Ideala | Page 8

distraction in
doing something--anything. But the desire to do good is latent in all of
them; show them the way, and it will make itself apparent."
"But what is the reason of all this dissatisfaction?" I asked. "Why don't
you go to your husbands and brothers to be set right, as of old?"
"Ah! when you ask me that, you get to the first cause of the trouble,"
she answered. "The truth is that we have lost faith in our men. They
claim some superiority for themselves, but we find none. The age
requires people to practise what they preach, and yet expects us to be
guided by the counsels of those whose own lives, we know, have
rendered them contemptible. They are not fit to guide us, and we are
not fit to go alone. I suppose we shall come to an understanding
eventually-- either they must be raised or we must be lowered. It is for
the death of manliness we women mourn. We marry, and find we have
taken upon ourselves misery, and lifelong widowhood of the mind and
moral nature. Do you wonder that some of us ask: Why should we keep
ourselves pure if impurity is to be our bedfellow? You make us breathe
corruption, and wonder that we lose our health."
"But why do you talk of the death of manliness? Men have as much
courage now as they ever had."
"Oh, of course--mere animal courage; there is plenty of that, but that is
nothing. A cat will fight for her kittens. It is moral courage that makes a
man, and where do you find it now? Are men self-denying? Are they
scrupulous to a shadow of the truth? Are they disinterested? How many
gentlemen have you met in the course of your life? I know about half a
dozen."

"What do you call a gentleman, then?" I asked in surprise. "What
makes a man one?"
"Why, truth and affection, of course," she answered; "the one is the
most ennobling, and the other the most refining quality. As a child I
used to think ladies and gentlemen never told stories; it was only the
common people who were dis-honourable, and that was what made
them common. _Hélas_! one lives and learns!"
"I don't think the world is worse than it ever was," I said, drily.
"Not worse, when we know so much better!" she answered with scorn.
"Not worse when we have learnt to see so clearly, and most of us
acknowledge that
It is our will Which thus enchains us to permitted ill!
It is nearly two thousand years since Christianity began its work, and it
is still unaccomplished. Do you know, I sometimes think that all this
talk of virtue, and teaching of religion, is a kind of practical joke,
gravely kept up to find a church parade of respectability for States, a
profession for hundreds, and a means of influencing men by making a
tender point in their nervous system to be touched, as with a rod, when
necessary--a rod that is held over them always in terrorem! We all talk
about morality; but try some measure of reform, and you will find that
every man sees the necessity of it for his neighbour only. Goodness is
happiness, and sin is disease. The truism is as old as the hills, and as
evident; but if men were in earnest, do you suppose they would go on
for ever choosing sin and its ghastly companion as they do? Do you
know, there are moments when I think that even their reverence for the
purity of women is a sham. For why do they keep us pure? Is it not to
make each morsel more delicious for themselves, that sense and
sentiment may be satisfied together, and their own pleasure made more
complete? Individuals may be in earnest, but the great bulk of mankind
is a hypocrite. When the history of this age is written, moral cowardice
and self-indulgence will be found to have been the most striking
characteristics of the people. There is no truth to be found in the inward
parts."

But Ideala did not often adopt this tone, and she would herself check
other people who were preparing to assume it. She had a favourite
quotation, adroitly mangled, to suit such occasions. "When we begin to
inculcate morality as a science, we must discard moralising as a
method," she declared; and she would also beg us to stop the hysteria.
"It is the mortal malady of all well-beloved measures," she said; "and it
spreads to an epidemic if the infected ones are not suppressed at once to
prevent contagion."
But, although she spoke so positively when taken out of herself by the
interest and importance of a subject, she had no very