The combination occurs, perhaps, more frequently than is commonly supposed, but it is such a grave departure from the respected tradition that we hasten to forget each instance as quickly as possible, to prevent any danger of a cumulative impression. Yet it is in no spirit of pandering to the tradition that the Englishwoman’s mind appears in this chapter unadorned or unexplained by her appearance: it is simply a matter of convenience. The mind of woman is not legitimately considered by itself, for the whole, the representative woman is not purely a function of her mind. Nevertheless, the Englishwoman’s mind, if not essential to the Englishwoman, exists, and it is growing. It would be unchivalrous to pass it by without observation. In George Meredith’s day it was hardly resolved that a woman might have a mind at all: this in itself is a measure of the later growth, for on this head, at least, there is now no doubt. The creator of Diana Warwick represented the Saxon man firmly treading with his heel on any feminine mental sparks which might set on fire the chips of his crumbling social structure. His faith in the sex’s capacity for growth has been justified to-day, when it would be absurd to represent women as anything but emancipated. Meredith’s view of the men as “pointed talkers” and the women as “conversationally fair Circassians” is no longer true. The women of England have made some progress on the upward route which he hoped that they would take.
At the same time, it will not do to contemplate our ladies as at the end of their journey instead of very much on the road. Exceptional women there have always been in this country, but the average woman still has an average mind, as the exceptional women, who are the severest critics of their sisters, will be the first to assert. They are the leaders through the jungle, forced ever to look back in impatience at the leisurely crowd following in the rear, calmly accepting the removal of the obstacles with which they have not to struggle, and far from guessing the need of the mental hatchet which had so happily cleared them away. It is probably true in all countries, but certainly in ours, that the necessity of cultivating a mind, even the latent possibility of doing so, is not apparent to the majority of women. It is made so easy for them to do without this troublesome acquisition. They are taught at school just sufficient for them to fill their probable station, which they do with docility and without ambition. Neither in their work nor their play have they any sense of a void aching to be filled up. Indeed what void could there be—unless it were pecuniary—when there is golf and tennis, bridge, fox trotting and hesitating, cinema gazing, novel-reading, playgoing to musical comedies and revues, or, in the most domestic regions, sewing and the rearing of children to keep them happily in the conviction that life is full enough without the added burdens of thought and knowledge? Men call them clever if they dress becomingly or if they can shuffle a room-full of guests adroitly, throwing conversational shuttlecocks up in the air for others to sweat in pursuit of: and to them cleverness appears a minor virtue, seeing the little enthusiasm with which their admirers regard it compared with their ecstasy over other more obviously feminine felicities. Or, on a lower scale, what time have they for any adornment of the mind, when the weekly toil of tending children and cooking for husbands, or the long days of drudgery at the factory, so fatigue the body and soul, that the mere bodily adornment of Sunday is almost too strenuous a reaction, when simple pleasures of the senses or even simple repose are the only appropriate drugs for their overstrained systems? Women with minds have still much work to do in order to give those who have none the leisure to look for them. The result is that women lag behind, with an unfortunate effect upon our national appearance. If ever the women overtake the men, much that is shoddy will disappear from the mental shopwindow? of this country.
So much may be said, I think, by a man without incurring the accusation of ordinary masculine prejudice. It is less than what is said and felt by the pioneers among women. That the world, even in England, is still arranged by men mainly for masculine convenience may be true, and will remain so as long as women allow most of their thinking to be done for them, as Miss Ethel Smyth, in her remarkable memoirs, holds that they do. Yet the enlightened man, though he may prefer that change should take place slower than the most ardent wish, may look forward with hope to the time when his convenience may less preponderate and feminine reverberations will cease to attend his thinking, then fulfilling the prophecy of the Lady Psyche in Tennyson’s “Princess”:
Everywhere
Two heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the tangled business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life,
Two plummets dropped for one to sound the abyss
Of science, and the secrets of the mind.
In the contemplation of this hope what he now sees before him in his womankind as a whole is an intellectual plant of idle and promiscuous growth, capable, as its rarer shoots prove, of the sturdiest and most luxuriant upward ranging, but content for the most part to twine itself, like the convolvulus, round the first support offered to its tendrils, a house, a domestic affection, the crumbling tower of antiquated beliefs, the hazily pointing sign-post of a dubious philosophy or the hardier neighbouring weeds which are rooted in passions and desires. From these more handy and material supports it will not tear itself away to grow towards the sun with lithe, independent shoots disdainfully forcing their way past all encumbrances. The rarer instances where from choicer ground and more livening influences this species pushes a vigorous head into the skies serve only to accentuate the lazy lowliness of the general stock. It seems to shrink from the light of ideas, or, where the attraction of the light is too imperious to be resisted, it lifts a shoot gingerly upwards only to curl a tendril lovingly round the first comfortable fact met with in the short upward progress, and to adhere to it gracefully, quite satisfied with the result of its exertion. Or let us vary the illustration. Men, in their intellectual journey, can contemplate with satisfaction at the first glance some vast mansion of knowledge rising up before them from its solid foundations to all the infinite variety of its higher tracery. That they cannot grasp the whole does not trouble them, for they quickly see the stages by which the ascent to greater knowledge will be attained. They are inspired not bewildered by the lofty prospect, resigning themselves happily to a study of the bare plan that will enable them to explore the beauties of the mansion intelligently and in order. The woman, on the other hand, is appalled by such an approach: the mansion swims before her eyes, the plan seems a confusing maze of meaningless lines. Her introduction must proceed on a different method. She must be led in by a side door through some pleasant alley into one of the rooms of the mansion, all comfortably furnished with easy chairs and pictures on the walls. Here, if she is allowed to linger without being too hastily pushed on by the official guide, her curiosity will be aroused. The assimilation of one room will prompt her to a timid sally into the next one, and so by good luck, if she is never frightened, she may in time be as much at home as any other explorer. Yet even then it is questionable whether she will ever venture out into the main court to gain a comprehensive view of the whole and of its relation to the surrounding architecture. Her domestic instinct tells her that she is more at home indoors, attending to the things which she can touch and see. So she is content to inhabit an appartement in the palace of truth, as an invalid pensioner might inhabit a set of rooms in Hampton Court Palace without ever drinking in the beauty of the whole building. It is only her mind which so flinches at magnificences and is afflicted with vertigo on eminences; her heart will take a Mount Everest of difficulties in its stride as if it were Primrose Hill, and her emotions will carry her on wings into the clouds without tremors, though she fall in the end as far and fast as Lucifer. Only when her intellectual dizziness is conquered shall we find her frequently, clear-headed and exultant, on the topmost pinnacles of truth, whence she can look down on her more elderly sisters placidly knitting in the verandah, while the children are playing hide-and-seek upon the stairs.