There is a more amiable, if a hardly more intelligent, trait in woman's character which renders her singularly averse to all criticism. Men can hardly be described as loyal to men. Whether it be their exaggerated self-esteem, their individuality, or their reason, it is certain that they do not imagine the honor of their sex to be concerned in the conduct of each particular member of it. The lawyer laughs over a little gentle fun when it is poked at his neighbor the vicar, and the parson has his amusement out of the exposure of the foibles of his friend the attorney. What they never dream of is the flinging over each other's defects the general cloak of manhood, and rallying at every smile of criticism under the general banner of the sex.
But woman, in front of the enemy, piques herself on her solidarité. Flirt or prude, prim or gay, foolish or wise, woman, once criticised, cries to her sisters, and is recognised and defended as woman. All feminine comment, all internal censure, is hushed before the foe. The tittle-tattle of the gossips, the social intrigues of the dowager, are adopted as frankly as the self-devotion of a Miss Nightingale. The door of refuge is flung open as widely for the foolish virgins as for the wise. All distinctions of age, of conduct, of intelligence, of rank are annihilated or forgotten in the presence of the enemy. Every fault is to be defended, every weakness to be held stoutly against his attacks. "No surrender" is the order of the day. It is only when the criticism of the outer world withdraws that woman's internal criticism recommences. This is, indeed, half the offence of outer assailants, that they suspend and injure the working of that inner discipline which woman exerts over woman. Mrs. Proudie, it has been said, is the Church.
Women certainly present the only analogy in the present day to that claim of internal jurisdiction for which the Church struggled so gallantly in the middle ages. No one who sees the serried ranks with which she encounters all investigation from without would imagine the severity with which she administers justice within. Like the Westphalian Vehm-gericht, the mystery of feminine courts is only equalled by their terrible sentences. Mrs. Grundy on the seat of justice is a Rhadamanthus to whom criticism may fairly leave an erring sister. But all this in nowise weakens the firmness of woman's attitude before an outer foe. She claims absolute right to all hanging, drawing, and quartering on her domains. Like a feudal baron, she will yield to no man her stocks and her gallows. But to judge from the prim front of her squares, the cordial grasp of hand-in-hand with which they form to resist all masculine charges, no one would imagine the ruthless severity with which woman was breaking some poor drummer-boy inside.
We are bound, however, to add, that in all our remarks we have only been nibbling at the outer rind of a great difficulty. Woman has characteristically fallen back on a grand principle, and has asserted her absolute immunity from all criticism whatever. It is not merely that this critic is deaf or that critic malignant, that one censor is ignorant and another basely envious of woman. All this special pleading is totally flung aside, and the defence stands on a basis of the most uncompromising sort. No man, it is asserted, can judge woman, because no man can understand her. She is the Sphinx of modern investigation, and man is not fated to be her Œdipus. We can conceive of few announcements more welcome, if it be only true.
In an age when everything seems pretty well discovered, when one cannot preserve even a shred of mystery to cloak the bareness of one's life, when the very surface of the globe is all mapped out, and the mysterious griffins of untraversed deserts are vanishing from the map, it is an amazing relief to know that an unsolved, nay more, that an insoluble, mystery is standing on one's very hearth-rug. No wonder great philosophers have spent their lives in vain in looking for the riddle of existence, when they never dreamt of looking for it at home. Why woman is so peculiarly mysterious, why the laws of her nature are so specially unintelligible to a common world, we have not yet been informed. What is asserted is simply the fact of this mystery, and before that great fact criticism retires.
All that remains for it is to pray and to wait, to hope for a revelation from within, since it is forbidden any exploration from without. Some prophetess, no doubt a veiled prophetess herself, will arise to lift the veil of her sex. Woman, let us hope, will at last unriddle woman. Smit by the sunbeams, or rather by the moonbeams, of self-discovery, the Sphinx of modern times will reveal in weird and superhuman music the mystery of her existence.
MISTRESS AND MAID ON DRESS AND UNDRESS.
No one with a soul to appreciate the extra-judicial utterances of Mr. Samuel Warren can have forgotten the memorable lament over the decline and fall of the fine old English maid-servant with which, some years ago, he introduced some cases of petty larceny to the notice of the grand-jurors of Hull. The alarm sounded with such touching eloquence from the judgment-seat was taken up last autumn, if we remember, by a venerable Countess, who, in an address to an assemblage of Cumbrian lasses, aspirants to the kitchen and the dairy, took occasion to read them a lecture on the duty of dressing with the simplicity befitting their station. Both the learned Recorder and the venerable Countess were animated by the best intentions. Their advice was excellent, and we sincerely trust that it may have induced the neat-handed Phyllis of the North to curb her immoderate taste for finery. These sporadic warnings seem likely to ripen at last into action.