The characteristics of all prison life, at all events in England, are silence and solitude, physical or spiritual; and this cell scene was selected to convey as nearly as the limitations of the stage permitted, these commonest characteristics of detention.
For the truth of this picture of Blind Justice as a whole I rely on the testimonial of that theatre attendant, employed out of charity, who, having been prosecuted, sentenced, imprisoned, and released, knew, let us hope, more of the matter spiritually, than those who criticize. After the play on the first night, to the question of his manager, “Well, is it true?” he looked up from his sweeping, and said: “Every word of it, sir.”
I have only this to add. If each scene is taken separately and looked on with a departmentally professional eye, it must needs seem out of drawing, for it was visualized by an eye looking on each department only in relation to the whole. When the professional reader or spectator of the Court or Prison scene, says “Oh! this or that is not true!” he is criticizing from the departmental, and not from the bird’s-eye point of view, which an author must needs assume. Even if the sentence be more than typically severe, though I doubt that, or the judgment not typically worded, they serve well enough as illustrations of that blindness which has accompanied the wisest judgments of one human being on another since the world began.
No, the only legitimate criticism which the professional reader or spectator can pass is that the particular bird’s-eye view is wrong. To that criticism this bird can make no answer, except to say with deference and courtesy that he must believe in his own eye—for it is all he has to see with.
ON THE POSITION OF WOMEN
I
“Gentles, Let Us Rest!”
(A Paper in the Nation, 1910.)
A man asked to define the essential characteristics of a gentleman—using the term in its widest sense—would presumably reply: The will to put himself in the place of others; the horror of forcing others into positions from which he himself would recoil; the power to do what seems to him right without fear of what others may say or think.
There is need just now of aid from these principles of gentility in a question of some importance—the future position of women.