If they have any friends out in Australia or India, they inquire of you, just returned, if you happened to meet them? When you ask, Where were they stationed?—they say they do not know; and when you suggest that Madras and Calcutta are not in the same Presidencies, that India is a large place and Australia not quite like an English county, they look helpless and bewildered, and drift away into the vague geography familiar to them, 'somewhere in India,' 'somewhere in Australia,' and 'I thought you might have met them.' For geography, like history, is one of the branches of the tree of knowledge they have never climbed, and the fruits thereof are as though they were not.
But apart from the personal discomforts to which vague people subject themselves, and the absurdities of which they are guilty, one cannot help speculating on the spiritual state of folks to whom nothing is precise, nothing definite, and no question of faith clearly thought out. To be sure they may be great in the realm of conviction; but so is the African savage when he hears the ghosts of his ancestors pass howling in the woods; so is the Assassin of the Mountain, when he sees heaven open as he throws himself on the spears of his enemies in an ecstacy of faith, to be realized by slaughter and suicide. Convictions based on imagination, unsupported by facts or proofs, are as worthless in a moral as in a logical point of view; but the vague have nothing better; and whether as politicians or as pietists, though theyare warm partizans they are but feeble advocates, fond of flourishing about large generalities, but impossible to be pinned to any point and unable to defend any position. To those who must have something absolute and precise, however limited—one inch of firmly-laid foundation on which to build up the superstructure—it is a matter of more wonder than envy how the vague are content to live for ever in a haze which has no clearness of outline, no definiteness of detail, and how they can make themselves happy in a name—calling their fog faith, and therewith counting themselves blessed.
Perhaps the largest amount of simple pleasure possible to adult life is to be found in the first weeks of the summer's holiday, when the hard-worked man of business leaves his office and all its anxieties behind him, and goes off to the sea-side or the hills for a couple of months' relaxation. Everything is so fresh to him, it is like the renewal of his boyhood; and if he happens to have chosen a picturesque place, where the houses stand well and make that ornate kind of landscape to be found in show-places, he wonders how it is that people who can stay here ever leave, or tire of the beauties that are so delightful to him. Yet he hears of this comfortable mansion, with its park and well-appointed grounds, waiting for an occupant; he is told of that fairyland cottage, embowered in roses and jessamine, with a garden gay and redolent with flowers, to be had for a mere song; and he finds to his surprise that the owners of these choice corners of Arcadia are only anxious to escape from what he would, if he could, be only anxious to retain.
In his first days this restlessness, this discontent,is simply inconceivable. What more do they want than what they have? Why, that field lying there in the sunshine, dotted about with dun-coloured cows which glow like glorified Cuyps in the evening red, and backed by rock and tree and tumbling cascade, would be enough to make him happy. He could never weary of such a lovely bit of home scenery; and if to this he adds a view of the sea, or the crags and purple shadows of a mountain, he has wherewith to make him blessed for the remainder of his life. So he thinks while the smoke of London and the sulphur of the Metropolitan still cling about his throat, and the roar of the streets has not quite died out of his ears.
The woods are full of flowers and the rarer kind of insects, and he is never sated with the sea. There is the trout stream as clear as crystal, where he is sure of a rise if he waits long enough; the moors, where he may shoot if he can put up a bird to shoot at, are handy; and there is no end to the picturesque bits just made for his sketch-book. Whatever his tastes may make him—naturalist, sailor, sportsman, artist—he has ample scope for their exercise; and ten or eleven months' disuse gives him a greater zest now that his playtime has come round again. At every turn he falls upon little scenes which give him an odd pleasure, as if they belonged to another life—things he has seen in old paintings, or read of in quaint books, long ago. Here go by two countrywomen, whose red and purple dresses are touched by the sunwith startling effect, as they wind up the grey hillside road; there clatters past on horseback a group of market-girls with flapping straw hats, and carrying their baskets on their arms as if they were a set of Gainsborough's models come back to life, who turn their dark eyes and fresh comely faces to the London man with frank curiosity as they canter on and smother him with dust. Now he passes through the midst of a village fair, where youths are dancing in a barn to the sound of a cracked fiddle, and where, standing under an ivied porch, a pretty young woman unconsciously makes a picture as she bends down to fill a little child's held-up pinafore with sweets and cakes. The idyl here is so complete that the contemplation of pence given for the accommodation of the barn, or the calculation of shillings to be spent in beer afterwards, or the likelihood that the little one had brought a halfpenny in its chubby fist for the good things its small soul coveted, does not enter his mind.
The idea of base pelf in a scene so pure and innocent would be a kind of high treason to the poetic instinct; so the London man instinctively feels, glad to recognize the ideal he is mainly responsible for making. How can it be otherwise? A heron is fishing in the river; a kingfisher flashes past; swallows skim the ground or dart slanting above his head; white-sailed boats glide close inshore; a dragon-fly suns itself on a tall plumed thistle; young birds rustle in and out of the foliage; distant cattlelow; cottage children laugh; everywhere he finds quiet, peace, absolute social repose, the absence of disturbing passions; and it seems to him that all who live here must feel the same delightful influences as those which he is feeling now, and be as innocent and virtuous as the place is beautiful and quiet.
But the charm does not last. Very few of us retain to the end of our holidays the same enthusiastic delight in our Arcadia that we had in the beginning. Constant change of Arcadias keeps up the illusion better; and with it the excitement; but a long spell in one place, however beautiful—unless indeed, it lasts so long that one becomes personally fond of the place and interested in the people—is almost sure to end in weariness. At first the modern pilgrim is savagely disinclined to society and his kind. All the signs and circumstances of the life he has left behind him are distasteful. He likes to watch the fishing-boats, but he abhors the steamers which put into his little harbour, and the excursionists who come by them he accounts as heathens and accursed. Trains, like steamers, are signs of a reprobate generation and made only for evildoers. He has no reverence for the post, and his soul is not rejoiced at the sight of letters. Even his daily paper is left unopened, and no change of Ministry counts as equal in importance with the picturesque bits he wishes to sketch, or the rare ferns and beetles to be found by long rambles and much diligence. By degrees the novelty wears off. His soul yearnsafter the life he has left, and he begins to look for the signs thereof with interest, not to say pleasure. He watches the arrival of the boat, or he strolls up to the railway station and speculates on the new comers with benevolence. If he sees a casual acquaintance, he hails him with enthusiastic cordiality; and in his extremity is reduced to fraternize with men 'not in his way.' He becomes peevish at the lateness of the mail, and he reads hisTimesfrom beginning to end, taking in even the agony column and the advertisements. He finds his idyllic pictures to be pictures, and nothing more. His Arcadians are no better than their neighbours; and, as for the absence of human passions—they are merely dwarfed to the dimensions of the life, and are as relatively strong here as elsewhere. The inhabitants of those flowery cottages quarrel among each other for trifles which he would have thought only children could have noticed; and they gossip to an extent of which he in his larger metropolitan life has no experience.
If he stays a few weeks longer than is the custom of visitors, he is as much an object of curiosity and surmise as if he were a man of another hemisphere; and he may think himself fortunate if vague reports do not get afloat touching his honesty, his morality, or his sanity. Nine times out of ten, if a personage at home, he is nobody here. He may be sure that, however great his name in art and literature, it will not be accounted to him for honour—it will only place him next to a well-conditioned mountebank; political fame, patent to all the world,rank which no one can mistake, and money which all may handle, alone going down in remote country places and carrying esteem along with them. If a wise man, he will forgive the uncharitable surmises and the contempt of which he is the object, knowing the ignorance of life as well as the purposeless vacuity from which they spring; but they are not the less unpleasant, and to understand a cause is not therefore to rejoice in the effect.
As time goes on, he finds Arcadian poverty of circumstance gradually becoming unbearable. He misses the familiar conveniences and orderly arrangements of his London life. He has a raging tooth, and there is no dentist for miles round; he falls sick, or sprains his ankle, and the only doctor at hand is a half tipsy vet., or perhaps an old woman skilled in herbs, or a bone-setter with a local reputation. His letters go astray among the various hands to which they are entrusted; his paper is irregular;Punchand his illustrated weeklies come a day late, with torn covers and greasy thumbmarks testifying to the love of pictorial art which encountered them by the way. He finds that he wants the excitement of professional life and the changeful action of current history. He feels shunted here, out of the world, in a corner, set aside, lost. The rest is still delicious; but he misses the centralized interest of metropolitan life, and catches himself hankering after the old intellectual fleshpots with the fervour of an exile, counting the days of his further stay.
And then at last this rest, which has been so sweet, becomes monotony, and palls on him. One trout is very like another trout, barring a few ounces of weight. When he has expatiated on his first find of moon-fern, and dug it up carefully by the roots for his own fernery at Bayswater, he is slightly disgusted to come upon many tufts of moon-fern, and to know that it is not so very rare hereabouts after all, and that he cannot take away half he sees. Then too, he begins to understand the true meaning of the pictures, Gainsborough and others, which were so quaintly beautiful to him in the early days. The idyllic youths dancing in the beerhouse barn are clumsy louts who are kept from the commission of great offences mainly because they have no opportunity for dramatic sins; but they indemnify themselves by petty agricultural pilferings, and they get boozy on small beer. The pretty market-girls cantering by, are much like other daughters of Eve elsewhere, save that they have more familiarity with certain facts of natural life than good girls in town possess, and are a trifle more easy to dupe. On the whole, he finds human nature much the same in essentials here as in London—Arcadia being the poorer of the two, inasmuch as it wants the sharpness, the deftness, the refinement of bearing given by much intercourse and the more intimate contact of classes.
By the time his holidays are over, our London man goes back to his work invigorated in body, butquite sufficiently sated in mind to return with pleasure to his old pursuits. He walks into the office decidedly stouter than when he left, much sunburnt, and unfeignedly glad to see them all again. It pleases him to feel like MacGregor on his native heath once more; though his native heath is only a dingy office in the E.C. district, with a view of his rival's chimney-pots. Still it is pleasant; and to know that he is recognized as Mr. So-and-So of the City, a safe man and with a character to lose, is more gratifying to his pride than to have his quality and standing discussed in village back-parlours and tap-rooms, and the question whether he is a man whom Arcadia may trust, gravely debated by boors whose pence are not as his pounds. He speaks with rapture of his delightful holiday, and extols the virtues of Arcadia and the Arcadians as warmly as if he believed in them. Perhaps he grumbles ostentatiously at his return to harness; but in his heart he knows it to be the better life; for, delicious as it is to sit in the sun eating lotuses, it is nobler to weed out tares and to plant corn.
The peace to which we are all looking is not to be had in a Highland glen nor a Devonshire lane; and beautiful as are the retreats and show-places to which men of business rush for rest and refreshment—peaceful as they are to look at, and happy as it seems to us their inhabitants must be—it is all only a matter of the eye. They are Arcadias, if one likes to call them so; but while a man's powers remain tohim they are halting-places only, not homes; and he who would make them his home before his legitimate time, would come to a weariness which should cause him to regret bitterly and often the collar which had once so galled him, and the work at the hardness of which he had so often growled.
If nothing is sacred to a sapper, neither is anything sacred to temper, ostentation, vanity; and church as little as any place else. In those thronged show-places which have what is called a summer season, church is the great Sunday entertainment; and when the service is of an ornate kind, and the strangers' seats are chairs placed at the west end, where in old times the village choir or the village schoolboys used to be, a great deal of human life goes on among the occupants; and there are certain displays of temper and feeling which make you ask yourself whether these strangers think it a religious service, or an operatic, at which they have come to assist, and whether what you see about you is quite in consonance with the spirit of the place or not. If the church is one that presents scenic attractions in the manner in which the service is conducted, there is a run on the front middle seats, as if the ceremonies to be performed were so much legerdemain or theatrical spectacle, of which you must have a good view if you are to have your money's worth; and the more knowing of the strangers take care to be early in the field, and toestablish themselves comfortably before the laggards come up. And when the best places are all filled, and the laggards do come up, then the human comedy begins.
Here trip in a couple of giggling girls, greatly conscious of their youth and good looks, but still more conscious of their bonnets. They look with tittering dismay at the crowded seats all along the middle, and when the verger makes them understand that they must go to the back of the side aisle, where they can be seen by no one but will only be able to hear the service and say their prayers, they hesitate and whisper to each other before they finally go up, feeling that the great object for which they came to church has failed them, and they had better have stayed away and taken their chance on the parade. When they speak of it afterwards, they say it was 'awfully slow sitting there;' and they determine to be earlier another time.
There sweep in a triad of superbly dressed women with fans and scent-bottles, who disdainfully decline the back places which the same verger, with a fine sense of justice and beginning to fail a little in temper, inexorably assigns them. They too confer together, but by no means in whispers; and finally elect to stand in the middle aisle, trusting to their magnificence and quiet determination to get 'nice places' in the pewed sittings. They are fine ladies who look as if they were performing an act of condescension by coming at all without special privilegesand separation from the vulgar; as if they had an inherent right to worship God in a superior and aristocratic manner, and were not to be confounded with the rest of the miserable sinners who ask for mercy and forgiveness. They are accustomed to the front seats everywhere; so why not in the place where they say sweetly they are 'nothing of themselves,' and pray to be delivered 'from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy'? That old lady, rouged and dyed and dressed to represent the heyday of youth, who also is supposed to come to church to say her prayers and confess her sins, looks as if she would be more at home at the green tables at Homburg than in an unpretending chair of the strangers' quarter in the parish church. But she finds her places in her Prayer-book, if after a time and with much seeking; and when she nods during the sermon, she has the good-breeding not to snore. She too, has the odd trick of looking like condescension when she comes in, trailing her costly silks and laces behind her; and by her manner she leaves on you the impression that she was a beauty in her youth; has been always used to the deference and admiration of men; to servants and a carriage and purple and fine linen; that all of you, whom she has the pleasure of surveying through her double eyeglass, are nobodies in comparison with her august self; and that she is out of place among you. She makes her demonstration, like the rest, when she finds that the best seats are already filled and that no oneoffers to stir that she may be well placed; and if she is ruthlessly relegated to the back, and stays there, as she does sometimes, your devotions are rendered uncomfortable by the unmistakable protest conveyed in her own. Only a few humble Christians in fashionable attire take those back places contentedly, and find they can say their prayers and sing their hymns with spiritual comfort to themselves, whether they are shut out from a sight of the decorations on the altar and the copes and stoles of the officiating ministers, or are in full view of the same. But then humble Christians in fashionable attire are rare; and the old difficulty about the camel and the needle's eye, remains.
Again, in the manner of following the services you see the oddest diversity among the strangers at church. The regular congregation has by this time got pretty well in step together, and stands up or sits down, speaks or keeps silence, with some kind of uniformity; even the older men having come to tolerate innovations which at first split the parish into factions. But the strangers, who have come from the north and from the south, from the east and from the west, have brought their own views and habits, and take a pride in making them manifest. Say that the service is only moderately High—that is, conducted with decency and solemnity but not going into extremes; your left-hand neighbour evidently belongs to one of the ultra-Ritualistic congregations, and disdains to conceal her affiliation. If she be atall woman, and therefore conspicuous, her genuflexions are more profound than any other person's; and her sudden and automatic way of dropping on her knees, and then getting up again as if she were worked by wires, attracts the attention of all about her. She crosses herself at various times; and ostentatiously forbears to use her book save at certain congregational passages. She regards the service as an act of priestly sacrifice and mediation, and her own attitude therefore is one of acceptance, not participation.
Your neighbour on your right is a sturdy Low Churchman, who sticks to the ways of his father and flings hard names at the new system. He makes his protest against what he calls 'all this mummery' visibly, if not audibly. He sits like a rock during the occasional intervals when modern congregations rise; and he reads his Prayer-book with unshaken fidelity from first to last, making the responses, which are intoned by the choir and the bulk of the congregation, in a loud and level voice, and even mutteringsotto vocethe clergyman's part after him. In the creed, when the Ritualistic lady bends both her knees and almost touches the ground, he simply bobs his head, as if saluting Robinson or Jones; and during the doxology, where she repeats the obeisance, and looks as if she were speaking confidentially to the matting, he holds up his chin and stares about him. She, the pronounced Ritualist, knows all the hymns by heart and joins in themlike one well accustomed; but he, the Evangelist, stumbles over the lines, with hispince-nezslipping off his nose, satisfied if he catches a word here and there so as to know something of his whereabouts. She sings correctly all through; but he can do no more than put in a fancy note on occasions, and perhaps come in with a flourish at the end. There are many such songsters at church who think they have done all that can be demanded of them in the way of congregational harmony if they hit the last two notes fairly, and join the pack at the Amen.
Sometimes the old-fashioned worshippers get put into the front row, and there, without prayer-stool or chair-back against which to steady themselves, find kneeling an impossibility; so they either sit with their elbows on their knees, or betray associations with square pews and comfortable corners at home, by turning their backs to the altar, and burying their faces in their rush-bottomed seats. The Ritualist would have knelt as straight as an arrow and without quivering once all through.
People are generally supposed to go to church for devotion, but, if they do, devotion and vanity are twin sisters. Look at the number of pretty hands which find it absolutely necessary to take off their gloves, and which are always wandering up to the face in becoming gestures and with the right curve. Or, if the hands are only mediocre, the rings are handsome; and diamonds sparkle as well in a church as anywhere else. And though one vowsto renounce the lusts of the world as well as of the flesh, there is no use in having diamonds if one's neighbours don't see them. Look too, at the pretty faces which know so well the effect produced by a little paint and powder beneath a softening mask of thin white lace. Is this their best confession of sin? And again, those elaborate toilets in which women come to pray for forgiveness and humility; are they for the honour of God? It strikes us that the honour of God has very little to do with that formidable, and may be unpaid, milliner's bill, but the admiration of men and the envy of other women a great deal. The Pope is wise to make all ladies go to his religious festivals without bonnets and in rigid black. It narrows the margin of coquetry somewhat, if it does not altogether remove it. But dress ever was, and ever will be, as webs spread in the way of woman's righteousness; and we have no doubt that Eve frilled her apron of fig-leaves before she had worn it a day.
All sorts of characters throng these strangers' seats; and some are typical. There are the men of low stature and awkward bearing, with stubbly chins, who stand in constrained positions and wear no gloves. They look like grooms; they may be clerks; but they are the men on whomPunchhas had his eye for many years now, when he portrays the British snob and diversifies him with the more modern cad. Then there are the well-dressed, well set-up gentlemen of military appearance, who carry their umbrellas under their arms as if they were swords, and areevidently accustomed to have their own will and command other people's; and the men who look like portraits of Montague Tigg, in cheap kid gloves and suspicious jewelry, who pray into their hats, or make believe to pray, while their bold eyes rove all about, fixing themselves most pertinaciously on the old lady with the diamonds and the giggling young ones with the paint. There is the bride in a white bonnet and light silk dress, who carries an ivory-backed Church Service with the most transparent attempts at unconsciousness, and the bridegroom who lounges after her and looks sheepish; sometimes it is the bride who straggles bashfully, and the groom who boldly leads the way. There is the young widow with new weeds; the sedate mother of many daughters; paterfamilias, with his numerous olive-branches, leading on his arm the exuberant wife of his bosom flushed with coming up the hill; the walking tourist, whose respect for Sunday goes to the length of a clean collar and a clothes-brush; and the female traveller, economical of luggage, who wears her waterproof and sea-side hat, and is independent and not ashamed. There are the people who come for simple distraction, because Sunday is such a dull day in a strange place, and there is nothing else to do; and those who come because it is respectable and the right thing, and they are accustomed to it; those who come to see and be seen; and those—the select few, the simple yearning souls—who come because they do honestly feel the church to be the very House of God, and that prayerwith its confession of sin helps them to live better lives. But, good or bad, vain or simple, arrogant or humble, they all sweep out when the last word is said, and the cottagers and small townsfolk stand at their doors to see them pass—'the quality coming out of church' counting astheirSunday sight. The women get ideas in millinery from the show, and discuss with each other what is worn this year, and how ever can they turn their old gowns into garments that shall imitate the last effort of a Court milliner's genius—the result of many sleepless nights? Fine ladies ridicule these clumsy apings of their humble sisters, and long for the old sumptuary laws to be in force on all below them; but if Sunday is the field-day and church the parade-ground of the strangers, we cannot wonder if the natives try to participate in the amusement. If Lady Jane likes to confess her shame and humiliation on a velvet cushion and in silk attire, can we reasonably blame Joan that her soul hankers after a hassock of felt, and a penance-sheet of homespun cut according to my lady's pattern?
Life not being holiday-making throughout, we have to allow for the bad half-hours that must come to us; and, if we are wise, we make provision to pass them with as little annoyance as possible. And of all the bad half-hours to which we are destined, those to be spent in sickness need the greatest amount of care to render them endurable. Without going to the length of Michelet's favourite theory, which sees in every woman nothing but an invalid more or less severely afflicted according to individual temperament, but always under the influence of diseased nerves and controlled by sickly fancies, there is no doubt that women suffer very much more than men; while their patience under physical ailments is one of the traditional graces with which they are credited. Where men fume and fret at the interruption to their lives brought about by a fit of illness, calculating anxiously the loss they are sustaining during the forced inaction of their convalescence, women submit resignedly, and make the best of the inevitable. With that clear sense of Fate characteristic of them, they do not fight against the evil which they know has to be borne,but wisely try to lighten it by such wiles and arts as are open to them, and set themselves to adorn the cross they must endure. One thing indeed, makes invalidism less terrible to them than to men; and that is their ability to perform their home duties, if not quite as efficiently as when they are up and about, yet well enough for all practical purposes in the conduct of the family. The woman who gives her mind to it can keep her house in smooth working gear by dictation from her sick couch; and what she cannot actively overlook she can arrange. So far this removes the main cause of irritation with which the man must battle in the best way he can, when his business comes to a stand-still; or is given up into the hands of but a makeshift kind of substitute taken at the best; while he is laid on his back undergoing many things from doctors for the good of science and the final settling of doubtful pathological points.
Another reason why women are more patient than men during sickness is that they can amuse themselves better. One gets tired of reading all day long with the aching eyes and weary brain of weakness; yet how few things a man can do to amuse himself without too great an effort, and without being dependent on others! But women have a thousand pretty little devices for whiling away the heavy hours. They can vary their finger-work almost infinitely, and they find real pleasure in a new stitch or a stripe of a different colour and design from the last. In the contempt in which needlework in all its formsis held by the advanced class of women, its use during the period of convalescence, when it helps the lagging time as nothing else can, is forgotten. Yet it is no bad wisdom to remember that the day of sickness will probably come some time to us all; and to lay in stores of potential interest and cheerfulness against that day is a not unworthy use of power. Certain it is that this greater diversity of small, unexciting, unfatiguing occupations enables women to bear a tedious illness with comparative patience, and helps to keep them more cheerful than men.
But when the time shall have come for the perfect development of the androgynous creature, who is as yet only in the pupal state of her existence, women will have lost these two great helps. Workers outside the home like their husbands and brothers, like them they will fume and fret when they are prevented from following their bread-winning avocations; calculations of the actual money loss they are sustaining coming in to aggravate their bodily pains. And, as the needle is looked on as one of the many symbols of feminine degradation, in the good time coming there will be none of that pretty trifling with silks and ribbons which may be very absurd by the side of important work, but which is invaluable as an invalid's pastime. Consequently, what with the anguish of knowing that her profession is neglected, and what with the unenlivened tedium of her days, sickness will be a formidable thing to women of the androgynous type—and to the men belonging to them.
Again, care and tact are required to rob sickness of its more painful features, and to render it not too distressing to the home companions. A real woman, with her instincts properly developed—among them the instinct of admiration—knows how to render even invalidism beautiful; and indeed, with her power of improving occasions, she is never more charming than as an invalid or a convalescent. There is a certain refined beauty about her more seductive than the robuster bloom of health. Her whole being seems purified. The coarser elements of humanity are obscured, passions are at rest, and all those fretful, anxious strivings, which probably afflict her when in the full swing of society, are put away as if they had never been. She is forced to let life glide, and her own mind follows the course of the quieter flow. She knows too how to make herself bewitching by the art which is not artifice so much as the highest point to which her natural excellences can be brought. If the radiance of health has gone, she has the sweeter, subtler loveliness of fragility; if her diamonds are laid aside, and all that glory of dress which does so much for women is perforce abandoned, the long, loose folds of falling drapery, with their antique grace, perhaps suit her better, and the fresh flowers on her table may be more suggestive and delightful than artificial ones in her hair.
Many a drifting husband has been brought back to his first enthusiasm by the illness of a wife who knew how to turn evil things into good, and toextract a charm even out of suffering. It is a turn of the kaleidoscope; a recombination of the same elements but in a new pattern and with fresh loveliness; whereas the androgynous woman, with her business worries and her honest, if impolitic, self-surrender to hideous flannel wraps and all the uglinesses of a sick room crudely pronounced, would have added a terror to disease which probably would have quenched his waning love for ever. For the androgynous woman despises every approach to coquetry, as she despises all the other insignia of feminine servitude. It is not part of her life's duties to make herself pleasing to men; and they must take her as they find her. Where the true woman contrives a beauty and creates a grace out of her very misfortune, the androgynous holds to the doctrine of spades and the value of the unvarnished truth. Where the one gives a little thought to the most becoming colour of her ribbon or the best arrangement of her draperies, the other pushes the tangled locks off her face anyhow, and makes herself an amorphous bundle of brown and lemon colour. Her sole wish is to get the bad time over. How it would be best got over does not trouble her; and to beautify the inherently unlovely is beyond her skill to compass. Hence her hours of sickness go by in ugliness and idle fretting; while the true woman finds graceful work to do that enlivens their monotony, and in the continuance of her home duties loses the galling sense of loss from which the other suffers.
In sickness too, who but women can nurse? Men make good nurses enough out in the bush, where nothing better can be had; and a Californian 'pardner' is tender enough in his uncouth way to his mate stricken down with fever in the shanty, when he comes in at meal-times and administers quinine and brick tea with horny hands bleeding from cuts and begrimed with mud. But this is not nursing in the woman's sense. To be sure the strength of men makes them often of value about an invalid. They can lift and carry as women cannot; and the want of a few nights' sleep does not make them hysterical. Still they are nowhere as nurses, compared with women; and the best of them are not up to the thoughtful cares and pleasant attentions which, as medical men know, are half the battle in recovery. And this is work which suits women. It appeals to their love of power and tenderness combined; it gratifies the maternal instinct of protection and self-sacrifice; and it pleasantly reverses the usual order of things, and gives into their hands Hercules twirling a distaff the wrong way, and fettered by the length of his skirts.
The bread-winning wife knows nothing of all this. To her, sickness in her household would be only a degree less destructive than her own disablement, if she were called on to nurse. She would not be able to leave her office for such unremunerative employment as soothing her children's feverish hours or helping her husband over his. She wouldcalculate, naturally enough, the difference of cost between hired help and her own earnings; and economy as well as inclination would decide the question. But the poor fellow left all day long to the questionable services of a hired nurse, or to the clumsy honesty of some domestic Phyllis less deft than faithful, would be a gainer by his wife's presence—granting that she was a real woman and not an androgyne—even if he lost the addition to their income which her work might bring in; as he would rather, when he came home from his work to her sick bed, find her patient and cheerful, making the best of things from the woman's point of view and with the woman's power of adaptation, than be met with anxious queries as to the progress of business; with doubts, fears, perplexities; the office dragged into the sick room, and unnecessary annoyance added to unavoidable pain.
There is a certain kind of woman, sweet always, who yet shows best when she is invalided. Cleared for a while from the social tangles which perplex and distress the sensitive, she is as if floated into a quiet corner where she has time to think and leisure to be her true self undisturbed; where she is able too, to give more to her friends, if less to the world at large than at other times. And she is always to be found. The invalid-couch is the rallying point of the household, and even the little children learn to regard it as a place of privilege dearer than the stately drawing-room of ordinary times. Her friends drop in, sureto find her at home and pleased by their coming; and her afternoon teas with her half-dozen chosen intimates have a character of their own, æsthetic and delightful; partly owing to the quiet and subdued tone that must perforce pervade them, partly to the unselfishness that reigns on all sides. Every one exerts himself to bring her things which may amuse her, and she is loaded with presents of a graceful kind—new books, early fruit, and a wealth of flowers to which even her poorest friend adds his bunch of violets, if nothing else. She is the precious child of her circle, and but for her innate sweetness would run a risk of being the spoilt one. Clever men come and talk to her, give her cause of thought, and knowledge to remember and be made glad by for all time; her lady friends keep her abreast of the outside doings of the world and their own especial coteries, contributing the dramatic element so dear to the feminine mind; every one tells her all that is afloat on the sea of society, but only all that is cheerful—no one brings her horrors, nor disturbs the frail grace of her repose with petty jealousies and tempers. Her atmosphere is pure and serene, and the dainty loveliness of her surroundings lends its charm to the rest.
To her husband she is even more beautiful than in the early days; and all men feel for her that chivalrous kind of tenderness and homage which the true woman alone excites. The womanly invalid, gentle, cheerful, full of interest for others, active inmind if prostrate in body, sympathetic and patient, is for the time the queen of her circle, loved and ministered to by all; and when she goes to Cannes or San Remo to escape the cruelty of the English winter, she carries with her a freight of good wishes and regrets, and leaves a blank which nothing can fill up until she returns with the summer roses to take her place once more as the popular woman of her society.
To most young people the social arrangement known as going on a visit to friends at a distance is one of the most charming things possible. Novelty being to them the very breath of life, and hope and expectation their normal mental condition, the mere fact of change is in itself delightful; unless it happens to be something so hopelessly dull as a visit single-handed to an invalid grandmother, or the yearly probation of a girl of the period, when obliged to put herself under the charge of a wealthy maiden aunt with strict principles and no games of any kind allowed on the lawn. If the young ladies out on a visit are however, moderately cheerful, they can contrive to make amusement for themselves out of anything short of such sober-tinted extremes as these; and very often they effect more serious matters than mere amusement, and their visit brings them a love-affair or a marriage which changes the whole tenor of their lives. At the worst, it has shown them a new part of the country; given them new patterns of embroidery; new fashions of hairdressing; new songs and waltzes; and afforded anoccasion for a large supply of pretty dresses—which last to most young women, or indeed to most women whether young or old, is a very effectual source of pleasure.
The great charm and excitement of going on a visit belongs naturally to the young of the middle classes; among those of higher condition it is a different matter altogether. When people take their own servants with them and live in exactly the same style as at home, they merely change the furniture of their rooms and the view from the windows. The same kind of thing goes on at Lord A.'s as at Lord B.'s, in the Scottish Highlands or the Leicestershire wolds. The quality of the hunting or shooting may be different, but the whole manner of living is essentially repetition; and the dead level of civilization is not broken up by any very startling innovations anywhere. But among the middle classes there is greater variety; and the country clergyman's daughter who goes on a visit to the London barrister's family, plunges into a manner of life totally different from that of her own home; the personal habits of town and country still remaining quite distinct, and the possibilities of action being on two different plans altogether.
A London-bred woman goes down to the country on a visit to a hale, hearty Hessian, her former school-fellow, who tucks up her woollen gown midway to her knees, wears stout boots of masculine appearance, and goes quite comfortably through mud and mire,across ploughed field and undrained farmyards—taking cramped stiles and five-barred gates in her way as obstacles of no more moment than was the mud or the mire. Long years of use to this unfastidious mode of existence have blinded her to the perception that a woman, without being an invalid, may yet be unable to do all that is so easy to her. So the London lady is taken for a walk, say of five or six miles, which to the vigorous Hessian is a mere unsatisfying stroll, to be counted no more as serious exercise than she would count a spoonful ofvol-au-ventas serious eating. To be sure the walk includes a few muddy corners and the like, and Bond Street boots do not bear the strain of stiff clay clods too well; neither is a new gown of the fashionable colour improved by being dragged through furze bushes and bracken, and brushed against the wet heads of field cabbages. Moreover, crossing meadows tenanted by cattle that toss their heads and look—and looking, in horned cattle, is a great offence to our town-bred woman—is a service of peril which alone would take all the strength out of her nerves, and all the pleasure out of her walk; but the hostess cannot imagine feelings which she herself does not share, and the London lady is of course credited with courage, because to doubt it would be to cast a slur on her whole moral character. The Hessian minds the beasts no more than so many tree-stumps, but her friend sees a raging bull in every milky mother that stares at her as shepasses, and thinks something dreadful is going to happen because the flies make the heifers swish their tails and stamp. Then the dogs bark furiously as they rush out of farmsteads and cottages; and the newly dressed fields are not pleasant to cross nor skirt. The visitor cares little for wild flowers, less for birds, and all trees are pretty much alike to her; and this long rude walk, accentuated with the true country emphasis, has been too much for her. Her host wonders at her evening lassitude and low spirits, and fears that she finds it dull; and the robust hostess anathematizes the demoralizing effects of Kensington, and scornfully contrasts her present friend with her past, when they were both schoolgirls together and on a par in strength and endurance. 'She was like other people then,' says the well-trained Hessian who has kept herself in condition by daily exercise of a severe character; 'and now see what a poor creature she is! She can do nothing but work at embroidery and crouch shivering over the fire.'
Sometimes however, it happens the other way, and the lady guest, even though a Londoner, is the stronger of the two. The wife has been broken down by family cares and the one inevitable child too many; the guest comes fresh, unworn, unmarried, still young. The wife seldom goes beyond the garden, never further than the village, and is knocked up if she has done two miles; the guest can manage her six or eight without fatigue. Hence she naturally becomes the husband's walking companion during her visit, tohis frank delight and as frank regrets that his wife cannot do as much. And the wife, though good-breeding and natural kindness prevent her objecting to these long walks, finds them hard lines all things considered. Most probably she bitterly regrets having invited her former friend, and mentally resolves never to ask her again. She wanted her as a little amusement and relaxation for herself. Her health is delicate and her life dull, and she thought a female friend in the house would cheer her up and be a help. But when she finds that she has invited one who, without in the least intending it and only by the force of circumstances, sets her in unfavourable contrast with her husband, we may be sure that it will not take much argument to convince her that asking friends on a visit is a ridiculous custom, and that people, especially young ladies fond of long walks, are best at their own homes.
In London there are two kinds of guests from the country; the insatiable, and the indifferent—those who wear out their hosts by their activity and those who oppress them by their supineness. The Londoner who has outlived all the excitement of the busy city life wonders at the energy and enthusiasm of his friend. Everything must be done, even to the Tower and the Whispering Gallery, Madame Tussaud's and the Agricultural Hall. There is not a second-rate trumpery trifle which has been in the shop windows for a year or more, that is not pored over, and if possible, bought; and among the inflictions of thehost may be counted the crude taste of the guest, and the childish flinging away of money on things absolutely worthless. Or it may be that the guest has come up stored with many maxims of worldly wisdom and vague suspicion, and, determined not to be taken in, attempts to bargain in shops where a second price would be impossible, and where the host is personally known.
With guests of superabundant energy a quiet evening is out of the question. They go the round of all the theatres, and fill in the gaps with the opera and concerts. They have come up not to stay with you, but to see London; and they fulfil their intention liberally. Or they are indifferent and supine, and not to be amused, do what you will. They think everything a bore, or they are nervous and not up to the mark. They beseech you not to ask any one to dinner, and not to take them with you to any reception. They are listless at the theatre and go to sleep at the opera. At the Royal Academy the only pictures they notice are those landscapes taken from their own neighbourhood, or perhaps one by a local artist known to them. All the finest works of the year fall flat; and before you have seen half the exhibition, they say they have had enough of it, and sit down, plaintively offering to wait till you have done, in the tone of a Christian martyr.
These are the people who are always complaining of the dirt and smoke of London and the stuffiness of the houses, as if they were personally injured andyou personally responsible. They show a very decided scorn for all London produce, natural or artificial, and wonder how people can live in such a place. They are sure to deride the prevailing fashions, whatever they may be; while their own, of last season, are exaggerated and excessive; but they refuse to have the town touch laid on them during their stay, and heroically follow the millinery gospel of their local Worth, and measure you by themselves. They show real animation only when they are going away, and begin to wonder how they shall find things at home, and whether Charles will meet them at the station or send William instead. But when they write to thank you for your hospitality, they tell you they never enjoyed anything so much in their lives; leaving you in a state of perplexity, as you remember their boredom, and peevish complainings, and evident relief in leaving, and compare your remembrance with the warm expressions of pleasure now before your eyes. All you can say is, that if they were pleased they took an odd way of showing it.
There are people rash enough to have other people's children on a visit; to take on themselves the responsibility of their health and safety, when the young guests are almost sure to fall ill by the change of diet and the unwonted amount of indulgence allowed, or to come into some trouble by the relaxing of due supervision and control. They get a touch of gastric fever, or they tumble into the pond; and either bronchitis, or a fall from horseback, topplingover from a ladder, or coming to grief on the swing, or some such accident, is generally the result of an act which is either heroism or madness as one may be inclined to regard it. For of all the inconveniences attending visiting, those incidental to child-guests are the most distressing. Yet there are philanthropic friends who run these risks for the sake of giving pleasure to a few young people. Whether they deserve canonization for their kindness or censure for their rashness we leave an open question.
As for a certain disturbance in health, that generally comes to other than children from being on a visit. Hours and style of food are sure to be somewhat different from those of home; and the slight constraint of the life, and the feverishness which this induces, add to the disturbance. Occupations are interrupted both to the guest and the host; and some hosts think it necessary to make company for the guest, and some guests are heavy on hand. Some regard your house as a gaol and you as the gaoler, and are afraid to initiate an independent action or to call their souls their own; others treat you as a landlord, and behave as if you kept an inn, making a convenience of your household in the most unblushing manner. Some are fastidious, and covertly snub your wines, your table, and your whole arrangements; others embarrass you by the fervour of their admiration, as if they had come out of a hovel and did not know the usages of civilized homes. Some intrude themselves into every small household matterthat goes on before them, and offer advice that is neither wanted nor desired; and others will not commit themselves to the most innocent opinion, fearful lest they should be thought to interfere or take sides. Some of the women dress at the husband; some of the men flirt with the wife or make love to the daughters surreptitiously; some loaf about or play billiards all day long till you are tired of the sound of their footsteps and the click of the balls; other bury their heads in a book and are no better than mummies lounging back in easy chairs; some insist on going to the meet in a hard frost; others will shoot in a downpour; and others again waste your whole day over the chess-table, and will not stir out at all. Some are so sensitive and fidgety that they will not stay above a day or two, and are gone before you have got into the habit of seeing them, leaving you with the feeling of a whirlwind having passed through your house; and others, when they come, stick, and you begin to despair of dislodging them.
On the other hand, there are houses where you feel that you would wear out your welcome after the third day, how long soever the distance you have come; and there are others where you would offend your hosts for life if you did not throw overboard every other duty and engagement to remain for as many weeks as they desire. In fact, paying visits and inviting guests are both risky matters, and need far more careful consideration than they generallyreceive. But when it happens that the thing is congenial on both sides, that the guest slips into a vacant place as it were, and neither bores nor is bored, then paying a visit is as delightful as the young imagination pictures it to be; and the peculiar closeness and sweetness of intimacy it engenders is one of the most enduring and charming circumstances incidental to friendship. This however, is rare and exceptional; as are most of the very good things of life.
In every coterie we find certain stray damsels unattached; young ladies of personable appearance and showy accomplishments who go about the world alone, and whose parents, never seen, are living in some obscure lodgings where they pinch and screw to furnish their daughter's bravery. Some one or two great ladies of the set patronize these girls, take them about a good deal, and ask them to all their drums and at-homes. They are useful in their degree; very good-natured; always ready to fetch and carry in a confidential kind of way; to sing and play when they are asked—and they sing and play with almost professional skill; full of the small talk of the day, and not likely to bore their companions with untimely discussions on dangerous subjects, nor to startle them with enthusiasm about anything. They serve to fill a vacant place when wanted; and they look nice and keep up the ball so far as their own sphere extends. They are safe, too; and, though lively and amusing, are never known to retail gossip nor talk scandal in public.
Who are they? No one exactly knows. They are Miss A. and Miss B., and they have collaterals of respectable name and standing; cousins in Government offices; dead uncles of good military rank; perhaps a father, dead or alive, with a quite unexceptionable position; but you never see them with their natural belongings, and no one thinks of visiting them at their own homes. They are sure to have a mother in bad health, who never goes out and never sees any one; and if you should by chance come across her, you find a shabby, painful, peevish woman who seems at odds with life altogether, and who is as unlike her showy daughter as a russet wren is unlike a humming-bird. The drawing-room epiphyte introduces mamma, when necessary, with a creditable effort at indifference, not to say content, with her conditions; but if you can read signs, you know what she is feeling about that suit of rusty black, and how little she enjoys the rencounter.
Sometimes she has a brother, of whom she never speaks unless obliged, and of whose occupation and whereabouts, when asked, she gives only the vaguest account. He has an office in the City; or he has gone abroad; or he is in the navy and she forgets the name of his ship; but, whatever he is, you can get no clue more distinct than this. If you should chance to see him, you get a greater surprise than you had when you met the mother; and you wonder, with a deeper wonder, how such a sister should have sprung from the same stock as that which produced such a brother.Sometimes however, the brother is as presentable as the sister; in which case he probably follows much the same course as herself, and hangs on to the skirts of those of the Upper Ten who recognize him—preferring to idle away his life and energy as a well-dressed epiphyte of greatness rather than live the life of a man in a lower social sphere. But, as a rule, stray damsels have neither brothers nor sisters visible to the world, and only a widowed mother in the background, whose health is bad and who does not go out.
The ulterior object of the ladies who patronize these pretty epiphytes is to get them married; partly from personal kindness, partly from the pleasure all women have in bringing about a marriage that does not interfere with themselves. But they seldom accomplish this object. Who is to marry the epiphyte? The men of the society into which she has been brought from the outside have their own ambitions to realize. They want money, or land, or a good family connexion, to make the sacrifice an equal bargain and to gild the yoke of matrimony with becoming splendour. And the drawing room epiphyte has nothing to offer as her contribution but a fine pair of eyes, a good-natured manner, and a pretty taste for music. To marry well among the society in which she finds herself is therefore almost impossible. And her tastes have been so far formed as to render a marriage into lower circumstances almost as impossible on the other side.
Besides, what could she do as the wife of a clergyman, say on three hundred a year, with a poor parish to look after and an increasing tribe of babies to feed and clothe? Her clear high notes, her splendid register, her brilliant touch, will not help her then; and the taste with which she makes up half-worn silk gowns, and transforms what was a rag into an ornament, will not do much towards finding the necessary boots and loaves which keep her sisters awake at night wondering how they are to be got. She has been taught nothing of the art of home life, if she has learnt much of that of the drawing-room. She cannot cook, nor make a little go a long way by the cunning of good management and a well-masked economy; she cannot do serviceable needlework, though she may be great in fancy work, and quite a genius in millinery; and the habit of having plenty of servants about her has destroyed the habit of turning her hand to anything like energetic self-help. Epiphyte as she is, penniless stray damsel more than half maintained by the kindness of her grand friends, she has to keep up the sham of appearances before those friends' domestics. And as ladyhood in England is chiefly measured by a woman's uselessness, and to do anything in the way of rational work would be a spot on her ermine, the poor epiphyte of the drawing-room, with mamma in rusty black in those shabby lodgings of theirs, learns in self-defence to practise all the foolish helplessness of her superiors; and, to retain the respect of the servants, loses her own.
What is she then but one of those misplaced beings who are neither of one sphere nor of another? She is not of thegrandes dameson her own account, yet she lives in their houses as one among them. She is not a woman who can make the best of things; who, notable and industrious, and by her clever contrivances of saving and substitution is able to order a home comfortably on next to nothing; and yet she has no solid claim to anything but the undercut of the middle classes, and no right to expect more than the most ordinary marriage. She is nothing. Ashamed and unable to work, she has to accept gratuities which are not wages. Waiting on Providence and floated by her friends, she wanders though society ever on the look-out for chances. Each new acquaintance is a fresh hope, and every house that opens to her contains the potentiality of final success. To be met everywhere is the ultimate point of her ambition with respect to means; the end kept steadily, if fruitlessly, in view, is that satisfying settlement which shall take her out of the category of a hanger-on and give her alocus standiof her own. But it does not come.
Year by year we meet the drawing-room epiphyte in the old haunts—at Brighton; at Ryde; at half-a-dozen good houses in London; on a visit to the friends who make much of her one day and snub her the next—but she does not 'go off.' She is pretty, she is agreeable, she is well dressed, she is accomplished; but she does not find the husband for whom all thisis offered as the equivalent. Year by year she grows fatter or thinner as her constitution expands into obesity or shrivels into leanness; the lines about her fine eyes deepen; the powder is a little thicker on her cheeks; and there are more than shrewd suspicions of a touch of rouge or of antimony, with a judicious application of patent hair-restorer to lift up the faded tints. Fighting desperately with that old enemy Time, she disputes line by line the tribute he claims; and succeeds so far as to continue a good make-up for a year or two after other women of her own age have given in and consented to look their years. But the drawing-room epiphyte is nothing if she is not young—which is synonymous with power to interest and amuse. Her friends, the great ladies who hold drawing-rooms and gather society in shoals, want points of colour in their rooms as well as serviceable foils. The apple-pie that was all made of quinces was a failure, wanting the homelycouchefrom which the savour of the more fragrant fruit might be thrown up. On the other hand there are social meetings which are like apple-pies without any quince at all; and then the epiphyte is invaluable, and her music worth as much in its degree as if she were a prima donna, each of whose notes ranked as gold. So that when she ceases to be young, when she loses her high notes and has gout in her fingers, she fails in her onlyraison d'être, and her occupation is gone. Hence her hard struggles with the old enemy, and her half-heroic, half-tragic determinationnot to give in while a shred of force remains.
On the day when she collapses into an old woman she is lost. She has nothing for it then but to withdraw from the brilliant drawing-rooms she has so long haunted into dingy lodgings in a back street, and live as her mother lived before her. Forgotten by the world which she has spent her life in waiting on, she has leisure to reflect on the relative values of things, and to lament, as she probably will, that she gave living grain for gilded husks; that she exchanged the realities of love and home, which might have been hers had she been contented to accept them on a lower social scale, for the barren pleasures of the day and the delusive hope of marrying well in a sphere where she had no solid foothold. She had her choice, like others; but she chose to throw for high stakes at heavy odds, and in so doing let slip what she originally held. The bird in the hand might have been of a homely kind enough; still, it was always the bird; while the two golden pheasants in the bush flew away unsalted, and left her only their shadows to run after.
On the whole then, we incline to the belief that the drawing-room epiphyte is a mistake, and that those stray damsels who wander about society unattended by any natural protector and always more or less in the character of adventuresses, would do better to keep to the sphere determined by parental circumstances than to let themselves be taken into one whichdoes not belong to them and which they cannot hold. And furthermore it seems to us that, irrespective of its present instability and future fruitlessness, the position of a drawing-room epiphyte is one which no woman of sense would accept, and to which no woman of spirit would submit.
There has always been in the world a kind of women whom one scarcely knows how to classify as to sex; men by their instincts, women by their form, but neither men nor women as we regard either in the ideal. In early times they were divided into two classes; the Amazons who, donning helmet and cuirass, went to the wars that they might be with their lovers, or perhaps only for an innate liking for rough work; and the tribe of ancient women, so withered and so wild, who should be women yet whose beards forbade men so to account them, and for whom public opinion usually closed the controversy by declaring that they were witches—that is, creatures so unlike the rightful woman of nature that only the devil himself was supposed to be answerable for them. These particular manifestations have long since passed away, and we have nowadays neither Amazons learning the goose-step in our barrack-yards, nor witches brewing hell-broth on Scottish moors; but we have the Epicene Sex all the same—women who would defy the acutest socialCuvier among us to classify, but who are growing daily into more importance and making continually fresh strides in their unwholesome way.
Possessed by a restless discontent with their appointed work, and fired with a mad desire to dabble in all things unseemly, which they call ambition; blasphemous to the sweetest virtues of their sex, which until now have been accounted both their own pride and the safeguard of society; holding it no honour to be reticent, unselfish, patient, obedient, but swaggering to the front, ready to try conclusions in aggression, in selfishness, in insolent disregard of duty, in cynical abasement of modesty, with the hardest and least estimable of the men they emulate;—these women of the doubtful gender have managed to drop all their own special graces while unable to gather up any of the more valuable virtues of men. They are no more philosophical than the most inconsequent sister who judges all things according to her feelings, and commends or condemns principles as she happens to like or dislike the persons advocating them; and they are as hysterical and intemperate in their political cries as if the whole world wagged by impulse only. They are no more magnanimous under rebuke than the stanchest advocate of the sacredness of sex, but resent all hostile criticism as passionately, and from grounds as merely personal, as if they were still shrouded from public blame by the safety of their privacy; and they are as little useful in their blatant energy as when theyspent their days in working monstrous patterns in crude-coloured wools, or found spiritual satisfaction in cutting holes in strips of calico to sew up again with a new stitch. They have committed the mistake of abandoning such work as they can do well, while trying to manipulate things which they touch only to spoil; they have ceased to be women and not learnt to be men; they have thrown aside beauty and not put on strength.
The latest development of the impulses which animate the epicene sex has taken its expression in after-dinner oratory. If we were as malicious to women as those whose follies we rebuke would have the world believe, we should encourage them to fight it out with womanly modesty and the world's esteem on this line. Their worst enemies could not wish to see them inflict on themselves a greater annoyance than the obligation of getting on their legs after the cheese has been removed, to turn on a stream of verbal insipidity for a quarter of an hour at a stretch. Only men who have something to say on the subject that may be on hand, and so are glad of every opportunity for elucidation or advocacy, or men who are eaten up with vanity, take pleasure in speechifying after dinner. Its uselessness is apparent; its mock hilarity is ghastly; even at political 'banquets,' when words are supposed to have some deep meaning, we get very little substance in it; while all the funny part of the business is thedreariest comedy, the unreality of which brings it close to tragedy.
If anything were wanting to show how much vanity prompts a certain class of women in their ways and works, and how tremendous is their passion for notoriety and personal display, it would be this assumption of the functions of the post-prandial orator. Indeed they have taken greatly of late to public speaking all round; and some among them seem only easy when they are standing before a crowd, to be admired if they are pretty, applauded if they are pert, and, in any case, the centre of attraction for the moment. We do not look forward with pleasure to the time when ladies will rise after their champagne and port, with flushed cheeks and eyes more bright than beautiful, steadying themselves adroitly against the back of their chairs, and rolling out either those interminable periods with no nominatives and no climax under which we have all so often suffered, or spasmodically jerking forth a few unconnected sentences of which the sole merit is their brevity. In the beginning of things, when the wedge has to be introduced, only the best of its kind puts itself forward; and doubtless the ladies who have already varied the usual dull routine of after-dinner oratory by their livelier utterances have done the thing comparatively well, and avoided a breakdown; but we own that we tremble at the thought of the flood of feminine eloquence which will be let loose if the fashion spreads.
Fancy the heavy British matron rearing her ample shoulders above the board, as she lays down the law on the duties of men towards women—especially sons-in-law—and the advantage to all concerned if wives are liberally dealt with in the matter of housekeeping money, and let to go their own way without marital hindrance. Or think of the woman's-rights woman, with her hybrid costume and her hard face, showing society how it can be saved from destruction only by throwing the balance of power into the hands of women—by the nobler and brighter instincts of the oppressed sex swamping that rude, rough, masculine element which has so long mismanaged matters. Or even think of the coquettish and alluring little woman getting up before a crowd of men and firing off the neatest and smartest park of verbal artillery possible, every shot of which tells and is applauded to the echo. How will men take it all? For ourselves, having too sincere a respect for women as they ought to be, and as nature meant them to be, we do not wish to see them turned into social buffoons, the mark for jeering comments and angry hisses when what they say displeases their hearers, told to 'sit down,' and 'shut up,' with entreaties to some strong man to 'take them out of that and carry them home to the nursery,' by a hundred voices roughened with drink and shouting. But if women expect that hostile feelings and opinions will be tamed or altogether suppressed in their honour because they choose tothrust themselves where they have no business, they will find out their mistake, perhaps when too late. If they abandon their safe cover and come out into the open, they must look to be hit like the rest. We cannot too often repeat that if they will mingle in the specialities of men's lives, they must put up with men's treatment and not cry out when they are struck home. In deference to them plain-speaking has been banished from the drawing rooms of society; but it is too much to expect men to sit in their own places under heavy boredom or fatuous gabble without wincing; and it is childish to ask us to make a free-gift of our truth and time to women who outrage one and waste the other. On the other hand the cheers which would follow if they hit the humour of the hour, or if, being specially pretty or specially smart, they afforded so much more than the ordinary excitement to the guests, would to our minds be just as offensive as the rougher truth, and perhaps more so. The leering approbation of men never over-nice in thought and now heated with wine, such as are always to be found at public dinners, is an infliction from which we should have imagined any woman with purity or self-respect would have shrunk with shame and dismay. But women who take to after-dinner speeches cannot be either nervous or fastidious.
Perhaps it is expecting too much of women of this kind if we ask them to consider themselves in relation to men's liking. They profess to despisethe masculine animal they are so fond of imitating, and to be careless of his liking; holding it a matter of supreme indifference whether they are to his taste or not. But it may be as well to say plainly that the disgust which we may presume the normal healthy woman feels for men who paint and pad and wear stays and work Berlin work—men who give their minds to chignons and costumes; who spy after their maids' love-letters, and watch their boys as cats watch mice—men who occupy themselves with domestic details they should know nothing about; who look after the baby's pap-boat and the cinders in the dust-heap, and can call the various articles of household linen by their proper names—the disgust which the womanly woman feels for them is exactly that which the manly man feels for the epicene sex.
Hard, unblushing, unloving women whose ideal of happiness lies in swagger and notoriety; who hate home life and despise home virtues; who have no tender regard for men and no instinctive love for children; who despise the modesty of sex as they deny its natural fitness—these women have worse than no charm for men, and their place in the human family seems altogether a mistake. If there were any special work which they could do better than manly men or feminine women, we could understand their economic uses, and accept them as eminently unlovely outgrowths of a natural law, but at least as necessary and natural. But they are not wanted. They simply disgust men and mislead women; andthose women whom they do not mislead in their own they often influence too strongly in the other direction by way of reaction, rendering them sickly in their sweetness, and weak rather than womanly. If the interlacing margins of certain things are lovely, as colours which blend together are more harmonious than those which are crudely distinct, it is not so with the interlacing margin of sex. Let men be men, and women women, sharply, unmistakably defined; but to have an ambiguous sex which is neither the one nor the other, possessing the coarser passions and instincts of men without their strength or better judgment, and the position and privileges of women without their tenderness, their sense of duty, or their modesty, is a state of things that we should like to see abolished by public opinion, which alone can touch it.