OF A WONDERFUL QUALITY IN WOMEN
Darwin expended many years of his life in the study of disagreeable
animals, that he might prove the adaptability of organism to
environment. How much pleasanter and briefer had been his task, if he
had begun his studies at once with the creature whose long history has
been one unbroken succession of inspired and noble adaptations!
Woman's adaptability to man is one of the most mysterious, as it is
perhaps the most pathetic, of all the modes of her mysterious being.
Like certain protection-seeking animals, she is always the colour of the
rock, the husband-rock, in whose shadow she lives. Sometimes, of course,
she is her own rock; but in such cases man is never her chameleon to a
like degree or indeed in a like manner. Such adaptability is not one of
the forms of his greatness, and even when he achieves it, it is not
becoming to him.
For woman's adaptability is not the domination of a weaker nature by a
stronger, it is in itself a noble and world-necessary form of strength.
Strength is needed as well for the taking as the making of an
impression,--something more than mere ductility. Weakness may never bear
the stamp of power,--it breaks in the moulding; and it is rather because
woman is so strong that she is able to take the Caesarean stamp of any
form of power. Nor cares she by whose hands she is moulded, whose image
she wears, be it warrior, poet, or priest, so long as she feels the
veritable grasp and impress of power. Some women are already made in the
image of the man they are to love before they meet him. Very wonderful,
very terrible, then, is the meeting, and it is a meeting that usually
comes too late. But oftener God gives a man a little measure of
porcelain and a handful of stars, and leaves him to make the woman he
needs for himself; and very wonderful too is that making,--though the
man will always have been the father before he was the lover.
Why, one may ponder, should a man who is great enough to mould a woman
to help him be great, not be great enough to do without her at all? Let
lovers of the unfathomable ask at the same time: Why is man, man? and
woman, woman? and what are both?
This gentle doll with the sweet breath, which he nips up in his arms and
kisses, and gives a tongue that she may talk back to him his own words,
endows with brains that she may think his thoughts,--a quaint little
helpless lovely parody of his wisdom and power; a toy, yes; a
refreshment, yes; a place of peace, yes,--but how much more! Yes, more
by all that we don't understand when we say "woman."
Why a great man should need, not a great woman, but a little woman, a
very little woman,--how is it to be explained, unless it be that woman,
however little, is mysteriously great, just because she is a woman, a
little woman? Unknown properties were wrapped up somewhere in that
porcelain; to press it with the lips is to feel strange virtue coming
into one,--the devil was in those stars.
Great men are only nourished on the elements. Woman is an element, all
the elements in one,--earth, air, fire, and water, met together in a
rose. She is a spring among the rocks, and she comes up dimpling from
the roots of the world. She is just as simple and just as strange. O!
little shining spring of woman that is called Jenny, a great man must
draw up through you the unfathomed, deep strengths of the old world. He
bends above you and drinks, and as he drinks, his face is mirrored
in yours.
"Jenny, I don't think I'd read 'Miss ----,' if I were you," would say
the great man.
"No, dear?" So Jenny was presently reading Ruskin instead, and wondering
how she could ever have read "Miss ----." And deep in her dear heart she
was saying, "Of course not; great men's wives never read 'Miss ----.'"
And yet had the great man said, "Read Gaboriau instead,"--as a certain
very great man does,--Jenny's heart would have said, "Of course, great
men's wives always read Gaboriau."
No! great men's wives read "Sesame and Lilies," and "Sartor Resartus,"
and "Marius the Epicurean," and "Richard Feverel," and "Virginibus
Puerisque,"--they even try to read Newman's "Apologia." Such were the
books on the sunnier side of Theophilus Londonderry's little library in
No. 3 Zion Place. In dark corners behind easy-chairs were the deep-sea
pools of theology,--pools which had long since given up all the fish
they had in them for their owner,--slabs of antique divinity, such as
you would find likewise in the equally cherished library of
Londonderry Senior.
Such were the fathers that slumbered on in a well-earned repose, and
which, far from desiring new readers, were so old that they were glad to
rest undisturbed,--being far too self-important to confuse a considerate
regard for their repose with neglect. And many of them were really quite
valuable as decoration, because of their fine old coats of gilded
leather; and such were ranged in the more penetrable shadows or even in
the lamp-light. Theophilus would point to them as to a portrait-gallery
of dead ancestors. One might admire the quaint and distinguished cut of
their clothes without dreaming of wearing the same,--and indeed old
divinity, he used to say, was poor food for young divines.
His divinity indeed was fed on the technical side, it is to be feared,
by the more destructive biblical criticism, like most destructive
engines, coming all the way from Germany, and at its more vital centres
by importations of strong meat from Russia and Scandinavia. Tolstoi and
Ibsen were his archprophets.
There was likewise a great Paris moralist called Zola, and a strange old
American father called Walt Whitman. And beauty, that can never be far
away from strength, found many new and wonderful prophets in that little
library,--poets and painters and musicians of whom hardly anyone else in
Coalchester had yet heard, and certainly no one above the age of
twenty-five.
Surely youth is in nothing more marvellous than in its mysterious power
of attracting to itself into the most out-of-the-way places the
sustenance and companionship it needs. In the unlikeliest wilderness
inspired youth is never without the mysteriously-brought food and the
company of angels. Powers of the air will sweep across continents to
rescue it from prison, soft gales travel from south to north to sow
seeds of beauty in its narrow ways, and little songs will flutter like
butterflies for hundreds of miles to cheer its heart.
The Time-Spirit had given its angels charge concerning these young
people, and, remote as they were from all the fiery centres of thought
and the dreaming schools of art, Zion Place, no less than the Rue de
Rivoli, took its thought of the newest and its beauty of the best.