The less adventurous spirit of woman in purely mental enterprise is shown in the besetting sin of our girl students, the tendency to regard learning as nothing but the accumulation of facts. Women are the most assiduous crammers: they will work long and desperately to “get up” texts and facts, they will industriously follow a teacher, memorising his every word and slavishly following his precepts. Since they are less lazy than men, mere disgust with drudgery does not tempt them off the track laid out for them and, in their determination to gain the end in view, which is usually a concrete one, they plod on and on, neither looking to the right nor the left, neither lingering nor venturing up attractive by-ways, lest they should lose the track, or miss the prescribed turning on the main road. Men try short cuts, often with disastrous consequences, but the tendency in itself has its advantages. It trains the mental eye for the lie of the country, so that the most desultory of male wanderers, though his wanderings do not lead him very far, may yet acquire some broad impression of the whole landscape, which is more stimulating to the imagination than a walk between hedges faithfully performed. But, if a man be tempted to scoff at this greater docility and timidity of his female companions, let him reflect that it is very largely due to the fault of his own kind, a fault which Englishwomen are now bent on clearing away. For centuries a world made for the convenience of men kept women in leading strings which are now being cut, though their habit will take long to eradicate. In their early years, whatever their ultimate aim, men are put out on the pastures of knowledge like young colts. In their case who questions the wisdom of sending them to a university? It is assumed that a general mental training will be of benefit to them in any profession. Not so with a woman: unless teaching is to be her aim she will find the training of a university hard to come by, because it has not become established that a general mental training of the best kind is as needful for a woman as for a man, and that it is as beneficial to the community that she should have it. A generation or two of equal opportunity will work wonders in the comparative aptitudes of the sexes.

Women may well exclaim at the little use men have made of their greater opportunities: boldness in mental adventure is not a salient virtue of our men. Still, even in England, the cloud of scouts which precedes the plodding main army is composed chiefly of men. Women have yet to prove their equal ability for this service. They have got to improve themselves in map-reading if they are to enter these ranks, and maps are only instances of those bogies to most women, abstractions. They take her beyond the immediate range of vision, beyond the hills on the horizon about which she feels instinctively that she has no right to let her imagination play unless the further prospect is displayed before her physical eye, and she is, therefore, apt to pull a man up short when he is measuring the distant ground beyond his view and to bring him back to the church tower in the foreground, if not to the village pump. For this reason general discussion with English women is so often fruitless: they cannot get away from the concrete and, intensely interested as they are in the thing immediately to be done, they feel at sea in the elaboration of general principle from which immediate action could be best taken or criticised. So often, too, a man is brought up short by finding that a woman is winding all his ideas, which have no immediate attachments to anything within view, round some visible peg in the vicinity, or is mentally striving to find the visible peg which she is sure is really the point of attachment. The worst is when she imagines the peg, quite wrongly, to be stuck into her own amour propre: all argument is then futile, for the two are hopelessly at cross purposes. When a man is trying to set out a general point of view and a woman is asking herself meanwhile: “why is he saying this now and to me?” the chance of mutual comprehension is slight.

It is this same passionate attachment to the concrete, where ideas are concerned, which makes women poor critics, though they are keen observers. If there is one application of the intellect where a comprehensive outlook is necessary, it is criticism. The individual judging and the individual thing judged are in themselves such infinitesimal portions of the whole of reality, that the one cannot seize the other unless they become magnified in the imagination so as to display the infinite connection of relations which is the condition of them both. In woman the personal element so enormously preponderates, both in her appreciations and her dislikes, that her critical judgment usually shoots out into the world through a distorted lens only partially illuminating the objects on which it is bent. Nevertheless, it may be a sad day for men if this feminine lens is rectified. The very distortion is one that serves his comfort, since it focusses so much light upon him and his home. I would not personally exchange the eye of the English wife and the English mother which sheds so warm and loving a beam upon the home for any more searching ray which illuminated a whole distant world and left a home in comparative darkness. It is hopelessly foolish idealism to wish for the combination of every virtue in one atom of humanity: we English with our excellent habit of compromise do not habitually act as if such a thing were possible. Yet there are certain idealists in this country who, in their anxiety to secure equality of opportunity for women, seem to assume that progress can be made without profound changes in the thing progressing, and as though by taking thought women could attain to all that men have got without losing some of their own peculiar and valuable possessions. Unfortunately it is not so. Men and women will never be practically interchangeable beings, and, perhaps, the limit of desirable progress would be that any individual should have the chance of deciding what admixture of the male and female qualities and possessions will suit him or her best. Freedom of choice is after all the great essential of liberty: the use of this liberty can only be well guided by what is greater than liberty, wisdom.

This chapter, I fear, has rather belied its title. We must hark back to the Englishwoman. Let me make her amends by asserting that if she pleases she may have as fine a mind as any woman breathing. She has a naturally quick intelligence, if she be careful not to let its keenness rust; she has been dowered with common sense and power of imagination in inverse proportions; in practical matters she has a sure glance for the best course to be taken, but her vision is hazy where principles are concerned. Her critical standards are usually as conventional as her standards of conduct, but she can be strikingly original in action and will stand up nobly for her convictions. Where she attains to a measure of intellectual superiority, except at the highest levels, she is apt to lose her balance, becoming either priggish and cold or luxuriously vague and mystical. The blue stocking is not typical, but she is English and she still exists. There was an awful Miss Benger who invited Charles Lamb and his sister to tea, macaroons and intellectual conversation, as Charles pathetically describes her in his letter to Coleridge:

“From thence she passed into the subject of poetry; where I, who had hitherto sat mute, and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a round assertion that no good poetry had appeared since Dr. Johnson’s time.... I here ventured to question the fact, and was beginning to appeal to names, but I was assured ‘it certainly was the case’.”

She has her counterpart to-day. She lays down the law, with a steely glance through her pince-nez, scattering words like “fundamental” with the self-satisfied air of one distributing sugar-plums to not very deserving children. She will stultify the very best of critics by quoting his most foolish passages as oracles, and contrive, where she admires the right things, to do so for the wrong reasons. The hazy dabbler is quite as bad, and quite as irritating. She vibrates like Memnon’s harp to any breath from higher planes, and mistakes the sympathetic vibrations of her empty head for the sounding of some organ note of the infinite. Like the shallowest pond she may sometimes produce the illusion of reflecting the profundity of the heavens, till a closer examination reveals the mud and the tin kettles such a very little way below the surface. The good Englishwoman is neither of these: she has either too great a simplicity or too well developed a sense of humour, for she hates pretence and is not slow to perceive it in others. So distrustful is she of artifice that she seldom shines in the fine rapier-play of witty conversation: her interchange of ideas may be compared rather to the game of lawn tennis, with plenty of movement and hard-hitting in it, most balls being returned from the base line with a well-timed drive, not snappily volleyed at the net. She is most attractive when a flush of emotion colours her thinking, showing thus as an effective foil to her mankind who think unemotionally or wear the mask of indifference to conceal their sensitiveness. She understands this shyness in Englishmen and overcomes it so delicately by her sympathy that they glow in her society as the Dolomite peaks in the sunset. She does this, if she takes any trouble at all, with a natural simplicity, not with the elaborate study that Balzac’s Princesse de Cadignan exercised to fascinate her D’Arthez.

The worst of it is that so many Englishwomen neglect their natural advantages. They forget their minds in thinking of their bodies, their souls, their duties or their amusements. They are apt, like slatterns, to trot about the material world in intellectual dressing gowns with their ideas in curl papers. This is delightful enough for friendly intimacy, but is calculated to produce a less charming impression in the wider world. But there is hope in the future. The Englishwoman is beginning to study herself more intently in the looking-glass. The result will be what we should expect of an Englishwoman’s turn-out, quiet and workmanlike, neither fussy nor flimsy, but with an unmistakable cut and a richness rather of material than of ornament. But she must submit herself to good tailors who understand her figure, paying them a good price. No cheap intellectual garment off the peg will do justice to the natural graciousness of her lines which, for all their conservatism, Englishmen truly appreciate; and, for all their grumbles, they will not at heart grudge any trouble or expense in enhancing its effect.

[CHAPTER VII]
THE ENGLISHWOMAN’S MANNERS

The quality, so rare and so unmistakeable, of good manners is more usually appreciated or missed in men than in women: and this in itself shows that the quality is something wider and deeper than good behaviour, which may be required of both sexes. The niceties of deportment, graceful and pleasing as they may be, are of comparatively small moment in human relations. They vary from nation to nation, one preferring to eat with knife and fork, another with its hands; but good manners are good manners all the world over. The Christian ideal of chivalry, at its best, made men exquisite heroes and women exquisite angels, but in its fallings away it turned, for men, the noble practices of knighthood into weapons of conquest for the beleaguering of women, and, for women, stitched the angelic halo formally to the coif of womanhood. Knightly devotion, once an inspiration, became a formality accepted as small change instead of as a choice gift. So decadent knights of a later age opened doors and made pretty speeches to win hearts, while the hearts’ owners permitted themselves impertinences and other licenses in the knowledge that the knights would not dare to reproach them, and as for the other angels—it mattered little what they thought. It has therefore come about that the good manners looked for in men are supposed very largely to consist in those arts of politeness and consideration by which a stronger sex places its protection and devotion at the service of the weaker, and on this supposition the weaker sex, having to receive rather than give, has less scope for exercising similar arts. In fact they are not considered necessary to a female equipment. A man is judged by his manners, but a woman, provided she does not grossly violate the decencies, mainly by her appearance. This distinction was unimportant, perhaps, when women were held in very real subjection, but it becomes a matter of greater concern in modern days of feminine independence.