MEN’S AND WOMEN’S COURAGE.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2379, 17 November 1881, Page 4

MEN’S AND WOMEN’S COURAGE.

(“ Spectator.”) Whether women are more or less courageous than men depends a good deal on what is meant by courage. Is it been defined as the readiness to encounter suffering of any tied rather than do wrong ; but so defined, would it cover half the oases of masculine courage ? It is particularly wrong not to bo willing to try a leap on horseback which you are by no means certain of the horse’s willingness to take ? Yet surely the man is courageous who rather enjoys a risk of that kind, while _ he who by temperament shrinks from it is called timid, though not perhaps cowardly. Wheu Socrates mode courage to consist chitfly in knowledge, maintaining that the most skilful on horseback are also tho moot courageous amongst horsemen, and that the most experienced clivers are also the moat courageous among divers, ho confounded the confidence and alacrity which come of a complete knowledge of circumstances and a complete command of your own powers, with that willingness to face tho unknown which is of tho essence of courage. You might as «ell speak of the courage of a watchmaker who deliberately sets about tho task of making a mainspring for a very small watch, as of the courage of a diver who, with nil his powers in perfect training, and with no new peril to encounter, does for the hundredth time what ho has done ninetynine times in tho same circumstances before. Courage, undoubtedly, implies alacrity, and even pleasure, in facing peril from which many shrink, a spirit that rises to the encounter with danger ; but whether or not courage properly implies a right and sufficient justification for such an encounter, is another question. If it does, then we should say that women are often more courageous than men, since the existence of a sufficient motive for encountering peril makes a vast deal more difference, on the whole, to their nerve, than it makes to tho nerve of mon. There is hardly a mother who will not encounter pain and shamo and peril with a firmer heart to save her child, than even a bravo man would show for the same end. But then compare the two in moments of peril when there is no such noble motivs to string the nerve of either, and the chances are that tho man will bo tho braver of the two—not, perhaps, that his heart is tho bolder, but that his mind passes much less easily into tho collapse which fear brings, and is less dependent on an exalted emotion for thereaisfcauco it opposes to anything like moral paralysis. If Alisa Oobbo is right, and courage implies the existence of some motive of absolute obligation on behalf of which peril is to be faced, then women, so far as they really enter into such motives, are, we believe, braver than men, because they live more tingly and heartily in the purer emotions to which they surrender themselves. If, on the contrary, courage is to cover all'the cases of self-possession and coolness in peril,—whether there is or is not a high and disinterested motivo for confronting the peril,—then mon are the more courageous, for their temperament is more combative ; there is more in it which rises to on emergency only beoausa there is an emergency to rise to ; more of immediato reaction against anything that has an aggressive look, than there is in women. Many, perhaps most women, if they have not a great motivo for being calm in time of shipwreck, will bo absorbed in tho horror of tho fate which they suppose to be awaiting them. Many, perhaps most men, even without such a motive, will be occupying themselves so intently with tho idea of what is to bo done, or even with tho not perhaps intrinsically noble task of barricading their own mindo against what, to men, is the intolerable emotion of confusion and panic —the true secret, wo fancy, of the ignoble rush to tho spirit cask so common with ignorant crews when all hope is over—that they do not give themselves up to the horrors of the situation. Wo should eay that tho minds of women do not rebel es instinctively against mere collapee as do the minds of men. Where there is any profound affection which steels thorn against such a collapse, they are more wholly impervious to it than men. But where there is no such antidote to collapse, the collapse of horror sets in much more easily in their minds than it does in the sturdier and lota mobile natures of the male eex. Men are less prone to bo unnerved by their fears than women. Women oro more prone to be nerved by their affections to great actions than mon. Bub it is not only by their affections that women are made notably courageous. Often they are made so by very inferior interests, especially by tho intense CDCEC-rvaUum of their proprietary instincts. We believe that women much oftener—offerer, at least, in proportion to the need —risk their lives in defence of their property than men. Women who would faint away in tho face of shipwreck, or oven at the approach of an angry bull, will constantly go alone about a house at night when they behove burglars to bo attempting tho house, without any panic at all. This is, no doubt, in part because they realise less clearly tho brutality of tho, sort of men who rob houses than men do, and are in fact rendered fearless by their comparative ignorance of tbe world. So likewise men are often exceedingly fearless at sea, or in danger from railway catastrophes, till their nerves have once received a serious ehock from either cause, after which they become as liable to collapse of nerve as a woman, Charles Dickens, who behaved like a hero in tho terrible SouthEastern railway accident, acknowledged that his nerve received ouch a shock in it that ho could not afterwards drive in an ordinary hansom cab without spasms of extreme terror. Tho comparative fearlessness either of unimaginative natures or of com-

plete 'ignorance, has hardly the right to the name of courage. It is only insensibility to a particular class of paralysing fears. The Virtue of courage, as distinguished from the temperament of courage, we take, with Miss Cobbe, to be tho power to quell feur in the cause of right. And so defined, wre should say women had more of the virtue of oouroge than men, at least where their affection *e identified with the cause of right—and lees of the temperament of courage. It is, however, not very oaey to distinguish truly between the two. It is more or less a virtue to bo able to keep your self-possession in danger, apart altogether from the cause in which you are called upon to face danger. And yet why should it bo shameful to feel and to acknowledge fear of such danger! It is very hard to see why the quailing in peril, and the frank confession that tou do quail in peril, should be ignoble. If it is, as it is, quite right to run away as fast as possible from a rising tide, why should it be shameful to run as fast as possible from -a dangerous bull ? If it is quite right to got with all convenient speed out of a house on fire why is it humiliating to got as fast as you can out of a fierce dog’s way. We suppose the answer is that man’s temperament should be in some fair proportion to his powers, and that bis instinct ought to teach him to stand bis ground where there would bo, in nine cases out of ten, more chance that he will stand his ground to good purpose than yield it to good purpose, and yet to yield his ground where it is all but certain that standing his ground means destruction. Still it is very difficult to connect a mere temperament of this practical kind—a sort of knack of hitting the right attitude towards different sorts of danger—with either virtue or vice. No man’s or woman’s character is of the highest calibre which puts forth no ■effort to despise danger in a great cause. But, on the other hand, no man or woman can bo morally condemned for shrinking, even faint-heartedly, from danger where there is no such cause at sta* l e. And yet such conduct is generally supposed to be quite inconsistent with tho virtue of “ courage.”