She cannot help herself; for it is part of the insignia of her artificial youth to have the reputation of a love affair, or the pretence of one, if even the reality is a mere delusion. When such a woman as this is one of the matrons, and consequently one of the leaders of society, what can we expect from the girls? What worse example could be given to the young? When we see her with her own daughters we feel instinctively that she is the most disastrous adviser they could have; and when in the company of girls or young married women not belonging to her, we doubt whether we ought not to warn their natural guardians against allowing such associations, for all that her standing in society is undeniable, and not a door is shut against her. We may have no absolutely tangible reason to give for our distaste beyond the self-evident facts that she paints her face and dyes her hair, dresses in a very decolleté style, and affects a girlish manner that is out of harmony with her age and condition. But though we cannot formularize reasons, we have instincts; and sometimes instinct sees more clearly than reason.
What good in life does this kind of woman do? All her time is taken up, first, in trying to make herself look twenty or thirty years younger than she is, and then in trying to make others believe the same; and she has neither thought nor energy to spare from this, to her, far more important work than is feeding the hungry or nursing the sick, rescuing the fallen or soothing the sorrowful. The final cause of her existence seems to be the impetus she has given to a certain branch of trade manufacture—unless we add to this, the corruption of society. For whom, but for her, are the "little secrets" which are continually being advertised as woman's social salvation—regardless of grammar! The "eaux noire, brun, et châtain, which dyes the hair any shade in one minute;" the "kohhl for the eyelids;" the "blanc de perle," and "rouge de Lubin"—which does not wash off; the "bleu pour les veines;" the "rouge of eight shades," and "the sympathetic blush," which are cynically offered for the use and adoption of our mothers and daughters, find their chief patroness in the femme passée who makes herself up—the middle-aged matron engaged in her frantic struggle against time, and obstinately refusing to grow old in spite of all that nature may say or do.
Bad as the girl of the period often is, this horrible travesty of her vices in the modern matron is even worse. Indeed, were it not for her, the girls would never have gone to such lengths as those to which they have gone; for elder women have naturally immense influence over younger ones, and if mothers were to set their faces resolutely against the follies of the day, daughters would and must give in. As it is, they go even ahead of the young, and by example on the one hand and rivalry on the other, sow the curse of corruption broadcast where they were meant to have only a pure influence and to set a wise example. Were it not for those who still remain faithful, women who regard themselves as appointed by God the trustees for humanity and virtue, the world would go to ruin forthwith; but so long as the five righteous are left we have hope, and a certain amount of security for the future, when the present disgraceful madness of society shall have subsided.
PRETTY PREACHERS.
To beings of the rougher sex—let us honestly confess it—one of the most charming of those ever-recurrent surprises which the commonest incidents of the holidays never fail to afford is the surprise of finding themselves at church. Whatever the cause may be, whether we owe our new access of devotion to the early breakfast and the boredom of a bachelor morning, or to the moral compulsion of the cunning display of prayer-books and hymnals in the hall, or to the temptation of that chattiest and gayest of all walks—the walk to church—or to an uneasy conscience that spurs us to set a good example to the coachman, or to a sheer impulse of courtesy to the rector, certain it is that a week after we have been lounging at the club-window, and wondering how all the good people get through their Sunday morning, we find ourselves safely boxed in the family pew, and chorusing the family "Amen!"
No doubt much of our new temper springs simply from the change of scene, and if the first week in the country were a time for self-analysis we might amuse ourselves with observing what a sudden simplicity of taste may be gained simply by a rush from town. There is a pleasant irony in being denounced from pulpit and platform as jaded voluptuaries, and then finding ourselves able to trample through coppices and plunge into cowsheds as if we had never seen a cowshed or a coppice before. But there is more than the pleasure of surprise in the peculiar rural development of attendance at church. Piety brings its own reward. We find ourselves invested with a new domestic interest, and brought into far closer and warmer domestic relations. Mamma looks a great deal more benignant than usual, and the girls lean on one's arm with a more trustful confidence and a deeper sympathy.
A new bond of family union has been found in that victory of the pew over the club-window. But earthly pleasure is always dashed with a little disappointment, and one drop of bitterness lingers in the cup of joy. If only Charlie and papa would remain awake during the sermon! They are so good in the Psalms, so attentive through the Lessons, so sternly responsive to each Commandment, that it is sad to see them edging towards the comfortable corners with the text, and fast asleep under the application. Then, too, there is so little hope of reform, not merely because on this point men are utterly obdurate, but because it is impossible for their reformers even to understand their obduracy. For with both the whole question is a pure question of sympathy. Men sleep under sermons because the whole temper of their minds, as they grow into a larger culture, drifts further and further from the very notion of preaching. Inquiry, quiet play of thought, a somewhat indolent appreciation of the various sides of every subject, an appetite for novelty, a certain shrinking from the definite, a certain pleasure in the vague—these characteristics of modern minds are hardly characteristics of the pulpit. There are, of course, your drawing-room spouters, who can reel off an artistic or poetic or critical discourse of any length on the rug. But, as a rule, men neither like to pump upon their kind nor to be pumped upon. They like a quiet, genial talk which turns over everything and settles nothing. They like to put their case, to put their objection, but they like both to be brief and tentative. As a rule they talk with their guard up, and say nothing about their deeper thoughts or feelings. They vote a man who airs his emotions to be as great a bore as the man with a dogma, or the man with a hobby. A sermon, therefore, from the very necessities of its structure, is the very type of the sort of talk that revolts men most.
On the other hand, women really enjoy preaching. Mamma's reply to the natural inquiry as to the goodness of the sermon—"My dear, all sermons are good"—is something more than a matronly snub, it is the inner conviction of woman. She likes, not merely a talk, but a good long talk. She likes being abused. She likes being dogmatized over and intellectually trampled on. In fact, she has very little belief in the intellect. But then she has an immense faith in the heart. She lives in a world of affections and sympathies. She has her little tale of passion in the past that she tells over to herself in the dusk of the autumn evening. She believes that the world at large is moved by those impulses of love and dislike that play so great a part in her own. And then, too, she has her practical house-keeping side, and likes her religion done up in neat little parcels of "heads" and "considerations" and "applications," and handed over the counter for immediate use. And so while papa quarrels with the rector's forty minutes, his indiscriminate censure of a world utterly unknown to him, his declamation against Pusey or Colenso, or while Charlie laughs over his rhetoric and his sentiment, woman listens a little sadly and wearily, and longs for a golden age when husbands will love sermons and men understand clergymen.
