Part 14

There is pleasure in the thought of all that delicate weakness appealing to our strength, of that innocent ignorance looking up to us for guidance through the wilderness of the world. Of course it will soon be over, and when the dear dependent has learnt to walk alone a little we can go back to the old faces and take our segar as before. But somehow the return never comes, or, if it does come, the old faces have grown far less enchanting to us. The truth is, we have tasted the second pleasure of married life--the pleasure of being an authority. All that shy appeal to us, all that confession of ignorance, has taught us what wonderfully wise fellows we are. We are far less inclined to wait for Smith's approval, or to take our tone from the group at the club-window. It is, to say the least, far pleasanter to be an authority at home. Gradually we find ourselves becoming oracular, having opinions on every subject that a leading article can give us one upon, correcting the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Malt-tax and censuring Lord Stanley's policy towards the King of Ashantee. Life takes a new interest when we can put it so volubly into words. At the same time we feel that the interest is hardly shared by the world.

Our old associates apparently fail to appreciate the change in us, or to listen to our disquisitions any more than they did of old; it is a comfort to feel that we have a home to retreat to, and that there is one there who will. To the subtle flattery, in short, of weakness and of ignorance, woman has now added the flattery of listening. To say little, to contribute hardly more than a cue now and then, but to be attentive, to be interested, to brighten at the proper moment, to laugh at the proper joke, to suggest the exact amount of difficulties which you require to make your oratorical triumph complete, and to join with an unreserved assent in its conclusion, that is the simple secret of the power of ninety-nine wives out of a hundred. It is a power which is far from being confined to the home. The most brilliant salons have always been created by dexterous listeners.

A pleasant house is not a house where one is especially talked to, but where one discovers that one talks more easily than elsewhere. The tact is certainly invaluable which enables a woman to know the strong points of her guests, to lead up to their subjects, to supply points for conversation, and then to leave it quietly alone. But it is only a display on the grand scale of that particular faculty of silence which wins its quiet triumphs on every hearth-rug.

The faculty, however, has other triumphs to win besides those in which it figures as a delicate administration of flattery to the vanity of men. It is the force which woman holds in reserve for the hour of revolt. For it must be owned that, pleasant as the tyranny is, men sometimes wake up to the fact that it is a tyranny, that in the most seductive way in the world they are being wheedled out of associations that are really dear to them, that their life is being cramped and confined, that their aims are being lowered. Then the newly-found eloquence exhausts itself in a declaration of revolt.

Things cannot go on in this way, life cannot be ruined for caprices. It is needless, perhaps, to repeat the rhetoric of rebellion, and all the more needless because it shares the fate of all rhetoric in producing not the slightest impression on the mind to which it is addressed. The wife simply listens as before, though the listening is now far from encouraging to eloquence. She is perfectly patient, patient in her refusal to continue an irritating discussion, patient in bearing your little spurts of vexation; she listens quietly to-day, with the air of one who is perfectly prepared to listen quietly to-morrow. But even rhetoric has its limits, and now that the cues have ceased, a husband finds it a little difficult to keep up a discussion where he has to supply both arguments and replies.

Moreover, the tact which managed in former days to place him in a highly pleasant position by the confession of weakness, now, by the very same silent avowal, places him in a decidedly unpleasant one. If a woman's air simply says at the end of it all, "I can't answer you, but I know I am right," a man has a lurking sense that his copious rhetoric has had a smack of the cowardly as well as of the tyrannical about it. And so, after a vigorous denunciation of some particular thing which his wife has done, a husband commonly finds himself no further than before; and the very instant that, from sheer weariness, he ceases, the wife usually steals out and does it again.

There is something feline about this combination of perfect patience with quiet persistence--a combination which the Jesuits on a larger scale have turned into the characteristic of their order. It is especially remarkable when it breaks the bonds of silence, and takes the form of what in vulgar language is called "nagging." No form of torture which has as yet been invented, save, perhaps, the slow dropping of water on some highly sensitive part of the frame, can afford a parallel to this ingenious application of the principle of persistence.

The absolute certainty that, when snub or scolding or refusal have died into silence, the word will be said again; the certainty that it will be said year after year, month after month, week after week; the irritation of expecting it, the irritation of hearing it, the irritation of expecting it again, tell on the firmest will in the world. In the long run the wife wins. The son goes to Harrow, though reason has proved a dozen times over that we can only afford the expense of Marlborough; the family gets its Alpine tour, though logic and unpaid bills imperatively dictate the choice of a quiet watering place. You yield, and you see that every one in the house knew that you would yield. There wasn't a servant who didn't know every turn of the domestic screw, or who took your resistance for more than the usual routine of the operation. "Time and I," said Philip of Spain, "against any two." It is no wonder if, fighting alone for prudence and economy, one is beaten by time and one's wife.

We have no wish to dispute the enormous benefits to man of woman's supremacy, but we may fairly leave the statement of them to the numerous troup of poets who dispute with Mr. Tupper the theme of the affections. For ourselves, we may undertake, perhaps, the humbler task of pointing out very briefly some of the disadvantages which, as in all human things, counterbalance these benefits. In the first place, feminine rule is certainly not favorable to anything like largeness of mind or breadth of view. It creates, as we have seen, an excessive self-conceit and opinionativeness, and then it directs these qualities to very small ends indeed. Woman lives from her childhood in a world of petty details, of minute household and other cares, of bargains where the price of every yard ends in some fraction of a penny. The habit of mind which is formed by these and similar influences becomes the spirit of the house, a spirit admirable no doubt in many ways, but excessively small.

The quarrels of a woman's life, her social warfare, her battles about precedence, her upward progress from set to set, have all the same stamp of Lilliput on them. But it is to these small details, these little pleasures and little anxieties and little disappointments and little ambitions, that a wife generally manages to bend the temper of her spouse. He gets gradually to share her indifference to large interests, to broad public questions. He imbibes little by little the most fatal of all kinds of selfishness, the selfishness of the home. It would be difficult, perhaps, to say how much of the patriotism of the Old World was owing to the inferior position of woman; but it is certain that the influence of woman tells fatally against any self-sacrificing devotion to those larger public virtues of which patriotism is one of the chief. Whether from innate narrowness of mind, or from defective training, or from the excessive development of the affections, family interests far outweigh, in the feminine estimation, any larger national or human considerations.

If ever the suffrage is given to woman, it will be necessary to punish bribery with the treadmill, for no "person" will regard it as a crime to barter away her vote for a year's schooling for Johnny or a new frock for Maud. Nothing tells more plainly the difference between the Old World and the New than the constant returns home during war. We can hardly conceive Pericles or even Alcibiades applying for leave of absence on the ground of "private affairs." But then Pericles and Alcibiades had no home that they could set above the interests of the State.

Lastly, from this narrow view bounded strictly by the limits and interests of the home comes, it may be feared, a vast deal of social and political bitterness and intolerance. Her very nature, her "deductive spirit," as Mr. Buckle puts it prettily for her, makes woman essentially a dogmatist. She has none of the larger intercourse with other minds and adverse circumstances which often creates the form, if not the spirit, of tolerance in the narrowest of men. Her very excellence and faith make her exactly what they made Queen Mary--a conscientious and therefore merciless persecutor.

It is just this feminine narrowness, this feminine conscientiousness, in the clergy which unfits them for any position where justice or moderation is requisite. Justice is a quality unknown to woman, and against which she wages a fierce battle in the house and in the world. There are few husbands who have been made more just, more tolerant, more large-hearted and large-headed, by their wives; for justice lives in a drier light than that of the affections, and dry light is not a very popular mode of illumination under "the monstrous regimen of women."

THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER.

Proverbs, as a rule, are believed to contain amongst them somehow or other a quantity of truth. There is scarcely one proverb which has not got another proverb that flatly contradicts it, and between the two it would be very odd if there was not a great deal of sound sense somewhere. There is, however, one of the number which, as every candid critic must allow, is based on an egregious falsehood--the proverb, namely, which affirms, against all experience, that whatever is good for the goose is good for the gander. Viewing the goose as the type of woman, and the gander as the type of man, no adage could be more preposterous or untenable. Such a maxim flies dead in the very face of society, and is calculated to introduce disturbance into the orderly sequence and subordination of the sexes. Who first invented it, it is difficult to conceive, unless it was some rustic Mrs. Poyser, full of the consciousness of domestic power, and anxious to reverse in daily life the law of priority which obtained--as she must have seen--even in her own poultry-yard.

There is one way of reading the proverb which perhaps renders it less monstrous; and if we confine ourselves to the view that "sauce" for the goose is also "sauce" for the gander, we escape from any of the philosophical difficulties in which the other version involves us. No doubt, when they are dead, goose and gander are alike, even in the way they are dressed, and there is no superiority on the part of either. Death makes all genders epicene. Except for one solitary text about silence in heaven for half an hour, which some cynical commentators have explained as indicating a temporary banishment from Paradise of one of the sexes, distinctions of this sort need not be supposed to continue after the present life. If we are to take the former reading, and to test it by what we know of life, nothing can be more unfounded, or more calculated to give a wrong impression as to the facts. Were it not too late, the proverb ought to be altered; and perhaps it is not absolutely hopeless to persuade Mr. Tupper to see to it.

"What is good for the goose is bad for the gander," or "what is bad for the goose is good for the gander;" or, perhaps, "what is a sin in the goose is only the gander's way," would read quite as well, would not be so diametrically at variance with the ordinary rules of social life, and, accordingly, would be infinitely truer and more moral. Even Mr. Mill, who is the advocate of female emancipation and female suffrage, never has gone so far as to say that all women, as well as all men, are brothers. The female suffrage, as we know, is merely a question of time. Before very long, no doubt, there will be a feminine Reform Bill, during the course of which Mr. Disraeli will explain that the feminine franchise has always been the one idea of the Conservative party, and in which the compound housekeeper will occupy as prominent a position as the compound householder ever could have done. Nobody, however, has as yet absolutely asserted, we do not say the equality, for equality is an invidious term, but the indifference of the sexes. And this being so, it is strange that a proverb should be retained which is so opposed to every notion that passes current in the world.

As the legislation of the world has hitherto been uniformly in the hands of men, it is not astonishing that it has always proceeded on the assumption of the absolute dependence of the weaker upon the stronger sex. Several thousand years of intellectual and political supremacy must have altered the type imperceptibly, and made the difference between the ordinary run of men and women far more marked than nature intended it originally to be. All theology, whether Christian or pagan, has been in the habit of representing woman as designed chiefly to be a sort of ornament and appendage to man; and the allegory of the creation of Eve, though Oriental in its tone, does nevertheless correspond to a vague feeling among even civilized nations that woman's mission is to fill up a gap in man's daily life.

Nor are they merely the opinions and laws of the world which have moulded themselves on this basis. The whole imagination of the race has been fed upon the notion, until the relations between the two sexes have become the one thing on which fancy, sentiment, and hope are taught from childhood to dwell. It is not an extravagant inference to suppose that centuries of this imaginative and sentimental habit have ended by affecting the brain and the physical nature of humanity. Man has become a woman-caressing animal. The life of the two sexes is made to centre round the once fictitious, but now universal, idea that they cannot exist without one another.

Goose and gander have lost their primitive conception of an individual and independent career, and are never happy unless they are permitted to go in pairs. Under less complex social conditions such interdependence led to no very intolerable results. Men and women formed a sort of convenient partnership, each contributing their quota of daily conveniences to the common fund. The chief protected his squaw--or, if he was a patriarch, his squaws--while the squaws ministered to his pleasures, cooked his food, milked--if Mr. Max Mueller's idea of the Sanscrit is correct--his cows, and carried his babies on their backs. The husband found the venison and the maize, while his wife dressed it and helped to eat it. This mutual arrangement had at any rate the advantage of being accommodated to the physical differences of strength between the two halves of society.

A little tyranny is the natural consequence of an unequal distribution of physical strength in all rude and barbarous states, and it was inevitable that woman should at such times have more than her share of labor and of patience imposed upon her. But it is evident that, as civilization has increased with the growth of population and of industrial interests, women no longer derive the same benefit from the social partnership as formerly. Some social philosophers still maintain, with M. Comte, that it is man's business to maintain woman, and to relieve her from the necessity of providing for her natural wants. But this theory seems Utopian and impracticable when we try to think of applying it to the world in which we live. Wealth is no longer distributed with the least reference to industrious and sober habits.

The principle of accumulation has been admitted, and social bodies have encouraged and sanctioned it by allowing property to descend from one generation to another intact, the result of which is that the industry of the father is able to insure the perpetual idleness of his posterity. Large multitudes of poor producers are occupied in earning their own necessary sustenance, and cannot take on themselves without enormous difficulty the burden of supporting womankind, a burden which the richer classes scarcely feel. As by far the majority of women belong to the impoverished and laborious class, it is obvious they must either enter the labor-market themselves, or purchase support from the rich by sacrifices which are inconsistent with their personal dignity and the morality of the social body. As the imagination of humanity has been long since given up to sentiment and passion, it is only too clear that the more vicious alternative is the one oftenest embraced. Society, then, has come to this--that woman must still depend on man, while man no longer, except on his own terms, fulfills his part of the tacit bargain by maintaining woman.

The first thing to be considered is what the public gains by keeping up the sentimental notion about woman's mission. It is her business, most of us think, to charm and to attract, partly in order that she may do man real good, and partly that she may add to the luxury, the refinement, and the happiness of life. With this view, society is very solicitous to keep her at a distance from everything that may spoil or destroy the bloom of her character and tastes. Few people go so far as to say that she ought not to work for her livelihood, if her circumstances render the effort necessary and prudent. As a fact, we see at once that such a proposition cannot be broadly supported, and that any attempt to enforce it would lead to endless misery and mischief. Poor women, for example, must work hard, or else their children and themselves will come to utter degradation.

But though society abstains from committing itself to the doctrine of the enforced idleness of women, it takes refuge in a species of half measure, and restricts, as far as it can, by its legislative enactments or its own social code, the labors which women are to perform to the narrowest possible compass. A woman may work, but she must do nothing which is called unfeminine. She may get up linen, ply her needle, keep weaving-machines in motion, knit, sew, and in higher spheres in life teach music, French, and English grammar. She may be a governess, or a sempstress, or even within certain limits may enter the literary market and write books. This is the extreme boundary of her liberty, and somewhere about this point society begins to draw a rigid line.

It earnestly discourages her from commercial occupations, except under the patronage of a husband who is to benefit by her exertions; she is not to be a counting-house clerk, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a parson. The great active avocations, all those that lead either to fame or fortune, are monopolized by men. Strong-minded women occasionally bore the public by complaining of and protesting against such restrictions; but, on the whole, the public is satisfied that it is convenient that they should be upheld. If we look at the matter from the point of view of the educated, or even the well-to-do classes, such a conclusion seems so reasonable that most of us can hardly induce ourselves to doubt its correctness. Women do a certain tangible amount of good to the world by being kept as a luxury and exotic. The most energetic and rebellious of them may feel angry to be told so, but it is the truth that it suits men in general to keep up a kind of hothouse bloom upon the characters of women. The society of soft, affectionate, unselfish creatures is decidedly good for man. It elevates his nature, it gives him a belief in what is pure and genuine, it alleviates the dust and turmoil of a busy career, and it enables him for so many hours of the day to refresh himself with the company of a being who is in some things a mediaeval saint, and in some, a child.

Whenever one contemplates the effect of more coarse experience of the world, more knowledge, and more rough and hard work on such a nature, one is invariably tempted to acquiesce in the view that it is good for man to have her in the state she is. One feels disposed to object to notions of female emancipation as profane. Education and science, thought and philosophy, like the winds of heaven, should never visit her cheek too roughly. The great thing is, to preserve in her that sort of luxurious unworldliness which represents the religious and refined element in the household to which she belongs. And a hundred things may be and have often been said about the advantage of making pure sentiment the foundation of all the relations that obtain between her and man.

As Plato thought, man elevates himself by elevating and sentimentalizing his affections. All poetry and most literature is given up to this sentimentalizing or refining process. Nor can it be denied that the effect is to increase very much the capacity of happiness in all people who are born to be happy or to enjoy life. What would youth be without its imaginative emotions? We all know, and are taught to believe, that it would be something much poorer than it is.

There is another side to the picture, and it is as well to contemplate it seriously, before we make up our minds to treat with undisguised contempt all the vagaries of those who wish definitely to alter the social condition of women. At present women are beautiful and delicate adjuncts of life. As Prometheus said of horses, they are the ornaments of wealth and luxury. They add perfume and refinement to existence. But, after all, it is an important question whether the conversion of women into this sort of drawing-room delicacy is not sacrificing the welfare of the many to the intellectual and social comfort of the few.

The world pays a heavy price for having its imagination sentimentalized. One of the items in the bill is the disappointment of the thousands whose sensibilities are never destined to be satisfied. For every woman who marries happily, a large percentage never marry at all, or marry in haste and repent at leisure. It remains to be proved that it is wise to teach and train the sex to fix all their views in life and to stake all their fortunes on the chance of the one rare thing--a lucky matrimonial choice. If one could succeed in de-sentimentalizing society, one would take from a few the chief pleasure of living, but it is far from certain that the material welfare of the majority would not be proportionately increased. Half-measures would of course be of very little use.

It would be a poor exchange to take from women all their reserve and innocence and refinement, without giving them free play in the world. They would be only coarse and wicked caricatures of what they are now. The change, to be tolerable, would have to be effectual and thorough. It would be necessary to change the whole current of their ideas, and the whole view of man about them also; to persuade the human race to fix its mind less on the difference of sexes, and to become less imaginative upon the subject. If so sweeping an alteration could be completely effected, perhaps it might be worth while to consider whether woman's absolute independence would not strengthen her character, and add permanently to the world's natural wealth.