The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays (Vol. 1&2). E. Lynn Linton
in almost all cases of domestic dog, however black.
A sleeping dog of another kind, which it would be well if women would always leave at rest, is the potential passion of a man who is a cherished friend but an impossible lover. Certain slow-going men are able to maintain for life a strong but strictly platonic attachment for certain women. If any warmer impulse or more powerful feeling give threatening notice of arising, it is kept in due subjection and a wholesome state of coolness, perhaps by its very hopelessness even if returned, perhaps by the fear or the knowledge that it would be ill-received, and that the only passport to the pleasant friendship so delighted in is in this calm and sober platonism. This is all very well so long as the woman minds what she is about; for the passionless attachment of a man depends mainly on her desire to keep things in their present place, and on her power of holding to the line to be observed. If she oversteps this line, if she wakens up that sleeping dog of passion, it is all over with her and platonism. What was once a pleasant truth would now be a burning satire; for friendship routed by love can never take service under its old banners again.
And yet this is what women are continually doing. They are always complaining that men are not their friends, and that they are only selfish and self-seeking in their relations with them; yet no sooner do they possess a man friend who is nothing else than they try their utmost to convert him into a lover, and are not too well pleased if they do not succeed—which might by chance sometimes happen like any other rare occurrence, but not often. And yet success ruins everything. It takes away the friend and does not give an available lover; it destroys the existing good and substitutes nothing better. If the woman be of the fishpond type, whose heart Thackeray wanted to 'drag,' she simply turns round upon the unhappy victim with one of the 'looks that kill;' if she be more weak than vain and less designing than impulsive, she regrets the momentary infatuation which has lost her her friend; but in any case she has lost him—by her own folly, not by inevitable misfortune.
Just as easy is it to rouse the sleeping dogs of hatred, of jealousy, of envy. You have a tepid well-controlled dislike to some one; and you know that he knows it. For feelings are eloquent, even when dumb, and express themselves in a thousand ways independent of words. You do not care much about your dislike—you do not nurse it nor feed it in any way, and are rather content than not to let it lie dormant, and so far harmless. But your unloved friend cannot let well alone. He will be always treading on your corns and touching you on the raw. That unlucky speculation you made; your play that was damned; the election you lost; the decision that was given against you, with costs—whenever you see him he is sure to introduce some topic that rubs you the wrong way, till at last the sleeping dog gets fairly roused, and what was merely a well-ordered dislike bursts out into a frantic and ungovernable hatred. It has been his own doing. Just as in the case of the platonic friend transformed into the passionate lover by the woman's wiles, so the dislike that gave you no trouble—become now the hatred which is a real curse to your existence—results from your friend's incessant rousing up of sleeping passions.
Young people are much given to this kind of thing. There is an impish tendency in most girls, and in all boys, that makes teazing a matter of exquisite delight to them. If they know of any sleeping dog which an elder carries about under his cloak, they are never so happy as when they are rousing it to activity, though their own backs may get bitten in the fray. Let a youngster into the secret of a weakness, a sore, and if he can resist the temptation of torturing you as the result of his knowledge he may lay claim to a virtue almost unknown in boyish morals. But he sometimes pays dearly for his fun. More than one life-long dislike, culminating in a disastrous codicil or total omission from the body of the will, has been the return-blow for a course of boyish teazings which a testy old uncle or huffish maiden aunt has had to undergo. The punishment may be severe and unjust; but the provocation was great; and revenge is a human, if indefensible, instinct common to all classes.
Fathers and mothers themselves are not always sacred ground, nor are their special dogs suffered to lie sleeping undisturbed; and perhaps the favouritism and comparative coldness patent in almost every family may be traced back to the propensity for soothing or for rousing those parental beasts. For even fathers and mothers have personal feelings in excess of their instincts, and they, no more than any one else, like to be put through their paces by the impish vivacity of youth, and made to dance according to the piping of an irreverent lad or saucy girl. If they have dogs, they do not want their children to pry into their kennels and whistle them out at their pleasure; and those who do so most will naturally get worst off in the great division of family love. 'Let sleeping dogs lie,' certainly, as a rule for private life.
Historically, the saying does not hold good. For if the great leaders of thought and reform had not roused up the sleeping dogs of their day, and made them give tongue for all after ages to hear, we should be but poorly off at this present time. Many of our liberties have been got only by diligently prodding up that very sleepy dog, the public, till he has been forced to show his teeth; and history is full of instances of how much has been done, all the world over and in every age, by the like means. Sometimes the prodded dog flies at the wrong throat on the other side, as we have had a few notable instances of late; and then it would have been wiser to leave him quietly sleeping in the shade, whether at Mentana or elsewhere; to rouse for rending being a poor amusement at the best, and an eminently unprofitable use of leather.
BEAUTY AND BRAINS.
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!