WOMEN’S
INTELLIGENCE
That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the
senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and
fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective
observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of
their lords and masters. One finds very few professors of the
subject, even among admitted feminists, approaching the fact
as obvious; practically all of them think it necessary to bring
up a vast mass of evidence to establish what should be an axiom.
Even the Franco Englishman, W. L. George, one of the most sharp-witted
of the faculty, wastes a whole book up on the demonstration,
and then, with a great air of uttering something new, gives
it the humourless title of "The Intelligence of Women."
The intelligence of women, forsooth! As well devote a laborious
time to the sagacity of serpents, pickpockets, or Holy Church!
Women,
in truth, are not only intelligent; they have almost a monopoly
of certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence.
The thing itself, indeed, might be reasonably described as a
special feminine character; there is in it, in more than one
of its manifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness
of cruelty, masochism or rouge. Men are strong. Men are brave
in physical combat. Men have sentiment. Men are romantic, and
love what they conceive to be virtue and beauty. Men incline
to faith, hope and charity. Men know how to sweat and endure.
Men are amiable and fond. But in so far as they show the true
fundamentals of intelligence—in so far as they reveal
a capacity for discovering the kernel of eternal verity in the
husk of delusion and hallucination and a passion for bringing
it forth—to that extent, at least, they are feminine,
and still nourished by the milk of their mothers. "Human
creatures," says George, borrowing from Weininger, "are
never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there
are no women, but only sexual majorities." Find me an obviously
intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion,
a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I'll show
you a man with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had
it; Goethe had it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln
had it; in Shakespeare, if the Freudians are to be believed,
it amounted to downright homosexuality. The essential traits
and qualities of the male, the hallmarks of the unpolluted masculine,
are at the same time the hall-marks of the Schalskopf. The caveman
is all muscles and mush. Without a woman to rule him and think
for him, he is a truly lamentable spectacle: a baby with whiskers,
a rabbit with the frame of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterous
caricature of God.
It
would be an easy matter, indeed, to demonstrate that superior
talent in man is practically always accompanied by this feminine
flavour—that complete masculinity and stupidity are often
indistinguishable. Lest I be misunderstood I hasten to add that
I do not mean to say that masculinity contributes nothing to
the complex of chemico-physiological reactions which produces
what we call talent; all I mean to say is that this complex
is impossible without the feminine contribution that it is a
product of the interplay of the two elements. In women of genius
we see the opposite picture. They are commonly distinctly mannish,
and shave as well as shine. Think of George Sand, Catherine
the Great, Elizabeth of England, Rosa Bonheur, Teresa Carreo
or Cosima Wagner. The truth is that neither sex, without some
fertilization by the complementary characters of the other,
is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavour. Man, without
a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and
romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination
to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a bank director.
And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence which
is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections
of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius.
Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are obtained
by a mingling of elements. The wholly manly man lacks the wit
necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams,
and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature
to dream at all.
THE
MASCULINE BAG OF TRICKS
What
men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of
intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering
that mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty
knowledges, that collection of cerebral rubber stamps, which
constitutes the chief mental equipment of the average male.
A man thinks that he is more intelligent than his wife because
he can add up a column of figures more accurately, and because
he understands the imbecile jargon of the stock market, and
because he is able to distinguish between the ideas of rival
politicians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some
sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling
or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are not really
signs of a profound intelligence; they are, in fact, merely
superficial accomplishments, and their acquirement puts little
more strain on the mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in
learning how to catch a penny or scratch a match. The whole
bag of tricks of the average business man, or even of the average
professional man, is inordinately childish. It takes no more
actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling
of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine
and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan
of fish. No observant person, indeed, can come into close contact
with the general run of business and professional men—I
confine myself to those who seem to get on in the world, and
exclude the admitted failures—without marvelling at their
intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their
appalling lack of ordinary sense. The late Charles Francis Adams,
a grandson of one American President and a great-grandson of
another, after a long lifetime in intimate association with
some of the chief business "geniuses" of that paradise
of traders and usurers, the United States, reported in his old
age that he had never heard a single one of them say anything
worth hearing. These were vigorous and masculine men, and in
a man's world they were successful men, but intellectually they
were all blank cartridges.
There
is, indeed, fair ground for arguing that, if men of that kidney
were genuinely intelligent, they would never succeed at their
gross and driveling concerns—that their very capacity
to master and retain such balderdash as constitutes their stock
in trade is proof of their inferior mentality. The notion is
certainly supported by the familiar incompetency of first rate
men for what are called practical concerns. One could not think
of Aristotle or Beethoven multiplying 3,472,701 by 99,999 without
making a mistake, nor could one think of him remembering the
range of this or that railway share for two years, or the number
of ten-penny nails in a hundred weight, or the freight on lard
from Galveston to Rotterdam. And by the same token one could
not imagine him expert at billiards, or at grouse-shooting,
or at golf, or at any other of the idiotic games at which what
are called successful men commonly divert themselves. In his
great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis found that an
incapacity for such petty expertness was visible in almost all
first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They do not understand
the fashionable card games. They are puzzled by book-keeping.
They know nothing of party politics. In brief, they are inert
and impotent in the very fields of endeavour that see the average
men's highest performances, and are easily surpassed by men
who, in actual intelligence, are about as far below them as
the Simidae.
This
lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivial character—which
must inevitably appear to a barber or a dentist as stupidity,
and to a successful haberdasher as downright imbecility—is
a character that men of the first class share with women of
the first, second and even third classes. There is at the bottom
of it, in truth, something unmistakably feminine; its appearance
in a man is almost invariably accompanied by the other touch
of femaleness that I have described. Nothing, indeed, could
be plainer than the fact that women, as a class, are sadly deficient
in the small expertness of men as a class. One seldom, if ever,
hears of them succeeding in the occupations which bring out
such expertness most lavishly—for example, tuning pianos,
repairing clocks, practising law, (i.e., matching petty tricks
with some other lawyer), painting portraits, keeping books,
or managing factories—despite the circumstance that the
great majority of such occupations are well within their physical
powers, and that few of them offer any very formidable social
barriers to female entrance. There is no external reason why
women shouldn't succeed as operative surgeons; the way is wide
open, the rewards are large, and there is a special demand for
them on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many women graduates
in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them
to make a success of it. There is, again, no external reason
why women should not prosper at the bar, or as editors of newspapers,
or as managers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale
trade, or as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way
are of very small force; various adventurous women have defied
them with impunity; once the door is entered there remains no
special handicap within. But, as every one knows, the number
of women actually practising these trades and professions is
very small, and few of them have attained to any distinction
in competition with men.
