Modern Women and What is Said of Them Part 10

We have been led, as the _Spectator_ would have said, into these reflections by the chorus of shrill indignation with which the world of woman encounters the slightest comment of extraneous critics. The censor is at once told flatly that he knows nothing of woman. He is a bachelor, he is blighted in love, he is envious, spiteful; he is blind, deaf, dumb. All this goes without saying, as the French have it, but he is certainly ignorant. The truth is, it is woman who knows nothing of herself. It is only self-a.n.a.lysis which reveals to us our inner anomalies, our ridiculous self-contrasts; it is humor which recognises and amuses itself with their existence. But it is just the absence of this sense of anomaly in her nature or her life that is the charm of woman.

Christmas has been bringing us, among its other festivities, a few of those delightful amus.e.m.e.nts called private theatricals; and in private theatricals all are agreed with Becky Sharpe, that woman reigns supreme.

We were present the other day at an entertaining little comedy of this kind, where the whole interest of the piece was absorbed by a fascinating widow and an intriguing attorney, and where both these parts were sustained with singular ability and success. The amateur who played the lawyer seized the general idea of his _role_ with perfect accuracy; in four minutes it was admirably rendered to his audience, but in four minutes it was exhausted. The preliminary cough, the constant angularity of att.i.tude in the midst of perpetual fidget, the indicative finger from which the legal remarks seemed to pop off as from a pocket-pistol, were grasped at once, and remained unvaried, undeveloped to the close. The very ability with which the actor rendered the inner unity of legal existence, the very fidelity with which he represented the lawyer as a cla.s.s, denied to him the subtle charm of the only unity which life as a representation exhibits--the charm of a unity of outer impression arising out of perpetual inner variety.

His feminine rival won her laurels just because she made no attempt to grasp any general idea at all, but abandoned herself freely to the phases of the character as it encountered the various other characters of the piece. Whether as the frivolous widow or the daring coquette, as the practical woman of business or the unprotected female, as the flirt in her wildest extravagance or the wife in her most melting moods, she aimed at no artistic unity beyond the general unity of s.e.x. She remained simply woman, and all this prodigious versatility was, as the audience observed, "so charmingly natural," just because it is woman's life. "On the stage," if we may venture to apply the lines about Garrick:--

On the stage she is natural, simple, affecting-- It is only that when she is off she is acting.

In actual fact she is acting whether off the boards or on, but the mere existence in outer impressions, in the unity of a constant admiration, which critics applaud as natural on the stage, they are unreasonably hard upon in general society.

A man on the boards is doing an unusual and exceptional thing, and as a rule the very effort he makes to do it only enhances his failure; but a woman on the boards is only doing, under very favorable circ.u.mstances, what she does every day with less notice and applause. There can be no wonder if she is "charmingly natural," but this naturalness depends, as we have seen, on the entire absence of what in men is called self-consciousness--that is, the sense of anomaly. When a critic then ventures to open this inner existence, and to give woman a peep at herself, we cannot be astonished at the scream of indignation which greets his efforts. But we may be permitted to repeat that the scream proves, not that he knows nothing of woman, but that woman knows nothing of herself.

We are afraid, however, that all this feminine resentment points to a radical defect in the mind of woman, which she is alternately proud to acknowledge and resolute to deny. Frenchmen of the Thiers sort have a trick to which they give the amusing name of logic; they present their reader with a couple of alternatives which they a.s.sert divide the universe, and bid you choose "of these two one." But any ordinary woman presents to the observer a hundred distinct alternatives, and defies him to choose any one in particular. There is no special reason, then, for astonishment at the coolness with which she sets herself up one moment as a "deductive creature," as one who attains the highest flights of knowledge by intuition rather than by reason, and the next poses herself as the one specially rational being in her household, and waits patiently till her husband is reasonable too.

We are sometimes afraid that neither one nor the other of these theories will hold water, and feel inclined to agree with one of the most brilliant of her s.e.x that, if woman loves with her head, she thinks with her heart. As a rule, certainly, she judges through her affections. She does not praise nor blame; she loves or hates. The one thing she cannot understand is a purely intellectual criticism, the sort of morbid anatomy of the mind which treats its subject as a mere dead thing simply useful for demonstration. Very naturally, she attributes the same spirit of affectional intelligence to her critics as to herself; and when they unravel a few of her inconsistencies, amuse themselves with a few follies, or even venture to point out a few faults, she brands them as "hating" or "despising" woman. Point, too, is given to the charge by the fact that these affections through which she lives are from their very nature incapable of dealing with qualities, and naturally transform them into persons. A woman does not love her lover's courage or truth or honor; she loves her lover. If she prizes his qualities at all it is simply because they are inherent in him, and so she gives herself very little trouble to distinguish between his bad qualities and his good ones. She considers herself bound to defend his characteristics in the ma.s.s, and if she seem to give up his extravagance or his rakishness, it is only with a secret determination that this concession to the world shall be balanced by an increase of adoration at home.

As she deals with mankind, so she expects mankind, and especially the mankind of criticism, to deal with her. It is in vain that her censor replies that he only blamed her bonnet-strings or attacked the color of her shoe-tie. Woman's answer is that he has attacked woman. This folly, that absurdity, are in woman's mind herself, and their a.s.sailant is her own personal antagonist. "Love me all in all or not at all" is a woman's song, not in Mr. Tennyson's _Idyl_ only, but all the world over. The discriminating admiration, the const.i.tutional obedience which still claims to preserve a certain reticence and caution in its loyalty, are more alien to woman's feelings than the refusal of all worship, all obedience whatever. "Picking her to pieces" is the phrase in which she describes the critical process against which she revolts, and it is a phrase which, in a woman's mouth, is the prelude to the bitterest warfare.

There is a more amiable, if a hardly more intelligent, trait in woman's character which renders her singularly averse to all criticism. Men can hardly be described as loyal to men. Whether it be their exaggerated self-esteem, their individuality, or their reason, it is certain that they do not imagine the honor of their s.e.x to be concerned in the conduct of each particular member of it. The lawyer laughs over a little gentle fun when it is poked at his neighbor the vicar, and the parson has his amus.e.m.e.nt out of the exposure of the foibles of his friend the attorney. What they never dream of is the flinging over each other's defects the general cloak of manhood, and rallying at every smile of criticism under the general banner of the s.e.x.

But woman, in front of the enemy, piques herself on her _solidarite_.

Flirt or prude, prim or gay, foolish or wise, woman, once criticised, cries to her sisters, and is recognised and defended as woman. All feminine comment, all internal censure, is hushed before the foe. The t.i.ttle-tattle of the gossips, the social intrigues of the dowager, are adopted as frankly as the self-devotion of a Miss Nightingale. The door of refuge is flung open as widely for the foolish virgins as for the wise. All distinctions of age, of conduct, of intelligence, of rank are annihilated or forgotten in the presence of the enemy. Every fault is to be defended, every weakness to be held stoutly against his attacks. "No surrender" is the order of the day. It is only when the criticism of the outer world withdraws that woman's internal criticism recommences. This is, indeed, half the offence of outer a.s.sailants, that they suspend and injure the working of that inner discipline which woman exerts over woman. Mrs. Proudie, it has been said, is the Church.

Women certainly present the only a.n.a.logy in the present day to that claim of internal jurisdiction for which the Church struggled so gallantly in the middle ages. No one who sees the serried ranks with which she encounters all investigation from without would imagine the severity with which she administers justice within. Like the Westphalian Vehm-gericht, the mystery of feminine courts is only equalled by their terrible sentences. Mrs. Grundy on the seat of justice is a Rhadamanthus to whom criticism may fairly leave an erring sister. But all this in nowise weakens the firmness of woman's att.i.tude before an outer foe. She claims absolute right to all hanging, drawing, and quartering on her domains. Like a feudal baron, she will yield to no man her stocks and her gallows. But to judge from the prim front of her squares, the cordial grasp of hand-in-hand with which they form to resist all masculine charges, no one would imagine the ruthless severity with which woman was breaking some poor drummer-boy inside.

We are bound, however, to add, that in all our remarks we have only been nibbling at the outer rind of a great difficulty. Woman has characteristically fallen back on a grand principle, and has a.s.serted her absolute immunity from all criticism whatever. It is not merely that this critic is deaf or that critic malignant, that one censor is ignorant and another basely envious of woman. All this special pleading is totally flung aside, and the defence stands on a basis of the most uncompromising sort. No man, it is a.s.serted, can judge woman, because no man can understand her. She is the Sphinx of modern investigation, and man is not fated to be her OEdipus. We can conceive of few announcements more welcome, if it be only true.

In an age when everything seems pretty well discovered, when one cannot preserve even a shred of mystery to cloak the bareness of one's life, when the very surface of the globe is all mapped out, and the mysterious griffins of untraversed deserts are vanishing from the map, it is an amazing relief to know that an unsolved, nay more, that an insoluble, mystery is standing on one's very hearth-rug. No wonder great philosophers have spent their lives in vain in looking for the riddle of existence, when they never dreamt of looking for it at home. Why woman is so peculiarly mysterious, why the laws of her nature are so specially unintelligible to a common world, we have not yet been informed. What is a.s.serted is simply the fact of this mystery, and before that great fact criticism retires.

All that remains for it is to pray and to wait, to hope for a revelation from within, since it is forbidden any exploration from without. Some prophetess, no doubt a veiled prophetess herself, will arise to lift the veil of her s.e.x. Woman, let us hope, will at last unriddle woman. Smit by the sunbeams, or rather by the moonbeams, of self-discovery, the Sphinx of modern times will reveal in weird and superhuman music the mystery of her existence.

MISTRESS AND MAID ON DRESS AND UNDRESS.

No one with a soul to appreciate the extra-judicial utterances of Mr.

Samuel Warren can have forgotten the memorable lament over the decline and fall of the fine old English maid-servant with which, some years ago, he introduced some cases of petty larceny to the notice of the grand-jurors of Hull. The alarm sounded with such touching eloquence from the judgment-seat was taken up last autumn, if we remember, by a venerable Countess, who, in an address to an a.s.semblage of c.u.mbrian la.s.ses, aspirants to the kitchen and the dairy, took occasion to read them a lecture on the duty of dressing with the simplicity befitting their station. Both the learned Recorder and the venerable Countess were animated by the best intentions. Their advice was excellent, and we sincerely trust that it may have induced the neat-handed Phyllis of the North to curb her immoderate taste for finery. These sporadic warnings seem likely to ripen at last into action.

From a letter lately inserted in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, we learn that a "Clergyman's Wife" has long been brooding in silent indignation over "the present disgraceful style of dress among female servants." Her disgust finds vent in a manifesto to the mistresses of Great Britain, in which, after painting the evil in the darkest possible colors, she ends by suggesting a remedy for it. Dress, we are told, among "the lower orders of females," has arrived at a pitch which has wholly changed the aspect and character of our towns and country villages. Neither preachers nor good books can avail to stop it. Bad women are fearfully increased in number, good wives and mothers are getting rare. In consequence of the reckless expenditure of women upon their dress, husbands become drunkards, and murder too commonly follows. The remedy for this terrible state of things is to be found in the following "proposition:"--The ladies of England are to form an a.s.sociation, pledging themselves to adopt, each family for themselves, a uniform for their female servants, and to admit none into their service who refuse to wear it.

The uniform is not to be old-fashioned or disfiguring, but merely neat, simple, and consequently becoming. The following ornaments are to be absolutely prohibited--"feathers, flowers, brooches, buckles or clasps, earrings, lockets, neck-ribbons and velvets, kid-gloves, parasols, sashes, jackets, Garibaldis, all tr.i.m.m.i.n.g on dresses, crinoline, or steel of any kind." No dress to touch the ground. No pads, frisettes, no chignons, no hair-ribbons. Having swept away by a stroke of the pen all this ma.s.s of finery, a "Clergyman's Wife" goes on to make some "suggestions," which we quote for the edification of our lady readers:--

"Morning dress: Lilac print, calico ap.r.o.n, linen collar. Afternoon dress: Some lighter print, muslin ap.r.o.n, linen collar and cuffs.

Sundays: a neat alpaca dress, linen collar and cuffs, or frill tacked into the neck of the dress, a black ap.r.o.n, a black shawl, a medium straw bonnet with ribbons and strings of the same color, a bow of the same inside, and a slight cap across the forehead, thread or cotton gloves, a small cotton or alpaca umbrella to keep off sun and rain. The winter Sunday dress: Linsey dress, shepherd's plaid shawl, black straw bonnet.

A plain brown or black turndown straw hat with a rosette of the same color, and fastened on with elastic, should be possessed by all servants for common use, and is indispensable for nursemaids walking out with children. Should servants be in mourning, the same neat style must be observed--no bugles, or beads, or c.r.a.pe flowers allowed."

The first thing that strikes us in connection with this glib project is the enormous difficulty of carrying it into execution. It is easy, we all know, to call spirits from the vasty deep, but exceedingly difficult to induce them to obey the summons. It is easy, and to feminine ingenuity rather pleasant than otherwise, to devise sumptuary laws for the kitchen. But it is quite another thing to try to enforce them. By what coercive machinery is Betsy Jane to be forced into the detested uniform? We know how deeply the Anglo-Saxon mind resents any social "ticketing." Does a "Clergyman's Wife" suppose that the British housemaid is exempt from this little weakness common to her race? At any rate, we are convinced that she would never subside into a "lilac print" or a "neat alpaca" without a tremendous struggle. Her first weapon of defence would infallibly be a strike. It is absurd to suppose that she would cling to her flowers and parasol with less tenacity than cabby to his right of running over people in the dark.

Now, is a "Clergyman's Wife" prepared to face the consequences of such a strike? Is she ready for an indefinite time to cook her own dinner, mend her own dresses, dust her own rooms, manage her own nursery? What if the vengeance of the housemaid menaced by the imposition of a "calico ap.r.o.n"

or a "medium straw bonnet" should a.s.sume a darker form, and a system of domestic "rattening" should spread terror through the tranquil parsonages of England? Is she prepared to brave the system of intimidation by which a union of vindictive cooks and nursery-maids might a.s.sert their inherent rights to lockets and earrings? Has she the nerve to crush the secret plots of kitchen Fenianism? Ultimately, no doubt, her efforts might be crowned with success. When that happy time arrived, when "her suggestions were generally adopted," and the "requirements of ladies, especially those of fortune, were generally known" to comprise a uniform for the maid-servant, she might succeed in closing the market of domestic service to the flaunting abigail whose audacious finery renders her to the outward eye indistinguishable from her own daughters.

But as that time would be long in coming, and probably would never arrive in her lifetime, she would have to face the discomforts of a long period of transition, during which she would have to rely on herself and her daughters for the discharge of the various operations of the household. Meantime we beg to suggest another way of effecting her purpose quite as easy, and much more effectual. Why not go in for an Act of Parliament, having for its object the total suppression of the instinct of vanity in the female bosom? Let it be enacted that, on and after the 1st of next April (the date would be appropriate), feathers, flowers, and the other abominations which she seeks to proscribe, shall be for ever abjured and disused by the fair s.e.x. As the prelude to that full entry on her social and political rights which is nowadays claimed for woman, a proposal of this magnitude would commend itself, no doubt, to the philosophic section of the House of Commons.

There is another feature in the manifesto of a "Clergyman's Wife" which calls for observation. She lays particular stress on securing the adhesion to her plan of "families of wealth and distinction," "ladies of position and fortune"--of the leaders of fashion, in short, wherever those mysterious but potent decoy-ducks are to be found. Its success depends on "making it fashionable to adopt the uniform," on making simplicity of dress among maid-servants the sole avenue to the "best situations." Now, as it is conceded that the "present disgraceful style of dress among servant girls" is the result of their ambition to imitate their superiors, it is worth while, in order to estimate both the amount of their responsibility for the said disgrace and the chances of success of the proposed reform, to glance from the style of dress in vogue in the kitchen to the style of dress in vogue in the drawing-room.

Oddly enough, on the very day on which a "Clergyman's Wife" was permitted to ventilate her project in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, the public was favored with the latest intelligence on this point, in the columns of a fashionable contemporary. Paris, we all know, is the sovereign arbiter of dress to all "ladies of position and fortune" in this country, the center of an authority on all matters relating to the toilette, which radiates, through "families of distinction and wealth,"

to those calm retreats where clergymen's wives, in chastely severe attire, exchange hospitalities with their neighbors. What is the fashionable style of dress in Paris at the present moment? The correspondent of our contemporary shall speak for himself. "We are living," he says, "in an age which seems to be reviving the cla.s.sical period in the history of drapery. You see pretty nearly as much of the female _torso_ now as the Athenians did when the bas-reliefs of the Parthenon copied the modes of the Greeks so many hundred years ago, and when the mult.i.tude did not worship the drapery of the G.o.ddess only."

After some piquant remarks on the style of dress in the theatres, he goes on to inform us how "in the more refined and virtuous society" the ladies are dressing this winter. "At a _fete_ graced by all that is elegant, refined, and aristocratic in Paris," he observed the d.u.c.h.ess, the countess, and the baroness imitating the costly toilettes of the _demi-monde_, arrayed like one of them precisely, in the very height of fashion. We are favored with a minute account of one representative toilette in the room:--

"The lady is of a n.o.ble Hungarian family, fair, with that dark brown reddish hair which is just going to begin to be golden, but never shines out. Pale oval face, heavy eyebrows, bright bronze eyes. Small festoons of hair over the brow, imprisoned by a golden metal band. Behind a Bismarck chignon. A ma.s.s of twisted hair, in a sort of Laoc.o.o.n agony, was decorated with small insects (of course I don't mean anything impossible), glittering gem-like beetles from the Brazils. Three long curls hang from the imposing ma.s.s, and could be worn before or behind, and be made to perform--as I witnessed--all sorts of coquettish tricks. . . . Now for the dress. Well, there is nothing to describe till you get very nearly down to the waist. A pretty bit of lace on a band wanders over the shoulder; the back is bare very low down, and more of the bust is seen than even last year's fashions permitted. . . . You may, as far as I could observe, dress or half-dress just as you like; caprice has taken the place of uniform fashion. As the panorama of _grandes dames_ floats before my mind's eye, I come to the conclusion that I have seen more of those ladies than one could have hoped or expected in so brief a s.p.a.ce of time."

This, then, is, or shortly will be, in a tasteless and exaggerated form, the style of dress among those "ladies of distinction" whose co-operation a "Clergyman's Wife" fondly hopes to enlist in her scheme for purging the kitchen of its "disgraceful" finery. It is just possible that she has not heard of these things. Perhaps in the retirement of the parsonage, with her eyes intently fixed on the moral havoc which dress is causing among "the lower orders of females," she has a.s.sumed that the dress of the higher orders of females is irreproachably modest and correct. If so, we are sorry to have to dispel an illusion which would go far to justify the self-complacent tone of her lecture. But unless she is blissfully ignorant of contemporary fashions in any sphere more elevated than the kitchen, we are struck with astonishment at the hardihood of an appeal at the present moment to ladies of fashion.

Is a being whose avowed object is to imitate as exactly as possible the cosmetic tricks of the _demi-monde_ likely to prove an influential ally in a crusade against cheap finery? Is a mistress whose head-gear resembles the art-trophy of an eccentric hair-dresser, and whose clothing is described as nothing to speak of "until you get very nearly down to the waist," the person to be especially selected to preach propriety of dress to her maid? Or is it that a "Clergyman's Wife"

objects to overdress only, and not to underdress; and that, while she would repress with severity any attempt on the part of "females of the lower order" to adorn their persons, she looks with a tolerant eye, among "ladies of position and fortune," upon the nude? We are curious to know at what point in the social scale she would draw the line above which an unblushing exhibition of the female _torso_ is decent, and below which earrings and a parasol are immoral.

As a matter of fact, so far from discouraging the pa.s.sion for dress among their female dependents, ladies of position and fortune are apt to insist on their dressing smartly. They like to see some of their own l.u.s.tre reflected on their attendants. A dowdy in sad-colored print or linsey is by no means to their taste. This has been well pointed out in a letter in which a "Maid-servant" replied, through the _Pall Mall Gazette_, to the project of reform proposed by a "Clergyman's Wife."

Looking at the question from her own point of view, she described in plain words how, when she first went into service, she had wished to dress simply, but was quickly made to understand that she must either spend more of her wages on dress, or seek another situation. We believe that her experience would be endorsed by the great majority of her cla.s.s. If a "Clergyman's Wife" would take the pains to inquire into the facts of the case, she would not be long in ascertaining from what quarter the signal for unbecoming finery among "females of the lower orders" really comes.

The plain truth of the matter is, that a reform in the dress of "lower cla.s.s females," and maid-servants in particular, can only be brought about in one way. The reaction in favor of a neat and simple style must come from above, and not from below; in the way of example, not of precept. When "ladies of position and fortune" cease to lavish their thousands on millinery, their copyists in the nursery and kitchen will cease to spend their wages on a similar object. When every one above the rank of a governess dresses in a manner suitable to her station, complaints will be no longer heard about "unbecoming" finery below stairs. The chief incentive to showy dress among the "lower orders of females" is unquestionably a desire to ape the extravagance of their betters. Remove that incentive, and the evil which a "Clergyman's Wife"

so forcibly deplores will soon cure itself.

We hope that she may be induced to turn her reforming zeal into another direction. Instead of indulging in childish projects for putting the Sunday-school, and the church singers, and maid-servants, and the lower orders of females generally into uniforms, let her attack the mischief at its root, and persuade the fine ladies of the earth to curtail their monstrous prodigality and immodest vagaries in dress. Let her add her warning voice to that of the Head of Latin Christianity, who has recently denounced this scandal of the age with the same perennial vigor that characterizes his anathemas on the Subalpine Government.

aeSTHETIC WOMAN.

It is the peculiar triumph of woman in this nineteenth century that she has made the conquest of Art. Our grandmothers lived in the kitchen, and debased their finer faculties to the creation of puddings and pies. They spun, they knitted, they mended, they darned, they kept the accounts of the household, and scolded the maids. From this underground existence of barbaric ages woman has at last come forth into the full sunshine of artistic day; she has mounted from the kitchen to the studio, the sketching-desk has superseded the pudding-board, sonatas have banished the knitting-needle, poetry has exterminated weekly accounts. Woman, in a word, has realized her mission; it is her characteristic, she tells us through a chorus of musical voices, to represent the artistic element of the world, to be pre-eminently the aesthetic creature.

Nature educates her, as Wordsworth sang long ago, into a being of her own, sensitive above all to beauty of thought and color, and sound and form. Delicate perceptions of evanescent shades and tones, lost to the coa.r.s.er eye and ear of man, exquisite refinements of spiritual appreciation, subtle powers of detecting latent harmonics between the outer and the inner world of nature and the soul, blend themselves like the colors of the prism in the pure white light of woman's organization.

And so the host of Woman, as it marches to the conquest of this world, flaunts over its legions the banner of art.

In one of the occasional pa.s.sages of real poetic power with which Walt Whitman now and then condescends to break the full tide of rhapsody over the eternities and the last patent drill, he describes himself as seeing two armies in succession go forth to the civil war. First pa.s.sed the legions of Grant and M'Clellan, flushed with patriotic enthusiasm and hope of victory, and cheered onward by the shouts of adoring mult.i.tudes.

Behind, silent and innumerable, march the army of the dead. Something, we must own, of the same contrast strikes us as we stand humbly aside to watch the aesthetic progress of woman.

It is impossible not to feel a certain glow of enthusiastic sympathy as the vanguard pa.s.ses by--women earnest in aim and effort, artists, nursing-sisters, poetesses, doctors, wives, musicians, novelists, mathematicians, political economists, in somewhat motley uniform and ill-dressed ranks, but full of resolve, independence, and self-sacrifice. If we were fighting folk we confess we should be half inclined to shout for the rights of woman, and to fall manfully into the rank. As it is, we wait patiently for the army behind, for the main body--woman herself. Woman fronts us as noisy, demonstrative, exacting in her aesthetic claims. Nothing can surpa.s.s the adroitness with which she uses her bluer sisters on ahead to clear the way for her gayer legions; nothing, at any rate, but the contempt with which she dismisses them when their work is done. Their office is to level the stubborn incredulity, to set straight the crooked criticisms, of sceptical man, and then to disappear. Woman herself takes their place. Art is everywhere throughout her host--for music, the highest of arts, is the art of all.

The singers go before, the minstrels follow after, in the midst are the damsels playing on the timbrels. The sister Arts have their own representatives within the ma.s.s. Sketching boasts its thousands, and poetry its tens of thousands. A demure band of maidens blend piety with art around the standard of Church decoration. Perhaps it is his very regard for the first host--for its earnestness, for its real womanhood--that makes the critic so cynical over the second; perhaps it is his very love for art that turns to quiet bitterness as he sees art dragged at the heels of foolish virgins. For art _is_ dragged at their heels. Woman will have man love her for her own sake; but she loves art for the sake of man. Very truly, if with an almost sublime effrontery, she re-christens for her own special purposes the great studies that fired Raffaelle or Beethoven. She pursues them, she pays for them, not as arts, but as accomplishments. Their cultivation is the last touch added at her finishing school ere she makes her bow to the world. She orders her new duet as she orders her new bonnet, and the two purchases have precisely the same significance. She drops her piano and her paint-brush as she drops her coquetries and flirtations, when the fish is landed and she can throw the bait away. Or, what is worse, she keeps them alive as little social enjoyments, as reliefs to the tedium of domestic life, as something which fills up the weary hours when she is fated to the boredom of rural existence.

A woman of business is counted a strange and remarkable being, we hardly know why. Looking coolly at the matter, it seems to us that all women are women of business; that their life is spent over the counter; that there is nothing in earth or heaven too sacred for their traffic and their barter. Love, youth, beauty, a British mother reckons them up on her fingers, and tells you to a fraction their value in the market. And the pale sentimental being at her side, after flooring one big fellow with a bit of Chopin, and another with a highly unintelligible verse of Robert Browning, poses herself shyly and asks through appealing eyes, "Am I not an aesthetic creature?"

The answer to this question is best read, perhaps, in the musical aspect of woman. Bold as the a.s.sumption sounds, it is quietly a.s.sumed that every woman is naturally musical. Music is the great accomplishment, and the logic of her schools proves to demonstration that every girl has fingers and an ear. In a wonderful number of cases the same logic proves that girls have a voice. Anyhow, the a.s.sumption moulds the very course of female existence. The morning is spent in practicing, and the evening in airing the results of the practice. There are country-houses where one only rushes away from the elaborate Thalberg of midnight to be roused up at dawn by the Battle of Prague on the piano in the school-room over-head. Still we all reconcile ourselves to this perpetual rattle, because we know that a musical being has to be educated into existence, and that a woman is necessarily a musical being. A glance, indeed, at what we may call the life of the piano explains the necessity.