The utmost limit to which enthusiasm can be carried with her is in the matter of dress and fashion; and the only subject that thoroughly arouses her is the last new colour, or the latest eccentricity of costume. Talk to her of books, and she will go to sleep; even novels, her sole reading, she forgets half an hour after she has turned the last page; while of any other kind of literature she is as profoundly ignorant as she is of mathematics; but she can discuss the mysteries of fashion with something like animation, these being to her what the wire is to the eyes of the dolls in the bazaar. Else she has no power of conversation. At the head of her own table she sits like a pretty waxen dummy, and can only simper out a few commonplaces, or simper without the commonplaces, satisfied if she is well appointed and looks lovely, and if her husband seems tolerably contented with the dinner. She is more in her element at a ball, where she is only asked to dance and not wanted to talk; but her ball-room days do not last for ever, and when they are over she has no available retreat.
If a rich doll woman is a mistake, a poor one who has been rich is about the greatest infliction that can be laid on a suffering household. Not all the teaching of experience can make wax and glue into flesh and blood, and nothing can train the human doll into a dignified or a capable womanhood. She still dresses in faded finery—which she calls keeping up appearances; and still has pretensions which no 'inexorable logic of facts' can destroy. She spends her money on sweets and ribbons and ignores the family need for meat and calico; and she sits by the fireside dozing over a trashy novel, while her children are in rags and her house is given over to disorder. But then she has a craze for the word 'lady-like,' and thinks it synonymous with ignorance and helplessness. She abhors the masculine-minded woman who helps her—sister, cousin, daughter—so far as she can abhor anything; but she is glad to lean on her strength, despite this abhorrence, and, while grumbling at her masculinity, does not disdain to take advantage of her power. The doll is only passively disagreeable though; and for all that she carps under her breath, will remain in any position in which she is placed. She will not act, but she will let you act unhindered; which is something gained when you have to deal with fools.
This quiescence of hers passes with the world for plasticity and amiability; it is neither; it is simply indolence and want of originating force. While she is young, she is nice enough to those who care only for a pretty face and a character founded on negatives; but when a man's pride of life has gone, and he has come into the phase of weakness, or under the harrow of affliction, or into the valley of the shadow of death, then she becomes in sorrowful truth the chain and bullet which make him a galley-slave for the remainder of his days, and which sign him to drudgery and despair.
As an old woman the doll has not one charm. She has learned none of that handiness, come to none of that grand maternal power of helping others, which should accompany maturity and age and has still to be thought for and protected, to the exclusion of the younger and naturally more helpless, as when she was young herself, and beautiful and fascinating, and men thought it a privilege to suffer for her sake. Nine times out of ten she has lost her temper as well as her complexion, and has become peevish and unreasonable. She gets fat and rouges; but she will not consent to get old. She takes to false hair, dyes, padded stays, arsenic or 'anti-fat,' and to artful contrivances of every description; but alas! there is no 'dolly's hospital' for her as there used to be for her battered old prototype in the nursery lumber-closet; and, whether she likes it or not, she has to succumb to the inevitable decree, and to become faded, worn out, unlovely, till the final coup de grâce is given and the poor doll is no more. Poor, weak, frivolous doll! it requires some faith to believe that she is of any good whatsoever in this overladen life of ours; but doubtless she has her final uses, though it would puzzle a Sanhedrim of wise men to discover them. Perhaps in the great readjustment of the future she may have her place and her work assigned to her in some inter-stellar Phalansterie; when the meaning of her helpless earthly existence shall be made manifest and its absurd uselessness atoned for by some kind of celestial 'charing.'
CHARMING WOMEN.
There are certain women who are invariably spoken of as charming. We never hear any other epithet applied to them. They are not said to be pretty, nor amiable, nor clever, though they may be all three, but simply charming; which we may take as a kind of verbal amalgam—the concentration and concretion of all praise. The main feature about these charming women is their intense feminality. There is no blurring of the outlines here; no confusion of qualities admirable enough in themselves but slightly out of place considering the sex; no Amazonian virtues which leave one in doubt as to whether we have not before us Achilles in petticoats rather than a true Pyrrha or a more tender Deidamia.
A charming woman is woman all over—one who places her glory in being a woman and has no desire to be anything else. She is a woman rather than a human being, and a lady rather than a woman. One of her characteristics is the exquisite grace of her manner which so sweetly represents the tender nature within. She has not an angle anywhere. If she were to be expressed geometrically, Hogarth's Line of Beauty is the sole figure that could be used for her. She is flowing, graceful, bending in mind as in body; she is neither self-asserting nor aggressive, neither rigid nor narrow; she is a creature who glides gracefully through life, and adjusts herself to her company and her circumstances in a manner little less than marvellous; working her own way without tumult or sharpness; creeping round the obstacles she cannot overthrow, and quietly wearing down more friable opposition with that gentle persistency which does so much more than turmoil and disturbance.
Even if enthusiastic—which she is for art, either as music, as painting, or yet as poetry—she is enthusiastic in such a sweet and graceful way that no one can be offended by a fire which shines and does not burn. There is no touch of scorn about her and no assumption of superior knowledge. She speaks to you, poor ignorant Philistine, with the most flattering conviction that you follow her in all her flights; and when she comes out, quite naturally, with her pretty little bits of recondite lore or professional technicalities, you cannot be so boorish as to ask for an explanation of these trite matters which she makes so sure you must understand. Are you not an educated person with a soul to be saved? can you then be ignorant of things with which every one of culture is familiar? She discourses confidentially of musicians and painters unknown to fame, and speaks as if she knew the secret doings of the Conservatoire and the R. A. council-chamber alike. The models and the methods, the loves and the hates, of the artistic world are to her things of every-day life, and you cannot tell her that she is shooting her delicate shafts wide of the mark, and that you know no more of what she means than if she were talking in the choicest Arabic.