being a fourth-rate man himself, is likely to be the last person in the
world to penetrate his master's charlatanry. Who ever heard of valet
who didn't envy his master wholeheartedly? who wouldn't willingly
change places with his master? who didn't secretly wish that he was
his master? A man's wife labours under no such naive folly. She
may envy her husband, true enough, certain of his more soothing
prerogatives and sentimentalities. She may envy him his masculine
liberty of movement and occupation, his impenetrable complacency,
his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the
harsh face of reality behind the cloak of romanticism, his general
innocence and childishness. But she never envies him his puerile
ego; she never envies him his shoddy and preposterous soul.


This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe,
this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at
the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the
name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man
simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable
environment, his touching self delusion. That ironical note is not
only daily apparent in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine
fiction. The woman novelist, if she be skillful enough to arise out of
mere imitation into genuine self-expression, never takes her heroes
quite seriously. From the day of George Sand to the day of Selma
Lagerlof she has always got into her character study a touch of
superior aloofness, of ill-concealed derision. I can't recall a single
masculine figure created by a woman who is not, at bottom, a
booby.