If one runs over in his mind the Madame Tussaud Gallery of masculine
types, he cannot fail to acknowledge that, in our capacity of lords
of creation and viceregents of Providence, we have produced and
perpetuated a number of sorry specimens. First in the list stands the
so-called man of the world, on account of whom in particular, according
to Barbara, the nineteenth-century Joan of Arc looks askance at our
sex. He is an old stager; he dates back very nearly, if not completely,
to the garden of Eden, and he has always been a bugbear to woman.
It is not necessary to describe him; he has ever stood for simply
carnal interests and appetites, whether as a satyr, a voluptuary, a
wine-bibber, a glutton, a miser, an idler, or a mere pleasure-seeker.
If all the human industries which have owed and still owe their
prosperity to his propensities were to be obliterated, there would be
a large array of unemployed in the morning but a healthier world. The
bully, or prevailer by brute force, the snob, the cynic, the parasite,
the trimmer, and the conceited egotist are others prominent in the
category, without regard to criminals and unvarnished offenders against
whose noxious behavior men have protected themselves by positive law.
On the other hand, our gallery of past types has many figures of which
we have a right to be proud. Unfortunately we are barred again from
comparison or answering back by the taunt that woman has never had a
chance; nevertheless we may claim for what it is worth that, in the
realm of intellect or of the spirit, there have been no women who
have soared so high; seers, poets, law-givers, unfolders of nature’s
secrets, administrators of affairs, healers and scholars have been
chiefly or solely men. If some of us have fraternized with Belial,
others have walked, or sought to walk, with God no less genuinely
and fervently than any woman who ever breathed. In the matter of
spirituality, indeed, some of us in the past having been led to
believe that women knew more about the affairs of the other world
than men, sought to cultivate the spindle-legged, thin-chested, pale,
anæmic Christian as the type of humanity most acceptable to God and
serviceable to society; but we have gone back to the bishop of sturdy
frame and a reasonably healthy appetite as a more desirable mediator
between ourselves and heaven.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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