| <The Saturday Review May 9, 1868>
| <Ideal Women>
| <pb n="609">
| It is often objected against fault-finders, writers or others, 
| that they destroy but do not build up, that while 
| industriously blaming errors they take good care not to 
| praise the counteracting virtues, that in their zeal against 
| the vermin of which they are seeking to sweep the house 
| clean they forget the nobler creatures which do good work 
| of keeping things sweet and wholesome.  But it is 
| impossible to be continually introducing the saving clause, 
| <q> </q>.  The seven thousand righteous who have not 
| bowed the knee to Baal are understood to exist in all 
| communities; and vicious as any special section may be, 
| there must always be the hidden salt and savour of the 
| virtuous to keep the whole from falling into utter 
| corruption.  This is specially true of modern women.  
| Certainly some of them are as unsatisfactory as any of their 
| kind that have ever appeared on earth before, but it would 
| be very queer logic to infer therefore that all are bad alike, 
| and that our modern womanhood is as ill off as the Cities of 
| the Plain which could not be saved for want of the ten just 
| men to save them.  Happily, we have noble women among 
| as yet; women who believe in something beside pleasure, 
| and who do their work faithfully, wherever it may lie; 
| women who can and do sacrifice themselves for love and 
| duty, and who do not think they were sent into the world 
| simply to run one mad life-long race for wealth, for 
| dissipation, or for distinction.  But the life of such women 
| is essentially in retirement; and though the lesson they 
| teach is beautiful, yet its influence is necessarily confined, 
| because of the narrow sphere of the teacher.  When such 
| public occasions for devotedness as the Crimean war occur, 
| we can in some sort measure the extent to which the 
| self-sacrifice of women can be carried; but in general their 
| noblest virtues come out only in the quiet and secrecy of 
| home, and the most heroic lives of patience and well-doing 
| go on in seclusion, uncheered by sympathy and unrewarded 
| by applause.
| Still, it is impossible to write of one absolute womanly 
| ideal ~~ one single type that shall satisfy every man's 
| fancy; for, naturally, what would be perfection to one is 
| imperfection to another, according to the special bent of the 
| individual mind.  Thus one man's ideal of womanly 
| perfection is in beauty, mere physical outside beauty; and 
| not all the virtues under heaven could warm him into love 
| with red hair or a snub nose.  He is entirely happy if his 
| wife is undeniably the handsomest woman of his 
| acquaintance, and holds himself blessed when all men 
| admire and all women envy.  But for his own sake rather 
| than for hers.  Pleasant as her loveliness is to look on, it is 
| pleasanter to know that he is the possessor of it.  The <p> 
| "handsomest woman in the room" </p> comes into the 
| same category as the finest picture or the most 
| thoroughbred horse within his sphere, and if the degree of 
| pride in his possession is different, the kind is the same.  
| And so in minor proportions, from the most beautiful 
| woman of all, to simply beauty as a <hi rend="italic"> <f> 
| a sine qua non, </f> </hi> whatever else may be wanting.  
| One other thing only is as absolute as this beauty, and that 
| is its undivided possession.  Another man's ideal is a good 
| housekeeper and a careful mother, and he does not care a 
| rush whether his wife, if she is these, is pretty or ugly.  
| Provided she is active and industrious, minds the house 
| well, and brings up the children as they ought to be brought 
| up, has good principles, is trustworthy, and even-tempered, 
| he is not particular as to colour or form, and can even be 
| brought to tolerate a limp or a squint.  Given the great 
| foundations of an honourable home, and he will forego the 
| lath and the plaster of personal appearance which will not 
| bear the wear and tear of years and their troubles.  The 
| solid virtues stand.  His balance at the banker's is a fact; his 
| good name and credit with the tradespeople is a fact; so is 
| the comfort of his home; so are the health, the morals, the 
| education of his children.  All these are the true realities of 
| life to him; but the beauty which changes to deformity by 
| the small-pox, which fades under dyspepsia, grows stale by 
| habit, and is worn threadbare by the end of twenty years, is 
| only a skin-deep grace which he does not value.  Perhaps 
| he is right.  Certainly, some of the happiest marriages 
| amongst one's acquaintances are those where the wife has 
| not one perceptible physical charm, and where the whole 
| force of her magnetic value lies in what she is, not in how 
| she looks.  Another man wants a tender, adoring, 
| fair-haired seraph, who will worship him as a demigod, and 
| accept him as her best revelation of strength and wisdom.  
| The more dependent she is, the better he will love her; the 
| less of conscious thought, of active will, of originative 
| power she has, the greater his regard and tenderness.  To be 
| the one sole teacher and protector of such a gentle little 
| creature seems to him the most delicious and the best 
| condition of married life; and he holds Milton's famous 
| lines to be expressive of the only fitting relations between 
| men and women.  The adoring seraph is his ideal; Griselda, 
| Desdemona, Lucy Ashton, are his highest culminations of 
| womanly grace; and the qualities which appeal the most 
| powerfully to his generosity are the patience which will not 
| complain, the gentleness that cannot resent, and the love 
| which nothing can chill.  Another man wants a cultivated 
| intelligence in his ideal.  As an author, an artiest, a student, 
| a statesman, he would like his wife to be able to help him 
| by the contact of bright wit and ready intellect.  He believes 
| in the sex of minds, and holds only that work complete 
| which has been created by the one and perfected by the 
| other.  He sees how women have helped on the leaders in 
| troubled times; he knows that almost all great men have 
| owed something of their greatness to the influence of a 
| mother or a wife; he remembers how thought which had 
| laid dumb in men's brains for more than half their lifetime 
| suddenly woke up into speech and activity by the influence 
| of a woman great enough to call them forth.  The adoring 
| seraph would be an encumbrance, and nothing better than a 
| child upon his hands; and the soul which had to be 
| awakened and directed by him would run great chance of 
| remaining torpid and inactive all its days.  He has his own 
| life to lead and round off, and so far from wishing to 
| influence another's, wants to be helped for himself.  
| Another man cares only for the birth and social position of 
| the woman to whom he gives his name and affection; to 
| another yellow gold stands higher than blue blood, and <p> 
| "my wife's father" </p> may have been a rag-picker, so 
| long as rag-picking had been a sufficiently rich alembic 
| with a residuum admitting of no kind of doubt.  Venus 
| herself without a dowry would be only a pretty sea-side girl 
| with a Newtown pippin in her hand; but Miss Kilmansegg 
| would be something worth thinking of, if but little worth 
| looking at.  One man delights in a smart, vivacious, little 
| woman of the irrepressible kind.  It makes no difference to 
| him how petulant she is, how full of fire and fury; the most 
| passionate bursts of temper simply amuse him, the small 
| virago in her tantrums, and to set her going again when he 
| thinks she has been a long enough time in subsidence.  His 
| ideal of woman is an amusing little plaything, with a great 
| facility for being put up, and a dash of viciousness to give it 
| piquancy.  Another wants a sweet and holy saint whose 
| patient humility springs from principle rather than from 
| fear; another likes a blithe-tempered, healthy girl with no 
| nonsense about her, full of fun and ready for everything, 
| and is not particular as to the strict order or economy of the 
| housekeeping, provided only she is at all times willing to 
| be his pleasant playmate and companion.  Another delights 
| in something very quiet, very silent, very home-staying.  
| One must have first-rate music in his ideal woman; another, 
| unimpeachable taste; a third, strict order; a fourth, liberal 
| breadth of nature; and each has his own ideal, not only of 
| nature but of person ~~ to the exact shade of the hair, the 
| colour of the eyes, and the oval of the face.  But all agree in 
| the great fundamental requirements of truth, and modesty, 
| and love, and unselfishness; for though it is impossible to 
| write of one womanly ideal as an absolute, it is very 
| possible to detail the virtues which ought to belong to all 
| alike.
| If this diversity of ideals is true of individuals, it is 
| especially true of nations, each of which has its own ideal 
| woman varying according to what is called the genius of 
| the country.  To the Frenchman, if we are to believe 
| Michelet and the novelists, it is a feverish little creature, 
| full of nervous energy, but without muscular force; of frail 
| health and feeble organization; a prey to morbid fancies 
| which she has no strength to control or to resist; now 
| weeping away her life in the pain of finding that her 
| husband, a man gross and material because husband, does 
| not understand her; now sighing over her delicious sins in 
| the arms of the lover who does; without reasoning faculties, 
| but with divine intuitions that are as good as revelations; 
| without cool judgment, but with the light of burning 
| passions that guide her just as well; thinking by her heart, 
| yet carrying the most refined metaphysics into her love; 
| subtle; incomprehensible by the coarser brain of man; a 
| creature born to bewilder and to be misled, to love and to 
| be adored, to madden men and to be destroyed by them.  It 
| does not much signify that the reality is a shrewd, 
| calculating, unromantic woman, with a hard face and keen 
| eyes, who for the most part makes a good practical wife to 
| her common-sense middle-aged husband, who thinks more 
| of her social position than of her feelings, more of her 
| children than of her lovers, more of her purse than of her 
| heart, and whose great object of life is a daily struggle for 
| centimes.  It pleases the French to idealize their eminently 
| practical and worldly-wise women into this queer 
| compound of hysterics and adultery; and if it pleases them 
| it need not displease us.  To the German his ideal is of two 
| kinds ~~ one, his Martha, the domestic broad-faced 
| <hi rend="italic"> Hausmutter, </hi> who cooks good dinners 
| at small cost, and mends the family linen as religiously as if 
| this were the Eleventh Commandment specially appointed 
| for feminine fingers to keep, the poetic culmination of 
| whom is Charlotte cutting bread and butter; the other, his 
| Mary, his Bettina, full of mind and aesthetics, and 
| heart-uplifting love, yearning after the infinite with holes 
| in her stockings and her shoes down at heel.  For what are 
| coarse material mendings to the aesthetic soul yearning after the 
| the infinite, and worshipping at the feet of the prophet? In  
| Italy the ideal woman
| <pb n="610">
| of modern times is the ardent patriot, full of active energy, 
| of physical force, and dauntless courage.  In Poland it is the 
| patriot too, but a more refined and etherialized type, 
| passively resenting Tartar tyranny by the subtlest feminine 
| scorn, and living in perpetual music and mourning.  In 
| Spain it is a woman beautiful and impassioned, with the 
| slight drawback of needing a world of looking after, of 
| which the men are undeniably capable.  In Mohammedan 
| countries generally it is a comely smooth-skinned Dudu, 
| patient and submissive, always in good humour with her 
| master, economical in house-living to suit the meanness, 
| and gorgeous in occasional attire to suit the ostentation, of 
| the genuine Oriental; but by no means Dudu ever asleep 
| and unoccupied; for, if not allowed to take part in active 
| outside life, the Eastern's wife or wives have their home 
| duties and their maternal cares like all other women, and 
| find to their cost that, if they neglect them unduly, they will 
| have a bad time of it with Ali Ben Hassan when the 
| question comes of piastres and sequins, and the dogs of 
| Jews who demand payment, and the pigs of Christians who 
| follow suit.  The American ideal is of two kinds, like the 
| German ~~ the one, the clever manager, the women with 
| good executive faculty in the matters of buck-wheat cakes 
| and oyster gumbo, as is needed in a country so poorly 
| provided with <p> "helps;" </p> the other, the aspiring soul 
| who puts her aspirations into deeds, and goes out into the 
| world to do battle with the sins of society as editress, 
| preacher, stump orator, and the like.  It must be rather 
| embarrassing to some men that this special manifestation of 
| the ideal woman at times advocates miscegenation and free 
| love; but perhaps we of the narrow old conventional type 
| are not up to the right mark yet, and have to wait until our 
| own women are thoroughly emancipated before we can 
| rightly appreciate these questions.  At all events, if this kind 
| of thing pleases the Americans, it is no more our business 
| to interfere with them than with the French compound; and 
| if miscegenation and free love seem to them the right 
| manner of life, let them follow it.
| In all countries, then, the ideal woman changes, chameleon-like
| to suit the taste of men; and the great doctrine that her 
| happiness does somewhat depend on his liking is part of the 
| very foundation of her existence.  According to his will she 
| is bond or free, educated or ignorant, lax or strict, 
| house-keeping or roving, and though we advocate neither the 
| bondage nor the ignorance, yet we do hold to the principle 
| that, by the laws which regulate all human communities 
| everywhere, she is bound to study the wishes of man, and 
| to mould her life in harmony with his liking.  No society 
| can get on in which there is total independence of sections 
| and members, for society is built up on the mutual 
| dependence of all its sections and all its members.  Hence 
| the defiant attitude which women have lately assumed, and 
| their indifference to the wishes and remonstrances of men, 
| cannot lead to any good results whatever.  It is not the 
| revolt of slaves against their tyrants ~~ in that we could 
| sympathize ~~ which they have begun, but a revolt against 
| their duties.  And this it is which makes the present state of 
| things so deplorable.  It is the vague restlessness, the fierce 
| extravagance, the neglect of home, the indolent 
| fine-ladyism, the passionate love of pleasure which characterise 
| the modern woman, that saddens men, and destroys in them 
| that respect which their very pride prompts them to feel.  
| And it is the painful conviction that the ideal woman of 
| truth and modesty and simple love and homely living has 
| somehow faded away under the paint and tinsel of this 
| modern reality which makes us speak out as we have done, 
| in the hope, perhaps a forlorn one, that if she could be made 
| to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she would, 
| by the very force of natural instinct and social necessity, 
| order herself in some accordance with the lost ideal, and 
| become again what we once loved and what we all regret.