| <Saturday Review, 15 May 1869, 641-2>
| <FINE FEELINGS.>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| There are people who pride themselves on the possession of what it
| pleases them to call fine feelings. Perhaps, if we were all diligent
| to call spades spades, these same fine feelings would come under a
| less euphemistic heading; but, as things are, we may as well adopt the
| softening gloze that is spread over the whole of our language, and
| call them by a pretty name with the rest. People who possess fine
| feelings are chiefly remarkable for the ease with which they take
| offence; it being indeed impossible, even for the most wary of their
| associates, to avoid giving umbrage in some shape, and generally when
| least intended and most innocently minded. Nothing satisfies them. No
| amount of attention, short of absolute devotion and giving them the
| place of honour everywhere, sets them at ease with themselves or keeps
| them in good-humour. If you ask them to your house, you must not dream
| of mixing them up with the rest. Though you have done them an honour
| in asking them at all, you must give them a marked position and bear
| them on your hands for the evening. They must be singled out from the
| herd and specially attended to; introduced to the nicest people;
| made a fuss with and taken care of; else they are offended, and feel
| they have been slighted ~~ their sensitiveness or fine feelings being a
| kind of Chat Moss which will swallow up any quantity of 
| <hi> petits soins </hi>
| that may be thrown in, and yet never be filled. If they are your 
| intimate friends, you have to ask them on every occasion on which you
| receive. They make it a grievance if they hear that you have had even
| a dinner party without inviting them, though your space is limited and
| you had them at your last gathering. Still, if it comes to their ears
| that you have had friends and did not include them, they will come
| down on you to a dead certainty if they are of the franker kind, and
| ask you seriously, perhaps pathetically, how they have offended you?
| If they are of the sullen sort they will meet you coldly, or pass you
| by without seeing you; and will either drift into a permanent
| estrangement or come round after a time, according to the degree of
| acidity in their blood and the amount of tenacity in their character.
| They have lost their friends many times for no worse offence than
| this.
| They are as punctilious too, as they are exacting. They demand visit
| for visit, invitation for invitation, letter for letter. Though you
| may be overwhelmed with serious work, while they have no weightier
| burden strapped to their shoulders than their social duties and social
| fineries, yet you must render point for point with them, keeping an
| exact tally with not a notch too many on their side, if you want
| to retain their acquaintance at all. And they must be always invited
| specially and individually, even to your open days; else they will not
| come at all; and their fine feelings will be hurt. They suffer no
| liberties to be taken with them and they take none with others;
| counting all frock-coat friendliness as taking liberties, and holding
| themselves refined and you coarse if you think that manners <hi> sans
| façon </hi> are pleasanter than those which put themselves 
| eternally into
| stays and stiff buckram, and are never in more undress than a Court
| suit. They will not go into your house to wait for you, however
| intimate they may be; and they would resent it as an intrusion,
| perhaps an impertinence, if you went into theirs in their absence. If
| you are at luncheon when they call, they stiffly leave their cards and
| turn away; though you have the heartiest, jolliest manner of
| housekeeping going, and keep a kind of open house for luncheon
| casuals. They do not understand heartiness or a jolly manner of
| housekeeping; open houses are not in their line and they will not be
| luncheon casuals; so they turn away grimly, and if you want to see
| them you have to send your servant panting down the street after them,
| when, their dignity being satisfied, their sensitiveness smoothed down
| and their fine feelings reassured, they will graciously turn back and
| do what they might have done at first without all this fuss and fume.
| When people who possess fine feelings are poor, their
| sensitiveness is indeed a cross both for themselves and their friends
| to bear. If you try to show them a kindness or do them a service, they
| fly out at you for patronizing them, and say you humiliate them by
| treating them as paupers. You may do to your rich acquaintances a
| hundred things which you dare not attempt with your poor friends
| cursed with fine feelings; and little offices of kindness, which pass
| as current coin through society, are construed into insults with them.
| Difficult to handle in every phase, they are in none more dangerous to
| meddle with than when poor, though they are as bad if they have become
| successful after a period of struggle. Then your attention to them is
| time-serving, bowing to the rising sun, worshipping the golden calf,
| &c. Else why did you not seek them out when they were poor? Why were
| you not cap in hand when they went bare-headed? Why have you waited
| until they were successful before you recognized their value?
| It is funny to hear how bitter these sensitive folks are when they
| have come out into the sunlight of success after the dark passage of
| poverty; as if it had been possible to dig them out of their obscurity
| when their name was still to make ~~ as if the world 
| could recognize its
| prophets before they had spoken. But this admission into the
| penetralia after success is a very delicate point with people of fine
| feelings, supposing always the previous struggle to have been hard;
| and even if there has been no struggle to speak of, then there are
| doubts and misgivings as to whether they are liked for themselves
| or not, and morbid speculations on the stability and absolute value of
| the position they hold and the attentions they receive, and endless
| surmises of what would be the result if they lost their fame or wealth
| or political power or social standing ~~ or whatever may be the hook
| whereon their success hangs, and their fine feelings are impaled. The
| act of wisdom most impossible to be performed by these self-torturers
| is the philosophic acceptance of life as it is and of things as they
| fall naturally to their share.
| Women remarkable for fine feelings are also remarkable for that uneasy
| distrust, that insatiable craving which continually requires
| reassuring and allaying. As wives or lovers they never take a man's
| love, once expressed and loyally acted on, as a certainty, unless
| constantly repeated; hence they are always pouting or bemoaning their
| loveless condition, getting up pathetic scenes of tender accusation or
| sorrowful acceptance of coolness and desertion, which at the first may
| have a certain charm to a man because flattering to his vanity, but
| which pall on him after a short time, and end by annoying and
| alienating him; thus bringing about the very catastrophe which was
| deprecated before it existed.
| Another characteristic with women of fine feelings is their inability
| to bear the gentlest remonstrance, the most shadowy fault-finding. A
| rebuke of any gravity throws them into hysterics on the spot; but even
| a request to do what they have not been in the habit of doing, or to
| abstain from doing that which they have used themselves to do, is
| more than they can endure with dry-eyed equanimity. You have to live
| with them in the fool's paradise of perfectness, or you are made to
| feel yourself an unmitigated brute. You have before you the two
| alternatives of suffering many things which are disagreeable and which
| might easily be remedied, or of having your wife sobbing in her own
| room and going about the house with red eyes and an expression of
| exasperating patience under ill-treatment, far worse to bear than the
| most passionate retaliation. Indeed women may be divided broadly into
| those who cry and those who retort when they are found fault with;
| which, with a side section of those wooden women who <p> 'don't care,'
| </p> leaves a very small percentage indeed of those 
| who can accept a rebuke
| good-temperedly, and simply try to amend a failing or break off an
| unpleasant habit, without parade of submission and sweet Griseldadom
| unjustly chastised, but kissing the rod with aggravating meekness.
| For there are women who can make their meekness a more potent weapon
| of offence than any passion or violence could give. They do not cry,
| neither do they complain, but they exaggerate their submission till
| you are driven half mad under the slow torture they inflict. They look
| at you so humbly; they speak to you in so subdued a voice, when they
| speak to you at all, which is rarely and never unless first addressed;
| they avoid you so pointedly, hurrying away if you are going to meet
| them about the house, on the pretext of being hateful to your
| sight and doing you a service by ridding you of their presence; they
| are so ostentatiously careful that the thing of which you mildly
| complained under some circumstances shall never happen again under any
| circumstances, that you are forced at last out of your entrenchments,
| and obliged to come to an explanation. You ask them what is amiss? or,
| what do they mean by their absurd conduct? and they answer you
| <p> 'Nothing,' </p> with an injured air or affected 
| surprise at your query.
| What have they done that you should speak to them so harshly? They are
| sure they have done all they could to please you, and they do not know
| what right you have to be vexed with them again. They have kept out of
| your way and not said a word to annoy you; they have only tried to
| obey you and to do as you ordered, and yet you are not satisfied! What
| can they do to please you? and why is it that they never can please
| you whatever they do? You get no nearer your end by this kind of
| thing; and the only way to bring your Griselda to reason is by having
| a row; when she will cry bitterly, but finally end by kissing and
| making up. You have to go through the process. Nothing else, save a
| sudden disaster or an unexpected pleasure of large dimensions, will
| save you from it; but as we cannot always command earthquakes nor
| godsends, and as the first are dangerous and the last costly, the
| short and easy method remaining is to have a decisive <p> 
| 'understanding,' </p> which means a scene and a domestic tempest 
| with smooth sailing till
| the next time.
| Sometimes fine feelings are hurt by no greater barbarity than that
| which is contained in a joke. People with fine feelings are seldom
| able to take a joke; and you will hear them relating, with an injured
| accent and as a serious accusation, the merest bit of nonsense you
| flung off at random, with no more intention of wounding them than had
| the merchant the intention of putting out the Efreet's eye when he
| flung his date-stones in the desert. As you cannot deny what you have
| said, they have the whip-hand of you for the moment; and all you can
| hope for is that the friend to whom they detail their grievance will
| see through them and it, and understand the joke if they cannot. Then
| there are fine feelings which express themselves in exceeding
| irritation at moral and intellectual differences of opinion ~~ fine
| feelings bound up in questions of faith and soundness of doctrine,
| having taken certain moral and theological views under their especial
| patronage and holding all diversity of judgment therefrom a personal
| offence. The people thus afflicted are exceedingly uncomfortable folks
| to deal with, and manage to make <reg orig=”every one”> 
| everyone </reg> else uncomfortable too. You
| hurt their feelings so continually and so unconsciously, that you
| might as well be living in a region of steel-traps and spring-guns,
| and set to walk blindfold among pitfalls and water-holes. You fling
| your date-stone here too, quite carelessly and thinking no evil,
| and up starts the Efreet who swears you have injured him intentionally.
| You express an opinion without attaching any particular importance
| to it, but you hurt the fine feelings which oppose it, and unless you
| wish to have a quarrel you must retract or apologize. As the worst
| temper always carries the day, and as fine feelings 
| are only bad tempers
| under another name, you very probably do apologize; and so the matter
| ends.
| Other people show their fineness of feeling by their impatience of
| pain and the tremendous grievance they think it that they should
| suffer as others ~~ they say, so much more than others. These are the
| people who are great on the theory of nervous differences, and who
| maintain that their cowardice and impatience of suffering means an
| organization like an Æolian harp for sensibility. The oddest part of
| the business is the sublime contempt which these sensitives have for
| other persons' patience and endurance, and how much more refined and
| touching they think their own puerile sensibility. But this is a
| characteristic of humanity all through; the masquerading of evil under
| the name of good being one of the saddest facts of an imperfect nature
| and a confused system of morals. If all things showed their faces
| without disguise, we should have fine feelings placed in a different
| category from that in which they stand at this moment, and the world
| would be the richer by just so much addition of truth.