THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume 13, Issue 1015, 19 January 1869, Page 3

THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD.

[The following article appeared some time sinco in the " Saturday Review." It created a great sensation at tho time, and many of our readers having suggested that it should appear in the columns of the Heeaid, we republish it accordingly.] Time was when the stereotyped phrase, " a fair young English girl," meant the ideal of womanhood, to us, at least, of home birth and breeding. It meant a creature generous, capable, and modest ; something franker than a French woman, more to be trusted than an Italian, as brave as an American, bufc more refined, as domestic as a German and more graceful. It meant a girl who could be trusted alone if need be, because of the innate purity and dignity of her nature, but who was neither bold in bearing nor masculine in mind ; a girl who, when she married, would be her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival ; one who would consider their interests identical, ancl not hold him as just so much game for spoil ; who would make his house his true home and place of rest, not a mere I passage-place for vanity and ostentation to go through : a tender mother, an industrious housekeeper, a judicious mistress. We prided ourselves as a nation on our women. We thought we had the ; pick of creation in this fair young English girl of ours, and envied no other men their own. We admired the languid grace and subtle fire of the South; the docility and childliko affectionateness of the East seemed to us sweet and simple and restful ; the vivacious sparkle of the trim and sprightly Parisienne was a pleasant little excitement when we met with ifc in its own domain ; but our allegiance never wandered from our brownhaired girls afc home, and our hearts were less vagrant than our fancies. This was in the "old time and when English girls were content to be what God and nature had made them. Of late years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the world a race of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal as if we had created another nation altogether. The girl of the period, and the fair young English girl of the past, have nothing in common save ancestry and their mother tongue ; and even of this last the modern version makes almost a now language, through the copious additions ifc has received from tho current slang of the clay. Tho girl of tho period is a creature who dyes her hair ancl paints her face, as the first articles of her personal religion; whose sole idea of life is plenty of fun and luxury ; and whose dress is the object of such thought and intellect as she possesses. Her main endeavour in this is to outvie her neighbours in tho extravagance of fashion. No matter whether, as in the time of crinolines, she sacrificed decency, or, as now, in the time of trains, she sacrifices cleanliness ; no matter either, whether she makes herself a nuisance and an inconvenience to every one she meets. The girl of the period has done away with such moral muffishness as consideration for others, or regard for counsel and rebuke. It was all very well in old fashioned times, when fathers and mothers had some authority and wero treatod with respect, to be tutored and made to obey, but she is far too fast ancl flourishing to be stopped in mid-career by these slow old morals ; and as she dresses to please herself, she does not care if she displeases every

one else. 'Noting and nothing too exaggerate,^ ted tristo ; and things whlejlvi& would be useful reforms if M||l£ne be* :• come monstrosities which they have displaced..s6; ! sp6n as she ]y begins to nianipulate ,Md impr.oye. If a 44 sensible fashion/lifts the gowk put oi the ' mud, she raises hers midway '|o her knee If the absurd structure of w-ire i- and buckram, once called a bonnet, is modified to something that shall protect . tiie . wearer's face without putting but the* eyesj of hep companion, she cuts{ hers down to four * straws and a rosebud, pr a tag of lace and a bunch of glass beads. If there is a reaction against an excess i .qf * Rowland's Macassar, and hair shiny and sticky with grease is thought less nice than] if left clean and healthily crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks hers put. on- .end like certain savages in Africa, or lets it wander down her back like Madge Wildfire's, and thinks herself all the more "beautiful the nearer she approaches ; in look to a maniac or a negress. With purity of!. taste she has lost also that far more precious purity and delicacy of preception/whicji sometimes mean more than appears on the surface. What the demi-monde^ /.dbei' in its frantic efforts to excite attention, she also does in imitation. If some fashionable devergmdee en evidence is reported to have come out with her dress, t}e_ow her shoulder-blades, md a gold 'strap, "for all the sleeve thought necessary, the; girl of the period follows suit next, day.; and then wonders tha,t men sometimes mistake her for her prototype, or that mothers of girls not quite so far gone as herself refuse her as a companion for" their daughters. She has blunted the fine edges of feeling so much that she cannot understand why she should be condemned for an imitation of form which does not include imitation of fact; she cannot be made to see that modesty of appearance and virtue ought to be inseparable, and that no good girl can afford to appear bad, under penalty of receiving the contempt awarded to the bad. """ This imitation of the d&mi-monde in dress leads to something in manner and feeling, not quite so pronounced, perhaps, but far too like to be honourable to herself or satisfactory to her friends. It leads to slang, bold talk, and fastness ; to the love of pleasure and indifference tp duty; to the desire of money ; before either love or happiness ; to nselessness at home, dissatisfaction with the ; monotony of ordinary life, and horror of all useful work ; in a word, to the worst; forms of luxury and selfishness, to the most.' fatal effects arising from want of high principle and absence of tender feeling. The girl of the period envies . the queens of the demi-monde far more than she abhors them. She sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously appointed, and she knows them to be flattered, feted,; and courted with a certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only the admiration while she ignores the disdain. They have all for which her soul is. : hungering, and she never stops to reflect at what a price they have bought their gains, and what fearful moral penalties they pay for their sensuous pleasures. She sees only the coarse gilding on the base token; and shuts her eyes to the hideous figure in the midst, and the foul legend written round the edge. It is this envy of the pleasures and indifference to the sins of these women of the demi-monde which is doing such infinite mischief to the modern girl. They brush too closely by each other, if not in actual deeds, yet in aims and feelings ; for the luxury which is bought by vice with the one is the thing of all in life most passionately desired by the other, though she is not yet prepared to payquite the same price. Unfortunately, she has already paid too much — all that once gave her distinctive national character. No one can say of the modern English girl that she is tender, loving, retiring, or domestic. The old fault so often found by keen-sighted Frenchwomen, that she was so fatally romcmesque, so prone to sacrifice appearances and social advantages 1 for love, will never be set down to the girl of the period. Love indeed is the last thing she thinks of, and the least of the dangers besetting her. Love in a cottage, that seductive dream which used to vex the heart and disturb the calculations of prudent mothers, is now a myth of past ages. The legal barter of herself for so much money, representing so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure — that is her idea ot marriage ; the only idea worth entertaining. For all seriousness of thought respecting the duties or the consequences of marriage, she has not a trace. If children come, they find but a stepmother's cold welcome from her; and if her husband thinks that he has married any thing that is to belong to him — a tacens et placens uxor pledged to make him happy— the sooner he wakes from his hallucination and understands that he has simply married some one who will condescend to spend his money on herself, and who will shelter his indiscretions behind the shield of his name, the less severe will be his disappointment. She has married his house, his carriage, his balance afc the banker's, his title ; and he himself is just the inevitable condition clogging the wheel of her fortune ; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated with more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the old-fashioned sort, nofc girls of the period pur so,ng, that marry for love, or put the husband before the banker. But she does not marry easily. Men are afraid of her ; and with reason. They may amuse themselves with her for an evening, but they do not take her readily for life. Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a poor copy of the real thing ; and fche real thing is far more amusing than the copy, because it is real. Men can get that whenever they like; and--^ when they _ro into their mothers' drawing rooms to see their sisters and their sisters' friends, they want something of quite different flavour. Toxojours perdrix is bad providing all the world over ; but a continual weak imitation of toujours perdrix is worse. If we must have only one kind of thing, let us have it genuine ; and the queens of Sfc. John's Wood in their unblushing honesty, rather than their imitators and make-believes in Bayswater and Belgravia. For, at whatever cost of shocked self-love or pained modesty it may be, it cannot be too plainly told to the modern English girl that the net result of her present manner of life is to. assimilate her as nearly as possible to a class of women whom we musfc nofc call by their proper or improper— name. And we are willing to boliovo that she has still some modesty of soul left hidden under all this effrontery of fashion, and that, if she could be made to see herself as she appears to the eyes of men, she would niend her ways before too. late. It is terribly significant of the present state of things when men are free to write as they do of tho women of their own nation. Every word of censure flung against them is two-edged, and wounds those who condemn as much as those who are condemned ; for surely it need hardly be said that men hold nothing so dear as' the honour of their women, and that np one living would willingly lower tho repute of his mother or sisters. It is only when these have placed themselves beyOnd^-h'e - pale of the masculine respect that siteb, things could be written as are. written, now ; when thoy become again what they- : were once they will gather round "thexii

m

v the love and homage and chivalrous devotioii Jf hioh were then an Englishwomen's • natc&al inheritance. The marvel, in the presenti fashion of life among women, is how it holds its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men. It used to be an bid-time notion that the sexes were made for each other, and that it was only natural for them to please each other, and j to set themselves out for that end. But the girl of the period does not please men. She pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how little she does that, the class of women she has taken as her models of itself testifies. All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and genuine girl of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties, to this loud, and rampant modernisation, with her false red hair and painted skin, talking slang as glibly as. a man, ahd by preference leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. She thinks she is piquante and exciting when she thus makes herself the bad copy of a worse original ; and she will not see that though then laugh with her they do not respect. '■•"'!lier>', though they flirt with her they do "- •"- not marry her ; she will not believe that 'she is not the kind of thing they want, ' and that she is acting against nature and her own interests when she disregards ,' their advice and offends their taste. We "do not see how she makes out her account, /viewing her life from any side ; but all we can do is to wait patiently until the national madness has passed, and our women have come back again to the old English ideal, onoe the most beautiful, the most modest, the most essentially womanly in the world.