THE INDIVIDUAL WOMAN
Miss Strongith’will believes in herself and has the courage of her individuality. She is no advertising advocate of Woman’s Rights, as spelt with a capital W and a capital R; but she quietly asserts the right of woman to live her own life, to mould her own mind, to shape her own destiny, on equal terms with man, but in her own womanly way. She does not proclaim aloud from a platform that she has a mission; she makes no attempt at public philanthropy, and works among no paupers; she does not wear a divided skirt and ride far afield for notoriety; she does not lecture at learned societies; nor does she run about the world looking at loathsome diseases, and wheedling guileless journalists into writing her down a heroine. She is simply a woman who believes that woman’s life can be quite complete without man, and she acts up to that belief by trying to make her own life self-contained and independent. To Miss Strongith’will the mere fact of being married or not is an extraneous circumstance, a matter of accident, opportunity, or inclination, which has nothing to do with a woman’s individualism. She can assert her own entity, whether she has a husband or not. At least, this is Miss Strongith’will’s theory, and she does not pretend to belong to the profession of strong-minded women. She has no sympathy with them; to her they are an impertinence, not because their minds happen to be strong, or perhaps unfeminine, but because they label themselves, and profess to despise any other brand.
Miss Strongith’will is the eldest of a large family; her parents are well provided with the means of life, their social position is such that the most refined and cultured society is open to them, and they have seen the wisdom and justice of giving their children the advantages of excellent education. In fact, the surroundings of Miss Strongith’will’s life have been in every way conducive to the cultivation of her individuality. She has enjoyed the friendship of men and women of culture, and has had the advantage of contrasting them with the commonplace and the uncultured. She has had the invaluable opportunity of travelling in foreign countries not merely holiday scampers through Continental towns, but sojourns for months at a time in the very centres of the social, artistic, and intellectual life of several countries, into which she has been admitted on intimate terms. She has thus learnt to regard the world in a cosmopolitan spirit, to look upon life in a large way. She has been forced to think for herself by the very eclecticism of her training, but this very cosmopolitanism, while enlarging her mind, has narrowed her heart to individuals. It has made her difficult to please, and impatient of any attempt to coerce her affections. It has deprived her of a husband.
Miss Strongith’will would be very indignant—very angry—if any one suggested that she ever wanted a husband; not that she has anything but respect and admiration for the domestic affections, for the peaceful beauties of home, for the lovely relations of parents and children, brothers and sisters. But she would resent the implication that she could not have been married had she so desired. As a matter of fact, she has had love affairs and offers of marriage; but those which she had before experience and critical judgment had tempered her susceptibility, were of the ineligible order—the medical student with a practice in prospect, the briefless barrister, the young artist who ought to be “on the line,” if only the Academicians were not so jealous, and so on. But these were in the days when a dance would lure her from any studies, when she was not above being flattered by the attentions of a “nice young man,” and before she had realised that “life is earnest, life is real, life is not an empty dream.” Now, however, she has become serious and superior, and the ordinary young man who flirts and dances and plays tennis is as nought to her. Men interest her, she says, intellectually, and only according to the measure of their mental powers or artistic sensibilities does she value their companionship. Let no man dare to talk frivolously to her; she would resent it as an insult to her understanding. If he attempted to pay conventional compliments, he would receive such a snub as should serve him for a lifetime, and put a check on the honeyed side of his tongue for evermore.
But Miss Strongith’will is not a stone, she is full of humanity, full of sympathy for those who suffer and those who struggle for existence or strive to realise lofty aspirations. She is only hard upon women who lower their natures for the love of men, who submit to martyrdom, or turn sour because they have been disappointed in love. She contends that love is not, as Byron has it, “woman’s whole existence,” but that, as the poet says with regard to man, it is of her life “a thing apart”—a beautiful thing that adorns her life and makes it more lovely, but not absolutely necessary as an active influence. But it could hardly be that a woman who thinks and theorises about love has never felt its magic spell, that she has never known the beautiful joy of loving and of being loved. Miss Strongith’will’s individualism is opposed to any outward show of emotion, and an ordinary acquaintance, even a friend, would never quite penetrate to her heart’s secrets. She never talks of her love affair—her great love affair, I mean, which changed the girl to woman, and made her herself. But I know something of what it was to her, what she suffered with the disappointment.
He was not an ordinary lover, he was not an ordinary man. He was a visionary, a poet, a dreamer, with a genius for planning great works and achieving none. He was full of ideas, vague, beautiful ideas which remained abstract, but never took concrete form. He would conceive lovely lyrics, imagine glorious epics, dream splendid dramas—and write a few columns for the newspapers. He was always going to do something, but time went by, and he did nothing, that is, nothing worthy of his undoubted abilities. He started life with brilliant promise, and probably had he known Miss Strongith’will in the days of his promise, he might have given the world something to remember, but he was naturally indolent and terribly sensitive, he hated the actual labour of writing, and the process of materialising his imagination, of reducing his ideas to words, destroyed their charm for him. He would revel in a fancy, but he could never satisfy himself in giving it form and expression, and he would not expose to unsympathetic criticism his dreams and fancies in forms which did not fully realise them. Thus he was frittering away his time, his opportunities, and such talents as were his when he met Miss Strongith’will.
He had just written enough in his time to reveal latent possibilities of literary achievement, and his poetic temperament appealed to her imagination. It touched her sentimentally as she had never been touched before, at the same time that it stirred her intellectually. She felt that here was a man with talent, but without the requisite impulse of industry; what if she should make him achieve something noble and endurable? Like Keats, he declared himself for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts. She would try and help him to combine both sensation and thought, with the result that he should produce poems worthy to live. His intellectual inertness should be corrected by her strength of mind. He should yet be great through her sympathy, her aid, her love. For she loved him; his very frailty of temperament, his acute sensitiveness, his lack of self-reliance, all appealed to her strong nature, and she gave him that love which is all the deeper because it feels bound to protect its object. But his imagination was not satisfied by love of this order, it was not sufficiently romantic, his temperament needed passionate response rather than intellectual aid. She loved him entirely in her womanly way, and according to the utmost possibilities of her nature, in which, however the intellectual element dominated the emotional, whereas in her lover’s nature it was the reverse. So, while he grew impatient and weary, she began to realise a sense of disappointment.
For a long time she hoped against hope that he was really worthy of the love she gave him, that he would do something to make the world respect him; but he had encouraged his nature to yearn for an ideal love, which should mean complete mutual self-surrender, the making of two lives one. The idea of female individualism he admitted was just, but it did not suit him, the substitution of intellectual sympathy and serene sentiment for that passionate love which must absorb every function of soul and body, left his life still unfulfilled. Literary achievement and fame could not fill it, only woman’s love could do that, only the love that maintains no distinct individuality, the love that gives and takes all. Aspasia would have suited him, as Walter Savage Landor draws her. “We cannot love without imitating,” she says, “and we are as proud in the loss of our originality as of our freedom.” But this was not Miss Strongith’will’s way of loving; to lose any measure of one’s individuality even in love was, in her eyes, to be degraded. Yet she loved deeply in her way, and when her impressionable, idealist lover, without any thought of inconstancy, took his love to another, whose nature he deemed more in sympathy with his own, Miss Strongith’will suffered a bitter blow and a deep wound.
She uttered no complaint, however, and few ever knew that she had been in love, much less that she had found it disappointing. But the experience seemed to open out her life, she saw clearer, her knowledge of human motives and feelings was widened, and she felt more than ever that woman can live individually and independently. She did not, however, perceive that she had met her disappointment through not attempting to weld her own individuality with that of the man she had loved without understanding. But after that she believed implicitly in herself, and determined to follow her own pursuits, to live as independently as if she were a man, and, thrown on her own resources, compelled to earn her own living, a duty she considers every woman owes to herself.
What would be Miss Strongith’will’s views on individualism were she a happy wife and the mother of a large family, whether she would still consider that a woman has the right to live exclusively according to her own tastes and inclinations, I cannot tell; I think she would find it rather difficult in practice. As it is, however, Miss Strongith’will is happily situated, for she is the beloved of her immediate family, among whom she is regarded as a superior being who ought to have her own way in everything.
She is the oracle of the house, and she rules accordingly. Perhaps her constant habit of self-reliance has made her a little dogmatic and impatient of contradiction. She has the courage of her own opinions, and the pugnacity of them. It is not wise to differ from them unless you be prepared to pummel her with logic and authority. Then you may have a chance with her in argument, but with all her strength of will and self-reliance, she is a very woman, and her reason will often be none but a woman’s reason, “I think it so, because I think it so.” She “sees life steadily,” and if she does not see it quite whole, she certainly has a good view of it, and from her coign of vantage she perceives the devious ways of women who have no vocation. Therefore, she devotes herself to art as a profession, with just the same enthusiasm as a man of fortune strives in the City to increase his banking account. She has not the stimulus of necessity, but she feels a certain triumphant satisfaction in doing what she is not obliged to do.
She has artistic aspirations, why should she not pursue them with as much avidity as if her livelihood depended upon her success? Why, she argues, should a woman only take to professional work when she cannot depend upon men to work for her? And why should she be accused of taking the bread out of poorer women’s mouths because she sells pictures, when her father or husband is able and willing to give her as much as she wants? No, Miss Strongith’will realises the sordid fact that money is the chief incentive to all work, and that work is valued according to its price; therefore she claims the right for women to work for money according to their instincts, abilities, and inclinations, without exciting any more remark than a man would who worked under similar circumstances. But though Miss Strongith’will asserts woman’s right to independence and the courage of her individuality, she is none the less womanly, none the less gentle and steadfastly affectionate to those she knows intimately, and those who understand her. Would she have been more so had she been happily married, so that her own individuality had blended harmoniously with that of the man she loved, and had become greater for motherhood? That is the question.