are to credit the latest rumors from the Vatican, Rome has grown
impatient of the class who now present themselves at her doors as
candidates for canonization, and has fallen back from the obscure
Italian beggars and Cochin Chinese martyrs whom she has recently
delighted to honor on the more illustrious names of Christopher Columbus
and Joan of Arc. A little courage must have been needed for this retreat
upon the past, for neither the great navigator nor the heroine found
much support or appreciation in the prelates of their day; and the
somewhat uncomfortable fact might be urged by the devil's advocate, in
the case of the latter, that if Joan was sent to the martyr's stake, it
was by a spiritual tribunal.
On the other hand, there is the obvious desirableness of showing how
perfectly at one the Papacy is with the spirit of the age in this double
compliment to the two primary forces of modern civilization--the
democratic force of the New World, and the feminine force of the Old.
The beatification of the Maid of Orleans in its most simple aspect is
the official recognition, by the Papacy, of the claims of her sex to a
far larger sphere of human action than has as yet been accorded to them.
Woman may fairly meet the domestic admonitions of Papal briefs by this
newly discovered instance of extra-domestic holiness, and may front the
taunts of cynical objectors with a saintly patron who was the first to
break through the outer conventionalities of womanhood.
But the figure of Joan of Arc is far more than a convenient answer to
objections such as these; it is, as we have said, in itself a cogent
argument for a better use of feminine energies. No life gives one such a
notion as hers of the vast forces which lie hidden, and as it would seem
wasted, in the present mass of women. It is impossible to be content
with little projects of utilization such as those which throw open to
her the telegraph-office or the printing-press, or even with the more
ambitious claims for her admission to the Bench or the dissecting-room,
when one gets a glimpse such as this of energies latent within the
female breast which are strong enough to change the face of the world.
It is difficult to suppose that the woman of our day is less energetic
than the woman of the fifteenth century, or that her piano and her
workbag sum up the whole of her possibilities any more than her
spinning-wheel or her sheep-tending exhausted those of the Maid of
Domremy. The ordinary occupations of woman strike us in this light as
mere jets of vapor, useful indeed as a relief to the volcanic pressure
within, but insufficient to remove the peril of an eruption. There must
be some truth in the spasmodic utterances of the fevered sibyls who
occasionally bare the female heart to us in three-volume novels, and the
gaiety and frivolity of the life of woman is a mere mask for the wild,
tossing emotions within. It is a standing danger, we own; and besides
the danger there is, as we have said, the waste and the pity of it.
A little closer examination, however, may suggest some doubt whether
this waste of power is not more apparent than real. In the physical
world, Mr. Grove has told us that the apparent destruction of a force is
only its transformation into a force which is correlative to it; that
motion, for instance, when lost is again detected in the new form of
heat, and heat in that of light. But the theory is far from being true
of the physical world only, and, had we space here, nothing would be
easier than to trace the same correlation of forces through the moral
nature of man. For waste, then, in the particular instance which is
before us, we may perhaps substitute transformation.
Professing herself the most rigid of conservatives, woman gives vent to
this heroic energy for which the times offer no natural outlet in the
radical modifications which she is continually introducing into modern
society. We overlook the manifold ways in which she is acting on and
changing the state of things around us, just because we are deceived by
the apparent unity with which the whole sex advances toward marriage. We
forget the large margin of those who fail in attaining their end, and we
act as if the great mass of unmarried women simply represented a waste
and lost force. And yet it is just this waste force which tells on
society more powerfully than all.
The energies which fail in finding a human object of domestic adoration
become the devotional energies of the world. The force which would have
made the home makes the Church. It is really amazing to watch, if we
look back through the ages, the silent steady working of this feminine
impulse, and to see how bit by bit it has recovered the ground of which
Christianity robbed Woman. We wonder that no woman poet has ever turned,
like Schiller, to the gods of old.
In every heathen religion of the Western world woman occupied a
prominent place. Priestess or prophetess, she stood in all ministerial
offices on an equality with man. It was only the irruption of religions
from the East, the faiths of Isis or Mithras, which swept woman from the
temple. Christianity shared the Oriental antipathy to the ministerial
service of woman; it banished her from altar and from choir; in darker
times it drove her to the very porch of its shrines. The Church of after
ages dealt with woman as the Empire dealt with its Caesars; it was ready
to grant her apotheosis, but only when she was safely out of the world.
It gave her canonization, and it gives it to her still, but not the
priesthood. No rout could seem more complete, but woman is never greater
than when she is routed.
The newly-instituted parson of to-day, brimming over with apostolic
texts which forbid woman to speak in church, no sooner arrives at his
parish than he finds himself in a spiritual world whose impulse and
guidance is wholly in the hands of woman. Expel woman as you will,
_tamen usque recurrit_. Woman is, in fact, the parish. Within, in her
lowest spiritual form, as the parson's wife, she inspires and sometimes
writes his sermons. Without, as the bulk of his congregation, she
watches over his orthodoxy, verifies his texts, visits his schools, and
harasses his sick. "Ah, Betsy!" said a sick woman to a wealthier sister
the other day, "it's of some use being well off; you won't be obliged
when you die to have a district-lady worriting you with a chapter." But
the district-lady has others to "worrit" in life besides the sick.
Mrs. Hannah More tells us exultantly in her journal how successful were
her raids upon the parsons, and in what dread all unspiritual ministers
stood of her visitations. And the same rigid censorship prevails in many
quarters still. The preacher who thunders so defiantly against spiritual
foes is trembling all the time beneath the critical eye that is watching
him from the dim recesses of an unworldly bonnet, and the critical
finger which follows him with so merciless an accuracy in his texts.
Impelled, guided, censured by woman, we can hardly wonder if in nine
cases out of ten the parson turns woman himself, and if the usurpation
of woman's rights in the services of religion has been deftly avenged by
the subjugation of the usurpers. Expelled from the Temple, woman has
simply put her priesthood into commission, and discharges her
ministerial duties by deputy.
It was impossible for woman to remain permanently content with a
position like this; but it is only of late that a favorable conjuncture
of affairs has enabled her to quit it for a more obtrusive one. The
great Church movement which the _Apologia_ has made so familiar to us in
its earlier progress came some ten years ago to a stand. Some of its
most eminent leaders had seceded to another communion, it had been
weakened by the Gorham decision, and by its own internal dissensions.
Whether on the side of dogma or ritual, it seemed to have lost for the
moment its old impulse--to have lost heart and life.
It was in this emergency that woman came to the front. She claimed to
revive the old religious position which had been assigned to her by the
monasticism of the middle ages, but to revive it under different
conditions and with a different end. The mediaeval Church had, indeed,
glorified, as much as words could glorify, the devotion of woman; but
once become a devotee, it had locked her in the cloister. As far as
action on the world without was concerned, the veil served simply as a
species of suicide, and the impulses of woman, after all the crowns and
pretty speeches of her religious counsellors, found themselves bottled
up within stout stone walls and as inactive as before. From this strait,
woman, at the time we speak of, delivered herself by the organization of
charity.
In lines of a certain beauty, though somewhat difficult in their
grammatical construction, she has been described as a ministering angel
when pain and anguish wring the brow; and it was in her capacity of
ministering angel that she now placed herself at the Church movement and
advanced upon the world. It was impossible to lock these beneficent
beings up, for the whole scope of their existence lay in the outer
world; but every day, as it developed their ecclesiastical position,
made even their admirers recognise the wise discretion of the middle
ages. Long before the Ritualists themselves, they, with a feminine
instinct, had discerned the value of costume. The district visitor, whom
nobody had paid the smallest attention to in the common vestments of the
world, became a sacred being as she donned the crape and hideous bonnet
of the "Sister."
Within the new establishment there was all the excitement of a perfectly
novel existence, of time broken up as women like it to be broken up in
perpetual services and minute obligation of rules, the dramatic change
of name, and the romantic self-abnegation of obedience. The "Mother
Superior" took the place of the tyrant of another sex who had hitherto
claimed the submission of woman, but she was something more to her
"children" than the husband or father whom they had left in the world
without. In all matters, ecclesiastical as well as civil, she claimed
within her dominions to be supreme. The quasi-sacerdotal dignity, the
pure religious ministration which ages have stolen from her, was quietly
reassumed. She received confessions, she imposed penances, she drew up
offices of devotion. Wherever the community settled, it settled as a new
spiritual power.
If the clergyman of the parish ventured on advice or suggestion, he was
told that the Sisterhood must preserve its own independence of action,
and was snubbed home again for his pains. The Mother Superior, in fact,
soon towered into a greatness far beyond the reach of ordinary parsons.
She kept her own tame chaplain, and she kept him in very edifying
subjection. From a realm completely her own, the influence of woman
began now to tell upon the world without. Little colonies of Sisters
planted here and there annexed parish after parish. Sometimes the
parson was worried into submission by incessant calls of the most
justifiable nature on his time and patience. Sometimes he was bribed
into submission by the removal from his shoulders of the burden of alms.
It was only when he was thoroughly tamed that he was rewarded by pretty
stoles and gorgeous vestments.
Astonished congregations saw their church blossom in purple and red, and
frontal and hanging told of the silent energy of the group of Sisters.
The parson found himself nowhere in his own parish; every detail managed
for him, every care removed, and all independence gone. If it suited the
ministering angels to make a legal splash, he found himself landed in
the Law Courts. If they took it into their heads to seek another fold,
every one assumed, as a matter of course, that their pastor would go
too. At such a rate of progress the great object of woman's ambition
must soon come in view, and the silent control over the priest will
merge in the open claim to the priesthood.
It may be in silent preparation for such a claim that the ecclesiastical
hierarchy are taking, year by year, a more feminine position. The Houses
of Convocation, for instance, present us with a lively image of what the
bitterest censor of woman would be delighted to predict as the result of
her admission to senatorial honors. There is the same interminable flow
of mellifluous talk, the same utter inability to devise or to understand
an argument, the same bitterness and hard words, the same skill in
little tricks and diplomacies, the same practical incompetence, which
have been denounced as characteristics of woman. The caution, the
finesse, the sly decorum, the inability to take a large view of any
question, the patience, the masterly inaction, the vicious outbreaks of
temper which now and then break the inaction of a Bishop, may sometimes
lead us to ask whether the Episcopal office is not one admirably suited
for the genius of woman.
But she must stoop to conquer heights like these, and it is probable
with a view to a slow ascent towards them through the ages to come that
she is now moulding the mind of the curate at her will. He, we have been
told, is commonly the first lady of the parish; and what he now is in
theory, a century hence may find him in fact. It would be difficult even
now to detect any difference of sex in the triviality of purpose, the
love of gossip, the petty interests, the feeble talk, the ignorance, the
vanity, the love of personal display, the white hand dangled over the
pulpit, the becoming vestment and the embroidered stole, which we are
learning gradually to look upon as attributes of the British curate. So
perfect, indeed, is the imitation that the excellence of her work may
perhaps defeat its own purpose; and the lacquered imitation of woman,
"dilettante, delicate-handed," as Tennyson saw and sang of him, may
satisfy the world, and for long ages prevent any anxious inquiry after
the real feminine Brummagem.
THE FUTURE OF WOMAN.
Woman is a thing of accident and spoilt in the making says the greatest
of the schoolmen, but we are far from denying her right to vindicate
something more than an accidental place in the world. After all that can
be urged as to the glory of self-sacrifice, the greatness of silent
devotion, or the compensations for her want of outer influence in the
inner power which she exerts through the medium of the family and the
home, there remains an odd sort of sympathy with the woman who asserts
that she is every bit as good as her master, and that there is no reason
why she should retire behind the domestic veil. Partly, of course, this
arises from our natural sympathy with pluck of any sort; partly, too,
there is the pleasure we feel in a situation which may be absurd, but
which, at any rate, is novel and piquant; partly, there is an impatience
with woman as she is, and a sort of lingering hope that something better
is in store for her.
The most sceptical, in fact, of woman's censors cannot help feeling a
suspicion that, after all, strong-minded women may be in the right. As
one walks home in the cool night-air it seems impossible to believe
that girls are to go on for ever chattering the frivolous nonsense they
do chatter, or living the absolutely frivolous lives they do live. And,
of course, the impression that a good time is coming for them is
immensely strengthened if one happens to have fallen in love. One's eyes
have got a little sharpened to see the real human soul that stirs
beneath all that sham life of idleness and vanity, but the vanity and
the idleness vexes more than ever. If we come across Miss Hominy at such
moments, we are extremely likely to find her a great deal less
ridiculous than we fancied her, and to listen with a certain gravity to
her plea for the enfranchisement of women.
It is not that we go all lengths with her; we stare a little perhaps at
the logical consequences on which she piques herself, and at the
panorama of woman as she is to be which she spreads before us, at the
consulting barrister waiting in her chambers and the lady advocate
flourishing her maiden brief; our pulse throbs a little awkwardly at the
thought of being tested by medical fingers and thumbs of such a delicate
order, and we hum a few lines of the _Princess_ as Miss Hominy poses
herself for a Lady Professor. Still we cannot help a half conviction
that even this would be better than the present style of thing, the
pretty face that kindles over the news of a fresh opera and gives you
the latest odds on the Derby, the creature of head-achy mornings, of
afternoons frittered on lounges, and bonnet-strings, of nights whirled
away in hot rooms and chatter on stairs. There are moments, we repeat,
when, looking at woman as she is, we could almost wish to wake the next
morning into a world where all women were Miss Hominys.
But when we do wake we find the world much what it was before, and
pretty faces just as indolent and as provoking as they were, and a sort
of ugly after-question cropping up in our minds whether we had exactly
realized the meaning of our wish, or conceived the nature of a world in
which all women were Miss Hominys. There is always a little difficulty
in fancying the world other than we find it; but it is really worth a
little trouble, before we enfranchise woman, to try to imagine the
results of her enfranchisement, the Future of Woman. In the first place,
it would amazingly reduce the variety of the world. As it is, we live in
a double world, and enjoy the advantages of a couple of hemispheres. It
is an immense luxury for men, when they are tired out with the worry and
seriousness of life, to be able to walk into a totally different
atmosphere, where nothing is looked at or thought about or spoken of in
exactly the same way as in their own.
When Mr. Gladstone, for instance, unbends (if he ever does unbend), and,
weary of the Irish question, asks his pretty neighbor what she thinks of
it, he gets into a new world at once. Her vague idea of the Irish
question, founded on a passing acquaintance with Moore's Melodies and a
wild regret after Donnybrook fair, may not be exactly adequate to the
magnitude of the interests involved, but it is at any rate novel and
amusing. It is not a House of Commons view of the subject, but then the
great statesman is only too glad to be rid of the House of Commons.
Thoughtful politicians may deplore that the sentimental beauty of
Charles I. and the pencil of Vandyke have made every English girl a
Malignant; but after one has got bored with Rushworth and Clarendon,
there is a certain pleasure at finding a great constitutional question
summarily settled by the height of a sovereign's brow.
It is a relief too, now and then, to get out of the world of morals into
the world of woman; out of the hard sphere of right and wrong into a
world like Mr. Swinburne's, where judgment goes by the beautiful, and
where red hair makes all the difference between Elizabeth and Mary of
Scotland. Above all, there is the delightful consciousness of
superiority. The happiness of the blessed in the next world consists,
according to Sir John Mandeville, in their being able to behold the
agonies of the lost; and half the satisfaction men have in their own
sense and vigor and success would be lost if they could not enjoy the
delicious view of the world where sense and energy go for nothing.
Whether all this would be worth sacrificing simply to acquire a woman
who could sympathize with, and support, a man in the stress and battle
of life, is a question we do not pretend to decide; but it is certain
that the enfranchisement of woman would be the passing of a social Act
of Uniformity, and the loss of half the grace and variety of life. Here,
as elsewhere, "the low sun makes the color," and the very excellences of
Miss Hominy carry her aloft into regions of white light, where our
eyes, even if dazzled, get a little tired with the monotony of the
intellectual Haze.
The result of such a change on woman herself would be something far
greater and more revolutionary. It is not merely that, as in the case of
men, she would lose the sense and comfort of another world of thought
and action, and of its contrast with the world in which she lives; it is
that she would lose her own world altogether. Conceive, for instance,
woman obliged to take life in earnest, to study as men study, to work as
men work. The change would be no mere modification, but the utter
abolition of her whole present existence. The whole theory of woman's
life is framed on the hypothesis of sheer indolence. She is often
charming, but she is always idle. There is an immense ingenuity and a
perfect grace about her idleness; the efforts, in fact, of generations
of cultivated women have been directed, and successfully directed, to
this special object of securing absolute indolence without either the
inner tedium or the outer contempt which indolence is supposed to bring
in its train.
Woman can always say with Titus, "I have wasted a day," but the
confession wears an air of triumph rather than regret. A world of
trivial occupations, a whole system of social life, has been laboriously
invented that the day might be wasted gracefully and without boredom. A
little riding, a little reading, a little dabbling with the paint-brush,
a little strumming on the piano, a little visiting, a little shopping,
a little dancing, and a general trivial chat scattered over the whole,
make up the day of an English girl in town. Transplant her into the
country, and the task of frittering away existence, though it becomes
more difficult, is faced just as gallantly as before. Mudie comes to the
rescue with the back novels which she was too busy to get through in the
season; there is the scamper from one country house to another, there
are the flirtations to keep her hand in, the pets to be fed, the cousins
to extemporize a mimic theatre, the curate--if worst comes to worst--to
try a little ritualism upon. With these helps a country day, what with
going to bed early and getting up late, may be frittered away as
aimlessly as a day in town.
Woman may fairly object, we think, to abolish at one fell swoop such an
ingenious fabric of idleness as this. A revolution in the whole system
of social life, in the whole conception and drift of feminine existence,
is a little too much to ask. As it is, woman wraps herself in her
indolence, and is perfectly satisfied with her lot. She assumes, and the
world has at least granted the assumption, that her little hands were
never made to do anything which any rougher hands can do for them. Man
has got accustomed to serve as her hewer of wood and drawer of water,
and to expect nothing from her but poetry and refinement. It is a little
too much to ask her to go back to the position of the squaw, and to do
any work for herself. But it is worse to ask her to remodel the world
around her, on the understanding that henceforth duty and toil and
self-respect are to take the place of frivolity and indolence and
adoration.
The great passion which knits the two sexes together presents a yet
stronger difficulty. To men, busy with the work of the world, there is
no doubt that, however delightful, love takes the form of a mere
interruption of their real life. They allow themselves the interval of
its indulgence, as they allow themselves any other holiday, simply as
something in itself temporary and accidental; as life, indeed, grows
more complex, there is an increasing tendency to reduce the amount of
time and attention which men devote to their affections. Already the
great philosopher of the age has pronounced that the passion of love
plays far too important a part in human existence, and that it is a
terrible obstacle to human progress.
The general temper of the times echoes the sentence of Mr. Mill. The
enthusiastic votary who has been pouring his vows at the feet of his
mistress consoles himself, as he leaves her, with the thought that
engagements cannot last for ever, and that he shall soon be able to get
back to the real world of business and of life. He presses his beloved
one, with all the eloquence of passion, to fix an early day for their
union, but the eloquence has a very practical bearing. While Corydon is
piping to Phyllis, he is anxious about the engagements he is missing,
and the distance he is losing in the race for life. But Phyllis remains
the nymph of passion and poetry and romance.