Читать книгу The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays (Vol. 1&2) - E. Lynn Linton - Страница 19

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That lovely woman fulfils only half her mission when she is unpersonable instead of beautiful, all young men, and all pretty girls secure in the consciousness of their own perfections, will agree. Indeed, it is cruel to hear the way in which ingenuous youths despise ugly girls, however clever, whose charm lies in their cleverness only, with a counteraction in their plainness. To hear them, one would think that hardness of feature was, like poverty, a crime voluntarily perpetrated, and that contempt was a righteous retribution for the offence. Yet their preference, though so cruelly expressed, is to a certain extent the right thing. When we are young, the beauty of women has a supreme attraction beyond all other possessions or qualities; and there are self-evident reasons why it should be so. It is only as we grow older that we know the value of brains, and, while still admiring beauty—as indeed who does not?—admire it as one passing by on the other side—as a grace to look at, but not to hold, unless accompanied by something more lasting.

This is in the middle term of a man's life. Old age, perhaps with the unconscious yearning of regret, goes back to the love of youth and beauty for their own sake; extremes meeting here as in almost all other circumstances. The danger is when a young man, obeying the natural impulse of his age and state, marries beauty only, with nothing more durable beneath. The mind sees what it brings, and we love the ideal we create rather than the reality that exists. A pretty face, the unworn nerves of youth, the freshness of hope that has not yet been soured by disappointment nor chilled by experience, a neat stroke at croquet and a merry laugh easily excited, make a girl a goddess to a boy who is what he himself calls in love and his friends 'spoony.' She may be narrow, selfish, spoilt, unfit to bear the burdens of life and unable to meet her trials patiently; she may be utterly unpractical and silly—one of those who never mature but only grow old—without judgment, forethought, common-sense or courage; but he sees nothing of all this. To him she is perfect; the 'jolliest girl in the world,' if he be slangy, or the 'dearest,' if he be affectionate; and he neither sees nor heeds her potential faults.

It is only when she has stepped down from her pedestal to the level of the home-threshold that he finds out she is but a woman after all, and perhaps an exceptionally weak and peevish one. Then he knows that he would have done better for himself had he married that plain brave-hearted girl who would have had him to a dead certainty if he had asked her, but whom he so unmercifully laughed at when he was making love to his fascinating charmer. As years go on and reduce the Hebe and Hecate of eighteen to much the same kind of woman at forty—with perhaps the advantage on Hecate's side if of the sort that ripens well and improves by keeping—the man feels that he has been a fool after the manner of Bunyan's Passion; that he has eaten up his present in the past, and had all his good things at once. If he had but looked at the future and been able to wait! But in those days he wanted beauty that does not last, and cared nothing for brains which do; and so, having made his election he must abide by it, and eat bitter bread from the yeast of his own brewing.

Many a man has cursed, his whole life long, the youthful infatuation that made him marry a pretty fool. Take the case of a rising politician whose fair-faced wife is either too stupid to care about his position, or who imperils it by her folly. If amiable and affectionate, and in her own silly little way ambitious, she does him incalculable mischief by exaggeration, and by saying and doing exactly the things which are most damaging to him; if stupid, she is just so much deadweight that he has to carry with him while swimming up the stream. She is very lovely certainly, and people crowd her drawing-room to look at her; but a plain-featured, sensible, shrewd woman, with no beauty to speak of but with tact and cleverness, would have helped him in his career far better than does his brainless Venus. He finds this out when it is too late to change M. for N. in the marriage service.

The successful men of small beginnings are greatly liable to this curse of wifely hindrance. A barrister once briefless and now in silk—an artist once obscure and now famous—who in the days of impecuniosity and Bohemianism married the landlady's pretty daughter and towards the meridian of life find themselves in the front ranks of la haute volée with a wife who drops her h's and multiplies her s's, know the full bitterness of the bread baked from that hasty brewing. Each woman may have been beautiful in her youth, and each man may have loved his own very passionately; but if she have nothing to supplement her beauty—if she have no brains to fall back on, by which she can be educated up to her husband's present social position as the wife of his successful maturity—she is a mistake. Dickens was quite right to kill off pretty childish Dora in 'David Copperfield.' If she had lived she would have been like Flora in 'Bleak House,' who indeed was Dora grown old but not matured; with all the grace and beauty of her youth gone, and nothing else to take their place.

Men do not care for brains in excess in women. They like a sympathetic intellect which can follow and seize their thoughts as quickly as they are uttered; but they do not much care for any clear or specific knowledge of facts. Even the most philosophic among them would rather not be set right in a classical quotation, an astronomical calculation, or the exact bearing of a political question by a lovely being in tarlatane whom he was graciously unbending to instruct. Neither do they want anything very strong-minded. To most men, indeed, the feminine strong-mindedness that can discuss immoral problems without blushing is a quality as unwomanly as a well-developed biceps or a 'shoulder-of-mutton' fist. It is sympathy, not antagonism—it is companionship, not rivalry, still less supremacy, that they like in women; and some women with brains as well as learning—for the two are not the same thing—understand this, and keep their blue stockings well covered by their petticoats. Others, enthusiasts for freedom of thought and intellectual rights, show theirs defiantly; and meet with their reward. Men shrink from them. Even clever men, able to meet them on their own ground, do not feel drawn to them; while all but high-class minds are humiliated by their learning and dwarfed by their moral courage. And no man likes to feel humiliated or dwarfed in the presence of a woman, and because of her superiority.

But the brains most useful to women, and most befitting their work in life, are those which show themselves in common-sense, in good judgment, and that kind of patient courage which enables them to bear small crosses and great trials alike with dignity and good temper. Mere intellectual culture, however valuable it may be in itself, does not equal the worth of this kind of moral power; for as the true domain of woman is the home, and her way of ordering her domestic life the best test of her faculties, mere intellectual culture does not help in this; and, in fact, is often a hindrance rather than a help. What good is there in one's wife being an accomplished mathematician, a sound scholar, a first-rate musician, a deeply-read theologian, if she cannot keep the accounts square, knows nothing of the management of children, lets herself be cheated by the servants and the tradespeople, has not her eyes opened to dirt and disorder, and gives way to a fretful temper on the smallest provocation?

The pretty fool who spends half her time in trying on new dresses and studying the effect of colours, and who knows nothing beyond the last new novel and the latest plate of fashions, is not a more disastrous wife than the woman of profound learning whose education has taught her nothing practical. They stand at the opposite ends of the same scale, and neither end gives the true position of women. Indeed, if one must have a fool in one's house, the pretty one would be the best, as, at the least, pleasant to look at; which is something gained.

The intellectual fool, with her head always in books and 'questions,' and her children dropping off like sheep for the want of womanly care, is something more than flesh and blood can tolerate. The pretty fool cannot help herself. If nature proved herself but a stepmother to her, and left out the best part of her wits while taking such especial care of her face, it is no fault of hers; but the intellectual fool is a case of maladministration of powers, for which she alone is responsible; and in this particular alternative between beauty and brains, without a shadow of doubt we would go in for beauty.

Ball-rooms and dinner-tables are the two places where certain women most shine. In the ball-room Hebe is the queen, and has it all her own way without fear of rivals. A very few men who care for dancing for its own sake will certainly dance with Hecate if she is light on hand, keeps accurate time, and manages her feet with scientific precision; but to the ruck of youths, Hebe, who jerks herself into step every second round, but whose lovely face and perfect figure make up for everything, is the partner they all besiege. Only to those exceptional few who regard dancing as a serious art would she be a bore with her three jumps and a hop; while Hecate, waltzing like an angel, would be divine, in spite of her high cheek-bones and light green eyes à fleur de tête. But at a dinner-table, where a man likes to talk between the dishes, a sympathetic listener with pleasant manners, to whom he can air his stalest stories and recount his personal experiences, is preferable to the prettiest girl if a simpleton, only able to show her small white teeth in a silly smile, and say 'yes' and 'indeed' in the wrong places. The ball-room may be taken to represent youth; the dinner-table maturity. The one is the apotheosis of mere beauty, in clouds of millinery glory and a heaven of flirting; the other is solid enjoyment, with brains to talk to by the side and beauty to look at opposite, in just the disposition that makes life perfect. A well-ordered dinner-table is a social microcosm; and, being so, this is the blue riband of the arrangement.

Every woman is bound to make the best of herself. The strong-minded women who hold themselves superior to the obligations of dress and manner and all the pleasant little artificial graces belonging to an artificial civilization, and who think any sacrifice made to appearance just so much waste of power, are awful creatures, ignorant of the real meaning of their sex—social Graiæ wanting in every charm of womanhood, and to be diligently shunned by the wary.

This making the best of themselves is a very different thing from making dress and personal vanity the first considerations in life. Where women in general fail is in the exaggerations into which they fall on this and on almost every other question. They are apt to be either demireps or devotees; frights or flirts; fashionable to an extent that lands them in illimitable folly and drags their husbands' names through the mire, or they are so dowdy that they disgrace a well-ordered drawing-room, and among nicely-dressed women stand out as living sermons on slovenliness. If they are clever, they are too commonly blue-stockings, and let the whole household go by the board for the sake of their fruitless studies; and if they are domestic and good managers they sink into mere servants, never opening a book save their daily ledger, and having no thought beyond the cheesemonger's bill and the butcher's prices. They want that fine balance, that accurate self-measurement and knowledge of results, which goes by the name of common-sense and is the best manifestation of brains they can give, and the thing which men most prize. It is the most valuable working form of intellectual power, and has most endurance and vitality; and it is the form which helps a man on in life, when he has found it in his wife, quite as much as money or a good connexion.

So that, on the whole, brains are before beauty in the solid things of life. For admiration and personal love and youthful enjoyment, beauty of course is supreme; but as we cannot be always young nor always apt for pleasure, it is as well to provide for the days when the daughters of music shall be brought low and the years draw nigh which have no pleasure in them.