The
theme is so obvious, so trite, so universally in mind,
and yet so baffling, elusive, and transcendental. Science
cannot say what gravity is; it is more obscure than
electricity; and yet from infancy we are as familiar
with it as with the air we breathe. Only intimacy blinds
us to its tremendous power and inscrutable mystery.
To pause and ask questions about it, is to become suddenly
aware that we are living in the presence of something
titanic and secret. It is so with woman; we live every
day in her all-pervading influence, taking her for granted
as something we are quite familiar with, until an occasion,
when we come to reflect, we find we hardly understand
her at all.
We
can hope for little light on the subject from men. We
know in advance that their estimates must be at best
only partial and prejudiced, and in these profound reaches
where we are most in need of enlightenment, uncomprehending.
On the other hand, if we ask women themselves for light
on the subject, we ought to know that such a hope is
rather impossible. They doubtless do not seem mysterious
to themselves. All their aims are so immediate and practical,
they dwell so little in regions of speculation and fancy,
that their life as they live it must appear to them
simple enough in its essential purpose. What can it
be about them that men do not understand? And even if
they were well aware of an veiled mystery in their nature,
why should they destroy their power by unveiling it?
If they should attempt to explain themselves to us,
we should probably not understand after all. As James
Whitcomb Riley says, "Some folks don't like poetry,
because they've got no liker to like it with."
Just so, if we do not understand women, it is because
we have no woman's understanding. We live in alien spheres
under independent laws, to a great extent. The orb of
woman's soul is like a bubble, radiant, expansive, magical,
and frail. The orb of man's spirit is like a drop of
dew, in comparison, more intense and far-glittering,
but also harder and less entrancing. They may impinge
and coalesce and run down into the soil to replenish
the divine earth, but only after a touch of the rough
world has shattered the bubble's tenuous glory and reduced
it to the dimensions of a drop. What miracle is to expand
the dewdrop to an airy bubble?
Men
always take a mystic view of woman, it seems, and there
is not much confidence in what philosophers have said
about her. With the exception of the theologians, who
long ago branded her in no uncertain terms as the source
of all evil, just men either confer their perplexity
or indulge in vague rhapsodies, half complimentary,
half sceptical. Even such a clear-eyed rationalist as
Santayana passes lightly over the topic, like a skater
on thin ice. "There is something," he says,
"mysterious and oracular about a woman's mind which
inspires a certain instinctive deference and puts it
out of the question to judge what she says by masculine
standards. She has a kind of sibylline intuition and
the right to be irrationally à propos."
That does not help us much, it only confirms our traditional
and instinctive attitude,-an amazed curiosity and resignation
such as we feel toward nature and the riddle of existence.
Another writer, a poet and man of the world with exceptionally
wide experience and knowledge of men and women, once
said to me in grave confusion, "All women are just
a little bit crazy." And so I suppose they must
often seem from the merely logical viewpoint.
When
Greek philosophy came upon the problem, How can the
finite comprehend the infinite, Plotinus solved it by
pointing out that although finite mind cannot comprehend
infinite mind, the finite soul can rise through ecstasy
into infinite regions. It was a shrewd answer, and there
is an echo of it in Emerson's phrase "the stairway
of surprise." Mysteries, these reasoners would
say, can never be understood by the literal force of
logic. The questioner must abandon his argument, and
by sheer transport of spirit pass behind the veil of
thought into the sanctuary of feeling. The discussion
is removed from the audience chamber of the mind to
the penetralia of the heart, and adoration may learn
what philosophy failed to unravel. Every many who has
been in love knows something of the doctrine of Plotinus.
It
is worthy to note that among modern philosophers Nietzsche,
the most uncompromising of logicians, was a confirmed
woman-hater, while Maeterlinck, the pronounced mystic,
has written about women with unsurpassed insight and
charm. Nietzsche dreamed of establishing an ideal of
manhood in which there should be no weakness, nothing
by triumphant energy and intelligence. There was no
mercy in his Superman, as there was no love in his nature.
With his surpassing brilliancy the saving tincture of
sympathy seems to have been lacking in his mortal make
up. He spent his life in intellectual warfare, a devotee
of the cold Goddess of Reason, and passed in his prime
to a living death in a mad-house, like a modern Lucifer
whose ambition was light and whose end what darkness,-the
most pitiable titan of the nineteenth century.
In
Maurice Maeterlinck our generation possesses a very
different thinker, a poet and dreamer whose life is
rooted in the generous soil of a normal physicality,
and whose mystic speculations, reasonable as they are,
seem to be prompted by an almost womanly tenderness
and intuitive wisdom. He is admirably a man in his way
of life, his love of science, and his power of creative
imagination. At the same time he is possessed of a psychologic
insight which seems almost feminine in its deep and
sympathetic brooding upon human destiny. The truths
he brings us are all irradiated with a touch of glory
beyond the guess of pure reason. He makes us familiar
with a region where beauty and truth are transfigured
into a supernal good; and this is the region where women
habitually dwell.
Maeterlinck
is the prophet of a new day in which spiritual ideals
of life are coming to prevail more and more. He foresees
the gradual unfolding of those mystic and emotional
powers in humanity. Of these powers woman is the natural
guardian and source, and woman's movement towards a
more complete development is really part of the spiritual
emancipation of the race. This does not mean that we
are becoming feminized or weak, only that we are becoming
wiser and happier, paying attention more obediently
to the dictates of the soul, and learning to light up
all our processes of reason and common life with a flow
of the kindly and impassioned heart. It means that we
are giving spiritual or moral forces their way, and
recognizing their legitimate place in a triune world,
where they must always be in the lead, yet always guided
by intelligence and given effectiveness through sense.
In
a civilization like that of the last century, dazed
by stupendous revelations and engrossed in a coil of
unexampled material welfare, it was only natural that
the affairs of the human spirit, with its divine affiliations
and unreckoned powers, should be forgotten or obscured.
And as all these triumphs of industry and intelligence,-inventions
and discovery and the arts,-are adjusted to life and
take their place in the perspective of human progress,
it is only natural that the eternal requirements of
the heart should make themselves imperatively felt again,
and be recognized as paramount needs.
If
there is indeed a "stream of tendency, not ourselves,
which makes for righteousness," beyond doubt that
stream is making itself unmistakably felt in our generation.
Our modern social unrest, our perplexed efforts to obtain
a more truly equitable justice for all men, our growing
sense of civic morality, our greater understanding and
sympathy with all human hopes and wants, an intolerance
of poverty, and out hatred of cruelty, our struggles
for reform and improvement everywhere,-what are all
these but evidences of the imperishable force and freshness
of that stream of spiritual life, whose source is unknown,
and whose trend can only be felt? We can only guess
at the meaning of life, but its goodness and savor are
indubitable.
In
this vast struggle which our race seems to be making
toward a fuller realization of its ideals of justice
and its dreams of happiness, the part played by women
must be incalculable. It is preeminently her concern.
She has been from time out of mind the treasurer of
all the spiritual wealth of the race, and now that this
wealth is in demand, it is to her we must come for our
supply. It is largely on her genius we must depend in
readjusting the balance of humanity, in saving civilization
from the extremes of rationalism and materialism. She
well know how best to make use of all the material riches
we have wrung from the earth and all the startling truths
we have discovered. That is her hereditary province.
She will know how to make comfort and knowledge serve
the interests of the soul, which only asks to be made
happy. Her genius is not only deeper, more mystical,
more instinctive and impassioned than man's but at the
same time more practical and less visionary. In her
capacity as the great preserver and fosterer of the
mysterious gift of life, she has passed countless ages
of existence. Protectress of the immortal seed, guardian
and transmitter of the racial wisdom and inherited good,
restricted to the cradle and the hearth, she had no
opportunity for that detachment and comparative irresponsibility
which developed men's wits. She could only brood upon
the secret of her own heart and serve the pressing need
of the day and the hour. So it happens she is at once
more religious and more material than man. Relying upon
intuition and fact, keeping close to the life of the
senses and the life of the soul, she is content to worship
without reason and to enjoy without question. With small
scope for speculation or adventure, and with immense
need of all actual advantages in an every day world,
she has little interest in abstract problems. She acts
from impulse rather than principle. She is a born pragmatist
and lives to make her own desires come true. She only
hits the high places of aspiration and achievement,
skipping the valley of reason in her haste. In the realms
of thought, of investigation, of invention and discovery
and the creative arts, her genius is sterile, being
without the detachment and roving curiosity which the
freer mind of man has been enabled to develop. She is
more essentially conservative than man, not less conventional,
more spontaneous and less formal. Only the most finely
cultivated women accept man's code of fair play, or
those who are compelled to deal with men on equal terms.
There
can be nothing of more vital importance in our advance
toward racial perfection than the liberation of Women.
It means the liberation and salvation of all that is
most divine in human nature; for all her triumphs of
mind, or science and art and trade, must remain aimless
and empty if they are not absorbed and transmuted into
happiness for the nourishment of spirit. In this process
of liberation woman's genius becomes more rational and
man's genius more inspired through enforced intercourse
in common interests and employments. This seems to be
one of the objects which the world spirit has in mind
at the present time.
Religious
and intellectual freedom women already have in common
with men. Their economic, social, and political freedom
is still in debate. Their control of their persons and
actions.is still limited. It is this control that many
women are fighting for. They wish to be mistresses of
their own destinies, to be set free from a position
of material dependence, and to come into contact with
the struggle for existence on the same terms as men.
Whatever
we may think of the wisdom of this contention and its
ultimate advantage, there is one direction in which
women are gradually becoming emancipated which can only
lead to good. I mean the direction of actual bodily
freedom in the matter of dress and activity. Women's
progress in this direction is surprisingly small as
yet, but it is encouraging. That women should so passionately
demand freedom of action in the world, and at the same
time cling so decidedly to the fetters of conventional
dress, which render freedom impossible, it one of those
instances of unreason which leave the masculine mind
in hopeless amazement. There are women who would welcome
martyrdom for what they believe to be the cause of personal
freedom, who would not accept the freedom of their own
natural bodies as a gift. Nothing could induce them
to abandon their absurd shoes and corsets. It is very
strange; but fortunately this is no longer true of all
women. The new woman, or she who was called the new
woman a decade or so ago, the independent woman is beginning
to insist on being free to move and breathe in a normal
healthy way. Gown, hats, shoes, were never more comfortable
than they are now. In her larger more active life, she
is insisting on being unhampered and comfortable, and
she is finding out that she can have that sort of freedom
not only without any loss of charm, but with an actual
increase of beauty and attractiveness. It was a long
time in arriving, but the era of sanity in women's costume
seems to have dawned. The mediaeval and oriental ideal
of womanhood, man's inferior and toy to be indulged
and enslaved, is passed, let us hope, forever; and with
it must gradually pass the standard of women's accustomed
dress, devised to emphasize and enforce women's restricted
sphere. If you are only to be a doll, you do not need
to walk and breathe like a human; but if you realize
that you are human, with an angelic mission in a beautiful
world, the doll's dress becomes intolerable.
With
the physical liberation of women, and the passing of
hampering dress, comes a magical increase of beauty
and charm. The conventional and artificial "style"
of the fashion-plate gives place to the loveliness of
living figures free to move with the sorcery of rhythmical
grace.
