have shrieked on platforms nor made an hysterical parade of their
work. Quietly, and with the dignity which comes by self-respect and
the consciousness of strength, they have done what it was in their
hearts to do; leaving the world to find out the value of their
labours, and to applaud or deride their independence. Mrs. Somerville
asked no man's leave to study science and make herself a distinguished
name as the result; nor did she find the need of any more special
organization than what the best books, a free press and first-rate
available teaching offered. Miss Martineau dived with more or less
success into the forbidding depths of the 'dismal science,' at a time
when political economy was shirked by men and considered as
essentially unfeminine as top-boots and tobacco; and she was
confessedly an advanced Liberal when to be a high Tory was part of the
whole duty of woman. Miss Nightingale undertook the care of wounded
soldiers without any more publicity than was absolutely necessary for
the organization of her staff, and with not so much as one shriek.
Rosa Bonheur laughed at those who told her that animal painting was
unwomanly, and that she had better restrict herself to flowers and
heads, as became the _jeune demoiselle_ of conventional life; but she
did not publish her programme of independence, nor take the world into
her confidence and tell them of her difficulties and defiance. The
Lady Superintendents of our own various sisterhoods have organized
their communities and performed their works of charity with very faint
blare of trumpets indeed; and we might enumerate many more who have
quietly lived the life of action and independence of which others
have only raved, and who have done while their sisters shrieked. These
are the women to be respected, whether we sympathize with their line
of action or not; having shown themselves to be true workers, capable
of sustained effort, and therefore worthy of the honour which belongs
to strength and endurance.
Of one thing women may be very sure, though they invariably deny it;
the world is glad to take good work from any one who will supply it.
The most certain patent of success is to deserve it; and if women will
prove that they can do the world's work as well as men, they will
share with them in the labour and the reward; and if they do it better
they will distance them. The appropriation of fields of labour is not
so much a question of selfishness as of (hitherto) proved fitness; but
if, in times to come, women can show better harvesting than men, can
turn out more finished, more perfected, results of any kind, the
world's custom will flow to them by the force of natural law, and they
will have the most to do of that which they can do the best. If they
wish to educate public opinion to accept them as equals with men, they
can only do so by demonstration, not by shrieks. Even men, who are
supposed to inherit the earth and to possess all the good things of
life, have to do the same thing.
Every young man yet untried is only in the position of every woman;
and, granting that he has not the deadweight of precedent and
prejudice against him, he yet has to win his spurs before he can wear
them. But women want theirs given to them without winning; and
moreover, ask to be taught how to wear them when they have got them.
They want to be received as masters before they have served their
apprenticeship, and to be put into office without passing an
examination or submitting to competition. They scream out for a clear
stage and favour superadded; and they ask men to shackle their own
feet, like Lightfoot in the fairy tale, that they may then be
handicapped to a more equal running. They do not remember that their
very demand for help vitiates their claim to equality; and that if
they were what they assume to be, they would simply take without leave
asked or given, and work out their own social salvation by the
irrepressible force of a concentrated will and in the silence of
conscious strength.
While the shrieking sisterhood remains to the front, the world will
stop its ears; and for every hysterical advocate 'the cause' loses a
rational adherent and gains a disgusted opponent. It is our very
desire to see women happy, noble, fitly employed and well remunerated
for such work as they can do, which makes us so indignant with the
foolish among them who obscure the question they pretend to elucidate,
and put back the cause which they say they advance. The earnest and
practical workers among women are a very different class from the
shriekers; but we wish the world could dissociate them more clearly
than it does at present, and discriminate between them, both in its
censure and its praise.
_OTHERWISE-MINDED._
Every now and then we receive from America a word or a phrase which
enriches the language without vulgarizing it--something, both
more subtle and more comprehensive than our own equivalent,
which we recognize at once as the better thing of the two. Thus
'otherwise-minded,' which some American writers use with such quaint
force, is quite beyond our old 'contradictious' expressing the full
meaning of contradictious and adding a great deal more. But if we have
not hitherto had the word we have the thing, which is more to the
purpose; and foremost among the powers which rule the world may be
placed 'otherwise-mindedness' in its various phases of active
opposition and passive immobility--the contradictiousness which must
fight on all points and which will not assent to any. At home,
otherwise-mindedness is an engine of tremendous power, ranking next to
sulks and tears in the defensive armoury of women; while men for the
most part use it in a more aggressive sense, and seldom content
themselves with the passive quietude of mere inertness.
An otherwise-minded person, if a man, is almost always a tyrant and a
bully, with decided opinions as to his right of making all about him
dance to his piping--his piping never giving one of their own
measures. If a woman, she is probably a superior being subjected to
domestic martyrdom while intended by nature for a higher intellectual
life,--doomed to the drudgery of housekeeping while yearning for the
æsthetic and panting after the ideal. She is generally dignified in
her bearing and of a cold, unappeasable discontent. She neither scolds
nor wrangles, though sometimes, no rule being without its exception,
she is peevish and captious and degenerates into the commonplace of
the _Naggleton_ type. But in the main she bounds herself to the
expression of her otherwise-mindedness in a stately if dogged manner,
and shows a serene disdain for her opponents, which is a trifle more
offensive than her undisguised satisfaction with herself. Nothing can
move her, nothing beat her off her holding; but then she offers no
points of attack. She is what she is on principle; and what can you
say to an opposition dictated by motives all out of reach of your own
miserable little groundling ideas? Where you advocate expediency, she
maintains abstract principles; if you are lenient to weaknesses, she
is stern to sin; if you would legislate for human nature as it is, she
will have nothing less than the standard of perfection; and when you
speak of the absolutism of facts, she argues on the necessity of
keeping the ideal intact, no matter whether any one was ever known to
attain to it or not. But if she finds herself in different company
from your own looser kind--say with Puritans of a strongly ascetic
caste--then she veers round to the other side, on the ground of
fairness; and for the benefit of fanatics propounds a slip-shod
easygoing morality which shuffles beyond your own lines. This she
calls keeping out of extremes and discouraging exaggeration. This
latter manifestation however, is not very frequently the case with
women: the otherwise-minded among them being almost always of the
rigid and ascetic class who despise the pleasant little vanities, the
graceful frivolities, the loveable frailties which make life easy and
humanity delightful, and who take their stand on the loftiest, the
most unelastic, not to say the grimmest, ethics. They have had it
borne in on them that they are to defy Baal and withstand;
consequently they do defy him, and they do withstand, at all four
corners stoutly.
To be otherwise-minded naturally implies having a mind; and of what
use is intellect if it cannot see all through and round a subject, and
pick the weak places into holes? Hence the otherwise-minded are
uncompromising critics and terrible fellows at scenting their prey. As
is the function of certain creatures--vultures, crows, flies, and
others--so is that of these children of Zoilus when dealing with
subjects not understood, or only guessed at with more or less
blundering in the process.
Take one of the class at a lecture on the higher branches of a science
of which he has not so much as thoroughly mastered the roots, and
wherein this higher analysis offers certain new and perhaps startling
results. It would seem that the sole thing possible to him who is
ignorant of the matter in hand is to listen and believe; but your
otherwise-minded critic is not content with the tame modesty of
humbleness. What if the subject be over his head, cannot he crane his
neck and look? has he not common-sense to guide him? and may he not
criticize in the block what he cannot dissect in detail? At the least
he can look grave, and say something about the danger of a little
knowledge; and fallen man's dangerous pride of intellect; and his
absolute and eternal ignorance; and the lecturer not making his
meaning clear--as how should he when he probably does not understand
his own subject nor what he wanted to say?--and what becomes of
accepted truths if such things are to be received? Be sure of this,
that otherwise-mindedness must sling its stone, whether it knows
exactly what it is aiming at or not. It not unfrequently happens that
the stone is after the pattern of a boomerang, and comes back on the
slinger's own pate with sounding effect, convicting him of ignorance
if of nothing worse, and a love of opposition so great that it
destroys both his power of perceiving truth and the sense of his own
incapacity.
But the otherwise-minded is nothing if not superior to his company;
and truth is after all relative as well as multiform, and needs
continual nice adjustment to make it balance fairly. The great
representative assembly of humanity must have its independent members
below the gangway who vote with no party; and if we were all on the
right side the devil's advocate would have no work to do; so that even
otherwise-mindedness on the wrong side has its uses, and must not be
wholly condemned. For the world would fare badly without its natural
borers and hole-pickers, its finders-out of weak places, its stone
walls to resist assertion and advance; and ants and worms make good
mould for garden flowers.
The constitutionally otherwise-minded are the worst partizans in the
world and never take up a cause heartily--never with more than one
hand, that they may leave the other free for a bit of intellectual
prestidigitation if need be, when their audience changes its character
and complexion. The only time when they are devoted adherents is if
their own family is decidedly in the opposite ranks, when they come
out from among them with scrip and spear, and go over to the enemy
without failing a single button of the uniform. This is specially true
of young people and of women; both of whom call their natural love of
opposition by the name of religious principle or moral duty. Youths
just fresh from the schools, bent on the regeneration of mankind and
thinking that they can do in a few years what society has been
painfully labouring to accomplish ever since the first savage clubbed
his neighbour for stealing his hoard of roots or carrying off his own
private squaw, are sure to be intensely otherwise-minded and to
understand nothing of harmonious working with the old plant. Red
Republicans under the family flag of purple and orange; free-thinkers
in the church where the paternal High and Dry holds forth on Sundays
on the principle of the divine inspiration of the English translation
bound in calf and lettered _cum privilegio_; Romanists worshipping
saints and relics in the very heart of the Peculiar People who put no
trust in man nor works--we know them all; ardent, enthusiastic,
uncompromising and horribly aggressive; with the down just shading
their smooth young chins, and the great book of human life barely
turned at the page of adolescence. Yet this is a form of
otherwise-mindedness which, though we laugh at and are often annoyed
by it, we must treat gently on the whole. We cannot be cruel to a
fervour, even when insolently expressed, which we know the world will
tame so soon, and which at the worst is often better than the dead
level of conformity; even though its zeal is not unmixed with conceit,
and a burning desire for the world's good is not free from a few
slumbering embers of self-laudation and the 'last infirmity.'
In a house inhabited by the otherwise-minded--and one member of a
family is enough to set the whole ruck awry--nothing is allowed to go
smoothly or by default; nothing can be done without endless
discussion; and all the well-oiled casters of compromise, good-nature,
'it does not signify,' &c., by which life runs easily in most places
are rusted or broken. At table there is an incessant cross-fire of
objections and of arguments, more or less intemperately conducted and
never coming to a satisfactory conclusion. There are so many places
too, which have been rubbed sore by this perpetual chafing, that a
stranger to the secrets of the domestic pathology is kept not only in
a fever of annoyance, but in an ague of dread, at the temper shown
about trifles, and the deadly offence that seems to lurk behind quite
ordinary topics of conversation. Not knowing all that has gone before,
he is not prepared for the present uncomfortable aspect of things, and
in fact is like a boy reading algebra, understanding nothing of what
he sees, though the symbolizing letters are familiar enough to him.
The family quarrel about everything; and when they do not quarrel they
argue. If one wants to do something that must be done in concert, the
others would die rather than unite; and days, seasons and wishes can
never be got to work themselves into harmonious coalition. When they
are out 'enjoying themselves'--language is arbitrary and the sense of
words not always clear--they cannot agree on anything; and you may
hear them fire off scornful squibs of otherwise-mindedness across the
rows of prize flowers or in the intervals of one of Beethoven's
sonatas. And if they cannot find cause for disagreement on the merits
of the subject before them, they find it in each other. For
otherwise-mindedness is like the ragged little princess in the German
fairy tale, who proved her royal blood by being unable to sleep on the
top of seven feather-beds--German feather-beds--beneath all of which
one single bean had been placed as the test of her sensibility. Give
it but the chance of a scuffle, the ghost of a coat-tail to tread on,
an imaginary chicken-bone among the down, and you may be sure that the
opportunity will not be lost. When we are on the look-out for beans we
shall find them beneath even seven feather-beds; and when shillelahs
abound there will never be wanting the trail of a coat-tail across the
path. So we find when we have to do with the otherwise-minded who will
not take things pleasantly, and can never be got to see either beauty
or value in their surroundings. Let one of these have a saint for a
wife, and he will tell you saints are bores and sinners the only
house-mates to be desired. Let him change his state, and this time
pick up the sinner in longing for whom he has so often vexed the poor
saint's soul, and he will find domestic happiness to consist in the
companionship of a seraph of the most exalted kind. If he has Zenobia,
he wants Griselda; if Semiramis, King Cophetua's beggar-maid. The dear
departed, who was such a millstone in times past, becomes the emblem
of all that is lovely in humanity when a shaft has to be thrown at the
partner of times present; and the marriage that was notoriously
ill-assorted is painted in gold and rose-colour throughout, and its
discords are mended up into a full score of harmony when the new wife
or the new husband has to be snubbed, for no other reason than the
otherwise-mindedness which cannot agree with what it has.
Children and servants come in for their share of this uncomfortable
temper which reverses the old adage about the absent, and which, so
far from making these in the wrong, transfers the burden of blame to
those present and conveniently forgets its former litany of complaint.
No one would be more surprised than those very absent if they heard
themselves upheld as possessors of all possible virtues when,
according to their memory, they had been little better than
concretions of wickedness and folly in the days of their subjection to
criticism. They need not flatter themselves. Could they return, or if
they do return, to the old place, they will be sure to return to the
old conditions; and the praise lavished on them when they are absent,
by way of rebuke to those unlucky ones on the spot, will be changed
for their benefit into the blame and the rebuke familiar to them. In
fact no circumstances whatever touch the central quality of the
otherwise-minded. They must have something to bite, to grumble at, to
rearrange, at least in wish, if not in deed. If only they had been
consulted, nothing would have gone wrong that has gone wrong; and 'I
told you so' is the shibboleth of their order. It is gall and wormwood
to them when they are obliged to agree, and when, for very decency's
sake, they must praise what indeed offers no points to condemn. But
even when they get caught in the trap of unanimity they contrive to
say something quite unnecessary about evils which no one was thinking
of, and which have nothing to do with the case in point. 'But' is
their mystic word, their truncated form of the Tetragrammaton which
rules the universe; and whatever their special private denomination,
they all belong in bulk to the
Sect whose chief devotion lies
In odd perverse antipathies;
In falling out with that or this,
And finding somewhat still amiss.
_LIMP PEOPLE._
Vice is bad and malignant wickedness is worse, but beyond either in
evil results to mankind is weakness; which indeed is the pabulum by
which vice is fed and the agent by which malignity works. If every one
in this world had a backbone, there would not be so much misery nor
guilt as there is now; for we must give each individual of the 'cruel
strong' a large following of weaker victims; and it would be easy to
demonstrate that the progress of nations has always been in proportion
to the number of stiff backbones among them. Yet unfortunately limp
people abound, to the detriment of society and to their own certain
sorrow; molluscs, predestined to be the food of the stronger, with no
power of self-defence nor of self-support, but having to be protected
against outside dangers if they are to be preserved at all;--and
perhaps when you have done all that you can do, not safe even then,
and most likely not worth the trouble taken about them. Open the gates
for but a moment, and they are swept up by the first passer-by. Let
them loose from your own sustaining hand, and they fall abroad in a
mass of flabby helplessness, unable to work, to resist, to
retain--mere heaps of moral protoplasm, pitiable as well as
contemptible; perhaps pitiable because so contemptible. See one of
these poor creatures left a widow, if a woman--turned out of his
office, if a man--and then judge of the value of a backbone by the
miserable consequences of its absence. The widow is simply lost in the
wilderness of her domestic solitude, as much so as would be a child if
set in the midst of a pathless moor with no one to guide him to the
safe highway. She may have money and she may have relations, but she
is as poor as if she had nothing better than parish relief; and unless
some one will take her up and manage everything for her
conscientiously, she is as lonely as if she were an exile in a strange
land. She has been so long used to lean on the stronger arm of her
husband, that she cannot stand upright now that her support has been
taken from her. Her servants make her their prey; her children
tyrannize over her and ignore her authority; her boys go to the bad;
her girls get fast and loud; all her own meek little ideas of modesty
and virtue are rudely thrust to the wall; and she is obliged to submit
to a family disorder which she neither likes nor encourages, but which
she has not the strength to oppose nor the wisdom to direct. She may
be the incarnation of all saintly qualities in her own person, but by
mere want of strength she is the occasion by which a very pandemonium
is possible; and the worst house of a community is sure to be that of
a quiet, gentle, molluscous little widow, without one single vicious
proclivity but without the power to repress or even to rebuke vice in
others.
A molluscous man too, suddenly ejected from his long-accustomed
groove, where, like a toad embedded in the rock, he had made his niche
exactly fitting to his own shape, presents just as wretched a picture
of helplessness and unshiftiness. In vain his friends suggest this or
that independent endeavour; he shakes his head, and says he can't--it
won't do. What he wants is a place where he is not obliged to depend
on himself; where he has to do a fixed amount of work for a fixed
amount of salary; and where his fibreless plasticity may find a mould
ready formed, into which it may run without the necessity of forging
shapes for itself. Many a man of respectable intellectual powers has
gone down into ruin, and died miserably, because of this limpness
which made it impossible for him to break new ground or to work at
anything whatsoever with the stimulus of hope only. He must be
bolstered up by certainty, supported by the walls of his groove, else
he can do nothing; and if he cannot get into this friendly groove, he
lets himself drift into destruction.