of jealousy, of vanity, of precision and intolerance.
These qualities are not vices, unless we call jealousy one, but
they are capable of making life intolerable to any one compelled to
associate intimately with the woman who possesses and develops them.
A man under certain conditions of excitement and provocation is apt
to become coarse and brutal. He swears, he bangs the furniture about,
he tells his wife she is a fool, or a liar, or a scold, and taunts her
with cruel insults.
He visibly, to her eyes if not to his own, steps down from his position
as man and gentleman and becomes an object of scorn and loathing.
Now comes in her foibles to fan the flame his vices have kindled. She
uses her nimble tongue like a lash, she mimics him, she _looks_ at him,
she wishes she had a kodak to take his picture--in fact, she arouses
all that is worst in his nature to a condition of frenzy, and after
that point anything is possible. He may strike her; he may heap upon
her insults so terrible that no penitence can ever wash them away; he
may even be so wrought upon by rage and that sense of helplessness
which assails a man when a clever woman lets loose her tongue upon him
as to lay out his brute strength upon her and lay her dead at his feet.
Two men or two women rarely if ever stir each other to such a pitch of
irresponsible wrath as that to which an angry woman can drive an angry
man.
Or let us impartially reverse the case. One of a woman’s foibles is
love of admiration and homage. She has beauty and fascination of
manner, and she likes to see their power confessed. Her husband is
a jealous man, and at the same time indifferent to those claims in
his wife which he was prompt to confess before they became his own
property. She seeks amusement and consolation in public and flirts
with this or that admirer, rather pleased at finding that she can stir
her careless lord to frantic jealousy. If she persists, and from the
mere love of power goads and teases him too far, he may break loose
from those bonds of morality which every decent man assumes with his
marriage vows and go to the bad generally, revenging himself upon his
giddy wife by flaunting before her face rivals whose very rivalry is a
degradation to her.
Or perhaps her foible is an inordinate precision. Her homo is like a
nunnery. Her own apartments are like those of an old maid. She cannot
have smoking anywhere in the house because it scents the walls and
furniture. She cannot have newspapers or paper novels thrown about
on chairs and tables. If the husband, manlike, pushes the furniture
this way, and that, throws open a window, and rudely twists the lace
draperies like a rope to keep them out of the way, the precise woman
replaces everything the moment his hand leaves it--perhaps silently and
with a long-suffering air of patient martyrdom, perhaps with a cold
and formal request that Mr. So-and-so will not turn her parlors into a
caucus room or worse.
The precise woman carries her precision further than the furniture. Her
husband, coming home from his all-day association with men, tells his
wife what he thinks a good story or a funny jest, or tells what some
man has told him about some other man. The precise woman is shocked.
Perhaps she ought to be shocked; perhaps she ought to make her husband
feel that he has come home to a purer and more refined atmosphere than
he has been breathing through the day, but her foible of precision
comes in to aggravate his vice of coarseness, and she rebukes him in
a cold and bitter fashion that only disgusts and annoys him, instead
of acknowledging the fun and then gently and deftly suggesting that it
might have been more delicately put; or else by a certain surprised and
pained look and a softly breathed “Oh, Ned!” or perhaps with a caress
and a whispered word like “Oh, darling, don’t; please don’t”--in one of
these ways or in some similar fashion a sweet, natural woman will soon
make her husband ashamed of being coarse, at least in her presence, and
she will have helped instead of hindering him.
But just so sure as a coarsely-genial man marries a precise and
intolerant woman, just so sure is she to drive him from home and from
her presence. He may not become unfaithful, as the husband of the flirt
does, but he seeks in his hours of leisure the society of other men or
of women who, as he puts it, “don’t care what you say to them.” Or he
lounges behind the scenes of the theater, or in the stables, or at
social assemblages far below his own level--anywhere, in fact, that he
can feel free and untrammeled.
I once remonstrated with a man whom I had known before his marriage as
a very genial, good-humored fellow, with the capacity for becoming a
really charming man.
“Why do you go to such places? Don’t you see that you are letting
yourself down terribly? What would your mother have thought if she had
heard of your being there last night?” demanded I, with the freedom of
long friendship; and he, with a sort of groan, replied:
“I know it; it’s all true; you can’t tell me more than I sometimes tell
myself. But what can I do? I’m a fellow that likes a good joke and a
jolly laugh, and to let loose generally when business is over and play
begun. But you know my wife--that is, you’ve seen her--you couldn’t
know unless you lived with her how horribly good she is----”
“Horribly good!” echoed I.
“Yes, just that,” responded my friend. “She’s neat and nice, of course.
In fact, I fell in love with her look and air like a white lily, but if
I were going to ‘call her pet names, darling,’ now, I’d change White
Lily into ‘Ice Woman.’ When I get home at night, I want to throw down
my hat and coat, and kick off my boots and unbuckle the armor I’ve worn
all day, and ‘lay off’ generally. I want a sweet, loving little woman
to come and give me a kiss, and say she’s glad to see me, and ask if I
won’t have something to drink--why, I’d be grateful if she offered me a
cup of tea even! But, no; it’s ‘Why, John, what a noise you make; and
pray don’t throw your hat down on that chair. Have you cleansed your
feet on the door mat?’
“Then if I try to tell her a joke, or a story, or something lively, she
pinches up her mouth like a vise, and says I insult her, and, oh, dear!
I feel just like that fellow who was shut into an iron cell, and saw
the walls close in and in upon him till they crushed him flat. I have
to get out of it somehow, and you know when a horse kicks over the
traces he generally bolts to finish up with.”
A similar foible to this is that of religious intolerance. Almost
every man wishes his wife to have some religious belief and practices.
In fact, I think a good many men look to their wives to take care
of the spiritual concerns of the family, just as they do after the
housekeeping or the mending. It is a part of their duty to the marital
firm. But a great many women pursue this duty until it becomes a
nuisance. They are not content with going to church in season and out
of season themselves, but they must drive their husbands thither at the
point of the bayonet--that bayonet of their tongue, which they know how
to use so fatally.
The young man of the present day is not a church-going animal as a
general thing. He will go as a bachelor sometimes on the chance of
walking home by the longest way with some pretty girl. He will go while
he is engaged because his _fiancée_ wishes him to, and he will go when
he is first married as a sort of obligation to “forswear sack and live
cleanly” that he has taken upon himself. But after the first year he
becomes accustomed to his new dignities, and is very apt when Sunday
morning comes round to have “a little headache,” or to feel very tired
and in need of a good rest, or to boldly declare that “he’d rather go
for a walk out of town.” In fact, he doesn’t want to go to church.
Now is the time when the wife, if she herself is a churchgoer and
a religious woman, has the opportunity either to make or mar the
happiness of her whole married life. If she is wise, she neither
argues, scolds nor sulks over her husband’s indevoutness, but goes her
way alone, trusting to time and tact and opportunity, one or the other
of which will, if she is patient and sweet and wise, generally give her
if not all at least part of what she desires.
But the intolerant woman! Alas, the father of evil must often be gay
and glad at seeing his work so well done with godly weapons. Bitter
speeches, direful forebodings as to his eternal doom, sneering
non-acceptance of excuses, a rigid and frozen air of pharisaic
displeasure--all these or even half of them will soon drive a man who
began by being careless and indifferent into bitter and honest hatred
of religion or any of its practices, and the vices of ribaldry and
profanity and blasphemy may spring up a sturdy crop from the seed sown
by the foible of intolerance and overrighteousness.
But not to multiply instances, it is, as it seems to me, a broad and
general truth that the vices of man and the foibles of woman act and
react upon each other with terrible power, and that when one of a
married couple finds him or herself confronted by an ill quality in the
other, which seems well-nigh intolerable, their first step should be
to keenly examine themselves or some vice or foible which acts as an
irritant and incentive to the other. The old saying that it takes two
to make a quarrel may be amplified to mean that when a married couple
lives unhappily the fault is not generally all on one side, and if each
party will honestly confess this and make some concessions the breach
may be healed, or at least lessened.
As a general rule, men are wanting in tact and adaptability, and
women are deficient in tolerance and patience. If both men and women
recognized these deficiencies and tried to remedy them, a great deal of
matrimonial trouble would be done away with almost imperceptibly, and
the marriage car would run upon velvet instead of cobble.
Of course, this general rule has exceptions, and a good many, too.
There are men so absorbed in their own selfish enjoyments, so bound in
their own vices, so utterly regardless of the welfare of other persons,
that no amount of self-sacrifice on the part of their wives would do
anything to soften or elevate them.
There are women so utterly frivolous, shallow and heartless that no
magnanimity or unselfish devotion upon the part of a husband could
elevate them.
Of such I have nothing to say, and probably nothing but death or some
other separation will help their sad case. But in the majority of
cases, if a man has vices, let the woman see to it that her foibles do
not aggravate them, and _vice versa_.
“_Verbum sapientia sufficit._”
XI.
WOMAN’S INTUITIONS.
“Your charming sex, as a rule, are not possessed of reasoning power,”
remarked a gentleman to me the other day. “They rush at conclusions in
the same sort of zigzag fashion that a humming bird darts at a bed of
clover. Nobody can tell which blossom she is aiming at, and I doubt if
she knows herself.”
“And yet I observe that the humming bird generally obtains the honey,”
remarked I dryly, “and however a woman reasons I observe that she
generally ‘gets there’s in the end.’”
“Aw! Ya-as--ah--‘gets there,’” mumbled my companion, who was an
Englishman not yet up in American slang. So I came to his aid with:
“She extracts what she wants from the question in hand just as the
humming bird extracts the honey, and I imagine the honey is just as
good and considerably less adulterated than if it had been crushed out
of the clover blossom by a steam engine.”
“And do they make honey by steam in your wonderful country?” demanded
my Englishman, eagerly catching at what seemed a tangible fact.
Well, an American would not have said it but I am sure a good many of
them think it, and especially those men whose reasoning powers are of
the heavy, wooden order which work like an old cider mill I once stood
and watched in the country, with creaks and groans portentous, and
which required a yoke of oxen to drag it round its little appointed
circuit.
Of course we all know that woman’s reason differs from man’s reason,
just as her light, agile figure differs from his breadth of brawn and
muscle. No woman is likely to excel in “putting the hammer,” or in
lifting heavy weights, or in a bout of fisticuffs in the ring, but a
great many women excel at tennis and billiards and archery, a good
many are excellent shots with light rifles, and some are as invincible
with the foils as Bussy d’Amboise or Henriot. Look, for instance, at
the Chevalier d’Eon, who fought many duels and killed many opponents
before she was discovered to be a woman. All of which goes to prove
that where quickness and skill are the qualities required, a woman is
just as likely to succeed as a man, although where weight and brawny
muscle are essential she does not claim equality.
What is true of the body is true of the mind in most cases: in fact our
friends, the theosophists and psychists, claim that the body is only
the outward and visible sign of the spirit within, and that what a man
is so he is bound to look, if not at the start, surely at the finish. I
don’t say this is true, for I have not made up my mind about it; but it
is a theory much in vogue just now.
I was saying very much the same thing the other day to a man, who
replied:
“Yes, women often play well at billiards, but they win the game by a
series of the most daring flukes and impossible hazards--plays that no
man would ever venture upon, and would be howled at if he did.”
“But you say they win the game,” remarked I, and he grumpily responded:
“Yes, they win, but they’ve no right to; and it’s just the same in
fencing. They dart under and over your guard, and use a foil more as if
it were a sting than a recognized weapon.”
“But if it were a real combat they would be likely to kill their
opponents?”
“Yes, the poor fellow would be spitted while he was trying to make out
what his fair enemy was doing.”
“Capital! That is just the parable I want to support my theory. You men
can’t or won’t allow that a woman has reasoning powers, but her tongue
is like her rapier--she may not use it according to the rules laid down
by men, but while her opponent is wondering what his fair enemy is
doing he finds himself stabbed to the heart.”
“To the heart, yes, but not generally to the brain,” responded my
friend, and I assured him that his retort was quite feminine in its
patness and conclusiveness.
But it is not only in argument that women show this side of
their complex nature, but in achieving whatever end they set
before themselves. They are not--that is, women, as a rule, are
not---consciously scheming and cunning; they do not say, “The best way
to win this success is to appear indifferent and to seem bent upon
something else,” but they all unconsciously act out that plan and so
achieve their end, they scarcely know how.
I have a friend who possesses a great many pictures and other
ornamental items of furnishing a room. She is, like many Americans,
very peripatetic in her disposition, and nearly every year sees her in
a new set of apartments. I lately visited her in her latest home and
noticed that very few of the pictures were hung, and that the bronzes,
china, statuettes, shrines, brackets, draperies--in fact, all the
objects of “bigotry and virtue”--were piled upon tables in the back
drawing room, evidently awaiting their fate.
“You have been here almost a week and not arranged your pretty things
yet!” exclaimed I; and she, with a little sigh replied:
“No! The inspiration hasn’t come yet. Until it does I haven’t the
faintest idea where any of those things belong, and if I insisted upon
arranging them very likely I should take such a dislike to the rooms
that I couldn’t stay in them.”
“But when the right moment comes,” suggested I, with a laugh, “you will
be like a poet who cannot wait for pen, ink and paper to put down his
idea.”
“Exactly,” replied my friend gravely. “When the right moment comes I
shall see the precise spot where every picture should hang, every vase
stand, every drapery be flung so as to look as if it had dropped there
by the happiest of accidents. My only trouble is lest the inspiration
shouldn’t come before my reception day comes round, for I positively
won’t let anybody else arrange them, and neither will I let the world
see the naked framework of my home.”
“Well, I shall come at any rate, for the skeleton in your cupboard is
an old friend of mine.”
“Yes, you may come, but the maid will probably tell you that I am in
bed with neuralgia. Then come right into my bedroom, and we will have a
cozy cup of tea all to ourselves.”
But when the reception day came round, and I presented myself with an
expectant smile just under the surface the maid simply ushered me into
the drawing room, where stood my hostess in the midst of her charming
surroundings, every one of which had found the very place of all others
where it looked the best and the most at home. Somebody was saying to
her as I approached:
“I am sure, Mrs. ----, that you select your apartments to fit your
pictures and ornaments. You saw, for instance, when you looked at this
room that your Bouguereau never could find another such light, and
that Venetian mirror and that pier were made for each other.”
“An eternal fitness for each other, haven’t they?” assented my friend,
turning to me with a twinkle of the eye as she murmured:
“The inspiration never came until noon to-day, but the moment it did I
called the servants, and we had everything done by 3 o’clock. Not bad,
is it?”
“Perfect, my dear; but your demon is a very unreliable official.”
“Wouldn’t do for a business man, would he?”
“Nor for a man of any sort,” thought I to myself, as I moved away, and
presently in my lonely drive I fell into my favorite fit of musing upon
the different characteristics of man and woman, and of the difficulty
each has in comprehending the other fully.
Probably of all the problems that puzzle the masculine student of
woman the most utterly insoluble is this matter of intuition. It is
far easier for a woman to understand the formal and laborious methods
of a man’s mind than for him to grasp the idea of an intuitive process
which cannot be formulated even by its owner. A man of intellectual
nature and regular education bases his every argument, his every
conviction, upon mathematical truths. He is fond of saying, “It is as
certain as that two and two make four,” and that to him is a perfectly
unassailable standpoint. He perceives that to the woman with whom he
argues the fact that two and two make four is not of the slightest
importance. She says, for instance, that a perfect army of street
roughs threatened her, and it was hours before she could get through
them. The man corrects her with:
“There were but four of the roughs, and it was not five minutes before
you were out of their reach and quite safe.”
“Only four indeed! More likely forty-four!” cries the woman, with scorn
and indignation.
“I assure you there were only four--two on one side of the door and two
on the other, and two and two make four, don’t they?”
“Not always, by any means,” retorts madame, with all the courage of her
convictions. “Not in this case, for instance. Two and two made a great
deal more than four for me, I assure you.”
And she is actually more correct than the man is. Four street ruffians,
inflamed with the lawless spirit of the mob and attempting to hustle
and annoy a lady simply because she is well dressed and looks
scornfully at them, become in her eyes and to her consciousness a great
many more than two and two--they become a crowd, a mob, a phalanx, a
terrifying and perhaps deadly force. She is quite right in saying that
in this case two and two did not make four, but forty-four, and that
the period of time during which she felt herself in their power was
to her without bounds or limit, but a chaos of endurance answering to
many hours of ordinary life. If the clock said it was but five minutes,
why, all the worse for the clock; and it must have been a male clock,
although they are generally called “she.”
But you can’t make a man see this. You, for instance--you are reading
it. Tell me, aren’t you saying to yourself:
“She means that to the frightened woman the mob _seemed_ large and the
time _seemed_ long, but in point of fact two men and two men are only
four men, and five minutes are but five minutes.”
There! That is exactly the difference between a man’s mind and a
woman’s. The man is fast bound, “tied and fettered in the chain,”
not “of his sins” perhaps, but of his mechanical make-up. He simply
_cannot_ take in the idea that an event is not what actually and
literally happens, but it is to each person the results it produces
upon that person’s mentality.
A volcanic eruption, for instance, or an earthquake, is to the
scientist a perfectly regular and comprehensible phenomenon of
nature--the combination and explosion of certain gases and the
liquefying and projection of certain mineral subterranean deposits. He
gets out of the way of the rivers of lava just as he would get out of
the way of a locomotive, but he is no more terrified by the one than
the other. It is simply a phenomenon of nature, like a snowstorm or a
high tide.
But to a savage, who had never seen or heard of such a thing, this
volcanic eruption is the malignant or tyrannical act of some mighty
spirit, some all-powerful demon who is threatening to destroy mankind
unless he is propitiated. He accordingly propitiates him either by
throwing his eldest son into one of the gaping chasms, or by vowing to
do some tremendous act of heroism, or perchance, if he is a very, very
good savage, by resolving not to flog his wife any more.
In any case, the eruption makes a big change in this savage’s career.
It is to him a matter of life and death. Its results last perhaps after
the man is dead.
Now, the scientist’s estimate of this phenomenon and the savage’s
estimate of the very same event are both true, perfectly true to the
individual forming the estimate. Neither one could possibly view the
occurrence from the standpoint of the other; neither one could perhaps
even put himself in the other’s place enough to see just what it was
the other believed. Each is to the other a poor, deluded fool, and the
savage despises and marvels at the philosopher just as much as the
philosopher at him.
Now, who shall say that either is absolutely right, to the
stultification of the other, any more than a mirror is a false mirror
because it shows you a different image from what it shows me?
And so by this rather roundabout course we come back to the different
workings of the man’s and the woman’s mind. Each arrives at a solution
of the problem, whatever it may be, by a route utterly unfamiliar, even
impossible, to the steps of the other. Perhaps the solution is the
same in essence, although somewhat differently expressed; perhaps, on
the other hand, the results are widely different; but in either case I
contend that both are right and neither wrong, and most women will be
ready to agree with me. Most men, on the other hand, will disagree and
exclaim contemptuously:
“How ridiculous! How exactly like a woman’s argument! Of course a
thing is either right or it’s wrong. How can two opposing views both
be correct? If two and two make four on one occasion, they do on every
occasion. It’s all nonsense, utter nonsense.”
So speaks the lord of creation and considers the matter settled, and so
it is for him; but the lady of creation has an equal right to an “_ipsé
dixit_” on this and every other topic of common interest and value to
both sexes, and she says:
“My friend, you are wrong. Things are not what they seem either to
you or to me. Things are what they become in the consciousness of
the individual receiving them. Two and two do generally make four, I
grant you; but there are occasions when they make infinitely more or
infinitely less, and it is your misfortune to be a man and therefore
unable to perceive this truth.”
If some reader of the masculine persuasion asks me, How do you know
this rather startling truth, and how do you prove it? I reply, with
that grand simplicity characteristic of great minds and great truths:
I know it by intuition, and I prove it by looking in upon my own
convictions, which tell me it is a truth.
If yours don’t tell you so, it is not a truth for you, and we continue
gazing, the one upon the gold and the other upon the silver side of the
shield, each assured that our own is the true side.