Part 3

The old lady of strong instinctive affections, who never reflects and never attempts to restrain her kindly weaknesses, stands at the other end of the scale. She is the grandmother _par excellence_, and spends her life in spoiling the little ones, cramming them with sugar-plums and rich cake whenever she has the chance, and nullifying mamma's punishments by surreptitious gifts and goodies. She is the dearly beloved of our childish recollections; and to the last days of our life we cherish the remembrance of the kind old lady with her beaming smile, taking out of her large black reticule, or the more mysterious recesses of her unfathomable pocket, wonderful little screws of paper which her withered hands thrust into our chubby fists; but we can understand now what an awful nuisance she must have been to the authorities, and how impossible she made it to preserve anything like discipline and the terrors of domestic law in the family.

The old lady who remains a mere child to the end; who looks very much like a faded old wax doll with her scanty hair blown out into transparent ringlets, and her jaunty cap bedecked with flowers and gay-coloured bows; who cannot rise into the dignity of true womanliness; who knows nothing useful; can give no wise advice: has no sentiment of protection, but on the contrary demands all sorts of care and protection for herself--she, simpering and giggling as if she were fifteen, is by no means an old lady of the finest type. But she is better than the leering old lady who says coarse things, and who, like Béranger's immortal creation, passes her time in regretting her plump arms and her well-turned ankle and the lost time that can never be recalled, and who is altogether a most unedifying old person and by no means nice company for the young.

Then there is the irascible old lady, who rates her servants and is free with full-flavoured epithets against sluts in general; who is like a tigress over her last unmarried daughter, and, when crippled and disabled, still insists on keeping the keys, which she delivers up when wanted only with a snarl and a suspicious caution. She has been one of the race of active housekeepers, and has prided herself on her exceptional ability that way for so long that she cannot bear to yield, even when she can no longer do any good; so she sits in her easy chair, like old Pope and Pagan in _Pilgrim's Progress_, and gnaws her fingers at the younger world which passes her by. She is an infliction to her daughter for all the years of her life, and to the last keeps her in leading-strings, tied up as tight as the sinewy old hands can knot them; treating her always as an irresponsible young thing who needs both guidance and control, though the girl has passed into the middle-aged woman by now, shuffling through life a poor spiritless creature who has faded before she has fully blossomed, and who dies like a fruit that has dropped from the tree before it has ripened.

Twin sister to this kind is the grim female become ancient; the gaunt old lady with a stiff backbone, who sits upright and walks with a firm tread like a man; a leathery old lady, who despises all your weak slips of girls that have nerves and headaches and cannot walk their paltry mile without fatigue; a desiccated old lady, large-boned and lean, without an ounce of superfluous fat about her, with keen eyes yet, with which she boasts that she can thread a needle and read small print by candlelight; an indestructible old lady, who looks as if nothing short of an earthquake would put an end to her. The friend of her youth is now a stout, soft, helpless old lady, much bedraped in woollen shawls, given to frequent sippings of brandy and water, and ensconced in the chimney corner like a huge clay figure set to dry. For her the indestructible old lady has the supremest contempt, heightened in intensity by a vivid remembrance of the time when they were friends and rivals. Ah, poor Laura, she says, straightening herself; she was always a poor creature, and see what she is now! To those who wait long enough the wheel always comes round, she thinks; and the days when Laura bore away the bell from her for grace and sweetness and loveableness generally are avenged now, when the one is a mere mollusc and the other has a serviceable backbone that will last for many a year yet.

Then there is the musical old lady, who is fond of playing small anonymous pieces of a jiggy character full of queer turns and shakes, music that seems all written in demi-semi-quavers, and that she gives in a tripping, catching way, as if the keys of the piano were hot. Sometimes she will sing, as a great favour, old-world songs which are almost pathetic for the thin and broken voice that chirrups out the sentiment with which they abound; and sometimes, as a still greater favour, she will stand up in the dance, and do the poor uncertain ghosts of what were once steps, in the days when dancing was dancing and not the graceless lounge it is now. But her dancing-days are over, she says, after half-a-dozen turns; though, indeed, sometimes she takes a frisky fit and goes in for the whole quadrille:--and pays for it the next day.

The very dress of old ladies is in itself a study and a revelation of character. There are the beautiful old women who make themselves like old pictures by a profusion of soft lace and tender greys; and the stately old ladies who affect rich rustling silks and sombre velvet; and there are the original and individual old ladies, who dress themselves after their own kind, like Mrs. Basil Montagu, Miss Jane Porter, and dear Mrs. Duncan Stewart, and have a _cachet_ of their own with which fashion has nothing to do. And there are the old women who wear rusty black stuffs and ugly helmet-like caps; and those who affect uniformity and going with the stream, when the fashion has become national--and these have been much exercised of late with the strait skirts and the new bonnets. But Providence is liberal and milliners are fertile in resources. In fact, in this as in all other sections of humanity, there are those who are beautiful and wise, and those who are foolish and unlovely; those who make the best of things as they are, and those who make the worst, by treating them as what they are not; those who extract honey, and those who find only poison. For in old age, as in youth, are to be found beauty, use, grace and value, but in different aspects and on another platform. And the folly is when this difference is not allowed for, or when the possibility of these graces is denied and their utility ignored.

_VOICES._

Far before the eyes or the mouth or the habitual gesture, as a revelation of character, is the quality of the voice and the manner of using it. It is the first thing that strikes us in a new acquaintance, and it is one of the most unerring tests of breeding and education. There are voices which have a certain truthful ring about them--a certain something, unforced and spontaneous, that no training can give. Training can do much in the way of making a voice, but it can never compass more than a bad imitation of this quality; for the very fact of its being an imitation, however accurate, betrays itself like rouge on a woman's cheeks, or a wig, or dyed hair. On the other hand, there are voices which have the jar of falsehood in every tone, and which are as full of warning as the croak of the raven or the hiss of the serpent. These are in general the naturally hard voices which make themselves caressing, thinking by that to appear sympathetic; but the fundamental quality strikes up through the overlay, and a person must be very dull indeed who cannot detect the pretence in that slow, drawling, would-be affectionate voice, with its harsh undertone and sharp accent whenever it forgets itself.

But without being false or hypocritical, there are voices which puzzle as well as disappoint us, because so entirely inharmonious with the appearance of the speaker. For instance, there is that thin treble squeak which we sometimes hear from the mouth of a well-grown portly man, when we expected the fine rolling utterance which would have been in unison with his outward seeming. And, on the other side of the scale, where we looked for a shrill head-voice or a tender musical cadence, we get that hoarse chest-voice with which young and pretty girls sometimes startle us. This voice is in fact one of the characteristics of the modern girl of a certain type; just as the habitual use of slang is characteristic of her, or that peculiar rounding of the elbows and turning out of the wrists--which gestures, like the chest-voice, instinctively belong to men only and have to be learned before they can be practised by women.

Nothing betrays feeling so much as the voice, save perhaps the eyes; and these can be lowered, and so far their expression hidden. In moments of emotion no skill can hide the fact of disturbed feeling by the voice; though a strong will and the habit of self-control can steady it when else it would be failing and tremulous. But not the strongest will, nor the largest amount of self-control, can keep it natural as well as steady. It is deadened, veiled, compressed, like a wild creature tightly bound and unnaturally still. One feels that it is done by an effort, and that if the strain were relaxed for a moment the wild creature would burst loose in rage or despair--and that the voice would break into the scream of passion or quiver down into the falter of pathos. And this very effort is as eloquent as if there had been no holding down at all, and the voice had been left to its own impulse unchecked.

Again, in fun and humour, is it not the voice even more than the face that is expressive? The twinkle of the eye, the hollow in the under lip, the dimples about the mouth, the play of the eyebrow, are all aids certainly; but the voice! The mellow tone that comes into the utterance of one man; the surprised accents of another; the fatuous simplicity of a third; the philosophical acquiescence of a fourth when relating the most outrageous impossibilities--a voice and manner peculiarly Transatlantic, and indeed one of the American forms of fun--do we not know all these varieties by heart? have we not veteran actors whose main point lies in one or other of these varieties? and what would be the drollest anecdote if told in a voice which had neither play nor significance? Pathos too--who feels it, however beautifully expressed so far as words may go, if uttered in a dead and wooden voice without sympathy? But the poorest attempts at pathos will strike home to the heart if given tenderly and harmoniously. And just as certain popular airs of mean association can be made into church music by slow time and stately modulation, so can dead-level literature be lifted into passion or softened into sentiment by the voice alone.

We all know the effect, irritating or soothing, which certain voices have over us; and we have all experienced that strange impulse of attraction or repulsion which comes from the sound of the voice alone. And generally, if not absolutely always, the impulse is a true one, and any modification which increased knowledge may produce is never quite satisfactory. Certain voices grate on our nerves and set our teeth on edge; and others are just as calming as these are irritating, quieting us like a composing draught, and setting vague images of beauty and pleasantness afloat in our brains.

A good voice, calm in tone and musical in quality, is one of the essentials for a physician--the 'bedside voice' which is nothing if not sympathetic by constitution. Not false, not made up, not sickly, but tender in itself, of a rather low pitch, well modulated and distinctly harmonious in its notes, it is the very opposite of the orator's voice, which is artificial in its management and a made voice. Whatever its original quality may be, the orator's voice bears the unmistakeable stamp of art and is artificial. It may be admirable; telling in a crowd; impressive in an address; but it is overwhelming and chilling at home, partly because it is always conscious and never self-forgetting.

An orator's voice, with its careful intonation and accurate accent, would be as much out of place by a sick-bed as Court trains and brocaded silk for the nurse. There are certain men who do a good deal by a hearty, jovial, fox-hunting kind of voice--a voice a little thrown up for all that it is a chest-voice--a voice with a certain undefined rollick and devil-may-care sound in it, and eloquent of a large volume of vitality and physical health. That, too, is a good property for a medical man. It gives the sick a certain fillip, and reminds them pleasantly of health and vigour. It may have a mesmeric kind of effect upon them--who knows?--so that it induces in them something of its own state, provided it be not overpowering. But a voice of this kind has a tendency to become insolent in its assertion of vigour, swaggering and boisterous; and then it is too much for invalided nerves, just as mountain-winds or sea-breezes would be too much, and the scent of flowers or of a hayfield oppressive.

The clerical voice again, is a class-voice--that neat, careful, precise voice, neither wholly made nor yet natural--that voice which never strikes one as hearty nor as having a really genuine utterance, but which is not entirely unpleasant if one does not require too much spontaneity. The clerical voice, with its mixture of familiarity and oratory as that of one used to talk to old women in private and to hold forth to a congregation in public, is as distinct in its own way as the mathematician's handwriting; and any one can pick out blindfold his man from a knot of talkers, without waiting to see the square-cut collar and close white tie. The legal voice is different again; but this is rather a variety of the orator's than a distinct species--a variety standing midway between that and the clerical, and affording more scope than either.

The voice is much more indicative of the state of the mind than many people know of or allow. One of the first symptoms of failing brain power is in the indistinct or confused utterance; no idiot has a clear nor melodious voice; the harsh scream of mania is proverbial; and no person of prompt and decisive thought was ever known to hesitate nor to stutter. A thick, loose, fluffy voice too, does not belong to the crisp character of mind which does the best active work; and when we meet with a keen-witted man who drawls, and lets his words drip instead of bringing them out in the sharp incisive way that should be natural to him, we may be sure there is a flaw somewhere, and that he is not 'clear grit' all through.

We all have our company voices, as we all have our company manners; and, after a time, we get to know the company voices of our friends, and to understand them as we understand their best dresses and state service. The person whose voice absolutely refuses to put itself into company tone startles us as much as if he came to a state dinner in a shooting-jacket. This is a different thing from the insincere and flattering voice, which is never laid aside while it has its object to gain, and which affects to be one thing when it means another. The company voice is only a little bit of finery, quite in its place if not carried into the home, where however, silly men and women think they can impose on their house-mates by assumptions which cannot stand the test of domestic ease. The lover's voice is of course _sui generis_; but there is another kind of voice which one sometimes hears that is quite as enchanting--the rich, full, melodious voice which irresistibly suggests sunshine and flowers, and heavy bunches of purple grapes, and a wealth of physical beauty at all four corners. Such a voice is Alboni's; such a voice we can conceive Anacreon's to have been; with less lusciousness and more stateliness, such a voice was Walter Savage Landor's. His was not an English voice; it was too rich and accurate; yet it was clear and apparently thoroughly unstudied, and was the very perfection of art. There was no greater treat of its kind than to hear Landor read Milton or Homer.

Though one of the essentials of a good voice is its clearness, there are certain lisps and catches which are pretty, though never dignified; but most of them are painful to the ear. It is the same with accents. A dash of brogue; the faintest suspicion of the Scotch twang; even a little American accent--but very little, like red-pepper to be sparingly used, as indeed we may say with the others--gives a certain piquancy to the voice. So does a Continental accent generally; few of us being able to distinguish the French accent from the German, the Polish from the Italian, or the Russian from the Spanish, but lumping them all together as 'a foreign accent' broadly. Of all the European voices the French is perhaps the most unpleasant in its quality, and the Italian the most delightful. The Italian voice is a song in itself; not the sing-song voice of an English parish schoolboy, but an unnoted bit of harmony. The French voice is thin, apt to become wiry and metallic; a head-voice for the most part, and eminently unsympathetic; a nervous, irritable voice, that seems more fit for complaint than for love-making; and yet how laughing, how bewitching it can make itself!--never with the Italian roundness, but _câlinante_ in its own half-pettish way, provoking, enticing, arousing. There are some voices which send you to sleep and others which stir you up; and the French voice is of the latter kind when setting itself to do mischief and work its own will.

Of all the differences lying between Calais and Dover, perhaps nothing strikes the traveller more than the difference in the national voice and manner of speech. The sharp, high-pitched, stridulous voice of the French, with its clear accent and neat intonation, is exchanged for the loose, fluffy utterance of England, where clear enunciation is considered pedantic; where brave men cultivate a drawl and pretty women a deep chest-voice; where well-educated people think it no shame to run all their words into each other, and to let consonants and vowels drip out like so many drops of water, with not much more distinction between them; and where no one knows how to educate his organ artistically, without going into artificiality and affectation. And yet the cultivation of the voice is an art, and ought to be made as much a matter of education as a good carriage or a legible handwriting. We teach our children to sing, but we never teach them to speak, beyond correcting a glaring piece of mispronunciation or so. In consequence of which we have all sorts of odd voices among us--short yelping voices like dogs; purring voices like cats; croakings and lispings and quackings and chatterings; a very menagerie in fact, to be heard in a room ten feet square, where a little rational cultivation would have reduced the whole of that vocal chaos to order and harmony, and would have made what is now painful and distasteful beautiful and seductive.

_BURNT FINGERS._

An old proverb says that a burnt child dreads the fire. If so, the child must be uncommonly astute, and with a power of reasoning by analogy in excess of impulsive desire rarely found either in children or adults. As a matter of fact, experience goes a very little way towards directing folks wisely. People often say how much they would like to live their lives over again with their present experience. That means, they would avoid certain specific mistakes of the past, of which they have seen and suffered from the issue. But if they retained the same nature as now, though they might avoid a few special blunders, they would fall into the same class of errors quite as readily as before, the gravitation of character towards circumstance being always absolute in its direction.

Our blunders in life are not due to ignorance so much as to temperament; and only the exceptionally wise among us learn to correct the excesses of temperament by the lessons of experience. To the mass of mankind these lessons are for the time only, and prophesy nothing of the future. They hold them to have been mistakes of method, not of principle, and they think that the same lines more carefully laid would lead to a better superstructure in the future, not seeing that the fault was organic and in those very initial lines themselves. No impulsive nor wildly hopeful person, for instance, ever learns by experience, so long as his physical condition remains the same. No one with a large faculty of faith--that is, credulous and easily imposed on--becomes suspicious or critical by mere experience. How much soever people of this kind have been taken in, in times past, they are just as ready to become the prey of the spoiler in times to come; and it would be sad, if it were not so silly, to watch how inevitably one half of the world gives itself up as food whereon the roguery of the other half may wax fat.

The person of facile confidence, whose secrets have been blazed abroad more than once by trusted friends, makes yet another and another safe confidant--quite safe this time; one of whose fidelity there is no doubt--and learns when too late that one _panier percé_ is very like another _panier percé_. The speculating man, without business faculty or knowledge, who has burnt his fingers bare to the bone with handling scrip and stock, thrusts them into the fire again so soon as he has the chance. The gambler blows his fingers just cool enough to shuffle the cards for this once only, sure that this time hope will tell no flattering tale, that ravelled ends will knit themselves up into a close and seemly garment, and heaven itself work a miracle in his favour against the law of mathematical certainty. In fact we are all gamblers in this way, and play our hazards for the stakes of faith and hope. We all burn our fingers again and again at some fire or another; but experience teaches us nothing; save perhaps a more hopeless, helpless resignation towards that confounded ill-luck of ours, and a weary feeling of having known it all before when things fall out amiss and we are blistered in the old flames.

In great matters this persistency of endeavour is sublime, and gets a wealth of laurel crowns and blue ribands; but in little things it is obstinacy, want of ability to profit by experience, denseness of perception as to what can and what cannot be done; and the apologue of Bruce's spider gets tiresome if too often repeated. The most hopelessly inapt people at learning why they burnt their fingers last time, and how they will burn them again, are those who, whatever their profession, are blessed or cursed with what is called the artistic temperament. A man will ruin himself for love of a particular place; for dislike of a certain kind of necessary work; for the prosecution of a certain hobby. Is he not artistic? and must he not have all the conditions of his life exactly square with his desires? else how can he do good work? So he goes on burning his fingers through self-indulgence, and persists in his unwisdom to the end of his life. He will paint his unsaleable pictures or write his unreadable books; his path is one in which the money-paying public will not follow; but though his very existence depends on the following of that paying public, he will not stir an inch to meet it, but keeps where he is because he likes the particular run of his hedgerows; and spends his days in thrusting his hand into the fire of what he chooses to call the ideal, and his nights in abusing the Philistinism of the world which lets him be burnt.