Could we but see her without her ‘side’! But we cannot. All the world’s a stage to her, and all the time she plays a part with an ineffable artistry of diplomacy beyond the understanding of a Richelieu or a Machiavelli. A statesman can frequently anticipate the ruses of a rival diplomat and thus check his schemes—because, being men, they both reason from a given point and can understand very accurately the workings of each other’s minds; but how shall one understand woman or predicate her actions when she does not understand herself or her fellow-feminines, and acts on the moment upon unreasoned impulse and pure caprice?
You may point to this and that feminine figure which has made an equable and logical course throughout her career, and exclaim triumphantly, ‘Here is the natural woman, without guile or self-consciousness: a logical and close-reasoning creature.’ Well, you are welcome to your opinion, pious, or derived from what shall seem to you as evidence sufficient for your contention. Hold it, nor inquire more narrowly, nor seek proselytes to your faith. The natural woman? My dear sir, how should your matter-of-fact and obvious nature distinguish the excellently-fashioned and well-assumed mask from the natural face? Summum ars—— you know the rest. Ponder it, nor prate glibly of natures, good sir!
Conceive of the dreadfully unreal puppets the novelists have created and labelled with feminine names. How the machinery creaks and rattles when the puppets move! With what unreal stagger they pace the stage, and how deep below contempt is the unlikeness to womankind of their ways and words.
For the nearest approach to an adequate portrayal of the feminine character, commend me to the women of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s novels, whose mental gyrations are set forth with a touch of inspiration: Bathsheba Everdene, Tess, Viviette, and the uncertain heroine of The Trumpet Major. Their speech has the convincing timbre of their sex; their walk is the true gait, not the masculine tramp that echoes through the pages of most men’s novels; and how truly like nature their tongues say ‘No,’ when their hearts throb ‘Yes, yes!’
They live, these women and girls—they breathe and palpitate with the full tide of life, and no other living novelist can so inform his feminine creations with reality.
But turn to the academic heroines of Mr. Besant. If they were not presented with the subtle suavity of his literary style, I do not know how we could endure the paragons of virtue and learning who occupy the foremost place in book after book that owns him author.
Phillis, in The Golden Butterfly, came as a novelty, but the type perpetuated in each succeeding novel—now as Armorel Rosevean in Armorel of Lyonesse; again, as Angela Messenger in All Sorts and Conditions of Men, and so onwards—is both monotonous and earnest of a poverty of imagination. They would seem to be frankly unreal: an acknowledged Besantine convention—analogous to that early Christian art by which representations of saints, with attendant aureoles, and posing in impossible attitudes, were shown, not as portraitures, but as religious abstractions. These maidens are all sweet and severely proper; as learned as professors and as didactic as lecturers, and they have haloes heavy with gilding. ‘I cannot,’ cries the novelist, in effect, ‘show you the living woman. Consider: how unforeseen her contradictory attitudes and consistent inconsistency.’ And this, after all, is wisdom: to portray your ideal of the sweet girl graduate; to sketch woman as she might be, rather than to fashion an inadequate presentment of woman as she is.
She will have to develop very greatly before she becomes the equal of man, either in mind or muscle; and she will have to slough some singular feminine characteristics if her incursions into masculine walks of life are to be continued. At present she carries her purse in her hand along the most crowded streets, at the imminent risk of its being snatched away. Ask her why she does this, and she will tell you that she has no pockets, or that they are difficult to reach, or else that they are too easily reached by pickpockets. It never occurs to her that the devising of new pockets comes within the range of the dressmaker’s craft. Not that it matters much; for the purse-snatcher obtains little result for his pains, and, beyond some postage-stamps, half a dozen visiting-cards, a packet of needles, and a few coppers, his enterprise usually goes unrewarded.
Woman does not date her correspondence. She has no ‘views’ on the subject; she simply forgets. Sometimes, indeed, she will head her letters with the day of the week; but, as the weeks slip by, a letter written on any ‘Wednesday’ becomes rather vague in date.
Also, it is notorious that the gist of a woman’s letter, the real reason of its being written, appears in a postscript.