years
+every woman's novel had got in it some dear and noble creature,
+generally underrated, and as often as not in embarrassed circumstances,
+who used to capture her husband by sheer force of genius, and by
+pretending not to notice him when he came into the room. Some pleasant
+womanly enthusiasts even went further, and invented heroines with
+tangled hair and inky fingers. We do not feel perfectly certain that
+Miss Yonge, for instance, has not married her inky Minervas to nicer and
+more pious husbands, as a rule, than her uninky ones. The advantage of
+the view that ugly heroines are the most charming is obvious, if only
+the world could be <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130"></a>[<a href="./images/130.png">130</a>]</span>brought to adopt it. It is a well-meant protest in
+favor of what may be called, in these days of political excitement, the
+"rights" of plain girls. It is very hard to think that a few more
+freckles or a quarter of an inch of extra chin should make all the
+difference in life to women, and those of them who are intellectually
+fitted to play a shining part in society or literature may be excused
+for rebelling against the masculine heresy of believing in beauty only.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever such women write, the constant moral they preach to us is that
+beauty is a delusion and a snare. This is the moral of Hetty in <i>Adam
+Bede</i>, and it is in the unsympathetic and cold way in which Hetty is
+described that one catches glimpses of the sex of the consummate author
+of the story. She is quite alive to Hetty's plump arms and pretty
+cheeks. She likes to pat her and watch her, as if Hetty were a cat, or
+some other sleek and supple animal. But we feel that the writer of <i>Adam
+Bede</i> is eyeing Hetty all over from the beginning to the end, and
+considering in herself the while what fools men are. It would be unjust
+and untrue to say that George Eliot in all her works does not do ample
+justice, in a noble and generous way, to the power of female beauty. The
+heroines of <i>Romola</i> and <i>Felix Holt</i> prove distinctly that she does.
+But one may fairly doubt whether a man could have painted Hetty. When
+one sees the picture, one understands its truth; but men who draw pretty
+faces usually do so with more enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>A similar sort of protest may be found lurking in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131"></a>[<a href="./images/131.png">131</a>]</span>a great many women's
+novels against the popular opinion that man is the more powerful animal,
+and that a wife is at best a domestic appanage of the husband.
+Authoresses are never weary of attempts to set this right. They like to
+prove, what is continually true, that feminine charms are the lever that
+moves the world, and that the ideal woman keeps her husband and all
+about her straight. In religious novels woman's task is to exercise the
+happiest influence on the man's theological opinions. Owing to the
+errors he has imbibed from the study of a false and shallow philosophy,
+he sees no good in going to church twice on Sundays, or feels that he
+cannot heartily adopt all the expressions in the Athanasian creed. It is
+the heroine's mission to cure this mental malady; to point out to him,
+from the impartial point of view of those who have never committed the
+folly of studying Kant or Hegel, how thoroughly superficial Kant and
+Hegel are; and to remind him by moonlight, and in the course of
+spiritual flirtation on a balcony, of the unutterable truths in theology
+which only a woman can naturally discern. We are far from wishing to
+intimate that there is not a good deal of usefulness in such feminine
+points of view. The <i>argumentum ad sexum</i>, if not a logical, is often no
+doubt a practical one, and women are right to employ it whenever they
+can make it tell. And as it would be impossible to develop it to any
+considerable extent in a dry controversial work, authoresses have no
+other place to work it in except in a romance. What they do for religion
+in pious novels, they do <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132"></a>[<a href="./images/132.png">132</a>]</span>for other things in productions of a more
+strictly secular kind.</p>
+
+<p>There is, for instance, a popular and prevalent fallacy that women ought
+to be submissive to, and governed by, their lords and masters. In
+feminine fiction we see a very wholesome reaction against this mistaken
+supposition. The hero of the female tale is often a poor, frivolous,
+easily led person. When he can escape from his wife's eye, he speculates
+heavily on Stock Exchange, goes in under the influence of evil advisers
+for any sort of polite swindling, and forgets, or is ill-tempered
+towards, the inestimable treasure he has at home. On such occasions the
+heroine of the feminine novel shines out in all her majesty. She is kind
+and patient to her husband's faults, except that when he is more than
+usually idiotic her eyes flash, and her nostrils dilate with a sort of
+grand scorn, while her knowledge of life and business is displayed at
+critical moments to save him from ruin. When every one else deserts him,
+she takes a cab into the city, and employs some clever friend, who has
+always been hopelessly in love with her&mdash;and for whom she entertains,
+unknown to her husband, a Platonic brotherly regard&mdash;to intervene in the
+nick of time, and to arrest her husband's fall.</p>
+
+<p>In a story called <i>Sowing the Wind</i>, which has recently been published,
+the authoress (for we assume, in spite of the ambiguous assertion on the
+title-page, that the pen which wrote it was not really a man's) goes to
+very great lengths. The hero, St. John Aylott, is always snubbing and
+lecturing Isola, whom <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133"></a>[<a href="./images/133.png">133</a>]</span>he married when she was half a child, and whom he
+treats as a child long after she has become a great and glorious woman.
+He administers the doctrine of conjugal authority to her in season and
+out of season, and his object is to convert her into a loving feminine
+slave. Against this revolting theory her nature rebels. Though she
+preserves her wifely attachment to a man whom she has once thought
+worthy of better things, her respect dies away, and at last she openly
+defies him when he wants her, in contravention of her plain duty, not to
+adopt as her son a deserted orphan-boy. At this point her character
+stands out in noble contrast to his. She does adopt the boy, and brings
+him to live with her in spite of all; and when St. John is unnaturally
+peevish at its childish squalling, Isola bears his fretful
+animadversions with a patient dignity that touches the hearts of all
+about her.</p>
+
+<p>Any husband who can go on preaching about conjugal obedience through
+three volumes to a splendid creature who is his wife, must have
+something wrong about his mind. And something wrong about St. John's
+mind there ultimately proves to be. It flashes across Isola that this is
+the case, and before long her worst suspicions are confirmed. At last
+St. John breaks out into open lunacy, and dies deranged&mdash;a fate which is
+partly the cause, and partly the consequence, of his continual
+indulgence in such wild theories about the relations of man and wife. It
+is not every day that we have the valuable lesson of the rights of wives
+so plainly or so practically put before <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134"></a>[<a href="./images/134.png">134</a>]</span>us, but when it is put before
+us, we recognize the service that may be conferred on literature and
+society by lady authors. To assert the great cause of the independence
+of the female sex is one of the ends of feminine fiction, just as the
+assertion of the rights of plain girls is another. Authoresses do not
+ask for what Mr. Mill wishes them to have&mdash;a vote for the borough, or
+perhaps a seat in Parliament. They do ask that young women should have a
+fair matrimonial chance, independently of such trivial considerations as
+good looks, and that after marriage they should have the right to
+despise their husbands whenever duty and common sense tell them it is
+proper to do so.</p>
+
+<p>The odd thing is that the heroines of whom authoresses are so fond in
+novels, are not the heroines whom other women like in real life. Even
+the popular authoresses of the day, who are always producing some lovely
+pantheress in their stories, and making her achieve an endless series of
+impossible exploits, would not care much about a lovely pantheress in a
+drawing-room or a country-house; and are not perhaps in the habit of
+meeting any. The fact is that the vast majority of women who write
+novels do not draw upon their observation for their characters so much
+as upon their imagination. In some respects this is curious enough, for
+when women observe, they observe acutely and to a good deal of purpose.
+Those of them, however, who take to the manufacture of fiction have
+generally done so because at some portion of their career they have been
+thrown back upon themselves. They began perhaps to write when
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135"></a>[<a href="./images/135.png">135</a>]</span>circumstances made them feel isolated from the rest of their little
+world, and in a spirit of sickly concentration upon their own thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>A woman with a turn for literary work who notices that she is distanced,
+as far as success or admiration goes, by rivals inferior in mental
+capacity to herself, flies eagerly to the society of her own fancies,
+and makes her pen her greatest friend. It is the lot of many girls to
+pass their childhood or youth in a somewhat monotonous round of domestic
+duties, and frequently in a narrow domestic circle, with which, except
+from natural affection, they may have no great intellectual sympathy.
+The stage of intellectual fever through which able men have passed when
+they were young is replaced, in the case of girls of talent, by a stage
+of moral morbidity. At first this finds vent in hymns, and it turns in
+the end to novels. Few clever young ladies have not written religious
+poetry at one period or other of their history, and few that have done
+so, stop there without going further. It is a great temptation to
+console oneself for the shortcomings of the social life around, by
+building up an imaginary picture of social life as it might be, full of
+romantic adventures and pleasant conquests.</p>
+
+<p>In manufacturing her heroines, the young recluse author puts on paper
+what she would herself like to be, and what she thinks she might be if
+only her eyes were bluer, her purse longer, or men more wise and
+discerning. In painting the slights offered to her favorite ideal, she
+conceives the slights that might possibly be offered to herself, and the
+triumphant <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136"></a>[<a href="./images/136.png">136</a>]</span>way in which she would (under somewhat more auspicious
+circumstances) delight to live them down and trample them under foot.
+The vexations and the annoyances she describes with considerable spirit
+and accuracy. The triumph is the representation of her own delicious
+dreams. The grand character of the imaginary victim is but a species of
+phantom of her ownself, taken, like the German's camel, from the depths
+of her own self-consciousness, and projected into cloudland. This is the
+reason why authoresses enjoy dressing up a heroine who is ill-used. They
+know the sensation of social martyrdom, and it is a gentle sort of
+revenge upon the world to publish a novel about an underrated martyr,
+whose merits are recognised in the end, either before or after her
+decease. They are probably not conscious of the precise work they are
+performing. They are not aware that their heroine represents what they
+believe they themselves would prove to be under impossible
+circumstances, provided they had only golden hair and a wider sphere of
+action.</p>
+
+<p>This is but another and a larger phase of a phenomenon which all of us
+have become familiar with who have ever had a large acquaintance with
+young ladies' poems. They all write about death with a pertinacity that
+is positively astounding. It is not that the young people actually want
+to die. But they like the idea that their family circle will find out,
+when it is too late, all the mistakes and injustices it has committed
+towards them, and that this world will perceive that it has been
+entertaining unawares <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137"></a>[<a href="./images/137.png">137</a>]</span>an angel, just as the angel has taken flight
+upwards to another. The juvenile aspirant commences with revenging her
+wrongs in heaven, but it occurs to her before long that she can with
+equal facility have them revenged upon earth. Poetry gives way to prose,
+and hymnology to fiction. The element of self-consciousness, unknown to
+herself, still continues to prevail, and to color the character of the
+heroines she turns out. Of course great authoresses shake themselves
+free from it. Real genius is independent of sex, and first-rate writers,
+whether they are men or women, are not morbidly in love with an
+idealized portrait of themselves.</p>
+
+<p>But the poorer or less worthy class of feminine novelists seldom escape
+from the fatal influence of egotism. Women's heroines, except in the
+case of the best artists, are conceptions borrowed, not from without,
+but from within. The consequence is that there is a sameness about them
+which becomes at last distasteful. The conception of the injured wife or
+the glorified governess is one which was a novelty fifteen or twenty
+years ago, while it cannot be said any longer to be lively or
+entertaining. As literature has grown to be a woman's occupation, we are
+afraid that glorified governesses in fiction will, like the poor, be
+always with us, and continue to the end to run their bright course of
+universal victory. The most, perhaps, that can be hoped is that they
+will in the long run take the wind out of the sails of the glorified
+adulteresses and murderesses which at present seem the latest and most
+successful efforts of feminine art.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138"></a>[<a href="./images/138.png">138</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>INTERFERENCE.</h2>
+
+
+<p>About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely
+personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. Not tyranny, which
+is another matter&mdash;tyranny being active while interference is negative;
+the one standing as the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of
+the same principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some personal gain in
+view when it takes in hand to force people to do what they do not like
+to do; while interference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply
+prevents the exercise of free will for the mere pleasure to be had out
+of such prevention. Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than
+domestic, but the curse of interference is seen most distinctly within
+the four walls of home, where also it is felt the most. Very many people
+spend their lives in interfering with others&mdash;perpetually putting spokes
+into wheels with which they have really nothing to do, and thrusting
+their fingers into pies about the baking of which they are not in any
+way concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women
+make up the larger number and are the greater sinners.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure there are some men&mdash;small, fussy, finicking fellows, with
+whom nature has made the irreparable blunder of sex&mdash;who are as
+troublesome in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139"></a>[<a href="./images/139.png">139</a>]</span>their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and
+most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the feminine
+characteristics of men are so exceptional that we need not take them
+into serious calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in
+any manly sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a
+right to control&mdash;say, with the wife's low dresses, or the daughter's
+too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are
+jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and
+knowing what men say of such displays, or fearing their effect, they
+stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But this
+kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes into
+another class of motives altogether, and does not belong to the kind of
+interference of which we are speaking.</p>
+
+<p>Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other and
+with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to church
+and subscribing to their favorite mission, so much as they tell us what
+we are not to do; they do not command so much as they forbid; and, of
+all women, wives and daughters are the most given to handling these
+check-strings and putting on these drag-chains. Sisters, while young,
+are obliged to be less interfering, under pain of a perpetual round of
+bickering; for brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of
+creatures for the most part as loftily snubbed as sisters are; while
+mothers are nine times out of ten laid aside for all but sentimental
+purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140"></a>[<a href="./images/140.png">140</a>]</span>be a boy and has learned to
+become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of personal and domestic
+interference lies with wives, and they know how to use the prerogative
+they assume.</p>
+
+<p>Take an unlucky man who smokes under protest, his wife not liking to
+forbid the pleasure entirely, but always grudging it, and interfering
+with its exercise. Each segar represents a battle, deepening in
+intensity according to the number. The first may have been had with only
+a light skirmish perhaps, perhaps a mere threatening of an attack that
+passed away without coming to actual onslaught; the second brings up the
+artillery; while the third or fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets
+the biggest guns thundering. She could understand a man smoking one
+segar in the day, she says, with a gracious condescension to masculine
+weakness; but when it comes to more she feels that she is called on to
+interfere, and to do her best towards checking such a reprehensible
+excess. It does not weaken her position that she knows nothing of what
+she is talking about. She never smoked a segar herself, and therefore
+does not understand the uses or the abuses of tobacco; but she holds
+herself pledged to interfere as soon as she gets the chance, and she
+redeems the pledge with energy.</p>
+
+<p>The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite to
+correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that he has a feeble
+digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the gauntlet
+of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines or sups jollily with
+his friends without being plucked at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141"></a>[<a href="./images/141.png">141</a>]</span>and reminded that salmon always
+disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a headache
+to-morrow; and "My dear! when you know how bad salad is for you!" or,
+"How can you eat that horrid pastry! You will be so ill in the night!"
+"What! more wine? another glass of whisky? how foolish you are! how
+wrong!" The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear
+stimulants; the husband is a strong large-framed man who can drink deep
+without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit is her
+husband's measure, and as soon as he has gone beyond the range of her
+own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks herself
+justified in interfering with his progress. For women cannot be brought
+to understand the capacities of a man's life; they cannot be made to
+understand that what is bad for themselves may not be bad for others,
+and that their weakness ought not to be the gauge of a man's strength.</p>
+
+<p>A pale chilly woman afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears furs
+and velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East-Indian
+fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, father, and sons in
+about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must not go out
+without an overcoat; they must be sure to take an umbrella if the day is
+at all cloudy; they must not walk too far, nor ride too hard, and they
+must be sure to be at home by a certain hour. When such women as these
+have to do with men just on the boundary-line between the last days of
+vigor and the first of old age, they put forward the time of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142"></a>[<a href="./images/142.png">142</a>]</span>old age by
+many years. One sees their men rapidly sink into the softness and
+incapacity of senility, when a more bracing life would have kept them
+good for half-a-dozen years longer. But women do not care for this. They
+like men to be their own companions more than they care for any manly
+comradeship among each other; and most women&mdash;but not all&mdash;would rather
+have their husbands manly in a womanly way than in a manly one, as being
+more within the compass of their own sympathies and understanding.</p>
+
+<p>The same kind of interference is very common where the husband is a man
+of broad humor&mdash;one who calls a spade a spade, with no circumlocution
+about an agricultural implement. The wife of such a man is generally one
+of the ultra-refined kind, according to the odd law of compensation
+which regulates so much of human action, and thinks herself obliged to
+stand as the enduring censor of her husband's speech. As this is an
+example most frequently to be found in middle life, and where there are
+children belonging to the establishment, the word of warning is
+generally "papa!"&mdash;said with reproach or resentment, according to
+circumstances&mdash;which has, of course, the effect of drawing the attention
+of the young people to the paternal breadth of speech, and of fixing
+that special breach of decorum on their memory. Sometimes the wife has
+sufficient self-restraint not to give the word of warning in public, but
+can nurse her displeasure for a more convenient season; but as soon as
+they are alone, the miserable man has to pass <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143"></a>[<a href="./images/143.png">143</a>]</span>under the harrow, as only
+husbands with wives of a chastising spirit can pass under it, and his
+life is made a burden to him because of that unlucky anecdote told with
+such verve a few hours ago, and received with such shouts of pleasant
+laughter. Perhaps the anecdote was just a trifle doubtful; granted; but
+what does the wife take by her remonstrance? Most probably a quarrel;
+possibly a good-natured <i>peccavi</i> for the sake of being let off the
+continuance of the sermon; perhaps a yawn; most certainly not reform. If
+the man is a man of free speech and broad humor by nature and liking, he
+will remain so to the end; and what the censorship of society leaves
+untouched, the interference of a wife will not control.</p>
+
+<p>Children come in for an enormous share of interference, which is not
+direction, not discipline, but simple interference for its own sake.
+There are mothers who meddle with every expression of individuality in
+their young people, quite irrespective of moral tendency, or whether the
+occasion is trivial or important. In the fancies, the pleasures, the
+minor details of dress in their children, there is always that intruding
+maternal finger upsetting the arrangements of the poor little pie as
+vigorously as if thrones and altars depended on the result. Not a game
+of croquet can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn instead of a pink one,
+without maternal interference; so that the bloom is rubbed off every
+enjoyment, and life becomes reduced to a kind of goose-step, with mamma
+for the drill-sergeant prescribing the inches to be marked. Sisters,
+too, do a great deal of this kind of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144"></a>[<a href="./images/144.png">144</a>]</span>thing among each other; as all
+those who are intimate where there are large families of unmarried girls
+must have seen. The nudges, the warning looks, the deprecating "Amies!"
+and "Oh Lucies!" and "Hush Roses!" by which some seek to act as
+household police over the others, are patent to all who use their
+senses.</p>
+
+<p>In some houses the younger sisters seem to have been born chiefly as
+training grounds for the elders, whereon they may exercise their powers
+of interference; and a hard time they have of it. If Emma goes to her
+embroidery, Ellen tells her she ought to practice her singing; if Jane
+is reading, Mary recommends sewing as a more profitable use of precious
+time; if Amy is at her easel, Ada wants to turn her round to the piano.
+It is quite the exception where four or five sisters leave each other
+free to do as each likes, and do not take to drilling and interference
+as part of the daily programme. Something of the reluctance to domestic
+service so painfully apparent among the better class of working women is
+due to this spirit of interference with women. The lady who wrote about
+the caps and gowns of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of dress, down
+to the very material of their gloves, was an instance of this spirit.
+For, when we come to analyse it, what does it really signify to us how
+our servants dress, so long as they are clean and decent, and do not let
+their garments damage our goods? Fashion is almost always ridiculous,
+and women as a rule care more for dress than they care for anything
+else; and if the kitchen apes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145"></a>[<a href="./images/145.png">145</a>]</span>the parlor, and Phyllis gives as much
+thought to her new linsey as my lady gives to her new velvet, we cannot
+wonder at it, nor need we hold up our hands in horror at the depravity
+of the smaller person. Does one flight of stairs transpose morality? If
+it does not, there is no real ethical reason why my lady should
+interfere with poor Phyllis's enjoyment in her ugly vanities, when she
+herself will not be interfered with, though press and pulpit both try to
+turn her out of her present path into one that all ages have thought the
+best for her, and the one divinely appointed. It is a thing that will
+not bear reasoning on, being simply a form of the old "who will guard
+the guardian?" Who will direct the directress? and to whose interference
+will the interferer submit?</p>
+
+<p>There are two causes for this excessive love of interference among
+women. The one is the narrowness of their lives and objects, by which
+insignificant things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes; the
+other, their belief that they are the only saviors of society, and that
+without them man would become hopelessly corrupt. And to a certain
+extent this belief is true, but surely with restrictions. Because the
+clearer moral sense and greater physical weakness of women restrain
+men's fiercer passions, and force them to be gentle and considerate,
+women are not, therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine life, into
+whose hands is given the paying out of just so much rope as they think
+fit for the occasion. They would do better to look to their own tackle
+before settling so exactly the run of others'; and if ever their desired
+time of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146"></a>[<a href="./images/146.png">146</a>]</span>equality is to come, it must come through mutual independence,
+not through womanly interference, and as much liberality and breadth
+must be given as is demanded&mdash;which, so far as humanity has gone
+hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of squaring accounts.</p>
+
+<p>Grant that women are the salt of the earth, and the great antiseptic
+element in society, still that does not reduce everything else to the
+verge of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet by their lives they
+evidently think that it is so, and that they are each and all the
+keepers of keys which give them a special entrance to the temple of
+morality, and by which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser
+body of men. Hence they interfere and restrict and pay out just so much
+rope, and measure off just so much gambolling ground, as they think fit;
+they think vile man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things
+into his own hand, and goes beyond their boundary-lines. It is all done
+in good if in a very narrow faith&mdash;that we admit willingly; but we would
+call their attention to the difference there is between influence and
+interference, which is just the difference between their ideal duty and
+their daily practice&mdash;between being the salt of the earth and the
+blister of the home. We think it only justice to put in a word for those
+poor henpecked fellows of husbands at a time when the whole cry is for
+Woman's Rights, which seems to mean chiefly her right of making man
+knuckle under on all occasions, and of making one will serve for two
+lives. We assure her that she <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147"></a>[<a href="./images/147.png">147</a>]</span>would get her own way in large matters
+much more easily if she would leave men more liberty in small ones, and
+not teaze them by interfering in things which do not concern her, and
+have only reference to themselves.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148"></a>[<a href="./images/148.png">148</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>PLAIN GIRLS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is beyond all question the tendency of modern society to regard
+marriage as the great end and justification of a woman's life. This is
+perhaps the single point on which practical and romantic people, who
+differ in so many things, invariably agree. Poets, novelists, natural
+philosophers, fashionable and unfashionable mothers, meet one another on
+the broad common ground of approving universal matrimony; and women from
+their earliest years are dedicated to the cultivation of those feminine
+accomplishments which are supposed either to be most seductive before
+marriage in a drawing-room, or most valuable after marriage in the
+kitchen and housekeeper's-room.</p>
+
+<p>It is admitted to be a sort of half necessity in any interesting work of
+fiction that its plots, its adventures, and its catastrophes should all
+lead up to the marriage of the principal young lady. Sometimes, as in
+the case of the celebrated Lilly Dale, the public tolerates a bold
+exception to the ordinary rule, on account of the extreme piquancy of
+the thing; but no wise novelist ventures habitually to disregard the
+prevalent opinion that the heroine's mission is to become a wife before
+the end of the third volume. The one ideal, accordingly, which romance
+has to offer <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149"></a>[<a href="./images/149.png">149</a>]</span>woman is marriage; and most novels thus make life end with
+what really is only its threshold and beginning. The Bible no doubt says
+that it is not good for man to live alone. What the Bible says of man,
+public opinion as unhesitatingly asserts of woman; and a text that it is
+not good for woman to live alone either, though not canonical, is
+silently added by all domestic commentators to the Scriptural original.</p>
+
+<p>Those who pretend to be best acquainted with the order of nature and the
+mysterious designs of Providence assure us with confidence that all this
+is as it should be; that woman is not meant to grow and flourish singly,
+but to hang on man, and to depend on him, like the vine upon the elm. If
+we remember right, M. Comte entertains opinions which really come to
+pretty much the same thing. Woman is to be maintained in ease and luxury
+by the rougher male animal, it being her duty in return to keep his
+spiritual nature up to the mark, to quicken and to purify his
+affections, to be a sort of drawing-room religion in the middle of
+every-day life, to serve as an object of devotion to the religious
+Comtist, and to lead him through love of herself up to the love of
+humanity in the abstract.</p>
+
+<p>One difficulty presented by this matrimonial view of woman's destiny is
+to know what, under the present conditions in which society finds itself
+placed, is to become of plain girls. Their mission is a subject which no
+philosopher as yet has adequately handled. If marriage is the object of
+all feminine endeavors and ambitions, it certainly seems rather hard
+that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150"></a>[<a href="./images/150.png">150</a>]</span>Providence should have condemned plain girls to start in the race
+at such an obvious disadvantage. Even under M. Comte's system, which
+provides for almost everything, and which, in its far-sightedness and
+thoughtfulness for our good, appears almost more benevolent than
+Providence, it would seem as if hardly sufficient provision had been
+made for them.</p>
+
+<p>It must be difficult for any one except a really advanced Comtist to
+give himself up to the worship of a thoroughly plain girl. Filial
+instinct might enable us to worship her as a mother, but even the
+noblest desire to serve humanity would scarcely be enough to keep a
+husband or a lover up to his daily devotions in the case of a plain girl
+with sandy hair and a freckled complexion. The boldest effort to rectify
+the inequalities of the position of plain girls has been made of late
+years by a courageous school of female writers of fiction. Everything
+has been done that could be done to persuade mankind that plain girls
+are in reality by far the most attractive of the lot. The clever
+authoress of "Jane Eyre" nearly succeeded in the forlorn attempt for a
+few years; and plain girls, with volumes of intellect speaking through
+their deep eyes and from their massive foreheads, seemed for a while, on
+paper at least, to be carrying everything before them.</p>
+
+<p>The only difficulty was to get the male sex to follow out in practice
+what they so completely admired in Miss Bront&eacute;'s three-volume novels.
+Unhappily, the male sex, being very imperfect and frail, could not be
+brought to do it. They recognized the beauty <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151"></a>[<a href="./images/151.png">151</a>]</span>of the conception about
+plain girls, they were very glad to see them married off in scores to
+heroic village doctors, and they quite admitted that occasional young
+noblemen might be represented in fiction as becoming violently attached
+to young creatures with inky fingers and remarkable minds.</p>
+
+<p>But no real change was brought about in ordinary life. Man, sinful man,
+read with pleasure about the triumphs of the sandy-haired girls, but
+still kept on dancing with and proposing to the pretty ones. And at last
+authoresses were driven back on the old standard of beauty. At present,
+in the productions both of masculine and feminine workmanship, the
+former view of plain girls has been resumed. They are allowed, if
+thoroughly excellent in other ways, to pair off with country curates and
+with devoted missionaries; but the prizes of fiction, as well as the
+prizes of reality, fall to the lot of their fairer and more fortunate
+sisters.</p>
+
+<p>Champions of plain girls are not, however, wanting who boldly take the
+difficulty by the horns, and deny <i>in toto</i> the fact that in matrimony
+and love the race is usually to the beautiful. Look about you, they tell
+us, in the world, and you will as often as not find beauties fading on
+their stalks, and plain girls marrying on every side of them. And no
+doubt plain girls do marry very frequently. Nobody, for instance, with
+half an eye can fail to be familiar with the phenomenon, in his own
+circle, of astonishingly ugly married women. It does not, however,
+follow that plain girls are not terribly weighted in the race.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152"></a>[<a href="./images/152.png">152</a>]</span>
+There are several reasons why women who rely on their beauty remain
+unmarried at the last, but the reason that their beauty gives them no
+advantage is certainly not one. The first reason perhaps is that
+beauties are inclined to be fastidious and capricious. They have no
+notion of following the advice of Mrs. Hannah More, and being contented
+with the first good, sensible, Christian lover who falls in their way;
+and they run, in consequence, no slight risk of overstaying their
+market. They go in for a more splendid sort of matrimonial success, and
+think they can afford to play the more daring game.</p>
+
+<p>Plain girls are providentially preserved from these temptations. At the
+close of a well-spent life they can conscientiously look back on a
+career in which no reasonable opportunity was neglected, and say that
+they have not broken many hearts, or been sinfully and distractingly
+particular. And there is the further consideration to be remembered in
+the case of plain girls, that fortune and rank are nearly as valuable
+articles as beauty, and lead to a fair number of matrimonial alliances.
+The system of Providence is full of kindly compensations, and it is a
+proof of the universal benevolence we see about us that so many
+heiresses should be plain. Plain girls have a right to be cheered and
+comforted by the thought. It teaches them the happy lesson that beauty,
+as compared with a settled income, is skin-deep and valueless; and that
+what man looks for in the companion of his life is not so much a bright
+cheek or a blue eye, as a substantial and useful amount of this world's
+wealth.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153"></a>[<a href="./images/153.png">153</a>]</span>
+Plain girls again expect less, and are prepared to accept less, in a
+lover. Everybody knows the sort of useful, admirable, practical man who
+sets himself to marry a plain girl. He is not a man of great rank, great
+promise, or great expectations. Had it been otherwise, he might possibly
+have flown at higher game, and set his heart on marrying female
+loveliness rather than homely excellence. His choice, if it is nothing
+else, is an index of a contented and modest disposition. He is not vain
+enough to compete in the great race for beauties. What he looks for is
+some one who will be the mother of his children, who will order his
+servants duly, and keep his household bills; and whose good sense will
+teach her to recognise the sterling qualities of her husband, and not
+object to his dining daily in his slippers. This is the sort of partner
+that plain girls may rationally hope to secure, and who can say that
+they ought not to be cheerful and happy in their lot? For a character of
+this undeniable sobriety there is indeed a positive advantage in a plain
+girl as a wife. It should never be forgotten that the man who marries a
+plain girl never need be jealous. He is in the Arcadian and fortunate
+condition of a lover who has no rivals. A sensible unambitious nature
+will recognize in this a solid benefit. Plain girls rarely turn into
+frisky matrons, and this fact renders them peculiarly adapted to be the
+wives of dull and steady mediocrity.</p>
+
+<p>Lest it should be supposed that the above calculation of what plain
+girls may do leaves some of their power and success still unaccounted
+for, it is quite <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154"></a>[<a href="./images/154.png">154</a>]</span>right and proper to add that the story of plain girls,
+if it were carefully written, would contain many instances, not merely
+of moderate good fortunes, but of splendid and exceptional triumph. Like
+<i>prima donnas</i>, opera-dancers, and lovely milliners, plain girls have
+been known to make extraordinary hits, and to awaken illustrious
+passions. Somebody ought to take up the subject in a book, and tell us
+how they did it.</p>
+
+<p>This is the age of Golden Treasuries. We have Golden Treasuries of
+English poets, of French poets, of great lawyers, of famous battles, of
+notable beauties, of English heroes, of successful merchants, and of
+almost every sort of character and celebrity that can be conceived. What
+is wanted is a Golden Treasury containing the narrative of the most
+successful plain girls. This book might be called the Book of Ugliness,
+and we see no reason why, to give reality to the story, the portraits of
+some of the most remarkable might not be appended. Of course, if ever
+such a volume is compiled, it will be proved to demonstration that plain
+girls have before now arrived at great matrimonial honor and renown.</p>
+
+<p>There is, for example, the sort of plain girl who nurses her hero
+(perhaps in the Crimea) through a dangerous attack of illness, and
+marries him afterwards. There is the class of those who have been
+married simply from a sense of duty. There is the class that
+distinguishes itself by profuse kindness to poor cottagers, and by
+reading the Bible to blind old women; an occupation which as we know,
+from the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155"></a>[<a href="./images/155.png">155</a>]</span>most ordinary works of fiction, leads directly to the
+promptest and speediest attachments on the part of the young men who
+happen to drop in casually at the time. The catalogue of such is perhaps
+long and famous. Yet, allowing for all these, allowing for everything
+else that can be adduced in their favor, we cannot help returning to the
+position that plain girls have an up-hill battle to fight. No doubt it
+ought not to be so.</p>
+
+<p>Cynics tell us that six months after a man is married it makes very
+little difference to him whether his wife's nose is Roman, aquiline, or
+retrouss&eacute;; and this may be so. The unfortunate thing is that most men
+persist in marrying for the sake of the illusion of the first six
+months, and under the influence of the ante-nuptial and not the
+post-nuptial sentiments; and as the first six months with a plain girl
+are confessedly inferior in attraction, the inference is clear that they
+do in effect attract less. Plainness or loveliness apart, a very large
+number of womankind have no reason to expect any very happy chance in
+married life; and if marriage is to be set before all women as the one
+ideal, a number of feminine lives will always turn out to have been
+failures.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that it is hopeless to attempt on this point to alter the
+sentiments of the female sex, or indeed the general verdict of society.
+We do not quite see the hopelessness. A considerable amount of the
+matrimonial ideas of young women are purely the result of their
+education, and of the atmosphere in which they have been brought up;
+and, by giving a new direction to their early training, it might not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156"></a>[<a href="./images/156.png">156</a>]</span>be
+altogether so quixotical to believe that we should alter all that is the
+result of the training. At any rate it has become essential for the
+welfare of women that they should, as far as possible, be taught that
+they may have a career open to them even if they never marry; and it is
+the duty of society to try to open to them as many careers of the sort
+as are not incompatible with the distinctive peculiarities of a woman's
+physical capacity.</p>
+
+<p>It may well be that society's present instincts as regards woman are at
+bottom selfish. The notion of feminine dependence on man, of the want of
+refinement in a woman who undertakes any active business or profession,
+and of the first importance of woman's domestic position, when carried
+to an extreme, are perhaps better suited to the caprice and fanciful
+fastidiousness of men than to the real requirements, in the present age,
+of the other sex. The throng of semi-educated authoresses who are now
+flocking about the world of letters is a wholesome protest against such
+exclusive jealousy. The real objection to literary women is that women,
+with a few notable exceptions, are not yet properly educated to write
+well, or to criticise well what others write. Remove this objection by
+improving the curriculum of feminine education, and there is hardly any
+other. There is none certainly of sufficient consequence to outweigh the
+real need which is felt of giving those women something to live for
+(apart from and above ordinary domestic and philanthropic duties), whose
+good or evil fortune it is not to be marked out by Heaven for a married
+life.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157"></a>[<a href="./images/157.png">157</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>A WORD FOR FEMALE VANITY.</h2>
+
+
+<p>If any human weakness has a right to complain of the ingratitude with
+which the world treats it, it is certainly vanity. It gets through more
+good work, and yet comes in for more hearty abuse, than all our other
+weaknesses put together. Preachers and moralists are always having hits
+at it, and in that philosophical study and scientific vivisection of
+character which two friends are always so ready to practice at the
+expense of a third, and which weak-minded people confound with scandal,
+to no foible is the knife so pitilessly applied as to vanity. What makes
+this rigor seem all the more cruel and unnatural is that vanity never
+gets so little quarter as from those who ought, one would think, to be
+on the best possible terms with her. She is never justified of her
+children, and, like Byron's unhappy eagle, "nurses the pinion that
+impels the steel" against her. Yet it is difficult to see how the world
+could get on without the weakness thus universally assailed, and what
+preachers and moralists would do if they had their own way.</p>
+
+<p>In the more important&mdash;or, we should rather say, in the larger&mdash;concerns
+of life vanity could perhaps be dispensed with. Where there is much at
+stake, other agencies come into play to keep the machinery <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158"></a>[<a href="./images/158.png">158</a>]</span>of the world
+in motion, though, even as regards these, it is a question how many
+great poems, great speeches, great actions, which have profoundly
+influenced the destinies of mankind, would have been lost to the world
+if there had been none but great motives at work to produce them. Great
+motives usually get the credit&mdash;that is, when we are dealing with
+historical characters, not dissecting a friend, in whose case it is
+necessary to guard against our natural proneness to partiality; but
+little motives often do the largest share of the work. It is proper, for
+instance, and due to our own dignity and self-respect to say, that the
+world owes <i>Childe Harold</i> to a great poet's inspired yearning for
+immortality. Still, we fear, there is room for a doubt whether the world
+would ever have seen <i>Childe Harold</i> if the great poet had not happened
+to be also a morbidly vain and, in some respects, remarkably small man.
+But even if we assume that the big affairs of life may be left to big
+motives, and do not require such a little motive as vanity to help them,
+these are, after all, few and far between.</p>
+
+<p>For one action that may safely be left to yearnings for immortality, or
+ambition, or love, or something equally lofty and grand, there are
+thousands which society must get done somehow, and which it gets done
+pleasantly and comfortably only because, by a charmingly convenient
+illusion, the vanity of each agent makes him attach a peculiar
+importance to them. There is no act so trivial, or to all appearance so
+unworthy of a rational being, that the magic of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159"></a>[<a href="./images/159.png">159</a>]</span>vanity cannot throw a
+halo of dignity over it, and persuade the agent that it is mainly by his
+exertions that society is kept together, as Moli&egrave;re's dancing-master
+reasoned that the secret of good government is the secret of good
+dancing&mdash;namely, how to avoid false steps. And it is this genial
+promoter of human happiness, this all-powerful diffuser of social
+harmony, this lubricating oil without which the vast and complex
+machinery of life could never work, that man, in his ignorant
+ingratitude, dares to denounce.</p>
+
+<p>We should like to ask one of these thoughtless revilers of vanity
+whether it has ever been his misfortune to meet a woman without it. He
+would probably try to escape by declaring that a woman without vanity is
+a purely imaginary being, if not a contradiction in terms; and we admit
+that there is something to be said in favor of this view. Nothing is
+more astonishing to the male philosopher than the odd way in which, from
+some stray corner of character where he would have least thought of
+looking for it, female vanity now and then suddenly pops out upon him.
+He fancied that he knew a woman well, that he had studied her character
+and mastered all its strong and weak points, when, by some accident or
+at some unguarded moment, he suddenly strikes a rich, deep, vein of
+vanity of the existence of which he never had the remotest suspicion. He
+may perhaps have known that she was not without vanity on certain
+points, but for these he had discovered, or had fancied he had
+discovered, some sort of reason. We do not necessarily mean, by reason,
+any cause that seemed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160"></a>[<a href="./images/160.png">160</a>]</span>to justify or, on any consistent principle, to
+account for the fact. As we have already remarked, it is the peculiarity
+of vanity that it often flourishes most vigorously, and puts forth a
+plentiful crop, where there does not seem to be even a layer of soil for
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Both men and women are occasionally most vain of their weakest points,
+perhaps by a merciful provision of nature similar to that by which a sow
+always takes most kindly to the weakest pig in the litter. Lord
+Chesterfield, when paternally admonishing his son as to the proper
+management of women, lays down as a general indisputable axiom that they
+are all, as a matter of course, to be flattered to the top of their
+bent; but he adds, as a special rule, that a very pretty or a very ugly
+woman should be flattered, not about her personal charms, but about her
+mental powers. It is only in the case of a moderately good-looking woman
+that the former should be singled out for praise. A very pretty woman
+takes her beauty as a matter of course, and would rather be flattered
+about the possession of some advantage to which her claim is not so
+clear, while a very ugly woman distrusts the sincerity of flattery about
+her person.</p>
+
+<p>It is not without the profoundest diffidence that we venture to dispute
+the opinion of such an authority on such a subject as Lord Chesterfield,
+but still we think that no woman is so hideous that she may not, if her
+vanity happens to take this turn, be told with perfect safety that she
+is a beauty. Her vanity is, indeed, not so likely to take this turn as
+it would be if she were really pretty. She will probably plume <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161"></a>[<a href="./images/161.png">161</a>]</span>herself
+upon her abilities or accomplishments, and therefore Chesterfield's
+excellent fatherly advice was, on the whole, tolerably safe. But still,
+if any hereditary bias or unlucky accident&mdash;such, for instance, as that
+of being brought up among people with whom brains are nothing, and
+beauty everything&mdash;does give an ugly woman's vanity an impulse in the
+direction of good looks, no excess of hideousness makes it unsafe to
+extol her beauty. On the contrary, she is more likely to be imposed upon
+than a moderately good-looking woman, from her greater eagerness to
+clutch at every straw that may help to keep up the darling delusion. No
+philosopher is, accordingly, surprised at finding that a woman is vain
+where he can discover not the slightest rational foundation even for
+female vanity.</p>
+
+<p>But it certainly is surprising, now and then, to find how long the most
+intense female vanity will lie, in some out-of-the-way corner of
+character, hidden from the eye. Perhaps we ought to say, the male eye,
+for women seem to discover each other's weak points by a power of
+intuition that amounts almost to instinct. But a man is amazed to find
+that a woman whose vanity he believed himself to have tracked into all
+its channels has it, after all, most strongly in some channel of which
+he previously knew nothing. He has perhaps considered her a sensible
+matter-of-fact woman, vain perhaps, though not unpardonably, of her
+capacity for business and knowledge of the world, but singularly free
+from the not uncommon female tendency to believe that every man who sees
+her is in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162"></a>[<a href="./images/162.png">162</a>]</span>love with her; and he unexpectedly discovers that she has for
+years considered herself the object of a desperate passion on the part
+of the parish rector, a prosaic middle-aged gentleman of ample waistcoat
+and large family, and is a little uneasy about being left alone in the
+same room with the butler.</p>
+
+<p>Unexpected discoveries of some such kind as this not unnaturally
+popularize the theory already mentioned, that such a being as a woman
+without vanity does not exist&mdash;that, no matter how securely the weakness
+may lie hidden from observation, it does somewhere or other exist, and
+some day will out. But we are inclined, notwithstanding, to hold that,
+here and there, but happily very seldom, there are to be found women
+really without vanity; and most unpleasant women they seem to us, as a
+rule, to be. They get on tolerably well with their own sex, for they are
+rarely pretty or affected, and they have usually certain solid,
+serviceable qualities which make up for not being attractive by standing
+wear and tear. But in their relations with men&mdash;as soon, that is, as
+they have secured a husband, and fascination has therefore ceased to be
+a matter of business, a practical question of bread-and-butter, to be
+grappled with in the spirit in which they would, if necessary, go out
+charing, or keep a mangle&mdash;they are painfully devoid of that eagerness
+to please and that readiness to be pleased which, in the present
+imperfect state of civilization, are among woman's chief charms.</p>
+
+<p>Even men cannot, as a rule, get on very well without these qualities;
+but still to please is not man's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163"></a>[<a href="./images/163.png">163</a>]</span>mission in the sense in which it is
+generally considered to be woman's, and probably will continue to be
+considered, until Dr. Mary Walkers are not the exception, but the rule.
+One now and then has the misfortune to come upon a specimen of
+womanhood, good and solid enough perhaps, making a most exemplary and
+respectable wife and mother, but nevertheless dull, heavy, and
+unattractive to an extent that fills the wretched man who takes it in to
+dinner with desperation. And then to think that one ounce of vanity
+might have leavened this lump, and converted it, as by magic, into a
+pleasant, palatable, convivial compound, good everywhere, but especially
+good at the dinner-table! For, where vanity exists at all, it can
+scarcely fail to influence the natural desire of one sex to please the
+other; and a woman must be singularly devoid of all charms, physical and
+mental, if she fails when she is really anxious to please. That women
+should be fascinating, as they sometimes are, in spite of some
+positively painful deformity, is a proof of what such anxiety can alone
+accomplish.</p>
+
+<p>We must admit that we have to postulate, on behalf of the female vanity
+whose cause we are espousing, that it should not derive its inspiration
+solely from self-love. However anxious a woman may be to please, if her
+anxiety is on her own account, and simply to secure admiration, she must
+be a very Helen if her vanity continues attractive. She is lucky if it
+does not take the most odious of all forms, and, from always revolving
+round self and dwelling upon selfish considerations, degenerate into a
+habit of perpetual <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164"></a>[<a href="./images/164.png">164</a>]</span>postures and stage tricks to gain applause. And this
+tendency naturally connects itself with the wish to please the opposite
+sex, its success being in inverse proportion to its strength. Just as
+one occasionally meets with men who are perfectly unaffected and
+sensible fellows in men's society, but whose whole demeanor becomes
+absurdly changed if any woman, though it be only the housemaid with a
+coal-scuttle, enters the room, so there are, more commonly, to be found
+women whose whole character seems to vary, as if by magic, according to
+the sex of the person whom they find themselves with. Before their own
+sex they are natural enough; before men they are eternally
+attitudinizing. We should be sorry to say that this repulsive form of
+vanity always takes its root in excessive self-love, but still a tinge
+of unselfishness seems to us the best antidote against it.</p>
+
+<p>It is marvellous with how much vanity, and that too of a tolerably
+ostentatious kind, a woman may be thoroughly agreeable even to her own
+sex, if her eagerness to please is accompanied by genuine kindliness, or
+is free from excessive selfishness. It may be easy enough to see that
+all her little courtesies and attentions are at bottom really
+attributable to vanity; that, when she does a kind act, she is thinking
+less of its effect upon your comfort and happiness than of its effect
+upon your estimate of her character. She would perhaps rather you got
+half the advantage with her aid than the whole advantage without it. Her
+motive is, primarily, vanity&mdash;clearly not kindness&mdash;however amicably
+they may in general work together. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165"></a>[<a href="./images/165.png">165</a>]</span>But still it is the kindness that
+makes the vanity flow into pleasant, friendly forms. In a selfish woman
+the very same vanity would degenerate into posturing or dressing. And,
+odd as it may seem, and as much as it may reflect upon the common sense
+of poor humanity, we believe that kind acts done out of genuine,
+unadulterated benevolence are less appreciated by the recipient than
+kind acts done out of benevolence stimulated by vanity. The latter are
+pleasant because they spring out of the desire to please, and soothe our
+self-love, whereas the former appeal to our self-interest.</p>
+
+<p>There are few things in this world more charming than the kindly
+courtesy of a pretty woman, not ungracefully conscious of her power to
+please, and showing courtesy because she enjoys the exercise of this
+power. Strictly speaking, she is acting less in your interest than in
+her own. Although she feels at once the pleasure of pleasing and the
+pleasure of doing a kindly action, the second is quite subordinate to
+the first, and is perhaps, more or less, sacrificed to it. Yet who is
+strong-minded enough to wish that the kindliness of a pretty woman
+should be dictated by simple benevolence, untinged by vanity? If we knew
+that her kindliness arose rather from a wish to benefit us than to
+conciliate our good opinion, it is perhaps possible that we should
+esteem her more, but we fear it is quite certain that we should like her
+less.</p>
+
+<p>Before we conclude, we ought perhaps to make one more postulate on
+behalf of female vanity, not less important than our postulate that it
+should be pleasantly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166"></a>[<a href="./images/166.png">166</a>]</span>tinged by unselfishness. To be agreeable, it must
+have fair foundation. A woman may be forgiven for over-estimating her
+charms, but there is no forgiveness on this side of the grave for a
+woman who recklessly credits herself with charms that do not exist. All
+the lavish cheques she draws upon her male neighbor's admiration are
+silently dishonored, and in half an hour after the moment they sit down
+to table together she is a hopeless bankrupt in his estimation, even
+though he may have courtesy and skill enough to conceal the collapse.</p>
+
+<p>As there are few, if any, pleasanter objects than a pretty woman,
+gracefully conscious of her beauty, and radiantly fulfilling its
+legitimate end, the power of pleasing, so are there few, if any, more
+unpleasant objects than a vain woman, ungracefully conscious of
+imaginary charms, and secretly disgusting those she strives to attract.
+An ugly woman who gives herself the airs of a beauty, or a silly woman
+who believes herself a genius, is not a spectacle upon which a man of
+healthy imagination and appetite likes to dwell. It is perhaps only in
+accordance with the theory that this life is a state of trial and
+probation that the tastes can be explained. Happily, it is not very
+common. Most women know their strong from their weak points, and marshal
+them on the whole well in the encounter with their lawful oppressor and
+great enemy, man. And until they have won the victory to which Dr. Mary
+Walker is now leading them on, may they never lack the female vanity
+which makes it one of their great objects in life to please!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167"></a>[<a href="./images/167.png">167</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>THE ABUSE OF MATCH-MAKING.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is a pity that when, by some train of ill-luck, a word of respectable
+parentage, and well brought up, is led astray, it cannot adopt
+Goldsmith's recipe and die. It has not even the more prosaic alternative
+of being made an honest word by marriage, and escaping the name under
+which it stooped to folly, and was betrayed. It drags on a dishonored
+life, with little or no chance of recovering its character, inflicting
+cruel disgrace upon the unlucky family of ideas, no matter what their
+own innocence and respectability, to which it happens to belong. Thus
+Casuistry, if not a very useful, was at least a perfectly harmless,
+member of society, and moved in the best circles, until in an evil hour
+she became too intimate with the unpopular Jesuits.</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago, when high feeding and sermonizing proved too much for
+the virtue of garotters, and, waxing fat, they not only kicked society,
+but danced hornpipes in hobnailed boots upon its head and stomach, even
+Philanthropy, at once the most fashionable and popular word of this
+century, was all but compromised by Sir Joshua Jebb and Sir George Grey.
+Baron Bramwell fortunately came to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168"></a>[<a href="./images/168.png">168</a>]</span>rescue, and saved it from
+permanent loss of character. But still to this day the word is sometimes
+used in a sense by no means complimentary. If the battue-system
+continues long enough, "good sport" will become a synonym for
+cold-blooded clumsy butchery, and thus all sport whatsoever will be more
+or less discredited. The <i>faux pas</i> of one member disgraces the whole
+family. A few men may be the lords of language, but the great majority
+are its slaves. They can no more disconnect the innocent idea from the
+soiled word that accompanies it than they can see a blue landscape
+through green glass. Let us hope that one of the first acts of Mr.
+Bright's millennial Parliament will be the establishment of a tribunal
+empowered to take a word when it arrives at this pitiable condition, and
+either in mercy knock it on the head altogether, or else formally
+readmit it into good society, and give it all the advantages of a fresh
+start.</p>
+
+<p>We take an early opportunity of inviting their special attention to the
+much-injured word "Match-making." The practice which it describes is not
+only harmless, but, in the present state of society, highly useful and
+meritorious. Yet there can be no doubt, that there is a powerful
+prejudice against it. Although all women&mdash;or rather, perhaps, as
+Thackeray said, all good women&mdash;are at heart match-makers, there are
+very few who own the soft impeachment. Many repudiate it with
+indignation. It is on the whole about as safe to charge a lady with
+Fenianism as facetiously to point out a young couple in her
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169"></a>[<a href="./images/169.png">169</a>]</span>drawing-room, whose flirtation has a suspicious businesslike look about
+it, and to hint that she has deliberately brought them together with a
+view to matrimony. It may be true that she has no selfish interest
+whatever in the matter. The criminal conspiracy in which she so
+strenuously repudiates any concern is, after all, nothing worse than the
+attempt to make two people whom she likes, and who she thinks will suit
+each other, happy for life. By any other name such an action ought, one
+would think, to smell sweet in the nostrils of gods and men.</p>
+
+<p>But, whatever the gods think of it, men cannot forget that the practice,
+whether harmless or not, goes by the objectionable name of match-making.
+So the lady replies, not, perhaps, without the energy of conscious
+guilt, that "things of this sort are best left to themselves," and
+piously begs you to remember that marriages are made in Heaven, not in
+her drawing-room. The melancholy truth is that the gentle craft of
+match-making has been so vulgarized by course and clumsy professors, and
+its very name has in consequence been brought into such disrepute, that
+few respectable women have the courage openly to recognise it. They are
+haunted by visions of the typical match-maker who does work for
+fashionable novels and social satires, and who is a truly awful
+personage. To her alone of mortals is it given to inspire, like the
+Harpies, at once contempt and fear. Keen-eyed and hook-nosed, like a
+bird of prey, she glowers from the corner of crowded ball-rooms upon the
+unconscious heir, hunts him untiringly from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170"></a>[<a href="./images/170.png">170</a>]</span>house to house, marries him
+remorselessly to her eldest daughter, and then never loses sight of him
+till his spirit is broken, his old friends discarded, and his segar-case
+thrown away.</p>
+
+<p>It is scarcely necessary to say that this fearful being exists only in
+fiction. In real life she has not only to marry her daughters, but also,
+like other human beings, to eat, drink, sleep, and otherwise dispose of
+the twenty-four hours of the day. She cannot therefore very well devote
+herself, from morning to night, to the one occupation of heir-hunting,
+with the precision of a machine, or one of Bunyan's walking vices. But
+still there must be some truth even in a caricature, and a man sometimes
+finds a girl "thrown at his head," as the process is forcibly termed,
+with a coarse-mindedness quite worthy of the typical match-maker, though
+also with a clumsiness which she would heartily despise.</p>
+
+<p>He goes as a stranger to some place, and is astonished to find himself
+at once taken to the bosom and innermost confidence of people whose very
+name he never heard before, as if he were their oldest and most familiar
+friend. He is asked to dinner one day, to breakfast the next, and warmly
+assured that a place is always kept for him at lunch. Charmed and
+flattered to find his many merits so quickly discovered and thoroughly
+appreciated by strangers, he votes them the cleverest, most genial, most
+hospitable people he ever met; and everything goes on delightfully until
+he begins to think it odd that he should be constantly left alone with,
+and now and then delicately <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171"></a>[<a href="./images/171.png">171</a>]</span>chaffed about, some <i>pass&eacute;e</i>, ill-favored
+woman, whom he no more connects with any thought of marriage than he
+would a female rhinoceros. And then slowly dawns upon him the cruel
+truth that his kind hosts have had their appreciation of his merits
+considerably sharpened by the fact that there is an ugly daughter or
+sister-in-law in the house whom they are sick to death of, whom they are
+always imploring "to marry or do something," and who, having for years
+ogled and angled for every marriageable pair of whiskers and pantoloons
+within ten miles, has gradually become so well known in the neighborhood
+that her one forlorn hope is to carry off some innocent stranger with a
+rush.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Quere peregrinum, vicinia rauca reclamat;</i>" and if the <i>peregrinus</i>
+happens to be young and verdant, and, having just been given a good
+appointment, feels, with the Vicar of Wakefield, that one of the three
+greatest characters on earth is the father of a family, he is possibly
+hooked securely before he discovers his danger. He discovers it to find
+himself tied for life to a woman with whom he has not a sympathy in
+common, and for whom every day increases his disgust. And the people who
+have ruined his life have not even the sorry excuse that they wished to
+better hers. Their one thought was to get rid of her as speedily as
+possible, no matter to whom; and they would rather have had Bluebeard at
+a two-months' engagement than any other man at one of six. There is
+something so coarse and revolting, so brutal, in the notion of bringing
+two people together <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172"></a>[<a href="./images/172.png">172</a>]</span>into such a relation as that of marriage on purely
+selfish grounds, and without the slightest regard to their future
+happiness, that any one who has seen the snare laid for himself or his
+friends may well shudder at the mere sound of match-making. Mezentius
+was more merciful, for of the two bodies which he chained together only
+one had life.</p>
+
+<p>The clumsy match-maker is a scarcely less dangerous, though a far more
+respectable, enemy to the gentle craft than the coarse one. She makes it
+ridiculous, while the latter makes it odious, and it is ridicule that
+kills. She is, perhaps, a well-meaning woman, who would be sorry to
+marry two people unless she thought them suited to each other; but the
+moment she has made up her mind that they ought to marry, she sets to
+work with a vigor which, unless she has a very young man to deal with,
+is almost sure to spoil her plans. This would not be surprising in a
+silly woman; but it is odd that the more energetic, and, in some
+respects, the more able a woman is, the more likely sometimes she is to
+fall into this error.</p>
+
+<p>A woman may be the life and soul of a dozen societies, write admirable
+letters, get half her male relatives into Government offices, and yet be
+the laughing-stock of the neighborhood for the absurd way in which she
+goes husband-hunting for her daughters. The very energy and ability
+which fit her for other pursuits disqualify her for match-making. She is
+too impatient and too fond of action to adopt the purely passive
+expectant attitude, the masterly inactivity, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173"></a>[<a href="./images/173.png">173</a>]</span>which is here the great
+secret of success. She is always feeling that something should be said
+or done to help on the business, and prematurely scares the shy or
+suspicious bird. Many a promising love-affair has been nipped in the bud
+simply because the too eager mother has drawn public attention to it
+before it was robust enough to face publicity, by throwing the two
+lovers conspicuously together, or by some unguarded remark.</p>
+
+<p>When one thinks of all that a man has to go through in the course of a
+love-affair&mdash;especially in a small society where everybody knows
+everybody&mdash;of all the chaffing and grinning, and significant interchange
+of glances when he picks up the daughter's fan, or hands the mother to
+her carriage, or laughs convulsively at the old jokes of the father, one
+is almost inclined to wonder how a Briton, of the average British
+stiffness and shyness, ever gets married at all. The explanation
+probably is, that he falls in love before he exactly knows what he is
+about, and, once in love, is of course gloriously blind and deaf to all
+obstacles between him and the adored one. But to subject a man to this
+trying ordeal, as the too eager match-maker does, before he is
+sufficiently in love to be proof against it, is like sending him into a
+snow-storm without a great-coat.</p>
+
+<p>The romantic match-maker is, in her way, as mischievous as the coarse or
+the clumsy one. She is usually a good sort of woman, but with decidedly
+more heart than head. She gets her notions of political economy from Mr.
+Dickens' novels, and holds <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174"></a>[<a href="./images/174.png">174</a>]</span>that, whenever two nice young people of
+opposite sexes like each other, it is their business then and there to
+marry. If Providence cannot always, like Mr. Dickens, provide a rich
+aunt or uncle, it at least never sends mouths without hands to feed
+them. Let every good citizen help the young people to marry as fast as
+they can, and let there be lots of chubby cheeks and lots of Sunday
+plum-pudding to fill them. There is no arguing with a woman of this
+kind, and she is perhaps the most dangerous of all match-makers,
+inasmuch as she is usually herself a warm-hearted pleasant woman, and
+there is a courage and disinterestedness about her views very
+captivating to young heads. There is no safety but in flight. Even a
+bachelor of fair prudence and knowledge of the world is not safe in her
+hands. We mean on the assumption that he is not in a position to marry.
+If he is "an eligible," he cannot, of course, be considered safe
+anywhere. But otherwise he knows that match-makers of the unromantic
+worldly type will be only too glad to leave him alone.</p>
+
+<p>And having, perhaps, been accustomed on this account to feel that he may
+flirt in moderation with impunity, as a man with whom marriage is
+altogether out of the question, he is quite unprepared for the new and
+startling unconventional view which the romantic match-maker takes of
+him. He is horrified to find that, ignoring the usual considerations as
+to the length of his purse, she has discovered that he and the pretty
+girl with whom he danced three consecutive dances last night must have
+been made <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175"></a>[<a href="./images/175.png">175</a>]</span>expressly for each other, and that she has somehow contrived,
+by the exercise of that freemasonry in love-affairs which is peculiar to
+women, to put the same ridiculous notion into the young lady's head. In
+fact, he suddenly finds to his astonishment that he must either
+propose&mdash;which is out of the question&mdash;or be considered a cold-blooded
+trifler with female hearts. And so he has nothing to do but pack up his
+portmanteau and beat an ignominious retreat, with an uncomfortable
+consciousness that his amiable hostess and pretty partner have a very
+poor opinion of him.</p>
+
+<p>It is rather hard, however, that these and other abuses, which we have
+not space to enumerate, of the great art of match-making should bring
+the art itself into odium and contempt. In all of them there is a
+violation of some one or more of what we take to be its three chief
+canons. First, the objects to be experimented upon should be pecuniarily
+in a position to marry. Secondly, care should be taken that they seem on
+the whole not unlikely to suit each other. Thirdly, the artist should be
+content, like a photographer, to bring the objects together, and leave
+the rest of the work mainly to nature. We confess that we feel painfully
+the unscientific vagueness of this last axiom, since so much turns upon
+the way in which the objects are brought together. But, as we only
+undertook to treat of the abuse of match-making, the reader must
+consider these maxims for its proper use to be thrown into the bargain
+<i>gratis</i>, and not therefore to be scrutinized severely. Some other <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176"></a>[<a href="./images/176.png">176</a>]</span>day,
+if we can muster up courage enough for so delicate and arduous a task,
+we may perhaps attempt to show that, in the present state of society,
+the art of match-making deserves and requires cultivation, and how, in
+our humble opinion, this cultivation should be carried on.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177"></a>[<a href="./images/177.png">177</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>FEMININE INFLUENCE.</h2>
+
+
+<p>All English ladies who are warmly devoted to the great cause of feminine
+authority have got their eyes just now upon the Empress of the French.
+It is understood in English domestic circles that the Empress has
+decided to go to Rome, and that the Emperor has decided on her staying
+at home, and the interest of the situation is generally thought to be
+intense. The ocean race between the yachts was nothing to it. Every
+woman of spirit has been betting heavily this Christmas upon the
+Empress, and praying mentally for the defeat of the Emperor, and every
+new telegram that bears upon the subject of the difficult controversy is
+scanned by hundreds of dovelike eyes every morning with indescribable
+eagerness.</p>
+
+<p>M. Reuter, who is a man probably, if he is not a joint-stock company, is
+believed not to be altogether an impartial historian; and it is felt in
+many drawing-rooms that what is wanted on this occasion, at the
+telegraph offices, is a sound and resolute Madame Reuter, to correct the
+deviations of M. Reuter's compass. In default of all trustworthy
+telegraphic intelligence, Englishwomen are compelled to fall back on
+their vivid imagination, and to construct a picture <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178"></a>[<a href="./images/178.png">178</a>]</span>of what is
+happening from the depths of their own moral consciousness. And several
+things their moral consciousness tells them are clear and certain. The
+first is, that the Empress Eug&eacute;nie is an injured and interesting victim.
+She has made a vow, under the very touching circumstances of measles in
+the Imperial nursery, to pay a visit to the Pope; and Cabinet Ministers
+like M. Lavalette, who throw suspicion on the binding nature of such a
+holy maternal obligation, are worse than "S. G. O." In the second place,
+she has set her heart upon going. Even if a vow were not binding, this
+is. It is mere nonsense to say that her pilgrimage would interfere with
+politics. A woman's fine tact is often of considerable use in politics,
+and the sight of the Prince Imperial in his mother's arms might exercise
+the most beneficial influence on the Pope's mind.</p>
+
+<p>Pio Nono has held out hitherto in the most inexplicable manner against
+the Prince Imperial's photograph, but he never could resist a sight of
+the original. And, thirdly, if a wife and a mother may not have her own
+way about going to see the Head of her own Church, when is she ever to
+have her way at all, and where is the line to be drawn? The next
+downward step in a husband's declension will be to prevent her from
+frequenting all religious exercises, or, still worse, from selecting her
+own balls and evening parties. This is what English ladies feel, and
+feel keenly. It is some consolation to them to learn that, if the
+Empress Eug&eacute;nie is discomfited, she will not have been discomfited
+without a struggle. Of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179"></a>[<a href="./images/179.png">179</a>]</span>course there will be no evening reception on the
+New Year at the Tuileries. No lady with a proper sense of what was due
+to her own dignity would receive under such circumstances. But till the
+most authentic news arrive, it will still be possible to hope and to
+believe that victory will eventually, and in spite of all appearances,
+declare itself upon the side of right and of propriety, and that her
+Majesty will not be interfered with merely to satisfy the idle caprices
+of a Foreign Office.</p>
+
+<p>The question of the proper limits of feminine influence is one which
+such universal enthusiasm forces naturally on one's notice. Not even the
+most rigid cynic can deny that women ought to have some influence on the
+mind and judgment of the opposite sex, and the only difficulty is to
+know how far that influence ought to go. Every one will be ready to
+concede that sound reasoning is worth hearing, whether it comes from a
+woman or a man; and that, so far as a lady argues well, she has as much
+claim on our attention as Diotima had on the attention of Socrates.
+This, however, is not precisely the point which is so difficult to
+settle. The problem is to know how much influence a woman ought to have
+when she does not argue well; and further, what are the matters on which
+her opinion, whether it be based on argument or instinct, is of value.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most important subjects on which women have some, and always
+want to have a great deal of power, is religion. This is one part of the
+supposed mission of the Empress upon which feminine <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180"></a>[<a href="./images/180.png">180</a>]</span>observers look with
+especial sympathy, and on which experienced masculine observers, on the
+other hand, look with some awe. The correspondents of the daily papers,
+whose pleasure and privilege it is to be able to instruct us in all the
+secrets of high life, have given us recently to understand that, for
+some time back, Her Majesty has been hard at work on the Emperor's soul.
+Every thoughtful woman likes to be at work on her husband's soul. Young
+ladies enjoy the prospect before they are married, and no novel is so
+thoroughly popular among them as one in which beauty is the instrument
+in the hands of Providence for the conversion of unbelief. And it is
+partly because the Empress Eug&eacute;nie is discharging this high missionary
+duty, that she is an object of particular admiration just at this
+moment. When Englishwomen hear that she is very active in favor of the
+Pope, and couple this news with the fact that the Emperor's soul is
+uneasy, they sniff&mdash;if we may be forgiven the expression&mdash;the battle
+from afar. Their education in respect of theology and religious opinion
+is very different from that of men.</p>
+
+<p>They have been brought up to believe strongly and heartily what they
+have been told, and they do not understand the half-sceptical way of
+regarding such things which is the result of larger views and more
+liberal education. It appears to them a terrible thing that the men they
+care for should be hesitating and doubtful about subjects where they
+themselves have been trained only to believe one view possible. And they
+set to work in the true temper of missionaries, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181"></a>[<a href="./images/181.png">181</a>]</span>with profound eagerness
+and energy, and narrowness of grasp. Many genuine prayers and tears are
+worthily spent in the effort to tether some truant husband or a son to a
+family theological peg, and to prevent him from roving. And, up to a
+certain point, men continually give in. They find it easier and more
+comfortable to lower their arms, and not always to be maintaining a
+barren controversy. They have not the slightest wish to convince their
+affectionate feminine disputant, to take from her the sincere and
+positive dogmas on which her happiness is built, and to substitute for
+these a phase of doubt and difficulty for which her past intellectual
+life has not fitted her. Accordingly, they indulge in a thousand little
+hypocrisies of a more or less harmless kind.</p>
+
+<p>So long as women's education continues to differ from that of men as
+widely as it does in England, this flexibility on the part of the latter
+under the influence of the former is not always amiss. It is better that
+the husband should be yielding than that he should hold aloof from all
+that interests and moves the wife, as is the case in countries where the
+one sex may be seen professing to believe in nothing, while the other as
+implicitly believes in everything. It is, however, easy to conceive of
+cases in which this feminine influence that seems so innocent, is in
+reality injurious. It may perhaps be the business of the husband to take
+a public part in the affairs of his time. Conscience tells him that he
+should be sincere, uncompromising, logical, even to the point of
+disputing conclusions which good and pious people consider <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182"></a>[<a href="./images/182.png">182</a>]</span>essential
+and important. Or he may be a religious preacher, or a religious
+reformer of his day, bound, in virtue of character, to maintain truth at
+the risk of being unpopular; or, it may be, to prosecute inquiries and
+reforms at the risk of shocking weaker brethren.</p>
+
+<p>There are many who could tell us from their experience how terribly at
+such a time they have been perplexed and hampered in their duty by the
+affectionate ignorance, the tears, and the piety of women. Protestant
+clergymen in particular are sometimes taunted with their conservative
+tendencies, their indifference to the new lights of science, or of
+history, and their disinclination to embark on perilous voyages in quest
+of truth. Part of their conservatism arises from the fact that their
+practical business is generally to teach what they do know, rather than
+to inquire into what they do not know. Part of it comes, as we suspect,
+from the fact that they are married. A wife is a sort of theological
+drag. It serves no doubt to keep some of us from rolling too rapidly
+down hill. It impedes equally the progress of others over ordinarily
+level ground.</p>
+
+<p>The importance of a social position to women is a thing which affects
+their influence upon men no less materially than does their religious
+sensibility. As a rule, they have no other means of measuring the
+consideration in which they are held by the world, or the success in
+life of those to whose fortunes they are linked, than by using a trivial
+and worthless social standard. Men, whose training is wider, estimate
+both their male and their female friends pretty fairly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183"></a>[<a href="./images/183.png">183</a>]</span>according to
+their merits. But the majority of women, from their youth up, seldom
+think of anybody without contrasting his or her social status with their
+own. Success signifies to them introduction to this or that feminine
+circle, admission to friendships from which they have been as yet
+excluded, and visiting cards of a more distinguished appearance than
+those which at present lie upon their table. They are unable to enjoy
+even the ordinary intercourse of society without an <i>arri&egrave;re pens&eacute;e</i> as
+to their chance of landing themselves a step higher on the social
+ladder. From such absurdities the best and most refined women of course
+are free, but the mass of Englishwomen seldom meet without wondering who
+on earth each of the others is, and to which county family she belongs.</p>
+
+<p>Humorous as is the spectacle of a crowd of English ladies, each of whom
+is employed in eyeing the lady next her and asking who she is, and
+comical as the point of view appears to any one who reflects on the
+shortness of human life and the littleness of human character, the
+effect of these feminine weaknesses is one which no one can be sure of
+escaping. We are afraid that half of the Englishmen who are snobs are
+made so by Englishwomen. It is impossible for the female portion of any
+domestic circle to be perpetually dwelling on their own social
+aspirations without communicating the infection to, or even forcing it
+upon the male. Wives and daughters become dissatisfied with their
+husbands' or their fathers' friends. They want to meet and to associate
+with people whom it is a social credit to know, and who in turn <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184"></a>[<a href="./images/184.png">184</a>]</span>may
+help them to know somebody beyond. Every fresh acquaintance of
+distinction, or of fashion, is a sort of milestone, showing the ground
+that has been travelled over by the family in the direction of their
+hopes. This sort of fever is very catching. But though men often catch
+it, they generally catch it from the other sex. And even when they are
+not impregnated with it themselves, the effect of feminine influence
+upon them is that they accept their lot with placidity, and acquiesce in
+the social struggle through which they are dragged.</p>
+
+<p>No man in his senses can wish or hope to order the social life of his
+belongings according to his own sober judgment. He is compelled to allow
+them a free rein in the matter, and to abstain from even expressing the
+astonishment he inwardly feels. Perhaps the world of women is a new
+world to him, and he feels incapable of regulating any of its movements;
+or perhaps, if he is wise, he is content with the reflection that little
+foibles do not altogether spoil real nobility of nature, and takes the
+bad side of a woman's education with the good. But there are innumerable
+matters in respect of which he cannot withdraw himself from the feminine
+influence about him. By degrees he comes to sympathize with the little
+social disappointments of his family group, and to take pleasure in
+their little social triumphs, which appear to be so productive of
+satisfaction and enjoyment to those to whom they fall. But the effect on
+his character is not usually wholesome. His eye is no longer single.
+Feminine influence has engrafted on his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185"></a>[<a href="./images/185.png">185</a>]</span>nature the defects of feminine
+character, without engrafting on it also its many virtues.</p>
+
+<p>Women usually fail in communicating to men their self-devotion, their
+gentleness, their piety; all that they manage to communicate amounts to
+little more than a respect for the observances of religion, and a
+nervous sensibility to social distinctions.</p>
+
+<p>While the mental development of women continues to be so little studied,
+it is not surprising that the intellectual influence of the sex should
+be almost <i>nil</i>, or that such a modicum of it as they possess should be
+exerted within a very narrow sphere. It is the fault, no doubt, of our
+systems of female education that the mental power of the cleverest women
+really comes in England to very little. In its highest form it amounts
+to a capacity for conversation on indifferent matters, a genius for
+music or some other fine art, a turn for talking about the poets of the
+day, and perhaps for imitating their style with ease, coupled, in
+exceptional cases, with a talent for guessing double acrostics. To be
+able to do all this, and to be charming and religious too, is the whole
+duty of young women.</p>
+
+<p>It would be difficult possibly to fit out an English young lady with the
+various practical accomplishments that are of use in matrimony, and to
+make her at the same time an intellectual equal of the other sex. But it
+would surely be possible to train her to understand more of the general
+current of the world's ideas, even if she could not devote herself to
+studying them in detail. What woman has now any <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186"></a>[<a href="./images/186.png">186</a>]</span>notion of the broad
+outline of history of human thought? All philosophy is a sealed book to
+her. It is the same with theology and politics. She has not the wildest
+conception, as a rule, of the grounds on which people think who think
+differently from herself; and all through life she is content to play
+the part of a partisan or a devotee with perfect equanimity.</p>
+
+<p>While, however, feminine influence in intellectual subjects is, as it
+deserves to be, infinitesimal, in practice and in action women are proud
+of being recognized as useful and sound advisers. As outsiders and
+spectators they see a good deal of the game, have leisure to watch
+narrowly all that is going on about them, and a subtle instinct teaches
+them to tread delicately over all dangerous ground. It is curious how
+many enemies women make amongst themselves, and yet how many enemies
+they prevent men from making. They seem to have less of self-control or
+prudence as far as their own strong feelings and fortunes are concerned,
+than they have of tact and temper in managing the fortunes and
+enterprises of others.</p>
+
+<p>There can, for example, be no doubt whatever that the parson who aims at
+being a bishop before he dies ought to marry early. The great strokes of
+policy which bring him preferment or popularity are pretty sure to have
+been devised in moments of happy inspiration, or perhaps during the
+watches of the night, by a feminine brain. Good mothers make saints and
+heroes, says the proverb, and beyond a doubt wise wives make bishops.
+Their influence <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187"></a>[<a href="./images/187.png">187</a>]</span>is not the less real because, unlike that of Mrs.
+Proudie, it is exerted chiefly behind the scenes. It is possibly because
+the influence possessed by women is so intangible, depending as it does
+less on the reason than on the sentiment, affection, and convenience of
+the other sex, that women are so jealous to assert and to protect it.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188"></a>[<a href="./images/188.png">188</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>PIGEONS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Every now and then, as the fashionable season comes round, in some
+corner of its space the daily press records a wholesale slaughter of the
+pigeon species. The world is informed of a series of sweepstakes, in
+which guardsmen and peers and foreigners of distinction take part. So
+many birds are shot at, so many are killed, so many get away. The
+quality of the birds and the skill of the shooters is specified. As the
+minutest details of the sport are interesting, we are even told who
+supplies the birds, and whether the day of their massacre was bright or
+cloudy. This is quite as it should be. The British public can never hear
+too much of the doings of its gilded youth. Sweet to it is sporting
+news, but "aristocratic sporting news" is sweeter still.</p>
+
+<p>And apart from this twofold source of interest, an element of deeper
+satisfaction mingles in the complacency with which it gloats over these
+pigeon holocausts. It is something to know that, in the last resort, we
+have these high-born and fashionable marksmen to protect our hearths and
+homes from the French invader and the irrepressible Beales. The nervous
+householder sleeps in his bed with a greater sense of security after
+reading of the awful havoc <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189"></a>[<a href="./images/189.png">189</a>]</span>which Captain A. and the Earl of B. are
+making of the feathery tribe. In the accuracy of their aim he sees a
+guarantee of order, and of the maintenance of his glorious Constitution.
+Foreign menace and internal discord lose something of their terrors for
+him as often as his eyes light upon the significant little paragraph to
+which we have referred. Here is an item of intelligence for the haughty
+Prussian and the dashing Zouave to ponder. Here is something for the
+mole-like Fenian and the blatant Leaguesman to put in their pipes and
+smoke.</p>
+
+<p>The fate of the pigeons awaits all who would violate our shores, or
+light up the flame of sedition in the land. If, as some philosophers
+aver, the pigeon does not all die, but in some tranquil limbo flutters
+on in an eternity of innocent cooing, it must console the poor bird to
+reflect that, however cheap he may be held, he has not perished
+altogether in vain. To serve a useful purpose is the great economy of
+things, to point a warning, at the cost of one's heart's blood, to
+England's foes and traitors&mdash;to the plotter in Munster as well as the
+safer conspirator of the Parks&mdash;might content even a greater ambition
+than that which animates the gentle bosom of a fantail.</p>
+
+<p>But suppose some vindictive pouter to survive his less lucky comrades,
+and, escaping among the birds who are duly chronicled as "getting away,"
+to perch, full of resentment at the probable extinction of his species,
+in the fashionable quarter of London. He would there witness a grand act
+of retaliation. He would learn how Belgravia avenges Hornsey and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190"></a>[<a href="./images/190.png">190</a>]</span>Shepherd's Bush. He would see the very men from whom his relatives had
+received their quietus flying to their clubs for shelter, and calling on
+their goddesses of the <i>demi-monde</i> to cover them. He would perceive, by
+an unerring instinct, that a contest was afoot in which the conditions
+of that suburban sweepstakes at which he had involuntarily assisted were
+exactly reversed. He would see those self-same sportsmen converted into
+the target, the flutterers of the dovecot themselves in a flutter. And
+he would be more than pigeon if he could repress a thrill of savage glee
+at the spectacle of the enemies of his race realizing by experience all
+the difference between shooting and being shot at.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose, further, that curious to watch the operations of "aristocratic
+sport," the intelligent bird, following the precedent of Edgar Poe's
+Raven, should alight, unseen and uninvited, on some object of art in a
+fashionable ballroom. Here he would find himself at once in the thick of
+the brilliant competition. He would see a row of lovely archers, backed
+by a second row of older and more experienced markswomen. And in the
+human pigeons now cowering before their combined artillery he would
+recognise the heroes so lately engaged in dispatching thousands of the
+feathered branch of the family to oblivion. At first sight it might
+strike an animal of his well-known gallantry that there was nothing so
+very terrible in their impending fate. To fall slain by bright eyes, and
+with the strains of Coote and Tinney lingering on the ear, to sigh out
+one's soul over a draught of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191"></a>[<a href="./images/191.png">191</a>]</span>seltzer and champagne or the sweet poison
+of a strawberry ice, might seem to the winged spectator a blissful
+ending.</p>
+
+<p>The doorway of the perfumed saloon might seem but the portal of a
+Mahomedan paradise, in which young and beautiful houris are deporting
+themselves under the guardian eye of the older and less beautiful
+houris. To the denizen of the air all, save the want of oxygen, might
+appear divine. But when he surveyed more closely that sexual row of
+sportswomen, he would know at once that he beheld the true avengers of
+his race. In their stony glare, in the cold glitter of their diamonds,
+in the ample proportions of their well-developed shoulders, in their
+sliding scale of manners, now adjusted to a sugary smile and now to a
+stare of annihilation, he would read a deadly purpose. Nor would the
+diversities of skill which this fringe of amazons exhibited in the use
+of their weapons escape his notice. He would see some whom success had
+made affable, and others whom failure had made desperate; some who
+covered their victim with an aim of pitiless precision, and others who
+spoilt their chances by bungling audacity. Conspicuous among them he
+would observe a giddy sexagenarian, whose random attempts to share in
+the sport made her the laughing-stock of the circle.</p>
+
+<p>And as he surveyed the <i>battue</i> he would gradually discern its tactics.
+The beautiful beings in tulle he would feel, by instinct, were a lure
+and a decoy. Once within reach of their victims, these lovely
+skirmishers would be seen to inflict on them a sudden <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192"></a>[<a href="./images/192.png">192</a>]</span>wound, leaving
+them to be despatched by the heavy reserve in <i>moire</i> and lace. As he
+watched the terror which these formidable beings inspired, and the
+business-like manner in which they addressed themselves to their task,
+as he noticed the jaunty destroyers of his race succumbing one by one to
+fate, or ignominiously attempting to "get away," he would feel that the
+"irony of the situation" was complete. In a vague way he would grasp the
+fact&mdash;hitherto undreamt of in his dove's philosophy&mdash;that, if the pigeon
+is preyed upon by man, man in his turn is preyed upon by the dowager.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, this difference between the fate of the pigeon and
+his human analogue, that, whereas the former is slain outright, the
+latter is often subjected to the prolonged agony of being plucked
+feather by feather. Not that he thinks it agony; on the contrary, he
+decidedly likes it, which is a wonderful proof of his simplicity, and
+the difference in people's tastes. But in order to pluck a human pigeon
+at leisure, you must first catch him. May is a good month for this
+operation. About now he begins to resort to the Opera and the park, and
+in the purlieus of either a fine specimen may be flashed. A clever
+sportswoman will get the earliest possible information about his
+movements. Much depends on forestalling her competitors.</p>
+
+<p>A youthful pigeon, just emerging from his minority, or freshly alighted
+from the grand tour, is easily captured. There are two principal
+contrivances for catching human pigeons. The first is the matrimonial
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193"></a>[<a href="./images/193.png">193</a>]</span>snare. This is worked by the dowager, in concert with her daughter,
+somewhat on the following plan. The daughter throws herself, as if by
+chance, in the pigeon's way. The brilliancy of her charms naturally
+attracts him. Small-talk ensues, in which an extraordinary similarity
+between her tastes and his is casually revealed. The simple pigeon,
+suspecting nothing, is delighted to find so congenial a soul. Is he
+musical? she adores the divine art. A gourmand? she owns to the
+possession of a cookery-book. Ritualistic? it was but the other day that
+she was at St. Alban's. Turfy? He must throw his eyes over her book for
+the Derby. Even if his pet pastime, like the Emperor Domitian's, were
+killing flies, she would profess her readiness to join him in it. Or she
+tries another dodge, and, putting on the airs of a pretty monitress,
+asks him with tender interest to confide in her.</p>
+
+<p>The great point is never to lose sight of him; to follow him to balls,
+concerts, or races, to cleave to him like his shadow. Then, when he is
+fairly caught in the toils of her encircling sympathy, the elder and
+more experienced ally appears on the scene. Her task is to cut off his
+retreat. Upon her firmness and accuracy in calculating the resisting
+power of her pigeon, success depends. Seizing an opportunity when he is
+least prepared, she sternly informs him that the time for dalliance is
+over, that he has said and done things of a very marked kind, and that
+there is only one course open to him as a pigeon of honor. And under
+this sort of compulsion the simple <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194"></a>[<a href="./images/194.png">194</a>]</span>creature, with his rent-roll,
+Consols, family diamonds, and all, hops with a fairly good grace into
+the matrimonial toils.</p>
+
+<p>The second contrivance to which he is apt to fall a victim is the
+infatuation trap. This is a much more elaborate machine, and is worked
+by one of those semi-attached couples who might sit to a new Hogarth for
+a new edition of <i>Marriage &aacute; la Mode</i>. The husband's part is very
+simple. It is to be as little in the way as possible, and to afford his
+sprightlier half every facility for pursuing her little game. The chief
+business devolves on the lady. It is her task to make the pigeon fall
+madly in love with her, and to keep him so, without overstepping the
+bounds of conventional propriety. Happily this can be managed nowadays
+without either elopement or scandal. Among the improvements of this
+mechanical age, it has been found possible to enlarge the limits of
+wedlock so as to include a third person.</p>
+
+<p>A life-long <i>t&ecirc;te-&aacute;-t&ecirc;te</i>, which was the old conception of marriage, is
+quite obsolete. It has given way to the triangular theory, by which a
+new element, in the shape of a parasitical adorer, has been introduced
+into the holy state. Matrimony, as reconstituted by fashionable
+scholiasts, comprises husband, wife, and, to relieve the tedium of the
+situation, a good-looking appendage of the male sex, who is an agreeable
+companion of the one and the devoted slave of the other. Each
+contributes to the harmony of the arrangement&mdash;the husband, a
+background; the wife, the charms of her presence; the adorer, cash.
+Whatever other <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195"></a>[<a href="./images/195.png">195</a>]</span>experience it brings, marriage generally sharpens the
+appreciation of the value of money; sentiment is sweet, but it is an
+article of confectionery, for which its fair dispensers in the married
+ranks exact an equivalent.</p>
+
+<p>In trapping her victim, therefore, a sharp young matron is careful to
+let her choice fall on a plump specimen of the pigeon species&mdash;a pigeon
+with a long purse and little brains. Once reduced to a state of
+infatuation, almost anything may be done with him. The luxury of
+plucking him will employ her delicate fingers for a long time to come.
+He may be sponged upon to any extent. The one thing he can do really
+well is to pay. His yacht, his drag, his brougham, his riding-horses,
+his shooting-box, all are at her disposal. At his expense she dines at
+Greenwich; at his expense she views the Derby; at his expense she enjoys
+an opera-box. And in return for all this she has only to smile and
+murmur "<i>so</i> nice," for the soft simpleton to fancy himself amply
+repaid. Then she exacts a great many costly presents, to say nothing of
+gloves, trinkets, and <i>bouquets</i>. It is curious to note how the code of
+propriety has altered in this particular.</p>
+
+<p>In old-fashioned novels the stereotyped dodge for compromising a lady's
+reputation is to force a present or a loan of money on her. Nowadays
+Lovelace's anxiety is just the other way&mdash;to keep the acquisitive
+propensity of his liege lady within tolerable bounds. It would be a
+great mistake to suppose that a woman can play this game without special
+gifts and aptitudes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196"></a>[<a href="./images/196.png">196</a>]</span>for it. It requires peculiar talents, and peculiar
+antecedents. First and foremost, she must have married a man whom she
+both dislikes and despises. And, further, she must be proof against the
+weakness which some of her sex exhibit, of growing fond of husbands who,
+without being Admirable Crichtons, treat them kindly and with
+forbearance. Next, she must have thrown overboard all the twaddle about
+domestic duties and responsibilities. If her child sickens of the
+measles just as she is starting for her bivouac in Norway, or a course
+of dinners in the Palais Royal, her duty is to call in the doctor and
+go. Weeks afterwards you will find the little darling picking up flesh,
+in mamma's absence, at some obscure watering-place. Then her temperament
+must be cool, calculating, and passionless in no ordinary degree, and
+this character is written in the hard lines of her mouth and the cold
+light of her fine eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, she must have, not a superstitious, but an intelligent regard
+for the world's opinion, or rather for the opinion of the influential
+part of it. No one has a nicer perception of the difference in the
+relative importance of stupid country gossip and ostracism from certain
+great houses in London. No one takes more pains to study appearances so
+long as they don't clash with her amusements. Indeed, you will generally
+find that her dear friend is a young lady of great simplicity and
+irreproachable principles, whom she admits just enough, but not too far,
+into her confidence, and who finds it worth while to enact the part, now
+of a blind, and now of a foil.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197"></a>[<a href="./images/197.png">197</a>]</span>
+If any one asserts that this treatment of the human pigeon is cruel, we
+can only reply, with a correspondent of the <i>Times</i> who writes to rebuke
+the humanitarians who would rob a poor boa of his squealing rabbit&mdash;away
+with such cant! Is a married woman to be stinted of her "small
+pleasures" because prudes affect to think the means by which they are
+obtained unfeminine? As well might they think it unfeline in pussy to
+play with her mouse.</p>
+
+<p>The walking pigeon is as much intended for the prey of a stronger
+species as the pigeon that flies. The plucking which he receives at the
+hands of his fair manipulator is nothing to what he would get at the
+hands of his own sex, in the army, on the turf, or in the city. If the
+pigeon has reason to think himself lucky in faring no worse, the
+non-pigeon section of society has no less reason to be grateful for a
+new illustration of female character. Not that the mercenary development
+in some of our young matrons is altogether new. It is only an old
+domestic virtue, carried to an extreme&mdash;thrift, running into an engaging
+rapacity.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198"></a>[<a href="./images/198.png">198</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>AMBITIOUS WIVES.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The recent death of Mrs. Proudie, who was so well known and so little
+loved by the readers of Mr. Trollope's novels, is one of those occasions
+which ought not to be allowed to pass away without being improved. To
+many men it will suggest many things. She was a type. As a type ought to
+be, she was perfect and full-blown. But her characteristics enter into
+other women in varying degrees, and with all sorts of minor colors. The
+Proudie element in wives and women is one of those unrecognised yet
+potent conditions of life which master us all, and yet are admitted and
+taken into calculation and account by none. It is in the nature of
+things that such an element should exist, and should be powerful in this
+peculiar and oblique way. We deny women the direct exercise of their
+capacities, and the immediate gratification of an overt ambition. The
+natural result is that they run to artifice, and that a good-natured
+husband is made the conductor between an ambitious wife and the outer
+world where the prizes of ambition are scrambled for. He is the wretched
+buffer through which the impetuous forces of his wife impinge upon his
+neighbors. That is to say, he leads an uneasy life between two ever
+colliding bodies, being equally misunderstood and equally reviled by
+either.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199"></a>[<a href="./images/199.png">199</a>]</span>
+This is the evil result of a state of things in which natural
+distinctions and conventional distinctions are a very long way from
+coinciding. The theory is that women are peaceful domestic beings, with
+no object beyond household cares, no wish nor will outside the objects
+of the man and his children, no active opinion or concern in the larger
+affairs of the State. Every man, on the other hand, is supposed to have
+views and principles about public topics, and to be anxious to make more
+or less of a figure in the enforcement of his views, to exercise in some
+shape an influence among his fellows, and to win renown of one sort or
+another. Of course if this division of the male and female natures
+covered the whole ground, society would be in a very well-balanced
+state, and things would go on very smoothly in consequence of the
+perfect equilibrium established by the exceeding contentedness of women
+and the constant activity and ambition of men.</p>
+
+<p>But a very small observation of life is quite enough to disclose how ill
+the facts correspond with the accepted hypothesis about them. We are
+constantly being told of some aspiring man that he is, in truth, no more
+than the representative of an aspiring wife. He would fain live his life
+in dignified or undignified serenity, and cares not a jot for a seat in
+the House of Commons, or for being made a bishop, or for any of those
+other objects which allure men out of a tranquil and independent
+existence. But he has a wife who does care for these things. She cannot
+be a member of Parliament or a bishop in her own person, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200"></a>[<a href="./images/200.png">200</a>]</span>but it is
+something to be the wife of somebody who can be these things.</p>
+
+<p>A part of the glory of the man is reflected upon the head of the woman.
+She receives her reward in a second-hand way, but still it is glory of
+its own sort. She becomes a leading lady in a provincial town, and
+during the season in town she is asked out to houses which she is very
+eager to get into, and of which she can talk with easily assumed
+familiarity when she returns to the provinces again. She is presented at
+Court too, and this makes her descend to the provincial plain with an
+aroma of Celestial dignity like that of Venus when she descended from
+Olympus. A bishop's wife is still more amply rewarded. Without being so
+imperious as the late Mrs. Proudie was, she has still a thousand of
+those opportunities for displaying power which are so dear to people who
+are fictitiously supposed to be too weak to care for power. Minor
+canons, incumbents, curates, and all their wives, pay her profound
+deference; or, if they do not, she can "put the screw on" in a gushing
+manner which is exceedingly effective.</p>
+
+<p>There are women, it is true, with souls above these light social
+matters. They do not particularly value the privilege of figuring as
+lady-patroness of a ball or bazaar, or the delights of trampling on a
+curate, or of being distantly adored by the wife of a minor canon. But
+they really have an interest in politics, or in some one or two special
+departments of that comprehensive subject. They would like to pass an
+Act of Parliament making it a capital offence for any <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201"></a>[<a href="./images/201.png">201</a>]</span>guardian of the
+poor or relieving-officer to refuse to give the paupers as much as they
+should choose to ask for. Drainage is the strong point of some women.
+Sewage with them is the key to civilization.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps most political women are actively interested in public affairs
+simply because they perceive that this is the most openly recognised
+sphere of influence and power; and what they yearn after is to be
+influential, and to stand on something higher than the ordinary level in
+the world, for no other reason than that it is higher than the ordinary
+level. Nobody has any right to find fault with this temper, provided the
+ladies who are possessed by it do not mistake mere domineering for the
+extraordinary elevation after which they aspire. It is through this
+temper, whether in one sex or the other, that the world is made better.
+If a certain number of men and women were not ambitious, what would
+become of the rest of us who possess our souls in patience and
+moderation?</p>
+
+<p>The only question is whether what we may call vicarious ambition, or
+aspirations by proxy, are particularly desirable forms of a confessedly
+useful and desirable sentiment. For the peace of mind of the man who is
+not ambitious, but is only pretending to be so, we may be pretty sure
+that the domestic stimulus has some drawbacks. We do not mean drawbacks
+after the manner of Mrs. Caudle. These show a coarse and vulgar
+conception of the goads which a man may have applied to him in his inner
+circle. There are moral and unheard reproofs. There is a consciousness
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202"></a>[<a href="./images/202.png">202</a>]</span>in the mind of a man that his wife thinks him (with all possible
+affection and tenderness) rather a poor creature for not taking his
+position in the world. And if he happens to be a man of anything like
+fine sensibility, this will make him exceedingly uneasy.</p>
+
+<p>The uneasiness may then become sufficiently decided to make him willing
+to undergo any amount of labor and outlay, rather than endure the
+presence of this &aelig;thereal skeleton in the family closet. He is quite
+right. He could barely preserve his self-respect otherwise. But he is
+mistaken if he fancies that a single step or a single series of steps
+will demolish the skeleton entirely. One compliance with the ambition of
+his wife will speedily beget the necessity for another. It is notorious
+that a thoroughly aspiring man is never content without the prospect of
+scaling new heights. No more is an aspiring woman. Whether you are
+directly ambitious, as a man is, and for yourself, or indirectly and for
+somebody else, as a woman is, in either case the law is the same. New
+summits ever glitter in the distance. You have got your husband into the
+House of Commons. That glory suffices for a month.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of two months it seems a very dim glory indeed, and having
+long been at an end, it by this time sinks into the second place of a
+means. The sacrificial calf must next be made to speak. He must acquire
+a reputation. Here in a good many cases, we suspect, the process finally
+stops. A man may be got into the House, but the coveted exaltation of
+that atmosphere does not convert a quiet, peaceable, dull <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203"></a>[<a href="./images/203.png">203</a>]</span>man into an
+orator. It does not give him ideas and the faculty of articulate speech.
+At this point, if he be wise, he draws the line. He endures the skeleton
+as best he may, or else his wife, quenching her ambition, resigns
+herself to incurable destiny, and learns to be content with the limits
+set by the fates to her lord's capacities. There are still certain
+fields open to her own powers, irrespective of what he is able to do.</p>
+
+<p>For example, she may open a <i>salon</i>, and there may exert unspeakable
+influence over all kinds of important people. This is not at present
+particularly congenial to English ground. As yet, the most vigorous
+intellectual people seem to have felt an active social life as something
+beneath them, and the highly social people have not been conspicuous for
+the activity of their intellectual life. The people who go so greatly to
+parties do not care for what they sum up, with an admirably
+comprehensive vagueness, as "intellect;" while, on the other hand,
+scholars and thinkers are wont to look on time given to society as
+something very like time absolutely wasted. In such a state of feeling,
+it is difficult for a clever woman to exercise much power.</p>
+
+<p>But, as other things improve, this unsocial feeling will dissolve.
+Clever men will see that a couple of hours spent with other clever men
+are not wasted just because a lady is of the party. Nobody would
+seriously maintain that this is so even now, but people are very often
+strongly under the influence of vague notions which they would never
+dream of seriously <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204"></a>[<a href="./images/204.png">204</a>]</span>maintaining. When women get their rights, the
+<i>salon</i> will become an institution. It will create a very fine field for
+the cultivation of their talents. And in proportion as it allows a woman
+to make a career for herself, it will bring relief to many excellent
+husbands who will then no longer have to make careers for them at the
+expense of overstraining their own too slender powers.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible, however, that even then the husband of an ambitious wife
+may not be fully contented. For people with any degree of weakness or
+incapacity in them are always more prone than their neighbors to
+littlenesses and meannesses, and a man who is not able to win much
+renown on his own account may possibly not be too well pleased to see
+his Wife surrounded by his intellectual betters. Indeed, he may even, if
+he is of a very mean nature indeed, resent the spectacle of her own
+predominance. It is some comfort to think that in such case the man's
+own temper will be his severest punishment.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, however, it is pleasant to think that with ambition in women,
+which is not their peculiarity, is yoked tact, which is their
+peculiarity emphatically. Hence, therefore, wives who are ambitious for
+their lords have often the discretion to conceal their mood. They may
+rule with a hand of iron, but the hand is sagely concealed in a glove of
+velvet. A man may be the creature of his wife's lofty projects, and yet
+dream all the time that he is altogether chalking out his own course.</p>
+
+<p>George II. used to be humored in this way by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205"></a>[<a href="./images/205.png">205</a>]</span>Queen Caroline. Bishop
+Proudie, on the other hand, was ruled by his wife, and knew that he was
+a mere weapon in her hands; and, what was even worse than all, knew that
+the rest of mankind knew this. This must be uncommonly unpleasant, we
+should suppose. The middle position of the husband who only now and then
+suspects in a dreamy way that he is being prompted and urged on and
+directed by an ambitious wife, and has sense enough not to inflame
+himself with chimerical notions about the superiority and grandeur of
+the male sex&mdash;this perhaps is not so bad. If the tide of ambition runs
+rather sluggish in yourself, it is a plain advantage to have somebody at
+your side with enthusiasm enough to atone for the deficiency.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to tell how much good the world gets, which otherwise
+it would miss, simply out of the fact that women are discontented with
+their position. Now and then, it is understood, the husband who is thus
+made a mere conductor for the mental electricity of a wife who is too
+clever for him may feel a little bored, and almost wish that he had
+married a girl instead. But enthusiasm spreads, and in a general way the
+fervor of the wife who aspires to distinction proves catching to the
+husband. Some ladies are found to prefer this position to any other.
+They are full of power, and have abundance of room for energy, and yet
+they have no responsibility. They get their ample share of the spoil,
+and yet they do not bear the public heat and burden of the day. It is
+only the more martial souls among them for whom this is not enough.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206"></a>[<a href="./images/206.png">206</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>PLATONIC WOMAN.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the wearier hours of life, when the season is over, and the boredom
+of country visits is beginning to tell on the hardy constitutions that
+have weathered out crush and ball-room, there is usually a moment when
+the heroine of twenty summers bemoans the hardships of her lot. Her
+brother snuffed her out yesterday when she tried politics, and the
+clerical uncle who comes in with the vacation extinguished a well-meant
+attempt at theology by a vague but severe reference to the Fathers. If
+the afternoon is particularly rainy, and Mudie's box is exhausted, the
+sufferer possibly goes further, and rises into eloquent revolt against
+the decorums of life.</p>
+
+<p>There is indeed one career left to woman, but a general looseness of
+grammar, and a conscious insecurity in the matter of spelling, stand in
+the way of literary expression of the burning thoughts within her. All
+she can do is to moan over her lot and to take refuge in the works of
+Miss Hominy. There she learns the great theory of the equality of the
+sexes, the advancement of woman and the tyranny of man. If her head
+doesn't ache, and holds out for a few pages more, she is comforted to
+find that her aspirations have a philosophic character. She is able <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207"></a>[<a href="./images/207.png">207</a>]</span>to
+tell the heavy Guardsman who takes her down to dinner and parries her
+observations with a joke that they have the sanction of the deepest of
+Athenian thinkers.</p>
+
+<p>It is, we suppose, necessary that woman should have her philosopher, but
+it must be owned that she has made an odd choice in Plato. No one would
+be more astonished than the severe dialectician of the Academy at the
+feminine conception of a sage of dreamy and poetic temperament, who
+spends half his time in asserting woman's rights, and half in inventing
+a peculiar species of flirtation. Platonic attachments, whatever their
+real origin may be, will scarcely be traced in the pages of Plato; and
+the rights of woman, as they are advocated in the Republic, are sadly
+deficient in the essential points of free love and elective affinity.</p>
+
+<p>The appearance of a real Platonic woman in the midst of a caucus of such
+female agitators as those who were lately engaged in stumping with
+singular ill success the American States of the West would, we imagine,
+give a somewhat novel turn to the discussion, and strip of a good deal
+of adoring admiration the philosopher in whom strong-minded woman has of
+late found a patron and friend. Plato is a little too logical and too
+fond of stating plain facts in plain words to suit the Miss Hominys who
+would put the legs of every pianoforte in petticoats, and if the
+Platonic woman were to prove as outspoken as her inventor, the
+conference would, we fear, come abruptly to an end. But if once the
+difficulty of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208"></a>[<a href="./images/208.png">208</a>]</span>decorum could be got over, some instruction and no little
+amusement might be derived from the inquiry which the discussion would
+open, as to how far the modern attitude of woman fulfils the dreams of
+her favorite philosopher.</p>
+
+<p>The institution of Ladies' Colleges is a sufficient proof that woman has
+arrived at Plato's conception of an identity of education for the two
+sexes. Professors, lecturers, class-rooms, note-books, the whole
+machinery of University teaching, is at her disposal. Logic and the
+long-envied classics are in the curriculum. Governesses are abolished,
+and the fair girl-graduates may listen to the sterner teachings of
+academical tutors. It is amusing to see how utterly discomfited the new
+Professor generally is when he comes in sight of his class. He feels
+that he must be interesting, but he is haunted above all with the sense
+that he must be proper. He remembers that when, in reply to the
+lady-principal's inquiry how he liked his class, he answered, with the
+strictest intellectual reference, that they were "charming," the stern
+matron suggested that another adjective would perhaps be more
+appropriate. He felt his whole moral sense as a teacher ebbing away.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of men he would insist on a thorough treatment of his
+subject, and would avoid sentiment and personal details as insults to
+their intelligence; but what is he to do with rows of pretty faces that
+grow black as he touches upon the dialect of Socrates, but kindle into
+life and animation when he depicts the sage's snub nose? Anecdotes,
+pretty stories, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209"></a>[<a href="./images/209.png">209</a>]</span>snatches of poetical quotation, slip in more and more
+as the students perceive and exercise their power. Men, too, are either
+intelligent or unintelligent, but the unhappy Professor at a Ladies'
+College soon perceives that he has to deal with a class of minds which
+are both at once. A luckless gentleman, after lecturing for forty
+minutes, found that the lecture had been most carefully listened to and
+reproduced in the note-books, but with the trifling substitution in
+every instance of the word "Ph&oelig;nician" for "Venetian." Above all, he
+is puzzled with the profuse employment of these note-books.</p>
+
+<p>To the Platonic girl her note-book takes the place of the old-fashioned
+diary. It is scribbled down roughly at the lecture and copied out fairly
+at night. It used to be a frightful thought that every evening, before
+retiring to rest, the girl with whom one had been chatting intended
+seriously to probe the state of her heart and set down her affections in
+black and white; but it is hardly less formidable to imagine her
+refusing to lay her head on her pillow before she has finished her fair
+copy of the battle of Salamis. The universality of female studies, too,
+astounds the teacher who is fresh from the world of man; he stands
+aghast before a girl who is learning four languages at once, besides
+attending courses on logic, music, and the use of the globes. This
+omnivorous appetite for knowledge he finds to co-exist with a great
+weakness in the minor matters of spelling, and a profound indifference
+to the simplest rules of grammar. We do not wonder then at Professors
+being a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210"></a>[<a href="./images/210.png">210</a>]</span>little shy of Ladies' Colleges; nor is it less easy to see why
+the Platonic theory of education has taken so little with the girls
+themselves. After all, the grievance of which they complain has its
+advantages.</p>
+
+<p>The worst of bores is restrained by courtesy from boring you if you give
+him no cue for further conversation, and the plea of utter ignorance
+which an English girl can commonly advance on any subject is at any rate
+a defence against the worst pests of society. On the other hand, the
+ingenuous confession that she really knows nothing about it can be
+turned by a smile into a prelude to the most engaging conversation, and
+into an implied flattery of the neatest kind to the favored being whose
+superiority is acknowledged. Ignorance, in fact, of this winsome order
+is one of the stock weapons of the feminine armory.</p>
+
+<p>The man who looks philosophically back after marriage to discover why on
+earth he is married at all will generally find that the mischief began
+in the <i>na&iuml;ve</i> confession on the part of his future wife of a total
+ignorance which asked humbly for enlightenment. One of the grandest
+<i>coups</i> we ever knew made in this way was effected by a desire on the
+part of a faded beauty to know the pedigree of a horse. The pride of her
+next neighbor at finding himself the possessor of knowledge on any
+subject on earth took the form of the most practical gratitude a man can
+show. But it is not before marriage only that woman finds her ignorance
+act as a charm. Husbands find pleasure in talking politics to their
+wives simply because, as they stand on the hearthrug, they are
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211"></a>[<a href="./images/211.png">211</a>]</span>displaying their own mental superiority. An Englishman likes to be
+master of his own house, but he dearly loves to be schoolmaster.</p>
+
+<p>A Platonic woman as well-informed as her husband would deprive him of
+this daily source of domestic enjoyment; his lecture would be reduced to
+discussion, and to discussion in which he might be defeated. To rob him
+of his oracular infallibility might greatly improve the husband, but it
+would revolutionize the character of the home.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to see at first sight any analogy between the
+Puritanical form of flirtation which calls itself a Platonic attachment,
+and the provisions by which Plato excluded all peculiar love or
+matrimonial choice from his commonwealth. The likeness is really to be
+found in the resolve on which both are based to obtain all the
+advantages of social intercourse between the sexes without the
+interference of passion. In a well-regulated State, no doubt, passion is
+a bore, and this is just the aspect which it takes to a highly regulated
+woman. An outburst of affection on the part of her numerous admirers
+would break up a very pleasant circle, and put an end to some charming
+conversations. On the other hand, the quiet sense of some special
+relationship, the faint odor of a passion carefully sealed up, gives a
+piquancy and flavor to social friendship which mere association wants.
+Very frequently such a relation forms an admirable retreat from stormier
+experiences in the past, and the tender grace of a day that is dead
+hangs pleasantly enough over the days that remain.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212"></a>[<a href="./images/212.png">212</a>]</span>
+But the Platonic woman proper, in this sense, is the spinster of
+five-and-thirty. She is clever enough to know that the day for inspiring
+grand passions is gone by, but that there is still nothing ridiculous in
+mingling a little sentiment with her friendly relations. She moves in
+maiden meditation fancy free, but the vestal flame of her life is none
+the more sullied for a slight tinge of earthly color. It is a connection
+that is at once interesting, undefined, and perfectly safe. It throws a
+little poetry over life to know that one being is cherishing a perfectly
+moral and carefully toned-down attachment for another, which will last
+for years, but never exceed the bounds of a smile and a squeeze of the
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>Animals in the lowest scale of life are notoriously the hardest to kill,
+and it is just this low vitality, as it were, of Platonic attachment
+that makes it so perfectly indestructible. Its real use is in keeping up
+a sort of minute irrigation of a good deal of human ground which would
+be barren without it. These little tricklings of affection, so small as
+not to disturb one's sleep or to drive one to compose a single sonnet,
+keep up a certain consciousness of attraction, and beget a corresponding
+return of kindliness and good temper towards the world around. A woman
+who has once given up the hope of being loved is a nuisance to
+everybody. But the Platonic woman need never give up her hope of being
+loved; she has reduced affection to a minimum, but from its very
+minuteness there is little or no motive to snap the bond, and with time
+habit makes it indestructible.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213"></a>[<a href="./images/213.png">213</a>]</span>
+One Christian body, we believe&mdash;the Moravians&mdash;still carries out the
+principle of Plato's ideal state in giving woman no choice in the
+selection of a spouse. The elders arrange their matches as the wise men
+of the Republic were wont to do. A friend of ours once met six young
+women going out to some Northern settlement of the Moravians with a view
+to marriage. "What is your husband's name?" he asked one. "I don't know;
+I shall find out when I see him," she answered. But we have heard of
+only one State which realizes Plato's theory as to the equal
+participation of woman in man's responsibilities as well as in his
+privileges, and that is the kingdom of Dahomey. If women were to learn
+and govern like men, Plato argued, women must fight like men, and the
+Amazons of Dahomey fight like very terrible men indeed.</p>
+
+<p>But we have as yet heard of no military grievance on the part of injured
+woman. She has not yet discovered the hardship of being deprived of a
+commission, or denied the Victoria Cross. No Miss Faithful has
+challenged woman's right to glory by the creation of a corps of
+riflewomen. Even Dr. Mary Walker, though she could boast of having gone
+through the American war, went through it with a scalpel, and not with a
+sword. We are far from attributing this peaceful attitude of modern
+woman, inferior though it be to the Platonic ideal, to any undue
+physical sensitiveness to danger, or to inability for deeds of daring;
+we attribute it simply to a sense that there is a warfare which she is
+discharging already, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214"></a>[<a href="./images/214.png">214</a>]</span>with the carrying on of which any more public
+exertions would interfere.</p>
+
+<p>Woman alone keeps up the private family warfare which in the earlier
+stages of society required all the energies of man. It is a field from
+which man has completely retired, and which would be left wholly vacant
+were it not occupied by woman. The stir, the jostling, the squabbling of
+social life, are all her own. We owe it to her that the family existence
+of England does not rot in mere inaction and peace. The guerilla warfare
+of house with house, the fierce rivalry of social circle with social
+circle, the struggle for precedence, the jealousies and envyings and
+rancors of every day&mdash;these are things which no man will take a proper
+interest in, and which it is lucky that woman can undertake for him. The
+Platonic woman of to-day may not march to the field or storm the breach,
+but she is unequalled in outman&oelig;uvring a rival, in forcing an
+entrance into society, in massacring an enemy's reputation, in carrying
+off matrimonial spoil. In war, then, as in education and the affections,
+modern woman has developed the spirit without copying the form of the
+Platonic ideal. After all superficial contrasts have been exhausted, she
+may still claim the patronage of the philosopher of Academe.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215"></a>[<a href="./images/215.png">215</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>MAN AND HIS MASTER.</h2>
+
+
+<p>There are, it must be owned, few things on earth of less interest at
+first sight than a girl in her teens. She is a mere bundle of pale
+colorless virtues, a little shy, slightly studious, passively obedient,
+tamely religious. Her tastes are "simple"&mdash;she has no particular
+preference, that is, for anything; her aims incline mildly towards a
+future of balls to come; her rule of life is an hourly reference to
+"mamma." She is without even the charm of variety; she has been
+hot-pressed in the most approved finishing establishments, and is turned
+out the exact double of her sister or her cousin or her friend, with the
+same stereotyped manner, the same smattering of accomplishments, the
+same contribution to society of her little sum of superficial
+information. We wonder how it is that any one can take an interest in a
+creature of this sort, just as we wonder how any one can take an
+interest in the <i>Court Circular</i>. And yet there are few sentiments more
+pardonable, as there are none more national, than our interest in that
+marvellous document.</p>
+
+<p>A people which chooses to be governed by kings and queens has a right to
+realize the fact that kings <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216"></a>[<a href="./images/216.png">216</a>]</span>and queens are human beings, that they
+shoot, drive, take the air like the subjects whom they govern. And if in
+some coming day we are to toss up our hats and shout ourselves hoarse
+for a sovereign who is still in his cradle, it is wise as well as
+natural that we should cultivate an interest in his babyhood, that we
+should hang on the vicissitudes of his teeth and his measles, that we
+should be curious as to the title of his spelling-book, and the exact
+score of his last game at cricket.</p>
+
+<p>It is precisely the same interest which attaches us to the loosely-tied
+bundle of virtues and accomplishments which we call a girl. We recognise
+in her our future ruler. The shy, modest creature who has no thought but
+a dance, and no will but mamma's, will in a few years be our master,
+changing our habits, moulding our tastes, bending our characters to her
+own. In the midst of our own drawing-room, in our pet easy-chair, we
+shall see that retiring figure quietly established, with downcast eyes,
+and hands busy with their crochet-needles, what Knox called, in days
+before a higher knowledge had dawned, "the Monstrous Regimen of Women."</p>
+
+<p>We are far from sharing the sentiments of the Scotch Reformer, and if we
+attempt here to seize a few of the characteristics of the rule against
+which he revolted, we hope to avoid his bitterness as carefully as his
+prolixity. What was a new thing in his day has become old in ours, and
+man learns perhaps somewhat too easily to acquiesce in "established
+facts." It is without a dream of revolt, and simply <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217"></a>[<a href="./images/217.png">217</a>]</span>in a philosophical
+spirit, that we approach the subject. Indeed, it is a feeling of
+admiration rather than of rebellion which seizes us when we begin to
+reflect on the character of woman's sway, and on the simplicity of the
+means by which she creates and establishes it. A little love, a little
+listening, a little patience, a little persistence, and the game is won.</p>
+
+<p>How charmingly natural and unobjectionable, for instance, is the very
+first move in it&mdash;what we may venture to call, since we have to create
+the very terminology of our subject, the Isolation of Man. When Brown
+meets us in the street and hopes that his approaching marriage will make
+no difference in our friendship, and that we shall see as much of one
+another as before, we know that the phrases simply mean that our
+intimacy is at an end. There will be no more pleasant lounges in the
+morning, no more strolls in the park, no more evenings at the club.
+Woman has succeeded in so completely establishing this cessation of
+former friendships as a condition of the new married life that hardly
+any one dreams of thinking what an enormous sacrifice it is. There are
+very few men, after all, who are not dependent on their little group of
+intimates for the general drift of their opinions, the general temper of
+their mind and character of their lives. Their mutual advice, support,
+praise or dispraise, enthusiasm, abhorrence, likings, dislikings,
+constitute the atmosphere in which one lives.</p>
+
+<p>A good deal of real modesty lingers about an unmarried man; he feels far
+more confident in his own <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218"></a>[<a href="./images/218.png">218</a>]</span>opinion if he knows it is Smith's opinion
+too, and his conception of life acquires all its definiteness from its
+being shared with half a dozen fairly reasonable fellows. It is no
+slight triumph that woman should not only have succeeded in enforcing
+the dissolution of this social tie as the first condition of married
+life, but that she has invested that dissolution with the air of an
+axiom which nobody dreams of disputing. The triumph is, as we said, won
+by the simplest agency&mdash;by nothing, in short, but a dexterous double
+appeal to human conceit. She is so weak, so frail, so helpless, so
+strange to this new world into which she has plunged from the realms of
+innocent girlhood, so utterly dependent on her husband, that a man sees
+at once that he has not a moment left for any one else.</p>
+
+<p>There is pleasure in the thought of all that delicate weakness appealing
+to our strength, of that innocent ignorance looking up to us for
+guidance through the wilderness of the world. Of course it will soon be
+over, and when the dear dependent has learnt to walk alone a little we
+can go back to the old faces and take our segar as before. But somehow
+the return never comes, or, if it does come, the old faces have grown
+far less enchanting to us. The truth is, we have tasted the second
+pleasure of married life&mdash;the pleasure of being an authority. All that
+shy appeal to us, all that confession of ignorance, has taught us what
+wonderfully wise fellows we are. We are far less inclined to wait for
+Smith's approval, or to take our tone from the group at the club-window.
+It is, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219"></a>[<a href="./images/219.png">219</a>]</span>to say the least, far pleasanter to be an authority at home.
+Gradually we find ourselves becoming oracular, having opinions on every
+subject that a leading article can give us one upon, correcting the
+Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Malt-tax and censuring Lord Stanley's
+policy towards the King of Ashantee. Life takes a new interest when we
+can put it so volubly into words. At the same time we feel that the
+interest is hardly shared by the world.</p>
+
+<p>Our old associates apparently fail to appreciate the change in us, or to
+listen to our disquisitions any more than they did of old; it is a
+comfort to feel that we have a home to retreat to, and that there is one
+there who will. To the subtle flattery, in short, of weakness and of
+ignorance, woman has now added the flattery of listening. To say little,
+to contribute hardly more than a cue now and then, but to be attentive,
+to be interested, to brighten at the proper moment, to laugh at the
+proper joke, to suggest the exact amount of difficulties which you
+require to make your oratorical triumph complete, and to join with an
+unreserved assent in its conclusion, that is the simple secret of the
+power of ninety-nine wives out of a hundred. It is a power which is far
+from being confined to the home. The most brilliant salons have always
+been created by dexterous listeners.</p>
+
+<p>A pleasant house is not a house where one is especially talked to, but
+where one discovers that one talks more easily than elsewhere. The tact
+is certainly invaluable which enables a woman to know <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220"></a>[<a href="./images/220.png">220</a>]</span>the strong points
+of her guests, to lead up to their subjects, to supply points for
+conversation, and then to leave it quietly alone. But it is only a
+display on the grand scale of that particular faculty of silence which
+wins its quiet triumphs on every hearth-rug.</p>
+
+<p>The faculty, however, has other triumphs to win besides those in which
+it figures as a delicate administration of flattery to the vanity of
+men. It is the force which woman holds in reserve for the hour of
+revolt. For it must be owned that, pleasant as the tyranny is, men
+sometimes wake up to the fact that it is a tyranny, that in the most
+seductive way in the world they are being wheedled out of associations
+that are really dear to them, that their life is being cramped and
+confined, that their aims are being lowered. Then the newly-found
+eloquence exhausts itself in a declaration of revolt.</p>
+
+<p>Things cannot go on in this way, life cannot be ruined for caprices. It
+is needless, perhaps, to repeat the rhetoric of rebellion, and all the
+more needless because it shares the fate of all rhetoric in producing
+not the slightest impression on the mind to which it is addressed. The
+wife simply listens as before, though the listening is now far from
+encouraging to eloquence. She is perfectly patient, patient in her
+refusal to continue an irritating discussion, patient in bearing your
+little spurts of vexation; she listens quietly to-day, with the air of
+one who is perfectly prepared to listen quietly to-morrow. But even
+rhetoric has its limits, and now that the cues have <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221"></a>[<a href="./images/221.png">221</a>]</span>ceased, a husband
+finds it a little difficult to keep up a discussion where he has to
+supply both arguments and replies.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, the tact which managed in former days to place him in a highly
+pleasant position by the confession of weakness, now, by the very same
+silent avowal, places him in a decidedly unpleasant one. If a woman's
+air simply says at the end of it all, "I can't answer you, but I know I
+am right," a man has a lurking sense that his copious rhetoric has had a
+smack of the cowardly as well as of the tyrannical about it. And so,
+after a vigorous denunciation of some particular thing which his wife
+has done, a husband commonly finds himself no further than before; and
+the very instant that, from sheer weariness, he ceases, the wife usually
+steals out and does it again.</p>
+
+<p>There is something feline about this combination of perfect patience
+with quiet persistence&mdash;a combination which the Jesuits on a larger
+scale have turned into the characteristic of their order. It is
+especially remarkable when it breaks the bonds of silence, and takes the
+form of what in vulgar language is called "nagging." No form of torture
+which has as yet been invented, save, perhaps, the slow dropping of
+water on some highly sensitive part of the frame, can afford a parallel
+to this ingenious application of the principle of persistence.</p>
+
+<p>The absolute certainty that, when snub or scolding or refusal have died
+into silence, the word will be said again; the certainty that it will be
+said year after <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222"></a>[<a href="./images/222.png">222</a>]</span>year, month after month, week after week; the
+irritation of expecting it, the irritation of hearing it, the irritation
+of expecting it again, tell on the firmest will in the world. In the
+long run the wife wins. The son goes to Harrow, though reason has proved
+a dozen times over that we can only afford the expense of Marlborough;
+the family gets its Alpine tour, though logic and unpaid bills
+imperatively dictate the choice of a quiet watering place. You yield,
+and you see that every one in the house knew that you would yield. There
+wasn't a servant who didn't know every turn of the domestic screw, or
+who took your resistance for more than the usual routine of the
+operation. "Time and I," said Philip of Spain, "against any two." It is
+no wonder if, fighting alone for prudence and economy, one is beaten by
+time and one's wife.</p>
+
+<p>We have no wish to dispute the enormous benefits to man of woman's
+supremacy, but we may fairly leave the statement of them to the numerous
+troup of poets who dispute with Mr. Tupper the theme of the affections.
+For ourselves, we may undertake, perhaps, the humbler task of pointing
+out very briefly some of the disadvantages which, as in all human
+things, counterbalance these benefits. In the first place, feminine rule
+is certainly not favorable to anything like largeness of mind or breadth
+of view. It creates, as we have seen, an excessive self-conceit and
+opinionativeness, and then it directs these qualities to very small ends
+indeed. Woman lives from her childhood in a world of petty details, of
+minute <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223"></a>[<a href="./images/223.png">223</a>]</span>household and other cares, of bargains where the price of every
+yard ends in some fraction of a penny. The habit of mind which is formed
+by these and similar influences becomes the spirit of the house, a
+spirit admirable no doubt in many ways, but excessively small.</p>
+
+<p>The quarrels of a woman's life, her social warfare, her battles about
+precedence, her upward progress from set to set, have all the same stamp
+of Lilliput on them. But it is to these small details, these little
+pleasures and little anxieties and little disappointments and little
+ambitions, that a wife generally manages to bend the temper of her
+spouse. He gets gradually to share her indifference to large interests,
+to broad public questions. He imbibes little by little the most fatal of
+all kinds of selfishness, the selfishness of the home. It would be
+difficult, perhaps, to say how much of the patriotism of the Old World
+was owing to the inferior position of woman; but it is certain that the
+influence of woman tells fatally against any self-sacrificing devotion
+to those larger public virtues of which patriotism is one of the chief.
+Whether from innate narrowness of mind, or from defective training, or
+from the excessive development of the affections, family interests far
+outweigh, in the feminine estimation, any larger national or human
+considerations.</p>
+
+<p>If ever the suffrage is given to woman, it will be necessary to punish
+bribery with the treadmill, for no "person" will regard it as a crime to
+barter away her vote for a year's schooling for Johnny or a new <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224"></a>[<a href="./images/224.png">224</a>]</span>frock
+for Maud. Nothing tells more plainly the difference between the Old
+World and the New than the constant returns home during war. We can
+hardly conceive Pericles or even Alcibiades applying for leave of
+absence on the ground of "private affairs." But then Pericles and
+Alcibiades had no home that they could set above the interests of the
+State.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, from this narrow view bounded strictly by the limits and
+interests of the home comes, it may be feared, a vast deal of social and
+political bitterness and intolerance. Her very nature, her "deductive
+spirit," as Mr. Buckle puts it prettily for her, makes woman essentially
+a dogmatist. She has none of the larger intercourse with other minds and
+adverse circumstances which often creates the form, if not the spirit,
+of tolerance in the narrowest of men. Her very excellence and faith make
+her exactly what they made Queen Mary&mdash;a conscientious and therefore
+merciless persecutor.</p>
+
+<p>It is just this feminine narrowness, this feminine conscientiousness, in
+the clergy which unfits them for any position where justice or
+moderation is requisite. Justice is a quality unknown to woman, and
+against which she wages a fierce battle in the house and in the world.
+There are few husbands who have been made more just, more tolerant, more
+large-hearted and large-headed, by their wives; for justice lives in a
+drier light than that of the affections, and dry light is not a very
+popular mode of illumination under "the monstrous regimen of women."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225"></a>[<a href="./images/225.png">225</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Proverbs, as a rule, are believed to contain amongst them somehow or
+other a quantity of truth. There is scarcely one proverb which has not
+got another proverb that flatly contradicts it, and between the two it
+would be very odd if there was not a great deal of sound sense
+somewhere. There is, however, one of the number which, as every candid
+critic must allow, is based on an egregious falsehood&mdash;the proverb,
+namely, which affirms, against all experience, that whatever is good for
+the goose is good for the gander. Viewing the goose as the type of
+woman, and the gander as the type of man, no adage could be more
+preposterous or untenable. Such a maxim flies dead in the very face of
+society, and is calculated to introduce disturbance into the orderly
+sequence and subordination of the sexes. Who first invented it, it is
+difficult to conceive, unless it was some rustic Mrs. Poyser, full of
+the consciousness of domestic power, and anxious to reverse in daily
+life the law of priority which obtained&mdash;as she must have seen&mdash;even in
+her own poultry-yard.</p>
+
+<p>There is one way of reading the proverb which perhaps renders it less
+monstrous; and if we confine ourselves to the view that "sauce" for the
+goose is also "sauce" for the gander, we escape from any of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226"></a>[<a href="./images/226.png">226</a>]</span>the
+philosophical difficulties in which the other version involves us. No
+doubt, when they are dead, goose and gander are alike, even in the way
+they are dressed, and there is no superiority on the part of either.
+Death makes all genders epicene. Except for one solitary text about
+silence in heaven for half an hour, which some cynical commentators have
+explained as indicating a temporary banishment from Paradise of one of
+the sexes, distinctions of this sort need not be supposed to continue
+after the present life. If we are to take the former reading, and to
+test it by what we know of life, nothing can be more unfounded, or more
+calculated to give a wrong impression as to the facts. Were it not too
+late, the proverb ought to be altered; and perhaps it is not absolutely
+hopeless to persuade Mr. Tupper to see to it.</p>
+
+<p>"What is good for the goose is bad for the gander," or "what is bad for
+the goose is good for the gander;" or, perhaps, "what is a sin in the
+goose is only the gander's way," would read quite as well, would not be
+so diametrically at variance with the ordinary rules of social life,
+and, accordingly, would be infinitely truer and more moral. Even Mr.
+Mill, who is the advocate of female emancipation and female suffrage,
+never has gone so far as to say that all women, as well as all men, are
+brothers. The female suffrage, as we know, is merely a question of time.
+Before very long, no doubt, there will be a feminine Reform Bill, during
+the course of which Mr. Disraeli will explain that the feminine
+franchise has always been the one idea of the Conservative party, and in
+which the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227"></a>[<a href="./images/227.png">227</a>]</span>compound housekeeper will occupy as prominent a position as
+the compound householder ever could have done. Nobody, however, has as
+yet absolutely asserted, we do not say the equality, for equality is an
+invidious term, but the indifference of the sexes. And this being so, it
+is strange that a proverb should be retained which is so opposed to
+every notion that passes current in the world.</p>
+
+<p>As the legislation of the world has hitherto been uniformly in the hands
+of men, it is not astonishing that it has always proceeded on the
+assumption of the absolute dependence of the weaker upon the stronger
+sex. Several thousand years of intellectual and political supremacy must
+have altered the type imperceptibly, and made the difference between the
+ordinary run of men and women far more marked than nature intended it
+originally to be. All theology, whether Christian or pagan, has been in
+the habit of representing woman as designed chiefly to be a sort of
+ornament and appendage to man; and the allegory of the creation of Eve,
+though Oriental in its tone, does nevertheless correspond to a vague
+feeling among even civilized nations that woman's mission is to fill up
+a gap in man's daily life.</p>
+
+<p>Nor are they merely the opinions and laws of the world which have
+moulded themselves on this basis. The whole imagination of the race has
+been fed upon the notion, until the relations between the two sexes have
+become the one thing on which fancy, sentiment, and hope are taught from
+childhood to dwell. It is not an extravagant inference to suppose that
+centuries <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228"></a>[<a href="./images/228.png">228</a>]</span>of this imaginative and sentimental habit have ended by
+affecting the brain and the physical nature of humanity. Man has become
+a woman-caressing animal. The life of the two sexes is made to centre
+round the once fictitious, but now universal, idea that they cannot
+exist without one another.</p>
+
+<p>Goose and gander have lost their primitive conception of an individual
+and independent career, and are never happy unless they are permitted to
+go in pairs. Under less complex social conditions such interdependence
+led to no very intolerable results. Men and women formed a sort of
+convenient partnership, each contributing their quota of daily
+conveniences to the common fund. The chief protected his squaw&mdash;or, if
+he was a patriarch, his squaws&mdash;while the squaws ministered to his
+pleasures, cooked his food, milked&mdash;if Mr. Max M&uuml;ller's idea of the
+Sanscrit is correct&mdash;his cows, and carried his babies on their backs.
+The husband found the venison and the maize, while his wife dressed it
+and helped to eat it. This mutual arrangement had at any rate the
+advantage of being accommodated to the physical differences of strength
+between the two halves of society.</p>
+
+<p>A little tyranny is the natural consequence of an unequal distribution
+of physical strength in all rude and barbarous states, and it was
+inevitable that woman should at such times have more than her share of
+labor and of patience imposed upon her. But it is evident that, as
+civilization has increased with the growth of population and of
+industrial interests, women no longer derive the same benefit from the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229"></a>[<a href="./images/229.png">229</a>]</span>social partnership as formerly. Some social philosophers still
+maintain, with M. Comte, that it is man's business to maintain woman,
+and to relieve her from the necessity of providing for her natural
+wants. But this theory seems Utopian and impracticable when we try to
+think of applying it to the world in which we live. Wealth is no longer
+distributed with the least reference to industrious and sober habits.</p>
+
+<p>The principle of accumulation has been admitted, and social bodies have
+encouraged and sanctioned it by allowing property to descend from one
+generation to another intact, the result of which is that the industry
+of the father is able to insure the perpetual idleness of his posterity.
+Large multitudes of poor producers are occupied in earning their own
+necessary sustenance, and cannot take on themselves without enormous
+difficulty the burden of supporting womankind, a burden which the richer
+classes scarcely feel. As by far the majority of women belong to the
+impoverished and laborious class, it is obvious they must either enter
+the labor-market themselves, or purchase support from the rich by
+sacrifices which are inconsistent with their personal dignity and the
+morality of the social body. As the imagination of humanity has been
+long since given up to sentiment and passion, it is only too clear that
+the more vicious alternative is the one oftenest embraced. Society,
+then, has come to this&mdash;that woman must still depend on man, while man
+no longer, except on his own terms, fulfills his part of the tacit
+bargain by maintaining woman.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing to be considered is what the public <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230"></a>[<a href="./images/230.png">230</a>]</span>gains by keeping up
+the sentimental notion about woman's mission. It is her business, most
+of us think, to charm and to attract, partly in order that she may do
+man real good, and partly that she may add to the luxury, the
+refinement, and the happiness of life. With this view, society is very
+solicitous to keep her at a distance from everything that may spoil or
+destroy the bloom of her character and tastes. Few people go so far as
+to say that she ought not to work for her livelihood, if her
+circumstances render the effort necessary and prudent. As a fact, we see
+at once that such a proposition cannot be broadly supported, and that
+any attempt to enforce it would lead to endless misery and mischief.
+Poor women, for example, must work hard, or else their children and
+themselves will come to utter degradation.</p>
+
+<p>But though society abstains from committing itself to the doctrine of
+the enforced idleness of women, it takes refuge in a species of half
+measure, and restricts, as far as it can, by its legislative enactments
+or its own social code, the labors which women are to perform to the
+narrowest possible compass. A woman may work, but she must do nothing
+which is called unfeminine. She may get up linen, ply her needle, keep
+weaving-machines in motion, knit, sew, and in higher spheres in life
+teach music, French, and English grammar. She may be a governess, or a
+sempstress, or even within certain limits may enter the literary market
+and write books. This is the extreme boundary of her liberty, and
+somewhere about this point society begins to draw a rigid line.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231"></a>[<a href="./images/231.png">231</a>]</span>
+It earnestly discourages her from commercial occupations, except under
+the patronage of a husband who is to benefit by her exertions; she is
+not to be a counting-house clerk, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a parson.
+The great active avocations, all those that lead either to fame or
+fortune, are monopolized by men. Strong-minded women occasionally bore
+the public by complaining of and protesting against such restrictions;
+but, on the whole, the public is satisfied that it is convenient that
+they should be upheld. If we look at the matter from the point of view
+of the educated, or even the well-to-do classes, such a conclusion seems
+so reasonable that most of us can hardly induce ourselves to doubt its
+correctness. Women do a certain tangible amount of good to the world by
+being kept as a luxury and exotic. The most energetic and rebellious of
+them may feel angry to be told so, but it is the truth that it suits men
+in general to keep up a kind of hothouse bloom upon the characters of
+women. The society of soft, affectionate, unselfish creatures is
+decidedly good for man. It elevates his nature, it gives him a belief in
+what is pure and genuine, it alleviates the dust and turmoil of a busy
+career, and it enables him for so many hours of the day to refresh
+himself with the company of a being who is in some things a medi&aelig;val
+saint, and in some, a child.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever one contemplates the effect of more coarse experience of the
+world, more knowledge, and more rough and hard work on such a nature,
+one is invariably tempted to acquiesce in the view that it is good for
+man to have her in the state she is. One <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232"></a>[<a href="./images/232.png">232</a>]</span>feels disposed to object to
+notions of female emancipation as profane. Education and science,
+thought and philosophy, like the winds of heaven, should never visit her
+cheek too roughly. The great thing is, to preserve in her that sort of
+luxurious unworldliness which represents the religious and refined
+element in the household to which she belongs. And a hundred things may
+be and have often been said about the advantage of making pure sentiment
+the foundation of all the relations that obtain between her and man.</p>
+
+<p>As Plato thought, man elevates himself by elevating and sentimentalizing
+his affections. All poetry and most literature is given up to this
+sentimentalizing or refining process. Nor can it be denied that the
+effect is to increase very much the capacity of happiness in all people
+who are born to be happy or to enjoy life. What would youth be without
+its imaginative emotions? We all know, and are taught to believe, that
+it would be something much poorer than it is.</p>
+
+<p>There is another side to the picture, and it is as well to contemplate
+it seriously, before we make up our minds to treat with undisguised
+contempt all the vagaries of those who wish definitely to alter the
+social condition of women. At present women are beautiful and delicate
+adjuncts of life. As Prometheus said of horses, they are the ornaments
+of wealth and luxury. They add perfume and refinement to existence. But,
+after all, it is an important question whether the conversion of women
+into this sort of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233"></a>[<a href="./images/233.png">233</a>]</span>drawing-room delicacy is not sacrificing the welfare
+of the many to the intellectual and social comfort of the few.</p>
+
+<p>The world pays a heavy price for having its imagination sentimentalized.
+One of the items in the bill is the disappointment of the thousands
+whose sensibilities are never destined to be satisfied. For every woman
+who marries happily, a large percentage never marry at all, or marry in
+haste and repent at leisure. It remains to be proved that it is wise to
+teach and train the sex to fix all their views in life and to stake all
+their fortunes on the chance of the one rare thing&mdash;a lucky matrimonial
+choice. If one could succeed in de-sentimentalizing society, one would
+take from a few the chief pleasure of living, but it is far from certain
+that the material welfare of the majority would not be proportionately
+increased. Half-measures would of course be of very little use.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a poor exchange to take from women all their reserve and
+innocence and refinement, without giving them free play in the world.
+They would be only coarse and wicked caricatures of what they are now.
+The change, to be tolerable, would have to be effectual and thorough. It
+would be necessary to change the whole current of their ideas, and the
+whole view of man about them also; to persuade the human race to fix its
+mind less on the difference of sexes, and to become less imaginative
+upon the subject. If so sweeping an alteration could be completely
+effected, perhaps it might be worth while to consider whether woman's
+absolute independence would not strengthen <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234"></a>[<a href="./images/234.png">234</a>]</span>her character, and add
+permanently to the world's natural wealth.</p>
+
+<p>One thing is certain, that if woman is to continue for ever in her
+present condition, the moral and social condition of large numbers of
+human beings must remain hopeless. Their future appears dreary in the
+extreme. It is Utopian to expect that men and women will grow less and
+less self-indulgent, so long as the education they undergo from their
+earliest years renders them prone to every species of temptation. There
+are some things which make social philosophers hopeful and confident,
+but no social philosopher can ever do anything but despair of real
+progress if he is to take for granted that women are always to play the
+part in life which they at present play. The emancipation of the goose
+is an experiment, but it is not surprising that many enthusiasts should
+believe it to be an experiment well deserving of a trial.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235"></a>[<a href="./images/235.png">235</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>ENGAGEMENTS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>A great writer has pathetically described the last days of a man under
+sentence of death. He has found appropriate expression for every phase
+of the protracted agony with characteristic richness and variety of
+language; we are made to taste each drop in the bitter cup&mdash;the remorse
+and the awful expectation, and the desperate clinging to deceitful
+straws of hope. Indeed it scarcely requires the eloquence of a
+first-rate writer to impress upon us the fact that it is very unpleasant
+to expect to be hanged. Every man's imagination is sufficient to realize
+some of the unpleasant consequences of such a state of mind; for though
+the number of persons who have encountered this particular experience is
+inconsiderable, most of us have gone through something more or less
+analogous&mdash;we have been significantly told to wait after school, or have
+paid visits to dentists, or have been candidates at competitive
+examinations, or have been engaged to be married. These and many other
+situations, though varying in the intrinsic pain or pleasure of the
+anticipated event, have thus much in common, that they are all states of
+abnormal suspense. The nerves are kept in a state of equal tension by
+the uncomfortable feeling that we are in for it, whatever the "it" may
+turn out to be.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236"></a>[<a href="./images/236.png">236</a>]</span>
+The first impression is simple; it resembles that felt by a man who has
+just slipped upon the side of a mountain, and knows that he is
+inevitably going to the bottom. He has not time to think whether he will
+fall upon snow or rocks, whether he will have merely a pleasant slide or
+be dashed into a thousand fragments; he does not make up his mind to be
+heroic or to be frightened; the one thought that flashes across his mind
+is that here at last is the situation which he has so often feebly
+pictured to himself; he will know all about it before he has time to
+reflect upon its pains or pleasures. People who have escaped drowning
+sometimes assert that they have remembered their whole lives in a few
+instants, though it does not quite appear how they can remember that
+they remembered the series of incidents without remembering the
+incidents themselves. But, so far as we have been able to collect
+evidence, the general rule in any sudden catastrophe is that which we
+have described. There is nothing but a dazzling flash of surprise, which
+almost excludes any decided judgment as to the painfulness or otherwise
+of the situation.</p>
+
+<p>If, then, we may venture to conjecture the frame of mind in which a lady
+or gentleman first enters upon an engagement, we should say that it was
+this sense of startled suspense. They feel as Guy Faux would have felt
+after lighting the train of gunpowder&mdash;that they have done something
+which they may probably never repeat in their lifetime, and every other
+emotion will be for the moment absorbed. But as engagements are
+generally more protracted than <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237"></a>[<a href="./images/237.png">237</a>]</span>most of the critical situations we have
+mentioned, the surprise dies away, and the victims have time to look
+about them, and analyze more closely the emotions produced by their
+position. To do any justice to the complicated and varying frame of mind
+into which even an average lover may be thrown in the course of a few
+weeks would of course require the pen, not of men, but of angels. It
+would involve a condensation of a large fraction of all the poetry that
+has been written in the world, and no small part of the cynical
+criticism by which it has been opposed. But, taking for granted the mass
+of commonplaces which has been accumulated in the course of centuries,
+there are a few special modifications of the position under our present
+social arrangements which are more fitted for remark. The state of mind
+known as being in love is confined to no particular race or period, but
+the position of the engaged persons may vary indefinitely. In a good
+simple state of society, the gentleman pays down his money or his sheep
+or his oxen, and takes away the lady without any superfluous sentiment.
+Even in more civilized states, a marriage may be substantially a bargain
+carried out in a business-like spirit. However unsatisfactory such a
+mode of proceeding may be from certain points of view, it is at any rate
+intelligible; all parties to the contract understand their relative
+positions, and have a plain line of conduct traced for them.</p>
+
+<p>But in a modern English engagement the form is necessarily different,
+even when the substance of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238"></a>[<a href="./images/238.png">238</a>]</span>arrangement is identical. For once in
+his experience a man feels called upon to accept that view of life for
+which novelists are unjustly condemned. We say unjustly, for it is
+inevitable that a novelist should frequently represent marriage as being
+the one great crisis of a man's history. It is not his function to give
+a complete theory of life, but to describe such scenes as are most
+interesting and most dramatic. He is quite justified in often writing as
+though two lovers should really think about nothing under heaven except
+their chances of union, and should be dismissed, when the happy event
+has once taken place, in a certainty of living very happily ever
+afterwards. He has no concern with the lover's briefs or sermons or
+operations on the Stock Exchange, which may really take up by far the
+greater part of the man's waking thoughts; and it would spoil the unity
+of his work if he were to dwell upon them proportionately. It would be
+as absurd to mistake the novelist's views for a complete one as to
+condemn it because it is incomplete. In novels which depend, as
+ninety-nine out of a hundred must depend, upon a love story, the
+importance of marriage, or at least the degree in which it occupies the
+thoughts of the characters, will necessarily be overstated. The engaged
+persons, however, find that, in the eyes of their friends, if not in
+their own, they are temporarily accepting the novelist's ideal. For the
+time they are considered exclusively as persons about to marry, and all
+their other relations in life retire into the background.</p>
+
+<p>The difficulty of the position depends upon the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239"></a>[<a href="./images/239.png">239</a>]</span>extent to which this
+conventional assumption diverges from the true facts of the case. The
+lady, for example, suffers less than the gentleman, because, in spite of
+Dr. Mary Walker and other martyrs to the cause of woman's rights, it is
+still true that marriage fills a larger space in her life than in that
+of the other sex. She can take up the character with a certain triumph,
+as of one who has more or less fulfilled her mission and passed from the
+ranks of the aspirants to those of the successful candidates for
+matrimony. At any rate, even if she takes a loftier view of feminine
+duties, there is nothing ridiculous about her position. She may busy
+herself about trousseaux or wedding-dresses or marriage-presents, with
+perfect satisfaction to herself and to the envy of her female friends.
+But her unfortunate accomplice, especially if he is of mature age, is in
+a far more uncomfortable position.</p>
+
+<p>Few men who have become immersed in any profession or business can act
+the character without an unpleasantly strong sense of being in a false
+position. There is nothing indeed intrinsically ludicrous about it; the
+chances are that the lover is doing a very sensible thing, and that his
+wisest friends approve of his conduct. Still it is undeniable that he
+moves about, to his own apprehension at least, in a universal atmosphere
+of ridicule. He feels that he is really a quiet hard-working young man,
+full of law it may be, or of plans for improving his parish, or of
+Parliamentary notices of motion. He can talk about his own topics with
+interest and intelligence, and may <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240"></a>[<a href="./images/240.png">240</a>]</span>possibly be an authority in a small
+way. He is quite conscious, too, that there are many sides to his
+character which do not come out in his ordinary every-day business.
+Unluckily that is just the fact which his friends are apt to ignore.</p>
+
+<p>We soon learn to associate our acquaintance with the positions in which
+we have been accustomed to see them, and forget that they may have
+sentiments and faculties of which we know nothing. Consequently an
+engagement seems to imply an entire metamorphosis. Our friend, or his
+image in our minds, was a comparatively simple compound of two or three
+characters at most; whereas men generally have a far more complex
+organization. In business hours, perhaps, he was simply a machine for
+grinding out law, and at other times a lively talker and a good
+whist-player. No process of transmutation will convert either of those
+into the conventional lover, who can think of nothing but the object of
+his affections; the apparent incongruity is too violent not to produce a
+sense of the ludicrous; and our friend is bound in decency to make it as
+violent as possible. From which it follows that we laugh, and that he
+knows that we are laughing, at him. Intensely awkward congratulations
+are exchanged, according to two or three formulas which have been handed
+down from distant generations. If the congratulator is a married man, he
+hopes that his friend may enjoy as much happiness as he has found
+himself in the married state; if a bachelor, he assures him that,
+although unable hitherto to act up to his principles, he has <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241"></a>[<a href="./images/241.png">241</a>]</span>always
+thought marriage the right thing. There are persons who can repeat one
+of these common forms with all the air of making an original
+observation, as there are men who can begin an oration by asserting that
+they are unaccustomed to public speaking; but, as a rule, it is said in
+such a way as to imply that the speaker, whilst admitting the absurdity
+of connecting the ideas of his friend and marriage, is willing to pay
+the necessary compliments, if he may do it as cheaply as possible.</p>
+
+<p>In short, until a man is engaged to be married, he scarcely knows how
+narrow a view his friends take of his character, and how easily they are
+amused at what is after all rather a commonplace proceeding. When his
+own friends look upon him so distinctly in the light of a joke, he of
+course cannot expect much quarter from the friends of the lady. He has a
+painful impression that he is coming out in a part for which he has had
+no practice, under the eyes of hostile critics. Every man thinks it only
+due to himself to criticise a friend's new purchases of horses or
+pictures or wines; if he did not find fault with them he would miss an
+opportunity of establishing his superior acumen. And of course the
+principle extends to lovers. There is probably a narrow circle who are
+bound officially to approve; but the unfortunate victim feels that,
+outside of it, every acquaintance of the lady will take pleasure in a
+keen observation of his defects, and he trembles accordingly. It is said
+(rather unfairly, perhaps) that shyness is a form of conceit; but the
+least self-conscious of mankind can <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242"></a>[<a href="./images/242.png">242</a>]</span>hardly fail to feel uncomfortable
+when he is called upon to perform such a highflown part under so severe
+a scrutiny.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the torment is far greater in the case of a middle-aged
+professional gentleman, who is habitually employed upon some incongruous
+work, than to a youth in whom any sort of folly is graceful; but there
+can be few persons to whom the position is not to a certain extent
+irksome. When a man is married, or when he is a bachelor, he is allowed
+to be a rational being, taking rational views of life. He feels it
+rather hard that in the interval society insists upon his being in a
+state of temporary insanity, and then laughs at him because it doesn't
+look natural. He begins to long even for that climax of misery when, if
+the custom be not already dead, he will have to commit one of the most
+absurd actions of which a human being can be guilty&mdash;namely, making a
+speech in the morning, at an anomalous and dreary meal, exactly when his
+shamefacedness is at its highest pitch. That so many people survive
+engagements without any perceptible sourness of temper is some proof of
+the goodness of human nature, or of the fact that there are
+compensations in the state of being in love which go to neutralize the
+discomfort of being engaged.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243"></a>[<a href="./images/243.png">243</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>WOMAN IN ORDERS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>There is, no doubt, something extremely flattering to our insular
+conceit in the mystery which hangs about the institutions which we prize
+as specially national. We feel that a Briton is still equal to three
+Frenchmen, so long as the three Frenchmen confess with a shrug that the
+Briton is wholly unintelligible. The blunders of Dr. D&ouml;llinger, the
+baffled wonderment with which every foreigner retires from the study of
+it, only endear to us the more the Church of England. This was perhaps
+the reason, besides the inherent marvel of the matter, why we passed so
+lightly over M. Esquiroz and his late ecclesiastical researches. It was
+humiliating to English pride to have to confess that a Frenchman had
+unveiled to the world of Paris the hitherto sacred mysteries of the
+perpetual curate and of the tithe rent-charge.</p>
+
+<p>The enemy was clearly at the gates of the central fortress of British
+insularism; even an American bishop was tempted to strive to understand
+Westminster Abbey; and a dismal rumor prevailed that nothing hindered
+the Ecclesiastical Commissioners from revealing the nature and purpose
+of their existence but the fact that, after prolonged inquiry, they
+found it impossible to understand them themselves. It was time, we felt,
+to abandon these mere outposts of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244"></a>[<a href="./images/244.png">244</a>]</span>unintelligible to the aggressions
+of an impertinent curiosity, and to retire to the citadel. There,
+happily, we are safe. Even the unhallowed inquisitiveness of M. Esquiroz
+recoils baffled from the parson's wife. Disdainful of all artificial
+adjuncts of mystery, to all appearance a woman like other women, packing
+her little sick-baskets, balancing the coal-club accounts, teaching in
+her Sunday-school, the centre of religion, of charity, and of
+tittle-tattle, woman in orders fronts calmly the inquirer, a being
+fearfully and wonderfully English, unknowable and unknown.</p>
+
+<p>No one who saw for the first time the calm, colorless serenity of the
+parson's wife would discover in her existence the result of a life-long
+disappointment. But the parson on whose arm she leans commonly
+represents to his spouse simply the descent from the ideal to the real,
+the step from the sublime to the prosaic, if not the ridiculous. There
+was a moment in her life when the vestry-door closed upon a world of
+hallowed wonder, when the being who appeared in white robes, "mystic,
+wonderful," was a being not as other men are, a being whose hours were
+spent in study, in meditation, in charity, a being of beautiful sermons
+and spotless neckties. The flirtation with him, so impatiently longed
+for, was not as other men's flirtations; there was a tinge of sacredness
+about his very frivolity, and a soft touch of piety in his sentiment. To
+share such a life, to commune hourly with a spirit so semi-angelic,
+seemed an almost religious ambition. The spirit of a Crusader,
+half-heaven, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245"></a>[<a href="./images/245.png">245</a>]</span>half-earth, fired the gentle breast of the besieger till
+Jerusalem was won.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the hour of disenchantment. The mysterious object of
+adoration, seen on his own hearth-rug, melted into the mass of men. The
+spiritual idealist was cross over an ill-cooked dinner, and as
+commonplace at breakfast as his <i>Times</i>. The discourses, so lately
+utterances from heaven, dwindled into copies or compilations from other
+heavenly utterers. The life of a Lady Bountiful turned out a dull
+routine of mothers' meetings and Sunday-schools. The ideal poor,
+grateful and resigned, proved cross and greedy old harridans. The world
+of peace, of nobleness, of serenity, died into a parish of bustle and
+scandal and worry. Out of this wreck of hope arises the parson's wife.
+Disillusionment is her ordination for a clerical position none the less
+real that it is without parallel in the ecclesiastical history of the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>She takes her part with all the decision of genius. Her first step is to
+restore the Temple she has broken down, to set up again the Dagon who
+lies across the threshold. If not for herself, at any rate for the world
+and for her children, she re-creates the priest she once dreamt of in
+the commonplace parson whom she has actually wedded. Conscious as she is
+of the inner nature of the idling apartment where he lounges through the
+morning, she impresses on the household the necessity of quiet while its
+master is in his "study." By the daily addition of skillful but minute
+touches, she paints him to the world as an ideal of piety and of
+learning. She takes bills and letters <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246"></a>[<a href="./images/246.png">246</a>]</span>off his hands, that his mind may
+not be disturbed from more serious subjects. She enforces a sacred
+silence throughout the house during the solemn hours while the sermon is
+being compiled. She sews the sacred sheets together, and listens while
+the discourse is recited for her approval. She listens again with an
+interest as fresh as ever when it is preached. She marks the text in her
+Bible, and sees that the children mark it too.</p>
+
+<p>As the first subject of his theological realm, she sets an example which
+other subjects are to follow. They, like her, mingle their contempt for
+the parson's business abilities and voluble talk with a hushed reverence
+for his esoteric knowledge of subjects inaccessible to common men. They,
+like her, manage to combine a perfect readiness to snub him and his
+opinions on all earthly topics, with an equal readiness to listen to
+him, as to a divine oracle, on the topics of grace and free-will.
+Insensibly the subtle distinction tells on the parson himself. He is
+conscious, perhaps pleasantly conscious, that he is seen through the
+glass of his wife, and seen therefore darkly. He retires within the
+domestic veil. He learns to avoid common subjects&mdash;subjects, that is,
+where the world holds itself at liberty to criticise him. He retires to
+fields where he is above criticism. He believes at last in the vamped-up
+sermons in which his wife persists in believing. He accepts the position
+of an oracle on sacred topics which his wife has made for him. In a
+word, the parson's wife has created the British parson.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247"></a>[<a href="./images/247.png">247</a>]</span>
+It is hard to say how far the creator believes in her own creation. In
+persuading others, she probably succeeds to a great extent in persuading
+herself. At any rate she accepts willingly enough the consequences of a
+position which leaves her the master of the parish. In the bulk of cases
+the parson is simply the Mikado, the nominal ruler, lapped in soft ease,
+and exempt from the worry of the world about him. Woman is the parochial
+Tycoon, the constitutional premier who does not rule, but governs. She
+is the hidden centre and force of the whole parochial machinery&mdash;the
+organist, the chief tract distributor, the president of the Dorcas
+society, the despot of the penny bank and the coal-club, the head of the
+sewing-class, the supervisor of district-visitors, the universal referee
+as to the character of mendicant Joneses and Browns. In other words, the
+parson's wife has revived an Apostolic Order which but for her would
+have died away; she has restored the primitive Diaconate.</p>
+
+<p>Woman is the true parochial deacon, and not the bashful young gentleman
+fresh from Oxford, who wears his stole over one shoulder rather than
+over two. It is the parson's wife who "serves tables" nowadays; and the
+results on parochial activity are in some ways remarkable enough. In the
+first place, men are fairly driven from the field. If a layman wishes to
+help in a parish he finds himself lost in a world of women. It is only
+those semi-clerical beings who seem to unite with a singular grace all
+the weaknesses of both the sexes who persist in the attempt. Then, too,
+all the ideas of the parochial <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248"></a>[<a href="./images/248.png">248</a>]</span>world become feminine; the parish buzzes
+with woman's hatred of the Poor-laws, and contempt for economic
+principles and hard-hearted statisticians.</p>
+
+<p>Mendicancy flies from the workhouse and the stone-yard to entrench
+itself against Guardians and relieving-officers among the soup-kitchens
+and the coal-tickets of feminine almsgiving. The parson, after a faint
+protest of common sense, surrenders at discretion, and flings all
+experience to the winds. One wife turns her husband into a fount of
+begging letters. Another forces him to set up manufactories for all the
+lucifer-match girls of the parish. Woman's imaginativeness, woman's
+fancy, woman's indifference to fact exhausts itself in "sensational
+cases," and revels in starvation and death. But we must turn to a
+brighter side of her activity. Ritualism is the great modern result of
+the parson's wife, though, with a base ingratitude to the rock from
+which they were hewn, Ritualists hoist the standard of clerical
+celibacy. Woman has long since made her parson; now (as of old with her
+doll) her pleasure is to dress him. A new religious atmosphere surrounds
+her life when the very work of her hands becomes hallowed in its
+purpose. The old crotchet and insertion&mdash;we use words to us more
+mysterious than intelligible&mdash;become flat, stale, and unprofitable by
+the side of the book-marker and the colored stole; and a flutter of
+excitement stirs even the stillness of a life which is sometimes
+offensively still at the sight of the new chasuble with "aunt's real
+lace, you know, dear," sewn about it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249"></a>[<a href="./images/249.png">249</a>]</span>
+However gray an existence may be, and the tones of a life like this are
+naturally subdued, it still cherishes within a warmth and poetry of its
+own; and the poetry of the parson's wife breaks out in vestments and
+decorations. Nothing brings out more vividly the fact that Mrs. Proudie
+<i>is</i> the Church of England than that her reaction against the prose of
+existence is shaking&mdash;so the Protestant Alliance tells us&mdash;the Church of
+England to its foundations. The real disturber of the Church peace, the
+real assertor of Catholic principles, or (for those who prefer a middle
+phrase to either of these contending statements) the real defendant in
+the Court of Arches, is not Mr. Mackonochie, but the parson's wife.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Proudie, we repeat, is the Church of England; but if it is
+difficult to estimate the results of her position upon the spouse of her
+bosom and the parish which she rules, it is still harder to estimate its
+results upon herself. Her outer manner seems, indeed, to reflect what we
+have ventured to call the gray tones of her life, and a certain
+weariness of routine breaks out even in the mechanical precision of her
+existence. Power, in the parochial as in the domestic circle, is bought
+by her at the cost of a perpetual self-abnegation, and it is a little
+hard to be always hiding the hand that pulls the strings. We may excuse
+a little forgetfulness in a wife when her daily sacrifice is wholly
+forgotten in the silver teapot and the emblazoned memorial which
+proclaim the borrowed glories of her spouse.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes there may be a little justification for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250"></a>[<a href="./images/250.png">250</a>]</span>the complaint of the
+British priestess that the priest alone should be crowned with laurel.
+But, if she is ecclesiastically forgotten, it must be remembered that
+her position receives a shy and timid recognition from society. She is
+credited with a quasi-clerical character, and regarded as having
+received a sort of semi-ordination. The Church, indeed, assigns her no
+parochial precedence; but public opinion, if it sets her beneath her
+husband, places her above all other ecclesiastical agencies. Tacitly she
+is allowed to have the right to speak of "<i>our</i> curates." Then, again,
+society assigns her a sort of mediatorial position between the Church
+and the world; she is the point of transition between the clergy and
+their flocks. It is through her that the incense of congregational
+flattery is suffered to mount up to the idol who may not personally
+inhale it; and it is through her that the parson can intimate his
+opinion, and scatter his hints on a number of social subjects too
+trivial for his personal intervention.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible, indeed, to express in words the delicate shades of her
+social position, or, what is yet more remarkable, the relation to her
+sister-world of woman. There can be no doubt that, taken all in all,
+women are a little proud of the parson's wife. She is, as it were, the
+tithe of their sex, taken and consecrated for the rest. The dignity of
+her position in close proximity to the very priesthood itself extends,
+by the subtle gradation of sisters of mercy, district-visitors, and
+tract-distributors, to women in the mass. Her influence is a quiet
+protest against the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251"></a>[<a href="./images/251.png">251</a>]</span>injustice of the present religions of the world in
+excluding woman from those ministerial functions with which Paganism
+invested her. It is an odd transition from the quiet parson's wife to
+the priestess of Delphi; but while the parson's wife exists there is at
+any rate a persistence in the claim of woman's right to resume her
+tripod again.</p>
+
+<p>It is the quiet consciousness of this, of her spiritual headship of her
+sex, of her mystic and unexpressed but real ecclesiastical position,
+quite as much as the weariness of her daily routine, which displays
+itself in the bearing of the parson's wife. She is not quite as other
+women are, any more than he is as other men. Her dress is&mdash;at any rate,
+in theory it ought to be&mdash;a shade quieter, her bonnets a little less
+modern, her manner a trifle more reserved, her mirth hardly as
+unrestrained as those of the rest of her sex. Her talk, without being
+clerical, takes a quiet clerical tinge. She has her little scandal about
+the archdeacon and her womanly abhorrence of that horrid Colenso. She
+knows Early English from Middle Pointed, and interprets Ritualistic
+phrases into intelligible vocables. Like the curate, she dances only in
+family circles, and then dances after a discreet and ecclesiastical
+sort. She has no objection to cards, but she plays only for love. She
+sings solos from the <i>Messiah</i> and <i>St. Paul</i>.</p>
+
+<p>An existence simple, kindly enough in its way, penetrating society no
+doubt with a thousand good influences, but yet, we must own, hardly very
+interesting to the priestess who lives it. Altogether, when <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252"></a>[<a href="./images/252.png">252</a>]</span>we get
+beyond the purple and gold of our rulers, we congratulate ourselves on
+being free from the tedium and weariness and perpetual self-restraint of
+their lofty position. And even the curate who has lately raised his
+faint protest against what he calls "feminine domination" may remember
+in charity that while croquet and flirtation remain to him, his
+existence, slavery though he deem it, is a slavery far freer, blither,
+and more lively than that of the curate's wife.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253"></a>[<a href="./images/253.png">253</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>WOMAN AND HER CRITICS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>We men boast, as Homer said, to be braver than our fathers; but, as a
+sort of compensation, our women are far more sensitive than their
+grandmothers. Phyllis has ceased to laugh at Mr. Spectator's criticisms
+on her fan and her patches; but then it may be doubted whether Phyllis
+ever did laugh very heartily at Mr. Spectator. Women have run through
+all the list of moral and intellectual qualities in their time, but we
+do not remember an instance of a really humorous woman. Witty women
+there have been, and no doubt are still in plenty, but the world has
+still to welcome its feminine Addison.</p>
+
+<p>The higher a man's nature, the keener seems his enjoyment of his own
+irony and mockery of his own foibles; but did any woman ever seriously
+sit down to write a "Roundabout Paper?" Women, we are generally told,
+are "especially self-conscious;" in fact, the whole theory of women,
+philosophically stated, from the shyness of the miss in her 'teens to
+the audacious flirtation of a heroine of the season, rests wholly on the
+assumed basis of "self-consciousness." But it is self-consciousness of a
+very peculiar and feminine sort&mdash;a consciousness, not of themselves in
+themselves, but of the reflection of themselves, in others, of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254"></a>[<a href="./images/254.png">254</a>]</span>impression they make on the world around. Woman, we suspect, lives
+always before her glass, and makes a mirror of existence. But for
+downright self-analysis, we repeat, she has little or no taste. A female
+Montaigne, a female Thackeray, would be a sheer impossibility.</p>
+
+<p>We have been led, as the <i>Spectator</i> would have said, into these
+reflections by the chorus of shrill indignation with which the world of
+woman encounters the slightest comment of extraneous critics. The censor
+is at once told flatly that he knows nothing of woman. He is a bachelor,
+he is blighted in love, he is envious, spiteful; he is blind, deaf,
+dumb. All this goes without saying, as the French have it, but he is
+certainly ignorant. The truth is, it is woman who knows nothing of
+herself. It is only self-analysis which reveals to us our inner
+anomalies, our ridiculous self-contrasts; it is humor which recognises
+and amuses itself with their existence. But it is just the absence of
+this sense of anomaly in her nature or her life that is the charm of
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>Christmas has been bringing us, among its other festivities, a few of
+those delightful amusements called private theatricals; and in private
+theatricals all are agreed with Becky Sharpe, that woman reigns supreme.
+We were present the other day at an entertaining little comedy of this
+kind, where the whole interest of the piece was absorbed by a
+fascinating widow and an intriguing attorney, and where both these parts
+were sustained with singular ability and success. The amateur who played
+the lawyer seized <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255"></a>[<a href="./images/255.png">255</a>]</span>the general idea of his <i>r&ocirc;le</i> with perfect accuracy;
+in four minutes it was admirably rendered to his audience, but in four
+minutes it was exhausted. The preliminary cough, the constant angularity
+of attitude in the midst of perpetual fidget, the indicative finger from
+which the legal remarks seemed to pop off as from a pocket-pistol, were
+grasped at once, and remained unvaried, undeveloped to the close. The
+very ability with which the actor rendered the inner unity of legal
+existence, the very fidelity with which he represented the lawyer as a
+class, denied to him the subtle charm of the only unity which life as a
+representation exhibits&mdash;the charm of a unity of outer impression
+arising out of perpetual inner variety.</p>
+
+<p>His feminine rival won her laurels just because she made no attempt to
+grasp any general idea at all, but abandoned herself freely to the
+phases of the character as it encountered the various other characters
+of the piece. Whether as the frivolous widow or the daring coquette, as
+the practical woman of business or the unprotected female, as the flirt
+in her wildest extravagance or the wife in her most melting moods, she
+aimed at no artistic unity beyond the general unity of sex. She remained
+simply woman, and all this prodigious versatility was, as the audience
+observed, "so charmingly natural," just because it is woman's life. "On
+the stage," if we may venture to apply the lines about Garrick:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">On the stage she is natural, simple, affecting&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It is only that when she is off she is acting.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In actual fact she is acting whether off the boards or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256"></a>[<a href="./images/256.png">256</a>]</span>on, but the mere
+existence in outer impressions, in the unity of a constant admiration,
+which critics applaud as natural on the stage, they are unreasonably
+hard upon in general society.</p>
+
+<p>A man on the boards is doing an unusual and exceptional thing, and as a
+rule the very effort he makes to do it only enhances his failure; but a
+woman on the boards is only doing, under very favorable circumstances,
+what she does every day with less notice and applause. There can be no
+wonder if she is "charmingly natural," but this naturalness depends, as
+we have seen, on the entire absence of what in men is called
+self-consciousness&mdash;that is, the sense of anomaly. When a critic then
+ventures to open this inner existence, and to give woman a peep at
+herself, we cannot be astonished at the scream of indignation which
+greets his efforts. But we may be permitted to repeat that the scream
+proves, not that he knows nothing of woman, but that woman knows nothing
+of herself.</p>
+
+<p>We are afraid, however, that all this feminine resentment points to a
+radical defect in the mind of woman, which she is alternately proud to
+acknowledge and resolute to deny. Frenchmen of the Thiers sort have a
+trick to which they give the amusing name of logic; they present their
+reader with a couple of alternatives which they assert divide the
+universe, and bid you choose "of these two one." But any ordinary woman
+presents to the observer a hundred distinct alternatives, and defies him
+to choose any one in particular. There is no special reason, then, for
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257"></a>[<a href="./images/257.png">257</a>]</span>astonishment at the coolness with which she sets herself up one moment
+as a "deductive creature," as one who attains the highest flights of
+knowledge by intuition rather than by reason, and the next poses herself
+as the one specially rational being in her household, and waits
+patiently till her husband is reasonable too.</p>
+
+<p>We are sometimes afraid that neither one nor the other of these theories
+will hold water, and feel inclined to agree with one of the most
+brilliant of her sex that, if woman loves with her head, she thinks with
+her heart. As a rule, certainly, she judges through her affections. She
+does not praise nor blame; she loves or hates. The one thing she cannot
+understand is a purely intellectual criticism, the sort of morbid
+anatomy of the mind which treats its subject as a mere dead thing simply
+useful for demonstration. Very naturally, she attributes the same spirit
+of affectional intelligence to her critics as to herself; and when they
+unravel a few of her inconsistencies, amuse themselves with a few
+follies, or even venture to point out a few faults, she brands them as
+"hating" or "despising" woman. Point, too, is given to the charge by the
+fact that these affections through which she lives are from their very
+nature incapable of dealing with qualities, and naturally transform them
+into persons. A woman does not love her lover's courage or truth or
+honor; she loves her lover. If she prizes his qualities at all it is
+simply because they are inherent in him, and so she gives herself very
+little trouble to distinguish between his bad qualities and his good
+ones. She considers herself <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258"></a>[<a href="./images/258.png">258</a>]</span>bound to defend his characteristics in the
+mass, and if she seem to give up his extravagance or his rakishness, it
+is only with a secret determination that this concession to the world
+shall be balanced by an increase of adoration at home.</p>
+
+<p>As she deals with mankind, so she expects mankind, and especially the
+mankind of criticism, to deal with her. It is in vain that her censor
+replies that he only blamed her bonnet-strings or attacked the color of
+her shoe-tie. Woman's answer is that he has attacked woman. This folly,
+that absurdity, are in woman's mind herself, and their assailant is her
+own personal antagonist. "Love me all in all or not at all" is a woman's
+song, not in Mr. Tennyson's <i>Idyl</i> only, but all the world over. The
+discriminating admiration, the constitutional obedience which still
+claims to preserve a certain reticence and caution in its loyalty, are
+more alien to woman's feelings than the refusal of all worship, all
+obedience whatever. "Picking her to pieces" is the phrase in which she
+describes the critical process against which she revolts, and it is a
+phrase which, in a woman's mouth, is the prelude to the bitterest
+warfare.</p>
+
+<p>There is a more amiable, if a hardly more intelligent, trait in woman's
+character which renders her singularly averse to all criticism. Men can
+hardly be described as loyal to men. Whether it be their exaggerated
+self-esteem, their individuality, or their reason, it is certain that
+they do not imagine the honor of their sex to be concerned in the
+conduct of each particular member of it. The lawyer laughs over a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259"></a>[<a href="./images/259.png">259</a>]</span>little gentle fun when it is poked at his neighbor the vicar, and the
+parson has his amusement out of the exposure of the foibles of his
+friend the attorney. What they never dream of is the flinging over each
+other's defects the general cloak of manhood, and rallying at every
+smile of criticism under the general banner of the sex.</p>
+
+<p>But woman, in front of the enemy, piques herself on her <i>solidarit&eacute;</i>.
+Flirt or prude, prim or gay, foolish or wise, woman, once criticised,
+cries to her sisters, and is recognised and defended as woman. All
+feminine comment, all internal censure, is hushed before the foe. The
+tittle-tattle of the gossips, the social intrigues of the dowager, are
+adopted as frankly as the self-devotion of a Miss Nightingale. The door
+of refuge is flung open as widely for the foolish virgins as for the
+wise. All distinctions of age, of conduct, of intelligence, of rank are
+annihilated or forgotten in the presence of the enemy. Every fault is to
+be defended, every weakness to be held stoutly against his attacks. "No
+surrender" is the order of the day. It is only when the criticism of the
+outer world withdraws that woman's internal criticism recommences. This
+is, indeed, half the offence of outer assailants, that they suspend and
+injure the working of that inner discipline which woman exerts over
+woman. Mrs. Proudie, it has been said, is the Church.</p>
+
+<p>Women certainly present the only analogy in the present day to that
+claim of internal jurisdiction for which the Church struggled so
+gallantly in the middle ages. No one who sees the serried ranks with
+which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260"></a>[<a href="./images/260.png">260</a>]</span>she encounters all investigation from without would imagine the
+severity with which she administers justice within. Like the Westphalian
+Vehm-gericht, the mystery of feminine courts is only equalled by their
+terrible sentences. Mrs. Grundy on the seat of justice is a Rhadamanthus
+to whom criticism may fairly leave an erring sister. But all this in
+nowise weakens the firmness of woman's attitude before an outer foe. She
+claims absolute right to all hanging, drawing, and quartering on her
+domains. Like a feudal baron, she will yield to no man her stocks and
+her gallows. But to judge from the prim front of her squares, the
+cordial grasp of hand-in-hand with which they form to resist all
+masculine charges, no one would imagine the ruthless severity with which
+woman was breaking some poor drummer-boy inside.</p>
+
+<p>We are bound, however, to add, that in all our remarks we have only been
+nibbling at the outer rind of a great difficulty. Woman has
+characteristically fallen back on a grand principle, and has asserted
+her absolute immunity from all criticism whatever. It is not merely that
+this critic is deaf or that critic malignant, that one censor is
+ignorant and another basely envious of woman. All this special pleading
+is totally flung aside, and the defence stands on a basis of the most
+uncompromising sort. No man, it is asserted, can judge woman, because no
+man can understand her. She is the Sphinx of modern investigation, and
+man is not fated to be her &OElig;dipus. We can conceive of few
+announcements more welcome, if it be only true.</p>
+
+<p>In an age when everything seems pretty well <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261"></a>[<a href="./images/261.png">261</a>]</span>discovered, when one cannot
+preserve even a shred of mystery to cloak the bareness of one's life,
+when the very surface of the globe is all mapped out, and the mysterious
+griffins of untraversed deserts are vanishing from the map, it is an
+amazing relief to know that an unsolved, nay more, that an insoluble,
+mystery is standing on one's very hearth-rug. No wonder great
+philosophers have spent their lives in vain in looking for the riddle of
+existence, when they never dreamt of looking for it at home. Why woman
+is so peculiarly mysterious, why the laws of her nature are so specially
+unintelligible to a common world, we have not yet been informed. What is
+asserted is simply the fact of this mystery, and before that great fact
+criticism retires.</p>
+
+<p>All that remains for it is to pray and to wait, to hope for a revelation
+from within, since it is forbidden any exploration from without. Some
+prophetess, no doubt a veiled prophetess herself, will arise to lift the
+veil of her sex. Woman, let us hope, will at last unriddle woman. Smit
+by the sunbeams, or rather by the moonbeams, of self-discovery, the
+Sphinx of modern times will reveal in weird and superhuman music the
+mystery of her existence.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262"></a>[<a href="./images/262.png">262</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>MISTRESS AND MAID ON DRESS AND UNDRESS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>No one with a soul to appreciate the extra-judicial utterances of Mr.
+Samuel Warren can have forgotten the memorable lament over the decline
+and fall of the fine old English maid-servant with which, some years
+ago, he introduced some cases of petty larceny to the notice of the
+grand-jurors of Hull. The alarm sounded with such touching eloquence
+from the judgment-seat was taken up last autumn, if we remember, by a
+venerable Countess, who, in an address to an assemblage of Cumbrian
+lasses, aspirants to the kitchen and the dairy, took occasion to read
+them a lecture on the duty of dressing with the simplicity befitting
+their station. Both the learned Recorder and the venerable Countess were
+animated by the best intentions. Their advice was excellent, and we
+sincerely trust that it may have induced the neat-handed Phyllis of the
+North to curb her immoderate taste for finery. These sporadic warnings
+seem likely to ripen at last into action.</p>
+
+<p>From a letter lately inserted in the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, we learn that
+a "Clergyman's Wife" has long been brooding in silent indignation over
+"the present disgraceful style of dress among female servants." Her
+disgust finds vent in a manifesto to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263"></a>[<a href="./images/263.png">263</a>]</span>mistresses of Great Britain,
+in which, after painting the evil in the darkest possible colors, she
+ends by suggesting a remedy for it. Dress, we are told, among "the lower
+orders of females," has arrived at a pitch which has wholly changed the
+aspect and character of our towns and country villages. Neither
+preachers nor good books can avail to stop it. Bad women are fearfully
+increased in number, good wives and mothers are getting rare. In
+consequence of the reckless expenditure of women upon their dress,
+husbands become drunkards, and murder too commonly follows. The remedy
+for this terrible state of things is to be found in the following
+"proposition:"&mdash;The ladies of England are to form an association,
+pledging themselves to adopt, each family for themselves, a uniform for
+their female servants, and to admit none into their service who refuse
+to wear it.</p>
+
+<p>The uniform is not to be old-fashioned or disfiguring, but merely neat,
+simple, and consequently becoming. The following ornaments are to be
+absolutely prohibited&mdash;"feathers, flowers, brooches, buckles or clasps,
+earrings, lockets, neck-ribbons and velvets, kid-gloves, parasols,
+sashes, jackets, Garibaldis, all trimming on dresses, crinoline, or
+steel of any kind." No dress to touch the ground. No pads, frisettes, no
+chignons, no hair-ribbons. Having swept away by a stroke of the pen all
+this mass of finery, a "Clergyman's Wife" goes on to make some
+"suggestions," which we quote for the edification of our lady readers:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Morning dress: Lilac print, calico apron, linen <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264"></a>[<a href="./images/264.png">264</a>]</span>collar. Afternoon
+dress: Some lighter print, muslin apron, linen collar and cuffs.
+Sundays: a neat alpaca dress, linen collar and cuffs, or frill tacked
+into the neck of the dress, a black apron, a black shawl, a medium straw
+bonnet with ribbons and strings of the same color, a bow of the same
+inside, and a slight cap across the forehead, thread or cotton gloves, a
+small cotton or alpaca umbrella to keep off sun and rain. The winter
+Sunday dress: Linsey dress, shepherd's plaid shawl, black straw bonnet.
+A plain brown or black turndown straw hat with a rosette of the same
+color, and fastened on with elastic, should be possessed by all servants
+for common use, and is indispensable for nursemaids walking out with
+children. Should servants be in mourning, the same neat style must be
+observed&mdash;no bugles, or beads, or crape flowers allowed."</p>
+
+<p>The first thing that strikes us in connection with this glib project is
+the enormous difficulty of carrying it into execution. It is easy, we
+all know, to call spirits from the vasty deep, but exceedingly difficult
+to induce them to obey the summons. It is easy, and to feminine
+ingenuity rather pleasant than otherwise, to devise sumptuary laws for
+the kitchen. But it is quite another thing to try to enforce them. By
+what coercive machinery is Betsy Jane to be forced into the detested
+uniform? We know how deeply the Anglo-Saxon mind resents any social
+"ticketing." Does a "Clergyman's Wife" suppose that the British
+housemaid is exempt from this little weakness common to her race? At any
+rate, we are convinced <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265"></a>[<a href="./images/265.png">265</a>]</span>that she would never subside into a "lilac
+print" or a "neat alpaca" without a tremendous struggle. Her first
+weapon of defence would infallibly be a strike. It is absurd to suppose
+that she would cling to her flowers and parasol with less tenacity than
+cabby to his right of running over people in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>Now, is a "Clergyman's Wife" prepared to face the consequences of such a
+strike? Is she ready for an indefinite time to cook her own dinner, mend
+her own dresses, dust her own rooms, manage her own nursery? What if the
+vengeance of the housemaid menaced by the imposition of a "calico apron"
+or a "medium straw bonnet" should assume a darker form, and a system of
+domestic "rattening" should spread terror through the tranquil
+parsonages of England? Is she prepared to brave the system of
+intimidation by which a union of vindictive cooks and nursery-maids
+might assert their inherent rights to lockets and earrings? Has she the
+nerve to crush the secret plots of kitchen Fenianism? Ultimately, no
+doubt, her efforts might be crowned with success. When that happy time
+arrived, when "her suggestions were generally adopted," and the
+"requirements of ladies, especially those of fortune, were generally
+known" to comprise a uniform for the maid-servant, she might succeed in
+closing the market of domestic service to the flaunting abigail whose
+audacious finery renders her to the outward eye indistinguishable from
+her own daughters.</p>
+
+<p>But as that time would be long in coming, and probably would never
+arrive in her lifetime, she <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266"></a>[<a href="./images/266.png">266</a>]</span>would have to face the discomforts of a
+long period of transition, during which she would have to rely on
+herself and her daughters for the discharge of the various operations of
+the household. Meantime we beg to suggest another way of effecting her
+purpose quite as easy, and much more effectual. Why not go in for an Act
+of Parliament, having for its object the total suppression of the
+instinct of vanity in the female bosom? Let it be enacted that, on and
+after the 1st of next April (the date would be appropriate), feathers,
+flowers, and the other abominations which she seeks to proscribe, shall
+be for ever abjured and disused by the fair sex. As the prelude to that
+full entry on her social and political rights which is nowadays claimed
+for woman, a proposal of this magnitude would commend itself, no doubt,
+to the philosophic section of the House of Commons.</p>
+
+<p>There is another feature in the manifesto of a "Clergyman's Wife" which
+calls for observation. She lays particular stress on securing the
+adhesion to her plan of "families of wealth and distinction," "ladies of
+position and fortune"&mdash;of the leaders of fashion, in short, wherever
+those mysterious but potent decoy-ducks are to be found. Its success
+depends on "making it fashionable to adopt the uniform," on making
+simplicity of dress among maid-servants the sole avenue to the "best
+situations." Now, as it is conceded that the "present disgraceful style
+of dress among servant girls" is the result of their ambition to imitate
+their superiors, it is worth while, in order to estimate both the amount
+of their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267"></a>[<a href="./images/267.png">267</a>]</span>responsibility for the said disgrace and the chances of
+success of the proposed reform, to glance from the style of dress in
+vogue in the kitchen to the style of dress in vogue in the drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>Oddly enough, on the very day on which a "Clergyman's Wife" was
+permitted to ventilate her project in the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, the
+public was favored with the latest intelligence on this point, in the
+columns of a fashionable contemporary. Paris, we all know, is the
+sovereign arbiter of dress to all "ladies of position and fortune" in
+this country, the center of an authority on all matters relating to the
+toilette, which radiates, through "families of distinction and wealth,"
+to those calm retreats where clergymen's wives, in chastely severe
+attire, exchange hospitalities with their neighbors. What is the
+fashionable style of dress in Paris at the present moment? The
+correspondent of our contemporary shall speak for himself. "We are
+living," he says, "in an age which seems to be reviving the classical
+period in the history of drapery. You see pretty nearly as much of the
+female <i>torso</i> now as the Athenians did when the bas-reliefs of the
+Parthenon copied the modes of the Greeks so many hundred years ago, and
+when the multitude did not worship the drapery of the goddess only."</p>
+
+<p>After some piquant remarks on the style of dress in the theatres, he
+goes on to inform us how "in the more refined and virtuous society" the
+ladies are dressing this winter. "At a <i>f&ecirc;te</i> graced by all that is
+elegant, refined, and aristocratic in Paris," he observed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268"></a>[<a href="./images/268.png">268</a>]</span>the duchess,
+the countess, and the baroness imitating the costly toilettes of the
+<i>demi-monde</i>, arrayed like one of them precisely, in the very height of
+fashion. We are favored with a minute account of one representative
+toilette in the room:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The lady is of a noble Hungarian family, fair, with that dark brown
+reddish hair which is just going to begin to be golden, but never shines
+out. Pale oval face, heavy eyebrows, bright bronze eyes. Small festoons
+of hair over the brow, imprisoned by a golden metal band. Behind a
+Bismarck chignon. A mass of twisted hair, in a sort of Laocoon agony,
+was decorated with small insects (of course I don't mean anything
+impossible), glittering gem-like beetles from the Brazils. Three long
+curls hang from the imposing mass, and could be worn before or behind,
+and be made to perform&mdash;as I witnessed&mdash;all sorts of coquettish
+tricks.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Now for the dress. Well, there is nothing to describe till
+you get very nearly down to the waist. A pretty bit of lace on a band
+wanders over the shoulder; the back is bare very low down, and more of
+the bust is seen than even last year's fashions permitted.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. You may,
+as far as I could observe, dress or half-dress just as you like; caprice
+has taken the place of uniform fashion. As the panorama of <i>grandes
+dames</i> floats before my mind's eye, I come to the conclusion that I have
+seen more of those ladies than one could have hoped or expected in so
+brief a space of time."</p>
+
+<p>This, then, is, or shortly will be, in a tasteless and exaggerated form,
+the style of dress among those <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269"></a>[<a href="./images/269.png">269</a>]</span>"ladies of distinction" whose
+co-operation a "Clergyman's Wife" fondly hopes to enlist in her scheme
+for purging the kitchen of its "disgraceful" finery. It is just possible
+that she has not heard of these things. Perhaps in the retirement of the
+parsonage, with her eyes intently fixed on the moral havoc which dress
+is causing among "the lower orders of females," she has assumed that the
+dress of the higher orders of females is irreproachably modest and
+correct. If so, we are sorry to have to dispel an illusion which would
+go far to justify the self-complacent tone of her lecture. But unless
+she is blissfully ignorant of contemporary fashions in any sphere more
+elevated than the kitchen, we are struck with astonishment at the
+hardihood of an appeal at the present moment to ladies of fashion.</p>
+
+<p>Is a being whose avowed object is to imitate as exactly as possible the
+cosmetic tricks of the <i>demi-monde</i> likely to prove an influential ally
+in a crusade against cheap finery? Is a mistress whose head-gear
+resembles the art-trophy of an eccentric hair-dresser, and whose
+clothing is described as nothing to speak of "until you get very nearly
+down to the waist," the person to be especially selected to preach
+propriety of dress to her maid? Or is it that a "Clergyman's Wife"
+objects to overdress only, and not to underdress; and that, while she
+would repress with severity any attempt on the part of "females of the
+lower order" to adorn their persons, she looks with a tolerant eye,
+among "ladies of position and fortune," upon the nude? We are curious to
+know at what point <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270"></a>[<a href="./images/270.png">270</a>]</span>in the social scale she would draw the line above
+which an unblushing exhibition of the female <i>torso</i> is decent, and
+below which earrings and a parasol are immoral.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, so far from discouraging the passion for dress
+among their female dependents, ladies of position and fortune are apt to
+insist on their dressing smartly. They like to see some of their own
+lustre reflected on their attendants. A dowdy in sad-colored print or
+linsey is by no means to their taste. This has been well pointed out in
+a letter in which a "Maid-servant" replied, through the <i>Pall Mall
+Gazette</i>, to the project of reform proposed by a "Clergyman's Wife."
+Looking at the question from her own point of view, she described in
+plain words how, when she first went into service, she had wished to
+dress simply, but was quickly made to understand that she must either
+spend more of her wages on dress, or seek another situation. We believe
+that her experience would be endorsed by the great majority of her
+class. If a "Clergyman's Wife" would take the pains to inquire into the
+facts of the case, she would not be long in ascertaining from what
+quarter the signal for unbecoming finery among "females of the lower
+orders" really comes.</p>
+
+<p>The plain truth of the matter is, that a reform in the dress of "lower
+class females," and maid-servants in particular, can only be brought
+about in one way. The reaction in favor of a neat and simple style must
+come from above, and not from below; in the way of example, not of
+precept. When "ladies of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271"></a>[<a href="./images/271.png">271</a>]</span>position and fortune" cease to lavish their
+thousands on millinery, their copyists in the nursery and kitchen will
+cease to spend their wages on a similar object. When every one above the
+rank of a governess dresses in a manner suitable to her station,
+complaints will be no longer heard about "unbecoming" finery below
+stairs. The chief incentive to showy dress among the "lower orders of
+females" is unquestionably a desire to ape the extravagance of their
+betters. Remove that incentive, and the evil which a "Clergyman's Wife"
+so forcibly deplores will soon cure itself.</p>
+
+<p>We hope that she may be induced to turn her reforming zeal into another
+direction. Instead of indulging in childish projects for putting the
+Sunday-school, and the church singers, and maid-servants, and the lower
+orders of females generally into uniforms, let her attack the mischief
+at its root, and persuade the fine ladies of the earth to curtail their
+monstrous prodigality and immodest vagaries in dress. Let her add her
+warning voice to that of the Head of Latin Christianity, who has
+recently denounced this scandal of the age with the same perennial vigor
+that characterizes his anathemas on the Subalpine Government.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272"></a>[<a href="./images/272.png">272</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>&AElig;STHETIC WOMAN.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is the peculiar triumph of woman in this nineteenth century that she
+has made the conquest of Art. Our grandmothers lived in the kitchen, and
+debased their finer faculties to the creation of puddings and pies. They
+spun, they knitted, they mended, they darned, they kept the accounts of
+the household, and scolded the maids. From this underground existence of
+barbaric ages woman has at last come forth into the full sunshine of
+artistic day; she has mounted from the kitchen to the studio, the
+sketching-desk has superseded the pudding-board, sonatas have banished
+the knitting-needle, poetry has exterminated weekly accounts. Woman, in
+a word, has realized her mission; it is her characteristic, she tells us
+through a chorus of musical voices, to represent the artistic element of
+the world, to be pre-eminently the &aelig;sthetic creature.</p>
+
+<p>Nature educates her, as Wordsworth sang long ago, into a being of her
+own, sensitive above all to beauty of thought and color, and sound and
+form. Delicate perceptions of evanescent shades and tones, lost to the
+coarser eye and ear of man, exquisite refinements of spiritual
+appreciation, subtle powers of detecting latent harmonics between the
+outer and the inner <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273"></a>[<a href="./images/273.png">273</a>]</span>world of nature and the soul, blend themselves like
+the colors of the prism in the pure white light of woman's organization.
+And so the host of Woman, as it marches to the conquest of this world,
+flaunts over its legions the banner of art.</p>
+
+<p>In one of the occasional passages of real poetic power with which Walt
+Whitman now and then condescends to break the full tide of rhapsody over
+the eternities and the last patent drill, he describes himself as seeing
+two armies in succession go forth to the civil war. First passed the
+legions of Grant and M'Clellan, flushed with patriotic enthusiasm and
+hope of victory, and cheered onward by the shouts of adoring multitudes.
+Behind, silent and innumerable, march the army of the dead. Something,
+we must own, of the same contrast strikes us as we stand humbly aside to
+watch the &aelig;sthetic progress of woman.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible not to feel a certain glow of enthusiastic sympathy as
+the vanguard passes by&mdash;women earnest in aim and effort, artists,
+nursing-sisters, poetesses, doctors, wives, musicians, novelists,
+mathematicians, political economists, in somewhat motley uniform and
+ill-dressed ranks, but full of resolve, independence, and
+self-sacrifice. If we were fighting folk we confess we should be half
+inclined to shout for the rights of woman, and to fall manfully into the
+rank. As it is, we wait patiently for the army behind, for the main
+body&mdash;woman herself. Woman fronts us as noisy, demonstrative, exacting
+in her &aelig;sthetic claims. Nothing can surpass the adroitness with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274"></a>[<a href="./images/274.png">274</a>]</span>which
+she uses her bluer sisters on ahead to clear the way for her gayer
+legions; nothing, at any rate, but the contempt with which she dismisses
+them when their work is done. Their office is to level the stubborn
+incredulity, to set straight the crooked criticisms, of sceptical man,
+and then to disappear. Woman herself takes their place. Art is
+everywhere throughout her host&mdash;for music, the highest of arts, is the
+art of all.</p>
+
+<p>The singers go before, the minstrels follow after, in the midst are the
+damsels playing on the timbrels. The sister Arts have their own
+representatives within the mass. Sketching boasts its thousands, and
+poetry its tens of thousands. A demure band of maidens blend piety with
+art around the standard of Church decoration. Perhaps it is his very
+regard for the first host&mdash;for its earnestness, for its real
+womanhood&mdash;that makes the critic so cynical over the second; perhaps it
+is his very love for art that turns to quiet bitterness as he sees art
+dragged at the heels of foolish virgins. For art <i>is</i> dragged at their
+heels. Woman will have man love her for her own sake; but she loves art
+for the sake of man. Very truly, if with an almost sublime effrontery,
+she re-christens for her own special purposes the great studies that
+fired Raffaelle or Beethoven. She pursues them, she pays for them, not
+as arts, but as accomplishments. Their cultivation is the last touch
+added at her finishing school ere she makes her bow to the world. She
+orders her new duet as she orders her new bonnet, and the two purchases
+have precisely the same <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275"></a>[<a href="./images/275.png">275</a>]</span>significance. She drops her piano and her
+paint-brush as she drops her coquetries and flirtations, when the fish
+is landed and she can throw the bait away. Or, what is worse, she keeps
+them alive as little social enjoyments, as reliefs to the tedium of
+domestic life, as something which fills up the weary hours when she is
+fated to the boredom of rural existence.</p>
+
+<p>A woman of business is counted a strange and remarkable being, we hardly
+know why. Looking coolly at the matter, it seems to us that all women
+are women of business; that their life is spent over the counter; that
+there is nothing in earth or heaven too sacred for their traffic and
+their barter. Love, youth, beauty, a British mother reckons them up on
+her fingers, and tells you to a fraction their value in the market. And
+the pale sentimental being at her side, after flooring one big fellow
+with a bit of Chopin, and another with a highly unintelligible verse of
+Robert Browning, poses herself shyly and asks through appealing eyes,
+"Am I not an &aelig;sthetic creature?"</p>
+
+<p>The answer to this question is best read, perhaps, in the musical aspect
+of woman. Bold as the assumption sounds, it is quietly assumed that
+every woman is naturally musical. Music is the great accomplishment, and
+the logic of her schools proves to demonstration that every girl has
+fingers and an ear. In a wonderful number of cases the same logic proves
+that girls have a voice. Anyhow, the assumption moulds the very course
+of female existence. The morning is spent in practicing, and the evening
+in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276"></a>[<a href="./images/276.png">276</a>]</span>airing the results of the practice. There are country-houses where
+one only rushes away from the elaborate Thalberg of midnight to be
+roused up at dawn by the Battle of Prague on the piano in the
+school-room over-head. Still we all reconcile ourselves to this
+perpetual rattle, because we know that a musical being has to be
+educated into existence, and that a woman is necessarily a musical
+being. A glance, indeed, at what we may call the life of the piano
+explains the necessity.</p>
+
+<p>Music is pre-eminently the social art; no art draws people so
+conveniently together, no art so lends itself to conversation, no art is
+in a maidenly sense at once so agreeable, so easy to acquire, and so
+eminently useful. A flirtation is never conducted under greater
+advantages than amid the deafening thunders of a grand finale; the
+victim doomed to the bondage of turning over is chained to the
+fascination of fine arms and delicate hands. Talk, too, may be conducted
+without much trouble over music on the small principles of female
+criticism. "Pretty" and "exquisite" go a great way with the Italian and
+the Romantic schools; "sublime" does pretty universally for the German.
+The opera is, of course, the crown and sum of things, the most charming
+and social of lounges, the readiest of conversational topics. It must be
+a very happy Guardsman indeed who cannot kindle over the Flower-song or
+the Jewel-scene. And it is at the opera that woman is supreme. The
+strange mingling of eye and ear, the confused appeal to every sensuous
+faculty, the littleness as well as the greatness <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277"></a>[<a href="./images/277.png">277</a>]</span>of it all, echo the
+conclusion within woman herself.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover there is no boredom&mdash;no absolute appeal to thought or deeper
+feeling. It is in good taste to drop in after the first act, and to
+leave before the last. It is true that an opera is supposed to be the
+great creation of a great artist, and an artist's work is presumed to
+have a certain order and unity of its own; but woman is the Queen of
+Art, and it is hard if she may not display her royalty by docking the
+Fidelio of its head and its tail. But, if woman is obliged to content
+herself with mutilating art in the opera or the concert-room, she is
+able to create art itself over her piano. A host of Claribels and
+Rosalies exist simply because woman is a musical creature. We turn over
+the heap of rubbish on the piano with a sense of wonder, and ask,
+without hope of an answer, why nine-tenths of our modern songs are
+written at all, or why, being written, they can find a publisher.</p>
+
+<p>But the answer is a simple one, after all; it is merely that &aelig;sthetic
+creatures, that queens of art and of song, cannot play good music and
+can play bad.</p>
+
+<p>There is not a publisher in London who would not tell us that the
+patronage of musical women is simply a patronage of trash. The fact is
+that woman is a very practical being, and she has learned by experience
+that trash pays better than good music for her own special purposes; and
+when these purposes are attained she throws good music and bad music
+aside with a perfect impartiality. It is with a certain feeling of
+equity, as well as of content, that the betrothed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278"></a>[<a href="./images/278.png">278</a>]</span>one resigns her sway
+over the keys. She has played and won, and now she holds it hardly fair
+that she should interfere with other people's game. So she lounges into
+a corner, and leaves her Broadwood to those who have practical work to
+do. Her <i>r&ocirc;le</i> in life has no need of accomplishments, and as for the
+serious study of music as an art, as to any real love of it or loyalty
+to it, that is the business of "professional people," and not of British
+mothers. Only she would have her girls remember that nothing is in
+better taste than for young people to show themselves artistic.</p>
+
+<p>Music only displays on the grand scale the laws which in less obtrusive
+form govern the whole &aelig;sthetic life of woman. Painting, for instance,
+dwindles in her hands into the "sketch;" the brown sands in the
+foreground, the blue wash of the sea, and the dab of rock behind. Not a
+very lofty or amusing thing, one would say at first sight; but, if one
+thinks of it, an eminently practical thing, rapid and easy of execution,
+not mewing the artist up in solitary studio, but lending itself
+gracefully to picnics and groups of a picturesque sort on cliff and
+boulder, and whispered criticism from faces peeping over one's shoulder.
+Serious painting woman can leave comfortably to Academicians and
+rough-bearded creatures of the Philip Firmin type, though even here she
+feels, as she glances round the walls of the Academy, that she is
+creating art as she is creating music. She dwells complacently on the
+home tendencies of modern painting, on the wonderful succession of
+squares of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279"></a>[<a href="./images/279.png">279</a>]</span>domestic canvas, on the nursemaid carrying children up
+stairs in one picture, on the nursemaid carrying children down stairs in
+the next. She has her little crow of triumph over the great artist who
+started with a lofty ideal, and has come down to painting the red
+stockings of little girls in green-baize pews, or the wonderful
+counterpanes and marvellous bed-curtains of sleeping innocents. She
+knows that the men who are forced to paint these things growl contempt
+over their own creations, but the very growl is a tribute to woman's
+supremacy. It is a great thing when woman can wring from an artist a
+hundred "pot-boilers," while man can only give him an order for a single
+"Light of the World."</p>
+
+<p>One field of art, indeed, woman claims for her own. Man may build
+churches as long as he leaves woman to decorate them. A crowning
+demonstration of her &aelig;sthetic faculties meet us on every festival in
+wreath and text and monogram, in exquisitely moulded pillars turned into
+grotesque corkscrews, in tracery broken by strips of greenery, in paper
+flowers and every variety of gilt gingerbread. But it may be questioned
+whether art is the sole aim of the ecclesiastical picnic out of which
+decorations spring. The chatty groups dotted over the aisle, the
+constant appeals to the curate, the dainty little screams and giggles as
+the ladder shakes beneath those artistic feet, the criticism of cousins
+who have looked in quite accidentally for a peep, the half-consecrated
+flirtations in the vestry, ally art even here to those practical
+purposes which &aelig;sthetic woman never forgets. Were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280"></a>[<a href="./images/280.png">280</a>]</span>she, indeed, once to
+forget them, she might become a Dr. Mary Walker; she might even become a
+George Sand. In other words, she might find herself an artist, loving
+and studying art for its own sake, solitary, despised, eccentric, and
+blue. From such a destiny &aelig;sthetic woman turns scornfully away.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281"></a>[<a href="./images/281.png">281</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?</h2>
+
+
+<p>This is a question which one half the world is asking the other half,
+with very wild answers as the result. Woman's work seems to be in these
+days everything that it was not in times past, and nothing that it was.
+Professions are undertaken and careers invaded which were formerly held
+sacred to men, while things are left undone which, for all the
+generations that the world has lasted, have been naturally and
+instinctively assigned to women to do. From the savage squaw gathering
+fuel or drawing water for the wigwam, to the lady giving up the keys to
+her housekeeper, housekeeping has been considered one of the primary
+functions of women. The man to provide, the woman to dispense; the man
+to do the rough initial work of bread-winning, whether as a half-naked
+barbarian hunting live meat, or as a city clerk painfully scoring lines
+of rugged figures, the woman to cook the meat when got, and to lay out
+to the best advantage for the family the quarter's salary gained by
+casting up ledgers, and writing advices and bills of lading.</p>
+
+<p>Take human society in any phase we like, we must come down to these
+radical conditions; and any system which ignores this division of labor,
+and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282"></a>[<a href="./images/282.png">282</a>]</span>confounds these separate functions, is of necessity imperfect and
+wrong. We have nothing whatever to say against the professional
+self-support of women who have no men to work for them, and who must
+therefore work for themselves in order to live. In what direction soever
+they can best make their way, let them take it. Brains and intellectual
+gifts are of no sex and no condition, and it is far more important that
+good work should be done than that it should be done by this or that
+particular set of workers.</p>
+
+<p>But we are speaking of the home duties of married women, and of those
+girls who have no need to earn their daily bread, and who are not so
+specially gifted as to be driven afield by the irrepressible power of
+genius. We are speaking of women who cannot help in the family income,
+but who can both save and improve in the home; women whose lives now are
+one long day of idleness, <i>ennui</i>, and vagrant imagination, because they
+despise the activities into which they were born, while seeking outlets
+for their energies impossible to them both by nature and social
+restrictions.</p>
+
+<p>It is strange to see into what unreasonable disrepute active
+housekeeping&mdash;woman's first natural duty&mdash;has fallen in England. Take a
+family with four or five hundred a year&mdash;and we know how small a sum
+that is for "genteel humanity" in these days&mdash;the wife who will be an
+active housekeeper, even with such an income, will be an exception to
+the rule; and the daughters who will be anything more than drawing-room
+dolls waiting for husbands to transfer them to a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283"></a>[<a href="./images/283.png">283</a>]</span>home of their own,
+where they may be as useless as they are now, will be rarer still. For
+things are getting worse, not better, and our young women are less
+useful even than their mothers; while these last do not, as a rule, come
+near the good housekeeping ladies of olden times, who knew every secret
+of domestic economy, and made a point of honor of a wise and pleasant
+"distribution of bread."</p>
+
+<p>The usual method of London housekeeping, even in the second ranks of the
+middle-classes, is for the mistress to give her orders in the kitchen in
+the morning, leaving the cook to pass them on to the tradespeople when
+they call. If she is not very indolent, and if she has a due regard for
+neatness and cleanliness, she may supplement her kitchen commands by
+going up stairs through some of the bedrooms; but after a kind word of
+advice to the housemaid if she is sweet-tempered, or a harsh word of
+censure if she is of the cross-grained type, her work in that department
+will be done, and her duties for the day are at an end. There is none of
+the clever marketing by which fifty per cent. is saved in the outlay if
+a woman knows what she is about, and how to buy; none of the personal
+superintendence so encouraging to servants when genially performed, and
+rendering slighted work impossible; none of that "seeing to things"
+herself, or doing the finer parts of the work with her own hands, which
+used to form part of a woman's unquestioned duty. She gives her orders,
+weighs out her supplies, then leaves the maids to do the best they know
+or the worst they will, according to the degree <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284"></a>[<a href="./images/284.png">284</a>]</span>in which they are
+supplied with faculty or conscience. Many women boast that their
+housekeeping takes them perhaps an hour, perhaps half an hour, in the
+morning, and no more; and they think themselves clever and commendable
+in proportion to the small amount of time given to their largest family
+duty. This is all very well where the income is such as to secure
+first-class servants&mdash;professors of certain specialities of knowledge,
+and far in advance of the mistress; but how about the comfort of the
+house with this hasty generalship, when the maids are mere scrubs who
+would have to go through years of training before they were worth their
+salt? It may be very well too in large households governed by general
+system, and not by individual ruling; but where the service is scant and
+poor, it is a stupidly uncomfortable as well as a wasteful way of
+housekeeping. It is analogous to English cookery&mdash;a revolting poverty of
+result with flaring prodigality of means; all the pompous paraphernalia
+of tradespeople, and their carts, and their red-books for orders, with
+nothing worth the trouble of booking, and everything of less quantity
+and lower quality than might be if personal pains were taken, which is
+always the best economy practicable.</p>
+
+<p>What is there in practical housekeeping less honorable than the ordinary
+work of middle-class gentlewomen? and why should women shrink from doing
+for utility, and for the general comfort of the family, what they would
+do at any time for vanity or idleness? No one need go into extremes, and
+wish our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285"></a>[<a href="./images/285.png">285</a>]</span>middle-class gentlewomen to become Cinderellas sitting among
+the kitchen ashes, Nausica&auml;s washing linen, or Penelopes spending their
+lives in needlework only. But, without undertaking anything unpleasant
+to her senses or degrading to her condition, a lady might do hundreds of
+things that are now left undone in a house altogether, or are given up
+to the coarse handling of servants, and domestic life would gain
+infinitely in consequence.</p>
+
+<p>What degradation, for instance, is there in cookery? and how much more
+home happiness would there not be if wives would take in hand that great
+cold-mutton question! But women are both selfish and small on this
+point. Born for the most part with very feebly developed gustativeness,
+they affect to despise the stronger instinct in men, and think it low
+and sensual if they are expected to give any special attention to the
+meals of the man who provides the meat. This contempt for good living is
+one cause of the ignorance there is among them of how to secure good
+living. Those horrible traditions of "plain roast and boiled" cling
+about them as articles of culinary faith; and because they have reached
+no higher knowledge for themselves, they decide that no one else shall
+go beyond them.</p>
+
+<p>For one middle-class gentlewoman who understands anything about cookery,
+or who really cares for it as a scientific art or domestic necessity,
+there are ten thousand who do not; yet our mothers and grandmothers were
+not ashamed to be known as deft professors, and homes were happier in
+proportion to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286"></a>[<a href="./images/286.png">286</a>]</span>respect paid to the stewpan and the stockpot. And
+cookery is more interesting now than it was then, because more advanced,
+more scientific, and with improved appliances; and, at the same time, it
+is of confessedly more importance. It may seem humiliating, to those who
+go in for spirit pure and simple, to speak of the condition of the soul
+as in any way determined by beef and cabbage; but it is so,
+nevertheless, the connection between food and virtue, food and thought,
+being a very close one; and the sooner wives recognise this connection
+the better for them and for their husbands.</p>
+
+<p>The clumsy savagery of a plain cook, or the vile messes of a fourth-rate
+confectioner, are absolute sins in a house where a woman has all her
+senses, and can, if she will, attend personally to the cooking. Many
+things pass for crimes which are really not so bad as this. But how
+seldom now do we find a house where the lady does look after the
+cooking, where clean hands and educated brains are put to active service
+for the good of others! The trouble would be too great in our fine-lady
+days, even if there was the requisite ability; but there is as little
+ability as there is energy, and the plain cook with her savagery, or the
+fourth-rate confectioner with his rancid pastry, have it all their own
+way, according to the election of economy or ostentation.</p>
+
+<p>If by chance one stumbles on a household where the woman does not
+disdain housewifely work, and specially the practical superintendence of
+the kitchen, there we may be sure we shall find cheerfulness and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287"></a>[<a href="./images/287.png">287</a>]</span>content. There seems to be something in the life of a practical
+housekeeper that answers to the needs of a woman's best nature, and that
+makes her pleasant and good-tempered. Perhaps it is the consciousness
+that she is doing her duty&mdash;of itself a wonderful sweetener of the
+nature; perhaps the greater amount of bodily exercise keeps the liver in
+good tone; whatever the cause, sure it is that the homes of the active
+housekeepers are more harmonious than those of the feckless and
+do-nothing sort. Yet the snobbish half of the middle-classes holds
+housewifely work as degrading, save in the trumpery pretentiousness of
+"giving orders."</p>
+
+<p>A woman may sit in a dirty drawing-room which the slipshod maid has not
+had time to clean, but she must not take a duster in her hands and
+polish the legs of the chairs; there is no disgrace in the dirt, only in
+the duster. She may do fancy work of no earthly use, but she must not be
+caught making a gown. Indeed very few women could make one, and as few
+will do plain needlework. They will braid and embroider, "cut holes, and
+sew them up again," and spend any amount of time and money on beads and
+wools for messy draperies which no one wants; the end, being finery,
+sanctions the toil and refines it; but they will not do things of any
+practical use, or if they are compelled by the exigencies of
+circumstances, they think themselves petty martyrs, and badly used by
+the fates.</p>
+
+<p>The whole scheme of woman's life at this present time is untenable and
+unfair. She wants to have all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288"></a>[<a href="./images/288.png">288</a>]</span>the pleasures and none of the
+disagreeables. Her husband goes to the city, and does monotonous and
+unpleasant work there; but his wife thinks herself in very evil case if
+asked to do monotonous housework at home. Yet she does nothing more
+elevating or more advantageous. Novel-reading, fancy-work, visiting,
+letter-writing, sum up her ordinary occupations; and she considers these
+more to the point than practical housekeeping. In fact it becomes a
+serious question what women think themselves sent into the world for,
+what they hold themselves designed by God to be or to do. They grumble
+at having children, and at the toil and anxiety which a family entails;
+they think themselves degraded to the level of servants if they have to
+do any practical housework whatever; they assert their equality with
+man, and express their envy of his life, yet show themselves incapable
+of learning the first lesson set to men, that of doing what they do not
+like to do. What, then, do they want? What do they hold themselves made
+for?</p>
+
+<p>Certainly some of the more benevolent sort carry their energies out of
+doors, and leave such prosaic matters as savory dinners and fast
+shirt-buttons for committees and charities, where they get excitement
+and <i>kudos</i> together. Others give themselves up to what they call
+keeping up society, which means being more at home in every person's
+house than their own; and some do a little weak art, and others a little
+feeble literature; but there are very few indeed who honestly buckle to
+the natural duties of their position, and who bear with the tedium of
+home work as men <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289"></a>[<a href="./images/289.png">289</a>]</span>bear with the tedium of office work. The little
+royalty of home is the last place where a woman cares to shine, and the
+most uninteresting of all the domains she seeks to govern. Fancy a
+high-souled creature, capable of &aelig;sthetics, giving her mind to soup or
+the right proportion of chutnee for the curry! Fancy, too, a brilliant
+creature foregoing an evening's conversational glory abroad for the sake
+of a prosaic husband's more prosaic dinner! He comes home tired from
+work, and desperately in need of a good dinner as a restorative; but the
+plain cook gives him cold meat and pickles, or an abomination which she
+calls hash, and the brilliant creature, full of mind, thinks the desire
+for anything else rank sensuality.</p>
+
+<p>It seems a little hard, certainly, on the unhappy fellow who works at
+the mill for such a return; but women believe that men are made only to
+work at the mill that they may receive the grist accruing, and be kept
+in idleness and uselessness all their lives. They have no idea of
+lightening the labor of that mill-round by doing their own natural work
+cheerfully and diligently. They will do everything but what they ought
+to do; they will make themselves doctors, committee-women, printers,
+what not, but they won't learn cooking, and they won't keep their own
+houses. There never was a time when women were less the helpmates of men
+than they are at present; when there was such a wide division between
+the interests and the sympathies of the sexes in the endeavor, on the
+one side, to approximate their pursuits.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290"></a>[<a href="./images/290.png">290</a>]</span>
+There is a great demand made now for more work for woman, and wider
+fields for her labor. We confess we should feel a deeper interest in the
+question if we saw more energy and conscience put into the work lying to
+her hand at home, and we hold that she ought to perform perfectly the
+duties instinctive to her sex before claiming those hitherto held remote
+from her natural condition. Much of this demand, too, springs from
+restlessness and dissatisfaction; little, if any, from higher
+aspirations or nobler unused energies. Indeed, the nobler the woman the
+more thoroughly she will do her own proper work, in the spirit of old
+George Herbert's well-worn line, and the less she will feel herself
+above her work. It is only the weak who cannot raise their circumstances
+to the level of their thoughts; only the poor who cannot enrich their
+deeds by their thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>That very much of this demand for more power of work comes from
+necessity and the absolute need of bread, we know; and that the demand
+will grow louder as marriage becomes scarcer, and there are more women
+left adrift in the world without the protection and help of men, we also
+know. But this belongs to another part of the subject. What we want to
+insist on now is the pitiable ignorance and shiftless indolence of most
+middle-class housekeepers; and we would urge on woman the value of a
+better system of life at home, before laying claim to the discharge of
+extra-domestic duties abroad.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291"></a>[<a href="./images/291.png">291</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>PAPAL WOMAN.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The wonderful instinct which has always guided the Papacy in
+distinguishing between forces that it may safely oppose and forces
+before which it must surrender, has just received a startling
+illustration in a scene reported to have taken place at the Vatican a
+few days ago. Rome may refuse all compromise with Italy, but even Rome
+shrinks from encountering the hostility of woman. The Brief of October
+last sounded, indeed, marvellously like a declaration of war; even in a
+Pope it argued no little resolution to denounce the "license of the
+female toilet," the "fantastic character of woman's head-dress," and the
+"scandalous indecency" of woman's attire. More worldly critics would
+hardly have ventured to describe a piquant chignon or a suggestive
+boddice as "a propaganda of the devil;" it will be long, at any rate,
+before censors of this class will meet with the reward of a deputation
+and a testimonial from the fair objects of their criticism.</p>
+
+<p>St. Peter, however, we are adroitly reminded, after his miraculous
+delivery from prison by an angel, found an asylum among women; and,
+fresh from his troubles with the red-shirts of Monte Rotondo, the
+successor of St. Peter seems to have found himself <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292"></a>[<a href="./images/292.png">292</a>]</span>wonderfully at home
+among the flounces that thronged the other day to his public audience at
+the Vatican. A hundred ladies&mdash;the presence amongst whom of a number of
+English Catholics gives us a national interest in the scene&mdash;came
+forward to express their gratitude for the censures of the Papal Briefs,
+and the adhesion of their sex to the orthodox doctrines of the toilet.
+The speech in which one of the fair deputation expressed the sentiments
+of her fellows has been unfortunately suppressed, but the letter of Pope
+Pius to the Bishop of Orleans explains the secret of this dramatic
+reconciliation, and the terms of the Concordat which has been arranged
+between Woman and the Papacy.</p>
+
+<p>A common danger has driven the two Powers to this fresh alliance. If
+Garabaldi threatens the supremacy of the Holy See, the educational
+reforms of M. Duruy menace the domestic tyranny of woman. Woman sees
+herself in peril of deposition at home by the same spirit of democratic
+and intellectual equality which would drive the Pope from the Vatican.
+In presence of such a peril, mutual concession becomes easy, and the
+fair votaries pardon all references to their "propaganda of the devil"
+in consideration of a Papal assault on the "cynical writers who are
+desirous of attacking woman."</p>
+
+<p>The motive of the Papacy, in opposing a system of education which
+emancipates woman from the intellectual control of the priesthood and
+plunges her into the midst of the doubts and questionings of sceptical
+man, is of course plain enough. We feel <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293"></a>[<a href="./images/293.png">293</a>]</span>no particular surprise when the
+attendance of girls at the public classes of a Professor is denounced as
+tending to "despoil woman of her native modesty, to drag her before the
+public, to turn her from domestic life and duties, to puff her up with
+vain and false science." It is the adhesion of woman to this view of the
+case which puzzles us a little at first. We recall her aspirations after
+a higher training, and her bitter contempt for the unhappy censors who
+venture to remind her of certain primary truths respecting puddings and
+pies.</p>
+
+<p>But the same problem meets us in other halls than those of the Vatican.
+Everywhere woman poses herself as a social martyr, as the victim of
+conventional bonds, as reduced to intellectual torpor by the refusal of
+intellectual facilities and intellectual distinctions, as excluded by
+sheer masculine tyranny from the larger sphere of thought and action
+which the world presents, as chained, like Prometheus, to the rock of
+home by necessity and force. It is only when some amiable enthusiast is
+taken in by all this admirable acting, and ventures to propose a plan
+for her deliverance, that one finds how wonderfully contented, after
+all, woman is with her bonds and her prison-house.</p>
+
+<p>The philosopher who comes forward with his pet theory of the
+enfranchisement of woman, who recognizes the necessity for loosening the
+matrimonial tie, for securing to woman her property and its
+responsibilities, for levelling all educational differences and
+abolishing all social distinctions between the sexes, only finds himself
+snubbed for his pains. He is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294"></a>[<a href="./images/294.png">294</a>]</span>calmly assured that home is the sphere of
+woman, and the care of a family the first of woman's duties; the
+domestic martyr of yesterday proves from Proverbs and the <i>Princess</i>
+that marriage is the completion of woman, and that her office is but to
+wed the "noble music" of her feminine nature to the "noble words" of the
+nature of her spouse.</p>
+
+<p>In a word, woman knows her own business a great deal better than her
+friends. She does not believe in the intellectual equality which she is
+always preaching about, and when M. Duruy offers it, a shriek of horror
+goes up from half the mothers of France. What she does believe is that,
+in seeking the educational Will-o'-the-Wisp, she may lose the solid
+pudding of domestic supremacy, and domestic supremacy is worth all the
+sciences in the world. Her position, as the Vatican suggests, is a
+religious, not an intellectual one, and her policy lies in an alliance
+with the priesthood, whose position is one with her own. So woman makes
+her submission to the Papacy, and the Pope snubs M. Duruy.</p>
+
+<p>It is amusing to see how limited, after all, a man's power, the power
+even of the stoutest of men, is in his own house, and to watch the
+simple process by which woman establishes the limitation. It consists
+simply in asserting a specially religious character for her sex. She is
+never tired of telling us that the sentiments and sympathies of the
+feminine breast have a greater affinity for divine things than the
+rougher masculine nature; that her instincts are purer, more poetic,
+more refined; that her moral nature has a certain <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295"></a>[<a href="./images/295.png">295</a>]</span>bloom upon it which
+contact with the world has brushed off from ours; that while we coarser
+creatures are driven to reason out our spiritual conclusions, she
+arrives at them by an intuitive process reserved for the angelic nature
+and her own.</p>
+
+<p>And on the whole man accepts the claim. He is bribed perhaps into
+allowing it by his own desire to have something at home better and purer
+than himself. It is a startling thing perhaps to say, but in ninety-nine
+homes out of a hundred real humility of heart is to be found in the
+husband, not in the wife. The husband has very little belief in his own
+religion, in his unworldliness and spirituality; but he has an immense
+belief in the spirituality and the devotion of the being who fronts him
+over the breakfast-table. He does not profess to understand the
+character of her piety, her lore of sermons, the severity with which she
+visits the household after family prayers, or the extreme interest with
+which she peruses the geographical chapters of the Book of Joshua. But
+his incapacity to understand it is mixed with a certain awe. He never
+ventures to disturb, by "shadowed hint" of his own thoughts about the
+matter, the "simple views" of his spouse. He adroitly diverts the
+conversation of his dinner-table when it drifts near to the fatal
+pigeons of Colenso.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes he bends to a little gentle deceit, and wins a smile of
+approval by turning up at an early Litany, or by bringing home the
+newest photograph of a colonial metropolitan. In one way or another he
+practically acknowledges, like King Cnut, that there is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296"></a>[<a href="./images/296.png">296</a>]</span>a bound to his
+empire. Over bonnet bills and butchers' bills he may exercise a certain
+nominal control. It is possible that years of struggle might enable him
+to alter by half an inch the length of his wife's skirt, if fashion had
+not shortened it in the interval. But over the whole domain of moral and
+religious thought and action he is absolutely powerless. Woman meets
+him, if he attempts any interference, as Christian martyrs have always
+met their persecutors, with outstretched neck and on her knees. She
+prays for his return to better thoughts, and the whole household knows
+she is praying for him. She listens to all his remonstrances, professes
+obedience on every point but the one he wants, and keeps her finger all
+the time on the particular page of Thomas &agrave; Kempis at which the
+remonstrance found her. Before such an adversary, there is no shame in a
+defeat.</p>
+
+<p>It is not that on all points of moral or religious life woman professes
+herself above criticism; to the criticisms of her religious teachers,
+for instance, we have seen her singularly obsequious. Woman and the
+priesthood in fact understand one another perfectly, and a tacit
+convention forces woman to submit to censures so long as those censures
+are reserved for one topic alone. To religion woman makes the sacrifice
+of her dress. It is not that she seriously intends to make the slightest
+amendments, or to withdraw before the exhortations of her spiritual
+guide into poke bonnets and print muslins. It is a sufficient mark of
+self-sacrifice if she listens patiently to a diatribe against butterfly
+bonnets, trains, or crinolines, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297"></a>[<a href="./images/297.png">297</a>]</span>or even thanks her pastor for
+describing evening costume as a "propaganda of the devil." The very
+minuteness, in fact, of censures such as these, is a flattering proof of
+the spiritual importance of even the most trivial details in the life of
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>When Father Ignatius informed mankind that the angels bent down from
+heaven to weep over the flirtations of Rotten Row, the smallest child on
+her pony felt her ride, and her chatter over her palings, invested with
+certain celestial importance. Criticisms, too, so strictly reserved for
+the outside of the platter, are an immense compliment to the inside, and
+it is something to listen to half an hour of spiritual reproof, and to
+be able to pass oneself triumphantly as a "Fair Soul" after all. There
+is nothing revolutionary in a mere border-skirmish, which leaves the
+field of woman's sway not an inch the narrower. It is another matter
+when M. Duruy calls on Hermione to come down from her pedestal of
+worship, and in the long run to abdicate. For equality of education
+would, of course, even if it did nothing else, make mince-meat of the
+spiritual pretensions of woman. It would be impossible to preserve a
+domestic Papacy with a more than papal weakness for dogmatism and
+infallibility, if woman is to come down into school and share the common
+training of men.</p>
+
+<p>If women are to be educated precisely as men are educated, they will
+share the reasonings, the scepticisms, the critical doubts of men. There
+will be no refuge for praying sisters in that world of "simple views"
+from which they come forth at present <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298"></a>[<a href="./images/298.png">298</a>]</span>furnished with a social and
+domestic decalogue whose sacredness it is impious to doubt or to
+dispute. In other words, the power which woman now exercises will simply
+crumble to dust. Whether she might gain a power higher and more
+beneficial to the world and to herself, is a matter which we are not now
+discussing. What is perfectly certain is that such a power would not be
+the power she exercises now. The moral censorship of woman over woman,
+for example, would at once pass away. It rests on the belief that women
+have higher moral faculties than other beings, and that their treason to
+this higher form of moral humanity which is exhibited in womanhood is a
+treason of deeper dye than an offence against morality itself.</p>
+
+<p>An erring sister sins against something greater than goodness&mdash;she sins
+against the theory of woman, against the faith that woman is a creature
+who soars high above the weaknesses of man and the common nature of man.
+Long ages of self-assertion have penetrated woman with the conviction of
+her worth; she is the object of her own especial worship, and the sharp
+stinging justice she deals out to social offenders is not merely a proof
+of the spiritual nature of her rule, but the vindication of her
+self-idolatry. Again, she would forfeit the peculiar influence which she
+is every day exerting in a greater degree on the course of religion and
+the Church. The hypothesis of a superior spiritual nature in woman lies
+at the root, for instance, of the great modern institution of
+sisterhoods, and of the peculiar relation which is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299"></a>[<a href="./images/299.png">299</a>]</span>slowly attaching his
+Paula and his Eustochium to every Jerome of our day.</p>
+
+<p>But the main loss of power would lie in the family itself. It would be
+no longer possible to front the political dogmatist of the hearth-rug
+with a social and religious dogmatism as brusque and unreasonable as his
+own. The balance of power which woman has slowly built up in home would
+be roughly disturbed, and new forms of social and domestic life would
+emerge from the chaos of such a revolution. From sweeping changes of
+this sort the very temper of woman, her innate conservatism, her want of
+originative power, turns her away. It is more comfortable to bask in the
+glow of Papal sunshine, to figure in Allocutions from the Vatican as
+"the pure and shining light of the house, the glory of her husband, the
+education of her family, a bond of peace, an emblem of piety;" and to
+let Monsieur Duruy and his insidious Professors alone.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300"></a>[<a href="./images/300.png">300</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>MODERN MOTHERS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>No human affection has been so passionately praised as maternal love,
+and none is supposed to be so holy or so strong. Even the poetic aspect
+of the instinct which inspires the young with their dearest dreams does
+not rank so high as this, and neither lover's love nor conjugal love,
+neither filial affection nor fraternal, comes near the sanctity or
+grandeur of the maternal instinct. But all women are not equally rich in
+this great gift; and, to judge by appearances, English women are at this
+moment particularly poor. It may seem a harsh thing to say, but it is
+none the less true&mdash;society has put maternity out of fashion, and the
+nursery is nine times out of ten a place of punishment, not of pleasure,
+to the modern mother.</p>
+
+<p>Two points connected with this subject are of growing importance at this
+present time&mdash;the one is the increasing disinclination of married women
+to be mothers at all; the other, the large number of those who, being
+mothers, will not, or cannot, nurse their own children. In the mad race
+after pleasure and excitement now going on all through English society
+the tender duties of motherhood have become simply disagreeable
+restraints, and the old feeling of the blessing attending the quiver
+full is exchanged for one <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301"></a>[<a href="./images/301.png">301</a>]</span>expressive of the very reverse. With some of
+the more intellectual and less instinctive sort, maternity is looked on
+as a kind of degradation; and women of this stamp, sensible enough in
+everything else, talk impatiently among themselves of the base
+necessities laid on them by men and nature, and how hateful to them is
+everything connected with their characteristic duties.</p>
+
+<p>This wild revolt against nature, and specially this abhorrence of
+maternity, is carried to a still greater extent by American women, with
+grave national consequences resulting; but though we have not yet
+reached the Transatlantic limit, the state of the feminine feeling and
+physical condition among ourselves will disastrously affect the future
+unless something can be done to bring our women back to a healthier tone
+of mind and body. No one can object to women declining marriage
+altogether in favor of a voluntary self-devotion to some project or
+idea; but, when married, it is a monstrous doctrine to hold that they
+are in any way degraded by the consequences, and that natural functions
+are less honorable than social excitements. The world can get on without
+balls and morning calls, it can get on too without amateur art and
+incorrect music, but not without wives and mothers; and those times in a
+nation's history when women have been social ornaments rather than
+family home-stays have ever been times of national decadence and of
+moral failure.</p>
+
+<p>Part of this growing disinclination is due to the enormous expense
+incurred now by having children. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302"></a>[<a href="./images/302.png">302</a>]</span>As women have ceased to take any
+active share in their own housekeeping, whether in the kitchen or the
+nursery, the consequence is an additional cost for service, which is a
+serious item in the yearly accounts. Women who, if they lived a rational
+life, could and would nurse their children, now require a wet-nurse, or
+the services of an experienced woman who can "bring up by hand," as the
+phrase is; women who once would have had one nursemaid now have two; and
+women who, had they lived a generation ago, would have had none at all,
+must in their turn have a wretched young creature without thought or
+knowledge, into whose questionable care they deliver what should be the
+most sacred obligation and the most jealously-guarded charge they
+possess.</p>
+
+<p>It is rare if, in any section of society where hired service can be had,
+mothers give more than a superficial personal superintendence to nursery
+or school-room&mdash;a superintendence about as thorough as their
+housekeeping, and as efficient. The one set of duties is quite as
+unfashionable as the other, and money is held to relieve from the
+service of love as entirely as it relieves from the need of labor. And
+yet, side by side with this personal relinquishment of natural duties,
+has grown up, perhaps as an instinctive compensation, an amount of
+attention and expensive management specially remarkable. There never was
+a time when children were made of so much individual importance in the
+family, yet in so little direct relation with the mother&mdash;never a time
+when maternity did so little and social organization so much.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303"></a>[<a href="./images/303.png">303</a>]</span>
+Juvenile parties; the kind of moral obligation apparently felt by all
+parents to provide heated and unhealthy amusements for their boys and
+girls during the holidays; extravagance in dress, following the same
+extravagance among their mothers; the increasing cost of education; the
+fuss and turmoil generally made over them&mdash;all render them real burdens
+in a house where money is not too plentiful, and where every child that
+comes is not only an additional mouth to feed and an additional body to
+clothe, but a subtractor by just so much from the family fund of
+pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>Even where there is no lack of money, the unavoidable restraints of the
+condition, for at least some months in the year, more than
+counterbalance any sentimental delight to be found in maternity. For,
+before all other things in life, maternity demands unselfishness in
+women; and this is just the one virtue of which women have least at this
+present time&mdash;just the one reason why motherhood is at a discount, and
+children are regarded as inflictions instead of blessings.</p>
+
+<p>Few middle-class women are content to bring up their children with the
+old-fashioned simplicity of former times, and to let them share and
+share alike in the family, with only so much difference in their
+treatment as is required by their difference of state; fewer still are
+willing to share in the labor and care that must come with children in
+the easiest-going household, and so to save in the expenses by their own
+work. The shabbiest little wife, with her two <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304"></a>[<a href="./images/304.png">304</a>]</span>financial ends always
+gaping and never meeting, must have her still shabbier little drudge to
+wheel her perambulator, so as to give her an air of fine-ladyhood and
+being too good for work; and the most indolent housekeeper, whose work
+is done in half an hour, cannot find time to go into the gardens or the
+square with nurse and the children, so that she may watch over them
+herself and see that they are properly cared for.</p>
+
+<p>In France, where it is the fashion for mother and <i>bonne</i> to be together
+both out of doors and at home, at least the children are not neglected
+nor ill-treated, as is too often the case with us; and if they are
+improperly managed, according to our ideas, the fault is in the system,
+not in the want of maternal supervision. Here it is a very rare case
+indeed when the mother accompanies the nurse and children; and those
+days when she does are nursery gala-days, to be talked of and remembered
+for weeks after. As they grow older, she may take them occasionally when
+she visits her more intimate friends; but this is for her own pleasure,
+not their good, and is quite beside the question of going with them to
+see that they are properly cared for.</p>
+
+<p>It is to be supposed that each mother has a profound belief in her own
+nurse, and that when she condemns the neglect and harshness shown to
+other children by the servants in charge, she makes a mental reservation
+in favor of her own, and is very sure that nothing improper or cruel
+takes place in <i>her</i> nursery. Her children do not complain, and she
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305"></a>[<a href="./images/305.png">305</a>]</span>always tells them to come to her when anything is amiss; on which
+negative evidence she satisfies her soul, and makes sure that all is
+right, because she is too neglectful to see if anything is wrong. She
+does not remember that her children do not complain because they dare
+not.</p>
+
+<p>Dear and beautiful as all mammas are to the small fry in the nursery,
+they are always in a certain sense Junos sitting on the top of Mount
+Olympus, making occasional gracious and benign descents, but practically
+too far removed for useful interference; while nurse is an ever-present
+power, capable of sly pinches and secret raids, as well as of more open
+oppression&mdash;a power, therefore, to be propitiated, if only with the
+subservience of a Yezidi, too much afraid of the Evil One to oppose him.
+Wherefore nurse is propitiated, failing the protection of the glorified
+creature just gone to her grand dinner in a cloud of lace and a blaze of
+jewels; and the first lesson taught the youthful Christian in short
+frocks or knickerbockers is not to carry tales down stairs, and by no
+means to let mamma know what nurse desires should be kept secret.</p>
+
+<p>A great deal of other evil, beside these sly beginnings of deceit, is
+taught in the nursery; a great deal of vulgar thought, of superstitious
+fear, of class coarseness. As, indeed, how must it not be when we think
+of the early habits and education of the women taken into the nursery to
+give the first strong indelible impressions to the young souls under
+their care. Many a man with a ruined constitution, and many a woman
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306"></a>[<a href="./images/306.png">306</a>]</span>with shattered nerves, can trace back the beginning of their sorrow to
+those neglected childish days of theirs when nurses had it all their own
+way because mamma never looked below the surface, and was satisfied with
+what was said instead of seeing for herself what was done. It is an odd
+state of society which tolerates this transfer of a mother's holiest and
+most important duty into the hands of a mere stranger, hired by the
+month, and never thoroughly known.</p>
+
+<p>Where the organization of the family is of the patriarchal kind&mdash;old
+retainers marrying and multiplying about the central home, and carrying
+on a warm personal attachment from generation to generation&mdash;this
+transfer of maternal care has not such bad effects; but in our present
+way of life, without love or real relationship between masters and
+servants, and where service is rendered for just so much money down, and
+for nothing more noble, it is a hideous system, and one that makes the
+modern mother utterly inexplicable. We wonder where her mere instincts
+can be, not to speak of her reason, her love, her conscience, her pride.
+Pleasure and self-indulgence have indeed gained tremendous power, in
+these later days, when they can thus break down the force of the
+strongest law of nature, a law stronger even than that of
+self-preservation.</p>
+
+<p>Folly is the true capillary attraction of the moral world, and
+penetrates every stratum of society; and the folly of extravagant attire
+in the drawing-room is reproduced in the nursery. Not content with
+bewildering men's minds, and emptying their husband's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307"></a>[<a href="./images/307.png">307</a>]</span>purses for the
+enhancement of their own charms, women do the same by their children,
+and the mother who leaves the health, and mind, and temper, and purity
+of her offspring in the keeping of a hired nurse takes especial care of
+the color and cut of the frocks and petticoats; and always with the same
+strain after show, and the same endeavor to make a little look a mickle.
+The children of five hundred a year must look like those of a thousand;
+and those of a thousand must rival the <i>tenue</i> of little lords and
+ladies born in the purple; while the amount of money spent in the
+tradesman-class is a matter of real amazement to those let into the
+secret.</p>
+
+<p>Simplicity of diet, too, is going out with simplicity of dress, with
+simplicity of habits generally; and stimulants and concentrated food are
+now the rule in the nursery, where they mar as many constitutions as
+they make. More than one child of which we have had personal knowledge
+has yielded to disease induced by too stimulating and too heating a
+diet; but artificial habits demand corresponding artificiality of food,
+and so the candle burns at both ends instead of one. Again, as for the
+increasing inability of educated women to nurse their children, even if
+desirous of doing so, that also is a bodily condition brought about by
+an unwholesome and unnatural state of life. Late hours, high living,
+heated blood, and vitiated atmosphere are the causes of this alarming
+physical defect. But it would be too much to expect that women should
+forego their pleasurable indulgences, or do anything disagreeable to
+their senses, for the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308"></a>[<a href="./images/308.png">308</a>]</span>sake of their offspring. They are not famous for
+looking far ahead on any matter, but to expect them to look beyond
+themselves, and their own present generation, is to expect the great
+miracle that never comes.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309"></a>[<a href="./images/309.png">309</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>THE PRIESTHOOD OF WOMAN.</h2>
+
+
+<p>If the female philosophers who plead for the emancipation of their sex
+would stoop from the sublimer heights of Woman's Rights to arguments of
+mere human expediency, we fancy they might find some of their critics
+disposed to listen in a more compliant mood. We can imagine a very good
+point being made out of the simple fact of waste, by some feminine
+advocate who would point out in a businesslike way how much more work
+the world might get through if only woman had fair play. Waste is always
+a pitiful and disagreeable thing, and the waste of whatever reserved
+power may lie at present unused in the breasts of half a million of old
+maids, for instance, is a thought which, with so much to be done around
+us, it is somewhat uncomfortable to dwell much upon. The argument, too,
+might be neatly enforced, just at present, by illustrations from a
+somewhat unexpected quarter.</p>
+
+<p>The Papacy seems determined to carry out its concordat with Woman. If we
+are to credit the latest rumors from the Vatican, Rome has grown
+impatient of the class who now present themselves at her doors as
+candidates for canonization, and has fallen back from the obscure
+Italian beggars and Cochin <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310"></a>[<a href="./images/310.png">310</a>]</span>Chinese martyrs whom she has recently
+delighted to honor on the more illustrious names of Christopher Columbus
+and Joan of Arc. A little courage must have been needed for this retreat
+upon the past, for neither the great navigator nor the heroine found
+much support or appreciation in the prelates of their day; and the
+somewhat uncomfortable fact might be urged by the devil's advocate, in
+the case of the latter, that if Joan was sent to the martyr's stake, it
+was by a spiritual tribunal.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, there is the obvious desirableness of showing how
+perfectly at one the Papacy is with the spirit of the age in this double
+compliment to the two primary forces of modern civilization&mdash;the
+democratic force of the New World, and the feminine force of the Old.
+The beatification of the Maid of Orleans in its most simple aspect is
+the official recognition, by the Papacy, of the claims of her sex to a
+far larger sphere of human action than has as yet been accorded to them.
+Woman may fairly meet the domestic admonitions of Papal briefs by this
+newly discovered instance of extra-domestic holiness, and may front the
+taunts of cynical objectors with a saintly patron who was the first to
+break through the outer conventionalities of womanhood.</p>
+
+<p>But the figure of Joan of Arc is far more than a convenient answer to
+objections such as these; it is, as we have said, in itself a cogent
+argument for a better use of feminine energies. No life gives one such a
+notion as hers of the vast forces which lie hidden, and as it would seem
+wasted, in the present <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311"></a>[<a href="./images/311.png">311</a>]</span>mass of women. It is impossible to be content
+with little projects of utilization such as those which throw open to
+her the telegraph-office or the printing-press, or even with the more
+ambitious claims for her admission to the Bench or the dissecting-room,
+when one gets a glimpse such as this of energies latent within the
+female breast which are strong enough to change the face of the world.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to suppose that the woman of our day is less energetic
+than the woman of the fifteenth century, or that her piano and her
+workbag sum up the whole of her possibilities any more than her
+spinning-wheel or her sheep-tending exhausted those of the Maid of
+Domremy. The ordinary occupations of woman strike us in this light as
+mere jets of vapor, useful indeed as a relief to the volcanic pressure
+within, but insufficient to remove the peril of an eruption. There must
+be some truth in the spasmodic utterances of the fevered sibyls who
+occasionally bare the female heart to us in three-volume novels, and the
+gaiety and frivolity of the life of woman is a mere mask for the wild,
+tossing emotions within. It is a standing danger, we own; and besides
+the danger there is, as we have said, the waste and the pity of it.</p>
+
+<p>A little closer examination, however, may suggest some doubt whether
+this waste of power is not more apparent than real. In the physical
+world, Mr. Grove has told us that the apparent destruction of a force is
+only its transformation into a force which is correlative to it; that
+motion, for instance, when lost <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312"></a>[<a href="./images/312.png">312</a>]</span>is again detected in the new form of
+heat, and heat in that of light. But the theory is far from being true
+of the physical world only, and, had we space here, nothing would be
+easier than to trace the same correlation of forces through the moral
+nature of man. For waste, then, in the particular instance which is
+before us, we may perhaps substitute transformation.</p>
+
+<p>Professing herself the most rigid of conservatives, woman gives vent to
+this heroic energy for which the times offer no natural outlet in the
+radical modifications which she is continually introducing into modern
+society. We overlook the manifold ways in which she is acting on and
+changing the state of things around us, just because we are deceived by
+the apparent unity with which the whole sex advances toward marriage. We
+forget the large margin of those who fail in attaining their end, and we
+act as if the great mass of unmarried women simply represented a waste
+and lost force. And yet it is just this waste force which tells on
+society more powerfully than all.</p>
+
+<p>The energies which fail in finding a human object of domestic adoration
+become the devotional energies of the world. The force which would have
+made the home makes the Church. It is really amazing to watch, if we
+look back through the ages, the silent steady working of this feminine
+impulse, and to see how bit by bit it has recovered the ground of which
+Christianity robbed Woman. We wonder that no woman poet has ever turned,
+like Schiller, to the gods of old.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313"></a>[<a href="./images/313.png">313</a>]</span>
+In every heathen religion of the Western world woman occupied a
+prominent place. Priestess or prophetess, she stood in all ministerial
+offices on an equality with man. It was only the irruption of religions
+from the East, the faiths of Isis or Mithras, which swept woman from the
+temple. Christianity shared the Oriental antipathy to the ministerial
+service of woman; it banished her from altar and from choir; in darker
+times it drove her to the very porch of its shrines. The Church of after
+ages dealt with woman as the Empire dealt with its C&aelig;sars; it was ready
+to grant her apotheosis, but only when she was safely out of the world.
+It gave her canonization, and it gives it to her still, but not the
+priesthood. No rout could seem more complete, but woman is never greater
+than when she is routed.</p>
+
+<p>The newly-instituted parson of to-day, brimming over with apostolic
+texts which forbid woman to speak in church, no sooner arrives at his
+parish than he finds himself in a spiritual world whose impulse and
+guidance is wholly in the hands of woman. Expel woman as you will,
+<i>tamen usque recurrit</i>. Woman is, in fact, the parish. Within, in her
+lowest spiritual form, as the parson's wife, she inspires and sometimes
+writes his sermons. Without, as the bulk of his congregation, she
+watches over his orthodoxy, verifies his texts, visits his schools, and
+harasses his sick. "Ah, Betsy!" said a sick woman to a wealthier sister
+the other day, "it's of some use being well off; you won't be obliged
+when you die to have a district-lady worriting you with a chapter." But
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314"></a>[<a href="./images/314.png">314</a>]</span>district-lady has others to "worrit" in life besides the sick.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Hannah More tells us exultantly in her journal how successful were
+her raids upon the parsons, and in what dread all unspiritual ministers
+stood of her visitations. And the same rigid censorship prevails in many
+quarters still. The preacher who thunders so defiantly against spiritual
+foes is trembling all the time beneath the critical eye that is watching
+him from the dim recesses of an unworldly bonnet, and the critical
+finger which follows him with so merciless an accuracy in his texts.
+Impelled, guided, censured by woman, we can hardly wonder if in nine
+cases out of ten the parson turns woman himself, and if the usurpation
+of woman's rights in the services of religion has been deftly avenged by
+the subjugation of the usurpers. Expelled from the Temple, woman has
+simply put her priesthood into commission, and discharges her
+ministerial duties by deputy.</p>
+
+<p>It was impossible for woman to remain permanently content with a
+position like this; but it is only of late that a favorable conjuncture
+of affairs has enabled her to quit it for a more obtrusive one. The
+great Church movement which the <i>Apologia</i> has made so familiar to us in
+its earlier progress came some ten years ago to a stand. Some of its
+most eminent leaders had seceded to another communion, it had been
+weakened by the Gorham decision, and by its own internal dissensions.
+Whether on the side of dogma or ritual, it seemed to have lost for the
+moment its old impulse&mdash;to have lost heart and life.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315"></a>[<a href="./images/315.png">315</a>]</span>
+It was in this emergency that woman came to the front. She claimed to
+revive the old religious position which had been assigned to her by the
+monasticism of the middle ages, but to revive it under different
+conditions and with a different end. The medi&aelig;val Church had, indeed,
+glorified, as much as words could glorify, the devotion of woman; but
+once become a devotee, it had locked her in the cloister. As far as
+action on the world without was concerned, the veil served simply as a
+species of suicide, and the impulses of woman, after all the crowns and
+pretty speeches of her religious counsellors, found themselves bottled
+up within stout stone walls and as inactive as before. From this strait,
+woman, at the time we speak of, delivered herself by the organization of
+charity.</p>
+
+<p>In lines of a certain beauty, though somewhat difficult in their
+grammatical construction, she has been described as a ministering angel
+when pain and anguish wring the brow; and it was in her capacity of
+ministering angel that she now placed herself at the Church movement and
+advanced upon the world. It was impossible to lock these beneficent
+beings up, for the whole scope of their existence lay in the outer
+world; but every day, as it developed their ecclesiastical position,
+made even their admirers recognise the wise discretion of the middle
+ages. Long before the Ritualists themselves, they, with a feminine
+instinct, had discerned the value of costume. The district visitor, whom
+nobody had paid the smallest attention to in the common vestments of the
+world, became a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316"></a>[<a href="./images/316.png">316</a>]</span>sacred being as she donned the crape and hideous bonnet
+of the "Sister."</p>
+
+<p>Within the new establishment there was all the excitement of a perfectly
+novel existence, of time broken up as women like it to be broken up in
+perpetual services and minute obligation of rules, the dramatic change
+of name, and the romantic self-abnegation of obedience. The "Mother
+Superior" took the place of the tyrant of another sex who had hitherto
+claimed the submission of woman, but she was something more to her
+"children" than the husband or father whom they had left in the world
+without. In all matters, ecclesiastical as well as civil, she claimed
+within her dominions to be supreme. The quasi-sacerdotal dignity, the
+pure religious ministration which ages have stolen from her, was quietly
+reassumed. She received confessions, she imposed penances, she drew up
+offices of devotion. Wherever the community settled, it settled as a new
+spiritual power.</p>
+
+<p>If the clergyman of the parish ventured on advice or suggestion, he was
+told that the Sisterhood must preserve its own independence of action,
+and was snubbed home again for his pains. The Mother Superior, in fact,
+soon towered into a greatness far beyond the reach of ordinary parsons.
+She kept her own tame chaplain, and she kept him in very edifying
+subjection. From a realm completely her own, the influence of woman
+began now to tell upon the world without. Little colonies of Sisters
+planted here and there annexed parish after parish. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317"></a>[<a href="./images/317.png">317</a>]</span>Sometimes the
+parson was worried into submission by incessant calls of the most
+justifiable nature on his time and patience. Sometimes he was bribed
+into submission by the removal from his shoulders of the burden of alms.
+It was only when he was thoroughly tamed that he was rewarded by pretty
+stoles and gorgeous vestments.</p>
+
+<p>Astonished congregations saw their church blossom in purple and red, and
+frontal and hanging told of the silent energy of the group of Sisters.
+The parson found himself nowhere in his own parish; every detail managed
+for him, every care removed, and all independence gone. If it suited the
+ministering angels to make a legal splash, he found himself landed in
+the Law Courts. If they took it into their heads to seek another fold,
+every one assumed, as a matter of course, that their pastor would go
+too. At such a rate of progress the great object of woman's ambition
+must soon come in view, and the silent control over the priest will
+merge in the open claim to the priesthood.</p>
+
+<p>It may be in silent preparation for such a claim that the ecclesiastical
+hierarchy are taking, year by year, a more feminine position. The Houses
+of Convocation, for instance, present us with a lively image of what the
+bitterest censor of woman would be delighted to predict as the result of
+her admission to senatorial honors. There is the same interminable flow
+of mellifluous talk, the same utter inability to devise or to understand
+an argument, the same bitterness and hard words, the same skill in
+little tricks <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318"></a>[<a href="./images/318.png">318</a>]</span>and diplomacies, the same practical incompetence, which
+have been denounced as characteristics of woman. The caution, the
+finesse, the sly decorum, the inability to take a large view of any
+question, the patience, the masterly inaction, the vicious outbreaks of
+temper which now and then break the inaction of a Bishop, may sometimes
+lead us to ask whether the Episcopal office is not one admirably suited
+for the genius of woman.</p>
+
+<p>But she must stoop to conquer heights like these, and it is probable
+with a view to a slow ascent towards them through the ages to come that
+she is now moulding the mind of the curate at her will. He, we have been
+told, is commonly the first lady of the parish; and what he now is in
+theory, a century hence may find him in fact. It would be difficult even
+now to detect any difference of sex in the triviality of purpose, the
+love of gossip, the petty interests, the feeble talk, the ignorance, the
+vanity, the love of personal display, the white hand dangled over the
+pulpit, the becoming vestment and the embroidered stole, which we are
+learning gradually to look upon as attributes of the British curate. So
+perfect, indeed, is the imitation that the excellence of her work may
+perhaps defeat its own purpose; and the lacquered imitation of woman,
+"dilettante, delicate-handed," as Tennyson saw and sang of him, may
+satisfy the world, and for long ages prevent any anxious inquiry after
+the real feminine Brummagem.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319"></a>[<a href="./images/319.png">319</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>THE FUTURE OF WOMAN.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Woman is a thing of accident and spoilt in the making says the greatest
+of the schoolmen, but we are far from denying her right to vindicate
+something more than an accidental place in the world. After all that can
+be urged as to the glory of self-sacrifice, the greatness of silent
+devotion, or the compensations for her want of outer influence in the
+inner power which she exerts through the medium of the family and the
+home, there remains an odd sort of sympathy with the woman who asserts
+that she is every bit as good as her master, and that there is no reason
+why she should retire behind the domestic veil. Partly, of course, this
+arises from our natural sympathy with pluck of any sort; partly, too,
+there is the pleasure we feel in a situation which may be absurd, but
+which, at any rate, is novel and piquant; partly, there is an impatience
+with woman as she is, and a sort of lingering hope that something better
+is in store for her.</p>
+
+<p>The most sceptical, in fact, of woman's censors cannot help feeling a
+suspicion that, after all, strong-minded women may be in the right. As
+one walks home in the cool night-air it seems impossible to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320"></a>[<a href="./images/320.png">320</a>]</span>believe
+that girls are to go on for ever chattering the frivolous nonsense they
+do chatter, or living the absolutely frivolous lives they do live. And,
+of course, the impression that a good time is coming for them is
+immensely strengthened if one happens to have fallen in love. One's eyes
+have got a little sharpened to see the real human soul that stirs
+beneath all that sham life of idleness and vanity, but the vanity and
+the idleness vexes more than ever. If we come across Miss Hominy at such
+moments, we are extremely likely to find her a great deal less
+ridiculous than we fancied her, and to listen with a certain gravity to
+her plea for the enfranchisement of women.</p>
+
+<p>It is not that we go all lengths with her; we stare a little perhaps at
+the logical consequences on which she piques herself, and at the
+panorama of woman as she is to be which she spreads before us, at the
+consulting barrister waiting in her chambers and the lady advocate
+flourishing her maiden brief; our pulse throbs a little awkwardly at the
+thought of being tested by medical fingers and thumbs of such a delicate
+order, and we hum a few lines of the <i>Princess</i> as Miss Hominy poses
+herself for a Lady Professor. Still we cannot help a half conviction
+that even this would be better than the present style of thing, the
+pretty face that kindles over the news of a fresh opera and gives you
+the latest odds on the Derby, the creature of head-achy mornings, of
+afternoons frittered on lounges, and bonnet-strings, of nights whirled
+away in hot rooms and chatter on stairs. There are moments, we repeat,
+when, looking at woman as she <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321"></a>[<a href="./images/321.png">321</a>]</span>is, we could almost wish to wake the next
+morning into a world where all women were Miss Hominys.</p>
+
+<p>But when we do wake we find the world much what it was before, and
+pretty faces just as indolent and as provoking as they were, and a sort
+of ugly after-question cropping up in our minds whether we had exactly
+realized the meaning of our wish, or conceived the nature of a world in
+which all women were Miss Hominys. There is always a little difficulty
+in fancying the world other than we find it; but it is really worth a
+little trouble, before we enfranchise woman, to try to imagine the
+results of her enfranchisement, the Future of Woman. In the first place,
+it would amazingly reduce the variety of the world. As it is, we live in
+a double world, and enjoy the advantages of a couple of hemispheres. It
+is an immense luxury for men, when they are tired out with the worry and
+seriousness of life, to be able to walk into a totally different
+atmosphere, where nothing is looked at or thought about or spoken of in
+exactly the same way as in their own.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Gladstone, for instance, unbends (if he ever does unbend), and,
+weary of the Irish question, asks his pretty neighbor what she thinks of
+it, he gets into a new world at once. Her vague idea of the Irish
+question, founded on a passing acquaintance with Moore's Melodies and a
+wild regret after Donnybrook fair, may not be exactly adequate to the
+magnitude of the interests involved, but it is at any rate novel and
+amusing. It is not a House of Commons view of the subject, but then the
+great statesman is only <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322"></a>[<a href="./images/322.png">322</a>]</span>too glad to be rid of the House of Commons.
+Thoughtful politicians may deplore that the sentimental beauty of
+Charles I. and the pencil of Vandyke have made every English girl a
+Malignant; but after one has got bored with Rushworth and Clarendon,
+there is a certain pleasure at finding a great constitutional question
+summarily settled by the height of a sovereign's brow.</p>
+
+<p>It is a relief too, now and then, to get out of the world of morals into
+the world of woman; out of the hard sphere of right and wrong into a
+world like Mr. Swinburne's, where judgment goes by the beautiful, and
+where red hair makes all the difference between Elizabeth and Mary of
+Scotland. Above all, there is the delightful consciousness of
+superiority. The happiness of the blessed in the next world consists,
+according to Sir John Mandeville, in their being able to behold the
+agonies of the lost; and half the satisfaction men have in their own
+sense and vigor and success would be lost if they could not enjoy the
+delicious view of the world where sense and energy go for nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Whether all this would be worth sacrificing simply to acquire a woman
+who could sympathize with, and support, a man in the stress and battle
+of life, is a question we do not pretend to decide; but it is certain
+that the enfranchisement of woman would be the passing of a social Act
+of Uniformity, and the loss of half the grace and variety of life. Here,
+as elsewhere, "the low sun makes the color," and the very excellences of
+Miss Hominy carry her aloft into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323"></a>[<a href="./images/323.png">323</a>]</span>regions of white light, where our
+eyes, even if dazzled, get a little tired with the monotony of the
+intellectual Haze.</p>
+
+<p>The result of such a change on woman herself would be something far
+greater and more revolutionary. It is not merely that, as in the case of
+men, she would lose the sense and comfort of another world of thought
+and action, and of its contrast with the world in which she lives; it is
+that she would lose her own world altogether. Conceive, for instance,
+woman obliged to take life in earnest, to study as men study, to work as
+men work. The change would be no mere modification, but the utter
+abolition of her whole present existence. The whole theory of woman's
+life is framed on the hypothesis of sheer indolence. She is often
+charming, but she is always idle. There is an immense ingenuity and a
+perfect grace about her idleness; the efforts, in fact, of generations
+of cultivated women have been directed, and successfully directed, to
+this special object of securing absolute indolence without either the
+inner tedium or the outer contempt which indolence is supposed to bring
+in its train.</p>
+
+<p>Woman can always say with Titus, "I have wasted a day," but the
+confession wears an air of triumph rather than regret. A world of
+trivial occupations, a whole system of social life, has been laboriously
+invented that the day might be wasted gracefully and without boredom. A
+little riding, a little reading, a little dabbling with the paint-brush,
+a little strumming on the piano, a little visiting, a little <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324"></a>[<a href="./images/324.png">324</a>]</span>shopping,
+a little dancing, and a general trivial chat scattered over the whole,
+make up the day of an English girl in town. Transplant her into the
+country, and the task of frittering away existence, though it becomes
+more difficult, is faced just as gallantly as before. Mudie comes to the
+rescue with the back novels which she was too busy to get through in the
+season; there is the scamper from one country house to another, there
+are the flirtations to keep her hand in, the pets to be fed, the cousins
+to extemporize a mimic theatre, the curate&mdash;if worst comes to worst&mdash;to
+try a little ritualism upon. With these helps a country day, what with
+going to bed early and getting up late, may be frittered away as
+aimlessly as a day in town.</p>
+
+<p>Woman may fairly object, we think, to abolish at one fell swoop such an
+ingenious fabric of idleness as this. A revolution in the whole system
+of social life, in the whole conception and drift of feminine existence,
+is a little too much to ask. As it is, woman wraps herself in her
+indolence, and is perfectly satisfied with her lot. She assumes, and the
+world has at least granted the assumption, that her little hands were
+never made to do anything which any rougher hands can do for them. Man
+has got accustomed to serve as her hewer of wood and drawer of water,
+and to expect nothing from her but poetry and refinement. It is a little
+too much to ask her to go back to the position of the squaw, and to do
+any work for herself. But it is worse to ask her to remodel the world
+around her, on the understanding that henceforth <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325"></a>[<a href="./images/325.png">325</a>]</span>duty and toil and
+self-respect are to take the place of frivolity and indolence and
+adoration.</p>
+
+<p>The great passion which knits the two sexes together presents a yet
+stronger difficulty. To men, busy with the work of the world, there is
+no doubt that, however delightful, love takes the form of a mere
+interruption of their real life. They allow themselves the interval of
+its indulgence, as they allow themselves any other holiday, simply as
+something in itself temporary and accidental; as life, indeed, grows
+more complex, there is an increasing tendency to reduce the amount of
+time and attention which men devote to their affections. Already the
+great philosopher of the age has pronounced that the passion of love
+plays far too important a part in human existence, and that it is a
+terrible obstacle to human progress.</p>
+
+<p>The general temper of the times echoes the sentence of Mr. Mill. The
+enthusiastic votary who has been pouring his vows at the feet of his
+mistress consoles himself, as he leaves her, with the thought that
+engagements cannot last for ever, and that he shall soon be able to get
+back to the real world of business and of life. He presses his beloved
+one, with all the eloquence of passion, to fix an early day for their
+union, but the eloquence has a very practical bearing. While Corydon is
+piping to Phyllis, he is anxious about the engagements he is missing,
+and the distance he is losing in the race for life. But Phyllis remains
+the nymph of passion and poetry and romance.</p>
+
+<p>Time has no meaning for her; she is not neglecting <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326"></a>[<a href="./images/326.png">326</a>]</span>any work; she is
+only idle, as she always is idle. But love throws a new glory and a new
+interest around her indolence. The endless little notes with which she
+worries the Post-Office and her friends become suddenly sacred and
+mysterious. The silly little prattle hushes into confidential whispers.
+Every crush through the season, becomes the scene of a reunion of two
+hearts which have been parted for the eternity of twenty-four hours.
+Love, in fact, does not in the least change woman's life, or give it new
+earnestness or a fresh direction; but it makes it infinitely more
+interesting, and it heightens the enjoyment of wasting a day by a new
+sense of power. For that brief space of triumph Phyllis is able to make
+Corydon waste his day too. The more he writhes and wriggles under the
+compulsion, the more lingering looks he casts back on the work he has
+quitted, the greater her victory.</p>
+
+<p>He cannot decently confess that he is tired of the little comedy in
+which he takes so romantic a part, and certainly his fellow actress will
+not help him to the confession. By dint of acting it, indeed, she comes
+at last to a certain belief in her <i>r&ocirc;le</i>. She really imagines herself
+to be very busy, to have sacrificed her leisure as well as her heart to
+the object of her devotion. She scolds him for his backwardness in not
+more thoroughly sacrificing his leisure to her. Work may be very
+important to him, but it is of less importance to the self-sacrificing
+being who hasn't had one moment to finish the third volume of the last
+sensational novel since she plighted her troth <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327"></a>[<a href="./images/327.png">327</a>]</span>to this monster of
+ingratitude! Of course a man likes to be flattered, and does as much as
+he can in the way of believing in the little comedy too; in fact, it is
+all amazingly graceful and entertaining on the one side and on the
+other. Our only doubt is whether this graceful and entertaining mode of
+interrupting all the serious business of life will not be treated rather
+mercilessly by enfranchised woman. How will the enchantment of passion
+survive when the object of our adoration can only spare us an hour from
+her medical cases, or defers an interview because she is choked with
+fresh briefs? One of two results must clearly follow. Either the great
+Westminster philosopher is right, and love will play a far less
+important part than it has done in human affairs, or else it will
+concentrate itself, and take a far more intense and passionate character
+than it exhibits now.</p>
+
+<p>We can quite conceive that the very difficulty of the new relations may
+give them a new fire and vigor, and that the women of the future,
+looking back on the old months of indolent coquetry, may feel a certain
+contempt for souls which can fritter away the grandeur of passion as
+they fritter away the grandeur of life. But even the gain of passion
+will hardly compensate us for the loss of variety. All this playing with
+love has a certain pretty independence about it, and leaves woman's
+individuality where it found it. Passion must of necessity whirl both
+beings, in the unity of a common desire, into one. And so we get back to
+the old problem of the monotony of life. But it is just this monotonous
+identity to which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328"></a>[<a href="./images/328.png">328</a>]</span>civilization, politics, and society are all visibly
+tending. Railways will tunnel Alps for us, democracy will extinguish
+heroes, and raise mankind to a general level of commonplace
+respectability; woman's enfranchisement will level the social world, and
+leave between sex and sex the difference&mdash;even if it leaves that&mdash;of a
+bonnet.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329"></a>[<a href="./images/329.png">329</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>COSTUME AND ITS MORALS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Nothing is more decisively indicative of the real value or necessity of
+a thing than the fact that, while its presence is hardly noticeable, it
+is immediately missed and asked for when it disappears; and it is thus
+that the paramount importance of clothing asserts itself by the
+conspicuousness of its absence. Of course the first purpose of dress is,
+or should be, decency, and for this, quantity rather than quality is
+looked for. But, as with the little cloud no larger than a man's hand,
+so from the primary fig-leaf or first element of dress, how great things
+have arisen! In respect of amplification, dress may be said to have
+attained its maximum when men wore ruffs which nearly concealed their
+heads, and shoes a quarter of a yard longer than their feet; but
+"fashion" has its day, and now dress threatens to dwindle into something
+not far from its original or fig-leaf dimensions.</p>
+
+<p>Another perfectly legitimate object of dress is attractiveness, so that
+by its aid our persons may be set off to the best advantage; dress
+should also be individual and symbolic, so as to indicate clearly the
+position and character which we desire to obtain and hold. It is not of
+men's attire that we have now to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330"></a>[<a href="./images/330.png">330</a>]</span>speak; that has been settled for them
+by the tailors' strike, which practically ordained that he that was
+shabby should be shabby, or even shabbier still, and he that had allowed
+himself to be thrust into the straitened trousers and scanty coatee of
+last year should continue to exhibit his proportions long after the
+grotesqueness of his figure had been recognised even by himself.</p>
+
+<p>But it is of the dress of our women that we are compelled to testify,
+and it can hardly be denied that at the present moment it offends
+grievously in three particulars. It is inadequate for decency; it lacks
+that truthfulness which is, and should be, the base of all that is
+attractive and beautiful; and in its symbolism it is in the highest
+degree objectionable, for it not only aims at what is unreal and false,
+but it simulates that which is positively hateful and meretricious, so
+that it is difficult now for even a practised eye to distinguish the
+high-born maiden or matron of Belgravia from the Anonymas who haunt the
+drive and fill our streets.</p>
+
+<p>This indictment is, it may be said, a severe one; but if we examine, so
+far as male critics may venture to do, the costume of a fashionable
+woman of the day, it can hardly be said to be unjust. The apparent
+object of modern female dress is to assimilate its wearers as nearly as
+possible in appearance to women of a certain class&mdash;the class to which
+it was formerly hardly practicable to allude, and yet be intelligible to
+young ladies; but all that is changed, and the habits and customs of the
+women of the <i>demi-monde</i> are now <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331"></a>[<a href="./images/331.png">331</a>]</span>studied as if they were indeed
+curious, but exceptionally admirable also, and thus a study unseemly and
+unprofitable has begotten a spirit of imitation which has achieved a
+degrading success.</p>
+
+<p>"Our modest matrons meet," not "to stare the strumpet down," but to
+compare notes, to get hints, and to engage in a kind of friendly
+rivalry&mdash;in short, to pay that homage to Vice, and in a very direct way
+too, which Vice is said formerly to have paid to Virtue. Paint and
+powder are of course the first requisites for the end in view, and these
+adjuncts have to be laid on with such skill as the <i>d&eacute;butante</i> or her
+toilette-maid possesses, which is sometimes so small as to leave their
+handiwork disgustingly coarse and apparent.</p>
+
+<p>There are pearl-powder, violet-powder, rouge, bistre for the eyelids,
+belladonna for the eyes, whitelead and blacklead, yellow dye and mineral
+acids for the hair&mdash;all tending to the utter destruction of both hair
+and skin. The effect of this "diaphanous" complexion and "aurified" hair
+(we borrow the expressions) in a person intended by nature to be dark,
+or swarthy, is most comical; sometimes the whitelead is used so
+unsparingly that it has quite a blue tint, which glistens until the face
+looks more like a death's head anointed with phosphorus and oil for
+theatrical purposes than the head of a Christian gentlewoman. It may be
+interesting to know, and we have the information from high, because
+<i>soi-disant</i> fashionable authority, that the reign of golden locks and
+blue-white visages is drawing to a close, and that it is to be <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332"></a>[<a href="./images/332.png">332</a>]</span>followed
+by bronze complexions and blue-black hair&mdash;<i>&agrave; l'Africaine</i> we presume.</p>
+
+<p>When fashionable Madame has, to her own satisfaction, painted and
+varnished her face, she then proceeds, like Jezebel, to tire her head,
+and, whether she has much hair or little, she fixes on to the back of it
+a huge nest of coarse hair generally well baked in order to free it from
+the parasites with which it abounded when it first adorned the person of
+some Russian or North-German peasant girl. Of course this gives an
+unnaturally large and heavy appearance to the cerebellar region; but
+nature is not exactly what is aimed at, still less refinement.</p>
+
+<p>If this style be not approved of, there is yet another fashion&mdash;namely,
+to cut the hair short in a crop, <i>cr&eacute;per</i> it, curl it, frizzle it,
+bleach it, burn it, and otherwise torture it until it has about as much
+life in it as last year's hay; and then to shampoo it, rumple it, and
+tousle it, until the effect is to produce the aspect of a madwoman in
+one of her worst fits. This method, less troublesome and costly than the
+other, may be considered even more striking, so that it is largely
+adopted by a number of persons who are rather disreputable, and poor. As
+is well known, not all of the asinine tribe wear asses' ears;
+nevertheless some of these votaries of dress find their ears too long,
+or too large, or ill-placed, or, what comes to the same thing,
+inconveniently placed, but a prettier or better-shaped pair are easily
+purchased, admirably moulded in gutta-percha or some other plastic
+material; they are delicately colored, fitted up with earrings and a
+spring <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333"></a>[<a href="./images/333.png">333</a>]</span>apparatus, and they are then adjusted on to the head, the
+despised natural ears being of course carefully hidden from view.</p>
+
+<p>It is long enough since a bonnet meant shelter to the face or protection
+to the head; that fragment of a bonnet which at present represents the
+head-gear, and which was some years ago worn on the back of the head and
+nape of the neck, is now poised on the front, and ornamented with birds,
+portions of beasts, reptiles, and insects. We have seen a bonnet
+composed of a rose and a couple of feathers, another of two or three
+butterflies or as many beads and a bit of lace, and a third represented
+by five green leaves joined at the stalks. A white or spotted veil is
+thrown over the visage, in order that the adjuncts that properly belong
+to the theatre may not be immediately detected in the glare of daylight;
+and thus, with diaphanous tinted face, large painted eyes, and
+stereotyped smile, the lady goes forth looking much more as if she had
+stepped out of the green room of a theatre, or from a Haymarket saloon,
+than from an English home.</p>
+
+<p>But it is in evening costume that our women have reached the minimum of
+dress and the maximum of brass. We remember a venerable old lady whose
+ideas of decorum were such that in her speech all above the foot was
+ankle, and all below the chin was chest; but now the female bosom is
+less the subject of a revelation than the feature of an exposition, and
+charms that were once reserved are now made the common property of every
+looker on. A costume <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334"></a>[<a href="./images/334.png">334</a>]</span>which has been described as consisting of a smock,
+a waistband, and a frill seems to exceed the bounds of honest
+liberality, and resembles most perhaps the attire mentioned by Rabelais,
+"nothing before and nothing behind, with sleeves of the same." Not very
+long ago two gentlemen were standing together at the Opera. "Did you
+ever see anything like that?" inquired one, with a significant glance,
+directing the eyes of his companion to the uncovered bust of a lady
+immediately below. "Not since I was weaned," was the suggestive reply.
+We are not aware whether the speaker was consciously or unconsciously
+reproducing a well-known archiepiscopal <i>mot</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Though our neighbors are not strait-laced, so far as bathing-costume is
+concerned, they are less tolerant of the nude than we are in this
+highly-favored land. There was lately a story in one of the French
+papers that at a certain ball a lady was requested to leave the room
+because a chain of wrought gold, suspended from shoulder to shoulder,
+was the sole protection which it seemed to her well to wear on her
+bosom. To have made the toilette correspond throughout, the dress should
+have consisted of a crinoline skirt, which, though not so ornamental,
+would have been not less admirable and more effective.</p>
+
+<p>Of course there are women to whom nature has been niggardly in the
+matter of roundness of form, but even these need not despair; if they
+cannot show their own busts, they can show something nearly as good,
+since we read the following, which we forbear to translate:&mdash;"Autre
+excentricit&eacute;. C'est l'invention <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335"></a>[<a href="./images/335.png">335</a>]</span>des <i>poitrines adh&eacute;rentes</i> &agrave; l'usage
+des dames trop &eacute;th&eacute;r&eacute;es. Il s'agit d'un syst&egrave;me en caoutchouc rose, qui
+s'adapte &agrave; la place vide comme une ventouse &agrave;, la peau, et qui suit les
+mouvements de la respiration avec une pr&eacute;cision math&eacute;matique et
+parfaite."</p>
+
+<p>Of those limbs which it is still forbidden to expose absolutely, the
+form and contour can at least be put in relief by insisting on the
+skirts being gored and straightened to the utmost; indeed, some of the
+riding-habits we have seen worn are in this respect so contrived that,
+when viewed from behind, especially when the wearer is not of too
+fairy-like proportions, they resemble a pair of tight trousers rather
+than the full flowing robe which we remember as so graceful and becoming
+to a woman. It will be observed that the general aim of all these
+adventitious aids is to give an impression of earth and the fullness
+thereof, to appear to have a bigger cerebellum, a more sensuous
+development of limb, and a greater abundance of flesh than can be either
+natural or true; but we are almost at a loss how to express the next
+point of ambition with which the female mind has become inspired.</p>
+
+<p>The women who are not as those who love their lords wish to be&mdash;indeed,
+as we have heard, those who have no lords of their own to love&mdash;have
+conceived the notion that, by simulating an "interesting condition" (we
+select the phrase accepted as the most delicate), they will add to their
+attractions; and for this purpose an article of toilet&mdash;an india-rubber
+anterior bustle&mdash;called the <i>demi-temps</i>, has been invented, and is worn
+beneath the dress, nominally to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336"></a>[<a href="./images/336.png">336</a>]</span>make the folds fall properly, but in
+reality, as the name betrays, to give the appearance of a woman advanced
+in pregnancy.</p>
+
+<p>No person will be found to say that the particular condition, when real,
+is unseemly or ridiculous. What it is when assumed, and for such a
+purpose&mdash;whether it is not all that and something worse&mdash;we leave our
+readers to decide for themselves. It is said that one distinguished
+personage first employed crinoline in order to render more graceful her
+appearance while in this situation; but these ladies with their
+ridiculous <i>demi-temps</i>, without excuse as without shame, travesty
+nature in their own persons in a way which a low-comedy actress would be
+ashamed to do in a tenth-rate theatre. The name is French, let us hope
+the idea is also; and this reminds us of the title of a little piece
+lately played in Paris by amateurs for some charitable purpose&mdash;<i>Il n'y
+a plus d'enfants.</i> No; in France they may indeed say, "It is true <i>il
+n'y a plus d'enfants</i>, but then have we not invented the <i>demi-temps</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>And if each separate point of female attire and decoration is a sham, so
+the whole is often a deception and a fraud. It is not true that by
+taking thought one cannot add a cubit to one's stature, for ladies, by
+taking thought about it, do add, if not a cubit, at least considerably,
+to their height, which, like almost everything about them, is often
+unreal. With high heels, <i>toup&eacute;</i>, and hat, we may calculate that about
+four or five inches are altogether borrowed for the occasion. Thus it
+comes to be a grave matter of doubt, when a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337"></a>[<a href="./images/337.png">337</a>]</span>man marries, how much is
+real of the woman who has become his wife, or how much of her is her own
+only in the sense that she has bought, and possibly may have paid for
+it. To use the words of an old writer, "As with rich furred conies,
+their cases are far better than their bodies; and, like the bark of a
+cinnamon-tree, which is dearer than the whole bulk, their outward
+accoutrements are far more precious than their inward endowments."</p>
+
+<p>Of the wife elect, her bones, her debts, and her caprices may be the
+only realities which she can bestow on her husband. All the rest&mdash;hair,
+teeth, complexion, ears, bosom, figure, including the <i>demi-temps</i>&mdash;are
+alike an imposition and a falsehood. In such case we should recommend,
+for the sake of both parties, that during at least the wedding-tour, the
+same precautions should be observed as when Louis XV. travelled with
+"the unblushing Chateauroux with her bandboxes and rougepots at his
+side, so that at every new station a wooden gallery had to be run up
+between their lodgings."</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that in all this we are ungenerous and ungrateful, and
+that in discussing the costume of women we are touching on a question
+which pertains to women more than to men. But is that so? Are we not by
+thus exposing what is false, filthy, and meretricious, seeking to lead
+what was once dignified by the name of "the fair sex" from a course
+alike unbecoming and undignified to one more worthy of the sex and its
+attributes? Most men like to please women, and most women like to please
+men. For, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338"></a>[<a href="./images/338.png">338</a>]</span>as has been well said, "Pour plaire aux femmes il faut &ecirc;tre
+consid&eacute;r&eacute; des hommes, et pour &ecirc;tre consid&eacute;r&eacute; des hommes il faut savoir
+plaire aux femmes."</p>
+
+<p>We have a right to suppose that women do not adopt a fashion or a
+costume unless they suppose that it will add to their attractions in
+general, and possibly also please men in particular. This being so, it
+may be well to observe that these fashions do not please or attract men,
+for we know they are but the inventions of some vulgar, selfish
+<i>perruquier</i> or <i>modiste</i>. We may add that if we want to study the nude
+we can do so in the sculpture galleries, or among the Tableaux Vivants,
+at our ease; and that for well-bred or well-educated and well-born
+women, or even for only fashionable and fast women, to approximate in
+their manners, habits, and dress to the members of the <i>demi-monde</i> is a
+mistake, and a grievous one, if they wish to be really and adequately
+appreciated by men whose good opinion, if not more, they would desire to
+possess.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339"></a>[<a href="./images/339.png">339</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>THE FADING FLOWER.</h2>
+
+
+<p>If there is any part of man's conduct which proves more conclusively
+than another the baseness of his ingratitude, it is his indifference to
+the Fading Flower. Woman may well wonder at the charm which prostrates
+the heavy Guardsman at the feet of the belle of the season. Even the
+most ardent of worshippers at such a shrine must, one would think,
+desire in their deity a little more sweetness and light. But the beauty
+of eighteen summers is trained to look on worship as simply her due, and
+to regard amiability as a mere superfluity. She knows she can summon an
+adorer by one beckon of her fan, and dismiss him by another. A bow will
+repay the most finished of pretty speeches, and conversation can be
+conducted at the least possible expense by the slight trouble of
+recollecting who was at Lady A.'s ball, and the yet slighter trouble of
+guessing who is likely to be at Lady C.'s.</p>
+
+<p>It is utterly needless to bestow any labor on society when society takes
+it as a crowning favor to be suffered simply to adore. There is a
+certain grandeur, therefore, of immobility about the English beauty, a
+statuesque perfection which no doubt has great merits of its own. But it
+must be owned that it is not amusing, and that it is only the intensity
+of our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340"></a>[<a href="./images/340.png">340</a>]</span>worship which saves us from feeling it to be dull. Beauty is apt
+to be a little heavy on the stairs. A shade of distress flits over the
+loveliest of faces if we stray for a moment beyond the happy
+hunting-grounds of the ball-room or the Opera, the last Academy or the
+next Horticultural. Beautiful beings are made, they feel, not to amuse,
+but to be amused. The one object of their enthusiasm is the "funny
+Bishop" who turns a great debate into a jest for the entertainment of
+his fair friends in the Ladies' Gallery. The object of their social
+preference is the young wit who lounges up to tell his last little
+story, and then, without boring them for a reply, lounges away again.
+The debt which they owe to society is simply the morning ride which
+keeps them blooming through the season. The debt which society owes to
+them is that eternal succession of gay nothings which keeps London in a
+whirl till the grouse are ready for the sacrifice. In a word, woman in
+her earlier stages is simply receptive.</p>
+
+<p>Light and sweetness come in with the Fading Flower. It is when the shy
+retreat of the elder sons makes way for the shyer approach of their
+younger brothers that woman becomes fragrant and intelligent. The old
+indifference quickens into a subdued vivacity; Hermione descends from
+her pedestal and warms into flesh and blood. She turns chatty, and her
+chat insensibly deepens into conversation. She discovers a new interest
+in life and in the last novel of the season. She ventures on the
+confines of poetry, and if she does not read Mr. Tennyson's <i>Lucretius</i>,
+she keeps his photograph in her album. She <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341"></a>[<a href="./images/341.png">341</a>]</span>flings herself with a far
+greater ardor into the mysteries of croquet. She has been known to
+garden. As petal after petal floats down to earth she becomes artistic.
+She reads, she talks Mr. Ruskin. She has her own views on Venice and its
+Doges, her enthusiasm over Alps and artisans. The slow approach of
+autumn brings her to politics. She is deep in Mr. Disraeli's novels, and
+quotes Mr. Gladstone's Homer. She speculates on Charlie's chances for
+the county. She knows why the Home Secretary was absent from the last
+division. The drop of another petal warns her further afield. She is
+manly now; she comes in at breakfast with her hair about her ears, and a
+tale of the gallop she has had across country. She takes you over the
+farm, and laughs at your ignorance of pigs. She peeps into the
+odoriferous sanctum upstairs, and owns to a taste for cigarettes. She is
+slightly horsey, and knows to a pound the value of her mare. Another
+season, and she is interested in Church questions, and inquires what is
+the next "new thing" at St. Andrew's. She adores Lord Shaftesbury, or
+works frontals for St. Gogmagog. She collects for the Irish missions, or
+misses an <i>entr&eacute;e</i> on Eves. It is only as woman fades that we realize
+the versatility, the inexhaustible resources, of woman.</p>
+
+<p>The one scene, however, where the Fading Flower is perhaps seen at her
+best is the County Arch&aelig;ological Meeting. Of all rural delusions this is
+perhaps the pleasantest, and if the name is forbidding, the Fading
+Flower knows how little there is in a name. About half a dozen old
+gentlemen, of course, take the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342"></a>[<a href="./images/342.png">342</a>]</span>thing in grand earnest. It is beyond
+measure amusing to peep over the learned Secretary's shoulder, to see
+the gray heads wagging and the spectacles in full play over the list of
+promised papers, to watch the carefully planned details, the solemn
+array of morning meetings, the grave excursions from abbey to castle,
+from castle to church, the graver soir&eacute;es where Dryasdust revels amidst
+armor and knicknackery. It is even more amusing to see the Fading Flower
+step in at the close of this learned preparation, and with a woman's
+alchemy turn all this dust to gold. A little happy audacity converts the
+morning meetings into convenient gatherings for the groups of the day,
+the excursion resolves itself into a refined picnic, the learned soir&eacute;e
+becomes a buzzing conversazione.</p>
+
+<p>Those who look forward with interest to woman's entrance into our
+Universities may gather something of the results to be expected from
+such a step in the fields of rural arch&aelig;ology. Her very presence at the
+meeting throws an air of gentle absurdity over the whole affair. It is
+difficult for the driest of antiquaries to read a paper on Roman roads
+in the teeth of a charming being who sleeps to the close, and then
+awakes only to assure him it was "very romantic." But it must be
+confessed that the charming being has very little trouble with the
+antiquaries. Half the fun of the thing lies in the ease and grace of her
+taming of Dryasdust; the learned Professor dies at her touch into "a
+dear delightful old thing," and fetches and carries all day with a
+perfect obedience. It is a delightful change from town, a sort of
+glorified afternoon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343"></a>[<a href="./images/343.png">343</a>]</span>in a pastoral Zoological, this junketing among the
+queer unclubbable animals of science and history. There is a noble
+disdain of rheumatism in the ardor with which they plunge into the dark
+and mysterious vaults where their willful student insists, with Mr.
+Froude, that those poor monks snatched their damp and difficult slumber;
+and there is a noble disdain of truth in their suppression of the
+treacherous and unsentimental "beer-cellar" which trembles on their
+lips.</p>
+
+<p>Woman, in fact, carries her atmosphere of romantic credulity into the
+gray and arid scepticism of a groping arch&aelig;ology. She frowns down any
+suggestion of the improbability of a pretty story, she believes in the
+poison-sucking devotion of Queen Eleanor, she shrugs her shoulders
+impatiently at a whisper of Queen Mary's wig. Every kitchen becomes a
+torture-chamber, every drain a subterranean passage. But resolute as she
+is on this point of the poetry of the past, on all other questions she
+is the most docile of pupils. Her interest, her listening power, her
+curiosity, is inexhaustible. If she has a passion, indeed, it is for
+Early English. But she has a proper awe for Romanesque, and a singular
+interest in Third Pointed. She is ruthless in insisting on her victim's
+spelling out every word of a brass in Latin that she cannot understand,
+and which he cannot translate. She collects little fragments of Roman
+brick, and wraps them up in tissue-paper for preservation at home like
+bride-cake. She is severe on restoration, and merciless on whitewash.
+She plunges, in fact, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344"></a>[<a href="./images/344.png">344</a>]</span>gallantly into the spirit of the thing, but she
+gracefully denudes it of its bareness and pedantry. Her bugle sings
+truce at midday for luncheon. She couches in the deep grass of the abbey
+ruins, and gathers in picturesque groups beneath castle walls. A flutter
+of silks, a ripple of feminine laughter, distract the audience from
+graver disquisitions. It is difficult to discuss the exact date of a
+moulding when soda-water bottles are popping beneath one's antiquarian
+nose.</p>
+
+<p>After all, arch&aelig;ologists are men, and sandwiches are sandwiches. It is
+at that moment perhaps that the Fading Flower is at her best. Her waning
+attractions are heightened artistically by the background of old fogies.
+Her sentiment blends with the poetry of the ruins around. The young
+squire, the young parson, who have been yawning under the prose of
+Dryasdust, find refreshment in the gay prattle of arch&aelig;ological woman.
+The sun too is overpowering, and a pretty woman leaning on one's arm in
+the leafy recesses of a ruined castle is sometimes more overpowering
+than the sun. There is much in the romance of the occasion. There is a
+little perhaps in the champagne. At any rate the Fading Flower blooms
+often into matronly life under the kindly influences of arch&aelig;ological
+meetings, and antiquarian studies flourish gaily under the patronage of
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>There is a certain melancholy in tracing further the career of the
+Fading Flower. We long to arrest it at each of these picturesque stages,
+as we long to arrest the sunset in its lovelier moments of violet and
+gold. But the sunset dies into the gray of eve, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345"></a>[<a href="./images/345.png">345</a>]</span>woman sets with the
+same fatal persistency. The evanescent tints fade into the gray. Woman
+becomes hard, angular, colorless. Her floating sentiment, so graceful in
+its mobility, curdles into opinions. Her conversation, so charmingly
+impalpable, solidifies into discussion. Her character, like her face,
+becomes rigid and osseous. She entrenches herself in the 'ologies. She
+works pinafores for New-Zealanders in the May Meetings, and appears in
+wondrous bonnets at the Church Congress. She adores Mr. Kingsley because
+he is earnest, and groans over the triviality of the literature of the
+day. She takes up the grievances of her sex, and badgers the puzzled
+overseer who has omitted to place her name on the register. She
+pronounces old men fogies, and young men intolerable. She throws out
+dark hints of her intention to compose a great work which shall settle
+everything. Then she bursts into poetry, and pens poems of so fiery a
+passion that her family are in consternation lest she should elope with
+the half-pay officer who meets her by moonlight on the pier. Then she
+plunges into science, and cuts her hair short to be in proper trim for
+Professor Huxley's lectures.</p>
+
+<p>For awhile she startles her next neighbor at dinner with speculations on
+molluscs, and questions as to the precise names of the twelve hundred
+new species of fish that Professor Agassiz has caught in the river
+Orinoco. There is a more terrible stage when she becomes heretical,
+subscribes to the support of Mr. Tonneson and pities the poor Bishop of
+Natal. But from this she is commonly saved by the deepening of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346"></a>[<a href="./images/346.png">346</a>]</span>eve.
+Little by little all this restless striving against the monotony of her
+existence dies down into calm. The gray of life hushes the Fading Flower
+into the kindly aunt, the patient nurse, the gentle friend of the poor.
+It is hard to recognise the proud beauty, the vivacious flirt, the
+sentimental poetess of days gone by in the practical little woman who
+watches by Harry's sick-bed or hurries off with blankets and broth down
+the lane. In some such peace the Fading Flower commonly finds her
+rest&mdash;a peace unromantic, utilitarian, and yet not perhaps unbeautiful.
+She has found&mdash;as she tells us&mdash;her work at last; and yet in the life
+that seems so profitless she has been doing a work after all. She has at
+any rate vindicated her sex against the charge of what Mr. Arnold calls
+Hebraism. She has displayed in Hellenic roundness the completeness of
+the nature of woman.</p>
+
+<p>Compared with the quick transitions, with the endless variety of her
+life, the life of man seems narrow and poor. There is hardly a phase of
+human thought, of human action, which she has not touched, and she has
+never touched but to adorn. If she has faded, she has revealed a new
+power and beauty and fragrance at each stage in her decay. Nothing in
+her life has proved so becoming as her leaving it. The song of
+ingenuity, of triumph, of defence, which has run along the course of her
+decline, softens at its close into a swan-song of peace and gentleness
+and true womanhood.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347"></a>[<a href="./images/347.png">347</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>LA FEMME PASS&Eacute;E.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Without doubt it is a time of trial to all women, more or less painful
+according to individual disposition, when they first begin to grow old
+and lose their good looks. Youth and beauty make up so much of their
+personal value, so much of their natural <i>raison d'&ecirc;tre</i>, that when
+these are gone many feel as if their whole career was at an end, and as
+if nothing was left to them now that they are no longer young enough to
+be loved as girls are loved, or pretty enough to be admired as once they
+were admired. For women of a certain position have so little wholesome
+occupation, and so little ambition for anything, save, indeed, that
+miserable thing called "getting on in society," that they cannot change
+their way of life with advancing years; they do not attempt to find
+interest in things outside themselves, and independent of the mere
+personal attractiveness which in youth constituted their whole pleasure
+of existence. This is essentially the case with fashionable women, who
+have staked their all on appearance, and to whom good looks are of more
+account than noble deeds; and, accordingly, the struggle to remain young
+is a frantic one with them, and as degrading as it is frantic.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348"></a>[<a href="./images/348.png">348</a>]</span>
+With the ideal woman of middle age&mdash;that pleasant woman, with her happy
+face and softened manner, who unites the charms of both epochs,
+retaining the ready responsiveness of youth while adding the wider
+sympathies of experience&mdash;with her there has never been any such
+struggle to make herself an anachronism. Consequently she remains
+beautiful to the last, far more beautiful than all the paste and washes
+in Madame Rachel's shop could make her. Sometimes, if rarely in these
+latter days, we meet her in society, where she carries with her an
+atmosphere of her own&mdash;an atmosphere of honest, wholesome truth and
+love, which makes every one who enters it better and purer for the time.
+All children and all young persons love her, because she understands and
+loves them. For she is essentially a mother&mdash;that is, a woman who can
+forget herself, who can give without asking to receive, and who, without
+losing any of the individualism which belongs to self-respect, can yet
+live for and in the lives of others, and find her best joy in the
+well-being of those about her. There is no servility, no exaggerated
+sacrifice in this; it is simply the fulfillment of woman's highest
+duty&mdash;the expression of that grand maternal instinct which need not
+necessarily include the fact of personal maternity, but which must find
+utterance in some line of unselfish action with all women worthy of the
+name.</p>
+
+<p>The ideal woman of middle age understands the young because she has
+lived with them. If a mother, she has performed her maternal duties with
+cheerfulness <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349"></a>[<a href="./images/349.png">349</a>]</span>and love. There has been no giving up her nursery to the
+care of a hired servant who is expected to do for twenty pounds a year
+what the tremendous instinct of a mother's love could not find strength
+to do. When she had children, she attended to them in great part
+herself, and learnt all about their tempers, their maladies, and the
+best methods of management; as they grew up she was still the best
+friend they had, the Providence of their young lives who gave them both
+care and justice, both love and guidance. Such a manner of life has
+forced her to forget herself. When her child lay ill, perhaps dying, she
+had no heart and no time to think of her own appearance, and whether
+this dressing-gown was more becoming than that; and what did the doctor
+think of her with her hair pushed back from her face; and what a fright
+she must have looked in the morning light after her sleepless night of
+watching. The world and all its petty pleasures and paltry pains faded
+away in the presence of the stern tragedy of the hour; and not the
+finest ball of the season seemed to be worth a thought compared to the
+all-absorbing question whether her child slept after his draught and
+whether he ate his food with better appetite.</p>
+
+<p>And such a life, in spite of all its cares, has kept her young as well
+as unselfish; we should rather say, young because unselfish. As she
+comes into the room with her daughters, her kindly face unpolluted by
+paint, her dress picturesque or fashionable according to her taste, but
+decent in form and consistent in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350"></a>[<a href="./images/350.png">350</a>]</span>tone with her age, it is often
+remarked that she looks more like their sister than their mother. This
+is because she is in harmony with her age, and has not, therefore, put
+herself in rivalry with them; and harmony is the very keystone of
+beauty. Her hair may be streaked with white, the girlish firmness and
+transparency of her skin has gone, the pearly clearness of her eye is
+clouded, and the slender grace of line is lost, but for all that she is
+beautiful, and she is intrinsically young. What she has lost in outside
+material charm&mdash;in that mere <i>beaut&eacute; da diable</i> of youth&mdash;she has gained
+in character and expression; and, not attempting to simulate the
+attractiveness of a girl, she keeps what nature gave her&mdash;the
+attractiveness of middle age. And as every epoch has its own beauty, if
+woman would but learn that truth, she is as beautiful now as a matron of
+fifty, because in harmony with her years, and because her beauty has
+been carried on from matter to spirit, as she was when a maiden of
+sixteen. This is the ideal woman of middle age, met with even yet at
+times in society&mdash;the woman whom all men respect, whom all women envy,
+and wonder how she does it, and whom all the young adore, and wish they
+had for an elder sister or an aunt. And the secret of it all lies in
+truth, in love, in purity, and in unselfishness.</p>
+
+<p>Standing far in front of this sweet and wholesome idealization is <i>la
+femme pass&eacute;e</i> of to-day&mdash;the reality as we meet with it at balls and
+f&ecirc;tes and afternoon at homes, ever foremost in the mad chase after
+pleasure, for which alone she seems to think she has been <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351"></a>[<a href="./images/351.png">351</a>]</span>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 was to be measured by cubic inches,
+her lustreless eyes blackened round the lids, to give the semblance of
+limpidity to the tarnished whites&mdash;perhaps the pupil dilated by
+belladonna, or 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 or gauze to conceal the breadth of her robust maturity, or to
+soften the dreadful shadows of her leanness&mdash;there she stands, the
+wretched creature who will not consent to grow old, and who will still
+affect to be like a fresh coquettish girl when she is nothing but <i>la
+femme pass&eacute;e, la femme pass&eacute;e et ridicule</i> into the bargain.</p>
+
+<p>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 honorable issue was as open to her as to her
+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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352"></a>[<a href="./images/352.png">352</a>]</span>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 <i>quid pro quo</i> 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&mdash;at this moment selling
+tapes behind a village counter, or gathering up the eggs in a country
+farm&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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, if even the reality is 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 associations, for all that her standing in society
+is undeniable, and not a door <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353"></a>[<a href="./images/353.png">353</a>]</span>is shut against her. We may have no
+absolutely tangible reason to give for our distaste beyond the
+self-evident facts that she paints her face and dyes her hair, dresses
+in a very <i>decollet&eacute;</i> style, and affects a girlish manner that is out of
+harmony with her age and condition. But though we cannot formularize
+reasons, we have instincts; and sometimes instinct sees more clearly
+than reason.</p>
+
+<p>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; and 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&mdash;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&mdash;regardless of grammar! The "eaux
+noire, brun, et ch&acirc;tain, which dyes the hair any shade in one minute;"
+the "kohhl for the eyelids;" the "blanc de perle," and "rouge de
+Lubin"&mdash;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 <i>femme pass&eacute;e</i> who makes herself up&mdash;the
+middle-aged matron engaged in her frantic struggle against time, and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354"></a>[<a href="./images/354.png">354</a>]</span>obstinately refusing to grow old in spite of all that nature may say or
+do.</p>
+
+<p>Bad as the girl of the period often 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 have naturally immense influence over younger
+ones, and if mothers were to set their faces resolutely against the
+follies of the day, daughters would and must give in. As it is, they 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
+appointed by God 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 subsided.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355"></a>[<a href="./images/355.png">355</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>PRETTY PREACHERS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>To beings of the rougher sex&mdash;let us honestly confess it&mdash;one of the
+most charming of those ever-recurrent surprises which the commonest
+incidents of the holidays never fail to afford is the surprise of
+finding themselves at church. Whatever the cause may be, whether we owe
+our new access of devotion to the early breakfast and the boredom of a
+bachelor morning, or to the moral compulsion of the cunning display of
+prayer-books and hymnals in the hall, or to the temptation of that
+chattiest and gayest of all walks&mdash;the walk to church&mdash;or to an uneasy
+conscience that spurs us to set a good example to the coachman, or to a
+sheer impulse of courtesy to the rector, certain it is that a week after
+we have been lounging at the club-window, and wondering how all the good
+people get through their Sunday morning, we find ourselves safely boxed
+in the family pew, and chorusing the family "Amen!"</p>
+
+<p>No doubt much of our new temper springs simply from the change of scene,
+and if the first week in the country were a time for self-analysis we
+might amuse ourselves with observing what a sudden simplicity of taste
+may be gained simply by a rush from town. There is a pleasant irony in
+being denounced <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356"></a>[<a href="./images/356.png">356</a>]</span>from pulpit and platform as jaded voluptuaries, and
+then finding ourselves able to trample through coppices and plunge into
+cowsheds as if we had never seen a cowshed or a coppice before. But
+there is more than the pleasure of surprise in the peculiar rural
+development of attendance at church. Piety brings its own reward. We
+find ourselves invested with a new domestic interest, and brought into
+far closer and warmer domestic relations. Mamma looks a great deal more
+benignant than usual, and the girls lean on one's arm with a more
+trustful confidence and a deeper sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>A new bond of family union has been found in that victory of the pew
+over the club-window. But earthly pleasure is always dashed with a
+little disappointment, and one drop of bitterness lingers in the cup of
+joy. If only Charlie and papa would remain awake during the sermon! They
+are so good in the Psalms, so attentive through the Lessons, so sternly
+responsive to each Commandment, that it is sad to see them edging
+towards the comfortable corners with the text, and fast asleep under the
+application. Then, too, there is so little hope of reform, not merely
+because on this point men are utterly obdurate, but because it is
+impossible for their reformers even to understand their obduracy. For
+with both the whole question is a pure question of sympathy. Men sleep
+under sermons because the whole temper of their minds, as they grow into
+a larger culture, drifts further and further from the very notion of
+preaching. Inquiry, quiet play of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357"></a>[<a href="./images/357.png">357</a>]</span>thought, a somewhat indolent
+appreciation of the various sides of every subject, an appetite for
+novelty, a certain shrinking from the definite, a certain pleasure in
+the vague&mdash;these characteristics of modern minds are hardly
+characteristics of the pulpit. There are, of course, your drawing-room
+spouters, who can reel off an artistic or poetic or critical discourse
+of any length on the rug. But, as a rule, men neither like to pump upon
+their kind nor to be pumped upon. They like a quiet, genial talk which
+turns over everything and settles nothing. They like to put their case,
+to put their objection, but they like both to be brief and tentative. As
+a rule they talk with their guard up, and say nothing about their deeper
+thoughts or feelings. They vote a man who airs his emotions to be as
+great a bore as the man with a dogma, or the man with a hobby. A sermon,
+therefore, from the very necessities of its structure, is the very type
+of the sort of talk that revolts men most.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, women really enjoy preaching. Mamma's reply to the
+natural inquiry as to the goodness of the sermon&mdash;"My dear, all sermons
+are good"&mdash;is something more than a matronly snub, it is the inner
+conviction of woman. She likes, not merely a talk, but a good long talk.
+She likes being abused. She likes being dogmatized over and
+intellectually trampled on. In fact, she has very little belief in the
+intellect. But then she has an immense faith in the heart. She lives in
+a world of affections and sympathies. She has her little tale of passion
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358"></a>[<a href="./images/358.png">358</a>]</span>in the past that she tells over to herself in the dusk of the autumn
+evening. She believes that the world at large is moved by those impulses
+of love and dislike that play so great a part in her own. And then, too,
+she has her practical house-keeping side, and likes her religion done up
+in neat little parcels of "heads" and "considerations" and
+"applications," and handed over the counter for immediate use. And so
+while papa quarrels with the rector's forty minutes, his indiscriminate
+censure of a world utterly unknown to him, his declamation against Pusey
+or Colenso, or while Charlie laughs over his rhetoric and his sentiment,
+woman listens a little sadly and wearily, and longs for a golden age
+when husbands will love sermons and men understand clergymen.</p>
+
+<p>It is just from this theological deadlock that we are freed by the
+Pretty Preacher. If the world laughs at the Reverend Olympia Brown, it
+is not because she preaches, but because she prisons herself in a
+pulpit. The sure evidence that woman is to become the preacher of the
+future is that woman is the only preacher men listen to. It is hard to
+imagine any bribe short of the National Debt that would have induced us
+to listen through the dog-days of the last few weeks to the panting
+rhetoric of Mr. Spurgeon. But it is harder to imagine the bribe that
+would have roused us to flight as we lay beneath the plane-tree, and
+listened to the cool ripple of the Pretty Preacher. Of course it is a
+mere phase in the life of woman, a short interval between the dawn and
+the night. There is an exquisite piquancy in the raw, shy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359"></a>[<a href="./images/359.png">359</a>]</span>epigrams of
+the abrupt little dogmatist who is just out of her teens. Her very want
+of training and science gives a novelty to her hits that makes her
+formidable in the ring. No doubt, too, as we have owned before, there is
+a faint and delicate attraction about the Fading Flower of later years
+that at certain times and places makes it not impossible to sit under
+her.</p>
+
+<p>But the sphere of the Pretty Preacher lies really between these
+extremes. She is not at war with mankind, like the nymph of bread and
+butter; nor does mankind suspect her of subtle designs in her discourse
+as it suspects the elder homilist. Her talk is just as easy and graceful
+and natural as herself, and, moreover, it is always in season. She never
+suffers a serious reflection to interfere with the whirl of town. She
+quite sees the absurdity of a sermon at a five o'clock tea. No one is
+freer from the boredom of a long talk when there is a chance of a boat
+or a ride. But there are moments when one is too hot, or too tired, or
+too lazy for chat or exertion, and such moments are the moments of the
+Pretty Preacher. The first week of the holidays is especially her own.
+There is a physical pleasure in doing, thinking, saying nothing. The
+highest reach of human effort consists in disentangling a skein of silk
+for her, or turning over Dor&eacute;'s hideous sketches for the Idyls. At such
+a moment there is a freshness as of cool waters in the accents of the
+Pretty Preacher. She does not plunge into the deepest themes at once.
+She leads her listener gently on, up the slopes of art <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360"></a>[<a href="./images/360.png">360</a>]</span>or letters or
+politics, to the higher peaks where her purely dogmatic mission begins.
+She is artistic, and she labors to wake the idler at her feet to higher
+views of beauty and art. She points out the tinting of the distant
+hills, she quotes Ruskin, she criticizes Millais. She crushes her
+auditor with a sense of his ignorance, of the base unpoetic view of
+things with which he lounged through the last Academy. What she longs
+for in English art is nobleness of purpose, and we smile bitter scorn in
+the sunshine at the ignoble artist who suffers a thought of his
+butcher's bills to penetrate into the studio. If we could only stretch
+the Royal Academicians beside us on the grass, what a thrill and an
+emotion would run through those elderly gentlemen as they listened to
+the indignation of the Pretty Preacher.</p>
+
+<p>But art shades off into literature, and literature into poetry. We are
+driven into a confession that we enjoy the frivolous articles that those
+horrid papers have devoted to her sex. Is there nothing, the Pretty
+Preacher asks us solemnly, to be said against our own? And the sun is
+hot, and we are speechless. It was shameful of us to put down the
+<i>Spanish Gipsy</i>, and let it return unfinished to Mudie's! Never did
+rebuke so fill us with shame at our want of imagination and of poesy.
+But already the Preacher has passed to politics, and is deep in Mr.
+Mill's prophecies of coming events. She is severe on the triviality of
+the House, or the quarrelsome debates of the past Session. She passes by
+our murmured excuse of the weather, and dwells with a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361"></a>[<a href="./images/361.png">361</a>]</span>temperate
+enthusiasm on the fact that the next will be a social Parliament. Do we
+know anything about the Poor-laws or Education or Trades'-societies?
+Have we subscribed to Mr. Mill's election? We plead poverty, but the
+miserable plea dies away on the contemptuous air.</p>
+
+<p>What our Pretty Preacher would like above all things would be to meet
+that dear Mr. Shaw Lefevre, and thank him for his efforts to protect
+woman. But she knows we are utterly heretical on the subject; she doubts
+very much whether we take in the <i>Victoria Magazine</i>. We listen as the
+Tory Mayor of Birmingham listened to Mr. Bright at his banquet. The
+politics are not ours, and the literature is not ours, and the art is
+not ours; but it is pleasant to lie in the sunshine and hear it all so
+charmingly put by the Pretty Preacher. We own that sermons have a little
+to say for themselves; above all, that the impossibility of replying to
+them has its advantages in a case like this. It would be absurd to
+discuss these matters with the Pretty Preacher, but it is delightful to
+look up and see the kindling little face and listen to the sermon.</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, as the theologian proper, as the moralist and divine,
+that we love her most. She arrives at this peak at last. As a rule, she
+chooses the tritest topics, but she gives them a novelty and grace of
+her own. Even Thackeray's old "Vanity of Vanities" wakes into new life
+as she dexterously couples it with the dances of the last season. We nod
+our applause from the grass as she denounces the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362"></a>[<a href="./images/362.png">362</a>]</span>worthlessness and
+frivolity of the life we lead. If the weather were cool enough we should
+at once vow, as she exhorts us, to be earnest and great and good. Above
+all, let us be noble. The Pretty Preacher is great on self-sacrifice.
+She sent two of her spoilt dresses to those poor people in the East-end,
+after listening to a whole sermon on their sufferings. The congregation
+at her feet feels a twinge of remorse at the thought of his inhumanity,
+and swears he will put down his segars and devote the proceeds to the
+emigration fund. Does he ever read Keble? There is a slight struggle in
+the unconverted mind, and a faint whisper that he now and then reads
+Tupper; but it is too hot to be flippant, or to do more than swear
+eternal allegiance to the <i>Christian Year</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The evening deepens, and the sermon deepens with it. It is one of the
+most disgusting points about the divine in the pulpit that he is always
+boasting of himself as a man like as we are, and of the sins he
+denounces as sins of his own. It is the special charm of the fair divine
+above us that she is eminently a being not as we are, but one serene,
+angelic, pure. It is the very vagueness of her condemnation that tells
+on us&mdash;the utter ignorance of what is so familiar to us that the
+vagueness betrays, the utter unskillfulness of the hits, and the purity
+that makes them so unskillful. It is only when she descends to
+particulars that we can turn round on the Pretty Preacher&mdash;only when a
+burning and impassioned invective against Cider Cellars suddenly softens
+into the plaintive inquiry, "But, oh, Charlie, dear, what <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363"></a>[<a href="./images/363.png">363</a>]</span><i>are</i> the
+Cider Cellars?" So long as the preacher keeps in the sphere of the
+indefinite, we lie at her mercy, and hear the soft thunders roll
+resistlessly overhead.</p>
+
+<p>But then they are soft thunders. We feel almost encouraged, like Luther,
+to "sin boldly" when the absolving fingers brush lightly over our
+cousinly hair. Our censor, too, has faith in us, in our capacity and
+will for better things, and it is amazingly pleasant to have the
+assurance confirmed by a squeeze from the gentle theologian's hand. And
+so night comes down, and preacher and penitent stroll pleasantly home
+together, and mamma wonders where both can have been; and the Pretty
+Preacher lays her head on her pillow with the sweet satisfaction that
+her mission is accomplished, and that a reprobate soul&mdash;the soul, too,
+of such a gentlemanly and agreeable reprobate&mdash;is won.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364"></a>[<a href="./images/364.png">364</a>]</span></p>
+<h2>SPOILT WOMEN.</h2>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;the spoiling which comes from being
+petted and given way to and indulged, till they think themselves better
+than everybody else, and as if living under laws made specially for them
+alone. 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; and, besides, even arbitrary men meet with opposition in
+certain directions, and the most self-contented social autocrat knows
+that his humblest adherents criticise though they dare not oppose.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365"></a>[<a href="./images/365.png">365</a>]</span>is&mdash;as if he alone of all mankind is to be exempt from misfortune and
+annoyances; as if his friends must never die, his youth never fade, his
+circumstances run always smoothly, protected by the care of others from
+all untoward hitch; and as if time and tide, which wait for no one else,
+are to be bound to him as humble servants dutifully observant of his
+wishes.</p>
+
+<p>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, pet and 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&mdash;a woman's man, with flowing hair and a turn for poetry,
+full of highflown sentiment, and morbidly excited sympathies; a man
+almost as much woman as man, who has no backbone of ambition in him, but
+who puts his whole life into love, just as women do, and who becomes at
+last emphatically not worth his salt.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366"></a>[<a href="./images/366.png">366</a>]</span>
+Bad as it is for a man to be <i>kowtowed</i> 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 at certain extent it
+is 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.</p>
+
+<p>Spoilt women are spoilt mainly from a like cause&mdash;over-attention from
+men. A few certainly are to be found, as pampered daughters, with
+indulgent mammas and subservient aunts given up wholly to ruining their
+young charge 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 compensation, that inevitable tendency to readjust
+the balance, which prevents the continuance of a like excess under
+different forms.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367"></a>[<a href="./images/367.png">367</a>]</span>
+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 is 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. One characteristic of the spoilt woman is
+her impatience of anything like rivalry. She never has a female
+friend&mdash;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 the lady-paramount that she cannot understand it if any one
+steps in to share her honors and divide her throne.</p>
+
+<p>To praise the beauty of any other woman, to find her charming, or 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&mdash;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 into 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368"></a>[<a href="./images/368.png">368</a>]</span>can develop into active good; but only
+sometimes. The spoilt woman <i>par excellence</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The spoilt woman as the wife of an unsuccessful husband or the mother of
+sickly children is a pitiable spectacle. If it comes to her to be
+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&mdash;not others' needs, but
+her own pain in supplying them, 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.</p>
+
+<p>All that large part of the perfect 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 or two she
+loves. She is the woman who calls her husband <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369"></a>[<a href="./images/369.png">369</a>]</span>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 attended to; and it is not
+for love&mdash;and the amiable if weak pleasure of attracting the notice of
+the beloved&mdash;it is just for the vanity of being a little somebody for
+the moment, and of playing off the small regality involved in the
+procedure. She would not return the attention.</p>
+
+<p>Unlike the Eastern women, who wait on their lords, hand and foot, and
+who place their highest honor 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 <i>demi-monde</i> of the higher class, and among
+women who are not of the <i>demi-monde</i> by station, but 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.</p>
+
+<p>It is very striking to see the difference between the women of this
+type, the <i>petites ma&icirc;tresses</i> who require the utmost attention and
+almost servility from man, and the noble dignity of service which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370"></a>[<a href="./images/370.png">370</a>]</span>the
+pure woman can afford to give&mdash;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&mdash;the rule holding good for
+other things besides mere social place.</p>
+
+<p>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 on burning ploughshares is the only fit analogy. A length of
+lace unstarched, a ribbon unsewed, a flower set awry, anything that
+crumples only 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 beset with thorns.</p>
+
+<p>If a dove was 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371"></a>[<a href="./images/371.png">371</a>]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 criticise, doubt, or contradict, is
+an intellectual Tower of Pisa under the shadow of which it is not
+pleasant to live.</p>
+
+
+<div class="notebox">
+<h2><a name="TN" id="TN"></a>TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES</h2>
+
+
+<p>Pages x and 24 are blank in the original.</p>
+
+<p>The following words appear with and without hyphens. They have been left
+as in the original.</p>
+
+<table style="margin-left: 10%;" summary="words with and without hyphens" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">ball-room</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">ballroom</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">business-like</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">businesslike</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">hearth-rug</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">hearthrug</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">house-keeper</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">housekeeper</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft" style="padding-right: 5em;">house-keeping</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">housekeeping</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">man-like</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">manlike</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">now-a-days</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">nowadays</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">over-head</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">overhead</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Variations in spelling have been left as in the original. Examples
+include the following:</p>
+
+<table style="margin-left: 10%;" summary="words with variant spellings" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">center</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">centre</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft" style="padding-right: 5em;">learned</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">learnt</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">spoiled</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">spoilt</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>The following corrections have been made to the text:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>Page xi: <span class="smcap">Introduction</span>, 13[original has 5]</p>
+
+<p>Page 48: slink away from a bantam[original has bantum] hen</p>
+
+<p>Page 67: you[original has vou] go in for this sort</p>
+
+<p>Page 129: sheer force of genius[original has genuis]</p>
+
+<p>Page 161: some out-of-the-way[original has out-of-the way]
+corner</p>
+
+<p>Page 220: exhausts itself in a declaration[original has
+delaration] of revolt</p>
+
+<p>Page 269: ignorant of contemporary[original is split across
+lines after con but hyphen is missing] fashions</p>
+
+<p>Page 303: following the [original has the the] same
+extravagance</p>
+
+<p>Page 332: torture it until it[original has is] has about as
+much life</p></div>
+
+<p>Ellipses match the original.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Modern Women and What is Said of Them, by Anonymous
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+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg's Modern Women and What is Said of Them, by Anonymous
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Modern Women and What is Said of Them
+       A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868)
+
+Author: Anonymous
+
+Commentator: Lucia Gilbert Calhoun
+
+Release Date: October 18, 2008 [EBook #26948]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN WOMEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Lisa Reigel, and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net (This file was made using scans of
+public domain works from the University of Michigan Digital
+Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             MODERN WOMEN
+
+                                 AND
+
+                         WHAT IS SAID OF THEM
+
+
+                             A REPRINT OF
+
+                     A SERIES OF ARTICLES IN THE
+
+                           SATURDAY REVIEW
+
+
+                       WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
+
+                      MRS. LUCIA GILBERT CALHOUN
+
+
+                               NEW YORK
+                     _J. S. REDFIELD, PUBLISHER_
+                          140 FULTON STREET
+                                 1868
+
+
+
+
+      Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
+
+                           J. S. REDFIELD,
+
+In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the
+                    Eastern District of New York.
+
+
+                          EDWARD O. JENKINS,
+                      _PRINTER AND STEREOTYPER_,
+                       No. 20 North William St.
+
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT.
+
+
+The following papers on Woman were originally published in the columns
+of the London SATURDAY REVIEW. Some of them have already been reprinted
+in the literary and daily journals of this country, and they have
+excited no little discussion and comment among readers of both sexes.
+
+Whether agreeing or not with the writer, it is impossible not to concede
+the eminent ability with which the various subjects are handled. No
+series of essays has appeared in the English language for many years
+which has been so extensively reprinted and so generally read.
+
+The authorship of these papers has been attributed to different
+individuals, male and female; but it is more than probable that the
+writers whose names have been mentioned in this connection are precisely
+those who have had nothing whatever to do with them. It is not unlikely
+that, in due time, the publisher of this volume may be in possession of
+authentic information on this head, and that the name of the author may
+then appear on the title-page.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+           INTRODUCTION,                                 5
+
+       I.--THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD,                      25
+
+      II.--FOOLISH VIRGINS,                             34
+
+     III.--LITTLE WOMEN,                                43
+
+      IV.--PINCHBECK,                                   52
+
+       V.--PUSHING WOMEN,                               61
+
+      VI.--FEMININE AFFECTATIONS,                       73
+
+     VII.--IDEAL WOMEN,                                 83
+
+    VIII.--WOMAN AND THE WORLD,                         93
+
+      IX.--UNEQUAL MARRIAGES,                          101
+
+       X.--HUSBAND-HUNTING,                            109
+
+      XI.--PERILS OF "PAYING ATTENTION,"               118
+
+     XII.--WOMEN'S HEROINES,                           128
+
+    XIII.--INTERFERENCE,                               138
+
+     XIV.--PLAIN GIRLS,                                148
+
+      XV.--A WORD FOR FEMALE VANITY,                   157
+
+     XVI.--THE ABUSE OF MATCH-MAKING,                  167
+
+    XVII.--FEMININE INFLUENCE,                         177
+
+   XVIII.--PIGEONS,                                    188
+
+     XIX.--AMBITIOUS WIVES,                            198
+
+      XX.--PLATONIC WOMAN,                             206
+
+     XXI.--MAN AND HIS MASTER,                         215
+
+    XXII.--THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER,                   225
+
+   XXIII.--ENGAGEMENTS,                                235
+
+    XXIV.--WOMAN IN ORDERS,                            243
+
+     XXV.--WOMAN AND HER CRITICS,                      253
+
+    XXVI.--MISTRESS AND MAID, ON DRESS AND UNDRESS,    262
+
+   XXVII.--AESTHETIC WOMAN,                             272
+
+  XXVIII.--WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?                       281
+
+    XXIX.--PAPAL WOMAN,                                291
+
+     XXX.--MODERN MOTHERS,                             300
+
+    XXXI.--PRIESTHOOD OF WOMAN,                        309
+
+   XXXII.--THE FUTURE OF WOMAN,                        319
+
+  XXXIII.--COSTUME AND ITS MORALS,                     329
+
+   XXXIV.--THE FADING FLOWER,                          339
+
+    XXXV.--LA FEMME PASSEE,                            347
+
+   XXXVI.--PRETTY PREACHERS,                           355
+
+  XXXVII.--SPOILT WOMEN,                               364
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+The "Woman Question" will not be put to silence. It demands an answer of
+Western legislators. It besets college faculties. It pursues veteran
+politicians to the fastnesses of so-called National Conventions. Under
+the sacred sounding-boards of New England pulpits has its voice been
+heard, and its unexpected ally, the London SATURDAY REVIEW, introduces
+it to the good society of English drawing-rooms. That this introduction
+comes in the form of diatribe and denunciation is a matter of the least
+moment. Judgment will finally rest, not on the conclusions of the
+special pleader, but on the strength of the case of the accused.
+
+Something, clearly, is wrong with fashionable women. They accept the
+thinnest gilt, the poorest pinchbeck, for gold. They care more for a
+dreary social pre-eminence than for home and children. They find in
+extravagance of living and a vulgar costliness of dress their only
+expression of a vague desire for the beauty and elegance of life. Is
+it, therefore, to be inferred that the race of noble women is dying out?
+St. Paul was hardly less severe than the London SATURDAY, if less
+explicit, in his condemnation of the fashionable women of his day, yet
+we look upon that day as heroic. Certainly neither London nor New York
+can rival the luxury of a rich Roman matron, yet it was not the luxury
+of her women which destroyed the empire, and Brutus's Portia was quite
+as truly a representative woman as the superb Messalina. John Knox
+thought that things were as bad as they could possibly be when he
+thundered at vice in high places; and if there had been a John Knox in
+the court of Charles the Second, he would have sighed for a return of
+the innocent days of his great-grandfather.
+
+On the whole, that hope which springs eternal suggests that the
+fashionable women of the reign of Victoria, and of our seventeenth
+President, are not essentially more discouraging than all the
+generations of the thoughtless fair who danced idly down forgotten
+pasts. Nay, we may even hope that they are better. If they will not
+actually think, yet the fatal contagion of the newspaper and the modern
+novel communicates to them an intellectual irritation which might
+almost stand for a mental process. If they have not ideas, they have
+notions of things, and however inexact and absurd these may be, they are
+better than emptiness.
+
+"Worse, decidedly worse," says our implacable critic; "when women were
+content with looking pretty before marriage, and with good housekeeping
+after, they were uninteresting certainly, but they were respectable. Now
+they dabble in all things; are weakly aesthetic, weakly scientific,
+weakly controversial, and wholly prosy, and contemptible." Dabbling is
+pitiful, certainly, and weakness has few allies, but let us do justice
+even to the weak dabblers. AEsthetic, or scientific, or controversial
+training has but recently been made possible to women. Their previous
+range of study had been very narrow. It is not strange that the least
+attainments should seem to them very profound and satisfactory, and the
+most manifest deductions pass for original conclusions. It is natural
+that their undisciplined faculties should grapple feebly with
+difficulties, and be quite unequal to argument. This is no reason for
+flinging the baffling volumes at their heads; better so educate their
+heads that the volumes shall no longer baffle.
+
+Scolded because they have not an idea beyond dress, laughed at when
+they try to think of something better, a word may certainly be said for
+the good temper and the patience even of the fashionable women, who
+would be wiser if they could.
+
+The fault is, we are assured, that these women take up books only to
+enhance their matrimonial value, and with no thought of the worth of
+study. Let us be just. What business or the professions are to most men,
+marriage is to most women. Men qualify themselves, if they can, for that
+competitive examination which is always going on, and which insures
+clients to the best lawyers, and business to the best merchant, and
+parishes to the best preacher. Women, compelled to wait at home for the
+wooing which changes their destiny, qualify themselves with attractions
+for that competitive examination which all marriageable young women feel
+that they undergo from every marriageable young man. Each has an eye to
+business. One does not feel that the motive in the one case is any
+higher than in the other.
+
+It is very bad, of course, that marriage should be a matter of business.
+It is, perhaps, the most tragic of all perversions. But, evidently, the
+evil is not to be abated by jeremiads, nor by lectures to young women,
+no, nor even by brilliant editorials. So long as women believe that
+inglorious ease is better than work, so long as they are taught that
+they are born to be the gentle dependents of a stronger being, so long
+as courage and capacity are held to be "strong-minded," so long as the
+range of employments for women is narrow, and the standard of wages
+lower than men's, so long they will seek in marriage a home, a larger
+liberty of action, an establishment, a servant who shall supply them
+with money and insure them ease without effort of their own.
+
+Men take the business opening which seems most congenial and most
+profitable. Women do the same thing, and their choice naturally falls
+upon marriage as altogether the most promising speculation of their very
+small list. The remedy seems to be to give women as thorough mental
+training as men receive, to make their training tend as directly to the
+business of earning their bread and their pretty feminine adornments,
+and for the same work to pay them the same wages. If it be objected that
+fashionable women will not work, let it be answered that work itself
+would be fashionable if it were held to be a dignity, and not a
+drudgery, and that the really fine and thoughtful leaders of society
+could easily establish the new order of things. In an aristocratic
+country, where labor is the badge of caste, it would be difficult to
+make it honorable. In a democracy like our own, it is the most
+contemptible snobbishness which frowns on the honest earning of money.
+
+The accusation of prodigal and senseless expenditure in dress must stand
+unrefuted. Sums which would adorn our cities with pleasure-gardens, with
+libraries, with galleries of art, are spent on perishable gauds that
+have not even beauty to commend them. Charities might be founded, lives
+be enriched with travel, all lands laid under contribution with the
+money that every year flows into Stewart's drawers, and the strong-boxes
+of fashionable dress-makers. But the jewelled prodigals who spend it are
+not more selfish, perhaps, than we plain folks who carp.
+
+Again, it is a mistake. They have the money. They mean to secure all the
+pleasure that money can buy. They have that feminine sensuousness which
+delights in color, and odor, and richness of fabric. Their sense of
+beauty is untaught. A little lower in the scale of civilization they
+would pierce their noses, and dye their finger-nails, and wear strings
+of glass beads. A little higher, they would sacrifice the splendid shawl
+to a rare marble, banish the chromo-lithograph, and turn the solitaire
+ear-drops into a lovely picture, and build a conservatory with the price
+of lace flounces. A little higher still, and we might have model
+lodging-houses, and foundling hospitals, and music in the squares given
+us by kindly women who had saved the money from milliner, and jeweller,
+and silk-mercer.
+
+But standing just where they are, clothes seem to these same undeveloped
+women the best things money can buy; and a lack of culture confuses them
+as to the attributes of clothes. Just now our fashionable women are
+bitterly reprehended for copying the dress of the "Anonymas," who
+establish the very pronounced fashions of Paris. Half of them do not
+know what model they have taken. The other half accept the various and
+tasteless costumes, not because they are devised by "Anonyma," but
+because they are striking. There is something in the commonplaceness of
+fashionable life which smothers all originality of thought, of action,
+even of device in costume; and the women who give most time and money to
+dress, to whom one would look for perfection in that mixed art, are
+almost invariably the women who are exact reproductions of their
+neighbors in this regard, as in their house-furnishing, their equipages,
+and their manners.
+
+Upon these splendidly monotonous fine ladies flashes the vision of
+"Anonyma," with her meretricious beauty, and her daring toilettes.
+Amenable to no social Mrs. Grundy, her love of dress develops itself in
+bold contrasts of color, in bizarre and showy ornaments, in picturesque,
+and often in grotesque and tawdry effects. But whatever the details, the
+whole is always striking. Our women longing for the new, accept the
+absurd; desiring the picturesque, take the bizarre, and eager for the
+elegant, content themselves with the costly.
+
+Nor does the fact that our present fashionable evening costume is
+immodest, of necessity impugn the modesty of the women who wear it. That
+they are wanting in fineness of perception must be admitted. But women
+of fashion accept without question the dictum of their modistes. La
+Belle Hamilton, the famous beauty of the reign of Charles the Second, so
+delicately modest and pure that she passed unbreathed upon by scandal
+through that most dissolute court, is painted in a costume that the
+fastest of New York belles would not venture to wear at the most
+fashionable of receptions. The gracious and self-sacrificing and womanly
+women of our revolution, wore dresses cut lower than those of their
+great-grand-daughters, as any portrait-gallery will show. The dress is
+indefensible, but let us not be too ready to condemn the wearer for
+worse sins than thoughtlessness and vanity.
+
+One doubts if there is a single Becky Sharp the less, (poor Becky!)
+since Thackeray gave such terrible immortality to their great prototype.
+The satirist is not the reformer. The satirized do not see themselves in
+the exaggerated type. They go their way, and thank God that they are not
+as these others. The critic of the London SATURDAY, beginning, perhaps,
+with the intention of telling sad and sober truth about a class, has
+ended with a list of the follies and faults of individuals, and these
+are set down with the keen and unconvincing clearness of the satirist.
+
+It is a good thing indeed, that any aspect of the "woman question"
+should claim place, week after week, in a leading English journal. It is
+a good thing that it has been thought wise to reprint these essays here.
+All this talk about the wrong ways of women suggests that there is a
+right way, as yet very much involved in the dust of discussion and the
+fogs of speculation. All these accusations against her folly imply a
+proportionate tribute to her possible wisdom, if once she can get a fair
+chance to be wise.
+
+What the reviewer urges against the effect of fashionable life on the
+intellect, cannot be gainsayed. But in America, at least, the injury to
+the young men is greater apparently than to the young women. At any
+evening party in New York, at any "Hop" in Newport or Saratoga, the
+faces of the men are of a lower type, their talk is more inane, their
+manners are more vulgar. The girls are empty enough, heaven knows! but
+they seem capable of better things, most of them. And they are not so
+wholly spoiled in character. I have found very fashionable girls capable
+of large sacrifices for love, or kindred, or obedience to some divine
+voice. This proves that they have only to be taught that there is
+something better than being very fashionable, to take it thankfully. But
+the men seemed sordid and selfish, and grown worldly-wise before their
+time.
+
+Yet it might make us both more just and more generous to remember that
+during our time of peril as a nation, these very ranks of purposeless
+men furnished us soldiers and money, and a cheerful faith in the cause,
+just as these very legions of idle women gave us workers and nurses.
+
+There is this cheer for American readers of these pages: What we have
+been told is our national sin of extravagance, the too pronounced
+character of our social life, the frivolity and ignorance of our women,
+the lack of a universal and high-toned society, we find not to be inborn
+defects peculiar to our system of government, and hopeless of change,
+but vices, also, of an old and cultivated and dignified nation.
+
+A cheerful optimist may well believe that we are in a transition state;
+that women, impatient of the old life which was without thought and
+culture and motive, in the blind struggle to something better have
+fallen for the time on something worse; that with the movement of the
+age toward mutual helpfulness, man to man, women will move not less
+steadily, if more slowly, and come gradually into truer relations with
+each other and with men. It will not hurt woman to be criticised. She
+has too long been assured of her angelhood, and denied her womanhood. It
+will not help her very greatly to be criticised as if she were being
+tomahawked. If they who come to scoff would but remain to teach! There
+has been much ungentle judgment of men by women, of women by men.
+Thoreau said, "Man is continually saying to Woman, 'Why are you not more
+wise?' Woman is continually saying to Man, 'Why are you not more
+loving?' Unless each is both wise and loving there can be no real
+growth."
+
+                                                         L. G. C.
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+MODERN WOMEN.
+
+
+
+
+THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD.
+
+
+Time was when the stereotyped phrase, "a fair young English girl," meant
+the ideal of womanhood; to us, at least, of home birth and breeding. It
+meant a creature generous, capable, and modest; something franker than a
+Frenchwoman, more to be trusted than an Italian, as brave as an
+American, but more refined, as domestic as a German and more graceful.
+It meant a girl who could be trusted alone if need be, because of the
+innate purity and dignity of her nature, but who was neither bold in
+bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be
+her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival; one who would
+consider their interests identical, and not hold him as just so much
+fair game for spoil; who would make his house his true home and place of
+rest, not a mere passage-place for vanity and ostentation to go through;
+a tender mother, an industrious house-keeper, a judicious mistress. We
+prided ourselves as a nation on our women. We thought we had the pick
+of creation in this fair young English girl of ours, and envied no other
+men their own.
+
+We admired the languid grace and subtle fire of the South; the docility
+and affectionateness of the East seemed to us sweet and simple and
+restful; the vivacious sparkle of the trim and sprightly Parisienne was
+a pleasant little excitement when we met with it in its own domain; but
+our allegiance never wandered from our brown-haired girls at home, and
+our hearts were less vagrant than our fancies. This was in the old time,
+and when English girls were content to be what God and nature had made
+them. Of late years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the
+world a race of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal as if we
+had created another nation altogether. The girl of the period, and the
+fair young English girl of the past, have nothing in common save
+ancestry and their mother-tongue: and even of this last the modern
+version makes almost a new language through the copious additions it has
+received from the current slang of the day.
+
+The girl of the period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her
+face, as the first articles of her personal religion; whose sole idea of
+life is plenty of fun and luxury; and whose dress is the object of such
+thought and intellect as she possesses. Her main endeavor in this is to
+outvie her neighbors in the extravagance of fashion. No matter whether,
+as in the time of crinolines, she sacrificed decency, or, as now in the
+time of trains, she sacrifices cleanliness; no matter either, whether
+she makes herself a nuisance and an inconvenience to every one she
+meets.
+
+The girl of the period has done away with such moral muffishness as
+consideration for others, or regard for counsel and rebuke. It was all
+very well in old-fashioned times, when fathers and mothers had some
+authority and were treated with respect, to be tutored and made to obey,
+but she is far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in mid-career by
+these slow old morals; and as she dresses to please herself, she does
+not care if she displeases every one else. Nothing is too extraordinary
+and nothing too exaggerated for her vitiated taste; and things which in
+themselves would be useful reforms if let alone become monstrosities
+worse than those which they have displaced so soon as she begins to
+manipulate and improve. If a sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the
+mud, she raises hers midway to her knee. If the absurd structure of wire
+and buckram, once called a bonnet, is modified to something that shall
+protect the wearer's face without putting out the eyes of her companion,
+she cuts hers down to four straws and a rosebud, or a tag of lace and a
+bunch of glass beads.
+
+If there is a reaction against an excess of Rowland's Macassar, and hair
+shiny and sticky with grease is thought less nice than if left clean and
+healthy crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks hers out on end like
+certain savages in Africa, or lets it wander down her back like Madge
+Wildfire's, and thinks herself all the more beautiful the nearer she
+approaches in look to a maniac or a negress. With purity of taste she
+has lost also that far more precious purity and delicacy of perception
+which sometimes mean more than appears on the surface. What the
+_demi-monde_ does in its frantic efforts to excite attention, she also
+does in imitation. If some fashionable _devergondee en evidence_ is
+reported to have come out with her dress below her shoulder-blades, and
+a gold strap for all the sleeve thought necessary, the girl of the
+period follows suit next day; and then wonders that men sometimes
+mistake her for her prototype, or that mothers of girls not quite so far
+gone as herself refuse her as a companion for their daughters. She has
+blunted the fine edges of feeling so much that she cannot understand why
+she should be condemned for an imitation of form which does not include
+imitation of fact; she cannot be made to see that modesty of appearance
+and virtue ought to be inseparable, and that no good girl can afford to
+appear bad, under penalty of receiving the contempt awarded to the bad.
+
+This imitation of the _demi-monde_ in dress leads to something in manner
+and feeling, not quite so pronounced, perhaps, but far too like to be
+honorable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to slang,
+bold talk, and fastness; to the love of pleasure and indifference to
+duty; to the desire of money before either love or happiness; to
+uselessness at home, dissatisfaction with the monotony of ordinary life,
+and horror of all useful work; in a word, to the worst forms of luxury
+and selfishness, to the most fatal effects arising from want of high
+principle and absence of tender feeling.
+
+The girl of the period envies the queens of the _demi-monde_ far more
+than she abhors them. She sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously
+appointed, and she knows them to be flattered, feted, and courted with a
+certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only the admiration
+while she ignores the disdain. They have all for which her soul is
+hungering, and she never stops to reflect at what a price they have
+bought their gains, and what fearful moral penalties they pay for their
+sensuous pleasures. She sees only the coarse gilding on the base token,
+and shuts her eyes to the hideous figure in the midst, and the foul
+legend written around the edge.
+
+It is this envy of the pleasures, and indifference to the sins, of these
+women of the _demi-monde_ which is doing such infinite mischief to the
+modern girl. They brush too closely by each other, if not in actual
+deeds, yet in aims and feelings; for the luxury which is bought by vice
+with the one is the thing of all in life most passionately desired by
+the other, though she is not yet prepared to pay quite the same price.
+Unfortunately, she has already paid too much, all, indeed, that once
+gave her distinctive national character. No one can say of the modern
+English girl that she is tender, loving, retiring, or domestic. The old
+fault so often found by keen-sighted Frenchwomen, that, she was so
+fatally _romanesque_, so prone to sacrifice appearances and social
+advantages for love, will never be set down to the girl of the period.
+Love, indeed, is the last thing she thinks of, and the least of the
+dangers besetting her. Love in a cottage, that seductive dream which
+used to vex the heart and disturb the calculations of prudent mothers,
+is now a myth of past ages. The legal barter of herself for so much
+money, representing so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure; that is
+her idea of marriage; the only idea worth entertaining.
+
+For all seriousness of thought respecting the duties or the consequences
+of marriage, she has not a trace. If children come, they find but a
+stepmother's cold welcome from her; and if her husband thinks that he
+has married anything that is to belong to him--a _tacens et placens
+uxor_ pledged to make him happy--the sooner he wakes from his
+hallucination and understands that he has simply married some one who
+will condescend to spend his money on herself, and who will shelter her
+indiscretions behind the shield of his name, the less severe will be his
+disappointment. She has married his house, his carriage, his balance at
+the banker's, his title; and he himself is just the inevitable condition
+clogging the wheels of her fortune; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated
+with more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the
+old-fashioned sort, not girls of the period _pur sang_, that marry for
+love, or put the husband before the banker.
+
+But she does not marry easily. Men are afraid of her; and with reason.
+They may amuse themselves with her for an evening, but they do not take
+her readily for life. Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a
+poor copy of the real thing; and the real thing is far more amusing than
+the copy, because it is real. Men can get that whenever they like; and
+when they go into their mother's drawing-rooms, to see their sisters and
+their sisters' friends, they want something of quite different flavor.
+_Toujours perdrix_ is bad providing all the world over; but a continual
+weak imitation of _toujours perdrix_ is worse. If we must have only one
+kind of thing, let us have it genuine; and the queens of St. John's Wood
+in their unblushing honesty, rather than their imitators and
+make-believes in Bayswater and Belgravia. For, at whatever cost of
+shocked self-love or pained modesty it may be, it cannot be too plainly
+told to the modern English girl that the net result of her present
+manner of life is to assimilate her as nearly as possible to a class of
+women whom we must not call by their proper--or improper--name. And we
+are willing to believe that she has still some modesty of soul left
+hidden under all this effrontery of fashion, and that, if she could be
+made to see herself as she appears to the eyes of men, she would mend
+her ways before too late.
+
+It is terribly significant of the present state of things when men are
+free to write as they do of the women of their own nation. Every word of
+censure flung against them is two-edged, and wounds those who condemn as
+much as those who are condemned; for surely it need hardly be said that
+men hold nothing so dear as the honor of their women, and that no one
+living would willingly lower the repute of his mother or his sisters. It
+is only when these have placed themselves beyond the pale of masculine
+respect that such things could be written as are written now; when they
+become again what they were once they will gather round them the love
+and homage and chivalrous devotion which were then an Englishwoman's
+natural inheritance. The marvel, in the present fashion of life among
+women, is how it holds its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men.
+It used to be an old-time notion that the sexes were made for each
+other, and that it was only natural for them to please each other, and
+to set themselves out for that end. But the girl of the period does not
+please men. She pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how
+little she does that, the class of women she has taken as her models of
+itself testifies.
+
+All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and genuine girl
+of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties,
+to this loud and rampant modernization, with her false red hair and
+painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and by preference
+leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. She thinks she is piquant
+and exciting when she thus makes herself the bad copy of a worse
+original; and she will not see that though men laugh with her they do
+not respect her, though they flirt with her they do not marry her; she
+will not believe that she is not the kind of thing they want, and that
+she is acting against nature and her own interests when she disregards
+their advice and offends their taste. We do not see how she makes out
+her account, viewing her life from any side; but all we can do is to
+wait patiently until the national madness has passed, and our women have
+come back again to the old English ideal, once the most beautiful, the
+most modest, the most essentially womanly in the world.
+
+
+
+
+FOOLISH VIRGINS.
+
+
+The heroines of the London season--the fillies, we mean, who have been
+entered for the great matrimonial stakes, and have been mentioned in the
+betting--have by this time exchanged the fast pleasures of the town for
+the vapid pastimes of the country. We do not of course concern ourselves
+with those poor simple girls who only repeat the lives and morals of
+old-fashioned English homes, and who are too respectable and too modest
+to be pointed at as the girls of the season. We speak of the fast
+sisterhood only. After three months of egregious dissipation they enter
+duly upon the next stage of their regular yearly alternations. Three
+months of headlong folly are succeeded by three months of deadly
+_ennui_. Action and reaction are always equal. The pains and weariness
+of moral crapulousness arise in nice proportion to the passion of the
+debauch. It is a dismal hour when we look on the withered leaves of last
+night's garland.
+
+The lovely and unlovely beings who are now living depressed days far
+from Belgravia and the Row have, it is true, but joyless orgies to look
+back upon. Their pleasures gave but a pinchbeck joviality after all,
+were but a thin lacker spread over mercenary cares and heart-aching
+jealousies--not the jealousies of passion, but the nipping vulgar
+vexation with which a shopkeeper trembles lest a customer should go to
+his rival over the way. Still there was excitement--the excitement of
+outdoing a rival in shamelessness of apparel, in reckless abandonment of
+manner, in the unblushing tolerance of impudent speech, in all the other
+elements of ignoble casino-emulation. Above all, there was the tickling
+excitement of knowing that all this was in some sort clandestine; that
+ostensibly, and on the surface, things looked as if they were all
+exhibiting human nature at its stateliest, most dignified, and most
+refined pitch. The consciousness that the thin surface only conceals
+some of the worst elements of character in full force and activity must
+give a pleasantly stinging sensation to an acutely cynical woman.
+However, this is all over for a time.
+
+For a time the half-dressed young Maenads of the season will be found
+clothed and in their right minds. And what sort of a right mind is it?
+We know the kind of preparation which they have had for the business of
+the season--for flirting, husband-hunting, waltzing, dressing so as to
+escape the regulations of the police, and the rest. For this their
+training has been perfect. But wise men agree that education should
+comprehend training for all the parts of life equally--for pleasure not
+less than for business, for hours of relaxation as well as for hours of
+strain and pressure, for leisure just as much as for active occupation.
+Education is supposed to arm us at every point. Nobody in this world was
+ever perfectly educated. Everybody has at least one side on which he is
+weak--one quarter where temptations are either not irresistible, or else
+are not recognised as alluring to what is wrong. But we all know that
+training, though never perfect, can make the difference between a
+decently right and happy life and a bad, corrupt half-life or no life.
+What does training do for the nimble-footed young beauties of the London
+ball-room? It makes them nimble-footed, we admit. And what else?
+
+The root-idea of the training of girls of the uppermost class in this
+country is perhaps the most absolutely shameless that ever existed
+anywhere out of Circassia or Georgia. It puts clean out of sight the
+notion that women are rational beings as well as animals, or that they
+are destined to be the companions of men who are, or ought to be, also
+something more than animals. It takes the mind into account only as an
+occasionally useful accident of body. The mind ought to be developed a
+little, and in such a way as to make the body more piquant and
+attractive. Like the candle inside a Chinese lantern, it may serve to
+light up and show to advantage the pretty devices outside. But the
+outside is the important thing, and the inside only incidental.
+Insipidity of mind is perhaps a trifle objectionable, because there are
+a few young men of property who dislike insipidity, and who therefore
+might be lost from the toils in consequence. It is a crotchet and an
+eccentricity in a man to desire a wife with a bright mind, but since
+there are such persons, it is just as well to pay a slight attention to
+the mind in odd moments when one is not engaged upon the more urgent
+business of the body. You don't know what may happen, and it is possible
+that the most eligible _parti_ of a season may dislike the idea of
+taking a female idiot to wife. Still it would be absurd to change the
+entire system of up-bringing for our girls merely because here and there
+a man has a distaste for a fool.
+
+The majority of men are incapable of gauging power of intellect and
+fineness of character. But the veriest blockhead and simpleton who ever
+lounged in a doorway or lisped in Pall Mall can tell a fine woman when
+he sees her, and is probably able to find pleasure and hope in the
+spectacle. It is these blockheads and simpletons who thus set the mode.
+They fix the standard of fashionable female education. Education, or the
+astounding modern conception of it, means preparation of girls for the
+marriage market. If a girl does not get well married, it were better for
+her and for her mother also if she had never been born, or had been cast
+with a millstone round her neck into the sea. Whom she marries--whether
+a man old enough to be her father, whether a pattern of imbecility,
+whether a man of a notoriously debauched character--this matters not a
+jot. Only let him have money. This being the conception of marriage, and
+marriage being the aim of all sagacious up-bringing, as most men
+unhappily are more surely taken on their animal than on their rational
+side, it is perfectly natural that you should strive to bring up a
+worthy family of attractive young animals. And let us pause upon this.
+
+If the idea which, even at its best, would be so deplorably imperfect,
+were rationally carried out, still it would not be so absolutely
+pestilent and debasing as it is. Physical education, rightly practiced,
+is a fine and indispensable process in right living. If the system had
+for its end the rearing of really robust and healthy creatures, it would
+mean something. On the contrary, however, anybody who makes a tour
+through fashionable rooms in the season may see that, in a vast quantity
+of cases, the heroines of the night are just as sorrily off in bodily
+stamina as they are for intellectual ideas and interests. Here we again
+encounter the fundamental blunder, that it is only the outside about
+which we need concern ourselves. Let a woman be well dressed (or
+judiciously undressed), have bright eyes, a whitish skin, rounded
+outlines, and that suffices. All this a wise English mother will
+certainly secure, just as a wise Chinese woman will take care to have
+tiny feet, plucked eyebrows, and black finger-nails.
+
+If you go into a nursery you will see the process already at work. The
+little girl, who would fain exercise her young limbs by manifold rude
+sprawlings and rushing hither and thither, and single combats with her
+brothers, is tricked out in ribbons and gay frocks, and bid sit still in
+solemn decorum. With every year of her growth this principle of
+attention to outside trickeries and fineries is more rigidly pursued.
+Less and less every year are the nerves and muscles, the restless
+activities of arms and legs, exercised and made to purvey new vigor to
+the life. The blood is allowed to grow stagnant. The life of the woman,
+even as mere animal, becomes poor and morbid and artificial. By dint of
+much attention and many devices, the outside of the body is maintained
+comely in the eyes of people whose notions of comeliness are thoroughly
+artificial and sophisticated. But how can there be any health with high
+eating, little exercise, above all, with the mind left absolutely vacant
+of all interests? The Belgravian mother does not even understand the
+miserable trade she has chosen. She is as poor a physical trainer as she
+is poor morally and intellectually.
+
+The truth is that in a human being, even from the physical point of
+view, it is rather a dangerous thing to ignore the intellect and the
+emotions. Nature resents being ignored. If you do not cultivate her, she
+will assuredly avenge herself. If you do not get wheat out of your piece
+of ground, she will abundantly give you tares. And there can be no other
+rule expressly invented for the benefit of fashionable young women.
+Their moral nature, if nobody ever taught them to keep an eager eye upon
+it, is soon overgrown, either with flaunting poison plants, or at best
+with dull gray moss. The parent dreams that the daughter's mind is all
+swept and garnished. Lo, there are seven or any other number of devils
+that have entered in and taken possession, more or less permanently. The
+human creature who has never been taught to take an interest in what is
+right and wholesome will, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, take an
+interest in what is wrong and unwholesome. You cannot keep minds in a
+state of vacuum. A girl, like anybody else, will obey the bent of the
+character which has been given either by the education of design or the
+more usual education of mere accidental experience. Everything depends,
+in the ordinary course of things, upon the general view of the aims and
+objects of life which you succeed, deliberately or by hazard, in
+creating.
+
+A girl is not taught that marriage has grave, moral and rational
+purposes, itself being no more than a means. On the contrary, it is
+always figured in her eyes as an end, and as an end scarcely at all
+connected with a moral and rational companionship. It is, she fancies,
+the gate to some sort of paradise whose mysterious joys are not to be
+analysed. She forgets that there are no such swift-coming spontaneous
+paradises in this world, where the future can never be anything more
+than the child of the present, indelibly stamped with every feature and
+line of its parent. This castle-building, however, is harmless. If it
+does not strengthen, still it does not absolutely impoverish or corrupt,
+characters. Of some castle-building one cannot say so much. Character
+_is_ assuredly corrupted by avaricious dreams of marriage as a road to
+material opulence and luxury. There is, indeed, no end to the depraved
+broodings which may come to an empty and undirected mind. If the
+emotions and the intellect are not tended and trained, they will run to
+an evil and evil-propagating seed. Rooted and incurable frivolty is the
+best that can come of it; corruption is the worst.
+
+People madly suppose that going to church, or giving an occasional
+blanket to a sick old woman, will suffice to implant a worthy conception
+of the aims of life. At this moment, some mothers are, perhaps,
+believing that the dull virtue of the country will in a few days redress
+the balance which had been too much discomposed by the rush and whirl of
+the town. As if one strong set of silly interests and emotions could be
+effaced at will by simple change of scene, without substitution of new
+interests and emotions. Excess of frivolous excitement is not repaired
+or undone by excess of mere blankness and nothingness. The dreariness of
+the virtue of the _villeggiatura_ is as noxious as the whirl of the
+mercenary and little virtuous period of the season. Teach young women
+from their childhood upwards that marriage is their single career, and
+it is inevitable that they should look upon every hour which is not
+spent in promoting this sublime end and aim as so much subtracted from
+life. Penetrated with unwholesome excitement in one part of their
+existence, they are penetrated with killing _ennui_ in the next.
+
+If mothers would only add to their account of marriage as the end of a
+woman's existence--which may be right or it may not--a definition of
+marriage as an association with a reasonable and reflective being, they
+would speedily effect a revolution in the present miserable system. To
+the business of finding a husband a young lady would then add the not
+less important business of making herself a rational person, instead of
+a more or less tastefully decorated doll with a passion for a great
+deal of money. She might awaken to the fact, which would at first
+startle her very much no doubt, that there is a great portion of a
+universe outside her own circle and her own mind. This simple discovery
+would of itself effect a revolution that might transform her from being
+an insipid idiot into a tolerably rational being. As it is, the universe
+to her is only a collection of rich bachelors in search of wives, and of
+odious rivals who are contending with her for one or more of these too
+wary prizes. All high social aims, fine broad humanizing ways of
+surveying life, are unknown to her, or else appear in her eyes as the
+worship of Mumbo Jumbo appears in the eyes of the philosopher. She
+thinks of nothing except her private affairs. She is indifferent to
+politics, to literature--in a word, to anything that requires thought.
+She reads novels of a kind, because novels are all about love, and love
+had once something to do with marriage, her own peculiar and absorbing
+business. Beyond this her mind does not stir. Any more positively gross
+state one cannot imagine. There are women who are by accident more
+degraded physically. _Mutatis mutandis_, there are none more degraded,
+morally and intellectually, than those whose minds are constantly bent
+upon marriage at any cost, and with anybody, however decrepit, however
+silly, and however evil, who can make a settlement.
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE WOMEN.
+
+
+The conventional idea of a brave, an energetic, or a supremely criminal
+woman is a tall, dark-haired, large-armed virago, who might pass as the
+younger brother of her husband, and about whom nature seemed to have
+hesitated before determining whether to make her a man or a woman--a
+kind of debatable land, in fact, between the two sexes, and almost as
+much one as the other. Helen Macgregor, Lady Macbeth, Catharine de'
+Medici, Mrs. Manning, and the old-fashioned murderesses in novels, are
+all of the muscular, black-brigand type, with more or less of regal
+grace superadded according to circumstances; and it would be thought
+nothing but a puerile fancy to suppose the contrary of those whose
+personal description is not already known. Crime, indeed, especially in
+art and fiction, has generally been painted in very nice proportion to
+the number of cubic inches embodied, and the depth of color employed;
+though we are bound to add that the public favor runs towards muscular
+heroines almost as much as towards muscular murderesses, which to a
+certain extent redresses the overweighted balance.
+
+Our later novelists, however, have altered the whole setting of the
+palette. Instead of five foot ten of black and brown, they have gone in
+for four foot nothing of pink and yellow; instead of tumbled masses of
+raven hair, they have shining coils of purest gold; instead of hollow
+caverns whence flash unfathomable eyes eloquent of every damnable
+passion, they have limpid lakes of heavenly blue; and their worst
+sinners are in all respects fashioned as much after the outward
+semblance of the ideal saint as can well be managed. The original notion
+was a very good one, and the revolution did not come before it was
+wanted; but it has been a little overdone of late, and we are threatened
+with as great a surfeit of small-limbed, yellow-headed criminals as we
+have had of the man-like black. One gets weary of the most perfect model
+in time, if too constantly repeated; as now, when we have all begun to
+feel that the resources of the angel's face and demon's soul have been
+more heavily drawn on than is quite fair, and that, given "heavy braids
+of golden hair," "bewildering blue eyes," "a small lithe frame," "a
+special delicacy of feet and hands," and we are booked for the
+companionship, through three volumes, of a young person to whom
+Messalina or Lucretia Borgia would be a mere novice.
+
+And yet there is a physiological truth in this association of energy
+with smallness; perhaps, also, with a certain tint of yellow hair,
+which, with a dash of red through it, is decidedly suggestive of nervous
+force. Suggestiveness, indeed, does not go very far in an argument; but
+the frequent connection of energy and smallness in women is a thing
+which all may verify in their own circles. In daily life, who is the
+really formidable woman to encounter?--the black-browed,
+broad-shouldered giantess, with arms almost as big in the girth as a
+man's? or the pert, smart, trim little female, with no more biceps than
+a ladybird, and of just about equal strength with a sparrow? Nine times
+out of ten, the giantess with the heavy shoulders and broad black
+eyebrows is a timid, feeble-minded, good tempered person, incapable of
+anything harsher than a mild remonstrance with her maid, or a gentle
+chastisement of her children. Nine times out of ten her husband has her
+in hand in the most perfect working order, so that she would swear the
+moon shone at midday if it were his pleasure that she should make a fool
+of herself in that direction. One of the most obedient and indolent of
+earth's daughters, she gives no trouble to any one, save the trouble of
+rousing, exciting, and setting her agoing; while, as for the conception
+or execution of any naughty piece of self-assertion, she is as utterly
+incapable as if she were a child unborn, and demands nothing better than
+to feel the pressure of the leading-strings, and to know exactly by
+their strain where she is desired to go and what to do.
+
+But the little woman is irrepressible. Too fragile to come into the
+fighting section of humanity, a puny creature whom one blow from a man's
+huge fist could annihilate, absolutely fearless, and insolent with the
+insolence which only those dare show who know that retribution cannot
+follow--what can be done with her? She is afraid of nothing, and to be
+controlled by no one. Sheltered behind her weakness as behind a triple
+shield of brass, the angriest man dare not touch her, while she provokes
+him to a combat in which his hands are tied. She gets her own way in
+everything, and everywhere. At home and abroad she is equally dominant
+and irrepressible, equally free from obedience and from fear. Who breaks
+all the public orders in sights and shows, and, in spite of king,
+kaiser, or policeman X, goes where it is expressly forbidden that she
+shall go? Not the large-boned, muscular woman, whatever her temperament;
+unless, indeed, of the exceptionally haughty type in distinctly inferior
+surroundings, and then she can queen it royally enough, and set
+everything at most lordly defiance. But in general the large-boned woman
+obeys the orders given, because, while near enough to man to be somewhat
+on a par with him, she is still undeniably his inferior. She is too
+strong to shelter herself behind her weakness, yet too weak to assert
+her strength and defy her master on equal grounds. She is like a
+flying-fish, not one thing wholly; and while capable of the
+inconveniences of two lives, is incapable of the privileges of either.
+
+It is not she, for all her well-developed frame and formidable looks,
+but the little woman, who breaks the whole code of laws and defies all
+their defenders--the pert, smart, pretty little woman, who laughs in
+your face, and goes straight ahead if you try to turn her to the right
+hand or to the left, receiving your remonstrances with the most sublime
+indifference, as if you were talking a foreign language she could not
+understand. She carries everything before her, wherever she is. You may
+see her stepping over barriers, slipping under ropes, penetrating to the
+green benches with a red ticket, taking the best places on the platform
+over the heads of their rightful owners, settling herself among the
+reserved seats without an inch of pasteboard to float her. You cannot
+turn her out by main force. British chivalry objects to the public
+laying on of hands in the case of a woman, even when most recalcitrant
+and disobedient; more particularly if a small and fragile-looking woman.
+So that, if it is only a usurpation of places especially masculine, she
+is allowed to retain what she has got amid the grave looks of the
+elders--not really displeased though at a flutter of her ribbons among
+them--and the titters and nudges of the young fellows.
+
+If the battle is between her and another woman, they are left to fight
+it out as they best can, with the odds laid heavily on the little one.
+All this time there is nothing of the tumult of contest about her. Fiery
+and combative as she generally is, when breaking the law in public
+places she is the very soul of serene daring. She shows no heat, no
+passion, no turbulence; she leaves these as extra weapons of defence to
+women who are assailable. For herself she requires no such aids. She
+knows her capabilities and the line of attack that best suits her, and
+she knows, too, that the fewer points of contact she exposes the more
+likely she is to slip into victory; the more she assumes, and the less
+she argues, the slighter the hold she gives her opponents. She is
+either perfectly good-humored or blankly innocent; she either smiles you
+into indulgence or wearies you into compliance by the sheer hopelessness
+of making any impression on her. She may, indeed, if of the very
+vociferous and shrill-tongued kind, burst out into such a noisy
+demonstration that you are glad to escape from her, no matter what
+spoils you leave on her hands; just as a mastiff will slink away from a
+bantam hen all heckled feathers and screeching cackle, and tremendous
+assumption of doing something terrible if he does not look out. Any way
+the little woman is unconquerable; and a tiny fragment of humanity at a
+public show, setting all rules and regulations at defiance, is only
+carrying out in the matter of benches the manner of life to which nature
+has dedicated her from the beginning.
+
+As a rule, the little woman is brave. When the lymphatic giantess falls
+into a faint or goes off into hysterics, she storms, or bustles about,
+or holds on like a game terrier, according to the work on hand. She will
+fly at any man who annoys her, and bears herself as equal to the biggest
+and strongest fellow of her acquaintance. In general she does it all by
+sheer pluck, and is not notorious for subtlety or craft. Had Delilah
+been a little woman she would never have taken the trouble to shear
+Samson's locks. She would have defied him with all his strength
+untouched on his head, and she would have overcome him too. Judith and
+Jael were both probably large women. The work they went about demanded a
+certain strength of muscle and toughness of sinew; but who can say that
+Jezebel was not a small, freckled, auburn-haired Lady Audley of her
+time, full of the concentrated fire, the electric force, the passionate
+recklessness of her type? Regan and Goneril might have been beautiful
+demons of the same pattern; we have the example of the Marchioness de
+Brinvilliers as to what amount of spiritual deviltry can exist with the
+face and manner of an angel direct from heaven; and perhaps Cordelia was
+a tall dark-haired girl, with a pair of brown eyes, and a long nose
+sloping downwards.
+
+Look at modern Jewesses, with their flashing Oriental orbs, their
+night-black tresses, and the dusky shadows of their olive-colored
+complexions; as catalogued properties according to the ideal, they would
+be placed in the list of the natural criminals and lawbreakers, while in
+reality they are about as meek and docile a set of women as are to be
+found within the four seas. Pit a fiery little Welsh woman or a petulant
+Parisienne against the most regal and Junonic amongst them, and let them
+try conclusions in courage, in energy, or in audacity; the Israelitish
+Juno will go down before either of the small Philistines, and the
+fallacy of weight and color in the generation of power will be shown
+without the possibility of denial. Even in those old days of long ago,
+when human characteristics were embodied and deified, we do not find
+that the white-armed, large-limbed Here, though queen by right of
+marriage, lorded it over her sister goddesses by any superior energy or
+force of nature. On the contrary, she was rather a heavy-going person,
+and, unless moved to anger by her husband's numerous infidelities, took
+her Olympian life placidly enough, and once or twice got cheated in a
+way that did no great credit to her sagacity. A little Frenchwoman would
+have sailed around her easily; and as it was, shrewish though she was in
+her speech when provoked, her husband not only deceived but chastised
+her, and reduced her to penitence and obedience as no little woman would
+have suffered herself to be reduced.
+
+There is one celebrated race of women who were probably the
+powerfully-built, large-limbed creatures they are assumed to have been,
+and as brave and energetic as they were strong and big--the Norse women
+of the sagas, who, for good or evil, seem to have been a very
+influential element in the old Northern life. Prophetesses, physicians,
+dreamers of dreams and the accredited interpreters as well, endowed with
+magic powers, admitted to a share in the councils of men, brave in war,
+active in peace, these fair-haired Scandinavian women were the fit
+comrades of their men, the fit wives and mothers of the Berserkers and
+the Vikings. They had no tame or easy life of it, if all we hear of them
+is true. To defend the farm and the homestead during their husbands'
+absence, and to keep themselves intact against all bold rovers to whom
+the Tenth Commandment was an unknown law; to dazzle and bewilder by
+magic arts when they could not conquer by open strength; to unite craft
+and courage, deception and daring, loyalty and independence, demanded
+no small amount of opposing qualities. But the Steingerdas and Gudrunas
+were generally equal to any emergency of fate or fortune, and slashed
+their way through the history of their time more after the manner of men
+than women; supplementing their downright blows by side thrusts of
+craftier cleverness when they had to meet power with skill, and were
+fain to overthrow brutality by fraud. The Norse women were certainly as
+largely framed as they were mentally energetic, and as crafty as either;
+but we know of no other women who unite the same characteristics, and
+are at once cunning, strong, brave and true.
+
+On the whole, then, the little women have the best of it. More petted
+than their bigger sisters, and infinitely more powerful, they have their
+own way in part because it really does not seem worth while to contest a
+point with such little creatures. There is nothing that wounds a man's
+self-respect in any victory they may get or claim. Where there is
+absolute inequality of strength, there can be no humiliation in the
+self-imposed defeat of the stronger; and as it is always more pleasant
+to have peace than war, and as big men for the most part rather like
+than not to put their necks under the tread of tiny feet, the little
+woman goes on her way triumphant to the end, breaking all the laws she
+does not like, and throwing down all the barriers that impede her
+progress, perfectly irresistible and irrepressible in all circumstances
+and under any condition.
+
+
+
+
+PINCHBECK.
+
+
+Not many years ago no really refined gentlewoman would have worn
+pinchbeck. False jewelry and imitation lace were touchstones with the
+sex, and the woman who would condescend to either was assumed, perhaps
+not quite without reason, to have lost something more than the mere
+perception of technical taste. This feeling ran through the whole of
+society, and pinchbeck was considered as at once despicable and
+disreputable. The successful speculator, sprung from nothing, who had
+made his fortune during the war, might buy land, build himself a
+mansion, and set up a magnificent establishment, but he was never looked
+on as more than a lucky adventurer by the aboriginal gentry of the
+place; and the blue blood, perhaps nourishing itself on thin beer,
+turned up its nose disdainfully at the claret and madeira which had been
+personally earned and not lineally inherited. This exclusiveness was
+narrow in spirit, and hard in individual working; and yet there was a
+wholesome sentiment underlying its pride which made it valuable in
+social ethics, if immoral on the score of natural equality and human
+charity. It was the rejection of pretentiousness, however gilded and
+glittering, in favor of reality, however poor and barren; it was the
+condemnation of make-believes--the repudiation of pinchbeck. It is not a
+generation since this was the normal attitude of society towards its
+_nouveaux riches_ and Brummagem jewelry; but time moves fast in these
+later days, and national sentiments change as quickly as national
+fashions.
+
+We are in the humor to rehabilitate all things, and pinchbeck has now
+its turn with the rest. The lady of slender means who would refuse to
+wear imitation lace and false jewelry is as rare as the country society
+which would exclude the _nouveau riche_ because of his newness, and not
+adopt him because of his riches. The whole anxiety now is, not what a
+thing is, but how it looks--not its quality, but its appearance. Every
+part of social and domestic life is dedicated to the apotheosis of
+pinchbeck. It meets us at the hall door, where miserable make-believes
+of stuccoed pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial dignity on a
+wretched little villa, run up without regard to one essential of home
+comfort or of architectural truth. It goes with us into the cold,
+conventional drawing-room, where all is for show, nothing for use, where
+no one lives, and which is just the mere pretence of a dwelling-room,
+set out to deceive the world into the belief that its cheap finery is
+the expression of the every-day life and circumstances of the family. It
+sits with us at the table, which a confectioner out of a back street has
+furnished, and where everything, down to the very flowers, is hired for
+the occasion. It glitters in the brooches and bracelets of the women, in
+the studs and signet-rings of the men; it is in the hired broughams,
+the hired waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers, the
+cheap champagne, and the affectation of social consideration that meet
+us at every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle classes
+is penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck, and for
+one family that holds itself in the honor and simplicity of truth, ten
+thousand lie, to the world and to themselves, in frippery and pretence.
+
+The greatest sinners in this are women. Men are often ostentatious,
+often extravagant, and not unfrequently dishonest in that broadway of
+dishonesty which is called living beyond their means--sometimes making
+up the deficit by practices which end in the dock of the Old Bailey;
+but, as a rule, they go in for the real thing in details, and their
+pinchbeck is at the core rather than on the surface. Women, on the
+contrary, give themselves up to a more general pretentiousness, and,
+provided they can make a show, care very little about the means;
+provided they can ring their metal on the counter, they ignore the want
+of the hall-stamp underneath. Locality, dress, their visiting-list, and
+domestic appearances are the four things which they demand shall be in
+accord with their neighbor's; and for these four surfaces they will
+sacrifice the whole internal fabric. They will have a showy-looking
+house, encrusted with base ornamentation and false grandeur, though it
+lets in wind, rain, and sound almost as if it were made of mud or
+canvas, rather than a plain and substantial dwelling-place, with comfort
+instead of stucco, and moderately thick walls instead of porches and
+pilasters. Most of their time is necessarily passed at home, but they
+undergo all manner of house discomfort resulting from this preference of
+cheap finery over solid structure, rather than forego their "genteel
+locality" and stereotyped ornamentation. A family of daughters on the
+one side, diligent over the "Battle of Prague;" a nursery full of crying
+babies on the other; more Battles of Prague opposite, diversified by a
+future Lind practicing her scales unweariedly; water-pipes bursting in
+the frost, walls streaming in the thaw, the lower offices reeking and
+green with damp, and the upper rooms too insecure for unrestricted
+movement--all these, and more miseries of the same kind, she willingly
+encounters rather than shift into a locality relatively unfashionable to
+her sphere, but where she could have substantiality and comfort for the
+same rent that she pays now for flash and pinchbeck.
+
+In dress it is the same thing. She must look like her neighbors, no
+matter whether they can spend pounds to her shillings, and run up a
+milliner's bill beyond what she can afford for the whole family living.
+If they can buy gold, she can manage pinchbeck; glass that looks like
+jet, like filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is every bit to
+her as good as the real thing; and if she cannot compass Valenciennes
+and Mechlin, she can go to Nottingham and buy machine-made imitations
+that will make quite as fine a show. How poor soever she may be, she
+must hang herself about with ornaments made of painted wood, glass, or
+vulcanite; she must break out into spangles and beads and chains and
+_benoitons_, which are cheap luxuries, and, as she thinks, effective.
+Flimsy silks make as rich a rustle to her ear as the stateliest brocade,
+and cotton-velvet delights the soul that cannot aspire to Genoa. The
+love of pinchbeck is so deeply ingrained in her that even if, in a
+momentary fit of aberration into good taste, she condescends to a simple
+material about which there can be neither disguise nor pretence, she
+must load it with that detestable cheap finery of hers till she makes
+herself as vulgar in a muslin as she was in a cotton velvet.
+
+The _simplex munditiis_, which used to be held as a canon of feminine
+good taste, is now abandoned altogether, and the more she can bedizen
+herself according to the pattern of a Sandwich islander the more
+beautiful she thinks herself, the more certain the fascination of the
+men, and the greater the jealousy of the women. This is the cause of all
+the tags and streamers, the bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces
+there, the puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off some dead
+girl's head, wherewith the modern Englishwoman delights to make herself
+hideous. It is pinchbeck throughout. But we fear she is past praying for
+in the matter of fashion, and that she is too far given over to the
+abomination of pretence to be called back to truth for any ethical
+reason whatsoever, or indeed by anything short of high examples. And
+then, if simplicity became the fashion, we should have our pinchbeck
+votaries translating that into extremes as they do now with
+ornamentation; if my lady took to plainness, they would go to
+nakedness.
+
+Another bit of pinchbeck is the visiting-list--the cards of invitation
+stuck against the drawing-room glass--with the grandest names and
+largest fortunes put forward, irrespective of dates or tenses. The
+chance contact with the people represented may be quite out of the
+ordinary circumstances of life, but their names are paraded as if an
+accident, which has happened once and may never occur again, were in the
+daily order of events. They are brought to the front to make others
+believe that the whole social thickness is of the same quality; that
+generals and admirals and sirs and ladies are the common elements of the
+special circle in which the family habitually moves; that pinchbeck is
+good gold, and that stucco means marble. Women are exceedingly tenacious
+of these pasteboard appearances.
+
+In a house with its couple of female servants, where formal visitors are
+very rare, and invitations, save by friendly word of mouth, rarer still,
+you may see a cracked china bowl or cheap mock _patera_ on the hall
+table, to receive the cards which are assumed to come in the thick
+showers usual with high people who have hall-porters, and a thousand
+names or more on their books. The pile gets horribly dusty to be sure,
+and the upper layer turns by degrees from cream-color to brown; but
+antiquity is not held to weaken the force of grandeur. The titled card
+left on a chance occasion more than a year ago still keeps the uppermost
+place, still represents a perpetual renewal of aristocratic visits, and
+an unbroken succession of social triumphs. Yellowed and soiled, it is
+none the less the trump-card of the list; and while the outside world
+laughs and ridicules, the lady at home thinks that no one sees through
+this puerile pretence, and that the visiting-list is accepted according
+to the status of the fugleman at the head. She is very happy if she can
+say that the pattern of her dress, her cap, her bonnet, was taken from
+that of Lady So and So; and we may be quite sure that all personal
+contact with grand folks does so express itself, and perpetuate the
+memory of the event, by such imitation--at a distance. It is too good an
+occasion for the airing of pinchbeck to be disregarded, and,
+consequently, for the most part is turned to this practical account.
+Whether the fashion will be suited to the material, or to the other
+parts of the dress, is quite a secondary consideration, it being of the
+essence of pinchbeck to despise both fitness and harmony.
+
+There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the appearance of social
+influence, much cultivated by women of a certain activity of mind, and
+with more definite aims than all women have. This belongs to a grade one
+step higher than the small pretences we have been speaking of--to women
+who have money, and so far have one reality, but who have not, by their
+own birth or their husband's, the original standing which would give
+them this influence as of right. Some make themselves notorious for
+their drawing-room patronage of artists, which, however, does not often
+include buying their pictures; others gather around them scores of
+obscure authors, whose books they talk of, if they do not read; a few, a
+short time since, were centres of spiritualistic circles, and got a
+queer kind of social influence thereby, so far as Philistine desire to
+witness the "manifestations" went; and one or two are names of weight in
+the emancipated ranks, and take chiefly to what they call "working
+women." These are they who attend Ladies' Committees, where they talk
+bosh, and pound away at utterly uninteresting subjects, as diligently as
+if what they said had any point in it, and what they did any ultimate
+issue in probability or common sense. But beyond the fact of having a
+large house, where their several sets may assemble at stated periods,
+these would-be lady patronesses are utterly impotent to help or hinder;
+and their patronage is just so much pinchbeck, not worth the trouble of
+weighing.
+
+In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless dissatisfaction with
+what they are, and ceaseless endeavour to appear something they are not,
+our middle-class ladies are doing themselves and society infinite
+mischief. They set the tone to the world below them, and the small
+tradespeople and the servants, when they copy the vices of their
+superiors, do not imitate her grace the duchess, but the doctor's wife
+over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door, and the young ladies
+everywhere, who all try to appear women of rank and fortune, and who are
+ashamed of nothing as much as of industry, truth and simplicity. Hence
+the rage for cheap finery in the kitchen, just a trifle more ugly and
+debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence the miserable
+pretentiousness, and pinchbeck fine-ladyism, filtering like poison
+through every pore of our society, to result God only knows in what
+grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and education will come to
+the front, and endeavour to stay the plague already begun.
+
+Chains and brooches may seem but small material causes for important
+moral effects, but they are symbols; and, as symbols, of deep national
+value. No good will be done till we get back some of our fine old horror
+of pinchbeck, and once more insist on truth as the foundation of our
+national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do
+not land us here; and the progress of the arts and society must not be
+brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the
+semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women
+are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home
+business. Here is something for them to do--the regeneration of society
+by means of their own energies; the bringing people back to the dignity
+of truth and the beauty of simplicity; and the substitution of that
+self-respect which is content to appear what it is, for the feeble pride
+which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot get gold, and which
+endeavors so hard to hide its real estate, and to pass for what it is
+not and never could be.
+
+
+
+
+PUSHING WOMEN.
+
+
+The achievements of Anglo-Saxon energy present a rich mine of material
+to the bookmaker. We are justly proud of our self-made men--of our
+Chancellors who have risen from the barber's-shop to the Woolsack, of
+our low-born inventors who have fought their way to scientific
+recognition, of our merchant princes who have begun life with a capital
+of one half-crown. The story of the man who has raised himself to
+eminence by his own exertions, in the face of overwhelming disadvantages
+and obstacles, is a thrice-told tale, thanks to Mr. Smiles and other
+biographers. But our admiration has been almost exclusively drawn to
+these signal examples of pushing _men_. The analogous exploits of the
+fair sex remain comparatively unchronicled. No one has hitherto
+published a book about Self-made Women. Yet this branch of the subject
+would be very interesting, and even instructive. Of course the
+opportunity for the display of energy in pushing is, in the case of
+woman, much more limited. She cannot push at the Bar or in the Church,
+or in business. Her sphere for pushing is practically narrowed down to
+one department of human life--society. But within the limits of that
+sphere she exhibits very remarkable proofs of this peculiar form of
+activity. Moreover, pushing is a feature so peculiarly characteristic of
+the English, as distinct from the Continental _salon_, that no attempt
+to place a picture of the Englishwoman in her totality before her
+foreign critics would be complete without it.
+
+There are three periods in the career of a pushing woman. The first is
+that in which she emerges from obscurity, or, worse perhaps, from the
+notoriety of commercial antecedents, and carried, by a vigorous push,
+the outworks of fashionable society. The wife of a successful speculator
+in cotton or guano, who is also the mistress of a comfortable mansion in
+Bloomsbury, gradually becomes restless and dissatisfied with her
+surroundings. It would be curious to trace the growth of this
+discontent. Ambition is deeply rooted in the female bosom. Even
+housemaids are actuated by an impulse to better themselves, and village
+school-mistresses yearn for a larger sphere. Perhaps it is this instinct
+to rise, so creditable to the sex, which compels a lady with a long
+purse, and a name well known in the city, to enter the lists as an
+aspirant to fashion. Perhaps her career is developed by a more gradual
+process. Climbing social Alps is like climbing material Alps--for a time
+the intervening heights shut out from view the grander peaks. It is not
+till one has topped Peckham or Hackney that a more extended horizon
+bursts on the eye, and one catches sight of the glittering summits of
+Belgravia. Account for it as we may, the phenomenon of a woman in the
+enjoyment of every comfort and luxury that wealth can give, but ready
+to barter it all for a few crumbs of contemptuous notice from persons of
+rank, is by no means uncommon. Probably the fashionable newspaper is a
+great stimulus to pushing.
+
+The rich vulgarian pores over _Court Circulars_ and catalogues of
+aristocratic names till the fascination becomes irresistible, and the
+desire to see her own name, purged of cotton or guano, figuring in the
+same sheet grows to a monomania. But how is this to be done? Fortunately
+for the purpose which she has in view, there exist in these latter days
+amphibious beings, half trader, half fop, with one set of relations with
+the world of commerce and another set of relations with the world of
+fashion. The dandy, driven into the city by the stress of his fiscal
+exigencies, forms a link between the East-end and the West. Among his
+other functions is that of giving aid and counsel, not exactly gratis,
+to any fair outsider who wants to "get into" society. For every
+applicant he has but one bit of advice. She must spend money.
+
+For a woman who is neither clever nor beautiful nor high-born, there is
+but one way to proceed. She must bribe right and left. No rotten borough
+absorbs more cash than the fashionable world. Its recognition is merely
+a question of money. All its distinctions have their price. It exacts
+from the pushing woman a thumping entrance-fee in the shape of a
+sumptuous concert or ball. Nor is it only the first push which costs.
+Every subsequent advance is as much a matter of purchase as a step in
+the army.
+
+There is a tariff of its honors, and any Belgravian actuary can
+calculate to a nicety the price of a stare from a great lady, or a card
+from a leader of fashion. This is the philosophy expounded by the
+amphibious dandy to his civic pupil. The upshot is, that she must give
+an entertainment, or a series of entertainments, on a scale of great
+splendor. Of course the house in Bloomsbury must be exchanged for
+another in a fashionable quarter. A more profuse style of living must be
+adopted. Her equipages must be gorgeous, her flunkeys numerous and well
+powdered. Above all, she must at once and for ever make a clean sweep of
+all her old friends. Upon these conditions, and in consideration of a
+_douceur_ for himself, he agrees to be her friend, and help her to push.
+Then follows a delicate negotiation with one of those dowagers who
+rather pique themselves on their good nature in standing sponsors to
+pushing nobodies. She, too, makes her conditions. For the sake of the
+elderly pet to whom she is indebted for her daily supply of scandal, she
+consents to countenance his _protegee_. But she declines to ask her to
+her own house. She will dine with her, provided the dinner is exquisite,
+and two or three of her own cronies are included in the invitation. Last
+and crowning condescension, she will ask the company for the proposed
+concert or ball, provided the thing is done regardless of expense. It
+would be hard to say which a cynic would think most charming--the
+readiness to accept, or the inclination to impose, such conditions.
+
+At last the great occasion arrives. Planted at the top of her staircase,
+under the wing of her fashionable allies, the nominal giver of the
+entertainment is duly stared at and glared at by a supercilious crowd,
+who examine her with the same sort of languid interest which they devote
+to a new animal at the Zoological. The greater number are "going on" to
+another party. But the next morning brings balm for every mortification.
+Her ball is blazoned in the fashionable journals, and the well-bred
+reporter, while elaborately complimentary to the exotics, is discreetly
+silent as to the supercilious stares. She does not exactly awake to find
+herself famous, but at least she is no longer outside the Pale. At a
+considerable outlay, she has got into what a connoisseur in shades of
+fashion would call tenth-rate society. This is not much; still, it is a
+beginning, and a beginning is everything to a pushing woman.
+
+In the pushing woman of the transition period we behold a lady who has
+got a certain footing in society, but who is straining every nerve, in
+season and out of season, by hook and by crook, to improve her position.
+Society within the Pale is divided into a great many "zones" or "sets."
+It is like a target, with outer, middle, inner, and innermost circles.
+The exterior circle, corresponding to "the black" in archery, consists
+of persona, for the most part, with limited means and moderate ambition.
+People who try to combine fashion with economy stick here, and advance
+no further. Carpet-dances and champagneless suppers are typical of this
+circle. Here mothers and daughters prey upon the inexperienced youth of
+the Universities and green young officers, who are deluded for one
+season by their pretensions to fashion, but who cut them the next.
+Here, too, may be found persons whose social progress has been retarded
+by foolish scruples about cutting their old friends. Between this band
+of prowlers upon the outskirts of fashion and "the best set"--the golden
+ring in the centre of the shield--are many intermediate circles, each
+representing a different stage of distinction and exclusiveness. It is
+the multiplicity of these invisible lines of demarcation which makes
+pushing so laborious.
+
+The world of fashion is not one homogeneous camp, but it is parcelled
+out into a number of cliques and coteries. Into one after another of
+these a pushing woman effects her entrance. She is always edging her way
+into a new and better set. At every step there are obstacles to be
+encountered, rivals to be jostled, fierce snubs to be endured. There is
+something almost sublime in the spectacle of this untiring activity of
+shoulder and elbow. The mere shoving--_vis consili expers_--would never
+bring her near to her goal. An adept in the art of pushing does not rely
+on sheer impudence alone. She has recourse to artificial aids and
+appliances. A great deal of ingenuity is exhibited in the selection of
+her self-propelling machinery. It is a good plan to acquire a name for
+some one social speciality.
+
+Private theatricals, for instance, or similar entertainments, may be
+turned to excellent account. Exhibitions of this kind pique curiosity,
+and people who come to stare remain to supper, and possibly return to
+drop a card on the following afternoon. But, if you go in for this sort
+of thing, you must resign yourself to certain inconveniences. Your
+pretty drawing-room will be like Park Lane in a state of chronic
+obstruction. The carpenter's work will interfere somewhat with your
+comfort, and it is tiresome to be perpetually unhinging your doors and
+pulling your windows out of their frames. The jealousies and bickerings
+among the performers are another source of vexation. Miss A. declines to
+sit as Rowena to Miss B.'s Rebecca; and the drawing-room Roscius
+invariably objects to the part for which he is cast. Altogether, unless
+you have a positive taste for carpentry and green-room squabbles, it is
+better to steer clear of private theatricals.
+
+Then there is the musical dodge. In skillful hands there is no better
+leverage for pushing operations than drawing-room music. Every one knows
+Lady Tweedledum and her amateur concerts. The fuss she makes about them
+is prodigious. They are a cheap sort of entertainment, but they cost the
+thrifty patroness of art a vast deal of trouble. She is always
+organizing practices, arranging rehearsals, drawing up programmes, or
+scouring London for musical recruits. She has been known to invade dingy
+Government offices for a tenor, and to run a soprano to earth in distant
+Bloomsbury. After all, her "music" is only so-so. You may hear better
+any night at Even's or the Oxford. One has heard "Dal tuo stellato
+soglio" before, and Niedermeyer insipidities are a little _fade_.
+Sometimes, to complete the imposture, the names of Mendelssohn and
+Mozart are invoked, and, under cover of doing honor to an immortal
+composer, a chorus of young people assemble for periodical flirtation.
+On the whole, it is wise not to attempt too much. Miss Quaver, with her
+staccato notes and semi-professional _minauderies_, is not exactly a
+queen of song. Nor does it give one any exquisite delight to hear Sir
+Raucisonous Trombone give tongue in a French romance. The talented band
+of the Piccadilly Troubadours, floundering through the overture to
+_Zampa_, hardly satisfies a refined musical ear. But, however
+indifferent in a musical point of view, from the point of view of the
+fair projector the thing is a success. It serves as a trap to catch
+duchesses, a device for putting salt on the tails of the popinjays of
+fashion. One fine day Lady Tweedledum's pretended zeal for music
+receives its crowning reward. The noise of it reaches august ears. An
+act of gracious condescension follows. Her Ladyship has the supreme
+delight of leading a scion of Royalty to a chair of state in her
+drawing-room, to hear Sir Raucisonous bleat and Miss Quaver trill.
+
+There are subtler means of pushing than amateur concerts and private
+theatricals. There is the push vertical, as in the case of the
+commercial lady; and there is also the push lateral. A good example of
+the latter style of operation is afforded by the dowager who is
+fortunate enough to have an eldest son to use as a pushing machine.
+Handled with tact, a young heir, not yet cut adrift from the maternal
+apron-string, may be turned to excellent account. There is, or was, a
+sentimental ballad entitled, "I'll kiss him for his mother." One might
+reverse the sentiment in the case of _Madame Mere_. Of her the dowagers
+with daughters to marry sing in chorus, "I'll visit her for her son."
+Civility to the mother is access to the son. A sharp tactician sees her
+advantage, and works the precious relationship for her own private ends.
+It is a mine of invitations of an eligible kind. By aid of it she
+springs over barriers which it would otherwise take her years to
+surmount, and is lifted into circles which by their unassisted efforts
+she and her daughters would never reach. Scheming dowagers are glad to
+have her at their balls when there is a chance of young Hopeful
+following in her train, and her five o'clock tea is delightful when
+there is a young millionaire to sip it with. Deprived of her decoy duck
+she would soon lose ground, and be left to push her way in society with
+uncomfortably reduced momentum.
+
+Another capital instrument for pushing is a country-house. The mistress
+of a fine old hall and a cypher of a husband is apt to take a peculiar
+view of the duties of property. One might expect her to be content with
+so dignified and enviable a lot, and to pass tranquil days in coddling
+the cottagers, patronizing the rector's wife, and impressing her
+crotchet on the national school. But no--she is bitten with the
+tarantula of social success. She wants to "get on" in society. She must
+push as vigorously as any trumpery adventuress in May Fair. A good old
+name is dragged into the dirt inseparable from pushing. The family
+portraits look disdainfully from their frames, and the ancestral oaks
+hang their heads in shame. The company reflects the peculiar ambition of
+the hostess. The neighboring squires are conspicuous by their absence.
+The local small fry are of course ignored, though to the great lady of
+the county, who cuts her in town, she is cringingly obsequious. The
+visitors consist mainly of relays of youths, fast, foolish, and
+fashionable, with now and then a stray politician or journalist thrown
+in to give the party a _soupcon_ of intellect. The principle of
+invitation is very simple. No one is asked who will not be of use in
+town. Any brainless little fop, any effete dandy, is sure of a welcome,
+provided he is known to certain circles and can help her to scramble
+into a little more vogue.
+
+One more instance of lateral pushing. A connection with literature may
+be very effectively worked. The wives of poets, novelists, and
+historians have great facilities for pushing if they care to use them.
+Even the sleek parasite who fattens on a literature which he has done
+nothing to adorn, and conceals his emptiness under the airs of Sir
+Oracle, has been known to hoist his female belongings into the high
+levels of society.
+
+The last period in the career of a pushing woman is the triumphant. This
+is when she has achieved fashion, and has virtually done pushing. There
+is nothing left to push for. The Belgravian citadel has fairly
+capitulated. Like Alexander weeping that there are no more worlds to
+conquer, she may indulge a transient regret that there are no more
+_salons_ left to penetrate. But rest is welcome after so harassing a
+struggle. And with rest comes a sensible improvement in her character
+and manners. The last stage of a pushing woman is emphatically better
+than the first. It is curious to notice what a change for the better is
+produced in her by the partial recovery of her self-respect. One might
+almost call her a pleasant person. She can at last afford to be civil,
+occasionally even good-natured. And this is only natural. In the thick
+of a struggle which taxes her energies to the uttermost, there is no
+time for courtesies and amenities. The better instincts of her nature
+necessarily remain in abeyance. But they reassert themselves, unless she
+be irretrievably spoilt, when the struggle is over.
+
+At last she can afford to speak her true thoughts, consult her own
+tastes, and receive her own friends, not another's, like a lady to the
+manner born. And if this emancipation from a self-imposed thraldom is
+not too long deferred, if it finds her at sixty with a relish for gaiety
+still unslaked, she may yet be able to enjoy society herself and to
+render it enjoyable to others. How many women there are of whom one
+says, How pleasant they will be when they have done pushing! or have
+pushed enough to allow themselves and others a little rest! One longs
+for the time to arrive when they shall have kicked down the ladders by
+which they have mounted, and effaced the trace of the rebuffs which they
+have encountered. One longs to see them cleansed from the stains with
+which their toilsome struggle has bespattered them, enjoying the ease
+and tranquillity of the after-push. If "getting on in society" must
+continue to be an object of female ambition, would it not be wise to
+abate the nuisance by rendering the process somewhat more easy? Might
+not some central authority be established to grant diplomas to pushing
+women, which would admit them _per saltum_ to those select circles which
+they go through so much dirt to reach?
+
+
+
+
+FEMININE AFFECTATIONS.
+
+
+The old form of feminine affectation used to be that of a die-away fine
+lady afflicted with a mysterious malady known by the name of the vapors,
+or one, no less obscure, called the spleen. Sometimes it was an
+etherealized being who had no capacity for homely things, but who passed
+her life in an atmosphere of poetry and music, for the most part
+expressing her vague ideas in halting rhymes that gave more satisfaction
+to herself than to her friends. She was probably an Italian scholar, and
+could quote Petrarch and Tasso, and did quote them pretty often; she
+might even be a Della Cruscan by honorable election, with her own
+peculiar wreath of laurel and her own silver lyre; any way she was "a
+sister of the Muses," and had something to do with Apollo and Minerva,
+whom she was sure to call Pallas, as being more poetical. Probably she
+had dealings with Diana too, for this kind of woman does not in any age
+affect the "sea-born," save in a hazy sentimental way that bears no
+fruits; a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit of counterpoint being to
+her worth all the manly love or fireside home delights that the world
+can give.
+
+What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or the rosy kisses of
+babies' lips compared to the pleasures of being a sister of the Muses,
+and one of the beloved of Apollo? The Della Cruscan of former days, or
+her modern avatar, will tell you that music and poetry are godlike and
+bear the soul away to heaven, but that the nursery is a prison, and
+babies no dearer gaolers than any other, and that household duties
+disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the empyrean. This was the
+Ethereal Being of the last generation--the Blue-stocking, as a poetess
+in white satin, with her eyes turned up to heaven, and her hair in
+dishevelled cascades about her neck. She dropped her mantle as she
+finally departed; and we still have the Della Cruscan essence, if not in
+the precise form of earlier times. We still have ethereal beings who, as
+the practical outcome of their etherealization, rave about music and
+poetry, and Halle and Ruskin, and horribly neglect their babies and the
+weekly bills.
+
+A favorite form of feminine affectation among certain opposers of the
+prevalent fast type is in an intense womanliness, an aggravating
+intensity of womanliness, that makes one long for a little roughness,
+just to take off the cloying excess of sweetness. This kind is generally
+found with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the orbit, by
+which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face, a certain
+look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty thought, that is very
+effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness that the real cause of
+the darkened lids and cavernous orbits, when not antimony, is most
+probably internal disease; eyes of this sort stand for spirituality and
+loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of nature, and, as all men
+are neither chemists nor doctors, the simulation does quite as well as
+truth.
+
+The main characteristic of these women is self-consciousness. They live
+before a moral mirror, and pass their time in attitudinizing to what
+they think the best advantage. They can do nothing simply, nothing
+spontaneously and without the fullest consciousness as to how they do
+it, and how they look while they are doing it. In every action of their
+lives they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a novel, as
+impersonations of poetic images or thoughts. If they give you a glass of
+water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth and Beauty ministering
+to Strength or Age, as the case may be; if they bring you a photographic
+album, they are Titian's Daughter carrying her casket, a trifle
+modernized; if they hold a child in their arms, they are Madonnas, and
+look unutterable maternal love, though they never saw the little
+creature before, and care for it no more than for the puppy in the mews;
+if they do any small personal office, or attempt to do it, making
+believe to tie a shoestring, comb out a curl, fasten a button, they are
+Charities in graceful attitudes, and expect you to think them both
+charitable and graceful. Nine times out of ten they can neither tie a
+string nor fasten a button with ordinary deftness, for they have a trick
+of using only the ends of their fingers when they do anything with their
+hands, as being more graceful, and altogether fitting in better than
+would a firmer grasp with the delicate womanliness of the character;
+and the less sweet and more commonplace woman who does not attitudinize
+morally, and never parades her womanliness, beats them out of the field
+for real helpfulness, and is the Charity which the other only plays at
+being.
+
+This kind, too, affects, in theory, wonderful submissiveness to man. It
+upholds Griselda as the type of feminine perfection, and--still in
+theory--between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in for the
+tyranny. "I would rather my husband beat me than let me do too much as I
+liked," said one before she married, who, after she was married, managed
+to get entire possession of the domestic reins, and took good care that
+her nominal lord should be her practical slave. For, notwithstanding the
+sweet submissiveness of her theory, the intensely womanly woman has the
+most astonishing knack of getting her own way and imposing her own will
+on others. The real tyrant among women is not the one who flounces and
+splutters, and declares that nothing shall make her obey, but the
+self-mannered, large-eyed, and intensely womanly person, who says that
+Griselda is her ideal, and that the whole duty of woman lies in
+unquestioning obedience to man.
+
+In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman--the
+woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big buttons, of which she
+flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness of
+a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears
+unmistakeable shirtfronts, linen collars, vests, and plain ties, like a
+man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even
+nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and
+makes believe that the attitude is comfortable because it is manlike. If
+the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness, the
+mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores dogs
+and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She boasts
+of how good a marksman she is--she does not call herself markswoman--and
+how she can hit right and left, and bring down both birds flying. When
+she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass between her first two
+fingers, hollows her underlip, and tosses it off, throwing her head well
+back--she would disdain the ladylike sip or the closer gesture of
+ordinary women. She is great in cheese and bitter beer, in claret cup
+and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of
+effervescing wines. She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward,
+as men round their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of
+carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw;
+for charms to her watch-chain she wears a corkscrew, a gimlet, a big
+knife, and a small foot-rule; and in entire contrast with the intensely
+womanly woman, who uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman
+when she does anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a
+needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of
+which is affectation--from first to last affectation; a mere assumption
+of virile fashions utterly inharmonious to the whole being, physical
+and mental, of a woman.
+
+Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and
+orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a personal
+insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact limits of
+her mental sphere. This is the woman who assumes to be the antiseptic
+element in society, who makes believe that without her the world and
+human nature would go to the dogs, and plunge headlong into the abyss of
+sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand heroism of
+man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavor and patient
+seeking after truth, would serve his turn or the world's if she did not
+spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the boundary lines
+within which she would confine the range of thought and speculation. She
+knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affectation,
+and that other minds have as much right to their own boundary lines as
+she claims for herself; but it seems to her pretty to assume that woman
+generally is the consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that
+she, of all women, is most specially consecrated.
+
+As an offshoot of this kind stands the affectation of simplicity--the
+woman whose mental attitude is self-depreciation, and who poses herself
+as a mere nobody when the world is ringing with her praises. "Is it
+possible that your Grace has ever heard of _me_?" said one of this class
+with prettily affected _naivete_ at a time when all England was astir
+about her, and when colors and fashions went by her name to make them
+take with the public at large. No one knew better than the fair
+_ingenue_ in question how far and wide her fame had spread, but she
+thought it looked modest and simple to assume ignorance of her own
+value, and to declare that she was but a creeping worm when all the
+world knew that she was a soaring butterfly.
+
+There is a certain little kind of affectation very common among pretty
+women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are pretty,
+and not recognising the effect of their beauty on men. Take a woman with
+bewildering eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape, and fringed with
+long lashes that distract you to look at; the creature knows that her
+eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that fire burns and that ice
+melts; she knows the effect of that trick she has with them--the sudden
+uplifting of the heavy lid, and the swift, full gaze that she gives
+right into a man's eyes. She has practiced it often in the glass, and
+knows to a mathematical nicety the exact height to which the lid must be
+raised, and the exact fixity of the gaze. She knows the whole meaning of
+the look, and the stirring of men's blood that it creates; but if you
+speak to her of the effect of her trick, she puts on an air of extremest
+innocence, and protests her entire ignorance as to anything her eyes may
+say or mean: and if you press her hard she will look at you in the same
+way for your own benefit, and deny at the very moment of offence.
+
+Various other tricks has she with those bewildering eyes of hers--each
+more perilous than the other to men's peace; and all unsparingly
+employed, no matter what the result. For this is the woman who flirts to
+the extreme limits, then suddenly draws up and says she meant nothing.
+Step by step she has led you on, with looks and smiles, and pretty
+doubtful phrases always susceptible of two meanings, the one for the ear
+by mere word, the other for the heart by the accompaniments of look and
+manner, which are intangible; step by step she has drawn you deeper and
+deeper into the maze where she has gone before as your decoy; then, when
+she has you safe, she raises her eyes for the last time, complains that
+you have mistaken her cruelly, and that she has meant nothing more than
+any one else might mean; and what can she do to repair her mistake? Love
+you? marry you? No; she is engaged to your rival, who counts his
+thousands to your hundreds; and what a pity that you had not seen this
+all along, and that you should have so misunderstood her! Besides, what
+is there about her that you or any one should love?
+
+Of all the many affectations of women, this affectation of their own
+harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when they
+practice their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most dangerous
+and the most disastrous. But what can one say to them? The very fact
+that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his perception
+until too late. That men love though they suffer is the woman's triumph,
+guilt, and condonation; and so long as the trick succeeds it will be
+practiced.
+
+Another affectation of the same family is the extreme friendliness and
+familiarity which some women adopt in their manners towards men. Young
+girls affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a year
+or so older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate, declare
+they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may not be natural. This
+form of affectation, once begun, continues through life, being too
+convenient to be lightly discarded; and youthful matrons not long out of
+their teens assume a tone and ways that would about befit middle age
+counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous even then
+if the "Indian summer" was specially bright and warm.
+
+Then there is the affectation pure and simple, which is the mere
+affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the
+mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of attitude that by consciousness
+ceases to be grace, and the thousand little _minauderies_ and coquetries
+of the sex known to us all. And there is the affectation which people of
+a higher social sphere show when they condescend to those of low estate,
+and talk and look as if they were not quite certain of their company,
+and scarcely knew if they were Christian or heathen, savage or
+civilized. And there is the affectation of the maternal passion with
+women who are never by any chance seen with their children, but who
+speak of them as if they were never out of their sight; the affectation
+of wifely adoration with women who are to be met about the world with
+every man of their acquaintance rather than with their lawful husbands;
+the affectation of asceticism in women who lead a thoroughly
+self-enjoying life from end to end; and the affectation of political
+fervor in those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to save
+Europe from universal revolution.
+
+Go where we will, affectation of being something she is not meets us in
+woman, like a ghost we cannot lay or a mist we cannot sweep away. In the
+holiest and the most trivial things alike we find it penetrating
+everywhere--even in church, and at her prayers, when the pretty
+penitent, rising from her lengthy orison, lifts her eyes and looks about
+her furtively to see who has noticed her self-abasement and to whom her
+picturesque piety has commended itself.
+
+All sorts and patterns of good girls and pleasant women are very dear
+and delightful; but the pearl of great price is the thoroughly natural
+and unaffected woman--that is, the woman who is truthful to her core,
+and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she would dare
+to tell a lie.
+
+
+
+
+IDEAL WOMEN.
+
+
+It is often objected against fault-finders, writers or others, that they
+destroy but do not build up, that while industriously blaming errors
+they take good care not to praise the counteracting virtues, that in
+their zeal against the vermin of which they are seeking to sweep the
+house clean they forget the nobler creatures which do the good work of
+keeping things sweet and wholesome. But it is impossible to be
+continually introducing the saving clause, "all are not so bad as
+these." The seven thousand righteous who have not bowed the knee to Baal
+are understood to exist in all communities; and, vicious as any special
+section may be, there must always be the hidden salt and savor of the
+virtuous to keep the whole from falling into utter corruption. This is
+specially true of modern women. Certainly, some of them are as
+unsatisfactory as any of their kind that have ever appeared on earth
+before, but it would be very queer logic to infer, therefore, that all
+are bad alike, and that our modern womanhood is as ill off as the Cities
+of the Plain which could not be saved for want of the ten just men to
+save them.
+
+Happily, we have noble women among us yet; women who believe in
+something beside pleasure, and who do their work faithfully, wherever
+it may lie; women who can and do sacrifice themselves for love and duty,
+and who do not think they were sent into the world simply to run one mad
+life-long race for wealth, for dissipation, or for distinction. But the
+life of such women is essentially in retirement; and though the lesson
+they teach is beautiful, yet its influence is necessarily confined,
+because of the narrow sphere of the teacher. When such public occasions
+for devotedness as the Crimean war occur, we can in some sort measure
+the extent to which the self-sacrifice of women can be carried; but in
+general their noblest virtues come out only in the quiet and secresy of
+home, and the most heroic lives of patience and well-doing go on in
+seclusion, uncheered by sympathy and unrewarded by applause.
+
+Still, it is impossible to write of one absolute womanly ideal--one
+single type that shall satisfy every man's fancy; for, naturally, what
+would be perfection to one is imperfection to another, according to the
+special bent of the individual mind. Thus one man's ideal of womanly
+perfection is in beauty, mere physical outside beauty; and not all the
+virtues under heaven could warm him into love with red hair or a snub
+nose. He is entirely happy if his wife is undeniably the handsomest
+woman of his acquaintance, and holds himself blessed when all men admire
+and all women envy. But for his own sake rather than for hers. Pleasant
+as her loveliness is to look on, it is pleasanter to know that he is the
+possessor of it. The "handsomest woman in the room" comes into the same
+category as the finest picture or the most thoroughbred horse within his
+sphere, and if the degree of pride in his possession is different, the
+kind is the same. And so in minor proportions, from the most beautiful
+woman of all, to simply beauty as a _sine qua non_, whatever else may be
+wanting. One other thing only is as absolute as this beauty, and that is
+its undivided possession.
+
+Another man's ideal is a good housekeeper and a careful mother, and he
+does not care a rush whether his wife, if she is these, is pretty or
+ugly. Provided she is active and industrious, minds the house well, and
+brings up the children as they ought to be brought up, has good
+principles, is trustworthy, and even-tempered, he is not particular as
+to color or form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or a
+squint. Given the great foundations of an honorable home, and he will
+forego the lath and plaster of personal appearance which will not bear
+the wear and tear of years and their troubles. The solid virtues stand.
+His balance at the banker's is a fact; his good name and credit with the
+tradespeople is a fact; so is the comfort of his home; so are the
+health, the morals, the education of his children. All these are the
+true realities of life to him; but the beauty which changes to deformity
+by the small-pox, which fades under dyspepsia, grows stale by habit, and
+is worn threadbare by the end of twenty years, is only a skin-deep grace
+which he does not value. Perhaps he is right. Certainly, some of the
+happiest marriages among one's acquaintances are those where the wife
+has not one perceptible physical charm, and where the whole force of her
+magnetic value lies in what she is, not in how she looks.
+
+Another man wants a tender, adoring, fair-haired seraph, who will
+worship him as a demigod, and accept him as her best revelation of
+strength and wisdom. The more dependent she is, the better he will love
+her; the less of conscious thought, of active will, of originative power
+she has, the greater his regard and tenderness. To be the one sole
+teacher and protector of such a gentle little creature seems to him the
+most delicious and the best condition of married life; and he holds
+Milton's famous lines to be expressive of the only fitting relation
+between men and women. The adoring seraph is his ideal; Griselda,
+Desdemona, Lucy Ashton, are his highest culminations of womanly grace;
+and the qualities which appeal the most powerfully to his generosity are
+the patience which will not complain, the gentleness that cannot resent,
+and the love which nothing can chill.
+
+Another man wants a cultivated intelligence in his ideal. As an author,
+an artist, a student, a statesman, he would like his wife to be able to
+help him by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect. He believes
+in the sex of minds, and holds only that work complete which has been
+created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees how women have
+helped on the leaders in troubled times; he knows that almost all great
+men have owed something of their greatness to the influence of a mother
+or a wife; he remembers how thoughts which had lain dumb in men's
+brains for more than half their lifetime suddenly woke up into speech
+and activity by the influence of a woman great enough to call them
+forth. The adoring seraph would be an encumbrance, and nothing better
+than a child upon his hands; and the soul which had to be awakened and
+directed by him would run great chance of remaining torpid and inactive
+all its days. He has his own life to lead and round off, and so far from
+wishing to influence another's, wants to be helped for himself.
+
+Another man cares only for the birth and social position of the woman to
+whom he gives his name and affection; to another yellow gold stands
+higher than blue blood, and "my wife's father" may have been a
+rag-picker, so long as rag-picking had been a sufficiently rich alembic
+with a residuum admitting of no kind of doubt. Venus herself without a
+dowry would be only a pretty sea-side girl with a Newtown pippin in her
+hand; but Miss Kilmansegg would be something worth thinking of, if but
+little worth looking at. One man delights in a smart, vivacious little
+woman of the irrepressible kind. It makes no difference to him how
+petulant she is, how full of fire and fury; the most passionate bursts
+of temper simply amuse him, like the anger of a canary-bird, and he
+holds it fine fun to watch the small virago in her tantrums, and to set
+her going again when he thinks she has been a long enough time in
+subsidence. His ideal of woman is an amusing little plaything, with a
+great facility for being put up, and a dash of viciousness to give it
+piquancy.
+
+Another wants a sweet and holy saint whose patient humility springs
+from principle rather than from fear; another likes a blithe-tempered,
+healthy girl with no nonsense about her, full of fun and ready for
+everything, and is not particular as to the strict order or economy of
+the housekeeping, provided only she is at all times willing to be his
+pleasant playmate and companion. Another delights in something very
+quiet, very silent, very home-staying. One must have first-rate music in
+his ideal woman; another unimpeachable taste; a third, strict orders; a
+fourth, liberal breadth of nature; and each has his own ideal, not only
+of nature but of person--to the exact shade of the hair, the color of
+the eyes, and the oval of the face. But all agree in the great
+fundamental requirements of truth, and modesty, and love, and
+unselfishness; for though it is impossible to write of one womanly ideal
+as an absolute, it is very possible to detail the virtues which ought to
+belong to all alike.
+
+If this diversity of ideals is true of individuals, it is especially
+true of nations, each of which has its own ideal of woman varying
+according to what is called the genius of the country. To the Frenchman,
+if we are to believe Michelet and the novelists, it is a feverish little
+creature, full of nervous energy, but without muscular force; of frail
+health and feeble organization; a prey to morbid fancies which she has
+no strength to control or to resist; now weeping away her life in the
+pain of finding that her husband, a man gross and material because
+husband, does not understand her; now sighing over her delicious sins
+in the arms of the lover who does; without reasoning faculties, but
+with divine intuitions that are as good as revelations; without cool
+judgment, but with the light of burning passions that guide her just as
+well; thinking by her heart, yet carrying the most refined metaphysics
+into her love; subtle; incomprehensible by the coarser brain of man; a
+creature born to bewilder and to be misled, to love and to be adored, to
+madden men and to be destroyed by them.
+
+It does not much signify that the reality is a shrewd, calculating,
+unromantic woman, with a hard face and keen eyes, who for the most part
+makes a good practical wife to her common-sense middle-aged husband, who
+thinks more of her social position than of her feelings, more of her
+children than of her lovers, more of her purse than of her heart, and
+whose great object of life is a daily struggle for centimes. It pleases
+the French to idealize their eminently practical and worldly-wise women
+into this queer compound of hysterics and adultery; and if it pleases
+them it need not displease us.
+
+To the German his ideal is of two kinds--one, his Martha, the domestic
+broad-faced _Hausmutter_, who cooks good dinners at small cost, and
+mends the family linen as religiously as if this were the Eleventh
+Commandment especially appointed for feminine fingers to keep, the
+poetic culmination of whom is Charlotte cutting bread and butter; the
+other, his Mary, his Bettina, full of mind and aesthetics, and
+heart-uplifting love, yearning after the infinite with holes in her
+stockings and her shoes down at heel. For what are coarse material
+mendings to the aesthetic soul yearning after the infinite, and
+worshipping at the feet of the prophet?
+
+In Italy the ideal woman of modern times is the ardent patriot, full of
+active energy, or physical force, and dauntless courage.
+
+In Poland it is the patriot too, but of a more refined and etherealized
+type, passively resenting Tartar tyranny by the subtlest feminine scorn,
+and living in perpetual music and mourning.
+
+In Spain it is a woman beautiful and impassioned, with the slight
+drawback of needing a world of looking after, of which the men are
+undeniably capable.
+
+In Mohammedan countries generally it is a comely smooth-skinned Dudu,
+patient and submissive, always in good humor with her master, economical
+in house-living to suit the meanness, and gorgeous in occasional attire
+to suit the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental; but by no means Dudu
+ever asleep and unoccupied; for, if not allowed to take part in active
+outside life, the Eastern's wife or wives have their home duties and
+their maternal cares like all other women, and find to their cost that,
+if they neglect them unduly, they will have a bad time of it with Ali
+Ben Hassan when the question comes of piastres and sequins, and the dogs
+of Jews who demand payment, and the pigs of Christians who follow suit.
+
+The American ideal is of two kinds, like the German--the one, the clever
+manager, the woman with good executive faculty in the matters of
+buckwheat cakes and oyster gumbo, as is needed in a country so poorly
+provided with "helps;" the other, the aspiring soul who puts her
+aspirations into deeds, and goes out into the world to do battle with
+the sins of society as editress, preacher, stump orator, and the like.
+It must be rather embarrassing to some men that this special
+manifestation of the ideal woman at times advocates miscegenation and
+free love; but perhaps we of the narrow old conventional type are not up
+to the right mark yet, and have to wait until our own women are
+thoroughly emancipated before we can rightly appreciate these questions.
+At all events, if this kind of thing pleases the Americans, it is no
+more our business to interfere with them than with the French compound;
+and if miscegenation and free love seem to them the right manner of
+life, let them follow it.
+
+In all countries, then, the ideal woman changes, chameleon-like, to suit
+the taste of man; and the great doctrine that her happiness does
+somewhat depend on his liking is part of the very foundation of her
+existence. According to his will she is bond or free, educated or
+ignorant, lax or strict, house-keeping or roving; and though we advocate
+neither the bondage nor the ignorance, yet we do hold to the principle
+that, by the laws which regulate all human communities everywhere, she
+is bound to study the wishes of man, and to mould her life in harmony
+with his liking. No society can get on in which there is total
+independence of sections and members, for society is built up on the
+mutual dependence of all its sections and all its members. Hence the
+defiant attitudes which women have lately assumed, and their
+indifference to the wishes and remonstrances of men, cannot lead to any
+good results whatever. It is not the revolt of slaves against their
+tyrants--in that we could sympathize--which they have begun, but a
+revolt against their duties. And this it is which makes the present
+state of things so deplorable. It is the vague restlessness, the fierce
+extravagance, the neglect of home, the indolent fine-ladyism, the
+passionate love of pleasure which characterise the modern woman, that
+saddens men, and destroys in them that respect which their very pride
+prompts them to feel. And it is the painful conviction that the ideal
+woman of truth and modesty and simple love and homely living has somehow
+faded away under the paint and tinsel of this modern reality which makes
+us speak out as we have done, in the hope, perhaps a forlorn one, that
+if she could be made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she
+would, by the very force of natural instinct and social necessity, order
+herself in some accordance with the lost ideal, and become again what we
+once loved and what we all regret.
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN AND THE WORLD.
+
+
+This, we are told in a tone of pathetic resignation, is a day of hard
+sayings for women. It is, we will venture to add, a day when women have
+to meet hard sayings with replies a little less superficial than the
+conventional stare of outraged womanhood or the trivial retort on the
+follies of men. Grant that woman's censors are as cynical and
+hollow-hearted as you will, there can be no doubt that their criticisms
+are simply the expression of a general uneasiness, and that that
+uneasiness has some ground to go upon. It is possible that observers
+across the water may be cynical in denouncing the "magnificent
+indecency" of the heroines of New York. It is possible that the
+schoolmasters of Berlin may be cynical in calling public opinion to
+their aid against the degrading exhibitions of the Prussian capital. It
+is possible that the thunders of the Vatican are merely an instance of
+Papal cynicism. It is possible that the protest of the Bishop of Orleans
+is as hollow-hearted as the protests of censors nearer home. But such a
+world-wide outbreak of cynicism without a cause is a somewhat improbable
+event, and the improbability is increased when we remark the silent
+acquiescence of the women of America and the Continent in the justice of
+these censures.
+
+It is only the British mother who ventures to protest. Now, we
+Englishmen have always felt a sort of national pride in the British
+mother. It has been a part of our patriotic self-satisfaction to pique
+ourselves on her icy decorum, on the merciless severity of her virtue.
+Colorless, uninteresting, limited as Continental critics pronounced her
+to be, we cherished her the more as something specially our own, and
+regarded the Channel as a barrier providentially invented for the
+isolation of her spotless prudery. It was peculiarly gratifying to
+suppose that on the other side of it there were no British homes, no
+British maidens, no British mothers. And it must be owned that the
+British mother took her cue admirably. She owned, with a sigh of
+complacency, that she was not as other women. She shuddered at foreign
+morals, and tabooed French novels. She shook all life and individuality
+out of her girls as un-English and Continental. She denounced all
+aspirations after higher and larger spheres of effort as unfeminine.
+Such a type of woman was naturally dull enough, but it fairly came up to
+its own standard; and if its respectability was prudery, it still
+earned, and had a right to claim, man's respect. The amusing thing is
+the persistence in the claim when the type has passed away.
+
+The British spouse has bloomed into the semi-detached wife, with a
+husband always conveniently in the distance, and a cicisbeo as
+conveniently in the corner. The British mother has died into the faded
+matrimonial schemer, contemptuous of younger sons. The innocent simper
+of the British maiden has developed into the loud laugh and the horsey
+slang of the girl of the season. But maiden and matron are still on one
+point faithful to the traditions of their grandmothers, and front all
+censorious comers with a shrug of their shoulder-straps and a flutter of
+indignant womanhood. And maiden and matron still claim their insular
+exemption from the foibles of their sex. The Pope may do what he will
+with the women of Italy, and Monseigneur of Orleans may deal stern
+justice out to the women of France; Continental immorality is in the
+nature of things; but there is something else that is in the nature of
+things too, and before the impeccable majesty of British womanhood every
+critic must stand abashed.
+
+Unfortunately, we are no sooner awed with the marble silence of our
+Hermione than Hermione descends from her pedestal and falls a-talking
+like other people. Woman, in a word, protests; and protests are often
+very dangerous things to the protesters. Nothing, for instance, can seem
+more simple or more effective than the _tu quoque_ retort, and as it is
+familiar to feminine disputants, we are favored with it in every
+possible form. If the girl of the period is fast and frivolous, is the
+young man of the period any better? No sketch can be more telling than
+the picture which she is ready to draw of his lounging ways, his
+epicurean indolence, his boredom at home, his foppery abroad, the
+vacancy of his stare, the inanity of his talk, his incredible conceit,
+his life vibrating between the Club and the stable. She hits off with a
+charming vivacity the list of his accomplishments--his skill at
+flirtation, his matchless ability at croquet, his assiduity over _Bell's
+Life_, the cleverness of his book on the Derby. No sensible or
+well-informed girl, she tells us, can talk for ten minutes to this
+creature without weariness and disgust at his ignorance, his narrowness,
+his triviality; no modestly-dressed or decently-mannered girl can win
+the slightest share of his attentions. Married, he is as frivolous as
+before marriage; he selects the toilette of the _demi-monde_ as an
+agreeable topic of domestic conversation, he resents affection and
+proclaims home a bore, he grudges the birth of children as an additional
+expense, he stunts and degrades the education of his girls, he is the
+despot of his household and the dread of his family.
+
+The sketch is powerful enough in its way, but the conclusion which the
+fair artist draws is at least an odd one. We prepare ourselves to hear
+that woman has resolved to extirpate such a monster as this, or that she
+will remain an obstinate vestal till a nobler breed of wooers arises.
+What woman owns that she really does is to mould herself as much on the
+monster's model as she can. According to her own account, she puts
+nature's picture of herself into the hands of this imbecile, invites him
+to blur it as he will, and lets him write under the daub "_Ego feci._"
+As he cannot talk sense, she stoops to bandy chaff and slang. As he
+refuses to be attracted by modesty of dress and manner, she apes the
+dress and manner of the _demi-monde_. His indolence, his triviality, his
+worldliness become her own. As he finds home a bore, she too plunges
+into her round of dissipation; as he objects to children, she declines
+to be a mother; as he wishes to get the girls off his hands, she flings
+them at the head of the first comer.
+
+Now, if such a defence as this at all adequately represents the facts of
+the case, we can only say that the girl of the period must be a far
+lower creature than we have ever asserted her to be. A sensible girl
+stooping to slang, a modest girl flinging aside modesty, simply to
+conquer a fool and a fop, is a satire upon woman which none but a woman
+could have invented, and which we must confess to be utterly incredible
+to men. But the assumption upon which the whole of this mimetic theory
+is based is one well worthy of a little graver consideration.
+
+"Tell me how to improve the youth of France," said Napoleon one day to
+Madame de Campan. "Give them good mothers," was the reply. There are
+some things which even a Napoleon may be pardoned for feeling a little
+puzzled in undertaking, and Madame de Campan would no doubt have added
+much to the weight of her reply by a few practical words as to the
+machinery requisite for the supply of the article she recommended. But
+her request is now the cry of the world. The general uneasiness of which
+we have spoken before arises simply from the conviction that woman is
+becoming more and more indifferent to her actual post in the social
+economy of the world, and the criticisms in which it takes form, whether
+grave or gay, could all be summed up in Madame de Campan's request,
+"Give us good mothers."
+
+After all protests against limiting the sphere of the sex to a single
+function of their existence, public opinion still regards woman
+primarily in her relation to the generation to come. If it censures the
+sensible girl who stoops to slang, or the modest girl who stoops to
+indecency, it is because the sense and the modesty which they abandon is
+not theirs to hold or to fling away, but the heritage of the human race.
+But this seems to be less and less the feeling of woman herself. For
+good or for evil, or, perhaps more truly, for both good and evil, woman
+is becoming conscious every day of new powers, and longing for an
+independent sphere in which she can exert them. Marriage is aimed at
+with a passionate ardor unknown before, not as a means of gratifying
+affection, but as a means of securing independence.
+
+To the unmarried girl life is a sheer bondage, and there is no sacrifice
+too great to be left untried if it only promises a chance of
+deliverance. She learns to despise the sense, the information, the
+womanly reserve which fail to attract the deliverer. She has to sell
+herself to purchase her freedom; and she will take very strong measures
+to secure a purchaser. The fop, the fool, little knows the keen scrutiny
+with which the gay creature behind her fan is taking stock of his feeble
+preferences, is preparing to play upon his feebler aversions. Pitiful as
+he is, it is for him that she arranges her artillery on the
+toilette-table, the "little secrets," the powder bloom, the rouge
+"precipitated from the damask rose-leaf," the Styrian lotion that gives
+"beauty and freshness to the complexion, plumpness to the figure,
+clearness and softness to the skin." He has a faint flicker of liking
+for brunettes; she lays her triumphant fingers on her "walnut stain,"
+and darkens into the favorite tint. He loves plumpness, and her "Sinai
+Manna" is at hand to secure _embonpoint_. Belladonna flashes on him from
+her eyes, Kohl and antimony deepen the blackness of her eyebrows, "bloom
+of roses" blushes from her lips. She stoops to conquer, and it is no
+wonder that the fop and the fool go down.
+
+The freedom she covets comes with marriage, but it is a freedom
+threatened by a thousand accidents, and threatened, above all, by
+maternity. It is of little use to have bowed to slang and
+shoulder-straps, if it be only to tie oneself to a cradle. The nursery
+stands sadly in the way of the free development of woman; it clips her
+social enjoyment, it curtails her bonnet bills. "The slavery of nursing
+a child," one fair protester tells us, "only a mother knows." And so she
+invents a pretty theory about the damage done to modern constitutions by
+our port-drinking forefathers, and ceases to nurse at all. But even this
+is only partial independence; she pants for perfect freedom from the
+cares of maternity. Her tone becomes the tone of the household, and the
+spouse she has won growls over each new arrival. She is quite ready to
+welcome the growl. "Nature," a mother informs us, "turns restive after
+the birth of two or three children," and mothers turn restive with
+nature. "Whatever else you may do," she adds, "you will never persuade
+us into liking to have children," and, if we did, we should not greatly
+value the conversion. And so woman wins her liberty, and bows her
+emphatic reply to the world's appeal, "Give us good mothers," by
+declining to be a mother at all.
+
+By the sacrifice of womanliness, by the sacrifice of modesty, by
+flattering her wooer's base preferences before marriage, by encouraging
+his baser selfishness afterwards, by hunting her husband to the club and
+restricting her maternal energies to a couple of infants, woman has at
+last bought her freedom. She is no slave to a husband as her mother was,
+she is not buried beneath the cares of a family like her grandmother.
+She has changed all that, and the old world of home and domestic
+tenderness and parental self-sacrifice lies in ruins at her feet. She
+has her liberty; what will she do with it? As yet, freedom means simply
+more slang, more jewelry, more selfish extravagance, less modesty. As we
+meet her on the stairs, as we see the profuse display of her charms, as
+we listen to the flippant, vapid chatter, we turn a little sickened from
+woman stripped of all that is womanly, and cry to Heaven, as Madame de
+Campan cried to the Emperor--"Give us good mothers."
+
+
+
+
+UNEQUAL MARRIAGES.
+
+
+Acute ladies who concern themselves much with the superficial social
+currents of the time are beginning to perceive, or at least to think
+that they perceive, a fatal and growing tendency to _mesalliances_ on
+the part of men who ought to know better. They complain not merely of
+the doting old gentleman who has been a bachelor long enough to lose his
+wits, and so marries his cook or his housemaid, nor of the debauched
+young simpleton who takes a wife from a casino or the bar of a
+night-_cafe_. Actions of this sort are as common at one time as at
+another. Old fools and young fools maintain a pretty steady average.
+Their silly exploits are the issue, not of the tendencies of the age,
+but of their own individual and particular lack of wits. They do not
+affect the general direction of social feeling, nor have we any right to
+argue up from their preposterous connexions to the influences and
+conditions of the society of which they are only the abnormal and
+irregular growths. What people mean, when they talk of an increase in
+the number of men who marry beneath them, is that men otherwise sensible
+and respectable and sober-minded perpetrate the irregularity in
+something like cold blood, and with a measure of deliberation. Whether
+observers who have formed this opinion are right, or are only
+anticipating their own apprehensions and alarms, is difficult to
+ascertain. A good deal depends on the accidental range of the observer's
+own acquaintances, and still more on their candor or discreet reticence.
+
+Besides, how are we to know how far one generation is worse than
+generations which have gone before it? Men are, after due time, forgiven
+for this defiance of social usage, and women who were barely presentable
+in youth become presentable enough by the time they reach middle age.
+People may seem to us to be very equally and justly mated who
+five-and-twenty years ago were the town's talk. It is practically
+impossible, therefore, to compare the actual number of unequal marriages
+in our day with those of a generation back. People may have their ideas,
+but verification is not to be had. All we can do is to estimate the
+increase in the conditions which are likely to make men find wives in a
+rank below their own. If we look at these, there may be a good many
+reasons for believing that the apprehensions of the shrewd and alarmed
+observers are not without justification.
+
+When a wise man with a living or a name to make, or both, looks for a
+wife, he certainly does not desire a person who shall be troublesome and
+an impediment to him. He wants a cheerful, sensible, and decently
+thrifty person. He probably has no inclination for a bluestocking, nor
+for a lady with aggressive views on points of theology, nor for one who
+can beat him in political discussion. Strong intellectual power he can
+most heartily dispense with. But then, on the other hand, he has no
+fancy for sitting day after day at table with a vapid, flippant,
+frivolous, empty soul who can neither talk nor listen, who takes no
+interest in things herself, and cannot understand why other people
+should take interest in them, who is penetrated with feeble little
+egoisms. An aggressive woman with opinions about prevenient grace, or
+the advantages of female emigration, or the functions of the deaconess,
+would be far preferable to this. She would irritate, but she would not
+fill the soul with everlasting despair, as the pretty vapid creature
+does. To discuss predestination and election over dinner is not nice,
+but still less is it nice to have to make talk with a fool, and to be
+obliged to answer her according to her folly.
+
+As the education of modern girls of fashion chiefly aims at making them
+either very fast or very slow, it is not to be wondered at that men find
+it hard to realize their ideals among their equals in position. It is
+not merely that so many marriageable young ladies are ignorant. They are
+this, but they are more. They are exacting and pretentious, and
+uneducated in the worst sense, for they are ignorant how ignorant they
+are, or even that they are ignorant at all.
+
+Then there is a still more obvious, palpable, and impressive
+circumstance. A man with ordinary means looks with alarm on the too
+visible and too unbounded extravagance of the ladies from among whom he
+is expected to take a partner. The thought of the apparel, of the
+luxuries, of the attendants, of the restless moving about, to which they
+have been accustomed, fills him with deep consternation. He might
+perhaps deceive himself into thinking that he could get on very well
+with an empty-minded woman, but he cannot forget the stern facts of
+arithmetic, nor hoodwink himself as to what would be left out of his
+income after he had paid for dresses, servants, household charges,
+carriages, parties, opera-boxes, traveling, and all the rest.
+
+Besides the flippancy of so many women, and the extravagance of most
+women, arising from their inexperience of the trouble with which money
+is made and of the importance of keeping it after it has been made,
+there is something in the characteristics of modern social intercourse
+which makes men of a certain temper intensely anxious to avoid a sort of
+marriage which would, among other things, have the effect of committing
+them more deeply to this kind of intercourse. Such men shrink with
+affright from giving hostages to society for a more faithful compliance
+with its most dismal exactions. To them there is nothing more
+unendurable than the monotonous round of general hospitalities and
+ceremonials, ludicrously misnamed pleasure. A detestation of wearisome
+formalities does not imply any clownish or misanthropic reluctance to
+remember that those who feel it live in a world with other people, and
+that a thoroughly social life is the only just and full life.
+
+But there is all the difference between a really social life and a
+hollow phantasmic imitation of it. A person may have the pleasantest
+possible circle of friends, and may like their society above all things.
+This is one thing. But to have to mix much with numbers of thoroughly
+indifferent people, and in a superficial, hollow way, is a very
+different thing. Of course, men who take life just as it comes, who are
+not very sedulous about making the most of it in their own way, and are
+quite willing to do all that their neighbors do just because their
+neighbors do it, find no annoyance in this. Men cast in another mould
+find not only annoyance but absolute misery. They know also that
+marriage with a woman who is in the full tide of society means an
+infinite augmentation of this round of tiresome and thoroughly useless
+ceremonies. Add this consideration to the two other considerations of
+elaborate vapidness and unfathomable extravagance, and you have three
+tolerably good arguments why a man with large discourse of reason,
+looking before and after, should be slow to fasten upon himself bonds
+which threaten to prove so leaden.
+
+The faults of the women of his own position, however, are a very poor
+reason why he should marry a woman beneath his own position. A man must
+be very weak to believe that, because fine ladies are often inane and
+extravagant, therefore women who are not fine ladies must be wise,
+clever, prudent, and everything else that belongs to the type of
+companionable womanhood. The fact of the mistress being a blank does not
+prove that the maid would be a prize. It may be wise to avoid the one,
+but it is certainly folly to seek the other. Granting that the
+housemaid or the cook or the daughter of the coachman is virtuous,
+high-minded, refined, thoughtful, thrifty, and everything else that is
+desirable under the sun, all will fail to counterbalance the drawbacks
+that flow from the first inequality of position.
+
+The misguided husband believes that he is going to live a plain
+unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company
+with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never
+infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The
+lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his
+motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the
+express desire of avoiding visits, yet he no sooner gets what he wished
+than his success begins to make him miserable. What he expected to
+please him as a relief mortifies him as a slight. Even if he be
+unsympathetic enough in nature not to care much for the disapproval of
+his fellows, he will rapidly find that his wife is a good deal less of a
+philosopher in these points, and that, though he may relish his escape
+from the miseries of society, she will vigorously resent her exclusion
+from its supposed delights.
+
+Again, from another point of view, he is tolerably sure to find that the
+common opinion of society about unequal unions is not so unsound as he
+used scornfully to suppose it to be. The vapidity of a polite woman is
+bad, but the vapidity of a woman who is not polite is decidedly worse. A
+simpering unthinking woman with good manners is decidedly better than
+an unthinking woman with imperfect manners; and if polish can spoil
+nature among one set of people, certainly among another set nature may
+be as much spoilt by lack of polish. It does not follow, from a person
+being indifferently well-bred, that therefore she is profoundly wise and
+thoughtful and poetic, and capable of estimating the things of this
+world at their worth. Boys at college indulge in this too generous
+fallacy. For grown-up men there is less excuse. They ought to know that
+obscure uneducated women are all the more likely on that account to fall
+short of magnanimity, self-control, self-containing composure, than
+girls who have grown up with a background of bright and gracious
+tradition, however little their education may have done to stimulate
+them to make the foreground like it. To have a common past is the first
+secret of happy association--a past common in ideas, sentiments, and
+growth, if not common in external incidents.
+
+One reason why a cultivated man is wretched with a vapid woman is that
+she has not traveled over a yard of that ground of knowledge and feeling
+which has in truth made his nature what it is. But a woman in his own
+station is more likely to have shared a past of this sort than a woman
+of lower station. Mere community of general circumstances and
+surrounding does something. The obscure woman taken from inferior place
+has not the common past of culture, nor of circumstance either. The
+foolish man who has married away from his class trusts that somehow or
+other nature will repair this. He assumes, in a real paroxysm of folly,
+that obscurity is the fostering condition of a richness of character
+which could not be got by culture. He pays the price of his blindness.
+Untended nature is more likely to produce weeds than choice fruits, and
+the chances in such cases as this are beyond calculation in favor of his
+having got a weed--in other words, having wedded himself to a life of
+wrangling, gloom, and swift deterioration of character. This result may
+not be invariable, but it must be more usual than not.
+
+In the exceptional cases where a man does not repent of an unequal match
+of this sort, you will mostly find that the match was unequal only in
+externals, and that his character had been a very fit counterpart for
+that of a vulgar and uneducated woman before he made her his wife. This
+may lead one to think that there is something to be said for the woman
+in morganatic marriages. The men who do these things are not always, not
+even generally, philosophic men in search of an unsophisticated life,
+but unamiable, defiant persons, who only hate society either because it
+has failed to appreciate their qualities, or because they cannot be at
+the trouble to go through the ordinary amount of polite usage.
+
+
+
+
+HUSBAND-HUNTING.
+
+
+What we have said in another place about the odium which attaches to
+"match-making" naturally applies in a far greater degree to
+"husband-hunting." Practically the two words mean much the same thing,
+since the successful result of a husband-hunt is of course a match, and
+match-making, in the common acceptation of the term, involves a
+husband-hunt. This latter fact is somewhat curious. There is no reason
+in the nature of things why the word match-making should be associated
+only with the pursuit of the unmarried male. On the contrary, the theory
+of marriage has always been that it is the woman who has to be hunted
+down. It is curious to note under what completely different
+circumstances, and occasionally in what grotesque forms, the same theory
+has been found all over the world, both in civilized and savage life.
+Sometimes the bride is carried away bodily from her home, as if nothing
+short of physical force could make a woman quit her maiden state.
+Sometimes the panting bridegroom has to run her down--no slight task if
+the adorer happens to be stout, and the adored one coquettish and fleet
+of foot. In marriage, this custom prevails only, we believe, among the
+savages, but visitors to the Crystal Palace may see how modern
+civilization has adapted it to courtship in the popular pastime of
+kiss-in-the-ring.
+
+We have read of a savage tribe in which the bride is thought no better
+than she should be, if, on the day after the wedding, the bridegroom
+does not show signs of having been vigorously pinched and scratched.
+This custom, again, is perhaps represented in civilized life by the
+kissing and struggling which are supposed every Christmas to go on under
+the mistletoe. It is not unworthy of remark, as regards these two points
+of comparison between civilization and barbarism, that, as the woman
+gets more civilized, she seems more disposed to meet her pursuer
+halfway. In the game of kiss-in-the-ring, for instance, although the
+lady does not run after the gentleman, but, on the contrary, shows her
+maiden modesty by giving him as hard a chase as she can, she still
+delicately paves the way for osculation by throwing the
+pocket-handkerchief. And, in the Christmas fights under the mistletoe
+(if we may take Mr. Dickens as an authority), slapping, and even
+pinching in moderation, are considered allowable--perhaps we ought to
+say proper--on the lady's part; but scratching--serious scratching, we
+mean, which would make her admirer's face look next morning as if he had
+been taking liberties with a savage bird or a cat--is thought not merely
+unnecessary, but unfair.
+
+The difference between civilized and savage woman may perhaps help to
+indicate the reason why, now-a-days, match-making should, as a matter of
+fact, be associated with husband-hunting in spite of the theory that it
+is the woman who has to be hunted, not the man. Popular phraseology has
+an awkward trick of making people unconsciously countenance the theories
+against which they most vehemently protest. Husband-hunting is a far
+more generally obnoxious word than even the much-injured match-making,
+simply because it flies in the face of the pet theory which we have
+described. But, if the theory really hold good in modern practice, why
+should man, not woman, be recognised as the professional match-maker's
+victim and legitimate game? Why does not wife-hunting, the word which
+this theory entitles us to expect, take its proper place in society?
+Heiress-hunting, indeed, is well known, but this can scarcely be
+considered a form of wife-hunting, for it is not the woman who is the
+object of pursuit, but her money-bags. We have the word heiress-hunting
+for the very obvious reason that heiresses are recognised game. The word
+husband-hunting exists for the same reason.
+
+Are we to infer from the non-existence, or at any rate the
+non-appearance in good society, of the word wife-hunting, that the
+practice is anything but common--that, since a hunt necessarily implies
+pursuit on one side and flight on the other, a man cannot well be said
+to hunt a woman who is either engaged in hunting him, or else only too
+ready to meet him halfway? Are we gradually tending towards an advanced
+stage of civilization in which woman will be formally recognized as the
+pursuer, and man as the pursued? We are not bold enough to take under
+our protection a view so glaringly heterodox, but still we think it
+only common justice to point out that there are difficult problems in
+the present state of society which the view helps materially to solve.
+We fear, for instance, there can be no doubt that there is a good deal
+of truth in the Belgravian mother's lament that marriage is gradually
+ceasing to be considered "the thing" among the young men of the present
+day; that girls of good families and even good looks are taking to
+sisterhoods, and nursing-institutes, and new-fangled abominations,
+simply because there is no one to marry them.
+
+It is not merely that the young men are getting every day rarer; though,
+unless there is some system, like Pharaoh's, for putting male infants to
+death, what can become of them all is a mystery. India and the colonies
+may absorb a good many, though these places also do duty in the
+absorption of spinsterhood. But this will not account for the alarming
+fact, that in almost every ball-room, no matter whether in the country
+or in town, there are usually at least three crinolines to one
+tail-coat, and that dancing bachelors are becoming so scarce that it is
+a question whether hostesses ought not, for their own peace of mind, to
+connive at the introduction of the Oriental nautch. Yet even the
+alarming scarcity of marriageable men is not so serious an evil as their
+growing disinclination to marry.
+
+With the causes of this disinclination we are not now concerned. Some
+attribute it to the increase of luxurious and expensive habits among
+bachelors--habits specially fostered by "those hateful clubs;" some to
+the "snobbishness" which makes a woman consider it beneath her dignity
+to marry into an establishment less stylish than that which it has
+perhaps taken her father all his life to secure; some to the
+_demi-monde_--an explanation very like the theory that small-pox is
+caused by pustules. But, whatever may be the causes of the
+disinclination, there can be but little doubt that it exists, and the
+worst part of the matter is, that it is found among rich men no less
+than among poor. That really poor men should not wish to marry is, even
+the Belgravian mother must admit, an admirable arrangement of nature.
+But it is too bad that so many men-about-town should seem rich enough
+for yachting, or racing, or opera-boxes, or even diamond necklaces--for
+anything, in short, but a wife. The fact is, that in the eyes of poor
+men a wife is associated chiefly with handsome carriages, showy dresses,
+fine furniture, and other forbidden luxuries; and, inasmuch as there is
+not one law of association for the rich and another for the poor, this
+view spreads, until even rich men consider whether it is not possible to
+secure the luxuries without the wife.
+
+Now, since marriage is, on the whole, an institution with which society
+cannot very well dispense--at any rate not until some good substitute
+has been found for it--it is clear that rich men ought not to be allowed
+to treat it in this way. If modern civilization tends to beget a
+disinclination to marry, it ought also, on the principle of
+compensation, to provide some means for counteracting this tendency, or
+keeping it under control. Is the increase of husband-hunting--we ask the
+question in a respectful and, we trust, purely philosophical spirit of
+inquiry--calculated to supply this great and obvious want? What are its
+merits, in this respect, as compared with the old-fashioned theory that
+woman should be wooed, not woo? Even the most inveterate hater of
+husband-hunting must admit that, so far as the great end of matrimony is
+concerned, the two sexes nowadays stand to each other in a most
+unnatural relation. It is alike the mission of both to marry, but
+whereas women are honorably anxious to fulfill this mission, men, as we
+have already seen, are too ready to shirk it. Yet, by a strange
+inversion of the usual order of things, to the very sex which evades the
+mission is its furtherance and chief control entrusted.
+
+Besides, not only does woman take more kindly to the duty of matrimony
+than man--or at least nineteenth-century man--but she has comparatively
+nothing else to think about. A dozen occupations are open to him, but
+her one object in life, her whole being's end and aim, is to marry.
+Surely, if the art of marriage requires cultivation, it ought, like
+everything else, to be entrusted to those who can give their whole time
+to it, not to those who have so much else to do. Even when a bachelor is
+in a position to marry, and not unwilling to make the experiment, he is
+still far less fitted for the furtherance of matrimony than a woman. He,
+perhaps, meets a nice girl at a ball, is taken with her, and after a
+mild flirtation thinks, as he walks home in the moonlight, that she
+would make a charming wife. He dreams about her, and next morning at
+breakfast, as he pensively eats a pound of steak, resolves that on the
+same afternoon, or the next at the very latest, he will contrive an
+accidental meeting, or even find some excuse for a call. But then comes
+office-work, or the _Times_, or some other distraction, and later on
+perhaps a visit from some matter-of-fact friend with an unromantic taste
+for "bitter," or a weakness for the Burlington Arcade. One day slips
+away, and by the next the image of the evening's idol has waxed
+comparatively faint. At least it is not sufficiently vivid to inspire
+him with courage enough for a call, or a too suspicious-looking
+rencontre. In a week he bows to the image, as it is driven by, as coolly
+as if he had never had a thought of making his heart its shrine; and
+thus a golden opportunity for bringing together two young people, in
+whose auspicious union the whole community has an interest, has been
+cruelly thrown away.
+
+How different might the case have been if fashion had allowed the lady
+to take the initiative, instead of compelling her to sit idly at home!
+She has no office-work, nor _Times_, nor any business but that of
+bringing last night's flirtation to a practical issue. Assuming her to
+be satisfied as to the eligibility of her partner, there is nothing to
+prevent her giving her whole time and attention to his capture. She is
+as little likely to throw away any chance of an interview calculated to
+help in bringing about this result as he is to neglect an opportunity
+for winning the lawn sleeves or silk gown. Marriage is of as much
+importance to her as either of these to him. It is, perhaps, not
+impossible that the mere notion of a woman's thus taking the initiative
+in courtship may to some appear outrageously immodest. But with this
+point we have nothing to do, as we have been discussing the theory of
+husband-hunting, not with any reference to its modesty, but solely and
+exclusively in its connexion with the great question, how marriage is to
+be carried on. We put together the three facts that nineteenth-century
+civilization makes men indisposed to marry, that it gives women no
+object in life but marriage, and yet that it assigns the furtherance of
+marriage, which we assume to be an institution deserving of careful
+cultivation, not to those whose interest it is to promote it, but to
+those who are comparatively averse to it. Modest or immodest,
+husband-hunting obviously tends to remedy this misdirection and waste of
+force.
+
+We take this to be the right explanation--and we have endeavored to make
+it an impartial one--of the charge not uncommonly brought against the
+young ladies of the present day, that, as compared with their mothers
+and grandmothers, they are rather forward and fast, and that
+husband-hunting in their hands, is gradually being developed to an
+extent scarcely compatible with the old-fashioned theories about
+maidenly modesty and reserve. The change may be considered the effort of
+modern civilization to remedy an evil of its own creation. The tide
+advances in one direction because it recedes in another. If the men
+will not come forward, the women must. It is all very well for satirists
+to call this immodest, but even modesty could be more easily dispensed
+with than marriage. Besides, without quitting our position as impartial
+observers, we may point out that it is only fair to the professor of
+husband-hunting to remember that there are two kinds of immodesty, and
+that some actions are immodest merely because it is the custom to
+consider them so. It would, no doubt, be immodest for a young lady to
+ride through Hyde Park in man's fashion. Yet what is there in the nature
+of things to make a side-saddle more modest than any other? The Amazons
+were positive prudes, and would never have even spoken to man if they
+could have contrived to carry on society without him; yet they rode
+astraddle. And if fashion could make this practice feminine, why should
+it not some day do as much for husband-hunting?
+
+
+
+
+THE PERILS OF "PAYING ATTENTION."
+
+
+We have elsewhere asserted that the art of match-making requires
+cultivation. We are told, however, that, on the contrary, match-making
+is so zealously studied and skillfully pursued that it bids fair to be
+the great social evil of nineteenth-century civilization. The growing
+difficulty of procuring sons-in-law has called forth a corresponding
+increase in the skill required for capturing them, just as the wits of
+the detective are sharpened to keep pace with the expertness which the
+general spread of useful knowledge has conferred upon the thief.
+Eligible bachelors complain that scarcity of marrying men has much the
+same effect upon the match-making mother as scarcity of food upon the
+wolf. It makes her at once more ferocious and more cunning. Her
+invitations to croquet-parties and little dinners are so constant and so
+pressing that it is scarcely possible for her destined prey to refuse
+them all without manifest rudeness, and yet it is equally hard for him
+to go without being judiciously manoeuvred into "paying attention" to
+the one young lady who has been selected to make him happy for life.
+
+This chivalrous and graceful synonym for courtship in itself speaks
+volumes for the serious nature of the risk which he runs. The truly
+gallant assumption which underlies it, that an Englishman only "pays
+attention" to a woman when he has a solid businesslike offer of marriage
+to make her, not only puts a formidable weapon into the hands of the
+match-maker, but also leaves her victim without a most effectual means
+of protection. The national gallantry towards women upon which a
+Frenchman so plumes himself may be, as your true Briton declares, a poor
+sort of quality enough; a mere grimace and trick of the lips--not
+genuine stuff from the heart; having much the same relation to true
+chivalry that his _biere_ has to beer, or his _potage_ to soup. But at
+any rate it has this advantage, that it enables him to pay any amount of
+flowery compliments to a woman without risk of committing himself, or of
+being misunderstood.
+
+If an Englishman asks a young lady after her sore throat, or her invalid
+grandmother, and throws into his voice that tone of eager interest or
+tender sympathy which a polite Frenchman would assume as a matter of
+course, he is at once suspected of matrimonial designs upon her. He is
+obliged to be as formal and businesslike in his mode of address as the
+lawyer's clerk who added at the end of a too ardent love-letter the
+saving clause "without prejudice." We have heard of a young lady who
+confided to her bosom friend that she that morning expected a proposal,
+and, when closely pressed for her reasons, blushingly confessed that the
+night before a gentleman had twice asked her whether she was fond of
+poetry, and four times whether she would like to go into the
+refreshment-room.
+
+We do not mean to say that this tendency to look upon every "attention"
+as a preliminary step to an offer is entirely, or even principally, due
+to British want of gallantry. Our national theory of courtship and
+marriage has probably much more to do with it. We say "theory"
+advisedly, for our practice approaches every day nearer to that of the
+Continental nations whose mercenary view of the holy estate of matrimony
+we righteously abjure. Our system is, in fact, gradually becoming a
+clumsy compromise between the _mariage de convenance_ and the _mariage
+d'amour_, with most of the disadvantages, and very few of the
+advantages, of either. Theoretically, English girls are allowed to marry
+for love, and to choose whichever they like best of all the admiring
+swains whom they fascinate at croquet-parties or balls. Practically, the
+majority marry for an establishment, and only flirt for love. They leave
+the school-room, no doubt, with an unimpeachably romantic conception of
+a youthful bridegroom who combines good looks, great intellect, and
+fervent piety with a modest four thousand a year, paid quarterly.
+
+But they are not very long in finding out that the men whom they like
+best, as being about their own age or still young enough to sympathise
+with their tastes and enter heartily into all their notions of fun, are
+rarely such as are pronounced by parents and guardians to be eligible;
+and so, after one or two attacks, more or less serious, of love-fever,
+they tranquilly look out for an admirer who can place the proper number
+of servants and horses at their disposal, while they in return
+magnanimously decline to make discourteously minute inquiries as to the
+condition of his hair or teeth. A marriage made in this spirit, even
+where no pressure is put upon the young lady by parents or friends, and
+she is allowed full liberty of action, is open to all the charges
+ordinarily brought against the Continental _mariage de convenance_. Yet,
+on the other hand, it has not the advantage of being formally arranged
+beforehand by a couple of elderly people, who are in no hurry, and who
+have seen enough of the world to know thoroughly what they are about;
+nor, we may add, does it usually take place in time to avert some one or
+more of those troublesome flirtations with handsome, but penniless,
+ball-room heroes which are not always calculated to improve either
+temper or character.
+
+Still, whatever our practice may be, we nevertheless do homage to the
+theory that, in this favored country, young ladies choose whatever
+husbands they like best, and marry for love; and although this theory is
+in some respects a serious obstacle to marriage, and often stands
+cruelly in the way of people with weak nerves, it places a powerful
+weapon in the hands of the dauntless and determined match-maker. If
+young people are to marry for love, they must obviously have every
+facility afforded them for meeting and fascinating each other. It is
+this consideration which reconciles the philosopher to some of our least
+entertaining entertainments, although, at the same time, it makes so
+much of our hospitality an organized hypocrisy.
+
+It is, indeed, a hard fate to be obliged to leave your after-dinner
+cigar and George Eliot's last novel in order to drive four miles through
+wind and snow to a party which your hostess has given, not because she
+has good fare, or good music, or agreeable guests, or anything, in
+short, really calculated to amuse you, but simply and solely because she
+has a tribe of daughters who somehow must be disposed of. Yet even a man
+of the Sir Cornewall Lewis stamp, who thinks that this world would be a
+very tolerable place but for its amusements, may forgive her when he
+reflects that business, not pleasure, is at the bottom of the
+invitation. If marriage is to be kept up, we must either abandon our
+theory that young ladies are allowed to choose husbands for themselves,
+or we must give them every possible facility for exercising the choice.
+Bachelors must be dragged, on every available pretext, and without the
+slightest reference to the nominal ends of amusement or hospitality,
+from the novel or cigar, and made to run the gauntlet of female charms.
+
+From the Sir Cornewall Lewis point of view, with which nearly all
+Englishmen over thirty more or less sympathise, it is the only sound
+defence of many of our so-called entertainments that they are virtually
+daughter-shows--genteel auctions, without which a sufficiently brisk
+trade in matrimony could not possibly be carried on. The consciousness
+of this is doubtless in one way somewhat of an obstacle to flirtation,
+and gives the frisky matron a cruel advantage over her unmarried rival.
+A man must have oak and triple brass round his heart who can flirt
+perfectly at his ease when he knows that his "attentions" are not
+merely watched by vigilant chaperons, but are actually reduced to a
+matter of numerical calculation--that a certain number of dances, or
+calls, or polite speeches will justify a stern father or big brother in
+asking his "intentions."
+
+This application of arithmetic is, in some respects, as dangerous to
+courtship as to the Pentateuch. But, nevertheless, it gives the clever
+and courageous match-maker an advantage of which the eligible bachelor
+complains that she makes the most pitiless use. He finds himself
+manoeuvred into "paying the attentions" which society considers the
+usual prelude to a marriage, with a dexterity which it is all but
+impossible to evade. The lady is played into his hands with much the
+same sort of skill that a conjuror exhibits in forcing a card. There are
+perhaps a number of other ladies present, in promiscuous flirtation with
+whom he sees, at first glance, an obvious means of escape. But this hope
+speedily turns out a delusion. One lady is vigilantly guarded by a
+jealous betrothed; a second is a poor relation, or humble friend, who
+knows that she would never get another invitation to the house if she
+once interfered with her patron's plans; a third is too plain to be
+approached on any ordinary calculation of probabilities; a fourth is
+hopelessly dull; the rest are married, and if not actually themselves in
+the conspiracy--which, however, is as likely as not--are still carefully
+chosen for their freedom from the flirting propensities of the frisky
+matron. The destined victim finds, in short, that he must either
+deliberately resign himself to be bored to death, or boldly face the
+peril in store for him, and take his chance of evading or breaking the
+net. Nine men out of ten naturally choose the latter alternative, too
+often in that presumptuous spirit of self-confidence which is the
+match-maker's best ally.
+
+A bachelor is perhaps never in so great danger of being caught as when
+he has come to the conclusion that he sees perfectly through the
+mother's little game and merely means to amuse himself by carrying on a
+strictly guarded flirtation with the daughter. We mean, of course, on
+the assumption that the daughter is either a pretty or clever girl, with
+whom any sort of flirtation is in itself perilous. His danger is all the
+greater if it happens--and it is only fair to young-ladydom to admit
+that it often does happen--that the daughter has sufficient spirit and
+self-respect to repudiate all share in the maternal plot. Many a man has
+been half surprised, half piqued, into serious courtship by finding
+himself vigorously snubbed and rebuffed where he had been led to imagine
+that his slightest advances would be only too eagerly received. But, in
+any case, the match-maker knows that, if she can only bring the two
+people whom she wishes to marry sufficiently often into each other's
+society, the battle is half won. According to Lord Lytton, whom every
+one will admit to be an authority on the philosophy of flirtation,
+"proximity is the soul of love." And eligible bachelors complain that it
+becomes every day harder to avoid this perilous proximity, and the duty
+of "paying attention" which it implies, without being positively rude.
+
+We have not much consolation to offer the sufferers who prefer this
+complaint. As regards our own statement that the art of match-making
+requires cultivation, we did not mean by it to imply that match-making
+is not vigorously carried on. So long as there are mothers left with
+daughters to be married, so long will match-making continue to be
+pursued; and it must obviously be pursued all the more energetically to
+keep pace with the growing disinclination of bachelors among the upper
+and middle classes to face the responsibilities of married life. We
+meant that match-making does not receive the sort of cultivation which
+it seems to us fairly to deserve, when we consider the paramount
+importance of the object which it at least professes to have in view,
+and the delicate nature of the instruments and experiments with which it
+is concerned.
+
+We have not yet mustered up courage for the attempt to show what should
+be its proper cultivation; but we may safely say that so long as it is
+left in the hands of those who are influenced by merely mercenary or
+interested motives, and who watch the "attentions" of a bachelor, not in
+the spirit of a philosopher or a philanthropist, but in that of a
+Belgravian mother, it cannot be cultivated as a fine art. It can only be
+rescued from the unmerited odium into which it has fallen by being taken
+under the patronage of those who are in a position to practice it on
+purely artistic and disinterested grounds. In their hands, the now
+perilous process of "paying attention" would be studied and criticized
+in a new spirit. It might still, indeed, be treated arithmetically, as
+perhaps the most promising way of reducing it to the precision and
+certainty of an exact science. But still the problem would be to
+determine, not what is the least possible number of dances, calls, or
+compliments which may justify the intervention of a big brother or heavy
+father, but what number warrants the assumption that the flirtation has
+passed out of the frivolous into the serious stage. Three dances, for
+instance, may expose a man to being asked what are his "intentions,"
+where six dances need not imply that he really has any. The mercenary
+match-maker considers only the first point; our ideal match-maker would
+lay far more stress upon the second. But still, in any case, this
+growing tendency to treat the practice of "paying attention" in the
+spirit of exact science offers at least one ray of hope to those who
+complain that, do what they will, they cannot escape having to pay this
+dangerous tribute. The tendency must sooner or later bear fruit in a
+generally recognised code of courtship (whether written or unwritten
+does not much matter), prescribing the precise number and character of
+the "attentions"--in their adaptation to dancing, croquet-playing,
+cracker-pulling, and other conventional pretexts for flirtation--which
+virtually amount to an offer of marriage. This scheme, we may mention,
+is not wholly imaginary. There is somewhere or other a stratum of
+English society in which such a code already exists. At least we have
+seen a book of etiquette in which, among similar ordinances, it was laid
+down that to hand anything--say a flower or a muffin--to a lady with
+the left hand was equivalent to a proposal. The general introduction of
+a system of this kind, although it might shorten the lives of timid or
+forgetful men, would obviously confer an unspeakable boon upon the
+majority of the match-maker's present victims. They would not only know
+exactly how far to go with safety, but also how at once to recede. To
+offer, for instance, two pieces of muffin firmly and decidedly with the
+right hand would probably make up for offering one flower with the left,
+at least if there were no guardian or chaperon on the spot to take
+instant advantage of the first overture. But it would now perhaps be
+premature to enter into the details of a system which it may take a
+generation or so more of match-making to introduce.
+
+
+
+
+WOMEN'S HEROINES.
+
+
+A vigorous and pertinacious effort has of late years been made to
+persuade mankind that beauty in women is a matter of very little moment.
+As long as literature was more or less a man's vocation, an opposite
+tendency prevailed; and a successful novelist would as soon have thought
+of flying as of driving a team of ugly heroines through three volumes.
+The rapid and portentous increase of authoresses changed the current of
+affairs. As a rule, authoresses do not care much about lovely women; and
+they must naturally despise the miserable masculine weakness which is
+led captive by a pretty face, even if it be only upon paper. They can
+have no patience with such feebleness, and it may well seem to them to
+be a high and important mission to help to put it down.
+
+It became, accordingly, the fashion at one time among the feminine
+writers of fiction to make all their fascinating heroines plain girls
+with plenty of soul, and to show, by a series of thrilling love
+adventures, how completely in the long run the plain girls had the best
+of it. There is a regular type of ideal young lady in women's novels, to
+which we have at last become accustomed. She is not at all a perfect
+beauty. Her features are not as finely chiseled as a Greek statue; she
+is taller, we are invariably told, than the model height, her nose is
+_retrousse_; and "in some lights" an unfavorable critic might affirm
+that her hair was positively tawny. But there is a well of feeling in
+her big brown eyes, which, when united to genius, invariably bowls over
+the hero of the book. And the passion she excites is of that stirring
+kind which eclipses all others.
+
+Through the first two volumes the predestined lover flirts with the
+beauties who despise her, dances with them under her eye, and wears
+their colors in her presence. But at the end of the third an expressive
+glance tells her that all is right, and that big eyes and a big soul
+have won the race in a canter. Jane Eyre was perhaps the first
+triumphant success of this particular school of art. And Jane Eyre
+certainly opened the door to a long train of imitators. For many years
+every woman's novel had got in it some dear and noble creature,
+generally underrated, and as often as not in embarrassed circumstances,
+who used to capture her husband by sheer force of genius, and by
+pretending not to notice him when he came into the room. Some pleasant
+womanly enthusiasts even went further, and invented heroines with
+tangled hair and inky fingers. We do not feel perfectly certain that
+Miss Yonge, for instance, has not married her inky Minervas to nicer and
+more pious husbands, as a rule, than her uninky ones. The advantage of
+the view that ugly heroines are the most charming is obvious, if only
+the world could be brought to adopt it. It is a well-meant protest in
+favor of what may be called, in these days of political excitement, the
+"rights" of plain girls. It is very hard to think that a few more
+freckles or a quarter of an inch of extra chin should make all the
+difference in life to women, and those of them who are intellectually
+fitted to play a shining part in society or literature may be excused
+for rebelling against the masculine heresy of believing in beauty only.
+
+Whenever such women write, the constant moral they preach to us is that
+beauty is a delusion and a snare. This is the moral of Hetty in _Adam
+Bede_, and it is in the unsympathetic and cold way in which Hetty is
+described that one catches glimpses of the sex of the consummate author
+of the story. She is quite alive to Hetty's plump arms and pretty
+cheeks. She likes to pat her and watch her, as if Hetty were a cat, or
+some other sleek and supple animal. But we feel that the writer of _Adam
+Bede_ is eyeing Hetty all over from the beginning to the end, and
+considering in herself the while what fools men are. It would be unjust
+and untrue to say that George Eliot in all her works does not do ample
+justice, in a noble and generous way, to the power of female beauty. The
+heroines of _Romola_ and _Felix Holt_ prove distinctly that she does.
+But one may fairly doubt whether a man could have painted Hetty. When
+one sees the picture, one understands its truth; but men who draw pretty
+faces usually do so with more enthusiasm.
+
+A similar sort of protest may be found lurking in a great many women's
+novels against the popular opinion that man is the more powerful animal,
+and that a wife is at best a domestic appanage of the husband.
+Authoresses are never weary of attempts to set this right. They like to
+prove, what is continually true, that feminine charms are the lever that
+moves the world, and that the ideal woman keeps her husband and all
+about her straight. In religious novels woman's task is to exercise the
+happiest influence on the man's theological opinions. Owing to the
+errors he has imbibed from the study of a false and shallow philosophy,
+he sees no good in going to church twice on Sundays, or feels that he
+cannot heartily adopt all the expressions in the Athanasian creed. It is
+the heroine's mission to cure this mental malady; to point out to him,
+from the impartial point of view of those who have never committed the
+folly of studying Kant or Hegel, how thoroughly superficial Kant and
+Hegel are; and to remind him by moonlight, and in the course of
+spiritual flirtation on a balcony, of the unutterable truths in theology
+which only a woman can naturally discern. We are far from wishing to
+intimate that there is not a good deal of usefulness in such feminine
+points of view. The _argumentum ad sexum_, if not a logical, is often no
+doubt a practical one, and women are right to employ it whenever they
+can make it tell. And as it would be impossible to develop it to any
+considerable extent in a dry controversial work, authoresses have no
+other place to work it in except in a romance. What they do for religion
+in pious novels, they do for other things in productions of a more
+strictly secular kind.
+
+There is, for instance, a popular and prevalent fallacy that women ought
+to be submissive to, and governed by, their lords and masters. In
+feminine fiction we see a very wholesome reaction against this mistaken
+supposition. The hero of the female tale is often a poor, frivolous,
+easily led person. When he can escape from his wife's eye, he speculates
+heavily on Stock Exchange, goes in under the influence of evil advisers
+for any sort of polite swindling, and forgets, or is ill-tempered
+towards, the inestimable treasure he has at home. On such occasions the
+heroine of the feminine novel shines out in all her majesty. She is kind
+and patient to her husband's faults, except that when he is more than
+usually idiotic her eyes flash, and her nostrils dilate with a sort of
+grand scorn, while her knowledge of life and business is displayed at
+critical moments to save him from ruin. When every one else deserts him,
+she takes a cab into the city, and employs some clever friend, who has
+always been hopelessly in love with her--and for whom she entertains,
+unknown to her husband, a Platonic brotherly regard--to intervene in the
+nick of time, and to arrest her husband's fall.
+
+In a story called _Sowing the Wind_, which has recently been published,
+the authoress (for we assume, in spite of the ambiguous assertion on the
+title-page, that the pen which wrote it was not really a man's) goes to
+very great lengths. The hero, St. John Aylott, is always snubbing and
+lecturing Isola, whom he married when she was half a child, and whom he
+treats as a child long after she has become a great and glorious woman.
+He administers the doctrine of conjugal authority to her in season and
+out of season, and his object is to convert her into a loving feminine
+slave. Against this revolting theory her nature rebels. Though she
+preserves her wifely attachment to a man whom she has once thought
+worthy of better things, her respect dies away, and at last she openly
+defies him when he wants her, in contravention of her plain duty, not to
+adopt as her son a deserted orphan-boy. At this point her character
+stands out in noble contrast to his. She does adopt the boy, and brings
+him to live with her in spite of all; and when St. John is unnaturally
+peevish at its childish squalling, Isola bears his fretful
+animadversions with a patient dignity that touches the hearts of all
+about her.
+
+Any husband who can go on preaching about conjugal obedience through
+three volumes to a splendid creature who is his wife, must have
+something wrong about his mind. And something wrong about St. John's
+mind there ultimately proves to be. It flashes across Isola that this is
+the case, and before long her worst suspicions are confirmed. At last
+St. John breaks out into open lunacy, and dies deranged--a fate which is
+partly the cause, and partly the consequence, of his continual
+indulgence in such wild theories about the relations of man and wife. It
+is not every day that we have the valuable lesson of the rights of wives
+so plainly or so practically put before us, but when it is put before
+us, we recognize the service that may be conferred on literature and
+society by lady authors. To assert the great cause of the independence
+of the female sex is one of the ends of feminine fiction, just as the
+assertion of the rights of plain girls is another. Authoresses do not
+ask for what Mr. Mill wishes them to have--a vote for the borough, or
+perhaps a seat in Parliament. They do ask that young women should have a
+fair matrimonial chance, independently of such trivial considerations as
+good looks, and that after marriage they should have the right to
+despise their husbands whenever duty and common sense tell them it is
+proper to do so.
+
+The odd thing is that the heroines of whom authoresses are so fond in
+novels, are not the heroines whom other women like in real life. Even
+the popular authoresses of the day, who are always producing some lovely
+pantheress in their stories, and making her achieve an endless series of
+impossible exploits, would not care much about a lovely pantheress in a
+drawing-room or a country-house; and are not perhaps in the habit of
+meeting any. The fact is that the vast majority of women who write
+novels do not draw upon their observation for their characters so much
+as upon their imagination. In some respects this is curious enough, for
+when women observe, they observe acutely and to a good deal of purpose.
+Those of them, however, who take to the manufacture of fiction have
+generally done so because at some portion of their career they have been
+thrown back upon themselves. They began perhaps to write when
+circumstances made them feel isolated from the rest of their little
+world, and in a spirit of sickly concentration upon their own thoughts.
+
+A woman with a turn for literary work who notices that she is distanced,
+as far as success or admiration goes, by rivals inferior in mental
+capacity to herself, flies eagerly to the society of her own fancies,
+and makes her pen her greatest friend. It is the lot of many girls to
+pass their childhood or youth in a somewhat monotonous round of domestic
+duties, and frequently in a narrow domestic circle, with which, except
+from natural affection, they may have no great intellectual sympathy.
+The stage of intellectual fever through which able men have passed when
+they were young is replaced, in the case of girls of talent, by a stage
+of moral morbidity. At first this finds vent in hymns, and it turns in
+the end to novels. Few clever young ladies have not written religious
+poetry at one period or other of their history, and few that have done
+so, stop there without going further. It is a great temptation to
+console oneself for the shortcomings of the social life around, by
+building up an imaginary picture of social life as it might be, full of
+romantic adventures and pleasant conquests.
+
+In manufacturing her heroines, the young recluse author puts on paper
+what she would herself like to be, and what she thinks she might be if
+only her eyes were bluer, her purse longer, or men more wise and
+discerning. In painting the slights offered to her favorite ideal, she
+conceives the slights that might possibly be offered to herself, and the
+triumphant way in which she would (under somewhat more auspicious
+circumstances) delight to live them down and trample them under foot.
+The vexations and the annoyances she describes with considerable spirit
+and accuracy. The triumph is the representation of her own delicious
+dreams. The grand character of the imaginary victim is but a species of
+phantom of her ownself, taken, like the German's camel, from the depths
+of her own self-consciousness, and projected into cloudland. This is the
+reason why authoresses enjoy dressing up a heroine who is ill-used. They
+know the sensation of social martyrdom, and it is a gentle sort of
+revenge upon the world to publish a novel about an underrated martyr,
+whose merits are recognised in the end, either before or after her
+decease. They are probably not conscious of the precise work they are
+performing. They are not aware that their heroine represents what they
+believe they themselves would prove to be under impossible
+circumstances, provided they had only golden hair and a wider sphere of
+action.
+
+This is but another and a larger phase of a phenomenon which all of us
+have become familiar with who have ever had a large acquaintance with
+young ladies' poems. They all write about death with a pertinacity that
+is positively astounding. It is not that the young people actually want
+to die. But they like the idea that their family circle will find out,
+when it is too late, all the mistakes and injustices it has committed
+towards them, and that this world will perceive that it has been
+entertaining unawares an angel, just as the angel has taken flight
+upwards to another. The juvenile aspirant commences with revenging her
+wrongs in heaven, but it occurs to her before long that she can with
+equal facility have them revenged upon earth. Poetry gives way to prose,
+and hymnology to fiction. The element of self-consciousness, unknown to
+herself, still continues to prevail, and to color the character of the
+heroines she turns out. Of course great authoresses shake themselves
+free from it. Real genius is independent of sex, and first-rate writers,
+whether they are men or women, are not morbidly in love with an
+idealized portrait of themselves.
+
+But the poorer or less worthy class of feminine novelists seldom escape
+from the fatal influence of egotism. Women's heroines, except in the
+case of the best artists, are conceptions borrowed, not from without,
+but from within. The consequence is that there is a sameness about them
+which becomes at last distasteful. The conception of the injured wife or
+the glorified governess is one which was a novelty fifteen or twenty
+years ago, while it cannot be said any longer to be lively or
+entertaining. As literature has grown to be a woman's occupation, we are
+afraid that glorified governesses in fiction will, like the poor, be
+always with us, and continue to the end to run their bright course of
+universal victory. The most, perhaps, that can be hoped is that they
+will in the long run take the wind out of the sails of the glorified
+adulteresses and murderesses which at present seem the latest and most
+successful efforts of feminine art.
+
+
+
+
+INTERFERENCE.
+
+
+About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely
+personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. Not tyranny, which
+is another matter--tyranny being active while interference is negative;
+the one standing as the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of
+the same principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some personal gain in
+view when it takes in hand to force people to do what they do not like
+to do; while interference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply
+prevents the exercise of free will for the mere pleasure to be had out
+of such prevention. Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than
+domestic, but the curse of interference is seen most distinctly within
+the four walls of home, where also it is felt the most. Very many people
+spend their lives in interfering with others--perpetually putting spokes
+into wheels with which they have really nothing to do, and thrusting
+their fingers into pies about the baking of which they are not in any
+way concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women
+make up the larger number and are the greater sinners.
+
+To be sure there are some men--small, fussy, finicking fellows, with
+whom nature has made the irreparable blunder of sex--who are as
+troublesome in their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and
+most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the feminine
+characteristics of men are so exceptional that we need not take them
+into serious calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in
+any manly sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a
+right to control--say, with the wife's low dresses, or the daughter's
+too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are
+jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and
+knowing what men say of such displays, or fearing their effect, they
+stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But this
+kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes into
+another class of motives altogether, and does not belong to the kind of
+interference of which we are speaking.
+
+Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other and
+with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to church
+and subscribing to their favorite mission, so much as they tell us what
+we are not to do; they do not command so much as they forbid; and, of
+all women, wives and daughters are the most given to handling these
+check-strings and putting on these drag-chains. Sisters, while young,
+are obliged to be less interfering, under pain of a perpetual round of
+bickering; for brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of
+creatures for the most part as loftily snubbed as sisters are; while
+mothers are nine times out of ten laid aside for all but sentimental
+purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be a boy and has learned to
+become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of personal and domestic
+interference lies with wives, and they know how to use the prerogative
+they assume.
+
+Take an unlucky man who smokes under protest, his wife not liking to
+forbid the pleasure entirely, but always grudging it, and interfering
+with its exercise. Each segar represents a battle, deepening in
+intensity according to the number. The first may have been had with only
+a light skirmish perhaps, perhaps a mere threatening of an attack that
+passed away without coming to actual onslaught; the second brings up the
+artillery; while the third or fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets
+the biggest guns thundering. She could understand a man smoking one
+segar in the day, she says, with a gracious condescension to masculine
+weakness; but when it comes to more she feels that she is called on to
+interfere, and to do her best towards checking such a reprehensible
+excess. It does not weaken her position that she knows nothing of what
+she is talking about. She never smoked a segar herself, and therefore
+does not understand the uses or the abuses of tobacco; but she holds
+herself pledged to interfere as soon as she gets the chance, and she
+redeems the pledge with energy.
+
+The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite to
+correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that he has a feeble
+digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the gauntlet
+of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines or sups jollily with
+his friends without being plucked at and reminded that salmon always
+disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a headache
+to-morrow; and "My dear! when you know how bad salad is for you!" or,
+"How can you eat that horrid pastry! You will be so ill in the night!"
+"What! more wine? another glass of whisky? how foolish you are! how
+wrong!" The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear
+stimulants; the husband is a strong large-framed man who can drink deep
+without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit is her
+husband's measure, and as soon as he has gone beyond the range of her
+own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks herself
+justified in interfering with his progress. For women cannot be brought
+to understand the capacities of a man's life; they cannot be made to
+understand that what is bad for themselves may not be bad for others,
+and that their weakness ought not to be the gauge of a man's strength.
+
+A pale chilly woman afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears furs
+and velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East-Indian
+fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, father, and sons in
+about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must not go out
+without an overcoat; they must be sure to take an umbrella if the day is
+at all cloudy; they must not walk too far, nor ride too hard, and they
+must be sure to be at home by a certain hour. When such women as these
+have to do with men just on the boundary-line between the last days of
+vigor and the first of old age, they put forward the time of old age by
+many years. One sees their men rapidly sink into the softness and
+incapacity of senility, when a more bracing life would have kept them
+good for half-a-dozen years longer. But women do not care for this. They
+like men to be their own companions more than they care for any manly
+comradeship among each other; and most women--but not all--would rather
+have their husbands manly in a womanly way than in a manly one, as being
+more within the compass of their own sympathies and understanding.
+
+The same kind of interference is very common where the husband is a man
+of broad humor--one who calls a spade a spade, with no circumlocution
+about an agricultural implement. The wife of such a man is generally one
+of the ultra-refined kind, according to the odd law of compensation
+which regulates so much of human action, and thinks herself obliged to
+stand as the enduring censor of her husband's speech. As this is an
+example most frequently to be found in middle life, and where there are
+children belonging to the establishment, the word of warning is
+generally "papa!"--said with reproach or resentment, according to
+circumstances--which has, of course, the effect of drawing the attention
+of the young people to the paternal breadth of speech, and of fixing
+that special breach of decorum on their memory. Sometimes the wife has
+sufficient self-restraint not to give the word of warning in public, but
+can nurse her displeasure for a more convenient season; but as soon as
+they are alone, the miserable man has to pass under the harrow, as only
+husbands with wives of a chastising spirit can pass under it, and his
+life is made a burden to him because of that unlucky anecdote told with
+such verve a few hours ago, and received with such shouts of pleasant
+laughter. Perhaps the anecdote was just a trifle doubtful; granted; but
+what does the wife take by her remonstrance? Most probably a quarrel;
+possibly a good-natured _peccavi_ for the sake of being let off the
+continuance of the sermon; perhaps a yawn; most certainly not reform. If
+the man is a man of free speech and broad humor by nature and liking, he
+will remain so to the end; and what the censorship of society leaves
+untouched, the interference of a wife will not control.
+
+Children come in for an enormous share of interference, which is not
+direction, not discipline, but simple interference for its own sake.
+There are mothers who meddle with every expression of individuality in
+their young people, quite irrespective of moral tendency, or whether the
+occasion is trivial or important. In the fancies, the pleasures, the
+minor details of dress in their children, there is always that intruding
+maternal finger upsetting the arrangements of the poor little pie as
+vigorously as if thrones and altars depended on the result. Not a game
+of croquet can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn instead of a pink one,
+without maternal interference; so that the bloom is rubbed off every
+enjoyment, and life becomes reduced to a kind of goose-step, with mamma
+for the drill-sergeant prescribing the inches to be marked. Sisters,
+too, do a great deal of this kind of thing among each other; as all
+those who are intimate where there are large families of unmarried girls
+must have seen. The nudges, the warning looks, the deprecating "Amies!"
+and "Oh Lucies!" and "Hush Roses!" by which some seek to act as
+household police over the others, are patent to all who use their
+senses.
+
+In some houses the younger sisters seem to have been born chiefly as
+training grounds for the elders, whereon they may exercise their powers
+of interference; and a hard time they have of it. If Emma goes to her
+embroidery, Ellen tells her she ought to practice her singing; if Jane
+is reading, Mary recommends sewing as a more profitable use of precious
+time; if Amy is at her easel, Ada wants to turn her round to the piano.
+It is quite the exception where four or five sisters leave each other
+free to do as each likes, and do not take to drilling and interference
+as part of the daily programme. Something of the reluctance to domestic
+service so painfully apparent among the better class of working women is
+due to this spirit of interference with women. The lady who wrote about
+the caps and gowns of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of dress, down
+to the very material of their gloves, was an instance of this spirit.
+For, when we come to analyse it, what does it really signify to us how
+our servants dress, so long as they are clean and decent, and do not let
+their garments damage our goods? Fashion is almost always ridiculous,
+and women as a rule care more for dress than they care for anything
+else; and if the kitchen apes the parlor, and Phyllis gives as much
+thought to her new linsey as my lady gives to her new velvet, we cannot
+wonder at it, nor need we hold up our hands in horror at the depravity
+of the smaller person. Does one flight of stairs transpose morality? If
+it does not, there is no real ethical reason why my lady should
+interfere with poor Phyllis's enjoyment in her ugly vanities, when she
+herself will not be interfered with, though press and pulpit both try to
+turn her out of her present path into one that all ages have thought the
+best for her, and the one divinely appointed. It is a thing that will
+not bear reasoning on, being simply a form of the old "who will guard
+the guardian?" Who will direct the directress? and to whose interference
+will the interferer submit?
+
+There are two causes for this excessive love of interference among
+women. The one is the narrowness of their lives and objects, by which
+insignificant things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes; the
+other, their belief that they are the only saviors of society, and that
+without them man would become hopelessly corrupt. And to a certain
+extent this belief is true, but surely with restrictions. Because the
+clearer moral sense and greater physical weakness of women restrain
+men's fiercer passions, and force them to be gentle and considerate,
+women are not, therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine life, into
+whose hands is given the paying out of just so much rope as they think
+fit for the occasion. They would do better to look to their own tackle
+before settling so exactly the run of others'; and if ever their desired
+time of equality is to come, it must come through mutual independence,
+not through womanly interference, and as much liberality and breadth
+must be given as is demanded--which, so far as humanity has gone
+hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of squaring accounts.
+
+Grant that women are the salt of the earth, and the great antiseptic
+element in society, still that does not reduce everything else to the
+verge of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet by their lives they
+evidently think that it is so, and that they are each and all the
+keepers of keys which give them a special entrance to the temple of
+morality, and by which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser
+body of men. Hence they interfere and restrict and pay out just so much
+rope, and measure off just so much gambolling ground, as they think fit;
+they think vile man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things
+into his own hand, and goes beyond their boundary-lines. It is all done
+in good if in a very narrow faith--that we admit willingly; but we would
+call their attention to the difference there is between influence and
+interference, which is just the difference between their ideal duty and
+their daily practice--between being the salt of the earth and the
+blister of the home. We think it only justice to put in a word for those
+poor henpecked fellows of husbands at a time when the whole cry is for
+Woman's Rights, which seems to mean chiefly her right of making man
+knuckle under on all occasions, and of making one will serve for two
+lives. We assure her that she would get her own way in large matters
+much more easily if she would leave men more liberty in small ones, and
+not teaze them by interfering in things which do not concern her, and
+have only reference to themselves.
+
+
+
+
+PLAIN GIRLS.
+
+
+It is beyond all question the tendency of modern society to regard
+marriage as the great end and justification of a woman's life. This is
+perhaps the single point on which practical and romantic people, who
+differ in so many things, invariably agree. Poets, novelists, natural
+philosophers, fashionable and unfashionable mothers, meet one another on
+the broad common ground of approving universal matrimony; and women from
+their earliest years are dedicated to the cultivation of those feminine
+accomplishments which are supposed either to be most seductive before
+marriage in a drawing-room, or most valuable after marriage in the
+kitchen and housekeeper's-room.
+
+It is admitted to be a sort of half necessity in any interesting work of
+fiction that its plots, its adventures, and its catastrophes should all
+lead up to the marriage of the principal young lady. Sometimes, as in
+the case of the celebrated Lilly Dale, the public tolerates a bold
+exception to the ordinary rule, on account of the extreme piquancy of
+the thing; but no wise novelist ventures habitually to disregard the
+prevalent opinion that the heroine's mission is to become a wife before
+the end of the third volume. The one ideal, accordingly, which romance
+has to offer woman is marriage; and most novels thus make life end with
+what really is only its threshold and beginning. The Bible no doubt says
+that it is not good for man to live alone. What the Bible says of man,
+public opinion as unhesitatingly asserts of woman; and a text that it is
+not good for woman to live alone either, though not canonical, is
+silently added by all domestic commentators to the Scriptural original.
+
+Those who pretend to be best acquainted with the order of nature and the
+mysterious designs of Providence assure us with confidence that all this
+is as it should be; that woman is not meant to grow and flourish singly,
+but to hang on man, and to depend on him, like the vine upon the elm. If
+we remember right, M. Comte entertains opinions which really come to
+pretty much the same thing. Woman is to be maintained in ease and luxury
+by the rougher male animal, it being her duty in return to keep his
+spiritual nature up to the mark, to quicken and to purify his
+affections, to be a sort of drawing-room religion in the middle of
+every-day life, to serve as an object of devotion to the religious
+Comtist, and to lead him through love of herself up to the love of
+humanity in the abstract.
+
+One difficulty presented by this matrimonial view of woman's destiny is
+to know what, under the present conditions in which society finds itself
+placed, is to become of plain girls. Their mission is a subject which no
+philosopher as yet has adequately handled. If marriage is the object of
+all feminine endeavors and ambitions, it certainly seems rather hard
+that Providence should have condemned plain girls to start in the race
+at such an obvious disadvantage. Even under M. Comte's system, which
+provides for almost everything, and which, in its far-sightedness and
+thoughtfulness for our good, appears almost more benevolent than
+Providence, it would seem as if hardly sufficient provision had been
+made for them.
+
+It must be difficult for any one except a really advanced Comtist to
+give himself up to the worship of a thoroughly plain girl. Filial
+instinct might enable us to worship her as a mother, but even the
+noblest desire to serve humanity would scarcely be enough to keep a
+husband or a lover up to his daily devotions in the case of a plain girl
+with sandy hair and a freckled complexion. The boldest effort to rectify
+the inequalities of the position of plain girls has been made of late
+years by a courageous school of female writers of fiction. Everything
+has been done that could be done to persuade mankind that plain girls
+are in reality by far the most attractive of the lot. The clever
+authoress of "Jane Eyre" nearly succeeded in the forlorn attempt for a
+few years; and plain girls, with volumes of intellect speaking through
+their deep eyes and from their massive foreheads, seemed for a while, on
+paper at least, to be carrying everything before them.
+
+The only difficulty was to get the male sex to follow out in practice
+what they so completely admired in Miss Bronte's three-volume novels.
+Unhappily, the male sex, being very imperfect and frail, could not be
+brought to do it. They recognized the beauty of the conception about
+plain girls, they were very glad to see them married off in scores to
+heroic village doctors, and they quite admitted that occasional young
+noblemen might be represented in fiction as becoming violently attached
+to young creatures with inky fingers and remarkable minds.
+
+But no real change was brought about in ordinary life. Man, sinful man,
+read with pleasure about the triumphs of the sandy-haired girls, but
+still kept on dancing with and proposing to the pretty ones. And at last
+authoresses were driven back on the old standard of beauty. At present,
+in the productions both of masculine and feminine workmanship, the
+former view of plain girls has been resumed. They are allowed, if
+thoroughly excellent in other ways, to pair off with country curates and
+with devoted missionaries; but the prizes of fiction, as well as the
+prizes of reality, fall to the lot of their fairer and more fortunate
+sisters.
+
+Champions of plain girls are not, however, wanting who boldly take the
+difficulty by the horns, and deny _in toto_ the fact that in matrimony
+and love the race is usually to the beautiful. Look about you, they tell
+us, in the world, and you will as often as not find beauties fading on
+their stalks, and plain girls marrying on every side of them. And no
+doubt plain girls do marry very frequently. Nobody, for instance, with
+half an eye can fail to be familiar with the phenomenon, in his own
+circle, of astonishingly ugly married women. It does not, however,
+follow that plain girls are not terribly weighted in the race.
+
+There are several reasons why women who rely on their beauty remain
+unmarried at the last, but the reason that their beauty gives them no
+advantage is certainly not one. The first reason perhaps is that
+beauties are inclined to be fastidious and capricious. They have no
+notion of following the advice of Mrs. Hannah More, and being contented
+with the first good, sensible, Christian lover who falls in their way;
+and they run, in consequence, no slight risk of overstaying their
+market. They go in for a more splendid sort of matrimonial success, and
+think they can afford to play the more daring game.
+
+Plain girls are providentially preserved from these temptations. At the
+close of a well-spent life they can conscientiously look back on a
+career in which no reasonable opportunity was neglected, and say that
+they have not broken many hearts, or been sinfully and distractingly
+particular. And there is the further consideration to be remembered in
+the case of plain girls, that fortune and rank are nearly as valuable
+articles as beauty, and lead to a fair number of matrimonial alliances.
+The system of Providence is full of kindly compensations, and it is a
+proof of the universal benevolence we see about us that so many
+heiresses should be plain. Plain girls have a right to be cheered and
+comforted by the thought. It teaches them the happy lesson that beauty,
+as compared with a settled income, is skin-deep and valueless; and that
+what man looks for in the companion of his life is not so much a bright
+cheek or a blue eye, as a substantial and useful amount of this world's
+wealth.
+
+Plain girls again expect less, and are prepared to accept less, in a
+lover. Everybody knows the sort of useful, admirable, practical man who
+sets himself to marry a plain girl. He is not a man of great rank, great
+promise, or great expectations. Had it been otherwise, he might possibly
+have flown at higher game, and set his heart on marrying female
+loveliness rather than homely excellence. His choice, if it is nothing
+else, is an index of a contented and modest disposition. He is not vain
+enough to compete in the great race for beauties. What he looks for is
+some one who will be the mother of his children, who will order his
+servants duly, and keep his household bills; and whose good sense will
+teach her to recognise the sterling qualities of her husband, and not
+object to his dining daily in his slippers. This is the sort of partner
+that plain girls may rationally hope to secure, and who can say that
+they ought not to be cheerful and happy in their lot? For a character of
+this undeniable sobriety there is indeed a positive advantage in a plain
+girl as a wife. It should never be forgotten that the man who marries a
+plain girl never need be jealous. He is in the Arcadian and fortunate
+condition of a lover who has no rivals. A sensible unambitious nature
+will recognize in this a solid benefit. Plain girls rarely turn into
+frisky matrons, and this fact renders them peculiarly adapted to be the
+wives of dull and steady mediocrity.
+
+Lest it should be supposed that the above calculation of what plain
+girls may do leaves some of their power and success still unaccounted
+for, it is quite right and proper to add that the story of plain girls,
+if it were carefully written, would contain many instances, not merely
+of moderate good fortunes, but of splendid and exceptional triumph. Like
+_prima donnas_, opera-dancers, and lovely milliners, plain girls have
+been known to make extraordinary hits, and to awaken illustrious
+passions. Somebody ought to take up the subject in a book, and tell us
+how they did it.
+
+This is the age of Golden Treasuries. We have Golden Treasuries of
+English poets, of French poets, of great lawyers, of famous battles, of
+notable beauties, of English heroes, of successful merchants, and of
+almost every sort of character and celebrity that can be conceived. What
+is wanted is a Golden Treasury containing the narrative of the most
+successful plain girls. This book might be called the Book of Ugliness,
+and we see no reason why, to give reality to the story, the portraits of
+some of the most remarkable might not be appended. Of course, if ever
+such a volume is compiled, it will be proved to demonstration that plain
+girls have before now arrived at great matrimonial honor and renown.
+
+There is, for example, the sort of plain girl who nurses her hero
+(perhaps in the Crimea) through a dangerous attack of illness, and
+marries him afterwards. There is the class of those who have been
+married simply from a sense of duty. There is the class that
+distinguishes itself by profuse kindness to poor cottagers, and by
+reading the Bible to blind old women; an occupation which as we know,
+from the most ordinary works of fiction, leads directly to the
+promptest and speediest attachments on the part of the young men who
+happen to drop in casually at the time. The catalogue of such is perhaps
+long and famous. Yet, allowing for all these, allowing for everything
+else that can be adduced in their favor, we cannot help returning to the
+position that plain girls have an up-hill battle to fight. No doubt it
+ought not to be so.
+
+Cynics tell us that six months after a man is married it makes very
+little difference to him whether his wife's nose is Roman, aquiline, or
+retrousse; and this may be so. The unfortunate thing is that most men
+persist in marrying for the sake of the illusion of the first six
+months, and under the influence of the ante-nuptial and not the
+post-nuptial sentiments; and as the first six months with a plain girl
+are confessedly inferior in attraction, the inference is clear that they
+do in effect attract less. Plainness or loveliness apart, a very large
+number of womankind have no reason to expect any very happy chance in
+married life; and if marriage is to be set before all women as the one
+ideal, a number of feminine lives will always turn out to have been
+failures.
+
+It may be said that it is hopeless to attempt on this point to alter the
+sentiments of the female sex, or indeed the general verdict of society.
+We do not quite see the hopelessness. A considerable amount of the
+matrimonial ideas of young women are purely the result of their
+education, and of the atmosphere in which they have been brought up;
+and, by giving a new direction to their early training, it might not be
+altogether so quixotical to believe that we should alter all that is the
+result of the training. At any rate it has become essential for the
+welfare of women that they should, as far as possible, be taught that
+they may have a career open to them even if they never marry; and it is
+the duty of society to try to open to them as many careers of the sort
+as are not incompatible with the distinctive peculiarities of a woman's
+physical capacity.
+
+It may well be that society's present instincts as regards woman are at
+bottom selfish. The notion of feminine dependence on man, of the want of
+refinement in a woman who undertakes any active business or profession,
+and of the first importance of woman's domestic position, when carried
+to an extreme, are perhaps better suited to the caprice and fanciful
+fastidiousness of men than to the real requirements, in the present age,
+of the other sex. The throng of semi-educated authoresses who are now
+flocking about the world of letters is a wholesome protest against such
+exclusive jealousy. The real objection to literary women is that women,
+with a few notable exceptions, are not yet properly educated to write
+well, or to criticise well what others write. Remove this objection by
+improving the curriculum of feminine education, and there is hardly any
+other. There is none certainly of sufficient consequence to outweigh the
+real need which is felt of giving those women something to live for
+(apart from and above ordinary domestic and philanthropic duties), whose
+good or evil fortune it is not to be marked out by Heaven for a married
+life.
+
+
+
+
+A WORD FOR FEMALE VANITY.
+
+
+If any human weakness has a right to complain of the ingratitude with
+which the world treats it, it is certainly vanity. It gets through more
+good work, and yet comes in for more hearty abuse, than all our other
+weaknesses put together. Preachers and moralists are always having hits
+at it, and in that philosophical study and scientific vivisection of
+character which two friends are always so ready to practice at the
+expense of a third, and which weak-minded people confound with scandal,
+to no foible is the knife so pitilessly applied as to vanity. What makes
+this rigor seem all the more cruel and unnatural is that vanity never
+gets so little quarter as from those who ought, one would think, to be
+on the best possible terms with her. She is never justified of her
+children, and, like Byron's unhappy eagle, "nurses the pinion that
+impels the steel" against her. Yet it is difficult to see how the world
+could get on without the weakness thus universally assailed, and what
+preachers and moralists would do if they had their own way.
+
+In the more important--or, we should rather say, in the larger--concerns
+of life vanity could perhaps be dispensed with. Where there is much at
+stake, other agencies come into play to keep the machinery of the world
+in motion, though, even as regards these, it is a question how many
+great poems, great speeches, great actions, which have profoundly
+influenced the destinies of mankind, would have been lost to the world
+if there had been none but great motives at work to produce them. Great
+motives usually get the credit--that is, when we are dealing with
+historical characters, not dissecting a friend, in whose case it is
+necessary to guard against our natural proneness to partiality; but
+little motives often do the largest share of the work. It is proper, for
+instance, and due to our own dignity and self-respect to say, that the
+world owes _Childe Harold_ to a great poet's inspired yearning for
+immortality. Still, we fear, there is room for a doubt whether the world
+would ever have seen _Childe Harold_ if the great poet had not happened
+to be also a morbidly vain and, in some respects, remarkably small man.
+But even if we assume that the big affairs of life may be left to big
+motives, and do not require such a little motive as vanity to help them,
+these are, after all, few and far between.
+
+For one action that may safely be left to yearnings for immortality, or
+ambition, or love, or something equally lofty and grand, there are
+thousands which society must get done somehow, and which it gets done
+pleasantly and comfortably only because, by a charmingly convenient
+illusion, the vanity of each agent makes him attach a peculiar
+importance to them. There is no act so trivial, or to all appearance so
+unworthy of a rational being, that the magic of vanity cannot throw a
+halo of dignity over it, and persuade the agent that it is mainly by his
+exertions that society is kept together, as Moliere's dancing-master
+reasoned that the secret of good government is the secret of good
+dancing--namely, how to avoid false steps. And it is this genial
+promoter of human happiness, this all-powerful diffuser of social
+harmony, this lubricating oil without which the vast and complex
+machinery of life could never work, that man, in his ignorant
+ingratitude, dares to denounce.
+
+We should like to ask one of these thoughtless revilers of vanity
+whether it has ever been his misfortune to meet a woman without it. He
+would probably try to escape by declaring that a woman without vanity is
+a purely imaginary being, if not a contradiction in terms; and we admit
+that there is something to be said in favor of this view. Nothing is
+more astonishing to the male philosopher than the odd way in which, from
+some stray corner of character where he would have least thought of
+looking for it, female vanity now and then suddenly pops out upon him.
+He fancied that he knew a woman well, that he had studied her character
+and mastered all its strong and weak points, when, by some accident or
+at some unguarded moment, he suddenly strikes a rich, deep, vein of
+vanity of the existence of which he never had the remotest suspicion. He
+may perhaps have known that she was not without vanity on certain
+points, but for these he had discovered, or had fancied he had
+discovered, some sort of reason. We do not necessarily mean, by reason,
+any cause that seemed to justify or, on any consistent principle, to
+account for the fact. As we have already remarked, it is the peculiarity
+of vanity that it often flourishes most vigorously, and puts forth a
+plentiful crop, where there does not seem to be even a layer of soil for
+it.
+
+Both men and women are occasionally most vain of their weakest points,
+perhaps by a merciful provision of nature similar to that by which a sow
+always takes most kindly to the weakest pig in the litter. Lord
+Chesterfield, when paternally admonishing his son as to the proper
+management of women, lays down as a general indisputable axiom that they
+are all, as a matter of course, to be flattered to the top of their
+bent; but he adds, as a special rule, that a very pretty or a very ugly
+woman should be flattered, not about her personal charms, but about her
+mental powers. It is only in the case of a moderately good-looking woman
+that the former should be singled out for praise. A very pretty woman
+takes her beauty as a matter of course, and would rather be flattered
+about the possession of some advantage to which her claim is not so
+clear, while a very ugly woman distrusts the sincerity of flattery about
+her person.
+
+It is not without the profoundest diffidence that we venture to dispute
+the opinion of such an authority on such a subject as Lord Chesterfield,
+but still we think that no woman is so hideous that she may not, if her
+vanity happens to take this turn, be told with perfect safety that she
+is a beauty. Her vanity is, indeed, not so likely to take this turn as
+it would be if she were really pretty. She will probably plume herself
+upon her abilities or accomplishments, and therefore Chesterfield's
+excellent fatherly advice was, on the whole, tolerably safe. But still,
+if any hereditary bias or unlucky accident--such, for instance, as that
+of being brought up among people with whom brains are nothing, and
+beauty everything--does give an ugly woman's vanity an impulse in the
+direction of good looks, no excess of hideousness makes it unsafe to
+extol her beauty. On the contrary, she is more likely to be imposed upon
+than a moderately good-looking woman, from her greater eagerness to
+clutch at every straw that may help to keep up the darling delusion. No
+philosopher is, accordingly, surprised at finding that a woman is vain
+where he can discover not the slightest rational foundation even for
+female vanity.
+
+But it certainly is surprising, now and then, to find how long the most
+intense female vanity will lie, in some out-of-the-way corner of
+character, hidden from the eye. Perhaps we ought to say, the male eye,
+for women seem to discover each other's weak points by a power of
+intuition that amounts almost to instinct. But a man is amazed to find
+that a woman whose vanity he believed himself to have tracked into all
+its channels has it, after all, most strongly in some channel of which
+he previously knew nothing. He has perhaps considered her a sensible
+matter-of-fact woman, vain perhaps, though not unpardonably, of her
+capacity for business and knowledge of the world, but singularly free
+from the not uncommon female tendency to believe that every man who sees
+her is in love with her; and he unexpectedly discovers that she has for
+years considered herself the object of a desperate passion on the part
+of the parish rector, a prosaic middle-aged gentleman of ample waistcoat
+and large family, and is a little uneasy about being left alone in the
+same room with the butler.
+
+Unexpected discoveries of some such kind as this not unnaturally
+popularize the theory already mentioned, that such a being as a woman
+without vanity does not exist--that, no matter how securely the weakness
+may lie hidden from observation, it does somewhere or other exist, and
+some day will out. But we are inclined, notwithstanding, to hold that,
+here and there, but happily very seldom, there are to be found women
+really without vanity; and most unpleasant women they seem to us, as a
+rule, to be. They get on tolerably well with their own sex, for they are
+rarely pretty or affected, and they have usually certain solid,
+serviceable qualities which make up for not being attractive by standing
+wear and tear. But in their relations with men--as soon, that is, as
+they have secured a husband, and fascination has therefore ceased to be
+a matter of business, a practical question of bread-and-butter, to be
+grappled with in the spirit in which they would, if necessary, go out
+charing, or keep a mangle--they are painfully devoid of that eagerness
+to please and that readiness to be pleased which, in the present
+imperfect state of civilization, are among woman's chief charms.
+
+Even men cannot, as a rule, get on very well without these qualities;
+but still to please is not man's mission in the sense in which it is
+generally considered to be woman's, and probably will continue to be
+considered, until Dr. Mary Walkers are not the exception, but the rule.
+One now and then has the misfortune to come upon a specimen of
+womanhood, good and solid enough perhaps, making a most exemplary and
+respectable wife and mother, but nevertheless dull, heavy, and
+unattractive to an extent that fills the wretched man who takes it in to
+dinner with desperation. And then to think that one ounce of vanity
+might have leavened this lump, and converted it, as by magic, into a
+pleasant, palatable, convivial compound, good everywhere, but especially
+good at the dinner-table! For, where vanity exists at all, it can
+scarcely fail to influence the natural desire of one sex to please the
+other; and a woman must be singularly devoid of all charms, physical and
+mental, if she fails when she is really anxious to please. That women
+should be fascinating, as they sometimes are, in spite of some
+positively painful deformity, is a proof of what such anxiety can alone
+accomplish.
+
+We must admit that we have to postulate, on behalf of the female vanity
+whose cause we are espousing, that it should not derive its inspiration
+solely from self-love. However anxious a woman may be to please, if her
+anxiety is on her own account, and simply to secure admiration, she must
+be a very Helen if her vanity continues attractive. She is lucky if it
+does not take the most odious of all forms, and, from always revolving
+round self and dwelling upon selfish considerations, degenerate into a
+habit of perpetual postures and stage tricks to gain applause. And this
+tendency naturally connects itself with the wish to please the opposite
+sex, its success being in inverse proportion to its strength. Just as
+one occasionally meets with men who are perfectly unaffected and
+sensible fellows in men's society, but whose whole demeanor becomes
+absurdly changed if any woman, though it be only the housemaid with a
+coal-scuttle, enters the room, so there are, more commonly, to be found
+women whose whole character seems to vary, as if by magic, according to
+the sex of the person whom they find themselves with. Before their own
+sex they are natural enough; before men they are eternally
+attitudinizing. We should be sorry to say that this repulsive form of
+vanity always takes its root in excessive self-love, but still a tinge
+of unselfishness seems to us the best antidote against it.
+
+It is marvellous with how much vanity, and that too of a tolerably
+ostentatious kind, a woman may be thoroughly agreeable even to her own
+sex, if her eagerness to please is accompanied by genuine kindliness, or
+is free from excessive selfishness. It may be easy enough to see that
+all her little courtesies and attentions are at bottom really
+attributable to vanity; that, when she does a kind act, she is thinking
+less of its effect upon your comfort and happiness than of its effect
+upon your estimate of her character. She would perhaps rather you got
+half the advantage with her aid than the whole advantage without it. Her
+motive is, primarily, vanity--clearly not kindness--however amicably
+they may in general work together. But still it is the kindness that
+makes the vanity flow into pleasant, friendly forms. In a selfish woman
+the very same vanity would degenerate into posturing or dressing. And,
+odd as it may seem, and as much as it may reflect upon the common sense
+of poor humanity, we believe that kind acts done out of genuine,
+unadulterated benevolence are less appreciated by the recipient than
+kind acts done out of benevolence stimulated by vanity. The latter are
+pleasant because they spring out of the desire to please, and soothe our
+self-love, whereas the former appeal to our self-interest.
+
+There are few things in this world more charming than the kindly
+courtesy of a pretty woman, not ungracefully conscious of her power to
+please, and showing courtesy because she enjoys the exercise of this
+power. Strictly speaking, she is acting less in your interest than in
+her own. Although she feels at once the pleasure of pleasing and the
+pleasure of doing a kindly action, the second is quite subordinate to
+the first, and is perhaps, more or less, sacrificed to it. Yet who is
+strong-minded enough to wish that the kindliness of a pretty woman
+should be dictated by simple benevolence, untinged by vanity? If we knew
+that her kindliness arose rather from a wish to benefit us than to
+conciliate our good opinion, it is perhaps possible that we should
+esteem her more, but we fear it is quite certain that we should like her
+less.
+
+Before we conclude, we ought perhaps to make one more postulate on
+behalf of female vanity, not less important than our postulate that it
+should be pleasantly tinged by unselfishness. To be agreeable, it must
+have fair foundation. A woman may be forgiven for over-estimating her
+charms, but there is no forgiveness on this side of the grave for a
+woman who recklessly credits herself with charms that do not exist. All
+the lavish cheques she draws upon her male neighbor's admiration are
+silently dishonored, and in half an hour after the moment they sit down
+to table together she is a hopeless bankrupt in his estimation, even
+though he may have courtesy and skill enough to conceal the collapse.
+
+As there are few, if any, pleasanter objects than a pretty woman,
+gracefully conscious of her beauty, and radiantly fulfilling its
+legitimate end, the power of pleasing, so are there few, if any, more
+unpleasant objects than a vain woman, ungracefully conscious of
+imaginary charms, and secretly disgusting those she strives to attract.
+An ugly woman who gives herself the airs of a beauty, or a silly woman
+who believes herself a genius, is not a spectacle upon which a man of
+healthy imagination and appetite likes to dwell. It is perhaps only in
+accordance with the theory that this life is a state of trial and
+probation that the tastes can be explained. Happily, it is not very
+common. Most women know their strong from their weak points, and marshal
+them on the whole well in the encounter with their lawful oppressor and
+great enemy, man. And until they have won the victory to which Dr. Mary
+Walker is now leading them on, may they never lack the female vanity
+which makes it one of their great objects in life to please!
+
+
+
+
+THE ABUSE OF MATCH-MAKING.
+
+
+It is a pity that when, by some train of ill-luck, a word of respectable
+parentage, and well brought up, is led astray, it cannot adopt
+Goldsmith's recipe and die. It has not even the more prosaic alternative
+of being made an honest word by marriage, and escaping the name under
+which it stooped to folly, and was betrayed. It drags on a dishonored
+life, with little or no chance of recovering its character, inflicting
+cruel disgrace upon the unlucky family of ideas, no matter what their
+own innocence and respectability, to which it happens to belong. Thus
+Casuistry, if not a very useful, was at least a perfectly harmless,
+member of society, and moved in the best circles, until in an evil hour
+she became too intimate with the unpopular Jesuits.
+
+A few years ago, when high feeding and sermonizing proved too much for
+the virtue of garotters, and, waxing fat, they not only kicked society,
+but danced hornpipes in hobnailed boots upon its head and stomach, even
+Philanthropy, at once the most fashionable and popular word of this
+century, was all but compromised by Sir Joshua Jebb and Sir George Grey.
+Baron Bramwell fortunately came to the rescue, and saved it from
+permanent loss of character. But still to this day the word is sometimes
+used in a sense by no means complimentary. If the battue-system
+continues long enough, "good sport" will become a synonym for
+cold-blooded clumsy butchery, and thus all sport whatsoever will be more
+or less discredited. The _faux pas_ of one member disgraces the whole
+family. A few men may be the lords of language, but the great majority
+are its slaves. They can no more disconnect the innocent idea from the
+soiled word that accompanies it than they can see a blue landscape
+through green glass. Let us hope that one of the first acts of Mr.
+Bright's millennial Parliament will be the establishment of a tribunal
+empowered to take a word when it arrives at this pitiable condition, and
+either in mercy knock it on the head altogether, or else formally
+readmit it into good society, and give it all the advantages of a fresh
+start.
+
+We take an early opportunity of inviting their special attention to the
+much-injured word "Match-making." The practice which it describes is not
+only harmless, but, in the present state of society, highly useful and
+meritorious. Yet there can be no doubt, that there is a powerful
+prejudice against it. Although all women--or rather, perhaps, as
+Thackeray said, all good women--are at heart match-makers, there are
+very few who own the soft impeachment. Many repudiate it with
+indignation. It is on the whole about as safe to charge a lady with
+Fenianism as facetiously to point out a young couple in her
+drawing-room, whose flirtation has a suspicious businesslike look about
+it, and to hint that she has deliberately brought them together with a
+view to matrimony. It may be true that she has no selfish interest
+whatever in the matter. The criminal conspiracy in which she so
+strenuously repudiates any concern is, after all, nothing worse than the
+attempt to make two people whom she likes, and who she thinks will suit
+each other, happy for life. By any other name such an action ought, one
+would think, to smell sweet in the nostrils of gods and men.
+
+But, whatever the gods think of it, men cannot forget that the practice,
+whether harmless or not, goes by the objectionable name of match-making.
+So the lady replies, not, perhaps, without the energy of conscious
+guilt, that "things of this sort are best left to themselves," and
+piously begs you to remember that marriages are made in Heaven, not in
+her drawing-room. The melancholy truth is that the gentle craft of
+match-making has been so vulgarized by course and clumsy professors, and
+its very name has in consequence been brought into such disrepute, that
+few respectable women have the courage openly to recognise it. They are
+haunted by visions of the typical match-maker who does work for
+fashionable novels and social satires, and who is a truly awful
+personage. To her alone of mortals is it given to inspire, like the
+Harpies, at once contempt and fear. Keen-eyed and hook-nosed, like a
+bird of prey, she glowers from the corner of crowded ball-rooms upon the
+unconscious heir, hunts him untiringly from house to house, marries him
+remorselessly to her eldest daughter, and then never loses sight of him
+till his spirit is broken, his old friends discarded, and his segar-case
+thrown away.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to say that this fearful being exists only in
+fiction. In real life she has not only to marry her daughters, but also,
+like other human beings, to eat, drink, sleep, and otherwise dispose of
+the twenty-four hours of the day. She cannot therefore very well devote
+herself, from morning to night, to the one occupation of heir-hunting,
+with the precision of a machine, or one of Bunyan's walking vices. But
+still there must be some truth even in a caricature, and a man sometimes
+finds a girl "thrown at his head," as the process is forcibly termed,
+with a coarse-mindedness quite worthy of the typical match-maker, though
+also with a clumsiness which she would heartily despise.
+
+He goes as a stranger to some place, and is astonished to find himself
+at once taken to the bosom and innermost confidence of people whose very
+name he never heard before, as if he were their oldest and most familiar
+friend. He is asked to dinner one day, to breakfast the next, and warmly
+assured that a place is always kept for him at lunch. Charmed and
+flattered to find his many merits so quickly discovered and thoroughly
+appreciated by strangers, he votes them the cleverest, most genial, most
+hospitable people he ever met; and everything goes on delightfully until
+he begins to think it odd that he should be constantly left alone with,
+and now and then delicately chaffed about, some _passee_, ill-favored
+woman, whom he no more connects with any thought of marriage than he
+would a female rhinoceros. And then slowly dawns upon him the cruel
+truth that his kind hosts have had their appreciation of his merits
+considerably sharpened by the fact that there is an ugly daughter or
+sister-in-law in the house whom they are sick to death of, whom they are
+always imploring "to marry or do something," and who, having for years
+ogled and angled for every marriageable pair of whiskers and pantoloons
+within ten miles, has gradually become so well known in the neighborhood
+that her one forlorn hope is to carry off some innocent stranger with a
+rush.
+
+"_Quere peregrinum, vicinia rauca reclamat;_" and if the _peregrinus_
+happens to be young and verdant, and, having just been given a good
+appointment, feels, with the Vicar of Wakefield, that one of the three
+greatest characters on earth is the father of a family, he is possibly
+hooked securely before he discovers his danger. He discovers it to find
+himself tied for life to a woman with whom he has not a sympathy in
+common, and for whom every day increases his disgust. And the people who
+have ruined his life have not even the sorry excuse that they wished to
+better hers. Their one thought was to get rid of her as speedily as
+possible, no matter to whom; and they would rather have had Bluebeard at
+a two-months' engagement than any other man at one of six. There is
+something so coarse and revolting, so brutal, in the notion of bringing
+two people together into such a relation as that of marriage on purely
+selfish grounds, and without the slightest regard to their future
+happiness, that any one who has seen the snare laid for himself or his
+friends may well shudder at the mere sound of match-making. Mezentius
+was more merciful, for of the two bodies which he chained together only
+one had life.
+
+The clumsy match-maker is a scarcely less dangerous, though a far more
+respectable, enemy to the gentle craft than the coarse one. She makes it
+ridiculous, while the latter makes it odious, and it is ridicule that
+kills. She is, perhaps, a well-meaning woman, who would be sorry to
+marry two people unless she thought them suited to each other; but the
+moment she has made up her mind that they ought to marry, she sets to
+work with a vigor which, unless she has a very young man to deal with,
+is almost sure to spoil her plans. This would not be surprising in a
+silly woman; but it is odd that the more energetic, and, in some
+respects, the more able a woman is, the more likely sometimes she is to
+fall into this error.
+
+A woman may be the life and soul of a dozen societies, write admirable
+letters, get half her male relatives into Government offices, and yet be
+the laughing-stock of the neighborhood for the absurd way in which she
+goes husband-hunting for her daughters. The very energy and ability
+which fit her for other pursuits disqualify her for match-making. She is
+too impatient and too fond of action to adopt the purely passive
+expectant attitude, the masterly inactivity, which is here the great
+secret of success. She is always feeling that something should be said
+or done to help on the business, and prematurely scares the shy or
+suspicious bird. Many a promising love-affair has been nipped in the bud
+simply because the too eager mother has drawn public attention to it
+before it was robust enough to face publicity, by throwing the two
+lovers conspicuously together, or by some unguarded remark.
+
+When one thinks of all that a man has to go through in the course of a
+love-affair--especially in a small society where everybody knows
+everybody--of all the chaffing and grinning, and significant interchange
+of glances when he picks up the daughter's fan, or hands the mother to
+her carriage, or laughs convulsively at the old jokes of the father, one
+is almost inclined to wonder how a Briton, of the average British
+stiffness and shyness, ever gets married at all. The explanation
+probably is, that he falls in love before he exactly knows what he is
+about, and, once in love, is of course gloriously blind and deaf to all
+obstacles between him and the adored one. But to subject a man to this
+trying ordeal, as the too eager match-maker does, before he is
+sufficiently in love to be proof against it, is like sending him into a
+snow-storm without a great-coat.
+
+The romantic match-maker is, in her way, as mischievous as the coarse or
+the clumsy one. She is usually a good sort of woman, but with decidedly
+more heart than head. She gets her notions of political economy from Mr.
+Dickens' novels, and holds that, whenever two nice young people of
+opposite sexes like each other, it is their business then and there to
+marry. If Providence cannot always, like Mr. Dickens, provide a rich
+aunt or uncle, it at least never sends mouths without hands to feed
+them. Let every good citizen help the young people to marry as fast as
+they can, and let there be lots of chubby cheeks and lots of Sunday
+plum-pudding to fill them. There is no arguing with a woman of this
+kind, and she is perhaps the most dangerous of all match-makers,
+inasmuch as she is usually herself a warm-hearted pleasant woman, and
+there is a courage and disinterestedness about her views very
+captivating to young heads. There is no safety but in flight. Even a
+bachelor of fair prudence and knowledge of the world is not safe in her
+hands. We mean on the assumption that he is not in a position to marry.
+If he is "an eligible," he cannot, of course, be considered safe
+anywhere. But otherwise he knows that match-makers of the unromantic
+worldly type will be only too glad to leave him alone.
+
+And having, perhaps, been accustomed on this account to feel that he may
+flirt in moderation with impunity, as a man with whom marriage is
+altogether out of the question, he is quite unprepared for the new and
+startling unconventional view which the romantic match-maker takes of
+him. He is horrified to find that, ignoring the usual considerations as
+to the length of his purse, she has discovered that he and the pretty
+girl with whom he danced three consecutive dances last night must have
+been made expressly for each other, and that she has somehow contrived,
+by the exercise of that freemasonry in love-affairs which is peculiar to
+women, to put the same ridiculous notion into the young lady's head. In
+fact, he suddenly finds to his astonishment that he must either
+propose--which is out of the question--or be considered a cold-blooded
+trifler with female hearts. And so he has nothing to do but pack up his
+portmanteau and beat an ignominious retreat, with an uncomfortable
+consciousness that his amiable hostess and pretty partner have a very
+poor opinion of him.
+
+It is rather hard, however, that these and other abuses, which we have
+not space to enumerate, of the great art of match-making should bring
+the art itself into odium and contempt. In all of them there is a
+violation of some one or more of what we take to be its three chief
+canons. First, the objects to be experimented upon should be pecuniarily
+in a position to marry. Secondly, care should be taken that they seem on
+the whole not unlikely to suit each other. Thirdly, the artist should be
+content, like a photographer, to bring the objects together, and leave
+the rest of the work mainly to nature. We confess that we feel painfully
+the unscientific vagueness of this last axiom, since so much turns upon
+the way in which the objects are brought together. But, as we only
+undertook to treat of the abuse of match-making, the reader must
+consider these maxims for its proper use to be thrown into the bargain
+_gratis_, and not therefore to be scrutinized severely. Some other day,
+if we can muster up courage enough for so delicate and arduous a task,
+we may perhaps attempt to show that, in the present state of society,
+the art of match-making deserves and requires cultivation, and how, in
+our humble opinion, this cultivation should be carried on.
+
+
+
+
+FEMININE INFLUENCE.
+
+
+All English ladies who are warmly devoted to the great cause of feminine
+authority have got their eyes just now upon the Empress of the French.
+It is understood in English domestic circles that the Empress has
+decided to go to Rome, and that the Emperor has decided on her staying
+at home, and the interest of the situation is generally thought to be
+intense. The ocean race between the yachts was nothing to it. Every
+woman of spirit has been betting heavily this Christmas upon the
+Empress, and praying mentally for the defeat of the Emperor, and every
+new telegram that bears upon the subject of the difficult controversy is
+scanned by hundreds of dovelike eyes every morning with indescribable
+eagerness.
+
+M. Reuter, who is a man probably, if he is not a joint-stock company, is
+believed not to be altogether an impartial historian; and it is felt in
+many drawing-rooms that what is wanted on this occasion, at the
+telegraph offices, is a sound and resolute Madame Reuter, to correct the
+deviations of M. Reuter's compass. In default of all trustworthy
+telegraphic intelligence, Englishwomen are compelled to fall back on
+their vivid imagination, and to construct a picture of what is
+happening from the depths of their own moral consciousness. And several
+things their moral consciousness tells them are clear and certain. The
+first is, that the Empress Eugenie is an injured and interesting victim.
+She has made a vow, under the very touching circumstances of measles in
+the Imperial nursery, to pay a visit to the Pope; and Cabinet Ministers
+like M. Lavalette, who throw suspicion on the binding nature of such a
+holy maternal obligation, are worse than "S. G. O." In the second place,
+she has set her heart upon going. Even if a vow were not binding, this
+is. It is mere nonsense to say that her pilgrimage would interfere with
+politics. A woman's fine tact is often of considerable use in politics,
+and the sight of the Prince Imperial in his mother's arms might exercise
+the most beneficial influence on the Pope's mind.
+
+Pio Nono has held out hitherto in the most inexplicable manner against
+the Prince Imperial's photograph, but he never could resist a sight of
+the original. And, thirdly, if a wife and a mother may not have her own
+way about going to see the Head of her own Church, when is she ever to
+have her way at all, and where is the line to be drawn? The next
+downward step in a husband's declension will be to prevent her from
+frequenting all religious exercises, or, still worse, from selecting her
+own balls and evening parties. This is what English ladies feel, and
+feel keenly. It is some consolation to them to learn that, if the
+Empress Eugenie is discomfited, she will not have been discomfited
+without a struggle. Of course there will be no evening reception on the
+New Year at the Tuileries. No lady with a proper sense of what was due
+to her own dignity would receive under such circumstances. But till the
+most authentic news arrive, it will still be possible to hope and to
+believe that victory will eventually, and in spite of all appearances,
+declare itself upon the side of right and of propriety, and that her
+Majesty will not be interfered with merely to satisfy the idle caprices
+of a Foreign Office.
+
+The question of the proper limits of feminine influence is one which
+such universal enthusiasm forces naturally on one's notice. Not even the
+most rigid cynic can deny that women ought to have some influence on the
+mind and judgment of the opposite sex, and the only difficulty is to
+know how far that influence ought to go. Every one will be ready to
+concede that sound reasoning is worth hearing, whether it comes from a
+woman or a man; and that, so far as a lady argues well, she has as much
+claim on our attention as Diotima had on the attention of Socrates.
+This, however, is not precisely the point which is so difficult to
+settle. The problem is to know how much influence a woman ought to have
+when she does not argue well; and further, what are the matters on which
+her opinion, whether it be based on argument or instinct, is of value.
+
+One of the most important subjects on which women have some, and always
+want to have a great deal of power, is religion. This is one part of the
+supposed mission of the Empress upon which feminine observers look with
+especial sympathy, and on which experienced masculine observers, on the
+other hand, look with some awe. The correspondents of the daily papers,
+whose pleasure and privilege it is to be able to instruct us in all the
+secrets of high life, have given us recently to understand that, for
+some time back, Her Majesty has been hard at work on the Emperor's soul.
+Every thoughtful woman likes to be at work on her husband's soul. Young
+ladies enjoy the prospect before they are married, and no novel is so
+thoroughly popular among them as one in which beauty is the instrument
+in the hands of Providence for the conversion of unbelief. And it is
+partly because the Empress Eugenie is discharging this high missionary
+duty, that she is an object of particular admiration just at this
+moment. When Englishwomen hear that she is very active in favor of the
+Pope, and couple this news with the fact that the Emperor's soul is
+uneasy, they sniff--if we may be forgiven the expression--the battle
+from afar. Their education in respect of theology and religious opinion
+is very different from that of men.
+
+They have been brought up to believe strongly and heartily what they
+have been told, and they do not understand the half-sceptical way of
+regarding such things which is the result of larger views and more
+liberal education. It appears to them a terrible thing that the men they
+care for should be hesitating and doubtful about subjects where they
+themselves have been trained only to believe one view possible. And they
+set to work in the true temper of missionaries, with profound eagerness
+and energy, and narrowness of grasp. Many genuine prayers and tears are
+worthily spent in the effort to tether some truant husband or a son to a
+family theological peg, and to prevent him from roving. And, up to a
+certain point, men continually give in. They find it easier and more
+comfortable to lower their arms, and not always to be maintaining a
+barren controversy. They have not the slightest wish to convince their
+affectionate feminine disputant, to take from her the sincere and
+positive dogmas on which her happiness is built, and to substitute for
+these a phase of doubt and difficulty for which her past intellectual
+life has not fitted her. Accordingly, they indulge in a thousand little
+hypocrisies of a more or less harmless kind.
+
+So long as women's education continues to differ from that of men as
+widely as it does in England, this flexibility on the part of the latter
+under the influence of the former is not always amiss. It is better that
+the husband should be yielding than that he should hold aloof from all
+that interests and moves the wife, as is the case in countries where the
+one sex may be seen professing to believe in nothing, while the other as
+implicitly believes in everything. It is, however, easy to conceive of
+cases in which this feminine influence that seems so innocent, is in
+reality injurious. It may perhaps be the business of the husband to take
+a public part in the affairs of his time. Conscience tells him that he
+should be sincere, uncompromising, logical, even to the point of
+disputing conclusions which good and pious people consider essential
+and important. Or he may be a religious preacher, or a religious
+reformer of his day, bound, in virtue of character, to maintain truth at
+the risk of being unpopular; or, it may be, to prosecute inquiries and
+reforms at the risk of shocking weaker brethren.
+
+There are many who could tell us from their experience how terribly at
+such a time they have been perplexed and hampered in their duty by the
+affectionate ignorance, the tears, and the piety of women. Protestant
+clergymen in particular are sometimes taunted with their conservative
+tendencies, their indifference to the new lights of science, or of
+history, and their disinclination to embark on perilous voyages in quest
+of truth. Part of their conservatism arises from the fact that their
+practical business is generally to teach what they do know, rather than
+to inquire into what they do not know. Part of it comes, as we suspect,
+from the fact that they are married. A wife is a sort of theological
+drag. It serves no doubt to keep some of us from rolling too rapidly
+down hill. It impedes equally the progress of others over ordinarily
+level ground.
+
+The importance of a social position to women is a thing which affects
+their influence upon men no less materially than does their religious
+sensibility. As a rule, they have no other means of measuring the
+consideration in which they are held by the world, or the success in
+life of those to whose fortunes they are linked, than by using a trivial
+and worthless social standard. Men, whose training is wider, estimate
+both their male and their female friends pretty fairly according to
+their merits. But the majority of women, from their youth up, seldom
+think of anybody without contrasting his or her social status with their
+own. Success signifies to them introduction to this or that feminine
+circle, admission to friendships from which they have been as yet
+excluded, and visiting cards of a more distinguished appearance than
+those which at present lie upon their table. They are unable to enjoy
+even the ordinary intercourse of society without an _arriere pensee_ as
+to their chance of landing themselves a step higher on the social
+ladder. From such absurdities the best and most refined women of course
+are free, but the mass of Englishwomen seldom meet without wondering who
+on earth each of the others is, and to which county family she belongs.
+
+Humorous as is the spectacle of a crowd of English ladies, each of whom
+is employed in eyeing the lady next her and asking who she is, and
+comical as the point of view appears to any one who reflects on the
+shortness of human life and the littleness of human character, the
+effect of these feminine weaknesses is one which no one can be sure of
+escaping. We are afraid that half of the Englishmen who are snobs are
+made so by Englishwomen. It is impossible for the female portion of any
+domestic circle to be perpetually dwelling on their own social
+aspirations without communicating the infection to, or even forcing it
+upon the male. Wives and daughters become dissatisfied with their
+husbands' or their fathers' friends. They want to meet and to associate
+with people whom it is a social credit to know, and who in turn may
+help them to know somebody beyond. Every fresh acquaintance of
+distinction, or of fashion, is a sort of milestone, showing the ground
+that has been travelled over by the family in the direction of their
+hopes. This sort of fever is very catching. But though men often catch
+it, they generally catch it from the other sex. And even when they are
+not impregnated with it themselves, the effect of feminine influence
+upon them is that they accept their lot with placidity, and acquiesce in
+the social struggle through which they are dragged.
+
+No man in his senses can wish or hope to order the social life of his
+belongings according to his own sober judgment. He is compelled to allow
+them a free rein in the matter, and to abstain from even expressing the
+astonishment he inwardly feels. Perhaps the world of women is a new
+world to him, and he feels incapable of regulating any of its movements;
+or perhaps, if he is wise, he is content with the reflection that little
+foibles do not altogether spoil real nobility of nature, and takes the
+bad side of a woman's education with the good. But there are innumerable
+matters in respect of which he cannot withdraw himself from the feminine
+influence about him. By degrees he comes to sympathize with the little
+social disappointments of his family group, and to take pleasure in
+their little social triumphs, which appear to be so productive of
+satisfaction and enjoyment to those to whom they fall. But the effect on
+his character is not usually wholesome. His eye is no longer single.
+Feminine influence has engrafted on his nature the defects of feminine
+character, without engrafting on it also its many virtues.
+
+Women usually fail in communicating to men their self-devotion, their
+gentleness, their piety; all that they manage to communicate amounts to
+little more than a respect for the observances of religion, and a
+nervous sensibility to social distinctions.
+
+While the mental development of women continues to be so little studied,
+it is not surprising that the intellectual influence of the sex should
+be almost _nil_, or that such a modicum of it as they possess should be
+exerted within a very narrow sphere. It is the fault, no doubt, of our
+systems of female education that the mental power of the cleverest women
+really comes in England to very little. In its highest form it amounts
+to a capacity for conversation on indifferent matters, a genius for
+music or some other fine art, a turn for talking about the poets of the
+day, and perhaps for imitating their style with ease, coupled, in
+exceptional cases, with a talent for guessing double acrostics. To be
+able to do all this, and to be charming and religious too, is the whole
+duty of young women.
+
+It would be difficult possibly to fit out an English young lady with the
+various practical accomplishments that are of use in matrimony, and to
+make her at the same time an intellectual equal of the other sex. But it
+would surely be possible to train her to understand more of the general
+current of the world's ideas, even if she could not devote herself to
+studying them in detail. What woman has now any notion of the broad
+outline of history of human thought? All philosophy is a sealed book to
+her. It is the same with theology and politics. She has not the wildest
+conception, as a rule, of the grounds on which people think who think
+differently from herself; and all through life she is content to play
+the part of a partisan or a devotee with perfect equanimity.
+
+While, however, feminine influence in intellectual subjects is, as it
+deserves to be, infinitesimal, in practice and in action women are proud
+of being recognized as useful and sound advisers. As outsiders and
+spectators they see a good deal of the game, have leisure to watch
+narrowly all that is going on about them, and a subtle instinct teaches
+them to tread delicately over all dangerous ground. It is curious how
+many enemies women make amongst themselves, and yet how many enemies
+they prevent men from making. They seem to have less of self-control or
+prudence as far as their own strong feelings and fortunes are concerned,
+than they have of tact and temper in managing the fortunes and
+enterprises of others.
+
+There can, for example, be no doubt whatever that the parson who aims at
+being a bishop before he dies ought to marry early. The great strokes of
+policy which bring him preferment or popularity are pretty sure to have
+been devised in moments of happy inspiration, or perhaps during the
+watches of the night, by a feminine brain. Good mothers make saints and
+heroes, says the proverb, and beyond a doubt wise wives make bishops.
+Their influence is not the less real because, unlike that of Mrs.
+Proudie, it is exerted chiefly behind the scenes. It is possibly because
+the influence possessed by women is so intangible, depending as it does
+less on the reason than on the sentiment, affection, and convenience of
+the other sex, that women are so jealous to assert and to protect it.
+
+
+
+
+PIGEONS.
+
+
+Every now and then, as the fashionable season comes round, in some
+corner of its space the daily press records a wholesale slaughter of the
+pigeon species. The world is informed of a series of sweepstakes, in
+which guardsmen and peers and foreigners of distinction take part. So
+many birds are shot at, so many are killed, so many get away. The
+quality of the birds and the skill of the shooters is specified. As the
+minutest details of the sport are interesting, we are even told who
+supplies the birds, and whether the day of their massacre was bright or
+cloudy. This is quite as it should be. The British public can never hear
+too much of the doings of its gilded youth. Sweet to it is sporting
+news, but "aristocratic sporting news" is sweeter still.
+
+And apart from this twofold source of interest, an element of deeper
+satisfaction mingles in the complacency with which it gloats over these
+pigeon holocausts. It is something to know that, in the last resort, we
+have these high-born and fashionable marksmen to protect our hearths and
+homes from the French invader and the irrepressible Beales. The nervous
+householder sleeps in his bed with a greater sense of security after
+reading of the awful havoc which Captain A. and the Earl of B. are
+making of the feathery tribe. In the accuracy of their aim he sees a
+guarantee of order, and of the maintenance of his glorious Constitution.
+Foreign menace and internal discord lose something of their terrors for
+him as often as his eyes light upon the significant little paragraph to
+which we have referred. Here is an item of intelligence for the haughty
+Prussian and the dashing Zouave to ponder. Here is something for the
+mole-like Fenian and the blatant Leaguesman to put in their pipes and
+smoke.
+
+The fate of the pigeons awaits all who would violate our shores, or
+light up the flame of sedition in the land. If, as some philosophers
+aver, the pigeon does not all die, but in some tranquil limbo flutters
+on in an eternity of innocent cooing, it must console the poor bird to
+reflect that, however cheap he may be held, he has not perished
+altogether in vain. To serve a useful purpose is the great economy of
+things, to point a warning, at the cost of one's heart's blood, to
+England's foes and traitors--to the plotter in Munster as well as the
+safer conspirator of the Parks--might content even a greater ambition
+than that which animates the gentle bosom of a fantail.
+
+But suppose some vindictive pouter to survive his less lucky comrades,
+and, escaping among the birds who are duly chronicled as "getting away,"
+to perch, full of resentment at the probable extinction of his species,
+in the fashionable quarter of London. He would there witness a grand act
+of retaliation. He would learn how Belgravia avenges Hornsey and
+Shepherd's Bush. He would see the very men from whom his relatives had
+received their quietus flying to their clubs for shelter, and calling on
+their goddesses of the _demi-monde_ to cover them. He would perceive, by
+an unerring instinct, that a contest was afoot in which the conditions
+of that suburban sweepstakes at which he had involuntarily assisted were
+exactly reversed. He would see those self-same sportsmen converted into
+the target, the flutterers of the dovecot themselves in a flutter. And
+he would be more than pigeon if he could repress a thrill of savage glee
+at the spectacle of the enemies of his race realizing by experience all
+the difference between shooting and being shot at.
+
+Suppose, further, that curious to watch the operations of "aristocratic
+sport," the intelligent bird, following the precedent of Edgar Poe's
+Raven, should alight, unseen and uninvited, on some object of art in a
+fashionable ballroom. Here he would find himself at once in the thick of
+the brilliant competition. He would see a row of lovely archers, backed
+by a second row of older and more experienced markswomen. And in the
+human pigeons now cowering before their combined artillery he would
+recognise the heroes so lately engaged in dispatching thousands of the
+feathered branch of the family to oblivion. At first sight it might
+strike an animal of his well-known gallantry that there was nothing so
+very terrible in their impending fate. To fall slain by bright eyes, and
+with the strains of Coote and Tinney lingering on the ear, to sigh out
+one's soul over a draught of seltzer and champagne or the sweet poison
+of a strawberry ice, might seem to the winged spectator a blissful
+ending.
+
+The doorway of the perfumed saloon might seem but the portal of a
+Mahomedan paradise, in which young and beautiful houris are deporting
+themselves under the guardian eye of the older and less beautiful
+houris. To the denizen of the air all, save the want of oxygen, might
+appear divine. But when he surveyed more closely that sexual row of
+sportswomen, he would know at once that he beheld the true avengers of
+his race. In their stony glare, in the cold glitter of their diamonds,
+in the ample proportions of their well-developed shoulders, in their
+sliding scale of manners, now adjusted to a sugary smile and now to a
+stare of annihilation, he would read a deadly purpose. Nor would the
+diversities of skill which this fringe of amazons exhibited in the use
+of their weapons escape his notice. He would see some whom success had
+made affable, and others whom failure had made desperate; some who
+covered their victim with an aim of pitiless precision, and others who
+spoilt their chances by bungling audacity. Conspicuous among them he
+would observe a giddy sexagenarian, whose random attempts to share in
+the sport made her the laughing-stock of the circle.
+
+And as he surveyed the _battue_ he would gradually discern its tactics.
+The beautiful beings in tulle he would feel, by instinct, were a lure
+and a decoy. Once within reach of their victims, these lovely
+skirmishers would be seen to inflict on them a sudden wound, leaving
+them to be despatched by the heavy reserve in _moire_ and lace. As he
+watched the terror which these formidable beings inspired, and the
+business-like manner in which they addressed themselves to their task,
+as he noticed the jaunty destroyers of his race succumbing one by one to
+fate, or ignominiously attempting to "get away," he would feel that the
+"irony of the situation" was complete. In a vague way he would grasp the
+fact--hitherto undreamt of in his dove's philosophy--that, if the pigeon
+is preyed upon by man, man in his turn is preyed upon by the dowager.
+
+There is, however, this difference between the fate of the pigeon and
+his human analogue, that, whereas the former is slain outright, the
+latter is often subjected to the prolonged agony of being plucked
+feather by feather. Not that he thinks it agony; on the contrary, he
+decidedly likes it, which is a wonderful proof of his simplicity, and
+the difference in people's tastes. But in order to pluck a human pigeon
+at leisure, you must first catch him. May is a good month for this
+operation. About now he begins to resort to the Opera and the park, and
+in the purlieus of either a fine specimen may be flashed. A clever
+sportswoman will get the earliest possible information about his
+movements. Much depends on forestalling her competitors.
+
+A youthful pigeon, just emerging from his minority, or freshly alighted
+from the grand tour, is easily captured. There are two principal
+contrivances for catching human pigeons. The first is the matrimonial
+snare. This is worked by the dowager, in concert with her daughter,
+somewhat on the following plan. The daughter throws herself, as if by
+chance, in the pigeon's way. The brilliancy of her charms naturally
+attracts him. Small-talk ensues, in which an extraordinary similarity
+between her tastes and his is casually revealed. The simple pigeon,
+suspecting nothing, is delighted to find so congenial a soul. Is he
+musical? she adores the divine art. A gourmand? she owns to the
+possession of a cookery-book. Ritualistic? it was but the other day that
+she was at St. Alban's. Turfy? He must throw his eyes over her book for
+the Derby. Even if his pet pastime, like the Emperor Domitian's, were
+killing flies, she would profess her readiness to join him in it. Or she
+tries another dodge, and, putting on the airs of a pretty monitress,
+asks him with tender interest to confide in her.
+
+The great point is never to lose sight of him; to follow him to balls,
+concerts, or races, to cleave to him like his shadow. Then, when he is
+fairly caught in the toils of her encircling sympathy, the elder and
+more experienced ally appears on the scene. Her task is to cut off his
+retreat. Upon her firmness and accuracy in calculating the resisting
+power of her pigeon, success depends. Seizing an opportunity when he is
+least prepared, she sternly informs him that the time for dalliance is
+over, that he has said and done things of a very marked kind, and that
+there is only one course open to him as a pigeon of honor. And under
+this sort of compulsion the simple creature, with his rent-roll,
+Consols, family diamonds, and all, hops with a fairly good grace into
+the matrimonial toils.
+
+The second contrivance to which he is apt to fall a victim is the
+infatuation trap. This is a much more elaborate machine, and is worked
+by one of those semi-attached couples who might sit to a new Hogarth for
+a new edition of _Marriage a la Mode_. The husband's part is very
+simple. It is to be as little in the way as possible, and to afford his
+sprightlier half every facility for pursuing her little game. The chief
+business devolves on the lady. It is her task to make the pigeon fall
+madly in love with her, and to keep him so, without overstepping the
+bounds of conventional propriety. Happily this can be managed nowadays
+without either elopement or scandal. Among the improvements of this
+mechanical age, it has been found possible to enlarge the limits of
+wedlock so as to include a third person.
+
+A life-long _tete-a-tete_, which was the old conception of marriage, is
+quite obsolete. It has given way to the triangular theory, by which a
+new element, in the shape of a parasitical adorer, has been introduced
+into the holy state. Matrimony, as reconstituted by fashionable
+scholiasts, comprises husband, wife, and, to relieve the tedium of the
+situation, a good-looking appendage of the male sex, who is an agreeable
+companion of the one and the devoted slave of the other. Each
+contributes to the harmony of the arrangement--the husband, a
+background; the wife, the charms of her presence; the adorer, cash.
+Whatever other experience it brings, marriage generally sharpens the
+appreciation of the value of money; sentiment is sweet, but it is an
+article of confectionery, for which its fair dispensers in the married
+ranks exact an equivalent.
+
+In trapping her victim, therefore, a sharp young matron is careful to
+let her choice fall on a plump specimen of the pigeon species--a pigeon
+with a long purse and little brains. Once reduced to a state of
+infatuation, almost anything may be done with him. The luxury of
+plucking him will employ her delicate fingers for a long time to come.
+He may be sponged upon to any extent. The one thing he can do really
+well is to pay. His yacht, his drag, his brougham, his riding-horses,
+his shooting-box, all are at her disposal. At his expense she dines at
+Greenwich; at his expense she views the Derby; at his expense she enjoys
+an opera-box. And in return for all this she has only to smile and
+murmur "_so_ nice," for the soft simpleton to fancy himself amply
+repaid. Then she exacts a great many costly presents, to say nothing of
+gloves, trinkets, and _bouquets_. It is curious to note how the code of
+propriety has altered in this particular.
+
+In old-fashioned novels the stereotyped dodge for compromising a lady's
+reputation is to force a present or a loan of money on her. Nowadays
+Lovelace's anxiety is just the other way--to keep the acquisitive
+propensity of his liege lady within tolerable bounds. It would be a
+great mistake to suppose that a woman can play this game without special
+gifts and aptitudes for it. It requires peculiar talents, and peculiar
+antecedents. First and foremost, she must have married a man whom she
+both dislikes and despises. And, further, she must be proof against the
+weakness which some of her sex exhibit, of growing fond of husbands who,
+without being Admirable Crichtons, treat them kindly and with
+forbearance. Next, she must have thrown overboard all the twaddle about
+domestic duties and responsibilities. If her child sickens of the
+measles just as she is starting for her bivouac in Norway, or a course
+of dinners in the Palais Royal, her duty is to call in the doctor and
+go. Weeks afterwards you will find the little darling picking up flesh,
+in mamma's absence, at some obscure watering-place. Then her temperament
+must be cool, calculating, and passionless in no ordinary degree, and
+this character is written in the hard lines of her mouth and the cold
+light of her fine eyes.
+
+Lastly, she must have, not a superstitious, but an intelligent regard
+for the world's opinion, or rather for the opinion of the influential
+part of it. No one has a nicer perception of the difference in the
+relative importance of stupid country gossip and ostracism from certain
+great houses in London. No one takes more pains to study appearances so
+long as they don't clash with her amusements. Indeed, you will generally
+find that her dear friend is a young lady of great simplicity and
+irreproachable principles, whom she admits just enough, but not too far,
+into her confidence, and who finds it worth while to enact the part, now
+of a blind, and now of a foil.
+
+If any one asserts that this treatment of the human pigeon is cruel, we
+can only reply, with a correspondent of the _Times_ who writes to rebuke
+the humanitarians who would rob a poor boa of his squealing rabbit--away
+with such cant! Is a married woman to be stinted of her "small
+pleasures" because prudes affect to think the means by which they are
+obtained unfeminine? As well might they think it unfeline in pussy to
+play with her mouse.
+
+The walking pigeon is as much intended for the prey of a stronger
+species as the pigeon that flies. The plucking which he receives at the
+hands of his fair manipulator is nothing to what he would get at the
+hands of his own sex, in the army, on the turf, or in the city. If the
+pigeon has reason to think himself lucky in faring no worse, the
+non-pigeon section of society has no less reason to be grateful for a
+new illustration of female character. Not that the mercenary development
+in some of our young matrons is altogether new. It is only an old
+domestic virtue, carried to an extreme--thrift, running into an engaging
+rapacity.
+
+
+
+
+AMBITIOUS WIVES.
+
+
+The recent death of Mrs. Proudie, who was so well known and so little
+loved by the readers of Mr. Trollope's novels, is one of those occasions
+which ought not to be allowed to pass away without being improved. To
+many men it will suggest many things. She was a type. As a type ought to
+be, she was perfect and full-blown. But her characteristics enter into
+other women in varying degrees, and with all sorts of minor colors. The
+Proudie element in wives and women is one of those unrecognised yet
+potent conditions of life which master us all, and yet are admitted and
+taken into calculation and account by none. It is in the nature of
+things that such an element should exist, and should be powerful in this
+peculiar and oblique way. We deny women the direct exercise of their
+capacities, and the immediate gratification of an overt ambition. The
+natural result is that they run to artifice, and that a good-natured
+husband is made the conductor between an ambitious wife and the outer
+world where the prizes of ambition are scrambled for. He is the wretched
+buffer through which the impetuous forces of his wife impinge upon his
+neighbors. That is to say, he leads an uneasy life between two ever
+colliding bodies, being equally misunderstood and equally reviled by
+either.
+
+This is the evil result of a state of things in which natural
+distinctions and conventional distinctions are a very long way from
+coinciding. The theory is that women are peaceful domestic beings, with
+no object beyond household cares, no wish nor will outside the objects
+of the man and his children, no active opinion or concern in the larger
+affairs of the State. Every man, on the other hand, is supposed to have
+views and principles about public topics, and to be anxious to make more
+or less of a figure in the enforcement of his views, to exercise in some
+shape an influence among his fellows, and to win renown of one sort or
+another. Of course if this division of the male and female natures
+covered the whole ground, society would be in a very well-balanced
+state, and things would go on very smoothly in consequence of the
+perfect equilibrium established by the exceeding contentedness of women
+and the constant activity and ambition of men.
+
+But a very small observation of life is quite enough to disclose how ill
+the facts correspond with the accepted hypothesis about them. We are
+constantly being told of some aspiring man that he is, in truth, no more
+than the representative of an aspiring wife. He would fain live his life
+in dignified or undignified serenity, and cares not a jot for a seat in
+the House of Commons, or for being made a bishop, or for any of those
+other objects which allure men out of a tranquil and independent
+existence. But he has a wife who does care for these things. She cannot
+be a member of Parliament or a bishop in her own person, but it is
+something to be the wife of somebody who can be these things.
+
+A part of the glory of the man is reflected upon the head of the woman.
+She receives her reward in a second-hand way, but still it is glory of
+its own sort. She becomes a leading lady in a provincial town, and
+during the season in town she is asked out to houses which she is very
+eager to get into, and of which she can talk with easily assumed
+familiarity when she returns to the provinces again. She is presented at
+Court too, and this makes her descend to the provincial plain with an
+aroma of Celestial dignity like that of Venus when she descended from
+Olympus. A bishop's wife is still more amply rewarded. Without being so
+imperious as the late Mrs. Proudie was, she has still a thousand of
+those opportunities for displaying power which are so dear to people who
+are fictitiously supposed to be too weak to care for power. Minor
+canons, incumbents, curates, and all their wives, pay her profound
+deference; or, if they do not, she can "put the screw on" in a gushing
+manner which is exceedingly effective.
+
+There are women, it is true, with souls above these light social
+matters. They do not particularly value the privilege of figuring as
+lady-patroness of a ball or bazaar, or the delights of trampling on a
+curate, or of being distantly adored by the wife of a minor canon. But
+they really have an interest in politics, or in some one or two special
+departments of that comprehensive subject. They would like to pass an
+Act of Parliament making it a capital offence for any guardian of the
+poor or relieving-officer to refuse to give the paupers as much as they
+should choose to ask for. Drainage is the strong point of some women.
+Sewage with them is the key to civilization.
+
+Perhaps most political women are actively interested in public affairs
+simply because they perceive that this is the most openly recognised
+sphere of influence and power; and what they yearn after is to be
+influential, and to stand on something higher than the ordinary level in
+the world, for no other reason than that it is higher than the ordinary
+level. Nobody has any right to find fault with this temper, provided the
+ladies who are possessed by it do not mistake mere domineering for the
+extraordinary elevation after which they aspire. It is through this
+temper, whether in one sex or the other, that the world is made better.
+If a certain number of men and women were not ambitious, what would
+become of the rest of us who possess our souls in patience and
+moderation?
+
+The only question is whether what we may call vicarious ambition, or
+aspirations by proxy, are particularly desirable forms of a confessedly
+useful and desirable sentiment. For the peace of mind of the man who is
+not ambitious, but is only pretending to be so, we may be pretty sure
+that the domestic stimulus has some drawbacks. We do not mean drawbacks
+after the manner of Mrs. Caudle. These show a coarse and vulgar
+conception of the goads which a man may have applied to him in his inner
+circle. There are moral and unheard reproofs. There is a consciousness
+in the mind of a man that his wife thinks him (with all possible
+affection and tenderness) rather a poor creature for not taking his
+position in the world. And if he happens to be a man of anything like
+fine sensibility, this will make him exceedingly uneasy.
+
+The uneasiness may then become sufficiently decided to make him willing
+to undergo any amount of labor and outlay, rather than endure the
+presence of this aethereal skeleton in the family closet. He is quite
+right. He could barely preserve his self-respect otherwise. But he is
+mistaken if he fancies that a single step or a single series of steps
+will demolish the skeleton entirely. One compliance with the ambition of
+his wife will speedily beget the necessity for another. It is notorious
+that a thoroughly aspiring man is never content without the prospect of
+scaling new heights. No more is an aspiring woman. Whether you are
+directly ambitious, as a man is, and for yourself, or indirectly and for
+somebody else, as a woman is, in either case the law is the same. New
+summits ever glitter in the distance. You have got your husband into the
+House of Commons. That glory suffices for a month.
+
+At the end of two months it seems a very dim glory indeed, and having
+long been at an end, it by this time sinks into the second place of a
+means. The sacrificial calf must next be made to speak. He must acquire
+a reputation. Here in a good many cases, we suspect, the process finally
+stops. A man may be got into the House, but the coveted exaltation of
+that atmosphere does not convert a quiet, peaceable, dull man into an
+orator. It does not give him ideas and the faculty of articulate speech.
+At this point, if he be wise, he draws the line. He endures the skeleton
+as best he may, or else his wife, quenching her ambition, resigns
+herself to incurable destiny, and learns to be content with the limits
+set by the fates to her lord's capacities. There are still certain
+fields open to her own powers, irrespective of what he is able to do.
+
+For example, she may open a _salon_, and there may exert unspeakable
+influence over all kinds of important people. This is not at present
+particularly congenial to English ground. As yet, the most vigorous
+intellectual people seem to have felt an active social life as something
+beneath them, and the highly social people have not been conspicuous for
+the activity of their intellectual life. The people who go so greatly to
+parties do not care for what they sum up, with an admirably
+comprehensive vagueness, as "intellect;" while, on the other hand,
+scholars and thinkers are wont to look on time given to society as
+something very like time absolutely wasted. In such a state of feeling,
+it is difficult for a clever woman to exercise much power.
+
+But, as other things improve, this unsocial feeling will dissolve.
+Clever men will see that a couple of hours spent with other clever men
+are not wasted just because a lady is of the party. Nobody would
+seriously maintain that this is so even now, but people are very often
+strongly under the influence of vague notions which they would never
+dream of seriously maintaining. When women get their rights, the
+_salon_ will become an institution. It will create a very fine field for
+the cultivation of their talents. And in proportion as it allows a woman
+to make a career for herself, it will bring relief to many excellent
+husbands who will then no longer have to make careers for them at the
+expense of overstraining their own too slender powers.
+
+It is possible, however, that even then the husband of an ambitious wife
+may not be fully contented. For people with any degree of weakness or
+incapacity in them are always more prone than their neighbors to
+littlenesses and meannesses, and a man who is not able to win much
+renown on his own account may possibly not be too well pleased to see
+his Wife surrounded by his intellectual betters. Indeed, he may even, if
+he is of a very mean nature indeed, resent the spectacle of her own
+predominance. It is some comfort to think that in such case the man's
+own temper will be his severest punishment.
+
+As a rule, however, it is pleasant to think that with ambition in women,
+which is not their peculiarity, is yoked tact, which is their
+peculiarity emphatically. Hence, therefore, wives who are ambitious for
+their lords have often the discretion to conceal their mood. They may
+rule with a hand of iron, but the hand is sagely concealed in a glove of
+velvet. A man may be the creature of his wife's lofty projects, and yet
+dream all the time that he is altogether chalking out his own course.
+
+George II. used to be humored in this way by Queen Caroline. Bishop
+Proudie, on the other hand, was ruled by his wife, and knew that he was
+a mere weapon in her hands; and, what was even worse than all, knew that
+the rest of mankind knew this. This must be uncommonly unpleasant, we
+should suppose. The middle position of the husband who only now and then
+suspects in a dreamy way that he is being prompted and urged on and
+directed by an ambitious wife, and has sense enough not to inflame
+himself with chimerical notions about the superiority and grandeur of
+the male sex--this perhaps is not so bad. If the tide of ambition runs
+rather sluggish in yourself, it is a plain advantage to have somebody at
+your side with enthusiasm enough to atone for the deficiency.
+
+It is impossible to tell how much good the world gets, which otherwise
+it would miss, simply out of the fact that women are discontented with
+their position. Now and then, it is understood, the husband who is thus
+made a mere conductor for the mental electricity of a wife who is too
+clever for him may feel a little bored, and almost wish that he had
+married a girl instead. But enthusiasm spreads, and in a general way the
+fervor of the wife who aspires to distinction proves catching to the
+husband. Some ladies are found to prefer this position to any other.
+They are full of power, and have abundance of room for energy, and yet
+they have no responsibility. They get their ample share of the spoil,
+and yet they do not bear the public heat and burden of the day. It is
+only the more martial souls among them for whom this is not enough.
+
+
+
+
+PLATONIC WOMAN.
+
+
+In the wearier hours of life, when the season is over, and the boredom
+of country visits is beginning to tell on the hardy constitutions that
+have weathered out crush and ball-room, there is usually a moment when
+the heroine of twenty summers bemoans the hardships of her lot. Her
+brother snuffed her out yesterday when she tried politics, and the
+clerical uncle who comes in with the vacation extinguished a well-meant
+attempt at theology by a vague but severe reference to the Fathers. If
+the afternoon is particularly rainy, and Mudie's box is exhausted, the
+sufferer possibly goes further, and rises into eloquent revolt against
+the decorums of life.
+
+There is indeed one career left to woman, but a general looseness of
+grammar, and a conscious insecurity in the matter of spelling, stand in
+the way of literary expression of the burning thoughts within her. All
+she can do is to moan over her lot and to take refuge in the works of
+Miss Hominy. There she learns the great theory of the equality of the
+sexes, the advancement of woman and the tyranny of man. If her head
+doesn't ache, and holds out for a few pages more, she is comforted to
+find that her aspirations have a philosophic character. She is able to
+tell the heavy Guardsman who takes her down to dinner and parries her
+observations with a joke that they have the sanction of the deepest of
+Athenian thinkers.
+
+It is, we suppose, necessary that woman should have her philosopher, but
+it must be owned that she has made an odd choice in Plato. No one would
+be more astonished than the severe dialectician of the Academy at the
+feminine conception of a sage of dreamy and poetic temperament, who
+spends half his time in asserting woman's rights, and half in inventing
+a peculiar species of flirtation. Platonic attachments, whatever their
+real origin may be, will scarcely be traced in the pages of Plato; and
+the rights of woman, as they are advocated in the Republic, are sadly
+deficient in the essential points of free love and elective affinity.
+
+The appearance of a real Platonic woman in the midst of a caucus of such
+female agitators as those who were lately engaged in stumping with
+singular ill success the American States of the West would, we imagine,
+give a somewhat novel turn to the discussion, and strip of a good deal
+of adoring admiration the philosopher in whom strong-minded woman has of
+late found a patron and friend. Plato is a little too logical and too
+fond of stating plain facts in plain words to suit the Miss Hominys who
+would put the legs of every pianoforte in petticoats, and if the
+Platonic woman were to prove as outspoken as her inventor, the
+conference would, we fear, come abruptly to an end. But if once the
+difficulty of decorum could be got over, some instruction and no little
+amusement might be derived from the inquiry which the discussion would
+open, as to how far the modern attitude of woman fulfils the dreams of
+her favorite philosopher.
+
+The institution of Ladies' Colleges is a sufficient proof that woman has
+arrived at Plato's conception of an identity of education for the two
+sexes. Professors, lecturers, class-rooms, note-books, the whole
+machinery of University teaching, is at her disposal. Logic and the
+long-envied classics are in the curriculum. Governesses are abolished,
+and the fair girl-graduates may listen to the sterner teachings of
+academical tutors. It is amusing to see how utterly discomfited the new
+Professor generally is when he comes in sight of his class. He feels
+that he must be interesting, but he is haunted above all with the sense
+that he must be proper. He remembers that when, in reply to the
+lady-principal's inquiry how he liked his class, he answered, with the
+strictest intellectual reference, that they were "charming," the stern
+matron suggested that another adjective would perhaps be more
+appropriate. He felt his whole moral sense as a teacher ebbing away.
+
+In the case of men he would insist on a thorough treatment of his
+subject, and would avoid sentiment and personal details as insults to
+their intelligence; but what is he to do with rows of pretty faces that
+grow black as he touches upon the dialect of Socrates, but kindle into
+life and animation when he depicts the sage's snub nose? Anecdotes,
+pretty stories, snatches of poetical quotation, slip in more and more
+as the students perceive and exercise their power. Men, too, are either
+intelligent or unintelligent, but the unhappy Professor at a Ladies'
+College soon perceives that he has to deal with a class of minds which
+are both at once. A luckless gentleman, after lecturing for forty
+minutes, found that the lecture had been most carefully listened to and
+reproduced in the note-books, but with the trifling substitution in
+every instance of the word "Phoenician" for "Venetian." Above all, he
+is puzzled with the profuse employment of these note-books.
+
+To the Platonic girl her note-book takes the place of the old-fashioned
+diary. It is scribbled down roughly at the lecture and copied out fairly
+at night. It used to be a frightful thought that every evening, before
+retiring to rest, the girl with whom one had been chatting intended
+seriously to probe the state of her heart and set down her affections in
+black and white; but it is hardly less formidable to imagine her
+refusing to lay her head on her pillow before she has finished her fair
+copy of the battle of Salamis. The universality of female studies, too,
+astounds the teacher who is fresh from the world of man; he stands
+aghast before a girl who is learning four languages at once, besides
+attending courses on logic, music, and the use of the globes. This
+omnivorous appetite for knowledge he finds to co-exist with a great
+weakness in the minor matters of spelling, and a profound indifference
+to the simplest rules of grammar. We do not wonder then at Professors
+being a little shy of Ladies' Colleges; nor is it less easy to see why
+the Platonic theory of education has taken so little with the girls
+themselves. After all, the grievance of which they complain has its
+advantages.
+
+The worst of bores is restrained by courtesy from boring you if you give
+him no cue for further conversation, and the plea of utter ignorance
+which an English girl can commonly advance on any subject is at any rate
+a defence against the worst pests of society. On the other hand, the
+ingenuous confession that she really knows nothing about it can be
+turned by a smile into a prelude to the most engaging conversation, and
+into an implied flattery of the neatest kind to the favored being whose
+superiority is acknowledged. Ignorance, in fact, of this winsome order
+is one of the stock weapons of the feminine armory.
+
+The man who looks philosophically back after marriage to discover why on
+earth he is married at all will generally find that the mischief began
+in the _naive_ confession on the part of his future wife of a total
+ignorance which asked humbly for enlightenment. One of the grandest
+_coups_ we ever knew made in this way was effected by a desire on the
+part of a faded beauty to know the pedigree of a horse. The pride of her
+next neighbor at finding himself the possessor of knowledge on any
+subject on earth took the form of the most practical gratitude a man can
+show. But it is not before marriage only that woman finds her ignorance
+act as a charm. Husbands find pleasure in talking politics to their
+wives simply because, as they stand on the hearthrug, they are
+displaying their own mental superiority. An Englishman likes to be
+master of his own house, but he dearly loves to be schoolmaster.
+
+A Platonic woman as well-informed as her husband would deprive him of
+this daily source of domestic enjoyment; his lecture would be reduced to
+discussion, and to discussion in which he might be defeated. To rob him
+of his oracular infallibility might greatly improve the husband, but it
+would revolutionize the character of the home.
+
+It is difficult to see at first sight any analogy between the
+Puritanical form of flirtation which calls itself a Platonic attachment,
+and the provisions by which Plato excluded all peculiar love or
+matrimonial choice from his commonwealth. The likeness is really to be
+found in the resolve on which both are based to obtain all the
+advantages of social intercourse between the sexes without the
+interference of passion. In a well-regulated State, no doubt, passion is
+a bore, and this is just the aspect which it takes to a highly regulated
+woman. An outburst of affection on the part of her numerous admirers
+would break up a very pleasant circle, and put an end to some charming
+conversations. On the other hand, the quiet sense of some special
+relationship, the faint odor of a passion carefully sealed up, gives a
+piquancy and flavor to social friendship which mere association wants.
+Very frequently such a relation forms an admirable retreat from stormier
+experiences in the past, and the tender grace of a day that is dead
+hangs pleasantly enough over the days that remain.
+
+But the Platonic woman proper, in this sense, is the spinster of
+five-and-thirty. She is clever enough to know that the day for inspiring
+grand passions is gone by, but that there is still nothing ridiculous in
+mingling a little sentiment with her friendly relations. She moves in
+maiden meditation fancy free, but the vestal flame of her life is none
+the more sullied for a slight tinge of earthly color. It is a connection
+that is at once interesting, undefined, and perfectly safe. It throws a
+little poetry over life to know that one being is cherishing a perfectly
+moral and carefully toned-down attachment for another, which will last
+for years, but never exceed the bounds of a smile and a squeeze of the
+hand.
+
+Animals in the lowest scale of life are notoriously the hardest to kill,
+and it is just this low vitality, as it were, of Platonic attachment
+that makes it so perfectly indestructible. Its real use is in keeping up
+a sort of minute irrigation of a good deal of human ground which would
+be barren without it. These little tricklings of affection, so small as
+not to disturb one's sleep or to drive one to compose a single sonnet,
+keep up a certain consciousness of attraction, and beget a corresponding
+return of kindliness and good temper towards the world around. A woman
+who has once given up the hope of being loved is a nuisance to
+everybody. But the Platonic woman need never give up her hope of being
+loved; she has reduced affection to a minimum, but from its very
+minuteness there is little or no motive to snap the bond, and with time
+habit makes it indestructible.
+
+One Christian body, we believe--the Moravians--still carries out the
+principle of Plato's ideal state in giving woman no choice in the
+selection of a spouse. The elders arrange their matches as the wise men
+of the Republic were wont to do. A friend of ours once met six young
+women going out to some Northern settlement of the Moravians with a view
+to marriage. "What is your husband's name?" he asked one. "I don't know;
+I shall find out when I see him," she answered. But we have heard of
+only one State which realizes Plato's theory as to the equal
+participation of woman in man's responsibilities as well as in his
+privileges, and that is the kingdom of Dahomey. If women were to learn
+and govern like men, Plato argued, women must fight like men, and the
+Amazons of Dahomey fight like very terrible men indeed.
+
+But we have as yet heard of no military grievance on the part of injured
+woman. She has not yet discovered the hardship of being deprived of a
+commission, or denied the Victoria Cross. No Miss Faithful has
+challenged woman's right to glory by the creation of a corps of
+riflewomen. Even Dr. Mary Walker, though she could boast of having gone
+through the American war, went through it with a scalpel, and not with a
+sword. We are far from attributing this peaceful attitude of modern
+woman, inferior though it be to the Platonic ideal, to any undue
+physical sensitiveness to danger, or to inability for deeds of daring;
+we attribute it simply to a sense that there is a warfare which she is
+discharging already, and with the carrying on of which any more public
+exertions would interfere.
+
+Woman alone keeps up the private family warfare which in the earlier
+stages of society required all the energies of man. It is a field from
+which man has completely retired, and which would be left wholly vacant
+were it not occupied by woman. The stir, the jostling, the squabbling of
+social life, are all her own. We owe it to her that the family existence
+of England does not rot in mere inaction and peace. The guerilla warfare
+of house with house, the fierce rivalry of social circle with social
+circle, the struggle for precedence, the jealousies and envyings and
+rancors of every day--these are things which no man will take a proper
+interest in, and which it is lucky that woman can undertake for him. The
+Platonic woman of to-day may not march to the field or storm the breach,
+but she is unequalled in outmanoeuvring a rival, in forcing an
+entrance into society, in massacring an enemy's reputation, in carrying
+off matrimonial spoil. In war, then, as in education and the affections,
+modern woman has developed the spirit without copying the form of the
+Platonic ideal. After all superficial contrasts have been exhausted, she
+may still claim the patronage of the philosopher of Academe.
+
+
+
+
+MAN AND HIS MASTER.
+
+
+There are, it must be owned, few things on earth of less interest at
+first sight than a girl in her teens. She is a mere bundle of pale
+colorless virtues, a little shy, slightly studious, passively obedient,
+tamely religious. Her tastes are "simple"--she has no particular
+preference, that is, for anything; her aims incline mildly towards a
+future of balls to come; her rule of life is an hourly reference to
+"mamma." She is without even the charm of variety; she has been
+hot-pressed in the most approved finishing establishments, and is turned
+out the exact double of her sister or her cousin or her friend, with the
+same stereotyped manner, the same smattering of accomplishments, the
+same contribution to society of her little sum of superficial
+information. We wonder how it is that any one can take an interest in a
+creature of this sort, just as we wonder how any one can take an
+interest in the _Court Circular_. And yet there are few sentiments more
+pardonable, as there are none more national, than our interest in that
+marvellous document.
+
+A people which chooses to be governed by kings and queens has a right to
+realize the fact that kings and queens are human beings, that they
+shoot, drive, take the air like the subjects whom they govern. And if in
+some coming day we are to toss up our hats and shout ourselves hoarse
+for a sovereign who is still in his cradle, it is wise as well as
+natural that we should cultivate an interest in his babyhood, that we
+should hang on the vicissitudes of his teeth and his measles, that we
+should be curious as to the title of his spelling-book, and the exact
+score of his last game at cricket.
+
+It is precisely the same interest which attaches us to the loosely-tied
+bundle of virtues and accomplishments which we call a girl. We recognise
+in her our future ruler. The shy, modest creature who has no thought but
+a dance, and no will but mamma's, will in a few years be our master,
+changing our habits, moulding our tastes, bending our characters to her
+own. In the midst of our own drawing-room, in our pet easy-chair, we
+shall see that retiring figure quietly established, with downcast eyes,
+and hands busy with their crochet-needles, what Knox called, in days
+before a higher knowledge had dawned, "the Monstrous Regimen of Women."
+
+We are far from sharing the sentiments of the Scotch Reformer, and if we
+attempt here to seize a few of the characteristics of the rule against
+which he revolted, we hope to avoid his bitterness as carefully as his
+prolixity. What was a new thing in his day has become old in ours, and
+man learns perhaps somewhat too easily to acquiesce in "established
+facts." It is without a dream of revolt, and simply in a philosophical
+spirit, that we approach the subject. Indeed, it is a feeling of
+admiration rather than of rebellion which seizes us when we begin to
+reflect on the character of woman's sway, and on the simplicity of the
+means by which she creates and establishes it. A little love, a little
+listening, a little patience, a little persistence, and the game is won.
+
+How charmingly natural and unobjectionable, for instance, is the very
+first move in it--what we may venture to call, since we have to create
+the very terminology of our subject, the Isolation of Man. When Brown
+meets us in the street and hopes that his approaching marriage will make
+no difference in our friendship, and that we shall see as much of one
+another as before, we know that the phrases simply mean that our
+intimacy is at an end. There will be no more pleasant lounges in the
+morning, no more strolls in the park, no more evenings at the club.
+Woman has succeeded in so completely establishing this cessation of
+former friendships as a condition of the new married life that hardly
+any one dreams of thinking what an enormous sacrifice it is. There are
+very few men, after all, who are not dependent on their little group of
+intimates for the general drift of their opinions, the general temper of
+their mind and character of their lives. Their mutual advice, support,
+praise or dispraise, enthusiasm, abhorrence, likings, dislikings,
+constitute the atmosphere in which one lives.
+
+A good deal of real modesty lingers about an unmarried man; he feels far
+more confident in his own opinion if he knows it is Smith's opinion
+too, and his conception of life acquires all its definiteness from its
+being shared with half a dozen fairly reasonable fellows. It is no
+slight triumph that woman should not only have succeeded in enforcing
+the dissolution of this social tie as the first condition of married
+life, but that she has invested that dissolution with the air of an
+axiom which nobody dreams of disputing. The triumph is, as we said, won
+by the simplest agency--by nothing, in short, but a dexterous double
+appeal to human conceit. She is so weak, so frail, so helpless, so
+strange to this new world into which she has plunged from the realms of
+innocent girlhood, so utterly dependent on her husband, that a man sees
+at once that he has not a moment left for any one else.
+
+There is pleasure in the thought of all that delicate weakness appealing
+to our strength, of that innocent ignorance looking up to us for
+guidance through the wilderness of the world. Of course it will soon be
+over, and when the dear dependent has learnt to walk alone a little we
+can go back to the old faces and take our segar as before. But somehow
+the return never comes, or, if it does come, the old faces have grown
+far less enchanting to us. The truth is, we have tasted the second
+pleasure of married life--the pleasure of being an authority. All that
+shy appeal to us, all that confession of ignorance, has taught us what
+wonderfully wise fellows we are. We are far less inclined to wait for
+Smith's approval, or to take our tone from the group at the club-window.
+It is, to say the least, far pleasanter to be an authority at home.
+Gradually we find ourselves becoming oracular, having opinions on every
+subject that a leading article can give us one upon, correcting the
+Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Malt-tax and censuring Lord Stanley's
+policy towards the King of Ashantee. Life takes a new interest when we
+can put it so volubly into words. At the same time we feel that the
+interest is hardly shared by the world.
+
+Our old associates apparently fail to appreciate the change in us, or to
+listen to our disquisitions any more than they did of old; it is a
+comfort to feel that we have a home to retreat to, and that there is one
+there who will. To the subtle flattery, in short, of weakness and of
+ignorance, woman has now added the flattery of listening. To say little,
+to contribute hardly more than a cue now and then, but to be attentive,
+to be interested, to brighten at the proper moment, to laugh at the
+proper joke, to suggest the exact amount of difficulties which you
+require to make your oratorical triumph complete, and to join with an
+unreserved assent in its conclusion, that is the simple secret of the
+power of ninety-nine wives out of a hundred. It is a power which is far
+from being confined to the home. The most brilliant salons have always
+been created by dexterous listeners.
+
+A pleasant house is not a house where one is especially talked to, but
+where one discovers that one talks more easily than elsewhere. The tact
+is certainly invaluable which enables a woman to know the strong points
+of her guests, to lead up to their subjects, to supply points for
+conversation, and then to leave it quietly alone. But it is only a
+display on the grand scale of that particular faculty of silence which
+wins its quiet triumphs on every hearth-rug.
+
+The faculty, however, has other triumphs to win besides those in which
+it figures as a delicate administration of flattery to the vanity of
+men. It is the force which woman holds in reserve for the hour of
+revolt. For it must be owned that, pleasant as the tyranny is, men
+sometimes wake up to the fact that it is a tyranny, that in the most
+seductive way in the world they are being wheedled out of associations
+that are really dear to them, that their life is being cramped and
+confined, that their aims are being lowered. Then the newly-found
+eloquence exhausts itself in a declaration of revolt.
+
+Things cannot go on in this way, life cannot be ruined for caprices. It
+is needless, perhaps, to repeat the rhetoric of rebellion, and all the
+more needless because it shares the fate of all rhetoric in producing
+not the slightest impression on the mind to which it is addressed. The
+wife simply listens as before, though the listening is now far from
+encouraging to eloquence. She is perfectly patient, patient in her
+refusal to continue an irritating discussion, patient in bearing your
+little spurts of vexation; she listens quietly to-day, with the air of
+one who is perfectly prepared to listen quietly to-morrow. But even
+rhetoric has its limits, and now that the cues have ceased, a husband
+finds it a little difficult to keep up a discussion where he has to
+supply both arguments and replies.
+
+Moreover, the tact which managed in former days to place him in a highly
+pleasant position by the confession of weakness, now, by the very same
+silent avowal, places him in a decidedly unpleasant one. If a woman's
+air simply says at the end of it all, "I can't answer you, but I know I
+am right," a man has a lurking sense that his copious rhetoric has had a
+smack of the cowardly as well as of the tyrannical about it. And so,
+after a vigorous denunciation of some particular thing which his wife
+has done, a husband commonly finds himself no further than before; and
+the very instant that, from sheer weariness, he ceases, the wife usually
+steals out and does it again.
+
+There is something feline about this combination of perfect patience
+with quiet persistence--a combination which the Jesuits on a larger
+scale have turned into the characteristic of their order. It is
+especially remarkable when it breaks the bonds of silence, and takes the
+form of what in vulgar language is called "nagging." No form of torture
+which has as yet been invented, save, perhaps, the slow dropping of
+water on some highly sensitive part of the frame, can afford a parallel
+to this ingenious application of the principle of persistence.
+
+The absolute certainty that, when snub or scolding or refusal have died
+into silence, the word will be said again; the certainty that it will be
+said year after year, month after month, week after week; the
+irritation of expecting it, the irritation of hearing it, the irritation
+of expecting it again, tell on the firmest will in the world. In the
+long run the wife wins. The son goes to Harrow, though reason has proved
+a dozen times over that we can only afford the expense of Marlborough;
+the family gets its Alpine tour, though logic and unpaid bills
+imperatively dictate the choice of a quiet watering place. You yield,
+and you see that every one in the house knew that you would yield. There
+wasn't a servant who didn't know every turn of the domestic screw, or
+who took your resistance for more than the usual routine of the
+operation. "Time and I," said Philip of Spain, "against any two." It is
+no wonder if, fighting alone for prudence and economy, one is beaten by
+time and one's wife.
+
+We have no wish to dispute the enormous benefits to man of woman's
+supremacy, but we may fairly leave the statement of them to the numerous
+troup of poets who dispute with Mr. Tupper the theme of the affections.
+For ourselves, we may undertake, perhaps, the humbler task of pointing
+out very briefly some of the disadvantages which, as in all human
+things, counterbalance these benefits. In the first place, feminine rule
+is certainly not favorable to anything like largeness of mind or breadth
+of view. It creates, as we have seen, an excessive self-conceit and
+opinionativeness, and then it directs these qualities to very small ends
+indeed. Woman lives from her childhood in a world of petty details, of
+minute household and other cares, of bargains where the price of every
+yard ends in some fraction of a penny. The habit of mind which is formed
+by these and similar influences becomes the spirit of the house, a
+spirit admirable no doubt in many ways, but excessively small.
+
+The quarrels of a woman's life, her social warfare, her battles about
+precedence, her upward progress from set to set, have all the same stamp
+of Lilliput on them. But it is to these small details, these little
+pleasures and little anxieties and little disappointments and little
+ambitions, that a wife generally manages to bend the temper of her
+spouse. He gets gradually to share her indifference to large interests,
+to broad public questions. He imbibes little by little the most fatal of
+all kinds of selfishness, the selfishness of the home. It would be
+difficult, perhaps, to say how much of the patriotism of the Old World
+was owing to the inferior position of woman; but it is certain that the
+influence of woman tells fatally against any self-sacrificing devotion
+to those larger public virtues of which patriotism is one of the chief.
+Whether from innate narrowness of mind, or from defective training, or
+from the excessive development of the affections, family interests far
+outweigh, in the feminine estimation, any larger national or human
+considerations.
+
+If ever the suffrage is given to woman, it will be necessary to punish
+bribery with the treadmill, for no "person" will regard it as a crime to
+barter away her vote for a year's schooling for Johnny or a new frock
+for Maud. Nothing tells more plainly the difference between the Old
+World and the New than the constant returns home during war. We can
+hardly conceive Pericles or even Alcibiades applying for leave of
+absence on the ground of "private affairs." But then Pericles and
+Alcibiades had no home that they could set above the interests of the
+State.
+
+Lastly, from this narrow view bounded strictly by the limits and
+interests of the home comes, it may be feared, a vast deal of social and
+political bitterness and intolerance. Her very nature, her "deductive
+spirit," as Mr. Buckle puts it prettily for her, makes woman essentially
+a dogmatist. She has none of the larger intercourse with other minds and
+adverse circumstances which often creates the form, if not the spirit,
+of tolerance in the narrowest of men. Her very excellence and faith make
+her exactly what they made Queen Mary--a conscientious and therefore
+merciless persecutor.
+
+It is just this feminine narrowness, this feminine conscientiousness, in
+the clergy which unfits them for any position where justice or
+moderation is requisite. Justice is a quality unknown to woman, and
+against which she wages a fierce battle in the house and in the world.
+There are few husbands who have been made more just, more tolerant, more
+large-hearted and large-headed, by their wives; for justice lives in a
+drier light than that of the affections, and dry light is not a very
+popular mode of illumination under "the monstrous regimen of women."
+
+
+
+
+THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER.
+
+
+Proverbs, as a rule, are believed to contain amongst them somehow or
+other a quantity of truth. There is scarcely one proverb which has not
+got another proverb that flatly contradicts it, and between the two it
+would be very odd if there was not a great deal of sound sense
+somewhere. There is, however, one of the number which, as every candid
+critic must allow, is based on an egregious falsehood--the proverb,
+namely, which affirms, against all experience, that whatever is good for
+the goose is good for the gander. Viewing the goose as the type of
+woman, and the gander as the type of man, no adage could be more
+preposterous or untenable. Such a maxim flies dead in the very face of
+society, and is calculated to introduce disturbance into the orderly
+sequence and subordination of the sexes. Who first invented it, it is
+difficult to conceive, unless it was some rustic Mrs. Poyser, full of
+the consciousness of domestic power, and anxious to reverse in daily
+life the law of priority which obtained--as she must have seen--even in
+her own poultry-yard.
+
+There is one way of reading the proverb which perhaps renders it less
+monstrous; and if we confine ourselves to the view that "sauce" for the
+goose is also "sauce" for the gander, we escape from any of the
+philosophical difficulties in which the other version involves us. No
+doubt, when they are dead, goose and gander are alike, even in the way
+they are dressed, and there is no superiority on the part of either.
+Death makes all genders epicene. Except for one solitary text about
+silence in heaven for half an hour, which some cynical commentators have
+explained as indicating a temporary banishment from Paradise of one of
+the sexes, distinctions of this sort need not be supposed to continue
+after the present life. If we are to take the former reading, and to
+test it by what we know of life, nothing can be more unfounded, or more
+calculated to give a wrong impression as to the facts. Were it not too
+late, the proverb ought to be altered; and perhaps it is not absolutely
+hopeless to persuade Mr. Tupper to see to it.
+
+"What is good for the goose is bad for the gander," or "what is bad for
+the goose is good for the gander;" or, perhaps, "what is a sin in the
+goose is only the gander's way," would read quite as well, would not be
+so diametrically at variance with the ordinary rules of social life,
+and, accordingly, would be infinitely truer and more moral. Even Mr.
+Mill, who is the advocate of female emancipation and female suffrage,
+never has gone so far as to say that all women, as well as all men, are
+brothers. The female suffrage, as we know, is merely a question of time.
+Before very long, no doubt, there will be a feminine Reform Bill, during
+the course of which Mr. Disraeli will explain that the feminine
+franchise has always been the one idea of the Conservative party, and in
+which the compound housekeeper will occupy as prominent a position as
+the compound householder ever could have done. Nobody, however, has as
+yet absolutely asserted, we do not say the equality, for equality is an
+invidious term, but the indifference of the sexes. And this being so, it
+is strange that a proverb should be retained which is so opposed to
+every notion that passes current in the world.
+
+As the legislation of the world has hitherto been uniformly in the hands
+of men, it is not astonishing that it has always proceeded on the
+assumption of the absolute dependence of the weaker upon the stronger
+sex. Several thousand years of intellectual and political supremacy must
+have altered the type imperceptibly, and made the difference between the
+ordinary run of men and women far more marked than nature intended it
+originally to be. All theology, whether Christian or pagan, has been in
+the habit of representing woman as designed chiefly to be a sort of
+ornament and appendage to man; and the allegory of the creation of Eve,
+though Oriental in its tone, does nevertheless correspond to a vague
+feeling among even civilized nations that woman's mission is to fill up
+a gap in man's daily life.
+
+Nor are they merely the opinions and laws of the world which have
+moulded themselves on this basis. The whole imagination of the race has
+been fed upon the notion, until the relations between the two sexes have
+become the one thing on which fancy, sentiment, and hope are taught from
+childhood to dwell. It is not an extravagant inference to suppose that
+centuries of this imaginative and sentimental habit have ended by
+affecting the brain and the physical nature of humanity. Man has become
+a woman-caressing animal. The life of the two sexes is made to centre
+round the once fictitious, but now universal, idea that they cannot
+exist without one another.
+
+Goose and gander have lost their primitive conception of an individual
+and independent career, and are never happy unless they are permitted to
+go in pairs. Under less complex social conditions such interdependence
+led to no very intolerable results. Men and women formed a sort of
+convenient partnership, each contributing their quota of daily
+conveniences to the common fund. The chief protected his squaw--or, if
+he was a patriarch, his squaws--while the squaws ministered to his
+pleasures, cooked his food, milked--if Mr. Max Mueller's idea of the
+Sanscrit is correct--his cows, and carried his babies on their backs.
+The husband found the venison and the maize, while his wife dressed it
+and helped to eat it. This mutual arrangement had at any rate the
+advantage of being accommodated to the physical differences of strength
+between the two halves of society.
+
+A little tyranny is the natural consequence of an unequal distribution
+of physical strength in all rude and barbarous states, and it was
+inevitable that woman should at such times have more than her share of
+labor and of patience imposed upon her. But it is evident that, as
+civilization has increased with the growth of population and of
+industrial interests, women no longer derive the same benefit from the
+social partnership as formerly. Some social philosophers still
+maintain, with M. Comte, that it is man's business to maintain woman,
+and to relieve her from the necessity of providing for her natural
+wants. But this theory seems Utopian and impracticable when we try to
+think of applying it to the world in which we live. Wealth is no longer
+distributed with the least reference to industrious and sober habits.
+
+The principle of accumulation has been admitted, and social bodies have
+encouraged and sanctioned it by allowing property to descend from one
+generation to another intact, the result of which is that the industry
+of the father is able to insure the perpetual idleness of his posterity.
+Large multitudes of poor producers are occupied in earning their own
+necessary sustenance, and cannot take on themselves without enormous
+difficulty the burden of supporting womankind, a burden which the richer
+classes scarcely feel. As by far the majority of women belong to the
+impoverished and laborious class, it is obvious they must either enter
+the labor-market themselves, or purchase support from the rich by
+sacrifices which are inconsistent with their personal dignity and the
+morality of the social body. As the imagination of humanity has been
+long since given up to sentiment and passion, it is only too clear that
+the more vicious alternative is the one oftenest embraced. Society,
+then, has come to this--that woman must still depend on man, while man
+no longer, except on his own terms, fulfills his part of the tacit
+bargain by maintaining woman.
+
+The first thing to be considered is what the public gains by keeping up
+the sentimental notion about woman's mission. It is her business, most
+of us think, to charm and to attract, partly in order that she may do
+man real good, and partly that she may add to the luxury, the
+refinement, and the happiness of life. With this view, society is very
+solicitous to keep her at a distance from everything that may spoil or
+destroy the bloom of her character and tastes. Few people go so far as
+to say that she ought not to work for her livelihood, if her
+circumstances render the effort necessary and prudent. As a fact, we see
+at once that such a proposition cannot be broadly supported, and that
+any attempt to enforce it would lead to endless misery and mischief.
+Poor women, for example, must work hard, or else their children and
+themselves will come to utter degradation.
+
+But though society abstains from committing itself to the doctrine of
+the enforced idleness of women, it takes refuge in a species of half
+measure, and restricts, as far as it can, by its legislative enactments
+or its own social code, the labors which women are to perform to the
+narrowest possible compass. A woman may work, but she must do nothing
+which is called unfeminine. She may get up linen, ply her needle, keep
+weaving-machines in motion, knit, sew, and in higher spheres in life
+teach music, French, and English grammar. She may be a governess, or a
+sempstress, or even within certain limits may enter the literary market
+and write books. This is the extreme boundary of her liberty, and
+somewhere about this point society begins to draw a rigid line.
+
+It earnestly discourages her from commercial occupations, except under
+the patronage of a husband who is to benefit by her exertions; she is
+not to be a counting-house clerk, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a parson.
+The great active avocations, all those that lead either to fame or
+fortune, are monopolized by men. Strong-minded women occasionally bore
+the public by complaining of and protesting against such restrictions;
+but, on the whole, the public is satisfied that it is convenient that
+they should be upheld. If we look at the matter from the point of view
+of the educated, or even the well-to-do classes, such a conclusion seems
+so reasonable that most of us can hardly induce ourselves to doubt its
+correctness. Women do a certain tangible amount of good to the world by
+being kept as a luxury and exotic. The most energetic and rebellious of
+them may feel angry to be told so, but it is the truth that it suits men
+in general to keep up a kind of hothouse bloom upon the characters of
+women. The society of soft, affectionate, unselfish creatures is
+decidedly good for man. It elevates his nature, it gives him a belief in
+what is pure and genuine, it alleviates the dust and turmoil of a busy
+career, and it enables him for so many hours of the day to refresh
+himself with the company of a being who is in some things a mediaeval
+saint, and in some, a child.
+
+Whenever one contemplates the effect of more coarse experience of the
+world, more knowledge, and more rough and hard work on such a nature,
+one is invariably tempted to acquiesce in the view that it is good for
+man to have her in the state she is. One feels disposed to object to
+notions of female emancipation as profane. Education and science,
+thought and philosophy, like the winds of heaven, should never visit her
+cheek too roughly. The great thing is, to preserve in her that sort of
+luxurious unworldliness which represents the religious and refined
+element in the household to which she belongs. And a hundred things may
+be and have often been said about the advantage of making pure sentiment
+the foundation of all the relations that obtain between her and man.
+
+As Plato thought, man elevates himself by elevating and sentimentalizing
+his affections. All poetry and most literature is given up to this
+sentimentalizing or refining process. Nor can it be denied that the
+effect is to increase very much the capacity of happiness in all people
+who are born to be happy or to enjoy life. What would youth be without
+its imaginative emotions? We all know, and are taught to believe, that
+it would be something much poorer than it is.
+
+There is another side to the picture, and it is as well to contemplate
+it seriously, before we make up our minds to treat with undisguised
+contempt all the vagaries of those who wish definitely to alter the
+social condition of women. At present women are beautiful and delicate
+adjuncts of life. As Prometheus said of horses, they are the ornaments
+of wealth and luxury. They add perfume and refinement to existence. But,
+after all, it is an important question whether the conversion of women
+into this sort of drawing-room delicacy is not sacrificing the welfare
+of the many to the intellectual and social comfort of the few.
+
+The world pays a heavy price for having its imagination sentimentalized.
+One of the items in the bill is the disappointment of the thousands
+whose sensibilities are never destined to be satisfied. For every woman
+who marries happily, a large percentage never marry at all, or marry in
+haste and repent at leisure. It remains to be proved that it is wise to
+teach and train the sex to fix all their views in life and to stake all
+their fortunes on the chance of the one rare thing--a lucky matrimonial
+choice. If one could succeed in de-sentimentalizing society, one would
+take from a few the chief pleasure of living, but it is far from certain
+that the material welfare of the majority would not be proportionately
+increased. Half-measures would of course be of very little use.
+
+It would be a poor exchange to take from women all their reserve and
+innocence and refinement, without giving them free play in the world.
+They would be only coarse and wicked caricatures of what they are now.
+The change, to be tolerable, would have to be effectual and thorough. It
+would be necessary to change the whole current of their ideas, and the
+whole view of man about them also; to persuade the human race to fix its
+mind less on the difference of sexes, and to become less imaginative
+upon the subject. If so sweeping an alteration could be completely
+effected, perhaps it might be worth while to consider whether woman's
+absolute independence would not strengthen her character, and add
+permanently to the world's natural wealth.
+
+One thing is certain, that if woman is to continue for ever in her
+present condition, the moral and social condition of large numbers of
+human beings must remain hopeless. Their future appears dreary in the
+extreme. It is Utopian to expect that men and women will grow less and
+less self-indulgent, so long as the education they undergo from their
+earliest years renders them prone to every species of temptation. There
+are some things which make social philosophers hopeful and confident,
+but no social philosopher can ever do anything but despair of real
+progress if he is to take for granted that women are always to play the
+part in life which they at present play. The emancipation of the goose
+is an experiment, but it is not surprising that many enthusiasts should
+believe it to be an experiment well deserving of a trial.
+
+
+
+
+ENGAGEMENTS.
+
+
+A great writer has pathetically described the last days of a man under
+sentence of death. He has found appropriate expression for every phase
+of the protracted agony with characteristic richness and variety of
+language; we are made to taste each drop in the bitter cup--the remorse
+and the awful expectation, and the desperate clinging to deceitful
+straws of hope. Indeed it scarcely requires the eloquence of a
+first-rate writer to impress upon us the fact that it is very unpleasant
+to expect to be hanged. Every man's imagination is sufficient to realize
+some of the unpleasant consequences of such a state of mind; for though
+the number of persons who have encountered this particular experience is
+inconsiderable, most of us have gone through something more or less
+analogous--we have been significantly told to wait after school, or have
+paid visits to dentists, or have been candidates at competitive
+examinations, or have been engaged to be married. These and many other
+situations, though varying in the intrinsic pain or pleasure of the
+anticipated event, have thus much in common, that they are all states of
+abnormal suspense. The nerves are kept in a state of equal tension by
+the uncomfortable feeling that we are in for it, whatever the "it" may
+turn out to be.
+
+The first impression is simple; it resembles that felt by a man who has
+just slipped upon the side of a mountain, and knows that he is
+inevitably going to the bottom. He has not time to think whether he will
+fall upon snow or rocks, whether he will have merely a pleasant slide or
+be dashed into a thousand fragments; he does not make up his mind to be
+heroic or to be frightened; the one thought that flashes across his mind
+is that here at last is the situation which he has so often feebly
+pictured to himself; he will know all about it before he has time to
+reflect upon its pains or pleasures. People who have escaped drowning
+sometimes assert that they have remembered their whole lives in a few
+instants, though it does not quite appear how they can remember that
+they remembered the series of incidents without remembering the
+incidents themselves. But, so far as we have been able to collect
+evidence, the general rule in any sudden catastrophe is that which we
+have described. There is nothing but a dazzling flash of surprise, which
+almost excludes any decided judgment as to the painfulness or otherwise
+of the situation.
+
+If, then, we may venture to conjecture the frame of mind in which a lady
+or gentleman first enters upon an engagement, we should say that it was
+this sense of startled suspense. They feel as Guy Faux would have felt
+after lighting the train of gunpowder--that they have done something
+which they may probably never repeat in their lifetime, and every other
+emotion will be for the moment absorbed. But as engagements are
+generally more protracted than most of the critical situations we have
+mentioned, the surprise dies away, and the victims have time to look
+about them, and analyze more closely the emotions produced by their
+position. To do any justice to the complicated and varying frame of mind
+into which even an average lover may be thrown in the course of a few
+weeks would of course require the pen, not of men, but of angels. It
+would involve a condensation of a large fraction of all the poetry that
+has been written in the world, and no small part of the cynical
+criticism by which it has been opposed. But, taking for granted the mass
+of commonplaces which has been accumulated in the course of centuries,
+there are a few special modifications of the position under our present
+social arrangements which are more fitted for remark. The state of mind
+known as being in love is confined to no particular race or period, but
+the position of the engaged persons may vary indefinitely. In a good
+simple state of society, the gentleman pays down his money or his sheep
+or his oxen, and takes away the lady without any superfluous sentiment.
+Even in more civilized states, a marriage may be substantially a bargain
+carried out in a business-like spirit. However unsatisfactory such a
+mode of proceeding may be from certain points of view, it is at any rate
+intelligible; all parties to the contract understand their relative
+positions, and have a plain line of conduct traced for them.
+
+But in a modern English engagement the form is necessarily different,
+even when the substance of the arrangement is identical. For once in
+his experience a man feels called upon to accept that view of life for
+which novelists are unjustly condemned. We say unjustly, for it is
+inevitable that a novelist should frequently represent marriage as being
+the one great crisis of a man's history. It is not his function to give
+a complete theory of life, but to describe such scenes as are most
+interesting and most dramatic. He is quite justified in often writing as
+though two lovers should really think about nothing under heaven except
+their chances of union, and should be dismissed, when the happy event
+has once taken place, in a certainty of living very happily ever
+afterwards. He has no concern with the lover's briefs or sermons or
+operations on the Stock Exchange, which may really take up by far the
+greater part of the man's waking thoughts; and it would spoil the unity
+of his work if he were to dwell upon them proportionately. It would be
+as absurd to mistake the novelist's views for a complete one as to
+condemn it because it is incomplete. In novels which depend, as
+ninety-nine out of a hundred must depend, upon a love story, the
+importance of marriage, or at least the degree in which it occupies the
+thoughts of the characters, will necessarily be overstated. The engaged
+persons, however, find that, in the eyes of their friends, if not in
+their own, they are temporarily accepting the novelist's ideal. For the
+time they are considered exclusively as persons about to marry, and all
+their other relations in life retire into the background.
+
+The difficulty of the position depends upon the extent to which this
+conventional assumption diverges from the true facts of the case. The
+lady, for example, suffers less than the gentleman, because, in spite of
+Dr. Mary Walker and other martyrs to the cause of woman's rights, it is
+still true that marriage fills a larger space in her life than in that
+of the other sex. She can take up the character with a certain triumph,
+as of one who has more or less fulfilled her mission and passed from the
+ranks of the aspirants to those of the successful candidates for
+matrimony. At any rate, even if she takes a loftier view of feminine
+duties, there is nothing ridiculous about her position. She may busy
+herself about trousseaux or wedding-dresses or marriage-presents, with
+perfect satisfaction to herself and to the envy of her female friends.
+But her unfortunate accomplice, especially if he is of mature age, is in
+a far more uncomfortable position.
+
+Few men who have become immersed in any profession or business can act
+the character without an unpleasantly strong sense of being in a false
+position. There is nothing indeed intrinsically ludicrous about it; the
+chances are that the lover is doing a very sensible thing, and that his
+wisest friends approve of his conduct. Still it is undeniable that he
+moves about, to his own apprehension at least, in a universal atmosphere
+of ridicule. He feels that he is really a quiet hard-working young man,
+full of law it may be, or of plans for improving his parish, or of
+Parliamentary notices of motion. He can talk about his own topics with
+interest and intelligence, and may possibly be an authority in a small
+way. He is quite conscious, too, that there are many sides to his
+character which do not come out in his ordinary every-day business.
+Unluckily that is just the fact which his friends are apt to ignore.
+
+We soon learn to associate our acquaintance with the positions in which
+we have been accustomed to see them, and forget that they may have
+sentiments and faculties of which we know nothing. Consequently an
+engagement seems to imply an entire metamorphosis. Our friend, or his
+image in our minds, was a comparatively simple compound of two or three
+characters at most; whereas men generally have a far more complex
+organization. In business hours, perhaps, he was simply a machine for
+grinding out law, and at other times a lively talker and a good
+whist-player. No process of transmutation will convert either of those
+into the conventional lover, who can think of nothing but the object of
+his affections; the apparent incongruity is too violent not to produce a
+sense of the ludicrous; and our friend is bound in decency to make it as
+violent as possible. From which it follows that we laugh, and that he
+knows that we are laughing, at him. Intensely awkward congratulations
+are exchanged, according to two or three formulas which have been handed
+down from distant generations. If the congratulator is a married man, he
+hopes that his friend may enjoy as much happiness as he has found
+himself in the married state; if a bachelor, he assures him that,
+although unable hitherto to act up to his principles, he has always
+thought marriage the right thing. There are persons who can repeat one
+of these common forms with all the air of making an original
+observation, as there are men who can begin an oration by asserting that
+they are unaccustomed to public speaking; but, as a rule, it is said in
+such a way as to imply that the speaker, whilst admitting the absurdity
+of connecting the ideas of his friend and marriage, is willing to pay
+the necessary compliments, if he may do it as cheaply as possible.
+
+In short, until a man is engaged to be married, he scarcely knows how
+narrow a view his friends take of his character, and how easily they are
+amused at what is after all rather a commonplace proceeding. When his
+own friends look upon him so distinctly in the light of a joke, he of
+course cannot expect much quarter from the friends of the lady. He has a
+painful impression that he is coming out in a part for which he has had
+no practice, under the eyes of hostile critics. Every man thinks it only
+due to himself to criticise a friend's new purchases of horses or
+pictures or wines; if he did not find fault with them he would miss an
+opportunity of establishing his superior acumen. And of course the
+principle extends to lovers. There is probably a narrow circle who are
+bound officially to approve; but the unfortunate victim feels that,
+outside of it, every acquaintance of the lady will take pleasure in a
+keen observation of his defects, and he trembles accordingly. It is said
+(rather unfairly, perhaps) that shyness is a form of conceit; but the
+least self-conscious of mankind can hardly fail to feel uncomfortable
+when he is called upon to perform such a highflown part under so severe
+a scrutiny.
+
+Of course the torment is far greater in the case of a middle-aged
+professional gentleman, who is habitually employed upon some incongruous
+work, than to a youth in whom any sort of folly is graceful; but there
+can be few persons to whom the position is not to a certain extent
+irksome. When a man is married, or when he is a bachelor, he is allowed
+to be a rational being, taking rational views of life. He feels it
+rather hard that in the interval society insists upon his being in a
+state of temporary insanity, and then laughs at him because it doesn't
+look natural. He begins to long even for that climax of misery when, if
+the custom be not already dead, he will have to commit one of the most
+absurd actions of which a human being can be guilty--namely, making a
+speech in the morning, at an anomalous and dreary meal, exactly when his
+shamefacedness is at its highest pitch. That so many people survive
+engagements without any perceptible sourness of temper is some proof of
+the goodness of human nature, or of the fact that there are
+compensations in the state of being in love which go to neutralize the
+discomfort of being engaged.
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN IN ORDERS.
+
+
+There is, no doubt, something extremely flattering to our insular
+conceit in the mystery which hangs about the institutions which we prize
+as specially national. We feel that a Briton is still equal to three
+Frenchmen, so long as the three Frenchmen confess with a shrug that the
+Briton is wholly unintelligible. The blunders of Dr. Doellinger, the
+baffled wonderment with which every foreigner retires from the study of
+it, only endear to us the more the Church of England. This was perhaps
+the reason, besides the inherent marvel of the matter, why we passed so
+lightly over M. Esquiroz and his late ecclesiastical researches. It was
+humiliating to English pride to have to confess that a Frenchman had
+unveiled to the world of Paris the hitherto sacred mysteries of the
+perpetual curate and of the tithe rent-charge.
+
+The enemy was clearly at the gates of the central fortress of British
+insularism; even an American bishop was tempted to strive to understand
+Westminster Abbey; and a dismal rumor prevailed that nothing hindered
+the Ecclesiastical Commissioners from revealing the nature and purpose
+of their existence but the fact that, after prolonged inquiry, they
+found it impossible to understand them themselves. It was time, we felt,
+to abandon these mere outposts of the unintelligible to the aggressions
+of an impertinent curiosity, and to retire to the citadel. There,
+happily, we are safe. Even the unhallowed inquisitiveness of M. Esquiroz
+recoils baffled from the parson's wife. Disdainful of all artificial
+adjuncts of mystery, to all appearance a woman like other women, packing
+her little sick-baskets, balancing the coal-club accounts, teaching in
+her Sunday-school, the centre of religion, of charity, and of
+tittle-tattle, woman in orders fronts calmly the inquirer, a being
+fearfully and wonderfully English, unknowable and unknown.
+
+No one who saw for the first time the calm, colorless serenity of the
+parson's wife would discover in her existence the result of a life-long
+disappointment. But the parson on whose arm she leans commonly
+represents to his spouse simply the descent from the ideal to the real,
+the step from the sublime to the prosaic, if not the ridiculous. There
+was a moment in her life when the vestry-door closed upon a world of
+hallowed wonder, when the being who appeared in white robes, "mystic,
+wonderful," was a being not as other men are, a being whose hours were
+spent in study, in meditation, in charity, a being of beautiful sermons
+and spotless neckties. The flirtation with him, so impatiently longed
+for, was not as other men's flirtations; there was a tinge of sacredness
+about his very frivolity, and a soft touch of piety in his sentiment. To
+share such a life, to commune hourly with a spirit so semi-angelic,
+seemed an almost religious ambition. The spirit of a Crusader,
+half-heaven, half-earth, fired the gentle breast of the besieger till
+Jerusalem was won.
+
+Then came the hour of disenchantment. The mysterious object of
+adoration, seen on his own hearth-rug, melted into the mass of men. The
+spiritual idealist was cross over an ill-cooked dinner, and as
+commonplace at breakfast as his _Times_. The discourses, so lately
+utterances from heaven, dwindled into copies or compilations from other
+heavenly utterers. The life of a Lady Bountiful turned out a dull
+routine of mothers' meetings and Sunday-schools. The ideal poor,
+grateful and resigned, proved cross and greedy old harridans. The world
+of peace, of nobleness, of serenity, died into a parish of bustle and
+scandal and worry. Out of this wreck of hope arises the parson's wife.
+Disillusionment is her ordination for a clerical position none the less
+real that it is without parallel in the ecclesiastical history of the
+world.
+
+She takes her part with all the decision of genius. Her first step is to
+restore the Temple she has broken down, to set up again the Dagon who
+lies across the threshold. If not for herself, at any rate for the world
+and for her children, she re-creates the priest she once dreamt of in
+the commonplace parson whom she has actually wedded. Conscious as she is
+of the inner nature of the idling apartment where he lounges through the
+morning, she impresses on the household the necessity of quiet while its
+master is in his "study." By the daily addition of skillful but minute
+touches, she paints him to the world as an ideal of piety and of
+learning. She takes bills and letters off his hands, that his mind may
+not be disturbed from more serious subjects. She enforces a sacred
+silence throughout the house during the solemn hours while the sermon is
+being compiled. She sews the sacred sheets together, and listens while
+the discourse is recited for her approval. She listens again with an
+interest as fresh as ever when it is preached. She marks the text in her
+Bible, and sees that the children mark it too.
+
+As the first subject of his theological realm, she sets an example which
+other subjects are to follow. They, like her, mingle their contempt for
+the parson's business abilities and voluble talk with a hushed reverence
+for his esoteric knowledge of subjects inaccessible to common men. They,
+like her, manage to combine a perfect readiness to snub him and his
+opinions on all earthly topics, with an equal readiness to listen to
+him, as to a divine oracle, on the topics of grace and free-will.
+Insensibly the subtle distinction tells on the parson himself. He is
+conscious, perhaps pleasantly conscious, that he is seen through the
+glass of his wife, and seen therefore darkly. He retires within the
+domestic veil. He learns to avoid common subjects--subjects, that is,
+where the world holds itself at liberty to criticise him. He retires to
+fields where he is above criticism. He believes at last in the vamped-up
+sermons in which his wife persists in believing. He accepts the position
+of an oracle on sacred topics which his wife has made for him. In a
+word, the parson's wife has created the British parson.
+
+It is hard to say how far the creator believes in her own creation. In
+persuading others, she probably succeeds to a great extent in persuading
+herself. At any rate she accepts willingly enough the consequences of a
+position which leaves her the master of the parish. In the bulk of cases
+the parson is simply the Mikado, the nominal ruler, lapped in soft ease,
+and exempt from the worry of the world about him. Woman is the parochial
+Tycoon, the constitutional premier who does not rule, but governs. She
+is the hidden centre and force of the whole parochial machinery--the
+organist, the chief tract distributor, the president of the Dorcas
+society, the despot of the penny bank and the coal-club, the head of the
+sewing-class, the supervisor of district-visitors, the universal referee
+as to the character of mendicant Joneses and Browns. In other words, the
+parson's wife has revived an Apostolic Order which but for her would
+have died away; she has restored the primitive Diaconate.
+
+Woman is the true parochial deacon, and not the bashful young gentleman
+fresh from Oxford, who wears his stole over one shoulder rather than
+over two. It is the parson's wife who "serves tables" nowadays; and the
+results on parochial activity are in some ways remarkable enough. In the
+first place, men are fairly driven from the field. If a layman wishes to
+help in a parish he finds himself lost in a world of women. It is only
+those semi-clerical beings who seem to unite with a singular grace all
+the weaknesses of both the sexes who persist in the attempt. Then, too,
+all the ideas of the parochial world become feminine; the parish buzzes
+with woman's hatred of the Poor-laws, and contempt for economic
+principles and hard-hearted statisticians.
+
+Mendicancy flies from the workhouse and the stone-yard to entrench
+itself against Guardians and relieving-officers among the soup-kitchens
+and the coal-tickets of feminine almsgiving. The parson, after a faint
+protest of common sense, surrenders at discretion, and flings all
+experience to the winds. One wife turns her husband into a fount of
+begging letters. Another forces him to set up manufactories for all the
+lucifer-match girls of the parish. Woman's imaginativeness, woman's
+fancy, woman's indifference to fact exhausts itself in "sensational
+cases," and revels in starvation and death. But we must turn to a
+brighter side of her activity. Ritualism is the great modern result of
+the parson's wife, though, with a base ingratitude to the rock from
+which they were hewn, Ritualists hoist the standard of clerical
+celibacy. Woman has long since made her parson; now (as of old with her
+doll) her pleasure is to dress him. A new religious atmosphere surrounds
+her life when the very work of her hands becomes hallowed in its
+purpose. The old crotchet and insertion--we use words to us more
+mysterious than intelligible--become flat, stale, and unprofitable by
+the side of the book-marker and the colored stole; and a flutter of
+excitement stirs even the stillness of a life which is sometimes
+offensively still at the sight of the new chasuble with "aunt's real
+lace, you know, dear," sewn about it.
+
+However gray an existence may be, and the tones of a life like this are
+naturally subdued, it still cherishes within a warmth and poetry of its
+own; and the poetry of the parson's wife breaks out in vestments and
+decorations. Nothing brings out more vividly the fact that Mrs. Proudie
+_is_ the Church of England than that her reaction against the prose of
+existence is shaking--so the Protestant Alliance tells us--the Church of
+England to its foundations. The real disturber of the Church peace, the
+real assertor of Catholic principles, or (for those who prefer a middle
+phrase to either of these contending statements) the real defendant in
+the Court of Arches, is not Mr. Mackonochie, but the parson's wife.
+
+Mrs. Proudie, we repeat, is the Church of England; but if it is
+difficult to estimate the results of her position upon the spouse of her
+bosom and the parish which she rules, it is still harder to estimate its
+results upon herself. Her outer manner seems, indeed, to reflect what we
+have ventured to call the gray tones of her life, and a certain
+weariness of routine breaks out even in the mechanical precision of her
+existence. Power, in the parochial as in the domestic circle, is bought
+by her at the cost of a perpetual self-abnegation, and it is a little
+hard to be always hiding the hand that pulls the strings. We may excuse
+a little forgetfulness in a wife when her daily sacrifice is wholly
+forgotten in the silver teapot and the emblazoned memorial which
+proclaim the borrowed glories of her spouse.
+
+Sometimes there may be a little justification for the complaint of the
+British priestess that the priest alone should be crowned with laurel.
+But, if she is ecclesiastically forgotten, it must be remembered that
+her position receives a shy and timid recognition from society. She is
+credited with a quasi-clerical character, and regarded as having
+received a sort of semi-ordination. The Church, indeed, assigns her no
+parochial precedence; but public opinion, if it sets her beneath her
+husband, places her above all other ecclesiastical agencies. Tacitly she
+is allowed to have the right to speak of "_our_ curates." Then, again,
+society assigns her a sort of mediatorial position between the Church
+and the world; she is the point of transition between the clergy and
+their flocks. It is through her that the incense of congregational
+flattery is suffered to mount up to the idol who may not personally
+inhale it; and it is through her that the parson can intimate his
+opinion, and scatter his hints on a number of social subjects too
+trivial for his personal intervention.
+
+It is impossible, indeed, to express in words the delicate shades of her
+social position, or, what is yet more remarkable, the relation to her
+sister-world of woman. There can be no doubt that, taken all in all,
+women are a little proud of the parson's wife. She is, as it were, the
+tithe of their sex, taken and consecrated for the rest. The dignity of
+her position in close proximity to the very priesthood itself extends,
+by the subtle gradation of sisters of mercy, district-visitors, and
+tract-distributors, to women in the mass. Her influence is a quiet
+protest against the injustice of the present religions of the world in
+excluding woman from those ministerial functions with which Paganism
+invested her. It is an odd transition from the quiet parson's wife to
+the priestess of Delphi; but while the parson's wife exists there is at
+any rate a persistence in the claim of woman's right to resume her
+tripod again.
+
+It is the quiet consciousness of this, of her spiritual headship of her
+sex, of her mystic and unexpressed but real ecclesiastical position,
+quite as much as the weariness of her daily routine, which displays
+itself in the bearing of the parson's wife. She is not quite as other
+women are, any more than he is as other men. Her dress is--at any rate,
+in theory it ought to be--a shade quieter, her bonnets a little less
+modern, her manner a trifle more reserved, her mirth hardly as
+unrestrained as those of the rest of her sex. Her talk, without being
+clerical, takes a quiet clerical tinge. She has her little scandal about
+the archdeacon and her womanly abhorrence of that horrid Colenso. She
+knows Early English from Middle Pointed, and interprets Ritualistic
+phrases into intelligible vocables. Like the curate, she dances only in
+family circles, and then dances after a discreet and ecclesiastical
+sort. She has no objection to cards, but she plays only for love. She
+sings solos from the _Messiah_ and _St. Paul_.
+
+An existence simple, kindly enough in its way, penetrating society no
+doubt with a thousand good influences, but yet, we must own, hardly very
+interesting to the priestess who lives it. Altogether, when we get
+beyond the purple and gold of our rulers, we congratulate ourselves on
+being free from the tedium and weariness and perpetual self-restraint of
+their lofty position. And even the curate who has lately raised his
+faint protest against what he calls "feminine domination" may remember
+in charity that while croquet and flirtation remain to him, his
+existence, slavery though he deem it, is a slavery far freer, blither,
+and more lively than that of the curate's wife.
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN AND HER CRITICS.
+
+
+We men boast, as Homer said, to be braver than our fathers; but, as a
+sort of compensation, our women are far more sensitive than their
+grandmothers. Phyllis has ceased to laugh at Mr. Spectator's criticisms
+on her fan and her patches; but then it may be doubted whether Phyllis
+ever did laugh very heartily at Mr. Spectator. Women have run through
+all the list of moral and intellectual qualities in their time, but we
+do not remember an instance of a really humorous woman. Witty women
+there have been, and no doubt are still in plenty, but the world has
+still to welcome its feminine Addison.
+
+The higher a man's nature, the keener seems his enjoyment of his own
+irony and mockery of his own foibles; but did any woman ever seriously
+sit down to write a "Roundabout Paper?" Women, we are generally told,
+are "especially self-conscious;" in fact, the whole theory of women,
+philosophically stated, from the shyness of the miss in her 'teens to
+the audacious flirtation of a heroine of the season, rests wholly on the
+assumed basis of "self-consciousness." But it is self-consciousness of a
+very peculiar and feminine sort--a consciousness, not of themselves in
+themselves, but of the reflection of themselves, in others, of the
+impression they make on the world around. Woman, we suspect, lives
+always before her glass, and makes a mirror of existence. But for
+downright self-analysis, we repeat, she has little or no taste. A female
+Montaigne, a female Thackeray, would be a sheer impossibility.
+
+We have been led, as the _Spectator_ would have said, into these
+reflections by the chorus of shrill indignation with which the world of
+woman encounters the slightest comment of extraneous critics. The censor
+is at once told flatly that he knows nothing of woman. He is a bachelor,
+he is blighted in love, he is envious, spiteful; he is blind, deaf,
+dumb. All this goes without saying, as the French have it, but he is
+certainly ignorant. The truth is, it is woman who knows nothing of
+herself. It is only self-analysis which reveals to us our inner
+anomalies, our ridiculous self-contrasts; it is humor which recognises
+and amuses itself with their existence. But it is just the absence of
+this sense of anomaly in her nature or her life that is the charm of
+woman.
+
+Christmas has been bringing us, among its other festivities, a few of
+those delightful amusements called private theatricals; and in private
+theatricals all are agreed with Becky Sharpe, that woman reigns supreme.
+We were present the other day at an entertaining little comedy of this
+kind, where the whole interest of the piece was absorbed by a
+fascinating widow and an intriguing attorney, and where both these parts
+were sustained with singular ability and success. The amateur who played
+the lawyer seized the general idea of his _role_ with perfect accuracy;
+in four minutes it was admirably rendered to his audience, but in four
+minutes it was exhausted. The preliminary cough, the constant angularity
+of attitude in the midst of perpetual fidget, the indicative finger from
+which the legal remarks seemed to pop off as from a pocket-pistol, were
+grasped at once, and remained unvaried, undeveloped to the close. The
+very ability with which the actor rendered the inner unity of legal
+existence, the very fidelity with which he represented the lawyer as a
+class, denied to him the subtle charm of the only unity which life as a
+representation exhibits--the charm of a unity of outer impression
+arising out of perpetual inner variety.
+
+His feminine rival won her laurels just because she made no attempt to
+grasp any general idea at all, but abandoned herself freely to the
+phases of the character as it encountered the various other characters
+of the piece. Whether as the frivolous widow or the daring coquette, as
+the practical woman of business or the unprotected female, as the flirt
+in her wildest extravagance or the wife in her most melting moods, she
+aimed at no artistic unity beyond the general unity of sex. She remained
+simply woman, and all this prodigious versatility was, as the audience
+observed, "so charmingly natural," just because it is woman's life. "On
+the stage," if we may venture to apply the lines about Garrick:--
+
+     On the stage she is natural, simple, affecting--
+     It is only that when she is off she is acting.
+
+In actual fact she is acting whether off the boards or on, but the mere
+existence in outer impressions, in the unity of a constant admiration,
+which critics applaud as natural on the stage, they are unreasonably
+hard upon in general society.
+
+A man on the boards is doing an unusual and exceptional thing, and as a
+rule the very effort he makes to do it only enhances his failure; but a
+woman on the boards is only doing, under very favorable circumstances,
+what she does every day with less notice and applause. There can be no
+wonder if she is "charmingly natural," but this naturalness depends, as
+we have seen, on the entire absence of what in men is called
+self-consciousness--that is, the sense of anomaly. When a critic then
+ventures to open this inner existence, and to give woman a peep at
+herself, we cannot be astonished at the scream of indignation which
+greets his efforts. But we may be permitted to repeat that the scream
+proves, not that he knows nothing of woman, but that woman knows nothing
+of herself.
+
+We are afraid, however, that all this feminine resentment points to a
+radical defect in the mind of woman, which she is alternately proud to
+acknowledge and resolute to deny. Frenchmen of the Thiers sort have a
+trick to which they give the amusing name of logic; they present their
+reader with a couple of alternatives which they assert divide the
+universe, and bid you choose "of these two one." But any ordinary woman
+presents to the observer a hundred distinct alternatives, and defies him
+to choose any one in particular. There is no special reason, then, for
+astonishment at the coolness with which she sets herself up one moment
+as a "deductive creature," as one who attains the highest flights of
+knowledge by intuition rather than by reason, and the next poses herself
+as the one specially rational being in her household, and waits
+patiently till her husband is reasonable too.
+
+We are sometimes afraid that neither one nor the other of these theories
+will hold water, and feel inclined to agree with one of the most
+brilliant of her sex that, if woman loves with her head, she thinks with
+her heart. As a rule, certainly, she judges through her affections. She
+does not praise nor blame; she loves or hates. The one thing she cannot
+understand is a purely intellectual criticism, the sort of morbid
+anatomy of the mind which treats its subject as a mere dead thing simply
+useful for demonstration. Very naturally, she attributes the same spirit
+of affectional intelligence to her critics as to herself; and when they
+unravel a few of her inconsistencies, amuse themselves with a few
+follies, or even venture to point out a few faults, she brands them as
+"hating" or "despising" woman. Point, too, is given to the charge by the
+fact that these affections through which she lives are from their very
+nature incapable of dealing with qualities, and naturally transform them
+into persons. A woman does not love her lover's courage or truth or
+honor; she loves her lover. If she prizes his qualities at all it is
+simply because they are inherent in him, and so she gives herself very
+little trouble to distinguish between his bad qualities and his good
+ones. She considers herself bound to defend his characteristics in the
+mass, and if she seem to give up his extravagance or his rakishness, it
+is only with a secret determination that this concession to the world
+shall be balanced by an increase of adoration at home.
+
+As she deals with mankind, so she expects mankind, and especially the
+mankind of criticism, to deal with her. It is in vain that her censor
+replies that he only blamed her bonnet-strings or attacked the color of
+her shoe-tie. Woman's answer is that he has attacked woman. This folly,
+that absurdity, are in woman's mind herself, and their assailant is her
+own personal antagonist. "Love me all in all or not at all" is a woman's
+song, not in Mr. Tennyson's _Idyl_ only, but all the world over. The
+discriminating admiration, the constitutional obedience which still
+claims to preserve a certain reticence and caution in its loyalty, are
+more alien to woman's feelings than the refusal of all worship, all
+obedience whatever. "Picking her to pieces" is the phrase in which she
+describes the critical process against which she revolts, and it is a
+phrase which, in a woman's mouth, is the prelude to the bitterest
+warfare.
+
+There is a more amiable, if a hardly more intelligent, trait in woman's
+character which renders her singularly averse to all criticism. Men can
+hardly be described as loyal to men. Whether it be their exaggerated
+self-esteem, their individuality, or their reason, it is certain that
+they do not imagine the honor of their sex to be concerned in the
+conduct of each particular member of it. The lawyer laughs over a
+little gentle fun when it is poked at his neighbor the vicar, and the
+parson has his amusement out of the exposure of the foibles of his
+friend the attorney. What they never dream of is the flinging over each
+other's defects the general cloak of manhood, and rallying at every
+smile of criticism under the general banner of the sex.
+
+But woman, in front of the enemy, piques herself on her _solidarite_.
+Flirt or prude, prim or gay, foolish or wise, woman, once criticised,
+cries to her sisters, and is recognised and defended as woman. All
+feminine comment, all internal censure, is hushed before the foe. The
+tittle-tattle of the gossips, the social intrigues of the dowager, are
+adopted as frankly as the self-devotion of a Miss Nightingale. The door
+of refuge is flung open as widely for the foolish virgins as for the
+wise. All distinctions of age, of conduct, of intelligence, of rank are
+annihilated or forgotten in the presence of the enemy. Every fault is to
+be defended, every weakness to be held stoutly against his attacks. "No
+surrender" is the order of the day. It is only when the criticism of the
+outer world withdraws that woman's internal criticism recommences. This
+is, indeed, half the offence of outer assailants, that they suspend and
+injure the working of that inner discipline which woman exerts over
+woman. Mrs. Proudie, it has been said, is the Church.
+
+Women certainly present the only analogy in the present day to that
+claim of internal jurisdiction for which the Church struggled so
+gallantly in the middle ages. No one who sees the serried ranks with
+which she encounters all investigation from without would imagine the
+severity with which she administers justice within. Like the Westphalian
+Vehm-gericht, the mystery of feminine courts is only equalled by their
+terrible sentences. Mrs. Grundy on the seat of justice is a Rhadamanthus
+to whom criticism may fairly leave an erring sister. But all this in
+nowise weakens the firmness of woman's attitude before an outer foe. She
+claims absolute right to all hanging, drawing, and quartering on her
+domains. Like a feudal baron, she will yield to no man her stocks and
+her gallows. But to judge from the prim front of her squares, the
+cordial grasp of hand-in-hand with which they form to resist all
+masculine charges, no one would imagine the ruthless severity with which
+woman was breaking some poor drummer-boy inside.
+
+We are bound, however, to add, that in all our remarks we have only been
+nibbling at the outer rind of a great difficulty. Woman has
+characteristically fallen back on a grand principle, and has asserted
+her absolute immunity from all criticism whatever. It is not merely that
+this critic is deaf or that critic malignant, that one censor is
+ignorant and another basely envious of woman. All this special pleading
+is totally flung aside, and the defence stands on a basis of the most
+uncompromising sort. No man, it is asserted, can judge woman, because no
+man can understand her. She is the Sphinx of modern investigation, and
+man is not fated to be her OEdipus. We can conceive of few
+announcements more welcome, if it be only true.
+
+In an age when everything seems pretty well discovered, when one cannot
+preserve even a shred of mystery to cloak the bareness of one's life,
+when the very surface of the globe is all mapped out, and the mysterious
+griffins of untraversed deserts are vanishing from the map, it is an
+amazing relief to know that an unsolved, nay more, that an insoluble,
+mystery is standing on one's very hearth-rug. No wonder great
+philosophers have spent their lives in vain in looking for the riddle of
+existence, when they never dreamt of looking for it at home. Why woman
+is so peculiarly mysterious, why the laws of her nature are so specially
+unintelligible to a common world, we have not yet been informed. What is
+asserted is simply the fact of this mystery, and before that great fact
+criticism retires.
+
+All that remains for it is to pray and to wait, to hope for a revelation
+from within, since it is forbidden any exploration from without. Some
+prophetess, no doubt a veiled prophetess herself, will arise to lift the
+veil of her sex. Woman, let us hope, will at last unriddle woman. Smit
+by the sunbeams, or rather by the moonbeams, of self-discovery, the
+Sphinx of modern times will reveal in weird and superhuman music the
+mystery of her existence.
+
+
+
+
+MISTRESS AND MAID ON DRESS AND UNDRESS.
+
+
+No one with a soul to appreciate the extra-judicial utterances of Mr.
+Samuel Warren can have forgotten the memorable lament over the decline
+and fall of the fine old English maid-servant with which, some years
+ago, he introduced some cases of petty larceny to the notice of the
+grand-jurors of Hull. The alarm sounded with such touching eloquence
+from the judgment-seat was taken up last autumn, if we remember, by a
+venerable Countess, who, in an address to an assemblage of Cumbrian
+lasses, aspirants to the kitchen and the dairy, took occasion to read
+them a lecture on the duty of dressing with the simplicity befitting
+their station. Both the learned Recorder and the venerable Countess were
+animated by the best intentions. Their advice was excellent, and we
+sincerely trust that it may have induced the neat-handed Phyllis of the
+North to curb her immoderate taste for finery. These sporadic warnings
+seem likely to ripen at last into action.
+
+From a letter lately inserted in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, we learn that
+a "Clergyman's Wife" has long been brooding in silent indignation over
+"the present disgraceful style of dress among female servants." Her
+disgust finds vent in a manifesto to the mistresses of Great Britain,
+in which, after painting the evil in the darkest possible colors, she
+ends by suggesting a remedy for it. Dress, we are told, among "the lower
+orders of females," has arrived at a pitch which has wholly changed the
+aspect and character of our towns and country villages. Neither
+preachers nor good books can avail to stop it. Bad women are fearfully
+increased in number, good wives and mothers are getting rare. In
+consequence of the reckless expenditure of women upon their dress,
+husbands become drunkards, and murder too commonly follows. The remedy
+for this terrible state of things is to be found in the following
+"proposition:"--The ladies of England are to form an association,
+pledging themselves to adopt, each family for themselves, a uniform for
+their female servants, and to admit none into their service who refuse
+to wear it.
+
+The uniform is not to be old-fashioned or disfiguring, but merely neat,
+simple, and consequently becoming. The following ornaments are to be
+absolutely prohibited--"feathers, flowers, brooches, buckles or clasps,
+earrings, lockets, neck-ribbons and velvets, kid-gloves, parasols,
+sashes, jackets, Garibaldis, all trimming on dresses, crinoline, or
+steel of any kind." No dress to touch the ground. No pads, frisettes, no
+chignons, no hair-ribbons. Having swept away by a stroke of the pen all
+this mass of finery, a "Clergyman's Wife" goes on to make some
+"suggestions," which we quote for the edification of our lady readers:--
+
+"Morning dress: Lilac print, calico apron, linen collar. Afternoon
+dress: Some lighter print, muslin apron, linen collar and cuffs.
+Sundays: a neat alpaca dress, linen collar and cuffs, or frill tacked
+into the neck of the dress, a black apron, a black shawl, a medium straw
+bonnet with ribbons and strings of the same color, a bow of the same
+inside, and a slight cap across the forehead, thread or cotton gloves, a
+small cotton or alpaca umbrella to keep off sun and rain. The winter
+Sunday dress: Linsey dress, shepherd's plaid shawl, black straw bonnet.
+A plain brown or black turndown straw hat with a rosette of the same
+color, and fastened on with elastic, should be possessed by all servants
+for common use, and is indispensable for nursemaids walking out with
+children. Should servants be in mourning, the same neat style must be
+observed--no bugles, or beads, or crape flowers allowed."
+
+The first thing that strikes us in connection with this glib project is
+the enormous difficulty of carrying it into execution. It is easy, we
+all know, to call spirits from the vasty deep, but exceedingly difficult
+to induce them to obey the summons. It is easy, and to feminine
+ingenuity rather pleasant than otherwise, to devise sumptuary laws for
+the kitchen. But it is quite another thing to try to enforce them. By
+what coercive machinery is Betsy Jane to be forced into the detested
+uniform? We know how deeply the Anglo-Saxon mind resents any social
+"ticketing." Does a "Clergyman's Wife" suppose that the British
+housemaid is exempt from this little weakness common to her race? At any
+rate, we are convinced that she would never subside into a "lilac
+print" or a "neat alpaca" without a tremendous struggle. Her first
+weapon of defence would infallibly be a strike. It is absurd to suppose
+that she would cling to her flowers and parasol with less tenacity than
+cabby to his right of running over people in the dark.
+
+Now, is a "Clergyman's Wife" prepared to face the consequences of such a
+strike? Is she ready for an indefinite time to cook her own dinner, mend
+her own dresses, dust her own rooms, manage her own nursery? What if the
+vengeance of the housemaid menaced by the imposition of a "calico apron"
+or a "medium straw bonnet" should assume a darker form, and a system of
+domestic "rattening" should spread terror through the tranquil
+parsonages of England? Is she prepared to brave the system of
+intimidation by which a union of vindictive cooks and nursery-maids
+might assert their inherent rights to lockets and earrings? Has she the
+nerve to crush the secret plots of kitchen Fenianism? Ultimately, no
+doubt, her efforts might be crowned with success. When that happy time
+arrived, when "her suggestions were generally adopted," and the
+"requirements of ladies, especially those of fortune, were generally
+known" to comprise a uniform for the maid-servant, she might succeed in
+closing the market of domestic service to the flaunting abigail whose
+audacious finery renders her to the outward eye indistinguishable from
+her own daughters.
+
+But as that time would be long in coming, and probably would never
+arrive in her lifetime, she would have to face the discomforts of a
+long period of transition, during which she would have to rely on
+herself and her daughters for the discharge of the various operations of
+the household. Meantime we beg to suggest another way of effecting her
+purpose quite as easy, and much more effectual. Why not go in for an Act
+of Parliament, having for its object the total suppression of the
+instinct of vanity in the female bosom? Let it be enacted that, on and
+after the 1st of next April (the date would be appropriate), feathers,
+flowers, and the other abominations which she seeks to proscribe, shall
+be for ever abjured and disused by the fair sex. As the prelude to that
+full entry on her social and political rights which is nowadays claimed
+for woman, a proposal of this magnitude would commend itself, no doubt,
+to the philosophic section of the House of Commons.
+
+There is another feature in the manifesto of a "Clergyman's Wife" which
+calls for observation. She lays particular stress on securing the
+adhesion to her plan of "families of wealth and distinction," "ladies of
+position and fortune"--of the leaders of fashion, in short, wherever
+those mysterious but potent decoy-ducks are to be found. Its success
+depends on "making it fashionable to adopt the uniform," on making
+simplicity of dress among maid-servants the sole avenue to the "best
+situations." Now, as it is conceded that the "present disgraceful style
+of dress among servant girls" is the result of their ambition to imitate
+their superiors, it is worth while, in order to estimate both the amount
+of their responsibility for the said disgrace and the chances of
+success of the proposed reform, to glance from the style of dress in
+vogue in the kitchen to the style of dress in vogue in the drawing-room.
+
+Oddly enough, on the very day on which a "Clergyman's Wife" was
+permitted to ventilate her project in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, the
+public was favored with the latest intelligence on this point, in the
+columns of a fashionable contemporary. Paris, we all know, is the
+sovereign arbiter of dress to all "ladies of position and fortune" in
+this country, the center of an authority on all matters relating to the
+toilette, which radiates, through "families of distinction and wealth,"
+to those calm retreats where clergymen's wives, in chastely severe
+attire, exchange hospitalities with their neighbors. What is the
+fashionable style of dress in Paris at the present moment? The
+correspondent of our contemporary shall speak for himself. "We are
+living," he says, "in an age which seems to be reviving the classical
+period in the history of drapery. You see pretty nearly as much of the
+female _torso_ now as the Athenians did when the bas-reliefs of the
+Parthenon copied the modes of the Greeks so many hundred years ago, and
+when the multitude did not worship the drapery of the goddess only."
+
+After some piquant remarks on the style of dress in the theatres, he
+goes on to inform us how "in the more refined and virtuous society" the
+ladies are dressing this winter. "At a _fete_ graced by all that is
+elegant, refined, and aristocratic in Paris," he observed the duchess,
+the countess, and the baroness imitating the costly toilettes of the
+_demi-monde_, arrayed like one of them precisely, in the very height of
+fashion. We are favored with a minute account of one representative
+toilette in the room:--
+
+"The lady is of a noble Hungarian family, fair, with that dark brown
+reddish hair which is just going to begin to be golden, but never shines
+out. Pale oval face, heavy eyebrows, bright bronze eyes. Small festoons
+of hair over the brow, imprisoned by a golden metal band. Behind a
+Bismarck chignon. A mass of twisted hair, in a sort of Laocoon agony,
+was decorated with small insects (of course I don't mean anything
+impossible), glittering gem-like beetles from the Brazils. Three long
+curls hang from the imposing mass, and could be worn before or behind,
+and be made to perform--as I witnessed--all sorts of coquettish
+tricks. . . . Now for the dress. Well, there is nothing to describe till
+you get very nearly down to the waist. A pretty bit of lace on a band
+wanders over the shoulder; the back is bare very low down, and more of
+the bust is seen than even last year's fashions permitted. . . . You
+may, as far as I could observe, dress or half-dress just as you like;
+caprice has taken the place of uniform fashion. As the panorama of
+_grandes dames_ floats before my mind's eye, I come to the conclusion
+that I have seen more of those ladies than one could have hoped or
+expected in so brief a space of time."
+
+This, then, is, or shortly will be, in a tasteless and exaggerated form,
+the style of dress among those "ladies of distinction" whose
+co-operation a "Clergyman's Wife" fondly hopes to enlist in her scheme
+for purging the kitchen of its "disgraceful" finery. It is just possible
+that she has not heard of these things. Perhaps in the retirement of the
+parsonage, with her eyes intently fixed on the moral havoc which dress
+is causing among "the lower orders of females," she has assumed that the
+dress of the higher orders of females is irreproachably modest and
+correct. If so, we are sorry to have to dispel an illusion which would
+go far to justify the self-complacent tone of her lecture. But unless
+she is blissfully ignorant of contemporary fashions in any sphere more
+elevated than the kitchen, we are struck with astonishment at the
+hardihood of an appeal at the present moment to ladies of fashion.
+
+Is a being whose avowed object is to imitate as exactly as possible the
+cosmetic tricks of the _demi-monde_ likely to prove an influential ally
+in a crusade against cheap finery? Is a mistress whose head-gear
+resembles the art-trophy of an eccentric hair-dresser, and whose
+clothing is described as nothing to speak of "until you get very nearly
+down to the waist," the person to be especially selected to preach
+propriety of dress to her maid? Or is it that a "Clergyman's Wife"
+objects to overdress only, and not to underdress; and that, while she
+would repress with severity any attempt on the part of "females of the
+lower order" to adorn their persons, she looks with a tolerant eye,
+among "ladies of position and fortune," upon the nude? We are curious to
+know at what point in the social scale she would draw the line above
+which an unblushing exhibition of the female _torso_ is decent, and
+below which earrings and a parasol are immoral.
+
+As a matter of fact, so far from discouraging the passion for dress
+among their female dependents, ladies of position and fortune are apt to
+insist on their dressing smartly. They like to see some of their own
+lustre reflected on their attendants. A dowdy in sad-colored print or
+linsey is by no means to their taste. This has been well pointed out in
+a letter in which a "Maid-servant" replied, through the _Pall Mall
+Gazette_, to the project of reform proposed by a "Clergyman's Wife."
+Looking at the question from her own point of view, she described in
+plain words how, when she first went into service, she had wished to
+dress simply, but was quickly made to understand that she must either
+spend more of her wages on dress, or seek another situation. We believe
+that her experience would be endorsed by the great majority of her
+class. If a "Clergyman's Wife" would take the pains to inquire into the
+facts of the case, she would not be long in ascertaining from what
+quarter the signal for unbecoming finery among "females of the lower
+orders" really comes.
+
+The plain truth of the matter is, that a reform in the dress of "lower
+class females," and maid-servants in particular, can only be brought
+about in one way. The reaction in favor of a neat and simple style must
+come from above, and not from below; in the way of example, not of
+precept. When "ladies of position and fortune" cease to lavish their
+thousands on millinery, their copyists in the nursery and kitchen will
+cease to spend their wages on a similar object. When every one above the
+rank of a governess dresses in a manner suitable to her station,
+complaints will be no longer heard about "unbecoming" finery below
+stairs. The chief incentive to showy dress among the "lower orders of
+females" is unquestionably a desire to ape the extravagance of their
+betters. Remove that incentive, and the evil which a "Clergyman's Wife"
+so forcibly deplores will soon cure itself.
+
+We hope that she may be induced to turn her reforming zeal into another
+direction. Instead of indulging in childish projects for putting the
+Sunday-school, and the church singers, and maid-servants, and the lower
+orders of females generally into uniforms, let her attack the mischief
+at its root, and persuade the fine ladies of the earth to curtail their
+monstrous prodigality and immodest vagaries in dress. Let her add her
+warning voice to that of the Head of Latin Christianity, who has
+recently denounced this scandal of the age with the same perennial vigor
+that characterizes his anathemas on the Subalpine Government.
+
+
+
+
+AESTHETIC WOMAN.
+
+
+It is the peculiar triumph of woman in this nineteenth century that she
+has made the conquest of Art. Our grandmothers lived in the kitchen, and
+debased their finer faculties to the creation of puddings and pies. They
+spun, they knitted, they mended, they darned, they kept the accounts of
+the household, and scolded the maids. From this underground existence of
+barbaric ages woman has at last come forth into the full sunshine of
+artistic day; she has mounted from the kitchen to the studio, the
+sketching-desk has superseded the pudding-board, sonatas have banished
+the knitting-needle, poetry has exterminated weekly accounts. Woman, in
+a word, has realized her mission; it is her characteristic, she tells us
+through a chorus of musical voices, to represent the artistic element of
+the world, to be pre-eminently the aesthetic creature.
+
+Nature educates her, as Wordsworth sang long ago, into a being of her
+own, sensitive above all to beauty of thought and color, and sound and
+form. Delicate perceptions of evanescent shades and tones, lost to the
+coarser eye and ear of man, exquisite refinements of spiritual
+appreciation, subtle powers of detecting latent harmonics between the
+outer and the inner world of nature and the soul, blend themselves like
+the colors of the prism in the pure white light of woman's organization.
+And so the host of Woman, as it marches to the conquest of this world,
+flaunts over its legions the banner of art.
+
+In one of the occasional passages of real poetic power with which Walt
+Whitman now and then condescends to break the full tide of rhapsody over
+the eternities and the last patent drill, he describes himself as seeing
+two armies in succession go forth to the civil war. First passed the
+legions of Grant and M'Clellan, flushed with patriotic enthusiasm and
+hope of victory, and cheered onward by the shouts of adoring multitudes.
+Behind, silent and innumerable, march the army of the dead. Something,
+we must own, of the same contrast strikes us as we stand humbly aside to
+watch the aesthetic progress of woman.
+
+It is impossible not to feel a certain glow of enthusiastic sympathy as
+the vanguard passes by--women earnest in aim and effort, artists,
+nursing-sisters, poetesses, doctors, wives, musicians, novelists,
+mathematicians, political economists, in somewhat motley uniform and
+ill-dressed ranks, but full of resolve, independence, and
+self-sacrifice. If we were fighting folk we confess we should be half
+inclined to shout for the rights of woman, and to fall manfully into the
+rank. As it is, we wait patiently for the army behind, for the main
+body--woman herself. Woman fronts us as noisy, demonstrative, exacting
+in her aesthetic claims. Nothing can surpass the adroitness with which
+she uses her bluer sisters on ahead to clear the way for her gayer
+legions; nothing, at any rate, but the contempt with which she dismisses
+them when their work is done. Their office is to level the stubborn
+incredulity, to set straight the crooked criticisms, of sceptical man,
+and then to disappear. Woman herself takes their place. Art is
+everywhere throughout her host--for music, the highest of arts, is the
+art of all.
+
+The singers go before, the minstrels follow after, in the midst are the
+damsels playing on the timbrels. The sister Arts have their own
+representatives within the mass. Sketching boasts its thousands, and
+poetry its tens of thousands. A demure band of maidens blend piety with
+art around the standard of Church decoration. Perhaps it is his very
+regard for the first host--for its earnestness, for its real
+womanhood--that makes the critic so cynical over the second; perhaps it
+is his very love for art that turns to quiet bitterness as he sees art
+dragged at the heels of foolish virgins. For art _is_ dragged at their
+heels. Woman will have man love her for her own sake; but she loves art
+for the sake of man. Very truly, if with an almost sublime effrontery,
+she re-christens for her own special purposes the great studies that
+fired Raffaelle or Beethoven. She pursues them, she pays for them, not
+as arts, but as accomplishments. Their cultivation is the last touch
+added at her finishing school ere she makes her bow to the world. She
+orders her new duet as she orders her new bonnet, and the two purchases
+have precisely the same significance. She drops her piano and her
+paint-brush as she drops her coquetries and flirtations, when the fish
+is landed and she can throw the bait away. Or, what is worse, she keeps
+them alive as little social enjoyments, as reliefs to the tedium of
+domestic life, as something which fills up the weary hours when she is
+fated to the boredom of rural existence.
+
+A woman of business is counted a strange and remarkable being, we hardly
+know why. Looking coolly at the matter, it seems to us that all women
+are women of business; that their life is spent over the counter; that
+there is nothing in earth or heaven too sacred for their traffic and
+their barter. Love, youth, beauty, a British mother reckons them up on
+her fingers, and tells you to a fraction their value in the market. And
+the pale sentimental being at her side, after flooring one big fellow
+with a bit of Chopin, and another with a highly unintelligible verse of
+Robert Browning, poses herself shyly and asks through appealing eyes,
+"Am I not an aesthetic creature?"
+
+The answer to this question is best read, perhaps, in the musical aspect
+of woman. Bold as the assumption sounds, it is quietly assumed that
+every woman is naturally musical. Music is the great accomplishment, and
+the logic of her schools proves to demonstration that every girl has
+fingers and an ear. In a wonderful number of cases the same logic proves
+that girls have a voice. Anyhow, the assumption moulds the very course
+of female existence. The morning is spent in practicing, and the evening
+in airing the results of the practice. There are country-houses where
+one only rushes away from the elaborate Thalberg of midnight to be
+roused up at dawn by the Battle of Prague on the piano in the
+school-room over-head. Still we all reconcile ourselves to this
+perpetual rattle, because we know that a musical being has to be
+educated into existence, and that a woman is necessarily a musical
+being. A glance, indeed, at what we may call the life of the piano
+explains the necessity.
+
+Music is pre-eminently the social art; no art draws people so
+conveniently together, no art so lends itself to conversation, no art is
+in a maidenly sense at once so agreeable, so easy to acquire, and so
+eminently useful. A flirtation is never conducted under greater
+advantages than amid the deafening thunders of a grand finale; the
+victim doomed to the bondage of turning over is chained to the
+fascination of fine arms and delicate hands. Talk, too, may be conducted
+without much trouble over music on the small principles of female
+criticism. "Pretty" and "exquisite" go a great way with the Italian and
+the Romantic schools; "sublime" does pretty universally for the German.
+The opera is, of course, the crown and sum of things, the most charming
+and social of lounges, the readiest of conversational topics. It must be
+a very happy Guardsman indeed who cannot kindle over the Flower-song or
+the Jewel-scene. And it is at the opera that woman is supreme. The
+strange mingling of eye and ear, the confused appeal to every sensuous
+faculty, the littleness as well as the greatness of it all, echo the
+conclusion within woman herself.
+
+Moreover there is no boredom--no absolute appeal to thought or deeper
+feeling. It is in good taste to drop in after the first act, and to
+leave before the last. It is true that an opera is supposed to be the
+great creation of a great artist, and an artist's work is presumed to
+have a certain order and unity of its own; but woman is the Queen of
+Art, and it is hard if she may not display her royalty by docking the
+Fidelio of its head and its tail. But, if woman is obliged to content
+herself with mutilating art in the opera or the concert-room, she is
+able to create art itself over her piano. A host of Claribels and
+Rosalies exist simply because woman is a musical creature. We turn over
+the heap of rubbish on the piano with a sense of wonder, and ask,
+without hope of an answer, why nine-tenths of our modern songs are
+written at all, or why, being written, they can find a publisher.
+
+But the answer is a simple one, after all; it is merely that aesthetic
+creatures, that queens of art and of song, cannot play good music and
+can play bad.
+
+There is not a publisher in London who would not tell us that the
+patronage of musical women is simply a patronage of trash. The fact is
+that woman is a very practical being, and she has learned by experience
+that trash pays better than good music for her own special purposes; and
+when these purposes are attained she throws good music and bad music
+aside with a perfect impartiality. It is with a certain feeling of
+equity, as well as of content, that the betrothed one resigns her sway
+over the keys. She has played and won, and now she holds it hardly fair
+that she should interfere with other people's game. So she lounges into
+a corner, and leaves her Broadwood to those who have practical work to
+do. Her _role_ in life has no need of accomplishments, and as for the
+serious study of music as an art, as to any real love of it or loyalty
+to it, that is the business of "professional people," and not of British
+mothers. Only she would have her girls remember that nothing is in
+better taste than for young people to show themselves artistic.
+
+Music only displays on the grand scale the laws which in less obtrusive
+form govern the whole aesthetic life of woman. Painting, for instance,
+dwindles in her hands into the "sketch;" the brown sands in the
+foreground, the blue wash of the sea, and the dab of rock behind. Not a
+very lofty or amusing thing, one would say at first sight; but, if one
+thinks of it, an eminently practical thing, rapid and easy of execution,
+not mewing the artist up in solitary studio, but lending itself
+gracefully to picnics and groups of a picturesque sort on cliff and
+boulder, and whispered criticism from faces peeping over one's shoulder.
+Serious painting woman can leave comfortably to Academicians and
+rough-bearded creatures of the Philip Firmin type, though even here she
+feels, as she glances round the walls of the Academy, that she is
+creating art as she is creating music. She dwells complacently on the
+home tendencies of modern painting, on the wonderful succession of
+squares of domestic canvas, on the nursemaid carrying children up
+stairs in one picture, on the nursemaid carrying children down stairs in
+the next. She has her little crow of triumph over the great artist who
+started with a lofty ideal, and has come down to painting the red
+stockings of little girls in green-baize pews, or the wonderful
+counterpanes and marvellous bed-curtains of sleeping innocents. She
+knows that the men who are forced to paint these things growl contempt
+over their own creations, but the very growl is a tribute to woman's
+supremacy. It is a great thing when woman can wring from an artist a
+hundred "pot-boilers," while man can only give him an order for a single
+"Light of the World."
+
+One field of art, indeed, woman claims for her own. Man may build
+churches as long as he leaves woman to decorate them. A crowning
+demonstration of her aesthetic faculties meet us on every festival in
+wreath and text and monogram, in exquisitely moulded pillars turned into
+grotesque corkscrews, in tracery broken by strips of greenery, in paper
+flowers and every variety of gilt gingerbread. But it may be questioned
+whether art is the sole aim of the ecclesiastical picnic out of which
+decorations spring. The chatty groups dotted over the aisle, the
+constant appeals to the curate, the dainty little screams and giggles as
+the ladder shakes beneath those artistic feet, the criticism of cousins
+who have looked in quite accidentally for a peep, the half-consecrated
+flirtations in the vestry, ally art even here to those practical
+purposes which aesthetic woman never forgets. Were she, indeed, once to
+forget them, she might become a Dr. Mary Walker; she might even become a
+George Sand. In other words, she might find herself an artist, loving
+and studying art for its own sake, solitary, despised, eccentric, and
+blue. From such a destiny aesthetic woman turns scornfully away.
+
+
+
+
+WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?
+
+
+This is a question which one half the world is asking the other half,
+with very wild answers as the result. Woman's work seems to be in these
+days everything that it was not in times past, and nothing that it was.
+Professions are undertaken and careers invaded which were formerly held
+sacred to men, while things are left undone which, for all the
+generations that the world has lasted, have been naturally and
+instinctively assigned to women to do. From the savage squaw gathering
+fuel or drawing water for the wigwam, to the lady giving up the keys to
+her housekeeper, housekeeping has been considered one of the primary
+functions of women. The man to provide, the woman to dispense; the man
+to do the rough initial work of bread-winning, whether as a half-naked
+barbarian hunting live meat, or as a city clerk painfully scoring lines
+of rugged figures, the woman to cook the meat when got, and to lay out
+to the best advantage for the family the quarter's salary gained by
+casting up ledgers, and writing advices and bills of lading.
+
+Take human society in any phase we like, we must come down to these
+radical conditions; and any system which ignores this division of labor,
+and confounds these separate functions, is of necessity imperfect and
+wrong. We have nothing whatever to say against the professional
+self-support of women who have no men to work for them, and who must
+therefore work for themselves in order to live. In what direction soever
+they can best make their way, let them take it. Brains and intellectual
+gifts are of no sex and no condition, and it is far more important that
+good work should be done than that it should be done by this or that
+particular set of workers.
+
+But we are speaking of the home duties of married women, and of those
+girls who have no need to earn their daily bread, and who are not so
+specially gifted as to be driven afield by the irrepressible power of
+genius. We are speaking of women who cannot help in the family income,
+but who can both save and improve in the home; women whose lives now are
+one long day of idleness, _ennui_, and vagrant imagination, because they
+despise the activities into which they were born, while seeking outlets
+for their energies impossible to them both by nature and social
+restrictions.
+
+It is strange to see into what unreasonable disrepute active
+housekeeping--woman's first natural duty--has fallen in England. Take a
+family with four or five hundred a year--and we know how small a sum
+that is for "genteel humanity" in these days--the wife who will be an
+active housekeeper, even with such an income, will be an exception to
+the rule; and the daughters who will be anything more than drawing-room
+dolls waiting for husbands to transfer them to a home of their own,
+where they may be as useless as they are now, will be rarer still. For
+things are getting worse, not better, and our young women are less
+useful even than their mothers; while these last do not, as a rule, come
+near the good housekeeping ladies of olden times, who knew every secret
+of domestic economy, and made a point of honor of a wise and pleasant
+"distribution of bread."
+
+The usual method of London housekeeping, even in the second ranks of the
+middle-classes, is for the mistress to give her orders in the kitchen in
+the morning, leaving the cook to pass them on to the tradespeople when
+they call. If she is not very indolent, and if she has a due regard for
+neatness and cleanliness, she may supplement her kitchen commands by
+going up stairs through some of the bedrooms; but after a kind word of
+advice to the housemaid if she is sweet-tempered, or a harsh word of
+censure if she is of the cross-grained type, her work in that department
+will be done, and her duties for the day are at an end. There is none of
+the clever marketing by which fifty per cent. is saved in the outlay if
+a woman knows what she is about, and how to buy; none of the personal
+superintendence so encouraging to servants when genially performed, and
+rendering slighted work impossible; none of that "seeing to things"
+herself, or doing the finer parts of the work with her own hands, which
+used to form part of a woman's unquestioned duty. She gives her orders,
+weighs out her supplies, then leaves the maids to do the best they know
+or the worst they will, according to the degree in which they are
+supplied with faculty or conscience. Many women boast that their
+housekeeping takes them perhaps an hour, perhaps half an hour, in the
+morning, and no more; and they think themselves clever and commendable
+in proportion to the small amount of time given to their largest family
+duty. This is all very well where the income is such as to secure
+first-class servants--professors of certain specialities of knowledge,
+and far in advance of the mistress; but how about the comfort of the
+house with this hasty generalship, when the maids are mere scrubs who
+would have to go through years of training before they were worth their
+salt? It may be very well too in large households governed by general
+system, and not by individual ruling; but where the service is scant and
+poor, it is a stupidly uncomfortable as well as a wasteful way of
+housekeeping. It is analogous to English cookery--a revolting poverty of
+result with flaring prodigality of means; all the pompous paraphernalia
+of tradespeople, and their carts, and their red-books for orders, with
+nothing worth the trouble of booking, and everything of less quantity
+and lower quality than might be if personal pains were taken, which is
+always the best economy practicable.
+
+What is there in practical housekeeping less honorable than the ordinary
+work of middle-class gentlewomen? and why should women shrink from doing
+for utility, and for the general comfort of the family, what they would
+do at any time for vanity or idleness? No one need go into extremes, and
+wish our middle-class gentlewomen to become Cinderellas sitting among
+the kitchen ashes, Nausicaaes washing linen, or Penelopes spending their
+lives in needlework only. But, without undertaking anything unpleasant
+to her senses or degrading to her condition, a lady might do hundreds of
+things that are now left undone in a house altogether, or are given up
+to the coarse handling of servants, and domestic life would gain
+infinitely in consequence.
+
+What degradation, for instance, is there in cookery? and how much more
+home happiness would there not be if wives would take in hand that great
+cold-mutton question! But women are both selfish and small on this
+point. Born for the most part with very feebly developed gustativeness,
+they affect to despise the stronger instinct in men, and think it low
+and sensual if they are expected to give any special attention to the
+meals of the man who provides the meat. This contempt for good living is
+one cause of the ignorance there is among them of how to secure good
+living. Those horrible traditions of "plain roast and boiled" cling
+about them as articles of culinary faith; and because they have reached
+no higher knowledge for themselves, they decide that no one else shall
+go beyond them.
+
+For one middle-class gentlewoman who understands anything about cookery,
+or who really cares for it as a scientific art or domestic necessity,
+there are ten thousand who do not; yet our mothers and grandmothers were
+not ashamed to be known as deft professors, and homes were happier in
+proportion to the respect paid to the stewpan and the stockpot. And
+cookery is more interesting now than it was then, because more advanced,
+more scientific, and with improved appliances; and, at the same time, it
+is of confessedly more importance. It may seem humiliating, to those who
+go in for spirit pure and simple, to speak of the condition of the soul
+as in any way determined by beef and cabbage; but it is so,
+nevertheless, the connection between food and virtue, food and thought,
+being a very close one; and the sooner wives recognise this connection
+the better for them and for their husbands.
+
+The clumsy savagery of a plain cook, or the vile messes of a fourth-rate
+confectioner, are absolute sins in a house where a woman has all her
+senses, and can, if she will, attend personally to the cooking. Many
+things pass for crimes which are really not so bad as this. But how
+seldom now do we find a house where the lady does look after the
+cooking, where clean hands and educated brains are put to active service
+for the good of others! The trouble would be too great in our fine-lady
+days, even if there was the requisite ability; but there is as little
+ability as there is energy, and the plain cook with her savagery, or the
+fourth-rate confectioner with his rancid pastry, have it all their own
+way, according to the election of economy or ostentation.
+
+If by chance one stumbles on a household where the woman does not
+disdain housewifely work, and specially the practical superintendence of
+the kitchen, there we may be sure we shall find cheerfulness and
+content. There seems to be something in the life of a practical
+housekeeper that answers to the needs of a woman's best nature, and that
+makes her pleasant and good-tempered. Perhaps it is the consciousness
+that she is doing her duty--of itself a wonderful sweetener of the
+nature; perhaps the greater amount of bodily exercise keeps the liver in
+good tone; whatever the cause, sure it is that the homes of the active
+housekeepers are more harmonious than those of the feckless and
+do-nothing sort. Yet the snobbish half of the middle-classes holds
+housewifely work as degrading, save in the trumpery pretentiousness of
+"giving orders."
+
+A woman may sit in a dirty drawing-room which the slipshod maid has not
+had time to clean, but she must not take a duster in her hands and
+polish the legs of the chairs; there is no disgrace in the dirt, only in
+the duster. She may do fancy work of no earthly use, but she must not be
+caught making a gown. Indeed very few women could make one, and as few
+will do plain needlework. They will braid and embroider, "cut holes, and
+sew them up again," and spend any amount of time and money on beads and
+wools for messy draperies which no one wants; the end, being finery,
+sanctions the toil and refines it; but they will not do things of any
+practical use, or if they are compelled by the exigencies of
+circumstances, they think themselves petty martyrs, and badly used by
+the fates.
+
+The whole scheme of woman's life at this present time is untenable and
+unfair. She wants to have all the pleasures and none of the
+disagreeables. Her husband goes to the city, and does monotonous and
+unpleasant work there; but his wife thinks herself in very evil case if
+asked to do monotonous housework at home. Yet she does nothing more
+elevating or more advantageous. Novel-reading, fancy-work, visiting,
+letter-writing, sum up her ordinary occupations; and she considers these
+more to the point than practical housekeeping. In fact it becomes a
+serious question what women think themselves sent into the world for,
+what they hold themselves designed by God to be or to do. They grumble
+at having children, and at the toil and anxiety which a family entails;
+they think themselves degraded to the level of servants if they have to
+do any practical housework whatever; they assert their equality with
+man, and express their envy of his life, yet show themselves incapable
+of learning the first lesson set to men, that of doing what they do not
+like to do. What, then, do they want? What do they hold themselves made
+for?
+
+Certainly some of the more benevolent sort carry their energies out of
+doors, and leave such prosaic matters as savory dinners and fast
+shirt-buttons for committees and charities, where they get excitement
+and _kudos_ together. Others give themselves up to what they call
+keeping up society, which means being more at home in every person's
+house than their own; and some do a little weak art, and others a little
+feeble literature; but there are very few indeed who honestly buckle to
+the natural duties of their position, and who bear with the tedium of
+home work as men bear with the tedium of office work. The little
+royalty of home is the last place where a woman cares to shine, and the
+most uninteresting of all the domains she seeks to govern. Fancy a
+high-souled creature, capable of aesthetics, giving her mind to soup or
+the right proportion of chutnee for the curry! Fancy, too, a brilliant
+creature foregoing an evening's conversational glory abroad for the sake
+of a prosaic husband's more prosaic dinner! He comes home tired from
+work, and desperately in need of a good dinner as a restorative; but the
+plain cook gives him cold meat and pickles, or an abomination which she
+calls hash, and the brilliant creature, full of mind, thinks the desire
+for anything else rank sensuality.
+
+It seems a little hard, certainly, on the unhappy fellow who works at
+the mill for such a return; but women believe that men are made only to
+work at the mill that they may receive the grist accruing, and be kept
+in idleness and uselessness all their lives. They have no idea of
+lightening the labor of that mill-round by doing their own natural work
+cheerfully and diligently. They will do everything but what they ought
+to do; they will make themselves doctors, committee-women, printers,
+what not, but they won't learn cooking, and they won't keep their own
+houses. There never was a time when women were less the helpmates of men
+than they are at present; when there was such a wide division between
+the interests and the sympathies of the sexes in the endeavor, on the
+one side, to approximate their pursuits.
+
+There is a great demand made now for more work for woman, and wider
+fields for her labor. We confess we should feel a deeper interest in the
+question if we saw more energy and conscience put into the work lying to
+her hand at home, and we hold that she ought to perform perfectly the
+duties instinctive to her sex before claiming those hitherto held remote
+from her natural condition. Much of this demand, too, springs from
+restlessness and dissatisfaction; little, if any, from higher
+aspirations or nobler unused energies. Indeed, the nobler the woman the
+more thoroughly she will do her own proper work, in the spirit of old
+George Herbert's well-worn line, and the less she will feel herself
+above her work. It is only the weak who cannot raise their circumstances
+to the level of their thoughts; only the poor who cannot enrich their
+deeds by their thoughts.
+
+That very much of this demand for more power of work comes from
+necessity and the absolute need of bread, we know; and that the demand
+will grow louder as marriage becomes scarcer, and there are more women
+left adrift in the world without the protection and help of men, we also
+know. But this belongs to another part of the subject. What we want to
+insist on now is the pitiable ignorance and shiftless indolence of most
+middle-class housekeepers; and we would urge on woman the value of a
+better system of life at home, before laying claim to the discharge of
+extra-domestic duties abroad.
+
+
+
+
+PAPAL WOMAN.
+
+
+The wonderful instinct which has always guided the Papacy in
+distinguishing between forces that it may safely oppose and forces
+before which it must surrender, has just received a startling
+illustration in a scene reported to have taken place at the Vatican a
+few days ago. Rome may refuse all compromise with Italy, but even Rome
+shrinks from encountering the hostility of woman. The Brief of October
+last sounded, indeed, marvellously like a declaration of war; even in a
+Pope it argued no little resolution to denounce the "license of the
+female toilet," the "fantastic character of woman's head-dress," and the
+"scandalous indecency" of woman's attire. More worldly critics would
+hardly have ventured to describe a piquant chignon or a suggestive
+boddice as "a propaganda of the devil;" it will be long, at any rate,
+before censors of this class will meet with the reward of a deputation
+and a testimonial from the fair objects of their criticism.
+
+St. Peter, however, we are adroitly reminded, after his miraculous
+delivery from prison by an angel, found an asylum among women; and,
+fresh from his troubles with the red-shirts of Monte Rotondo, the
+successor of St. Peter seems to have found himself wonderfully at home
+among the flounces that thronged the other day to his public audience at
+the Vatican. A hundred ladies--the presence amongst whom of a number of
+English Catholics gives us a national interest in the scene--came
+forward to express their gratitude for the censures of the Papal Briefs,
+and the adhesion of their sex to the orthodox doctrines of the toilet.
+The speech in which one of the fair deputation expressed the sentiments
+of her fellows has been unfortunately suppressed, but the letter of Pope
+Pius to the Bishop of Orleans explains the secret of this dramatic
+reconciliation, and the terms of the Concordat which has been arranged
+between Woman and the Papacy.
+
+A common danger has driven the two Powers to this fresh alliance. If
+Garabaldi threatens the supremacy of the Holy See, the educational
+reforms of M. Duruy menace the domestic tyranny of woman. Woman sees
+herself in peril of deposition at home by the same spirit of democratic
+and intellectual equality which would drive the Pope from the Vatican.
+In presence of such a peril, mutual concession becomes easy, and the
+fair votaries pardon all references to their "propaganda of the devil"
+in consideration of a Papal assault on the "cynical writers who are
+desirous of attacking woman."
+
+The motive of the Papacy, in opposing a system of education which
+emancipates woman from the intellectual control of the priesthood and
+plunges her into the midst of the doubts and questionings of sceptical
+man, is of course plain enough. We feel no particular surprise when the
+attendance of girls at the public classes of a Professor is denounced as
+tending to "despoil woman of her native modesty, to drag her before the
+public, to turn her from domestic life and duties, to puff her up with
+vain and false science." It is the adhesion of woman to this view of the
+case which puzzles us a little at first. We recall her aspirations after
+a higher training, and her bitter contempt for the unhappy censors who
+venture to remind her of certain primary truths respecting puddings and
+pies.
+
+But the same problem meets us in other halls than those of the Vatican.
+Everywhere woman poses herself as a social martyr, as the victim of
+conventional bonds, as reduced to intellectual torpor by the refusal of
+intellectual facilities and intellectual distinctions, as excluded by
+sheer masculine tyranny from the larger sphere of thought and action
+which the world presents, as chained, like Prometheus, to the rock of
+home by necessity and force. It is only when some amiable enthusiast is
+taken in by all this admirable acting, and ventures to propose a plan
+for her deliverance, that one finds how wonderfully contented, after
+all, woman is with her bonds and her prison-house.
+
+The philosopher who comes forward with his pet theory of the
+enfranchisement of woman, who recognizes the necessity for loosening the
+matrimonial tie, for securing to woman her property and its
+responsibilities, for levelling all educational differences and
+abolishing all social distinctions between the sexes, only finds himself
+snubbed for his pains. He is calmly assured that home is the sphere of
+woman, and the care of a family the first of woman's duties; the
+domestic martyr of yesterday proves from Proverbs and the _Princess_
+that marriage is the completion of woman, and that her office is but to
+wed the "noble music" of her feminine nature to the "noble words" of the
+nature of her spouse.
+
+In a word, woman knows her own business a great deal better than her
+friends. She does not believe in the intellectual equality which she is
+always preaching about, and when M. Duruy offers it, a shriek of horror
+goes up from half the mothers of France. What she does believe is that,
+in seeking the educational Will-o'-the-Wisp, she may lose the solid
+pudding of domestic supremacy, and domestic supremacy is worth all the
+sciences in the world. Her position, as the Vatican suggests, is a
+religious, not an intellectual one, and her policy lies in an alliance
+with the priesthood, whose position is one with her own. So woman makes
+her submission to the Papacy, and the Pope snubs M. Duruy.
+
+It is amusing to see how limited, after all, a man's power, the power
+even of the stoutest of men, is in his own house, and to watch the
+simple process by which woman establishes the limitation. It consists
+simply in asserting a specially religious character for her sex. She is
+never tired of telling us that the sentiments and sympathies of the
+feminine breast have a greater affinity for divine things than the
+rougher masculine nature; that her instincts are purer, more poetic,
+more refined; that her moral nature has a certain bloom upon it which
+contact with the world has brushed off from ours; that while we coarser
+creatures are driven to reason out our spiritual conclusions, she
+arrives at them by an intuitive process reserved for the angelic nature
+and her own.
+
+And on the whole man accepts the claim. He is bribed perhaps into
+allowing it by his own desire to have something at home better and purer
+than himself. It is a startling thing perhaps to say, but in ninety-nine
+homes out of a hundred real humility of heart is to be found in the
+husband, not in the wife. The husband has very little belief in his own
+religion, in his unworldliness and spirituality; but he has an immense
+belief in the spirituality and the devotion of the being who fronts him
+over the breakfast-table. He does not profess to understand the
+character of her piety, her lore of sermons, the severity with which she
+visits the household after family prayers, or the extreme interest with
+which she peruses the geographical chapters of the Book of Joshua. But
+his incapacity to understand it is mixed with a certain awe. He never
+ventures to disturb, by "shadowed hint" of his own thoughts about the
+matter, the "simple views" of his spouse. He adroitly diverts the
+conversation of his dinner-table when it drifts near to the fatal
+pigeons of Colenso.
+
+Sometimes he bends to a little gentle deceit, and wins a smile of
+approval by turning up at an early Litany, or by bringing home the
+newest photograph of a colonial metropolitan. In one way or another he
+practically acknowledges, like King Cnut, that there is a bound to his
+empire. Over bonnet bills and butchers' bills he may exercise a certain
+nominal control. It is possible that years of struggle might enable him
+to alter by half an inch the length of his wife's skirt, if fashion had
+not shortened it in the interval. But over the whole domain of moral and
+religious thought and action he is absolutely powerless. Woman meets
+him, if he attempts any interference, as Christian martyrs have always
+met their persecutors, with outstretched neck and on her knees. She
+prays for his return to better thoughts, and the whole household knows
+she is praying for him. She listens to all his remonstrances, professes
+obedience on every point but the one he wants, and keeps her finger all
+the time on the particular page of Thomas a Kempis at which the
+remonstrance found her. Before such an adversary, there is no shame in a
+defeat.
+
+It is not that on all points of moral or religious life woman professes
+herself above criticism; to the criticisms of her religious teachers,
+for instance, we have seen her singularly obsequious. Woman and the
+priesthood in fact understand one another perfectly, and a tacit
+convention forces woman to submit to censures so long as those censures
+are reserved for one topic alone. To religion woman makes the sacrifice
+of her dress. It is not that she seriously intends to make the slightest
+amendments, or to withdraw before the exhortations of her spiritual
+guide into poke bonnets and print muslins. It is a sufficient mark of
+self-sacrifice if she listens patiently to a diatribe against butterfly
+bonnets, trains, or crinolines, or even thanks her pastor for
+describing evening costume as a "propaganda of the devil." The very
+minuteness, in fact, of censures such as these, is a flattering proof of
+the spiritual importance of even the most trivial details in the life of
+woman.
+
+When Father Ignatius informed mankind that the angels bent down from
+heaven to weep over the flirtations of Rotten Row, the smallest child on
+her pony felt her ride, and her chatter over her palings, invested with
+certain celestial importance. Criticisms, too, so strictly reserved for
+the outside of the platter, are an immense compliment to the inside, and
+it is something to listen to half an hour of spiritual reproof, and to
+be able to pass oneself triumphantly as a "Fair Soul" after all. There
+is nothing revolutionary in a mere border-skirmish, which leaves the
+field of woman's sway not an inch the narrower. It is another matter
+when M. Duruy calls on Hermione to come down from her pedestal of
+worship, and in the long run to abdicate. For equality of education
+would, of course, even if it did nothing else, make mince-meat of the
+spiritual pretensions of woman. It would be impossible to preserve a
+domestic Papacy with a more than papal weakness for dogmatism and
+infallibility, if woman is to come down into school and share the common
+training of men.
+
+If women are to be educated precisely as men are educated, they will
+share the reasonings, the scepticisms, the critical doubts of men. There
+will be no refuge for praying sisters in that world of "simple views"
+from which they come forth at present furnished with a social and
+domestic decalogue whose sacredness it is impious to doubt or to
+dispute. In other words, the power which woman now exercises will simply
+crumble to dust. Whether she might gain a power higher and more
+beneficial to the world and to herself, is a matter which we are not now
+discussing. What is perfectly certain is that such a power would not be
+the power she exercises now. The moral censorship of woman over woman,
+for example, would at once pass away. It rests on the belief that women
+have higher moral faculties than other beings, and that their treason to
+this higher form of moral humanity which is exhibited in womanhood is a
+treason of deeper dye than an offence against morality itself.
+
+An erring sister sins against something greater than goodness--she sins
+against the theory of woman, against the faith that woman is a creature
+who soars high above the weaknesses of man and the common nature of man.
+Long ages of self-assertion have penetrated woman with the conviction of
+her worth; she is the object of her own especial worship, and the sharp
+stinging justice she deals out to social offenders is not merely a proof
+of the spiritual nature of her rule, but the vindication of her
+self-idolatry. Again, she would forfeit the peculiar influence which she
+is every day exerting in a greater degree on the course of religion and
+the Church. The hypothesis of a superior spiritual nature in woman lies
+at the root, for instance, of the great modern institution of
+sisterhoods, and of the peculiar relation which is slowly attaching his
+Paula and his Eustochium to every Jerome of our day.
+
+But the main loss of power would lie in the family itself. It would be
+no longer possible to front the political dogmatist of the hearth-rug
+with a social and religious dogmatism as brusque and unreasonable as his
+own. The balance of power which woman has slowly built up in home would
+be roughly disturbed, and new forms of social and domestic life would
+emerge from the chaos of such a revolution. From sweeping changes of
+this sort the very temper of woman, her innate conservatism, her want of
+originative power, turns her away. It is more comfortable to bask in the
+glow of Papal sunshine, to figure in Allocutions from the Vatican as
+"the pure and shining light of the house, the glory of her husband, the
+education of her family, a bond of peace, an emblem of piety;" and to
+let Monsieur Duruy and his insidious Professors alone.
+
+
+
+
+MODERN MOTHERS.
+
+
+No human affection has been so passionately praised as maternal love,
+and none is supposed to be so holy or so strong. Even the poetic aspect
+of the instinct which inspires the young with their dearest dreams does
+not rank so high as this, and neither lover's love nor conjugal love,
+neither filial affection nor fraternal, comes near the sanctity or
+grandeur of the maternal instinct. But all women are not equally rich in
+this great gift; and, to judge by appearances, English women are at this
+moment particularly poor. It may seem a harsh thing to say, but it is
+none the less true--society has put maternity out of fashion, and the
+nursery is nine times out of ten a place of punishment, not of pleasure,
+to the modern mother.
+
+Two points connected with this subject are of growing importance at this
+present time--the one is the increasing disinclination of married women
+to be mothers at all; the other, the large number of those who, being
+mothers, will not, or cannot, nurse their own children. In the mad race
+after pleasure and excitement now going on all through English society
+the tender duties of motherhood have become simply disagreeable
+restraints, and the old feeling of the blessing attending the quiver
+full is exchanged for one expressive of the very reverse. With some of
+the more intellectual and less instinctive sort, maternity is looked on
+as a kind of degradation; and women of this stamp, sensible enough in
+everything else, talk impatiently among themselves of the base
+necessities laid on them by men and nature, and how hateful to them is
+everything connected with their characteristic duties.
+
+This wild revolt against nature, and specially this abhorrence of
+maternity, is carried to a still greater extent by American women, with
+grave national consequences resulting; but though we have not yet
+reached the Transatlantic limit, the state of the feminine feeling and
+physical condition among ourselves will disastrously affect the future
+unless something can be done to bring our women back to a healthier tone
+of mind and body. No one can object to women declining marriage
+altogether in favor of a voluntary self-devotion to some project or
+idea; but, when married, it is a monstrous doctrine to hold that they
+are in any way degraded by the consequences, and that natural functions
+are less honorable than social excitements. The world can get on without
+balls and morning calls, it can get on too without amateur art and
+incorrect music, but not without wives and mothers; and those times in a
+nation's history when women have been social ornaments rather than
+family home-stays have ever been times of national decadence and of
+moral failure.
+
+Part of this growing disinclination is due to the enormous expense
+incurred now by having children. As women have ceased to take any
+active share in their own housekeeping, whether in the kitchen or the
+nursery, the consequence is an additional cost for service, which is a
+serious item in the yearly accounts. Women who, if they lived a rational
+life, could and would nurse their children, now require a wet-nurse, or
+the services of an experienced woman who can "bring up by hand," as the
+phrase is; women who once would have had one nursemaid now have two; and
+women who, had they lived a generation ago, would have had none at all,
+must in their turn have a wretched young creature without thought or
+knowledge, into whose questionable care they deliver what should be the
+most sacred obligation and the most jealously-guarded charge they
+possess.
+
+It is rare if, in any section of society where hired service can be had,
+mothers give more than a superficial personal superintendence to nursery
+or school-room--a superintendence about as thorough as their
+housekeeping, and as efficient. The one set of duties is quite as
+unfashionable as the other, and money is held to relieve from the
+service of love as entirely as it relieves from the need of labor. And
+yet, side by side with this personal relinquishment of natural duties,
+has grown up, perhaps as an instinctive compensation, an amount of
+attention and expensive management specially remarkable. There never was
+a time when children were made of so much individual importance in the
+family, yet in so little direct relation with the mother--never a time
+when maternity did so little and social organization so much.
+
+Juvenile parties; the kind of moral obligation apparently felt by all
+parents to provide heated and unhealthy amusements for their boys and
+girls during the holidays; extravagance in dress, following the same
+extravagance among their mothers; the increasing cost of education; the
+fuss and turmoil generally made over them--all render them real burdens
+in a house where money is not too plentiful, and where every child that
+comes is not only an additional mouth to feed and an additional body to
+clothe, but a subtractor by just so much from the family fund of
+pleasure.
+
+Even where there is no lack of money, the unavoidable restraints of the
+condition, for at least some months in the year, more than
+counterbalance any sentimental delight to be found in maternity. For,
+before all other things in life, maternity demands unselfishness in
+women; and this is just the one virtue of which women have least at this
+present time--just the one reason why motherhood is at a discount, and
+children are regarded as inflictions instead of blessings.
+
+Few middle-class women are content to bring up their children with the
+old-fashioned simplicity of former times, and to let them share and
+share alike in the family, with only so much difference in their
+treatment as is required by their difference of state; fewer still are
+willing to share in the labor and care that must come with children in
+the easiest-going household, and so to save in the expenses by their own
+work. The shabbiest little wife, with her two financial ends always
+gaping and never meeting, must have her still shabbier little drudge to
+wheel her perambulator, so as to give her an air of fine-ladyhood and
+being too good for work; and the most indolent housekeeper, whose work
+is done in half an hour, cannot find time to go into the gardens or the
+square with nurse and the children, so that she may watch over them
+herself and see that they are properly cared for.
+
+In France, where it is the fashion for mother and _bonne_ to be together
+both out of doors and at home, at least the children are not neglected
+nor ill-treated, as is too often the case with us; and if they are
+improperly managed, according to our ideas, the fault is in the system,
+not in the want of maternal supervision. Here it is a very rare case
+indeed when the mother accompanies the nurse and children; and those
+days when she does are nursery gala-days, to be talked of and remembered
+for weeks after. As they grow older, she may take them occasionally when
+she visits her more intimate friends; but this is for her own pleasure,
+not their good, and is quite beside the question of going with them to
+see that they are properly cared for.
+
+It is to be supposed that each mother has a profound belief in her own
+nurse, and that when she condemns the neglect and harshness shown to
+other children by the servants in charge, she makes a mental reservation
+in favor of her own, and is very sure that nothing improper or cruel
+takes place in _her_ nursery. Her children do not complain, and she
+always tells them to come to her when anything is amiss; on which
+negative evidence she satisfies her soul, and makes sure that all is
+right, because she is too neglectful to see if anything is wrong. She
+does not remember that her children do not complain because they dare
+not.
+
+Dear and beautiful as all mammas are to the small fry in the nursery,
+they are always in a certain sense Junos sitting on the top of Mount
+Olympus, making occasional gracious and benign descents, but practically
+too far removed for useful interference; while nurse is an ever-present
+power, capable of sly pinches and secret raids, as well as of more open
+oppression--a power, therefore, to be propitiated, if only with the
+subservience of a Yezidi, too much afraid of the Evil One to oppose him.
+Wherefore nurse is propitiated, failing the protection of the glorified
+creature just gone to her grand dinner in a cloud of lace and a blaze of
+jewels; and the first lesson taught the youthful Christian in short
+frocks or knickerbockers is not to carry tales down stairs, and by no
+means to let mamma know what nurse desires should be kept secret.
+
+A great deal of other evil, beside these sly beginnings of deceit, is
+taught in the nursery; a great deal of vulgar thought, of superstitious
+fear, of class coarseness. As, indeed, how must it not be when we think
+of the early habits and education of the women taken into the nursery to
+give the first strong indelible impressions to the young souls under
+their care. Many a man with a ruined constitution, and many a woman
+with shattered nerves, can trace back the beginning of their sorrow to
+those neglected childish days of theirs when nurses had it all their own
+way because mamma never looked below the surface, and was satisfied with
+what was said instead of seeing for herself what was done. It is an odd
+state of society which tolerates this transfer of a mother's holiest and
+most important duty into the hands of a mere stranger, hired by the
+month, and never thoroughly known.
+
+Where the organization of the family is of the patriarchal kind--old
+retainers marrying and multiplying about the central home, and carrying
+on a warm personal attachment from generation to generation--this
+transfer of maternal care has not such bad effects; but in our present
+way of life, without love or real relationship between masters and
+servants, and where service is rendered for just so much money down, and
+for nothing more noble, it is a hideous system, and one that makes the
+modern mother utterly inexplicable. We wonder where her mere instincts
+can be, not to speak of her reason, her love, her conscience, her pride.
+Pleasure and self-indulgence have indeed gained tremendous power, in
+these later days, when they can thus break down the force of the
+strongest law of nature, a law stronger even than that of
+self-preservation.
+
+Folly is the true capillary attraction of the moral world, and
+penetrates every stratum of society; and the folly of extravagant attire
+in the drawing-room is reproduced in the nursery. Not content with
+bewildering men's minds, and emptying their husband's purses for the
+enhancement of their own charms, women do the same by their children,
+and the mother who leaves the health, and mind, and temper, and purity
+of her offspring in the keeping of a hired nurse takes especial care of
+the color and cut of the frocks and petticoats; and always with the same
+strain after show, and the same endeavor to make a little look a mickle.
+The children of five hundred a year must look like those of a thousand;
+and those of a thousand must rival the _tenue_ of little lords and
+ladies born in the purple; while the amount of money spent in the
+tradesman-class is a matter of real amazement to those let into the
+secret.
+
+Simplicity of diet, too, is going out with simplicity of dress, with
+simplicity of habits generally; and stimulants and concentrated food are
+now the rule in the nursery, where they mar as many constitutions as
+they make. More than one child of which we have had personal knowledge
+has yielded to disease induced by too stimulating and too heating a
+diet; but artificial habits demand corresponding artificiality of food,
+and so the candle burns at both ends instead of one. Again, as for the
+increasing inability of educated women to nurse their children, even if
+desirous of doing so, that also is a bodily condition brought about by
+an unwholesome and unnatural state of life. Late hours, high living,
+heated blood, and vitiated atmosphere are the causes of this alarming
+physical defect. But it would be too much to expect that women should
+forego their pleasurable indulgences, or do anything disagreeable to
+their senses, for the sake of their offspring. They are not famous for
+looking far ahead on any matter, but to expect them to look beyond
+themselves, and their own present generation, is to expect the great
+miracle that never comes.
+
+
+
+
+THE PRIESTHOOD OF WOMAN.
+
+
+If the female philosophers who plead for the emancipation of their sex
+would stoop from the sublimer heights of Woman's Rights to arguments of
+mere human expediency, we fancy they might find some of their critics
+disposed to listen in a more compliant mood. We can imagine a very good
+point being made out of the simple fact of waste, by some feminine
+advocate who would point out in a businesslike way how much more work
+the world might get through if only woman had fair play. Waste is always
+a pitiful and disagreeable thing, and the waste of whatever reserved
+power may lie at present unused in the breasts of half a million of old
+maids, for instance, is a thought which, with so much to be done around
+us, it is somewhat uncomfortable to dwell much upon. The argument, too,
+might be neatly enforced, just at present, by illustrations from a
+somewhat unexpected quarter.
+
+The Papacy seems determined to carry out its concordat with Woman. If we
+are to credit the latest rumors from the Vatican, Rome has grown
+impatient of the class who now present themselves at her doors as
+candidates for canonization, and has fallen back from the obscure
+Italian beggars and Cochin Chinese martyrs whom she has recently
+delighted to honor on the more illustrious names of Christopher Columbus
+and Joan of Arc. A little courage must have been needed for this retreat
+upon the past, for neither the great navigator nor the heroine found
+much support or appreciation in the prelates of their day; and the
+somewhat uncomfortable fact might be urged by the devil's advocate, in
+the case of the latter, that if Joan was sent to the martyr's stake, it
+was by a spiritual tribunal.
+
+On the other hand, there is the obvious desirableness of showing how
+perfectly at one the Papacy is with the spirit of the age in this double
+compliment to the two primary forces of modern civilization--the
+democratic force of the New World, and the feminine force of the Old.
+The beatification of the Maid of Orleans in its most simple aspect is
+the official recognition, by the Papacy, of the claims of her sex to a
+far larger sphere of human action than has as yet been accorded to them.
+Woman may fairly meet the domestic admonitions of Papal briefs by this
+newly discovered instance of extra-domestic holiness, and may front the
+taunts of cynical objectors with a saintly patron who was the first to
+break through the outer conventionalities of womanhood.
+
+But the figure of Joan of Arc is far more than a convenient answer to
+objections such as these; it is, as we have said, in itself a cogent
+argument for a better use of feminine energies. No life gives one such a
+notion as hers of the vast forces which lie hidden, and as it would seem
+wasted, in the present mass of women. It is impossible to be content
+with little projects of utilization such as those which throw open to
+her the telegraph-office or the printing-press, or even with the more
+ambitious claims for her admission to the Bench or the dissecting-room,
+when one gets a glimpse such as this of energies latent within the
+female breast which are strong enough to change the face of the world.
+
+It is difficult to suppose that the woman of our day is less energetic
+than the woman of the fifteenth century, or that her piano and her
+workbag sum up the whole of her possibilities any more than her
+spinning-wheel or her sheep-tending exhausted those of the Maid of
+Domremy. The ordinary occupations of woman strike us in this light as
+mere jets of vapor, useful indeed as a relief to the volcanic pressure
+within, but insufficient to remove the peril of an eruption. There must
+be some truth in the spasmodic utterances of the fevered sibyls who
+occasionally bare the female heart to us in three-volume novels, and the
+gaiety and frivolity of the life of woman is a mere mask for the wild,
+tossing emotions within. It is a standing danger, we own; and besides
+the danger there is, as we have said, the waste and the pity of it.
+
+A little closer examination, however, may suggest some doubt whether
+this waste of power is not more apparent than real. In the physical
+world, Mr. Grove has told us that the apparent destruction of a force is
+only its transformation into a force which is correlative to it; that
+motion, for instance, when lost is again detected in the new form of
+heat, and heat in that of light. But the theory is far from being true
+of the physical world only, and, had we space here, nothing would be
+easier than to trace the same correlation of forces through the moral
+nature of man. For waste, then, in the particular instance which is
+before us, we may perhaps substitute transformation.
+
+Professing herself the most rigid of conservatives, woman gives vent to
+this heroic energy for which the times offer no natural outlet in the
+radical modifications which she is continually introducing into modern
+society. We overlook the manifold ways in which she is acting on and
+changing the state of things around us, just because we are deceived by
+the apparent unity with which the whole sex advances toward marriage. We
+forget the large margin of those who fail in attaining their end, and we
+act as if the great mass of unmarried women simply represented a waste
+and lost force. And yet it is just this waste force which tells on
+society more powerfully than all.
+
+The energies which fail in finding a human object of domestic adoration
+become the devotional energies of the world. The force which would have
+made the home makes the Church. It is really amazing to watch, if we
+look back through the ages, the silent steady working of this feminine
+impulse, and to see how bit by bit it has recovered the ground of which
+Christianity robbed Woman. We wonder that no woman poet has ever turned,
+like Schiller, to the gods of old.
+
+In every heathen religion of the Western world woman occupied a
+prominent place. Priestess or prophetess, she stood in all ministerial
+offices on an equality with man. It was only the irruption of religions
+from the East, the faiths of Isis or Mithras, which swept woman from the
+temple. Christianity shared the Oriental antipathy to the ministerial
+service of woman; it banished her from altar and from choir; in darker
+times it drove her to the very porch of its shrines. The Church of after
+ages dealt with woman as the Empire dealt with its Caesars; it was ready
+to grant her apotheosis, but only when she was safely out of the world.
+It gave her canonization, and it gives it to her still, but not the
+priesthood. No rout could seem more complete, but woman is never greater
+than when she is routed.
+
+The newly-instituted parson of to-day, brimming over with apostolic
+texts which forbid woman to speak in church, no sooner arrives at his
+parish than he finds himself in a spiritual world whose impulse and
+guidance is wholly in the hands of woman. Expel woman as you will,
+_tamen usque recurrit_. Woman is, in fact, the parish. Within, in her
+lowest spiritual form, as the parson's wife, she inspires and sometimes
+writes his sermons. Without, as the bulk of his congregation, she
+watches over his orthodoxy, verifies his texts, visits his schools, and
+harasses his sick. "Ah, Betsy!" said a sick woman to a wealthier sister
+the other day, "it's of some use being well off; you won't be obliged
+when you die to have a district-lady worriting you with a chapter." But
+the district-lady has others to "worrit" in life besides the sick.
+
+Mrs. Hannah More tells us exultantly in her journal how successful were
+her raids upon the parsons, and in what dread all unspiritual ministers
+stood of her visitations. And the same rigid censorship prevails in many
+quarters still. The preacher who thunders so defiantly against spiritual
+foes is trembling all the time beneath the critical eye that is watching
+him from the dim recesses of an unworldly bonnet, and the critical
+finger which follows him with so merciless an accuracy in his texts.
+Impelled, guided, censured by woman, we can hardly wonder if in nine
+cases out of ten the parson turns woman himself, and if the usurpation
+of woman's rights in the services of religion has been deftly avenged by
+the subjugation of the usurpers. Expelled from the Temple, woman has
+simply put her priesthood into commission, and discharges her
+ministerial duties by deputy.
+
+It was impossible for woman to remain permanently content with a
+position like this; but it is only of late that a favorable conjuncture
+of affairs has enabled her to quit it for a more obtrusive one. The
+great Church movement which the _Apologia_ has made so familiar to us in
+its earlier progress came some ten years ago to a stand. Some of its
+most eminent leaders had seceded to another communion, it had been
+weakened by the Gorham decision, and by its own internal dissensions.
+Whether on the side of dogma or ritual, it seemed to have lost for the
+moment its old impulse--to have lost heart and life.
+
+It was in this emergency that woman came to the front. She claimed to
+revive the old religious position which had been assigned to her by the
+monasticism of the middle ages, but to revive it under different
+conditions and with a different end. The mediaeval Church had, indeed,
+glorified, as much as words could glorify, the devotion of woman; but
+once become a devotee, it had locked her in the cloister. As far as
+action on the world without was concerned, the veil served simply as a
+species of suicide, and the impulses of woman, after all the crowns and
+pretty speeches of her religious counsellors, found themselves bottled
+up within stout stone walls and as inactive as before. From this strait,
+woman, at the time we speak of, delivered herself by the organization of
+charity.
+
+In lines of a certain beauty, though somewhat difficult in their
+grammatical construction, she has been described as a ministering angel
+when pain and anguish wring the brow; and it was in her capacity of
+ministering angel that she now placed herself at the Church movement and
+advanced upon the world. It was impossible to lock these beneficent
+beings up, for the whole scope of their existence lay in the outer
+world; but every day, as it developed their ecclesiastical position,
+made even their admirers recognise the wise discretion of the middle
+ages. Long before the Ritualists themselves, they, with a feminine
+instinct, had discerned the value of costume. The district visitor, whom
+nobody had paid the smallest attention to in the common vestments of the
+world, became a sacred being as she donned the crape and hideous bonnet
+of the "Sister."
+
+Within the new establishment there was all the excitement of a perfectly
+novel existence, of time broken up as women like it to be broken up in
+perpetual services and minute obligation of rules, the dramatic change
+of name, and the romantic self-abnegation of obedience. The "Mother
+Superior" took the place of the tyrant of another sex who had hitherto
+claimed the submission of woman, but she was something more to her
+"children" than the husband or father whom they had left in the world
+without. In all matters, ecclesiastical as well as civil, she claimed
+within her dominions to be supreme. The quasi-sacerdotal dignity, the
+pure religious ministration which ages have stolen from her, was quietly
+reassumed. She received confessions, she imposed penances, she drew up
+offices of devotion. Wherever the community settled, it settled as a new
+spiritual power.
+
+If the clergyman of the parish ventured on advice or suggestion, he was
+told that the Sisterhood must preserve its own independence of action,
+and was snubbed home again for his pains. The Mother Superior, in fact,
+soon towered into a greatness far beyond the reach of ordinary parsons.
+She kept her own tame chaplain, and she kept him in very edifying
+subjection. From a realm completely her own, the influence of woman
+began now to tell upon the world without. Little colonies of Sisters
+planted here and there annexed parish after parish. Sometimes the
+parson was worried into submission by incessant calls of the most
+justifiable nature on his time and patience. Sometimes he was bribed
+into submission by the removal from his shoulders of the burden of alms.
+It was only when he was thoroughly tamed that he was rewarded by pretty
+stoles and gorgeous vestments.
+
+Astonished congregations saw their church blossom in purple and red, and
+frontal and hanging told of the silent energy of the group of Sisters.
+The parson found himself nowhere in his own parish; every detail managed
+for him, every care removed, and all independence gone. If it suited the
+ministering angels to make a legal splash, he found himself landed in
+the Law Courts. If they took it into their heads to seek another fold,
+every one assumed, as a matter of course, that their pastor would go
+too. At such a rate of progress the great object of woman's ambition
+must soon come in view, and the silent control over the priest will
+merge in the open claim to the priesthood.
+
+It may be in silent preparation for such a claim that the ecclesiastical
+hierarchy are taking, year by year, a more feminine position. The Houses
+of Convocation, for instance, present us with a lively image of what the
+bitterest censor of woman would be delighted to predict as the result of
+her admission to senatorial honors. There is the same interminable flow
+of mellifluous talk, the same utter inability to devise or to understand
+an argument, the same bitterness and hard words, the same skill in
+little tricks and diplomacies, the same practical incompetence, which
+have been denounced as characteristics of woman. The caution, the
+finesse, the sly decorum, the inability to take a large view of any
+question, the patience, the masterly inaction, the vicious outbreaks of
+temper which now and then break the inaction of a Bishop, may sometimes
+lead us to ask whether the Episcopal office is not one admirably suited
+for the genius of woman.
+
+But she must stoop to conquer heights like these, and it is probable
+with a view to a slow ascent towards them through the ages to come that
+she is now moulding the mind of the curate at her will. He, we have been
+told, is commonly the first lady of the parish; and what he now is in
+theory, a century hence may find him in fact. It would be difficult even
+now to detect any difference of sex in the triviality of purpose, the
+love of gossip, the petty interests, the feeble talk, the ignorance, the
+vanity, the love of personal display, the white hand dangled over the
+pulpit, the becoming vestment and the embroidered stole, which we are
+learning gradually to look upon as attributes of the British curate. So
+perfect, indeed, is the imitation that the excellence of her work may
+perhaps defeat its own purpose; and the lacquered imitation of woman,
+"dilettante, delicate-handed," as Tennyson saw and sang of him, may
+satisfy the world, and for long ages prevent any anxious inquiry after
+the real feminine Brummagem.
+
+
+
+
+THE FUTURE OF WOMAN.
+
+
+Woman is a thing of accident and spoilt in the making says the greatest
+of the schoolmen, but we are far from denying her right to vindicate
+something more than an accidental place in the world. After all that can
+be urged as to the glory of self-sacrifice, the greatness of silent
+devotion, or the compensations for her want of outer influence in the
+inner power which she exerts through the medium of the family and the
+home, there remains an odd sort of sympathy with the woman who asserts
+that she is every bit as good as her master, and that there is no reason
+why she should retire behind the domestic veil. Partly, of course, this
+arises from our natural sympathy with pluck of any sort; partly, too,
+there is the pleasure we feel in a situation which may be absurd, but
+which, at any rate, is novel and piquant; partly, there is an impatience
+with woman as she is, and a sort of lingering hope that something better
+is in store for her.
+
+The most sceptical, in fact, of woman's censors cannot help feeling a
+suspicion that, after all, strong-minded women may be in the right. As
+one walks home in the cool night-air it seems impossible to believe
+that girls are to go on for ever chattering the frivolous nonsense they
+do chatter, or living the absolutely frivolous lives they do live. And,
+of course, the impression that a good time is coming for them is
+immensely strengthened if one happens to have fallen in love. One's eyes
+have got a little sharpened to see the real human soul that stirs
+beneath all that sham life of idleness and vanity, but the vanity and
+the idleness vexes more than ever. If we come across Miss Hominy at such
+moments, we are extremely likely to find her a great deal less
+ridiculous than we fancied her, and to listen with a certain gravity to
+her plea for the enfranchisement of women.
+
+It is not that we go all lengths with her; we stare a little perhaps at
+the logical consequences on which she piques herself, and at the
+panorama of woman as she is to be which she spreads before us, at the
+consulting barrister waiting in her chambers and the lady advocate
+flourishing her maiden brief; our pulse throbs a little awkwardly at the
+thought of being tested by medical fingers and thumbs of such a delicate
+order, and we hum a few lines of the _Princess_ as Miss Hominy poses
+herself for a Lady Professor. Still we cannot help a half conviction
+that even this would be better than the present style of thing, the
+pretty face that kindles over the news of a fresh opera and gives you
+the latest odds on the Derby, the creature of head-achy mornings, of
+afternoons frittered on lounges, and bonnet-strings, of nights whirled
+away in hot rooms and chatter on stairs. There are moments, we repeat,
+when, looking at woman as she is, we could almost wish to wake the next
+morning into a world where all women were Miss Hominys.
+
+But when we do wake we find the world much what it was before, and
+pretty faces just as indolent and as provoking as they were, and a sort
+of ugly after-question cropping up in our minds whether we had exactly
+realized the meaning of our wish, or conceived the nature of a world in
+which all women were Miss Hominys. There is always a little difficulty
+in fancying the world other than we find it; but it is really worth a
+little trouble, before we enfranchise woman, to try to imagine the
+results of her enfranchisement, the Future of Woman. In the first place,
+it would amazingly reduce the variety of the world. As it is, we live in
+a double world, and enjoy the advantages of a couple of hemispheres. It
+is an immense luxury for men, when they are tired out with the worry and
+seriousness of life, to be able to walk into a totally different
+atmosphere, where nothing is looked at or thought about or spoken of in
+exactly the same way as in their own.
+
+When Mr. Gladstone, for instance, unbends (if he ever does unbend), and,
+weary of the Irish question, asks his pretty neighbor what she thinks of
+it, he gets into a new world at once. Her vague idea of the Irish
+question, founded on a passing acquaintance with Moore's Melodies and a
+wild regret after Donnybrook fair, may not be exactly adequate to the
+magnitude of the interests involved, but it is at any rate novel and
+amusing. It is not a House of Commons view of the subject, but then the
+great statesman is only too glad to be rid of the House of Commons.
+Thoughtful politicians may deplore that the sentimental beauty of
+Charles I. and the pencil of Vandyke have made every English girl a
+Malignant; but after one has got bored with Rushworth and Clarendon,
+there is a certain pleasure at finding a great constitutional question
+summarily settled by the height of a sovereign's brow.
+
+It is a relief too, now and then, to get out of the world of morals into
+the world of woman; out of the hard sphere of right and wrong into a
+world like Mr. Swinburne's, where judgment goes by the beautiful, and
+where red hair makes all the difference between Elizabeth and Mary of
+Scotland. Above all, there is the delightful consciousness of
+superiority. The happiness of the blessed in the next world consists,
+according to Sir John Mandeville, in their being able to behold the
+agonies of the lost; and half the satisfaction men have in their own
+sense and vigor and success would be lost if they could not enjoy the
+delicious view of the world where sense and energy go for nothing.
+
+Whether all this would be worth sacrificing simply to acquire a woman
+who could sympathize with, and support, a man in the stress and battle
+of life, is a question we do not pretend to decide; but it is certain
+that the enfranchisement of woman would be the passing of a social Act
+of Uniformity, and the loss of half the grace and variety of life. Here,
+as elsewhere, "the low sun makes the color," and the very excellences of
+Miss Hominy carry her aloft into regions of white light, where our
+eyes, even if dazzled, get a little tired with the monotony of the
+intellectual Haze.
+
+The result of such a change on woman herself would be something far
+greater and more revolutionary. It is not merely that, as in the case of
+men, she would lose the sense and comfort of another world of thought
+and action, and of its contrast with the world in which she lives; it is
+that she would lose her own world altogether. Conceive, for instance,
+woman obliged to take life in earnest, to study as men study, to work as
+men work. The change would be no mere modification, but the utter
+abolition of her whole present existence. The whole theory of woman's
+life is framed on the hypothesis of sheer indolence. She is often
+charming, but she is always idle. There is an immense ingenuity and a
+perfect grace about her idleness; the efforts, in fact, of generations
+of cultivated women have been directed, and successfully directed, to
+this special object of securing absolute indolence without either the
+inner tedium or the outer contempt which indolence is supposed to bring
+in its train.
+
+Woman can always say with Titus, "I have wasted a day," but the
+confession wears an air of triumph rather than regret. A world of
+trivial occupations, a whole system of social life, has been laboriously
+invented that the day might be wasted gracefully and without boredom. A
+little riding, a little reading, a little dabbling with the paint-brush,
+a little strumming on the piano, a little visiting, a little shopping,
+a little dancing, and a general trivial chat scattered over the whole,
+make up the day of an English girl in town. Transplant her into the
+country, and the task of frittering away existence, though it becomes
+more difficult, is faced just as gallantly as before. Mudie comes to the
+rescue with the back novels which she was too busy to get through in the
+season; there is the scamper from one country house to another, there
+are the flirtations to keep her hand in, the pets to be fed, the cousins
+to extemporize a mimic theatre, the curate--if worst comes to worst--to
+try a little ritualism upon. With these helps a country day, what with
+going to bed early and getting up late, may be frittered away as
+aimlessly as a day in town.
+
+Woman may fairly object, we think, to abolish at one fell swoop such an
+ingenious fabric of idleness as this. A revolution in the whole system
+of social life, in the whole conception and drift of feminine existence,
+is a little too much to ask. As it is, woman wraps herself in her
+indolence, and is perfectly satisfied with her lot. She assumes, and the
+world has at least granted the assumption, that her little hands were
+never made to do anything which any rougher hands can do for them. Man
+has got accustomed to serve as her hewer of wood and drawer of water,
+and to expect nothing from her but poetry and refinement. It is a little
+too much to ask her to go back to the position of the squaw, and to do
+any work for herself. But it is worse to ask her to remodel the world
+around her, on the understanding that henceforth duty and toil and
+self-respect are to take the place of frivolity and indolence and
+adoration.
+
+The great passion which knits the two sexes together presents a yet
+stronger difficulty. To men, busy with the work of the world, there is
+no doubt that, however delightful, love takes the form of a mere
+interruption of their real life. They allow themselves the interval of
+its indulgence, as they allow themselves any other holiday, simply as
+something in itself temporary and accidental; as life, indeed, grows
+more complex, there is an increasing tendency to reduce the amount of
+time and attention which men devote to their affections. Already the
+great philosopher of the age has pronounced that the passion of love
+plays far too important a part in human existence, and that it is a
+terrible obstacle to human progress.
+
+The general temper of the times echoes the sentence of Mr. Mill. The
+enthusiastic votary who has been pouring his vows at the feet of his
+mistress consoles himself, as he leaves her, with the thought that
+engagements cannot last for ever, and that he shall soon be able to get
+back to the real world of business and of life. He presses his beloved
+one, with all the eloquence of passion, to fix an early day for their
+union, but the eloquence has a very practical bearing. While Corydon is
+piping to Phyllis, he is anxious about the engagements he is missing,
+and the distance he is losing in the race for life. But Phyllis remains
+the nymph of passion and poetry and romance.
+
+Time has no meaning for her; she is not neglecting any work; she is
+only idle, as she always is idle. But love throws a new glory and a new
+interest around her indolence. The endless little notes with which she
+worries the Post-Office and her friends become suddenly sacred and
+mysterious. The silly little prattle hushes into confidential whispers.
+Every crush through the season, becomes the scene of a reunion of two
+hearts which have been parted for the eternity of twenty-four hours.
+Love, in fact, does not in the least change woman's life, or give it new
+earnestness or a fresh direction; but it makes it infinitely more
+interesting, and it heightens the enjoyment of wasting a day by a new
+sense of power. For that brief space of triumph Phyllis is able to make
+Corydon waste his day too. The more he writhes and wriggles under the
+compulsion, the more lingering looks he casts back on the work he has
+quitted, the greater her victory.
+
+He cannot decently confess that he is tired of the little comedy in
+which he takes so romantic a part, and certainly his fellow actress will
+not help him to the confession. By dint of acting it, indeed, she comes
+at last to a certain belief in her _role_. She really imagines herself
+to be very busy, to have sacrificed her leisure as well as her heart to
+the object of her devotion. She scolds him for his backwardness in not
+more thoroughly sacrificing his leisure to her. Work may be very
+important to him, but it is of less importance to the self-sacrificing
+being who hasn't had one moment to finish the third volume of the last
+sensational novel since she plighted her troth to this monster of
+ingratitude! Of course a man likes to be flattered, and does as much as
+he can in the way of believing in the little comedy too; in fact, it is
+all amazingly graceful and entertaining on the one side and on the
+other. Our only doubt is whether this graceful and entertaining mode of
+interrupting all the serious business of life will not be treated rather
+mercilessly by enfranchised woman. How will the enchantment of passion
+survive when the object of our adoration can only spare us an hour from
+her medical cases, or defers an interview because she is choked with
+fresh briefs? One of two results must clearly follow. Either the great
+Westminster philosopher is right, and love will play a far less
+important part than it has done in human affairs, or else it will
+concentrate itself, and take a far more intense and passionate character
+than it exhibits now.
+
+We can quite conceive that the very difficulty of the new relations may
+give them a new fire and vigor, and that the women of the future,
+looking back on the old months of indolent coquetry, may feel a certain
+contempt for souls which can fritter away the grandeur of passion as
+they fritter away the grandeur of life. But even the gain of passion
+will hardly compensate us for the loss of variety. All this playing with
+love has a certain pretty independence about it, and leaves woman's
+individuality where it found it. Passion must of necessity whirl both
+beings, in the unity of a common desire, into one. And so we get back to
+the old problem of the monotony of life. But it is just this monotonous
+identity to which civilization, politics, and society are all visibly
+tending. Railways will tunnel Alps for us, democracy will extinguish
+heroes, and raise mankind to a general level of commonplace
+respectability; woman's enfranchisement will level the social world, and
+leave between sex and sex the difference--even if it leaves that--of a
+bonnet.
+
+
+
+
+COSTUME AND ITS MORALS.
+
+
+Nothing is more decisively indicative of the real value or necessity of
+a thing than the fact that, while its presence is hardly noticeable, it
+is immediately missed and asked for when it disappears; and it is thus
+that the paramount importance of clothing asserts itself by the
+conspicuousness of its absence. Of course the first purpose of dress is,
+or should be, decency, and for this, quantity rather than quality is
+looked for. But, as with the little cloud no larger than a man's hand,
+so from the primary fig-leaf or first element of dress, how great things
+have arisen! In respect of amplification, dress may be said to have
+attained its maximum when men wore ruffs which nearly concealed their
+heads, and shoes a quarter of a yard longer than their feet; but
+"fashion" has its day, and now dress threatens to dwindle into something
+not far from its original or fig-leaf dimensions.
+
+Another perfectly legitimate object of dress is attractiveness, so that
+by its aid our persons may be set off to the best advantage; dress
+should also be individual and symbolic, so as to indicate clearly the
+position and character which we desire to obtain and hold. It is not of
+men's attire that we have now to speak; that has been settled for them
+by the tailors' strike, which practically ordained that he that was
+shabby should be shabby, or even shabbier still, and he that had allowed
+himself to be thrust into the straitened trousers and scanty coatee of
+last year should continue to exhibit his proportions long after the
+grotesqueness of his figure had been recognised even by himself.
+
+But it is of the dress of our women that we are compelled to testify,
+and it can hardly be denied that at the present moment it offends
+grievously in three particulars. It is inadequate for decency; it lacks
+that truthfulness which is, and should be, the base of all that is
+attractive and beautiful; and in its symbolism it is in the highest
+degree objectionable, for it not only aims at what is unreal and false,
+but it simulates that which is positively hateful and meretricious, so
+that it is difficult now for even a practised eye to distinguish the
+high-born maiden or matron of Belgravia from the Anonymas who haunt the
+drive and fill our streets.
+
+This indictment is, it may be said, a severe one; but if we examine, so
+far as male critics may venture to do, the costume of a fashionable
+woman of the day, it can hardly be said to be unjust. The apparent
+object of modern female dress is to assimilate its wearers as nearly as
+possible in appearance to women of a certain class--the class to which
+it was formerly hardly practicable to allude, and yet be intelligible to
+young ladies; but all that is changed, and the habits and customs of the
+women of the _demi-monde_ are now studied as if they were indeed
+curious, but exceptionally admirable also, and thus a study unseemly and
+unprofitable has begotten a spirit of imitation which has achieved a
+degrading success.
+
+"Our modest matrons meet," not "to stare the strumpet down," but to
+compare notes, to get hints, and to engage in a kind of friendly
+rivalry--in short, to pay that homage to Vice, and in a very direct way
+too, which Vice is said formerly to have paid to Virtue. Paint and
+powder are of course the first requisites for the end in view, and these
+adjuncts have to be laid on with such skill as the _debutante_ or her
+toilette-maid possesses, which is sometimes so small as to leave their
+handiwork disgustingly coarse and apparent.
+
+There are pearl-powder, violet-powder, rouge, bistre for the eyelids,
+belladonna for the eyes, whitelead and blacklead, yellow dye and mineral
+acids for the hair--all tending to the utter destruction of both hair
+and skin. The effect of this "diaphanous" complexion and "aurified" hair
+(we borrow the expressions) in a person intended by nature to be dark,
+or swarthy, is most comical; sometimes the whitelead is used so
+unsparingly that it has quite a blue tint, which glistens until the face
+looks more like a death's head anointed with phosphorus and oil for
+theatrical purposes than the head of a Christian gentlewoman. It may be
+interesting to know, and we have the information from high, because
+_soi-disant_ fashionable authority, that the reign of golden locks and
+blue-white visages is drawing to a close, and that it is to be followed
+by bronze complexions and blue-black hair--_a l'Africaine_ we presume.
+
+When fashionable Madame has, to her own satisfaction, painted and
+varnished her face, she then proceeds, like Jezebel, to tire her head,
+and, whether she has much hair or little, she fixes on to the back of it
+a huge nest of coarse hair generally well baked in order to free it from
+the parasites with which it abounded when it first adorned the person of
+some Russian or North-German peasant girl. Of course this gives an
+unnaturally large and heavy appearance to the cerebellar region; but
+nature is not exactly what is aimed at, still less refinement.
+
+If this style be not approved of, there is yet another fashion--namely,
+to cut the hair short in a crop, _creper_ it, curl it, frizzle it,
+bleach it, burn it, and otherwise torture it until it has about as much
+life in it as last year's hay; and then to shampoo it, rumple it, and
+tousle it, until the effect is to produce the aspect of a madwoman in
+one of her worst fits. This method, less troublesome and costly than the
+other, may be considered even more striking, so that it is largely
+adopted by a number of persons who are rather disreputable, and poor. As
+is well known, not all of the asinine tribe wear asses' ears;
+nevertheless some of these votaries of dress find their ears too long,
+or too large, or ill-placed, or, what comes to the same thing,
+inconveniently placed, but a prettier or better-shaped pair are easily
+purchased, admirably moulded in gutta-percha or some other plastic
+material; they are delicately colored, fitted up with earrings and a
+spring apparatus, and they are then adjusted on to the head, the
+despised natural ears being of course carefully hidden from view.
+
+It is long enough since a bonnet meant shelter to the face or protection
+to the head; that fragment of a bonnet which at present represents the
+head-gear, and which was some years ago worn on the back of the head and
+nape of the neck, is now poised on the front, and ornamented with birds,
+portions of beasts, reptiles, and insects. We have seen a bonnet
+composed of a rose and a couple of feathers, another of two or three
+butterflies or as many beads and a bit of lace, and a third represented
+by five green leaves joined at the stalks. A white or spotted veil is
+thrown over the visage, in order that the adjuncts that properly belong
+to the theatre may not be immediately detected in the glare of daylight;
+and thus, with diaphanous tinted face, large painted eyes, and
+stereotyped smile, the lady goes forth looking much more as if she had
+stepped out of the green room of a theatre, or from a Haymarket saloon,
+than from an English home.
+
+But it is in evening costume that our women have reached the minimum of
+dress and the maximum of brass. We remember a venerable old lady whose
+ideas of decorum were such that in her speech all above the foot was
+ankle, and all below the chin was chest; but now the female bosom is
+less the subject of a revelation than the feature of an exposition, and
+charms that were once reserved are now made the common property of every
+looker on. A costume which has been described as consisting of a smock,
+a waistband, and a frill seems to exceed the bounds of honest
+liberality, and resembles most perhaps the attire mentioned by Rabelais,
+"nothing before and nothing behind, with sleeves of the same." Not very
+long ago two gentlemen were standing together at the Opera. "Did you
+ever see anything like that?" inquired one, with a significant glance,
+directing the eyes of his companion to the uncovered bust of a lady
+immediately below. "Not since I was weaned," was the suggestive reply.
+We are not aware whether the speaker was consciously or unconsciously
+reproducing a well-known archiepiscopal _mot_.
+
+Though our neighbors are not strait-laced, so far as bathing-costume is
+concerned, they are less tolerant of the nude than we are in this
+highly-favored land. There was lately a story in one of the French
+papers that at a certain ball a lady was requested to leave the room
+because a chain of wrought gold, suspended from shoulder to shoulder,
+was the sole protection which it seemed to her well to wear on her
+bosom. To have made the toilette correspond throughout, the dress should
+have consisted of a crinoline skirt, which, though not so ornamental,
+would have been not less admirable and more effective.
+
+Of course there are women to whom nature has been niggardly in the
+matter of roundness of form, but even these need not despair; if they
+cannot show their own busts, they can show something nearly as good,
+since we read the following, which we forbear to translate:--"Autre
+excentricite. C'est l'invention des _poitrines adherentes_ a l'usage
+des dames trop etherees. Il s'agit d'un systeme en caoutchouc rose, qui
+s'adapte a la place vide comme une ventouse a, la peau, et qui suit les
+mouvements de la respiration avec une precision mathematique et
+parfaite."
+
+Of those limbs which it is still forbidden to expose absolutely, the
+form and contour can at least be put in relief by insisting on the
+skirts being gored and straightened to the utmost; indeed, some of the
+riding-habits we have seen worn are in this respect so contrived that,
+when viewed from behind, especially when the wearer is not of too
+fairy-like proportions, they resemble a pair of tight trousers rather
+than the full flowing robe which we remember as so graceful and becoming
+to a woman. It will be observed that the general aim of all these
+adventitious aids is to give an impression of earth and the fullness
+thereof, to appear to have a bigger cerebellum, a more sensuous
+development of limb, and a greater abundance of flesh than can be either
+natural or true; but we are almost at a loss how to express the next
+point of ambition with which the female mind has become inspired.
+
+The women who are not as those who love their lords wish to be--indeed,
+as we have heard, those who have no lords of their own to love--have
+conceived the notion that, by simulating an "interesting condition" (we
+select the phrase accepted as the most delicate), they will add to their
+attractions; and for this purpose an article of toilet--an india-rubber
+anterior bustle--called the _demi-temps_, has been invented, and is worn
+beneath the dress, nominally to make the folds fall properly, but in
+reality, as the name betrays, to give the appearance of a woman advanced
+in pregnancy.
+
+No person will be found to say that the particular condition, when real,
+is unseemly or ridiculous. What it is when assumed, and for such a
+purpose--whether it is not all that and something worse--we leave our
+readers to decide for themselves. It is said that one distinguished
+personage first employed crinoline in order to render more graceful her
+appearance while in this situation; but these ladies with their
+ridiculous _demi-temps_, without excuse as without shame, travesty
+nature in their own persons in a way which a low-comedy actress would be
+ashamed to do in a tenth-rate theatre. The name is French, let us hope
+the idea is also; and this reminds us of the title of a little piece
+lately played in Paris by amateurs for some charitable purpose--_Il n'y
+a plus d'enfants._ No; in France they may indeed say, "It is true _il
+n'y a plus d'enfants_, but then have we not invented the _demi-temps_?"
+
+And if each separate point of female attire and decoration is a sham, so
+the whole is often a deception and a fraud. It is not true that by
+taking thought one cannot add a cubit to one's stature, for ladies, by
+taking thought about it, do add, if not a cubit, at least considerably,
+to their height, which, like almost everything about them, is often
+unreal. With high heels, _toupe_, and hat, we may calculate that about
+four or five inches are altogether borrowed for the occasion. Thus it
+comes to be a grave matter of doubt, when a man marries, how much is
+real of the woman who has become his wife, or how much of her is her own
+only in the sense that she has bought, and possibly may have paid for
+it. To use the words of an old writer, "As with rich furred conies,
+their cases are far better than their bodies; and, like the bark of a
+cinnamon-tree, which is dearer than the whole bulk, their outward
+accoutrements are far more precious than their inward endowments."
+
+Of the wife elect, her bones, her debts, and her caprices may be the
+only realities which she can bestow on her husband. All the rest--hair,
+teeth, complexion, ears, bosom, figure, including the _demi-temps_--are
+alike an imposition and a falsehood. In such case we should recommend,
+for the sake of both parties, that during at least the wedding-tour, the
+same precautions should be observed as when Louis XV. travelled with
+"the unblushing Chateauroux with her bandboxes and rougepots at his
+side, so that at every new station a wooden gallery had to be run up
+between their lodgings."
+
+It may be said that in all this we are ungenerous and ungrateful, and
+that in discussing the costume of women we are touching on a question
+which pertains to women more than to men. But is that so? Are we not by
+thus exposing what is false, filthy, and meretricious, seeking to lead
+what was once dignified by the name of "the fair sex" from a course
+alike unbecoming and undignified to one more worthy of the sex and its
+attributes? Most men like to please women, and most women like to please
+men. For, as has been well said, "Pour plaire aux femmes il faut etre
+considere des hommes, et pour etre considere des hommes il faut savoir
+plaire aux femmes."
+
+We have a right to suppose that women do not adopt a fashion or a
+costume unless they suppose that it will add to their attractions in
+general, and possibly also please men in particular. This being so, it
+may be well to observe that these fashions do not please or attract men,
+for we know they are but the inventions of some vulgar, selfish
+_perruquier_ or _modiste_. We may add that if we want to study the nude
+we can do so in the sculpture galleries, or among the Tableaux Vivants,
+at our ease; and that for well-bred or well-educated and well-born
+women, or even for only fashionable and fast women, to approximate in
+their manners, habits, and dress to the members of the _demi-monde_ is a
+mistake, and a grievous one, if they wish to be really and adequately
+appreciated by men whose good opinion, if not more, they would desire to
+possess.
+
+
+
+
+THE FADING FLOWER.
+
+
+If there is any part of man's conduct which proves more conclusively
+than another the baseness of his ingratitude, it is his indifference to
+the Fading Flower. Woman may well wonder at the charm which prostrates
+the heavy Guardsman at the feet of the belle of the season. Even the
+most ardent of worshippers at such a shrine must, one would think,
+desire in their deity a little more sweetness and light. But the beauty
+of eighteen summers is trained to look on worship as simply her due, and
+to regard amiability as a mere superfluity. She knows she can summon an
+adorer by one beckon of her fan, and dismiss him by another. A bow will
+repay the most finished of pretty speeches, and conversation can be
+conducted at the least possible expense by the slight trouble of
+recollecting who was at Lady A.'s ball, and the yet slighter trouble of
+guessing who is likely to be at Lady C.'s.
+
+It is utterly needless to bestow any labor on society when society takes
+it as a crowning favor to be suffered simply to adore. There is a
+certain grandeur, therefore, of immobility about the English beauty, a
+statuesque perfection which no doubt has great merits of its own. But it
+must be owned that it is not amusing, and that it is only the intensity
+of our worship which saves us from feeling it to be dull. Beauty is apt
+to be a little heavy on the stairs. A shade of distress flits over the
+loveliest of faces if we stray for a moment beyond the happy
+hunting-grounds of the ball-room or the Opera, the last Academy or the
+next Horticultural. Beautiful beings are made, they feel, not to amuse,
+but to be amused. The one object of their enthusiasm is the "funny
+Bishop" who turns a great debate into a jest for the entertainment of
+his fair friends in the Ladies' Gallery. The object of their social
+preference is the young wit who lounges up to tell his last little
+story, and then, without boring them for a reply, lounges away again.
+The debt which they owe to society is simply the morning ride which
+keeps them blooming through the season. The debt which society owes to
+them is that eternal succession of gay nothings which keeps London in a
+whirl till the grouse are ready for the sacrifice. In a word, woman in
+her earlier stages is simply receptive.
+
+Light and sweetness come in with the Fading Flower. It is when the shy
+retreat of the elder sons makes way for the shyer approach of their
+younger brothers that woman becomes fragrant and intelligent. The old
+indifference quickens into a subdued vivacity; Hermione descends from
+her pedestal and warms into flesh and blood. She turns chatty, and her
+chat insensibly deepens into conversation. She discovers a new interest
+in life and in the last novel of the season. She ventures on the
+confines of poetry, and if she does not read Mr. Tennyson's _Lucretius_,
+she keeps his photograph in her album. She flings herself with a far
+greater ardor into the mysteries of croquet. She has been known to
+garden. As petal after petal floats down to earth she becomes artistic.
+She reads, she talks Mr. Ruskin. She has her own views on Venice and its
+Doges, her enthusiasm over Alps and artisans. The slow approach of
+autumn brings her to politics. She is deep in Mr. Disraeli's novels, and
+quotes Mr. Gladstone's Homer. She speculates on Charlie's chances for
+the county. She knows why the Home Secretary was absent from the last
+division. The drop of another petal warns her further afield. She is
+manly now; she comes in at breakfast with her hair about her ears, and a
+tale of the gallop she has had across country. She takes you over the
+farm, and laughs at your ignorance of pigs. She peeps into the
+odoriferous sanctum upstairs, and owns to a taste for cigarettes. She is
+slightly horsey, and knows to a pound the value of her mare. Another
+season, and she is interested in Church questions, and inquires what is
+the next "new thing" at St. Andrew's. She adores Lord Shaftesbury, or
+works frontals for St. Gogmagog. She collects for the Irish missions, or
+misses an _entree_ on Eves. It is only as woman fades that we realize
+the versatility, the inexhaustible resources, of woman.
+
+The one scene, however, where the Fading Flower is perhaps seen at her
+best is the County Archaeological Meeting. Of all rural delusions this is
+perhaps the pleasantest, and if the name is forbidding, the Fading
+Flower knows how little there is in a name. About half a dozen old
+gentlemen, of course, take the thing in grand earnest. It is beyond
+measure amusing to peep over the learned Secretary's shoulder, to see
+the gray heads wagging and the spectacles in full play over the list of
+promised papers, to watch the carefully planned details, the solemn
+array of morning meetings, the grave excursions from abbey to castle,
+from castle to church, the graver soirees where Dryasdust revels amidst
+armor and knicknackery. It is even more amusing to see the Fading Flower
+step in at the close of this learned preparation, and with a woman's
+alchemy turn all this dust to gold. A little happy audacity converts the
+morning meetings into convenient gatherings for the groups of the day,
+the excursion resolves itself into a refined picnic, the learned soiree
+becomes a buzzing conversazione.
+
+Those who look forward with interest to woman's entrance into our
+Universities may gather something of the results to be expected from
+such a step in the fields of rural archaeology. Her very presence at the
+meeting throws an air of gentle absurdity over the whole affair. It is
+difficult for the driest of antiquaries to read a paper on Roman roads
+in the teeth of a charming being who sleeps to the close, and then
+awakes only to assure him it was "very romantic." But it must be
+confessed that the charming being has very little trouble with the
+antiquaries. Half the fun of the thing lies in the ease and grace of her
+taming of Dryasdust; the learned Professor dies at her touch into "a
+dear delightful old thing," and fetches and carries all day with a
+perfect obedience. It is a delightful change from town, a sort of
+glorified afternoon in a pastoral Zoological, this junketing among the
+queer unclubbable animals of science and history. There is a noble
+disdain of rheumatism in the ardor with which they plunge into the dark
+and mysterious vaults where their willful student insists, with Mr.
+Froude, that those poor monks snatched their damp and difficult slumber;
+and there is a noble disdain of truth in their suppression of the
+treacherous and unsentimental "beer-cellar" which trembles on their
+lips.
+
+Woman, in fact, carries her atmosphere of romantic credulity into the
+gray and arid scepticism of a groping archaeology. She frowns down any
+suggestion of the improbability of a pretty story, she believes in the
+poison-sucking devotion of Queen Eleanor, she shrugs her shoulders
+impatiently at a whisper of Queen Mary's wig. Every kitchen becomes a
+torture-chamber, every drain a subterranean passage. But resolute as she
+is on this point of the poetry of the past, on all other questions she
+is the most docile of pupils. Her interest, her listening power, her
+curiosity, is inexhaustible. If she has a passion, indeed, it is for
+Early English. But she has a proper awe for Romanesque, and a singular
+interest in Third Pointed. She is ruthless in insisting on her victim's
+spelling out every word of a brass in Latin that she cannot understand,
+and which he cannot translate. She collects little fragments of Roman
+brick, and wraps them up in tissue-paper for preservation at home like
+bride-cake. She is severe on restoration, and merciless on whitewash.
+She plunges, in fact, gallantly into the spirit of the thing, but she
+gracefully denudes it of its bareness and pedantry. Her bugle sings
+truce at midday for luncheon. She couches in the deep grass of the abbey
+ruins, and gathers in picturesque groups beneath castle walls. A flutter
+of silks, a ripple of feminine laughter, distract the audience from
+graver disquisitions. It is difficult to discuss the exact date of a
+moulding when soda-water bottles are popping beneath one's antiquarian
+nose.
+
+After all, archaeologists are men, and sandwiches are sandwiches. It is
+at that moment perhaps that the Fading Flower is at her best. Her waning
+attractions are heightened artistically by the background of old fogies.
+Her sentiment blends with the poetry of the ruins around. The young
+squire, the young parson, who have been yawning under the prose of
+Dryasdust, find refreshment in the gay prattle of archaeological woman.
+The sun too is overpowering, and a pretty woman leaning on one's arm in
+the leafy recesses of a ruined castle is sometimes more overpowering
+than the sun. There is much in the romance of the occasion. There is a
+little perhaps in the champagne. At any rate the Fading Flower blooms
+often into matronly life under the kindly influences of archaeological
+meetings, and antiquarian studies flourish gaily under the patronage of
+woman.
+
+There is a certain melancholy in tracing further the career of the
+Fading Flower. We long to arrest it at each of these picturesque stages,
+as we long to arrest the sunset in its lovelier moments of violet and
+gold. But the sunset dies into the gray of eve, and woman sets with the
+same fatal persistency. The evanescent tints fade into the gray. Woman
+becomes hard, angular, colorless. Her floating sentiment, so graceful in
+its mobility, curdles into opinions. Her conversation, so charmingly
+impalpable, solidifies into discussion. Her character, like her face,
+becomes rigid and osseous. She entrenches herself in the 'ologies. She
+works pinafores for New-Zealanders in the May Meetings, and appears in
+wondrous bonnets at the Church Congress. She adores Mr. Kingsley because
+he is earnest, and groans over the triviality of the literature of the
+day. She takes up the grievances of her sex, and badgers the puzzled
+overseer who has omitted to place her name on the register. She
+pronounces old men fogies, and young men intolerable. She throws out
+dark hints of her intention to compose a great work which shall settle
+everything. Then she bursts into poetry, and pens poems of so fiery a
+passion that her family are in consternation lest she should elope with
+the half-pay officer who meets her by moonlight on the pier. Then she
+plunges into science, and cuts her hair short to be in proper trim for
+Professor Huxley's lectures.
+
+For awhile she startles her next neighbor at dinner with speculations on
+molluscs, and questions as to the precise names of the twelve hundred
+new species of fish that Professor Agassiz has caught in the river
+Orinoco. There is a more terrible stage when she becomes heretical,
+subscribes to the support of Mr. Tonneson and pities the poor Bishop of
+Natal. But from this she is commonly saved by the deepening of eve.
+Little by little all this restless striving against the monotony of her
+existence dies down into calm. The gray of life hushes the Fading Flower
+into the kindly aunt, the patient nurse, the gentle friend of the poor.
+It is hard to recognise the proud beauty, the vivacious flirt, the
+sentimental poetess of days gone by in the practical little woman who
+watches by Harry's sick-bed or hurries off with blankets and broth down
+the lane. In some such peace the Fading Flower commonly finds her
+rest--a peace unromantic, utilitarian, and yet not perhaps unbeautiful.
+She has found--as she tells us--her work at last; and yet in the life
+that seems so profitless she has been doing a work after all. She has at
+any rate vindicated her sex against the charge of what Mr. Arnold calls
+Hebraism. She has displayed in Hellenic roundness the completeness of
+the nature of woman.
+
+Compared with the quick transitions, with the endless variety of her
+life, the life of man seems narrow and poor. There is hardly a phase of
+human thought, of human action, which she has not touched, and she has
+never touched but to adorn. If she has faded, she has revealed a new
+power and beauty and fragrance at each stage in her decay. Nothing in
+her life has proved so becoming as her leaving it. The song of
+ingenuity, of triumph, of defence, which has run along the course of her
+decline, softens at its close into a swan-song of peace and gentleness
+and true womanhood.
+
+
+
+
+LA FEMME PASSEE.
+
+
+Without doubt it is a time of trial to all women, more or less painful
+according to individual disposition, when they first begin to grow old
+and lose their good looks. Youth and beauty make up so much of their
+personal value, so much of their natural _raison d'etre_, that when
+these are gone many feel as if their whole career was at an end, and as
+if nothing was left to them now that they are no longer young enough to
+be loved as girls are loved, or pretty enough to be admired as once they
+were admired. For women of a certain position have so little wholesome
+occupation, and so little ambition for anything, save, indeed, that
+miserable thing called "getting on in society," that they cannot change
+their way of life with advancing years; they do not attempt to find
+interest in things outside themselves, and independent of the mere
+personal attractiveness which in youth constituted their whole pleasure
+of existence. This is essentially the case with fashionable women, who
+have staked their all on appearance, and to whom good looks are of more
+account than noble deeds; and, accordingly, the struggle to remain young
+is a frantic one with them, and as degrading as it is frantic.
+
+With the ideal woman of middle age--that pleasant woman, with her happy
+face and softened manner, who unites the charms of both epochs,
+retaining the ready responsiveness of youth while adding the wider
+sympathies of experience--with her there has never been any such
+struggle to make herself an anachronism. Consequently she remains
+beautiful to the last, far more beautiful than all the paste and washes
+in Madame Rachel's shop could make her. Sometimes, if rarely in these
+latter days, we meet her in society, where she carries with her an
+atmosphere of her own--an atmosphere of honest, wholesome truth and
+love, which makes every one who enters it better and purer for the time.
+All children and all young persons love her, because she understands and
+loves them. For she is essentially a mother--that is, a woman who can
+forget herself, who can give without asking to receive, and who, without
+losing any of the individualism which belongs to self-respect, can yet
+live for and in the lives of others, and find her best joy in the
+well-being of those about her. There is no servility, no exaggerated
+sacrifice in this; it is simply the fulfillment of woman's highest
+duty--the expression of that grand maternal instinct which need not
+necessarily include the fact of personal maternity, but which must find
+utterance in some line of unselfish action with all women worthy of the
+name.
+
+The ideal woman of middle age understands the young because she has
+lived with them. If a mother, she has performed her maternal duties with
+cheerfulness and love. There has been no giving up her nursery to the
+care of a hired servant who is expected to do for twenty pounds a year
+what the tremendous instinct of a mother's love could not find strength
+to do. When she had children, she attended to them in great part
+herself, and learnt all about their tempers, their maladies, and the
+best methods of management; as they grew up she was still the best
+friend they had, the Providence of their young lives who gave them both
+care and justice, both love and guidance. Such a manner of life has
+forced her to forget herself. When her child lay ill, perhaps dying, she
+had no heart and no time to think of her own appearance, and whether
+this dressing-gown was more becoming than that; and what did the doctor
+think of her with her hair pushed back from her face; and what a fright
+she must have looked in the morning light after her sleepless night of
+watching. The world and all its petty pleasures and paltry pains faded
+away in the presence of the stern tragedy of the hour; and not the
+finest ball of the season seemed to be worth a thought compared to the
+all-absorbing question whether her child slept after his draught and
+whether he ate his food with better appetite.
+
+And such a life, in spite of all its cares, has kept her young as well
+as unselfish; we should rather say, young because unselfish. As she
+comes into the room with her daughters, her kindly face unpolluted by
+paint, her dress picturesque or fashionable according to her taste, but
+decent in form and consistent in tone with her age, it is often
+remarked that she looks more like their sister than their mother. This
+is because she is in harmony with her age, and has not, therefore, put
+herself in rivalry with them; and harmony is the very keystone of
+beauty. Her hair may be streaked with white, the girlish firmness and
+transparency of her skin has gone, the pearly clearness of her eye is
+clouded, and the slender grace of line is lost, but for all that she is
+beautiful, and she is intrinsically young. What she has lost in outside
+material charm--in that mere _beaute da diable_ of youth--she has gained
+in character and expression; and, not attempting to simulate the
+attractiveness of a girl, she keeps what nature gave her--the
+attractiveness of middle age. And as every epoch has its own beauty, if
+woman would but learn that truth, she is as beautiful now as a matron of
+fifty, because in harmony with her years, and because her beauty has
+been carried on from matter to spirit, as she was when a maiden of
+sixteen. This is the ideal woman of middle age, met with even yet at
+times in society--the woman whom all men respect, whom all women envy,
+and wonder how she does it, and whom all the young adore, and wish they
+had for an elder sister or an aunt. And the secret of it all lies in
+truth, in love, in purity, and in unselfishness.
+
+Standing far in front of this sweet and wholesome idealization is _la
+femme passee_ of to-day--the reality as we meet with it at balls and
+fetes 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 was 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 pupil dilated by
+belladonna, or 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 or gauze to conceal the breadth of her robust maturity, or to
+soften the dreadful shadows of her leanness--there she stands, the
+wretched creature who will not consent to grow old, and who will still
+affect to be like a fresh coquettish girl when she is nothing but _la
+femme passee, la femme passee 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 honorable issue was as open to her as to her
+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, if even the reality is 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 associations, for all that her standing in society
+is undeniable, and not a door is shut against her. We may have no
+absolutely tangible reason to give for our distaste beyond the
+self-evident facts that she paints her face and dyes her hair, dresses
+in a very _decollete_ style, and affects a girlish manner that is out of
+harmony with her age and condition. But though we cannot formularize
+reasons, we have instincts; and sometimes instinct sees more clearly
+than reason.
+
+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; and 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 chatain, which dyes the hair any shade in one minute;"
+the "kohhl 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 passee_ 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 often 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 have naturally immense influence over younger
+ones, and if mothers were to set their faces resolutely against the
+follies of the day, daughters would and must give in. As it is, they 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
+appointed by God 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 subsided.
+
+
+
+
+PRETTY PREACHERS.
+
+
+To beings of the rougher sex--let us honestly confess it--one of the
+most charming of those ever-recurrent surprises which the commonest
+incidents of the holidays never fail to afford is the surprise of
+finding themselves at church. Whatever the cause may be, whether we owe
+our new access of devotion to the early breakfast and the boredom of a
+bachelor morning, or to the moral compulsion of the cunning display of
+prayer-books and hymnals in the hall, or to the temptation of that
+chattiest and gayest of all walks--the walk to church--or to an uneasy
+conscience that spurs us to set a good example to the coachman, or to a
+sheer impulse of courtesy to the rector, certain it is that a week after
+we have been lounging at the club-window, and wondering how all the good
+people get through their Sunday morning, we find ourselves safely boxed
+in the family pew, and chorusing the family "Amen!"
+
+No doubt much of our new temper springs simply from the change of scene,
+and if the first week in the country were a time for self-analysis we
+might amuse ourselves with observing what a sudden simplicity of taste
+may be gained simply by a rush from town. There is a pleasant irony in
+being denounced from pulpit and platform as jaded voluptuaries, and
+then finding ourselves able to trample through coppices and plunge into
+cowsheds as if we had never seen a cowshed or a coppice before. But
+there is more than the pleasure of surprise in the peculiar rural
+development of attendance at church. Piety brings its own reward. We
+find ourselves invested with a new domestic interest, and brought into
+far closer and warmer domestic relations. Mamma looks a great deal more
+benignant than usual, and the girls lean on one's arm with a more
+trustful confidence and a deeper sympathy.
+
+A new bond of family union has been found in that victory of the pew
+over the club-window. But earthly pleasure is always dashed with a
+little disappointment, and one drop of bitterness lingers in the cup of
+joy. If only Charlie and papa would remain awake during the sermon! They
+are so good in the Psalms, so attentive through the Lessons, so sternly
+responsive to each Commandment, that it is sad to see them edging
+towards the comfortable corners with the text, and fast asleep under the
+application. Then, too, there is so little hope of reform, not merely
+because on this point men are utterly obdurate, but because it is
+impossible for their reformers even to understand their obduracy. For
+with both the whole question is a pure question of sympathy. Men sleep
+under sermons because the whole temper of their minds, as they grow into
+a larger culture, drifts further and further from the very notion of
+preaching. Inquiry, quiet play of thought, a somewhat indolent
+appreciation of the various sides of every subject, an appetite for
+novelty, a certain shrinking from the definite, a certain pleasure in
+the vague--these characteristics of modern minds are hardly
+characteristics of the pulpit. There are, of course, your drawing-room
+spouters, who can reel off an artistic or poetic or critical discourse
+of any length on the rug. But, as a rule, men neither like to pump upon
+their kind nor to be pumped upon. They like a quiet, genial talk which
+turns over everything and settles nothing. They like to put their case,
+to put their objection, but they like both to be brief and tentative. As
+a rule they talk with their guard up, and say nothing about their deeper
+thoughts or feelings. They vote a man who airs his emotions to be as
+great a bore as the man with a dogma, or the man with a hobby. A sermon,
+therefore, from the very necessities of its structure, is the very type
+of the sort of talk that revolts men most.
+
+On the other hand, women really enjoy preaching. Mamma's reply to the
+natural inquiry as to the goodness of the sermon--"My dear, all sermons
+are good"--is something more than a matronly snub, it is the inner
+conviction of woman. She likes, not merely a talk, but a good long talk.
+She likes being abused. She likes being dogmatized over and
+intellectually trampled on. In fact, she has very little belief in the
+intellect. But then she has an immense faith in the heart. She lives in
+a world of affections and sympathies. She has her little tale of passion
+in the past that she tells over to herself in the dusk of the autumn
+evening. She believes that the world at large is moved by those impulses
+of love and dislike that play so great a part in her own. And then, too,
+she has her practical house-keeping side, and likes her religion done up
+in neat little parcels of "heads" and "considerations" and
+"applications," and handed over the counter for immediate use. And so
+while papa quarrels with the rector's forty minutes, his indiscriminate
+censure of a world utterly unknown to him, his declamation against Pusey
+or Colenso, or while Charlie laughs over his rhetoric and his sentiment,
+woman listens a little sadly and wearily, and longs for a golden age
+when husbands will love sermons and men understand clergymen.
+
+It is just from this theological deadlock that we are freed by the
+Pretty Preacher. If the world laughs at the Reverend Olympia Brown, it
+is not because she preaches, but because she prisons herself in a
+pulpit. The sure evidence that woman is to become the preacher of the
+future is that woman is the only preacher men listen to. It is hard to
+imagine any bribe short of the National Debt that would have induced us
+to listen through the dog-days of the last few weeks to the panting
+rhetoric of Mr. Spurgeon. But it is harder to imagine the bribe that
+would have roused us to flight as we lay beneath the plane-tree, and
+listened to the cool ripple of the Pretty Preacher. Of course it is a
+mere phase in the life of woman, a short interval between the dawn and
+the night. There is an exquisite piquancy in the raw, shy epigrams of
+the abrupt little dogmatist who is just out of her teens. Her very want
+of training and science gives a novelty to her hits that makes her
+formidable in the ring. No doubt, too, as we have owned before, there is
+a faint and delicate attraction about the Fading Flower of later years
+that at certain times and places makes it not impossible to sit under
+her.
+
+But the sphere of the Pretty Preacher lies really between these
+extremes. She is not at war with mankind, like the nymph of bread and
+butter; nor does mankind suspect her of subtle designs in her discourse
+as it suspects the elder homilist. Her talk is just as easy and graceful
+and natural as herself, and, moreover, it is always in season. She never
+suffers a serious reflection to interfere with the whirl of town. She
+quite sees the absurdity of a sermon at a five o'clock tea. No one is
+freer from the boredom of a long talk when there is a chance of a boat
+or a ride. But there are moments when one is too hot, or too tired, or
+too lazy for chat or exertion, and such moments are the moments of the
+Pretty Preacher. The first week of the holidays is especially her own.
+There is a physical pleasure in doing, thinking, saying nothing. The
+highest reach of human effort consists in disentangling a skein of silk
+for her, or turning over Dore's hideous sketches for the Idyls. At such
+a moment there is a freshness as of cool waters in the accents of the
+Pretty Preacher. She does not plunge into the deepest themes at once.
+She leads her listener gently on, up the slopes of art or letters or
+politics, to the higher peaks where her purely dogmatic mission begins.
+She is artistic, and she labors to wake the idler at her feet to higher
+views of beauty and art. She points out the tinting of the distant
+hills, she quotes Ruskin, she criticizes Millais. She crushes her
+auditor with a sense of his ignorance, of the base unpoetic view of
+things with which he lounged through the last Academy. What she longs
+for in English art is nobleness of purpose, and we smile bitter scorn in
+the sunshine at the ignoble artist who suffers a thought of his
+butcher's bills to penetrate into the studio. If we could only stretch
+the Royal Academicians beside us on the grass, what a thrill and an
+emotion would run through those elderly gentlemen as they listened to
+the indignation of the Pretty Preacher.
+
+But art shades off into literature, and literature into poetry. We are
+driven into a confession that we enjoy the frivolous articles that those
+horrid papers have devoted to her sex. Is there nothing, the Pretty
+Preacher asks us solemnly, to be said against our own? And the sun is
+hot, and we are speechless. It was shameful of us to put down the
+_Spanish Gipsy_, and let it return unfinished to Mudie's! Never did
+rebuke so fill us with shame at our want of imagination and of poesy.
+But already the Preacher has passed to politics, and is deep in Mr.
+Mill's prophecies of coming events. She is severe on the triviality of
+the House, or the quarrelsome debates of the past Session. She passes by
+our murmured excuse of the weather, and dwells with a temperate
+enthusiasm on the fact that the next will be a social Parliament. Do we
+know anything about the Poor-laws or Education or Trades'-societies?
+Have we subscribed to Mr. Mill's election? We plead poverty, but the
+miserable plea dies away on the contemptuous air.
+
+What our Pretty Preacher would like above all things would be to meet
+that dear Mr. Shaw Lefevre, and thank him for his efforts to protect
+woman. But she knows we are utterly heretical on the subject; she doubts
+very much whether we take in the _Victoria Magazine_. We listen as the
+Tory Mayor of Birmingham listened to Mr. Bright at his banquet. The
+politics are not ours, and the literature is not ours, and the art is
+not ours; but it is pleasant to lie in the sunshine and hear it all so
+charmingly put by the Pretty Preacher. We own that sermons have a little
+to say for themselves; above all, that the impossibility of replying to
+them has its advantages in a case like this. It would be absurd to
+discuss these matters with the Pretty Preacher, but it is delightful to
+look up and see the kindling little face and listen to the sermon.
+
+It is, however, as the theologian proper, as the moralist and divine,
+that we love her most. She arrives at this peak at last. As a rule, she
+chooses the tritest topics, but she gives them a novelty and grace of
+her own. Even Thackeray's old "Vanity of Vanities" wakes into new life
+as she dexterously couples it with the dances of the last season. We nod
+our applause from the grass as she denounces the worthlessness and
+frivolity of the life we lead. If the weather were cool enough we should
+at once vow, as she exhorts us, to be earnest and great and good. Above
+all, let us be noble. The Pretty Preacher is great on self-sacrifice.
+She sent two of her spoilt dresses to those poor people in the East-end,
+after listening to a whole sermon on their sufferings. The congregation
+at her feet feels a twinge of remorse at the thought of his inhumanity,
+and swears he will put down his segars and devote the proceeds to the
+emigration fund. Does he ever read Keble? There is a slight struggle in
+the unconverted mind, and a faint whisper that he now and then reads
+Tupper; but it is too hot to be flippant, or to do more than swear
+eternal allegiance to the _Christian Year_.
+
+The evening deepens, and the sermon deepens with it. It is one of the
+most disgusting points about the divine in the pulpit that he is always
+boasting of himself as a man like as we are, and of the sins he
+denounces as sins of his own. It is the special charm of the fair divine
+above us that she is eminently a being not as we are, but one serene,
+angelic, pure. It is the very vagueness of her condemnation that tells
+on us--the utter ignorance of what is so familiar to us that the
+vagueness betrays, the utter unskillfulness of the hits, and the purity
+that makes them so unskillful. It is only when she descends to
+particulars that we can turn round on the Pretty Preacher--only when a
+burning and impassioned invective against Cider Cellars suddenly softens
+into the plaintive inquiry, "But, oh, Charlie, dear, what _are_ the
+Cider Cellars?" So long as the preacher keeps in the sphere of the
+indefinite, we lie at her mercy, and hear the soft thunders roll
+resistlessly overhead.
+
+But then they are soft thunders. We feel almost encouraged, like Luther,
+to "sin boldly" when the absolving fingers brush lightly over our
+cousinly hair. Our censor, too, has faith in us, in our capacity and
+will for better things, and it is amazingly pleasant to have the
+assurance confirmed by a squeeze from the gentle theologian's hand. And
+so night comes down, and preacher and penitent stroll pleasantly home
+together, and mamma wonders where both can have been; and the Pretty
+Preacher lays her head on her pillow with the sweet satisfaction that
+her mission is accomplished, and that a reprobate soul--the soul, too,
+of such a gentlemanly and agreeable reprobate--is won.
+
+
+
+
+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 as if living under laws made specially for them
+alone. 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; and, besides, even arbitrary men meet with opposition in
+certain directions, and the most self-contented social autocrat knows
+that his humblest adherents criticise 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 is to be exempt from misfortune and
+annoyances; as if his friends must never die, his youth never fade, his
+circumstances run always smoothly, protected by the care of others from
+all untoward hitch; and as if time and tide, which wait for no one else,
+are to be 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, pet and 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 flowing hair and a turn for poetry,
+full of highflown sentiment, and morbidly excited sympathies; a man
+almost as much woman as man, who has no backbone of ambition in him, but
+who puts his whole life into love, just as women do, and who becomes at
+last emphatically not worth his salt.
+
+Bad as it is for a man to be _kowtowed_ 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 at certain extent it
+is 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 wholly to ruining their
+young charge 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 compensation, 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 is 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. One characteristic of the spoilt woman is
+her impatience 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 the lady-paramount that she cannot understand it if any one
+steps in to share her honors and divide her throne.
+
+To praise the beauty of any other woman, to find her charming, or 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 into 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 it comes to her to be
+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, 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 perfect 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 or two 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 attended to; and it is not
+for love--and the amiable if weak pleasure of attracting the notice of
+the beloved--it is just for the vanity of being a little somebody for
+the moment, and of playing off the small regality involved in the
+procedure. She would not return the attention.
+
+Unlike the Eastern women, who wait on their lords, hand and foot, and
+who place their highest honor 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 not of the _demi-monde_ by station, but 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 maitresses_ 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 on burning ploughshares is the only fit analogy. A length of
+lace unstarched, a ribbon unsewed, a flower set awry, anything that
+crumples only 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 beset with thorns.
+
+If a dove was 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 criticise, doubt, or contradict, is
+an intellectual Tower of Pisa under the shadow of which it is not
+pleasant to live.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+Words in italics in the original are surrounded by _underscores_.
+
+The following words appear with and without hyphens. They have been left
+as in the original.
+
+     ball-room         ballroom
+     business-like     businesslike
+     hearth-rug        hearthrug
+     house-keeper      housekeeper
+     house-keeping     housekeeping
+     man-like          manlike
+     now-a-days        nowadays
+     over-head         overhead
+
+Variations in spelling have been left as in the original. Examples
+include the following:
+
+     center/centre
+     learned/learnt
+     spoiled/spoilt
+
+The following corrections have been made to the text:
+
+     Page xi: INTRODUCTION, 13[original has 5]
+
+     Page 48: slink away from a bantam[original has bantum] hen
+
+     Page 67: you[original has vou] go in for this sort
+
+     Page 129: sheer force of genius[original has genuis]
+
+     Page 161: some out-of-the-way[original has out-of-the way]
+     corner
+
+     Page 220: exhausts itself in a declaration[original has
+     delaration] of revolt
+
+     Page 269: ignorant of contemporary[original is split across
+     lines after con but hyphen is missing] fashions
+
+     Page 303: following the [original has the the] same
+     extravagance
+
+     Page 332: torture it until it[original has is] has about as
+     much life
+
+The following words use an oe ligature in the original:
+
+     manoeuvred
+     outmanoeuvring
+     Oedipus
+     Phoenician
+
+In the phrase, "white-armed, large-limbed Here", the original has
+macrons over both of the vowels in "Here".
+
+Ellipses match the original.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Modern Women and What is Said of Them, by Anonymous
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN WOMEN ***
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