Part 11 (1/2)
Music is pre-eminently the social art; no art draws people so conveniently together, no art so lends itself to conversation, no art is in a maidenly sense at once so agreeable, so easy to acquire, and so eminently useful. A flirtation is never conducted under greater advantages than amid the deafening thunders of a grand finale; the victim doomed to the bondage of turning over is chained to the fascination of fine arms and delicate hands. Talk, too, may be conducted without much trouble over music on the small principles of female criticism. ”Pretty” and ”exquisite” go a great way with the Italian and the Romantic schools; ”sublime” does pretty universally for the German.
The opera is, of course, the crown and sum of things, the most charming and social of lounges, the readiest of conversational topics. It must be a very happy Guardsman indeed who cannot kindle over the Flower-song or the Jewel-scene. And it is at the opera that woman is supreme. The strange mingling of eye and ear, the confused appeal to every sensuous faculty, the littleness as well as the greatness of it all, echo the conclusion within woman herself.
Moreover there is no boredom--no absolute appeal to thought or deeper feeling. It is in good taste to drop in after the first act, and to leave before the last. It is true that an opera is supposed to be the great creation of a great artist, and an artist's work is presumed to have a certain order and unity of its own; but woman is the Queen of Art, and it is hard if she may not display her royalty by docking the Fidelio of its head and its tail. But, if woman is obliged to content herself with mutilating art in the opera or the concert-room, she is able to create art itself over her piano. A host of Claribels and Rosalies exist simply because woman is a musical creature. We turn over the heap of rubbish on the piano with a sense of wonder, and ask, without hope of an answer, why nine-tenths of our modern songs are written at all, or why, being written, they can find a publisher.
But the answer is a simple one, after all; it is merely that aesthetic creatures, that queens of art and of song, cannot play good music and can play bad.
There is not a publisher in London who would not tell us that the patronage of musical women is simply a patronage of trash. The fact is that woman is a very practical being, and she has learned by experience that trash pays better than good music for her own special purposes; and when these purposes are attained she throws good music and bad music aside with a perfect impartiality. It is with a certain feeling of equity, as well as of content, that the betrothed one resigns her sway over the keys. She has played and won, and now she holds it hardly fair that she should interfere with other people's game. So she lounges into a corner, and leaves her Broadwood to those who have practical work to do. Her _role_ in life has no need of accomplishments, and as for the serious study of music as an art, as to any real love of it or loyalty to it, that is the business of ”professional people,” and not of British mothers. Only she would have her girls remember that nothing is in better taste than for young people to show themselves artistic.
Music only displays on the grand scale the laws which in less obtrusive form govern the whole aesthetic life of woman. Painting, for instance, dwindles in her hands into the ”sketch;” the brown sands in the foreground, the blue wash of the sea, and the dab of rock behind. Not a very lofty or amusing thing, one would say at first sight; but, if one thinks of it, an eminently practical thing, rapid and easy of execution, not mewing the artist up in solitary studio, but lending itself gracefully to picnics and groups of a picturesque sort on cliff and boulder, and whispered criticism from faces peeping over one's shoulder.
Serious painting woman can leave comfortably to Academicians and rough-bearded creatures of the Philip Firmin type, though even here she feels, as she glances round the walls of the Academy, that she is creating art as she is creating music. She dwells complacently on the home tendencies of modern painting, on the wonderful succession of squares of domestic canvas, on the nursemaid carrying children up stairs in one picture, on the nursemaid carrying children down stairs in the next. She has her little crow of triumph over the great artist who started with a lofty ideal, and has come down to painting the red stockings of little girls in green-baize pews, or the wonderful counterpanes and marvellous bed-curtains of sleeping innocents. She knows that the men who are forced to paint these things growl contempt over their own creations, but the very growl is a tribute to woman's supremacy. It is a great thing when woman can wring from an artist a hundred ”pot-boilers,” while man can only give him an order for a single ”Light of the World.”
One field of art, indeed, woman claims for her own. Man may build churches as long as he leaves woman to decorate them. A crowning demonstration of her aesthetic faculties meet us on every festival in wreath and text and monogram, in exquisitely moulded pillars turned into grotesque corkscrews, in tracery broken by strips of greenery, in paper flowers and every variety of gilt gingerbread. But it may be questioned whether art is the sole aim of the ecclesiastical picnic out of which decorations spring. The chatty groups dotted over the aisle, the constant appeals to the curate, the dainty little screams and giggles as the ladder shakes beneath those artistic feet, the criticism of cousins who have looked in quite accidentally for a peep, the half-consecrated flirtations in the vestry, ally art even here to those practical purposes which aesthetic woman never forgets. Were she, indeed, once to forget them, she might become a Dr. Mary Walker; she might even become a George Sand. In other words, she might find herself an artist, loving and studying art for its own sake, solitary, despised, eccentric, and blue. From such a destiny aesthetic woman turns scornfully away.
WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?
This is a question which one half the world is asking the other half, with very wild answers as the result. Woman's work seems to be in these days everything that it was not in times past, and nothing that it was.
Professions are undertaken and careers invaded which were formerly held sacred to men, while things are left undone which, for all the generations that the world has lasted, have been naturally and instinctively a.s.signed to women to do. From the savage squaw gathering fuel or drawing water for the wigwam, to the lady giving up the keys to her housekeeper, housekeeping has been considered one of the primary functions of women. The man to provide, the woman to dispense; the man to do the rough initial work of bread-winning, whether as a half-naked barbarian hunting live meat, or as a city clerk painfully scoring lines of rugged figures, the woman to cook the meat when got, and to lay out to the best advantage for the family the quarter's salary gained by casting up ledgers, and writing advices and bills of lading.
Take human society in any phase we like, we must come down to these radical conditions; and any system which ignores this division of labor, and confounds these separate functions, is of necessity imperfect and wrong. We have nothing whatever to say against the professional self-support of women who have no men to work for them, and who must therefore work for themselves in order to live. In what direction soever they can best make their way, let them take it. Brains and intellectual gifts are of no s.e.x and no condition, and it is far more important that good work should be done than that it should be done by this or that particular set of workers.
But we are speaking of the home duties of married women, and of those girls who have no need to earn their daily bread, and who are not so specially gifted as to be driven afield by the irrepressible power of genius. We are speaking of women who cannot help in the family income, but who can both save and improve in the home; women whose lives now are one long day of idleness, _ennui_, and vagrant imagination, because they despise the activities into which they were born, while seeking outlets for their energies impossible to them both by nature and social restrictions.
It is strange to see into what unreasonable disrepute active housekeeping--woman's first natural duty--has fallen in England. Take a family with four or five hundred a year--and we know how small a sum that is for ”genteel humanity” in these days--the wife who will be an active housekeeper, even with such an income, will be an exception to the rule; and the daughters who will be anything more than drawing-room dolls waiting for husbands to transfer them to a home of their own, where they may be as useless as they are now, will be rarer still. For things are getting worse, not better, and our young women are less useful even than their mothers; while these last do not, as a rule, come near the good housekeeping ladies of olden times, who knew every secret of domestic economy, and made a point of honor of a wise and pleasant ”distribution of bread.”
The usual method of London housekeeping, even in the second ranks of the middle-cla.s.ses, is for the mistress to give her orders in the kitchen in the morning, leaving the cook to pa.s.s them on to the tradespeople when they call. If she is not very indolent, and if she has a due regard for neatness and cleanliness, she may supplement her kitchen commands by going up stairs through some of the bedrooms; but after a kind word of advice to the housemaid if she is sweet-tempered, or a harsh word of censure if she is of the cross-grained type, her work in that department will be done, and her duties for the day are at an end. There is none of the clever marketing by which fifty per cent. is saved in the outlay if a woman knows what she is about, and how to buy; none of the personal superintendence so encouraging to servants when genially performed, and rendering slighted work impossible; none of that ”seeing to things”
herself, or doing the finer parts of the work with her own hands, which used to form part of a woman's unquestioned duty. She gives her orders, weighs out her supplies, then leaves the maids to do the best they know or the worst they will, according to the degree in which they are supplied with faculty or conscience. Many women boast that their housekeeping takes them perhaps an hour, perhaps half an hour, in the morning, and no more; and they think themselves clever and commendable in proportion to the small amount of time given to their largest family duty. This is all very well where the income is such as to secure first-cla.s.s servants--professors of certain specialities of knowledge, and far in advance of the mistress; but how about the comfort of the house with this hasty generals.h.i.+p, when the maids are mere scrubs who would have to go through years of training before they were worth their salt? It may be very well too in large households governed by general system, and not by individual ruling; but where the service is scant and poor, it is a stupidly uncomfortable as well as a wasteful way of housekeeping. It is a.n.a.logous to English cookery--a revolting poverty of result with flaring prodigality of means; all the pompous paraphernalia of tradespeople, and their carts, and their red-books for orders, with nothing worth the trouble of booking, and everything of less quant.i.ty and lower quality than might be if personal pains were taken, which is always the best economy practicable.
What is there in practical housekeeping less honorable than the ordinary work of middle-cla.s.s gentlewomen? and why should women shrink from doing for utility, and for the general comfort of the family, what they would do at any time for vanity or idleness? No one need go into extremes, and wish our middle-cla.s.s gentlewomen to become Cinderellas sitting among the kitchen ashes, Nausicaas was.h.i.+ng linen, or Penelopes spending their lives in needlework only. But, without undertaking anything unpleasant to her senses or degrading to her condition, a lady might do hundreds of things that are now left undone in a house altogether, or are given up to the coa.r.s.e handling of servants, and domestic life would gain infinitely in consequence.
What degradation, for instance, is there in cookery? and how much more home happiness would there not be if wives would take in hand that great cold-mutton question! But women are both selfish and small on this point. Born for the most part with very feebly developed gustativeness, they affect to despise the stronger instinct in men, and think it low and sensual if they are expected to give any special attention to the meals of the man who provides the meat. This contempt for good living is one cause of the ignorance there is among them of how to secure good living. Those horrible traditions of ”plain roast and boiled” cling about them as articles of culinary faith; and because they have reached no higher knowledge for themselves, they decide that no one else shall go beyond them.
For one middle-cla.s.s gentlewoman who understands anything about cookery, or who really cares for it as a scientific art or domestic necessity, there are ten thousand who do not; yet our mothers and grandmothers were not ashamed to be known as deft professors, and homes were happier in proportion to the respect paid to the stewpan and the stockpot. And cookery is more interesting now than it was then, because more advanced, more scientific, and with improved appliances; and, at the same time, it is of confessedly more importance. It may seem humiliating, to those who go in for spirit pure and simple, to speak of the condition of the soul as in any way determined by beef and cabbage; but it is so, nevertheless, the connection between food and virtue, food and thought, being a very close one; and the sooner wives recognise this connection the better for them and for their husbands.
The clumsy savagery of a plain cook, or the vile messes of a fourth-rate confectioner, are absolute sins in a house where a woman has all her senses, and can, if she will, attend personally to the cooking. Many things pa.s.s for crimes which are really not so bad as this. But how seldom now do we find a house where the lady does look after the cooking, where clean hands and educated brains are put to active service for the good of others! The trouble would be too great in our fine-lady days, even if there was the requisite ability; but there is as little ability as there is energy, and the plain cook with her savagery, or the fourth-rate confectioner with his rancid pastry, have it all their own way, according to the election of economy or ostentation.
If by chance one stumbles on a household where the woman does not disdain housewifely work, and specially the practical superintendence of the kitchen, there we may be sure we shall find cheerfulness and content. There seems to be something in the life of a practical housekeeper that answers to the needs of a woman's best nature, and that makes her pleasant and good-tempered. Perhaps it is the consciousness that she is doing her duty--of itself a wonderful sweetener of the nature; perhaps the greater amount of bodily exercise keeps the liver in good tone; whatever the cause, sure it is that the homes of the active housekeepers are more harmonious than those of the f.e.c.kless and do-nothing sort. Yet the sn.o.bbish half of the middle-cla.s.ses holds housewifely work as degrading, save in the trumpery pretentiousness of ”giving orders.”
A woman may sit in a dirty drawing-room which the slipshod maid has not had time to clean, but she must not take a duster in her hands and polish the legs of the chairs; there is no disgrace in the dirt, only in the duster. She may do fancy work of no earthly use, but she must not be caught making a gown. Indeed very few women could make one, and as few will do plain needlework. They will braid and embroider, ”cut holes, and sew them up again,” and spend any amount of time and money on beads and wools for messy draperies which no one wants; the end, being finery, sanctions the toil and refines it; but they will not do things of any practical use, or if they are compelled by the exigencies of circ.u.mstances, they think themselves petty martyrs, and badly used by the fates.
The whole scheme of woman's life at this present time is untenable and unfair. She wants to have all the pleasures and none of the disagreeables. Her husband goes to the city, and does monotonous and unpleasant work there; but his wife thinks herself in very evil case if asked to do monotonous housework at home. Yet she does nothing more elevating or more advantageous. Novel-reading, fancy-work, visiting, letter-writing, sum up her ordinary occupations; and she considers these more to the point than practical housekeeping. In fact it becomes a serious question what women think themselves sent into the world for, what they hold themselves designed by G.o.d to be or to do. They grumble at having children, and at the toil and anxiety which a family entails; they think themselves degraded to the level of servants if they have to do any practical housework whatever; they a.s.sert their equality with man, and express their envy of his life, yet show themselves incapable of learning the first lesson set to men, that of doing what they do not like to do. What, then, do they want? What do they hold themselves made for?
Certainly some of the more benevolent sort carry their energies out of doors, and leave such prosaic matters as savory dinners and fast s.h.i.+rt-b.u.t.tons for committees and charities, where they get excitement and _kudos_ together. Others give themselves up to what they call keeping up society, which means being more at home in every person's house than their own; and some do a little weak art, and others a little feeble literature; but there are very few indeed who honestly buckle to the natural duties of their position, and who bear with the tedium of home work as men bear with the tedium of office work. The little royalty of home is the last place where a woman cares to s.h.i.+ne, and the most uninteresting of all the domains she seeks to govern. Fancy a high-souled creature, capable of aesthetics, giving her mind to soup or the right proportion of chutnee for the curry! Fancy, too, a brilliant creature foregoing an evening's conversational glory abroad for the sake of a prosaic husband's more prosaic dinner! He comes home tired from work, and desperately in need of a good dinner as a restorative; but the plain cook gives him cold meat and pickles, or an abomination which she calls hash, and the brilliant creature, full of mind, thinks the desire for anything else rank sensuality.
It seems a little hard, certainly, on the unhappy fellow who works at the mill for such a return; but women believe that men are made only to work at the mill that they may receive the grist accruing, and be kept in idleness and uselessness all their lives. They have no idea of lightening the labor of that mill-round by doing their own natural work cheerfully and diligently. They will do everything but what they ought to do; they will make themselves doctors, committee-women, printers, what not, but they won't learn cooking, and they won't keep their own houses. There never was a time when women were less the helpmates of men than they are at present; when there was such a wide division between the interests and the sympathies of the s.e.xes in the endeavor, on the one side, to approximate their pursuits.