Although, as we have seen everywhere, the women novelists did so much
in lifting the veil and, so to speak, giving themselves away; they also
held up the mirror to man’s complacency, and, in a measure, enabled the
other sex to see himself as they saw him. In the process they created
a type, beloved of schoolgirls, which can only be described as the
“Woman’s Man,” and must be admitted a partial travesty on human nature.
It does not, however, reveal any less insight than much of man’s
feminine portraiture.
Curiously enough, the earliest “Woman’s Man” in fiction was of male
origin. We all know how Richardson, having given us Clarissa, was
invited to exert his genius upon the “perfect gentleman.” But the
little printer had ever an eye on the ladies, and, whether or no of
malice prepense, drew the immaculate Sir Charles Grandison--frankly,
in every particular--not as he must have known him in real life, but
rather according to the pretty fancy of the dear creatures whose
entreaties had called into being the gallant hero.
And, as elsewhere, Fanny Burney took up the type, refined it, and lent
an attractive subtlety to that somewhat monumental erection of the
infallible. The actual imaginings of woman are proved less wooden than
Richardson supposed them, and infinitely more like human nature. In
many things Lord Orville resembles Sir Charles. He is scarcely less
perfect, but his empire is more restricted. The chorus of admiration
granted to Grandison, and his astounding complacency, are replaced by
the unconscious revelations of innocent girlhood naturally expressing
her simple enthusiasm to the kindest of foster-parents. The peerless
Orville, indeed, is not exactly a “popular” hero. It needs a superior
mind to appreciate his superiority; and we suspect there were circles
in which he was voted a “prodigious dull fellow.” His life was not
passed in an atmosphere of worship. It is only in the heart of Evelina
that he is king. Nor can we fancy Miss Burney submitting her heroine
to the ignominy, as modern readers must judge it, of patiently and
contentedly waiting, like Harriet Byron, until such time as his
majesty should determine between the well-balanced claims of herself
and her rival to the honour of his hand. Personally, we have never been
able to satisfy ourselves whether Grandison loved Clementina more or
less than Harriet; if he was properly “in love” with either.
It was, indeed, rather becoming so fine a gentleman to be wooed than
to woo; and the visit to Italy was, in all likelihood, actually
brought in as an afterthought, mainly designed to illustrate the power
of conscience over a good man. Anyone less perfect than Sir Charles
would be universally charged with having compromised Clementina; and
the real motive of his English “selection in wives” was to escape
the consequences of an entanglement involving difficulties about
religion and constant association with the Italian temperament. Having
thoroughly investigated the circumstances and judicially examined his
own heart, the cool-headed young man decides that he is not in honour
bound; gently but firmly severs the somewhat embarrassing connection;
and, in dignified language, communicates his decision to “the other
lady.” Humbly and gratefully she accepts his self-justification and his
love. It is obvious that no one could ever have either refused him or
questioned the dictates of his conscience. But as Jane Austen remarks,
in a very different connection, “It is a new circumstance in romance,
I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of a heroine’s dignity.” No
woman writer would permit it.
Nevertheless, in the essential qualities of heart and mind, no less
than in the heroine’s mental attitude towards their perfections, Lord
Orville and Sir Charles Grandison belong to the same order of men: made
by women for women. So far as I am aware, Miss Burney originated the
semi-paternal relationship (reappearing, with variations, in Knightley
and Henry Tilney) which certainly helped to deceive Evelina as to the
state of her heart, and has in itself a peculiar charm. There is real
delicacy, quite beyond Richardson or his Sir Charles, in Orville’s
repeated attempts to preserve Evelina from her own ignorance; to give
her (as none of her natural guardians ever attempted) some slight
knowledge of the world; protect her from insult; and advise her in
difficulty. He never intrudes or presumes; and, because, after all,
women’s first and last mission as novel-writers was the refinement of
fiction, it cannot be too often emphasised that Miss Burney was most
extraordinarily refined for her age. The very coarseness in certain
externals which she admits without protest, should serve only to
establish her own innate superiority.
But it remains true that the essential attribute of Orville, as
of Grandison, was perfectibility. He is a very Bayard, the _preux
chevalier_, and the Sir Galahad of eighteenth-century drawing-rooms.
Neither the author, nor her heroine, would have ever imagined it
possible to criticise this prince of gentlemen. It really pained them
when persons of inferior breeding or less exalted morality occasionally
ventured to oppose his will or question his judgment. His praise, and
his love, were alike a mighty condescension; his mere notice an honour
almost greater than they could bear.
This is the modern, civilised notion of knighthood; the personification
(in terms of everyday life) of that pure dream which has haunted, and
will ever haunt, the musings of maidenhood; the pretty fancy that one
day He, prince of fairyland, will ride into her very ordinary little
existence, acclaim her queen, and carry her away somewhere to be happy
ever after. Miss Burney translated the vision for her generation,
making it, verily, not greatly dissimilar from actual human experience.
We shall see later how certain women of the Victorian era visualised
the same ideal.
In the numberless remarkable signs of feminine advance between the
authoress of _Evelina_ and Jane Austen we find that this particular
attitude and ideal has almost completely vanished. The hero is no
longer quite perfect; condescension is not now his most conspicuous
virtue. The heroine, indeed, has become the one woman who ventures to
criticise him. Darcy learns quite as much from Elizabeth as she from
him. As already hinted, “Mr. Knightley” is the nearest approach in
Jane Austen to the old type. He is the only person in Highbury who
“ventured to criticise Emma”--without being sufficiently snubbed for
his pains. He is, admittedly, the personification of superiority;
though he is not very “sure of the lady.” Again the character is gently
satirised in Henry Tilney, the situation of Northanger Abbey, as we
have said above, being a more subtle parody of Evelina than of Udolpho.
The young clergyman is nearly faultless. Catherine swears by him in
everything--from theology to “sprigged muslin.” He, too, teaches her
all she ever knew about the “great world”; and guides her, without a
rival in authority, among the bewildering intricacies of men and books.
But, in her own domain and as to her most original creations, Miss
Austen has been criticised for her occasional lack of insight towards
men. It may be true, indeed, that neither Darcy nor Knightley always
speaks, or behaves, quite like a gentlemen; which means that, like all
women, she had not an absolutely unerring instinct for the things which
are “not done.” In all probability, as men will never quite understand
women’s emotional purity, women will never fully appreciate men’s alert
sense of honour. Generally speaking, of course, the feminine standard
in all things is far higher than the masculine; and the women novelists
have done much in pulling us up to their level. But there are a few
points, which concern deeper issues than social polish, of which few
women, if any, can attain to the absolute ideal of chivalry.
There are, of course, many more superficial aspects by which the
men in Jane Austen may be easily recognised as woman-made. We hear
comparatively little of their point of view in affairs of the
heart, with which the novels are mainly concerned, save in that most
thoughtful passage closing _Persuasion_; and we know even less of their
attitude towards ethics, citizenship, business, or social problems.
Only clergymen or sailors are shown to be even superficially concerned
with any profession in life; and this is merely because the authoress
was personally intimate with both. It is, in fact, an infallible
instinct for her own limitations which saved her from more obvious
failure as a portrait-painter of men. Man at the tea-table is her
chosen theme; and this too is a work which could not have been safely
entrusted to any male pen.
The Brontës, on the other hand, exhibit a startlingly original
and unexpected revival of the early type, in the central feature
of its conception. Here once more the hero is most emphatically
“the master”--of body and soul. Jane Eyre, we remember, loved--and
served--her “employer”; Lucy Snowe and Shirley their “teachers.” There
are, probably, no more arrogant males in fiction than these gentlemen;
no more enslaved female worshippers. Yet the combination is totally
unlike the Richardson-Burney brand. To begin with, the dominant,
and domineering, hero is represented in each case as almost, if not
quite, unique; not as the man normal. Nor are we called upon to admire
without qualification. There is nothing ideal about Rochester, Monsieur
Heger, Paul Emmanuel, or Louis Moore. The Brontë heroines did not at
all admire perfection in man, and they abominated good looks. Nor were
they, on the other hand, in the least humble by nature, generally
yielding and clinging, or ever grateful for guidance and information.
They had no patience and very little respect for the genus Homo.
There is, indeed, a touch of melodrama in the sharp contrast exhibited
between their proud prickliness towards mankind and their idolatry
of The Man. Few women have written more bitterly of our idle vanity,
our heartless neglect and supreme selfishness, our blind folly, and
our indifference to moral standards. None has spoken with more biting
emphasis of woman’s natural superiority, or of the grinding tyranny
which, for so many generations, she is herein shown to have stupidly
endured. Yet Charlotte Brontë has declared, without qualification and
more frankly than any of her sisters, that no woman can really love a
man incapable of mastery; that she is ever longing for the whip.
To assert herself, to demand liberty or even equality, is uncongenial;
and the aggressive attitude is only adopted as a duty, undertaken
for the weaker sister from a passionate instinct for justice and an
intolerance of sham. There were two things Charlotte Brontë hated:
a handsome man and a deceitful woman. But hate left her very weary.
It was the strain of playing prophetess that inspired her taste for
“doormats.”
Obviously, the conception of a Hero thus evolved is essentially
feminine. The most complacently conservative among us, however
intolerant of the fine shades, could never have either conceived or
admired a Rochester. We should certainly not suppose him attractive
to any woman of character. To us he appears mere tinsel, the obvious
counterfeit and exaggeration of a type we have come to despise a little
at its best. Naturally, such men fancy that they can “do what they like
with the women”; but _we_ knew better, until the novelist confirmed the
truth of their boast. Miss Brontë, moreover, is very much farther from
our idea of a gentleman than Miss Austen. It may be doubted if men
ever like or applaud rudeness, which she apparently considers essential
to honest manliness.
Yet, however unique in its external manifestations, and however
exaggerated in expression, the Brontë hero-recipe involves, like Miss
Burney’s, an assumption that happy marriages are achieved by meeting
mastery with submission. However diverse their conceptions of the
proper everyday balance between the sexes, both find their _ideal_ in
the absolute monarchy of Man.
It must be always more difficult and more hazardous to determine an
author’s private point of view as her art becomes more professional and
self-conscious. George Eliot’s characters are all deliberate studies,
neither the instinctive expression of an ideal nor the unconscious
reflection of experience; and such manufactured products naturally
tend to be extensively varied, seeking to avoid repetition or even
similarity. We may, perhaps, say that George Eliot, out of her wider
experience and more scholarly training, understood men better than her
predecessors. She certainly avoided, as did Jane Austen, the specific
“Woman’s Man”; and, on the other hand, she penetrated, without losing
her way, more deeply into the masculine mystery than the creator of
Messrs. Elton and Collins.
Tom Tulliver’s whole relationship with his sister is an admirable
study in the conventional notion of a stupid man’s “superiority” to a
clever woman; but it cannot be criticised, or in any way regarded, as
a feminine conception. That provokingly worthy and obstinate young man
is perfectly true to life. There is neither mistake nor exaggeration
here. We must all feel that “this lady” knows. In marriage, Tom would
certainly have played the master to any woman “worthy of him,” but
would not thereby have become less normal or natural. If men question
or puzzle over anything in _The Mill on the Floss_, it is not Maggie’s
toleration of Tom, but her temporary infatuation for Stephen. He indeed
is something of a lady’s man, not a woman’s; but probably we may not
disown the type. To some extent, again, Adam Bede is “masterly” to
his mother, and would probably--barring accidents on which the plot
hinges--have been accepted by Hetty in the same spirit; but he is
certainly _not_ perfect, and seldom, if ever, outruns probability.
But although George Eliot, having a wide outlook, recognises and
illustrates the tendency in man to play the master, she does not
associate it with any idea of perfection, nor does she idealise
submission in women. Yet we know that personally, though less intensely
than Charlotte Brontë, she too disliked sex-assertion, and found
comfort in what the other only desired, a large measure of intellectual
rest, by letting a man think and act for her. At all times her religion
and her philosophy were largely borrowed or reflective--for all
their assumption of independence--and every page of her life reveals
the carefully protective influence of George Henry Lewes. Only less
than any of the other chief women novelists did George Eliot permit
self-expression in her work, and the particular portraiture of man we
are here discussing was not the result of study but the exposure of
conviction.
Finally, it was reserved for later writers, not of supreme genius, to
develop the type to its extremity. Charlotte Yonge, with her usual
superabundance of dramatis personæ, has _two_ “women’s men” in _The
Heir of Redclyffe_, and the contrast between them is most instructive.
The aggressive “perfection” of Philip, indeed, is crude enough. Miss
Yonge deliberately exaggerates his manifold virtues in order to
darken the evil within. The reader and his own conscience alone ever
realise the full force of his jealous suspicions and obstinacy in
self-justification. Guy’s faults, on the other hand, are all on the
surface; but his exalted saintliness is even more superhuman than the
other’s unerring morality. Both exemplify a feminine ideal; though
Philip has only one worshipper, her faith is unfaltering. His, indeed,
is the type that lives to hold forth, to inform, and to dogmatise. Woe
to the woman who ventures to think for herself. The power or charm of
Guy is unconscious. They love his passionate outbursts, his generous
impetuosity, his childish remorse and “sensibility.” In him, however,
there are _some_ qualities which men esteem: he was a sportsman,
adventurous, and transparently sincere. Only his final “conversion” and
the death-bed scene spoil the picture. He becomes, in the end (what
Philip had always been), the sport of feminine imagination with its
craving for perfectibility. He loses the human touch, vanishing among
the gods.
We have the “last word” in this matter from _John Halifax, Gentleman_.
With school-girl naïveté Phineas tells us on every page that “there was
never any man like him.” His smile, his tenderness, his courage, his
independence, his tact and tyranny in the home, his quiet influence
on Capital and Labour, are certainly unique, and no less certainly
monotonous. He _understands_ everybody, and “deals with them” easily.
It costs him nothing to lead men and dominate women. Quietly and
without effort, he pursues his way--to an admiring chorus, always “the
master,” the perfect gentleman. He was dignified, attractive, and very
“particular over his daintiest of cambric and finest of lawn.” The
little waif of the opening chapters indignantly repudiated the name of
“beggar-boy”: “You mistake; I never begged in my life: I am a person of
independent property, which consists of my head and my two hands, out
of which I hope to realise a large capital some day.” And he kept his
word.
Prompt and acute in business, of unflinching integrity, and guided
by generous understanding as to the serious labour problems of his
generation, John was one of those fine English tradesmen who effected
so much, not only towards the foundation of our commercial empire, but
towards removing the barriers between their own class and a Society
largely composed of “fox-hunting, drinking, dicing fools.” The girl who
loved him was “shocked” to hear of his being “in business,” although
her feelings quickly developed to proud worship.
It is here, indeed, that Mrs. Craik reveals most power. Towards the
“world”--his equals, his “men,” or his “superiors”--John Halifax is
the true gentleman, and a splendid specimen of manhood. He has rare
dignity, shrewd insight, and ready command of language. The scene of
his “drawing-room” fracas with Richard Brithwood is extremely dramatic,
and gives us almost a higher opinion of the hero than any other.
Entirely free from the narrow-mindedness of the ordinary self-made man,
he almost subdues our dislike of the gentle despotism which he assumes
towards wife and family. The complacent masculinity is exaggerated by
the author’s persistence in keeping him to the centre of the picture;
and we are disposed to believe that it might have been less open to
criticism if expressed, as well as conceived, by a woman. Phineas
Fletcher, the fictional Ego, has some charm; but he is absolutely
feminine, if not womanish, and the Jonathan-David attitude of every
page becomes wearisome by repetition. There is no doubt that this
perpetual enthusiasm of one man for another offends our taste, and
has a tendency to make both a little ridiculous. John has a positive
weakness for perfection, and we should observe the fact with more
pleasure if it were less frequently “explained.”
Here the man creates his surroundings or sets the tone, presumably
exemplifying the author’s ideal. He is singularly pure-minded,
preposterously domestic, and very confident about the natural supremacy
of man. It is the immense amount of tender detail, the infinite number
of soft touches which convict the author of femininity. Her hero,
however, is no knight of romance, no Bayard of the drawing-room, no
love-lorn youth of dreams, no “fine gentleman,” the mate of a girl’s
sensibility. He is not all soul and heart. He is of tougher fibre in
groundwork (despite his “halo”), and primarily practical. Concerned
externally with such tough problems as trade depression, the “bread
riots,” and the introduction of machinery, he is more often placed
before us as lover, husband, father, and friend. Frank and decisive,
he has remarkable self-control, and remains ideally simple. He has
no doubts about sin and goodness, indifference or faith. We should
be tempted to say that he spent his life in the nursery, though
sometimes, indeed, the view of the nursery is not unworthy of our
attention:
“I delighted to see dancing. Dancing, such as it was then, when young
people moved breezily and lightly, as if they loved it; skimming
like swallows down the long line of the Triumph--gracefully winding
in and out through the graceful country-dance--lively always, but
always decorous. In those days people did not think it necessary to
the pleasures of dancing that any stranger should have the liberty to
snatch a shy, innocent girl round the waist, and whirl her about in
mad waltz or awkward polka, till she stops, giddy and breathless, with
burning cheek and tossed hair, looking--as I would not have liked to
see our pretty Maud look.”
Most of us, I fancy, would think better of John without Phineas at his
elbow, if he were less supremely self-conscious, less given to that
analysis of his own acts and emotions which is essentially feminine.
But Mrs. Craik will not let her hero alone. She thrusts him upon us
without mercy, till we are driven to cry “halt.” We are convinced that
no human being could comfortably carry about with him so heavy a burden
of perfectibility. He is (as women have often fancied us) not what we
are but what she would have us be; and here, as elsewhere, even the
Ideal does not please man.