Which among the famous days of the French Revolution is more tragic or more ludicrous than the Fifth of October, 1789? It is the day of the 'Insurrection of Women.' That wet autumnal evening saw the bedraggled Parisian host, volunteers and captives, defiling in sullen rage before the front of Versailles, bewildered at the glories they were themselves overcasting as with eclipse, and resolved to do justice on Marie Antoinette, whom her enemies called Messalina. Leading these anarchist women, came on the brown-locked Théroigne de Méricour, for an instant brilliant and victorious, but already hysterical, driven by impulse like a leaf before the wind, and destined, after she had dipped her hands in the blood of September massacres, to lose what little mind she could ever boast and spend long years in the Salpêtrière. The Queen whom she took captive died on a scaffold with a kind of funereal grandeur. Théroigne died in her asylum, when she had lapsed down the many degrees which separate our nature from the brutish and chaotic appetite. So in these two women, both suffering and making to suffer, the gay society of France, the City, and the Court became an example to the nations; and their tragedy was a looking-glass in which the laws of righteousness, economic, domestic, religious, stood revealed as in lightning-flashes. For Queen and courtesan symbolized all that a light-minded century admired and worshipped; while the Place de la Révolution and the cells of the Salpêtrière bore witness that, in so worshipping, the world had by some dreadful blunder missed its upward path and had taken the abyss for a shallow stream. Into that abyss a whole order of things plunged headlong, nor has it ever again emerged. A hundred years after, we find ourselves asking whether society has learned its lesson.
The New Woman boldly answers No. In her wide-spreading tumultuous battalions, many of them wearing the divided skirt, she advances, with drums beating and colours flying, to the sound also of the Phrygian flutes, a disordered array, but nowise daunted, resolute in her determination to end what she is pleased to define as the slavery of one-half the human race. One-half, and surely the better! A voice from Oneida Creek proclaims the 'strike of a sex'--that never before imagined battle of Armageddon, in which all on one side are Amazons, marshalled by their Idealas and their Louise Michels, all on the other mere conscience-stricken males, 'skulking creatures of the opposite sex,'--to quote that unsparing critic, Mrs. Evadne Colquhoun,--who know their sin and are ashamed to be found out. The Rights of Woman must supplement and crown the Rights of Man. [ . . .]
[. . . ] But though women have taken part in revolts--like that insurrection which Théroigne headed--for wars or for revolutions demanding powers of forethought and generalship they have not, hitherto, shown the capacity of average men. Excesses they may commit as pétroleuses in a Commune of 1871; nor is there any degree of self-sacrifice from which they have shrunk .[ . . .] What they cannot undertake is a regular campaign.[ . . . ]
Rousseau, we are all aware, returned to the golden age, or the state of primeval innocence, not alone, but in the society of Madame de Warens, the Amiable Indifferent, as we may describe her. And Diderot, in his rhapsodical fragment 'Sur les Femmes,' while exalting their qualities of tenderness, of devotion, and of ecstasy, concludes by saying that 'they are more civilized than men on the surface, but within have remained true savages.' From which it seems to follow that the road which would lead them back to the age of instinct is more direct and a good deal shorter than the way of the skulking creature, man. Or, as Burdach observes, with his sure touch, 'though women do not tend to vary so much as men, when they do vary, they fall into an extreme.' The wits and the philosophers of the eighteenth century in France exemplified, not only the law by which genius often displays a certain feminine softness, but also the fact that the brains of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen are much upon an average. Hence, on the one hand, 'masculine thought'--so abhorrent to the New Woman--did set in motion those systems and sketch those Utopias, which account for the idyls of Les Charmettes, the Watteau-like pastorals of the Little Trianon, the heroics of 'Corinne,' and the Rights of the Female, as summed up in her seventeen articles by Mlle. Olympe de Gouges. But, on the other band, if the brains of the two sexes had been decidedly unequal in weight and in the number of their convolutions, it is probable that men might have preached in vain for want of an audience. Women can hardly take to themselves, therefore, the glory of the fresh and glad tidings, the liberty, equality, and free union, which make the substance of that Evangel. Yet, now as always, they have proved to be fervent disciples, energetic, unrelenting, self-convinced. They have pleaded with equal enthusiasm the privileges of genius and the wrongs of their own sex. They were willing to forego the honours decreed them by chivalry, if only they might claim even-handed justice. And to them justice signified emphatically freedom: 'La carrière ouverte aux talents.' But their chief talent has ever been to please, as Joubert would tell them with a smile. How, then, are they to please? Alas if it be true that they remain savages, according to Diderot! alas if that diamond-pointed satirist Pope should not be quite in the wrong when he affirms that 'every woman is at heart a rake,' and 'most women have no character at all'! For in this arduous, this unprecedented enterprise, who would desire to behold vice decked out with the plumes of genius, character sacrificed to impulse, modesty put to the blush on the score of emancipating knowledge, and the 'forsaken Sibyl' leaping from her Delphic seat, in order to join Théroigne de Méricour and her Menads in their assault upon Versailles?
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Here, then, is the New Woman. Like the 'noble savage' of Dryden and Rousseau, she condemns law as tyranny; the social contract itself she deems irreconcilable with her changing moods; and her lover's oaths, everlasting as they sound, are but the eloquence of a stage-scene or a parliamentary programme. She is in complete accord with the anarchist who assures us that 'nothing has yielded him a standard which does not vary.' Like him, she perceives 'the panorama of life rolling incessantly on, and realities in their season appearing under different lights.' She declines, as he does, 'to resist the seductions of contradictory views.' [ . . . ] For what can be more simple than the dilettantism of impulse, the argument of novelty and freedom? The heart is to be judge and jury, witness and advocate; religion, law, custom, and authority make up the old despotic rule from which woman is now, by her individual and combined efforts, to be emancipated. She will indite for herself a Gospel and an Apocalypse, a Code which is to express her sovereign will, a philosophy corresponding to her aspirations. And she will revolutionize fashion and its manner of distinguishing the sexes. Rosalind shall walk undisguised along Piccadilly in doublet and hose, not masquerading in a play, but in deadly earnest, bent upon winning that equal friendship where the absurd homage formerly paid to the sex shall have no part. [ . . .]
Yet a change has come over society during the last fifteen or twenty years which the author of 'Valentine' could scarcely have foreboded. Women are now graduates in half-a-dozen professions, and disciples in all. They practise medicine as well as novel-writing; the forceps is familiar to them no less than the bicycle; even dress-cutting advertises itself as 'scientific' at six guineas the course. [ . . . ] Such intemperate cleverness would have alarmed Burdach, and confirmed him in the view that women, if they leave the average, are apt to fall into an extreme. Shakespeare has observed, from his play-actor's point of sight, that 'All the world's a stage'; the New Woman, who delights in pathology, bids him leave his jesting. 'All the world's a hospital,' she says with Heine, 'and all the men and women merely patients.' The late Dr. Anna Kingsford, whose published works proclaim her to have been a medical practitioner, a vegetarian, a trance-writer, and an ecstatic, was not solely singular in this complication of civilizing functions. Accomplishments have given way before science; senior wranglers must look to their laurels, worn upon occasion simply by leave of their more learned sisters; the girl-graduate is a proficient in Greek, and Mrs. Humphry Ward scatters the shafts of German criticism through the picturesque pages of the novel.
[ . . .]
But the New Woman cannot escape economics, any more than she is willing to dispense with a rational dress in favour of the 'undivided cylinder,' or grandmother's petticoat, which she once wore contentedly. And as, like other abstractions, she is not to be found complete and realized in one individual,--as she ranges from grave to gay, from lively to severe,--it is the novelist's duty to sketch her in all her varying aspects. There is a type much closer to life than the grotesques and caricatures of 'The Heavenly Twins,' and the author of 'Robert Elsmere' has given it to the world in a brilliant, half-serious, half-satirical fashion, naming it 'Marcella.' Those who have lost themselves in Mrs. Grand's sea of moving wax, where the story does not march but only welters round its disjointed personages, will break out into vehement praise on turning to the transparent colours, the crisp dialogue, the distinctly painted figures, and the style, as keen as it is light and sparkling, of a volume which shows Mrs. Humphry Ward at her best. Not that 'Marcella' is so perfect as the art of blotting could have given it us. If the characters of 'The Heavenly Twins' do not move at all, those which Mrs. Ward has called out on her stage can hardly be persuaded to go off again. It is worth noting how, in her three so widely advertised and successful stories, Mrs. Ward has not once ended at the psychological moment. She lingers with a superfluous book, plays out the tricks when we know them all, registers the obvious three-volume gambit, and sings her swan-song, not unmusically, to an audience that is looking for its wrappers and great coats. The effect is certainly marred; but no additions, however tiresome, can do it away. 'Marcella' is still the platonic exemplar of a circulating novel, composed, alas! not for all time but for a season; it is surface-painting which has no great depth,--echoes skilfully rendered of discussions, talk, reading, of the thousand and one things that make the current of society-life, with a background of so-called opinions to subdue its frivolity and its fashion. But the touch and the make-up are, in their kind, admirable. Women, it is agreed on all hands, excel in fiction. We hasten to explain our meaning, which is not that of Lombroso, who lays down that in the female sex deception is almost an organic aptitude. What we have in view is the slightly dream-like reproduction of emotion and character, the fanciful version of things, made credible to others by strokes of detail, in which women have found a means of expression well within their grasp. They observe minute traits of conduct; they spy unconsciously upon the men their masters, and learn the signals which betoken storm or sunshine; while uttering their smooth, Evadne-phrases, they are drawing conclusions and moving to the point of assault. When a woman sits down to write a story, she is exercising the same kind of faculties that enable her to overcome mere strength by delicacy of interpretation and natural tact; she has but to throw her feelings upon paper, to describe the scenes which she habitually notes in her thoughts, and, unless her style and education have been wholly neglected, she will produce the outline of a readable fiction.
'Marcella,' we need not say, is much more. It is a genuine work of art, rising in one scene at least to the height and the beauty of a poem--that daring yet finely-wrought situation in the library, when love and moonlight, treason and the distant view of murder, and the playing at passion into which fire seems to be stealing as the play goes on, are thrown into a framework that makes the whole as detachable as it is arresting.
Mrs. Humphry Ward knows her feminine chess, and practises the game with subtle power. It is an ancient but fascinating problem, 'Marcella to play and mate in three moves.' The opening, in which we are introduced to Raeburn, the chivalrous and strong, might perhaps be summed up as the knight's gambit. And if the New Woman were consulted, she would undoubtedly suggest as a novel but appropriate ending, 'Queen castles and takes knight.' The wedding ought to be a surrender on the part of the bridegroom, condemned henceforth to do his lady's will, to see with her eyes, and let her govern while he pretends to reign--'delicias hominis!' That, however, is not the philosophy of Marcella's biographer, to whom an equality of the sexes in this large revolutionary sense appears to be impossible. The knight, by sheer force of character, takes the queen, compelling her to own that he is worthy of her obedience as well as her love: that a woman may ask forgiveness on her knees from the man she has wronged, and may rise to a life which shall be all the nobler in that weakness is overcome by frank acknowledgment. Man triumphs, but only to set his partner on a throne.
Not being original enough to invent a religion, much less a system of economics, Marcella, who is a bright imitative girl, nervously eloquent, and striking in her dramatic postures, was made to be the exponent of views which gave to these personal advantages a setting beyond the common. Unlike Evadne, she did not exhaust encyclopaedias in her youth; she never had a particle of industry or method; and her interest in Mr. Ellerton's sermons had been as strictly self-regarding as the enthusiasm with which she took up the Socialist propaganda, meaning to attain a high place in the movement. Her politics were guided by 'violent hearsays'; and though nourished on Karl Marx and Lassalle, a haze, which the historian of the damsel never quite succeeds in scattering, clouds the statement of Marcella's opinions. They were, in fact, little better than the 'imaginative intrigue' which had occupied her fancy and given a scope to her affections at school. The daughter and heir of a discredited gentleman, a black sheep in his own class, who comes into an embarrassed property, she finds that pretty things and old associations have their charm. The instinct of aristocracy wakes up; she aspires to be the Lady Bountiful of her village; and in a dream of great houses, family portraits, tapestries and heirlooms, of bric-à-brac, the peerage, and forty thousand a year, she engages herself to Mr. Raeburn, who will one day be the 'titled coronet' of American millionaire ambition. Of course she proposes to 'live quite simply' in Mayfair, with a carriage and two thousand pounds per annum at her disposal. We think with a smile of Marianne Dashwood. But she does not care the value of a Social Democratic leaflet for the young man himself, and she insists on a Magna Charta and Bill of Rights which he meekly signs, leaving her free to attend any one's meetings except his own, and to vote against him at the Board of Guardians. Perhaps we have not rehearsed the stipulations of that remarkable protocol quite accurately; but to this complexion it must have come, had not the second gentleman walked forward to the footlights. His name was Wharton, and, much as we dislike him, it must be admitted that he is the hero of this bold adventure.
Women are certainly more unrestrained than men, if once they have passed the Rubicon. Would Thackeray, who knew his Paris, have dared to write the French scenes in 'David Grieve'? We all remember his apologies for Pendennis--that harmless youth who fell in love and out again with the scarcely more innocent Fanny in the Temple Gardens. But Mrs. Ward is one of a new group of female novelists, ranging from Miss George Egerton to the powerful historian who has recounted 'The Wages of Sin,' and their distinguishing mark is by no means that 'unnatural habit of reticence' which Dr. Galbraith endeavoured to correct in his Evadne. We are told of Mr. Hamilton-Wells, the empty pageant who served as a father to the Twins, that he never quite knew 'what not to say.' Have these women of genius solved the problem? In Mrs. Grand's hurricane of words, how many there are which flash and startle, like gleams of forked lightning followed by thunder! They smell of sulphur, and are as little framed for delight as the reports in a medical journal. 'Marcella' does not fill the air with these fumes and vapours. She has come forth from a school of literature, not of medicine; but the literature is the latest French. Wharton, at all events, would find himself at home, much more easily than the virtuous David, with the persons and the style of M. Alphonse Daudet, rather than among the characters drawn in our native fiction by the masters. His reflections, soliloquies, and cynicisms, printed by the New Woman, and read by her daughters, breathe a decadent perfume, which the complex self-indulgence of his hedonist and egoist philosophy heightens to a rare degree. The man is wholly perverse, but on principle--an arrangement which would have satisfied Baudelaire, and is better known in Paris coteries than in London clubs. 'My mother,' says Wharton, by way of explanation, 'taught me to see everything dramatically.' It is needless to observe that no British female could have imagined this theatrical idea, not to speak of applying it. However, the consequence is that he amuses himself with the 'great tragicomedy of the working-class movement,' because it is the part in life that brings him most thrill. He is a perfect dilettante--too perfect, indeed, since at the very height and crisis of feeling he remembers, nay he quotes to himself, the names of Alfred de Musset and George Sand, with an unconscious pedantry, traceable, as is clear, to Mrs. Ward's reading, and not to anything real in Wharton. This, perhaps, is the most decided instance of a lapse from her artistic self-control which can be charged to the author. In general, she lets the characters speak for themselves; and they do so with point.
But the French combination of action and sentiment, the sensuous introspection, the careful Epicurean tasting of life's flavours, and the doctrine of 'thrill,' which make Wharton a new and distinct personage at Mudie's, are not only decadent in their origin, they bring the taint into the book which describes them. Has the New Woman a lesson to learn from that school? For what purpose give these studies to the idle public, too little read in the argot and the perversities of modern French to seek them at their source, but eager to drink in the odours of this bouquet of poisoned flowers when put to its nostrils? It is not too much to say that the better this thing is done, the worse we ought to judge it. Wharton's aesthetic wickedness throws into the shade Colonel Colquhoun with his military adventures. 'Vice from its hardness takes a polish too,' it has been well observed. The nether millstone was not less impressionable than this finely-strung machine, in which the nerves were steel threads, not quivering flesh. Or if he trembled, straightway it was his nature to look on himself as acting, and applaud the emotion. Women have done such things time out of mind; it is in them to play a part. The opposite sex, in specimens like Wharton, has now begun to take up that double life, of sentiment realized, and a drama distinctly constructed by the actor for his own amusement. Is that a gain to society, or a mark of progress? Let Anarchism reply.
We need not dwell on the steps by which Marcella is brought to repentance. She reaches it by developing a character, by tasting the bitterness of life and the sweetness of hard work--by nursing also, in a London hospital, for how else should she keep even a film connecting her with the Woman's Movement?--and by refusing the passionless Wharton's hand, when he discovers that it will suit him to propose. At no time is there much strong passion in the treatment; but who could fail to admire the deftness, the polish, and the staging--to borrow a word from the theatre--which carry us on so gracefully to the end? Mrs. Ward has an eye for definite situations; she sees and sees into her personages, and she has caught the partisan outcries, the fragmentary dialogues, the conversational aspects, of what is called Socialism, as in earlier books she gave us an impressionist picture of criticism on the Church and the Bible. No one will imagine that her science goes deep; it has a family likeness to the history which musicians put into their libretti, and which Hugo has so abundantly lavished in his plays. The Socialism of 'Marcella' is wholly subordinate to character, feeling, and event. It is not science, but art,--a canvas on which to paint the picture, in no sense the picture itself. Economic questions are raised but never settled; the sound lesson appears, in taking colours, that men and women are much too human for the algebraic process to which abstract reasoners would offer them up; but the writer cares, just as little as the reader, to work out a calculus of supply and demand. 'Marcella' is the old-world tragedy of two men and a maid, its conditions slightly changed, the key of the music sharpened, by talk of reciprocal freedom, that is all. Had Wharton, instead of preaching economics, taken down an artist's portfolio to Mellor,--had Raeburn hunted four times a week, or kept harriers and beagles, the same entanglements, catastrophes, and final grouping, might have occurred. Realities, as Wharton observes, must have won. The genuine woman, Marcella, who did not go about in boy's clothes, or fail to recognize how little she understood of the world's immense machinery, was unequal to beating down Raeburn's strength by interminable speeches; and her defence against Wharton--when she declines him in London--was not simply that she mistrusted his sophistries, but that she did not care for him.
Thus, while acknowledging the literary grace, the admirable drawing of the persons, the wit, and even the humour, which entitle this work to be called Mrs. Ward's masterpiece, we are still at a loss to conceive how she would reply to the question with which we started. What are the Rights of Woman? What is the programme to be fulfilled? Is a change coming over the ideal of marriage, or is another springing up by its side? And are women to insist on a separate maintenance, on competing with their husbands in the labour-market, and on exchanging partners with the freedom allowed in some districts of Germany and certain of the United States? 'Marcella' speaks with mild satisfaction of 'standards spiritualized,' of 'sacred institutions,'--meaning, thereby, matrimony,--of 'social sympathies and relations'; but the wife's duty, as it still appears, will always be that of reconciling the noble Raeburn with himself and life, of cheering him forward on the lines of his own nature--of believing, understanding, helping. The old way--not the new! Woman may inspire, as the thought of a man's children will inspire him; but to teach as from a high place, like Deborah sitting under her terebinth, to rule the day instead of shining when the sun goes down, this, if we may draw the moral for ourselves, is shown in 'Marcella' to be idle folly and a chaotic dream.
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'A woman,' says Marcella to Raeburn, 'is bound to cherish her own individuality sacredly, married or not married.' Yes; but will the lady be good enough to explain? What does she mean by this great word? A stream of sensations? A heap of molecules endowed with feeling? Or an immortal spirit, living under the law of conscience? Man has been compelled to ask himself these questions, and on the answer he gives to them his fate hangs. Hitherto, the immense majority of women have taken the answer which religion offers; they have believed in duty, self-denial, the world to come, and the supremacy of goodness. Now, in a day of conflicting ideals, the tempest which has broken out in that high region is sending down its hail and its rain upon them. The larger experience, the reading and travel, the freedom they have already won, must be paid for in a quickened sense of unrest, in freaks of enthusiasm; with advancing civilization, Mr. Ellis points out, crime and insanity among women have steadily increased. To speak in terms of art, this new world brings with it 'a lower degree of mental integration'; if man's brain is almost overweighted by the pressure which is daily put upon him, what shall we conclude of woman, who has ever shown less balance and greater affectibility? To her immediate surroundings she is, and must be, susceptible; she has waking dreams, and falls into trance or ecstasy where the less sensitive man escapes. The centre of his life may vary from thought to action; but how seldom is it feeling! Woman lives in her affections, and they demand, as all sentiment does, that the great postulates of existence shall be taken for granted. The period of luxury and decay through which we are passing,--the earthquake which is rocking so many institutions,--has begun to affect even the conservative sex, indifferent as it is by nature to these wider issues. The New Woman ought to be aware that her condition is morbid, or, at least, hysterical; that the true name of science falsely so-called may be 'brain-poisoning'; that 'ideas' and love affairs, when mixed in unequal proportions, may explode like dynamite upon all concerned; and that Rousseau, Diderot, John Stuart Mill, Comte, Bakounine, and Ibsen, are masters not to be trusted, for they have all put themselves at the mercy of sentiment, and mistaken impulse, or pleasure, for conscience. Wharton, 'and his doctrine of 'thrill,' command the situation Gefühl ist alles.
But feeling is not the key to this problem. The forms of life are subject to law, and a broken law avenges itself by making an end of the law-breaker. The New Woman will not continue long in the land. Like other fashions, she is destined to excite notice, to be admired, criticised, and forgotten. The liberty which she invokes will be fatal to her. If on men's selection of their mates the future depends--and they are still, by force of numbers, able to choose--what likelihood is there that an untamed Marcella--still less the scientific Evadne, and the 'savage viper' with chloroform on her toilet-table--will attract either Hercules or Apollo? Who would bind himself to spend his days with the anarchist, the athlete, the bluestocking, the aggressively philanthropic, the political, the surgical woman? And what man would submit to an alliance which was terminable, not when he chose, but when his comrade was tired of him? Such are not the ideals to which he has looked up, or the qualities that win his affections. The age of chivalry cannot die, so long as woman keeps her peculiar grace, which is neither rugged strength nor stores of erudition, but a human nature predestined to Motherhood. She is called upon, in the plain language of Mr. Carpenter, 'to bear children, to guard them, to teach them, to turn them out strong and healthy citizens of the great world.' And she has a divine right to all that will fit her for so noble a duty.
Still, 'married or not,' her personality is sacred. Mindful of the services demanded of human creatures by their fellows, women who feel no attraction to the estate of matrimony, and who know that passion is consecrated only by the divine purpose which justifies it, will devote themselves to the sick and the suffering; they will be the delight of households not their own, yet by their presence made beautiful; they will learn and teach, if their genius bids them, and write touching histories, or be in their lives heroic, and in remembrance hallowed. Let them judge men severely, and aim at a simpler standard of living than is now thought needful to the gracious amenities of intercourse. Luxury is not their friend; the decadent is their worst enemy. An art, a literature, which degrades man does absolutely destroy woman; and an effeminate dilettantism, whether it falls on its knees in aesthetic rapture, or makes of religion a decorative industry, is merely the plague disguised. No man has ever sunk below fallen woman; none had ever so much to lose. If the new generation seeks freedom, let it count the cost. Our finest ideals are in danger, and nothing but the true and sensitive conscience of the woman herself will save them.[ . . .]
Barry--1