As a nurse the grim female is precise, punctual, obedient to orders, but inexorable. She would give the patient a fit of nervous hysterics which would throw him back for a week, rather than allow him five minutes' grace in the matter of a painful operation or a nauseous draught. Without variableness or weakness herself, she cannot endure it in others, and whosoever comes under her hand must be content to remain in shape, and to keep himself well braced up to the utmost rigidity of duty. If she had to lose an arm or a leg, she would go to her trouble like a Trojan; and why not others? She would merely tighten her lips and hold her breath, and then would sit down to let herself be hacked and mangled without a groan or a word. To judge by the notice given of her in her sister's life, Emily Brontë was of the grim class, and about the grimmest for her age and state that could well be found. Had she lived, and lived unsoftened, she would have been one unbroken mass of iron and granite, without a soft spot anywhere. Her very love was fiercer than other women's hate; her strength was more terrible than a man's anger; her passions were as fiery as furnace flames. Of all the examples we could cite, she seems about the fittest for our model.
A grim female has no mercy. She may be just, but if so, it is in a hard uncompromizing way that makes her justice worse than others' partiality. For justice can be sympathetic, even if unwavering; and the grim female is never sympathetic, how painful soever the work on hand and the sentence to be executed. Neither is she gay; for she is not plastic enough to be either one or the other. She is run into an iron mould, where her nature is compressed as in a vice; and she allows of no expansion, no lipping over, no bursting of bonds anyhow.
What would become of us if all our women were like her? Without any of the feminine little weaknesses at which we have our laugh yet which we do not wholly dislike—without any of the pretty coaxing ways which we know warp our better judgment and take us out of the strict course; and yet how pleasant that warping process is!—without any even of the transient petulances which give so much light and shade to a woman's character, the grim female stands like an old-world Gorgon, turning living flesh and blood to stone. When we look at her we are inclined to forgive all the smallness and silliness which sometimes vex us in the ordinary woman, and to think that there are worse things than the love of dress for which we so often reproach our wives and daughters; that flirting, which is reprehensible no doubt, might be exchanged for something even more reprehensible; and that vanity, of the giggling, coquettish kind, though to be steadily discouraged and sternly reproved, is not quite the worst feminine thing after all. Surely not! A grim female who cannot flirt nor giggle nor cry, nor yet kiss and make up again when scolded, is far away a worse kind of thing than a feather-headed little puss who is always doing wrong by reason of her foolish brain, but who manages somehow to pull herself right because of her loving heart. Weak women, vain women, affected women, and the whole class of silly women, whatever the speciality of silliness exhibited, are tiresome enough, heaven knows; but, unsatisfactory as they are, they are better than the grim female—that woman of no sex, born without softness or sympathy and living without pity and without love.
Nothing is more incomprehensible to girls than the love and admiration sometimes given to middle-aged women. They cannot understand it; and nothing but experience will ever make them understand it. In their eyes, a woman is out of the pale of personal affection altogether when she has once lost that shining gloss of youth, that exquisite freshness of skin and suppleness of limb, which to them, in the insolent plenitude of their unfaded beauty, constitute the chief claims to admiration of the one sex from the other. And yet they cannot conceal from themselves that the pretty maid of eighteen is often deserted for the handsome woman of forty, and that the patent witchery of their own youth and brilliant colouring goes for nothing against the mysterious charms of a mature siren. What can they say to such an anomaly? There is no good in going about the world disdainfully wondering how on earth a man could ever have taken up with such an antiquated creature!—suggestively asking their male friends what could he see in a woman of her age, old enough to be his mother? There the fact stands; and facts are stubborn things. The eligible suitor who has been coveted by more than one golden-haired girl has married a woman twenty years her senior, and the middle-aged siren has quietly carried off the prize which nymphs in their teens have frantically desired to win. What is the secret? How is it done? The world, even of silly girls, has got past any belief in spells and talismans, such as Charlemagne's mistress wore, and yet the man's fascination seems to them quite as miraculous and almost as unholy as if it had been brought about by the black art. But if they had any analytical power they would understand the diablerie of the mature siren clearly enough; for it is not so difficult to understand when one puts one's mind to it.
In the first place, a woman of ripe age has a knowledge of the world, and a certain suavity of manner and moral flexibility, wholly wanting to the young. Young girls are for the most part all angles—harsh in their judgments, stiff in their prejudices, narrow in their sympathies. They are full of combativeness and self-assertion if they belong to one type of young people, or they are stupid and shy if they belong to another type. They are talkative with nothing to say, and positive with nothing known; or they are monosyllabic dummies who stammer out Yes or No at random, and whose brains become hopelessly confused at the first sentence with which the stranger, to whom they have just been introduced, attempts to open a conversation. They are generally without pity; their want of experience making them hard towards sorrows which they do not understand—let us charitably hope also making them ignorant of the pain they inflict. That famous article in the Times on the cruelty of young girls, àpropos of Constance Kent's confession, though absurdly exaggerated, had in it the core of truth which gives the sting to such papers, which makes them stick, and which is the real cause of the outcry they create.
Girls are cruel; there is no question about it. If passive rather than active, they are simply indifferent to the sufferings of others; if of a more active temperament, they find a positive pleasure in giving pain. A girl will say horribly cruel things to her dearest friend, then laugh at her because she cries. Even her own mother she will hurt and humiliate if she can; while, as for any unfortunate aspirant not approved of, were he as tough-skinned as a rhinoceros she would find means to make him wince. But all this acerbity is toned down in the mature woman. Experience has enlarged her sympathies, and knowledge of suffering has softened her heart to the sufferings of others. Her lessons of life too, have taught her tact; and tact is one of the most valuable lessons that a man or woman can learn. She sees at a glance the weak points and sore places in her companion, and she avoids them; or if she passes over them, it is with a hand so soft and tender, a touch so soothing, that she calms instead of irritating. A girl would have come down on those weak places heavily, and would have torn off the bandages from the sore ones, jesting at scars because she herself had never felt a wound, and deriding the sybaritism of diachylon because ignorant of the anguish it conceals.
Furthermore, the mature siren is thoughtful for others. Girls are self-asserting and aggressive. Life is so strong in them, and the instinct which prompts them to try their strength with all comers and to get the best of everything everywhere, is so irrepressible, that they are often disagreeable because of that instinctive selfishness, that craving, natural to the young, of taking all and giving back nothing. But the mature siren knows better than this. She knows that social success entirely depends on what each of us can throw into the common fund of society; that the surest way to win consideration for ourselves is to be considerate for others; that sympathy begets liking, and self-suppression leads to exaltation; and that if we want to gain love we must first show how well we can give it. Her tact then, and her sympathy, her moral flexibility and quick comprehension of character, her readiness to give herself to others, are some of the reasons, among others, why the society of a cultivated agreeable woman of a certain age is sought by those men to whom women are more than mere mistresses or toys. Besides, she is a good conversationalist. She has no pretensions to any special or deep learning—for, if pedantic, she is spoilt as a siren at any age—but she knows a little about most things; at all events, she knows enough to make her a pleasant companion in a tête-à-tête or at a dinner-table, and to enable her to keep up the ball when thrown. And men like to talk to intelligent women. They do not like to be taught nor corrected by them, but they like that quick sympathetic intellect which follows them readily, and that amount of knowledge which makes a comfortable cushion for their own. And a mature siren who knows what she is about would never do more than this, even if she could.
Though the mature siren rests her claims to admiration on more than mere personal charms, and appeals to something beyond the senses, yet she is personable and well preserved, and, in a favourable light, looks nearly as young as ever. So the men say who knew her when she was twenty; who loved her then, and have gone on loving her, with a difference, despite the twenty years which lie between this and then. Girls, indeed, despise her charms because she is no longer young; and yet she may be even more beautiful than youth. She knows all the little niceties of dress, and, without going into the vulgar trickery of paint and dyes—which would make her hideous—is up to the best arts of the toilet by which every point is made to tell and every minor beauty is given its fullest value. For part of the art and mystery of sirenhood is an accurate perception of times and conditions, and a careful avoidance of that suicidal mistake of which la femme passée is so often guilty—namely, setting herself in confessed rivalry with the young by trying to look like them, and so losing the good of what she has retained, and betraying the ravages of time by the contrast.
The mature siren is wiser than this. She knows exactly what she has and what she can do; and before all things avoids whatever seems too youthful for her years; and this is one reason why she is always beautiful, because always in harmony. Besides, she has very many good points, many positive charms still left. Her figure is still good—not slim and slender certainly, but round and soft, and with that slower, riper, lazier grace which, quite different from the antelope-like elasticity of youth, is in its own way as lovely. If her hair has lost its maiden luxuriance she makes up with crafty arrangements of lace, which are more picturesque than the fashionable wisp of hay-like ends tumbling half-way to the waist. She has still her white and shapely hands with their pink filbert-like nails; still her pleasant smile and square small teeth—those one or two new, matching so perfectly with the old as to be undiscoverable! Her eyes are bright yet, and if the upper muscles are a little shrunk, the consequent apparent enlargement of the orbit only makes them more expressive; her lips are not yet withered; her skin is not wrinkled. Undeniably, when well-dressed and in a favourable light, the mature siren is as beautiful in her own way as the girlish belle; and the world knows it and acknowledges it.
That mature sirens can be passionately loved, even when very mature, history gives us more than one example; and the first name that naturally occurs to one's mind is that of the too famous Ninon de l'Enclos. And Ninon, if a trifle mythical, was yet a fact and an example. But not going quite to Ninon's age, we often see women of forty and upwards who are personally charming, and whom men love with as much warmth and tenderness as if they were in the heyday of life—women who count their admirers by dozens, and who end by making a superb marriage, and having quite an Indian summer of romance and happiness. The young laugh at this idea of the Indian summer for a bride of forty-five; but it is true; for neither romance nor happiness, neither love nor mental youth, is a matter of years; and after all we are only as old as we feel, and certainly no older than we look.
All women do not harden by time, nor wither, nor yet corrupt. Some merely ripen and mellow and get enriched by the passage of the years, retaining the most delicate womanliness—we had almost said girlishness into quite old age, blushing as swiftly under their grey hairs, while shrinking from anything coarse or vulgar or impure as sensitively, as when they were girls. La femme à quarante ans is the French term for the opening of the great gulf beyond which love cannot pass; but human history disproves this date, and shows that the heart can remain fresh and the person lovely long after the age fixed for the final adieu to admiration—that the mature siren can be adored by her own contemporaries when the rising generation regard her as nothing better than a chimney-corner fixture. Mr. Trollope recognized the claims of the mature siren in his Orley Farm and Miss Mackenzie; and no one can deny the intense naturalness of the characters and the interest of the stories.
Another point which tells with the mature woman is, that she is not jealous nor exacting. She knows the world, and takes what comes with that philosophy which springs from knowledge. If she be of an enjoying nature—and she cannot be a siren else—she accepts such good as floats to the top, neither looking too deep into the cup nor speculating on the time when she shall have drained it to the dregs. Men feel safe with her. If they have entered on a tender friendship with her, they know that there will be no scene, no tears, no upbraidings, when an inexorable fate comes in to end their pleasant little drama, with the inevitable wife as the scene-shifter. The mature siren knows so well that fate and the wife must break in between her and her friend, that she is resigned from the first to what is foredoomed, and thus accepts her bitter portion, when it comes, with dignity and in silence. Where younger women would fall into hysterics and make a scene, perhaps go about the world taking their revenge in slander, the middle-aged woman holds out a friendly hand and takes the back seat gallantly, never showing by word nor look that she has felt her deposition. She becomes the best friend of the new household; and if any one is jealous, ten to one it is the husband who is jealous of her love for his wife. Of course it may be the wife herself, who cannot see what her husband can find to admire so much in Mrs. A, and who pouts at his extraordinary predilection for her, though of course she would scorn to be jealous—as, indeed, she has no cause. For even a mature siren, however delightful she may be, is not likely to come before a young wife in the heart of a young husband. Though the French paint the love of a woman of forty as pathetic, because slightly ridiculous and certainly hopeless, yet they arrange their theory of social life so that a youth is generally supposed to make his first love of a married woman many years his elder, while a mature siren finds her last love in a youth.
We have not come to this yet in England, either in theory or practice; and it is to be hoped that we never shall come to it. Mature sirens are all very well for men of their own age, and it is pleasant to see them still loved and admired, and to recognize in them the claims of women to something higher than mere personal passion; but the case would be very different if they became ghoulish seducers of the young, and kept up the habit of love by entangling boyish hearts and blighting youthful lives. As they are now, they form a charming element in society, and are of infinite use to the world. They are the ripe fruit in the garden where else everything would be green and immature—the last days of the golden summer set against the disappointing backwardness of spring and before the chills of autumn have come. They contain in themselves the advantages of two distinct epochs, and while possessing as much personal charm as youth, possess also the gains which come by experience and maturity. They keep things together as the young could not do; and no gathering of friends is perfect which has not one or two mature sirens to give the tone, and prevent excesses. They soften the asperities of high-handed boys and girls, which else would be too biting; and they set people at ease, and make them in good humour with themselves, by the courtesy with which they listen to them and the patience with which they bear with them. Even the very girls who hate them fiercely as rivals love them passing well as half maternal, half sisterly, companions; and the first person to whom they would carry their sorrows would be a mature siren, quite capable for her own part of having caused them.
It would be hard indeed if the loss of youth did not bring with it some compensations; but the mature siren suffers less from that loss than any other kind of woman. Indeed, she seems to have a private elixir of her own which is not quite drained dry when she dies, beloved and regretted, at threescore years and ten; leaving behind her one or two old friends who were once her ardent lovers, and who still cherish her memory as that of the finest and most fascinating woman they ever knew—something which the present generation is utterly incapable of repeating.
Pumpkins are among the most imposing of all groundling growths. They have fine showy flowers, handsome leaves, roving stems, and they bear solid-looking fruit of a goodly size and gorgeous colour. To see them spreading over their domain with such rapid luxuriance, one would imagine them among the best things growing; but a critical examination proves their flesh to be about three parts water, while as for their stalks, they are of so pithless a nature that they can only creep along the earth, unable to stand upright without support;—which tells something against the pumpkin's claim for extra consideration. Still, their showy largeness attracts the eye, and not a few of us believe in pumpkins, and admire both their mode of growth and the fruit resulting. In like manner the human pumpkins—those beings of imposing presence and loud self-assertion—get themselves believed in by the simple; and, as occasions by which their watery and fibreless nature is revealed do not arise every day, they are for the most part accepted for the substantialities they assume to be, and the world is deceived by appearances as it ever has been.
These human pumpkins abound everywhere. In all states and professions, and in both sexes, we find them flourishing magnificently on the face of the earth, taking the lead in their society and setting themselves out as the finest fellows to be found in their respective gardens. Among them are the men of the Bombastes type, so dear to the older playwrights; braggadocios of the kill 'em and eat 'em school, who were such terrible fellows to look at and listen to, though only pumpkins of a singularly innocuous nature when stoutly squeezed and analyzed; fire-eaters of the juggling kind, with special care taken that the fire shall be harmless and that the danger shall lie only in the fear of the spectators. Now that duelling has gone out of fashion, and discharged captains who have signalized themselves in war are rare, our old swashbuckler type of pumpkins has gone out both in fact and fiction, on the stage and off it. To be sure we have a few travellers of slightly apocryphal courage, and more than doubtful accuracy, whose books of perilous adventure and breathless dangers are to us what Bombastes and Bobadil were to our fathers; and we have Major Wellington de Boots with his military swagger and his hare's heart. But he is a very weak imitation of the old fire-eater; and, on the whole, this special family of the pumpkins has dwindled into insignificance, and their place knows them no more.
Then there is the pumpkin after the cut of the Prince Regent—the man of deportment, big, handsome, showy, and specially noticeable for a loud voice, a broad chest, and an indescribable air of superiority and command; the man who has studied bowing as one of the fine arts, who walks with a swagger, and even now tips his curly-brimmed hat slightly to the side. This is the kind of man who influences women. Bombastes frightens the nervous and inexperienced of his own sex, but the man of deportment partly fascinates and partly overawes the other. They take him at his own valuation, and have not skill enough to find out the flaw in the summing up until perhaps it is too late, when they have come so near to him that they are able to appraise him for themselves, and have learnt by bitter experience of what unsound materials he is made. And then let him look out. There is nothing women resent so much as pumpkin manhood—nothing which humiliates them more in their own esteem than to discover that they have been taken in by appearances, and that what they had believed in as solid wood turns out to be only squash.
Women like to rely on men, and dread nothing so much as weakness and vacillation in their male protectors; save indeed those grim and bulky females in whom Hood so much delighted, who take small men vi et armis, and subjugate them body and soul, like two-legged poodles trained to fetch and carry at the word of command. But these are exceptions; the average woman prizing strength rather than poodle-like docility. The pumpkin of the Prince Regent cut is generally notorious for laying down the law on all points. His voice is so loud and his manner of speech so dictatorial, that no one dreams of doubting still less of contradicting him, but everybody takes him as he represents himself to be—a man of prompt decision, of boundless resources, a granitic tower of strength to be leant against in all emergencies without the slightest fear of failure; a man who is not only sufficient for himself but strong enough to bear the weaknesses of others. He is famous for giving advice—advice of a vague, rapid, sprawling kind, never quite exact to the circumstances, never quite practical nor to the point—large advice, general in scope but wonderfully positive in tone, and, until you analyze, grandly imposing in effect. Nail him to the point; ask his advice seriously on any question where the responsibility of counsel will rest with him; place yourself in his hands where the consequences of failure will touch him as well as you; and then see to what meagre dimensions your goodly gourd will shrink. The confident assertion drops into a weak hesitation; the arrogant dictum melts into a timid refusal to take such a serious responsibility on himself; you have pricked your windbag, bisected your pumpkin, and henceforth you know the precise weight of substance remaining. Yet mankind sees him exactly where he was before, and he will go about the world in his large, loud way, saying to every one that if you had followed his advice you would have succeeded—supposing you have failed; or, if you have succeeded, he will take all the credit to himself, and say it was he who guided you and showed you how to go in and win. For himself, and his own affairs, he has no more moral stamina than he had leadership for you and yours. The least reverse knocks him over. Care or sorrow, when it touches him, shrivels him up as completely as frost shrivels up the pumpkin. In every circumstance requiring promptitude, coolness, keen perception, just decision, our swaggering man of froth fails ignominiously; and one hour of real pressure proves incontestably that he was only a pumpkin of imposing presence, good neither as meat nor staff when the time of trial came.
Very often the pumpkin has a wife whose fibre is as close as his is loose, and whose nature is as tough as his is soft; a hard-eyed, thin-lipped, tenacious woman, who speaks little and boasts not at all, but who does all she wishes to do, and whose iron will pins her pumpkin to the wall as the spear of the Bushman pins the elephant or the rhinoceros. It is very curious to see how a blatant blustering man who is so loud and confident abroad, knocks under at home; and how the high-crested deportment which carries things with such a lofty bearing out of doors droops into the meek submission of the henpecked husband so soon as the house-door closes on him, and he is subjected to the pitiless analysis of home. There is no question of flourish then; and if by chance the ambitious crest should make an effort to display itself, the wife knows how to lower it by a few decisive words of a keen-edged kind, and her pumpkin is made to feel sharply enough the difference existing between fibre and pulp. It is almost melancholy to see one of these fine flourishing fellows so subdued. Pumpkin as he may be, it is not pleasant to see him so cut down in his pride; and involuntarily one's sympathies go with him rather than with that tenacious, hard-mouthed wife of his, who would be none the worse perhaps for a little of her husband's essential softness and with less than her own hardness.
How often too, these big fellows have no physical stamina as well as but very shaky moral fibre! A small, wiry light-weight will do twice as much as they; not, of course, where muscle only is wanted, but where the question is of endurance. Large heavy men knock up far sooner than the light-weights; and though size and weight count for something at certain times and on occasions, fibre and tenacity go for more in the long run. In the Crimea, the men who first dropped off from exposure and privation were the magnificently-built Guardsmen—men apparently bred and fed to the highest point of physical perfection; while the undersized little liners, who had nothing to be admired in them, stood the strain gamely, and were brisk and serviceable when the others were either dead or in hospital. So far as we have gone yet, we have not solved the problem of how to combine toughness and bigness, solidity and size, but for the most part fail in the one in proportion as we succeed in the other.
Many of the dark-skinned races are what we may call emotional pumpkins. Their flashing black eyes and swarthy skins seem to be instinct with passion; they look like living furnaces filled with flames and molten metal, terrible fellows, dangerous to meddle with and almost impossible to subdue. But nine times out of ten we find them to be marvellously meek persons, timid, amenable to law, unable to give offence and incapable of taking it—lambs masquerading in tiger-skins. A fair-faced Anglo-Saxon, with his sensitive blush, good-humoured smile and light blue eyes, has more pluck and pith in him than a whole brigade of certain of these dark-skinned men. He has less ferocity perhaps than they when they are thoroughly roused, though our good-humoured Anglo-Saxon is by no means destitute of ferocity on occasions when his blood is up; but his is ferocity of the quarter-staff and bludgeon stand-up fight kind—the ferocity of strength fairly put out against an adversary, not the tigerish cruelty which is almost always found when moral weakness and physical submission have a momentary triumph and reaction. Cowardly men are like women in their revenge when once they get the upper hand; and their revenge is more cruel than that of the habitually brave man who, after a fair fight, overthrows his opponent. Some of the dark-skinned races look the very ideal of the melodramatic ruffian—operatic brigands painted with broad black lines, and up to any amount of deeds of daring and of crime; but they are only pumpkins at the core. We need not go so far as Calcutta to find them; we get examples nearer home, both in Houndsditch and in Rome; for both Jews and Italians are soft-cored men in spite of their passionate outsides, and both would be better for an extra twist and toughness in their fibres.
Intellectual pumpkins are as common as those of the more specially physical kind. You meet with philosophers and 'thinkers'—perhaps they are poets, perhaps politicians—who flourish out a vague big declamation which, when you reduce it to its essence, you find to be a platitude worth nothing; whipped cream, without any foundation of solid pudding. If they are of the philosophic sort, they quote you Fichte and Hegel, to the bewilderment of your brains unless you have gone into the metaphysical maze on your own account; but they might have put all they have said into half a dozen words of three letters, like a child's first reading lesson. The flourish imposes, and people who cannot analyze take the whipped cream for solid pudding, and think that platitudes dressed in the garb of Fichte and Hegel are utterances worthy of deep respect and admiring wonder.
All the professions which talk, either by word of mouth or in print, are specially given to this manifestation of pumpkinhood. Preachers and authors sprawl and flourish over their small inheritance with a tremendous assumption of vital force and vigorous growth; and weak hands, with weaker heads, find support and shelter in their foliage. Poets too, with a knack for turning out large moulds in which they have run very small ideas, are pumpkins dear to the feminine mind. Have we not our Tupper? had we not our 'Satan' Montgomery? and a few others whom we might catalogue if we cared for the task, each with his multifarious female following and his spiritual harem of ardent admirers? All artists—that is, the men who create, or rather who assume to create—are liable to be proved pumpkins when called on to show themselves solid wood. They talk grandly enough, but when they have to translate their words into deeds, too often the noble aims and immortal efforts they have been advocating tail off into pulp and water, and we have botches and pot-boilers instead of masterpieces and high art. Perhaps we may take it as a rule that all doers who talk much and boast grandly are of the pumpkin order, and that art, like nature, elaborates best in silence.
Strong-visaged women are often pure pumpkins with a very rough and corrugated outside. It is astonishing how soon they break down, and for all their stern and powerful looks sink under burdens under which a frail little creature, as light as thistledown, will glide along quite easily. Women with black brows and harsh voices—brigandesses by appearance, or like the typical Herodias of unimaginative artists—are often the gentlest and most pithless of their sex, and may be seen acting quite compassionately towards their infants, or vindicating their womanhood by meekly sewing on their husbands' buttons and weeping at their rebukes; while a fair, silver-tongued, languid lady, as soft as if she were made of nothing harder than the traditional cream and rose-leaves, will give up her babies as a prey to unfeeling nurses and let her husband go buttonless and in rags, while she lounges before the fire indifferent to his wrath and callous to his wrongs. There is many a house mistress who looks as if she could use her fists when annoyed, who is absolutely afraid of her servants; and the maid is always the mistress when the one is fibre and the other pulp.
Heaven be praised that the strong-visaged women are not 'clear grit' all through. If they were as hard as they look, the world would go but queerly, and society would have to make new laws for the protection of its weaker male members. But nature is merciful as well as sportive, and while she amuses herself by creating pumpkins of formidable aspect, takes care that the core shall not always correspond to the rind. Like the Athenian images of the satyr which enclosed a god, the black-browed brigandesses and the men of magnificent deportment are sometimes impostors of a quite amiable kind; and when you have once learnt by heart the false analogies of form, you will cease to fear your typical Herodias, to be impressed by your copy of the Prince Regent, or to be influenced by your wordy Hegelian talking platitudes in the philosophic dialect.
There are widows and widows; there are those who are bereaved and those who are released; those who lose their support and those whose chains are broken; those who are sunk in desolation and those who wake up into freedom. Of the first we will not speak. Theirs is a sorrow too sacred to be publicly handled even with sympathy; but the second demand no such respectful reticence. The widow who is no sooner released from one husband than she plots for another, and the widow who leaps into liberty over the grave of a gaoler, not a lover, are fair game enough. They have always been favourite subjects whereon authors may exercise their wits; and while men are what they are—laughing animals apt to see the humour lying in incongruity, and with a spice of the devil to sharpen that same laughter into satire—they will remain favourite subjects, tragic as the state is when widowhood is deeper than mere outward condition.
There are many varieties of the widow and all are not beautiful. For one, there is the widow who is bent on re-marrying whether men like it or not; that thing of prey who goes about the world seeking whom she may devour; that awful creature who bears down on her victims with a vigour in her assaults which puts to flight the popular fancy about the weaker sex and the natural distribution of power. No hawk poised over a brood of hedge birds, no shark cruising steadily towards a shoal of small fry, no piratical craft sailing under a free flag and accountable to no law save success, was ever more formidable to the weaker things pursued than is the hawk widow to men when she is bent on re-marrying. She knows so much!—there is not a manœuvre by which a victory can be stolen that she has not mastered and she is not afraid of even the most desperate measures. When she has once struck, he would be a clever man and a strong one who should escape her. Generally left but meagrely provided for in worldly goods—else her game would not be difficult—she makes up for her financial poverty by her wealth of bold resources, and by the courage with which she takes her own fortunes in hand and, with her own, those of her more eligible masculine associates. She is a woman of purpose and lives for an end; and that end is remarriage, with the most favourable settlement that can be obtained by her lawyer from his. If fate has dealt hardly by her—though, may be, compassionately by her successive spouses—and has landed her in the widowed state twice or thrice, she is in nowise daunted and as little abashed. She merely refits after a certain time of anchorage, and goes out into the open again for a repetition of her chance. She has no notion of a perpetuity of weeds, and, though she may have cleared her half century with a margin besides, thinks the suggestive orange-blossoms of the bride infinitely more desirable than the fruitless heliotrope of the widow. If one husband is taken, she remembers the old proverb, and reflects on the many, quite as good, who are left potentially subject to her choice. And somehow she manages. It has been said that any woman can marry any man if she determines to do so, and follows on the line of her determination with tenacity and common-sense.
The hawk widow exemplifies the truth of this saying. She determines upon marriage; and she usually succeeds; the question being one of victim only, not of sacrifice. One has to fall to her share; there is no help for it; and the whole contest is, which shall it be? which is strongest to break her bonds? which craftiest to slip out of them? which most resolute not to bear them from the beginning? This the straggling covey must settle among themselves the best way they can. When the hawk pounces down upon its quarry, it is sauve qui peut! But all cannot be saved. One has to be caught; and the choice is determined partly by chance and partly by relative strength. When the widow of experience and resolve bears down on her prey, the result is equally certain. Floundering avails nothing; struggling and splashing are just as futile; one among the crowd has to come to the slaughter, like Mrs. Bond's ducks, and to assist at his own immolation. The best thing he can do is to make a handsome surrender, and to let the world of men and brothers believe he rather likes his position than not.
But there are pleasanter types of the re-marrying widow than this. There is the widow of the Wadman kind, who has outlived her grief and is not disinclined to a repetition of the matrimonial experiment, if asked humbly by an experimenter after her own heart. But she must be asked humbly that she may grant in a pretty, tender, womanly way—if not quite so timidly as a girl, yet as becomingly in her degree, and with that peculiar fascination which nothing but the combination of experience and modesty can give. The widow of the Wadman kind is no creature of prey, neither shark nor hawk; at the worst she is but a cooing dove, making just the sweetest little noise in the world, the tenderest little call to indicate her whereabouts, and to show that she is lonely and feels a-cold. She sits close, waiting to be found, and does not ramp and dash about like the hawk sisterhood; neither does she pretend that she is unwilling to be found, still less deny that a soft warm nest, well lined and snugly sheltered, is better than a lonely branch stretching out comfortless and bare into the bleak wide world. She, too, is almost sure to get what she wants, with the advantage of being voluntarily chosen and not unwillingly submitted to.
This is the kind of woman who is always mildly but thoroughly happy in her married life; unless indeed her husband should be a brute, which heaven forefend. She lives in peace and bland contentment while the fates permit, and when he dies she buries him decently and laments him decorously; but she thinks it folly to spend her life in weeping by the side of his cold grave, when her tears can do no good to either of them. Rather she thinks it a proof of her love for him, and the evidence of how true was her happiness, that she should elect to give him a successor. Her blessed experience in the past has made her trustful of the future; and because she has found one man faithful she thinks that all are Abdiels. As a rule, this type of woman does find men pleasant; and by her own nature she ensures domestic happiness. She is always tenderly, and never passionately, in love, even with the husband she has loved the best. She gives in to no excesses to the right nor to the left. Her temperament is of that serene moonlight kind which does not fatigue others nor wear out its possessor. Without ambition or the power to fling herself into any absorbing occupation, she lives only to please and be pleased at home; and if she be not a wife, wearing her light fetters lovingly and proud that she is fettered, she is nothing. As some women are born mothers and others are born nuns, so is the Wadman woman a born wife, and shines in no other character nor capacity. But in this she excels; and knowing this, she sticks to her rôle, how frequently so ever the protagonist may be changed.
There are widows, however, who have no thought nor desire for remaining anything but widows—who have gained the worth of the world in their condition, 'Jeune, riche, et veuve—quel bonheur!' says the French wife, eyeing 'mon mari' askance. Can the most exacting woman ask for more? And truly such a one is in the most enviable position possible to a woman, supposing always that she has not lost in her husband the man she loved. If she has lost only the man who sat by right at the same hearth with herself—perhaps the man who quarrelled with her across the ashes—she has lost her burden and gained her release.
The cross of matrimony lies heavy on many a woman who never takes the world into her confidence, and who bears in absolute silence what she has not the power to cast from her. Perhaps her husband has been a man of note, a man of learning, of elevated station, a political or a philanthropic power. She alone knew the fretfulness, the petty tyranny, the miserable smallness at home of the man of large repute whom his generation conspired to honour, and whose public life was a mark for the future to date by. When he died the press wrote his eulogy and his elegy; but his widow, when she put on her weeds, sang softly in her own heart a pæan to the great King of Freedom, and whispered to herself Laudamus with a sigh of unutterable relief. To such a woman widowhood has no sentimental regrets. She has come into possession of the goods for which perhaps she sold herself; she is young enough to enjoy the present and to project a future; she has the free choice of a maid and the free action of a matron, as no other woman has. She may be courted and she need not be chaperoned, nor yet forced to accept. Experience has mellowed and enriched her; for though the asperities of her former condition were sharp while they lasted, they have not permanently roughened nor embittered her. Then the sense of relief gladdens, while the sense of propriety subdues, her; and the delicate mixture of outside melancholy, tempered with internal warmth, is wonderfully enticing. Few men know how to resist that gentle sadness which does not preclude the sweetest sympathy with pleasures in which she may not join—with happiness which is, alas! denied her. It gives an air of such profound unselfishness; it asks so mutely, so bewitchingly, for consolation!
Even a hard man is moved at the sight of a pretty young widow in the funereal black of her first grief, sitting apart with a patient smile and eyes cast meekly down, as one not of the world though in it. Her loss is too recent to admit of any thought of reparation; and yet what man does not think of that time of reparation? and if she be more than usually charming in person and well dowered in purse, what man does not think of himself as the best repairer she could take? Then, as time goes on and she glides gracefully into the era of mitigated grief, how beautiful is her whole manner, how tasteful her attire! The most exquisite colours of the prismatic scale look garish beside her dainty tints, and the untempered mirth of happy girls is coarse beside her subdued admission of moral sunshine. Greys as tender as a dove's breast; regal purples which have a glow behind their gloom; stately silks of sombre black softly veiled by clouds of gauzy white or brightened with the 'dark light' of sparkling jet—all speak of passing time and the gradual blooming of the spring after the sadness of the winter; all symbolize the flowers which are growing on the sod that covers the dear departed; all hint at a melting of the funereal gloom into the starlight of a possible bridal. She begins too to take pleasure in the old familiar things of life. She steals into a quiet back seat at the Opera; she just walks through a quadrille; she sees no harm in a fête or flower-show, if properly companioned. Winter does not last for ever; and a life-long mourning is a wearisome prospect. So she goes through her degrees in accurate order, and comes out at the end radiant.
For when the faint shadows cast by the era of mitigated grief fade away, she is the widow par excellence—the blooming widow, young, rich, gay, free; with the world on her side, her fortune in her hand, the ball at her foot. She is the freest woman alive; freer even than any old maid to be found. Freedom, indeed, comes to the old maid when too late to enjoy it; at least in certain directions; for while she is young she is necessarily in bondage, and when parents and guardians leave her at liberty, the world and Mrs. Grundy take up the reins and hold them pretty tight. But the widow is as thoroughly emancipated from the conventional bonds which confine the free action of a maid as she is from those which fetter the wife; and only she herself knows what she has lost and gained. She bore her yoke well while it pressed on her. It galled her but she did not wince; only when it was removed, did she become fully conscious of how great had been the burden, from her sense of infinite relief through her freedom. The world never knew that she had passed under the harrow; probably therefore it wonders at her cheerfulness, with the dear departed scarce two years dead; and some say how sweetly resigned she is, and others how unfeeling. She is neither. She is simply free after having lived in bondage; and she is glad in consequence. But she is dangerous. In fact, she is the most dangerous of all women to men's peace of mind. She does not want to marry again—does not mean to marry again for many years to come, if ever; granted; but this does not say that she is indifferent to admiration or careless of men's society. And being without serious intentions herself, she does not reflect that she may possibly mislead and deceive others who have no such cause as she has to beware of the pleasant folly of love and its results.
In the exercise of her prerogative as a free woman, able to cultivate the dearest friendships with men and fearlessly using her power, she entangles many a poor fellow's heart which she never wished to engage more than platonically, and crushes hopes which she had not the slightest intention to raise. Why cannot men be her friends? she asks, with a pretty, pleading look—a tender kind of despair at the wrong-headedness of the stronger sex. But, tender as she is, she does not easily yield even when she loves. The freedom she has gone through so much to gain she does not rashly throw away; and if ever the day comes when she gives it up into the keeping of another—and for all her protestations it comes sometimes—the man to whom she succumbs may congratulate himself on a victory more flattering to his vanity, and more complete in its surrender of advantages, than he could have gained over any other woman. Belle or heiress, of higher rank or of greater fame than himself, no unmarried woman could have made such a sacrifice in her marriage as did this widow of means and good looks, when she laid her freedom, her joyous present and potential future, in his hand. He will be lucky if he manages so well that he is never reproached for that sacrifice—if his wife never looks back regretfully to the time when she was a widow—if there are no longing glances forward to possibilities ahead, mingled with sighs at the difficulty of retracing a step when made. On the whole, if a woman can live without love, or with nothing stronger than a tender sentimental friendship, widowhood is the most blissful state she can attain. But if she be of a loving nature and fond of home, finding her own happiness in the happiness of others and indifferent to freedom—thinking, indeed, that feminine freedom is only another word for desolation—she will be miserable until she has doubled her experience and carried on the old into the new.
The love of dolls is instinctive with girl children; and a nursery without some of these silent simulacra for the amusement of the little maids is a very lifeless affair. But outside the nursery door dolls are stupid things enough; and, whether improvised of wisped-up bundles of rags or made of the costliest kind of composition, they are at the best mere pretences for the pastime of babies, not living creatures to be loved nor artistic creations to be admired. Certainly they are pretty in their own way, and some are made to simulate human actions quite cleverly; and one of their charms with children is that they can be treated like sentient beings without a chance of retaliation. They can be scolded for being naughty; put to bed in broad daylight for a punishment; seated in the corner with their impassive faces turned to the wall, just as the little ones themselves are dealt with; the doll all the time smiling exactly as it smiled before, its round blue beads staring just as they stared before; neither scolding nor cornering making more impression on its sawdust soul than do little missy's sobs and tears when nurse is cross and dolly is her only friend. But the child has had its hour of play and make-believe sentiment of companionship and authority; and so, if the doll can do no good of itself, it can at least be the occasion of pleasantness to others.
Now there are women who are dolls in all but the mere accident of material. The doll proper is a simple structure of wax or wood, 'its knees and elbows glued together;' and the human doll is a complex machine of flesh and blood. But, saving such structural differences, these women are as essentially dolls as those in the bazaar which open and shut their eyes at the word of command enforced by a wire, and squeak when you pinch them in the middle. There are women who seem born into the world only as the playthings and make-believes of human life. As impassive as the waxen creatures in the nursery, no remonstrance touches them and no experience teaches them. Their final cause seems to be to look pretty, to be always in perfect drawing-room order, and to be the occasions by which their friends and companions are taught patience and self-denial. And they perfectly fulfil their destiny; which may be so much carried to their credit. A doll woman is hopelessly useless and can do nothing with her brains or her hands. In distress or sickness she can only sit by you and look as sorrowful as her round smooth face will permit; but she has not a helping suggestion to make, not a fraction of practical power to put forth.
When a man has married a doll wife he has assigned himself to absolute loneliness or a double burden. He cannot live with his pretty toy in any more reality of sympathy than does a child with her puppet. He can tell her nothing of his affairs, nothing of his troubles nor of his thoughts, because she can impart no new idea, even from the woman's point of view, not from want of heart but from want of brains to understand another's life. Is she not a doll? and does not the very essence of her dollhood lie in this want of perceptive faculty both for things and feelings? What are the hot flushes of passion, the bitter tears of grief, the frenzy of despair, to her? She sees them; and she wonders that people can be so silly as to make themselves and her so uncomfortable; but of the depth of the anguish they express she knows no more than does her waxen prototype when little missy sobs over it in her arms and confides her sorrows to its deaf ears. Whatever anxieties oppress her husband, he must keep them to himself, he cannot share them with her; and the last shred of his credit, like the last effort of his strength, must be employed in maintaining his toy wife in the fool's paradise where alone she can make her habitation. Many a man's back has broken under the strain of such a burden; and many a ruined fortune might have been held together and repaired when damaged, had it not been for the exigencies and necessities of the living doll, who had to be spared all want or inconvenience at the cost of everything else. How many men are groaning in spirit at this moment over the infatuation that made them sacrifice the whole worth of life for the sake of a pretty face and a plastic manner!
The doll woman is as helpless practically as she is useless morally. If she is in personal danger, she either faints or becomes dazed, according to her physiological conditions. Sometimes she is hysterical and frantic, and then she is actively troublesome. In general, however, she is just so much dead weight on hand, to be thought for as well as protected; a living corpse to be carried on the shoulders of those who are struggling for their own lives. She can foresee no possibilities, measure no distances, think of no means of escape. Never quick nor ready, pressure paralyzes such wits as she possesses; and it is not from selfishness so much as from pure incapacity to help herself or to serve others that the poor doll falls down in a helpless heap of self-surrender, and lets her very children perish before her eyes without making an effort to protect them.
As a mother indeed, the doll woman is perhaps more unsatisfactory than in any other character. She gives up her nursery into the absolute keeping of her nurse, and does not attempt to control nor to interfere. This again, is not from want of affection, but from want of capacity. In her tepid way she has a heart, if only half-vitalized like the rest of her being; and she is by no means cruel. Indeed, she has not force enough to be cruel nor wicked anyhow; her worst offence being a passive kind of selfishness, not from greed but from inactivity, by which she is made simply useless for the general good. As for her children, she understands neither their moral nature nor their physical wants; and beyond a universal 'Oh, naughty!' if the little ones express their lives in the rampant manner proper to young things, or as a universal 'Oh, let them have it!' if there is a howl over what is forbidden or unwise, she has no idea of discipline or management. If they teaze her, they are sent away; if they are naughty, they are whipped by papa or nurse; if they are ill, the doctor is summoned and they have medicine as he directs; but none of the finer and more intimate relations usual between mother and child exist in the home of the doll mother. The children are the property of the nurse only; unless indeed the father happens to be a specially affectionate and a specially domestic man, and then he does the work of the mother—at the best clumsily, but at the worst better than the doll could have done it.
Very shocking and revolting are all the more tragic facts of human life to the smooth-skinned easy-going doll. When it comes to her own turn to bear pain, she wonders how a good God can permit her to suffer. Had she brains enough to think, the great mystery of pain would make her atheistical in her angry surprise that she should be so hardly dealt with. As dolls have a constitutional immunity from suffering, her first initiation into even a minor amount of anguish is generally a tremendous affair; and though it may be pain of a quite natural and universal character, she is none the less indignant and astonished at her portion. She invariably thinks herself worse treated than her sisters, and cannot be made to understand that others suffer as much as, and more than, herself. As she has always shrunk from witnessing trouble of any kind, and as what she may have seen has passed over her mind without leaving any impression, she comes to her own sorrows totally inexperienced; and one of the most pitiable sights in the world is that of a poor doll woman writhing in the grasp of physical agony, and broken down or rendered insanely impatient by what other women can bear without a murmur.
When she is in the presence of the moral tragedies of life, she is as lost and bewildered as she is with the physical. All sin and crime are to her odd and inexplicable. She cannot pity the sinner, because she cannot understand the temptation; and she cannot condemn from any lofty standpoint, because she has not mind enough to see the full meaning of iniquity. It is simply something out of the ordinary run of her life, and the doll naturally dislikes disturbance, whether of habit or of thought. Yet if a noted criminal came and sat down by her, she would probably whisper to her next friend, 'How shocking!' but she would simper when he spoke, and perhaps in her heart feel flattered by the attention of even so doubtful a notoriety. If she be a doll with a bias towards naughtiness, the utmost limit to which she can go is a mild kind of curiosity about the outsides of things—the mere husk and rind of the forbidden fruit—such as wondering how such and such people look who have done such dreadful things; and what they felt the next morning; and how could they ever come to think of such horrors! She would be more interested in hearing about the dress and hair and eyes of the female plaintiff or defendant in a famous cause than many other women would be; but she would not give herself the trouble to read the evidence, and she would take all her opinions secondhand. But whether the colour of the lady's gown was brown or blue, and whether she wore her hair wisped or plaited, would be matters in which she would take as intense an interest as is possible to her.
The utmost limit to which enthusiasm can be carried with her is in the matter of dress and fashion; and the only subject that thoroughly arouses her is the last new colour, or the latest eccentricity of costume. Talk to her of books, and she will go to sleep; even novels, her sole reading, she forgets half an hour after she has turned the last page; while of any other kind of literature she is as profoundly ignorant as she is of mathematics; but she can discuss the mysteries of fashion with something like animation, these being to her what the wire is to the eyes of the dolls in the bazaar. Else she has no power of conversation. At the head of her own table she sits like a pretty waxen dummy, and can only simper out a few commonplaces, or simper without the commonplaces, satisfied if she is well appointed and looks lovely, and if her husband seems tolerably contented with the dinner. She is more in her element at a ball, where she is only asked to dance and not wanted to talk; but her ball-room days do not last for ever, and when they are over she has no available retreat.
If a rich doll woman is a mistake, a poor one who has been rich is about the greatest infliction that can be laid on a suffering household. Not all the teaching of experience can make wax and glue into flesh and blood, and nothing can train the human doll into a dignified or a capable womanhood. She still dresses in faded finery—which she calls keeping up appearances; and still has pretensions which no 'inexorable logic of facts' can destroy. She spends her money on sweets and ribbons and ignores the family need for meat and calico; and she sits by the fireside dozing over a trashy novel, while her children are in rags and her house is given over to disorder. But then she has a craze for the word 'lady-like,' and thinks it synonymous with ignorance and helplessness. She abhors the masculine-minded woman who helps her—sister, cousin, daughter—so far as she can abhor anything; but she is glad to lean on her strength, despite this abhorrence, and, while grumbling at her masculinity, does not disdain to take advantage of her power. The doll is only passively disagreeable though; and for all that she carps under her breath, will remain in any position in which she is placed. She will not act, but she will let you act unhindered; which is something gained when you have to deal with fools.
This quiescence of hers passes with the world for plasticity and amiability; it is neither; it is simply indolence and want of originating force. While she is young, she is nice enough to those who care only for a pretty face and a character founded on negatives; but when a man's pride of life has gone, and he has come into the phase of weakness, or under the harrow of affliction, or into the valley of the shadow of death, then she becomes in sorrowful truth the chain and bullet which make him a galley-slave for the remainder of his days, and which sign him to drudgery and despair.
As an old woman the doll has not one charm. She has learned none of that handiness, come to none of that grand maternal power of helping others, which should accompany maturity and age and has still to be thought for and protected, to the exclusion of the younger and naturally more helpless, as when she was young herself, and beautiful and fascinating, and men thought it a privilege to suffer for her sake. Nine times out of ten she has lost her temper as well as her complexion, and has become peevish and unreasonable. She gets fat and rouges; but she will not consent to get old. She takes to false hair, dyes, padded stays, arsenic or 'anti-fat,' and to artful contrivances of every description; but alas! there is no 'dolly's hospital' for her as there used to be for her battered old prototype in the nursery lumber-closet; and, whether she likes it or not, she has to succumb to the inevitable decree, and to become faded, worn out, unlovely, till the final coup de grâce is given and the poor doll is no more. Poor, weak, frivolous doll! it requires some faith to believe that she is of any good whatsoever in this overladen life of ours; but doubtless she has her final uses, though it would puzzle a Sanhedrim of wise men to discover them. Perhaps in the great readjustment of the future she may have her place and her work assigned to her in some inter-stellar Phalansterie; when the meaning of her helpless earthly existence shall be made manifest and its absurd uselessness atoned for by some kind of celestial 'charing.'
There are certain women who are invariably spoken of as charming. We never hear any other epithet applied to them. They are not said to be pretty, nor amiable, nor clever, though they may be all three, but simply charming; which we may take as a kind of verbal amalgam—the concentration and concretion of all praise. The main feature about these charming women is their intense feminality. There is no blurring of the outlines here; no confusion of qualities admirable enough in themselves but slightly out of place considering the sex; no Amazonian virtues which leave one in doubt as to whether we have not before us Achilles in petticoats rather than a true Pyrrha or a more tender Deidamia.
A charming woman is woman all over—one who places her glory in being a woman and has no desire to be anything else. She is a woman rather than a human being, and a lady rather than a woman. One of her characteristics is the exquisite grace of her manner which so sweetly represents the tender nature within. She has not an angle anywhere. If she were to be expressed geometrically, Hogarth's Line of Beauty is the sole figure that could be used for her. She is flowing, graceful, bending in mind as in body; she is neither self-asserting nor aggressive, neither rigid nor narrow; she is a creature who glides gracefully through life, and adjusts herself to her company and her circumstances in a manner little less than marvellous; working her own way without tumult or sharpness; creeping round the obstacles she cannot overthrow, and quietly wearing down more friable opposition with that gentle persistency which does so much more than turmoil and disturbance.
Even if enthusiastic—which she is for art, either as music, as painting, or yet as poetry—she is enthusiastic in such a sweet and graceful way that no one can be offended by a fire which shines and does not burn. There is no touch of scorn about her and no assumption of superior knowledge. She speaks to you, poor ignorant Philistine, with the most flattering conviction that you follow her in all her flights; and when she comes out, quite naturally, with her pretty little bits of recondite lore or professional technicalities, you cannot be so boorish as to ask for an explanation of these trite matters which she makes so sure you must understand. Are you not an educated person with a soul to be saved? can you then be ignorant of things with which every one of culture is familiar? She discourses confidentially of musicians and painters unknown to fame, and speaks as if she knew the secret doings of the Conservatoire and the R. A. council-chamber alike. The models and the methods, the loves and the hates, of the artistic world are to her things of every-day life, and you cannot tell her that she is shooting her delicate shafts wide of the mark, and that you know no more of what she means than if she were talking in the choicest Arabic.
If she has been abroad—and she generally has been more or less—she will pour out her tender little rhapsodies about palazzi and musei of which you have never heard, but every room of which she assumes you know by heart; and she will speak of out-of-the-way churches, and grim old castles perched upon vine-clad mounts, as if you were as well acquainted with them as with your native hamlet. She will bring into her discourse all manner of Italian technicalities, as if you understood the subject as well as she herself understands it; though your learning is limited to a knowledge of how much has been done in jute and tallow this last half year, or how many pockets of hops went off in the market last week. If she has a liking for high life and titles—and what charming woman has not?—she will mention the names of all manner of counts and dukes and monsignori unknown to English society, as though they were her brothers; but if you were to interrupt the gentle ripple of her speech with such rude breakwaters as 'who?' and 'what?' the charming woman would think you a horrid bore—and no man would willingly face that humiliation. One may be a rhinoceros in one's own haunts, but, as the fable tells us, even rhinoceroses are ashamed of their parentage when among gazelles.
Never self-asserting, never contradictory, only sweetly and tenderly putting you right when you blunder, the charming woman nevertheless always makes you feel her superiority. True, she lays herself as it were at your feet and gives you a thousand delicate flatteries—indeed among her specialities is that of being able to set you on good terms with yourself by her art of subtle flattery; but despite her own self-abasement and your exaltation you cannot but feel her superiority; and, although she is too charming to acknowledge what would wound your pride, you know that she feels it too, and tries to hide it. All of which has the effect of making you admire her still more for her grace and tact.
The charming woman is generally notoriously in love with her husband, who is almost always inferior to her in birth, acquirements, manner, appearance. This Titania-like affection of hers only shows her feminine qualities of sacrifice and wifely devotion to greater advantage, and makes other men envy more ferociously the lucky fellow who has drawn such a prize. The husband of a charming woman is indeed lucky in the world's esteem; no man more so. Though he may be one of the most ordinary, perhaps unpleasant, fellows you know, with a sour face, an underbred air, and by no means famous in his special sphere, his wife speaks of him enthusiastically as so good, so clever, so delightful! No one knows how good he is, she says; though of course he has his little peculiarities of temper and the rest of it, and perhaps every one would not bear with them as she does. But then she knows him, and knows his wonderful worth and value! If they are not seen much together, that comes from causes over which they have no control, not from anything like disinclination to each other's society. Certainly, for so happy a marriage, it is a little surprising how very seldom they are together; and how all her friends are hers only and not his, and how much she goes into society without him. On the whole, counting hours, they live very much more apart than united; but that is the misfortune of his career, of his health, or of hers—a misfortune due to any cause but that of diversity of tastes, inharmoniousness of pursuits, or lack of love.
Full of home affection and the tenderest sentiment as she is, the charming woman does sometimes the oddest-looking things, which a rough little domestic creature without graceful pretensions would not dream of doing. Her child is lying dangerously ill, perhaps dying, and she appears at the grand ball of the season, subdued certainly—how well that sweet melancholy becomes her!—but always graceful, always thoughtful for others, and attentive to the minutest detail of her social duties. And though indeed, she will tell you, she does not know how she got dressed at all, because of the state of cruel anxiety in which she is, yet she is undeniably the best dressed woman in the room and the most carefully appointed. It is against her own will that she is there, you may be sure; but she has been forced to sacrifice herself, and tear herself away for an hour. The exigencies of society are so merciless!—the world is such a terrible Juggernaut! she says, raising her eyes with plaintive earnestness to yours in the breathing-times of the waltz.
She has another trial if her husband is ordered out to Canada or the West Indies. Dearly as she loves him, and though she is heart-broken at the idea of the separation, yet her health cannot stand the climate; and she must obey her doctor's orders. She is so delicate, you know—all charming women are delicate—and the doctor tells her she could not live six months either in Toronto or Port Royal. If her lord and master had to go on diplomatic service to St. Petersburg or Madrid, she might be able to stand the climate then; but that is different. A dull station, without any of her favourite pleasures, would be more than she could bear; so she remains behind, goes out into society, and writes her husband tender and amusing letters once a month.
The charming woman is the gentlest of her sex. She would not do a cruel thing nor say an unkind word for the world. When she tells you the unpleasant things which ill-natured people have said of your friends or hers, she tells them in the sweetest and dearest way imaginable. She is so sure there is not a syllable of truth in it all; and what a shame it is that people should be so ill-natured! In the gentle tone of sympathy and deprecation peculiar to her, she gives you all the ugly and uncomfortable reports which have come to her, and of which you have never heard a breath until this moment. Yet it is you who are stupid, not she who is initiative, for she tells them to you as if they were of patent notoriety to the whole world; only she does not believe them, remember! She takes the most scrupulous care to deny and defend as she retails, and you cannot class her with the tribe of the ill-natured whom she censures, setting, as she does, the whole strength of her gentle words and generous disbelief in opposition to these ugly rumours. Yet you wish she had not told you. Her disclaimers spring so evidently from the affectionate amiability of her own mind, which cannot bear to think evil, that they have not much effect upon you. The excuse dies away from your memory, but the ill-savoured report roots; and you feel that you have lost your respect for your former friends for ever; or, if they were only hers, then, that nothing should tempt you to know them. There is no smoke without some fire, you think; and the charming woman cannot possibly have kindled the flame herself out of sticks and leaves and rubbish of her own collecting. But how sweet and charitable she was when she told you! how much you love her for her tenderness of nature! what a guileless and delightful creature she is!
The charming woman is kind and graceful, but she does not command the stronger virtues. She flatters sweetly, but, it must be confessed, she fibs as sweetly. She sometimes owns to this, but only to fibs that do more good than harm—fibs into the utterance of which she is forced for the sake of peace and to avoid mischief. It is a feminine privilege, she says; and men agree with her. Truth at all times—bold, uncompromising, stern-faced truth—is coarse and indelicate she says; a masculine quality as little fitted for women as courage or great bodily strength. Her husband knows that she fibs; her friends at times find her out too; but though the women throw it at her as an accusation, the men accept it as a quality without which she would be less the charming woman that she is; and not only forgive it, but like her the better for the grace and tact and suppleness she displays in the process of manufacture. Hers are not the severer virtues, but the gentler, the more insinuating; and absolute truth—truth at any price and on all occasions—does not come into the list.
Charming women, with their plastic manners and non-aggressive force, always have their own way in the end. They are the women who influence by unseen methods and who shrink from any open display of power. They know that their métier is to soothe men, to put them on good terms with themselves, and so to get the benefit of the good humour they induce; and they dread nothing so much as a contest of wills. They coax and flatter for their rights, and consequently they are given privileges in excess of their rights; whereas the women who take their rights, as things to which they are entitled without favour, lose them and their privileges together. This art of self-abasement for future exaltation is one which it is given only to few to carry to perfection, but no woman is really charming without it. In fact it is part of her power; and she knows it. Though charming women are decidedly the favourites with men, they are careful to keep on good terms with their own sex; and in society you may often see them almost ostentatiously surrounded by women only, whom they take pains to please or exert themselves to amuse, but whom they throw into the shade in the most astonishing way.