A most quaint and charming creature—this ideal who haunts the dreams of maidenhood! Compounded all of purity and passion, of chivalry and grace, of vigour and beauty. He can in moments of excitement tie the poker into love-knots, and has a hand of velvet with which to touch the dreamer's curls. A ruler of men, he is to be led by a single golden hair. Capable of volcanic passion, which renders him indifferent to meals or to fatigue, he can yet be moved to these ecstasies by but a single member of the sex, and despite snubs or coquetry can live for decades upon the mere hope of her favour. He excels in all manly prowess and diversions, and yet is never guilty of causing the loved one to mourn his absence during a golf widowhood. He adores poetry and is superior to all vulgar commercialism, and yet manages—in that simple fashion known only to ideals—to accumulate a fortune and be generous in the matter of diamonds. He combines in one stalwart person all the virtues of Galahad, Arthur, Launcelot, and Baron Rothschild.
Later on the wife develops an ideal less magnificently ornamental than this choice collection of bric-à-brac virtues. The married idol must be thoroughly domesticated: prepared to throw himself with enthusiasm into the study of croup and measles; is deeply versed in the matter of female domestic service, and yet so full of tact as to be able to obliterate himself at moments of domestic crisis. Like the ideal servant, he must be never in the way and never out of it. He must be uncritical of failure, yet capable of enthusiasm for success; unselfish as a saint, yet commanding the secret of worldly achievement; and above all he must be hopelessly blind to the virtues and charms of every woman but his wife.
Taste as to details may differ according to temperament, nationality, and social condition, but, broadly speaking, this delightful person with his eccentric combination of qualities figures in the abstract affections of all women.
But these are dreams; diversions of those pleasant moments when the human moth allows itself, with futile richness of imagination, to consider the star as a possible companion, and it seems useless to hope that such a person will ever appear in this sinful and unworthy world.
Perhaps from time to time a man who faintly reflects the luminous charms of this knightly husband-saint does arise to cheer and comfort the weaker sex and keep their hopes and ideals alive, but the "Mauds," and "Charlottes," and "Mrs. S. F. J.s," who have been extolling his attractions in print, seem not to have prayerfully considered whether they themselves were fit mates for, or capable of satisfying the ideals of, this wholly impossible he. There is far less talk about the ideal wife—for two reasons, I suppose. One is that men have less time for chattering generalizations, and the other—alas!—is that men are far less interested in women than are women in men.
The American is supposed to more nearly approach this high standard than the men of any other nationality, but that typical American husband of novels has, I must confess, always seemed to me a paltry, bourgeois creature, with the soul of a bank clerk, a neglected mind, and with a low estimate and a sort of amused indulgence of women as pretty, fantastic, inconsequent children with an insane greed of luxury.
Of course, it is heresy to say so, but my observation leads me to think that American women hold a general position far inferior to the women of Europe. The American man is pre-eminently generous to them in material things. Often while he slaves and goes shabby himself he is willing to metaphorically back a van up to the coal-hole and fill the cellar full of jewels, but he denies to his women that whose price is above rubies—his own society. Why is American society made up of women? What is the cause of our superfluity of women's clubs, committees, and classes? What place has the middle-aged or elderly woman in America except as the mother of her daughters, or the dispenser of her husband's hospitalities and charities?
After the period of sex-attraction has passed women have no power in America. Who ever sees here, as is so often seen in Europe, an elderly woman's drawing-rooms filled with politicians, financiers, artists, who come for the refreshment and stimulation of her ideas and conversation? Mentally American women do not interest American men.