| <The Saturday Review October 17, 1868>
| <repub: Girl of Period, London 1883>
| <Pinching Shoes>
| <pb n="516">
| There are two ways of dealing with pinching shoes.  The 
| one is to wear them easy; the other is to kick them off and 
| have done with them altogether.  The one is founded on the 
| accommodating principle of human nature by which it is 
| enabled to fit itself to circumstances, the other is the 
| high-handed masterfulness whereby the earth is subdued and 
| obstacles are removed; the one is emblematic of Christian 
| patience, the other of Pagan power.  Both are good in 
| certain states, and neither is absolutely the best for all 
| conditions.  There are some shoes indeed which, do what 
| we will, we can never wear easy.  We may keep them well 
| fixed on our feet all our life, loyally accepting the pressure 
| which fate and misfortune have imposed on us; but we go 
| lame and hobbled in consequence, and never know what it 
| is to make a free step, or to walk on our way without 
| discomfort.  Examples abound; for among all the pilgrims 
| toiling more or less painfully through life to death, there is 
| not one whose shoes do not pinch him somewhere, how 
| easy soever they may look, and how soft soever the 
| material of which they may be made.  Even those 
| proverbial possessors of roomy shoes, the traditional King 
| and Princess, have their own little private bedroom slippers, 
| which pinch then undetected by the gaping multitude who 
| measure happiness by lengths of velvet and weight of gold 
| embroidery; and the proverbial owners of the treasure 
| which all seek and none find might better stand as instances 
| of sorrow than of happiness ~~ examples of how badly 
| shod poor royalty is, and how, far more than meaner folk, it 
| suffers from the pinching of its princely shoes.
| The uncongeniality of a profession into which a man may 
| have been forced by the injudicious overruling of his 
| friends, or by the exigencies of family position and 
| inherited rights, is one form of the pinching shoe by no 
| means rare to find.  And here, again, poor royalty comes in 
| for a share of the grip on tender places, and the consequent 
| hobbling of its feet.  For many an hereditary king was 
| meant by nature to be nothing but a plain country 
| gentleman at the best ~~ perhaps even less; many, like poor 
| <p> "Louis Capet," </p> would have gone to the end quite 
| happily and respectably if only they might have kicked off 
| the shoes of sovereignty, and betaken themselves to the 
| highlows of the herd ~ if only they might have exchanged 
| the scepter for the turning-lathe, the pen, or the 
| fowling-piece.  <q> </q>, Victor Emmanuel is reported to have 
| said to a republican friend who sympathized with the monarch's 
| well-known tastes in other things beside his hatred of the 
| kingly profession; and history repeats this frank avowal in 
| every page.  But the purple is almost as hard to be got rid of 
| comfortably as Deianeira's robe; for the most part carrying 
| the skin along with it, and trailed through a pool of blood in 
| the act of transfer ~~ which is scarcely what royalty, 
| oppressed with its own greatness, and willing to rid itself of 
| scepter and shoes that it may enjoy itself in list slippers 
| after a more bourgeois fashion, would find in accordance 
| with its wishes.  Lower down in the social scale we find the 
| same kind of misfit between nature and position as a very 
| frequent occurrence ~~ pinching shoes productive of 
| innumerable corns and tender places.  How often we see a 
| natural <p> "heavy" </p> securely swathed in cassock and 
| bands, and set up in the pulpit of the family church, simply 
| because the tithes were large, and the living lay in the 
| family gift.  But that stiff rectorial shoe of his will never 
| wear easy.  The man's secret soul goes out to the 
| parade-ground and the mess-table. The glitter and jingle and 
| theatrical display of a soldier's life seem to him the finest 
| things in the whole round of professions, and the quiet 
| uneventful life of a village pastor is of all the most 
| abhorrent.  He wants to act, not to teach.  Yet there he is, 
| penned in beyond all power of breaking loose on this side 
| the grave; bound to drone out muddled sermons half an 
| hour long, and eminently good for sleeping-draughts, 
| instead of shouting terse and stirring words of command 
| that set the blood on fire to hear; bound to rout the shadowy 
| enemy of souls with weapons he can neither feel nor use, 
| instead of prancing off at the head of his men, waving his 
| drawn sword above his head in a whirlwind of excitement 
| and martial glory, to rout the tangible enemies of his 
| country's flag.  He loves his wife, and takes a mild parsonic 
| pleasure in his roses; he energizes his schools, and beats up 
| recruits for his parish penny readings; he lends his pulpit to 
| missionary delegates, and takes the chair at the meeting for 
| the conversion of Jews; he does his duty, poor man, so far 
| as he knows how, and so far as nature gave him the power; 
| but his feet are in pinching shoes all his life long, and no 
| amount of walking on the clerical highway can ever make 
| them pleasant wearing.  Or he may have a passionate love 
| for the sea, and be mewed up in a lawyer's musty office, 
| where his large limbs have not half enough space for their 
| natural activity; where he is perched for twelve hours out of 
| the twenty-four on a high stool against a desk, instead of 
| climbing cat-like up the ropes, and set to engross a 
| longwinded deed of conveyance, or to make a fair copy of a 
| bill of costs, instead of bearing a hand in a gale, and saving 
| his ship by pluck and quickness.  He could save ship better 
| than he can engross a deed; while, as for law, he cannot get 
| as much of that into his heavy brain as would enable him to 
| advise a client on the simplest case of assault; but he knows 
| all the differences of rig, and the whole code of signals, and 
| can tell you to a nicety about the flags of all nations, and 
| the name and position of every spar and stay and sheet, and 
| when to reef and when to set sail, with any other nautical 
| information to be had from books and a chance cruise as far 
| as the Nore.  That pen behind his ear never ceases to gall 
| and fret, his shoe never ceases to pinch; and to the last day 
| of his life the high stool in the lawyer's office will be a 
| place of penance, and the sailor's quarter-deck the very 
| heaven of his ambition.  No doubt, by the time the soldier 
| wrongly labeled as a parson, or the sailor painfully working 
| the legal treadmill, comes to the end of his career, the old 
| shoe which has pinched him so long will be worn 
| comparatively easy.  The gradual decay of manly vigour, 
| and the slow but sure destruction of strong desires, reduce 
| one's feet at last to masses of accommodating pulp; but 
| what years of fruitless yearning, of fierce despair, of 
| pathetic self-suppression, of jarring discord between work 
| and fitness, must pound all the life out of us before our 
| bones become like wax, and pinching shoes are 
| transformed to easy-fitting slippers.  For itself alone, not 
| counting the beyond, it would scarcely seem that such a life 
| was worth the living.
| Another pinching shoe is to be found in climate and 
| locality.  A man hungering for the busy life of the city has 
| to vegetate in the rural districts, where the days drop one 
| after the other like leaden bullets, and time is only marked 
| by an accession of dullness.  Another, thirsting for the 
| repose of the country, has to jostle daily through 
| Cheapside.  To one who thinks Canadian salmon-fishing 
| the supreme of earthly happiness, fate gives the chance of 
| chasing butterflies in Brazil; to another who holds <p> "the 
| common objects of the seashore" </p> of more account 
| than silver and gold, an adverse fortune assigns a station in 
| the middle of a plain as arid as if the world had been made 
| without water; and a third, who cares for nothing but the 
| free breathing of the open moors, or the rugged beauty of 
| the barren fells, is dropped down into the heart of a narrow 
| valley where he cannot see the sun for the trees.  At first 
| this matter of locality seems to be but a very small grip on 
| the foot, not worth a second thought; but it is one of a 
| certain cumulative power impossible to describe, though 
| keen enough to him who suffers; and the pinching shoe of 
| uncongenial place is quite as hard to bear as that of 
| uncongenial work.  Again, a man to whom intellectual 
| companionship means more than it does to many is thrown 
| into a neighbourhood where he cannot hope to meet with 
| comprehension, still less with sympathy.  He is a 
| Freethinker, and the neighbourhood goes in for the strictest 
| Methodism or the highest ultra-Ritualism; he is a Radical, 
| and he is in the very focus of county Toryism, where the 
| doctrine of equality and the rights of man is just so much 
| seditious blasphemy, while the British Constitution is held 
| as a direct emanatice from divine wisdom second only to 
| the Bible; or he is a Tory to the backbone ~~ and his 
| backbone is a pretty stiff one ~~ and he is in the midst of 
| that blatant kind of Radicalism which thinks gentlehood a 
| remnant of the dark ages, and confounds good breeding 
| with servility, and loyalty to the Crown with oppression of 
| the people.  Surrounded by his kind he is as much alone as 
| if in the middle of a desert; and Englishman among 
| Englishmen, he has no more mental companionship than if 
| he were in a foreign country, where he and his neighbours 
| spoke different tongues, and had each a set of signs with 
| not two agreeing.  And this kind of solitude makes a 
| pinching shoe to many minds; though to some of the more 
| self-centred or defying kind it is hearable enough ~ perhaps 
| even giving a sense of roominess which closer communion 
| would not give.
| Of course one of the worst of our pinching shoes is 
| matrimony, when marriage means bondage and not union.  
| The mismated wife or husband never leaves off, willingly 
| or unwillingly, squeezing the tender places; and the more 
| the pressure is objected to, the worse the pain becomes.  
| And nothing can relieve it.  A country gentleman, hating 
| the dust and noise of London, with all his interest in his 
| county position and all his pleasure in his estate, and a wife 
| whose love lies in Queen's balls and opera-boxes, and to 
| whom the country is simply a slice out of Siberia wherever 
| it
| <pb n="517">
| may be; a hearty hospitable man, liking to see his table well 
| filled, and a wife with a weak digestion, irritable nerves, 
| and a morbid horror of society; a pushing and ambitious 
| man, with a loud voice and an imposing presence, and a 
| shrinking fireside woman, who asks only to glide unnoticed 
| through the crowd, and to creep noiselessly from her home 
| to her grave ~ are not all these shod with pinching shoes, 
| which, do what they will, go on pinching to the end, and 
| which nothing short of death or chance can remove?  The 
| pinching shoe of matrimony pinches both sides equally ~~ 
| excepting, indeed, one chances to be specially phlegmatic 
| or pachydermatous, and then the grip is harmless; but, as a 
| rule, the ring-fence of marriage doubles all conditions, and 
| when A. walks hobbled, B falls lame, and both suffer from 
| the same misfit.  However, the only thing to do is to bear 
| and wear till the upper-leather yields, or till the foot takes 
| the required shape; but there is an eternity of pain to be 
| gone through before either of these desirable ends comes 
| about; and the instinct which dreads pain, and questions its 
| necessity, is by no means a false one.  For all that, we must 
| wear our pinching shoes of matrimony till death or the 
| Divorce Court pulls them from our feet, which points to the 
| need of being more careful than we usually are about the fit 
| beforehand.
| Poverty has a whole rack full of pinching shoes very hard 
| to get accustomed to, and as bad to dance in lightly as were 
| the fiery slippers of the naughty little girl in the German 
| fairy-tale.  Given a large heart, generous instincts, and an 
| empty hand, and we have the elements of a real tragedy, 
| both individual and social.  For poverty does not mean only 
| that animal want of food and clothing which we generally 
| associate with its name.  Poverty may have two thousand a 
| year as well as only a mouldy crust and three shillings a 
| week from the parish; and poverty cursing its sore feet in a 
| brougham is quite as common as poverty, full of corns and 
| callosities, wheeling a costermonger's barrow.  The shoe 
| may pinch horribly, though there is no question of hunger 
| or the <p> "twopenny rope"; </p> for it is all a matter of 
| relative degree, and the means wherewith to meet wants.  
| But as poverty is not one of those fixed conditions of 
| human life which no human power can remove, we have 
| not perhaps quite so much sympathy with its grips and 
| pinches as in other things less remediable.  For while there 
| is work still undone in the world, there is gain still to be 
| had; the man whose energies run now in a dry channel can, 
| if he will, turn them into one more fertile; and if he is 
| making but a poor business out of meal, it is his own fault 
| if he does not try to make a better out of malt.  Where the 
| shoe pinches hardest is in places which we cannot protect 
| and with a grip which we cannot prevent; but we cannot 
| say this of poverty as a necessary and inalienable condition, 
| and sympathy is so much waste when circumstances can be 
| changed by energy or will.