Is discontent a privilege?
Yes, it is a privilege for you to suffer for your race?a privilege not reserved to the Redeemer, and the martyrs alone, but one enjoyed by numbers in every age.
The commonplace life of thousands; and in that is its only interest?its only merit as a history; viz., that it is the type of common sufferings?the story of one who has not the courage to resist nor to submit to the civilization of her time?is this.
Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.
Then comes intellect. It wishes to satisfy the wants which intellect creates for it. But there is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilization at which we have arrived. The stimulus, the training, the time, are all three wanting to us; or, in other words, the means and inducements are not there.
Look at the poor lives we lead. It is a wonder that we are so good as we are, not that we are so bad. In looking round we are struck with the power of the organizations1 we see, not with their want of power. Now and then, it is true, we are conscious that there is an inferior organization, but, in general, just the contrary. Mrs A. has the imagination, the poetry of a Murillo,2 and has suffi
1. Beings, organisms. 2. Bartolome Murillo (1617?1682), Spanish painter.
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NIGHTINGALE: CASSANDRA / 159 9
cient power of execution to show that she might have had a great deal more. Why is she not a Murillo? From a material difficulty, not a mental one. If she has a knife and fork in her hands for three hours of the day, she cannot have a pencil or brush. Dinner is the great sacred ceremony of this day, the great sacrament. To be absent from dinner is equivalent to being ill. Nothing else will excuse us from it. Bodily incapacity is the only apology valid. If she has a pen and ink in her hands during other three hours, writing answers for the penny post,3 again, she cannot have her pencil, and so ad infinitum through life. People have no type before them in their lives, neither fathers nor mothers, nor the children themselves. They look at things in detail. They say, 'It is very desirable that A., my daughter, should go to such a party, should know such a lady, should sit by such a person.' It is true. But what standard have they before them of the nature and destination of man? The very words are rejected as pedantic. But might they not, at least, have a type in their minds that such an one might be a discoverer through her intellect, such another
through her art, a third through her moral power?
Women often try one branch of intellect after another in their youth, e.g., mathematics. But that, least of all, is compatible with the life of 'society.' It is impossible to follow up anything systematically. Women often long to enter some man's profession where they would find direction, competition (or rather opportunity of measuring the intellect with others) and, above all, time.
In those wise institutions, mixed as they are with many follies, which will last as long as the human race lasts, because they are adapted to the wants of the human race; those institutions which we call monasteries, and which, embracing much that is contrary to the laws of nature, are yet better adapted to the union of the life of action and that of thought than any other mode of life with which we are acquainted; in many such, four and a half hours, at least, are daily set aside for thought, rules are given for thought, training and opportunity afforded. Among us there is no time appointed for this purpose, and the difficulty is that, in our social life, we must be always doubtful whether we ought not to be with somebody else or be doing something else.
Are men better off than women in this?
If one calls upon a friend in London and sees her son in the drawing room, it strikes one as odd to find a young man sitting idle in his mother's drawing room in the morning. For men, who are seen much in those haunts, there is no end of the epithets we have: 'knights of the carpet,' 'drawing-room heroes,' 'ladies' men.' But suppose we were to see a number of men in the morning sitting round a table in the drawing-room, looking at prints, doing worsted work,4 and reading little books, how we should laugh! A member of the House of Commons was once known to do worsted work. Of another man was said, 'His only fault is that he is too good; he drives out with his mother every day in the carriage, and if he is asked anywhere he answers that he must dine with his mother, but, if she can spare him, he will come in to tea, and he does not come.'
Now, why is it more ridiculous for a man than for a woman to do worsted work and drive out every day in the carriage? Why should we laugh if we were
3. Replying (to social correspondence and invita-tuted in 1840. tions) in letters, which would then be mailed; a 4. Embroidery or other needlework with fine wool- uniform rate of a penny for each letter was insti-len yarn.
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1 582 / THE 'WOMAN QUESTION'
to see a parcel of men sitting round a drawing room table in the morning, and think it all right if they were women? Is man's time more valuable than woman's? or is the difference between man and woman this, that woman has confessedly nothing to do?
Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted, except 'suckling their fools';5 and women themselves have accepted this, have written books to support it, and have trained themselves so as to consider whatever they do as not of such value to the world or to others, but that they can throw it up at the first 'claim of social life.' They have accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their 'duty' to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves.
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Women have no means given them, whereby they can resist the 'claims of social life.' They are taught from their infancy upwards that it is a wrong, ill- tempered, and a misunderstanding of 'woman's mission' (with a great M) if they do not allow themselves willingly to be interrupted at all hours. If a woman has once put in a claim to be treated as a man by some work of science or art or literature, which she can show as the 'fruit of her leisure,' then she will be considered justified in having leisure (hardly, perhaps, even then). But if not, not. If she has nothing to show, she must resign herself to her fate.
'I like riding about this beautiful place, why don't you? I like walking about the garden, why don't you?' is the common expostulation?as if we were children, whose spirits rise during a fortnight's holiday, who think that they
