Part 9 (1/2)
Large mult.i.tudes of poor producers are occupied in earning their own necessary sustenance, and cannot take on themselves without enormous difficulty the burden of supporting womankind, a burden which the richer cla.s.ses scarcely feel. As by far the majority of women belong to the impoverished and laborious cla.s.s, it is obvious they must either enter the labor-market themselves, or purchase support from the rich by sacrifices which are inconsistent with their personal dignity and the morality of the social body. As the imagination of humanity has been long since given up to sentiment and pa.s.sion, it is only too clear that the more vicious alternative is the one oftenest embraced. Society, then, has come to this--that woman must still depend on man, while man no longer, except on his own terms, fulfills his part of the tacit bargain by maintaining woman.
The first thing to be considered is what the public gains by keeping up the sentimental notion about woman's mission. It is her business, most of us think, to charm and to attract, partly in order that she may do man real good, and partly that she may add to the luxury, the refinement, and the happiness of life. With this view, society is very solicitous to keep her at a distance from everything that may spoil or destroy the bloom of her character and tastes. Few people go so far as to say that she ought not to work for her livelihood, if her circ.u.mstances render the effort necessary and prudent. As a fact, we see at once that such a proposition cannot be broadly supported, and that any attempt to enforce it would lead to endless misery and mischief.
Poor women, for example, must work hard, or else their children and themselves will come to utter degradation.
But though society abstains from committing itself to the doctrine of the enforced idleness of women, it takes refuge in a species of half measure, and restricts, as far as it can, by its legislative enactments or its own social code, the labors which women are to perform to the narrowest possible compa.s.s. A woman may work, but she must do nothing which is called unfeminine. She may get up linen, ply her needle, keep weaving-machines in motion, knit, sew, and in higher spheres in life teach music, French, and English grammar. She may be a governess, or a sempstress, or even within certain limits may enter the literary market and write books. This is the extreme boundary of her liberty, and somewhere about this point society begins to draw a rigid line.
It earnestly discourages her from commercial occupations, except under the patronage of a husband who is to benefit by her exertions; she is not to be a counting-house clerk, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a parson.
The great active avocations, all those that lead either to fame or fortune, are monopolized by men. Strong-minded women occasionally bore the public by complaining of and protesting against such restrictions; but, on the whole, the public is satisfied that it is convenient that they should be upheld. If we look at the matter from the point of view of the educated, or even the well-to-do cla.s.ses, such a conclusion seems so reasonable that most of us can hardly induce ourselves to doubt its correctness. Women do a certain tangible amount of good to the world by being kept as a luxury and exotic. The most energetic and rebellious of them may feel angry to be told so, but it is the truth that it suits men in general to keep up a kind of hothouse bloom upon the characters of women. The society of soft, affectionate, unselfish creatures is decidedly good for man. It elevates his nature, it gives him a belief in what is pure and genuine, it alleviates the dust and turmoil of a busy career, and it enables him for so many hours of the day to refresh himself with the company of a being who is in some things a mediaeval saint, and in some, a child.
Whenever one contemplates the effect of more coa.r.s.e experience of the world, more knowledge, and more rough and hard work on such a nature, one is invariably tempted to acquiesce in the view that it is good for man to have her in the state she is. One feels disposed to object to notions of female emanc.i.p.ation as profane. Education and science, thought and philosophy, like the winds of heaven, should never visit her cheek too roughly. The great thing is, to preserve in her that sort of luxurious unworldliness which represents the religious and refined element in the household to which she belongs. And a hundred things may be and have often been said about the advantage of making pure sentiment the foundation of all the relations that obtain between her and man.
As Plato thought, man elevates himself by elevating and sentimentalizing his affections. All poetry and most literature is given up to this sentimentalizing or refining process. Nor can it be denied that the effect is to increase very much the capacity of happiness in all people who are born to be happy or to enjoy life. What would youth be without its imaginative emotions? We all know, and are taught to believe, that it would be something much poorer than it is.
There is another side to the picture, and it is as well to contemplate it seriously, before we make up our minds to treat with undisguised contempt all the vagaries of those who wish definitely to alter the social condition of women. At present women are beautiful and delicate adjuncts of life. As Prometheus said of horses, they are the ornaments of wealth and luxury. They add perfume and refinement to existence. But, after all, it is an important question whether the conversion of women into this sort of drawing-room delicacy is not sacrificing the welfare of the many to the intellectual and social comfort of the few.
The world pays a heavy price for having its imagination sentimentalized.
One of the items in the bill is the disappointment of the thousands whose sensibilities are never destined to be satisfied. For every woman who marries happily, a large percentage never marry at all, or marry in haste and repent at leisure. It remains to be proved that it is wise to teach and train the s.e.x to fix all their views in life and to stake all their fortunes on the chance of the one rare thing--a lucky matrimonial choice. If one could succeed in de-sentimentalizing society, one would take from a few the chief pleasure of living, but it is far from certain that the material welfare of the majority would not be proportionately increased. Half-measures would of course be of very little use.
It would be a poor exchange to take from women all their reserve and innocence and refinement, without giving them free play in the world.
They would be only coa.r.s.e and wicked caricatures of what they are now.
The change, to be tolerable, would have to be effectual and thorough. It would be necessary to change the whole current of their ideas, and the whole view of man about them also; to persuade the human race to fix its mind less on the difference of s.e.xes, and to become less imaginative upon the subject. If so sweeping an alteration could be completely effected, perhaps it might be worth while to consider whether woman's absolute independence would not strengthen her character, and add permanently to the world's natural wealth.
One thing is certain, that if woman is to continue for ever in her present condition, the moral and social condition of large numbers of human beings must remain hopeless. Their future appears dreary in the extreme. It is Utopian to expect that men and women will grow less and less self-indulgent, so long as the education they undergo from their earliest years renders them p.r.o.ne to every species of temptation. There are some things which make social philosophers hopeful and confident, but no social philosopher can ever do anything but despair of real progress if he is to take for granted that women are always to play the part in life which they at present play. The emanc.i.p.ation of the goose is an experiment, but it is not surprising that many enthusiasts should believe it to be an experiment well deserving of a trial.
ENGAGEMENTS.
A great writer has pathetically described the last days of a man under sentence of death. He has found appropriate expression for every phase of the protracted agony with characteristic richness and variety of language; we are made to taste each drop in the bitter cup--the remorse and the awful expectation, and the desperate clinging to deceitful straws of hope. Indeed it scarcely requires the eloquence of a first-rate writer to impress upon us the fact that it is very unpleasant to expect to be hanged. Every man's imagination is sufficient to realize some of the unpleasant consequences of such a state of mind; for though the number of persons who have encountered this particular experience is inconsiderable, most of us have gone through something more or less a.n.a.logous--we have been significantly told to wait after school, or have paid visits to dentists, or have been candidates at compet.i.tive examinations, or have been engaged to be married. These and many other situations, though varying in the intrinsic pain or pleasure of the antic.i.p.ated event, have thus much in common, that they are all states of abnormal suspense. The nerves are kept in a state of equal tension by the uncomfortable feeling that we are in for it, whatever the ”it” may turn out to be.
The first impression is simple; it resembles that felt by a man who has just slipped upon the side of a mountain, and knows that he is inevitably going to the bottom. He has not time to think whether he will fall upon snow or rocks, whether he will have merely a pleasant slide or be dashed into a thousand fragments; he does not make up his mind to be heroic or to be frightened; the one thought that flashes across his mind is that here at last is the situation which he has so often feebly pictured to himself; he will know all about it before he has time to reflect upon its pains or pleasures. People who have escaped drowning sometimes a.s.sert that they have remembered their whole lives in a few instants, though it does not quite appear how they can remember that they remembered the series of incidents without remembering the incidents themselves. But, so far as we have been able to collect evidence, the general rule in any sudden catastrophe is that which we have described. There is nothing but a dazzling flash of surprise, which almost excludes any decided judgment as to the painfulness or otherwise of the situation.
If, then, we may venture to conjecture the frame of mind in which a lady or gentleman first enters upon an engagement, we should say that it was this sense of startled suspense. They feel as Guy Faux would have felt after lighting the train of gunpowder--that they have done something which they may probably never repeat in their lifetime, and every other emotion will be for the moment absorbed. But as engagements are generally more protracted than most of the critical situations we have mentioned, the surprise dies away, and the victims have time to look about them, and a.n.a.lyze more closely the emotions produced by their position. To do any justice to the complicated and varying frame of mind into which even an average lover may be thrown in the course of a few weeks would of course require the pen, not of men, but of angels. It would involve a condensation of a large fraction of all the poetry that has been written in the world, and no small part of the cynical criticism by which it has been opposed. But, taking for granted the ma.s.s of commonplaces which has been acc.u.mulated in the course of centuries, there are a few special modifications of the position under our present social arrangements which are more fitted for remark. The state of mind known as being in love is confined to no particular race or period, but the position of the engaged persons may vary indefinitely. In a good simple state of society, the gentleman pays down his money or his sheep or his oxen, and takes away the lady without any superfluous sentiment.
Even in more civilized states, a marriage may be substantially a bargain carried out in a business-like spirit. However unsatisfactory such a mode of proceeding may be from certain points of view, it is at any rate intelligible; all parties to the contract understand their relative positions, and have a plain line of conduct traced for them.
But in a modern English engagement the form is necessarily different, even when the substance of the arrangement is identical. For once in his experience a man feels called upon to accept that view of life for which novelists are unjustly condemned. We say unjustly, for it is inevitable that a novelist should frequently represent marriage as being the one great crisis of a man's history. It is not his function to give a complete theory of life, but to describe such scenes as are most interesting and most dramatic. He is quite justified in often writing as though two lovers should really think about nothing under heaven except their chances of union, and should be dismissed, when the happy event has once taken place, in a certainty of living very happily ever afterwards. He has no concern with the lover's briefs or sermons or operations on the Stock Exchange, which may really take up by far the greater part of the man's waking thoughts; and it would spoil the unity of his work if he were to dwell upon them proportionately. It would be as absurd to mistake the novelist's views for a complete one as to condemn it because it is incomplete. In novels which depend, as ninety-nine out of a hundred must depend, upon a love story, the importance of marriage, or at least the degree in which it occupies the thoughts of the characters, will necessarily be overstated. The engaged persons, however, find that, in the eyes of their friends, if not in their own, they are temporarily accepting the novelist's ideal. For the time they are considered exclusively as persons about to marry, and all their other relations in life retire into the background.
The difficulty of the position depends upon the extent to which this conventional a.s.sumption diverges from the true facts of the case. The lady, for example, suffers less than the gentleman, because, in spite of Dr. Mary Walker and other martyrs to the cause of woman's rights, it is still true that marriage fills a larger s.p.a.ce in her life than in that of the other s.e.x. She can take up the character with a certain triumph, as of one who has more or less fulfilled her mission and pa.s.sed from the ranks of the aspirants to those of the successful candidates for matrimony. At any rate, even if she takes a loftier view of feminine duties, there is nothing ridiculous about her position. She may busy herself about trousseaux or wedding-dresses or marriage-presents, with perfect satisfaction to herself and to the envy of her female friends.
But her unfortunate accomplice, especially if he is of mature age, is in a far more uncomfortable position.
Few men who have become immersed in any profession or business can act the character without an unpleasantly strong sense of being in a false position. There is nothing indeed intrinsically ludicrous about it; the chances are that the lover is doing a very sensible thing, and that his wisest friends approve of his conduct. Still it is undeniable that he moves about, to his own apprehension at least, in a universal atmosphere of ridicule. He feels that he is really a quiet hard-working young man, full of law it may be, or of plans for improving his parish, or of Parliamentary notices of motion. He can talk about his own topics with interest and intelligence, and may possibly be an authority in a small way. He is quite conscious, too, that there are many sides to his character which do not come out in his ordinary every-day business.
Unluckily that is just the fact which his friends are apt to ignore.
We soon learn to a.s.sociate our acquaintance with the positions in which we have been accustomed to see them, and forget that they may have sentiments and faculties of which we know nothing. Consequently an engagement seems to imply an entire metamorphosis. Our friend, or his image in our minds, was a comparatively simple compound of two or three characters at most; whereas men generally have a far more complex organization. In business hours, perhaps, he was simply a machine for grinding out law, and at other times a lively talker and a good whist-player. No process of trans.m.u.tation will convert either of those into the conventional lover, who can think of nothing but the object of his affections; the apparent incongruity is too violent not to produce a sense of the ludicrous; and our friend is bound in decency to make it as violent as possible. From which it follows that we laugh, and that he knows that we are laughing, at him. Intensely awkward congratulations are exchanged, according to two or three formulas which have been handed down from distant generations. If the congratulator is a married man, he hopes that his friend may enjoy as much happiness as he has found himself in the married state; if a bachelor, he a.s.sures him that, although unable hitherto to act up to his principles, he has always thought marriage the right thing. There are persons who can repeat one of these common forms with all the air of making an original observation, as there are men who can begin an oration by a.s.serting that they are unaccustomed to public speaking; but, as a rule, it is said in such a way as to imply that the speaker, whilst admitting the absurdity of connecting the ideas of his friend and marriage, is willing to pay the necessary compliments, if he may do it as cheaply as possible.