Chapter 13

At the end of two months it seems a very dim glory indeed, and having long been at an end, it by this time sinks into the second place of a means. The sacrificial calf must next be made to speak. He must acquire a reputation. Here in a good many cases, we suspect, the process finally stops. A man may be got into the House, but the coveted exaltation of that atmosphere does not convert a quiet, peaceable, dull man into an orator. It does not give him ideas and the faculty of articulate speech. At this point, if he be wise, he draws the line. He endures the skeleton as best he may, or else his wife, quenching her ambition, resigns herself to incurable destiny, and learns to be content with the limits set by the fates to her lord's capacities. There are still certain fields open to her own powers, irrespective of what he is able to do.

For example, she may open a _salon_, and there may exert unspeakable influence over all kinds of important people. This is not at present particularly congenial to English ground. As yet, the most vigorous intellectual people seem to have felt an active social life as something beneath them, and the highly social people have not been conspicuous for the activity of their intellectual life. The people who go so greatly to parties do not care for what they sum up, with an admirably comprehensive vagueness, as "intellect;" while, on the other hand, scholars and thinkers are wont to look on time given to society as something very like time absolutely wasted. In such a state of feeling, it is difficult for a clever woman to exercise much power.

But, as other things improve, this unsocial feeling will dissolve. Clever men will see that a couple of hours spent with other clever men are not wasted just because a lady is of the party. Nobody would seriously maintain that this is so even now, but people are very often strongly under the influence of vague notions which they would never dream of seriously maintaining. When women get their rights, the _salon_ will become an institution. It will create a very fine field for the cultivation of their talents. And in proportion as it allows a woman to make a career for herself, it will bring relief to many excellent husbands who will then no longer have to make careers for them at the expense of overstraining their own too slender powers.

It is possible, however, that even then the husband of an ambitious wife may not be fully contented. For people with any degree of weakness or incapacity in them are always more prone than their neighbors to littlenesses and meannesses, and a man who is not able to win much renown on his own account may possibly not be too well pleased to see his Wife surrounded by his intellectual betters. Indeed, he may even, if he is of a very mean nature indeed, resent the spectacle of her own predominance. It is some comfort to think that in such case the man's own temper will be his severest punishment.

As a rule, however, it is pleasant to think that with ambition in women, which is not their peculiarity, is yoked tact, which is their peculiarity emphatically. Hence, therefore, wives who are ambitious for their lords have often the discretion to conceal their mood. They may rule with a hand of iron, but the hand is sagely concealed in a glove of velvet. A man may be the creature of his wife's lofty projects, and yet dream all the time that he is altogether chalking out his own course.

George II. used to be humored in this way by Queen Caroline. Bishop Proudie, on the other hand, was ruled by his wife, and knew that he was a mere weapon in her hands; and, what was even worse than all, knew that the rest of mankind knew this. This must be uncommonly unpleasant, we should suppose. The middle position of the husband who only now and then suspects in a dreamy way that he is being prompted and urged on and directed by an ambitious wife, and has sense enough not to inflame himself with chimerical notions about the superiority and grandeur of the male sex--this perhaps is not so bad. If the tide of ambition runs rather sluggish in yourself, it is a plain advantage to have somebody at your side with enthusiasm enough to atone for the deficiency.

It is impossible to tell how much good the world gets, which otherwise it would miss, simply out of the fact that women are discontented with their position. Now and then, it is understood, the husband who is thus made a mere conductor for the mental electricity of a wife who is too clever for him may feel a little bored, and almost wish that he had married a girl instead. But enthusiasm spreads, and in a general way the fervor of the wife who aspires to distinction proves catching to the husband. Some ladies are found to prefer this position to any other. They are full of power, and have abundance of room for energy, and yet they have no responsibility. They get their ample share of the spoil, and yet they do not bear the public heat and burden of the day. It is only the more martial souls among them for whom this is not enough.

PLATONIC WOMAN.

In the wearier hours of life, when the season is over, and the boredom of country visits is beginning to tell on the hardy constitutions that have weathered out crush and ball-room, there is usually a moment when the heroine of twenty summers bemoans the hardships of her lot. Her brother snuffed her out yesterday when she tried politics, and the clerical uncle who comes in with the vacation extinguished a well-meant attempt at theology by a vague but severe reference to the Fathers. If the afternoon is particularly rainy, and Mudie's box is exhausted, the sufferer possibly goes further, and rises into eloquent revolt against the decorums of life.

There is indeed one career left to woman, but a general looseness of grammar, and a conscious insecurity in the matter of spelling, stand in the way of literary expression of the burning thoughts within her. All she can do is to moan over her lot and to take refuge in the works of Miss Hominy. There she learns the great theory of the equality of the sexes, the advancement of woman and the tyranny of man. If her head doesn't ache, and holds out for a few pages more, she is comforted to find that her aspirations have a philosophic character. She is able to tell the heavy Guardsman who takes her down to dinner and parries her observations with a joke that they have the sanction of the deepest of Athenian thinkers.

It is, we suppose, necessary that woman should have her philosopher, but it must be owned that she has made an odd choice in Plato. No one would be more astonished than the severe dialectician of the Academy at the feminine conception of a sage of dreamy and poetic temperament, who spends half his time in asserting woman's rights, and half in inventing a peculiar species of flirtation. Platonic attachments, whatever their real origin may be, will scarcely be traced in the pages of Plato; and the rights of woman, as they are advocated in the Republic, are sadly deficient in the essential points of free love and elective affinity.

The appearance of a real Platonic woman in the midst of a caucus of such female agitators as those who were lately engaged in stumping with singular ill success the American States of the West would, we imagine, give a somewhat novel turn to the discussion, and strip of a good deal of adoring admiration the philosopher in whom strong-minded woman has of late found a patron and friend. Plato is a little too logical and too fond of stating plain facts in plain words to suit the Miss Hominys who would put the legs of every pianoforte in petticoats, and if the Platonic woman were to prove as outspoken as her inventor, the conference would, we fear, come abruptly to an end. But if once the difficulty of decorum could be got over, some instruction and no little amusement might be derived from the inquiry which the discussion would open, as to how far the modern attitude of woman fulfils the dreams of her favorite philosopher.

The institution of Ladies' Colleges is a sufficient proof that woman has arrived at Plato's conception of an identity of education for the two sexes. Professors, lecturers, class-rooms, note-books, the whole machinery of University teaching, is at her disposal. Logic and the long-envied classics are in the curriculum. Governesses are abolished, and the fair girl-graduates may listen to the sterner teachings of academical tutors. It is amusing to see how utterly discomfited the new Professor generally is when he comes in sight of his class. He feels that he must be interesting, but he is haunted above all with the sense that he must be proper. He remembers that when, in reply to the lady-principal's inquiry how he liked his class, he answered, with the strictest intellectual reference, that they were "charming," the stern matron suggested that another adjective would perhaps be more appropriate. He felt his whole moral sense as a teacher ebbing away.

In the case of men he would insist on a thorough treatment of his subject, and would avoid sentiment and personal details as insults to their intelligence; but what is he to do with rows of pretty faces that grow black as he touches upon the dialect of Socrates, but kindle into life and animation when he depicts the sage's snub nose? Anecdotes, pretty stories, snatches of poetical quotation, slip in more and more as the students perceive and exercise their power. Men, too, are either intelligent or unintelligent, but the unhappy Professor at a Ladies' College soon perceives that he has to deal with a class of minds which are both at once. A luckless gentleman, after lecturing for forty minutes, found that the lecture had been most carefully listened to and reproduced in the note-books, but with the trifling substitution in every instance of the word "Phoenician" for "Venetian." Above all, he is puzzled with the profuse employment of these note-books.

To the Platonic girl her note-book takes the place of the old-fashioned diary. It is scribbled down roughly at the lecture and copied out fairly at night. It used to be a frightful thought that every evening, before retiring to rest, the girl with whom one had been chatting intended seriously to probe the state of her heart and set down her affections in black and white; but it is hardly less formidable to imagine her refusing to lay her head on her pillow before she has finished her fair copy of the battle of Salamis. The universality of female studies, too, astounds the teacher who is fresh from the world of man; he stands aghast before a girl who is learning four languages at once, besides attending courses on logic, music, and the use of the globes. This omnivorous appetite for knowledge he finds to co-exist with a great weakness in the minor matters of spelling, and a profound indifference to the simplest rules of grammar. We do not wonder then at Professors being a little shy of Ladies' Colleges; nor is it less easy to see why the Platonic theory of education has taken so little with the girls themselves. After all, the grievance of which they complain has its advantages.

The worst of bores is restrained by courtesy from boring you if you give him no cue for further conversation, and the plea of utter ignorance which an English girl can commonly advance on any subject is at any rate a defence against the worst pests of society. On the other hand, the ingenuous confession that she really knows nothing about it can be turned by a smile into a prelude to the most engaging conversation, and into an implied flattery of the neatest kind to the favored being whose superiority is acknowledged. Ignorance, in fact, of this winsome order is one of the stock weapons of the feminine armory.

The man who looks philosophically back after marriage to discover why on earth he is married at all will generally find that the mischief began in the _naive_ confession on the part of his future wife of a total ignorance which asked humbly for enlightenment. One of the grandest _coups_ we ever knew made in this way was effected by a desire on the part of a faded beauty to know the pedigree of a horse. The pride of her next neighbor at finding himself the possessor of knowledge on any subject on earth took the form of the most practical gratitude a man can show. But it is not before marriage only that woman finds her ignorance act as a charm. Husbands find pleasure in talking politics to their wives simply because, as they stand on the hearthrug, they are displaying their own mental superiority. An Englishman likes to be master of his own house, but he dearly loves to be schoolmaster.

A Platonic woman as well-informed as her husband would deprive him of this daily source of domestic enjoyment; his lecture would be reduced to discussion, and to discussion in which he might be defeated. To rob him of his oracular infallibility might greatly improve the husband, but it would revolutionize the character of the home.

It is difficult to see at first sight any analogy between the Puritanical form of flirtation which calls itself a Platonic attachment, and the provisions by which Plato excluded all peculiar love or matrimonial choice from his commonwealth. The likeness is really to be found in the resolve on which both are based to obtain all the advantages of social intercourse between the sexes without the interference of passion. In a well-regulated State, no doubt, passion is a bore, and this is just the aspect which it takes to a highly regulated woman. An outburst of affection on the part of her numerous admirers would break up a very pleasant circle, and put an end to some charming conversations. On the other hand, the quiet sense of some special relationship, the faint odor of a passion carefully sealed up, gives a piquancy and flavor to social friendship which mere association wants. Very frequently such a relation forms an admirable retreat from stormier experiences in the past, and the tender grace of a day that is dead hangs pleasantly enough over the days that remain.

But the Platonic woman proper, in this sense, is the spinster of five-and-thirty. She is clever enough to know that the day for inspiring grand passions is gone by, but that there is still nothing ridiculous in mingling a little sentiment with her friendly relations. She moves in maiden meditation fancy free, but the vestal flame of her life is none the more sullied for a slight tinge of earthly color. It is a connection that is at once interesting, undefined, and perfectly safe. It throws a little poetry over life to know that one being is cherishing a perfectly moral and carefully toned-down attachment for another, which will last for years, but never exceed the bounds of a smile and a squeeze of the hand.

Animals in the lowest scale of life are notoriously the hardest to kill, and it is just this low vitality, as it were, of Platonic attachment that makes it so perfectly indestructible. Its real use is in keeping up a sort of minute irrigation of a good deal of human ground which would be barren without it. These little tricklings of affection, so small as not to disturb one's sleep or to drive one to compose a single sonnet, keep up a certain consciousness of attraction, and beget a corresponding return of kindliness and good temper towards the world around. A woman who has once given up the hope of being loved is a nuisance to everybody. But the Platonic woman need never give up her hope of being loved; she has reduced affection to a minimum, but from its very minuteness there is little or no motive to snap the bond, and with time habit makes it indestructible.

One Christian body, we believe--the Moravians--still carries out the principle of Plato's ideal state in giving woman no choice in the selection of a spouse. The elders arrange their matches as the wise men of the Republic were wont to do. A friend of ours once met six young women going out to some Northern settlement of the Moravians with a view to marriage. "What is your husband's name?" he asked one. "I don't know; I shall find out when I see him," she answered. But we have heard of only one State which realizes Plato's theory as to the equal participation of woman in man's responsibilities as well as in his privileges, and that is the kingdom of Dahomey. If women were to learn and govern like men, Plato argued, women must fight like men, and the Amazons of Dahomey fight like very terrible men indeed.

But we have as yet heard of no military grievance on the part of injured woman. She has not yet discovered the hardship of being deprived of a commission, or denied the Victoria Cross. No Miss Faithful has challenged woman's right to glory by the creation of a corps of riflewomen. Even Dr. Mary Walker, though she could boast of having gone through the American war, went through it with a scalpel, and not with a sword. We are far from attributing this peaceful attitude of modern woman, inferior though it be to the Platonic ideal, to any undue physical sensitiveness to danger, or to inability for deeds of daring; we attribute it simply to a sense that there is a warfare which she is discharging already, and with the carrying on of which any more public exertions would interfere.

Woman alone keeps up the private family warfare which in the earlier stages of society required all the energies of man. It is a field from which man has completely retired, and which would be left wholly vacant were it not occupied by woman. The stir, the jostling, the squabbling of social life, are all her own. We owe it to her that the family existence of England does not rot in mere inaction and peace. The guerilla warfare of house with house, the fierce rivalry of social circle with social circle, the struggle for precedence, the jealousies and envyings and rancors of every day--these are things which no man will take a proper interest in, and which it is lucky that woman can undertake for him. The Platonic woman of to-day may not march to the field or storm the breach, but she is unequalled in outmanoeuvring a rival, in forcing an entrance into society, in massacring an enemy's reputation, in carrying off matrimonial spoil. In war, then, as in education and the affections, modern woman has developed the spirit without copying the form of the Platonic ideal. After all superficial contrasts have been exhausted, she may still claim the patronage of the philosopher of Academe.

MAN AND HIS MASTER.

There are, it must be owned, few things on earth of less interest at first sight than a girl in her teens. She is a mere bundle of pale colorless virtues, a little shy, slightly studious, passively obedient, tamely religious. Her tastes are "simple"--she has no particular preference, that is, for anything; her aims incline mildly towards a future of balls to come; her rule of life is an hourly reference to "mamma." She is without even the charm of variety; she has been hot-pressed in the most approved finishing establishments, and is turned out the exact double of her sister or her cousin or her friend, with the same stereotyped manner, the same smattering of accomplishments, the same contribution to society of her little sum of superficial information. We wonder how it is that any one can take an interest in a creature of this sort, just as we wonder how any one can take an interest in the _Court Circular_. And yet there are few sentiments more pardonable, as there are none more national, than our interest in that marvellous document.

A people which chooses to be governed by kings and queens has a right to realize the fact that kings and queens are human beings, that they shoot, drive, take the air like the subjects whom they govern. And if in some coming day we are to toss up our hats and shout ourselves hoarse for a sovereign who is still in his cradle, it is wise as well as natural that we should cultivate an interest in his babyhood, that we should hang on the vicissitudes of his teeth and his measles, that we should be curious as to the title of his spelling-book, and the exact score of his last game at cricket.

It is precisely the same interest which attaches us to the loosely-tied bundle of virtues and accomplishments which we call a girl. We recognise in her our future ruler. The shy, modest creature who has no thought but a dance, and no will but mamma's, will in a few years be our master, changing our habits, moulding our tastes, bending our characters to her own. In the midst of our own drawing-room, in our pet easy-chair, we shall see that retiring figure quietly established, with downcast eyes, and hands busy with their crochet-needles, what Knox called, in days before a higher knowledge had dawned, "the Monstrous Regimen of Women."

We are far from sharing the sentiments of the Scotch Reformer, and if we attempt here to seize a few of the characteristics of the rule against which he revolted, we hope to avoid his bitterness as carefully as his prolixity. What was a new thing in his day has become old in ours, and man learns perhaps somewhat too easily to acquiesce in "established facts." It is without a dream of revolt, and simply in a philosophical spirit, that we approach the subject. Indeed, it is a feeling of admiration rather than of rebellion which seizes us when we begin to reflect on the character of woman's sway, and on the simplicity of the means by which she creates and establishes it. A little love, a little listening, a little patience, a little persistence, and the game is won.

How charmingly natural and unobjectionable, for instance, is the very first move in it--what we may venture to call, since we have to create the very terminology of our subject, the Isolation of Man. When Brown meets us in the street and hopes that his approaching marriage will make no difference in our friendship, and that we shall see as much of one another as before, we know that the phrases simply mean that our intimacy is at an end. There will be no more pleasant lounges in the morning, no more strolls in the park, no more evenings at the club. Woman has succeeded in so completely establishing this cessation of former friendships as a condition of the new married life that hardly any one dreams of thinking what an enormous sacrifice it is. There are very few men, after all, who are not dependent on their little group of intimates for the general drift of their opinions, the general temper of their mind and character of their lives. Their mutual advice, support, praise or dispraise, enthusiasm, abhorrence, likings, dislikings, constitute the atmosphere in which one lives.

A good deal of real modesty lingers about an unmarried man; he feels far more confident in his own opinion if he knows it is Smith's opinion too, and his conception of life acquires all its definiteness from its being shared with half a dozen fairly reasonable fellows. It is no slight triumph that woman should not only have succeeded in enforcing the dissolution of this social tie as the first condition of married life, but that she has invested that dissolution with the air of an axiom which nobody dreams of disputing. The triumph is, as we said, won by the simplest agency--by nothing, in short, but a dexterous double appeal to human conceit. She is so weak, so frail, so helpless, so strange to this new world into which she has plunged from the realms of innocent girlhood, so utterly dependent on her husband, that a man sees at once that he has not a moment left for any one else.