But there is a further fact; forgotten also because we moderns forget
that there is a female point of view. The woman’s wisdom stands partly,
not only for a wholesome hesitation about punishment, but even for a
wholesome hesitation about absolute rules. There was something feminine
and perversely true in that phrase of Wilde’s, that people should not
be treated as the rule, but all of them as exceptions. Made by a man the
remark was a little effeminate; for Wilde did lack the masculine power
of dogma and of democratic cooperation. But if a woman had said it
it would have been simply true; a woman does treat each person as a
peculiar person. In other words, she stands for Anarchy; a very ancient
and arguable philosophy; not anarchy in the sense of having no customs
in one’s life (which is inconceivable), but anarchy in the sense of
having no rules for one’s mind. To her, almost certainly, are due all
those working traditions that cannot be found in books, especially those
of education; it was she who first gave a child a stuffed stocking
for being good or stood him in the corner for being naughty. This
unclassified knowledge is sometimes called rule of thumb and sometimes
motherwit. The last phrase suggests the whole truth, for none ever
called it fatherwit.
Now anarchy is only tact when it works badly. Tact is only anarchy
when it works well. And we ought to realize that in one half of
the world--the private house--it does work well. We modern men are
perpetually forgetting that the case for clear rules and crude penalties
is not self-evident, that there is a great deal to be said for the
benevolent lawlessness of the autocrat, especially on a small scale;
in short, that government is only one side of life. The other half is
called Society, in which women are admittedly dominant. And they have
always been ready to maintain that their kingdom is better governed than
ours, because (in the logical and legal sense) it is not governed at
all. “Whenever you have a real difficulty,” they say, “when a boy is
bumptious or an aunt is stingy, when a silly girl will marry somebody,
or a wicked man won’t marry somebody, all your lumbering Roman Law and
British Constitution come to a standstill. A snub from a duchess or a
slanging from a fish-wife are much more likely to put things straight.”
So, at least, rang the ancient female challenge down the ages until the
recent female capitulation. So streamed the red standard of the higher
anarchy until Miss Pankhurst hoisted the white flag.
It must be remembered that the modern world has done deep treason to the
eternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum. A man
must be dead before he swings. It has substituted an idea of fatalistic
alternation for the mediaeval freedom of the soul seeking truth.
All modern thinkers are reactionaries; for their thought is always a
reaction from what went before. When you meet a modern man he is always
coming from a place, not going to it. Thus, mankind has in nearly all
places and periods seen that there is a soul and a body as plainly
as that there is a sun and moon. But because a narrow Protestant sect
called Materialists declared for a short time that there was no
soul, another narrow Protestant sect called Christian Science is
now maintaining that there is no body. Now just in the same way
the unreasonable neglect of government by the Manchester School has
produced, not a reasonable regard for government, but an unreasonable
neglect of everything else. So that to hear people talk to-day one would
fancy that every important human function must be organized and avenged
by law; that all education must be state education, and all employment
state employment; that everybody and everything must be brought to the
foot of the august and prehistoric gibbet. But a somewhat more liberal
and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross
is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and
independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters
a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose. The huge
fundamental function upon which all anthropology turns, that of sex
and childbirth, has never been inside the political state, but always
outside of it. The state concerned itself with the trivial question of
killing people, but wisely left alone the whole business of getting them
born. A Eugenist might indeed plausibly say that the government is
an absent-minded and inconsistent person who occupies himself with
providing for the old age of people who have never been infants. I will
not deal here in any detail with the fact that some Eugenists have
in our time made the maniacal answer that the police ought to control
marriage and birth as they control labor and death. Except for this
inhuman handful (with whom I regret to say I shall have to deal with
later) all the Eugenists I know divide themselves into two sections:
ingenious people who once meant this, and rather bewildered people who
swear they never meant it--nor anything else. But if it be conceded
(by a breezier estimate of men) that they do mostly desire marriage to
remain free from government, it does not follow that they desire it to
remain free from everything. If man does not control the marriage market
by law, is it controlled at all? Surely the answer is broadly that man
does not control the marriage market by law, but the woman does control
it by sympathy and prejudice. There was until lately a law forbidding
a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister; yet the thing happened
constantly. There was no law forbidding a man to marry his deceased
wife’s scullery-maid; yet it did not happen nearly so often. It did not
happen because the marriage market is managed in the spirit and by the
authority of women; and women are generally conservative where classes
are concerned. It is the same with that system of exclusiveness by
which ladies have so often contrived (as by a process of elimination)
to prevent marriages that they did not want and even sometimes procure
those they did. There is no need of the broad arrow and the fleur-de
lis, the turnkey’s chains or the hangman’s halter. You need not strangle
a man if you can silence him. The branded shoulder is less effective and
final than the cold shoulder; and you need not trouble to lock a man in
when you can lock him out.
The same, of course, is true of the colossal architecture which we call
infant education: an architecture reared wholly by women. Nothing can
ever overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even the male
child is born closer to his mother than to his father. No one, staring
at that frightful female privilege, can quite believe in the equality of
the sexes. Here and there we read of a girl brought up like a tom-boy;
but every boy is brought up like a tame girl. The flesh and spirit of
femininity surround him from the first like the four walls of a house;
and even the vaguest or most brutal man has been womanized by being
born. Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery; but
nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would belong
to such a monster as man that was born of a man.
*****