SPANIELS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4774, 11 July 1876, Page 3

SPANIELS.

(From the Queen.) Our women are in danger of becoming tyrants rather than slaves, and the demands made by the weaker are growing almost as excessive as have been in foretime the requirements enforced by the stronger. But, with all this, the nature which some call womanly, and others spaniel-like, still exists among us. Heaven be praised ! and we have yet left to us a few low-voiced, gentle, tender-hearted women who find their highest joy in self -suppression and affection, in giving up their own desires for the good of others, and devoting themselves to the service of those they love. Neither rancor nor revenge enters into the soul of her whom her deriders call a spaniel, her admirers womanly. . Even where she has been ill-treated she can forgive ; and the divine precept of seventy times seven seems to her a law of loveliness by which greater things are to be attained than the childish pleasure of manifesting " a high spirit" and a determination "not to be put upon." She asks for nothing beyond the leave to love, the privilege to bless ; and they who are most sorrowful are those who lie nearest to her heart, and for whom her soul goes out with tenderest yearning. To her the joy of life is found rather in loving and worshipping than in being loved and worshipped ; and were she able to choose she would prefer to lie in the shadow of her husband's greatness rather than .that he should be overshadowed by her own. What gifts and graces belong to her she uses as flowers in the chaplet with which she crowns her beloved ; and for his sake rather than her own rejoices in her beauty, her wit, her acquirements, her intellect, as making his life the richer because hers is the lovelier. If troubles come upon them, she is brave that he may not be saddened ; if trouble comes between them, she bears her share in silence ; and even when illusage rouses her to dignity, self-protection, and defence, it never rouses her to resentment. To the offer of repentance she answers back with forgiveness ; and only repeated failures can convince her that her trust has been misplaced—that her tenderness is misunderstood; and that, if she would be true to herself and her ideal, she must abandon all hope of influencing to better things that terrible failure —the real. And this is the hardest lesson which life can set a woman of this kind to learn ; the bitterest chapter of that whole tear-stained book of experience in which we all have to read our daily service of sorrow and disappointment. But it is learnt after a time even by the "spaniel;" and when repentance has become a mockery, her forgiveness refuses to be its sport. It is the old story of the pitcher and the well over again. After repeated journeyings, the day of final destruction comes ; and the poor fool who trusted to the indestructibility even of Christian forbearance, womanly allowance, gets for his reward a handful of clay fragments instead of the pure water from which he thought to drink his fill when and however he desired.

People make grave mistakes about the morale of the spaniel woman. They do not see her motives, and they therefore project an impossible and non-existing individuality from the false base lines which they have imagined as the plan, on which she is built. Take a woman of natural affectionateness and of unselfishness acquired by principle—a woman who desires to be just in her judgments, not warped by the purely personal effects of ac-. tions, and wishful to see things as they are in themselves, not only as they touch her—well, such a woman almost certainly appears as a Spaniel to those who know her merely superficially, who do not give her credit for principles, and who see only the broad facts of temperament. Unselfishness, acquired at cost and practised with daily striving, is read off as servility—a quality which no one need give himself the trouble to "manage," a quality which is the camel whose patient strength no last straw can break. Because she accepts patiently, she is handled roughly ; and then there is blank amazement and outcry when she shows her3elf capable of being hurt, when she refuses to allow herself to be pained simply for another's pleasure, not for his good, nor yet by misadventure. While she could say to herself "he did not mean it," she looked up to her master with patient, loving eyes, and bore the pain that had been inflicted without even a whine of remonstrance. AVhen that pleasant fancy is no longer possible, and she knows herself to be the mere victim of his caprice, the sport of his cruelty, the subject of a worse torture than bodily vivisection, then she takes her ground and keeps it; and the person most amazed at the repudiation is the one who has caused it. Then he finds that the caresses, once so powerful, fall dead; that the sweet words, once a compelling charm, are like dry husks rattling futilely in the air; that flatteries and fondnesses, the food of love in the days gone by, are seen to be what they are-—mere snares for the fond loving heart, lures by which it is expected that she shall become once more a prey to the conqueror; and then the poor spaniel woman, too often broken-hearted, takes refuge in the barren peace of self-respect, and breaks for ever the spell which had so long both bound and blinded her.

But -with this loving, self-repressive, and tender-hearted woman—the woman whose nature is affectionate, and whose unselfishness is a matter of principle—there is also the true spaniel ; the woman who has absolutely no self-respect anywhere, but who "lets herself go," as the very sport and creature of stronger man, without the power to repress on the one hand or assert on the other, and whose want of womanly dignity is her shame and not her glory. Passive, unresisting, she seems almost to offer herself as the slave whom the overseer may lash at his pleasure, sure of no complaint to be made to men or angels. As a woman of the lower class she is half-killed by her brutal husband, whom, however, she shields from the observation of intrusive justice, and swears is a good husband to her, barring the drink. As " the drink" is his normal condition, it is rather puzzling to know what time is left for him to be the good husband of her legend ; but that this is her pleasure to believe is manifest from her life. Give her the power of escape, and she refuses it ; preferring her brutal master, even with the chance of being lacked to death some dark night, when the drink is more potent than usual and there is no one by to save her, rather than to leave him for security of life and its attendant loneliness apart from him. Even her children do not

rouse this kind of spaniel woman to active measures against her master ; and the story of Griselda is repeated to this day in many a court and alley where the happiness and wellbeing of the family are sacrificed that a masterful brute may have his fling, and not be let or hindered in his course. Women of this kind have been known to follow their husbands and lovers to Australia, in the days when transportation drafted off our home villany and made a clear sweep of felons. Bearing always the marks of former ill-usage, and knowing if their dense wits could know anything, that the future* would repeat that past, instead of thanking Heaven for their deliverance and accepting it as the turning point for better things of their lives, they hugged their chains only the more closely, and gave up everything that life held dear and precious for them here at home, to follow their proprietor to exile.