Women, to whom a barbarous description, willingly accepted by themselves,
has been applied, have recently been much in the public eye, and still
more in the public prints. But I should not class them under the
designation of feminine; and, though they may have invaded prose fiction,
they have not been, and I think they never will be, met with in Poetry.
They are noisy, but numerically weak. Eve listening to the Tempter, then
bewailing her weakness; Ruth amid the alien corn; Magdalen and her box of
spikenard; Helen of Troy following evil-hearted Paris; Beatrice in heaven;
Una and the milk-white lamb; Rosalind and Celia in _As You Like It_; the
Lily Maid of Astolat in the _Idylls of the King_--these are women of whom,
or, at least, of the sentiments and sympathies of whom, as manifested in
English poetry, I wish to speak. The most progressive age one can possibly
conceive will never succeed in leaving human nature behind, and I have not
the smallest doubt that women will continue to be womanly to the end of
time.
What, then, is feminine as contrasted with masculine? what is womanly as
compared with manly, whether in literature or in life? Men and women have
many qualities in common, and resemble more than they differ from each
other. But while, speaking generally, the man's main occupations lie
abroad, the woman's main occupation is at home. He has to deal with public
and collective interests; she has to do with private and individual
interests. We need not go so far as to say, with Kingsley, that man must
work and woman must weep; but at least he has to fight and to struggle,
she has to solace and to heal. Ambition, sometimes high, sometimes low,
but still ambition--ambition and success are the main motives and purpose
of his life. Her noblest ambition is to foster domestic happiness, to
bring comfort to the afflicted, and to move with unostentatious but
salutary step over the vast territory of human affection. While man busies
himself with the world of politics, with the world of commerce, with the
rise and fall of empires, with the fortunes and fate of humanity, woman
tends the hearth, visits the sick, consoles the suffering--in a word, in
all she does, fulfils the sacred offices of love.
Now the highest literature--and Poetry is confessedly the highest
literature--is a transfiguring reflex of life; and in its magic mirror we
perforce see reflected all the thoughts, feelings, interests, passions,
and events of human existence. In English poetry, therefore, we shall
expect to hear both the masculine note and the feminine note; and in what
proportions we hear them will be incidentally indicated in the course of
my remarks. But it is the Feminine Note in which we are at present
specially interested, and if I am asked to define briefly what I mean by
this Feminine Note, I should say that I mean the private or domestic note,
the compassionate note or note of pity, and the sentimental note or note
of romantic love.
Now I am well aware there are numbers of people who look on poetry as
something essentially and necessarily feminine, and who will say, "What do
you mean by speaking of the Feminine Note in English poetry? Surely it has
no other note, poetry being an effeminate business altogether, with which
men, real robust men, need not concern themselves." The people who hold
this opinion can have but a very limited acquaintance with English poetry,
and a yet more limited familiarity with the poetry of other ages and other
nations that has come down to us. As a matter of fact, though the feminine
note has rarely, if ever, been wholly absent from poetry, it is only of
late years comparatively that it has become a very audible note. I should
be carried too far away from my subject if I attempted to demonstrate the
accuracy of this assertion by a survey, however rapid, of all the
best-known poetry in languages, dead and living, of other times and other
peoples. But to cite one or two familiar examples, is the feminine note, I
may ask, the predominant, or even a frequent, note in the _Iliad_? The
poem opens, it is true, with a dispute among the Argive chiefs, and mainly
between Agamemnon and Achilles, concerning two young women. But how
quickly Chryseis and Bryseis fall into the background, and in place of any
further reference to them, we have a tempest of manly voices, the clang of
arms, the recriminations of the Gods up in Olympus, and the cataloguing of
the Grecian ships! Lest perhaps tender interest should be absent overmuch,
just when Paris is being worsted in his duel with Menelaus for the
determination of the siege, Venus carries him off under cover of a cloud,
and brings Helen to his side. Then follows a scene in which the fair cause
of strife and slaughter stands distracted between her passion for Paris,
her shame at his defeat and flight, and her recollection of the brave
Argive Chief she once called her lord. But more fighting promptly
supervenes, and, save in such a passing episode as the lovely leave-taking
of Hector and Andromache, the poem moves on through a magnificent medley
of fighting, plotting, and speech-making. Even in that exceptionally
tender episode what are the farewell words of Hector to his wife, "Go to
your house and see to your own duties, the loom and the distaff, and bid
your handmaidens perform their tasks. But for war shall _man_ provide." It
is over the dead body of Patroclus that Achilles weeps; and whatever tears
are shed in the _Iliad_ are shed by heroes for heroes. Life, as
represented in that poem, is a life in which woman plays a shadowy and
insignificant part, and wherein domestic sentiments are subordinated to
the rivalries of the Gods and the clash of chariot-wheels.
This subordinating of woman to man, of individual aims and private
feelings to great aims and public issues, is equally present in the great
Latin poem, the _AEneid_. "Arms and the Man, I sing," says Virgil at once,
and in the very first line of his poem; and though in one book out of the
twelve of which it consists he sings of the woman likewise, it is but to
leave her to her fate and to liberate AEneas from her seductions. Virgil is
rightly esteemed the most tender and refined writer of antiquity. Yet to
the modern reader, accustomed to the feminine note in poetry, there is
something amazingly callous, almost cruel, in the lines with which, while
the funeral pyre of Dido is still smoking, he tells us how AEneas, without
a moment's hesitation, makes for the open sea, and sails away from
Carthage. But then the main business of AEneas was not to soothe or satisfy
the Carthaginian queen, but to build the city and found the Empire of
Rome. "Spirits," says Shakespeare, "are not finely touched save to fine
issues"; and it never would have occurred to Virgil to allow the hero of
the _AEneid_ to be diverted from his masculine purpose by anything so
secondary as the love, or even the self-immolation, of a woman.
Let us, however, overleap the intervening centuries, and betake ourselves
to the poetry of our own land and our own language. Chaucer, the first
great English poet, was, like all writers of supreme genius, a prolific
and voluminous writer, and we have thousands of verses of his besides the
Prologue to the _Canterbury Tales_. But it is by this latter work that he
is best known; and it is pre-eminently and adequately representative, both
of his own genius and of the temper of the times in which he lived. You
will have to hunt very diligently through his description of the Knight,
the Squire, the Yeoman, the Prioress, the Monk, the Merchant, the Sergeant
of the Law, the Franklin, the Miller, the Manciple, and the rest of his
jovial company, in order to find anything approaching the feminine note.
He says little about what any of them thought, and absolutely nothing
concerning what they felt, but confines himself to descriptions of their
personal appearance, of their conduct and their character, in a word, of
their external presentation of themselves. The Knight who wore a doublet
all stained by his coat of mail, was well mounted, and had ridden far, no
man farther. The Squire, or page, had curly locks, and had borne himself
well in Flanders and Picardy. The Yeoman bore a weighty bow, handled his
arrows and tackle in admirable fashion, and was dressed in a coat of
green. The Monk was fat and in good case, and loved a roast swan more than
any other dish. The Friar, we are told, had made many a marriage at his
own cost, and would get a farthing out of a poor widow, though she had
only one shoe left. The Franklin had a white beard and a high complexion,
kept a capital table, and blew up his cook loudly if the sauces were not
to his liking. The Wife of Bath had married five husbands, not to speak of
other company in her youth; and the Sumpnor loved garlic, onions, and
leeks, had a fiery face, and doated on strong wine. There is nothing very
feminine in all this, is there? The one sole touch of tenderness that I
can remember, and it is very elementary and introduced quite casually, is
that in which we are told that the Prioress is so full of pity that she
would weep if she saw a mouse caught in a trap. One can easily surmise
what sort of tales would proceed from such downright, hearty, unromantic
personages; and, save where any of them recite well-known stories from
ancient poets, their own narratives are as buxom, burly, and as
unsentimental as themselves. If princes and princesses, fine lords and
ladies, be the heroes and heroines of the Tale, a certain amount of
conventional pity is extended to their woes. But if the personages of the
story be, as they for the most part are, common folk, and such as the
story-tellers themselves would be likely to know, their misfortunes and
mishaps are used merely as a theme for mirth and merciless banter. The
humour displayed is excellent, but it is not the humour of _charity_. It
is not compassionate, and it is not feminine. The feminine note is not
absent from Chaucer's Tales, but it is generally a subordinate note, a
rare note, a note scarcely heard in his great concert of masculine
voices.
Passing from the pages of Chaucer to those of Spenser is like passing from
some cheery tavern where the ale is good and the jokes are excellent, but
a trifle coarse, and the company diverting but a little mixed, to the
banqueting-hall of some stately palace, where the wines and meats are of
the choicest, where all the guests are of high degree, the women all fair,
the men all courtly, and where fine manners and dignified speech leave no
place for loud lewd laughter or even for homely familiarity. Surely in one
who is such a poet, and such a gentleman, and in every respect, to quote a
line of his own "a very perfect gentle knight," we shall come across, ever
and anon at least, the feminine note. And indeed we do. The first three
stanzas of the _Fairy Queen_ are dedicated to the description of the
Knight that was pricking on the plain. But listen to the fourth:
A lovely lady rode him fair beside,
Upon a lowly ass more white than snow;
Yet she much whiter; but the same did hide
Under a veil that wimpled was full low,
And over all a black stole did she throw;
As one that inly mourned, so was she sad,
And heavy sate upon her palfrey slow.
Seemed at heart some hidden care she had.
And by her in a line a milk-white lamb she lad.
So pure and innocent as that same lamb
She was, in life and every virtuous lore.
She by descent from royal lineage came.
Her name, as doubtless you well know, was Una, and, when by foul
enchantment she is severed a while from her true knight, harken with what
a truly feminine note Spenser bewails her misfortune:
Nought is there under heaven's wide hollowness
Did recover more dear compassion of the mind
Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness
Through envy's snare, or fortune's freaks unkind.
I, whether lately through her brightness blind,
Or through allegiance, and fast fealty
Which I do owe unto all womankind,
Feel my heart prest with so great agony,
When such I see, that all for pity I could die.
Spenser cannot endure the thought of beauty in distress. So at once he
brings upon the scene a ramping lion, which, in the ordinary course of
things would have put a speedy end to her woes. But not so Spenser's lion:
Instead thereof he kissed her weary feet,
And licked her lily hands with fawning tongue,
As he her wronged innocence did weet.
O how can beauty master the most strong.
And thus he goes on:
The lion would not leave her desolate,
But with her went along, as a strong guard
Of her chaste person, and a faithful mate
Of her sad troubles and misfortunes hard:
Still when she slept, he kept both watch and ward,
And when she waked, he waited diligent
With humble service to her will prepared.
This allegiance and fast fealty which Spenser declares he owes unto all
womankind is the attitude, not only of all true knights and all true
gentlemen, but likewise, I trust, of all true poets. But do not suppose on
that account that Spenser is a feminine poet. He is very much the reverse.
It would be impossible for a poet to be more masculine than he.
Upon a great adventure he was bound,
he says at once of his hero, and describes how the knight's heart groaned
to prove his prowess in battle brave. Spenser has the feminine note, but
in subordination to the masculine note; and if I were asked to name some
one quality by which you may know whether a poet be of the very highest
rank, I should be disposed to say, "See if in his poetry you meet with the
feminine note and the masculine note, and if the first be duly
subordinated to the second."
I wish it were possible, within the limit I have here assigned myself, to
apply this test and pursue this enquiry at length in regard to
Shakespeare, in regard to Milton, and likewise in regard to Dryden and
Pope. But of this I am sure that the wider and deeper the survey the more
clear would be the conclusion that in Shakespeare, as we might have
expected, the masculine note and the feminine note are heard in perfect
harmony, but by far the larger volume of sound proceeds from the former.
When, then, was it that the feminine note, the domestic or personal note,
the compassionate note or note of pity, the purely sentimental note, was
first heard in English poetry as a note asserting equality with the
masculine note, and tending to assert itself as the dominant note?
One of the most beautiful and best-known poems in the English language is
Gray's _Elegy written in a Country Churchyard_; and in the following
stanzas which many of you will recognise as belonging to it, do we not
seem to overhear something like the note of which we are in search?--
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,
The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her ev'ning care:
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
Here our sympathy is asked, not for kings and princesses, not for great
lords and fine ladies, not for the rise and fall of empires, but for the
rude forefathers of the hamlet, for the busy housewife, for the
hard-working peasant and his children, for homely joys and the annals of
the poor. But Gray does not maintain this note beyond the five stanzas I
have just quoted. He quickly again lapses into the traditional, the
classic, the purely masculine note:
The boast of Heraldry, the pomp of Pow'r,
And all that Beauty, all that Wealth e'er gave,
Await alike th' inevitable hour,
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,
If Mem'ry o'er their tombs no trophies raise,
Where through the long-drawn aisle, and fretted vault,
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.
Can storied urn, or animated bust,
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
The stanzas that follow are splendid stanzas, but they are the stately and
sonorous verse of a detached and moralising mind, not the pathetic verse
of a sympathising heart. We have to wait another twenty years before we
come upon a poem of consequence in which the feminine note is not only
present, but paramount. In the year 1770, nearly a century and a half
ago, appeared Goldsmith's poem, _The Deserted Village_, and in it I catch,
for the first time, as the prevailing and predominant note, the note of
feminine compassion, the note of humble happiness and humble grief. In
Goldsmith's verse we hear nothing of great folks except to be told how
small and insignificant are the ills which they can cause or cure.
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath hath made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
Goldsmith's themes in _The Deserted Village_ are avowedly:
The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,
The never-failing brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topped the neighbouring hill,
The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,
For talking age and whispering lovers made.
We seem to have travelled centuries away from the _Troilus and Cressida_,
or the _Palamon and Arcite_ of Chaucer, from the Red Cross Knight and Una,
from the Britomart, the Florimel, the Calidore, the Gloriana of Spenser,
from the kingly ambitions and princely passions of Shakespeare, from the
throes and denunciations of _Paradise Lost_, and equally from the
coffee-house epigrams and savage satire of Pope. We have at last got among
ordinary people, among humble folk, people of our own flesh and blood,
with simple joys and simple sorrows. What could be more unlike the poetry
we have so far been surveying than these lines from _The Deserted
Village_?--
Sweet was the sound when oft at evening's close
Up yonder hill the village murmur rose,
There, as I passed, with careless steps and slow,
The mingling notes came softened from below.
The swain responsive as the milkmaid sung,
The sober herd that lowed to meet their young,
The noisy geese that gabbled o'er the pool,
The playful children just let loose from school.
Which of you does not remember the description in the same poem of the
Village Clergyman? the man who was to all his country dear, etc. Some of
you, I daresay, know it by heart. Nothing is too lowly, some would say,
nothing too mean, for Goldsmith's tender Muse. He loves to dwell on the
splendour of the humble parlour, on the whitewashed wall, the sanded
floor, the varnished clock, the chest of drawers, and the chimney-piece
with its row of broken teacups. Truly it is a feminine Muse which can make
poetry, and, in my opinion, very charming poetry, out of broken teacups.
The feminine note once struck, the note of personal tenderness, of
domestic interest, of compassion for the homely, the suffering, or the
secluded was never again to be absent from English poetry; and Cowper
continued, without a break, the still sad music of humanity first clearly
uttered by Goldsmith. What is the name of Cowper's principal and most
ambitious poem? As you know, it is called _The Task_; and what are the
respective titles of the six books into which it is divided? They are:
_The Sofa_, _The Time-Piece_, _The Garden_, _The Winter Evening_, _The
Winter Morning Walk_, _The Winter Walk at Noon_. Other poems of a kindred
character are entitled _Hope_, _Charity_, _Conversation_, _Retirement_.
Open what page you will of Cowper's verse, and you will be pretty sure to
find him either denouncing things which women, good women, at least, find
abhorrent, such as the slave-trade, gin-drinking, gambling, profligacy,
profane language, or dwelling on occupations which are dear to them.
O for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
he exclaims--
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more! My ear is pained,
My soul is sick with every day's report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,
It does not feel for man.
These are the opening lines of the _Time-Piece_, and they sound what may
be called the note of feminine indignation; a note which is reverted to by
him again and again.
More placidly but still in the same spirit, he exclaims:
Now stir the fire and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud hissing urn
Throws up a steaming column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.