Part 19

According to a statement in _Nature_, 30,000 ruby and topaz humming-birds were sold in London some years ago in the course of one afternoon, “and the number of West Indian and Brazilian birds sold by one auction-room in London during the four months ending April 1885, was 404,464, besides 356,389 Indian birds, without counting thousands of Impeyan pheasants, birds of paradise,” etc. A writer in _Forest and Stream_ mentioned a dealer in South Carolina who handled 30,000 bird-skins per annum. “During four months 70,000 birds were supplied to New York dealers from a single village on Long Island, and an enterprising woman from New York contracted with a Paris millinery firm to deliver during this summer 40,000 or more skins of birds at 40 cents a piece. From Cape Cod, one of the haunts of terns and gulls, 40,000 of the former birds were killed in a single season, so that at points where a few years since these beautiful birds filled the air with their graceful forms and snowy plumage, only a few pairs now remain.” “It is estimated that not less than 5,000,000 birds of all sorts were killed last year for purposes of ornamentation,” wrote Mr. E. P. Powell in the New York _Independent_. A correspondent of the New York _Evening Post_ saw at an art exhibition a young lady, with “nothing in her face to denote excessive cruelty,” who wore a hat trimmed with “the heads of _over twenty little birds_”; and the same paper remarked editorially: “No one can tell how large a bird can be worn on a woman’s head, by walking in Fifth Avenue. It is necessary to take a ride in a Second Avenue car to get the full effect of the prevailing fashion. There one may see on the head-gear of poorer classes, and especially of coloured women, every species of the feathered kingdom smaller than a prairie chicken or a canvas-back duck and every colour of the rainbow.”

“Think of women!” exclaims Diderot; “they are miles beyond us in sensibility.”

It was _Science_, edited by men, that started the agitation against woman’s cruel and tasteless fashion—a fashion which not one woman in a hundred apparently refused to conform to. It was Messrs. J. A. Allen, W. Dutcher, G. B. Sennett, and other ornithologists, who raised their voices in behalf of the murdered birds, for whom no woman seemed to have a thought except Mrs. Celia Thaxter—all honour to her—and a small circle of ladies in England. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes who wrote how he felt “the shame of the wanton destruction of our singing-birds to feed the demands of a barbaric vanity;” another man, Charles Dudley Warner, who pertinently suggested that “a dead bird does not help the appearance of an ugly woman, and a pretty woman needs no such adornment.”

That the average woman’s imagination is not sufficiently refined and quick to feel for these winged poems of the air is historically proven by this fashion, which, characteristically enough, was first introduced by a member of the Paris _demi-monde_.

It has disappeared for the moment, but is almost absolutely certain to reappear within five years.

But who, after all, is responsible for this sluggish condition of the feminine imagination, this lack of sympathy for the fate of harmless happy birds, who in their domestic affections and love-affairs so closely resemble man? Is it not the men who, till within a few years, have refused to give their daughters a rational education? It must be so, for in that sphere where woman has been able to educate herself, and where she is queen—in the domestic circle, she _does_ possess that tender sympathy which she withholds from lower beings.

Within the range of human affections woman manifests more pity, is stirred to nobler needs of self-sacrifice, than man. Is Love included in this category? Dryden tells us that “pity melts the heart to love,” and novelists delight to make their heroines first refuse their suitors and subsequently accept them from real Love born of pity. For my part, I doubt this assumed relationship between Pity and Love; and I do not believe that a girl who has refused a lover ordinarily feels any more pity for him than a cat does for a mouse, or a person who is all right on a steamer does for another who is sea-sick—though he be his best friend. There is an instinctive belief in the human mind that love-sickness and sea-sickness are never fatal.

It does, indeed, very often happen—perhaps in half the cases; it would be interesting to have approximate statistics on the subject—that a girl first refuses the man whose second or third offer she accepts; for, as an anonymous writer remarks, “women are so made (happily for men) that gratitude, pity, the exquisite pleasure of pleasing, the sweet surprise at finding themselves necessary to another’s happiness ... altogether obscure and confuse the judgment.” But in such cases there are other factors which probably influence the girl much more than Pity does. She is, in the first place, largely influenced by this “exquisite pleasure of pleasing”—another name for Pride. Then there is a certain advantage to a man in having proposed, even unsuccessfully; for whenever subsequently the girl reads about Love she will involuntarily think of him; and thus his image will become associated with all the pleasure she derives from Love stories—which may prove the first step for her—and a long one—into the romantic passion. Besides, to propose to a girl is the greatest compliment a man can pay a girl; and this cannot be without influence.

Thus it is possible that Pity, allied with Pride, association, and flattery, may work a change of feeling in a feminine mind; but Pity alone will rarely lead her into the realms of Cupid. A man certainly would never dream of marrying from Pity, on seeing that she loves him deeply, a woman for whom he does not otherwise care. Nor should either man or woman ever marry from Pity, any more than for money or rank. Love should ever be the sole guide to matrimony.

_Love at First Sight._—La Bruyère gives his opinion that “the love which arises suddenly takes longest to cure;” and that “love which grows slowly and by degrees resembles friendship too much to be an ardent passion.” Schopenhauer, too, asserts that “great passions, as a rule, arise at first sight.” He refers to Shakspere’s

“Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?”

and then cites Mateo Aleman’s old Spanish romance, _Guzman de Alfarache_, in which, three centuries ago, the following observation was made: “To fall in love one does not require much time or reflection and choice; all that is needed is that in that first and only sight there should be a mutual suitability and harmony, or what in common life we call a sympathy of the blood, and which is due to a special influence of the stars.”

As it is not permissible, in these degenerate days of positive science, to explain a thing by a vague reference to poetic astrology, an attempt must be made to account for the possibility of Love at first sight on more prosaic grounds.

Physiognomy furnishes a simple solution of the problem. In every man’s face is painted his personal history, as well as his favourite and customary sphere of thoughts and feelings. As Sir Charles Bell remarks, “Expression is to passion what language is to thought.” The gift of reading correctly this facial language of passion is given to different persons in different degrees, though all have some share of it: and on their more or less accurate and subtle interpretation of the “lines and frowns and wrinkles strange” in another’s features depends the art of reading character and being sympathetically attracted or repulsed, as the case may be. A young man who has unconsciously associated certain peculiarities of facial expression in his sisters or female friends with habitual cheerfulness, amiability, and brightness will, on recognising similar features in a new acquaintance, take for granted similar charms of character: this, which is the work of a second, may result in sympathy at first sight, which very often is the beginning of Romantic Love.

Love at First Sight may be inspired by this instinctive perception of beauty of character, _i.e._ amiability; or by the sight of mere physical beauty; or, thirdly, by Personal Beauty in the highest sense of the word, uniting intellectual fascination with bodily charms.

Inasmuch as there are not a few men whose æsthetic taste is so weak that they would rather marry a useful, companionable girl and imagine her beautiful, than take a beauty and imagine her useful; and inasmuch as there are a great many more amiable and vivacious girls in the world than pretty ones, it happens that in a large number of cases Love is inspired by the physiognomic interpretation of sympathetic traits of character just referred to. Hence plain girls need never despair of finding husbands. There is even a current notion that the deepest passions are commonly inspired by plain women who are otherwise attractive. But what inspires the Love in these cases is not so much the woman’s amiability—and certainly not her plainness—as the fact that the style of her homeliness is of an opposite kind from the faults of the lover, and promises to neutralise them in the offspring.

Plain and homely, moreover, are terms often applied to women whose faces only are so, while their figures are sometimes superb. But a fine figure is quite as essential a part of Personal Beauty as a fine face, and is, in the opinion of Schopenhauer, even more potent as a love-inspirer. If the figure is disregarded in favour of the face, Romantic Love is apt to become hyper-romantic, as in the days of Dante.

Perhaps the largest number of cases of Love at First Sight, so called, are inspired by mere _beauté du diable_—a female “bud” whose sole charm apparent is sparkling health and fragrant, dew-bejewelled freshness. That this kind of Love at sight, which consists in being dazzled for the moment by a set of regular features and a pair of bright eyes, is often of brief duration, does not militate against the statement that the deepest Love is also born of such a flash of æsthetic admiration. An incipient passion may be crushed by the discovery of some disagreeable trait in the person who inspired it; but when, owing to want of early opportunity to discover unsympathetic traits, Love has been allowed to make some progress, the subsequent discovery of a flaw is not nearly so serious a matter, for then Master Cupid simply puts a daub of whitewash on it and calls it a beauty-spot.

_Intellect and Love._—But, after all, the deepest Love at Sight, and that which gives promise of greatest permanence, is that inspired by a handsome woman in whose face Intellect has written its autograph. Goethe, indeed, has remarked that “intellect cannot warm us, or inspire us with passion;” but the view he takes here of the relations between intellect and passion is obviously very crude and superficial. No man, of course, would ever fall in Love with a woman who showed her intellectuality—as not a few do—by a parrotlike repetition of encyclopædic reading or magazine epitomes of knowledge. This gives evidence of only one form of intellect, the lowest, namely, Memory. It is the higher forms—imagination, wit, clever reasoning, that constitute the essence of intellectual culture; and though woman may never quite equal man in this sphere, such cases as Mme. de Staël, George Sand, and George Eliot show how much she _can_ accomplish by means of application.

Now this higher kind of intellectual culture is able to influence the amorous feelings in two ways: first, by refining and vivifying the features; secondly, by enabling a woman to appreciate her lover’s ambitions and afford him sympathetic assistance, thereby awakening a responsive echo in his grateful mind.

Look at Miss Marbleface in yonder corner, surrounded by a group of admirers. Everybody wonders why she, whose features might inspire a sculptor, remains unmarried at twenty-six. Her friends, indeed, whisper that she never even got an offer. Yet all the men to whom she is introduced admire her immensely—the first evening; but strange to say, after they have seen her a few times, they are not a bit jealous to leave her to a new group of admirers; who, in turn, cede her to another. Her beauty, in truth, is but skin-deep, _literally_; the muscles under the skin are never vivified by an electric flash of wit from the brain; there is nothing but marble features and a stereotyped smile; no animation, no change of expression, no Intellect. Were her intellect as carefully cultivated as her features are chiselled, she would inspire _Love_, not mere momentary admiration; and she would have been married six years ago to a man chosen at will from the whole circle of her acquaintances.

It is easy to explain how the absurd and fatal notion that intellectual application mars women’s peculiar beauty and lessens the feminine graces in general must have arisen. The inference seems to follow logically from the two undeniable premises that pretty girls very often _are_ insipid, and intellectual women commonly _are_ plain. But this is only another case of putting the cart before the horse. Pretty girls, on the one hand, are so rare that they are almost sure to be spoiled by flattery. They receive so much attention that they have no time for study; and ambitious mothers take them into society prematurely, where they get married before their intellectual capacities—which sometimes are excellent—have had time to unfold. Ugly girls, on the other hand, being neglected by the men, have to while away their time with books, music, art, etc., and thus they become bright and entertaining. Therefore it is not the intellect that makes them ugly, but the ugliness that makes them intellectual.

The culture that can be compressed into a single lifetime unfortunately does not suffice to modify the bony and cartilaginous parts of the human face sufficiently to change homeliness into beauty; but the muscles can be mobilised, the expression quickened and beautified by an individual’s efforts at culture; hence some of these reputed plain intellectual women, in moments when they are excited, become more truly fascinating, with all their badly-chiselled features, than any number of cold marble faces. If men only knew it!—but they are afraid of them—the average men are—because they do not constantly wish to be reminded of their own mental shortcomings in a tournament of wit, pleasantry, or erudition.

Even Schopenhauer, who was convinced that women are too stupid to appreciate a man’s intellect, if abnormal, held that women, on the contrary, gain an advantage in Love by cultivating their minds; adding that it is owing to the appreciation of this fact that mothers teach their daughters music, languages, etc.; thus artificially padding out their minds, as on occasion they do parts of the body.

No doubt, as a rule, women are more influenced in love-affairs by a man who excels in athletic qualities of manly energy than by one of intellectual supereminence. But the adoration of women for a Liszt, a Rubinstein, and other men of genius, whose eminence lies in a department that has been made accessible to women for centuries, shows what might be if women were trained in other spheres of human activity and knowledge.

Regarding the mental padding, however, we might continue in the old pessimist’s vein by saying that it is a trick which has had its day. Men do not marry girls quite so blindly as in the days when Romantic Love was a novelty. They keep their eyes open; and when they find that their girl’s musical “culture” consists in the mechanical drumming of three pieces, and that her other “accomplishments” are similar shams, they are apt to take their throbbing hearts and put them into a refrigerator until the young lady has become a faded, harmless old maid, still drumming her three pieces on the piano. The fact that so many mothers persist in thus “padding” their daughters’ minds, instead of educating them properly, is largely responsible for the ever-increasing number of self-conscious and disgusted bachelors in the world.

The example of Aspasia illustrates both the physical advantages beauty derives from intellectual culture—through the refinement of expression—and the emotional advantages a woman secures by being able to sympathise intelligently with her lover’s or husband’s enterprises. Nothing more irresistibly fascinates a man than genuine questioning interest shown by a woman in his life-work. Or, as Mr. Hamerton puts it, “the most exquisite pleasure the masculine mind can ever know, is that of being looked upon by a feminine intelligence with clear sight and affection at the same time.” But on this topic Mr. Mill has discoursed so enthusiastically in his _Subjection of Women_ that anything that might be added here could be little more than a faint echo of his persuasive eloquence, tinged though it be with true lovers’ exaggeration.

Goethe illustrated his maxim that “intellect cannot warm us or inspire us with passion” by marrying a pretty, brainless doll of whom he soon got heartily tired. Heine followed his example by marrying a Parisian labouring girl who, like Madame Racine, probably never read her husband’s writings. And in his _Unterwelt_ he laments his “verfehlte Liebe, verfehltes Leben”—his mistaken love and wasted life.

Why did the ancient Greeks neglect their women? Why did they remain strangers to Love and seek refuge in Friendship? Their women were modest, domestic, good mothers and wives; but they lacked one thing, and that was Intellect.

GALLANTRY AND SELF-SACRIFICE

Primitive tribes have a delightfully simple way of arranging their division of labour. The men do the hunting and carry on wars, the women do everything else. If a warrior on “moving day” should say to his wife and daughters: “See here, this will never do for me to have nothing but my weapons and my pipe, while you carry the babies, the cooking utensils, the remnants of the game, and the tent: let me help you!”—if he should say this, his comrades would consider him crazy, or rather, possessed of a demon, and would burn two or three persons at the stake for having bewitched him.

Gallantry, in other words, is unknown to savages either between lovers, or, in a general sense, towards all women. Nor is it known to semi-civilised peoples. Among the nomadic Arab tribes of the Sahara the wife has to do all the work unless her husband is rich enough to own a slave; and among the poorer Bedouins the husband traverses the desert comfortably seated on his camel, while his wife plods along behind on foot, loaded with her bed, her kitchen utensils, and her child on top.

The ancient Greeks were not so ungallant as these peoples towards their women, as they had slaves to do their hard work; but the constant devoted attention and desire to please which constitute modern Gallantry did not, as we have seen, exist among them. Among the Romans we find traces—but traces only—of this virtue. Mediæval Gallantry reached its extremes in the witches’ fires on the one side, and the grotesque performances of the knight-errants on the other. The intermediate ground apparently remained uncultivated, except during the brief period of chivalrous poetry, and then only in the highest classes. Wherever, in short, Romantic Love was absent, Gallantry, as one of its ingredients, was unknown.

Coming to modern times, we see the same parallelism between general Gallantry and the freedom granted to the young to form Love-matches.

In France, Germany, Italy, the women still have to do the hardest field work, though the men assist. The French, indeed, who systematically suppress Romantic Love, are apparently the most gallant nation in the world. But there is a general agreement among tourists that in _real_ Gallantry, which calls for self-sacrificing actions and not mere polite words and bows, the French are inferior to all other European nations. It is in England and America that true general Gallantry, like true Romantic Love, flourishes most. In America, indeed, owing to the former scarcity of women, Gallantry was for a time carried to a ludicrous excess, almost reminding one of the days of Don Quixote; as in that story of the Western miners who surrounded an emigrant’s waggon and insisted on his “trotting out” his wife; which being done by the trembling man, who feared the worst, the “roughs” passed round the hat and collected a large sum of gold for the woman. Perhaps American women still are, as we read in _Daisy Miller_, “the most exacting in the world and the least endowed with a sense of indebtedness.” But the constant sight in New York and elsewhere of street-cars in which every man has a seat while every woman is standing, seems to indicate that there is a reaction which may go to the opposite extreme. But after a while the pendulum will doubtless swing back to the middle and remain stationary; and this will be in the new golden age when men will always give up their seats to old and infirm women, to pretty girls, and to all the others who display truly refined instincts and good taste by abjuring crinolines, bustles, high heels, stuffed birds on their hats, and other “ornaments” fatal to Personal Beauty.

From the facts thus hastily sketched we may safely infer that, as we saw in the case of Sympathy with another’s joys, so again with Gallantry, what was born as a trait of Romantic Love was subsequently transferred to the social and domestic relations of men and women in general. Had Romantic Love done nothing more than this, it would deserve to rank among the most refining influences in modern civilisation.

Perhaps the most remarkable existing illustration of the way in which Lovers’ Gallantry may assume a general form, is to be found in Mr. Ruskin’s recent confession regarding girls: “My primary thought is how to serve _them_ and make them happy; or if they could use me for a plank-bridge over a stream, or set me up for a post to tie a swing to, or anything of the sort not requiring me to talk, I should be always quite happy in such a promotion.”

This reads precisely like Heine’s poem in which the lover wishes he were his mistress’s footstool, or again her needle-cushion, that he might experience the delights of pain inflicted by her foot or hand.

Such excess of amorous Gallantry is a favourite theme for poetic hyperbole, and it hardly can be exaggerated; for the lover really _does_ entertain such wishes. With him, _romance is realism_.

No slave could be so meek and humble, no well-trained dog so obedient as the amorous swain. Again and again will he, without a moment’s hesitation, plunge into a wintry stream and triumphantly snap up and bring back to her the chip she has thrown in to amuse herself.

_Active and Passive Desire to Please._—"Love, studious how to please" (Dryden), has two ways of accomplishing its purpose—one passive, one active. Women, owing to their prescribed Coyness, are not allowed to indulge in actions that would imply a desire to please a suitor, except in the later stages of Courtship, when all is settled or understood. Hence their desire to please can only show itself passively in their efforts to make their personal appearance attractive to the lover. Nor are men indifferent to this passive phase of Gallantry. As nothing so fills a man with Pride as the thought that She, a paragon of beauty, adorns herself so carefully all for his delight; so in turn he feels it incumbent on him to follow her example. Even the habitually slovenly become dandies for the moment, brush their hair, buy a new hat and clothes; the lazy become industrious, the cowards assume heroic airs and strut about like tragedians—