The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays (Vol. 1&2). E. Lynn Linton
and perpetuates the memory of the event, by such imitation—at a distance. It is too good an occasion for the airing of pinchbeck to be disregarded; consequently, for the most part it is turned to this practical account. Whether the fashion be suited to the material or to the other parts of the dress, is quite a secondary consideration; it being of the essence of pinchbeck to despise both fitness and harmony.
There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the appearance of social influence, much cultivated by women of a certain activity of mind and with more definite aims than all women have. This belongs to a grade higher than the small pretences of which we have been speaking—to women who have money, and so far have one reality, but who have not, by their own birth or their husbands', the original standing which would give them this social influence as of right. Some make themselves notorious for their drawing-room patronage of artists, which however does not include buying their pictures; others gather round them scores of obscure authors, whose books they talk of but do not read; a few, a short time since, were centres of spiritualistic circles and got a queer kind of social influence thereby, so far as Philistine desire to witness the 'manifestations' went; and one or two are names of weight in the emancipated ranks, and take chiefly to what they call 'working women.' These are they who attend Ladies' Committees, where they talk bosh and pound away at utterly uninteresting subjects as diligently as if what they said had any point in it, and what they did any ultimate issue in probability or common sense. But beyond the fact of having a large house, where their several sets may assemble at stated periods, these would-be lady patronesses are utterly impotent to help or to hinder; and their patronage is just so much pinchbeck, not worth the trouble of weighing.
In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless dissatisfaction with what they are and ceaseless endeavour to appear something they are not, our middle-class ladies are doing themselves and society infinite mischief. They set the tone to the world below them; and the small tradespeople and the servants, when they copy the vices of their superiors, do not imitate her grace the duchess, but the doctor's wife over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door, and the young ladies everywhere, who all try to appear like women of rank and fortune, and who are ashamed of nothing so much as of industry, truth and simplicity. Hence the rage for cheap finery in the kitchen, just a trifle more ugly and debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence the miserable pretentiousness and pinchbeck fine-ladyism filtering like poison through every pore of our society, to result God only knows in what grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and education will come to the front and endeavour to stay the plague already begun. Chains and brooches may seem but small material causes for important moral effects, but they are symbols; and, as symbols, they are of deep national value.
No good will be done till we get back some of our fine old horror of pinchbeck, and once more insist on Truth as the foundation of our national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do not land us here; and the progress of the arts and sciences must not be brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home business. Here is something for them to do—the regeneration of society by means of their own energies; the bringing people back to the dignity of truth and the beauty of simplicity; the substitution of that self-respect which is content to appear what it is, for the feeble pride which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot get gold, which endeavours so hard to hide its real estate and to pass for what it is not and never can be.
AFFRONTED WOMANHOOD.
Amongst other queer anomalies in human nature is the difference that lies between sectarian sins and personal immoralities, between the intellectual untruth of a man's creed and the spiritual evil of his own nature. Rigid Calvinism, for instance, which narrows the issues of divine grace and shuts up the avenues of salvation from all but a select few, is a sour and illiberal faith; and yet a rigid Calvinist, simply continuing to believe in predestination and election as he was taught from the beginning, may be a generous, genial, large-hearted man. An inventor scheming out the deadliest projectile that has yet been devised is not necessarily indifferent to human life on his own account; nor is every American who talks tall talk about the glorious destinies of his country and the infinite superiority of his countrymen, as conceited personally as he is vainglorious nationally. In fact, he may be a very modest fellow by his own fireside; and though in his quality of American he is of course able to whip universal creation, in his mere quality of man he is quite ready to take the lower seat at the table and to give honour where honour is due.
This kind of distinction between the faults of the sect and the person, the nature and the cause, is very noticeable in women; and especially in all things relating to themselves. Individually, many among them are meek and long-suffering enough, and would be as little capable of resenting a wrong as of revenging it. Being used from the cradle to a good deal of snubbing, they take to it kindly as part of the inevitable order of things, and kiss the chastening rod with edifying humility; but, collectively, they are the most impatient of rebuke, the most arrogant in moral attitude, and the most restive of all created things sought to be led or driven. The woman who will bear to hear of her personal faults without offering a word in self-defence, and who will even say peccavi quite humbly if hard pressed, fires up into illimitable indignation when told that her foibles are characteristic of her sex, and that she is no worse than nature meant her to be. Personally she is willing to confess that she is only a poor worm grovelling in the dust—perhaps an exceptionally poor worm, if of the kind given to spiritual asceticism—but by her class she claims to be considered next door to an angel, and arrogates to her sex virtues which she would blush to claim on her own behalf.
Men, as men, are all sorts of bad things, as every one knows. They are selfish, cruel, tyrannical, sensual, unjust, bloodthirsty—where does the list end? and human nature in the abstract is a bad thing too, given over to lies and various deadly lusts; but women, as women, are exempt from any special share in the general iniquity, and only come under the ban with universal nature—with lambs and doves and other pretty creatures—not quite perfection, because of the Fall which spoilt everything, and yet very near it. As children of the rash parents who corrupted the race they certainly suffer from the general infection of sin that followed, but, as daughters contrasted with the sons, they are so far superior to those evil-minded brethren of theirs that their comparative virtues by sex override their positive vices by race. As individuals, they are worms; as human beings, they are poor sinful souls; but by their womanhood they are above rebuke.
Women have been so long wrapped in this pleasant little delusion about the sacredness of their sex, and the perfections belonging thereto by nature, that any attempt to show them the truth and convince them that they too are guilty of the mean faults and petty ways common to a fallen humanity—whereof certain manifestations are special to themselves—is met with the profound scorn or shrill cries of affronted womanhood. A man who speaks of their faults as they appear to him, and as he suffers by them, is illiberal and unmanly, and the rage of the more hysterically indignant would not be very far below that of the Thracian Mænads, could they lay hands on the offending Orpheus of the moment; but a woman who speaks from knowledge, and touches the weak places and the sore spots known best to the initiated, is a traitress even baser than the rude man who perhaps knows no better.
The whole life and being of womanhood must be held sacred from censure, exalted as it is by a kind of sentimental apotheosis that will not bear reasoning about, to something very near divinity. Even the follies of fashion must be exempt from both ridicule and rebuke, on the ground of man's utter ignorance of the merits of the question; for how should a poor male body know anything about trains or crinolines, or the pleasure that a woman feels in making herself ridiculous or indecent in appearance and a nuisance to her neighbours? while, for anything graver than the follies of fashion, it is in a manner high treason against the supremacy of the sex to assume that they deserve either ridicule or rebuke. Besides, it is indelicate. Women are made to be worshipped, not criticized; to be reverenced as something mystically holy and incomprehensible by the grosser masculine faculties; and it is indiscreet, to say the least of it, when vile man takes it on himself