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 savour 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 who 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 besides 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, 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 public occasions for
devotedness occur, we 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 sacredness 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 be undeniably the handsomest woman of his acquaintance,
and holds himself blessed when all men
admire and all women envy. But he is blessed 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
be different, the kind is the same. And so in
minor proportions—from the most beautiful woman
of all, to simply beauty as a sine quâ 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, be pretty or ugly. Provided
she is active and industrious, minds the house
well, 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 colour or
form, and can even be brought to tolerate a limp or
a squint. Given the broad foundations of an honourable
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 are
facts; 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 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 amongst 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
will be his regard and tenderness. To be the one
sole teacher and protector of such a gentle little
creature seems to him the most delicious joy and the
best condition of married life; and he holds Milton's
famous lines to be expressive of the only fitting relations
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 no work
complete which has not been created by the one and
perfected by the other. He sees how women have
helped on the leaders in troublous 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
and dormant in men's brains for more than half their
lifetime have suddenly wakened 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 on 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, he 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
distilled in a sufficiently rich alembic leaving a residuum
admitting no kind of doubt. Venus herself
without a dowry would be only a pretty seaside 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 he
is not particular as to the strict order or economy of
the housekeeping, provided only his wife 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 order; 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 colour 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 be true of individuals, it
is especially true of nations, each of which has its
own ideal 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 nor yet 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 which are as
good as revelations; without cool judgment but with
the light of burning passions which guide her just as
well; thinking by her heart and carrying the most
refined metaphysics into her love; subtle; incomprehensible
by the coarser brains of men and women who
are only honest; 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 specially
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 late times was the
ardent patriot, full of active energy, of physical force,
of 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 humour with her master,
economical in house-living to please the meanness,
and gorgeous in occasional attire to gratify 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 unduly neglect them, 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 men; 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, housekeeping
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 attitude 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
which they have begun—in that we could sympathize—but
it is 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 characterises 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.
