The ever-present phenomenon of revolution bears two forms. They may be discrete or concrete, but they are two—ideas, movement,—cause, result—force, effect. And progressive humanity marches upon its future with ideas for its centre, movement its right and left wings. Not a step is taken till the Great Field-Marshal has sent his orders along the lines.
Revolutions go by periods. Are they possibly controlled or influenced in these years by the stellar affinities of the north pole? Is that capricious functionary leading up to Casseopeia, in this cycle, or Andromeda, that we find ourselves turning from great Hercules, fiery Bootes, and even neglecting the shining majesty of belted, sworded Orion, to consider woman? I have not consulted the astronomers. The stars of the heavens are in their places. Male and female, the groups come to us in winter and retire in summer: their faint splendors fall down upon our harvest nights, and then give way to the more august retinue of the wintry solstice. The boreal pivot, whose journal is the awful, compact blue, may, for aught I know, be hobnobbing at this moment with the most masculine of starry masculinities. But if it be, it is in little sympathy with the magnetic pole of human thought, whose fine point turns unwaveringly in these days of many revolutions to woman as the centre and leader of the grandest of them all.
A great storm overtook an ancient navigator of the Ægean. He called on his gods, he importuned them, but the waves rolled and raged the more angrily the more he prayed. 'Neptune, wilt thou not save me?' 'Go below,' was the uncourteous answer, and, as with a great blow struck by the hand of the busy deity, the vessel was suddenly suspended midway between the surface and the depths of the waters. What a peaceful spot she had reached! The astonished mariner looked around him in wonder more than gratitude. 'Good deity,' said he, taking breath, 'I prayed not to be saved thus from the storm, but in it. Return me to the upper world, I beseech thee, and let me do my stroke in its battle.'
Storms have swept over the ages as winds over the blue Ægean, and woman, shrinking from their blasts and the agitations that have followed them, has prayed to her gods, and been suspended between the depths of man's depravity and the heights of his achievements, around whose wintry peaks winds of ambition have roared, storms of vaulting self-love have gathered, tempests of passion have contended in angry and fierce strife. To brighten the heights they assailed each one, to clear the lofty airs embracing them. They shine now where clouds were wont to hover; sunshine steeps the rugged declivities where mists of ages hung their impenetrable folds, paths invite where unknown, forbidding fastnesses repelled even daring feet, and thus the stormy career of conflict is vindicated in its results. The dove testifies a certain divinity in the Doing which has produced it.
But that still region where the more timid life has nestled undaring, unadventured, shrinking from the struggle and the strife above, recoiling from the seething foulness below—what have we in this dreamland inhabited by woman? And wherefore the earnest turning thitherward, in our day, of so many brave, so many earnest, so many sad, so many yearning, aspiring eyes? Wherefore the restlessness, wherefore the groans of imprisonment here, wherefore the passionate longings, the resolute, deep, inextinguishable purpose of escape? Make way, O propitious gods; I can no longer be saved from this struggle of life, but through it. This mariner must be brought to the surface, or the waters will be parted before her by the conquering power in her own soul, and she will present herself there unaided. But not in the fierce spirit of a combatant, not as a conqueror—only as one moved by divine purpose to reach and take her place, to touch and accomplish her work.
What are the qualities of this new soldier in the field of human struggle? Whence comes and whither goes she?
These inquiries point us to the ideas of the Woman Revolution—its Movements will be deductions from them.
Man knows neither woman nor her whence or whither. He acknowledges her a Mystery from his earliest acquaintance with her to the present day. Whatever his conquests over the hidden and the mysterious elsewhere in nature, here is a mystery that confronts him whenever he turns hither—nay, that grows by his attempts at mastering it. The permanently mysterious is only that which exceeds us, and we study this but to learn how widely its embracing horizon can spread as we advance. Thus the woman of the nineteenth century is an incomparably greater mystery to man than was her sister of the ninth. Scientific conquests do but touch the periphery of her being; they explore her nature so far as it is of common quality and powers with the nature of man and of the feminine animals, and would perhaps do more wisely if they stopped dumb before what lies beyond and above these levels. For beyond, man reads but to misread—studies but to vex and confuse himself, and—shall I say it?—learns to sneer at rather than to reverence what baffles his inquiries. Does this statement seem harsh? Is it doubted? See its truth. The only science (so called) which undertakes a study of woman does not inspire its student with an increased respect for her. As a class, medical men, above that of other men, are perhaps less chivalrous than blacksmiths. Lucky is she and lucky are they if it be not diminished instead. For, assuming man as the standard, the corporeal functions, which absolutely elevate her in the scale of development, being added to all that he possesses, and constituting her corporeal womanhood, are seen by this student only as disabilities from which he is happily exempt (as if a disability could come into any life but through the door of an ability); and her larger measure of the divine attributes, faith, hope, and love—love, as compassion and as maternity—are seen as simple weaknesses to which he is happily superior.
The greatness of man's individuality lies in his power over the external; that of woman's is interior, central, as the sun to our planets, which roll through common fields of space, breathe a common ether, share a common light and warmth, but know not that ether, that light, that warmth, whence theirs flows out to them. Central, potent, commanding, superior to laws which alternately move and still their currents—nay, being in themselves those very laws—this hidden power is never touched by them, is shared by them only in fixed measure, beyond which drafts upon it are protested as inexorably as turn the wheels of fate in producing a midge or a mastodon.
The greater includes the less, said the first Mathematician. It is no more true of the geometer's space and the philosopher's matter than of the physiologist's functional power. Apply the axiom to the functional quantity of the feminine and masculine, and it will be seen which includes which, and why man, in all the pride of his highest achievements, is obliged to confess himself defeated, when, as an investigator, he addresses himself to the solution of the problem of womanhood. Her individualizing attributes make in her life a kingdom of her own. Possessing every function and power which man possesses, either in identity or equivalent—the faculties, capacities, and functions common to both differing only comparatively in each from their degree in the other, the masculine being confessedly the lighter side of the balance, when the higher and finer attributes are in the scale—woman has above them all her own unique life, which man can learn only as a student and spectator, the depths of which all his penetration does not enable him to explore, the secrets of which his consciousness can never report. From and through the powers and attributes which centre herein, come those experiences, perceptions—those faiths, hopes, trusts, yearnings, aspirations, loves, which ray out to man that purer and divine light without which he soon stumbles and falls—that warmth without which his life becomes a wintry waste—that harmony without which he is an instrument played at will by the cunning fiend of discord and selfishness—that purity without whose sweet, cleansing current flowing over and around him he is soon mired in the sloughs of appetite, or swamped in the unclean sinks of sensualism—that steadfast holding to things above, without which he soon drops down to grovel along the earth—that unwavering faith and that utter trust in good which keeps alive and warm in the heart of humanity its noblest ideals.