| <Saturday Review, 10 April 1869, 477-8>
| <DOVECOTS.>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| Times must be very bad indeed if a faithful few are not still left to
| keep the sources of society sweet and wholesome. When corruption has
| gone through the whole mass and all classes are bad alike, everything
| comes to an end, and there is a general overthrow of national life;
| but while some are left pure and unspotted, we are not quite undone,
| and we may reasonably hope for better days in the future. In the midst
| of the reign of the Girl of the Period, with her slang and her
| boldness ~~ of the fashionable woman, with her denial of duty and her
| madness for pleasure ~~ we come every now and then upon a group of good
| girls of the real old English type; the faithful few growing up
| silently among us, but none the less valuable because they are silent
| and make no public display; doves who are content with life as they
| have it in the dovecot, and have no desire to be either eagles
| dwelling on romantic heights, or peacocks displaying their pride in
| sunny courts. We find these faithful few in town and country alike;
| but they are rifest in the country, where there is less temptation to
| go wrong than there is in the large towns, and where life is
| simpler and the moral tone undeniably higher. The leading feature of
| these girls is their love of home and of their own family, and their
| power of making occupation and happiness out of apparently meagre
| materials. If they are the elders, they find amusement and interest in
| their little brothers and sisters, whom they consider immensely funny
| and to whom they are as much girl-mothers as sisters; if they are the
| youngers, they idolize their baby nephews and nieces. For there is
| always a baby going on somewhere about these houses ~~ babies being the
| great excitement of home-life, and the antiseptic element among women
| which keeps everything else pure. They are passionately attached to
| papa and mamma, whom they think the very king and queen of humanity,
| yet whom they do not call by even endearing slang names. It has never
| occurred to them to criticize them as ordinary mortals; and as they
| have not been in the way of learning the prevailing accent of
| disrespect, they have not shaken off that almost religious veneration
| for their parents which all young people naturally feel, if they have
| been well brought up and are not corrupted.
| The yoke in most middle-class country-houses is one fitting very
| loosely round all necks; and as they have all the freedom they desire
| or could use, the girls are not fretted by undue pressure, and are
| content to live in peace under such restraints as they have. They
| adore their elder brothers who are from home just beginning the great
| battle of life for themselves, and confidently believe them to be
| the finest fellows going, and the future great men of the day if only
| they care to put out those splendid talents of theirs, and take the
| trouble of plucking the prizes within their reach. They may have a
| slight reservation perhaps, in favour of the brother's friend, whom
| they place on a pedestal of almost equal height. But they keep their
| mental architecture a profound secret from 
| <reg orig=”every one”> everyone </reg>, and do not
| suffer it to grow into too solid a structure unless it has some surer
| foundation than their own fancy. For, though doves are loving, they
| are by no means lovesick, and are too healthy and natural and quietly
| busy for unwholesome dreams. If one of them marries, they all unite in
| loving the man who comes in among them. He is adopted as one of
| themselves, and leaps into a family of idolizing sisters who pet him
| as their brother ~~ with just that subtle little difference in their
| petting, in so much as it comes from sisters unaccustomed, and so has
| the charm of novelty without the prurient excitement of naughtiness.
| But this kind of thing is about the most dangerous to a man's moral
| nature that can befall him. Though pretty to see and undeniably
| pleasant to experience, and though perfectly innocent in every way,
| still, nothing enervates him so much as this idolatrous submission of
| a large family of women. In a widow's house, where there are many
| daughters and no sons, and where the man who marries one marries the
| whole family and is worshipped accordingly, the danger is of course
| increased tenfold; but if there are brothers and a father, the
| sister's husband, though affectionately cooed over, is not made quite
| such a fuss with, and the association is all the less hurtful in
| consequence.
| These girls lead a by no means stupid life, though it is a quiet one,
| and without any spasmodic events or tremendous cataclysms. They go a
| great deal among the village poor, and they teach at the
| Sunday-school, and attend the mothers' meetings and clothing-clubs and
| the like, and learn to get interested in their humbler friends, who
| after all are Christian sisters. They read their romances in real life
| instead of in three-volume novels, and study human nature 
| as it is ~~ in
| the rough certainly, but perhaps in more genuine form than if they
| learnt it only in what is called society. Then they have their
| pleasures, though they are of an unexciting kind and what fast girls
| would call awfully slow. They have their horses and their croquet
| parties, their lawn tennis and their archery meetings; they have
| batches of new music, and a monthly box from Mudie's ~~ and they know
| the value of both; they go out to tea, and sometimes to dinner, in the
| neighbourhood; and they enjoy the rare county balls with a zest
| unknown to London girls who are out every night in the week. They have
| their village flower-shows, which the great families patronize in a
| free-and-easy kind of way, and which give occupation for weeks before
| and subject for talk for weeks after; their school feasts, where the
| pet parson of the district comes out with his best anecdotes, and
| makes mild jokes at a long distance from Sydney Smith; their
| periodical missionary meetings, where they have great guns from
| London, and where they hear unctuous stories about the saintliness of
| converted cannibals, and are required to believe in the power of
| change of creed to produce an ethnological miracle; they have their
| friends to stay with them ~~ school-girl friends ~~ with whom they
| exchange deep confidences, and go back over the old days ~~ so old to
| their youth! ~~ their brothers come down in the summer, and their
| brothers' friends come with them, and do a little spooning in the
| shrubbery. But there is more spooning done at picnics than anywhere
| else; and more offers are made there under the shadow of the old ruin,
| or in the quiet leafy nook by the river side, than at any other
| gathering time of the country. And as we are all to a certain extent
| what we are made by our environment, the doves take to these pleasures
| quite kindly and gratefully, as being the only ones known to them, and
| enjoy themselves in a simplicity of circumstances which would give no
| pleasure at all to girls accustomed to more highly-spiced
| entertainments.
| Doves know very little of evil. They are not in the way of learning
| it; and they do not care to learn it. The few villagers who are
| supposed to lead ill lives are spoken of below the breath, and
| carefully avoided without being critically studied. When the railway
| is to be carried past their quiet nest, there is an immense
| excitement as the report goes that a knot of strange men have been
| seen scattering themselves over the fields with their little white
| flags and theodolites, their measuring lines and levels. But when the
| army of navvies follows after, the excitement is changed to
| consternation, and a general sense of evil to come advancing
| ruthlessly towards them. The clergy of the district organize special
| services, and the scared doves keep religiously away from the place
| where the navvies are hutted. They think them little better than the
| savages about whom the Deputation tell them once or twice a year; and
| they create almost as much terror as an encampment of gipsies. They
| represent the lawless forces of the world and the unknown sins of
| strong men; and the wildest story about them is not too wild to be
| believed. The railway altogether is a great offence to the
| neighbourhood, and the line is assumed to destroy the whole scenic
| beauty of the place. There are lamentations over the cockneys it will
| bring down; over the high prices it will create, the immorality it
| will cause. Only the sons who are out in the world and have learnt how
| life goes on outside the dovecot, advocate keeping pace with the
| times; and a few of the stronger minded of the sisters listen to them
| with a timid admiration of their breadth and boldness, and think there
| may be two sides to the question after all. When the dashing captain
| and his fast wife suddenly appear in the village ~~ as often happens in
| these remote districts ~~ the doves are in a state of great moral
| tribulation. They are scandalized by Mrs. Highflyer's costume and
| complexion, and think her manners odd and doubtful; her slang shocks
| them; and when they meet her in the lanes, talking so loudly and
| laughing so shrilly with that horrid-looking man in a green cutaway,
| they feel as fluttered as their namesakes when a hawk is hovering over
| the farmyard. The dashing captain, who does not use a prayer-book at
| church, who stares at all the girls so rudely, and who has even been
| seen to wink at some of the prettier cottage girls, and his handsome
| wife with her equivocal complexion and pronounced fashions, who makes
| eyes at the curate, are never heartily adopted by the local magnates,
| though vouched for by some far-away backer; and the doves always feel
| them to be strange bodies among them, and out of their rightful
| element somehow. If things go quietly without an explosion, well and
| good; but if the truth bursts to the surface in the shape of a London
| detective, and the Highflyers are found to be no better than they
| should be, the consternation and half-awed wonderment at the existence
| of so much effrontery and villany in their atmosphere create an
| impression which no time effaces. The first clash of innocence with
| evil is an event in the life of the innocent the effect of which
| nothing ever destroys.
| The dovecot is rather dull in the winter, and the doves are somewhat
| moped; but even then they have the church to decorate, and the
| sentiment of Christmas to enliven them. The absent ones of the
| family too, return to the old hearth while they can; and as the great
| joy of the dovecot lies in the family union that is kept up, and in
| the family love which is so strong, the visits of those who no longer
| live at home bring a moral summer as warm and cheering as the physical
| sunshine. But they do not all assemble. For many of the doves marry
| men whose work lies abroad; these quiet country-houses being the
| favourite matrimonial hunting-grounds for colonists and Anglo-Indians.
| So that some are always absent whose healths are drunk in the
| traditional punch, while eyes grow moist as the names are given. Doves
| are not disinclined to marry men who have to go abroad, for all the
| passionate family love common to them. Travel is a golden dream to
| them in their still homes; but travel properly companioned. For even
| the most adventurous among them are not independent, as we mean when
| we speak of independence in women. They are essentially home-girls,
| family-girls, doves who cannot exist without a dovecot, however
| humble. The family is everything to them; and they are utterly unfit
| for the solitude which so many of our self-supporting women can accept
| quite resignedly. Not that they are necessarily useless even as
| breadwinners. They could work, if pushed to it; but it must be in a
| quiet womanly way, with the mother, the sister, the husband as the
| helper ~~ with the home as the place of rest and the refuge. 
| Their whole
| lines are laid in love and quietness; not by any means in inaction,
| but all centred within the home circle. If they marry, they find
| the love of their husband enough for them, and have no desire for
| other men's admiration. Their babies are all the world to them, and
| they do not think maternity an infliction, as so many of the miserably
| fashionable think it. They like the occupation of housekeeping, and
| feel pride in their fine linen and clean service, in their
| well-ordered table and neatly-balanced accounts. They are kind to
| their servants, who generally come from the old home, and whose
| families they therefore know; but they keep up a certain dignity and
| tone of superiority towards them in the midst of all their kindness,
| which very few town-bred mistresses can keep to town-bred maids. They
| have always been the aristocracy in their native place; and they carry
| through life the ineffaceable stamp which being 
| <p> 'the best' </p> gives.
| Doves are essentially mild and gentle women; not queens of society
| even when they are pretty, because not caring for social success and
| therefore not laying themselves out for it; for if they please at home
| that is all they care for, holding love before admiration, and the
| esteem of one higher than the praise of many. If a fault is to be
| found with them it is that they have not perhaps quite enough salt for
| the general taste, used as it is to such highly-seasoned social food;
| but do we really want our women to have so very much character? Do not
| our splendid passionate creatures lead madly wretched lives and make
| miserably uncomfortable homes? and are not our glorious heroines
| better in pictures and in fiction than seated by the domestic fire, or
| checking the baker's bill? No doubt the quiet home-staying doves seem
| tame enough when we think of the gorgeous beings made familiar to us
| by romance, and history, which is more romantic still; but as our
| daily lives run chiefly in prose, our doves are better fitted for
| things as they are; and to men who want wives and not playthings, and
| who care for the peace of family life and the dignity of home, they
| are beyond price when they can be found and secured. So that, on the
| whole, we can dispense with the splendid creatures of character and
| the magnificent queens of society sooner than with the quiet and
| unobtrusive doves. And though they do spoil men most monstrously, they
| know where to draw the line, and while petting their own at home they
| keep strangers abroad at a distance, and make themselves respected as
| only modest and gentle women are respected by men.