Volume Ii Part 9 (2/2)

As a mother, she is discontented at the loss of personal freedom compelled by her condition; at the physical annoyances and mental anxieties included in the list of her nursery grievances. She would probably fret grievously if she had no children at all, but she frets quite as much when they come. In the former case she is humiliated, in the latter inconvenienced, and in both discontented. Indeed, the way in which so many women deliver up their children to the supreme control of hired nurses proves practically enough the depth of their discontent with maternity when they have it.

If the discontented woman is rich, she speaks despondingly of the difficulties included in the fit ordering of large means; if she is poor, life has no joys worth having when frequent change of scene is unattainable, and the milliner's bill is a domestic calamity that has to be conscientiously staved off by rigorous curtailment. If she lives in London, she laments the want of freedom and fresh air for the children, and makes the unhappy father, toiling at his City office from ten till seven, feel himself responsible for the pale cheeks and attenuated legs which are probably to be referred to injudicious diet and the frequency of juvenile dissipations. But if she is in the country, then all the charm of existence is centred in London and its thoroughfares, and not the finest scenery in the world is to be compared with the attractions of the shops in Regent Street or the crowds thronging Cheapside.

This question of country living is one that presses heavily on many a female mind; but we must believe that, in spite of the plausible reasons so often a.s.signed, the chief causes of discontent are want of employment and deadness of interest in the life that lies around. The husband makes himself happy with his rod and gun, with his garden or his books, with huntsmen or bricklayers, as his tastes lead him; but the wife--we are speaking of the wife given over to disappointment and discontent, for there are still, thank Heaven, bright, busy, happy women both in country and in town--sits over the fire in winter and by the empty hearth in summer, and finds all barren because she is without an occupation or an interest within doors or without. Ask her why she does not garden--if her circ.u.mstances are of the kind where hands are scarce and even a lady's energies would do potent service among the flower beds; and she will tell you it makes her back ache, and she does not know a weed from a flower, and would be sure to pick up the young seedlings for chickweed and groundsel. And if she is rich and has hands about her who know their business and guard it jealously, she takes shelter behind her inability to do actual manual labour side by side with them.

Within doors active housekeeping is repulsive to her; and though her servants may be quasi-savages, she prefers the dirt and discomfort of idleness to the domestic pleasantness to be had by her own industry and practical a.s.sistance. Unless she has a special call towards some particular party in the Church, she does nothing in the parish, and seems to think philanthropy and help to one's poorer neighbours part of the ecclesiastical machinery of the country, devolving on the Rectory alone. She gets bilious through inaction and heated rooms, and then says the place disagrees with her and will be the death of her before long. She cannot breathe among the mountains; the moor and plain are too exposed; the sea gives her a fit of melancholy whenever she looks at it, and she calls it cruel, crawling, hungry, with a pa.s.sion that sounds odd to those who love it; she hates the leafy tameness of the woods and longs for the freer uplands, the vigorous wolds, of her early days.

Wherever, in short, the discontented woman is, it is just where she would rather not be; and she holds fate and her husband cruel beyond words because she cannot be transplanted into the exact opposite of her present position. But mainly and above all she desires to be transplanted to London. If you were to get her confidence, she would perhaps tell you she thinks the advice of that sister who counselled the Lady of Groby to burn down the house, whereby her husband would be compelled to take her to town, the wisest and most to the purpose that one woman could give to another. So she mopes and moons through the days, finding no pleasure anywhere, taking no interest in anything, viewing herself as a wifely martyr and the oppressed victim of circ.u.mstances; and then she wonders that her husband is always ready to leave her company and that he evidently finds her more tiresome than delightful. If she would cultivate a little content she might probably change the aspect of things even to finding the mountains beautiful and the sea sublime; but dissatisfaction with her condition is the Nessus garment which clings to the unhappy creature like a second self, destroying all her happiness and the chief part of her usefulness.

Women of this cla.s.s say that they want more to do, and a wider field for their energies than any of those a.s.signed to them by the natural arrangement of personal and social duties. As administrators of the fortune which man earns, and as mothers--that is, as the directors, caretakers, and moulders of the future generation--they have as important functions as those performed by vestrymen and surgeons. But let that pa.s.s for the moment; the question is not where they ought to find their fitting occupation and their dearest interests, but where they profess a desire to do so. As it is, this desire for an enlarged sphere is one form among many which their discontent takes; yet when they are obliged to work, they bemoan their hards.h.i.+p in having to find their own food, and think that men should either take care of them gratuitously or make way for them chivalrously. In spite of Scripture, they find that the battle is to the strong and the race to the swift; and they do not like to be overcome by the one nor distanced by the other. Their idea of a clear stage is one that includes favour to their own side; yet they put on airs of indignation and profess themselves humiliated when men pay the homage of strength to their weakness and treat them as ladies rather than as equals.

Elsewhere they complain when they are thrust to the side by the superior force of the unG.o.dly s.e.x; and think themselves ill-used if fewer hours of labour--and that labour of what Mr. Carlyle called a 'slim' and superficial kind--cannot command the market and hold the field against the better work and more continuous efforts of men.

There is nothing of which women speak with more bitterness than of the lower rates of payment usually accorded to their work; nothing wherein they seem to be so utterly incapable of judging of cause and effect; or of taking to heart the unchangeable truth that the best must necessarily win in the long run, and that the first condition of equality of payment is equality in the worth of the work done. If women would perfect themselves in those things which they do already before carrying their efforts into new fields, we cannot but think it would be better both for themselves and the world.

Life is a bewildering tangle at the best, but the discontented woman is not the one to make it smoother. The craze for excitement and for unfeminine publicity of life has possessed her, to the temporary exclusion of many of the sweeter and more modest qualities which were once distinctively her own. She must have movement, action, fame, notoriety; and she must come to the front on public questions, no matter what the subject, to ventilate her theories and show the quality of her brain. She must be professional all the same as man, with M.D. after her name; and perhaps, before long, she will want to don a horsehair wig over her back hair, and address 'My Lud' on behalf of some interesting criminal taken red-handed, or to follow the tortuous windings of Chancery practice. When that time comes, and as soon as the novelty has worn off, she will be sure to complain of the hardness of the grind and the woes of compet.i.tion; and the obscure female apothecary struggling for patients in a poor neighbourhood--the unemployed lady lawyer waiting in dingy chambers for the clients who never come--will look back with envy and regret to the time when women were cared for by men, protected and worked for, and had nothing more arduous to do than attend to the house, spend the money they did not earn and forbear to add to the anxieties they did not share. Could they get all the plums and none of the suet it would be fine enough; but we question whether they will find the battle of life as carried on in the lower ranks of the hitherto masculine professions one whit more enn.o.bling or inspiriting than it is now in their own special departments. Like the poor man who, being well, wished to be better, and came to the grave as the result, they do not know when they are well off; and in their search for excitement, and their discontent with the monotony, undutifulness and inaction which they have created for themselves, they run great danger of losing more than they can gain, and of only changing the name, while leaving untouched the real nature, of the disease under which they are suffering.

_ENGLISH CLERGYMEN IN FOREIGN WATERING-PLACES._

Those persons who object to the influence of the clergy in their parishes at home, and who dislike the idea of being laid hold of by the ecclesiastical crook and dragged perforce up steep ways and narrow paths, ought to visit some of our little outlying settlements in foreign parts. They might take a revengeful pleasure in seeing how the tables there are turned against the tyrants here, and how weak in the presence of his transmarine flock is the expatriated shepherd whose rod at home is oftentimes a rod of iron, and his crook more compelling than persuasive. Of all men the most to be pitied is surely the clergyman of one of those small English settlements which are scattered about France and Italy, Germany and Switzerland; and of all men of education, and what is meant by the position of a gentleman, he is the most in thraldom.

His very means of living depending on his congregation, he must first of all please that congregation and keep it in good humour. So, it may be said, must a clergyman in London whose income is from pew-rents and whose congregation are not his paris.h.i.+oners. But London is large; the tempers and thoughts of men are as numerous as the houses; there is room for all, and lines of affinity for all. The Broad Churchman will attract his hearers, and the Ritualist his, from out of the ma.s.s, as magnets attract steel filings; and each church will be filled with hearers who come there by preference. But in a small and stationary society, in a congregation already made and not specially attracted, yet by which he has to live, the clergyman finds himself more the servant than the leader, less the pastor than the thrall. He must 'suit,' else he is nowhere, and his bread and b.u.t.ter are vanis.h.i.+ng points in his horizon; that is, he must preach and think, not according to the truth that is in him, but according to the views of the most influential of his hearers, and in attacking their souls he must touch tenderly their tempers.

These tempers are for the most part lions in the way difficult to propitiate. The elementary doctrines of Christianity must be preached of course, and sin must be held up as the thing to avoid, while virtue must be complimented as the thing to be followed, and a spiritual state of mind must be discreetly advocated. These are safe generalities; but the dangers of application are many. How to preach of duties to a body of men and women who have thrown off every national and local obligation?--who have left their estates to be managed by agents, their houses to be filled by strangers, who have given up their share of interest in the school and the village reading-room, the poor and the parish generally--men and women who have handed themselves over to indolence and pleasure-seeking, the luxurious enjoyment of a fine climate, the pleasant increase of income to be got by comparative cheapness of breadstuffs, and the abandonment of all those outgoings roughly comprised under the head of local duties and local obligations?--how, indeed? They have no duties to be reminded of in those moral generalizations which touch all and offend none; and the clergyman who should go into details affecting his congregation personally, who should preach against sloth and slander, pleasure-seeking and selfishness, would soon preach to empty pews and be cut by his friends as an impertinent going beyond his office.

His congregation too, composed of educated ladies and gentlemen, is sure to be critical, and therefore all but impossible to teach. If he inclines a hair's breadth to the right or the left beyond the point at which they themselves stand, he is held to be unsound. His sermons are gravely canva.s.sed in the afternoon conclaves which meet at each other's houses to discuss the excitement of the Sunday morning in the new arrivals or the new toilets. Has he dwelt on the humanity underlying the Christian faith? He is drifting into Socinianism; and those whose inclinations go for abstract dogmas well backed by brimstone say that he does not preach the Gospel. Has he exalted the functions of the minister, and tried to invest his office with a spiritual dignity and power that would furnish a good leverage over his flock? He is accused of sacerdotalism, and the free-citizen blood of his listening Erastians is up and flaming. Does he, to avoid these stumbling-blocks, wander into the deeper mysteries and discourse on things which no man can either explain or understand? He is accused of presumption and profanity, and is advised to stick to the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount. If he is earnest he is impertinent; if he is level he is cold. Each member of his congregation, subscribing a couple of guineas towards his support, feels as if he or she had claims to that amount over the body and soul and mind and powers of the poor parson in his or her pay; and the claim is generally worked out in snippets, not individually dangerous to life nor fortune, but inexpressibly aggravating, and as depressing as annoying. For the most part, the unhappy man is safest when he sticks to broad dogma, and leaves personal morality alone. And he is almost sure to be warmly applauded when he has a shy at science, and says that physicists are fools who a.s.sert more than they can prove, because they cannot show why an acorn should produce an oak, nor how the phenomena of thought are elaborated. This throwing of date-stones is sure to strike no listening djinn. The ma.s.s of the congregations sitting in the English Protestant churches built on foreign soil, know little and care less about the physical sciences; but it gives them a certain comfortable glow to think that they are so much better than those sinful and presumptuous men who work at bacteria and the spectroscope; and they hug themselves as they say, each man in his own soul, how much nicer it is to be dogmatically safe than intellectually learned.

Preaching personal morality indeed, with possible private application, would be rather difficult in dealing with a congregation not unfrequently made up of doubtful elements. Take that pretty young woman and her handsome _roue_-looking husband, who have come no one knows whence and are no one knows what, but who attend the services with praiseworthy punctuality, spend any amount of money, and are being gradually incorporated into the society of the place. The parson may have had private hints conveyed to him from his friends at home that, of the matrimonial conditions between the two, everything is real save the a.s.sumed 'lines.' But how is he to say so? They have made themselves valuable members of his congregation, and give larger donations than any one else. They have got the good will of the leading persons in the sacred community, and, having something to hide, are naturally careful to please, and are consequently popular.

He can scarcely give form and substance to the hints he has had conveyed to him; yet his conscience cries out on the one side, if his weakness binds him to silence on the other. In any case, how can he make himself the Nathan to this questionable David, and, holding forth on the need of virtuous living, thunder out, 'Thou art the man!'? Let him try the experiment, and he will find a hornet's nest nothing to it.

How too, can he preach honesty to men, perhaps his own churchwardens, who have outrun the constable and outwitted their creditors at one and the same time? How lecture women who flirt over the borders on the week days, but pay handsomely for their sittings on Sundays, on the crown with which Solomon endowed the lucky husband of the virtuous woman? He may wish to do all this; but his wife and children, and the supreme need of food and firing, step in between him and the higher functions of his calling; and he owns himself forced to accept the world as he finds it, sins and shortcomings with the rest, and to take heed lest he be eaten up by over-zeal or carried into personal darkness by his desire for his people's light.

Sometimes the poor man is in thrall to some one in particular rather than to his flock as a body; and there are times when this dominant power is a woman; in which case the many contrarieties besetting his position may be multiplied _ad infinitum_. Nothing can exceed the miserable subjection of a clergyman given over to the tender mercies of a feminine despot. She knows everything, and she governs as much as she knows. She makes herself the arbiter of his whole life, from his conscience to his children's boots, and he can call neither his soul nor his home his own. She prescribes his doctrine, and takes care to let him know when he has transgressed the rules she has laid down for his guidance. She treats the hymns as part of her personal prerogative, and is violently offended if those having a ritualistic tendency are sung, or if those are taken whereof the tunes are too jaunty or the measure is too slow. The unfortunate man feels under her eye during the whole of the service, like a schoolboy under the eye of his preceptress; and he dare not even begin the opening sentences until she has rustled up the aisle and has said her private prayer quite comfortably. She holds over his head the terror of vague threats and shadowy misfortunes should he cross her will; but at the same time he does not find that running in her harness brings extra grist to his mill, nor that his way is the smoother because he treads in the footsteps she has marked out for him.

Sometimes she takes a craze against a voluntary; sometimes she objects to any approach to chanting; and if certain recalcitrants of the congregation, in possession of the harmonium, insist on their own methods against hers, she writes home to the Society and complains of the thin edge of the wedge and the Romanizing tendencies of her spiritual adviser. In any case she is a fearful infliction; and a church ruled by a female despot is about the most pitiable instance we know of insolent tyranny and broken-backed dependence.

But the clergymen serving these transmarine stations are not often themselves men of mark nor equal to their contemporaries at home. They are often sickly, which means a low amount of vital energy; oftener impecunious, which presupposes want of grip and precludes real independence. They are men whose career has been somehow arrested; and their natures have suffered in the blight that has befallen their hopes. Their whole life is more or less a compromise, now with conscience, now with character; and they have to wink at evils which they ought to denounce, and bear with annoyances which they ought to resent. In most cases they are obliged to eke out their scanty incomes by taking pupils; and here again the millstone round their necks is heavy, and they have to pay a large moral percentage on their pecuniary gains. If their pupils are of the age when boys begin to call themselves men, they have to keep a sharp look-out on them; and they suffer many things on the score of responsibility when that look-out is evaded, as it necessarily must be at times. As the characteristic quality of small societies is gossip, and as gossip always includes exaggeration, the peccadilloes of the young fellows are magnified into serious sins, and then bound as a burden on the back of the poor cleric in thrall to the idle imaginings of men and the foolish fears of women. One black sheep in the pupilary flock will do more damage to the reputation of the unhappy pastor who has them in hand than a dozen s.h.i.+ning lights will do him good. Morality is a.s.sumed to be the free gift of the tutor to the pupil; and if the boy is bad the man is to blame for not having made that free-gift betimes.

Look at it how we will, the clergyman in charge of these foreign congregations has no very pleasant time of it. In a sense expatriated; his home ties growing daily weaker; his hope of home preferment reduced to _nil_; his liberty of conscience a dream of the past; and all the mystical power of his office going down in the conflict caused by the need of pew-rents, submission to tyrants, and dependence on the Home Society, he lives from year to year bemoaning the evil chances which have flung him on this barren, s.h.i.+fting, desolate strand, and becoming less and less fitted for England and English parochial work--that castle in the air, quiet and secure, which he is destined never to inhabit. He is touched too in part by the atmosphere of his surroundings; and to a congregation without duties a clergyman with views more accommodating than severe comes only too naturally as the appropriate pastor. The whole thing proves that thraldom to the means of living, or rather to the persons representing those means, damages all men alike--those in ca.s.sock and gown as well as those in slop and blouse--and that lay influence can, in certain circ.u.mstances, be just as tyrannical over the clerical conscience as clerical influence is apt to be tyrannical over lay living.

_OLD FRIENDS._

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