| <Saturday Review, 4 September 1869, 315-6>
| <GUSHING MEN.>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| The picture of a gushing creature all heart and no brains, all impulse
| and no ballast, is familiar to most of us; and we know her, either by
| repute or by personal acquaintance, as well as we know our alphabet.
| But we are not so familiar with the idea of the gushing man. Yet
| gushing men exist, if not in such numbers as their sisters, still in
| quite sufficient force to constitute a distinct type. The gushing man
| is the furthest possible removed from the ordinary manly ideal, as
| women create it out of their own imaginations. Women like to picture
| men as inexorably just, yet tender; calm, grave, restrained, yet full
| of passion well mastered; Greathearts with an eye cast Mercywards if
| you will, else unapproachable by all the world; Goethes with one weak
| corner left for Bettina, where love may queen it over wisdom, but in
| all save love strong as Titans, powerful as gods, unchangeable as
| fate. They forgive anything in a man who is manly according to their
| own pattern and ideas. Even harshness amounting to brutality is
| condoned if the hero have a jaw of sufficient squareness, and mighty
| passions just within the limits of control ~~ 
| as witness <hi> Jane Eyre's </hi>
| Rochester and his long line of unpleasant followers. But this
| harshness must be accompanied by love. Like the Russian wife who wept
| for want of her customary thrashing, taking immunity from the stick to
| mean indifference, these women would rather have brutality with love
| than no love at all.
| But a gushing man, as judged by men among men, is a being so foreign
| to the womanly ideal that very few understand him when they do see
| him. And they do not call him gushing. He is frank, enthusiastic,
| unworldly, aspiring; perhaps he is labelled with that word of power,
| <p> 'high-souled;' </p> but he is not gushing, 
| save when spoken of by men who
| despise him. For men have an intense contempt for him. A woman who has
| no ballast, and whose self-restraint goes to the winds on every
| occasion, is accepted for what she is worth, and but little
| disappointment and less annoyance is felt for what is wanting. Indeed,
| men in general expect so little from women that their follies count as
| of course and only what might be looked for. They are like marriage,
| or the English climate, or a lottery ticket, or a dark horse heavily
| backed, and have to be taken for better or worse as they may turn out,
| with the violent probability that the chances are all on the side of
| the worse.
| But the gushing man is inexcusable. He is a nuisance or a
| laughing-stock; and as either he is resented. In his club, at the
| mess-table, in the city, at home, wherever he may be and whatever he
| may be about, he is always plunging headlong into difficulties and
| dragging his friends with him; always quarrelling for a straw; putting
| himself grossly in the wrong and vehemently apologizing afterwards;
| hitting wild at one moment and down on his knees the next, and as
| absurd in the one attitude as he is abject in the other. He falls in
| love at first sight and makes a fool of himself on unknown ground
| while with men he is ready to swear eternal friendship or undying
| enmity before he has had time to know anything whatever about the
| object of his regard or his dislike. In consequence he is being
| perpetually associated with shaky names and brought into questionable
| positions. He is full of confidence in himself on every occasion, and
| is given to making the most positive assertions on things he knows
| nothing about; when afterwards he is obliged to retract and to own
| himself mistaken. But he is just as full of self-abasement when, like
| vaulting ambition, he has overleaped himself and fallen into mistakes
| and failures unawares. He makes rash bets about things of which he has
| the best information; so he says; and will not be staved off by those
| who know what folly he is committing, but insists on writing himself
| down after Dogberry at the cost of just so much. He backs the worst
| player at billiards on the strength of a chance hazard, and bets on
| the losing hand at whist. He goes into wild speculations in the city,
| where he is certain to land a pot of money according to his own
| account and whence he comes with empty pockets, as you foretold and
| warned. He takes up with all manner of doubtful schemes and yet more
| doubtful promoters; but he will not be advised. Is he not gushing? and
| does not the quality of gushingness include an Arcadian belief in the
| virtue of all the world?
| The gushing man is the very pabulum of sharks and sharpers; and it is
| he whose impressibility and gullible good-nature supply wind for the
| sails of half the rotten schemes afloat. Full of faith in his fellows,
| and of belief in a brilliant future to be had by good luck and not by
| hard work, he cannot bring himself to doubt either men or measures;
| unless indeed his gushingness takes the form of suspicion, and then he
| goes about delivering himself of accusations not one of which he can
| substantiate by the weakest bulwark of fact, and doubting the
| soundness of investments as safe as the Three per Cents.
| In manner the gushing man is familiar and caressing. He may be
| patronizing or playful according to the bent of his own nature. If the
| first, he will call his superior, My dear boy, and pat him on the back
| encouragingly; if the second, he will put his arm schoolboy fashion
| round the neck of any man of note who has the misfortune of his
| intimacy, and call him Old fellow, or Governor, or 
| <hi> rex meus </hi>, as he
| is inclined. With women his familiarity is excessively offensive. He
| gives them pet names, or calls to them by their 
| Christian names from one
| end of the room to the other, and pats and paws them in all fraternal
| affectionateness, after about the same length of acquaintanceship
| as would bring other men from the bowing stage to that of shaking
| hands. His manners throughout are enough to compromise the toughest
| reputation; and one of the worst misfortunes that can befall a
| woman whose circumstances lay her specially open to slander and
| misrepresentation is to include among her friends a gushing man of
| energetic tendencies, on the look-out to do her a good turn if he can,
| and anxious to let people see on what familiar terms he stands with
| her. He means nothing in the least degree improper when he puts his
| arm round her waist, calls her My dear and even Darling in a loud
| voice for all the world to hear; or when he seats himself at her table
| before folk to write her private messages, which he makes believe to
| be of so much importance that they must not be spoken aloud, and which
| are of no importance at all. He is only familiar and gushing; and he
| would be the first to cry out against the evil imagination of the
| world which saw harm in what he does with such innocent intent.
| The gushing man has one grave defect ~~ he is not safe nor secret. From
| no bad motive, but just from the blind propulsion of gushingness, he
| cannot keep a secret, and he is sure to let out sooner or later all
| he knows. He holds back nothing of his friends nor of his own ~~ not
| even when his honour is engaged in the trust; being essentially
| loose-lipped, and with his emotional life always bubbling up through
| the thin crust of conventional reserve. Not that he means to be
| dishonourable; he is only gushing and unrestrained. Hence every friend
| he has knows all about him. His latest lover learns the roll-call of
| all his previous loves; and there is not a man in his club, with whom
| he is on speaking terms, who does not know as much. Women who trust
| themselves to gushing men simply trust themselves to broken reeds; and
| they might as well look for a sieve that will hold water as expect a
| man of the sieve nature to keep their secret, whatever it may cost
| them and him to divulge it.
| As a theorist the gushing man is for ever advocating untenable
| opinions and taking up with extreme doctrines, which he announces
| confidently and out of which he can be argued by the first opponent he
| encounters. The facility with which he can be bowled over on any
| ground ~~ he calls it being converted ~~ is in fact one of his most
| striking characteristics; and a gushing man rushes from the school of
| one professor to that of another, his zeal unabated, no matter how
| many his reconversions. He is always finding the truth, which he never
| retains; and the loudest and most active in damning a cast-off
| doctrine is the gushing man who has once followed it. As a leader, he
| is irresistible to both boys and women. His enthusiastic,
| unreflecting, unballasted character finds a ready response in the
| youthful and feminine nature; and he is the idol of a small knot of
| ardent worshippers, who believe in him as the logical and
| well-balanced man is never believed in. He takes them captive by a
| community of imagination, of impulsiveness, of exaggeration; and is
| followed just in proportion to his unfitness to lead.
| This is the kind of man who writes sentimental novels, with a good
| deal of love laced with a vague form of pantheism or of weak
| evangelical religion, to suit all tastes; or he is great in a certain
| kind of indefinite poetry which <reg orig=”no one”> no-one </reg> 
| has yet been found to
| understand, save perhaps, a special Soul Sister, which is the subdued
| version among us of the more suggestive Spiritual Wife. He adores the
| feminine virtues, which he places far beyond all the masculine ones;
| and expatiates on the beauty of the female character which he thinks
| is to be the rule of the future. Perhaps though, he goes off into
| panegyrics on the Vikings and the Berserkers; or else plunges boldly
| into the mists of the Arthurian era, and gushes in obsolete English
| about chivalry and the Round Table, Sir Launcelot and the Holy Graal,
| to the bewilderment of his entranced audience to whom he does not
| supply a glossary. In religion he is generally a mystic and always in
| extremes. He can never be pinned down to logic, to facts, to reason;
| and to his mind the golden mean is the sin for which the Laodicean
| Church was cursed. Feeling and emotion and imagination do all the
| work of the world according to him; and when he is asked to reason and
| to demonstrate, he answers, with the lofty air of one secure of the
| better way, that he Loves, and that Love sees further and more clearly
| than reason.
| As the strong-minded woman is a mistake among women, so is the gushing
| man among men. Fluid, unstable, without curb to govern or rein to
| guide, he brings into the masculine world all the mental frailties of
| the feminine, and adds to them the force of his own organization as a
| man. Whatever he may be he is a disaster; and at all times is
| associated with failure. He is the revolutionary leader who gets up
| abortive risings ~~ the schemer whose plans run into sand ~~ the poet
| whose books are read only by schoolgirls, or lie on the publisher's
| shelves uncut, as his gushingness bubbles over into twaddle or exhales
| itself in the smoke of obscurity ~~ the fanatic whose faith is more
| madness than philosophy ~~ the man of society who is the butt of his
| male companions and the terror of his lady acquaintances ~~ the father
| of a family which he does his best, unintentionally, to ruin by
| neglect, which he calls nature, or by eccentricity of training, which
| he calls faith ~~ and the husband of a woman who either worships him in
| blind belief, or who laughs at him in secret, as heart or head
| preponderates in her character. In any case he is a man who never
| finds the fitting time or place; and who dies as he has lived, with
| everything about him incomplete.