The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays Volume I Part 5

Her greatest sphere of social glory is a picnic, where she always heads the exploring party, clambering up the rocks of the waterfall, or diving down into the close-smelling caves, or scaling the crumbling walls of the ruin before any one else can come up to her. She is specially happy at old ruins, where she flits in and out among the broken columns and under the mouldering arches, like a spirit of the place unduly disturbed. Sometimes she climbs up by unseen means, till she reaches a point where it makes one dizzy to see her; and sometimes she startles her company by the sudden bleating of a sheep, or the wild hoot of an owl. For she can imitate the sounds of animals for the most part with wonderful accuracy; though she can also sing simple ballads without music, with sweetness and correctness. She is fond of all animals and fears none. She will pa.s.s through a field thronged with wild-looking cattle without the least hesitation; and makes friends even with the yelping farm-dogs which come snapping and snarling at her heels. In winter she feeds the wood-birds by flocks, and always takes care that the horses have a handful of corn or a carrot when she goes to see them, and that the cows are the better for her visit by a bunch of lucerne or a fat fresh cabbage-leaf. The home-beasts show their pleasure when they hear her fleet footstep on the paved yard; and her favourite pony whinnies to her in a peculiar voice as she pa.s.ses his stable door. These are her friends, and their love for her is her reward.

In her early days the nymph was notorious for her dilapidated attire, perplexing mother and nurse to mend, or to understand why or how it had come about. But as her favourite hiding-place was in a forked branch midway up an old tree in the shrubbery, or a natural arbour which she had cut out for herself in the very heart of the underwood, it was scarcely to be wondered at if cloth and cotton testified to the severity of her retreats. She has still mysterious rents in her skirts, got no one knows how; and her mother still laments over her apt.i.tude for rags, and wishes she could be brought to see the beauty of unstained apparel. She is given to early rising--to fits indeed of rising at some wild hour in the morning, for walks before breakfast and the like innocent insanities. Sometimes she takes it in hand to educate herself in certain stoicisms, and goes without b.u.t.ter at breakfast or without breakfast altogether, if she thinks that thereby she will grow stronger or less inclined to self-indulgence. For drink she will never touch wine nor beer; but she likes new milk, and is great in her capacity for water.

The nymph is almost always of the middle-cla.s.ses. It is next to impossible indeed that she should be found in the higher ranks, where girls are not left to themselves, and where no one lives in far-away country places out of the reach of public opinion and beyond the range of public overlooking. Some years ago, before the railroads and monster hotels had made the mountain districts like Hampstead or Richmond on a Sunday afternoon, the nymph was to be found in great abundance down in c.u.mberland and Westmoreland. By the more remote lakes, like b.u.t.termere and Hawes Water, and in the secluded valleys running up from the larger lakes, you would come upon square stuccoed houses, generally abominably ugly, where the nymph was mistress of the situation. She might be met riding about alone in a flapping straw hat, long before hats were fashionable headgear for women, and in a blue baize skirt for all the riding-habit thought necessary; or she might be encountered on the wild fell sides, or on the mountain heights, or in her boat sculling among the lonely lake islets, or gathering water-lilies in the bays. In the desolate stretch of moorland country to the north of Skiddaw the whole female population a few years ago was of the nymph kind; but railroads and the penny-post, cheap trains, fashion and fine-ladyism have penetrated even into the heart of the wild mountains, and now the nymph there is only a transitional development--not, as formerly, a fixed type.

The nymph is the very reverse of a flirt. She has no inclination that way, and looks shy and awkward at the men who pay her compliments or attempt anything like sentimentality. But she is not superior to boys, who are her chosen companions and favourites. A bold, brave boy, who just overtops her in skill and daring, is her delight; but anything over twenty is 'awfully old,' while forty and sixty are so remote that the lines blur and blend together and have no distinction. By-and-by the nymph becomes a staid young woman, and marries. If she goes into a close town and has children, very often her vigorous health gives way, and we see her in a few years nervous, emaciated, consumptive, and with a pitiful yearning for 'home' more pathetic than all the rest. But if she remains where she is, in the fresh pure air of her native place, she retains her youth and strength long after the age when ordinary women lose theirs, and her children are celebrated as magnificent specimens of the future generation.

We often see in country places matrons of over forty who are still like young women, both in looks and bearing, both in mental innocence and physical power. They have the shy and innocent look of girls; they blush like girls; they know less evil than almost any town-bred girl of eighteen, mothers of stalwart youths though they may be; they can walk and laugh and take pleasure in their lives like girls; and their daughters find them as much sisters as mothers. It is not quite the same thing if they do not marry; for among the saddest sights of social life is that terrible fading and withering away of comely, healthy, vigorous young country girls, who slowly pa.s.s from nymphs, full of grace and beauty, of happiness and power, to antiquated virgins, soured, useless, debilitated and out of nature. Of these, too, there are plenty in country places; but perhaps some scheme will be some day set afoot which shall redress the overweighted balance and bring to the service of the future some of the healthiest and best of our women. Meanwhile the fresh, innocent, breezy nymph is a charming study; and may the time be far distant which shall see her tamed and civilized out of existence altogether!

_MeSALLIANCES._

The French system of parents arranging the marriage of their children without the consent of the girl being even asked, but a.s.sumed as granted, is not so wholly monstrous as many people in England believe.

It seems to be founded on the idea that, given a young girl who has been kept shut up from all possibility of forming the most shadowy attachment for any man whatsoever, and present to her as her husband a sufficiently well-endowed and nice-looking man, with whom come liberty, pretty dresses, b.a.l.l.s, admiration and social standing, and the chances are she will love him and live with him in tolerable harmony to the end of the chapter. And this idea is by no means wholly beside the truth, as we find it in practice. The parents, who are better judges of character and circ.u.mstance than the daughter can possibly be, are supposed to take care that their future son-in-law is up to their standard, whatever that may be, and that the connexion is not of a kind to bring discredit on their house; and on this and the joint income, as the solid bases, they build the not very unreasonable hypothesis that one man is as good as another for the satisfaction of a quite untouched and virginal fancy, and that suitable external conditions go further and last longer than pa.s.sion. They trust to the force of instinct to make all square with the affections, while they themselves arrange for the smooth running of the social circ.u.mstances; and they are not far out in their calculations.

The young people of the two lonely lighthouse islands, who made love to each other through telescopes, are good examples of the way in which instinct simulates the impulse which calls itself love when there are two or three instead of one to look at. For we may be quite sure that had the lighthouse island youth been John instead of James, fair instead of dark, garrulous instead of reticent, short and fat instead of tall and slender, the lighthouse island girl would have loved him all the same, and would have quite believed that this man was the only man she ever could have loved, and that her instinctive gravitation was her free choice.

The French system of marriage, then, based on this accommodating instinct, works well for women who are not strongly individual, not inconstant by temperament, and not given to sentimentality. But, seeing that all women are not merely negative, and that pa.s.sions and affections do sometimes a.s.sert themselves inconveniently, the system has had the effect of making society lenient to the little follies of married women, unless too strongly p.r.o.nounced--partly because the human heart insists on a certain amount of free-will, which fact must be recognized--but partly, we must remember, because of the want of the young-lady element in society. In England, where our girls are let loose early, we have free-trade in flirting; consequently, we think that all that sort of thing ought to be done before marriage, and that, when once a woman has made her choice and put her neck under the yoke, she ought to stick to her bargain and loyally fulfil her self-imposed engagement.

One consequence of this free-trade in flirting and this large amount of personal liberty is that love-marriages are more frequent with us than with the French, with whom indeed, in the higher cla.s.ses, they are next to impossible; and, unfortunately, the corollary to this is that love-marriages are too often _mesalliances_. There is of course no question, ethically, between virtuous vulgarity and refined vice. A groom who smells of the stable and speaks broad Somersetshire or racier c.u.mberland, but who is brave, faithful, honest, incapable of a lie or of meanness in any form, is a better man than the best-bred gentleman whose life is as vicious as his bearing is unexceptionable.

The most undeniable taste in dress, and the most correct p.r.o.nunciation, would scarcely reconcile us to cruelty, falsehood, or cowardice; and yet we do not know a father who would prefer to give his girl to the groom, rather than the gentleman, and who would think h.o.r.n.y-handed virtue, dressed in fustian and smelling of the stable, the fitter husband of the two.

If we take the same case out of our own time and circ.u.mstances, we have no doubt as to the choice to be made. It seems to us a very little matter that honest Charicles should tell his love to Aglae in the broad Doric tongue instead of in the polished Athenian accents to which she was accustomed; that he should wear his chiton a hand's breadth too long or a span too short; that his chlamys should be flung across his brawny chest in a way which the young bloods of the time thought ungraceful; or that, as he a.s.sisted at a symposium, he should not hold the rhyton at quite the proper angle, but in a fashion at which the refined Cleon laughed as he nudged his neighbour. Yet all these conventional solecisms, of no account whatever now, would have weighed heavily against poor Charicles when he went to demand Aglae's hand; and the balance would probably have gone down in favour of that scampish Cleon, who was an Athenian of the Athenians, perfect in all the graces of the age, but not to be compared to his rival in anything that makes a man n.o.ble or respectable. We, who read only from a distance, think that Aglae's father made a mistake, and that the honester man would have been the better choice of the two.

It is only when we bring the same circ.u.mstances home to ourselves that we realize the immense importance of the social element; and how, in this complex life of ours, we are unable to move in a single line independent of all it touches. Imagine a fine old county family with a son-in-law who ate peas with his knife, said 'you was' and 'they is,' and came down to dinner in a shooting-jacket and a blue bird's-eye tied in a wisp about his throat! He might be the possessor of all imaginable virtues, and, if occasion required, a very hero and a _preux chevalier_, however rough; but occasions in which a man can be a hero or a _preux chevalier_ are rare, whereas dinner comes every day, and the senses are never shut. The core within a conventionally ungainly envelope may be as sound as is possible to a corrupt humanity, but social life requires manners as well as principles; and though eating peas with a knife is not so bad as telling falsehoods, still we should all agree in saying, Give us truth that does not eat peas with its knife; let us have honesty in a dress coat and pureheartedness in a clean shirt, seeing that there is no absolute necessity why these several things should be disunited.

Love-marriages, made against the will of the parents before the character is formed and while the obligations of society are still unrealized, are generally _mesalliances_ founded on pa.s.sion and fancy only. A man and woman of mature age who know what they want may make a _mesalliance_, but it is made with a full understanding and deliberate choice; and, if the thing turns out badly, they can blame themselves less for precipitancy than for wrong calculation. The man of fifty who marries his cook knows what he most values in women. It is not manners and it is not accomplishments; perhaps it is usefulness, perhaps good-temper; at all events it is something that the cook has and that the ladies of his acquaintance have not, and he is content to take the disadvantages of his choice with its advantages. But the boy who runs away with his mother's maid neither calculates nor sees any disadvantages. He marries a pretty girl because her beauty has touched his senses; or he is got hold of by an artful woman who has bamboozled and seduced him. It is only when his pa.s.sion has worn off that he wakes to the full consequences of his mistake, and understands then how right his parents were when they cashiered his pretty Jane so soon as they became aware of what was going on, and sent that artful Sarah to the right about--just a week too late.

It is the same with girls; but in a far greater extent. If a youth's _mesalliance_ is a millstone round his neck for life, a girl's is simply destruction. The natural instinct with all women is to marry above themselves; and we know on what physiological basis this instinct stands, and what useful racial ends it serves. And the natural instinct is as true in its social as in its physiological expression. A woman's honour is in her husband; her status, her social life, are determined by his; and even the few women who, having made a bad marriage, have nerve and character enough to set themselves free from the personal a.s.sociation, are never able to thoroughly regain their maiden place. There is always something about them which clogs and fetters them; always a kind of doubtful and depressing aura that surrounds and influences them. If they have not strength to free themselves, they never cease to feel the mistake they have made, until the old sad process of degeneration is accomplished, and the 'grossness of his nature' has had strength to drag her down. After a time, if her ladyhood has been of a superficial kind only, a woman who has married beneath herself may ease down into her groove and be like the man she has married; if, however, she has sufficient force to resist outside influences she will not sink, and she will never cease to suffer. She has sinned against herself, her cla.s.s and her natural instincts; and has done substantially a worse thing than has the boy who married his mother's maid. Society understands this, and not unjustly if harshly punishes the one while it lets the other go scot-free; so that the woman who makes a _mesalliance_ suffers on every side, and destroys her life almost as much as the woman who goes wrong.

All this is as evident to parents and elders as that the sun shines.

They understand the imperative needs of social life, and they know how fleeting are the pa.s.sions of youth and how they fade by time and use and inharmonious conditions; and they feel that their first duty to their children is to prevent a _mesalliance_ which has nothing, and can have nothing, but pa.s.sion for its basis. But novelists and poets are against the hard dull dictates of worldly wisdom, and join in the apotheosis of love at any cost--all for love and the world well lost; love in a cottage, with nightingales and honeysuckles as the chief means of paying the rent; Libussa and her ploughman; the princess and the swineherd, &c. And the fathers who stand out against the ruin of their girls by means of estimable men of inferior condition and with not enough to live on, are stony-hearted and cruel, while the daughters who take to cold poison in the back-garden, if they cannot compa.s.s a secret honeymoon or an open flight, have all the world's sympathy and none of its censure. The cruel parent is the favourite whipping-boy of poetry and fiction; and yet which is likely to be the better guide--reason or pa.s.sion? experience or ignorance?

calculation or impulse? maturity which can judge or youth which can only feel? There would be no hesitation in any other case than that of love; but the love-instinct is generally considered to be superior to every other consideration, and has to be obeyed as a divine voice, no matter at what cost or consequence.

The ideal of life, according to some, is founded on early marriages.

But men are slower in the final setting of their character than women, and one never knows how a young fellow of twenty or so will turn out.

If he is devout now, he may be an infidel at forty; if, under home influences, he is temperate and pure, when these are withdrawn he may become a rake of the fastest kind. His temper, morals, business power, ability to resist temptation, all are as yet inchoate and undefined; nothing is sure; and the girl's fancy that makes him perfect in proportion to his good looks, is a mere instinct determined by chance a.s.sociation.

A girl, too, has more character than she shows in her girlhood. Though she sets sooner than men, she does not set unalterably, and marriage and maternity bring out the depths of her nature as nothing else can.

It is only common-sense, then, to marry her to a man whose character is already somewhat formed, rather than to one who is still fluid and floating.

It is all very well to talk of fighting the battle of life together, and welding together by time. Many a man has been ruined by these metaphors. The theory, partly true and partly pretty, is good enough in its degree; and, indeed, so far as the welding goes, we weld together in almost all things by time. We wear our shoe till we wear it into shape and it ceases to pinch us; but, in the process, we go through a vast deal of pain, and are liable to make corns which last long after the shoe itself fits easily. We do not advocate the French system of marrying off our girls according to our own ideas of suitableness, and without consulting them; but we not the less think that, of all fatal social mistakes, _mesalliances_ are the most fatal, and, in the case of women, to be avoided and prevented at any cost short of a broken heart or a premature death. And even death would sometimes be better than the life-long misery, the enduring shame and humiliation, of certain _mesalliances_.

_WEAK SISTERS._

The line at which a virtue becomes a vice through excess can never be exactly defined, being one of those uncertain conditions which each mind must determine for itself. But there is a line, wheresoever we may choose to set it; and it is just this fine dividing mark which women are so apt to overrun. For women, as a rule, are nothing if not extreme. Whether as saints or sinners, they carry a principle to its outside limits; and of all partizans they are the most thoroughgoing, whether it be to serve G.o.d or the devil, liberty or bigotry, Bible Communism or Calvinistic Election. Sometimes they are just as extreme in their absolute negation of force, and in the narrowness of the limits within which they would confine all human expression either by word or deed--and especially all expression of feminine life. These are the women who carry womanly gentleness into the exaggeration of self-abas.e.m.e.nt, and make themselves mere footstools for the stronger creature to kick about at his pleasure; the weak sisters who think all self-reliance unfeminine, and any originality of thought or character an offence against the ordained inferiority of their s.e.x. They are the parasitic plants of the human family, living by and on the strength of others; growths unable to stand alone, and, when deprived of their advent.i.tious support, falling to the ground in a ruin perhaps worse than death.

It is sad to see one of these weak sisters when given up to herself after she has lived on the strength of another. As a wife, she was probably a docile, gentle kind of Medora--at least on the outside; for we must not confound weakness with amiability--suffering many things because of imperfect servants and unprofitable tradesmen, maybe because of unruly children and encroaching friends, over none of whom she had so much moral power as enabled her to hold them in check; but on the whole drifting through her days peacefully enough, and, though always in difficulties, never quite aground. She had a tower of strength in her husband, on whom she leaned for a.s.sistance in all she undertook, whether it were to give a dose of Dalby to the child, or a scolding to the maid, or to p.r.o.nounce upon the soundness of two rival sects each touting for her soul. While he lived she obeyed his counsel--not always without a futile echo of discontent in her own heart--and copied his opinions with what amount of accuracy nature had bestowed on her; though it must be confessed more often making a travesty than a facsimile, according to the trick of inferior translators, and not necessarily better pleased with his opinions than with his counsels. For your weak sister is frequently peevish, and though unable to originate is not always ready to obey cheerfully; cheerfulness indeed being for the most part an attribute of power.

Still, there stood her tower of strength, and while it stood, she, the parasite growing round it, did well enough, and flourished with a pleasant semblance of individual life into the hollowness of which it was no one's business to inquire. But when the tower fell, where was the ivy? The husband taken away, what became of the wife?--he who had been the life and she only the parasite. Abandoned to the poor resources of her own judgment she is like one suddenly thrown into deep water, not knowing how to swim. She has no judgment. She has been so long accustomed to rely on the mind of another, that her will is paralyzed for want of use. She is any one's tool, any one's echo, and worse than that, if left to herself she is any one's victim. All she wants is to be spared the hardship of self-reliance and to be directed free of individual exertion. She is utterly helpless--helpless to act, to direct, to decide; and it depends on the mere chance of proprietorship whether her slavery shall be degradation or protection, ruin or safety. For she will be a slave, whosoever may be her proprietor; being the pabulum of which slaves and victims are naturally formed. The old age of Medora is Mrs. Borradaile, who, if her husband had lived, would have probably ended her life in an honourable captivity and a well-directed subserviency.

We often see this kind of helpless weakness in the daughter of a man of overbearing will, or of a termagant mother fond of managing and impatient of opposition. During the plastic time of her life, when education might perhaps have developed a sufficient amount of mental muscle, and a course of judicious moulding might have fairly set her up, she is snubbed and suppressed till all power is crushed out of her. She is taught the virtue of self-abnegation till she has no self to abnegate; and the backbone of her individuality is so incessantly broken that at last there is no backbone left in her to break. She has become a mere human mollusc which, when it loses its native sh.e.l.l, drifts helplessly at the mercy of chance currents into the maw of any stronger creature that may fancy it for his prey. One often sees these poor things left orphans and friendless at forty or fifty years of age. They have lived all their lives in leading-strings, and now are utterly unable to walk alone. They are infants in all knowledge of the world, of business, of human life; their youth is gone, and with it such beauty and attractiveness as they might have had, so that men who liked them when fresh and gentle at twenty do not care to accept their wrinkled helplessness at forty. They have been kept in and kept down, and so have made no friends of their own; and then, when the strong-willed father dies and the termagant mother goes to the place where the wicked cease from troubling, the mollusc these have hitherto protected is left defenceless and alone. If she has money, her chances of escape from the social sharks always on the look-out for fat morsels are very small indeed. It is well if she falls into no worse hands than those of legitimate priests of either section, whether enthusiastic for chasubles or crazy for missions; and if her money is put to no baser use than supplying church embroidery for some Brother Ignatius at home, or blankets for converted Africans in the tropics. It might go into Agapemones, into spiritual Athenaeums, into Bond Street back-parlours, where it certainly would do no good, take it any way one would; for, as it must go into some side-channel dug by stronger hands than hers, the question is, into which of the innumerable conduits offered for the conveyance of superfluous means shall it be directed?

This is the woman who is sure to go in for religious excess of one kind or another, and for whom therefore, a convent with a sympathetic director is a G.o.dsend past words to describe. She is unfit for the life of the world outside. She has neither strength to protect herself, nor beauty to win the loving protection of men; she cannot be taken as a precious charge, but she will be made a pitiable victim; and, though matins and vespers come frightfully often, surely the narrow safety of a convent-cell is a better fate for her than the publicity of the witness-box at the Old Bailey! As she must have a master, her condition depends on what master she has; and the whole line of her future is ruled according to the fact whether she is directed or 'exploited,' and used to serve n.o.ble ends or base ones.

As a mother, the weak sister is even more unsatisfactory than as a spinster left to herself with funds which she can manipulate at pleasure. She is affectionate and devoted; but of what use are affection and devotion without guiding sense or judgment? Even in the nursery, and while the little ones need only physical care, she is more obstructive than helpful, never having so much self-reliance nor readiness of wit as to dare a remedy for one of those sudden maladies, incidental to children, which are dangerous just in proportion to the length of time they are allowed to run unchecked. And if she should by chance remember anything of therapeutic value, she has no power to make her children take what they don't like to take, nor do what they don't like to do. In the horror of an accident she is lost. If her child were to cut an artery, she would take it up into her lap tenderly enough, but she would never dream of stopping the flow; if it swallowed poison, she would send for the doctor who lives ten miles away; and if it set itself on fire, she would probably rush with it into the street, for the chance of a.s.sistance from a friendly pa.s.ser-by. She never has her senses under serviceable command; and her action in a moment of danger generally consists in unavailing pity or in obstructive terror, but never in useful service nor in valuable suggestion.

But if useless in her nursery while her children are young, she is even more helpless as they get older; and the family of a weak woman grows up, una.s.sisted by counsel or direction, just as the old Adam wills and the natural bent inclines. Her girls may be loud and fast, her sons idle and dissipated, but she is powerless to correct or to influence. If her husband does not take the reins into his own hands, or if she be a widow, the young people manage matters for themselves under the perilous guidance of youthful pa.s.sions and inexperience. And nine times out of ten they give her but a rough corner for her own share. They have no respect for her, and, unless more generously compa.s.sionate than young people usually are, scarcely care to conceal the contempt they cannot help feeling. What can she expect? If she was not strong enough to root out the tares while still green and tender, can she wonder at their luxuriant growth about her feet now? She, like every one else, must learn the sad meaning of retribution, and how the weakness which allowed evil to flourish unsubdued has to share in its consequences and to suffer for its sin.

Unsatisfactory in her home, the weak sister does not do much better in society. She is there the embodiment of restriction. She can bear nothing that has any flavour or colour in it. Topics of broad human interest are forbidden in her presence because they are vulgar, improper, unfeminine. She takes her stand on her womanhood, and makes that womanhood to be something apart from humanity in the gross.

There must be no cakes and ale for others if she be virtuous; and spades are not to be called spades when she is by to hear. She is the limit beyond which no one must go, under pain of such displeasure as the weak sister can show. And, weak as she is in many things, she can compa.s.s a certain strength of displeasure; she can condemn, persistently if not pa.s.sionately.

Nothing is more curious than the way in which the weak sister exercises this power of condemnation, and nothing much more wide than its scope. If incapable of yielding to certain temptations, because incapable of feeling them, she has no pity for those who have not been able to resist; yet, on the other hand, she cannot comprehend the vigour of those who withstand such influences as conquer her. If she be under the shadow of family protection, safe in the power of those who know how to hold her in all honour and prosperity, she cannot forgive the poor weak waif--no weaker than herself!--who has been caught up in the outside desert of desolation, and made to subserve evil ends. Yet, on the other hand, for the woman who is able to think and act for herself she has a kind of superst.i.tious horror; and she shrinks from one who has made herself notorious, no matter what the mode or method, as from something tainted, something unnatural and unwomanly. She has even grave doubts respecting the lawfulness of doing good if the manner of it gets into the papers and names are mentioned as well as things; and though the fashion of the day favours feminine notoriety in all directions, she holds by the instinct of her temperament, and languidly maintains that woman is the cipher to which man alone gives distinctive value. Griselda and Medora are the types to her of womanly perfection; and the only strength she tolerates in her own s.e.x is the strength of endurance and the power of patience.

She has no doubt in her own mind that the ordained purpose of woman is to be convenient for the high-handedness and brutality of man; and any woman who objects to this theory, and demands a better place for herself, is flying in the face of Providence and forfeiting one of the distinctive privileges of her s.e.x. For the weak sister thinks, like some others, that it is better to be destroyed by orthodox means than to be saved by heterodox ones; and that if good Christians uphold moral suttee, they are only pagans and barbarians who would put out the flames and save the victim from the burning. So far she is respectable, in that she has a distinct theory about something; but it is wonderfully eloquent of her state that it should only be the theory of Griseldadom as womanly perfection, and the beauty to be found in the moral of Cinderella sitting supinely among the ashes, and forbidden to own even the gla.s.s-slipper that belonged to her.

Fortunately for the world, the weak sister and her theories do not rule. Indeed we are in danger of going too much the other way in these times, and the revolt of our women against undue slavery goes very near to a revolt against wise submission. Still, women who are to be the mothers of men ought to have some kind of power, if the men are to be worth their place in the world; and if we want creatures with backbones we must not give our strength to rearing a race of molluscs.

_PINCHING SHOES._

There are two ways of dealing with pinching shoes. The one is to wear them till you get accustomed to the pressure, and so to wear them easy; the other is to kick them off and have done with them altogether. The one is founded on the accommodating principle of human nature by which it is enabled to fit itself to circ.u.mstances, the other is the high-handed masterfulness whereby the earth is subdued and obstacles are removed; the one is emblematic of Christian patience, the other of Pagan power. Both are good in certain states and neither is absolutely the best for all conditions. There are some shoes indeed, which, do what we will, we can never wear easy. We may keep them well fixed on our feet all our life, loyally accepting the pressure which fate and misfortune have imposed on us; but we go lame and hobbled in consequence, and never know what it is to make a free step, nor to walk on our way without discomfort. Examples abound; for among all the pilgrims toiling more or less painfully through life to death, there is not one whose shoes do not pinch him somewhere, how easy soever they may look and how soft soever the material of which they may be made. Even those proverbial possessors of roomy shoes, the traditional King and Princess, have their own little private bedroom slippers which pinch them, undetected by the gaping mult.i.tude who measure happiness by lengths of velvet and weight of gold embroidery; and the envied owners of the treasure which all seek and none find might better stand as instances of sorrow than of happiness--examples of how badly shod poor royalty is, and how, far more than meaner folk, it suffers from the pinching of its regal shoes.

The uncongeniality of a profession into which a man may have been forced by the injudicious overruling of his friends, or by the exigencies of family position and inherited rights, is one form of the pinching shoe by no means rare to find. And here, again, poor royalty comes in for a share of the grip on tender places, and the consequent hobbling of its feet. For many an hereditary king was meant by nature to be nothing but a plain country gentleman at the best--perhaps even less; many, like poor 'Louis Capet,' would have gone to the end quite happily and respectably if only they might have kicked off the embroidered shoes of sovereignty and betaken themselves to the highlows of the herd--if only they might have exchanged the sceptre for the turning-lathe, the pen or the fowling-piece. 'Je deteste mon metier de roi,' Victor Emmanuel is reported to have said to a republican friend who sympathized with the monarch's well-known tastes in other things beside his hatred of the kingly profession; and history repeats this frank avowal in every page. But the purple is as hard to be got rid of as Deianeira's robe; for the most part carrying the skin along with it and trailed through a pool of blood in the act of transfer--which is scarcely what royalty, oppressed with its own greatness, and willing to rid itself of sceptre and shoes that it may enjoy itself in list-slippers after a more bourgeoise fashion, would find in accordance with its wishes.

Lower down in the social scale we find the same kind of misfit between nature and position as a very frequent occurrence--pinching shoes, productive of innumerable corns and tender places, being many where the feet represent the temperament and the shoes are the profession.

How often we see a natural 'heavy' securely swathed in ca.s.sock and bands, and set up in the pulpit of the family church, simply because the t.i.thes were large and the advowson was part of the family inheritance. But that stiff rectorial shoe of his will never wear easy. The man's secret soul goes out to the parade-ground and the mess-table. The glitter and jingle and theatrical display of a soldier's life seem to him the finest things in the whole round of professions, and the quiet uneventful life of a village pastor is of all the most abhorrent. He wants to act, not to teach. Yet there he is, penned in beyond all power of breaking loose on this side the grave; bound to drone out muddled sermons half an hour long and eminently good for sleeping draughts, instead of shouting terse and stirring words of command which set the blood on fire to hear; bound to rout the shadowy enemy of souls with weapons he can neither feel nor use, instead of prancing off at the head of his men, waving his drawn sword above his head in a whirlwind of excitement and martial glory, to rout the tangible enemies of his country's flag. He loves his wife and takes a mild parsonic pleasure in his roses; he energizes his schools and beats up recruits for his parish penny readings; he lends his pulpit to missionary delegates and takes the chair at the meeting for the conversion of Jews; he does his duty, poor man, so far as he knows how and so far as nature gave him the power; but his feet are in pinching shoes all his life long, and no amount of walking on the clerical highway can ever make them pleasant wearing. Or he may have a pa.s.sionate love for the sea, and be mewed up in a lawyer's musty office where his large limbs have not half enough s.p.a.ce for their natural activity; where he is perched for twelve hours out of the twenty-four on a high stool against a desk instead of climbing cat-like up the ropes; and where he is set to engross a longwinded deed of conveyance, or to make a fair copy of a bill of costs, instead of bearing a hand in a gale and saving his ship by pluck and quickness. He could save a ship better than he can engross a deed; while, as for law, he cannot get as much of that into his heavy brain as would enable him to advise a client on the simplest case of a.s.sault; but he knows all the differences of rig, and the whole code of signals, and can tell you to a nicety about the flags of all nations, and the name and position of every spar and stay and sheet, and when to reef and when to set sail, with any other nautical information to be had from books and a chance cruise as far as the Nore. That pen behind his ear never ceases to gall and fret; his shoe never ceases to pinch; and to the last day of his life the high stool in the lawyer's office will be a place of penance and the sailor's quarter-deck the lost heaven of his ambition.

No doubt, by the time the soldier wrongly labelled as a parson or the sailor painfully working the legal treadmill, comes to the end of his career, the old shoe which has pinched him so long will be worn comparatively easy. The gradual decay of manly vigour, and the slow but sure destruction of strong desires, reduce one's feet at last to ma.s.ses of accommodating pulp; but what suffering we go through before this result can be attained!--what years of fruitless yearning, of fierce despair, of pathetic self-suppression, of jarring discord between work and fitness, pound all the life out of us before our bones become like wax and pinching shoes are transformed to easy-fitting slippers! For itself alone, not counting the beyond to which the hope clings, it would scarcely seem that such a life were worth the living.

Another pinching shoe is to be found in climate and locality. A man hungering for the busy life of the city has to vegetate in the rural districts, where the days drop one after the other like leaden bullets, and time is only marked by an accession of dulness. Another, thirsting for the repose of the country, has to jostle daily through Cheapside. To one who thinks Canadian salmon-fishing the supreme of earthly happiness, fate gives the chance of chasing b.u.t.terflies in Brazil; to another who holds 'the common objects of the seash.o.r.e' of more account than silver and gold, an adverse fortune a.s.signs a station in the middle of a plain as arid as if the world had been made without water; and a third, who cares for nothing but the free breathing of the open moors or the rugged beauty of the barren fells, is dropped down into the heart of a narrow valley where he cannot see the sun for the trees. At first this matter of locality seems to be but a very small grip on the foot, not worth a second thought; but it is one of a certain c.u.mulative power impossible to describe, though keen enough to him who suffers; and the pinching shoe of uncongenial place is quite as hard to bear as that of uncongenial work.

Again, a man to whom intellectual companionship means more than it does to many is thrown into a neighbourhood where he cannot hope to meet with comprehension, still less with sympathy. He is a Freethinker, and the neighbourhood goes in for the strictest Methodism or the highest ultra-Ritualism; he is a Radical, and he is in the very focus of county Toryism, where the doctrine of equality and the rights of man is just so much seditious blasphemy, while the British Const.i.tution is held as a direct emanation from divine wisdom second only to the Bible; or he is a Tory to the backbone--and his backbone is a pretty stiff one--and he is in the midst of that blatant kind of Radicalism which thinks gentlehood a remnant of the dark ages, and confounds good breeding with servility, and loyalty to the Crown with oppression of the people. Surrounded by his kind, he is as much alone as if in the middle of a desert. An Englishman among Englishmen, he has no more mental companionship than if he were in a foreign country where he and his neighbour spoke different tongues, and each had a set of signs with not two agreeing. And this kind of solitude makes a pinching shoe to many minds; though to some of the more self-centred or defying kind it is bearable enough--perhaps even giving a sense of roominess which closer communion would destroy.

Of course one of the worst of our pinching shoes is matrimony, when marriage means bondage and not union. The mismated wife or husband never leaves off, willingly or unwillingly, squeezing the tender places; and the more the pressure is objected to the worse the pain becomes. And nothing can relieve it. A country gentleman, hating the dust and noise of London, with all his interest in his county position and all his pleasure in his place, and a wife whose love lies in Queen's b.a.l.l.s and opera-boxes, and to whom the country is simply a slice out of Siberia wherever it may be; a hearty hospitable man, liking to see his table well filled, and a wife with a weak digestion, irritable nerves and a morbid horror of society; a pushing and ambitious man, with a loud voice and an imposing presence, and a shrinking fireside woman, who asks only to glide unnoticed through the crowd and to creep noiselessly from her home to her grave--are not all these shod with pinching shoes, which, do what they will, go on pinching to the end, and which nothing short of death or the Sir James Hannen of the time can remove? The pinching shoe of matrimony pinches both sides equally--excepting indeed, one of the two is specially phlegmatic or pachydermatous, and then the grip is harmless; but, as a rule, the ring-fence of marriage doubles all conditions, and when A.

walks hobbled, B. falls lame, and both suffer from the same misfit.

However, the only thing to do is to bear and wear till the upper-leather yields or till the foot takes the required shape; but there is an eternity of pain to be gone through before either of these desirable ends comes about; and the instinct which dreads pain, and questions its necessity, is by no means a false one. For all that, we must wear our pinching shoes of matrimony till death or the Divorce Court pulls them from our feet; which points to the need of being more careful than we usually are about the fit beforehand.

Poverty has a whole rack full of pinching shoes very hard to get accustomed to, and as bad to dance in lightly as were the fiery slippers of the naughty little girl in the German fairy-tale. Given a large heart, generous instincts and an empty purse, and we have the conditions of a real tragedy, both individual and social. For poverty does not mean only that elemental want of food and clothing which we generally a.s.sociate with its name. Poverty may have two thousand a year as well as only a mouldy crust and three shillings a week from the parish; and poverty cursing its sore feet in a brougham is quite as common as poverty, full of corns and callosities, blaspheming behind a costermonger's barrow. The shoe may pinch horribly, though there is no question of hunger or the 'twopenny rope;' for it is all a matter of relative degree, and the means wherewith to meet wants. But as poverty is not one of those fixed conditions of human life which no human power can remove, we have not perhaps quite so much sympathy with its grips and pinches as in other things less remediable. For while there is work still undone in the world, there is gain still to be had. The man whose energies stagnate now in a dry channel can, if he will, turn them into one more fertile; and if he is making but a poor business out of meal, it is his own fault if he does not try to make a better out of malt. Where the shoe pinches hardest is in places which we cannot protect and with a grip which we cannot prevent; but we cannot say this of poverty as a necessary and inalienable condition, and sympathy is so much waste when circ.u.mstances can be changed by energy or will.