A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies Part 11

Montaigne deals with the whole question in his own homely straightforward fashion:-

"Je dis que les males et les femelles sont jettes en meme moule; sauf l'inst.i.tution et l'usage la difference n'y est pas grande. Platon appelle indifferemment les uns et les autres a la societe de touts etudes, exercises, charges, et vocations guerrieres et paisibles en sa republique, et le philosophe Antisthenes otait toute distinction entre leur vertu et la notre. Il est bien plus aise d'accuser un s.e.xe que d'excuser l'autre: c'est ce qu'on dit, 'le fourgon se moque de la poele.'"

Not that I agree with Plato,-rather would leave all the fighting, military and political, if there must be fighting, to the men.

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Among the absurdities talked about women, one hears, perhaps, such an aphorism as the following quoted with a sort of ludicrous complacency,-"The woman's strength consists in her weakness!" as if it were not the weakness of a woman which makes her in her violence at once so aggravating and so contemptible, in her dissimulation at once so shallow and so dangerous, and in her vengeance at once so cowardly and so cruel.

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I should not say, from my experience of my own s.e.x, that a woman's nature is flexible and impressible, though her feelings are. I know very few instances of a very inferior man ruling the mind of a superior woman, whereas I know twenty-fifty-of a very inferior woman ruling a superior man. If he love her, the chances are that she will in the end weaken and demoralise him. If a superior woman marry a vulgar or inferior man he makes her miserable, but he seldom governs her mind, or vulgarises her nature, and if there be love on his side the chances are that in the end she will elevate and refine him.

The most dangerous man to a woman is a man of high intellectual endowments morally perverted; for in a woman's nature there is such a necessity to approve where she admires, and to believe where she loves,-a devotion compounded of love and faith is so much a part of her being,-that while the instincts remain true and the feelings uncorrupted, the conscience and the will may both be led far astray.

Thus fell "our general mother,"-type of her s.e.x,-overpowered, rather than deceived, by the colossal intellect,-half serpent, half angelic.

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Coleridge speaks, and with a just indignant scorn, of those who consider chast.i.ty as if it were a _thing_-a thing which might be lost or kept by external accident-a thing of which one might be robbed, instead of a state of being. According to law and custom, the chast.i.ty of Woman is as the property of Man, to whom she is accountable for it, rather than to G.o.d and her own conscience. Whatever people may say, such is the common, the social, the legal view of the case. It is a remnant of Oriental barbarism. It tends to much vice, or, at the best, to a low standard of morality, in both s.e.xes. This idea of property in the woman survives still in our present social state, particularly among the lower orders, and is one cause of the ill treatment of wives. All those who are particularly acquainted with the manners and condition of the people will testify to this; namely, that when a child or any weaker individual is ill treated, those standing by will interfere and protect the victim; but if the sufferer be _the wife_ of the oppressor, it is a point of etiquette to look on, to take no part in the fray, and to leave the brute man to do what he likes "with his own." Even the victim herself, if she be not pummelled to death, frequently deprecates such an interference with the dignity and the rights of her owner. Like the poor woman in the "Medecin malgre lui:"-"Voyez un peu cet impertinent qui vent empecher les maris de battre leurs femmes!-et si je veux qu'il me batte, moi?"-and so ends by giving her defender a box on the ear.

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"Au milieu de tous les obstacles que la nature et la societe out semes sur les pas de la femme, la seule condition de repos pour elle est de s'entourer de barrieres que les pa.s.sions ne puissent franchir; incapable de s'approprier l'existence, elle est toujours semblable a la Chinoise dont les pieds ont ete mutiles et pour laquelle toute liberte est un leurre, toute es.p.a.ce ouverte une cause de chute. En attendant que l'education ait donne aux femmes leur veritable place, malheur a celles qui brisent les lisses accoutumees! pour elles l'independance ne sera, comme la gloire, qu'un deuil eclatant du bonheur!"-_B. Constant._

This also is one of those common-places of well-sounding eloquence, in which a fallacy is so wrapt up in words we have to dig it out. If this be true, it is true only so long as you compress the feet and compress the intellect,-no longer.

Here is another:-

"L'experience lui avait appris que quel que fut leur age, ou leur caractere, toutes les femmes vivaient avec le meme reve, et qu'elles avaient toutes au fond du cur un roman commence dont elles attendaient jusqu'a la mort le heros, comme les juifs attendent le Messie."

This "roman commence," (et qui ne finit jamais), is true as regards women who are idle, and who have not replaced dreams by duties. And what are the "barrieres" which pa.s.sion cannot overleap, from the moment it has subjugated the will? How fine, how true that scene in Calderon's "Magico Prodigioso," where Justina conquers the fiend only by not _consenting_ to ill!

--"This agony Of pa.s.sion which afflicts my heart and soul May sweep imagination in its storm; The will is firm."

And the baffled demon shrinks back,-

"Woman, thou hast subdued me Only by not owning thyself subdued!"

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A friend of mine was once using some mincing elegancies of language to describe a high degree of moral turpitude, when a man near her interposed, with stern sarcasm, "Speak out! Give things their proper names! _Half words are the perdition of women!_"

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"I observe," said Sydney Smith, "that _generally_ about the age of forty, women get tired of being virtuous and men of being honest." This was said and received with a laugh as one of his good things; but, like many of his good things, how dreadfully true! And why? because, _generally_, education has made the virtue of the woman and the honesty of the man a matter of external opinion, not a law of the inward life.

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Dante, in his lowest h.e.l.l, has placed those who have betrayed women; and in the lowest deep of the lowest deep those who have betrayed trust.

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Inveterate sensuality, which has the effect of utterly stupifying and brutifying lower minds, gives to natures more sensitively or more powerfully organised a horrible dash of ferocity. For there is an awful relation between animal blood-thirstiness and the p.r.o.neness to sensuality, and in some sensualists a sort of feline propensity to torment and lacerate the prey they have not the appet.i.te to devour.

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"La Chevalerie faisait une tentative qui n'a jamais reussi, quoique souvent essayee; la tentative de se servir des pa.s.sions humaines, et particulierement de l'amour pour conduire l'homme a la vertu. Dans cette route l'homme s'arrete toujours en chemin. L'amour inspire beaucoup de bons sentiments-le courage, le devouement, le sacrifice des biens et de la vie; mais il ne se sacrifie pas lui-meme, et c'est la que la faiblesse humaine reprend ses droits."-_St. Marc-Girardin._

I am not sure that this well-sounding remark is true-or, if true, it is true of the mere pa.s.sion, not of love in its highest phase, which is self-sacrificing, which has its essence in the capability of self-sacrifice.

"Love was given, Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end; For this the pa.s.sion to excess was driven, That _self_ might be annull'd."

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In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear, there is a strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell next door to hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such intense haters.

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Our present social opinion says to the man, "You may be a vulgar brutal sensualist, and use the basest means to attain the basest ends; but so long as you do not offend against conventional good manners you shall be held blameless." And to the woman it says, "You shall be guilty of nothing but of yielding to the softest impulses of tenderness, of relenting pity; but if you cannot add hypocrisy you shall be punished as the most desperate criminal."

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96.

"It is worthy of notice that the external expressions appropriated to certain feelings undergo change at different periods of life and in different const.i.tutions. The child cries and sobs from fear or pain, the adult more generally from sudden grief or warm affection, or sympathy with the feeling of others."-_Dr. Holland._

Those who have been accustomed to observe the ways of children will doubt the accuracy of this remark, though from the high authority of one of the most accomplished physiologists of our time. Children cry from grief, and from sympathy with grief, at a very early age. I have seen an infant in its mother's arms, before it could speak, begin to whimper and cry when it looked up in her face, which was disturbed and bathed with tears; and that has always appeared to me an exquisite touch of most truthful nature in Wordsworth's description of the desolation of Margaret:-

"Her little child Had from its mother caught the trick of grief, And sighed amid its playthings."

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97.

"LETTERS," said Sir James Mackintosh, "must not be on a subject. Lady Mary Wortley's letters on her journey to Constantinople are an admirable book of travels, but they are not letters. A meeting to discuss a question of science is not conversation, nor are papers written to another to inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxation, not business, and must never appear to be occupation;-nor must letters."

"A masculine character may be a defect in a female, but a masculine genius is still a praise to a writer of whatever s.e.x. The feminine graces of Madame de Sevigne's genius are exquisitely charming, but the philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Stael are above the distinctions of s.e.x."

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98.

OF the wars between Napoleon and the Holy Alliance, Madame de Stael once said with most admirable and prophetic sense:-"It is a contest between a _man_ who is the enemy of liberty, and a _system_ which is equally its enemy." But it is easier to get rid of a man than of a system: witness the Russians, who a.s.sa.s.sinate their czars one after another, but cannot get rid of their _system_.