Part 14 (2/2)
She leads her listener gently on, up the slopes of art or letters or politics, to the higher peaks where her purely dogmatic mission begins.
She is artistic, and she labors to wake the idler at her feet to higher views of beauty and art. She points out the tinting of the distant hills, she quotes Ruskin, she criticizes Millais. She crushes her auditor with a sense of his ignorance, of the base unpoetic view of things with which he lounged through the last Academy. What she longs for in English art is n.o.bleness of purpose, and we smile bitter scorn in the suns.h.i.+ne at the ign.o.ble artist who suffers a thought of his butcher's bills to penetrate into the studio. If we could only stretch the Royal Academicians beside us on the gra.s.s, what a thrill and an emotion would run through those elderly gentlemen as they listened to the indignation of the Pretty Preacher.
But art shades off into literature, and literature into poetry. We are driven into a confession that we enjoy the frivolous articles that those horrid papers have devoted to her s.e.x. Is there nothing, the Pretty Preacher asks us solemnly, to be said against our own? And the sun is hot, and we are speechless. It was shameful of us to put down the _Spanish Gipsy_, and let it return unfinished to Mudie's! Never did rebuke so fill us with shame at our want of imagination and of poesy.
But already the Preacher has pa.s.sed to politics, and is deep in Mr.
Mill's prophecies of coming events. She is severe on the triviality of the House, or the quarrelsome debates of the past Session. She pa.s.ses by our murmured excuse of the weather, and dwells with a temperate enthusiasm on the fact that the next will be a social Parliament. Do we know anything about the Poor-laws or Education or Trades'-societies?
Have we subscribed to Mr. Mill's election? We plead poverty, but the miserable plea dies away on the contemptuous air.
What our Pretty Preacher would like above all things would be to meet that dear Mr. Shaw Lefevre, and thank him for his efforts to protect woman. But she knows we are utterly heretical on the subject; she doubts very much whether we take in the _Victoria Magazine_. We listen as the Tory Mayor of Birmingham listened to Mr. Bright at his banquet. The politics are not ours, and the literature is not ours, and the art is not ours; but it is pleasant to lie in the suns.h.i.+ne and hear it all so charmingly put by the Pretty Preacher. We own that sermons have a little to say for themselves; above all, that the impossibility of replying to them has its advantages in a case like this. It would be absurd to discuss these matters with the Pretty Preacher, but it is delightful to look up and see the kindling little face and listen to the sermon.
It is, however, as the theologian proper, as the moralist and divine, that we love her most. She arrives at this peak at last. As a rule, she chooses the tritest topics, but she gives them a novelty and grace of her own. Even Thackeray's old ”Vanity of Vanities” wakes into new life as she dexterously couples it with the dances of the last season. We nod our applause from the gra.s.s as she denounces the worthlessness and frivolity of the life we lead. If the weather were cool enough we should at once vow, as she exhorts us, to be earnest and great and good. Above all, let us be n.o.ble. The Pretty Preacher is great on self-sacrifice.
She sent two of her spoilt dresses to those poor people in the East-end, after listening to a whole sermon on their sufferings. The congregation at her feet feels a twinge of remorse at the thought of his inhumanity, and swears he will put down his segars and devote the proceeds to the emigration fund. Does he ever read Keble? There is a slight struggle in the unconverted mind, and a faint whisper that he now and then reads Tupper; but it is too hot to be flippant, or to do more than swear eternal allegiance to the _Christian Year_.
The evening deepens, and the sermon deepens with it. It is one of the most disgusting points about the divine in the pulpit that he is always boasting of himself as a man like as we are, and of the sins he denounces as sins of his own. It is the special charm of the fair divine above us that she is eminently a being not as we are, but one serene, angelic, pure. It is the very vagueness of her condemnation that tells on us--the utter ignorance of what is so familiar to us that the vagueness betrays, the utter unskillfulness of the hits, and the purity that makes them so unskillful. It is only when she descends to particulars that we can turn round on the Pretty Preacher--only when a burning and impa.s.sioned invective against Cider Cellars suddenly softens into the plaintive inquiry, ”But, oh, Charlie, dear, what _are_ the Cider Cellars?” So long as the preacher keeps in the sphere of the indefinite, we lie at her mercy, and hear the soft thunders roll resistlessly overhead.
But then they are soft thunders. We feel almost encouraged, like Luther, to ”sin boldly” when the absolving fingers brush lightly over our cousinly hair. Our censor, too, has faith in us, in our capacity and will for better things, and it is amazingly pleasant to have the a.s.surance confirmed by a squeeze from the gentle theologian's hand. And so night comes down, and preacher and penitent stroll pleasantly home together, and mamma wonders where both can have been; and the Pretty Preacher lays her head on her pillow with the sweet satisfaction that her mission is accomplished, and that a reprobate soul--the soul, too, of such a gentlemanly and agreeable reprobate--is won.
SPOILT WOMEN.
Like children and all soft things, women are soon spoilt if subjected to unwholesome conditions. Sometimes the spoiling comes from over-harshness, sometimes from over-indulgence; what we are speaking of to-day is the latter condition--the spoiling which comes from being petted and given way to and indulged, till they think themselves better than everybody else, and as if living under laws made specially for them alone. Men get spoilt too in the same manner; but for the most part there is a tougher fibre in them, which resists the flabby influences of flattery and exaggerated attention better than can the morale of the weaker s.e.x; and, besides, even arbitrary men meet with opposition in certain directions, and the most self-contented social autocrat knows that his humblest adherents criticise though they dare not oppose.
A man who has been spoilt by success and a gratified ambition, so that he thinks himself a small Alexander in his own way, and able to conquer any obstacles which may present themselves, has a certain high-handed activity of will about him that does not interfere with his duties in life; he is not made fretful and impatient and exigeant as a woman is--as if he alone of all mankind is to be exempt from misfortune and annoyances; as if his friends must never die, his youth never fade, his circ.u.mstances run always smoothly, protected by the care of others from all untoward hitch; and as if time and tide, which wait for no one else, are to be bound to him as humble servants dutifully observant of his wishes.
The useful art of ”finding his level,” which he learnt at school and in his youth generally, keeps him from any very weak manifestation of being spoilt; save, indeed, when he has been spoilt by women at home, nursed up by an adoring wife, and a large circle of wife's sisters almost as adoring, to all of whom his smallest wishes are religious obligations, and his faintest virtues G.o.dly graces, and who vie with each other which of them shall wait upon him most servilely, flatter him most outrageously, pet and coax and coddle him most entirely, and so do him the largest amount of spiritual damage, and unfit him most thoroughly for the worth and work of masculine life. A man subjected to this insidious injury is simply ruined so far as any real manliness of nature goes. He is made into that sickening creature, ”a sweet being,” as the women call him--a woman's man, with flowing hair and a turn for poetry, full of highflown sentiment, and morbidly excited sympathies; a man almost as much woman as man, who has no backbone of ambition in him, but who puts his whole life into love, just as women do, and who becomes at last emphatically not worth his salt.
Bad as it is for a man to be _kowtowed_ by men, it is not so bad, because not so weakening, as the domestic idolatry which sometimes goes on when one man is the centre of a large family of women, and the only object upon which the natural feminine instinct can expend itself. No greater damage can be done to a man than is done by this kind of domestic idolatry. But, in truth, the evil is too pleasant to be resisted; and there is scarcely a man so far master of himself as to withstand the subtle intoxication, the sweet and penetrating poison, of woman's tender flattery and loving submission. To at certain extent it is so entirely the right thing, because it is natural and instinctive, that it is difficult to draw the line and map out exactly the division between right and wrong, pleasantness and harmfulness, and where loving submission ends and debasing slavishness begins.
Spoilt women are spoilt mainly from a like cause--over-attention from men. A few certainly are to be found, as pampered daughters, with indulgent mammas and subservient aunts given up wholly to ruining their young charge with the utmost despatch possible; but this is comparatively a rare form of the disease, and one which a little wholesome matrimonial discipline would soon cure. For it is seldom that a petted daughter becomes a spoilt wife, human affairs having that marvellous power of compensation, that inevitable tendency to readjust the balance, which prevents the continuance of a like excess under different forms.
Besides, a spoilt daughter generally makes such a supremely unpleasant wife that the husband has no inducement to continue the mistake, and therefore either lowers her tone by a judicious exhibition of snubbing, or, if she is aggressive as well as unpleasant, leaves her to fight with her shadows in the best way she can, glad for his own part to escape the strife she will not forego. One characteristic of the spoilt woman is her impatience of anything like rivalry. She never has a female friend--certainly not one of her own degree, and not one at all in the true sense of the word. Friends.h.i.+p presupposes equality, and a spoilt woman knows no equality. She has been so long accustomed to consider herself as the lady-paramount that she cannot understand it if any one steps in to share her honors and divide her throne.
To praise the beauty of any other woman, to find her charming, or to pay her the attention due to a charming woman, is to insult our spoilt darling, and to slight her past forgiveness. If there is only one good thing, it must be given to her--the first seat, the softest cus.h.i.+on, the most protected situation; and she looks for the best of all things as if naturally consecrated from her birth into the suns.h.i.+ne of life, and as if the ”cold shade” which may do for others were by no means the portion allotted to her. It is almost impossible to make the spoilt woman understand the grace or the glory of sacrifice. By rare good fortune she may sometimes be found to possess an indestructible germ of conscience which sorrow and necessity can develop into active good; but only sometimes. The spoilt woman _par excellence_ understands only her own value, only her own merits and the absolutism of her own requirements; and sacrifice, self-abnegation, and the whole cla.s.s of virtues belonging to unselfishness are as much unknown to her as is the Decalogue in the original, or the squaring of the circle.
The spoilt woman as the wife of an unsuccessful husband or the mother of sickly children is a pitiable spectacle. If it comes to her to be obliged to sacrifice her usual luxuries, to make an old gown serve when a new one is desired, to sit up all night watching by the sick bed, to witness the painful details of illness, perhaps of death, to meet hards.h.i.+p face to face, and to bend her back to the burden of sorrow, she is at the first absolutely lost. Not the thing to be done, but her own discomfort in doing it, is the one master idea--not others' needs, but her own pain in supplying them, the great grief of the moment. Many are the hard lessons set us by life and fate, but the hardest of all is that given to the spoilt woman when she is made to think for others rather than for herself, and is forced by the exigencies of circ.u.mstances to sacrifice her own ease for the greater necessities of her kind.
All that large part of the perfect woman's nature which expresses itself in serving is an unknown function to the spoilt woman. She must be waited on, but she cannot in her turn serve even the one or two she loves. She is the woman who calls her husband from one end of the room to the other to put down her cup, rather than reach out her arm and put it down for herself; who, however weary he may be, will bid him get up and ring the bell, though it is close to her own hand, and her longest walk during the day has been from the dining-room to the drawing-room.
It is not that she cannot do these small offices for herself, but that she likes the feeling of being waited on and attended to; and it is not for love--and the amiable if weak pleasure of attracting the notice of the beloved--it is just for the vanity of being a little somebody for the moment, and of playing off the small regality involved in the procedure. She would not return the attention.
Unlike the Eastern women, who wait on their lords, hand and foot, and who place their highest honor in their lowliest service, the spoilt woman of Western life knows nothing of the natural grace of womanly serving for love, for grace, or for grat.i.tude. This kind of thing is peculiarly strong among the _demi-monde_ of the higher cla.s.s, and among women who are not of the _demi-monde_ by station, but by nature. The respect they cannot command by their virtues they demand in the simulation of manner; and perhaps no women are more tenacious of the outward forms of deference than those who have lost their claim to the vital reality.
It is very striking to see the difference between the women of this type, the _pet.i.tes maitresses_ who require the utmost attention and almost servility from man, and the n.o.ble dignity of service which the pure woman can afford to give--which she finds, indeed, that it belongs to the very purity and n.o.bleness of her womanhood to give. It is the old story of the ill-a.s.sured position which is afraid of its own weakness, and the security which can afford to descend--the rule holding good for other things besides mere social place.
Another characteristic of the spoilt woman is the changeableness and excitability of her temper. All suavity and gentleness and delightful gaiety and perfect manners when everything goes right, she startles you by her outburst of petulance when the first cross comes. If no man is a hero to his valet, neither is a spoilt woman a heroine to her maid; and the lady who has just been the charm of the drawing-room, upstairs in her boudoir makes her maid go through spiritual exercises to which walking on burning ploughshares is the only fit a.n.a.logy. A length of lace unstarched, a ribbon unsewed, a flower set awry, anything that crumples only one of the myriad rose-leaves on which she lies, and the spoilt woman raves as much as if each particular leaf had become suddenly beset with thorns.
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