Part 5
But it was not always so. When I first knew Kate Singleton she was a bright, sympathetic girl of eighteen, and I envied the man who should some day call her his wife. She had certainly both will and character, but these were tempered by true womanly sensibility, and a good and magnanimous man’s love might have helped her to develop into a delightful woman and an excellent wife. Unfortunately, however, the romantic element in her nature was appealed to by the fascinations of a man who was not good, though he understood women’s weaknesses fatally well, and knew how to simulate the qualities that would most readily appeal to any particular girl. The cynical would perhaps excuse him with that cheap and common plea which covers so much of the wrong done in this world: “He was no worse than other men.” He had certainly committed no crime; only he had lived fast, perhaps a little faster than most men of his age. But he was a handsome young man, with a very engaging manner, a generous income, and many temptations; so, of course, it did not take him long to spend his patrimony, though he enjoyed its full value in luxurious pastimes and dissipation. Then, having nothing but debts and a rake’s reputation to his name, he endeavoured to make matrimonial capital out of his good looks and personal fascination. He met Kate Singleton, whose father he had understood would give her a handsome dowry, and perceiving the vulnerable place in her affections, he appealed to her sympathies through the story of his troubles and temptations. He worked with such infinite care and such insidious art, while he simulated the reckless, generous impulses of a simple-minded, honest-hearted hero of melodrama, that she gave her entire love to him, and became his promised wife. Her parents opposed the marriage, seeing facts with the eyes of experience, but she held to her determination, defiantly proclaimed her faith in the man of her choice, and fought in defence of her love as fiercely as a lioness defends her cubs. Then all her womanhood was aroused, and mind and feeling put forth their strength for love had waked the heroine in her, and the spirit of romance exercised its magic influence upon her life.
But the truth broke upon her with sudden cruelty. In an unguarded moment of anxiety concerning her wedding portion, should she succeed in obtaining her parents’ consent, the lover revealed the mercenary motive of his wooing. Her pride was wounded, her love insulted, and by this lightning-shock all her better, truer self was blighted in its growth. All the taunts that she had endured in defence of her love, all the sanctity of feeling laid bare to the callous stare of this man, recoiled upon her like the backwash of a wave of bitter waters, turning all her sweetness sour. Then she grew to mistrust all men because of the falseness of that one, and for a time she really set her face against marriage, and that, too, when her face had yet the bloom of girlhood upon it.
After a while, however, there came in her life an Indian summer of love-longings and marriage-hopes, but by that time the bitterness of doubt and disappointment had hardened the tone of her voice, drawn her mouth to a set sternness, and tainted her mind with cynicism. So now, though there be plenty to flirt with her, there be none who strive to lure back the softness of her nature through the gentle persuasion of love, and no doubt she has recognised this, for she always pretends to laugh at sentiment, and to regard emotion as a species of hysteria. But once I chanced to notice her while a girl, with a voice that sounded like the very incarnation of music—she was singing a simple, pathetic little folk-song.
It was out in a garden on a summer’s night, “and music and moonlight and feeling were one,” and, as Kate Singleton sat in the shadow of a tree, the tears rolled down her cheek, and I am sure that a sympathetic wooer might then have struck the vein of true womanliness in her with all the old softness, all the old lovableness of girlhood. But the melting mood was brief, for soon afterwards, in the gaslight of the drawing room, there were no traces of tears on her face, no gentle signs in her voice of a recent “session of sweet silent thought.” She was busily challenging to flirtation a man whom she had artfully taken from the side of a pretty young girl to whom his words were as honey. It was a petty episode quite unworthy of her, for at best the conquest would be but for an evening, while it would cause the young girl a real heart-pang. But this was one of the atoms of excitement that make her life tolerable to her; her dominant desire is to make men feel the pangs of unreturned love, or, failing that, her pleasure is to flirt with them up to a point and then to turn round and snub them. This affords her amusement as well as vent for bitterness of feeling.
Some unmarried women can soothe their solitary souls with charity of act and feeling, and bless other people’s lives with their benevolence, thus directing the love and sympathy that one man has missed into the wider channel of philanthropy. But these, possibly, have never been crossed in love, or, if they have, they are the women of whom the silent, uncomplaining martyrs of the world are made. Miss Singleton, however, is none of these. She cannot forgive, especially as she finds it impossible to forget.
But, after all, what is to be Miss Singleton’s ultimate aim in life? She cannot fill her whole existence with dances, tennis, and flirtations, for time will have something serious to say on that subject. Say she is five-and-thirty now; in another five years she will have leisure from her present pastimes to realise her want of new interests. She may not personally feel that age is creeping on apace, but she will be made sensible of the fact by all kinds of external signs. She will find that, though the marriages of her brothers and sisters, and other contemporaries of her girlhood, at first made little difference in their attitude towards her, the increasing and growing-up of their families make a very great difference, and, naturally, the interest that is taken in herself must under these conditions become gradually lessened. A new generation of girls will have ousted her from the arena of flirtation, for the spinster of forty stands but little chance against the girl of twenty, though her wit be twenty times as great, and her charms be all the more telling for long practice. And then her interests will become narrower as her field of interest is reduced in dimensions by the encroachments of time and its consequences, until an utter sense of loneliness and uncaredforness sets in, and then—God help her!
But I would let Miss Singleton’s story point a moral for all spinsters. Because one man gave her a bitter draught to swallow, she allowed herself to believe, until too late, that there was no more sweetness in the world; because one man proved false, she withdrew her faith from all men; and so she has missed the blessings of domestic love, the wife’s happiness, the mother’s joys, and so some good man has missed a good wife.
_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.
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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.
_THE SUBMISSIVE WOMAN_
I remember, when I was a little boy, a beautiful young woman and a very handsome man coming to my father’s house, and these were husband and wife. And I looked upon him with a sort of worshipful wonder, for they told me he was a brave soldier, and had fought gloriously in battles. At that period of my life my young imagination was quickened by every story of adventure, and the only books or pictures that appealed to me were those that told of battle, or of the doughty deeds of soldiers and sailors. The sword seemed to me then far mightier than the pen, which latter I regarded merely as an instrument of scholastic torture.
Imagine my great pride and joy, therefore, when this real live hero talked to me as familiarly as any schoolboy of my own age, and when, looking over some pictures of the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny, which were among my treasures, he told me how he had stormed the heights of Alma and captured Sebastopol, how he had relieved Lucknow, and blown thousands of mutinous Sepoys from the guns. I listened to him with all my sense and spirit. How graphically he described the fights, remembering every detail, even to the name of the little bugler who sounded the “cease firing,” and the exact expression of the Sepoys the moment before the guns were fired that should blow them to eternity! I drank it all in, and thought there never was such a great man in the world as Captain Marshall Meek. No wonder that his sweet and gentle wife cast such constant looks of affectionate pride upon him. She was indeed a fortunate woman to be the wife of such a hero, and I regarded her with boyish enthusiasm, because of her heroic husband’s reflected light. To me they were the most romantic couple I had ever met, for they embodied beauty and chivalry—such as I had read and dreamt of. They might have been Lancelot and Guinevere for me and they remained impressed upon my young memory, she as the beautiful daughter of a distinguished family, he as an ideal soldier, handsome and brave.