articles of their creed is to regard men as their natural enemies from
whom they must both protect themselves and be protected; and one of
their favourite exercises is to rail at them as both weak and wicked,
both moral cowards and personal bullies, with whom the best wisdom is
to have least intercourse, and on whom no woman who has either
common-sense or self-respect would rely. To those who get the
confidence of women many startling revelations are made; but one of
the most startling is the fierce kind of contempt for men, and the
unnatural revolt against anything like control or guidance, which
animates the class of modern man-haters. That husbands, fathers,
brothers should be thought by women to be tyrannical, severe, selfish,
or anything else expressive of the misuse of strength, is perhaps
natural and no doubt too often deserved; but we confess it seems an
odd inversion of relations when a pretty, frail, delicate woman, with
a narrow forehead, accuses her broad-shouldered, square-browed male
companions of the meaner and more cowardly class of faults hitherto
considered distinctively feminine. And when she says with a disdainful
toss of her small head, 'Men are so weak and unjust, I have no respect
for them!' we wonder where the strength and justice of the world can
have taken shelter, for, if we are to trust our senses, we can
scarcely credit her with having them in her keeping.
On the other hand, the man-hater ascribes to her own sex every good
quality under heaven; and, not content with taking the more patient
and negative virtues which have always been allowed to women, boldly
bestows on them the energetic and active as well, and robs men of
their inborn characteristics that she may deck her own sex with their
spoils. She grants, of course, that men are superior in physical
strength and courage; but she qualifies the admission by adding that
all they are good for is to push a way for her in a crowd, to protect
her at night against burglars, to take care of her on a journey, to
fight for her when occasion demands, to bear the heavy end of the
stick always, to work hard that she may enjoy and encounter dangers
that she may be safe. This is the only use of their lives, so far as
she is concerned. And to women of this way of thinking the earth is
neither the Lord's, nor yet man's, but woman's.
Apart from this mere brute strength which has been given to men mainly
for her advantage, she says they are nuisances and for the most part
shams; and she wonders with less surprise than disdain at those of her
sisters who have kept trust in them; who still honestly profess to
both love and respect them; and who are not ashamed to own that they
rely on men's better judgment in all important matters of life, and
look to them for counsel and protection generally. The modern
man-hater does none of these things. If she has a husband she holds
him as her enemy _ex officio_, and undertakes home-life as a state of
declared warfare where she must be in antagonism if she would not be
in slavery. Has she money? It must be tied up safe from his control;
not as a joint precaution against future misfortune, but as a personal
protection against his malice; for the modern theory is that a husband
will, if he can get it, squander his wife's money simply for cruelty
and to spite her, though in so doing he may ruin himself as well. It
is a new reading of the old saying about being revenged on one's face.
Has she friends whom he, in his quality of man of the world, knows to
be unsuitable companions for her, and such as he conscientiously
objects to receive into his house? His advice to her to drop them is
an unwarrantable interference with her most sacred affections, and she
stands by her undesirable acquaintances, for whom she has never
particularly cared until now, with the constancy of a martyr defending
her faith. If it would please her to rush into public life as the
noisy advocate of any nasty subject that may be on hand--his refusal
to have his name dragged through the mire at the instance of her folly
is coercion in its worst form--the coercion of her conscience, of her
mental liberty; and she complains bitterly to her friends among the
shrieking sisterhood of the harsh restrictions he places on her
freedom of action. Her heart is with them, she says; and perhaps she
gives them pecuniary and other aid in private; but she cannot follow
them on to the platform, nor sign her name to passionate manifestoes
as ignorant as they are unseemly; nor tout for signatures to petitions
on things of which she knows nothing, and the true bearing of which
she cannot understand; nor dabble in dirt till she has lost the sense
of its being dirt at all. And, not being able to disgrace her husband
that she may swell the ranks of the unsexed, she is quoted by the
shriekers as one among many examples of the subjection of women and
the odious tyranny under which they live.
As for the man, no hard words are too hard for him. It is only enmity
which animates him, only tyranny and oppression which govern him.
There is no intention of friendly guidance in his determination to
prevent his wife from making a gigantic blunder--feeling of kindly
protection in the authority which he uses to keep her from offering
herself as a mark for public ridicule and damaging discussion, wherein
the bloom of her name and nature would be swept away for ever. It is
all the base exercise of an unrighteous power; and the first crusade
to be undertaken in these latter days is the woman's crusade against
masculine supremacy.
Warm partizan however, as she is of her own sex, the modern man-hater
cannot forgive the woman we spoke of who still believes in
old-fashioned distinctions; who thinks that nature framed men for
power and women for tenderness, and that the fitting, because the
natural, division of things is protection on the one side and a
reasonable measure of--we will not mince the word--obedience on the
other. For indeed the one involves the other. Women of this kind,
whose sentiment of sex is natural and healthy, the modern man-hater
regards as traitors in the camp; or as slaves content with their
slavery, and therefore in more pitiable case than those who, like
herself, jangle their chains noisily and seek to break them by loud
uproar.
But even worse than the women who honestly love and respect the men to
whom they belong, and who find their highest happiness in pleasing
them and their truest wisdom in self-surrender, are those who frankly
confess the shortcomings of their own sex, and think the best chance
of mending a fault is first to understand that it is a fault. With
these worse than traitors no terms are to be kept; and the man-haters
rise in a body and ostracize the offenders. To be known to have said
that women are weak; that their best place is at home; that filthy
matters are not for their handling; that the instinct of feminine
modesty is not a thing to be disregarded in the education of girls nor
the action of matrons; are sins for which these self-accusers are
accounted 'creatures' not fit for the recognition of the nobler-souled
man-hater. The gynecian war between these two sections of womanhood is
one of the oddest things belonging to this odd condition of affairs.
This sect of modern man-haters is recruited from three classes
mainly--those who have been cruelly treated by men, and whose faith
in one half of the human race cannot survive their own one sad
experience; those restless and ambitious persons who are less than
women, greedy of notoriety, indifferent to home life, holding home
duties in disdain, with strong passions rather than warm affections,
with perverted instincts in one direction and none worthy of the name
in another; and those who are the born vestals of nature, whose
organization fails in the sweeter sympathies of womanhood, and who are
unsexed by the atrophy of their instincts as the other class are by
the perversion and coarsening of theirs. By all these men are held to
be enemies and oppressors; and even love is ranked as a mere matter of
the senses, whereby women are first subjugated and then betrayed.
The crimes of which these modern man-haters accuse their hereditary
enemies are worthy of Munchausen. A great part of the sorry success
gained by the opposers of the famous Acts has been due to the
monstrous fictions which have been told of men's dealings with the
women under consideration. No brutality has been too gross to be
related as an absolute truth, of which the name, address, and all
possible verification could be given, if desired. And the women who
have taken the lead in this matter have not been afraid to ascribe to
some of the most honourable names in the opposite ranks words and
deeds which would have befouled a savage. Details of every apocryphal
crime have been passed from one credulous or malicious matron to the
other, over the five o'clock tea; and tender-natured women,
horror-stricken at what they heard, have accepted as proofs of the
ineradicable enmity of man to woman these unfounded fables which the
unsexed so positively asserted among themselves as facts.
The ease of conscience with which the man-hating propagandists have
accepted and propagated slanderous inventions in this matter has been
remarkable, to say the least of it; and were it not for the gravity of
the principles at stake, and the nastiness of the subject, the stories
of men's vileness in connexion with this matter, would make one of the
absurdest jest-books possible, illustrative of the credulity, the
falsehood, and the ingenious imagination of women. We do not say that
women have no just causes of complaint against men. They have; and
many. And so long as human nature is what it is, strength will at
times be brutal rather than protective, and weakness will avenge
itself with more craft than patience. But that is a very different
thing from the sectional enmity which the modern man-haters assert,
and the revolt which they make it their religion to preach. No good
will come of such a movement, which is in point of fact creating the
ill-feeling it has assumed. On the contrary, if women will but believe
that on the whole men wish to be their friends and to treat them with
fairness and generosity, they will find the work of self-protection
much easier and the reconcilement of opposing interests greatly
simplified.
_VAGUE PEOPLE._
The core of society is compact enough, made up as it is of those real
doers of the world's work who are clear as to what they want and who
pursue a definite object with both meaning and method. But outside
this solid nucleus lies a floating population of vague people;
nebulous people; people without mental coherence or the power of
intellectual growth; people without purpose, without aim, who drift
with any current anywhere, making no attempt at conscious steering and
having no port to which they desire to steer; people who are
emphatically loose in their mental hinges, and who cannot be trusted
with any office requiring distinct perception or exact execution;
people to whom existence is something to be got through with as little
trouble and as much pleasure as may be, but who have not the faintest
idea that life contains a principle which each man ought to make clear
to himself and work out at any cost, and to which he ought to
subordinate and harmonize all his faculties and his efforts. These
vague people of nebulous minds compose the larger half of the world,
and count for just so much dead weight which impedes, or gives its
inert strength to the active agents, as it chances to be handled.
They are the majority who vote in committees and all assemblies as
they are influenced by the one or two clear-minded leaders who know
what they are about, and who drive them like sheep by the mere force
of a definite idea and a resolute will.
Yet if there is nothing on which vague people are clear, and if they
are not difficult to influence as the majority, there is much on which
they are positive as a matter of private conviction. In opposition to
the exhortation to be able to give a reason for the faith that is in
us, they can give no reason for anything they believe, or fancy they
believe. They are sure of the result; but the logical method by which
that result has been reached is beyond their power to remember or
understand. To argue with them is to spend labour and strength in
vain, like trying to make ropes out of sea-sand. Beaten off at every
point, they settle down again into the old vapoury, I believe; and it
is like fighting with ghosts to attempt to convince them of a better
way. They look at you helplessly; assent loosely to your propositions;
but when you come to the necessary deduction, they double back in a
vague assertion that they do not agree with you--they cannot prove you
wrong but they are sure that they are right; and you know then that
the collapse is hopeless. If this meant tenacity, it would be so far
respectable, even though the conviction were erroneous; but it is the
mere unimpressible fluidity of vagueness, the impossibility of giving
shape and coherence to a floating fog or a formless haze.
Vague as to the basis of their beliefs, they are vaguer still as to
their facts. These indeed are like a ladder of which half the rungs
are missing. They never remember a story and they cannot describe what
they have seen. Of the first they are sure to lose the point and to
entangle the thread; of the last they forget all the details and
confound both sequence and position. As to dates, they are as if lost
in a wood when you require definite centuries, years, months; but they
are great in the chronological generosity of 'about,' which is to them
what the Middle Ages and Classic Times are to uncertain historians. It
is as much as they can do to remember their own birthday; but they are
never sure of their children's; and generally mix up names and ages in
a manner that exasperates the young people like a personal insult.
With the best intentions in the world they do infinite mischief. They
detail what they think they have heard of their neighbours' sayings
and doings; but as they never detail anything exactly, nor twice
alike, by the time they have told the story to half a dozen friends
they have given currency to half a dozen different chimeras which
never existed save in their own woolly imaginations. No repute is safe
with them, even though they may be personally good-natured and anxious
not to do any one harm; for they are so vague that they are always
setting afloat exaggerations which are substantially falsehoods; and
if you tell them the most innocent fact of any one you would not
injure for worlds--say your daughter or your dearest friend--they are
sure to repeat it with additions and distortions, till they have made
it into a Frankenstein which no one now can subdue.
Beside this mental haziness, which neither sees nor shapes a fact
correctly, vague people are loose and unstable in their habits. They
know nothing of punctuality at home nor abroad; and you are never sure
that you will not stumble on them at meal-times at what time soever
you may call. But worse than this, your own meal-times, or any other
times, are never safe from them. They float into your house
uncertainly, vaguely, without purpose, with nothing to say and nothing
to do, and for no reason that you can discover. And when they come
they stay; and you cannot for the life of you find out what they want,
nor why they have come at all. They invade you at all times; in your
busy hours; on your sacred days; and sit there in a chaotic kind of
silence, or with vague talk which tires your brains to bring to a
focus. But they are too foggy to understand anything like a delicate
hint, and if you want to get rid of them, you must risk a quarrel and
effectively shoulder them out. They will be no loss. They are so much
driftweed in your life, and you can make no good of them for yourself
nor others.
Even when they undertake to help you, they do you more harm than good
by the hazy way in which they understand, and the inexactness with
which they carry out, your wishes. They volunteer to get you by
favour the thing you want and cannot find in the general way of
business--say, something of a peculiar shade of olive-green--and they
bring you in triumph a brilliant cobalt. They know the very animal you
are looking for, they say, with a confidence that impresses you, and
they send to your stable a grey horse to match your bay pony; and if
you trust to their uncontrolled action in your affairs, you find
yourself committed to responsibilities you cannot meet and whereby you
are brought to the verge of destruction.
They do all this mischief, not for want of goodwill but for want of
definiteness of perception; and are as sorry as you are when they make
'pie' and not a legible sheet. Their desire is good, but a vague
desire to help is equal to no help at all; or even worse--it is a
positive evil, and throws you wrong by just so much as it attempts to
set you straight. They are as unsatisfactory if you try to help them.
They are in evil case, and you are philanthropically anxious to assist
them. You think that one vigorous push would lift the car of their
fortunes out of the rut in which it has stuck; and you go to them with
the benevolent design of lending your shoulder as the lever. You
question them as to the central fact which they wish changed; for you
know that in most cases misfortunes crystallize round one such evil
centre, which, being removed, the rest would go well. But your vague
friends can tell you nothing. They point out this little superficial
inconvenience, that small remediable annoyance, as the utmost they can
do in the way of definiteness; but when you want to get to the core,
you find nothing but a cloudy complaint of general ill-will, or a
universal run of untoward circumstances with which you cannot grapple.
To cut off the hydra's heads was difficult enough; but could even
Hercules have decapitated the Djinn who rose in a volume of smoke from
the fisherman's jar?
It is the same in matters of health. Only medical men know to the full
the difficulty of dealing with vague people when it is necessary that
these should be precise. They can localize no pain, define no
sensations. If the doctor thinks he has caught hold of one leading
symptom, it fades away as he tries to examine it; and, probe as he
may, he comes to nothing more definite than a pervading sense of
discomfort, which he must resolve into its causes as he best can. So
with their suspicions; and vague people are often strangely suspicious
and distrustful. They tell you in a loose kind of way that such or
such a man is a rogue, such or such a woman no better than she should
be. You ask them for their data--they have none; you suggest that they
are mistaken, or at least that they should hold themselves as mistaken
until they can prove the contrary, and you offer your version of the
reputations aspersed--your vague friends listen to you amiably, then
go back on their charge and say, 'I am sure of it'--which ends the
conversation. They rely on their impression as other people rely on
known facts; and a foggy belief is to them what a mathematical
demonstration is to the exact.
In business matters they are simply maddening. They never have the
necessary papers; they do not answer letters; they confuse your
questions and reply at random or not at all; and they forget all dates
and details. When they go to their lawyer on business they leave
certificates and drafts behind them locked up where no one can get at
them; or if they send directions and the keys, they tell the servant
to look for an oblong blue envelope in the right-hand drawer, when
they ought to have said a square white parcel in the left. They give
you vague commissions to execute; and you have to find your way in the
fog to the best of your ability. They say they want something like
something else you have never seen, and they cannot give an address
more exact than 'somewhere in Oxford Street.' They think the man's
name is Baker, or something like that. Perhaps it is Flower; but the
suggestion of ideas ought to be intelligible to you, and is quite near
enough for them. They ask you to meet them when they come up to
London, but they do not give you either the station or the train. You
have to make a guess as near as you can; and when you reproach them,
they pay you the compliment of saying you are so clever, it was not
necessary for them to explain.
If they have any friends out in Australia or India, they inquire of
you, just returned, if you happened to meet them? When you ask, Where
were they stationed?--they say they do not know; and when you suggest
that Madras and Calcutta are not in the same Presidencies, that India
is a large place and Australia not quite like an English county, they
look helpless and bewildered, and drift away into the vague geography
familiar to them, 'somewhere in India,' 'somewhere in Australia,' and
'I thought you might have met them.' For geography, like history, is
one of the branches of the tree of knowledge they have never climbed,
and the fruits thereof are as though they were not.
But apart from the personal discomforts to which vague people subject
themselves, and the absurdities of which they are guilty, one cannot
help speculating on the spiritual state of folks to whom nothing is
precise, nothing definite, and no question of faith clearly thought
out. To be sure they may be great in the realm of conviction; but so
is the African savage when he hears the ghosts of his ancestors pass
howling in the woods; so is the Assassin of the Mountain, when he sees
heaven open as he throws himself on the spears of his enemies in an
ecstacy of faith, to be realized by slaughter and suicide. Convictions
based on imagination, unsupported by facts or proofs, are as worthless
in a moral as in a logical point of view; but the vague have nothing
better; and whether as politicians or as pietists, though they are
warm partizans they are but feeble advocates, fond of flourishing
about large generalities, but impossible to be pinned to any point and
unable to defend any position. To those who must have something
absolute and precise, however limited--one inch of firmly-laid
foundation on which to build up the superstructure--it is a matter of
more wonder than envy how the vague are content to live for ever in a
haze which has no clearness of outline, no definiteness of detail, and
how they can make themselves happy in a name--calling their fog faith,
and therewith counting themselves blessed.
_ARCADIA._
Perhaps the largest amount of simple pleasure possible to adult life
is to be found in the first weeks of the summer's holiday, when the
hard-worked man of business leaves his office and all its anxieties
behind him, and goes off to the sea-side or the hills for a couple of
months' relaxation. Everything is so fresh to him, it is like the
renewal of his boyhood; and if he happens to have chosen a picturesque
place, where the houses stand well and make that ornate kind of
landscape to be found in show-places, he wonders how it is that people
who can stay here ever leave, or tire of the beauties that are so
delightful to him. Yet he hears of this comfortable mansion, with its
park and well-appointed grounds, waiting for an occupant; he is told
of that fairyland cottage, embowered in roses and jessamine, with a
garden gay and redolent with flowers, to be had for a mere song; and
he finds to his surprise that the owners of these choice corners of
Arcadia are only anxious to escape from what he would, if he could, be
only anxious to retain.
In his first days this restlessness, this discontent, is simply
inconceivable. What more do they want than what they have? Why, that
field lying there in the sunshine, dotted about with dun-coloured cows
which glow like glorified Cuyps in the evening red, and backed by rock
and tree and tumbling cascade, would be enough to make him happy. He
could never weary of such a lovely bit of home scenery; and if to this
he adds a view of the sea, or the crags and purple shadows of a
mountain, he has wherewith to make him blessed for the remainder of
his life. So he thinks while the smoke of London and the sulphur of
the Metropolitan still cling about his throat, and the roar of the
streets has not quite died out of his ears.