The Campaigner, Mrs. Clapp, the landlady in "Vanity Fair," Mrs.
Baynes, and all the rest of the deplorable bevy rest like nightmares
upon our memory. Dickens always made the shrew laughable, so that we
can hardly spare pity for the poor Snagsbys and Raddles and Crupps, or
any of her victims in that wonderful gallery; but Thackeray's,
Trollope's, Charles Reade's, Mrs. Oliphant's, and even Miss
Broughton's shrews are always odious, and they all seem to start from
the page alive.
But I am not minded to deal with the special instances of shrewism
which have been pronounced enough to claim attention from powerful
masters of fiction and history; I am rather interested in the swarms
of totally commonplace shrews who live around us, and who do their
very best--or worst--to make the earth a miserable place. I can laugh
as heartily as anybody at Dickens's "scolds" and female bullies; none
the less however am I ready in all seriousness to reckon the shrew as
an evil influence, as bad as some of the most subtle and malevolent
scourges inflicted by physical nature. All of us have but a little
span on earth, and we should be able to economise every minute, so as
to extract the maximum of joy from existence; yet how many frail lives
are embittered by the shrew! How many men, women, and children has she
not forced to wish almost for death as a relief from morbid pain and
keen humiliation! Our social conditions tend to foster shrewish
temperament, for we are gradually changing the subjection of woman to
the enslavement of man; gentle chivalry is developing into maudlin
self-advertising self-abnegation on the part of the males who favour
the new movement.
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