before we were ready to leave. Having at length got off the natives with their burdens, two for Hilo and two for Kau, we kneeled for the last time by that wonderful old furnace, where the hand of God works the bellows and keeps up his vast laboratory of elemental fire. Then we mounted our horses and bade a final good-by, the one for Hilo, and the other for his happy Hawaiian home.
THE EVERY-DAY YOUNG LADY
The every-day young lady is neither tall nor short, neither fat nor lean. Her complexion is not fair, but clear, and her color not bright, but healthy. She is not vulgarly well, but has not the least illness in the world. Her face is oval, and her hair, moderate in quantity, is usually of a soft brown. Her features are small and unobtrusive: her nose being what the French passports call moyen– that is, neither one thing nor t'other – and her eyes as gray as glass, but clear and gentle. It is not the eyes that give her any little character she has; although, if you have nothing else to do, and happen to look at them for a minute or so, they win upon you. They are not varnished eyes, in which you can see nothing but the brightness; and not deep eyes, into which your soul plunges as into a gulf: they are mere common skylights, winning into them a little bit of heaven, and giving you an inkling of good temper and feminine gentleness. Neither is it her air, nor manner, nor dress, that stamps her individuality, if she has any, for these belong to the class of society in which she moves; but altogether she gives you an idea of young-womanish refinement and amiableness, and you would think of her again when alone, if there were not so many of her friends about her as to divide and dilute, as it were, your impressions.
The every-day young lady is usually dependent upon somebody or other, but sometimes she has a small independence, which is much worse. In the former case she clings like ivy, adorning, by her truth and gentleness, the support she is proud of; while in the other she gives her £30 a year to a relation as an inadequate compensation for her board and clothing, and lives in a state of unheard-of bondage and awful gratitude. Her life is diversified by friendships, in which her own feelings last the longest; by enmities, in which she suffers and forgives; and by loves – though almost always at second-hand. She is a confidant, a go-between, a bridemaid; but if she finds herself on the brink of a serious flirtation, she shrinks into her own foolish little heart in surprise and timidity, and the affair never becomes any thing but a mystery, which she carries with her through life, and which makes her shake her head on occasions, and look conscious and experienced, so as to give people the idea that this young lady has a history. If the affair does go on, it is a public wonder how she came to get actually married. Many persons consider that she must have been playing a part all along for this very purpose; that her timidity and bashfulness were assumed, and her self-denial a ruse; and that, in point of fact, she was not by any means what she gave herself out to be – an every-day young lady.
For our part we have known many such young ladies in our day – and so have you, and you, and you: the world of society is full of them. We have a notion of our own, indeed, that they are the sex; or, in other words, that they are the class from which are drawn our conventional notions of womankind, and that the rest – that is those women who have what is called character – are counterfeit women. The feminine virtues are all of a retiring kind, which does not mean that they are invisible even to strangers, but that they are seen through a half-transparent vail of feminine timidity and self-postponement. In like manner, the physique of women, truly so called, is not remarkable or obtrusive: their eyes do not flash at you like a pistol, nor their voices arrest suddenly your attention, as if they said "Stand and deliver!" That men in general admire the exceptions rather than the rule, may be true, but that is owing to bad taste, coarseness of mind, or the mere hurry of society, which prevents them from observing more than its salient points. For our part we have always liked every-day young ladies, and sometimes we felt inclined to love a few of them; but somehow it never went beyond inclination. This may have been owing in part to the headlong life one leads in the world, but in part likewise – if we may venture the surmise – to our own sensitiveness preventing us from poking ourselves upon the sensitiveness of other people.
A great many every-day young ladies have been represented in the character of heroines of romance; but there they are called by other names, and made to run about, and get into predicaments, so that one does not know what to make of them. The Countess Isabelle of Croye is an extremely every-day young lady; but look how she runs away, and how she sees a bishop murdered at supper, and how she is going to be married to a Wild Boar, and how at last, after running away again, she gives her hand and immense possessions to a young Scotsman as poor as a church mouse! Who can tell, in such a hurry-skurry, what she is in her individuality, or what she would turn out to be if let alone, or if the author had a turn for bringing out every-day characters? Then we have every-day young ladies set up for heroines without doing any thing for it at all, and who look in the emergencies of life just as if they were eating bread and butter, or crying over a novel at home. Of such is Evelina, who has a sweet look for every person, and every thing, in every possible situation, and who is expected, on the strength of that sole endowment, to pass for a heroine of every-day life. This is obviously improper; for an every-day young lady has a principle of development within her like every body else. If you expose her to circumstances, these circumstances must act upon her in one way or another; they must bring her out; and she must win a husband for herself, not get him by accident, blind contact, or the strong necessity of marrying – a necessity which has no alternative in the case of a heroine but the grave.
Such blunders, however, are now at an end; for a real every-day young lady has come out into public life, and an illumination has been thrown upon the class, which must proceed either from one of themselves or from inspiration.15 But we are not going to criticise the book; for that would bring us to loggerheads with the critics, not one of whom has the least notion of the nature of the charm they all confess. This charm consists in its painting an every-day young lady to the life, and for the first time; and it by no means consists, as it is said to do, in the plot, which is but indifferently concocted, or in the incidents, that are sometimes destitute both of social and artistical truth. Anne Dysart herself, however, is a masterly portrait. Its living eyes are upon us from first to last, following us like the eyes of those awful pictures in the dining-room of long ago, which we could not escape from in any corner of the room. But Anne's eyes are not awful: they are sweet, calm, gentle. The whole figure is associated with the quieter and better parts of our nature. It comes to us, with its shy looks and half-withdrawn hands, like somebody we knew all our lives, and still know; somebody who walks with us, mellowing, but not interrupting our thoughts; somebody who sits by us when we are writing or reading, and throws a creamy hue upon the paper; somebody whose breath warms us when it is cold, and whose shadow stands between us and the scorching sun; somebody, in short, who gives us assurance, we know not how, of an every-day young lady.
To paint a character which has no salient points demands a first-rate artist; but to see the inner life of a quiet, timid, retiring mind, is the exclusive privilege of a poet. To suppose that there is no inner life in such minds, or none worth observing, is a grand mistake. The crested wave may be a picturesque or striking object in itself; but under the calm, smooth surface of the passionless sea there are beautiful things to behold – painted shells, and corals, and yellow sands, and sea-plants stretching their long waving arms up to the light. How many of us sail on without giving a glance to such things, our eyes fixed on the frowning or inviting headland, or peopling the desert air with phantoms! Just so do we turn away from what seems to us the void of every-day life to grapple with the excitements of the world.
Anne Dysart is not Miss Douglas's Anne Dysart: she is yours, ours, everybody's. She is the very every-day young lady. The author did not invent her: she found her where the Highlandman found the tongs – by the fireside. And that is her true position, where alone she is at home. When she goes into society, unless it be among associates, she is always under some sort of alarm. She is told that there is company in the drawing-room, strangers come to visit – young ladies celebrated for their beauty and accomplishments – and she treads the stairs with a beating heart, feeling awkward and ignorant, and enters with a desperate calmness. The
Anne Dysart, a Tale of Every-day Life. 3 vols. London: Colburn. 1850.
