THE WOMAN’S MAN
Although, as we have seen everywhere, the women novelists did so much in lifting the veil and, so to speak, giving themselves away; they also held up the mirror to man’s complacency, and, in a measure, enabled the other sex to see himself as they saw him. In the process they created a type, beloved of schoolgirls, which can only be described as the “Woman’s Man,” and must be admitted a partial travesty on human nature. It does not, however, reveal any less insight than much of man’s feminine portraiture.
Curiously enough, the earliest “Woman’s Man” in fiction was of male origin. We all know how Richardson, having given us Clarissa, was invited to exert his genius upon the “perfect gentleman.” But the little printer had ever an eye on the ladies, and, whether or no of malice prepense, drew the immaculate Sir Charles Grandison—frankly, in every particular—not as he must have known him in real life, but rather according to the pretty fancy of the dear creatures whose entreaties had called into being the gallant hero.
And, as elsewhere, Fanny Burney took up the type, refined it, and lent an attractive subtlety to that somewhat monumental erection of the infallible. The actual imaginings of woman are proved less wooden than Richardson supposed them, and infinitely more like human nature. In many things Lord Orville resembles Sir Charles. He is scarcely less perfect, but his empire is more restricted. The chorus of admiration granted to Grandison, and his astounding complacency, are replaced by the unconscious revelations of innocent girlhood naturally expressing her simple enthusiasm to the kindest of foster-parents. The peerless Orville, indeed, is not exactly a “popular” hero. It needs a superior mind to appreciate his superiority; and we suspect there were circles in which he was voted a “prodigious dull fellow.” His life was not passed in an atmosphere of worship. It is only in the heart of Evelina that he is king. Nor can we fancy Miss Burney submitting her heroine to the ignominy, as modern readers must judge it, of patiently and contentedly waiting, like Harriet Byron, until such time as his majesty should determine between the well-balanced claims of herself and her rival to the honour of his hand. Personally, we have never been able to satisfy ourselves whether Grandison loved Clementina more or less than Harriet; if he was properly “in love” with either.
It was, indeed, rather becoming so fine a gentleman to be wooed than to woo; and the visit to Italy was, in all likelihood, actually brought in as an afterthought, mainly designed to illustrate the power of conscience over a good man. Anyone less perfect than Sir Charles would be universally charged with having compromised Clementina; and the real motive of his English “selection in wives” was to escape the consequences of an entanglement involving difficulties about religion and constant association with the Italian temperament. Having thoroughly investigated the circumstances and judicially examined his own heart, the cool-headed young man decides that he is not in honour bound; gently but firmly severs the somewhat embarrassing connection; and, in dignified language, communicates his decision to “the other lady.” Humbly and gratefully she accepts his self-justification and his love. It is obvious that no one could ever have either refused him or questioned the dictates of his conscience. But as Jane Austen remarks, in a very different connection, “It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of a heroine’s dignity.” No woman writer would permit it.
Nevertheless, in the essential qualities of heart and mind, no less than in the heroine’s mental attitude towards their perfections, Lord Orville and Sir Charles Grandison belong to the same order of men: made by women for women. So far as I am aware, Miss Burney originated the semi-paternal relationship (reappearing, with variations, in Knightley and Henry Tilney) which certainly helped to deceive Evelina as to the state of her heart, and has in itself a peculiar charm. There is real delicacy, quite beyond Richardson or his Sir Charles, in Orville’s repeated attempts to preserve Evelina from her own ignorance; to give her (as none of her natural guardians ever attempted) some slight knowledge of the world; protect her from insult; and advise her in difficulty. He never intrudes or presumes; and, because, after all, women’s first and last mission as novel-writers was the refinement of fiction, it cannot be too often emphasised that Miss Burney was most extraordinarily refined for her age. The very coarseness in certain externals which she admits without protest, should serve only to establish her own innate superiority.
But it remains true that the essential attribute of Orville, as of Grandison, was perfectibility. He is a very Bayard, the preux chevalier, and the Sir Galahad of eighteenth-century drawing-rooms. Neither the author, nor her heroine, would have ever imagined it possible to criticise this prince of gentlemen. It really pained them when persons of inferior breeding or less exalted morality occasionally ventured to oppose his will or question his judgment. His praise, and his love, were alike a mighty condescension; his mere notice an honour almost greater than they could bear.
This is the modern, civilised notion of knighthood; the personification (in terms of everyday life) of that pure dream which has haunted, and will ever haunt, the musings of maidenhood; the pretty fancy that one day He, prince of fairyland, will ride into her very ordinary little existence, acclaim her queen, and carry her away somewhere to be happy ever after. Miss Burney translated the vision for her generation, making it, verily, not greatly dissimilar from actual human experience.
We shall see later how certain women of the Victorian era visualised the same ideal.
In the numberless remarkable signs of feminine advance between the authoress of Evelina and Jane Austen we find that this particular attitude and ideal has almost completely vanished. The hero is no longer quite perfect; condescension is not now his most conspicuous virtue. The heroine, indeed, has become the one woman who ventures to criticise him. Darcy learns quite as much from Elizabeth as she from him. As already hinted, “Mr. Knightley” is the nearest approach in Jane Austen to the old type. He is the only person in Highbury who “ventured to criticise Emma”—without being sufficiently snubbed for his pains. He is, admittedly, the personification of superiority; though he is not very “sure of the lady.” Again the character is gently satirised in Henry Tilney, the situation of Northanger Abbey, as we have said above, being a more subtle parody of Evelina than of Udolpho. The young clergyman is nearly faultless. Catherine swears by him in everything—from theology to “sprigged muslin.” He, too, teaches her all she ever knew about the “great world”; and guides her, without a rival in authority, among the bewildering intricacies of men and books.
But, in her own domain and as to her most original creations, Miss Austen has been criticised for her occasional lack of insight towards men. It may be true, indeed, that neither Darcy nor Knightley always speaks, or behaves, quite like a gentlemen; which means that, like all women, she had not an absolutely unerring instinct for the things which are “not done.” In all probability, as men will never quite understand women’s emotional purity, women will never fully appreciate men’s alert sense of honour. Generally speaking, of course, the feminine standard in all things is far higher than the masculine; and the women novelists have done much in pulling us up to their level. But there are a few points, which concern deeper issues than social polish, of which few women, if any, can attain to the absolute ideal of chivalry.
There are, of course, many more superficial aspects by which the men in Jane Austen may be easily recognised as woman-made. We hear comparatively little of their point of view in affairs of the heart, with which the novels are mainly concerned, save in that most thoughtful passage closing Persuasion; and we know even less of their attitude towards ethics, citizenship, business, or social problems. Only clergymen or sailors are shown to be even superficially concerned with any profession in life; and this is merely because the authoress was personally intimate with both. It is, in fact, an infallible instinct for her own limitations which saved her from more obvious failure as a portrait-painter of men. Man at the tea-table is her chosen theme; and this too is a work which could not have been safely entrusted to any male pen.
The Brontës, on the other hand, exhibit a startlingly original and unexpected revival of the early type, in the central feature of its conception. Here once more the hero is most emphatically “the master”—of body and soul. Jane Eyre, we remember, loved—and served—her “employer”; Lucy Snowe and Shirley their “teachers.” There are, probably, no more arrogant males in fiction than these gentlemen; no more enslaved female worshippers. Yet the combination is totally unlike the Richardson-Burney brand. To begin with, the dominant, and domineering, hero is represented in each case as almost, if not quite, unique; not as the man normal. Nor are we called upon to admire without qualification. There is nothing ideal about Rochester, Monsieur Heger, Paul Emmanuel, or Louis Moore. The Brontë heroines did not at all admire perfection in man, and they abominated good looks. Nor were they, on the other hand, in the least humble by nature, generally yielding and clinging, or ever grateful for guidance and information. They had no patience and very little respect for the genus Homo.
There is, indeed, a touch of melodrama in the sharp contrast exhibited between their proud prickliness towards mankind and their idolatry of The Man. Few women have written more bitterly of our idle vanity, our heartless neglect and supreme selfishness, our blind folly, and our indifference to moral standards. None has spoken with more biting emphasis of woman’s natural superiority, or of the grinding tyranny which, for so many generations, she is herein shown to have stupidly endured. Yet Charlotte Brontë has declared, without qualification and more frankly than any of her sisters, that no woman can really love a man incapable of mastery; that she is ever longing for the whip.
To assert herself, to demand liberty or even equality, is uncongenial; and the aggressive attitude is only adopted as a duty, undertaken for the weaker sister from a passionate instinct for justice and an intolerance of sham. There were two things Charlotte Brontë hated: a handsome man and a deceitful woman. But hate left her very weary. It was the strain of playing prophetess that inspired her taste for “doormats.”
Obviously, the conception of a Hero thus evolved is essentially feminine. The most complacently conservative among us, however intolerant of the fine shades, could never have either conceived or admired a Rochester. We should certainly not suppose him attractive to any woman of character. To us he appears mere tinsel, the obvious counterfeit and exaggeration of a type we have come to despise a little at its best. Naturally, such men fancy that they can “do what they like with the women”; but we knew better, until the novelist confirmed the truth of their boast. Miss Brontë, moreover, is very much farther from our idea of a gentleman than Miss Austen. It may be doubted if men ever like or applaud rudeness, which she apparently considers essential to honest manliness.
Yet, however unique in its external manifestations, and however exaggerated in expression, the Brontë hero-recipe involves, like Miss Burney’s, an assumption that happy marriages are achieved by meeting mastery with submission. However diverse their conceptions of the proper everyday balance between the sexes, both find their ideal in the absolute monarchy of Man.
It must be always more difficult and more hazardous to determine an author’s private point of view as her art becomes more professional and self-conscious. George Eliot’s characters are all deliberate studies, neither the instinctive expression of an ideal nor the unconscious reflection of experience; and such manufactured products naturally tend to be extensively varied, seeking to avoid repetition or even similarity. We may, perhaps, say that George Eliot, out of her wider experience and more scholarly training, understood men better than her predecessors. She certainly avoided, as did Jane Austen, the specific “Woman’s Man”; and, on the other hand, she penetrated, without losing her way, more deeply into the masculine mystery than the creator of Messrs. Elton and Collins.
Tom Tulliver’s whole relationship with his sister is an admirable study in the conventional notion of a stupid man’s “superiority” to a clever woman; but it cannot be criticised, or in any way regarded, as a feminine conception. That provokingly worthy and obstinate young man is perfectly true to life. There is neither mistake nor exaggeration here. We must all feel that “this lady” knows. In marriage, Tom would certainly have played the master to any woman “worthy of him,” but would not thereby have become less normal or natural. If men question or puzzle over anything in The Mill on the Floss, it is not Maggie’s toleration of Tom, but her temporary infatuation for Stephen. He indeed is something of a lady’s man, not a woman’s; but probably we may not disown the type. To some extent, again, Adam Bede is “masterly” to his mother, and would probably—barring accidents on which the plot hinges—have been accepted by Hetty in the same spirit; but he is certainly not perfect, and seldom, if ever, outruns probability.
But although George Eliot, having a wide outlook, recognises and illustrates the tendency in man to play the master, she does not associate it with any idea of perfection, nor does she idealise submission in women. Yet we know that personally, though less intensely than Charlotte Brontë, she too disliked sex-assertion, and found comfort in what the other only desired, a large measure of intellectual rest, by letting a man think and act for her. At all times her religion and her philosophy were largely borrowed or reflective—for all their assumption of independence—and every page of her life reveals the carefully protective influence of George Henry Lewes. Only less than any of the other chief women novelists did George Eliot permit self-expression in her work, and the particular portraiture of man we are here discussing was not the result of study but the exposure of conviction.
Finally, it was reserved for later writers, not of supreme genius, to develop the type to its extremity. Charlotte Yonge, with her usual superabundance of dramatis personæ, has two “women’s men” in The Heir of Redclyffe, and the contrast between them is most instructive. The aggressive “perfection” of Philip, indeed, is crude enough. Miss Yonge deliberately exaggerates his manifold virtues in order to darken the evil within. The reader and his own conscience alone ever realise the full force of his jealous suspicions and obstinacy in self-justification. Guy’s faults, on the other hand, are all on the surface; but his exalted saintliness is even more superhuman than the other’s unerring morality. Both exemplify a feminine ideal; though Philip has only one worshipper, her faith is unfaltering. His, indeed, is the type that lives to hold forth, to inform, and to dogmatise. Woe to the woman who ventures to think for herself. The power or charm of Guy is unconscious. They love his passionate outbursts, his generous impetuosity, his childish remorse and “sensibility.” In him, however, there are some qualities which men esteem: he was a sportsman, adventurous, and transparently sincere. Only his final “conversion” and the death-bed scene spoil the picture. He becomes, in the end (what Philip had always been), the sport of feminine imagination with its craving for perfectibility. He loses the human touch, vanishing among the gods.
We have the “last word” in this matter from John Halifax, Gentleman. With school-girl naïveté Phineas tells us on every page that “there was never any man like him.” His smile, his tenderness, his courage, his independence, his tact and tyranny in the home, his quiet influence on Capital and Labour, are certainly unique, and no less certainly monotonous. He understands everybody, and “deals with them” easily. It costs him nothing to lead men and dominate women. Quietly and without effort, he pursues his way—to an admiring chorus, always “the master,” the perfect gentleman. He was dignified, attractive, and very “particular over his daintiest of cambric and finest of lawn.” The little waif of the opening chapters indignantly repudiated the name of “beggar-boy”: “You mistake; I never begged in my life: I am a person of independent property, which consists of my head and my two hands, out of which I hope to realise a large capital some day.” And he kept his word.
Prompt and acute in business, of unflinching integrity, and guided by generous understanding as to the serious labour problems of his generation, John was one of those fine English tradesmen who effected so much, not only towards the foundation of our commercial empire, but towards removing the barriers between their own class and a Society largely composed of “fox-hunting, drinking, dicing fools.” The girl who loved him was “shocked” to hear of his being “in business,” although her feelings quickly developed to proud worship.
It is here, indeed, that Mrs. Craik reveals most power. Towards the “world”—his equals, his “men,” or his “superiors”—John Halifax is the true gentleman, and a splendid specimen of manhood. He has rare dignity, shrewd insight, and ready command of language. The scene of his “drawing-room” fracas with Richard Brithwood is extremely dramatic, and gives us almost a higher opinion of the hero than any other. Entirely free from the narrow-mindedness of the ordinary self-made man, he almost subdues our dislike of the gentle despotism which he assumes towards wife and family. The complacent masculinity is exaggerated by the author’s persistence in keeping him to the centre of the picture; and we are disposed to believe that it might have been less open to criticism if expressed, as well as conceived, by a woman. Phineas Fletcher, the fictional Ego, has some charm; but he is absolutely feminine, if not womanish, and the Jonathan-David attitude of every page becomes wearisome by repetition. There is no doubt that this perpetual enthusiasm of one man for another offends our taste, and has a tendency to make both a little ridiculous. John has a positive weakness for perfection, and we should observe the fact with more pleasure if it were less frequently “explained.”
Here the man creates his surroundings or sets the tone, presumably exemplifying the author’s ideal. He is singularly pure-minded, preposterously domestic, and very confident about the natural supremacy of man. It is the immense amount of tender detail, the infinite number of soft touches which convict the author of femininity. Her hero, however, is no knight of romance, no Bayard of the drawing-room, no love-lorn youth of dreams, no “fine gentleman,” the mate of a girl’s sensibility. He is not all soul and heart. He is of tougher fibre in groundwork (despite his “halo”), and primarily practical. Concerned externally with such tough problems as trade depression, the “bread riots,” and the introduction of machinery, he is more often placed before us as lover, husband, father, and friend. Frank and decisive, he has remarkable self-control, and remains ideally simple. He has no doubts about sin and goodness, indifference or faith. We should be tempted to say that he spent his life in the nursery, though sometimes, indeed, the view of the nursery is not unworthy of our attention:
“I delighted to see dancing. Dancing, such as it was then, when young people moved breezily and lightly, as if they loved it; skimming like swallows down the long line of the Triumph—gracefully winding in and out through the graceful country-dance—lively always, but always decorous. In those days people did not think it necessary to the pleasures of dancing that any stranger should have the liberty to snatch a shy, innocent girl round the waist, and whirl her about in mad waltz or awkward polka, till she stops, giddy and breathless, with burning cheek and tossed hair, looking—as I would not have liked to see our pretty Maud look.”
Most of us, I fancy, would think better of John without Phineas at his elbow, if he were less supremely self-conscious, less given to that analysis of his own acts and emotions which is essentially feminine. But Mrs. Craik will not let her hero alone. She thrusts him upon us without mercy, till we are driven to cry “halt.” We are convinced that no human being could comfortably carry about with him so heavy a burden of perfectibility. He is (as women have often fancied us) not what we are but what she would have us be; and here, as elsewhere, even the Ideal does not please man.