Reading exclusively from a single point of view, Mme. Villard seems to have sometimes sacrificed her critical sense to her principles. Thus, as a type of the nineteenth-century “old maid,” so neglected, so ill-used by society, she selects Miss Rachel Wardle! Dickens, generally “so pitiful to the weak, so generous to the oppressed and the conquered,” had no pity for her. But upon us it is incumbent to pity and understand and find excuses for her. “At any rate, her desire to be loved and, above all, to experience in other surroundings a freer and less humiliating life should have nothing surprising for us.” Isn’t this rather a solemn way of describing the lady’s amours with Mr. Tupman and Mr. Jingle? Is it really the fault of society if an amorous old dame will be silly? And is she not to be laughed at if she happen to fall into the category “old maid”? Mrs. Bardell was amorous too. So was Mr. Tupman. Dickens laughs at these also—but then they were not old maids, they didn’t illustrate a “feminine case.” Then there was Mrs. Jellyby. She reminded some people of Harriet Martineau. But Dickens had deformed the type (who was intelligent and was not the mother of a family) so as to present the “new woman” in the least favourable light. He “has fixed for half a century the type of the intellectual or enfranchised woman, as conceived by those who trust the judgment of others rather than their own direct observation.” The question, surely, is not whether Mrs. Jellyby was unlike Harriet Martineau, but whether in herself she was a sufficiently comic personage. Most readers of Dickens find her so. What injustice is there in this to the real “new woman,” whom, as Mme. Villard has shown, she did not resemble? As a matter of fact, when Dickens had a mind to draw a real “strong-minded” woman he drew her most sympathetically. Is there any of his women more delightful than Miss Trotwood? “To-day,” says Mme. Villard, “she appears to us an unconscious feminist whose feminism misses its mark, since it can find no field of action amid narrow, provincial, routine surroundings.” Poor Miss Trotwood!
We are to understand that it was the domination and the selfishness of man that created the lamentable type of nineteenth-century “old maid.” But who were unkindest to Miss Wardle? Her nieces, members of her own sex. Who created the typical “old maid” and terrible bore, Miss Bates? Another “old maid,” Jane Austen. The fact is, old maids like other human beings have their foibles. Are these never to be put into a book? Feminism seems to make its disciples terribly serious. Miss La Creevy is Dickens’s example of the femme artiste. See, says Mme. Villard, how types of “independent women” are caricatured! She cannot laugh at Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig, because they testify to the social contempt attaching to the nursing profession at their date! Has it never occurred to her that novels are sometimes written merely as novels and not as dossiers in a “case” for the “evolution” of woman?
After all, however, there are plenty of serious novelists who do supply good evidence—more particularly the quasi-propagandists like Mrs. Gaskell (when she chose) and Mrs. Humphry Ward (sometimes), and (nearly always) Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells. Mme. Villard makes effective play with these. She has no difficulty, for instance, in showing the immense economic advance of the woman-worker during the last century, though even here her eye seems too exclusively fixed on her own sex. True, women were the chief victims of the old “factory” and “sweating” systems, but the amelioration of their condition, if I am not mistaken, came only as part of the general amelioration in the condition of “labour,” without sex-distinction.
It is when she comes to the sentimental side of her subject, the relation of woman to man whether in marriage or “free love,” that Mme. Villard finds her material a little too much for her. Naturally, for our novelists and playwrights can never let the too fascinating subject alone and seem to go on saying the same things about it over and over again—con variazioni. You have, for example, Mrs. Gaskell, so far back as 1850, dealing with the same theme as Mr. Stanley Houghton dealt with in “Hindle Wakes” (1910)—the refusal of the seduced woman to accept the regularization of her position by marriage. Then there are the free-lovers “on principle,” who end by conceding marriage to social prejudice—like Mr. Wells’s Ann Veronica. There must be English novels where the “free lovers” maintain their principle triumphantly to the end, though I haven’t read them; but I seem to remember several in the French language. It is all very confusing. Perhaps—I only say perhaps—those are wisest who leave “principle” in these matters to the heroes and heroines of the novelists and are content to live ordinary lives in an ordinary jog-trot way, without too much thinking about it. There is this comfort for the old-fashioned commonplace people among us, at any rate, that whatever “evolution” of woman there may have been in the nineteenth century, she remains in all essentials very much what she used to be. I can find it as easy to-day to be in love with Emma and Elizabeth and Anne—I needn’t mention their surnames—who are more than a century old, bless them, as with (not to compromise myself with any contemporary English heroine) M. Barrès’s Bérénice, or with one of M. Marcel Proust’s “Jeunes filles en Fleurs.”
PICKLES AND PICARDS
A writer in the Nouvelle Revue Française drops a remark which it does one good to read. He says that in the old French villages on the Picardy front all that the English have taught the countryfolk in five years of cohabitation is to eat pickles with their boiled beef. Very likely this is a humorous perversion of the truth; but I should like to believe it. Not from any personal interest in pickles, though that will seem odd, and perhaps incredible, to my French friends, who seem to think that every Englishman must be a pickle-eater—just as we English used to think every Frenchman ate frogs. No doubt, however, this French generalization is fairly accurate; we are a nation of pickle-eaters, and if any one asks why, I guess the answer is cold beef. Anyhow, the idea has fascinated the French mind. Among the English characteristics of which Jules Lemaître once gave a list (from hearsay, which he thought, good, easy man, as authentic evidence as coming to see England for himself) I remember he mentions “Les pickles.” And it is the one English characteristic that has infected the Picards!
My reason for rejoicing is that they have not been infected by more than one, that in spite of all temptations, etc., they remain (pickles excepted) true Picards. There have been times (particularly in mid-eighteenth century) when the French have shown a tendency to Anglomania. Let us be glad that these are over. Probably the French Revolution settled that point, as it settled so many others, by isolating France for the time being, and making her the common enemy. More than one of the Terrorists were Picards by race, but you may be sure they never ate pickles. But cohabitation may bring about the same result as isolation, in a different way. Our armies have lived for five years with the French; both natives and visitors have had ample opportunities for observing each other’s characteristics; and I like to think that both have parted with the profound conviction that, on either side, these are inimitable. Condiments, of course, excepted. They have adopted our pickles, and we have taken their sauce bigarade, which is excellent with wild duck. Condiments, by the way, include the linguistic sort. We have seen the delight with which Lemaître wrote down that strange, abrupt, tart English word “pickles” in his French text. So some of our own scribblers wantonly and wickedly flavour their writings with an occasional French phrase, because it seems to them to give a piquancy, a zest. These apart, let us by all means admire one another’s qualities without seeking to interchange them. Let us jealously preserve our own characteristics, our own type, like the Picardy villagers. National peculiarities are the perpetual joy of travel (except when one side wants the window down and the other up), the bouquet of literature, the salt of life.
Talking of travel, we have been having a correspondence in The Times on the lavatories and the closed windows on the P.L.M. I am not using that railway myself just now, and I confess I like to see that here again the French remain obstinately French. France is endeared to us, like any other friend, by its weaknesses as well as its virtues; it would, for many of us, not be the old friend that we know and love without its occasional stuffiness and its occasional smells. Louis Veuillot once wrote a book called “Les Odeurs de Paris.” We have all smelt them, and should hardly recognize our Paris without them—though they must have had more pungency, a more racy, romantic flavour in Balzac’s Paris, the Paris of our dreams. Nowadays for the rich Balzacian smells you will have to visit some of the provincial towns of his novels, and so your pilgrimage will combine a literary with all factory interest. I know of one old Burgundian town—I will not name it, for obvious reasons—not mentioned, I fancy, by Balzac, quite untouched by time, with pepper-pot towers, a river in a deep ravine, and well worth a literary pilgrimage if only for its associations with Mme. de Sévigné and the Président de Brosses, where you have the added delight of the richest medieval odours powerfully assisted by a tannery—an unrivalled combination! Why do so many Englishmen grumble at these things instead of appreciating them æsthetically, as accompaniments of the French scene, as part of that varied experience which we call “abroad”? Or why do they explain them on the illiberal assumption of some inherent inferiority in the French character?