The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays Volume Ii Part 2

Perhaps we ought to apologize for using a foreign label, but there is no one English word which gives the full meaning of _desoeuvrement_.

Only paraphrases and acc.u.mulations would convey the many subtle shades contained in it; and paraphrases and acc.u.mulations are inconvenient as headings. But if we have not the word, we have a great deal of the thing; for _desoeuvrement_ is an evil unfortunately not confined to one country nor to one cla.s.s; and even we, with all our boasted Anglo-Saxon energy, have people among us as unoccupied and purposeless as are to be found elsewhere. Certainly we have nothing like the Neapolitan lazzaroni who pa.s.s their lives in dozing in the sun; but that is more because of our climate than our condition, and if our _desoeuvres_ do not doze out of doors, it by no means follows that they are wide awake within.

No state is more unfortunate than this listless want of purpose which has nothing to do, which is interested in nothing, and which has no serious object in life; and the drifting, aimless temperament, which merely waits and does not even watch, is the most disastrous that a man or woman can possess. Feverish energy, wearing itself out on comparative nothings, is better than the indolence which folds its hands and makes neither work nor pleasure; and the most microscopic and restless perception is more healthful than the dull blindness which goes from Dan to Beersheba, and finds all barren.

If even death itself is only a trans.m.u.tation of forces--an active and energizing change--what can we say of this worse than mental death?

How can we characterize a state which is simply stagnation? Not all of us have our work cut out and laid ready for us to do; very many of us have to seek for objects of interest and to create our own employment; and were it not for the energy which makes work by its own force, the world would still be lying in barbarism, content with the skins of beasts for clothing and with wild fruits and roots for food. But the _desoeuvres_ know nothing of the pleasures of energy; consequently none of the luxuries of idleness--only its tedium and monotony. Life is a dull round to them of alternate vacancy and mechanical routine; a blank so dead that active pain and positive sorrow would be better for them than the pa.s.sionless negation of their existence. They love nothing; they hope for nothing; they work for nothing; to-morrow will be as to-day, and to-day is as yesterday was; it is the mere pa.s.sing of time which they call living--a moral and mental hybernation broken up by no springtime waking.

Though by no means confined to women only, this disastrous state is nevertheless more frequently found with them than with men. It is comparatively rare that a man--at least an Englishman--is born with so little of the activity which characterizes manhood as to rest content without some kind of object for his life, either in work or in pleasure, in study or in vice. But many women are satisfied to remain in an unending _desoeuvrement_, a listless supineness that has not even sufficient active energy to fret at its own dullness.

We see this kind of thing especially in the families of the poorer cla.s.s of gentry in the country. If we except the Sunday school and district visiting, neither of which commends itself as a pleasant occupation to all minds--both in fact needing a little more active energy than we find in the purely _desoeuvre_ cla.s.s--what is there for the unmarried daughters of a family to do? There is no question of a profession for any of them. Ideas travel slowly in country places, and root themselves still more slowly, even yet; and the idea of woman's work for ladies is utterly inadmissible by the English gentleman who can leave a modest sufficiency to his daughters--just enough to live on in the old house and in the old way, without a margin for luxuries, but above anything like positive want. There is no possibility then of an active career in art or literature; of going out as a governess, as a hospital nurse, or as a Sister. There is only home, with the possible and not very probable chance of marriage as the vision of hope in the distant future. And that chance is very small and very remote; for the simple reason--there is no one to marry.

There are the young collegians who come down in reading parties; the group of Bohemian artists, if the place be picturesque and not too far from London; the curate; and the new doctor, fresh from the hospitals, who has to make his practice out of the poorer and more outlying _clientele_ of the old and established pract.i.tioners of the place. But collegians do not marry, and long engagements are proverbially hazardous; Bohemian artists are even less likely than they to trouble the surrogate; and the curate and the doctor can at the best marry only one apiece of the many who are waiting. The family keeps neither carriages nor horses, so that the longest tether to which life can be carried, with the house for the stake, is simply the three or four miles which the girls can walk out and back. And the visiting list is necessarily comprised within this circle. There is then, absolutely nothing to occupy nor to interest. The whole day is spent in playing over old music, in needlework, in a little desultory reading, such as is supplied by the local book society; all without other object than that of pa.s.sing the time. The girls have had nothing like a thorough education in anything; they are not specially gifted, and what brains they have are dormant and uncultivated. There is not even enough housework to occupy their time, unless they were to send away the servants. Besides, domestic work of an active kind is vulgar, and gentlemen and gentlewomen do not allow their daughters to do it. They may help in the housekeeping; which means merely giving out the week's supplies on Monday and ordering the dinner on other days, and which is not an hour's occupation in the week; and they can do a little amateur spudding and raking among the flower-beds when the weather is fine, if they care for the garden; and they can do a great deal of walking if they are strong; and this is all that they can do. There they are, four or five well-looking girls perhaps, of marriageable age, fairly healthy and amiable, and with just so much active power as would carry them creditably through any work that was given them to do, but with not enough originative energy to make them create work for themselves out of nothing.

In their quiet uneventful sphere, with the circ.u.mscribed radius and the short tether, it would be very difficult for any women but those few who are gifted with unusual energy to create a sufficient human interest; to ordinary young ladies it is impossible. They can but make-believe, even if they try--and they don't try. They can but raise up shadows which they would fain accept as living creatures if they give themselves the trouble to evoke anything at all, and they don't give themselves the trouble. They simply live on from day to day in a state of mental somnolency--hopeless, _desoeuvrees_, inactive; just drifting down the smooth slow current of time, with not a ripple nor an eddy by the way.

Quiet families in towns, people who keep no society and live in a self-made desert apart though in the midst of the very vortex of life, are alike in the matter of _desoeuvrement_; and we find exactly the same history with them as we find with their country cousins, though apparently their circ.u.mstances are so different. They cannot work and they may not play; the utmost dissipation allowed them is to look at the outside of things--to make one of the fringe of spectators lining the streets and windows on a show day, and this but seldom; or to go once or twice a year to the theatre or a concert. So they too just lounge through their life, and pa.s.s from girlhood to old age in utter _desoeuvrement_ and want of object. Year by year the lines about their eyes deepen, their smile gets sadder, their cheeks grow paler; while the cherished secret romance which even the dullest life contains gets a colour of its own by age, and a firmness of outline by continual dwelling on, which it had not in the beginning. Perhaps it was a dream built on a tone, a look, a word--may be it was only a half-evolved fancy without any basis whatever--but the imagination of the poor _desoeuvree_ has clung to the dream, and the uninteresting dullness of her life has given it a mock vitality which real activity would have destroyed.

This want of healthy occupation is the cause of half the hysterical reveries which it is a pretty flattery to call constancy and an enduring regret; and we find it as absolutely as that heat follows from flame, that the mischievous habit of bewailing an irrevocable past is part of the _desoeuvree_ condition in the present. People who have real work to do cannot find time for unhealthy regrets, and _desoeuvrement_ is the most fertile source of sentimentality to be found.

The _desoeuvree_ woman of means and middle age, grown grey in her want of purpose and suddenly taken out of her accustomed groove, is perhaps more at sea than any others. She has been so long accustomed to the daily flow of certain lines that she cannot break new ground and take up with anything fresh, even if it be only a fresh way of being idle.

Her daughter is married; her husband is dead; her friend who was her right hand and manager-in-chief has gone away; she is thrown on her own resources, and her own resources will not carry her through. She generally falls a prey to her maid, who tyrannizes over her, and a phlegmatic kind of despair, which darkens the remainder of her life without destroying it. She loses even her power of enjoyment, and gets tired before the end of the rubber which is the sole amus.e.m.e.nt in which she indulges. For _desoeuvrement_ has that fatal reflex action which everything bad possesses, and its strength is in exact ratio with its duration.

Women of this cla.s.s want taking in hand by the stronger and more energetic. Many even of those who seem to do pretty well as independent workers, men and women alike, would be all the better for being farmed out; and _desoeuvrees_ women especially want extraneous guidance, and to be set to such work as they can do, but cannot make.

An establishment which would utilize their faculties, such as they are, and give them occupation in harmony with their powers, would be a real salvation to many who would do better if they only knew how, and would save them from stagnation and apathy. But society does not recognize the existence of moral rickets, though the physical are cared for; consequently it has not begun to provide for them as moral rickets, and no Proudhon has yet managed to utilize the _desoeuvres_ members of the State. When they do find a place of retreat and advent.i.tious support, it is under another name.

The retired man of business, utterly without object in his new conditions, is another portrait that meets us in country places. He is not fit for magisterial business; he cannot hunt nor shoot nor fish; he has no literary tastes; he cannot create objects of interest for himself foreign to the whole experience of his life. The idleness which was so delicious when it was a brief season of rest in the midst of his high-pressure work, and the country which was like Paradise when seen in the summer only and at holiday time, make together just so much blank dullness now that he has bound himself to the one and fixed himself in the other. When he has spelt over every article in the _Times_, pottered about his garden and his stables, and irritated both gardener and groom by interfering in what he does not understand, the day's work is at an end. He has nothing more to do but eat his dinner and sip his wine, doze over the fire for a couple of hours, and go to bed as the clock strikes ten.

This is the reality of that long dream of retirement which has been the golden vision of hope to many a man during the heat and burden of the day. The dream is only a dream. Retirement means _desoeuvrement_; leisure is tedium; rest is want of occupation truly, but want of interest, want of object, want of purpose as well; and the prosperous man of business, who has retired with a fortune and broken energies, is bored to death with his prosperity, and wishes himself back to his desk or his counter--back to business and something to do. He wonders, on retrospection, what there was in his activity that was distasteful to him; and thinks with regret that perhaps, on the whole, it is better to wear out than to rust out; that _desoeuvrement_ is a worse state than work at high pressure; and that life with a purpose is a n.o.bler thing than one which has nothing in it but idleness:--whereof the main object is how best to get rid of time.

_THE SHRIEKING SISTERHOOD._

We by no means put it forward as an original remark when we say that Nature does her grandest works of construction in silence, and that all great historical reforms have been brought about either by long and quiet preparation, or by sudden and authoritative action. The inference from which is, that no great good has ever been done by shrieking; that much talking necessarily includes a good deal of dilution; and that fuss is never an attribute of strength nor coincident with concentration. Whenever there has been a very deep and sincere desire on the part of a cla.s.s or an individual to do a thing, it has been done not talked about; where the desire is only halfhearted, where the judgment or the conscience is not quite clear as to the desirableness of the course proposed, where the chief incentive is love of notoriety and not the intrinsic worth of the action itself--personal _kudos_, and not the good of a cause nor the advancement of humanity--then there has been talk; much talk; hysterical excitement; a long and prolonged cackle; and heaven and earth called to witness that an egg has been laid wherein lies the germ of a future chick--after proper incubation.

Necessarily there must be much verbal agitation if any measure is to be carried the fulcrum of which is public opinion. If you have to stir the dry bones you must prophesy to them in a loud voice, and not leave off till they have begun to shake. Things which can only be known by teaching must be spoken of, but things which have to be done are always better done the less the fuss made about them; and the more steadfast the action, the less noisy the agent. Purpose is apt to exhale itself in protestations, and strength is sure to exhaust itself by a flux of words. But at the present day what Mr. Carlyle called the Silences are the least honoured of all the minor G.o.ds, and the babble of small beginnings threatens to become intolerable. We all 'think outside our brains,' and the result is not conducive to mental vigour.

It is as if we were to set a plant to grow with its heels in the air, and then look for roots, flowers and fruit, by the process of excitation and disclosure.

One of our quarrels with the Advanced Women of our generation is the hysterical parade they make about their wants and their intentions. It never seems to occur to them that the best means of getting what they want is to take it, when not forbidden by the law--to act, not to talk; that all this running hither and thither over the face of the earth, this feverish unrest and loud acclaim are but the dilution of purpose through much speaking, and not the right way at all; and that to hold their tongues and do would advance them by as many leagues as babble puts them back. A small knot of women, 'terribly in earnest,'

could move mult.i.tudes by the silent force of example. One woman alone, quietly taking her life in her own hands and working out the great problem of self-help and independence practically, not merely stating it theoretically, is worth a score of shrieking sisters frantically calling on men and G.o.ds to see them make an effort to stand upright without support, with interludes of reproach to men for the want of help in their attempt. The silent woman who quietly calculates her chances and measures her powers with her difficulties so as to avoid the probability of a fiasco, and who therefore achieves a success according to her endeavour, does more for the real emanc.i.p.ation of her s.e.x than any amount of pamphleteering, lecturing, or pet.i.tioning by the shrieking sisterhood can do. Hers is deed not declamation; proof not theory; and it carries with it the respect always accorded to success.

And really if we think of it dispa.s.sionately, and carefully dissect the great mosaic of hindrances which women say makes up the pavement of their lives, there is very little which they may not do if they like--and can. They have already succeeded in reopening for themselves the practice of medicine, for one thing; and this is an immense opportunity if they know how to use it. A few pioneers, unhelped for the most part, steadily and without shrieking, stormed the barricades of the hospitals and dissecting-rooms; heroically bearing the shower of hard-mouthed missiles with which they were pelted, and successfully forcing their way notwithstanding. But the most successful of them are those who held on with least excitement and who strove more than they declaimed; while others, by const.i.tution belonging to the shrieking sisterhood, have comparatively failed, and have mainly succeeded in making themselves ridiculous. After some pressure but very little cackle--for here too the work was wanted, the desire real, and the workers in earnest--female colleges on a liberal and extended system of education have been established, and young women have now an opportunity of showing what they can do in brain work.

It is no longer by the n.i.g.g.ardliness of men and the fault of an imperfect system if they prove intellectually inferior to the stronger s.e.x; they have their dynamometer set up for them, and all they have to do is to register their relative strength--and abide the issue. All commerce, outside the Stock Exchange, is open to them equally with men; and there is nothing to prevent their becoming merchants, as they are now petty traders, or setting up as bill-brokers, commission agents, or even bankers--which last profession, according to a contemporary, they have actually adopted in New York, some ladies there having established a bank, which, so far as they have yet gone, they are said to conduct with deftness and ready arithmetic.

In literature they have compet.i.tors in men, but no monopolists.

Indeed, they themselves have become almost the monopolists of the whole section of light literature and fiction; while nothing but absolute physical and mental incapacity prevents their taking the charge of a journal, and working it with female editor, sub-editor, manager, reporters, compositors, and even news-girls to sell the second edition at omnibus doors and railway stations. If a set of women chose to establish a newspaper and work it amongst themselves, no law could be brought to bear against them; and if they made it as philosophical as some, or as gus.h.i.+ng as others, they might enter into a formidable rivalry with the old-established. They would have a fair hearing, or rather reading; they would not be 'nursed' nor hustled, and they would get just as much success as they deserved. To be sure, they do not yet sit on the Bench nor plead at the Bar. They are not in Parliament, and they are not even voters; while, as married women with unfriendly husbands and no protection-order, they have something to complain of, and wrongs which are in a fair way of being righted if the shrieking sisterhood does not frighten the world prematurely. But, despite these restrictions, they have a very wide circle wherein they can display their power, and witch the world with n.o.ble deeds, if they choose--and as some have chosen.

Of the representative 'working-women' in England, we find none who have shrieked on platforms nor made an hysterical parade of their work. Quietly, and with the dignity which comes by self-respect and the consciousness of strength, they have done what it was in their hearts to do; leaving the world to find out the value of their labours, and to applaud or deride their independence. Mrs. Somerville asked no man's leave to study science and make herself a distinguished name as the result; nor did she find the need of any more special organization than what the best books, a free press and first-rate available teaching offered. Miss Martineau dived with more or less success into the forbidding depths of the 'dismal science,' at a time when political economy was s.h.i.+rked by men and considered as essentially unfeminine as top-boots and tobacco; and she was confessedly an advanced Liberal when to be a high Tory was part of the whole duty of woman. Miss Nightingale undertook the care of wounded soldiers without any more publicity than was absolutely necessary for the organization of her staff, and with not so much as one shriek.

Rosa Bonheur laughed at those who told her that animal painting was unwomanly, and that she had better restrict herself to flowers and heads, as became the _jeune demoiselle_ of conventional life; but she did not publish her programme of independence, nor take the world into her confidence and tell them of her difficulties and defiance. The Lady Superintendents of our own various sisterhoods have organized their communities and performed their works of charity with very faint blare of trumpets indeed; and we might enumerate many more who have quietly lived the life of action and independence of which others have only raved, and who have done while their sisters shrieked. These are the women to be respected, whether we sympathize with their line of action or not; having shown themselves to be true workers, capable of sustained effort, and therefore worthy of the honour which belongs to strength and endurance.

Of one thing women may be very sure, though they invariably deny it; the world is glad to take good work from any one who will supply it.

The most certain patent of success is to deserve it; and if women will prove that they can do the world's work as well as men, they will share with them in the labour and the reward; and if they do it better they will distance them. The appropriation of fields of labour is not so much a question of selfishness as of (hitherto) proved fitness; but if, in times to come, women can show better harvesting than men, can turn out more finished, more perfected, results of any kind, the world's custom will flow to them by the force of natural law, and they will have the most to do of that which they can do the best. If they wish to educate public opinion to accept them as equals with men, they can only do so by demonstration, not by shrieks. Even men, who are supposed to inherit the earth and to possess all the good things of life, have to do the same thing.

Every young man yet untried is only in the position of every woman; and, granting that he has not the deadweight of precedent and prejudice against him, he yet has to win his spurs before he can wear them. But women want theirs given to them without winning; and moreover, ask to be taught how to wear them when they have got them.

They want to be received as masters before they have served their apprentices.h.i.+p, and to be put into office without pa.s.sing an examination or submitting to compet.i.tion. They scream out for a clear stage and favour superadded; and they ask men to shackle their own feet, like Lightfoot in the fairy tale, that they may then be handicapped to a more equal running. They do not remember that their very demand for help vitiates their claim to equality; and that if they were what they a.s.sume to be, they would simply take without leave asked or given, and work out their own social salvation by the irrepressible force of a concentrated will and in the silence of conscious strength.

While the shrieking sisterhood remains to the front, the world will stop its ears; and for every hysterical advocate 'the cause' loses a rational adherent and gains a disgusted opponent. It is our very desire to see women happy, n.o.ble, fitly employed and well remunerated for such work as they can do, which makes us so indignant with the foolish among them who obscure the question they pretend to elucidate, and put back the cause which they say they advance. The earnest and practical workers among women are a very different cla.s.s from the shriekers; but we wish the world could dissociate them more clearly than it does at present, and discriminate between them, both in its censure and its praise.

_OTHERWISE-MINDED._

Every now and then we receive from America a word or a phrase which enriches the language without vulgarizing it--something, both more subtle and more comprehensive than our own equivalent, which we recognize at once as the better thing of the two. Thus 'otherwise-minded,' which some American writers use with such quaint force, is quite beyond our old 'contradictious' expressing the full meaning of contradictious and adding a great deal more. But if we have not hitherto had the word we have the thing, which is more to the purpose; and foremost among the powers which rule the world may be placed 'otherwise-mindedness' in its various phases of active opposition and pa.s.sive immobility--the contradictiousness which must fight on all points and which will not a.s.sent to any. At home, otherwise-mindedness is an engine of tremendous power, ranking next to sulks and tears in the defensive armoury of women; while men for the most part use it in a more aggressive sense, and seldom content themselves with the pa.s.sive quietude of mere inertness.

An otherwise-minded person, if a man, is almost always a tyrant and a bully, with decided opinions as to his right of making all about him dance to his piping--his piping never giving one of their own measures. If a woman, she is probably a superior being subjected to domestic martyrdom while intended by nature for a higher intellectual life,--doomed to the drudgery of housekeeping while yearning for the aesthetic and panting after the ideal. She is generally dignified in her bearing and of a cold, unappeasable discontent. She neither scolds nor wrangles, though sometimes, no rule being without its exception, she is peevish and captious and degenerates into the commonplace of the _Naggleton_ type. But in the main she bounds herself to the expression of her otherwise-mindedness in a stately if dogged manner, and shows a serene disdain for her opponents, which is a trifle more offensive than her undisguised satisfaction with herself. Nothing can move her, nothing beat her off her holding; but then she offers no points of attack. She is what she is on principle; and what can you say to an opposition dictated by motives all out of reach of your own miserable little groundling ideas? Where you advocate expediency, she maintains abstract principles; if you are lenient to weaknesses, she is stern to sin; if you would legislate for human nature as it is, she will have nothing less than the standard of perfection; and when you speak of the absolutism of facts, she argues on the necessity of keeping the ideal intact, no matter whether any one was ever known to attain to it or not. But if she finds herself in different company from your own looser kind--say with Puritans of a strongly ascetic caste--then she veers round to the other side, on the ground of fairness; and for the benefit of fanatics propounds a slip-shod easygoing morality which shuffles beyond your own lines. This she calls keeping out of extremes and discouraging exaggeration. This latter manifestation however, is not very frequently the case with women: the otherwise-minded among them being almost always of the rigid and ascetic cla.s.s who despise the pleasant little vanities, the graceful frivolities, the loveable frailties which make life easy and humanity delightful, and who take their stand on the loftiest, the most unelastic, not to say the grimmest, ethics. They have had it borne in on them that they are to defy Baal and withstand; consequently they do defy him, and they do withstand, at all four corners stoutly.

To be otherwise-minded naturally implies having a mind; and of what use is intellect if it cannot see all through and round a subject, and pick the weak places into holes? Hence the otherwise-minded are uncompromising critics and terrible fellows at scenting their prey. As is the function of certain creatures--vultures, crows, flies, and others--so is that of these children of Zoilus when dealing with subjects not understood, or only guessed at with more or less blundering in the process.

Take one of the cla.s.s at a lecture on the higher branches of a science of which he has not so much as thoroughly mastered the roots, and wherein this higher a.n.a.lysis offers certain new and perhaps startling results. It would seem that the sole thing possible to him who is ignorant of the matter in hand is to listen and believe; but your otherwise-minded critic is not content with the tame modesty of humbleness. What if the subject be over his head, cannot he crane his neck and look? has he not common-sense to guide him? and may he not criticize in the block what he cannot dissect in detail? At the least he can look grave, and say something about the danger of a little knowledge; and fallen man's dangerous pride of intellect; and his absolute and eternal ignorance; and the lecturer not making his meaning clear--as how should he when he probably does not understand his own subject nor what he wanted to say?--and what becomes of accepted truths if such things are to be received? Be sure of this, that otherwise-mindedness must sling its stone, whether it knows exactly what it is aiming at or not. It not unfrequently happens that the stone is after the pattern of a boomerang, and comes back on the slinger's own pate with sounding effect, convicting him of ignorance if of nothing worse, and a love of opposition so great that it destroys both his power of perceiving truth and the sense of his own incapacity.

But the otherwise-minded is nothing if not superior to his company; and truth is after all relative as well as multiform, and needs continual nice adjustment to make it balance fairly. The great representative a.s.sembly of humanity must have its independent members below the gangway who vote with no party; and if we were all on the right side the devil's advocate would have no work to do; so that even otherwise-mindedness on the wrong side has its uses, and must not be wholly condemned. For the world would fare badly without its natural borers and hole-pickers, its finders-out of weak places, its stone walls to resist a.s.sertion and advance; and ants and worms make good mould for garden flowers.

The const.i.tutionally otherwise-minded are the worst partizans in the world and never take up a cause heartily--never with more than one hand, that they may leave the other free for a bit of intellectual prestidigitation if need be, when their audience changes its character and complexion. The only time when they are devoted adherents is if their own family is decidedly in the opposite ranks, when they come out from among them with scrip and spear, and go over to the enemy without failing a single b.u.t.ton of the uniform. This is specially true of young people and of women; both of whom call their natural love of opposition by the name of religious principle or moral duty. Youths just fresh from the schools, bent on the regeneration of mankind and thinking that they can do in a few years what society has been painfully labouring to accomplish ever since the first savage clubbed his neighbour for stealing his h.o.a.rd of roots or carrying off his own private squaw, are sure to be intensely otherwise-minded and to understand nothing of harmonious working with the old plant. Red Republicans under the family flag of purple and orange; free-thinkers in the church where the paternal High and Dry holds forth on Sundays on the principle of the divine inspiration of the English translation bound in calf and lettered _c.u.m privilegio_; Romanists wors.h.i.+pping saints and relics in the very heart of the Peculiar People who put no trust in man nor works--we know them all; ardent, enthusiastic, uncompromising and horribly aggressive; with the down just shading their smooth young chins, and the great book of human life barely turned at the page of adolescence. Yet this is a form of otherwise-mindedness which, though we laugh at and are often annoyed by it, we must treat gently on the whole. We cannot be cruel to a fervour, even when insolently expressed, which we know the world will tame so soon, and which at the worst is often better than the dead level of conformity; even though its zeal is not unmixed with conceit, and a burning desire for the world's good is not free from a few slumbering embers of self-laudation and the 'last infirmity.'

In a house inhabited by the otherwise-minded--and one member of a family is enough to set the whole ruck awry--nothing is allowed to go smoothly or by default; nothing can be done without endless discussion; and all the well-oiled casters of compromise, good-nature, 'it does not signify,' &c., by which life runs easily in most places are rusted or broken. At table there is an incessant cross-fire of objections and of arguments, more or less intemperately conducted and never coming to a satisfactory conclusion. There are so many places too, which have been rubbed sore by this perpetual chafing, that a stranger to the secrets of the domestic pathology is kept not only in a fever of annoyance, but in an ague of dread, at the temper shown about trifles, and the deadly offence that seems to lurk behind quite ordinary topics of conversation. Not knowing all that has gone before, he is not prepared for the present uncomfortable aspect of things, and in fact is like a boy reading algebra, understanding nothing of what he sees, though the symbolizing letters are familiar enough to him.

The family quarrel about everything; and when they do not quarrel they argue. If one wants to do something that must be done in concert, the others would die rather than unite; and days, seasons and wishes can never be got to work themselves into harmonious coalition. When they are out 'enjoying themselves'--language is arbitrary and the sense of words not always clear--they cannot agree on anything; and you may hear them fire off scornful squibs of otherwise-mindedness across the rows of prize flowers or in the intervals of one of Beethoven's sonatas. And if they cannot find cause for disagreement on the merits of the subject before them, they find it in each other. For otherwise-mindedness is like the ragged little princess in the German fairy tale, who proved her royal blood by being unable to sleep on the top of seven feather-beds--German feather-beds--beneath all of which one single bean had been placed as the test of her sensibility. Give it but the chance of a scuffle, the ghost of a coat-tail to tread on, an imaginary chicken-bone among the down, and you may be sure that the opportunity will not be lost. When we are on the look-out for beans we shall find them beneath even seven feather-beds; and when s.h.i.+llelahs abound there will never be wanting the trail of a coat-tail across the path. So we find when we have to do with the otherwise-minded who will not take things pleasantly, and can never be got to see either beauty or value in their surroundings. Let one of these have a saint for a wife, and he will tell you saints are bores and sinners the only house-mates to be desired. Let him change his state, and this time pick up the sinner in longing for whom he has so often vexed the poor saint's soul, and he will find domestic happiness to consist in the companions.h.i.+p of a seraph of the most exalted kind. If he has Zen.o.bia, he wants Griselda; if Semiramis, King Cophetua's beggar-maid. The dear departed, who was such a millstone in times past, becomes the emblem of all that is lovely in humanity when a shaft has to be thrown at the partner of times present; and the marriage that was notoriously ill-a.s.sorted is painted in gold and rose-colour throughout, and its discords are mended up into a full score of harmony when the new wife or the new husband has to be snubbed, for no other reason than the otherwise-mindedness which cannot agree with what it has.

Children and servants come in for their share of this uncomfortable temper which reverses the old adage about the absent, and which, so far from making these in the wrong, transfers the burden of blame to those present and conveniently forgets its former litany of complaint.

No one would be more surprised than those very absent if they heard themselves upheld as possessors of all possible virtues when, according to their memory, they had been little better than concretions of wickedness and folly in the days of their subjection to criticism. They need not flatter themselves. Could they return, or if they do return, to the old place, they will be sure to return to the old conditions; and the praise lavished on them when they are absent, by way of rebuke to those unlucky ones on the spot, will be changed for their benefit into the blame and the rebuke familiar to them. In fact no circ.u.mstances whatever touch the central quality of the otherwise-minded. They must have something to bite, to grumble at, to rearrange, at least in wish, if not in deed. If only they had been consulted, nothing would have gone wrong that has gone wrong; and 'I told you so' is the s.h.i.+bboleth of their order. It is gall and wormwood to them when they are obliged to agree, and when, for very decency's sake, they must praise what indeed offers no points to condemn. But even when they get caught in the trap of unanimity they contrive to say something quite unnecessary about evils which no one was thinking of, and which have nothing to do with the case in point. 'But' is their mystic word, their truncated form of the Tetragrammaton which rules the universe; and whatever their special private denomination, they all belong in bulk to the

Sect whose chief devotion lies In odd perverse antipathies; In falling out with that or this, And finding somewhat still amiss.

_LIMP PEOPLE._

Vice is bad and malignant wickedness is worse, but beyond either in evil results to mankind is weakness; which indeed is the pabulum by which vice is fed and the agent by which malignity works. If every one in this world had a backbone, there would not be so much misery nor guilt as there is now; for we must give each individual of the 'cruel strong' a large following of weaker victims; and it would be easy to demonstrate that the progress of nations has always been in proportion to the number of stiff backbones among them. Yet unfortunately limp people abound, to the detriment of society and to their own certain sorrow; molluscs, predestined to be the food of the stronger, with no power of self-defence nor of self-support, but having to be protected against outside dangers if they are to be preserved at all;--and perhaps when you have done all that you can do, not safe even then, and most likely not worth the trouble taken about them. Open the gates for but a moment, and they are swept up by the first pa.s.ser-by. Let them loose from your own sustaining hand, and they fall abroad in a ma.s.s of flabby helplessness, unable to work, to resist, to retain--mere heaps of moral protoplasm, pitiable as well as contemptible; perhaps pitiable because so contemptible. See one of these poor creatures left a widow, if a woman--turned out of his office, if a man--and then judge of the value of a backbone by the miserable consequences of its absence. The widow is simply lost in the wilderness of her domestic solitude, as much so as would be a child if set in the midst of a pathless moor with no one to guide him to the safe highway. She may have money and she may have relations, but she is as poor as if she had nothing better than parish relief; and unless some one will take her up and manage everything for her conscientiously, she is as lonely as if she were an exile in a strange land. She has been so long used to lean on the stronger arm of her husband, that she cannot stand upright now that her support has been taken from her. Her servants make her their prey; her children tyrannize over her and ignore her authority; her boys go to the bad; her girls get fast and loud; all her own meek little ideas of modesty and virtue are rudely thrust to the wall; and she is obliged to submit to a family disorder which she neither likes nor encourages, but which she has not the strength to oppose nor the wisdom to direct. She may be the incarnation of all saintly qualities in her own person, but by mere want of strength she is the occasion by which a very pandemonium is possible; and the worst house of a community is sure to be that of a quiet, gentle, molluscous little widow, without one single vicious proclivity but without the power to repress or even to rebuke vice in others.

A molluscous man too, suddenly ejected from his long-accustomed groove, where, like a toad embedded in the rock, he had made his niche exactly fitting to his own shape, presents just as wretched a picture of helplessness and uns.h.i.+ftiness. In vain his friends suggest this or that independent endeavour; he shakes his head, and says he can't--it won't do. What he wants is a place where he is not obliged to depend on himself; where he has to do a fixed amount of work for a fixed amount of salary; and where his fibreless plasticity may find a mould ready formed, into which it may run without the necessity of forging shapes for itself. Many a man of respectable intellectual powers has gone down into ruin, and died miserably, because of this limpness which made it impossible for him to break new ground or to work at anything whatsoever with the stimulus of hope only. He must be bolstered up by certainty, supported by the walls of his groove, else he can do nothing; and if he cannot get into this friendly groove, he lets himself drift into destruction.

In no manner are limp people to be depended on; their very central quality being fluidity, which is a bad thing to rest on. Take them in their family quarrels--and they are always quarrelling among themselves--you think they must have broken with each other for ever; that surely they can never forget or forgive all the insolent expressions, the hard words, the full-flavoured epithets which they have flung at one another; but the next time you meet them they are quite good friends again, and going on in the old fluid way as if no fiery storms had lately troubled the domestic horizon. Perhaps they have induced you to take sides; if so, you may look out, for you are certain to be thrown over and to have the enmity of both parties instead of only one. They are much given to this kind of thing, and fond of making pellets for you to shoot; when, after the shot, they disclaim and disown you. They speak against each other furiously, tell you all the family secrets and make them worse and greater than they really are. If you are credulous for your own part you take them literally; and if highly moral, you probably act on their accusations in a spirit of rhadamanthine justice, and the absolute need of rewarding sin according to its sinfulness. Beware; their accusations are baseless as the wind, and acting on them will lead to your certain discomfiture. The only safe way with limp people is never to believe what they say; or, if you are forced to believe, never to translate your faith into deeds nor even words; never to commit yourself to partizans.h.i.+p in any form whatever. They do not intend it, in all probability, but by very force of their weakness limp people are almost invariably untruthful and treacherous. By the force too, of this same weakness, they are incapable of anything like true friends.h.i.+p, and in fact make the most dangerous friends to be found.