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MODERN WOMEN

AND

WHAT IS SAID OF THEM

A REPRINT OF

A SERIES OF ARTICLES IN THE

SATURDAY REVIEW

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Mrs. LUCIA GILBERT CALHOUN

NEW YORK

J. S. REDFIELD, PUBLISHER

140 FULTON STREET

1868

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
J. S. REDFIELD,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern
District of New York.

Edward O. Jenkins,
PRINTER AND STEREOTYPER,
No. 20 North William St.

ADVERTISEMENT.

The following papers on Woman were originally published in the columns of the London Saturday Review. Some of them have already been reprinted in the literary and daily journals of this country, and they have excited no little discussion and comment among readers of both sexes.

Whether agreeing or not with the writer, it is impossible not to concede the eminent ability with which the various subjects are handled. No series of essays has appeared in the English language for many years which has been so extensively reprinted and so generally read.

The authorship of these papers has been attributed to different individuals, male and female; but it is more than probable that the writers whose names have been mentioned in this connection are precisely those who have had nothing whatever to do with them. It is not unlikely that, in due time, the publisher of this volume may be in possession of authentic information on this head, and that the name of the author may then appear on the title-page.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

The "Woman Question" will not be put to silence. It demands an answer of Western legislators. It besets college faculties. It pursues veteran politicians to the fastnesses of so-called National Conventions. Under the sacred sounding-boards of New England pulpits has its voice been heard, and its unexpected ally, the London Saturday Review, introduces it to the good society of English drawing-rooms. That this introduction comes in the form of diatribe and denunciation is a matter of the least moment. Judgment will finally rest, not on the conclusions of the special pleader, but on the strength of the case of the accused.

Something, clearly, is wrong with fashionable women. They accept the thinnest gilt, the poorest pinchbeck, for gold. They care more for a dreary social pre-eminence than for home and children. They find in extravagance of living and a vulgar costliness of dress their only expression of a vague desire for the beauty and elegance of life. Is it, therefore, to be inferred that the race of noble women is dying out? St. Paul was hardly less severe than the London Saturday, if less explicit, in his condemnation of the fashionable women of his day, yet we look upon that day as heroic. Certainly neither London nor New York can rival the luxury of a rich Roman matron, yet it was not the luxury of her women which destroyed the empire, and Brutus's Portia was quite as truly a representative woman as the superb Messalina. John Knox thought that things were as bad as they could possibly be when he thundered at vice in high places; and if there had been a John Knox in the court of Charles the Second, he would have sighed for a return of the innocent days of his great-grandfather.

On the whole, that hope which springs eternal suggests that the fashionable women of the reign of Victoria, and of our seventeenth President, are not essentially more discouraging than all the generations of the thoughtless fair who danced idly down forgotten pasts. Nay, we may even hope that they are better. If they will not actually think, yet the fatal contagion of the newspaper and the modern novel communicates to them an intellectual irritation which might almost stand for a mental process. If they have not ideas, they have notions of things, and however inexact and absurd these may be, they are better than emptiness.

"Worse, decidedly worse," says our implacable critic; "when women were content with looking pretty before marriage, and with good housekeeping after, they were uninteresting certainly, but they were respectable. Now they dabble in all things; are weakly æsthetic, weakly scientific, weakly controversial, and wholly prosy, and contemptible." Dabbling is pitiful, certainly, and weakness has few allies, but let us do justice even to the weak dabblers. Æsthetic, or scientific, or controversial training has but recently been made possible to women. Their previous range of study had been very narrow. It is not strange that the least attainments should seem to them very profound and satisfactory, and the most manifest deductions pass for original conclusions. It is natural that their undisciplined faculties should grapple feebly with difficulties, and be quite unequal to argument. This is no reason for flinging the baffling volumes at their heads; better so educate their heads that the volumes shall no longer baffle.

Scolded because they have not an idea beyond dress, laughed at when they try to think of something better, a word may certainly be said for the good temper and the patience even of the fashionable women, who would be wiser if they could.

The fault is, we are assured, that these women take up books only to enhance their matrimonial value, and with no thought of the worth of study. Let us be just. What business or the professions are to most men, marriage is to most women. Men qualify themselves, if they can, for that competitive examination which is always going on, and which insures clients to the best lawyers, and business to the best merchant, and parishes to the best preacher. Women, compelled to wait at home for the wooing which changes their destiny, qualify themselves with attractions for that competitive examination which all marriageable young women feel that they undergo from every marriageable young man. Each has an eye to business. One does not feel that the motive in the one case is any higher than in the other.

It is very bad, of course, that marriage should be a matter of business. It is, perhaps, the most tragic of all perversions. But, evidently, the evil is not to be abated by jeremiads, nor by lectures to young women, no, nor even by brilliant editorials. So long as women believe that inglorious ease is better than work, so long as they are taught that they are born to be the gentle dependents of a stronger being, so long as courage and capacity are held to be "strong-minded," so long as the range of employments for women is narrow, and the standard of wages lower than men's, so long they will seek in marriage a home, a larger liberty of action, an establishment, a servant who shall supply them with money and insure them ease without effort of their own.

Men take the business opening which seems most congenial and most profitable. Women do the same thing, and their choice naturally falls upon marriage as altogether the most promising speculation of their very small list. The remedy seems to be to give women as thorough mental training as men receive, to make their training tend as directly to the business of earning their bread and their pretty feminine adornments, and for the same work to pay them the same wages. If it be objected that fashionable women will not work, let it be answered that work itself would be fashionable if it were held to be a dignity, and not a drudgery, and that the really fine and thoughtful leaders of society could easily establish the new order of things. In an aristocratic country, where labor is the badge of caste, it would be difficult to make it honorable. In a democracy like our own, it is the most contemptible snobbishness which frowns on the honest earning of money.

The accusation of prodigal and senseless expenditure in dress must stand unrefuted. Sums which would adorn our cities with pleasure-gardens, with libraries, with galleries of art, are spent on perishable gauds that have not even beauty to commend them. Charities might be founded, lives be enriched with travel, all lands laid under contribution with the money that every year flows into Stewart's drawers, and the strong-boxes of fashionable dress-makers. But the jewelled prodigals who spend it are not more selfish, perhaps, than we plain folks who carp.

Again, it is a mistake. They have the money. They mean to secure all the pleasure that money can buy. They have that feminine sensuousness which delights in color, and odor, and richness of fabric. Their sense of beauty is untaught. A little lower in the scale of civilization they would pierce their noses, and dye their finger-nails, and wear strings of glass beads. A little higher, they would sacrifice the splendid shawl to a rare marble, banish the chromo-lithograph, and turn the solitaire ear-drops into a lovely picture, and build a conservatory with the price of lace flounces. A little higher still, and we might have model lodging-houses, and foundling hospitals, and music in the squares given us by kindly women who had saved the money from milliner, and jeweller, and silk-mercer.

But standing just where they are, clothes seem to these same undeveloped women the best things money can buy; and a lack of culture confuses them as to the attributes of clothes. Just now our fashionable women are bitterly reprehended for copying the dress of the "Anonymas," who establish the very pronounced fashions of Paris. Half of them do not know what model they have taken. The other half accept the various and tasteless costumes, not because they are devised by "Anonyma," but because they are striking. There is something in the commonplaceness of fashionable life which smothers all originality of thought, of action, even of device in costume; and the women who give most time and money to dress, to whom one would look for perfection in that mixed art, are almost invariably the women who are exact reproductions of their neighbors in this regard, as in their house-furnishing, their equipages, and their manners.

Upon these splendidly monotonous fine ladies flashes the vision of "Anonyma," with her meretricious beauty, and her daring toilettes. Amenable to no social Mrs. Grundy, her love of dress develops itself in bold contrasts of color, in bizarre and showy ornaments, in picturesque, and often in grotesque and tawdry effects. But whatever the details, the whole is always striking. Our women longing for the new, accept the absurd; desiring the picturesque, take the bizarre, and eager for the elegant, content themselves with the costly.

Nor does the fact that our present fashionable evening costume is immodest, of necessity impugn the modesty of the women who wear it. That they are wanting in fineness of perception must be admitted. But women of fashion accept without question the dictum of their modistes. La Belle Hamilton, the famous beauty of the reign of Charles the Second, so delicately modest and pure that she passed unbreathed upon by scandal through that most dissolute court, is painted in a costume that the fastest of New York belles would not venture to wear at the most fashionable of receptions. The gracious and self-sacrificing and womanly women of our revolution, wore dresses cut lower than those of their great-grand-daughters, as any portrait-gallery will show. The dress is indefensible, but let us not be too ready to condemn the wearer for worse sins than thoughtlessness and vanity.

One doubts if there is a single Becky Sharp the less, (poor Becky!) since Thackeray gave such terrible immortality to their great prototype. The satirist is not the reformer. The satirized do not see themselves in the exaggerated type. They go their way, and thank God that they are not as these others. The critic of the London Saturday, beginning, perhaps, with the intention of telling sad and sober truth about a class, has ended with a list of the follies and faults of individuals, and these are set down with the keen and unconvincing clearness of the satirist.

It is a good thing indeed, that any aspect of the "woman question" should claim place, week after week, in a leading English journal. It is a good thing that it has been thought wise to reprint these essays here. All this talk about the wrong ways of women suggests that there is a right way, as yet very much involved in the dust of discussion and the fogs of speculation. All these accusations against her folly imply a proportionate tribute to her possible wisdom, if once she can get a fair chance to be wise.

What the reviewer urges against the effect of fashionable life on the intellect, cannot be gainsayed. But in America, at least, the injury to the young men is greater apparently than to the young women. At any evening party in New York, at any "Hop" in Newport or Saratoga, the faces of the men are of a lower type, their talk is more inane, their manners are more vulgar. The girls are empty enough, heaven knows! but they seem capable of better things, most of them. And they are not so wholly spoiled in character. I have found very fashionable girls capable of large sacrifices for love, or kindred, or obedience to some divine voice. This proves that they have only to be taught that there is something better than being very fashionable, to take it thankfully. But the men seemed sordid and selfish, and grown worldly-wise before their time.

Yet it might make us both more just and more generous to remember that during our time of peril as a nation, these very ranks of purposeless men furnished us soldiers and money, and a cheerful faith in the cause, just as these very legions of idle women gave us workers and nurses.

There is this cheer for American readers of these pages: What we have been told is our national sin of extravagance, the too pronounced character of our social life, the frivolity and ignorance of our women, the lack of a universal and high-toned society, we find not to be inborn defects peculiar to our system of government, and hopeless of change, but vices, also, of an old and cultivated and dignified nation.

A cheerful optimist may well believe that we are in a transition state; that women, impatient of the old life which was without thought and culture and motive, in the blind struggle to something better have fallen for the time on something worse; that with the movement of the age toward mutual helpfulness, man to man, women will move not less steadily, if more slowly, and come gradually into truer relations with each other and with men. It will not hurt woman to be criticised. She has too long been assured of her angelhood, and denied her womanhood. It will not help her very greatly to be criticised as if she were being tomahawked. If they who come to scoff would but remain to teach! There has been much ungentle judgment of men by women, of women by men. Thoreau said, "Man is continually saying to Woman, 'Why are you not more wise?' Woman is continually saying to Man, 'Why are you not more loving?' Unless each is both wise and loving there can be no real growth."

L. G. C.

THE

MODERN WOMEN.

THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD.

Time was when the stereotyped phrase, "a fair young English girl," meant the ideal of womanhood; to us, at least, of home birth and breeding. It meant a creature generous, capable, and modest; something franker than a Frenchwoman, more to be trusted than an Italian, as brave as an American, but more refined, as domestic as a German and more graceful. It meant a girl who could be trusted alone if need be, because of the innate purity and dignity of her nature, but who was neither bold in bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival; one who would consider their interests identical, and not hold him as just so much fair game for spoil; who would make his house his true home and place of rest, not a mere passage-place for vanity and ostentation to go through; a tender mother, an industrious house-keeper, a judicious mistress. We prided ourselves as a nation on our women. We thought we had the pick of creation in this fair young English girl of ours, and envied no other men their own.

We admired the languid grace and subtle fire of the South; the docility and affectionateness of the East seemed to us sweet and simple and restful; the vivacious sparkle of the trim and sprightly Parisienne was a pleasant little excitement when we met with it in its own domain; but our allegiance never wandered from our brown-haired girls at home, and our hearts were less vagrant than our fancies. This was in the old time, and when English girls were content to be what God and nature had made them. Of late years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the world a race of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal as if we had created another nation altogether. The girl of the period, and the fair young English girl of the past, have nothing in common save ancestry and their mother-tongue: and even of this last the modern version makes almost a new language through the copious additions it has received from the current slang of the day.

The girl of the period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her face, as the first articles of her personal religion; whose sole idea of life is plenty of fun and luxury; and whose dress is the object of such thought and intellect as she possesses. Her main endeavor in this is to outvie her neighbors in the extravagance of fashion. No matter whether, as in the time of crinolines, she sacrificed decency, or, as now in the time of trains, she sacrifices cleanliness; no matter either, whether she makes herself a nuisance and an inconvenience to every one she meets.

The girl of the period has done away with such moral muffishness as consideration for others, or regard for counsel and rebuke. It was all very well in old-fashioned times, when fathers and mothers had some authority and were treated with respect, to be tutored and made to obey, but she is far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in mid-career by these slow old morals; and as she dresses to please herself, she does not care if she displeases every one else. Nothing is too extraordinary and nothing too exaggerated for her vitiated taste; and things which in themselves would be useful reforms if let alone become monstrosities worse than those which they have displaced so soon as she begins to manipulate and improve. If a sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the mud, she raises hers midway to her knee. If the absurd structure of wire and buckram, once called a bonnet, is modified to something that shall protect the wearer's face without putting out the eyes of her companion, she cuts hers down to four straws and a rosebud, or a tag of lace and a bunch of glass beads.

If there is a reaction against an excess of Rowland's Macassar, and hair shiny and sticky with grease is thought less nice than if left clean and healthy crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks hers out on end like certain savages in Africa, or lets it wander down her back like Madge Wildfire's, and thinks herself all the more beautiful the nearer she approaches in look to a maniac or a negress. With purity of taste she has lost also that far more precious purity and delicacy of perception which sometimes mean more than appears on the surface. What the demi-monde does in its frantic efforts to excite attention, she also does in imitation. If some fashionable dévergondée en evidence is reported to have come out with her dress below her shoulder-blades, and a gold strap for all the sleeve thought necessary, the girl of the period follows suit next day; and then wonders that men sometimes mistake her for her prototype, or that mothers of girls not quite so far gone as herself refuse her as a companion for their daughters. She has blunted the fine edges of feeling so much that she cannot understand why she should be condemned for an imitation of form which does not include imitation of fact; she cannot be made to see that modesty of appearance and virtue ought to be inseparable, and that no good girl can afford to appear bad, under penalty of receiving the contempt awarded to the bad.

This imitation of the demi-monde in dress leads to something in manner and feeling, not quite so pronounced, perhaps, but far too like to be honorable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to slang, bold talk, and fastness; to the love of pleasure and indifference to duty; to the desire of money before either love or happiness; to uselessness at home, dissatisfaction with the monotony of ordinary life, and horror of all useful work; in a word, to the worst forms of luxury and selfishness, to the most fatal effects arising from want of high principle and absence of tender feeling.

The girl of the period envies the queens of the demi-monde far more than she abhors them. She sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously appointed, and she knows them to be flattered, fêted, and courted with a certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only the admiration while she ignores the disdain. They have all for which her soul is hungering, and she never stops to reflect at what a price they have bought their gains, and what fearful moral penalties they pay for their sensuous pleasures. She sees only the coarse gilding on the base token, and shuts her eyes to the hideous figure in the midst, and the foul legend written around the edge.

It is this envy of the pleasures, and indifference to the sins, of these women of the demi-monde which is doing such infinite mischief to the modern girl. They brush too closely by each other, if not in actual deeds, yet in aims and feelings; for the luxury which is bought by vice with the one is the thing of all in life most passionately desired by the other, though she is not yet prepared to pay quite the same price. Unfortunately, she has already paid too much, all, indeed, that once gave her distinctive national character. No one can say of the modern English girl that she is tender, loving, retiring, or domestic. The old fault so often found by keen-sighted Frenchwomen, that, she was so fatally romanesque, so prone to sacrifice appearances and social advantages for love, will never be set down to the girl of the period. Love, indeed, is the last thing she thinks of, and the least of the dangers besetting her. Love in a cottage, that seductive dream which used to vex the heart and disturb the calculations of prudent mothers, is now a myth of past ages. The legal barter of herself for so much money, representing so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure; that is her idea of marriage; the only idea worth entertaining.

For all seriousness of thought respecting the duties or the consequences of marriage, she has not a trace. If children come, they find but a stepmother's cold welcome from her; and if her husband thinks that he has married anything that is to belong to him—a tacens et placens uxor pledged to make him happy—the sooner he wakes from his hallucination and understands that he has simply married some one who will condescend to spend his money on herself, and who will shelter her indiscretions behind the shield of his name, the less severe will be his disappointment. She has married his house, his carriage, his balance at the banker's, his title; and he himself is just the inevitable condition clogging the wheels of her fortune; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated with more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the old-fashioned sort, not girls of the period pur sang, that marry for love, or put the husband before the banker.

But she does not marry easily. Men are afraid of her; and with reason. They may amuse themselves with her for an evening, but they do not take her readily for life. Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a poor copy of the real thing; and the real thing is far more amusing than the copy, because it is real. Men can get that whenever they like; and when they go into their mother's drawing-rooms, to see their sisters and their sisters' friends, they want something of quite different flavor. Toujours perdrix is bad providing all the world over; but a continual weak imitation of toujours perdrix is worse. If we must have only one kind of thing, let us have it genuine; and the queens of St. John's Wood in their unblushing honesty, rather than their imitators and make-believes in Bayswater and Belgravia. For, at whatever cost of shocked self-love or pained modesty it may be, it cannot be too plainly told to the modern English girl that the net result of her present manner of life is to assimilate her as nearly as possible to a class of women whom we must not call by their proper—or improper—name. And we are willing to believe that she has still some modesty of soul left hidden under all this effrontery of fashion, and that, if she could be made to see herself as she appears to the eyes of men, she would mend her ways before too late.

It is terribly significant of the present state of things when men are free to write as they do of the women of their own nation. Every word of censure flung against them is two-edged, and wounds those who condemn as much as those who are condemned; for surely it need hardly be said that men hold nothing so dear as the honor of their women, and that no one living would willingly lower the repute of his mother or his sisters. It is only when these have placed themselves beyond the pale of masculine respect that such things could be written as are written now; when they become again what they were once they will gather round them the love and homage and chivalrous devotion which were then an Englishwoman's natural inheritance. The marvel, in the present fashion of life among women, is how it holds its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men. It used to be an old-time notion that the sexes were made for each other, and that it was only natural for them to please each other, and to set themselves out for that end. But the girl of the period does not please men. She pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how little she does that, the class of women she has taken as her models of itself testifies.

All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and genuine girl of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties, to this loud and rampant modernization, with her false red hair and painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and by preference leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. She thinks she is piquant and exciting when she thus makes herself the bad copy of a worse original; and she will not see that though men laugh with her they do not respect her, though they flirt with her they do not marry her; she will not believe that she is not the kind of thing they want, and that she is acting against nature and her own interests when she disregards their advice and offends their taste. We do not see how she makes out her account, viewing her life from any side; but all we can do is to wait patiently until the national madness has passed, and our women have come back again to the old English ideal, once the most beautiful, the most modest, the most essentially womanly in the world.

FOOLISH VIRGINS.

The heroines of the London season—the fillies, we mean, who have been entered for the great matrimonial stakes, and have been mentioned in the betting—have by this time exchanged the fast pleasures of the town for the vapid pastimes of the country. We do not of course concern ourselves with those poor simple girls who only repeat the lives and morals of old-fashioned English homes, and who are too respectable and too modest to be pointed at as the girls of the season. We speak of the fast sisterhood only. After three months of egregious dissipation they enter duly upon the next stage of their regular yearly alternations. Three months of headlong folly are succeeded by three months of deadly ennui. Action and reaction are always equal. The pains and weariness of moral crapulousness arise in nice proportion to the passion of the debauch. It is a dismal hour when we look on the withered leaves of last night's garland.

The lovely and unlovely beings who are now living depressed days far from Belgravia and the Row have, it is true, but joyless orgies to look back upon. Their pleasures gave but a pinchbeck joviality after all, were but a thin lacker spread over mercenary cares and heart-aching jealousies—not the jealousies of passion, but the nipping vulgar vexation with which a shopkeeper trembles lest a customer should go to his rival over the way. Still there was excitement—the excitement of outdoing a rival in shamelessness of apparel, in reckless abandonment of manner, in the unblushing tolerance of impudent speech, in all the other elements of ignoble casino-emulation. Above all, there was the tickling excitement of knowing that all this was in some sort clandestine; that ostensibly, and on the surface, things looked as if they were all exhibiting human nature at its stateliest, most dignified, and most refined pitch. The consciousness that the thin surface only conceals some of the worst elements of character in full force and activity must give a pleasantly stinging sensation to an acutely cynical woman. However, this is all over for a time.

For a time the half-dressed young Mænads of the season will be found clothed and in their right minds. And what sort of a right mind is it? We know the kind of preparation which they have had for the business of the season—for flirting, husband-hunting, waltzing, dressing so as to escape the regulations of the police, and the rest. For this their training has been perfect. But wise men agree that education should comprehend training for all the parts of life equally—for pleasure not less than for business, for hours of relaxation as well as for hours of strain and pressure, for leisure just as much as for active occupation. Education is supposed to arm us at every point. Nobody in this world was ever perfectly educated. Everybody has at least one side on which he is weak—one quarter where temptations are either not irresistible, or else are not recognised as alluring to what is wrong. But we all know that training, though never perfect, can make the difference between a decently right and happy life and a bad, corrupt half-life or no life. What does training do for the nimble-footed young beauties of the London ball-room? It makes them nimble-footed, we admit. And what else?

The root-idea of the training of girls of the uppermost class in this country is perhaps the most absolutely shameless that ever existed anywhere out of Circassia or Georgia. It puts clean out of sight the notion that women are rational beings as well as animals, or that they are destined to be the companions of men who are, or ought to be, also something more than animals. It takes the mind into account only as an occasionally useful accident of body. The mind ought to be developed a little, and in such a way as to make the body more piquant and attractive. Like the candle inside a Chinese lantern, it may serve to light up and show to advantage the pretty devices outside. But the outside is the important thing, and the inside only incidental. Insipidity of mind is perhaps a trifle objectionable, because there are a few young men of property who dislike insipidity, and who therefore might be lost from the toils in consequence. It is a crotchet and an eccentricity in a man to desire a wife with a bright mind, but since there are such persons, it is just as well to pay a slight attention to the mind in odd moments when one is not engaged upon the more urgent business of the body. You don't know what may happen, and it is possible that the most eligible parti of a season may dislike the idea of taking a female idiot to wife. Still it would be absurd to change the entire system of up-bringing for our girls merely because here and there a man has a distaste for a fool.

The majority of men are incapable of gauging power of intellect and fineness of character. But the veriest blockhead and simpleton who ever lounged in a doorway or lisped in Pall Mall can tell a fine woman when he sees her, and is probably able to find pleasure and hope in the spectacle. It is these blockheads and simpletons who thus set the mode. They fix the standard of fashionable female education. Education, or the astounding modern conception of it, means preparation of girls for the marriage market. If a girl does not get well married, it were better for her and for her mother also if she had never been born, or had been cast with a millstone round her neck into the sea. Whom she marries—whether a man old enough to be her father, whether a pattern of imbecility, whether a man of a notoriously debauched character—this matters not a jot. Only let him have money. This being the conception of marriage, and marriage being the aim of all sagacious up-bringing, as most men unhappily are more surely taken on their animal than on their rational side, it is perfectly natural that you should strive to bring up a worthy family of attractive young animals. And let us pause upon this.

If the idea which, even at its best, would be so deplorably imperfect, were rationally carried out, still it would not be so absolutely pestilent and debasing as it is. Physical education, rightly practiced, is a fine and indispensable process in right living. If the system had for its end the rearing of really robust and healthy creatures, it would mean something. On the contrary, however, anybody who makes a tour through fashionable rooms in the season may see that, in a vast quantity of cases, the heroines of the night are just as sorrily off in bodily stamina as they are for intellectual ideas and interests. Here we again encounter the fundamental blunder, that it is only the outside about which we need concern ourselves. Let a woman be well dressed (or judiciously undressed), have bright eyes, a whitish skin, rounded outlines, and that suffices. All this a wise English mother will certainly secure, just as a wise Chinese woman will take care to have tiny feet, plucked eyebrows, and black finger-nails.

If you go into a nursery you will see the process already at work. The little girl, who would fain exercise her young limbs by manifold rude sprawlings and rushing hither and thither, and single combats with her brothers, is tricked out in ribbons and gay frocks, and bid sit still in solemn decorum. With every year of her growth this principle of attention to outside trickeries and fineries is more rigidly pursued. Less and less every year are the nerves and muscles, the restless activities of arms and legs, exercised and made to purvey new vigor to the life. The blood is allowed to grow stagnant. The life of the woman, even as mere animal, becomes poor and morbid and artificial. By dint of much attention and many devices, the outside of the body is maintained comely in the eyes of people whose notions of comeliness are thoroughly artificial and sophisticated. But how can there be any health with high eating, little exercise, above all, with the mind left absolutely vacant of all interests? The Belgravian mother does not even understand the miserable trade she has chosen. She is as poor a physical trainer as she is poor morally and intellectually.

The truth is that in a human being, even from the physical point of view, it is rather a dangerous thing to ignore the intellect and the emotions. Nature resents being ignored. If you do not cultivate her, she will assuredly avenge herself. If you do not get wheat out of your piece of ground, she will abundantly give you tares. And there can be no other rule expressly invented for the benefit of fashionable young women. Their moral nature, if nobody ever taught them to keep an eager eye upon it, is soon overgrown, either with flaunting poison plants, or at best with dull gray moss. The parent dreams that the daughter's mind is all swept and garnished. Lo, there are seven or any other number of devils that have entered in and taken possession, more or less permanently. The human creature who has never been taught to take an interest in what is right and wholesome will, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, take an interest in what is wrong and unwholesome. You cannot keep minds in a state of vacuum. A girl, like anybody else, will obey the bent of the character which has been given either by the education of design or the more usual education of mere accidental experience. Everything depends, in the ordinary course of things, upon the general view of the aims and objects of life which you succeed, deliberately or by hazard, in creating.

A girl is not taught that marriage has grave, moral and rational purposes, itself being no more than a means. On the contrary, it is always figured in her eyes as an end, and as an end scarcely at all connected with a moral and rational companionship. It is, she fancies, the gate to some sort of paradise whose mysterious joys are not to be analysed. She forgets that there are no such swift-coming spontaneous paradises in this world, where the future can never be anything more than the child of the present, indelibly stamped with every feature and line of its parent. This castle-building, however, is harmless. If it does not strengthen, still it does not absolutely impoverish or corrupt, characters. Of some castle-building one cannot say so much. Character is assuredly corrupted by avaricious dreams of marriage as a road to material opulence and luxury. There is, indeed, no end to the depraved broodings which may come to an empty and undirected mind. If the emotions and the intellect are not tended and trained, they will run to an evil and evil-propagating seed. Rooted and incurable frivolty is the best that can come of it; corruption is the worst.

People madly suppose that going to church, or giving an occasional blanket to a sick old woman, will suffice to implant a worthy conception of the aims of life. At this moment, some mothers are, perhaps, believing that the dull virtue of the country will in a few days redress the balance which had been too much discomposed by the rush and whirl of the town. As if one strong set of silly interests and emotions could be effaced at will by simple change of scene, without substitution of new interests and emotions. Excess of frivolous excitement is not repaired or undone by excess of mere blankness and nothingness. The dreariness of the virtue of the villeggiatura is as noxious as the whirl of the mercenary and little virtuous period of the season. Teach young women from their childhood upwards that marriage is their single career, and it is inevitable that they should look upon every hour which is not spent in promoting this sublime end and aim as so much subtracted from life. Penetrated with unwholesome excitement in one part of their existence, they are penetrated with killing ennui in the next.

If mothers would only add to their account of marriage as the end of a woman's existence—which may be right or it may not—a definition of marriage as an association with a reasonable and reflective being, they would speedily effect a revolution in the present miserable system. To the business of finding a husband a young lady would then add the not less important business of making herself a rational person, instead of a more or less tastefully decorated doll with a passion for a great deal of money. She might awaken to the fact, which would at first startle her very much no doubt, that there is a great portion of a universe outside her own circle and her own mind. This simple discovery would of itself effect a revolution that might transform her from being an insipid idiot into a tolerably rational being. As it is, the universe to her is only a collection of rich bachelors in search of wives, and of odious rivals who are contending with her for one or more of these too wary prizes. All high social aims, fine broad humanizing ways of surveying life, are unknown to her, or else appear in her eyes as the worship of Mumbo Jumbo appears in the eyes of the philosopher. She thinks of nothing except her private affairs. She is indifferent to politics, to literature—in a word, to anything that requires thought. She reads novels of a kind, because novels are all about love, and love had once something to do with marriage, her own peculiar and absorbing business. Beyond this her mind does not stir. Any more positively gross state one cannot imagine. There are women who are by accident more degraded physically. Mutatis mutandis, there are none more degraded, morally and intellectually, than those whose minds are constantly bent upon marriage at any cost, and with anybody, however decrepit, however silly, and however evil, who can make a settlement.

LITTLE WOMEN.

The conventional idea of a brave, an energetic, or a supremely criminal woman is a tall, dark-haired, large-armed virago, who might pass as the younger brother of her husband, and about whom nature seemed to have hesitated before determining whether to make her a man or a woman—a kind of debatable land, in fact, between the two sexes, and almost as much one as the other. Helen Macgregor, Lady Macbeth, Catharine de' Medici, Mrs. Manning, and the old-fashioned murderesses in novels, are all of the muscular, black-brigand type, with more or less of regal grace superadded according to circumstances; and it would be thought nothing but a puerile fancy to suppose the contrary of those whose personal description is not already known. Crime, indeed, especially in art and fiction, has generally been painted in very nice proportion to the number of cubic inches embodied, and the depth of color employed; though we are bound to add that the public favor runs towards muscular heroines almost as much as towards muscular murderesses, which to a certain extent redresses the overweighted balance.

Our later novelists, however, have altered the whole setting of the palette. Instead of five foot ten of black and brown, they have gone in for four foot nothing of pink and yellow; instead of tumbled masses of raven hair, they have shining coils of purest gold; instead of hollow caverns whence flash unfathomable eyes eloquent of every damnable passion, they have limpid lakes of heavenly blue; and their worst sinners are in all respects fashioned as much after the outward semblance of the ideal saint as can well be managed. The original notion was a very good one, and the revolution did not come before it was wanted; but it has been a little overdone of late, and we are threatened with as great a surfeit of small-limbed, yellow-headed criminals as we have had of the man-like black. One gets weary of the most perfect model in time, if too constantly repeated; as now, when we have all begun to feel that the resources of the angel's face and demon's soul have been more heavily drawn on than is quite fair, and that, given "heavy braids of golden hair," "bewildering blue eyes," "a small lithe frame," "a special delicacy of feet and hands," and we are booked for the companionship, through three volumes, of a young person to whom Messalina or Lucretia Borgia would be a mere novice.

And yet there is a physiological truth in this association of energy with smallness; perhaps, also, with a certain tint of yellow hair, which, with a dash of red through it, is decidedly suggestive of nervous force. Suggestiveness, indeed, does not go very far in an argument; but the frequent connection of energy and smallness in women is a thing which all may verify in their own circles. In daily life, who is the really formidable woman to encounter?—the black-browed, broad-shouldered giantess, with arms almost as big in the girth as a man's? or the pert, smart, trim little female, with no more biceps than a ladybird, and of just about equal strength with a sparrow? Nine times out of ten, the giantess with the heavy shoulders and broad black eyebrows is a timid, feeble-minded, good tempered person, incapable of anything harsher than a mild remonstrance with her maid, or a gentle chastisement of her children. Nine times out of ten her husband has her in hand in the most perfect working order, so that she would swear the moon shone at midday if it were his pleasure that she should make a fool of herself in that direction. One of the most obedient and indolent of earth's daughters, she gives no trouble to any one, save the trouble of rousing, exciting, and setting her agoing; while, as for the conception or execution of any naughty piece of self-assertion, she is as utterly incapable as if she were a child unborn, and demands nothing better than to feel the pressure of the leading-strings, and to know exactly by their strain where she is desired to go and what to do.

But the little woman is irrepressible. Too fragile to come into the fighting section of humanity, a puny creature whom one blow from a man's huge fist could annihilate, absolutely fearless, and insolent with the insolence which only those dare show who know that retribution cannot follow—what can be done with her? She is afraid of nothing, and to be controlled by no one. Sheltered behind her weakness as behind a triple shield of brass, the angriest man dare not touch her, while she provokes him to a combat in which his hands are tied. She gets her own way in everything, and everywhere. At home and abroad she is equally dominant and irrepressible, equally free from obedience and from fear. Who breaks all the public orders in sights and shows, and, in spite of king, kaiser, or policeman X, goes where it is expressly forbidden that she shall go? Not the large-boned, muscular woman, whatever her temperament; unless, indeed, of the exceptionally haughty type in distinctly inferior surroundings, and then she can queen it royally enough, and set everything at most lordly defiance. But in general the large-boned woman obeys the orders given, because, while near enough to man to be somewhat on a par with him, she is still undeniably his inferior. She is too strong to shelter herself behind her weakness, yet too weak to assert her strength and defy her master on equal grounds. She is like a flying-fish, not one thing wholly; and while capable of the inconveniences of two lives, is incapable of the privileges of either.

It is not she, for all her well-developed frame and formidable looks, but the little woman, who breaks the whole code of laws and defies all their defenders—the pert, smart, pretty little woman, who laughs in your face, and goes straight ahead if you try to turn her to the right hand or to the left, receiving your remonstrances with the most sublime indifference, as if you were talking a foreign language she could not understand. She carries everything before her, wherever she is. You may see her stepping over barriers, slipping under ropes, penetrating to the green benches with a red ticket, taking the best places on the platform over the heads of their rightful owners, settling herself among the reserved seats without an inch of pasteboard to float her. You cannot turn her out by main force. British chivalry objects to the public laying on of hands in the case of a woman, even when most recalcitrant and disobedient; more particularly if a small and fragile-looking woman. So that, if it is only a usurpation of places especially masculine, she is allowed to retain what she has got amid the grave looks of the elders—not really displeased though at a flutter of her ribbons among them—and the titters and nudges of the young fellows.

If the battle is between her and another woman, they are left to fight it out as they best can, with the odds laid heavily on the little one. All this time there is nothing of the tumult of contest about her. Fiery and combative as she generally is, when breaking the law in public places she is the very soul of serene daring. She shows no heat, no passion, no turbulence; she leaves these as extra weapons of defence to women who are assailable. For herself she requires no such aids. She knows her capabilities and the line of attack that best suits her, and she knows, too, that the fewer points of contact she exposes the more likely she is to slip into victory; the more she assumes, and the less she argues, the slighter the hold she gives her opponents. She is either perfectly good-humored or blankly innocent; she either smiles you into indulgence or wearies you into compliance by the sheer hopelessness of making any impression on her. She may, indeed, if of the very vociferous and shrill-tongued kind, burst out into such a noisy demonstration that you are glad to escape from her, no matter what spoils you leave on her hands; just as a mastiff will slink away from a bantam hen all heckled feathers and screeching cackle, and tremendous assumption of doing something terrible if he does not look out. Any way the little woman is unconquerable; and a tiny fragment of humanity at a public show, setting all rules and regulations at defiance, is only carrying out in the matter of benches the manner of life to which nature has dedicated her from the beginning.

As a rule, the little woman is brave. When the lymphatic giantess falls into a faint or goes off into hysterics, she storms, or bustles about, or holds on like a game terrier, according to the work on hand. She will fly at any man who annoys her, and bears herself as equal to the biggest and strongest fellow of her acquaintance. In general she does it all by sheer pluck, and is not notorious for subtlety or craft. Had Delilah been a little woman she would never have taken the trouble to shear Samson's locks. She would have defied him with all his strength untouched on his head, and she would have overcome him too. Judith and Jael were both probably large women. The work they went about demanded a certain strength of muscle and toughness of sinew; but who can say that Jezebel was not a small, freckled, auburn-haired Lady Audley of her time, full of the concentrated fire, the electric force, the passionate recklessness of her type? Regan and Goneril might have been beautiful demons of the same pattern; we have the example of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers as to what amount of spiritual deviltry can exist with the face and manner of an angel direct from heaven; and perhaps Cordelia was a tall dark-haired girl, with a pair of brown eyes, and a long nose sloping downwards.

Look at modern Jewesses, with their flashing Oriental orbs, their night-black tresses, and the dusky shadows of their olive-colored complexions; as catalogued properties according to the ideal, they would be placed in the list of the natural criminals and lawbreakers, while in reality they are about as meek and docile a set of women as are to be found within the four seas. Pit a fiery little Welsh woman or a petulant Parisienne against the most regal and Junonic amongst them, and let them try conclusions in courage, in energy, or in audacity; the Israelitish Juno will go down before either of the small Philistines, and the fallacy of weight and color in the generation of power will be shown without the possibility of denial. Even in those old days of long ago, when human characteristics were embodied and deified, we do not find that the white-armed, large-limbed Hērē, though queen by right of marriage, lorded it over her sister goddesses by any superior energy or force of nature. On the contrary, she was rather a heavy-going person, and, unless moved to anger by her husband's numerous infidelities, took her Olympian life placidly enough, and once or twice got cheated in a way that did no great credit to her sagacity. A little Frenchwoman would have sailed around her easily; and as it was, shrewish though she was in her speech when provoked, her husband not only deceived but chastised her, and reduced her to penitence and obedience as no little woman would have suffered herself to be reduced.

There is one celebrated race of women who were probably the powerfully-built, large-limbed creatures they are assumed to have been, and as brave and energetic as they were strong and big—the Norse women of the sagas, who, for good or evil, seem to have been a very influential element in the old Northern life. Prophetesses, physicians, dreamers of dreams and the accredited interpreters as well, endowed with magic powers, admitted to a share in the councils of men, brave in war, active in peace, these fair-haired Scandinavian women were the fit comrades of their men, the fit wives and mothers of the Berserkers and the Vikings. They had no tame or easy life of it, if all we hear of them is true. To defend the farm and the homestead during their husbands' absence, and to keep themselves intact against all bold rovers to whom the Tenth Commandment was an unknown law; to dazzle and bewilder by magic arts when they could not conquer by open strength; to unite craft and courage, deception and daring, loyalty and independence, demanded no small amount of opposing qualities. But the Steingerdas and Gudrunas were generally equal to any emergency of fate or fortune, and slashed their way through the history of their time more after the manner of men than women; supplementing their downright blows by side thrusts of craftier cleverness when they had to meet power with skill, and were fain to overthrow brutality by fraud. The Norse women were certainly as largely framed as they were mentally energetic, and as crafty as either; but we know of no other women who unite the same characteristics, and are at once cunning, strong, brave and true.

On the whole, then, the little women have the best of it. More petted than their bigger sisters, and infinitely more powerful, they have their own way in part because it really does not seem worth while to contest a point with such little creatures. There is nothing that wounds a man's self-respect in any victory they may get or claim. Where there is absolute inequality of strength, there can be no humiliation in the self-imposed defeat of the stronger; and as it is always more pleasant to have peace than war, and as big men for the most part rather like than not to put their necks under the tread of tiny feet, the little woman goes on her way triumphant to the end, breaking all the laws she does not like, and throwing down all the barriers that impede her progress, perfectly irresistible and irrepressible in all circumstances and under any condition.

PINCHBECK.

Not many years ago no really refined gentlewoman would have worn pinchbeck. False jewelry and imitation lace were touchstones with the sex, and the woman who would condescend to either was assumed, perhaps not quite without reason, to have lost something more than the mere perception of technical taste. This feeling ran through the whole of society, and pinchbeck was considered as at once despicable and disreputable. The successful speculator, sprung from nothing, who had made his fortune during the war, might buy land, build himself a mansion, and set up a magnificent establishment, but he was never looked on as more than a lucky adventurer by the aboriginal gentry of the place; and the blue blood, perhaps nourishing itself on thin beer, turned up its nose disdainfully at the claret and madeira which had been personally earned and not lineally inherited. This exclusiveness was narrow in spirit, and hard in individual working; and yet there was a wholesome sentiment underlying its pride which made it valuable in social ethics, if immoral on the score of natural equality and human charity. It was the rejection of pretentiousness, however gilded and glittering, in favor of reality, however poor and barren; it was the condemnation of make-believes—the repudiation of pinchbeck. It is not a generation since this was the normal attitude of society towards its nouveaux riches and Brummagem jewelry; but time moves fast in these later days, and national sentiments change as quickly as national fashions.

We are in the humor to rehabilitate all things, and pinchbeck has now its turn with the rest. The lady of slender means who would refuse to wear imitation lace and false jewelry is as rare as the country society which would exclude the nouveau riche because of his newness, and not adopt him because of his riches. The whole anxiety now is, not what a thing is, but how it looks—not its quality, but its appearance. Every part of social and domestic life is dedicated to the apotheosis of pinchbeck. It meets us at the hall door, where miserable make-believes of stuccoed pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial dignity on a wretched little villa, run up without regard to one essential of home comfort or of architectural truth. It goes with us into the cold, conventional drawing-room, where all is for show, nothing for use, where no one lives, and which is just the mere pretence of a dwelling-room, set out to deceive the world into the belief that its cheap finery is the expression of the every-day life and circumstances of the family. It sits with us at the table, which a confectioner out of a back street has furnished, and where everything, down to the very flowers, is hired for the occasion. It glitters in the brooches and bracelets of the women, in the studs and signet-rings of the men; it is in the hired broughams, the hired waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers, the cheap champagne, and the affectation of social consideration that meet us at every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle classes is penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck, and for one family that holds itself in the honor and simplicity of truth, ten thousand lie, to the world and to themselves, in frippery and pretence.

The greatest sinners in this are women. Men are often ostentatious, often extravagant, and not unfrequently dishonest in that broadway of dishonesty which is called living beyond their means—sometimes making up the deficit by practices which end in the dock of the Old Bailey; but, as a rule, they go in for the real thing in details, and their pinchbeck is at the core rather than on the surface. Women, on the contrary, give themselves up to a more general pretentiousness, and, provided they can make a show, care very little about the means; provided they can ring their metal on the counter, they ignore the want of the hall-stamp underneath. Locality, dress, their visiting-list, and domestic appearances are the four things which they demand shall be in accord with their neighbor's; and for these four surfaces they will sacrifice the whole internal fabric. They will have a showy-looking house, encrusted with base ornamentation and false grandeur, though it lets in wind, rain, and sound almost as if it were made of mud or canvas, rather than a plain and substantial dwelling-place, with comfort instead of stucco, and moderately thick walls instead of porches and pilasters. Most of their time is necessarily passed at home, but they undergo all manner of house discomfort resulting from this preference of cheap finery over solid structure, rather than forego their "genteel locality" and stereotyped ornamentation. A family of daughters on the one side, diligent over the "Battle of Prague;" a nursery full of crying babies on the other; more Battles of Prague opposite, diversified by a future Lind practicing her scales unweariedly; water-pipes bursting in the frost, walls streaming in the thaw, the lower offices reeking and green with damp, and the upper rooms too insecure for unrestricted movement—all these, and more miseries of the same kind, she willingly encounters rather than shift into a locality relatively unfashionable to her sphere, but where she could have substantiality and comfort for the same rent that she pays now for flash and pinchbeck.

In dress it is the same thing. She must look like her neighbors, no matter whether they can spend pounds to her shillings, and run up a milliner's bill beyond what she can afford for the whole family living. If they can buy gold, she can manage pinchbeck; glass that looks like jet, like filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is every bit to her as good as the real thing; and if she cannot compass Valenciennes and Mechlin, she can go to Nottingham and buy machine-made imitations that will make quite as fine a show. How poor soever she may be, she must hang herself about with ornaments made of painted wood, glass, or vulcanite; she must break out into spangles and beads and chains and benoîtons, which are cheap luxuries, and, as she thinks, effective. Flimsy silks make as rich a rustle to her ear as the stateliest brocade, and cotton-velvet delights the soul that cannot aspire to Genoa. The love of pinchbeck is so deeply ingrained in her that even if, in a momentary fit of aberration into good taste, she condescends to a simple material about which there can be neither disguise nor pretence, she must load it with that detestable cheap finery of hers till she makes herself as vulgar in a muslin as she was in a cotton velvet.

The simplex munditiis, which used to be held as a canon of feminine good taste, is now abandoned altogether, and the more she can bedizen herself according to the pattern of a Sandwich islander the more beautiful she thinks herself, the more certain the fascination of the men, and the greater the jealousy of the women. This is the cause of all the tags and streamers, the bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces there, the puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off some dead girl's head, wherewith the modern Englishwoman delights to make herself hideous. It is pinchbeck throughout. But we fear she is past praying for in the matter of fashion, and that she is too far given over to the abomination of pretence to be called back to truth for any ethical reason whatsoever, or indeed by anything short of high examples. And then, if simplicity became the fashion, we should have our pinchbeck votaries translating that into extremes as they do now with ornamentation; if my lady took to plainness, they would go to nakedness.

Another bit of pinchbeck is the visiting-list—the cards of invitation stuck against the drawing-room glass—with the grandest names and largest fortunes put forward, irrespective of dates or tenses. The chance contact with the people represented may be quite out of the ordinary circumstances of life, but their names are paraded as if an accident, which has happened once and may never occur again, were in the daily order of events. They are brought to the front to make others believe that the whole social thickness is of the same quality; that generals and admirals and sirs and ladies are the common elements of the special circle in which the family habitually moves; that pinchbeck is good gold, and that stucco means marble. Women are exceedingly tenacious of these pasteboard appearances.

In a house with its couple of female servants, where formal visitors are very rare, and invitations, save by friendly word of mouth, rarer still, you may see a cracked china bowl or cheap mock patera on the hall table, to receive the cards which are assumed to come in the thick showers usual with high people who have hall-porters, and a thousand names or more on their books. The pile gets horribly dusty to be sure, and the upper layer turns by degrees from cream-color to brown; but antiquity is not held to weaken the force of grandeur. The titled card left on a chance occasion more than a year ago still keeps the uppermost place, still represents a perpetual renewal of aristocratic visits, and an unbroken succession of social triumphs. Yellowed and soiled, it is none the less the trump-card of the list; and while the outside world laughs and ridicules, the lady at home thinks that no one sees through this puerile pretence, and that the visiting-list is accepted according to the status of the fugleman at the head. She is very happy if she can say that the pattern of her dress, her cap, her bonnet, was taken from that of Lady So and So; and we may be quite sure that all personal contact with grand folks does so express itself, and perpetuate the memory of the event, by such imitation—at a distance. It is too good an occasion for the airing of pinchbeck to be disregarded, and, consequently, for the most part is turned to this practical account. Whether the fashion will be suited to the material, or to the other parts of the dress, is quite a secondary consideration, it being of the essence of pinchbeck to despise both fitness and harmony.

There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the appearance of social influence, much cultivated by women of a certain activity of mind, and with more definite aims than all women have. This belongs to a grade one step higher than the small pretences we have been speaking of—to women who have money, and so far have one reality, but who have not, by their own birth or their husband's, the original standing which would give them this influence as of right. Some make themselves notorious for their drawing-room patronage of artists, which, however, does not often include buying their pictures; others gather around them scores of obscure authors, whose books they talk of, if they do not read; a few, a short time since, were centres of spiritualistic circles, and got a queer kind of social influence thereby, so far as Philistine desire to witness the "manifestations" went; and one or two are names of weight in the emancipated ranks, and take chiefly to what they call "working women." These are they who attend Ladies' Committees, where they talk bosh, and pound away at utterly uninteresting subjects, as diligently as if what they said had any point in it, and what they did any ultimate issue in probability or common sense. But beyond the fact of having a large house, where their several sets may assemble at stated periods, these would-be lady patronesses are utterly impotent to help or hinder; and their patronage is just so much pinchbeck, not worth the trouble of weighing.

In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless dissatisfaction with what they are, and ceaseless endeavour to appear something they are not, our middle-class ladies are doing themselves and society infinite mischief. They set the tone to the world below them, and the small tradespeople and the servants, when they copy the vices of their superiors, do not imitate her grace the duchess, but the doctor's wife over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door, and the young ladies everywhere, who all try to appear women of rank and fortune, and who are ashamed of nothing as much as of industry, truth and simplicity. Hence the rage for cheap finery in the kitchen, just a trifle more ugly and debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence the miserable pretentiousness, and pinchbeck fine-ladyism, filtering like poison through every pore of our society, to result God only knows in what grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and education will come to the front, and endeavour to stay the plague already begun.

Chains and brooches may seem but small material causes for important moral effects, but they are symbols; and, as symbols, of deep national value. No good will be done till we get back some of our fine old horror of pinchbeck, and once more insist on truth as the foundation of our national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do not land us here; and the progress of the arts and society must not be brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home business. Here is something for them to do—the regeneration of society by means of their own energies; the bringing people back to the dignity of truth and the beauty of simplicity; and the substitution of that self-respect which is content to appear what it is, for the feeble pride which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot get gold, and which endeavors so hard to hide its real estate, and to pass for what it is not and never could be.

PUSHING WOMEN.

The achievements of Anglo-Saxon energy present a rich mine of material to the bookmaker. We are justly proud of our self-made men—of our Chancellors who have risen from the barber's-shop to the Woolsack, of our low-born inventors who have fought their way to scientific recognition, of our merchant princes who have begun life with a capital of one half-crown. The story of the man who has raised himself to eminence by his own exertions, in the face of overwhelming disadvantages and obstacles, is a thrice-told tale, thanks to Mr. Smiles and other biographers. But our admiration has been almost exclusively drawn to these signal examples of pushing men. The analogous exploits of the fair sex remain comparatively unchronicled. No one has hitherto published a book about Self-made Women. Yet this branch of the subject would be very interesting, and even instructive. Of course the opportunity for the display of energy in pushing is, in the case of woman, much more limited. She cannot push at the Bar or in the Church, or in business. Her sphere for pushing is practically narrowed down to one department of human life—society. But within the limits of that sphere she exhibits very remarkable proofs of this peculiar form of activity. Moreover, pushing is a feature so peculiarly characteristic of the English, as distinct from the Continental salon, that no attempt to place a picture of the Englishwoman in her totality before her foreign critics would be complete without it.

There are three periods in the career of a pushing woman. The first is that in which she emerges from obscurity, or, worse perhaps, from the notoriety of commercial antecedents, and carried, by a vigorous push, the outworks of fashionable society. The wife of a successful speculator in cotton or guano, who is also the mistress of a comfortable mansion in Bloomsbury, gradually becomes restless and dissatisfied with her surroundings. It would be curious to trace the growth of this discontent. Ambition is deeply rooted in the female bosom. Even housemaids are actuated by an impulse to better themselves, and village school-mistresses yearn for a larger sphere. Perhaps it is this instinct to rise, so creditable to the sex, which compels a lady with a long purse, and a name well known in the city, to enter the lists as an aspirant to fashion. Perhaps her career is developed by a more gradual process. Climbing social Alps is like climbing material Alps—for a time the intervening heights shut out from view the grander peaks. It is not till one has topped Peckham or Hackney that a more extended horizon bursts on the eye, and one catches sight of the glittering summits of Belgravia. Account for it as we may, the phenomenon of a woman in the enjoyment of every comfort and luxury that wealth can give, but ready to barter it all for a few crumbs of contemptuous notice from persons of rank, is by no means uncommon. Probably the fashionable newspaper is a great stimulus to pushing.

The rich vulgarian pores over Court Circulars and catalogues of aristocratic names till the fascination becomes irresistible, and the desire to see her own name, purged of cotton or guano, figuring in the same sheet grows to a monomania. But how is this to be done? Fortunately for the purpose which she has in view, there exist in these latter days amphibious beings, half trader, half fop, with one set of relations with the world of commerce and another set of relations with the world of fashion. The dandy, driven into the city by the stress of his fiscal exigencies, forms a link between the East-end and the West. Among his other functions is that of giving aid and counsel, not exactly gratis, to any fair outsider who wants to "get into" society. For every applicant he has but one bit of advice. She must spend money.

For a woman who is neither clever nor beautiful nor high-born, there is but one way to proceed. She must bribe right and left. No rotten borough absorbs more cash than the fashionable world. Its recognition is merely a question of money. All its distinctions have their price. It exacts from the pushing woman a thumping entrance-fee in the shape of a sumptuous concert or ball. Nor is it only the first push which costs. Every subsequent advance is as much a matter of purchase as a step in the army.

There is a tariff of its honors, and any Belgravian actuary can calculate to a nicety the price of a stare from a great lady, or a card from a leader of fashion. This is the philosophy expounded by the amphibious dandy to his civic pupil. The upshot is, that she must give an entertainment, or a series of entertainments, on a scale of great splendor. Of course the house in Bloomsbury must be exchanged for another in a fashionable quarter. A more profuse style of living must be adopted. Her equipages must be gorgeous, her flunkeys numerous and well powdered. Above all, she must at once and for ever make a clean sweep of all her old friends. Upon these conditions, and in consideration of a douceur for himself, he agrees to be her friend, and help her to push. Then follows a delicate negotiation with one of those dowagers who rather pique themselves on their good nature in standing sponsors to pushing nobodies. She, too, makes her conditions. For the sake of the elderly pet to whom she is indebted for her daily supply of scandal, she consents to countenance his protegée. But she declines to ask her to her own house. She will dine with her, provided the dinner is exquisite, and two or three of her own cronies are included in the invitation. Last and crowning condescension, she will ask the company for the proposed concert or ball, provided the thing is done regardless of expense. It would be hard to say which a cynic would think most charming—the readiness to accept, or the inclination to impose, such conditions.

At last the great occasion arrives. Planted at the top of her staircase, under the wing of her fashionable allies, the nominal giver of the entertainment is duly stared at and glared at by a supercilious crowd, who examine her with the same sort of languid interest which they devote to a new animal at the Zoological. The greater number are "going on" to another party. But the next morning brings balm for every mortification. Her ball is blazoned in the fashionable journals, and the well-bred reporter, while elaborately complimentary to the exotics, is discreetly silent as to the supercilious stares. She does not exactly awake to find herself famous, but at least she is no longer outside the Pale. At a considerable outlay, she has got into what a connoisseur in shades of fashion would call tenth-rate society. This is not much; still, it is a beginning, and a beginning is everything to a pushing woman.

In the pushing woman of the transition period we behold a lady who has got a certain footing in society, but who is straining every nerve, in season and out of season, by hook and by crook, to improve her position. Society within the Pale is divided into a great many "zones" or "sets." It is like a target, with outer, middle, inner, and innermost circles. The exterior circle, corresponding to "the black" in archery, consists of persona, for the most part, with limited means and moderate ambition. People who try to combine fashion with economy stick here, and advance no further. Carpet-dances and champagneless suppers are typical of this circle. Here mothers and daughters prey upon the inexperienced youth of the Universities and green young officers, who are deluded for one season by their pretensions to fashion, but who cut them the next. Here, too, may be found persons whose social progress has been retarded by foolish scruples about cutting their old friends. Between this band of prowlers upon the outskirts of fashion and "the best set"—the golden ring in the centre of the shield—are many intermediate circles, each representing a different stage of distinction and exclusiveness. It is the multiplicity of these invisible lines of demarcation which makes pushing so laborious.

The world of fashion is not one homogeneous camp, but it is parcelled out into a number of cliques and coteries. Into one after another of these a pushing woman effects her entrance. She is always edging her way into a new and better set. At every step there are obstacles to be encountered, rivals to be jostled, fierce snubs to be endured. There is something almost sublime in the spectacle of this untiring activity of shoulder and elbow. The mere shoving—vis consilî expers—would never bring her near to her goal. An adept in the art of pushing does not rely on sheer impudence alone. She has recourse to artificial aids and appliances. A great deal of ingenuity is exhibited in the selection of her self-propelling machinery. It is a good plan to acquire a name for some one social speciality.

Private theatricals, for instance, or similar entertainments, may be turned to excellent account. Exhibitions of this kind pique curiosity, and people who come to stare remain to supper, and possibly return to drop a card on the following afternoon. But, if you go in for this sort of thing, you must resign yourself to certain inconveniences. Your pretty drawing-room will be like Park Lane in a state of chronic obstruction. The carpenter's work will interfere somewhat with your comfort, and it is tiresome to be perpetually unhinging your doors and pulling your windows out of their frames. The jealousies and bickerings among the performers are another source of vexation. Miss A. declines to sit as Rowena to Miss B.'s Rebecca; and the drawing-room Roscius invariably objects to the part for which he is cast. Altogether, unless you have a positive taste for carpentry and green-room squabbles, it is better to steer clear of private theatricals.

Then there is the musical dodge. In skillful hands there is no better leverage for pushing operations than drawing-room music. Every one knows Lady Tweedledum and her amateur concerts. The fuss she makes about them is prodigious. They are a cheap sort of entertainment, but they cost the thrifty patroness of art a vast deal of trouble. She is always organizing practices, arranging rehearsals, drawing up programmes, or scouring London for musical recruits. She has been known to invade dingy Government offices for a tenor, and to run a soprano to earth in distant Bloomsbury. After all, her "music" is only so-so. You may hear better any night at Even's or the Oxford. One has heard "Dal tuo stellato soglio" before, and Niedermeyer insipidities are a little fadé. Sometimes, to complete the imposture, the names of Mendelssohn and Mozart are invoked, and, under cover of doing honor to an immortal composer, a chorus of young people assemble for periodical flirtation. On the whole, it is wise not to attempt too much. Miss Quaver, with her staccato notes and semi-professional minauderies, is not exactly a queen of song. Nor does it give one any exquisite delight to hear Sir Raucisonous Trombone give tongue in a French romance. The talented band of the Piccadilly Troubadours, floundering through the overture to Zampa, hardly satisfies a refined musical ear. But, however indifferent in a musical point of view, from the point of view of the fair projector the thing is a success. It serves as a trap to catch duchesses, a device for putting salt on the tails of the popinjays of fashion. One fine day Lady Tweedledum's pretended zeal for music receives its crowning reward. The noise of it reaches august ears. An act of gracious condescension follows. Her Ladyship has the supreme delight of leading a scion of Royalty to a chair of state in her drawing-room, to hear Sir Raucisonous bleat and Miss Quaver trill.

There are subtler means of pushing than amateur concerts and private theatricals. There is the push vertical, as in the case of the commercial lady; and there is also the push lateral. A good example of the latter style of operation is afforded by the dowager who is fortunate enough to have an eldest son to use as a pushing machine. Handled with tact, a young heir, not yet cut adrift from the maternal apron-string, may be turned to excellent account. There is, or was, a sentimental ballad entitled, "I'll kiss him for his mother." One might reverse the sentiment in the case of Madame Mère. Of her the dowagers with daughters to marry sing in chorus, "I'll visit her for her son." Civility to the mother is access to the son. A sharp tactician sees her advantage, and works the precious relationship for her own private ends. It is a mine of invitations of an eligible kind. By aid of it she springs over barriers which it would otherwise take her years to surmount, and is lifted into circles which by their unassisted efforts she and her daughters would never reach. Scheming dowagers are glad to have her at their balls when there is a chance of young Hopeful following in her train, and her five o'clock tea is delightful when there is a young millionaire to sip it with. Deprived of her decoy duck she would soon lose ground, and be left to push her way in society with uncomfortably reduced momentum.

Another capital instrument for pushing is a country-house. The mistress of a fine old hall and a cypher of a husband is apt to take a peculiar view of the duties of property. One might expect her to be content with so dignified and enviable a lot, and to pass tranquil days in coddling the cottagers, patronizing the rector's wife, and impressing her crotchet on the national school. But no—she is bitten with the tarantula of social success. She wants to "get on" in society. She must push as vigorously as any trumpery adventuress in May Fair. A good old name is dragged into the dirt inseparable from pushing. The family portraits look disdainfully from their frames, and the ancestral oaks hang their heads in shame. The company reflects the peculiar ambition of the hostess. The neighboring squires are conspicuous by their absence. The local small fry are of course ignored, though to the great lady of the county, who cuts her in town, she is cringingly obsequious. The visitors consist mainly of relays of youths, fast, foolish, and fashionable, with now and then a stray politician or journalist thrown in to give the party a soupçon of intellect. The principle of invitation is very simple. No one is asked who will not be of use in town. Any brainless little fop, any effete dandy, is sure of a welcome, provided he is known to certain circles and can help her to scramble into a little more vogue.

One more instance of lateral pushing. A connection with literature may be very effectively worked. The wives of poets, novelists, and historians have great facilities for pushing if they care to use them. Even the sleek parasite who fattens on a literature which he has done nothing to adorn, and conceals his emptiness under the airs of Sir Oracle, has been known to hoist his female belongings into the high levels of society.

The last period in the career of a pushing woman is the triumphant. This is when she has achieved fashion, and has virtually done pushing. There is nothing left to push for. The Belgravian citadel has fairly capitulated. Like Alexander weeping that there are no more worlds to conquer, she may indulge a transient regret that there are no more salons left to penetrate. But rest is welcome after so harassing a struggle. And with rest comes a sensible improvement in her character and manners. The last stage of a pushing woman is emphatically better than the first. It is curious to notice what a change for the better is produced in her by the partial recovery of her self-respect. One might almost call her a pleasant person. She can at last afford to be civil, occasionally even good-natured. And this is only natural. In the thick of a struggle which taxes her energies to the uttermost, there is no time for courtesies and amenities. The better instincts of her nature necessarily remain in abeyance. But they reassert themselves, unless she be irretrievably spoilt, when the struggle is over.

At last she can afford to speak her true thoughts, consult her own tastes, and receive her own friends, not another's, like a lady to the manner born. And if this emancipation from a self-imposed thraldom is not too long deferred, if it finds her at sixty with a relish for gaiety still unslaked, she may yet be able to enjoy society herself and to render it enjoyable to others. How many women there are of whom one says, How pleasant they will be when they have done pushing! or have pushed enough to allow themselves and others a little rest! One longs for the time to arrive when they shall have kicked down the ladders by which they have mounted, and effaced the trace of the rebuffs which they have encountered. One longs to see them cleansed from the stains with which their toilsome struggle has bespattered them, enjoying the ease and tranquillity of the after-push. If "getting on in society" must continue to be an object of female ambition, would it not be wise to abate the nuisance by rendering the process somewhat more easy? Might not some central authority be established to grant diplomas to pushing women, which would admit them per saltum to those select circles which they go through so much dirt to reach?

FEMININE AFFECTATIONS.

The old form of feminine affectation used to be that of a die-away fine lady afflicted with a mysterious malady known by the name of the vapors, or one, no less obscure, called the spleen. Sometimes it was an etherealized being who had no capacity for homely things, but who passed her life in an atmosphere of poetry and music, for the most part expressing her vague ideas in halting rhymes that gave more satisfaction to herself than to her friends. She was probably an Italian scholar, and could quote Petrarch and Tasso, and did quote them pretty often; she might even be a Della Cruscan by honorable election, with her own peculiar wreath of laurel and her own silver lyre; any way she was "a sister of the Muses," and had something to do with Apollo and Minerva, whom she was sure to call Pallas, as being more poetical. Probably she had dealings with Diana too, for this kind of woman does not in any age affect the "sea-born," save in a hazy sentimental way that bears no fruits; a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit of counterpoint being to her worth all the manly love or fireside home delights that the world can give.

What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or the rosy kisses of babies' lips compared to the pleasures of being a sister of the Muses, and one of the beloved of Apollo? The Della Cruscan of former days, or her modern avatar, will tell you that music and poetry are godlike and bear the soul away to heaven, but that the nursery is a prison, and babies no dearer gaolers than any other, and that household duties disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the empyrean. This was the Ethereal Being of the last generation—the Blue-stocking, as a poetess in white satin, with her eyes turned up to heaven, and her hair in dishevelled cascades about her neck. She dropped her mantle as she finally departed; and we still have the Della Cruscan essence, if not in the precise form of earlier times. We still have ethereal beings who, as the practical outcome of their etherealization, rave about music and poetry, and Hallé and Ruskin, and horribly neglect their babies and the weekly bills.

A favorite form of feminine affectation among certain opposers of the prevalent fast type is in an intense womanliness, an aggravating intensity of womanliness, that makes one long for a little roughness, just to take off the cloying excess of sweetness. This kind is generally found with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the orbit, by which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face, a certain look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty thought, that is very effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness that the real cause of the darkened lids and cavernous orbits, when not antimony, is most probably internal disease; eyes of this sort stand for spirituality and loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of nature, and, as all men are neither chemists nor doctors, the simulation does quite as well as truth.

The main characteristic of these women is self-consciousness. They live before a moral mirror, and pass their time in attitudinizing to what they think the best advantage. They can do nothing simply, nothing spontaneously and without the fullest consciousness as to how they do it, and how they look while they are doing it. In every action of their lives they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a novel, as impersonations of poetic images or thoughts. If they give you a glass of water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth and Beauty ministering to Strength or Age, as the case may be; if they bring you a photographic album, they are Titian's Daughter carrying her casket, a trifle modernized; if they hold a child in their arms, they are Madonnas, and look unutterable maternal love, though they never saw the little creature before, and care for it no more than for the puppy in the mews; if they do any small personal office, or attempt to do it, making believe to tie a shoestring, comb out a curl, fasten a button, they are Charities in graceful attitudes, and expect you to think them both charitable and graceful. Nine times out of ten they can neither tie a string nor fasten a button with ordinary deftness, for they have a trick of using only the ends of their fingers when they do anything with their hands, as being more graceful, and altogether fitting in better than would a firmer grasp with the delicate womanliness of the character; and the less sweet and more commonplace woman who does not attitudinize morally, and never parades her womanliness, beats them out of the field for real helpfulness, and is the Charity which the other only plays at being.

This kind, too, affects, in theory, wonderful submissiveness to man. It upholds Griselda as the type of feminine perfection, and—still in theory—between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in for the tyranny. "I would rather my husband beat me than let me do too much as I liked," said one before she married, who, after she was married, managed to get entire possession of the domestic reins, and took good care that her nominal lord should be her practical slave. For, notwithstanding the sweet submissiveness of her theory, the intensely womanly woman has the most astonishing knack of getting her own way and imposing her own will on others. The real tyrant among women is not the one who flounces and splutters, and declares that nothing shall make her obey, but the self-mannered, large-eyed, and intensely womanly person, who says that Griselda is her ideal, and that the whole duty of woman lies in unquestioning obedience to man.

In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman—the woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big buttons, of which she flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness of a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears unmistakeable shirtfronts, linen collars, vests, and plain ties, like a man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and makes believe that the attitude is comfortable because it is manlike. If the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness, the mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores dogs and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She boasts of how good a marksman she is—she does not call herself markswoman—and how she can hit right and left, and bring down both birds flying. When she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass between her first two fingers, hollows her underlip, and tosses it off, throwing her head well back—she would disdain the ladylike sip or the closer gesture of ordinary women. She is great in cheese and bitter beer, in claret cup and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of effervescing wines. She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward, as men round their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw; for charms to her watch-chain she wears a corkscrew, a gimlet, a big knife, and a small foot-rule; and in entire contrast with the intensely womanly woman, who uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman when she does anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of which is affectation—from first to last affectation; a mere assumption of virile fashions utterly inharmonious to the whole being, physical and mental, of a woman.

Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a personal insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact limits of her mental sphere. This is the woman who assumes to be the antiseptic element in society, who makes believe that without her the world and human nature would go to the dogs, and plunge headlong into the abyss of sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand heroism of man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavor and patient seeking after truth, would serve his turn or the world's if she did not spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the boundary lines within which she would confine the range of thought and speculation. She knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affectation, and that other minds have as much right to their own boundary lines as she claims for herself; but it seems to her pretty to assume that woman generally is the consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that she, of all women, is most specially consecrated.

As an offshoot of this kind stands the affectation of simplicity—the woman whose mental attitude is self-depreciation, and who poses herself as a mere nobody when the world is ringing with her praises. "Is it possible that your Grace has ever heard of me?" said one of this class with prettily affected naïveté at a time when all England was astir about her, and when colors and fashions went by her name to make them take with the public at large. No one knew better than the fair ingénue in question how far and wide her fame had spread, but she thought it looked modest and simple to assume ignorance of her own value, and to declare that she was but a creeping worm when all the world knew that she was a soaring butterfly.

There is a certain little kind of affectation very common among pretty women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are pretty, and not recognising the effect of their beauty on men. Take a woman with bewildering eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape, and fringed with long lashes that distract you to look at; the creature knows that her eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that fire burns and that ice melts; she knows the effect of that trick she has with them—the sudden uplifting of the heavy lid, and the swift, full gaze that she gives right into a man's eyes. She has practiced it often in the glass, and knows to a mathematical nicety the exact height to which the lid must be raised, and the exact fixity of the gaze. She knows the whole meaning of the look, and the stirring of men's blood that it creates; but if you speak to her of the effect of her trick, she puts on an air of extremest innocence, and protests her entire ignorance as to anything her eyes may say or mean: and if you press her hard she will look at you in the same way for your own benefit, and deny at the very moment of offence.

Various other tricks has she with those bewildering eyes of hers—each more perilous than the other to men's peace; and all unsparingly employed, no matter what the result. For this is the woman who flirts to the extreme limits, then suddenly draws up and says she meant nothing. Step by step she has led you on, with looks and smiles, and pretty doubtful phrases always susceptible of two meanings, the one for the ear by mere word, the other for the heart by the accompaniments of look and manner, which are intangible; step by step she has drawn you deeper and deeper into the maze where she has gone before as your decoy; then, when she has you safe, she raises her eyes for the last time, complains that you have mistaken her cruelly, and that she has meant nothing more than any one else might mean; and what can she do to repair her mistake? Love you? marry you? No; she is engaged to your rival, who counts his thousands to your hundreds; and what a pity that you had not seen this all along, and that you should have so misunderstood her! Besides, what is there about her that you or any one should love?

Of all the many affectations of women, this affectation of their own harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when they practice their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most dangerous and the most disastrous. But what can one say to them? The very fact that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his perception until too late. That men love though they suffer is the woman's triumph, guilt, and condonation; and so long as the trick succeeds it will be practiced.

Another affectation of the same family is the extreme friendliness and familiarity which some women adopt in their manners towards men. Young girls affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a year or so older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate, declare they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may not be natural. This form of affectation, once begun, continues through life, being too convenient to be lightly discarded; and youthful matrons not long out of their teens assume a tone and ways that would about befit middle age counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous even then if the "Indian summer" was specially bright and warm.

Then there is the affectation pure and simple, which is the mere affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of attitude that by consciousness ceases to be grace, and the thousand little minauderies and coquetries of the sex known to us all. And there is the affectation which people of a higher social sphere show when they condescend to those of low estate, and talk and look as if they were not quite certain of their company, and scarcely knew if they were Christian or heathen, savage or civilized. And there is the affectation of the maternal passion with women who are never by any chance seen with their children, but who speak of them as if they were never out of their sight; the affectation of wifely adoration with women who are to be met about the world with every man of their acquaintance rather than with their lawful husbands; the affectation of asceticism in women who lead a thoroughly self-enjoying life from end to end; and the affectation of political fervor in those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to save Europe from universal revolution.

Go where we will, affectation of being something she is not meets us in woman, like a ghost we cannot lay or a mist we cannot sweep away. In the holiest and the most trivial things alike we find it penetrating everywhere—even in church, and at her prayers, when the pretty penitent, rising from her lengthy orison, lifts her eyes and looks about her furtively to see who has noticed her self-abasement and to whom her picturesque piety has commended itself.

All sorts and patterns of good girls and pleasant women are very dear and delightful; but the pearl of great price is the thoroughly natural and unaffected woman—that is, the woman who is truthful to her core, and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she would dare to tell a lie.

IDEAL WOMEN.

It is often objected against fault-finders, writers or others, that they destroy but do not build up, that while industriously blaming errors they take good care not to praise the counteracting virtues, that in their zeal against the vermin of which they are seeking to sweep the house clean they forget the nobler creatures which do the good work of keeping things sweet and wholesome. But it is impossible to be continually introducing the saving clause, "all are not so bad as these." The seven thousand righteous who have not bowed the knee to Baal are understood to exist in all communities; and, vicious as any special section may be, there must always be the hidden salt and savor of the virtuous to keep the whole from falling into utter corruption. This is specially true of modern women. Certainly, some of them are as unsatisfactory as any of their kind that have ever appeared on earth before, but it would be very queer logic to infer, therefore, that all are bad alike, and that our modern womanhood is as ill off as the Cities of the Plain which could not be saved for want of the ten just men to save them.

Happily, we have noble women among us yet; women who believe in something beside pleasure, and who do their work faithfully, wherever it may lie; women who can and do sacrifice themselves for love and duty, and who do not think they were sent into the world simply to run one mad life-long race for wealth, for dissipation, or for distinction. But the life of such women is essentially in retirement; and though the lesson they teach is beautiful, yet its influence is necessarily confined, because of the narrow sphere of the teacher. When such public occasions for devotedness as the Crimean war occur, we can in some sort measure the extent to which the self-sacrifice of women can be carried; but in general their noblest virtues come out only in the quiet and secresy of home, and the most heroic lives of patience and well-doing go on in seclusion, uncheered by sympathy and unrewarded by applause.

Still, it is impossible to write of one absolute womanly ideal—one single type that shall satisfy every man's fancy; for, naturally, what would be perfection to one is imperfection to another, according to the special bent of the individual mind. Thus one man's ideal of womanly perfection is in beauty, mere physical outside beauty; and not all the virtues under heaven could warm him into love with red hair or a snub nose. He is entirely happy if his wife is undeniably the handsomest woman of his acquaintance, and holds himself blessed when all men admire and all women envy. But for his own sake rather than for hers. Pleasant as her loveliness is to look on, it is pleasanter to know that he is the possessor of it. The "handsomest woman in the room" comes into the same category as the finest picture or the most thoroughbred horse within his sphere, and if the degree of pride in his possession is different, the kind is the same. And so in minor proportions, from the most beautiful woman of all, to simply beauty as a sine qua non, whatever else may be wanting. One other thing only is as absolute as this beauty, and that is its undivided possession.

Another man's ideal is a good housekeeper and a careful mother, and he does not care a rush whether his wife, if she is these, is pretty or ugly. Provided she is active and industrious, minds the house well, and brings up the children as they ought to be brought up, has good principles, is trustworthy, and even-tempered, he is not particular as to color or form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or a squint. Given the great foundations of an honorable home, and he will forego the lath and plaster of personal appearance which will not bear the wear and tear of years and their troubles. The solid virtues stand. His balance at the banker's is a fact; his good name and credit with the tradespeople is a fact; so is the comfort of his home; so are the health, the morals, the education of his children. All these are the true realities of life to him; but the beauty which changes to deformity by the small-pox, which fades under dyspepsia, grows stale by habit, and is worn threadbare by the end of twenty years, is only a skin-deep grace which he does not value. Perhaps he is right. Certainly, some of the happiest marriages among one's acquaintances are those where the wife has not one perceptible physical charm, and where the whole force of her magnetic value lies in what she is, not in how she looks.

Another man wants a tender, adoring, fair-haired seraph, who will worship him as a demigod, and accept him as her best revelation of strength and wisdom. The more dependent she is, the better he will love her; the less of conscious thought, of active will, of originative power she has, the greater his regard and tenderness. To be the one sole teacher and protector of such a gentle little creature seems to him the most delicious and the best condition of married life; and he holds Milton's famous lines to be expressive of the only fitting relation between men and women. The adoring seraph is his ideal; Griselda, Desdemona, Lucy Ashton, are his highest culminations of womanly grace; and the qualities which appeal the most powerfully to his generosity are the patience which will not complain, the gentleness that cannot resent, and the love which nothing can chill.

Another man wants a cultivated intelligence in his ideal. As an author, an artist, a student, a statesman, he would like his wife to be able to help him by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect. He believes in the sex of minds, and holds only that work complete which has been created by the one and perfected by the other. He sees how women have helped on the leaders in troubled times; he knows that almost all great men have owed something of their greatness to the influence of a mother or a wife; he remembers how thoughts which had lain dumb in men's brains for more than half their lifetime suddenly woke up into speech and activity by the influence of a woman great enough to call them forth. The adoring seraph would be an encumbrance, and nothing better than a child upon his hands; and the soul which had to be awakened and directed by him would run great chance of remaining torpid and inactive all its days. He has his own life to lead and round off, and so far from wishing to influence another's, wants to be helped for himself.

Another man cares only for the birth and social position of the woman to whom he gives his name and affection; to another yellow gold stands higher than blue blood, and "my wife's father" may have been a rag-picker, so long as rag-picking had been a sufficiently rich alembic with a residuum admitting of no kind of doubt. Venus herself without a dowry would be only a pretty sea-side girl with a Newtown pippin in her hand; but Miss Kilmansegg would be something worth thinking of, if but little worth looking at. One man delights in a smart, vivacious little woman of the irrepressible kind. It makes no difference to him how petulant she is, how full of fire and fury; the most passionate bursts of temper simply amuse him, like the anger of a canary-bird, and he holds it fine fun to watch the small virago in her tantrums, and to set her going again when he thinks she has been a long enough time in subsidence. His ideal of woman is an amusing little plaything, with a great facility for being put up, and a dash of viciousness to give it piquancy.

Another wants a sweet and holy saint whose patient humility springs from principle rather than from fear; another likes a blithe-tempered, healthy girl with no nonsense about her, full of fun and ready for everything, and is not particular as to the strict order or economy of the housekeeping, provided only she is at all times willing to be his pleasant playmate and companion. Another delights in something very quiet, very silent, very home-staying. One must have first-rate music in his ideal woman; another unimpeachable taste; a third, strict orders; a fourth, liberal breadth of nature; and each has his own ideal, not only of nature but of person—to the exact shade of the hair, the color of the eyes, and the oval of the face. But all agree in the great fundamental requirements of truth, and modesty, and love, and unselfishness; for though it is impossible to write of one womanly ideal as an absolute, it is very possible to detail the virtues which ought to belong to all alike.

If this diversity of ideals is true of individuals, it is especially true of nations, each of which has its own ideal of woman varying according to what is called the genius of the country. To the Frenchman, if we are to believe Michelet and the novelists, it is a feverish little creature, full of nervous energy, but without muscular force; of frail health and feeble organization; a prey to morbid fancies which she has no strength to control or to resist; now weeping away her life in the pain of finding that her husband, a man gross and material because husband, does not understand her; now sighing over her delicious sins in the arms of the lover who does; without reasoning faculties, but with divine intuitions that are as good as revelations; without cool judgment, but with the light of burning passions that guide her just as well; thinking by her heart, yet carrying the most refined metaphysics into her love; subtle; incomprehensible by the coarser brain of man; a creature born to bewilder and to be misled, to love and to be adored, to madden men and to be destroyed by them.

It does not much signify that the reality is a shrewd, calculating, unromantic woman, with a hard face and keen eyes, who for the most part makes a good practical wife to her common-sense middle-aged husband, who thinks more of her social position than of her feelings, more of her children than of her lovers, more of her purse than of her heart, and whose great object of life is a daily struggle for centimes. It pleases the French to idealize their eminently practical and worldly-wise women into this queer compound of hysterics and adultery; and if it pleases them it need not displease us.

To the German his ideal is of two kinds—one, his Martha, the domestic broad-faced Hausmutter, who cooks good dinners at small cost, and mends the family linen as religiously as if this were the Eleventh Commandment especially appointed for feminine fingers to keep, the poetic culmination of whom is Charlotte cutting bread and butter; the other, his Mary, his Bettina, full of mind and æsthetics, and heart-uplifting love, yearning after the infinite with holes in her stockings and her shoes down at heel. For what are coarse material mendings to the æsthetic soul yearning after the infinite, and worshipping at the feet of the prophet?

In Italy the ideal woman of modern times is the ardent patriot, full of active energy, or physical force, and dauntless courage.

In Poland it is the patriot too, but of a more refined and etherealized type, passively resenting Tartar tyranny by the subtlest feminine scorn, and living in perpetual music and mourning.

In Spain it is a woman beautiful and impassioned, with the slight drawback of needing a world of looking after, of which the men are undeniably capable.

In Mohammedan countries generally it is a comely smooth-skinned Dudù, patient and submissive, always in good humor with her master, economical in house-living to suit the meanness, and gorgeous in occasional attire to suit the ostentation, of the genuine Oriental; but by no means Dudù ever asleep and unoccupied; for, if not allowed to take part in active outside life, the Eastern's wife or wives have their home duties and their maternal cares like all other women, and find to their cost that, if they neglect them unduly, they will have a bad time of it with Ali Ben Hassan when the question comes of piastres and sequins, and the dogs of Jews who demand payment, and the pigs of Christians who follow suit.

The American ideal is of two kinds, like the German—the one, the clever manager, the woman with good executive faculty in the matters of buckwheat cakes and oyster gumbo, as is needed in a country so poorly provided with "helps;" the other, the aspiring soul who puts her aspirations into deeds, and goes out into the world to do battle with the sins of society as editress, preacher, stump orator, and the like. It must be rather embarrassing to some men that this special manifestation of the ideal woman at times advocates miscegenation and free love; but perhaps we of the narrow old conventional type are not up to the right mark yet, and have to wait until our own women are thoroughly emancipated before we can rightly appreciate these questions. At all events, if this kind of thing pleases the Americans, it is no more our business to interfere with them than with the French compound; and if miscegenation and free love seem to them the right manner of life, let them follow it.

In all countries, then, the ideal woman changes, chameleon-like, to suit the taste of man; and the great doctrine that her happiness does somewhat depend on his liking is part of the very foundation of her existence. According to his will she is bond or free, educated or ignorant, lax or strict, house-keeping or roving; and though we advocate neither the bondage nor the ignorance, yet we do hold to the principle that, by the laws which regulate all human communities everywhere, she is bound to study the wishes of man, and to mould her life in harmony with his liking. No society can get on in which there is total independence of sections and members, for society is built up on the mutual dependence of all its sections and all its members. Hence the defiant attitudes which women have lately assumed, and their indifference to the wishes and remonstrances of men, cannot lead to any good results whatever. It is not the revolt of slaves against their tyrants—in that we could sympathize—which they have begun, but a revolt against their duties. And this it is which makes the present state of things so deplorable. It is the vague restlessness, the fierce extravagance, the neglect of home, the indolent fine-ladyism, the passionate love of pleasure which characterise the modern woman, that saddens men, and destroys in them that respect which their very pride prompts them to feel. And it is the painful conviction that the ideal woman of truth and modesty and simple love and homely living has somehow faded away under the paint and tinsel of this modern reality which makes us speak out as we have done, in the hope, perhaps a forlorn one, that if she could be made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she would, by the very force of natural instinct and social necessity, order herself in some accordance with the lost ideal, and become again what we once loved and what we all regret.

WOMAN AND THE WORLD.

This, we are told in a tone of pathetic resignation, is a day of hard sayings for women. It is, we will venture to add, a day when women have to meet hard sayings with replies a little less superficial than the conventional stare of outraged womanhood or the trivial retort on the follies of men. Grant that woman's censors are as cynical and hollow-hearted as you will, there can be no doubt that their criticisms are simply the expression of a general uneasiness, and that that uneasiness has some ground to go upon. It is possible that observers across the water may be cynical in denouncing the "magnificent indecency" of the heroines of New York. It is possible that the schoolmasters of Berlin may be cynical in calling public opinion to their aid against the degrading exhibitions of the Prussian capital. It is possible that the thunders of the Vatican are merely an instance of Papal cynicism. It is possible that the protest of the Bishop of Orleans is as hollow-hearted as the protests of censors nearer home. But such a world-wide outbreak of cynicism without a cause is a somewhat improbable event, and the improbability is increased when we remark the silent acquiescence of the women of America and the Continent in the justice of these censures.

It is only the British mother who ventures to protest. Now, we Englishmen have always felt a sort of national pride in the British mother. It has been a part of our patriotic self-satisfaction to pique ourselves on her icy decorum, on the merciless severity of her virtue. Colorless, uninteresting, limited as Continental critics pronounced her to be, we cherished her the more as something specially our own, and regarded the Channel as a barrier providentially invented for the isolation of her spotless prudery. It was peculiarly gratifying to suppose that on the other side of it there were no British homes, no British maidens, no British mothers. And it must be owned that the British mother took her cue admirably. She owned, with a sigh of complacency, that she was not as other women. She shuddered at foreign morals, and tabooed French novels. She shook all life and individuality out of her girls as un-English and Continental. She denounced all aspirations after higher and larger spheres of effort as unfeminine. Such a type of woman was naturally dull enough, but it fairly came up to its own standard; and if its respectability was prudery, it still earned, and had a right to claim, man's respect. The amusing thing is the persistence in the claim when the type has passed away.

The British spouse has bloomed into the semi-detached wife, with a husband always conveniently in the distance, and a cicisbeo as conveniently in the corner. The British mother has died into the faded matrimonial schemer, contemptuous of younger sons. The innocent simper of the British maiden has developed into the loud laugh and the horsey slang of the girl of the season. But maiden and matron are still on one point faithful to the traditions of their grandmothers, and front all censorious comers with a shrug of their shoulder-straps and a flutter of indignant womanhood. And maiden and matron still claim their insular exemption from the foibles of their sex. The Pope may do what he will with the women of Italy, and Monseigneur of Orleans may deal stern justice out to the women of France; Continental immorality is in the nature of things; but there is something else that is in the nature of things too, and before the impeccable majesty of British womanhood every critic must stand abashed.

Unfortunately, we are no sooner awed with the marble silence of our Hermione than Hermione descends from her pedestal and falls a-talking like other people. Woman, in a word, protests; and protests are often very dangerous things to the protesters. Nothing, for instance, can seem more simple or more effective than the tu quoque retort, and as it is familiar to feminine disputants, we are favored with it in every possible form. If the girl of the period is fast and frivolous, is the young man of the period any better? No sketch can be more telling than the picture which she is ready to draw of his lounging ways, his epicurean indolence, his boredom at home, his foppery abroad, the vacancy of his stare, the inanity of his talk, his incredible conceit, his life vibrating between the Club and the stable. She hits off with a charming vivacity the list of his accomplishments—his skill at flirtation, his matchless ability at croquet, his assiduity over Bell's Life, the cleverness of his book on the Derby. No sensible or well-informed girl, she tells us, can talk for ten minutes to this creature without weariness and disgust at his ignorance, his narrowness, his triviality; no modestly-dressed or decently-mannered girl can win the slightest share of his attentions. Married, he is as frivolous as before marriage; he selects the toilette of the demi-monde as an agreeable topic of domestic conversation, he resents affection and proclaims home a bore, he grudges the birth of children as an additional expense, he stunts and degrades the education of his girls, he is the despot of his household and the dread of his family.

The sketch is powerful enough in its way, but the conclusion which the fair artist draws is at least an odd one. We prepare ourselves to hear that woman has resolved to extirpate such a monster as this, or that she will remain an obstinate vestal till a nobler breed of wooers arises. What woman owns that she really does is to mould herself as much on the monster's model as she can. According to her own account, she puts nature's picture of herself into the hands of this imbecile, invites him to blur it as he will, and lets him write under the daub "Ego feci." As he cannot talk sense, she stoops to bandy chaff and slang. As he refuses to be attracted by modesty of dress and manner, she apes the dress and manner of the demi-monde. His indolence, his triviality, his worldliness become her own. As he finds home a bore, she too plunges into her round of dissipation; as he objects to children, she declines to be a mother; as he wishes to get the girls off his hands, she flings them at the head of the first comer.

Now, if such a defence as this at all adequately represents the facts of the case, we can only say that the girl of the period must be a far lower creature than we have ever asserted her to be. A sensible girl stooping to slang, a modest girl flinging aside modesty, simply to conquer a fool and a fop, is a satire upon woman which none but a woman could have invented, and which we must confess to be utterly incredible to men. But the assumption upon which the whole of this mimetic theory is based is one well worthy of a little graver consideration.

"Tell me how to improve the youth of France," said Napoleon one day to Madame de Campan. "Give them good mothers," was the reply. There are some things which even a Napoleon may be pardoned for feeling a little puzzled in undertaking, and Madame de Campan would no doubt have added much to the weight of her reply by a few practical words as to the machinery requisite for the supply of the article she recommended. But her request is now the cry of the world. The general uneasiness of which we have spoken before arises simply from the conviction that woman is becoming more and more indifferent to her actual post in the social economy of the world, and the criticisms in which it takes form, whether grave or gay, could all be summed up in Madame de Campan's request, "Give us good mothers."

After all protests against limiting the sphere of the sex to a single function of their existence, public opinion still regards woman primarily in her relation to the generation to come. If it censures the sensible girl who stoops to slang, or the modest girl who stoops to indecency, it is because the sense and the modesty which they abandon is not theirs to hold or to fling away, but the heritage of the human race. But this seems to be less and less the feeling of woman herself. For good or for evil, or, perhaps more truly, for both good and evil, woman is becoming conscious every day of new powers, and longing for an independent sphere in which she can exert them. Marriage is aimed at with a passionate ardor unknown before, not as a means of gratifying affection, but as a means of securing independence.

To the unmarried girl life is a sheer bondage, and there is no sacrifice too great to be left untried if it only promises a chance of deliverance. She learns to despise the sense, the information, the womanly reserve which fail to attract the deliverer. She has to sell herself to purchase her freedom; and she will take very strong measures to secure a purchaser. The fop, the fool, little knows the keen scrutiny with which the gay creature behind her fan is taking stock of his feeble preferences, is preparing to play upon his feebler aversions. Pitiful as he is, it is for him that she arranges her artillery on the toilette-table, the "little secrets," the powder bloom, the rouge "precipitated from the damask rose-leaf," the Styrian lotion that gives "beauty and freshness to the complexion, plumpness to the figure, clearness and softness to the skin." He has a faint flicker of liking for brunettes; she lays her triumphant fingers on her "walnut stain," and darkens into the favorite tint. He loves plumpness, and her "Sinai Manna" is at hand to secure embonpoint. Belladonna flashes on him from her eyes, Kohl and antimony deepen the blackness of her eyebrows, "bloom of roses" blushes from her lips. She stoops to conquer, and it is no wonder that the fop and the fool go down.

The freedom she covets comes with marriage, but it is a freedom threatened by a thousand accidents, and threatened, above all, by maternity. It is of little use to have bowed to slang and shoulder-straps, if it be only to tie oneself to a cradle. The nursery stands sadly in the way of the free development of woman; it clips her social enjoyment, it curtails her bonnet bills. "The slavery of nursing a child," one fair protester tells us, "only a mother knows." And so she invents a pretty theory about the damage done to modern constitutions by our port-drinking forefathers, and ceases to nurse at all. But even this is only partial independence; she pants for perfect freedom from the cares of maternity. Her tone becomes the tone of the household, and the spouse she has won growls over each new arrival. She is quite ready to welcome the growl. "Nature," a mother informs us, "turns restive after the birth of two or three children," and mothers turn restive with nature. "Whatever else you may do," she adds, "you will never persuade us into liking to have children," and, if we did, we should not greatly value the conversion. And so woman wins her liberty, and bows her emphatic reply to the world's appeal, "Give us good mothers," by declining to be a mother at all.

By the sacrifice of womanliness, by the sacrifice of modesty, by flattering her wooer's base preferences before marriage, by encouraging his baser selfishness afterwards, by hunting her husband to the club and restricting her maternal energies to a couple of infants, woman has at last bought her freedom. She is no slave to a husband as her mother was, she is not buried beneath the cares of a family like her grandmother. She has changed all that, and the old world of home and domestic tenderness and parental self-sacrifice lies in ruins at her feet. She has her liberty; what will she do with it? As yet, freedom means simply more slang, more jewelry, more selfish extravagance, less modesty. As we meet her on the stairs, as we see the profuse display of her charms, as we listen to the flippant, vapid chatter, we turn a little sickened from woman stripped of all that is womanly, and cry to Heaven, as Madame de Campan cried to the Emperor—"Give us good mothers."

UNEQUAL MARRIAGES.

Acute ladies who concern themselves much with the superficial social currents of the time are beginning to perceive, or at least to think that they perceive, a fatal and growing tendency to mésalliances on the part of men who ought to know better. They complain not merely of the doting old gentleman who has been a bachelor long enough to lose his wits, and so marries his cook or his housemaid, nor of the debauched young simpleton who takes a wife from a casino or the bar of a night-café. Actions of this sort are as common at one time as at another. Old fools and young fools maintain a pretty steady average. Their silly exploits are the issue, not of the tendencies of the age, but of their own individual and particular lack of wits. They do not affect the general direction of social feeling, nor have we any right to argue up from their preposterous connexions to the influences and conditions of the society of which they are only the abnormal and irregular growths. What people mean, when they talk of an increase in the number of men who marry beneath them, is that men otherwise sensible and respectable and sober-minded perpetrate the irregularity in something like cold blood, and with a measure of deliberation. Whether observers who have formed this opinion are right, or are only anticipating their own apprehensions and alarms, is difficult to ascertain. A good deal depends on the accidental range of the observer's own acquaintances, and still more on their candor or discreet reticence.

Besides, how are we to know how far one generation is worse than generations which have gone before it? Men are, after due time, forgiven for this defiance of social usage, and women who were barely presentable in youth become presentable enough by the time they reach middle age. People may seem to us to be very equally and justly mated who five-and-twenty years ago were the town's talk. It is practically impossible, therefore, to compare the actual number of unequal marriages in our day with those of a generation back. People may have their ideas, but verification is not to be had. All we can do is to estimate the increase in the conditions which are likely to make men find wives in a rank below their own. If we look at these, there may be a good many reasons for believing that the apprehensions of the shrewd and alarmed observers are not without justification.

When a wise man with a living or a name to make, or both, looks for a wife, he certainly does not desire a person who shall be troublesome and an impediment to him. He wants a cheerful, sensible, and decently thrifty person. He probably has no inclination for a bluestocking, nor for a lady with aggressive views on points of theology, nor for one who can beat him in political discussion. Strong intellectual power he can most heartily dispense with. But then, on the other hand, he has no fancy for sitting day after day at table with a vapid, flippant, frivolous, empty soul who can neither talk nor listen, who takes no interest in things herself, and cannot understand why other people should take interest in them, who is penetrated with feeble little egoisms. An aggressive woman with opinions about prevenient grace, or the advantages of female emigration, or the functions of the deaconess, would be far preferable to this. She would irritate, but she would not fill the soul with everlasting despair, as the pretty vapid creature does. To discuss predestination and election over dinner is not nice, but still less is it nice to have to make talk with a fool, and to be obliged to answer her according to her folly.

As the education of modern girls of fashion chiefly aims at making them either very fast or very slow, it is not to be wondered at that men find it hard to realize their ideals among their equals in position. It is not merely that so many marriageable young ladies are ignorant. They are this, but they are more. They are exacting and pretentious, and uneducated in the worst sense, for they are ignorant how ignorant they are, or even that they are ignorant at all.

Then there is a still more obvious, palpable, and impressive circumstance. A man with ordinary means looks with alarm on the too visible and too unbounded extravagance of the ladies from among whom he is expected to take a partner. The thought of the apparel, of the luxuries, of the attendants, of the restless moving about, to which they have been accustomed, fills him with deep consternation. He might perhaps deceive himself into thinking that he could get on very well with an empty-minded woman, but he cannot forget the stern facts of arithmetic, nor hoodwink himself as to what would be left out of his income after he had paid for dresses, servants, household charges, carriages, parties, opera-boxes, traveling, and all the rest.

Besides the flippancy of so many women, and the extravagance of most women, arising from their inexperience of the trouble with which money is made and of the importance of keeping it after it has been made, there is something in the characteristics of modern social intercourse which makes men of a certain temper intensely anxious to avoid a sort of marriage which would, among other things, have the effect of committing them more deeply to this kind of intercourse. Such men shrink with affright from giving hostages to society for a more faithful compliance with its most dismal exactions. To them there is nothing more unendurable than the monotonous round of general hospitalities and ceremonials, ludicrously misnamed pleasure. A detestation of wearisome formalities does not imply any clownish or misanthropic reluctance to remember that those who feel it live in a world with other people, and that a thoroughly social life is the only just and full life.

But there is all the difference between a really social life and a hollow phantasmic imitation of it. A person may have the pleasantest possible circle of friends, and may like their society above all things. This is one thing. But to have to mix much with numbers of thoroughly indifferent people, and in a superficial, hollow way, is a very different thing. Of course, men who take life just as it comes, who are not very sedulous about making the most of it in their own way, and are quite willing to do all that their neighbors do just because their neighbors do it, find no annoyance in this. Men cast in another mould find not only annoyance but absolute misery. They know also that marriage with a woman who is in the full tide of society means an infinite augmentation of this round of tiresome and thoroughly useless ceremonies. Add this consideration to the two other considerations of elaborate vapidness and unfathomable extravagance, and you have three tolerably good arguments why a man with large discourse of reason, looking before and after, should be slow to fasten upon himself bonds which threaten to prove so leaden.

The faults of the women of his own position, however, are a very poor reason why he should marry a woman beneath his own position. A man must be very weak to believe that, because fine ladies are often inane and extravagant, therefore women who are not fine ladies must be wise, clever, prudent, and everything else that belongs to the type of companionable womanhood. The fact of the mistress being a blank does not prove that the maid would be a prize. It may be wise to avoid the one, but it is certainly folly to seek the other. Granting that the housemaid or the cook or the daughter of the coachman is virtuous, high-minded, refined, thoughtful, thrifty, and everything else that is desirable under the sun, all will fail to counterbalance the drawbacks that flow from the first inequality of position.

The misguided husband believes that he is going to live a plain unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the express desire of avoiding visits, yet he no sooner gets what he wished than his success begins to make him miserable. What he expected to please him as a relief mortifies him as a slight. Even if he be unsympathetic enough in nature not to care much for the disapproval of his fellows, he will rapidly find that his wife is a good deal less of a philosopher in these points, and that, though he may relish his escape from the miseries of society, she will vigorously resent her exclusion from its supposed delights.

Again, from another point of view, he is tolerably sure to find that the common opinion of society about unequal unions is not so unsound as he used scornfully to suppose it to be. The vapidity of a polite woman is bad, but the vapidity of a woman who is not polite is decidedly worse. A simpering unthinking woman with good manners is decidedly better than an unthinking woman with imperfect manners; and if polish can spoil nature among one set of people, certainly among another set nature may be as much spoilt by lack of polish. It does not follow, from a person being indifferently well-bred, that therefore she is profoundly wise and thoughtful and poetic, and capable of estimating the things of this world at their worth. Boys at college indulge in this too generous fallacy. For grown-up men there is less excuse. They ought to know that obscure uneducated women are all the more likely on that account to fall short of magnanimity, self-control, self-containing composure, than girls who have grown up with a background of bright and gracious tradition, however little their education may have done to stimulate them to make the foreground like it. To have a common past is the first secret of happy association—a past common in ideas, sentiments, and growth, if not common in external incidents.

One reason why a cultivated man is wretched with a vapid woman is that she has not traveled over a yard of that ground of knowledge and feeling which has in truth made his nature what it is. But a woman in his own station is more likely to have shared a past of this sort than a woman of lower station. Mere community of general circumstances and surrounding does something. The obscure woman taken from inferior place has not the common past of culture, nor of circumstance either. The foolish man who has married away from his class trusts that somehow or other nature will repair this. He assumes, in a real paroxysm of folly, that obscurity is the fostering condition of a richness of character which could not be got by culture. He pays the price of his blindness. Untended nature is more likely to produce weeds than choice fruits, and the chances in such cases as this are beyond calculation in favor of his having got a weed—in other words, having wedded himself to a life of wrangling, gloom, and swift deterioration of character. This result may not be invariable, but it must be more usual than not.

In the exceptional cases where a man does not repent of an unequal match of this sort, you will mostly find that the match was unequal only in externals, and that his character had been a very fit counterpart for that of a vulgar and uneducated woman before he made her his wife. This may lead one to think that there is something to be said for the woman in morganatic marriages. The men who do these things are not always, not even generally, philosophic men in search of an unsophisticated life, but unamiable, defiant persons, who only hate society either because it has failed to appreciate their qualities, or because they cannot be at the trouble to go through the ordinary amount of polite usage.

HUSBAND-HUNTING.

What we have said in another place about the odium which attaches to "match-making" naturally applies in a far greater degree to "husband-hunting." Practically the two words mean much the same thing, since the successful result of a husband-hunt is of course a match, and match-making, in the common acceptation of the term, involves a husband-hunt. This latter fact is somewhat curious. There is no reason in the nature of things why the word match-making should be associated only with the pursuit of the unmarried male. On the contrary, the theory of marriage has always been that it is the woman who has to be hunted down. It is curious to note under what completely different circumstances, and occasionally in what grotesque forms, the same theory has been found all over the world, both in civilized and savage life. Sometimes the bride is carried away bodily from her home, as if nothing short of physical force could make a woman quit her maiden state. Sometimes the panting bridegroom has to run her down—no slight task if the adorer happens to be stout, and the adored one coquettish and fleet of foot. In marriage, this custom prevails only, we believe, among the savages, but visitors to the Crystal Palace may see how modern civilization has adapted it to courtship in the popular pastime of kiss-in-the-ring.

We have read of a savage tribe in which the bride is thought no better than she should be, if, on the day after the wedding, the bridegroom does not show signs of having been vigorously pinched and scratched. This custom, again, is perhaps represented in civilized life by the kissing and struggling which are supposed every Christmas to go on under the mistletoe. It is not unworthy of remark, as regards these two points of comparison between civilization and barbarism, that, as the woman gets more civilized, she seems more disposed to meet her pursuer halfway. In the game of kiss-in-the-ring, for instance, although the lady does not run after the gentleman, but, on the contrary, shows her maiden modesty by giving him as hard a chase as she can, she still delicately paves the way for osculation by throwing the pocket-handkerchief. And, in the Christmas fights under the mistletoe (if we may take Mr. Dickens as an authority), slapping, and even pinching in moderation, are considered allowable—perhaps we ought to say proper—on the lady's part; but scratching—serious scratching, we mean, which would make her admirer's face look next morning as if he had been taking liberties with a savage bird or a cat—is thought not merely unnecessary, but unfair.

The difference between civilized and savage woman may perhaps help to indicate the reason why, now-a-days, match-making should, as a matter of fact, be associated with husband-hunting in spite of the theory that it is the woman who has to be hunted, not the man. Popular phraseology has an awkward trick of making people unconsciously countenance the theories against which they most vehemently protest. Husband-hunting is a far more generally obnoxious word than even the much-injured match-making, simply because it flies in the face of the pet theory which we have described. But, if the theory really hold good in modern practice, why should man, not woman, be recognised as the professional match-maker's victim and legitimate game? Why does not wife-hunting, the word which this theory entitles us to expect, take its proper place in society? Heiress-hunting, indeed, is well known, but this can scarcely be considered a form of wife-hunting, for it is not the woman who is the object of pursuit, but her money-bags. We have the word heiress-hunting for the very obvious reason that heiresses are recognised game. The word husband-hunting exists for the same reason.

Are we to infer from the non-existence, or at any rate the non-appearance in good society, of the word wife-hunting, that the practice is anything but common—that, since a hunt necessarily implies pursuit on one side and flight on the other, a man cannot well be said to hunt a woman who is either engaged in hunting him, or else only too ready to meet him halfway? Are we gradually tending towards an advanced stage of civilization in which woman will be formally recognized as the pursuer, and man as the pursued? We are not bold enough to take under our protection a view so glaringly heterodox, but still we think it only common justice to point out that there are difficult problems in the present state of society which the view helps materially to solve. We fear, for instance, there can be no doubt that there is a good deal of truth in the Belgravian mother's lament that marriage is gradually ceasing to be considered "the thing" among the young men of the present day; that girls of good families and even good looks are taking to sisterhoods, and nursing-institutes, and new-fangled abominations, simply because there is no one to marry them.

It is not merely that the young men are getting every day rarer; though, unless there is some system, like Pharaoh's, for putting male infants to death, what can become of them all is a mystery. India and the colonies may absorb a good many, though these places also do duty in the absorption of spinsterhood. But this will not account for the alarming fact, that in almost every ball-room, no matter whether in the country or in town, there are usually at least three crinolines to one tail-coat, and that dancing bachelors are becoming so scarce that it is a question whether hostesses ought not, for their own peace of mind, to connive at the introduction of the Oriental nautch. Yet even the alarming scarcity of marriageable men is not so serious an evil as their growing disinclination to marry.

With the causes of this disinclination we are not now concerned. Some attribute it to the increase of luxurious and expensive habits among bachelors—habits specially fostered by "those hateful clubs;" some to the "snobbishness" which makes a woman consider it beneath her dignity to marry into an establishment less stylish than that which it has perhaps taken her father all his life to secure; some to the demi-monde—an explanation very like the theory that small-pox is caused by pustules. But, whatever may be the causes of the disinclination, there can be but little doubt that it exists, and the worst part of the matter is, that it is found among rich men no less than among poor. That really poor men should not wish to marry is, even the Belgravian mother must admit, an admirable arrangement of nature. But it is too bad that so many men-about-town should seem rich enough for yachting, or racing, or opera-boxes, or even diamond necklaces—for anything, in short, but a wife. The fact is, that in the eyes of poor men a wife is associated chiefly with handsome carriages, showy dresses, fine furniture, and other forbidden luxuries; and, inasmuch as there is not one law of association for the rich and another for the poor, this view spreads, until even rich men consider whether it is not possible to secure the luxuries without the wife.

Now, since marriage is, on the whole, an institution with which society cannot very well dispense—at any rate not until some good substitute has been found for it—it is clear that rich men ought not to be allowed to treat it in this way. If modern civilization tends to beget a disinclination to marry, it ought also, on the principle of compensation, to provide some means for counteracting this tendency, or keeping it under control. Is the increase of husband-hunting—we ask the question in a respectful and, we trust, purely philosophical spirit of inquiry—calculated to supply this great and obvious want? What are its merits, in this respect, as compared with the old-fashioned theory that woman should be wooed, not woo? Even the most inveterate hater of husband-hunting must admit that, so far as the great end of matrimony is concerned, the two sexes nowadays stand to each other in a most unnatural relation. It is alike the mission of both to marry, but whereas women are honorably anxious to fulfill this mission, men, as we have already seen, are too ready to shirk it. Yet, by a strange inversion of the usual order of things, to the very sex which evades the mission is its furtherance and chief control entrusted.

Besides, not only does woman take more kindly to the duty of matrimony than man—or at least nineteenth-century man—but she has comparatively nothing else to think about. A dozen occupations are open to him, but her one object in life, her whole being's end and aim, is to marry. Surely, if the art of marriage requires cultivation, it ought, like everything else, to be entrusted to those who can give their whole time to it, not to those who have so much else to do. Even when a bachelor is in a position to marry, and not unwilling to make the experiment, he is still far less fitted for the furtherance of matrimony than a woman. He, perhaps, meets a nice girl at a ball, is taken with her, and after a mild flirtation thinks, as he walks home in the moonlight, that she would make a charming wife. He dreams about her, and next morning at breakfast, as he pensively eats a pound of steak, resolves that on the same afternoon, or the next at the very latest, he will contrive an accidental meeting, or even find some excuse for a call. But then comes office-work, or the Times, or some other distraction, and later on perhaps a visit from some matter-of-fact friend with an unromantic taste for "bitter," or a weakness for the Burlington Arcade. One day slips away, and by the next the image of the evening's idol has waxed comparatively faint. At least it is not sufficiently vivid to inspire him with courage enough for a call, or a too suspicious-looking rencontre. In a week he bows to the image, as it is driven by, as coolly as if he had never had a thought of making his heart its shrine; and thus a golden opportunity for bringing together two young people, in whose auspicious union the whole community has an interest, has been cruelly thrown away.

How different might the case have been if fashion had allowed the lady to take the initiative, instead of compelling her to sit idly at home! She has no office-work, nor Times, nor any business but that of bringing last night's flirtation to a practical issue. Assuming her to be satisfied as to the eligibility of her partner, there is nothing to prevent her giving her whole time and attention to his capture. She is as little likely to throw away any chance of an interview calculated to help in bringing about this result as he is to neglect an opportunity for winning the lawn sleeves or silk gown. Marriage is of as much importance to her as either of these to him. It is, perhaps, not impossible that the mere notion of a woman's thus taking the initiative in courtship may to some appear outrageously immodest. But with this point we have nothing to do, as we have been discussing the theory of husband-hunting, not with any reference to its modesty, but solely and exclusively in its connexion with the great question, how marriage is to be carried on. We put together the three facts that nineteenth-century civilization makes men indisposed to marry, that it gives women no object in life but marriage, and yet that it assigns the furtherance of marriage, which we assume to be an institution deserving of careful cultivation, not to those whose interest it is to promote it, but to those who are comparatively averse to it. Modest or immodest, husband-hunting obviously tends to remedy this misdirection and waste of force.

We take this to be the right explanation—and we have endeavored to make it an impartial one—of the charge not uncommonly brought against the young ladies of the present day, that, as compared with their mothers and grandmothers, they are rather forward and fast, and that husband-hunting in their hands, is gradually being developed to an extent scarcely compatible with the old-fashioned theories about maidenly modesty and reserve. The change may be considered the effort of modern civilization to remedy an evil of its own creation. The tide advances in one direction because it recedes in another. If the men will not come forward, the women must. It is all very well for satirists to call this immodest, but even modesty could be more easily dispensed with than marriage. Besides, without quitting our position as impartial observers, we may point out that it is only fair to the professor of husband-hunting to remember that there are two kinds of immodesty, and that some actions are immodest merely because it is the custom to consider them so. It would, no doubt, be immodest for a young lady to ride through Hyde Park in man's fashion. Yet what is there in the nature of things to make a side-saddle more modest than any other? The Amazons were positive prudes, and would never have even spoken to man if they could have contrived to carry on society without him; yet they rode astraddle. And if fashion could make this practice feminine, why should it not some day do as much for husband-hunting?

THE PERILS OF "PAYING ATTENTION."

We have elsewhere asserted that the art of match-making requires cultivation. We are told, however, that, on the contrary, match-making is so zealously studied and skillfully pursued that it bids fair to be the great social evil of nineteenth-century civilization. The growing difficulty of procuring sons-in-law has called forth a corresponding increase in the skill required for capturing them, just as the wits of the detective are sharpened to keep pace with the expertness which the general spread of useful knowledge has conferred upon the thief. Eligible bachelors complain that scarcity of marrying men has much the same effect upon the match-making mother as scarcity of food upon the wolf. It makes her at once more ferocious and more cunning. Her invitations to croquet-parties and little dinners are so constant and so pressing that it is scarcely possible for her destined prey to refuse them all without manifest rudeness, and yet it is equally hard for him to go without being judiciously manœuvred into "paying attention" to the one young lady who has been selected to make him happy for life.

This chivalrous and graceful synonym for courtship in itself speaks volumes for the serious nature of the risk which he runs. The truly gallant assumption which underlies it, that an Englishman only "pays attention" to a woman when he has a solid businesslike offer of marriage to make her, not only puts a formidable weapon into the hands of the match-maker, but also leaves her victim without a most effectual means of protection. The national gallantry towards women upon which a Frenchman so plumes himself may be, as your true Briton declares, a poor sort of quality enough; a mere grimace and trick of the lips—not genuine stuff from the heart; having much the same relation to true chivalry that his bière has to beer, or his potage to soup. But at any rate it has this advantage, that it enables him to pay any amount of flowery compliments to a woman without risk of committing himself, or of being misunderstood.

If an Englishman asks a young lady after her sore throat, or her invalid grandmother, and throws into his voice that tone of eager interest or tender sympathy which a polite Frenchman would assume as a matter of course, he is at once suspected of matrimonial designs upon her. He is obliged to be as formal and businesslike in his mode of address as the lawyer's clerk who added at the end of a too ardent love-letter the saving clause "without prejudice." We have heard of a young lady who confided to her bosom friend that she that morning expected a proposal, and, when closely pressed for her reasons, blushingly confessed that the night before a gentleman had twice asked her whether she was fond of poetry, and four times whether she would like to go into the refreshment-room.

We do not mean to say that this tendency to look upon every "attention" as a preliminary step to an offer is entirely, or even principally, due to British want of gallantry. Our national theory of courtship and marriage has probably much more to do with it. We say "theory" advisedly, for our practice approaches every day nearer to that of the Continental nations whose mercenary view of the holy estate of matrimony we righteously abjure. Our system is, in fact, gradually becoming a clumsy compromise between the mariage de convenance and the mariage d'amour, with most of the disadvantages, and very few of the advantages, of either. Theoretically, English girls are allowed to marry for love, and to choose whichever they like best of all the admiring swains whom they fascinate at croquet-parties or balls. Practically, the majority marry for an establishment, and only flirt for love. They leave the school-room, no doubt, with an unimpeachably romantic conception of a youthful bridegroom who combines good looks, great intellect, and fervent piety with a modest four thousand a year, paid quarterly.

But they are not very long in finding out that the men whom they like best, as being about their own age or still young enough to sympathise with their tastes and enter heartily into all their notions of fun, are rarely such as are pronounced by parents and guardians to be eligible; and so, after one or two attacks, more or less serious, of love-fever, they tranquilly look out for an admirer who can place the proper number of servants and horses at their disposal, while they in return magnanimously decline to make discourteously minute inquiries as to the condition of his hair or teeth. A marriage made in this spirit, even where no pressure is put upon the young lady by parents or friends, and she is allowed full liberty of action, is open to all the charges ordinarily brought against the Continental mariage de convenance. Yet, on the other hand, it has not the advantage of being formally arranged beforehand by a couple of elderly people, who are in no hurry, and who have seen enough of the world to know thoroughly what they are about; nor, we may add, does it usually take place in time to avert some one or more of those troublesome flirtations with handsome, but penniless, ball-room heroes which are not always calculated to improve either temper or character.

Still, whatever our practice may be, we nevertheless do homage to the theory that, in this favored country, young ladies choose whatever husbands they like best, and marry for love; and although this theory is in some respects a serious obstacle to marriage, and often stands cruelly in the way of people with weak nerves, it places a powerful weapon in the hands of the dauntless and determined match-maker. If young people are to marry for love, they must obviously have every facility afforded them for meeting and fascinating each other. It is this consideration which reconciles the philosopher to some of our least entertaining entertainments, although, at the same time, it makes so much of our hospitality an organized hypocrisy.

It is, indeed, a hard fate to be obliged to leave your after-dinner cigar and George Eliot's last novel in order to drive four miles through wind and snow to a party which your hostess has given, not because she has good fare, or good music, or agreeable guests, or anything, in short, really calculated to amuse you, but simply and solely because she has a tribe of daughters who somehow must be disposed of. Yet even a man of the Sir Cornewall Lewis stamp, who thinks that this world would be a very tolerable place but for its amusements, may forgive her when he reflects that business, not pleasure, is at the bottom of the invitation. If marriage is to be kept up, we must either abandon our theory that young ladies are allowed to choose husbands for themselves, or we must give them every possible facility for exercising the choice. Bachelors must be dragged, on every available pretext, and without the slightest reference to the nominal ends of amusement or hospitality, from the novel or cigar, and made to run the gauntlet of female charms.

From the Sir Cornewall Lewis point of view, with which nearly all Englishmen over thirty more or less sympathise, it is the only sound defence of many of our so-called entertainments that they are virtually daughter-shows—genteel auctions, without which a sufficiently brisk trade in matrimony could not possibly be carried on. The consciousness of this is doubtless in one way somewhat of an obstacle to flirtation, and gives the frisky matron a cruel advantage over her unmarried rival. A man must have oak and triple brass round his heart who can flirt perfectly at his ease when he knows that his "attentions" are not merely watched by vigilant chaperons, but are actually reduced to a matter of numerical calculation—that a certain number of dances, or calls, or polite speeches will justify a stern father or big brother in asking his "intentions."

This application of arithmetic is, in some respects, as dangerous to courtship as to the Pentateuch. But, nevertheless, it gives the clever and courageous match-maker an advantage of which the eligible bachelor complains that she makes the most pitiless use. He finds himself manœuvred into "paying the attentions" which society considers the usual prelude to a marriage, with a dexterity which it is all but impossible to evade. The lady is played into his hands with much the same sort of skill that a conjuror exhibits in forcing a card. There are perhaps a number of other ladies present, in promiscuous flirtation with whom he sees, at first glance, an obvious means of escape. But this hope speedily turns out a delusion. One lady is vigilantly guarded by a jealous betrothed; a second is a poor relation, or humble friend, who knows that she would never get another invitation to the house if she once interfered with her patron's plans; a third is too plain to be approached on any ordinary calculation of probabilities; a fourth is hopelessly dull; the rest are married, and if not actually themselves in the conspiracy—which, however, is as likely as not—are still carefully chosen for their freedom from the flirting propensities of the frisky matron. The destined victim finds, in short, that he must either deliberately resign himself to be bored to death, or boldly face the peril in store for him, and take his chance of evading or breaking the net. Nine men out of ten naturally choose the latter alternative, too often in that presumptuous spirit of self-confidence which is the match-maker's best ally.

A bachelor is perhaps never in so great danger of being caught as when he has come to the conclusion that he sees perfectly through the mother's little game and merely means to amuse himself by carrying on a strictly guarded flirtation with the daughter. We mean, of course, on the assumption that the daughter is either a pretty or clever girl, with whom any sort of flirtation is in itself perilous. His danger is all the greater if it happens—and it is only fair to young-ladydom to admit that it often does happen—that the daughter has sufficient spirit and self-respect to repudiate all share in the maternal plot. Many a man has been half surprised, half piqued, into serious courtship by finding himself vigorously snubbed and rebuffed where he had been led to imagine that his slightest advances would be only too eagerly received. But, in any case, the match-maker knows that, if she can only bring the two people whom she wishes to marry sufficiently often into each other's society, the battle is half won. According to Lord Lytton, whom every one will admit to be an authority on the philosophy of flirtation, "proximity is the soul of love." And eligible bachelors complain that it becomes every day harder to avoid this perilous proximity, and the duty of "paying attention" which it implies, without being positively rude.

We have not much consolation to offer the sufferers who prefer this complaint. As regards our own statement that the art of match-making requires cultivation, we did not mean by it to imply that match-making is not vigorously carried on. So long as there are mothers left with daughters to be married, so long will match-making continue to be pursued; and it must obviously be pursued all the more energetically to keep pace with the growing disinclination of bachelors among the upper and middle classes to face the responsibilities of married life. We meant that match-making does not receive the sort of cultivation which it seems to us fairly to deserve, when we consider the paramount importance of the object which it at least professes to have in view, and the delicate nature of the instruments and experiments with which it is concerned.

We have not yet mustered up courage for the attempt to show what should be its proper cultivation; but we may safely say that so long as it is left in the hands of those who are influenced by merely mercenary or interested motives, and who watch the "attentions" of a bachelor, not in the spirit of a philosopher or a philanthropist, but in that of a Belgravian mother, it cannot be cultivated as a fine art. It can only be rescued from the unmerited odium into which it has fallen by being taken under the patronage of those who are in a position to practice it on purely artistic and disinterested grounds. In their hands, the now perilous process of "paying attention" would be studied and criticized in a new spirit. It might still, indeed, be treated arithmetically, as perhaps the most promising way of reducing it to the precision and certainty of an exact science. But still the problem would be to determine, not what is the least possible number of dances, calls, or compliments which may justify the intervention of a big brother or heavy father, but what number warrants the assumption that the flirtation has passed out of the frivolous into the serious stage. Three dances, for instance, may expose a man to being asked what are his "intentions," where six dances need not imply that he really has any. The mercenary match-maker considers only the first point; our ideal match-maker would lay far more stress upon the second. But still, in any case, this growing tendency to treat the practice of "paying attention" in the spirit of exact science offers at least one ray of hope to those who complain that, do what they will, they cannot escape having to pay this dangerous tribute. The tendency must sooner or later bear fruit in a generally recognised code of courtship (whether written or unwritten does not much matter), prescribing the precise number and character of the "attentions"—in their adaptation to dancing, croquet-playing, cracker-pulling, and other conventional pretexts for flirtation—which virtually amount to an offer of marriage. This scheme, we may mention, is not wholly imaginary. There is somewhere or other a stratum of English society in which such a code already exists. At least we have seen a book of etiquette in which, among similar ordinances, it was laid down that to hand anything—say a flower or a muffin—to a lady with the left hand was equivalent to a proposal. The general introduction of a system of this kind, although it might shorten the lives of timid or forgetful men, would obviously confer an unspeakable boon upon the majority of the match-maker's present victims. They would not only know exactly how far to go with safety, but also how at once to recede. To offer, for instance, two pieces of muffin firmly and decidedly with the right hand would probably make up for offering one flower with the left, at least if there were no guardian or chaperon on the spot to take instant advantage of the first overture. But it would now perhaps be premature to enter into the details of a system which it may take a generation or so more of match-making to introduce.

WOMEN'S HEROINES.

A vigorous and pertinacious effort has of late years been made to persuade mankind that beauty in women is a matter of very little moment. As long as literature was more or less a man's vocation, an opposite tendency prevailed; and a successful novelist would as soon have thought of flying as of driving a team of ugly heroines through three volumes. The rapid and portentous increase of authoresses changed the current of affairs. As a rule, authoresses do not care much about lovely women; and they must naturally despise the miserable masculine weakness which is led captive by a pretty face, even if it be only upon paper. They can have no patience with such feebleness, and it may well seem to them to be a high and important mission to help to put it down.

It became, accordingly, the fashion at one time among the feminine writers of fiction to make all their fascinating heroines plain girls with plenty of soul, and to show, by a series of thrilling love adventures, how completely in the long run the plain girls had the best of it. There is a regular type of ideal young lady in women's novels, to which we have at last become accustomed. She is not at all a perfect beauty. Her features are not as finely chiseled as a Greek statue; she is taller, we are invariably told, than the model height, her nose is retroussé; and "in some lights" an unfavorable critic might affirm that her hair was positively tawny. But there is a well of feeling in her big brown eyes, which, when united to genius, invariably bowls over the hero of the book. And the passion she excites is of that stirring kind which eclipses all others.

Through the first two volumes the predestined lover flirts with the beauties who despise her, dances with them under her eye, and wears their colors in her presence. But at the end of the third an expressive glance tells her that all is right, and that big eyes and a big soul have won the race in a canter. Jane Eyre was perhaps the first triumphant success of this particular school of art. And Jane Eyre certainly opened the door to a long train of imitators. For many years every woman's novel had got in it some dear and noble creature, generally underrated, and as often as not in embarrassed circumstances, who used to capture her husband by sheer force of genius, and by pretending not to notice him when he came into the room. Some pleasant womanly enthusiasts even went further, and invented heroines with tangled hair and inky fingers. We do not feel perfectly certain that Miss Yonge, for instance, has not married her inky Minervas to nicer and more pious husbands, as a rule, than her uninky ones. The advantage of the view that ugly heroines are the most charming is obvious, if only the world could be brought to adopt it. It is a well-meant protest in favor of what may be called, in these days of political excitement, the "rights" of plain girls. It is very hard to think that a few more freckles or a quarter of an inch of extra chin should make all the difference in life to women, and those of them who are intellectually fitted to play a shining part in society or literature may be excused for rebelling against the masculine heresy of believing in beauty only.

Whenever such women write, the constant moral they preach to us is that beauty is a delusion and a snare. This is the moral of Hetty in Adam Bede, and it is in the unsympathetic and cold way in which Hetty is described that one catches glimpses of the sex of the consummate author of the story. She is quite alive to Hetty's plump arms and pretty cheeks. She likes to pat her and watch her, as if Hetty were a cat, or some other sleek and supple animal. But we feel that the writer of Adam Bede is eyeing Hetty all over from the beginning to the end, and considering in herself the while what fools men are. It would be unjust and untrue to say that George Eliot in all her works does not do ample justice, in a noble and generous way, to the power of female beauty. The heroines of Romola and Felix Holt prove distinctly that she does. But one may fairly doubt whether a man could have painted Hetty. When one sees the picture, one understands its truth; but men who draw pretty faces usually do so with more enthusiasm.

A similar sort of protest may be found lurking in a great many women's novels against the popular opinion that man is the more powerful animal, and that a wife is at best a domestic appanage of the husband. Authoresses are never weary of attempts to set this right. They like to prove, what is continually true, that feminine charms are the lever that moves the world, and that the ideal woman keeps her husband and all about her straight. In religious novels woman's task is to exercise the happiest influence on the man's theological opinions. Owing to the errors he has imbibed from the study of a false and shallow philosophy, he sees no good in going to church twice on Sundays, or feels that he cannot heartily adopt all the expressions in the Athanasian creed. It is the heroine's mission to cure this mental malady; to point out to him, from the impartial point of view of those who have never committed the folly of studying Kant or Hegel, how thoroughly superficial Kant and Hegel are; and to remind him by moonlight, and in the course of spiritual flirtation on a balcony, of the unutterable truths in theology which only a woman can naturally discern. We are far from wishing to intimate that there is not a good deal of usefulness in such feminine points of view. The argumentum ad sexum, if not a logical, is often no doubt a practical one, and women are right to employ it whenever they can make it tell. And as it would be impossible to develop it to any considerable extent in a dry controversial work, authoresses have no other place to work it in except in a romance. What they do for religion in pious novels, they do for other things in productions of a more strictly secular kind.

There is, for instance, a popular and prevalent fallacy that women ought to be submissive to, and governed by, their lords and masters. In feminine fiction we see a very wholesome reaction against this mistaken supposition. The hero of the female tale is often a poor, frivolous, easily led person. When he can escape from his wife's eye, he speculates heavily on Stock Exchange, goes in under the influence of evil advisers for any sort of polite swindling, and forgets, or is ill-tempered towards, the inestimable treasure he has at home. On such occasions the heroine of the feminine novel shines out in all her majesty. She is kind and patient to her husband's faults, except that when he is more than usually idiotic her eyes flash, and her nostrils dilate with a sort of grand scorn, while her knowledge of life and business is displayed at critical moments to save him from ruin. When every one else deserts him, she takes a cab into the city, and employs some clever friend, who has always been hopelessly in love with her—and for whom she entertains, unknown to her husband, a Platonic brotherly regard—to intervene in the nick of time, and to arrest her husband's fall.

In a story called Sowing the Wind, which has recently been published, the authoress (for we assume, in spite of the ambiguous assertion on the title-page, that the pen which wrote it was not really a man's) goes to very great lengths. The hero, St. John Aylott, is always snubbing and lecturing Isola, whom he married when she was half a child, and whom he treats as a child long after she has become a great and glorious woman. He administers the doctrine of conjugal authority to her in season and out of season, and his object is to convert her into a loving feminine slave. Against this revolting theory her nature rebels. Though she preserves her wifely attachment to a man whom she has once thought worthy of better things, her respect dies away, and at last she openly defies him when he wants her, in contravention of her plain duty, not to adopt as her son a deserted orphan-boy. At this point her character stands out in noble contrast to his. She does adopt the boy, and brings him to live with her in spite of all; and when St. John is unnaturally peevish at its childish squalling, Isola bears his fretful animadversions with a patient dignity that touches the hearts of all about her.

Any husband who can go on preaching about conjugal obedience through three volumes to a splendid creature who is his wife, must have something wrong about his mind. And something wrong about St. John's mind there ultimately proves to be. It flashes across Isola that this is the case, and before long her worst suspicions are confirmed. At last St. John breaks out into open lunacy, and dies deranged—a fate which is partly the cause, and partly the consequence, of his continual indulgence in such wild theories about the relations of man and wife. It is not every day that we have the valuable lesson of the rights of wives so plainly or so practically put before us, but when it is put before us, we recognize the service that may be conferred on literature and society by lady authors. To assert the great cause of the independence of the female sex is one of the ends of feminine fiction, just as the assertion of the rights of plain girls is another. Authoresses do not ask for what Mr. Mill wishes them to have—a vote for the borough, or perhaps a seat in Parliament. They do ask that young women should have a fair matrimonial chance, independently of such trivial considerations as good looks, and that after marriage they should have the right to despise their husbands whenever duty and common sense tell them it is proper to do so.

The odd thing is that the heroines of whom authoresses are so fond in novels, are not the heroines whom other women like in real life. Even the popular authoresses of the day, who are always producing some lovely pantheress in their stories, and making her achieve an endless series of impossible exploits, would not care much about a lovely pantheress in a drawing-room or a country-house; and are not perhaps in the habit of meeting any. The fact is that the vast majority of women who write novels do not draw upon their observation for their characters so much as upon their imagination. In some respects this is curious enough, for when women observe, they observe acutely and to a good deal of purpose. Those of them, however, who take to the manufacture of fiction have generally done so because at some portion of their career they have been thrown back upon themselves. They began perhaps to write when circumstances made them feel isolated from the rest of their little world, and in a spirit of sickly concentration upon their own thoughts.

A woman with a turn for literary work who notices that she is distanced, as far as success or admiration goes, by rivals inferior in mental capacity to herself, flies eagerly to the society of her own fancies, and makes her pen her greatest friend. It is the lot of many girls to pass their childhood or youth in a somewhat monotonous round of domestic duties, and frequently in a narrow domestic circle, with which, except from natural affection, they may have no great intellectual sympathy. The stage of intellectual fever through which able men have passed when they were young is replaced, in the case of girls of talent, by a stage of moral morbidity. At first this finds vent in hymns, and it turns in the end to novels. Few clever young ladies have not written religious poetry at one period or other of their history, and few that have done so, stop there without going further. It is a great temptation to console oneself for the shortcomings of the social life around, by building up an imaginary picture of social life as it might be, full of romantic adventures and pleasant conquests.

In manufacturing her heroines, the young recluse author puts on paper what she would herself like to be, and what she thinks she might be if only her eyes were bluer, her purse longer, or men more wise and discerning. In painting the slights offered to her favorite ideal, she conceives the slights that might possibly be offered to herself, and the triumphant way in which she would (under somewhat more auspicious circumstances) delight to live them down and trample them under foot. The vexations and the annoyances she describes with considerable spirit and accuracy. The triumph is the representation of her own delicious dreams. The grand character of the imaginary victim is but a species of phantom of her ownself, taken, like the German's camel, from the depths of her own self-consciousness, and projected into cloudland. This is the reason why authoresses enjoy dressing up a heroine who is ill-used. They know the sensation of social martyrdom, and it is a gentle sort of revenge upon the world to publish a novel about an underrated martyr, whose merits are recognised in the end, either before or after her decease. They are probably not conscious of the precise work they are performing. They are not aware that their heroine represents what they believe they themselves would prove to be under impossible circumstances, provided they had only golden hair and a wider sphere of action.

This is but another and a larger phase of a phenomenon which all of us have become familiar with who have ever had a large acquaintance with young ladies' poems. They all write about death with a pertinacity that is positively astounding. It is not that the young people actually want to die. But they like the idea that their family circle will find out, when it is too late, all the mistakes and injustices it has committed towards them, and that this world will perceive that it has been entertaining unawares an angel, just as the angel has taken flight upwards to another. The juvenile aspirant commences with revenging her wrongs in heaven, but it occurs to her before long that she can with equal facility have them revenged upon earth. Poetry gives way to prose, and hymnology to fiction. The element of self-consciousness, unknown to herself, still continues to prevail, and to color the character of the heroines she turns out. Of course great authoresses shake themselves free from it. Real genius is independent of sex, and first-rate writers, whether they are men or women, are not morbidly in love with an idealized portrait of themselves.

But the poorer or less worthy class of feminine novelists seldom escape from the fatal influence of egotism. Women's heroines, except in the case of the best artists, are conceptions borrowed, not from without, but from within. The consequence is that there is a sameness about them which becomes at last distasteful. The conception of the injured wife or the glorified governess is one which was a novelty fifteen or twenty years ago, while it cannot be said any longer to be lively or entertaining. As literature has grown to be a woman's occupation, we are afraid that glorified governesses in fiction will, like the poor, be always with us, and continue to the end to run their bright course of universal victory. The most, perhaps, that can be hoped is that they will in the long run take the wind out of the sails of the glorified adulteresses and murderesses which at present seem the latest and most successful efforts of feminine art.

INTERFERENCE.

About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. Not tyranny, which is another matter—tyranny being active while interference is negative; the one standing as the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of the same principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some personal gain in view when it takes in hand to force people to do what they do not like to do; while interference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply prevents the exercise of free will for the mere pleasure to be had out of such prevention. Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than domestic, but the curse of interference is seen most distinctly within the four walls of home, where also it is felt the most. Very many people spend their lives in interfering with others—perpetually putting spokes into wheels with which they have really nothing to do, and thrusting their fingers into pies about the baking of which they are not in any way concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women make up the larger number and are the greater sinners.

To be sure there are some men—small, fussy, finicking fellows, with whom nature has made the irreparable blunder of sex—who are as troublesome in their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the feminine characteristics of men are so exceptional that we need not take them into serious calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in any manly sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a right to control—say, with the wife's low dresses, or the daughter's too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and knowing what men say of such displays, or fearing their effect, they stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But this kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes into another class of motives altogether, and does not belong to the kind of interference of which we are speaking.

Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other and with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to church and subscribing to their favorite mission, so much as they tell us what we are not to do; they do not command so much as they forbid; and, of all women, wives and daughters are the most given to handling these check-strings and putting on these drag-chains. Sisters, while young, are obliged to be less interfering, under pain of a perpetual round of bickering; for brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of creatures for the most part as loftily snubbed as sisters are; while mothers are nine times out of ten laid aside for all but sentimental purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be a boy and has learned to become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of personal and domestic interference lies with wives, and they know how to use the prerogative they assume.

Take an unlucky man who smokes under protest, his wife not liking to forbid the pleasure entirely, but always grudging it, and interfering with its exercise. Each segar represents a battle, deepening in intensity according to the number. The first may have been had with only a light skirmish perhaps, perhaps a mere threatening of an attack that passed away without coming to actual onslaught; the second brings up the artillery; while the third or fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets the biggest guns thundering. She could understand a man smoking one segar in the day, she says, with a gracious condescension to masculine weakness; but when it comes to more she feels that she is called on to interfere, and to do her best towards checking such a reprehensible excess. It does not weaken her position that she knows nothing of what she is talking about. She never smoked a segar herself, and therefore does not understand the uses or the abuses of tobacco; but she holds herself pledged to interfere as soon as she gets the chance, and she redeems the pledge with energy.

The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite to correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that he has a feeble digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the gauntlet of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines or sups jollily with his friends without being plucked at and reminded that salmon always disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a headache to-morrow; and "My dear! when you know how bad salad is for you!" or, "How can you eat that horrid pastry! You will be so ill in the night!" "What! more wine? another glass of whisky? how foolish you are! how wrong!" The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear stimulants; the husband is a strong large-framed man who can drink deep without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit is her husband's measure, and as soon as he has gone beyond the range of her own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks herself justified in interfering with his progress. For women cannot be brought to understand the capacities of a man's life; they cannot be made to understand that what is bad for themselves may not be bad for others, and that their weakness ought not to be the gauge of a man's strength.

A pale chilly woman afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears furs and velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East-Indian fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, father, and sons in about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must not go out without an overcoat; they must be sure to take an umbrella if the day is at all cloudy; they must not walk too far, nor ride too hard, and they must be sure to be at home by a certain hour. When such women as these have to do with men just on the boundary-line between the last days of vigor and the first of old age, they put forward the time of old age by many years. One sees their men rapidly sink into the softness and incapacity of senility, when a more bracing life would have kept them good for half-a-dozen years longer. But women do not care for this. They like men to be their own companions more than they care for any manly comradeship among each other; and most women—but not all—would rather have their husbands manly in a womanly way than in a manly one, as being more within the compass of their own sympathies and understanding.

The same kind of interference is very common where the husband is a man of broad humor—one who calls a spade a spade, with no circumlocution about an agricultural implement. The wife of such a man is generally one of the ultra-refined kind, according to the odd law of compensation which regulates so much of human action, and thinks herself obliged to stand as the enduring censor of her husband's speech. As this is an example most frequently to be found in middle life, and where there are children belonging to the establishment, the word of warning is generally "papa!"—said with reproach or resentment, according to circumstances—which has, of course, the effect of drawing the attention of the young people to the paternal breadth of speech, and of fixing that special breach of decorum on their memory. Sometimes the wife has sufficient self-restraint not to give the word of warning in public, but can nurse her displeasure for a more convenient season; but as soon as they are alone, the miserable man has to pass under the harrow, as only husbands with wives of a chastising spirit can pass under it, and his life is made a burden to him because of that unlucky anecdote told with such verve a few hours ago, and received with such shouts of pleasant laughter. Perhaps the anecdote was just a trifle doubtful; granted; but what does the wife take by her remonstrance? Most probably a quarrel; possibly a good-natured peccavi for the sake of being let off the continuance of the sermon; perhaps a yawn; most certainly not reform. If the man is a man of free speech and broad humor by nature and liking, he will remain so to the end; and what the censorship of society leaves untouched, the interference of a wife will not control.

Children come in for an enormous share of interference, which is not direction, not discipline, but simple interference for its own sake. There are mothers who meddle with every expression of individuality in their young people, quite irrespective of moral tendency, or whether the occasion is trivial or important. In the fancies, the pleasures, the minor details of dress in their children, there is always that intruding maternal finger upsetting the arrangements of the poor little pie as vigorously as if thrones and altars depended on the result. Not a game of croquet can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn instead of a pink one, without maternal interference; so that the bloom is rubbed off every enjoyment, and life becomes reduced to a kind of goose-step, with mamma for the drill-sergeant prescribing the inches to be marked. Sisters, too, do a great deal of this kind of thing among each other; as all those who are intimate where there are large families of unmarried girls must have seen. The nudges, the warning looks, the deprecating "Amies!" and "Oh Lucies!" and "Hush Roses!" by which some seek to act as household police over the others, are patent to all who use their senses.

In some houses the younger sisters seem to have been born chiefly as training grounds for the elders, whereon they may exercise their powers of interference; and a hard time they have of it. If Emma goes to her embroidery, Ellen tells her she ought to practice her singing; if Jane is reading, Mary recommends sewing as a more profitable use of precious time; if Amy is at her easel, Ada wants to turn her round to the piano. It is quite the exception where four or five sisters leave each other free to do as each likes, and do not take to drilling and interference as part of the daily programme. Something of the reluctance to domestic service so painfully apparent among the better class of working women is due to this spirit of interference with women. The lady who wrote about the caps and gowns of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of dress, down to the very material of their gloves, was an instance of this spirit. For, when we come to analyse it, what does it really signify to us how our servants dress, so long as they are clean and decent, and do not let their garments damage our goods? Fashion is almost always ridiculous, and women as a rule care more for dress than they care for anything else; and if the kitchen apes the parlor, and Phyllis gives as much thought to her new linsey as my lady gives to her new velvet, we cannot wonder at it, nor need we hold up our hands in horror at the depravity of the smaller person. Does one flight of stairs transpose morality? If it does not, there is no real ethical reason why my lady should interfere with poor Phyllis's enjoyment in her ugly vanities, when she herself will not be interfered with, though press and pulpit both try to turn her out of her present path into one that all ages have thought the best for her, and the one divinely appointed. It is a thing that will not bear reasoning on, being simply a form of the old "who will guard the guardian?" Who will direct the directress? and to whose interference will the interferer submit?

There are two causes for this excessive love of interference among women. The one is the narrowness of their lives and objects, by which insignificant things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes; the other, their belief that they are the only saviors of society, and that without them man would become hopelessly corrupt. And to a certain extent this belief is true, but surely with restrictions. Because the clearer moral sense and greater physical weakness of women restrain men's fiercer passions, and force them to be gentle and considerate, women are not, therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine life, into whose hands is given the paying out of just so much rope as they think fit for the occasion. They would do better to look to their own tackle before settling so exactly the run of others'; and if ever their desired time of equality is to come, it must come through mutual independence, not through womanly interference, and as much liberality and breadth must be given as is demanded—which, so far as humanity has gone hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of squaring accounts.

Grant that women are the salt of the earth, and the great antiseptic element in society, still that does not reduce everything else to the verge of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet by their lives they evidently think that it is so, and that they are each and all the keepers of keys which give them a special entrance to the temple of morality, and by which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser body of men. Hence they interfere and restrict and pay out just so much rope, and measure off just so much gambolling ground, as they think fit; they think vile man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things into his own hand, and goes beyond their boundary-lines. It is all done in good if in a very narrow faith—that we admit willingly; but we would call their attention to the difference there is between influence and interference, which is just the difference between their ideal duty and their daily practice—between being the salt of the earth and the blister of the home. We think it only justice to put in a word for those poor henpecked fellows of husbands at a time when the whole cry is for Woman's Rights, which seems to mean chiefly her right of making man knuckle under on all occasions, and of making one will serve for two lives. We assure her that she would get her own way in large matters much more easily if she would leave men more liberty in small ones, and not teaze them by interfering in things which do not concern her, and have only reference to themselves.

PLAIN GIRLS.

It is beyond all question the tendency of modern society to regard marriage as the great end and justification of a woman's life. This is perhaps the single point on which practical and romantic people, who differ in so many things, invariably agree. Poets, novelists, natural philosophers, fashionable and unfashionable mothers, meet one another on the broad common ground of approving universal matrimony; and women from their earliest years are dedicated to the cultivation of those feminine accomplishments which are supposed either to be most seductive before marriage in a drawing-room, or most valuable after marriage in the kitchen and housekeeper's-room.

It is admitted to be a sort of half necessity in any interesting work of fiction that its plots, its adventures, and its catastrophes should all lead up to the marriage of the principal young lady. Sometimes, as in the case of the celebrated Lilly Dale, the public tolerates a bold exception to the ordinary rule, on account of the extreme piquancy of the thing; but no wise novelist ventures habitually to disregard the prevalent opinion that the heroine's mission is to become a wife before the end of the third volume. The one ideal, accordingly, which romance has to offer woman is marriage; and most novels thus make life end with what really is only its threshold and beginning. The Bible no doubt says that it is not good for man to live alone. What the Bible says of man, public opinion as unhesitatingly asserts of woman; and a text that it is not good for woman to live alone either, though not canonical, is silently added by all domestic commentators to the Scriptural original.

Those who pretend to be best acquainted with the order of nature and the mysterious designs of Providence assure us with confidence that all this is as it should be; that woman is not meant to grow and flourish singly, but to hang on man, and to depend on him, like the vine upon the elm. If we remember right, M. Comte entertains opinions which really come to pretty much the same thing. Woman is to be maintained in ease and luxury by the rougher male animal, it being her duty in return to keep his spiritual nature up to the mark, to quicken and to purify his affections, to be a sort of drawing-room religion in the middle of every-day life, to serve as an object of devotion to the religious Comtist, and to lead him through love of herself up to the love of humanity in the abstract.

One difficulty presented by this matrimonial view of woman's destiny is to know what, under the present conditions in which society finds itself placed, is to become of plain girls. Their mission is a subject which no philosopher as yet has adequately handled. If marriage is the object of all feminine endeavors and ambitions, it certainly seems rather hard that Providence should have condemned plain girls to start in the race at such an obvious disadvantage. Even under M. Comte's system, which provides for almost everything, and which, in its far-sightedness and thoughtfulness for our good, appears almost more benevolent than Providence, it would seem as if hardly sufficient provision had been made for them.

It must be difficult for any one except a really advanced Comtist to give himself up to the worship of a thoroughly plain girl. Filial instinct might enable us to worship her as a mother, but even the noblest desire to serve humanity would scarcely be enough to keep a husband or a lover up to his daily devotions in the case of a plain girl with sandy hair and a freckled complexion. The boldest effort to rectify the inequalities of the position of plain girls has been made of late years by a courageous school of female writers of fiction. Everything has been done that could be done to persuade mankind that plain girls are in reality by far the most attractive of the lot. The clever authoress of "Jane Eyre" nearly succeeded in the forlorn attempt for a few years; and plain girls, with volumes of intellect speaking through their deep eyes and from their massive foreheads, seemed for a while, on paper at least, to be carrying everything before them.

The only difficulty was to get the male sex to follow out in practice what they so completely admired in Miss Bronté's three-volume novels. Unhappily, the male sex, being very imperfect and frail, could not be brought to do it. They recognized the beauty of the conception about plain girls, they were very glad to see them married off in scores to heroic village doctors, and they quite admitted that occasional young noblemen might be represented in fiction as becoming violently attached to young creatures with inky fingers and remarkable minds.

But no real change was brought about in ordinary life. Man, sinful man, read with pleasure about the triumphs of the sandy-haired girls, but still kept on dancing with and proposing to the pretty ones. And at last authoresses were driven back on the old standard of beauty. At present, in the productions both of masculine and feminine workmanship, the former view of plain girls has been resumed. They are allowed, if thoroughly excellent in other ways, to pair off with country curates and with devoted missionaries; but the prizes of fiction, as well as the prizes of reality, fall to the lot of their fairer and more fortunate sisters.

Champions of plain girls are not, however, wanting who boldly take the difficulty by the horns, and deny in toto the fact that in matrimony and love the race is usually to the beautiful. Look about you, they tell us, in the world, and you will as often as not find beauties fading on their stalks, and plain girls marrying on every side of them. And no doubt plain girls do marry very frequently. Nobody, for instance, with half an eye can fail to be familiar with the phenomenon, in his own circle, of astonishingly ugly married women. It does not, however, follow that plain girls are not terribly weighted in the race.

There are several reasons why women who rely on their beauty remain unmarried at the last, but the reason that their beauty gives them no advantage is certainly not one. The first reason perhaps is that beauties are inclined to be fastidious and capricious. They have no notion of following the advice of Mrs. Hannah More, and being contented with the first good, sensible, Christian lover who falls in their way; and they run, in consequence, no slight risk of overstaying their market. They go in for a more splendid sort of matrimonial success, and think they can afford to play the more daring game.

Plain girls are providentially preserved from these temptations. At the close of a well-spent life they can conscientiously look back on a career in which no reasonable opportunity was neglected, and say that they have not broken many hearts, or been sinfully and distractingly particular. And there is the further consideration to be remembered in the case of plain girls, that fortune and rank are nearly as valuable articles as beauty, and lead to a fair number of matrimonial alliances. The system of Providence is full of kindly compensations, and it is a proof of the universal benevolence we see about us that so many heiresses should be plain. Plain girls have a right to be cheered and comforted by the thought. It teaches them the happy lesson that beauty, as compared with a settled income, is skin-deep and valueless; and that what man looks for in the companion of his life is not so much a bright cheek or a blue eye, as a substantial and useful amount of this world's wealth.

Plain girls again expect less, and are prepared to accept less, in a lover. Everybody knows the sort of useful, admirable, practical man who sets himself to marry a plain girl. He is not a man of great rank, great promise, or great expectations. Had it been otherwise, he might possibly have flown at higher game, and set his heart on marrying female loveliness rather than homely excellence. His choice, if it is nothing else, is an index of a contented and modest disposition. He is not vain enough to compete in the great race for beauties. What he looks for is some one who will be the mother of his children, who will order his servants duly, and keep his household bills; and whose good sense will teach her to recognise the sterling qualities of her husband, and not object to his dining daily in his slippers. This is the sort of partner that plain girls may rationally hope to secure, and who can say that they ought not to be cheerful and happy in their lot? For a character of this undeniable sobriety there is indeed a positive advantage in a plain girl as a wife. It should never be forgotten that the man who marries a plain girl never need be jealous. He is in the Arcadian and fortunate condition of a lover who has no rivals. A sensible unambitious nature will recognize in this a solid benefit. Plain girls rarely turn into frisky matrons, and this fact renders them peculiarly adapted to be the wives of dull and steady mediocrity.

Lest it should be supposed that the above calculation of what plain girls may do leaves some of their power and success still unaccounted for, it is quite right and proper to add that the story of plain girls, if it were carefully written, would contain many instances, not merely of moderate good fortunes, but of splendid and exceptional triumph. Like prima donnas, opera-dancers, and lovely milliners, plain girls have been known to make extraordinary hits, and to awaken illustrious passions. Somebody ought to take up the subject in a book, and tell us how they did it.

This is the age of Golden Treasuries. We have Golden Treasuries of English poets, of French poets, of great lawyers, of famous battles, of notable beauties, of English heroes, of successful merchants, and of almost every sort of character and celebrity that can be conceived. What is wanted is a Golden Treasury containing the narrative of the most successful plain girls. This book might be called the Book of Ugliness, and we see no reason why, to give reality to the story, the portraits of some of the most remarkable might not be appended. Of course, if ever such a volume is compiled, it will be proved to demonstration that plain girls have before now arrived at great matrimonial honor and renown.

There is, for example, the sort of plain girl who nurses her hero (perhaps in the Crimea) through a dangerous attack of illness, and marries him afterwards. There is the class of those who have been married simply from a sense of duty. There is the class that distinguishes itself by profuse kindness to poor cottagers, and by reading the Bible to blind old women; an occupation which as we know, from the most ordinary works of fiction, leads directly to the promptest and speediest attachments on the part of the young men who happen to drop in casually at the time. The catalogue of such is perhaps long and famous. Yet, allowing for all these, allowing for everything else that can be adduced in their favor, we cannot help returning to the position that plain girls have an up-hill battle to fight. No doubt it ought not to be so.

Cynics tell us that six months after a man is married it makes very little difference to him whether his wife's nose is Roman, aquiline, or retroussé; and this may be so. The unfortunate thing is that most men persist in marrying for the sake of the illusion of the first six months, and under the influence of the ante-nuptial and not the post-nuptial sentiments; and as the first six months with a plain girl are confessedly inferior in attraction, the inference is clear that they do in effect attract less. Plainness or loveliness apart, a very large number of womankind have no reason to expect any very happy chance in married life; and if marriage is to be set before all women as the one ideal, a number of feminine lives will always turn out to have been failures.

It may be said that it is hopeless to attempt on this point to alter the sentiments of the female sex, or indeed the general verdict of society. We do not quite see the hopelessness. A considerable amount of the matrimonial ideas of young women are purely the result of their education, and of the atmosphere in which they have been brought up; and, by giving a new direction to their early training, it might not be altogether so quixotical to believe that we should alter all that is the result of the training. At any rate it has become essential for the welfare of women that they should, as far as possible, be taught that they may have a career open to them even if they never marry; and it is the duty of society to try to open to them as many careers of the sort as are not incompatible with the distinctive peculiarities of a woman's physical capacity.

It may well be that society's present instincts as regards woman are at bottom selfish. The notion of feminine dependence on man, of the want of refinement in a woman who undertakes any active business or profession, and of the first importance of woman's domestic position, when carried to an extreme, are perhaps better suited to the caprice and fanciful fastidiousness of men than to the real requirements, in the present age, of the other sex. The throng of semi-educated authoresses who are now flocking about the world of letters is a wholesome protest against such exclusive jealousy. The real objection to literary women is that women, with a few notable exceptions, are not yet properly educated to write well, or to criticise well what others write. Remove this objection by improving the curriculum of feminine education, and there is hardly any other. There is none certainly of sufficient consequence to outweigh the real need which is felt of giving those women something to live for (apart from and above ordinary domestic and philanthropic duties), whose good or evil fortune it is not to be marked out by Heaven for a married life.

A WORD FOR FEMALE VANITY.

If any human weakness has a right to complain of the ingratitude with which the world treats it, it is certainly vanity. It gets through more good work, and yet comes in for more hearty abuse, than all our other weaknesses put together. Preachers and moralists are always having hits at it, and in that philosophical study and scientific vivisection of character which two friends are always so ready to practice at the expense of a third, and which weak-minded people confound with scandal, to no foible is the knife so pitilessly applied as to vanity. What makes this rigor seem all the more cruel and unnatural is that vanity never gets so little quarter as from those who ought, one would think, to be on the best possible terms with her. She is never justified of her children, and, like Byron's unhappy eagle, "nurses the pinion that impels the steel" against her. Yet it is difficult to see how the world could get on without the weakness thus universally assailed, and what preachers and moralists would do if they had their own way.

In the more important—or, we should rather say, in the larger—concerns of life vanity could perhaps be dispensed with. Where there is much at stake, other agencies come into play to keep the machinery of the world in motion, though, even as regards these, it is a question how many great poems, great speeches, great actions, which have profoundly influenced the destinies of mankind, would have been lost to the world if there had been none but great motives at work to produce them. Great motives usually get the credit—that is, when we are dealing with historical characters, not dissecting a friend, in whose case it is necessary to guard against our natural proneness to partiality; but little motives often do the largest share of the work. It is proper, for instance, and due to our own dignity and self-respect to say, that the world owes Childe Harold to a great poet's inspired yearning for immortality. Still, we fear, there is room for a doubt whether the world would ever have seen Childe Harold if the great poet had not happened to be also a morbidly vain and, in some respects, remarkably small man. But even if we assume that the big affairs of life may be left to big motives, and do not require such a little motive as vanity to help them, these are, after all, few and far between.

For one action that may safely be left to yearnings for immortality, or ambition, or love, or something equally lofty and grand, there are thousands which society must get done somehow, and which it gets done pleasantly and comfortably only because, by a charmingly convenient illusion, the vanity of each agent makes him attach a peculiar importance to them. There is no act so trivial, or to all appearance so unworthy of a rational being, that the magic of vanity cannot throw a halo of dignity over it, and persuade the agent that it is mainly by his exertions that society is kept together, as Molière's dancing-master reasoned that the secret of good government is the secret of good dancing—namely, how to avoid false steps. And it is this genial promoter of human happiness, this all-powerful diffuser of social harmony, this lubricating oil without which the vast and complex machinery of life could never work, that man, in his ignorant ingratitude, dares to denounce.

We should like to ask one of these thoughtless revilers of vanity whether it has ever been his misfortune to meet a woman without it. He would probably try to escape by declaring that a woman without vanity is a purely imaginary being, if not a contradiction in terms; and we admit that there is something to be said in favor of this view. Nothing is more astonishing to the male philosopher than the odd way in which, from some stray corner of character where he would have least thought of looking for it, female vanity now and then suddenly pops out upon him. He fancied that he knew a woman well, that he had studied her character and mastered all its strong and weak points, when, by some accident or at some unguarded moment, he suddenly strikes a rich, deep, vein of vanity of the existence of which he never had the remotest suspicion. He may perhaps have known that she was not without vanity on certain points, but for these he had discovered, or had fancied he had discovered, some sort of reason. We do not necessarily mean, by reason, any cause that seemed to justify or, on any consistent principle, to account for the fact. As we have already remarked, it is the peculiarity of vanity that it often flourishes most vigorously, and puts forth a plentiful crop, where there does not seem to be even a layer of soil for it.

Both men and women are occasionally most vain of their weakest points, perhaps by a merciful provision of nature similar to that by which a sow always takes most kindly to the weakest pig in the litter. Lord Chesterfield, when paternally admonishing his son as to the proper management of women, lays down as a general indisputable axiom that they are all, as a matter of course, to be flattered to the top of their bent; but he adds, as a special rule, that a very pretty or a very ugly woman should be flattered, not about her personal charms, but about her mental powers. It is only in the case of a moderately good-looking woman that the former should be singled out for praise. A very pretty woman takes her beauty as a matter of course, and would rather be flattered about the possession of some advantage to which her claim is not so clear, while a very ugly woman distrusts the sincerity of flattery about her person.

It is not without the profoundest diffidence that we venture to dispute the opinion of such an authority on such a subject as Lord Chesterfield, but still we think that no woman is so hideous that she may not, if her vanity happens to take this turn, be told with perfect safety that she is a beauty. Her vanity is, indeed, not so likely to take this turn as it would be if she were really pretty. She will probably plume herself upon her abilities or accomplishments, and therefore Chesterfield's excellent fatherly advice was, on the whole, tolerably safe. But still, if any hereditary bias or unlucky accident—such, for instance, as that of being brought up among people with whom brains are nothing, and beauty everything—does give an ugly woman's vanity an impulse in the direction of good looks, no excess of hideousness makes it unsafe to extol her beauty. On the contrary, she is more likely to be imposed upon than a moderately good-looking woman, from her greater eagerness to clutch at every straw that may help to keep up the darling delusion. No philosopher is, accordingly, surprised at finding that a woman is vain where he can discover not the slightest rational foundation even for female vanity.

But it certainly is surprising, now and then, to find how long the most intense female vanity will lie, in some out-of-the-way corner of character, hidden from the eye. Perhaps we ought to say, the male eye, for women seem to discover each other's weak points by a power of intuition that amounts almost to instinct. But a man is amazed to find that a woman whose vanity he believed himself to have tracked into all its channels has it, after all, most strongly in some channel of which he previously knew nothing. He has perhaps considered her a sensible matter-of-fact woman, vain perhaps, though not unpardonably, of her capacity for business and knowledge of the world, but singularly free from the not uncommon female tendency to believe that every man who sees her is in love with her; and he unexpectedly discovers that she has for years considered herself the object of a desperate passion on the part of the parish rector, a prosaic middle-aged gentleman of ample waistcoat and large family, and is a little uneasy about being left alone in the same room with the butler.

Unexpected discoveries of some such kind as this not unnaturally popularize the theory already mentioned, that such a being as a woman without vanity does not exist—that, no matter how securely the weakness may lie hidden from observation, it does somewhere or other exist, and some day will out. But we are inclined, notwithstanding, to hold that, here and there, but happily very seldom, there are to be found women really without vanity; and most unpleasant women they seem to us, as a rule, to be. They get on tolerably well with their own sex, for they are rarely pretty or affected, and they have usually certain solid, serviceable qualities which make up for not being attractive by standing wear and tear. But in their relations with men—as soon, that is, as they have secured a husband, and fascination has therefore ceased to be a matter of business, a practical question of bread-and-butter, to be grappled with in the spirit in which they would, if necessary, go out charing, or keep a mangle—they are painfully devoid of that eagerness to please and that readiness to be pleased which, in the present imperfect state of civilization, are among woman's chief charms.

Even men cannot, as a rule, get on very well without these qualities; but still to please is not man's mission in the sense in which it is generally considered to be woman's, and probably will continue to be considered, until Dr. Mary Walkers are not the exception, but the rule. One now and then has the misfortune to come upon a specimen of womanhood, good and solid enough perhaps, making a most exemplary and respectable wife and mother, but nevertheless dull, heavy, and unattractive to an extent that fills the wretched man who takes it in to dinner with desperation. And then to think that one ounce of vanity might have leavened this lump, and converted it, as by magic, into a pleasant, palatable, convivial compound, good everywhere, but especially good at the dinner-table! For, where vanity exists at all, it can scarcely fail to influence the natural desire of one sex to please the other; and a woman must be singularly devoid of all charms, physical and mental, if she fails when she is really anxious to please. That women should be fascinating, as they sometimes are, in spite of some positively painful deformity, is a proof of what such anxiety can alone accomplish.

We must admit that we have to postulate, on behalf of the female vanity whose cause we are espousing, that it should not derive its inspiration solely from self-love. However anxious a woman may be to please, if her anxiety is on her own account, and simply to secure admiration, she must be a very Helen if her vanity continues attractive. She is lucky if it does not take the most odious of all forms, and, from always revolving round self and dwelling upon selfish considerations, degenerate into a habit of perpetual postures and stage tricks to gain applause. And this tendency naturally connects itself with the wish to please the opposite sex, its success being in inverse proportion to its strength. Just as one occasionally meets with men who are perfectly unaffected and sensible fellows in men's society, but whose whole demeanor becomes absurdly changed if any woman, though it be only the housemaid with a coal-scuttle, enters the room, so there are, more commonly, to be found women whose whole character seems to vary, as if by magic, according to the sex of the person whom they find themselves with. Before their own sex they are natural enough; before men they are eternally attitudinizing. We should be sorry to say that this repulsive form of vanity always takes its root in excessive self-love, but still a tinge of unselfishness seems to us the best antidote against it.

It is marvellous with how much vanity, and that too of a tolerably ostentatious kind, a woman may be thoroughly agreeable even to her own sex, if her eagerness to please is accompanied by genuine kindliness, or is free from excessive selfishness. It may be easy enough to see that all her little courtesies and attentions are at bottom really attributable to vanity; that, when she does a kind act, she is thinking less of its effect upon your comfort and happiness than of its effect upon your estimate of her character. She would perhaps rather you got half the advantage with her aid than the whole advantage without it. Her motive is, primarily, vanity—clearly not kindness—however amicably they may in general work together. But still it is the kindness that makes the vanity flow into pleasant, friendly forms. In a selfish woman the very same vanity would degenerate into posturing or dressing. And, odd as it may seem, and as much as it may reflect upon the common sense of poor humanity, we believe that kind acts done out of genuine, unadulterated benevolence are less appreciated by the recipient than kind acts done out of benevolence stimulated by vanity. The latter are pleasant because they spring out of the desire to please, and soothe our self-love, whereas the former appeal to our self-interest.

There are few things in this world more charming than the kindly courtesy of a pretty woman, not ungracefully conscious of her power to please, and showing courtesy because she enjoys the exercise of this power. Strictly speaking, she is acting less in your interest than in her own. Although she feels at once the pleasure of pleasing and the pleasure of doing a kindly action, the second is quite subordinate to the first, and is perhaps, more or less, sacrificed to it. Yet who is strong-minded enough to wish that the kindliness of a pretty woman should be dictated by simple benevolence, untinged by vanity? If we knew that her kindliness arose rather from a wish to benefit us than to conciliate our good opinion, it is perhaps possible that we should esteem her more, but we fear it is quite certain that we should like her less.

Before we conclude, we ought perhaps to make one more postulate on behalf of female vanity, not less important than our postulate that it should be pleasantly tinged by unselfishness. To be agreeable, it must have fair foundation. A woman may be forgiven for over-estimating her charms, but there is no forgiveness on this side of the grave for a woman who recklessly credits herself with charms that do not exist. All the lavish cheques she draws upon her male neighbor's admiration are silently dishonored, and in half an hour after the moment they sit down to table together she is a hopeless bankrupt in his estimation, even though he may have courtesy and skill enough to conceal the collapse.

As there are few, if any, pleasanter objects than a pretty woman, gracefully conscious of her beauty, and radiantly fulfilling its legitimate end, the power of pleasing, so are there few, if any, more unpleasant objects than a vain woman, ungracefully conscious of imaginary charms, and secretly disgusting those she strives to attract. An ugly woman who gives herself the airs of a beauty, or a silly woman who believes herself a genius, is not a spectacle upon which a man of healthy imagination and appetite likes to dwell. It is perhaps only in accordance with the theory that this life is a state of trial and probation that the tastes can be explained. Happily, it is not very common. Most women know their strong from their weak points, and marshal them on the whole well in the encounter with their lawful oppressor and great enemy, man. And until they have won the victory to which Dr. Mary Walker is now leading them on, may they never lack the female vanity which makes it one of their great objects in life to please!

THE ABUSE OF MATCH-MAKING.

It is a pity that when, by some train of ill-luck, a word of respectable parentage, and well brought up, is led astray, it cannot adopt Goldsmith's recipe and die. It has not even the more prosaic alternative of being made an honest word by marriage, and escaping the name under which it stooped to folly, and was betrayed. It drags on a dishonored life, with little or no chance of recovering its character, inflicting cruel disgrace upon the unlucky family of ideas, no matter what their own innocence and respectability, to which it happens to belong. Thus Casuistry, if not a very useful, was at least a perfectly harmless, member of society, and moved in the best circles, until in an evil hour she became too intimate with the unpopular Jesuits.

A few years ago, when high feeding and sermonizing proved too much for the virtue of garotters, and, waxing fat, they not only kicked society, but danced hornpipes in hobnailed boots upon its head and stomach, even Philanthropy, at once the most fashionable and popular word of this century, was all but compromised by Sir Joshua Jebb and Sir George Grey. Baron Bramwell fortunately came to the rescue, and saved it from permanent loss of character. But still to this day the word is sometimes used in a sense by no means complimentary. If the battue-system continues long enough, "good sport" will become a synonym for cold-blooded clumsy butchery, and thus all sport whatsoever will be more or less discredited. The faux pas of one member disgraces the whole family. A few men may be the lords of language, but the great majority are its slaves. They can no more disconnect the innocent idea from the soiled word that accompanies it than they can see a blue landscape through green glass. Let us hope that one of the first acts of Mr. Bright's millennial Parliament will be the establishment of a tribunal empowered to take a word when it arrives at this pitiable condition, and either in mercy knock it on the head altogether, or else formally readmit it into good society, and give it all the advantages of a fresh start.

We take an early opportunity of inviting their special attention to the much-injured word "Match-making." The practice which it describes is not only harmless, but, in the present state of society, highly useful and meritorious. Yet there can be no doubt, that there is a powerful prejudice against it. Although all women—or rather, perhaps, as Thackeray said, all good women—are at heart match-makers, there are very few who own the soft impeachment. Many repudiate it with indignation. It is on the whole about as safe to charge a lady with Fenianism as facetiously to point out a young couple in her drawing-room, whose flirtation has a suspicious businesslike look about it, and to hint that she has deliberately brought them together with a view to matrimony. It may be true that she has no selfish interest whatever in the matter. The criminal conspiracy in which she so strenuously repudiates any concern is, after all, nothing worse than the attempt to make two people whom she likes, and who she thinks will suit each other, happy for life. By any other name such an action ought, one would think, to smell sweet in the nostrils of gods and men.

But, whatever the gods think of it, men cannot forget that the practice, whether harmless or not, goes by the objectionable name of match-making. So the lady replies, not, perhaps, without the energy of conscious guilt, that "things of this sort are best left to themselves," and piously begs you to remember that marriages are made in Heaven, not in her drawing-room. The melancholy truth is that the gentle craft of match-making has been so vulgarized by course and clumsy professors, and its very name has in consequence been brought into such disrepute, that few respectable women have the courage openly to recognise it. They are haunted by visions of the typical match-maker who does work for fashionable novels and social satires, and who is a truly awful personage. To her alone of mortals is it given to inspire, like the Harpies, at once contempt and fear. Keen-eyed and hook-nosed, like a bird of prey, she glowers from the corner of crowded ball-rooms upon the unconscious heir, hunts him untiringly from house to house, marries him remorselessly to her eldest daughter, and then never loses sight of him till his spirit is broken, his old friends discarded, and his segar-case thrown away.

It is scarcely necessary to say that this fearful being exists only in fiction. In real life she has not only to marry her daughters, but also, like other human beings, to eat, drink, sleep, and otherwise dispose of the twenty-four hours of the day. She cannot therefore very well devote herself, from morning to night, to the one occupation of heir-hunting, with the precision of a machine, or one of Bunyan's walking vices. But still there must be some truth even in a caricature, and a man sometimes finds a girl "thrown at his head," as the process is forcibly termed, with a coarse-mindedness quite worthy of the typical match-maker, though also with a clumsiness which she would heartily despise.