Perhaps it is expecting too much of women of this kind if we ask them to consider themselves in relation to men's liking. They profess to despise the masculine animal they are so fond of imitating, and to be careless of his liking; holding it a matter of supreme indifference whether they are to his taste or not. But it may be as well to say plainly that the disgust which we may presume the normal healthy woman feels for men who paint and pad and wear stays and work Berlin work—men who give their minds to chignons and costumes; who spy after their maids' love-letters, and watch their boys as cats watch mice—men who occupy themselves with domestic details they should know nothing about; who look after the baby's pap-boat and the cinders in the dust-heap, and can call the various articles of household linen by their proper names—the disgust which the womanly woman feels for them is exactly that which the manly man feels for the epicene sex.
Hard, unblushing, unloving women whose ideal of happiness lies in swagger and notoriety; who hate home life and despise home virtues; who have no tender regard for men and no instinctive love for children; who despise the modesty of sex as they deny its natural fitness—these women have worse than no charm for men, and their place in the human family seems altogether a mistake. If there were any special work which they could do better than manly men or feminine women, we could understand their economic uses, and accept them as eminently unlovely outgrowths of a natural law, but at least as necessary and natural. But they are not wanted. They simply disgust men and mislead women; and those women whom they do not mislead in their own they often influence too strongly in the other direction by way of reaction, rendering them sickly in their sweetness, and weak rather than womanly. If the interlacing margins of certain things are lovely, as colours which blend together are more harmonious than those which are crudely distinct, it is not so with the interlacing margin of sex. Let men be men, and women women, sharply, unmistakably defined; but to have an ambiguous sex which is neither the one nor the other, possessing the coarser passions and instincts of men without their strength or better judgment, and the position and privileges of women without their tenderness, their sense of duty, or their modesty, is a state of things that we should like to see abolished by public opinion, which alone can touch it.
WOMEN'S MEN.
If songs are the expressions of a nation's political temper, novels show the current of its social morality, and what the learned would call its psychological condition. When French novelists devote half their stories to the analysis of those feelings which end in breaking the seventh commandment, and the other half to the gradual evolution of the evidence which leads to the detection of a secret murderer, we may safely assume, on the one hand, that the marriage law presses heavily, and, on the other, that the national intellect is of that ingenious kind which takes pleasure in puzzles, and is best represented by the familiar examples of dovetailing and mosaic work. When too, we see that their common feminine type is a creature given over as a prey to nervous fancies and an exalted imagination, of a feverish temperament and a general obscuration of plain morality in favour of a subtilizing and misleading kind of thing which she calls her besoin d'âme, we may be sure that this is the type most approved by both writer and readers, and that anything else would be unwelcome.
The French novelist who should describe, as his central figure, a self-disciplined, straightforward, healthy young woman, honestly in love with her husband, rationally fond of her children, not given to dangerous musings about the need of her soul for an elective affinity outside her marriage bond, nor spending her hours in speculating on the philosophy of necessity as represented by Léon or Alphonse; who should make her absolutely impervious to the sickly sentimentalism of the inevitable célibat, and neither palter with peril nor lament that sin should be sinful when it is so pleasant; who should paint domestic morality as we know it exists in France no less than in England, and trust for his interest to the quiet pathos of unfriendly but cleanly circumstances, would be hard put to it to make his heroine attractive and his story popular; and his readers would not be counted by tens of thousands, as were those who gloated over the sins of Madame Bovary and the prurience of Fanny. The Scandinavian type of woman again, strong-armed, independent, athletic, practical, would not go down with the French reading public; wherefore we may assume that the Parisienne, as we know her in romance—feverish, subtil, casuistic, self-deluding, and always ready to sacrifice duty to sentiment—is the woman best liked by the people to whom she is offered, and that the novelist but repeats and represents the wish of his readers.
So, too, when our own novelists carry their stock puppets through the nine hundred pages held to be necessary for the due display of their follies and disasters, we may be sure that they are of the kind which finds favour in the eyes of the ordinary English reader; that the girls are the girls who please young men or do not alarm mothers, and that the men are the men in whom women delight, and think the ideals of their sex. If, as it is said, the delineation of her hero is the touchstone of a woman's literary power, it must be confessed that the touchstone discloses, for the most part, a very feeble amount of literary power, and that the female mind has but a small perception of all that relates to man's needs and nature.
It is the rarest thing possible to find a flesh-and-blood man in the pages of a woman's novel; far rarer than to meet with a flesh-and-blood young lady in the pages of a man's. They are all either prigs, ruffians, or curled darlings; each of whom a man longs to kick. They are goody men of such exalted morality that Sir Galahad himself might take a lesson from them. Or they are brutes with the well-worn square jaw and beetling brow, who translate into the milder action of modern life the savage's method of wooing a woman by first knocking her senseless and then carrying her off. Or they are impossible light-weights, with small hands and artistic tendencies—men who moon about a good deal, and are sure to love the wrong woman in a helpless, drifting sort of way, as if it were quite the right and manly thing to do to let themselves fall under the dominion of a passion which a little resolution could overcome. Sometimes, for a difference, these light-weights are men of tremendous pluck and quality of muscle, able to thrash a burly bargee twice their weight and development with as much ease as a steel sword can cut through one of pith. The female crowd of present novel-writers repeat these four types with undeviating constancy, so that we have learnt them all by heart; and after the first outline indicative of their attributes, we can tell who they are as certainly as we can tell Minerva by her owl, St. Catharine by her wheel, Jupiter by his thunderbolts, or St. Sebastian by his arrows. But in what form soever they elect to portray their hero, they are sure to make his love for woman his best and his dominant quality.
Few women know anything of the intricacies of a man's life and emotion, save such as are connected with love. Yet, though love is certainly the strongest passion in youth, it is by no means all powerful in maturity and middle age. But the lady's hero of fifty and upwards is as much under the influence of his erotic fancies as if he were a boy of eighteen; and life holds nothing worth living for if he does not get the woman with whom he has fallen in love. It seems impossible for a woman to understand the loftier side of a man's nature. She knows nothing, subjectively, of the political aims, the love for abstract truth, the desire for human progress, which take him out of the narrow domestic sphere, and make him comparatively indifferent to the life of sense and emotion altogether. And when she sees this she does not tolerate it. When Newton used his lady's little finger for a tobacco-stopper, he dug his grave in the female garden of the soul; and women rarely appreciate either Dr. Johnson or Dean Swift, because of the absence in the one of anything like romantic tenderness and its perversion in the other. All they care for is that men shall be tender and true to them; idealizing as lovers; as husbands constant and indulgent; and for this they will condone any amount of crookedness or meanness which does not make its way into the home. If he is complying and caressing there, he may be what fate and the foul fiend like to make him elsewhere, so long as he is not openly unfaithful and never gets drunk.