Aye or Nay! No wonder the youth feels embarrassed! Such an examination by Life itself is hard to bear. The verdict, too, if it be favourable, is gratifying. The approval of a positive, healthy, well-built girl is a certificate of potency; because it is not only Life’s approval of one of its own products; it is healthy Life acquiescing in one of its essential means to multiplication. To feel pleased in such circumstances is perfectly justifiable; to feel satisfied here is nothing but becoming.
But there is another side to the picture, and I state it now, while we are discussing this particular situation. There is nothing more harrowing, more pathetic, more heartrending than to witness poor, patient and enduring Life, in the form of a beautiful maiden, being forced by circumstances (by the fact perhaps that this is the girl’s only chance) to choose the next best, the second best, the third best! Oh, how she stifles her highest feelings! How she chafes beneath the yoke! And how ruthlessly Life re-registers upon her eyes all the defects of her future mate, as fast as she in her positiveness wipes them away with the impatient sponge of her desire!
That “Yea,” given reluctantly, shamefully, almost guiltily (because women feel that they are betraying a trust in such circumstances), in the presence of a poor specimen of manhood,[35] simply because it is better to be positive to Life, even on a minor scale, than not to be positive at all!—there is nothing more excruciatingly painful to witness!
How often this tragic farce is enacted in our part of the world, only women know, only brave women know—they who prefer anything rather than not to remain positive to Life.
Unfortunately, it is not unusual nowadays for the positive healthy girl, particularly of the wealthier classes, to be spoilt by foolish modern prejudices that misguide her in this first important criticism of the men with whom she is confronted. From the very atmosphere she has breathed ever since her infancy, she has imbibed certain wholly fictitious standards regarding so-called “manliness” which, at this vital moment in her life, frequently cause her to make the most grievous mistakes. She has had dinned into her innumerable conventional desiderata relating to manners, sporting capacities, cheerfulness, levity, boyishness and bodily build, which now cause her to select consciously the very kind of man who is least likely to constitute an understanding and adequate mate. He must possess a certain kind of mind—supple, ready for light laughter, humorous, not too broody, not too masterful, not too self-centred, and above all, painstakingly chivalrous. He must have had his spirit, if not broken, at least curbed by the public-school system; his self-esteem severely shaken by excessive contact with mediocrities who have insisted on his being like one of themselves, and he must have the body and face of a young athlete. He must be capable of being trusted alone with her on rambles in the country, at games, on short excursions. He must not take himself or his claims or his thoughts too seriously, and the sine qua non is that he must be capable of idealizing Woman, of “looking up” to her, of feeling a lump in his throat at the thought of her purity, her devotion, her “heroism” as a mother, her condescension as a possible mate to himself, and her ladyhood.
All these attributes the spoilt positive girl of our wealthier classes has been taught to seek and select among the young men that are paraded before her; and in insisting on these attributes, she consistently, almost without exception, succeeds in taking a man who is ideally equipped with every possible characteristic for making her thoroughly and exasperatingly miserable the whole of her life. For very few indeed of these attributes have any connexion whatsoever with true, desirable manliness in a mate, and the young man who has been tamed into making a trustworthy companion to a single positive girl in her games and her walks, is more often a torture machine than a delight as her husband in later years.
But let us see what unspoilt Life, through the positive unspoilt girl, is actually trying to discover in the positive young man before her. Is she concerned with probing his soul? Does she meditate about his chances of going to Heaven when he dies? Is she wondering whether he has a load of sin that weighs him down?—She is very far from giving a thought to these matters. Her primary consideration is undoubtedly: Is he a fully equipped male? Is he a normally equipped male? Has he, above all, that exuberance which at one and the same time is beauty, sexual potency, and tense passion? Is he savoury?—that is to say, is he devoid of everything capable of ultimately inspiring disgust? Classical features are by no means a vital consideration. Exuberance and savouriness are much more important. Is there fire in his eyes?—voluptuousness and fullness in his mouth? Is there eagerness and enthusiasm in the dilatation of his nostrils? Is there energy lurking in the vibrations of his voice? Is his mouth clean and his breath pure?—Is there all this, and yet a remoteness from the brute, from the mere animal into the bargain?
These facts are ascertained in the first few seconds, and all this time Life alone has been active in criticism. A satisfactory reply to all these questions makes the young man at once an object of the keenest interest to the girl, and her eyes now begin, in a more collected and less rapid manner, to survey the accessory man—his hands, his feet, his taste as revealed by his clothes, his intelligence as revealed by his remarks, his degree of mastery as revealed by his manner of approaching her. All these things are important, because they represent not merely the “quality” but also the “surviving power” of the tree to which the female butterfly is going to entrust her eggs.
A sleek, flourishing youth has a tremendous advantage here; because it is not Woman’s self-preservative instinct that demands the evidence of a sound worldly position in a man, but again her reproductive instinct thinking of the security of the coming brood. All this, of course, is more or less unconscious, but it is satisfactorily accomplished by the instinct.
A brilliant exuberant youth, who is shabby and poor, is naturally and very rightly less attractive to the positive girl than the youth who, though less brilliant, but quite as exuberant, flings on an opulent fur coat after a champagne supper, and gracefully hands her and her chaperon into his 40-horse-power Rolls-Royce. This youth is simply irresistible!