Now was woman at last robbed and poor indeed! Her social and civil equality having been yielded in exchange for protection, her protectors had bereft her of all moral rights, and denounced as unclean the function for the perfect performance of which she had paid out all her goods. It was the triumph of the Oriental idea over the ideals of the Occident, and so deeply did the Eastern thought stamp itself upon the Western mind that only to-day the latter begins to free itself from the yoke of the Asian Paul's fierce egotism of sex. So deeply indeed did this thought penetrate, that historians do not hesitate to attribute to this scorn of woman and her mission of childbearing a long delay in the development of European civilization. The higher spiritual natures, being more under the influence of the Church, accepted its suggestions of asceticism and left the baser sort to perpetuate the race and thus delayed the processes of evolution.
It was the denial by the Church of the beauty and nobility of natural love that drove the Middle Ages to the invention of chivalry and the romantic love of the unwedded, that they might evade the ban and find some outlet for the emotions.
With the Reformation, that first uprising of the Western mind against Asian domination, men threw off the yoke in so far as it bound their own necks, and declared the rightness and reasonableness of all their mental and physical functions. It was no longer a shame for the priest of God to mate with a woman, nor a weakness for a man to round his life with the fulness of joy to be found in connubial love, when he at the same time assumed its duties and responsibilities. The ingrained contempt of women was not so easily eradicated. Honour the man defined for himself as integrity, wholeness, a development of every power to its highest possibility. Honour for woman was simply chastity. That is to say, if she repressed all the animal side of life she might entirely neglect the spiritual. She might be but indifferently honest, a liar, a slanderer and a tattler, guilty of every minor baseness, and yet be held in good and honourable repute. The wonder is that woman's morals survived at all so false a training!
Centuries of such teaching wrought their wretched work despite all the forces of nature. Virginity instead of purity became the ideal of the highest type of woman, who shrank from the fulfilment of her functions as a stepping down, instead of glorying in it as the fulfilment of her sacred purpose. What had been urged upon her upon every side she endeavoured to conform to in the spirit as well as the letter. Her mind strained towards the virginal as well as her body. The higher type of woman cried out to man for spiritual rather than physical love, and she found his natural sane tenderness for her person brutal rather than beautiful. The young girl, sedulously guarded from knowledge of the fundamental reasons of her being, cast suddenly and unprepared into marriage, shrank with disgust from a relation which her husband—educated in wholeness of thought—regarded as the culmination of the flower of life into its fruit. It is not too much to say that four fifths of all modest, pure girls—as a result of their foolish training—contemplated the sexual relation with the bitterest reluctance. They had been led to believe that virginity was in itself a virtue, instead of regarding it only as the sanctification of the body until such time as it legitimately becomes the temple of life. With many this feeling survived marriage, and embittered it to both the wife, who resented what she looked upon as a baser nature in the man, and to the man who resented, and was rebuffed by the coldness of his companion.
At least half of the disappointments and failures of marriage arose from the mistaken training of good women.
Ten years ago this Patristic ideal still had a strong hold upon the race, but the long centuries of study of the Latin and Greek literatures in the schools finally, almost suddenly, bore fruit. We had through our school boys and girls imbibed the spirit of the two European races whom the Semitic influences had never dominated. One wonders that some foolish so-called progressives should now be wishing to drop those literatures from the curriculum of students, though perhaps their work is done. At all events we hear very little now of this talk of the inferiority of women.
When the miracles of male achievement are pointed to to-day, women know enough to say proudly, "Did man make this? Well, I made man"; and is content.
May 4. Seville.
The Beauty of Cruelty.
What a people are these,—these Spaniards! This afternoon—Sunday—I saw my first bull-fight. One need never wonder again at the Roman Arena and its horrors. It is as incredible that human beings can sit through such spectacles as that women could have reversed their thumbs when a staggering, bloody barbarian turned up a glazed eye to seek mercy.... And this, after two thousand years of Catholicism, of Christianity!