Part 19

Sometimes she takes a craze against a voluntary; sometimes she objects to any approach to chanting; and if certain recalcitrants of the congregation, in possession of the harmonium, insist on their own methods against hers, she writes home to the Society and complains of the thin edge of the wedge and the Romanizing tendencies of her spiritual adviser. In any case she is a fearful infliction; and a church ruled by a female despot is about the most pitiable instance we know of insolent tyranny and broken-backed dependence.

But the clergymen serving these transmarine stations are not often themselves men of mark nor equal to their contemporaries at home. They are often sickly, which means a low amount of vital energy; oftener impecunious, which presupposes want of grip and precludes real independence. They are men whose career has been somehow arrested; and their natures have suffered in the blight that has befallen their hopes. Their whole life is more or less a compromise, now with conscience, now with character; and they have to wink at evils which they ought to denounce, and bear with annoyances which they ought to resent. In most cases they are obliged to eke out their scanty incomes by taking pupils; and here again the millstone round their necks is heavy, and they have to pay a large moral percentage on their pecuniary gains. If their pupils are of the age when boys begin to call themselves men, they have to keep a sharp look-out on them; and they suffer many things on the score of responsibility when that look-out is evaded, as it necessarily must be at times. As the characteristic quality of small societies is gossip, and as gossip always includes exaggeration, the peccadilloes of the young fellows are magnified into serious sins, and then bound as a burden on the back of the poor cleric in thrall to the idle imaginings of men and the foolish fears of women. One black sheep in the pupilary flock will do more damage to the reputation of the unhappy pastor who has them in hand than a dozen shining lights will do him good. Morality is assumed to be the free gift of the tutor to the pupil; and if the boy is bad the man is to blame for not having made that free-gift betimes.

Look at it how we will, the clergyman in charge of these foreign congregations has no very pleasant time of it. In a sense expatriated; his home ties growing daily weaker; his hope of home preferment reduced to _nil_; his liberty of conscience a dream of the past; and all the mystical power of his office going down in the conflict caused by the need of pew-rents, submission to tyrants, and dependence on the Home Society, he lives from year to year bemoaning the evil chances which have flung him on this barren, shifting, desolate strand, and becoming less and less fitted for England and English parochial work--that castle in the air, quiet and secure, which he is destined never to inhabit. He is touched too in part by the atmosphere of his surroundings; and to a congregation without duties a clergyman with views more accommodating than severe comes only too naturally as the appropriate pastor. The whole thing proves that thraldom to the means of living, or rather to the persons representing those means, damages all men alike--those in cassock and gown as well as those in slop and blouse--and that lay influence can, in certain circumstances, be just as tyrannical over the clerical conscience as clerical influence is apt to be tyrannical over lay living.

_OLD FRIENDS._

We know all that can be said in laudation of old friends--the people whose worth has been tried and their constancy proved--who have come when you have called and danced when you have piped--been faithful in sunshine and shadow alike--not envious of your prosperity nor deserting you in your adversity--old friends who, like old wine, have lost the crudity of newness, have mellowed by keeping, and have blended the ripeness of age with the vigour of youth. It is all true in certain circumstances and under certain conditions; but the old friend of this ideal type is as hard to find as any other ideal; while bad imitations abound, and life is rendered miserable by them.

There are old friends who make the fact of old friendship a basis for every kind of unpleasantness. Their opinion is not asked, but they volunteer it on all occasions, and are sure to give it in the manner which galls you most and which you can least resent. They snub you before your latest acquaintances--charming people of good status with whom you especially desire to stand well; and break up your pretensions of present superiority by that sledge-hammer of old friendship which knows you down to the ground and will stand no nonsense. The more formal and fastidious your company, the more they will rasp your nerves by the coarse familiarity of their address; and they know no greater pleasure than to put you in a false position by pretending to keep you in your true place. They run in on you at all times; and you have neither an hour undisturbed nor a pursuit uninterrupted, still less a circumstance of your life kept sacred from them. The strictest orders to your servant are ignored; and they push past any amount of verbal barriers with the irresistible force of old friendship to which nothing can be denied. Whatever you are doing you can just see them, they say, smiling; and they have neither conscience nor compassion when they come and eat up your time, which is your money, for the gratification of hearing themselves talk and of learning how you are getting on. They do not scruple to ask about your affairs direct questions to which you must perforce give an answer; silence or evasion betraying the truth as much as assent; and they will make you a present of their mind on the matter, which, though to the last degree condemnatory, you are expected to accept with becoming gratitude and humility.

If you have known them in your early boyhood, when you were all uncivilized hail-fellows together, they refuse to respect your maturer dignity, and will Tom and Dick and Harry you to the end, though you sit in a horsehair wig on the bench, while your old friend, once your class-mate of the country grammar school where you both got your rudiments, is only a city clerk, badly paid and married to his landlady's daughter.

To women this kind of return from the grave of the past is a dreadful infliction and oftentimes a danger. The playfellows of the romping hoydenish days dash home, bearded and bronzed, from Australia or California; stride into the calm circle of refined matronhood with the old familiar manner and using the old familiar terms; ask Fan or Nell if she remembers this or that adventure on the mountain-side? by the lake? in the wood?--topping their query by a meaning laugh as if more remained behind than was expedient to declare. They slap the dignified husband on the back, and call him a d----d lucky dog; telling him that they envy him his catch, and would gladly stand in his shoes if they could. It was all that cross-cornered cursed fate of theirs which sent them off to Australia or California; else he, the dignified husband, would never have had the chance--hey, Fan? And they wink when they say it, as if they had good grounds to go on. The wife is on thorns all the time these hateful visits last. She wonders how she could ever have been on romping terms with such a horror, even in her youngest days; and feels that she shall hate her own name for ever, after hearing it mouthed and bawled by her old friend with such aggressive familiarity. The husband, if jealous by nature, begins to look sullen and suspicious. Even if he is not jealous, but only reserved and conventional, he does not like what he sees, still less what he hears; and is more than half inclined to think he has made a mistake, and that the Fan or Nell of his bosom would have been better mated with the old friend from the backwoods than with him.

The old friends who turn up in this way at all corners of your life are sure to be needy, and hold their old friendship as a claim on your balance at the bank. They stick closer to you than a brother, and you are expected to stick as close to them; and, as a sign thereof, to provide for their necessities as so much interest on the old account of affection still running. If you shrink from them and try to shunt them quietly, they go about the world proclaiming your ingratitude, and trumpeting forth their deserts and your demerits. They deride your present success, which they call stuck-up and mushroom; telling all the minor miseries of your past, when your father found it hard to provide suitably for his large family, and their mother had more than once to give yours a child's frock and pinafore in pity for your rags. They generally contrive to make a division in your circle; and you find some of your new friends look coldly on you because it is said you have been ungrateful to your old. The whole story may be a myth, the mere coinage of vanity and disappointment; but when did the world stop to prove the truth before it condemned?

There is no circumstance so accidental, no kindness so trivial, that it cannot be made to constitute a claim to friendship for life and all that friendship includes--intimacy before the world; pecuniary help when needed; no denial of time; no family secrets; unvarying inclusion in all your entertainments; personal participation in all your successes; liberty to say unpleasant things without offence and to interfere in your arrangements; and the right to take at least one corner of your soul, and that not a small one, which is not to be your own but your old friends'. Have they, by the merest chance, introduced you to your wife the beautiful heiress, to your husband the good match?--the world echoes with the news, and the echoes are never suffered to die out. It is told everywhere, and always as if your happy marriage were the object they had had in view from the earliest times--as if they had lived and worked for a consummation which in reality came about by the purest accident. Have they been helpful and friendly when your first child was born, or nursery sickness was in your house?--you are bought for life, you and your offspring; unless you have had the happy thought of making them sponsors, when they learn the knack of disappearing from your immediate circle, and of only turning up on those formal occasions which do not admit of making presents. Did they introduce you to your first employer?--your subsequent success is the work of their hands, and they bear your fame on their shoulders like complacent Atlases balancing the world.

They go about cackling to every one who will listen to them how they got your first essay into print; how they mentioned your name to the Commissioners, and how, in consequence, the Commissioners gave you that place whence dates your marvellous rise in life; how they advised your father to send you to sea and so to make a man of you, and thus were the indirect cause of your K.C.B.-ship. But for them you would have been a mere nobody, grubbing in a dingy City office to this day. They gave you your start, and you owe all you are to them. And if you fail to honour their draft on your gratitude to the fullest amount, they proclaim you a defaulter to the most sacred claims and the most pious feelings of humanity. You point the moral of the base ingratitude of man, and are a text on which they preach the sermon of non-intervention in the affairs of others. Let drowning men sink; let the weak go to the wall; and on no account let any one trouble himself about the welfare of old friends, if this is to be the reward. Henceforth, you are morally branded, and your old friend takes care that the iron shall be hot. There is no service, however trifling, but can be made a yoke to hang round your neck for life; and the more you struggle against it the more it galls you. Your best plan of bearing it is with the patience which laughs and lets things slide. If however, you are resolute in repudiation, you must take the sure result without wincing.

To these friends of your own add the friends of the family--those uncomfortable adhesives who cling to you like so many octopods, and are not to be shaken off by any means known to you. They claim you as their own--something in which they have the rights of part-proprietorship--because they knew you when you were in your cradle, and had bored your parents as they want to bore you. It is of no use to say that circumstances are of less weight than character. You and they may stand at opposite poles in thought, in aspiration, in social condition, in habits. Nevertheless they insist on it that the bare fact of longtime acquaintance is to be of more value than all these vital discrepancies; and you find yourself saddled with friends who are utterly uncongenial to you in every respect, because your father once lived next door to them in the country town where you were born, and spent one evening a week in their society playing long whist for threepenny points. You inherit your weak chest and your snub nose, gout in your blood and a handful of ugly skeletons in your cupboard; these are things you cannot get rid of; things which come as part of the tangled yarn of your life and are the inalienable misfortunes of inheritance; but it is too bad to add family friends whom of your own accord you would never have known; and to have them seated as Old Men of the Sea on your neck, never to be shaken off while they live.

In fact, this whole question of friendship wants revision. The general tendency is to make it too stringent in its terms, and too indissoluble in its fastenings. If the present should not make one forget the past, neither should the past tyrannize over the present. Old friends may have been pleasant enough in their day, but a day is not for ever, and they are hurtful and unpleasant now, under new conditions and in changed circumstances. They disturb the harmony of our surroundings, and no one can feel happy in discord.

They themselves too, change; we all do, as life goes on and experience increases; and it is simply absurd to bring the old fashions of early days into the new relations of later times. We are not the Tom, Dick, and Harry of our boyhood in any essential save identity of person; neither are they the Bill and Jim they were. We have gone to the right, they to the left; and the gap between us is wider and deeper than that of mere time. Of what use then, to try to galvanize the dead past into the semblance of vitality? Each knows in his heart that it is dead; and the only one who wishes to galvanize it into simulated life is the one who will somehow benefit by the discomfort and abasement of the other. For our own part, we think one of the most needful things to learn on our way through the world is, that the dead are dead, and that silent burial is better than spasmodic galvanism.

_POPULAR WOMEN._

The three chief causes of personal popularity among women are, the admiration which is excited, the sympathy which is given, or the pleasure that can be bestowed. We put out of court for our present purpose the popularity which accompanies political power or intellectual strength, this being due to condition, not quality, and therefore not of the sort we mean. Besides, it belongs to men rather than to women, who seldom have any direct power that can advance others, and still seldomer intellectual strength enough to obtain a public following because of their confessed supremacy. The popular women we mean are simply those met with in society--women whose natural place is the drawing-room and whose sphere is the well-dressed world--women who are emphatically ladies, and who understand _les convenances_ and obey them, even if they take up a cause, practise philanthropy or preach philosophy. But the popular woman rarely does take up a cause or make her philanthropy conspicuous and her philosophy audible. Partizanship implies angles; and she has no angles. If of the class of the admired, she is most popular who is least obtrusive in her claims and most ingenuous in ignoring her superiority. A pretty woman, however pretty, if affected, vain, or apt to give herself airs, may be admired but is never popular. The men whom she snubs sneer at her in private; the women whom she eclipses as well as snubs do more than sneer; those only to whom she is gracious find her beauty a thing of joy; but as she is distractingly eclectic in her favouritism she counts as many foes as she has friends; and though those who dislike her cannot call her ugly, they can call her disagreeable, and do. But the pretty woman who wears her beauty to all appearance unconsciously, never suffering it to be aggressive to other women nor wilfully employing it for the destruction of men, who is gracious in manner and of a pleasant temper, who is frank and approachable, and does not seem to consider herself as something sacred and set apart from the world because nature made her lovelier than the rest--she is the woman whom all unite in admiring, the popular person _par excellence_ of her set.

The popular pretty woman is one who, take her as a young wife (and she must be married), honestly loves her husband, but does not thrust her affection into the face of the world, and never flirts with him in public. Indeed, she flirts with other men just enough to make time pass pleasantly, and enjoys a rapid waltz or a lively conversation as much as when she was seventeen and before she was appropriated. She does not think it necessary to go about morally ticketed; nor does she find it vital to her dignity nor to her virtue to fence herself round with coldness or indifference to the multitude by way of proving her loyalty to one. Still, as it is notorious that she does love her husband, and as every one knows that he and she are perfectly content with each other and therefore not on the look-out for supplements, the men with whom she has those innocent little jokes, those transparent secrets, those animated conversations, that confessed friendship and good understanding, do not make mistakes; and the very women belonging to them forget to be censorious, even though this other, this popular woman, is so much admired.

This popular woman is a mother too, and a fond one. Hence she can sympathize with other mothers, and expatiate on their common experiences in the confidential chat over five o'clock tea, as all fond mothers do and should. She keeps a well-managed house, and is notorious for the amount of needlework she gets through; and of which she is prettily proud; not being ashamed to tell you that the dress you admire so much was made by her own hands, and she will give your wife the pattern if she likes; while she boasts of even rougher upholstery work which she and her maid and her sewing-machine have got through with despatch and credit. She gives dinners with a _cachet_ of their own--dinners which have evidently been planned with careful thought and study; and she is not above her work as mistress and organizer of her household. Yet she finds time to keep abreast with the current literature of the day, and never has to confess to ignorance of the ordinary topics of conversation. She is not a woman of extreme views about anything. She has not signed improper papers and she does not discuss improper questions; she does not go in for woman's rights; she has a horror of facility of divorce; and she sets up for nothing--being neither an Advanced Woman desirous of usurping the possessions and privileges of men, nor a Griselda who thinks her proper place is at the feet of men, to take their kicks with patience and their caresses with gratitude, as is becoming in an inferior creature. She does not dabble in politics; and though she likes to make her dinners successful and her evenings brilliant, she by no means assumes to be a leader of fashion nor to impose laws on her circle. She likes to be admired, and she is always ready to let herself be loved. She is always ready too, to do any good work that comes in her way; and she finds time for the careful overlooking of a few pet charities about which she makes no parade, just as she finds time for her nursery and her needlework. And, truth to tell, she enjoys these quiet hours, with only her children to love her and her poor pensioners to admire her, quite as much as she enjoys the brilliant receptions where she is among the most popular and the most beautiful.

Her nature is gentle, her affections are large, her passions small. She may have prejudices, but they are prejudices of a mild kind, mainly on the side of modesty and tenderness and the quietude of true womanhood. She is woman throughout, without the faintest dash of the masculine element in mind or manners; and she aspires to be nothing else. She carries with her an atmosphere of happiness, of content, of spiritual completeness, of purity which is not prudery. Her life is filled with a variety of interests; consequently she is never peevish through monotony, nor yet, on the other hand, is she excited, hurried, storm-driven, as those who give themselves up to 'objects,' and perfect nothing because they attempt too much. She is popular, because she is beautiful without being vain; loving without being sentimental; happy in herself, yet not indifferent to others; because she understands her drawing-room duties as well as her domestic ones, and knows how to combine the home life with social splendour. This is the best type of the popular pretty woman to whom is given admiration, and against whom no one has a stone to fling nor a slander to whisper; and this is the ideal woman of the English upper-class home, of whom we still raise a few specimens, just to show what women may be if they like, and what sweet and lovely creatures they are when they are content to be as nature designed them.