The higher a man's nature, the keener seems his enjoyment of his own irony and mockery of his own foibles; but did any woman ever seriously sit down to write a "Roundabout Paper?" Women, we are generally told, are "especially self-conscious;" in fact, the whole theory of women, philosophically stated, from the shyness of the miss in her 'teens to the audacious flirtation of a heroine of the season, rests wholly on the assumed basis of "self-consciousness." But it is self-consciousness of a very peculiar and feminine sort—a consciousness, not of themselves in themselves, but of the reflection of themselves, in others, of the impression they make on the world around. Woman, we suspect, lives always before her glass, and makes a mirror of existence. But for downright self-analysis, we repeat, she has little or no taste. A female Montaigne, a female Thackeray, would be a sheer impossibility.
We have been led, as the Spectator would have said, into these reflections by the chorus of shrill indignation with which the world of woman encounters the slightest comment of extraneous critics. The censor is at once told flatly that he knows nothing of woman. He is a bachelor, he is blighted in love, he is envious, spiteful; he is blind, deaf, dumb. All this goes without saying, as the French have it, but he is certainly ignorant. The truth is, it is woman who knows nothing of herself. It is only self-analysis which reveals to us our inner anomalies, our ridiculous self-contrasts; it is humor which recognises and amuses itself with their existence. But it is just the absence of this sense of anomaly in her nature or her life that is the charm of woman.
Christmas has been bringing us, among its other festivities, a few of those delightful amusements called private theatricals; and in private theatricals all are agreed with Becky Sharpe, that woman reigns supreme. We were present the other day at an entertaining little comedy of this kind, where the whole interest of the piece was absorbed by a fascinating widow and an intriguing attorney, and where both these parts were sustained with singular ability and success. The amateur who played the lawyer seized the general idea of his rôle with perfect accuracy; in four minutes it was admirably rendered to his audience, but in four minutes it was exhausted. The preliminary cough, the constant angularity of attitude in the midst of perpetual fidget, the indicative finger from which the legal remarks seemed to pop off as from a pocket-pistol, were grasped at once, and remained unvaried, undeveloped to the close. The very ability with which the actor rendered the inner unity of legal existence, the very fidelity with which he represented the lawyer as a class, denied to him the subtle charm of the only unity which life as a representation exhibits—the charm of a unity of outer impression arising out of perpetual inner variety.
His feminine rival won her laurels just because she made no attempt to grasp any general idea at all, but abandoned herself freely to the phases of the character as it encountered the various other characters of the piece. Whether as the frivolous widow or the daring coquette, as the practical woman of business or the unprotected female, as the flirt in her wildest extravagance or the wife in her most melting moods, she aimed at no artistic unity beyond the general unity of sex. She remained simply woman, and all this prodigious versatility was, as the audience observed, "so charmingly natural," just because it is woman's life. "On the stage," if we may venture to apply the lines about Garrick:—
On the stage she is natural, simple, affecting—
It is only that when she is off she is acting.
In actual fact she is acting whether off the boards or on, but the mere existence in outer impressions, in the unity of a constant admiration, which critics applaud as natural on the stage, they are unreasonably hard upon in general society.
A man on the boards is doing an unusual and exceptional thing, and as a rule the very effort he makes to do it only enhances his failure; but a woman on the boards is only doing, under very favorable circumstances, what she does every day with less notice and applause. There can be no wonder if she is "charmingly natural," but this naturalness depends, as we have seen, on the entire absence of what in men is called self-consciousness—that is, the sense of anomaly. When a critic then ventures to open this inner existence, and to give woman a peep at herself, we cannot be astonished at the scream of indignation which greets his efforts. But we may be permitted to repeat that the scream proves, not that he knows nothing of woman, but that woman knows nothing of herself.
We are afraid, however, that all this feminine resentment points to a radical defect in the mind of woman, which she is alternately proud to acknowledge and resolute to deny. Frenchmen of the Thiers sort have a trick to which they give the amusing name of logic; they present their reader with a couple of alternatives which they assert divide the universe, and bid you choose "of these two one." But any ordinary woman presents to the observer a hundred distinct alternatives, and defies him to choose any one in particular. There is no special reason, then, for astonishment at the coolness with which she sets herself up one moment as a "deductive creature," as one who attains the highest flights of knowledge by intuition rather than by reason, and the next poses herself as the one specially rational being in her household, and waits patiently till her husband is reasonable too.
We are sometimes afraid that neither one nor the other of these theories will hold water, and feel inclined to agree with one of the most brilliant of her sex that, if woman loves with her head, she thinks with her heart. As a rule, certainly, she judges through her affections. She does not praise nor blame; she loves or hates. The one thing she cannot understand is a purely intellectual criticism, the sort of morbid anatomy of the mind which treats its subject as a mere dead thing simply useful for demonstration. Very naturally, she attributes the same spirit of affectional intelligence to her critics as to herself; and when they unravel a few of her inconsistencies, amuse themselves with a few follies, or even venture to point out a few faults, she brands them as "hating" or "despising" woman. Point, too, is given to the charge by the fact that these affections through which she lives are from their very nature incapable of dealing with qualities, and naturally transform them into persons. A woman does not love her lover's courage or truth or honor; she loves her lover. If she prizes his qualities at all it is simply because they are inherent in him, and so she gives herself very little trouble to distinguish between his bad qualities and his good ones. She considers herself bound to defend his characteristics in the mass, and if she seem to give up his extravagance or his rakishness, it is only with a secret determination that this concession to the world shall be balanced by an increase of adoration at home.
As she deals with mankind, so she expects mankind, and especially the mankind of criticism, to deal with her. It is in vain that her censor replies that he only blamed her bonnet-strings or attacked the color of her shoe-tie. Woman's answer is that he has attacked woman. This folly, that absurdity, are in woman's mind herself, and their assailant is her own personal antagonist. "Love me all in all or not at all" is a woman's song, not in Mr. Tennyson's Idyl only, but all the world over. The discriminating admiration, the constitutional obedience which still claims to preserve a certain reticence and caution in its loyalty, are more alien to woman's feelings than the refusal of all worship, all obedience whatever. "Picking her to pieces" is the phrase in which she describes the critical process against which she revolts, and it is a phrase which, in a woman's mouth, is the prelude to the bitterest warfare.