Part 5

In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman--the woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big buttons, of which she flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness of a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears unmistakeable shirtfronts, linen collars, vests, and plain ties, like a man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and makes believe that the attitude is comfortable because it is manlike. If the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness, the mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores dogs and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She boasts of how good a marksman she is--she does not call herself markswoman--and how she can hit right and left, and bring down both birds flying. When she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass between her first two fingers, hollows her underlip, and tosses it off, throwing her head well back--she would disdain the ladylike sip or the closer gesture of ordinary women. She is great in cheese and bitter beer, in claret cup and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of effervescing wines. She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward, as men round their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw; for charms to her watch-chain she wears a corkscrew, a gimlet, a big knife, and a small foot-rule; and in entire contrast with the intensely womanly woman, who uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman when she does anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of which is affectation--from first to last affectation; a mere assumption of virile fashions utterly inharmonious to the whole being, physical and mental, of a woman.

Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a personal insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact limits of her mental sphere. This is the woman who assumes to be the antiseptic element in society, who makes believe that without her the world and human nature would go to the dogs, and plunge headlong into the abyss of sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand heroism of man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavor and patient seeking after truth, would serve his turn or the world's if she did not spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the boundary lines within which she would confine the range of thought and speculation. She knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affectation, and that other minds have as much right to their own boundary lines as she claims for herself; but it seems to her pretty to assume that woman generally is the consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that she, of all women, is most specially consecrated.

As an offshoot of this kind stands the affectation of simplicity--the woman whose mental attitude is self-depreciation, and who poses herself as a mere nobody when the world is ringing with her praises. "Is it possible that your Grace has ever heard of _me_?" said one of this class with prettily affected _naivete_ at a time when all England was astir about her, and when colors and fashions went by her name to make them take with the public at large. No one knew better than the fair _ingenue_ in question how far and wide her fame had spread, but she thought it looked modest and simple to assume ignorance of her own value, and to declare that she was but a creeping worm when all the world knew that she was a soaring butterfly.

There is a certain little kind of affectation very common among pretty women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are pretty, and not recognising the effect of their beauty on men. Take a woman with bewildering eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape, and fringed with long lashes that distract you to look at; the creature knows that her eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that fire burns and that ice melts; she knows the effect of that trick she has with them--the sudden uplifting of the heavy lid, and the swift, full gaze that she gives right into a man's eyes. She has practiced it often in the glass, and knows to a mathematical nicety the exact height to which the lid must be raised, and the exact fixity of the gaze. She knows the whole meaning of the look, and the stirring of men's blood that it creates; but if you speak to her of the effect of her trick, she puts on an air of extremest innocence, and protests her entire ignorance as to anything her eyes may say or mean: and if you press her hard she will look at you in the same way for your own benefit, and deny at the very moment of offence.

Various other tricks has she with those bewildering eyes of hers--each more perilous than the other to men's peace; and all unsparingly employed, no matter what the result. For this is the woman who flirts to the extreme limits, then suddenly draws up and says she meant nothing. Step by step she has led you on, with looks and smiles, and pretty doubtful phrases always susceptible of two meanings, the one for the ear by mere word, the other for the heart by the accompaniments of look and manner, which are intangible; step by step she has drawn you deeper and deeper into the maze where she has gone before as your decoy; then, when she has you safe, she raises her eyes for the last time, complains that you have mistaken her cruelly, and that she has meant nothing more than any one else might mean; and what can she do to repair her mistake? Love you? marry you? No; she is engaged to your rival, who counts his thousands to your hundreds; and what a pity that you had not seen this all along, and that you should have so misunderstood her! Besides, what is there about her that you or any one should love?

Of all the many affectations of women, this affectation of their own harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when they practice their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most dangerous and the most disastrous. But what can one say to them? The very fact that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his perception until too late. That men love though they suffer is the woman's triumph, guilt, and condonation; and so long as the trick succeeds it will be practiced.

Another affectation of the same family is the extreme friendliness and familiarity which some women adopt in their manners towards men. Young girls affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a year or so older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate, declare they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may not be natural. This form of affectation, once begun, continues through life, being too convenient to be lightly discarded; and youthful matrons not long out of their teens assume a tone and ways that would about befit middle age counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous even then if the "Indian summer" was specially bright and warm.

Then there is the affectation pure and simple, which is the mere affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of attitude that by consciousness ceases to be grace, and the thousand little _minauderies_ and coquetries of the sex known to us all. And there is the affectation which people of a higher social sphere show when they condescend to those of low estate, and talk and look as if they were not quite certain of their company, and scarcely knew if they were Christian or heathen, savage or civilized. And there is the affectation of the maternal passion with women who are never by any chance seen with their children, but who speak of them as if they were never out of their sight; the affectation of wifely adoration with women who are to be met about the world with every man of their acquaintance rather than with their lawful husbands; the affectation of asceticism in women who lead a thoroughly self-enjoying life from end to end; and the affectation of political fervor in those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to save Europe from universal revolution.

Go where we will, affectation of being something she is not meets us in woman, like a ghost we cannot lay or a mist we cannot sweep away. In the holiest and the most trivial things alike we find it penetrating everywhere--even in church, and at her prayers, when the pretty penitent, rising from her lengthy orison, lifts her eyes and looks about her furtively to see who has noticed her self-abasement and to whom her picturesque piety has commended itself.

All sorts and patterns of good girls and pleasant women are very dear and delightful; but the pearl of great price is the thoroughly natural and unaffected woman--that is, the woman who is truthful to her core, and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she would dare to tell a lie.

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 nobler 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 savor 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 that 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 noble women among us yet; women who believe in something beside 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, or 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 such public occasions for devotedness as the Crimean war occur, we can in some sort measure the extent to which the self-sacrifice of women can be carried; but in general their noblest virtues come out only in the quiet and secresy 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 is undeniably the handsomest woman of his acquaintance, and holds himself blessed when all men admire and all women envy. But 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 is 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, is pretty or ugly. Provided she is active and industrious, minds the house well, and 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 color or form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or a squint. Given the great foundations of an honorable 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 is a fact; 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 the 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 among 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 demigod, 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 his regard and tenderness. To be the one sole teacher and protector of such a gentle little creature seems to him the most delicious and the best condition of married life; and he holds Milton's famous lines to be expressive of the only fitting relation 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 sex of minds, and holds only that work complete which has been created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees how women have helped on the leaders in troubled 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 in men's brains for more than half their lifetime suddenly woke up into speech and activity by the influence of a woman great enough to call them forth. The adoring seraph would be an encumbrance, and nothing better than a child upon 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, 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 a sufficiently rich alembic with a residuum admitting of no kind of doubt. Venus herself without a dowry would be only a pretty sea-side 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 passionate 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 is not particular as to the strict order or economy of the housekeeping, provided only she 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 orders; 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 color 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 is true of individuals, it is especially true of nations, each of which has its own ideal of 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 or 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 that are as good as revelations; without cool judgment, but with the light of burning passions that guide her just as well; thinking by her heart, yet carrying the most refined metaphysics into her love; subtle; incomprehensible by the coarser brain of man; 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 _Hausmutter_, who cooks good dinners at small cost, and mends the family linen as religiously as if this were the Eleventh Commandment especially appointed for feminine fingers to keep, the poetic culmination of whom is Charlotte cutting bread and butter; 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 coarse material mendings to the aesthetic soul yearning after the infinite, and worshipping at the feet of the prophet?

In Italy the ideal woman of modern times is the ardent patriot, full of active energy, or physical force, and dauntless courage.

In Poland it is the patriot too, but of a more refined and etherealized type, passively resenting Tartar tyranny by the subtlest feminine scorn, and living in perpetual music and mourning.

In Spain it is a woman beautiful and impassioned, 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 humor with her master, economical in house-living to suit the meanness, and gorgeous in occasional attire to suit 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 neglect them unduly, they will have a bad time of it with Ali Ben Hassan 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 embarrassing 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 emancipated 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.