A “FIN-DE-SIÈCLE” WOMAN
The habit of credulity is one of my peculiarities; some people indeed regard it as a fatal weakness, especially when it leads me to place implicit faith in women. Nevertheless I cannot bring myself to take Mrs. Reuben Neuralys quite seriously in all her social and psychical vagaries.
Every period grafts some special types of woman on to the Eternal Feminine, and Mrs. Neuralys represents quite a special type of the present. She is a very complex and not easily comprehended creature, and since it has lately become the fashion to describe anything that seems to elude ordinary classification as fin-de-siècle, I suppose I must regard Mrs. Neuralys as a fin-de-siècle woman. Certainly she has no counterpart in the pages of Jane Austen or Miss Mitford, and if we would find any approach to her prototype in fiction, we must look to the works of the later “realists.” She is perfectly conscious of this; in fact, she studies that it shall be so, and acts up to it with picturesque effect. And “there’s the rub.” One is constantly led to suspect, by some little unconscious incongruous touch of naturalism, that she is only acting the part of the Emancipated Woman, that she is only playing at what she has read and talked about, that after all there is an artificial ring in this advanced development of womanhood, as represented by Mrs. Neuralys.
Not that I discredit in any way the advancing condition of women, the greater freedom, mental, moral and social, that they are gradually and justly assuming as their right. But I always find that they take an exaggerated view of their emancipation; to prove their independence they begin to shatter idols and scoff at sacred things, after the manner of all revolutionists. Yet though they consider their emancipation demands that they shall at least affect to regard children as intolerable nuisances and husbands as merely useful appendages to their own lives and quite irrelevant to their romances, only let a child of theirs be ill, or a lover give cause for jealousy, and it is the unemancipated, the real woman that will reveal herself in all her elemental femininity.
I cannot say that Mrs. Neuralys belongs to the strong-minded sections of the Emancipated Sisterhood; she stumps no platforms and professes no mission; she sets herself no philanthropic task; she has adopted no vocation, unless it be that of living so as to best please Mrs. Reuben Neuralys. She cultivates a kind of world-weariness, and professes to be hopelessly oppressed by custom. She is bored by everything in which her foremothers were wont to take pleasure. The ruling passion of her life is novelty of sensation, and in seeking this she is utterly without conscience. No consideration of conventionality can restrain her in the pursuit of a new experience in emotion; no respect for tradition has weight with her to restrict any experiment in sentiment or sensibility. Anything that produces new psychical or sensuous effects upon her is welcomed, irrespective of Mrs. Grundy, the Ten Commandments, or Mrs. Lynn Linton. Whether it be a new religion, a new social environment, a new specific for neuralgia, to which she is of course a martyr, a new personality to love and be loved by, a new artistic cult, she will make for it with unbridled eagerness, no matter what social or other susceptibility she may shock in the accomplishment. I believe that she really enjoys the sense of novelty, though I shrewdly suspect that she affects many fancies and pretends many enthusiasms merely because she thinks that not to do so would be “conventional.”
This word “conventional” is the bogie of her life, she is so afraid of it that she will run into any extravagance to escape its application. It is her own pet term of contempt—that and “suburban.” I believe she herself would rather be called improper than suburban. To her mind, conscious, of course, of its own innocence, there might be something piquant in being thought improper; it might lead to new experiences of other people’s real characters, shed side-lights on the world of men and women, and pluck for her the heart of many mysteries. For this reason she affects exceptional freedom of speech and licence of subject, and she expresses no anger, or only smiles, whenever mischievous persons couple her name with that of any man who may be openly admiring her at the moment, and whose escort to places of public resort she may constantly accept,—for of course, being an emancipated woman, it would be altogether too “suburban” to be seen about with her husband. Indeed she appears to deem it a point of honour, and an obligation due to the end of the century, to let it be clearly understood that her husband bores her, and that no sympathy of any kind exists between them. And certain of her friends, and I am told many wives of most affectionate disposition, consider that no self-respecting husband outside Peckham Rye and its like would wish it otherwise.
But, you may ask, what induced a woman like Mrs. Neuralys to marry at all, leastways this husband who bores her so? Might you not ask the same question about nine wives out of ten? Does any girl ever know exactly why she marries? Does she ever know really whether she is in love till after marriage? Is it not illusion in most cases—the love of a girl for a man? I do not think Mrs. Neuralys was ever really in love with Reuben, but she married him out of curiosity. I am betraying no confidence in saying this, for she herself has stated it frequently and openly, and I think she is rather proud of it. Certainly, the fact is characteristic of her, and in this wise.
Aline Aubyn, as she was then, was decidedly of a religious habit, but it was the mystery of religion that attracted her, while its shows appealed to her sensuous nature? To her it meant no spiritual communion, no divine faith, but the sounds of the organ and the choir and the church-bells caused her unspeakable emotions. She enjoyed the sense of the church with its stained-glass windows and its mediæval architecture and the devotional attitude of the congregation. When therefore her parents took her abroad and she visited many cathedrals, the vestments of the priests, the scent of the incense, the pretty acolytes, the mass-music and the general colour and picturesqueness, quickly converted her to the Church of Rome. The novelty of her conversion delighted her for a time, and she was assiduous in her attendances at chapel. But novelties have a way of losing their freshness, and, as I have said, Aline was not spiritually religious. Therefore when she met Reuben Neuralys, her interest took another turn, for he was the first Jew she had ever encountered. She had read and heard much of the Jews and their wonderful history, of their persecutions and their ancient rites, and to her the very name of Jew meant mystery. Reuben therefore appealed to her imagination, and exercised for the time being an extraordinary fascination over her. His manners were at all times charming, the bent of his mind distinctly idealistic, and his nature emotional. Aline’s sensuousness and personal charms attracted him, though, in his idealistic way, he deceived himself into thinking the attraction was dominated by her spirituality. He loved her, and she fancied that being fascinated at the novelty of being loved by a member of a race she could not dissociate from mystery and mysticism was being in love. So they became engaged, and probably never would have married, but the parents on both sides made such strenuous opposition to the marriage, on the score of difference in religion, that the situation presented to Aline a romantically dramatic colour of irresistible and obstinate charm. There was one drawback however. The Registry office was so ugly, the ceremonial seemed so bare and common. It was a novelty to Aline certainly; but it was all unbeautiful, unbridal, and she hated it.
It did not take long to prove to Mr. and Mrs. Neuralys that they were temperamentally ill-suited to one another. Her illusions as to his ancient race had worn off, and she found him similar in manner and habit to any other ordinary young English gentleman of University education and a comfortable worldly position for which others had worked. But perhaps he was more full of ideals than most young men of the day, and some of these ideals she proved impracticable for him, notably that concerning the absolute union of a man and woman in love. She was disappointed in his Judaism, which had nothing mysterious or sensuous in it, and she seemed gradually to display personal indifference towards him, because he loved her uxoriously, and entertained patriarchal views with regard to conjugal life. She by no means falls in with these views, on the contrary she has asserted her individual liberty at all points, and though she was never one of those women who must love to live, she has ever held the opinion that for a woman to be interesting she must always be adored by more than her husband. She says that the adoration of a lover preserves her youth, and as she loves herself too much to fall really in love, and expresses only a kind of sympathetic scorn for those women who love “not wisely but too well,” it may be supposed that she is still on the right side of the marriage contract. Anyhow her husband has faith in her to this extent, for it is a kind of racial instinct with Jews to believe in the purity of their wives, and though Reuben Neuralys has individually ceased to observe the ancient ceremonials of his creed his racial feelings continue very strong. So he has never a fear of the Divorce Court, although he has realised his wife’s sensuous craze for novelty simply because it is novelty, and discovered that she is pretending to be always in love, first with one man who has superficially inducted her into the mysteries of Esoteric Buddhism, then with another who has engaged her fancy with Ibsen, Schopenhauer and the Fabian Essays, and anon with a third who has persuaded her that all pleasure is Pagan, and that pure Hedonism can alone make the world beautiful. As it is only in the nature of things that the cause of each of these successive loves should prepare some distrust of the next, Reuben Neuralys, knowing his wife’s temperament, regards these as extra safeguards rather than as dangers. Moreover, since he has ceased to expect from her that complete companionship and passionate sympathy he had hitherto regarded, in his idealistic way, as the natural bonds of married life, he has accustomed himself to look for these elsewhere. And she more than suspects this—and does not care. “Poor fellow,” she says, and laughs. She is a fin-de-siècle wife, you know.
Thus they live, these two, practically separate, though always meeting at dinner-time. He, practising little deceptions which she always suspects or detects but never exposes, for fear he should discontinue them and bore her instead; she, simulating occasional moods of sentiment and even affection, and dexterously playing upon the most sensitive chords of his nature, when she fancies it necessary to preserve her empire over him, and cozen him into accordance with her wishes. She is so absolute in her desire for power and ascendancy that she would battle hard to retain the admiration of even a husband, how ever little she might really value it. Nevertheless they go their separate ways pleasantly, and if they never talk of happiness, perhaps, under the circumstances, their unconventional but easy and casual philosophy of matrimony is preferable to the perpetual bickerings, or heart-breaking suppression of feelings, which so often mar the more domestic households.
But I fear I may be conveying an impression that Mrs. Neuralys is not all she should be, which would be unjust—to say the least of it. What can I say to correct any such impression? Let me catalogue her virtues.
However tastes may differ, no one can deny that she is piquantly pretty. Ask all the best photographers in London, ask at least one of our most artistic young painters. Look round his studio-walls, they will testify extensively to her facial charms. Then, how she dresses—why, Venus herself might have dressed so, had she been born in the fashion. In her monetary dealings she is liberal to a fault, and, as her tradespeople and dressmakers, who all adore her, will tell you, the fault is always on the right side—she never inquires the cost of anything. And so affable too, she frequently drinks afternoon-tea with her milliner, who is of course socially her equal. Indeed I am not certain that Mrs. Neuralys does not hanker after adopting some such profession herself, by way of a new experience, and, if she did, I am sure her bonnet-shop would be the most alluring boudoir in London. But, intellectually, she is really above this kind of thing. She has not read Schopenhauer and all the latest English and foreign “realists,” and pessimistic critics for nothing. She is alive to every new “movement” in art, literature, religion or the drama, and as long as it is new and provocative of opposition from the advocates of the traditional, it will be sure of her ardent and aggressive partisanship. The very opposition will flatter her into thinking she is asserting her own individuality, for, of course, she forgets that she is only following a lead and running in a groove. Moreover she will think she is sincere in professing admiration for eccentric authors worshipped by experimental cliques, whereas if they were popular, and were accepted by the “plain man” of the Times and the Nineteenth Century, I doubt if she would concern herself with them, however good they might be. In everything her taste must be as unconventional as her daily life. She is so impressionable, she will tell you, so sensitive to all that is beautiful or bizarre.
At the same time Mrs. Neuralys unflinchingly seeks to know life in all its phases, however shocking to the ordinary “suburban” mind. She will go to a music-hall, a race-meeting or a Salvation Army service with equal alacrity, so long as her husband does not take her. He may make one of a parti carré, but alone he would bore her. She is a ravenous reader of newspapers, and to see her devouring some notorious divorce case in a “special edition” over her coffee and cigarette is to see the fin-de-siècle woman quite at home. She is a most assiduous theatre-goer, and is frequently met at the first performances of new plays, but she regards the modern drama in a very pessimistic light, and, for the moment, she may possibly affect to believe that its regeneration can only be brought about through the influence of a new Hottentot dramatist of pristine simplicity, about to be discovered by the very newest critic of the day. She is always most enthusiastic about matters of this kind, and ever alert for the latest.
But I wonder what Mrs. Neuralys will be like when she is old; whether, indeed, old age will be tolerable to her without any backbone of faith and domesticity. Can she always remain an Emancipated Woman, or, as the years pass, will the humanity that is in her cry out for something more tangible than the showy make-believe of her present life, something truer, something more sacred and beautiful? Who can tell?