3 OCTOBER 1891, Page 9

PRETTY SIMPLETONS.

WE had thought that the cult of the pretty simpleton had died away, like the cult of " sensibility " which distinguished Miss Austen's time, and with it the fear of the pretty woman of cultivation. We notice, however, that Mrs. Snoad, President of the Women's Progressive Society, at the end of a most sensible, and indeed able, letter advising girls what to do if they find life too monotonous, published in the Daily News of Tuesday, thinks it necessary to remind them and their mothers that young women with brains and energy to use them do get married. We hear, too, on many sides that the old dread which thirty years since so greatly checked the progress of women's education, has again revived, and that a wave of opinion is warning mothers and young women that culture makes the latter too "formidable " to young men, and that "the clever ones" miss the most natural and most fitting of women's careers. They get appointments sometimes, but they never get proposals. We believe that the facts are misrepre- sented, and that the fear, which if well founded would rightly check education, is almost entirely without foundation. Having watched the movement in favour of female education from the beginning with entire impartiality—that is, with a keen dis- like for the " advanced " women who want, as Mr. Frederick Harrison says, to be "abortive men," to vote, and to ride astraddle, and to discuss "The Kreutzr Sonata," and a strong sympathy for the women who desire culture, and gainful work, and control of their own money—we think we may say con- fidently that to the latter, their grand profession, marriage, is in no way debarred. Attractions for attractions, they are courted just as much as their foolish sisters. They are flirted with less, partly because very young men demand in those they flirt with a certain amount of silliness, so that in flirting there may be no demand upon the intellect, and partly because of a fault of manner of which we speak below ; but they receive just as many serious proposals. The men who can marry, and who nowadays are usually thirty-three—a social misfortune, owing mainly to the late period at which the successful now retire from active life —are men of a certain experience, and by no means fools. They are attracted by good looks, whether in the foolish or the wise virgins, and are carried away by unusual beauty, as they were in the days of Helen, and will be when the world cools ; but they are quite conscious of the advantage possessed by the sensible and the cultivated. They know what terrible bores ignorant girls can be—we do not mean by "ignorance" mere want of familiarity with learning—how utterly un- reasonable they often are, and how much more liable they are in middle life to grow acrid, snappish, or posi- tively ill-tempered. There is no one so perverse as the woman without intellectual interests whose situation happens to be at variance with her ideas of comfort, or who, being comfortable, is conscious of the faint contempt, or rather, slight avoidance, of those around her. Women are perfectly well aware when men listen from politeness alone, and those among them to whom that lot falls grow as bitter as some disappointed spinsters. The men of thirty-three know per- fectly well how great a part friendship plays in married life, how it deepens affection, and how difficult it is to feel friendship for a woman whose early charm has passed, who does not understand one word in six you say, and who can neither sympathise with failure, nor understand why you have succeeded. Camaraderie, one of the most delightful of all the bonds of union, is impossible between the able and the silly. The men, too, are aware that it is the clever girls, not the simpletons, who are free from the senseless extravagance which is perhaps, of all the foibles which are not exactly vices, the most permanently irritating in wives. That thing at least cul- ture has done for the majority of cultured women, it has taught them how to count. Here and there, perhaps, may be found the " Nina " of Mr. Norris's clever story, "Matrimony," the competent and cultured woman to whose selfishness expendi- ture seems a necessity, and who is only not extravagant when she has six thousand a year, who will plunder her father with- out remorse, and keep her mother without a shilling; but the immense majority of cultivated girls are economical. Frugality is their road to independence. They could not live their lives if they cost their fathers too much, and they learn to know the value of pounds, to avoid debt with horror, and to see that discount is allowed them if they pay ready-money. They are not, perhaps, devoted to " housekeeping " as some of the un- lettered are, meaning, three times out of five, endless and harassing interference with their servants ; but they can keep house, when they know their incomes, at an outlay well within them. The men understand that by a kind of instinct, our system of courtship allowing little chance of real knowledge— the American system does, and the Canadian—and they know, too, another thing which appeals still more directly to their self- love. They know what it is to be bored. There is no bore on earth equal to the woman who can neither talk nor listen, who has no mental interests in common with her husband, who thinks his friends satirical because they attend to her with a faint sense of amused amazement, and who gathers round her all women except those whose intelligence relieves life of its monotony and sense of strain. We should add that the men we are •speaking of are aware also that, of the two, the educated are the more affectionate, but that we know this might be a subject of endless argument. Thousands of men, otherwise heartily with us, would deny it, remembering that a strain of stupidity in sisters or mothers had been com- patible with deep affection, and forgetting that, as between husband and wife, comprehension is almost essential, we will not say quite essential, to a self-sacrificing regard, more especially when the man is, as so many men are, of the rather " trying " sort. Carlyle is the only man we can think of whose inmost life it is not an impertinence to quote, and no stupid woman could have loved Carlyle for three weeks on end. The one stupid woman, or, at all events, uncultured woman, who tried to love Shelley—of course a most extreme

instance, moths and stars being separated by irresistible fiat —made a horrid mess of the business.

This is not a "society "paper, and we shall not be guilty of the vulgarity of adducing the hundred instances known to all men in the last thirty years in which the "great matches" of the world have fallen to the women with cultivated brains, though we suppose we may mention that in the most striking instance of modern life, the rise of Mademoiselle de Montijo, her beauty was not her only charm—the Empress never could spell French, but her letters are as good as any but the best of Madame Mohl's—but we think any old lady who remembers society would give evidence of the fact. Nothing can com- pensate with most " askers," as Mrs. Oliphant calls men who are seeking wives, for decided meanness or insignificance of appearance, unredeemed even by eyes or bearing ; but apart from that, and from the intense self-absorption which study induces' in a few women—a misdirection of the habit of concentration—the reason for the dread of neglect by men now once again expressed by mothers, is, we believe, to be explained without much difficulty. The girls of culture are too frank of speech, contradict men, unless much and visibly their elders, too often and too bluntly, and are thereupon condemned as "formidable." This habit, for it is nothing worse, does not proceed in them, as it does in most men, from either arrogance, or temper, or want of self-control, for they do not display it towards women, even when intellectually their inferiors. It proceeds from delight in intellectual independence, from an unexpected sense of mental equality which must be made audible, even in a tots-a- tete, to be thoroughly enjoyed. The girl does not want to be rude, or snubbing, or even pert, but only to be separate, to say her own saying and think her own thought, and avoid being "merged," as we once heard it expressed, in any way whatever. "I can think for myself" she feels, "and I like doing it," and she contradicts flatly in order to make herself quite certain. You will see a son do it to his father, or a clever lad to his tutor, from precisely the same motive ; but men who are on an equality rather avoid it, striving rather to differ utterly under cover of some formula of assent, and disliking the Hazlitt way—he used to contradict everybody, even the watchman when calling the hour—and they dislike it in women most particularly. Even very sensible young men of experience will retreat before it with a sense of disappoint- ment and choler, and never again, unless by accident, give the girl who has tried, as they think, to "put them down" a chance of showing that she was attempting nothing of the kind. The habit is a mere gesture in reality, a colt's kick of pleasure in the free field, and not, as it often is in old women, a sign of vicious temper ; but it constantly ruins a bright girl's chances, and has done much to create in society an im- pression which is, we feel satisfied, on the evidence of facts, entirely unfounded. The cultivated girls have, in fact, a trick of thinking that argument is conversation, and that contra- diction shows mental fearlessness, which men, even tolerant men, never quite like, and very seldom recognise for what it is, a mental " way " of young and able women, not half so bad to bear as a precisely similar trick of the stupider sort, the habit of speaking in little breaks of underlined italics. That is a trick, too ; but while the former recognises implicitly the competence of the interlocutor, and is, in truth, a raspy compliment, the other always means that, in the judgment of the woman who vocally underlines, you will, but for her emphasis, be sure in your crassitude to miss all her finest points. Contradiction in a girl is as often as not a mere sign of joy in intellectual freedom, while vocal underlining is usually a sign of the narrowest self-conceit. Innocent as the former habit may be, however, it ought to be got rid of; for cultivated young women may rely on it that it is the main reason, after the intellectual antics of the "advanced," why mothers are once more apt to believe that ignorance increases their daughters' chance of making a good match.