Volume I Part 5 (2/2)

The line at which a virtue becomes a vice through excess can never be exactly defined, being one of those uncertain conditions which each mind must determine for itself. But there is a line, wheresoever we may choose to set it; and it is just this fine dividing mark which women are so apt to overrun. For women, as a rule, are nothing if not extreme. Whether as saints or sinners, they carry a principle to its outside limits; and of all partizans they are the most thoroughgoing, whether it be to serve G.o.d or the devil, liberty or bigotry, Bible Communism or Calvinistic Election. Sometimes they are just as extreme in their absolute negation of force, and in the narrowness of the limits within which they would confine all human expression either by word or deed--and especially all expression of feminine life. These are the women who carry womanly gentleness into the exaggeration of self-abas.e.m.e.nt, and make themselves mere footstools for the stronger creature to kick about at his pleasure; the weak sisters who think all self-reliance unfeminine, and any originality of thought or character an offence against the ordained inferiority of their s.e.x. They are the parasitic plants of the human family, living by and on the strength of others; growths unable to stand alone, and, when deprived of their advent.i.tious support, falling to the ground in a ruin perhaps worse than death.

It is sad to see one of these weak sisters when given up to herself after she has lived on the strength of another. As a wife, she was probably a docile, gentle kind of Medora--at least on the outside; for we must not confound weakness with amiability--suffering many things because of imperfect servants and unprofitable tradesmen, maybe because of unruly children and encroaching friends, over none of whom she had so much moral power as enabled her to hold them in check; but on the whole drifting through her days peacefully enough, and, though always in difficulties, never quite aground. She had a tower of strength in her husband, on whom she leaned for a.s.sistance in all she undertook, whether it were to give a dose of Dalby to the child, or a scolding to the maid, or to p.r.o.nounce upon the soundness of two rival sects each touting for her soul. While he lived she obeyed his counsel--not always without a futile echo of discontent in her own heart--and copied his opinions with what amount of accuracy nature had bestowed on her; though it must be confessed more often making a travesty than a facsimile, according to the trick of inferior translators, and not necessarily better pleased with his opinions than with his counsels. For your weak sister is frequently peevish, and though unable to originate is not always ready to obey cheerfully; cheerfulness indeed being for the most part an attribute of power.

Still, there stood her tower of strength, and while it stood, she, the parasite growing round it, did well enough, and flourished with a pleasant semblance of individual life into the hollowness of which it was no one's business to inquire. But when the tower fell, where was the ivy? The husband taken away, what became of the wife?--he who had been the life and she only the parasite. Abandoned to the poor resources of her own judgment she is like one suddenly thrown into deep water, not knowing how to swim. She has no judgment. She has been so long accustomed to rely on the mind of another, that her will is paralyzed for want of use. She is any one's tool, any one's echo, and worse than that, if left to herself she is any one's victim. All she wants is to be spared the hards.h.i.+p of self-reliance and to be directed free of individual exertion. She is utterly helpless--helpless to act, to direct, to decide; and it depends on the mere chance of proprietors.h.i.+p whether her slavery shall be degradation or protection, ruin or safety. For she will be a slave, whosoever may be her proprietor; being the pabulum of which slaves and victims are naturally formed. The old age of Medora is Mrs. Borradaile, who, if her husband had lived, would have probably ended her life in an honourable captivity and a well-directed subserviency.

We often see this kind of helpless weakness in the daughter of a man of overbearing will, or of a termagant mother fond of managing and impatient of opposition. During the plastic time of her life, when education might perhaps have developed a sufficient amount of mental muscle, and a course of judicious moulding might have fairly set her up, she is snubbed and suppressed till all power is crushed out of her. She is taught the virtue of self-abnegation till she has no self to abnegate; and the backbone of her individuality is so incessantly broken that at last there is no backbone left in her to break. She has become a mere human mollusc which, when it loses its native sh.e.l.l, drifts helplessly at the mercy of chance currents into the maw of any stronger creature that may fancy it for his prey. One often sees these poor things left orphans and friendless at forty or fifty years of age. They have lived all their lives in leading-strings, and now are utterly unable to walk alone. They are infants in all knowledge of the world, of business, of human life; their youth is gone, and with it such beauty and attractiveness as they might have had, so that men who liked them when fresh and gentle at twenty do not care to accept their wrinkled helplessness at forty. They have been kept in and kept down, and so have made no friends of their own; and then, when the strong-willed father dies and the termagant mother goes to the place where the wicked cease from troubling, the mollusc these have hitherto protected is left defenceless and alone. If she has money, her chances of escape from the social sharks always on the look-out for fat morsels are very small indeed. It is well if she falls into no worse hands than those of legitimate priests of either section, whether enthusiastic for chasubles or crazy for missions; and if her money is put to no baser use than supplying church embroidery for some Brother Ignatius at home, or blankets for converted Africans in the tropics. It might go into Agapemones, into spiritual Athenaeums, into Bond Street back-parlours, where it certainly would do no good, take it any way one would; for, as it must go into some side-channel dug by stronger hands than hers, the question is, into which of the innumerable conduits offered for the conveyance of superfluous means shall it be directed?

This is the woman who is sure to go in for religious excess of one kind or another, and for whom therefore, a convent with a sympathetic director is a G.o.dsend past words to describe. She is unfit for the life of the world outside. She has neither strength to protect herself, nor beauty to win the loving protection of men; she cannot be taken as a precious charge, but she will be made a pitiable victim; and, though matins and vespers come frightfully often, surely the narrow safety of a convent-cell is a better fate for her than the publicity of the witness-box at the Old Bailey! As she must have a master, her condition depends on what master she has; and the whole line of her future is ruled according to the fact whether she is directed or 'exploited,' and used to serve n.o.ble ends or base ones.

As a mother, the weak sister is even more unsatisfactory than as a spinster left to herself with funds which she can manipulate at pleasure. She is affectionate and devoted; but of what use are affection and devotion without guiding sense or judgment? Even in the nursery, and while the little ones need only physical care, she is more obstructive than helpful, never having so much self-reliance nor readiness of wit as to dare a remedy for one of those sudden maladies, incidental to children, which are dangerous just in proportion to the length of time they are allowed to run unchecked. And if she should by chance remember anything of therapeutic value, she has no power to make her children take what they don't like to take, nor do what they don't like to do. In the horror of an accident she is lost. If her child were to cut an artery, she would take it up into her lap tenderly enough, but she would never dream of stopping the flow; if it swallowed poison, she would send for the doctor who lives ten miles away; and if it set itself on fire, she would probably rush with it into the street, for the chance of a.s.sistance from a friendly pa.s.ser-by. She never has her senses under serviceable command; and her action in a moment of danger generally consists in unavailing pity or in obstructive terror, but never in useful service nor in valuable suggestion.

But if useless in her nursery while her children are young, she is even more helpless as they get older; and the family of a weak woman grows up, una.s.sisted by counsel or direction, just as the old Adam wills and the natural bent inclines. Her girls may be loud and fast, her sons idle and dissipated, but she is powerless to correct or to influence. If her husband does not take the reins into his own hands, or if she be a widow, the young people manage matters for themselves under the perilous guidance of youthful pa.s.sions and inexperience. And nine times out of ten they give her but a rough corner for her own share. They have no respect for her, and, unless more generously compa.s.sionate than young people usually are, scarcely care to conceal the contempt they cannot help feeling. What can she expect? If she was not strong enough to root out the tares while still green and tender, can she wonder at their luxuriant growth about her feet now? She, like every one else, must learn the sad meaning of retribution, and how the weakness which allowed evil to flourish unsubdued has to share in its consequences and to suffer for its sin.

Unsatisfactory in her home, the weak sister does not do much better in society. She is there the embodiment of restriction. She can bear nothing that has any flavour or colour in it. Topics of broad human interest are forbidden in her presence because they are vulgar, improper, unfeminine. She takes her stand on her womanhood, and makes that womanhood to be something apart from humanity in the gross.

There must be no cakes and ale for others if she be virtuous; and spades are not to be called spades when she is by to hear. She is the limit beyond which no one must go, under pain of such displeasure as the weak sister can show. And, weak as she is in many things, she can compa.s.s a certain strength of displeasure; she can condemn, persistently if not pa.s.sionately.

Nothing is more curious than the way in which the weak sister exercises this power of condemnation, and nothing much more wide than its scope. If incapable of yielding to certain temptations, because incapable of feeling them, she has no pity for those who have not been able to resist; yet, on the other hand, she cannot comprehend the vigour of those who withstand such influences as conquer her. If she be under the shadow of family protection, safe in the power of those who know how to hold her in all honour and prosperity, she cannot forgive the poor weak waif--no weaker than herself!--who has been caught up in the outside desert of desolation, and made to subserve evil ends. Yet, on the other hand, for the woman who is able to think and act for herself she has a kind of superst.i.tious horror; and she shrinks from one who has made herself notorious, no matter what the mode or method, as from something tainted, something unnatural and unwomanly. She has even grave doubts respecting the lawfulness of doing good if the manner of it gets into the papers and names are mentioned as well as things; and though the fas.h.i.+on of the day favours feminine notoriety in all directions, she holds by the instinct of her temperament, and languidly maintains that woman is the cipher to which man alone gives distinctive value. Griselda and Medora are the types to her of womanly perfection; and the only strength she tolerates in her own s.e.x is the strength of endurance and the power of patience.

She has no doubt in her own mind that the ordained purpose of woman is to be convenient for the high-handedness and brutality of man; and any woman who objects to this theory, and demands a better place for herself, is flying in the face of Providence and forfeiting one of the distinctive privileges of her s.e.x. For the weak sister thinks, like some others, that it is better to be destroyed by orthodox means than to be saved by heterodox ones; and that if good Christians uphold moral suttee, they are only pagans and barbarians who would put out the flames and save the victim from the burning. So far she is respectable, in that she has a distinct theory about something; but it is wonderfully eloquent of her state that it should only be the theory of Griseldadom as womanly perfection, and the beauty to be found in the moral of Cinderella sitting supinely among the ashes, and forbidden to own even the gla.s.s-slipper that belonged to her.

Fortunately for the world, the weak sister and her theories do not rule. Indeed we are in danger of going too much the other way in these times, and the revolt of our women against undue slavery goes very near to a revolt against wise submission. Still, women who are to be the mothers of men ought to have some kind of power, if the men are to be worth their place in the world; and if we want creatures with backbones we must not give our strength to rearing a race of molluscs.

_PINCHING SHOES._

There are two ways of dealing with pinching shoes. The one is to wear them till you get accustomed to the pressure, and so to wear them easy; the other is to kick them off and have done with them altogether. The one is founded on the accommodating principle of human nature by which it is enabled to fit itself to circ.u.mstances, the other is the high-handed masterfulness whereby the earth is subdued and obstacles are removed; the one is emblematic of Christian patience, the other of Pagan power. Both are good in certain states and neither is absolutely the best for all conditions. There are some shoes indeed, which, do what we will, we can never wear easy. We may keep them well fixed on our feet all our life, loyally accepting the pressure which fate and misfortune have imposed on us; but we go lame and hobbled in consequence, and never know what it is to make a free step, nor to walk on our way without discomfort. Examples abound; for among all the pilgrims toiling more or less painfully through life to death, there is not one whose shoes do not pinch him somewhere, how easy soever they may look and how soft soever the material of which they may be made. Even those proverbial possessors of roomy shoes, the traditional King and Princess, have their own little private bedroom slippers which pinch them, undetected by the gaping mult.i.tude who measure happiness by lengths of velvet and weight of gold embroidery; and the envied owners of the treasure which all seek and none find might better stand as instances of sorrow than of happiness--examples of how badly shod poor royalty is, and how, far more than meaner folk, it suffers from the pinching of its regal shoes.

The uncongeniality of a profession into which a man may have been forced by the injudicious overruling of his friends, or by the exigencies of family position and inherited rights, is one form of the pinching shoe by no means rare to find. And here, again, poor royalty comes in for a share of the grip on tender places, and the consequent hobbling of its feet. For many an hereditary king was meant by nature to be nothing but a plain country gentleman at the best--perhaps even less; many, like poor 'Louis Capet,' would have gone to the end quite happily and respectably if only they might have kicked off the embroidered shoes of sovereignty and betaken themselves to the highlows of the herd--if only they might have exchanged the sceptre for the turning-lathe, the pen or the fowling-piece. 'Je deteste mon metier de roi,' Victor Emmanuel is reported to have said to a republican friend who sympathized with the monarch's well-known tastes in other things beside his hatred of the kingly profession; and history repeats this frank avowal in every page. But the purple is as hard to be got rid of as Deianeira's robe; for the most part carrying the skin along with it and trailed through a pool of blood in the act of transfer--which is scarcely what royalty, oppressed with its own greatness, and willing to rid itself of sceptre and shoes that it may enjoy itself in list-slippers after a more bourgeoise fas.h.i.+on, would find in accordance with its wishes.

Lower down in the social scale we find the same kind of misfit between nature and position as a very frequent occurrence--pinching shoes, productive of innumerable corns and tender places, being many where the feet represent the temperament and the shoes are the profession.

How often we see a natural 'heavy' securely swathed in ca.s.sock and bands, and set up in the pulpit of the family church, simply because the t.i.thes were large and the advowson was part of the family inheritance. But that stiff rectorial shoe of his will never wear easy. The man's secret soul goes out to the parade-ground and the mess-table. The glitter and jingle and theatrical display of a soldier's life seem to him the finest things in the whole round of professions, and the quiet uneventful life of a village pastor is of all the most abhorrent. He wants to act, not to teach. Yet there he is, penned in beyond all power of breaking loose on this side the grave; bound to drone out muddled sermons half an hour long and eminently good for sleeping draughts, instead of shouting terse and stirring words of command which set the blood on fire to hear; bound to rout the shadowy enemy of souls with weapons he can neither feel nor use, instead of prancing off at the head of his men, waving his drawn sword above his head in a whirlwind of excitement and martial glory, to rout the tangible enemies of his country's flag. He loves his wife and takes a mild parsonic pleasure in his roses; he energizes his schools and beats up recruits for his parish penny readings; he lends his pulpit to missionary delegates and takes the chair at the meeting for the conversion of Jews; he does his duty, poor man, so far as he knows how and so far as nature gave him the power; but his feet are in pinching shoes all his life long, and no amount of walking on the clerical highway can ever make them pleasant wearing. Or he may have a pa.s.sionate love for the sea, and be mewed up in a lawyer's musty office where his large limbs have not half enough s.p.a.ce for their natural activity; where he is perched for twelve hours out of the twenty-four on a high stool against a desk instead of climbing cat-like up the ropes; and where he is set to engross a longwinded deed of conveyance, or to make a fair copy of a bill of costs, instead of bearing a hand in a gale and saving his s.h.i.+p by pluck and quickness. He could save a s.h.i.+p better than he can engross a deed; while, as for law, he cannot get as much of that into his heavy brain as would enable him to advise a client on the simplest case of a.s.sault; but he knows all the differences of rig, and the whole code of signals, and can tell you to a nicety about the flags of all nations, and the name and position of every spar and stay and sheet, and when to reef and when to set sail, with any other nautical information to be had from books and a chance cruise as far as the Nore. That pen behind his ear never ceases to gall and fret; his shoe never ceases to pinch; and to the last day of his life the high stool in the lawyer's office will be a place of penance and the sailor's quarter-deck the lost heaven of his ambition.

No doubt, by the time the soldier wrongly labelled as a parson or the sailor painfully working the legal treadmill, comes to the end of his career, the old shoe which has pinched him so long will be worn comparatively easy. The gradual decay of manly vigour, and the slow but sure destruction of strong desires, reduce one's feet at last to ma.s.ses of accommodating pulp; but what suffering we go through before this result can be attained!--what years of fruitless yearning, of fierce despair, of pathetic self-suppression, of jarring discord between work and fitness, pound all the life out of us before our bones become like wax and pinching shoes are transformed to easy-fitting slippers! For itself alone, not counting the beyond to which the hope clings, it would scarcely seem that such a life were worth the living.

Another pinching shoe is to be found in climate and locality. A man hungering for the busy life of the city has to vegetate in the rural districts, where the days drop one after the other like leaden bullets, and time is only marked by an accession of dulness. Another, thirsting for the repose of the country, has to jostle daily through Cheapside. To one who thinks Canadian salmon-fis.h.i.+ng the supreme of earthly happiness, fate gives the chance of chasing b.u.t.terflies in Brazil; to another who holds 'the common objects of the seash.o.r.e' of more account than silver and gold, an adverse fortune a.s.signs a station in the middle of a plain as arid as if the world had been made without water; and a third, who cares for nothing but the free breathing of the open moors or the rugged beauty of the barren fells, is dropped down into the heart of a narrow valley where he cannot see the sun for the trees. At first this matter of locality seems to be but a very small grip on the foot, not worth a second thought; but it is one of a certain c.u.mulative power impossible to describe, though keen enough to him who suffers; and the pinching shoe of uncongenial place is quite as hard to bear as that of uncongenial work.

Again, a man to whom intellectual companions.h.i.+p means more than it does to many is thrown into a neighbourhood where he cannot hope to meet with comprehension, still less with sympathy. He is a Freethinker, and the neighbourhood goes in for the strictest Methodism or the highest ultra-Ritualism; he is a Radical, and he is in the very focus of county Toryism, where the doctrine of equality and the rights of man is just so much seditious blasphemy, while the British Const.i.tution is held as a direct emanation from divine wisdom second only to the Bible; or he is a Tory to the backbone--and his backbone is a pretty stiff one--and he is in the midst of that blatant kind of Radicalism which thinks gentlehood a remnant of the dark ages, and confounds good breeding with servility, and loyalty to the Crown with oppression of the people. Surrounded by his kind, he is as much alone as if in the middle of a desert. An Englishman among Englishmen, he has no more mental companions.h.i.+p than if he were in a foreign country where he and his neighbour spoke different tongues, and each had a set of signs with not two agreeing. And this kind of solitude makes a pinching shoe to many minds; though to some of the more self-centred or defying kind it is bearable enough--perhaps even giving a sense of roominess which closer communion would destroy.

Of course one of the worst of our pinching shoes is matrimony, when marriage means bondage and not union. The mismated wife or husband never leaves off, willingly or unwillingly, squeezing the tender places; and the more the pressure is objected to the worse the pain becomes. And nothing can relieve it. A country gentleman, hating the dust and noise of London, with all his interest in his county position and all his pleasure in his place, and a wife whose love lies in Queen's b.a.l.l.s and opera-boxes, and to whom the country is simply a slice out of Siberia wherever it may be; a hearty hospitable man, liking to see his table well filled, and a wife with a weak digestion, irritable nerves and a morbid horror of society; a pus.h.i.+ng and ambitious man, with a loud voice and an imposing presence, and a shrinking fireside woman, who asks only to glide unnoticed through the crowd and to creep noiselessly from her home to her grave--are not all these shod with pinching shoes, which, do what they will, go on pinching to the end, and which nothing short of death or the Sir James Hannen of the time can remove? The pinching shoe of matrimony pinches both sides equally--excepting indeed, one of the two is specially phlegmatic or pachydermatous, and then the grip is harmless; but, as a rule, the ring-fence of marriage doubles all conditions, and when A.

walks hobbled, B. falls lame, and both suffer from the same misfit.

However, the only thing to do is to bear and wear till the upper-leather yields or till the foot takes the required shape; but there is an eternity of pain to be gone through before either of these desirable ends comes about; and the instinct which dreads pain, and questions its necessity, is by no means a false one. For all that, we must wear our pinching shoes of matrimony till death or the Divorce Court pulls them from our feet; which points to the need of being more careful than we usually are about the fit beforehand.

Poverty has a whole rack full of pinching shoes very hard to get accustomed to, and as bad to dance in lightly as were the fiery slippers of the naughty little girl in the German fairy-tale. Given a large heart, generous instincts and an empty purse, and we have the conditions of a real tragedy, both individual and social. For poverty does not mean only that elemental want of food and clothing which we generally a.s.sociate with its name. Poverty may have two thousand a year as well as only a mouldy crust and three s.h.i.+llings a week from the parish; and poverty cursing its sore feet in a brougham is quite as common as poverty, full of corns and callosities, blaspheming behind a costermonger's barrow. The shoe may pinch horribly, though there is no question of hunger or the 'twopenny rope;' for it is all a matter of relative degree, and the means wherewith to meet wants. But as poverty is not one of those fixed conditions of human life which no human power can remove, we have not perhaps quite so much sympathy with its grips and pinches as in other things less remediable. For while there is work still undone in the world, there is gain still to be had. The man whose energies stagnate now in a dry channel can, if he will, turn them into one more fertile; and if he is making but a poor business out of meal, it is his own fault if he does not try to make a better out of malt. Where the shoe pinches hardest is in places which we cannot protect and with a grip which we cannot prevent; but we cannot say this of poverty as a necessary and inalienable condition, and sympathy is so much waste when circ.u.mstances can be changed by energy or will.

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