Eve the Unfolded

IT HAVE elsewhere expressed my belief that the second chapter of Genesis is a picture not of the creating, but of the unfolding, of Woman. From an artistic and literary point of view it is a most striking picture. The primitive man is represented as feeling himself alone. He is surrounded by fruits and flowers, he is encompassed by sights of beauty, he is greeted by the glories of morning and evening, he is regaled by the song of the bird and lulled by the music of the river; yet he feels himself alone. The burden of his solitude induces sleep. We see him lying in a garden — overwhelmed in the slumber, not of hard work, but of inanity — somnolent for want of a common interest. Nothing around has had any message for him. The trees have whispered — but not to him. The rivers have murmured — but not to him. The bird has sung

—but not to him. There has been contact everywhere; but nowhere has there been communion. The impression given by the world has been that of a vast desert where the spirit of man dwells alone; and, through the sheer fatigue of vacuity, Adam sleeps.

But that sleep is his awaking. It is to bring him for the first time that sense which as yet was dormant — the sense of fellowship. There comes to him a dream-consciousness. He sees a mysterious presence stealing through the trees of the garden. It approaches him nearer and nearer. It lays its hand upon him. It extracts something from his side, it is a rib of his own body. And as the dreamer gazes at this fragment of himself, the wonder deepens. For the insignificant rib begins to expand, to grow, to develop. Its original form disappears. It puts on flesh and blood; it is rounded into human proportions; at last its transformations culminate in a form of exceeding beauty. Then the voice of the mystic presence says to Adam, “You have been seeking for some one to break your solitude; see what I have prepared for you; here is a life which will be to you what the flowers of the garden cannot be — a helpmeet, a companion, an equal!” And as the new form moves forward to meet him Adam is startled. He makes a discovery. Who is this that he has found in the visions of the night! Has he ever seen the image before! Yes. Is not this the very woman who was created along with him and whom he had always looked upon as inferior to himself, as little less below himaelf than the birds and beasts of Eden! In his complainings of solitude had he after all been overlooking something — the best flower of the garden! Had he not been passing by as worthless a life which would have suppHed all his need and given him the solace of a kindred soul! And Adam cried, ‘’This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” The emphatic word is ‘’now.” It implies a previous inferiority — the recognition of a glory which he had not seen before, which he had underrated, which he had passed on the way as an idle and a useless thing.

The truth is, I regard this second chapter of Genesis as an attempt to paint not the making but the marriage of Woman. It is an effort to delineate the day not of her birth, but of her emergence — the day when there dawned upon the consciousness of man the sense that to him she was something more than a chattel, something more than a drudge, something more even than a plaything. Eve from the outset stands before us as the representative of Woman’s unfolding. Other portraits represent other phases of the feminine nature; but Eve has this function all to herself. She stands permanently as the type of female development — that development which can be observed in the social life of every age and whose analogy of process annuls the gulf of time between the girl of England and the girl of Eden. I wish to look at this process of development as exhibited in the portrait of Eve, and I wish to look at it from the standpoint of the gallery alone. I shall leave theological questions to the theologian. For us the sole problem is, What is the artistic and literary significance of the portrait of Eve, and how does it conform to the experience of future ages?

It seems to me that there are three periods indicated in the development of this primitive

EVE TlEtE UNFOLDED 31

woman — a period of innocence or unconsciousness, a period of conscious expansion, and a period of conscious or voluntary self- repression. I believe this in one form or other to be the normal course of all rounded and completed womanhood. It is not always rounded and completed; but where it is, this is the order of its development. It begins with the life of spontaneity. The years of early girlhood are unaware of their own possibilities. They are unconscious of the garden in which they grow. To the adult spectator the charm of these years is their simpUcity — their exhibition of plant life, unreflective life, life free from planning and scheming. Then there comes a change — a transition which generally originates in a single moment. The girl awakes into consciousness. She gets the favourable reflection of a looking-glass, hterally or metaphorically. Something happens which reveals her to herself; and suddenly she sees the possibilities of the garden in which she dwells. There breaks upon her the impression of power which may be utilized — the knowledge that within her reach there are things pleasant to the sight and good for food and desirable for reputation. The path of ambition opens; she lets loose the reins of fancy, and flies. She may have no steed in reality; but every maiden has a steed in imagination, and, in the land of dreams at least, she expands herself exceedingly. In the farness of her flight we lose sight of her for long years. And when next we see her there has come another transition. Voluntary expansion has been followed by voluntary contraction. She has given up the pursuit of large things. She has settled down into a corner — the corner of home. She has ceased to be personal in her ambition; she has become impersonal. She no longer covets the trees of the Garden for herself; she desires them for her children. She sees herself no longer in her looking-glass, but in her family or in those whom she adopts as her family; for the wings of the moth have been singed by that spirit of motherhood whose fire is the normal completion of every perfected female heart, married or single.

The picture of Eve is an unfolding of these stages. She begins, so to speak, underground. She is at first invisible in the Garden. As I have said, I do not think the picture means to suggest that she is not there. She is there, but she is not yet there as Woman. She has not yet wakened to the dream of her destiny, to the sense of her possibiUties. She is not the bone of the man’s bone and the flesh of the man’s flesh, nor has she aspired so to be. Her Ufe is one of modest subordination — simple, artless, unrecognized and unseeking of recognition. It is her period of unconsciousness, of spontaneity, of existence that has never seen itself in the mirror nor stood before the bar of its own judgment-seat.

But then the man has his dream, and all is changed. He has a dream of another self, a kindred self, a self who is to be his equal and his helpmeet. That other self is the poor neglected creature at the back of the Garden who is as yet unrepresented on the canvas. The ideal of love’s first dream has been, not one of the stars, not one of the rivers, not one of the beautiful birds, but a life which as yet has not strayed beyond the Garden and whose power of locomotion is more circumscribed than any of these. The choice of man has fallen on Woman.

34 l^VE THE UNFOLDEO

And when next the curtain rises there has dawned the second period of female development. Eve has become the mistress of Adam’s ground. Not only so, but there has come to her the sense of being mistress. Spontaneity is dead, artlessness is dead, simplicity is dead; she has looked into the glass and said, “A11 this is mine!” Do not think there is any decHne here. The sense of her own privileges must at some time come to every woman; it would not be well for her if it did not come. Upon the woman of the picture there bursts a sense of conscious possession. It is she and not Adam that wakens first to the glories of the Garden. Do you think this strange? Is it not ever so? Does not the girl tend to manifest maturity sooner than the boy? For all practical purposes the rule over a house of young people passes into the hands of the sister rather than of the brother, even though the brother be the elder of the two. What is this but to say that the female mind tends to waken sooner than the male into that consciousness of self which puts reflection in the place of ww-consciousness and substitutes the gravity of judgment for the freedom of spontaneous action?

There is nothing wrong, therefore, in Eve’s sense of possession. She wakes to her privileges with rapture, she rejoices in her new-found dominion; and we feel that her joy is a mental gain. But it is a gain that involves danger. When a woman first sees her advantages in the glass of fortune there are two opposite ways in which the vision may affect her — with humiUation or with pride. The revealing of a conscious possession may bring humbleness — humbleness which was not felt before. The first conviction of being beautiful, the first knowledge of being wealthy, the first sense of being great in the world’s eyes, may impart to her a thrill, not of self-importance, but of something very like awe. With all her gratification there may be the impression that a heavy burden is laid upon her — that her gifts have ordained her to a ministry which must render her less, and not more, free. But there is another way in which the woman may be affected by her looking-glass — pride. She may say: ‘’ What might I not do with these great advantages of mine I I could make myself the admired of all admirers. I could become the centre of a vast circle, the nucleus of universal attraction. I could be the star of my horizon — the object to which all would look with adoration. In the world whither I go everything would bend to me. I should become the sun of the social system — the arbiter of its fashions, the ruler of its days. Truly there opens before me a feeling of what it is to be divine!”

Now, it is this latter experience, and not the former, which is the case of Eve. The charm of her new-found possession dazzled her. It was not the sense of expansion that did her harm, nor her joy in it. It was the reason for her joy. The picture describes her attitude most graphically. It represents her satisfaction as having its root in unblushing egotism. It portrays her as being tempted to be a god. It depicts her as weighing the value of everything by its power to minister to her individual wants. It is not the beauty of the tree of knowledge that sways her; it is the desirableness of being thought to possess that tree. “A tree to be desired to make one wise” — such is the comment of her heart. It is the comment of an egotist. The tree itself is nowhere. That which figures in the mirror is herself. The thing coveted is not knowledge but the position which knowledge brings — a place among the gods, a seat amid the higher intelUgences of the universe, a reputation which will raise her above the narrow precincts of the Garden and give her an access into wider fields.

What is the effect of this egotism of the primitive woman? What is the result of the expansion of her own shadow in the rivers of Eden? The portrait is very expUcit on this point, and I wish to consider it from the artistic side alone. We are all familiar with the old narrative in Genesis; but we look at it purely from a theological standpoint. We say the woman was tempted to disobey God. But what we want to know is, not what the temptation involved, but wherein the temptation lay. Disobedience either to God or man is not in itself a motive; it presupposes an anterior motive. The temptation of the woman in Eden is not a temptation to disobey, but a temptation to get possession of something which can only be got through disobedience. That temptation is not itself the wish to transgress. but the wish to possess; the transgression is merely a means. We want to know what in the eye of the artist was the primitive temptation. We want specially to know what in the view of the artist made the temptation pecuharly applicable to the woman; for in the picture it is the woman who experiences the first thrust of the tempter. Let us try to put our hand upon the moral feature of the portrait.

What are the bare facts deUneated? A woman gets the gift of a piece of ground on one condition — that she does not trespass on another piece of ground retained for the use of the donor. The two departments are distinguished by the difference of their fruits. The woman’s ground has every variety of fruit but one; that one is reserved for the master’s ground. The boundary-line between them is to be rigidly observed, and the warning is given that any aggressive act on the part of the woman will result in her impoverishment. Immediately, this forbidden ground becomes to her an object of great desire. The fruits on her side lose all their value; they have no glory in her eyes by reason of that all-excelling glory — the fruit on the other side. She finds her share of the Garden insufficient. She begins to loiter round the forbidden spot- The tempter knocks at her heart and suggests what she is losing by the want of his tree, how the pride of life is lowered and the luxury of life curtailed. At last, one day, the impulse quite masters her; she puts out her hand and plucks what is not her own.

What is this sin of the woman? Something antediluvian, you say. No, something intensely modern — a temptation which besets the woman of the twentieth century as much as it overshadowed the woman of the world’s first day. That sin can be expressed in one word — extravagance. The word ‘’extravagance” literally means “wandering beyond.” It is inability to live within one’s income. That was the sin of Eve; that is proverbially the sin of many of Eve’s daughters. But you will observe that neither to Eve nor to her daughters does the sin present itself in its true colours. The act of the primitive woman is really an act of theft; she appropriates the possession of another. To live beyond one’s income is always the appropriation of another’s possession. It is a trespass on somebody’s tree under pretence of buying the fruit. But happily for Eve she is not consciously guilty of the fraud she is perpetrating. If the tempter had said, “Steal!” he would not have been listened to for a moment. But the tempter does not say, ‘’Steal!” he says, “Speculate!” He says, ‘’You are only buying the fruit after all; the increase of your resources will make you far more valuable to the master of the vineyard whom you serve; you will pay him back by and by in double work, in intelligent work, in remunerative work.” Temptation since the days of Eden has never ceased to clothe itself in a seemly garment. The subtlety of the serpent does not lie in its stimulation of the passions, but in its pretence of being dispassionate — of not letting its own interest obscure the interest of the Divine. It ever paints the downward way as leading to an upward path which will issue in the elevation of the soul, “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

The sin of Eve, then, was inability to keep within her income. Has it ever occurred to you that this error of the primitive woman has after long centuries reappeared with lurid colours in the later history of Judaism? I do not mean, in the life of the individual Jew. The fault of the individual Jew was not extravagance; his tendency was rather the reverse. But the temptation of Eve to Uve beyond her income has been singularly reproduced, as I think, in the climax of the national life. The political error of Judaism in her last days of nationality has been simply a repetition of the primitive woman’s attempt to live beyond her income. The nation, like her female prototype, was also placed in a garden and given her special fruits. The mission assigned her was to dress and to keep that garden — to plant within it a tree of religious devotion whose leaves should be for the healing of other nations. But Judaism exaggerated her mission — Uved beyond her income. She was not content to be the planter of a religious tree which the outside world should admire and reverence. She wanted the trees of the outside world itself. She aspired, not to be the helper, but to be the mistress, of the kingdoms. The temptation offered to Christ in the wilderness was the temptation offered to all Israel in the wilderness of her national decline — to have the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. It is the anomaly of all history. Just in proportion as this people became restricted and restrained, its claims became louder, its voice more imperious. It put out its fettered hand to grasp the sceptre of the earth. It stamped its chained foot as a sign of despotic power. It raised its quivering arm to assert universal dominion. It issued from its hovel the commands for the furnishing of a palace. Its latest accents were feeble accents; but they uttered the cry of the woman, “We shall be as gods!” Let us return to the picture. We have seen two stages in the development of Eve — a period of unconscious growth and a period of conscious expansion; and we have seen that in this she is a representative of her sex. But there is a third stage remaining in which she is also representative — a period of conscious contraction. The typical woman of the world generally settles down. I do not say she becomes unworldly. I should rather say that the world contracts to her vision.

The scene of her empire narrows — narrows even in her desire. She begins by claiming the sphere outside her part of the Garden; she ends by building an empire within the sphere she had rejected — the empire of home. It is not a stooping of her pride; it is the taking pride in something new, something nobler.. She may still want the branches of her tree to run over the wall; but the branches of her tree are no longer her material treasures. They are the objects of her motherhood — her own children or the children of humanity — the inmates of her own house or the members of that wider household of undeveloped souls which the All-Father has recommended to the charity of man.

When the curtain next rises on Eve the scene is all changed. The extravagant expenditure has brought a crash. Paradise has faded from the imagination. The gay colours have vanished, and the rich foliage has withered in the autumn’s breath. The luxurious menage has been broken up; the life of ease has been followed by the sweat of the brow. There has come to Eve what the picture describes as a care — motherhood. There has come to her also a voluntary humility — a wish to be subordinate to wedded love — “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” It is indeed a contraction of sphere — a narrowing-down of her wild flights of fearless fancy. Yet who shall say that the later stage is not the nobler! Who will fail to see that the period of contraction is grander to Eve than her period of expansive egotism! Nowhere does she come so near to universal experience as when she is driven out from the illusive Paradise of her own vain dreams. It is when she has given up the pursuit of a fictitious glory, it is when she has abandoned the attempt to overstep her boundaries, that she really secures a place in our human, interest. It is in the circumscribed region of the home that Eve becomes modern. Within the precincts of her primitive nursery we forget the ’ vast years that interpose between us and the picture. Time fades from our view and the centuries join hands. The home Hfc of this primitive woman has nothing antique about it; it has its echoes in our own home. The old narrative says she was “the mother of all living.” It is true even in a deeper sense than the writer means. Eve is the type of all motherhood. As we read the record of her sober years we feel that they are not past years, that they are being lived anew in the midst of us, that the experience of yesterday is the experience of to-day.

We see the joy over the first-born, “I have gotten a man from the Lord.” It is a modern mother’s joy. The strong lusty child whom we christen Cain is always a prospect of gladness to the heart of motherhood; it seems to promise great things. Then comes Eve’s second-hovn, and again there is struck a modern chord. We hear, not a mother’s laughter, but a mother’s sigh. It is no longer the lusty Cain. It is a feeble child — a child that to all seeming a zephyr will blow away. We detect the weeping in her voice as she calls him Abel, a name suggesting “a breath,” ‘’vapour,” “vanity;” and we feel that her experience is repeated in a million maternal souls. Then in the course of years there comes what myriad mothers have seen repealed — the great reversal of the first maternal judgment. The child that woke her laughter becomes a disappointment, and the child that touched her pity becomes a glory. Cain is indeed a strong man, and Abel’s life is indeed but a breath; but for Eve and for the world the short-lived breath of Abel effects more than the massive strength of Cain. We feel again that we are in the presence of the moderns — that the primitive Garden in its fading has passed into the developed city, and that the woman has become one of us in the knowledge of good and evil. * * *

I thank Thee, O Lord, for that image of motherhood outside the Garden. I thank Thee that when Paradise was lost there was something found — the birth of maternal care. I thank Thee that even in the dawn one mother’s heart could hold within its love two such opposite types as Cain and Abel. I thank Thee that already could nestle there the strong and the feeble, the lusty and the frail. I bless Thee that in this mother’s heart there was not only an admiring but a protective love — a devotion not only to the might of Cain but to the fragileness of Abel. I praise Thee that in the experience of that mother Thou hast proved the profit .of protectiveness — hast caused the fragile to become the fragrant, the broken to become the benefactor. Impress that picture on the heart of all parents! Teach them that the love painted in Thy Gallery was never primitive — that it always enfolded the weak as well as the strong! Never let them be without a place for Abel at the hearth or in the home! Never let them despise his feebleness or laugh at his seeming impotence! Let them accept him in faith! Let them believe that his very weakness may become his weightedness of glory! Let them trust that his cross may yet be his crown — Thy crown! Let them figure the possibihty that their man of sorrows may be the man they have gotten from the Lord! Then shall Thy first picture in the Gallery be proved eternally true.