Sect whose chief devotion liesIn odd perverse antipathies;In falling out with that or this,And finding somewhat still amiss.
Sect whose chief devotion liesIn odd perverse antipathies;In falling out with that or this,And finding somewhat still amiss.
Sect whose chief devotion liesIn odd perverse antipathies;In falling out with that or this,And finding somewhat still amiss.
Sect whose chief devotion lies
In odd perverse antipathies;
In falling out with that or this,
And finding somewhat still amiss.
Vice is bad and malignant wickedness is worse, but beyond either in evil results to mankind is weakness; which indeed is the pabulum by which vice is fed and the agent by which malignity works. If every one in this world had a backbone, there would not be so much misery nor guilt as there is now; for we must give each individual of the 'cruel strong' a large following of weaker victims; and it would be easy to demonstrate that the progress of nations has always been in proportion to the number of stiff backbones among them. Yet unfortunately limp people abound, to the detriment of society and to their own certain sorrow; molluscs, predestined to be the food of the stronger, with no power of self-defence nor of self-support, but having to be protected against outside dangers if they are to be preserved at all;—and perhaps when you have done all that you can do, not safe even then, and most likely not worth the trouble taken about them. Open the gates for but a moment, and they are swept up by the first passer-by. Let them loose from your own sustaining hand, and they fall abroad in a mass of flabby helplessness,unable to work, to resist, to retain—mere heaps of moral protoplasm, pitiable as well as contemptible; perhaps pitiable because so contemptible. See one of these poor creatures left a widow, if a woman—turned out of his office, if a man—and then judge of the value of a backbone by the miserable consequences of its absence. The widow is simply lost in the wilderness of her domestic solitude, as much so as would be a child if set in the midst of a pathless moor with no one to guide him to the safe highway. She may have money and she may have relations, but she is as poor as if she had nothing better than parish relief; and unless some one will take her up and manage everything for her conscientiously, she is as lonely as if she were an exile in a strange land. She has been so long used to lean on the stronger arm of her husband, that she cannot stand upright now that her support has been taken from her. Her servants make her their prey; her children tyrannize over her and ignore her authority; her boys go to the bad; her girls get fast and loud; all her own meek little ideas of modesty and virtue are rudely thrust to the wall; and she is obliged to submit to a family disorder which she neither likes nor encourages, but which she has not the strength to oppose nor the wisdom to direct. She may be the incarnation of all saintly qualities in her own person, but by mere want of strength she is the occasion by which a very pandemonium is possible; and the worst house of acommunity is sure to be that of a quiet, gentle, molluscous little widow, without one single vicious proclivity but without the power to repress or even to rebuke vice in others.
A molluscous man too, suddenly ejected from his long-accustomed groove, where, like a toad embedded in the rock, he had made his niche exactly fitting to his own shape, presents just as wretched a picture of helplessness and unshiftiness. In vain his friends suggest this or that independent endeavour; he shakes his head, and says he can't—it won't do. What he wants is a place where he is not obliged to depend on himself; where he has to do a fixed amount of work for a fixed amount of salary; and where his fibreless plasticity may find a mould ready formed, into which it may run without the necessity of forging shapes for itself. Many a man of respectable intellectual powers has gone down into ruin, and died miserably, because of this limpness which made it impossible for him to break new ground or to work at anything whatsoever with the stimulus of hope only. He must be bolstered up by certainty, supported by the walls of his groove, else he can do nothing; and if he cannot get into this friendly groove, he lets himself drift into destruction.
In no manner are limp people to be depended on; their very central quality being fluidity, which is a bad thing to rest on. Take them in their family quarrels—and they are always quarrelling among themselves—you think they must have broken witheach other for ever; that surely they can never forget or forgive all the insolent expressions, the hard words, the full-flavoured epithets which they have flung at one another; but the next time you meet them they are quite good friends again, and going on in the old fluid way as if no fiery storms had lately troubled the domestic horizon. Perhaps they have induced you to take sides; if so, you may look out, for you are certain to be thrown over and to have the enmity of both parties instead of only one. They are much given to this kind of thing, and fond of making pellets for you to shoot; when, after the shot, they disclaim and disown you. They speak against each other furiously, tell you all the family secrets and make them worse and greater than they really are. If you are credulous for your own part you take them literally; and if highly moral, you probably act on their accusations in a spirit of rhadamanthine justice, and the absolute need of rewarding sin according to its sinfulness. Beware; their accusations are baseless as the wind, and acting on them will lead to your certain discomfiture. The only safe way with limp people is never to believe what they say; or, if you are forced to believe, never to translate your faith into deeds nor even words; never to commit yourself to partizanship in any form whatever. They do not intend it, in all probability, but by very force of their weakness limp people are almost invariably untruthful and treacherous. By the force too, of this same weakness, they are incapableof anything like true friendship, and in fact make the most dangerous friends to be found. They are so plastic that they take the shape of every hand which holds them; and if you do not know them well, you may be deceived by their softness of touch, and think them sympathetic because they are fluid. They leave you full of promises to hold all you have told them sacred, and before an hour is out they have repeated to your greatest enemy every word you have said. They had not the faintest intention of doing so when they left you, but they 'slop about,' as the Americans say; and sloppy folk cannot hold secrets. The traitors of life are the limp, much more than the wicked—people who let things be wormed out of them rather than intentionally betray them. They repent likely enough; Judas hanged himself; but of what good is their repentance when the mischief is done? Not all the tears in the world can put out the fire when once lighted, and to hang oneself because one has betrayed another will make no difference save in the number of victims which one's own weakness has created.
Limp men are invariably under petticoat government, and it all depends on chance and the run of circumstance whose petticoat is dominant. The mother's, for a long period; then the sisters'. If the wife's, there is sure to be war in the camp belonging to the invertebrate commander; for such a man creates infinitely more jealousy among his womankind than the most discursive and the most unjust.He is a power, not to act, but to be used; and the woman who can hold him with the firmest grasp has necessarily the largest share of good things belonging. She can close or draw his purse-strings at pleasure. She can use his name and mask herself behind his authority at pleasure. He is the undying Jorkins who is never without a Spenlow to set him well up in front; and we can scarcely wonder that the various female Spenlows who shoot with his bow and manipulate his circumstances are jealous of each other to a frantic pitch—regarding his limpness, as they do, as so much raw material from which they can spin out their own strength.
As the mollusc has to become the prey of some one, the question simply resolves itself into whose? the new wife's or the old sisters'? Who shall govern, sitting on his shoulders? and to whom shall he be assigned captive? He generally inclines to his wife, if she is younger than he and has a backbone of her own; and you may see a limp man of this kind, with a fringe of old-rooted female epiphytes, gradually drop one after another of the ancient stock, till at last his wife and her relations take up all the space and are the only ones he supports. His own kith and kin go bare while he clothes her and hers in purple and fine linen; and the fatted calves in his stalls are liberally slain for the prodigals on her side of the house, while the dutiful sons on his own get nothing better than the husks.
Another characteristic of limp people is theircurious ingratitude. Give them nine-tenths of your substance, and they will turn against you if you refuse them the remaining tenth. Lend them all the money you can spare, and lend in utter hopelessness of any future day of reckoning, but refrain once for your own imperative needs, and they will leave your house open-mouthed at your stinginess. To be grateful implies some kind of retentive faculty; and this is just what the limp have not. Another characteristic of a different kind is the rashness with which they throw themselves into circumstances which they afterwards find they cannot bear. They never know how to calculate their forces, and spend the latter half of their life in regretting what they had spent the former half in endeavouring to attain, or to get rid of, as it might chance. If they marry A. they wish they had taken B. instead; as house-mistresses they turn away their servants at short notice after long complaint, and then beg them to remain if by any means they can bribe them to stay. They know nothing of that clear incisive action which sets men and women at ease with themselves, and enables them to bear consequences, be they good or ill, with dignity and resignation.
A limp backboneless creature always falls foul of conditions, whatever they may be; thinking the right side better than the left, and the left so much nicer than the right, according to its own place of standing for the moment; and what heads plan and hands execute, lips are never weary ofbemoaning. In fact the limp, like fretful babies, do not know what they want, being unconscious that the whole mischief lies in their having a vertebral column of gristle instead of one of bone. They spread themselves abroad and take the world into their confidence—weep in public and rave in private—and cry aloud to the priest and the Levite passing by on the other side (maybe heavily laden for their own share) to come over and help them, poor sprawling molluscs, when no man but themselves can set them upright.
The confidences of the limp are told through a trumpet to all four corners of the sky, and are as easy to get at, with the very gentlest pressure, as the juice of an over-ripe grape. And no lessons of experience will ever teach them reticence, or caution in their choice of confidants.
Not difficult to press into the service of any cause whatever, they are the very curse of all causes which they assume to serve. They collapse at the first touch of persecution, of misunderstanding, of harsh judgment, and fall abroad in hopeless panic at the mere tread of the coming foe. Always convinced by the last speaker, facile to catch and impossible to hold, they are the prizes, the decoy ducks, for which contending parties fight, perpetually oscillating between the maintenance of old abuses and the advocacy of dangerous reforms; but the side to which they have pledged themselves on Monday they forsake on Tuesday under the plea of reconversion.Neither can they carry out any design of their own, if their friends take it in hand to over-persuade them.
If a man of this stamp has painted a picture he can be induced to change the whole key, the central circumstance and the principal figure, at the suggestion of a confident critic who is only a pupil in the art of which he is, at least technically, a master. If he is preaching or lecturing, he thinks more of the people he is addressing than of what he has to say; and, though impelled at times to use the scalping-knife, hopes he doesn't wound. Vehement advocates at times, these men's enthusiasm is merely temporary, and burns itself out by its own energy of expression; and how fierce soever their aspect when they ruffle their feathers and make believe to fight, one vigorous peck from their opponent proves their anatomy as that of a creature without vertebræ, pulpy, gristly, gelatinous, and limp. All things have their uses and good issues; but what portion of the general good the limp are designed to subserve is one of those mysteries not to be revealed in time nor space.
Among other classifications we may divide the world into those who live by impulse and the undirected flow of circumstance, and those who map out their lives according to art and a definite design. These last however, are rare; few people having capacity enough to construct any persistent plan of life or to carry it through if even begun—it being so much easier to follow nature than to work by rule and square, and to drift with the stream than to build up even a beaver's dam. Now, in the matter of reticence;—How few people understand this as an art, and how almost entirely it is by the mere chance of temperament whether a person is confidential or reticent—with his heart on his sleeve or not to be got at by a pickaxe—irritatingly silent or contemptibly loquacious. Sometimes indeed we do find one who, like Talleyrand, has mastered the art of an eloquent reticence from alpha to omega, and knows how to conceal everything without showing that he conceals anything; but we find such a person very seldom, and we do not always understand his value when we have him.
Any one not a born fool can resolve to keep silence on certain points, but it takes a master-mind to be able to talk, and yet not tell. Silence indeed, self-evident and without disguise, though a safe method, is but a clumsy one, and to be tolerated only in very timid or very young people. "Le silence est le parti plus sûr pour celui qui se défie de soi-même," says Rochefoucauld. So is total abstinence for him who cannot control himself. Yet we do not preach total abstinence as the best order of life for a wise and disciplined person, any more than we would put strong ankles into leg-irons, or forbid a rational man to handle a sword. Besides, silence may be as expressive, as tell-tale even, as speech; and at the best there is no science in shutting one's lips and sitting mute; though indeed too few people have got even so far as this in the art of reticence, but tell everything they know so surely as water flows through a sieve, and are safe just in proportion to their ignorance.
But there is art, the most consummate art, in appearing absolutely frank, yet never telling anything which it is not wished should be known; in being pleasantly chatty and conversational, yet never committing oneself to a statement nor an opinion which might be used against one afterwards—ars celare artembeing a true maxim in keeping one's own counsel as well as in other things. It is only after a long acquaintance with this kind of person that you find out he has been substantially reticent throughout,though apparently so frank. Caught by his easy manner, his genial talk, his ready sympathy, you have confided to him not only all that you have of your own, but all that you have of other people's; and it is only long after, when you reflect quietly, undisturbed by the magnetism of his presence, that you come to the knowledge of how reticent he has been in the midst of his seeming frankness, and how little reciprocity there has been in your confidences together. You know such people for years, and you never really know more of them at the end than you did in the beginning. You cannot lay your finger on a fact that would in any way place them in your power; and though you did not notice it at the time, and do not know how it has been done now, you feel that they have never trusted you, and have all along carefully avoided anything like confidence. But you are at their mercy by your own rashness, and if they do not destroy you it is because they are reticent for you as well as towards you; perhaps because they are good-natured; perhaps because they despise you for your very frankness too much to hurt you; but above all things not because they are unable. How you hate them when you think of the skill with which they took all that was offered to them, yet never let you see they gave back nothing for their own part—rather by the jugglery of manner made you believe that they were giving back as much as they were receiving! Perhaps it was a little ungenerous; but they had the right to argue that ifyou could not keep your own counsel you would not be likely to keep theirs, and it was only kind at the time to let you hoodwink yourself so that you might not be offended.
In manner genial, frank, conversational, sympathetic—in substance absolutely secret, cautious, never taken off their guard, never seduced into dangerous confidences, as careful for their friends as they are for themselves, and careful even for strangers unknown to them—these people are the salvation as they are the charm of society; never making mischief, and, by their habitual reticence, raising up barriers at which gossip halts and rumour dies. No slander is ever traced to them, and what they know is as though it were not. Yet they do not make the clumsy mistake of letting you see that they are better informed than yourself on certain subjects, and know more about the current scandals of the day than they choose to reveal. On the contrary, they listen to your crude mistakes with a highly edified air, and leave you elated with the idea that you have let them behind the scenes and told them more than they knew before. If only they had spoken, your elation would not have been very long-lived.
Of all personal qualities this art of reticence is the most important and most valuable for a professional man to possess. Lawyer or physician, he must be able to hold all and hear all without betraying by word or look—by injudicious defence no more than by overt treachery—by anger at a malicious accusationno more than by a smile at an egregious mistake. His business is to be reticent, not exculpatory; to maintain silence, not set up a defence nor yet proclaim the truth. To do this well requires a rare combination of good qualities—among which are tact and self-respect in about equal amount—self-command and the power of hitting that fine line which marks off reticence from deception. No man was ever thoroughly successful as either a lawyer or physician who did not possess this combination; and with it even a modest amount of technical skill can be made to go a long way.
Valuable in society, at home the reticent are so many forms of living death. Eyes have they and see not; ears and hear not; and the faculty of speech seems to have been given them in vain. They go out and they come home, and they tell you nothing of all they have seen. They have heard all sorts of news and seen no end of pleasant things, but they come down to breakfast the next morning as mute as fishes, and if you want it you must dig out your own information bit by bit by sequential, categorical questioning. Not that they are surly nor ill-natured; they are only reticent. They are really disastrous to those who are associated with them, and make the worst partners in the world in business or marriage; for you never know what is going on, nor where you are, and you must be content to walk blindfold if you walk with them. They tell you nothing beyond what they are obliged to tell; takeyou into no confidence; never consult you; never arrest their own action for your concurrence; and the consequence is that you live with them in the dark, for ever afraid of looming catastrophes, and more like a captive bound to the car of their fortunes than like the coadjutor with a voice in the manner of the driving and the right to assist in the direction of the journey. This is the reticence of temperament, and we see it in children from quite an early age—those children who are trusted by the servants, and are their favourites in consequence, because they tell no tales; but it is a disposition that may become dangerous unless watched, and that is always liable to degenerate into falsehood. For reticence is just on the boundary of deception, and it needs but a very little step to take one over the border.
That obtrusive kind of reticence which parades itself—which makes mysteries and lets you see there are mysteries—which keeps silence and flaunts it in your face as an intentional silence brooding over things you are not worthy to know—that silence which is as loud as words, is one of the most irritating things in the world and can be made one of the most insulting. If words are sharp arrows, this kind of dumbness is paralysis, and all the worse to bear because it puts it out of your power to complain. You cannot bring into court a list of looks and shrugs, nor make it a grievance that a man held his tongue while you raved, and to all appearance kept his temper when you lost yours. Yet all of us whohave had any experience that way know that his holding his tongue was the very reason why you raved, and that if he had spoken for his own share the worst of the tempest would have been allayed. This is a common manner of tormenting with reticent people who have a moral twist; and to fling stones at you from behind the shield of silence by which they have sheltered themselves is a pastime that hurts only one of the combatants. Reticence, though at times one of the greatest social virtues we possess, is also at times one of the most disastrous personal conditions.
Half our modern novels turn on the misery brought about by mistaken reticence; and though novelists generally exaggerate the circumstances they deal with, they are not wrong in their facts. If the waters of strife have been let loose because of many words, there have been broken hearts before now because of none. Old proverbs, to be sure, inculcate the value of reticence, and the wisdom of keeping one's own counsel. If speech is silvern, silence is golden, in popular philosophy; and the youth is ever enjoined to be like the wise man, and keep himself free from the peril of words. Yet for all that, next to truth, on which society rests, mutual knowledge is the best working virtue, and a state of reticent distrust is more prudent than noble.
Many people think it a fine thing to live with their most intimate friends as if they would one day become their enemies, and never let even theirdeepest affections strike root so far down as confidence. They rearrange La Bruyère's famous maxim, 'L'on peut avoir la confiance de quelqu'un sans en avoir le cœur,' and take it quite the contrary way; but perhaps the heart which gives itself, divorced from confidence, is not worth accepting; and reticence where there is love sounds almost a contradiction in terms. Indeed, the certainty of unlimited confidences where there is love is one of the strongest of all the arguments in favour of general reticence. For in nine cases out of ten you tell your secrets and open your heart, not only to your friend, but to your friend's wife, or husband, or lover; and secondhand confidence is rarely held sacred if it can be betrayed with impunity.
By an apparent contradiction, reticent people who tell nothing are often the most charming letter-writers. Full of chit-chat, of descriptions dashed off with a warm and flowing pen, giving all the latest news well authenticated and not scandalous, and breathing just the right amount of affection according to the circumstances of the correspondents—a naturally eloquent person who has cultivated the art of reticence writes letters unequalled for charm of manner. The first impression of them is superb, enchanting, enthralling, like the bouquet of old wine; but, on reconsideration, what have they said? Absolutely nothing. This charming letter, apparently so full of matter, is an answer to a great, good, honest outpour wherein you laid bare thatfoolish heart of yours and delivered up your soul for anatomical examination; and you looked for a reply based on the same lines. At first delighted, you are soon chilled and depressed by such a return, and you feel that you have made a fool of yourself, and that your correspondent is laughing in his sleeve at your insane propensity to gush. So must it be till that good time comes when man shall have no need to defend himself against his fellows; when confidence shall not bring sorrow nor trust betrayal; and when the art of reticence shall be as obsolete as the art of fence, or the Socratic method.
We often hear women speak with a certain curious disdain of one of themselves as a 'gentlemen's favourite;' generally adding that gentlemen's favourites are never liked by their own sex, and giving you to understand that they are minxes rather than otherwise, and objectionable in proportion to their attractiveness. They never can understand why they should be so attractive, they say; and hold it as one of the unfathomable mysteries of men's bad taste—the girls to whom no man addresses half a dozen words in the course of the evening being far prettier and nicer than the favourite with whom everybody is talking, and for whom all men are contending. Yet see how utterly they are neglected, while she is surrounded with admirers. But then she is an artful little flirt, they say, who lays herself out to attract, while the others are content to stay quietly in the shade until they are sought. And they speak as if to attract men's admiration was a sin, and not one of the final causes of woman as well as one of her chief social duties.
There is always war between the women who aregentlemen's favourites and those who are not; and if the last dislike the first, the first despise the last, and go out of their way to provoke them; a thing not difficult to do when a woman gives her mind to it. A gentlemen's favourite is generally attacked on the score of her morality, not to speak of her manners, which are pronounced as bad as they can be; while, how pretty soever men may think her, her own sex decry her, and pick her to pieces with such effect that they do not leave her a single charm. She is assumed to be incapable of anything like real earnestness of feeling; of anything like true womanliness of sentiment; to be ignorant of the higher rules of modesty; to be fast or sly, according to her speciality of style; and if you listen to her dissector you will find in time that she has every fault incidental to a frail humanity, while her noblest virtue is in all probability a 'kind of good nature' which does not count for much. In return, the favourite sneers at the wallflower, whom she calls stupid and spiteful, and whom she rejoices to annoy by the excess of her popularity; nothing pleasing her so much as to make herself look worse than she is in the way of men's liking—except it be to carry off the one tup lamb belonging to a wallflower, and brand him as of her own multitudinous herd. The quarrel is a deadly one as regards the combatants, but it has very little effect on the 'ring;' for, notwithstanding the faults and frailties of which they hear so much, the men flock round the one and make her the publicfavourite of the set. But, as the valid result, probably the prize match of the circle chooses a stupid wallflower for life; and the favourite who has ridiculed the successful prizeholder scores of times, and who would give ten years of her life to be in her place, has to swallow her confusion as she best can, and accept her discomfiture as if she liked it.
If a men's favourite begins her career unmarried, she most frequently remains unmarried to the end; fulfilling her mission of charming all and fixing none till she comes to the age when her sex has no mission at all. If she is married she has developed after the event; in her nonage having been a shy if observant wallflower, quietly watching the methods which later she has so ably applied, and taking lessons from the very girls who queened it over her with that insolent supremacy which, more than all else, she noted, envied and profited by. If she marries while a favourite and in the full swing of her triumphs, she probably gets pulled up by her husband (unless she is in India, or wherever else women are at a premium and mistresses of the situation), and subsides into the best and most domestic kind of 'brooding hen.' However that may be, marriage, which is the great transforming agent of a woman's character, seldom leaves her on the same lines as before; though sometimes of course the foolish virgin developes into the frisky matron, and the girl who begins life as a men's favourite ends it as a mature siren.
There are two kinds of men's favourites—the bright women who amuse them and the sympathetic ones who love them. But these last are of a doubtful, what country people call 'chancy,' kind; women who show their feelings too openly, who fall in love too seriously, or perhaps unasked altogether, being more likely to irritate and repel than to charm. But the bright, animated women who know how to talk and do not preach; who say innocent things in an audacious way and audacious things in an innocent way; who are clever without pedantry; frank without impudence; quick to follow a lead when shown them; and who know the difference between badinage and earnestness, flirting and serious intentions—these are the women who are liked by men and whose social success in no wise depends on their beauty.
Of one thing the clever woman who wants to be a men's favourite must always be careful—to keep that half step in the rear which alone reconciles men to her superiority of wit. She must not shine so much by her own light as by contact with theirs; and her most brilliant sallies ought to convey the impression of being struck out by them rather than of being elaborated by herself alone—suggested by what had gone before, if improved on for their advantage. Else she offends masculine self-love, never slow to take fire, and gains an element of hardness and self-assertion incompatible with her character of favourite. Not that men dislike all kinds of self-assertion. The irrepressible little woman with hertrim waist and jaunty air, pert, pretty, defiant, who laughs in the face of the burly policeman able to crush her between his finger and thumb, and to whom ropes and barriers are things to be skipped over or dived under, as the case may be—she who is all cackle and self-assertion like a little bantam, is also most frequently a men's favourite, and encouraged in her saucy forwardness.
Then there is the graceful, fragile, swan-necked woman, who, a generation ago, would have been one of the Della Cruscan school, all poetry and music and fine feelings, and of a delicacy so refined that broad-browed Nature herself had to be veiled and toned down to the subdued key proper for the graceful creature to accept—but nowadays this graceful creature plunges boldly into the midst of the most tremendous realism, is an ardent advocate for woman's rights, and perhaps goes out 'on the rampage,' on platforms and the like to advocate doctrines as little in harmony with the kind of being she is as would be a diet of horseflesh and brandy. She gets her following; and men who do not agree with her delight to set her off on her favourite topics, just as women like to see their little girls play with their dolls and repeat to the harmless dummy the experiences which have been real to themselves.
These two classes of self-assertion are mere plays which amuse men; but when it comes to a reality, and is no longer a play—when a man is made to feel small, useless, insignificant by the side of a woman—hemeets them with something he neither likes nor easily forgives; and if such a woman had the beauty of Venus, she would not be a men's favourite of the right sort; though some of course would admire her and do their best to spoil and make a fool of her.
A men's favourite of the right sort must, among other things, be well up in the accidence of flirting, and know how to take it at exactly its proper value. She must be able to accept broad compliments, or more subtle love-making, without either too serious an acceptance or too grave a deprecation. This is a great art, and one that, more than any other, puts men at their ease and sets the machinery of pleasant intercourse in harmonious action. Never to show whether she is really hit or not; never to give a fop occasion for a boast nor an enemy room for a pitying sneer; to take everything in good part and to be as quick in giving as in receiving; never to be off her guard; never to throw away her arms; to conceal any number of foxes that may be gnawing at her beneath her cloak—this kind of flirting, in which most men's favourites are adepts, is an art that reaches almost the dimensions of a science. And it is just that in which your very intense, your very earnest and sincere, women are utter failures. They know nothing of badinage, but take everythingau grand sérieux; and when you mean to be simply playful and complimentary, imagine you in tragic earnest, and think themselves obliged to frown down a compliment as a liberty; or else they accept it witha passionate pleasure that shows how deeply it has struck.
These intense and very sincere women are not as a rule men's favourites, unless they have other qualities of such a pleasant and seductive kind as to excuse the enormous blunder they make of wearing their hearts on their sleeves for drawing-room daws to peck at, and the still greater blunder of confounding love-making with love. They may be, and if they have nice manners and are good-tempered they probably are, of the race of popular women; that is, liked by both men and women; but they are not men's favouritespar excellence, who moreover are never liked by women at all.
Women are quite right in one thing, hard as it seems to say it:—men's favourites, whom women dislike and distrust, are not usually good for much morally. They are often false, insincere, superficial, and possibly with a very low aim in life. And the men know all this, but forgive it for the sake of the pleasantness and charm which is the grace that shadows, or rather brightens, all the rest; having oftentimes indeed a half-contemptuous tolerance for the sins of their favourites as not expecting anything better from them. Grant that they are false, that they sail perilously near the wind, are shifty and untrustworthy—what of that? They are not favourites because of their good qualities, only because of their pleasant ones; because of that subtleje ne sais quoiof old writers which stands one insuch good stead when one is at a loss for an analysis, and which is the only term that expresses the strong yet indefinite charm which certain women possess for men. It is not beauty; it is not necessarily cleverness taken in the sense of education, though it must be a keenness if not depth of intellect, and smartness if not the power of reasoning; it certainly is not goodness; it is not always youth, nor yet warmth of feeling—though all these things come in as characteristics in their turn; but it is companionship and the power of amusing. Still, what is it that creates this power, this companionship? A smart, pert, flippant little minx, as women call her, with a shrill voice and a saucy air, may be the men's favourite of one set; a refined, graceful woman, speaking softly, and with pleading eyes, may be the favourite of another; a third may be a blunt, off-handed young person, given to speaking her mind so that there shall be no mistake; a fourth may be a silent and seemingly a shy woman, fond of sitting out in retired places, and with a reputation for flirting of a quiet kind that sets the woman's fingers tingling.
There is no settled rule anyhow, and all kinds have their special sphere of shining, according to circumstances. But whatever they may be, they are useful in their generation and valuable for such work as they have to do. Society is a miserably dull affair to men when there are no favourites of any sort; where the womanhood in the room is of thekind that herds together as if for protection, and looks askance over its shoulder at the wolves in coats and beards who prowl about the sheepfold of petticoats; where conversation is monosyllabic in form and restricted in substance; where pleasant men who talk are considered dangerous, and fascinating women who answer immoral; where the matrons are grim and the maidens still in the bread-and-butter stage of existence; and where young wives take matrimonial fidelity to mean making themselves disagreeable to every man but their husband, on the plea that one never knows what may happen, and that you cannot go on with what you never begin.
There are certain words, suggestive rather than descriptive, the value of which lies in their very vagueness and elasticity of interpretation, by which each mind can write its own commentary, each imagination sketch out its own illustration. And one of these is Womanliness; a word infinitely more subtle in meaning, with more possibilities of definition, more light and shade, more facets, more phases, than the corresponding word manliness. This indeed must necessarily be so, since the character of women is so much more varied in colour and more delicate in its many shades than that of men.
We call it womanliness when a lady of refinement and culture overcomes the natural shrinking of sense, and voluntarily enters into the circumstances of sickness and poverty, that she may help the suffering in their hour of need; when she can bravely go through some of the most shocking experiences of humanity for the sake of the higher law of charity; and we call it womanliness when she removes from herself every suspicion of grossness, coarseness, or ugliness, and makes her life as dainty as a picture, as lovely asa poem. She is womanly when she asserts her own dignity; womanly when her highest pride is the sweetest humility, the tenderest self-suppression; womanly when she protects the weaker; womanly when she submits to the stronger. To bear in silence and to act with vigour; to come to the front on some occasions, to efface herself on others, are alike the characteristics of true womanliness; as is also the power to be at once practical and æsthetic, the careful worker-out of minute details and the upholder of a sublime idealism—the house-mistress dispensing bread and the priestess serving in the temple. In fact, it is a very Proteus of a word, and means many things by turns; but it never means anything but what is sweet, tender, gracious and beautiful. Yet, protean as it is in form, its substance has hitherto been considered simple enough, and its limits have been very exactly defined; and we used to think we knew to a shade what was womanly and what was unwomanly—where, for instance, the nobleness of dignity ended and the hardness of self-assertion began; while no one could mistake the heroic sacrifice of self for the indifference to pain and the grossness belonging to a coarse nature:—which last is as essentially unwomanly as the first is one of the finest manifestations of true womanliness. But if this exactness of interpretation belonged to past times, the utmost confusion prevails at present; and one of the points on which society is now at issue in all directions is just this very question—What is essentially unwomanly? and, what arethe only rightful functions of true womanliness? Men and tradition say one thing, certain women say another thing; and if what these women say is to become the rule, society will have to be reconstructedab initio, and a new order of human life must begin. We have no objection to this, provided the new order is better than the old, and the modern phase of womanhood more beautiful, more useful to the community at large, more elevating to general morality than was the ancient. But the whole matter hangs on this proviso; and until it can be shown for certain that the latter phase is to be undeniably the better we will hold by the former.
There are certain old—superstitions must we call them?—in our ideas of women, with which we should be loth to part. For instance, the infinite importance of a mother's influence over her children, and the joy that she herself took in their companionship—the pleasure that it was to her to hold a baby in her arms—her delight and maternal pride in the beauty, the innocence, the quaint ways, the odd remarks, the half-embarrassing questions, the first faint dawnings of reason and individuality, of the little creatures to whom she had given life and who were part of her very being—that pleasure and maternal pride were among the characteristics we used to ascribe to womanliness; as was also the mother's power of forgetting herself for her children, of merging herself in them as they grew older, and finding her own best happiness in theirs. Butamong the advanced women who despise the tame teachings of what was once meant by womanliness, maternity is considered a bore rather than a blessing; the children are shunted to the side when they come; and ignorant undisciplined nurses are supposed to do well for wages what mothers will not do for love.
Also we held it as womanliness when women resolutely refused to admit into their presence, to discuss or hear discussed before them, impure subjects, or even doubtful ones; when they kept the standard of delicacy, of purity, of modesty, at a high level, and made men respect, even if they could not imitate. Now the running between them and men whose delicacy has been rubbed off long ago by the intimate contact of coarse life is very close; and some of them go even beyond those men whose lives have been of a quiet and unexperimental kind. Nothing indeed, is so startling to a man who has not lived in personal and social familiarity with certain subjects, and who has retained the old chivalrous superstitions about the modesty and innocent ignorance of women, as the easy, unembarrassed coolness with which his fair neighbour at a dinner-table will dash off into thorny paths, managing between the soup and the grapes to run through the whole gamut of improper subjects.
It was also an old notion that rest and quiet and peace were natural characteristics of womanliness; and that life had been not unfairly apportioned between the sexes, each having its own distinctive duties as well as virtues, its own burdens as well asits own pleasures. Man was to go out and do battle with many enemies; he was to fight with many powers; to struggle for place, for existence, for natural rights; to give and take hard blows; to lose perhaps this good impulse or that noble quality in the fray—the battle-field of life not being that wherein the highest virtues take root and grow. But he had always a home where was one whose sweeter nature brought him back to his better self; a place whence the din of battle was shut out; where he had time for rest and spiritual reparation; where a woman's love and gentleness and tender thought and unselfish care helped and refreshed him, and made him feel that the prize was worth the struggle, that the home was worth the fight to keep it. And surely it was not asking too much of women that they should be beautiful and tender to the men whose whole life out of doors was one of work for them—of vigorous toil that they might be kept in safety and luxury. But to the advanced woman it seems so; consequently the home as a place of rest for the man is becoming daily more rare. Soon, it seems to us, there will be no such thing as the old-fashioned home left in England. Women are swarming out at all doors; running hither and thither among the men; clamouring for arms that they may enter into the fray with them; anxious to lay aside their tenderness, their modesty, their womanliness, that they may become hard and fierce and self-asserting like them; thinking it a farhigher thing to leave the home and the family to take care of themselves, or under the care of some incompetent hireling, while they enter on the manly professions and make themselves the rivals of their husbands and brothers.
Once it was considered an essential of womanliness that a woman should be a good house-mistress, a judicious dispenser of the income, a careful guide to her servants, a clever manager generally. Now practical housekeeping is a degradation; and the free soul which disdains the details of housekeeping yearns for the intellectual employment of an actuary, of a law clerk, of a banker's clerk. Making pills is held to be a nobler employment than making puddings; while, to distinguish between the merits of Egyptians and Mexicans, the Turkish loan and the Spanish, is considered a greater exercise of mind than to know fresh salmon from stale and how to lay in household stores with judgment. But the last is just as important as the first, and even more so; for the occasional pill, however valuable, is not so valuable as the daily pudding, and not all the accumulations made by lucky speculation are of any use if the house-bag which holds them has a hole in it.
Once women thought it no ill compliment that they should be considered the depositaries of the highest moral sentiments. If they were not held the wiser nor the more logical of the two sections of the human race, they were held the more religious,the more angelic, the better taught of God, and the nearer to the way of grace. Now they repudiate the assumption as an insult, and call that the sign of their humiliation which was once their distinguishing glory. They do not want to be patient, self-sacrifice is only a euphemism for slavish submission to manly tyranny; the quiet peace of home is miserable monotony; and though they have not come to the length of renouncing the Christian virtues theoretically, their theory makes but weak practice, and the womanliness integral to Christianity is by no means the rule of life of modern womanhood. But the oddest part of the present odd state of things is the curious blindness of women to what is most beautiful in themselves. Granting even that the world has turned so far upside down that the one sex does not care to please the other, still, there is a good of itself in beauty, which some of our modern women seem to overlook. And of all kinds of beauty that which is included in what we mean by womanliness is the greatest and the most beautiful.
A womanly woman has neither vanity nor hardness. She may be pretty—most likely she is—and she may know it; for, not being a fool, she cannot help seeing it when she looks at herself in the glass; but knowing the fact is not being conscious of the possession, and a pretty woman, if of the right ring, is not vain, though she prizes her beauty as she ought. And she is as little hard as vain. Her soul is not given up to ribbons, but neither is she indifferent toexternals, dress among them. She knows that part of her natural mission is to please and be charming, and she knows that dress sets her off, and that men feel more enthusiastically towards her when she is looking fresh and pretty than when she is a dowdy and a fright. And, being womanly, she likes the admiration of men, and thinks their love a better thing than their indifference. If she likes men she loves children, and never shunts them as nuisances, nor frets when forced to have them about her. She knows that she was designed by the needs of the race and the law of nature to be a mother; sent into the world for that purpose mainly; and she knows that rational maternity means more than simply giving life and then leaving it to others to preserve it. She has no newfangled notions about the animal character of motherhood, nor about the degrading character of housekeeping. On the contrary, she thinks a populous and happy nursery one of the greatest blessings of her state; and she puts her pride in the perfect ordering, the exquisite arrangements, the comfort, thoughtfulness and beauty of her house. She is not above hermétieras a woman; and she does not want to ape the manliness she can never possess.
She has always been taught that, as there are certain manly virtues, so are there certain feminine ones; and that she is the most womanly among women who has those virtues in greatest abundance and in the highest perfection. She has taken it toheart that patience, self-sacrifice, tenderness, quietness, with some others, of which modesty is one, are the virtues more especially feminine; just as courage, justice, fortitude, and the like, belong to men.
Passionate ambition, virile energy, the love of strong excitement, self-assertion, fierceness, an undisciplined temper, are all qualities which detract from her ideal of womanliness, and which make her less beautiful than she was meant to be. Consequently she has cultivated all the meek and tender affections, all the unselfishness and thought for others which have hitherto been the distinctive property of her sex, by the exercise of which they have done their best work and earned their highest place. She thinks it no degradation that she should take pains to please, to soothe, to comfort the man who, all day long, has been doing irksome work that her home may be beautiful and her life at ease. She does not think it incumbent on her, as a woman of spirit, to fly out at an impatient word; to answer back a momentary irritation with defiance; to give back a Roland to his Oliver. Her womanliness inclines her to loving forbearance, to patience under difficulties, to unwearied cheerfulness under such portion of the inevitable burden as may have been laid on her. She does not hold herself predestined by nature to receive only the best of everything, and deem herself affronted where her own especial cross is bound on her shoulders. Rather, she understands that she too must take the rough with the smooth; but that, asher husband's way in life is rougher than hers, his trials are greater, his burden is heavier, it is her duty—and her privilege—to help him all she can with her tenderness and her love; and to give back to him at home, if in a different form, some of the care he has expended while abroad to make her path smooth.
In a word, the womanly woman whom we all once loved and in whom we have still a kind of traditional belief, is she who regards the wishes of men as of some weight in female action; who holds to love rather than opposition; to reverence, not defiance; who takes more pride in the husband's fame than in her own; who glories in the protection of his name, and in her state as wife; who feels the honour given to her as wife and matron far dearer than any she may earn herself by personal prowess; and who believes in her consecration as a helpmeet for man, not in a rivalry which a few generations will ripen into a coarse and bitter enmity.
A humane condescension to instinct has lately supplied ladies' lapdogs with an ingenious instrument of mock torture, in the shape of an india-rubber head which hops about the room on the smallest persuasion, and squeaks shrilly when caught and worried. The animal has thus the pleasure of mauling something which seems to suffer from the process; while in reality it hurts nothing, but expends its tormenting energy on a quite unfeeling creature, whoseraison d'êtreit is to be worried and made to squeak. It would be well for some of us if those people who must have something to worry would be content with a creature analogous to the lapdog's india-rubber head. It would do just as well for them, and it would save us who feel a great deal of real pain. Tippoo Sahib was a wise man when he caused his automaton to be made, in which a tiger seemed to be tearing at the prostrate figure of a wooden European, and the group gave out mingled growls and groans at the turning of a handle in its side. It might have been a dismal fancy perhaps; but the fancy was better than the reality, and did quite as well for thepurpose, which was that the monarch should keep himself in good humour by the charm of something to worry.
There are few pains in life greater than the companionship of one of those ill-conditioned people who must have something to worry, and who are only happy with a grievance. No fortune, no fair possessions of love nor beauty, nor what one would think must be the sources of intense happiness, are spells to exorcise the worrying spirit—opiates to allay the worrying fever. If in the midst of all they have to make them blessed among the sons of men, there hops the squeaking ball, in an instant every good thing belonging to them is forgotten, and there is nothing in heaven and earth but that one obtruding grievance, that one intolerable annoyance. Nothing is too small for them to make into a gigantic evil and be offended at accordingly. They will not endure with patience the minutest, nor the most inevitable, of the crosses of life—things which every one has to bear alike; which no one can help; and concerning which the only wisdom is to meet them with cheerfulness, tiding over the bad time as quietly as possible till things take a turn. Not they. They know the luxury of having something to complain of; and they like to feel wronged. The wind is in the east and they are personally injured; the rain has come on a pleasure day, or has not come in a seed-sowing week, and they fret grimly and make every one about them uncomfortable, as if the weatherwere a thing to be arranged at will, and a disappointing day were the result of wilful mismanagement. Life is a burden to them and all about them because the climate is uncertain and the elements are out of human control. They make themselves the most wretched of martyrs too, if they are in a country they do not like; and they never do like the country they are in. If down in a valley, they are suffocated; if in the plains or on a table-land, they hate monotony and long for undulations; if they are in a wooded district, they dread the damp and worry about the autumn exhalations; if on a moor, who can live without green hills and hedgerow birds? They are sorely exercised concerning clay and gravel; and they find as many differences in the London climate within a half-hour's walk as those who do not worry would find between St. Andrews and Mentone. But they are no nearer the right thing wherever they go; and the people belonging to them may as well bear the worry at Brompton as at Hampstead, in Cumberland as in Cornwall, and so save both trouble and expense.
These worrying folk never let a thing alone. If they have once found a victim they keep him; crueller in this than cats and tigers which play with their prey only for a time, but finally give thecoup de grâceand devour it, bones and all. But worrying folk never have done with their prey, be it person or thing, and have an art of persistence—a way of establishing a raw—that drives their poor victimsinto temporary insanity. This persistency indeed, and the total indifference to the maddening effect they produce, are the oddest parts of the performance. They begin again for the twentieth time, just where they left off; as fresh as if they had not done it all before, and as eager as if you did not know exactly what was coming. And it makes no kind of difference to them that their worrying has no effect, and that things go on exactly as before—exactly as they would have done had there been no fuss about them at all.
Granting however, that the old proverb about constant dropping and inevitable wearing is fulfilled, and that worrying accomplishes its end, it had better have been let alone; for no one was ever yet worried into compliance with an uncongenial or abandonment of a favourite habit, who did not make the worrier wish more than once that he had let matters remain where he had found them. Imbued with the unfortunate belief that all things and persons are to be ordered to their liking, the worriers think themselves justified in flying at the throat of everything they dislike, and in making their dislikes peculiar grievances. The natural inclination of boys to tear their clothes and begrime their hands, to climb up ladders at the peril of their necks, and to make themselves personally unpleasant to every sense, is a burden laid specially on them, if they chance to be the parents of vigorous and robust youth. The cares of their family are greater than the cares of anyother family; and no one understands what they go through, though every one is told pretty liberally. Hint at the sufferings of others, and they think you unfeeling and unsympathetic; try to cheer them, and you affront them; unless you would offend them for life, you must listen patiently to the repetition of their miseries continually twanged on one string, and feign the commiseration you cannot feel.
It is impossible for these people to go through life in amity with all men. They may be very good Christians theoretically; most likely they are; according to the law of compensation by which theory and practice so seldom go together; but the elementary doctrines of peace and goodwill are beyond their power of translation into deeds. They have always some one who is Mordecai to them; some one connected with them, whose habits, nature, whose very being is a decided offence, and whom therefore they worry without mercy. You never know these people to be without a grievance. It may be husband or brother, friend or servant, as it happens; but there is sure to be some one whose existence puts them out of tune, and on whom therefore they revenge the discord by continual worrying. Yet they would be miserable if their grievance were withdrawn, leaving them for the time without a victim. It would be only for a time indeed; for the exit of one would be the signal for the entrance of another. The millennium to these people would be intolerable dullness; and if they were translated into heaven itself, theywould of a certainty travesty the child's desire, and ask for a little devil to worry, if not to play with. Women are sad sinners in this way. Men who stay at home and potter about get like them, but women, who are naturally nervous, and whose lives are spent in small things, are generally more worrying than men; at least in daily life and at home. Indeed, the woman who is more cheerful and hopeful than easily depressed, and who does not worry any one, is the exception rather than the rule, and to be prized as one would prize any other rarity.
Children come in for a good deal of domestic worrying; and under pretence of good management and careful education are used as mamma's squeaking heads, which lie ever handy for a chase. Any one who has been in a family where the mother is of a naturally worrying temper, and where a child has a peculiarity, can appreciate to the full what the propensity is. With substantial love at heart, the mother leads the wretched little creature a life worse than that of the typical dog; and makes of its peculiarity, whatever that may be, a personal offence which she is justified in resenting and never leaving alone. And if it be so with her children, much more is it with her husband, for whom her tenderness is naturally less. Though concerning him she evidently does not know her own mind; for when she has worried into his grave the man who all his life was such a trial to her, such a cross, perhaps such a brute, she puts on widow's weeds of thedeepest hue, and worries her sons and daughters with her uncomfortable reaction in favour of 'poor papa,' whose virtues come to the front with a bound. Or may be she continues the old song in a different key, substituting compassion and a sublime forgiveness in place of her former annoyance, but harping all the same on the old strain and rasping the old sores.
Infelicitous at home, these worrying people are almost more than flesh and blood can bear as travelling companions abroad. Always sure that the train is going to start and leave them behind; that their landlord is a robber and in league with brigands; that they will be dashed down the precipice which tens of thousands have passed in safety before; worrying about the luggage; and where is that trunk? and are yousureyou saw the portmanteau safe? and have you the keys? and the custom-house officers will find that bottle of eau-de-cologne and charge both fine and duty for it; and have you changed the money? and are you sure you have enough? and what are the fares? and you have been cheated; and what a bill for only one breakfast and one night!—and so on.
The person who undertakes a journey with constitutional worriers ought to have nerves of iron and a head of ice. They will leave nothing to the care of ordinary rule, let nothing go by faith. The luggage is always being lost, according to them; accidents are certain to happen half a dozen times aday; and the beds are invariably damp. Their mosquito bites are worse than any other person's; and no one is plagued with small beasts as they are. They worry all through the journey, till you wish yourself dead twenty times at least before the month is out; and when they come home, they tell their friends they would have enjoyed themselves immensely had they been allowed, but they were so much annoyed and worried they lost half the pleasure of the trip. So it will be to the end of time. As children, fretful; as boys and girls, impatient and ill-tempered; as men and women, worrying, interfering, restless; as old people, peevish and exacting—they will die as they have lived; and the world about them will draw a deep breath of relief when the day of their departure comes, and will feel their atmosphere so much the lighter for their loss. Poor creatures! They are conscious of not being loved as they love, and as perhaps theoretically, they deserve to be loved; but it would be impossible, even by a surgical operation, to make them understand the reason why; and that it is their own habit of incessantly worrying which has chilled the hearts of their friends, and made them such a burden to others that their removal is a release and their absence the promise of a life of peace.
Marriage, which most girls consider the sole aim of their existence and the end of all their anxieties, is often the beginning of a set of troubles which none among them expect, and which, when they come, very few accept with the dignity of patience or the reasonableness of common sense. Hitherto the man has been the suitor, the wooer. It has been hismétierto make love; to utter extravagant professions; to talk poetry and romance of an eminently unwearable kind; and to swear that feelings, which by the very nature of things it is impossible to maintain at their present state of fever heat, will be as lasting as life itself and never know subsidence nor diminution. And girls believe all that their lovers tell them. They believe in the absorption of the man's whole life in the love which at the most cannot be more than a part of his life; they believe that things will go on for ever as they have begun, and that the fire and fervour of passion will never cool down to the more manageable warmth of friendship. And in this belief of theirs lies the rock on which not a few make such pitiful shipwreck of their married happiness.They expect their husbands to remain always lovers. Not lovers only in the best sense, which of course all happy husbands are to the end of time, but lovers as in the old fond, foolish, courting days. They expect a continuance of the romance, the poetry, the exaggeration, thepetits soins, the microscopic attentions, the absorption of thought and interest, the centralization of his happiness in her society, just as in the days when she was still to be won, or, a little later, when, being won, she was new in the wearing. And as we said before, a wife's first trial, and her greatest, is when her husband begins to leave off this kind of fervid love-making and settles down into the tranquil friend.
As with children so is it in the nature of most women to require continual assurances. Very few believe in a love which is not frequently expressed; while the ability to trust in the vital warmth of an affection that has lost its early feverishness is the mark of a higher wisdom than most of them possess. To make them thoroughly happy a man must be always at their feet; and they are jealous of everything—even of his work—that takes him away from them, or gives him occasion for thought and interest outside themselves. They are rarely able to rise to the height of married friendship; and if they belong to a reticent and quiet-going man—a man who says 'I love you' once for all, and then contents himself with living a life of loyalty and kindness and not talking aboutit—they fret at what they call his coldness, and feel themselves shorn of half their glory and more than half their dues. They refuse to believe in that which is not daily repeated. They want the incense of flattery, the excitement of love-making; and if these desires are not ministered to by their husbands, the danger is that they will get some one else to 'understand' them and feed the sentimentality which dies of inanition in the quiet serenity of home. Moonlights; a bouquet of the earliest flowers carefully arranged and tenderly presented; the changing lights on the mountain tops; the exquisite song of the nightingale at two o'clock in the morning; all the rest of those vague and suggestive delights which once made the meeting-places of souls, and furnished occasion for delicious ravings, become by time and use and the wearing realities of business and the crowding pressure of anxieties, puerile and annoying to the ordinary Englishman, who is not a poet by nature. When all the world was young by reason of his own youth, and the fever of the love-making time was on him, he was quite as romantic as his wife. But now he is sobering down; life is fast becoming a very prosaic thing to him; work is taking the place of pleasure, ambition of romance; he pooh-poohs her fond remembrances of bygone follies, and prefers his pipe in the warm library to a station by the open window, watching the sunset because it looks as it did onthatevening, and shivering with incipient catarrh.All this is very dreadful to her; women, unfortunately for themselves, remaining young and keeping hold much longer than do men.
The first defection of this kind is a pang the young wife never forgets. But she has many more and yet more bitter ones, when the defection takes a personal shape, and some pretty little attention is carelessly received without its due reward of loving thanks. Perhaps some usual form of caress is omitted in the hurry of the morning's work; or some gloomy anticipation of professional trouble makes him oblivious of her presence; or, fretted by her importunate attentions, he buries himself in a book, more to escape being spoken to than for the book's own merits.
Many a woman has gone into her own room and had a 'good cry' because her husband called her by her baptismal name, and not by some absurd nickname invented in the days of their folly; or because, pressed for time, he hurried out of the house without going through the established formula of leave-taking. The lover has merged in the husband; security has taken the place of wooing; and the woman does not take kindly to the transformation. Sometimes she plays a dangerous game, and tries what flirting with other men will do. If her scheme does not answer, and her husband is not made jealous, she is revolted, and holds herself that hardly-used being, a neglected wife. She cannot accept as a compliment the quiet trust which certain cool-headed men of a loyal kindplace in their wives; and her husband's tolerance of her flirting manner—which he takes to be manner only, with no evil in it, and with which, though he may not especially like it, he does not interfere—seems to her indifference rather than tolerance. Yet the confidence implied in this forbearance is in point of fact a compliment worth all the pretty nothings ever invented; though this hearty faith is just the thing which annoys her, and which she stigmatizes as neglect. If she were to go far enough she would find out her mistake. But by that time she would have gone too far to profit by her experience.
Nothing is more annoying than that display of affection which some husbands and wives show to each other in society. That familiarity of touch, those half-concealed caresses, those absurd names, that prodigality of endearing epithets, that devoted attention which they flaunt in the face of the public as a kind of challenge to the world at large to come and admire their happiness, is always noticed and laughed at; and sometimes more than laughed at. Yet to some women this parade of love is the very essence of married happiness and part of their dearest privileges. They believe themselves admired and envied when they are ridiculed and scoffed at; and they think their husbands are models for other men to copy when they are taken as examples for all to avoid.
Men who have any real manliness however, do not give in to this kind of thing; though there aresome, as effeminate and gushing as women themselves, who like this sloppy effusiveness of love and carry it on into quite old age, fondling the ancient grandmother with grey hair as lavishly as they had fondled the youthful bride, and seeing no want of harmony in calling a withered old dame of sixty and upwards by the pet names by which they had called her when she was a slip of a girl of eighteen. The continuance of love from youth to old age is very lovely, very cheering; but even 'John Anderson my Jo' would lose its pathos if Mrs. Anderson had ignored the difference between the raven locks and the snowy brow.
All that excess of flattering and petting of which women are so fond becomes a bore to a man if required as part of the daily habit of life. Out in the world as he is, harassed by anxieties of which she knows nothing, home is emphatically his place of rest—where his wife is his friend who knows his mind; where he may be himself without the fear of offending, and relax the strain that must be kept up out of doors; where he may feel himself safe, understood, at ease. And some women, and these by no means the coldest nor the least loving, are wise enough to understand this need of rest in the man's harder life, and, accepting the quiet of security as part of the conditions of marriage, content themselves with the undemonstrative love into which the fever of passion has subsided. Others fret over it, and make themselves and their husbands wretched because theycannot believe in that which is not for ever paraded before their eyes.
Yet what kind of home is it for the man when he has to walk as if on egg-shells, every moment afraid of wounding the susceptibilities of a woman who will take nothing on trust, and who has to be continually assured that he still loves her, before she will believe that to-day is as yesterday? Of one thing she may be certain; no wife who understands what is the best kind of marriage demands these continual attentions, which, voluntary offerings of the lover, become enforced tribute from the husband. She knows that as a wife, whom it is not necessary to court nor flatter, she has a nobler place than that which is expressed by the attentions paid to a mistress.
Wifehood, like all assured conditions, does not need to be buttressed up; but a less certain position must be supported from the outside, and an insecure self-respect, an uncertain holding, must be perpetually strengthened and reassured. Women who cannot live happily without being made love to are more like mistresses than wives, and come but badly off in the great struggles of life and the cruel handling of time. Placing all their happiness in things which cannot continue, they let slip that which lies in their hands; and in their desire to retain the romantic position of lovers lose the sweet security of wives. Perhaps, if they had higher aims in life than those with which they make shift to satisfy themselves, they would not let themselves sink to the level ofthis folly, and would understand better than they do now the worth of realities as contrasted with appearances. And yet we cannot but pity the poor, weak, craving souls who long so pitifully for the freshness of the morning to continue far into the day and evening—who cling so tenaciously to the fleeting romance of youth. They are taken by the glitter of things—love-making among the rest; and the man who is showiest in his affection, who can express it with most colour, and paint it, so to speak, with the minutest touches, is the man whose love seems to them the most trustworthy and the most intense. They make the mistake of confounding this show with the substance, of trusting to pictorial expression rather than to solid facts. And they make that other mistake of cloying their husbands with half-childish caresses which were all very well in the early days, but which become tiresome as time goes on and the gravity of life deepens. And then, when the man either quietly keeps them off or more brusquely repels them, they are hurt and miserable, and think the whole happiness of their lives is dead, and all that makes marriage beautiful at an end.