The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays Volume I Part 2

_IDEAL WOMEN._

It is often objected against fault-finders, writers or others, that they destroy but do not build up; that while industriously blaming errors they take good care not to praise the counteracting virtues; that in their zeal against the vermin of which they are seeking to sweep the house clean they forget the n.o.bler creatures which do the good work of keeping things sweet and wholesome. But it is impossible to be continually introducing the saving clause, 'all are not so bad as these.' The seven thousand righteous who have not bowed the knee to Baal are understood to exist in all communities; and, vicious as any special section may be, there must always be the hidden salt and savour of the virtuous to keep the whole from falling into utter corruption.

This is specially true of modern women. Certainly some of them are as unsatisfactory as any of their kind who have ever appeared on earth before; but it would be very queer logic to infer therefore that all are bad alike, and that our modern womanhood is as ill off as the Cities of the Plain, which could not be saved for want of the ten just men to save them. Happily, we have n.o.ble women among us yet; women who believe in something besides pleasure, and who do their work faithfully, wherever it may lie; women who can and do sacrifice themselves for love and duty, and who do not think they were sent into the world simply to run one mad life-long race for wealth, for dissipation, for distinction. But the life of such women is essentially in retirement; and though the lesson they teach is beautiful, yet its influence is necessarily confined, because of the narrow sphere of the teacher. When public occasions for devotedness occur, we in some sort measure the extent to which the self-sacrifice of women can be carried; but in general their n.o.blest virtues come out only in the quiet sacredness of home, and the most heroic lives of patience and well-doing go on in seclusion, uncheered by sympathy and unrewarded by applause.

Still, it is impossible to write of one absolute womanly ideal--one single type that shall satisfy every man's fancy; for, naturally, what would be perfection to one is imperfection to another, according to the special bent of the individual mind. Thus one man's ideal of womanly perfection is in beauty, mere physical outside beauty; and not all the virtues under heaven could warm him into love with red hair or a snub nose. He is entirely happy if his wife be undeniably the handsomest woman of his acquaintance, and holds himself blessed when all men admire and all women envy. But he is blessed for his own sake rather than for hers. Pleasant as her loveliness is to look on, it is pleasanter to know that he is the possessor of it. The 'handsomest woman in the room' comes into the same category as the finest picture or the most thoroughbred horse within his sphere; and if the degree of pride in his possession be different, the kind is the same. And so in minor proportions--from the most beautiful woman of all, to simply beauty as a _sine qua non_, whatever else may be wanting. One other thing only is as absolute as this beauty, and that is its undivided possession.

Another man's ideal is a good housekeeper and a careful mother; and he does not care a rush whether his wife, if she is these, be pretty or ugly. Provided she is active and industrious, minds the house well, brings up the children as they ought to be brought up, has good principles, is trustworthy and even-tempered, he is not particular as to colour or form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or a squint. Given the broad foundations of an honourable home, and he will forego the lath and plaster of personal appearance which will not bear the wear and tear of years and their troubles. The solid virtues stand. His balance at the banker's is a fact; his good name and credit with the tradespeople are facts; so is the comfort of his home; so are the health, the morals, the education of his children. All these are the true realities of life to him; but the beauty which changes to deformity by small-pox, which fades under dyspepsia, grows stale by habit, and is worn threadbare by the end of twenty years, is only a skin-deep grace which he does not value. Perhaps he is right.

Certainly, some of the happiest marriages amongst one's acquaintances are those where the wife has not one perceptible physical charm, and where the whole force of her magnetic value lies in what she is, not in how she looks.

Another man wants a tender, adoring, fair-haired seraph, who will worship him as a demiG.o.d and accept him as her best revelation of strength and wisdom. The more dependent she is, the better he will love her; the less of conscious thought, of active will, of originative power she has, the greater will be his regard and tenderness. To be the one sole teacher and protector of such a gentle little creature seems to him the most delicious joy and the best condition of married life; and he holds Milton's famous lines to be expressive of the only fitting relations between men and women. The adoring seraph is his ideal; Griselda, Desdemona, Lucy Ashton, are his highest culminations of womanly grace; and the qualities which appeal the most powerfully to his generosity are the patience which will not complain, the gentleness that cannot resent, and the love which nothing can chill.

Another man wants a cultivated intelligence in his ideal. As an author, an artist, a student, a statesman, he would like his wife to be able to help him by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect.

He believes in the s.e.x of minds, and holds no work complete which has not been created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees how women have helped on the leaders in troublous times; he knows that almost all great men have owed something of their greatness to the influence of a mother or a wife; he remembers how thoughts which had lain dumb and dormant in men's brains for more than half their lifetime have suddenly wakened up into speech and activity by the influence of a woman great enough to call them forth. The adoring seraph would be an enc.u.mbrance and nothing better than a child on his hands; and the soul which had to be awakened and directed by him would run great chance of remaining torpid and inactive all its days. He has his own life to lead and round off; and, so far from wishing to influence another's, he wants to be helped for himself.

Another man cares only for the birth and social position of the woman to whom he gives his name and affection. To another yellow gold stands higher than blue blood, and 'my wife's father' may have been a rag-picker, so long as rag-picking had been distilled in a sufficiently rich alembic leaving a residuum admitting no kind of doubt. Venus herself without a dowry would be only a pretty seaside girl with a Newtown pippin in her hand; but Miss Kilmansegg would be something worth thinking of, if but little worth looking at.

One man delights in a smart, vivacious little woman of the irrepressible kind. It makes no difference to him how petulant she is, how full of fire and fury; the most pa.s.sionate bursts of temper simply amuse him, like the anger of a canary-bird, and he holds it fine fun to watch the small virago in her tantrums, and to set her going again when he thinks she has been a long enough time in subsidence. His ideal of woman is an amusing little plaything, with a great facility for being put up, and a dash of viciousness to give it piquancy. Another wants a sweet and holy saint whose patient humility springs from principle rather than from fear; another likes a blithe-tempered, healthy girl with no nonsense about her, full of fun and ready for everything, and he is not particular as to the strict order or economy of the housekeeping, provided only his wife is at all times willing to be his pleasant playmate and companion. Another delights in something very quiet, very silent, very home-staying. One must have first-rate music in his ideal woman; another, unimpeachable taste; a third, strict order; a fourth, liberal breadth of nature; and each has his own ideal, not only of nature but of person--to the exact shade of the hair, the colour of the eyes and the oval of the face.

But all agree in the great fundamental requirements of truth and modesty and love and unselfishness; for though it is impossible to write of one womanly ideal as an absolute, it is very possible to detail the virtues which ought to belong to all alike.

If this diversity of ideals be true of individuals, it is especially true of nations, each of which has its own ideal woman varying according to what is called the genius of the country. To the Frenchman, if we are to believe Michelet and the novelists, it is a feverish little creature, full of nervous energy but without muscular force; of frail health and feeble organization; a prey to morbid fancies which she has no strength to control nor yet to resist; now weeping away her life in the pain of finding that her husband--a man gross and material because husband--does not understand her, now sighing over her delicious sins in the arms of the lover who does; without reasoning faculties but with divine intuitions which are as good as revelations; without cool judgment but with the light of burning pa.s.sions which guide her just as well; thinking by her heart and carrying the most refined metaphysics into her love; subtle; incomprehensible by the coa.r.s.er brains of men and women who are only honest; a creature born to bewilder and to be misled, to love and to be adored, to madden men and to be destroyed by them.

It does not much signify that the reality is a shrewd, calculating, unromantic woman, with a hard face and keen eyes, who for the most part makes a good practical wife to her common-sense middle-aged husband, who thinks more of her social position than of her feelings, more of her children than of her lovers, more of her purse than of her heart, and whose great object of life is a daily struggle for centimes. It pleases the French to idealize their eminently practical and worldly-wise women into this queer compound of hysterics and adultery; and if it pleases them it need not displease us. To the German his ideal is of two kinds--one, his Martha, the domestic broad-faced _Haus.m.u.tter_, who cooks good dinners at small cost, and mends the family linen as religiously as if this were the Eleventh Commandment specially appointed for feminine fingers to keep, the poetic culmination of whom is Charlotte cutting bread and b.u.t.ter; the other, his Mary, his Bettina, full of mind and aesthetics and heart-uplifting love, yearning after the infinite with holes in her stockings and her shoes down at heel. For what are coa.r.s.e material mendings to the aesthetic soul yearning after the Infinite and worshipping at the feet of the prophet?

In Italy the ideal woman of late times was the ardent patriot, full of active energy, of physical force, of dauntless courage. In Poland it is the patriot too, but of a more refined and etherealized type, pa.s.sively resenting Tartar tyranny by the subtlest feminine scorn, and living in perpetual music and mourning. In Spain it is a woman beautiful and impa.s.sioned, with the slight drawback of needing a world of looking after, of which the men are undeniably capable. In Mohammedan countries generally it is a comely smooth-skinned Dudu, patient and submissive, always in good humour with her master, economical in house-living to please the meanness, and gorgeous in occasional attire to gratify the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental; but by no means Dudu ever asleep and unoccupied. For, if not allowed to take part in active outside life, the Eastern's wife or wives have their home duties and their maternal cares like all other women, and find to their cost that, if they unduly neglect them, they will have a bad time of it with Ali Ben Ha.s.san when the question comes of piastres and sequins, and the dogs of Jews who demand payment, and the pigs of Christians who follow suit.

The American ideal is of two kinds, like the German--the one, the clever manager, the woman with good executive faculty in the matters of buckwheat cakes and oyster gumbo, as is needed in a country so poorly provided with 'helps;' the other, the aspiring soul who puts her aspirations into deeds, and goes out into the world to do battle with the sins of society as editress, preacher, stump-orator and the like. It must be rather embarra.s.sing to some men that this special manifestation of the ideal woman at times advocates miscegenation and free love; but perhaps we of the narrow old conventional type are not up to the right mark yet, and have to wait until our own women are thoroughly emanc.i.p.ated before we can rightly appreciate these questions. At all events, if this kind of thing pleases the Americans, it is no more our business to interfere with them than with the French compound; and if miscegenation and free love seem to them the right manner of life, let them follow it.

In all countries, then, the ideal woman changes, chameleon-like, to suit the taste of men; and the great doctrine that her happiness does somewhat depend on his liking is part of the very foundation of her existence. According to his will she is bond or free, educated or ignorant, lax or strict, housekeeping or roving; and though we advocate neither the bondage nor the ignorance, yet we do hold to the principle that, by the laws which regulate all human communities everywhere, she is bound to study the wishes of man and to mould her life in harmony with his liking. No society can get on in which there is total independence of sections and members, for society is built up on the mutual dependence of all its sections and all its members.

Hence the defiant att.i.tude which women have lately a.s.sumed, and their indifference to the wishes and remonstrances of men, cannot lead to any good results whatever. It is not the revolt of slaves against their tyrants which they have begun--in that we could sympathize--but it is a revolt against their duties.

And this it is which makes the present state of things so deplorable.

It is the vague restlessness, the fierce extravagance, the neglect of home, the indolent fine-ladyism, the pa.s.sionate love of pleasure which characterises the modern woman, that saddens men and destroys in them that respect which their very pride prompts them to feel. And it is the painful conviction that the ideal woman of truth and modesty and simple love and homely living has somehow faded away under the paint and tinsel of this modern reality which makes us speak out as we have done, in the hope--perhaps a forlorn one--that if she could be made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she would, by the very force of natural instinct and social necessity, order herself in some accordance with the lost ideal, and become again what we once loved and what we all regret.

_PINCHBECK._

Not many years ago no really refined gentlewoman would have worn pinchbeck. False jewelry and imitation lace were touchstones with the s.e.x, and the woman who would condescend to either was a.s.sumed, perhaps not quite without reason, to have lost something more than the mere niceness of technical taste. This feeling ran through the whole of society, and pinchbeck was considered as at once despicable and disreputable. The successful speculator, sprung from nothing, who had made his fortune during the war, might buy land, build himself a mansion and set up a magnificent establishment, but he was never looked on by the aboriginal gentry of the place as more than a lucky adventurer; and the blue blood, perhaps nourishing itself on thin beer, turned up its nose disdainfully at the claret and Madeira which had been personally earned and not lineally inherited. This exclusiveness was narrow in spirit and hard in individual working; and yet there was a wholesome sentiment underlying its pride which made it valuable in social ethics, if immoral on the score of natural equality and human charity. It was the rejection of pretentiousness, however gilded and glittering, in favour of reality, however poor and barren; it was the condemnation of make-believe--the repudiation of pinchbeck. It is not a generation since this was the normal att.i.tude of society towards its _nouveaux riches_ and Brummagem jewelry; but time moves fast in these later days, and national sentiments change as quickly as national fashions.

We are in the humour to rehabilitate all things, and pinchbeck has now its turn with the rest. The lady of slender means who would refuse to wear imitation lace and false jewelry is as rare as the country society which would exclude the _nouveau riche_ because of his newness, and not adopt him because of his riches. The whole anxiety now is, not what a thing is, but how it looks--not its quality, but its appearance. Every part of social and domestic life is dedicated to the apotheosis of pinchbeck. It meets us at the hall-door, where miserable stuccoed pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial dignity on a wretched jerry-built little villa run up without regard to one essential of home comfort or of architectural truth. It goes with us into the cold, conventional drawing-room, where all is for show and nothing for use, in which no one lives, and which is just the mere pretence of a dwelling-room, set out to deceive the world into the belief that its cheap finery is the expression of the every-day life and circ.u.mstances of the family. It sits with us at the table, which a confectioner out of a back street has furnished and where everything, down to the very flowers, is hired for the occasion.

It glitters in the brooches and bracelets of the women, in the studs and signet-rings of the men. It is in the hired broughams, the hired waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers, the cheap champagne, and the affectation of social consideration that meet us at every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle-cla.s.ses is penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck; and for one family that holds itself in the honour and simplicity of truth, ten thousand lie, to the world and to themselves, in frippery and pretence.

The greatest sinners in this are women. Men are often ostentatious, often extravagant, and not unfrequently dishonest in that broad way of dishonesty which is called living beyond their means--sometimes making up the deficit by practices which end in the dock of the Old Bailey; but, as a rule, they go in for the real thing in details, and their pinchbeck is at the core rather than on the surface. Women, on the contrary, give themselves up to a more general pretentiousness, and, provided they can make a show, care very little about the means; provided they can ring their metal on the counter, they ignore the want of the hall-stamp underneath. Locality, dress, their visiting-list and domestic appearances are the four things which they demand shall be in accord with their neighbours'; and for these four surfaces they will sacrifice the whole internal fabric. They will have a showy-looking house, encrusted with base ornamentation and false grandeur, though it lets in wind, rain and noise almost as if it were made of mud or canvas, rather than a plain and substantial dwelling-place, with comfort instead of stucco, and moderately thick walls instead of porches and pilasters. Most of their time is necessarily pa.s.sed at home, but they will undergo all manner of house discomfort resulting from this preference of cheap finery over solid structure, rather than forego their 'genteel locality' and stereotyped ornamentation. A family of daughters on the one side, diligent over the 'Battle of Prague;' a nursery full of crying babies on the other; more Battles of Prague opposite, diversified by a future Lind practising her scales unweariedly; water-pipes bursting in the frost; walls streaming in the thaw; the lower offices reeking and green with damp; the upper rooms too insecure for unrestricted movement--all these, and more miseries of the same kind, a woman given over to the worship of pinchbeck willingly encounters rather than shift into a locality relatively unfashionable to her sphere, but where she could have substantiality and comfort for the same rent that she pays now for flash and show.

In dress it is the same thing. She must look like her neighbours, no matter whether they can spend pounds to her shillings, so runs up a milliner's bill beyond what she ought to afford for the whole family expenses. If others can buy gold, she can manage pinchbeck. Gla.s.s that looks like jet, like filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is every bit to her as good as the real thing; and if she cannot compa.s.s Valenciennes and Mechlin, she can go to Nottingham and buy machine-made imitations that will make quite as fine a show. How poor soever she may be, she must hang herself about with ornaments made of painted wood, of gla.s.s, of vulcanite; she must break out into spangles and beads and chains and _benoitons_, which are cheap luxuries and, as she thinks, effective decorations. Flimsy silks make as rich a rustle to her ear as the stateliest brocade; and cotton velvet delights the soul that cannot aspire to Genoa. The love of pinchbeck is so deeply ingrained in her that even if, in a momentary fit of aberration into good taste, she condescends to a simple material about which there can be neither disguise nor pretence, she must load it with that detestable cheap finery of hers till she makes herself as vulgar in a muslin as she was in a cotton velvet. The _simplex munditiis_, which used to be held as a canon of feminine good taste, is now abandoned altogether, and the more she can bedizen herself according to the pattern of a Sandwich islander the more beautiful she thinks herself--the more certain the fascination of the men and the greater the jealousy of the women. This is the cause of all the tags and streamers, the bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces there, the puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off some dead girl's head, wherewith the modern Englishwoman delights to make herself hideous. It is pinchbeck throughout.

But we fear woman is past praying for in the matter of fashion; and that she is too far given over to the abomination of pretence to be called back to truth for any ethical reason whatsoever, or indeed by anything short of high examples. And then, if simplicity became the fashion, we should have our pinchbeck votaries translating that into extremes as they do now with ornamentation; if my lady took to plainness, they would go to nakedness.

Another bit of pinchbeck is the visiting-list--the cards of invitation stuck against the drawing-room gla.s.s--with the grandest names and largest fortunes put forward, irrespective of dates or tenses. The chance contact with the people represented may be quite out of the ordinary circ.u.mstances of life, but their names are paraded as if an accident, which has happened once and may never occur again, were in the daily order of events. They are brought to the front to make others believe that the whole social substance is of the same quality; that generals and admirals and lords and ladies are the common elements of the special circle in which the family habitually moves; that pinchbeck is good gold, and that 'composition' means marble.

Women are exceedingly tenacious of these pasteboard appearances. In a house with its couple of female servants, where formal visitors are very rare and invitations, save by friendly word of mouth, rarer still, you may see a cracked china bowl or cheap mock _patera_ on the hall table, to receive the cards which are a.s.sumed to come in the thick showers usual with high people who have hall-porters and a thousand names or more on their books. The pile gets horribly dusty to be sure, and the upper layer turns by degrees from cream-colour to brown; but antiquity is not held to weaken the force of grandeur. The t.i.tled card left on a chance occasion more than a year ago still keeps the uppermost place, still represents a perpetual renewal of aristocratic visits and an unbroken succession of social triumphs.

Yellowed and soiled, it is none the less the trump-card of the list; and while the outside world laughs and ridicules, the lady at home thinks that no one sees through this puerile pretence, and that the visiting-list is accepted according to the status of the fugleman at the head. She is very happy if she can say that the pattern of her dress, her cap, her bonnet, was taken from that of Lady So and So's; and we may be quite sure that all personal contact with grand folks so expresses itself and perpetuates the memory of the event, by such imitation--at a distance. It is too good an occasion for the airing of pinchbeck to be disregarded; consequently, for the most part it is turned to this practical account. Whether the fashion be suited to the material or to the other parts of the dress, is quite a secondary consideration; it being of the essence of pinchbeck to despise both fitness and harmony.

There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the appearance of social influence, much cultivated by women of a certain activity of mind and with more definite aims than all women have. This belongs to a grade higher than the small pretences of which we have been speaking--to women who have money, and so far have one reality, but who have not, by their own birth or their husbands', the original standing which would give them this social influence as of right. Some make themselves notorious for their drawing-room patronage of artists, which however does not include buying their pictures; others gather round them scores of obscure authors, whose books they talk of but do not read; a few, a short time since, were centres of spiritualistic circles and got a queer kind of social influence thereby, so far as Philistine desire to witness the 'manifestations' went; and one or two are names of weight in the emanc.i.p.ated ranks, and take chiefly to what they call 'working women.' These are they who attend Ladies'

Committees, where they talk bosh and pound away at utterly uninteresting subjects as diligently as if what they said had any point in it, and what they did any ultimate issue in probability or common sense. But beyond the fact of having a large house, where their several sets may a.s.semble at stated periods, these would-be lady patronesses are utterly impotent to help or to hinder; and their patronage is just so much pinchbeck, not worth the trouble of weighing.

In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless dissatisfaction with what they are and ceaseless endeavour to appear something they are not, our middle-cla.s.s ladies are doing themselves and society infinite mischief. They set the tone to the world below them; and the small tradespeople and the servants, when they copy the vices of their superiors, do not imitate her grace the d.u.c.h.ess, but the doctor's wife over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door, and the young ladies everywhere, who all try to appear like women of rank and fortune, and who are ashamed of nothing so much as of industry, truth and simplicity. Hence the rage for cheap finery in the kitchen, just a trifle more ugly and debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence the miserable pretentiousness and pinchbeck fine-ladyism filtering like poison through every pore of our society, to result G.o.d only knows in what grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and education will come to the front and endeavour to stay the plague already begun. Chains and brooches may seem but small material causes for important moral effects, but they are symbols; and, as symbols, they are of deep national value.

No good will be done till we get back some of our fine old horror of pinchbeck, and once more insist on Truth as the foundation of our national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do not land us here; and the progress of the arts and sciences must not be brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances.

Women are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home business. Here is something for them to do--the regeneration of society by means of their own energies; the bringing people back to the dignity of truth and the beauty of simplicity; the subst.i.tution of that self-respect which is content to appear what it is, for the feeble pride which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot get gold, which endeavours so hard to hide its real estate and to pa.s.s for what it is not and never can be.

_AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD._

Amongst other queer anomalies in human nature is the difference that lies between sectarian sins and personal immoralities, between the intellectual untruth of a man's creed and the spiritual evil of his own nature. Rigid Calvinism, for instance, which narrows the issues of divine grace and shuts up the avenues of salvation from all but a select few, is a sour and illiberal faith; and yet a rigid Calvinist, simply continuing to believe in predestination and election as he was taught from the beginning, may be a generous, genial, large-hearted man. An inventor scheming out the deadliest projectile that has yet been devised is not necessarily indifferent to human life on his own account; nor is every American who talks tall talk about the glorious destinies of his country and the infinite superiority of his countrymen, as conceited personally as he is vainglorious nationally.

In fact, he may be a very modest fellow by his own fireside; and though in his quality of American he is of course able to whip universal creation, in his mere quality of man he is quite ready to take the lower seat at the table and to give honour where honour is due.

This kind of distinction between the faults of the sect and the person, the nature and the cause, is very noticeable in women; and especially in all things relating to themselves. Individually, many among them are meek and long-suffering enough, and would be as little capable of resenting a wrong as of revenging it. Being used from the cradle to a good deal of snubbing, they take to it kindly as part of the inevitable order of things, and kiss the chastening rod with edifying humility; but, collectively, they are the most impatient of rebuke, the most arrogant in moral att.i.tude, and the most restive of all created things sought to be led or driven. The woman who will bear to hear of her personal faults without offering a word in self-defence, and who will even say peccavi quite humbly if hard pressed, fires up into illimitable indignation when told that her foibles are characteristic of her s.e.x, and that she is no worse than nature meant her to be. Personally she is willing to confess that she is only a poor worm grovelling in the dust--perhaps an exceptionally poor worm, if of the kind given to spiritual asceticism--but by her cla.s.s she claims to be considered next door to an angel, and arrogates to her s.e.x virtues which she would blush to claim on her own behalf.

Men, as men, are all sorts of bad things, as every one knows. They are selfish, cruel, tyrannical, sensual, unjust, bloodthirsty--where does the list end? and human nature in the abstract is a bad thing too, given over to lies and various deadly l.u.s.ts; but women, as women, are exempt from any special share in the general iniquity, and only come under the ban with universal nature--with lambs and doves and other pretty creatures--not quite perfection, because of the Fall which spoilt everything, and yet very near it. As children of the rash parents who corrupted the race they certainly suffer from the general infection of sin that followed, but, as daughters contrasted with the sons, they are so far superior to those evil-minded brethren of theirs that their comparative virtues by s.e.x override their positive vices by race. As individuals, they are worms; as human beings, they are poor sinful souls; but by their womanhood they are above rebuke.

Women have been so long wrapped in this pleasant little delusion about the sacredness of their s.e.x, and the perfections belonging thereto by nature, that any attempt to show them the truth and convince them that they too are guilty of the mean faults and petty ways common to a fallen humanity--whereof certain manifestations are special to themselves--is met with the profound scorn or shrill cries of affronted womanhood. A man who speaks of their faults as they appear to him, and as he suffers by them, is illiberal and unmanly, and the rage of the more hysterically indignant would not be very far below that of the Thracian Maenads, could they lay hands on the offending Orpheus of the moment; but a woman who speaks from knowledge, and touches the weak places and the sore spots known best to the initiated, is a traitress even baser than the rude man who perhaps knows no better.

The whole life and being of womanhood must be held sacred from censure, exalted as it is by a kind of sentimental apotheosis that will not bear reasoning about, to something very near divinity. Even the follies of fashion must be exempt from both ridicule and rebuke, on the ground of man's utter ignorance of the merits of the question; for how should a poor male body know anything about trains or crinolines, or the pleasure that a woman feels in making herself ridiculous or indecent in appearance and a nuisance to her neighbours?

while, for anything graver than the follies of fashion, it is in a manner high treason against the supremacy of the s.e.x to a.s.sume that they deserve either ridicule or rebuke. Besides, it is indelicate.

Women are made to be worshipped, not criticized; to be reverenced as something mystically holy and incomprehensible by the grosser masculine faculties; and it is indiscreet, to say the least of it, when vile man takes it on himself to test the idol by the hard mechanical tests of truth and common-sense, and to show the world how much alloy is mingled with the gold.

This is in ethics what the Oriental's reserve about his harem is in domestic life. The sacredness of a Mohammedan's womankind must be so complete that they are even nameless to the coa.r.s.er s.e.x; and not, 'How is your wife?' 'How are your daughters?' but, 'How is your house?' is the only accepted form of words by which Ali may ask Ha.s.san about the health of his Fatimas and Zuliekas. In much the same way our women must be kept behind the close gilded gratings of affected perfectness, and, above all things, never publicly discussed--much less publicly condemned.

It is by no means a proof of wisdom, or of the power of logically reasoning out a position and its consequences, that women should thus demand to be treated as things superior to the faults and follies of humanity at large. They are clamouring loudly, and with some justice, for an equal share in the world's work and wages, and it is wonderfully stupid in them to stand on their womanly dignity and their quasi-sacredness, when told of their faults and measured according to their shortcomings, not their pretensions. If they come down into the arena to fight, they must fight subject to the conditions of the arena. They must not ask for special rules to be made in their behalf--for blunted weapons on the one side and impregnable defences on the other. If they demand either mystic reverence or chivalric homage they must be content with their own narrow but safe enclosure, where they have nothing to do but to look at the turmoil below, and accept with grat.i.tude such portions of the good things fought for as the men to whom they belong see fit to bring them. They cannot at one and the same time have the good of both positions--the courtesy claimed by weakness and the honour paid to prowess. If they mingle in the _melee_ they must expect as hard knocks as the rest, and must submit to be bullied when they hit foul and to be struck home when they hit wide. If they do not like these conditions, let them keep out of the fray altogether; but if they choose to mingle in it, no hysterics of affronted womanhood, however loud the shrieks, will keep them safe from hard knocks and rough treatment.

Time out of mind women have been credited with all the graces and virtues possible in a world which 'the trail of the serpent' has defiled. To be sure they have been cursed as well, as the causes of most of the miseries of society from Eve's time to Helen's, and later still. _Teterrima causa._ But the praise alone sticks, so far as their own self-belief is concerned, and men, who create the curses, may arrange them to their own liking. The poet says they are 'ministering angels;' the very name of mother is to some men almost as holy as that of G.o.d, and the most solemn oath a Frenchman can take in a private way is not by his own honour, but by the name or the head or the life of his mother.

As wives--well, save in the old nursery doggrel which sets forth that they are made of 'all that's good if well understood'--as wives certainly they get not a few ungentle rubs. But then only a husband knows where the shoe pinches, and if he blasphemes during the wearing of it, on his own head be the guilt as is already the punishment.

As maidens they are confessedly the most sacred manifestation of humanity, and to be approached with the reverence rightfully due to the holiest thing we know; while in the new spiritualistic world we are told to look for the time when the moral supremacy of woman shall be the recognized law of human life and the reign of violence and tears and all iniquity shall therefore be at an end. Thus the moral loveliness of collective womanhood is a dogma which men are taught from their boyhood as an article of faith if not a matter of experience, and women naturally keep them up to the mark--theoretically, at all events. Yet for all this lip-homage, of which so much account is made, women are often ill-used and brutalized, and in spite of their superior pretensions as often fall below men in every quality but that of patience. And patience is eminently the virtue of weakness, and therefore woman's cardinal grace; speaking broadly and allowing for exceptions. But what women do not see is that all this poetic flattery comes originally from the idealizing pa.s.sion of men, and that, left to themselves, with only each other for critics and a.n.a.lyzers, they would soon find themselves stripped of their superfluous moral finery and reduced to the bare core of uncompromising truth.

And this would be the best thing for them in the end. If they could but rise superior to the weakness of flattery, they would rise beyond the power of much that now degrades them. If they would but honestly consider the question of their own shortcomings when told where they fail, and what they cannot do, and what they will be sure to make a mess of if they attempt, they would prove their t.i.tle to man's respect far more than they prove it now by the shrill cries and indignant remonstrances of affronted womanhood.

This is the day of trial for many things--among others, for the capacity of women for an enlarged sphere of action and more public exercise of power. Do women think they show their fitness for n.o.bler duties than those already a.s.signed them, by their impatience under censure, which is, after all, but one mode of teaching? Are they qualifying themselves to act in concert with men, by a.s.suming an absolute moral supremacy which it is a kind of sacrilege to deny? If they think they are on the right road as at present followed, let them go on in heaven's name. When they have wandered sufficiently far perhaps they will have sense enough to turn back, and see for themselves what mistakes they have made and might have avoided, had they had the wisdom of self-knowledge in only a small degree.

Certainly, so long as womanhood is held to confer, _per se_, a special and una.s.sailable divinity, so long will women be rendered comparatively incapable of the best work through vanity, through ignorance, and through impatience of the teaching that comes by rebuke. Nothing is so damaging in the long run as exaggerated pretensions; for by-and-by, after a certain period of uncritical homage, the world is sure to believe that the silver veil which it has so long respected hides deformity, not divinity, and that what is too sacred for public use is too poor for public honour. If the faults of women are not to be discussed, nor their follies condemned, because womanhood is a sacred thing and a man naturally respects his mother and sisters, then women must be content to live in a moral harem, where they will be safe from both the gaze and the censure of the outside world; they must not come down into the battle-fields and the workshops, where they forfeit all claim to protection and have to accept the man's law of 'no favour.' It must be one thing or the other. Either their merits must be weighed and their capacity a.s.sayed in reference to the place they want to take--and in doing this their faults must be boldly and distinctly discussed--or they must be content with their present condition; and, with the mystic sanct.i.ty of their womanhood, they must accept also its moral seclusion--belonging, by their very nature, to things too sacred for criticism and too perfect for censure. It rests with themselves to decide which it is to be.