But the poorer or less worthy class of feminine novelists seldom escape from the fatal influence of egotism. Women's heroines, except in the case of the best artists, are conceptions borrowed, not from without, but from within. The consequence is that there is a sameness about them which becomes at last distasteful. The conception of the injured wife or the glorified governess is one which was a novelty fifteen or twenty years ago, while it cannot be said any longer to be lively or entertaining. As literature has grown to be a woman's occupation, we are afraid that glorified governesses in fiction will, like the poor, be always with us, and continue to the end to run their bright course of universal victory. The most, perhaps, that can be hoped is that they will in the long run take the wind out of the sails of the glorified adulteresses and murderesses which at present seem the latest and most successful efforts of feminine art.
INTERFERENCE.
About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. Not tyranny, which is another matter—tyranny being active while interference is negative; the one standing as the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of the same principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some personal gain in view when it takes in hand to force people to do what they do not like to do; while interference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply prevents the exercise of free will for the mere pleasure to be had out of such prevention. Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than domestic, but the curse of interference is seen most distinctly within the four walls of home, where also it is felt the most. Very many people spend their lives in interfering with others—perpetually putting spokes into wheels with which they have really nothing to do, and thrusting their fingers into pies about the baking of which they are not in any way concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women make up the larger number and are the greater sinners.
To be sure there are some men—small, fussy, finicking fellows, with whom nature has made the irreparable blunder of sex—who are as troublesome in their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the feminine characteristics of men are so exceptional that we need not take them into serious calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in any manly sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a right to control—say, with the wife's low dresses, or the daughter's too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and knowing what men say of such displays, or fearing their effect, they stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But this kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes into another class of motives altogether, and does not belong to the kind of interference of which we are speaking.
Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other and with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to church and subscribing to their favorite mission, so much as they tell us what we are not to do; they do not command so much as they forbid; and, of all women, wives and daughters are the most given to handling these check-strings and putting on these drag-chains. Sisters, while young, are obliged to be less interfering, under pain of a perpetual round of bickering; for brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of creatures for the most part as loftily snubbed as sisters are; while mothers are nine times out of ten laid aside for all but sentimental purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be a boy and has learned to become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of personal and domestic interference lies with wives, and they know how to use the prerogative they assume.
Take an unlucky man who smokes under protest, his wife not liking to forbid the pleasure entirely, but always grudging it, and interfering with its exercise. Each segar represents a battle, deepening in intensity according to the number. The first may have been had with only a light skirmish perhaps, perhaps a mere threatening of an attack that passed away without coming to actual onslaught; the second brings up the artillery; while the third or fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets the biggest guns thundering. She could understand a man smoking one segar in the day, she says, with a gracious condescension to masculine weakness; but when it comes to more she feels that she is called on to interfere, and to do her best towards checking such a reprehensible excess. It does not weaken her position that she knows nothing of what she is talking about. She never smoked a segar herself, and therefore does not understand the uses or the abuses of tobacco; but she holds herself pledged to interfere as soon as she gets the chance, and she redeems the pledge with energy.
The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite to correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that he has a feeble digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the gauntlet of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines or sups jollily with his friends without being plucked at and reminded that salmon always disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a headache to-morrow; and "My dear! when you know how bad salad is for you!" or, "How can you eat that horrid pastry! You will be so ill in the night!" "What! more wine? another glass of whisky? how foolish you are! how wrong!" The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear stimulants; the husband is a strong large-framed man who can drink deep without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit is her husband's measure, and as soon as he has gone beyond the range of her own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks herself justified in interfering with his progress. For women cannot be brought to understand the capacities of a man's life; they cannot be made to understand that what is bad for themselves may not be bad for others, and that their weakness ought not to be the gauge of a man's strength.
A pale chilly woman afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears furs and velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East-Indian fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, father, and sons in about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must not go out without an overcoat; they must be sure to take an umbrella if the day is at all cloudy; they must not walk too far, nor ride too hard, and they must be sure to be at home by a certain hour. When such women as these have to do with men just on the boundary-line between the last days of vigor and the first of old age, they put forward the time of old age by many years. One sees their men rapidly sink into the softness and incapacity of senility, when a more bracing life would have kept them good for half-a-dozen years longer. But women do not care for this. They like men to be their own companions more than they care for any manly comradeship among each other; and most women—but not all—would rather have their husbands manly in a womanly way than in a manly one, as being more within the compass of their own sympathies and understanding.
