FINE FEELINGS.

There are people who pride themselves on the possession of what it pleases them to call fine feelings. Perhaps, if we were all diligent to call spades spades, these same fine feelings would come under a less euphemistic heading; but, as things are, we may as well adopt the softening gloze that is spread over the whole of our language, and call them by a pretty name with the rest. People who possess fine feelings are chiefly remarkable for the ease with which they take offence; it being indeed impossible, even for the most wary of their associates, to avoid giving umbrage in some shape, and generally when least intended and most innocently minded. Nothing satisfies them. No amount of attention, short of absolute devotion and giving them the place of honour everywhere, sets them at ease with themselves or keeps them in good-humour. If you ask them to your house, you must not dream of mixing them up with the rest. Though you have done them an honour in asking them at all, you must give them a marked position and bear them on your hands for the evening. They must be singled out from the herd and specially attended to; introduced to the nicest people; made a fuss with and taken care of; else they are offended, and feel they have been slighted—their sensitiveness or fine feelings being a kind of Chat Moss which will swallow up any quantity of petits soins that may be thrown in, and yet never be filled. If they are your intimate friends, you have to ask them on every occasion on which you receive. They make it a grievance if they hear that you have had even a dinner party without inviting them, though your space is limited and you had them at your last gathering. Still, if it comes to their ears that you have had friends and did not include them, they will come down on you to a dead certainty if they are of the franker kind, and ask you seriously, perhaps pathetically, how they have offended you? If they are of the sullen sort they will meet you coldly, or pass you by without seeing you; and will either drift into a permanent estrangement or come round after a time, according to the degree of acidity in their blood and the amount of tenacity in their character. They have lost their friends many times for no worse offence than this.

They are as punctilious too, as they are exacting. They demand visit for visit, invitation for invitation, letter for letter. Though you may be overwhelmed with serious work, while they have no weightier burden strapped to their shoulders than their social duties and social fineries, yet you must render point for point with them, keeping an exact tally with not a notch too many on their side, if you want to retain their acquaintance at all. And they must be always invited specially and individually, even to your open days; else they will not come at all; and their fine feelings will be hurt. They suffer no liberties to be taken with them and they take none with others; counting all frock-coat friendliness as taking liberties, and holding themselves refined and you coarse if you think that manners sans façon are pleasanter than those which put themselves eternally into stays and stiff buckram, and are never in more undress than a Court suit. They will not go into your house to wait for you, however intimate they may be; and they would resent it as an intrusion, perhaps an impertinence, if you went into theirs in their absence. If you are at luncheon when they call, they stiffly leave their cards and turn away; though you have the heartiest, jolliest manner of housekeeping going, and keep a kind of open house for luncheon casuals. They do not understand heartiness or a jolly manner of housekeeping; open houses are not in their line and they will not be luncheon casuals; so they turn away grimly, and if you want to see them you have to send your servant panting down the street after them, when, their dignity being satisfied, their sensitiveness smoothed down and their fine feelings reassured, they will graciously turn back and do what they might have done at first without all this fuss and fume.

When people who possess fine feelings are poor, their sensitiveness is indeed a cross both for themselves and their friends to bear. If you try to show them a kindness or do them a service, they fly out at you for patronizing them, and say you humiliate them by treating them as paupers. You may do to your rich acquaintances a hundred things which you dare not attempt with your poor friends cursed with fine feelings; and little offices of kindness, which pass as current coin through society, are construed into insults with them. Difficult to handle in every phase, they are in none more dangerous to meddle with than when poor, though they are as bad if they have become successful after a period of struggle. Then your attention to them is time-serving, bowing to the rising sun, worshipping the golden calf, &c. Else why did you not seek them out when they were poor? Why were you not cap in hand when they went bare-headed? Why have you waited until they were successful before you recognized their value?

It is funny to hear how bitter these sensitive folks are when they have come out into the sunlight of success after the dark passage of poverty; as if it had been possible to dig them out of their obscurity when their name was still to make—as if the world could recognize its prophets before they had spoken. But this admission into the penetralia after success is a very delicate point with people of fine feelings, supposing always the previous struggle to have been hard; and even if there has been no struggle to speak of, then there are doubts and misgivings as to whether they are liked for themselves or not, and morbid speculations on the stability and absolute value of the position they hold and the attentions they receive, and endless surmises of what would be the result if they lost their fame or wealth or political power or social standing—or whatever may be the hook whereon their success hangs, and their fine feelings are impaled. The act of wisdom most impossible to be performed by these self-torturers is the philosophic acceptance of life as it is and of things as they fall naturally to their share.

Women remarkable for fine feelings are also remarkable for that uneasy distrust, that insatiable craving which continually requires reassuring and allaying. As wives or lovers they never take a man's love, once expressed and loyally acted on, as a certainty, unless constantly repeated; hence they are always pouting or bemoaning their loveless condition, getting up pathetic scenes of tender accusation or sorrowful acceptance of coolness and desertion, which at the first may have a certain charm to a man because flattering to his vanity, but which pall on him after a short time, and end by annoying and alienating him; thus bringing about the very catastrophe which was deprecated before it existed.

Another characteristic with women of fine feelings is their inability to bear the gentlest remonstrance, the most shadowy fault-finding. A rebuke of any gravity throws them into hysterics on the spot; but even a request to do what they have not been in the habit of doing, or to abstain from doing that which they have used themselves to do, is more than they can endure with dry-eyed equanimity. You have to live with them in the fool's paradise of perfectness, or you are made to feel yourself an unmitigated brute. You have before you the two alternatives of suffering many things which are disagreeable and which might easily be remedied, or of having your wife sobbing in her own room and going about the house with red eyes and an expression of exasperating patience under ill-treatment, far worse to bear than the most passionate retaliation. Indeed women may be divided broadly into those who cry and those who retort when they are found fault with; which, with a side section of those wooden women who 'don't care,' leaves a very small percentage indeed of those who can accept a rebuke good-temperedly, and simply try to amend a failing or break off an unpleasant habit, without parade of submission and sweet Griseldadom unjustly chastised, but kissing the rod with aggravating meekness.

For there are women who can make their meekness a more potent weapon of offence than any passion or violence could give. They do not cry, neither do they complain, but they exaggerate their submission till you are driven half mad under the slow torture they inflict. They look at you so humbly; they speak to you in so subdued a voice, when they speak to you at all, which is rarely and never unless first addressed; they avoid you so pointedly, hurrying away if you are going to meet them about the house, on the pretext of being hateful to your sight and doing you a service by ridding you of their presence; they are so ostentatiously careful that the thing of which you mildly complained under some circumstances shall never happen again under any circumstances, that you are forced at last out of your entrenchments, and obliged to come to an explanation. You ask them what is amiss? or, what do they mean by their absurd conduct? and they answer you 'Nothing,' with an injured air or affected surprise at your query. What have they done that you should speak to them so harshly? They are sure they have done all they could to please you, and they do not know what right you have to be vexed with them again. They have kept out of your way and not said a word to annoy you; they have only tried to obey you and to do as you ordered, and yet you are not satisfied! What can they do to please you? and why is it that they never can please you whatever they do? You get no nearer your end by this kind of thing; and the only way to bring your Griselda to reason is by having a row; when she will cry bitterly, but finally end by kissing and making up. You have to go through the process. Nothing else, save a sudden disaster or an unexpected pleasure of large dimensions, will save you from it; but as we cannot always command earthquakes nor godsends, and as the first are dangerous and the last costly, the short and easy method remaining is to have a decisive 'understanding,' which means a scene and a domestic tempest with smooth sailing till the next time.

Sometimes fine feelings are hurt by no greater barbarity than that which is contained in a joke. People with fine feelings are seldom able to take a joke; and you will hear them relating, with an injured accent and as a serious accusation, the merest bit of nonsense you flung off at random, with no more intention of wounding them than had the merchant the intention of putting out the Efreet's eye when he flung his date-stones in the desert. As you cannot deny what you have said, they have the whip-hand of you for the moment; and all you can hope for is that the friend to whom they detail their grievance will see through them and it, and understand the joke if they cannot. Then there are fine feelings which express themselves in exceeding irritation at moral and intellectual differences of opinion—fine feelings bound up in questions of faith and soundness of doctrine, having taken certain moral and theological views under their especial patronage and holding all diversity of judgment therefrom a personal offence. The people thus afflicted are exceedingly uncomfortable folks to deal with, and manage to make every one else uncomfortable too. You hurt their feelings so continually and so unconsciously, that you might as well be living in a region of steel-traps and spring-guns, and set to walk blindfold among pitfalls and water-holes. You fling your date-stone here too, quite carelessly and thinking no evil, and up starts the Efreet who swears you have injured him intentionally. You express an opinion without attaching any particular importance to it, but you hurt the fine feelings which oppose it, and unless you wish to have a quarrel you must retract or apologize. As the worst temper always carries the day, and as fine feelings are only bad tempers under another name, you very probably do apologize; and so the matter ends.

Other people show their fineness of feeling by their impatience of pain and the tremendous grievance they think it that they should suffer as others—they say, so much more than others. These are the people who are great on the theory of nervous differences, and who maintain that their cowardice and impatience of suffering means an organization like an Æolian harp for sensibility. The oddest part of the business is the sublime contempt which these sensitives have for other persons' patience and endurance, and how much more refined and touching they think their own puerile sensibility. But this is a characteristic of humanity all through; the masquerading of evil under the name of good being one of the saddest facts of an imperfect nature and a confused system of morals. If all things showed their faces without disguise, we should have fine feelings placed in a different category from that in which they stand at this moment, and the world would be the richer by just so much addition of truth.