17 JULY 1886, Page 11

MEN AND WOMEN.

As yet we are far from realising the full significance of the change. We are apt to imagine, or at least unconsciously to. assume, that men will carry on to the acceptance of a new creed the desires and aspirations which are the natural growth of beliefs which they have discarded. And no doubt those individual men will do so to a great extent. The limits of an individual life are too narrow to exhibit the change of moral colouring which corresponds to the change of intellec- tual conviction. But democracy is old enough now to show us the influence of the ideal of equality on the moral life. We may trace it in the growing distaste for any kind of moral differen- tiation. The older view looked upon differences of position and relation as part of the moral scheme in which we find ourselves, and accepted them as in their degree a basis of duty and a justification of claim. The new ideal insists that a clean sweep shall be made at starting of every such distinction. All in- dividual claim must be justified by circumstances needing for their discernment merely logical insight; so that nothing shall be a duty which cannot be a mutual claim between man and man. You must not expect anything of me that I may not expect of you. Of course, contract may establish such expectations, a promise may convert mutual to correlative claim ; you have en- gaged to be my servant; I may therefore blame you for disobeying me, though I cannot be blamed for disobeying you. But there is no idea of obedience as an excellence in itself. It is no longer felt a loss never to have practised it ; it has ceased to be a desirable characteristic of any age in which it is not an absolute necessity. We are obliged to keep some shadow of the old belief when we are dealing with the relations between children in the nursery and their parents ; but even there it is astonishing to see how little of it survives, and beyond these limits it almost disappears. The young are expected to listen to the advice and consult the wishes of the elders ; they are no longer expected to defer to their authority. Obedience is no longer regarded as the virtue of the young. All that we imply in the word, indeed, may much more truly be described as the vice of the old. The ideal of our day would banish it from young and old alike, and leave justice and reason to adjust their differences and arbitrate on their mutual claim.

It would be a great gain if the general mind could recognise in this change the substitution of a more difficult for a less diffi- cult duty. We do not mean that this is an argument either way. It is natural that duty should get, more difficult at one gets older, and the principle may hold good, perhaps, of society as well as of the individuaL But it is a disadvantage not to recognise the fact that in losing all differentiation of claim we have put a much greater strain on moral originality. Let us explain ourselves by a trivial illustration, which lies within the experience of most people,—we mean the proverbial difficulties that attend fellow-travellers. Why are those who take a journey together so certain to discover each other's faults ? Nobody can suppose that the life of foreign hotels and railways brings ordinary mankind into trying and difficult circumstances where human endurance gives way. All that happens to convert the courteous host or guest into the intolerable fellow-traveller is that the idea of hospitality—that is, of moral differentiation— is at an end. Host and guest expect different kinds of excellence from each other. The guest does not feel affronted if the carriage is ordered without any consultation with him ; the host takes care that his guest shall be helped first at dinner, and seated in the most comfortable chair. But as fellow-travellers, whose comfort is to be considered and whose decisions are to be accepted? All claims are, as it were, boiled down together, and an equal share is meted out to each party. It is surprising, considering how very common the experience is which demon- strates the increased difficulty of relation in these circumstances, that people so rarely discover its warning as to the strain that is thrown on character when position goes for nothing. Horace Walpole, in reviewing his squabble with Gray at Venice, wonders, with a rather pathetic humility, that the man of genius could not put up with the impertinence of the man of fashion ; and there is a certain moral attractiveness in the notion that the richer nature should be prepared for tolerance. But, in fact, nothing is harder than to put up with impertinence because one is a person of eminent genius or virtue. The relation of host and guest is a fact unaffected by moods, acknowledged without ques- tion, implied without arrogance ; the idiosyncrasies of individual character are complicated by considerations which must make them always an unstable foundation for tolerance, or even for justice. No position is so insecure as conscious magnanimity ; and that of conscious insignificance has its dangers, of a different kind. Men need a great deal more goodness, and a great deal more wisdom, when they have to take their several endowments of each into account before they settle their mutual difficulties.

This loss of differentiation in the ideal of duty has hitherto influenced the relation between the different ages more than that between the two sexes ; bat we begin to perceive it here too. Only turn back to the civil sentences at the beginning of Macaulay's review of a book of Miss Aikin's, and you will feel what a different thing the relation between men and women was half a century ago. "It would," said the great critic, "be of most pernicious consequence that inaccurate history or un- sound philosophy should be suffered to pass uncensured, merely because the offender chanced to be a lady. But we conceive that, on such occasions, a critic would do well to imitate Ariosto's courteous knight when he found himself compelled by duty to keep the lists against Bradamante. He, we are told, defended successfully the cause of which he was the champion ; bat, before the fight began, exchanged Balisarda for a less deadly sword, of which he carefully blunted the point and edge." Macaulay evidently felt that he owed Miss Aikin a kind of consideration which to him and her alike it would seem absurd to expect from her, not because he was a great writer and she was a small one, but because she was a woman and he was a man. The feeling belonged to that social scheme which assumed that man was to be the protector and supporter of woman ; which looked upon men and women as possible husbands and wives, owing different service, requiring different aid. Circum- stances have changed, and still more feelings. Most men find a companion for life among women, and very few indeed find a rival. But the fact that even exceptional women have taken up the work of ordinary men has led all men to look upon them less as specimens of a different kind of being, adapted to supply their own deficiencies, and more as fellow-workers, to be judged by a common standard. Men and women have changed their aspect each to each, and are on their way to be all mere human beings, owning the same needs, the same fears, aspiring after the same virtues, dreading the same kinds of reproach.

The process which we would thus indicate is an incomplete one. We may seem to exaggerate in thus describing it. It is doubtless to many rather an aspiration than an achievement. Dare we confess that our object is to urge upon these persons a reconsideration of their ideal ? The avowal is a perilous one. But in our day there is little danger in urging any objections to the ideal of equality, except, indeed, so far as an unwise or exaggerated objection is apt to stimulate the progress of that which it would oppose. It is the ideal of the past which now needs representation and claim ; men and women alike would gain by considering that view of life which made them rather correlatives than equals. It would not slacken woman's pro- gress towards new spheres of exertion to consider what that is which she should dread to lose in the attempt. Or, at least, if it would slacken such progress, it would, we are certain, only retard its velocity to increase its momentum. It would delay her entrance on new realms only to render that entrance more secure, and that abode more enduring and more fruitful of good.

The standard of the sexes has hitherto been largely moulded by differentiation of claim. The mere fact that a woman cannot fight, affects all that she aims at being. We should condemn cowardice in man or woman, but we should not condemn it equally. It is not so very long since it was thought, as Miss Cobbe has said, possible to avow cowardice as a feminine weakness which had a certain charm for the manly heart ; and although the silliest woman could hardly make that mistake now, an expression of fear which nobody would remember against a woman would, among the cultivated classes, be felt very damaging if it came from a man, and this even in cases where he had no advantage from his superior strength. A man's possible duties, we feel, ought always to modify his actual fears. No doubt there is a sense in which "the manly soul," ascribed by Ben Jonson to a heroine in some fine lines, should be the characteristic of women also ; but it is not the same sense, and if we tried to destroy this difference, we should find that we had been levelling down, not levelling up. It is, unfortunately, more easy always to make human beings cowardly than courageous ; the theory that women should be as courageous as men would be apt to be em- bodied in the fact that men became as timid as women. We cannot make the loss of a special the gain of a universal duty. While men feel it their special duty to be manly, women will uphold the standard of courage by the tribute of admiration; let them be taught that men need show no more courage than they do, and so far as such teaching has any effect at all, the standard of courage sinks for man and woman alike.

There considerations will find a ready agreement, so long as it concerns the special obligation on the man to be manly. We would ask our readers why considerations obvious as to the characteristic duty of one sex should be thought dangerous when referred to the characteristic duty of another. Why should it be thought that the expansive power of a special duty disappears when we translate manliness into the Latin form in which—by a carious and interesting process, embodying a large part of the history of morals—it has crossed over from one sex to the other ? Why should not a woman be bound over to her virtue by a special claim, as a man is to his? If those moralists who now bend their efforts to make purity an equal duty to the sexes urged that the present standard should be simply inverted —that the man should be pure, that the woman should be courageous—we should concede, though not without hesita- tion, that effort may profitably be fixed on the duty which is most remote from he character. But even then, we should feel the chief value of the concession was in its tribute to the importance of this special claim, which is just what these persons are trying to do away with. Any measure of success attending their effort would, we are cer- tain, result not in an elevation of the human standard towards the female, but in its depression towards the male standard. Impurity might conceivably become a peccadillo in every human being ; no preaching, no effort, no general consent of society could equalise its reproach in any other way. Nature and history are stronger than theoretic morality, and they have pro- claimed with no uncertain voice, that this sin has a different scope among one half the race and among the other. The mercy which, in order to soften the punishment of a woman here and there, would lower the barrier which saves women from the parentage of a fatherless child, is like that which would hesitate to break her slumbers in order to save her from a burning house. And, on the other hand, if unmarried mothers were to be received into society as unmarried fathers are, men would lose that which to many is their only religion. They would not only cease to be pure themselves, they would cease to reverence purity. We have two standards now, and we should have two standards then. but the division-line which now separates men from women would then separate sinners from saints. We can hardly imagine a change more to be deprecated in the interests of morality. While purity is the virtue of the woman, it is an object of reverence to all but bad men. Make it the virtue of the saint, and it will cease to be the object of reverence to ordinary men. Most men have loved some woman more than any man, and the love has taught them to discover depths within their own nature much beyond anything that could be revealed by the warmest friendship for one of their own sex. The characteristic virtue of a class represented by the person one has most loved has an attractive power wholly lacking to the characteristic virtue of a class formed only by the fact that each member excels in it. Men have no natural respect for the exceptional. It is not only that among the saints they would have to remember some of the coldest, the most selfish of mankind, among the sinners, some of the most generous and warmhearted ; it is that the very fact of recognising two grades of moral claim cuts off the aspirations of ordinary men from the highest. Whatever else they are in doubt about, they are sure they are not saints. Saintly virtue is not so much above them as remote from them. We are not speaking of men who hate or despise it ; we have in view the ordinary citizen, the man who would like to be better than he is, but who must not be asked to go to any vast moral expense in the process, and is always in a hurry to return to the easy non-moral region where con- science may go to sleep. Let us not so under-rate his moral equipment as lightly to imperil it. He already regards seduction with indignation, crime with abhorrence, debauchery with contempt. Above all, he shudders at the idea that his wife should share his own laxity as to vice which entails neither seduction nor debauchery ; he feels a stain on her honour a wound to his own. Many influences may prevent reverence for virtue from developing into imitation of virtue ; but we should work on their side if we insisted that all such imperfect reverence must be branded as hypocrisy. There is nothing in the recognition of grades of difficulty to imperil urgency of claims ; rather it is this recognition which makes urgency efficient. We sanction no lowered aim in one half of the human race when we insist that it shall be the special duty of the other half to keep that aim at its ideal height.

"Man and woman," says a mystic writer, "are each to each The image of God," and many who recognise no other God will feel the truth of the words. It is in lamentable ignorance, if with good motives, that some who labour to make men's lives pure are preparing to rob them of that religion. Their effort is allied to that Christianity which would bring over all adherents of a dif- ferent religion by destroying the faith they possess already; to that .political theory which, in identifying love of one's own kindred with injustice to others, would make patriotism the foe of philanthropy ; and to that scientific heresy which ignores the result of a patient study of Nature's laws, and thinks that the great law of evolution—the development of heterogeneity—can be inverted in its most striking illustration—the history of man. Nor is it less opposed to the teaching of a faith which has recognised the Divine in the human, and has called upon man to recognise his ideal as something above,—something, in a sense, inaccessibly above him. All these profound and varied springs of will must be neglected if male and female purity are to be measured by one standard ; men must turn to that view of duty which is least dynamic, they must set logic to do the work of passion, they must look to argument for the rush of desire, to calcula- tion for the upheaval of a mighty inspiration. May Heaven grant better things than that good men should have to discover, in their battle with the canker of our civilisation, the compara- tive strength of the ideal which they thus desert, and that which they seek to follow !