Woman—through a man's eyeglass

Without woman man is nought; and the proverb, Cherchez la femme, though commonly urged with a cynical sneer, is as full of humane wisdom as any saying of Solomon.

When I contemplate woman in the abstract, with all her divine gentleness and sympathy, and her essential spirituality, I feel that I must kneel and worship her from afar; but when I regard her in the concrete, with all those little weaknesses and vanities and sleight-of-mind tricks, which are as the electric wires through which man is brought into familiar and continuous communion with her then I feel that she is near to me, that we can meet on a common plane of humanity, and that the privilege of loving her is not beyond my reach. And to love woman is surely the highest privilege of life, and the noblest duty.

It is but a shallow philosophy that underrates the married state, and he who bids you avoid matrimony, because he has tried it and failed, is a fool for his pains and deserved his fate, for he chose rashly and without discrimination. “Wife and children,” as Bacon says, “are a kind of discipline of humanity.” Your true philosopher will tell you that the enduring companionship of a good woman is the most beautiful influence in a man’s life, but it must be hoped for only after an ample apprenticeship in love, through which alone a man can arrive at any true knowledge of woman. Your wise man will never marry his first love, for he knows that matrimony demands as much special education as any of the learned professions. Yet the number of unqualified amateurs who enter the matrimonial ranks every year is perfectly appalling to contemplate, the Divorce Court annals recording but an infinitesimal portion of the spoiled lives for which the lack of conjugal education is responsible. And yet I am not inclined to set much store by the wisdom of Thales, who, when asked, as one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, to prescribe the proper period for a man to marry, replied, “A young man not yet; an elder man, not at all.” I only feel convinced that incompatibility of temper with Mrs. Thales was at the root of his wisdom, and gave it a false twist.

Does every man of us indeed deserve a wife? or rather, have we all studied to understand a woman and to love her with comprehension? This is not such an easy matter as we think, for when do we know exactly how much of her love a woman expects to give for how much of ours? When can we tell in what proportions she wants us to be severally husband, lover and friend? For if we would maintain that illusion which alone preserves real matrimonial happiness, we must never allow the relations of lover and companion to appear lost in that of husband. The essence of woman is in her love, the substance remains for domesticity; and when the happy state of marriage proves a failure, be sure that there has been misconception as to the relativeness of the one and the other. After I shall have written that great work I have in contemplation, to be entitled “The Wooing of Women: by a Practical Failure,” there shall be no more unhappy marriages; for my readers will then learn to recognise the adaptable wife and avoid the unsuitable, and the wooing shall be conducted on such scientific principles that all misunderstandings will be rectified in the probationary stage, and a matrimonial millennium will set in. Then, perchance, the writers of romance may look in vain to real life for their plots; but a grateful posterity will write my epitaph, “He made true love run smooth.”

But you may ask, why have I never married? Well, the answer is a long story in many chapters; but perhaps I may summarise it in a sentence. I have always loved too much. This statement will, no doubt, be regarded as a confession of frequent infidelity, and perhaps I may be misconstrued as a kind of gay Lothario. But I am really no such thing. Though the names of my loves have been many, I have—paradoxical as it may sound—loved the same woman all my life. She is only a fantasy of the heart; yet I have sometimes thought that, after much seeking, I had found the original in flesh and blood, and I have invested her with all the attributes of the ideal woman, the wife of my dreaming, the complement of myself. Then I have loved to idolatry, turned life into a perpetual love-making, and suffered tortures of jealousy until the real woman has revealed herself behind the image of the ideal, and proved but another case of mistaken identity.

Yet, though I were less than human, did I not feel some sort of sorrow or disappointment at the first perception of my mistake, it has left no bitterness, for the fault has been invariably my own. I had clothed with my own ideas an entity sufficiently beautiful in herself, and loved her, not for the woman that she was, but for the woman that I wanted her to be. How, then, could there be perfect sympathy between us? We were playing at cross-purposes. If she cared for me at all, it was as one who loved her for herself; not as one who was endeavouring to model her to the mould of his own mind, when he found that, after all, she was a misfit. The misunderstanding was of my own making, for, as I am beginning to find out, ideals are impracticable in the commerce of life. To be happy, one must have no preconceived notions, but “catch the joy as it flies,” and accept that which is for what it is.

Nevertheless, though my life has been a series of individual disillusionings, and while I cannot but feel that an excellent husband has been squandered in me, I have never loved in vain. Even in my sorrowful awakenings to the fact that the One Woman is still a Will-o’-the-Wisp to me, and that she whom I had permitted to personate her, and had taken to my heart in her place, is, after all, hopelessly separate from me, I have invariably felt the better for the experience. Our natures always gain by love, even though it be fruitless; it opens the pores of our souls, and lets in charity, which is the very sap of society. And each fresh experience of love adds to one’s store of sympathy, and increases one’s knowledge of “Womanity”—if I may be allowed the term—and consequently one’s power of loving. “Appetite grows by what it feeds on,” and so the more one loves the more one needs to love, and it is very pleasant.

Who that has suffered much from love of woman would not willingly pay double the price in heart-aches to buy back “love’s young dream?” For my own part, I would sooner be miserable in love than happy out of it; but then there are those with whom to love is as necessary as to breathe. I am not ashamed to confess it is so with me, for is not love the most beautiful element in life? Nor have I any sympathy with those cynical-minded persons who regard absolute devotion to a woman as feebly foolish. Though bachelorhood has become almost chronic with me, I still never meet a woman without wondering whether she and I could love each other under appropriate circumstances. And surely it is this capacity to give and take in the matter of the affections that preserves our youth for us; while we retain it, we can never grow old, though our years may increase apace. When we feel that we are open to no new sensations of love, then let us prepare for old age, and turn an indifferent ear to the sound of funeral bells. But while one can say, “What a charming woman; I believe I could love her,” one feels that life is still worth living, and full of beautiful possibilities.

It has been a fashion in all ages to decry women, to call them false and fickle, to say that their business is to deceive, that their spell is that of the serpent, that they are vain and shallow and cruel. Poets have railed against them in plausible verse; philosophers have said bitter things about them; and many a wit has gained his reputation at the expense of woman’s fame; all of which is as wickedly foolish as to say that human nature is uniformly infamous. You will not find that the great writers who live in the hearts of mankind ever stultified or debased their genius by defaming woman; but, on the contrary, they have created for us immortal types of pure and lovely womanhood. It is the cheapest cynicism to discredit a whole sex; and misogyny and misanthropy are merely the affectations of vain and egotistical minds. When I hear a man say he does not believe in woman’s constancy or woman’s virtue, I know that there is something wrong with that man: he is either a libertine or a bully, and no woman will ever respect him, however much he may ensnare her senses.

Belief in woman must be part of the religion of all men who are worthy of their mothers. By this I do not mean that one must take for gospel her every word and act, for the gift of dissimulation is a special dispensation of Nature for her protection against what is aggressive or destructive in man; just as to the female of the African butterfly Papilio merope is accorded the power of protecting herself, during certain seasons, against the depredations of birds, by assuming the colour of the malodorous Amauris niavius, which is particularly obnoxious to the feathered tribes. And as we recognise the humour of this comedy of the mimic butterfly and the cunningly duped bird, so do we perceive, if we be true critics of the stage of life, that nine-tenths of its comedy are due to the protective dissimulation of woman in her relations with man. Else were it all drama, with an excess of tragedy, and that were dreary. Woman is full of quaint conceit and subtle humour, whether she know it herself or not, and we love her all the more for this, especially since the laugh is often against ourselves.

Confidence between man and woman must always be comparative, and absolute trust a practicable impossibility, since the differences of temperament preclude a perfect understanding. A man can never see a woman entirely as she is, or as one of her own sex may see her, and vice versâ. Yet a woman is more likely to comprehend a man and his motives than he is to comprehend her; for a woman, while more sensitively sympathetic, judges instantly by instinct, straight and sure as the crow flies. A man, on the other hand, travels the railroad of reason, where there are many shuntings, and a single mistaken signal may upset the whole train of his logic. In judging a woman’s motives and feelings a man argues from his own, and deduces conclusions which are, more often than not, radically erroneous.

For instance, a man kisses the woman he loves, and she responds to his caress. He believes it is in the same passionate spirit, but really the impulse is subtly different. He kisses her to satisfy his own yearning; she kisses him because she knows it will make him happy, and to make him happy is the active spirit of her love. And it is just the failure of man to distinguish and accept this beautiful spirituality in woman’s relations with him, which necessitates that protective dissimulation which becomes her second nature. For example, here the woman must simulate the passion of her lover, for he would not be satisfied with the delicate impulse of her responsive caress; so is he permitted to believe that she feels as he does, reasoning only from his own emotions, while she instinctively knows that their feelings are running in different channels, though they meet in the broad ocean of love. How true to womanhood is that passage in the journal of that extraordinary girl, Marie Bashkirtseff, where, relating how, in response to the passionate protestations of a youthful lover, she kissed him, she adds, “I did it more for his sake than mine.” Did the young man think it was for his sake? Not a bit of it. He thought it was a passionate impulse for her own gratification, as any man in his place would have thought.

But what must be the result of all this misunderstanding if the lover be one of your unqualified amateurs? After marriage the wife, happy in the possession of the husband she loves, believes that all is mutual trust, and she ceases to practise that beautifully innocent dissimulation by which she held him as a lover. Then he begins to misunderstand, and her love seems not the same to him, though it has been unchanged all the while; so his love grows colder as he becomes consequently dissatisfied and irritable, and, with this rift within the lute, the music of matrimony sounds out of tune and grates upon their ears, and the lovers drift into mere husband and housewife—lovers no more.

But I am getting serious and psychological, and what has an incorrigible bachelor like me to do with the psychology of woman? I have but to glance round my companionless room, and a photograph on the mantelpiece, a picture on the wall, a book on the shelf, a faded letter-case on the table, will remind me how little I really know of it all; else, perhaps, who knows? the wife of my dreams might even now be sitting in that chair yonder, where those books and newspapers rest in such confusion, and the sweet, happy voices of children might be waking the slumbering soul of the room to joyous laughter, and I should not want an excuse to fling away my pen, and romp on the floor with the little ones, and play with their toys, while she smiled happily, and called me a “great baby.”

No; let me believe that I know nothing of woman now, as I knew nothing then—how long ago? Is it years, months, weeks, days—what matter? Regret is for the failures of marriage, and time a matter for the Benedicts. I can dream a whole life’s happiness between waking and bedtime, and choose my bride from any age or clime I will. Helen of Troy or Guinevere of Camelot shall be she if I dream it so, and I’ll snap my fingers at Paris or Lancelot, and yet remain a free man, with an undisputed smile for the young lady who sells me my morning paper. So let me be a dreamer still, and woman a beautiful fantasy.

But some memories are pleasant, so if you, my reader, care to listen, as we sit together in the hush of the twilight, I will sketch you portraits of some typical women I have known—not necessarily loved; and if I chance to dip my brush in cynicism, I pray you stop me, for I would not be a caricaturist, but if I happen to lay the tint of tenderness on my canvas a little too thickly, forgive it, since the subject is a woman.