Very often the pumpkin has a wife whose fibre is as close as his is loose, and whose nature is as tough as his is soft; a hard-eyed, thin-lipped, tenacious woman, who speaks little and boasts not at all, but who does all she wishes to do, and whose iron will pins her pumpkin to the wall as the spear of the Bushman pins the elephant or the rhinoceros. It is very curious to see how a blatant blustering man who is so loud and confident abroad, knocks under at home; and how the high-crested deportment which carries things with such a lofty bearing out of doors droops into the meek submission of the henpecked husband so soon as the house-door closes on him, and he is subjected to the pitiless analysis of home. There is no question of flourish then; and if by chance the ambitious crest should make an effort to display itself, the wife knows how to lower it by a few decisive words of a keen-edged kind, and her pumpkin is made to feel sharply enough the difference existing between fibre and pulp. It is almost melancholy to see one of these fine flourishing fellows so subdued. Pumpkin as he may be, it is not pleasant to see him so cut down in his pride; and involuntarily one's sympathies go with him rather than with that tenacious, hard-mouthed wife of his, who would be none the worse perhaps for a little of her husband's essential softness and with less than her own hardness.
How often too, these big fellows have no physical stamina as well as but very shaky moral fibre! A small, wiry light-weight will do twice as much as they; not, of course, where muscle only is wanted, but where the question is of endurance. Large heavy men knock up far sooner than the light-weights; and though size and weight count for something at certain times and on occasions, fibre and tenacity go for more in the long run. In the Crimea, the men who first dropped off from exposure and privation were the magnificently-built Guardsmen—men apparently bred and fed to the highest point of physical perfection; while the undersized little liners, who had nothing to be admired in them, stood the strain gamely, and were brisk and serviceable when the others were either dead or in hospital. So far as we have gone yet, we have not solved the problem of how to combine toughness and bigness, solidity and size, but for the most part fail in the one in proportion as we succeed in the other.
Many of the dark-skinned races are what we may call emotional pumpkins. Their flashing black eyes and swarthy skins seem to be instinct with passion; they look like living furnaces filled with flames and molten metal, terrible fellows, dangerous to meddle with and almost impossible to subdue. But nine times out of ten we find them to be marvellously meek persons, timid, amenable to law, unable to give offence and incapable of taking it—lambs masquerading in tiger-skins. A fair-faced Anglo-Saxon, with his sensitive blush, good-humoured smile and light blue eyes, has more pluck and pith in him than a whole brigade of certain of these dark-skinned men. He has less ferocity perhaps than they when they are thoroughly roused, though our good-humoured Anglo-Saxon is by no means destitute of ferocity on occasions when his blood is up; but his is ferocity of the quarter-staff and bludgeon stand-up fight kind—the ferocity of strength fairly put out against an adversary, not the tigerish cruelty which is almost always found when moral weakness and physical submission have a momentary triumph and reaction. Cowardly men are like women in their revenge when once they get the upper hand; and their revenge is more cruel than that of the habitually brave man who, after a fair fight, overthrows his opponent. Some of the dark-skinned races look the very ideal of the melodramatic ruffian—operatic brigands painted with broad black lines, and up to any amount of deeds of daring and of crime; but they are only pumpkins at the core. We need not go so far as Calcutta to find them; we get examples nearer home, both in Houndsditch and in Rome; for both Jews and Italians are soft-cored men in spite of their passionate outsides, and both would be better for an extra twist and toughness in their fibres.
Intellectual pumpkins are as common as those of the more specially physical kind. You meet with philosophers and 'thinkers'—perhaps they are poets, perhaps politicians—who flourish out a vague big declamation which, when you reduce it to its essence, you find to be a platitude worth nothing; whipped cream, without any foundation of solid pudding. If they are of the philosophic sort, they quote you Fichte and Hegel, to the bewilderment of your brains unless you have gone into the metaphysical maze on your own account; but they might have put all they have said into half a dozen words of three letters, like a child's first reading lesson. The flourish imposes, and people who cannot analyze take the whipped cream for solid pudding, and think that platitudes dressed in the garb of Fichte and Hegel are utterances worthy of deep respect and admiring wonder.
All the professions which talk, either by word of mouth or in print, are specially given to this manifestation of pumpkinhood. Preachers and authors sprawl and flourish over their small inheritance with a tremendous assumption of vital force and vigorous growth; and weak hands, with weaker heads, find support and shelter in their foliage. Poets too, with a knack for turning out large moulds in which they have run very small ideas, are pumpkins dear to the feminine mind. Have we not our Tupper? had we not our 'Satan' Montgomery? and a few others whom we might catalogue if we cared for the task, each with his multifarious female following and his spiritual harem of ardent admirers? All artists—that is, the men who create, or rather who assume to create—are liable to be proved pumpkins when called on to show themselves solid wood. They talk grandly enough, but when they have to translate their words into deeds, too often the noble aims and immortal efforts they have been advocating tail off into pulp and water, and we have botches and pot-boilers instead of masterpieces and high art. Perhaps we may take it as a rule that all doers who talk much and boast grandly are of the pumpkin order, and that art, like nature, elaborates best in silence.
Strong-visaged women are often pure pumpkins with a very rough and corrugated outside. It is astonishing how soon they break down, and for all their stern and powerful looks sink under burdens under which a frail little creature, as light as thistledown, will glide along quite easily. Women with black brows and harsh voices—brigandesses by appearance, or like the typical Herodias of unimaginative artists—are often the gentlest and most pithless of their sex, and may be seen acting quite compassionately towards their infants, or vindicating their womanhood by meekly sewing on their husbands' buttons and weeping at their rebukes; while a fair, silver-tongued, languid lady, as soft as if she were made of nothing harder than the traditional cream and rose-leaves, will give up her babies as a prey to unfeeling nurses and let her husband go buttonless and in rags, while she lounges before the fire indifferent to his wrath and callous to his wrongs. There is many a house mistress who looks as if she could use her fists when annoyed, who is absolutely afraid of her servants; and the maid is always the mistress when the one is fibre and the other pulp.
Heaven be praised that the strong-visaged women are not 'clear grit' all through. If they were as hard as they look, the world would go but queerly, and society would have to make new laws for the protection of its weaker male members. But nature is merciful as well as sportive, and while she amuses herself by creating pumpkins of formidable aspect, takes care that the core shall not always correspond to the rind. Like the Athenian images of the satyr which enclosed a god, the black-browed brigandesses and the men of magnificent deportment are sometimes impostors of a quite amiable kind; and when you have once learnt by heart the false analogies of form, you will cease to fear your typical Herodias, to be impressed by your copy of the Prince Regent, or to be influenced by your wordy Hegelian talking platitudes in the philosophic dialect.