Nobody could fail to be impressed by the physical beauty of young Englishwomen. It is confined to no class, though better preserved in the more leisurely. The ball-room and the village green compete easily with any exhibition of it on the stage. The question now to be presented is whether an honest observer, presuming him competent to observe, would be equally impressed with the mental qualities of our women. The answer, I think, would be extremely doubtful. Our young beauties, in any case, proudly conscious of their triumph in the physical test, would be indifferent to the outcome of the intellectual, if they could even conceive that anyone would be foolish enough to apply it. A quick brain is not in England regarded as an enviable possession, which proves it not to be a national one. In his penetrating first chapter to “Diana of the Crossways” George Meredith pointed out that "English men and women feel toward the quick-witted of their species as to aliens—having the demerits of aliens—wordiness, vanity, shallowness, an empty glitter, the sin of posturing." He might have added that, so far as women are concerned, quick wits were only excused by absence of physical attraction, though he implied this addition in his picture of Diana Warwick in her conflict with public opinion. George du Maurier contrasted with evident approbation the beauty of young Vere-de-Veredom with the consoling hideousness of the three clever Miss Bilderbogies, translating thus into art a thoroughly English point of view. One can respect this point of view without adopting it: the British instinct for safety is illustrated by it. Englishmen may well be suspicious, and Englishwomen jealous, of the combination of beauty and brains: it is too overwhelmingly powerful and likely to be disturbing to the peace.

The combination occurs, perhaps, more frequently than is commonly supposed, but it is such a grave departure from the respected tradition that we hasten to forget each instance as quickly as possible, to prevent any danger of a cumulative impression. Yet it is in no spirit of pandering to the tradition that the Englishwoman’s mind appears in this chapter unadorned or unexplained by her appearance: it is simply a matter of convenience. The mind of woman is not legitimately considered by itself, for the whole, the representative woman is not purely a function of her mind. Nevertheless, the Englishwoman’s mind, if not essential to the Englishwoman, exists, and it is growing. It would be unchivalrous to pass it by without observation. In George Meredith’s day it was hardly resolved that a woman might have a mind at all: this in itself is a measure of the later growth, for on this head, at least, there is now no doubt. The creator of Diana Warwick represented the Saxon man firmly treading with his heel on any feminine mental sparks which might set on fire the chips of his crumbling social structure. His faith in the sex’s capacity for growth has been justified to-day, when it would be absurd to represent women as anything but emancipated. Meredith’s view of the men as “pointed talkers” and the women as “conversationally fair Circassians” is no longer true. The women of England have made some progress on the upward route which he hoped that they would take.

At the same time, it will not do to contemplate our ladies as at the end of their journey instead of very much on the road. Exceptional women there have always been in this country, but the average woman still has an average mind, as the exceptional women, who are the severest critics of their sisters, will be the first to assert. They are the leaders through the jungle, forced ever to look back in impatience at the leisurely crowd following in the rear, calmly accepting the removal of the obstacles with which they have not to struggle, and far from guessing the need of the mental hatchet which had so happily cleared them away. It is probably true in all countries, but certainly in ours, that the necessity of cultivating a mind, even the latent possibility of doing so, is not apparent to the majority of women. It is made so easy for them to do without this troublesome acquisition. They are taught at school just sufficient for them to fill their probable station, which they do with docility and without ambition. Neither in their work nor their play have they any sense of a void aching to be filled up. Indeed what void could there be—unless it were pecuniary—when there is golf and tennis, bridge, fox trotting and hesitating, cinema gazing, novel-reading, playgoing to musical comedies and revues, or, in the most domestic regions, sewing and the rearing of children to keep them happily in the conviction that life is full enough without the added burdens of thought and knowledge? Men call them clever if they dress becomingly or if they can shuffle a room-full of guests adroitly, throwing conversational shuttlecocks up in the air for others to sweat in pursuit of: and to them cleverness appears a minor virtue, seeing the little enthusiasm with which their admirers regard it compared with their ecstasy over other more obviously feminine felicities. Or, on a lower scale, what time have they for any adornment of the mind, when the weekly toil of tending children and cooking for husbands, or the long days of drudgery at the factory, so fatigue the body and soul, that the mere bodily adornment of Sunday is almost too strenuous a reaction, when simple pleasures of the senses or even simple repose are the only appropriate drugs for their overstrained systems? Women with minds have still much work to do in order to give those who have none the leisure to look for them. The result is that women lag behind, with an unfortunate effect upon our national appearance. If ever the women overtake the men, much that is shoddy will disappear from the mental shopwindow? of this country.

So much may be said, I think, by a man without incurring the accusation of ordinary masculine prejudice. It is less than what is said and felt by the pioneers among women. That the world, even in England, is still arranged by men mainly for masculine convenience may be true, and will remain so as long as women allow most of their thinking to be done for them, as Miss Ethel Smyth, in her remarkable memoirs, holds that they do. Yet the enlightened man, though he may prefer that change should take place slower than the most ardent wish, may look forward with hope to the time when his convenience may less preponderate and feminine reverberations will cease to attend his thinking, then fulfilling the prophecy of the Lady Psyche in Tennyson’s “Princess”:

In the contemplation of this hope what he now sees before him in his womankind as a whole is an intellectual plant of idle and promiscuous growth, capable, as its rarer shoots prove, of the sturdiest and most luxuriant upward ranging, but content for the most part to twine itself, like the convolvulus, round the first support offered to its tendrils, a house, a domestic affection, the crumbling tower of antiquated beliefs, the hazily pointing sign-post of a dubious philosophy or the hardier neighbouring weeds which are rooted in passions and desires. From these more handy and material supports it will not tear itself away to grow towards the sun with lithe, independent shoots disdainfully forcing their way past all encumbrances. The rarer instances where from choicer ground and more livening influences this species pushes a vigorous head into the skies serve only to accentuate the lazy lowliness of the general stock. It seems to shrink from the light of ideas, or, where the attraction of the light is too imperious to be resisted, it lifts a shoot gingerly upwards only to curl a tendril lovingly round the first comfortable fact met with in the short upward progress, and to adhere to it gracefully, quite satisfied with the result of its exertion. Or let us vary the illustration. Men, in their intellectual journey, can contemplate with satisfaction at the first glance some vast mansion of knowledge rising up before them from its solid foundations to all the infinite variety of its higher tracery. That they cannot grasp the whole does not trouble them, for they quickly see the stages by which the ascent to greater knowledge will be attained. They are inspired not bewildered by the lofty prospect, resigning themselves happily to a study of the bare plan that will enable them to explore the beauties of the mansion intelligently and in order. The woman, on the other hand, is appalled by such an approach: the mansion swims before her eyes, the plan seems a confusing maze of meaningless lines. Her introduction must proceed on a different method. She must be led in by a side door through some pleasant alley into one of the rooms of the mansion, all comfortably furnished with easy chairs and pictures on the walls. Here, if she is allowed to linger without being too hastily pushed on by the official guide, her curiosity will be aroused. The assimilation of one room will prompt her to a timid sally into the next one, and so by good luck, if she is never frightened, she may in time be as much at home as any other explorer. Yet even then it is questionable whether she will ever venture out into the main court to gain a comprehensive view of the whole and of its relation to the surrounding architecture. Her domestic instinct tells her that she is more at home indoors, attending to the things which she can touch and see. So she is content to inhabit an appartement in the palace of truth, as an invalid pensioner might inhabit a set of rooms in Hampton Court Palace without ever drinking in the beauty of the whole building. It is only her mind which so flinches at magnificences and is afflicted with vertigo on eminences; her heart will take a Mount Everest of difficulties in its stride as if it were Primrose Hill, and her emotions will carry her on wings into the clouds without tremors, though she fall in the end as far and fast as Lucifer. Only when her intellectual dizziness is conquered shall we find her frequently, clear-headed and exultant, on the topmost pinnacles of truth, whence she can look down on her more elderly sisters placidly knitting in the verandah, while the children are playing hide-and-seek upon the stairs.

The less adventurous spirit of woman in purely mental enterprise is shown in the besetting sin of our girl students, the tendency to regard learning as nothing but the accumulation of facts. Women are the most assiduous crammers: they will work long and desperately to “get up” texts and facts, they will industriously follow a teacher, memorising his every word and slavishly following his precepts. Since they are less lazy than men, mere disgust with drudgery does not tempt them off the track laid out for them and, in their determination to gain the end in view, which is usually a concrete one, they plod on and on, neither looking to the right nor the left, neither lingering nor venturing up attractive by-ways, lest they should lose the track, or miss the prescribed turning on the main road. Men try short cuts, often with disastrous consequences, but the tendency in itself has its advantages. It trains the mental eye for the lie of the country, so that the most desultory of male wanderers, though his wanderings do not lead him very far, may yet acquire some broad impression of the whole landscape, which is more stimulating to the imagination than a walk between hedges faithfully performed. But, if a man be tempted to scoff at this greater docility and timidity of his female companions, let him reflect that it is very largely due to the fault of his own kind, a fault which Englishwomen are now bent on clearing away. For centuries a world made for the convenience of men kept women in leading strings which are now being cut, though their habit will take long to eradicate. In their early years, whatever their ultimate aim, men are put out on the pastures of knowledge like young colts. In their case who questions the wisdom of sending them to a university? It is assumed that a general mental training will be of benefit to them in any profession. Not so with a woman: unless teaching is to be her aim she will find the training of a university hard to come by, because it has not become established that a general mental training of the best kind is as needful for a woman as for a man, and that it is as beneficial to the community that she should have it. A generation or two of equal opportunity will work wonders in the comparative aptitudes of the sexes.

Women may well exclaim at the little use men have made of their greater opportunities: boldness in mental adventure is not a salient virtue of our men. Still, even in England, the cloud of scouts which precedes the plodding main army is composed chiefly of men. Women have yet to prove their equal ability for this service. They have got to improve themselves in map-reading if they are to enter these ranks, and maps are only instances of those bogies to most women, abstractions. They take her beyond the immediate range of vision, beyond the hills on the horizon about which she feels instinctively that she has no right to let her imagination play unless the further prospect is displayed before her physical eye, and she is, therefore, apt to pull a man up short when he is measuring the distant ground beyond his view and to bring him back to the church tower in the foreground, if not to the village pump. For this reason general discussion with English women is so often fruitless: they cannot get away from the concrete and, intensely interested as they are in the thing immediately to be done, they feel at sea in the elaboration of general principle from which immediate action could be best taken or criticised. So often, too, a man is brought up short by finding that a woman is winding all his ideas, which have no immediate attachments to anything within view, round some visible peg in the vicinity, or is mentally striving to find the visible peg which she is sure is really the point of attachment. The worst is when she imagines the peg, quite wrongly, to be stuck into her own amour propre: all argument is then futile, for the two are hopelessly at cross purposes. When a man is trying to set out a general point of view and a woman is asking herself meanwhile: “why is he saying this now and to me?” the chance of mutual comprehension is slight.

It is this same passionate attachment to the concrete, where ideas are concerned, which makes women poor critics, though they are keen observers. If there is one application of the intellect where a comprehensive outlook is necessary, it is criticism. The individual judging and the individual thing judged are in themselves such infinitesimal portions of the whole of reality, that the one cannot seize the other unless they become magnified in the imagination so as to display the infinite connection of relations which is the condition of them both. In woman the personal element so enormously preponderates, both in her appreciations and her dislikes, that her critical judgment usually shoots out into the world through a distorted lens only partially illuminating the objects on which it is bent. Nevertheless, it may be a sad day for men if this feminine lens is rectified. The very distortion is one that serves his comfort, since it focusses so much light upon him and his home. I would not personally exchange the eye of the English wife and the English mother which sheds so warm and loving a beam upon the home for any more searching ray which illuminated a whole distant world and left a home in comparative darkness. It is hopelessly foolish idealism to wish for the combination of every virtue in one atom of humanity: we English with our excellent habit of compromise do not habitually act as if such a thing were possible. Yet there are certain idealists in this country who, in their anxiety to secure equality of opportunity for women, seem to assume that progress can be made without profound changes in the thing progressing, and as though by taking thought women could attain to all that men have got without losing some of their own peculiar and valuable possessions. Unfortunately it is not so. Men and women will never be practically interchangeable beings, and, perhaps, the limit of desirable progress would be that any individual should have the chance of deciding what admixture of the male and female qualities and possessions will suit him or her best. Freedom of choice is after all the great essential of liberty: the use of this liberty can only be well guided by what is greater than liberty, wisdom.

This chapter, I fear, has rather belied its title. We must hark back to the Englishwoman. Let me make her amends by asserting that if she pleases she may have as fine a mind as any woman breathing. She has a naturally quick intelligence, if she be careful not to let its keenness rust; she has been dowered with common sense and power of imagination in inverse proportions; in practical matters she has a sure glance for the best course to be taken, but her vision is hazy where principles are concerned. Her critical standards are usually as conventional as her standards of conduct, but she can be strikingly original in action and will stand up nobly for her convictions. Where she attains to a measure of intellectual superiority, except at the highest levels, she is apt to lose her balance, becoming either priggish and cold or luxuriously vague and mystical. The blue stocking is not typical, but she is English and she still exists. There was an awful Miss Benger who invited Charles Lamb and his sister to tea, macaroons and intellectual conversation, as Charles pathetically describes her in his letter to Coleridge:

“From thence she passed into the subject of poetry; where I, who had hitherto sat mute, and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a round assertion that no good poetry had appeared since Dr. Johnson’s time.... I here ventured to question the fact, and was beginning to appeal to names, but I was assured ‘it certainly was the case’.”

She has her counterpart to-day. She lays down the law, with a steely glance through her pince-nez, scattering words like “fundamental” with the self-satisfied air of one distributing sugar-plums to not very deserving children. She will stultify the very best of critics by quoting his most foolish passages as oracles, and contrive, where she admires the right things, to do so for the wrong reasons. The hazy dabbler is quite as bad, and quite as irritating. She vibrates like Memnon’s harp to any breath from higher planes, and mistakes the sympathetic vibrations of her empty head for the sounding of some organ note of the infinite. Like the shallowest pond she may sometimes produce the illusion of reflecting the profundity of the heavens, till a closer examination reveals the mud and the tin kettles such a very little way below the surface. The good Englishwoman is neither of these: she has either too great a simplicity or too well developed a sense of humour, for she hates pretence and is not slow to perceive it in others. So distrustful is she of artifice that she seldom shines in the fine rapier-play of witty conversation: her interchange of ideas may be compared rather to the game of lawn tennis, with plenty of movement and hard-hitting in it, most balls being returned from the base line with a well-timed drive, not snappily volleyed at the net. She is most attractive when a flush of emotion colours her thinking, showing thus as an effective foil to her mankind who think unemotionally or wear the mask of indifference to conceal their sensitiveness. She understands this shyness in Englishmen and overcomes it so delicately by her sympathy that they glow in her society as the Dolomite peaks in the sunset. She does this, if she takes any trouble at all, with a natural simplicity, not with the elaborate study that Balzac’s Princesse de Cadignan exercised to fascinate her D’Arthez.

The worst of it is that so many Englishwomen neglect their natural advantages. They forget their minds in thinking of their bodies, their souls, their duties or their amusements. They are apt, like slatterns, to trot about the material world in intellectual dressing gowns with their ideas in curl papers. This is delightful enough for friendly intimacy, but is calculated to produce a less charming impression in the wider world. But there is hope in the future. The Englishwoman is beginning to study herself more intently in the looking-glass. The result will be what we should expect of an Englishwoman’s turn-out, quiet and workmanlike, neither fussy nor flimsy, but with an unmistakable cut and a richness rather of material than of ornament. But she must submit herself to good tailors who understand her figure, paying them a good price. No cheap intellectual garment off the peg will do justice to the natural graciousness of her lines which, for all their conservatism, Englishmen truly appreciate; and, for all their grumbles, they will not at heart grudge any trouble or expense in enhancing its effect.