Part 16

The charming woman is the gentlest of her sex. She would not do a cruel thing nor say an unkind word for the world. When she tells you the unpleasant things which ill-natured people have said of your friends or hers, she tells them in the sweetest and dearest way imaginable. She is so sure there is not a syllable of truth in it all; and what a shame it is that people should be so ill-natured! In the gentle tone of sympathy and deprecation peculiar to her, she gives you all the ugly and uncomfortable reports which have come to her, and of which you have never heard a breath until this moment. Yet it is you who are stupid, not she who is initiative, for she tells them to you as if they were of patent notoriety to the whole world; only she does not believe them, remember! She takes the most scrupulous care to deny and defend as she retails, and you cannot class her with the tribe of the ill-natured whom she censures, setting, as she does, the whole strength of her gentle words and generous disbelief in opposition to these ugly rumours. Yet you wish she had not told you. Her disclaimers spring so evidently from the affectionate amiability of her own mind, which cannot bear to think evil, that they have not much effect upon you. The excuse dies away from your memory, but the ill-savoured report roots; and you feel that you have lost your respect for your former friends for ever; or, if they were only hers, then, that nothing should tempt you to know them. There is no smoke without some fire, you think; and the charming woman cannot possibly have kindled the flame herself out of sticks and leaves and rubbish of her own collecting. But how sweet and charitable she was when she told you! how much you love her for her tenderness of nature! what a guileless and delightful creature she is!

The charming woman is kind and graceful, but she does not command the stronger virtues. She flatters sweetly, but, it must be confessed, she fibs as sweetly. She sometimes owns to this, but only to fibs that do more good than harm--fibs into the utterance of which she is forced for the sake of peace and to avoid mischief. It is a feminine privilege, she says; and men agree with her. Truth at all times--bold, uncompromising, stern-faced truth--is coarse and indelicate she says; a masculine quality as little fitted for women as courage or great bodily strength. Her husband knows that she fibs; her friends at times find her out too; but though the women throw it at her as an accusation, the men accept it as a quality without which she would be less the charming woman that she is; and not only forgive it, but like her the better for the grace and tact and suppleness she displays in the process of manufacture. Hers are not the severer virtues, but the gentler, the more insinuating; and absolute truth--truth at any price and on all occasions--does not come into the list.

Charming women, with their plastic manners and non-aggressive force, always have their own way in the end. They are the women who influence by unseen methods and who shrink from any open display of power. They know that their _métier_ is to soothe men, to put them on good terms with themselves, and so to get the benefit of the good humour they induce; and they dread nothing so much as a contest of wills. They coax and flatter for their rights, and consequently they are given privileges in excess of their rights; whereas the women who take their rights, as things to which they are entitled without favour, lose them and their privileges together. This art of self-abasement for future exaltation is one which it is given only to few to carry to perfection, but no woman is really charming without it. In fact it is part of her power; and she knows it. Though charming women are decidedly the favourites with men, they are careful to keep on good terms with their own sex; and in society you may often see them almost ostentatiously surrounded by women only, whom they take pains to please or exert themselves to amuse, but whom they throw into the shade in the most astonishing way.

Whatever these really charming women are, or do, or wear, is exactly the right thing; and every other woman fails in proportion to the distance she is removed from this model. When a charming woman is dressed richly, the simpler costumes of her friends look poor and mean; when she is _à la bergère_, the Court dresses about her are vulgar; when she is gay, quietness is dullness; when she is quiet, laughter is coarse. And there is no use in trying to imitate her. She is the very Will-o'-the-wisp of her circle, and no sooner shows her light here than she flits away there; she has no sooner set one fashion, which her admiring friends have adopted with infinite pains and trouble, than she has struck out a new one which renders all the previous labour in vain. This is part of her very essence; and the originality which is simply perfection that cannot be repeated, and not eccentricity that no one will imitate, comes in as one of the finest and most potent of her charms. When she lends her patterns to her friends, or tells them this or that little secret, she laughs in her heart, knowing that she has shown them a path they cannot possibly follow and raised up a standard to which they cannot attain. And even should they do either, then she knows that, by the time they have begun to get up to her, she will be miles away, and that no art whatever can approximate them to her as she is. What she was she tosses among them as a worn-out garment; what she is they cannot be. She remains still the unapproachable, the inimitable, the charming woman _par excellence_ of her set, whom none can rival.

_APRON-STRINGS._

Among other classifications, the world of men and women may be divided into those who wear aprons and those who are tied to the strings thereof--those who determine the length of the tether and those who are bound to browse within its circuit--those who hold the reins and those who go bitted. All men and women are fond of power, but there is a wide difference in the ways in which they use it. To men belong the grave political tyrannies at which nations revolt and history is outraged, to women the small conventional laws framed against individual liberty by Mrs. Grundy and society; men rule with rods of iron and drive with whips of steel, women shorten the tether and tie up close to apron-strings; men coerce, women forbid. In fact, the difference is just that which lies between action and negation, compulsion and restraint; between the masculine jealousy of equality and the feminine fear of excess. If men debar women from all entrance into their larger sphere, women try to dwarf men's lives to their own measure, and not a few hold themselves aggrieved when they fail. They think that everything which is impossible to them should be forbidden to others, and they maintain that to be a lamentable extreme which is simply in excess of their own powers. Not content with supremacy in the home which is their own undisputed domain, nor satisfied with binding on men the various rules distinguishing life in the drawing-room, the dining-room and the breakfast-parlour, they would, if they could, carry their code outside, and sweep into its narrow net the club-house and the mess-table, the billiard-room and the race-course, and wherever else men congregate together--delivered from the bondage of feminine conventionalities.

For almost all women have an uneasy feeling when their men are out of sight, enjoying themselves in their own way. They fear on all sides--both bodily harm and moral evil; and regard men's rougher sports and freer thoughts as a hen regards her wilful ducklings when they take to the water in which she would be drowned, and leave her high and dry lamenting their danger and self-destruction. The man they love best for his manliness they would, in their loving cowardice, do their utmost to make effeminate; and, while adoring him for all that makes him bold and strong in thought as well as in frame, they would tie him up to their apron-strings, and keep him there till he became as soft and narrow as themselves. Not that they would wish to do so; if you asked them they would tell you quite the contrary. But this would be the result if they had their own way, their love being at all times more timid than confident.

To home-staying women, a brilliant husband courted by the world and loving what courts him, is a painful cross to bear, however much he may be beloved--the pain, in fact, being proportionate to the love. Perhaps no life exemplifies this so much as Moore's. Poor "Bessy" suffered many things because of the looseness of the apron-string by which her roving husband was tied, and the length of the tether which he allowed himself. _Farfallone amoroso_ as he was, his incessant flutterings out of range and reach caused her many a sad hour; and in after years she was often heard to say that the happiest time of her life was when his mind had begun to fail, for then she had him all to herself and no one came in between them--no great world swept him away to be the idol of a _salon_, and left her alone at home casting up her accounts with life and love, and quaking at the result that came out. When the brilliancy and the idolatry came to an end, then her turn began; and she tied up her dulled and faltering idol close to her side for ever after, and was happier to have him there helpless, affectionate, dependent and imbecile than when he was at his brightest--and a rover.

Many a wife has felt the same when sickness has broken down the strong man's power to a weakness below her own, and made her, so long the inferior, now the more powerful of the two, and the supreme. She gathers up the reins with that firm, tight hand peculiar to women, and ties her master to her apron-string so that he cannot escape. It is quite a matter of pride with her that she has got him into such good order. He obeys her so implicitly about his medicines, and going to bed early, and wrapping himself up, and avoidance of draughts and night-air, that she feels all the reflected glory of one who has conquered a hero. The Samson who used to defy the elements and break her careful strings like bands of tow, has at last laid his head in her lap and suffered himself to be covered by her apron. It is worth while to have had the anxiety and loss of his illness for the sake of the submission resulting; and she generally ends by gaining a hold over him which he can never shake off again.

It is pitiful though, to see the stronger life thus dwarfed and bound. But women like it; and while the need for it lasts men must submit. The danger is lest the habit of the apron-string should become permanent; for it is so perilously pleasant to be petted and made much of by women, that few men can resist the temptation when it offers; and many have been ruined for the remainder of their days by an illness which gave them up into the keeping of wife and sisters--those fireside Armidas who will coddle all the real manliness out of their finest heroes, if they are let. If this kind of thing occurs at the break of life, the _mezzo cammino_ between maturity and age, it is doubly difficult to throw off; and many a man who had good years of vigour and strength, before him if he had been kept up to the mark, sinks all at once into senility because his womankind got frightened at that last small attack of his, and thought the best way to preserve him from another was to weaken him by over-care out of all wish for dangerous exposure.

Perhaps the greatest misfortune that can befall a man is to have been an only son brought up by a timid widow mother. It is easy to see at a glance, among a crowd of boys, who has been educated under exclusively feminine influence. The long curled shining hair, the fantastic tunic--generally a kind of hybrid between a tunic and a frock--the lavish use of embroidery, the soft pretty-behaved manner, the clean unroughened hands, all mark the boy of whom his mother has so often wished that he had been a girl, and whom she has made as much like a girl as possible. His intellectual education has been as unboylike as his daily breeding. Mothers' boys are taught to play the piano, to amuse themselves with painting, or netting, or perhaps a little woolwork in the evenings--anything to keep them quietly seated by the family table, without an outbreak of boyish restlessness or inconvenient energy; but they are never taught to ride, to hunt, to shoot, to swim, to play at cricket, football, nor billiards, unless a stalwart uncle happens to be about who takes the reins in his own hand at times, and insists on having a word to say to his nephew's education.

There is danger in all, and evil in some, of these things; and women cannot bear that those they love should run the risk of either. Wherefore their boys are modest and virtuous truly, but they are not manly; and when they go out into the world, as they must sooner or later, they are either laughed at for their priggishness, or they go to the bad by the very force of reaction. The mother has allowed them to learn nothing that will be of solid use to them, and they enter the great arena wholly unprepared either to fight or to resist, to push their own way or to take their own part. They have been kept tied up to the apron-string to the last moment, and only when absolutely forced by the necessity of events will she cut the knot and let them go free. But she holds on to the last moment. Even when the time comes for college-life and learning, she often goes with her darling, and takes lodgings in the town, that she may be near at hand to watch over his health and morals, and continue her careful labours for his destruction.

The chances are that a youth so brought up never becomes a real man, nor worth his salt anyhow. He is a prig if he is good, a debauchee of the worst kind if he kicks over the traces at all. He is more likely the first, carrying the mark of the apron-string round his wrist for life. Like a tame falcon used to the hood and the perch and the lure home, no matter what the temptation of the quarry afield, he is essentially a domestic man, at ease only in the society of women; a fussy man; a small-minded man; delicate in health; with a dread of strong measures, physical, political, or intellectual; a crotchety man given to passing quackeries; but not a man fit for man's society nor for man's work. When there are many boys, instead of only one, in a widow's family, the opposite of all this is the case. So soon as they have escaped from the nursery, they have escaped from all control whatsoever; and if one wants to realize a puerile pandemonium of dirt, discomfort, noise and general disorganization, the best place in the world is the household of a feeble-spirited mother of many sons where there is no controlling masculine influence.

Daughters, who are naturally and necessarily tied up to the mother's apron-string, suffer occasionally from too tight a strain; though certainly it is not the fault of the present day that girls are too closely fettered, too home-staying or subdued. Still, every now and then one comes across a matron who has crushed all individuality out of her family, and whose grown-up daughters are still children to her in moral go-carts and intellectual leading-strings. They may be the least attractive of their sex, but a mother of this kind has one fixed delusion respecting them--namely, that the world is full of wolves eager to devour her lambs, and that they are only safe when close to the maternal apron and browsing within an inch of the tether stake. These are the girls who become hopeless old maids. Men have an instinctive dread of the maternal apron-string. They do not want to marry a mother as well as a wife, and to live under a double dominion and a reduplicated opposition.

It is all very well to say that a girl so brought up is broken in already, and therefore more likely to make a good wife than many others, seeing that it is only a transfer of obedience. That may do for slaves who cannot be other than slaves whoever is the master; but it does not do for women who, seeing their friends freer than themselves, reflect with grief and longing that, had fate so ordered it, they might have been free too. The chances here, as with the mothers' boys, are, that the girl kept too close to the apron-string during her spinsterhood goes all abroad so soon as she gets on the free ground of matrimony, and lets her liberty run into license. Or she keeps her old allegiance to her mother intact, and her husband is never more than the younger branch at best. Most likely he is a usurper, whom it is her duty to disobey in favour of the rightful ruler when they chance to come into collision.

If women had their will, all national enterprise would be at an end. There would be no Arctic Expeditions, no Alpine Clubs, no dangerous experiments in science, no firearms at home, no volunteering--in their own family at least. All the danger would be done by the husbands and brothers and sons of other women, but each would guard her own. For women cannot go beyond the individual; and the loss of one of their own, by misadventure, weighs more with them than the necessity of keeping up the courage and hardihood of the nation. Nor do they see the difference between care and coddling, refinement and effeminacy; consequently, men are obliged to resist their influence, and many cut the apron-string altogether, because delicate fingers will tie the knots too tight. They do not remember that the influence to which men yield as a voluntary act of their own grace is a very different thing from obedience to the open denial, the undisguised interference and restraint, which some women like to show. Men respect the higher standard of morality kept up by women; they obey the major and the minor laws of refinement which are framed for home life and for society; and they confess that, without woman's influence, they would soon degenerate into mere savages and be no better than so many Choctaws before a generation was over; but they do not like being pulled up short, especially in public, and hounded into the safe sheepfold for all the world to see them run. And they resent the endeavour. And the world resents it too, and feels that something is wrong when a woman shows that she has the whip hand, and that she can treat her husband like a petted child or bully him like a refractory one; that she has him tied to her apron-strings and tethered to the stake of her will. But there is more of this kind of thing in families than the world at large always knows of; and many a fine, stalwart fellow who holds his own among men, who is looked up to at his club and respected in his office for his courage, decision and self-reliance, sinks into mere poodledom at home, where his wife has somehow managed to get hold of the leading-strings, and has taught him that the only way to peace is by submission and obedience.

_FINE FEELINGS._

There are people who pride themselves on the possession of what it pleases them to call fine feelings. Perhaps, if we were all diligent to call spades spades, these same fine feelings would come under a less euphemistic heading; but, as things are, we may as well adopt the softening gloze that is spread over the whole of our language, and call them by a pretty name with the rest. People who possess fine feelings are chiefly remarkable for the ease with which they take offence; it being indeed impossible, even for the most wary of their associates, to avoid giving umbrage in some shape, and generally when least intended and most innocently minded. Nothing satisfies them. No amount of attention, short of absolute devotion and giving them the place of honour everywhere, sets them at ease with themselves or keeps them in good-humour. If you ask them to your house, you must not dream of mixing them up with the rest. Though you have done them an honour in asking them at all, you must give them a marked position and bear them on your hands for the evening. They must be singled out from the herd and specially attended to; introduced to the nicest people; made a fuss with and taken care of; else they are offended, and feel they have been slighted--their sensitiveness or fine feelings being a kind of Chat Moss which will swallow up any quantity of _petits soins_ that may be thrown in, and yet never be filled. If they are your intimate friends, you have to ask them on every occasion on which you receive. They make it a grievance if they hear that you have had even a dinner party without inviting them, though your space is limited and you had them at your last gathering. Still, if it comes to their ears that you have had friends and did not include them, they will come down on you to a dead certainty if they are of the franker kind, and ask you seriously, perhaps pathetically, how they have offended you? If they are of the sullen sort they will meet you coldly, or pass you by without seeing you; and will either drift into a permanent estrangement or come round after a time, according to the degree of acidity in their blood and the amount of tenacity in their character. They have lost their friends many times for no worse offence than this.

They are as punctilious too, as they are exacting. They demand visit for visit, invitation for invitation, letter for letter. Though you may be overwhelmed with serious work, while they have no weightier burden strapped to their shoulders than their social duties and social fineries, yet you must render point for point with them, keeping an exact tally with not a notch too many on their side, if you want to retain their acquaintance at all. And they must be always invited specially and individually, even to your open days; else they will not come at all; and their fine feelings will be hurt. They suffer no liberties to be taken with them and they take none with others; counting all frock-coat friendliness as taking liberties, and holding themselves refined and you coarse if you think that manners _sans façon_ are pleasanter than those which put themselves eternally into stays and stiff buckram, and are never in more undress than a Court suit. They will not go into your house to wait for you, however intimate they may be; and they would resent it as an intrusion, perhaps an impertinence, if you went into theirs in their absence. If you are at luncheon when they call, they stiffly leave their cards and turn away; though you have the heartiest, jolliest manner of housekeeping going, and keep a kind of open house for luncheon casuals. They do not understand heartiness or a jolly manner of housekeeping; open houses are not in their line and they will not be luncheon casuals; so they turn away grimly, and if you want to see them you have to send your servant panting down the street after them, when, their dignity being satisfied, their sensitiveness smoothed down and their fine feelings reassured, they will graciously turn back and do what they might have done at first without all this fuss and fume.