Part 7

Yet surely Archdeacon Grantly is worth a brace of lovers. With what sincerity he is drawn, and with what consummate care! A churchman who, as Sir Leslie Stephen somewhat petulantly observes, “gives no indication of having any religious views whatever, beyond a dislike to dissenters.” A solidly respectable member of provincial clerical society, ambitious, worldly, prizing wealth, honouring rank, unspiritual, unprogressive,--but none the less a man who would have proved his worth in the hour of England’s trial.

It is a testimony to the power of fiction that, having read with breathless concern and through countless pages Mr. Britling’s reflections on the war, my soul suddenly cried out within me for the reflections of Archdeacon Grantly. Mr. Britling is an acute and sensitive thinker. The archdeacon’s mental processes are of the simplest. Mr. Britling has winged his triumphant flight from “the clumsy, crawling, snobbish, comfort-loving caterpillar of Victorian England.” The archdeacon is still confessedly a grub. Mr. Britling has “truckled to no domesticated god.” The archdeacon’s deity is open to such grievous innuendoes. Yet I wish I could have stood on the smooth lawn of Plumstead, and have heard what the archdeacon had to say when he learned that an English scholar and gentleman had smuggled out of England, by the help of a female “confidential agent,” a treacherous appeal to the President of the United States, asking that pressure should be brought upon fighting Englishmen in the interests of peace. I wish I could have heard the cawing rooks of Plumstead echo his mighty wrath. For there is that in the heart of a man, even a Victorian churchman with a love of preferment and a distaste for dissenters, which holds scatheless the sacred thing called honour.

Trollope is as frank about the archdeacon’s frailties as Mr. Wells is frank about Mr. Britling’s frailties. In piping days of peace, the archdeacon’s contempt for Mr. Britling would have been as sincere and hearty as Mr. Britling’s contempt for the archdeacon. But under the hard, heroic discipline of war there would have come to the archdeacon, as to Mr. Britling, a white dawn of revelation. Both men have the liberating qualities of manhood.

It is always hard to make an elastic phrase fit with precision. We know what we mean by Victorian conventions and hypocrisies, but the perpetual intrusion of blinding truths disturbs our point of view. The new Reform bill and the extension of the suffrage were hardy denials of convention. “The Origin of Species” and “Zoölogical Evidences as to Man’s Place in Nature” were not published in the interests of hypocrisy. There was nothing oppressively respectable about “The Ring and the Book”; and Swinburne can hardly be said to have needed correction at Zola’s hands. These mid-Victorian products have a savour of freedom about them, and so has “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.” Even the Homeric eloquence of Ruskin was essentially the eloquence of the free. The two lessons he sought to drive home to his reluctant readers were, first, that Englishmen were not living on an illuminated earth spot, under the especial patronage of the Almighty; and, second, that no one was called by Providence to the enjoyment of wealth and security. If such unpleasant and reiterated truths--as applicable to the United States to-day as they were to Victoria’s England--are “smug,” then Jeremiah is sugar-coated, and the Baptist an apostle of ease.

The English have at all times lacked the courage of their emotions, but not the emotions themselves. Their reticence has stood for strength as well as for stiffness. The pre-Raphaelites, indeed, surrendered their souls with docility to every wavelet of feeling, and produced something iridescent, like the shining of wet sand. Love, according to their canon, was expressed with transparent ease. It was “a great but rather sloppy passion,” says Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, “which you swooned about on broad general lines.” A pre-Raphaelite corsair languished as visibly as a pre-Raphaelite seraph. He could be bowled over by a worsted ball; but he was at least more vigorous and more ruddy than a cubist nude. One doubted his seared conscience and his thousand crimes; but not his ability to walk unassisted downstairs.

The Victorian giants were of mighty girth. They trod the earth with proud and heavy steps, and with a strength of conviction which was as vast and tranquil as the plains. We have parted with their convictions and with their tranquillity. We have parted also with their binding prejudices and with their standards of taste. Freedom has come to us, not broadening down

“from precedent to precedent,”

but swiftly and comprehensively. There are no more taboos, no more silent or sentimental hypocrisies. We should now know a great many interesting details concerning the Marquis of Steyne and the Duke of Omnium, if these two imposing figures had not passed forever from our ken. We should have searchlights thrown upon Becky Sharp, if Becky had not escaped into the gloom. Her successors sin exhaustively, and with a lamentable lack of _esprit_. We are bidden to scrutinize their transgressions, but Becky’s least peccadillo is more engaging than all their broken commandments. The possibility of profound tediousness accompanying perfect candour dawns slowly on the truth-tellers of fiction. It takes a great artist, like Edith Wharton, to recognize and deplore “the freedom of speech which never arrives at wit, and the freedom of act which never makes for romance.”

Woman Enthroned

The Michigan magistrate who gave orders that a stalwart male angel presiding over the gateway of a cemetery should be recast in feminine mould may have been an erring theologian and a doubtful art-critic; but that he was a sound-hearted American no one can deny. He was not thinking of Azrael the mighty who had garnered that little harvest of death; or of Michael, great leader of the “fighting seraphim,” whose blade

“smote and felled Squadrons at once”;

or of Gabriel the messenger. Holy Writ was as remote from his mental vision as was Paradise Lost. He was thinking very properly of the “angel in the house,” and this feminine ideal was affronted by the robust outlines, no less than by the robust virtues, associated with the heavenly host. Cowley’s soothing compromise, which was designed as a compliment to a lady, and which, instead of unsexing angels, endowed them with a double line of potencies,--

“They are than Man more strong, and more than Woman sweet,”--

is not easily expressed in art. The very gallant Michigan gentleman simplified the situation by eliminating the masculine element. He registered his profession of faith in the perfectibility of women.

It is awkward to be relegated to the angelic class, and to feel that one does not fit. Intelligent feminists sometimes say that chivalry--that inextinguishable point of view which has for centuries survived its own death-notices--is more disheartening than contempt. Chivalry is essentially protective. It is rooted in the consciousness of superior strength. It is expansively generous and scrimpingly just. It will not assure to women a fair field and no favours, which is the salvation of all humanity; but it will protect them from the consequences of their own deeds, and that way lies perdition.

Down through the ages we see the working of this will. Rome denied to women all civic rights, but allowed them many privileges. They were not permitted to make any legal contract. They were not permitted to bequeath their own fortunes, or--ordinarily--to give testimony in court. But they might plead ignorance of the law, “as a ground for dissolving an obligation,” which, if often convenient, was always demoralizing. Being somewhat contemptuously absolved from the oath of allegiance in the Middle Ages, they were as a consequence immune from outlawry. On the other hand, the severity with which they were punished for certain crimes which were presumed to come easy to them--poisoning, husband-murder, witchcraft (King Jamie was not the only wiseacre who marvelled that there should be twenty witches to one warlock)--is evidence of fear on the legislators’ part. The oldest laws, the oldest axioms which antedate all laws, betray this uneasy sense of insecurity. “Day and night must women be held by their protectors in a state of dependence,” says Manu, the Hindu Noah, who took no female with him in his miraculously preserved boat, but was content with his own safety, and trusted the continuance of the race to the care and ingenuity of the gods.

In our day, and in our country, women gained their rights (I use the word “rights” advisedly, because, though its definition be disputed, every one knows what it implies) after a prolonged, but not embittered struggle. Certain States moved so slowly that they were over-taken by a Federal Amendment. Even with the franchise to back them, American women have a hard time making their way in the professions, though a great deal of courtesy is shown them by professional men. They have a hard time making their way in trades, where the unions block their progress. They have a very small share of political patronage, and few good positions on the civil lists. Whether the best interests of the country will be advanced or retarded by a complete recognition of their claims--which implies giving them an even chance with men--is a point on which no one can speak with authority. The absence of data leaves room only for surmise. Women are striving to gain this “even chance” for their own sakes, which is lawful and reasonable. Their public utterances, it is true, dwell pointedly on the regeneration of the world. This also is lawful and reasonable. Public utterances have _always_ dwelt on the regeneration of the world, since the apple was eaten and Paradise closed its gates.

Meanwhile American chivalry, a strong article and equal to anything Europe ever produced, clings passionately and persistently to its inward vision. Ellen Key speaks casually of “the vices which men call woman’s nature.” If Swedish gentlemen permit themselves this form of speech, it finds no echo in our loyal land. Two things an American hates to do,--hold a woman accountable for her misdeeds, and punish her accordingly. When Governor Craig of North Carolina set aside the death-sentence which had been passed upon a murderess, and committed her to prison for life, he gave to the public this plain and comprehensive statement: “There is no escape from the conclusion that Ida Bell Warren is guilty of murder, deliberate and premeditated. Germany executed the woman spy; England did not. The action of the military Governor of Belgium was condemned by the conscience of the world. The killing of this woman would send a shiver through North Carolina.”

Apart from the fact that Edith Cavell was not a spy, and that her offence was one which has seldom in the world’s history been so cruelly punished, Governor Craig’s words deserve attention. He explicitly exempted a woman, because she was a woman, from the penalty which would have been incurred by a man. Incidentally he was compelled to commute the death-sentence of her confederate, as it was hardly possible to send the murderous wife to prison, and her murderous accomplice to the chair. That the execution of Mrs. Warren would have sent a “shiver” through North Carolina is doubtless true. The Governor had received countless letters and telegrams protesting against the infliction of the death-penalty on a woman.

One of the reasons which has been urged for the total abolition of this penalty is the reluctance of juries to convict women of crimes punishable by death. The number of wives who murder their husbands, and of girls who murder their lovers, is a menace to society. Our sympathetic tolerance of these _crimes passionnés_, the sensational scenes in court, and the prompt acquittals which follow, are a menace to law and justice. Better that their perpetrators should be sent to prison, and suffer a few years of corrective discipline, until soft-hearted sentimentalists circulate petitions, and secure their pardon and release.

The right to be judged as men are judged is perhaps the only form of equality which feminists fail to demand. Their attitude to their own _errata_ is well expressed in the solemn warning addressed by Mr. Louis Untermeyer’s Eve to the Almighty,

“Pause, God, and ponder, ere Thou judgest me!”

The right to be punished is not, and has never been, a popular prerogative with either sex. There was, indeed, a London baker who was sentenced in the year 1816 to be whipped and imprisoned for vagabondage. He served his term; but, whether from clemency or from oversight, the whipping was never administered. When released, he promptly brought action against the prison authorities because he had not been whipped, “according to the statute,” and he won his case. Whether or not the whipping went with the verdict is not stated; but it was a curious joke to play with the grim realities of British law.

American women are no such sticklers for a code. They acquiesce in their frequent immunity from punishment, and are correspondingly, and very naturally, indignant when they find themselves no longer immune. There was a pathetic ring in the explanation offered some years ago by Mayor Harrison of Chicago, whose policemen were accused of brutality to female strikers and pickets. “When the women do anything in violation of the law,” said the Mayor to a delegation of citizens, “the police arrest them. And then, instead of going along quietly as men prisoners would, the women sit down on the sidewalks. What else can the policemen do but lift them up?”

If men “go along quietly,” it is because custom, not choice, has bowed their necks to the yoke of order and equity. They break the law without being prepared to defy it. The lawlessness of women may be due as much to their long exclusion from citizenship,

“Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,”

as to the lenity shown them by men,--a lenity which they stand ever ready to abuse. We have only to imagine what would have happened to a group of men who had chosen to air a grievance by picketing the White House, the speed with which they would have been arrested, fined, dispersed, and forgotten, to realize the nature of the tolerance granted to women. For months these female pickets were unmolested. Money was subscribed to purchase for them umbrellas and overshoes. The President, whom they were affronting, sent them out coffee on cold mornings. It was only when their utterances became treasonable, when they undertook to assure our Russian visitors that Mr. Wilson and Mr. Root were deceiving Russia, and to entreat these puzzled foreigners to help them free our nation, that their sport was suppressed, and they became liable to arrest and imprisonment.

Much censure was passed upon the unreasonable violence of these women. The great body of American suffragists repudiated their action, and the anti-suffragists used them to point stern morals and adorn vivacious tales. But was it quite fair to permit them in the beginning a liberty which would not have been accorded to men, and which led inevitably to licence? Were they not treated as parents sometimes treat children, allowing them to use bad language because, “if you pay no attention to them, they will stop it of their own accord”; and then, when they do not stop it, punishing them for misbehaving before company? When a sympathetic gentleman wrote to a not very sympathetic paper to say that the second Liberty Loan would be more popular if Washington would “call off the dogs of war on women,” he turned a flashlight upon the fathomless gulf with which sentimentalism has divided the sexes. No one dreams of calling policemen and magistrates “dogs of war” because they arrest and punish men for disturbing the peace. If men claim the privileges of citizenship, they are permitted to suffer its penalties.

A few years before the war, a rage for compiling useless statistics swept over Europe and the United States. When it was at its height, some active minds bethought them that children might be made to bear their part in the guidance of the human race. Accordingly a series of questions--some sensible and some foolish--were put to English, German, and American school-children, and their enlightening answers were given to the world. One of these questions read: “Would you rather be a man or a woman, and why?” Naturally this query was of concern only to little girls. No sane educator would ask it of a boy. German pedagogues struck it off the list. They said that to ask a child, “Would you rather be something you must be, or something you cannot possibly be?” was both foolish and useless. Interrogations concerning choice were of value only when the will was a determining factor.

No such logical inference chilled the examiners’ zeal in this inquisitive land. The question was asked and was answered. We discovered, as a result, that a great many little American girls (a minority, to be sure, but a respectable minority) were well content with their sex; not because it had its duties and dignities, its pleasures and exemptions; but because they plainly considered that they were superior to little American boys, and were destined, when grown up, to be superior to American men. One small New England maiden wrote that she would rather be a woman because “Women are always better than men in morals.” Another, because “Women are of more use in the world.” A third, because “Women learn things quicker than men, and have more intelligence.” And so on through varying degrees of self-sufficiency.

These little girls, who had no need to echo the Scotchman’s prayer, “Lord, gie us a gude conceit o’ ourselves!” were old maids in the making. They had stamped upon them in their tender childhood the hall-mark of the American spinster. “The most ordinary cause of a single life,” says Bacon, “is liberty, especially in certain self-pleasing and humorous minds.” But it is reserved for the American woman to remain unmarried because she feels herself too valuable to be entrusted to a husband’s keeping. Would it be possible in any country save our own for a lady to write to a periodical, explaining “Why I am an Old Maid,” and be paid coin of the realm for the explanation? Would it be possible in any other country to hear such a question as “Should the Gifted Woman Marry?” seriously asked, and seriously answered? Would it be possible for any sane and thoughtful woman who was not an American to consider even the remote possibility of our spinsters becoming a detached class, who shall form “the intellectual and economic _élite_ of the sex, leaving marriage and maternity to the less developed woman”? What has become of the belief, as old as civilization, that marriage and maternity are developing processes, forcing into flower a woman’s latent faculties; and that the less-developed woman is inevitably the woman who has escaped this keen and powerful stimulus? “Never,” said Edmond de Goncourt, “has a virgin, young or old, produced a work of art.” One makes allowance for the Latin point of view. And it is possible that M. de Goncourt never read “Emma.”

There is a formidable lack of humour in the somewhat contemptuous attitude of women, whose capabilities have not yet been tested, toward men who stand responsible for the failures of the world. It denotes, at home and abroad, a density not far removed from dulness. In Mr. St. John Ervine’s depressing little drama, “Mixed Marriage,” which the Dublin actors played in New York some years ago, an old woman, presumed to be witty and wise, said to her son’s betrothed: “Sure, I believe the Lord made Eve when He saw that Adam could not take care of himself”; and the remark reflected painfully upon the absence of that humorous sense which we used to think was the birthright of Irishmen. The too obvious retort, which nobody uttered, but which must have occurred to everybody’s mind, was that if Eve had been designed as a care-taker, she had made a shining failure of her job.

That astute Oriental, Sir Rabindranath Tagore, manifested a wisdom beyond all praise in his recognition of American standards, when addressing American audiences. As the hour for his departure drew nigh, he was asked to write, and did write, a “Parting Wish for the Women of America,” giving graceful expression to the sentiments he knew he was expected to feel. The skill with which he modified and popularized an alien point of view revealed the seasoned lecturer. He told his readers that “God has sent woman to love the world,” and to build up a “spiritual civilization.” He condoled with them because they were “passing through great sufferings in this callous age.” His heart bled for them, seeing that their hearts “are broken every day, and victims are snatched from their arms to be thrown under the car of material progress.” The Occidental sentiment which regards man simply as an offspring, and a fatherless offspring at that (no woman, says Olive Schreiner, could look upon a battle-field without thinking, “So many mothers’ sons!”), came as naturally to Sir Rabindranath as if he had been to the manner born. He was content to see the passion and pain, the sorrow and heroism of men, as reflections mirrored in a woman’s soul. The ingenious gentlemen who dramatize Biblical narratives for the American stage, and who are hampered at every step by the obtrusive masculinity of the East, might find a sympathetic supporter in this accomplished and accommodating Hindu.

The story of Joseph and his Brethren, for example, is perhaps the best tale ever told the world,--a tale of adventure on a heroic scale, with conflicting human emotions to give it poignancy and power. It deals with pastoral simplicities, with the splendours of court, and with the “high finance” which turned a free landholding people into tenantry of the crown. It is a story of men, the only lady introduced being a disedifying _dea ex machina_, whose popularity in Italian art has perhaps blinded us to the brevity of her Biblical rôle. But when this most dramatic narrative was cast into dramatic form, Joseph’s splendid loyalty to his master, his cold and vigorous chastity, were nullified by giving him an Egyptian sweetheart. Lawful marriage with this young lady being his sole solicitude, the advances of Potiphar’s wife were less of a temptation than an intrusion. The keynote of the noble old tale was destroyed, to assure to woman her proper place as the guardian of man’s integrity.

Still more radical was the treatment accorded to the parable of the “Prodigal Son,” which was expanded into a pageant play, and acted with a hardy realism permitted only to the strictly ethical drama. The scriptural setting of the story was preserved, but its patriarchal character was sacrificed to modern sentiment which refuses to be interested in the relation of father and son. Therefore we beheld the prodigal equipped with a mother and a trusting female cousin, who, between them, put the poor old gentleman out of commission, reducing him to his proper level of purveyor-in-ordinary to the household. It was the prodigal’s mother who bade her reluctant husband give their wilful son his portion. It was the prodigal’s mother who watched for him from the house-top, and silenced the voice of censure. It was the prodigal’s mother who welcomed his return, and persuaded father and brother to receive him into favour. The whole duty of man in that Syrian household was to obey the impelling word of woman, and bestow blessings and bags of gold according to her will.