The Fading Flower

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Title:     The Fading Flower
Author: E. Lynn Linton [More Titles by Linton]

If there is any part of man's conduct which proves more conclusively than another the baseness of his ingratitude, it is his indifference to the Fading Flower. Woman may well wonder at the charm which prostrates the heavy Guardsman at the feet of the belle of the season. Even the most ardent of worshippers at such a shrine must, one would think, desire in their deity a little more sweetness and light. But the beauty of eighteen summers is trained to look on worship as simply her due, and to regard amiability as a mere superfluity. She knows she can summon an adorer by one beckon of her fan, and dismiss him by another. A bow will repay the most finished of pretty speeches, and conversation can be conducted at the least possible expense by the slight trouble of recollecting who was at Lady A.'s ball, and the yet slighter trouble of guessing who is likely to be at Lady C.'s.

It is utterly needless to bestow any labor on society when society takes it as a crowning favor to be suffered simply to adore. There is a certain grandeur, therefore, of immobility about the English beauty, a statuesque perfection which no doubt has great merits of its own. But it must be owned that it is not amusing, and that it is only the intensity of our worship which saves us from feeling it to be dull. Beauty is apt to be a little heavy on the stairs. A shade of distress flits over the loveliest of faces if we stray for a moment beyond the happy hunting-grounds of the ball-room or the Opera, the last Academy or the next Horticultural. Beautiful beings are made, they feel, not to amuse, but to be amused. The one object of their enthusiasm is the "funny Bishop" who turns a great debate into a jest for the entertainment of his fair friends in the Ladies' Gallery. The object of their social preference is the young wit who lounges up to tell his last little story, and then, without boring them for a reply, lounges away again. The debt which they owe to society is simply the morning ride which keeps them blooming through the season. The debt which society owes to them is that eternal succession of gay nothings which keeps London in a whirl till the grouse are ready for the sacrifice. In a word, woman in her earlier stages is simply receptive.

Light and sweetness come in with the Fading Flower. It is when the shy retreat of the elder sons makes way for the shyer approach of their younger brothers that woman becomes fragrant and intelligent. The old indifference quickens into a subdued vivacity; Hermione descends from her pedestal and warms into flesh and blood. She turns chatty, and her chat insensibly deepens into conversation. She discovers a new interest in life and in the last novel of the season. She ventures on the confines of poetry, and if she does not read Mr. Tennyson's Lucretius, she keeps his photograph in her album. She flings herself with a far greater ardor into the mysteries of croquet. She has been known to garden. As petal after petal floats down to earth she becomes artistic. She reads, she talks Mr. Ruskin. She has her own views on Venice and its Doges, her enthusiasm over Alps and artisans. The slow approach of autumn brings her to politics. She is deep in Mr. Disraeli's novels, and quotes Mr. Gladstone's Homer. She speculates on Charlie's chances for the county. She knows why the Home Secretary was absent from the last division. The drop of another petal warns her further afield. She is manly now; she comes in at breakfast with her hair about her ears, and a tale of the gallop she has had across country. She takes you over the farm, and laughs at your ignorance of pigs. She peeps into the odoriferous sanctum upstairs, and owns to a taste for cigarettes. She is slightly horsey, and knows to a pound the value of her mare. Another season, and she is interested in Church questions, and inquires what is the next "new thing" at St. Andrew's. She adores Lord Shaftesbury, or works frontals for St. Gogmagog. She collects for the Irish missions, or misses an entrée on Eves. It is only as woman fades that we realize the versatility, the inexhaustible resources, of woman.

The one scene, however, where the Fading Flower is perhaps seen at her best is the County Archæological Meeting. Of all rural delusions this is perhaps the pleasantest, and if the name is forbidding, the Fading Flower knows how little there is in a name. About half a dozen old gentlemen, of course, take the thing in grand earnest. It is beyond measure amusing to peep over the learned Secretary's shoulder, to see the gray heads wagging and the spectacles in full play over the list of promised papers, to watch the carefully planned details, the solemn array of morning meetings, the grave excursions from abbey to castle, from castle to church, the graver soirées where Dryasdust revels amidst armor and knicknackery. It is even more amusing to see the Fading Flower step in at the close of this learned preparation, and with a woman's alchemy turn all this dust to gold. A little happy audacity converts the morning meetings into convenient gatherings for the groups of the day, the excursion resolves itself into a refined picnic, the learned soirée becomes a buzzing conversazione.

Those who look forward with interest to woman's entrance into our Universities may gather something of the results to be expected from such a step in the fields of rural archæology. Her very presence at the meeting throws an air of gentle absurdity over the whole affair. It is difficult for the driest of antiquaries to read a paper on Roman roads in the teeth of a charming being who sleeps to the close, and then awakes only to assure him it was "very romantic." But it must be confessed that the charming being has very little trouble with the antiquaries. Half the fun of the thing lies in the ease and grace of her taming of Dryasdust; the learned Professor dies at her touch into "a dear delightful old thing," and fetches and carries all day with a perfect obedience. It is a delightful change from town, a sort of glorified afternoon in a pastoral Zoological, this junketing among the queer unclubbable animals of science and history. There is a noble disdain of rheumatism in the ardor with which they plunge into the dark and mysterious vaults where their willful student insists, with Mr. Froude, that those poor monks snatched their damp and difficult slumber; and there is a noble disdain of truth in their suppression of the treacherous and unsentimental "beer-cellar" which trembles on their lips.

Woman, in fact, carries her atmosphere of romantic credulity into the gray and arid scepticism of a groping archæology. She frowns down any suggestion of the improbability of a pretty story, she believes in the poison-sucking devotion of Queen Eleanor, she shrugs her shoulders impatiently at a whisper of Queen Mary's wig. Every kitchen becomes a torture-chamber, every drain a subterranean passage. But resolute as she is on this point of the poetry of the past, on all other questions she is the most docile of pupils. Her interest, her listening power, her curiosity, is inexhaustible. If she has a passion, indeed, it is for Early English. But she has a proper awe for Romanesque, and a singular interest in Third Pointed. She is ruthless in insisting on her victim's spelling out every word of a brass in Latin that she cannot understand, and which he cannot translate. She collects little fragments of Roman brick, and wraps them up in tissue-paper for preservation at home like bride-cake. She is severe on restoration, and merciless on whitewash. She plunges, in fact, gallantly into the spirit of the thing, but she gracefully denudes it of its bareness and pedantry. Her bugle sings truce at midday for luncheon. She couches in the deep grass of the abbey ruins, and gathers in picturesque groups beneath castle walls. A flutter of silks, a ripple of feminine laughter, distract the audience from graver disquisitions. It is difficult to discuss the exact date of a moulding when soda-water bottles are popping beneath one's antiquarian nose.

After all, archæologists are men, and sandwiches are sandwiches. It is at that moment perhaps that the Fading Flower is at her best. Her waning attractions are heightened artistically by the background of old fogies. Her sentiment blends with the poetry of the ruins around. The young squire, the young parson, who have been yawning under the prose of Dryasdust, find refreshment in the gay prattle of archæological woman. The sun too is overpowering, and a pretty woman leaning on one's arm in the leafy recesses of a ruined castle is sometimes more overpowering than the sun. There is much in the romance of the occasion. There is a little perhaps in the champagne. At any rate the Fading Flower blooms often into matronly life under the kindly influences of archæological meetings, and antiquarian studies flourish gaily under the patronage of woman.

There is a certain melancholy in tracing further the career of the Fading Flower. We long to arrest it at each of these picturesque stages, as we long to arrest the sunset in its lovelier moments of violet and gold. But the sunset dies into the gray of eve, and woman sets with the same fatal persistency. The evanescent tints fade into the gray. Woman becomes hard, angular, colorless. Her floating sentiment, so graceful in its mobility, curdles into opinions. Her conversation, so charmingly impalpable, solidifies into discussion. Her character, like her face, becomes rigid and osseous. She entrenches herself in the 'ologies. She works pinafores for New-Zealanders in the May Meetings, and appears in wondrous bonnets at the Church Congress. She adores Mr. Kingsley because he is earnest, and groans over the triviality of the literature of the day. She takes up the grievances of her sex, and badgers the puzzled overseer who has omitted to place her name on the register. She pronounces old men fogies, and young men intolerable. She throws out dark hints of her intention to compose a great work which shall settle everything. Then she bursts into poetry, and pens poems of so fiery a passion that her family are in consternation lest she should elope with the half-pay officer who meets her by moonlight on the pier. Then she plunges into science, and cuts her hair short to be in proper trim for Professor Huxley's lectures.

For awhile she startles her next neighbor at dinner with speculations on molluscs, and questions as to the precise names of the twelve hundred new species of fish that Professor Agassiz has caught in the river Orinoco. There is a more terrible stage when she becomes heretical, subscribes to the support of Mr. Tonneson and pities the poor Bishop of Natal. But from this she is commonly saved by the deepening of eve. Little by little all this restless striving against the monotony of her existence dies down into calm. The gray of life hushes the Fading Flower into the kindly aunt, the patient nurse, the gentle friend of the poor. It is hard to recognise the proud beauty, the vivacious flirt, the sentimental poetess of days gone by in the practical little woman who watches by Harry's sick-bed or hurries off with blankets and broth down the lane. In some such peace the Fading Flower commonly finds her rest--a peace unromantic, utilitarian, and yet not perhaps unbeautiful. She has found--as she tells us--her work at last; and yet in the life that seems so profitless she has been doing a work after all. She has at any rate vindicated her sex against the charge of what Mr. Arnold calls Hebraism. She has displayed in Hellenic roundness the completeness of the nature of woman.

Compared with the quick transitions, with the endless variety of her life, the life of man seems narrow and poor. There is hardly a phase of human thought, of human action, which she has not touched, and she has never touched but to adorn. If she has faded, she has revealed a new power and beauty and fragrance at each stage in her decay. Nothing in her life has proved so becoming as her leaving it. The song of ingenuity, of triumph, of defence, which has run along the course of her decline, softens at its close into a swan-song of peace and gentleness and true womanhood.

[The end]
E. Lynn Linton's essay: Fading Flower

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