Daughters, who are naturally and necessarily tied up to the mother's apron-string, suffer occasionally from too tight a strain; though certainly it is not the fault of the present day that girls are too closely fettered, too home-staying or subdued. Still, every now and then one comes across a matron who has crushed all individuality out of her family, and whose grown-up daughters are still children to her in moral go-carts and intellectual leading-strings. They may be the least attractive of their sex, but a mother of this kind has one fixed delusion respecting them—namely, that the world is full of wolves eager to devour her lambs, and that they are only safe when close to the maternal apron and browsing within an inch of the tether stake. These are the girls who become hopeless old maids. Men have an instinctive dread of the maternal apron-string. They do not want to marry a mother as well as a wife, and to live under a double dominion and a reduplicated opposition.
It is all very well to say that a girl so brought up is broken in already, and therefore more likely to make a good wife than many others, seeing that it is only a transfer of obedience. That may do for slaves who cannot be other than slaves whoever is the master; but it does not do for women who, seeing their friends freer than themselves, reflect with grief and longing that, had fate so ordered it, they might have been free too. The chances here, as with the mothers' boys, are, that the girl kept too close to the apron-string during her spinsterhood goes all abroad so soon as she gets on the free ground of matrimony, and lets her liberty run into license. Or she keeps her old allegiance to her mother intact, and her husband is never more than the younger branch at best. Most likely he is a usurper, whom it is her duty to disobey in favour of the rightful ruler when they chance to come into collision.
If women had their will, all national enterprise would be at an end. There would be no Arctic Expeditions, no Alpine Clubs, no dangerous experiments in science, no firearms at home, no volunteering—in their own family at least. All the danger would be done by the husbands and brothers and sons of other women, but each would guard her own. For women cannot go beyond the individual; and the loss of one of their own, by misadventure, weighs more with them than the necessity of keeping up the courage and hardihood of the nation. Nor do they see the difference between care and coddling, refinement and effeminacy; consequently, men are obliged to resist their influence, and many cut the apron-string altogether, because delicate fingers will tie the knots too tight. They do not remember that the influence to which men yield as a voluntary act of their own grace is a very different thing from obedience to the open denial, the undisguised interference and restraint, which some women like to show. Men respect the higher standard of morality kept up by women; they obey the major and the minor laws of refinement which are framed for home life and for society; and they confess that, without woman's influence, they would soon degenerate into mere savages and be no better than so many Choctaws before a generation was over; but they do not like being pulled up short, especially in public, and hounded into the safe sheepfold for all the world to see them run. And they resent the endeavour. And the world resents it too, and feels that something is wrong when a woman shows that she has the whip hand, and that she can treat her husband like a petted child or bully him like a refractory one; that she has him tied to her apron-strings and tethered to the stake of her will. But there is more of this kind of thing in families than the world at large always knows of; and many a fine, stalwart fellow who holds his own among men, who is looked up to at his club and respected in his office for his courage, decision and self-reliance, sinks into mere poodledom at home, where his wife has somehow managed to get hold of the leading-strings, and has taught him that the only way to peace is by submission and obedience.
FINE FEELINGS.
There are people who pride themselves on the possession of what it pleases them to call fine feelings. Perhaps, if we were all diligent to call spades spades, these same fine feelings would come under a less euphemistic heading; but, as things are, we may as well adopt the softening gloze that is spread over the whole of our language, and call them by a pretty name with the rest. People who possess fine feelings are chiefly remarkable for the ease with which they take offence; it being indeed impossible, even for the most wary of their associates, to avoid giving umbrage in some shape, and generally when least intended and most innocently minded. Nothing satisfies them. No amount of attention, short of absolute devotion and giving them the place of honour everywhere, sets them at ease with themselves or keeps them in good-humour. If you ask them to your house, you must not dream of mixing them up with the rest. Though you have done them an honour in asking them at all, you must give them a marked position and bear them on your hands for the evening. They must be singled out from the herd and specially attended to; introduced to the nicest people; made a fuss with and taken care of; else they are offended, and feel they have been slighted—their sensitiveness or fine feelings being a kind of Chat Moss which will swallow up any quantity of petits soins that may be thrown in, and yet never be filled. If they are your intimate friends, you have to ask them on every occasion on which you receive. They make it a grievance if they hear that you have had even a dinner party without inviting them, though your space is limited and you had them at your last gathering. Still, if it comes to their ears that you have had friends and did not include them, they will come down on you to a dead certainty if they are of the franker kind, and ask you seriously, perhaps pathetically, how they have offended you? If they are of the sullen sort they will meet you coldly, or pass you by without seeing you; and will either drift into a permanent estrangement or come round after a time, according to the degree of acidity in their blood and the amount of tenacity in their character. They have lost their friends many times for no worse offence than this.
They are as punctilious too, as they are exacting. They demand visit for visit, invitation for invitation, letter for letter. Though you may be overwhelmed with serious work, while they have no weightier burden strapped to their shoulders than their social duties and social fineries, yet you must render point for point with them, keeping an exact tally with not a notch too many on their side, if you want to retain their acquaintance at all. And they must be always invited specially and individually, even to your open days; else they will not come at all; and their fine feelings will be hurt. They suffer no liberties to be taken with them and they take none with others; counting all frock-coat friendliness as taking liberties, and holding themselves refined and you coarse if you think that manners sans façon are pleasanter than those which put themselves eternally into stays and stiff buckram, and are never in more undress than a Court suit. They will not go into your house to wait for you, however intimate they may be; and they would resent it as an intrusion, perhaps an impertinence, if you went into theirs in their absence. If you are at luncheon when they call, they stiffly leave their cards and turn away; though you have the heartiest, jolliest manner of housekeeping going, and keep a kind of open house for luncheon casuals. They do not understand heartiness or a jolly manner of housekeeping; open houses are not in their line and they will not be luncheon casuals; so they turn away grimly, and if you want to see them you have to send your servant panting down the street after them, when, their dignity being satisfied, their sensitiveness smoothed down and their fine feelings reassured, they will graciously turn back and do what they might have done at first without all this fuss and fume.
When people who possess fine feelings are poor, their sensitiveness is indeed a cross both for themselves and their friends to bear. If you try to show them a kindness or do them a service, they fly out at you for patronizing them, and say you humiliate them by treating them as paupers. You may do to your rich acquaintances a hundred things which you dare not attempt with your poor friends cursed with fine feelings; and little offices of kindness, which pass as current coin through society, are construed into insults with them. Difficult to handle in every phase, they are in none more dangerous to meddle with than when poor, though they are as bad if they have become successful after a period of struggle. Then your attention to them is time-serving, bowing to the rising sun, worshipping the golden calf, &c. Else why did you not seek them out when they were poor? Why were you not cap in hand when they went bare-headed? Why have you waited until they were successful before you recognized their value?
It is funny to hear how bitter these sensitive folks are when they have come out into the sunlight of success after the dark passage of poverty; as if it had been possible to dig them out of their obscurity when their name was still to make—as if the world could recognize its prophets before they had spoken. But this admission into the penetralia after success is a very delicate point with people of fine feelings, supposing always the previous struggle to have been hard; and even if there has been no struggle to speak of, then there are doubts and misgivings as to whether they are liked for themselves or not, and morbid speculations on the stability and absolute value of the position they hold and the attentions they receive, and endless surmises of what would be the result if they lost their fame or wealth or political power or social standing—or whatever may be the hook whereon their success hangs, and their fine feelings are impaled. The act of wisdom most impossible to be performed by these self-torturers is the philosophic acceptance of life as it is and of things as they fall naturally to their share.