POPULAR WOMEN.

The three chief causes of personal popularity among women are, the admiration which is excited, the sympathy which is given, or the pleasure that can be bestowed. We put out of court for our present purpose the popularity which accompanies political power or intellectual strength, this being due to condition, not quality, and therefore not of the sort we mean. Besides, it belongs to men rather than to women, who seldom have any direct power that can advance others, and still seldomer intellectual strength enough to obtain a public following because of their confessed supremacy. The popular women we mean are simply those met with in society—women whose natural place is the drawing-room and whose sphere is the well-dressed world—women who are emphatically ladies, and who understand les convenances and obey them, even if they take up a cause, practise philanthropy or preach philosophy. But the popular woman rarely does take up a cause or make her philanthropy conspicuous and her philosophy audible. Partizanship implies angles; and she has no angles. If of the class of the admired, she is most popular who is least obtrusive in her claims and most ingenuous in ignoring her superiority. A pretty woman, however pretty, if affected, vain, or apt to give herself airs, may be admired but is never popular. The men whom she snubs sneer at her in private; the women whom she eclipses as well as snubs do more than sneer; those only to whom she is gracious find her beauty a thing of joy; but as she is distractingly eclectic in her favouritism she counts as many foes as she has friends; and though those who dislike her cannot call her ugly, they can call her disagreeable, and do. But the pretty woman who wears her beauty to all appearance unconsciously, never suffering it to be aggressive to other women nor wilfully employing it for the destruction of men, who is gracious in manner and of a pleasant temper, who is frank and approachable, and does not seem to consider herself as something sacred and set apart from the world because nature made her lovelier than the rest—she is the woman whom all unite in admiring, the popular person par excellence of her set.

The popular pretty woman is one who, take her as a young wife (and she must be married), honestly loves her husband, but does not thrust her affection into the face of the world, and never flirts with him in public. Indeed, she flirts with other men just enough to make time pass pleasantly, and enjoys a rapid waltz or a lively conversation as much as when she was seventeen and before she was appropriated. She does not think it necessary to go about morally ticketed; nor does she find it vital to her dignity nor to her virtue to fence herself round with coldness or indifference to the multitude by way of proving her loyalty to one. Still, as it is notorious that she does love her husband, and as every one knows that he and she are perfectly content with each other and therefore not on the look-out for supplements, the men with whom she has those innocent little jokes, those transparent secrets, those animated conversations, that confessed friendship and good understanding, do not make mistakes; and the very women belonging to them forget to be censorious, even though this other, this popular woman, is so much admired.

This popular woman is a mother too, and a fond one. Hence she can sympathize with other mothers, and expatiate on their common experiences in the confidential chat over five o'clock tea, as all fond mothers do and should. She keeps a well-managed house, and is notorious for the amount of needlework she gets through; and of which she is prettily proud; not being ashamed to tell you that the dress you admire so much was made by her own hands, and she will give your wife the pattern if she likes; while she boasts of even rougher upholstery work which she and her maid and her sewing-machine have got through with despatch and credit. She gives dinners with a cachet of their own—dinners which have evidently been planned with careful thought and study; and she is not above her work as mistress and organizer of her household. Yet she finds time to keep abreast with the current literature of the day, and never has to confess to ignorance of the ordinary topics of conversation. She is not a woman of extreme views about anything. She has not signed improper papers and she does not discuss improper questions; she does not go in for woman's rights; she has a horror of facility of divorce; and she sets up for nothing—being neither an Advanced Woman desirous of usurping the possessions and privileges of men, nor a Griselda who thinks her proper place is at the feet of men, to take their kicks with patience and their caresses with gratitude, as is becoming in an inferior creature. She does not dabble in politics; and though she likes to make her dinners successful and her evenings brilliant, she by no means assumes to be a leader of fashion nor to impose laws on her circle. She likes to be admired, and she is always ready to let herself be loved. She is always ready too, to do any good work that comes in her way; and she finds time for the careful overlooking of a few pet charities about which she makes no parade, just as she finds time for her nursery and her needlework. And, truth to tell, she enjoys these quiet hours, with only her children to love her and her poor pensioners to admire her, quite as much as she enjoys the brilliant receptions where she is among the most popular and the most beautiful.

Her nature is gentle, her affections are large, her passions small. She may have prejudices, but they are prejudices of a mild kind, mainly on the side of modesty and tenderness and the quietude of true womanhood. She is woman throughout, without the faintest dash of the masculine element in mind or manners; and she aspires to be nothing else. She carries with her an atmosphere of happiness, of content, of spiritual completeness, of purity which is not prudery. Her life is filled with a variety of interests; consequently she is never peevish through monotony, nor yet, on the other hand, is she excited, hurried, storm-driven, as those who give themselves up to 'objects,' and perfect nothing because they attempt too much. She is popular, because she is beautiful without being vain; loving without being sentimental; happy in herself, yet not indifferent to others; because she understands her drawing-room duties as well as her domestic ones, and knows how to combine the home life with social splendour. This is the best type of the popular pretty woman to whom is given admiration, and against whom no one has a stone to fling nor a slander to whisper; and this is the ideal woman of the English upper-class home, of whom we still raise a few specimens, just to show what women may be if they like, and what sweet and lovely creatures they are when they are content to be as nature designed them.

Another kind of popular woman is the sympathetic woman, the woman who gives instead of receiving. This kind is of variable conditions. She may be old, she may be ugly; in fact, she is more often both than neither; but she is a universal favourite notwithstanding, and no woman is more sought after nor less wearied of, although few can say why they like her. She may be married; but generally she is either a widow or an old maid; for, if she be a wife, her sympathies for things abroad are necessarily somewhat cramped by the pressure of those at home;—and her sympathies are her claim to popularity. She is sincere too, as well as sympathetic, and she is safe. She holds the secrets of all her friends; but no one suspects that any before himself has confided in her. She has the art, or rather the charm, of perpetual spiritual freshness, and all her friends think in turn that the fountain has been unsealed now for the first time. This is not artifice; it is simply the property of deep and inexhaustible sympathy. It is not necessary that she should be a wise adviser to be popular. Her province is to listen and to sympathize; to gather the sorrows and the joys of others into her own breast, so as to soften by sharing or heighten by reduplication. Most frequently she is not over rigid in her notions of moral prudence, and will let a lovesick girl talk of her lover, even if the affair be hopeless and has been forbidden; while she will do her best to soothe the man who has had the misfortune to get crazed about his friend's wife. She has been even known, under pressure, to convey a message or a hint; and of the two she is decidedly more pitiful to sorrow than severe to wrong-doing. She is in all the misfortunes and maladies of her friends. No death takes place without her bearing part of the mourning on her own soul; but then no marriage is considered complete in which she has not a share. She is called on to help whenever there is work to be done, if she be of the practical type; if of the mental, she has merely to give up her own pleasures and her time that she may look on and sympathize. Every one likes her; every one takes to her at first sight; no one is jealous of her; and the law of her life is to spend and be spent for others. It not rarely happens though, that she who does so much for those others has to bear her own burden unassisted; and that she sits at home surrounded by those spectres of despair, those ghosts of sorrow, which she helps to dispel from the homes of others. But she is not selfish; and while she trudges along cheerfully enough under the heavy end of her friend's crosses, she asks no one to lay so much as a finger on her own. In consequence of which no one imagines that she ever suffers at all on her own account; and most of her friends would take it as a personal affront were she to turn the tables and ask for the smallest portion of that of which she had given so much to others. She is the moral anodyne of her circle; and when she ceases to soothe, she abdicates the function assigned to her by nature and dies out of her allotted uses.

Another kind of popular person is the woman whose sympathies are more superficial, but whose faculties are more brilliant; the woman who makes herself agreeable, as it is called—that is, who can talk when she is wanted to talk; listen when she is wanted to listen; take a prominent part and some responsibility or keep her personality in the background, according to circumstances and the need of the moment; who is eminently a useful member of society, and popular just in proportion to the pleasure she can shed around her. But she offends no one, even though she is notoriously sought after and made much of; for she is good-natured to all, and people are not jealous of those who do not flaunt their successes and whom popularity does not make insolent. The popular woman of this kind is always ready to help in the pleasure of others. She is a fair-weather friend, and shrinks with the most charming frankness from those on whom dark days have fallen. She is really very sorry when any of her friends fall out from the ranks, and are left behind to the tender mercies of those cruel camp-followers in the march of life—sorrow or sickness; but she feels that her place is not with them—rather with the singers and players who are stepping along in front making things pleasant for the main body. But if she cannot stop to smooth the pillows of a dying-bed, nor soothe the troubles of an aching heart, she can organize delightful parties; set young people to congenial games; take off bores on to her own shoulders, and even utilize them for the neutralization of other bores. She is good for the back seat or the front, as is most convenient to others. She can shine at the state-dinner where you want a serviceable show, or make a diversion in the quiet, not to say stupid, conglomerate of fogies, where you want a lively element to prevent universal stupor. She talks easily and well, and even brilliantly when on her mettle, but not so as to excite men's envy; and she has no decided opinions. She is a chameleon, an opal, changing ever in changing lights, and no one was yet able to determine her central quality. All that can be said of her is that she is good-natured and amusing, clever, facile, and ever ready to assist at all kinds of gatherings, which she has the knack of making go, and which would have been slow without her; that she knows every game ever invented, and is good for every sort of festivity; that she is always well-dressed, even-tempered, and in (apparently) unwearied spirits and superb health; but what she is at home, when the world is shut out, never troubles the thoughts of any. She is to society what the sympathetic woman is to the individual, and the reward is much the same in both cases. But unless the socially useful woman has been able to secure the interest of the sympathetic one, the chances are that, popular as she is now, she will be relegated to the side when her time of brilliancy has passed; and that, when her last hour comes, it will find her without the comfort of a friend, forsaken and forgotten. She is of the kind to whom sic transit more especially applies; and if her life's food has not been quite the husks, at all events it has not been good meat nor fine meal.