Vanishing Roads and Other Essays | Page 9

weaker being than
himself? Does other weakness always command his pity? We know
that it does not. No, this "protection" is but a part of an instinctive
reverence, for which he can give no reason, the same kind of reverence
which he has always given to divine beings, to any manifestation or
vessel of the mysteriously sacred something in human life. He respects
and protects woman from the same instinct which makes him shrink
from profaning an altar or robbing a church, or sends him on his knees
before any apparition supposedly divine. Priests and women are often
classed together, but not because the priests are regarded as
effeminately "helpless"; rather because both are recognized as ministers
of sacred mysteries, both belong to the spiritual sphere, and have
commerce with the occult holiness of things. Also be it remarked that
this "protection" is chiefly needed against the brutality and bestiality of

man's own heart, which woman and religion alike rather hold in
subjection by their mysterious influence than have to thank for any
favours of self-control. Man "protects" woman because he first
worships her, because, if she has for him not always the beauty of
holiness, she at least always suggests the holiness of beauty.
Now when has man ever suggested holiness to the most adoring
woman? I do not refer to the professional holiness of saints and
ecclesiastics, but to that sense of hallowed strangeness, of mystic purity,
of spiritual exquisiteness, which breathes from a beautiful woman and
makes the touch of her hand a religious ecstasy, and her very garments
a thrilling mystery. How impossible it is to imagine a woman writing
the Vita Nuova, or a girl feeling toward a boy such feelings of awe and
worship as set the boy Dante a-tremble at his first sight of the girl
Beatrice.
At that moment [he writes], I say most truly that the spirit of life, which
hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble
so violently that the least pulse of my body shook therewith; and in
trembling it said these words: "Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens
dominabitur mihi. (Here is a deity stronger than I, who, coming, shall
rule over me.)"
And, loverlike, he records of "this youngest of the angels" that "her
dress on that day was of a most noble colour, a subdued and goodly
crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very
tender age." Ah! that "little frock," that sacred little frock we first saw
her in! Don't we all know it? And the little handkerchief, scented like
the breath of heaven, we begged as a sacred relic! And--
Long after you are dead I will kiss the shoes of your feet....
Yes! anything she has worn or touched; for, as a modern writer has
said:
Everything a woman wears or touches immediately incarnates
something of herself. A handkerchief, a glove, a flower--with a breath
she endows them with immortal souls.

Waller with his girdle, Donne with "that subtle wreath of hair about his
arm," the mediaeval knight riding at tourney with his lady's sleeve at
his helm, and all relic-worshipping lovers through the ages bear witness
to that divine supernaturalism of woman. To touch the hem of that little
frock, to kiss the mere imprint of those little feet, is to be purified and
exalted. But when did man affect woman in that way? I am tolerably
well read in the poetry of woman's emotions, but I recall no parallel
expressions of feeling. No passionate apostrophes of his golf stockings
come to my mind, nor wistful recollections of the trousers he wore on
that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon. The immaculate collar that
spanned his muscular throat finds no Waller to sing it:
A narrow compass--and yet there Dwelt all that's good, and all that's
fair,
and probably the smartest negligée shirt that ever sported with the
summer winds on a clothes-line has never caused the smallest flutter in
feminine bosoms. The very suggestion is, of course, absurd--whereas
with women, in very deed, it is as with the temple in Keats's lines:
... even as the trees That whisper round a temple become soon Dear as
the temple's self.
Properly understood, therefore, the cult of the skirt-dancer has a
religious significance, and man's preoccupation with petticoats is but
the popular recognition of the divinity of woman. All that she is and
does and wears has a ritualistic character, and she herself commands
our reverence because we feel her to be the vessel of sacred mysteries,
the earthly representative of unearthly powers, with which she enjoys
an intimacy of communication denied to man. It is not a reasonable
feeling, or one to be reasoned about; and that is why we very properly
exempt woman from the necessity