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 circ.u.mstance 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.signed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 their curious ingrat.i.tude.
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 circ.u.mstances 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 of bemoaning. 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sume 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 circ.u.mstance and the princ.i.p.al 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 vertebrae, 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 s.p.a.ce.
_THE ART OF RETICENCE._
Among other cla.s.sifications we may divide the world into those who live by impulse and the undirected flow of circ.u.mstance, 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 sr pour celui qui se defie de soi-meme," 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 artem_ being 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 if you 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 accusation no 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 a.s.sociated 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; take you 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 a.s.sist 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 who have 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 circ.u.mstances 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 n.o.ble.
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 their deepest affections strike root so far down as confidence.
They rearrange La Bruyere"s famous maxim, "L"on peut avoir la confiance de quelqu"un sans en avoir le coeur," 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 circ.u.mstances 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 that foolish 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.
_MEN"S FAVOURITES._
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 s.e.x, 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 are gentlemen"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 p.r.o.nounced as bad as they can be; while, how pretty soever men may think her, her own s.e.x decry her, and pick her to pieces with such effect that they do not leave her a single charm. She is a.s.sumed 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 n.o.blest 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 mult.i.tudinous 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 public favourite 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 s.e.x 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-a.s.sertion incompatible with her character of favourite. Not that men dislike all kinds of self-a.s.sertion. The irrepressible little woman with her trim 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-a.s.sertion 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 cla.s.ses of self-a.s.sertion 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--he meets 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 everything _au grand serieux_; 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 with a pa.s.sionate 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 favourites _par 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 subtle _je ne sais quoi_ of old writers which stands one in such good stead when one is at a loss for an a.n.a.lysis, 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 the kind 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-b.u.t.ter 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.
_WOMANLINESS._
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 ill.u.s.tration. 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 circ.u.mstances 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, coa.r.s.eness, or ugliness, and makes her life as dainty as a picture, as lovely as a poem. She is womanly when she a.s.serts 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 aesthetic, 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. .h.i.therto 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 n.o.bleness of dignity ended and the hardness of self-a.s.sertion began; while no one could mistake the heroic sacrifice of self for the indifference to pain and the grossness belonging to a coa.r.s.e 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 are the 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 reconstructed _ab 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--superst.i.tions 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-embarra.s.sing 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. But among 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 coa.r.s.e 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 superst.i.tions about the modesty and innocent ignorance of women, as the easy, unembarra.s.sed coolness with which his fair neighbour at a dinner-table will dash off into th.o.r.n.y 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 s.e.xes, each having its own distinctive duties as well as virtues, its own burdens as well as its 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 n.o.ble 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-a.s.serting like them; thinking it a far higher 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 n.o.bler 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 acc.u.mulations 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 G.o.d, and the nearer to the way of grace. Now they repudiate the a.s.sumption 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 s.e.x 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 gla.s.s; 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 to externals, 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.