the goose is good for the gander;" or, perhaps, "what is a sin in the
goose is only the gander's way," would read quite as well, would not be
so diametrically at variance with the ordinary rules of social life,
and, accordingly, would be infinitely truer and more moral. Even Mr.
Mill, who is the advocate of female emancipation and female suffrage,
never has gone so far as to say that all women, as well as all men, are
brothers. The female suffrage, as we know, is merely a question of time.
Before very long, no doubt, there will be a feminine Reform Bill, during
the course of which Mr. Disraeli will explain that the feminine
franchise has always been the one idea of the Conservative party, and in
which the compound housekeeper will occupy as prominent a position as
the compound householder ever could have done. Nobody, however, has as
yet absolutely asserted, we do not say the equality, for equality is an
invidious term, but the indifference of the sexes. And this being so, it
is strange that a proverb should be retained which is so opposed to
every notion that passes current in the world.
As the legislation of the world has hitherto been uniformly in the hands
of men, it is not astonishing that it has always proceeded on the
assumption of the absolute dependence of the weaker upon the stronger
sex. Several thousand years of intellectual and political supremacy must
have altered the type imperceptibly, and made the difference between the
ordinary run of men and women far more marked than nature intended it
originally to be. All theology, whether Christian or pagan, has been in
the habit of representing woman as designed chiefly to be a sort of
ornament and appendage to man; and the allegory of the creation of Eve,
though Oriental in its tone, does nevertheless correspond to a vague
feeling among even civilized nations that woman's mission is to fill up
a gap in man's daily life.
Nor are they merely the opinions and laws of the world which have
moulded themselves on this basis. The whole imagination of the race has
been fed upon the notion, until the relations between the two sexes have
become the one thing on which fancy, sentiment, and hope are taught from
childhood to dwell. It is not an extravagant inference to suppose that
centuries of this imaginative and sentimental habit have ended by
affecting the brain and the physical nature of humanity. Man has become
a woman-caressing animal. The life of the two sexes is made to centre
round the once fictitious, but now universal, idea that they cannot
exist without one another.
Goose and gander have lost their primitive conception of an individual
and independent career, and are never happy unless they are permitted to
go in pairs. Under less complex social conditions such interdependence
led to no very intolerable results. Men and women formed a sort of
convenient partnership, each contributing their quota of daily
conveniences to the common fund. The chief protected his squaw--or, if
he was a patriarch, his squaws--while the squaws ministered to his
pleasures, cooked his food, milked--if Mr. Max Mueller's idea of the
Sanscrit is correct--his cows, and carried his babies on their backs.
The husband found the venison and the maize, while his wife dressed it
and helped to eat it. This mutual arrangement had at any rate the
advantage of being accommodated to the physical differences of strength
between the two halves of society.
A little tyranny is the natural consequence of an unequal distribution
of physical strength in all rude and barbarous states, and it was
inevitable that woman should at such times have more than her share of
labor and of patience imposed upon her. But it is evident that, as
civilization has increased with the growth of population and of
industrial interests, women no longer derive the same benefit from the
social partnership as formerly. Some social philosophers still
maintain, with M. Comte, that it is man's business to maintain woman,
and to relieve her from the necessity of providing for her natural
wants. But this theory seems Utopian and impracticable when we try to
think of applying it to the world in which we live. Wealth is no longer
distributed with the least reference to industrious and sober habits.
The principle of accumulation has been admitted, and social bodies have
encouraged and sanctioned it by allowing property to descend from one
generation to another intact, the result of which is that the industry
of the father is able to insure the perpetual idleness of his posterity.
Large multitudes of poor producers are occupied in earning their own
necessary sustenance, and cannot take on themselves without enormous
difficulty the burden of supporting womankind, a burden which the richer
classes scarcely feel. As by far the majority of women belong to the
impoverished and laborious class, it is obvious they must either enter
the labor-market themselves, or purchase support from the rich by
sacrifices which are inconsistent with their personal dignity and the
morality of the social body. As the imagination of humanity has been
long since given up to sentiment and passion, it is only too clear that
the more vicious alternative is the one oftenest embraced. Society,
then, has come to this--that woman must still depend on man, while man
no longer, except on his own terms, fulfills his part of the tacit
bargain by maintaining woman.
The first thing to be considered is what the public gains by keeping up
the sentimental notion about woman's mission. It is her business, most
of us think, to charm and to attract, partly in order that she may do
man real good, and partly that she may add to the luxury, the
refinement, and the happiness of life. With this view, society is very
solicitous to keep her at a distance from everything that may spoil or
destroy the bloom of her character and tastes. Few people go so far as
to say that she ought not to work for her livelihood, if her
circumstances render the effort necessary and prudent. As a fact, we see
at once that such a proposition cannot be broadly supported, and that
any attempt to enforce it would lead to endless misery and mischief.
Poor women, for example, must work hard, or else their children and
themselves will come to utter degradation.
But though society abstains from committing itself to the doctrine of
the enforced idleness of women, it takes refuge in a species of half
measure, and restricts, as far as it can, by its legislative enactments
or its own social code, the labors which women are to perform to the
narrowest possible compass. A woman may work, but she must do nothing
which is called unfeminine. She may get up linen, ply her needle, keep
weaving-machines in motion, knit, sew, and in higher spheres in life
teach music, French, and English grammar. She may be a governess, or a
sempstress, or even within certain limits may enter the literary market
and write books. This is the extreme boundary of her liberty, and
somewhere about this point society begins to draw a rigid line.
It earnestly discourages her from commercial occupations, except under
the patronage of a husband who is to benefit by her exertions; she is
not to be a counting-house clerk, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a parson.
The great active avocations, all those that lead either to fame or
fortune, are monopolized by men. Strong-minded women occasionally bore
the public by complaining of and protesting against such restrictions;
but, on the whole, the public is satisfied that it is convenient that
they should be upheld. If we look at the matter from the point of view
of the educated, or even the well-to-do classes, such a conclusion seems
so reasonable that most of us can hardly induce ourselves to doubt its
correctness. Women do a certain tangible amount of good to the world by
being kept as a luxury and exotic. The most energetic and rebellious of
them may feel angry to be told so, but it is the truth that it suits men
in general to keep up a kind of hothouse bloom upon the characters of
women. The society of soft, affectionate, unselfish creatures is
decidedly good for man. It elevates his nature, it gives him a belief in
what is pure and genuine, it alleviates the dust and turmoil of a busy
career, and it enables him for so many hours of the day to refresh
himself with the company of a being who is in some things a mediaeval
saint, and in some, a child.
Whenever one contemplates the effect of more coarse experience of the
world, more knowledge, and more rough and hard work on such a nature,
one is invariably tempted to acquiesce in the view that it is good for
man to have her in the state she is. One feels disposed to object to
notions of female emancipation as profane. Education and science,
thought and philosophy, like the winds of heaven, should never visit her
cheek too roughly. The great thing is, to preserve in her that sort of
luxurious unworldliness which represents the religious and refined
element in the household to which she belongs. And a hundred things may
be and have often been said about the advantage of making pure sentiment
the foundation of all the relations that obtain between her and man.
As Plato thought, man elevates himself by elevating and sentimentalizing
his affections. All poetry and most literature is given up to this
sentimentalizing or refining process. Nor can it be denied that the
effect is to increase very much the capacity of happiness in all people
who are born to be happy or to enjoy life. What would youth be without
its imaginative emotions? We all know, and are taught to believe, that
it would be something much poorer than it is.
There is another side to the picture, and it is as well to contemplate
it seriously, before we make up our minds to treat with undisguised
contempt all the vagaries of those who wish definitely to alter the
social condition of women. At present women are beautiful and delicate
adjuncts of life. As Prometheus said of horses, they are the ornaments
of wealth and luxury. They add perfume and refinement to existence. But,
after all, it is an important question whether the conversion of women
into this sort of drawing-room delicacy is not sacrificing the welfare
of the many to the intellectual and social comfort of the few.
The world pays a heavy price for having its imagination sentimentalized.
One of the items in the bill is the disappointment of the thousands
whose sensibilities are never destined to be satisfied. For every woman
who marries happily, a large percentage never marry at all, or marry in
haste and repent at leisure. It remains to be proved that it is wise to
teach and train the sex to fix all their views in life and to stake all
their fortunes on the chance of the one rare thing--a lucky matrimonial
choice. If one could succeed in de-sentimentalizing society, one would
take from a few the chief pleasure of living, but it is far from certain
that the material welfare of the majority would not be proportionately
increased. Half-measures would of course be of very little use.
It would be a poor exchange to take from women all their reserve and
innocence and refinement, without giving them free play in the world.
They would be only coarse and wicked caricatures of what they are now.
The change, to be tolerable, would have to be effectual and thorough. It
would be necessary to change the whole current of their ideas, and the
whole view of man about them also; to persuade the human race to fix its
mind less on the difference of sexes, and to become less imaginative
upon the subject. If so sweeping an alteration could be completely
effected, perhaps it might be worth while to consider whether woman's
absolute independence would not strengthen her character, and add
permanently to the world's natural wealth.
One thing is certain, that if woman is to continue for ever in her
present condition, the moral and social condition of large numbers of
human beings must remain hopeless. Their future appears dreary in the
extreme. It is Utopian to expect that men and women will grow less and
less self-indulgent, so long as the education they undergo from their
earliest years renders them prone to every species of temptation. There
are some things which make social philosophers hopeful and confident,
but no social philosopher can ever do anything but despair of real
progress if he is to take for granted that women are always to play the
part in life which they at present play. The emancipation of the goose
is an experiment, but it is not surprising that many enthusiasts should
believe it to be an experiment well deserving of a trial.
ENGAGEMENTS.
A great writer has pathetically described the last days of a man under
sentence of death. He has found appropriate expression for every phase
of the protracted agony with characteristic richness and variety of
language; we are made to taste each drop in the bitter cup--the remorse
and the awful expectation, and the desperate clinging to deceitful
straws of hope. Indeed it scarcely requires the eloquence of a
first-rate writer to impress upon us the fact that it is very unpleasant
to expect to be hanged. Every man's imagination is sufficient to realize
some of the unpleasant consequences of such a state of mind; for though
the number of persons who have encountered this particular experience is
inconsiderable, most of us have gone through something more or less
analogous--we have been significantly told to wait after school, or have
paid visits to dentists, or have been candidates at competitive
examinations, or have been engaged to be married. These and many other
situations, though varying in the intrinsic pain or pleasure of the
anticipated event, have thus much in common, that they are all states of
abnormal suspense. The nerves are kept in a state of equal tension by
the uncomfortable feeling that we are in for it, whatever the "it" may
turn out to be.
The first impression is simple; it resembles that felt by a man who has
just slipped upon the side of a mountain, and knows that he is
inevitably going to the bottom. He has not time to think whether he will
fall upon snow or rocks, whether he will have merely a pleasant slide or
be dashed into a thousand fragments; he does not make up his mind to be
heroic or to be frightened; the one thought that flashes across his mind
is that here at last is the situation which he has so often feebly
pictured to himself; he will know all about it before he has time to
reflect upon its pains or pleasures. People who have escaped drowning
sometimes assert that they have remembered their whole lives in a few
instants, though it does not quite appear how they can remember that
they remembered the series of incidents without remembering the
incidents themselves. But, so far as we have been able to collect
evidence, the general rule in any sudden catastrophe is that which we
have described. There is nothing but a dazzling flash of surprise, which
almost excludes any decided judgment as to the painfulness or otherwise
of the situation.
If, then, we may venture to conjecture the frame of mind in which a lady
or gentleman first enters upon an engagement, we should say that it was
this sense of startled suspense. They feel as Guy Faux would have felt
after lighting the train of gunpowder--that they have done something
which they may probably never repeat in their lifetime, and every other
emotion will be for the moment absorbed. But as engagements are
generally more protracted than most of the critical situations we have
mentioned, the surprise dies away, and the victims have time to look
about them, and analyze more closely the emotions produced by their
position. To do any justice to the complicated and varying frame of mind
into which even an average lover may be thrown in the course of a few
weeks would of course require the pen, not of men, but of angels. It
would involve a condensation of a large fraction of all the poetry that
has been written in the world, and no small part of the cynical
criticism by which it has been opposed. But, taking for granted the mass
of commonplaces which has been accumulated in the course of centuries,
there are a few special modifications of the position under our present
social arrangements which are more fitted for remark. The state of mind
known as being in love is confined to no particular race or period, but
the position of the engaged persons may vary indefinitely. In a good
simple state of society, the gentleman pays down his money or his sheep
or his oxen, and takes away the lady without any superfluous sentiment.
Even in more civilized states, a marriage may be substantially a bargain
carried out in a business-like spirit. However unsatisfactory such a
mode of proceeding may be from certain points of view, it is at any rate
intelligible; all parties to the contract understand their relative
positions, and have a plain line of conduct traced for them.
But in a modern English engagement the form is necessarily different,
even when the substance of the arrangement is identical. For once in
his experience a man feels called upon to accept that view of life for
which novelists are unjustly condemned. We say unjustly, for it is
inevitable that a novelist should frequently represent marriage as being
the one great crisis of a man's history. It is not his function to give
a complete theory of life, but to describe such scenes as are most
interesting and most dramatic. He is quite justified in often writing as
though two lovers should really think about nothing under heaven except
their chances of union, and should be dismissed, when the happy event
has once taken place, in a certainty of living very happily ever
afterwards. He has no concern with the lover's briefs or sermons or
operations on the Stock Exchange, which may really take up by far the
greater part of the man's waking thoughts; and it would spoil the unity
of his work if he were to dwell upon them proportionately. It would be
as absurd to mistake the novelist's views for a complete one as to
condemn it because it is incomplete. In novels which depend, as
ninety-nine out of a hundred must depend, upon a love story, the
importance of marriage, or at least the degree in which it occupies the
thoughts of the characters, will necessarily be overstated. The engaged
persons, however, find that, in the eyes of their friends, if not in
their own, they are temporarily accepting the novelist's ideal. For the
time they are considered exclusively as persons about to marry, and all
their other relations in life retire into the background.
The difficulty of the position depends upon the extent to which this
conventional assumption diverges from the true facts of the case. The
lady, for example, suffers less than the gentleman, because, in spite of
Dr. Mary Walker and other martyrs to the cause of woman's rights, it is
still true that marriage fills a larger space in her life than in that
of the other sex. She can take up the character with a certain triumph,
as of one who has more or less fulfilled her mission and passed from the
ranks of the aspirants to those of the successful candidates for
matrimony. At any rate, even if she takes a loftier view of feminine
duties, there is nothing ridiculous about her position. She may busy
herself about trousseaux or wedding-dresses or marriage-presents, with
perfect satisfaction to herself and to the envy of her female friends.
But her unfortunate accomplice, especially if he is of mature age, is in
a far more uncomfortable position.
Few men who have become immersed in any profession or business can act
the character without an unpleasantly strong sense of being in a false
position. There is nothing indeed intrinsically ludicrous about it; the
chances are that the lover is doing a very sensible thing, and that his
wisest friends approve of his conduct. Still it is undeniable that he
moves about, to his own apprehension at least, in a universal atmosphere
of ridicule. He feels that he is really a quiet hard-working young man,
full of law it may be, or of plans for improving his parish, or of
Parliamentary notices of motion. He can talk about his own topics with
interest and intelligence, and may possibly be an authority in a small
way. He is quite conscious, too, that there are many sides to his
character which do not come out in his ordinary every-day business.
Unluckily that is just the fact which his friends are apt to ignore.
We soon learn to associate our acquaintance with the positions in which
we have been accustomed to see them, and forget that they may have
sentiments and faculties of which we know nothing. Consequently an
engagement seems to imply an entire metamorphosis. Our friend, or his
image in our minds, was a comparatively simple compound of two or three
characters at most; whereas men generally have a far more complex
organization. In business hours, perhaps, he was simply a machine for
grinding out law, and at other times a lively talker and a good
whist-player. No process of transmutation will convert either of those
into the conventional lover, who can think of nothing but the object of
his affections; the apparent incongruity is too violent not to produce a
sense of the ludicrous; and our friend is bound in decency to make it as
violent as possible. From which it follows that we laugh, and that he
knows that we are laughing, at him. Intensely awkward congratulations
are exchanged, according to two or three formulas which have been handed
down from distant generations. If the congratulator is a married man, he
hopes that his friend may enjoy as much happiness as he has found
himself in the married state; if a bachelor, he assures him that,
although unable hitherto to act up to his principles, he has always
thought marriage the right thing. There are persons who can repeat one
of these common forms with all the air of making an original
observation, as there are men who can begin an oration by asserting that
they are unaccustomed to public speaking; but, as a rule, it is said in
such a way as to imply that the speaker, whilst admitting the absurdity
of connecting the ideas of his friend and marriage, is willing to pay
the necessary compliments, if he may do it as cheaply as possible.
In short, until a man is engaged to be married, he scarcely knows how
narrow a view his friends take of his character, and how easily they are
amused at what is after all rather a commonplace proceeding. When his
own friends look upon him so distinctly in the light of a joke, he of
course cannot expect much quarter from the friends of the lady. He has a
painful impression that he is coming out in a part for which he has had
no practice, under the eyes of hostile critics. Every man thinks it only
due to himself to criticise a friend's new purchases of horses or
pictures or wines; if he did not find fault with them he would miss an
opportunity of establishing his superior acumen. And of course the
principle extends to lovers. There is probably a narrow circle who are
bound officially to approve; but the unfortunate victim feels that,
outside of it, every acquaintance of the lady will take pleasure in a
keen observation of his defects, and he trembles accordingly. It is said
(rather unfairly, perhaps) that shyness is a form of conceit; but the
least self-conscious of mankind can hardly fail to feel uncomfortable
when he is called upon to perform such a highflown part under so severe
a scrutiny.
Of course the torment is far greater in the case of a middle-aged
professional gentleman, who is habitually employed upon some incongruous
work, than to a youth in whom any sort of folly is graceful; but there
can be few persons to whom the position is not to a certain extent
irksome. When a man is married, or when he is a bachelor, he is allowed
to be a rational being, taking rational views of life. He feels it
rather hard that in the interval society insists upon his being in a
state of temporary insanity, and then laughs at him because it doesn't
look natural. He begins to long even for that climax of misery when, if
the custom be not already dead, he will have to commit one of the most
absurd actions of which a human being can be guilty--namely, making a
speech in the morning, at an anomalous and dreary meal, exactly when his
shamefacedness is at its highest pitch. That so many people survive
engagements without any perceptible sourness of temper is some proof of
the goodness of human nature, or of the fact that there are
compensations in the state of being in love which go to neutralize the
discomfort of being engaged.
WOMAN IN ORDERS.