Now this is obviously a very useful and a very vital instinct in woman. From the standpoint of the species nothing could be more laudable than this anxious preoccupation with the future of the offspring. But it amounts to this, that by their nature women can have no primary concern about those things that bear the hallmarks of cultivation, of refinement and of greatness, and that, therefore, they are essentially vulgar.[214]
If in the Europe of to-day, and in all countries like Europe, it is material success alone that is regarded as of the highest value, and if money is the principal hall-mark of power and prestige, it is due to the ascendancy of women in our midst. Women cannot take any other point of view, and where their influence tends to prevail, as it does particularly in England and America, there you will find the worship of cash the principal religion of the community. It is true that women fall at the feet of great men and artists when they become famous. When I was private secretary to Auguste Rodin, the great sculptor, at a time when he was making anything from fifteen to twenty thousand pounds a year, women were his principal visitors. They flocked to his studio and to his private house at Meudon as to an Oxford Street drapery sale. But, as he used to say, they left him in peace in his dirty little studio in La Rue des Fourneaux at the time when he was poor and struggling.
It is indeed one of the most pernicious results of woman’s ascendancy in any society, that this vulgar pursuit of mere material success (because it provides the surest provision for the offspring) tends to become general,[215] and it is a sign of woman’s subordination in the Hindu community, for instance, that there the most respected caste is the poorest caste.
To-day this vulgarity can be detected in every aspect of our lives. Everything, every consideration of refinement, is overlooked, provided that money be present. And the man who kills most female hearts is he who can throw a rich fur round his capture and whirl her off in a sumptuous Rolls-Royce. This to the normal decent woman is simply irresistible. She will abandon any mere artist for this experience. And though in later years, when the latter has become great in a worldly sense, she may deplore her error of judgment, she has no gifts that enable her immediately to gauge his worth, and thus to foretell his ultimate position.
It is interesting to note that neither Heine, Nietzsche nor Van Gogh ever became a material success until long after his death. But Heine, Nietzsche and Van Gogh were singularly free from the sort of female persecution that harassed Rodin and Wagner in later life, and certainly not one of them ever had a successful association with a woman of his own station or class.
Indeed, so deeply rooted is this love of material success in women that it manifests itself in those who have long ceased to be able to bear children. Thus wives who have passionately loved their husbands will learn to dislike and despise them intensely if owing to some unhappy turn in their fortunes they become material failures. Daughters will also manifest a pronounced dislike towards fathers who, for their station in life, have been inadequate material successes. I once heard a daughter of a peer talk most bitterly about her father, because he was a failure from the financial point of view. A woman will forgive anything in her man—adultery, cruelty, obesity, and stupidity,—but she cannot and will not forgive material failure.
The ramifications of this fundamental and vital vulgarity in woman are, of course, manifold. We have only to think of the ostentation of wealth, of the insistence upon the insignia of wealth and material success by women (diamonds, pearls, furs, fine external domestic appointments, etc.), and of the stampede for wealth and success in modern, women-ridden society. We have only to think of the commercial, industrial and financial immorality of modern societies, all of which are the direct outcome of the maniacal struggle for that hall-mark which alone means power and prestige in an effeminate community. Individually this vulgarity ramifies in woman as an inability to pursue refinement, unassisted or undirected; as a readiness to sacrifice refinement or else the fruits of cultivation, to any other sordid end, and as an inaccessibility to the finer nuances of thought. That is why the notion “Lady” is such absurd nonsense. It is the grossest and most palpable fiction. No “lady” has ever existed or will ever exist. As Napoleon said, “Women have no rank”;—we have seen why this must be so.[216]
No. 4. Woman’s love of petty power is obvious and hardly requires demonstrating. It arises from the species’ urgent need of some adult animal which, when the offspring is born, will take an instinctive delight in looking after it. Apart from the pleasant sensations that the healthy female—whether animal or human—derives from suckling,[217] there must also be an instinct which makes it a pleasure to nurse, to fondle, and to tend the infant of the species. This instinct can be examined under its two aspects, either as a love of petty power or as a love of dealing with something pathetically helpless. And, indeed, if some of the deepest chords in the female’s being were not moved by helplessness, where on earth should we be? What would become of our babies and our children?
As far as her relation to the child is concerned, therefore, there can be no doubt whatsoever concerning the utility to the species of woman’s love of petty power, and away from the child it is revealed in a hundred different ways: woman’s pronounced preference for lap-dogs, her fondness for teaching (when children play at school it is invariably a little girl of the party who plays the part of teacher),[218] her conscious preference for the grown-up schoolboy as a husband (that is to say, the man who is easily led by the nose), her tendency to desire to give advice to relatives and friends, in everything, so that virtually she directs their lives (this is admirably depicted by George Eliot in her descriptions of Maggie’s aunts in the Mill on the Floss), and finally her tendency to excessive self-assertion and to interference with other people’s concerns.
It is only in its ramifications that this vital instinct in woman has a deleterious influence if it is not kept in check; for her desire for petty power is always out of all proportion to her capacity for wielding any power whatsoever. For instance, in its tendency to make her favour the grown-up schoolboy type of man as a husband, it acts as a distinct drawback to the race. Because, although he proves an easy man to rule, he is by no means a desirable type from the standpoint of virile virtue. He is the type called “Promethean” in my Man’s Descent from the Gods—that is to say, a man who has no mastery of life, very little depth or understanding, and who is gifted with the qualities of the lackey rather than of the leader. The prevalence of this type of man to-day, together with the paucity of men of the masculine and leader type, is another sign of the extent to which women are having their own way. He is a man who knows nothing about women, but he is usually athletic, breezy and fond of games—i.e. he is harmless. The fact that he now stands as the pattern of the “manly” man reveals the influence of the female standpoint in our modern communities, as does also the fact that the other type of man (the masculine and manly type who understands woman, and who shows that he does) is now vilified everywhere as the “prig.”