Part 20

Another kind of popular woman is the sympathetic woman, the woman who gives instead of receiving. This kind is of variable conditions. She may be old, she may be ugly; in fact, she is more often both than neither; but she is a universal favourite notwithstanding, and no woman is more sought after nor less wearied of, although few can say why they like her. She may be married; but generally she is either a widow or an old maid; for, if she be a wife, her sympathies for things abroad are necessarily somewhat cramped by the pressure of those at home;--and her sympathies are her claim to popularity. She is sincere too, as well as sympathetic, and she is safe. She holds the secrets of all her friends; but no one suspects that any before himself has confided in her. She has the art, or rather the charm, of perpetual spiritual freshness, and all her friends think in turn that the fountain has been unsealed now for the first time. This is not artifice; it is simply the property of deep and inexhaustible sympathy. It is not necessary that she should be a wise adviser to be popular. Her province is to listen and to sympathize; to gather the sorrows and the joys of others into her own breast, so as to soften by sharing or heighten by reduplication. Most frequently she is not over rigid in her notions of moral prudence, and will let a lovesick girl talk of her lover, even if the affair be hopeless and has been forbidden; while she will do her best to soothe the man who has had the misfortune to get crazed about his friend's wife. She has been even known, under pressure, to convey a message or a hint; and of the two she is decidedly more pitiful to sorrow than severe to wrong-doing. She is in all the misfortunes and maladies of her friends. No death takes place without her bearing part of the mourning on her own soul; but then no marriage is considered complete in which she has not a share. She is called on to help whenever there is work to be done, if she be of the practical type; if of the mental, she has merely to give up her own pleasures and her time that she may look on and sympathize. Every one likes her; every one takes to her at first sight; no one is jealous of her; and the law of her life is to spend and be spent for others. It not rarely happens though, that she who does so much for those others has to bear her own burden unassisted; and that she sits at home surrounded by those spectres of despair, those ghosts of sorrow, which she helps to dispel from the homes of others. But she is not selfish; and while she trudges along cheerfully enough under the heavy end of her friend's crosses, she asks no one to lay so much as a finger on her own. In consequence of which no one imagines that she ever suffers at all on her own account; and most of her friends would take it as a personal affront were she to turn the tables and ask for the smallest portion of that of which she had given so much to others. She is the moral anodyne of her circle; and when she ceases to soothe, she abdicates the function assigned to her by nature and dies out of her allotted uses.

Another kind of popular person is the woman whose sympathies are more superficial, but whose faculties are more brilliant; the woman who makes herself agreeable, as it is called--that is, who can talk when she is wanted to talk; listen when she is wanted to listen; take a prominent part and some responsibility or keep her personality in the background, according to circumstances and the need of the moment; who is eminently a useful member of society, and popular just in proportion to the pleasure she can shed around her. But she offends no one, even though she is notoriously sought after and made much of; for she is good-natured to all, and people are not jealous of those who do not flaunt their successes and whom popularity does not make insolent. The popular woman of this kind is always ready to help in the pleasure of others. She is a fair-weather friend, and shrinks with the most charming frankness from those on whom dark days have fallen. She is really very sorry when any of her friends fall out from the ranks, and are left behind to the tender mercies of those cruel camp-followers in the march of life--sorrow or sickness; but she feels that her place is not with them--rather with the singers and players who are stepping along in front making things pleasant for the main body. But if she cannot stop to smooth the pillows of a dying-bed, nor soothe the troubles of an aching heart, she can organize delightful parties; set young people to congenial games; take off bores on to her own shoulders, and even utilize them for the neutralization of other bores. She is good for the back seat or the front, as is most convenient to others. She can shine at the state-dinner where you want a serviceable show, or make a diversion in the quiet, not to say stupid, conglomerate of fogies, where you want a lively element to prevent universal stupor. She talks easily and well, and even brilliantly when on her mettle, but not so as to excite men's envy; and she has no decided opinions. She is a chameleon, an opal, changing ever in changing lights, and no one was yet able to determine her central quality. All that can be said of her is that she is good-natured and amusing, clever, facile, and ever ready to assist at all kinds of gatherings, which she has the knack of making go, and which would have been slow without her; that she knows every game ever invented, and is good for every sort of festivity; that she is always well-dressed, even-tempered, and in (apparently) unwearied spirits and superb health; but what she is at home, when the world is shut out, never troubles the thoughts of any. She is to society what the sympathetic woman is to the individual, and the reward is much the same in both cases. But unless the socially useful woman has been able to secure the interest of the sympathetic one, the chances are that, popular as she is now, she will be relegated to the side when her time of brilliancy has passed; and that, when her last hour comes, it will find her without the comfort of a friend, forsaken and forgotten. She is of the kind to whom _sic transit_ more especially applies; and if her life's food has not been quite the husks, at all events it has not been good meat nor fine meal.

_CHOOSING OR FINDING._

The controversy as to which is the better of the two methods of marrying one's daughter, in use in France and England respectively, has not yet been decided by any preponderating evidence. Whether the parents--especially the mother--ought to find a husband for the daughter, or whether the girl, young and inexperienced as she is, should seek one for herself, with the chance of not knowing her own mind in the first place, and of not understanding the real nature of the man she chooses in the second--these are the two principles contended for by the rival methods; and the fight is still going on. The truth is, the worst of either is so infinitely bad that there is nothing to choose between them; and the same is true, inversely, of the best. When things go well, the advocates of the particular system involved sing their pæans, and show how wise they were; when they go ill, the opponents howl their condemnation, and say: We told you so.

The French method is based on the theory that a woman's knowledge of the world, and a mother's intimate acquaintance with her daughter's special temper and requirements, are likely to be truer guides in the choice of a husband than the callow fancy of a girl. It is assumed that the former will be better able than the latter to separate the reality from the appearance, to winnow the grain from the chaff. She will appraise at its true value a fascinating manner with a shaky moral character at its back; and a handsome face will go for little when the family lawyer confesses the poverty of the family purse. To the girl, a fluent tongue, flattering ways, a taking presence, would have included everything in heaven and earth that a man should be; and no dread of future poverty, no evidence of the bushels of wild oats sown broadcast, would have convinced her that Don Juan was a _mauvais parti_ and a scamp into the bargain. Again, the mother usually knows her daughters' dispositions better than the daughters themselves, and can distinguish between idiosyncrasies and needs as no young people are able to do. Laura is romantic, sentimental, imaginative; but Laura cannot mend a stocking nor make a shirt, nor do any kind of work requiring strength of grasp or deftness of touch. She has no power of endurance, no persistency of will, no executive ability; but she falls in love with a younger son just setting out to seek his fortunes in Australia; and, if allowed, she marries him, full of enthusiasm and delight, and goes out with him. In a year's time she is dead--literally killed by hardship; or, if she has vitality enough to survive the hard experience of roughing it in the bush, she collapses into a wretched, haggard, faded woman, prematurely old, hopeless and dejected; the miserable victim of circumstances sinking under a burden too heavy for her to bear.

Now a French mother would have foreseen all these dangers, and would have provided against them. She would have known the unsubstantial quality of Laura's romance, and the reality of her physical weakness and incapacity. She would have kept her out of sight and hearing of that fascinating younger son just off to Australia to dig out his rough fortunes in the bush, and would have quietly assigned her to some conventional well-endowed man of mature age--who might not have been a soul's ideal, and whose rheumatism would have made him chary of the moonlight--but who would have taken care of the poor little frail body, dressed it in dainty gowns and luxurious furs, given it a soft couch to lie on and a luxurious carriage to drive in, and provided it with food convenient and ease unbroken. And in the end, Laura would have found that mamma had known what was best for her; and that her ordinary-looking, middle-aged caretaker was a better husband for her than would have been that adventurous young Adonis, who could have given her nothing better than a shakedown of dried leaves, a deal box for an arm-chair, and a cup of brick tea for the sparkling wines of her youth.

It may be a humiliating confession to make, but the old saying about poverty coming in at the door and love flying out of the window holds true in all cases where there is not strength enough to rough it; for the body holds the spirit captive, and, however willing the one may be, the weakness of the other conquers in the end.

On the other hand, Maria, square-set, defying, adventurous, brave, as the wife of a rich man here in England, would be as one smothered in rose leaves. The dull monotony of conventional life would half madden her; and her uncompromising temper would break out in a thousand eccentricities, and make her countless enemies. Let _her_ go to the bush if you like. She is of the stamp which bears heroes; and her sons will be a stalwart race fit for the work before them. The wise mother who had it in hand to organize the future of her daughters would take care to find her a man and a fortune that would utilize her energy and courage; but Maria, if left to herself, might perhaps fall in love with some cavalry officer of good family and expectations, whose present dash would soon have to be exchanged for the stereotyped conventionalities of the owner of a place, where, as his wife, her utmost limit of physical action would be riding to hounds and taking off the prize for archery.

Such well-fitting arrangements as these are the ideal of the French system; just as the union of two hearts, the one soul finding its companion soul and both living happily ever after, is the ideal of the English system. Against the French lies the charge of the cruel sale, for so much money, of a young creature who has not been allowed a choice, scarcely even the right of rejection; against the English the cruelty of suffering a girl's foolish fancy to destroy her whole life, and the absurdity of treating such a fancy as a fact. For the French there is the plea of the enormous power of instinct and habit, and that really it signifies very little to a girl what man she marries; provided only that he is kind to her and that she has not fallen in love with any one else; seeing that she is sure to love the first presented. For the English there is the counter plea of individual needs and independent choice, and the theory that women do not love by instinct but by sympathy. The French make great account of the absolute virginity in heart of the young girl they marry; and few Frenchmen would think they had got the kind of woman warranted if they married one who had been engaged two or three times already--to whose affianced lovers had been accorded the familiarities which we in England hold innocent and as matters of course. The English, in return, demand a more absolute fidelity after marriage, and are generous enough to a few false starts before. To them the contract is more a matter of free choice than it is in France; consequently failure in carrying out the stipulations carries with it more dishonour. The French, taking into consideration that the wife had nothing to say to the bargain which gave her away, are inclined to be more lenient when the theory of instinctive love fails to work, and the individuality of the woman expresses itself in an after-preference; always provided, of course, that the _bienséances_ are respected, and that no scandal is created.

Among the conflicting rights and wrongs of the two systems it is very difficult to say which is the better, which the wiser. If it seems a horrible thing to marry a young girl without her consent, or without any more knowledge of the man with whom she is to pass her life than can be got by seeing him once or twice in formal family conclave, it seems quite as bad to let our women roam about the world at the age when their instincts are strongest and their reason weakest--open to the flatteries of fools and fops--the prey of professed lady-killers--the objects of lover-like attentions by men who mean absolutely nothing but the amusement of making love--the subjects for erotic anatomists to study at their pleasure. Who among our girls after twenty carries an absolutely untouched heart to the man she marries? Her former predilection may have been a dream, a fancy--still it was there; and there are few wives who, in their little tiffs and moments of irritation, do not feel, 'If I had married my first love, _he_ would not have treated me so.' Perhaps a wise man does not care for a mere baseless thought; but all men are not wise, and to some a spiritual condition is as real as a physical fact. Others however, do not trouble themselves for what has gone before if they can but secure what follows after; but we imagine that most men would rather not know their wives' dreams; and _cet autre_, however shadowy, is a rival not specially desired by the average husband.

If the independence of life and free intercourse between young men and maidens is in its degree dangerous in England, what must it be in America, where anything like chaperonage is unknown, and where girls and boys flock together without a mamma or a guardian among them? where engaged couples live under the same roof for months at a time, also without a mamma or a guardian? and where the young men take the young women about on night excursions alone, and no harm thought by any one? Is human nature really different in America from what it is in the Old World? Are Columbia's sons in truth like Erin's of old time, so good or so cold? It is a saying hard of acceptance to us who are accustomed to regard our daughters as precious things to be taken care of--if not quite so frail as the French regard theirs, yet not too secure, and certainly not to be left too much to themselves with only young men for their guardians. They are our lambs, and we look out for wolves. To be sure the comparative paucity of women in the United States, and the conviction which every girl has that she may pretty well make her own choice, help to keep matters straight. That is easy to be understood. There is no temptation to eat green berries in an orchard full of ripe fruit. But if this be true of America, then the converse must be true of England, where the redundancy of women is one of the most patent facts of the time, and where consequently they cannot so well afford to indulge that pride of person which hesitates among many before selecting one. In America this pride of person of itself erects a barrier between the wolves and the lambs; but where the very groundwork of it is wanting, as in England, it behoves the natural guardians to be on the watch, and to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Whether or not that care should be carried to the extent to which French parents carry theirs--and especially in the matter of making the marriage for the daughter and not letting her make it for herself--we leave an open question. Perhaps a little modification in the practice of both nations would be the best for all concerned. Without trusting quite so much to instinct as the French, we might profitably curtail a little more than we do the independent choice of those who are too young and too ignorant to know what they want, or what they have got when they have chosen; and without letting their young girls run all abroad without direction, the French might, in turn, allow them some kind of human preference, and not treat them as mere animals bound to be grateful to the hand that feeds them, and docile to the master who governs them.

_LOCAL FÊTES._

The efforts of country places in the matter of local fêtes and shows are often beset with difficulties. The great people, who have seen the best of everything in Paris and London, give their money sparsely and their energies with languor; or it may be that certain of the more good-natured kill the whole affair by their superabundant patronage, as nurses stifle infants by over-care. The very poor can only participate to the extent of pence when the thing is organized; they can neither subscribe for the general expenses nor give time to the arrangements; consequently the burden rests on the shoulders of the middle class, which in a small country neighbourhood is represented by the well-to-do tradesmen, the innkeepers, and the rival professionals. Once a year or so the desire fastens on these people to get up a local fête--say a flower-show, or games, or both combined--as an evidence of local vitality; a claim on the county newspaper for two or three columns of description with all the names in full flanked by a generous application of adjectives; an occasion for mutual self-laudation; and a pleasing impression of the eyes of England being turned upon them. They find their work cut out for them when they begin; and before the end most of them wish they had never been bitten by the mania of parochial ambition, but had let the old place lie in its wonted stagnation without attempting to stir it at the cost of so much vexation and thankless trouble.

Jealousy and huffiness are the dominant characteristics of small communities, as all people know who have had dealings therewith. The question of precedence affects more than the choice of the First Lady in an assembly where there are no ladies to be first, though there may be plenty of honest women; and the men squabble for distinctive offices and the recognition of services to the full as much as the lawyer's wife squabbles with the doctor's, and both with the wholesale grocer's, as to which of the three is to be first taken down to supper and set at the head of the table with the master of the house. One wants to be the secretary, that he may display his power of fine writing when he asks the resident nobility and gentry for their subscriptions, and draws up the final report for the press. Another thinks he should be made chairman of the acting committee, because he imagines he has the gift of eloquence, and he would like to use the time of the association in airing his syntax. A third puts in his claim to be elected one of the judges of things he does not understand, because his son-in-law is to be an exhibitor, and he would be glad to be able to say a good word for him; and all decline those offices which have no outside show, where only work is to be done and no credit gained. It requires a considerable amount of tact and firmness to withstand these clamorous vanities, to put the right men in the right places, and yet not make enmities which will last a lifetime. But if the thing is to succeed at all, this is what must be done; and the little committee must stick to its text of _pro bono publico_ as steadfastly as if the flower-show were a conqueror's triumph, and the rules and regulations for its fit management consular decrees.

When the eventful day arrives, every one feels that the eyes of England are indeed turned hither-ward. If the great people are languid, the meaner folks are jocund, and the stewards are as proud as the proudest ædiles of old Rome. Their knots of coloured ribbon make new men of them for the time, and justify the instinct which puts its trust in regalia. They are sure to be on the ground from the earliest hours in the morning; and though scoffers might perhaps question the practical value of their zeal, no one can doubt its heartiness. If it is fussy, it is genuine; and as every one is fussy alike, they cannot complain of one another. A band has been lent by a neighbouring regiment, and the men come radiant into the little town. It is delightful to see the cordial condescension with which the trombone and the cornet, the serpent and the drum shake hands with their civilian friends; and how the fine fellows in scarlet accept drinks quite fraternally from fustian and corderoy. For a full half-hour the town is kept alive by the dazzle and resonance of these musical heroes as they stand before the door of the 'public' which they have elected to patronize, and lighten the pockets of the lieges by the successive 'go's' drained out of them. Then the church clock chimes the appointed hour; the last flag is run up; the finishing touch is given to the calico and the moss; the last award has been affixed; and the policeman stationed at the gate to keep order among the little boys has tightened his belt and drawn on his gloves ready for action. The band marches through the town, drums beating and fifes playing, and when the gates are opened as the clock is on the stroke of twelve, they are all settled in their places with their music handy, ready to salute the gentry with the overture from _Zampa_, taken in false time. The imposing effect however, is rather marred by the friendly feelings of the public; for when jolly farmers and small boys insist on sharing the benches assigned to the red coats, the orchestra has necessarily a patchwork kind of look that does not add to its dignity.