28th Nov.
Tux Lnglish Illustrated Magazine under fresh management makes a new departure in allowing the pros and cons of a vexed question to be discussed simultaneously by two well-known writers, It is seldom indeed that two adversaries have an opportunity of tilting on such equal ground as this. The interest excited by the opening article of a literary controversy has generally waned considerably by the time the rejoinder appears. It is with real pleasure, therefore, that we hail this advance in the field of journalistic argument especially as the question raised is one whose importance grows in proportion with the steady progress of the Eternal Feminine.
"Why women weep" is a problem whose solution Lady Colin Campbell would unquestionably find in their enforced -restriction from tobacco-smoking, judging by the eloquent plea she makes for the feminine cigarette. Lady Colin may be truly said, in hackneyed journalese, to be as beautiful as she is talented; and the arguments she brings to bear upon her pet subject certainly tend to make us all converts, She takes very high ground, protesting that all her conclusions are based upon purely altruistic premises. She argues that if men really find in tobacco that "very dear and well-beloved friend" whose praises the author of Three Men ina Boat hymned so enthusiastically, they have no right to withhold from women a similar solace without providing them with a fitting substitute. Lady Colin almost persuades us that there would be no more contentious women if there were more female smokers; and she prophecies a Utopia where nagging is unknown, where there is no longer any division' of the sexes into non-smoking sheep and smoking goats. We lay down her paper with a dreamy remembrance of a picture she has conjured' up; a picture of a tired, harassed man returning to a room farnished with oriental luxury, and glowing with colours from rose-shaded lamps and the blue and violet flames of a roaring fire, The presiding goddess of this seductive salon does not insist on her husband's banishment to his study because there alone is he permitted to surrender himself to the soothing influence of his favourite pipe. On the contrary, she herself provides him with the implements of war, and having seen that all his wants are supplied, gues back to her own place amongst the billowy silken cushions of the sofa, where the cloudy vapours of a cigarette surround her head like a nimbus, and seem impregnated with the dainty thoughts that issue from her lips at intervals.
Bat this fairy vision is rudely dispelled when we turn the page and read Mrs. Lymn Linton's view of the same subject, Glad of an opportunity of enemy, the modern girl—this lady has much to say in her rejoinder. She acknowledges the powerful advocacy of Lady Colin; but bewails the fact that she is using her talents in a repulsive cause. Mrs. Lyon Linton would permit her sex no weeds but those of widowhdod, She regards this new movement as the forerunner of a conquering raid on the part of those terrible wild women, the depth of whose utter blackness her diatribes incline us to doubt. The portrait she draws of a possible future of universal smoking when the cook may drop the ashes of her pipe into the stew, and the lady's-maid burn round pinholes in her employer's garments, might perhaps sound convincing did we not remember that such argument have never yet been urged against chefs or valets, who are surely not always taken from a non-smoking class. Lady Colin contends that it is chiefly in England that women-smokers are regarded with suspicion, and adds that England alone has had the doubtful honour of inventing that epicene horror the "manly" woman who is held in detestation by the purest femininity of other European countries. with whom the cigarette is a regular institution, Mrs, Lyon Linton answers this by maintaining that women-smokers of Italy and France. are not a good, high-bred, modest, well conducted type, but belong either to the domei-monde or the peasantry. lo make this statement sufficiently sweeping she is obliged altogether to ignore the claims to a worthy place in society of smoking Spanish, Russian, and Austrian ladies. She further declares that a catholicity of smoking will give birth to a multitude of—if not exactly: wild women—at least traitors in the camp, insurgents who will revolt at every form of discipline, if one point is ceded to them now. Mrs. Lynn Linton passes over the fact that Lady Colin's chief plea for smoking is urged in favour of women-workers whose weary brains need soothing as much as men's. The great authoress. writes as if the refreshing vapours of Our Lady Nicotine were only required by that genius of unrest, the modern society woman, whose Ibsenitish morbidness and hysteria she declines to dispel by what she regards as a purely masculine anodyne. Her words would carry more weight if we idid not all know what an entirely erroneous idea she entertains of fin-desidcle waidenhood. ''o her distorted vision, the Girton girl is a hybrid creature, almost incapable of any noble sentiment. 'I'o those who rejoice in the possession of the said girl as sister or wife, she assumes another aspect and becomes that ideal creation—the woman with a man's mind and woman's might. Mrs. Lynn Linton ere this has told us that all feminine graces would disappear when women studied Art in a life class, or followed in the footsteps of Zsculapius; and the students at the Slade School and University College are a living proof of the fallacies in her assertions. And surely in this very question—shall woman smoke?—is there not a chance that her reasoning is not altogether logical? We do not wish to pose as advocates of universal smoking; but we decline to admit that a woman necessarily becomes unsexed because she shares in a pleasure to whose unmitigated charm her companion, man, is testifying eloquently every hour of the day.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.