Part 10

If inclined to be intolerant to any one, it is to those who seek to disturb the existing state of things, or whose speculations unsettle men's minds; those who, as she thinks, entangle the sense of that which is clear and straightforward enough if they would but leave it alone, and who, by their love of iconoclasm, run the risk of destroying more than idols. But she is intolerant only because she believes that when men put forth false doctrines they put them forth for a bad purpose, and to do intentional mischief. Had she not this simple faith, which no philosophic questionings have either enlarged or disturbed, she would not be the great girl she is; and what she would have gained in catholicity she would have lost in freshness. For herself, she has no self-asserting power, and would shrink from any kind of public action; but she likes to visit the poor, and is sedulous in the matter of tracts and flannel-petticoats, vexing the souls of the sterner, if wiser, guardians and magistrates by her generosity which they affirm only encourages idleness and creates pauperism. She cannot see it in that light. Charity is one of the cardinal virtues of Christianity; accordingly, charitable she will be, in spite of all that political economists may say.

She belongs to her family, they do not belong to her; and you seldom hear her say 'I went' or 'I did.' It is always 'we;' which, though a small point, is a significant one, showing how little she holds to anything like an isolated individuality, and how entirely she feels a woman's life to belong to and be bound up in her home relations. She is romantic too, and has her dreams and memories of early days; when her eyes grow moist as she looks at her husband--the first and only man she ever loved--and the past seems to be only part of the present. The experience which she must needs have had has served only to make her more gentle, more pitiful, than the ordinary girl, who is naturally inclined to be a little hard; and of all her household she is the kindest and the most intrinsically sympathetic. She keeps up her youth for the children's sake she says; and they love her more like an elder sister than the traditional mother. They never think of her as old, for she is their constant companion and can do all that they do. She is fond of exercise; is a good walker; an active climber; a bold horsewoman; a great promoter of picnics and open-air amusements. She looks almost as young as her eldest daughter differentiated by a cap and covered shoulders; and her sons have a certain playfulness in their love for her which makes them more her brothers than her sons. Some of them are elderly men before she has ceased to be a great girl; for she keeps her youth to the last by virtue of a clear conscience, a pure mind and a loving nature. She is wise in her generation and takes care of her health by means of active habits, fresh air, cold water and a sparing use of medicines and stimulants; and if the dear soul is proud of anything it is of her figure, which she keeps trim and elastic to the last, and of the clearness of her complexion, which no heated rooms have soddened, no accustomed strong waters have clouded nor bloated.

Then there are great girls of another kind--women who, losing the sweetness of youth, do not get in its stead the dignity of maturity; who are fretful, impatient, undisciplined, knowing no more of themselves nor human nature than they did when they were nineteen, yet retaining nothing of that innocent simplicity, that single-hearted freshness and joyousness of nature which one does not wish to see disturbed even for the sake of a deeper knowledge. These are the women who will not get old and who consequently do not keep young; who, when they are fifty, dress themselves in gauze and rosebuds, and think to conceal their years by a judicious use of many paint-pots and the liberality of the hairdresser; who are jealous of their daughters, whom they keep back as much and as long as they can, and terribly aggrieved at their irrepressible six feet of sonship; women who have a trick of putting up their fans before their faces as if they were blushing; who give you the impression of flounces and ringlets, and who flirt by means of much laughter and a long-sustained giggle; who talk incessantly, yet have said nothing to the purpose when they have done; and who simper and confess they are not strong-minded but only 'awfully silly little things,' when you try to lead the conversation into anything graver than fashion and flirting. They are women who never learn repose of mind nor dignity of manner; who never lose their taste for mindless amusements, and never acquire one for nature nor for quiet happiness; and who like to have lovers always hanging about them--men for the most part younger than themselves, whom they call naughty boys and tap playfully by way of rebuke. They are women unable to give young girls good advice on prudence or conduct; mothers who know nothing of children; mistresses ignorant of the alphabet of housekeeping; wives whose husbands are merely the bankers, and most probably the bugbears, of the establishment; women who think it horrible to get old and to whom, when you talk of spiritual peace or intellectual pleasures, you are as unintelligible as if you were discoursing in the Hebrew tongue. As a class they are wonderfully inept; and their hands are practically useless, save as ring-stands and glove-stretchers. For they can do nothing with them, not even frivolous fancy-work. They read only novels; and one of the marvels of their existence is what they do with themselves in those hours when they are not dressing, flirting, nor paying visits.

If they are of a querulous and nervous type, their children fly from them to the furthest corners of the house; if they are molluscous and good-natured, they let themselves be manipulated up to a certain point, but always on the understanding that they are only a few years older than their daughters; almost all these women, by some fatality peculiar to themselves, having married when they were about ten years old, and having given birth to progeny with the uncomfortable property of looking at the least half a dozen years older than they are. This accounts for the phenomenon of a girlish matron of this kind, dressed to represent first youth, with a sturdy black-browed débutante by her side, looking, you would swear to it, of full majority if a day. Her only chance is to get that black-browed tell-tale married out of hand; and this is the reason why so many daughters of great girls of this type make such notoriously early--and bad--matches; and why, when once married, they are never seen in society again.

Grandmaternity and girlishness scarcely fit in well together, and rosebuds are a little out of place when a nursery of the second degree is established. There are scores of women fluttering through society at this moment whose elder daughters have been socially burked by the friendly agency of a marriage almost as soon as, or even before, they were introduced, and who are therefore, no longer witnesses against the hairdresser and the paint-pots; and there are scores of these same marriageable daughters eating out their hearts and spoiling their pretty faces in the school-room a couple of years beyond their time, that mamma may still believe the world takes her to be under thirty yet--and young at that.

_SHUNTED DOWAGERS._

The typical mother-in-law is, as we all know, fair game for every one's satire; and according to the odd notions which prevail on certain points, a man is assumed to show his love for his wife by systematic disrespect to her mother, and to think that her new affections will be knit all the closer the more loosely he can induce her to hold her old ones. The mother-in-law, according to this view of things, has every fault. She interferes, and always at the wrong time and on the wrong side; she makes a tiff into a quarrel and widens a coolness into a breach; she is self-opinionated and does not go with the times; she treats her daughter like a child and her son-in-law like an appendage; she spoils the elder children and feeds the baby with injudicious generosity; she spends too much on her dress, wears too many rings, trumps her partner's best card and does not attend to the 'call;'--and she is fat. But even the well abused mother-in-law--the portly old dowager who has had her day and is no longer pleasing in the eyes of men--even she has her wrongs like most of us; and if she sometimes asserts her rights more aggressively than patiently, she has to put up with many disagreeable rubs for her own part; and female tempers over fifty are not notorious for humility.

Take the case of a widow with means, whose family is settled. Not a daughter to chaperone, not a son to marry; all are so far happily off her hands, and she is left alone. But what does her loneliness mean? In the first place, while her grief for her husband is yet new--and we will assume that she does grieve for him--she has to turn out of the house where she has been queen and mistress for the best years of her life; to abdicate state and style in favour of her son and her son's wife whom she is sure not to like; and, however good her jointure may be, she must necessarily find her new home one of second-rate importance. Perhaps however, the family objects to her having a home of her own. Dear mamma must give up housekeeping and divide her time among them all; but specially among her daughters, being more likely to get on well with their husbands than with her sons' wives.

Dear mamma has means, be it remembered. Perhaps she is a good natured soul, a trifle weak and vain in proportion; who knows what evil-disposed person may not get influence over her and exercise it to the detriment of all concerned? She has the power of making her will, and, granting that she is proof against the fascinations of some fortune-hunting scamp twenty years at the least her junior--may be forty, who knows? do not men continually marry their grandmothers if they are well paid for it?--and though every daughter's mamma is of course normally superior to weakness of this kind, yet accidents will happen where least expected. And even if there is no possible fear of the fascinating scamp on the look-out for a widow with a jointure, there are artful companions and intriguing maids who worm themselves into confidence and ultimate power; sly professors of faiths dependent on filthy lucre for their proof of divinity; and on the whole, all things considered, dear mamma's purse and person are safest in the custody of her children. So the poor lady, who was once the head of a place, gives up all title to a home of her own, and spends her time among her married daughters, in whose houses she is neither guest nor mistress. She is only mamma; one of the family without a voice in the family arrangements; a member of a community without a recognized status; shunted; set aside; and yet with dangers of the most delicate kind besetting her path in all directions. Nothing can be much more unsatisfactory than such a position; and none much more difficult to steer through, without renouncing the natural right of self-assertion on the one hand, or certainly rasping the exaggerated susceptibilities of touchy people on the other.

In general the shunted dowager has as little indirect influence as direct power; and her opinion is never asked nor desired as a matter of graceful acknowledgment of her maturer judgment. If she is appealed to, it is in some family dispute between her son and daughter, where her partizanship is sought only as a makeweight for one or other of the belligerents. But, so far as she individually is concerned, she is given to understand that she is rococo, out of date, absurd; that, since she was young and active, things have entered on a new phase where she is nowhere, and that her past experience is not of the slightest use as things are nowadays. If she has still energy enough left, so that she likes to have her say and do her will, she has to pass under a continual fire of opposition. If she is timid, phlegmatic, indolent, or peaceable, and with no fight in her, she is quietly sat upon and extinguished.

Dear mamma is the best creature in the world so long as she is the mere pawn on the young folks' domestic chess-board, to be placed without an opposing will or sentiment of her own. She is the 'greatest comfort' to her daughter; and even her son-in-law assents to her presence, so long as she takes the children when required to do so, does her share of the tending and more than her share of the giving, but never presuming to administer nor to correct; so long as she is placidly ready to take off all the bores; listen to the interminable story-tellers; play propriety for the young people; make conversation for the helplessly stupid or nervous; so long in fact as she will make herself generally useful to others, demand nothing on her own account, and be content to stand on the siding while the younger world whisks up and down at express speed at its pleasure. Let her do more than this--let her sometimes attempt to manage and sometimes object to be managed--let her have a will of her own and seek to impose it--and then 'dear mamma is so trying, so fond of interfering, so unable to understand things;' and nothing but mysterious 'considerations' induce either daughter or son-in-law to keep her.

No one seems to understand the heartache it must have cost her, and that it must be continually costing her, to see herself so suddenly and completely shunted. Only a year ago and she had pretensions of all kinds. Time had dealt with her leniently, and no moment had come when she had suddenly leaped a gulf and passed from one age to another without gradations. She had drifted almost imperceptibly through the various stages into a long term of mature sirenhood, remaining always young and pretty to her husband. But now her widow's cap marks an era in her life, and the loss of her old home a new and descending step in her career. She is plainly held to have done with the world and all individual happiness--all personal importance; plainly told that she is now only an interposing cushion to soften the shock or ease the strain for others. But she does not quite see it for her own part, and after having been so long first--first in her society, in her home, with her husband, with her children--it is a little hard on her that she should have to sink down all at once into a mere rootless waif, a kind of family possession belonging to every one in turn and the common property of all, but possessing nothing of herself.

Of course dear mamma can make herself bitterly disagreeable if she likes. She can taunt instead of letting herself be snubbed. She can interfere where she is not wanted; give unpalatable advice; make unpleasant remarks; tell stinging truths; and in all ways act up to the reputation of the typical mother-in-law. But in general that is only when she has kept her life in her own hands; has still her place and her own home; remains the centre of the family and its recognized head; with the dreadful power of making innumerable codicils and leaving munificent bequests. If she has gone into the Learism of living about among her daughters, it is scarce likely that she has character enough to be actively disagreeable or aggressive.

On a first visit to a country-house it is sometimes difficult to rightly localize the old lady on the sofa who goes in and out of the room apparently without purpose, and who seems to have privileges but no rights. Whose property is she? What is she doing here? She is dear mamma certainly; but is she a personage or a dependent? Is she on a visit like the rest of us? Is she the maternal lodger whose income helps not unhandsomely? or, has she no private fortune, and so lives with her son-in-law because she cannot afford to keep house on her own account? She is evidently shunted, whatever her circumstances, and has no _locus standi_ save that given by sufferance, convenience, or affection. Naturally she is the last of the dowagers visiting at the house. She may come before the younger women, from the respect due to age; but her place is at the rear of all her own contemporaries; not for the graceful fiction of hospitality, but because she is one of the family and therefore must give precedence to strangers.

She is the movable circumstance of the home life. The young wife, of course, has her fixed place and settled duties; the master is the master; the guests have their graduated rights; but the shunted dowager is peripatetic and elastic as well as shunted, and to be used according to general convenience. If a place is vacant, which there is no one else to fill, dear mamma must please to take it; if the party is larger than there are places, dear mamma must please stay away. She is assumed to have got over the age when pleasure means pleasure, and to know no more of disappointment than of skipping. In fact, she is assumed to have got over all individuality of every kind, and to be able to sacrifice or to restrain as she may be required by the rest.

Perhaps one of her greatest trials lies in the silence she is obliged to keep, if she would keep peace. She must sit still and see things done which are gall and wormwood to her. Say that she has been specially punctilious in habits, suave in bearing, perhaps a trifling humbugging and flattering--she has to make the best of her daughter's brusqueries and uncontrolled tempers, of her son-in-law's dirty boots, and the new religion of outspokenness which both profess. Say that she has been accustomed to speak her mind with the uncompromising boldness of a woman owning a place and stake in the county--she has to curb the natural indignation of her soul when her young people, wiser in their generation or not so securely planted, make friends with all sorts and conditions, are universally sweet to everybody, hunt after popularity with untiring zest, and live according to the doctrine of angels unawares. The ways of the house are not her ways, and things are not ordered as she used to order them. People are invited with whom she would not have shaken hands, and others are left out whose acquaintance she would have specially affected. All sorts of subversive doctrines are afloat, and the old family traditions are sure to be set aside. She abhors the Ritualistic tendencies of her son-in-law, or she despises his Evangelical proclivities; his politics are not sound and his vote fatally on the wrong side; and she laments that her daughter, so differently brought up, should have been won over as she has been to her husband's views. But what of that? She is only a dowager shunted and laid on the shelf; and what she likes or dislikes does not weigh a feather in the balance, so long as her purse and person are safe in the family, and her will securely locked up in the solicitor's iron safe, with no likelihood of secret codicils upstairs. On the whole then, there is a word to be said even for the dreadful mother-in-law of general scorn; and, as the shunted dowager, the poor soul has her griefs of no slight weight and her daily humiliations bitter enough to bear.

_PRIVILEGED PERSONS._

We all number among our acquaintances certain privileged persons; people who make their own laws without regard to the received canons of society, and who claim exemption from some of the moral and most of the conventional obligations which are considered binding on others. The privileged person may be male or female; but is more often the latter; sundry restraining influences keeping men in check which are inoperative with women. Women indeed, when they choose to fall out of the ranks and follow an independent path of their own, care very little for any influences at all, the restraining power which will keep them in line being yet an unknown quantity. As a woman then, we will first deal with the privileged person.

One embodiment of the privileged person is she whose forte lies in saying unpleasant things with praiseworthy coolness. She aims at a reputation for smartness or for honesty, according to the character of her intellect, and she uses what she gets without stint or sparing. If clever, she is noted for her sarcastic speeches and epigrammatic brilliancy; and her good things are bandied about from one to the other of her friends; with an uneasy sense however, in the laughter they excite. For every one feels that he who laughs to-day may have cause to wince to-morrow, and that dancing on one's own grave is by no means an exhilarating exercise.

No one is safe with her--not even her nearest and dearest; and she does not care how deeply she wounds when she is about it. But her victims rarely retaliate; which is the oddest part of the business. They resign themselves meekly enough to the scalpel, and comfort themselves with the reflection that it is only pretty Fanny's way, and that she is known to all the world as a privileged person who may say what she likes. It falls hard though, on the uninitiated and sensitive, when they are first introduced to a privileged person with a talent for saying smart things and no pity to speak of. Perhaps they have learned their manners too well to retort in kind, if even they are able; and so feel themselves constrained to bear the unexpected smart, as the Spartan boy bore his fox. One sees them at times endure their humiliation before folk with a courageous kind of stoicism which would do honour to a better cause. Perhaps they are too much taken aback to be able to marshal their wits for a serviceable counter-thrust; all they can do is to look confused and feel angry; but sometimes, if seldom, the privileged person with a talent for sarcastic sayings meets with her match and gets paid off in her own coin--which greatly offends her, while it rejoices those of her friends who have suffered many things at her hands before. If she is rude in a more sledge-hammer kind of way--rude through what it pleases her to call honesty and the privilege of speaking her mind--her attacks are easier to meet, being more openly made and less dependent on quickness or subtlety of intellect to parry.