In Defense of Women | Page 7

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 aman 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 down right 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.

3.
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 intakes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. No observant person,
indeed, can come into