| <The Saturday Review August 15, 1868>
| <Buttercups>
| <pb n="29">
| It is not the least debt we owe to the holidays that they give 
| us our buttercups back again.  Few faces have <afforded?> 
| us with a <?> touch of pity through the whole of the season 
| than the face of the pale, awkward girl who slips by us now 
| and then on <?>, a face mutinous in revolt against its 
| imprisonment in brick and mortar, dull with the boredom of 
| the schoolroom, weary of the <?> walk, the monotonous 
| drive, the inevitable practice of the hated piano, the 
| perpetual round of lessons from the odd creatures who 
| leave their <?> <?> in <?> <?>.  It is amazingly pleasant to 
| meet the same little face on the lawn, and to see it 
| blooming with new life at the touch of freedom and fresh 
| air.  It blooms with a sense of individuality, a sense of 
| power.  In town the buttercup was <?>, silent, unnoticed, 
| lost in the haste and splendour of elder sisterdom.   Here 
| among the fields and the hedges she is queen.  Her very 
| laugh, the reckless shout that calls for mama's frown and 
| dooms the governess to a headache, rings out like a claim 
| of possession.  Here in her own realm she rushes at once to 
| the front, and if we find ourselves enjoying a scamper over 
| the common or a run down the hillside, it is the buttercup 
| that leads the way.  All the silent defiance of her town 
| bondage vanishes in the chatty familiarities of home.  She 
| has a story about the elm and the pond, she knows where 
| Harry landed the trout last year, she is intimate with the 
| keeper, and hints to us his mysterious hopes about the 
| pheasants.  She is great in short cuts through the woods, 
| and has made herself wondrous lurking-places which she 
| betrays under solemn promises of secrecy.  She is a friend 
| of every dog about the place, and if the pony lies nearest to 
| her heart her lesser affections range over a world of 
| favourites.  It is hard to remember the pale, silent, school-girl
| of town in the vivid, chatty little buttercup, who hurries 
| one from the parrot to the pigeon, from the stables to the 
| farm, and who knows and describes the merits of every 
| hound in the kennels.  It is natural enough that the deti<?> 
| beauties who meet us at luncheon should wonder at our 
| enthusiasm for nymphs of bread and butter, and ask, with a 
| certain severity of scorn the secret of our happy mornings.  
| The secret is simply that the buttercup is at home, and that 
| with the close of her bondage comes a grace and a 
| naturalness that take her out of the realms of bread and 
| butter.  However difficult it may be for her maturer rivals to 
| abdicate, it is the buttercup, in fact, who gives the tone to 
| the holidays.  There is a subtle contagion about pleasure, 
| and it is from her that we catch the sense of largeness and 
| liberty and physical enjoyment that gives a new zest to life.  
| She laughs at our moans about sunshine as she laughs at 
| our moans about mud, till we are as indifferent to mud and 
| sunshine as she is herself.  The whole atmosphere of our 
| life, is, in fact, changed, and it is amusing to recognise how 
| much of the change we owe to the buttercup.
| It is impossible, perhaps, to be whirled in the fashion out of 
| the whisperings and boredoms of town without longing to 
| know a little more of the pretty magician who works this 
| wonderful transformation scene.  But it is no easy matter to 
| know much of the buttercup.  Her whole charm lies in her 
| freedom from self-consciousness; she has a reserved force 
| of shyness behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant 
| sort of shyness.  Her character, in fact, is one of which it is 
| easier to feel the beauty than to analyse or describe it.  Like 
| all transitional phases, girlhood is full of picturesque 
| inequalities, strange slumbers of one faculty and stranger 
| developments of another; full of startling effects, of 
| contrasts and surprises, of light and shade, that no other 
| phase of life affords.  Unconsciously, month after month 
| drifts the buttercup on to womanhood; consciously she 
| lives in the past of the child.  She comes to us trailing 
| clouds
| <pb n="220">
| of glory ~~ as Wordsworth sings ~~ from her earlier 
| existence, from her home, her schoolroom, her catechism.  
| The girl of twenty summers whose faith has been wrecked 
| by clerical croquet looks with amazement on the implicit 
| faith which the buttercup retains in the clergy.  Even on the 
| curate, shy and awkward as he is, she looks as on a being 
| sacred and ineffable.  Perhaps his very shyness and 
| awkwardness creates a sympathy between the two, and 
| rouses a keener remorse for her yawns under his sermons, 
| and a keener gratitude for the heavenly generosity with 
| which he bestowed on her the confirmation ticket.  Free as 
| she is from fancies, her conception of the daily life of her 
| clergyman shows amusingly enough that she can attain a 
| very fair pitch of idealism.  We remember the story of a 
| certain parson of our acquaintance who owned to a meek 
| little buttercup his habit of carrying a book in his pocket for 
| reading in leisure hours.  <q> </q>, replied the eager little 
| auditor, with hush of real awe in her voice ~~ <q> </q>!  
| Unluckily, it was the <hi rend="italic"> Physiologie du 
| Gout. </hi>  Still more does the sister of a couple of 
| seasons wonder at the ardour and fidelity of buttercup 
| friendships.  In after-life men have friends and women have 
| lovers.  The home and the husband and the child absorb the 
| whole tenderness of a woman where they only temper and 
| moderate the old external affections of her spouse.  But 
| then girl-friendship is a much more vivid and far more 
| universal thing than friendship among boys.  The one 
| means, in nine cases out of ten, an accident of 
| nieghbourhood in school that fades with the next remove, 
| or a partnership in some venture, or a common attachment 
| to some particular game.  But the school friendship of a girl 
| is a passionate idolatry and devotion of friend for friend.  
| Their desks are full of little gifts to each other.  They have 
| pet names that no strange ear may know, and hidden 
| photographs that no strange eye may see.  They share all 
| the innocent secrets of their hearts, they are fondly 
| interested in one another's brothers, they plan subtle 
| devices to wear the same ribbons and to dress their hair in 
| the same fashion.  No amount of affection ever made a boy 
| like the business of writing his friend a letter in the 
| holidays, but half the charm of holidays to a girl lies in the 
| letters they get and the letters they send.  Nothing save 
| friendship itself is more sacred to girlhood than a friend's 
| letter; nothing more exquisite than the pleasure of stealing 
| from the breakfast table to kiss it and read it, and then tie it 
| up with the rest that lie in the nook that nobody knows but 
| the one pet brother.  The pet brother is as necessary an 
| element in buttercup life as the friend.  He is generally the 
| dullest, the most awkward, the most silent of the family 
| group.  He takes all this sisterly devotion as a matter of 
| course, and half resents it as a matter of boredom.  He is 
| fond of informing his adorer that he hates girls, that they 
| are always kissing and crying, and that they can't play 
| cricket.  The buttercup rushes away to pour out her woes to 
| her little nest in the woods, and hurries back to worship as 
| before.  Girlhood, indeed, is the one stage of feminine 
| existence in which woman has brothers.  Her first season 
| out digs a gulf between their sister and <p> "the boys" </p> 
| of the family that nothing can fill up.  Henceforth the latter 
| are useful to get tickets for her, to carry her shawls, to drive 
| her to Goodwood or to Lord's.  In the mere fetching and 
| carrying business they sink into the general ruck of cousins, 
| grumbling only a little more than cousins usually do at the 
| luck that dooms them to hew wood and draw water for the 
| belle of the season.  But in the pure equality of earlier days, 
| the buttercup shares half the games and all the secrets of 
| the boys about her, and brotherhood and sisterhood are very 
| real things indeed.
| Unluckily the holidays pass away, and the buttercup passes 
| away like the holidays.  There is a strange humour about 
| the subtle gradations by which girlhood passes out of all 
| this free, genial, irreflective life into the self-consciousness, 
| the reserve, the artificiality of womanhood.  It is the sudden 
| discovery of a new sense of enjoyment that first whirls the 
| buttercup out of her purely family affections.  She laughs at 
| the worship of her new adorer.  She is as far as Dian herself 
| from any return of it; but the sense of power is awakened, 
| and she has a sort of puckish pride in bringing her suitor to 
| her feet.  Nobody is so exacting, so capricious, so 
| uncertain, so fascinating as a buttercup, because 
| <reg orig="no one"> no-one </reg> is so perfectly free from 
| love.  The first touch of passion renders her more exacting 
| and more charming than ever.  She resents the suspicion of 
| a tenderness whose very novelty scares her, and she visits 
| her resentment on her worshipper.  If he enjoys a kind 
| farewell overnight, he atones for it by the coldest greeting 
| in the morning.  There are days when the buttercup runs
| a-muck among her adorers, days of snubbing and sarcasm 
| and bitterness.  The poor little bird beats savagely against 
| the wires that are closing her round.  And then there are 
| days of pure abandon and coquetry and fun.  The buttercup 
| flirts, but she flirts in such an open and ingenuous fashion 
| that nobody is a bit the worse for it.  She tells you the fun 
| she had overnight with that charming young fellow from 
| Oxford, and you know that to-morrow she will be telling 
| that hated Guardsman what fun she has had with you.  She 
| is a little dazzled with the wealth and profusion of the new 
| life that is bursting on her, and she wings her way from one 
| charming flower to another with little thought of more than 
| a sip from each.  Then there is a return of pure girlhood, 
| days in which the buttercup is simply the buttercup again.  
| Flirtations are forgotten, conquests are abandoned, brothers 
| are worshipped with the old worship; and we start back, 
| and rub our eyes, and wonder whether life is all a delusion, 
| and whether this pure creature of home and bread and 
| butter is the volatile, provoking? little pass who gave our 
| hand such a significant squeeze yesterday.  But it is just this 
| utterly illogical, unreasonable, inconsequential character 
| that gives the pursuit of the buttercup its charm.  There is a 
| pleasure in this irregular warfare, with its razzias and 
| dashes and repulses and successes and skirmishes and 
| flights, which we cannot get out of the regular operations of 
| the sap and the mine.  We sympathize with the ingenious 
| gentleman who declined to study astronomy on the ground 
| of his aversion to the sun for the monotonous regularity of 
| its daily rising and setting.  There is something delightfully 
| cometary about the affection of the buttercup.  Any 
| experienced strategist in the art of getting married will tell 
| us the exact time within which her elder sister may be 
| reduced, and sketch for us a plan of the campaign.  But the 
| buttercup lies outside of the rules of war.  She gives one the 
| pleasure of adoration in its purest and most ideal form, and 
| she ads to this the pleasure <hi rend="italic"> rouge et noir. 
| </hi>  One feels in the presence of a buttercup the 
| possibility of combining enjoyments which are in no other 
| sphere compatible with each other ~~ the delight, say, of a 
| musing over <hi rend="italic"> In Memoriam </hi> with 
| the fiercer joys of the gambling-table.  And meanwhile the 
| buttercup drifts on, recking little of us and of our thoughts, 
| into a world mysterious and unknown to her.  Tones of 
| deeper colour flush the pure light of her dawn, and 
| announce the fuller day of womanhood.  And with the 
| death of the dawn the buttercup passes insensibly away.  
| The next season steals her from us; it is only the holidays 
| that give her to us, and dispel half our conventionality, our 
| shams, our conceit with the laugh of the buttercup.