WOMEN AND CENSURE.
MISS COBBE, in her valuable little volume on the "Duties of Women" (reviewed in these columns when it first appeared) touches on a part of duty which seems to us inadequately recognised by either women or men. No service to the right equally important, is more often neglected than that of protest against the wrong, supposing that the pro- test should be, as it must be if it is to have any value, perfectly disinterested. The exertion it involves is opposed by much of what is best in our nature, and much of what is worst in it. Good-nature and modesty are apt, when censure is concerned, to join hands with indolence and cowardice, or rather, to take direction from them ; and the warning not to cast pearls before swine (so often misinterpreted that perhaps it may be more fitly conveyed in the words of a heathen moralist, who urges his reader not to degrade virtue into the clientele of vice), is in no case more needful than in considering the question of express- ing disapproval. To remember one's own ignorance and weak- ness ; to refrain from judging a case of which we have only a part before us ; to withhold a judgment, even if it be sound, which would, if acted upon, do more harm than good; to keep an anxious regard to the hope of change in every wrong-doer, and a careful sense of the degree in which misfortune mingles with all guilt,—these are aims so excellent, that we doubt whether it be a greater evil to lose sight of them altogether, or to associate them with the mere love of ease or of safety. Nor, unless among definitely limited classes, does it seem to us possible to say which danger is the greatest. Women are often supposed to be more " censorious " than men, but that is only because people use the word with reference to trifles. The only general rule on the subject, we should say, would be that the young judge too much, and the old too little ; and we know not which is the greater mistake. The practical result is much the same in either case. Whether we blame everything, or blame nothing, we do equal hurt to the standard of right and wrong.
It may be said that those can do hurt to the standard of right and wrong, and those alone, whose position enables them to enforce it with a disapproval forming a substantial penalty, or an approval acting as a real stimulus in the direc- tion of its object. In all persons not thus qualified to give effect to their judgment of others, anything of the nature of condemnation, it may be thought, takes the character of a futile irritation. It is true that judgment is, on the whole, the duty of those whom, speaking broadly, we may call the rich— that is, of those who have some advantage, apart from all moral ground, in the field of judgment, —those whose dis- pleasure is dreaded by the good and bad alike ; and it is a large compensation in the condition of the lowly and the unpopular, that they are to a considerable extent set free from this claim. But this truth does not cover the whole ground. We have all, in our measure, a certain power of contributing to that general displeasure which supplies the only sanction of perhaps the most important half of law ; and if we neglect this, we are not merely hiding our talent in a napkin, we are putting it out to interest in the Devil's service. The moment we cease to discourage wrong, we must perforce
encourage it. To attempt to stand neutral in the battle of good and evil is, in fact, to carry over our forces to the enemy's side. And hence it seems to us that even a faulty life which refuses to stand an indifferent spectator in the battle, but gives an open, even if an inconsistent, allegiance to the side of right, stands morally higher than one which, otherwise comparatively blameless, has withheld this open loyalty, and the protest against evil which is its shadow. It is no refutation of such a view that this duty is difficult to discern, as well as to put in practice. The larger half of duty is so likewise. The stress of moral pro- gress lies quite as much in discovering, as in following, the path towards the right.
Perhaps it is easier to recognise duty by the light of what we approve than by the light of what we condemn, and we will endeav- our to enforce the obligation of censure by referring to an instance in which every one will feel it to have been the performance of a duty. At a public meeting held at Norwich, the Bishop of that See rose, his son tells us, to answer a proposal that some influential place should be assigned to a person there present, who must, of course, have been a man of position, to denounce the char- acter of this person in unambiguous terms. No man could have less sympathy with anything harsh than Arthur Stanley, yet his " Life " of his father contains few passages in which his admiration is more evident than this anec- dote, given in refutation of Miss Martineau's most unjust attack upon the Bishop for timidity. Every one, whether he would or would not have imitated such conduct, must surely feel its nobility, taking for granted, what we think unquestionable under the circumstances narrated, that it was just. It is not a small exercise of courage, in clerk or layman. A mere negative exhibition of disapproval in such a case as is im- plied here is, perhaps, not uncommon ; but the fearless expres- sion of such a feeling, face to face with the person who would suppose himself aggrieved by it, hardly ever finds place, except under the influence of exactly those personal feelings which ought to repress such utterance. And if it is objected that con- duct which is admirable in a teacher in a high position in the Church is not that which insignificant persons, making no pre- tence to the character of teachers, would do well to imitate, we would answer that this spirit could be shown by men of position and authority, only on the condition that it had been felt by them long before there was any opportunity of showing it. The moment for acting on such principles would never arrive, if the importance of these principles were not accepted before they could be put in practice. The opportunity for protest would never occur, if it were also the occasion of judgment.
This truth is chronicled for us on the page of history in char- acters so large that the warning escapes our notice, from the mag- nitude of its scale. A nation perished, at the beginning of our era, because it had lost the power of indignation. It was pulverised by its submission to individuals, and thus lost the cohesion needed to withstand the shock of adverse races. The want of resistance to some of the Roman Emperors seems to us one of the great problems of history. No one who has studied that era can have failed to ask himself—Why were some of these tyrants allowed to pollute the earth for a single day ? The two things which have formed the ordinary support of tyranny—a tradi- tioual prestige and a great genius—were conspicuously absent, in the worst tyrants the civilised world has ever known. Bona- parte had as much of a pedigree and the Bourbons as much genius as most of the Emperors outside the Julian line. Their despotism was as brittle as it was odious. Nevertheless, it was enduring,—mainly, as we believe, because the Romans of that age had ceased to condemn evil. They had not by any means ceased to admire good. Some then alive were among the best men who ever lived, but their goodness was just as hurtful as the wickedness of their neighbours. The Stoic morality— perhaps also, to some extent, the early Christian morality— fostered a purely individual sense of rightness, from which no vigorous resistance can ever spring. The teachers of that age sought to make men look for rightness only within. They taught that no one has anything to do with the wrong acts of his neighbour, that wrongs are mere misfortunes for every one but the wrongdoer. We need not point out how much in this teaching is noble, how much is akin to what we have most need to remember ; we are dwelling now on its defective side. It is evident, that if this is accepted, not as an important side of truth, but as the whole, there is no such thing as a social code. We are not members of each other, there is no common moral life. This tendency to abdicate the responsibilities of a true civil bond seems to us one of the characteristic dangers of our time. It must obviously always be the danger of a democracy, for the dangers of any system are no more than its purest doctrines refracted through the mists which form the inevit- able medium of observation for the many; and the love of liberty, as it appears to all but good men, is indistinguishable from the toleration of wrong. But there is a less obvious and less un- questionable reason why a democratic society is tempted to lower its common standard. It is a greater gain to the human ideal than we are apt to suppose, when the universal human claim is enforced by some special pre- scriptive claim which gives it definiteness. The duties of landlord and tenant, for instance, as they are sanc- tioned by common recollections and traditions, may not appear more important than those common duties of justice and kindness which belong to all human relations ; yet, if all be stripped away bat these human claims, they will be found far more difficult to estimate, and any breach will become far less evident. A society made up of equals lacks momentum for mutual judg- ment. There is no raised platform for examples, no enclosure within which such judgment is comparatively easy, and from which it may, therefore, take its start. If "conduct unworthy of a gentleman" loses its meaning, conduct unworthy of a man is not so readily stamped with social disapproval. And then, too, the fact that such disapproval has lost its practical enforcement, however foolish and hurtful that may have been, is a step in the same direction. No one will regret the miscalled "law of honour," but with all its disadvantages it did keep up the im- pression of a corporate conscience, and its loss renders more urgent a general recognition of the principle that if Society is to be an organic whole, every member of it must be care- ful to give effect to that expression of displeasure which forms the sole sanction of its common code. And if ever that indolent and cowardly spirit, which is the temptation of a democracy, shall counteract this stern claim, then farewell as much to all that is heroic, as to all that is saintly ! Farewell to every eminence above that decent level of blamelessness which our mutual selfishness as much accepts as imposes.
We rejoice, therefore, in any attempt to call attention to an increasingly neglected duty, such as Miss Cobbe has made in the little work we have mentioned. But we differ from many (and from her among them), in the special point of view from which it should be regarded. We would hardly include it in any review of the special duties of women. To a great extent, it is a woman's duty, because it is the duty of a human being. And possibly, in one sense, it may be called especially the duty of women, inasmuch as the intellectual world being less to them, the moral world must be more. But in another and a deeper sense, we should say that so far as this duty appertains more to one sex than to the other, we should call it especially the duty of men. There are very few wrong actions large enough, and unmistakable enough, to demand distinct and unhesitating protest, or the social ban which that implies, of which men are not better judges than women. A presumptuous judgment is apt to do more harm than no judgment at all ; and though, as we began by urging, we think the tendency of our day is to dwell upon this truth too exclusively, it is very needful to re- member it, when indignation comes into play. And it is a part of our object to bring forward an application of this truth which the changes in women's position—both their stronger feeling of a sisterly bond among themselves, and their entrance on a great_part of the ground formerry occupied only by men—render it peculiarly necessary for them to bear in mind. We allude to what we believe to be a very general feeling among women, that they are guilty of a certain cowardice in refusing to take sufficient cognizance of those temptations of one sex which may be considered the wrongs of the other, and that they ought, in this respect, to judge Coesar as they judge Cmsar's wife. This view is not shared by men ; they know that the thing is impossible.
We deprecate any approach towards such a change, for the very reason for which many would, in our day, encourage it. We be- lieve that it would remove a great safeguard from morality. It would make the influence of women not more elevating, but less purifying. No doubt, the theory that women are to be ignorant of one large side of life, so far as it is a mere pretence, 113 ES much a mistake as any other pretence. If evil is open and notorious, nothing is gained by seeming not to see it, and if a woman sees it, certainly it should be perfectly evident what she thinks of it. We should hope that the picture given in the latest work of our great novelist—of a woman who becomes the wife of a man after receiving a visit from his mistress—was an improbability; even where the bride is the heartless girl she is represented there. But speaking broadly, and for average women, to say that they should mark with displeasure men's immorality only in its open and notorious form, is almost the -same as saying that they should not so mark it at all. Surely in this matter women are not prepared to sift evidence. Yet their displeasure, if it is to be at once just and manifest, must be discriminating. They must not act upon suspicion. And we should say that a woman who was ready to go into proofs that -charges of this nature were false or true, had already for- feited the specially womanly influence antagonistic to this form of evil. And can women gain any other ? Can they make their protest effective, even if they could make it just ? No means of dealing with what is wrong seems to us so hurtful as inadequate notice. There is a remarkable power in an atmo- sphere of silence, so it be absolute, to ward off some of the worst xesults of evil. A man who feels that the ignorance which screens his sin is the expression of a profound horror against 4211 such sin, does not mistake that ignorance for indifference. If the screen were removed, we fear that the feeling which would succeed ignorance would, in many cases, die away into .real indifference. Ordinary women, if they knew the lives of -ordinary men, would be incapable of the mere self-denial of
• carrying out any definite and consistent judgment upon them ; 'what they keep hold of now in social intercourse, they would, we fully believe, refuse to give up then. But knowledge would -convert conduct which is now expressive, in a certain sense, of horror of sin, into an actual condoning of sin.
Then why, it may be asked, do we touch on a subject which should never be touched without necessity ? If all we wish is that things should continue as they are, why not let them alone ? It is not quite true that we wish things to continue as -they are. We do not wish what we cannot expect. One-half of the human race has of late years assumed new aims, new duties, a. new ideal of life, and that they should carry into the new field now opened to them any important part of their moral standard, without its being in any degree affected by its new atmosphere, is impossible. Women have enlarged their intellectual world ; they cannot, it seems to us, avoid reconsidering the limits -of their moral world. They have entered on the circle of itnen's intellectual ideas ; if they are to retain the pecu- liarities of their own moral ideas, it must be from some new -ground. What we desire is, that they should act not very .differently from what they do now, but that they should discern the reason of that action as they have never yet done. We would dissuade them from exchanging the impressive protest of
• a voluntary ignorance for the certain feebleness and inadequacy -of any other protest. Guarded by this barrier, we believe that many a man finds in a friendship with some pure woman a restraining power which the condemnation she could not withhokd, if she knew, or, worse still, only half- 'knew, his life, would utterly fail to supply. Let us not think such a possibility an evil thing. It would become -evil, if unconsciousness became pretence ; but it need not be a. pretence, because it is to some extent voluntary. Far from regarding it as a disadvantage that a part of conduct should be withheld from judgment, we think that for beings so inconsist- -cut as many men and women, it is often a great gain that they should meet a sympathy, and even affection, which they could not inspire, if the whole of their lives were known, or at least known in that incomplete wholeness which alone is possible to .our mutual knowledge in this state of our being. The evil is not encouraged, for there is no encouragement in ignorance.
'The good grows, and we may trust that from this reason only, the evil, to some extent, tends to wither away.
Previous page
