To assert herself, to demand liberty or even equality, is uncongenial; and the aggressive attitude is only adopted as a duty, undertaken for the weaker sister from a passionate instinct for justice and an intolerance of sham. There were two things Charlotte Brontë hated: a handsome man and a deceitful woman. But hate left her very weary. It was the strain of playing prophetess that inspired her taste for “doormats.”
Obviously, the conception of a Hero thus evolved is essentially feminine. The most complacently conservative among us, however intolerant of the fine shades, could never have either conceived or admired a Rochester. We should certainly not suppose him attractive to any woman of character. To us he appears mere tinsel, the obvious counterfeit and exaggeration of a type we have come to despise a little at its best. Naturally, such men fancy that they can “do what they like with the women”; but we knew better, until the novelist confirmed the truth of their boast. Miss Brontë, moreover, is very much farther from our idea of a gentleman than Miss Austen. It may be doubted if men ever like or applaud rudeness, which she apparently considers essential to honest manliness.
Yet, however unique in its external manifestations, and however exaggerated in expression, the Brontë hero-recipe involves, like Miss Burney’s, an assumption that happy marriages are achieved by meeting mastery with submission. However diverse their conceptions of the proper everyday balance between the sexes, both find their ideal in the absolute monarchy of Man.
It must be always more difficult and more hazardous to determine an author’s private point of view as her art becomes more professional and self-conscious. George Eliot’s characters are all deliberate studies, neither the instinctive expression of an ideal nor the unconscious reflection of experience; and such manufactured products naturally tend to be extensively varied, seeking to avoid repetition or even similarity. We may, perhaps, say that George Eliot, out of her wider experience and more scholarly training, understood men better than her predecessors. She certainly avoided, as did Jane Austen, the specific “Woman’s Man”; and, on the other hand, she penetrated, without losing her way, more deeply into the masculine mystery than the creator of Messrs. Elton and Collins.
Tom Tulliver’s whole relationship with his sister is an admirable study in the conventional notion of a stupid man’s “superiority” to a clever woman; but it cannot be criticised, or in any way regarded, as a feminine conception. That provokingly worthy and obstinate young man is perfectly true to life. There is neither mistake nor exaggeration here. We must all feel that “this lady” knows. In marriage, Tom would certainly have played the master to any woman “worthy of him,” but would not thereby have become less normal or natural. If men question or puzzle over anything in The Mill on the Floss, it is not Maggie’s toleration of Tom, but her temporary infatuation for Stephen. He indeed is something of a lady’s man, not a woman’s; but probably we may not disown the type. To some extent, again, Adam Bede is “masterly” to his mother, and would probably—barring accidents on which the plot hinges—have been accepted by Hetty in the same spirit; but he is certainly not perfect, and seldom, if ever, outruns probability.
But although George Eliot, having a wide outlook, recognises and illustrates the tendency in man to play the master, she does not associate it with any idea of perfection, nor does she idealise submission in women. Yet we know that personally, though less intensely than Charlotte Brontë, she too disliked sex-assertion, and found comfort in what the other only desired, a large measure of intellectual rest, by letting a man think and act for her. At all times her religion and her philosophy were largely borrowed or reflective—for all their assumption of independence—and every page of her life reveals the carefully protective influence of George Henry Lewes. Only less than any of the other chief women novelists did George Eliot permit self-expression in her work, and the particular portraiture of man we are here discussing was not the result of study but the exposure of conviction.
Finally, it was reserved for later writers, not of supreme genius, to develop the type to its extremity. Charlotte Yonge, with her usual superabundance of dramatis personæ, has two “women’s men” in The Heir of Redclyffe, and the contrast between them is most instructive. The aggressive “perfection” of Philip, indeed, is crude enough. Miss Yonge deliberately exaggerates his manifold virtues in order to darken the evil within. The reader and his own conscience alone ever realise the full force of his jealous suspicions and obstinacy in self-justification. Guy’s faults, on the other hand, are all on the surface; but his exalted saintliness is even more superhuman than the other’s unerring morality. Both exemplify a feminine ideal; though Philip has only one worshipper, her faith is unfaltering. His, indeed, is the type that lives to hold forth, to inform, and to dogmatise. Woe to the woman who ventures to think for herself. The power or charm of Guy is unconscious. They love his passionate outbursts, his generous impetuosity, his childish remorse and “sensibility.” In him, however, there are some qualities which men esteem: he was a sportsman, adventurous, and transparently sincere. Only his final “conversion” and the death-bed scene spoil the picture. He becomes, in the end (what Philip had always been), the sport of feminine imagination with its craving for perfectibility. He loses the human touch, vanishing among the gods.
We have the “last word” in this matter from John Halifax, Gentleman. With school-girl naïveté Phineas tells us on every page that “there was never any man like him.” His smile, his tenderness, his courage, his independence, his tact and tyranny in the home, his quiet influence on Capital and Labour, are certainly unique, and no less certainly monotonous. He understands everybody, and “deals with them” easily. It costs him nothing to lead men and dominate women. Quietly and without effort, he pursues his way—to an admiring chorus, always “the master,” the perfect gentleman. He was dignified, attractive, and very “particular over his daintiest of cambric and finest of lawn.” The little waif of the opening chapters indignantly repudiated the name of “beggar-boy”: “You mistake; I never begged in my life: I am a person of independent property, which consists of my head and my two hands, out of which I hope to realise a large capital some day.” And he kept his word.
Prompt and acute in business, of unflinching integrity, and guided by generous understanding as to the serious labour problems of his generation, John was one of those fine English tradesmen who effected so much, not only towards the foundation of our commercial empire, but towards removing the barriers between their own class and a Society largely composed of “fox-hunting, drinking, dicing fools.” The girl who loved him was “shocked” to hear of his being “in business,” although her feelings quickly developed to proud worship.
It is here, indeed, that Mrs. Craik reveals most power. Towards the “world”—his equals, his “men,” or his “superiors”—John Halifax is the true gentleman, and a splendid specimen of manhood. He has rare dignity, shrewd insight, and ready command of language. The scene of his “drawing-room” fracas with Richard Brithwood is extremely dramatic, and gives us almost a higher opinion of the hero than any other. Entirely free from the narrow-mindedness of the ordinary self-made man, he almost subdues our dislike of the gentle despotism which he assumes towards wife and family. The complacent masculinity is exaggerated by the author’s persistence in keeping him to the centre of the picture; and we are disposed to believe that it might have been less open to criticism if expressed, as well as conceived, by a woman. Phineas Fletcher, the fictional Ego, has some charm; but he is absolutely feminine, if not womanish, and the Jonathan-David attitude of every page becomes wearisome by repetition. There is no doubt that this perpetual enthusiasm of one man for another offends our taste, and has a tendency to make both a little ridiculous. John has a positive weakness for perfection, and we should observe the fact with more pleasure if it were less frequently “explained.”