E. Lynn (Elizabeth Lynn) Linton - The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays, Vol. 2 (of 2)

THE

GIRL OF THE PERIOD

ETC.

VOL. II.

[ Reprinted , by permission, from the Saturday Review ]

AND OTHER

Social Essays

BY
E. LYNN LINTON
AUTHOR OF 'THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS' 'UNDER WHICH LORD?'
'THE REBEL OF THE FAMILY' 'IONE' ETC.

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II.

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LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1883

[All rights reserved]

LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET

OF

THE SECOND VOLUME.

ESSAYS
UPON
SOCIAL SUBJECTS.

The picture of a gushing creature all heart and no brains, all impulse and no ballast, is familiar to most of us; and we know her, either by repute or by personal acquaintance, as well as we know our alphabet. But we are not so familiar with the idea of the gushing man. Yet gushing men exist, if not in such numbers as their sisters, still in quite sufficient force to constitute a distinct type. The gushing man is the furthest possible removed from the ordinary manly ideal, as women create it out of their own imaginations. Women like to picture men as inexorably just, yet tender; calm, grave, restrained, yet full of passion well mastered; Greathearts with an eye cast Mercywards if you will, else unapproachable by all the world; Goethes with one weak corner left for Bettina, where love may queen it over wisdom, but in all save love strong as Titans, powerful as gods, unchangeable as fate. They forgive anything in a man who is manly according to their own pattern and ideas. Even harshness amounting to brutality is condoned if the hero have a jaw of sufficient squareness, and mighty passions just within the limits of controlas witness Jane Eyre's Rochester and his long line of unpleasant followers. But this harshness must be accompanied by love. Like the Russian wife who wept for want of her customary thrashing, taking immunity from the stick to mean indifference, these women would rather have brutality with love than no love at all.

But a gushing man, as judged by men among men, is a being so foreign to the womanly ideal that very few understand him when they do see him. And they do not call him gushing. He is frank, enthusiastic, unworldly, aspiring; perhaps he is labelled with that word of power, 'high-souled;' but he is not gushing, save when spoken of by men who despise him. For men have an intense contempt for him. A woman who has no ballast, and whose self-restraint goes to the winds on every occasion, is accepted for what she is worth, and but little disappointment and less annoyance is felt for what is wanting. Indeed, men in general expect so little from women that their follies count as of course and only what might be looked for. They are like marriage, or the English climate, or a lottery ticket, or a dark horse heavily backed, and have to be taken for better or worse as they may turn out, with the violent probability that the chances are all on the side of the worse.

But the gushing man is inexcusable. He is a nuisance or a laughing-stock; and as either he is resented. In his club, at the mess-table, in the city, at home, wherever he may be and whatever he may be about, he is always plunging headlong into difficulties and dragging his friends with him; always quarrelling for a straw; putting himself grossly in the wrong and vehemently apologizing afterwards; hitting wild at one moment and down on his knees the next, and as absurd in the one attitude as he is abject in the other. He falls in love at first sight and makes a fool of himself on unknown ground while with men he is ready to swear eternal friendship or undying enmity before he has had time to know anything whatever about the object of his regard or his dislike. In consequence he is being perpetually associated with shaky names and brought into questionable positions. He is full of confidence in himself on every occasion, and is given to making the most positive assertions on things he knows nothing about; when afterwards he is obliged to retract and to own himself mistaken. But he is just as full of self-abasement when, like vaulting ambition, he has overleaped himself and fallen into mistakes and failures unawares. He makes rash bets about things of which he has the best information; so he says; and will not be staved off by those who know what folly he is committing, but insists on writing himself down after Dogberry at the cost of just so much. He backs the worst player at billiards on the strength of a chance hazard, and bets on the losing hand at whist. He goes into wild speculations in the city, where he is certain to land a pot of money according to his own account and whence he comes with empty pockets, as you foretold and warned. He takes up with all manner of doubtful schemes and yet more doubtful promoters; but he will not be advised. Is he not gushing? and does not the quality of gushingness include an Arcadian belief in the virtue of all the world?

The gushing man is the very pabulum of sharks and sharpers; and it is he whose impressibility and gullible good-nature supply wind for the sails of half the rotten schemes afloat. Full of faith in his fellows, and of belief in a brilliant future to be had by good luck and not by hard work, he cannot bring himself to doubt either men or measures; unless indeed his gushingness takes the form of suspicion, and then he goes about delivering himself of accusations not one of which he can substantiate by the weakest bulwark of fact, and doubting the soundness of investments as safe as the Three per Cents.

In manner the gushing man is familiar and caressing. He may be patronizing or playful according to the bent of his own nature. If the first, he will call his superior, My dear boy, and pat him on the back encouragingly; if the second, he will put his arm schoolboy fashion round the neck of any man of note who has the misfortune of his intimacy, and call him Old fellow, or Governor, or rex meus, as he is inclined. With women his familiarity is excessively offensive. He gives them pet names, or calls to them by their Christian names from one end of the room to the other, and pats and paws them in all fraternal affectionateness, after about the same length of acquaintanceship as would bring other men from the bowing stage to that of shaking hands. His manners throughout are enough to compromise the toughest reputation; and one of the worst misfortunes that can befall a woman whose circumstances lay her specially open to slander and misrepresentation is to include among her friends a gushing man of energetic tendencies, on the look-out to do her a good turn if he can, and anxious to let people see on what familiar terms he stands with her. He means nothing in the least degree improper when he puts his arm round her waist, calls her My dear and even Darling in a loud voice for all the world to hear; or when he seats himself at her table before folk to write her private messages, which he makes believe to be of so much importance that they must not be spoken aloud, and which are of no importance at all. He is only familiar and gushing; and he would be the first to cry out against the evil imagination of the world which saw harm in what he does with such innocent intent.