These intense and very sincere women are not as a rule men's favourites, unless they have other qualities of such a pleasant and seductive kind as to excuse the enormous blunder they make of wearing their hearts on their sleeves for drawing-room daws to peck at, and the still greater blunder of confounding love-making with love. They may be, and if they have nice manners and are good-tempered they probably are, of the race of popular women; that is, liked by both men and women; but they are not men's favourites par excellence, who moreover are never liked by women at all.
Women are quite right in one thing, hard as it seems to say it:—men's favourites, whom women dislike and distrust, are not usually good for much morally. They are often false, insincere, superficial, and possibly with a very low aim in life. And the men know all this, but forgive it for the sake of the pleasantness and charm which is the grace that shadows, or rather brightens, all the rest; having oftentimes indeed a half-contemptuous tolerance for the sins of their favourites as not expecting anything better from them. Grant that they are false, that they sail perilously near the wind, are shifty and untrustworthy—what of that? They are not favourites because of their good qualities, only because of their pleasant ones; because of that subtle je ne sais quoi of old writers which stands one in such good stead when one is at a loss for an analysis, and which is the only term that expresses the strong yet indefinite charm which certain women possess for men. It is not beauty; it is not necessarily cleverness taken in the sense of education, though it must be a keenness if not depth of intellect, and smartness if not the power of reasoning; it certainly is not goodness; it is not always youth, nor yet warmth of feeling—though all these things come in as characteristics in their turn; but it is companionship and the power of amusing. Still, what is it that creates this power, this companionship? A smart, pert, flippant little minx, as women call her, with a shrill voice and a saucy air, may be the men's favourite of one set; a refined, graceful woman, speaking softly, and with pleading eyes, may be the favourite of another; a third may be a blunt, off-handed young person, given to speaking her mind so that there shall be no mistake; a fourth may be a silent and seemingly a shy woman, fond of sitting out in retired places, and with a reputation for flirting of a quiet kind that sets the woman's fingers tingling.
There is no settled rule anyhow, and all kinds have their special sphere of shining, according to circumstances. But whatever they may be, they are useful in their generation and valuable for such work as they have to do. Society is a miserably dull affair to men when there are no favourites of any sort; where the womanhood in the room is of the kind that herds together as if for protection, and looks askance over its shoulder at the wolves in coats and beards who prowl about the sheepfold of petticoats; where conversation is monosyllabic in form and restricted in substance; where pleasant men who talk are considered dangerous, and fascinating women who answer immoral; where the matrons are grim and the maidens still in the bread-and-butter stage of existence; and where young wives take matrimonial fidelity to mean making themselves disagreeable to every man but their husband, on the plea that one never knows what may happen, and that you cannot go on with what you never begin.
WOMANLINESS.
There are certain words, suggestive rather than descriptive, the value of which lies in their very vagueness and elasticity of interpretation, by which each mind can write its own commentary, each imagination sketch out its own illustration. And one of these is Womanliness; a word infinitely more subtle in meaning, with more possibilities of definition, more light and shade, more facets, more phases, than the corresponding word manliness. This indeed must necessarily be so, since the character of women is so much more varied in colour and more delicate in its many shades than that of men.
We call it womanliness when a lady of refinement and culture overcomes the natural shrinking of sense, and voluntarily enters into the circumstances of sickness and poverty, that she may help the suffering in their hour of need; when she can bravely go through some of the most shocking experiences of humanity for the sake of the higher law of charity; and we call it womanliness when she removes from herself every suspicion of grossness, coarseness, or ugliness, and makes her life as dainty as a picture, as lovely as a poem. She is womanly when she asserts her own dignity; womanly when her highest pride is the sweetest humility, the tenderest self-suppression; womanly when she protects the weaker; womanly when she submits to the stronger. To bear in silence and to act with vigour; to come to the front on some occasions, to efface herself on others, are alike the characteristics of true womanliness; as is also the power to be at once practical and æsthetic, the careful worker-out of minute details and the upholder of a sublime idealism—the house-mistress dispensing bread and the priestess serving in the temple. In fact, it is a very Proteus of a word, and means many things by turns; but it never means anything but what is sweet, tender, gracious and beautiful. Yet, protean as it is in form, its substance has hitherto been considered simple enough, and its limits have been very exactly defined; and we used to think we knew to a shade what was womanly and what was unwomanly—where, for instance, the nobleness of dignity ended and the hardness of self-assertion began; while no one could mistake the heroic sacrifice of self for the indifference to pain and the grossness belonging to a coarse nature:—which last is as essentially unwomanly as the first is one of the finest manifestations of true womanliness. But if this exactness of interpretation belonged to past times, the utmost confusion prevails at present; and one of the points on which society is now at issue in all directions is just this very question—What is essentially unwomanly? and, what are the only rightful functions of true womanliness? Men and tradition say one thing, certain women say another thing; and if what these women say is to become the rule, society will have to be reconstructed ab initio, and a new order of human life must begin. We have no objection to this, provided the new order is better than the old, and the modern phase of womanhood more beautiful, more useful to the community at large, more elevating to general morality than was the ancient. But the whole matter hangs on this proviso; and until it can be shown for certain that the latter phase is to be undeniably the better we will hold by the former.
There are certain old—superstitions must we call them?—in our ideas of women, with which we should be loth to part. For instance, the infinite importance of a mother's influence over her children, and the joy that she herself took in their companionship—the pleasure that it was to her to hold a baby in her arms—her delight and maternal pride in the beauty, the innocence, the quaint ways, the odd remarks, the half-embarrassing questions, the first faint dawnings of reason and individuality, of the little creatures to whom she had given life and who were part of her very being—that pleasure and maternal pride were among the characteristics we used to ascribe to womanliness; as was also the mother's power of forgetting herself for her children, of merging herself in them as they grew older, and finding her own best happiness in theirs. But among the advanced women who despise the tame teachings of what was once meant by womanliness, maternity is considered a bore rather than a blessing; the children are shunted to the side when they come; and ignorant undisciplined nurses are supposed to do well for wages what mothers will not do for love.
Also we held it as womanliness when women resolutely refused to admit into their presence, to discuss or hear discussed before them, impure subjects, or even doubtful ones; when they kept the standard of delicacy, of purity, of modesty, at a high level, and made men respect, even if they could not imitate. Now the running between them and men whose delicacy has been rubbed off long ago by the intimate contact of coarse life is very close; and some of them go even beyond those men whose lives have been of a quiet and unexperimental kind. Nothing indeed, is so startling to a man who has not lived in personal and social familiarity with certain subjects, and who has retained the old chivalrous superstitions about the modesty and innocent ignorance of women, as the easy, unembarrassed coolness with which his fair neighbour at a dinner-table will dash off into thorny paths, managing between the soup and the grapes to run through the whole gamut of improper subjects.