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?
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