This kind, too, affects, in theory, wonderful submissiveness to man. It upholds Griselda as the type of feminine perfection, and—still in theory—between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in for the tyranny. "I would rather my husband beat me than let me do too much as I liked," said one before she married, who, after she was married, managed to get entire possession of the domestic reins, and took good care that her nominal lord should be her practical slave. For, notwithstanding the sweet submissiveness of her theory, the intensely womanly woman has the most astonishing knack of getting her own way and imposing her own will on others. The real tyrant among women is not the one who flounces and splutters, and declares that nothing shall make her obey, but the self-mannered, large-eyed, and intensely womanly person, who says that Griselda is her ideal, and that the whole duty of woman lies in unquestioning obedience to man.

In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman—the woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big buttons, of which she flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness of a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears unmistakeable shirtfronts, linen collars, vests, and plain ties, like a man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and makes believe that the attitude is comfortable because it is manlike. If the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness, the mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores dogs and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She boasts of how good a marksman she is—she does not call herself markswoman—and how she can hit right and left, and bring down both birds flying. When she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass between her first two fingers, hollows her underlip, and tosses it off, throwing her head well back—she would disdain the ladylike sip or the closer gesture of ordinary women. She is great in cheese and bitter beer, in claret cup and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of effervescing wines. She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward, as men round their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw; for charms to her watch-chain she wears a corkscrew, a gimlet, a big knife, and a small foot-rule; and in entire contrast with the intensely womanly woman, who uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman when she does anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of which is affectation—from first to last affectation; a mere assumption of virile fashions utterly inharmonious to the whole being, physical and mental, of a woman.

Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a personal insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact limits of her mental sphere. This is the woman who assumes to be the antiseptic element in society, who makes believe that without her the world and human nature would go to the dogs, and plunge headlong into the abyss of sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand heroism of man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavor and patient seeking after truth, would serve his turn or the world's if she did not spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the boundary lines within which she would confine the range of thought and speculation. She knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affectation, and that other minds have as much right to their own boundary lines as she claims for herself; but it seems to her pretty to assume that woman generally is the consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that she, of all women, is most specially consecrated.

As an offshoot of this kind stands the affectation of simplicity—the woman whose mental attitude is self-depreciation, and who poses herself as a mere nobody when the world is ringing with her praises. "Is it possible that your Grace has ever heard of me?" said one of this class with prettily affected naivete at a time when all England was astir about her, and when colors and fashions went by her name to make them take with the public at large. No one knew better than the fair ingenue in question how far and wide her fame had spread, but she thought it looked modest and simple to assume ignorance of her own value, and to declare that she was but a creeping worm when all the world knew that she was a soaring butterfly.

There is a certain little kind of affectation very common among pretty women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are pretty, and not recognising the effect of their beauty on men. Take a woman with bewildering eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape, and fringed with long lashes that distract you to look at; the creature knows that her eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that fire burns and that ice melts; she knows the effect of that trick she has with them—the sudden uplifting of the heavy lid, and the swift, full gaze that she gives right into a man's eyes. She has practiced it often in the glass, and knows to a mathematical nicety the exact height to which the lid must be raised, and the exact fixity of the gaze. She knows the whole meaning of the look, and the stirring of men's blood that it creates; but if you speak to her of the effect of her trick, she puts on an air of extremest innocence, and protests her entire ignorance as to anything her eyes may say or mean: and if you press her hard she will look at you in the same way for your own benefit, and deny at the very moment of offence.

Various other tricks has she with those bewildering eyes of hers—each more perilous than the other to men's peace; and all unsparingly employed, no matter what the result. For this is the woman who flirts to the extreme limits, then suddenly draws up and says she meant nothing. Step by step she has led you on, with looks and smiles, and pretty doubtful phrases always susceptible of two meanings, the one for the ear by mere word, the other for the heart by the accompaniments of look and manner, which are intangible; step by step she has drawn you deeper and deeper into the maze where she has gone before as your decoy; then, when she has you safe, she raises her eyes for the last time, complains that you have mistaken her cruelly, and that she has meant nothing more than any one else might mean; and what can she do to repair her mistake? Love you? marry you? No; she is engaged to your rival, who counts his thousands to your hundreds; and what a pity that you had not seen this all along, and that you should have so misunderstood her! Besides, what is there about her that you or any one should love?

Of all the many affectations of women, this affectation of their own harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when they practice their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most dangerous and the most disastrous. But what can one say to them? The very fact that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his perception until too late. That men love though they suffer is the woman's triumph, guilt, and condonation; and so long as the trick succeeds it will be practiced.

Another affectation of the same family is the extreme friendliness and familiarity which some women adopt in their manners towards men. Young girls affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a year or so older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate, declare they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may not be natural. This form of affectation, once begun, continues through life, being too convenient to be lightly discarded; and youthful matrons not long out of their teens assume a tone and ways that would about befit middle age counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous even then if the "Indian summer" was specially bright and warm.

Then there is the affectation pure and simple, which is the mere affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of attitude that by consciousness ceases to be grace, and the thousand little minauderies and coquetries of the sex known to us all. And there is the affectation which people of a higher social sphere show when they condescend to those of low estate, and talk and look as if they were not quite certain of their company, and scarcely knew if they were Christian or heathen, savage or civilized. And there is the affectation of the maternal passion with women who are never by any chance seen with their children, but who speak of them as if they were never out of their sight; the affectation of wifely adoration with women who are to be met about the world with every man of their acquaintance rather than with their lawful husbands; the affectation of asceticism in women who lead a thoroughly self-enjoying life from end to end; and the affectation of political fervor in those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to save Europe from universal revolution.

Go where we will, affectation of being something she is not meets us in woman, like a ghost we cannot lay or a mist we cannot sweep away. In the holiest and the most trivial things alike we find it penetrating everywhere—even in church, and at her prayers, when the pretty penitent, rising from her lengthy orison, lifts her eyes and looks about her furtively to see who has noticed her self-abasement and to whom her picturesque piety has commended itself.

All sorts and patterns of good girls and pleasant women are very dear and delightful; but the pearl of great price is the thoroughly natural and unaffected woman—that is, the woman who is truthful to her core, and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she would dare to tell a lie.



IDEAL WOMEN.

It is often objected against fault-finders, writers or others, that they destroy but do not build up, that while industriously blaming errors they take good care not to praise the counteracting virtues, that in their zeal against the vermin of which they are seeking to sweep the house clean they forget the nobler creatures which do the good work of keeping things sweet and wholesome. But it is impossible to be continually introducing the saving clause, "all are not so bad as these." The seven thousand righteous who have not bowed the knee to Baal are understood to exist in all communities; and, vicious as any special section may be, there must always be the hidden salt and savor of the virtuous to keep the whole from falling into utter corruption. This is specially true of modern women. Certainly, some of them are as unsatisfactory as any of their kind that have ever appeared on earth before, but it would be very queer logic to infer, therefore, that all are bad alike, and that our modern womanhood is as ill off as the Cities of the Plain which could not be saved for want of the ten just men to save them.

Happily, we have noble women among us yet; women who believe in something beside pleasure, and who do their work faithfully, wherever it may lie; women who can and do sacrifice themselves for love and duty, and who do not think they were sent into the world simply to run one mad life-long race for wealth, for dissipation, or for distinction. But the life of such women is essentially in retirement; and though the lesson they teach is beautiful, yet its influence is necessarily confined, because of the narrow sphere of the teacher. When such public occasions for devotedness as the Crimean war occur, we can in some sort measure the extent to which the self-sacrifice of women can be carried; but in general their noblest virtues come out only in the quiet and secresy of home, and the most heroic lives of patience and well-doing go on in seclusion, uncheered by sympathy and unrewarded by applause.

Still, it is impossible to write of one absolute womanly ideal—one single type that shall satisfy every man's fancy; for, naturally, what would be perfection to one is imperfection to another, according to the special bent of the individual mind. Thus one man's ideal of womanly perfection is in beauty, mere physical outside beauty; and not all the virtues under heaven could warm him into love with red hair or a snub nose. He is entirely happy if his wife is undeniably the handsomest woman of his acquaintance, and holds himself blessed when all men admire and all women envy. But for his own sake rather than for hers. Pleasant as her loveliness is to look on, it is pleasanter to know that he is the possessor of it. The "handsomest woman in the room" comes into the same category as the finest picture or the most thoroughbred horse within his sphere, and if the degree of pride in his possession is different, the kind is the same. And so in minor proportions, from the most beautiful woman of all, to simply beauty as a sine qua non, whatever else may be wanting. One other thing only is as absolute as this beauty, and that is its undivided possession.

Another man's ideal is a good housekeeper and a careful mother, and he does not care a rush whether his wife, if she is these, is pretty or ugly. Provided she is active and industrious, minds the house well, and brings up the children as they ought to be brought up, has good principles, is trustworthy, and even-tempered, he is not particular as to color or form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or a squint. Given the great foundations of an honorable home, and he will forego the lath and plaster of personal appearance which will not bear the wear and tear of years and their troubles. The solid virtues stand. His balance at the banker's is a fact; his good name and credit with the tradespeople is a fact; so is the comfort of his home; so are the health, the morals, the education of his children. All these are the true realities of life to him; but the beauty which changes to deformity by the small-pox, which fades under dyspepsia, grows stale by habit, and is worn threadbare by the end of twenty years, is only a skin-deep grace which he does not value. Perhaps he is right. Certainly, some of the happiest marriages among one's acquaintances are those where the wife has not one perceptible physical charm, and where the whole force of her magnetic value lies in what she is, not in how she looks.

Another man wants a tender, adoring, fair-haired seraph, who will worship him as a demigod, and accept him as her best revelation of strength and wisdom. The more dependent she is, the better he will love her; the less of conscious thought, of active will, of originative power she has, the greater his regard and tenderness. To be the one sole teacher and protector of such a gentle little creature seems to him the most delicious and the best condition of married life; and he holds Milton's famous lines to be expressive of the only fitting relation between men and women. The adoring seraph is his ideal; Griselda, Desdemona, Lucy Ashton, are his highest culminations of womanly grace; and the qualities which appeal the most powerfully to his generosity are the patience which will not complain, the gentleness that cannot resent, and the love which nothing can chill.

Another man wants a cultivated intelligence in his ideal. As an author, an artist, a student, a statesman, he would like his wife to be able to help him by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect. He believes in the sex of minds, and holds only that work complete which has been created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees how women have helped on the leaders in troubled times; he knows that almost all great men have owed something of their greatness to the influence of a mother or a wife; he remembers how thoughts which had lain dumb in men's brains for more than half their lifetime suddenly woke up into speech and activity by the influence of a woman great enough to call them forth. The adoring seraph would be an encumbrance, and nothing better than a child upon his hands; and the soul which had to be awakened and directed by him would run great chance of remaining torpid and inactive all its days. He has his own life to lead and round off, and so far from wishing to influence another's, wants to be helped for himself.

Another man cares only for the birth and social position of the woman to whom he gives his name and affection; to another yellow gold stands higher than blue blood, and "my wife's father" may have been a rag-picker, so long as rag-picking had been a sufficiently rich alembic with a residuum admitting of no kind of doubt. Venus herself without a dowry would be only a pretty sea-side girl with a Newtown pippin in her hand; but Miss Kilmansegg would be something worth thinking of, if but little worth looking at. One man delights in a smart, vivacious little woman of the irrepressible kind. It makes no difference to him how petulant she is, how full of fire and fury; the most passionate bursts of temper simply amuse him, like the anger of a canary-bird, and he holds it fine fun to watch the small virago in her tantrums, and to set her going again when he thinks she has been a long enough time in subsidence. His ideal of woman is an amusing little plaything, with a great facility for being put up, and a dash of viciousness to give it piquancy.

Another wants a sweet and holy saint whose patient humility springs from principle rather than from fear; another likes a blithe-tempered, healthy girl with no nonsense about her, full of fun and ready for everything, and is not particular as to the strict order or economy of the housekeeping, provided only she is at all times willing to be his pleasant playmate and companion. Another delights in something very quiet, very silent, very home-staying. One must have first-rate music in his ideal woman; another unimpeachable taste; a third, strict orders; a fourth, liberal breadth of nature; and each has his own ideal, not only of nature but of person—to the exact shade of the hair, the color of the eyes, and the oval of the face. But all agree in the great fundamental requirements of truth, and modesty, and love, and unselfishness; for though it is impossible to write of one womanly ideal as an absolute, it is very possible to detail the virtues which ought to belong to all alike.

If this diversity of ideals is true of individuals, it is especially true of nations, each of which has its own ideal of woman varying according to what is called the genius of the country. To the Frenchman, if we are to believe Michelet and the novelists, it is a feverish little creature, full of nervous energy, but without muscular force; of frail health and feeble organization; a prey to morbid fancies which she has no strength to control or to resist; now weeping away her life in the pain of finding that her husband, a man gross and material because husband, does not understand her; now sighing over her delicious sins in the arms of the lover who does; without reasoning faculties, but with divine intuitions that are as good as revelations; without cool judgment, but with the light of burning passions that guide her just as well; thinking by her heart, yet carrying the most refined metaphysics into her love; subtle; incomprehensible by the coarser brain of man; a creature born to bewilder and to be misled, to love and to be adored, to madden men and to be destroyed by them.

It does not much signify that the reality is a shrewd, calculating, unromantic woman, with a hard face and keen eyes, who for the most part makes a good practical wife to her common-sense middle-aged husband, who thinks more of her social position than of her feelings, more of her children than of her lovers, more of her purse than of her heart, and whose great object of life is a daily struggle for centimes. It pleases the French to idealize their eminently practical and worldly-wise women into this queer compound of hysterics and adultery; and if it pleases them it need not displease us.

To the German his ideal is of two kinds—one, his Martha, the domestic broad-faced Hausmutter, who cooks good dinners at small cost, and mends the family linen as religiously as if this were the Eleventh Commandment especially appointed for feminine fingers to keep, the poetic culmination of whom is Charlotte cutting bread and butter; the other, his Mary, his Bettina, full of mind and aesthetics, and heart-uplifting love, yearning after the infinite with holes in her stockings and her shoes down at heel. For what are coarse material mendings to the aesthetic soul yearning after the infinite, and worshipping at the feet of the prophet?

In Italy the ideal woman of modern times is the ardent patriot, full of active energy, or physical force, and dauntless courage.

In Poland it is the patriot too, but of a more refined and etherealized type, passively resenting Tartar tyranny by the subtlest feminine scorn, and living in perpetual music and mourning.

In Spain it is a woman beautiful and impassioned, with the slight drawback of needing a world of looking after, of which the men are undeniably capable.

In Mohammedan countries generally it is a comely smooth-skinned Dudu, patient and submissive, always in good humor with her master, economical in house-living to suit the meanness, and gorgeous in occasional attire to suit the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental; but by no means Dudu ever asleep and unoccupied; for, if not allowed to take part in active outside life, the Eastern's wife or wives have their home duties and their maternal cares like all other women, and find to their cost that, if they neglect them unduly, they will have a bad time of it with Ali Ben Hassan when the question comes of piastres and sequins, and the dogs of Jews who demand payment, and the pigs of Christians who follow suit.

The American ideal is of two kinds, like the German—the one, the clever manager, the woman with good executive faculty in the matters of buckwheat cakes and oyster gumbo, as is needed in a country so poorly provided with "helps;" the other, the aspiring soul who puts her aspirations into deeds, and goes out into the world to do battle with the sins of society as editress, preacher, stump orator, and the like. It must be rather embarrassing to some men that this special manifestation of the ideal woman at times advocates miscegenation and free love; but perhaps we of the narrow old conventional type are not up to the right mark yet, and have to wait until our own women are thoroughly emancipated before we can rightly appreciate these questions. At all events, if this kind of thing pleases the Americans, it is no more our business to interfere with them than with the French compound; and if miscegenation and free love seem to them the right manner of life, let them follow it.

In all countries, then, the ideal woman changes, chameleon-like, to suit the taste of man; and the great doctrine that her happiness does somewhat depend on his liking is part of the very foundation of her existence. According to his will she is bond or free, educated or ignorant, lax or strict, house-keeping or roving; and though we advocate neither the bondage nor the ignorance, yet we do hold to the principle that, by the laws which regulate all human communities everywhere, she is bound to study the wishes of man, and to mould her life in harmony with his liking. No society can get on in which there is total independence of sections and members, for society is built up on the mutual dependence of all its sections and all its members. Hence the defiant attitudes which women have lately assumed, and their indifference to the wishes and remonstrances of men, cannot lead to any good results whatever. It is not the revolt of slaves against their tyrants—in that we could sympathize—which they have begun, but a revolt against their duties. And this it is which makes the present state of things so deplorable. It is the vague restlessness, the fierce extravagance, the neglect of home, the indolent fine-ladyism, the passionate love of pleasure which characterise the modern woman, that saddens men, and destroys in them that respect which their very pride prompts them to feel. And it is the painful conviction that the ideal woman of truth and modesty and simple love and homely living has somehow faded away under the paint and tinsel of this modern reality which makes us speak out as we have done, in the hope, perhaps a forlorn one, that if she could be made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she would, by the very force of natural instinct and social necessity, order herself in some accordance with the lost ideal, and become again what we once loved and what we all regret.



WOMAN AND THE WORLD.

This, we are told in a tone of pathetic resignation, is a day of hard sayings for women. It is, we will venture to add, a day when women have to meet hard sayings with replies a little less superficial than the conventional stare of outraged womanhood or the trivial retort on the follies of men. Grant that woman's censors are as cynical and hollow-hearted as you will, there can be no doubt that their criticisms are simply the expression of a general uneasiness, and that that uneasiness has some ground to go upon. It is possible that observers across the water may be cynical in denouncing the "magnificent indecency" of the heroines of New York. It is possible that the schoolmasters of Berlin may be cynical in calling public opinion to their aid against the degrading exhibitions of the Prussian capital. It is possible that the thunders of the Vatican are merely an instance of Papal cynicism. It is possible that the protest of the Bishop of Orleans is as hollow-hearted as the protests of censors nearer home. But such a world-wide outbreak of cynicism without a cause is a somewhat improbable event, and the improbability is increased when we remark the silent acquiescence of the women of America and the Continent in the justice of these censures.

It is only the British mother who ventures to protest. Now, we Englishmen have always felt a sort of national pride in the British mother. It has been a part of our patriotic self-satisfaction to pique ourselves on her icy decorum, on the merciless severity of her virtue. Colorless, uninteresting, limited as Continental critics pronounced her to be, we cherished her the more as something specially our own, and regarded the Channel as a barrier providentially invented for the isolation of her spotless prudery. It was peculiarly gratifying to suppose that on the other side of it there were no British homes, no British maidens, no British mothers. And it must be owned that the British mother took her cue admirably. She owned, with a sigh of complacency, that she was not as other women. She shuddered at foreign morals, and tabooed French novels. She shook all life and individuality out of her girls as un-English and Continental. She denounced all aspirations after higher and larger spheres of effort as unfeminine. Such a type of woman was naturally dull enough, but it fairly came up to its own standard; and if its respectability was prudery, it still earned, and had a right to claim, man's respect. The amusing thing is the persistence in the claim when the type has passed away.

The British spouse has bloomed into the semi-detached wife, with a husband always conveniently in the distance, and a cicisbeo as conveniently in the corner. The British mother has died into the faded matrimonial schemer, contemptuous of younger sons. The innocent simper of the British maiden has developed into the loud laugh and the horsey slang of the girl of the season. But maiden and matron are still on one point faithful to the traditions of their grandmothers, and front all censorious comers with a shrug of their shoulder-straps and a flutter of indignant womanhood. And maiden and matron still claim their insular exemption from the foibles of their sex. The Pope may do what he will with the women of Italy, and Monseigneur of Orleans may deal stern justice out to the women of France; Continental immorality is in the nature of things; but there is something else that is in the nature of things too, and before the impeccable majesty of British womanhood every critic must stand abashed.

Unfortunately, we are no sooner awed with the marble silence of our Hermione than Hermione descends from her pedestal and falls a-talking like other people. Woman, in a word, protests; and protests are often very dangerous things to the protesters. Nothing, for instance, can seem more simple or more effective than the tu quoque retort, and as it is familiar to feminine disputants, we are favored with it in every possible form. If the girl of the period is fast and frivolous, is the young man of the period any better? No sketch can be more telling than the picture which she is ready to draw of his lounging ways, his epicurean indolence, his boredom at home, his foppery abroad, the vacancy of his stare, the inanity of his talk, his incredible conceit, his life vibrating between the Club and the stable. She hits off with a charming vivacity the list of his accomplishments—his skill at flirtation, his matchless ability at croquet, his assiduity over Bell's Life, the cleverness of his book on the Derby. No sensible or well-informed girl, she tells us, can talk for ten minutes to this creature without weariness and disgust at his ignorance, his narrowness, his triviality; no modestly-dressed or decently-mannered girl can win the slightest share of his attentions. Married, he is as frivolous as before marriage; he selects the toilette of the demi-monde as an agreeable topic of domestic conversation, he resents affection and proclaims home a bore, he grudges the birth of children as an additional expense, he stunts and degrades the education of his girls, he is the despot of his household and the dread of his family.

The sketch is powerful enough in its way, but the conclusion which the fair artist draws is at least an odd one. We prepare ourselves to hear that woman has resolved to extirpate such a monster as this, or that she will remain an obstinate vestal till a nobler breed of wooers arises. What woman owns that she really does is to mould herself as much on the monster's model as she can. According to her own account, she puts nature's picture of herself into the hands of this imbecile, invites him to blur it as he will, and lets him write under the daub "Ego feci." As he cannot talk sense, she stoops to bandy chaff and slang. As he refuses to be attracted by modesty of dress and manner, she apes the dress and manner of the demi-monde. His indolence, his triviality, his worldliness become her own. As he finds home a bore, she too plunges into her round of dissipation; as he objects to children, she declines to be a mother; as he wishes to get the girls off his hands, she flings them at the head of the first comer.

Now, if such a defence as this at all adequately represents the facts of the case, we can only say that the girl of the period must be a far lower creature than we have ever asserted her to be. A sensible girl stooping to slang, a modest girl flinging aside modesty, simply to conquer a fool and a fop, is a satire upon woman which none but a woman could have invented, and which we must confess to be utterly incredible to men. But the assumption upon which the whole of this mimetic theory is based is one well worthy of a little graver consideration.

"Tell me how to improve the youth of France," said Napoleon one day to Madame de Campan. "Give them good mothers," was the reply. There are some things which even a Napoleon may be pardoned for feeling a little puzzled in undertaking, and Madame de Campan would no doubt have added much to the weight of her reply by a few practical words as to the machinery requisite for the supply of the article she recommended. But her request is now the cry of the world. The general uneasiness of which we have spoken before arises simply from the conviction that woman is becoming more and more indifferent to her actual post in the social economy of the world, and the criticisms in which it takes form, whether grave or gay, could all be summed up in Madame de Campan's request, "Give us good mothers."

After all protests against limiting the sphere of the sex to a single function of their existence, public opinion still regards woman primarily in her relation to the generation to come. If it censures the sensible girl who stoops to slang, or the modest girl who stoops to indecency, it is because the sense and the modesty which they abandon is not theirs to hold or to fling away, but the heritage of the human race. But this seems to be less and less the feeling of woman herself. For good or for evil, or, perhaps more truly, for both good and evil, woman is becoming conscious every day of new powers, and longing for an independent sphere in which she can exert them. Marriage is aimed at with a passionate ardor unknown before, not as a means of gratifying affection, but as a means of securing independence.

To the unmarried girl life is a sheer bondage, and there is no sacrifice too great to be left untried if it only promises a chance of deliverance. She learns to despise the sense, the information, the womanly reserve which fail to attract the deliverer. She has to sell herself to purchase her freedom; and she will take very strong measures to secure a purchaser. The fop, the fool, little knows the keen scrutiny with which the gay creature behind her fan is taking stock of his feeble preferences, is preparing to play upon his feebler aversions. Pitiful as he is, it is for him that she arranges her artillery on the toilette-table, the "little secrets," the powder bloom, the rouge "precipitated from the damask rose-leaf," the Styrian lotion that gives "beauty and freshness to the complexion, plumpness to the figure, clearness and softness to the skin." He has a faint flicker of liking for brunettes; she lays her triumphant fingers on her "walnut stain," and darkens into the favorite tint. He loves plumpness, and her "Sinai Manna" is at hand to secure embonpoint. Belladonna flashes on him from her eyes, Kohl and antimony deepen the blackness of her eyebrows, "bloom of roses" blushes from her lips. She stoops to conquer, and it is no wonder that the fop and the fool go down.

The freedom she covets comes with marriage, but it is a freedom threatened by a thousand accidents, and threatened, above all, by maternity. It is of little use to have bowed to slang and shoulder-straps, if it be only to tie oneself to a cradle. The nursery stands sadly in the way of the free development of woman; it clips her social enjoyment, it curtails her bonnet bills. "The slavery of nursing a child," one fair protester tells us, "only a mother knows." And so she invents a pretty theory about the damage done to modern constitutions by our port-drinking forefathers, and ceases to nurse at all. But even this is only partial independence; she pants for perfect freedom from the cares of maternity. Her tone becomes the tone of the household, and the spouse she has won growls over each new arrival. She is quite ready to welcome the growl. "Nature," a mother informs us, "turns restive after the birth of two or three children," and mothers turn restive with nature. "Whatever else you may do," she adds, "you will never persuade us into liking to have children," and, if we did, we should not greatly value the conversion. And so woman wins her liberty, and bows her emphatic reply to the world's appeal, "Give us good mothers," by declining to be a mother at all.

By the sacrifice of womanliness, by the sacrifice of modesty, by flattering her wooer's base preferences before marriage, by encouraging his baser selfishness afterwards, by hunting her husband to the club and restricting her maternal energies to a couple of infants, woman has at last bought her freedom. She is no slave to a husband as her mother was, she is not buried beneath the cares of a family like her grandmother. She has changed all that, and the old world of home and domestic tenderness and parental self-sacrifice lies in ruins at her feet. She has her liberty; what will she do with it? As yet, freedom means simply more slang, more jewelry, more selfish extravagance, less modesty. As we meet her on the stairs, as we see the profuse display of her charms, as we listen to the flippant, vapid chatter, we turn a little sickened from woman stripped of all that is womanly, and cry to Heaven, as Madame de Campan cried to the Emperor—"Give us good mothers."



UNEQUAL MARRIAGES.

Acute ladies who concern themselves much with the superficial social currents of the time are beginning to perceive, or at least to think that they perceive, a fatal and growing tendency to mesalliances on the part of men who ought to know better. They complain not merely of the doting old gentleman who has been a bachelor long enough to lose his wits, and so marries his cook or his housemaid, nor of the debauched young simpleton who takes a wife from a casino or the bar of a night-cafe. Actions of this sort are as common at one time as at another. Old fools and young fools maintain a pretty steady average. Their silly exploits are the issue, not of the tendencies of the age, but of their own individual and particular lack of wits. They do not affect the general direction of social feeling, nor have we any right to argue up from their preposterous connexions to the influences and conditions of the society of which they are only the abnormal and irregular growths. What people mean, when they talk of an increase in the number of men who marry beneath them, is that men otherwise sensible and respectable and sober-minded perpetrate the irregularity in something like cold blood, and with a measure of deliberation. Whether observers who have formed this opinion are right, or are only anticipating their own apprehensions and alarms, is difficult to ascertain. A good deal depends on the accidental range of the observer's own acquaintances, and still more on their candor or discreet reticence.

Besides, how are we to know how far one generation is worse than generations which have gone before it? Men are, after due time, forgiven for this defiance of social usage, and women who were barely presentable in youth become presentable enough by the time they reach middle age. People may seem to us to be very equally and justly mated who five-and-twenty years ago were the town's talk. It is practically impossible, therefore, to compare the actual number of unequal marriages in our day with those of a generation back. People may have their ideas, but verification is not to be had. All we can do is to estimate the increase in the conditions which are likely to make men find wives in a rank below their own. If we look at these, there may be a good many reasons for believing that the apprehensions of the shrewd and alarmed observers are not without justification.

When a wise man with a living or a name to make, or both, looks for a wife, he certainly does not desire a person who shall be troublesome and an impediment to him. He wants a cheerful, sensible, and decently thrifty person. He probably has no inclination for a bluestocking, nor for a lady with aggressive views on points of theology, nor for one who can beat him in political discussion. Strong intellectual power he can most heartily dispense with. But then, on the other hand, he has no fancy for sitting day after day at table with a vapid, flippant, frivolous, empty soul who can neither talk nor listen, who takes no interest in things herself, and cannot understand why other people should take interest in them, who is penetrated with feeble little egoisms. An aggressive woman with opinions about prevenient grace, or the advantages of female emigration, or the functions of the deaconess, would be far preferable to this. She would irritate, but she would not fill the soul with everlasting despair, as the pretty vapid creature does. To discuss predestination and election over dinner is not nice, but still less is it nice to have to make talk with a fool, and to be obliged to answer her according to her folly.

As the education of modern girls of fashion chiefly aims at making them either very fast or very slow, it is not to be wondered at that men find it hard to realize their ideals among their equals in position. It is not merely that so many marriageable young ladies are ignorant. They are this, but they are more. They are exacting and pretentious, and uneducated in the worst sense, for they are ignorant how ignorant they are, or even that they are ignorant at all.

Then there is a still more obvious, palpable, and impressive circumstance. A man with ordinary means looks with alarm on the too visible and too unbounded extravagance of the ladies from among whom he is expected to take a partner. The thought of the apparel, of the luxuries, of the attendants, of the restless moving about, to which they have been accustomed, fills him with deep consternation. He might perhaps deceive himself into thinking that he could get on very well with an empty-minded woman, but he cannot forget the stern facts of arithmetic, nor hoodwink himself as to what would be left out of his income after he had paid for dresses, servants, household charges, carriages, parties, opera-boxes, traveling, and all the rest.

Besides the flippancy of so many women, and the extravagance of most women, arising from their inexperience of the trouble with which money is made and of the importance of keeping it after it has been made, there is something in the characteristics of modern social intercourse which makes men of a certain temper intensely anxious to avoid a sort of marriage which would, among other things, have the effect of committing them more deeply to this kind of intercourse. Such men shrink with affright from giving hostages to society for a more faithful compliance with its most dismal exactions. To them there is nothing more unendurable than the monotonous round of general hospitalities and ceremonials, ludicrously misnamed pleasure. A detestation of wearisome formalities does not imply any clownish or misanthropic reluctance to remember that those who feel it live in a world with other people, and that a thoroughly social life is the only just and full life.

But there is all the difference between a really social life and a hollow phantasmic imitation of it. A person may have the pleasantest possible circle of friends, and may like their society above all things. This is one thing. But to have to mix much with numbers of thoroughly indifferent people, and in a superficial, hollow way, is a very different thing. Of course, men who take life just as it comes, who are not very sedulous about making the most of it in their own way, and are quite willing to do all that their neighbors do just because their neighbors do it, find no annoyance in this. Men cast in another mould find not only annoyance but absolute misery. They know also that marriage with a woman who is in the full tide of society means an infinite augmentation of this round of tiresome and thoroughly useless ceremonies. Add this consideration to the two other considerations of elaborate vapidness and unfathomable extravagance, and you have three tolerably good arguments why a man with large discourse of reason, looking before and after, should be slow to fasten upon himself bonds which threaten to prove so leaden.

The faults of the women of his own position, however, are a very poor reason why he should marry a woman beneath his own position. A man must be very weak to believe that, because fine ladies are often inane and extravagant, therefore women who are not fine ladies must be wise, clever, prudent, and everything else that belongs to the type of companionable womanhood. The fact of the mistress being a blank does not prove that the maid would be a prize. It may be wise to avoid the one, but it is certainly folly to seek the other. Granting that the housemaid or the cook or the daughter of the coachman is virtuous, high-minded, refined, thoughtful, thrifty, and everything else that is desirable under the sun, all will fail to counterbalance the drawbacks that flow from the first inequality of position.

The misguided husband believes that he is going to live a plain unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the express desire of avoiding visits, yet he no sooner gets what he wished than his success begins to make him miserable. What he expected to please him as a relief mortifies him as a slight. Even if he be unsympathetic enough in nature not to care much for the disapproval of his fellows, he will rapidly find that his wife is a good deal less of a philosopher in these points, and that, though he may relish his escape from the miseries of society, she will vigorously resent her exclusion from its supposed delights.

Again, from another point of view, he is tolerably sure to find that the common opinion of society about unequal unions is not so unsound as he used scornfully to suppose it to be. The vapidity of a polite woman is bad, but the vapidity of a woman who is not polite is decidedly worse. A simpering unthinking woman with good manners is decidedly better than an unthinking woman with imperfect manners; and if polish can spoil nature among one set of people, certainly among another set nature may be as much spoilt by lack of polish. It does not follow, from a person being indifferently well-bred, that therefore she is profoundly wise and thoughtful and poetic, and capable of estimating the things of this world at their worth. Boys at college indulge in this too generous fallacy. For grown-up men there is less excuse. They ought to know that obscure uneducated women are all the more likely on that account to fall short of magnanimity, self-control, self-containing composure, than girls who have grown up with a background of bright and gracious tradition, however little their education may have done to stimulate them to make the foreground like it. To have a common past is the first secret of happy association—a past common in ideas, sentiments, and growth, if not common in external incidents.

One reason why a cultivated man is wretched with a vapid woman is that she has not traveled over a yard of that ground of knowledge and feeling which has in truth made his nature what it is. But a woman in his own station is more likely to have shared a past of this sort than a woman of lower station. Mere community of general circumstances and surrounding does something. The obscure woman taken from inferior place has not the common past of culture, nor of circumstance either. The foolish man who has married away from his class trusts that somehow or other nature will repair this. He assumes, in a real paroxysm of folly, that obscurity is the fostering condition of a richness of character which could not be got by culture. He pays the price of his blindness. Untended nature is more likely to produce weeds than choice fruits, and the chances in such cases as this are beyond calculation in favor of his having got a weed—in other words, having wedded himself to a life of wrangling, gloom, and swift deterioration of character. This result may not be invariable, but it must be more usual than not.

In the exceptional cases where a man does not repent of an unequal match of this sort, you will mostly find that the match was unequal only in externals, and that his character had been a very fit counterpart for that of a vulgar and uneducated woman before he made her his wife. This may lead one to think that there is something to be said for the woman in morganatic marriages. The men who do these things are not always, not even generally, philosophic men in search of an unsophisticated life, but unamiable, defiant persons, who only hate society either because it has failed to appreciate their qualities, or because they cannot be at the trouble to go through the ordinary amount of polite usage.



HUSBAND-HUNTING.

What we have said in another place about the odium which attaches to "match-making" naturally applies in a far greater degree to "husband-hunting." Practically the two words mean much the same thing, since the successful result of a husband-hunt is of course a match, and match-making, in the common acceptation of the term, involves a husband-hunt. This latter fact is somewhat curious. There is no reason in the nature of things why the word match-making should be associated only with the pursuit of the unmarried male. On the contrary, the theory of marriage has always been that it is the woman who has to be hunted down. It is curious to note under what completely different circumstances, and occasionally in what grotesque forms, the same theory has been found all over the world, both in civilized and savage life. Sometimes the bride is carried away bodily from her home, as if nothing short of physical force could make a woman quit her maiden state. Sometimes the panting bridegroom has to run her down—no slight task if the adorer happens to be stout, and the adored one coquettish and fleet of foot. In marriage, this custom prevails only, we believe, among the savages, but visitors to the Crystal Palace may see how modern civilization has adapted it to courtship in the popular pastime of kiss-in-the-ring.

We have read of a savage tribe in which the bride is thought no better than she should be, if, on the day after the wedding, the bridegroom does not show signs of having been vigorously pinched and scratched. This custom, again, is perhaps represented in civilized life by the kissing and struggling which are supposed every Christmas to go on under the mistletoe. It is not unworthy of remark, as regards these two points of comparison between civilization and barbarism, that, as the woman gets more civilized, she seems more disposed to meet her pursuer halfway. In the game of kiss-in-the-ring, for instance, although the lady does not run after the gentleman, but, on the contrary, shows her maiden modesty by giving him as hard a chase as she can, she still delicately paves the way for osculation by throwing the pocket-handkerchief. And, in the Christmas fights under the mistletoe (if we may take Mr. Dickens as an authority), slapping, and even pinching in moderation, are considered allowable—perhaps we ought to say proper—on the lady's part; but scratching—serious scratching, we mean, which would make her admirer's face look next morning as if he had been taking liberties with a savage bird or a cat—is thought not merely unnecessary, but unfair.

The difference between civilized and savage woman may perhaps help to indicate the reason why, now-a-days, match-making should, as a matter of fact, be associated with husband-hunting in spite of the theory that it is the woman who has to be hunted, not the man. Popular phraseology has an awkward trick of making people unconsciously countenance the theories against which they most vehemently protest. Husband-hunting is a far more generally obnoxious word than even the much-injured match-making, simply because it flies in the face of the pet theory which we have described. But, if the theory really hold good in modern practice, why should man, not woman, be recognised as the professional match-maker's victim and legitimate game? Why does not wife-hunting, the word which this theory entitles us to expect, take its proper place in society? Heiress-hunting, indeed, is well known, but this can scarcely be considered a form of wife-hunting, for it is not the woman who is the object of pursuit, but her money-bags. We have the word heiress-hunting for the very obvious reason that heiresses are recognised game. The word husband-hunting exists for the same reason.

Are we to infer from the non-existence, or at any rate the non-appearance in good society, of the word wife-hunting, that the practice is anything but common—that, since a hunt necessarily implies pursuit on one side and flight on the other, a man cannot well be said to hunt a woman who is either engaged in hunting him, or else only too ready to meet him halfway? Are we gradually tending towards an advanced stage of civilization in which woman will be formally recognized as the pursuer, and man as the pursued? We are not bold enough to take under our protection a view so glaringly heterodox, but still we think it only common justice to point out that there are difficult problems in the present state of society which the view helps materially to solve. We fear, for instance, there can be no doubt that there is a good deal of truth in the Belgravian mother's lament that marriage is gradually ceasing to be considered "the thing" among the young men of the present day; that girls of good families and even good looks are taking to sisterhoods, and nursing-institutes, and new-fangled abominations, simply because there is no one to marry them.

It is not merely that the young men are getting every day rarer; though, unless there is some system, like Pharaoh's, for putting male infants to death, what can become of them all is a mystery. India and the colonies may absorb a good many, though these places also do duty in the absorption of spinsterhood. But this will not account for the alarming fact, that in almost every ball-room, no matter whether in the country or in town, there are usually at least three crinolines to one tail-coat, and that dancing bachelors are becoming so scarce that it is a question whether hostesses ought not, for their own peace of mind, to connive at the introduction of the Oriental nautch. Yet even the alarming scarcity of marriageable men is not so serious an evil as their growing disinclination to marry.

With the causes of this disinclination we are not now concerned. Some attribute it to the increase of luxurious and expensive habits among bachelors—habits specially fostered by "those hateful clubs;" some to the "snobbishness" which makes a woman consider it beneath her dignity to marry into an establishment less stylish than that which it has perhaps taken her father all his life to secure; some to the demi-monde—an explanation very like the theory that small-pox is caused by pustules. But, whatever may be the causes of the disinclination, there can be but little doubt that it exists, and the worst part of the matter is, that it is found among rich men no less than among poor. That really poor men should not wish to marry is, even the Belgravian mother must admit, an admirable arrangement of nature. But it is too bad that so many men-about-town should seem rich enough for yachting, or racing, or opera-boxes, or even diamond necklaces—for anything, in short, but a wife. The fact is, that in the eyes of poor men a wife is associated chiefly with handsome carriages, showy dresses, fine furniture, and other forbidden luxuries; and, inasmuch as there is not one law of association for the rich and another for the poor, this view spreads, until even rich men consider whether it is not possible to secure the luxuries without the wife.

Now, since marriage is, on the whole, an institution with which society cannot very well dispense—at any rate not until some good substitute has been found for it—it is clear that rich men ought not to be allowed to treat it in this way. If modern civilization tends to beget a disinclination to marry, it ought also, on the principle of compensation, to provide some means for counteracting this tendency, or keeping it under control. Is the increase of husband-hunting—we ask the question in a respectful and, we trust, purely philosophical spirit of inquiry—calculated to supply this great and obvious want? What are its merits, in this respect, as compared with the old-fashioned theory that woman should be wooed, not woo? Even the most inveterate hater of husband-hunting must admit that, so far as the great end of matrimony is concerned, the two sexes nowadays stand to each other in a most unnatural relation. It is alike the mission of both to marry, but whereas women are honorably anxious to fulfill this mission, men, as we have already seen, are too ready to shirk it. Yet, by a strange inversion of the usual order of things, to the very sex which evades the mission is its furtherance and chief control entrusted.

Besides, not only does woman take more kindly to the duty of matrimony than man—or at least nineteenth-century man—but she has comparatively nothing else to think about. A dozen occupations are open to him, but her one object in life, her whole being's end and aim, is to marry. Surely, if the art of marriage requires cultivation, it ought, like everything else, to be entrusted to those who can give their whole time to it, not to those who have so much else to do. Even when a bachelor is in a position to marry, and not unwilling to make the experiment, he is still far less fitted for the furtherance of matrimony than a woman. He, perhaps, meets a nice girl at a ball, is taken with her, and after a mild flirtation thinks, as he walks home in the moonlight, that she would make a charming wife. He dreams about her, and next morning at breakfast, as he pensively eats a pound of steak, resolves that on the same afternoon, or the next at the very latest, he will contrive an accidental meeting, or even find some excuse for a call. But then comes office-work, or the Times, or some other distraction, and later on perhaps a visit from some matter-of-fact friend with an unromantic taste for "bitter," or a weakness for the Burlington Arcade. One day slips away, and by the next the image of the evening's idol has waxed comparatively faint. At least it is not sufficiently vivid to inspire him with courage enough for a call, or a too suspicious-looking rencontre. In a week he bows to the image, as it is driven by, as coolly as if he had never had a thought of making his heart its shrine; and thus a golden opportunity for bringing together two young people, in whose auspicious union the whole community has an interest, has been cruelly thrown away.

How different might the case have been if fashion had allowed the lady to take the initiative, instead of compelling her to sit idly at home! She has no office-work, nor Times, nor any business but that of bringing last night's flirtation to a practical issue. Assuming her to be satisfied as to the eligibility of her partner, there is nothing to prevent her giving her whole time and attention to his capture. She is as little likely to throw away any chance of an interview calculated to help in bringing about this result as he is to neglect an opportunity for winning the lawn sleeves or silk gown. Marriage is of as much importance to her as either of these to him. It is, perhaps, not impossible that the mere notion of a woman's thus taking the initiative in courtship may to some appear outrageously immodest. But with this point we have nothing to do, as we have been discussing the theory of husband-hunting, not with any reference to its modesty, but solely and exclusively in its connexion with the great question, how marriage is to be carried on. We put together the three facts that nineteenth-century civilization makes men indisposed to marry, that it gives women no object in life but marriage, and yet that it assigns the furtherance of marriage, which we assume to be an institution deserving of careful cultivation, not to those whose interest it is to promote it, but to those who are comparatively averse to it. Modest or immodest, husband-hunting obviously tends to remedy this misdirection and waste of force.

We take this to be the right explanation—and we have endeavored to make it an impartial one—of the charge not uncommonly brought against the young ladies of the present day, that, as compared with their mothers and grandmothers, they are rather forward and fast, and that husband-hunting in their hands, is gradually being developed to an extent scarcely compatible with the old-fashioned theories about maidenly modesty and reserve. The change may be considered the effort of modern civilization to remedy an evil of its own creation. The tide advances in one direction because it recedes in another. If the men will not come forward, the women must. It is all very well for satirists to call this immodest, but even modesty could be more easily dispensed with than marriage. Besides, without quitting our position as impartial observers, we may point out that it is only fair to the professor of husband-hunting to remember that there are two kinds of immodesty, and that some actions are immodest merely because it is the custom to consider them so. It would, no doubt, be immodest for a young lady to ride through Hyde Park in man's fashion. Yet what is there in the nature of things to make a side-saddle more modest than any other? The Amazons were positive prudes, and would never have even spoken to man if they could have contrived to carry on society without him; yet they rode astraddle. And if fashion could make this practice feminine, why should it not some day do as much for husband-hunting?



THE PERILS OF "PAYING ATTENTION."

We have elsewhere asserted that the art of match-making requires cultivation. We are told, however, that, on the contrary, match-making is so zealously studied and skillfully pursued that it bids fair to be the great social evil of nineteenth-century civilization. The growing difficulty of procuring sons-in-law has called forth a corresponding increase in the skill required for capturing them, just as the wits of the detective are sharpened to keep pace with the expertness which the general spread of useful knowledge has conferred upon the thief. Eligible bachelors complain that scarcity of marrying men has much the same effect upon the match-making mother as scarcity of food upon the wolf. It makes her at once more ferocious and more cunning. Her invitations to croquet-parties and little dinners are so constant and so pressing that it is scarcely possible for her destined prey to refuse them all without manifest rudeness, and yet it is equally hard for him to go without being judiciously manoeuvred into "paying attention" to the one young lady who has been selected to make him happy for life.

This chivalrous and graceful synonym for courtship in itself speaks volumes for the serious nature of the risk which he runs. The truly gallant assumption which underlies it, that an Englishman only "pays attention" to a woman when he has a solid businesslike offer of marriage to make her, not only puts a formidable weapon into the hands of the match-maker, but also leaves her victim without a most effectual means of protection. The national gallantry towards women upon which a Frenchman so plumes himself may be, as your true Briton declares, a poor sort of quality enough; a mere grimace and trick of the lips—not genuine stuff from the heart; having much the same relation to true chivalry that his biere has to beer, or his potage to soup. But at any rate it has this advantage, that it enables him to pay any amount of flowery compliments to a woman without risk of committing himself, or of being misunderstood.

If an Englishman asks a young lady after her sore throat, or her invalid grandmother, and throws into his voice that tone of eager interest or tender sympathy which a polite Frenchman would assume as a matter of course, he is at once suspected of matrimonial designs upon her. He is obliged to be as formal and businesslike in his mode of address as the lawyer's clerk who added at the end of a too ardent love-letter the saving clause "without prejudice." We have heard of a young lady who confided to her bosom friend that she that morning expected a proposal, and, when closely pressed for her reasons, blushingly confessed that the night before a gentleman had twice asked her whether she was fond of poetry, and four times whether she would like to go into the refreshment-room.

We do not mean to say that this tendency to look upon every "attention" as a preliminary step to an offer is entirely, or even principally, due to British want of gallantry. Our national theory of courtship and marriage has probably much more to do with it. We say "theory" advisedly, for our practice approaches every day nearer to that of the Continental nations whose mercenary view of the holy estate of matrimony we righteously abjure. Our system is, in fact, gradually becoming a clumsy compromise between the mariage de convenance and the mariage d'amour, with most of the disadvantages, and very few of the advantages, of either. Theoretically, English girls are allowed to marry for love, and to choose whichever they like best of all the admiring swains whom they fascinate at croquet-parties or balls. Practically, the majority marry for an establishment, and only flirt for love. They leave the school-room, no doubt, with an unimpeachably romantic conception of a youthful bridegroom who combines good looks, great intellect, and fervent piety with a modest four thousand a year, paid quarterly.

But they are not very long in finding out that the men whom they like best, as being about their own age or still young enough to sympathise with their tastes and enter heartily into all their notions of fun, are rarely such as are pronounced by parents and guardians to be eligible; and so, after one or two attacks, more or less serious, of love-fever, they tranquilly look out for an admirer who can place the proper number of servants and horses at their disposal, while they in return magnanimously decline to make discourteously minute inquiries as to the condition of his hair or teeth. A marriage made in this spirit, even where no pressure is put upon the young lady by parents or friends, and she is allowed full liberty of action, is open to all the charges ordinarily brought against the Continental mariage de convenance. Yet, on the other hand, it has not the advantage of being formally arranged beforehand by a couple of elderly people, who are in no hurry, and who have seen enough of the world to know thoroughly what they are about; nor, we may add, does it usually take place in time to avert some one or more of those troublesome flirtations with handsome, but penniless, ball-room heroes which are not always calculated to improve either temper or character.

Still, whatever our practice may be, we nevertheless do homage to the theory that, in this favored country, young ladies choose whatever husbands they like best, and marry for love; and although this theory is in some respects a serious obstacle to marriage, and often stands cruelly in the way of people with weak nerves, it places a powerful weapon in the hands of the dauntless and determined match-maker. If young people are to marry for love, they must obviously have every facility afforded them for meeting and fascinating each other. It is this consideration which reconciles the philosopher to some of our least entertaining entertainments, although, at the same time, it makes so much of our hospitality an organized hypocrisy.

It is, indeed, a hard fate to be obliged to leave your after-dinner cigar and George Eliot's last novel in order to drive four miles through wind and snow to a party which your hostess has given, not because she has good fare, or good music, or agreeable guests, or anything, in short, really calculated to amuse you, but simply and solely because she has a tribe of daughters who somehow must be disposed of. Yet even a man of the Sir Cornewall Lewis stamp, who thinks that this world would be a very tolerable place but for its amusements, may forgive her when he reflects that business, not pleasure, is at the bottom of the invitation. If marriage is to be kept up, we must either abandon our theory that young ladies are allowed to choose husbands for themselves, or we must give them every possible facility for exercising the choice. Bachelors must be dragged, on every available pretext, and without the slightest reference to the nominal ends of amusement or hospitality, from the novel or cigar, and made to run the gauntlet of female charms.

From the Sir Cornewall Lewis point of view, with which nearly all Englishmen over thirty more or less sympathise, it is the only sound defence of many of our so-called entertainments that they are virtually daughter-shows—genteel auctions, without which a sufficiently brisk trade in matrimony could not possibly be carried on. The consciousness of this is doubtless in one way somewhat of an obstacle to flirtation, and gives the frisky matron a cruel advantage over her unmarried rival. A man must have oak and triple brass round his heart who can flirt perfectly at his ease when he knows that his "attentions" are not merely watched by vigilant chaperons, but are actually reduced to a matter of numerical calculation—that a certain number of dances, or calls, or polite speeches will justify a stern father or big brother in asking his "intentions."

This application of arithmetic is, in some respects, as dangerous to courtship as to the Pentateuch. But, nevertheless, it gives the clever and courageous match-maker an advantage of which the eligible bachelor complains that she makes the most pitiless use. He finds himself manoeuvred into "paying the attentions" which society considers the usual prelude to a marriage, with a dexterity which it is all but impossible to evade. The lady is played into his hands with much the same sort of skill that a conjuror exhibits in forcing a card. There are perhaps a number of other ladies present, in promiscuous flirtation with whom he sees, at first glance, an obvious means of escape. But this hope speedily turns out a delusion. One lady is vigilantly guarded by a jealous betrothed; a second is a poor relation, or humble friend, who knows that she would never get another invitation to the house if she once interfered with her patron's plans; a third is too plain to be approached on any ordinary calculation of probabilities; a fourth is hopelessly dull; the rest are married, and if not actually themselves in the conspiracy—which, however, is as likely as not—are still carefully chosen for their freedom from the flirting propensities of the frisky matron. The destined victim finds, in short, that he must either deliberately resign himself to be bored to death, or boldly face the peril in store for him, and take his chance of evading or breaking the net. Nine men out of ten naturally choose the latter alternative, too often in that presumptuous spirit of self-confidence which is the match-maker's best ally.

A bachelor is perhaps never in so great danger of being caught as when he has come to the conclusion that he sees perfectly through the mother's little game and merely means to amuse himself by carrying on a strictly guarded flirtation with the daughter. We mean, of course, on the assumption that the daughter is either a pretty or clever girl, with whom any sort of flirtation is in itself perilous. His danger is all the greater if it happens—and it is only fair to young-ladydom to admit that it often does happen—that the daughter has sufficient spirit and self-respect to repudiate all share in the maternal plot. Many a man has been half surprised, half piqued, into serious courtship by finding himself vigorously snubbed and rebuffed where he had been led to imagine that his slightest advances would be only too eagerly received. But, in any case, the match-maker knows that, if she can only bring the two people whom she wishes to marry sufficiently often into each other's society, the battle is half won. According to Lord Lytton, whom every one will admit to be an authority on the philosophy of flirtation, "proximity is the soul of love." And eligible bachelors complain that it becomes every day harder to avoid this perilous proximity, and the duty of "paying attention" which it implies, without being positively rude.

We have not much consolation to offer the sufferers who prefer this complaint. As regards our own statement that the art of match-making requires cultivation, we did not mean by it to imply that match-making is not vigorously carried on. So long as there are mothers left with daughters to be married, so long will match-making continue to be pursued; and it must obviously be pursued all the more energetically to keep pace with the growing disinclination of bachelors among the upper and middle classes to face the responsibilities of married life. We meant that match-making does not receive the sort of cultivation which it seems to us fairly to deserve, when we consider the paramount importance of the object which it at least professes to have in view, and the delicate nature of the instruments and experiments with which it is concerned.

We have not yet mustered up courage for the attempt to show what should be its proper cultivation; but we may safely say that so long as it is left in the hands of those who are influenced by merely mercenary or interested motives, and who watch the "attentions" of a bachelor, not in the spirit of a philosopher or a philanthropist, but in that of a Belgravian mother, it cannot be cultivated as a fine art. It can only be rescued from the unmerited odium into which it has fallen by being taken under the patronage of those who are in a position to practice it on purely artistic and disinterested grounds. In their hands, the now perilous process of "paying attention" would be studied and criticized in a new spirit. It might still, indeed, be treated arithmetically, as perhaps the most promising way of reducing it to the precision and certainty of an exact science. But still the problem would be to determine, not what is the least possible number of dances, calls, or compliments which may justify the intervention of a big brother or heavy father, but what number warrants the assumption that the flirtation has passed out of the frivolous into the serious stage. Three dances, for instance, may expose a man to being asked what are his "intentions," where six dances need not imply that he really has any. The mercenary match-maker considers only the first point; our ideal match-maker would lay far more stress upon the second. But still, in any case, this growing tendency to treat the practice of "paying attention" in the spirit of exact science offers at least one ray of hope to those who complain that, do what they will, they cannot escape having to pay this dangerous tribute. The tendency must sooner or later bear fruit in a generally recognised code of courtship (whether written or unwritten does not much matter), prescribing the precise number and character of the "attentions"—in their adaptation to dancing, croquet-playing, cracker-pulling, and other conventional pretexts for flirtation—which virtually amount to an offer of marriage. This scheme, we may mention, is not wholly imaginary. There is somewhere or other a stratum of English society in which such a code already exists. At least we have seen a book of etiquette in which, among similar ordinances, it was laid down that to hand anything—say a flower or a muffin—to a lady with the left hand was equivalent to a proposal. The general introduction of a system of this kind, although it might shorten the lives of timid or forgetful men, would obviously confer an unspeakable boon upon the majority of the match-maker's present victims. They would not only know exactly how far to go with safety, but also how at once to recede. To offer, for instance, two pieces of muffin firmly and decidedly with the right hand would probably make up for offering one flower with the left, at least if there were no guardian or chaperon on the spot to take instant advantage of the first overture. But it would now perhaps be premature to enter into the details of a system which it may take a generation or so more of match-making to introduce.



WOMEN'S HEROINES.

A vigorous and pertinacious effort has of late years been made to persuade mankind that beauty in women is a matter of very little moment. As long as literature was more or less a man's vocation, an opposite tendency prevailed; and a successful novelist would as soon have thought of flying as of driving a team of ugly heroines through three volumes. The rapid and portentous increase of authoresses changed the current of affairs. As a rule, authoresses do not care much about lovely women; and they must naturally despise the miserable masculine weakness which is led captive by a pretty face, even if it be only upon paper. They can have no patience with such feebleness, and it may well seem to them to be a high and important mission to help to put it down.

It became, accordingly, the fashion at one time among the feminine writers of fiction to make all their fascinating heroines plain girls with plenty of soul, and to show, by a series of thrilling love adventures, how completely in the long run the plain girls had the best of it. There is a regular type of ideal young lady in women's novels, to which we have at last become accustomed. She is not at all a perfect beauty. Her features are not as finely chiseled as a Greek statue; she is taller, we are invariably told, than the model height, her nose is retrousse; and "in some lights" an unfavorable critic might affirm that her hair was positively tawny. But there is a well of feeling in her big brown eyes, which, when united to genius, invariably bowls over the hero of the book. And the passion she excites is of that stirring kind which eclipses all others.

Through the first two volumes the predestined lover flirts with the beauties who despise her, dances with them under her eye, and wears their colors in her presence. But at the end of the third an expressive glance tells her that all is right, and that big eyes and a big soul have won the race in a canter. Jane Eyre was perhaps the first triumphant success of this particular school of art. And Jane Eyre certainly opened the door to a long train of imitators. For many years every woman's novel had got in it some dear and noble creature, generally underrated, and as often as not in embarrassed circumstances, who used to capture her husband by sheer force of genius, and by pretending not to notice him when he came into the room. Some pleasant womanly enthusiasts even went further, and invented heroines with tangled hair and inky fingers. We do not feel perfectly certain that Miss Yonge, for instance, has not married her inky Minervas to nicer and more pious husbands, as a rule, than her uninky ones. The advantage of the view that ugly heroines are the most charming is obvious, if only the world could be brought to adopt it. It is a well-meant protest in favor of what may be called, in these days of political excitement, the "rights" of plain girls. It is very hard to think that a few more freckles or a quarter of an inch of extra chin should make all the difference in life to women, and those of them who are intellectually fitted to play a shining part in society or literature may be excused for rebelling against the masculine heresy of believing in beauty only.

Whenever such women write, the constant moral they preach to us is that beauty is a delusion and a snare. This is the moral of Hetty in Adam Bede, and it is in the unsympathetic and cold way in which Hetty is described that one catches glimpses of the sex of the consummate author of the story. She is quite alive to Hetty's plump arms and pretty cheeks. She likes to pat her and watch her, as if Hetty were a cat, or some other sleek and supple animal. But we feel that the writer of Adam Bede is eyeing Hetty all over from the beginning to the end, and considering in herself the while what fools men are. It would be unjust and untrue to say that George Eliot in all her works does not do ample justice, in a noble and generous way, to the power of female beauty. The heroines of Romola and Felix Holt prove distinctly that she does. But one may fairly doubt whether a man could have painted Hetty. When one sees the picture, one understands its truth; but men who draw pretty faces usually do so with more enthusiasm.

A similar sort of protest may be found lurking in a great many women's novels against the popular opinion that man is the more powerful animal, and that a wife is at best a domestic appanage of the husband. Authoresses are never weary of attempts to set this right. They like to prove, what is continually true, that feminine charms are the lever that moves the world, and that the ideal woman keeps her husband and all about her straight. In religious novels woman's task is to exercise the happiest influence on the man's theological opinions. Owing to the errors he has imbibed from the study of a false and shallow philosophy, he sees no good in going to church twice on Sundays, or feels that he cannot heartily adopt all the expressions in the Athanasian creed. It is the heroine's mission to cure this mental malady; to point out to him, from the impartial point of view of those who have never committed the folly of studying Kant or Hegel, how thoroughly superficial Kant and Hegel are; and to remind him by moonlight, and in the course of spiritual flirtation on a balcony, of the unutterable truths in theology which only a woman can naturally discern. We are far from wishing to intimate that there is not a good deal of usefulness in such feminine points of view. The argumentum ad sexum, if not a logical, is often no doubt a practical one, and women are right to employ it whenever they can make it tell. And as it would be impossible to develop it to any considerable extent in a dry controversial work, authoresses have no other place to work it in except in a romance. What they do for religion in pious novels, they do for other things in productions of a more strictly secular kind.

There is, for instance, a popular and prevalent fallacy that women ought to be submissive to, and governed by, their lords and masters. In feminine fiction we see a very wholesome reaction against this mistaken supposition. The hero of the female tale is often a poor, frivolous, easily led person. When he can escape from his wife's eye, he speculates heavily on Stock Exchange, goes in under the influence of evil advisers for any sort of polite swindling, and forgets, or is ill-tempered towards, the inestimable treasure he has at home. On such occasions the heroine of the feminine novel shines out in all her majesty. She is kind and patient to her husband's faults, except that when he is more than usually idiotic her eyes flash, and her nostrils dilate with a sort of grand scorn, while her knowledge of life and business is displayed at critical moments to save him from ruin. When every one else deserts him, she takes a cab into the city, and employs some clever friend, who has always been hopelessly in love with her—and for whom she entertains, unknown to her husband, a Platonic brotherly regard—to intervene in the nick of time, and to arrest her husband's fall.

In a story called Sowing the Wind, which has recently been published, the authoress (for we assume, in spite of the ambiguous assertion on the title-page, that the pen which wrote it was not really a man's) goes to very great lengths. The hero, St. John Aylott, is always snubbing and lecturing Isola, whom he married when she was half a child, and whom he treats as a child long after she has become a great and glorious woman. He administers the doctrine of conjugal authority to her in season and out of season, and his object is to convert her into a loving feminine slave. Against this revolting theory her nature rebels. Though she preserves her wifely attachment to a man whom she has once thought worthy of better things, her respect dies away, and at last she openly defies him when he wants her, in contravention of her plain duty, not to adopt as her son a deserted orphan-boy. At this point her character stands out in noble contrast to his. She does adopt the boy, and brings him to live with her in spite of all; and when St. John is unnaturally peevish at its childish squalling, Isola bears his fretful animadversions with a patient dignity that touches the hearts of all about her.

Any husband who can go on preaching about conjugal obedience through three volumes to a splendid creature who is his wife, must have something wrong about his mind. And something wrong about St. John's mind there ultimately proves to be. It flashes across Isola that this is the case, and before long her worst suspicions are confirmed. At last St. John breaks out into open lunacy, and dies deranged—a fate which is partly the cause, and partly the consequence, of his continual indulgence in such wild theories about the relations of man and wife. It is not every day that we have the valuable lesson of the rights of wives so plainly or so practically put before us, but when it is put before us, we recognize the service that may be conferred on literature and society by lady authors. To assert the great cause of the independence of the female sex is one of the ends of feminine fiction, just as the assertion of the rights of plain girls is another. Authoresses do not ask for what Mr. Mill wishes them to have—a vote for the borough, or perhaps a seat in Parliament. They do ask that young women should have a fair matrimonial chance, independently of such trivial considerations as good looks, and that after marriage they should have the right to despise their husbands whenever duty and common sense tell them it is proper to do so.

The odd thing is that the heroines of whom authoresses are so fond in novels, are not the heroines whom other women like in real life. Even the popular authoresses of the day, who are always producing some lovely pantheress in their stories, and making her achieve an endless series of impossible exploits, would not care much about a lovely pantheress in a drawing-room or a country-house; and are not perhaps in the habit of meeting any. The fact is that the vast majority of women who write novels do not draw upon their observation for their characters so much as upon their imagination. In some respects this is curious enough, for when women observe, they observe acutely and to a good deal of purpose. Those of them, however, who take to the manufacture of fiction have generally done so because at some portion of their career they have been thrown back upon themselves. They began perhaps to write when circumstances made them feel isolated from the rest of their little world, and in a spirit of sickly concentration upon their own thoughts.

A woman with a turn for literary work who notices that she is distanced, as far as success or admiration goes, by rivals inferior in mental capacity to herself, flies eagerly to the society of her own fancies, and makes her pen her greatest friend. It is the lot of many girls to pass their childhood or youth in a somewhat monotonous round of domestic duties, and frequently in a narrow domestic circle, with which, except from natural affection, they may have no great intellectual sympathy. The stage of intellectual fever through which able men have passed when they were young is replaced, in the case of girls of talent, by a stage of moral morbidity. At first this finds vent in hymns, and it turns in the end to novels. Few clever young ladies have not written religious poetry at one period or other of their history, and few that have done so, stop there without going further. It is a great temptation to console oneself for the shortcomings of the social life around, by building up an imaginary picture of social life as it might be, full of romantic adventures and pleasant conquests.

In manufacturing her heroines, the young recluse author puts on paper what she would herself like to be, and what she thinks she might be if only her eyes were bluer, her purse longer, or men more wise and discerning. In painting the slights offered to her favorite ideal, she conceives the slights that might possibly be offered to herself, and the triumphant way in which she would (under somewhat more auspicious circumstances) delight to live them down and trample them under foot. The vexations and the annoyances she describes with considerable spirit and accuracy. The triumph is the representation of her own delicious dreams. The grand character of the imaginary victim is but a species of phantom of her ownself, taken, like the German's camel, from the depths of her own self-consciousness, and projected into cloudland. This is the reason why authoresses enjoy dressing up a heroine who is ill-used. They know the sensation of social martyrdom, and it is a gentle sort of revenge upon the world to publish a novel about an underrated martyr, whose merits are recognised in the end, either before or after her decease. They are probably not conscious of the precise work they are performing. They are not aware that their heroine represents what they believe they themselves would prove to be under impossible circumstances, provided they had only golden hair and a wider sphere of action.

This is but another and a larger phase of a phenomenon which all of us have become familiar with who have ever had a large acquaintance with young ladies' poems. They all write about death with a pertinacity that is positively astounding. It is not that the young people actually want to die. But they like the idea that their family circle will find out, when it is too late, all the mistakes and injustices it has committed towards them, and that this world will perceive that it has been entertaining unawares an angel, just as the angel has taken flight upwards to another. The juvenile aspirant commences with revenging her wrongs in heaven, but it occurs to her before long that she can with equal facility have them revenged upon earth. Poetry gives way to prose, and hymnology to fiction. The element of self-consciousness, unknown to herself, still continues to prevail, and to color the character of the heroines she turns out. Of course great authoresses shake themselves free from it. Real genius is independent of sex, and first-rate writers, whether they are men or women, are not morbidly in love with an idealized portrait of themselves.

But the poorer or less worthy class of feminine novelists seldom escape from the fatal influence of egotism. Women's heroines, except in the case of the best artists, are conceptions borrowed, not from without, but from within. The consequence is that there is a sameness about them which becomes at last distasteful. The conception of the injured wife or the glorified governess is one which was a novelty fifteen or twenty years ago, while it cannot be said any longer to be lively or entertaining. As literature has grown to be a woman's occupation, we are afraid that glorified governesses in fiction will, like the poor, be always with us, and continue to the end to run their bright course of universal victory. The most, perhaps, that can be hoped is that they will in the long run take the wind out of the sails of the glorified adulteresses and murderesses which at present seem the latest and most successful efforts of feminine art.



INTERFERENCE.

About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. Not tyranny, which is another matter—tyranny being active while interference is negative; the one standing as the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of the same principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some personal gain in view when it takes in hand to force people to do what they do not like to do; while interference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply prevents the exercise of free will for the mere pleasure to be had out of such prevention. Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than domestic, but the curse of interference is seen most distinctly within the four walls of home, where also it is felt the most. Very many people spend their lives in interfering with others—perpetually putting spokes into wheels with which they have really nothing to do, and thrusting their fingers into pies about the baking of which they are not in any way concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women make up the larger number and are the greater sinners.

To be sure there are some men—small, fussy, finicking fellows, with whom nature has made the irreparable blunder of sex—who are as troublesome in their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the feminine characteristics of men are so exceptional that we need not take them into serious calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in any manly sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a right to control—say, with the wife's low dresses, or the daughter's too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and knowing what men say of such displays, or fearing their effect, they stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But this kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes into another class of motives altogether, and does not belong to the kind of interference of which we are speaking.