Rightly or wrongly, it is certain that a man both liberal and chivalric,
can and very often does feel a dis-ease and distrust touching those
political women we call Suffragettes. Like most other popular sentiments,
it is generally wrongly stated even when it is rightly felt. One part of
it can be put most shortly thus: that when a woman puts up her fists to a
man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid
force reminds him of a rusted but very real weapon of which he has grown
ashamed. But these crude summaries are never quite accurate in any matter
of the instincts. For the things which are the simplest so long as they
are undisputed invariably become the subtlest when once they are disputed:
which was what Joubert meant, I suppose, when he said, "It is not hard to
believe in God if one does not define Him." When the evil instincts of
old Foulon made him say of the poor, "Let them eat grass," the good and
Christian instincts of the poor made them hang him on a lamppost with his
mouth stuffed full of that vegetation. But if a modern vegetarian
aristocrat were to say to the poor, "But why don't you like grass?" their
intelligences would be much more taxed to find such an appropriate
repartee. And this matter of the functions of the sexes is primarily a
matter of the instincts; sex and breathing are about the only two things
that generally work best when they are least worried about. That, I
suppose, is why the same sophisticated age that has poisoned the world
with Feminism is also polluting it with Breathing Exercises. We plunge at
once into a forest of false analogies and bad blundering history; while
almost any man or woman left to themselves would know at least that sex is
quite different from anything else in the world.
There is no kind of comparison possible between a quarrel of man and woman
(however right the woman may be) and the other quarrels of slave and
master, of rich and poor, or of patriot and invader, with which the
Suffragists deluge us every day. The difference is as plain as noon;
these other alien groups never came into contact until they came into
collision. Races and ranks began with battle, even if they afterwards
melted into amity. But the very first fact about the sexes is that they
like each other. They seek each other: and awful as are the sins and
sorrows that often come of their mating, it was not such things that made
them meet. It is utterly astounding to note the way in which modern
writers and talkers miss this plain, wide, and overwhelming fact: one
would suppose woman a victim and nothing else. By this account ideal,
emancipated woman has, age after age, been knocked silly with a stone axe.
But really there is no fact to show that ideal, emancipated woman was
ever knocked silly; except the fact that she is silly. And that might
have arisen in so many other ways. Real responsible woman has never been
silly; and any one wishing to knock her would be wise (like the
streetboys) to knock and run away. It is ultimately idiotic to compare
this prehistoric participation with any royalties or rebellions. Genuine
royalties wish to crush rebellions. Genuine rebels wish to destroy kings.
The sexes cannot wish to abolish each other; and if we allow them any
sort of permanent opposition it will sink into something as base as a
party system.
As marriage, therefore, is rooted in an aboriginal unity of instincts, you
cannot compare it, even in its quarrels, with any of the mere collisions
of separate institutions. You could compare it with the emancipation of
negroes from planters--if it were true that a white man in early youth
always dreamed of the abstract beauty of a black man. You could compare
it with the revolt of tenants against a landlord--if it were true that
young landlords wrote sonnets to invisible tenants. You could compare it
to the fighting policy of the Fenians--if it were true that every normal
Irishman wanted an Englishman to come and live with him. But as we know
there are no instincts in any of these directions, these analogies are not
only false but false on the cardinal fact. I do not speak of the
comparative comfort or merit of these different things: I say they are
different. It may be that love turned to hate is terribly common in
sexual matters: it may be that hate turned to love is not uncommon in the
rivalries of race or class. But any philosophy about the sexes that
begins with anything but the mutual attraction of the sexes, begins with a
fallacy; and all its historical comparisons are as irrelevant and
impertinent as puns.
But to expose such cold negation of the instincts is easy: to express or
even half express the instincts is very hard. The instincts are very much
concerned with what literary people call "style" in letters or more vulgar
people call "style" in dress. They are much concerned with how a thing is
done, as well as whether one may do it: and the deepest elements in their
attraction or aversion can often only be conveyed by stray examples or
sudden images. When Danton was defending himself before the Jacobin
tribunal he spoke so loud that his voice was heard across the Seine, in
quite remote streets on the other side of the river. He must have
bellowed like a bull of Bashan. Yet none of us would think of that
prodigy except as something poetical and appropriate. None of us would
instinctively feel that Danton was less of a man or even less of a
gentleman, for speaking so in such an hour. But suppose we heard that
Marie Antoinette, when tried before the same tribunal, had howled so that
she could be heard in the Faubourg St. Germain--well, I leave it to the
instincts, if there are any left. It is not wrong to howl. Neither is it
right. It is simply a question of the instant impression on the artistic
and even animal parts of humanity, if the noise were heard suddenly like a
gun.
Perhaps the nearest verbal analysis of the instinct may be found in the
gestures of the orator addressing a crowd. For the true orator must
always be a demagogue: even if the mob be a small mob, like the French
committee or the English House of Lords. And "demagogue," in the good
Greek meaning, does not mean one who pleases the populace, but one who
leads it: and if you will notice, you will see that all the instinctive
gestures of oratory are gestures of military leadership; pointing the
people to a path or waving them on to an advance. Notice that long sweep
of the arm across the body and outward, which great orators use naturally
and cheap orators artificially. It is almost the exact gesture of the
drawing of a sword.
The point is not that women are unworthy of votes; it is not even that
votes are unworthy of women. It is that votes are unworthy of men, so
long as they are merely votes; and have nothing in them of this ancient
militarism of democracy. The only crowd worth talking to is the crowd
that is ready to go somewhere and do something; the only demagogue worth
hearing is he who can point at something to be done: and, if he points
with a sword, will only feel it familiar and useful like an elongated
finger. Now, except in some mystical exceptions which prove the rule,
these are not the gestures, and therefore not the instincts, of women.
No honest man dislikes the public woman. He can only dislike the
political woman; an entirely different thing. The instinct has nothing to
do with any desire to keep women curtained or captive: if such a desire
exists. A husband would be pleased if his wife wore a gold crown and
proclaimed laws from a throne of marble; or if she uttered oracles from
the tripod of a priestess; or if she could walk in mystical motherhood
before the procession of some great religious order. But that she should
stand on a platform in the exact altitude in which he stands; leaning
forward a little more than is graceful and holding her mouth open a little
longer and wider than is dignified--well, I only write here of the facts
of natural history; and the fact is that it is this, and not publicity or
importance, that hurts. It is for the modern world to judge whether such
instincts are indeed danger signals; and whether the hurting of moral as
of material nerves is a tocsin and a warning of nature.
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