Varia. Agnes Repplier
the Duchess of Queensberry, with an oath as resonant as the doorkeeper's, swore that in they would come, in spite of the Chancellor and the Lords and the Commons to boot. The Peers resolved to starve them into docility, and gave orders that the doors should not be opened until they raised their siege. These Amazons stood there, so we are informed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, uncheered by food or drink, but solacing themselves repeatedly by thumping and kicking at the doors with so much violence that the speakers in the House were scarcely heard. When the Lords remained unconquered by such tactics, the two duchesses, well versed in the stratagems of war, commanded half an hour of dead silence; and the Chancellor thinking this silence a certain proof of their withdrawal (the Commons, who had been kept out all this time, being very impatient to enter), the doors were finally opened; whereupon the astute and triumphant women rushed in, and promptly secured the best seats in the gallery. There they stayed, with magnificent endurance, until after eleven at night, and indulged themselves during the debate in such noisy tokens of regard or disapproval that the greatest confusion ensued. The newest of new women is but a modest and shrinking wild-flower when compared with such flaunting arrogance as this.
Nor were the "platform women," as they are unkindly called to-day, unknown or even uncommon in those good old times of domesticity; for nearly a hundred and twenty years ago the "London Mirror" printed a caustic protest against the mannishness of fashionable ladies, their pernicious meddling with things which concerned them not, and, above all, their calm effrontery in addressing public audiences on political and social questions, "with the spirit and freedom of the boldest male orators." In fact, several societies had been already formed with the express view of enlightening the public as to the opinions of women on matters which were presumably beyond their jurisdiction, and of pushing these opinions to some ultimate and practical conclusion,—which is the precise object of similar societies to-day. For the determination of the sex from the beginning has been, not merely to assert its own intellectual independence, like the heroine of Vanbrugh's comedy,—so out of date yet so strikingly modern,—who affirms that the pleasure of women's lives is founded on entire liberty to think and to do what they please; but there was always the well-defined anticipation of influencing by unconstrained thought and action the current of affairs. They wished their voices to count. When Dr. Sacheverell was prosecuted by the Whigs for his famous sermons on the neglect of the church by the government, the women of London made his cause their own. All duties and all diversions gave way before the paramount excitement of this trial. Churches and theatres were alike deserted. "The ladies lay aside their tea and chocolate," writes Defoe pleasantly, "leave off visiting after dinner, and, forming themselves into cabals, turn privy councillors, and settle the affairs of state. Gallantry and gayety are given up for business. Even the little girls talk politics." Lady Wentworth, with her customary acuteness, remarked that Dr. Sacheverell would make the women good housewives. The laziest of them had ceased to lie in bed in the mornings, since the trial began every day at seven. So great was the enthusiasm for the persecuted divine, that his conviction and punishment, though the latter was purely nominal, helped largely to overthrow the Whig ministry, and added one more triumph to the energetic interference, the "pernicious meddling," of women.
To understand, however, the full extent of female influence in affairs of state, we should turn to France, where for centuries the sex has played an all-important part, for good and ill, in the ruling of the land. Any page of French history will tell this tale, from the far-off day when Brabant and Hainault, and England, too, listened to the persuasions of Joan of Valois, raised the siege of Tournay, and suffered the exhausted nation to breathe again, down to the less impetuous age when that astute princess, Charlotte Elizabeth, remarked—out of the fullness of her hatred for Mme. de Maintenon—that France had been governed by too many women, young and old, and that it was almost time the men began to take a hand. Perhaps we can best appreciate the force of feminine dominion when we read the half-amused, half-exasperated comments of Gouverneur Morris, whose diary, written on the eve of the French Revolution, reveals an intimate knowledge of that strange society, already crumbling to decay. At a dinner in the chateau of M. le Norrage, the political situation is discussed with so much vehemence by the men that the women's gentler voices are lost in the uproar, which sorely vexes these fair politicians, accustomed to being listened to with deference. "They will have more of this," says Morris shrewdly, "if the States General should really fix a constitution. Such an event would be particularly distressing to the women of this countiy, for they would be thereby deprived of their share in the government; and hitherto they have exercised an authority almost unlimited, with no small pleasure to themselves, though not perhaps with the greatest advantage to the community."
He realizes this more fully when he goes to consult with M. de Corney on a question of finance, and finds that Mme. de Corney is well acquainted with the matter. "It is the woman's country," he writes with whimsical dismay; and he is fain to repeat the sentiment hotly and angrily when Mme. de Staël, who was not wont to be troubled by petty scruples, dupes him into showing her some papers, and gossips about them to her father and Bishop d'Autun. "She is a devilish creature," says the outraged American, feeling he has been outwitted in the game; but it is difficult, in the face of such little anecdotes, to distinguish between the new woman and the old.
One thing is tolerably sure. The new woman, to whatever century she belonged,—and she has been under varying aspects the product of every age,—has never achieved great popularity with man. This is not wholly to her discredit; for the desire to look at life from a standpoint of her own, while irritating and subversive of general order, cannot reasonably be accounted a crime. Yet when we consider the invectives which have been hurled at women from the day they were created until now, we find that most of them have for their basis the natural indignation which is born of disregarded advice. The whole ground for complaint is summed up admirably in the angry remonstrance of Clarissa Harlowe's uncle, when his niece prefers the lover she has chosen for herself to the suitor chosen for her by her family. "I have always found a most horrid romantic perverseness in your sex," says this experienced old man. "To do and to love what you should not, is meat, drink, and vesture to you all." There lies the argument in a nutshell; and if Richardson be the first great English novelist who has painted for us a woman moved by the secret and powerful impulses of her heart, the unwritten and irrefutable laws of her own nature, he has also expressed for us in brief and accurate phraseology the masculine reading of this problem. "Nothing worse than woman can befall mankind," says Sophocles apprehensively; and far-off Hesiod, as cheerless, but somewhat more philosophical, explains that our sex is a necessary deduction from the coveted happiness of life. Burton tells us of an excellent old anchorite who fell into a "cold palsy" whenever a woman was brought before him; which pious and consistent behavior is more to my liking than the gay ingratitude of the Greeks, who drew their inspiration from the fairness and weakness, the passion and pain of women, and then bequeathed to all coming ages the weight of their dispassionate condemnation. Better to me is the old Sanskrit saying, "The hearts of women are as the hearts of wolves;" or the Turkish jibe anent the length of our hair and the shortness of our wits; or that last and final verdict from the pen of our modern analyst, Mr. George Meredith, "Woman will be the last thing civilized by man,"—an ambiguously brilliant epigram which waits for the elucidation of the critics.
The really curious thing is, not that we should have been found in a general way unsatisfactory, which was to be expected, but that we should be held to blame for such widely divergent desires. Take for example the indifference of women to intellectual pursuits, which has earned for them centuries of masculine contempt; and their thirst for intellectual pursuits, which has earned for them centuries of masculine disapprobation. On the one hand, we have some of the most delightful writers England has known, calmly reminding them that sewing is their one legitimate occupation. "Now for women," says dear old Robert Burton, "instead of laborious studies, they have curious needlework, cutwork, spinning, bonelace, and many pretty devices of their own making with which to adorn their houses." Addison, a hundred years later, does not seem to have advanced one step beyond this eminently conservative attitude. He wishes with all his heart that women would apply themselves more to embroidery and less to rhyme, a wish which was heartily echoed by Edward Fitzgerald, who carried unimpaired to the nineteenth century these sound and orthodox principles. Addison would rather listen to his fair friends discussing the merits of red and blue embroidery silks than the merits