Part 23
It has been passed, like many another fallacy, from generation to generation, and the enormous power of evil which lies in the female sex has been underestimated or conventionally disregarded for the sake of a poetic effect. The seducer is continually held up for condemnation, but the temptress is seldom remembered. It is common to write of women as the victims of men, and it is forgotten how many men are the victims in their earliest youth of women. Even in marriage the woman, by her infidelity, can inflict the most poignant, the most torturing dishonour on the man; the man’s infidelity does not in the least touch the honour of the woman. She can never be in doubt as to the fact of her children being her own; but he may be perpetually tortured by such a doubt, nay, may be compelled through lack of proof to give his name and shelter to his offspring when he is morally convinced that they are not his. The woman can bring shame into a great race as the man can never do, and ofttimes brings it with impunity. In marriage, moreover, the influence of the woman, whatever popular prejudices plead to the contrary, is constantly belittling and injurious to the intelligence of the man. How many great artists since the days of Andrea del Sarto have cursed the woman who has made them barter their heritage of genius for the ‘pottage’ of worldly affluence? How much, how often, and how pitilessly have the petty affairs, the personal greeds, the unsympathetic and low-toned character of the woman he has unfortunately wedded, put lead on the winged feet of the man of genius, and made him leave the Muses for the god of barter beloved of the common people in the market-place? Not infrequently what is called with pious praise a good woman, blameless in her own conduct and devoted to what she conceives to be her duties, has been more fatal to the originality, the integrity, and the intellectual brilliancy of a man than the worst courtesan could have been. The injury which women have done the minds of men may fairly be set off against those social and physical injuries which men are said by M. Dumas to inflict so ruthlessly on women.
If outside monogamous marriage the woman suffers from the man, within it man suffers from the woman. It is doubtful if but for the obligation to accept it, which is entailed by property, and the desire for legitimate heirs, one man in a hundred of the richer classes would consent to marry. Whenever Socialism succeeds in abolishing property, monogamy will be destroyed with it perforce.
In the lower strata of society the conjugal association is made on more equal terms: both work hard and both frequently come to blows. The poor man loses less by marriage than the rich man, for he has his comforts, his food and his clothes looked after gratis, but the poor woman gains very little indeed by it; and if she got a hearing in the political world, she would probably brawl against it, or, which is still more likely, she would do worse and insist on marriage laws which should restrict the personal freedom of the man as severely and as tyrannically as the Sabbath observance laws do in Scotland, and as the Puritan exactions did in the early years of American colonisation.
The net result of the entrance of the woman into the political arena can never be for the happiness of humanity.
‘Prevant leur revanche de l’immobilité à laquelle on les a condamnées elles vont courrir par n’importe quels chemins à côté de l’homme, devant lui si elles peuvent, contre lui s’il le faut à la conquête d’un nouveau monde. En matière de sensation la femme est l’extrême, l’excès, de l’homme.’ Dumas recognises the inevitable hostility which will be begotten between the sexes if they war in the same public arena; but he passes over it.
If female suffrage become law anywhere, it must be given to all women who have not rendered themselves ineligible for it by criminality. The result will scarcely be other than the emasculation and the confusion of the whole world of politics. The ideal woman is, we know, the type of heroism, fortitude, wisdom, sweetness and light; but even the ideal woman is not always distinguished by breadth of thought, and it is here a question not of the ideal woman at all, but of the millions of ordinary women who have as little of the sage in them as of the angel. Very few women are capable of being the sympathetic mistress of a great man, or the ennobling mother of a child of genius. Most women are the drag on the wheel of the higher aspirations, to the nobler impulses, to the more original and unconventional opinions, of the men whom they influence. The prospect of their increased ascendency over national movements is very ominous. Is the mass of male humanity ready to accept it?
Women will not find happiness in hostility to men even if they obtain a victory in it, which is very doubtful. Women of genius have never hated men: they have perhaps liked them too well. To the woman of genius love may not be the sole thing on earth, as it is to Gretchen; it is only one amongst the many emotions, charms and delights of life; but she never denies its attractions, its consolation, its supreme ecstasy, its exquisite sympathies. Heloise and Aspasia can love better than Penelope.
Who, then, will become those enemies of men to whom Dumas looks for the emancipation of the weaker sex? All the _délaissées_, all the _déclassées_, all the discontented, jaded, unloved, embittered women in the world, all those, and their number is legion, who have not genius or loveliness, fortune or power, the wisdom to be mute or the sorcery to charm; women restless, feverish, envious, irritable, embittered, whose time hangs heavy on their hands and whose brains seethe under the froth of ill-assorted and ill-assimilated knowledge.
‘Quarry the granite rock with razors,’ wrote John Newman, ‘or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope, with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human understanding, to contend against these giants, the passions and the pride of man;’—or against the difference and the influence of sex.
I know not why women should wish or clamour at once to resemble and to quarrel with man. The attitude is an unnatural one; it is sterile, not only physically but mentally. It is true that the prejudices and conventionalities of society, and the fictions of monogamy have stranded a vast number of women, undistinguished and unhappy, with no career and no interests, who would imagine themselves disgraced if they enjoyed the natural affections of life outside that pale of propriety which the conventions of society have created. These are the women who would care for political power and would be allowed to exercise it. What could the world gain from such as these? What would it not lose of the small modicum of freedom, of contentment, and of wisdom which it already possesses?
To most women success is measured by the balance at the bank, by the applause of the hour, and nothing is esteemed which has not received the hall-mark of the world’s approval. There are exceptions, no doubt; but they have been and are, I think, fewer than the advocates of female suffrage would have us believe. Men too often are mere _moutons de Panurge_, but women are so almost invariably. The Arab who weeps when a female child is born to him is perhaps more correct in his measurement of the sex than the American who is prepared to make her the spoiled and wayward sovereign of his household.
I have previously used the words ‘mental and moral inferiority’; it is perhaps necessary to explain them. By mental inferiority I do not mean that the average women might not, if educated to it, learn as much mathematics or as much metaphysics as the ordinary man. I do not deny that Girton may produce senior wranglers or physiologists in time to come; it may do so. But the female mind has a radical weakness which is often also its peculiar charm; it is intensely subjective, it is only reluctantly forced to be impersonal, and it has the strongest possible tendency to tyranny, as I have said before. In public morality, also, the female mind is unconsciously unscrupulous; it is seldom very frank or honest, and it would burn down a temple to warm its own pannikin. Women of perfect honesty of intentions and antecedents will adopt a dishonest course, if they think it will serve an aim or a person they care for, with a headlong and cynical completeness which leaves men far behind it. In intrigue a man will often have scruples which the woman brushes aside as carelessly as if they were cobwebs, if once her passions or her jealousies are ardently involved. There is not much veracity anywhere in human nature, but it may always be roughly calculated that the man will be more truthful than the woman, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred; his judgments will be less coloured by personal wishes and emotions, and his instincts towards justice will be straighter and less mobile than hers. Were women admitted into public life, bribery would become a still greater factor in that life than it now is, which is needless. All the world over, what is wanted for the health of the nations is the moral purification of politics, the elimination of venal and personal views, the disinterested advocacy and adoption of broad, just and magnanimous principles of action. Can it be said that the entry of women into politics would have this effect? He must be a sanguine man who can think that it would, and he must have but little knowledge of women.
_On a les défauts de ses qualités._ This is one of the most profound axioms ever evolved out of a study of human nature. And all which constitutes the charm of women, mutability, caprice, impressionability, power of headlong self-abandonment, mingled with intense subjectiveness and self-engrossment, would all make of women an inferior but of a most dangerous political force. Where Mr Gladstone has sent out troops and recalled them a dozen times, she, with similar but still greater oscillations of purpose, would send them out and recall them five hundred times. The _Souvent femme varie_ of Francois the First is true to all time. But in all her variations it is the Sejanus, the Orloff, the Biron, the Bothwell of the moment, whom she would wade through seas of blood to please. This makes at once her dangerousness and her charm.
As scientists look forward to the time when every man will be bald from boyhood, thus having outgrown the last likeness to the beasts that perish, so enthusiasts for female suffrage look forward to a time when woman will have shed all her fair follies and rectified all her amusing inconsistencies. What will she be like then? Very unlovely it may safely be predicted, as unlovely as the men without hair; very mischievous for evil, it may also be deemed certain.
A French physiologist, who lectured in Russia not very long ago, was amazed at the howls of impatience and disdain which was aroused in the female students amongst his audience in Moscow by his simple statement that the claims of the arts must not be wholly lost sight of in the demands and inquiries of science. They would not tolerate even the mention of the arts; in their fanaticism they would only worship one God. The youths were willing to award a place to art; the maidens would hear of nothing but science. ‘_Une grande sécheresse de cœur domine la femme qui se donne à la Science_;’ and with this dryness of the soul comes an unmerciful and intolerant disposition to tyranny over the minds of others.
It cannot be denied that the quality which in women bestows most happiness on those around them, is that which is called in French and has no exact descriptive word in English, _gaîte de cœur_. Not frivolous unusefulness, or passion for diversion and excitement, but a sweet and happy spirit, finding pleasure in small things and great, and shedding a light like that of Moore’s wild freshness of morning on the beaten tracks of life. Where will this pleasant gaiety and smiling radiance go when, harassed, heated, and blown by the bitter winds of strife, the woman seeks to outshriek the man on political platforms, or when with blood-stained hands she bends over the torture-trough of the physiological laboratory?
The humanities do not harden a woman: erudition may leave her loveliness and grace of form and mind; though as proficient a Greek and Latin scholar as any of the learned Italian women of the Renaissance, yet she may be the joy of her home and the angel of the poor. A love of learning, of art, of nature, keeps long young the heart in which it has a place. But the noisy conflicts of the polling-booths and the pitiless cruelties of the laboratories will not do so. There is in every woman, even in the best woman, a sleeping potentiality for crime, a curious possibility of fiendish evil. Even her maternal love is dangerously near an insane ferocity, which at times breaks out in infanticide or child-murder. Everything which tends to efface in her gentler and softer instincts tends to make of her a worse curse to the world than any man has ever been. If, indeed, in the centuries to come she should develop into the foe of man, which Dumas _fils_ wishes her to become, it is by no means improbable that men, in sheer self-defence, will be compelled to turn on her and chain her down into the impotency of servitude once more.
If she once leave the power which nature has given her over her lovers, her friends, her sons, to become the opponent, the jealous rival and the acrid enemy of men, then men, it may be with surety predicted, will not long keep the gloves on as they fight with her, but with the brutality which is natural to the male animal and which is only curbed, not effaced, by the graceful hypocrisies of society and of courtship, will with his closed fists send her down into that lower place of _la femelle de l’homme_, from which it has been the effort and the boast of Christianity and of civilisation to raise her. Woman can never truly conquer man, except by those irresistible weapons which the Queen of the Amazons leaned on in her strife with Alexander.
Man has, I repeat, been very fair in his dealings with women, as far as legislation goes; he could easily have kept her from all time to the harem, and it has been a proof of his fairness, if not of his wisdom, that he has not done so. I have but little doubt but that, before long, he will cede to her clamour, and let her seat herself beside him, or opposite to him, on the benches of his representative houses. When he does, he will, I think, regret the loss of the harem.
There is a lax and perilous inclination in the mass of mankind, in these latter days of the century, to give anything which is much asked for.
‘To yield to clamour and to pallid fears, What wisdom, temperance and truth deny;’
to let the reins go, and the steeds, which draw the chariot of national fate, gallop headlong, whither they will, downhill if they choose. The pessimism prevalent in the classes which think, lies at the root of their indifference to change, and their apathy and indolence before fresh demands. Men who do think at all, see how unsatisfactory all things are, how unreal all religions, how fictitious the bond of marriage, how mutable the laws of property, how appalling the future of the world, when there will not be even standing-room upon it for all the billions of peoples begotten. And they are, therefore, in that mood which makes them willing to try any new thing, even as men at death’s door languidly affirm their despairing readiness to try any nostrum or panacea tendered to them.
Woman may, will, very possibly, snatch from the nerveless hand of the sick man those legal and legislative rights which she covets. The political movements of modern times have been always in the direction of giving unlimited power to blind and unmeasured masses, whose use of that which is thus rashly given them the boldest prophet dare not predict. Such movement will probably give political power to women.
I confess that I, for one, dread the day which shall see this further development of that crude and restless character of the nineteenth century, which, with sublime self-contentment and self-conceit, it has presumed to call Progress.
VULGARITY
If the present age were less of a hypocrite than it is, probably its conscience would compel it to acknowledge that vulgarity is excessively common in it; more common than in any preceding time, despite its very bountiful assumptions of good taste and generalised education.
Vulgarity is almost a modern vice; it is doubtful whether classic ages knew it at all, except in that sense in which it must be said that even Socrates was vulgar, _i.e._, inquisitiveness, and in that other sense of love of display to which the tailless dog of Alkibiades was a mournful victim. We are aware that Alkibiades said he cut off his dog’s tail and ears to give the Athenians something to talk of, that they might not gossip about what else he was doing. But though gossip was no doubt rife in Athens, still, vulgarity in its worst sense, that is, in the struggle to seem what the struggler is not, could have had no existence in times when every man’s place was marked out for him, and the lines of demarcation could not be overstepped. Vulgarity began when the freedman began to give himself airs, and strut and talk as though he had been a porphyrogenitus; and this pretension was only possible in a decadence.
There may be a vast vulgarity of soul with an admirable polish of manners, and there may be a vast vulgarity of manner with a generous delicacy of soul. But, in this life, we are usually compelled to go by appearances, and we can seldom see beyond them, except in the cases of those few dear to, and intimate with us. We must be pardoned if we judge by the externals which are palpable to us and do not divine the virtues hidden beneath them.
An essayist has recently defined good manners as courtesy and truthfulness. Now this is simply nonsense. A person may be full of kindly courtesies, and never utter the shadow of an untruth, and yet he may have red-hot hands, a strident voice, an insupportable manner, dropped aspirates, and a horribly gross joviality, which make him the vulgarest of the vulgar. It is often said that a perfect Christian is a perfect gentleman, but this also is a very doubtful postulate. The good Christian may ‘love his neighbour as himself,’ and yet he may offend his ear with a cockney accent and sit down to his table with unwashed hands. ‘Manners make the man,’ is an old copy-book adage, and is not quiet true either: but it is certain that, without good manners, the virtues of a saint may be more offensive, by far, to society than the vices of a sinner. It is a mistake to confuse moral qualities with the social qualities which come from culture and from breeding.
I have said that Socrates must have been in a certain degree vulgar, because he was so abominably inquisitive. For surely all interrogation is vulgar? When strangers visit us, we can at once tell whether they are ill-bred or high-bred persons by the mere fact of whether they do, or do not, ask us questions. Even in intimacy, much interrogation is a vulgarity; it may be taken for granted that your friend will tell you what he wishes you to know. Here and there when a question seems necessary, if silence would imply coldness and indifference, then must it be put with the utmost delicacy and without any kind of semblance of its being considered a demand which must be answered. All interrogation for purposes of curiosity is vulgar, curiosity itself being so vulgar; and even the plea of friendship or of love cannot be pleaded in extenuation of it. But if love and friendship be pardoned their inquisitiveness, the anxiety of the general public to have their curiosity satisfied as to the habits, ways and scandals of those who are conspicuous in any way, is mere vulgar intrusiveness, which the ‘society newspapers,’ as they are called, do, in all countries, feed to a most pernicious degree. Private life has no longer any door that it can shut and bolt against the intrusion of the crowd. Whether a royal prince has quarrelled with his wife, or a country mayoress has quarelled with a house-maid, the press, large or small, metropolitan or provincial, serves up the story to the rapacious curiosity of the world-wide, or the merely local public. This intrusion on personal and wholly private matters is an evil which increases every day; it is a twofold evil, for it is alike a curse to those whose privacy it poisons, and a curse to those whose debased appetites it feeds. It would be wholly impossible, in an age which was not vulgar, for those journals which live on personalities to find a public. They are created by the greed of the multitude which calls for them. It is useless to blame the proprietors and editors who live on them; the true culprits are the readers—the legions of readers—who relish and patronise them, and without whose support such carrion flies could not live out a summer.
‘It is so easy to talk about people’ is the excuse constantly made by those who are reproved for gossiping about others who are not even, perhaps, their personal acquaintances. Yes, it is very easy; the most mindless creature can do it; the asp, be he ever so small, can sting the hero, and perchance can slay him; but gossip of a malicious kind is intensely vulgar, and to none but the vulgar should it be welcome, even if their vulgarity be such as is hidden under a cloak of good manners. It is true that there is a sort of spurious wit which springs out of calumny, and which is _malgré nous_ too often diverting to the best of us, and this sort of personality has a kind of contagious attraction which is apt to grow even on those who loathe it, much as absinthe does. But it is none the less vulgar, and vulgarises the mind which admits its charm, as absinthe slowly eats up the vitality and the digestive powers of those who yield to its attraction. Were there no vulgarity, it may be said that there would be no scandal; for scandal is born of that marked desire to think ill of others, and that restless inquisitiveness into affairs that do not concern us, which is pre-eminently vulgar. When we talk of the follies of our friends, or the backslidings of our acquaintances, in a duchess’s boudoir, we are every whit as vulgar as the fishwives or the village dames jabbering of the sins of Jack and Jill in any ale-house. The roots of the vulgarity are the same—inquisitiveness and idleness. All personalities are vulgar; and whether personalities are used as the base weapons to turn an argument, or as the equally base bait wherewith to make the fortunes of a newspaper, they are alike offensive and unpardonable. The best characteristic of the best society would be that they should be absolutely forbidden in it.
Another reason why the present age is more vulgar than any preceding it, may also be found in the fact that, in it pretension is infinitely more abundant, because infinitely more successful than it ever was before. An autocratic aristocracy, or a perfect equality, would equally make pretension impossible. But, at the present time, aristocracy is without power, and equality has no existence outside the dreams of Utopians. The result is, that the whole vast mass of humanity, uncontrolled, can struggle, and push, and strive, and sweat, and exhaust itself, to appear something that it is not, and all repose and calm and dignity, which are the foes of vulgarity, are destroyed.