Why are women so mysterious, so inscrutable? Cynics say because you
cannot calculate what they will do, as they have no fixed compass by
which they steer, _i.e._ no character. But Heine takes up their defence.
Far from having no character, he says, they have a new one every day.
The world’s opinion of women is best revealed in the crystallised
wisdom, based on experience, called proverbs. It will soothe the wounded
lover’s heart to note the unanimity with which woman’s foibles are dwelt
on in the proverbs of all nations from ancient Greece to modern China
and France. To give only three instances of a thousand that may be found
in any collection of proverbs: “Women,” says a French proverb, “have
quicksilver in the brain, wax in the heart.” The old Greek poet
Xenarchus sang, “Happy the cicadas live, since they all have voiceless
wives.” “There is no such poison in the green snake’s mouth or in the
hornet’s sting as in a woman’s heart,” says a Chinese maxim.
But it is not necessary to rely on such anonymous collections of wisdom
as proverbs to convince a man of the folly of linking himself for life
with such a miserable inferior being as a woman. From Plato to Darwin
there is a consensus of opinion as to woman’s vast inferiority to man.
According to Plato, says Mr. Grote, “men are superior to women in
everything; in one occupation as well as in another.” Cookery and
weaving having been named as two apparent exceptions, Plato denies
woman’s superiority even in these.
“The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes,”
says Darwin, “is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in
whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought,
reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If
two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry,
painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and
performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half a dozen names
under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison.”
“I found, as a rule,” says Mr. Galton, "that men have more delicate
powers of discrimination than women, and the business of life seems to
confirm this view. The tuners of pianofortes are men, and so, I
understand, are the tasters of tea and wine, the sorters of wool, and
the like. These latter occupations are well salaried, because it is of
the first moment to the merchant that he should be rightly advised on
the real value of what he is about to purchase or to sell. If the
sensitivity of women were superior to that of men, the self-interest of
merchants would lead to their being always employed; but as the reverse
is the case, the opposite supposition is likely to be the true one.
“Ladies rarely distinguish the merits of wine at the dinner-table, and
though custom allows them to preside at the breakfast-table, men think
them, on the whole, to be far from successful makers of tea and coffee.”
This disposes of the old myth that women are more sensitive than men.
And De Quincy, in his essay on _False Distinctions_, refutes the equally
absurd notion that “women have more imagination than men.” He comes to
the conclusion that, “as to poetry in its highest form, I never yet knew
a woman, nor yet will believe that any has existed, who could rise to an
entire sympathy with what is most excellent in that art.”
One proof of this statement lies in the fact that as a rule men of
genius have been refused by the women they loved most deeply.
Regarding the emotional sphere, we have seen that it is only in parental
and conjugal feeling that woman surpasses man. In Romantic Love, in all
the impersonal feelings for art and nature, she is vastly his inferior.
Her superficial education gives her no intellectual interests, and that
is the reason why so many married men prefer the club and friendship to
home and conjugal devotion—even as did the ancient Greeks.
It is in the seventh book of the _Laws_, p. 806, that Plato remarks:
“The legislator ought not to let the female sex live softly and waste
money and have no order of life, while he takes the utmost care of the
male sex, and leaves half of life only blest with happiness, when he
might have made the whole state happy.”
Is it not humiliating to man, who loves to call himself a “reasoning
animal,” to find that, after so many centuries, one of our greatest and
most liberal thinkers, Professor Huxley, is obliged to write in this
same Platonic tone that “the present system of female education stands
self-condemned, as inherently absurd,” because it fosters and
exaggerates instead of removing woman’s natural disadvantages? “With few
insignificant exceptions,” Professor Huxley continues, “girls have been
educated either to be drudges or toys beneath man, or a sort of angels
above him; the highest ideal aimed at oscillating between Clärchen and
Beatrice. The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in
the fair saint nor in the fair sinner; that women are meant neither to
be men’s guides nor their playthings, but their comrades, their fellows,
and their equals, so far as Nature puts no bar to their equality, does
not seem to have entered into the minds of those who have had the
conduct of the education of girls” (_Lay Sermons_, p. 25).
Woman, in short, is a failure; and let any disappointed lover ask
himself, Is it businesslike to begin life with a failure?