Part 6 (1/2)
Unexpected discoveries of some such kind as this not unnaturally popularize the theory already mentioned, that such a being as a woman without vanity does not exist--that, no matter how securely the weakness may lie hidden from observation, it does somewhere or other exist, and some day will out. But we are inclined, notwithstanding, to hold that, here and there, but happily very seldom, there are to be found women really without vanity; and most unpleasant women they seem to us, as a rule, to be. They get on tolerably well with their own s.e.x, for they are rarely pretty or affected, and they have usually certain solid, serviceable qualities which make up for not being attractive by standing wear and tear. But in their relations with men--as soon, that is, as they have secured a husband, and fascination has therefore ceased to be a matter of business, a practical question of bread-and-b.u.t.ter, to be grappled with in the spirit in which they would, if necessary, go out charing, or keep a mangle--they are painfully devoid of that eagerness to please and that readiness to be pleased which, in the present imperfect state of civilization, are among woman's chief charms.
Even men cannot, as a rule, get on very well without these qualities; but still to please is not man's mission in the sense in which it is generally considered to be woman's, and probably will continue to be considered, until Dr. Mary Walkers are not the exception, but the rule.
One now and then has the misfortune to come upon a specimen of womanhood, good and solid enough perhaps, making a most exemplary and respectable wife and mother, but nevertheless dull, heavy, and unattractive to an extent that fills the wretched man who takes it in to dinner with desperation. And then to think that one ounce of vanity might have leavened this lump, and converted it, as by magic, into a pleasant, palatable, convivial compound, good everywhere, but especially good at the dinner-table! For, where vanity exists at all, it can scarcely fail to influence the natural desire of one s.e.x to please the other; and a woman must be singularly devoid of all charms, physical and mental, if she fails when she is really anxious to please. That women should be fascinating, as they sometimes are, in spite of some positively painful deformity, is a proof of what such anxiety can alone accomplish.
We must admit that we have to postulate, on behalf of the female vanity whose cause we are espousing, that it should not derive its inspiration solely from self-love. However anxious a woman may be to please, if her anxiety is on her own account, and simply to secure admiration, she must be a very Helen if her vanity continues attractive. She is lucky if it does not take the most odious of all forms, and, from always revolving round self and dwelling upon selfish considerations, degenerate into a habit of perpetual postures and stage tricks to gain applause. And this tendency naturally connects itself with the wish to please the opposite s.e.x, its success being in inverse proportion to its strength. Just as one occasionally meets with men who are perfectly unaffected and sensible fellows in men's society, but whose whole demeanor becomes absurdly changed if any woman, though it be only the housemaid with a coal-scuttle, enters the room, so there are, more commonly, to be found women whose whole character seems to vary, as if by magic, according to the s.e.x of the person whom they find themselves with. Before their own s.e.x they are natural enough; before men they are eternally att.i.tudinizing. We should be sorry to say that this repulsive form of vanity always takes its root in excessive self-love, but still a tinge of unselfishness seems to us the best antidote against it.
It is marvellous with how much vanity, and that too of a tolerably ostentatious kind, a woman may be thoroughly agreeable even to her own s.e.x, if her eagerness to please is accompanied by genuine kindliness, or is free from excessive selfishness. It may be easy enough to see that all her little courtesies and attentions are at bottom really attributable to vanity; that, when she does a kind act, she is thinking less of its effect upon your comfort and happiness than of its effect upon your estimate of her character. She would perhaps rather you got half the advantage with her aid than the whole advantage without it. Her motive is, primarily, vanity--clearly not kindness--however amicably they may in general work together. But still it is the kindness that makes the vanity flow into pleasant, friendly forms. In a selfish woman the very same vanity would degenerate into posturing or dressing. And, odd as it may seem, and as much as it may reflect upon the common sense of poor humanity, we believe that kind acts done out of genuine, unadulterated benevolence are less appreciated by the recipient than kind acts done out of benevolence stimulated by vanity. The latter are pleasant because they spring out of the desire to please, and soothe our self-love, whereas the former appeal to our self-interest.
There are few things in this world more charming than the kindly courtesy of a pretty woman, not ungracefully conscious of her power to please, and showing courtesy because she enjoys the exercise of this power. Strictly speaking, she is acting less in your interest than in her own. Although she feels at once the pleasure of pleasing and the pleasure of doing a kindly action, the second is quite subordinate to the first, and is perhaps, more or less, sacrificed to it. Yet who is strong-minded enough to wish that the kindliness of a pretty woman should be dictated by simple benevolence, untinged by vanity? If we knew that her kindliness arose rather from a wish to benefit us than to conciliate our good opinion, it is perhaps possible that we should esteem her more, but we fear it is quite certain that we should like her less.
Before we conclude, we ought perhaps to make one more postulate on behalf of female vanity, not less important than our postulate that it should be pleasantly tinged by unselfishness. To be agreeable, it must have fair foundation. A woman may be forgiven for over-estimating her charms, but there is no forgiveness on this side of the grave for a woman who recklessly credits herself with charms that do not exist. All the lavish cheques she draws upon her male neighbor's admiration are silently dishonored, and in half an hour after the moment they sit down to table together she is a hopeless bankrupt in his estimation, even though he may have courtesy and skill enough to conceal the collapse.
As there are few, if any, pleasanter objects than a pretty woman, gracefully conscious of her beauty, and radiantly fulfilling its legitimate end, the power of pleasing, so are there few, if any, more unpleasant objects than a vain woman, ungracefully conscious of imaginary charms, and secretly disgusting those she strives to attract.
An ugly woman who gives herself the airs of a beauty, or a silly woman who believes herself a genius, is not a spectacle upon which a man of healthy imagination and appet.i.te likes to dwell. It is perhaps only in accordance with the theory that this life is a state of trial and probation that the tastes can be explained. Happily, it is not very common. Most women know their strong from their weak points, and marshal them on the whole well in the encounter with their lawful oppressor and great enemy, man. And until they have won the victory to which Dr. Mary Walker is now leading them on, may they never lack the female vanity which makes it one of their great objects in life to please!
THE ABUSE OF MATCH-MAKING.
It is a pity that when, by some train of ill-luck, a word of respectable parentage, and well brought up, is led astray, it cannot adopt Goldsmith's recipe and die. It has not even the more prosaic alternative of being made an honest word by marriage, and escaping the name under which it stooped to folly, and was betrayed. It drags on a dishonored life, with little or no chance of recovering its character, inflicting cruel disgrace upon the unlucky family of ideas, no matter what their own innocence and respectability, to which it happens to belong. Thus Casuistry, if not a very useful, was at least a perfectly harmless, member of society, and moved in the best circles, until in an evil hour she became too intimate with the unpopular Jesuits.
A few years ago, when high feeding and sermonizing proved too much for the virtue of garotters, and, waxing fat, they not only kicked society, but danced hornpipes in hobnailed boots upon its head and stomach, even Philanthropy, at once the most fas.h.i.+onable and popular word of this century, was all but compromised by Sir Joshua Jebb and Sir George Grey.
Baron Bramwell fortunately came to the rescue, and saved it from permanent loss of character. But still to this day the word is sometimes used in a sense by no means complimentary. If the battue-system continues long enough, ”good sport” will become a synonym for cold-blooded clumsy butchery, and thus all sport whatsoever will be more or less discredited. The _faux pas_ of one member disgraces the whole family. A few men may be the lords of language, but the great majority are its slaves. They can no more disconnect the innocent idea from the soiled word that accompanies it than they can see a blue landscape through green gla.s.s. Let us hope that one of the first acts of Mr.
Bright's millennial Parliament will be the establishment of a tribunal empowered to take a word when it arrives at this pitiable condition, and either in mercy knock it on the head altogether, or else formally readmit it into good society, and give it all the advantages of a fresh start.
We take an early opportunity of inviting their special attention to the much-injured word ”Match-making.” The practice which it describes is not only harmless, but, in the present state of society, highly useful and meritorious. Yet there can be no doubt, that there is a powerful prejudice against it. Although all women--or rather, perhaps, as Thackeray said, all good women--are at heart match-makers, there are very few who own the soft impeachment. Many repudiate it with indignation. It is on the whole about as safe to charge a lady with Fenianism as facetiously to point out a young couple in her drawing-room, whose flirtation has a suspicious businesslike look about it, and to hint that she has deliberately brought them together with a view to matrimony. It may be true that she has no selfish interest whatever in the matter. The criminal conspiracy in which she so strenuously repudiates any concern is, after all, nothing worse than the attempt to make two people whom she likes, and who she thinks will suit each other, happy for life. By any other name such an action ought, one would think, to smell sweet in the nostrils of G.o.ds and men.
But, whatever the G.o.ds think of it, men cannot forget that the practice, whether harmless or not, goes by the objectionable name of match-making.
So the lady replies, not, perhaps, without the energy of conscious guilt, that ”things of this sort are best left to themselves,” and piously begs you to remember that marriages are made in Heaven, not in her drawing-room. The melancholy truth is that the gentle craft of match-making has been so vulgarized by course and clumsy professors, and its very name has in consequence been brought into such disrepute, that few respectable women have the courage openly to recognise it. They are haunted by visions of the typical match-maker who does work for fas.h.i.+onable novels and social satires, and who is a truly awful personage. To her alone of mortals is it given to inspire, like the Harpies, at once contempt and fear. Keen-eyed and hook-nosed, like a bird of prey, she glowers from the corner of crowded ball-rooms upon the unconscious heir, hunts him untiringly from house to house, marries him remorselessly to her eldest daughter, and then never loses sight of him till his spirit is broken, his old friends discarded, and his segar-case thrown away.
It is scarcely necessary to say that this fearful being exists only in fiction. In real life she has not only to marry her daughters, but also, like other human beings, to eat, drink, sleep, and otherwise dispose of the twenty-four hours of the day. She cannot therefore very well devote herself, from morning to night, to the one occupation of heir-hunting, with the precision of a machine, or one of Bunyan's walking vices. But still there must be some truth even in a caricature, and a man sometimes finds a girl ”thrown at his head,” as the process is forcibly termed, with a coa.r.s.e-mindedness quite worthy of the typical match-maker, though also with a clumsiness which she would heartily despise.
He goes as a stranger to some place, and is astonished to find himself at once taken to the bosom and innermost confidence of people whose very name he never heard before, as if he were their oldest and most familiar friend. He is asked to dinner one day, to breakfast the next, and warmly a.s.sured that a place is always kept for him at lunch. Charmed and flattered to find his many merits so quickly discovered and thoroughly appreciated by strangers, he votes them the cleverest, most genial, most hospitable people he ever met; and everything goes on delightfully until he begins to think it odd that he should be constantly left alone with, and now and then delicately chaffed about, some _pa.s.see_, ill-favored woman, whom he no more connects with any thought of marriage than he would a female rhinoceros. And then slowly dawns upon him the cruel truth that his kind hosts have had their appreciation of his merits considerably sharpened by the fact that there is an ugly daughter or sister-in-law in the house whom they are sick to death of, whom they are always imploring ”to marry or do something,” and who, having for years ogled and angled for every marriageable pair of whiskers and pantoloons within ten miles, has gradually become so well known in the neighborhood that her one forlorn hope is to carry off some innocent stranger with a rush.
”_Quere peregrinum, vicinia rauca reclamat;_” and if the _peregrinus_ happens to be young and verdant, and, having just been given a good appointment, feels, with the Vicar of Wakefield, that one of the three greatest characters on earth is the father of a family, he is possibly hooked securely before he discovers his danger. He discovers it to find himself tied for life to a woman with whom he has not a sympathy in common, and for whom every day increases his disgust. And the people who have ruined his life have not even the sorry excuse that they wished to better hers. Their one thought was to get rid of her as speedily as possible, no matter to whom; and they would rather have had Bluebeard at a two-months' engagement than any other man at one of six. There is something so coa.r.s.e and revolting, so brutal, in the notion of bringing two people together into such a relation as that of marriage on purely selfish grounds, and without the slightest regard to their future happiness, that any one who has seen the snare laid for himself or his friends may well shudder at the mere sound of match-making. Mezentius was more merciful, for of the two bodies which he chained together only one had life.
The clumsy match-maker is a scarcely less dangerous, though a far more respectable, enemy to the gentle craft than the coa.r.s.e one. She makes it ridiculous, while the latter makes it odious, and it is ridicule that kills. She is, perhaps, a well-meaning woman, who would be sorry to marry two people unless she thought them suited to each other; but the moment she has made up her mind that they ought to marry, she sets to work with a vigor which, unless she has a very young man to deal with, is almost sure to spoil her plans. This would not be surprising in a silly woman; but it is odd that the more energetic, and, in some respects, the more able a woman is, the more likely sometimes she is to fall into this error.
A woman may be the life and soul of a dozen societies, write admirable letters, get half her male relatives into Government offices, and yet be the laughing-stock of the neighborhood for the absurd way in which she goes husband-hunting for her daughters. The very energy and ability which fit her for other pursuits disqualify her for match-making. She is too impatient and too fond of action to adopt the purely pa.s.sive expectant att.i.tude, the masterly inactivity, which is here the great secret of success. She is always feeling that something should be said or done to help on the business, and prematurely scares the shy or suspicious bird. Many a promising love-affair has been nipped in the bud simply because the too eager mother has drawn public attention to it before it was robust enough to face publicity, by throwing the two lovers conspicuously together, or by some unguarded remark.
When one thinks of all that a man has to go through in the course of a love-affair--especially in a small society where everybody knows everybody--of all the chaffing and grinning, and significant interchange of glances when he picks up the daughter's fan, or hands the mother to her carriage, or laughs convulsively at the old jokes of the father, one is almost inclined to wonder how a Briton, of the average British stiffness and shyness, ever gets married at all. The explanation probably is, that he falls in love before he exactly knows what he is about, and, once in love, is of course gloriously blind and deaf to all obstacles between him and the adored one. But to subject a man to this trying ordeal, as the too eager match-maker does, before he is sufficiently in love to be proof against it, is like sending him into a snow-storm without a great-coat.
The romantic match-maker is, in her way, as mischievous as the coa.r.s.e or the clumsy one. She is usually a good sort of woman, but with decidedly more heart than head. She gets her notions of political economy from Mr.
d.i.c.kens' novels, and holds that, whenever two nice young people of opposite s.e.xes like each other, it is their business then and there to marry. If Providence cannot always, like Mr. d.i.c.kens, provide a rich aunt or uncle, it at least never sends mouths without hands to feed them. Let every good citizen help the young people to marry as fast as they can, and let there be lots of chubby cheeks and lots of Sunday plum-pudding to fill them. There is no arguing with a woman of this kind, and she is perhaps the most dangerous of all match-makers, inasmuch as she is usually herself a warm-hearted pleasant woman, and there is a courage and disinterestedness about her views very captivating to young heads. There is no safety but in flight. Even a bachelor of fair prudence and knowledge of the world is not safe in her hands. We mean on the a.s.sumption that he is not in a position to marry.
If he is ”an eligible,” he cannot, of course, be considered safe anywhere. But otherwise he knows that match-makers of the unromantic worldly type will be only too glad to leave him alone.
And having, perhaps, been accustomed on this account to feel that he may flirt in moderation with impunity, as a man with whom marriage is altogether out of the question, he is quite unprepared for the new and startling unconventional view which the romantic match-maker takes of him. He is horrified to find that, ignoring the usual considerations as to the length of his purse, she has discovered that he and the pretty girl with whom he danced three consecutive dances last night must have been made expressly for each other, and that she has somehow contrived, by the exercise of that freemasonry in love-affairs which is peculiar to women, to put the same ridiculous notion into the young lady's head. In fact, he suddenly finds to his astonishment that he must either propose--which is out of the question--or be considered a cold-blooded trifler with female hearts. And so he has nothing to do but pack up his portmanteau and beat an ignominious retreat, with an uncomfortable consciousness that his amiable hostess and pretty partner have a very poor opinion of him.