Originally published in The Windsor Magazine (Ward, Lock & Bowden Ltd.) vol.1 #1 (Jan 1895).
Without being as nervous as a débutante at a Drawing-Room, a new Magazine which presents itself at the Court of the British public may confess to a certain fascinating timidity. The young Magazine has to carry its own train (we resist the temptation to suggest that its train is carried by pages) with becoming diffidence, and yet with an assurance of substantial claims to favour.
There are some periodicals, no doubt, which bounce into popularity by the power of mere flourish, just as a girl whose charms are of a somewhat bold type makes a masculine circle captive to an audacious freshness. We are old-fashioned enough to regard that kind of success with a distrustful eye. When the first flush of conquest is over, it does not wear well. The audacity remains, but the freshness goes off. Far more likely to endure is the less obtrusive beauty which steals into the manly heart by a postern gate, while its rival is flaunting a transient triumph on the battlements.
In these days of adventurous womanhood, a certain beseeching coyness may be pronounced a little out of date; yet we have greater faith in it as a means of subjugation than in more ambitious pretensions. Behold, then, the Windsor Magazine making its obeisance to its Sovereign and to the public alike, mingling devotion to the gracious Lady on the throne and to her three direct heirs, whose portraits are here presented, with loyalty to some of the best and widest interests of her subjects.
Amongst those interests we do not class everything that ministers to a fermenting curiosity. The spurious novelty of one year is apt to be the neglected fossil of the next. Nothing ages so fast as the "new movement," which takes no account of the silent forces of nature, and is gone while its proclamation of a revolution or the millennium is still in our ears. The butterfly, emerging from the chrysalis, probably thinks that a new heaven and a new earth have been created for its benefit, but whole epochs of butterflies witness no material change in the universe.
To say that the New Woman is a butterfly would be to do some injustice to a meritorious insect, for the New Woman is apt to be unlovely, and to make her brief sojourn amongst us hideous with discordant cries. We do not propose to encourage her in the illusion that she is a permanent factor in social development, and is working victoriously for the regeneration of man by the equality of the sexes. The only service she renders to man is to provide him with cynical entertainment, while she fondly imagines that his natural supremacy is seriously in question.
The true responsibilities of woman do not vary; they demand a deep and lasting respect which man is eager to accord; they assert in a considerable sphere an authority which he does not dispute; they are infinitely helpful to the race by virtue of an enlarged education which he does not grudge; but they cannot supersede the fundamental law which gives to him alone the arbitrament of the force that makes the basis of government. When the New Woman announces that she is the equal, if not the superior, of man, she overlooks the important though prosaic fact that in the last extremity he is the stronger animal. It is he and not she who, in the struggle for existence, which the most exalted humanitarian cannot disguise, must be the chief bread-winner, who must bear the greatest physical strain, who must defend the country against invasion, who must decide the issues of peace and war.
Many women, it is true, have to earn their own livelihood, and to acquire through much suffering the needful self-reliance for independent toil; but the ordinance of nature still holds good, for few women will undertake this task when they can get men to do it for them—men whom they can rule through the affections, and bind with the tender ties of the family and the home.
It is to the home that the Windsor Magazine desires specially to appeal. This is not an original ambition. There are contemporaries which have long been labouring in the same vineyard. We wish them well; but if we may exercise the candour of a new-comer, we would suggest that their office in the vineyard is not always grateful to man and woman resting from labour, and yearning for some spiritual stimulus under the roof-tree or the fig-tree.
There is no moral necessity for a home magazine to be tedious, to regale the wife with solemn precepts when she wants to be cheered, and the husband with domestic little tales which never touch the strong currents of life. There is a lamentable lack of humour in the notion that the minds of men and women can be improved, and their souls comforted, by these obvious devices. The leisurely trail of the tract can be only too plainly discerned in literature of this kind. There is a lingering belief amongst its purveyors that sound principles of conduct are best nurtured on spoon-meat, and that nothing is so dangerous to the home as the intrusion of topics which stir the intelligence to issues more remote than the front door.
This theory of the family hearth treats it as a sanctuary which is constantly threatened by prowling wolves in the shape of ideas from the outer world. To keep these more or less at bay, the family when abroad must suspend the faculty of observation altogether, and when at home must endeavour to obscure and stupefy it with improving legends which belong to any sphere except that of experience. The effects of this ostrich policy may be seen in the craving of many a boy for the pernicious trash which feeds a starved imagination on the wrong food. Just as the sheer dulness of a squalid life drives a man to poisonous alcohol, so the narrow doctrine of the domestic sanctuary begets in a young fancy the distorted passion for excitement. The glamour of the world, the great mysterious movement beyond the borders of the home, must hold a healthful sway over youthful dreams, or it will turn them to nightmare and disease.
So the chief purpose of the Windsor Magazine is to illuminate the hearth with genial philosophy, to widen its outlook, to give it a reasonable attitude of inquiry towards the problems of the time, to make it crackle with the good humour which is born of true tolerance, and puts to flight the exaggerated self-consciousness of aggressive virtue.
But the dominant note of this Magazine will be buoyant. We have no native affinity with megrims. From the literary and social standpoint, the microbe seems to us an overrated creature, and we take no æsthetic satisfaction in the tenth transmission of folly or corruption. Why should the hearth be sicklied o'er by those unheavenly twins, Hysteria and Hypochondria?
In our first number begins a serial story, "A Bid for Fortune," by Mr. Guy Boothby, a writer who has given proof of his capacity to keep alight in fiction the camp-fires of adventure. Though despised of Mr. Howells, the adventure story has an abiding fascination for households in which nothing eventful ever happens, for the world is not yet so completely cured of marvels that every novelist is reduced to evolving analytic significance from the buttons of the heroine's shoe!
Another serial story which begins in this number is "The Gray Lady," by Mr. Henry Seton Merriman. We have an unshaken faith in the capacity of the hearth to follow two serials without mixing them, as well as the short stories by Mr. Arthur Morrison, who will be reinforced later by that redoubtable enemy of gloom, Mr. Barry Pain. And if anyone can read Mr. Norman Gale's lyrics without feeling in his blood the sunshine of the meadow and the sap of the orchard, he may be assured that the ravages of melancholy need heroic treatment. He had better study Mr. Frank Shorland, who will tell him that to the cyclist it is given to ride without black Care on the crupper.
But the Windsor Magazine offers no monopoly to man. The hearth, on its feminine side, will take a serious interest in educational questions, and especially in a project which deeply concerns the welfare of women. We submit elsewhere the details of a Marriage Insurance scheme, the most important feature of which is the provision of dowries. British sentiment still hugs the convention that it ennobles a man to marry a portionless girl. On the stage the lover is offended by the mention of the heroine's fortune. He reproaches her with it, and she weeps. "Were you but penniless," he exclaims, "this cloud of misery would not be hanging over us. I want you, not your money-bags!" And she strives to soothe her wounded pride by wishing the filthy dross at the bottom of the sea. In the end he finds some decent pretext for consenting to undertake this burden of shame.
The French marriage system is still the target for insular sarcasm, and we are bidden to ponder the instructive contrast between the sordid negotiations of the dot and the sublime conduct of the British idealist who weds the penniless orphan. In practice, however, the material consideration plays a conspicuous part in our overtures to Hymen. The Married Women's Property Act is not the creation of sentimentalists, and for many women the social conditions make marriage without a dowry remote, if not impossible. Immortality was the prize of the benefactor who made two blades of grass grow where one grew before. To the same laurel aspired the enterprising editor who said that his journal would drop two lumps of sugar into the teacup of the charwoman who had thought that one lump was the maximum of temporal riches. What shall be our reward if our insurance scheme should waft half-a-dozen daughters on the way which only one or even none trod before, to the altar or the registry-office?
For woman's lighter fancies, there is, we trust, excellent provision. There are purblind sociologists who imagine that in some distant stage of development women will be content to wear an international costume which will never vary. They will then devote themselves to exalted labours instead of yielding to the distractions and temptations of dress. The black and white artist, foretold by Macaulay, may have an opportunity of sketching women in this aspect, together with the ruins of St. Paul's. But on a reasonable computation of the time which it will take the Windsor Magazine to run its course—say, three centuries—we have no apprehension that our artists, whose pictorial devotion to woman will abundantly appear, will see her consigned to so forlorn a destiny.
So the fashions will be treated and illustrated by most competent hands, and even man's humble regard for his own adornment will not be forgotten. It is very well for Mr. Austin Dobson to reprove the "ladies of St. James's" who "wear satin on their backs," and to express his preference for Phyllis, who
"Dons her russet gown,
And runs to gather May-dew
Before the world is down."
We suspect that Phyllises who live in the country will get up early to sigh over some of our pictures. No sound philosophy of clothes discourages the reasonable longing of woman for a becoming array. It is a sentiment which we share so far as to regard the illustrations of the Windsor Magazine with all the pride of plumage which we hope will moult no feather.