However this may be, Balzac’s train of thought does not apply to England. His reflection would not have occurred to an English novelist, or, if it had, it would have been thrown off easily as an obvious, not particularly pregnant, fact, without the wealth of suggestion in the antithesis of “female” and “woman” which is implied in Balzac’s sentence. The Englishman would be more apt to give the reflection another turn, to say: “Nature made woman and woman makes society,” leaving sharp the opposition between nature and society but blurring that between the natural and the social woman, with the idea that the two are too closely interwoven to be usefully disconnected. And that is the English point of view. Woman in England has never been a mystery, an intricate engine with simple aims and complicated methods, of a different order from man with his complex aims and simpler methods. The texture of English life is, and has always been, compounded of both as the warp and the woof—the more active man passing rapidly between the more stable feminine strands which keep his thread in place. Though this interconnection has become more obvious latterly with the complete disappearance of feudal and patriarchal traditions, earlier literature bears abundant witness to it. The Canterbury Tales are significant enough in this respect. In spite of occasional romanticism in the tales themselves, we have no hedged divinities in the band of pilgrims: the nun, the prioress and the wife of Bath all take their places naturally in the cavalcade, and the poet insists as little on the special claims of their femininity as he pays deference to their modesty. And where is the mystery in Viola, Sylvia, Beatrice or Rosalind? They are palpably of the same stuff as their lovers, and only distinguished by greater sanity from their fools. If there be any point in mystery, it is men, with weird compounds of good and evil in their souls, who were Shakespeare’s mysteries. But, so far as social relations are concerned in Shakespeare, as in England generally, men and women are part of the same homespun which covers all the issues of life in this country. I see no reason to doubt that it will continue to do so: even the apparently strong antagonisms of recent years, when loud exclamations were heard against a “man-made” world, made little difference to the even textile process of ordinary social life, and now, since the political enfranchisement of women, are but very feeble ghosts.