Part 5

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 specially 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 æsthetics 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 æsthetic soul yearning after the Infinite and worshipping at the feet of the prophet?

In Italy the ideal woman of late times was the ardent patriot, full of active energy, of physical force, of 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 Dudù, patient and submissive, always in good humour with her master, economical in house-living to please the meanness, and gorgeous in occasional attire to gratify the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental; but by no means Dudù 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 unduly neglect them, 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.

In all countries, then, the ideal woman changes, chameleon-like, to suit the taste of men; and the great doctrine that her happiness does somewhat depend on his liking is part of the very foundation of her existence. According to his will she is bond or free, educated or ignorant, lax or strict, housekeeping or roving; and though we advocate neither the bondage nor the ignorance, yet we do hold to the principle that, by the laws which regulate all human communities everywhere, she is bound to study the wishes of man and to mould her life in harmony with his liking. No society can get on in which there is total independence of sections and members, for society is built up on the mutual dependence of all its sections and all its members. Hence the defiant attitude which women have lately assumed, and their indifference to the wishes and remonstrances of men, cannot lead to any good results whatever. It is not the revolt of slaves against their tyrants which they have begun--in that we could sympathize--but it is a revolt against their duties.

And this it is which makes the present state of things so deplorable. It is the vague restlessness, the fierce extravagance, the neglect of home, the indolent fine-ladyism, the passionate love of pleasure which characterises the modern woman, that saddens men and destroys in them that respect which their very pride prompts them to feel. And it is the painful conviction that the ideal woman of truth and modesty and simple love and homely living has somehow faded away under the paint and tinsel of this modern reality which makes us speak out as we have done, in the hope--perhaps a forlorn one--that if she could be made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she would, by the very force of natural instinct and social necessity, order herself in some accordance with the lost ideal, and become again what we once loved and what we all regret.

_PINCHBECK._

Not many years ago no really refined gentlewoman would have worn pinchbeck. False jewelry and imitation lace were touchstones with the sex, and the woman who would condescend to either was assumed, perhaps not quite without reason, to have lost something more than the mere niceness of technical taste. This feeling ran through the whole of society, and pinchbeck was considered as at once despicable and disreputable. The successful speculator, sprung from nothing, who had made his fortune during the war, might buy land, build himself a mansion and set up a magnificent establishment, but he was never looked on by the aboriginal gentry of the place as more than a lucky adventurer; and the blue blood, perhaps nourishing itself on thin beer, turned up its nose disdainfully at the claret and Madeira which had been personally earned and not lineally inherited. This exclusiveness was narrow in spirit and hard in individual working; and yet there was a wholesome sentiment underlying its pride which made it valuable in social ethics, if immoral on the score of natural equality and human charity. It was the rejection of pretentiousness, however gilded and glittering, in favour of reality, however poor and barren; it was the condemnation of make-believe--the repudiation of pinchbeck. It is not a generation since this was the normal attitude of society towards its _nouveaux riches_ and Brummagem jewelry; but time moves fast in these later days, and national sentiments change as quickly as national fashions.

We are in the humour to rehabilitate all things, and pinchbeck has now its turn with the rest. The lady of slender means who would refuse to wear imitation lace and false jewelry is as rare as the country society which would exclude the _nouveau riche_ because of his newness, and not adopt him because of his riches. The whole anxiety now is, not what a thing is, but how it looks--not its quality, but its appearance. Every part of social and domestic life is dedicated to the apotheosis of pinchbeck. It meets us at the hall-door, where miserable stuccoed pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial dignity on a wretched jerry-built little villa run up without regard to one essential of home comfort or of architectural truth. It goes with us into the cold, conventional drawing-room, where all is for show and nothing for use, in which no one lives, and which is just the mere pretence of a dwelling-room, set out to deceive the world into the belief that its cheap finery is the expression of the every-day life and circumstances of the family. It sits with us at the table, which a confectioner out of a back street has furnished and where everything, down to the very flowers, is hired for the occasion. It glitters in the brooches and bracelets of the women, in the studs and signet-rings of the men. It is in the hired broughams, the hired waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers, the cheap champagne, and the affectation of social consideration that meet us at every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle-classes is penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck; and for one family that holds itself in the honour and simplicity of truth, ten thousand lie, to the world and to themselves, in frippery and pretence.

The greatest sinners in this are women. Men are often ostentatious, often extravagant, and not unfrequently dishonest in that broad way of dishonesty which is called living beyond their means--sometimes making up the deficit by practices which end in the dock of the Old Bailey; but, as a rule, they go in for the real thing in details, and their pinchbeck is at the core rather than on the surface. Women, on the contrary, give themselves up to a more general pretentiousness, and, provided they can make a show, care very little about the means; provided they can ring their metal on the counter, they ignore the want of the hall-stamp underneath. Locality, dress, their visiting-list and domestic appearances are the four things which they demand shall be in accord with their neighbours'; and for these four surfaces they will sacrifice the whole internal fabric. They will have a showy-looking house, encrusted with base ornamentation and false grandeur, though it lets in wind, rain and noise almost as if it were made of mud or canvas, rather than a plain and substantial dwelling-place, with comfort instead of stucco, and moderately thick walls instead of porches and pilasters. Most of their time is necessarily passed at home, but they will undergo all manner of house discomfort resulting from this preference of cheap finery over solid structure, rather than forego their 'genteel locality' and stereotyped ornamentation. A family of daughters on the one side, diligent over the 'Battle of Prague;' a nursery full of crying babies on the other; more Battles of Prague opposite, diversified by a future Lind practising her scales unweariedly; water-pipes bursting in the frost; walls streaming in the thaw; the lower offices reeking and green with damp; the upper rooms too insecure for unrestricted movement--all these, and more miseries of the same kind, a woman given over to the worship of pinchbeck willingly encounters rather than shift into a locality relatively unfashionable to her sphere, but where she could have substantiality and comfort for the same rent that she pays now for flash and show.

In dress it is the same thing. She must look like her neighbours, no matter whether they can spend pounds to her shillings, so runs up a milliner's bill beyond what she ought to afford for the whole family expenses. If others can buy gold, she can manage pinchbeck. Glass that looks like jet, like filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is every bit to her as good as the real thing; and if she cannot compass Valenciennes and Mechlin, she can go to Nottingham and buy machine-made imitations that will make quite as fine a show. How poor soever she may be, she must hang herself about with ornaments made of painted wood, of glass, of vulcanite; she must break out into spangles and beads and chains and _benoîtons_, which are cheap luxuries and, as she thinks, effective decorations. Flimsy silks make as rich a rustle to her ear as the stateliest brocade; and cotton velvet delights the soul that cannot aspire to Genoa. The love of pinchbeck is so deeply ingrained in her that even if, in a momentary fit of aberration into good taste, she condescends to a simple material about which there can be neither disguise nor pretence, she must load it with that detestable cheap finery of hers till she makes herself as vulgar in a muslin as she was in a cotton velvet. The _simplex munditiis_, which used to be held as a canon of feminine good taste, is now abandoned altogether, and the more she can bedizen herself according to the pattern of a Sandwich islander the more beautiful she thinks herself--the more certain the fascination of the men and the greater the jealousy of the women. This is the cause of all the tags and streamers, the bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces there, the puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off some dead girl's head, wherewith the modern Englishwoman delights to make herself hideous. It is pinchbeck throughout.

But we fear woman is past praying for in the matter of fashion; and that she is too far given over to the abomination of pretence to be called back to truth for any ethical reason whatsoever, or indeed by anything short of high examples. And then, if simplicity became the fashion, we should have our pinchbeck votaries translating that into extremes as they do now with ornamentation; if my lady took to plainness, they would go to nakedness.

Another bit of pinchbeck is the visiting-list--the cards of invitation stuck against the drawing-room glass--with the grandest names and largest fortunes put forward, irrespective of dates or tenses. The chance contact with the people represented may be quite out of the ordinary circumstances of life, but their names are paraded as if an accident, which has happened once and may never occur again, were in the daily order of events. They are brought to the front to make others believe that the whole social substance is of the same quality; that generals and admirals and lords and ladies are the common elements of the special circle in which the family habitually moves; that pinchbeck is good gold, and that 'composition' means marble. Women are exceedingly tenacious of these pasteboard appearances. In a house with its couple of female servants, where formal visitors are very rare and invitations, save by friendly word of mouth, rarer still, you may see a cracked china bowl or cheap mock _patera_ on the hall table, to receive the cards which are assumed to come in the thick showers usual with high people who have hall-porters and a thousand names or more on their books. The pile gets horribly dusty to be sure, and the upper layer turns by degrees from cream-colour to brown; but antiquity is not held to weaken the force of grandeur. The titled card left on a chance occasion more than a year ago still keeps the uppermost place, still represents a perpetual renewal of aristocratic visits and an unbroken succession of social triumphs. Yellowed and soiled, it is none the less the trump-card of the list; and while the outside world laughs and ridicules, the lady at home thinks that no one sees through this puerile pretence, and that the visiting-list is accepted according to the status of the fugleman at the head. She is very happy if she can say that the pattern of her dress, her cap, her bonnet, was taken from that of Lady So and So's; and we may be quite sure that all personal contact with grand folks so expresses itself and perpetuates the memory of the event, by such imitation--at a distance. It is too good an occasion for the airing of pinchbeck to be disregarded; consequently, for the most part it is turned to this practical account. Whether the fashion be suited to the material or to the other parts of the dress, is quite a secondary consideration; it being of the essence of pinchbeck to despise both fitness and harmony.

There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the appearance of social influence, much cultivated by women of a certain activity of mind and with more definite aims than all women have. This belongs to a grade higher than the small pretences of which we have been speaking--to women who have money, and so far have one reality, but who have not, by their own birth or their husbands', the original standing which would give them this social influence as of right. Some make themselves notorious for their drawing-room patronage of artists, which however does not include buying their pictures; others gather round them scores of obscure authors, whose books they talk of but do not read; a few, a short time since, were centres of spiritualistic circles and got a queer kind of social influence thereby, so far as Philistine desire to witness the 'manifestations' went; and one or two are names of weight in the emancipated ranks, and take chiefly to what they call 'working women.' These are they who attend Ladies' Committees, where they talk bosh and pound away at utterly uninteresting subjects as diligently as if what they said had any point in it, and what they did any ultimate issue in probability or common sense. But beyond the fact of having a large house, where their several sets may assemble at stated periods, these would-be lady patronesses are utterly impotent to help or to hinder; and their patronage is just so much pinchbeck, not worth the trouble of weighing.

In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless dissatisfaction with what they are and ceaseless endeavour to appear something they are not, our middle-class ladies are doing themselves and society infinite mischief. They set the tone to the world below them; and the small tradespeople and the servants, when they copy the vices of their superiors, do not imitate her grace the duchess, but the doctor's wife over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door, and the young ladies everywhere, who all try to appear like women of rank and fortune, and who are ashamed of nothing so much as of industry, truth and simplicity. Hence the rage for cheap finery in the kitchen, just a trifle more ugly and debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence the miserable pretentiousness and pinchbeck fine-ladyism filtering like poison through every pore of our society, to result God only knows in what grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and education will come to the front and endeavour to stay the plague already begun. Chains and brooches may seem but small material causes for important moral effects, but they are symbols; and, as symbols, they are of deep national value.

No good will be done till we get back some of our fine old horror of pinchbeck, and once more insist on Truth as the foundation of our national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do not land us here; and the progress of the arts and sciences must not be brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home business. Here is something for them to do--the regeneration of society by means of their own energies; the bringing people back to the dignity of truth and the beauty of simplicity; the substitution of that self-respect which is content to appear what it is, for the feeble pride which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot get gold, which endeavours so hard to hide its real estate and to pass for what it is not and never can be.

_AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD._

Amongst other queer anomalies in human nature is the difference that lies between sectarian sins and personal immoralities, between the intellectual untruth of a man's creed and the spiritual evil of his own nature. Rigid Calvinism, for instance, which narrows the issues of divine grace and shuts up the avenues of salvation from all but a select few, is a sour and illiberal faith; and yet a rigid Calvinist, simply continuing to believe in predestination and election as he was taught from the beginning, may be a generous, genial, large-hearted man. An inventor scheming out the deadliest projectile that has yet been devised is not necessarily indifferent to human life on his own account; nor is every American who talks tall talk about the glorious destinies of his country and the infinite superiority of his countrymen, as conceited personally as he is vainglorious nationally. In fact, he may be a very modest fellow by his own fireside; and though in his quality of American he is of course able to whip universal creation, in his mere quality of man he is quite ready to take the lower seat at the table and to give honour where honour is due.

This kind of distinction between the faults of the sect and the person, the nature and the cause, is very noticeable in women; and especially in all things relating to themselves. Individually, many among them are meek and long-suffering enough, and would be as little capable of resenting a wrong as of revenging it. Being used from the cradle to a good deal of snubbing, they take to it kindly as part of the inevitable order of things, and kiss the chastening rod with edifying humility; but, collectively, they are the most impatient of rebuke, the most arrogant in moral attitude, and the most restive of all created things sought to be led or driven. The woman who will bear to hear of her personal faults without offering a word in self-defence, and who will even say peccavi quite humbly if hard pressed, fires up into illimitable indignation when told that her foibles are characteristic of her sex, and that she is no worse than nature meant her to be. Personally she is willing to confess that she is only a poor worm grovelling in the dust--perhaps an exceptionally poor worm, if of the kind given to spiritual asceticism--but by her class she claims to be considered next door to an angel, and arrogates to her sex virtues which she would blush to claim on her own behalf.

Men, as men, are all sorts of bad things, as every one knows. They are selfish, cruel, tyrannical, sensual, unjust, bloodthirsty--where does the list end? and human nature in the abstract is a bad thing too, given over to lies and various deadly lusts; but women, as women, are exempt from any special share in the general iniquity, and only come under the ban with universal nature--with lambs and doves and other pretty creatures--not quite perfection, because of the Fall which spoilt everything, and yet very near it. As children of the rash parents who corrupted the race they certainly suffer from the general infection of sin that followed, but, as daughters contrasted with the sons, they are so far superior to those evil-minded brethren of theirs that their comparative virtues by sex override their positive vices by race. As individuals, they are worms; as human beings, they are poor sinful souls; but by their womanhood they are above rebuke.

Women have been so long wrapped in this pleasant little delusion about the sacredness of their sex, and the perfections belonging thereto by nature, that any attempt to show them the truth and convince them that they too are guilty of the mean faults and petty ways common to a fallen humanity--whereof certain manifestations are special to themselves--is met with the profound scorn or shrill cries of affronted womanhood. A man who speaks of their faults as they appear to him, and as he suffers by them, is illiberal and unmanly, and the rage of the more hysterically indignant would not be very far below that of the Thracian Mænads, could they lay hands on the offending Orpheus of the moment; but a woman who speaks from knowledge, and touches the weak places and the sore spots known best to the initiated, is a traitress even baser than the rude man who perhaps knows no better.