A HOUSEWIFE’S I A HOUSEWIFE’S OPINIONS. A HOUSEWIFE’S OPINIONS. AUGUSTA WEBSTER. IContum : MACMILLAN AND CO. 1879. [All Rights reserved .] CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. These Essays are reprinted from the Examiner. Though written for immediate appearance in those lighter columns of weekly journals which everyone reads and no one recalls, they had, even the most jesting of them, all the care and thought I could have given work meant to last. Because of this, and because the matters to which I have tried, in one guise or another, to give help or hindrance are no mere momentary questions begun and ended with the talk of the week, I can ask acquittal from any charge of impertinence in venturing to make a book out of some of the “ social articles ” — more commonly, I believe, called “ middles ” — in which I have been encouraged to put forth “a housewife’s opinions.” I have, of course, not thought reviews suitable to this selection. Yet one review is among the contents, and perhaps its appearance asks for a word or two here. My excuse is that comments occasioned by a work of Robert Browning are, as to their theme, of an importance which makes them rather a literary essay than a review in the ordinary sense of the word. But my reason is that in that review I had had an opportunity of saying some things about translation generally for which I could ill find like text and illustration elsewhere. A. W. 24 Cheyne Walk, S.W. October, 1878. CONTENTS. PAGB The Cost op a Leo of Mutton ..... 1 Co-operative Housekeeping G The Depravity of English Ladies . . . .16 Pianist and Martyr 21 An Obsolete Virtue 26 Mrs. Grundy ........ 32 Keys 37 Clothes 42 Domestic Service 47 The Translation of Poetry 61 A Transcript and a Transcription .... 66 CONTENTS. viii TAGB Household Art 80 A Hew Sin 86 University Degrees for Women .... 89 University Examinations for Women ... 95 Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well . 105 Virtue is its own Eeward 109 Children’s Literature 114 Children’s Toys and Games 121 A Polynesian Griselda . . . . . .127 Infallibility 134 Conceit 139 Lay Figures 144 Poets and Personal Pronouns 150 Vocations and Avocations 157 The Livery of Woe . 162 CONTENTS . ix Portraits ....... PAGE . 168 Protection for the Working Woman . 173 The Vice of Parking Shop . 170 Champagne ....... . 183 The Novel-making Trade .... . 187 Companions ....... . 193 Yoke-fellows ...... . 198 St. Opportune ...... . 203 Imagination . 213 Word-Memory ...... . 218 Home Gossip ...... . 223 Matrimony as a Means of Livelihood . 228 Husband-Hunting and Match-Making . 234 The Dearth of Husbands .... . 239 Creating Sins . 246 X CONTENTS. Old Acquaintances .... - PAGB . 250 Dull People • . 255 English Extravagance • . 260 Waiting to be Ready • . 266 An Irrepressible Army • . 270 Parliamentary Franchise for Women Ratepayers . 275 The Domestic Economy Congress, 1878 . 280 A HOUSEWIFE’S OPINIONS. A HOUSEWIFE’S OPINIONS. THE COST OF A LEG OF MUTTON. We have all heard often enough to be able to say it of ourselves when we are having dessert in the country that the gentleman rich enough to grow peaches pays a shilling for each individual peach on his trees. There is an impressiveness in this way of quoting the cost of production which moves us as it is given to no wholesale arithmetic to do, not even if it goes up to millions and makes its precision exquisite with decimal points : the hearer thinks of a definite peach, of a definite shilling, his roused imagination presents him with all the sensations of exchanging the one for the other, and, whatever may be his relative regard for shillings and for peaches, the con- ception in his mind of the expensiveness of peach-growing is distinct and indelible. How would it be if a similar calculation were applied to that most thrifty of plain joints, the leg of mutton, as it appears on the table of the gentleman of limited income ? “ Each leg of mutton that comes to my table costs me three guineas,” the host might say, with a mixture of pride and regret, and, when his visitors had recovered the shock, he would explain the calculation, and would prove that his estimate was not too high but too low for the fact. For does not his leg of mutton require him to pay and board one woman at B 2 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. liigli wages, who shall give her whole time and energies to it, and to supply her with another woman, at lower wages, more or less entirely devoted to her service? Does it not require him to spend the keep of a poor man s family on his kitchen fire ? Does it not increase his rent by compelling him to provide it with at least a couple of kitchens and a larder for its personal uses, besides of course the bedrooms of its special attendants ? Then there is the footman or the parlourmaid engaged chiefly on its account, there is — but it would take too long to particu- larise the household corollaries, animate and inanimate, of that time-honoured symbol of family bliss, the unpre- tending leg of mutton. And, if the cost were only in money, the householder might yet be content, even although his leg of mutton makes greater demands on his purse year by year and he finds the mere necessaries of his establishment swallow up that marginal portion of his income which should purchase for himself and his wife and children the plea- sures and little luxuries of their station and the means of indulging cultivated tastes. But the relations between servants and their employers are on the servants* side almost hostile, on the employers* side uneasy with disap- pointment and mistrust. The whole domestic system appears to be out of joint. And, whatever the causes of the present uncomfortable state of things may be — causes into which the scope of this paper does not admit of an inquiry — they are not simply, as depicted by the suave ignorance and catchpenny philanthropy of irresponsible advisers of the public writing of household life from the distant calm of their hotels or their lodgings, the des- potism or the callous neglect of the employers ; nor can they be removed by any amount of consideration and in- dulgence or any effort of organising and disciplining ability. The conditions and duties of household service are not to the mind of household servants of the present day, and cannot be made so without some such complete change in our domestic and social institutions and customs as is not possible in one generation, and, above all, not possible in this generation of household servants. In the THE COST OF A LEG OF MUTTON. 3 meanwhile, the servant of the nineteenth century is a sort of Frankenstein production, revenging 1 itself on the society which has created it. Our wives are the first victims. The hapless mistress of the house is worn and wearied with unavailing cares. She has more servants than she can afford, but they are for each other’s con- venience, not for hers ; and the chief purpose of her life as wife and mother is to provide for their requirements and limit their expenditure. She thought to have been her husband’s companion, her children’s instructress and playfellow ; but she is an appendage of the leg of mutton. It gives her no respite ; it frets away her good looks, her health, and, woe worth the day, her temper. If she is a true gentlewoman she feels that no work for her home, not even the lowliest of the duties her servants leave un- done as beneath them, can be degrading to her if it is well that she should do it : but the kind of sordid contest in which she is perforce engaged does degrade her, and she feels it. And its deteriorating effect on her character is all the surer because she feels it. But Paterfamilias is beginning to reflect that he does not get anything like a return for his expenditure on his housekeeping. He perceives that increased outlay does not increase the personal comfort of himself and his wife and children, and that he is in fact keeping an establish- ment for his servants. Not only is he spending far too much for the results, but he is likely to spend more, for prices are rising and wages are rising, it takes more servants to do less work, and servants at all are becoming scarce relatively to the demand. It is time for him to do something; buti what ? Social philosophers tell him of co- operation. Some of the philosophers, being of a second- hand turn of mind, do not exactly know what they mean, and the thing that most of the others mean is not co- operation at all ; however, that matters little — they offer him escape. “ Come,” say the sirens, “ come and co- operate, amalgamate the kitchen fires, divide the legs of mutton. Come and co-operate, and sixpence shall be sixpence and a guinea a guinea, and your meals shall be seasoned with contentment, and your soul shall be free b 2 4 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. of the cook. Besting on your sofa, irresponsible for its dusting, you shall smile to think of life that knows no troublous change or fear, no unavailing bitter strife that ere its time brings trouble near.” Only, if he will go to the sirens and learn their ,f new wisdom,” he must give up his separate outer walls, his individual backyard, his kitchen area apart from the world. No more will ho have his flight of four doorsteps all to himself, no more will the slates of his roof cover his family alone. Just so, say his friends, the modern Joshuas who, if they do not exactly succeed in making the sun and moon stand still, resolve at the least to stand still themselves in hopes that it will come to the same thing, just so, he- must give up Home — Home as understood in that most domesticated and useful-companionable of lyrics, that “ Rule Britannia ” of the British fireside, the guileless lay of the guileless bard who, as is well known, cared nothing for pleasures and palaces and found his modest joys in Home, sweet Home. Home, they argue, is, like most of the virtues and all the respectabilities, a peculiar possession and privilege of the Briton. It is an institu- tion envied us by all foreigners, but understood by none. Without it, manly virtues, feminine graces, conjugal trust, family affection, Christmas puddings, cannot exist. And it cannot exist without a separate front door on the- street. And indeed to give up home would be too great a sacrifice to be repaid by any amount of comfort and freedom from cares, if by home is meant room and privacy for family intercourse and the intimate sympathies of close relationships, for independence of the outside world and the power of being alone, for the indulgence of indi- vidual tastes and the enjoyment of pursuits in common. But home is where we are, where husbands and wives, parents and children, live their lives together. House aud Home must surely cease to be synonymous in days when houses are built not to last one ordinary lifetime, and when railway extension and the growth of suburbs proceed at such a rate that the cottage near a wood which saw the birth of your firstborn may have disappeared in THE COST OF A LEG OF MUTTON. 5 a cutting or an Albert Terrace while your youngest is still wearing the family christening frock. We cannot form a strong attachment to walls which will not last and premises which are always going wrong in their drains. The old house which held the history of the family in its bricks and mortar, which saw the children come back to it old men, might well get so identified with the idea of home that it, in its material existence, and not those living within it, should be the picture the word would first summon up. But why, apart from such associations, should one sort of receptacle for our furniture and our- selves be more sacred and domestic than another ? Why must Home be a separate compartment of a street ? Why may Home not be horizontal as well as vertical ? If domestic life cannot be made enjoyable without the sacrifice of that appearance of isolation which to many people represents the possession of a home, it would surely be wise to yield the appearance for the reality, to seem to have no home for the sake of having a true one — that is a place for happiness and rest. If, by any de- parture from the system to which English family life used to owe its comfort, the comfort can be continued or restored, we had better depart from the system and achieve its former results. And if expenditure of money, of time, and of health, on the mere brute necessaries of existence can by any method of co-operative supply be lessened without loss of those necessaries and with gain of higher enjoyments, will our leg of mutton taste the worse ? CO- OPERA TI VE HO USEKEEPING. True co-operation has not jet been tried on homes and. housekeeping, and there seems no present likelihood that it will be tried. Complete schemes have been devised for enrolling a company of tenants to be their own landlords and divide the rents, to be their own purveyors and sell themselves what they consume, to be unitedly master of a united corps of servants, and to let their legs of mutton share fraternally the glow of one kitchen fire, just as we human beings have to share the warmth of only one sun. Such an institution would have its affairs governed by an elected committee responsible to the shareholders ; and, as all the tenants, and only the tenants, would be share- holders — the committee, of course, being chosen from among them — it is presumed that the strong interest which each individual must feel for his own sake in the efficiency of the administration will keep the electors and the elected alike soberly conscientious in their functions. Then, too, each tenant having a shareholders regard for the financial prosperity of the company as landlord and purveyor, there is argument against anyone ; s making unreasonable and expensive demands ; each would be able to see that, even if a disproportionate outlay for his individual gratification did not noticeably affect his part of the common balance, whether of money or of comfort, it would create a precedent whose mischievous results he himself would have to feel. And yet — and yet — one would scarcely wish to be a member of that committee. 7 CO-OPERATIVE HOUSEKEEPING. And, in spite of the sound economical principles ex- pounded by the advocates of this thorough-going system of domestic co-operation, it would appear that converts are few or faint-hearted, since up to this moment it has not been possible to get up a company to carry out the scheme. Yet it is an experiment which all who, thought- fully watching the progress of disruption between the drawing-room and basement estates of the domestic commonwealth, perceive that the old order is changing and must give place to a new, cannot but wish to see fairly tried. It must be owned, to be sure, that most of us feel that form of enthusiasm which nerved Artemus Ward to his willingness to spend every drop of his relations’ blood, and of his wife’s relations’ blood, in the good cause of his country. Our zeal has a vicarious vigour ; it is to see co-operative housekeeping tried that we yearn, trying it ourselves is another matter. Fiat experimentum in cor pore alieno. But if no institution for co-operation, in the strictly accurate sense of the term, as to board and lodging, has yet been able to pass forth from the dim. world of projects into material existence, there do exist arrangements which are so far co-operative that they owe the advantages they offer to their departure from the older and more dis- tinctively English system of unit-ism in every detail. And, as a matter of convenience, the epithet co-operative may reasonably be applied to them, after due apology to the sternly accurate in nomenclature — all the more that the British public, fond of a handy word without too definitive a meaning, has already got in the habit of applying it without the apology. So far, at all events, as homes and housekeeping are concerned, any applica- tions of the principle of combination, in contradistinction to that more familiar principle of domestic economy which the absent-minded philosopher unintentionally exemplified when he cut in his door one hole for his cat to pass through and another for his kitten, is popularly known as co-operation ; and it is perfectly possible for one person to include in his ideal of co-operative house- keeping the isolated calm of a hermit-like retreat, and 8 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. for another to connect the phrase with club fellowship and the animation of evening- parties for a permanence. The simplest and most natural form of co-operative housekeepings in this unrestricted sense of the term, is evidently that of the family communities so frequent on the Continent and so perplexing to the minds of English folk aware that a resident assemblage of ourselves and our children, together with our fathers -in-law and mothers-in-law, our married brothers and sisters with their spouses and children, and a few promiscuous uncles and aunts and cousins, would by no means constitute a little heaven below. The secret of the possibility of different households of one family thus inhabiting the paternal dwelling lies, of course, in the fact that their intercourse as a family is by no means of that gregarious and dependent nature which we English connect with the notion of family life — especially as regards the women of the family — as if all belonged to a great boarding-school in which everybody must do the same thing at the same time, and in which sitting-rooms and meals and pursuits and acquaintances must always under all circumstances be shared in common. If the unremitting companionship of an English household had to be practised among the members of a French family comprising various menages the hope of harmony would be no greater than for a like miscellany of near relations in England ; for human nature is but slightly modified by languages and delights to bark and bite in all countries. But the appartement of a French house is really a place apart, a home within the home, and the sisters-in-law on the first floor and the second can receive their respective friends and carry on their individual pursuits each without reference to the other. Even the custom which makes a bedroom wear, so far as it can, the disguise of a sitting-room and do duty as its occupant’s legitimate private parlour is an important adjunct and goes further to preserving peace within the walls than any amount of affection. Where solitude can be had at will sociability retains its attrac- tions. Nothing short of pulling down most of the houses in CO- OPERA TIVE HO USEKEEPING. 9 England, however — most of the houses, that is, which are not palaces — could make the joint residence of different branches of a family possible among us generally. We should need on every floor suites of rooms habitable by day as well as by night, instead of having our top floors built for sleeping in only and our lower floors exclusively for what the house agents call reception-rooms, with the basement for the leg of mutton. Our houses would have to be individual buildings instead of narrow partitions sub-partitioned into the regulation one room, two rooms, three, four, six rooms a floor, smaller and more numerous in fixed progression upwards, with no more design than goes to the divisions of a measuring tape. And, if we had the houses to put the federated families in, we should in these days have more than a little difficulty in finding the families. Wherever railway communication spreads family localisation ceases. Colonies of relations and connections no longer cluster together on their .native half-mile ; the railway makes anywhere near enough for continued intimacy, and they perceive that as they multiply they are in each other’s way — likely, perhaps, to overstock the neighbourhood with a population of doctors, or lawyers, or bankers, or linendrapers, or whatever the favourite family calling may be, and with a general risk of treading on each other’s toes in most of their aims and achievements. Migration has come to be considered a matter of course part of a son’s establishment in life ; the daughters are wooed by the help of express trains, and would scarcely feel themselves married at all if they were not transplanted. Thus the cases in which there would be any possibility of groups of near relations com- bining their outlay so as to avoid the waste and needless trouble of separate housekeeping are really so exceptional that any arguments in favour of this sort of family federation, however irrefutable from the point of view of patriarchalism and cheapness, can only be assented to with the irresistible If. If it were possible, it could be •done. Of the ways of applying something of co-operation to our domestic requirements the most rudimentary and the IO A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. least apparently co-operative is that which goes no further than giving us for our dwellings, under the name of flats, isolated level sections of one large house in the place of the little house to ourselves. A man with a few children, or even with no children, requires on the whole as many sitting-rooms as the man with a quiverfull; both alike have their friends to entertain, both alike are accustomed, to those rules of civilised comfort which preclude us from dining in the kitchen and conducting our correspondence on the staircase. But London houses all go by the measuring tape, so many rooms to so many floors, so many bedrooms to so many sitting-rooms, and the child- less man who wants his three or four sitting-rooms is inevitably hampered with a number of superfluous bed- rooms and, owing to the exacting and to him useless size of his house, of superfluous servants, while the man with many children may very likely find himself forced, in order to get them sleeping room, to submit to the ex- penses of a house the number and style of whose reception- rooms is quite beyond his modest desires. But when the architect is dealing with the levels of his huge “mansion^ neither custom nor external construction compels him to sort off a given number of rooms to each tenement, and he so arranges the internal distribution that there are premises with few rooms and premises with many rooms, and that the small premises are by no means necessarily, like small houses, afflicted with straitness and squalor, but offer whatever architectural advantages belong to the larger premises, the difference being in the number not the goodness or size of the rooms. The scale on which these congeries of homes are built evidently allows the money spent on their erection to go much further, with better results, than where a terrace of small houses is built by several separate enterprisers ; the construction is altogether more solid, the great public staircases fulfil a work of ventilation in no way proportionately represented by the narrow carpeted flights of single houses, the system of drainage can be simpler and more complete, and every householder within the mansion has, with the privacy of his completely separate abode, the brick and CO- OPERA TIVE HO USEKEEPING. 1 1 mortar and plumber’s -work advantages of such an edifice as he could by no means have procured for his sole habitation. Yet there are in this sort of residence inconveniences which cannot be overlooked — inconveniences which need not exist, for they are entirely separable from the system, but which, since for the present they do exist, must bo taken into account. Tradesmen, or rather, tradesmen's carriers and messengers, look on them, except the ground floors, with an evil eye ; they resent the stairs, and can ill bring themselves to recognise people whose front doors are not on the street as having separate addresses and requiring their goods to be delivered to themselves. Evidently the predicaments which may come of errands- men choosing to regard the several premises of twenty or thirty families as indifferently occupied by all are un- limited in possibilities. It is not soothing, for instance, to the inhabitants of the remote and airy heights of a Westminster fourth or fifth floor flat, after having had to breakfast without milk, to learn, in answer to their resentful inquiries, that the milkman’s conscience is clear,, and the milk a quarter of a mile off in the fathomless deeps of an area of whose existence they are scarcely aware and whence it is about as likely to get to them as if it were in the opposite house’s coal-cellar. Nor is it conducive to feelings of neighbourly benevolence when the tenants of a downstairs and easily accessible flat find their abode treated as a good place for getting rid of parcels addressed to any other number within the same block of buildings, and their footman or their parlourmaid kept in a wrathful simmer by the persecution of irrelevant door-bell ringing. Then, enormous in proportion to ordinary house-rent as are the rents, and therefore inclusively the rates and housetax, paid by the householders of flats, these house- holders find their separate existence denied by the Post Office, which, lumping them together like the casual guests of an hotel, will do no more for them than leave their letters in the street-hall for fate and the porter to deal with — which is much as if, where some select square rejoices in the dignity of gates, the postal delivery to- 12 A HOUSEWIFE' S OPINIONS. each house should be accomplished by the postmarks leaving the letters at the gates for the gatekeeper to distribute at his leisure. The tenant of perhaps only a room or so in a block of chambers or offices is allowed his citizen’s share of the conveniences of the public postal service, albeit he have not sole and undivided use of the main door on the street ; but the tenant of a whole distinct residence in a block of household residences learns that, so far as the Post Office is concerned, he had better, like Peter Schlemihl, have parted with his shadow than have foregone his Briton’s birthright of a street-door. Then — to come to the disadvantages really inherent in the flats themselves as generally constructed at present — there is too frequently a deficiency of needful offices and appliances for carrying on the work of a household. The same confusion of ideas which leads to the builder’s fallacy that a small family must necessarily require small rooms, not merely few rooms, appears to have presided over the planning of the domestic offices in flats. It seems to have been assumed that, because families living in flats have respectively fewer rooms than would have gone to a house containing accommodation to their re- quirements plus the supernumerary and uninhabitable back-rooms and cells which seem inevitable to London single-house architecture, their scale of living will be of an untoilsome simplicity requiring neither larder, scullery, nor butler’s pantry, and that everything they can possibly want to have cooked or cleaned or stored is provided for by the small kitchen with its sink, and its dresser, and its little kitchener-grate barely affording space for a family dinner on the simplest scale to be cooked at it. Peabody’s trustees appear to have larger views of the scullery-work and stowage needs of household life in their workmen’s homes than do most of the builders of these high-rented flats, where well-to-do people are meant to live in well- to-do style and to give dinners and crushes to well-to-do friends. The sorrows of the housekeeping matron and her discomfitures in the daily war against dirt and dis- order, though of another kind than in her former layers CO- OPERA TIVE HO USEKEEPING. 13 of house from basement to attics, with dirt- cupboards on every landing and unlimited capacities for mess-holes every- where, are only a little less amid the inconveniences and impossibilities of the overcrowded kitchen serving for every sort of domestic purpose at once and badly off in appur- tenances for any. And there is another great fault in the arrangements connected with housekeeping in these flats, one which inspires us with small respect for the per- spicacity of the landlords as to their primary interests in the long run — the question of their humanity may be left to the anti-vivisection societies. It is the very general absence of lifts ; not merely of lifts to save unladen legs an upward journey — which may be looked on as a luxury — but of lifts for the ascent of heavy goods, sacks of coal and so forth — which ought to be looked on as a necessary. Since it is with questions of the comfort of those living in flats and not of those serving them from without that this paper has to do, not much need be said of the severe labour inflicted and its possible injuriousness, although indeed it can by no means be thought that such con- siderations do not very appreciably lessen the comfort of the dwellers in flats, perpetually causing them unsatis- factory sensations as if they were oppressors of their kind : but the resentful illtempers, the complaints, the demands for fees out of all permissible proportion to the value of the goods delivered, the growlings, and the gibes, of the unwilling Atlases who, groaning and grumbling, stagger up the stairs with their burdens,, must be counted as a materially manifest discomfort which it needs neither imagination nor sympathy te feel. But not one of these drawbacks is inevitable to flats — tradesmen will come to understand that in England, as in France or Italy, customers may be distant from them by the height of their homes as well as by any other form of distance for errandsmen to tread; the householders of flats, being a by no means unimportant body of citizens and electors, will, when they have had time clearly to perceive, themselves, that their houses are their houses, find means to impress an intelligent ^4 A HOUSEWIFE’S OPINIONS. public department like the Post Office with the fact ; newer mansions will avoid the defects of internal arrangement which dishearten intending tenants ; and already lifts, not only for goods but for persons, are getting recognised by shrewd landlords as a needful appendage to their staircases if their flats are to continue popular. What remains against them from a co-operative point of view is that they continue the system of separate cooking, separate cooks. The leg of mutton is still the real master of the house. There is, however, a way of escape from its tyranny, although it is one which has not yet been sufficiently tested for its success to be declared certain. Attempts have been made to provide the home privacy of the flat •combined with the freedom from household cares of the hotel. You have your own dwelling, your own furniture, but not your own servants : your concern with your meals is to order them, to eat them, and to pay for them, and you have the privilege of finding fault with them without setting your Lu cilia’s cap awry. Free from the pangs of responsibility, she agrees with you that the cook really cannot serve cutlets properly, and enjoys them with the placidity of a clear conscience. You are hypercritical, but what is that to her ? And — as the theory goes — you are to be supplied at moderate prices, prices rendered possible by the great economy of catering on a large and wholesale scale and making one large fire do the work of many small ones, as opposed to the high prices and inevitable waste of isolated purveying for each family and a grate at work for a single meal. In some of the mansions which thus offer us in our homes the “ world’s best welcome ” of an inn, if not in all, public rooms to be used at will complete the arrangements and afford something like the combined independence of a club. The drawback to be apprehended is evident. With excellent servants, the inhabitant of one of these mansions may live at ease among his household gods, waited on, in some respects by unseen hands, but waited on. But supposing the servants are not excellent ? He has his flat on a lease, he has decorated it, furnished it — and he CO- OPERA TIVE HO USEKEEPING. iS is not waited on. He shaves, and lie can get no hot water, unless he provides it on Edward the Second’s plan ; his wife, as she offers an afternoon caller a cup of tea, shudders with the presentiment of despair, foreseeing that her friend will have gone home to dinner long before the operation of getting it brought will have been concluded ; the housemaids are neglectful, the waiters supercilious, the cook impossible. Supposing this, or some of this — and the suppositions suggested have not all of them been drawn entirely from the writer’s imagination — supposing this, what is the disappointed seeker after domestic amelioration to do ? Only a house-agent can tell him. If the attendance can be kept well-regulated and ample there seems no reason why this sort of home- hotel, or, as it is more generally, if less truly, named, co-operative home, should not be altogether successful. And such success would indeed succeed. The enter- prising proprietors, as they counted their profits and knew themselves millionaires, might feel the con- scientious joys of benefactors to their race and call themselves the liberators and saviours of the human householder. The appalling erection which, scowling over Westminster, grows and grows till it threatens to shut London out from the sun, with its tier upon tier of square flat windows, and its unpretending hideous- ness — hideousness so unpretending that it fills us with the sort of faith in its internal merits inspired by an uncompromisingly ugly woman — with its squareness, and hugeness, and obtrusiveness, looks like an exaggerated factory ; perhaps it is a factory of domestic bliss. If only the factories could supply domestic bliss at lower rents ! THE DEPRAVITY OF ENGLISH LADIES. There used to be among the English a complacent idea of their own domestic virtues as superior to those of all other nationalities. Conjugal fidelity, decorum, ingenu- ousness, modesty, innocence, were regarded as having embraced the opinion of Daddy Neptune and Freedom, and hit on Britain as their own island. The secret of family bliss was ours, and ours only ; other peoples might be courteous and affectionate, but we were respectable. A consoling sense of our national respectability went with us on our travels — Italian skies were blue, but then look at our English domestic life — French cookery was appetising and judicious, but consider our English mo- rality. In our own country we took our accustomed mild excitement of self-reviling, after the manner of sleepy folk who pinch themselves to keep awake ; we wrote our- selves down dull, tasteless, clumsy, prudish, Pharisaic, but it never occurred to us to impugn our respectabilitv. That was as manifest as the fog in the heavens, as indis- putable as Magna Charta. And, whatever else an Englishman might doubt, he believed in the virtue and self-respect of his countrywomen. Our wives were after Caesar’s pattern, and our daughters at worst ministering angels undeveloped. But for some years back we have been diligently taught to discern our social world with other eyes. Moralists have arisen who, with gleeful severity, have set themselves to chasing away, one after the other, our i7 THE HE PR A VITY OF ENGLISH LADIES. flattering illusions, and who have shown us to be living in an atmosphere of subtle corruption and refined lasci- viousness calculated to make any right-minded person, who happens to be aware of it, yearn for a return to the frank and simple libertinism of the Merry Monarch's days. Week by week they have explained to us how impurity is lurking in all sorts of unsuspected places, is facing us at every step — in our homes, in our ball-rooms, in our churches — everywhere except perhaps among those who make no claim to purity — and how what we might purblindly mistake for virtue is vice’s sickly and unsatis- fied twin. Week after week they have expounded the peculiar provocations of fashionable millinery, till it is •our own fault if we do not appreciate them, and have made the foulnesses of the fashionable heart so plain that the most unintelligent reader can form an adequate con- ception of them. They have enlightened us all, old and young. In the beginning it might have been anticipated that English society would take umbrage at the new method of interpreting it. But English society, tired, doubtless, of hearing itself called the respectable, and always glad of a scolding to break monotony, stomached it with com- placence. The short essays which revealed the mysteries of our iniquities were jaunty and clever, and decidedly amusing, and society was ready for more. The moralists were still more ready ; civilisation is too rich in vices and the possibilities of vices not to offer inexhaustible sug- gestions to the nice inquirer. They had not created a demand without being well prepared with a supply ; and the supply was such as to keep up the demand. Their writings conciliated both the moral and the immoral ; the former would chuckle over the detection of vice, the latter over the exposure of virtue. The style was admir- able for zest and point, the themes, imbued with the life-giving animation of a vivid and practised imagina- tion, were treated with an attractive mingling of candour and piquancy tempered by bashfulness, while there ran through the minutest details depicted, as through the widest generalisings, a subtle flavour of reticence which c 1 8 A HOUSEWIFE'S O PI XI O NS. was infinitely expressive. It is with intention that the past tense is used here, for there are later productions which show signs of the carelessness or the weariness of too long wont — the master-hand seems to have lost its touch ; it is as if it somehow worked by force of fist instead of by the old flexibility of fingers. The descrip- tions are more strenuous and more explicit, the inferences more destructive, but a racy, delicate something is lost, which, to connoisseurs, is ill replaced by crude force. It was inevitable that, in the process of destroying our respectability, women — women of good repute — should be the chief objects of attack ; and this apart from inducements of any supposed personal rancour in the moralists towards them, and simply because in their fair fame lay the strength and boast of respectability. More- over, there would have been nothing novel and surprising* in making lamentation about the long familiar sins of men — about the sowing of wild oats and the wasting of substance ; any preacher in the pulpit could do that, and send his audience to sleep over it. The moralists must keep their audience awake. They have turned their lanterns on our homes, and showed us mothers, wives, and daughters, all wanton and mercenary at heart, saved from absolute dishonour only by their selfishness and the preventive etiquettes of society ; their follies and their prudences, their mirth and their earnest, all alike prompted by sensual instincts and forbidden wishes, and regulated by considerations of material interests ; their dress deliberately meretricious; their amusements in- tentionally dangerous. That was novel and striking, and successful. People who were not already subscribers to the periodicals in which these revelations were made hastened to become subscribers, the moralists had readers in plenty, and the readers had something to discuss — or rather to talk about — at dinner parties. There was little discussion in the shape of debate, for it is a note of stupidity to be unable to discern the wickedness around one, and we could not afford to be guilty of stupidity. So we settled down to the new view with our usual English resignation to a fait accompli, consented to the THE DERR A VITY OF ENGLISH LADIES, ig depravity of everybody’s female relatives except our own, and, with our usual English want of logic, went about practically extending the exception to every lady we met. And in this contentment a good many people got tired of the moralists, who seemed to them to be harping too long on the same chords — the strain had become commonplace by repetition, and bade fair to be voted a nuisance. The moralists have risen to the occasion. They have made their women worse, and they have turned their lantern on the children. But here patience breaks down. One cannot speak without loathing of the monstrous prurience which has conceived the foulness of precocity and perversion as- cribed to the minds of children. Spoiled children may be cross, vain, selfish, pert, greedy, presumptuous ; they may ape the ways of their elders ; they may imitate the flirtations and the courtships, and repeat the fast and frivolous talk of which they have been suffered to be the spies and eavesdroppers ; they may be so far from the unconsciousness and unsuspectingness of genuine child- hood as almost to deserve the malignance of the hatred they seem to have excited, or so inconvenient and forward as to account for it — but they are human and they are children. In the names of common sense and common decency let it be forborne to make them too the subjects of an obscene psychology, and to credit them with impulses and calculations impossible to their years and their kind. There is something more to be said as to the protracted onslaughts on the reputation of pretty well all classes of reputable women. The reputable women, if they have not previously brought it on themselves, offered too many tempting weaknesses in their armour. Fashions took a bad turn among them — and have taken a worse since the moralists began. Good women ought to resist bad fashions, but, save some rare exceptions, who are gene- rally condemned as strongminded or anxious to be conspicuous, they do not. For one thing the men of their families, who as a rule dread nothing more for their female relatives than eccentricity of appearance, would c 2 20 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. discourage them from rebellion against a reigning mode ; for another they get speedily accustomed to what every- body else wears and, perhaps not unreasonably, see no immodesty in any garb which does not force attention by its singularity. Then there were doubtless — for there always are many matrons who forget that they were not girls — many girls who forgot to exact the respect due to their maidenly dignity. There were, for unhappily there always are, careless mothers and disloyal wives to be found. Some of the types presented existed — whether enough to justify the generalising from them is another matter. On the whole the pictures of English life pre- sented might seem to the uninitiated reader to be evolved partly from the depths of the writer’s inner conscious- ness, partly from reminiscences of French novels for the matrons’ figures and of sensation novels for the girls’, but it was noised abroad that certain of the portraits, whether fair likenesses or not, had their living originals and that the moralists might plead the famous “ Pensez done, e’est mon amie intime ; est-ce que je voudrais la calomnier ? ” But, if we admit so much, must we needs infer that every silly girl who flaunts in the indiscreet fashions of the day, and giggles for admiration, is rejoicing in con- scious impropriety and cherishing immodest aspirations ; that every wife who is foolishly pleased with flatteries she ought to resent is given up to vicious propensities ? Must we believe the moralists, or may we trust our own expe- rience of average men and women, and reject these imaginations of wholesale depravity, of assignations and intrigues, of guilt in the afternoon cup of tea, and danger in the morning call ? PIANIST AND MARTYR. When Music, heavenly maid, was young, did she practise many hours a day ? Did she train her fingers gymnasti- cally with scales and shakes and exercises on five notes ; and did she plod through the bars of toilsome fantasias, repeating them through weeks, a dozen times together, until at last the patient process had achieved the crown of success, and she could take the allegros, and for the matter of that the andantes too, at a fast prestissimo ? And did she have next-door neighbours ? In our days there are many maidens, young and doubtless heavenly, who are perseveringly flattening their finger-tips with a view to becoming musical. They pursue their art of measured sounds ascetically, not to gratify a taste but to perform a duty. Left to their own instinctive aspirations, they would have been as likely to wish to learn bricklaying as instrumental music, but they, or their parents for them, know the moral proprieties, and therefore they set themselves to fulfil one of the chief purposes to which Nature has destined them and acquire the womanly virtue of playing the piano. The better the girl the longer she practises. Miss Goodenough just passes muster with an hour a day. Miss Well-Bred takes rank as a pattern young lady with three, but Miss Nonesuch with five establishes her reputation as a glory and hope of her sex. The present writer has known two Miss Nonesuches whose merit was quoted in each case as immeasurably enhanced by the fact that the persevering 22 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. votary of this “ forceful art ” was deficient in ear for music, and had no taste for it. One of them succeeded and became, for an amateur, quite a dexterous pianist, particularly neat in her fingering ; the other, perverted by inclinations for drawing and for croquet, fell away after only two years’ diligence, and by that instability lost more than all the ground she had gained during her period of melodious Juggernautism. It w T as absurd of her to plead that her two years’ hard work had not enabled her to play any one of her “ pieces ” correctly and in time ; if she played so badly there was all the more need for practising. Putting aside any recollection of personal sufferings of our own, of chromatic ascensions next door of which each note seemed hammered into our aching heads, of bluettes, and pensees, and rains of pearls and roses and stars and all things droppable and drippable on the piano, setting our brains in a watery whirl as we painfully try to write or read and not to hear, of glib perpetual waltzes and too familiar “short tunes and long tunes” forcing themselves, like old acquaintances defiant of “ not-at-homes,” through our unwilling ears and churning on inside our heads when we want to write our epic or our recondite treatise on political economy — putting aside all subjective considera- tions, we must needs revere these martyrs to duty who are to be found in every English home and swarm next door. What they do they do because it is right. They do not know why they ought to give a large part of their young lives to a protracted attempt at mastering a craft which requires a rare and special talent not belonging to them, they only know that it is their vocation. Like Tennyson’s linnet they do but sing because they must; but theirs is not the linnet’s unreasoning self-indulgent must, it is the must of the civi- lised being, obedient to conscience and with a conscience obedient to public opinion. The taunt sometimes levelled at them that they seek and value musical acquirements as a means of winning a husband, is one which, in nineteen cases out of twenty at the least, is undeserved. Girls who consciously go to work to get married know very well that a well-placed sigh is worth fifty sonatas and that no PIANIST AND MARTYR. 2 3 amount of major or minor prestidigitation can win a triumph over the rival who, though a dunce at the music-book is an expert in smiles and dropped eye- lids ; and the other girls, who, taking their lives as they find them, shut their eyes and see what chance will send them, simply accept their music, like their lace- embroidery, as a part of woman’s mission to anybody or nobody. The patent fact that so many women “ leave off music ” after their marriage is no proof of their skill or no-skill having been attained with ulterior motives : other duties arise and multiply, life has become too hurried and too full of much small business for piano-playing as a duty, and the achievement has never been, like the craft of the true musician, a necessity of nature — very likely not even a recreation. Then, in spite of the theory that the reason the use of the piano ought to be a principal part of a girl’s education is that she may be qualified to make a husband’s home happy, most men rather dislike tete-a-tete musical enter- tainments where the wife is the solitary performer. They are sleepy, or they are studious, or they want to go away and smoke, or they are critical connoisseurs and do not like the domestic average, or they like the barrel- organ’s cheerful and compendious tunes and are worried at the effort of conscious listening required to follow the melody as their divine Cecilia goes on “ adding length to solemn sounds.” If the husband can sing at all it is another matter, he wants his wife to accompany him, he votes himself musical, the pair practise together. But the majority of husbands do not sing. The proper and charitable feeling when one hears of a woman who before marriage gave up her time largely to practising “ leaving off music” after marriage is that of pity for her that she ever was constrained to begin it : or — for perhaps, on the principle that you cannot tell if you can play the flute till you have tried, and in order to train the ear to some intelligent and pleasurable appreciation of harmony, a rudimentary musical education should be given to all children — the pity for her might only extend to her having been constrained to labour on at an uncongenial 24 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. and utterly useless occupation. No person in whom any particle of the divine faculty of music had life could, after having attained a mastery over the mechanical difficulties of instrumentation and after having made its exercise a daily habit for years, renounce the habit and forego the mastery. If music had not been alien to the nature, it must have become a second nature. Of course this does not mean that there was a dislike to hearing music, any more than the absence of the painter’s temperament involves a dislike to seeing pictures, but simply that the gifts and predisposition which go to make the musician were wanting, as the soil and climate for azaleas are wanting on Norway hills. In fact, the enjoyment of rhythmic sounds is so universal to mankind that, as a general rule, the last thing an unmusical man suspects about himself is that he is unmusical. Once one of the most excruciating and disunited of itinerant bands con- ceivable out of Hades was jerking through a popular set of quadrilles in a variety of keys and times, when a bene- volent and cheerful auditor said to a silent sufferer pacing his garden with him “Do you like music?” “Yes,” was the answer of course — who would own to being the man that has not music in his soul ? — but the “ yes ” was languid and slow, for the noise the itinerants were making bore the generic name of music, and the thought had arisen, as it must have often arisen to most people, that the tuneful art gives too much pain for too rare a pleasure. “ So do I ; I delight in it,” was the hearty reply, “ I do enjoy this now. In fact I am so fond of music that there is no sort I don’t enjoy. It gives me the greatest pleasure to hear even a common barrel-organ.” Many respectable persons wholly without ear think they are fond of music, on much the same grounds. Some of them regret that they never learned music ; some of them have learned it. Only the latter are objectionable in society. It is a decided alleviation to party-goers in general, and probably to most of the martyrs to music themselves, that the barbarous custom of making oppressed young ladies bestow their vocal or instrumental tediousness on the oppressed company has gone far towards disappearing. PIANIST AND MARTYR. 2S The poor girls, called on to air their abilities before a roomful of strangers and indifferent or even hostile acquaintances, and aware from the comments themselves and their intimates pass on the performances of other girls and the manner in which they listen to them that they will have more critics than hearers and that criticism will chiefly mean censure, fall far short of their best where their best would not qualify them to take the places of fourth-rate professionals at public concerts. They have spent weary hours in practising up the song or the nocturne that was to earn the enthusiasm of the enchanted assemblage, and only mortification is the result ; the com- pliments are forced and cold, and the thank-yous that echo the concluding chords are at least as likely to repre- sent gratitude that the process is over as delight in its having taken place. Of the audience, those who under- stand music have wished they were hearing better, and those who wanted to talk have wished they were hearing none. If a girl plays fairly well, or sings even but a little, her accomplishments may give real pleasure in the home circle, especially if her brothers and sisters are musical too. The young people get up duets and trios and choruses together, fearless of difficulties, and each too self-intent to be unkindly critical of the others; the elders listen in their easy-chairs, and, if they do not exactly think their geese all swans, feel that such cheery melodious geese as theirs are pleasanter to hear than any swans in the world. And yet are even these family evenings made wiser and merrier with well-timed music always worth the cost ? Think of the hours of practising. Think of the next-door neighbours. AN OBSOLETE VIRTUE. There was once a virtue that everybody said was the most useful, and wholesome, and sensible, and self-re- warding, virtue that ever was. Everybody loved and re- spected it — even those who never thought of practising it. But so much was written and talked in its honour that there were few people who at some time or other did not make up their minds to practise it, and, just as the good books told them they would do, they always felt a glow of satisfaction whenever they had carried out their intention ; though some of them only carried it out once nr twice and then gave it up again till the next time for making good resolutions arrived. That virtue, now so long forgotten that many of the present generation have never heard of it, was Early Bising. Its history is simple and sad : it was for a few centuries a habit; then, becom- ing rarer, it was promoted to a virtue, in which honour- able dignity it was suffered to remain long after it had lost all influence ; finally it was declared guilty of arro- gance and keeping unseasonable hours, and, falling into disrepute, vanished, ashamed, into obscurity. Several persons of archaic disposition, especially schoolmistresses with a turn for inditing advice to the youthful female mind and getting it published, have, within the memory of man, tried to resuscitate the legendary honours of the fallen virtue, but such attempts were about as practical and as successful as if they had aimed at the revival of knight- errantry, and their main result was to arouse damaging AN OBSOLETE VIRTUE. -7 ■attention and to suggest to vivacious but lie-a-bed writers •of small-talk essays a palpable tlieme for sarcasms. The change in the literature of early rising is indeed ■a noticeable phenomenon. During the epoch of mediaeval superstition and barbarity when everybody got up early, it seems to have almost completely escaped the attention of poets and moralists, and such tributes to it as have been handed down to us are contained almost, if not altogether, exclusively in those pithy summaries of prac- tical ethics called proverbs — terse axioms of experience which condense a whole code of policy into half-a-dozen words, but which do not concern themselves with the virtues from an unremunerative point of view. When the proverb tells us that — He that would thrive, Must rise at five ; He that has thriven, May rise at seven — it ascribes no moral superiority to the five o’clock over the seven o’clock riser ; it simply recommends a line of conduct serviceable towards getting on in the world. And so with the other matutinal proverbs, we cannot in any way draw from them the inference that early rising was, in the times which gave birth to these proverbs, classed among the abstract virtues ; neither can we draw from them the inference that it was not. They are economical recipes of the character of our own pet cut-and-dried phrases about small profits and quick returns, buying in a cheap market and selling in a dear, and so forth — phrases which would long since have been crystallised by rhyme or alliteration or homely metaphor into such familiar views as those which made the prudence of our ancestors’ gospel to Hob and Wat and their babies, but for the disappearance of the gift of proverb-making from among a spelling -book -ridden and grammar -haunted generation. But the time came when early rising met with higher recognition than that of a few utilitarian proverbs. It is an invariable consequence of civilisation that mankind comes to prefer being awake chiefly in the 28 A BO USE WIFE'S OPINIONS. hours of artificial light and asleep chiefly by daylight, and. thus, as civilisation progressed, early rising became less and less customary, until at last it attained that degree of rarity which is essential to a virtue. The days of its triumph had arrived. The poet racked his imagination for many-hued pictures of the dawn, and sang of the healthfulness of getting damp with the pearly morning dews ; the social philosopher expatiated on the righteous joys of being up before everybody else, the strengthening of the moral tone, the improvement of the complexion, the increase of acquaintance with Nature and of appetite for breakfast ; the arithmetician did inspiring sums about the decades that would be added to life by rising every morning only a few hours sooner than fires are lit and sitting-rooms swept and dusted. From round-text copy- slips to epics early rising was the theme of every pen. And then, without transition and without premonitory signs, the reaction came. The causes of the revulsion of style by which this dis- used and venerated practice became all at once a theme for reprobation and derision seem to have been several and dissimilar. One, and perhaps the most important, was doubtless the spirit of earnestness which, though already on the wane, was predominantly manifest among us a few years back. Persons who had decided on earnestness could not be content with lip-service ; it could never be to their mind to recognise a duty, to praise a virtue, without strenuously putting it into action ; they said early rising was wrong. Another cause was the spirit of levity of these latter days — that mocking spirit which rejoices in exhibiting time-honoured respectabilities in a comic light and making, as it were, Aunt Sallies of the venerable idols of a didactic past. Yet another was what, for want of a name in classic English, must be called the spirit of topsyturvyness — that which moves us to eulogise the modest merits of a Nebuchadnezzar, the first vegetarian, and the votary of a proud simplicity in days of effeminacy and luxurious apparel, and to despise the selfish cowardice of a Boadicea, taking with her in her chariot her two young daughters to face the missiles AN OBSOLETE VIRTUE. 29 of the enemy, while she, safely ensconced behind them, displayed her skill in rhetoric — that which makes us in- telligently deaf to any side but the other side, and vivaciously blind to whatever is not concealed by a mill- stone. Much also was due to the fact that there was nothing left to say in honour of early rising — no similes, no sums, no eloquence — all had been used up by that obtrusive class of persons which, in spite of malediction, has persevered through centuries in saying our good things before us. Obviously, when a subject has got to the stage in which nothing new can be said in its favour, the next thing for authors to do with it is to write against it. Early rising, then, has become known among us as an act of arbitrary and un-Protestant asceticism — a vain- glorious piece of Pharisaism, to be abhorred of modest souls who sleep late and make no boast over their neigh- bours — a disorderly caprice, and an infringement of the uniformity of domestic routine. It is impertinent, it is ridiculous. Frequently — alas! too frequently, for “sweet is sweet/'’ and a joke is a joke, “but while a little strange'’'’ — frequently is it observed that the early worm would not have been got by the early bird if he had stayed in his hole. It is asked why we should be set to imitate the lark and the lamb rather than the owl, the very bird of wisdom, and the victorious lion ; how we can rise with the dawn when the dawn varies from four a.m. in summer to noon or not at all in winter ; why we should lengthen our lives by getting up early more than by sitting up late; and, if it has not been added it might be, what is the use of getting an appetite for breakfast when you cannot get the breakfast ? And, whatever amount of argument there may be in the questions with which it is now customary to answer the ancient parables and pre- cepts, who shall deny the relevancy of that last ? In it he who runs may read the monumental vale of early rising : it is an anachronism. In 1878 servants like a long night's rest, and they like it to begin late. And they do not like masters and mistresses getting up before they do : they discourage it. 3° A HOUSEWIFE'S OPIXIOXS. But, whatever other guilt there maybe in early rising, the reproach that it is Pharisaic is now in itself an ana- chronism. There is no pomp of conscious virtue about early rising now : if we commit it we are abashed and secret. Should some ill chance require avowal we admit the practice timidly, we are humbled by our malfeasance, we make haste to forestall the coming ridicule by laughing at ourselves ; we say the things about the early worm ; we put forward our excuses deprecatingly, as who would lie as late as the latest if we could have our will ; we hug ourselves when we hear of a fellow-culprit and endeavour anxiously to make out that he is a quarter of an hour the sooner. The pickpocket may be proud — in fitting- company — but not the early riser. And yet something might be said in favour of lengthening- our forenoons — or, rather, of having fore- noons at all, for that part of the day, more and more curtailed, is fast disappearing from our practical existence. Much of the hurry that wears the lives of business and professional men is due to that crowding the appoint- ments of the day into three or four hours, to which, if they do not condemn themselves, others condemn them ; they are perpetually straining their energies to get in 360 minutes between midday and four o'clock. Seamstresses lie in bed late because they sit up late ; but would it not be better for them to use the early daylight than to work on wearily through the night and blind themselves over their needles by candlelight ? And so with other callings, both men's and women’s, might not the work, with advantage both to the work and the workers, be begun sooner in the day, to end the sooner ? It will come to that again in the end. Meals, occupations, amusements, grow later to hour after hour, till at last custom will have gone round the clock, and passed on from rising at sunset to beauty-sleep and eight o'clock breakfast. But that will take a generation or two. Meanwhile, a large number of persons, the majority even in London perhaps, and certainly the majority in the United Kingdom, follow the fashion of lateness after Charles Lamb's method of measuring his office time — they get up late, “ but then AN OBSOLETE VIRTUE. 3i they go to bed so early R To have legislated all night, or to have danced all night, is full reason for sleeping away the next morning, and after all it is only keeping good hours for the Antipodes ; but there are households by the million which, having neither duty nor amusement to keep them up, get into bed at a punctual or even a premature ten, and barely manage to be up in time for breakfast at a lagging nine. In ancient times these would have been exposed to unpleasant references to the ways of the ant, but there are no sluggards now, only people too wise to waste the precious hours by being out of bed earlier than they can help. MRS. GRUXDY. If ever virtuous and valuable female was ungratefully rewarded by tliis ungrateful world it is sbe. Somewhere or other, whether as a sweet little cherub aloft or a view- less messenger of air among us we know not — “ perhaps no man ever shall know ” — she takes care of us, all and individually, she watches over our cradles, she instigates our funerals, she assists us in choosing our spouses, our hats, our houses, our friends, our religion, our dinners, she inspires many and controls all of our Acts of Parliament, she breathes her afflatus into our art, she prompts our literature, our pulpit eloquence, our evening-party ballads of the affections. What should we do without her ? Pancy having to settle all the details of our lives for our- selves — which quarter of the town to live in, what sort of house to have, what furniture, how many servants, what o^clock to dine at, at which part of the dinner to have the fish. Fancy having to find out our own wishes, to create our own tastes, to propound our own code of social morals. Kine-tenths of us would have our minds like the old fresco of the man clad with a pair of shears, meditating into what fashion he should cut the provision of cloths and silks spread around him for his covering, and would wait in hesitating bewilderment unprovided with ideas at all ; and the remaining tenth would live in a state of perpetual variation and experiment, and would be like independent hermits in a too crowded desert, each an offence to all the others, and all the others in the way MRS. GRUNDY. 33 of each. There would be no certainty about anything ; one lady would be found at family prayers at what wo thought was her hour for morning calls and scandal, one would summon us to attend her “ at home” at 10 a.m. ; our friends would scatter themselves round all the points of the compass wherever their whims and their house- rents drew them ; we should not know when it was right and when it was wrong to be in town ; we should have no idea whither to betake ourselves to meet, or if need were to avoid, our acquaintances ; the butler would demand our dining at one time of the day, or of night, the cook would strike for another time. Nothing would be beyond discussion ; and there would be no final argu- ment. “ Everybody does it ; ” “ Nobody does it ; ” “ People would think it strange ; ” “ People will think we ought ” — the safe decisive phrases, to the point and unanswerable, how we should miss them in our inter- minable Sisypheian debates on everything to be, to do and to suffer under the sun ! We are saved from chaos by Mrs. Grundy. But her benefits do not end here : she rewards our virtues, she palliates our vices ; she is the wisdom of fools, the courage of the fainthearted, the conscience of us all — Mr. Greatheart was no surer guide along the road from the City of Destruction than she through the ways of the world. And she does not lead us into bogs and brakes and uncomfortable valleys and hills — no Apollyons and Giant Despairs for her — she takes us along clean nicely rolled level highways where respectable people go and the police move on inconvenient vagabonds. Again, she is the guardian of our domestic happiness. Pear of her censure keeps ill-assorted couples from a separation and at the same time restrains them from “heaving bricks'’-’ (metaphorically of course) at each other outside the privacy of home “ to any great extent;” it checks the incipient declaration of rights of revolu- tionary sons and daughters chafing under the parental discipline ; it prevents uncongenial relations from telling of each other except to presumably safe confidants. We inspire our little ones with meritorious conduct by D 34 A HOUSEWIFE' S OPINIONS. impressing their dawning intelligence with a sense of her ubiquitous supervision ; she is the providence of nurse- maids and governesses. We look to her to store the mind of adolescence with manners and morality, and well does she repay our trust; good-humouredly lenient to young men, the fault is not hers if at times some fool- hardy or dunderheaded fellow abuses his privileges and, turning against his benefactress, breaks her rule of decorum — and then how capitally she manages our girls ! It is said that two or three hundred years ago English parents were noted for their severe and even cruel rule ; surelv the need thev found for restraints and chastise- ments came from the absence of that gentler though stronger control by Mrs. Grundy which lightens the hands of the parents of to-day. She existed and flourished then, as she has done under her thousand names and phases since the world began, but not till railroads and conver- sation by newspapers made one locality of everywhere — the whole of the country suburb to the metropolis — and abolished geographical limits to neighbourly criticism, could she exercise the all-pervading and all-permeating influence to which we are accustomed. And the English nature is submissive to precedent, but is not obedient ; our first impulse when we are told we must do a thing is to prove the must a mistake. We will do as others do, and that with the martyr's zeal, but not upon compulsion, and not upon argument. Mi’s. Grundy’s whisper in our children's ears is wiser than Solomon's rod. There are, however, many persons who regard the presiding genius of our race and of the British Consti- tution as a mere useless and oppressive despot, a tyrant whom they serve because they cannot choose, or whom they desperately defy for freedom's sake and fame's. There are more persons who, being her faithful votaries at heart and in deed, disparage her by word, under the strangely-mistaken conception that they thus dis- play originality, who act concerning her as some hen- pecked husbands are found to act concerning their wives in order to conceal subservience. And the oddest result of Mrs. Grundy's influence is the fashion for abusing her: MRS. GRUNDY. 35 accustomed to do what is customary, each of us fires off his regulation volley of heresies and epigrams without any real intention of damaging her, and simply in that unreflecting obedience to her golden rule, “ Do as others do/’ which she has made become our strongest instinct. Ourveryreviling is a homage. Those only have really passed from her allegiance who forget her ; and they are few indeed. Her loudest assailants are but heated debaters who would fain have her on their side, defendants who are their own counsel. They are not willing to slip obscurely out of her ken; they writhe under her con- demnation and kick against the pricks. They are not regardless of appearances, any more than was the fox who had parted with his tail ; they wish to go tailless admired and in company. Nothing would vex them more than the indifference towards their proceedings which they demand, often in good faith, of Mrs. Grundy. “ I do love nothing in the world so well as you ; is it not strange ? ” said Benedick to the lady whom he had described as the infernal Ate in good apparel. And it must be admitted that Mrs. Grundy, on her side, is no irreconcilable Beatrice. The fact of the matter is that in nine cases out of ten — or is it ninety-nine out of a hundred ? — Mrs. Grundy's golden rule is the best for us. To refuse to do as others do is to put ourselves in the position of the bumpkin who, for want of keeping to the right-hand side and following the stream, jostles and is jostled at every step on the pavement. It is to insist on treading down for ourselves a way by the guide of our pocket compass to where we need to go, instead of accepting the evidence of sign- posts and using the ready-made highway. No doubt it would be dull never to be allowed to strike into a by-path on our holiday walks ; but for use the highway is the thing. We cannot create each of us his fife ; our days are not enough ; death would overtake us while we were each botching at our earliest abortions. We cannot wait for our habits, our tastes, our opinions, until we have originated them ; before we begin to think about them are already there. For most of them we have no d 2 36 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. better reason than that they are the habits, tastes, and. opinions of other people. And for most of them that reason is sufficient. Probably we could find, if we cared to find, good matter-of-fact grounds enough for the common practice or sentiment ; for instance, we could urge a score of admirable arguments for using forks rather than fingers, or for preferring monogamy to polygamy, but the true motive principle of our own indi- vidual conduct in these matters is that, being English, we follow English customs. The experience of others was our inheritance and we entered upon it uncon- sciously. In other words, Mrs. Grundy led us by the hand and we went whither she would with the chihPs wisdom, obedience. Grown older we may, if we choose, discover why she led us in one direction rather than the other, and approve her guidance. And if we do not approve ? If, not from wayward- ness, and not from a zeal for being noted down eccentric, but in dull earnest we disbelieve the precept, suffer in the practice ? Why, then, perturbed soul, “ let thee and me go our own way, and weTl let she go shisffi.” The danger is really not so terrific as it is represented. Mrs. Grundy, as known to us in her serene maturity, has little of the bloodhound in her, she does not care to pursue and to maul unattacked. Do your will and let her be; it will be strange if she does not let you be. But if you cannot take leave to do as you please without shouting it into her ears, like a teasing schoolboy defying his school- dame before all the other pupils, what can the good lady do ? KEYS. Everybody must have remarked the extraordinary multiplying powers belonging to keys. There is a glamour about them : in vain do you from time to time make inquisitorial inspections and expurgate your key- rings and key-boxes ; ere long you are wondering to what lock to ascribe this unexplained Bramah — how in the world you came into possession of this would-be- orna- mental implement with a four-cornered head, which can certainly open nothing you are aware of possessing — - what you can possibly want with this clumsy kitchen-door affair, looking as if its wards had been made by a process of gnawing and biting. There they are, mysterious, unsuggestive ; you can find no key-holes for them and you dare not throw them away, since surely their key- holes must be awaiting them somewhere in your keeping. For awhile you go on letting them dangle on your key- ring in hopes of some sudden flash of memory or stroke of chance revealing those key-holes to you ; but the revelation never comes, and at last you take them off and consign them — if you are of a prudent and packing-away turn of mind — to the company of their unavailing brethren in a limbo of the lockless. They will never come out, and more will be added to them. But the despair of it is that keys do not content themselves with this supernatural multiplying ; they also disappear like merely mortal things, like wineglasses, and teacups, and pins, and buttons. If it were only having 3 8 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. so many keys with, no locks we might accept tlie phe- nomenon with, meek wonder, as we wonder at there being" so many more stars in the sky than we require for navigating purposes and so many flowers wasting their sweetness on the desert air : but then we have so many locks without keys. From our wardrobes, our drawers, our doors, from our cabinets, our secretaires, and all the various receptacles to which upholsterers refuse handles, the keys drop away like autumn leaves and, apparently, like autumn leaves wither and pass into dust. But the unexpected keys never fit the deserted locks ; and that seems a mystery of evil. It is peculiarly disturbing when, on your return from your holiday rambles, you have found in your key-box half-a-dozen keys whose raison d'etre is an insoluble problem, to have to send for the locksmith to replace half-a-dozen other keys which have melted out of their locks no one knows when or how. As a rule, unexpected keys are small, deserted locks are large. Unless vexatious fairies make change- lings of keys as they used to do of babies, there is no theory which can connect those keys with those locks. The troubles of life assume different aspects to different sufferers. To some the disease, to others the doctor, is the greater trial : to some the dinner of herbs, to others the stalled ox, is the mortification : to some the frying-pan, to others the fire, is the less objectionable martyrdom. So it is with locks and keys. There are persons — perhaps a majority, for such persons must be unthinking, and the unthinking are a majority — there are persons who hold it a lighter affliction to possess keys without locks than locks without keys. Looking only to the moment, they note the inconvenience of finding their properties secured from their access, perhaps just when they most need them for immediate purposes, and, since no like obstruction can ever arise from the possession of aimless keys, which, if they can unfasten nothing, at least fasten up nothing, they take it that the momentary, the removeable, difficulty — that of the lock whose key has gone into the past — represents the immeasurably greater loss. But this is an evident mistake. The lock- smith arrives, forces the lock, mends it, puts it back with KEYS. 39 another key, and all is as before. The loss is definite : a key, some time, more temper, and your expenses. In the other case the loss is indefinite, never at an end. You have forgotten or you have failed to learn what that key could have unlocked for you ; it remains a monument of vanished possibilities, those chief though unknown dis- appointments of life ; it is the visible but unintelligible record of something you ought to have and have not. You can never tell now, you can only guess, what it might have done if you had discovered its use. And it has become worse than useless, it is aggravating. What endowment can be more annoying than a possession which the owner is hopelessly precluded from enjoying ? Maybe we are richer in such keys than we know. Maybe we possess some of them allegorically as well as tangibly. Fortune, education, may have put keys into our hands for which we have, by oversight or forgetful- ness, or sheer stupidity, failed to find the locks. It does seem as if especially in the matter of education this were a frequent case. The office of education is not and cannot be to provide us with all the provender, all the working materials, our intellects require ; its office is to forge for us the keys with which we can unlock the store- houses for ourselves. And, man and boy, people spend ten or twelve years in obtaining such keys, then put them away, then some day wonder why they ever had them. Nothing, for instance, is commoner than to hear a man of mature years, who, having nothing special to do, has spent all the time since his college days in acquiring a boundless ignorance, wondering what was the good of his learning Latin and Greek and talking of waste of time in unprofitable studies. He designs this for a proof of latent capacities for greater things than grammar, and it is often accepted as such a proof : it simply means that he could not put the keys into the locks. Two noble storehouses of human thought, to which access was allowed him, remained closed to him : that was not owing to his classical education. Another, whose early floggings had chiefly a mathematical tendency, and who the moment he became intellectually his own master said a long farewell to all his triangles and conic sections, 40 A HOUSEWIFE’S OPINIONS. demands aloud for what purpose his mind should ever have been oppressed by them, and talks, he also, of waste of time in unprofitable studies. The unused key again. He did not unlock the gate and pass into the far-reaching realm of science and discovery : that was not owing to his mathematical education. There are men too who complain of having had the wrong keys given them ; but they are of another stamp. They are Apollo set to tend sheep, Hercules compelled to spin, the hen’s ducklings, the useful camel forced to dance. In most cases it may seem to the observer a question whether they are not in fact the gainers by the cross-grained schooling — as the tree is the stronger and straighter for having, when a sapling, been propped towards the contrary side from that to which it swayed. But at all events they have other grounds for their com- plaints than those of the illiterate moralizers who ascribe their knowing nothing to their having been taught some- thing ; and, if they have let the keys consigned to them by their alma maters of whatever kind become rusty, they have acquired others and opened doors into regions where their foot treads firmly and at home. Perhaps the mental waste of keys is most to be seen in the case of modern languages. Everybody who pays income-tax has, in these days, a smattering of two or three. We learn them for the purpose of conversing with the waiters at continental hotels, only, as the waiters insist on speaking English, we are not often able to make that use of them, and no other occurs to us. But these are keys to open us worlds. In spite of the evident risk of harm to the mind — let alone the morals — of a half- educated or less than half-educated young man under the spell of a stranger literature in which, because it is stranger and not of the country and people he knows, he has no data wherewith to check the possibly crude sayings or glowing unreason of his author, Mr. John Morley spoke a manifest wisdom when he advised the artisans of the Midland Institute to learn to read French — to unlock for themselves the thought and the life of another great people. But there is only a moderate advantage in having learned to read French and not reading it, or. KEYS. 4i wliat comes to about the same, reading it only in a stray novel or so. Yet tbis is what many people who speak the language very conveniently and rarely confuse the genders do with the power they have obtained. Ladies, of all other sinners, commit most waste in this direction. To be sure, one reason for it is that they generally are taught more modern languages to waste than are their male relatives. A more productive cause, however, is the mistaken theory in their education which accounts the art of speech in foreign tongues as a chief and ultimate object, ignoring altogether the art of having anything worth saying in them. It is difficult to persuade women that the knowing, more or less, several languages is not in itself either a consequence or a cause of superior capacity, except in the linguistic faculty, and that it is more to think soundly in one language than to talk sillily in a dozen. But it would be hard to blame them for an exaggerated estimate of the relative value of linguistic accomplishments in their education when it is one held by so many of those to whom they are taught to look for guidance — i.e. their partners at balls, and their husbands. Once a lady was being discussed; one gentleman was enthusiastic — and rightly, for the lady was pretty and pleasant — “ And she is so clever,” he wound up. “ Is she clever ? ” dubiously replied a hearer who knew the lady, and who knew also that in the society she frequented little anecdotes concerning her, founded on a somewhat excessive naivete scarcely compatible with any form of cleverness, were apt to circulate. “ Clever ! ” exclaimed the other in amazement at the doubt. “ Clever ! Why, she can speak four languages ! ” And this carried the question; everybody agreed that a woman who could speak four languages was clever. The lady could do this, for she had lived all her life in foreign countries — she had the keys, nobody asked what she did with them. It so happened that there was no language she could think in. But when we have all learned, men and women, to keep and to use our real and our metaphorical keys, the Golden Age will have returned, considerably improved, and we shall be a world of sages. CLOTHES. Whence do we get our clothing ? Not the actual gar- ments, the Ulster coat or the fourreau a l’ impossible, but the inspiration and device ; not the detailed parts, but the system, the stupendous whole. Who make the laws which appoint whether or no we are to have lung disease, or sore throat, or indigestion, or headache, or corns, whether or no we are to shiver succinct in winter, whether or no to melt within air-tight envelopes in the dog-days, whether or no our women are to take out-of- door exercise on muddy days, whether or no our children are to run and romp at their sports ? Our tailors and dressmakers recite and enforce the laws of the hour, but they are not responsible for them ; sometimes even, when those laws are bad for trade as well as for comfort and beauty, they bemoan them with us. Our heroes and heroines of the Park teach them by the practice that is better than precept, and, with the security of the unmis- takeably orthodox, they will venture upon small eccen- tricities and innovations, on an extra button, a braid the less, an unprecedented flounce, a retrogressive sleeve, which forthwith become authoritative, like judges' rulings ; but they are without real control, and indeed without real independence — they would be powerless to abolish the chimney-pot hat for male heads or to institute “ garmenture of dual form ” for female legs ; they could not even, without falling hopelessly from their high estate of fashionable empire, without incurring all the- CLOTHES. 43 pains and penalties that would visit mere Smith, resist the customs that impose the one and forbid the other. The common public, by whose resolute and careless adhesion the whole code, like many a better and many a worse, is maintained and rendered compulsory, has and asks to have no originating influence in the matter; it wonders and obeys — with an obedience whose unanimity is command. Have the types of the various monstrosities in which man (especially woman) is made awkward and uncomfortable pre-existed for ever in the world of ideas ? Are they necessary developements which, through what- ever strangeness and whatever perturbations, must come of what has been and must go on to what will be, and whose course we weak human things can only follow while we dream we guide ? Or does a fashion sprout up like a plant whose seed a chance bird has dropped irrele- vantly into a careless corner where the soil happens to fit, and which grows to an ineradicable constancy or to a day’s ephemeral freshness according, not to its use or desirable- ness in anybody’s eyes, but to the pertinacity with which nature has endowed it ? But if there are, hidden behind a veil of mystery, secret rulers, mute inglorious Alexanders and Bismarcks who conquer and rule the world of clothes, not simply following its events and administering its government constitutionally, wdiat a power those beings hold ! The influence upon us of our clothes is incalculable. Let anyone imagine himself normally clad in the garb of another civilisation or another period, in the flowing splendours of Eastern luxury, in a courtly Watteau costume of rose-coloured satin and damask, or in a toga, or in a buff jerkin, and ask himself whether he could then be in his habits of life, his manners, his gait, even his language and his thoughts, the same as the hurried, practical, unceremonious, every-day man of an every-day world he finds himself now. You might change a man’s whole nature by changing the nature of his dress. Per- haps that is how women have acquired their traditional reputation for instability; the variations in their fashions are too radical, as well as too frequent, for them to retain 44 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. a settled disposition. What unity of purpose is to be expected from a creature who has no sooner become accustomed to the brisk step and to the disembarrassed motion of the upper part of the body which belong to a fashion of short frocks than she has to adopt the drag- ging gliding gait and compressed steadiness of arms and hands busy in holding up the drapery which attend a long-train epoch, then is back again to the short frocks, then doubtless to the train anew ? How can she make permanently hers either the decision and vivacity which arise from the habit of unimpeded motion or the dignity and languor which would grow of stately and difficult walking amid drooping yards of magnificence ? What steadiness can there be in her politics or her ethics or her aesthetics when Marie Antoinette and Charlotte Corday, the Marquise de Pompadour and Queen Anne, the Roman matrons of the Appian road tombstones and the Parisian matrons of the First Empire, the demonstrative court beauties of Lely and Pre-Rafaelite damsels in long straight folds, Gainsboroughs, Reynoldses, Winterhalters, Friths, Vandykes, Watteaus, and Phidiases, the swathed mummies of one historic period and the petticoated hogs- heads of another, Graces, nuns, Japanese princesses, and Swiss peasants, are in turn assigned to her as her models? Comparatively speaking, mem's fashions do not vary : a long while ago destiny produced the present combina- tion ; it is hideous, but is fairly serviceable, and successive generations are content to grumble and to wear it — with ups and downs of waists and widenings and skimpings in of sleeves and trouser-legs but no serious alteration for good or bad. The natural results have followed; men have become duller and samer and steadier like their clothes. Doubtless vanity and dandyism are not wholly extinct, but who could be a “ fop ” in such rough-and- ready garments? Men are decently civil to their lady friends and cheery to each other, but courtesies and com- pliments are obsolete ; the costume of to-day refuses grace to the bows which should punctuate them, they are incongruous with its ostentatious unadornment. There are no loungers now ; every man, whatever his station. CLOTHES. 45 goes about possessed with the idea that be is meant to be useful — liis clothes tell him so ; what can they be for but to work in ? There are men of thought, of scientific research, of invention, but who could carry a “ sprightly wit ” under our matter-of-fact broadcloths and tweeds ? There are no dreamers, no builders of castles in the air ; poets can exist, for it is their business to deal with the common facts of life however they find them, but those bubble-blowers are of the past — could any man write the Arcadia in our business-like and commercial raiment ? To be sure “Let who will make laws for the people, let me make their ballads” was a pregnant phrase, but how much more would it have involved to say “ Let' me make their clothes.” Of late there have been many signs that women at least are becoming alive to the strong control of clothes upon their fate. From time to time we hear of revolu- tionary associations instituted to free them from the weight of ruchings and burst for them the fetters of Valenciennes and ribbons. Now it is a band of sedate Englishwomen who are pledging themselves to a con- venient, if doleful, livery of perpetual black; now it is the patriotic and contrite ladies of Prussia who, under Imperial patronage, swear resistance to their too fondly obeyed tyrants and natural foes, the milliners of Paris ; now it is a fiery squadron of American Amazons who are- enrolling themselves to do battle with the hostile world for health and happiness and trousers. We all find food for mirth in such associations, for we are agreed that dress is a trifle, and the idea of an association at all about such an indifferent matter reminds us of the famous- tempest in a teacup : and when trousers get into the dis- cussions we laugh still more, because it is understood that the mere name of trousers is a capital joke. Yet, after all, there is something to be said for the women who “agitate” about their clothes. There is no doubt that the dress of Western women is cumbrous and, by its. weight and the impediment it puts in the way of active exercise, a bondage ; there is no doubt that it is unduly expensive ; and there is no doubt that it sins nearly as- 46 A HOUSEWIFE’S OPINIONS. often and as mucli against artistic as against hygienic fitness. Raiment better adapted to the need, lighter to bear, more complete as a protection against vicissitudes of weather, allowing the whole body more play and, if one may dare to say it, less display, more lasting, and more graceful, is an improvement no sane observer can pro- nounce unneeded. But a woman of the smallest self- respect, whatever might be her courage, would decline to adopt singly no matter how rational and modest a costume which could be a surprise to beholders ; and no scattered missionaries, though looking never so comfort- able and never so picturesque, could entice the female multitude to imitate their venture. If ever a material alteration is effected it must be by the union of many. Here is a difficulty at the threshold, for such union could ill be achieved except by the efforts of an association, and in such a cause the very name of association is a hindrance, suggesting suicidal parade and publicity over a reform in which of all others an unobtrusive modesty would be essential. Supposing that difficulty disposed of the fatal difficulty is reached : What should the dress be ? There is an old round which runs “ Let us be merry in our old clothes for we shall never get new.” For want of the perfect dress to which a fairly representative women’s parliament could be got to agree, the sufferers under too much skirt will have a good many years yet in which to sing that chorus. DOMESTIC SERVICE. There are very many positions and predicaments of customary life in which the wearing moral blinkers is decidedly helpful to our getting along. It is not advis- able to see all around us at all times, and our necessary road may be pleasanter to us if we do not know more about it than what lies immediately before us. If we do but get smooth room for our feet, we may pass on in comfortable indifference, under the shelter of our ignorance, where the knowledge of what is at our right hand and our left might startle us aside into a hundred perils and perplexities, or enfeeble us with a nullifying despondency. We cannot have contentment and com- posure in our daily doings if we keep ourselves conscious of the misdoings of others with whom we are, will we nill we, in contact ; and the chief secret of being comfortable is not to find out that things are uncomfortable. In the great business of making life easy, to detect is talent, not to detect is genius. Even in diplomacy, to see only what you are meant to see may often prove more profit- able than the most lynx-eyed astuteness; and, as a system in social and domestic tactics, it is usually found to be as much the most prudent as it is the least troublesome. Let us wear our blinkers wherever we can, and let no hand be thanked that rashly tears them off us. There is no matter in which the policy of not seeing more than you must is of more general and time-honoured 4 8 A HOUSEWIFE’S OPINIONS I acceptance than in that of our dealings with our servants — or rather of their dealings with us. It was recognised, even in the days of absolute authority of master over servant, that abiding obedience in sight and out of sight is more than one human being ever yet got from another, such obedience being only conceivable as from Divinity to Divinity, and that frankness and fidelity, the virtues of an exalted education, cannot in either justice or common sense be expected as the habit of an uneducated class. The merits demanded of a servant, the zeal, the energy, the integrity, the courtesy, the unselfish loyalty, amounted to the perfection of a noble character; but the demand was a make-believe, nobody hoped for such, perfection: the standard of servitorial virtue was kept high, on the principle that “ aim at the moon and vou may hit the clouds,” but masters and mistresses could never afford to know all the faults of the faulty servants and not to take the good servants for better than they were. If we insisted on it that all our soldiers should be six feet four high, we should be forced to allow six feet four to go by a very variable mensuration, or we should have no army : and for generations this was the sort of compromise about servants. The demand for too much was counted fulfilled by enough or a little less ; and prudent people did not always note too closely how great the little less might be. And, so long as on their side servants accepted the idea of having something to “ put up with” even in a good place and wore their own blinkers as to the more distasteful but indispensable duties of their employments, domestic service went ou like other home affairs, more or less smoothlv according to times and persons, with a good deal of imperfection in its working both by employers and employed, but with no signs of anything vitally amiss in the system. The relation between master and servant — more especially, because of the more frequent contact, between mistress and servant — must have many moments of difficulty, many opportunities for mistakes in conduct, not to speak of faults, on either side ; but so have many other relations which are not found incompatible with "mutual DOMESTIC SEE VICE. 49 trust and goodwill. But in this relation the mutual trust and goodwill is gone, or at the least fast going. And it is too late now for blinkers : if they had not been already torn off our eyes we must have laid them aside, for the road we were on is becoming impracticable and it is time to look about us and see where we have got to, and if there is any getting back, or finding a better road. There is a saying — once not meaningless — ■“ Good mistresses make good servants,” which, in munificence of cheap wisdom, is, with comments to the ready text, bestowed on inquirers into the reason for this uncomfort- able state of things and on the troubled housewife weary of her life for kitchen catastrophes and changes of servants from worse to worse — bestowed chiefly by persons of lively judgment whose experience of servants is to have had none. In days when the mistress was overseer of the maids, the saying was a wise lesson; for the personal influence of the mistress could not but tell, and, if she was sensible and firm, and, above all, considerate, a servant with any head and heart to speak of would get good training and profit by it in a kindly spirit. But this overseership by the mistress is worse than obsolete ; the mildest approach to its revival is resented as tyranny and espionage. Servants do not understand it. The mistress, having read with contrition that all the troublesomeness of the household comes from the neglect of her and such as she, from their ignorance of the details of housework, from their want of active interest in its execution, their keeping their hands from the cooking, their limited personal intercourse with the servants, resolves to become an expert in the duties of each and all of her staff, to win — according to her author — their respect by her practical knowledge and their affection by her friendly interest in the way they do their work, and in their conversation and affairs in general. But the servants think her an unwarrantable intruder; they consider themselves watched, and complain of her for prying and meanness : in all probabditv one of them E 5 ° A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. at least breaks out on her in wrath and “ never was in any place where any lady (emphatic) thought of coming after the servants at their work, nor of walking into the kitchen.” And the mistress who per- severes in practical knowledge and friendly interest will never have order in her house again ; she will always be in a revolution, or on the brink of one ; for one change of servants in her neglectful days she will have a dozen, and her personal influence will resolve itself into her being treated as an enemy by all in her service and all their guests. The very last model for the virtuous woman who wishes her servants as well as her children and husband to call her blessed and to praise her is the virtuous woman of the Book ox Proverbs. But, supposing we take, not the moralists’, but the servants’ own parlance, and, by a good mistress, mean merely a kindly and careless one in whose house they have ample provision of creature comforts and no restriction in followers, we have to ask how it is that these mistresses find that, as old servants marry away from them or die, they too share the common fate of mistresses and the friendly union between upstairs and downstairs is at an end. If the present incompatibility (to use the only word not too strong which seems to define the feeling) between servants and their employers were all, or mainly, or even to any appreciable extent, the fault of the employers, we should find that employers who for years had had their servants their friends would still be able to be on like terms ■with the successors of those servants. And again, all evidence, actual and inferential, goes to prove that inconsiderate and unjust treatment of servants is not a common fault in our day among those classes where the servant difficulty is making itself felt. It is indeed scarcely a possible fault among them, for the servants are in a position to assert themselves and they would not tolerate it ; and, if it were possible, we know that our own opinions and habits, our neighbours’, our acquaintances’, everybody’s who writes or talks on the subject, everybody’s we ever hear DOMESTIC SEE VICE. 5i about, are wholly in favour of the rights of servants to be well paid, well fed, well housed, to have not only their comfort but their pleasure considered, and to be treated with kindness and courtesy and the respect due as much from the social superior as from the social inferior towards a person brought in contact with us by honest service given and received. That such a view of the case, and such conduct, is the rule, no one can well dispute, and the exceptions to it prove less than nothing unless their result were that the exceptional people got worse servants than the others : which we all know that it is not. Employers of servants, as a class, are better, not worse, than they were in the days when the pre-disposition of servants was to like rather than to dislike their employers. What then is happening to us ? Are we a generation of Louis XVI. s suffering for the despotisms of our ancestors ? Or is there some change of circumstances, or of ideas, or of both — beyond the mere fact of the power given them by their greater scarcity in proportion to the places open to them — which is acting on the class of servants and making them resentful of a chosen but despised position which a former generation could accept without loss of self-respect ? If any calling, or if any particular kind of work, is commonly looked on as ignoble, it will, whether it de- serves to be so looked on or not, have a deteriorating effect on the character, except where it is undertaken from those motives which make derogation honourable — motives of duty or of self-sacrifice — and, of course, except where the common opinion is set aside and the individual sentiment is free from all abasement. To say this is to state a truism ; but, unfortunately, arguments have a way of requiring truisms for their major premisses. It is less a truism, not less a truth, to say that the ignoble calling or work is more deteriorating to the character if under- taken from the lowly but useful and, within right limits, respectable considerations of gain and comfort than if undertaken through influence of less respected but less sordid temptations. To do or to be that which 52 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. you think less than worthy of you may be less, not more, excusable if you are prompted to do it by vanity or ambi- tion or love of pleasure than if the object is to earn a livelihood, yet, from feelings too common to us all to be disputed but which it would take a whole essay to expound, that motive which is the unblameable one is felt to add a peculiar degradation, and the damage to moral dignity is far the greatest when the descent, real or supposed, has been for hire. In this way professions which in themselves are blameless — nay, some which are worthy of the highest honour — have been, or still are, made dangerous to those who adopt them : to be able to honour oneself in a contemned position needs a clear and unswerving conviction of that position^ being honourable which it can only be given to a few rare intellects to be able to hold at all times untouched by familiar prejudices, together with a conscious nobility and a loftiness of aim quite unnecessary in the avocations popularly warranted remunerative in respectability as well as in cash. Where a popularly banned profession is a righteous one irrationally banned, it is sure to attract to itself, and even to produce, characters of this excep- tional strength and nobility ; but in no profession can the majority be made up of persons beyond the common, and there can be no profession so worthy and so elevating that, if the majority of those who followed it believed it base, the moral standard of that profession would not be a low one. And if this has been, as all social history shows it to have been, the effect of disparagement upon professions which in their very nature demand intellectual capability and education, what are we to look for from the disparagement of a calling exercised with nearly the minimum of mental effort, and not necessarily exacting even rudimentary literary instruction ? Service is honourable : but the servants and their kin do not think so. And it may be — and if so here is a fault which is one of the roots of the mischief known as “ the servant difficulty” — it may be that some of the masters and mistresses do not think so either. Slavery is not so obsolete, and we have some of us not so fully DOMESTIC SEE VICE. 53 learned the whole lesson of liberty, that we are free altogether of the depraved associations of slavery. We keep among us a sort of idea that, the slave's condition being degrading, his duties were so, and that, because certain human beings with the status of marketable cattle had to be helpful in the household to other human beings who owned them, something of the disgrace of their status clings to the helpfulness of one human being in the household of another. Any of us who, keeping our own servants or using other people's, in the least believe that the contract by which domestic servants engage to submit to our government as rulers of the households into which they voluntarily come, and to pay us by their labour for the wages, board, and food, we pay them, has in it anything of the stigma of servility, are practising no higher morality than mere slave-owners. We should in fact, if our belief were true, be committing* a more harmful offence against mankind than if we had been able to own slaves, for we should be hiring free men and women to degrade themselves into a condition more humiliating, because voluntary, than any compulsory slavery. Unless we are clear in our own minds that the calling of domestic servants is one worthy of every respect due to honest labour, we have no right to employ them. But this is a digression, for it is very little the fault of the employers if domestic service is not held in the honour to which it is entitled, and, on the contrary, the calling was in higher esteem among the working-classes when it stood lower than now in the esteem of the employer classes. It is the classes from which the servants come who put contempt on service. And they do so mainly from that confusion just spoken of between slavery and the tasks performed by slaves — a confusion which, in some periods and countries, has made musical skill and dancing ignominious, and of which at this day, even among the most educated communities, the traces have barely disappeared from the social standing of the schoolmaster. Our working classes are somewhat like M. Jourdain when he came to know that it was his custom to talk prose — they have been free and using 54 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIO XS. their freedom for a long while, but the fact had not much come before them in a definite statement ; at present the fact in verbal form is impressed upon their minds, and they think a great deal of it. They are right to do so, and this stage of political and social education is a very necessary and valuable one ; bat it has its own risks of exaggerations and misapprehensions. And these risks are exemplified in the frequent failure to distinguish between the dignity of disciplinary obedience and the frank performance of voluntarily accepted tasks under a contract which can be cancelled at will, and the degradation of filling no matter what functions, though they were vice-regal, as another man's personal chattel. The term “ slavey/' once appropriated, more in pity than in scorn, to the fagged and grimy maid-of-all-work of cheap lodgings, now bestowed by their own society not in service on even the loftiest of the household ministers before whom we tremble, is not used merely as a jest, and is almost more a downright than a metaphorical expression of the popular idea. The wide acceptance of such an idea works, of course, in a twofold way against the efficiency and trustworthi- ness of servants as a class. It leads such persons as have an uncompromising self-respect, and such persons as, with self-respect more or less uncompromising, have capabilities at all to turn to account, to choose any work rather than domestic service ; and it places under the ill influences of their own contempt for their calling such persons as, enticed by the sure and easy earnings, the comfort, and the freedom from care, or because they have no other chance of getting a livelihood, enter into that misprized condition. Thus, while the number of beginners of any promise steadily diminishes nearer and nearer to zero, the possibility of improving such servants as can be got remains stationarily hopeless. In the case of women-servants, especially, still another cause has tended to lower the standard. The greatly increasing prevalence, during the last thirty years or so, of the system of having girls taught at home under governesses instead of sending them to schools, and DOMESTIC SEE VICE. 55 the spread downwards of that superficial tincturing of accomplishments and foreign phraseologies accepted as feminine education, combined with the pushing-upwards tendency which is at once the strength and the folly of our age,, have had the result of entirely removing from the servant class the large number of those who, with something of the traditions of a borderland gentility and some of the liberal sentiments developed by a higher instruction than the housemaid's, became capable servants, instead of, as now, incapable governesses. These, both by their higher social antecedents and con- nexions and by their higher personal level, did much to raise the standing of the whole class of women servants, and their influence could not but tend to keep the moral tone of servantdom higher than when, as now, it is wholly set by untaught persons from the lowest classes, whose main idea of honour is assumption. If “lady- helps " were what the name betokens, and that in both its parts, their appearance in the servant world would be of high value for its redemption — as it would have been still higher if, being ladies and thinking it no shame to perform servants' tasks, they had thought it also no shame to take the honest name of servant : but the last thing to be wished by those who, for the sake of servants and employers alike, would have domestic service justly valued as honourable, is the disguising the servant under any pretentious non-servant name. It is because servants are ashamed of service that they are making the name of servant discreditable, and so long as they are ashamed of service they will make any name under which they accept it discreditable; while any show of thinking it charitable and complimentary to shirk the word servant as if it were opprobrious and to euphonise it into gentleman-help or lady-help or ministering angel or delicate Ariel or any other pretty way of calling a servant not a servant, is to avow that to be a servant is to commit a baseness which asks for concealment. If we cannot call men and women servants with no other feelings than as we call them blacksmiths or dressmakers or greengrocers, there must be something wrong either in the condition of 56 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. servant or in our appreciation of it. And clearly, unless we hit upon some expedient for abolishing domestic service, what we have to aim at is that not only the condition of servant, but our appreciation of it, and still more the servants* own appreciation of it, should have in it nothing that can abase an honourable man or woman in that condition. The abolition of domestic service, if it were possible, is by no means to be wished for in the interest of the classes from whom the servants come. The arts of house- wifery are notoriously not intuitive among the English, and, if the wives and daughters of working men had no other example of culinary care and cleanliness and the refinements of orderly domestic habits than they would create for themselves, there would inevitably be a falling back in these matters. As it is, there is usually, from their want of skill, and want of management, and want of zeal as cooks, caterers, and cleaners, far too little comfort in their homes for the expenditure ; but, so long as an appreciable percentage among them receive something of a practical education in domestic duties, and have oppor- tunities of forming a higher ideal of cleanliness and fitness and prettiness in domestic surroundings than that sug- gested by the arrangements of slatternly neighbours, there is something to leaven the general incapacity, and good traditions must exist. Even where the mother is herself competent there are very few working-class homes in which the daughters can be effectually trained in the household skills of which they ought to be past mistresses when they come to the management of homes of their own. The notable mother has no time to spare, and finds it quicker work to do things herself than to entrust them to bungling and very likely unwilling beginners ; she can- not afford the damage of their breakages and blunders, and she has not patience to see the things she would have done well herself disgrace her housekeeping ill done by others. It is not uncommon even to find the daughters of particularly active and efficient housewives more indolent and inefficient in housewifery than those of the gossips and the slatterns and the helpless creatures who are daily in a feeble and promiscuous way “ cleaning up*’ DOMESTIC SERVICE. 57 after yesterday and making dirt for to-morrow ; the in- capable women, for their own sakes, make their girls do something, though they may not be wholesomely exacting as to how it is done ; the capable women are apt to think only of how the work will prosper best, and to do it all themselves. There is scarcely any form of self-control more difficult to practise than that of seeing another in- competently performing, in obedience to your own com- mand, a task which you could achieve better yourself; to leave to your pupil or your servant what it is his part to do and yours only to direct, but what you can do and he cannot, is one of the most difficult offices of teaching and ruling, one to some natures well-nigh impossible. It is, at all events, a power not as a matter of course possessed by all educated persons, nor even by all educated persons who recognise its importance, and it seems to be one of more difficult acquirement by women than by men. It is certainly not a power likely to be common among hard- worked women barely able to read and write, and with no leisure for considering moral problems and striking the balance between the immediate and final uses of their accustomed ways. And, under any circumstances, a small and plainly furnished home cannot in the care of it offer so much employment to several women as to give a useful apprenticeship to the business of housewifery; nor can several daughters be maintained at home without remunerative occupation in order to give them oppor- tunity of practising house-work. But domestic service offers the best imaginable training school for young women who are some day to have the handiwork of their own homes to perform. And, all the while they are getting their apprenticeship in it, they are earning a comfortable maintenance and wages sufficient, not only for dress according to their needs — allowing the indul- gence of a little pardonable feminine vanity to be also a need, — but for, when they are wise enough, the putting something into the savings’ bank against rainy days, or towards stocking the house when they marry. The value of domestic service as a training school is, it will be noticed, only spoken of here in connection with women-servants. Under the present order of hierarchy 58 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. and division of labour among servants — which, having been evolved by the servants for themselves, are practi- cally unalterable by the employers — it cannot be said that domestic service has any like advantages for developing usefulness in English in-door men-servants. In foreign households in-door men-servants may readily acquire activity and industry, and the knack of a dozen home handicrafts that need a strong hand and a little ingenuity, the knack best described as “ being able to turn one's hand to anything ; ” for then- service demands such qualities. They take a prominent share in the laborious part of the house-work, using their superior strength to the rubbings and burnishings which tax weak arms so severely; and the natural rule of households is felt to be that work too hard for women-servants is for men- servants.. In our system, the men-servants accept only a light and lady-like share of anything that can be called house-work, and have no functions for which strength is desirable, or even for which it is of the slightest use, except waiting at table and cleaning plate — tasks which, though strength is a great help to their easy and successful performance, call for no effort from the strong and are scarcely a fatigue to the weak. The natural rule of households with us is that work too hard for the men- servants is for the women-servants. In-door service so constituted can only be valuable so far as its inducements of little labour, luxury, and high wages are valuable in the eyes of the men who prefer it. But the number of men employed in in-door domestic service is so small as compared to that of the women, that it is scarcely necessary to take them into consideration at all in estimating questions connected with the “ servant difficulty." There is the other side of the question : Whether the abolition of domestic service would not be a gain to the employers. We might let our wives and daughters do the work. So we might ; and shame on any lady who would think herself the less a lady for performing the humblest or the foulest of household tasks. But a revolution in our social life would be necessary. It is as easy to make the heroines of a tale become in a moment perfect cooks and housemaids, deft enough, and what is more, strong DOMESTIC SEE VICE. 59 •enough in the arms for every sort of necessity of their work as it is to make Cinderella in her sudden splendour the most accomplished of princesses, perfect in polite con- versation and the minuet ; and no doubt, in plain fact, any heartily robust girls could quickly, though it must be gradually, get their muscles into training, and any girls short of idiots could, with brains strengthened by their schoolwork at French exercises and German declensions and so forth, still more quickly arrive at such an intelli- gent comprehension of ends and means as, with a little practice to help it, would stand them in better stead than the unreasoning routine experience of ordinary servants. But not even the fairy godmother's wand could enable Cinderella to play her two parts at once ; and that double career is what bachelor's essays and the romances of the besom and the meat-jack put as a possibility for model young ladies. The lady who is black-leading a grate, or scrubbing the stairs, or dishing up the dinner, cannot, in real life, be in spotless and dainty attire ready on the instant to receive a caller or to take her place, fresh and unflustered, at the dinner-table. Mortal women cannot do cooking and house-work like the Brownies unperceived and in the secret hours of night; they must, unless their ministry is to be mere sham and huggermugger, take to it with absolute simplicity as their recognised and serious business. They must put aside all refinements and etiquettes which are incompatible with it ; and they must make other demands on their time give way to it, just as they would have to do if they were engaged in a higher profession, just as servants have to do. Unless they were to have no recreation at all, they would have next to no time for study of the cultivation of accomplishments. And much of the routine and ceremony which guard social intercourse in the upper classes would have to be done away with in consideration of want of leisure for such nice formalities. There might be as much good as harm in some of these consequences, but it is manifest that they would result in a complete change of the social position of women of the employer classes, while in their homes the manner of their employment would put them much more than now away from the society of the men of 6o A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. their fa mili es, whose place would continue to be in the drawing-rooms., while the women’s work would keep them in the kitchens, and the female relatives of educated men would be like a separate class, wholly apart from them in thought and pursuits. It would, moreover, be necessary, in order to make the employment of ladies as the regular servants in their homes compatible with their joining in the drawing-room life at all, and with their taking still a share in the out- side visiting, to alter our habits of life very considerably. It is not merely that homelier ways would have to be adopted, and a certain rough-and-readiness in the arrange- ments, more especially in the table service which is now made one of the great points of refined housekeeping, to be admitted for the saving time and lessening toil, but that the principal meal of the day must be an early one, or how could there be possibility of drawing-room toilet and two or three hours’ absence from the kitchen in the evening for the cook ? and that the times of the customary entertainments must be advanced so as to allow of their breaking up soon enough to let the ladies who have fires to light betimes next morning be in bed at least by mid- nig’ht. These consequences would, doubtless, have in them more good than harm, and there is no objection to them but that they are out of the question. AVithout such changes, to make our wives and daughters household servants would be to separate them completely from the lives of the men of their families, excepting as their servants. AVhile admitting, and more than admitting that it would be well that every lady should have a practical knowledge of domestic details, and should be able at need to put her hand to the work herself, it may be said that the method of reforming domestic service by doing away with domestic service is one of which the adoption could not be for the interests of society, of the employers separately considered, or of the servants and the classes they come from separately considered. How far we are likely to be carried without our seeking towards that undesirable but frequently advocated reform is a question not without imminence ; and if we are brought near it — but alors comme alors. THE TRANSLATION OF POETRY . It is customary to talk of translation as a process to be conducted according to one of two opposing theories : the translator aiming at the loyal transfer of some masterpiece into another language than that in which its maker con- ceived and executed it is understood to begin by resolving whether he will reproduce by the letter or by the spirit. Will he take meanings by the rules of the dictionary, or evolve them from his own inner consciousness ? will he measure word by word to the original, or will he re- conceive the thoughts from the original and give them a later but, so far as later conditions allow, continuous in- dividuality like that of transmigrated souls ? will he fix his mind most on rendering the very thing said trusting to something in it which even under the losses of strict translation shall produce something of its true effect, or on rendering the effect as he feels it and knows that others ought to feel ? Between the alternative treatments as here put the translator certainly has a choice — nay must deliberately choose. But has he really a choice between letter and spirit ? If he has, if it be possible to have either in- differently without the other, and impossible to have both, by all means let him translate the spirit in preference. But can you have the spirit of a poet's work without the letter? No one advises a painter to paint the beauty of his sitter and never stickle for the features, or the instru- mentalist to render the expression of a composer's music by altering the air at will. In poetry the form of the 62 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. thought is part of the thought, not merely its containing body. One poet will have a more euphonious method than another, or a more etymological precision ; one takes minute pains over jewels five words long, another dashes off unregarded cadences to the first tune that sings itself in his head; one is a very dandy in his dainty phrasing, another an untamed and hasty sloven making his crude carelessness a law ; but, however all these things may be, the poet — the man who writes that which he thinks poetry — takes the form of his work as of its essence and will have no fathership of ideas disembodied of his shapes for them. His implement is the letter, and he knows it. His result is the letter, and he knows it. He will be judged, careless or careful of manner, by what he has said, not by what you think he should or would have said. Say he is careless, his very carelessness is of his individuality as an artist; he will thank no neater stranger for representing him with the charms of neatness. Ho poet, minor or major, will ever be got, whatever his theory of how to translate other men J s poems, to accept a free rendering of his own as conveying their spirit. Give the merest twaddler his raw attempts in- terpreted by a Tennyson or a Swinburne out of his own dislocated English and halting measures into a stronger and sweeter form, or give them to him liberally translated into splendour in a foreign tongue by some Victor Hugo, he would feel that he had had, if more than generosity, yet less than justice, given him. He would refuse to recognise his thoughts, his descriptions, his similes, transmuted in the crucible of another man’s mind. He would be like a man who wanted his own portrait — painted, of course in good looks — and who got instead the limniug of a handsome man unrecognisable. Even corrections must be made by the author hand ; the touch of the better poet may spoil the worsens work and, for the purpose, be inferior; because of the want of full apprehension of what the author had it in him to say if he could, what he perhaps thought he did say ; because of the want of the sympathy of union which cannot be between two persons of different mental force ; because. THE TRANSLATION OF POETRY. 63 in fact, two men are two men, not one man. A mature poet's emendations of his own younger work many a time have the effect of interpretations by another hand, and jar ; because the mature poet is no longer one with him who wrote the younger poems. And what then will it be if, not the Tennyson or the Swinburne or the Victor Hugo, not the expert and ripened poet, assumes to interpret the spirit, apart from the literary form, of the poetaster or the beginner, but the scholar who has learned to scan, the linguist who knows his own tongue no better than the stranger one he has mastered by perseverance and etymological acuteness, busies himself in adding spirit of his own making to the letter he has to translate. The letter, though it becomes part of the spirit, is not the spirit. The poet, no matter how inspired, is after all but a craftsman. His words are the thing he means, but often sound, or even a technical necessity of metre, may have suggested the words. And yet other words will not afterwards do. Tor what has been said influences what is to follow, sets the key for melody and harmony alike. True the poet himself alters what he has said ; but he does it under his own laws ; if he changes even a word it is because another word is more keenly accurate as the language of his thought, or because another word more fitly leads to the next thought ; or, making the change for purposes of melody only, he has, and he uses, the power also to make in the passage he has touched whatever other changes will keep the sense he has in view complete to his own mind. Admit intellectual superiority of the translator, admit, what is certainly improbable, the translator's superiority as poet to poet over his original, and may we say that the translator can, under any human conditions, supplement the poet with the fitness of similarity, and amplify and embellish him into the fashion of thought of centuries later or worlds apart, without loss of whatever individuality of genius gave the poet his claim to be translated at all ? And when we remember, as needs we must, that except by most rare and, we might say, unreasonable exceptions, the trans- lator is, as a matter of course, in no point of originating 6 4 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. force tlie equal of the author translated, we must feel that the translator’s true work is to give us, so nearly as the respective grammars and idiomatic constructions of his divers tongues may allow., the translated author’s thoughts as he himself gave them and to trust to accuracy to the letter for accuracy to the spirit. If only the master poets of the classical world could be rendered for us as have been the magnificent Hebrews! If translation of them could be done by a company — a company seeking no personal glory and impressed with such a reverence as would prevent their altering or elaborating one jot or one tittle ! Such a translation would have to be in prose — for poets have their vanity, and still more have their taste in harmonies — in prose by faithful men who knew their tongue and aspired to be its perfect servants, not its harmonious masters as versifiers claim to be. What then ? If we could but have the sweeping rhythms of our Biblical translators, need we long for others ? "What poet’s ghost could desire more glorifying translation of his music of words than such as the unforgettable cadence of “ How art thou fallen from heaven, Lucifer, son of the morning ? ” It is a cadence which, more than perfect in its isolation, would become but a monotonous doggerel in the echoed repetition of verse ; it is a glory and a sweetness that only prose must dare to possess. And yet that same book of Isaiah, and yet the Psalms, the love- song of Solomon, the pithy poetry of Proverbs, the low long wails of Ecclesiastes, can give us rivals by the dozen to this, for versifiers, inimitable rhythm. But we could be thankful for less than our Biblical swell and fall of solemn and pathetic measureless measures. Will any prose translators give us Isaac Walton’s “ natural rising and falling, doubling and redoubling ” like his own mellifluous description of the nightingale’s sweet descants ? Only the perfection of English prose could reasonably convey to us the perfection of Greek verse ; for in our lost melodious prose the absolute poetry of sound would be compatible with blind fidelity of verbal rendering. And no sole human being can translate with the entire disinterestedness necessary THE TRANSLATION OF POETRY. 65 for such translation as tliat of our masterpiece of the English language, the version of the Hebrew Testament. The men who made that version looked above all, before all, to the letter; the spirit, they thought, was there of itself, if they were but faithful to the dictionary. If there were but men to translate Homer so by the letter ! As to translating by the spirit — there is a well-known University story of a good lady who could by no means be satisfied with a usually much approved artist’s portrait of her husband, a man of considerable academical and some scientific achievement : “ it was like him,” she said, “ but where was the intellect ? the artist had not painted his intellect.” It was suggested that the intellect should be painted in a separate picture and hung up beside the portrait. As it happened, nobody was found to paint the intellect thus apart from the bodily man, the spirit away from the letter. Had the question been of producing his intellect apart from its outward embodiment, had the University notability been a world's great writer with his works liable to translation, he might not have escaped so easily. A very nice intellect would have been pourtrayed for him : but would he have accepted it for his ? A TRANSCRIPT AND A TRANSCRIPTION. There have just appeared, almost simultaneously, two renderings of a most unrenderable masterpiece. One calls itself a transcript, and the other ought to call itself a transcription, according to Webster's definition of the word, as applied by composers to “ a more or less fanciful and ornate reproduction on them own instrument of a song or other piece not originally intended for it." One is by a chief of poets now, the other perhaps by a poet to be pleasantly revealed to us in a not remote futurity ; and, as might be expected, it is the great poet, the hail-fellow of .ZEschylus, who spends his vigour in unflinching self- restraint and will not be lured from his dogged fidelity as a translator by any temptation to achieve a beautiful passage or a well-rounded stanza, it is the aspirant who turns aside to follow the flights of his own fancy, who, in the enthusiasm of versification, finds surprises of happy touches and new turns, and adds himself to MDschylus. It is noticeable, too, that it is the word-by-word transla- tion, the mere imitation as one might say, which bears the strong impression of originative power — a power which must have been recognised if Robert Browning had never been heard of before — and the loose translation, giving play to interpolated originality, which leaves the reader suspicious of the want of such a power in the translator and certain only of his elegant scholarship. If we judge the fulfilment by the intention as expressed in their respective prefaces, both translators are to be con- gratulated. Mr. Morshead's “object has been through- A TRANSCRIPT AND A TRANSCRIPTION 67 out to be, if possible, readable,” and be bas succeeded. Mr. Browning considered that if be carried out bis wishes in bis work tbe result would “ prove very bard reading indeed,” and be bas succeeded. The consequence is that, if any person wholly unacquainted with flEschylus either in tbe original or by translations should make acquaintance with him under tbe auspices of Mr. Morshead, be would conceive of him as a melodious and easily intelligible writer a little too much given to prolong an idea into several lines for tbe sake of perspicuity or of sound; and, if be made acquaintance with him under tbe auspices of Mr. Browning, be would conceive of him as bewilderingly, sometimes hopelessly, obscure, and as rugged to an intolerable harshness. That is, Mr. Browning’s disciple would have acquired a true idea exaggerated, and Mr. Morshead’ s disciple would have learned to think of a pear and call it a pine-apple. Nothing could be more un-iEschylean than Mr. Mors- head’s paraphrase of tbe Agamemnon. Much of it is beautiful, all is musical, it rarely deserts tbe original completely — rather it hovers round it in its desertions like a butterfly round a favourite flower — it rarely, perhaps never, misses or perverts a meaning ; altogether, as a non-literal and expanded translation, it is essentially correct. But it is not ABsehylus. Tbe spirit is gone — this very merit aimed at by free and expanding transla- tions, that of preserving tbe higher thing, tbe spirit, at tbe expense of tbe lower thing, tbe letter, is just what oftenest does go, much as you would lose tbe expression of a sitting face if you tried to paint tbe expression disregarding tbe features. With Mr. Morshead one might quote half tbe book in instances of poetical, if sometimes rather weak, versions, but not one passage of which it can be said, “ Here you have tbe true strength and flavour.” Take, for instance, tbe opening of the drama, tbe watchman’s speech. Tbe watchman, grum- bling at bis long and, as be seems half inclined to think, useless watch for tbe beacon light which is to announce tbe fall of Troy and Agamemnon’s return, suddenly sees tbe light and breaks into shouts of joy and into dancing. p 2 68 A HOUSEWIFE’S OPINIONS. The speech is a fine one, as its subject warrants, but it is not a subjective and thoughtful one, which the character of the speaker does not warrant. He complains that when he lies on his dew-drenched couch he gets no rest, “for fear” (doubtless of being caught napping and missing the signal of the beacon) “ stands by keeping off sleep ” (avd’ Znvov) “ so that I cannot steadily close my eyelids together in sleep ; and when I think to sing or hum throwing in ” (literally shredding in or cutting in) “the opposing {avrifioKnov) cure of sleep, I bewail, groaning, the calamity of this house not managed, as formerly, in the best way.” There is nothing’ in this dramatically unfit for the character. But Mr. Morsliead’s watchman is a superior person and has a soul, and this is what he says : — For in the plac« of sleep Stands Fear as my Familiar, and repels The soft repose that would assuage mine eyes. And if at whiles, for the lost balm of sleep I medicine my soul with melody Of trill or song — anon to tears I turn Wailing the woe that broods npon this home, Unguided now, by honour, as of old. Presently he sees the beacon aflame. “ Hail, light of night showing the radiance of day, and ordaining many dances in Argos,” he gleefully exclaims — according to HUschylus — but according to Mr. Morshead : — Fire of the night, that brings my spirit day, Shedding on Argos light, and dance, and song. The lines are good lines, but as a mere question of artistic propriety who would not prefer Mr. Browning’s uncouth veracity ? We have taken this speech not as an especially re- markable instance of Mr. Morshead’s method, but because it begins the book. The fatal falseness of the method has perhaps its strongest exemplification in the oracular chorus which, with its intentionally mystic obscurity and veiled meanings, must have been meant to be but semi- intelligible to the audience, attuning their minds to the coming tragedy by mysterious forebodings, but not A TRANSCRIPT AND A TRANSCRIPTION 69 revealing too much of the story beforehand. Even the lucid Miss Swanwick, when she deals with this chorus, announces in a footnote her intention of being obscure — although she is unable wholly to adhere to her resolution. Mr. Browning, we need scarcely say, does the most ample justice to the bewildering effect of the original. Mr. Morshead sails off smoothly with four-lined stanzas and, in a neat poem, without jar or puzzle, makes the oracle of Calchas clear to the meanest capacity and rather agree- able reading. Cassandra herself may not rave too roughly, and must do her metaphors prettily. “ Behold ! behold! keep the bull from the cow!” she screams in her Pythonic frenzy, as she seems to see the murder which is presently to be. “ In the robes having caught him, the black-horned, by a trick,” (or, differently read, “ having caught him with her cunning black horn,”) “ she strikes, and he falls in the water-filled bath ! ” Then, the vision passing, she says, as if by way of explanation to the chorus, no longer in the fantastic language Greek religion ascribed to prophecy, though still unintelligibly, “ I am telling you the event of a treacherously murderous bath/'’ This is Mr. Morshead’ s suave translation : — Away, away — keep him away — • The monarch of the herd, the pasture’s pride, Tar from his mate ! In treach’rous wrath, Muffling his swarthy horns, with secret scathe, She gores his fenceless side ! Hark ! in the brimming bath. The heavy plash — the dying cry — • Hark — in the laver — hark, he falls by treachery ! Compare with this, and with the tritely literal prose rendering given above, Mr. Browning’s spirited and exact “ transcript ” — not very coherent, but rather more so than the original, not very graceful, but again rather more so than the original : — How ! How ! See — see quick ! Keep the bull from the cow ! In the vesture she, catching him, strikes him now With the black-horned trick, And he falls in the watery vase ! Of the craft-killing cauldron I tell thee the case ! 7 ° A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. Which best fulfils dramatic fitness ? Which is iEschylus ? It must be owned that, according to cus- tomary pronunciation, vase and case are not comfortable rhymes, but after all what is rhyme compared to reason? And is Mr. Morshead's speech for Cassandra at such a mad moment in the least reasonable ? We have seen the interpolation, “The monarch of the herd, the pasture's pride/' the omission of the bull and the cow, praised as a felicitous version putting Mr. Browning's ruder accuracy to shame. Apparently it had not struck the critic that it would have been strangely inappropriate for the possessed woman looking on in the spirit at the slaughter of Agamemnon to go out of her way to describe in metaphor his stateliness or his greatness. Cassandra says bull and cow, instead of man and woman, because she speaks the prophetic language, which avoids calling things by their right names, but she is too much absorbed in the agony of her vision to expatiate and pay compliments. To the Greek mind, of course, not accustomed to look on bulls and cows only from the point of view of beef and milk, but regarding them as the useful equals of the horse, and above all as the highest sort of sacrificial offering, the use of these names to symbolise Agamemnon and Clvtem- nestra would present nothing coarse or ludicrous, but, if a similar use in English seem inexpedient, the substitution of some animal we regard as poetical — the lion or the lioness for instance — would have better represented the original, and with less dramatic irrelevancy, than the circumlocutory phraseology Mr. Morshead’s timidity has selected. And, as to Mr. Browning’s rendering, it can only be urged that if he says “keep the bull from the cow " instead of something more polished, his reason, apparently, is that precisely that and not anything more polished is what iEschylus said. It may be a question whether iEschylus had better have said “the monarch of the herd " and the other things ; it can scarcely be a question whether a translator should say them for him. We cannot express any gratitude to Mr. Morshead for his adaptation of the Agamemnon. Gin with water and sugar may be a pleasanter and for the matter of that a A TRANSCRIPT AND A TRANSCRIPTION. 71 wliolesomer beverage than gin alone, but the magistrate 9 seem to be of opinion that when a man proposes to sell you gin it is to be gin, and not a compound of his own. If Mr. Morshead really wished in translating the Agamemnon to help “ one or two of those to whom the original is a closed book, to share its treasures” he should have translated, not amplified and altered. Of the translation which we have been chiefly criticising it may be said that since — not to speak of other translators who have achieved, like Mr. Morshead, readable English, and who have, better or worse than he, combined with readable English fidelity to the original — we have Miss Swanwick’s excellently poetical as well as careful version, there seems to be no particular reason for its existence. Of Mr. Browning’s translation we cannot ask why it should exist. Good or bad it stands alone. No one has done what he has done, no one has even tried to do it. With a deter- mination and a minute accuracy which approach the miraculous he has trodden step by step in the footprints of his elected leader. He has added nothing, altered nothing, omitted nothing. He has done by /Eschylus as he would have had /Eschylus do by him if each had been the other. And no poet will dispute his theory of translation. A poet would no more wish to be changed and embellished to the taste and after the likeness of his translator than a woman aware of beauty would wish to have her portrait painted up to the type of another, even if a fairer woman. Like the pretty woman he wants his own characteristics, his own charms, even the gracious irregularities that mar details but make the whole, accurately but lovingly repro- duced. And the self-sacrificing labour of such a repro- duction of one poet by another is rare and very great. We have it here, and with a Browning to devote this labour upon an /Eschylus the result ought to have been one of the most magnificent poems in the English language. But alas ! we have only the most magnificent of u cribs/ - ’ Considered as a help and teacher to a student no such version of any author in any language has ever been pro- duced in prose or in verse. Line by line, word by word, the pupil may trace the text in Mr. Browning’s words. 72 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. The reader learned in Greek but no poet may find the subtle inner sense a lexicon could not give him nor he himself supply, and the reader helped by poetic instinct but little versed in Greek will find the verbal key he needed, and be moved by the intenseness of meaning shown him in each word to a perception which he would not have had alone. But the reader who. knows no Greek at all will be left bewildered and incredulous. Bor Mr. Browning’s translation — in that much like a literal prose crib — needs the Greek text to explain it. And it needs it in consequence, not merely of the word-to-word severity which at times must make any absolutely literal translation seem disjointed and confused, but in con- sequence of obscurity for which Mr. Browning’s idio- syncrasies rather than his theory of translation are responsible. Mr. Browning felt himself required “to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language” — a theory of his duty as a translator in which we readily acquiesce. But what we question is whether the inver- sions by which he so conscientiously endeavours to follow the Greek even in the sequence of words are not an absolute violence to our language, and whether to use them really is to be literal. If you translate a sentence which is not upside down Greek into one which is upside down English, you are not literal, although you may have rendered the words exactly and in their very order, for you have introduced an element — that of confusion or of eccentricity — which was not in the original phrase. Any poet who is worth translating at all will have used his words with such definite intention that no exactitude in giving their equivalents can be too scrupulous ; but he will have arranged them according to the wont and grammar of his language — excepting of course where there is some artistic motive for irregularity — and the way to make his translated words produce on foreigners a like effect with that which his original words produced on his own countrymen must surely be to arrange them according to the wont and grammar of the foreigners 5 language. Difficult poet as iEschylus may have been, he A TRANSCRIPT AND A TRANSCRIPTION. 73 could never have puzzled Greeks as Englishmen must be puzzled by this : — And they send, lighting np with ungrudged vigour, Of flame a huge beard, ay, the very foreland So as to strike above, in burning onward, The look-out which commands the Strait Saronic. Or this : — And Fortune, saviour, willing on our ship sat, So as it neither had in harbour wave-surge Nor ran aground against a shore all rocky. And then, the water-Hades having fled from In the white day, not trusting to our fortune, We chewed the cud in thoughts. Such passages as these — and there are scores of them — convey at first sight, or worse still at first hearing, no meaning whatever. One must take the Greek text to elucidate them, and then, re-reading them several times, accustom oneself to them ; they will thus, like passages which have been difficult in a language with which one is not thoroughly familiar, become intelligible and expres- sive, and their really great force may be appreciated. It is difficult to suggest any process by which those who cannot use the Greek text may arrive at a like appreciation; the resource of tracing out the meaning and reducing the sentences to uninverted prose is scarcely open to them, for, without iEschylus to translate Browning, how can they track out the meaning ? Many of the inversions by which Mr. Browning puts the dutiful among his readers into a position of mind, if not of body, like that of the Irishman who had to stand on his head to read a signboard which had somehow been fixed upside down, are owing to the supplementary half-foot with which he has elected to terminate his blank verse — why, there is no telling, for nothing could be less like the iambus which terminates the iambic line of Greek tragedy. The “ Saxon ” English to which he mainly adheres, as an Englishman should, is habitually monosyllabic, and the majority of its monosyllables are strong; hence, to get a dissyllable, or, as a substitute, a 74 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. strong 1 monosyllable followed by a weak one, at tbe end of every line, is a difficult operation, and a pbrase may have to be distorted to effect it. For instance, “ Tbee, in this tenth year’s light, am I returned to ” — which, however, is quite intelligible — is not by any means the nearest approach to the sequence of the Greek Semi-w o-e x*p'h with barbarous or foreign hand — i.e. make signs like a foreigner, Mr. Browning’s “ speech with hand as Kars (Carians) do ” seems quite irrelevant although Fipfiavos might be traced to a deriva- tion from the foreign tribe of Carians. The primary meaning of 7 rdKaurT^s is, of course, wrestler, but by obvious gradations, it came to mean rival, and merely suitor ; when therefore Mr. Browning makes Cassandra say of A TRANSCRIPT AND A TRANSCRIPTION 79 her cheated lover, Apollo, “ But he was athlete to me — huge grace breathing ” we can see, by the tnrn he gives the second half of the line, in what manner he contrives to reconcile his interpretation of TraXato-n)? to something approaching common sense, but it takes some time to follow him in it, and we are left unconvinced. There is no need of multiplying instances ; we have noted down a long list of them, but our object is merely to illustrate a general criticism, not to pursue the ungracious task of hunting out imperfections for a catalogue. Of downright mistranslations there is little to be said. Some there do seem to be; but they are few indeed. We say seem to be, because from the peculiarities to which we have referred, it often happens that, not only at first blush but for some time, Mr. Browning’s phrases wear a meaning other than he meant, and that the careful critic, after much pondering over some surprising passage, is about reluctantly to believe in a mistranslation, when all at once, there beams on him a new sense, not in the Greek but in the English, and everything becomes clear. We should like, to say more of this translation — a work of genius, if of genius not wholly wisely spent. We should like to point out admirable felicities of word- rendering ; but our list of such — it could be a long one — ■ would mean nothing to those whe have no Greek, and would be superfluous to those who have. We should like to quote splendid passages ; but, alas ! there is not one unbroken by the ruggedness of sense and sound of which we have spoken, and to give such by way of the chosen completenesses which readers look to have presented them in critics’ complimentary quotations would be an extreme injustice. There is no translation of the Aga- memnon from which, truth to words and truth to dramatic fitness apart, we could not select, page by page, more attractive extracts ; there is none so note- worthy as a whole. We could wish nothing better for literature than that Mr. Browning, having translated the Agamemnon of ^Eschylus, should go on to translate the Agamemnon of Robert Browning. HOUSEHOLD ART. Me. Poyxtee has been talking, if not “rhyme and reason/'’ art and reason, on a subject concerning vrhich artistically- disposed persons are apt to talk and to act so much un- reason that well-intending Philistines too often get scared past all hope of salvation, and exclaim defiantly, “Let who will be artistic, let me be comfortable.” He has treated with much practical sense the question of getting more beauty into the necessary surroundings of common life. It was not essential for this purpose that he should discuss the valuable or deleterious effects of art, that is art for art’s sake, on the welfare of a nation ; nor did he, in refusing the ethical and economical controversy which he left aside as out of his province as an artist, omit any- thing which his address might be felt to need. There are indeed moralists who more than disbelieve in art as a moral means, who hold it a sensuous and enervating influence, sure to sap the rude and healthy strength of a people who could love it as Greece and once Italy loved it ; and there are upholders of utility who look on it as sheer waste, no gain to anybody but those who get money by it which they do not deserve ; but these icono- clasts aim their blows at Art, the great goddess of lives — Art, the soul-devourer — Art (from their point of view) useless, and careless of the common world. None of them see any harm in having things neat and pretty around yon indoors and even out, on the contrary they think such a state of affairs desirable for body and mind ; and HOUSEHOLD ART. 8r tliis form of art is in fact, though Mr. Poynter would righteously disdain the phraseology, what he is urging upon us. It is art, the trim business-like handmaid of Yulcan and of Cloacina, whose cause he is advocating, and nobody is afraid of her, provided only that she will be a little accommodating, and consult our creature convenience as well as our aesthetic developement. But the result of seeing genuine principles of art steadily employed on everyday objects, so that our eyes should unconsciously acquire a need for harmony and symmetry and an intolerance of hideousness, would, in a society like ours, spread further and lower than art proper, or what we may call unapplied art, can reach. We stare at paintings at the Academy exhibitions, or on sign- boards, or in shop windows, or on our friends' dining- room walls, according to our respective duties and oppor- tunities, and some of us think we find a certain mild pleasure in the operation, but we are in too great a hurry, or too ignorant, or too prosaic, to feel the artist's impulse in his work, or to receive from it any impression worth retaining. We have stared, we have admired, or said we admired, and we remain the same men as if the picture we praised had never been. Our fenders and our soup- tureens have a subtler and more lasting effect upon us. It is true that, unless we have taken some special dislike to them, we oftenest see them without thinking of them, without consciously receiving any sensation whatever ; but it is just that property of habitualness in an object, making us aware of it without being attentive to it, which affects our permanent taste. We grow used to its curves or its angles, any change in them would disturb us ; we should detect the want or the intrusion in a moment with that unpleasant sense of being perpetually forced to look at it which is a consequence of any interference with a familiar thing. Meanwhile our eye is learning its lesson, as a baby learns speech, and the combinations of lines and of colours which it has found acceptable from custom become the guide of a taste which seems, but is not, instinctive. Thus if art, taking possession of the tools and adjuncts of our daily existence, surrounds us with G 82 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. true proportions and suavely blended tints, the educa- tional influence on the eye and the taste must be mucb greater on society at large than could be that of any number of those masterpieces of painting and sculpture for tbe enjoyment of wbicb the immense majority of our countrymen are at present almost as much without the faculty as if they were purblind. But, admitting unreservedly that the influence which should train us, as a people, to prefer good taste to bad, would be a salutary one, we may yet claim that, if art is to interfere in our domestic arrangements, it shall take common-sense and expediency for counsellors. House- hold art cannot exist for itself alone. Ho matter how complete and cultured the oaken chimney-piece with its tiled stove, if it is not adapted for warming the particular room it is in, if comfort, or if just economy in fuel, has been sacrificed to its artistic correctness, it is morally ugly, and, being unfit for its purposes, has no true right to call itself artistic at all. Ho matter how orthodoxly Gothic a sideboard may be, it is, as a sideboard, not beautiful if it will not admit a modem decanter into its recesses. Or in out-of-door work, if a railway station or an iron bridge cannot be made both thoroughly fit for its purpose and beautiful, it must be made fit, and beauty must be a secondary consideration. Happily fitness is always so large an element of beauty that in time genius and skill, learning to master new conditions and new mate- rials by yielding to them, may bring even such structures to a perfection which can rejoice the sight. And again, while thanking the artists, and even their imitators, who are willing to save us from ourselves and plan the furnishing of our dwelling-rooms for us, instead of leaving us to make our own confusion of styles and hues, we may urge upon them that we should be left some little erratic license, some little power of varying our respective homes according to our individualities, even in disobe- dience to the artistic unities. The weaknesses of our Philistine nature, old associations, our idiosyncrasies of comfort, require this much concession. And indeed it is a question whether the risk of infringing the complete- HOUSEHOLD ART. 83 ness of the artist’s plan if he indulges his clients a little in personal interpolations would not be balanced by the occasional foil of characteristic irregularities. Gothic architecture has owed much of its charm and human interest to its way of humouring necessities ; a turret, an oriel, a balcony would get put in some unexpected and, on paper, unsuitable place, because the people who were to use the premises had a need for it there; and nine times out of ten the intruded feature adds the charm of life-like quaintness to the building. An unauthorised arm-chair expressive of an old prejudice of the master of the house, an incongruous flower- stand due to the whim of its mistress, might in the same way give an attraction to a dining-room which correctness and unity of style would fail to produce alone. At present it must be owned that art decorators are, from all accounts, somewhat tyrannous ; and many people, who would otherwise grate- fully put themselves under their guidance when the terrible task of “ doing up ” a house overtakes them, elect to abide by their own ignorance and the advice of an ordinary upholsterer rather than, as their friends have done, abnegate every wish and will at the command of a benevolent despot. Certainly it is pathetic to hear of an unfortunate lady gazing shudderingly on what is to be her drawing-room carpet, and exclaiming with tears in her eyes “ Of course, of course, I must have it, Mr. , since you say so — but, oh, I do think it hideous ! ” But the movement which, as Mr. Poynter showed, grew from the experiment of Mr. William Morris (better known still to most of us as the poet) and certain dis- tinguished artists, in establishing a firm whose aim was the regeneration of household art, would stop far short of exercising a permanent influence on even the wealthier classes and would have no influence on the multitude if it remained in the hands of artists only. To the classes who can afford to avail themselves of the privilege it must be a boon of immense value that artists of genius and technical knowledge combined should relieve them from the diffi- culties caused by their own inability to appreciate genuine artistic work and their tradesmen’s inability to supply g 2 8 4 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. it. But it is because the movement has done more than this, because it has spread as it were beyond itself, that there is a chance of its being more than a passing fashion for the rich ; it is the number of the imitators of Mr. Morris to whom Mr. Poynter referred which gives the promise. Doubtless some of these are, as Mr. Poynter says, passing off furniture and fabrics as bad in design and construction as before, and even infinitely worse in taste, but this is far from being the case with all. Already in homes where art is undreamed of, and where perhaps Mr. Morris's name is unknown, his influence is seen. Cheap carpets are soberer, cheap chairs are of a simpler make, cheap wall-papers have less aggressive tints and are of well-intentioned, if not always well-executed, designs. Mr. Poynter forcibly said “ The Greek idea of art was not merely in adornment; it was above everything in com- pleteness and consistency." Our modern idea of house- hold art has been almost only adornment ; and, taking it in that sense, we have had not too little but a great deal too much art applied to our furniture. The legs of tables and chairs writhed and twisted in all sorts of meaningless convolutions; couches curved in and out in forms the least possibly adapted to the mould of the human body — as if boa- constrictors or other zigzag animals were ex- pected to be their occupants ; everything that could not be gilded was Prench-polished, and everything that could not be Prench-polished was gilded. There being nothing so difficult and so expensive as to procure what is not in fashion, only millionaires could afford simplicity. And, as millionaires usually prefer being in the fashion, simple, straight, square-backed, comfortable furniture was no- where to be seen. The Morris movement has chiefly been to simplicity. Hence we have a gain in comfort as well as in beauty. There has however of late been apparent among those who, rightly or wrongly, are called of the “ Morris School," a tendency to desert comfort, and to plan by purely technical art laws. Such hard and fixed tech- nical rules are at all times apt to lose their meaning, and HOUSEHOLD ART. 85 work executed under suck a system, wketker done by band or by machine, is meckanical. A wearisome repe- tition is the result, the monotonous reproduction of the same types everywhere and for everything — and there is perhaps a danger here for household art at the present moment. And, as in the history of art it would appear that an adherence to fixed laws after the life has passed out of them, and they have become merely conventional, tends from simplicity to adornment, we may by-and-by find Mr. Morris’s now most diligent imitators wriggling their way back again to the scrolls and curves. Which Heaven and Mr. William Morris forefend ! A NEW SIN. Most of us will accept the interpretation given by Mr. Walter, as Chairman, at the Newbury Conference, accord- ing to which intemperance means excess. Besides being sane, commonplace, and pertinent, it has this advantage — it can be extended or contracted to fit the views of all sides. For, since the minutest minim of that which is essentially deleterious is too much, the energetic total abstainer may declare that there is excess in the swallow- ing were it but a teaspoonful of alcohol to a gallon of water ; and who can impugn his reasoning ? To indulge an animal craving at the expense of a risk to health, however trifling the indulgence may be by weight and measure, and, whatever its nature, must be an excess and an intemperance. But, on this trite and palpable moral axiom, follows a mournful consequence. There is a new sin in England. It is the sin whose non-existence Sophie Arnould or some other lady more witty than staid is said to have regretted with pathos long ago. “ Ah ! ” sighed she, as she drank a bumper of cool crystal water, “what a pity this is not a sin!” She might recognise the missing relish in the innocent-looking fluid now. Nous avons change tout cela. In the very number of The Times which records the Newbury Conference on intemperance, there was a letter from a householder at Lancaster Gate, communicating the results of an analysis of the water supplied him — that water which denizens of Paddington and Bayswater fondly A NEW SIN. 87 toast pre-eminent in purity over the brews of all other London water companies. This water contains, it seems, “ considerable portions of ammonia, nitrates, and nitrites, all of which point to possibly injurious contamination; organic matters and chlorides and sulphates also being in notable amount present, point clearly to the fact that this is a highly impure water.” The analyst “ is of opinion that injury to health must be the consequence of the use of the water for domestic purposes.” Oh, ye gods and little fishes ! is this a beverage for the temperate ? Had we not better, fishes and all, confine ourselves to brandy as more suited to our natural constitutions ! Is it cleanly, is it sober, is it morally excusable, to imbibe fever, debility, parasites, and who knows what mysterious ail- ments ? — not to speak of the chance of paralysis from lead-poisoning, if the dangerous liquid has come, as it probably has, through leaden pipes, and has lain in a leaden cistern. If this is true of the best water of London, what must the middling water be ! horror of horrors, what must the worst ! Plainly it cannot be long before the temperance apostles forbid us water with still more zeal than they now direct against fermented liquors. One can imagine the first conference. Sir Wilfrid Lawson in the chair. One can imagine the impassioned mover of the first resolution electrifying the audience with his portrayal of the consequences of indulgence in water. “And yet,” he will say, “ and yet there are men, rational beings, Christians, Britons, and yet there are — I can scarcely bring myself to speak it — there are even women, wives and mothers, who, knowing as they must know, all the dangers, all the horrors, of their deadly draughts, will, rather than bear the inconvenience of thirst, pour the demon of disease down their throats and sacrifice health, happiness, self-respect, for a gulp of water ! ” There will be useful anecdotes too ; we shall read how John Jackson lived industrious and happy, mending kettles in the bosom of a devoted wife and six rosy children, with a nice nest-egg in the savings bank and a rapidly-increasing income, till one fatal summer day he 88 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. was persuaded by a profligate neighbour to slake bis thirst with a sip of water. From that hour his fate was sealed; he drank water every day. In vain his wife remonstrated, in vain she pointed to their children and implored him for their sakes to abstain ; he had no longer the energy to abandon his vice. Swiftly and surely, as usual, its attendant evils made him their victim, and, a prey to indigestion and diphtheria, he was unable to work and saw his family reduced to beggary. At last his wife, disheartened and weary, felt the temptation to which he had succumbed, and ere long became as abandoned a water- drinker as himself. The children saw their parents' per- nicious habit and, ignorant of its dangers, took occasional glasses of water by stealth. Within a year from John Jackson's first wine-glass of water, his wife was a palsied cripple, and all his children, except one who became an idiot, were dead — victims one and all of water-drinking. The miserable man, stung with remorse, disgusted with his vile habit, yet unable to forego it, drowned himself in the reservoir of the water company whose guilty traffic had caused his ruin. It seems, indeed, to be a question whether the tem- perance societies ought not to put down water first and attend to the alcoholic mixtures afterwards. For in one shape or other everybody, man, woman, or child, swallows water, and some men, many women, and all children are guiltless of resorting to strong drinks. Besides, those who injure themselves by intoxication deserve the retri- bution, but the water-drinkers are mostly sinning in ignorance. At all events the crusade against water cannot long be delayed, and, if existing temperance societies do not forthwith add water to the list of the liquors they assail, other temperance societies will arise with the suppression of water-drinking for them special destiny. But what are we to drink ? The true temperance apostle will be he who discovers that for us. Why does not the United Kingdom Alliance offer a prize for the invention of a harmless, acceptable, and if possible digestive beverage ? UNIVERSITY DEGREES FOR WOMEN. The friends of education for women may congratulate themselves that the thin end of the wedge and something more has been got in, when so many of those from whom they least looked for even accidental help, the prompt opponents of the admission of women to the medical degree and its attendant right to practise which recent legislation has made immediately possible, stand forward as advocates of the more catholic, as also more future, scheme of the admission of women to all degrees. It is ominous, however, that this alternative proposal should have been so nearly synchronous with the debate in the House of Commons the result of which was an over- whelming refusal to permit the University of Cambridge to admit women to its recognised examinations if it should desire to do so. Still, in the case of the University of London, there can be no such confusion as there was in the minds'of honourable members between the enabling the University of Cambridge to recognise female students in open examinations and to assert authority according to its judgment over the conditions of their residence and discipline, and the instituting in it education in common for both sexes with the colleges for men thrown open to women also; and, if the University of London really should resolve to try the faculty's new and some- what unexpected prescription for conciliating the doctors and the ladies at the same time, and should apply for a charter enabling it to confer on women other degrees 9 ° A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. than the medical alone, it remains possible that the request should be granted. With regard to Cambridge it may be remarked that the present position there as to female students is peculiar. The University has female students, but it has no control over them. It has, as it were, espoused the women’s colleges morganatically ; there is a tie and a close one, but it is not of legal force, and if ever there were an emergency in which the restraint of the tie became especially needful it would be then that it would snap. Considering what the management of Girton and Newn- ham is and is likely to continue, there is a sense of absurdity in imagining any future in which they could become open to objection on the score of their teaching or their discipline. Still it is humanly possible that such an establishment should be under unwise government. Carelessness or mistakes, the zeal which is not according to knowledge, views too narrow or views too wide, might destroy its efficiency as a place of sound education, and even make it mischievous to the young women entrusted to it, and a thorn in the side of the University authorities. We must trust it all to the good sense of founders, managers, pupils, and parents. And it might be said that this is ample enough to trust to, were it not that the history of many a well-planned institution, scholastic, conventual, and other, shows how easily and imper- ceptibly original principles are forgotten and abuses allowed to creep in, where the conduct of affairs is left to a few irresponsible wills, and the criticism to a fortuitous concourse of irresponsible opinions. Looking from a parent's point of view, one might well desire the college to which one should send a daughter to be under the con- trol of such a body as the University of Cambridge, plus that of the committee of a private society, rather than under that of the committee alone. The Girton and Newnham students are, however, already allowed to present themselves for the examina- tions which confer the University degree, and that not only for the poll pass but for honours. The examiners of the year, with the sanction of the University, extend UNIVERSITY DEGREES FOR WOMEN 91 their functions to them and inform them whereabouts they would have been classed in the degree lists, if they had been classed. Thus as, of course, no special papers are set for them, but they are given those which decide the fate of undergraduates, their attainments are tested, not in comparison with each other's, which would be useless to them, but in comparison with those of com- petitors numerous and various enough to show the quality of their relative success or failure. But the boon, valuable though it be, has its value much lessened by its semi-contraband and secret bestowal. It has two great drawbacks — and perhaps the more important is the one which is little noticed, that is its deficiency in the humbling qualities of an authoritative test. The other, drawback, that the private recognition by the examiners that Miss So-and-So has the attainments which could have earned a degree does not confer on her the con- venient University mint-mark, is at once evident both to Miss So-and-So and to her friends ; they see that the young man who has got the degree goes forth to the world stamped and warranted, while the young woman who has only been politely assured that she would have had the degree if she might is to the exoteric public no more than she was before, and if she is to earn an income they cannot forget how immeasurably she would have benefited by the degree’s plain voucher for her com- petence among the incompetent host of untrained women struggling for wages. But Miss So-and-So and her parents and friends cannot be expected always to see quite so plainly that what they glory in as her success in the examination is also failure — failure relatively to all those who have taken a higher place on the class-lists than that which she is told would have been hers if she had been in the competition, and very possibly failure relatively to herself. To the University man the ex- amination is a matter of course, not to pass it is to be proved a dunce, but there is no special credit in the fact of having passed it : if he be a candidate for honours that fact also is in itself but an everyday affair. And pretty well every man but the first on the Tripos List is 92 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. left with a twinge of disappointment — every man but the first with a wholesome sense of not being a miracu- lous unit. It is not so with the young women following the University curriculum. The examination, instead of presenting itself to them as a routine obligation, comes as a polite attention on the part of the examiners and on their part a voluntary heroism : to undergo it is in itself a distinction. We have all of us often heard men put forward as a redeeming merit, in the case of some friend who has done less than they looked for in an examination, that he need not have gone in for it at all if he had not chosen ; and this feeling seems to be carried still further among women and as to women. It is, however, not as yet displayed as to cases of positive failure, for there are none such; the Grirton and Xewnham students do not get plucked. But where it shows itself is in the uncon- scionable crowing over the surely not unexpected circum- stance that they pass, and pass meritoriously and above all in the outbursts of inapplicable triumph when one of them has achieved but second or third class honours. One may readily admit that the winning (de jure ) of the wooden spoon by a young woman who might, instead, have been killing time Lady Clara Vere de Yere fashion, or writing sensation novels, is creditable to her head and her heart ; one may also readily admit that, considering her inferior opportunities and probably deficient or faulty early training, her abilities are in all likelihood some shades more respectable than those of the male student who carried off that prize ; but that is not enough. What one is in fact required to admit is that the wooden article when won by a woman is equal to gold, or indeed a trifle superior. If you should venture to remark to certain of the Women's Educationalists who make London drawing-rooms ring with the names of young women who have after all only reached to those lower honours which have been described as “the reward of industrious mediocrity/' and which are sometimes the reward of a clever man's idleness, that such an amount of success should not yet be hailed as all we are to hope for from the women's colleges, you are at once hushed UNIVERSITY DEGREES FOR WOMEN. 93 with a reminder that the woman students are not under- graduates, and that they deserve the highest praise for entering into the Tripos contest at all. Nor is this all; the position assigned by the examiners is not accepted — you hear that, though such and such a young lady was told by them that she was equal to the second class, she is really to be counted in the first because one of the examiners is known to have said in conversation that she did one particular paper better than the senior himself, and that such another young lady must be promoted one class, if not two, higher than that assigned to her, as another examiner is understood to believe that she would have done a paper she failed in to perfection if something had not happened — your informant, not being scientific, cannot explain what, but knows it was something for which the young lady was not responsible. This sort of might-could-would-and-should-have-been re-classification falls stillborn among men in face of the official decisions, absolute as the laws of the Medes and Persians, recorded in the University class-lists. There stand the proofs of the examiners’ considered opinions ; and if anyone has in some fortunate paper done better than the best, why he has had his marks counted to him for it and has gained accordingly, and since he is not higher than he is it must be that his other work was inferior. He has to accept his place as the one due to his performance ; and it is undoubtedly a good thing that the scholar who is second-class should know he is not first-class, even although it may be in him to be some day more than first-class whether in scholarship or in something else. He is the more likely to become his best for recognising his present insufficiency. Such an uncompromising competitive trial as that which our Universities inflict on male students is what those who wish for women all possible opportunity and encouragement towards the developement of whatever capacity they may possess are still left vainly seeking for them. Female students are but human still; they are not less liable — let us not say they are more liable — ■ than male students to human temptations to sciolism 94 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. and Admirable Crichtonism. If it were only for the sake of a corrective to tbese temptations, those of us who desire that women should be soberly and steadily educated ought to desire for them the sifting and testing of a University degree examination. The London University seems at the present juncture to have the power of conferring this vital benefit on female students ; will it lead the way and be the recognised helper and restrainer of feminine genius and feminine enthusiasm ? is ote. — This, of course, was written before the London University did lead the way and, by so doing, earn the hearty gratitude of all who are anxious for the improvement of women’s education. UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS FOR WOMEN . The London University Las now declared its willingness to give women, so far as it is concerned, that great boon of life a fair field and no favour. Its voters have decided by a majority that, if a woman can do as well as a man, she may — at least in a London University Examination. Thus, if there be no unlooked-for slip between the cup and the lip, and the charter comes out right, students of the sex of Minerva and the Muses will be allowed the valuable guidance and stimulus to their studies given by the knowledge of the authentic tests which await aspirants for University degrees, and the assistance to them, in such careers as they may need or be able to follow, of the certificate of capacity given by those degrees. This is much — very much — but the extent of the favour does not stop here. This high recognition of women’s education as of moment to themselves and to the public, this acceptance of minds as minds, whether within male bodies or female, coming from such a quarter, is a sort of public proclamation of a repeal of the women’s mental disabilities acts, a Magna Charta authorising them to possess abilities and to train them. However great may be the direct consequences on the education of women of such an exaltation in educational status, they cannot be so great as the indirect consequences. We shall not have all the young ladies in England M.A.s, but, with the possibility of their being M.A.s like their brothers, will 96 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS. creep in a feeling that their faculties, like those of their brothers, need to be trained and ought to be trained, and that that requirement is not met by even the best oppor- tunities for acquiring “ fluent French and German ” and a facility upon the piano. That large class of parents who might at present be disinclined to listen to arguments in favour of a more real education for their girls, because they see that their girls can be just as successful in society without it, will by-and-by unconsciously accept the stronger argument of example, and come, as though they had never felt otherwise, to feel it their natural duty to give daughters, as well as sons, a solid preparation for the work of life. But this change will bring another, even greater : a girl's time will be considered to have some value. What there lies in such a change as this it would carry us too far on from the starting-point of examinations and education to trace out, but those who have noted the aimlessness and drifting and fussy futility of the days of most women in the classes where women have their maintenance provided for them and are under- stood never to be too busy over one thing to do another, as most of us must have noted, can easily see that this higher appreciation by others and by herself of the value of her time would in itself be an education to a girl. The expense of instruction must long continue to tell more restrictively against girls than boys. This is hard on the girls, and one might say that in abstract justice parents are bound to distribute what mental provision they can afford to buy for the creatures they have brought into the world among them all, with the same fairness as bodily food, and that they have no right to stint one sex in order to fatten the other. But in this world justice refuses to be abstract ; it persists in getting muddled up in concrete circumstances in an inextricable manner which pulls it all out of shape. When it has to deal with social matters it too often reduces itself to such a resemblance with the baser goddess, expediency, that there is no telling; the one from the other. It is thus p transformed in this case. For the parents are sure that their sons cannot take their places in the world without UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS FOR WOMEN 97 education for those places, that the instruction they purchase for them is their indispensable stock-in-trade, and that without it they must sink in worldly position, and do only minor, or even menial, work ; and they are not sure that a similar investment for their daughters will bring in any return whatever — it might even, they perhaps think, be a counter influence to the young women's natural charms in the eyes of some possible husbands and so hinder instead of helping them to take their places in the world. It is at all events not indis- pensable, for a girl can marry without it ; and they remember that, if their daughters marry, the husbands thenceforth answer for their maintenance, while their sons when they marry must maintain wife and children. Thus that practical family system which may be summed up in an axiom as “ Do for your sons as you must and for your daughters as you can ” has some show of righteousness in its favour. The fact that the matrimonial means of livelihood is, in these days, only open to two women out of three, though now pretty generally known, is still only known like such an outside-our- sphere matter as the distance of the sun from the earth, no calculation or mis- calculation about which affects our ideas on the household window- blinds. We have the broad generality that marriage is the lot of most women, and we naturally apply it to our own six daughters. And even where parents of less faith in their daughters, or more faith in statistics, forecast the probability of “ the girls having to do something for themselves some day/' as they are likely vaguely to put it, there cannot be before their eyes any such evident balancing of results against preparation and profits against outlay as with their sons. There is an indefiniteness about educating a young person to do something some day if she does not do something else beforehand which makes the necessity for spending money appreciably on the process too problematic to be kept in mind if her brothers have to be prepared for good professions and the family income is small. It is hard on the girls, but it is not fair to blame the parents : they must look to the material prospects of their children, H 9 8 A HOUSEWIFE’S OPINIONS. and can but do so under the conditions of life as they find it. It has undoubtedly been a great lessening of the commercial value of education for women that its results could not be tested and approved by competent and publicly-recognised authority, so that patrons and em- ployers should have warranty of their existence and give preference by reason of them. Not long ago the patrons and employers could have no such warranty whatever ; they must trust to chance and the private, perhaps not entirely sincere, opinion of some recommending lady perhaps not in the least qualified to have an opinion. The silver might be genuine silver, but there could be no hall-mark to show it. And, for want of this protection, assuming qualifications might easily serve a candidate as much as possessing them. Cambridge, and then Oxford, did much to mend this matter by admitting girls to their examinations . for schoolboys, and the having passed the examination for senior students does frequent duty as a certificate of competence for, at all events, a more thorough style of teaching than governesses had usually thought necessary. But these senior students are after all but children of the age for leaving school who prove themselves fitly prepared to go on with their studies. Clearly that examination would have little weight as a final one. This being so, Cambridge (the women’s alma mater, so far as she can be) created an examination for women — women of about the age at which men get their degrees — and made it sufficiently difficult, as was desirable, to ensure that no one should pass it without equ allin g the average poll-man in intelligence and industry. But this examination is for women as a class apart, and is in fact designed for women who mean to be governesses. Its certificate loses value from the commercial point of view because it is taken not to certify absolute capacity up to a certain standard with regard to such and such subjects, but capacity relatively to that of other weak vessels. That this view of the Cambridge special examination for women is not entirely adequate may be ascertained by a study of the examination questions ; but the public is not accus- UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS FOR WOMEN. 99 tomed to judge of the merit there may be in passing a given examination by getting tbe questions and trying if it can answer them — and there are obvious reasons why such a test might not always be conclusive. And by the time a woman is ripe for this examination she should, if she is not preparing to be a governess, have chosen some special branch of study, and should be able to pursue it without being compelled into other directions by the final examination. What was wanted was not a special and inferior examination restricted to the supposed range of women’s studies, but admission to an established examination in which their acquirements should be tested by an esta- blished standard — so that a record of success in grammars and sciences not supposed to be affected by consider- ations of sex should have a definite meaning without reference to sex, and represent for Mary what they represent for John. An examination for women apart is as valueless in assigning the candidates their scholastic positions as is a criticism which busies itself with the fact of the author of a book being a woman, instead of with the contents of the book whatever sort of creature wrote it, in assigning her her literary position ; it is of no great use to them or to anybody else to know whether they have equalled, or have excelled, other women ; the question is whether they have known what should be known or have done what should be done. And this is what the London University is willing now to tell women, by admitting them to its examinations. Cambridge has gone some way towards granting an equal test; it has allowed its examiners to admit the women students at Grirton and Newnham to answer the degree examination papers set for members of the University, but it could not, if it would, concede to these young ladies an open admission to examination, nor the certificate of its degree, while the privilege of being thus far admitted is by its nature limited to very few. Between this half clan- destine favour and the boon of a recognised and un- limited right proposed by the London University there is the same difference as between permission to walk in h 2 IOO A BOUSE WIFE'S OPINIONS. your neighbours avenue if you will keep from under bis windows and right to use the highway. The Hall-mark which was needed to make women’s education commercially valuable, by rendering an accu- rately-trained woman’s chance in the competition for employment a better one than that of the untrained or ill-trained, is now to be attainable. Thus those many parents whose limited means — and perhaps we should add whose ignorance of the larger influences of education — compel them to measure the rights of their children, respectively, to schooling and books and opportunity for study by the rough-and-ready rule of market value for the results will see a warrantable security for investments of this kind for their daughters. They will know that so many pounds besides her dress allowance spent on a marriageable girl can buy her the most advantageous starting-point for earning an income with honour and comfort in case she should not marry — perhaps, under some circumstances, even if she should. They will also have the means of knowing whether what they spend on instruction beyond the nursery and the schoolroom borders is well spent — whether their girls are taught the things they pay for them to learn. Tor, though the absurdity, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, of measuring the competence of the teacher by the success of the individual pupil is evident — evident to everyone, that is, except to the near relations of the said pupil, if he (or she) turn out a dunce — the fact that open examinations on a large scale are tests of the teachers no less than of the taught is too matter-of-course to require to be either proved or accounted for. The guidance given to the course of a young woman’s studies by the examination kept in view as their im- mediate aim will remove that indefiniteness which is another reason of the indifference of parents to the instruction of their daughters in anything but accom- plishments and the fashionable languages treated as accomplishments. Granted that a girl is anxious to improve her mind by solid studies, and that her parents ■are in favour of her doing so, when there is no extraneous UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS TOR WOMEN, ioi reason for her pursuing one train of subjects more than another, and no hurry for her to pursue any, there is no sort of minor consideration which will not be allowed to come in the way, and every subject may be postponed for that better opportunity which is the misfortune of free choice and sent the heron supperless to roost. It is thus that, in homes where there is spare money to provide good help of tuition and books, and where there is no dislike to seeing a woman do the best she can for her brains — where there is perhaps even a clear belief that that is but her duty — girls who have come out of the schoolroom in love with study, and with scholarly ambitions, find on all sides hindrance instead of help to their attempts at self-improvement, and end by forgetting the very wish and drifting into the aimless content, or still more aimless discontent, of a vacuous waiting for the something to do in earnest that is to come with marriage. Something to point to a distinct course of study, and to some limit for its accomplishment, has been needed. Hitherto the educational career of young lady students has been too much like the Wonderland “caucus-race,” in which all the runners began when and where they liked, and left off where they happened to be, and everybody had won. Parents will naturally feel the race more worthy their interest when it appears to be under some rules and to lead to somewhere. As to the girls themselves, one can scarcely say that those who will feel the privilege of the London Univer- sity examinations a stimulus to their mental energies, need the stimulus as such. Side by side with the frivolous, or the stupid, or the merely patient, girls who take their ignorance pleasantly and never find it too much, there have always been others — a minority doubtless but a large minority — who have felt the restlessness of intellectual faculties unnaturally cramped, the weariness of unsatisfied hunger of mind, and who in their drawing-room life have envied their schoolboy brothers their teachers and their tasks, their books and their hours set aside for using them, as a crippled invalid on a sofa may envy the healthy their fatigues. It is because of the great number of such 102 A HOUSEWIFE’S OPINIONS. girls that the average of woman’s education was not far lower than the reformers found it when they took it in hand so few years ago. The highest education offered women was no measure of the highest education they contrived to get, for women of the sort spoken of took a higher than was offered them — some of them, in fact, stole it, working surreptitiously over their brothers* discarded schoolbooks and hiding away treatises on metaphysics or astronomy as novelists make naughty heroines hide away French novels. It is not stimulus but possibilities that such as these require. And even with the many less wilful souls who longed but thought longing vain and resigned themselves to leave the sweets of learn- ing for their betters, the case is the same ; not the wish but the power was deficient. Therefore it is natural, in fore-scanning the effects upon women’s educational prospects of a large measure like that of the opening of the London University, to give prominent importance to its influence upon those with whom it rests to supply or with- hold the cost of instruction. There is no lack of girls eager to learn if they may; there are probably fewer girls than youths not willing to learn if they must. Yet that there must be a lack of women candidates for the London degree seems sure. It will not be surprising if there should be actually none for the first examinations open to them, except from among the medical students who have been preparing to pass some examination at all events, and perhaps two or three Girton or Newnham pupils who, having passed, or being ready to pass, the Cambridge degree examination privately, feel able to secure the further advantages of an open examination with a degree to get by it. Those who have advocated the opening to women of such ex- aminations must be prepared to be told that their victory has become a defeat, that all their arguments as to the need and value of the step have been disproved by the fact that barely a handful of women go up for examina- tion, and that the London University might as well close a door through which so few care to pass. The answer to all this will belong not to now but to the future. UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS FOR WOMEN. 103 Passing such, an examination as that of the London University cannot be achieved by the first clever girl who has in her own fashion made the best she knew how of her abilities; it is a test of training. And the training has been wanting — is wanting, in spite of so much that has been done of late for the advancement of womeks education. The best part of the boon the London University has given is in truth that it creates a reason and a visible necessity for such training, and, with that reason and that necessity for stimulus, we may look con- fidently for eventual supply of the necessary teachers, lectures, class-rooms or schools or colleges, and, above all, home co-operation and encouragement. But all this must be a work of time; and till this is attained few indeed must be the women students who can render themselves equal to a searching test, not of brilliancy and facility and fitful scholarship, much here little there, such as comes of self-teaching and undirected zeal, but of even and thorough work. Concerning one class of candidates who might swell the list, one may venture to express a hope that its number may not be large. There are many women who have struggled on as they best might, remedying for them- selves the inaccuracy and deficiencies of the education given them and never ceasing to be conscious of their loss of preparation for the later wprk of life, but who have reached the later work and received that second and still more important training that comes of it, and who are busied in literary, artistic, philanthropic, even educational occupations. Some of these, and still more their friends for them, will feel a temptation to their seeking now the academical distinction which it was not open to them to earn in a seasonable day. They will be urged perhaps to do so for the sake of other women — to show at the earliest moment possible that women can and will enter into these competitions. But nothing could be more unwise. It would be Atalanta stopping and groping for a golden apple instead of spending her strength on the race she is running. Life must give, or has given, women their examinations and their degrees. It is only 104 A HOUSEWIFE’S OPINIONS. too certain that they will always be the weaker for the want of due training in due time ; but it would be worse than futile to track back for it too late. As well set mature ladies to make up by vehement skipping-rope and vaulting practice for the active exercises they did not have in their growing time, as set them to that sort of schooling which should have been the preliminary to the studies and undertakings of elder years. It is never too late to learn ; but it is soon too late to learn after the fashion of youth. Let us hope that women who are doing their work well will not be persuaded to stop in it in order to undergo a now unserviceable preparation for it, or with the idea of proving, for other women’s sakes, what those other women may as well prove for themselves, that women can pass an unbefeminized examination in non-medical subjects, as they have already shown they can do in medical subjects. WHATEVER IS WORTH DOING IS WORTH DOING WELL. It had been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth and untruth together in few words than in that speech, Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well . If it had not pleased Francis, Lord Verulam, in one of his Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral, to use this exordium about something else, the present writer would have wished to invent it here. For the speech quoted is full of truth and of untruth, hard to gainsay and very deceptive. It sums up in strong epitome the whole laws of industry, and it is directly responsible for more waste of time than all the dolce far niente fascina- tions and philosophies put together. The fallacy of it lies in the word well. Translate well by fitly and the moral is irrefutable; but in the customary reading of the proverb well means thoroughly — to do what is worth doing, well, means to do it with pains and strenuous- ness. And it is absolutely untrue that everything we may wisely spend a while upon deserves such a doing. There are moments in which to blow away the down from the dandelion's “clock" may be more worth doing than any work, but it would be another matter to make a duty of perfection in the achievement. And many necessary and serviceable tasks winch are efficiently per- formed with a rough-and-rea. r ay easiness would be no whit the better, and very likely the worse, for a dogged taking trouble. 106 A HOUSEWIFE'S OPINIONS . In days when scamping and vamping take the place of honest effort, with such detriment to so many crafts and arts, such weakening to vanishing-point of the will and purpose without which craftsman or artist is of less value than a good bit of machinery, it seems almost dangerous to say a word against any sort of laborious- ness. But the mischief of futile laboriousness is not slight ; and it is frequent among us. The gift of taking pains is too good to be frittered away as it is upon results to last a day and the nice completion of nothings. So used it is not merely a waste of power, but to its possessor an injury, for nothing is more cramping and narrowing to the mind than prolonged industry in petti- nesses. The victim of the vice is beguiled into thinking it a virtue ; if you are doing nothing in a bond fide way, you are aware of it and amenable to being ashamed if necessary; but, if you are doing nothing by help of energetic pottering and a resolution to do it well, you have your conscience triumphant, and you can scorn the sluggard. The sluggard has yawned, and wondered how there came to be such a fine crop of weeds in his garden ; and you have polished several score of pins almost brighter than new. But you will keep on polishing pins as the hope and use of life ; and the sluggard may some day go to the ant, consider her ways, and be wise. If he never does — why then, he will have yawned, and you will have polished pins. And there is every reason to suppose that he will not go about conscious of those who do not yawn; but you, one may fear, will have your opinion of those who are incompetent in pins. It is, of course, among people who know the com- mercial la w of life “ Time is money ” only as a respect- able but distant fact akin to the latitude of Timbuctoo, that the wast e of work inculcated, according to the common interpretation, in the proverb which heads this paper, comes to be .accepted as work. When time has a well-understood arithin' etical value it is little enough likely to be spent in less" than necessary performance : yet, even so, while honesty hodds out against haste and weariness it may be misdirected and there may be a WHATEVER IS WORTH DOING ,