Perhaps the nearest verbal analysis of the instinct may be found in the gestures of the orator addressing a crowd.  For the true orator must always be a demagogue:  even if the mob be a small mob, like the French committee or the English House of Lords.  And “demagogue,” in the good Greek meaning, does not mean one who pleases the populace, but one who leads it:  and if you will notice, you will see that all the instinctive gestures of oratory are gestures of military leadership; pointing the people to a path or waving them on to an advance.  Notice that long sweep of the arm across the body and outward, which great orators use naturally and cheap orators artificially.  It is almost the exact gesture of the drawing of a sword.

The point is not that women are unworthy of votes; it is not even that votes are unworthy of women.  It is that votes are unworthy of men, so long as they are merely votes; and have nothing in them of this ancient militarism of democracy.  The only crowd worth talking to is the crowd that is ready to go somewhere and do something; the only demagogue worth hearing is he who can point at something to be done:  and, if he points with a sword, will only feel it familiar and useful like an elongated finger.  Now, except in some mystical exceptions which prove the rule, these are not the gestures, and therefore not the instincts, of women.  No honest man dislikes the public woman.  He can only dislike the political woman; an entirely different thing.  The instinct has nothing to do with any desire to keep women curtained or captive:  if such a desire exists.  A husband would be pleased if his wife wore a gold crown and proclaimed laws from a throne of marble; or if she uttered oracles from the tripod of a priestess; or if she could walk in mystical motherhood before the procession of some great religious order.  But that she should stand on a platform in the exact altitude in which he stands; leaning forward a little more than is graceful and holding her mouth open a little longer and wider than is dignified—­well, I only write here of the facts of natural history; and the fact is that it is this, and not publicity or importance, that hurts.  It is for the modern world to judge whether such instincts are indeed danger signals; and whether the hurting of moral as of material nerves is a tocsin and a warning of nature.

THE POET AND THE CHEESE

There is something creepy in the flat Eastern Counties; a brush of the white feather.  There is a stillness, which is rather of the mind than of the bodily senses.  Rapid changes and sudden revelations of scenery, even when they are soundless, have something in them analogous to a movement of music, to a crash or a cry.  Mountain hamlets spring out on us with a shout like mountain brigands.  Comfortable valleys accept us with open arms and warm words, like comfortable innkeepers.  But travelling in the great level lands has a curiously still and lonely quality; lonely even when there are plenty of people on the road and in the market-place.  One’s voice seems to break an almost elvish silence, and something unreasonably weird in the phrase of the nursery tales, “And he went a little farther and came to another place,” comes back into the mind.