| <The Saturday Review, January 25 1868>
| <Woman and Her Critics>
| <pb n="108">
| We men boast, as Homer said, to be braver than our 
| fathers; but, as a sort of compensation, our women are far 
| more sensitive than their grandmothers. Phylis has ceased 
| to laugh at Mr. Spectator's criticisms on her fan and her 
| patches; but then it may be doubted whether Phylis ever 
| did laugh very heartily at Mr. Spectator. Women have run 
| through all the list of moral and intellectual qualities in 
| their time, but we do not remember an instance of a really 
| humorous woman. Witty women there have been, and no 
| doubt are still in plenty, but the world has still to 
| welcome its feminine Addison. The higher a man's 
| nature, the keener seems his enjoyment of his own irony 
| and mockery of his own foibles; but did any woman ever 
| seriously sit down to write a "Roundabout Paper"? 
| Women, we are generally told, are especially <p>
| "self-conscious;" </p> in fact, the whole theory of women, 
| philosophically stated, from the shyness of the miss in her 
| teens to the flirtation of a heroine of the season, rests 
| wholly on the assumed basis of <p> "self-consciousness."
| </p> But it is self-consciousness of a very peculiar and 
| feminine sort ~~ a consciousness, not of themselves in 
| themselves, but of the reflection of themselves in others, 
| of the impression they make on the world around. 
| Woman, we suspect, lives always before her glass, and 
| makes a mirror of existence. But for downright 
| self-analysis, we repeat, she has little or no taste. A 
| female Montaigne, a female Thackeray, would be a sheer 
| impossibility.
| We have been led, as the <hi> Spectator </hi> would 
| have said, into these reflections by the chorus of shrill 
| indignation with which the world of woman encounters 
| the slightest comment of extraneous critics. The censor is 
| at once told flatly that he knows nothing of woman. He is 
| a bachelor, he is blighted in love, he is envious, spiteful; 
| he is blind, deaf, dumb. All this goes without saying, as 
| the French have it, but he is certainly ignorant. The truth 
| is, it is woman who knows nothing of herself. It is only 
| self-analysis which reveals to us our inner anomalies, our 
| ridiculous self-contrasts; it is humour which recognizes 
| and amuses itself with their existence. But it is just the 
| absence of this sense of anomaly in her nature or her life 
| that is the charm of woman. Christmas has been bringing 
| us, among its other festivities, a few of those delightful 
| amusements called private theatricals; all are agreed with 
| Becky Sharpe, that woman reigns supreme. We were 
| present the other day at an entertaining little comedy of 
| this kind, where the whole interest of the piece was 
| absorbed by a fascinating widow and an intriguing 
| attorney, and where both these parts were sustained with 
| singular ability and success. The amateur who played the 
| lawyer seized the general idea of his role with perfect 
| accuracy. In four minutes it was admirably rendered to 
| his audience, but in four minutes it was exhausted. The 
| preliminary cough, the constant angularity of attitude in 
| the midst of perpetual fidget, the indicative finger from 
| which the legal remarks seem to pop off as from a 
| pocket-pistol, were grasped at once, and remained 
| unvaried, undeveloped to the close. The very ability with 
| which the actor rendered the inner unity of legal 
| existence, the very fidelity with which he represented the 
| lawyer as a class, denied to him the subtle charm of the 
| only unity which life as a representation exhibits ~~ the 
| charm of a unity of outer impression arising out of 
| perpetual inner variety. His feminine rival won her laurels 
| just because she made no attempt to grasp any general 
| ideas at all, but abandoned freely to the phases of the 
| character as it encountered the various other characters of 
| the piece. Whether as the frivolous widow or the daring 
| coquette, as the practical woman of business or the 
| unprotected female, as the flirt in her wildest 
| extravagance or the wife in her most melting moods, she 
| aimed at no artistic unity beyond the general unity of sex. 
| She remained simply woman, and all this prodigious 
| versatility was, as the audience observed <p> "so 
| charmingly natural" </p> just because it is woman's life. 
| <p> "On the stage," </p> if we may venture to apply the 
| lines about Garrick: ~~
| <q> On the stage she is natural, simple, affecting ~~
| It is only that when she is off she is acting. </q>
| In actual fact she is acting whether off the boards or on, 
| but the mere existence in outer impressions, in the unity 
| of a constant unreasonably hard upon in general society. 
| A man on the boards is doing an unusual and exceptional 
| thing, and as a rule the very effort he makes to do it only 
| enhances his failure; but a woman on the boards is only 
| doing, under very favourable circumstances, what she 
| does every day with less notice and applause. There can 
| be no wonder if she is <p> "charmingly natural," </p> 
| but this naturalness depends, as we have seen, on the 
| entire absence of what in men is called self-consciousness 
| ~~ that is, the sense of anomaly. When a critic then 
| ventures to open this inner existence, and to give a 
| woman a peep at herself, we cannot be astonished at the 
| scream of indignation which greets his efforts. But we 
| may be permitted to repeat that the scream proves, not 
| that he knows nothing of woman, but that woman knows 
| nothing of herself.
| We are afraid, however, that all this feminine resentment 
| points to a radical defect in the mind of woman, which 
| she is alternately proud to acknowledge and resolute to 
| deny. Frenchmen of the Thiers sort have a trick to which 
| they give the amusing name of logic; they present their 
| reader with a couple of alternatives which they assert 
| divide the universe, and bid you choose <p> "of these 
| two one." </p> But any ordinary woman presents to the 
| observer a hundred distinct alternatives, and defies him to 
| choose any one in particular. There is no special reason, 
| then, for astonishment at the coolness with which she sets 
| herself up one moment as a <p> "deductive creature," 
| </p> as one who attains the highest flights of knowledge 
| by intuition rather than by reason, and the next poses 
| herself as the one specially rational being in her 
| household, and waits patiently till her husband is 
| reasonable too. We are sometimes afraid that neither one 
| not the other of these theories will hold water, and fell 
| inclined to agree with one of the most brilliant of her sex 
| that, if woman loves with her head, she thinks with her 
| heart. As a rule, certainly, she judges through her 
| affections. She does not praise or blame; she loves or 
| hates. The one thing she cannot understand is a purely 
| intellectual criticism, the sort of morbid anatomy of the 
| mind which treats its subject as a mere dead thing simply 
| useful for demonstration. Very naturally, she attributes 
| the same spirit of affectional intelligence to her critics as 
| to herself; and when they unravel a few of her 
| inconsistencies, amuse themselves with a few follies, or 
| even venture to point out a few faults, she brands them as 
| <p> "hating" </p> or <p> "despising" </p> woman. 
| Point, too, is given to the charge by the fact that these 
| affections through which she lives are from their very 
| nature incapable of dealing with qualities and naturally 
| transform them into persons. A woman does not love her 
| lover's courage or truth or honour; she loves her lover. If 
| she prizes his qualities at all it is simply because they are 
| inherent in him, and so she gives herself very little 
| trouble to distinguish between his bad qualities and his 
| good ones. She considers herself bound to defend his 
| characteristics in the mass, and if she seems to give up his 
| extravagance or his rakishness, it is only with a secret 
| determination that this concession to the world shall be 
| balanced by an increase of adoration at home. As she 
| deals with mankind, so she expects mankind, and 
| especially the mankind of criticism, to deal with her. It is 
| in vain that her censor replies that he only blamed her 
| bonnet-strings or attacked the colour of her shoe-tie. 
| Woman's answer is that he has attacked woman. This 
| folly, that absurdity, are in woman's mind herself, and 
| their assailant is her own personal antagonist. <q> “Love 
| me all in all or not at all” </q> is a woman's song not in 
| Mr. Tennyson's <hi> Idyl </hi> only, but all the world 
| over. The discriminating admiration, the constitutional 
| obedience which still claims to preserve a certain 
| reticence and caution in its loyalty, are more alien to 
| woman's feelings than the refusal of all worship, all 
| obedience whatever. <p> "Picking her to pieces" </p> is 
| the phrase in which she describes the critical process 
| against which she revolts, and it is a phrase which, in a 
| woman's mouth, is the prelude to the bitterest warfare.
| Three is a more amiable, if a hardly more intelligent, trait 
| in woman's character which renders her singularly averse 
| to all criticism. Men can hardly be described as loyal to 
| men. Whether it be their exaggerated self-esteem, their 
| individuality, ot their reason, it is certain that they do not 
| imagine the honour of their sex to be concerned in the 
| conduct of each particular member of it. The lawyer 
| laughs over a little gentle fun when it is poked at his 
| neighbour the vicar, and the parson has his amusement 
| out of the exposure of the foibles of his friend the 
| attorney. What they never dream of is the flinging over 
| each other's defects the general cloak of manhood, and 
| rallying at every smile of criticism under the general 
| banner of their sex. But woman, in front of the enemy, 
| picques herself on her <hi> solidarity. </hi> Flirt or 
| prude, prim or gay, foolish or wise, woman, once 
| criticized, cries to her sisters, and is recognized and 
| defended"109">
| censure, is hushed before the foe. The tittle-tattle of the 
| gossips, the social intrigues of the dowager, are adopted 
| as frankly as the self-devotion of a Miss Nightingale. The 
| door of refuge is flung open as widely for the foolish 
| virgins as for the wise. All distinctions of age, of conduct, 
| of intelligence, of rank are annihilated or forgotten in the 
| presence of the enemy. Every fault is to be defended, 
| every weakness to be held stoutly against his attacks. <p> 
| "No surrender" </p> is the order of the day. It is only 
| when the criticism of the outer world withdraws that 
| woman's internal criticism recommences. This is, indeed, 
| half the offence of outer assailants, that they suspend and 
| injure the working of that inner discipline which woman 
| exerts over woman. Mrs. Proudie, it has been said, is the 
| Church. Women certainly present the only analogy in the 
| present day to that claim of internal jurisdiction for which 
| the Church struggled so gallantly in the middle ages.  
| <reg orig="No one"> No-one </reg> who sees the serried 
| ranks with which she encounters all investigation from 
| without would imagine the severity with which she 
| administer justice within. Like the Westphalian 
| Vehm-gericht, the mystery of feminine courts is only equaled 
| by their terrible sentences. Mrs. Grundy on the seat of justice 
| is a Rhadamanthus to whom criticism may fairly leave an 
| erring sister. But all this in  nowise wakens the firmness 
| of woman's attitude before an outer foe. She claims 
| absolute right to all hanging, drawing, and quartering on 
| her domains. Like a feudal baron, she will yield to no 
| man her stocks and gallows. But to judge from the prim 
| front of her squares, the cordial grasp of hand-in-hand 
| with which they form to resist all masculine charges,
| <reg orig="no one"> no-one </reg> would imagine the 
| ruthless severity with which woman was breaking some 
| poor drummer-boy inside.
| We are bound, however, to add, that in all our remarks 
| we have only been nibbling at the outer rind of a great 
| difficulty. Woman has characteristically fallen back on a 
| grand principle, and has asserted her absolute immunity 
| from all criticism whatever. It is not merely that this critic 
| is deaf or that critic malignant, that one censor is ignorant 
| and another basely envious of woman. All this special 
| pleading is totally flung aside, and the defence stands on 
| a basis of the most uncompromising sort. No man, it is 
| asserted, can judge woman, because no man can 
| understand her. She is the Sphinx of modern 
| investigation, and man is not fated to be her Oedipus. We 
| can conceive of few announcements more welcome, if it 
| be only true. In an age when everything seems pretty well 
| discovered, when one cannot preserve even a shred of 
| mystery to cloak the bareness of one's life, when the very 
| surface of the globe is all mapped out, and the mysterious 
| griffins of untraversed deserts are vanishing from the 
| map, it is an amazing relief to know that an unsolved, nay 
| more, that an insoluble, mystery is standing on one's very 
| hearth-rug. No wonder great philosophers have spent 
| their lives in vain in looking for the riddle of existence, 
| when they never dreamt of looking for it at home. Why 
| woman is so peculiarly mysterious, why the laws of her 
| nature are so specially unintelligible to a common world, 
| we have not yet been informed. What is asserted is 
| simply the fact of this mystery, and before that great fact 
| criticism retires. All that remains for it is to pray and to 
| wait, to hope for a revelation from within, since it is 
| forbidden any exploration from without. Some 
| prophetess, no doubt a veiled prophetess herself, will 
| arise to lift the veil of her sex. Woman, let us hope, will 
| at last unriddle woman. Smit by the sunbeams, or rather 
| by the moon-beams, of self-discovery, the Sphinx of 
| modern times will reveal in weird and superhuman music 
| the mystery of her existence.