Part 8 (2/2)
Things cannot go on in this way, life cannot be ruined for caprices. It is needless, perhaps, to repeat the rhetoric of rebellion, and all the more needless because it shares the fate of all rhetoric in producing not the slightest impression on the mind to which it is addressed. The wife simply listens as before, though the listening is now far from encouraging to eloquence. She is perfectly patient, patient in her refusal to continue an irritating discussion, patient in bearing your little spurts of vexation; she listens quietly to-day, with the air of one who is perfectly prepared to listen quietly to-morrow. But even rhetoric has its limits, and now that the cues have ceased, a husband finds it a little difficult to keep up a discussion where he has to supply both arguments and replies.
Moreover, the tact which managed in former days to place him in a highly pleasant position by the confession of weakness, now, by the very same silent avowal, places him in a decidedly unpleasant one. If a woman's air simply says at the end of it all, ”I can't answer you, but I know I am right,” a man has a lurking sense that his copious rhetoric has had a smack of the cowardly as well as of the tyrannical about it. And so, after a vigorous denunciation of some particular thing which his wife has done, a husband commonly finds himself no further than before; and the very instant that, from sheer weariness, he ceases, the wife usually steals out and does it again.
There is something feline about this combination of perfect patience with quiet persistence--a combination which the Jesuits on a larger scale have turned into the characteristic of their order. It is especially remarkable when it breaks the bonds of silence, and takes the form of what in vulgar language is called ”nagging.” No form of torture which has as yet been invented, save, perhaps, the slow dropping of water on some highly sensitive part of the frame, can afford a parallel to this ingenious application of the principle of persistence.
The absolute certainty that, when snub or scolding or refusal have died into silence, the word will be said again; the certainty that it will be said year after year, month after month, week after week; the irritation of expecting it, the irritation of hearing it, the irritation of expecting it again, tell on the firmest will in the world. In the long run the wife wins. The son goes to Harrow, though reason has proved a dozen times over that we can only afford the expense of Marlborough; the family gets its Alpine tour, though logic and unpaid bills imperatively dictate the choice of a quiet watering place. You yield, and you see that every one in the house knew that you would yield. There wasn't a servant who didn't know every turn of the domestic screw, or who took your resistance for more than the usual routine of the operation. ”Time and I,” said Philip of Spain, ”against any two.” It is no wonder if, fighting alone for prudence and economy, one is beaten by time and one's wife.
We have no wish to dispute the enormous benefits to man of woman's supremacy, but we may fairly leave the statement of them to the numerous troup of poets who dispute with Mr. Tupper the theme of the affections.
For ourselves, we may undertake, perhaps, the humbler task of pointing out very briefly some of the disadvantages which, as in all human things, counterbalance these benefits. In the first place, feminine rule is certainly not favorable to anything like largeness of mind or breadth of view. It creates, as we have seen, an excessive self-conceit and opinionativeness, and then it directs these qualities to very small ends indeed. Woman lives from her childhood in a world of petty details, of minute household and other cares, of bargains where the price of every yard ends in some fraction of a penny. The habit of mind which is formed by these and similar influences becomes the spirit of the house, a spirit admirable no doubt in many ways, but excessively small.
The quarrels of a woman's life, her social warfare, her battles about precedence, her upward progress from set to set, have all the same stamp of Lilliput on them. But it is to these small details, these little pleasures and little anxieties and little disappointments and little ambitions, that a wife generally manages to bend the temper of her spouse. He gets gradually to share her indifference to large interests, to broad public questions. He imbibes little by little the most fatal of all kinds of selfishness, the selfishness of the home. It would be difficult, perhaps, to say how much of the patriotism of the Old World was owing to the inferior position of woman; but it is certain that the influence of woman tells fatally against any self-sacrificing devotion to those larger public virtues of which patriotism is one of the chief.
Whether from innate narrowness of mind, or from defective training, or from the excessive development of the affections, family interests far outweigh, in the feminine estimation, any larger national or human considerations.
If ever the suffrage is given to woman, it will be necessary to punish bribery with the treadmill, for no ”person” will regard it as a crime to barter away her vote for a year's schooling for Johnny or a new frock for Maud. Nothing tells more plainly the difference between the Old World and the New than the constant returns home during war. We can hardly conceive Pericles or even Alcibiades applying for leave of absence on the ground of ”private affairs.” But then Pericles and Alcibiades had no home that they could set above the interests of the State.
Lastly, from this narrow view bounded strictly by the limits and interests of the home comes, it may be feared, a vast deal of social and political bitterness and intolerance. Her very nature, her ”deductive spirit,” as Mr. Buckle puts it prettily for her, makes woman essentially a dogmatist. She has none of the larger intercourse with other minds and adverse circ.u.mstances which often creates the form, if not the spirit, of tolerance in the narrowest of men. Her very excellence and faith make her exactly what they made Queen Mary--a conscientious and therefore merciless persecutor.
It is just this feminine narrowness, this feminine conscientiousness, in the clergy which unfits them for any position where justice or moderation is requisite. Justice is a quality unknown to woman, and against which she wages a fierce battle in the house and in the world.
There are few husbands who have been made more just, more tolerant, more large-hearted and large-headed, by their wives; for justice lives in a drier light than that of the affections, and dry light is not a very popular mode of illumination under ”the monstrous regimen of women.”
THE GOOSE AND THE GANDER.
Proverbs, as a rule, are believed to contain amongst them somehow or other a quant.i.ty of truth. There is scarcely one proverb which has not got another proverb that flatly contradicts it, and between the two it would be very odd if there was not a great deal of sound sense somewhere. There is, however, one of the number which, as every candid critic must allow, is based on an egregious falsehood--the proverb, namely, which affirms, against all experience, that whatever is good for the goose is good for the gander. Viewing the goose as the type of woman, and the gander as the type of man, no adage could be more preposterous or untenable. Such a maxim flies dead in the very face of society, and is calculated to introduce disturbance into the orderly sequence and subordination of the s.e.xes. Who first invented it, it is difficult to conceive, unless it was some rustic Mrs. Poyser, full of the consciousness of domestic power, and anxious to reverse in daily life the law of priority which obtained--as she must have seen--even in her own poultry-yard.
There is one way of reading the proverb which perhaps renders it less monstrous; and if we confine ourselves to the view that ”sauce” for the goose is also ”sauce” for the gander, we escape from any of the philosophical difficulties in which the other version involves us. No doubt, when they are dead, goose and gander are alike, even in the way they are dressed, and there is no superiority on the part of either.
Death makes all genders epicene. Except for one solitary text about silence in heaven for half an hour, which some cynical commentators have explained as indicating a temporary banishment from Paradise of one of the s.e.xes, distinctions of this sort need not be supposed to continue after the present life. If we are to take the former reading, and to test it by what we know of life, nothing can be more unfounded, or more calculated to give a wrong impression as to the facts. Were it not too late, the proverb ought to be altered; and perhaps it is not absolutely hopeless to persuade Mr. Tupper to see to it.
”What is good for the goose is bad for the gander,” or ”what is bad for the goose is good for the gander;” or, perhaps, ”what is a sin in the goose is only the gander's way,” would read quite as well, would not be so diametrically at variance with the ordinary rules of social life, and, accordingly, would be infinitely truer and more moral. Even Mr.
Mill, who is the advocate of female emanc.i.p.ation and female suffrage, never has gone so far as to say that all women, as well as all men, are brothers. The female suffrage, as we know, is merely a question of time.
Before very long, no doubt, there will be a feminine Reform Bill, during the course of which Mr. Disraeli will explain that the feminine franchise has always been the one idea of the Conservative party, and in which the compound housekeeper will occupy as prominent a position as the compound householder ever could have done. n.o.body, however, has as yet absolutely a.s.serted, we do not say the equality, for equality is an invidious term, but the indifference of the s.e.xes. And this being so, it is strange that a proverb should be retained which is so opposed to every notion that pa.s.ses current in the world.
As the legislation of the world has. .h.i.therto been uniformly in the hands of men, it is not astonis.h.i.+ng that it has always proceeded on the a.s.sumption of the absolute dependence of the weaker upon the stronger s.e.x. Several thousand years of intellectual and political supremacy must have altered the type imperceptibly, and made the difference between the ordinary run of men and women far more marked than nature intended it originally to be. All theology, whether Christian or pagan, has been in the habit of representing woman as designed chiefly to be a sort of ornament and appendage to man; and the allegory of the creation of Eve, though Oriental in its tone, does nevertheless correspond to a vague feeling among even civilized nations that woman's mission is to fill up a gap in man's daily life.
Nor are they merely the opinions and laws of the world which have moulded themselves on this basis. The whole imagination of the race has been fed upon the notion, until the relations between the two s.e.xes have become the one thing on which fancy, sentiment, and hope are taught from childhood to dwell. It is not an extravagant inference to suppose that centuries of this imaginative and sentimental habit have ended by affecting the brain and the physical nature of humanity. Man has become a woman-caressing animal. The life of the two s.e.xes is made to centre round the once fict.i.tious, but now universal, idea that they cannot exist without one another.
Goose and gander have lost their primitive conception of an individual and independent career, and are never happy unless they are permitted to go in pairs. Under less complex social conditions such interdependence led to no very intolerable results. Men and women formed a sort of convenient partners.h.i.+p, each contributing their quota of daily conveniences to the common fund. The chief protected his squaw--or, if he was a patriarch, his squaws--while the squaws ministered to his pleasures, cooked his food, milked--if Mr. Max Muller's idea of the Sanscrit is correct--his cows, and carried his babies on their backs.
The husband found the venison and the maize, while his wife dressed it and helped to eat it. This mutual arrangement had at any rate the advantage of being accommodated to the physical differences of strength between the two halves of society.
A little tyranny is the natural consequence of an unequal distribution of physical strength in all rude and barbarous states, and it was inevitable that woman should at such times have more than her share of labor and of patience imposed upon her. But it is evident that, as civilization has increased with the growth of population and of industrial interests, women no longer derive the same benefit from the social partners.h.i.+p as formerly. Some social philosophers still maintain, with M. Comte, that it is man's business to maintain woman, and to relieve her from the necessity of providing for her natural wants. But this theory seems Utopian and impracticable when we try to think of applying it to the world in which we live. Wealth is no longer distributed with the least reference to industrious and sober habits.
The principle of acc.u.mulation has been admitted, and social bodies have encouraged and sanctioned it by allowing property to descend from one generation to another intact, the result of which is that the industry of the father is able to insure the perpetual idleness of his posterity.
<script>