“Ueberall wo du auch wandelst,
Schaust du mich zu allen Stunden,
Und jemehr du mich misshandelst,
Treuer bleib ich dir verbunden.
“Denn mich fesselt holde Bosheit
Wie mich Güte stets vertrieben;
Willst du sicher meiner los sein
Musst du dich in mich verlieben.”
In one English sentence: Your amiability repels, your malice attracts
me; if you wish to get rid of my attentions, you must fall in love with
me.
If a refined man can feel ardent affection for an animal, a friend, a
relative, without being “spurned” and consequently “fawning,” why should
not the same be true of his love for a beautiful girl? It is true; and
hence the cleverest women of the period, feeling this change in the
masculine heart, have adopted a different method of fascinating men and
bringing them to their feet, as we shall presently see.
Women, in turn, are injured by Coyness; first, because it makes them act
foolishly. French and German girls are systematically taught to take
immediate alarm at sight of a horrid man (whom they secretly consider a
darling creature, with _such_ a moustache) and conceal themselves behind
their mamma or chaperon, like spring chickens creeping under the old hen
at sight of a hawk. This sort of _spring-chicken coyness_ does
infinitely more harm than good; it makes the girls weak and frivolous,
and as for the men, if they are systematically treated as birds of prey,
how can they avoid falling in with their _rôle_? If men are to behave
like gentlemen they must be treated as gentlemen, as they are in England
and America.
Coyness, again, makes women deceitful and insincere. “Amongst her other
feminine qualities,” says Thackeray of one of his characters, “she had
that of being a perfect dissembler.” And in another place, “I think
women have an instinct of dissimulation; they know by nature how to
disguise their emotions far better than the most consummate courtiers
can do.” It cannot be said that dissimulation is a virtue, though it may
be a useful weapon against coarse and selfish men. If not the same thing
as hypocrisy, it is next door to it; and it cannot have a beneficial
effect on a woman’s general moral instincts if she is compelled
constantly to act a part contrary to her convictions and feelings.
Though as deeply in love as her suitor, she is commanded to treat him
with indifference, coldness, even cruelty,—in a word, to do constant
violence to her and his feelings, and to lacerate her own heart perhaps
even more than the unhappy lover’s. Thus instead of mutually enjoying
the period of Courtship, and indulging in harmless banter, “they gaze at
each other fiercely, though ready to die for love”; or, as Heine puts
it—
“Sie sahen sich an so feindlich,
Und wollten vor Liebe vergehen.”
And why all this perverseness, this unnaturalness, this emotional
torture? Simply because—once more be it said—the men of former days, the
men who lived on pork and port, who delighted in bear-baiting,
cock-fights, and similar æsthetic amusements, had nerves so coarse and
callous that to make any impression on them the women had to play with
them as a cat does with a mouse to make it tender and sweet.
_Coyness lessens Woman’s Love._—One more charge, the gravest of all,
remains to be piled on top, as a last crushing argument against crude
Coyness. An emotion, like a plant, requires for its growth sunshine,
light, and open air; if kept in a dark cellar and stifled, it soon
becomes weak and pale and languishes. Man’s superior strength and
selfish exercise of it have compelled women to cultivate Coyness as an
art of dissembling, hiding, and repressing their real feelings. But to
repress the manifestations of anger, of pity, of Love, is to suppress
them; hence Coyness has necessarily had the effect of weakening woman’s
Love. It weakens it in the same proportion as it strengthens man’s. And
hence, as I have said before, the current notion that women love more
ardently, more deeply, than men is an absurd myth. The poets have always
shown a predilection for this, as for all other myths; and as it is
still served up as a self-evident truth in a thousand books every year,
it is worth while to clear away the underbrush and let in some daylight
on the subject.
_Masculine_ versus _Feminine Love_.—One thing may be conceded at the
outset: that woman’s Love, when once kindled, is apt to endure longer
than man’s. Shakspere’s “’Tis brief, my Lord, as woman’s love” is
therefore a libel on the sex. The difficulty is to get it under way. It
takes so much of the small kindling wood of courtship (“sparking” it is
called) to set a female heart aflame, that many men give it up in
despair and remain bachelors; or else, like the young man in _Fidelio_,
they finally tell their girl, “If you will not love me, at least marry
me.”
It may also be conceded that Rousseau exaggerates when he says that
“Women are a hundred times sooner reasonable than passionate: they are
as unable to describe love as to feel it.” This may have been true in
his day; but that there have since been some female authors who have
correctly described Love, and thousands of women who have been deeply in
Love, it would be absurd to deny. All that is here maintained is that
Love is of less frequent occurrence in women than in men; and when it
does occur in women it is not usually so deep, so passionate, so
maddening. The average woman knows little of Romantic Love. She has read
about it in novels, in poems, and thinks how delightful it must be. The
faintest symptom is taken for an attack, just as in perusing a medical
book people commonly fancy they have symptoms of the disease they chance
to be reading about. Thus it happens that young girls so easily “fall in
love,” as they imagine, and are ready to elope with the first music
teacher or circus rider that comes along—
“A blockhead with melodious voice
In boarding-school may have his choice,
And oft the dancing-master’s art
Climbs from the toe to touch the heart.”—SWIFT.