Volume Ii Part 8 (1/2)

_WOMEN'S MEN._

If songs are the expressions of a nation's political temper, novels show the current of its social morality, and what the learned would call its psychological condition. When French novelists devote half their stories to the a.n.a.lysis of those feelings which end in breaking the seventh commandment, and the other half to the gradual evolution of the evidence which leads to the detection of a secret murderer, we may safely a.s.sume, on the one hand, that the marriage law presses heavily, and, on the other, that the national intellect is of that ingenious kind which takes pleasure in puzzles, and is best represented by the familiar examples of dovetailing and mosaic work.

When too, we see that their common feminine type is a creature given over as a prey to nervous fancies and an exalted imagination, of a feverish temperament and a general obscuration of plain morality in favour of a subtilizing and misleading kind of thing which she calls her _besoin d'ame_, we may be sure that this is the type most approved by both writer and readers, and that anything else would be unwelcome.

The French novelist who should describe, as his central figure, a self-disciplined, straightforward, healthy young woman, honestly in love with her husband, rationally fond of her children, not given to dangerous musings about the need of her soul for an elective affinity outside her marriage bond, nor spending her hours in speculating on the philosophy of necessity as represented by Leon or Alphonse; who should make her absolutely impervious to the sickly sentimentalism of the inevitable _celibat_, and neither palter with peril nor lament that sin should be sinful when it is so pleasant; who should paint domestic morality as we know it exists in France no less than in England, and trust for his interest to the quiet pathos of unfriendly but cleanly circ.u.mstances, would be hard put to it to make his heroine attractive and his story popular; and his readers would not be counted by tens of thousands, as were those who gloated over the sins of _Madame Bovary_ and the prurience of _f.a.n.n.y_. The Scandinavian type of woman again, strong-armed, independent, athletic, practical, would not go down with the French reading public; wherefore we may a.s.sume that the _Parisienne_, as we know her in romance--feverish, subtil, casuistic, self-deluding, and always ready to sacrifice duty to sentiment--is the woman best liked by the people to whom she is offered, and that the novelist but repeats and represents the wish of his readers.

So, too, when our own novelists carry their stock puppets through the nine hundred pages held to be necessary for the due display of their follies and disasters, we may be sure that they are of the kind which finds favour in the eyes of the ordinary English reader; that the girls are the girls who please young men or do not alarm mothers, and that the men are the men in whom women delight, and think the ideals of their s.e.x. If, as it is said, the delineation of her hero is the touchstone of a woman's literary power, it must be confessed that the touchstone discloses, for the most part, a very feeble amount of literary power, and that the female mind has but a small perception of all that relates to man's needs and nature.

It is the rarest thing possible to find a flesh-and-blood man in the pages of a woman's novel; far rarer than to meet with a flesh-and-blood young lady in the pages of a man's. They are all either prigs, ruffians, or curled darlings; each of whom a man longs to kick. They are goody men of such exalted morality that Sir Galahad himself might take a lesson from them. Or they are brutes with the well-worn square jaw and beetling brow, who translate into the milder action of modern life the savage's method of wooing a woman by first knocking her senseless and then carrying her off. Or they are impossible light-weights, with small hands and artistic tendencies--men who moon about a good deal, and are sure to love the wrong woman in a helpless, drifting sort of way, as if it were quite the right and manly thing to do to let themselves fall under the dominion of a pa.s.sion which a little resolution could overcome.

Sometimes, for a difference, these light-weights are men of tremendous pluck and quality of muscle, able to thrash a burly bargee twice their weight and development with as much ease as a steel sword can cut through one of pith. The female crowd of present novel-writers repeat these four types with undeviating constancy, so that we have learnt them all by heart; and after the first outline indicative of their attributes, we can tell who they are as certainly as we can tell Minerva by her owl, St. Catharine by her wheel, Jupiter by his thunderbolts, or St. Sebastian by his arrows. But in what form soever they elect to portray their hero, they are sure to make his love for woman his best and his dominant quality.

Few women know anything of the intricacies of a man's life and emotion, save such as are connected with love. Yet, though love is certainly the strongest pa.s.sion in youth, it is by no means all powerful in maturity and middle age. But the lady's hero of fifty and upwards is as much under the influence of his erotic fancies as if he were a boy of eighteen; and life holds nothing worth living for if he does not get the woman with whom he has fallen in love. It seems impossible for a woman to understand the loftier side of a man's nature. She knows nothing, subjectively, of the political aims, the love for abstract truth, the desire for human progress, which take him out of the narrow domestic sphere, and make him comparatively indifferent to the life of sense and emotion altogether. And when she sees this she does not tolerate it. When Newton used his lady's little finger for a tobacco-stopper, he dug his grave in the female garden of the soul; and women rarely appreciate either Dr. Johnson or Dean Swift, because of the absence in the one of anything like romantic tenderness and its perversion in the other. All they care for is that men shall be tender and true to them; idealizing as lovers; as husbands constant and indulgent; and for this they will condone any amount of crookedness or meanness which does not make its way into the home. If he is complying and caressing there, he may be what fate and the foul fiend like to make him elsewhere, so long as he is not openly unfaithful and never gets drunk.

All the false glitter of the Corsair school is due solely to the capacity for loving ascribed to the heroes thereof. Though a man's name be 'linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes,' the one virtue, being love, outweighs the thousand crimes in the estimation of women and of the more effeminate kind of poets; and so long as the 'heart is framed for softness,' it may be 'warped to wrong' without doing any Conrad much injury with them. The absolute rightness and justness of a man count for little in comparison with his tenderness; and we know of no woman whose ideal man would be one neither a saint nor a lover.

The reason why the men of a softer civilization are in general so successful with the women of the harder and more northerly countries is because of the comparative softness of their manners and the larger place which love and love-making hold among them. All who know France know the Frenchman's jealous hatred of Italian men; which hatred we share here in England, only we add the Frenchman to the list. We affect to despise the arts by which the men succeed and the women are gained over; but we cannot deny their potency, nor shut our eyes to the esteem in which they are held by women. This is not saying that the chivalrous habit of deference taught by civilization is not a good thing in itself, but it is saying that it is not worth the stronger and more essentially masculine qualities. But to women the art of love-making is worth all the other virtues in a lump; indeed, it comprises them all, and without it the best are valueless. It is the crown and glory of life--the one thing to live for; and where it is not, there is no life worthy of the name. Not that women are insensible to the charms of public fame. If a man has made himself a great reputation, he may throw the handkerchief where he likes, and he will find plenty of women to pick it up. In this case they are not too rigid in their requirements; and if his ways are a little hard and cold, they hold themselves indemnified for the loss of personal tenderness by the glory which surrounds a name which is now theirs. A woman must be exceptionally silly if she cannot take comfort in her husband's public repute for her disappointment in his private manners.

But this is only with recognized and fully successful heroes. As a rule, no amount of manly virtues will excuse the want of the softer graces; and the finest fellow that ever lived, the true _anax andron_ among men, must be content to be measured by women merely according to his own estimate of them, and the power which the pa.s.sion of love has over him.

Nothing surprises men more than the odd ignorance of women concerning them; and half the unhappiness in married life, at least in England, springs from that ignorance. They cannot be made to understand the differences between a man's nature and requirements and their own; and they condemn all that they cannot understand. In those few rational homes where men's sports and gatherings, undisturbed by the presence of petticoats, are not made occasions for suspicion nor remonstrance, the stock of love and happiness with which married life began is more like the widow's cruse than elsewhere; but unfortunately for both husbands and wives, these homes are rare; while those are common where an extramural game of billiards in the evening is occasion for tears or pouting, and deadly offence is taken at club dinners or a week's shooting. The consequence of which is deceit or dissension; and sometimes both.

The woman's ideal man has none of these erratic tendencies. His business done, he comes home with the docility of a well-bred pointer sent to heel, and finds energy enough after his hard day's work for a variety of caressing cares which make him more precious in her eyes than all the tact, the temper, the judgment, the uprightness he has manifested in his dealings with the outside world. And the domesticity which she claims from her husband she demands from her son. Latchkeys are her abomination, and the 'gas left burning' is as a beacon-light on the way of destruction. She has the profoundest suspicion of all the men whom her boy calls his friends. She never knows into what mischief they may lead him; but she is sure it is mischief if they keep him away from his home in the evening. She would prescribe the same social restraints and moral regimen for her son as for her daughter, and she thinks the energies of masculine nature require no wider field and no looser rein. But though she likes those tame and tender men whom she can tie up close to her ap.r.o.n-strings and lovingly imprison in the narrow domain of home, she succ.u.mbs without a struggle to the square-jawed brute of the Rochester type, the man who dominates her by the mere force of superior strength; and she is not too severe on Don Juan, if only she can flatter herself that she is the best loved--and the last. That these are the men most liked by women is shown both by their own novels and by daily observation; and it seems to us that, among the many subjects for extended study of late proposed for women, a better acquaintance with men's minds, a higher regard for the n.o.bler kind of man and the ability to accept love as only one of many qualities, and not always the strongest nor the most praiseworthy of his impulses, would not be out of place.

_HOTEL LIFE IN ENGLAND._

If any one wants to see human nature stripped of certain conventional disguises and reduced to some of its primitive elements, let him try a boarding-house or family hotel for a while. If not always a profitable, it is generally an amusing, exhibition of character; and materials are never wanting to the student of human life. The predominating quality of most people will be found to be selfishness.

There is a kind of fighting for self that goes on which is very funny, because concentrated on such mean objects. Who shall have the most comfortable chair, the best place at the window, the cosiest by the fire--such are the favourite prizes to be gained by superior craft or boldness; and the ladies chiefly interested have recourse to a series of manoeuvres to circ.u.mvent their rivals, or steal a march on them unprepared, more ingenious at times than well-bred. Then there is the lady who appropriates the only footstool, and the lady who disputes the appropriation and sometimes 'comes to words' on the same; the couple who monopolize the bagatelle board, and the couple waiting savagely for their turn, which comes only when the gong sounds for dinner or the sky clears up for a walk. The quartet who settle themselves to whist every evening as to a regular part of the business of life, without caring to inquire whether others would like to cut in or not, are more justified in their exclusiveness; else it may happen that a Club man who can make his bad cards beat his opponent's good ones is mated with a partner who inquires anxiously 'Is that the queen to beat?' then, with the king in his hand, quietly drops the deuce, and gives the adversaries the game. All these however, are regarded with equally hostile feelings by the rest of the community; and sharp sermons are administered on the sin of selfishness by the bolder sort, with the application too evident to be misunderstood.

At meal times the same kind of odd fighting for self goes on. The table is set as for a dinner party; but it is the hands of Esau and the voice of Jacob. Instead of the silent waiting for one's turn, with the quiet acceptance of fate in the shape of the butler and his underlings, that belongs to a private dinner-table, here, at the _table d'hote_, there is an incessant call for this or that out of time; an angry demand to be served sooner or better than one's neighbours; a greedy 'taking care of number one' at the head of the table that excites as greedy apprehensions in number two at the foot; a running fire of criticism on the dishes--that does not help the illusion of the private dinner-party; and, with people who live much about in hotels, there is a continual comparison with this and that, here and there, always to the disadvantage of the place and the thing under present consideration.

Among the inmates are sure to be some who are fastidious and peevish about their food; women who come down late and complain that things are not as fresh as when first served up; men who always want fried fish when the management has provided boiled, and boiled when the _menu_ says fried; dyspeptic bodies who cannot eat bread unless it is two days old, and bodies defiant of dyspepsia who will not eat it at all unless it is hot from the oven; plain feeders who turn up their noses at the made dishes, and dainty livers who call simple roast and boiled coa.r.s.e. And for all these societies the management has to cater impartially; and probably miss the reward of thanks at the end.

The feelings of people are expressed with the same kind of defiant individualism as are their tastes. There are the married people who make love to each other in public, and the married people who make anything but love; the women who sit and adore their husbands like wors.h.i.+ppers before a shrine, and who like the world to be conscious of their devotion; the men who call their wives pet names for the benefit of the whole table, and even indulge in playful little familiarities which make the girls toss their heads and the young men laugh; and the happy pair who quarrel without restraint, and say snappish and disagreeable things to each other in audible voices, to the embarra.s.sment of all who hear them. There is the rakish Lothario who neglects his own better half and devotes himself to some other man's, with a lofty disregard of appearances; and there is the coquettish little wife who treats her husband very much like a dog and very little like her lord, and who carries on her flirtations in the most audacious manner under his eyes, and apparently with his sanction.

And, having his sanction, she defies the world about her to take umbrage at her proceedings.

As for flirtations indeed, these are always going on in hotel life.

Sometimes it is flirtation between a single man and a single woman, against which no one has a word to say on the score of propriety, though some think it will never come to anything and some think it will, and all scan curiously the signs of progressive heating, or the process of cooling off. Sometimes it is a more questionable matter; the indiscreet behaviour of a young wife, unprotected by her husband, who takes up furiously with some stranger met at the _table d'hote_ by chance, and of whose character or antecedents she is utterly ignorant.

This is the kind of things that sets the whole hotel by the ears. Prim women ask severely, 'How long has Mrs. So-and-So known Major Fourstars?' and their faces, when told, are a sufficient commentary on the text. Others, in seeming innocence, call them by the same name, and express intense surprise when informed they are not man and wife, but acquaintances of only a week's standing. Others again say it is shameful to see them, and wonder why some one does not write home to the poor husband, and speak of doing that kind office themselves; and others watch them with a cynical half-amused attention, interpreting their actions by the broadest glossary, and carefully guarding their wives or daughters from any a.s.sociation with either of the offenders.

Whatever else fails, this kind of vulgar hotel intrigue is always on hand at sea-side places and the like; sometimes ending disastrously, sometimes dying out in favour of a new flame, but always causing discomfort while it lasts, and annoying every one connected therewith save the sinners themselves.

The women who dress to excess are balanced by the women who do not dress at all. The first are the walking advertis.e.m.e.nts of fas.h.i.+on, the last might be mistaken for the canva.s.sers of old clothes' shops. The one cla.s.s oppress by their magnificence, the other disgust by their dowdiness; and each ridicules the other to the indifferent third party, who, holding the scales of justice evenly, condemns both alike.

Then there are the ugly women who manifestly think themselves attractive, and the pretty women who are too conscious of their charms. To be sure there are also ugly women who are content to know themselves unpersonable, as there are pretty women who are content to know that they are pretty, just as they know that they are alive, but who think no more about it, and never trouble themselves nor their neighbours by their affectations. There are the dear motherly women beyond middle age, scant of breath and incapable of exertion, who sit in the drawing-room, placid and asthmatic, and to whom every one pays an affectionate reverence; and there are the elderly women who chirrup about like young things, and skip up and down steep places with commendable agility, and who are by no means disposed to let old age have the victory for many a year to come. There are the mothers who make their lumpish children sick with a multiplicity of good things, and the mothers who never give a moment's thought to the comfort nor the well-being of theirs; the mothers who fidget their little ones and every one else by their over-anxiety, their over caution, their incessant preoccupation and fear, and the mothers who let theirs wander, and who take it quite comfortably if they do not come in even at night-fall; the mothers who prank their children out like Mayday Jacks and Jills, and the mothers who let theirs go free in rags and dirt, till you are puzzled to believe them better born than the gutter. And with all this there is the plague of the children themselves--the babies who cry all night; the two-year-olds who scream all day; the rampaging boys who haunt the stairs and pa.s.sages and who will slide down the banisters on a wet afternoon; the clattering little troop playing at horses before your bedroom door, while you are lying down with a sick headache; and the irruption into the drawing-room of the young barbarians who have no nursery of their own.