[13] That a great many of the Utilitarian ideas of John Locke may be traced to their origin in the works of Montaigne has been demonstrated by M. Pierre Villey in his "L'influence de Montaigne sur les Idées pédagogiques de Locke et de Rousseau", who thus claims for the literature of his own country an honour which was commonly granted to that of England.
[14] The education recommended for Emile is not domestic. He was to be kept carefully isolated from the world, so as to escape its taint, until such time as his character would be fully matured, placing him above the reach of disastrous influences. A similar principle had prevailed at Mme de Maintenon's establishment of St. Cyr.
CHAPTER IV. Feminist and Anti-Feminist Tendencies among the English Augustans.
In studying the march of feminism among the two rival nations on either side the Channel, one cannot help being struck by the remarkable lateness of anything resembling a feminist movement in England. That the women of mediaeval England were looked down upon, not only on account of their inferior muscular strength, but also on the score of their supposed want of mental and moral stability, appears but too plainly from the numerous scornful references to the weaker sex in the literature of those days. The Song-collections of the Transition Period clearly betray the "esprit gaulois" in their brutal estimate of woman and in the tone of undisguised contempt and ridicule which prevails whenever women are the theme. The often-repeated story of the henpecked husband and the shrewish wife contains a warning against marriage which, although couched in the form of banter, evidently has its foundation in the general conviction of female depravity. The early plays with their brawling scenes and stock female characters were also most unfavourable to women. Nor did the early Renaissance bring any marked improvement either in the female morals or in the male appreciation of them, for the satires against women continued with hardly a refutation. The improvement which resulted in Ascham's days from the awakening female interest in learning and in the Caroline period from the introduction into poetry of the Platonic love ideal, was too partial and too qualified to be permanent, and in later years the Puritanic ideal of womanhood was an abomination to feminists of the Wollstonecraft type. But the general estimate of women in England had never been lower than in the notorious days that followed the Restoration. In the Middle Ages all influence had been denied them on the score of their supposed inferiority of understanding and inequality of temper; the men of the reign of Charles II regarded them merely as fair dissemblers and utter strangers to the nobler motives, in which opinion the ladies of the age did all they could to confirm them. The higher the society in which they moved, the less likely they were to escape the many vices which prevailed in that age of depravity and libertinism. There were, of course, the Puritans, who were forced by circumstances to lead lives of retirement, regarding the vicious excesses of Whitehall with disgust and jealously guarding their women against degrading influences. The puritan ideal of womanhood was thus preserved; but there was no promise for the future in the state of close confinement and complete submission which the Judaic notions of Puritanism demanded.
In those days, when night was darkest, a faint glimmer of a coming dawn was seen. It consisted in some women beginning to take a modest share in literary pursuits. When late in the seventeenth and early in the 18th century the modern novel was passing through its preparatory stage, Mrs. Aphra Behn, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Haywood and some other women realised that here was a new domain of literature in which woman was qualified by her fertile imagination and quick power of observation to excel. Even before the Restoration, the birth of a new social problem dealing with the relative positions of the sexes was heralded in the works of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle[15]. However, public opinion stamped any such efforts—whether conscious or no—as immature, and therefore doomed to failure.
All through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century women were regarded from a purely sexual point of view; they were, as Mr. Lyon Blease calls it "enveloped in an atmosphere of sex". Their being judged exclusively by a sexual standard entailed as a necessary consequence the scornful neglect of those among them who were disqualified by age or lack of physical attractions. If the lot of the married women was often a sad one, considering the habitual inconstancy of husbands, the condition of those who had drawn a blank in the matrimonial lottery was even more pitiable. Hence that desperate hunting for husbands which it is among the most creditable performances of modern feminism to have lessened. It is easy to understand that it is among forsaken married women and especially among the more pronounced spinsters that we must look for such elements of female wisdom and virtue as the barren age affords. The middle-aged mother of a family was sometimes possessed of a certain hard-acquired dignity; and to the often bitter experiences of spinsterhood we owe women of the type of Mary Astell. But contemporary literature, while on the whole inclined to be lenient towards married women who became "stricken in years" was almost uniformly severe in dealing with the "old maid of fiction", and the unmarried female had to await the broader days of humanitarianism to have her troubles understood and her wrongs righted.
But even the more privileged among the female sex, those who in their personal attractions possessed some kind of coin, the value of which masculine opinion was not slow to recognise, were not much better off than their plain sisters. The prevailing views regarding the place of women in social life were the direct outcome of the general tendencies of egoism and materialism by which the age was characterised. Woman was regarded only in her relations to the male sex, and, what was worse, woman herself had not yet learned to rebel against the shackles of a convention of centuries, unquestioningly adopted the male verdict and tried her hardest to become what the opposite sex wanted her to be. They found it easy to relinquish all individuality, and live up to the ideal set up by a degenerated manhood, and readily assumed the vices which their lack of any sense of moral responsibility prevented them from recognising as such. This total absence of moral purpose is a characteristic of the age which was not restricted to women only. The moral standard had sunk very low indeed, existence among the better situated seemed exclusively devoted to the pursuit of pleasure with all its attendant vices. From the male standpoint this view of life determined the esteem in which the female sex was held. The eighteenth century "beau" regarded woman only as an instrument of animal passion, which hypocrisy tried very successfully to gild over with a varnish of mock gallantry that was a remnant of better times of Platonic chivalry, and aroused the indignation of moralists. This gallantry tried to make up in extravagance for what it lacked in sincerity. The pursuit of the object of his passion led the libertine to the most absurd excesses which were very far removed from a devout worship[16]. Love had become a grossly sensual passion, and women were treated with exaggerated ceremony, but with little respect. Men held with Pope that "every woman is at heart a rake", and treated them accordingly. They laid a mock siege to what was conventionally called "the female heart" and when that fortress in an unguarded moment surrendered or was taken by storm, the conqueror, after enjoying the spoils of his victory, left the poor victim to pay the penalty of social excommunication and flaunted his conquest in the face of a society which maintained a double standard of morality, and in which seduction and adultery on the part of the male were held to be titles of honour.
To fully understand the eighteenth century interpretation of the passion of love we have only to scan the pages of that new form of fiction, the novel, which has supplied us with a truthful and lifelike picture of the morals and manners of the time. In many of them the heroine is made the object of libertine attempts which to the twentieth century reader are absolutely revolting. It is true that she does not submit to the outrage, but defends her honour as well as she is able—strange to say, the eighteenth century heroine, apart from a few females of the picaresque kind, is generally represented as virtuous and chaste, rather a picture of womanhood as the author liked to imagine than a faithful one, a circumstance for which the presence of a moral purpose may account—but the secondary female characters are often of a frailty which contrasts strongly with it. The "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality" in Peregrine Pickle, for instance, are a frank confession of the most shameless female profligacy, and the outrages upon decorum and good taste described in them are corroborated by numerous descriptions of female indecency and wantonness displayed either in the baths of the fashionable watering-places or at the masquerades which were in great vogue, giving the female sex ample opportunity for displaying their charms with an utter want of delicacy. Nor were the "bucks", "beaux" or "maccaronies" at all inclined to be particular with regard to the language they used in the presence of ladies. The obscenity of their conversation aroused the indignation of Swift's Stella, but upon the whole women were too much accustomed to the coarseness of male conversation to think of protesting, nor did their parents or husbands think it necessary to interfere. Besides which, the dialogue of those novels which constituted their daily amusement was of much the same kind, and even the works of an Aphra Behn or a Mrs. Manley were read freely in the presence of young girls without being considered in the least offensive to feminine delicacy.
The improvement which the latter half of the century witnessed in this respect was, as we shall see, in no small measure due to female influence. The Bluestocking circles were largely instrumental in bringing about this purifying of conversational and literary taste. The female novelists of the next generation, while following in the steps of Richardson and Fielding, and imitating their choice of incidents, do not imitate their revolting coarseness. The stories of libertinage and violence occur in a much modified form, and the treatment is less offensive and not unfrequently humorous, taking the edge off the indelicacy of many a doubtful situation.