Volume Ii Part 8 (2/2)

Quite recent widows with fluffy heads and no sign of their bereaved state, come to the hotel flanked by those of a couple of years'

standing, still dressed in the deepest weeds, with the significant cap cherished as a sacred symbol. Brisk young widows appeal to men's admiration by their brightness, and languid young widows excite sympathy by their despair. Pretty young widows of small endowment, whose chances you would back at long odds, are handicapped against plain-featured widows, whose desolation you know no one would ever ask to relieve were it not for those Three per cents. with which they are credited. And the widows of hotel life are always a feature worth studying. There are many who do so study them;--chiefly the old bachelor of well-preserved appearance and active habits, who has const.i.tuted himself the squire of dames to the establishment, and who takes up first with one and then another of the unprotected females as they appear, and escorts them about the neighbourhood. He never makes friends with men, but he is hand-in-glove with all the pretty women; and his critical judgment on them on their first appearance is considered final. As a rule he does not care to attach himself so exclusively to one, be she maid, wife, or widow, as to get himself talked about; but sometimes he falls into the clutches of a woman of more tenacity than he has bargained for, and, man of irreproachable respectability as he is, drifts into a flirtation which the hotel takes to mean an offer or an intrigue, according to the state of the lady concerned. As the hotel-life bachelor is generally a man of profound selfishness, the discomfort that ensues does no great harm; and it sometimes happens that it is diamond cut diamond, which is a not unrighteous retribution.

For the most part the people haunting hotels and living at _tables d'hote_ are not specially charming, but among them may sometimes be met men and women of broad views and liberal minds, cultivated and thoughtful, whose a.s.sociation time ripens into friends.h.i.+p. They stand out in bold relief among the vulgar people who talk loud, stare hard, ask impertinent questions, and discuss the dinners and the company in a broad provincial accent; among the silent people who sit gloomily at table as if oppressed with debt or a.s.sisting at a funeral; among the betting-men who flood the house at race-time, making it echo with the jargon of the Turf and the stable; among the quarrelsome people who snap and snarl at every subject started, like dogs growling over a bone; among the religious people who will testify in season and out of season, and the political people who will argue; the stupid people who have not two ideas, and the ignorant people who do not understand anything beyond the educational range of a child or a peasant; the conventional people who oppress one with their strained proprieties, and the doubtful people of whom no one knows anything and every one suspects all. Among the _oi polloi_ of hotel life the really nice people s.h.i.+ne conspicuous: and more than one pleasant friends.h.i.+p which has lasted for life has been begun over the soup and fish of a _table d'hote_.

_OUR MASKS._

We should do badly, as things are ordered, if we went about the world with our natural moral faces. Even stopping short of the extravagance of betraying our most important secrets, as in a Palace of Truth, and frankly telling men and women that we think them fools or bores, it is difficult for the most honest person in society to do without something of a mask in regard to minor matters. The old quarrel between nature and art, and where the limits of each should extend, has not yet got itself arranged; and it is doubtful whether it will during the present dispensation. It may be put to rights in some future state of human development, when the spiritualists will have it all their own way and tell us exactly what we ought to do; but pending this forecast of the millennium, we are obliged to have recourse to art for the better concealment of our natural selves, and especially, for the maintenance of that queer bundle of compromises and conventions which we call society.

The oddest consequence of the artificial state in which we find ourselves obliged to live is that nature looks like affectation, and that the highest art is the most like nature of anything we know. It is in drawing-rooms as on the stage. A thoroughly inartificial actor would be a mere dummy, just as in the Greek theatre a man with his natural face would have seemed mean and insignificant to the spectators accustomed to fixed types of heroic size and set intention.

But he whose acting brings the house down because of its truth to nature is he whose art has been the most profoundly studied, and with whom the concealment of art has therefore been the most perfectly attained. So in society. A man of thoroughly natural manners pa.s.ses as either morose or pert according to his mood--either stupid because disinclined to exert himself, or obtrusive because in the humour to talk. He means no offence, honest body! but he makes himself disagreeable all the same. Such a man is the pest of his club, and the nuisance of every drawing-room he enters. It matters little whether he is const.i.tutionally boorish or good-natured; he is natural; and his naturalness comes like an ugly patch of frieze on the cloth of gold with which the G.o.ddess of conventionality is draped.

Natural women too, may be found at times--women who demonstrate on small occasions, sincerely no doubt, but excessively; women who skip like young lambs when they are pleased and pout like naughty children when they are displeased; who disdain all those little arts of dress which conceal defects and heighten beauties, and who are always at war with the fas.h.i.+ons of the day; who despise those conventional graces of manner which have come to be part of the religion of society, contradicting point-blank, softening no refusal with the expression of a regret they do not feel, yawning in the face of the bore, admiring with the _navete_ of a savage whatever is new to them or pleasing.

Such women are not agreeable companions, however devoid of affectation they may be, however stanch adherents to truth and things as they are, according to their boast. The woman who has not a particle of untrained spontaneity left in her and who has herself in hand on all occasions, who gives herself to her company and is always collected, graceful, and at ease, playing her part without a trip, but always playing her part and never letting herself drop into uncontrolled naturalness--this is the woman whom men agree to call, not only charming, but thoroughly natural as well.

On the other hand, the untrained woman who speaks just as she thinks, and who cares more to express her own sensations than to study those of her companions, is sneered at as silly or underbred, as the current sets; or perhaps as affected; her transparency, to which the world is not accustomed and to which it does not wish to get accustomed, puzzling the critics of their kind. Social naturalness, like perfect theatrical representation, is everywhere the result of the best art; that is, of the most careful training. It simulates self-forgetfulness by the very perfection of its self-control, while untrained nature is self-a.s.sertion at all corners, and is founded on the imperious consciousness of personality.

All of us carry our masks into society. We offer an eidolon to our fellow-creatures, showing our features but not expressing our mind; and the one whose eidolon, while betraying least of the being within, reflects most of the beings without, is the most popular and considered the most self-revealed. We may take it as a certainty that we never really know any one. We may know the broad outlines of character; and we generally believe far more than we have warranty for; but we rarely, if ever, penetrate the inner circle wherein the man's real self hides. If our friend is a person of small curiosity and large self-respect, we may trust him not to commit a base action; if he has a calm temperament, with physical strength and without imagination, he will not do a cowardly one; if he has the habit of truth, he will not tell a lie on any paltry occasion; if he is tenacious and secret, he will not betray his cause nor his friend. But we know very little more than this. Even with one's most familiar friend there is always one secret door in the casket which is never opened; and those which are thrown wide apart are not those which lead to the most cherished treasures. With the frankest or the shallowest there are depths never sounded; what shall we say, then, of those who have real profundity of character?

Who is not conscious of an ego that no man has seen? In praise or blame we feel that we are not thoroughly known. There is something infinitely pathetic in this dumb consciousness of an inner self, an unrevealed truth, which bears us up through injustice and makes us shrink from excessive praise. Our very lovers love us for the least worthy part of us, or for fancied virtues which we do not possess; and if our worst enemies knew us as we are, they would come round to the other side and shake hands over the grave of their mistaken estimate.

The mask hides the reality in either case, for good or for ill; and we know that if it could be removed, we should be judged differently. For the matter of that it never can be removed. The most transparent are judged according to the temper of the spectator; and the mind sees what it brings in our judgment of our fellows as well as in other things.

But, apart from that inner nature, that hidden part which so few people even imagine exists in each other, the masks we wear in society cover histories, sufferings, feelings, which would set the world aflame if betrayed. No one who gets below the smooth crust of conventional life can be ignorant of the fierce lava flood that sometimes flows and rages underneath. In those quiet drawing-rooms where everything looks the embodiment of harmony, of tranquil understanding, and where the absence of mystery is the first thing felt, there are dramas at the very time enacting of which only the exceptionally observant catch the right cue. Ruin faces some whose s.h.i.+p of good fortune seems sailing steadily on a halcyon sea; a hideous secret stands like a spectre in the doorway of another. The domestic happiness which these covenant between themselves to show in the full suns.h.i.+ne to the world is no better than a Dead Sea apple displayed for pride, for policy, and of which those who eat alone know the extreme bitterness. The grand repute which makes men honour the name to the very echo, is a sham, and tottering to its fall. Here the confessing religionist hides by the fervour of his amens the scepticism which he dares not show by the honesty of his negation; there the respectable moralist denounces in his mask the iniquities which he practises daily when he lays it aside. To the right the masks of two loving friends greet each other with smiles and large expressions of affection, then part, to push the friendly falsehood aside, and to whisper confidentially to the crowd what scoundrelism they have mutually embraced; to the left another couple of unreasoning foes want only to see each other in unmasked simplicity to become fast allies for life. The world and all it disguises play sad mischief with human affections as well as with truth.

Everything serves for a mask. A man's public character makes one which is as impenetrable in its disguise as any. The world takes one or two salient points and subordinates every other characteristic to these.

It ignores all those subtle intricacies which modify thought and action at every turn, producing apparent inconsistency--but only apparent; and it boldly blocks out a mask of one or two dominant lines as the representative of a nature protean because complex. Any quality that makes itself seen from behind this mask which popular opinion has created out of a man's public character is voted as inconsistent, or, it may be, insincere; and the richer the nature the less it is understood. So it is with us all in our degree:--a thought which might lead us to gentler judgments on each other than it is the fas.h.i.+on to cultivate, knowing as we do that we each wear a mask which hides our real self from the world; and that if this real self is less beautiful than our admirers say, it is infinitely less hideous than our enemies would make it to appear.

_HEROES AT HOME._

We may say what we like about the worthlessness of the world and the solid charms of home, but the plain fact, stripped of oratorical disguise, is that we mostly give society the best we have and keep the worst of ourselves for our own. The hero at home is not half so fine a fellow as the hero in public, and cares far less for his audience.

Indeed, when looked at under the domestic microscope, he is frequently found to be eminently un-heroic--something of the nature of a botch rather than n.o.bility in undress and an ideal brought down to the line of sight; which would be the case if he and all things else were what they seem, and if heroism, like fine gold, was good all through. This is not saying that the hero in public is a cheat. He has only turned the best of his cloak outside, and hidden the seams and frays next his skin. We know that every man's cloak must have its seams and frays; and the vital question for each man's life is, Who ought to see most of them, strangers or friends? We fear it must be owned that, whoever ought, it is our friends who do get the worst of our wardrobe--the people we love, and for whom we would willingly die if necessary; whilst strangers, for whom we have no kind of affection, are treated to the freshest of the velvet and the brightest of the embroidery. The man, say, who is pre-eminently good company abroad, who keeps a dinner-table alive with his quick wit and keen repartee, and who has always on hand a store of unhackneyed anecdotes, the latest _on dits_, and the newest information not known to Reuter, but who hangs up his fiddle at his own fireside and in the bosom of his family is as silent as the vocal Memnon at midnight, is not necessarily a cheat. He is an actor without a part to play or a stage whereon to play it; a hero without a flag; a bit of brute matter without an energizing force.

The excitement of applause, the good wine and the pleasant dishes, the bright eyes of pretty women, the half-concealed jealousy of clever men, the sensation of s.h.i.+ning--all these things, which are spurs to him abroad, are wanting at home; and he has not the originating faculty which enables him to dispense with these incentives. He is a first-cla.s.s hero on his own ground; but it would be a tremendous downfall to his reputation were his admirers to see him as he is off parade, without the pomps and vanities to show him to advantage. He has just been the social hero of a dinner; 'so bright, so lively, so delightful,' says the hostess enthusiastically, with a side blow to her own proprietor, who perhaps is pleasant enough by the domestic hearth but only a dumb dog in public. The party has been 'made' by him, rescued from universal dullness by his efforts alone; and every woman admires him as he leaves in a polite blaze of glory, and only wishes he could be secured for her own little affair next week. So he takes his departure, a hero to the last, with a happy thought for every one and a bright word all round. The hall-door closes on him, and the hero sinks into the husband. He is as much transformed as soon as he steps inside his brougham as was ever Cinderella after twelve, with her state coach and footmen gone to pumpkin and green lizards. He likes his wife well enough, as wives and liking go; but she does not stir him up intellectually, and her applause is no whetstone for his wit. Put the veriest chit of a girl as bodkin between them and he will waken into life again, and become once more the conversational hero, because he is no longer wholly at home. His wife probably does not like it, and she laughs, as wives do, when she hears his praises from those who know him only at his best, letting off his fireworks for the applause of the crowd.

But then wives are proverbially unflattering in their estimates of their husbands' heroics; and the Truth that used to live at the bottom of a well has changed her name and abode in these later times, and has come to mean the partner of your joys, who gives you her candid opinion at home. Still, your good company abroad who sits like a mute Memnon at home is not pleasant, though not necessarily a sham.

Certainly he is no hero all through, but he may be nothing worse than one of those unfortunates whose intellect lives on drams and does not take kindly to domestic pudding.

His wife does not approve of this hanging up of the fiddle by his own fireside; yet she does the same thing on her side, and is as little a heroine by the domestic hearth as he is a hero. What his talk is to him her beauty is to her; and for whom, let us ask, does she make herself loveliest? For her husband, or for a handful of fops and sn.o.bs each one of whom individually is more indifferent to her than the other? See her in society, a very Venus dressed by Worth and Bond Street, if not by the Graces. Follow her home, and see her as her maid sees her. The abundant _chevelure_, which is the admiration of the men and the envy of the women who believe in it, is taken off and hung up like her great-grandfather's wig, leaving her small round head covered by a wisp of ragged ends broken and burnt by dyes and restorers; her bloom of glycerine and powder is washed from her face, showing the faded skin and betraying lines beneath; the antimony is rubbed off her eyelids; the effects of belladonna leave her now contracting pupils; her perfectly moulded form is laid aside with her dress; and the fair queen of the _salon_--the heroine of gaslight loveliness--stands as a lay-figure with bare tracts of possibilities whereon the artist may work, but which tracts nature has forgotten or which she herself has worked on so unmercifully as to have worn out. How many a heartache would be healed if only the heroine, like the hero, could be followed to the sanctuary of the dressing-room, and if the adored could appear to the adorer as does the one to the maid the other to the valet!

The tender, sympathetic, moist-eyed woman who condoles so sweetly with your little troubles, and whose affectionate compa.s.sion soothes you like the trickling of sweet waters or the cooling breath of a pleasant air, but who leaves her sick husband at home to get through the weary hours as he best may, who bullies her servants and scolds her children--she too, is a heroine of a cla.s.s that does not look well when closely studied. The pretty young mother, making play with her pretty young children in the Park--a smiling picture of love and loveliness--when followed home, turning into a fretful, self-indulgent fine lady, flung wearily into an easy chair, sending the children up to the nursery and probably seeing them no more until Park hour to-morrow, when their beautiful little _tetes d'ange_ will enhance her own loveliness in the eyes of men, and make her more beautiful because making the picture more complete; Mrs. Jellaby given up to universal philanthropy, refusing a crust to the beggar at her own gate, but full of tearful pity for the misery she has undertaken to mitigate at Borioboolagha; Croesus scattering showers of gold abroad, and applauded to the echo when his name, with the donation following, is read out at a public dinner, but looking after the cheese-parings at home; the eloquent upholder of human equality in public, snubbing in private all who are one degree below him in the social scale, and treating his servants like dogs; the no less eloquent descanter on the motto _n.o.blesse oblige_, when the house-door is shut between him and the world, running honesty so fine that it is almost undistinguishable from roguery--all these heroes abroad show but shabbily at home, and make their heroism within the four walls literally a vanis.h.i.+ng quant.i.ty.

People who live on the outside of the charmed circle of letters, but who believe that the men and women that compose it are of a different mould from the rest of mankind, and who long to be permitted to penetrate the rose-hedge and learn the facts of Armida's garden for themselves, sometimes learn them too clearly for their dreams to be ever possible again. They have a favourite author--a poet, say, or a novelist. If a poet, he is probably one whose songs are full of that delicious melancholy which makes them so divinely sad; an aesthetic poet; a blighted being; a creature walking in the moonlight among the graves and watering their flowers with his tears:--if a novelist, he is one whose sprightly fancy makes the dull world gay. A friend takes the wors.h.i.+pper to the shrine where the idol is to be found; in other words, they go to call on him at his own house. The melancholy poet 'hidden in the light of thought,' is a rubicund, rosy-gilled gentleman, brisk, middle-aged, comfortable, respectable, particular as to his wines, a connoisseur as to the merits of the _chef_, a _bon vivant_ of the Horatian order, and in his talk p.r.o.ne to personal gossip and feeble humour. The lively novelist, on the other hand, is a taciturn, morose kind of person, afflicted with perennial catarrh, ever ready with an unpleasant suggestion, given to start disagreeable topics of a grave, not to say depressing, nature, perhaps a rabid politician incapable of a give-and-take argument, or a pessimistic economist, taking gloomy views of the currency and despondent about our carrying trade.

<script>