MEN AND WOMEN.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE 'SPECTATOR?') SIR,—I saw with some surprise that the article in your- issue of July 17th, on "Men and Women," had not drawn any such remarks from correspondents as the character of the topic, and the grave and thoughtful originality with which (if I may be allowed to say so) they were handled, led one to expect.. In the silence of others, may I be allowed to make one or two. remarks on one point of momentous moral interest upon which it touched ?
You are tracing the indirect effects upon moral opinion of the dominant modern notion of equality, and you suggest that it may involve a danger to our common moral standard, by im- pairing the responsibility of special classes for special virtues;. that instead of levelling up, this may lead to levelling down. You instance the special responsibility of men for a high standard of manliness or courage. You fear that if for this be- substituted an equal demand for courage upon men and women, the result will not be to raise our human standard of courage, or to increase the amount of courage in the world. And so you come up to a point of more burning interest. Has not woman also a special responsibility and a special service to. render to the moral standard of the race ? Is it not womanly to be pure in just the same special and noble sense as it is manly to be brave ? And have we not to fear that a demand for an. equal standard of purity in judging men and women will, as la- the other case, level down and not level up, and lower our human standard of purity, by relieving of their special responsi- bility for it those upon whom that responsibility has hitherto lain ? The argument is strong and convincing. It coincides, for most of us, with what is unquestionably our moral feeling and instinct, even though we may have thought it our duty to try and reason ourselves, in the interests of higher morality, into feeling that impurity violates no more in a woman than. it does in a man,—or rather, no less in a man than it does in a woman. If our reason has been convinced, our feeling has not. We know that tragic and suicidal as impurity is in both sexes, and the first act of it by either the=
irreparable loss of a jewel without price, the crossing of a moral line such as there is no other, yet it does violate in woman a special strength of interest, a special seal of responsibility. She has less natural temptation than man, and she breaks down more in yielding to it. To deny this is to get wrong in order to get right; it rings slightly insincere in a matter where ab3olute sincerity is essential to the perfect imperiousness and the perfect persuasiveness which the moral standard should wiell. It h like those mistaken teachings which have underva'ued our natural faith in our senses, or the witness of natural instinct and conscience to a future life of the soul or the existence of God, in order to build by Revelation a firmer structure on the area so cleared. But "Nature and instinct," as you say, "are stronger than theoretic morality,"—the higher teachings prove their virtue by confirming and completing the upward instincts in nature, not by destroying them to put some- thing better in their place. And nature and history" have pro- claimed with no uncertain voice that this sin has a different scope among one-half the race, and among the other." Woman's priestess-ship of purity is one of the moral resources which we can indeed ill afford to undervalue. This is true, and you have done well to say it.
But is this the last word upon the matter ? Are we to be c)ntent with the inequality of ordinary opinion in judging men and women upon the matter? Shall we have no eye to see the back side of our doctrine that women have a special resposibility for purity, and to recognise the part which it has been made to play in excusing the laxity of men and in justifying the horrible hypocrisy with which men come jauntily into the society of pure women whom they have made themselves unfit to approach? Are we to have no sympathy with those who seem at least to be among the most ardent of our day in their self-denying zeal for morals, and who tell us that the very key to moral progress is to enforce the absolute equality of the obligation to purity on men and women ? Can we forget that their words seem to echo the tone of the New Testament, or the " apnd nos quod non licet fceminis mine non 'Met viris " which embodies the standard of early Christianity ?
It is not enough to meet the difficulty by the cold reply, that to say that women are specially responsible for purity is not to deny that men are responsible for it also. Nor is it enough to say, though it may be profoundly true, that in morals we must not be afraid of a noble paradox, and must boldly say, ' Purity is more binding on women, but not less binding on men; we must assert this for women, and for maintaining in all its austerity the standard of moral judgment upon women which is their great outward protection, but we must decline alto- gether to allow it be used negatively for the excuse of men.'
We seem, therefore, to have a real difficulty, a baffling moral c'cropict. May I suggest that its solution is to be looked for in the following way, obvious enough, but not, I hope, too obvious to be worth stating ? Laoked at simply under the head of personal purity, this sin does violate in woman something over and above all that it violates in man. But such a way of looking at it is an abstract one, and cannot be full or final. It is only by abstraction that we think of personal purity, apart from the other moral aspects of the single thing which we call character. And directly we leave the abstraction, and look at the whole character, and the whole responsibility, then oar judgment upon men and women in the matter begins at once to alter. For then entirely fresh considerations come in ; and they are found to redress the balance, and tell the other way. For now we are obliged to recognise that immorality in man has in it a character of selfishness and self-indulgence which it has in no like degree in woman ; that in him it is often cruel, while in her it suffers ; that (apart from the tragical plea of material necessity), in her it has often a tincture of self- sacrifice and surrender, miserably mistaken, indeed, and wofully caricatured, but yet at least in its degradation carrying with it something of the nobility of sacrifice, compared with the mere selfish plunder of the man. And more than this. For now it begins to appear that man in this is really a traitor to his special responsibility of manliness. If we are to have special moral respon- sibilities, then in the special male responsibility it is included to protect, to shield, to guide ; while woman may look to be guided and to follow. In this lies all the truth, so far as it was true, of chivalry actual or ideal. And to all this the man, when he sins with a woman, or leads her to sin, is a traitor in a sense that she can never be. It is this which he selfishly and cravenly forgets, even when he is only trampling a little deeper one who
is already trodden down. His act has something in it of the baseness of the parent who corrupts the child, the husband who degrades the wife, the general who sells his soldiers. It is the forfeiture of a special responsibility, and the misuse for vile and selfish purposes of the natural instincts of those whom God has made to confide, to depend, to cling.—I am, Sir, &c., [We have no intention of admitting a general correspondence on the subject, but Mr. Talbot's letter has a certain authority, and, no doubt, it supplies elements which were needed to suprlement the drift of our article.—En. Spectator.]
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