Part 9

Here is a sparkling view of life; here is a joyous standpoint of observation. There is generosity enough in the world to win for the dejected, the wistful, the pathetic woman a fair share of commiseration; provided always that she does not oppose her own interests to the interests of those around her. But what if she honestly prefers her own interests,--a not uncommon attitude of mind? What if patient endurance be the very last virtue to which she can lay claim? What if she is not in the least wistful, and never casts longing looks at her sister-in-law’s babies, nor strains them passionately to her heart, nor deems it a privilege to nurse her nephews through whooping-cough and measles, nor offers herself in any fashion as a holocaust upon other people’s domestic altars? What if, holding her life in her two hands, and knowing it to be her only real possession, she disposes of it in the way she feels will give her most content, swimming smoothly in the stream of her own nature, and clearly aware that happiness lies in the development of her individual tastes and acquirements? Such a woman may, as Mr. Brownell says, exhibit transparently “her native and elemental inconsistencies;” but she calls for no commiseration, and perhaps adds a trifle to the harmonious gayety of earth.

That she should be censured for laying claim to what is truly hers seems unkind and irrational,--a tyranny of opinion. Marriage is a delightful thing; but it is not, and never can be, a duty; nor is it as a duty that men and women have hitherto zealously practised it. The outcry against celibacy as a “great social disease” is louder than the situation warrants. It is the echo of an older protest against the deferring of the inevitable wedding-day; against the perverse “boggling at every object,” which Burton found so exasperating a trait in youth, and which La Bruyère calmly and conclusively condemns. “There is,” says the French moralist, “a time when even the richest women ought to marry. They cannot allow their youthful chances to escape them, without the risk of a long repentance. The importance of their reputed wealth seems to diminish with their beauty. A young woman, on the contrary, has everything in her favour; and if, added to youth, she possesses other advantages, she is so much the more desirable.”

This is the simplest possible exposition of the masculine point of view. It is plain that nothing is farther from La Bruyère’s mind than the possibility of a lifelong spinsterhood for even the most procrastinating heiress. He merely points out that it would be more reasonable in her to permit a husband to enjoy her youth and her wealth simultaneously. The modern moralist argues with less suavity that the rich woman who remains unmarried because she relishes the wide and joyous activity fostered by her independence is a transgressor against social laws. She sins through dire selfishness, and her punishment is the loss of all that gives dignity and importance to her life. Only a few months ago a strenuous advocate of matrimony--as if matrimony had need of advocates--pointed out judicially in “Harper’s Magazine” that the childless woman has nothing to show for all the strength and skill she has put into the business of living. She may be intelligent, stimulating, and serene. She may have seen much of the world, and have taken its lessons to heart. She may have filled her days with useful and agreeable occupations. Nevertheless, he considers her existence “in the long run, a bootless sort of errand;” doubting whether she has acquired anything that can make life more interesting to her at thirty-five, at forty-five, at seventy. “And so much the worse for her.”

This is assuming that there _are_ no interests outside of marriage; no emotions, ambitions, nor obligations unconnected with the rearing of children. We are invited to believe that the great world, filled to its brim with pleasures and pains, duties, diversions, and responsibilities, cannot keep a woman going--even to thirty-five--without the incentive of maternity. Accustomed as we are to the expansive utterances of conjugal felicity, this seems a trifle overbearing. Charles Lamb thought it hard to be asked by a newly wedded lady how--being a bachelor--he could assume to know anything about the breeding of oysters. To-day the expressed doubt is how--being spinsters or bachelors--we can assume to know anything about the serious significance of life.

It is not the rich and presumably self-indulgent woman alone who is admonished to mend her ways and marry. The sentence extends to the working classes, who are held to be much in fault. Even the factory girl, toiling for her daily bread, has been made the subject of censure as unjust as it is severe. What if she does covet the few poor luxuries,--the neat shoes and pretty frock which represent her share of æsthetic development? What if she does enjoy her independence, and the power to spend as she pleases the money for which she works so hard? These things are her inalienable rights. To limit them is tyranny. To denounce them is injustice. We may sincerely believe that she would be better and happier if she married; and that the bringing up of children on the precarious earnings of a working-man would be a more legitimate field for her intelligence and industry. But it is her privilege to decide this point for herself; and no one is warranted in questioning her decision. She does not owe matrimony to the world.

There is still another class of women whose spinsterhood is hardly a matter of choice, yet whose independence has aroused especial criticism and denunciation. A few years ago there appeared in “Macmillan’s Magazine” a well-written article on the educated, unmarried, and self-supporting women, who, in London alone, fill countless clerical, official, and academic positions. It was pointed out that these toilers, debarred by poverty from agreeable social conditions, lead lives of cheerful and honourable frugality, preserving their self-respect, seeking help and commiseration from none, enjoying their scanty pleasures with intelligence, and doing their share of work with eager and anxious precision. Surely if any creatures on God’s earth merit some esteem, these spinsters may be held in deference. Yet the writer of the article unhesitatingly, though not unkindly, summed up the case against them. No woman with a sensitive conscience, he avowed, can be happy on such terms. “She more than suspects she is in danger of serious moral deterioration.... She is aware that her mode of life is essentially selfish, and therefore stands condemned.”

In the name of Heaven, why? Would her mode of life be less selfish if she asked a support from a married brother, or a wealthy aunt? Is it necessary to her moral well-being that she should pass her days in polite servitude? Apparently it is; for hardly had the “Macmillan” article appeared, when a more strenuous critic in the “Spectator” took its writer severely to task, not for his censorship, but for his leniency. The “Spectator” declared in round terms that the woman who devotes herself to the difficult problem of her own support “lives a more or less unnatural life of self-dependence;--the degree of the unnaturalness depending on the degree of her self-dependence, and the completeness of the disappearance of that religious devoutness which prevents loneliness from degenerating into self-dependence.”

Shades of Addison and Steele pardon this cumbrous sentence! That self-dependence might degenerate into loneliness we can understand; but how or why should loneliness degenerate into self-dependence, and what has either loneliness or self-dependence to do with the “disappearance of religious devoutness”? Is religion also a perquisite of family life? May we not be devout in solitude? “Be able to be alone,” counsels Sir Thomas Browne, whose piety was of a most satisfying order. It is not profane to plan or to advance an individual career. We do not insult Providence by endeavouring to provide for ourselves. And if the restlessness of modern life impels women of independent fortune to enter congenial fields of work, the freedom to do this thing is their birthright and prerogative. We can no more sweep back the rising tide of interests and ambitions than we can sweep back the waves of the Atlantic. A hundred years ago, marriage was for an intelligent woman a necessary entrance into life, a legitimate method of carrying out her ideas and her aims. To-day she tries to carry them out, whether she be married or not. Perhaps some awkwardness of self-assertion disfigures that “polished moderation” which is her highest grace; but the frank resoluteness of her attitude is more agreeable to contemplate than sad passivity and endurance. Mr. John Stuart Mill said that a woman’s inheritance of “subjection”--he never minced words--induced, on the one hand, a capacity for self-sacrifice, and, on the other, a habit of pusillanimity. Both characteristics have been modified by changing circumstances. But with more courage and less self-immolation has come a happier outlook upon life, and an energy which is not always misplaced. Mariana no longer waits tearfully in the Moated Grange. She leaves it as quickly as possible for some more healthful habitation, and a more engaging pursuit.

There is one English author who has defended with delicacy that sagacious self-respect which, even in his time, preserved a woman now and then from the blunder of an unequal and unbecoming marriage. De Quincey, extolling the art of letter-writing, pays this curious bit of homage to his most valued correspondents:--

“Three out of four letters in the mail-bag will be written by that class of women who have the most leisure, and the most interest in a correspondence by the post; and who combine more intelligence, cultivation, and thoughtfulness than any other class in Europe. They are the unmarried women over twenty-five, who, from mere dignity of character, have renounced all prospects of conjugal and parental life, rather than descend into habits unsuitable to their birth. Women capable of such sacrifices, and marked by such strength of mind, may be expected to think with deep feeling, and to express themselves (unless when they have been too much biassed by bookish connections) with natural grace.”

This is something very different from the “All for Love, and the World well lost,” flaunted by novelists and poets; very different from the well-worn “Quand on n’a pas ce qu’on aime, il faut aimer ce qu’on a,” which has married generations of women. But in the philosophy of life, the power to estimate and to balance scores heavily for success. It is not an easy thing to be happy. It takes all the brains, and all the soul, and all the goodness we possess. We may fail of our happiness, strive we ever so bravely; but we are less likely to fail if we measure with judgment our chances and our capabilities. To glorify spinsterhood is as ridiculous as to decry it. Intelligent women marry or remain single, because in married or in single life they see their way more clearly to content. They do not, in either case, quarrel with fate which has modelled them for, and fitted them into, one groove rather than another; but follow, consciously or unconsciously, the noble maxim of Marcus Aurelius: “Love that only which the gods send thee, and which is spun with the thread of thy destiny.”

THE TOURIST

See Thrale’s grey widow with a satchel roam, And bring in pomp laborious nothings home.

_The Baviad._

“Potter hates Potter, and Poet hates Poet,”--so runs the wisdom of the ancients,--but tourist hates tourist with a cordial Christian animosity that casts all Pagan prejudices in the shade. At home we tolerate--sometimes we even love--our fellow creatures. We can see large masses of them in church and theatre, we can be jostled by them in streets, and be kept waiting by them in shops, and be inconvenienced by them at almost every turn, without rancorous annoyance or ill will. But abroad it is our habit to regard all other travellers in the light of personal and unpardonable grievances. They are intruders into our chosen realms of pleasure, they jar upon our sensibilities, they lessen our meagre share of comforts, they are everywhere in our way, they are always an unnecessary feature in the landscape.

I love not man the less, but nature more,

wrote Byron, when sore beset; but the remark cannot be said to bear the stamp of truth. Nine tenths of the poet’s love for nature was irritation at the boundless injustice and the sterling stupidity of man. He would never have expressed so much general benevolence had Europe in his time been the tourist-trodden platform it is to-day.

We might, were we disposed to be reasonable, bear in mind the humiliating fact that we too are aliens, out of harmony with our surroundings, and marring, as far as in us lies, the charm of ancient street or the still mountain side. Few of us, however, are so candid as Mr. Henry James, who, while detesting his fellow travellers, frankly admits his own inherent undesirability. “We complain,” he says, “of a hackneyed and cockneyized Europe; but wherever, in desperate search of the untrodden, we carry our much-labelled luggage, our bad French, our demand for a sitzbath and pale ale, we rub off the bloom of local colour, and establish a precedent for unlimited intrusion.”

This is generous, and it is not a common point of view. “Americans do roam so,” I heard an Englishwoman remark discontentedly in Cook’s Paris office, where she was waiting with manifest impatience while the clerk made up tickets for a party of trans-Atlantic kindred. It never seemed to occur to her that she was not upon her own native heath. The habit of classifying our distastes proves how strong is our general sense of injury. We dislike English tourists more than French, or French more than English, or Americans more than either, or Germans most of all,--the last a common verdict. There is a power of universal mastery about the travelling Teuton which affronts our feebler souls. We cannot cope with him; we stand defeated at every turn by his resistless determination to secure the best. The windows of the railway carriages, the little sunny tables in the hotel dining-rooms, the back seats--commanding the view--of the Swiss _funiculaires_;--all these strong positions he occupies at once with the strategical genius of a great military nation. No weak concern for other people’s comfort mars the simple straightforwardness of his plans, nor interferes with their prompt and masterly execution. Amid the confusion and misery of French and Italian railway stations, he plays a conqueror’s part, commanding the services of the porters, and marching off triumphantly with his innumerable pieces of hand luggage, while his fellow tourists clamour helplessly for aid. “The Germans are a rude, unmannered race, but active and expert where their personal advantages are concerned,” wrote the observant Froissart many years ago. He could say neither more nor less were he travelling over the Continent to-day.

Granted that the scurrying crowds who infest Italy every spring, and Switzerland every summer, are seldom “children of light;” that their motives in coming are, for the most part, unintelligible, and their behaviour the reverse of urbane;--even then there seems to be no real cause for the demoralization that follows in their wake, for the sudden and bitter change that comes over a land when once the stranger claims it as his own. It is the cordial effort made to meet the tourist halfway, to minister to his supposed wants, and to profit by his supposed wealth, that desolates the loveliest cities in the world, that flouts the face of nature, and rasps our most tender sensibilities. Venice turned into a grand bazaar, Vaucluse packed with stalls for the sale of every object which ought never to be found there, the Falls of the Rhine lit up by electricity, like the transformation scene of a ballet;--is it our misfortune or our fault that these things may be directly traceable to us? Do we _like_ to see a trolley-car bumping its way to Chillon, or to find the castle entrance stocked with silver spoons, and wooden bears, and miniature Swiss châlets? Shall I confess that I watched a youthful countrywoman of my own carrying delightedly away--as an appropriate souvenir of the spot--a group consisting of Mother bear sitting up languidly in bed, Nurse bear wrapping Infant bear in swaddling-cloths, and Doctor bear holding a labelled bottle of medicine? There seemed a certain incongruity about the purchase, and a certain lack of sensibility in the purchaser. Chillon is not without sombre associations, nor poetic life; and if Byron’s “Prisoner” no longer wrings our hearts, still youth is youth,--or, at least, it used to be,--and the

seven columns, massy and grey,

were at one time part of its inheritance. Is it better, I wonder, to begin life with a few illusions, a little glow, a pardonable capacity for enthusiasm, or to be so healthily free from every breath of sentiment as to be capable--at eighteen--of buying comic bears within the melancholy portals of Chillon.

Travelling, like novel-writing, is but a modern form of activity; and tourists, like novelists, are increasing at so fearful a rate of speed that foreign countries and library shelves bid fair to be equally overrun. There _was_ a time when good men looked askance both upon the page of fable, and upon those far countries where reality was stranger than romance. “I was once in Italy myself,” confesses the pious Roger Ascham; “but I thank God my abode there was but nine days.” Nine days seem a scant allowance for Italy. Even the business-like traveller who now scampers “_more Americano_” over Europe is wont to deal more generously with this, its fairest land. But in Roger Ascham’s time nine days would hardly have permitted a glimpse at the wonders from which he so swiftly and fearfully withdrew.

Now and then, as years went by, men with a genuine love of roving and adventure wandered far afield, unbaffled by difficulties, and unscandalized by foreign creeds and customs. James Howell, that most delightful of gossips and chroniclers, has so much to say in praise of “the sweetness and advantage of travel,” that even now his letters--nearly three hundred years old--stir in our hearts the wayfarer’s restless longing. After being “toss’d from shore to shore for thirty-odd months,” he can still write stoutly: “And tho’ these frequent removes and tumblings under climes of differing temper were not without some danger, yet the delight which accompany’d them was far greater; and it is impossible for any man to conceive the true pleasure of peregrination, but he who actually enjoys and puts it into practice.” Moreover, he is well assured that travel is “a profitable school, a running academy, and nothing conduceth more to the building up and perfecting of a man. They that traverse the world up and down have the clearest understanding; being faithful eye-witnesses of those things which others receive but in trust, whereunto they must yield an intuitive consent, and a kind of implicit faith.”

In one respect, however, Howell was a true son of his day, of the day when Prelacy and Puritanism alternately afflicted England. For foreign cities and foreign citizens he had a keen and intelligent appreciation; nothing daunted his purpose, nor escaped his observation; but he drew the line consistently at the charms of nature. The “high and hideous Alps” were as abhorrent to his soul as they were, a century later, to Horace Walpole’s. It was the gradual--I had almost said the regrettable--discovery of beauty in these “uncouth, huge, monstrous excrescences” which gave a new and powerful impetus to travel. Here at least were innocent objects of pilgrimage, wonders uncontaminated by the evils which were vaguely supposed to lurk in the hearts of Paris and of Rome. It was many, many years after Roger Ascham’s praiseworthy flight from Italy that we find Patty More, sister to the ever-virtuous Hannah, writing apprehensively to a friend:--

“What is to become of us? All the world, as it seems, flying off to France, that land of deep corruption and wickedness, made hotter in sin by this long and dreadful Revolution. _The very curates in our neighbourhood have been._ I fear a deterioration in the English character is taking place. The Ambassador’s lady in Paris could not introduce the English ladies till they had covered up their bodies.”

This sounds rather as though England were corrupting France. Perhaps, notwithstanding the truly reprehensible conduct of the curates,--for whom no excuse can be made,--the exodus was not so universal as the agitated Mrs. Patty seemed to think. There were still plenty of stay-at-homes, lapped in rural virtues, and safe from contamination;--like the squire who told Jane Austen’s father that he and his wife had been quarrelling the night before as to whether Paris were in France, or France in Paris. The “Roman Priest Conversion Branch Tract Society” gave to bucolic Britain all the Continental details it required.

But when the “hideous Alps” became the “matchless heights,” the “palaces of Nature,” when poets had sung their praises lustily, and it had dawned upon the minds of unpoetic men that they were not merely obstacles to be crossed, but objects to be looked at and admired;--_then_ were gathered slowly the advance guards of that mighty army of sight-seers which sweeps over Europe to-day. “Switzerland,” writes Mr. James gloomily, “has become a show country. I think so more and more every time I come here. Its use in the world is to reassure persons of a benevolent imagination who wish the majority of mankind had only a little more elevating amusement. Here is amusement for a thousand years, and as elevating certainly as mountains five miles high can make it. I expect to live to see the summit of Mount Rosa heated by steam-tubes, and adorned with a hotel setting three dinners a day.”

The last words carry a world of weight. They are the key-note of the situation. Tourists in these years of grace need a vast deal of food and drink to keep their enthusiasm warm. James Howell lived contentedly upon bread and grapes for three long months in Spain. Byron wrote mockingly from Lisbon: “Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a-pleasuring;” and no one ever bore manifold discomforts with more endurance and gayety than he did. But now that the “grand tour”--once the experience of a lifetime--has become a succession of little tours, undertaken every year or two, things are made easy for slackened sinews and impaired digestions. The average traveller concentrates his attention sternly upon the slowness of the Italian trains, the shortness of the Swiss beds, the surliness of the German officials, the dirt of the French inns, the debatableness of the Spanish butter, the universal and world-embracing badness of the tea. These things form the staple topics of discussion among men and women who exchange confidences at the table d’hôte, and they lend a somewhat depressing tone to the conversation, which is not greatly enlivened by a few side remarks connecting the drinking water with the germs of typhoid fever. It is possible that the talkers have enjoyed some exhilarating experiences, some agreeable sensations, which they hesitate--mistakenly--to reveal; but they wax eloquent on the subject of cost. “The continual attention to pecuniary disbursements detracts terribly from the pleasure of all travelling schemes,” wrote Shelley in a moment of dejection; and the sentiment, couched in less Johnsonian English, is monotonously familiar to-day. Paying for things is a great trouble and a great expense; and the tourist’s uneasy apprehension that he is being overcharged turns this ordinary process--which is not wholly unknown at home--into a bitter grievance. To hear him expatiate upon the subject, one might imagine that his fellow creatures had heretofore supplied all his wants for love.