Volume I Part 7 (1/2)

The mature siren is wiser than this. She knows exactly what she has and what she can do; and before all things avoids whatever seems too youthful for her years; and this is one reason why she is always beautiful, because always in harmony. Besides, she has very many good points, many positive charms still left. Her figure is still good--not slim and slender certainly, but round and soft, and with that slower, riper, lazier grace which, quite different from the antelope-like elasticity of youth, is in its own way as lovely. If her hair has lost its maiden luxuriance she makes up with crafty arrangements of lace, which are more picturesque than the fas.h.i.+onable wisp of hay-like ends tumbling half-way to the waist. She has still her white and shapely hands with their pink filbert-like nails; still her pleasant smile and square small teeth--those one or two new, matching so perfectly with the old as to be undiscoverable! Her eyes are bright yet, and if the upper muscles are a little shrunk, the consequent apparent enlargement of the orbit only makes them more expressive; her lips are not yet withered; her skin is not wrinkled. Undeniably, when well-dressed and in a favourable light, the mature siren is as beautiful in her own way as the girlish belle; and the world knows it and acknowledges it.

That mature sirens can be pa.s.sionately loved, even when very mature, history gives us more than one example; and the first name that naturally occurs to one's mind is that of the too famous Ninon de l'Enclos. And Ninon, if a trifle mythical, was yet a fact and an example. But not going quite to Ninon's age, we often see women of forty and upwards who are personally charming, and whom men love with as much warmth and tenderness as if they were in the heyday of life--women who count their admirers by dozens, and who end by making a superb marriage, and having quite an Indian summer of romance and happiness. The young laugh at this idea of the Indian summer for a bride of forty-five; but it is true; for neither romance nor happiness, neither love nor mental youth, is a matter of years; and after all we are only as old as we feel, and certainly no older than we look.

All women do not harden by time, nor wither, nor yet corrupt. Some merely ripen and mellow and get enriched by the pa.s.sage of the years, retaining the most delicate womanliness--we had almost said girlishness into quite old age, blus.h.i.+ng as swiftly under their grey hairs, while shrinking from anything coa.r.s.e or vulgar or impure as sensitively, as when they were girls. _La femme a quarante ans_ is the French term for the opening of the great gulf beyond which love cannot pa.s.s; but human history disproves this date, and shows that the heart can remain fresh and the person lovely long after the age fixed for the final adieu to admiration--that the mature siren can be adored by her own contemporaries when the rising generation regard her as nothing better than a chimney-corner fixture. Mr. Trollope recognized the claims of the mature siren in his _Orley Farm_ and _Miss Mackenzie_; and no one can deny the intense naturalness of the characters and the interest of the stories.

Another point which tells with the mature woman is, that she is not jealous nor exacting. She knows the world, and takes what comes with that philosophy which springs from knowledge. If she be of an enjoying nature--and she cannot be a siren else--she accepts such good as floats to the top, neither looking too deep into the cup nor speculating on the time when she shall have drained it to the dregs.

Men feel safe with her. If they have entered on a tender friends.h.i.+p with her, they know that there will be no scene, no tears, no upbraidings, when an inexorable fate comes in to end their pleasant little drama, with the inevitable wife as the scene-s.h.i.+fter. The mature siren knows so well that fate and the wife must break in between her and her friend, that she is resigned from the first to what is foredoomed, and thus accepts her bitter portion, when it comes, with dignity and in silence. Where younger women would fall into hysterics and make a scene, perhaps go about the world taking their revenge in slander, the middle-aged woman holds out a friendly hand and takes the back seat gallantly, never showing by word nor look that she has felt her deposition. She becomes the best friend of the new household; and if any one is jealous, ten to one it is the husband who is jealous of her love for his wife. Of course it may be the wife herself, who cannot see what her husband can find to admire so much in Mrs. A., and who pouts at his extraordinary predilection for her, though of course she would scorn to be jealous--as, indeed, she has no cause. For even a mature siren, however delightful she may be, is not likely to come before a young wife in the heart of a young husband. Though the French paint the love of a woman of forty as pathetic, because slightly ridiculous and certainly hopeless, yet they arrange their theory of social life so that a youth is generally supposed to make his first love of a married woman many years his elder, while a mature siren finds her last love in a youth.

We have not come to this yet in England, either in theory or practice; and it is to be hoped that we never shall come to it. Mature sirens are all very well for men of their own age, and it is pleasant to see them still loved and admired, and to recognize in them the claims of women to something higher than mere personal pa.s.sion; but the case would be very different if they became ghoulish seducers of the young, and kept up the habit of love by entangling boyish hearts and blighting youthful lives. As they are now, they form a charming element in society, and are of infinite use to the world. They are the ripe fruit in the garden where else everything would be green and immature--the last days of the golden summer set against the disappointing backwardness of spring and before the chills of autumn have come. They contain in themselves the advantages of two distinct epochs, and while possessing as much personal charm as youth, possess also the gains which come by experience and maturity. They keep things together as the young could not do; and no gathering of friends is perfect which has not one or two mature sirens to give the tone, and prevent excesses. They soften the asperities of high-handed boys and girls, which else would be too biting; and they set people at ease, and make them in good humour with themselves, by the courtesy with which they listen to them and the patience with which they bear with them. Even the very girls who hate them fiercely as rivals love them pa.s.sing well as half maternal, half sisterly, companions; and the first person to whom they would carry their sorrows would be a mature siren, quite capable for her own part of having caused them.

It would be hard indeed if the loss of youth did not bring with it some compensations; but the mature siren suffers less from that loss than any other kind of woman. Indeed, she seems to have a private elixir of her own which is not quite drained dry when she dies, beloved and regretted, at threescore years and ten; leaving behind her one or two old friends who were once her ardent lovers, and who still cherish her memory as that of the finest and most fascinating woman they ever knew--something which the present generation is utterly incapable of repeating.

_PUMPKINS._

Pumpkins are among the most imposing of all groundling growths. They have fine showy flowers, handsome leaves, roving stems, and they bear solid-looking fruit of a goodly size and gorgeous colour. To see them spreading over their domain with such rapid luxuriance, one would imagine them among the best things growing; but a critical examination proves their flesh to be about three parts water, while as for their stalks, they are of so pithless a nature that they can only creep along the earth, unable to stand upright without support;--which tells something against the pumpkin's claim for extra consideration. Still, their showy largeness attracts the eye, and not a few of us believe in pumpkins, and admire both their mode of growth and the fruit resulting. In like manner the human pumpkins--those beings of imposing presence and loud self-a.s.sertion--get themselves believed in by the simple; and, as occasions by which their watery and fibreless nature is revealed do not arise every day, they are for the most part accepted for the substantialities they a.s.sume to be, and the world is deceived by appearances as it ever has been.

These human pumpkins abound everywhere. In all states and professions, and in both s.e.xes, we find them flouris.h.i.+ng magnificently on the face of the earth, taking the lead in their society and setting themselves out as the finest fellows to be found in their respective gardens.

Among them are the men of the Bombastes type, so dear to the older playwrights; braggadocios of the kill 'em and eat 'em school, who were such terrible fellows to look at and listen to, though only pumpkins of a singularly innocuous nature when stoutly squeezed and a.n.a.lyzed; fire-eaters of the juggling kind, with special care taken that the fire shall be harmless and that the danger shall lie only in the fear of the spectators. Now that duelling has gone out of fas.h.i.+on, and discharged captains who have signalized themselves in war are rare, our old swashbuckler type of pumpkins has gone out both in fact and fiction, on the stage and off it. To be sure we have a few travellers of slightly apocryphal courage, and more than doubtful accuracy, whose books of perilous adventure and breathless dangers are to us what Bombastes and Bobadil were to our fathers; and we have Major Wellington de Boots with his military swagger and his hare's heart.

But he is a very weak imitation of the old fire-eater; and, on the whole, this special family of the pumpkins has dwindled into insignificance, and their place knows them no more.

Then there is the pumpkin after the cut of the Prince Regent--the man of deportment, big, handsome, showy, and specially noticeable for a loud voice, a broad chest, and an indescribable air of superiority and command; the man who has studied bowing as one of the fine arts, who walks with a swagger, and even now tips his curly-brimmed hat slightly to the side. This is the kind of man who influences women.

Bombastes frightens the nervous and inexperienced of his own s.e.x, but the man of deportment partly fascinates and partly overawes the other.

They take him at his own valuation, and have not skill enough to find out the flaw in the summing up until perhaps it is too late, when they have come so near to him that they are able to appraise him for themselves, and have learnt by bitter experience of what unsound materials he is made. And then let him look out. There is nothing women resent so much as pumpkin manhood--nothing which humiliates them more in their own esteem than to discover that they have been taken in by appearances, and that what they had believed in as solid wood turns out to be only squash.

Women like to rely on men, and dread nothing so much as weakness and vacillation in their male protectors; save indeed those grim and bulky females in whom Hood so much delighted, who take small men _vi et armis_, and subjugate them body and soul, like two-legged poodles trained to fetch and carry at the word of command. But these are exceptions; the average woman prizing strength rather than poodle-like docility. The pumpkin of the Prince Regent cut is generally notorious for laying down the law on all points. His voice is so loud and his manner of speech so dictatorial, that no one dreams of doubting still less of contradicting him, but everybody takes him as he represents himself to be--a man of prompt decision, of boundless resources, a granitic tower of strength to be leant against in all emergencies without the slightest fear of failure; a man who is not only sufficient for himself but strong enough to bear the weaknesses of others. He is famous for giving advice--advice of a vague, rapid, sprawling kind, never quite exact to the circ.u.mstances, never quite practical nor to the point--large advice, general in scope but wonderfully positive in tone, and, until you a.n.a.lyze, grandly imposing in effect. Nail him to the point; ask his advice seriously on any question where the responsibility of counsel will rest with him; place yourself in his hands where the consequences of failure will touch him as well as you; and then see to what meagre dimensions your goodly gourd will shrink. The confident a.s.sertion drops into a weak hesitation; the arrogant dictum melts into a timid refusal to take such a serious responsibility on himself; you have p.r.i.c.ked your windbag, bisected your pumpkin, and henceforth you know the precise weight of substance remaining. Yet mankind sees him exactly where he was before, and he will go about the world in his large, loud way, saying to every one that if you had followed his advice you would have succeeded--supposing you have failed; or, if you have succeeded, he will take all the credit to himself, and say it was he who guided you and showed you how to go in and win. For himself, and his own affairs, he has no more moral stamina than he had leaders.h.i.+p for you and yours. The least reverse knocks him over. Care or sorrow, when it touches him, shrivels him up as completely as frost shrivels up the pumpkin. In every circ.u.mstance requiring prompt.i.tude, coolness, keen perception, just decision, our swaggering man of froth fails ignominiously; and one hour of real pressure proves incontestably that he was only a pumpkin of imposing presence, good neither as meat nor staff when the time of trial came.

Very often the pumpkin has a wife whose fibre is as close as his is loose, and whose nature is as tough as his is soft; a hard-eyed, thin-lipped, tenacious woman, who speaks little and boasts not at all, but who does all she wishes to do, and whose iron will pins her pumpkin to the wall as the spear of the Bushman pins the elephant or the rhinoceros. It is very curious to see how a blatant bl.u.s.tering man who is so loud and confident abroad, knocks under at home; and how the high-crested deportment which carries things with such a lofty bearing out of doors droops into the meek submission of the henpecked husband so soon as the house-door closes on him, and he is subjected to the pitiless a.n.a.lysis of home. There is no question of flourish then; and if by chance the ambitious crest should make an effort to display itself, the wife knows how to lower it by a few decisive words of a keen-edged kind, and her pumpkin is made to feel sharply enough the difference existing between fibre and pulp. It is almost melancholy to see one of these fine flouris.h.i.+ng fellows so subdued. Pumpkin as he may be, it is not pleasant to see him so cut down in his pride; and involuntarily one's sympathies go with him rather than with that tenacious, hard-mouthed wife of his, who would be none the worse perhaps for a little of her husband's essential softness and with less than her own hardness.

How often too, these big fellows have no physical stamina as well as but very shaky moral fibre! A small, wiry light-weight will do twice as much as they; not, of course, where muscle only is wanted, but where the question is of endurance. Large heavy men knock up far sooner than the light-weights; and though size and weight count for something at certain times and on occasions, fibre and tenacity go for more in the long run. In the Crimea, the men who first dropped off from exposure and privation were the magnificently-built Guardsmen--men apparently bred and fed to the highest point of physical perfection; while the undersized little liners, who had nothing to be admired in them, stood the strain gamely, and were brisk and serviceable when the others were either dead or in hospital. So far as we have gone yet, we have not solved the problem of how to combine toughness and bigness, solidity and size, but for the most part fail in the one in proportion as we succeed in the other.

Many of the dark-skinned races are what we may call emotional pumpkins. Their flas.h.i.+ng black eyes and swarthy skins seem to be instinct with pa.s.sion; they look like living furnaces filled with flames and molten metal, terrible fellows, dangerous to meddle with and almost impossible to subdue. But nine times out of ten we find them to be marvellously meek persons, timid, amenable to law, unable to give offence and incapable of taking it--lambs masquerading in tiger-skins. A fair-faced Anglo-Saxon, with his sensitive blush, good-humoured smile and light blue eyes, has more pluck and pith in him than a whole brigade of certain of these dark-skinned men. He has less ferocity perhaps than they when they are thoroughly roused, though our good-humoured Anglo-Saxon is by no means dest.i.tute of ferocity on occasions when his blood is up; but his is ferocity of the quarter-staff and bludgeon stand-up fight kind--the ferocity of strength fairly put out against an adversary, not the tigerish cruelty which is almost always found when moral weakness and physical submission have a momentary triumph and reaction. Cowardly men are like women in their revenge when once they get the upper hand; and their revenge is more cruel than that of the habitually brave man who, after a fair fight, overthrows his opponent. Some of the dark-skinned races look the very ideal of the melodramatic ruffian--operatic brigands painted with broad black lines, and up to any amount of deeds of daring and of crime; but they are only pumpkins at the core.

We need not go so far as Calcutta to find them; we get examples nearer home, both in Houndsditch and in Rome; for both Jews and Italians are soft-cored men in spite of their pa.s.sionate outsides, and both would be better for an extra twist and toughness in their fibres.

Intellectual pumpkins are as common as those of the more specially physical kind. You meet with philosophers and 'thinkers'--perhaps they are poets, perhaps politicians--who flourish out a vague big declamation which, when you reduce it to its essence, you find to be a plat.i.tude worth nothing; whipped cream, without any foundation of solid pudding. If they are of the philosophic sort, they quote you Fichte and Hegel, to the bewilderment of your brains unless you have gone into the metaphysical maze on your own account; but they might have put all they have said into half a dozen words of three letters, like a child's first reading lesson. The flourish imposes, and people who cannot a.n.a.lyze take the whipped cream for solid pudding, and think that plat.i.tudes dressed in the garb of Fichte and Hegel are utterances worthy of deep respect and admiring wonder.

All the professions which talk, either by word of mouth or in print, are specially given to this manifestation of pumpkinhood. Preachers and authors sprawl and flourish over their small inheritance with a tremendous a.s.sumption of vital force and vigorous growth; and weak hands, with weaker heads, find support and shelter in their foliage. Poets too, with a knack for turning out large moulds in which they have run very small ideas, are pumpkins dear to the feminine mind. Have we not our Tupper? had we not our 'Satan' Montgomery? and a few others whom we might catalogue if we cared for the task, each with his multifarious female following and his spiritual harem of ardent admirers? All artists--that is, the men who create, or rather who a.s.sume to create--are liable to be proved pumpkins when called on to show themselves solid wood. They talk grandly enough, but when they have to translate their words into deeds, too often the n.o.ble aims and immortal efforts they have been advocating tail off into pulp and water, and we have botches and pot-boilers instead of masterpieces and high art. Perhaps we may take it as a rule that all doers who talk much and boast grandly are of the pumpkin order, and that art, like nature, elaborates best in silence.

Strong-visaged women are often pure pumpkins with a very rough and corrugated outside. It is astonis.h.i.+ng how soon they break down, and for all their stern and powerful looks sink under burdens under which a frail little creature, as light as thistledown, will glide along quite easily. Women with black brows and harsh voices--brigandesses by appearance, or like the typical Herodias of unimaginative artists--are often the gentlest and most pithless of their s.e.x, and may be seen acting quite compa.s.sionately towards their infants, or vindicating their womanhood by meekly sewing on their husbands' b.u.t.tons and weeping at their rebukes; while a fair, silver-tongued, languid lady, as soft as if she were made of nothing harder than the traditional cream and rose-leaves, will give up her babies as a prey to unfeeling nurses and let her husband go b.u.t.tonless and in rags, while she lounges before the fire indifferent to his wrath and callous to his wrongs. There is many a house mistress who looks as if she could use her fists when annoyed, who is absolutely afraid of her servants; and the maid is always the mistress when the one is fibre and the other pulp.

Heaven be praised that the strong-visaged women are not 'clear grit'

all through. If they were as hard as they look, the world would go but queerly, and society would have to make new laws for the protection of its weaker male members. But nature is merciful as well as sportive, and while she amuses herself by creating pumpkins of formidable aspect, takes care that the core shall not always correspond to the rind. Like the Athenian images of the satyr which enclosed a G.o.d, the black-browed brigandesses and the men of magnificent deportment are sometimes impostors of a quite amiable kind; and when you have once learnt by heart the false a.n.a.logies of form, you will cease to fear your typical Herodias, to be impressed by your copy of the Prince Regent, or to be influenced by your wordy Hegelian talking plat.i.tudes in the philosophic dialect.

_WIDOWS._

There are widows and widows; there are those who are bereaved and those who are released; those who lose their support and those whose chains are broken; those who are sunk in desolation and those who wake up into freedom. Of the first we will not speak. Theirs is a sorrow too sacred to be publicly handled even with sympathy; but the second demand no such respectful reticence. The widow who is no sooner released from one husband than she plots for another, and the widow who leaps into liberty over the grave of a gaoler, not a lover, are fair game enough. They have always been favourite subjects whereon authors may exercise their wits; and while men are what they are--laughing animals apt to see the humour lying in incongruity, and with a spice of the devil to sharpen that same laughter into satire--they will remain favourite subjects, tragic as the state is when widowhood is deeper than mere outward condition.