Whatever these really charming women are, or do, or wear, is exactly the right thing; and every other woman fails in proportion to the distance she is removed from this model. When a charming woman is dressed richly, the simpler costumes of her friends look poor and mean; when she is à la bergère, the Court dresses about her are vulgar; when she is gay, quietness is dullness; when she is quiet, laughter is coarse. And there is no use in trying to imitate her. She is the very Will-o'-the-wisp of her circle, and no sooner shows her light here than she flits away there; she has no sooner set one fashion, which her admiring friends have adopted with infinite pains and trouble, than she has struck out a new one which renders all the previous labour in vain. This is part of her very essence; and the originality which is simply perfection that cannot be repeated, and not eccentricity that no one will imitate, comes in as one of the finest and most potent of her charms. When she lends her patterns to her friends, or tells them this or that little secret, she laughs in her heart, knowing that she has shown them a path they cannot possibly follow and raised up a standard to which they cannot attain. And even should they do either, then she knows that, by the time they have begun to get up to her, she will be miles away, and that no art whatever can approximate them to her as she is. What she was she tosses among them as a worn-out garment; what she is they cannot be. She remains still the unapproachable, the inimitable, the charming woman par excellence of her set, whom none can rival.
Among other classifications, the world of men and women may be divided into those who wear aprons and those who are tied to the strings thereof—those who determine the length of the tether and those who are bound to browse within its circuit—those who hold the reins and those who go bitted. All men and women are fond of power, but there is a wide difference in the ways in which they use it. To men belong the grave political tyrannies at which nations revolt and history is outraged, to women the small conventional laws framed against individual liberty by Mrs. Grundy and society; men rule with rods of iron and drive with whips of steel, women shorten the tether and tie up close to apron-strings; men coerce, women forbid. In fact, the difference is just that which lies between action and negation, compulsion and restraint; between the masculine jealousy of equality and the feminine fear of excess. If men debar women from all entrance into their larger sphere, women try to dwarf men's lives to their own measure, and not a few hold themselves aggrieved when they fail. They think that everything which is impossible to them should be forbidden to others, and they maintain that to be a lamentable extreme which is simply in excess of their own powers. Not content with supremacy in the home which is their own undisputed domain, nor satisfied with binding on men the various rules distinguishing life in the drawing-room, the dining-room and the breakfast-parlour, they would, if they could, carry their code outside, and sweep into its narrow net the club-house and the mess-table, the billiard-room and the race-course, and wherever else men congregate together—delivered from the bondage of feminine conventionalities.
For almost all women have an uneasy feeling when their men are out of sight, enjoying themselves in their own way. They fear on all sides—both bodily harm and moral evil; and regard men's rougher sports and freer thoughts as a hen regards her wilful ducklings when they take to the water in which she would be drowned, and leave her high and dry lamenting their danger and self-destruction. The man they love best for his manliness they would, in their loving cowardice, do their utmost to make effeminate; and, while adoring him for all that makes him bold and strong in thought as well as in frame, they would tie him up to their apron-strings, and keep him there till he became as soft and narrow as themselves. Not that they would wish to do so; if you asked them they would tell you quite the contrary. But this would be the result if they had their own way, their love being at all times more timid than confident.
To home-staying women, a brilliant husband courted by the world and loving what courts him, is a painful cross to bear, however much he may be beloved—the pain, in fact, being proportionate to the love. Perhaps no life exemplifies this so much as Moore's. Poor "Bessy" suffered many things because of the looseness of the apron-string by which her roving husband was tied, and the length of the tether which he allowed himself. Farfallone amoroso as he was, his incessant flutterings out of range and reach caused her many a sad hour; and in after years she was often heard to say that the happiest time of her life was when his mind had begun to fail, for then she had him all to herself and no one came in between them—no great world swept him away to be the idol of a salon, and left her alone at home casting up her accounts with life and love, and quaking at the result that came out. When the brilliancy and the idolatry came to an end, then her turn began; and she tied up her dulled and faltering idol close to her side for ever after, and was happier to have him there helpless, affectionate, dependent and imbecile than when he was at his brightest—and a rover.
Many a wife has felt the same when sickness has broken down the strong man's power to a weakness below her own, and made her, so long the inferior, now the more powerful of the two, and the supreme. She gathers up the reins with that firm, tight hand peculiar to women, and ties her master to her apron-string so that he cannot escape. It is quite a matter of pride with her that she has got him into such good order. He obeys her so implicitly about his medicines, and going to bed early, and wrapping himself up, and avoidance of draughts and night-air, that she feels all the reflected glory of one who has conquered a hero. The Samson who used to defy the elements and break her careful strings like bands of tow, has at last laid his head in her lap and suffered himself to be covered by her apron. It is worth while to have had the anxiety and loss of his illness for the sake of the submission resulting; and she generally ends by gaining a hold over him which he can never shake off again.
It is pitiful though, to see the stronger life thus dwarfed and bound. But women like it; and while the need for it lasts men must submit. The danger is lest the habit of the apron-string should become permanent; for it is so perilously pleasant to be petted and made much of by women, that few men can resist the temptation when it offers; and many have been ruined for the remainder of their days by an illness which gave them up into the keeping of wife and sisters—those fireside Armidas who will coddle all the real manliness out of their finest heroes, if they are let. If this kind of thing occurs at the break of life, the mezzo cammino between maturity and age, it is doubly difficult to throw off; and many a man who had good years of vigour and strength, before him if he had been kept up to the mark, sinks all at once into senility because his womankind got frightened at that last small attack of his, and thought the best way to preserve him from another was to weaken him by over-care out of all wish for dangerous exposure.
Perhaps the greatest misfortune that can befall a man is to have been an only son brought up by a timid widow mother. It is easy to see at a glance, among a crowd of boys, who has been educated under exclusively feminine influence. The long curled shining hair, the fantastic tunic—generally a kind of hybrid between a tunic and a frock—the lavish use of embroidery, the soft pretty-behaved manner, the clean unroughened hands, all mark the boy of whom his mother has so often wished that he had been a girl, and whom she has made as much like a girl as possible. His intellectual education has been as unboylike as his daily breeding. Mothers' boys are taught to play the piano, to amuse themselves with painting, or netting, or perhaps a little woolwork in the evenings—anything to keep them quietly seated by the family table, without an outbreak of boyish restlessness or inconvenient energy; but they are never taught to ride, to hunt, to shoot, to swim, to play at cricket, football, nor billiards, unless a stalwart uncle happens to be about who takes the reins in his own hand at times, and insists on having a word to say to his nephew's education.
There is danger in all, and evil in some, of these things; and women cannot bear that those they love should run the risk of either. Wherefore their boys are modest and virtuous truly, but they are not manly; and when they go out into the world, as they must sooner or later, they are either laughed at for their priggishness, or they go to the bad by the very force of reaction. The mother has allowed them to learn nothing that will be of solid use to them, and they enter the great arena wholly unprepared either to fight or to resist, to push their own way or to take their own part. They have been kept tied up to the apron-string to the last moment, and only when absolutely forced by the necessity of events will she cut the knot and let them go free. But she holds on to the last moment. Even when the time comes for college-life and learning, she often goes with her darling, and takes lodgings in the town, that she may be near at hand to watch over his health and morals, and continue her careful labours for his destruction.
The chances are that a youth so brought up never becomes a real man, nor worth his salt anyhow. He is a prig if he is good, a debauchee of the worst kind if he kicks over the traces at all. He is more likely the first, carrying the mark of the apron-string round his wrist for life. Like a tame falcon used to the hood and the perch and the lure home, no matter what the temptation of the quarry afield, he is essentially a domestic man, at ease only in the society of women; a fussy man; a small-minded man; delicate in health; with a dread of strong measures, physical, political, or intellectual; a crotchety man given to passing quackeries; but not a man fit for man's society nor for man's work. When there are many boys, instead of only one, in a widow's family, the opposite of all this is the case. So soon as they have escaped from the nursery, they have escaped from all control whatsoever; and if one wants to realize a puerile pandemonium of dirt, discomfort, noise and general disorganization, the best place in the world is the household of a feeble-spirited mother of many sons where there is no controlling masculine influence.
Daughters, who are naturally and necessarily tied up to the mother's apron-string, suffer occasionally from too tight a strain; though certainly it is not the fault of the present day that girls are too closely fettered, too home-staying or subdued. Still, every now and then one comes across a matron who has crushed all individuality out of her family, and whose grown-up daughters are still children to her in moral go-carts and intellectual leading-strings. They may be the least attractive of their sex, but a mother of this kind has one fixed delusion respecting them—namely, that the world is full of wolves eager to devour her lambs, and that they are only safe when close to the maternal apron and browsing within an inch of the tether stake. These are the girls who become hopeless old maids. Men have an instinctive dread of the maternal apron-string. They do not want to marry a mother as well as a wife, and to live under a double dominion and a reduplicated opposition.
It is all very well to say that a girl so brought up is broken in already, and therefore more likely to make a good wife than many others, seeing that it is only a transfer of obedience. That may do for slaves who cannot be other than slaves whoever is the master; but it does not do for women who, seeing their friends freer than themselves, reflect with grief and longing that, had fate so ordered it, they might have been free too. The chances here, as with the mothers' boys, are, that the girl kept too close to the apron-string during her spinsterhood goes all abroad so soon as she gets on the free ground of matrimony, and lets her liberty run into license. Or she keeps her old allegiance to her mother intact, and her husband is never more than the younger branch at best. Most likely he is a usurper, whom it is her duty to disobey in favour of the rightful ruler when they chance to come into collision.
If women had their will, all national enterprise would be at an end. There would be no Arctic Expeditions, no Alpine Clubs, no dangerous experiments in science, no firearms at home, no volunteering—in their own family at least. All the danger would be done by the husbands and brothers and sons of other women, but each would guard her own. For women cannot go beyond the individual; and the loss of one of their own, by misadventure, weighs more with them than the necessity of keeping up the courage and hardihood of the nation. Nor do they see the difference between care and coddling, refinement and effeminacy; consequently, men are obliged to resist their influence, and many cut the apron-string altogether, because delicate fingers will tie the knots too tight. They do not remember that the influence to which men yield as a voluntary act of their own grace is a very different thing from obedience to the open denial, the undisguised interference and restraint, which some women like to show. Men respect the higher standard of morality kept up by women; they obey the major and the minor laws of refinement which are framed for home life and for society; and they confess that, without woman's influence, they would soon degenerate into mere savages and be no better than so many Choctaws before a generation was over; but they do not like being pulled up short, especially in public, and hounded into the safe sheepfold for all the world to see them run. And they resent the endeavour. And the world resents it too, and feels that something is wrong when a woman shows that she has the whip hand, and that she can treat her husband like a petted child or bully him like a refractory one; that she has him tied to her apron-strings and tethered to the stake of her will. But there is more of this kind of thing in families than the world at large always knows of; and many a fine, stalwart fellow who holds his own among men, who is looked up to at his club and respected in his office for his courage, decision and self-reliance, sinks into mere poodledom at home, where his wife has somehow managed to get hold of the leading-strings, and has taught him that the only way to peace is by submission and obedience.
There are people who pride themselves on the possession of what it pleases them to call fine feelings. Perhaps, if we were all diligent to call spades spades, these same fine feelings would come under a less euphemistic heading; but, as things are, we may as well adopt the softening gloze that is spread over the whole of our language, and call them by a pretty name with the rest. People who possess fine feelings are chiefly remarkable for the ease with which they take offence; it being indeed impossible, even for the most wary of their associates, to avoid giving umbrage in some shape, and generally when least intended and most innocently minded. Nothing satisfies them. No amount of attention, short of absolute devotion and giving them the place of honour everywhere, sets them at ease with themselves or keeps them in good-humour. If you ask them to your house, you must not dream of mixing them up with the rest. Though you have done them an honour in asking them at all, you must give them a marked position and bear them on your hands for the evening. They must be singled out from the herd and specially attended to; introduced to the nicest people; made a fuss with and taken care of; else they are offended, and feel they have been slighted—their sensitiveness or fine feelings being a kind of Chat Moss which will swallow up any quantity of petits soins that may be thrown in, and yet never be filled. If they are your intimate friends, you have to ask them on every occasion on which you receive. They make it a grievance if they hear that you have had even a dinner party without inviting them, though your space is limited and you had them at your last gathering. Still, if it comes to their ears that you have had friends and did not include them, they will come down on you to a dead certainty if they are of the franker kind, and ask you seriously, perhaps pathetically, how they have offended you? If they are of the sullen sort they will meet you coldly, or pass you by without seeing you; and will either drift into a permanent estrangement or come round after a time, according to the degree of acidity in their blood and the amount of tenacity in their character. They have lost their friends many times for no worse offence than this.
They are as punctilious too, as they are exacting. They demand visit for visit, invitation for invitation, letter for letter. Though you may be overwhelmed with serious work, while they have no weightier burden strapped to their shoulders than their social duties and social fineries, yet you must render point for point with them, keeping an exact tally with not a notch too many on their side, if you want to retain their acquaintance at all. And they must be always invited specially and individually, even to your open days; else they will not come at all; and their fine feelings will be hurt. They suffer no liberties to be taken with them and they take none with others; counting all frock-coat friendliness as taking liberties, and holding themselves refined and you coarse if you think that manners sans façon are pleasanter than those which put themselves eternally into stays and stiff buckram, and are never in more undress than a Court suit. They will not go into your house to wait for you, however intimate they may be; and they would resent it as an intrusion, perhaps an impertinence, if you went into theirs in their absence. If you are at luncheon when they call, they stiffly leave their cards and turn away; though you have the heartiest, jolliest manner of housekeeping going, and keep a kind of open house for luncheon casuals. They do not understand heartiness or a jolly manner of housekeeping; open houses are not in their line and they will not be luncheon casuals; so they turn away grimly, and if you want to see them you have to send your servant panting down the street after them, when, their dignity being satisfied, their sensitiveness smoothed down and their fine feelings reassured, they will graciously turn back and do what they might have done at first without all this fuss and fume.
When people who possess fine feelings are poor, their sensitiveness is indeed a cross both for themselves and their friends to bear. If you try to show them a kindness or do them a service, they fly out at you for patronizing them, and say you humiliate them by treating them as paupers. You may do to your rich acquaintances a hundred things which you dare not attempt with your poor friends cursed with fine feelings; and little offices of kindness, which pass as current coin through society, are construed into insults with them. Difficult to handle in every phase, they are in none more dangerous to meddle with than when poor, though they are as bad if they have become successful after a period of struggle. Then your attention to them is time-serving, bowing to the rising sun, worshipping the golden calf, &c. Else why did you not seek them out when they were poor? Why were you not cap in hand when they went bare-headed? Why have you waited until they were successful before you recognized their value?
It is funny to hear how bitter these sensitive folks are when they have come out into the sunlight of success after the dark passage of poverty; as if it had been possible to dig them out of their obscurity when their name was still to make—as if the world could recognize its prophets before they had spoken. But this admission into the penetralia after success is a very delicate point with people of fine feelings, supposing always the previous struggle to have been hard; and even if there has been no struggle to speak of, then there are doubts and misgivings as to whether they are liked for themselves or not, and morbid speculations on the stability and absolute value of the position they hold and the attentions they receive, and endless surmises of what would be the result if they lost their fame or wealth or political power or social standing—or whatever may be the hook whereon their success hangs, and their fine feelings are impaled. The act of wisdom most impossible to be performed by these self-torturers is the philosophic acceptance of life as it is and of things as they fall naturally to their share.
Women remarkable for fine feelings are also remarkable for that uneasy distrust, that insatiable craving which continually requires reassuring and allaying. As wives or lovers they never take a man's love, once expressed and loyally acted on, as a certainty, unless constantly repeated; hence they are always pouting or bemoaning their loveless condition, getting up pathetic scenes of tender accusation or sorrowful acceptance of coolness and desertion, which at the first may have a certain charm to a man because flattering to his vanity, but which pall on him after a short time, and end by annoying and alienating him; thus bringing about the very catastrophe which was deprecated before it existed.
Another characteristic with women of fine feelings is their inability to bear the gentlest remonstrance, the most shadowy fault-finding. A rebuke of any gravity throws them into hysterics on the spot; but even a request to do what they have not been in the habit of doing, or to abstain from doing that which they have used themselves to do, is more than they can endure with dry-eyed equanimity. You have to live with them in the fool's paradise of perfectness, or you are made to feel yourself an unmitigated brute. You have before you the two alternatives of suffering many things which are disagreeable and which might easily be remedied, or of having your wife sobbing in her own room and going about the house with red eyes and an expression of exasperating patience under ill-treatment, far worse to bear than the most passionate retaliation. Indeed women may be divided broadly into those who cry and those who retort when they are found fault with; which, with a side section of those wooden women who 'don't care,' leaves a very small percentage indeed of those who can accept a rebuke good-temperedly, and simply try to amend a failing or break off an unpleasant habit, without parade of submission and sweet Griseldadom unjustly chastised, but kissing the rod with aggravating meekness.
For there are women who can make their meekness a more potent weapon of offence than any passion or violence could give. They do not cry, neither do they complain, but they exaggerate their submission till you are driven half mad under the slow torture they inflict. They look at you so humbly; they speak to you in so subdued a voice, when they speak to you at all, which is rarely and never unless first addressed; they avoid you so pointedly, hurrying away if you are going to meet them about the house, on the pretext of being hateful to your sight and doing you a service by ridding you of their presence; they are so ostentatiously careful that the thing of which you mildly complained under some circumstances shall never happen again under any circumstances, that you are forced at last out of your entrenchments, and obliged to come to an explanation. You ask them what is amiss? or, what do they mean by their absurd conduct? and they answer you 'Nothing,' with an injured air or affected surprise at your query. What have they done that you should speak to them so harshly? They are sure they have done all they could to please you, and they do not know what right you have to be vexed with them again. They have kept out of your way and not said a word to annoy you; they have only tried to obey you and to do as you ordered, and yet you are not satisfied! What can they do to please you? and why is it that they never can please you whatever they do? You get no nearer your end by this kind of thing; and the only way to bring your Griselda to reason is by having a row; when she will cry bitterly, but finally end by kissing and making up. You have to go through the process. Nothing else, save a sudden disaster or an unexpected pleasure of large dimensions, will save you from it; but as we cannot always command earthquakes nor godsends, and as the first are dangerous and the last costly, the short and easy method remaining is to have a decisive 'understanding,' which means a scene and a domestic tempest with smooth sailing till the next time.
Sometimes fine feelings are hurt by no greater barbarity than that which is contained in a joke. People with fine feelings are seldom able to take a joke; and you will hear them relating, with an injured accent and as a serious accusation, the merest bit of nonsense you flung off at random, with no more intention of wounding them than had the merchant the intention of putting out the Efreet's eye when he flung his date-stones in the desert. As you cannot deny what you have said, they have the whip-hand of you for the moment; and all you can hope for is that the friend to whom they detail their grievance will see through them and it, and understand the joke if they cannot. Then there are fine feelings which express themselves in exceeding irritation at moral and intellectual differences of opinion—fine feelings bound up in questions of faith and soundness of doctrine, having taken certain moral and theological views under their especial patronage and holding all diversity of judgment therefrom a personal offence. The people thus afflicted are exceedingly uncomfortable folks to deal with, and manage to make every one else uncomfortable too. You hurt their feelings so continually and so unconsciously, that you might as well be living in a region of steel-traps and spring-guns, and set to walk blindfold among pitfalls and water-holes. You fling your date-stone here too, quite carelessly and thinking no evil, and up starts the Efreet who swears you have injured him intentionally. You express an opinion without attaching any particular importance to it, but you hurt the fine feelings which oppose it, and unless you wish to have a quarrel you must retract or apologize. As the worst temper always carries the day, and as fine feelings are only bad tempers under another name, you very probably do apologize; and so the matter ends.
Other people show their fineness of feeling by their impatience of pain and the tremendous grievance they think it that they should suffer as others—they say, so much more than others. These are the people who are great on the theory of nervous differences, and who maintain that their cowardice and impatience of suffering means an organization like an Æolian harp for sensibility. The oddest part of the business is the sublime contempt which these sensitives have for other persons' patience and endurance, and how much more refined and touching they think their own puerile sensibility. But this is a characteristic of humanity all through; the masquerading of evil under the name of good being one of the saddest facts of an imperfect nature and a confused system of morals. If all things showed their faces without disguise, we should have fine feelings placed in a different category from that in which they stand at this moment, and the world would be the richer by just so much addition of truth.
There are people to whom mystery is the very breath of life and the main element of their existence. Without it they are insignificant nobodies; by its aid they are magnified into vague and perhaps awful potentialities. They are the people who take the Sphinx for their model, and like her, speak darkly and in parables; making secrets of every-day matters which would be patent to the whole world in their simplicity, but which, by the magic of enigmatic handling, become riddles that the curious would give their lives to unravel.
Nothing with these people is confessed and above board, and nothing is shown openly so that you may look at it all round and judge for yourself what it is like and what it is worth. The utmost they do is to uncover just a corner of something they keep back in the bulk, tantalizing you with glimpses that bewilder and mislead; or they will dangle before you the end of a clue which they want you to take up and follow, making you believe that you will be guided thereby into the very heart of a mystery, and that you will find a treasure hidden in the centre of the maze which will abundantly repay you for the trouble of hunting it out. Nine times out of ten you will find nothing but a scarecrow of no more value than the rags of which it is composed—if even you find that. They are the people who repeat to you the most trivial things you may have said, and who remind you of the most unimportant things you may have done, years ago, all of which you have totally forgotten; but they will speak of them in a mysterious manner, as if they had been matters of vital meaning at the time—things which would open, if followed up, a page in your private history that it were better should be forgotten. As it is a question of memory, you cannot deny point-blank what they affirm; and as we all have pages of private history which we would rather not hear read aloud at the market-cross, you are obliged to accept their highly suggestive recollections with a queer feeling of helplessness and being somehow in their power—not knowing how much they are really acquainted with your secret affairs, nor whether the signal they have flashed before your eyes is a feint or a revelation.
Of the same sort, with a difference, are those who are always going to tell you something some day—people burdened with a perennial mystery which never sees the light. You are for ever tormented with these folks' possibilities of knowledge. You turn over in your own mind every circumstance that you think they could have got hold of; you cunningly subject all your common friends to crafty cross-examination; you go, link by link, through the whole chain connecting you with them; but you can find nothing that leads to the mere outskirts of the mystery. You can make nothing of it; and your sphinx goes on to the end promising some day to tell you something which dies with him untold. Your only consolation is the inner conviction that there was nothing to tell after all.
Then there are sphinxes of a more personal kind—people who keep their affairs a profound secret from every one, who wash all their dirty linen scrupulously at home and double-lock the door of the cupboard where the family skeleton lives. They are dungeons of silence, unfathomable abysses of reserve. You never know more of them, mind nor estate, than what you can learn from the merest outside of things. Look back, and you cannot recollect that you have ever heard them speak of their family or of their early days; and you are not acquainted with a living soul with whom they are connected. You may visit them for years without knowing that such and such a friend is their cousin, or maybe their sister. If they are unmarried men, they have no address save at their club; and neither you nor their most intimate friends have an idea where they sleep. For all you know to the contrary they may be married, with a fine flourishing family snugly stowed away in some suburban villa, where perhaps they live under another name, or with the omission or addition of a title that effectually masks their real individuality. If this is their special manifestation of sphinxhood, they take as many precautions against being identified as a savage when out on a scouting expedition. They obliterate all traces of themselves so soon as they leave their office in the City, and take it as a terrible misfortune if the truth is ever discovered; though there is nothing disgraceful in their circumstances, and their wives and children are healthy and presentable.
Most of us have been startled by the sudden discovery, in our own circle of friends, of the wife and children of some member of our society hitherto supposed to be a bachelor and unshackled. All the time that we have been joking him on his celibacy and introducing him to various young ladies likely to make good wives if properly taught, he has been living in the holy estate a little way out of town, where he is at last stumbled on by some Œdipus who tells the secret to all the world and blows the mystery to the winds. We may be very sure that the officious Œdipus in question gets no thanks for his pains, and that the sphinx he has unmasked would rather have gone on living in congenial secrecy with his unacknowledged family in that remote suburban villa, than be forced into publicity and recognition. Leading two lives and personating two men—the one as imagined by his friends, the other as known to his belongings—was a kind of existence he liked infinitely better than the commonplace respectability of being en évidence throughout.
With certain sphinxes, no one but the officials concerned ever knows what they have done, where they have served, what laurels they have gained. It comes out quite by accident that they were in the Crimea, where, like Jack Poyntz in School, they were heroes in their own way, though they don't talk about it; or that they performed prodigies of valour in the Indian Mutiny and obtained the Victoria Cross, which they never wear. This kind has at least the merit of being unboastful; keeping their virtues hidden like the temple which the real sphinx held between her paws, and to which only those had access who knew the secret of the way. But though it is hateful to hear a man blowing his own trumpet in season and out of season, yet it is pleasant to know the good deeds of one's neighbours, and to have the power of admiring what is worthy of admiration. Besides, modesty and mystery are not the same things; and there is a mean to be found between the secrecy of a sphinx making riddles of commonplace matters, and the cackle of a hen when she has laid an egg for the family breakfast.
The monetary or financial sphinx is one of the oddest of the whole tribe and one of the most mysterious. There are people who live on notoriously small incomes—such as the widows, say, of naval or military men, whose pensions are printed in blue-books and of whose yearly receipts the world can take exact cognizance—yet who dress in velvet and satin, perpetually go about in cabs and hired carriages, and are never without money to spend, though always complaining of poverty. How these financial sphinxes manage surpasses the understanding of every one; and by what royal road they arrive at the power of making two do the work of four is hidden from the ordinary believers in Cocker. You know their ostensible income; indeed, they themselves put it at so much; but they keep up a magnificent appearance on a less sum than that on which you would go shabby and dilapidated. When you ask them how it is done, they answer, 'by management.' Anything can be done by management, they say, by those who have the gift; which you feel to be an utterance of the sphinx—a dark saying the key to which has not yet been forged.
You calculate to the best of your ability, and you know that you are sound in your arithmetic; but, do what you will, you can never come to the rule by which five hundred a year can be made to compass the expenditure of a thousand. If you whisper secret supplies, concealed resources, your sphinx will not so much as wink her eyelid. How she contrives to make her ostensible five hundred do the work of a thousand—how she gets velvet and satin for the value of cotton and stuff, and how, though always complaining of poverty, she keeps unfailingly flush of cash—how all this is done is her secret, and she holds it sacred. And you may be quite sure of one thing—it is a secret she will never share with you nor any one else.
The rapidly-working littérateur is another sphinx worth studying as a curiosity—we might say, indeed, a living miracle. There he stands, a jovial, self-indulgent, enjoying man, out in society every night in the week; by no means abstinent from champagne, and as little given to early rising as he is to consumption of the midnight oil. But he gets through a mass of work which would be respectable in a mere copyist, and which is little less than miraculous in an original producer. How he thinks, when he finds time to make up his plots, to work out his characters, even to correct his proofs, are riddles unanswerable by all his friends. Taking the mere mechanical act alone, he must write faster than any living man has ever been known to write, to get through all that goes under his name. And when is it done? Literary sphinxes of this kind go about unchallenged; indeed, they are very much about, and to be beheld everywhere; and one looks at them with respect, not knowing of what material they are made, nor of what mysterious gifts they are the possessors. Novels, plays, essays, poems, come pouring forth in never slackening supply. The railway stations and all hoardings are made gorgeous by the announcement of their feats set out in red and blue and yellow. No sooner has one blaze of triumph burnt itself out than another blaze of triumph flares up; and nothing but death or a rich inheritance seems likely to stop their mysterious fecundity. How is it done? That is the secret of the literary sphinx, to which the admiring and amazed brotherhood is anxiously seeking some clue; but up to the present hour it has been kept jealously guarded and no solution has been arrived at.
There is another form of the literary sphinx in the Nobodies and Anons who speak from out the darkness and let no man see whence the voice proceeds. They are generally tracked to their lair sooner or later, and the sphinx's head turns out to be only a pasteboard mask behind which some well-known Apuleian hid himself for a while, working much amazement among the wondering crowd while the clasps held good, but losing something of that fervid worship when the reality became known. Others, again, of these Anons have, like Junius, kept their true abode hidden and their name a mystery still, though there be some who swear they have traced the footsteps and know exactly where the sphinx lives, and what is the name upon his frontlet, and of what race and complexion he is without his mask. It may be so. But as every discoverer has a track of his own, and as each swears that his sphinx is the real one and no other, the choice among so many becomes a service of difficulty; and perhaps the wisest thing to do is to suspend judgment until the literary sphinx of the day chooses to reveal himself by the prosaic means of a title-page, with his name as author printed thereon and his place of abode jotted down at the foot of the preface.
There are certain things which can never be accurately described—things so shadowy, so fitful, so dependent on the mood of the moment, both in the audience and the actor, that analysis and representation are equally at fault. And flirting is one of them. What is flirting? Who can define or determine? It is more serious than talking nonsense and not so serious as making love; it is not chaff and it is not feeling; it means something more than indifference and yet something less than affection; it binds no one; it commits no one though it raises expectations in the individual and sets society on the look-out for results; it is a plaything in the hands of the experienced but a deadly weapon against the breast of the unwary; and it is a thing so vague, so protean, that the most accurate measurer of moral values would be puzzled to say where it exactly ends and where serious intentions begin.
But again we ask: What is flirting? What constitutes its essence? What makes the difference between it and chaff on the one hand, and it and love-making on the other? Has it a cumulative power, and, according to the old saying of many a pickle making a mickle, does a long series of small flirtings make up a concrete whole of love? or is it like an unmortared heap of bricks, potential utilities if conditions were changed, but valueless as things are? The man who would be able to reduce flirting to a definite science, who could analyze its elements and codify its laws, would be doing infinite service to his generation; but we fear that this is about as difficult as finding the pot of gold under the end of a rainbow, or catching small birds with a pinch of salt.
Every one has his or her ideas of what constitutes flirting; consequently every one judges of that pleasant exercise according to individual temperament and experience. Faded flowers, who see impropriety in everything they are no longer able to enjoy, say with more or less severity that Henry and Angelina are flirting if they are laughing while whispering together in an alcove, probably the most innocent nonsense in the world; but the fact that they are enjoying themselves in their own way, albeit a silly one, is enough for the faded flower to think they are after mischief, flirting being to her mind about the worst bit of mischief that a fallen humanity can perpetrate. The watchful mother, intent on chances, says that dancing together oftener than is necessary for good breeding and just the amount of attention demanded by circumstances, is flirting; timid girls newly out, and not yet used to the odd ways of men, think they are being flirted with outrageously if their partner fires off the meekest little compliment at them, or looks at them more tenderly than he would look at a cabbage; but bolder spirits of both sexes think nothing worthy of the name which does not include a few questionable familiarities, and an equivoke or two, more or less risky. With some, flirting is nothing but the passing fun of the moment; with others, it is the first lesson of the great unopened book and means the beginning of the end; with some, it is not even angling with intent; with others, it is deep-sea fishing with a broad, boldly-made net, and taking all fish that come in as good for sport if not for food.
Flirts are of many kinds as well as of all degrees. There are quiet flirts and demonstrative flirts; flirts of the subtle sort whose practice is made by the eyes alone, by the manner, by the tender little sigh, by the bend of the head and the wave of the hand, to give pathos and point to the otherwise harmless word; and flirts of the open and rampant kind, who go up quite boldly towards the point, but who never reach it, taking care to draw back in time before they fairly cross the border. This is the kind which, as the flirt male, does incalculable damage to the poor little fluttering dove to whom it is as a bird of prey, handsome, bold, cruel; but this is the kind which has unlimited success, using as it does that immense moral leverage we call 'tantalizing'—for ever rousing hopes and exciting expectations, and luring a woman on as an ignis fatuus lures us on across the marsh, in the vain belief that it will bring us to our haven at last.
Akin to this kind are those male flirts who are great in the way in which they manage to insinuate things without committing themselves to positive statements. They generally contrive to give the impression of some mysterious hindrance by which they are held back from full and frank confession. They hint at fatal bonds, at unfortunate attachments, at a past that has burnt them up or withered them up, at any rate that has prevented their future from blossoming in the direction in which they would fain have had it blossom and bear fruit. They sketch out vaguely the outlines of some thrilling romance; a few, of the Byronic breed, add the suspicion of some dark and melancholy crime as a further romantic charm and personal obstacle; and when they have got the girl's pity, and the love that is akin to pity, then they cool down scientifically, never creating any scandal, never making any rupture, never coming to a moment when awkward explanations can be asked, but cooling nevertheless, till the thing drops of its own accord and dies out from inanition; when they are free to carry their sorrows and their mysteries elsewhere. Some men spend their lives in this kind of thing, and find their pleasure in making all the women they know madly or sentimentally in love with them; and if by chance any poor moth who has burned her wings makes too loud an outcry, the tables are turned against her dexterously, and she is held up to public pity—contempt would be a better word—as one who has suffered herself to love too well and by no means wisely, and who has run after a Lothario by no means inclined to let himself be caught.
Then there are certain men who flirt only with married women, and others who flirt only with girls; and the two pastimes are as different as tropical sunlight and northern moonshine. And there are some who are 'brothers,' and some who are 'fathers' to their young friends—suspicious fathers on the whole, not unlike Little Red Ridinghood's grandmother the wolf, with perilously bright eyes, and not a little danger to Red Ridinghood in the relationship, how delightful soever it may be to the wolf. Some are content with cousinship only—which however breaks down quite sufficient fences; and some are 'dearest friends,' no more, and find that an exceedingly useful centre from which to work onward and outward. For, if any peg will do on which to hang a discourse, so will any relationship or adoption serve the ends of flirting, if it be so willed.
But what is flirting? Is sitting away in corners, talking in low voices and looking personally affronted if any unlucky outsider comes within earshot, flirting? Not necessarily. It is just possible that Henry may be telling Angelina all about his admiration for her sister Grace; or Angelina may be confessing to Henry what Charley said to her last night;—which makes her lower her eyes as she is doing now, and play with the fringe of her fan so nervously. May be, if not likely. So that sitting away in corners and whispering together is not necessarily flirting, though it may look like it. Is dancing all the 'round' dances together? This goes for decided flirting in the code of the ball-room. But if the two keep well together? If they are really fond of dancing, as one of the fine arts combining science and enjoyment, they would dance with each other all night, though outside the 'marble halls' they might be deadly enemies—Montagues and Capulets, with no echo of Romeo and Juliet to soften their mutual dislike. So that not even dancing together oftener than is absolutely necessary is unmistakeable evidence, any more than is sitting away in corners, seeing that equal skill and keeping well in step are reasons enough for perpetual partnership, making all idea of flirtation unnecessary. In fact, there is no outward sign nor symbol of flirting which may not be mistaken and turned round, because flirting is so entirely in the intention and not in the mere formula, that it becomes a kind of phantasm, a Proteus, impossible to seize or to depict with accuracy.
One thing however, we can say—taking gifts and attentions, offered with evident design and accepted with tacit understanding, may be certainly held as constituting an important element of flirting. But this is flirting on the woman's side. And here you are being continually taken in. Your flirt of the cunningly simple kind, who smiles so sweetly and seems so flatteringly glad to see you when you come, who takes all your presents and acted expressions of love with the most bewitching gratitude and effusion, even she, so simple as she seems to be, slips the thread and will not be caught if she does not wish to be caught. At the decisive moment when you think you have secured her, she makes a bound and is away; then turns round, looks you in the face, and with many a tear and pretty asseveration declares that she never understood you to mean what you say you have meant all along; and that you are cruel to dispel her dream of a pleasant and harmless friendship, and very wicked indeed because you press her for a decision. Yes; you are cruel, because you have believed her honest; cruel, because you did not see through the veil of flattery and insincerity in which she clothed her selfishness; cruel, because she was false. This is the flirt's logic when brought to book, and forced to confess that her pretended love was only flirting, and that she led you on to your destruction simply because it pleased her vanity to make you her victim.
Then there are flirts of the open and rollicking kind, who let you go far, very far indeed, when suddenly they pull up and assume an offended air as if you had wilfully transgressed known and absolute boundaries—girls and women who lead you on, all in the way of good fellowship, to knock you over when you have got just far enough to lose your balance. That is their form of the art. They like to see how far they can make a man forget himself, and how much stronger their own delusive enticements are than prudence, experience and common-sense. And there are flirts of the artful and 'still waters' kind, something like the male flirts spoken of just now; sentimental little pusses—perhaps pretty young wives with uncomfortable husbands, whose griefs have by no means soured nor scorched, but just mellowed and refined, them. Or they may be of the sisterly class; creatures so very frank, so very sisterly and confiding and unsuspicious of evil, that really you scarcely know how to deal with them at all. And there are flirts of the scientific kind; women who have studied the art thoroughly; and who are adepts in the use of every weapon known—using each according to circumstances and the nature of the victim, and using each with deadly precision. From such may a kind Providence deliver us! As the tender mercies of the wicked, so are the scientific flirts—the women and the men who play at bowls with human hearts, for the stakes of a whole life's happiness on the one side and a few weeks of gratified vanity on the other.
It used to be an old schoolboy maxim that no real gentleman could be refused by a lady, because no real gentleman could presume beyond his line of encouragement. À fortiori, no lady would or could give more encouragement than she meant. What are we to say then of our flirts if this maxim be true? Are they really 'no gentlemen' and 'no ladies,' according to the famous formula of the kitchen? Perhaps it would be said so if gentlehood meant now, as it meant centuries ago, the real worth and virtue of humanity. For flirting with intent is a cruel, false, heartless amusement; and time was when cruelty and falsehood were essentially sins which vitiated all claims to gentlehood. And yet the world would be very dull without that innocent kind of nonsense which often goes by the name of flirting—that pleasant something which is more than mere acquaintanceship and less than formal loverhood—that bright and animated intercourse which makes the hours pass so easily, yet which leaves no bitter pang of self-reproach—that indefinite and undefinable interest by which the one man or the one woman becomes a kind of microcosm for the time, the epitome of all that is pleasant and of all that is lovely. The only caution to be observed is:—Do not go too far.
There are people who are never what Northern housewives call 'straight'—people who seem to have been born in a scramble, who live in a scramble, and who, when their time comes, will die in a scramble, just able to scrawl their signature to a will that ought to have been made years ago, and that does not embody their real intentions now. Emphatically the Unready, they are never prepared for anything, whether expected or unexpected; they make no plans more stable than good intentions; and they neither calculate nor foresee. Everything with them is hurry and confusion; not because they have more to do than other people, but because they do it more loosely and less methodically—because they have not learnt the art of dovetailing nor the mystery of packing. Consequently half their pleasures and more than half their duties slip through their fingers for want of the knack of compact holding; and their lives are passed in trying to pick up what they have let drop and in frantic endeavours to remedy their mistakes. For scramblers are always making mistakes and going through an endless round of forgetting. They never remember their engagements, but accept in the blandest and frankest way imaginable two or more invitations for the same day and hour, and assure you quite seriously when, taught by experience, you push them hard and probe them deep, that they have no engagement whatever on hand and are certain not to fail you. In an evil hour you trust to them. When the day comes they suddenly wake to the fact that they had accepted Mrs. So-and-So's invitation before yours; and all you get for your empty place and your careful arrangements ruthlessly upset, is a hurried note of apology which comes perhaps in the middle of dinner, perhaps sometime next day, when too late to be of use.
If they forget their own engagements they also ignore yours, no matter how distinctly you may have tabulated them; and are sure to come rattling to your house on the day when you said emphatically you were engaged and could not see them. If you keep to your programme and refuse to admit them, more likely than not you affront them. Engagements being in their eyes moveable feasts, which it does not in the least degree signify whether they keep on the date set down or not, they cannot understand your rigidity of purpose; and were it not that as a tribe they are good-natured, and too fluid to hold even annoyance for any length of time, you would in all probability have a quarrel fastened on you because your scrambling friends chose to make a calendar for themselves and to insist on your setting your diary by it.
As they ignore your appointed hours, so do they forget your street and number. They always stick to your first card, though you may have moved many times since it was printed, duly apprizing them of each change as it occurred. That does not help you, for they never note the changes of their friends' addresses, but keep loyally to the first. It all comes to the same in the end, they say, and the postman is cleverer than they. But they do not often trouble their friends with letters on their own account, for they have a speciality for not answering such as are written to them. When they do by chance answer them, they never reply to the questions asked nor give the news demanded. They do not even reply to invitations like other people, but leave you to infer from their silence the acceptance or rejection they are meditating. When they in their turn invite you, they generally puzzle you by mismatching the day of the week with the date of the month, leaving you tormented with doubt which you are to go by; and they forget to give you the hour. Besides this, they write an illegible hand; and they are famous for the blots they make and the Queen's heads they omit.
A scrambling wife is no light cross to a man who values order and regularity as part of his home life. She may be, and probably is, the best-tempered creature in the world—a peevish scrambler would be too unendurable—but a fresh face, bright eyes and a merry laugh do not atone for never-ending disorder and discomfort. This kind of thing does not depend on income and is not to be remedied by riches. The households where my lady has nothing to do but let her maid keep her to the hours she herself has appointed are just as uncomfortable in their way as poorer establishments, if my lady is a scrambler, and cannot be taught method and the value of holding on by the forelock. Sometimes my lady gets herself into such an inextricable coil of promises and engagements, all crossing each other, that in despair she takes to her bed and gives herself out as ill, and so cuts what she cannot untie. People wonder at her sudden indisposition, looking as she did only yesterday in the bloom of health; and they wonder at her radiant reappearance in a day or two without a trace of even languor upon her. They do not know that her retirement was simply a version of the famous rope trick, and that, like the Brothers Davenport, she went into the dark to shake herself free of the cords with which she had suffered herself to be bound. It is a short and easy method certainly, but it has rather too much of the echo of 'Wolf' in it to bear frequent repetition.
In houses of a lower grade, where the lady is her own housekeeper, the habit of scrambling of course leads to far greater and more manifest confusion. The servants catch from the mistress the trick of overstaying time; and punctuality at last comes to mean an elastic margin, where fixed duties and their appointed times appear cometically at irregular intervals. The cook is late with dinner; the coachman begins to put-to a little after the hour he was ordered to be at the door; but they know that, however late they are, the chances are ten to one their mistress will not be ready for them, and that in her heart she will be grateful to them for the shelter their own unpunctuality affords her. This being so, they take their time and dawdle at their pleasure; thus adding to the pressure which always comes at the end of the scrambler's day, when everything is thrown into a chaotic mass and nothing comes out straight or complete.
Did any one ever know a scrambling woman ready at the moment in her own house? That she should be punctual to any appointment out of her house is, of course, not to be thought of; but she makes an awkward thing of it sometimes at home. Her guests are often all assembled, and the dinner hour has struck, before she has torn off one gown and dragged on another. What she cannot tie she pins; and her pins are many and demonstrative. She wisps up her hair, not having left herself time to braid it; and the consequence is that before she has been half an hour in the room ends and tails are sure to stray playfully from their fastenings and come tumbling about her ears. Her jewels are mismatched, her colours ill-assorted, her belt is awry, her bouquet falling to pieces. She rushes into the drawing-room in her morning slippers, smiling and good-tempered, with a patch-work look about her—something forgotten in her attire that makes her whole appearance shaky and unfinished—fastening her last button or clasping on her first bracelet. She is full of regrets and excuses delivered in her joyous, buoyant manner, or in a voice so winning, an accent so coaxing, that you cannot be annoyed. Besides, you leave the annoyance to her husband, who is sure to have in reserve a pickle quite sufficiently strong for the inevitable rod, as the poor scrambler knows too well. All you can do is to accept her apologies with a good grace, and to carry away with you a vivid recollection of an awkward half-hour, a spoilt dinner, and a scrambling hostess all abroad and out of time, sweeping through the room very heated, very good-tempered, only half-dressed and chronically out of breath.
Scramblers can never learn the value of money, neither for themselves nor for others. They are famous for borrowing small sums which they forget to return; but, to do them justice, they are just as willing to lend what they never dream of asking for again. Long ago they caught hold of the fact that money is only a circulating medium, and they have added an extra speed to the circulation at which slower folk stand aghast. To be sure, the practical results of their theory are not very satisfactory, and the confusion between the possessive pronouns which distinguishes their financial catechism is apt to lead to unpleasant issues.
Scrambling women are especially notorious for the way in which they set themselves afloat without sufficient means to carry them on; finding themselves stranded in mid-career because they have made no calculations and have forgotten the rule of subtraction. They find themselves at a small Italian town, say, where the virtues of the British banking system are unknown, and where their letters of credit and circular notes are not worth more than the value of the paper they are written on. More than one British matron of respectable condition and weak arithmetic has found herself in such a plight as this, with her black-eyed landlord perfectly civil and well-bred, but as firm as a rock in his resolution that the Signora shall not depart out of his custody till his little account is paid—a plight out of which she has to scramble the best way she can, with the loss perhaps of a little dignity and of more repute—at least in the locality where her solid scudi gave out and her precious paper could not be cashed. This is the same woman who offers an omnibus conductor a sovereign for a three-penny fare; who gives the village grocer a ten-pound note for a shilling's-worth of sugar; and who, when she comes up to London for a day's shopping, and has got her last parcel made up and ready to be put into her cab, finds she has not left herself half enough money to pay for it—with a shopman whose faith in human nature is by no means lively, and who only last week was bitten by a lady swindler of undeniable manners and appearance, and not very unlike herself. She has been known too, to go into a confectioner's and, after having made an excellent luncheon, to find to her dismay that she has left her purse in the pocket of her other dress at home, and that she has not six-pence about her. In fact there is not an equivocal position in which forgetfulness, want of method, want of foresight, and all the other characteristics which make up scrambling in the concrete, can place her, in which she has not been at some time or other. But no experience teaches her; the scrambler she was born, the scrambler she will die, and to the last will tumble through her life, all her ends flying and deprecating excuses on her lips.
Scramblers are notoriously great for making promises, and as notorious for not performing what they promise. Kindhearted as they are in general, and willing to do their friends a service—going out of their way indeed to proffer kindnesses quite beyond your expectations and the range of their duties towards you, and always undertaking works of supererogation; which works in fact lead to more than half their normal scramble—they forget the next hour the promise on which you have based your dearest hopes. Or, if they do not forget it, they find it is crowded out of time by a multitude of engagements and prior promises, of all of which they were innocently oblivious when they offered to do your business so frankly, and swore so confidently they would set about it now at once and get it out of hand without delay. The oath and the offer which you took to be as sure as the best chain-cable, you will find on trial to be only a rope of sand that could not bind so much as a bunch of tow together, still less hold the anchor of a life; and many a heart, sick with hope deferred and wrung with the disappointment which might have been so easily prevented, has been half broken before now from the anguish that has followed on the failure of the kindhearted scrambler to perform the promise voluntarily made, and the service earnestly pressed on a reluctant acceptor.
This is the tragic side of the scrambler's career, the shadow thrown by almost every one of the class. For all the minor delinquencies of hurry and unpunctuality in social affairs it is not difficult to find full and ample forgiveness; but when it comes to untrustworthiness in graver matters, then the scrambler becomes a scourge instead of only an inconvenience. The only safe way of dealing with the class is to take them when we can get hold of them, and to accept them for what they are worth; but not to rely on them, and not to attempt any mortising of our own affairs with their promises. They are the froth and foam of society, pretty and pleasant enough in the sunlight as they splash and splutter about the rocks; but they are not the deep waters which bear the burden of our ships and by which the life of the world is maintained.