Women have sinned in every age, but they have sinned in some ages picturesquely and pathetically, because Nature led them. While the morbids and neurotics of our modern Plays are for ever noisily turning out the dusty corners of their warped psychologies, in order to discover some loose end of Nature in them to condone their erotic eccentricities. Strange, that Twentieth-Century woman tolerates the mirror held to her in these abnormal and distasteful creatures!
The modern dramatist is handicapped in his art, it is true, by lack, in our latter-day actresses, of that personal charm and magnetism, and the vital power to render the higher and subtler emotions and passions, whereby the actresses of earlier days held audiences spell-bound.
Politics and Sports destroy alike the Muses and the Graces. One who attempts to combine them with the delicate psychological arts and artistries of The Drama is bound to failure—in her art, at all events.
Time was when the best men reverenced women as beings of more delicate calibre, to be shielded from the rougher and grosser contacts of life. Chivalry forbade that they should have taken these to coarse exhibitions, prize-fights and the like. And to such restriction woman's purer instinct and her finer taste assented.
The male being practical and rational, however, since women themselves are changing all that, he too is coming to believe that any and every thing is good enough for a sex which more and more repudiates its subtler quality.
That native delicacy which preserved her once from masculine habits of thought and indulgence, taught man to realise woman as belonging, by nature, to a purer and daintier order. (Howsoever inferior to himself in some other respects he may have held her.)
It won his reverence and worship that these frailer and more exquisitely-constituted creatures should possess, despite their exquisiteness, such fine mettle of resistance in their softness as withstood the fire and urgence of the masculine siege; that within their (possibly) ignorant little brains was light that flashed straight to intrinsic truths and right courses of action; such intuitive apprehension of The Good and The Beautiful, without experience of the base and ugly, as taught them to distinguish clearly, to select, and to hold fast to the fairer in thought and in conduct.
To encounter in woman his own traits touched to higher, subtler issues, and transformed to novel and alluring quality by the charm and graces of another sex, has made always an enchanting, an inspiring, and a baffling enigma of her—to endue woman for man with eternal values and impenetrable mystery. For he has visioned in her—without formulating—the mystery of the Human Duality.
Trembling in the delicate poise of her twofold being, between the soft impressionable, variable woman in her and the man of steel æsthetically sheathed within the velvet of her womanhood, the play of her swift supple transitions, the kaleidoscopic changes of her perpetual new combinations—giving ever fresh bewildering effects of colour, light and mode—have made her infinite variety for him. While her soft, immediate adjustments to his own moods and needs have been his wonder and delight; presenting to him all that there is in himself, yet in modes impossible to himself. All that he knows by acquaintance she knows by intuition—and in a fresh and fairer way. All that he sees, her eyes make him see again in new and more exquisite lights. All that he thinks had been already in her woman-heart ere ever man began to think. All that he loves she shows him a reason for loving—yet not by way of reason. All that he craves with his soul, her soul can confer. All that his body and sense have desired, her body and sense can bestow—But with all the immeasurable differences and enhancements of her unlike sex.
"Away, away!" cried Jean Paul Richter, apostrophising Music, "thou speakest to me of things that in all my endless life I have not found, and shall not find!"