WOMANHOOD
"And another said: I have married a wife and therefore
I cannot come."
Yes, and we have been satisfied always to blame the wife, without
noticing the man who is fond of his comfort first of all, who slips
quietly away to enjoy a quiet smoke and a quiet glass in some quiet
nook--always securing his escape by the readiest excuse. We are coming
now to consider the aspect of the question that touches our sincere
manhood; but let no one think we overlook that mean type of man who
evades every call to duty on the comfortable plea: "I have married a
wife."
I
When the mere man approaches the woman to study her, we can imagine the
fair ones getting together and nudging one another in keen amusement as
to what this seer is going to say. It is often sufficiently amusing when
the clumsy male approaches her with self-satisfied air, thinking he has
the secret of her mysterious being. I have no intention here of entering
a rival search for the secret. But we can, perhaps, startle the gay ones
from merriment to gravity by stating the simple fact that every man
stands in some relationship to woman, either as son, brother, or
husband; and if it be admitted that there is to be a fight to-morrow,
then there are some things to be settled to-day. How is the woman
training for to-morrow? How, then, will the man stand by that very
binding relationship? Will clinging arms hold him back or proud ones
wave him on? Will he have, in place of a comrade in the fight, a burden;
or will the battle that has too often separated them but give them
closer bonds of union and more intimate knowledge of the wonderful thing
that is Life?
II
I wish to concentrate on one heroic example of Irish Womanhood that
should serve as a model to this generation; and I do not mean to dwell
on much that would require detailed examination. But some points should
be indicated. For example, the awakening consciousness of our womanhood
is troubling itself rightly over the woman's place in the community, is
concentrating on the type delineated in "The Doll's House," and is
agitating for a more honourable and dignified place. We applaud the
pioneers thus fighting for their honour and dignity: but let them not
make the mistake of assuming the men are wholly responsible for "The
Doll's House," and the women would come out if they could. We have
noticed the man who prefers his ease to any troubling duty: he has his
mate in the woman who prefers to be wooed with trinkets, chocolates, and
the theatre to a more beautiful way of life, that would give her a
nobler place but more strenuous conditions. Again, the man is not always
the lord of the house. He is as often, if not more frequently, its
slave. Then there are the conventions of life. In place of a fine sense
of courtesy prevailing between man and woman, which would recognise with
the woman's finer sensibility a fine self-reliance, and with the man's
greater strength a fine gentleness, we have a false code of manners, by
which the woman is to be taken about, petted and treated generally as
the useless being she often is; while the man becomes an effeminate
creature that but cumbers the earth. Fine courtesy and fine comradeship
go together. But we have allowed a standard to gain recognition that is
a danger alike to the dignity of our womanhood and the virility of our
manhood. It is for us who are men to labour for a finer spirit in our
manhood: we cannot throw the blame for any weakness over on external
conditions. The woman is in the same position. She must understand that
greater than the need of the suffrage is the more urgent need of making
her fellow-woman spirited and self-reliant, ready rather to anticipate a
danger than to evade it. When she is thus trained, not all the men of
all the nations can deny her recognition and equality.
III
For the battle of to-morrow then there is a preliminary fight to-day.
The woman must come to this point, too. In life there is frequently so
much meanness, a man is often called to acknowledge some degrading
standard or fight for the very recognition of manhood, and the woman
must stand in with him or help to pull him down. Let her understand this
and her duty is present and urgent. The man so often wavers on the verge
of the right path, the woman often decides him. If she is nobler than
he, as is frequently the case, she can lift him to her level; if she is
meaner, as she often is, she as surely drags him down. When they are
both equal in spirit and nobility of nature, how the world is filled
with a glory that should assure us, if nothing else could, of the truth
of the Almighty God and a beautiful Eternity to explain the origin and
destiny of their wonderful existence. They are indispensable to each
other: if they stand apart, neither can realise in its fulness the
beauty and glory of life. Let the man and woman see this, and let them
know in the day that is at hand, how the challenge may come from some
petty authority of the time that rules not by its integrity but by its
favourites. We are cursed with such authority, and many a one drives
about in luxury because he is obsequious to it: he prefers to be a
parasite and to live in splendour than be a man and live in straits. He
has what Bernard Shaw so aptly calls "the soul of a servant." If we are
to prepare for a braver future, let us fight this evil thing; if we are
to put by national servitude, let us begin by driving out individual
obsequiousness. This is our training ground for to-morrow. Let the woman
realise this, and at least as many women as men will prefer privation
with self-respect to comfort with contempt. Let us, then, in the name of
our common nature, ask those who have her training in hand, to teach the
woman to despise the man of menial soul and to loathe the luxury that is
his price.
IV
I wish to come to the heroic type of Irish Womanhood. When we need to
hearten ourselves or others for a great enterprise, we instinctively
turn to the examples of heroes and heroines who, in similar difficulties
to ours, have entered the fight bravely, and issued heroically, leaving
us a splendid heritage of fidelity and achievement. It is little to our
credit that our heroes are so little known. It is less to our credit
that our heroines are hardly known at all; and when we praise or sing
of one our selection is not always the happiest. How often in the
concert-hall or drawing-room do we get emotional when someone sings in
tremulous tones, "She is far from the Land." There is a feeling for
poetry in our lives, a feeling that patriotism will not have it, a
melting pity for the love that went to wreck, a sympathy for ourselves
and everybody and everything--a relaxing of all the nerves in a wave of
sentiment. This emotion is of the enervating order. There is no sweep of
strong fire through the blood, no tightening grip on life, no set
resolve to stand to the flag and see the battle through. It is well,
then, a generation that has heard from a thousand platforms, in
plaintive notes, of Sarah Curran and her love should turn to the braver
and more beautiful model of her who was the wife of Tone.
V
When we think of the qualities that are distinctive of the woman, we
have in mind a finer gentleness, sensibility, sympathy and tenderness;
and when we have these qualities intensified in any woman, and with
them combined the endurance, courage and daring that are taken as the
manly virtues, we have a woman of the heroic type. Of such a type was
the wife of Tone. We can speak her praise without fear, for she was put
to the test in every way, and in every way found marvellously true. For
her devotion to, and encouragement of, her great husband in his great
work, she would have won our high praise, even if, when he was stricken
down and she was bereft of his wonderful love and buoyant spirits, she
had proved forgetful of his work and the glory of his name. But she was
bereft, and she was then found most marvellously true. Her devotion to
Tone, while he was living and fighting, might be explained by the
woman's passionate attachment to the man she loved. It is the woman's
tenderness that is most evident in these early years, but there is
shining evidence of the fortitude that showed her true nobility in the
darker after-years. It was no ordinary love that bound them, and reading
the record of their lives this stands out clear and beautiful. Tone,
whom we know as patient organiser, tenacious fighter, far-seeing
thinker, indomitable spirit--a born leader of men--writes to his wife
with the passionate simplicity of an enraptured child: "I doat upon you
and the babes." And his letters end thus: "Kiss the babies for me ten
thousand times. God Almighty for ever bless you, my dearest life and
soul." (This from the "French Atheist." I hope his traducers are
heartily ashamed of themselves.) Nor is it strange. When, in the
beginning of his enterprise, he is in America, preparing to go to France
on his great mission, he is troubled by the thought of his defenceless
ones. In the crisis how does his wife act? Does she wind clinging arms
around him, telling him with tears, of their children and his early
vows, and beseeching him to think of his love and forget his country?
No; let the diary speak: "My wife especially, whose courage and whose
zeal for my honour and interests were not in the least abated by all her
past sufferings, supplicated me to let no consideration of her or our
children stand for a moment in the way of my engagements to our friends
and my duty to my country, adding that she would answer for our family
during my absence, and that the same Providence which had so often, as
it were, miraculously preserved us, would, she was confident, not desert
us now." It is the unmistakable accent of the woman. She is quivering as
she sends him forth, but the spirit in her eyes would put a trembling
man to shame--a spirit that her peerless husband matched but no man
could surpass. Her fortitude was to be more terribly tried in the
terrible after-time, when the Cause went down in disaster and Tone had
to answer with his life. No tribute could be so eloquent as the letter
he wrote to her when the last moment had come and his doom was
pronounced: "Adieu, dearest love, I find it impossible to finish this
letter. Give my love to Mary; and, above all, remember you are now the
only parent of our dearest children, and that the best proof you can
give of your affection for me will be to preserve yourself for their
education. God Almighty bless you all." That letter is like Stephens'
speech from the dock, eloquent for what is left unsaid. There is no
wailing for her, least of all for himself, not that their devoted souls
were not on the rack: "As no words can express what I feel for you and
our children, I shall not attempt it; complaint of any kind would be
beneath your courage and mine"--but their souls, that were destined to
suffer, came sublimely through the ordeal. When Tone left his children
as a trust to his wife, he knew from the intimacy of their union what we
learn from the after-event, how that trust might be placed and how
faithfully it would be fulfilled. What a tribute from man to wife! How
that trust was fulfilled is in evidence in every step of the following
years. Remembering Tone's son who survived to write the memoirs was a
child at his father's death, his simple tribute written in manhood is
eloquent in the extreme: "I was brought up by my surviving parent in all
the principles and in all the feelings of my father"--of itself it would
suffice. But we can follow the years between and find moving evidence of
the fulfilment of the trust. We see her devotion to her children and her
proud care to preserve their independence and her own. She puts by
patronage, having a higher title as the widow of a General of France;
and she wins the respect of the great ones of France under the Republic
and the Empire. Lucien Buonaparte, a year after Tone's death, pleaded
before the Council of Five Hundred, in warm and eloquent praise: "If
the services of Tone were not sufficient of themselves to rouse your
feelings, I might mention the independent spirit and firmness of that
noble woman who, on the tomb of her husband and her brother, mingles
with her sighs aspirations for the deliverance of Ireland. I would
attempt to give you an expression of that Irish spirit which is blended
in her countenance with the expression of her grief. Such were those
women of Sparta, who, on the return of their countrymen from the battle,
when with anxious looks they ran over the ranks and missed amongst them
their sons, their husbands, and their brothers, exclaimed, 'He died for
his country; he died for the Republic.'" When the Republic fell, and in
the upheaval her rights were ignored, she went to the Emperor Napoleon
in person and, recalling the services of Tone, sought naturalization for
her son to secure his career in the army; and to the wonder of all near
by, the Emperor heard her with marked respect and immediately granted
her request. She sought only this for her surviving son. She had seen
two children die--there was moving pathos in the daughter's death--and
now she was standing by the last. Never was child guarded more
faithfully or sent more proudly on his path in life. One should read the
memoirs to understand, and pause frequently to consider: how she
promised her husband bravely in the beginning that she would answer for
their children, and how, in what she afterwards styled the hyperbole of
grief, she was called to fulfil to the letter, and was found faithful,
with an unexampled strength and devotion; how she saw two children
struck down by a fatal disease, and how she drew the surviving son back
to health by her watchful care to send him on his college and military
career with loving pride; how, when a Minister of France, irritated at
her putting by his patronage, roughly told her he could not "take the
Emperor by the collar to place Mr. Tone"--she went to the Emperor in
person, with dignity but without fear, and won his respect; how the
suggestion of the mean-minded that her demand was a pecuniary one, drew
from her the proud boast that in all her misfortunes she had never
learned to hold out her hand; how through all her misfortunes we watch
her with wonderful dignity, delicacy, courage, and devotion quick to
see what her trust demanded and never failing to answer the call, till
her task is done, and we see her on the morning when her son sets out on
the path she had prepared, the same quivering woman, who had sent her
husband with words of comfort to his duty, now, after all the years of
trial, sending her son as proudly on his path. It is their first
parting. Let her own words speak: "Hitherto I had not allowed myself
even to feel that my William was my own and my only child; I considered
only that Tone's son was confided to me; but in that moment Nature
resumed her rights. I sat in a field: the road was long and white before
me and no object on it but my child.... I could not think; but all I had
ever suffered seemed before and around me at that moment, and I wished
so intensely to close my eyes for ever, that I wondered it did not
happen. The transitions of the mind are very extraordinary. As I sat in
that state, unable to think of the necessity of returning home, a little
lark rushed up from the grass beside me; it whirled over my head and
hovered in the air singing such a beautiful, cheering, and, as it
sounded to me, approving note, that it roused me. I felt in my heart as
if Tone had sent it to me. I returned to my solitary home." It is a
picture to move us, to think of the devoted woman there in the sunshine,
bent down in the grass, utterly alone, till the lark, sweeping
heavenward in song, seems to give a message of gentle comfort from her
husband's watching spirit. Our emotion now is of no enervating order. We
are proud of our land and her people; our nerves are firm and set; our
hearts cry out for action; we are not weeping, but burning for the
Cause. How little we know of this heroic woman. We are in some ways
familiar with Tone, his high character, his genial open nature, his
daring, his patience, his farsightedness, his judgment--in spirit
tireless and indomitable: a man peerless among his fellows. But he had
yet one compeer; there was one nature that matched his to depth and
height of its greatness--that nature was a woman's, and the woman was
Wolfe Tone's wife.
VI
It is well this heroic example of our womanhood should be before not
only our womanhood but our manhood. It should show us all that
patriotism does not destroy the finer feelings, but rather calls them
forth and gives them wider play. We have been too used to thinking that
the qualities of love and tenderness are no virtues for a soldier, that
they will sap his resolution and destroy his work; but our movements
fail always when they fail to be human. Until we mature and the poetry
in life is wakening, we are ready to act by a theory; but when Nature
asserts herself the hard theorist fails to hold us. Let us remember and
be human. We have been saying in effect, if not in so many words: "For
Ireland's sake, don't fall in love"--we might as well say: "For
Ireland's sake, don't let your blood circulate." It is impossible--even
if it were possible it would be hateful. The man and woman have a great
and beautiful destiny to fulfil together: to substitute for it an
unnatural way of life that can claim neither the seclusion of the
cloister nor the dominion of the world is neither beautiful nor great.
We have cause for gratitude in the example before us. The woman can
learn from it how she may equal the bravest man; and the man should
learn to let his wife and children suffer rather than make of them
willing slaves and cowards. For there are some earnest men who are
ready to suffer themselves but cannot endure the suffering of those they
love, and a mistaken family tenderness binds and drags them down. No
one, surely, can hold it better to carefully put away every duty that
may entail hardship on wife and child, for then the wife is, instead of
a comrade, a burden, and the child becomes a degenerate creature,
creeping between heaven and earth, afraid to hold his head erect, and
unable to fulfil his duty to God or man. Let no man be afraid that those
he loves may be tried in the fire; but let him, to the best of his
strength, show them how to stand the ordeal, and then trust to the
greatness of the Truth and the virtue of a loyal nature to bring each
one forth in triumph, and he and they may have in the issue undreamed of
recompense. For the battle that tries them will discover finer chords
not yet touched in their intercourse; finer sympathies,
susceptibilities, gentleness and strength; a deeper insight into life
and a wider outlook on the world, making in fine a wonderful blend of
wisdom, tenderness and courage that gives them to realise that life,
with all its faults, struggles, and pain is still and for ever great and
beautiful.