It might seem unnecessary to dwell at all on what the English wife takes from her husband and what she gives him, seeing that we are a race of the most frantic writers and readers of novels under the sun. Nevertheless it would be impossible in this chapter to omit the conjugal relation which, while it reflects in its changes the manners of different generations, remains all through something essentially English. The humility of the mediæval châtelaine which persisted in the ceremonious respect of a Duchess of Newcastle for her “dear lord,” and the rather pompous solemnity of the early nineteenth century with which Mrs Briggs addressed “Mr Briggs” as such even in his portly presence are now things of the past, having fled scandalised before the easy familiarity of more modern husbands and wives: but there would appear less difference than might be supposed if the Duchess of Newcastle beloved by Lamb could exchange sentiments with a wife of to-day. They would find, in particular, a common fund of that protective tenderness which is characteristic in the attitude of an Englishwoman to her husband, whom she regards in some aspects as a mother regards her son strutting in his first pair of trousers before admiring friends: she adores his grown up airs and would not reveal to him for worlds that he is not yet quite capable of looking after himself. It is for this that she puts up so kindly with his idiosyncracies, not because he is a man whose will is law and whose whims are not to be questioned. She feels that she is to some extent responsible for him, not only in the home, but in the outer world: to the wise fairy who orders his domestic interior she adds the character of interpreter whose aim is to reveal his promising social exterior to a possibly unappreciative audience, much in the manner that a bilingual Hottentot, producing a white man before his tribe, would give them to understand that he came in every way up to the best Hottentot standards of good manners and capability. In the same spirit she is ever ready to act as his shock-absorber, ready to undergo every compression on her own part for the sake of his smoother daily progress.
A man, though he might naturally wish to do so, cannot act as a buffer for his wife except in the greater shocks of life where the strain on the joint machine is much eased by any elasticity on his part: the smaller jars and jolts occur in the home where he is inevitably the passenger. It is she upon whom falls the daily impact of breakages, leakages of domestic energy, minor and unceasing adjustments and all the host of inquiries which may be generically described as the "Pleas’m"s. If she is occasionally exasperated at the complacency with which he receives the service, she has the good sense to reflect that if the passenger were continually worrying about the feelings of the springs he would never have the heart to drive anywhere at all; and, since he is unavoidably there in the seat, it is better that he should get up some momentum than subject the springs to the motionless pressure of his own dead weight.
The English wife does not exact a punctilious politeness from her husband, which is only an instance of the general difficulty that English people experience in associating polished manners with familiarity. Politeness for them is a mark of distance, and its use in any degree of social proximity has the air of hoisting a telescope to see one’s friends across a table: it is a source, even, of suspicion, and there are few of us sufficiently enlightened not to feel almost unconsciously the “Garn, ’oo are yer gettin’ at?” which rises to the lips of our less cultured citizens on being treated to any address at all elaborately flavoured. There is sound sense, not merely boorishness, at the bottom of this instinctive suspicion, for forms and ceremonies are at their best a mask to conceal more natural emotions, though we do not always too nicely judge the moments when these emotions might be more profitably concealed than revealed. At the same time, the English wife expects a good deal of attention from the man who, presumably, first won her by his attentions, and feels aggrieved if she does not get it. The English husband—and he would be the first to admit it—is expected to remain l’amant de sa femme and to abound in those attentions great and small which are easily prompted by the emotion of passionate love, but sprout less eagerly from the more solid but less exciting relation of the ami, in the conjugal sense of that word. The happiest wife has her amant and ami in one, and she is slow, for all that the novelists and dramatists may say, to look for the former away from home. Most of our country women are more ready to face the great disillusionment with resignation than to seek a new revelation as an antidote. But it is not easy to destroy the illusions of an Englishwoman or, as it may be better put, they are not often totally destroyed. One reason for this, perhaps the chief, is that neither the Englishman nor Englishwoman have, in early life, formed a passionate ideal of l’amour to be destroyed in the process of daily realisation. They regard the prospect of “settling down” with equanimity, having usually had before their eyes an example of the amount of tenderness and affection which attend the settlement, and being too practical to imagine themselves ever taking desperate and decisive action to assuage a merely emotional longing for an intangible something. We are too ready adventurers in the realm of the concrete to waste our energy on less promising quests in the realm of ideas. All our adventures, marriage included, have a practical aim which keeps our roving desires in a fairly domesticated condition, like house terriers who hunt a rabbit now and then rather than greyhounds for ever straining at the leash. The English wife views her husband’s rabbit hunts with the complacency of a good mistress, quite ready to admire the good figure that he cuts, provided the chase is not tiresomely prolonged. She will even allow the rabbits to make a polite semblance of being caught, so long as it is perfectly understood that it is all a game and so long as they do not too shamelessly wait for their pursuer. She does not claim so much indulgence for herself, knowing that her husband’s progress is a serious walk rather than an amiable constitutional, and that the distraction caused by having to turn and whistle after a rabbit-hunting companion would be too trying for his temper. It is usually enough for her to let him suspect her virtuously avoided opportunities, with a hint of her successful chases before she caught him.
Mr H. G. Wells, in a series of novels after the “New Machiavelli,” tried to make us believe that the triangular drama was as common in England as in other nations, and quite as well suited to our ordinary habits. It was a foolish attempt to ascribe the passions of the few to the temperaments of the many. Wives of Sir Isaac Harman and Passionate Friends are no more characteristically English than Don Quixote, except in an extremely attenuated sense. There are people in London, also conspicuous at the Russian ballet, who find a diversion in a display of promiscuity, though they are a small and despicable section of the community: but the seeker after a maximum of loves and lovers is not the typical Englishman or woman, just as Mr Walter Sickert’s back bedrooms and lumbar nudities are not typical English scenery. No doubt, as a nation, we are sexually unimaginative, which leads us into a false puritanism, makes our marriage laws grossly unfair, hinders enlightened attempts to amend them, and complacently allows the worst of all diseases to do its fell work upon the population. But eroticism, we may be thankful, is alien to us, particularly as any attempt to translate eroticism into adequate or possible social terms is bound to be, as Mr Wells shows, a dismal failure. The English woman and the English man, like all others of the species, are liable to be misled by their physical desires, but their good sense and their innate domesticity are too strong to countenance any hasty experiments in the relations which they consider sacred and vital. It is good philosophy, surely, to take things as they are, not as you might wish them to be. It is the athletic activity, the courage, the practical energy of the Englishwoman which make her, possibly, ascetic in her imagination and prim even in her abandonments. To a Frenchman it is always problematical whether a given woman is virtuous, to an Englishman her virtue is a natural assumption: the difference indicated in the women of the two nations is obvious. The Englishwoman can answer the reliance of the man with a self-reliance which is one of her most charming qualities; the Frenchwoman can only answer her countrymen’s suspicion by an elaborate avoidance of any appearance of justifying it: and the mind of the latter is occupied with infinite possibilities the absence of which from the mind of the average Englishwoman allows her to be more spontaneous, if also more frivolous. In the future of feminism, they will get over their frivolity quicker than their French sisters with their excessive caution, and, without the showy exuberance of the American sister, will give the most solid contribution to the welfare of the human race. In marriage, which also purges frivolity, the Englishwoman has already shown the measure of her strength and of her wisdom. If, prone to material waste and putting sentiment before utility, she has yet to become an adept in the theory of social economy, her practical instinct, aided by her admirable economy of emotion, make her by temperament and by experience a woman of action, a staunch comrade and an agreeable companion. She is fitted to teach as much, at least, as she will ever have to learn, nor has she anything to fear from any comparison made over the whole ground of womanly activities, capabilities and graces.
[CHAPTER V]
THE ENGLISH MOTHER
When a woman has begun to speak and think in terms of “your father” as well as of “my husband,” she has not merely extended the sphere of her interpretership, but has assumed a new personality in addition to any that she may have had before, the personality of the mother. The extension of the interpretership, which is one of the responsibilities of the added personality, is in itself not unimportant. In the outer world the wife-interpreter has not to create an entire character, but to give a greater reality to an already well apprehended external appearance, and that only in the direction of increasing its amenity. The mother has to create the father for the children progressively, timing the stages of the structure to the expansion of their intelligence, and she has to awake in them not only a sense of his beauty, goodness and power, but of his displeasure, his wisdom even in denial, and the sanctity of his preoccupations. This task is not too easy, however lightly and inevitably it is undertaken. The beneficent deity, so soon to dwindle in stature to that of an ordinary man, is not hidden, as it is wise for deities to be, so that if the artistic imagination be stretched too far in his creation, the discrepancies between the living person and the created being become sufficiently glaring to strike even a childish apprehension. The woman who creates the father with tact, giving the impression of removing rather than giving false impressions, is a valuable wife and an excellent mother. It is difficult for a man to reveal himself to a child, unless he has a peculiarly expansive disposition, and, with the best will in the world to stand before his offspring on his own legs, he is bound to depend to some extent—though some men are far more lazy than others—upon wifely interpretation. But the interpreter must be wary lest she is caught by keen little eyes in the act of booming out oracles from behind a hollow image, for no discovery is more disillusioning; nor must she officiously intervene if the hardy growing intellect demands a directer communication with the source of all wisdom. The temptation to say: “don’t bother Daddy, he’s busy” is not always due to entirely unselfish promptings. It is better for a child that the direct revelations should come in the shape of mysteriously expressed riddles than that they should be repressed by intervention from the sanctuary, for the riddle, if a good one, may bear unconscious fruit, whereas silence may lead to disappointment and an estrangement which can never afterwards be overcome. There are fathers who, at a certain stage, can step blandly down from the high place, incarnating themselves as it were, and take the novice by the hand which will rest in his as long as may be: there are other fathers who can never quite leave the steps of their own altar. The difference is a matter of temperament. Yet, in either case, the ultimate relations between father and children will depend upon the mother’s tact, sympathy, and power of divination in the earliest stages. Any flaw in her own understanding will here be visited with punishment.
The Englishwoman brings a considerable amount of acumen into her parental interpretership, though it consists, perhaps, more in her acute comprehension of a child’s imagination than in profundity of psychological analysis of her husband’s character. She has a natural gift for attaining the confidence of children, putting things to them in the manner least calculated to cause doubt or dismay. Her own illogical mind protects them from the devastating effects of logic upon too tender susceptibilities. I remember so well a father who set out one winter’s evening in pure kindness of heart to teach two daughters the rudiments of whist. All went well, if rather silently, till an awful moment when in a majestic voice—intended purely as a warning and not as a reproof—the father uttered the words: “Why on earth did you trump your partner’s best card?” The reply was a flood of tears and a hasty call for female intervention. Mother would have conveyed the warning with less emphasis and more prolixity, but she would have preserved a disposition for whist which was then and there for ever shattered. These are the domestic pitfalls against which she has to guard, as the speaking tube through which father and children communicate, a speaking tube shortening ever with the years till its use becomes quite unnecessary.
But motherhood is more than this: it is a new personality put on with pain, worn with mingled joy and anxiety, only to be put off with death. Its qualities are universal, and there would be only idleness in an elaborate attempt to ascribe any particular maternal character to the English, as opposed to any other, mother. She is but one of the world of mothers with all their virtues, pleasures and sorrows, as deeply moved by the mystery, as keenly wounded by the arrows, as proudly equal to the sacrifices of motherhood as a woman of another nation. Nationality does not enter into motherhood, which is a function of universal humanity, so well understood that, instead of being emotionally exhaustive on the subject, I have only to refer each reader to the memories of his or her own heart, where childhood, if not marriage also, has stored some of its most precious secrets. There may be degrees of motherly feeling, for instance between the hen with a brood and the cow with a single calf,—a contrast which has its human counterpart—but for all mothers the essential quality is that of the pelican. I need say no more than that English mothers make the most admirable pelicans, sparing themselves no more and devoting themselves no less than those of other nations. In no country, therefore, is the mother more honoured or cherished: and if the tie that binds a man to his mother in later life is less emotionally strong than with some Latin nations, it is because an Englishman directs his emotions habitually along different channels, not because his heart is devoid of a very precious memory, indelibly enshrined. But it is possible to over-sentimentalise this theme by dwelling on it. Certain passages in “Pendennis” come to my mind as I write the words in which Thackeray pulls out the “vox pathetica” in reflecting on the relations between Arthur and his mother. When one is treated to voluntaries of this kind one has an irresistible inclination to be horrid and realistic, remembering that in England, as in all other countries, there are mothers who do not deserve the name, that baby clinics would be not so urgently necessary in our big towns if all mothering were perfect, and that Samuel Butler wrote a book called “The Way of All Flesh,” which is a strong-tasting antidote to any overdoses of sentiment in the matter of parenthood. How Thackeray would have disliked that book! Yet the truth in it will live as long as “Pendennis.” Lately, however, what with “Fanny’s First Play,” “The Younger Generation” and the like, dilutions of this truth have been a little too freely administered: so I prefer to leave the ultimate moralisings to the individual.