The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays Volume I Part 11

_DOVECOTS._

Times must be very bad indeed if a faithful few are not still left to keep the sources of society sweet and wholesome. When corruption has gone through the whole ma.s.s and all cla.s.ses are bad alike, everything comes to an end, and there is a general overthrow of national life; but while some are left pure and unspotted, we are not quite undone, and we may reasonably hope for better days in the future. In the midst of the reign of the Girl of the Period, with her slang and her boldness--of the fashionable woman, with her denial of duty and her madness for pleasure--we come every now and then upon a group of good girls of the real old English type; the faithful few growing up silently among us, but none the less valuable because they are silent and make no public display; doves who are content with life as they have it in the dovecot, and have no desire to be either eagles dwelling on romantic heights, or peac.o.c.ks displaying their pride in sunny courts. We find these faithful few in town and country alike; but they are rifest in the country, where there is less temptation to go wrong than there is in the large towns, and where life is simpler and the moral tone undeniably higher. The leading feature of these girls is their love of home and of their own family, and their power of making occupation and happiness out of apparently meagre materials. If they are the elders, they find amus.e.m.e.nt and interest in their little brothers and sisters, whom they consider immensely funny and to whom they are as much girl-mothers as sisters; if they are the youngers, they idolize their baby nephews and nieces. For there is always a baby going on somewhere about these houses--babies being the great excitement of home-life, and the antiseptic element among women which keeps everything else pure. They are pa.s.sionately attached to papa and mamma, whom they think the very king and queen of humanity, yet whom they do not call by even endearing slang names. It has never occurred to them to criticize them as ordinary mortals; and as they have not been in the way of learning the prevailing accent of disrespect, they have not shaken off that almost religious veneration for their parents which all young people naturally feel, if they have been well brought up and are not corrupted.

The yoke in most middle-cla.s.s country-houses is one fitting very loosely round all necks; and as they have all the freedom they desire or could use, the girls are not fretted by undue pressure, and are content to live in peace under such restraints as they have. They adore their elder brothers who are from home just beginning the great battle of life for themselves, and confidently believe them to be the finest fellows going, and the future great men of the day if only they care to put out those splendid talents of theirs, and take the trouble of plucking the prizes within their reach. They may have a slight reservation perhaps, in favour of the brother's friend, whom they place on a pedestal of almost equal height. But they keep their mental architecture a profound secret from every one, and do not suffer it to grow into too solid a structure unless it has some surer foundation than their own fancy. For, though doves are loving, they are by no means lovesick, and are too healthy and natural and quietly busy for unwholesome dreams. If one of them marries, they all unite in loving the man who comes in among them. He is adopted as one of themselves, and leaps into a family of idolizing sisters who pet him as their brother--with just that subtle little difference in their petting, in so much as it comes from sisters unaccustomed, and so has the charm of novelty without the prurient excitement of naughtiness.

But this kind of thing is about the most dangerous to a man's moral nature that can befall him. Though pretty to see and undeniably pleasant to experience, and though perfectly innocent in every way, still, nothing enervates him so much as this idolatrous submission of a large family of women. In a widow's house, where there are many daughters and no sons, and where the man who marries one marries the whole family and is worshipped accordingly, the danger is of course increased tenfold; but if there are brothers and a father, the sister's husband, though affectionately cooed over, is not made quite such a fuss with, and the a.s.sociation is all the less hurtful in consequence.

These girls lead a by no means stupid life, though it is a quiet one, and without any spasmodic events or tremendous cataclysms. They go a great deal among the village poor, and they teach at the Sunday-school, and attend the mothers' meetings and clothing-clubs and the like, and learn to get interested in their humbler friends, who after all are Christian sisters. They read their romances in real life instead of in three-volume novels, and study human nature as it is--in the rough certainly, but perhaps in more genuine form than if they learnt it only in what is called society. Then they have their pleasures, though they are of an unexciting kind and what fast girls would call awfully slow. They have their horses and their croquet parties, their lawn tennis and their archery meetings; they have batches of new music, and a monthly box from Mudie's--and they know the value of both; they go out to tea, and sometimes to dinner, in the neighbourhood; and they enjoy the rare county b.a.l.l.s with a zest unknown to London girls who are out every night in the week. They have their village flower-shows, which the great families patronize in a free-and-easy kind of way, and which give occupation for weeks before and subject for talk for weeks after; their school feasts, where the pet parson of the district comes out with his best anecdotes, and makes mild jokes at a long distance from Sydney Smith; their periodical missionary meetings, where they have great guns from London, and where they hear unctuous stories about the saintliness of converted cannibals, and are required to believe in the power of change of creed to produce an ethnological miracle; they have their friends to stay with them--school-girl friends--with whom they exchange deep confidences, and go back over the old days--so old to their youth!--their brothers come down in the summer, and their brothers' friends come with them, and do a little spooning in the shrubbery. But there is more spooning done at picnics than anywhere else; and more offers are made there under the shadow of the old ruin, or in the quiet leafy nook by the river side, than at any other gathering time of the country. And as we are all to a certain extent what we are made by our environment, the doves take to these pleasures quite kindly and gratefully, as being the only ones known to them, and enjoy themselves in a simplicity of circ.u.mstances which would give no pleasure at all to girls accustomed to more highly-spiced entertainments.

Doves know very little of evil. They are not in the way of learning it; and they do not care to learn it. The few villagers who are supposed to lead ill lives are spoken of below the breath, and carefully avoided without being critically studied. When the railway is to be carried past their quiet nest, there is an immense excitement as the report goes that a knot of strange men have been seen scattering themselves over the fields with their little white flags and theodolites, their measuring lines and levels. But when the army of navvies follows after, the excitement is changed to consternation, and a general sense of evil to come advancing ruthlessly towards them. The clergy of the district organize special services, and the scared doves keep religiously away from the place where the navvies are hutted. They think them little better than the savages about whom the Deputation tell them once or twice a year; and they create almost as much terror as an encampment of gipsies. They represent the lawless forces of the world and the unknown sins of strong men; and the wildest story about them is not too wild to be believed. The railway altogether is a great offence to the neighbourhood, and the line is a.s.sumed to destroy the whole scenic beauty of the place. There are lamentations over the c.o.c.kneys it will bring down; over the high prices it will create, the immorality it will cause. Only the sons who are out in the world and have learnt how life goes on outside the dovecot, advocate keeping pace with the times; and a few of the stronger minded of the sisters listen to them with a timid admiration of their breadth and boldness, and think there may be two sides to the question after all. When the dashing captain and his fast wife suddenly appear in the village--as often happens in these remote districts--the doves are in a state of great moral tribulation. They are scandalized by Mrs. Highflyer's costume and complexion, and think her manners odd and doubtful; her slang shocks them; and when they meet her in the lanes, talking so loudly and laughing so shrilly with that horrid-looking man in a green cutaway, they feel as fluttered as their namesakes when a hawk is hovering over the farmyard. The dashing captain, who does not use a prayer-book at church, who stares at all the girls so rudely, and who has even been seen to wink at some of the prettier cottage girls, and his handsome wife with her equivocal complexion and p.r.o.nounced fashions, who makes eyes at the curate, are never heartily adopted by the local magnates, though vouched for by some far-away backer; and the doves always feel them to be strange bodies among them, and out of their rightful element somehow. If things go quietly without an explosion, well and good; but if the truth bursts to the surface in the shape of a London detective, and the Highflyers are found to be no better than they should be, the consternation and half-awed wonderment at the existence of so much effrontery and villany in their atmosphere create an impression which no time effaces. The first clash of innocence with evil is an event in the life of the innocent the effect of which nothing ever destroys.

The dovecot is rather dull in the winter, and the doves are somewhat moped; but even then they have the church to decorate, and the sentiment of Christmas to enliven them. The absent ones of the family too, return to the old hearth while they can; and as the great joy of the dovecot lies in the family union that is kept up, and in the family love which is so strong, the visits of those who no longer live at home bring a moral summer as warm and cheering as the physical sunshine. But they do not all a.s.semble. For many of the doves marry men whose work lies abroad; these quiet country-houses being the favourite matrimonial hunting-grounds for colonists and Anglo-Indians.

So that some are always absent whose healths are drunk in the traditional punch, while eyes grow moist as the names are given. Doves are not disinclined to marry men who have to go abroad, for all the pa.s.sionate family love common to them. Travel is a golden dream to them in their still homes; but travel properly companioned. For even the most adventurous among them are not independent, as we mean when we speak of independence in women. They are essentially home-girls, family-girls, doves who cannot exist without a dovecot, however humble. The family is everything to them; and they are utterly unfit for the solitude which so many of our self-supporting women can accept quite resignedly. Not that they are necessarily useless even as breadwinners. They could work, if pushed to it; but it must be in a quiet womanly way, with the mother, the sister, the husband as the helper--with the home as the place of rest and the refuge. Their whole lines are laid in love and quietness; not by any means in inaction, but all centred within the home circle. If they marry, they find the love of their husband enough for them, and have no desire for other men's admiration. Their babies are all the world to them, and they do not think maternity an infliction, as so many of the miserably fashionable think it. They like the occupation of housekeeping, and feel pride in their fine linen and clean service, in their well-ordered table and neatly-balanced accounts. They are kind to their servants, who generally come from the old home, and whose families they therefore know; but they keep up a certain dignity and tone of superiority towards them in the midst of all their kindness, which very few town-bred mistresses can keep to town-bred maids. They have always been the aristocracy in their native place; and they carry through life the ineffaceable stamp which being 'the best' gives.

Doves are essentially mild and gentle women; not queens of society even when they are pretty, because not caring for social success and therefore not laying themselves out for it; for if they please at home that is all they care for, holding love before admiration, and the esteem of one higher than the praise of many. If a fault is to be found with them it is that they have not perhaps quite enough salt for the general taste, used as it is to such highly-seasoned social food; but do we really want our women to have so very much character? Do not our splendid pa.s.sionate creatures lead madly wretched lives and make miserably uncomfortable homes? and are not our glorious heroines better in pictures and in fiction than seated by the domestic fire, or checking the baker's bill? No doubt the quiet home-staying doves seem tame enough when we think of the gorgeous beings made familiar to us by romance, and history, which is more romantic still; but as our daily lives run chiefly in prose, our doves are better fitted for things as they are; and to men who want wives and not playthings, and who care for the peace of family life and the dignity of home, they are beyond price when they can be found and secured. So that, on the whole, we can dispense with the splendid creatures of character and the magnificent queens of society sooner than with the quiet and un.o.btrusive doves. And though they do spoil men most monstrously, they know where to draw the line, and while petting their own at home they keep strangers abroad at a distance, and make themselves respected as only modest and gentle women are respected by men.

_BORED HUSBANDS._

The curtain falls on joined hands when it does not descend on a tragedy; and novels for the most part end with a wreath of orange-blossoms and a pair of high-stepping greys, as the last act that claims to be recorded. For both novelists and playwrights a.s.sume that with marriage all the great events of life have ceased, and that, once wedded to the beloved object, there is sure to be smooth sailing and halcyon seas to the end of time. It sounds very cynical and shocking to question this pretty belief; but unfortunately for us who live in the world as it is and not as it is supposed to be, we find that even a union with the beloved object does not always ensure perfect contentment in the home, and that bored husbands are by no means rare.

The ideal honeymoon is of course an Elysian time, during which nothing works rusty nor gets out of joint; and the ideal marriage is only a life-long honeymoon, where the happiness is more secure and the love deeper, if more sober; but the prose reality of one and the other has often a terrible dash of weariness in it, even under the most favourable conditions. Boredom begins in the very honeymoon itself. At first starting in married life there are many dangers to be encountered, not a shadow of which was seen in the wooing. There are odd freaks of temper turning up quite unexpectedly; there is the sense, so painful to some men, of being tied for life, of never being able to be alone again, never free and without responsibilities; there are misunderstandings to-day and the struggle for mastery to-morrow--the cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, which may prove to be the tempest that will destroy all; there is the unrest of travelling, and the awkwardness of unusual a.s.sociation, to help in the general discomfort; or, if the happy pair have settled down in a vale and a cottage for their month, there is the 'sad satiety' which all men feel after a time when they have had one companion only, with no outside diversion to cause a break. But the honeymoon at last draws to a close, and the relieved bridegroom gets back to his old haunts, to his work, his friends, and his club; and though he takes to all these things again with a difference, still they are helps and additions.

This is the time of trial to a woman. If she gets over this pinch, and is sensible enough to understand that human nature cannot be kept up at high pressure, even in love, and that a man must sooner or later come down from romance to work-a-day prose, from the pa.s.sionate lover to the cool and sober husband--if she can understand this, and settle into his pace, without fretting on the one hand or casting about for unhealthy distractions on the other--she will do well, and will probably make a pleasant home, and thereby diminish the boredom of life. But unfortunately, not every woman can do this; and it is just during this time of the man's transition from the lover to the friend that so many women begin to make shipwreck of their own happiness and his. They think to keep him a romantic wooer still, by their tears at his prosaic indifference to the little sentimentalities once so eagerly accepted and offered; they try to hold him close by their flattering but somewhat tiresome exactions; their jealousies--very pretty perhaps, and quite as flattering--are infinite, and as baseless as they are infinite; all of which is very nice up to a certain point and in the beginning of things, but all of which gets wearisome as time goes on, and a man wants both a little change and a little rest.

But women do not see this; or seeing it, they cannot accept it as a necessary condition of things; wherefore they go on in their fatal way, and by the very unwisdom of their own love bore their husband out of his. Or they grow substantially cold because he is superficially cooler, and think themselves justified in ceasing to love him altogether because he takes their love for granted, and so has ceased to woo it.

If they are jealous, or shy, or unsocial, as so many women are, they make life very heavy by their exclusiveness, and the monastic character they give the home. A man married to a woman of this kind is, in fact, a house prisoner, whose only free s.p.a.ces lie beyond the four walls of home. His bachelor friends are shut out. They smoke; or entice him to drink more than his wife thinks is good for him; or they induce him to bet on the Derby; or to play for half-crowns at whist or billiards; or they lead him in some other way of offence abhorrent to women. So the bachelor friends are shouldered out; and when the husband wants to entertain them, he must invite them to his club--if he has one--and pay the penalty when he gets home. In a few years' time his wife will be glad to encourage her sons' young friends to the house, for the sake of the daughters on hand; but husbands and sons are in a different category, and there are few fathers who do not learn, as time goes on, how much the mother will allow that the wife refused.

If bachelor friends are shouldered out of the house, all female friends are forbidden anything like an intimate footing, save those few whom the wife thinks specially devoted to herself and of whom she is not jealous. And these are very few. There are perhaps no women in the world so exclusive in their dealings with their husbands as are Englishwomen. A husband is bound to one woman only, no doubt; but the average wife thinks him also bound to have no affection whatever outside her and perhaps her family. If he meets an intelligent woman, pleasant to talk to, of agreeable manners and ready wit, and if he talks to her in consequence with anything like persistency or interest, he offends against the unwritten law; and his wife, whose utmost power of conversation consists in putting in a yes or no with tolerable accuracy of aim, thinks herself slighted and ill-used. She may be young and pretty, and dearly loved for her own special qualities; and her husband may not have a thought towards his new friend, or any other woman, in the remotest degree trenching on his allegiance to her; but the fact that he finds pleasure, though only of an intellectual and aesthetic kind, in the society of any other woman, that he feels an interest in her life, chooses her for his friend, or finds community of pursuits or sympathy in ideas, makes his wife by just so much a victim and aggrieved.

And yet what a miserably monotonous home is that to which she would confine him! He is at his office all day, badgered and worried with various business complications, and he comes home tired, perhaps cross--even well-conducted husbands have that way sometimes. He finds his wife tired and cross too; so that they begin the evening together mutually at odds, she irritated by small cares and he disturbed by large anxieties. Or he finds her preoccupied and absorbed in her own pursuits, and quite disinclined to make any diversion for his sake. He asks her for some music; she used to be ready enough to sing and play to him in the old love-making days; but she refuses now. Either she has some needlework to do, which might have been done during the day when he was out, or baby is asleep in the nursery, and music in the drawing-room would disturb him--at all events she cannot sing or play to-night; and even if she does--he has heard all her pieces so often! If he is not a reading-man, those long, dull, silent evenings are very trying. She works, and drives him wild with the click of her needle; or she reads the last new novel, and he hates novels, and gets tired to death when she insists on telling him all about the story and the characters; or she chooses the evening for letter-writing, and if the noise of her pen scratching over the paper does not irritate him, perhaps it sends him to sleep, when at least he is not bored. But dull, objectless, and vacant as their evenings are, his wife would not hear of any help from without to give just that little fillip which would prevent boredom and not create ceremony. She would think her life had gone to pieces, and that only desolation was before her, if he hinted that his home was dull, and that though he loves her very dearly and wants no other wife but her, yet that her society only--_toujours perdrix_, without change or addition--is a little stupid, however nice the partridge may be, and that things would be bettered if Mrs. or Miss So-and-So came in sometimes, just to brighten up the hours. And if he were to make a practice of bringing home his men friends, she would probably let all parties concerned feel pretty distinctly that she considered the home her special sanctuary, and that guests whom she did not invite were intruders. She would perhaps go willingly enough to a ball or crowded _soiree_, or she might like to give one; but that intimate form of society, which is a mere enlargement of the home life, she dreads as the supplementing of deficiencies, and thinks her married happiness safer in boredom than in any diversion from herself as the sole centre of her husband's pleasure.

Home life stagnates in England; and in very few families is there any mean between dissipation and this stagnation. We can scarcely wonder that so many husbands think matrimony a mistake as we have it in our insular arrangements; that they look back regretfully to the time when they were unfettered and not bored; or that their free friends, who watch them as wild birds watch their caged companions, curiously and reflectively, share their opinion. Wife and home, after all, make up but part of a man's life; they are not his all, and do not satisfy the whole of his social instinct; nor is any one woman the concentration of all womanhood to a man, leaving nothing that is beautiful, nor in its own unconjugal way desirable, on the outside. Besides, when with his wife a man is often as much isolated as when alone, for any real companionship there is between them. Few women take a living interest in the lives of men, and fewer still understand them. They expect the husband to sympathize with them in the kitchen gossip and the nursery chatter, the neighbours' doings and all the small household politics; but they are utterly unable to comprehend his pleasures, his thoughts, his duties, the responsibilities of his profession, or the bearings of any public question in which he takes a part.

Even if this were not so, and granting that they could enter fully into his life and sympathize with him as intelligent equals, not only as compa.s.sionate saints or loving children, there would still be the need of novelty, and still the certainty of boredom without it. For human life, like all other forms of life, must have a due proportion of fresh elements continually added to keep it sweet and growing, else it becomes stagnant and stunted. And daily intercourse undeniably exhausts the moral ground. After the close companionship of years no one can remain mentally fresh to the other, unless indeed one or both be of the rarest order of mind and of a practically inexhaustible power of acquiring knowledge. Save these exceptional instances, we must all of necessity get worn out by constant intercourse. We know every thought, every opinion, and almost every square inch of information possessed; we have heard the old stories again and again, and know exactly what will lead up to them, and at what point they will begin; we have measured the whole sweep of mind, and have probed its depths; and though we may love and value what we have learnt, yet we want something new--fresh food for interest, though not necessarily a new love for the displacement of the old. But this is what very few Englishwomen can understand or will allow. They hold so intensely by the doctrine of unity that they are even jealous of a man's pursuits, if they think these take up any place in his mind which might also be theirs. They must be good for every part of his life; and the poorest of them all must be his only source of interest, suffering no other woman to share his admiration nor obtain his friendship, though this would neither touch his love nor interfere with their rights. Friendship is a hard saying to them, and one they cannot receive. Wherefore they keep a tight grasp on the marital collar, and suffer no relief of monotony by judicious loosening, nor by generous faith in integral fidelity. The practical result of which is that most men are horribly bored at home, and that the ma.s.s of them really suffer from the domestic stagnation to which national customs and the exclusiveness of women doom them so soon as they become family men. It must however, in fairness be added, that in general they obtain some kind of compensation; and that very few walk meekly in their bonds without at times slipping them off, with or without the concurrence of their wives.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.