[Speech of Sarah Grand [Mrs. M'Fall] at the annual ladies' banquet of
the Whitefriars Club, London, May 4, 1900. Max O'Rell [Paul Blouet]
acted as chairman. L. F. Austin, who spoke earlier than Madame Grand,
said, turning to Max O'Rell: "It used to be said of certain
politicians by way of odium that they mumbled the dry bones of
political economy; but you, sir, who sit trembling in that chair
[laughter]--you are trying not to look it, but you are trembling with
apprehension of the delicately anointed barb with which Madame Sarah.
Grand will presently transfix you [laughter]; you must feel that we
shall not very long be permitted even to mumble the barren epigrams of
a vanished ascendancy."]
MR. CHAIRMAN:--I have the honor to propose the toast of "Mere
Man" [laughter], but why "Mere Man," I want to know? After all that has
been said this evening so truthfully on the subject of "Sovran Woman,"
it is impossible for me to use such an epithet without feeling myself in
an invidious position, in the position of the dog that bites the hand
which has just caressed it--or rather I should feel myself in that
position if I were in any way responsible for the use of the ungracious
word. I beg most emphatically to state that I am not in any way
responsible for it. I decline to be identified with such an expression:
I decline to be accused of calling man any names [laughter], any names
that I have not already called him. [Laughter.] I do not decline out of
consideration for mere man altogether, but in self-defence. To use such
an expression deprives me of any dignity which I might myself derive
from the dignity of my subject. Besides, the words in my mouth, were I
to be identified with them, would be used against me as a bomb by a
whole section of the press, to blow me up. [Laughter.] I object to be
blown up for nothing by a whole section of the press. [Laughter.] That
is the sort of thing which almost ruffles my equanimity. My comfort is,
that no one can accuse me of having originated such an expression,
because it is well known no woman ever originated anything. [Laughter.]
I assure you I have seen it so stated in print; and in one article I
read on the subject the perturbation of the writer, lest there should be
any mistake about it, so agitated his grammar that it was impossible to
parse it. I should like to know who was responsible in the first place
for the expression which has been imposed upon me. It seems to me there
is strong presumptive evidence that it was by man himself that man was
dubbed mere man. If the lords of creation choose to masquerade sometimes
as mere man by all means let them.
The saying is, "In small things, liberty; in great things, unity; in all
things, charity," but when you meet a man who describes himself as a
mere man, you would always do well to ask what he wants, because, since
man first swung himself from his bough in the forest primeval and stood
upright on two legs, he has never assumed that position for nothing.
[Laughter.] My own private opinion, which I confide to you, knowing it
will go no further, is that he assumes that tone, as a rule, to draw
sovran woman. [Laughter.] Mere man is a paradoxical creature--it is not
always possible to distinguish between his sober earnest and his
leg-pulling exercises. [Laughter.] One has to be on one's guard, and woe
be to the woman who in these days displays that absence of the sense of
humor which is such a prominent characteristic of our comic papers.
[Laughter.] I do not mean to say for a moment that man assumes his
"mere man" tone for unpleasant purposes. On the contrary, he assumes it
for party purposes as a rule--for dinner party purposes. [Laughter.]
When man is in his mere man mood sovran woman would do well to ask for
anything that she wants--for it is then that he holds the sceptre out to
her. [Laughter.] Unfortunately, the mood does not last; if it did he
would have given us the suffrage ages ago. Sovran woman is the Uitlander
of civilization--and man is her Boer. [Laughter.] It seems to me that
sovran woman is very much in the position of Queen Esther; she has her
crown, and her kingdom, and her royal robes, but she is liable to have
her head snapped off at any moment. [Laughter.] On the other hand,
there are hundreds of men who have their heads snapped off every day.
[Laughter.] Mere man has his faults, no doubt, but sovran woman also can
be a rasping sort of creature, especially if she does not cultivate
sympathy with cigarettes as she gets older. [Laughter.] Let us be fair
to mere man. Mere man has always treated me with exemplary fairness, and
I certainly have never maintained that the blockhead majority is
entirely composed of men; neither have I ever insinuated that it is man
that makes all the misery.
Personally, and speaking as a woman whose guiding principle through life
has been never to do anything for herself that she can get a nice man to
do for her [laughter], a principle which I have found entirely
successful, and which I strongly recommend to every other
woman--personally I have always found mere man an excellent comrade.
[Applause.] He has stood by me loyally, and held out an honest hand to
me, and lent me his strength when mine was failing, and helped me
gallantly over many an awkward bit of the way, and that, too, at times
when sovran woman, whom I had so respected and admired and championed,
had nothing for me but bonnet-pins. [Laughter.] It does upset one's
ideas and unsettle one's principles when sovran woman has nothing for
one but bonnet-pins. [Laughter.] The sharp points of those pins have
made me a little doubtful about sovran woman at times--a little apt to
suspect that in private life her name is Mrs. Harris [laughter], but I
must be careful about what I say in this connection lest it should be
supposed that I have been perverted.
In the great republic of letters to which I have the honor to belong--in
the distinguished position of the letter "Z"--my experience is that
woman suffers no indignity at the hands of man on account of her sex.
That is the sort of experience which creates a prejudice. It is apt to
color the whole of one's subsequent opinions. It gives one a sort of
idea that there are men in the world who would stand by a woman on
occasion; and I must confess that I began life with a very strong
prejudice of that kind. For a woman to have had a good father is to have
been born an heiress. If you had asked me as a child who ran to help me
when I fell, I should have answered, "My daddy." When a woman begins
life with a prejudice of this kind she never gets over it. The prejudice
of a man for his mother is feeble in comparison with the prejudice of a
woman for her father, when she has had a man for her father and not one
of what Shelley called, those--
"Things whose trade is over ladies
To lean and flirt and stare and simper,
Till all that is divine in woman
Grows cruel, courteous, smooth, inhuman,
Crucified 'twixt a smile and whimper."'
Whatever that woman has to suffer she never loses her faith in man.
Remembering what her father was, she always believes there are good men
and true in the world somewhere. The recollection of her father becomes
a buffer between that woman and the shocks and jars of her after life;
because of him, there is nothing distorted in her point of view, and she
remains sane. It rather spoils a woman in some ways to have a good
husband as well as a good father, because then she is so sure that
"God's in His heaven,
All's well with the world,"
that she becomes utterly selfish, and cares for nothing that is outside
her own little circle. But the thing to guard against is loss of faith.
Men and women who have lost faith in each other never rise above the
world again--one wing is broken, and they cannot soar. It has been said
that the best way to manage man is to feed the brute [laughter], but
sovran woman never made that discovery for herself--I believe it was a
man in his mere man mood who first confided the secret to some young
wife in distress--somebody else's young wife. [Laughter.] Feed him and
flatter him. Why not? Is there anything more delightful in this world
than to be flattered and fed? Let us do as we would be done by. It seems
to me sometimes that it is impossible in reviewing our social relations
ever to be wholly in earnest. One's opinions do wobble so. [Laughter.]
If one would earn a reputation for consistency one must be like that
great judge who declined to hear more than one side of the case because
he found that hearing the other side only confused him. [Laughter.]
The thing about mere man which impresses me most, which fills me with
the greatest respect, is not his courage in the face of death, but the
courage with which he faces life. The way in which we face death is not
necessarily more heroic than the way in which we face life. The
probability is that you never think less about yourself than you do at
the moment when you and eternity are face to face. When you are sick
unto death you are too sick to care whether you live or die. In some
great convulsion of nature, a great typhoon, for instance, when the wind
in its fury lashes the walls of the house till they writhe, and there
are the shrieks of people in dire distress, and fire, and the crash of
giant waves, and all that makes for horror, the shock of these brute
irresponsible forces of nature is too tremendous for fear to obtrude.
Thought is suspended--you are in an ecstasy of awful emotion, emotion
made perfect by the very strength of it.
But when it comes to facing life day after day, and day after day, as so
many men have to face it, the workingmen, in all classes of society,
upon whom the home depends, men whose days are only too often a weary
effort, and whose nights are an ache of anxiety, lest the strength
should give out which means bread, when one thinks of the lives these
men live, and the way in which they live them, the brave, uncomplaining
way in which they fight to the death for those dear to them, when one
considers mere man from this point of view, one is moved to enthusiasm,
and one is fain to confess that "sovran woman" on a pedestal is a poor
sort of creature compared with this kind of mere man in that so often
she not only fails to help and cheer him in his heroic efforts, but to
appreciate that he is making any effort at all. I positively refuse to
subscribe to the assertion, "How poor a thing is man!" [Laughter.] It
takes more genius to be a man than manhood to be a genius. [Applause.]
As to the differences between men and women, I believe that when finally
their accounts have been properly balanced it will be found that it has
been a case of six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, both in the
matter of sovereignty and of mereness [laughter], and, therefore, without
prejudice, I propose that the sixes to which I belong shall rise and
cordially drink to the health of the other half dozens, our kind and
generous hosts of to-night. [Applause.]