LA FEMME PASSÉE.
Without doubt it is a time of trial to all women, more or less painful according to individual disposition, when they first begin to grow old and lose their good looks. Youth and beauty make up so much of their personal value, so much of their natural final cause, that when these are gone many feel as if their whole career were at an end, and as if nothing were left to them now that they are no longer young enough to be loved as girls are loved, or pretty enough to be admired as mature sirens are admired. For women of a certain position have so little wholesome occupation, and so little ambition for anything save indeed that miserable thing called 'getting on in society,' that they cannot change their way of life with advancing years. Hence they do not attempt to find interest in things outside themselves, and independent of the personal attractiveness which in youth constituted their whole pleasure of existence.
This is essentially the case with fashionable women, who have staked their all on appearance, and to whom good looks are of more account than noble deeds; and, accordingly, the struggle to remain young is a frantic one with them, and as degrading as it is frantic.
With the ideal woman of middle age—that pleasant She with her calm face and soft manner, who unites the charms of both epochs, retaining the ready responsiveness of youth while adding the wider sympathies of experience—with her there has been no such struggle to make herself an anachronism. Consequently she remains beautiful to the last—far more beautiful than all the pastes and washes in Madame Rachel's shop could make her. Sometimes, if rarely in these latter days, we meet her in society, where she carries with her an atmosphere of her own—an atmosphere of honest, wholesome truth and love, which makes every one who enters it better and purer for the time. All children and all young persons love her, because she understands and loves them. For she is essentially a mother—that is, a woman who can forget herself; who can give without asking to receive; and who, without losing any of the individualism which belongs to self-respect, can yet live for and in the lives of others, and find her best joy in the well-being of those about her. There is no exaggerated sacrifice in this; it is simply the fulfilment of woman's highest duty—the expression of that grand maternal instinct which need not necessarily include the fact of personal maternity, but which, with all women worthy of the name, must find utterance in some line of unselfish action.
The ideal woman of middle age understands the young because she has lived with them. If a mother, she has performed her maternal duties with cheerfulness and love. There has been no giving up her nursery to the care of a hired servant who is expected to do for so many pounds a year things which the tremendous instinct of a mother's love could not find strength to do. When she had children, she attended to them in great part herself, and learnt all about their tempers, their maladies, and the best methods of management. As they grew up she was still the best friend they had—the Providence of their young lives who gave them both care and justice, both love and guidance. Such a manner of life has forced her to forget herself. When her child lay ill, perhaps dying, she had no heart and no time to think of her own appearance, and whether this dressing-gown was more becoming than that: and what did the doctor think of her with her hair pushed back from her face?—and what a fright she must have looked in the morning light after her sleepless night of watching! The world and all its petty pleasures and paltry pains faded away in the presence of the stern tragedy of the hour; and not the finest ball of the season seemed to be worth a thought compared to the all-absorbing question of whether her child slept after his draught and whether he ate his food with better appetite. And such a life, in spite of all its cares, has kept her young as well as unselfish; we should rather say, young because unselfish. As she comes into the room with her daughters, her kindly face unpolluted by paint, her dress picturesque or fashionable according to her taste, but decent in form and consistent in tone with her age, it is often remarked that she looks more like the sister than the mother of her girls. This is because she is in harmony with her age, and has not therefore put herself in rivalry with them; and harmony is the very keystone of beauty. Her hair is thickly streaked with white; the girlish firmness and transparency of her skin have gone; the pearly clearness of her eye is clouded; the slender grace of line is lost—but for all that she is beautiful, and she is intrinsically young. What she has lost in outside material charm—in that mere beauté du diable of youth—she has gained in character and expression; and by not attempting to simulate the attractiveness of a girl, she keeps what nature gave her—the attractiveness of middle age. And as every epoch has its own beauty—if women would but learn that truth—she is as beautiful now as a matron of fifty, because in harmony with her years, as she was when a maiden of sixteen.
This is the ideal woman of middle age, met with even yet at times in society—the woman whom all men respect; whom all women envy, and wonder how she does it; and whom all the young adore, and wish they had for an elder sister or an aunt. And the secret of it all lies in truth, in love, in purity, and in unselfishness.
Standing far apart from this sweet and wholesome idealization is la femme passée of to-day—the reality as we meet with it at balls and fêtes and afternoon At Homes, ever foremost in the mad chase after pleasure, for which alone she seems to think she has been sent into the world. Dressed in the extreme of youthful fashion; her thinning hair dyed and crimped and fired till it is more like red-brown tow than hair; her flaccid cheeks ruddled; her throat whitened; her bust displayed with unflinching generosity—as if beauty is to be measured by cubic inches; her lustreless eyes blackened round the lids, to give the semblance of limpidity to the tarnished whites; perhaps the pupils dilated by belladonna; perhaps a false and fatal brilliancy for the moment given by opium, or by eau de cologne, of which she has a store in her carriage, and drinks as she passes from ball to ball; no kindly drapery of lace nor of gauze to conceal the breadth of her robust maturity, to soften the dreadful shadows of her leanness—there she stands, the wretched creature who will not consent to grow old, and who still affects to be a fresh coquettish girl when she is nothing but la femme passée—la femme passée et ridicule into the bargain.
There is not a folly for which even the thoughtlessness of youth is but a poor excuse into which she, in all the plenitude of her abundant experience, does not plunge. Wife and mother as she may be, she flirts and makes love as if an honourable issue were as open to her as to her young daughter; or as if she did not know to what end flirting and making love lead in all ages. If we watch the career of such a woman, we see how, by slow but very sure degrees, she is obliged to lower the standard of her adorers, and to take up at last with men of inferior social position, who are content to buy her patronage by their devotion. To the best men of her own class she can give nothing that they value; so she barters with snobs, who go into the transaction with their eyes open, and take the whole affair as a matter of exchange, and quid pro quo rigidly exacted. Or she does really dazzle some very young and low-born man who is weak as well as ambitious, and who thinks the fugitive regard of a middle-aged woman of high rank something to be proud of and boasted about. That she is as old as his own mother—at this moment selling tapes behind a village counter, or gathering up the eggs in a country farm—tells nothing against the association with him; and the woman who began her career of flirtation with the son of a duke ends it with the son of a shopkeeper, having between these two terms spanned all the several degrees of degradation which lie between giving and buying. 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, even if the reality be 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 association, for all that her standing in society is undeniable, and not a door is shut against her.