New shelves had to be added every year as the books accumulated. Big as the room was, the wall space was not enough and one large bookcase was built out from the wall near the fireplace into the middle of the room, as in a public library. It looked well there and it screened one from the bitterest blasts. For the place seemed full of air from the four winds of heaven. The rest of the house was built on to this room and looked tiny beside it. Kitchen and servants' quarters, two fair-sized and one very small bedroom, a minute sitting room for Frances where she kept her collection of tiny things—toys and ornaments mostly less than an inch, many far smaller, that were the delight of children. She had not, Gilbert remarked, allowed her taste to guide her in choosing a husband.
A mixture of Gilbert's strong and weak qualities affected his dealings with his dependents. I am not sure he felt certain that it was quite right that he should have a gardener: anyhow, no man was ever paid so highly and allowed to idle so completely as was the gardener I remember there, an exceedingly able gardener when he chose to work. To such trifles as the disappearance of coal or tools, neither Gilbert nor Frances would dream of adverting. And they were entirely at the mercy of a "hard case" story at all times. One man used to call weekly to receive ten shillings—for what service no one was able to form the faintest conception. Should he fail to appear Gilbert mailed the money. He was found one day fighting another man on the doorstep for daring to beg from Mr. Chesterton!
From a conventional point of view the maids were inconceivably casual. Neither Gilbert nor Frances would have thought it right to insist on caps or indeed on any sort of uniform. It is my impression that I have been waited on at dinner by someone garbed in a skirt, a sweater and a pair of bedroom slippers. And the parlor maid took for granted her own presence beside Frances and Dorothy Collins as a chief mourner at Gilbert's funeral.
According to Bernard Shaw, writing of Dickens, marriage between a genius and an ordinary or normal woman could not succeed—the gap was too wide. Dickens had thought he could go through with it, only because he had not measured the gap. In this theory, as in so much else, Gilbert stood violently opposed to Shaw. No doubt he must at times have realised that there was an intellectual gap between himself and the ordinary man or woman, but it was a thing utterly unimportant. Character, love, sanity: these things mattered infinitely more, and he more than once depicts the genius as painfully climbing to reach the ordinary.
His views concerning the sexes were equally at variance with those of Shaw and of most of the moderns. He was quite frankly the old-fashioned man and Frances was the old-fashioned woman. They both agreed that there is one side of life that belongs to man—the side of endless cigars smoked over endless discussions about the universe. Gilbert, in What's Wrong With the World, tells us that the voice in which the working woman summons her husband from the tavern is the same voice as that of the hostess who, leaving the men in the dining room, tells her husband not to stay too long over the cigars.
Of this voice he entirely approved so long as it did not ask to stay on in the dining room. He often said that the important thing for a country was that the men should be manly, the women womanly: the thing he hated was the modern hybrid: the woman who gate-crashes the male side of life: no one, he had said in a letter of his engagement time, "takes such a fierce pleasure as I do in things being themselves." And both he and Frances found amusement in that "eternal equality" which Gilbert saw in the sexes so long as they kept their eternal separateness. If everything, he said, is trying to be red some things are redder than others, but there is an eternal and unalterable equality between red and green.
It so happens that in the matter of the wives of great men he had something to say more than once. He longed to hear the point of view of Mrs. Cobbett who "remains in the background of his life in a sort of powerful silence." He combated Shaw's notion that the young poet would repudiate domestic toils for his wife: rather he would idealise them—though this, Gilbert admits, might at times be hard on the wife. But the matter is best expressed in the love scene in one of his later romances: Tales of the Long Bow:
That valley had a quality of repose with a stir of refreshment, as if the west wind had been snared in it and tamed into a summer air. . . .
"What would you say if I turned the world upside down and set my
foot upon the sun and the moon?"
"I should say," replied Joan Hardy, still smiling, "that you wanted
somebody to look after you."