Part 4

And what does any amount of experience do for us in the matter of friendship or love? As the world goes round, and our credulous morning darkens into a more sceptical twilight, we believe as a general principle--a mere abstraction--that all new friends are just so much gilt gingerbread; and that a very little close holding and hard rubbing brings off the gilt, and leaves nothing but a slimy, sticky mess of little worth as food and of none as ornament. And yet, if of the kind to whom friendship is necessary for happiness, we rush as eagerly into the new affection as if we had never philosophized on the emptiness of the old, and believe as firmly in the solid gold of our latest cake as if we had never smeared our hands with one of the same pattern before. So with love. A man sees his comrades fluttering like enchanted moths about some stately man-slayer, some fair and shining light set like a false beacon on a dangerous cliff to lure men to their destruction. He sees how they singe and burn in the flame of her beauty, but he is not warned. If one's own experience teaches one little or nothing, the experience of others goes for even less, and no man yet was ever warned off the destructive fire of love because his companions had burnt their fingers there before him and his own are sure to follow.

It is the same with women; and in a greater degree. They know all about Don Juan well enough. They are perfectly well aware how he treated A. and B. and C. and D. But when it comes to their own turn, they think that this time surely, and to them, things will be different and he will be in earnest. So they slide down into the alluring flame, and burn their fingers for life by playing with forbidden fire. But have we not all the secret belief that we shall escape the snares and pitfalls into which others have dropped and among which we choose to walk? that fire will not burn our fingers, at least so very badly, when we thrust them into it? and that, by some legerdemain of Providence, we shall be delivered from the consequences of our own folly, and that two and two may be made to count five in our behalf? Who is taught by the experience of an unhappy marriage, say? No sooner has a man got himself free from the pressure of one chain and bullet, than he hastens to fasten on another, quite sure that this chain will be no heavier than the daintiest little thread of gold, and this bullet as light and sweet as a cowslip-ball. Everything that had gone wrong before will come right this time; and the hot bars of close association with an uncomfortable temper and unaccommodating habits will be only like a juggling trick, and will burn no one's heart or hands.

People too, who burn their fingers in giving good advice unasked, seldom learn to hold them back. With an honest intention, and a strong desire to see right done, it is difficult to avoid putting our hands into fires with which we have no business. While we are young and ardent, it seems to us as if we have distinct business with all fraud, injustice, folly, wilfulness, which we believe a few honest words of ours will control and annul; but nine times out of ten we only burn our own hands, while we do not in the least strengthen those of the right nor weaken those of the wrong. We may say the same of good-natured people. There was never a row of chestnuts roasting at the fire for which your good-natured oaf will not stretch out his hand at the bidding and for the advantage of a friend. Experience teaches the poor oaf nothing; not even that fire burns. To put his name at the back of a bill, just as a mere form; to lend his money, just for a few days; or to do any other sort of self-immolating folly, on the faithful promise that the fire will not burn nor the knife cut--it all comes as easy to men of the good-natured sort as their alphabet. Indeed it is their alphabet, out of which they spell their own ruin; but so long as the impressionable temperament lasts--so long as the liking to do a good-natured action is greater than caution, suspicion, or the power of analogical reasoning--so long will the oaf make himself the catspaw of the knave, till at last he has left himself no fingers wherewith to pluck out the chestnuts for himself or another.

The first doubt of young people is always a source of intense suffering. Hitherto they have believed what they saw and all they heard; and they have not troubled themselves with motives nor facts beyond those given to them and lying on the surface. But when they find out for themselves that seeming is not necessarily being, and that all people are not as good throughout as they thought them, then they suffer a moral shock which often leads them into a state of practical atheism and despair. Many young people give up altogether when they first open the book of humanity and begin to read beyond the title-page; and, because they have found specks in the cleanest parts, they believe that nothing is left pure. They are as much bewildered as horror-struck, and cannot understand how any one they have loved and respected should have done this or that misdeed. Having done it, there is nothing left to love nor respect further. It is only by degrees that they learn to adjust and apportion, and to understand that the whole creature is not necessarily corrupt because there are a few unhealthy places here and there. But in the beginning this first scorching by the fire of experience is very painful and bad to bear. Then they begin to think the knowledge of the world, as got from books, so wonderful, so profound; and they look on it as a science to be learned by much studying of aphorisms. They little know that not the most affluent amount of phrase knowledge can ever regulate that class of action which springs from a man's inherent disposition; and that it is not facts which teach but self-control which prevents.

After very early youth we all have enough theoretical knowledge to keep us straight; but theoretical knowledge does nothing without self-knowledge, or its corollary, self-control. The world has never yet got beyond the wisdom of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes; and Solomon's advice to the Israelitish youth lounging round the gates of the Temple is quite as applicable to young Hopeful coming up to London chambers as it was to them. Teaching of any kind, by books or events, is the mere brute weapon; but self-control is the intelligent hand to wield it. To burn one's fingers once in a lifetime tells nothing against a man's common-sense nor dignity; but to go on burning them is the act of a fool, and we cannot pity the wounds, however sore they may be. The Arcadian virtues of unlimited trust and hope and love are very sweet and lovely; but they are the graces of childhood, not the qualities of manhood. They are charming little finalities, which do not admit of modification nor of expansion; and in a naughty world, to go about with one's heart on one's sleeve, believing every one and accepting everything to be just as it presents itself, is offering bowls of milk to tigers, and meeting armed men with a tin sword. Such universal trust can only result in a perpetual burning of one's fingers; and a life spent in pulling out hot chestnuts from the fire for another's eating is by no means the most useful nor the most dignified to which a man can devote himself.

_DÉSOEUVREMENT._

Perhaps we ought to apologize for using a foreign label, but there is no one English word which gives the full meaning of _désoeuvrement_. Only paraphrases and accumulations would convey the many subtle shades contained in it; and paraphrases and accumulations are inconvenient as headings. But if we have not the word, we have a great deal of the thing; for _désoeuvrement_ is an evil unfortunately not confined to one country nor to one class; and even we, with all our boasted Anglo-Saxon energy, have people among us as unoccupied and purposeless as are to be found elsewhere. Certainly we have nothing like the Neapolitan lazzaroni who pass their lives in dozing in the sun; but that is more because of our climate than our condition, and if our _désoeuvrés_ do not doze out of doors, it by no means follows that they are wide awake within.

No state is more unfortunate than this listless want of purpose which has nothing to do, which is interested in nothing, and which has no serious object in life; and the drifting, aimless temperament, which merely waits and does not even watch, is the most disastrous that a man or woman can possess. Feverish energy, wearing itself out on comparative nothings, is better than the indolence which folds its hands and makes neither work nor pleasure; and the most microscopic and restless perception is more healthful than the dull blindness which goes from Dan to Beersheba, and finds all barren.

If even death itself is only a transmutation of forces--an active and energizing change--what can we say of this worse than mental death? How can we characterize a state which is simply stagnation? Not all of us have our work cut out and laid ready for us to do; very many of us have to seek for objects of interest and to create our own employment; and were it not for the energy which makes work by its own force, the world would still be lying in barbarism, content with the skins of beasts for clothing and with wild fruits and roots for food. But the _désoeuvrés_ know nothing of the pleasures of energy; consequently none of the luxuries of idleness--only its tedium and monotony. Life is a dull round to them of alternate vacancy and mechanical routine; a blank so dead that active pain and positive sorrow would be better for them than the passionless negation of their existence. They love nothing; they hope for nothing; they work for nothing; to-morrow will be as to-day, and to-day is as yesterday was; it is the mere passing of time which they call living--a moral and mental hybernation broken up by no springtime waking.

Though by no means confined to women only, this disastrous state is nevertheless more frequently found with them than with men. It is comparatively rare that a man--at least an Englishman--is born with so little of the activity which characterizes manhood as to rest content without some kind of object for his life, either in work or in pleasure, in study or in vice. But many women are satisfied to remain in an unending _désoeuvrement_, a listless supineness that has not even sufficient active energy to fret at its own dullness.

We see this kind of thing especially in the families of the poorer class of gentry in the country. If we except the Sunday school and district visiting, neither of which commends itself as a pleasant occupation to all minds--both in fact needing a little more active energy than we find in the purely _désoeuvré_ class--what is there for the unmarried daughters of a family to do? There is no question of a profession for any of them. Ideas travel slowly in country places, and root themselves still more slowly, even yet; and the idea of woman's work for ladies is utterly inadmissible by the English gentleman who can leave a modest sufficiency to his daughters--just enough to live on in the old house and in the old way, without a margin for luxuries, but above anything like positive want. There is no possibility then of an active career in art or literature; of going out as a governess, as a hospital nurse, or as a Sister. There is only home, with the possible and not very probable chance of marriage as the vision of hope in the distant future. And that chance is very small and very remote; for the simple reason--there is no one to marry.

There are the young collegians who come down in reading parties; the group of Bohemian artists, if the place be picturesque and not too far from London; the curate; and the new doctor, fresh from the hospitals, who has to make his practice out of the poorer and more outlying _clientèle_ of the old and established practitioners of the place. But collegians do not marry, and long engagements are proverbially hazardous; Bohemian artists are even less likely than they to trouble the surrogate; and the curate and the doctor can at the best marry only one apiece of the many who are waiting. The family keeps neither carriages nor horses, so that the longest tether to which life can be carried, with the house for the stake, is simply the three or four miles which the girls can walk out and back. And the visiting list is necessarily comprised within this circle. There is then, absolutely nothing to occupy nor to interest. The whole day is spent in playing over old music, in needlework, in a little desultory reading, such as is supplied by the local book society; all without other object than that of passing the time. The girls have had nothing like a thorough education in anything; they are not specially gifted, and what brains they have are dormant and uncultivated. There is not even enough housework to occupy their time, unless they were to send away the servants. Besides, domestic work of an active kind is vulgar, and gentlemen and gentlewomen do not allow their daughters to do it. They may help in the housekeeping; which means merely giving out the week's supplies on Monday and ordering the dinner on other days, and which is not an hour's occupation in the week; and they can do a little amateur spudding and raking among the flower-beds when the weather is fine, if they care for the garden; and they can do a great deal of walking if they are strong; and this is all that they can do. There they are, four or five well-looking girls perhaps, of marriageable age, fairly healthy and amiable, and with just so much active power as would carry them creditably through any work that was given them to do, but with not enough originative energy to make them create work for themselves out of nothing.

In their quiet uneventful sphere, with the circumscribed radius and the short tether, it would be very difficult for any women but those few who are gifted with unusual energy to create a sufficient human interest; to ordinary young ladies it is impossible. They can but make-believe, even if they try--and they don't try. They can but raise up shadows which they would fain accept as living creatures if they give themselves the trouble to evoke anything at all, and they don't give themselves the trouble. They simply live on from day to day in a state of mental somnolency--hopeless, _désoeuvrées_, inactive; just drifting down the smooth slow current of time, with not a ripple nor an eddy by the way.

Quiet families in towns, people who keep no society and live in a self-made desert apart though in the midst of the very vortex of life, are alike in the matter of _désoeuvrement_; and we find exactly the same history with them as we find with their country cousins, though apparently their circumstances are so different. They cannot work and they may not play; the utmost dissipation allowed them is to look at the outside of things--to make one of the fringe of spectators lining the streets and windows on a show day, and this but seldom; or to go once or twice a year to the theatre or a concert. So they too just lounge through their life, and pass from girlhood to old age in utter _désoeuvrement_ and want of object. Year by year the lines about their eyes deepen, their smile gets sadder, their cheeks grow paler; while the cherished secret romance which even the dullest life contains gets a colour of its own by age, and a firmness of outline by continual dwelling on, which it had not in the beginning. Perhaps it was a dream built on a tone, a look, a word--may be it was only a half-evolved fancy without any basis whatever--but the imagination of the poor _désoeuvrée_ has clung to the dream, and the uninteresting dullness of her life has given it a mock vitality which real activity would have destroyed.

This want of healthy occupation is the cause of half the hysterical reveries which it is a pretty flattery to call constancy and an enduring regret; and we find it as absolutely as that heat follows from flame, that the mischievous habit of bewailing an irrevocable past is part of the _désoeuvrée_ condition in the present. People who have real work to do cannot find time for unhealthy regrets, and _désoeuvrement_ is the most fertile source of sentimentality to be found.

The _désoeuvrée_ woman of means and middle age, grown grey in her want of purpose and suddenly taken out of her accustomed groove, is perhaps more at sea than any others. She has been so long accustomed to the daily flow of certain lines that she cannot break new ground and take up with anything fresh, even if it be only a fresh way of being idle. Her daughter is married; her husband is dead; her friend who was her right hand and manager-in-chief has gone away; she is thrown on her own resources, and her own resources will not carry her through. She generally falls a prey to her maid, who tyrannizes over her, and a phlegmatic kind of despair, which darkens the remainder of her life without destroying it. She loses even her power of enjoyment, and gets tired before the end of the rubber which is the sole amusement in which she indulges. For _désoeuvrement_ has that fatal reflex action which everything bad possesses, and its strength is in exact ratio with its duration.

Women of this class want taking in hand by the stronger and more energetic. Many even of those who seem to do pretty well as independent workers, men and women alike, would be all the better for being farmed out; and _désoeuvrées_ women especially want extraneous guidance, and to be set to such work as they can do, but cannot make. An establishment which would utilize their faculties, such as they are, and give them occupation in harmony with their powers, would be a real salvation to many who would do better if they only knew how, and would save them from stagnation and apathy. But society does not recognize the existence of moral rickets, though the physical are cared for; consequently it has not begun to provide for them as moral rickets, and no Proudhon has yet managed to utilize the _désoeuvrés_ members of the State. When they do find a place of retreat and adventitious support, it is under another name.

The retired man of business, utterly without object in his new conditions, is another portrait that meets us in country places. He is not fit for magisterial business; he cannot hunt nor shoot nor fish; he has no literary tastes; he cannot create objects of interest for himself foreign to the whole experience of his life. The idleness which was so delicious when it was a brief season of rest in the midst of his high-pressure work, and the country which was like Paradise when seen in the summer only and at holiday time, make together just so much blank dullness now that he has bound himself to the one and fixed himself in the other. When he has spelt over every article in the _Times_, pottered about his garden and his stables, and irritated both gardener and groom by interfering in what he does not understand, the day's work is at an end. He has nothing more to do but eat his dinner and sip his wine, doze over the fire for a couple of hours, and go to bed as the clock strikes ten.

This is the reality of that long dream of retirement which has been the golden vision of hope to many a man during the heat and burden of the day. The dream is only a dream. Retirement means _désoeuvrement_; leisure is tedium; rest is want of occupation truly, but want of interest, want of object, want of purpose as well; and the prosperous man of business, who has retired with a fortune and broken energies, is bored to death with his prosperity, and wishes himself back to his desk or his counter--back to business and something to do. He wonders, on retrospection, what there was in his activity that was distasteful to him; and thinks with regret that perhaps, on the whole, it is better to wear out than to rust out; that _désoeuvrement_ is a worse state than work at high pressure; and that life with a purpose is a nobler thing than one which has nothing in it but idleness:--whereof the main object is how best to get rid of time.

_THE SHRIEKING SISTERHOOD._

We by no means put it forward as an original remark when we say that Nature does her grandest works of construction in silence, and that all great historical reforms have been brought about either by long and quiet preparation, or by sudden and authoritative action. The inference from which is, that no great good has ever been done by shrieking; that much talking necessarily includes a good deal of dilution; and that fuss is never an attribute of strength nor coincident with concentration. Whenever there has been a very deep and sincere desire on the part of a class or an individual to do a thing, it has been done not talked about; where the desire is only halfhearted, where the judgment or the conscience is not quite clear as to the desirableness of the course proposed, where the chief incentive is love of notoriety and not the intrinsic worth of the action itself--personal _kudos_, and not the good of a cause nor the advancement of humanity--then there has been talk; much talk; hysterical excitement; a long and prolonged cackle; and heaven and earth called to witness that an egg has been laid wherein lies the germ of a future chick--after proper incubation.

Necessarily there must be much verbal agitation if any measure is to be carried the fulcrum of which is public opinion. If you have to stir the dry bones you must prophesy to them in a loud voice, and not leave off till they have begun to shake. Things which can only be known by teaching must be spoken of, but things which have to be done are always better done the less the fuss made about them; and the more steadfast the action, the less noisy the agent. Purpose is apt to exhale itself in protestations, and strength is sure to exhaust itself by a flux of words. But at the present day what Mr. Carlyle called the Silences are the least honoured of all the minor gods, and the babble of small beginnings threatens to become intolerable. We all 'think outside our brains,' and the result is not conducive to mental vigour. It is as if we were to set a plant to grow with its heels in the air, and then look for roots, flowers and fruit, by the process of excitation and disclosure.

One of our quarrels with the Advanced Women of our generation is the hysterical parade they make about their wants and their intentions. It never seems to occur to them that the best means of getting what they want is to take it, when not forbidden by the law--to act, not to talk; that all this running hither and thither over the face of the earth, this feverish unrest and loud acclaim are but the dilution of purpose through much speaking, and not the right way at all; and that to hold their tongues and do would advance them by as many leagues as babble puts them back. A small knot of women, 'terribly in earnest,' could move multitudes by the silent force of example. One woman alone, quietly taking her life in her own hands and working out the great problem of self-help and independence practically, not merely stating it theoretically, is worth a score of shrieking sisters frantically calling on men and gods to see them make an effort to stand upright without support, with interludes of reproach to men for the want of help in their attempt. The silent woman who quietly calculates her chances and measures her powers with her difficulties so as to avoid the probability of a fiasco, and who therefore achieves a success according to her endeavour, does more for the real emancipation of her sex than any amount of pamphleteering, lecturing, or petitioning by the shrieking sisterhood can do. Hers is deed not declamation; proof not theory; and it carries with it the respect always accorded to success.