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 close contact with the general run of business and
professional men--I confine myself to those who seem to get on in
the world, and exclude the admitted failures--without marvelling at
their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their
appalling lack of ordinary sense. The late Charles Francis Adams, a
grandson of one American President and a great-grandson of
another, after a long lifetime in intimate association with some of the
chief business
"geniuses" of that paradise of traders and
usurers, the United States, reported in his old age that he had never
heard a single one of them say anything worth hearing. These were
vigorous and masculine men, and in a man's world they were
successful men, but intellectually they were all blank cartridges.
There is, indeed, fair ground for arguing that, if men of that kidney
were genuinely intelligent, they would never succeed at their gross
an driveling concerns--that their very capacity to master and retain
such balderdash as constitutes their stock in trade is proof of their
inferior mentality. The notion is certainly supported by the familiar
incompetency of first rate men for what are called practical
concerns. One could not think of Aristotle or Beethoven
multiplying 3,472,701 by 99,999 without making a mistake, nor
could one think of him remembering the range of this or that railway
share for two years, or the number of ten-penny nails in a hundred
weight, or the freight on lard from Galveston to Rotterdam. And by
the same token one could not imagine him expert at billiards, or at
grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any other of the idiotic games at
which what
are called successful men commonly divert
themselves. In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis
found that an incapacity for such petty expertness was visible in
almost all first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They do
not understand the fashionable card games. They are puzzled by
book-keeping. They know nothing of party politics. In brief, they
are inert and impotent in the very fields of endeavour that see the
average men's highest performances, and are easily surpassed by
men who, in actual intelligence, are about as far below them as the
Simidae.
This lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivial
character--which must inevitably appear to a barber or a dentist as
stupidity, and to a successful haberdasher as downright imbecility--is
a character that men of the first class share with women of the first,
second and even third classes. There is at the bottom of it, in truth,
something unmistakably feminine; its appearance in a man is almost
invariably accompanied by the other touch of femaleness that I have
described. Nothing, indeed, could be plainer than the fact that
women, as a class, are sadly deficient in the small expertness of men
as a class. One seldom, if ever, hears of them succeeding in the
occupations which bring out such expertness most lavishly--for
example, tuning pianos, repairing clocks, practising law, (ie.,
matching petty tricks with some other lawyer), painting portraits,
keeping books, or managing factories--despite the circumstance that
the great majority of such occupations are well within their physical
powers, and that few of them offer any very formidable social
barriers to female entrance. There is no external reason why
women shouldn't succeed as operative surgeons; the way is wide
open, the rewards are large, and there is a special demand for them
on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many women graduates
in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them to make
a success of it. There is, again, no external reason why women
should not prosper at the bar, or as editors of newspapers, or as
managers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale trade, or
as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very small
force; various adventurous women have defied them with impunity;
once the door is entered there remains no special handicap within.
But, as every one
knows, the number of women actually
practising these trades and professions is very small, and few of
them have attained to any distinction in competition with men.