A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his
merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with
something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom
deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a
shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the
best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes
it, feminine intuition. The mark of that so-called intuition is simply
a sharp and accurate perception of reality, an habitual immunity to
emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly
between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal
family circle, is a hero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor
mountebank.
The proverb that no man is a hero to his valet is obviously of
masculine manufacture. It is both insincere and untrue: insincere
because it merely masks the egotistic doctrine that he is potentially a
hero to everyone else, and untrue because a valet, being a fourth-rate
man himself, is likely to be the last person in the world to penetrate
his master’s charlatanry. Who ever heard of valet who didn’t envy his
master wholeheartedly? who wouldn’t willingly change places with his
master? who didn’t secretly wish that he was his master? A man’s wife
labours under no such naive folly. She may envy her husband, true
enough, certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities.
She may envy him his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his
impenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his
capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak of
romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she never
envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy and
preposterous soul.
This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this
acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the
bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the
maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she
sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his
touching self delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent
in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine fiction. The woman
novelist, if she be skillful enough to arise out of mere imitation into
genuine self-expression, never takes her heroes quite seriously. From
the day of George Sand to the day of Selma Lagerlof she has always got
into her character study a touch of superior aloofness, of
ill-concealed derision. I can’t recall a single masculine figure
created by a woman who is not, at bottom, a booby.