Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

“But what do I know of Aurelia, or any other girl?” he says to me with that abstracted air; “I, whose Amelias were of another century and another zone.”

—GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

—FRANCIS BACON.

WHEN I said a moment ago that I thought all teaching should be done by men, I hope I made it clear that my reference was to formal teaching, institutional teaching. A great deal of informal non-professional teaching is, and should be, done by women,—indeed must be, if it is to be done at all, for only women can do it; and here I am referring not so much to instruction in the nursery or kindergarten as to the invaluable directions, suggestions and spiritual assistances that one gets continually from women throughout one’s later life. I must observe, however, that my opinion about women’s place in professional teaching is only an opinion. I think that, ceteris paribus, women are less well adapted to a career in teaching than men are. Given two persons, a man and a woman whose abilities and attainments are in every respect exactly equal, I believe the student will profit more from the man’s instruction than from the woman’s. I do not know why this should be so, and I am sure I could not defend my belief to the satisfaction of the intrepid ladies who so nobly fit, bled and died in the cause of feminism some twenty-odd years ago. The matter appears to me as one of the innumerable phenomena of nature which simply are so, and about whose reason, necessity or justification one finds it useless to speculate.

But the enlightenment,—let me say, the education,—which one gets from women is of immense abundance and priceless value. One may easily see how this should be so, for women are roughly one-half of the race, and in studying the special endowments and characteristics of this feminine mass, in observing the ways by which they approach and take hold of life, their particular adaptabilities, their instinctive turns of view upon specific questions, interests, sets of circumstances,—by this means one gets a vast amount of education that is otherwise unobtainable. It is surely unreasonable to think that one can round out a practical philosophy of existence without taking full account of a distinctly differentiated half of the beings among whom that existence must, for better or worse, be spent. For my own part I am free to say that, taking my education as a whole, I am indebteded to women for the most valuable part of it; even though, to the best of my recollection, I never got a single line of book-l’arnin’ through the instrumentality of any woman.

One of the most fascinating adventures of my life was exploring the literature of the Querelle des Dames. What started me on it was Rabelais’s account of Panurge’s shillyshallying indecision about taking a wife, which makes up practically the whole subject-matter of the Third Book. One would hardly believe that during the last half of the fifteenth century and well into the sixteenth, a red-hot feminist controversy raged in Europe like the plague, and that virtually all the capable male minds of the time lent themselves to it, some maintaining that woman is by nature an inferior being, properly subject to man, and others maintaining the contrary. The subject had a large literature before the invention of printing; and after that, a great number of books appeared. Even the colossal Erasmus of Rotterdam chipped in with a short treatise, On Christian Marriage, which was probably more or less done to order at the instance of his English friends.

Scholars think that Rabelais published the Third Book as a piece of market-writing, knowing that feminism was a live topic, and hoping that a playful work which touched on it would have a good sale. I disagree with that view. My notion is that Rabelais was wickedly delighted by the spectacle of full-grown men making such a tremendous pother over nothing, and felt an irresistible temptation to stir up the animals. It is clear that nothing pleased him more than a chance of this kind, and he never missed one. Even a careless reader of the Third Book can see that when it got into the hands of people who took all this foolishness seriously, whether they were on one side of the controversy or the other, it would make them madder than wet hens, as in fact it did; and I believe he meant it to do just that. I can see him now, slapping his thigh and roaring with laughter as he turned off one salty paragraph after another at the top of his speed. He was promptly blackguarded as an anti-feminist, for such is the habit of the neolithic mentality under such circumstances; and this despite the exalted view of women which he expressed when writing seriously in his description of Thélème. A few years after Rabelais’s death François Billon, who wrote a massive history of the great controversy, renewed the old calumny, and in some quarters it sticks to this day.

It was many years ago, just after I had finished my graduate studies, that I dipped into this literature. I touched on it in a superficial way, as I was reading only for fun, so actually I did little with it beyond sampling it here and there as something would strike my fancy, and I soon gave it up. I got enough out of it, however, so that when the British suffragettes broke loose under the lead of Mrs. Pankhurst, and the American sisterhood dutifully followed suit by going on the warpath, I found I had a complete perspective on their doings. I was on familiar terms with the whole substance of their contention; I had been familiar with it, so to say, for four hundred years; it was good classical fifteenth-century stuff. Perceiving this at once, I saw I was in for a long season of excellent diversion, and I accordingly got myself comfortably squared away to enjoy it.

I remembered one matter which had interested me at the time of my earlier readings. I had noticed that in Rabelais’s period the controversy was carried on by men. Men wrote all the books, did all the pamphleteering. Women did nothing. I thought this was rather remarkable, especially as the French Renaissance brought forth any number of women perfectly capable of lending a hand if they had seen fit to do so. They were able, brilliant, successful in politics and literature, and were at the top of the heap in point of social influence and prestige. Those were the days when Louise of Savoy, Marguerite of Angoulême, Anne of Brittany, Renée of France, were distinguishing themselves in public affairs. Some women of the time, moreover, had that rarest of gifts, potent even after the lapse of four hundred years, the power of making one wish mightily that one could have known them. They were not great, no doubt, except for this wonderful gift of imparting, if I may put it so, a delicate and delicious fragrance to their period’s literary history. I am unable at the moment to think of any of the great historical female characters of the period, or any period, whom I should much care to meet, but I would cheerfully give all my old boots and shoes if I could have known the belle cordière Louise Labé, Anne Tallonne, Sybille and Claudine Scève, and Pernette du Guillet, who must have been the most exquisite of spirits, and who died so young.

Yet out of all this array of feminine ability, no one seems to have got up much steam over the question which was agitating the men-folk: the question whether by nature women are, or are not, inferior beings. I suspect that with good hard common sense they, like Rabelais, thought the whole contention was supremely silly. If the men saw fit to fool away their time on it, well and good, let them do so; it would do no harm, and might tend to keep them out of mischief; but as for themselves, they had better fish to fry. I think that here one can recognise a turn of realism essentially feminine, or should I say French-feminine? It is noteworthy that Marguerite of Angoulême befriended Rabelais, as she did Marot, des Périers, Dolet and other unruly gentry who made the mistake of being too openly sportive about matters which the authorities of State and Church regarded as serious. She wangled a copyright for Rabelais out of her brother Francis I, which was a hard thing to get in those days, and Rabelais paid off the favour by dedicating the Third Book to her in a short flight of shocking poor verse. She unquestionably read the Third Book, for there is a reminiscence of the lively thirty-fifth chapter in one of her own poems; so if she saw any signs of anti-feminism in it, she seems not to have taken them to heart.

So much, then, for the attitude of women towards the earlier controversy. When the storm broke out afresh in the twentieth century I made two interesting observations. The first one was that this time, in both England and America, it was the women who were sweating all the blood and raising all the commotion. They had some men under conviction in both countries, but they were largely of the Liberal persuasion and hence devoid of humour, incapable of recognising the essential futility of causes which for some reason seem always chiefly to attract them. A few others gave a diffident and sheepish sort of allegiance, probably under domestic dragooning of a severe type. Aside from these, the men stood aloof; many of them, especially in England, annoyed by the various arsons, assaults, picketings and general carryings-on with which the ladies were entertaining themselves; and the rest either indifferent or displaying only a sporting interest. In short, the men and women of the twentieth-century cast had simply swapped rôles with the actors in the earlier performance four centuries ago.

I was much interested by this, and far more by my second observation, that in France the women were standing pat, precisely like the women of the Renaissance, and the men had cooled off to the zero-point, so that feminism was distinctly a dead issue. I looked into the matter, and found that French law prima facie bore as hardly on women as English law, much harder than American law, yet Frenchwomen seemed to be doing very well under its iniquities, and were quite indisposed to make a fuss about them. Missionaries from England got no results; the Frenchwomen were polite and pleasant, but firmly declined to get stirred up. The result of my investigations convinced me that if they had full suffrage presented to them outright they would not take the trouble to find out when election-day was due. I was pleased by these discoveries. When I contrasted the Frenchwomen’s attitude with that of the British and American sisterhood, I was no end delighted at perceiving that the steady-headed, realistic, thoroughly objective spirit of the great Louises, Marguerites and Renées was still to the front and going strong.

As I saw it, the Frenchwomen were toeing the Platonist mark of seeing things as they were; not as they thought they should be, or wanted them to be, but as they actually were. With regard to suffrage, they could see that as long as the State was administered by criminals and psychopaths, their vote would not be worth casting. Moreover, they might know what any one of ordinary common sense would know, that the State must go on being administered by criminals and psychopaths because in the nature of things none but a criminal or psychopath would take the job, or could get it, or could do anything with it if he had it. France’s century of political experience would seem to have drummed a sense of this transcendent truth into the Frenchwoman’s head. If by an untoward stroke of fate some one who was neither a criminal nor a psychopath found himself at the head of the State’s affairs in a modern republic, he would do about as well and last about as long as Adrian VI at Rome or John Quincy Adams at Washington. The British suffrage was extended to women; the suffragettes won their case,—and look at England’s political record of the past twenty years! The American suffragettes also won their case; they have been busily voting, jobholding and saving the country ever since, and now,—God help us all!—just look at it!

I say this not by way of aspersing American womankind or of offloading any undue responsibility on them. As I have already explained, a sense of logic and justice put me on the side of the suffragettes and kept me there. I was, and am, for full suffrage, full rights of property, a “single standard of morals,” whatever that is, divorce on demand,—I do not think there is a single moot point on which I would be found tripping. I am interested only in remarking that by the test of practice the contention proved worthless, quite as I knew it would; and that the attitude of the Frenchwomen was far more sensible. They had made France a woman’s country, not by voting or jobholding or getting up parades and mass-meetings, organising clubs, and so on, but by making themselves indispensable to the country’s welfare. France was a country of small businesses, and women managed them; women managed the household, the family; in fact, there was precious little in the day-to-day life of France that women did not manage, and manage exceedingly well. They knew they were indispensable; the men also knew it, and went very gingerly about interfering with any of their prerogatives, law or no law. When Marianne spoke up, her menfolk listened earnestly and took due notice. Experience, I repeat, must have bred in the realistic Marianne a calm Emersonian disregard of Falstaff’s “old Father Antic, the law”; and properly so. If one has an unbreakable grip on the reality of power, why bother to coerce an omniumgatherum of illiterate blackguards into validating the mere appearance of it?

I saw a delicious exhibition of this spirit only a few weeks ago when I was in company with a lady who was bitterly resentful—and rightly so—of some of our statutes affecting women. It appears that somewhere in the Grand Republic there is a state law permitting a husband to alienate his children from their mother by will. This did not seem so heinous to me (though I did not say so) for I understand that in the state where I am sojourning a man can be put in gaol for kissing his wife on Sunday, though I have not yet heard of its being done. A case which the lady cited as the locus classicus was that of a wife who found under the pillow of her husband’s death-bed a scribbled codicil bequeathing his unborn child to another woman, said to be his mistress. Most thoughtlessly (the French strain in me is always cropping out when it should not, and getting me into trouble) I said at once it was no doubt an excellent arrangement, for the man knew both women and knew all the circumstances, and therefore—but I was not permitted to go on. When the smoke cleared away, a French girl in the company quietly said, “A Frenchwoman would just have torn up that paper and said nothing about it.”

Precisely so; there you have it! That girl knew her countrywomen. I was so delighted that I yearned to kiss the hem of her garment, but being new to this country she could not possibly have understood why I should make so much fuss over what would seem to her a very small matter of everyday good sense; so I restrained myself and gave no sign.

By a series of adjustments and understandings, quite elaborate and entirely extra-legal, Frenchwomen had built themselves into a position of power and authority substantial enough not only to make them indispensable to the working of their social system, but also to make them recognised as indispensable; so what the law might say or not say mattered little. While I was on the side of our suffragettes, I could not help thinking that their contention was paltry, as the outcome has shown it to be, and that they might have done better with their energy and devotion if they had taken a leaf out of the Frenchwomen’s book. American women had long been in a notoriously privileged position; the fact was known wherever the sun shines; and I wondered why they had not shown the Frenchwomen’s sagacity and cleverness in consolidating their advantage. Quite evidently they had not done so, and the exhibitions they have put on since they were legally enabled to cut a larger figure on the public stage gave additional evidence that they neither had nor have any idea of doing so.

On one point of doctrine, perhaps, I was a little heretical. I was all for equality of the sexes before the law, but the left-wing doctrine of “natural equality” impressed me as profound nonsense. The Tiraqueaus and Bouchards of the Renaissance struck me, as they did Rabelais, as acting like incredible simpletons, and so did their continuators in the twentieth century. Any one capable of seeing what he looks at knows that there is no such thing as this natural equality anywhere in the mammalian world. It is ten to one that neither Tiraqueau nor Bouchard ever kept cats, though such a thing is hard to believe of any Frenchman. Women, like the she-females of any mammalian species, are in some respects superior to their males, immeasurably so, and in other respects are distinctly inferior. These qualities of excess and defect are complementary, and the practical thing is to adjust one’s personal sex-relations in correspondence with that natural arrangement. Here again the Frenchwomen, in my opinion, have shown themselves the soundest of feminists, and American women, as I observed in my last chapter, the most unsound.

My belief is that the most unfortunate result of the American querelle des dames has been an aggravation of the peculiarly American itch for inquisitional meddling, snooping, prying into all sorts of ill-understood matters, and bustling about in the effort to regulate, re-shape and, Gott soll hüten, to improve them; and invariably invoking the very worst and most incompetent agency for the purpose—political action. I do not imply, nor do I believe, that American women are more subject to this odious disorder than American men. I observe merely that for obvious reasons their seizures are usually more violent and longer protracted; also that their change of legal status adds greatly to the epidemic force and spread of this mania. Since the first days of Prohibition, whenever I have visited this country I have found its atmosphere reeking with the “insane smell,” familiar to alienists, of Weltverbesserungswahn; and in the last ten years its thickening stench has become unbearable. Thus one may say quite justly, I believe, that the New Woman of Anglo-American feminism has contributed much more than her full share to a continuous process of debasement and vulgarisation. As a matter of simple honesty, the first act of our present Administration should have been to take the legend E pluribus unum off our currency, and substitute Goethe’s phrase, Was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.

II

Since I began this chapter I have been prodding my memory vigorously to see what I could stir up about the little girls who were in my orbit when I was a little boy. The result is that I have drawn a complete blank, except for the French child who lived next door to us, or it may have been two or three doors away, in Brooklyn. I think my remembering her at all may be due to the fact which would naturally make a considerable impression on a child, that while apparently she knew well enough how to talk, she did not say anything that I could understand, nor could she understand anything I said to her. Aside from this, all I can recall of her is that she was a light blonde and seemed frail. I do not remember her face, her actions, or anything that passed between us except two or three haphazard attempts at making conversation.

Barring this episode, my life up past the age of ten seems to have been completely girlless. There must have been a herd of girl-children loose about our neighbourhood, but I do not remember ever seeing any. I do not recall a single name, face, skirt, pinafore or hair-ribbon. Of the boys I played with, some at least must have had sisters, but if they ever spoke of them I’do not recall it. This seems rather strange, now that I think of it, for most men have preserved some little recollection of having been thrown with girls at no later age than ten, playing games with them, fighting them, teasing and bullying them, and being teased and bullied in return. But I have no such recollection. One reason may be that I did not go to school, for I suppose it is usually at school that boys and girls first find themselves mixed up promiscuously. Another reason may be that I had no sisters; all my associations in the family were with men and women around the age of thirty, so my views and impressions of womankind and their relations with men were formed on adults.

In this I was extremely lucky, for the women around me were, without exception, superb specimens of their kind. They were able, gifted, handsome, witty, strong-minded, humorous, and above all they were downright. There was not a grain of humbug or sickly-sentimentalist nonsense in any of them. I was loved devotedly as none too many children are, but I was also respected as far too few children are. No woman ever petted me, took me on her lap, made up to me, gushed baby-talk over me. I should have taken anything of the kind as a low indecency and an outrage. I know this, for I remember one attempt made by a silly old blister who was talking with my mother at our front gate when I happened along. She got as far as patting me on the back, with a maudlin word or two thrown in, when I retired in silent indignation with every feather bristling, and I never went near the sappy old creature again.

Thus my early impressions of women were not of a kind to provoke any curiosity about their nature or their peculiarities; still less, to excite any sense of their inferiority or their superiority. There the women were, and I took them as they were. They were different from the men, different in appearance, dress, interests and occupations, but they did not seem at all superior to men or in the least inferior, but merely different. I liked them immensely, thought they were splendid, and they never amused me more than when they were matching wits with their menfolk; but my affection for them was no deeper than for the men, nor yet any shallower. As for their relations, I saw that in certain well-defined ways the men looked after the women, and in other ways, equally well-defined, the women looked after the men; and this seemed perfectly reasonable and natural.

I noticed also that both the women and men came in for certain conventional deferences as matter-of-course, and could count on their being punctiliously yielded; but these stirred in me no sense of inequality either way, nor did they seem to betoken any sacrifice of self-respect. I was instinctively all in favour of these deferences, since I saw that both the women and men were far above taking any unscrupulous advantage of the spirit which prompted them. I could understand how they would make things go easier, more agreeably and gracefully, and hence I liked them and more or less unconsciously fell in with them. The two sets of deferences were different, naturally, but they were equally effortless and prepossessing. All this probably did something towards putting me in the way, later on, of appreciating the devoted and undemanding spirit of the cavaliere servente, which I have always believed to be the best for men’s cultivation, and which I always have cultivated in my relations with all sorts and conditions of women. As well as I can judge from observation, experience, and the reading of history, the cavaliere servente has always got the best out of womankind, and hence I think it likely that he always will.

As for the girls in our northern lumber-town, my memory serves me but little better. There were some with whom I was on terms that were friendly and pleasant enough, but all I had to do with them was casual, and I remember almost nothing about them. I suppose I had too much else on hand to get up any great amount of interest in cultivating them. I can recall a few names, but no faces to answer to them. I remember any number of older women well enough, but no girls of anywhere near my own age. Perhaps the doings of a long life among many peoples have overlaid these memories, but I do not think so. I think they have faded out because there was so little of any consequence to be remembered.

I do, however, remember very clearly when I began to take critical notice of youthful female beauty; I believe I have already mentioned somewhere that it was in the period of my being away at boarding-school. The town was brimming with pretty girls, and I took a good deal of interest in studying their looks and making comparisons, as one does when considering objects in a jeweller’s window. We boys scraped acquaintance with a number of them; probably some of us flirted with them more or less, and perhaps one or two of us came down with mild cases of calf-love, though this is only a suspicion on my part. I did not get so far as any of this. The girls were always amiable and pleasant with me, and that was all.

Nevertheless I liked to look at them, more than anything for the sake of making out just what it was in which their good looks consisted. I began to consider such matters as bone-structure, facial contour, types of feature. The one whom I put up in my mind as entitled to the blue ribbon had a perfect Roman face, in full and in profile, and she carried herself with somewhat of a Roman bearing; which was rather remarkable, for she was echt-German as Dortmund beer, like nearly all the girls in that town. Still, she may have thrown back to some irregular ancestor in camp on the banks of the Lippe confronting the mighty Arminius; perhaps to Varus himself. There is a pleasant irony in the thought of all the innumerable social complexities and dishevelments which the mere lapse of time so quickly irons out.

Somehow I managed to contemplate this kaleidoscopic array of alluring loveliness without being seriously smitten by anything I saw. I liked the girls I knew, liked to look at them, liked to please them and do them what little courtesies were in my power, and was usually ready to chatter small-talk with them till the cows came home; yet, after one had chattered, looked and listened through a session of small-talk, what was there to show for it? Later I discovered the reason why these girls had so little affected my peace of mind. They were stunning beauties, sweet as they could be, and horribly out of luck in being born too soon to make their everlasting fortune in Hollywood or on magazine-covers. But despite all this, there was no denying that their beauty not only betokened immaturity, which was quite to be expected, but also disclosed the certain forecast of a mature being who, in point of perspicacity, imagination and humour, would be more than a little dumm. Their good looks gave no promise of ever becoming ausdrucksvoll with the irresistible power of attraction which I had seen residing in the faces of the women I had known since first my eyes were opened on the world.

My perception of this was instinctive at the time, but accurate. Ever since then,—or always, in fact, counting in the period during which my preferences were established by instinct,—this quality which I then found undetectable in prospect has been the one to mark the difference between effective charm and the lack of it in determining my reaction to female beauty. Mere regularity in beauty has never interested me, though until it became so filthily vulgarised I enjoyed looking at it with the appreciation of a connoisseur. I soon became aware of the curious magnetic power resident even in certain positive defects, though I do not more than half-understand it; the kind of thing that helped out the astonishing popularity of stage-women like Anna Held, Polaire and Rigolboche. Once at a foreign summer-resort, when I was twenty-six or so, I wasted a great deal of time on putting myself in the way of a pretty-pretty young girl who had one green eye and one brown eye. I had not the slightest wish to meet her or talk with her, but I could see how this strange defect might be a great asset to a face that carried the expression, which hers distinctly did not carry, of high intelligence and refinement. With those eyes a Marguerite or Renée might have made even the inexorable Tiraqueau come to terms. I presume my sense of this magnetic power may account for the rather silly satisfaction I got out of tagging around after the young woman for views of her eyes. I do not know how else to account for it.

III

To me it appears indisputable that out of all peoples, nations and languages, male writers of every sort and size have committed themselves to more damneder fiddle-faddle on the subject of women than on any other subject under the sun. Perhaps in saying what little I have to say on the subject I am merely adding one more to the list. I must take my chances on that, however, in pursuance of the purpose of this book, as I have already explained; withal admitting, as I do, that with so many eminent writers talking nonsense, the chances are heavily against one so obscure as myself. The writers of the French Renaissance, incredible numskulls as Rabelais seems to have thought them, were in my opinion quite as rational in their appraisals of women as writers of the nineteenth century on whose works I browsed. These could be roughly sorted into three schools; the dry-nursing, the analytic, and the lyrical. I have in mind chiefly the French representatives of these schools, because they are the most thorough-going; but they had able competitors in England and Germany whose names will at once occur to any reader, and no doubt in other countries as well.

The school of dry-nursing,—the cult devoted to exploiting the enfant malade et douze fois impure,—might well have compressed what they had to say into a pamphlet and brought it out as a brochure On the Care and Feeding of Women. Only the other day I came on a three-star passage by one of these artists (one does not see how he could have been a great writer, but he was) which for emetic efficiency and promptness can hardly be matched. Here is a paragraph from it:

He who has preserved in his heart the flame of gallantry which burned in the last centuries surrounds women with a tenderness at once profound, gentle, sensitive and vigilant. He loves everything that belongs to them; everything that comes from them; everything that they are; everything they do. He loves their toilette, their knick-knacks, their adornments, their artifices, their naïvetes, their little perfidies, their lies, and their dainty ways.... He knows how, from the very first word, by a look, by a smile, to show that he adores them, to arouse their attention, to sharpen their wish to please and to display for his benefit all their powers of seduction. Between them and him there is established a quick sympathy, a fellowship of instincts, almost a relationship through similarity of character and nature. Then begins a combat of coquetry and gallantry,...

—but I closed the book at this point, lest haply I should pewk. The reader will probably be willing to take the rest of the passage on faith, as I am. One can see well enough what the besotted man is driving at in his darkened way, and can see that it is something very admirable; but spewing whole pages of neurasthenic slaver over it tends only to obscure and befoul it.

Then there is the school of the psychologie de l’amour moderne, the school which spreads itself on analysing and psychologising women as mysterious beings, unpredictable, unprincipled, predacious, infinitely subtle, and for the most part exceedingly nasty; such, for example, as the disgusting henhussies of Bourget’s Mensonges. It gives one a turn of hopelessness to see Amiel edging himself into this gallery with a piece of simply inimitable nonsense:

A woman is sometimes fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical and contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, for she may bring about innumerable evils without knowing it.

Amiel was a much-travelled philosopher, an excellent critic and man of letters, with all the culture of Europe in his head, yet he did not see that what he says here is equally applicable to either sex. He is adverting to qualities and behaviour which are characteristic of the psychically-anthropoid; and the vast overwhelming majority of Homo sapiens, women as well as men, are psychically-anthropoid. Psychically-human females do not exhibit such traits, nor yet do psychically-human males.

The third school, the lyrical or panegyrist, glorify woman as a kind of Institution. If they are French, they glorify her as a National Institution, like the Academy or the Comédie Française, which none but Frenchmen can properly appreciate and reverence. All of them do this; from Michelet up and down, all are guilty. Crimine ab uno disce omnes; the documentary evidence is complete in the pages of La Femme and L’Amour.

The curious thing is that the men of all three schools actually believed in the dreadful balderdash which they put forth about women. There is no doubt of it; no one could counterfeit such fatuous sincerity. This has the effect of giving a fantastic semblance of reality to such figures of womanhood as I have never seen and never expect to see, nor do I wish to see, whether on earth, in heaven, or in the waters under the earth.

IV

One of my valued friends is an Armenian merchant, dealing in objects of art. Armenians are known the world over as uncommonly shrewd merchants, and my friend is no exception; I can bear witness to this, for I have seen him in action. When I go in his shop he knows he has nothing in stock that I would take as a gift, let alone pay money for. I go in, seeking nothing, expecting nothing but an hour or so of his interesting and instructive companionship. Hence our conversation is free, disinterested, intimate, affectionate. I get a great deal out of it in respect of many recondite matters pertaining to the Oriental world of thought and action, and I think he also gets something. What we get, however, is not at all what we would get if I approached him in his capacity as merchant; and without pretending to answer for him, I may say that what I get is infinitely more valuable. This story may not seem apposite to a discussion of sex-relations, but it is, as I shall now show.

I think there can be “no manner of doubt, no probable, possible shadow of doubt” that men need women far more than women need men. I am not speaking of relative susceptibility to “the sexual urge.” All that is as it may be, but it is entirely out of present consideration. Women may like men and want them, but on a forced put they can, and do, get on very handily without them. Men may not like women or want them, but without them they can hardly get on at all. I do not know why this should be so, though I can think of several contributory reasons, as any one can; but however the fact may be accounted for, there it seems to be.

Obviously this fact causes women, by and large, to appear before men in a double capacity. They appear in the capacity of friends and fellow-beings, casual associates; but they also appear in the capacity of merchants, exercising a sort of natural monopoly, and looking for trade. In their capacity as merchants they regard men primarily as potential customers. They have a merchant’s eye out for the best customers available among those who present themselves, and they have the monopolist’s instinct for regulating the terms of their market according to careful calculation of what the traffic will bear. The standard British novelists, such as Trollope, Thackeray, Jane Austen, consistently exhibit women in this capacity, and women’s assumption of it is everywhere a matter of observed and acknowledged fact.

One may reluct a little at an exposition of this matter in such plain terms, perhaps, but when one understands the laws governing mankind’s conduct one perceives at once that there can be no reasonable complaint of the fact, and therefore no particular point to glossing it over. Woman’s basic needs and desires are the same as man’s; they need and desire a steady and stable supply of food, clothing and shelter. In the effort to ensure this supply they tend always, precisely as men do, to follow the path of least resistance—Epstean’s law. In the great majority of instances that path leads by way of bargaining with men through marriage. The Church of England’s formula for solemnising marriage reflects the operation of Epstean’s law by introducing the clause, “with all my worldly goods I thee endow.” In instances where “social security” is effected by other means, such as an adequate inherited income, the path of least resistance does not usually run that way, save where a dominant motive of pure greed affords newspapers a chance to make a splurge over “the union of two great fortunes.” Such instances are relatively infrequent. Nor would I dream of intimating that these needs and desires are the only ones that women have, for that would be simply silly; I say no more than that they are basic, primary, which most obviously they are. It is the part of wisdom in all circumstances, however, to keep steadily in mind the fact that Epstean’s law bears just as powerfully on women as on men. Whatever a woman’s needs and desires may be, from the least to the greatest, she tends always, as men do, to satisfy them with the least possible exertion; that is to say, by exploitation whenever exploitation is practicable. There are circumstances in which one is sometimes tempted to lose sight of this, but it is inadvisable to do so.

And now to my main point, indeed my only point, which is sincerely practical. If you approach women with the faintest suggestion of being a potential customer, you may expect to find the ensuing relation tinctured heavily with a spirit of mercantilism exactly analogous to that which my Armenian friend displays when some one comes in to look over his stock. The ways in which this spirit is displayed are of infinite variety and exceedingly attractive; my Armenian friend is one of the most accomplished coquettes I ever saw, when it suits him to turn the pressure on a potential customer. But these elaborate little arts all tending steadily in one direction, coynesses, backings and fillings, turns of finesse, are so well understood that there is no need to multiply words about them. Any one who does not understand them simply shows himself not only most unobservant, but also deplorably ignorant of literature, for even the literature of the modern Emancipation makes its roughneck heroines display them all.

On the other hand, if you approach a woman as I approach my Armenian, on the understanding that nothing is to be expected in the way of business, the ensuing relation will turn out to be infinitely rewarding. Unless all my experience and observation go for nothing, it will be devoted and enduring, intimate, candid, understanding, truly affectionate and disinterested. It will assay much richer in all these qualities than any comparable relationship between men, because it brings into reciprocal action qualities which are naturally complementary, thus correcting defects, smoothing down excesses, and carrying on a general course of strengthening and enlargement of both mind and spirit. To give but one illustration, I have learned ten times as much practical wisdom from women as from men, in virtue of all the superiority of women’s realism and objectivity. It must be understood that in all I have been saying on this point I speak only of the psychically-human woman; of the psychically-anthropoid or mass-woman I can of course say no more than for her male congener.

The understanding I posit should be arrived at tacitly; I never told my Armenian friend in so many words that I was not interested in his merchandise, nor did he ever openly suggest an indisposition to selling me anything. But however arrived at, the understanding must be established in sincere good faith. No counterfeit, albeit ever so well made, will pass the test; and here may be seen the force of what I said a moment ago about the spirit of the cavaliere servente as being the best for men’s cultivation. In Thélème and the Courts of Love it was thoroughly drilled into the lady’s head that she had nothing in the world that her cavaliere servente was after. She could not sell him a pennyworth of anything. He was by her side day in and day out for no reason but that it suited him to be there. Under those conditions, whatever either of them got out of their association was not subject to “the higgling of the market.” It came as a gift freely offered, not asked for or suggested. The whole philosophy of their relationship is summed up in the deep observation of Filena to Wilhelm, “If I love you, what business is that of yours?”