Thus it seems from the “Life and Letters” of Sydney Dobell, the English poet, that he was opposed both to woman suffrage and woman authorship, believing the movement for the former to be a “blundering on to the perdition of womanhood.”  It appears that against all authorship by women his convictions yearly grew stronger, he regarding it as “an error and an anomaly.”  It seems quite in accordance with my friend’s theory to hear, after this, that Sydney Dobell was slight in person and a lifelong invalid; nor is it surprising, on the same theory, that his poetry took no deep root, and that it will not be likely to survive long, except perhaps in his weird ballad of “Ravelston.”  But he represents a large class of masculine intellects, of secondary and mediocre quality, whose opinions on this subject are not so much opinions as instinctive prejudices against a competitor who may turn out their superior.  Whether they know it, or not, their aversion to the authorship of women is very much like the conviction of a weak pedestrian, that women are not naturally fitted to take long walks; or the opinion of a man whose own accounts are in a muddle, that his wife is constitutionally unfitted to understand business.

It is a pity to praise either sex at the expense of the other.  The social inequality of the sexes was not produced so much by the voluntary tyranny of man, as by his great practical advantage at the outset; human history necessarily beginning with a period when physical strength was sole ruler.  It is unnecessary, too, to consider in how many cases women may have justified this distrust; and may have made themselves as obnoxious as Horace Walpole’s maids of honor, whose coachman left his savings to his son on condition that he should never marry a maid of honor.  But it is safe to say that on the whole the feeling of contempt for women, and the love to exercise arbitrary power over them, is the survival of a crude impulse which the world is outgrowing, and which is in general least obvious in the manliest men.  That clear and able English writer, Walter Bagehot, well describes “the contempt for physical weakness and for women which marks early society.  The non-combatant population is sure to fare ill during the ages of combat.  But these defects, too, are cured or lessened; women have now marvellous means of winning their way in the world; and mind without muscle has far greater force than muscle without mind.” [1]

[Footnote 1:  Physics and Politics, p. 79.]

THE NOBLE SEX

A highly educated American woman of my acquaintance once employed a French tutor in Paris to assist her in teaching Latin to her little grandson.  The Frenchman brought with him a Latin grammar, written in his own language, with which my friend was quite pleased, until she came to a passage relating to the masculine gender in nouns, and claiming grammatical precedence for it on the ground that the male sex is the noble sex,—­“le sexe noble.”  “Upon that,” she said, “I burst forth in indignation, and the poor teacher soon retired.  But I do not believe,” she added, “that the Frenchman has the slightest conception, up to this moment, of what I could find in that phrase to displease me.”