THE BRITISH MATRON
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
I have heard a good deal of the tenacity with
which English ladies retain their personal
beauty to a late period of life; but (not to
suggest that an American eye needs use and
cultivation, before it can quite appreciate
the charm of English beauty at any age) it
strikes me that an English lady of fifty is
apt to become a creature less refined and
delicate, so far as her physique goes, than
anything that we Western people class under
the name of woman. She has an awful ponderosity
of frame, not pulpy, like the looser development
of our few fat women, but massive with solid
beef and streaky tallow; so that (though
struggling manfully against the idea) you
inevitably think of her as made up of steaks
and sirloins. When she walks, her advance is
elephantine. When she sits down it is on a
great round space of her Maker's footstool,
where she looks as if nothing could ever move
her. She imposes awe and respect by the
muchness of her personality, to such a degree
that you probably credit her with far greater
moral and intellectual force than she can
fairly claim. Her visage is usually grim and
stern, seldom positively forbidding, yet
calmly terrible, not merely by its breadth
and weight of feature, but because it seems
to express so much well-defined self-reliance,
such acquaintance with the world, its toils,
troubles, and dangers, and such sturdy capacity
for trampling down a foe. Without anything
positively salient, or actively offensive, or,
indeed, unjustly formidable to her neighbors,
she has the effect of a seventy-four-gun ship
in time of peace; for, while you assure yourself
that there is no real danger, you can not help
thinking how tremendous would be her onset, if
pugnaciously inclined, and how futile the effort
to inflict any counter-injury. She certainly
looks tenfold--nay, a hundredfold--better able
to take care of herself than our slender-framed
and haggard womankind; but I have not found
reason to suppose that the English dowager of
fifty has actually greater courage, fortitude,
and strength of character than our women of
similar age, or even a tougher physical endurance
than they. Morally, she is strong, I suspect,
only in society, and in the common routine of
social affairs, and would be found powerless
and timid in any exceptional strait that might
call for energy outside of the conventionalities
amid which she has grown up.
You can meet this figure in the street, and
live, and even smile at the recollection. But
conceive of her in a ball-room, with the bare,
brawny arms that she invariably displays there,
and all the other corresponding development,
such as is beautiful in the maiden blossom,
but a spectacle to howl at in such an over-blown
cabbage-rose as this.
Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must
be hidden the modest, slender, violet-nature of
a girl, whom an alien mass of earthliness has
unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in
her teens, though very seldom so pretty as our
own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a
certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately
folded leaves, and tender womanhood, shielded
by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or
other, our American girls often fail to adorn
themselves during an appreciable moment. It
is a pity that the English violet should grow
into such an outrageously developed peony as I
have attempted to describe. I wonder whether a
middle-aged husband ought to be considered as
legally married to all the accretions that have
overgrown the slenderness of his bride, since
he led her to the altar, and which make her so
much more than he ever bargained for! Is it not
a sounder view of the case, that the matrimonial
bond can not be held to include the three-fourths
of the wife that had no existence when the ceremony
was performed? And as a matter of conscience and
good morals, ought not an English married pair to
insist upon the celebration of a silver wedding
at the end of twenty-five years in order to
legalize and mutually appropriate that corporeal
growth of which both parties have individually
come into possession since they were pronounced
one flesh?
~~~~~~~ THE END ~~~~~~~
|
