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 circ.u.mstances 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 to the ground and will stand no nonsense. The more formal and fastidious your company, the more they will rasp your nerves by the coa.r.s.e 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 circ.u.mstance 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 compa.s.sion 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 a.s.sent; 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 grat.i.tude 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 d.i.c.k and Harry you to the end, though you sit in a horsehair wig on the bench, while your old friend, once your cla.s.s-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 not jealous, 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 ingrat.i.tude, 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 circ.u.mstance so accidental, no kindness so trivial, that it cannot be made to const.i.tute a 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 will listen 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 n.o.body, 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 grat.i.tude 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 ingrat.i.tude 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 cling to 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 circ.u.mstances 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 its fastenings. 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 circ.u.mstances. 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, d.i.c.k, and Harry of our boyhood in any essential save ident.i.ty 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 abas.e.m.e.nt 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.
_POPULAR WOMEN._
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 understand _les convenances_ and 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 cla.s.s of the admired, she is most popular who is least obtrusive in her claims and most ingenuous in 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 person _par excellence_ of 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 pa.s.s 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 her dignity nor to her virtue to fence herself round with coldness or indifference to the mult.i.tude 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 a _cachet_ of 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 she finds 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 grat.i.tude, 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 a.s.sumes 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 pa.s.sions small.
She may have prejudices, but they are prejudices of a mild kind, mainly on the side of modesty and 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-cla.s.s 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 universal favourite 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 takes place 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 una.s.sisted; 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 a.s.signed 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 can talk 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 circ.u.mstances 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, or make 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 a.s.sist 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 pa.s.sed; 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 whom _sic transit_ more 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.
_CHOOSING OR FINDING._
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 paeans, 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 special temper and requirements, are likely to be truer guides in the choice of a husband than the callow fancy of a girl. It is a.s.sumed 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 a _mauvais parti_ and 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, faded woman, prematurely old, hopeless and dejected; the miserable victim of circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.signed 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 all cases 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. Let _her_ go 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, scarcely even 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 individuality of the woman expresses itself in an after-preference; always provided, of course, that the _bienseances_ are 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 pa.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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, _he_ would 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 most men would rather not know their wives" dreams; and _cet 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 redundancy of 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.
_LOCAL FeTES._
The efforts of country places in the matter of local fetes and shows are often beset with difficulties. The great people, who have seen the best of everything in Paris and London, give their money spa.r.s.ely 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 cla.s.s, 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 fete--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 of the 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 a.s.sembly 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 n.o.bility 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 a.s.sociation 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 decline those 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 of _pro bono publico_ as 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 aediles 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 from fustian 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 from _Zampa_, 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 a.s.signed 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 mult.i.tude for the rest. Nevertheless these great creatures regard their presence there as a _corvee_ which 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 compet.i.tion but as a model for imitation, their enthusiasm knows no bounds; and a fine alamanda or a richly-coloured dracaena 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 compet.i.tion 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 some places they divide the cla.s.ses, 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 fetes. There is the harmless imbecile, who wanders about the roads with a peac.o.c.k"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 st.u.r.dy 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 quant.i.ties 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 of too 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 fete 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 gra.s.s and twirls a huge ball between his feet, which sets all the little boys to do the like in imitation, and perhaps brings down many 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 coa.r.s.e jollity among the men and women over the failures and successes alike, and if the fete 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 fetes 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.
THE END.