After all, it is the English wife and mother who is chiefly responsible for good manners in the home, and it is in the home that her own manners are most attractive. Nearly every Englishwoman is an admirable hostess, and there is a particular flavour about the welcome given by an Englishwoman in her own dwelling. To receive it is one among the uniquely pleasant experiences within the reach of humanity, not only in this country but wherever on the globe an Englishwoman has raised the tabernacle of home till she return again to the holy precincts of England, that home of homes. The hospitality of English people is justly renowned, and that for its cordiality rather than its lavishness. In this the cheery generosity and brotherliness of English men play no small part, but the serenity and solicitous friendliness of English women are the ingredients which give it the incomparable bouquet that other nations perceive and cannot imitate. Mr Maurice Baring, in a recent book, expatiates upon the extraordinary considerateness and hospitable energy of the Americans: he may have had every reason to do so, but I cannot believe that English hospitality comes one whit behind it. We may be less ready to make special efforts for strangers outside the home, but within there is no limit to the success of our ministrations, when we are remaining true to the spirit of an English home and not aping the unsatisfying sufficiency of a cosmopolitan hotel. Our stiffness, which is our instinctive protection for our too little ruthless hearts in the general clash of human atoms, falls off us in our homes. The guest, once within our hall, is in a new world, not to be conceived by one who only knew the uncompromising dreariness of our streets.
The Englishwoman removes her formality with her hat: with her for hostess new guest and old guest alike find neither ceremony nor constraint. She does not motion them to a settee, in the German fashion, and expect the overflow to group itself primly round the walls of a room obviously devoted only to these chilly entertainments. She takes them into her life when she settles them in the comfortably disposed armchairs of the room she lives in. They may drop out of it again when the door closes behind them, but while they are there all equally share the warmth. It is her wish, not precisely formulated, that those who visit her, whether for an hour or a month, should not be impressed or flattered but should enjoy themselves. She wants them, as the saying is, “to have a good time,” and into the realisation of this desire she brings a charming motherliness—particularly noticeable, I imagine, by men—which is one of her most beautiful qualities.
Few races can have such a passion as ours for “having people to stay,” so far as means will allow. All layers of English society have this passion in their hearts. Its satisfaction lays its chief burden on the woman, not only in the increase of domestic arrangements to be made, but in its added demand upon the fund of her social energy. She rises to it like a well-bred horse to a jump, self-spurred by the exercise of an activity for which she is so admirably suited. She may not always be sufficiently imaginative to fit her hospitable offerings to the particular temperament of every guest—though it is just in this discrimination and adaptability that the best Englishwomen shine—but her intention is invariably in that direction. Even Mrs Proudie at the Palace, Barchester, intolerable woman as she was, would have meant well by those who shared her formidable tea-table.
So vital a quality is this of Englishwomen that to have only met them out of their own surroundings is only to have seen half their selves: their intelligences may have been all poorly, or richly, enough on exhibition, but their manners cannot be fairly judged till they have been exposed in their own appropriate setting. It is surprising what lustre will then be taken on by facets which seemed harsh and uncouth in an uncongenial light. The most censorious foreigner caught by the radiation of an Englishwoman within her own four walls could not come away unmelted. Like the nightly twinkle of ships’ lights on the dark chilly waters of a harbour innumerable English hearths stud the external coldness of our country with spots of warmth and brightness. The genial fire is tended by the Englishwoman, the paragon of vestal domesticity. Even in her least attractive manifestations, as haughty clerk, surly landlady, insolent hussy of the factory, raucous slattern of a slum, empty dawdler, or priggish teacher, she sloughs a husk upon her own doorstep. You must judge her at home, as a guest not as an inquisitor, before you wholly condemn her manners. You will find, as a rule, that you will forgive much more than you condemn.
The point, however, is not so much what we may have to forgive her now as her probable demands on our forbearance in the future. Taking our figure in khaki astride the motor bicycle as typifying the Englishwoman to come, into whatsoever less violent exercise she may as an individual divert her energies, we may well ask what is the outlook for her manners. We may take it for granted, I am sure, that the essential virtues of the English stock are there unchanged, but a new strength and a new independence have sprung up to modify their activities. The new grafting may for some time produce a less mellow fruit. It is the settled people, I have already said, who bring forth the fine fruit of English manners, and where is settlement to-day? Society is regrouping itself busily like iron filings on a sounding board, values are profoundly changing, ideals are in the agonies of birth and death. The seething crowd in Oxford Street is England in miniature: people are everywhere hurrying to and fro, physically and mentally, laden with new ideas, new purposes and new experiences. It will be hardly strange if they leave their manners at home, or drop them in the bustle, as a man with two bags to carry might leave or drop his walking stick. We may wait in hope for their resumption in times of more leisured progress.
It is not that men and women generally are hunting for new positions in the snobbish and vulgar sense of the phrase, though efforts of this kind are inevitably obvious after the recent displacement of wealth: it is that the restoration of the world’s gravity is hustling us all in spite of ourselves, making us all more hard and less accommodating. Spring cleaning has only just begun, and it is a process in which our most irreproachable English women will not lay undue stress on ceremony and well-bred ease. The great thing is to sweep up the rubbish, banish the dust and get things clean, and if we look to the women to play the true housewives in this matter, we must excuse a certain brusquerie in the handling of the broom. The dwelling when restored may not be quite the one to which we were accustomed: there may be a hygienic bareness where we remember a cosy stuffiness, a brisker march in ministration to replace slow-moving but charming affability, and a not too gracious economy to succeed some harmlessly extravagant amenities. We shall not complain if our women, needing broader horizons than the drawing room fireplace, fix their eyes upon the things which matter, and grasp them with a finer sense of proportion than did their mothers. In common sense, in sympathy, in personal charm they will never surpass the best of older generations, but wider opportunity and greater freedom must give them new and fine qualities for which a Diana Warwick sighed and which a Christina Pontifex would have abhorred.
And if equality be the cry, let it be for equality of opportunity, of education, of service to the state, but not a petty insistence on equality of personal value which must ever be an illusion. There is nothing so deleterious to manners as self-assertiveness, and if it is necessary for citizens of the New Jerusalem to assert daily and with vehemence in the market place that they are as good as any of the other citizens, there will be at least one quality in which it will be inferior to the older foundation. Let me plead with the women of England not so to misuse the name of a great ideal, as it has been misused before: they will not by so doing redress the wrongs of inequality. If they are supremely conscious of their worth, let them at least preserve the urbanity of the truly great who assert no claim but act upon the easy assumption of its general recognition. But it would be better if they could emulate the humility of the truly wise who, measuring themselves humbly by their ideals, find no delight in standing on tip-toe among their fellow mortals. Equality of achievement or capacity is beyond human powers to secure, and of what value are more formal equalities when grand eminences of wisdom and bursting torrents of energy put to shame the less exalted hillocks and narrower streams of the average human landscape? To serve with dignity is a greater claim to honour than to be served with deference. This is a hard lesson for those emerging from ill-devised trammels: they can only learn it slowly when they have become accustomed to their freedom. The good Englishwoman will more readily learn it than the man, for it will be proved to her in the primeval claims which men and children make on her devotion. Let her harry overweening man as much as she will, shaking her broom in his face, compelling him to call her in to reinforce his weakness and striving victoriously for equality with him in every service to the community; but only at her peril will she cast aside permanently her good manners as despicable relics of older restraints and seclusions. They are the natural flower of her good comradeship and motherliness: why should she stunt the growth from those two roots which are fixed ineradicably in the deepest fibres of her nature?
[CHAPTER VIII]
THE ENGLISHWOMAN AND THE ARTS
The recognition accorded in previous chapters to the good Englishwoman’s claims and virtues has, I hope, dispelled any impression that they are the work of a mind befogged with old masculine prejudices, for I must begin this chapter with a confession that with regard to the arts I hold a view which is not too complimentary to women. However, many women of judgment admit its truth, so that the indignation of a few will leave me unrepentant. The view is, simply, that given roughly the same environment and training men are far better creative artists than women. To inquire fully into the reasons for this would be a long matter, for they are complex and, in some measure, below the external surface of personality: it is for the psychologist to dig them out. But I claim the fact to be sufficiently proved by the record of history, which shows that for one even capable woman artist there are ten men at least, and that among the company of the sublime masters, unless we adopt Samuel Butler’s absurd theory of the authorship of the Odyssey, there is not a single woman. That this is due simply to the long oppression of the sex and the denial to it of equal opportunity with men cannot for a moment be admitted. There have been women enough to show that, given the talent and the inspiration, the sex has had ample scope to reach its full capacity in the arts. Yet its performance, in spite of all that brilliant individuals may have achieved, has not come within measurable distance of the performance of men. It does seem as if the capacity for physical creation which is woman’s pride and burden has stood in the way of that other creation—so analogous in its ecstasies and its agonies to childbearing—for which men have proved themselves peculiarly suited. Where the subtle difference, the little falling-off, exactly comes is difficult to determine, even on a careful comparison of the two sexes: no particular gift belongs to one which may not belong to the other. Yet, to whatever art you look, be it poetry, music or painting, on a general survey the work of men sweeps right up to a lofty pinnacle beside which the work of women is but a moderate hill.