From Tom Kalin's "Swoon" (1992).

Our attitudes toward women and prostitution haven't changed much since 1890.

Our attitudes toward men and prostitution changed dramatically between 1890 and 1899. As I explained in my post on sexual orientation, they began the decade without the labels of hetero, or homosexual, while simultaneously living in a heterosexist society.

Male prostitution existed in 1890. Homosexual prostitution, both male and female, was a common part of city life. The city had molly houses (places for men to dress in drag and meet other men), and there was an all-male brothel on Cleveland Street in 1889. Male prostitutes serviced male clients.

Without sexual orientation labels, people normalized male homosexual acts by over-sexualizing men. The idea was, and sadly sometimes still is, that men needed to have sex, masturbation was forbidden, and if he couldn't find a woman, sex with another man would do, especially a young man because they could sometimes look a little like women.

Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing with his wife, Marie Luise.

In Psychopathia Sexualis (1886; 1894 translated), Richard von Kraft-Ebing only reinforced the idea that, while abstinence in women was to be expected, abstinence in men was "sufficient to overcome re-pugnance for the unnatural act," by 'unnatural' he meant 'homosexual.'

So, it was believed that:

• Men needed to have sex.
• If they masturbated, they might go insane, or develop epilepsy.
• If they couldn't find a woman to have sex with, a man would do.
• Two men having sex was still unnatural, whatever that means.

The heterosexist society of London in the 1890s heteronormalized the male on male sex acts taking place in the streets until they were blue in the balls, but the fact was that there were more female prostitutes per capita in London in 1890, than there are today. 

Indeed, many of those who campaigned against female prostitution, both in the eighteenth century and the early twentieth, sought only to regulate the trade rather than to eliminate it, fearing that if men did not have easy access to women, they would turn to each other. - Kerwin Kaye

Cleveland Street Scandal in the London Illustrated News (1889).

The practice was so common that most of the writers in my blog, who used male prostitutes at one time, or another, were at some point also victims of blackmail. Consequently, the clients were labelled as degenerate hedonists, who deserved to be blackmailed; while the male prostitutes themselves were to be viewed with suspicion.

Until the invention of homosexuality, neither of the actors in male on male prostitution were viewed as homosexuals, only as degenerate men with excessive sexual tastes that corrupted younger men into an 'easy' way of making money.

Gender played a strong role in the perception of prostitutes. More agency was read into the characters of male prostitutes. They were seen as more responsible for their own fates, and their own destinies. A male prostitute could leave it behind him, when he got too old to continue working, or simply didn't wish to carry on with it anymore. The main difference between the perception of male prostitutes versus the perception of female prostitutes was how much agency men and women had.

No one seemed to be organizing to reform male prostitutes the way that they were organizing to reform female prostitutes, often called "fallen women," out of the separate spheres ideology. Separate spheres ideology maintained that while men needed sex, women shouldn't even want it a little bit. The idea that a Victorian woman might have had sex with many men was devastating to the angel of the household mythology. Even if a female prostitute was reformed, or somehow 'saved' from her 'vile' circumstances, she would never be admitted into polite society, as was the case with Lady Meux.

Lady Meux.

Still, Victorians were mighty reformers, and a man with a questionable past could always be redeemed by marriage to a morally outstanding woman. I will write more on marriage later.

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Providence has made the continuation of the species depend on a process of a coupling the sexes, called fucking. It is performed by two organs. That of the male is familiarly and vulgarly called a prick, that of the female a cunt. Politely one is called a penis the other a pudenda. The prick, broadly speaking, is a long, fleshy, gristly pipe. The cunt a fleshy, warm, wet hole, or tube. The prick is at times and in a peculiar manner, thrust up the cunt, and discharges a thick fluid into it, and that is the operation called fucking. It is not a graceful operation, in fact it is not more elegant than pissing, or shitting, and is more ridiculous; but it is one giving the intensest pleasure to the parties operating together, and most people try to do as much of it as they can.

Annie Besant (1847–1933) was a prominent British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator and supporter of Irish and Indian self-rule.

Cecil Reddie

1890s Abbotsholme School.

Cartoon from The Wasp (San Fransisco) of May 26, 1882, promoting the then-common racist myth that diseases were rampant in Chinatown. (Source)

A race which is regularly addicted, even! without excess, to narcotics and stimulants in any form (such, as fermented alcoholic drinks, tobacco, opium, hashish, arsenic, which partakes of tainted foods (bread made with bad corn, which absorbs organic poisons (marsh fever, syphilis, tuberculosis, goitre), begets degenerate descendants who, if they remain exposed to the same influences, rapidly descend to the lowest degrees of degeneracy, to idiocy, to dwarfishness, etc. That the poisoning of civilized peoples continues and increases at a very rapid rate is widely attested by statistics.

Degeneration was translated to English three years after its initial publication, and introduced to London at a time when they were starting to talk more seriously about STDs.  Coincidently, 1895 is the same year Wilde went to prison. The book maintained ideas that were popular outside the bohemian set; chiefly, that lust was incompatible with intellect and artistic genius.

Women were still blamed for the spread of STDs in WW2 propaganda posters

If the statistics Nardau refers to existed, they were, at best, misleading. Victorian doctors did not yet possess the means of accurately diagnosing STDs, and were as likely to overlook STDs, as they were to over-diagnose them. Wealthier people would have been seen outside of hospitals, and could expect their doctors to be discreet. Autopsies usually only superficially identified cause of death, such as which organs failed, though they might not know why.

They knew that STDs existed, and primarily blamed prostitutes, as is evidenced by the Contagious Diseases Acts, originally passed in parliament in 1864. 'Blame' is even too light a word, in this context. If a female sex worker was believed to have a STD, she would be locked away in a special hospital, until 'cured' - only there wasn't enough room in these Lock Hospitals (that's actually what they were called), so she was more likely to end up in a workhouse infirmary. Those laws were repealed in 1885, but the prevailing attitude toward sex workers and disease hadn't really changed by the 1890s.

Still, I am trying to talk about how STDs impacted a man's sexual identity in the 1890s. The state didn't do anything to the men, who had slept with the infected sex workers. In one sense, these men were left to fend for themselves, to find their own treatment. I don't know how many saw doctors. Their doctors were very discreet, after all. More realistically, they continued sleeping with sex workers, and spreading their infections.

Origin of the No Nose Club. Star, Issue 1861, 18 February 1874, p. 3. (Source)

The idea of catching an STD would have been terrifying, and a little unbelievable. As I've mentioned before, sex education wasn't very popular yet, and rumours were abundant. Indicative, of what men imagined from an STD was the No-Nose Club, which Linda Dowling calls, "an imaginary assembly of beakless sufferers of syphilis." They imagined that the signs of such terrible diseases would be quite obvious.

"The Martyrdom of Mercury," (1709).

If one didn't have symptoms, one couldn't be sick! Antibiotics weren't used to treat the disease until 1905-1910. For a man in the 1890s, having an STD was probably a secret shame, akin to masturbating. Admitting you had it or did it was akin to admitting you were a crazed pervert. Treatment with mercury was most common in the 1890s, and that was worse than the symptoms of infection, which brings us back to the spreading of diseases. It was as John H. Stokes wrote in 1920:

The third great plague is syphilis, a disease which, in these times of public enlightenment, is still shrouded in obscurity, entrenched behind a barrier of silence, and armed, by our own ignorance and false shame, with a thousand times its actual power to destroy. . . . It is one of the ironies, the paradoxes, of fate that the disease against which the most tremendous advances have been made, the most brilliant victories won, is the third great plague, syphilis the disease that still destroys us through our ignorance or our refusal to know the truth. (Source)

Shame kept people from getting treatment, so people died from their illnesses. Our beloved Mrs Beeton, of the  popular household management book, a pillar of society, died of syphilis, contracted from her husband. It may have also killed her first two children. I mention Mrs Beeton because her case demonstrates that there is no shame in getting sick. She bought into Victorian morality wholeheartedly, and it did nothing to save her.

Lee Jackson tells the story of another innocent woman, who died of syphilis, and concludes: "Who could have seen that hapless, unoffending victim to her woman's trust and man's barbarity, hurried to an early grave, without asking himself could such a one have been marked out for example and for punishment by a discerning Providence, as some would tell us?"

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There are no perfect rules for sexual behavior, but the conservative elements of society often try to enforce traditional rules and understandings. Sometimes when these rules are based upon mistaken ideas, they generate more problems than they solve. - "Shattering Sacred Myths," The Academy of Evolutionary Metaphysics, 2005.

"Priestess of Delphi," by John Collier  (1891).

"It was an era of religion and faith, and intellectual change." - Nina Auerbach 

Although the Oneida Community was founded before the publication of the Origin of Species, they began selective breeding programs in the 1870s.

What is pornography?

The definition of "pornography" is famously subjective. After all, one man's Venus de Milo is another man's masturbation aid. But researchers generally define the genre as material designed solely for sexual arousal, without further artistic merit. - source

When I started this series of posts, I foolishly thought it would be easy to tell you what pornography was, and though this particular post would contain a string of cheeky photos of women in corsets 120 years ago. I was wrong. Determining what counted as porn was as complicated in the 1890s as it is today. The only thing that has become clear is that Victorian society feared sexual arousal, and by extension the distribution and production of pornographic materials.

In 1885, the Society for the Suppression of Vice was absorbed into the National Vigilance Association. The National Vigilance Association (NVA) was inspired by the need to fight child prostitution. Toward the end of restricting the sale of pornographic material the NVA pursued stricter legislation, and published a pamphlet called Pernicious Literature (1889). 

There can be no two opinions that the dissemination of such vile books must do harm to the youth of the country, into whose hands such literature only too readily falls.

Affordable pornography came in the form of pamphlets containing erotic stories, like "Intrigues and Confessions of a Ballet Girl" (1870), which was one of many. These pamphlets didn't have any explicit sex scenes. According to Allison Pease, "the cheaper the pornography, the less body and acts were portrayed." Erotic imagery was also an important part of the penny illustrated weeklies, "and a postcard set depicting a nude gymnast on the swing and trapeze could be purchased in the 1890s at a cost of one shilling for thirty-six poses."

Victorians were definitely kinky. There were sub-genres of pornography, just as there is today. Some of these sub-genres included BDSM (especially riding crops and leather), interracial, same-sex, bestiality, and many others.

Images like this (some with much more nudity) were sold as cabinet cards.

Rule 34 applied in the Victorian era too; if it existed, there was porn of it. They invented the camera and immediately started taking dirty pictures.

Cabinet card. No date.

I even found Sasquatch porn. It was terrifying. I'm not sharing those pictures here.

And the idea that pornographic images were either hand-drawn or rather tame, like the burlesque photos that have been circulating around the internet, is wrong, very wrong. By the 1890s, pornographic images were could be very explicit, as seen in this auctioneer's photo set.

So, who was buying pornography in the 1890s and how much of it? Although they certainly weren't immune to pornography's allure, the middle-class viewed the poor and the aristocratic as hungry for vice. Unlike masturbation, I don't think every one does porn. The NVA said there could be no two opinions about the harmful effects of pornography, but there were varying definitions about what pornography was, as seen by the trials of Oscar Wilde. When does a poem become pornographic and what makes it so? Is pornography an art? Can art be pornographic?

Dracula 1st edition cover.

Bram Stoker's Dracula originally sported a yellow cover to warn readers of its pornographic contents, which elude the modern reader. Stoker never intended it to be pornographic. Of Dracula, Stoker wrote to William Ewart Gladstone that:

The book is necessarily full of horrors and terrors but I trust that these are calculated to “cleanse the mind by pity & terror.” At any rate there is nothing base in the book and though superstition is brought in with the weapons of superstition I hope it is not irreverent.

Considering him a friend, Stoker had already sent Gladstone, and many other friends, copies of the book. Although the book's cover was yellow, Stoker didn't seem to fear any social repercussions for a book he didn't consider pornographic.

Dracula was nothing compared to My Secret Life (1888).

The next night undressing, he showed me his prick, stiff, as he sat naked on a chair; it was an exceedingly long, but thin article; he told me about frigging, and said he would frig me, if I would frig him. He commenced moving his hand quickly up and down...

Some books were clearly pornographic, just as they are today. In fact, the only difference between Victorian porn and modern porn is that Victorian porn was lower tech, and more people were 'morally' against it. If you have any further insight, please leave a comment.

I will be writing one more post in this series on 1890s male sexuality, in which I plan to connect the different aspects of what influenced sexuality together, concluding this series.

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The strange sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature gives us the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and its posing and eliding of the issue of man, sliding as it does between male and human, between a sexual-instinctual problematic of masculinity and an undifferentiating psychological recognition of the beyond of consciousness, of ego and id. The story starts from the exclusion of the woman which is the condition of a questioning of the man and also its limitation, the specifics of difference are pulled back into general themes. The title, in fact, is misleading or, to put it another way, is itself one of the precautions and a symptom of the problem of representation: nothing about the story is really strange other than that it should be thought strange, the strange case of male sexuality is precisely unstrange by being made into this strange case which comes out of, works with the assumptions of, the given system of representation. Male sexuality is neither the foregone conclusion of animal passion nor the horror of an unspeakable darkness but once it is envisaged within this system that is all that can be said, all that is allowed.

Eugen Sandow

On June 10, 1865 the London Times reported a "Dreadful RailwayAccidentat Staplehurst:10 Persons Killed-Upwards of 20 Wounded."One of the passengers, who had "a narrow escape . . . fortunately for himself and for the interests of literature,"was Charles Dickens. The previous day the 2:38 tidal train from Folkestone had come off the rails at the viaduct just outside Staplehurst. The track was being repaired at the time of the accident and a section of it had been taken up. Having read the wrong time-table, the foreman in charge of the repairs did not expect the train for another two hours, and by the time the train driver saw the flag man who was in the wrong place it was much too late to brake. The front of the train cleared the gap in the tracks, but the rest of the carriages plunged down into the river bed. Only one of the seven first-class carriages escaped the fall by being securely coupled to the second-class carriage in front. In that fortunate carriage were Charles Dickens, his mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother. Also present was the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend, which, famously, Dickens rescued from the precariouly balanced carriage, after first extricating the Ternans and offering assistance to the injured and dying. Ellen Ternan appears to have been hurt in the crash, but Dickens felt no ill-effects until he was back in London, when he describes himself as being "quite shattered and brokenup.""Shaken"is the word that he uses to describe his nervous condition in letter after letter. On June 10 he apologizes to Charles Lever that he "can't sign [his] flourish, being nervously shaken." On June 13, in a letter to Thomas Mitton, he describes himself as still reliving the original impact:" In writing these scanty words of recollection I feel the shake and I am obliged to stop." On June 21 he still feels "a little shaken in [his] nervous system by the terrible and affecting incidents of the late railway accident." And the effects lingered long after, as Peter Ackroyd describes:

["]The effect of the Staplehurst accident "tells more and more," [Dickens] noted in 1867, and then a year later he confessed that ". .. I have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable." His son, Henry, recalled that "I have seen him sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight jolt. When this happened he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both hands." And Mamie remembered that ". .. my father's nerves never really were the same again ... we have often seen him, when travelling home from London, suddenly fall into a paroxysm of fear,  tremble all over, clutch the arms of the railway carriage, large beads of perspiration standing on his face, and suffer agonies of terror. We ... would touch his hand gently now and then. He had,  however, ... no idea of our presence"["] 

Although Dickens got off lightly in the accident itself, then, the original jolt seems to have left its mark on his body, to have filed itself away in his nervous system; he relived the event over and over, experiencing all the anxiety that he didn't feel at the time. He died on the anniversary of the crash five years later. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes, we can identify Dickens as one of the most famous victims of a peculiarly modem form of nervous after-effect: shock.

Jack.  I am afraid I really don’t know.  The fact is, Lady Bracknell, I said I had lost my parents.  It would be nearer the truth to say that my parents seem to have lost me . . . I don’t actually know who I am by birth.  I was . . . well, I was found.
Lady Bracknell.  Found!
Jack.  The late Mr. Thomas Cardew, an old gentleman of a very charitable and kindly disposition, found me, and gave me the name of Worthing, because he happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket at the time.  Worthing is a place in Sussex.  It is a seaside resort.
Lady Bracknell.  Where did the charitable gentleman who had a first-class ticket for this seaside resort find you?
Jack.  [Gravely.]  In a hand-bag.
Lady Bracknell.  A hand-bag?
Jack.  [Very seriously.]  Yes, Lady Bracknell.  I was in a hand-bag—a somewhat large, black leather hand-bag, with handles to it—an ordinary hand-bag in fact.
Lady Bracknell.  In what locality did this Mr. James, or Thomas, Cardew come across this ordinary hand-bag?
Jack.  In the cloak-room at Victoria Station.  It was given to him in mistake for his own.
Lady Bracknell.  The cloak-room at Victoria Station?
Jack.  Yes.  The Brighton line.
Lady Bracknell.  The line is immaterial.  Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me.  To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.  And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?  As for the particular locality in which the hand-bag was found, a cloak-room at a railway station might serve to conceal a social indiscretion—has probably, indeed, been used for that purpose before now—but it could hardly be regarded as an assured basis for a recognised position in good society.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. - Oscar Wilde

A Dr Jaeger imitator in Winnipeg (1907).

Source of quote.

The Marquess had hired a gang of roughs and instructed them to follow Wilde and see that he did not secure admittance to any hotel in town. [...] Towards midnight, however, they lost sight of him. At this time Wilde's mother was living with Willie in Oakley Street, Chelsea, and it was to the door of their house that Wilde at length staggered in a state of complete physical exhaustion. 'Give me shelter, Willie,' he gasped as his astonished brother opened the door. 'Let me lie on the floor, or I shall die in the streets.' With these words he collapsed across the threshold, as Willie Wilde put it, 'like a wounded stag.'

[...] The family atmosphere had the worst possible psychological effect upon him. Both his eccentric mother and his drunken brother kept telling him that he must behave like an Irish gentleman and face the music. 'This house is depressing,' he complained. 'Willie makes such a merit of giving me shelter. He means well, I suppose, but it is all dreadful.'

Newman Noggs and Kate Nickleby Charles Dickens

"I am growing popular!"
"Popular!" said his friend.
"Why, last night I saw them pelt you with rotten eggs!"
"Yes!" he replied with gratification, "that is right! But they used to throw bricks!"

He had a crowded house, and was warmly received, in fact, it was altogether hot for him, there being distributed among the audience a bushel or two of rotten tomatoes. The first act opened with Mr. Ritchie trying to turn a somersault. He probably would have succeeded had not a great many tomatoes struck him, throwing him off his balance and demoralizing him… a large tomato thrown from the gallery struck him square between the eyes, and he fell to the stage floor just as several bad eggs dropped upon his head. Then the tomatoes flew thick and fast, and Ritchie fled for the stage door.

...a type of heroic character possessing extraordinary talents, supernatural phenomena, or superhuman powers and dedicated to protecting the public.

Headline from the November 18, 1909 issue of The Republican.

ARE MEN GAY DECEIVERS?

It is a stock phrase under certain unfortunate circumstances to say that a girl has "been deceived" by some man, or to call an immoral man "a gay deveiver." Now, the question in my mind is whether this is, in the majority of cases, a correct judgement, or whether one might not better say the woman deceived herself and blinded her own eyes.

The fact is that most women are far more clear-sighted than most men, and even those of the sex who might be called deficient in intelligence are endowed with a keen, if vague, instinct which cries "'Ware, danger!" even though it is quite unable to describe the precise nature or position of the menaced trouble.

Willie Wilde by Alfred Bryan.

But a woman, no matter of what degree, so soon as she falls in love blinds herself, or rather, she sets up her own ideal of the beloved object between herself and the reality, and if she said reality only reasonably keep quiet, and not persist in destroying of stepping out from behind his shelter, all will go well.

 The trouble is that few men have enough tact to be really deceitful; few have finesse enough to enter into a woman's mind and perceive the position which she has assigned to her hero of the moment and adapt themselves to it. They try to do it, but they don't often succeed; and by way of a glittering generality on may say that men mean to be deceitful and are really transparent, and that women, while apparently most deliciously transparent, are actually subtly deceitful.

Of course, like other generalities, this rule has particular exceptions; and there are men who really do deceive, and women who cannot do so. I must say that for myself I do not like either of these classes; they are out of nature, and require special study.

Born Miriam Florence Folline, she changed her name to retain control of her third husband's publishing empire. Willie Wilde was her fourth and last husband.

The really deceitful has a strong feminine coat of character, and this of the womanish and not womanly nature. He is a self deceiver like her, but not because, like her, he wishes to believe others better than they really are, but because he is determined to believe them as bad as he wishes them to be. He adopts a code of morals, or immorals, and various forms of casuistry persuades himself that this is not only justifiable for himself, but the actual code of others, no matter what they may profess. If he is clever, he can argue from this standpoint that black is white, and left is right, and crooked straight, with so much conviction and candor that he may often end in persuading even a woman to believe him and to adjust her own beliefs to his.

But this sort of man is unfortunately rare; the more usual form is the man who knows very well his right hand from his left, an is perfectly sure that the moon is not made of green cheese, but who wishes to make some woman believe that it is; it is rather interesting to watch the maneuvers of this class of deceivers; the casual mention of the fact to be established, let us say  of the cheesy quality of the moon; the apparent surprise and indulgent amusement when the pupil indignantly contradicts the proposition; the gentle arguments, the mock deference and respect for the feminine view so diffusely and vaguely set forth; the raillery and playful irony, often more effectual than any other weapon; the compliments so skillfully introduced, and the thoughtful pause, as if considering the true value of the pearls of wisdom let fall from the pretty lips, at which he gazes so admiringly.

Later in life, Mrs Frank Leslie fashioned herself the Baroness de Bazus.

Then comes the personal appeal: "If anybody could convince me, it certainly would be you, and your arguments are so strong and so well put that I am half inclined to accept them in spite of my own reason, and yet I can't but see that there is a very, very cheesy look to the moon, and so many people older and perhaps wiser than either of us have believed it. Don't you think you are perhaps a little prejudiced? I wish we could think alike upon this as upon so many other matters. Now don't you se," this and this?

Victorian advice on handkerchief flirting.

Probably at this point of the game the game the woman who is in love begins to finger the handkerchief with which she will presently blind her own eyes; she listens more to the compliments and personal appeal than to the arguments; she begins to take note of the hyacinthine locks, the careful moustache, the white teeth, the handsome hand of her companion-but shall I tell you where she did not look? It is into his eyes; for although I have seen a great many men trying to deceive, I have never seen one who could bring his eyes into full subjection. He may open them wide and stare you boldly in the face; he may raise them to your own with elaborate candor; he may gaze upward at the ceiling or outward at the sky, or downward in pensive consideration, but I have never yet saw an eye absolutely successful in deceit; and I believe that if Marguerite had looked Mephistopheles full in the eye, and meant to read the truth there, he would not have had power to conceal it; and if he could not, less expert "gay deceivers" need not try to. But if the woman is not in love she is very much tempted to laugh aloud and say: "What a clever special pleader you are! You ought to be a lawyer; but all the same, you don't believe a word you're saying and neither do I. We both know perfectly well that the moon is not made of green cheese, and never was, and never will be. Why pretend it is? 

 I say the woman may be tempted to make this little speech, but if she is a wise woman she will resist the indulgence, for she knows perfectly well that to mortify a man's amour propre is to lose that man's allegiance, whatever that may be. Every man is born with the belief that he is intellectually full-blooded specimen of his sex he carries that belief to his grave; and it is very commendable that he should do so, for one likes to see landmarks respected.

1890s ideal of the perfect man.

 Now, of course, if the woman sees through the man's sophistry, and laughs at his attempts to deceive her, it is flinging confetti or even mud-pellets at the landmarks; it is disturbing tradition and suggesting that she actually knows as much and is quite as clever as her traditional lord and master. Therefore the clear-headed woman never laughs at the man's attempt to deceive, unless  she is ready to be rid of him, and even then it is not a good plan, for no wise woman wishes to sow dragon's teeth in her own path; no, as a general thing she gently deceives him, but not herself; she listens to his arguments, she looks sweetly considerate over his propositions, however absurd; she appears to be on the point of yielding while fixed like a rock in her own position. When tired of the situation, she ends it by murmuring, with pretty deference: "There's a great deal in what you say, and I never looked at the question from your point of view; of course you have studied these matters a great deal more than I, and you have a much wider opportunity of observation-but-well, I must think it over; and certainly I shall look at the moon with different eyes from what I ever did before." But sometimes, alas! one only wishes the man could and would be more deceitful than he tries to be. Most men, when in a candid mood, confess that there are depths in the masculine nature which few, perhaps no women, can fathom; that they are of coarser fiber and more earthly material than women are, and that no woman ever enters into their temptations or realizes their possibilities. All this may be so; if they say so of themselves, one is bound to believe it, for surely no man can be suspected of deceit in this direction. But if these depths do exist, one would wish them to be securely and constantly concealed. the oubliettes in the Imperial Palace were so well disguised that the innocent guests walked over them quite unconsciously, and if some sinister rumor of their existence came to unwilling ears, it could at least be dismissed with the verdict, not proven. But if people insist upon glass windows over their oubliettes, and call upon you, as you gayly tread parlor-floors, to gaze upon the unclean depths below, one wishes that such people were wise enough to at least try to be deceitful. Again, a man is ignoble; he is dishonest in his affairs, he is cowardly, he is disloyal, he is purse-proud, or perhaps he has rheumatism, or colic, or some other distressing complaint not necessarily apparent. Well, let him cover up both his mental and his bodily diseases and deficiencies while in society, and refrain from obtruding sentiments, theories or symptoms with which the companion of the moment can not agree or alleviate. But if he is not wise enough to do this, he may, perhaps never suspect that he ought to have done so, for one of the most charming and most dangerous traits in a woman's nature is her power of sympathy and her dread of giving pain.

She feels for the man who is making himself ridiculous as he would be quite incapable of feeling for himself, and she gently guards him from perceiving his own folly, even while she is dimly conscious that no human power could make him see it. I have seen a very clever woman listening with serene patience and apparent interest to a deluded individual who was explaining the wonderful system he would adopt if he were Secretary of the Treasury, and winding himself up in such a spider's web of words that he finally turned very red and moist, and stammered into silence, with a suspicious glance at the gentle face beside him, upon which, however, not a trace of a smile could be observed as the candid voice replied: "I don't wonder you despair of making me understand. I never could get hold of politics, and am glad all these matters are in your hands rather than mine."

Do you call this woman deceitful? Well, so do I-admirably, generously, charmingly deceitful; and if that man went away comforted in his soul rather than humiliated and stung, was it not well for him and also for her?

Sometimes, of course, the sympathetic in the woman degenerates into weakness; and I have seen nice women behave in anything but a nice manner, simply because they did not wish to mortify their male companions by showing that they felt shocked at their language and manners. In fact, I think women seldom enjoy or wish to indulge for their own pleasure in objectionable pursuits; they simply allow themselves to be led by their companionship, and will, out of real goodness and delicacy, pretend to be bad and coarse. But to return to the first point, of what deceit a good woman will cultivate when she is in love. It is one of the most painful, or rather, pathetic, sights in life to see some lovely, piquant, little Titania trying to impress both the world and herself with the idea that Nick Bottom is a hero, and the ass' head is the true model of an Adonis. How wistfully she watches him in society; how she hovers around his conversations, darting in now and again with some word or hint, or little laugh or gesture, that seems to interpret his platitudes or errors into capital jests and hidden bits of wisdom. How she finishes out his sentences, and suggests to his dull brain something to say next. How lovingly she listens to the dullest and most prolix harangues; how she puts a noble construction upon his most ignoble deeds, and tells everybody how prudent he was in not making that investment, or helping this imposter, or subscribing to their plan, when all the world knows he was saved from loss in these directions by the pigheadedness that never allows him to do what anybody asks him to do.

Shakespeare's Titania depicted by Edwin Landseer in his painting Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Dear, deceitful little Titanias! What a multitude of them there are, and how I love them, even while they always remind me of an old Dutch tomb whereon are sculptured two delicate little angels tugging away at the soul of an uncomfortable old alderman who declines to budge an inch.