see the qualities that a woman, spontaneously
loves, the expression, the tone, the bearing that thoroughly satisfies
her self-respect, that not only secures her acquiescence, but arouses
her enthusiasm and commands her abdication, crucify the flesh, and read
Coventry Patmore. Not that he is the world's great poet, nor Arthur
Vaughan the ideal man; but this I do mean: that the delicacy, the
spirituality of his love, the scrupulous respectfulness of his demeanor,
his unfeigned inward humility, as far removed from servility on the one
side as from assumption on the other, and less the opponent than the
offspring of self-respect, his thorough gentleness, guilelessness,
deference, his manly, unselfish homage, are such qualities, and such
alone, as lead womanhood captive. Listen to me, you rattling, roaring,
rollicking Ralph Roister Doisters, you calm, inevitable Gradgrinds, as
smooth, as sharp, as bright as steel, and as soulless, and you men,
whoever, whatever, and wherever you are, with fibres of rope and nerves
of wire, there is many and many a woman who tolerates you because she
finds you, but there is nothing in her that ever goes out to seek you.
Be not deceived by her placability. "Here he is," she says to herself,
"and something must be done about it. Buried under Ossa and Pelion
somewhere he must be supposed to have a soul, and the sooner he is dug
into, the sooner it will be exhumed." So she digs. She would never have
made you, nor of her own free-will elected you; but being made, such as
you are, and on her hands in one way or another, she carves and chisels,
and strives to evoke from the block a breathing statue. She may succeed
so far as that you shall become her Frankenstein, a great, sad,
monstrous, incessant, inevitable caricature of her ideal, the monument
at once of her success and her failure, the object of her compassion,
the intimate sorrow of her soul, a vast and dreadful form into which
her creative power can breathe the breath of life, but not of sympathy.
Perhaps she loves you with a remorseful, pitying, protesting love, and
carries you on her shuddering shoulders to the grave. Probably, as she
is good and wise, you will never find it out. A limpid brook ripples in
beauty and bloom by the side of your muddy, stagnant self-complacence,
and you discern no essential difference. "Water's water," you say, with
your broad, stupid generalization, and go oozing along contentedly
through peat-bogs and meadow-di