Chapter 15

One thing is certain, that if woman is to continue for ever in her present condition, the moral and social condition of large numbers of human beings must remain hopeless. Their future appears dreary in the extreme. It is Utopian to expect that men and women will grow less and less self-indulgent, so long as the education they undergo from their earliest years renders them prone to every species of temptation. There are some things which make social philosophers hopeful and confident, but no social philosopher can ever do anything but despair of real progress if he is to take for granted that women are always to play the part in life which they at present play. The emancipation of the goose is an experiment, but it is not surprising that many enthusiasts should believe it to be an experiment well deserving of a trial.

ENGAGEMENTS.

A great writer has pathetically described the last days of a man under sentence of death. He has found appropriate expression for every phase of the protracted agony with characteristic richness and variety of language; we are made to taste each drop in the bitter cup--the remorse and the awful expectation, and the desperate clinging to deceitful straws of hope. Indeed it scarcely requires the eloquence of a first-rate writer to impress upon us the fact that it is very unpleasant to expect to be hanged. Every man's imagination is sufficient to realize some of the unpleasant consequences of such a state of mind; for though the number of persons who have encountered this particular experience is inconsiderable, most of us have gone through something more or less analogous--we have been significantly told to wait after school, or have paid visits to dentists, or have been candidates at competitive examinations, or have been engaged to be married. These and many other situations, though varying in the intrinsic pain or pleasure of the anticipated event, have thus much in common, that they are all states of abnormal suspense. The nerves are kept in a state of equal tension by the uncomfortable feeling that we are in for it, whatever the "it" may turn out to be.

The first impression is simple; it resembles that felt by a man who has just slipped upon the side of a mountain, and knows that he is inevitably going to the bottom. He has not time to think whether he will fall upon snow or rocks, whether he will have merely a pleasant slide or be dashed into a thousand fragments; he does not make up his mind to be heroic or to be frightened; the one thought that flashes across his mind is that here at last is the situation which he has so often feebly pictured to himself; he will know all about it before he has time to reflect upon its pains or pleasures. People who have escaped drowning sometimes assert that they have remembered their whole lives in a few instants, though it does not quite appear how they can remember that they remembered the series of incidents without remembering the incidents themselves. But, so far as we have been able to collect evidence, the general rule in any sudden catastrophe is that which we have described. There is nothing but a dazzling flash of surprise, which almost excludes any decided judgment as to the painfulness or otherwise of the situation.

If, then, we may venture to conjecture the frame of mind in which a lady or gentleman first enters upon an engagement, we should say that it was this sense of startled suspense. They feel as Guy Faux would have felt after lighting the train of gunpowder--that they have done something which they may probably never repeat in their lifetime, and every other emotion will be for the moment absorbed. But as engagements are generally more protracted than most of the critical situations we have mentioned, the surprise dies away, and the victims have time to look about them, and analyze more closely the emotions produced by their position. To do any justice to the complicated and varying frame of mind into which even an average lover may be thrown in the course of a few weeks would of course require the pen, not of men, but of angels. It would involve a condensation of a large fraction of all the poetry that has been written in the world, and no small part of the cynical criticism by which it has been opposed. But, taking for granted the mass of commonplaces which has been accumulated in the course of centuries, there are a few special modifications of the position under our present social arrangements which are more fitted for remark. The state of mind known as being in love is confined to no particular race or period, but the position of the engaged persons may vary indefinitely. In a good simple state of society, the gentleman pays down his money or his sheep or his oxen, and takes away the lady without any superfluous sentiment. Even in more civilized states, a marriage may be substantially a bargain carried out in a business-like spirit. However unsatisfactory such a mode of proceeding may be from certain points of view, it is at any rate intelligible; all parties to the contract understand their relative positions, and have a plain line of conduct traced for them.

But in a modern English engagement the form is necessarily different, even when the substance of the arrangement is identical. For once in his experience a man feels called upon to accept that view of life for which novelists are unjustly condemned. We say unjustly, for it is inevitable that a novelist should frequently represent marriage as being the one great crisis of a man's history. It is not his function to give a complete theory of life, but to describe such scenes as are most interesting and most dramatic. He is quite justified in often writing as though two lovers should really think about nothing under heaven except their chances of union, and should be dismissed, when the happy event has once taken place, in a certainty of living very happily ever afterwards. He has no concern with the lover's briefs or sermons or operations on the Stock Exchange, which may really take up by far the greater part of the man's waking thoughts; and it would spoil the unity of his work if he were to dwell upon them proportionately. It would be as absurd to mistake the novelist's views for a complete one as to condemn it because it is incomplete. In novels which depend, as ninety-nine out of a hundred must depend, upon a love story, the importance of marriage, or at least the degree in which it occupies the thoughts of the characters, will necessarily be overstated. The engaged persons, however, find that, in the eyes of their friends, if not in their own, they are temporarily accepting the novelist's ideal. For the time they are considered exclusively as persons about to marry, and all their other relations in life retire into the background.

The difficulty of the position depends upon the extent to which this conventional assumption diverges from the true facts of the case. The lady, for example, suffers less than the gentleman, because, in spite of Dr. Mary Walker and other martyrs to the cause of woman's rights, it is still true that marriage fills a larger space in her life than in that of the other sex. She can take up the character with a certain triumph, as of one who has more or less fulfilled her mission and passed from the ranks of the aspirants to those of the successful candidates for matrimony. At any rate, even if she takes a loftier view of feminine duties, there is nothing ridiculous about her position. She may busy herself about trousseaux or wedding-dresses or marriage-presents, with perfect satisfaction to herself and to the envy of her female friends. But her unfortunate accomplice, especially if he is of mature age, is in a far more uncomfortable position.

Few men who have become immersed in any profession or business can act the character without an unpleasantly strong sense of being in a false position. There is nothing indeed intrinsically ludicrous about it; the chances are that the lover is doing a very sensible thing, and that his wisest friends approve of his conduct. Still it is undeniable that he moves about, to his own apprehension at least, in a universal atmosphere of ridicule. He feels that he is really a quiet hard-working young man, full of law it may be, or of plans for improving his parish, or of Parliamentary notices of motion. He can talk about his own topics with interest and intelligence, and may possibly be an authority in a small way. He is quite conscious, too, that there are many sides to his character which do not come out in his ordinary every-day business. Unluckily that is just the fact which his friends are apt to ignore.

We soon learn to associate our acquaintance with the positions in which we have been accustomed to see them, and forget that they may have sentiments and faculties of which we know nothing. Consequently an engagement seems to imply an entire metamorphosis. Our friend, or his image in our minds, was a comparatively simple compound of two or three characters at most; whereas men generally have a far more complex organization. In business hours, perhaps, he was simply a machine for grinding out law, and at other times a lively talker and a good whist-player. No process of transmutation will convert either of those into the conventional lover, who can think of nothing but the object of his affections; the apparent incongruity is too violent not to produce a sense of the ludicrous; and our friend is bound in decency to make it as violent as possible. From which it follows that we laugh, and that he knows that we are laughing, at him. Intensely awkward congratulations are exchanged, according to two or three formulas which have been handed down from distant generations. If the congratulator is a married man, he hopes that his friend may enjoy as much happiness as he has found himself in the married state; if a bachelor, he assures him that, although unable hitherto to act up to his principles, he has always thought marriage the right thing. There are persons who can repeat one of these common forms with all the air of making an original observation, as there are men who can begin an oration by asserting that they are unaccustomed to public speaking; but, as a rule, it is said in such a way as to imply that the speaker, whilst admitting the absurdity of connecting the ideas of his friend and marriage, is willing to pay the necessary compliments, if he may do it as cheaply as possible.

In short, until a man is engaged to be married, he scarcely knows how narrow a view his friends take of his character, and how easily they are amused at what is after all rather a commonplace proceeding. When his own friends look upon him so distinctly in the light of a joke, he of course cannot expect much quarter from the friends of the lady. He has a painful impression that he is coming out in a part for which he has had no practice, under the eyes of hostile critics. Every man thinks it only due to himself to criticise a friend's new purchases of horses or pictures or wines; if he did not find fault with them he would miss an opportunity of establishing his superior acumen. And of course the principle extends to lovers. There is probably a narrow circle who are bound officially to approve; but the unfortunate victim feels that, outside of it, every acquaintance of the lady will take pleasure in a keen observation of his defects, and he trembles accordingly. It is said (rather unfairly, perhaps) that shyness is a form of conceit; but the least self-conscious of mankind can hardly fail to feel uncomfortable when he is called upon to perform such a highflown part under so severe a scrutiny.

Of course the torment is far greater in the case of a middle-aged professional gentleman, who is habitually employed upon some incongruous work, than to a youth in whom any sort of folly is graceful; but there can be few persons to whom the position is not to a certain extent irksome. When a man is married, or when he is a bachelor, he is allowed to be a rational being, taking rational views of life. He feels it rather hard that in the interval society insists upon his being in a state of temporary insanity, and then laughs at him because it doesn't look natural. He begins to long even for that climax of misery when, if the custom be not already dead, he will have to commit one of the most absurd actions of which a human being can be guilty--namely, making a speech in the morning, at an anomalous and dreary meal, exactly when his shamefacedness is at its highest pitch. That so many people survive engagements without any perceptible sourness of temper is some proof of the goodness of human nature, or of the fact that there are compensations in the state of being in love which go to neutralize the discomfort of being engaged.

WOMAN IN ORDERS.

There is, no doubt, something extremely flattering to our insular conceit in the mystery which hangs about the institutions which we prize as specially national. We feel that a Briton is still equal to three Frenchmen, so long as the three Frenchmen confess with a shrug that the Briton is wholly unintelligible. The blunders of Dr. Doellinger, the baffled wonderment with which every foreigner retires from the study of it, only endear to us the more the Church of England. This was perhaps the reason, besides the inherent marvel of the matter, why we passed so lightly over M. Esquiroz and his late ecclesiastical researches. It was humiliating to English pride to have to confess that a Frenchman had unveiled to the world of Paris the hitherto sacred mysteries of the perpetual curate and of the tithe rent-charge.

The enemy was clearly at the gates of the central fortress of British insularism; even an American bishop was tempted to strive to understand Westminster Abbey; and a dismal rumor prevailed that nothing hindered the Ecclesiastical Commissioners from revealing the nature and purpose of their existence but the fact that, after prolonged inquiry, they found it impossible to understand them themselves. It was time, we felt, to abandon these mere outposts of the unintelligible to the aggressions of an impertinent curiosity, and to retire to the citadel. There, happily, we are safe. Even the unhallowed inquisitiveness of M. Esquiroz recoils baffled from the parson's wife. Disdainful of all artificial adjuncts of mystery, to all appearance a woman like other women, packing her little sick-baskets, balancing the coal-club accounts, teaching in her Sunday-school, the centre of religion, of charity, and of tittle-tattle, woman in orders fronts calmly the inquirer, a being fearfully and wonderfully English, unknowable and unknown.

No one who saw for the first time the calm, colorless serenity of the parson's wife would discover in her existence the result of a life-long disappointment. But the parson on whose arm she leans commonly represents to his spouse simply the descent from the ideal to the real, the step from the sublime to the prosaic, if not the ridiculous. There was a moment in her life when the vestry-door closed upon a world of hallowed wonder, when the being who appeared in white robes, "mystic, wonderful," was a being not as other men are, a being whose hours were spent in study, in meditation, in charity, a being of beautiful sermons and spotless neckties. The flirtation with him, so impatiently longed for, was not as other men's flirtations; there was a tinge of sacredness about his very frivolity, and a soft touch of piety in his sentiment. To share such a life, to commune hourly with a spirit so semi-angelic, seemed an almost religious ambition. The spirit of a Crusader, half-heaven, half-earth, fired the gentle breast of the besieger till Jerusalem was won.

Then came the hour of disenchantment. The mysterious object of adoration, seen on his own hearth-rug, melted into the mass of men. The spiritual idealist was cross over an ill-cooked dinner, and as commonplace at breakfast as his _Times_. The discourses, so lately utterances from heaven, dwindled into copies or compilations from other heavenly utterers. The life of a Lady Bountiful turned out a dull routine of mothers' meetings and Sunday-schools. The ideal poor, grateful and resigned, proved cross and greedy old harridans. The world of peace, of nobleness, of serenity, died into a parish of bustle and scandal and worry. Out of this wreck of hope arises the parson's wife. Disillusionment is her ordination for a clerical position none the less real that it is without parallel in the ecclesiastical history of the world.

She takes her part with all the decision of genius. Her first step is to restore the Temple she has broken down, to set up again the Dagon who lies across the threshold. If not for herself, at any rate for the world and for her children, she re-creates the priest she once dreamt of in the commonplace parson whom she has actually wedded. Conscious as she is of the inner nature of the idling apartment where he lounges through the morning, she impresses on the household the necessity of quiet while its master is in his "study." By the daily addition of skillful but minute touches, she paints him to the world as an ideal of piety and of learning. She takes bills and letters off his hands, that his mind may not be disturbed from more serious subjects. She enforces a sacred silence throughout the house during the solemn hours while the sermon is being compiled. She sews the sacred sheets together, and listens while the discourse is recited for her approval. She listens again with an interest as fresh as ever when it is preached. She marks the text in her Bible, and sees that the children mark it too.

As the first subject of his theological realm, she sets an example which other subjects are to follow. They, like her, mingle their contempt for the parson's business abilities and voluble talk with a hushed reverence for his esoteric knowledge of subjects inaccessible to common men. They, like her, manage to combine a perfect readiness to snub him and his opinions on all earthly topics, with an equal readiness to listen to him, as to a divine oracle, on the topics of grace and free-will. Insensibly the subtle distinction tells on the parson himself. He is conscious, perhaps pleasantly conscious, that he is seen through the glass of his wife, and seen therefore darkly. He retires within the domestic veil. He learns to avoid common subjects--subjects, that is, where the world holds itself at liberty to criticise him. He retires to fields where he is above criticism. He believes at last in the vamped-up sermons in which his wife persists in believing. He accepts the position of an oracle on sacred topics which his wife has made for him. In a word, the parson's wife has created the British parson.

It is hard to say how far the creator believes in her own creation. In persuading others, she probably succeeds to a great extent in persuading herself. At any rate she accepts willingly enough the consequences of a position which leaves her the master of the parish. In the bulk of cases the parson is simply the Mikado, the nominal ruler, lapped in soft ease, and exempt from the worry of the world about him. Woman is the parochial Tycoon, the constitutional premier who does not rule, but governs. She is the hidden centre and force of the whole parochial machinery--the organist, the chief tract distributor, the president of the Dorcas society, the despot of the penny bank and the coal-club, the head of the sewing-class, the supervisor of district-visitors, the universal referee as to the character of mendicant Joneses and Browns. In other words, the parson's wife has revived an Apostolic Order which but for her would have died away; she has restored the primitive Diaconate.

Woman is the true parochial deacon, and not the bashful young gentleman fresh from Oxford, who wears his stole over one shoulder rather than over two. It is the parson's wife who "serves tables" nowadays; and the results on parochial activity are in some ways remarkable enough. In the first place, men are fairly driven from the field. If a layman wishes to help in a parish he finds himself lost in a world of women. It is only those semi-clerical beings who seem to unite with a singular grace all the weaknesses of both the sexes who persist in the attempt. Then, too, all the ideas of the parochial world become feminine; the parish buzzes with woman's hatred of the Poor-laws, and contempt for economic principles and hard-hearted statisticians.

Mendicancy flies from the workhouse and the stone-yard to entrench itself against Guardians and relieving-officers among the soup-kitchens and the coal-tickets of feminine almsgiving. The parson, after a faint protest of common sense, surrenders at discretion, and flings all experience to the winds. One wife turns her husband into a fount of begging letters. Another forces him to set up manufactories for all the lucifer-match girls of the parish. Woman's imaginativeness, woman's fancy, woman's indifference to fact exhausts itself in "sensational cases," and revels in starvation and death. But we must turn to a brighter side of her activity. Ritualism is the great modern result of the parson's wife, though, with a base ingratitude to the rock from which they were hewn, Ritualists hoist the standard of clerical celibacy. Woman has long since made her parson; now (as of old with her doll) her pleasure is to dress him. A new religious atmosphere surrounds her life when the very work of her hands becomes hallowed in its purpose. The old crotchet and insertion--we use words to us more mysterious than intelligible--become flat, stale, and unprofitable by the side of the book-marker and the colored stole; and a flutter of excitement stirs even the stillness of a life which is sometimes offensively still at the sight of the new chasuble with "aunt's real lace, you know, dear," sewn about it.

However gray an existence may be, and the tones of a life like this are naturally subdued, it still cherishes within a warmth and poetry of its own; and the poetry of the parson's wife breaks out in vestments and decorations. Nothing brings out more vividly the fact that Mrs. Proudie _is_ the Church of England than that her reaction against the prose of existence is shaking--so the Protestant Alliance tells us--the Church of England to its foundations. The real disturber of the Church peace, the real assertor of Catholic principles, or (for those who prefer a middle phrase to either of these contending statements) the real defendant in the Court of Arches, is not Mr. Mackonochie, but the parson's wife.

Mrs. Proudie, we repeat, is the Church of England; but if it is difficult to estimate the results of her position upon the spouse of her bosom and the parish which she rules, it is still harder to estimate its results upon herself. Her outer manner seems, indeed, to reflect what we have ventured to call the gray tones of her life, and a certain weariness of routine breaks out even in the mechanical precision of her existence. Power, in the parochial as in the domestic circle, is bought by her at the cost of a perpetual self-abnegation, and it is a little hard to be always hiding the hand that pulls the strings. We may excuse a little forgetfulness in a wife when her daily sacrifice is wholly forgotten in the silver teapot and the emblazoned memorial which proclaim the borrowed glories of her spouse.