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 theunintelligible 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 hisTimes. 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 lettersoff 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 parochialworld 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. Proudieisthe 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 forthe 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 "ourcurates." 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 theinjustice 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 theMessiahandSt. 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, whenwe 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.
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 theimpression 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 theSpectatorwould 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 seizedthe general idea of hisrôlewith 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.
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 oron, 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, forastonishment 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 herselfbound 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'sIdylonly, 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 alittle 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 hersolidarité. 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 whichshe 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 Œdipus. We can conceive of few announcements more welcome, if it be only true.
In an age when everything seems pretty welldiscovered, 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.
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 thePall 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 themistresses 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, linencollar. 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 convincedthat 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, shewould 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 theirresponsibility 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 thePall 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 femaletorsonow 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 afêtegraced by all that is elegant, refined, and aristocratic in Paris," he observedthe duchess, the countess, and the baroness imitating the costly toilettes of thedemi-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 ofgrandes damesfloats 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 thedemi-mondelikely 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 pointin the social scale she would draw the line above which an unblushing exhibition of the femaletorsois 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 thePall 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 ofposition 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.
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 innerworld 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 withwhich 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 artisdragged 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 samesignificance. 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 inairing 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 greatnessof 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 betrothedone 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. Herrôlein 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 ofdomestic 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. Wereshe, 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.
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, andconfounds 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 ahome 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 degreein 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 ourmiddle-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 therespect 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 andcontent. 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 allthe 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 andkudostogether. 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 menbear 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.