ABSTRACT
The notion that a man was waiting, thirsting for her love, would have been enough for many a woman in Anne’s position – many a woman more gifted than Anne, and more conscious of her gifts, especially if the man who thus tacitly implored her to love and kindle love in him, were, like Hamlin, the former object of passionate worship. But with Anne Brown it was different. Some few women seem to be born to have been men, or at least not to have been women. To them love, if it come, will be an absorbing passion, but a passion only of brief duration, the mere momentary diversion into a personal and individual channel of a force which constitutes the whole moral and intellectual existence, whose object is an unattainable ideal of excellence, and whose field is the whole of the world in which there is injustice, and callousness, and evil. Such women may be very happy if they love a man with their eyes open – love him as a mere secondary concern, as a mere trusty companion in the struggle after the ideal; but if they love in a man what momentarily seems to be that ideal, if they love with all the force of their nature, a terrible reaction of vacuity and despair must soon come. As with their lovers and husbands, so also with their children: they cannot blissfully concentrate all their passion upon them; such love will soon become narrow and bitter for them. They are indeed sent into the world (if any of us is ever sent for any purpose) to be its Joans of Arc 161 – to kindle from their pure passion a fire of enthusiasm as passionate, but purer than it is given to men to kindle: they are not intended to be, except as a utilisation of what is fatally wasted, either wives or mothers. Masculine women, mere men in disguise, they are not: the very strength and purity of their nature, its intensity as of some undiluted spirit, is dependent upon their cleaner and narrower woman’s nature, upon their narrowness and obstinacy of woman’s mind; they are, and can only be, true women; but women without woman’s instincts and wants, sexless – women made not for man but for humankind. Anne Brown was one of these. She had no idea that she was of this strange, rare stuff of heroines; she had no notion that she was at all 208superior to the ordinary run of her sex; indeed it was her perfect ignorance of her own exceptional nature which caused most of her wretchedness, making her at once more impatient with the weakness of others, and more impatient with her own difficulty of being satisfied. Love, therefore, was not for her a happiness, nor an ideal, nor even a compensation. In an intensely earnest nature like hers, a few years are worth a lifetime: everything is understood, endured much sooner; all that can be felt, for pleasure or pain, is rapidly exhausted, and the character remains early, with all its human lusts and vanities burnt out like the gases in green wood, ready to become the fuel for unindividual ideal passion. So at twenty-three, Anne had, so to speak, loved out her love, her passionate adoring love, as she had dreamed out the dreams of her life; anything that might still come would be but a faint momentary flicker of sentiment, a detail in her life, and no more.
