When the corn is in the shockThe fish are at the rock;
When the corn is in the shockThe fish are at the rock;
When the corn is in the shockThe fish are at the rock;
When the corn is in the shock
The fish are at the rock;
harvest-time, which means from August to the end of October, being the main season for pilchard-fishing in shoal-water close at home. There are some choice bits of picturesque life still left to us in faraway places where the ordinary tourist has not penetrated; but nothing is more picturesque than seine-fishing in one of the wilder Cornish coves, when the tucking goes on at midnight, either by moonlight or torchlight, or only by the phosphorescent illumination of the sea itself. No artist that we can remember at this moment has yet painted it; but it is a subject which would well repay careful study and loving handling.
The discontented woman would seem to be becoming an unpleasantly familiar type of character. A really contented woman, thoroughly well pleased with her duties and her destiny, may almost be said to be the exception rather than the rule in these days of tumultuous revolt against all fixed conditions, and vagrant energies searching for interest in new spheres of thought and action. It seems impossible to satisfy the discontented woman by any means short of changing the whole order of nature and society for her benefit. And even then the chances are that she would get wearied of her new work, and, like Alexander, would weep for more worlds to rearrange according to her liking—with the power to take or to leave the duties she had voluntarily assumed, as she claims now the power of discarding those which have been hers from the beginning. As things are, nothing contents her; and the keynote which shall put her in harmony with existing conditions, or make her ready to bear the disagreeable burdens which she has been obliged to carry from Eve's time downward, has yet to be found. If she is unmarried, she is discontented at thewant of romance in her life; her main desire is to exchange her father's house for a home of her own; her pride is pained at the prospect of being left an old maid unsought by men; and her instincts rebel at the thought that she may never know maternity, the strongest desire of the average woman.
But if she is married, the causes of her discontent are multiplied indefinitely, and where she was out of harmony with one circumstance she is now in discord with twenty. She is discontented on all sides; because her husband is not her lover, and marriage is not perpetual courtship; because he is so irritable that life with him is like walking among thorns if she makes the mistake of a hair's-breadth; or because he is so imperturbably good-natured that he maddens her with his stolidity, and cannot be made jealous even when she flirts before his eyes. Or she is discontented because she has so many household duties to perform—the dinner to order, the books to keep, the servants to manage; because she has not enough liberty, or because she has too much responsibility; because she has so few servants that she has to work with her own hands, or because she has so many that she is at her wit's end to find occupation for them all, not to speak of discipline and good management.
As a mother, she is discontented at the loss of personal freedom compelled by her condition; at the physical annoyances and mental anxieties included in the list of her nursery grievances. She would probably fret grievously if she had no children at all,but she frets quite as much when they come. In the former case she is humiliated, in the latter inconvenienced, and in both discontented. Indeed, the way in which so many women deliver up their children to the supreme control of hired nurses proves practically enough the depth of their discontent with maternity when they have it.
If the discontented woman is rich, she speaks despondingly of the difficulties included in the fit ordering of large means; if she is poor, life has no joys worth having when frequent change of scene is unattainable, and the milliner's bill is a domestic calamity that has to be conscientiously staved off by rigorous curtailment. If she lives in London, she laments the want of freedom and fresh air for the children, and makes the unhappy father, toiling at his City office from ten till seven, feel himself responsible for the pale cheeks and attenuated legs which are probably to be referred to injudicious diet and the frequency of juvenile dissipations. But if she is in the country, then all the charm of existence is centred in London and its thoroughfares, and not the finest scenery in the world is to be compared with the attractions of the shops in Regent Street or the crowds thronging Cheapside.
This question of country living is one that presses heavily on many a female mind; but we must believe that, in spite of the plausible reasons so often assigned, the chief causes of discontent are want of employment and deadness of interest in the life that lies around. The husband makes himself happy withhis rod and gun, with his garden or his books, with huntsmen or bricklayers, as his tastes lead him; but the wife—we are speaking of the wife given over to disappointment and discontent, for there are still, thank Heaven, bright, busy, happy women both in country and in town—sits over the fire in winter and by the empty hearth in summer, and finds all barren because she is without an occupation or an interest within doors or without. Ask her why she does not garden—if her circumstances are of the kind where hands are scarce and even a lady's energies would do potent service among the flower beds; and she will tell you it makes her back ache, and she does not know a weed from a flower, and would be sure to pick up the young seedlings for chickweed and groundsel. And if she is rich and has hands about her who know their business and guard it jealously, she takes shelter behind her inability to do actual manual labour side by side with them.
Within doors active housekeeping is repulsive to her; and though her servants may be quasi-savages, she prefers the dirt and discomfort of idleness to the domestic pleasantness to be had by her own industry and practical assistance. Unless she has a special call towards some particular party in the Church, she does nothing in the parish, and seems to think philanthropy and help to one's poorer neighbours part of the ecclesiastical machinery of the country, devolving on the Rectory alone. She gets bilious through inaction and heated rooms, and then says theplace disagrees with her and will be the death of her before long. She cannot breathe among the mountains; the moor and plain are too exposed; the sea gives her a fit of melancholy whenever she looks at it, and she calls it cruel, crawling, hungry, with a passion that sounds odd to those who love it; she hates the leafy tameness of the woods and longs for the freer uplands, the vigorous wolds, of her early days.
Wherever, in short, the discontented woman is, it is just where she would rather not be; and she holds fate and her husband cruel beyond words because she cannot be transplanted into the exact opposite of her present position. But mainly and above all she desires to be transplanted to London. If you were to get her confidence, she would perhaps tell you she thinks the advice of that sister who counselled the Lady of Groby to burn down the house, whereby her husband would be compelled to take her to town, the wisest and most to the purpose that one woman could give to another. So she mopes and moons through the days, finding no pleasure anywhere, taking no interest in anything, viewing herself as a wifely martyr and the oppressed victim of circumstances; and then she wonders that her husband is always ready to leave her company and that he evidently finds her more tiresome than delightful. If she would cultivate a little content she might probably change the aspect of things even to finding the mountains beautiful and the sea sublime; but dissatisfactionwith her condition is the Nessus garment which clings to the unhappy creature like a second self, destroying all her happiness and the chief part of her usefulness.
Women of this class say that they want more to do, and a wider field for their energies than any of those assigned to them by the natural arrangement of personal and social duties. As administrators of the fortune which man earns, and as mothers—that is, as the directors, caretakers, and moulders of the future generation—they have as important functions as those performed by vestrymen and surgeons. But let that pass for the moment; the question is not where they ought to find their fitting occupation and their dearest interests, but where they profess a desire to do so. As it is, this desire for an enlarged sphere is one form among many which their discontent takes; yet when they are obliged to work, they bemoan their hardship in having to find their own food, and think that men should either take care of them gratuitously or make way for them chivalrously. In spite of Scripture, they find that the battle is to the strong and the race to the swift; and they do not like to be overcome by the one nor distanced by the other. Their idea of a clear stage is one that includes favour to their own side; yet they put on airs of indignation and profess themselves humiliated when men pay the homage of strength to their weakness and treat them as ladies rather than as equals.
Elsewhere they complain when they are thrust tothe side by the superior force of the ungodly sex; and think themselves ill-used if fewer hours of labour—and that labour of what Mr. Carlyle called a 'slim' and superficial kind—cannot command the market and hold the field against the better work and more continuous efforts of men. There is nothing of which women speak with more bitterness than of the lower rates of payment usually accorded to their work; nothing wherein they seem to be so utterly incapable of judging of cause and effect; or of taking to heart the unchangeable truth that the best must necessarily win in the long run, and that the first condition of equality of payment is equality in the worth of the work done. If women would perfect themselves in those things which they do already before carrying their efforts into new fields, we cannot but think it would be better both for themselves and the world.
Life is a bewildering tangle at the best, but the discontented woman is not the one to make it smoother. The craze for excitement and for unfeminine publicity of life has possessed her, to the temporary exclusion of many of the sweeter and more modest qualities which were once distinctively her own. She must have movement, action, fame, notoriety; and she must come to the front on public questions, no matter what the subject, to ventilate her theories and show the quality of her brain. She must be professional all the same as man, with M.D. after her name; and perhaps, before long, she will want todon a horsehair wig over her back hair, and address 'My Lud' on behalf of some interesting criminal taken red-handed, or to follow the tortuous windings of Chancery practice. When that time comes, and as soon as the novelty has worn off, she will be sure to complain of the hardness of the grind and the woes of competition; and the obscure female apothecary struggling for patients in a poor neighbourhood—the unemployed lady lawyer waiting in dingy chambers for the clients who never come—will look back with envy and regret to the time when women were cared for by men, protected and worked for, and had nothing more arduous to do than attend to the house, spend the money they did not earn and forbear to add to the anxieties they did not share. Could they get all the plums and none of the suet it would be fine enough; but we question whether they will find the battle of life as carried on in the lower ranks of the hitherto masculine professions one whit more ennobling or inspiriting than it is now in their own special departments. Like the poor man who, being well, wished to be better, and came to the grave as the result, they do not know when they are well off; and in their search for excitement, and their discontent with the monotony, undutifulness and inaction which they have created for themselves, they run great danger of losing more than they can gain, and of only changing the name, while leaving untouched the real nature, of the disease under which they are suffering.
Those persons who object to the influence of the clergy in their parishes at home, and who dislike the idea of being laid hold of by the ecclesiastical crook and dragged perforce up steep ways and narrow paths, ought to visit some of our little outlying settlements in foreign parts. They might take a revengeful pleasure in seeing how the tables there are turned against the tyrants here, and how weak in the presence of his transmarine flock is the expatriated shepherd whose rod at home is oftentimes a rod of iron, and his crook more compelling than persuasive. Of all men the most to be pitied is surely the clergyman of one of those small English settlements which are scattered about France and Italy, Germany and Switzerland; and of all men of education, and what is meant by the position of a gentleman, he is the most in thraldom.
His very means of living depending on his congregation, he must first of all please that congregation and keep it in good humour. So, it may be said, must a clergyman in London whose income is from pew-rents and whose congregation are not his parishioners. But London is large; the tempers andthoughts of men are as numerous as the houses; there is room for all, and lines of affinity for all. The Broad Churchman will attract his hearers, and the Ritualist his, from out of the mass, as magnets attract steel filings; and each church will be filled with hearers who come there by preference. But in a small and stationary society, in a congregation already made and not specially attracted, yet by which he has to live, the clergyman finds himself more the servant than the leader, less the pastor than the thrall. He must 'suit,' else he is nowhere, and his bread and butter are vanishing points in his horizon; that is, he must preach and think, not according to the truth that is in him, but according to the views of the most influential of his hearers, and in attacking their souls he must touch tenderly their tempers.
These tempers are for the most part lions in the way difficult to propitiate. The elementary doctrines of Christianity must be preached of course, and sin must be held up as the thing to avoid, while virtue must be complimented as the thing to be followed, and a spiritual state of mind must be discreetly advocated. These are safe generalities; but the dangers of application are many. How to preach of duties to a body of men and women who have thrown off every national and local obligation?—who have left their estates to be managed by agents, their houses to be filled by strangers, who have given up their share of interest in the school and the village reading-room, the poor and the parish generally—men and womenwho have handed themselves over to indolence and pleasure-seeking, the luxurious enjoyment of a fine climate, the pleasant increase of income to be got by comparative cheapness of breadstuffs, and the abandonment of all those outgoings roughly comprised under the head of local duties and local obligations?—how, indeed? They have no duties to be reminded of in those moral generalizations which touch all and offend none; and the clergyman who should go into details affecting his congregation personally, who should preach against sloth and slander, pleasure-seeking and selfishness, would soon preach to empty pews and be cut by his friends as an impertinent going beyond his office.
His congregation too, composed of educated ladies and gentlemen, is sure to be critical, and therefore all but impossible to teach. If he inclines a hair's breadth to the right or the left beyond the point at which they themselves stand, he is held to be unsound. His sermons are gravely canvassed in the afternoon conclaves which meet at each other's houses to discuss the excitement of the Sunday morning in the new arrivals or the new toilets. Has he dwelt on the humanity underlying the Christian faith? He is drifting into Socinianism; and those whose inclinations go for abstract dogmas well backed by brimstone say that he does not preach the Gospel. Has he exalted the functions of the minister, and tried to invest his office with a spiritual dignity and power that would furnish a good leverage over his flock? He is accused ofsacerdotalism, and the free-citizen blood of his listening Erastians is up and flaming. Does he, to avoid these stumbling-blocks, wander into the deeper mysteries and discourse on things which no man can either explain or understand? He is accused of presumption and profanity, and is advised to stick to the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount. If he is earnest he is impertinent; if he is level he is cold. Each member of his congregation, subscribing a couple of guineas towards his support, feels as if he or she had claims to that amount over the body and soul and mind and powers of the poor parson in his or her pay; and the claim is generally worked out in snippets, not individually dangerous to life nor fortune, but inexpressibly aggravating, and as depressing as annoying. For the most part, the unhappy man is safest when he sticks to broad dogma, and leaves personal morality alone. And he is almost sure to be warmly applauded when he has a shy at science, and says that physicists are fools who assert more than they can prove, because they cannot show why an acorn should produce an oak, nor how the phenomena of thought are elaborated. This throwing of date-stones is sure to strike no listening djinn. The mass of the congregations sitting in the English Protestant churches built on foreign soil, know little and care less about the physical sciences; but it gives them a certain comfortable glow to think that they are so much better than those sinful and presumptuous men who work at bacteria and the spectroscope;and they hug themselves as they say, each man in his own soul, how much nicer it is to be dogmatically safe than intellectually learned.
Preaching personal morality indeed, with possible private application, would be rather difficult in dealing with a congregation not unfrequently made up of doubtful elements. Take that pretty young woman and her handsomeroué-looking husband, who have come no one knows whence and are no one knows what, but who attend the services with praiseworthy punctuality, spend any amount of money, and are being gradually incorporated into the society of the place. The parson may have had private hints conveyed to him from his friends at home that, of the matrimonial conditions between the two, everything is real save the assumed 'lines.' But how is he to say so? They have made themselves valuable members of his congregation, and give larger donations than any one else. They have got the good will of the leading persons in the sacred community, and, having something to hide, are naturally careful to please, and are consequently popular. He can scarcely give form and substance to the hints he has had conveyed to him; yet his conscience cries out on the one side, if his weakness binds him to silence on the other. In any case, how can he make himself the Nathan to this questionable David, and, holding forth on the need of virtuous living, thunder out, 'Thou art the man!'? Let him try the experiment, and he will find a hornet's nest nothing to it.
How too, can he preach honesty to men, perhaps his own churchwardens, who have outrun the constable and outwitted their creditors at one and the same time? How lecture women who flirt over the borders on the week days, but pay handsomely for their sittings on Sundays, on the crown with which Solomon endowed the lucky husband of the virtuous woman? He may wish to do all this; but his wife and children, and the supreme need of food and firing, step in between him and the higher functions of his calling; and he owns himself forced to accept the world as he finds it, sins and shortcomings with the rest, and to take heed lest he be eaten up by over-zeal or carried into personal darkness by his desire for his people's light.
Sometimes the poor man is in thrall to some one in particular rather than to his flock as a body; and there are times when this dominant power is a woman; in which case the many contrarieties besetting his position may be multipliedad infinitum. Nothing can exceed the miserable subjection of a clergyman given over to the tender mercies of a feminine despot. She knows everything, and she governs as much as she knows. She makes herself the arbiter of his whole life, from his conscience to his children's boots, and he can call neither his soul nor his home his own. She prescribes his doctrine, and takes care to let him know when he has transgressed the rules she has laid down for his guidance. She treats the hymns as part of her personal prerogative, and isviolently offended if those having a ritualistic tendency are sung, or if those are taken whereof the tunes are too jaunty or the measure is too slow. The unfortunate man feels under her eye during the whole of the service, like a schoolboy under the eye of his preceptress; and he dare not even begin the opening sentences until she has rustled up the aisle and has said her private prayer quite comfortably. She holds over his head the terror of vague threats and shadowy misfortunes should he cross her will; but at the same time he does not find that running in her harness brings extra grist to his mill, nor that his way is the smoother because he treads in the footsteps she has marked out for him.
Sometimes she takes a craze against a voluntary; sometimes she objects to any approach to chanting; and if certain recalcitrants of the congregation, in possession of the harmonium, insist on their own methods against hers, she writes home to the Society and complains of the thin edge of the wedge and the Romanizing tendencies of her spiritual adviser. In any case she is a fearful infliction; and a church ruled by a female despot is about the most pitiable instance we know of insolent tyranny and broken-backed dependence.
But the clergymen serving these transmarine stations are not often themselves men of mark nor equal to their contemporaries at home. They are often sickly, which means a low amount of vital energy; oftener impecunious, which presupposes want ofgrip and precludes real independence. They are men whose career has been somehow arrested; and their natures have suffered in the blight that has befallen their hopes. Their whole life is more or less a compromise, now with conscience, now with character; and they have to wink at evils which they ought to denounce, and bear with annoyances which they ought to resent. In most cases they are obliged to eke out their scanty incomes by taking pupils; and here again the millstone round their necks is heavy, and they have to pay a large moral percentage on their pecuniary gains. If their pupils are of the age when boys begin to call themselves men, they have to keep a sharp look-out on them; and they suffer many things on the score of responsibility when that look-out is evaded, as it necessarily must be at times. As the characteristic quality of small societies is gossip, and as gossip always includes exaggeration, the peccadilloes of the young fellows are magnified into serious sins, and then bound as a burden on the back of the poor cleric in thrall to the idle imaginings of men and the foolish fears of women. One black sheep in the pupilary flock will do more damage to the reputation of the unhappy pastor who has them in hand than a dozen shining lights will do him good. Morality is assumed to be the free gift of the tutor to the pupil; and if the boy is bad the man is to blame for not having made that free-gift betimes.
Look at it how we will, the clergyman in charge of these foreign congregations has no very pleasanttime of it. In a sense expatriated; his home ties growing daily weaker; his hope of home preferment reduced tonil; his liberty of conscience a dream of the past; and all the mystical power of his office going down in the conflict caused by the need of pew-rents, submission to tyrants, and dependence on the Home Society, he lives from year to year bemoaning the evil chances which have flung him on this barren, shifting, desolate strand, and becoming less and less fitted for England and English parochial work—that castle in the air, quiet and secure, which he is destined never to inhabit. He is touched too in part by the atmosphere of his surroundings; and to a congregation without duties a clergyman with views more accommodating than severe comes only too naturally as the appropriate pastor. The whole thing proves that thraldom to the means of living, or rather to the persons representing those means, damages all men alike—those in cassock and gown as well as those in slop and blouse—and that lay influence can, in certain circumstances, be just as tyrannical over the clerical conscience as clerical influence is apt to be tyrannical over lay living.
We know all that can be said in laudation of old friends—the people whose worth has been tried and their constancy proved—who have come when you have called and danced when you have piped—been faithful in sunshine and shadow alike—not envious of your prosperity nor deserting you in your adversity—old friends who, like old wine, have lost the crudity of newness, have mellowed by keeping, and have blended the ripeness of age with the vigour of youth. It is all true in certain circumstances and under certain conditions; but the old friend of this ideal type is as hard to find as any other ideal; while bad imitations abound, and life is rendered miserable by them.
There are old friends who make the fact of old friendship a basis for every kind of unpleasantness. Their opinion is not asked, but they volunteer it on all occasions, and are sure to give it in the manner which galls you most and which you can least resent. They snub you before your latest acquaintances—charming people of good status with whom you especially desire to stand well; and break up your pretensions of present superiority by that sledge-hammer of old friendship which knows you down tothe ground and will stand no nonsense. The more formal and fastidious your company, the more they will rasp your nerves by the coarse familiarity of their address; and they know no greater pleasure than to put you in a false position by pretending to keep you in your true place. They run in on you at all times; and you have neither an hour undisturbed nor a pursuit uninterrupted, still less a circumstance of your life kept sacred from them. The strictest orders to your servant are ignored; and they push past any amount of verbal barriers with the irresistible force of old friendship to which nothing can be denied. Whatever you are doing you can just see them, they say, smiling; and they have neither conscience nor compassion when they come and eat up your time, which is your money, for the gratification of hearing themselves talk and of learning how you are getting on. They do not scruple to ask about your affairs direct questions to which you must perforce give an answer; silence or evasion betraying the truth as much as assent; and they will make you a present of their mind on the matter, which, though to the last degree condemnatory, you are expected to accept with becoming gratitude and humility.
If you have known them in your early boyhood, when you were all uncivilized hail-fellows together, they refuse to respect your maturer dignity, and will Tom and Dick and Harry you to the end, though you sit in a horsehair wig on the bench, while yourold friend, once your class-mate of the country grammar school where you both got your rudiments, is only a city clerk, badly paid and married to his landlady's daughter.
To women this kind of return from the grave of the past is a dreadful infliction and oftentimes a danger. The playfellows of the romping hoydenish days dash home, bearded and bronzed, from Australia or California; stride into the calm circle of refined matronhood with the old familiar manner and using the old familiar terms; ask Fan or Nell if she remembers this or that adventure on the mountain-side? by the lake? in the wood?—topping their query by a meaning laugh as if more remained behind than was expedient to declare. They slap the dignified husband on the back, and call him a d——d lucky dog; telling him that they envy him his catch, and would gladly stand in his shoes if they could. It was all that cross-cornered cursed fate of theirs which sent them off to Australia or California; else he, the dignified husband, would never have had the chance—hey, Fan? And they wink when they say it, as if they had good grounds to go on. The wife is on thorns all the time these hateful visits last. She wonders how she could ever have been on romping terms with such a horror, even in her youngest days; and feels that she shall hate her own name for ever, after hearing it mouthed and bawled by her old friend with such aggressive familiarity. The husband, if jealous by nature, begins to look sullen and suspicious. Even if he is notjealous, but only reserved and conventional, he does not like what he sees, still less what he hears; and is more than half inclined to think he has made a mistake, and that the Fan or Nell of his bosom would have been better mated with the old friend from the backwoods than with him.
The old friends who turn up in this way at all corners of your life are sure to be needy, and hold their old friendship as a claim on your balance at the bank. They stick closer to you than a brother, and you are expected to stick as close to them; and, as a sign thereof, to provide for their necessities as so much interest on the old account of affection still running. If you shrink from them and try to shunt them quietly, they go about the world proclaiming your ingratitude, and trumpeting forth their deserts and your demerits. They deride your present success, which they call stuck-up and mushroom; telling all the minor miseries of your past, when your father found it hard to provide suitably for his large family, and their mother had more than once to give yours a child's frock and pinafore in pity for your rags. They generally contrive to make a division in your circle; and you find some of your new friends look coldly on you because it is said you have been ungrateful to your old. The whole story may be a myth, the mere coinage of vanity and disappointment; but when did the world stop to prove the truth before it condemned?
There is no circumstance so accidental, no kindness so trivial, that it cannot be made to constitutea claim to friendship for life and all that friendship includes—intimacy before the world; pecuniary help when needed; no denial of time; no family secrets; unvarying inclusion in all your entertainments; personal participation in all your successes; liberty to say unpleasant things without offence and to interfere in your arrangements; and the right to take at least one corner of your soul, and that not a small one, which is not to be your own but your old friends'. Have they, by the merest chance, introduced you to your wife the beautiful heiress, to your husband the good match?—the world echoes with the news, and the echoes are never suffered to die out. It is told everywhere, and always as if your happy marriage were the object they had had in view from the earliest times—as if they had lived and worked for a consummation which in reality came about by the purest accident. Have they been helpful and friendly when your first child was born, or nursery sickness was in your house?—you are bought for life, you and your offspring; unless you have had the happy thought of making them sponsors, when they learn the knack of disappearing from your immediate circle, and of only turning up on those formal occasions which do not admit of making presents. Did they introduce you to your first employer?—your subsequent success is the work of their hands, and they bear your fame on their shoulders like complacent Atlases balancing the world.
They go about cackling to every one who willlisten to them how they got your first essay into print; how they mentioned your name to the Commissioners, and how, in consequence, the Commissioners gave you that place whence dates your marvellous rise in life; how they advised your father to send you to sea and so to make a man of you, and thus were the indirect cause of your K.C.B.-ship. But for them you would have been a mere nobody, grubbing in a dingy City office to this day. They gave you your start, and you owe all you are to them. And if you fail to honour their draft on your gratitude to the fullest amount, they proclaim you a defaulter to the most sacred claims and the most pious feelings of humanity. You point the moral of the base ingratitude of man, and are a text on which they preach the sermon of non-intervention in the affairs of others. Let drowning men sink; let the weak go to the wall; and on no account let any one trouble himself about the welfare of old friends, if this is to be the reward. Henceforth, you are morally branded, and your old friend takes care that the iron shall be hot. There is no service, however trifling, but can be made a yoke to hang round your neck for life; and the more you struggle against it the more it galls you. Your best plan of bearing it is with the patience which laughs and lets things slide. If however, you are resolute in repudiation, you must take the sure result without wincing.
To these friends of your own add the friends of the family—those uncomfortable adhesives who clingto you like so many octopods, and are not to be shaken off by any means known to you. They claim you as their own—something in which they have the rights of part-proprietorship—because they knew you when you were in your cradle, and had bored your parents as they want to bore you. It is of no use to say that circumstances are of less weight than character. You and they may stand at opposite poles in thought, in aspiration, in social condition, in habits. Nevertheless they insist on it that the bare fact of longtime acquaintance is to be of more value than all these vital discrepancies; and you find yourself saddled with friends who are utterly uncongenial to you in every respect, because your father once lived next door to them in the country town where you were born, and spent one evening a week in their society playing long whist for threepenny points. You inherit your weak chest and your snub nose, gout in your blood and a handful of ugly skeletons in your cupboard; these are things you cannot get rid of; things which come as part of the tangled yarn of your life and are the inalienable misfortunes of inheritance; but it is too bad to add family friends whom of your own accord you would never have known; and to have them seated as Old Men of the Sea on your neck, never to be shaken off while they live.
In fact, this whole question of friendship wants revision. The general tendency is to make it too stringent in its terms, and too indissoluble in itsfastenings. If the present should not make one forget the past, neither should the past tyrannize over the present. Old friends may have been pleasant enough in their day, but a day is not for ever, and they are hurtful and unpleasant now, under new conditions and in changed circumstances. They disturb the harmony of our surroundings, and no one can feel happy in discord.
They themselves too, change; we all do, as life goes on and experience increases; and it is simply absurd to bring the old fashions of early days into the new relations of later times. We are not the Tom, Dick, and Harry of our boyhood in any essential save identity of person; neither are they the Bill and Jim they were. We have gone to the right, they to the left; and the gap between us is wider and deeper than that of mere time. Of what use then, to try to galvanize the dead past into the semblance of vitality? Each knows in his heart that it is dead; and the only one who wishes to galvanize it into simulated life is the one who will somehow benefit by the discomfort and abasement of the other. For our own part, we think one of the most needful things to learn on our way through the world is, that the dead are dead, and that silent burial is better than spasmodic galvanism.
The three chief causes of personal popularity among women are, the admiration which is excited, the sympathy which is given, or the pleasure that can be bestowed. We put out of court for our present purpose the popularity which accompanies political power or intellectual strength, this being due to condition, not quality, and therefore not of the sort we mean. Besides, it belongs to men rather than to women, who seldom have any direct power that can advance others, and still seldomer intellectual strength enough to obtain a public following because of their confessed supremacy. The popular women we mean are simply those met with in society—women whose natural place is the drawing-room and whose sphere is the well-dressed world—women who are emphatically ladies, and who understandles convenancesand obey them, even if they take up a cause, practise philanthropy or preach philosophy. But the popular woman rarely does take up a cause or make her philanthropy conspicuous and her philosophy audible. Partizanship implies angles; and she has no angles. If of the class of the admired, she is most popular who is least obtrusive in her claims and most ingenuousin ignoring her superiority. A pretty woman, however pretty, if affected, vain, or apt to give herself airs, may be admired but is never popular. The men whom she snubs sneer at her in private; the women whom she eclipses as well as snubs do more than sneer; those only to whom she is gracious find her beauty a thing of joy; but as she is distractingly eclectic in her favouritism she counts as many foes as she has friends; and though those who dislike her cannot call her ugly, they can call her disagreeable, and do. But the pretty woman who wears her beauty to all appearance unconsciously, never suffering it to be aggressive to other women nor wilfully employing it for the destruction of men, who is gracious in manner and of a pleasant temper, who is frank and approachable, and does not seem to consider herself as something sacred and set apart from the world because nature made her lovelier than the rest—she is the woman whom all unite in admiring, the popular personpar excellenceof her set.
The popular pretty woman is one who, take her as a young wife (and she must be married), honestly loves her husband, but does not thrust her affection into the face of the world, and never flirts with him in public. Indeed, she flirts with other men just enough to make time pass pleasantly, and enjoys a rapid waltz or a lively conversation as much as when she was seventeen and before she was appropriated. She does not think it necessary to go about morally ticketed; nor does she find it vital to herdignity nor to her virtue to fence herself round with coldness or indifference to the multitude by way of proving her loyalty to one. Still, as it is notorious that she does love her husband, and as every one knows that he and she are perfectly content with each other and therefore not on the look-out for supplements, the men with whom she has those innocent little jokes, those transparent secrets, those animated conversations, that confessed friendship and good understanding, do not make mistakes; and the very women belonging to them forget to be censorious, even though this other, this popular woman, is so much admired.
This popular woman is a mother too, and a fond one. Hence she can sympathize with other mothers, and expatiate on their common experiences in the confidential chat over five o'clock tea, as all fond mothers do and should. She keeps a well-managed house, and is notorious for the amount of needlework she gets through; and of which she is prettily proud; not being ashamed to tell you that the dress you admire so much was made by her own hands, and she will give your wife the pattern if she likes; while she boasts of even rougher upholstery work which she and her maid and her sewing-machine have got through with despatch and credit. She gives dinners with acachetof their own—dinners which have evidently been planned with careful thought and study; and she is not above her work as mistress and organizer of her household. Yet shefinds time to keep abreast with the current literature of the day, and never has to confess to ignorance of the ordinary topics of conversation. She is not a woman of extreme views about anything. She has not signed improper papers and she does not discuss improper questions; she does not go in for woman's rights; she has a horror of facility of divorce; and she sets up for nothing—being neither an Advanced Woman desirous of usurping the possessions and privileges of men, nor a Griselda who thinks her proper place is at the feet of men, to take their kicks with patience and their caresses with gratitude, as is becoming in an inferior creature. She does not dabble in politics; and though she likes to make her dinners successful and her evenings brilliant, she by no means assumes to be a leader of fashion nor to impose laws on her circle. She likes to be admired, and she is always ready to let herself be loved. She is always ready too, to do any good work that comes in her way; and she finds time for the careful overlooking of a few pet charities about which she makes no parade, just as she finds time for her nursery and her needlework. And, truth to tell, she enjoys these quiet hours, with only her children to love her and her poor pensioners to admire her, quite as much as she enjoys the brilliant receptions where she is among the most popular and the most beautiful.
Her nature is gentle, her affections are large, her passions small. She may have prejudices, but they are prejudices of a mild kind, mainly on the side of modestyand tenderness and the quietude of true womanhood. She is woman throughout, without the faintest dash of the masculine element in mind or manners; and she aspires to be nothing else. She carries with her an atmosphere of happiness, of content, of spiritual completeness, of purity which is not prudery. Her life is filled with a variety of interests; consequently she is never peevish through monotony, nor yet, on the other hand, is she excited, hurried, storm-driven, as those who give themselves up to 'objects,' and perfect nothing because they attempt too much. She is popular, because she is beautiful without being vain; loving without being sentimental; happy in herself, yet not indifferent to others; because she understands her drawing-room duties as well as her domestic ones, and knows how to combine the home life with social splendour. This is the best type of the popular pretty woman to whom is given admiration, and against whom no one has a stone to fling nor a slander to whisper; and this is the ideal woman of the English upper-class home, of whom we still raise a few specimens, just to show what women may be if they like, and what sweet and lovely creatures they are when they are content to be as nature designed them.
Another kind of popular woman is the sympathetic woman, the woman who gives instead of receiving. This kind is of variable conditions. She may be old, she may be ugly; in fact, she is more often both than neither; but she is a universalfavourite notwithstanding, and no woman is more sought after nor less wearied of, although few can say why they like her. She may be married; but generally she is either a widow or an old maid; for, if she be a wife, her sympathies for things abroad are necessarily somewhat cramped by the pressure of those at home;—and her sympathies are her claim to popularity. She is sincere too, as well as sympathetic, and she is safe. She holds the secrets of all her friends; but no one suspects that any before himself has confided in her. She has the art, or rather the charm, of perpetual spiritual freshness, and all her friends think in turn that the fountain has been unsealed now for the first time. This is not artifice; it is simply the property of deep and inexhaustible sympathy. It is not necessary that she should be a wise adviser to be popular. Her province is to listen and to sympathize; to gather the sorrows and the joys of others into her own breast, so as to soften by sharing or heighten by reduplication. Most frequently she is not over rigid in her notions of moral prudence, and will let a lovesick girl talk of her lover, even if the affair be hopeless and has been forbidden; while she will do her best to soothe the man who has had the misfortune to get crazed about his friend's wife. She has been even known, under pressure, to convey a message or a hint; and of the two she is decidedly more pitiful to sorrow than severe to wrong-doing. She is in all the misfortunes and maladies of her friends. No death takesplace without her bearing part of the mourning on her own soul; but then no marriage is considered complete in which she has not a share. She is called on to help whenever there is work to be done, if she be of the practical type; if of the mental, she has merely to give up her own pleasures and her time that she may look on and sympathize. Every one likes her; every one takes to her at first sight; no one is jealous of her; and the law of her life is to spend and be spent for others. It not rarely happens though, that she who does so much for those others has to bear her own burden unassisted; and that she sits at home surrounded by those spectres of despair, those ghosts of sorrow, which she helps to dispel from the homes of others. But she is not selfish; and while she trudges along cheerfully enough under the heavy end of her friend's crosses, she asks no one to lay so much as a finger on her own. In consequence of which no one imagines that she ever suffers at all on her own account; and most of her friends would take it as a personal affront were she to turn the tables and ask for the smallest portion of that of which she had given so much to others. She is the moral anodyne of her circle; and when she ceases to soothe, she abdicates the function assigned to her by nature and dies out of her allotted uses.
Another kind of popular person is the woman whose sympathies are more superficial, but whose faculties are more brilliant; the woman who makes herself agreeable, as it is called—that is, who cantalk when she is wanted to talk; listen when she is wanted to listen; take a prominent part and some responsibility or keep her personality in the background, according to circumstances and the need of the moment; who is eminently a useful member of society, and popular just in proportion to the pleasure she can shed around her. But she offends no one, even though she is notoriously sought after and made much of; for she is good-natured to all, and people are not jealous of those who do not flaunt their successes and whom popularity does not make insolent. The popular woman of this kind is always ready to help in the pleasure of others. She is a fair-weather friend, and shrinks with the most charming frankness from those on whom dark days have fallen. She is really very sorry when any of her friends fall out from the ranks, and are left behind to the tender mercies of those cruel camp-followers in the march of life—sorrow or sickness; but she feels that her place is not with them—rather with the singers and players who are stepping along in front making things pleasant for the main body. But if she cannot stop to smooth the pillows of a dying-bed, nor soothe the troubles of an aching heart, she can organize delightful parties; set young people to congenial games; take off bores on to her own shoulders, and even utilize them for the neutralization of other bores. She is good for the back seat or the front, as is most convenient to others. She can shine at the state-dinner where you want a serviceable show, ormake a diversion in the quiet, not to say stupid, conglomerate of fogies, where you want a lively element to prevent universal stupor. She talks easily and well, and even brilliantly when on her mettle, but not so as to excite men's envy; and she has no decided opinions. She is a chameleon, an opal, changing ever in changing lights, and no one was yet able to determine her central quality. All that can be said of her is that she is good-natured and amusing, clever, facile, and ever ready to assist at all kinds of gatherings, which she has the knack of making go, and which would have been slow without her; that she knows every game ever invented, and is good for every sort of festivity; that she is always well-dressed, even-tempered, and in (apparently) unwearied spirits and superb health; but what she is at home, when the world is shut out, never troubles the thoughts of any. She is to society what the sympathetic woman is to the individual, and the reward is much the same in both cases. But unless the socially useful woman has been able to secure the interest of the sympathetic one, the chances are that, popular as she is now, she will be relegated to the side when her time of brilliancy has passed; and that, when her last hour comes, it will find her without the comfort of a friend, forsaken and forgotten. She is of the kind to whomsic transitmore especially applies; and if her life's food has not been quite the husks, at all events it has not been good meat nor fine meal.
The controversy as to which is the better of the two methods of marrying one's daughter, in use in France and England respectively, has not yet been decided by any preponderating evidence. Whether the parents—especially the mother—ought to find a husband for the daughter, or whether the girl, young and inexperienced as she is, should seek one for herself, with the chance of not knowing her own mind in the first place, and of not understanding the real nature of the man she chooses in the second—these are the two principles contended for by the rival methods; and the fight is still going on. The truth is, the worst of either is so infinitely bad that there is nothing to choose between them; and the same is true, inversely, of the best. When things go well, the advocates of the particular system involved sing their pæans, and show how wise they were; when they go ill, the opponents howl their condemnation, and say: We told you so.
The French method is based on the theory that a woman's knowledge of the world, and a mother's intimate acquaintance with her daughter's specialtemper and requirements, are likely to be truer guides in the choice of a husband than the callow fancy of a girl. It is assumed that the former will be better able than the latter to separate the reality from the appearance, to winnow the grain from the chaff. She will appraise at its true value a fascinating manner with a shaky moral character at its back; and a handsome face will go for little when the family lawyer confesses the poverty of the family purse. To the girl, a fluent tongue, flattering ways, a taking presence, would have included everything in heaven and earth that a man should be; and no dread of future poverty, no evidence of the bushels of wild oats sown broadcast, would have convinced her that Don Juan was amauvais partiand a scamp into the bargain. Again, the mother usually knows her daughters' dispositions better than the daughters themselves, and can distinguish between idiosyncrasies and needs as no young people are able to do. Laura is romantic, sentimental, imaginative; but Laura cannot mend a stocking nor make a shirt, nor do any kind of work requiring strength of grasp or deftness of touch. She has no power of endurance, no persistency of will, no executive ability; but she falls in love with a younger son just setting out to seek his fortunes in Australia; and, if allowed, she marries him, full of enthusiasm and delight, and goes out with him. In a year's time she is dead—literally killed by hardship; or, if she has vitality enough to survive the hard experience of roughing it in the bush, she collapses into a wretched, haggard, fadedwoman, prematurely old, hopeless and dejected; the miserable victim of circumstances sinking under a burden too heavy for her to bear.
Now a French mother would have foreseen all these dangers, and would have provided against them. She would have known the unsubstantial quality of Laura's romance, and the reality of her physical weakness and incapacity. She would have kept her out of sight and hearing of that fascinating younger son just off to Australia to dig out his rough fortunes in the bush, and would have quietly assigned her to some conventional well-endowed man of mature age—who might not have been a soul's ideal, and whose rheumatism would have made him chary of the moonlight—but who would have taken care of the poor little frail body, dressed it in dainty gowns and luxurious furs, given it a soft couch to lie on and a luxurious carriage to drive in, and provided it with food convenient and ease unbroken. And in the end, Laura would have found that mamma had known what was best for her; and that her ordinary-looking, middle-aged caretaker was a better husband for her than would have been that adventurous young Adonis, who could have given her nothing better than a shakedown of dried leaves, a deal box for an arm-chair, and a cup of brick tea for the sparkling wines of her youth.
It may be a humiliating confession to make, but the old saying about poverty coming in at the door and love flying out of the window holds true in allcases where there is not strength enough to rough it; for the body holds the spirit captive, and, however willing the one may be, the weakness of the other conquers in the end.
On the other hand, Maria, square-set, defying, adventurous, brave, as the wife of a rich man here in England, would be as one smothered in rose leaves. The dull monotony of conventional life would half madden her; and her uncompromising temper would break out in a thousand eccentricities, and make her countless enemies. Lethergo to the bush if you like. She is of the stamp which bears heroes; and her sons will be a stalwart race fit for the work before them. The wise mother who had it in hand to organize the future of her daughters would take care to find her a man and a fortune that would utilize her energy and courage; but Maria, if left to herself, might perhaps fall in love with some cavalry officer of good family and expectations, whose present dash would soon have to be exchanged for the stereotyped conventionalities of the owner of a place, where, as his wife, her utmost limit of physical action would be riding to hounds and taking off the prize for archery.
Such well-fitting arrangements as these are the ideal of the French system; just as the union of two hearts, the one soul finding its companion soul and both living happily ever after, is the ideal of the English system. Against the French lies the charge of the cruel sale, for so much money, of a young creature who has not been allowed a choice, scarcelyeven the right of rejection; against the English the cruelty of suffering a girl's foolish fancy to destroy her whole life, and the absurdity of treating such a fancy as a fact. For the French there is the plea of the enormous power of instinct and habit, and that really it signifies very little to a girl what man she marries; provided only that he is kind to her and that she has not fallen in love with any one else; seeing that she is sure to love the first presented. For the English there is the counter plea of individual needs and independent choice, and the theory that women do not love by instinct but by sympathy. The French make great account of the absolute virginity in heart of the young girl they marry; and few Frenchmen would think they had got the kind of woman warranted if they married one who had been engaged two or three times already—to whose affianced lovers had been accorded the familiarities which we in England hold innocent and as matters of course. The English, in return, demand a more absolute fidelity after marriage, and are generous enough to a few false starts before. To them the contract is more a matter of free choice than it is in France; consequently failure in carrying out the stipulations carries with it more dishonour. The French, taking into consideration that the wife had nothing to say to the bargain which gave her away, are inclined to be more lenient when the theory of instinctive love fails to work, and the individualityof the woman expresses itself in an after-preference; always provided, of course, that thebienséancesare respected, and that no scandal is created.
Among the conflicting rights and wrongs of the two systems it is very difficult to say which is the better, which the wiser. If it seems a horrible thing to marry a young girl without her consent, or without any more knowledge of the man with whom she is to pass her life than can be got by seeing him once or twice in formal family conclave, it seems quite as bad to let our women roam about the world at the age when their instincts are strongest and their reason weakest—open to the flatteries of fools and fops—the prey of professed lady-killers—the objects of lover-like attentions by men who mean absolutely nothing but the amusement of making love—the subjects for erotic anatomists to study at their pleasure. Who among our girls after twenty carries an absolutely untouched heart to the man she marries? Her former predilection may have been a dream, a fancy—still it was there; and there are few wives who, in their little tiffs and moments of irritation, do not feel, 'If I had married my first love,hewould not have treated me so.' Perhaps a wise man does not care for a mere baseless thought; but all men are not wise, and to some a spiritual condition is as real as a physical fact. Others however, do not trouble themselves for what has gone before if they can but secure what follows after; but we imagine that mostmen would rather not know their wives' dreams; andcet autre, however shadowy, is a rival not specially desired by the average husband.
If the independence of life and free intercourse between young men and maidens is in its degree dangerous in England, what must it be in America, where anything like chaperonage is unknown, and where girls and boys flock together without a mamma or a guardian among them? where engaged couples live under the same roof for months at a time, also without a mamma or a guardian? and where the young men take the young women about on night excursions alone, and no harm thought by any one? Is human nature really different in America from what it is in the Old World? Are Columbia's sons in truth like Erin's of old time, so good or so cold? It is a saying hard of acceptance to us who are accustomed to regard our daughters as precious things to be taken care of—if not quite so frail as the French regard theirs, yet not too secure, and certainly not to be left too much to themselves with only young men for their guardians. They are our lambs, and we look out for wolves. To be sure the comparative paucity of women in the United States, and the conviction which every girl has that she may pretty well make her own choice, help to keep matters straight. That is easy to be understood. There is no temptation to eat green berries in an orchard full of ripe fruit. But if this be true of America, then the converse must be true of England, where the redundancyof women is one of the most patent facts of the time, and where consequently they cannot so well afford to indulge that pride of person which hesitates among many before selecting one. In America this pride of person of itself erects a barrier between the wolves and the lambs; but where the very groundwork of it is wanting, as in England, it behoves the natural guardians to be on the watch, and to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Whether or not that care should be carried to the extent to which French parents carry theirs—and especially in the matter of making the marriage for the daughter and not letting her make it for herself—we leave an open question. Perhaps a little modification in the practice of both nations would be the best for all concerned. Without trusting quite so much to instinct as the French, we might profitably curtail a little more than we do the independent choice of those who are too young and too ignorant to know what they want, or what they have got when they have chosen; and without letting their young girls run all abroad without direction, the French might, in turn, allow them some kind of human preference, and not treat them as mere animals bound to be grateful to the hand that feeds them, and docile to the master who governs them.
The efforts of country places in the matter of local fêtes and shows are often beset with difficulties. The great people, who have seen the best of everything in Paris and London, give their money sparsely and their energies with languor; or it may be that certain of the more good-natured kill the whole affair by their superabundant patronage, as nurses stifle infants by over-care. The very poor can only participate to the extent of pence when the thing is organized; they can neither subscribe for the general expenses nor give time to the arrangements; consequently the burden rests on the shoulders of the middle class, which in a small country neighbourhood is represented by the well-to-do tradesmen, the innkeepers, and the rival professionals. Once a year or so the desire fastens on these people to get up a local fête—say a flower-show, or games, or both combined—as an evidence of local vitality; a claim on the county newspaper for two or three columns of description with all the names in full flanked by a generous application of adjectives; an occasion for mutual self-laudation; and a pleasing impression ofthe eyes of England being turned upon them. They find their work cut out for them when they begin; and before the end most of them wish they had never been bitten by the mania of parochial ambition, but had let the old place lie in its wonted stagnation without attempting to stir it at the cost of so much vexation and thankless trouble.
Jealousy and huffiness are the dominant characteristics of small communities, as all people know who have had dealings therewith. The question of precedence affects more than the choice of the First Lady in an assembly where there are no ladies to be first, though there may be plenty of honest women; and the men squabble for distinctive offices and the recognition of services to the full as much as the lawyer's wife squabbles with the doctor's, and both with the wholesale grocer's, as to which of the three is to be first taken down to supper and set at the head of the table with the master of the house. One wants to be the secretary, that he may display his power of fine writing when he asks the resident nobility and gentry for their subscriptions, and draws up the final report for the press. Another thinks he should be made chairman of the acting committee, because he imagines he has the gift of eloquence, and he would like to use the time of the association in airing his syntax. A third puts in his claim to be elected one of the judges of things he does not understand, because his son-in-law is to be an exhibitor, and he would be glad to be able to say a good word for him; and all declinethose offices which have no outside show, where only work is to be done and no credit gained. It requires a considerable amount of tact and firmness to withstand these clamorous vanities, to put the right men in the right places, and yet not make enmities which will last a lifetime. But if the thing is to succeed at all, this is what must be done; and the little committee must stick to its text ofpro bono publicoas steadfastly as if the flower-show were a conqueror's triumph, and the rules and regulations for its fit management consular decrees.
When the eventful day arrives, every one feels that the eyes of England are indeed turned hither-ward. If the great people are languid, the meaner folks are jocund, and the stewards are as proud as the proudest ædiles of old Rome. Their knots of coloured ribbon make new men of them for the time, and justify the instinct which puts its trust in regalia. They are sure to be on the ground from the earliest hours in the morning; and though scoffers might perhaps question the practical value of their zeal, no one can doubt its heartiness. If it is fussy, it is genuine; and as every one is fussy alike, they cannot complain of one another. A band has been lent by a neighbouring regiment, and the men come radiant into the little town. It is delightful to see the cordial condescension with which the trombone and the cornet, the serpent and the drum shake hands with their civilian friends; and how the fine fellows in scarlet accept drinks quite fraternally fromfustian and corderoy. For a full half-hour the town is kept alive by the dazzle and resonance of these musical heroes as they stand before the door of the 'public' which they have elected to patronize, and lighten the pockets of the lieges by the successive 'go's' drained out of them. Then the church clock chimes the appointed hour; the last flag is run up; the finishing touch is given to the calico and the moss; the last award has been affixed; and the policeman stationed at the gate to keep order among the little boys has tightened his belt and drawn on his gloves ready for action. The band marches through the town, drums beating and fifes playing, and when the gates are opened as the clock is on the stroke of twelve, they are all settled in their places with their music handy, ready to salute the gentry with the overture fromZampa, taken in false time. The imposing effect however, is rather marred by the friendly feelings of the public; for when jolly farmers and small boys insist on sharing the benches assigned to the red coats, the orchestra has necessarily a patchwork kind of look that does not add to its dignity.
The great people do their duty as they ought, and come in their carriages; which make a show and give an air of regality to the affair. Many of them have had early high-priced tickets given to them in consideration of their subscribed guineas; it being held the right thing to do to give to those who can afford to pay, trusting to the pence of the multitudefor the rest. Nevertheless these great creatures regard their presence there as acorvéewhich they must fulfil, but at the least cost possible to themselves; so they make up parties to meet at a certain time, and endure the stewards, who talk fine and are important, with the best philosophy granted them by nature. When the second prices come, then the real fun of the fair begins. The great people are uninterested. The indifferently grown flowers which are offered for prizes do not call forth their enthusiasm; but the smaller folk think them superb, and express their admiration with unstinted delight. When the gardener of a neighbouring lord exhibits a good specimen from his choicest plants, not for competition but as a model for imitation, their enthusiasm knows no bounds; and a fine alamanda or a richly-coloured dracæna receives almost divine honours. As a rule, the flowers in these local shows are poor enough; but the fruit is often good and the vegetables are magnificent. The highest efforts of competition are usually devoted to onions and beans; but potatoes come in for their due share, and the summer celery is for the most part an instance of misdirected power. The great houses carry off the first prizes—the poor little cottage plots, cultivated at odd hours under difficulties, not touching them in value. The gentlemen say they give their prizes to their gardeners; but that does not help the cottagers who have spent time and money and hope in this unequal struggle of pigmies with giants. In someplaces they divide the classes, and give prizes to the gentlefolks apart, and to the cottagers by themselves. In which case they fulfil the Scriptures literally, and give most to those who already have most.
All the local oddities are sure to be at these fêtes. There is the harmless imbecile, who wanders about the roads with a peacock's feather in his battered old cap, and who talks to himself when he cannot find another listener; and there is the stalwart lady proprietor who farms her own land and knows as much about roots and beasts as the best of them. She is reported to have thrashed her man in her time, and is said to be a crack shot and the best roughrider for miles round. There is the ruined yeoman who came into a good property when he was a handsome young fellow with the ball at his foot, but who has drunk himself from affluence to penury, and from sturdy health to palsy and delirium tremens, yet who has always a kindly word from his betters, having been no man's enemy but his own, and even at his worst being a good fellow in a sort of way. There is the farmer who is supposed capable of buying up all the leaner gentry in a batch, but who, being a misogynist, lives by himself in his rambling old ruined Hall, with a hind to do the scullery maid's work, and never a petticoat about the place. There is the self-taught man of science whose quantities are shaky when he tells you the names of his treasures, but whose knowledge of local fossils, of rare plants, of concealed antiquities, is true so far as it goes, if oftoo great importance in his estimate of things; and side by side with him is the self-made poet, whose verses are not always easy to scan and whose thoughts are apt to express themselves mistily. These and more are sure to be at the fête bringing; their peculiarities as their quota, and giving that indescribable but pleasant local flavour which is half the interest of the thing.
There is a great deal of practical democracy in these gatherings if the grand people stay into the time of the second prices; which however, they generally do not. If they do, then ragged coats jostle the squire's glossy broadcloth, and rude boys crumple the fresh silks and muslins of the ladies with the most communistic unconcern. The shopgirl and farmer's daughters come out in gorgeous array, with bonnets and skirts, streamers and furbelows, of wonderful construction; and their sisters of more cultivated taste regard their exaggerated toilets as moral crimes. But the poor things are happy in their ugly finery; and, as millinery is by no means an exact science, they may be pardoned if they adopt monstrosities on their own account which a year or so ago had been sanctioned by fashion. Sometimes Punch and Judy, 'as performed before the Queen and Prince Albert,' helps on the enjoyment of the day, with the '——' softened out of respect for the clergyman. Sometimes an acrobat lies down on the grass and twirls a huge ball between his feet, which sets all the little boys to do the like in imitation, and perhaps brings downmany a maternal hand on fleshy places as the result. In some localities a troop of little girls in scarlet and white plait ribbons dance round a maypole and are called inappropriately morris-dancers. Perhaps there are fireworks at the end of all things; when the set pieces will not light simultaneously in all their parts, the catherine-wheels have the disastrous trick of sticking, and only the Roman candles and the rockets succeed as they should. But the gaping crowd is vociferous and good-natured, and holds the whole affair to have been splendid. There is a great deal of coarse jollity among the men and women over the failures and successes alike, and if the fête is in the North there is sure to be more drink afloat than is desirable. Headaches are the rule of the next morning, with perhaps some things lost which can never be regained. Yet, in spite of the inevitable abuses, these local fêtes are things worthy of encouragement; and perhaps if the great people would enter into them more heartily, and remain on the ground longer, the lower orders would behave themselves better all through, and there would not be so much rowdyism at the end. It does not seem to us that this would be an unendurable sacrifice of time and personal dignity for the pleasure and morality of the neighbourhood where one lives.