Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/320

our ideal of life and promised it a future. We could not tolerate any discrepancy with the allurement of this mystery. Our own sexual distinction enhanced it to the pitch of astonishment and reverence. We could not bear to see her clothed and adorned in a way to jar the taste which she first woke in us. We cannot bear it now. No pretext of convenience in locomotion, whether by horseback, rail, steamer, velocipede, or mangle, can rub out of our preference the lines which trace the reserve that protects our youthful dream. And how can this being, only half suggested yet clearly not ourselves, put a scrawl of crudity in place of those fluent curves that describe something less angular than we are? The gestures of her mind, when they are publicly displayed to throw a glove into the mob of us from the edge of a platform, must always indorse our preconception. Any thing harsh, some acidity of tone, sentences that stride or bandy with arms akimbo, will pique the unconverted world into taking up her glove to crush and not to kiss. So we cannot bear to see a woman pushed forward into premature expression which the gift will not confirm. A man's stupidity does not inflict so great a hurt on our imagination. Distance doth breed divinity; and we shrink to find a woman capable of dulness, and yet able to show it. All this may be conceded to be a natural instinct which men will not abandon. But its root is in regard for woman; so that men should be the first to sound a trumpet before the lists to champion her genius, whatever it may be, and to see that fair play is enforced in the tournament. Shall the gifted woman enter the