earth he is married at all will generally find that the mischief began
in the _naive_ confession on the part of his future wife of a total
ignorance which asked humbly for enlightenment. One of the grandest
_coups_ we ever knew made in this way was effected by a desire on the
part of a faded beauty to know the pedigree of a horse. The pride of her
next neighbor at finding himself the possessor of knowledge on any
subject on earth took the form of the most practical gratitude a man can
show. But it is not before marriage only that woman finds her ignorance
act as a charm. Husbands find pleasure in talking politics to their
wives simply because, as they stand on the hearthrug, they are
displaying their own mental superiority. An Englishman likes to be
master of his own house, but he dearly loves to be schoolmaster.
A Platonic woman as well-informed as her husband would deprive him of
this daily source of domestic enjoyment; his lecture would be reduced to
discussion, and to discussion in which he might be defeated. To rob him
of his oracular infallibility might greatly improve the husband, but it
would revolutionize the character of the home.
It is difficult to see at first sight any analogy between the
Puritanical form of flirtation which calls itself a Platonic attachment,
and the provisions by which Plato excluded all peculiar love or
matrimonial choice from his commonwealth. The likeness is really to be
found in the resolve on which both are based to obtain all the
advantages of social intercourse between the sexes without the
interference of passion. In a well-regulated State, no doubt, passion is
a bore, and this is just the aspect which it takes to a highly regulated
woman. An outburst of affection on the part of her numerous admirers
would break up a very pleasant circle, and put an end to some charming
conversations. On the other hand, the quiet sense of some special
relationship, the faint odor of a passion carefully sealed up, gives a
piquancy and flavor to social friendship which mere association wants.
Very frequently such a relation forms an admirable retreat from stormier
experiences in the past, and the tender grace of a day that is dead
hangs pleasantly enough over the days that remain.
But the Platonic woman proper, in this sense, is the spinster of
five-and-thirty. She is clever enough to know that the day for inspiring
grand passions is gone by, but that there is still nothing ridiculous in
mingling a little sentiment with her friendly relations. She moves in
maiden meditation fancy free, but the vestal flame of her life is none
the more sullied for a slight tinge of earthly color. It is a connection
that is at once interesting, undefined, and perfectly safe. It throws a
little poetry over life to know that one being is cherishing a perfectly
moral and carefully toned-down attachment for another, which will last
for years, but never exceed the bounds of a smile and a squeeze of the
hand.
Animals in the lowest scale of life are notoriously the hardest to kill,
and it is just this low vitality, as it were, of Platonic attachment
that makes it so perfectly indestructible. Its real use is in keeping up
a sort of minute irrigation of a good deal of human ground which would
be barren without it. These little tricklings of affection, so small as
not to disturb one's sleep or to drive one to compose a single sonnet,
keep up a certain consciousness of attraction, and beget a corresponding
return of kindliness and good temper towards the world around. A woman
who has once given up the hope of being loved is a nuisance to
everybody. But the Platonic woman need never give up her hope of being
loved; she has reduced affection to a minimum, but from its very
minuteness there is little or no motive to snap the bond, and with time
habit makes it indestructible.
One Christian body, we believe--the Moravians--still carries out the
principle of Plato's ideal state in giving woman no choice in the
selection of a spouse. The elders arrange their matches as the wise men
of the Republic were wont to do. A friend of ours once met six young
women going out to some Northern settlement of the Moravians with a view
to marriage. "What is your husband's name?" he asked one. "I don't know;
I shall find out when I see him," she answered. But we have heard of
only one State which realizes Plato's theory as to the equal
participation of woman in man's responsibilities as well as in his
privileges, and that is the kingdom of Dahomey. If women were to learn
and govern like men, Plato argued, women must fight like men, and the
Amazons of Dahomey fight like very terrible men indeed.
But we have as yet heard of no military grievance on the part of injured
woman. She has not yet discovered the hardship of being deprived of a
commission, or denied the Victoria Cross. No Miss Faithful has
challenged woman's right to glory by the creation of a corps of
riflewomen. Even Dr. Mary Walker, though she could boast of having gone
through the American war, went through it with a scalpel, and not with a
sword. We are far from attributing this peaceful attitude of modern
woman, inferior though it be to the Platonic ideal, to any undue
physical sensitiveness to danger, or to inability for deeds of daring;
we attribute it simply to a sense that there is a warfare which she is
discharging already, and with the carrying on of which any more public
exertions would interfere.
Woman alone keeps up the private family warfare which in the earlier
stages of society required all the energies of man. It is a field from
which man has completely retired, and which would be left wholly vacant
were it not occupied by woman. The stir, the jostling, the squabbling of
social life, are all her own. We owe it to her that the family existence
of England does not rot in mere inaction and peace. The guerilla warfare
of house with house, the fierce rivalry of social circle with social
circle, the struggle for precedence, the jealousies and envyings and
rancors of every day--these are things which no man will take a proper
interest in, and which it is lucky that woman can undertake for him. The
Platonic woman of to-day may not march to the field or storm the breach,
but she is unequalled in outmanoeuvring a rival, in forcing an
entrance into society, in massacring an enemy's reputation, in carrying
off matrimonial spoil. In war, then, as in education and the affections,
modern woman has developed the spirit without copying the form of the
Platonic ideal. After all superficial contrasts have been exhausted, she
may still claim the patronage of the philosopher of Academe.
MAN AND HIS MASTER.
There are, it must be owned, few things on earth of less interest at
first sight than a girl in her teens. She is a mere bundle of pale
colorless virtues, a little shy, slightly studious, passively obedient,
tamely religious. Her tastes are "simple"--she has no particular
preference, that is, for anything; her aims incline mildly towards a
future of balls to come; her rule of life is an hourly reference to
"mamma." She is without even the charm of variety; she has been
hot-pressed in the most approved finishing establishments, and is turned
out the exact double of her sister or her cousin or her friend, with the
same stereotyped manner, the same smattering of accomplishments, the
same contribution to society of her little sum of superficial
information. We wonder how it is that any one can take an interest in a
creature of this sort, just as we wonder how any one can take an
interest in the _Court Circular_. And yet there are few sentiments more
pardonable, as there are none more national, than our interest in that
marvellous document.
A people which chooses to be governed by kings and queens has a right to
realize the fact that kings and queens are human beings, that they
shoot, drive, take the air like the subjects whom they govern. And if in
some coming day we are to toss up our hats and shout ourselves hoarse
for a sovereign who is still in his cradle, it is wise as well as
natural that we should cultivate an interest in his babyhood, that we
should hang on the vicissitudes of his teeth and his measles, that we
should be curious as to the title of his spelling-book, and the exact
score of his last game at cricket.
It is precisely the same interest which attaches us to the loosely-tied
bundle of virtues and accomplishments which we call a girl. We recognise
in her our future ruler. The shy, modest creature who has no thought but
a dance, and no will but mamma's, will in a few years be our master,
changing our habits, moulding our tastes, bending our characters to her
own. In the midst of our own drawing-room, in our pet easy-chair, we
shall see that retiring figure quietly established, with downcast eyes,
and hands busy with their crochet-needles, what Knox called, in days
before a higher knowledge had dawned, "the Monstrous Regimen of Women."
We are far from sharing the sentiments of the Scotch Reformer, and if we
attempt here to seize a few of the characteristics of the rule against
which he revolted, we hope to avoid his bitterness as carefully as his
prolixity. What was a new thing in his day has become old in ours, and
man learns perhaps somewhat too easily to acquiesce in "established
facts." It is without a dream of revolt, and simply in a philosophical
spirit, that we approach the subject. Indeed, it is a feeling of
admiration rather than of rebellion which seizes us when we begin to
reflect on the character of woman's sway, and on the simplicity of the
means by which she creates and establishes it. A little love, a little
listening, a little patience, a little persistence, and the game is won.
How charmingly natural and unobjectionable, for instance, is the very
first move in it--what we may venture to call, since we have to create
the very terminology of our subject, the Isolation of Man. When Brown
meets us in the street and hopes that his approaching marriage will make
no difference in our friendship, and that we shall see as much of one
another as before, we know that the phrases simply mean that our
intimacy is at an end. There will be no more pleasant lounges in the
morning, no more strolls in the park, no more evenings at the club.
Woman has succeeded in so completely establishing this cessation of
former friendships as a condition of the new married life that hardly
any one dreams of thinking what an enormous sacrifice it is. There are
very few men, after all, who are not dependent on their little group of
intimates for the general drift of their opinions, the general temper of
their mind and character of their lives. Their mutual advice, support,
praise or dispraise, enthusiasm, abhorrence, likings, dislikings,
constitute the atmosphere in which one lives.
A good deal of real modesty lingers about an unmarried man; he feels far
more confident in his own opinion if he knows it is Smith's opinion
too, and his conception of life acquires all its definiteness from its
being shared with half a dozen fairly reasonable fellows. It is no
slight triumph that woman should not only have succeeded in enforcing
the dissolution of this social tie as the first condition of married
life, but that she has invested that dissolution with the air of an
axiom which nobody dreams of disputing. The triumph is, as we said, won
by the simplest agency--by nothing, in short, but a dexterous double
appeal to human conceit. She is so weak, so frail, so helpless, so
strange to this new world into which she has plunged from the realms of
innocent girlhood, so utterly dependent on her husband, that a man sees
at once that he has not a moment left for any one else.
There is pleasure in the thought of all that delicate weakness appealing
to our strength, of that innocent ignorance looking up to us for
guidance through the wilderness of the world. Of course it will soon be
over, and when the dear dependent has learnt to walk alone a little we
can go back to the old faces and take our segar as before. But somehow
the return never comes, or, if it does come, the old faces have grown
far less enchanting to us. The truth is, we have tasted the second
pleasure of married life--the pleasure of being an authority. All that
shy appeal to us, all that confession of ignorance, has taught us what
wonderfully wise fellows we are. We are far less inclined to wait for
Smith's approval, or to take our tone from the group at the club-window.
It is, to say the least, far pleasanter to be an authority at home.
Gradually we find ourselves becoming oracular, having opinions on every
subject that a leading article can give us one upon, correcting the
Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Malt-tax and censuring Lord Stanley's
policy towards the King of Ashantee. Life takes a new interest when we
can put it so volubly into words. At the same time we feel that the
interest is hardly shared by the world.
Our old associates apparently fail to appreciate the change in us, or to
listen to our disquisitions any more than they did of old; it is a
comfort to feel that we have a home to retreat to, and that there is one
there who will. To the subtle flattery, in short, of weakness and of
ignorance, woman has now added the flattery of listening. To say little,
to contribute hardly more than a cue now and then, but to be attentive,
to be interested, to brighten at the proper moment, to laugh at the
proper joke, to suggest the exact amount of difficulties which you
require to make your oratorical triumph complete, and to join with an
unreserved assent in its conclusion, that is the simple secret of the
power of ninety-nine wives out of a hundred. It is a power which is far
from being confined to the home. The most brilliant salons have always
been created by dexterous listeners.
A pleasant house is not a house where one is especially talked to, but
where one discovers that one talks more easily than elsewhere. The tact
is certainly invaluable which enables a woman to know the strong points
of her guests, to lead up to their subjects, to supply points for
conversation, and then to leave it quietly alone. But it is only a
display on the grand scale of that particular faculty of silence which
wins its quiet triumphs on every hearth-rug.
The faculty, however, has other triumphs to win besides those in which
it figures as a delicate administration of flattery to the vanity of
men. It is the force which woman holds in reserve for the hour of
revolt. For it must be owned that, pleasant as the tyranny is, men
sometimes wake up to the fact that it is a tyranny, that in the most
seductive way in the world they are being wheedled out of associations
that are really dear to them, that their life is being cramped and
confined, that their aims are being lowered. Then the newly-found
eloquence exhausts itself in a declaration of revolt.
Things cannot go on in this way, life cannot be ruined for caprices. It
is needless, perhaps, to repeat the rhetoric of rebellion, and all the
more needless because it shares the fate of all rhetoric in producing
not the slightest impression on the mind to which it is addressed. The
wife simply listens as before, though the listening is now far from
encouraging to eloquence. She is perfectly patient, patient in her
refusal to continue an irritating discussion, patient in bearing your
little spurts of vexation; she listens quietly to-day, with the air of
one who is perfectly prepared to listen quietly to-morrow. But even
rhetoric has its limits, and now that the cues have ceased, a husband
finds it a little difficult to keep up a discussion where he has to
supply both arguments and replies.
Moreover, the tact which managed in former days to place him in a highly
pleasant position by the confession of weakness, now, by the very same
silent avowal, places him in a decidedly unpleasant one. If a woman's
air simply says at the end of it all, "I can't answer you, but I know I
am right," a man has a lurking sense that his copious rhetoric has had a
smack of the cowardly as well as of the tyrannical about it. And so,
after a vigorous denunciation of some particular thing which his wife
has done, a husband commonly finds himself no further than before; and
the very instant that, from sheer weariness, he ceases, the wife usually
steals out and does it again.
There is something feline about this combination of perfect patience
with quiet persistence--a combination which the Jesuits on a larger
scale have turned into the characteristic of their order. It is
especially remarkable when it breaks the bonds of silence, and takes the
form of what in vulgar language is called "nagging." No form of torture
which has as yet been invented, save, perhaps, the slow dropping of
water on some highly sensitive part of the frame, can afford a parallel
to this ingenious application of the principle of persistence.
The absolute certainty that, when snub or scolding or refusal have died
into silence, the word will be said again; the certainty that it will be
said year after year, month after month, week after week; the
irritation of expecting it, the irritation of hearing it, the irritation
of expecting it again, tell on the firmest will in the world. In the
long run the wife wins. The son goes to Harrow, though reason has proved
a dozen times over that we can only afford the expense of Marlborough;
the family gets its Alpine tour, though logic and unpaid bills
imperatively dictate the choice of a quiet watering place. You yield,
and you see that every one in the house knew that you would yield. There
wasn't a servant who didn't know every turn of the domestic screw, or
who took your resistance for more than the usual routine of the
operation. "Time and I," said Philip of Spain, "against any two." It is
no wonder if, fighting alone for prudence and economy, one is beaten by
time and one's wife.
We have no wish to dispute the enormous benefits to man of woman's
supremacy, but we may fairly leave the statement of them to the numerous
troup of poets who dispute with Mr. Tupper the theme of the affections.
For ourselves, we may undertake, perhaps, the humbler task of pointing
out very briefly some of the disadvantages which, as in all human
things, counterbalance these benefits. In the first place, feminine rule
is certainly not favorable to anything like largeness of mind or breadth
of view. It creates, as we have seen, an excessive self-conceit and
opinionativeness, and then it directs these qualities to very small ends
indeed. Woman lives from her childhood in a world of petty details, of
minute household and other cares, of bargains where the price of every
yard ends in some fraction of a penny. The habit of mind which is formed
by these and similar influences becomes the spirit of the house, a
spirit admirable no doubt in many ways, but excessively small.
The quarrels of a woman's life, her social warfare, her battles about
precedence, her upward progress from set to set, have all the same stamp
of Lilliput on them. But it is to these small details, these little
pleasures and little anxieties and little disappointments and little
ambitions, that a wife generally manages to bend the temper of her
spouse. He gets gradually to share her indifference to large interests,
to broad public questions. He imbibes little by little the most fatal of
all kinds of selfishness, the selfishness of the home. It would be
difficult, perhaps, to say how much of the patriotism of the Old World
was owing to the inferior position of woman; but it is certain that the
influence of woman tells fatally against any self-sacrificing devotion
to those larger public virtues of which patriotism is one of the chief.
Whether from innate narrowness of mind, or from defective training, or
from the excessive development of the affections, family interests far
outweigh, in the feminine estimation, any larger national or human
considerations.
If ever the suffrage is given to woman, it will be necessary to punish
bribery with the treadmill, for no "person" will regard it as a crime to
barter away her vote for a year's schooling for Johnny or a new frock
for Maud. Nothing tells more plainly the difference between the Old
World and the New than the constant returns home during war. We can
hardly conceive Pericles or even Alcibiades applying for leave of
absence on the ground of "private affairs." But then Pericles and
Alcibiades had no home that they could set above the interests of the
State.
Lastly, from this narrow view bounded strictly by the limits and
interests of the home comes, it may be feared, a vast deal of social and
political bitterness and intolerance. Her very nature, her "deductive
spirit," as Mr. Buckle puts it prettily for her, makes woman essentially
a dogmatist. She has none of the larger intercourse with other minds and
adverse circumstances which often creates the form, if not the spirit,
of tolerance in the narrowest of men. Her very excellence and faith make
her exactly what they made Queen Mary--a conscientious and therefore
merciless persecutor.
It is just this feminine narrowness, this feminine conscientiousness, in
the clergy which unfits them for any position where justice or
moderation is requisite. Justice is a quality unknown to woman, and
against which she wages a fierce battle in the house and in the world.
There are few husbands who have been made more just, more tolerant, more
large-hearted and large-headed, by their wives; for justice lives in a
drier light than that of the affections, and dry light is not a very
popular mode of illumination under "the monstrous regimen of women."
THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER.
Proverbs, as a rule, are believed to contain amongst them somehow or
other a quantity of truth. There is scarcely one proverb which has not
got another proverb that flatly contradicts it, and between the two it
would be very odd if there was not a great deal of sound sense
somewhere. There is, however, one of the number which, as every candid
critic must allow, is based on an egregious falsehood--the proverb,
namely, which affirms, against all experience, that whatever is good for
the goose is good for the gander. Viewing the goose as the type of
woman, and the gander as the type of man, no adage could be more
preposterous or untenable. Such a maxim flies dead in the very face of
society, and is calculated to introduce disturbance into the orderly
sequence and subordination of the sexes. Who first invented it, it is
difficult to conceive, unless it was some rustic Mrs. Poyser, full of
the consciousness of domestic power, and anxious to reverse in daily
life the law of priority which obtained--as she must have seen--even in
her own poultry-yard.
There is one way of reading the proverb which perhaps renders it less
monstrous; and if we confine ourselves to the view that "sauce" for the
goose is also "sauce" for the gander, we escape from any of the
philosophical difficulties in which the other version involves us. No
doubt, when they are dead, goose and gander are alike, even in the way
they are dressed, and there is no superiority on the part of either.
Death makes all genders epicene. Except for one solitary text about
silence in heaven for half an hour, which some cynical commentators have
explained as indicating a temporary banishment from Paradise of one of
the sexes, distinctions of this sort need not be supposed to continue
after the present life. If we are to take the former reading, and to
test it by what we know of life, nothing can be more unfounded, or more
calculated to give a wrong impression as to the facts. Were it not too
late, the proverb ought to be altered; and perhaps it is not absolutely
hopeless to persuade Mr. Tupper to see to it.