The mothers of Professors were indulged in the practice of jumping at
conclusions, and were praised for their impatience of the slow process of
reason.
Professors have written of the mental habits of women as though they
accumulated generation by generation upon women, and passed over their
sons. Professors take it for granted, obviously by some process other
than the slow process of reason, that women derive from their mothers and
grandmothers, and men from their fathers and grandfathers. This, for
instance, was written lately: "This power [it matters not what] would be
about equal in the two sexes but for the influence of heredity, which
turns the scale in favour of the woman, as for long generations the
surroundings and conditions of life of the female sex have developed in
her a greater degree of the power in question than circumstances have
required from men." "Long generations" of subjection are, strangely
enough, held to excuse the timorousness and the shifts of women to-day.
But the world, unknowing, tampers with the courage of its sons by such a
slovenly indulgence. It tampers with their intelligence by fostering the
ignorance of women.
And yet Shakespeare confessed the participation of man and woman in their
common heritage. It is Cassius who speaks:
"Have you not love enough to bear with me
When that rash humour which my mother gave me
Makes me forgetful?"
And Brutus who replies:
"Yes, Cassius, and from henceforth
When you are over-earnest with your Brutus
He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so."
Dryden confessed it also in his praises of Anne Killigrew:
"If by traduction came thy mind,
Our wonder is the less to find
A soul so charming from a stock so good.
Thy father was transfused into thy blood."
The winning of Waterloo upon the Eton playgrounds is very well; but there
have been some other, and happily minor, fields that were not won--that
were more or less lost. Where did this loss take place, if the gains
were secured at football? This inquiry is not quite so cheerful as the
other. But while the victories were once going forward in the
playground, the defeats or disasters were once going forward in some
other place, presumably. And this was surely the place that was not a
playground, the place where the future wives of the football players were
sitting still while their future husbands were playing football.
This is the train of thought that followed the grey figure of a woman on
a bicycle in Oxford Street. She had an enormous and top-heavy omnibus at
her back. All the things on the near side of the street--the things
going her way--were going at different paces, in two streams, overtaking
and being overtaken. The tributary streets shot omnibuses and carriages,
cabs and carts--some to go her own way, some with an impetus that carried
them curving into the other current, and other some making a straight
line right across Oxford Street into the street opposite. Besides all
the unequal movement, there were the stoppings. It was a delicate tangle
to keep from knotting. The nerves of the mouths of horses bore the whole
charge and answered it, as they do every day.
The woman in grey, quite alone, was immediately dependent on no nerves
but her own, which almost made her machine sensitive. But this alertness
was joined to such perfect composure as no flutter of a moment disturbed.
There was the steadiness of sleep, and a vigilance more than that of an
ordinary waking.
At the same time, the woman was doing what nothing in her youth could
well have prepared her for. She must have passed a childhood unlike the
ordinary girl's childhood, if her steadiness or her alertness had ever
been educated, if she had been rebuked for cowardice, for the egoistic
distrust of general rules, or for claims of exceptional chances. Yet
here she was, trusting not only herself but a multitude of other people;
taking her equal risk; giving a watchful confidence to averages--that
last, perhaps, her strangest and greatest success.
No exceptions were hers, no appeals, and no forewarnings. She evidently
had not in her mind a single phrase, familiar to women, made to express
no confidence except in accidents, and to proclaim a prudent foresight of
the less probable event. No woman could ride a bicycle along Oxford
Street with any such baggage as that about her.
The woman in grey had a watchful confidence not only in a multitude of
men but in a multitude of things. And it is very hard for any untrained
human being to practise confidence in things in motion--things full of
force, and, what is worse, of forces. Moreover, there is a supreme
difficulty for a mind accustomed to search timorously for some little
place of insignificant rest on any accessible point of stable
equilibrium; and that is the difficulty of holding itself nimbly secure
in an equilibrium that is unstable. Who can deny that women are
generally used to look about for the little stationary repose just
described? Whether in intellectual or in spiritual things, they do not
often live without it.
She, none the less, fled upon unstable equilibrium, escaped upon it,
depended upon it, trusted it, was 'ware of it, was on guard against it,
as she sped amid her crowd her own unstable equilibrium, her machine's,
that of the judgment, the temper, the skill, the perception, the strength
of men and horses.
She had learnt the difficult peace of suspense. She had learnt also the
lowly and self-denying faith in common chances. She had learnt to be
content with her share--no more--in common security, and to be pleased
with her part in common hope. For all this, it may be repeated, she
could have had but small preparation. Yet no anxiety was hers, no uneasy
distrust and disbelief of that human thing--an average of life and death.
To this courage the woman in grey had attained with a spring, and she had
seated herself suddenly upon a place of detachment between earth and air,
freed from the principal detentions, weights, and embarrassments of the
usual life of fear. She had made herself, as it were, light, so as not
to dwell either in security or danger, but to pass between them. She
confessed difficulty and peril by her delicate evasions, and consented to
rest in neither. She would not owe safety to the mere motionlessness of
a seat on the solid earth, but she used gravitation to balance the slight
burdens of her wariness and her confidence. She put aside all the pride
and vanity of terror, and leapt into an unsure condition of liberty and
content.
She leapt, too, into a life of moments. No pause was possible to her as
she went, except the vibrating pause of a perpetual change and of an
unflagging flight. A woman, long educated to sit still, does not
suddenly learn to live a momentary life without strong momentary
resolution. She has no light achievement in limiting not only her
foresight, which must become brief, but her memory, which must do more;
for it must rather cease than become brief. Idle memory wastes time and
other things. The moments of the woman in grey as they dropped by must
needs disappear, and be simply forgotten, as a child forgets. Idle
memory, by the way, shortens life, or shortens the sense of time, by
linking the immediate past clingingly to the present. Here may possibly
be found one of the reasons for the length of a child's time, and for the
brevity of the time that succeeds. The child lets his moments pass by
and quickly become remote through a thousand little successive oblivions.
He has not yet the languid habit of recall.
"Thou art my warrior," said Volumnia. "I holp to frame thee."
Shall a man inherit his mother's trick of speaking, or her habit and
attitude, and not suffer something, against his will, from her bequest of
weakness, and something, against his heart, from her bequest of folly?
From the legacies of an unlessoned mind, a woman's heirs-male are not cut
off in the Common Law of the generations of mankind. Brutus knew that
the valour of Portia was settled upon his sons.