made and might have avoided, had they had the wisdom of self-knowledge in only a small degree. Certainly, so long as womanhood is held to confer, per se, a special and unassailable divinity, so long will women be rendered comparatively incapable of the best work through vanity, through ignorance, and through impatience of the teaching that comes by rebuke. Nothing is so damaging in the long run as exaggerated pretensions; for by-and-by, after a certain period of uncritical homage, the world is sure to believe that the silver veil which it has so long respected hides deformity, not divinity, and that what is too sacred for public use is too poor for public honour. If the faults of women are not to be discussed, nor their follies condemned, because womanhood is a sacred thing and a man naturally respects his mother and sisters, then women must be content to live in a moral harem, where they will be safe from both the gaze and the censure of the outside world; they must not come down into the battle-fields and the workshops, where they forfeit all claim to protection and have to accept the man's law of 'no favour.' It must be one thing or the other. Either their merits must be weighed and their capacity assayed in reference to the place they want to take—and in doing this their faults must be boldly and distinctly discussed—or they must be content with their present condition; and, with the mystic sanctity of their womanhood, they must accept also its moral seclusion—belonging, by their very nature, to things too sacred for criticism and too perfect for censure. It rests with themselves to decide which it is to be.
FEMININE AFFECTATIONS.
The old form of feminine affectation used to be that of a die-away fine lady afflicted with a mysterious malady known by the name of the vapours, or one, no less obscure, called the spleen. Sometimes it was an etherealized being who had no capacity for homely things, but who passed her life in an atmosphere of poetry and music, for the most part expressing her vague ideas in halting rhymes which gave more satisfaction to herself than to her friends. She was probably an Italian scholar and could quote Petrarch and Tasso, and did quote them pretty often; she might even be a Della Cruscan by honourable election, with her own peculiar wreath of laurel and her own silver lyre; any way she was 'a sister of the Muses,' and had something to do with Apollo or Minerva, whom she was sure to call Phœbus or Pallas Athene, as being the more poetical name of the two. Probably she had dealings with Diana too—for this kind of woman does not in any age affect the 'seaborn,' save in a hazy sentimental way that bears no fruits—a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit of counterpoint being to her worth all the manly love or fireside home delights that the world can give. What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or the rosy kisses of babies' lips compared to the pleasures of being a sister of the Muses and one of the beloved of Apollo! The Della Cruscan of former days, or her modern avatar, will tell you that music and poetry are godlike and bear the soul away to heaven, but that the nursery is a prison and babies are no dearer gaolers than any other; and that household duties disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the empyrean. This was the Ethereal Being of last generation—the Blue-stocking, as a poetess in white satin, with her eyes turned up to heaven and her hair in dishevelled cascades about her neck. She dropped her mantle as she finally departed; and we still have the Della Cruscan essence, if not in the precise form of earlier times. We still have ethereal beings who, as the practical outcome of their etherealization, rave about music and poetry and æsthetics and culture, and horribly neglect their babies and the weekly bills.
A favourite form of feminine affectation among certain opposers of the prevalent fast type is in an intense womanliness—an aggravating intensity of womanliness—that makes one long for a little roughness, just to take off the cloying excess of sweetness. This kind is generally found with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the orbit, by which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face—a certain look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty thought, that is very effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness that the real cause of the darkened lids and cavernous orbits is most probably internal disease, when not antimony. Eyes of this sort stand for spirituality and loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of nature; and, as all men are neither chemists nor doctors, the simulation does quite as well as truth.
The main characteristic of these women is self-consciousness. They live before a moral mirror, and pass their time in attitudinizing to what they think the best advantage. They can do nothing simply, nothing spontaneously and without the fullest consciousness as to how they do it, and how they look while they are doing it. In every action of their lives they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a novel, as impersonations of poetic images or thoughts. If they give you a glass of water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth and Beauty ministering to Strength or Age, as the case may be; if they bring you a photographic album, they are Titian's Daughter carrying her casket, a trifle modernized; if they hold a child in their arms, they are Madonnas, and look unutterable maternal love though they never saw the little creature before, and care for it no more than for the puppy in the mews; if they do any small personal office, or attempt to do it—making believe to tie a shoestring, comb out a curl, fasten a button—they are Charities in graceful attitudes, and expect you to think them both charitable and graceful. Nine times out of ten they can neither tie the string nor fasten the button with ordinary deftness—for they have a trick of using only the ends of their fingers when they do anything with their hands, as being more graceful and fitting in better, than would a firmer grasp, with the delicate womanliness of the character; and the less sweet and more commonplace woman who does not attitudinize morally and never parades her womanliness, beats them out of the field for real helpfulness, and is the Charity which the other only plays at being.
This kind too affects, in theory, wonderful submissiveness to man. It upholds Griselda as the type of feminine perfection, and—still in theory—between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in for the tyranny. 'I would rather my husband beat me than let me do too much as I liked,' said one before she married, who, after she was married, managed to get entire possession of the domestic reins and took good care that her nominal lord should be her practical slave. For, notwithstanding the sweet submissiveness of her theory, the intensely womanly woman has the most astonishing knack of getting her own way and imposing her own will on others. The real tyrant among women is not the one who flounces and splutters and declares that nothing shall make her obey, but this soft-mannered, large-eyed, intensely womanly person who says that Griselda is her ideal and that the whole duty of woman lies in unquestioning obedience to man.
In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman—the woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big buttons, of which she flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness of a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears unmistakeable shirt-fronts, linen collars, vests and plain ties, like a man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and makes believe that the attitude is comfortable because it is manlike. If the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness, the mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores dogs and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She boasts of how good a marksman she is—she does not call herself markswoman—and how she can hit right and left and bring down both birds flying. When she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass between her first two fingers, hollows her underlip, and, throwing her head well back, tosses off the whole at a draught—she would disdain the lady-like sip or the closer gesture of ordinary women. She is great in cheese and bitter-beer, in claret-cup and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of effervescing wines. She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward, as men round their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw. For charms to her watch-chain she wears a cork-screw, a gimlet, a big knife and a small foot-rule; and in contrast with the intensely womanly woman, who uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman when she does anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of which is affectation—from first to last affectation; a mere assumption of
