Part 8 (1/2)
In the case of men he would insist on a thorough treatment of his subject, and would avoid sentiment and personal details as insults to their intelligence; but what is he to do with rows of pretty faces that grow black as he touches upon the dialect of Socrates, but kindle into life and animation when he depicts the sage's snub nose? Anecdotes, pretty stories, s.n.a.t.c.hes of poetical quotation, slip in more and more as the students perceive and exercise their power. Men, too, are either intelligent or unintelligent, but the unhappy Professor at a Ladies'
College soon perceives that he has to deal with a cla.s.s of minds which are both at once. A luckless gentleman, after lecturing for forty minutes, found that the lecture had been most carefully listened to and reproduced in the note-books, but with the trifling subst.i.tution in every instance of the word ”Phoenician” for ”Venetian.” Above all, he is puzzled with the profuse employment of these note-books.
To the Platonic girl her note-book takes the place of the old-fas.h.i.+oned diary. It is scribbled down roughly at the lecture and copied out fairly at night. It used to be a frightful thought that every evening, before retiring to rest, the girl with whom one had been chatting intended seriously to probe the state of her heart and set down her affections in black and white; but it is hardly less formidable to imagine her refusing to lay her head on her pillow before she has finished her fair copy of the battle of Salamis. The universality of female studies, too, astounds the teacher who is fresh from the world of man; he stands aghast before a girl who is learning four languages at once, besides attending courses on logic, music, and the use of the globes. This omnivorous appet.i.te for knowledge he finds to co-exist with a great weakness in the minor matters of spelling, and a profound indifference to the simplest rules of grammar. We do not wonder then at Professors being a little shy of Ladies' Colleges; nor is it less easy to see why the Platonic theory of education has taken so little with the girls themselves. After all, the grievance of which they complain has its advantages.
The worst of bores is restrained by courtesy from boring you if you give him no cue for further conversation, and the plea of utter ignorance which an English girl can commonly advance on any subject is at any rate a defence against the worst pests of society. On the other hand, the ingenuous confession that she really knows nothing about it can be turned by a smile into a prelude to the most engaging conversation, and into an implied flattery of the neatest kind to the favored being whose superiority is acknowledged. Ignorance, in fact, of this winsome order is one of the stock weapons of the feminine armory.
The man who looks philosophically back after marriage to discover why on earth he is married at all will generally find that the mischief began in the _nave_ confession on the part of his future wife of a total ignorance which asked humbly for enlightenment. One of the grandest _coups_ we ever knew made in this way was effected by a desire on the part of a faded beauty to know the pedigree of a horse. The pride of her next neighbor at finding himself the possessor of knowledge on any subject on earth took the form of the most practical grat.i.tude a man can show. But it is not before marriage only that woman finds her ignorance act as a charm. Husbands find pleasure in talking politics to their wives simply because, as they stand on the hearthrug, they are displaying their own mental superiority. An Englishman likes to be master of his own house, but he dearly loves to be schoolmaster.
A Platonic woman as well-informed as her husband would deprive him of this daily source of domestic enjoyment; his lecture would be reduced to discussion, and to discussion in which he might be defeated. To rob him of his oracular infallibility might greatly improve the husband, but it would revolutionize the character of the home.
It is difficult to see at first sight any a.n.a.logy between the Puritanical form of flirtation which calls itself a Platonic attachment, and the provisions by which Plato excluded all peculiar love or matrimonial choice from his commonwealth. The likeness is really to be found in the resolve on which both are based to obtain all the advantages of social intercourse between the s.e.xes without the interference of pa.s.sion. In a well-regulated State, no doubt, pa.s.sion is a bore, and this is just the aspect which it takes to a highly regulated woman. An outburst of affection on the part of her numerous admirers would break up a very pleasant circle, and put an end to some charming conversations. On the other hand, the quiet sense of some special relations.h.i.+p, the faint odor of a pa.s.sion carefully sealed up, gives a piquancy and flavor to social friends.h.i.+p which mere a.s.sociation wants.
Very frequently such a relation forms an admirable retreat from stormier experiences in the past, and the tender grace of a day that is dead hangs pleasantly enough over the days that remain.
But the Platonic woman proper, in this sense, is the spinster of five-and-thirty. She is clever enough to know that the day for inspiring grand pa.s.sions is gone by, but that there is still nothing ridiculous in mingling a little sentiment with her friendly relations. She moves in maiden meditation fancy free, but the vestal flame of her life is none the more sullied for a slight tinge of earthly color. It is a connection that is at once interesting, undefined, and perfectly safe. It throws a little poetry over life to know that one being is cheris.h.i.+ng a perfectly moral and carefully toned-down attachment for another, which will last for years, but never exceed the bounds of a smile and a squeeze of the hand.
Animals in the lowest scale of life are notoriously the hardest to kill, and it is just this low vitality, as it were, of Platonic attachment that makes it so perfectly indestructible. Its real use is in keeping up a sort of minute irrigation of a good deal of human ground which would be barren without it. These little tricklings of affection, so small as not to disturb one's sleep or to drive one to compose a single sonnet, keep up a certain consciousness of attraction, and beget a corresponding return of kindliness and good temper towards the world around. A woman who has once given up the hope of being loved is a nuisance to everybody. But the Platonic woman need never give up her hope of being loved; she has reduced affection to a minimum, but from its very minuteness there is little or no motive to snap the bond, and with time habit makes it indestructible.
One Christian body, we believe--the Moravians--still carries out the principle of Plato's ideal state in giving woman no choice in the selection of a spouse. The elders arrange their matches as the wise men of the Republic were wont to do. A friend of ours once met six young women going out to some Northern settlement of the Moravians with a view to marriage. ”What is your husband's name?” he asked one. ”I don't know; I shall find out when I see him,” she answered. But we have heard of only one State which realizes Plato's theory as to the equal partic.i.p.ation of woman in man's responsibilities as well as in his privileges, and that is the kingdom of Dahomey. If women were to learn and govern like men, Plato argued, women must fight like men, and the Amazons of Dahomey fight like very terrible men indeed.
But we have as yet heard of no military grievance on the part of injured woman. She has not yet discovered the hards.h.i.+p of being deprived of a commission, or denied the Victoria Cross. No Miss Faithful has challenged woman's right to glory by the creation of a corps of riflewomen. Even Dr. Mary Walker, though she could boast of having gone through the American war, went through it with a scalpel, and not with a sword. We are far from attributing this peaceful att.i.tude of modern woman, inferior though it be to the Platonic ideal, to any undue physical sensitiveness to danger, or to inability for deeds of daring; we attribute it simply to a sense that there is a warfare which she is discharging already, and with the carrying on of which any more public exertions would interfere.
Woman alone keeps up the private family warfare which in the earlier stages of society required all the energies of man. It is a field from which man has completely retired, and which would be left wholly vacant were it not occupied by woman. The stir, the jostling, the squabbling of social life, are all her own. We owe it to her that the family existence of England does not rot in mere inaction and peace. The guerilla warfare of house with house, the fierce rivalry of social circle with social circle, the struggle for precedence, the jealousies and envyings and rancors of every day--these are things which no man will take a proper interest in, and which it is lucky that woman can undertake for him. The Platonic woman of to-day may not march to the field or storm the breach, but she is unequalled in outmanoeuvring a rival, in forcing an entrance into society, in ma.s.sacring an enemy's reputation, in carrying off matrimonial spoil. In war, then, as in education and the affections, modern woman has developed the spirit without copying the form of the Platonic ideal. After all superficial contrasts have been exhausted, she may still claim the patronage of the philosopher of Academe.
MAN AND HIS MASTER.
There are, it must be owned, few things on earth of less interest at first sight than a girl in her teens. She is a mere bundle of pale colorless virtues, a little shy, slightly studious, pa.s.sively obedient, tamely religious. Her tastes are ”simple”--she has no particular preference, that is, for anything; her aims incline mildly towards a future of b.a.l.l.s to come; her rule of life is an hourly reference to ”mamma.” She is without even the charm of variety; she has been hot-pressed in the most approved finis.h.i.+ng establishments, and is turned out the exact double of her sister or her cousin or her friend, with the same stereotyped manner, the same smattering of accomplishments, the same contribution to society of her little sum of superficial information. We wonder how it is that any one can take an interest in a creature of this sort, just as we wonder how any one can take an interest in the _Court Circular_. And yet there are few sentiments more pardonable, as there are none more national, than our interest in that marvellous doc.u.ment.
A people which chooses to be governed by kings and queens has a right to realize the fact that kings and queens are human beings, that they shoot, drive, take the air like the subjects whom they govern. And if in some coming day we are to toss up our hats and shout ourselves hoa.r.s.e for a sovereign who is still in his cradle, it is wise as well as natural that we should cultivate an interest in his babyhood, that we should hang on the vicissitudes of his teeth and his measles, that we should be curious as to the t.i.tle of his spelling-book, and the exact score of his last game at cricket.
It is precisely the same interest which attaches us to the loosely-tied bundle of virtues and accomplishments which we call a girl. We recognise in her our future ruler. The shy, modest creature who has no thought but a dance, and no will but mamma's, will in a few years be our master, changing our habits, moulding our tastes, bending our characters to her own. In the midst of our own drawing-room, in our pet easy-chair, we shall see that retiring figure quietly established, with downcast eyes, and hands busy with their crochet-needles, what Knox called, in days before a higher knowledge had dawned, ”the Monstrous Regimen of Women.”
We are far from sharing the sentiments of the Scotch Reformer, and if we attempt here to seize a few of the characteristics of the rule against which he revolted, we hope to avoid his bitterness as carefully as his prolixity. What was a new thing in his day has become old in ours, and man learns perhaps somewhat too easily to acquiesce in ”established facts.” It is without a dream of revolt, and simply in a philosophical spirit, that we approach the subject. Indeed, it is a feeling of admiration rather than of rebellion which seizes us when we begin to reflect on the character of woman's sway, and on the simplicity of the means by which she creates and establishes it. A little love, a little listening, a little patience, a little persistence, and the game is won.
How charmingly natural and un.o.bjectionable, for instance, is the very first move in it--what we may venture to call, since we have to create the very terminology of our subject, the Isolation of Man. When Brown meets us in the street and hopes that his approaching marriage will make no difference in our friends.h.i.+p, and that we shall see as much of one another as before, we know that the phrases simply mean that our intimacy is at an end. There will be no more pleasant lounges in the morning, no more strolls in the park, no more evenings at the club.
Woman has succeeded in so completely establis.h.i.+ng this cessation of former friends.h.i.+ps as a condition of the new married life that hardly any one dreams of thinking what an enormous sacrifice it is. There are very few men, after all, who are not dependent on their little group of intimates for the general drift of their opinions, the general temper of their mind and character of their lives. Their mutual advice, support, praise or dispraise, enthusiasm, abhorrence, likings, dislikings, const.i.tute the atmosphere in which one lives.
A good deal of real modesty lingers about an unmarried man; he feels far more confident in his own opinion if he knows it is Smith's opinion too, and his conception of life acquires all its definiteness from its being shared with half a dozen fairly reasonable fellows. It is no slight triumph that woman should not only have succeeded in enforcing the dissolution of this social tie as the first condition of married life, but that she has invested that dissolution with the air of an axiom which n.o.body dreams of disputing. The triumph is, as we said, won by the simplest agency--by nothing, in short, but a dexterous double appeal to human conceit. She is so weak, so frail, so helpless, so strange to this new world into which she has plunged from the realms of innocent girlhood, so utterly dependent on her husband, that a man sees at once that he has not a moment left for any one else.
There is pleasure in the thought of all that delicate weakness appealing to our strength, of that innocent ignorance looking up to us for guidance through the wilderness of the world. Of course it will soon be over, and when the dear dependent has learnt to walk alone a little we can go back to the old faces and take our segar as before. But somehow the return never comes, or, if it does come, the old faces have grown far less enchanting to us. The truth is, we have tasted the second pleasure of married life--the pleasure of being an authority. All that shy appeal to us, all that confession of ignorance, has taught us what wonderfully wise fellows we are. We are far less inclined to wait for Smith's approval, or to take our tone from the group at the club-window.
It is, to say the least, far pleasanter to be an authority at home.
Gradually we find ourselves becoming oracular, having opinions on every subject that a leading article can give us one upon, correcting the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Malt-tax and censuring Lord Stanley's policy towards the King of Ashantee. Life takes a new interest when we can put it so volubly into words. At the same time we feel that the interest is hardly shared by the world.
Our old a.s.sociates apparently fail to appreciate the change in us, or to listen to our disquisitions any more than they did of old; it is a comfort to feel that we have a home to retreat to, and that there is one there who will. To the subtle flattery, in short, of weakness and of ignorance, woman has now added the flattery of listening. To say little, to contribute hardly more than a cue now and then, but to be attentive, to be interested, to brighten at the proper moment, to laugh at the proper joke, to suggest the exact amount of difficulties which you require to make your oratorical triumph complete, and to join with an unreserved a.s.sent in its conclusion, that is the simple secret of the power of ninety-nine wives out of a hundred. It is a power which is far from being confined to the home. The most brilliant salons have always been created by dexterous listeners.
A pleasant house is not a house where one is especially talked to, but where one discovers that one talks more easily than elsewhere. The tact is certainly invaluable which enables a woman to know the strong points of her guests, to lead up to their subjects, to supply points for conversation, and then to leave it quietly alone. But it is only a display on the grand scale of that particular faculty of silence which wins its quiet triumphs on every hearth-rug.
The faculty, however, has other triumphs to win besides those in which it figures as a delicate administration of flattery to the vanity of men. It is the force which woman holds in reserve for the hour of revolt. For it must be owned that, pleasant as the tyranny is, men sometimes wake up to the fact that it is a tyranny, that in the most seductive way in the world they are being wheedled out of a.s.sociations that are really dear to them, that their life is being cramped and confined, that their aims are being lowered. Then the newly-found eloquence exhausts itself in a declaration of revolt.