| <The Saturday Review July 18, 1868>
| <The Fading Flower>
| <pb n="81">
| If there is any part of man's conduct which proves more 
| conclusively than another the baseness of his ingratitude, it 
| is his indifference to the Fading Flower.  Woman may well 
| wonder at the charm which prostrates the heavy Guardsman 
| at the feet of the belle of the season.  Even the most ardent 
| of worshippers at such a shrine must, one would think, 
| desire in their deity a little more sweetness and light.  But 
| the beauty of eighteen strangers is trained to look on 
| worship as simply her due, and to regard amiability as a 
| mere superfluity.  She knows she can summon an adorer by 
| one beckon of her fan and dismiss him by another.  A bow 
| will repay the most finished of pretty speeches, and 
| conversation can be conducted at the least possible expense 
| by the slight trouble of recollecting who was at Lady A.'s 
| ball, and the yet slighter trouble of guessing who is likely to 
| be at Lady C.'s.  It is utterly needless to bestow any labour 
| on society when society takes it as a crowning favour to be 
| suffered simply to adore.  There is a certain grandeur, 
| therefore, of immobility about the English beauty, a 
| statuesque perfection which no doubt has great merits of its 
| own.  But it must be owned that it is not amusing, and that 
| it is only the intensity of our worship which saves us from 
| feeling it to be dull.  Beauty is apt to be a little heavy on the 
| stairs.  A shade of distress flits over the loveliest of faces if 
| we stray for a moment beyond the happy hunting-groups of 
| the ball-room or the Opera, the last Academy or the next 
| Horticultural.  Beautiful beings are made, they feel, not to 
| amuse, but to be amused.  The one object of their 
| enthusiasm is the <p> "funny Bishop" </p> who turns a 
| great debate into a jest for the entertainment of his fair 
| friends in the Ladies' Gallery.  The object of their social 
| preference is the young wit who lounges up to tell his last 
| little story, and then, without boring them for a reply, 
| lounges away again.  The debt which they owe to society is 
| simply the morning ride which keeps them blooming 
| through the season.  The debt which society owes to them 
| is that eternal succession of gay nothings which keeps 
| London in a whirl till the grouse are ready for the sacrifice.  
| In a word, woman in her earlier sages is simply receptive.  
| Light and sweetness come in with the Fading Flower.  It is 
| when the shy retreat of the elder sons makes way for the 
| shyer approach of their younger brothers that woman 
| becomes fragrant and intelligent.  The old indifference 
| quickens into a subdued vivacity; Hermione descends from 
| her pedestal and warms into flesh and blood.  She turns 
| chatty, and her chat insensibly deepens into conversation.  
| She discovers a new interest in life and in the last novel of 
| the season.  She ventures on the confines of poetry, and if 
| she does not read Mr. Tennyson's <hi rend="italic"> 
| Lucretius, </hi> she keeps his photograph in her album.  
| She flings herself with a far greater ardour into the 
| mysteries of croquet.  She has been known to garden.  As 
| petal after petal floats down to earth she becomes artistic.  
| She reads, she talks Mr. Ruskin.  She has her own views on 
| Venice and its Doges, her enthusiasm over Alps and 
| artisans.  The slow approach of autumn brings her to 
| politics.  She is deep in Mr. Disraeli's novels, and quotes 
| Mr. Gladstone's Homer.  She speculates on Charlie's 
| chances for the country. She knows why the Home 
| Secretary was absent from the last division.  The drop of 
| another petal warns her further afield.  She is manly now; 
| she comes in at breakfast with her hair about her ears, and a 
| tale of the gallop she has had across country.  She takes you 
| over the farm, and laughs at your ignorance of pigs.  She 
| peeps into the odoriferous sanctum
| <pb n="82">
| upstairs, and owns to a taste for cigarettes.  She is slightly 
| horsey, and knows to a pound the value of her mare.  
| Another season, and she is interested in Church questions, 
| and inquires what is the next <p> "new thing" </p> at St. 
| Andrew's.  She adores Lord Shaftesbury, or works frontals 
| for St. Gogmagog.  She collects for the Irish missions, or 
| misses an <hi rend="italic"> entree </hi> on Eves.  It is 
| only as woman fades that we realize the versatility, the 
| inexhaustible resources, of woman.
| The one scene, however, where the Fading Flower is 
| perhaps seen at her best is the County Archaeological 
| Meeting.  Of all rural delusions this is perhaps the 
| pleasantest and if the name is forbidding, the Fading 
| Flower knows how little there is in a name.  About half a 
| dozen old gentlemen, of course, take the thing in grand 
| earnest.  It is beyond measure amusing to peep over the 
| learned Secretary's shoulder, to see the grey heads wagging 
| and the spectacles in full play over the list of promised 
| papers, to watch the carefully planned details, the solemn 
| array of morning meetings, the grave excursions from 
| abbey to castle, from castle to church, the graver soirees 
| where Dryascost revels amidst armour and knicknakery.  It 
| is even more amusing to see the Fading Flower step in at 
| the close of this learned preparation, and with a woman's 
| alchemy turn all this dust to gold.  A little happy audacity 
| converts the morning meetings into convenient gatherings 
| for the groups of the day, the excursion resolves itself into a 
| relined picnic, the learned soiree becomes a buzzing 
| conversazione.  Those who look forward with interest to 
| woman's entrance into our Universities may gather 
| something of the results to be expected from such a step in 
| the fields of rural archaeology.  Her very presence at the 
| meeting throws an air of gentle absurdity over the whole 
| affair.  It is difficult for the driest of antiquaries to read a 
| paper on Roman roads in the teeth of a charming being who 
| sleeps to the close, and then awakes only to assure him it 
| was <p> "very romantic." </p> But it must be confessed 
| that the charming being has very little trouble with the 
| antiquaries.  Half the fun of the thing lies in the ease and 
| grace of her taming of Dryasdust; the learned Professor 
| dies at her touch into <p> "a dear delightful old thing," 
| </p> and fetches and carries all day with a perfect 
| obedience.  It is a delightful change from town, a sort of 
| glorified afternoon in a pastoral Zoological, this junketing 
| among the queer unclubbable animals of science and 
| history.  There is a noble disdain of rheumatism in the 
| ardour with which they plunge into the dark and mysterious 
| vaults where their willful student insists, with Mr. Froude, 
| that those poor monks snatched their damp and difficult 
| slumber; and there is a noble disdain of truth in their 
| suppression of the treacherous and unsentimental <p> "beer-cellar"
| </p> which trembles on their lips.  Woman, in fact, caries 
| her atmosphere of romantic credulity into the grey and arid 
| skepticism of a groping archaeology.  She frowns down any 
| suggestion of the improbability of a pretty story, she 
| believes in the poison-sucking devotion of Queen Eleanor, 
| she shrugs her shoulders impatiently at a whisper of Queen 
| Mary's wig.  Every kitchen becomes a torture-chamber, 
| every drain a subterranean passage.  But resolute as she is 
| on this point of the poetry of the past, on all other questions 
| she is the most docile of pupils.  Her interest, her listening 
| power, her curiosity, is inexhaustible.  If she has a passion, 
| indeed, it is for Early English.  But she has a proper awe for 
| Romanesque, and a singular interest in Third Pointed.  She 
| is ruthless in insisting on her victims spelling out every 
| word of a brass in Latin that she cannot understand, and 
| which he cannot translate.  She collects little fragments of 
| Roman brick, and wraps them up in tissue-paper for 
| preservation at home like bride-cake.  She is severe on 
| restoration, and merciless on whitewash.  She plunges, in 
| fact, gallantly into the spirit of the thing, but she gracefully 
| denudes it of its bareness and pedantry.  Her bugle sings 
| truce at midday for luncheon.  She coaches in the deep 
| grass of the abbey ruins, and gathers in picturesque groups 
| beneath castle walls.  A flutter of silks, a ripple of feminine 
| laughter, distract the audience from graver disquisitions.  It 
| is difficult to discuss the exact date of a moulding when 
| soda-water bottles are popping beneath one's antiquarian 
| nose.  After all, archaeologists are men, and sandwiches are 
| sandwiches.  It is at that moment perhaps that the Fading 
| Flower is at her best.  Her waning attractions are 
| heightened artistically by the background of old fogies.  
| Her sentiment blends with the poetry of the ruins around.  
| The young squire, the young parson, who have been 
| yawning under the prose of Dryasdust and refreshment in 
| the gay prattle of archaeological woman.  The sun too is 
| overpowering, and a pretty woman leaning on one's arm in 
| the leafy recesses of a ruined castle is sometimes more 
| overpowering than the sun.  There is much in the romance 
| of the occasion.  There is a little perhaps in the champagne.  
| At any rate the Fading Flower blooms often into matronly 
| life under the kindly influences of archaeological meetings, 
| and antiquarian studies flourish gaily under the patronage 
| of woman.
| There is a certain melancholy in tracing further the career 
| of the Fading Flower.  We long to arrest it at each of these 
| picturesque stages, as we long to arrest the sunset in its 
| lovelier moments of violet and gold.  But the sunset dies 
| into the grey of eve, and woman sets with the same fatal 
| persistency.  The evanescent tints fade into the grey.  
| Woman becomes hard, angular, colourless.  Her floating 
| sentiment, so graceful in its mobility, curdles into opinions.  
| Her conversation, so charmingly impalpable, solidifies into 
| discussion.  Her character, like her face, becomes rigid and 
| osseous.  She entrenches herself in the ologies.  She works 
| pinafores for New Zealanders in the May Meetings, and 
| appears in wondrous bonnets at the Church Congress.  She 
| adores Mr. Kingsley because he is earnest, and groans over 
| the triviality of the literature of the day.  She takes up the 
| grievances of her sex, and badgers the puzzled overseer 
| who has omitted to place her name on the register.  She 
| pronounces old men fogies, and young men intolerable.  
| She throws out dark hints of her intention to compose a 
| great work which shall settle everything.  Then she bursts 
| into poetry, and pens poems of so fiery a passion that her 
| family are in consternation lest she should elope with the 
| half-pay officer who meets her by moonlight on the pier.  
| Then she plunges into science, and cuts her hair short too 
| be in proper trim for Professor Huxley's lectures.  For 
| awhile she startles her next neighbour at dinner with 
| speculations on molluscs, and questions as to the precise 
| names of the twelve hundred new species of fish that 
| Professor Agassiz has caught in the river Oronoco.  There 
| is a more terrible stage when she becomes heretical, 
| subscribes to the support of Mr. Tonneson and pities the 
| poor Bishop of Natal.  But from this she is commonly 
| saved by the deepening of eve.  Little by little all this 
| restless striving against the monotony of her existence dies 
| down into calm.  The grey of life hushes the Fading Flower 
| into the kindly aunt, the patient nurse, the gentle friend of 
| the poor.  It is hard to recognise the proud beauty, the 
| vivacious flirt, the sentimental poetess of days gone by in 
| the practical little woman who watches by Harry's sick-bed 
| or hurries off with blankets and broth down the lane.  In 
| some such peace the Fading Flower commonly finds her 
| rest ~~ a peace unromantic, utilitarian, and yet not perhaps 
| unbeautiful.  She has found ~~ as she tells us ~~ her work 
| at last; and yet in the life that seems so profitless she has 
| been doing a work after all.  She has at any rate vindicated 
| her sex against the charge of what Mr. Arnold calls 
| Hebraism.  She has displayed in Hellenic roundness the 
| completeness of the nature of woman.  Compared with the 
| quick transitions, with the endless variety of her life, the 
| life of man seems narrow and poor.  There is hardly a phase 
| of human thought, of human action, which she has not 
| touched, and she has never touched but to adorn.  If she has 
| faded, she has revealed a new power and beauty and 
| fragrance at each stage in her decay.  Nothing in her life 
| has proved so becoming as her leaving it.  The song 
| ingenuity, of triumph, of defiance, which has rung along 
| the course of her decline, softens at its close into a 
| swan-song of peace and gentleness and true womanhood.