The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays Volume Ii Part 1

The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays.

Vol. II.

by Eliza Lynn Linton.

_GUSHING MEN._

The picture of a gushing creature all heart and no brains, all impulse and no ballast, is familiar to most of us; and we know her, either by repute or by personal acquaintance, as well as we know our alphabet.

But we are not so familiar with the idea of the gushing man. Yet gushing men exist, if not in such numbers as their sisters, still in quite sufficient force to const.i.tute a distinct type. The gushing man is the furthest possible removed from the ordinary manly ideal, as women create it out of their own imaginations. Women like to picture men as inexorably just, yet tender; calm, grave, restrained, yet full of pa.s.sion well mastered; Greathearts with an eye cast Mercywards if you will, else unapproachable by all the world; Goethes with one weak corner left for Bettina, where love may queen it over wisdom, but in all save love strong as t.i.tans, powerful as G.o.ds, unchangeable as fate. They forgive anything in a man who is manly according to their own pattern and ideas. Even harshness amounting to brutality is condoned if the hero have a jaw of sufficient squareness, and mighty pa.s.sions just within the limits of control--as witness _Jane Eyre's_ Rochester and his long line of unpleasant followers. But this harshness must be accompanied by love. Like the Russian wife who wept for want of her customary thrashing, taking immunity from the stick to mean indifference, these women would rather have brutality with love than no love at all.

But a gushing man, as judged by men among men, is a being so foreign to the womanly ideal that very few understand him when they do see him. And they do not call him gushing. He is frank, enthusiastic, unworldly, aspiring; perhaps he is labelled with that word of power, 'high-souled;' but he is not gushing, save when spoken of by men who despise him. For men have an intense contempt for him. A woman who has no ballast, and whose self-restraint goes to the winds on every occasion, is accepted for what she is worth, and but little disappointment and less annoyance is felt for what is wanting. Indeed, men in general expect so little from women that their follies count as of course and only what might be looked for. They are like marriage, or the English climate, or a lottery ticket, or a dark horse heavily backed, and have to be taken for better or worse as they may turn out, with the violent probability that the chances are all on the side of the worse.

But the gushing man is inexcusable. He is a nuisance or a laughing-stock; and as either he is resented. In his club, at the mess-table, in the city, at home, wherever he may be and whatever he may be about, he is always plunging headlong into difficulties and dragging his friends with him; always quarrelling for a straw; putting himself grossly in the wrong and vehemently apologizing afterwards; hitting wild at one moment and down on his knees the next, and as absurd in the one att.i.tude as he is abject in the other. He falls in love at first sight and makes a fool of himself on unknown ground while with men he is ready to swear eternal friendship or undying enmity before he has had time to know anything whatever about the object of his regard or his dislike. In consequence he is being perpetually a.s.sociated with shaky names and brought into questionable positions. He is full of confidence in himself on every occasion, and is given to making the most positive a.s.sertions on things he knows nothing about; when afterwards he is obliged to retract and to own himself mistaken. But he is just as full of self-abas.e.m.e.nt when, like vaulting ambition, he has overleaped himself and fallen into mistakes and failures unawares. He makes rash bets about things of which he has the best information; so he says; and will not be staved off by those who know what folly he is committing, but insists on writing himself down after Dogberry at the cost of just so much. He backs the worst player at billiards on the strength of a chance hazard, and bets on the losing hand at whist. He goes into wild speculations in the city, where he is certain to land a pot of money according to his own account and whence he comes with empty pockets, as you foretold and warned. He takes up with all manner of doubtful schemes and yet more doubtful promoters; but he will not be advised. Is he not gushing? and does not the quality of gushingness include an Arcadian belief in the virtue of all the world?

The gushing man is the very pabulum of sharks and sharpers; and it is he whose impressibility and gullible good-nature supply wind for the sails of half the rotten schemes afloat. Full of faith in his fellows, and of belief in a brilliant future to be had by good luck and not by hard work, he cannot bring himself to doubt either men or measures; unless indeed his gushingness takes the form of suspicion, and then he goes about delivering himself of accusations not one of which he can substantiate by the weakest bulwark of fact, and doubting the soundness of investments as safe as the Three per Cents.

In manner the gushing man is familiar and caressing. He may be patronizing or playful according to the bent of his own nature. If the first, he will call his superior, My dear boy, and pat him on the back encouragingly; if the second, he will put his arm schoolboy fashion round the neck of any man of note who has the misfortune of his intimacy, and call him Old fellow, or Governor, or _rex meus_, as he is inclined. With women his familiarity is excessively offensive. He gives them pet names, or calls to them by their Christian names from one end of the room to the other, and pats and paws them in all fraternal affectionateness, after about the same length of acquaintanceship as would bring other men from the bowing stage to that of shaking hands. His manners throughout are enough to compromise the toughest reputation; and one of the worst misfortunes that can befall a woman whose circ.u.mstances lay her specially open to slander and misrepresentation is to include among her friends a gushing man of energetic tendencies, on the look-out to do her a good turn if he can, and anxious to let people see on what familiar terms he stands with her. He means nothing in the least degree improper when he puts his arm round her waist, calls her My dear and even Darling in a loud voice for all the world to hear; or when he seats himself at her table before folk to write her private messages, which he makes believe to be of so much importance that they must not be spoken aloud, and which are of no importance at all. He is only familiar and gushing; and he would be the first to cry out against the evil imagination of the world which saw harm in what he does with such innocent intent.

The gushing man has one grave defect--he is not safe nor secret. From no bad motive, but just from the blind propulsion of gushingness, he cannot keep a secret, and he is sure to let out sooner or later all he knows. He holds back nothing of his friends nor of his own--not even when his honour is engaged in the trust; being essentially loose-lipped, and with his emotional life always bubbling up through the thin crust of conventional reserve. Not that he means to be dishonourable; he is only gushing and unrestrained. Hence every friend he has knows all about him. His latest lover learns the roll-call of all his previous loves; and there is not a man in his club, with whom he is on speaking terms, who does not know as much. Women who trust themselves to gushing men simply trust themselves to broken reeds; and they might as well look for a sieve that will hold water as expect a man of the sieve nature to keep their secret, whatever it may cost them and him to divulge it.

As a theorist the gushing man is for ever advocating untenable opinions and taking up with extreme doctrines, which he announces confidently and out of which he can be argued by the first opponent he encounters. The facility with which he can be bowled over on any ground--he calls it being converted--is in fact one of his most striking characteristics; and a gushing man rushes from the school of one professor to that of another, his zeal unabated, no matter how many his reconversions. He is always finding the truth, which he never retains; and the loudest and most active in d.a.m.ning a cast-off doctrine is the gushing man who has once followed it. As a leader, he is irresistible to both boys and women. His enthusiastic, unreflecting, unballasted character finds a ready response in the youthful and feminine nature; and he is the idol of a small knot of ardent worshippers, who believe in him as the logical and well-balanced man is never believed in. He takes them captive by a community of imagination, of impulsiveness, of exaggeration; and is followed just in proportion to his unfitness to lead.

This is the kind of man who writes sentimental novels, with a good deal of love laced with a vague form of pantheism or of weak evangelical religion, to suit all tastes; or he is great in a certain kind of indefinite poetry which no one has yet been found to understand, save perhaps, a special Soul Sister, which is the subdued version among us of the more suggestive Spiritual Wife. He adores the feminine virtues, which he places far beyond all the masculine ones; and expatiates on the beauty of the female character which he thinks is to be the rule of the future. Perhaps though, he goes off into panegyrics on the Vikings and the Berserkers; or else plunges boldly into the mists of the Arthurian era, and gushes in obsolete English about chivalry and the Round Table, Sir Launcelot and the Holy Graal, to the bewilderment of his entranced audience to whom he does not supply a glossary. In religion he is generally a mystic and always in extremes. He can never be pinned down to logic, to facts, to reason; and to his mind the golden mean is the sin for which the Laodicean Church was cursed. Feeling and emotion and imagination do all the work of the world according to him; and when he is asked to reason and to demonstrate, he answers, with the lofty air of one secure of the better way, that he Loves, and that Love sees further and more clearly than reason.

As the strong-minded woman is a mistake among women, so is the gushing man among men. Fluid, unstable, without curb to govern or rein to guide, he brings into the masculine world all the mental frailties of the feminine, and adds to them the force of his own organization as a man. Whatever he may be he is a disaster; and at all times is a.s.sociated with failure. He is the revolutionary leader who gets up abortive risings--the schemer whose plans run into sand--the poet whose books are read only by schoolgirls, or lie on the publisher's shelves uncut, as his gushingness bubbles over into twaddle or exhales itself in the smoke of obscurity--the fanatic whose faith is more madness than philosophy--the man of society who is the b.u.t.t of his male companions and the terror of his lady acquaintances--the father of a family which he does his best, unintentionally, to ruin by neglect, which he calls nature, or by eccentricity of training, which he calls faith--and the husband of a woman who either worships him in blind belief, or who laughs at him in secret, as heart or head preponderates in her character. In any case he is a man who never finds the fitting time or place; and who dies as he has lived, with everything about him incomplete.

_SWEET SEVENTEEN._

A vast amount of poetry has always been thrown round that special time of a woman's life when,

Standing with reluctant feet Where the brook and river meet,

she is no longer a child and yet not quite a woman--that transition time between the closed bud and the full-blown flower which we in England express by the term, among others, of Sweet Seventeen. Without meaning to be sentimental, or to envelope things in a golden haze wrought by the imagination only and nowhere to be found in fact, we cannot deny the peculiar charm which belongs to a girl of this age, if she is nice, and neither pert nor silly. Besides, it is not only what she is that interests us, but what she will be; for this is the time when the character is settling into its permanent form, so that the great thought of every one connected with her is, How will she turn out? Into what kind of woman will the girl develop? and, What kind of life will she make for herself?

Certainly Sweet Seventeen may be a most unlovely creature, and in fact she often is; a creature hard and forward, having lost the innocence and obedience of childhood and having gained nothing yet of the tact and grace of womanhood; a creature whose hopes and thoughts are all centred on the time when she shall be brought out and have her fling of flirting and fine dresses with the rest. Or she may be only a gauche and giggling schoolgirl, with a mind as narrow as her life, given up to the small intrigues and scandals of the dormitory and the playground--a girl who scamps her lessons and cheats her masters; whose highest efforts of intellect are shown in the cleverness with which she can break the rules of the establishment without being found out; who thinks talking at forbidden times, peeping through forbidden windows, giving silly nicknames to her companions and teachers, and telling silly secrets with less truth than ingenuity in them, the greatest fun imaginable, and all the greater because of the spice of rebellion and perversity with which her folly is dashed. Or she may be a mere tomboy, regretting her s.e.x and despising its restraints; cultivating schoolboy slang and aping schoolboy habits; ridiculing her sisters and disliked by her companions, while thinking girlhood a bore and womanhood a mistake in exact proportion to its feminality. Or she may be a budding miss, shy and awkward, with no harm in her and as little good--a mere sketch of a girl, without a leading line as yet made out or the dominant colour so much as indicated.

Sometimes she is awkward in another way, being studious and preoccupied--when she pa.s.ses for odd and original, and is partly feared, partly disliked, and wholly misunderstood by her own young world; and sometimes she has a cynical contempt for men and beauty and pleasure and dress, when she will make herself ridiculous by her revolt against all the canons of good taste and conventionality. But after her _debut_ in tattered garments of severe colours and ungainly cut, she will probably end her days as a frantic Fashionable, the salvation of whose soul depends on the faultless propriety of her wardrobe. The eccentricities of Sweet Seventeen not unfrequently revenge themselves by an exactly opposite extravagance of maturity.

But though there are enough and to spare of girls according to all these patterns, the Sweet Seventeen of one's affections is none of them. And yet she is not always the same, but has her different presentations, her varying facets, which give her variety of charm and beauty.

The best and loveliest thing about Sweet Seventeen is her sense of duty--for the most part a new sense. She no longer needs to be told what to do; she has not to be kept to her tasks by the fear of authority nor the submissive grace of obedience; but of her own free will, because understanding that it is her duty and that duty is a holier thing than self-will, she conscientiously does what she does not like to do, and cheerfully gives up what she desires without being driven or exhorted. She has generally before her mind some favourite heroine in a girl's novel, who goes through much painful discipline and comes out all the brighter for it in the end; and she makes n.o.ble resolves of living as worthily as her model. She comforts her soul too, with pa.s.sages from Longfellow and Tennyson and the 'Christian Year,' and learns long extracts from 'Evangeline' and the 'Idyls;'

poetry having an almost magical influence over her, nearly as powerful as the Sunday sermons to which she listens so devoutly and tries so patiently to understand. For the first time she wakes to a dim sense of her own individuality, and confesses to herself that she has a life of her own, apart from and extraneous to her mere family membership.

She is not only the sister or the daughter living with and for her parents or her brothers and sisters, but she is also herself, with a future of her own not to be shared with them, not to be touched by them. And she begins to have vague dreams of this future and its hero--dreams that are as much of fairyland as if they were of the young prince coming over the sea in a golden boat to find the princess in a tower of bra.s.s waiting for him.

Quite impersonal, and with a hero only in the clouds, nevertheless these dreams are suggested by the special circ.u.mstances of her life, by her favourite books or the style of society in which she has been placed. The young prince is either a beautiful and high-souled clergyman--not unlike the young vicar or the new curate, but infinitely more beautiful--an apostle in the standing collar and single-breasted coat of the nineteenth century; or he is an artist in a velvet blouse and with flowing hair, living in a world of beauty such as no Philistine can imagine; or he is a gallant sailor, with blue eyes and a loose necktie, looking up to heaven in a gale, and thinking of his mother and sisters at home and of the one still more beloved, when he certainly ought to be thinking of tarry ropes and coa.r.s.e sailcloth; or he is a magnificent young officer heading his men at a charge, and looking supremely well got up and handsome. This is the kind of _futur_ she dreams of when she dreams at all, which is not often. The reality of her mature life is perhaps a stolid square-set squire, or a prosaic city merchant without the thinnest thread of romance in his composition; while her own life, which was to be such a lovely poem of graceful usefulness and heroic beauty, sinks into the prosaic routine of housekeeping and society, the sigh after the vanished ideal growing fainter and fainter as the weight of fact grows heavier.

Married men are all sacred to Sweet Seventeen when she is a good girl; so are engaged men. For the matter of that, she believes that nothing could induce her to marry either a widower or one who had been already engaged, as nothing could induce her to marry any man under five foot eleven, or with a snub nose or sandy whiskers. Sweet Seventeen has in general the most profound aversion for boys. To be sure she may have her favourites--very few and very seldom; but she mostly thinks them stupid or conceited, and impartially resents either their awkward attentions to herself or their a.s.sumptions of superiority. An abnormally clever boy--the Poet-Laureate or George Stephenson of his generation--is her detestation, because he is odd and unlike every one else; while the one that she dislikes least among them is the school hero, who is first in the sports and takes all the prizes, and who goes through life loved by every one and never famous.

For her several brothers she has a range of entirely different feelings. Her younger schoolboy brothers she regards as the torments of her existence, whose unkempt hair, dirty boots and rude manners are her special crosses, to be borne with patience, tempered by an active endeavour after reform. But the more advanced, and those who are older than herself, are her loves for whom she has an enthusiastic admiration, and whose future she believes in as something specially brilliant and successful. If only slightly older or younger than herself, she impresses them powerfully with the sentiment of her superiority, and patronizes them--kindly enough; but she makes them feel the ineffable supremacy of her s.e.x, and how that she by virtue of her womanhood is a glorified creature beside them--an Ariel to their Caliban.

Now too, she begins to speak to her mother on more equal terms; to criticize her dress, and to make her understand that she considers her old-fashioned and inclined to be dowdy. She ties her bonnet-strings for her; arranges her cap; smartens up her old dress and compels her to buy a new one; and, while considering her immeasurably ancient, likes her to look nice, and thinks her in her own way beautiful.

Sometimes she opposes and quarrels with her, if the mother has less tact than arbitrariness. But this is not her natural state; for one of the characteristics of Sweet Seventeen is her love for her mother and her need of better counsel and guidance; so that if she comes into opposition with her it is only through extreme pain, and the bitter teaching of tyranny and injustice. This is just the age indeed, when the mother's influence is everything to a girl; and when a silly, an unjust, or an unprincipled woman is the very ruin of her life. But with a low or evil-natured mother we seldom see a Sweet Seventeen worth the trouble of writing about: which shows at least one thing--the importance of the womanly influence at such a time, and how so much that we blame in our modern girls lies to the account of their mothers.

Great tact is required with Sweet Seventeen in such society as is allowed her; care to bring her out a little without obtruding her on the world, without making her forward and consequential, and without attracting too much attention to her. She is no longer a child to be shut away in the nursery, but she is not yet ent.i.tled to the place and consideration of a member of society. And yet it would be cruel to debar her wholly from all that is going on in the house. To be sure there is the governess, as well as mamma, to look after her manners and to give her rope enough and not too much; but by the time a girl is seventeen a governess has ceased to be the autocrat _ex officio_, and she obeys her or not according to their respective strengths.

Still, the governess or mamma is for the most part at her elbow; and Sweet Seventeen, if well brought up, is left very little to her own guidance, and sees the world only through half-opened doors.

Girls of this age are often wonderfully sad, and full of a kind of wondering despair at the sin and misery they are beginning to learn.

They take up extreme views in religion and talk largely on the nothingness of pleasure and the emptiness of the world; and many fair young creatures whom their elders, laden with sorrowful experience, think full of hope and joy, are ready to give up all the pleasure of life, and to lay down life itself, for very disgust of that of which they know nothing. They delight in sorrowful lamentations and sentimental regrets put into rhyme; and one of the funniest things in the world is to see a girl dancing with the merriest in the evening, and to hear her talking broken-hearted pessimism in the morning. It is merely an example of the old proverb about the meeting of extremes; vacuity leading to the same results as experience.

But however she takes this unknown life, it is always in an unreal and romantic aspect. Some of more robust mind delight in the bolder stories of Greece and Rome, and wish they had played a part in the sensational heroism of those grand old times; while others go to Venice, and make pictures for themselves out of the gliding gondolas and the mysterious Council of Ten, the lovely ladies with grim old fathers and high-handed brothers acting as gaolers, and the handsome cavaliers serenading them in the moonlight. That is their idea of love. They have no perception of anything warmer. It is all romance and poetry, and tender glances from afar, and long and patient wooing under difficulties and a little danger, with scarce a word spoken, and nothing more expressive than a flower furtively given, or a fleeting pressure of the finger tips. They know nothing else and expect nothing else. Their cherry is without stone, their bird without bone, their orange without rind, as in the old song; and they imagine a love as unreal as all the rest.

When thrown into actualities, though--say when left motherless, and the eldest girl of perhaps a large family with a father to comfort and a young brood to see after--Sweet Seventeen is often very beautiful in her degree, and rises grandly to her position. Sometimes the burden of her responsibilities is too much for her tender shoulders, and she is overweighted, and fails. Sometimes too she is tyrannical and selfish in such a position, and uses her power ill; and sometimes she is careless and good-humoured, when they all scramble up together, through confusion, dirt and disorder, till the close time is over, and they scatter themselves abroad. Sometimes she is a martyr, and makes herself and every one else uncomfortable by the perpetual demonstration of her martyrdom, and how she considers herself sacrificed and put upon. Indeed she is not unfrequently a martyr from other causes than heavy duties, being fond of adopting unworkable views which cannot run in the family groove anyhow. If she falls upon this rock she is in her glory; youth being marvellously proud of voluntary crucifixion, and thinking itself especially ill-used because it must be made conformable and is prevented from making itself ridiculous.

But Sweet Seventeen is intolerant of all moral differences. What she holds to be right is the absolute, the one sole and only just law; and she thinks it tampering with sin to allow that any one else has an equal right with herself to a contrary opinion. But on the whole she is a pleasant, loveable interesting creature; and one's greatest regret about her is that she is so often in the hands of unsuitable guides, and that her powers and n.o.ble impulses get so stunted and shadowed by the commonplace training which is her general lot, and the low aims of life which are the only ones held out to her.

_THE HABIT OF FEAR._

The mind, like the body, contracts tricks and habits which in time become automatic and involuntary--habits of a.s.sociation, tricks of repet.i.tion, of which the excess is monomania, but which, without attaining to quite that extreme, become more or less masters of the brain and directors of the thoughts. And, of all these tricks of the mind, the habit of fear is the most insidious and persistent. It is seldom that any one who has once given in to it is able to clear himself of it again. However unreasonable it may be, the trick clings, and it would take an exceptionally strong intellect to be convinced of its folly and learn the courage of common-sense. But this is just the intellect which does not allow itself to contract the habit in the beginning; a coward being for the most part a washy, weak kind of being, with very little backbone anyhow. We do not mean by this fear that which is physical and personal only, though this is generally the sole idea which people have of the word; but moral and mental cowardice as well. Personal fear indeed, is common enough, and as pitiable as it is common; and we are ashamed to say that it is not confined to women, though naturally it is more predominant with them than with men.

As for women, the tyranny of fear lies very heavy on them, taking the flavour out of many a life which else would be perfectly happy; being often the only bitter drop in a cup full of sweetness. But how bitter that drop is!--bitter enough to destroy all the sweetness of the rest.

Some women live in the perpetual presence of dread, both mental and personal. It surrounds them like an atmosphere; it clothes them like a garment; day by day, and from night to morning, it dogs their steps and sits like a nightmare on their hearts; it is their very root work of sensation, and they could as soon live without food as live without fear.

Ludicrous as many of their terrors are, we still cannot help pitying these poor self-made martyrs of imaginary danger. Take that most familiar of all forms of fear among women, the fear of burglars, and let us imagine for a moment the horror of the life which is haunted by a nightly dread--by a terror that comes with as unfailing regularity as the darkness--and measure, if we can, the amount of anguish that must be endured before death comes to take off the torture. There are many women to whom night is simply this time of torture, never varying, never relieved. They dare not lock their doors, because then they would be at the mercy of the man who sooner or later is to come in at the window; and if they hear the boards creak or the furniture crack they are in agonies because of the man who they are sure is in the house, and who will come in at the door. They cannot sleep if they have not looked all about the room--under the bed, behind the curtains, into the closet, where perhaps a dress hanging a little fantastically gives them a nervous start that lasts for the night.

But though they search so diligently they would probably faint on the spot if they so much as saw the heels of the housebreaker they are looking for. Yet you cannot reason with these poor creatures. You cannot deny the fact that burglars have been found before now secreted in bedrooms; and you cannot pooh-pooh the murders and housebreakings which are reported in the newspapers; so you have nothing to say to their argument that things which have happened once may happen again, and that there is no reason why they specially should be exempt from a misfortune to which others have been subjected. But you feel that their terrors are just so much pith and substance taken out of their strength; and that if they could banish the fear of burglars from their minds they would be so much the more valuable members of society, while the exorcism of their dismal demon would be so much the better for themselves.

It is the same in everything. If they are living in the country, and go up to London lodgings, they take the ground floor for fear of fire and being burnt alive in their beds. If they go from London to the country they see an escaped convict or a murderer in every ragged reaper asking for work, or every tramp that begs for broken victuals at the door. The country to them is full of dangers. In the shooting season they are sure they will be shot if they go near a wood or a turnip-field. They think they will be gored to death if they meet a meek-eyed cow going placidly through the lane to her milking; and you might as well try to march them up to the cannon's mouth as induce them to cross a field where cattle are grazing. If they are driving, and the horses are going at full trot, they say they are running away and clutch the driver's arm nervously. As travellers they are in a state of not wholly unreasonable apprehension the whole time the railway journey lasts. They wait at Folkestone for days for a smooth crossing; and when they are on board they call a breeze a gale, and make sure they are bound for the bottom if the sea chops enough to rock the boat so much as a cradle. If they go over a Swiss pa.s.s they say their prayers and shut their eyes till it is over; and they are horribly afraid of banditti on every foot of Italian ground, besides firmly believing in the complicity with brigands of all the innkeepers and _vetturini_.

Their fear extends to all who belong to them, for whom they conjure up scenes of deadly disaster so soon as they are out of sight. Their fancy is faceted, like the eyes of a fly, and they worry themselves and every one else by exaggerating every chance of danger into a certainty of destruction. When an epidemic is abroad, they are sure all the children will take it; and if they have taken it, they are sure they will never get over it. In illness indeed, those people who have allowed themselves to fall into the habit of fear are especially full of foreboding; not because they are more loving, more sympathetic than others, but because they are more timid and less hopeful. If you believe them, no one will recover who is in any way seriously attacked; and the smallest ailment in themselves or their friends is the sure forerunner of a mortal sickness. They make no allowance for the elastic power of human nature; and they dislike hope and courage in others, thinking you unfeeling in exact proportion to your cheerfulness.

Morally this same habit of fear deteriorates, because it weakens and narrows, the whole nature. So far from following Luther's famous advice--Sin boldly and leave the rest to G.o.d--their sin is their very fear, their unconquerable distrust. These are the people who regard our affections as snares and all forms of pleasure as so many waymarks on the road to perdition--who would narrow the circle of human life to the smallest point both of feeling and action, because of the sin in which, according to them, the whole world is steeped. They see guilt everywhere, but innocence not at all. Their minds are set to the trick of terror; and fear of the power of the devil and the anger of G.o.d weighs on them like an iron chain from which there is no release.

This is not so much from delicacy of conscience as from simple moral cowardice; for you seldom find these very timid people lofty-minded or capable of any great act of heroism. On the contrary, they are generally peevish and always selfish; self-consideration being the tap-root of their fears, though the cause is a.s.signed to all sorts of pretty things, such as acute sensibilities, keen imagination, bad health, tender conscience, delicate nerves--to anything in fact but the real cause, a cowardly habit of fear produced by continual moral selfishness, by incessant thought of and regard for themselves.

Nothing is so depressing as the society of a timid person, and nothing is so infectious as fear. Live with any one given up to an eternal dread of possible dangers and disasters, and you can scarcely escape the contagion, nor, however brave you may be, maintain your cheerfulness and faculty of faith. Indeed, as timid folks crave for sympathy in their terrors--that very craving being part of their malady of fear--you cannot show them a cheerful countenance under pain of offence, and seeming to be brutal in your disregard of what so tortures them. Their fears may be simply absurd and irrational, yet you must sympathize with them if you wish even to soothe; argument or common-sense demonstration of their futility being so much mental ingenuity thrown away.

Fear breeds suspicion too, and timid people are always suspecting ill of some one. The deepest old diplomatist who has probed the folly and evil of the world from end to end, and who has sharpened his wits at the expense of his trust, is not more full of suspicion of his kind than a timid, superst.i.tious, world-withdrawn man or woman given up to the tyranny of fear. Every one is suspected more or less, but chiefly lawyers, servants and all strangers. Any demonstration of kindness or interest at all different from the ordinary jogtrot of society fills them with undefined suspicion and dread; and, fear being in some degree the product of a diseased imagination, the 'probable' causes for anything they do not quite understand would make the fortune of a novel-writer if given him for plots. If any one wants to hear thrilling romances in course of actual enactment, let him go down among remote and quiet-living country people, and listen to what they have to say of the chance strangers who may have established themselves in the neighbourhood, and who, having brought no letters of introduction, are not known by the aborigines. The Newgate Calendar or Dumas' novels would scarcely match the stories which fear and ignorance have set afoot.

Fearful folk are always on the brink of ruin. They cannot wait to see how things will turn before they despair; and they cannot hope for the best in a bad pa.s.s. They are engulfed in abysses which never open, and they die a thousand deaths before the supreme moment actually arrives.

The smallest difficulties are to them like the straws placed crosswise over which no witch could pa.s.s; the beneficent action of time, either as a healer of sorrow or a revealer of hidden mercies, is a word of comfort they cannot accept for themselves, how true soever it may be for others; the doctrine that chances are equal for good as well as for bad is what they will not understand; and they know of no power that can avert the disaster, which perhaps is simply a possibility not even probable, and which their own fears only have arranged. If they are professional men, having to make their way, they are for ever antic.i.p.ating failure for to-day and absolute destruction for to-morrow; and they bemoan the fate of the wife and children sure to be left to poverty by their untimely decease, when the chances are ten to one in favour of the apportioned threescore and ten years. Life is a place of suffering here and a place of torment hereafter; yet they often wish to die, reversing Hamlet's decision by thinking the mystery of unknown ills preferable to the reality of those they have on hand.

Over such minds as these the vaticinations of such a prophet as Dr.