Woman: Through A Man's Eyeglass
9781465550620
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Without woman man is nought; and the proverb, Cherchez la femme, though commonly urged with a cynical sneer, is as full of humane wisdom as any saying of Solomon. When I contemplate woman in the abstract, with all her divine gentleness and sympathy, and her essential spirituality, I feel that I must kneel and worship her from afar; but when I regard her in the concrete, with all those little weaknesses and vanities and sleight-of-mind tricks, which are as the electric wires through which man is brought into familiar and continuous communion with her then I feel that she is near to me, that we can meet on a common plane of humanity, and that the privilege of loving her is not beyond my reach. And to love woman is surely the highest privilege of life, and the noblest duty. It is but a shallow philosophy that underrates the married state, and he who bids you avoid matrimony, because he has tried it and failed, is a fool for his pains and deserved his fate, for he chose rashly and without discrimination. “Wife and children,” as Bacon says, “are a kind of discipline of humanity.” Your true philosopher will tell you that the enduring companionship of a good woman is the most beautiful influence in a man’s life, but it must be hoped for only after an ample apprenticeship in love, through which alone a man can arrive at any true knowledge of woman. Your wise man will never marry his first love, for he knows that matrimony demands as much special education as any of the learned professions. Yet the number of unqualified amateurs who enter the matrimonial ranks every year is perfectly appalling to contemplate, the Divorce Court annals recording but an infinitesimal portion of the spoiled lives for which the lack of conjugal education is responsible. And yet I am not inclined to set much store by the wisdom of Thales, who, when asked, as one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, to prescribe the proper period for a man to marry, replied, “A young man not yet; an elder man, not at all.” I only feel convinced that incompatibility of temper with Mrs. Thales was at the root of his wisdom, and gave it a false twist. Does every man of us indeed deserve a wife? or rather, have we all studied to understand a woman and to love her with comprehension? This is not such an easy matter as we think, for when do we know exactly how much of her love a woman expects to give for how much of ours? When can we tell in what proportions she wants us to be severally husband, lover and friend? For if we would maintain that illusion which alone preserves real matrimonial happiness, we must never allow the relations of lover and companion to appear lost in that of husband. The essence of woman is in her love, the substance remains for domesticity; and when the happy state of marriage proves a failure, be sure that there has been misconception as to the relativeness of the one and the other. After I shall have written that great work I have in contemplation, to be entitled “The Wooing of Women: by a Practical Failure,” there shall be no more unhappy marriages; for my readers will then learn to recognise the adaptable wife and avoid the unsuitable, and the wooing shall be conducted on such scientific principles that all misunderstandings will be rectified in the probationary stage, and a matrimonial millennium will set in. Then, perchance, the writers of romance may look in vain to real life for their plots; but a grateful posterity will write my epitaph, “He made true love run smooth.”
