The fashion is to pity and deride the "poor" early Victorian because she lacked the manifold and nerve-wracking outlets for that restlessness and boredom from which modern women suffer.
The "poor" Victorian was a more harmonious, better-balanced and more tranquil being, however. And she was far less cursed with "nerves," with feverish unrest and carking discontent, than women are to-day.
Mrs. Craigie observed that the Victorian, with her backboard and gentle accomplishments, produced (without the pusillanimous expedient of "Twilight Sleep") notably stronger, finer, and more clever children than do present-day over-educated or athletic women—athletic women, whose muscles of arms and of legs have so sapped the powers of important internal muscles that most of them are incapable of bringing their infants into life without instrumental aid.
One does not, for a moment, counsel reversion to the type or to the methods of an earlier generation. Evolution and development must advance, and are, of course, advancing satisfactorily in some stock. But the Victorian served her generation nobly, producing splendid specimens of men and women, and handing on a generous racial constitution—now being squandered recklessly, alas! by her descendants. The tide of greater freedom, of broader outlook, and fuller effectiveness for woman has set in, however. Albeit, owing to Feminist misapprehensions, it is not only moving too rapidly but it is moving in a wrong direction; because in direct opposition to biological law.
By their fruits ye shall know them. And the Victorian so preserved her woman-powers and attributes that she was an excellent and a contented wife, and could bring into existence—without instrumental aid—a family of comely, clever boys and girls; nurse them all from eldest to youngest; rear and discipline and put such stuff of health and sanity and enterprise into them as shames some flimsy, feeble-minded, characterless modern stock. We have far to look to-day, indeed, for statesmen and soldiers, poets and artists, business and craftsmen, and other such virile and talented personages as those early and pre-Victorian mothers endowed their epoch with.
And were further evidence needed that our great-grandmothers equalled our own women in the qualities we pride ourselves upon as triumphs of Feminism, the strength and courage, the resource and fortitude those others showed throughout the stress and horrors of the Indian Mutiny are proof sufficient that, beneath their gentler virtues, lay the sterner fibre of nobility.
IX
To prove to what a third-grade power Woman, once so potent an inspiration of life, has lapsed, we need but go to The Drama—reflex ever of its period. Consider Shakespeare's women—subtly wise, profoundly clever, beautiful and gracious, true and charming, strong and tender, chaste and gay; warm with temperament, crystal-sparkling with wit and parry!
And comparing these adorable beings with the posturing, tricky, intriguing, slangy, spotty creatures—neurotic unfaithful wives and erratic "bachelor"-daughters—of the modern stage, the deplorable deterioration of our womanly ideals becomes patent.