r own
sex: there is no pleasing him. Also he discerns in this unsatisfactory
creature extreme unselfishness, purity, capacity for self-sacrifice. It
seems that the intelligence of man cannot solve the problem of woman,
which is a bad sign in a superior intelligence. The trouble lies in
this: man assumes too readily that woman essentially differs from man.
Hardly a man has lived who did not so exaggerate. Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer, agreed to despise women; Napoleon seemed to view them as
engines of pleasure; for Shakespeare they may well have embodied a
romantic ideal, qualified by sportive wantonness. In Walter Scott, women
appear as romance in a cheap edition; Byron in their regard is a beast
of prey, Doctor Johnson a pompous brute and a puritanical sensualist.
Cervantes mixed in his romantic outlook a sort of suspicious hatred,
while Alexandre Dumas thought them born only to lay laurel wreaths and
orange blossoms (together with coronets) on the heads of musketeers.
All, all--from Thackeray, who never laid his hand upon a woman save in
the way of patronage, to Goethe, to Dante, to Montaigne, to
Wellington--all harbored this curious idea: in one way or another woman
differs from man. And to-day, whether we read Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr.
George Moore, M. Paul Bourget, or Mr. Hall Caine, we find that there
still persists a belief in Byron's lines:--

"What a strange thing is man! And what a stranger
Is woman!"

Almost every man, except the professional Lovelace (and he knows
nothing), believes in the mystery of woman. I do not. For men are also
mysterious to women; women are quite as puzzled by our stupidity as by
our subtlety. I do not believe that there is either a male or a female
mystery; there is only the mystery of mankind. There are to-day
differences between the male and the female intellect; we have to ask
ourselves whether they are absolute or only apparent, or whether they
are absolute but removable by education and time, assuming this to be
desirable. I believe that these differences are superficial, temporary,
traceable to hereditary and local influences. I believe that they will
not endure forever, that they will tend to vanish as environment is
modified, as old suggestions cease to be made.

This leads us to consider present idiosyncrasies in woman as a sex, her
apparently low and apparently high impulses, her exaltations, and, in
the light of her achievements, her future. I do not want to generalize
hast