Volume I Part 6 (2/2)
In this instance the weaker creature is the stronger, and the more defenceless is the safer. You have only the rather questionable consolation of knowing that you are not singular in your discomfiture, and that when she has made an end of you she will probably have a turn with your betters, and make them too, dance to her piping, whether they like the tune or not. At all events, if she humiliates you she humiliates her sisters still more; and with the knowledge that, hardly handled as you have been, others are yet more severely dealt with, you must learn to be content, and to practise as much of that grim kind of patience, which suffers keenly and bears silently, as your nature will permit.
_GRIM FEMALES._
Almost all histories and mythologies embody the idea of a race of grim females. Whether as fabulous and complex monsters, like the Sphinx and the Harpies, or in the more human forms of the Fates and the Furies, uns.e.xed women have been universally recognized as forming part of the system of nature and to be accepted among the stranger manifestations of human life. Yet it is hard to understand why they should exist at all. As moral 'sports,' they are so far interesting to the psychologists; but, as women with definite duties and fixed functions, nothing can be less admirable. They are even worse than effeminate men--which is saying everything.
The grim female must be carefully distinguished from the masculine woman; for they are by no means essentially the same, though the types may run into each other, and sometimes do. But the masculine woman, if not grim but only Amazonian, has often much that is fine and beautiful in her, as we see in her great prototype Pallas Athene; but the grim female _pur sang_ is never n.o.ble, never beautiful; and the only meaning of her existence--the only mission she seems sent into the world to fulfil--is that of serving as a warning to the young what to avoid.
The grim female is not necessarily an old maid, as would appear likely at first sight. We find her of all conditions indifferently--as maid, wife, widow, as mother and childless alike--and we do not find that her condition in any way affects her character. If born grim, she remains grim to the end; and neither marriage nor motherhood modifies her. The grim female of novelists is generally an old maid; but she is a caricature, painted in the broadest lines and copied from the outsides of things. She is emphatically an odd woman; odd in her dress, her mode, her state. She wears a flapping cap, skimpy skirts and rusty brown mittens on her bony hands. She has a pa.s.sionate aversion against men and matrimony; and she lives queerly behind a barricaded house-door, with a small slavey, or an elderly female afflicted with deafness, to do her work and bear the brunt of her temper. But she is always odd, unmarried, unfas.h.i.+onable and unlike everybody else, and could never be mistaken for an ordinary woman from the first phrase which stamps her personality on the page to the last paragraph of her fict.i.tious existence.
Now the grim female of real life may be one of the most conventional of her s.e.x, and in fact, she generally is one of the most conventional of her s.e.x. She is one who rules her household with a rod of iron carefully wrought after the pattern of her neighbours' rods, and to whom a dish set awry, or the second-best china instead of the best, counts for as great a moral delinquency in her servants as a breach of all the Ten Commandments together. She is a woman who regards being out of the fas.h.i.+on, or being foremost in the fas.h.i.+on, as equally reprehensible, and to whom dress is among the most important matters of life. Wherefore she is notorious for a certain grim grandeur of style, as one who respects herself by her clothes, and is known among other women as possessing handsome lace and costly velvet in profusion. Are not lace and velvet _de rigueur_ for women of condition? and what is the grim female but the embodiment of the 'rigour of the game' in all matters? Therefore she clothes herself sumptuously, without elegance or taste; and would as soon be seen abroad in her dressing-gown and slippers as without her characteristic heavy velvet or rustling silk. But the artist's little wife, in her fresh muslin and nice admixture of colours, sails round her for grace and beauty at about one-twentieth part of what the grim female's stately ugliness has cost.
One characteristic of the grim female is her want of womanly pa.s.sion for children. She may have so much maternal instinct, perverted, as to be on friendly terms with a dog or two, a cat, or may be a c.o.c.katoo; but she has no real affection for children, no comprehension of child-nature, and the 'sublime nonsense' of the nursery is a thing unknown to her from first to last. If she have children of her own, she treats them in a hard wooden way that has nothing of the ideal mother about it. She generally sees that they are properly cared for, because she is a disciplinarian; but, though she is inexorable on the score of cold baths and 'no trash,' she never condescends to the weakness of love. If her little ones are sick, they are set aside and dosed until they are well; if they are naughty, they are punished; but they never know those moments of tender indulgence which help them over a period of indisposition not severe enough for actual doctoring, yet throwing them out of gear and inducing a spell of what ignorance calls naughtiness. Rhadamanthus was a weakling compared to the grim female in the nursery; and what she is in her nursery she continues to be in the schoolroom, and the drawing-room to follow. Her children are always causes of annoyance to the grim female, and the first stirrings of individuality, the first half-unconscious trials of their young strength, are offences she cannot away with. Children and inferiors are they in her eyes, even when grown up and married; and she exacts from them the humility and deference of their lower condition. Hence she is one to whom the present generation is undeniably worse than the past; one who groans over the follies and shortcomings of the times and who thinks that good conduct died out with her own youth, and that it is not likely, by the look of things, to be restored. In fact, youth itself is the root and basis of offence; and if she coerces children, she tyrannizes over girls and snubs young men, with inexorable impartiality.
The grim female is not necessarily a strong-minded woman, nor a learned woman, like those who wear spectacles, go to scientific meetings and are great in the cla.s.sics and the 'ologies. She may be of the emanc.i.p.ated cla.s.s; it all depends on chance; and a grim female, when of the emanc.i.p.ated, is a very formidable person indeed. But she is not necessarily one of these. On the contrary, part of her very grimness comes from her intense conservatism and uncompromising conventionality. Nothing is so abhorrent to her as innovation or novelty in any shape. She does not hold with any one out of the narrowest groove of respectable belief, in what direction soever the diverging line may go. A Romanist or a Baptist, a Jew or an infidel, it is all one to her; each is equally dreadful to her, and each is eternally foredoomed. She is of the orthodox Church without fal-lals; as far removed from Ritualism as she is from ranting, and demanding for herself that infallibity of judgment and absolute possession of the truth which she denies to the Pope and all his Cardinals. Beware how you broach new doctrines in her presence. She has been known before now to abjure her nearest relations for no greater moral lapse than a weak belief in globules; while, as for anything like graver aberrations, say on the ape theory or on the plurality of races, on development in religions or on a republican form of government, she has no toleration whatever. If the Smithfield fires existed at the present day, the grim female would be the first to light the f.a.ggots.
It is all the same if she belongs to any Dissenting persuasion; part of her grimness coming from her intolerance, and her own beliefs being simply the springboard on which she stands.
Many causes produce the grim female. It may be that she is grim from social pride as well as from natural hardness. If she has been used to live with people whom, rightly or wrongly, she considers her inferiors, she will probably queen it over them in a very unmistakeable manner. The prelatic blood is renowned for this sort of thing; and a bishop's daughter, or an archbishop's grand-daughter, or Mrs. Proudie, prelatic by marriage only, if of the grim cla.s.s, is one of the grimmest of her cla.s.s. The halo of sanct.i.ty round the mitre and the crozier will be greater in her eyes than even the glitter of the strawberry leaves; and she holds herself consecrated by her birth or marriage to the understanding of every moral question, and specially to the final settlement of every tough theological position. Or she may be grim because of her isolation and meagre intercourse with the world at large; such as she is found in the remoter districts. This kind comes into the exceptional or novelist's cla.s.s, and is often more masculine than grim. These are the women who hunt and fish and shoot like men, and who may be found in all weathers wandering alone about the mountains in short petticoats and spatterdashes--women who affect to be essentially mannish in person, habits and attire, and who may be quite jolly easy-going fellows in their own way, or else grim and trenchant, as nature or the fit takes them. This is a kind not at all uncommon in country places among the higher cla.s.s of resident ladies--ladies who are so highly placed locally that they can afford to disregard public opinion, and who are so independent by disposition that they naturally go off to the manly side, and make themselves bad imitations, as the best they can do.
The grim female tries her strength with all newcomers. She is like one of the giants or black knights of old romance, who lived in castles or caves, whence they pounced on all pa.s.sers-by, and either wrung their necks if they conquered or retreated howling if discomfited. This is what the grim female does in her degree. She dashes on all who are presented to her, and has a pa.s.sage of arms as the first act of the new drama. If her opponents yield out of timidity or good-breeding, or perhaps from not understanding the warlike nature of the encounter, she puts her foot on them forthwith, and ignominiously crushes them; if they defy her, and give her back blow for blow, ten to one she cuts them and becomes their enemy for ever after. For she has not breadth enough to be magnanimous, and the one thing she never forgives is successful opposition. Very grim is she in the presence of human weakness, moral and physical. Woe to that unhappy maid of hers who has slipped on the narrow path of prudence! She will be turned out to perish with no more compunction than if she were a black-beetle to be swept out of the way.
As a nurse the grim female is precise, punctual, obedient to orders, but inexorable. She would give the patient a fit of nervous hysterics which would throw him back for a week, rather than allow him five minutes' grace in the matter of a painful operation or a nauseous draught. Without variableness or weakness herself, she cannot endure it in others, and whosoever comes under her hand must be content to remain in shape, and to keep himself well braced up to the utmost rigidity of duty. If she had to lose an arm or a leg, she would go to her trouble like a Trojan; and why not others? She would merely tighten her lips and hold her breath, and then would sit down to let herself be hacked and mangled without a groan or a word. To judge by the notice given of her in her sister's life, Emily Bronte was of the grim cla.s.s, and about the grimmest for her age and state that could well be found. Had she lived, and lived unsoftened, she would have been one unbroken ma.s.s of iron and granite, without a soft spot anywhere. Her very love was fiercer than other women's hate; her strength was more terrible than a man's anger; her pa.s.sions were as fiery as furnace flames. Of all the examples we could cite, she seems about the fittest for our model.
A grim female has no mercy. She may be just, but if so, it is in a hard uncompromizing way that makes her justice worse than others'
partiality. For justice can be sympathetic, even if unwavering; and the grim female is never sympathetic, how painful soever the work on hand and the sentence to be executed. Neither is she gay; for she is not plastic enough to be either one or the other. She is run into an iron mould, where her nature is compressed as in a vice; and she allows of no expansion, no lipping over, no bursting of bonds anyhow.
What would become of us if all our women were like her? Without any of the feminine little weaknesses at which we have our laugh yet which we do not wholly dislike--without any of the pretty coaxing ways which we know warp our better judgment and take us out of the strict course; and yet how pleasant that warping process is!--without any even of the transient petulances which give so much light and shade to a woman's character, the grim female stands like an old-world Gorgon, turning living flesh and blood to stone. When we look at her we are inclined to forgive all the smallness and silliness which sometimes vex us in the ordinary woman, and to think that there are worse things than the love of dress for which we so often reproach our wives and daughters; that flirting, which is reprehensible no doubt, might be exchanged for something even more reprehensible; and that vanity, of the giggling, coquettish kind, though to be steadily discouraged and sternly reproved, is not quite the worst feminine thing after all. Surely not!
A grim female who cannot flirt nor giggle nor cry, nor yet kiss and make up again when scolded, is far away a worse kind of thing than a feather-headed little puss who is always doing wrong by reason of her foolish brain, but who manages somehow to pull herself right because of her loving heart. Weak women, vain women, affected women, and the whole cla.s.s of silly women, whatever the speciality of silliness exhibited, are tiresome enough, heaven knows; but, unsatisfactory as they are, they are better than the grim female--that woman of no s.e.x, born without softness or sympathy and living without pity and without love.
_MATURE SIRENS._
Nothing is more incomprehensible to girls than the love and admiration sometimes given to middle-aged women. They cannot understand it; and nothing but experience will ever make them understand it. In their eyes, a woman is out of the pale of personal affection altogether when she has once lost that s.h.i.+ning gloss of youth, that exquisite freshness of skin and suppleness of limb, which to them, in the insolent plenitude of their unfaded beauty, const.i.tute the chief claims to admiration of the one s.e.x from the other. And yet they cannot conceal from themselves that the pretty maid of eighteen is often deserted for the handsome woman of forty, and that the patent witchery of their own youth and brilliant colouring goes for nothing against the mysterious charms of a mature siren. What can they say to such an anomaly? There is no good in going about the world disdainfully wondering how on earth a man could ever have taken up with such an antiquated creature!--suggestively asking their male friends what could he see in a woman of her age, old enough to be his mother? There the fact stands; and facts are stubborn things. The eligible suitor who has been coveted by more than one golden-haired girl has married a woman twenty years her senior, and the middle-aged siren has quietly carried off the prize which nymphs in their teens have frantically desired to win. What is the secret? How is it done?
The world, even of silly girls, has got past any belief in spells and talismans, such as Charlemagne's mistress wore, and yet the man's fascination seems to them quite as miraculous and almost as unholy as if it had been brought about by the black art. But if they had any a.n.a.lytical power they would understand the _diablerie_ of the mature siren clearly enough; for it is not so difficult to understand when one puts one's mind to it.
In the first place, a woman of ripe age has a knowledge of the world, and a certain suavity of manner and moral flexibility, wholly wanting to the young. Young girls are for the most part all angles--harsh in their judgments, stiff in their prejudices, narrow in their sympathies. They are full of combativeness and self-a.s.sertion if they belong to one type of young people, or they are stupid and shy if they belong to another type. They are talkative with nothing to say, and positive with nothing known; or they are monosyllabic dummies who stammer out Yes or No at random, and whose brains become hopelessly confused at the first sentence with which the stranger, to whom they have just been introduced, attempts to open a conversation. They are generally without pity; their want of experience making them hard towards sorrows which they do not understand--let us charitably hope also making them ignorant of the pain they inflict. That famous article in the _Times_ on the cruelty of young girls, _apropos_ of Constance Kent's confession, though absurdly exaggerated, had in it the core of truth which gives the sting to such papers, which makes them stick, and which is the real cause of the outcry they create.
Girls are cruel; there is no question about it. If pa.s.sive rather than active, they are simply indifferent to the sufferings of others; if of a more active temperament, they find a positive pleasure in giving pain. A girl will say horribly cruel things to her dearest friend, then laugh at her because she cries. Even her own mother she will hurt and humiliate if she can; while, as for any unfortunate aspirant not approved of, were he as tough-skinned as a rhinoceros she would find means to make him wince. But all this acerbity is toned down in the mature woman. Experience has enlarged her sympathies, and knowledge of suffering has softened her heart to the sufferings of others. Her lessons of life too, have taught her tact; and tact is one of the most valuable lessons that a man or woman can learn. She sees at a glance the weak points and sore places in her companion, and she avoids them; or if she pa.s.ses over them, it is with a hand so soft and tender, a touch so soothing, that she calms instead of irritating. A girl would have come down on those weak places heavily, and would have torn off the bandages from the sore ones, jesting at scars because she herself had never felt a wound, and deriding the sybaritism of diachylon because ignorant of the anguish it conceals.
Furthermore, the mature siren is thoughtful for others. Girls are self-a.s.serting and aggressive. Life is so strong in them, and the instinct which prompts them to try their strength with all comers and to get the best of everything everywhere, is so irrepressible, that they are often disagreeable because of that instinctive selfishness, that craving, natural to the young, of taking all and giving back nothing. But the mature siren knows better than this. She knows that social success entirely depends on what each of us can throw into the common fund of society; that the surest way to win consideration for ourselves is to be considerate for others; that sympathy begets liking, and self-suppression leads to exaltation; and that if we want to gain love we must first show how well we can give it. Her tact then, and her sympathy, her moral flexibility and quick comprehension of character, her readiness to give herself to others, are some of the reasons, among others, why the society of a cultivated agreeable woman of a certain age is sought by those men to whom women are more than mere mistresses or toys. Besides, she is a good conversationalist. She has no pretensions to any special or deep learning--for, if pedantic, she is spoilt as a siren at any age--but she knows a little about most things; at all events, she knows enough to make her a pleasant companion in a _tete-a-tete_ or at a dinner-table, and to enable her to keep up the ball when thrown. And men like to talk to intelligent women. They do not like to be taught nor corrected by them, but they like that quick sympathetic intellect which follows them readily, and that amount of knowledge which makes a comfortable cus.h.i.+on for their own. And a mature siren who knows what she is about would never do more than this, even if she could.
Though the mature siren rests her claims to admiration on more than mere personal charms, and appeals to something beyond the senses, yet she is personable and well preserved, and, in a favourable light, looks nearly as young as ever. So the men say who knew her when she was twenty; who loved her then, and have gone on loving her, with a difference, despite the twenty years which lie between this and then.
Girls, indeed, despise her charms because she is no longer young; and yet she may be even more beautiful than youth. She knows all the little niceties of dress, and, without going into the vulgar trickery of paint and dyes--which would make her hideous--is up to the best arts of the toilet by which every point is made to tell and every minor beauty is given its fullest value. For part of the art and mystery of sirenhood is an accurate perception of times and conditions, and a careful avoidance of that suicidal mistake of which _la femme pa.s.see_ is so often guilty--namely, setting herself in confessed rivalry with the young by trying to look like them, and so losing the good of what she has retained, and betraying the ravages of time by the contrast.
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