As to the mercenary marriage, further satire is contributed by Thackeray, whose plaints over the matches made every day in Vanity Fair are well known; by Dickens and Brontë in short, glancing shafts; and by Trollope, who makes it the main or secondary theme of half a dozen novels. On the more intricate subject of the Eternal Feminine, the contributions come from Lytton, Brontë, (not, however, from Mrs. Gaskell or George Eliot), Trollope, and Meredith. The first three agree on the bane of enforced idleness, which breeds frivolity and inane restlessness. Caroline Helstone reflects bitterly on the helplessness of her position:[270]
“I observe that to such grievances as society cannot readily cure, it usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn: this scorn being only a sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded of ills they are unwilling or unable to remedy: such reminder, in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the homeless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents.”
She envies Solomon’s model woman, who had to arise early to go about her own business; and Violet Effingham exclaims,—[271]
“‘I wish I could be something, if it were only a stick in waiting, or a door-keeper. It is so good to be something!’
“‘A man should try to be something,’ said Phineas.
“‘And a woman must be content to be nothing,—unless Mr. Mill can pull us through!’”
By the late seventies, Mr. Mill, with reinforcements, had done something toward pulling us through; so that Meredith was able to satirize masculine desire to stave off the threatened feminism, and failure to appreciate the value of equality in comradeship.
In his ideal for his first betrothed, Constantia Durham, Sir Willoughby is as much Man as Egoist:[272]
“He wished for her to have come to him out of an egg shell, somewhat more astonished at things than a chicken, but as completely enclosed before he tapped the shell, and seeing him with her sex’s eyes first of all men.”
In another of the late novels, the two abstractions, society and woman, are fused in one description as,—[273]