Part 8
The expansion of the maternal sentiment until it embraces, or seeks to embrace, humanity, is the vision of the emotional, as opposed to the intellectual, feminist. “The Mother State of which we dream” offers no attraction to many plain and practical workers, and is a veritable nightmare to others. “Woman,” writes an enthusiast in the “Forum,” “means to be, not simply the mother of the individual, but of society, of the State with its man-made institutions, of art and science, of religion and morals. All life, physical and spiritual, personal and social, needs to be mothered.”
“Needs to be mothered”! When men proffer this welter of sentiment in the name of women, how is it possible to say convincingly that the girl student standing at the gates of knowledge is as humble-hearted as the boy; that she does not mean to mother medicine, or architecture, or biology, any more than the girl in the banker’s office means to mother finance? Her hopes for the future are founded on the belief that fresh opportunities will meet a sure response; but she does not, if she be sane, measure her untried powers by any presumptive scale of valuation. She does not consider the advantages which will accrue to medicine, biology, or architecture by her entrance--as a woman--into any one of these fields. Their need for her maternal ministration concerns her less than her need for the magnificent heritage they present.
It has been said many times that the craving for material profit is not instinctive in women. If it is not instinctive, it will be acquired, because every legitimate incentive has its place in the progress of the world. The demand that women shall be paid men’s wages for men’s work may represent a desire for justice rather than a desire for gain; but money fairly earned is sweet in the hand, and to the heart. An open field, an even start, no handicap, no favours, and the same goal for all. This is the worker’s dream of paradise. Women have long known that lack of citizenship was an obstacle in their path. Self-love has prompted them to overrate their imposed, and underrate their inherent, disabilities. “Whenever you see a woman getting a high salary, make up your mind that she is giving twice the value received,” writes an irritable correspondent to the “Survey”; and this pretension paralyzes effort. To be satisfied with ourselves is to be at the end of our usefulness.
M. Émile Faguet, that most radical and least sentimental of French feminists, would have opened wide to women every door of which man holds the key. He would have given them every legal right and burden which they are physically fitted to enjoy and to bear. He was as unvexed by doubts as he was uncheered by illusions. He had no more fear of the downfall of existing institutions than he had hope for the regeneration of the world. The equality of men and women, as he saw it, lay, not in their strength, but in their weakness; not in their intelligence, but in their stupidity; not in their virtues, but in their perversity. Yet there was no taint of pessimism in his rational refusal to be deceived. No man saw more clearly, or recognized more justly, the art with which his countrywomen have cemented and upheld a social state at once flexible and orderly, enjoyable and inspiriting. That they have been the allies, and not the rulers, of men in building this fine fabric of civilization was also plain to his mind. Allies and equals he held them, but nothing more. “_La femme est parfaitement l’égale de l’homme, mais elle n’est que son égale._”
Naturally to such a man the attitude of Americans toward women was as unsympathetic as was the attitude of Dahomeyans. He did not condemn it (possibly he did not condemn the Dahomeyans, seeing that the civic and social ideals of France and Dahomey are in no wise comparable); but he explained with careful emphasis that the French woman, unlike her American sister, is not, and does not desire to be, “_un objet sacro-saint_.” The reverence for women in the United States he assumed to be a national trait, a sort of national institution among a proud and patriotic people. “_L’idolâtrie de la femme est une chose américaine par excellence._”
The superlative complacency of American women is due largely to the oratorical adulation of American men,--an adulation that has no more substance than has the foam on beer. I have heard a candidate for office tell his female audience that men are weak and women are strong, that men are foolish and women are wise, that men are shallow and women are deep, that men are submissive tools whom women, the leaders of the race, must instruct to vote for _him_. He did not believe a word that he said, and his hearers did not believe that he believed it; yet the grossness of his flattery kept pace with the hypocrisy of his self-depreciation. The few men present wore an attitude of dejection, not unlike that of the little boy in “Punch” who has been told that he is made of
“Snips and snails, And puppy dogs’ tails,”
and can “hardly believe it.”
What Mr. Roosevelt called the “lunatic fringe” of every movement is painfully obtrusive in the great and noble movement which seeks fair play for women. The “full habit of speech” is never more regrettable than when the cause is so good that it needs but temperate championing. “Without the aid of women, England could not carry on this war,” said Mr. Asquith in the second year of the great struggle,--an obvious statement, no doubt, but simple, truthful, and worthy to be spoken. Why should the “New Republic,” in an article bearing the singularly ill-mannered title, “Thank You For Nothing!” have heaped scorn upon these words? Why should its writer have made the angry assertion that the British Empire had been “deprived of two generations of women’s leadership,” because only a world’s war could drill a new idea into a statesman’s head? The war has drilled a great many new ideas into all our heads. Absence of brain matter could alone have prevented this infusion. But “leadership” is a large word. It is not what men are asking, and it is not what women are offering, even at this stage of the game. Partnership is as far as obligation on the one side and ambition on the other are prepared to go; and a clear understanding of this truth has accomplished great results.
Therefore, when we are told that the women of to-day are “giving their vitality to an anæmic world,” we wonder if the speaker has read a newspaper for the past half-dozen years. The passionate cruelty and the passionate heroism of men have soaked the earth with blood. Never, since it came from its Maker’s hands, has it seen such shame and glory. There may be some who still believe that this blood would not have been spilled had women shared in the citizenship of nations; but the arguments they advance in support of an undemonstrable theory show a soothing ignorance of events.
“War will pass,” says Olive Schreiner, “when intellectual culture and activity have made possible to the female an equal share in the control and government of modern national life.” And why? Because “Arbitration and compensation will naturally occur to her as cheaper and simpler methods of bridging the gaps in national relationship.”
Strange that this idea never “naturally” occurred to man! Strange that no delegate to The Hague should have perceived so straight a path to peace! Strange that when Germany struck her long-planned, well-prepared blow, this cheap and simple measure failed to stay her hand! War will pass when injustice passes. Never before, unless hope leaves the world.
That any civilized people should bar women from the practice of law is to the last degree absurd and unreasonable. There never can be an adequate cause for such an injurious exclusion. There is, in fact, no cause at all, only an arbitrary decision on the part of those who have the authority to decide. Yet nothing is less worth while than to speculate dizzily on the part women are going to play in any field from which they are at present debarred. They may be ready to burnish up “the rusty old social organism,” and make it shine like new; but this is not the work which lies immediately at hand. A suffragist who believes that the world needs house-cleaning has made the terrifying statement that when English women enter the law courts they will sweep away all “legal frippery,” all the “accumulated dust and rubbish of centuries.” Latin terms, flowing gowns and wigs, silly staves and worn-out symbols, all must go, and with them must go the antiquated processes which confuse and retard justice. The women barristers of the future will scorn to have “legal natures like Portia’s,” basing their claims on quibbles and subterfuges. They will cut all Gordian knots. They will deal with naked simplicities.
References to Portia are a bit disquieting. Her law was stage law, good enough for the drama which has always enjoyed a jurisprudence of its own. We had best leave her out of any serious discussion. But why should the admission of women to the bar result in a volcanic upheaval? Women have practised medicine for years, and have not revolutionized it. Painstaking service, rather than any brilliant display of originality, has been their contribution to this field. It is reasonable to suppose that their advance will be resolute and beneficial. If they ever condescended to their profession, they do so no longer. If they ever talked about belonging to “the class of real people,” they have relinquished such flowers of rhetoric. If they have earnestly desired the franchise, it was because they saw in it justice to themselves, not the torch which would enlighten the world.
It is conceded theoretically that woman’s sphere is an elastic term, embracing any work she finds herself able to do,--not necessarily do well, because most of the world’s work is done badly, but well enough to save herself from failure. Her advance is unduly heralded and unduly criticized. She is the target for too much comment from friend and foe. On the one hand, a keen (but of course perverted) misogynist like Sir Andrew Macphail, welcomes her entrance into public life because it will tend to disillusionment. If woman can be persuaded to reveal her elemental inconsistencies, man, freed in some measure from her charm--which is the charm of _retenue_--will no longer be subject to her rule. On the other hand, that most feminine of feminists, Miss Jane Addams, predicts that “the dulness which inheres in both domestic and social affairs when they are carried on by men alone, will no longer be a necessary attribute of public life when gracious and grey-haired women become part of it.”
If Sir Andrew is as acid as Schopenhauer, Miss Addams is early Victorian. Her point of view presupposes a condition of which we had not been even dimly aware. Granted that domesticity palls on the solitary male. Housekeeping seldom attracts him. The tea-table and the friendly cat fail to arrest his roving tendencies. Granted that some men are polite enough to say that they do not enjoy social events in which women take no part. They showed no disposition to relinquish such pastimes until the arid days of prohibition, and even now they cling forlornly to the ghost of a cheerful past. When they assert, however, that they would have a much better time if women were present, no one is wanton enough to contradict them. But public life! The arena in which whirling ambition sweeps human souls as an autumn wind sweeps leaves; which resounds with the shouts of the conquerors and the groans of the conquered; which is degraded by cupidity and ennobled by achievement; that this field of adventure, this heated race-track needs to be relieved from dulness by the presence and participation of elderly ladies is the crowning vision of sensibility.
“_Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête_,” said Pascal; and the Michigan angel is a danger signal. The sentimental and chivalrous attitude of American men reacts alarmingly when they are brought face to face with the actual terms and visible consequences of woman’s enfranchisement. There exists a world-wide and age-long belief that what women want they get. They must want it hard enough and long enough to make their desire operative. It is the listless and preoccupied unconcern of their own sex which bars their progress. But men will fall into a flutter of admiration because a woman runs a successful dairy-farm, or becomes the mayor of a little town; and they will look aghast upon such commonplace headlines as these in their morning paper: “Women Confess Selling Votes”; “Chicago Women Arrested for Election Frauds”;--as if there had not always been, and would not always be, a percentage of unscrupulous voters in every electorate. No sane woman believes that women, as a body, will vote more honestly than men; but no sane man believes that they will vote less honestly. They are neither the “gateway to hell,” as Tertullian pointed out, nor the builders of Sir Rabindranath Tagore’s “spiritual civilization.” They are neither the repositories of wisdom, nor the final word of folly.
It was unwise and unfair to turn a searchlight upon the first woman in Congress, and exhibit to a gaping world her perfectly natural limitations. Such limitations are common in our legislative bodies, and excite no particular comment. They are as inherent in the average man as in the average woman. They in no way affect the question of enfranchisement. Give as much and ask no more. Give no more and ask as much. This is the watchword of equality.
“God help women when they have only their rights!” exclaimed a brilliant American lawyer; but it is in the “only” that all savour lies. Rights and privileges are incompatible. Emancipation implies the sacrifice of immunity, the acceptance of obligation. It heralds the reign of sober and disillusioning experience. Women, as M. Faguet reminds us, are only the equals of men; a truth which was simply phrased in the old Cornish adage, “Lads are as good as wenches when they are washed.”
The Strayed Prohibitionist
The image of the prohibition-bred American youth (not this generation, but the next) straying through the wine-drenched and ale-drenched pages of English literature captivates the fancy. The classics, to be sure, are equally bibulous; but with the classics the American youth has no concern. The advance guard of educators are busy clearing away the débris of Greek and Latin which has hitherto clogged his path. There is no danger of his learning from Homer that “Generous wine gives strength to toiling men,” or from Socrates that “The potter’s art begins with the wine jar,” or from the ever-scandalous Horace that “Wine is mighty to inspire hope, and to drown the bitterness of care.” The professor has conspired with the prohibitionist to save the undergraduate from such disedifying sentiments.
As for the Bible, where corn and oil and wine, the three fruits of a bountiful harvest, are represented as of equal virtue, it will probably be needful to supply such texts with explanatory and apologetic footnotes. The sweet and sober counsel of Ecclesiastes: “Forsake not an old friend, for the new will not be like to him. A new friend is as new wine; it shall grow old, and thou shalt drink it with pleasure,” has made its way into the heart of humanity, and has been embedded in the poetry of every land. But now, like the most lovely story of the marriage feast at Cana, it has been robbed of the simplicity of its appeal. I heard a sermon preached upon the marriage feast which ignored the miracle altogether. The preacher dwelt upon the dignity and responsibility of the married state, reprobated divorce, and urged parents to send their children to Sunday school. It was a perfectly good sermon, filled with perfectly sound exhortations; but the speaker “strayed.” Sunday schools were not uppermost in the holy Mother’s mind when she perceived and pitied the humiliation of her friends.
The banishing of the classics, the careful editing of the Scriptures, and the comprehensive ignorance of foreign languages and letters which distinguishes the young American, leaves only the field of British and domestic literature to enlighten or bewilder him. Now New England began to print books about the time that men grew restive as to the definition of temperance. Longfellow wrote a “Drinking Song” to water, which achieved humour without aspiring to it, and Dr. Holmes wrote a teetotaller’s adaptation of a drinking song, which aspired to humour without achieving it. As a matter of fact, no drinking songs, not even the real ones and the good ones which sparkle in Scotch and English verse, have any illustrative value. They come under the head of special pleading, and are apt to be a bit defiant. In them, as in the temperance lecture, “that good sister of common life, the vine,” becomes an exotic, desirable or reprehensible according to the point of view, but never simple and inevitable, like the olive-tree and the sheaves of corn.
American letters, coming late in the day, are virgin of wine. There have been books, like Jack London’s “John Barleycorn,” written in the cause of temperance; there have been pleasant trifles, like Dr. Weir Mitchell’s “Madeira Party,” written to commemorate certain dignified convivialities which even then were passing silently away; and there have been chance allusions, like Mr. Dooley’s vindication of whisky from the charge of being food: “I wudden’t insult it be placin’ it on the same low plain as a lobster salad”; and his loving recollection of his friend Schwartzmeister’s cocktail, which was of such generous proportions that it “needed only a few noodles to look like a biled dinner.” But it is safe to say that there is more drinking in “Pickwick Papers” than in a library of American novels. It is drinking without bravado, without reproach, without justification. For natural treatment of a debatable theme, Dickens stands unrivalled among novelists.
We are told that the importunate virtue of our neighbours, having broken one set of sympathies and understandings, will in time deprive us of meaner indulgences, such as tobacco, tea, and coffee. But tobacco, tea, and coffee, though friendly and compassionate to men, are late-comers and district-dwellers. They do not belong to the stately procession of the ages, like the wine which Noah and Alexander and Cæsar and Praxiteles and Plato and Lord Kitchener drank. When the Elgin marbles were set high over the Parthenon, when the Cathedral of Chartres grew into beauty, when “Hamlet” was first played at the Globe Theatre, men lived merrily and wisely without tobacco, tea, and coffee, but not without wine. Tobacco was given by the savage to the civilized world. It has an accidental quality which adds to its charm, but which promises consolation when those who are better than we want to be have taken it away from us. “I can understand,” muses Dr. Mitchell, “the discovery of America, and the invention of printing; but what human want, what instinct, led up to tobacco? Imagine intuitive genius capturing this noble idea from the odours of a prairie fire!”
Charles Lamb pleaded that tobacco was at worst only a “white devil.” But it was a persecuted little devil which for years suffered shameful indignities. We have Mr. Henry Adams’s word for it that, as late as 1862, Englishmen were not expected to smoke in the house. They went out of doors or to the stables. Only a licensed libertine like Monckton Milnes permitted his guests to smoke in their rooms. Half a century later, Mr. Rupert Brooke, watching a designer in the advertising department of a New York store making “Matisse-like illustrations to some notes on summer suitings,” was told by the superintendent that the firm gave a “free hand” to its artists, “except for nudes, improprieties, and figures of people smoking.” To these last, some customers--even customers of the sex presumably interested in summer suitings--“strongly objected.”
The new school of English fiction which centres about the tea-table, and in which, as in the land of the lotus-eaters, it is always afternoon, affords an arena for conversation and an easily procurable atmosphere. England is the second home of tea. She waited centuries, kettle on hob and cat purring expectantly by the fire, for the coming of that sweet boon, and she welcomed it with the generous warmth of wisdom. No duties daunted her. No price was too high for her to pay. No risk was too great to keep her from smuggling the “China drink.” No hearth was too humble to covet it, and the homeless brewed it by the roadside. Isopel Berners, that peerless and heroic tramp, paid ten shillings a pound for her tea; and when she lit her fire in the Dingle, comfort enveloped Lavengro, and he tasted the delights of domesticity.
But though England will doubtless fight like a lion for her tea, as for her cakes and ale, when bidden to purify herself of these indulgences, yet it is the ale, and not the tea, which has coloured her masterful literature. There are phrases so inevitable that they defy monotony. Such are the “wine-dark sea” of Greece, and the “nut-brown ale” of England. Even Lavengro, though he shared Isopel’s tea, gave ale, “the true and proper drink of Englishmen,” to the wandering tinker and his family. How else, he asks, could he have befriended these wretched folk? “There is a time for cold water” [this is a generous admission on the writer’s part], “there is a time for strong meat, there is a time for advice, and there is a time for ale; and I have generally found that the time for advice is after a cup of ale.”
“Lavengro” has been called the epic of ale; but Borrow was no English rustic, content with the buxom charms of malt, and never glancing over her fat shoulder to wilder, gayer loves. He was an accomplished wanderer, at home with all men and with all liquor. He could order claret like a lord, to impress the supercilious waiter in a London inn. He could drink Madeira with the old gentleman who counselled the study of Arabic, and the sweet wine of Cypress with the Armenian who poured it from a silver flask into a silver cup, though there was nothing better to eat with it than dry bread. When, harried by the spirit of militant Protestantism, he peddled his Bibles through Spain, he dined with the courteous Spanish and Portuguese Gipsies, and found that while bread and cheese and olives comprised their food, there was always a leathern bottle of good white wine to give zest and spirit to the meal. He offered his brandy-flask to a Genoese sailor, who emptied it, choking horribly, at a draught, so as to leave no drop for a shivering Jew who stood by, hoping for a turn. Rather than see the Christian cavalier’s spirits poured down a Jewish throat, explained the old boatman piously, he would have suffocated.
Englishmen drank malt liquor long before they tasted sack or canary. The ale-houses of the eighth century bear a respectable tradition of antiquity, until we remember that Egyptians were brewing barley beer four thousand years ago, and that Herodotus ascribes its invention to the ingenuity and benevolence of Isis. Thirteen hundred years before Christ, in the time of Seti I, an Egyptian gentleman complimented Isis by drinking so deeply of her brew that he forgot the seriousness of life, and we have to-day the record of his unseemly gaiety. Xenophon, with notable lack of enthusiasm, describes the barley beer of Armenia as a powerful beverage, “agreeable to those who were used to it”; and adds that it was drunk out of a common vessel through hollow reeds,--a commendable sanitary precaution.
In Thomas Hardy’s story, “The Shepherd’s Christening,” there is a rare tribute paid to mead, that glorious intoxicant which our strong-headed, stout-hearted progenitors drank unscathed. The traditional “heather ale” of the Picts, the secret of which died with the race, was a glorified mead.