" F LTSS-CATS."
ALITTLE while ago we wrote about " copy-oats," and con- eluded that they had few virtues. Humanity bears a favour to dogs and cats, but the moment they appear in metaphor they lose their characters. Metaphorical cats are, however, a little redeemed by a hyphen. A " copy-cat" is not as bad as a "cat," and a " fuss-cat " may be quite a nice person. There is, in fact, an air of aspiration about a fuss-cat. Almost all fuss-cats are, in a sense, idealists. In their small and tiresome way they are always agitating for some sort of reform, or struggling to forestall some impending evil in a manner to mitigate it. They have, as a rule, an active conscience and a keen, critical faculty, together with a paralysing desire for what they consider perfection, but what really is symmetry upon a small scale. They aro for over trying to make the world conform to their pretty pattern. No one ever, heard of any one who made a great fuss in a bad cause. The fuss. maker is almost always following his own spluttering and ill-smelling light as best he may.
The best fuse-cats are openly and perpetually exercised about small moral questions. They are always fussing about their own duty. To use a Scotch expression, they are everlast- ingly " yammering " on the side of virtue. Very often they acquire a good deal of merit, but very often, alas ! their souls become attenuated through worry till they are so morally nervous that they have no initiative at all, and spend their time between indecision and remorse. The worst fuss-cats worry about other people's duty and are so censorious as to unfit them altogether for social life. They cannot learn to overlook. These fuss-cats are called naggers in another rank of life. They are the cause of many crimes, not excluding murder; but they are not bad people, as any just-minded man who knows them will admit— that is, if he lives no nearer to them than next door. The vulgarest comic papers give evidence that they nag on the right side and witness unconsciously for the fuss-cats. By the by, the larger number of fuss-cats in the highest and the lowest class are women—men suffer little from scrupulosity and they seldom nag. Not that the nagging man is unknown. When a man does nag he nags worse than any woman. Certain men in a position of small authority will drive their underlings wild. The present writer knew a butler, or rather " a single-handed man," who was assisted in his duties by a boy. Morning, noon, and night did the single-handed man scold the boy. Unlike a woman he did not raise his voice. Again, unlike a woman he did not cease. Strangers who passed the pantry window imagined that he was reading aloud, so calm and continuous was the flow of fault-finding. The effect upon the boy was undoubtedly bad. He sought no revenge, but he hardened his heart and became impervious to any other form of verbal correction. He worked like a, machine, and when no longer wound up by the butler's nag- ging he ceased to go at all, and became utterly idle. He is young, and may yet recover, but what if he had been the butler's wife P Oddly enough, one never hears of a woman who has murdered her husband for nagging, though un- doubtedly men sometimes murder their wives for it. The truth is that a woman who nags at her husband humiliates him, none the less because she is, as a rule,• in the right, while a man who nags at his wife humiliates himself--• and it is humiliation which really hurts, and which rouses un- controllable hate. It is possible for a woman to pity a nagging man, even though she be married to him. We doubt the possibility of pity where the situation is reversed.
Scrupulosity, we think, never accompanies a strong and healthy sense of justice. It troubles those who desire to do more than well, to do (as we once heard an old man say) " more than God set them "—whose moral will is strong and eager, but whose intellectual moral perception is occasionally and consciously blurred. A great many canonized saints had they lived to-day might have been called "fuss-cats." After all, the world will never suffer from too many of these good people, though they only belong to one sex. Of course the commonest cause of the "to do" made by the "fuss-eat " is apprehension. Fussing is a form of ex- pression frequently taken by fear. No one can help being apprehensive, though it is perhaps possible to help showing it. Those who have ears to hear the menace of the future must hear it. We are constantly told that happiness cannot be defined, yet we believe a vast number of people could describe it as the heightening of present pleasure to the point at which it appears to cut off all connexion with approaching to-morrows. The state of well being in which one cannot think forward—that is happiness for the fuss-cat !
That is the moment when the fuss-cats purr—those fuss-cats, we mean, who fuss from fear. Fear is not a sentiment of which any one can be proud, but a great many fuss-eats are no cowards. They fear for other people very often much more than for themselves. They chafe under responsibility though they never refuse it. To the charge of the young they are singularly ill-suited. Children have no sympathy with them. Anxiety is pain which attacks only the mature. They see the world during their frequent accesses of excitement as a stage for accidents, a hotbed of infection, and a perfect hell of temptations. They babble out their terrors from sheer nervous excitement, and the strain renders them liable to a particular form of superstition. When it is pointed out to them that their fears were idle and all has gone well they begin secretly to suspect that by the expression of those fears they have avoided the evil eye of fate, and they express them once more at the next crisis in the hope of propitiating the powers of mischief.
To be faced by a sudden necessity for the smallest act of organization turns some perfectly calm people into fuss-cats.
They become confused and lose their heads as truly as if they had found themselves upon a height. They cannot look down upon two or three other people and tell them what to do.
They have common sense and self-control enough for their own individual use, but when any outside call is made upon these excellent qualities they are at once bankrupt. Even to arrange a journey or an expedition in which more than one person is concerned agitates them. They cannot take com- mand in the smallest social crisis. If they would but confess themselves incapable all would he well, but they never do.
Now and then a remarkably strong fuss-cat—a Tom fuss-cat as a rule—will throw a veil of facetiousness over his fussing.
The effort made should appeal to every generous heart. 'Unfortunately, generous hearts are so often accompanied by bad nerves, and there is something peculiarly rasping about facetious fuss.
Are there any fuss-cats who simply make a fuss because they like it—in other words, because they know no better way of being conspicuous! We think there are; but all motives are mixed, and this desire for conspicuousness is mixed, as a rule, with some good. They want to be conspicuous for virtue. The people who would move heaven and earth to get some infinitesimal wrong righted do enjoy some of the pure pleasure which is the lot of the real reformer. They enjoy the providence game. The horribly irritating fuss- cats who spend their time looking for misprints and mistakes of a hardly more important kind feel that they are helping the world forward to perfection; like the Pharisees, "they have their reward." They do not know that they are actuated chiefly by the fear of being overlooked. Their sense of pro- portion is nil, but they are on the side of right and accuracy after all.
Everybody likes easy-going people, even if they are bad. Fuss-cats must not hope for more than forgiveness, however good they are. For all that, while high-mindedness will often make a man easy-going, absolute want of ideal will pro- duce what appears at first sight to be the same result. Magnanimity and indifference are superficially alike. A great many easy-going people have no feeling whatever. They are, as it were, under-vitalized. They cannot be agitated because they do not care. The simple machinery of their minds is liable to no disorder. They have no ideals ; con- sequently they do not strive after them, and no one is annoyed by the sight and sound of their efforts. Fuss-cats will always get all the blame they deserve, and make a fuss about it and so lose the pity they might have; for all that, we maintain that fussing is the disease of the good, not of the good and great, but of the good and little—to whose ranks most of us in our more clear-sighted moments, when we are neither deluded by dreams nor misled by remorse, believe that we belong.
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