Man And His Master

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Title:     Man And His Master
Author: E. Lynn Linton [More Titles by Linton]

There are, it must be owned, few things on earth of less interest at first sight than a girl in her teens. She is a mere bundle of pale colorless virtues, a little shy, slightly studious, passively obedient, tamely religious. Her tastes are "simple"--she has no particular preference, that is, for anything; her aims incline mildly towards a future of balls to come; her rule of life is an hourly reference to "mamma." She is without even the charm of variety; she has been hot-pressed in the most approved finishing establishments, and is turned out the exact double of her sister or her cousin or her friend, with the same stereotyped manner, the same smattering of accomplishments, the same contribution to society of her little sum of superficial information. We wonder how it is that any one can take an interest in a creature of this sort, just as we wonder how any one can take an interest in the Court Circular. And yet there are few sentiments more pardonable, as there are none more national, than our interest in that marvellous document.

A people which chooses to be governed by kings and queens has a right to realize the fact that kings and queens are human beings, that they shoot, drive, take the air like the subjects whom they govern. And if in some coming day we are to toss up our hats and shout ourselves hoarse for a sovereign who is still in his cradle, it is wise as well as natural that we should cultivate an interest in his babyhood, that we should hang on the vicissitudes of his teeth and his measles, that we should be curious as to the title of his spelling-book, and the exact score of his last game at cricket.

It is precisely the same interest which attaches us to the loosely-tied bundle of virtues and accomplishments which we call a girl. We recognise in her our future ruler. The shy, modest creature who has no thought but a dance, and no will but mamma's, will in a few years be our master, changing our habits, moulding our tastes, bending our characters to her own. In the midst of our own drawing-room, in our pet easy-chair, we shall see that retiring figure quietly established, with downcast eyes, and hands busy with their crochet-needles, what Knox called, in days before a higher knowledge had dawned, "the Monstrous Regimen of Women."

We are far from sharing the sentiments of the Scotch Reformer, and if we attempt here to seize a few of the characteristics of the rule against which he revolted, we hope to avoid his bitterness as carefully as his prolixity. What was a new thing in his day has become old in ours, and man learns perhaps somewhat too easily to acquiesce in "established facts." It is without a dream of revolt, and simply in a philosophical spirit, that we approach the subject. Indeed, it is a feeling of admiration rather than of rebellion which seizes us when we begin to reflect on the character of woman's sway, and on the simplicity of the means by which she creates and establishes it. A little love, a little listening, a little patience, a little persistence, and the game is won.

How charmingly natural and unobjectionable, for instance, is the very first move in it--what we may venture to call, since we have to create the very terminology of our subject, the Isolation of Man. When Brown meets us in the street and hopes that his approaching marriage will make no difference in our friendship, and that we shall see as much of one another as before, we know that the phrases simply mean that our intimacy is at an end. There will be no more pleasant lounges in the morning, no more strolls in the park, no more evenings at the club. Woman has succeeded in so completely establishing this cessation of former friendships as a condition of the new married life that hardly any one dreams of thinking what an enormous sacrifice it is. There are very few men, after all, who are not dependent on their little group of intimates for the general drift of their opinions, the general temper of their mind and character of their lives. Their mutual advice, support, praise or dispraise, enthusiasm, abhorrence, likings, dislikings, constitute the atmosphere in which one lives.

A good deal of real modesty lingers about an unmarried man; he feels far more confident in his own opinion if he knows it is Smith's opinion too, and his conception of life acquires all its definiteness from its being shared with half a dozen fairly reasonable fellows. It is no slight triumph that woman should not only have succeeded in enforcing the dissolution of this social tie as the first condition of married life, but that she has invested that dissolution with the air of an axiom which nobody dreams of disputing. The triumph is, as we said, won by the simplest agency--by nothing, in short, but a dexterous double appeal to human conceit. She is so weak, so frail, so helpless, so strange to this new world into which she has plunged from the realms of innocent girlhood, so utterly dependent on her husband, that a man sees at once that he has not a moment left for any one else.

There is pleasure in the thought of all that delicate weakness appealing to our strength, of that innocent ignorance looking up to us for guidance through the wilderness of the world. Of course it will soon be over, and when the dear dependent has learnt to walk alone a little we can go back to the old faces and take our segar as before. But somehow the return never comes, or, if it does come, the old faces have grown far less enchanting to us. The truth is, we have tasted the second pleasure of married life--the pleasure of being an authority. All that shy appeal to us, all that confession of ignorance, has taught us what wonderfully wise fellows we are. We are far less inclined to wait for Smith's approval, or to take our tone from the group at the club-window. It is, to say the least, far pleasanter to be an authority at home. Gradually we find ourselves becoming oracular, having opinions on every subject that a leading article can give us one upon, correcting the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Malt-tax and censuring Lord Stanley's policy towards the King of Ashantee. Life takes a new interest when we can put it so volubly into words. At the same time we feel that the interest is hardly shared by the world.

Our old associates apparently fail to appreciate the change in us, or to listen to our disquisitions any more than they did of old; it is a comfort to feel that we have a home to retreat to, and that there is one there who will. To the subtle flattery, in short, of weakness and of ignorance, woman has now added the flattery of listening. To say little, to contribute hardly more than a cue now and then, but to be attentive, to be interested, to brighten at the proper moment, to laugh at the proper joke, to suggest the exact amount of difficulties which you require to make your oratorical triumph complete, and to join with an unreserved assent in its conclusion, that is the simple secret of the power of ninety-nine wives out of a hundred. It is a power which is far from being confined to the home. The most brilliant salons have always been created by dexterous listeners.

A pleasant house is not a house where one is especially talked to, but where one discovers that one talks more easily than elsewhere. The tact is certainly invaluable which enables a woman to know the strong points of her guests, to lead up to their subjects, to supply points for conversation, and then to leave it quietly alone. But it is only a display on the grand scale of that particular faculty of silence which wins its quiet triumphs on every hearth-rug.

The faculty, however, has other triumphs to win besides those in which it figures as a delicate administration of flattery to the vanity of men. It is the force which woman holds in reserve for the hour of revolt. For it must be owned that, pleasant as the tyranny is, men sometimes wake up to the fact that it is a tyranny, that in the most seductive way in the world they are being wheedled out of associations that are really dear to them, that their life is being cramped and confined, that their aims are being lowered. Then the newly-found eloquence exhausts itself in a declaration of revolt.

Things cannot go on in this way, life cannot be ruined for caprices. It is needless, perhaps, to repeat the rhetoric of rebellion, and all the more needless because it shares the fate of all rhetoric in producing not the slightest impression on the mind to which it is addressed. The wife simply listens as before, though the listening is now far from encouraging to eloquence. She is perfectly patient, patient in her refusal to continue an irritating discussion, patient in bearing your little spurts of vexation; she listens quietly to-day, with the air of one who is perfectly prepared to listen quietly to-morrow. But even rhetoric has its limits, and now that the cues have ceased, a husband finds it a little difficult to keep up a discussion where he has to supply both arguments and replies.

Moreover, the tact which managed in former days to place him in a highly pleasant position by the confession of weakness, now, by the very same silent avowal, places him in a decidedly unpleasant one. If a woman's air simply says at the end of it all, "I can't answer you, but I know I am right," a man has a lurking sense that his copious rhetoric has had a smack of the cowardly as well as of the tyrannical about it. And so, after a vigorous denunciation of some particular thing which his wife has done, a husband commonly finds himself no further than before; and the very instant that, from sheer weariness, he ceases, the wife usually steals out and does it again.

There is something feline about this combination of perfect patience with quiet persistence--a combination which the Jesuits on a larger scale have turned into the characteristic of their order. It is especially remarkable when it breaks the bonds of silence, and takes the form of what in vulgar language is called "nagging." No form of torture which has as yet been invented, save, perhaps, the slow dropping of water on some highly sensitive part of the frame, can afford a parallel to this ingenious application of the principle of persistence.

The absolute certainty that, when snub or scolding or refusal have died into silence, the word will be said again; the certainty that it will be said year after year, month after month, week after week; the irritation of expecting it, the irritation of hearing it, the irritation of expecting it again, tell on the firmest will in the world. In the long run the wife wins. The son goes to Harrow, though reason has proved a dozen times over that we can only afford the expense of Marlborough; the family gets its Alpine tour, though logic and unpaid bills imperatively dictate the choice of a quiet watering place. You yield, and you see that every one in the house knew that you would yield. There wasn't a servant who didn't know every turn of the domestic screw, or who took your resistance for more than the usual routine of the operation. "Time and I," said Philip of Spain, "against any two." It is no wonder if, fighting alone for prudence and economy, one is beaten by time and one's wife.

We have no wish to dispute the enormous benefits to man of woman's supremacy, but we may fairly leave the statement of them to the numerous troup of poets who dispute with Mr. Tupper the theme of the affections. For ourselves, we may undertake, perhaps, the humbler task of pointing out very briefly some of the disadvantages which, as in all human things, counterbalance these benefits. In the first place, feminine rule is certainly not favorable to anything like largeness of mind or breadth of view. It creates, as we have seen, an excessive self-conceit and opinionativeness, and then it directs these qualities to very small ends indeed. Woman lives from her childhood in a world of petty details, of minute household and other cares, of bargains where the price of every yard ends in some fraction of a penny. The habit of mind which is formed by these and similar influences becomes the spirit of the house, a spirit admirable no doubt in many ways, but excessively small.

The quarrels of a woman's life, her social warfare, her battles about precedence, her upward progress from set to set, have all the same stamp of Lilliput on them. But it is to these small details, these little pleasures and little anxieties and little disappointments and little ambitions, that a wife generally manages to bend the temper of her spouse. He gets gradually to share her indifference to large interests, to broad public questions. He imbibes little by little the most fatal of all kinds of selfishness, the selfishness of the home. It would be difficult, perhaps, to say how much of the patriotism of the Old World was owing to the inferior position of woman; but it is certain that the influence of woman tells fatally against any self-sacrificing devotion to those larger public virtues of which patriotism is one of the chief. Whether from innate narrowness of mind, or from defective training, or from the excessive development of the affections, family interests far outweigh, in the feminine estimation, any larger national or human considerations.

If ever the suffrage is given to woman, it will be necessary to punish bribery with the treadmill, for no "person" will regard it as a crime to barter away her vote for a year's schooling for Johnny or a new frock for Maud. Nothing tells more plainly the difference between the Old World and the New than the constant returns home during war. We can hardly conceive Pericles or even Alcibiades applying for leave of absence on the ground of "private affairs." But then Pericles and Alcibiades had no home that they could set above the interests of the State.

Lastly, from this narrow view bounded strictly by the limits and interests of the home comes, it may be feared, a vast deal of social and political bitterness and intolerance. Her very nature, her "deductive spirit," as Mr. Buckle puts it prettily for her, makes woman essentially a dogmatist. She has none of the larger intercourse with other minds and adverse circumstances which often creates the form, if not the spirit, of tolerance in the narrowest of men. Her very excellence and faith make her exactly what they made Queen Mary--a conscientious and therefore merciless persecutor.

It is just this feminine narrowness, this feminine conscientiousness, in the clergy which unfits them for any position where justice or moderation is requisite. Justice is a quality unknown to woman, and against which she wages a fierce battle in the house and in the world. There are few husbands who have been made more just, more tolerant, more large-hearted and large-headed, by their wives; for justice lives in a drier light than that of the affections, and dry light is not a very popular mode of illumination under "the monstrous regimen of women."

[The end]
E. Lynn Linton's essay: Man And His Master

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