The old form of feminine affectation used to be that of a die-away fine lady afflicted with a mysterious malady known by the name of the vapours, or one, no less obscure, called the spleen. Sometimes it was an etherealized being who had no capacity for homely things, but who passed her life in an atmosphere of poetry and music, for the most part expressing her vague ideas in halting rhymes which gave more satisfaction to herself than to her friends. She was probably an Italian scholar and could quote Petrarch and Tasso, and did quote them pretty often; she might even be a Della Cruscan by honourable election, with her own peculiar wreath of laurel and her own silver lyre; any way she was 'a sister of the Muses,' and had something to do with Apollo or Minerva, whom she was sure to call Phœbus or Pallas Athene, as being the more poetical name of the two. Probably she had dealings with Diana too—for this kind of woman does not in any age affect the 'seaborn,' save in a hazy sentimental way that bears no fruits—a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit of counterpoint being to her worth all the manly love or fireside home delights that the world can give. What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or the rosy kisses of babies' lips compared to the pleasures of being a sister of the Muses and one of the beloved of Apollo! The Della Cruscan of former days, or her modern avatar, will tell you that music and poetry are godlike and bear the soul away to heaven, but that the nursery is a prison and babies are no dearer gaolers than any other; and that household duties disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the empyrean. This was the Ethereal Being of last generation—the Blue-stocking, as a poetess in white satin, with her eyes turned up to heaven and her hair in dishevelled cascades about her neck. She dropped her mantle as she finally departed; and we still have the Della Cruscan essence, if not in the precise form of earlier times. We still have ethereal beings who, as the practical outcome of their etherealization, rave about music and poetry and æsthetics and culture, and horribly neglect their babies and the weekly bills.
A favourite form of feminine affectation among certain opposers of the prevalent fast type is in an intense womanliness—an aggravating intensity of womanliness—that makes one long for a little roughness, just to take off the cloying excess of sweetness. This kind is generally found with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the orbit, by which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face—a certain look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty thought, that is very effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness that the real cause of the darkened lids and cavernous orbits is most probably internal disease, when not antimony. Eyes of this sort stand for spirituality and loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of nature; and, as all men are neither chemists nor doctors, the simulation does quite as well as truth.
The main characteristic of these women is self-consciousness. They live before a moral mirror, and pass their time in attitudinizing to what they think the best advantage. They can do nothing simply, nothing spontaneously and without the fullest consciousness as to how they do it, and how they look while they are doing it. In every action of their lives they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a novel, as impersonations of poetic images or thoughts. If they give you a glass of water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth and Beauty ministering to Strength or Age, as the case may be; if they bring you a photographic album, they are Titian's Daughter carrying her casket, a trifle modernized; if they hold a child in their arms, they are Madonnas, and look unutterable maternal love though they never saw the little creature before, and care for it no more than for the puppy in the mews; if they do any small personal office, or attempt to do it—making believe to tie a shoestring, comb out a curl, fasten a button—they are Charities in graceful attitudes, and expect you to think them both charitable and graceful. Nine times out of ten they can neither tie the string nor fasten the button with ordinary deftness—for they have a trick of using only the ends of their fingers when they do anything with their hands, as being more graceful and fitting in better, than would a firmer grasp, with the delicate womanliness of the character; and the less sweet and more commonplace woman who does not attitudinize morally and never parades her womanliness, beats them out of the field for real helpfulness, and is the Charity which the other only plays at being.
This kind too affects, in theory, wonderful submissiveness to man. It upholds Griselda as the type of feminine perfection, and—still in theory—between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in for the tyranny. 'I would rather my husband beat me than let me do too much as I liked,' said one before she married, who, after she was married, managed to get entire possession of the domestic reins and took good care that her nominal lord should be her practical slave. For, notwithstanding the sweet submissiveness of her theory, the intensely womanly woman has the most astonishing knack of getting her own way and imposing her own will on others. The real tyrant among women is not the one who flounces and splutters and declares that nothing shall make her obey, but this soft-mannered, large-eyed, intensely womanly person who says that Griselda is her ideal and that the whole duty of woman lies in unquestioning obedience to man.
In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman—the woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big buttons, of which she flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness of a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears unmistakeable shirt-fronts, linen collars, vests and plain ties, like a man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and makes believe that the attitude is comfortable because it is manlike. If the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness, the mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores dogs and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She boasts of how good a marksman she is—she does not call herself markswoman—and how she can hit right and left and bring down both birds flying. When she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass between her first two fingers, hollows her underlip, and, throwing her head well back, tosses off the whole at a draught—she would disdain the lady-like sip or the closer gesture of ordinary women. She is great in cheese and bitter-beer, in claret-cup and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of effervescing wines. She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward, as men round their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw. For charms to her watch-chain she wears a cork-screw, a gimlet, a big knife and a small foot-rule; and in contrast with the intensely womanly woman, who uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman when she does anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of which is affectation—from first to last affectation; a mere assumption of virile fashions utterly inharmonious to the whole being, physical and mental, of a woman.
Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a personal insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact limits of her mental sphere. This is the woman who assumes to be the antiseptic element in society; who makes believe that without her the world and human nature would go to the dogs and plunge headlong into the abyss of sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand heroism of man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavour and patient seeking after truth would serve his turn or the world's if she did not spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the boundary lines within which she would confine the range of thought and speculation. She knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affectation, and that other minds have as much right to their own boundary lines as that which she claims for herself: but it seems to her pretty to assume that woman generally is the consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that she, of all women, is most specially consecrated. As an offshoot of this kind stands the affectation of simplicity—the woman whose mental attitude is self-depreciation, and who poses herself as a mere nobody when the world is ringing with her praises. 'Is it possible that your Grace has ever heard of me?' said one of this class with prettily affected naïveté at a time when all England was astir about her, and when colours and fashions went by her name to make them take with the public at large. No one knew better than the fair ingénue in question how far and wide her fame had spread; but she thought it looked modest and simple to assume ignorance of her own value, and to declare that she was but a creeping worm when all the world knew that she was a soaring butterfly.
There is a certain like kind of affectation very common among pretty women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are pretty, and not recognizing the effect of their beauty on men. Take a woman with bewildering eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape and fringed with long lashes which distract you to look at; the creature knows that her eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that fire burns and that ice melts; she knows the effect of that trick she has with them—the sudden uplifting of the heavy lid and the swift, full gaze that she gives right into a man's eyes. She has practised it often in the glass, and knows to a mathematical nicety the exact height to which the lid must be raised and the exact fixity of the gaze. She knows the whole meaning of the look and the stirring of men's blood that it creates; but if you speak to her of the effect of her trick, she puts on an air of extremest innocence, and protests her entire ignorance as to anything her eyes may say or mean; and if you press her hard she will look at you in the same way for your own benefit, and deny at the very moment of offence. Various other tricks has she with those bewildering eyes of hers—each more perilous than the other to men's peace; and all unsparingly employed, no matter what the result. For this is the woman who flirts to the extreme limits, then suddenly draws up and says she meant nothing. Step by step she has led you on, with looks and smiles and pretty doubtful phrases always susceptible of two meanings—the one for the ear by mere word, the other for the heart by the accompaniments of look and manner, which are intangible; step by step she has drawn you deeper and deeper into the maze where she has gone before as your decoy; then, when she has you safe, she raises her eyes for the last time, complains that you have mistaken her cruelly and that she has meant nothing more than any one else might mean; and what can she do to repair her mistake? Love you? marry you? No; she is engaged to your rival, who counts his thousands to your hundreds; and what a pity that you had not seen this all along and that you should have so misunderstood her! Besides, what is there about her that you or any one should love?
Of all the many affectations of women, this affectation of their own harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when they practise their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most dangerous and the most disastrous. But what can one say to them? The very fact that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his perception until too late. That men love though they suffer is the woman's triumph, guilt and condonation; and so long as the trick succeeds it will be practised.
Another affectation of the same family is the extreme friendliness and familiarity which some women adopt in their manners towards men. Young girls affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a year or so older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate, declare they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may not be natural! This form of affectation, once begun, continues through life; being too convenient to be lightly discarded; and youthful matrons not long out of their teens assume a tone and ways that would befit middle age counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous even then if the 'Indian summer' were specially bright and warm.
Then there is that affectation pure and simple which is the mere affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of attitude which by consciousness ceases to be grace, and the thousand little minauderies and coquetries of the sex known to us all. And there is the affectation which people of a higher social sphere show when they condescend to those of low estate, and talk and look as if they are not quite certain of their company, and scarcely know if they are Christian or heathen, savage or civilized. And there is the affectation of the maternal passion with women who are never by any chance seen with their children, but who speak of them as if they were never out of their sight; the affectation of wifely adoration with women who are to be met about the world with every man of their acquaintance rather than with their lawful husbands; the affectation of asceticism in women who lead a self-enjoying life from end to end; and the affectation of political fervour in those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to save Europe from universal revolution.
Go where we will, the affectation of being something she is not meets us in woman, like a ghost we cannot lay, a mist we cannot sweep away. In the holiest and the most trivial things we find it penetrating everywhere—even in church and at her prayers, when the pretty penitent, rising from her lengthy orisons, lifts her eyes and furtively looks about to see who has noticed her self-abasement and to whom her picturesque piety has commended itself. All sorts and patterns of good girls and pleasant women are very dear and delightful; but the pearl of great price is the thoroughly natural and unaffected woman—that is, the woman who is truthful to her heart's core, and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she would dare to tell a lie.
About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. We do not mean tyranny; that is another matter—tyranny being active while interference is negative—the one standing as the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of the same principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some personal gain in view when it takes it in hand to force people to do what they dislike to do; while interference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply prevents the exercise of free-will for the mere pleasure to be had out of such prevention.
Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than domestic; but the curse of interference is seen most distinctly within the four walls of home, where also it is most felt. Very many people spend their lives in interfering with others—perpetually putting spokes into wheels with the turning of which they have nothing to do, and thrusting their fingers into pies about the baking of which they are in no way concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women make up the larger number and are the greater sinners. To be sure there are some men—small, fussy, finnicking fellows, with whom nature has made the irreparable blunder of sex—who are as troublesome in their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the feminine characteristics of men are so exceptional that we need not take them into serious calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in any manly sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a right to control—say, with the wife's low dresses or the daughter's too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and, knowing what other men say of such displays, or fearing their effect, they stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But this kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes into another class of motives altogether and does not belong to that kind of interference of which we are speaking.
Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other and with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to church and subscribing to their favourite mission, so much as they tell us what we are not to do. They do not command so much as they forbid. And, of all women, wives and daughters are the most given to handling these check-strings and putting on these drag-chains. Sisters, while young, are obliged to be less interfering, under pain of a perpetual round of bickering; for brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of creatures for the most part so loftily snubbed as sisters; while mothers nine times out of ten are laid aside for all but sentimental purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be a boy and has learned to become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of personal and domestic interference lies with wives, and they know how to use the prerogative they assume. Take an unlucky man who smokes under protest—his wife not liking to forbid the pleasure entirely, but always grudging it and interfering with its exercise. Each cigar represents a battle, deepening in intensity according to the number. The first may have been had with only a light skirmish—perhaps a mere threatening of an attack that passed away without coming to actual onslaught; the second brings up the artillery; while the third or fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets the big guns thundering. She could understand a man smoking one cigar in the day, she says, with a gracious condescension to masculine weakness; but when it comes to more she feels that she is called on to interfere, and to do her best towards checking such a reprehensible excess. It does not weaken her position that she knows nothing of what she is talking about. She never smoked a cigar herself, therefore does not understand the uses nor the abuses of tobacco; but she holds herself pledged to interfere so soon as she gets the chance; and she redeems that pledge with energy.
The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite to correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that he has a feeble digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the gauntlet of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines nor sups jollily with his friends without being plucked at and reminded that salmon always disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a headache to-morrow; and, 'My dear! when you know how bad salad is for you!' or, 'How can you eat that horrid pastry? You will be so ill in the night!' 'What! more wine? another glass of whisky? how foolish you are! how wrong!' The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear stimulants; the husband is a strong, large-framed man who can drink deep without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit is her husband's measure, and when he has gone beyond the range of her own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks herself justified in interfering with his further progress. For women cannot be brought to understand the capacities of a man's life; they cannot be made to understand that what is bad for themselves may not be bad for others, and that their weakness ought not to be the gauge of a man's strength.
A pale, chilly woman, afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears furs and velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East Indian fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, father, sons, in about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must not go out without an overcoat; they must take an umbrella if the day is at all cloudy; they must not walk too far nor ride too hard; and they must be sure to be at home by a given hour.
When such women as these have to do with men just on the boundary-line between the last days of vigour and the first of old age, they put forward the time of old age by many years. We see their men rapidly sink into the softness and incapacity of senility, when a more bracing life would have kept them good for half-a-dozen years longer. But women do not care for this. They like men to be their own companions and dread rather than desire the masculine comradeship which would keep them up to the mark of virile independence; for most women—but not all—would rather have their husbands manly in a womanly way than in a manly one, as being more within the compass of their own sympathies and understanding.
The same kind of interference is very common where the husband is a man of broad humour—one who calls a spade a spade, with no circumlocution about an agricultural implement. According to the odd law of compensation which regulates so much of human action, the wife of such a man is generally one of the ultra-refined kind, who thinks herself consecrated the enduring censor of her husband's speech. As this is an example most frequently to be found in middle life and where there are children belonging to the establishment, the word of warning is generally 'papa!'—said with reproach or resentment, according to circumstances—which has, of course, the effect of drawing the attention of the young people to the paternal breadth of speech, and of fixing that special breach of decorum on their memory. Sometimes the wife has sufficient self-restraint not to give the word of warning in public, but can nurse her displeasure for a more convenient season; but so soon as they are alone the miserable man has to pass under the harrow, as only husbands with wives of a chastising spirit can pass under it, and his life is made a burden to him because of that unlucky anecdote told with such verve a few hours ago, and received with such shouts of pleasant laughter. Perhaps the anecdote was just a trifle doubtful; granted; but what does the wife take by her remonstrance? Most probably a quarrel; possibly a good-natured peccavi for the sake of being let off the continuance of the sermon; perhaps a yawn; most certainly not reform. If the man be a man of free speech and broad humour by nature and liking, he will remain so to the end; and what the censorship of society leaves untouched, the interference of a wife will not control.
Children come in for an enormous share of interference, which is not direction nor discipline, but simple interference for its own sake. There are mothers who meddle with every expression of individuality in their young people, quite irrespective of moral tendency, or whether the occasion is trivial or important. In the fancies, the pleasures, the minor details of dress in their children, there is always that intruding maternal finger upsetting the arrangements of the poor little pie as vigorously as if thrones and altars depended on the result. Not a game of any kind can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn instead of a pink, without maternal interference; so that the bloom is rubbed off every enjoyment, and life becomes reduced to a kind of goose-step, with mamma for the drill-sergeant prescribing the inches to be marked. Sisters, too, do a great deal of this kind of thing among each other; as all those who are intimate in houses where there are large families of unmarried girls must have seen. The nudges, the warning looks, the deprecating 'Amy's!' and 'Oh, Lucy's!' and 'Hush, Rose's!' by which some seek to act as household police over the others, are patent to all who use their senses. In some houses the younger sisters seem to have been born chiefly as training grounds for the elders, whereon they may exercise their powers of interference; and a hard time they have of it. If Emma goes to her embroidery, Ellen tells her she ought to practise her singing; if Jane is reading, Mary recommends sewing as a more profitable use of precious time; if Amy is at her easel, Ada wants to turn her round to the piano. It is quite the exception where four or five sisters leave each other free to do as each likes, and do not take to drilling and interference as part of the daily programme.
Something of the reluctance to domestic service, so painfully apparent among the better class of working women, is due to this spirit of interference with women. The lady who wrote about the caps and gowns of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of dress, down to the very material of their gloves, was an instance of this spirit. For, when we come to analyze it, what does it really signify to us how our servants dress, so long as they are clean and decent and do not let their garments damage our goods? Fashion is almost always ridiculous, and women, as a rule, care more for dress than they care for anything else; and if the kitchen apes the parlour, and Phyllis gives as much thought to her new linsey as my lady gives to her new velvet, we cannot wonder at it, nor need we hold up our hands in horror at the depravity of the smaller person. Does one flight of stairs transpose morality? If it does not, there is no real ethical reason why my lady should interfere with poor Phyllis's enjoyment in her ugly little vanities, when she herself will not be interfered with—though press and pulpit both try to turn her out of her present path into the way which all ages have thought the best for her and the one naturally appointed. It is a thing that will not bear reasoning on, being simply a form of the old 'who will guard the guardian?' Who will direct the directress? and to whose interference will the interferer submit?
There are two causes for this excessive love of interference among women. The one is the narrowness of their lives and objects, by which insignificant things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes; the other, their belief that they are the only saviours of society, and that without them man would become hopelessly corrupt. And to a certain extent this belief is true; but surely with restrictions! Because the clearer moral sense and greater physical weakness of women restrain men's fiercer passions and force them to be gentle and considerate, women are not, therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine life into whose hands is given the paying out of just so much rope as they think fit for the occasion. They would do better to look to their own tackle before settling so exactly the run of others; and if ever their desired time of equality is to come, it must come through mutual independence, not through womanly interference, and as much liberality and breadth given as demanded:—which, so far as humanity has gone hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of squaring accounts.
Grant that women are the salt of the earth and the great antiseptic element in society, still that does not reduce everything else to the verge of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet they evidently think that it is so, and that they are each and all the keepers of keys which give them a special entrance to the temple of morality, and by which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser body of men. Hence they interfere and restrict and pay out just so much rope, and measure off just so much gambolling ground, as they think fit; then think vile man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things into his own hand and goes beyond their boundary-lines. It is all done in good if in a very narrow faith—that we admit willingly; but we would call their attention to the difference there is between influence and interference; which is just the difference between their ideal duty and their daily practice—between being the salt of the earth and the blister of the home.
We think it only justice to put in a word for those poor henpecked fellows of husbands at a time when the whole cry is for Woman's Rights, which seems to mean chiefly her right of making man knuckle under on all occasions and of making one will serve for two lives—and that will hers. We assure her that she would get her own way in large matters much more easily if she would leave men more liberty in small ones, and not teaze them by interfering in things which do not concern her and have only reference to themselves.
Among the many odd products of a mature civilization, the fashionable woman is one of the oddest. From first to last she is an amazing spectacle; and if we take human life in any earnestness at all, whether individually, as the passage to an eternal existence the condition of which depends on what we are here, or collectively, as the highest thing we know, we can only look in blank astonishment at the fashionable woman and her career. She is the one sole capable member of the human family without duties and without useful occupation; the one sole being who might be swept out of existence altogether, without deranging the nice arrangement of things, or upsetting the balance of inter-dependent forces. We know of no other organic creation of which this could be said; but the fashionable woman is not as other creatures, being, fortunately, sui generis, and of a type not existing elsewhere. If we take the mere ordering of her days and the employment of her time as the sign of her mental state, we may perhaps measure to a certain extent, but not fully, the depth of inanity into which she has fallen and the immensity of her folly. Considering her as a being with the potentiality of reason, of usefulness, of thought, the actual result is surely the saddest and the strangest thing under heaven!
She goes to bed at dawn and does not attempt to rise till noon. For the most part she breakfasts in bed, and then amuses herself with a cursory glance at the morning paper, if she have sufficient energy for so great a mental exertion; if she have not, she lies for another hour or two in that half-slumberous state which is so destructive to mind and body, weakening as it does both fibre and resolution, both muscle and good principle. At last she languidly rises, to be dressed in time for luncheon and her favoured intimates—the men who have the entrée at sacred hours when the world in general is forbidden. Some time later she dresses again for her drive—for the first part of the day's serious business; for paying visits and leaving cards; for buying jewelry and dresses, and ordering all sorts of unnecessary things at her milliner's; for this grand lady's ordinary 'day,' and that grand lady's extraordinary At Home; for her final slow parade in the Park, where she sees her friends as in an open air drawing-room, makes private appointments, carries on flirtations, and hears and retails gossip and scandal of a full flavour. Then she goes home to dress for tea in a 'lovely gown' of suggestive piquancy; to be followed by dinner, the opera or a concert, a soirée, or perhaps a ball or two; whence she returns towards morning, flushed with excitement or worn out with fatigue, feverish or nervous, as she has had pleasure and success or disappointment and annoyance.
This is her outside life; and this is no fancy picture and no exaggeration. After a certain time of such an existence, can we wonder if her complexion fades and her eyes grow dim? if that inexpressible air of haggard weariness creeps over her, which ages even a young girl and makes a mature woman substantially an old one? It is then that she has recourse to those foul and fatal expedients of which we have heard more than enough in these latter days. She will not try simplicity of living, natural hours, wholesome occupation, unselfish endeavour, but rushes off for help to paints and cosmetics, to stimulants and drugs, and attempts to restore the tarnished freshness of her beauty by the very means which further corrode it. Every now and then, for very weariness when not for idleness, she feigns herself sick and has her favourite physician to attend her. In fact the funniest thing about her is the ease with which she takes to her bed on the slightest provocation, and the strange pleasure she seems to find in what is a penance to most women.
You meet her in a heated, crowded, noisy room, looking just as she always looks, whatever her normal state of health may be; and in answer to your inquiries she tells you she has only two hours ago left her bed to come here, having been confined to her room for a week, with Dr. Blank in close attendance. If you are an intimate female friend she will whisper you the name of her malady, which is sure to be something terrific, and which, if true, would have kept her a real invalid for months instead of days; but if you are only a man she will make herself out to have been very ill indeed in a more mysterious way, and leave you to wonder at the extraordinary physique of fashionable women, which enables them to live on the most friendly touch-and-go terms with death, and to overcome mortal maladies by an effort of the will and the delights of a ducal ball. The favourite physician has a hard time of it with these ladies; and the more popular he is the harder his work. It is well for his generation when he is a man of honour and integrity, and knows how to add self-respect and moral power to the qualities which have made him the general favourite. For his influence over women is almost unlimited—like nothing so much as that of the handsome Abbé of the Regency or the fascinating Monsignore of Rome; and if he chooses to abuse it and turn it to evil issues, he can. And, however great the merit in him that he does not, it does not lessen the demerit of the woman that he could.
Sometimes the fashionable woman takes up with the clergyman instead of the physician, and coquets with religious exercises rather than with drugs; but neither clergyman nor physician can change her mode of life nor give her truth nor common-sense. Sometimes there is a fluttering show of art-patronage, and the fashionable woman has a handsome painter or well-bred musician in her train, whom she pets publicly and patronizes graciously. Sometimes it is a young poet or a rising novelist, considerably honoured by the association, who dedicates his next novel to her, or writes verses in her praise, with such fervency of gratitude as sets the base Philistines on the scent of the secret—perhaps guessing not far amiss. For the fashionable woman has always some love-affair on hand, more or less platonic according to her own temperament or the boldness of the man—a love-affair in which the smallest ingredient is love; a love-affair which is vanity, idleness, a dissolute imagination and contempt of such prosaic things as morals; a love-affair not even to be excused by the tragic frenzy of earnest passion, and which may be guilty and yet not true.
The physical effects of such a life as this are as bad as the mental, and both are as bad as the worst can make them. A feverish, overstrained condition of health either prevents the fashionable woman from being a mother at all, or makes her the mother of nervous, sickly children. Many a woman of high rank is at this moment paying bitterly for the disappointment of which she herself, in her illimitable folly, has been the sole and only cause. And, whether women like to hear it or not, it is none the less a truth that part of the reason for their being born at all is that they may in their turn bear children. The unnatural feeling against maternity existing among fashionable women is one of the worst mental signs of their state, as their frequent inability to be mothers is one of the worst physical results. This is a condition of things which no false modesty nor timid reserve should keep in the background, for it is a question of national importance, and will soon become one of national disaster unless checked by a healthier current and more natural circumstances.
Dress, dissipation and flirting make up the questionable lines which enclose the life of the fashionable woman, and which enclose nothing useful, nothing good, nothing deep nor true nor holy. Her piety is a pastime; her art the poorest pretence; her pleasure consists only in hurry and excitement alternating with debasing sloth, in heartless coquetry or in lawless indulgence, as nature made her more vain or more sensual. As a wife she fulfils no wifely duty in any grand or loving sense, for the most part regarding her husband only as a banker or an adjunct, according to the terms of her marriage settlement; as a mother she is a stranger to her children, to whom nurse and governess supply her place and give such poor makeshift for maternal love as they are enabled or inclined. In no domestic relation is she of the smallest value, and of none in any social circumstance beside the adorning of a room—if she be pretty—and the help she gives to trade through her expenditure. She lives only in the gaslight, and her nature at last becomes as artificial as her habits.
As years go on, and she changes from the acknowledged belle to la femme passée, she goes through a period of frantic endeavour to retain her youth; and even when time has clutched her with too firm a hand to be shaken off, and she begins to feel the infirmities which she still puts out all her strength to conceal, even then she grasps at the departing shadow and fresh daubs the crumbling ruin, in the belief that the world's eyes are dim and that stucco may pass for marble for another year or two longer. Or she becomes a Belgravian mother, with daughters to sell to the highest bidder; and then the aim of her life is to secure the purchaser. Her daughters are never objects of real love with the fashionable woman. They are essentially her rivals, and the idea of carrying on her life in theirs, of forgetting herself in them, occurs to her only as a forecast of death. She shrinks even from her sons, as living evidences of the lapse of time which she cannot deny, and awkward memoria technica for fixing dates; and there is not a home presided over by a fashionable woman where the family is more than a mere name, a mere social convention loosely held together by circumstances, not by love.
Closing such a life as this comes the unhonoured end, when the miserable made-up old creature totters down into the grave where paint and padding, and glossy plaits cut from some fresh young head, are of no more avail; and where death, which makes all things real, reduces her life of lies to the nothingness it has been from the beginning. What does she leave behind her? A memory by which her children may order their own lives in proud assurance that so they will order them best for virtue and for honour? Or a memory which speaks to them of time misused, of duties unfulfilled, of love discarded for pleasure, and of a life-long sacrifice of all things good and pure for selfishness?
We all know examples of the worldly old woman clinging batlike to the last to the old roofs and rafters; and we all know how heartily we despise her, and how we ridicule her in our hearts, if not by our words. If the reigning queens of fashion, at present young and beautiful, would but remember that they are only that worldly old woman in embryo, and that in a very few years they will be her exact likeness, unhappily repeated for the scorn of the world once more to follow! The traditional skeleton at the feast had a wonderfully wise meaning, crude and gross as it was in form. For though its memento mori, too constantly before us, would either sadden or brutalize, as we were thoughtful or licentious, yet it is good to see the end of ourselves, and to study the meaning and lesson of our lives in those of our prototypes and elder likenesses.
The pleasures of the world are, as we all know, very potent and very alluring, but nothing can be more unsatisfying if taken as the main purpose of life. While we are young, the mere stirring of the blood stands instead of anything more real; but as we go on, and the pulse flags and pleasurable occasions get rare and more rare, we find that we have been like the Prodigal Son, and that our food and his have been out of much the same trough, and come in the main to much the same thing.
This is an age of extraordinary wealth and of corresponding extraordinary luxury; of unparalleled restlessness, which is not the same thing as activity or energy, but which is the kind of restlessness that disdains all quiet and repose, as unendurable stagnation. Hence the fashionable woman of the day is one of extremes in her own line also; and the idleness, the heartlessness, the self-indulgence, the want of high morality, and the insolent luxury at all times characteristic of her were never displayed with more cynical effrontery than at present, and never called for more severe condemnation.
The fashionable women of Greece and Rome, of Italy and France, have left behind them names which the world has made typical of the vices naturally engendered by idleness and luxury. But do we wish that our women should become subjects for an English Juvenal? that fashion should create a race of Laïses and Messalinas, of Lucrezia Borgias and Madame du Barrys, out of the stock which once gave us Lucy Hutchinson and Elizabeth Fry? Once the name of Englishwoman carried with it a grave and noble echo as the name of women known for their gentle bearing and their blameless honour—of women who loved their husbands, and brought up about their own knees the children they were not reluctant to bear and not ashamed to love. Now, it too often means a girl of the period, a frisky matron, a fashionable woman—a thing of paints and pads, consorting with dealers of no doubtful calling for the purchase of what she grimly calls 'beauty,' making pleasure her only good and the world her highest god. It too often means a woman who is not ashamed to supplement her husband with a lover, but who is unwilling to become the honest mother of that husband's children. It too often means a hybrid creature, perverted out of the natural way altogether, affecting the license but ignorant of the strength of a man; as girl or woman alike valueless so far as her highest natural duties are concerned; and talking largely of liberty while showing at every turn how much she fails in that co-essential of liberty—knowledge how to use it.
There is a capital old proverb, often quoted but not so often acted on, called 'Let sleeping dogs lie;' a proverb which, if we were to abide by its injunction, would keep us out of many a mess that we get into now, because we cannot let well alone. Certainly we fall into trouble sometimes, or rather we drift into it—we allow it to gather round us—for want of a frank explanation to clear off small misunderstandings. At least novelists say so, and then make a great point of the anguish endured by Henry and Angelina for three mortal volumes, because they were too stupid to ask the reason why the one looked cold the other evening at the duchess's ball, and the other looked shy the next morning in the park. But then novelists, poor souls, are driven to such extravagant expedients for motives and matter, that we can scarcely take them as rational exponents of real life in any way; though the very meaning and final cause of their profession is to depict human nature as it is, and to show the reflex action of character and circumstances somewhat according to the pattern set out in the actual world. But, leaving novelists alone, on the whole we find in real life that if speech is silvern, silence is essentially golden, and that more harm is done by saying too much than by saying too little; above all, that infinite mischief arises by not letting sleeping dogs lie.
People are so wonderfully anxious to stir up the dregs of everything, they can never let things rest. Take a man or woman who has done something queer that gets noised abroad, and who is coldly looked on in consequence by those who believe the worst reports which arise as interpretations. Now the wisest thing undoubtedly is to bear this coldness as the righteous punishment of that folly, and to trust for rehabilitation to the mysterious process called 'living it down.' If there has been absolutely no sinfulness to speak of, nothing but a little imprudence and a big glossary of scandalous explanation, a little precipitancy and a great deal of ill-nature, by all means wake up the sleeping dog and set him howling through the streets. He may do good, seeing that truth would be your friend. But if there be a core of ugly fact, even if it be not quite so ugly as the envelope which rumour has wrapped round it, then fall back on the dignity of 'living it down,' and let the dog lie sleeping and muzzled.
There is another, but an unsavoury saying, which advises against the stirring up of evil odours; but this is just what imprudent, high-spirited people will not understand. They will take their own way in spite of society and all its laws; they will kick over the traces when it suits them; they will do this and that of which the world says authoritatively, 'No, you shall not do it;' and then, when the day of wrath arrives, and down comes the whip on the offending back, they shriek piteously and wake up all the dogs in the town in the 'investigation of their case.' And a queer kennel enough they turn out sometimes! They would have done better to put up with their social thrashing than to have set the bloodhounds of 'investigation' on their heels.
Actions for libel often do this kind of thing, as every one may read for himself. Many a man who gets his farthing damages had better have borne the surly growl of the only half-roused dog, than have retaliated, and so waked him up. The farthing damages, representing say a cuff on the head or a kick in the ribs, or a milder 'Lie down, sir!' may be very pleasant to the feelings of the yelped-at, as so much revenge exacted—Shylock's pound of flesh, without the blood. But what about the consequences? what about the disclosure of your secret follies and the uncovering of the foundations on which the libel rested? The foundations remain immoveable to the end of time if the superstructure be disroofed, and the sleeping dog is awakened, never to be set at rest again while he has a tooth in his head that can bite.
One of the arts of peaceful living at home is contained in the power of letting sleeping dogs lie. Papa is surly—it is a way papas have—or mamma is snappish, as even the best of mammas are at times when the girls are tiresome and will flirt with ineligible younger brothers, or when the boys, who must marry money, are paying attention to dowerless beauty instead. Well, the family horizon is overcast, and the black dog keeps the gate of the family mansion. Better let it lie there asleep, if it will but remain so. It is not pleasant to have it there certainly, but it would be worse to rouse it into activity and to have a general yelping through the house.
Sometimes, indeed, in a family given to tears and caresses and easily excited feelings, a frank challenge as to reasons why is answered by a temporary storm, followed by a scene of effusion and attendrissement, and the black dog is not awakened, but banished, by the rousing he has got. This is a method that can be tried when you have perfect knowledge and command of your material; else it is a dangerous, and nine times out of ten would be an unsuccessful, experiment. It is nearly always unsuccessful with husbands and wives, who often sulk, but rarely for causes needing explanation. Angelina knows quite well that she danced too often the other night with that fascinating young Lovelace for whom her Henry has a special, and not quite groundless, aversion. She may put on as many airs of injured innocence as she likes, and affect to consider herself an ill-used wife suffering grievous things because of her husband's displeasure and the black dog of sulks accompanying; but she knows as well as her Henry himself where her sin lies, and to kick at the black dog would only be to set him loose upon her, and be well barked at if not worried for her pains. The wiser course would be to muzzle him by ignoring his presence; and so in almost all cases of domestic dog, however black.
A sleeping dog of another kind, which it would be well if women would always leave at rest, is the potential passion of a man who is a cherished friend but an impossible lover. Certain slow-going men are able to maintain for life a strong but strictly platonic attachment for certain women. If any warmer impulse or more powerful feeling give threatening notice of arising, it is kept in due subjection and a wholesome state of coolness, perhaps by its very hopelessness even if returned, perhaps by the fear or the knowledge that it would be ill-received, and that the only passport to the pleasant friendship so delighted in is in this calm and sober platonism. This is all very well so long as the woman minds what she is about; for the passionless attachment of a man depends mainly on her desire to keep things in their present place, and on her power of holding to the line to be observed. If she oversteps this line, if she wakens up that sleeping dog of passion, it is all over with her and platonism. What was once a pleasant truth would now be a burning satire; for friendship routed by love can never take service under its old banners again.
And yet this is what women are continually doing. They are always complaining that men are not their friends, and that they are only selfish and self-seeking in their relations with them; yet no sooner do they possess a man friend who is nothing else than they try their utmost to convert him into a lover, and are not too well pleased if they do not succeed—which might by chance sometimes happen like any other rare occurrence, but not often. And yet success ruins everything. It takes away the friend and does not give an available lover; it destroys the existing good and substitutes nothing better. If the woman be of the fishpond type, whose heart Thackeray wanted to 'drag,' she simply turns round upon the unhappy victim with one of the 'looks that kill;' if she be more weak than vain and less designing than impulsive, she regrets the momentary infatuation which has lost her her friend; but in any case she has lost him—by her own folly, not by inevitable misfortune.
Just as easy is it to rouse the sleeping dogs of hatred, of jealousy, of envy. You have a tepid well-controlled dislike to some one; and you know that he knows it. For feelings are eloquent, even when dumb, and express themselves in a thousand ways independent of words. You do not care much about your dislike—you do not nurse it nor feed it in any way, and are rather content than not to let it lie dormant, and so far harmless. But your unloved friend cannot let well alone. He will be always treading on your corns and touching you on the raw. That unlucky speculation you made; your play that was damned; the election you lost; the decision that was given against you, with costs—whenever you see him he is sure to introduce some topic that rubs you the wrong way, till at last the sleeping dog gets fairly roused, and what was merely a well-ordered dislike bursts out into a frantic and ungovernable hatred. It has been his own doing. Just as in the case of the platonic friend transformed into the passionate lover by the woman's wiles, so the dislike that gave you no trouble—become now the hatred which is a real curse to your existence—results from your friend's incessant rousing up of sleeping passions.
Young people are much given to this kind of thing. There is an impish tendency in most girls, and in all boys, that makes teazing a matter of exquisite delight to them. If they know of any sleeping dog which an elder carries about under his cloak, they are never so happy as when they are rousing it to activity, though their own backs may get bitten in the fray. Let a youngster into the secret of a weakness, a sore, and if he can resist the temptation of torturing you as the result of his knowledge he may lay claim to a virtue almost unknown in boyish morals. But he sometimes pays dearly for his fun. More than one life-long dislike, culminating in a disastrous codicil or total omission from the body of the will, has been the return-blow for a course of boyish teazings which a testy old uncle or huffish maiden aunt has had to undergo. The punishment may be severe and unjust; but the provocation was great; and revenge is a human, if indefensible, instinct common to all classes.
Fathers and mothers themselves are not always sacred ground, nor are their special dogs suffered to lie sleeping undisturbed; and perhaps the favouritism and comparative coldness patent in almost every family may be traced back to the propensity for soothing or for rousing those parental beasts. For even fathers and mothers have personal feelings in excess of their instincts, and they, no more than any one else, like to be put through their paces by the impish vivacity of youth, and made to dance according to the piping of an irreverent lad or saucy girl. If they have dogs, they do not want their children to pry into their kennels and whistle them out at their pleasure; and those who do so most will naturally get worst off in the great division of family love. 'Let sleeping dogs lie,' certainly, as a rule for private life.
Historically, the saying does not hold good. For if the great leaders of thought and reform had not roused up the sleeping dogs of their day, and made them give tongue for all after ages to hear, we should be but poorly off at this present time. Many of our liberties have been got only by diligently prodding up that very sleepy dog, the public, till he has been forced to show his teeth; and history is full of instances of how much has been done, all the world over and in every age, by the like means. Sometimes the prodded dog flies at the wrong throat on the other side, as we have had a few notable instances of late; and then it would have been wiser to leave him quietly sleeping in the shade, whether at Mentana or elsewhere; to rouse for rending being a poor amusement at the best, and an eminently unprofitable use of leather.
That lovely woman fulfils only half her mission when she is unpersonable instead of beautiful, all young men, and all pretty girls secure in the consciousness of their own perfections, will agree. Indeed, it is cruel to hear the way in which ingenuous youths despise ugly girls, however clever, whose charm lies in their cleverness only, with a counteraction in their plainness. To hear them, one would think that hardness of feature was, like poverty, a crime voluntarily perpetrated, and that contempt was a righteous retribution for the offence. Yet their preference, though so cruelly expressed, is to a certain extent the right thing. When we are young, the beauty of women has a supreme attraction beyond all other possessions or qualities; and there are self-evident reasons why it should be so. It is only as we grow older that we know the value of brains, and, while still admiring beauty—as indeed who does not?—admire it as one passing by on the other side—as a grace to look at, but not to hold, unless accompanied by something more lasting.
This is in the middle term of a man's life. Old age, perhaps with the unconscious yearning of regret, goes back to the love of youth and beauty for their own sake; extremes meeting here as in almost all other circumstances. The danger is when a young man, obeying the natural impulse of his age and state, marries beauty only, with nothing more durable beneath. The mind sees what it brings, and we love the ideal we create rather than the reality that exists. A pretty face, the unworn nerves of youth, the freshness of hope that has not yet been soured by disappointment nor chilled by experience, a neat stroke at croquet and a merry laugh easily excited, make a girl a goddess to a boy who is what he himself calls in love and his friends 'spoony.' She may be narrow, selfish, spoilt, unfit to bear the burdens of life and unable to meet her trials patiently; she may be utterly unpractical and silly—one of those who never mature but only grow old—without judgment, forethought, common-sense or courage; but he sees nothing of all this. To him she is perfect; the 'jolliest girl in the world,' if he be slangy, or the 'dearest,' if he be affectionate; and he neither sees nor heeds her potential faults.
It is only when she has stepped down from her pedestal to the level of the home-threshold that he finds out she is but a woman after all, and perhaps an exceptionally weak and peevish one. Then he knows that he would have done better for himself had he married that plain brave-hearted girl who would have had him to a dead certainty if he had asked her, but whom he so unmercifully laughed at when he was making love to his fascinating charmer. As years go on and reduce the Hebe and Hecate of eighteen to much the same kind of woman at forty—with perhaps the advantage on Hecate's side if of the sort that ripens well and improves by keeping—the man feels that he has been a fool after the manner of Bunyan's Passion; that he has eaten up his present in the past, and had all his good things at once. If he had but looked at the future and been able to wait! But in those days he wanted beauty that does not last, and cared nothing for brains which do; and so, having made his election he must abide by it, and eat bitter bread from the yeast of his own brewing.
Many a man has cursed, his whole life long, the youthful infatuation that made him marry a pretty fool. Take the case of a rising politician whose fair-faced wife is either too stupid to care about his position, or who imperils it by her folly. If amiable and affectionate, and in her own silly little way ambitious, she does him incalculable mischief by exaggeration, and by saying and doing exactly the things which are most damaging to him; if stupid, she is just so much deadweight that he has to carry with him while swimming up the stream. She is very lovely certainly, and people crowd her drawing-room to look at her; but a plain-featured, sensible, shrewd woman, with no beauty to speak of but with tact and cleverness, would have helped him in his career far better than does his brainless Venus. He finds this out when it is too late to change M. for N. in the marriage service.
The successful men of small beginnings are greatly liable to this curse of wifely hindrance. A barrister once briefless and now in silk—an artist once obscure and now famous—who in the days of impecuniosity and Bohemianism married the landlady's pretty daughter and towards the meridian of life find themselves in the front ranks of la haute volée with a wife who drops her h's and multiplies her s's, know the full bitterness of the bread baked from that hasty brewing. Each woman may have been beautiful in her youth, and each man may have loved his own very passionately; but if she have nothing to supplement her beauty—if she have no brains to fall back on, by which she can be educated up to her husband's present social position as the wife of his successful maturity—she is a mistake. Dickens was quite right to kill off pretty childish Dora in 'David Copperfield.' If she had lived she would have been like Flora in 'Bleak House,' who indeed was Dora grown old but not matured; with all the grace and beauty of her youth gone, and nothing else to take their place.
Men do not care for brains in excess in women. They like a sympathetic intellect which can follow and seize their thoughts as quickly as they are uttered; but they do not much care for any clear or specific knowledge of facts. Even the most philosophic among them would rather not be set right in a classical quotation, an astronomical calculation, or the exact bearing of a political question by a lovely being in tarlatane whom he was graciously unbending to instruct. Neither do they want anything very strong-minded. To most men, indeed, the feminine strong-mindedness that can discuss immoral problems without blushing is a quality as unwomanly as a well-developed biceps or a 'shoulder-of-mutton' fist. It is sympathy, not antagonism—it is companionship, not rivalry, still less supremacy, that they like in women; and some women with brains as well as learning—for the two are not the same thing—understand this, and keep their blue stockings well covered by their petticoats. Others, enthusiasts for freedom of thought and intellectual rights, show theirs defiantly; and meet with their reward. Men shrink from them. Even clever men, able to meet them on their own ground, do not feel drawn to them; while all but high-class minds are humiliated by their learning and dwarfed by their moral courage. And no man likes to feel humiliated or dwarfed in the presence of a woman, and because of her superiority.
But the brains most useful to women, and most befitting their work in life, are those which show themselves in common-sense, in good judgment, and that kind of patient courage which enables them to bear small crosses and great trials alike with dignity and good temper. Mere intellectual culture, however valuable it may be in itself, does not equal the worth of this kind of moral power; for as the true domain of woman is the home, and her way of ordering her domestic life the best test of her faculties, mere intellectual culture does not help in this; and, in fact, is often a hindrance rather than a help. What good is there in one's wife being an accomplished mathematician, a sound scholar, a first-rate musician, a deeply-read theologian, if she cannot keep the accounts square, knows nothing of the management of children, lets herself be cheated by the servants and the tradespeople, has not her eyes opened to dirt and disorder, and gives way to a fretful temper on the smallest provocation?
The pretty fool who spends half her time in trying on new dresses and studying the effect of colours, and who knows nothing beyond the last new novel and the latest plate of fashions, is not a more disastrous wife than the woman of profound learning whose education has taught her nothing practical. They stand at the opposite ends of the same scale, and neither end gives the true position of women. Indeed, if one must have a fool in one's house, the pretty one would be the best, as, at the least, pleasant to look at; which is something gained.
The intellectual fool, with her head always in books and 'questions,' and her children dropping off like sheep for the want of womanly care, is something more than flesh and blood can tolerate. The pretty fool cannot help herself. If nature proved herself but a stepmother to her, and left out the best part of her wits while taking such especial care of her face, it is no fault of hers; but the intellectual fool is a case of maladministration of powers, for which she alone is responsible; and in this particular alternative between beauty and brains, without a shadow of doubt we would go in for beauty.
Ball-rooms and dinner-tables are the two places where certain women most shine. In the ball-room Hebe is the queen, and has it all her own way without fear of rivals. A very few men who care for dancing for its own sake will certainly dance with Hecate if she is light on hand, keeps accurate time, and manages her feet with scientific precision; but to the ruck of youths, Hebe, who jerks herself into step every second round, but whose lovely face and perfect figure make up for everything, is the partner they all besiege. Only to those exceptional few who regard dancing as a serious art would she be a bore with her three jumps and a hop; while Hecate, waltzing like an angel, would be divine, in spite of her high cheek-bones and light green eyes à fleur de tête. But at a dinner-table, where a man likes to talk between the dishes, a sympathetic listener with pleasant manners, to whom he can air his stalest stories and recount his personal experiences, is preferable to the prettiest girl if a simpleton, only able to show her small white teeth in a silly smile, and say 'yes' and 'indeed' in the wrong places. The ball-room may be taken to represent youth; the dinner-table maturity. The one is the apotheosis of mere beauty, in clouds of millinery glory and a heaven of flirting; the other is solid enjoyment, with brains to talk to by the side and beauty to look at opposite, in just the disposition that makes life perfect. A well-ordered dinner-table is a social microcosm; and, being so, this is the blue riband of the arrangement.
Every woman is bound to make the best of herself. The strong-minded women who hold themselves superior to the obligations of dress and manner and all the pleasant little artificial graces belonging to an artificial civilization, and who think any sacrifice made to appearance just so much waste of power, are awful creatures, ignorant of the real meaning of their sex—social Graiæ wanting in every charm of womanhood, and to be diligently shunned by the wary.
This making the best of themselves is a very different thing from making dress and personal vanity the first considerations in life. Where women in general fail is in the exaggerations into which they fall on this and on almost every other question. They are apt to be either demireps or devotees; frights or flirts; fashionable to an extent that lands them in illimitable folly and drags their husbands' names through the mire, or they are so dowdy that they disgrace a well-ordered drawing-room, and among nicely-dressed women stand out as living sermons on slovenliness. If they are clever, they are too commonly blue-stockings, and let the whole household go by the board for the sake of their fruitless studies; and if they are domestic and good managers they sink into mere servants, never opening a book save their daily ledger, and having no thought beyond the cheesemonger's bill and the butcher's prices. They want that fine balance, that accurate self-measurement and knowledge of results, which goes by the name of common-sense and is the best manifestation of brains they can give, and the thing which men most prize. It is the most valuable working form of intellectual power, and has most endurance and vitality; and it is the form which helps a man on in life, when he has found it in his wife, quite as much as money or a good connexion.
So that, on the whole, brains are before beauty in the solid things of life. For admiration and personal love and youthful enjoyment, beauty of course is supreme; but as we cannot be always young nor always apt for pleasure, it is as well to provide for the days when the daughters of music shall be brought low and the years draw nigh which have no pleasure in them.