The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays Volume Ii Part 8

_WOMEN'S MEN._

If songs are the expressions of a nation's political temper, novels show the current of its social morality, and what the learned would call its psychological condition. When French novelists devote half their stories to the a.n.a.lysis of those feelings which end in breaking the seventh commandment, and the other half to the gradual evolution of the evidence which leads to the detection of a secret murderer, we may safely a.s.sume, on the one hand, that the marriage law presses heavily, and, on the other, that the national intellect is of that ingenious kind which takes pleasure in puzzles, and is best represented by the familiar examples of dovetailing and mosaic work.

When too, we see that their common feminine type is a creature given over as a prey to nervous fancies and an exalted imagination, of a feverish temperament and a general obscuration of plain morality in favour of a subtilizing and misleading kind of thing which she calls her _besoin d'ame_, we may be sure that this is the type most approved by both writer and readers, and that anything else would be unwelcome.

The French novelist who should describe, as his central figure, a self-disciplined, straightforward, healthy young woman, honestly in love with her husband, rationally fond of her children, not given to dangerous musings about the need of her soul for an elective affinity outside her marriage bond, nor spending her hours in speculating on the philosophy of necessity as represented by Leon or Alphonse; who should make her absolutely impervious to the sickly sentimentalism of the inevitable _celibat_, and neither palter with peril nor lament that sin should be sinful when it is so pleasant; who should paint domestic morality as we know it exists in France no less than in England, and trust for his interest to the quiet pathos of unfriendly but cleanly circ.u.mstances, would be hard put to it to make his heroine attractive and his story popular; and his readers would not be counted by tens of thousands, as were those who gloated over the sins of _Madame Bovary_ and the prurience of _f.a.n.n.y_. The Scandinavian type of woman again, strong-armed, independent, athletic, practical, would not go down with the French reading public; wherefore we may a.s.sume that the _Parisienne_, as we know her in romance--feverish, subtil, casuistic, self-deluding, and always ready to sacrifice duty to sentiment--is the woman best liked by the people to whom she is offered, and that the novelist but repeats and represents the wish of his readers.

So, too, when our own novelists carry their stock puppets through the nine hundred pages held to be necessary for the due display of their follies and disasters, we may be sure that they are of the kind which finds favour in the eyes of the ordinary English reader; that the girls are the girls who please young men or do not alarm mothers, and that the men are the men in whom women delight, and think the ideals of their s.e.x. If, as it is said, the delineation of her hero is the touchstone of a woman's literary power, it must be confessed that the touchstone discloses, for the most part, a very feeble amount of literary power, and that the female mind has but a small perception of all that relates to man's needs and nature.

It is the rarest thing possible to find a flesh-and-blood man in the pages of a woman's novel; far rarer than to meet with a flesh-and-blood young lady in the pages of a man's. They are all either prigs, ruffians, or curled darlings; each of whom a man longs to kick. They are goody men of such exalted morality that Sir Galahad himself might take a lesson from them. Or they are brutes with the well-worn square jaw and beetling brow, who translate into the milder action of modern life the savage's method of wooing a woman by first knocking her senseless and then carrying her off. Or they are impossible light-weights, with small hands and artistic tendencies--men who moon about a good deal, and are sure to love the wrong woman in a helpless, drifting sort of way, as if it were quite the right and manly thing to do to let themselves fall under the dominion of a pa.s.sion which a little resolution could overcome.

Sometimes, for a difference, these light-weights are men of tremendous pluck and quality of muscle, able to thrash a burly bargee twice their weight and development with as much ease as a steel sword can cut through one of pith. The female crowd of present novel-writers repeat these four types with undeviating constancy, so that we have learnt them all by heart; and after the first outline indicative of their attributes, we can tell who they are as certainly as we can tell Minerva by her owl, St. Catharine by her wheel, Jupiter by his thunderbolts, or St. Sebastian by his arrows. But in what form soever they elect to portray their hero, they are sure to make his love for woman his best and his dominant quality.

Few women know anything of the intricacies of a man's life and emotion, save such as are connected with love. Yet, though love is certainly the strongest pa.s.sion in youth, it is by no means all powerful in maturity and middle age. But the lady's hero of fifty and upwards is as much under the influence of his erotic fancies as if he were a boy of eighteen; and life holds nothing worth living for if he does not get the woman with whom he has fallen in love. It seems impossible for a woman to understand the loftier side of a man's nature. She knows nothing, subjectively, of the political aims, the love for abstract truth, the desire for human progress, which take him out of the narrow domestic sphere, and make him comparatively indifferent to the life of sense and emotion altogether. And when she sees this she does not tolerate it. When Newton used his lady's little finger for a tobacco-stopper, he dug his grave in the female garden of the soul; and women rarely appreciate either Dr. Johnson or Dean Swift, because of the absence in the one of anything like romantic tenderness and its perversion in the other. All they care for is that men shall be tender and true to them; idealizing as lovers; as husbands constant and indulgent; and for this they will condone any amount of crookedness or meanness which does not make its way into the home. If he is complying and caressing there, he may be what fate and the foul fiend like to make him elsewhere, so long as he is not openly unfaithful and never gets drunk.

All the false glitter of the Corsair school is due solely to the capacity for loving ascribed to the heroes thereof. Though a man's name be 'linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes,' the one virtue, being love, outweighs the thousand crimes in the estimation of women and of the more effeminate kind of poets; and so long as the 'heart is framed for softness,' it may be 'warped to wrong' without doing any Conrad much injury with them. The absolute rightness and justness of a man count for little in comparison with his tenderness; and we know of no woman whose ideal man would be one neither a saint nor a lover.

The reason why the men of a softer civilization are in general so successful with the women of the harder and more northerly countries is because of the comparative softness of their manners and the larger place which love and love-making hold among them. All who know France know the Frenchman's jealous hatred of Italian men; which hatred we share here in England, only we add the Frenchman to the list. We affect to despise the arts by which the men succeed and the women are gained over; but we cannot deny their potency, nor shut our eyes to the esteem in which they are held by women. This is not saying that the chivalrous habit of deference taught by civilization is not a good thing in itself, but it is saying that it is not worth the stronger and more essentially masculine qualities. But to women the art of love-making is worth all the other virtues in a lump; indeed, it comprises them all, and without it the best are valueless. It is the crown and glory of life--the one thing to live for; and where it is not, there is no life worthy of the name. Not that women are insensible to the charms of public fame. If a man has made himself a great reputation, he may throw the handkerchief where he likes, and he will find plenty of women to pick it up. In this case they are not too rigid in their requirements; and if his ways are a little hard and cold, they hold themselves indemnified for the loss of personal tenderness by the glory which surrounds a name which is now theirs. A woman must be exceptionally silly if she cannot take comfort in her husband's public repute for her disappointment in his private manners.

But this is only with recognized and fully successful heroes. As a rule, no amount of manly virtues will excuse the want of the softer graces; and the finest fellow that ever lived, the true _anax andron_ among men, must be content to be measured by women merely according to his own estimate of them, and the power which the pa.s.sion of love has over him.

Nothing surprises men more than the odd ignorance of women concerning them; and half the unhappiness in married life, at least in England, springs from that ignorance. They cannot be made to understand the differences between a man's nature and requirements and their own; and they condemn all that they cannot understand. In those few rational homes where men's sports and gatherings, undisturbed by the presence of petticoats, are not made occasions for suspicion nor remonstrance, the stock of love and happiness with which married life began is more like the widow's cruse than elsewhere; but unfortunately for both husbands and wives, these homes are rare; while those are common where an extramural game of billiards in the evening is occasion for tears or pouting, and deadly offence is taken at club dinners or a week's shooting. The consequence of which is deceit or dissension; and sometimes both.

The woman's ideal man has none of these erratic tendencies. His business done, he comes home with the docility of a well-bred pointer sent to heel, and finds energy enough after his hard day's work for a variety of caressing cares which make him more precious in her eyes than all the tact, the temper, the judgment, the uprightness he has manifested in his dealings with the outside world. And the domesticity which she claims from her husband she demands from her son. Latchkeys are her abomination, and the 'gas left burning' is as a beacon-light on the way of destruction. She has the profoundest suspicion of all the men whom her boy calls his friends. She never knows into what mischief they may lead him; but she is sure it is mischief if they keep him away from his home in the evening. She would prescribe the same social restraints and moral regimen for her son as for her daughter, and she thinks the energies of masculine nature require no wider field and no looser rein. But though she likes those tame and tender men whom she can tie up close to her ap.r.o.n-strings and lovingly imprison in the narrow domain of home, she succ.u.mbs without a struggle to the square-jawed brute of the Rochester type, the man who dominates her by the mere force of superior strength; and she is not too severe on Don Juan, if only she can flatter herself that she is the best loved--and the last. That these are the men most liked by women is shown both by their own novels and by daily observation; and it seems to us that, among the many subjects for extended study of late proposed for women, a better acquaintance with men's minds, a higher regard for the n.o.bler kind of man and the ability to accept love as only one of many qualities, and not always the strongest nor the most praiseworthy of his impulses, would not be out of place.

_HOTEL LIFE IN ENGLAND._

If any one wants to see human nature stripped of certain conventional disguises and reduced to some of its primitive elements, let him try a boarding-house or family hotel for a while. If not always a profitable, it is generally an amusing, exhibition of character; and materials are never wanting to the student of human life. The predominating quality of most people will be found to be selfishness.

There is a kind of fighting for self that goes on which is very funny, because concentrated on such mean objects. Who shall have the most comfortable chair, the best place at the window, the cosiest by the fire--such are the favourite prizes to be gained by superior craft or boldness; and the ladies chiefly interested have recourse to a series of manoeuvres to circ.u.mvent their rivals, or steal a march on them unprepared, more ingenious at times than well-bred. Then there is the lady who appropriates the only footstool, and the lady who disputes the appropriation and sometimes 'comes to words' on the same; the couple who monopolize the bagatelle board, and the couple waiting savagely for their turn, which comes only when the gong sounds for dinner or the sky clears up for a walk. The quartet who settle themselves to whist every evening as to a regular part of the business of life, without caring to inquire whether others would like to cut in or not, are more justified in their exclusiveness; else it may happen that a Club man who can make his bad cards beat his opponent's good ones is mated with a partner who inquires anxiously 'Is that the queen to beat?' then, with the king in his hand, quietly drops the deuce, and gives the adversaries the game. All these however, are regarded with equally hostile feelings by the rest of the community; and sharp sermons are administered on the sin of selfishness by the bolder sort, with the application too evident to be misunderstood.

At meal times the same kind of odd fighting for self goes on. The table is set as for a dinner party; but it is the hands of Esau and the voice of Jacob. Instead of the silent waiting for one's turn, with the quiet acceptance of fate in the shape of the butler and his underlings, that belongs to a private dinner-table, here, at the _table d'hote_, there is an incessant call for this or that out of time; an angry demand to be served sooner or better than one's neighbours; a greedy 'taking care of number one' at the head of the table that excites as greedy apprehensions in number two at the foot; a running fire of criticism on the dishes--that does not help the illusion of the private dinner-party; and, with people who live much about in hotels, there is a continual comparison with this and that, here and there, always to the disadvantage of the place and the thing under present consideration.

Among the inmates are sure to be some who are fastidious and peevish about their food; women who come down late and complain that things are not as fresh as when first served up; men who always want fried fish when the management has provided boiled, and boiled when the _menu_ says fried; dyspeptic bodies who cannot eat bread unless it is two days old, and bodies defiant of dyspepsia who will not eat it at all unless it is hot from the oven; plain feeders who turn up their noses at the made dishes, and dainty livers who call simple roast and boiled coa.r.s.e. And for all these societies the management has to cater impartially; and probably miss the reward of thanks at the end.

The feelings of people are expressed with the same kind of defiant individualism as are their tastes. There are the married people who make love to each other in public, and the married people who make anything but love; the women who sit and adore their husbands like wors.h.i.+ppers before a shrine, and who like the world to be conscious of their devotion; the men who call their wives pet names for the benefit of the whole table, and even indulge in playful little familiarities which make the girls toss their heads and the young men laugh; and the happy pair who quarrel without restraint, and say snappish and disagreeable things to each other in audible voices, to the embarra.s.sment of all who hear them. There is the rakish Lothario who neglects his own better half and devotes himself to some other man's, with a lofty disregard of appearances; and there is the coquettish little wife who treats her husband very much like a dog and very little like her lord, and who carries on her flirtations in the most audacious manner under his eyes, and apparently with his sanction.

And, having his sanction, she defies the world about her to take umbrage at her proceedings.

As for flirtations indeed, these are always going on in hotel life.

Sometimes it is flirtation between a single man and a single woman, against which no one has a word to say on the score of propriety, though some think it will never come to anything and some think it will, and all scan curiously the signs of progressive heating, or the process of cooling off. Sometimes it is a more questionable matter; the indiscreet behaviour of a young wife, unprotected by her husband, who takes up furiously with some stranger met at the _table d'hote_ by chance, and of whose character or antecedents she is utterly ignorant.

This is the kind of things that sets the whole hotel by the ears. Prim women ask severely, 'How long has Mrs. So-and-So known Major Fourstars?' and their faces, when told, are a sufficient commentary on the text. Others, in seeming innocence, call them by the same name, and express intense surprise when informed they are not man and wife, but acquaintances of only a week's standing. Others again say it is shameful to see them, and wonder why some one does not write home to the poor husband, and speak of doing that kind office themselves; and others watch them with a cynical half-amused attention, interpreting their actions by the broadest glossary, and carefully guarding their wives or daughters from any a.s.sociation with either of the offenders.

Whatever else fails, this kind of vulgar hotel intrigue is always on hand at sea-side places and the like; sometimes ending disastrously, sometimes dying out in favour of a new flame, but always causing discomfort while it lasts, and annoying every one connected therewith save the sinners themselves.

The women who dress to excess are balanced by the women who do not dress at all. The first are the walking advertis.e.m.e.nts of fas.h.i.+on, the last might be mistaken for the canva.s.sers of old clothes' shops. The one cla.s.s oppress by their magnificence, the other disgust by their dowdiness; and each ridicules the other to the indifferent third party, who, holding the scales of justice evenly, condemns both alike.

Then there are the ugly women who manifestly think themselves attractive, and the pretty women who are too conscious of their charms. To be sure there are also ugly women who are content to know themselves unpersonable, as there are pretty women who are content to know that they are pretty, just as they know that they are alive, but who think no more about it, and never trouble themselves nor their neighbours by their affectations. There are the dear motherly women beyond middle age, scant of breath and incapable of exertion, who sit in the drawing-room, placid and asthmatic, and to whom every one pays an affectionate reverence; and there are the elderly women who chirrup about like young things, and skip up and down steep places with commendable agility, and who are by no means disposed to let old age have the victory for many a year to come. There are the mothers who make their lumpish children sick with a multiplicity of good things, and the mothers who never give a moment's thought to the comfort nor the well-being of theirs; the mothers who fidget their little ones and every one else by their over-anxiety, their over caution, their incessant preoccupation and fear, and the mothers who let theirs wander, and who take it quite comfortably if they do not come in even at night-fall; the mothers who prank their children out like Mayday Jacks and Jills, and the mothers who let theirs go free in rags and dirt, till you are puzzled to believe them better born than the gutter. And with all this there is the plague of the children themselves--the babies who cry all night; the two-year-olds who scream all day; the rampaging boys who haunt the stairs and pa.s.sages and who will slide down the banisters on a wet afternoon; the clattering little troop playing at horses before your bedroom door, while you are lying down with a sick headache; and the irruption into the drawing-room of the young barbarians who have no nursery of their own.

Quite recent widows with fluffy heads and no sign of their bereaved state, come to the hotel flanked by those of a couple of years'

standing, still dressed in the deepest weeds, with the significant cap cherished as a sacred symbol. Brisk young widows appeal to men's admiration by their brightness, and languid young widows excite sympathy by their despair. Pretty young widows of small endowment, whose chances you would back at long odds, are handicapped against plain-featured widows, whose desolation you know no one would ever ask to relieve were it not for those Three per cents. with which they are credited. And the widows of hotel life are always a feature worth studying. There are many who do so study them;--chiefly the old bachelor of well-preserved appearance and active habits, who has const.i.tuted himself the squire of dames to the establishment, and who takes up first with one and then another of the unprotected females as they appear, and escorts them about the neighbourhood. He never makes friends with men, but he is hand-in-glove with all the pretty women; and his critical judgment on them on their first appearance is considered final. As a rule he does not care to attach himself so exclusively to one, be she maid, wife, or widow, as to get himself talked about; but sometimes he falls into the clutches of a woman of more tenacity than he has bargained for, and, man of irreproachable respectability as he is, drifts into a flirtation which the hotel takes to mean an offer or an intrigue, according to the state of the lady concerned. As the hotel-life bachelor is generally a man of profound selfishness, the discomfort that ensues does no great harm; and it sometimes happens that it is diamond cut diamond, which is a not unrighteous retribution.

For the most part the people haunting hotels and living at _tables d'hote_ are not specially charming, but among them may sometimes be met men and women of broad views and liberal minds, cultivated and thoughtful, whose a.s.sociation time ripens into friends.h.i.+p. They stand out in bold relief among the vulgar people who talk loud, stare hard, ask impertinent questions, and discuss the dinners and the company in a broad provincial accent; among the silent people who sit gloomily at table as if oppressed with debt or a.s.sisting at a funeral; among the betting-men who flood the house at race-time, making it echo with the jargon of the Turf and the stable; among the quarrelsome people who snap and snarl at every subject started, like dogs growling over a bone; among the religious people who will testify in season and out of season, and the political people who will argue; the stupid people who have not two ideas, and the ignorant people who do not understand anything beyond the educational range of a child or a peasant; the conventional people who oppress one with their strained proprieties, and the doubtful people of whom no one knows anything and every one suspects all. Among the _oi polloi_ of hotel life the really nice people s.h.i.+ne conspicuous: and more than one pleasant friends.h.i.+p which has lasted for life has been begun over the soup and fish of a _table d'hote_.

_OUR MASKS._

We should do badly, as things are ordered, if we went about the world with our natural moral faces. Even stopping short of the extravagance of betraying our most important secrets, as in a Palace of Truth, and frankly telling men and women that we think them fools or bores, it is difficult for the most honest person in society to do without something of a mask in regard to minor matters. The old quarrel between nature and art, and where the limits of each should extend, has not yet got itself arranged; and it is doubtful whether it will during the present dispensation. It may be put to rights in some future state of human development, when the spiritualists will have it all their own way and tell us exactly what we ought to do; but pending this forecast of the millennium, we are obliged to have recourse to art for the better concealment of our natural selves, and especially, for the maintenance of that queer bundle of compromises and conventions which we call society.

The oddest consequence of the artificial state in which we find ourselves obliged to live is that nature looks like affectation, and that the highest art is the most like nature of anything we know. It is in drawing-rooms as on the stage. A thoroughly inartificial actor would be a mere dummy, just as in the Greek theatre a man with his natural face would have seemed mean and insignificant to the spectators accustomed to fixed types of heroic size and set intention.

But he whose acting brings the house down because of its truth to nature is he whose art has been the most profoundly studied, and with whom the concealment of art has therefore been the most perfectly attained. So in society. A man of thoroughly natural manners pa.s.ses as either morose or pert according to his mood--either stupid because disinclined to exert himself, or obtrusive because in the humour to talk. He means no offence, honest body! but he makes himself disagreeable all the same. Such a man is the pest of his club, and the nuisance of every drawing-room he enters. It matters little whether he is const.i.tutionally boorish or good-natured; he is natural; and his naturalness comes like an ugly patch of frieze on the cloth of gold with which the G.o.ddess of conventionality is draped.

Natural women too, may be found at times--women who demonstrate on small occasions, sincerely no doubt, but excessively; women who skip like young lambs when they are pleased and pout like naughty children when they are displeased; who disdain all those little arts of dress which conceal defects and heighten beauties, and who are always at war with the fas.h.i.+ons of the day; who despise those conventional graces of manner which have come to be part of the religion of society, contradicting point-blank, softening no refusal with the expression of a regret they do not feel, yawning in the face of the bore, admiring with the _navete_ of a savage whatever is new to them or pleasing.

Such women are not agreeable companions, however devoid of affectation they may be, however stanch adherents to truth and things as they are, according to their boast. The woman who has not a particle of untrained spontaneity left in her and who has herself in hand on all occasions, who gives herself to her company and is always collected, graceful, and at ease, playing her part without a trip, but always playing her part and never letting herself drop into uncontrolled naturalness--this is the woman whom men agree to call, not only charming, but thoroughly natural as well.

On the other hand, the untrained woman who speaks just as she thinks, and who cares more to express her own sensations than to study those of her companions, is sneered at as silly or underbred, as the current sets; or perhaps as affected; her transparency, to which the world is not accustomed and to which it does not wish to get accustomed, puzzling the critics of their kind. Social naturalness, like perfect theatrical representation, is everywhere the result of the best art; that is, of the most careful training. It simulates self-forgetfulness by the very perfection of its self-control, while untrained nature is self-a.s.sertion at all corners, and is founded on the imperious consciousness of personality.

All of us carry our masks into society. We offer an eidolon to our fellow-creatures, showing our features but not expressing our mind; and the one whose eidolon, while betraying least of the being within, reflects most of the beings without, is the most popular and considered the most self-revealed. We may take it as a certainty that we never really know any one. We may know the broad outlines of character; and we generally believe far more than we have warranty for; but we rarely, if ever, penetrate the inner circle wherein the man's real self hides. If our friend is a person of small curiosity and large self-respect, we may trust him not to commit a base action; if he has a calm temperament, with physical strength and without imagination, he will not do a cowardly one; if he has the habit of truth, he will not tell a lie on any paltry occasion; if he is tenacious and secret, he will not betray his cause nor his friend. But we know very little more than this. Even with one's most familiar friend there is always one secret door in the casket which is never opened; and those which are thrown wide apart are not those which lead to the most cherished treasures. With the frankest or the shallowest there are depths never sounded; what shall we say, then, of those who have real profundity of character?

Who is not conscious of an ego that no man has seen? In praise or blame we feel that we are not thoroughly known. There is something infinitely pathetic in this dumb consciousness of an inner self, an unrevealed truth, which bears us up through injustice and makes us shrink from excessive praise. Our very lovers love us for the least worthy part of us, or for fancied virtues which we do not possess; and if our worst enemies knew us as we are, they would come round to the other side and shake hands over the grave of their mistaken estimate.

The mask hides the reality in either case, for good or for ill; and we know that if it could be removed, we should be judged differently. For the matter of that it never can be removed. The most transparent are judged according to the temper of the spectator; and the mind sees what it brings in our judgment of our fellows as well as in other things.

But, apart from that inner nature, that hidden part which so few people even imagine exists in each other, the masks we wear in society cover histories, sufferings, feelings, which would set the world aflame if betrayed. No one who gets below the smooth crust of conventional life can be ignorant of the fierce lava flood that sometimes flows and rages underneath. In those quiet drawing-rooms where everything looks the embodiment of harmony, of tranquil understanding, and where the absence of mystery is the first thing felt, there are dramas at the very time enacting of which only the exceptionally observant catch the right cue. Ruin faces some whose s.h.i.+p of good fortune seems sailing steadily on a halcyon sea; a hideous secret stands like a spectre in the doorway of another. The domestic happiness which these covenant between themselves to show in the full suns.h.i.+ne to the world is no better than a Dead Sea apple displayed for pride, for policy, and of which those who eat alone know the extreme bitterness. The grand repute which makes men honour the name to the very echo, is a sham, and tottering to its fall. Here the confessing religionist hides by the fervour of his amens the scepticism which he dares not show by the honesty of his negation; there the respectable moralist denounces in his mask the iniquities which he practises daily when he lays it aside. To the right the masks of two loving friends greet each other with smiles and large expressions of affection, then part, to push the friendly falsehood aside, and to whisper confidentially to the crowd what scoundrelism they have mutually embraced; to the left another couple of unreasoning foes want only to see each other in unmasked simplicity to become fast allies for life. The world and all it disguises play sad mischief with human affections as well as with truth.

Everything serves for a mask. A man's public character makes one which is as impenetrable in its disguise as any. The world takes one or two salient points and subordinates every other characteristic to these.

It ignores all those subtle intricacies which modify thought and action at every turn, producing apparent inconsistency--but only apparent; and it boldly blocks out a mask of one or two dominant lines as the representative of a nature protean because complex. Any quality that makes itself seen from behind this mask which popular opinion has created out of a man's public character is voted as inconsistent, or, it may be, insincere; and the richer the nature the less it is understood. So it is with us all in our degree:--a thought which might lead us to gentler judgments on each other than it is the fas.h.i.+on to cultivate, knowing as we do that we each wear a mask which hides our real self from the world; and that if this real self is less beautiful than our admirers say, it is infinitely less hideous than our enemies would make it to appear.

_HEROES AT HOME._

We may say what we like about the worthlessness of the world and the solid charms of home, but the plain fact, stripped of oratorical disguise, is that we mostly give society the best we have and keep the worst of ourselves for our own. The hero at home is not half so fine a fellow as the hero in public, and cares far less for his audience.

Indeed, when looked at under the domestic microscope, he is frequently found to be eminently un-heroic--something of the nature of a botch rather than n.o.bility in undress and an ideal brought down to the line of sight; which would be the case if he and all things else were what they seem, and if heroism, like fine gold, was good all through. This is not saying that the hero in public is a cheat. He has only turned the best of his cloak outside, and hidden the seams and frays next his skin. We know that every man's cloak must have its seams and frays; and the vital question for each man's life is, Who ought to see most of them, strangers or friends? We fear it must be owned that, whoever ought, it is our friends who do get the worst of our wardrobe--the people we love, and for whom we would willingly die if necessary; whilst strangers, for whom we have no kind of affection, are treated to the freshest of the velvet and the brightest of the embroidery. The man, say, who is pre-eminently good company abroad, who keeps a dinner-table alive with his quick wit and keen repartee, and who has always on hand a store of unhackneyed anecdotes, the latest _on dits_, and the newest information not known to Reuter, but who hangs up his fiddle at his own fireside and in the bosom of his family is as silent as the vocal Memnon at midnight, is not necessarily a cheat. He is an actor without a part to play or a stage whereon to play it; a hero without a flag; a bit of brute matter without an energizing force.

The excitement of applause, the good wine and the pleasant dishes, the bright eyes of pretty women, the half-concealed jealousy of clever men, the sensation of s.h.i.+ning--all these things, which are spurs to him abroad, are wanting at home; and he has not the originating faculty which enables him to dispense with these incentives. He is a first-cla.s.s hero on his own ground; but it would be a tremendous downfall to his reputation were his admirers to see him as he is off parade, without the pomps and vanities to show him to advantage. He has just been the social hero of a dinner; 'so bright, so lively, so delightful,' says the hostess enthusiastically, with a side blow to her own proprietor, who perhaps is pleasant enough by the domestic hearth but only a dumb dog in public. The party has been 'made' by him, rescued from universal dullness by his efforts alone; and every woman admires him as he leaves in a polite blaze of glory, and only wishes he could be secured for her own little affair next week. So he takes his departure, a hero to the last, with a happy thought for every one and a bright word all round. The hall-door closes on him, and the hero sinks into the husband. He is as much transformed as soon as he steps inside his brougham as was ever Cinderella after twelve, with her state coach and footmen gone to pumpkin and green lizards. He likes his wife well enough, as wives and liking go; but she does not stir him up intellectually, and her applause is no whetstone for his wit. Put the veriest chit of a girl as bodkin between them and he will waken into life again, and become once more the conversational hero, because he is no longer wholly at home. His wife probably does not like it, and she laughs, as wives do, when she hears his praises from those who know him only at his best, letting off his fireworks for the applause of the crowd.

But then wives are proverbially unflattering in their estimates of their husbands' heroics; and the Truth that used to live at the bottom of a well has changed her name and abode in these later times, and has come to mean the partner of your joys, who gives you her candid opinion at home. Still, your good company abroad who sits like a mute Memnon at home is not pleasant, though not necessarily a sham.

Certainly he is no hero all through, but he may be nothing worse than one of those unfortunates whose intellect lives on drams and does not take kindly to domestic pudding.

His wife does not approve of this hanging up of the fiddle by his own fireside; yet she does the same thing on her side, and is as little a heroine by the domestic hearth as he is a hero. What his talk is to him her beauty is to her; and for whom, let us ask, does she make herself loveliest? For her husband, or for a handful of fops and sn.o.bs each one of whom individually is more indifferent to her than the other? See her in society, a very Venus dressed by Worth and Bond Street, if not by the Graces. Follow her home, and see her as her maid sees her. The abundant _chevelure_, which is the admiration of the men and the envy of the women who believe in it, is taken off and hung up like her great-grandfather's wig, leaving her small round head covered by a wisp of ragged ends broken and burnt by dyes and restorers; her bloom of glycerine and powder is washed from her face, showing the faded skin and betraying lines beneath; the antimony is rubbed off her eyelids; the effects of belladonna leave her now contracting pupils; her perfectly moulded form is laid aside with her dress; and the fair queen of the _salon_--the heroine of gaslight loveliness--stands as a lay-figure with bare tracts of possibilities whereon the artist may work, but which tracts nature has forgotten or which she herself has worked on so unmercifully as to have worn out. How many a heartache would be healed if only the heroine, like the hero, could be followed to the sanctuary of the dressing-room, and if the adored could appear to the adorer as does the one to the maid the other to the valet!

The tender, sympathetic, moist-eyed woman who condoles so sweetly with your little troubles, and whose affectionate compa.s.sion soothes you like the trickling of sweet waters or the cooling breath of a pleasant air, but who leaves her sick husband at home to get through the weary hours as he best may, who bullies her servants and scolds her children--she too, is a heroine of a cla.s.s that does not look well when closely studied. The pretty young mother, making play with her pretty young children in the Park--a smiling picture of love and loveliness--when followed home, turning into a fretful, self-indulgent fine lady, flung wearily into an easy chair, sending the children up to the nursery and probably seeing them no more until Park hour to-morrow, when their beautiful little _tetes d'ange_ will enhance her own loveliness in the eyes of men, and make her more beautiful because making the picture more complete; Mrs. Jellaby given up to universal philanthropy, refusing a crust to the beggar at her own gate, but full of tearful pity for the misery she has undertaken to mitigate at Borioboolagha; Croesus scattering showers of gold abroad, and applauded to the echo when his name, with the donation following, is read out at a public dinner, but looking after the cheese-parings at home; the eloquent upholder of human equality in public, snubbing in private all who are one degree below him in the social scale, and treating his servants like dogs; the no less eloquent descanter on the motto _n.o.blesse oblige_, when the house-door is shut between him and the world, running honesty so fine that it is almost undistinguishable from roguery--all these heroes abroad show but shabbily at home, and make their heroism within the four walls literally a vanis.h.i.+ng quant.i.ty.

People who live on the outside of the charmed circle of letters, but who believe that the men and women that compose it are of a different mould from the rest of mankind, and who long to be permitted to penetrate the rose-hedge and learn the facts of Armida's garden for themselves, sometimes learn them too clearly for their dreams to be ever possible again. They have a favourite author--a poet, say, or a novelist. If a poet, he is probably one whose songs are full of that delicious melancholy which makes them so divinely sad; an aesthetic poet; a blighted being; a creature walking in the moonlight among the graves and watering their flowers with his tears:--if a novelist, he is one whose sprightly fancy makes the dull world gay. A friend takes the wors.h.i.+pper to the shrine where the idol is to be found; in other words, they go to call on him at his own house. The melancholy poet 'hidden in the light of thought,' is a rubicund, rosy-gilled gentleman, brisk, middle-aged, comfortable, respectable, particular as to his wines, a connoisseur as to the merits of the _chef_, a _bon vivant_ of the Horatian order, and in his talk p.r.o.ne to personal gossip and feeble humour. The lively novelist, on the other hand, is a taciturn, morose kind of person, afflicted with perennial catarrh, ever ready with an unpleasant suggestion, given to start disagreeable topics of a grave, not to say depressing, nature, perhaps a rabid politician incapable of a give-and-take argument, or a pessimistic economist, taking gloomy views of the currency and despondent about our carrying trade.