THE FUTURE OF WOMAN.
Woman is a thing of accident and spoilt in the making says the greatest of the schoolmen, but we are far from denying her right to vindicate something more than an accidental place in the world. After all that can be urged as to the glory of self-sacrifice, the greatness of silent devotion, or the compensations for her want of outer influence in the inner power which she exerts through the medium of the family and the home, there remains an odd sort of sympathy with the woman who asserts that she is every bit as good as her master, and that there is no reason why she should retire behind the domestic veil. Partly, of course, this arises from our natural sympathy with pluck of any sort; partly, too, there is the pleasure we feel in a situation which may be absurd, but which, at any rate, is novel and piquant; partly, there is an impatience with woman as she is, and a sort of lingering hope that something better is in store for her.
The most sceptical, in fact, of woman's censors cannot help feeling a suspicion that, after all, strong-minded women may be in the right. As one walks home in the cool night-air it seems impossible to believe that girls are to go on for ever chattering the frivolous nonsense they do chatter, or living the absolutely frivolous lives they do live. And, of course, the impression that a good time is coming for them is immensely strengthened if one happens to have fallen in love. One's eyes have got a little sharpened to see the real human soul that stirs beneath all that sham life of idleness and vanity, but the vanity and the idleness vexes more than ever. If we come across Miss Hominy at such moments, we are extremely likely to find her a great deal less ridiculous than we fancied her, and to listen with a certain gravity to her plea for the enfranchisement of women.
It is not that we go all lengths with her; we stare a little perhaps at the logical consequences on which she piques herself, and at the panorama of woman as she is to be which she spreads before us, at the consulting barrister waiting in her chambers and the lady advocate flourishing her maiden brief; our pulse throbs a little awkwardly at the thought of being tested by medical fingers and thumbs of such a delicate order, and we hum a few lines of the Princess as Miss Hominy poses herself for a Lady Professor. Still we cannot help a half conviction that even this would be better than the present style of thing, the pretty face that kindles over the news of a fresh opera and gives you the latest odds on the Derby, the creature of head-achy mornings, of afternoons frittered on lounges, and bonnet-strings, of nights whirled away in hot rooms and chatter on stairs. There are moments, we repeat, when, looking at woman as she is, we could almost wish to wake the next morning into a world where all women were Miss Hominys.
But when we do wake we find the world much what it was before, and pretty faces just as indolent and as provoking as they were, and a sort of ugly after-question cropping up in our minds whether we had exactly realized the meaning of our wish, or conceived the nature of a world in which all women were Miss Hominys. There is always a little difficulty in fancying the world other than we find it; but it is really worth a little trouble, before we enfranchise woman, to try to imagine the results of her enfranchisement, the Future of Woman. In the first place, it would amazingly reduce the variety of the world. As it is, we live in a double world, and enjoy the advantages of a couple of hemispheres. It is an immense luxury for men, when they are tired out with the worry and seriousness of life, to be able to walk into a totally different atmosphere, where nothing is looked at or thought about or spoken of in exactly the same way as in their own.
When Mr. Gladstone, for instance, unbends (if he ever does unbend), and, weary of the Irish question, asks his pretty neighbor what she thinks of it, he gets into a new world at once. Her vague idea of the Irish question, founded on a passing acquaintance with Moore's Melodies and a wild regret after Donnybrook fair, may not be exactly adequate to the magnitude of the interests involved, but it is at any rate novel and amusing. It is not a House of Commons view of the subject, but then the great statesman is only too glad to be rid of the House of Commons. Thoughtful politicians may deplore that the sentimental beauty of Charles I. and the pencil of Vandyke have made every English girl a Malignant; but after one has got bored with Rushworth and Clarendon, there is a certain pleasure at finding a great constitutional question summarily settled by the height of a sovereign's brow.
It is a relief too, now and then, to get out of the world of morals into the world of woman; out of the hard sphere of right and wrong into a world like Mr. Swinburne's, where judgment goes by the beautiful, and where red hair makes all the difference between Elizabeth and Mary of Scotland. Above all, there is the delightful consciousness of superiority. The happiness of the blessed in the next world consists, according to Sir John Mandeville, in their being able to behold the agonies of the lost; and half the satisfaction men have in their own sense and vigor and success would be lost if they could not enjoy the delicious view of the world where sense and energy go for nothing.
Whether all this would be worth sacrificing simply to acquire a woman who could sympathize with, and support, a man in the stress and battle of life, is a question we do not pretend to decide; but it is certain that the enfranchisement of woman would be the passing of a social Act of Uniformity, and the loss of half the grace and variety of life. Here, as elsewhere, "the low sun makes the color," and the very excellences of Miss Hominy carry her aloft into regions of white light, where our eyes, even if dazzled, get a little tired with the monotony of the intellectual Haze.
The result of such a change on woman herself would be something far greater and more revolutionary. It is not merely that, as in the case of men, she would lose the sense and comfort of another world of thought and action, and of its contrast with the world in which she lives; it is that she would lose her own world altogether. Conceive, for instance, woman obliged to take life in earnest, to study as men study, to work as men work. The change would be no mere modification, but the utter abolition of her whole present existence. The whole theory of woman's life is framed on the hypothesis of sheer indolence. She is often charming, but she is always idle. There is an immense ingenuity and a perfect grace about her idleness; the efforts, in fact, of generations of cultivated women have been directed, and successfully directed, to this special object of securing absolute indolence without either the inner tedium or the outer contempt which indolence is supposed to bring in its train.
Woman can always say with Titus, "I have wasted a day," but the confession wears an air of triumph rather than regret. A world of trivial occupations, a whole system of social life, has been laboriously invented that the day might be wasted gracefully and without boredom. A little riding, a little reading, a little dabbling with the paint-brush, a little strumming on the piano, a little visiting, a little shopping, a little dancing, and a general trivial chat scattered over the whole, make up the day of an English girl in town. Transplant her into the country, and the task of frittering away existence, though it becomes more difficult, is faced just as gallantly as before. Mudie comes to the rescue with the back novels which she was too busy to get through in the season; there is the scamper from one country house to another, there are the flirtations to keep her hand in, the pets to be fed, the cousins to extemporize a mimic theatre, the curate—if worst comes to worst—to try a little ritualism upon. With these helps a country day, what with going to bed early and getting up late, may be frittered away as aimlessly as a day in town.
