The Representative Women of the Bible

IT AM now entering a new department of the great Bible Gallery. We have considered its representative men; we come to view its representative women. I do not mean its representatives of female holiness, of female heroism, of female distinction. A representative gallery is a gallery which exhibits traits of character which are found in all ages. Its glory is its universality. The mediaeval world has a of female saints. No one would call these a representative band of women. Their pecuharity is that they are not representative. They do not exhibit the entire type of womanhood, but only a section of the type. The representative gallery of womanhood, wherever it is found, must be a series of portraits which reveal her in her abiding varieties. There are saintly women among us as there are saintly men; and these should have their place in any portraiture which professes to be cosmopolitan. But there are aspects of the feminine mind which reveal other chords than these, and which demand recognition from a comprehensive artist. There are abnormal virtues and abnormal vices to be found in every age; but I think the essential quaHties alike of women and of men are to be measured, not by their abnormal deeds either of good or evil, but by those vv’ords and aims and actions which belong to the sphere of the commonplace.

If I were asked to express in a single sentence the difference between ancient and modern life, I should say, “It lies in two tilings — the man abroad and the woman at home.” They are two opposite things. The former is the point on which the eye of the observer chiefly dwells. We are again and again reminded how modern civilization has brought out the man from his own land into other lands. It has increased his power of locomotion — given him the steamboat and the railway. It has increased his power of communication — given him the telegraph and the telephone. It has increased his power of vision — given him a sight of starry worlds to which he was formerly a stranger. It has increased his power of brotherhood — given him a link of sympathy with the tenants of the air and the denizens of the forest. Every later discovery has tended to bring out the man from home life into foreign life — to enlarge his capacity for travel, to widen his boundaries for movement. The path of commerce and the path of science have by different routes led to one common goal — the sending abroad of the man.

But in modern culture there is another and an antithetical side of the picture which is equally clear and equally strong. If the man has been provided with means of locomotion, the woman has been assigned a home of rest. The idea of the universe has widened; but parallel with that widening there has been a process of contraction. A little spot which once was part of the open has been walled in and called “Home,” and there woman has received a kingdom. It is a small sphere, but it is permanent, and it is hers inaHenably. When I survey the galleries of the old Gentile world, the one spot absent to the modern eye is the woman’s empire at home. In India she was and is a prisoner — the zenanas are not places of nile but of enslavement. In Japan she was and remains not the mistress of a house, but a housekeeper — she holds the keys for her husband. In China she was and continues to be subordinate to the masculine powers — the relation of father and son precedes that of mother and daughter. In the palmiest days of old Rome she was still but a possession of the man — a source of his wealth, an article of his furniture. In Greece she rose sometimes to distinction, but it was not as the mistress of the house; it was as the favoured courtesan. What we miss in these galleries is a throne for woman in the sphere of the commonplace. She is either distinguished or servile; where she is distinguished she is above the sphere of motherhood, where she is servile she is below the range of ordinary humanity. What we seek for her, and in the old Gentile galleries seek in vain, is an empire at home — the wielding of a sceptre over that family life whose nurture is the making of nations and whose nursery is the training of kings.

But amid the galleries of the ancient world there is one whose female portraits are unique; it is that of the Bible. As I look into this Judaic Gallery that which arrests me most is the beginning of it and the end of it. At its opening and at its close the hand of the artist has been strikingly at work, and in each case on a female portraiture. The hall of entrance and the hall of exit are each occupied by a picture of Woman. The pictures are different in execution and unUke in their expression; but in each the idea is the same — the enfranchisement of the feminine soul. Let us look at them one by one.

Let us begin with the entrance portrait. It strikes a new note in eastern lands. It is a hymn of female conquest expressed in colours. Out from the canvas there starts an unprecedented figure — a woman triumphant over the forms of nature. She is seen struggling for the possession of a garden. Her antagonist is the serpent — a symbol of those powers of craft and diplomacy which hitherto in the artist’s experience have been the rulers of the world. Long and fierce is the conflict; and the woman does not emerge unwoundcd. But she emerges victorious.

We see her foot on the head of the serpent — a unique sight for the primitive world to behold. We see in vision the conquest of craft by simplicity, the defeat of subtlety by artlessness, the subjugation of diplomatic power by the intensity of the heart. Woman is recognized as the prospective possessor of the garden of life — the future mistress of the home. It matters not that it is still in the future. What we want to see is not a nation’s achievement but a nation’s ideal; we judge it not by its fruits, but by its aspirings. It would be of no avail for the critic to prove that in the actual history of Judaism the glory of womanhood was never attained. What we are in search of is not an attainment but an ideal. The triumph of the Bible is its conception. Its merit is that at a time when woman was a slave it painted a gallery in which she was free. It lifted the minds of men above their surroundings by the picture of a golden past upon whose threshold womanhood sat enthroned, claiming her legitimate empire amid the forces of the world, and receiving the promise that her battle should be won.

Let us pass to the other end of the Gallery — the completing end. The intermediate parts do not reveal the representadve woman. She appears only in the morning and in the evening of the Bible story — at the entrance and at the terminus of the Great Gallery. The women of the middle stage rarely rise to a height. The court of David, the haunts of Absalom, the palaces of Solomon, the pleasure-grounds of Ahab, reveal women attractive to the eye and charming to the ear; but the attractiveness is that of an hour’s pastime, and the charm is that of a child’s toy. In this intermediate period she has increased her gaudy trappings; but they have become the trappings of a slave. We will not tarry here. We will pass by those scenes in which Israel rises not above her eastern neighbours. We feel that in her middle stage she has fallen beneath her morning and behind the glory of her opening day. But when we come to the evening, she redeems herself. As we pass to the terminus of her gallery we are confronted by a portraiture of Woman which gives back the freshness of the dawn. In the streets of that Roman lo INTRODUCTION

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