| <The Saturday Review>
| <republished in 1883>
| <Girl of the Period and other Social Essays>
| <Saturday Mornings>
| <Pumpkins>
| <pb n="213">
| Pumpkins are among the most imposing of all 
| groundlings growths.  They have fine showy flowers, 
| handsome leaves, roving stems, and they bear 
| solid-looking fruit of a goodly size and gorgeous colour.
| To see them spreading over their domain with such rapid 
| luxuriance, one would imagine them among the best 
| things growing; but a critical examination proves their 
| flesh to be about three parts water, while as for their 
| stalks, they are of so pithless a nature that they can only 
| creep along the earth, unable to stand upright without 
| support; ~~ which tells something against the pumpkin's 
| claim for extra consideration.  Still, their showy largeness 
| attracts the eye, and not a few of us believe in pumpkins, 
| and admire both their mode of growth and the fruit 
| resulting.  In like manner the human pumpkins ~~ those 
| beings of imposing presence and loud self-assertion ~~ 
| get themselves believed in by the simple; and, as 
| occasions by which their watery and fibreless nature is 
| revealed do not arise every day, they are for the most part 
| accepted for the substantialities they assume to be, and 
| the world is deceived by appearances as it ever has been.
| <pb n="214">
| These human pumpkins abound everywhere.  In all states 
| and professions, and in both sexes, we find them 
| flourishing magnificently on the face of the earth, taking 
| the lead in their society and setting themselves out as the 
| finest fellows to be found in their respective gardens.  
| Among them are the men of the Bombastes type, so dear 
| to the older playwrights; braggadocios of the kill 'em and 
| eat 'em school, who were such terrible fellows to look at 
| and listen to, though only pumpkins of a singularly 
| innocuous nature when stoutly squeezed and analyzed; 
| fire-eaters of the juggling kind, with special care taken 
| that the fire shall be harmless and that the danger shall lie 
| only in the fear of the spectators.  Now that duelling has 
| gone out of fashion, and discharged captains who have 
| signalized themselves in war are rare, our old 
| swashbuckler type of pumpkins has gone out both in fact 
| and fiction, on the stage and off it.  To be sure we have 
| few travellers of slightly apocryphal courage, and more 
| than doubtful accuracy, whose books of perilous 
| adventure and breathless dangers are to us what 
| Bombastes and Bobadil were to our fathers; and we have 
| Major Wellington de Boots with his military swagger and 
| his hare's heart.  But he is a very weak imitation of the 
| old fire-eater; and, on the whole, this special family of the 
| pumpkins has dwindled into insignificance, and their 
| place knows them no more.
| then there is the pumpkin after the cut of the Prince 
| Regent ~~ the man of deportment, big, handsome,
| <pb n="215">
| showy, and specially noticeable for a loud voice, a 
| broad chest, and an indescribable air of superiority and 
| command; the man who has studied bowing as one of the 
| fine arts, who walks with a swagger, and even now tips 
| his curly-brimmed hat slightly to the side.  This is the 
| kind of man who influences women.  Bombastes 
| frightens the nervous and inexperienced of his own sex, 
| but the man of deportment partly fascinates and partly 
| overawes the other.  They take him at his own valuation, 
| and have not skill enough to find out the flaw in the 
| summing up until perhaps it is too late, when they have 
| come so near to him that they are able to appraise him for 
| themselves, and have learnt by bitter experience of what 
| unsound materials he is made.  And then let him look out.  
| There is nothing women resent so much as pumpkin 
| manhood ~~ nothing which humiliates them more in their 
| own esteem than to discover that they have been taken in 
| by appearances, and that what they had believed in as 
| solid wood turns out to be only squash.
| Women like to rely on men, and dread nothing so much 
| as weakness and vacillation in their male protectors; save 
| indeed those grim and bulky females in whom Hood so 
| much delighted, and take small men <hi rend="italic"> 
| <f> vi et armis, </f> </hi> and subjugate them body and 
| soul, like two-legged poodles trained to fetch and carry at 
| the word of command.  But these are exceptions; the 
| average woman prizing strength rather than poodle-like 
| docility.  The pumpkin of the Prince
| <pb n="216">
| Regent cut is generally notorious for laying down the law 
| on all points.  His voice is so loud and his manner of 
| speech so dictatorial, that 
| <reg orig="no one"> no-one </reg> dreams of doubting still 
| less of contradicting him, but everybody takes him as he 
| represents himself to be ~~ a man of prompt decision, of 
| boundless resources, a granitic tower of strength to be 
| leant against in all emergencies without the slightest fear 
| of failure; a man who is not only sufficient for himself 
| but strong enough to bear the weaknesses of others.  He is 
| famous for giving advice ~~ advice of a vague, rapid, 
| sprawling kind, never quite exact to the circumstances, 
| never quite practical nor to the point ~~ large advice, 
| general in scope but wonderfully positive in tone, and, 
| until you analyze, grandly imposing in effect.  Nail him 
| to the point; ask his advice seriously on any question 
| where the responsibility of counsel will rest with him; 
| place yourself in his hands where the consequences of 
| failure will touch him as well as you; and then see to 
| what meagre dimensions your goodly gourd will shrink.  
| The confident assertion drops into a weak hesitation; the 
| arrogant dictum melts into a timid refusal to take such a 
| serious responsibility on himself; you have picked your 
| windbag, bisected your pumpkin, and henceforth you 
| know the precise weight of substance remaining.  Yet 
| mankind sees him exactly where he was before, and he 
| will go about the world in his large, loud way, saying to 
| <reg orig="every one"> everyone </reg> that if 
| you had followed his advice you would 
| have succeeded ~~ supposing you have failed;
| <pb n="217">
| or, if you have succeeded, he will take all the credit to 
| himself, and say it was he who guided you and showed 
| you how to go in and win.  For himself, and his own 
| affairs, he has no more moral stamina than he had 
| leadership for you and yours.  The least reverse knocks 
| him over.  Care or sorrow, when it touches him, shrivels 
| him up as completely as frost shrivels up the pumpkin.  In 
| every circumstance requiring promptitude, coolness, keen 
| perception, just decision, our swaggering man of froth 
| fails ignominiously; and one hour of real pressure proves 
| incontestably that he was only a pumpkin of imposing 
| presence, good neither as meat nor staff when the time of 
| trial came.
| Very often the pumpkin has a wife whose fibre is as close 
| as his is loose, and whose nature is as tough as his is soft; 
| a hard-eyed, thin-lipped, tenacious woman, who speaks 
| little and boasts not at all, but who does all she wishes to 
| do, and whose iron will pins her pumpkin to the wall as 
| the spear of the Bushman pins the elephant or the 
| rhinoceros.  It is very curious to see how a blatant 
| blustering man who is so loud and confident abroad, 
| knocks under at home; and how the high-crested 
| deportment which carries things with such a lofty bearing 
| out of doors droops into the meek submission of the 
| hen-pecked husband so soon as the house-door closes on him, 
| and he is subjected to the pitiless analysis of home.  
| There is no question of flourish then; and if by chance the 
| ambitious crest should make an effort
| <pb n="218">
| to display itself, the wife knows how to lower it by a few 
| decisive words of a keen-edged kind, and her pumpkin is 
| made to feel sharply enough the difference existing 
| between fibre and pulp.  It is almost melancholy to see 
| one of these fine flourishing fellows so subdued.  
| Pumpkin as he may be, it is not pleasant to see him so cut 
| down in his pride; and involuntarily one's sympathies go 
| with him rather than with that tenacious, hard-mouthed 
| wife of his, who would be none the worse perhaps for a 
| little of her husband's essential softness and with less than 
| her own hardness.
| How often too, these big fellows have no physical 
| stamina as well as but very shaky moral fibre!  A small, 
| wiry light-weight will do twice as much as they; not, of 
| course, where muscle only is wanted, but where the 
| question is of endurance.  Large heavy men knock up far 
| sooner than the light-weights; and though size and weight 
| count for something at certain times and on occasions, 
| fibre and tenacity go for more in the long run.  In the 
| Crimea, the men who first dropped off from exposure and 
| privation were the magnificently-built Guardsmen ~~ 
| men apparently bred and fed to the highest point of 
| physical perfection; while the undersized little liners, who 
| had nothing to be admired in them, stood the strain 
| gamely, and were brisk and serviceable when the others 
| were either dead or in hospital.  So far as we have gone 
| yet, we have not solved the problem of how to combine 
| toughness and bigness, solidity and size, but for
| <pb n="219">
| the most part fail in the one in proportion as we succeed 
| in the other.
| Many of the dark-skinned races are what we may call 
| emotional pumpkins.  Their flashing black eyes and 
| swarthy skins seem to be instinct with passion; they look 
| like living furnaces filled with flames and molten metal, 
| terrible fellows, dangerous to meddle with and almost 
| impossible to subdue.  But nine times out of ten we find 
| them to be marvelously meek persons, timid, amenable to 
| law, unable to give offence and incapable of taking it ~~ 
| lambs masquerading in tiger-skins.  A fair-faced 
| Anglo-Saxon, with his sensitive blush, good-humoured smile 
| and light blue eyes, has more pluck and pith in him than a 
| whole brigade of certain of these dark-skinned men.  He 
| has less ferocity perhaps than they when they are 
| thoroughly roused, though our good-humoured A
| Anglo-Saxon is by no means destitute of ferocity on occasions 
| when his blood is up; but his is ferocity of the 
| quarter-staff and bludgeon stand-up fight kind ~~ the ferocity
| of strength fairly put out against an adversary, not the 
| tigerish cruelty which is almost always found when moral 
| weakness and physical submission have a momentary 
| triumph and reaction.  Cowardly men are like women in 
| their revenge when once they get the upper hand; and 
| their revenge is more cruel than that of the habitually 
| brave man who, after a fair fight, overthrows his 
| opponent.  Some of the dark-skinned races look the very 
| ideal of the melodramatic ruffian ~~ operatic brigands 
| painted with
| <pb n="220">
| broad black lines, and up to any amount of deeds of 
| daring and of crime; but they are only pumpkins at the 
| core.  We need not go so far as Calcutta to find them; we 
| get examples nearer home, both in Houndsditch and in 
| Rome; for both Jews and Italians are soft-cored men in 
| spite of their passionate outsides, and both would be 
| better for an extra twist and toughness in their fibres.
| Intellectual pumpkins are as common as those of the 
| more specially physical kind.  You meet with 
| philosophers and <p> "thinkers" </p> ~~ perhaps they 
| are poets, perhaps politicians ~~ who flourish out a vague 
| big declamation which, when you reduce it to its essence, 
| you find to be a platitude worth nothing; whipped cream, 
| without any foundation of solid pudding.  If they are of 
| the philosophic sort, they quote you Fichte and Hegel, to 
| the bewilderment of your brains unless you have gone 
| into the metaphysical maze on your own account; but 
| they might have put all they have said into half a dozen 
| words of three letters, like a child's first reading lesson.   
| The flourish imposes, and people who cannot analyze 
| take the whipped cream for solid pudding, and think that 
| platitudes dressed in the garb of Fichte and Hegel are 
| utterances worthy of deep respect and admiring wonder.
| All the professions which talk, either by word of mouth 
| or in print, are specially given to this manifestation of 
| pumpkinhood.  Preachers and authors sprawl and flourish 
| over their small inheritance with a tremendous 
| assumption of vital force and vigorous
| <pb n"221">
| growth; and weak hands, with weaker heads, find support 
| and shelter in their foliage.  Poets too, with a knack for 
| turning out large moulds in which they have run very 
| small ideas, are pumpkins dear to the feminine mind.  
| Have we not our Tupper? had we not our "Satan" 
| Montgomery? and a few others whom we might 
| catalogue if we cared for the task, each with his 
| multifarious female following and his spiritual harem of 
| ardent admirers?  All artists ~~ that is, the men who 
| create, or rather who assume to create ~~ are liable to be 
| proved pumpkins when called onto show themselves 
| solid wood.  They talk grandly enough, but when they 
| have to translate their words into deeds, too often the 
| noble aims and immortal efforts they have been 
| advocating tail off into pulp and water, and we have 
| botches and pot-boilers instead of masterpieces and high 
| art.  Perhaps we may take it as a rule that all doers who 
| talk much and boast grandly are of the pumpkin order, 
| and that art, like nature, elaborates best in silence.
| Strong-visaged women are often pure pumpkins with a 
| very rough and corrugated outside.  It is astonishing how 
| soon they break down, and for all their stern and powerful 
| looks sink under burdens under which a frail little 
| creature, as light as thistledown, will glide along quite 
| easily.  Women with black brows and harsh voices ~~ 
| brigandesses by appearance, or like the typical Herodias 
| of unimaginative artists ~~ are often the gentlest and 
| most pithless of their sex, and may be seen acting quite 
| compassionately
| <pb n="222">
| towards their infants, or vindicating their womanhood by 
| meekly sewing on their husbands' buttons and weeping at 
| their rebukes; while a fair, silver-tongued, languid lady, 
| as soft as if she were made of nothing harder than the 
| traditional cream and rose-leaves, will give up her babies 
| as a prey to unfeeling nurses and let her husband go 
| buttonless and in rags, while she lounges before the fire 
| indifferent to his wrath and callous to his wrongs.  There 
| is many a house mistress who looks as if she could use 
| her fists when annoyed, who is absolutely afraid of her 
| servants; and the maid is always the mistress when the 
| one is fibre and the other pulp.
| Heaven be praised that the strong-visaged women are not 
| <p> "clear grit" </p> all through.  If they were as hard as 
| they look, the world would go but queerly, and society 
| would have to make new laws for the protection of its 
| weaker male members.  But nature is merciful as well as 
| sportive, and while she amuses herself by creating 
| pumpkins of formidable aspect, takes care that the core 
| shall not always correspond to the rind.  Like the 
| Athenian images of the satyr which enclosed a god, the 
| black-browed brigandesses and the men of magnificent 
| deportment are sometimes impostors of a quite amiable 
| kind; and when you have once learnt by heart the false 
| analogies of form, you will cease to fear your typical 
| Herodias, to be impressed by your copy of the Prince 
| Regent, or to be influenced by your wordy Hegelian 
| talking platitudes in the philosophic dialect.