WOMEN’S JOURNALS
Who was the wit who, to the usual misquotation from Buffon, le style c’est l’homme, rejoined mais ce n’est pas la femme? The statement has perhaps as much truth as is required from a witticism; it is half true. Woman, unlike man, does not express all of herself. She has her reticences, her euphemisms, and her asterisks. She will on no account name all things by their names. It is one of the childish weaknesses of men, she holds, to practise veracity to excess. Like children, they cannot help blurting out the truth. But she, from diligent experiments on her own person, has learnt that truth looks all the better for having its nose powdered and its cheeks discreetly rouged. Readers of George Sand’s “Histoire de ma Vie” are often baffled in tracing the fine distinction between the woman and the make-up. Therein the work is typical, illustrating as it does the general desire of women in literature to look pretty—to look pretty in their mirror, for themselves, for their own pleasure. Not, as is sometimes erroneously asserted, to look pretty in the eyes of men or of a particular man. So one is amused but scarcely convinced by Heine’s well-known remark that every woman who writes has one eye on her paper and the other on some man—except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who had only one eye. Evidently the generalization was invented just to spite the countess. Mme. de Sévigné’s letters to her daughter are far better than those to Bussy-Rabutin. George Eliot may have had one eye on Lewes when she did her best to spoil her novels by scientific pedantry—which was sheer waste (let alone the damage to the novels), as Lewes was, by all accounts, the ugliest man in London. But on what man had Jane Austen an eye? One might ask the question about our thousands of women novelists to-day, and at once see the refutation of Heine in simple arithmetic; there would not be enough men to go round. There is clearly no rule. Heine may have been thinking of George Sand, already mentioned, whose eye—her “glad eye,” I fear it must be called—revolved as she wrote upon a round dozen of men in turn.
But there is one department of women’s literature wherein the element of doubt altogether vanishes. I mean the journals they publish, or get published, for themselves. They cannot write here with their eye on some man. Indeed, men, nice men (“nice” in the strict sense, approved in a certain talk between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney), are rather chary of even approaching such journals. They exhibit advertisements of “undies,” corsets, and other things that used to be called feminine mysteries, but are now entitled perhaps to the rank of notorieties which make one instinctively stammer, “Oh, I beg your pardon,” and beat a hasty retreat. So, it will at once be said, do all newspapers nowadays, and that is true. Yet, somehow, one feels more indiscreet in lighting upon them in the women’s journals than in the others. For one thing, they seem to be more dainty and alluring by reason of more artistic execution and glazed paper, so that they may satisfy the critical eye of their proper wearers. And, for another, there is a difference between the high-road of the newspaper, whereon a man willy-nilly must travel, and the by-path of the women’s journal, where he is at best a privileged intruder. If you ask, “Goosey, goosey, gander, whither shall I wander?” there is a distinct difference between answering, “Upstairs and downstairs,” and “in my lady’s chamber.”
All this, of course, as the judicious will have perceived, really means that I am as interested as, I suppose, are most of my fellow-men in all these curiously dainty and elegant ingenuities of women’s apparel, and that I am only pretending to be shocked. (After all, in his pursuit of veracity, even a man may occasionally powder his nose.) The advertisers, bless them, know all about that. They know that the natural man shares the naïve admiration which Pepys once expressed on seeing Lady Castlemaine’s wonderful lingerie and laces hanging out to dry on a clothes-line in Whitehall. But the natural man generally finds it convenient to be more reticent about it than Pepys.
The first number of the Woman’s Supplement, which has prompted these reflections, suggests another: the perpetual wonder and delight of men at the success with which women accommodate facts to their ideals. We saw them, just now, doing this with their literature; we saw them determined that, at all costs, this shall be pleasing and themselves the most pleasing things in it; we saw the notable success of George Sand in accommodating her historical to her ideal self. But they are as successful with nature as with history. Just now, for example, sloping shoulders are manifestly the ideal—sloping shoulders with the obviously appropriate balloon sleeves, as in Mr. Bernard Lintott’s lady, or else with no sleeves at all, as in M. Jean Doumergue’s. And part of the same ideal is that the “figure” shall be anything but “full.” Now are women’s shoulders naturally more sloping or their figures less full than they used to be? These are puzzling questions, but not beyond conjecture, and, for my part, I guess that the answer is No. Yet our women have easily triumphed over nature and slope their shoulders with the uniformity of a regiment sloping arms, while every woman with a full figure has quietly become a fausse maigre.
While I am about it, let me echo the usual male protest. As the Supplement shows, women have not yet persuaded themselves to abandon their detestable high heels. The consequence is that there threatens to be no longer any such thing as a graceful gait. Incessu patuit dea will soon have become an incomprehensible allusion. And that hideous square patch which too often peeps above the back of the shoe? I suppose it is just a practical device to strengthen the stocking in a part of stress; but I hardly think really “nice” women can abide it. On the whole, however, I subscribe cheerfully to the current opinion that woman’s dress was never so charming as it is at present. That is probably an illusion. The mysterious laws that regulate fashion mercifully regulate also the capacity for enjoying it. And it is a mercy, too, that the beauty of woman can triumph even over “old-fashioned” things. To our modern eyes the fashions of the ’70’s and ’80’s were far from beautiful in themselves—bunchy, humpy, without “line.” Yet, when they were playing Peter Ibbetson, one saw some fair women in them—and was at once reconciled, able in fact to see them with the eye of their period.