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II

MY LADY

All things uncomely and broken, all
things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway,
the creak of a lumbering cart,

The heavy steps of the ploughman
splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong
too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew, and sit
on a green knoll apart.
With the earth and the sky and the water
re-made, like a casket of gold,
For my dreams of your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.

These beautiful verses by Mr. Yeats are the song of the new spirit hymning the mistress of the world. The old chivalry couched a lance against dragons that would devour us, and sang our beauty in unmeasured ecstasy. In some legends it proved its gallantry by kissing an ugly hag, and forthwith she turned into a lovely princess. When we were locked in grim dungeons, chivalry assailed the stronghold and delivered us, especially if we were handsome and of royal blood.

The new chivalry is dressed in working-clothes, and the dragons it must face are poverty, squalor, industrial slavery. The distressed damsel in the moonlit tower has become the girl in the street, the woman prisoned in a dirty kitchen, the wage-earner in the factory. Our champion need not fare forth into far countries to do wonders and attest his prowess. The enemy is here, everywhere -- "all things uncomely and broken."

Woman-worship, the central motive of song and legend these many centuries, has been too much inspired by the will to possess and too little by the will to serve. The modern knight sans peur et sans reproche must learn that virtues ascribed to his lady to make her a more precious object of desire have not proved good working substitutes for some plainer virtues which he denies her after he has won his suit. It is but niggardly largess to bestow upon her so much education as will make her a witty, pleasant companion and then refuse her access to the wider knowledge of which man is the jealous custodian. We confess our incapacities. We are inconsistent and timid. We hand down from mother to daughter ideals of ourselves which are not in keeping with our experience. We amuse our brothers by irreconcilable and conflicting assertions. Every day of our lives we justify that superior masculine smile which says, "Just like a woman!" We especially justify it by accepting the legendary ideal of us which he has made for his gratification. This ideal has tender and beautiful aspects. But it is full of contradictions and absurdities. It is, on the whole, an obstacle to justice, intervening darkly between the facts of life and a clear, honest vision.

Men assure us that woman is an angel, but has not sense enough to share in the management of common earthly affairs. The standard of good sense which man has in mind is not an absolute standard beyond the reach of human attainment, but the ordinary standard of masculine achievement. Man ascribes to woman a mysterious short-cut method of mind known as "intuition," a cerebral power which guides all her activities from sewing on a button to discharging statesman's duties as Queen of England. Perception, tact, sympathy, nervous rapidity of thought are her age-long attributes. But -- she would abuse the ballot. Her judgment is childish, she lacks discrimination and balance. She is frugal, a sharp bargainer in the retail market, a capable partner in a little shop; but she is unable to figure the economy of spending a hundred and fifty millions for battleships. She excels in organizing and conducting philanthropic work; but it would be disastrous to allow her an equal voice in determining how much public money should be spent in charitable undertakings.

I was once a member of the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. We had forty thousand dollars of public money to spend. The work was so new and experimental that the Legislature and other officers of government could not know whether we were using the money wisely or not. There were three men on the commission and one other woman. She and I were in a safe minority, but our voice counted in every expenditure. The money was appropriated by a legislature of men as the result of an investigation and appeal made largely by women. Now note the contradiction. Women were allowed to have authority in spending State money. But no woman had had direct voice in deciding whether or not the money should be appropriated at all. The money was collected from tax-payers, many of whom were women, and it was created in part by the labour of women wage-earners. Once in the hands of the State, it was beyond the control of woman's fine, feminine intuition, of her perception, her tact, her other adorable qualities. If a woman, unaided and triumphantly irrational, should devise a situation as contradictory as that, the magnificent male would smile in condescension and say: "There you are! You see, women are utterly inconsistent."