work both sexes should labour together is disobeyed. In obedience to that law, which Tennyson in this book meant to dwell upon (at least so far as regards the aim of the Princess), the proper and successful conduct of the woman's cause is everywhere contained. Women sometimes deny this, and try to carry out their aims independent of men. I do not wonder that they make the effort, for men have long shut out women from any active share in a great number of their ends, isolating women in home alone. None, indeed, have violated more than men the law which is here laid down. In that has lain the most crying mistake of civilisation. Owing to that disobedience the whole progress of humanity has made only half the way it would otherwise have done. Government, law, religion, literature, art, commerce, science of all kinds, social order and progress, national and international union, are all only developed to half the excellence they would have reached, had women shared in them as co-workers with men. But the more women believe that this is true, the more foolish it would be for them, for the sake of a petty vengeance or a personal pique, to perpetrate, even at one single point, the same folly -to isolate their work from men as men have isolated their work from women in the past. On the contrary-always together, as Nature means. Tennyson saw this up to a certain point, and now and again in this poem seems to infer the whole of it. But he did not really go so far. He seems to keep himself within equality in married life. But his principle goes beyond that sphere. Day by day his limits fade away. It can This, then, was Ida's first mistake-isolation of woman from man. The second was that she thought knowledge alone was enough to lift woman into equality with man, to rescue her from her position as toy or slave. Knowledge, of course, is good; the more knowledge women get the better. It is an absolute necessity. But alone it injures more than assists their cause. It does part of their work; it cannot possibly do all. destroy the opinions which make women dolls to be played with or vassals to be exploited. It can supply them with the tools necessary to carve their way upwards, to take up the works that men assume as only theirs; but it cannot supply the spirit which feels the right way to do these things; it cannot create the imaginative or spiritual powers which illuminate or kindle work; nor can it enable womanhood to guard her own nature from its excesses or defects. By itself, it is weak, save to destroy ignorance or prejudice. And by itself, it has its own prejudices, its own blindness. Worst of all, it has its own vanity, and the vanity of knowledge is the most successful corrupter and overthrower of the noble causes for which mankind has fought and suffered. If this vanity of knowledge should prevail among women (and they are peculiarly liable to it) their cause will break up, the positions they have won will be lost. One of its tendencies, when women think that knowledge is all they need, is to lead them to deny or minimise the radical difference of sex on which Tennyson dwells so much. It is an astonishing piece of folly. Only women could have the audacity to contradict one of the primeval facts of the universe. It is a case where the vanity of know ledge devours knowledge itself. Again, when knowledge, full of its self-admiration, neglects or denies the imagination, the affections, the sentiment of life; when it passes by beauty as of no importance and looks on the ideal faiths of man as folly-there is nothing which is so certain to take the wrong road, and to ruin the cause it boasts that it supports. Any one of the emotional, imaginative, and spiritual powers of nature directs and moves personal and collective human life more than the intellectual power directed to the objects of knowledge. With all their tendency to run into extremes these powers are safer guides than mere knowledge in the affairs of daily life and in the working of great human causes. Each of them-emotional, imaginative, or spiritual-needs knowledge, and to let any one of them act without knowledge is as foolish as to let knowledge act without them. But even when one of them does act alone, it does not do quite as much harm to the progress of humanity as knowledge does, when it isolates itself. in its pride as the only master of action or the only guide of thought. And many women in the present day seem to look with a certain contempt on sentiment, on imagination, on beauty and art, on the affections, on the high passions of the ideal or of the religious life. It is a fatal pride, and a folly for which they will sorely suffer. Women do not want less emotion but larger emotion, nobler and less personal direction of emotion; more of love and not less, more true passion and not less; more sense of beauty and not less; more imagination, more of the energy of faith working by love, more sacrifice of self, that is, more universal, less particular sacrifice. Education in these they want above all, and they want it at present more than men. These, then, were the two great errors into which the Princess fell, and they defeated her And this is the main meaning of Tenny cause. son. The college is broken up first by the love of a man to a maid. Death stands before the Prince, but the danger emboldens him. Over rocks that are steepest What are isolations to that overwhelming conqueror! Love blows his trumpet, and the walls of the college fall down. Secondly, it is broken up by feminine jealousy. Ida neglects Lady Blanche for Psyche, a younger friend, one nearer her heart, and the clashing of these two (owing to the Princess following her affections) disintegrates the college. The sketch of this little in-and-out of feeling is no doubt intended by Tennyson to illustrate a danger which does not indeed belong only to the woman's question. Jealousies and personal claims of the sort made by Lady Blanche, personal affections like that of the Princess which neglect some comrades and favour others, personal feelings of any kind pushed athwart the cause-with their envies, their pettinesses, even their malignancies, their party preferences, their claims for office, their dwelling on small points which men or women make into important things in order to fix attention on them selves these are the worms which eat into the heart of great causes and rot away the finest plans. Women are even more subject to these faults than men—not that men are naturally better, but women have not had that public training which men have in the repression of the personal and all its . stupidities. Thirdly, the march of events breaks up the college. The college has isolated itself from the general work of the world. Whenever a movement does that, it is certain to be walked over and crushed by the general movement. Events come knocking at its doors and the gates break down under the pressure. The representation of this is one of the most skilful things that Tennyson has done in this poem. And it will never do for the leaders of the woman's movement to isolate it. It must take part in affairs other than its own, bring them into itself, fit itself to events and events to it-harmonise itself with all the forward forces round about it. Otherwise it will be dissolved and have to crystallise all over again. It is not only the college which is dissolved. The Princess herself is broken down, and at every point this is done by the recurrence of the natural emotions from which she has tried to free her heart lest they should weaken her will. Nature expelled returns all armed. Ida keeps the child of Psyche with her in the college-that is, she keeps with her an impulse to the motherhood she has abjured. She cannot give up the child to its mother. True sympathy with her own sex would not permit her to be guilty of so great a want of nature; yet, along with this unnatural hardness, |
