In letters, at all events, there is no need to be so irritable. In this domain of art, ornamented by no nation more signally than our own, the critic of to-day may discern so much that has been notably done and so much that is indubitably promised that, in regarding our Englishwomen of letters, he may surrender himself to a benevolent glow of gratitude and admiration. With the names of Virginia Woolf, Clemence Dane, Rose Macaulay, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, “Somerville and Ross,” Elizabeth of the German Garden, Jane Harrison and Evelyn Underhill occurring agreeably, among many others, to his mind, he might well be content to succumb to the temptation of gracefully acknowledging in this art a divided empire and withdrawing with a courtly bow. But he would be neglecting his duty. There is a goodly body of women upon the heights, but it is nothing to the multitudes still ambling in the sentimental lanes of the Valley of Twaddle. The home, the home is the test, the bookstall counter, the lending library, the beach on a summer’s day. Turn thither the eye, and who shall say that the Englishwoman has reached the limits of progress? In this country and in America a mass of second-rate novels is yearly produced which it is appalling to contemplate. For whom are they, and for whom are those drugs of the mind, the story magazines, produced? Chiefly for women. The lending library of a seaside town tells a plain enough tale. Which are the well-thumbed books with dog-eared pages? Not those on whose title page appears any of the names that I have mentioned above, but senseless masquerades of artistic fiction, panderings to prurience and love of sensation, spongy sweets of sentiment and little tarts of so-called “mystery.” The tale that these shelves tell is that the bulk of Englishwomen have no wish to think when they read. Books are to them as a cup of tea—a pleasant narcotic—or as a stick of chewing gum that can be comfortably sucked for hours in a state of vacuity. And when they are moved, dear sensitive ladies, who touches their delicate chords? Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Mrs Barclay. It is no use for them to retort that the men are just as bad, for it is not true. It is women who keep up the circulation of the worse popular novelists. The Englishman who works with his head or his hands reads comparatively little: his work, exercise, cards, billiards, golf and other sport leave him too little time. He only sips the cup of sentiment and sensation of which the woman swallows daily goblets. Also, it is the man who sets out deliberately to improve his mind far more frequently than the woman. Men are the chief customers for the “Everyman” editions and “The Home University Library”; men read technical books and papers about their hobby, whether it be chess or motor cycling or stamp collecting or photography, while women at best acquire a new stitch in knitting; men read the political news in the papers while their wives snatch up the outer cover with the feuilleton.
If only the Englishwoman, in the mass, could learn to take some pleasure in thinking and to bear thinking in taking her pleasure, the artistic standards of this country would be raised immeasurably. We should have better plays in our theatres, for one thing, and—how badly we want it—better actresses. The stage minx who has a few tricks and looks pretty might disappear before the disapprobation of her sex, and learn before she reappeared how to speak and walk and stand still on the stage. We might evolve again a really great tragic actress or even a comic one. We have neither of them now. We might, impossible as it may seem, make some artistic use of the cinema, for that, if anything, is the haunt of women who find that it saves them even the trouble of reading. It is well, perhaps, for one’s peace of mind that one does not stop to imagine the possible appearance in all its nakedness of the soul to which the bulk of modern films appeals. Would it not be a distorted impish little thing, with vacuous goggling eyes, a slobbering mouth and a receding chin? Would it not have a woman’s form to wriggle in ecstasy as a gigantic tear squeezed out of Mary Pickford’s magnified eyelid? It is a monstrosity unworthy to exist, and yet it now thrives amazingly upon its ample diet. In thousands of halls in towns, villages and cities it is fed every afternoon and evening with variations of the same crudity which never palls upon its unregenerate palate. Who can speak of art in England with this vast daily sacrifice to its negation drawing millions to the unedifying rites?
And now this unpleasant chapter is ended. Even if it has done no more than annoy, it has perhaps attained its object, which was to point out the vast room still left for women in the strengthening and purifying of our country’s art. The influence of women, when they choose to exercise it, is so irresistible and so salutary that they cannot really be injured by an honest complaint of its failure hitherto to act sufficiently upon national taste and of its tendency, where it is exercised, to be hampering rather than helpful. The chosen spirits among Englishwomen who, by general acknowledgment, are pursuing high ideals with success in the various arts must feel that an injustice is being done to them by their more numerous sisters. Like ardent mountain climbers, pressing on towards a far glistening peak, they must be irritated that the bulk of the party choose to sit down in Teutonic fashion in some comfortable châlet a few hundred feet up to imbibe in perfect contentment small beer and smaller lemonade. Nor are men indifferent. Not at their behest do women lag behind. It is not their wish that women should be feeble critics possessed of uncertain standards or of no standards at all, easily misled by tinsel and facile tears, hypnotised by charlatans, enticed by plausible pedlars of the cheap and showy, charmed by smooth phrases but repelled by fine ideas, partial in their views, lazy in their judgments; for men, in their rambles after the true and the beautiful, often have reason to regret the rarity of feminine companionship to sympathise and share in these loftier activities of the mind. Why should man any longer deplore his masculine solitude? There is nothing now to hinder women from hastening to his side: their knees are no longer hampered by the trailing skirts of prejudice and tradition, they have only to put on intellectual breeches and strike upwards with a will. If they fail there will be no excuse for them: the reproach of being weaker vessels, not by nature’s decree nor men’s foolishness, but of their own deliberate choice, will not be easily avoided. The good Englishwoman has unlimited will and energy: she may yet, if she wishes, lead the women of the world as well in artistic cultivation as in practical activity.
[CHAPTER IX]
THE ENGLISHWOMAN IN SOCIETY
“La société crée la femme où la nature a fait une femelle.” This reflection comes from that great novelist, but not too profound philosopher, Balzac. It is sufficiently general to start many trains of thought, though it is not in itself a peculiarly valuable addition to sociological ideas. Yet Balzac’s own train of thought when he wrote it is clear enough. He was lingering with admiration over the figure of Diane de Maufrigneuse, Princesse de Cadignan, his incarnation of all the charm and the attraction of women. For him the opposition between the woman and the female was no idle one. In the latter he took no interest: she meant less to him than the hideous cowering creature with a baby at its breast which appeared behind that rutilant and terrifying primitive man on the cover of Mr Wells’ universal history, No. 2, means to us. But woman, as typified in Diane the supreme example, appeared to him as a work of art so amazingly perfected in every detail that one can almost describe him as kissing the tips of his fingers when he writes of her. He saw women as wonderful and beautiful refinements of raw nature, extraordinarily complicated, subtle beyond measure, no less alluring but more wily than the sirens, forming part of society, it is true, but in a remote way of their own, not as companions of the other half of humanity but as incalculable accidents of the simpler life of men. They were in his eyes divinities, witches or devils, but hardly ordinary human beings. Mrs Edith Wharton in her “French Ways and their Meaning” seems, in a less enthusiastic way, to adopt the same attitude towards French women. She boldly tells the American girl that she is but a child in the nursery compared with this daedal repository of feminine secrets, the French femme du monde. It is, in fact, the French point of view, which accounts for the power of women, or rather of the woman, in France and for the limitation of her activities to her own peculiar temples. She does not waste her virtues by wafting them at large over the dustier tracts of life, though it is possible that the jeunes filles en fleur, with their golf and tennis and boyish companionships, of whom M. Marcel Proust so engagingly writes, may come down from their pedestals more frequently than their mothers.
However this may be, Balzac’s train of thought does not apply to England. His reflection would not have occurred to an English novelist, or, if it had, it would have been thrown off easily as an obvious, not particularly pregnant, fact, without the wealth of suggestion in the antithesis of “female” and “woman” which is implied in Balzac’s sentence. The Englishman would be more apt to give the reflection another turn, to say: “Nature made woman and woman makes society,” leaving sharp the opposition between nature and society but blurring that between the natural and the social woman, with the idea that the two are too closely interwoven to be usefully disconnected. And that is the English point of view. Woman in England has never been a mystery, an intricate engine with simple aims and complicated methods, of a different order from man with his complex aims and simpler methods. The texture of English life is, and has always been, compounded of both as the warp and the woof—the more active man passing rapidly between the more stable feminine strands which keep his thread in place. Though this interconnection has become more obvious latterly with the complete disappearance of feudal and patriarchal traditions, earlier literature bears abundant witness to it. The Canterbury Tales are significant enough in this respect. In spite of occasional romanticism in the tales themselves, we have no hedged divinities in the band of pilgrims: the nun, the prioress and the wife of Bath all take their places naturally in the cavalcade, and the poet insists as little on the special claims of their femininity as he pays deference to their modesty. And where is the mystery in Viola, Sylvia, Beatrice or Rosalind? They are palpably of the same stuff as their lovers, and only distinguished by greater sanity from their fools. If there be any point in mystery, it is men, with weird compounds of good and evil in their souls, who were Shakespeare’s mysteries. But, so far as social relations are concerned in Shakespeare, as in England generally, men and women are part of the same homespun which covers all the issues of life in this country. I see no reason to doubt that it will continue to do so: even the apparently strong antagonisms of recent years, when loud exclamations were heard against a “man-made” world, made little difference to the even textile process of ordinary social life, and now, since the political enfranchisement of women, are but very feeble ghosts.
The truth is that in few societies have women always had greater rights than in English society. The English woman is neither, like the Frenchwoman, the flying buttress of one particular man, nor, like the German, his beast of burden, nor like the American, his imperious tyrant: she is, as I have already pointed out, his companion, and she is the ideal companion because she has so long been admitted to all the private rights of companionship. English society is held together by English women, for the men of England have a strange aloofness from one another and a want of curiosity about one another which is always an astonishment to women, who can make or break men’s friendships without an effort. English men cling to one another with such feeble tendrils that the faintest tug pulls them apart. Yet, if women sometimes almost involuntarily apply the tug, they are coagulators of men, linking knots of them together by tighter bonds of familiarity than they could have ever manufactured for themselves. They are able to perform this function because the two sexes do not live separate lives converging at a few fixed points, but common lives with a few divergences which are becoming more and more reduced. Wherever you look you see them coupled together, in tea shops and restaurants, in theatres and music-halls and cinemas, on the hunting field and in the butt; they shop together, they serve together, they go to church together. This state of affairs is not without its disadvantages: it encourages, for one thing, a lower standard of common thought than in France where the men keep more to themselves and more together, setting a higher level of intelligence to which women are expected to conform when the two sexes meet on common ground. But it is the characteristic note of English society, in which alone could women say without pose or presumption that “they like to have their men about.” Their men, mark you, not men in general, and in a very conscious possessive sense. There is an amusing passage in an early chapter of “Mount Music” by Miss Somerville and Martin Ross. Major Talbot-Lowry, a middle-aged country gentleman, has just left the room, singing. “In both his wife’s and his cousin’s faces was the same look that often comes into women’s faces when, unperceived, they regard the sovereign creature. Future generations may not know that look, but in the faces of these women, born in the earlier half of the nineteenth century, there was something of awe, and of indulgence, of apprehension and of pity. Dick was so powerful, so blundering, so childlike.” The authors are perhaps right in saying that future generations will not know this look: the awe and the apprehension are giving way to more sympathetic emotions. But the look that remains will not be unlike the old look. It is a look of which English men are more conscious than women suppose: they catch it early on the more innocent faces of sisters and sisters’ friends. They know that women regard them with a blend of tolerance and admiration, as a kind of familiar institution to which they are bound by ties too intimate to be unravelled or analysed.
This intimate connection in the texture of society has an unmistakeable effect upon English men. It gives them, from early days, an inner refinement which, however rough and unpolished or cold and uncompromising their external appearance, is nearly always to be found behind it. Heavy-footed, wanting in delicacy and the finer shades as they may seem in comparison with men of some other nations, who pay more attention to finish and elegance of address, they are in many ways more truly civilised, with less of the wild man of the woods, the hunter, at the bottom of their natures. The manners of an English gentleman, which are manners of the heart, not of the dancing master or the enchanter, have, for their inward grace, no equal in the world. And the emotion which lies behind these manners is common to all English men, an emotion distilled of long and easy companionship with women, in which neither took more than was given in return, but the interchange of services and sympathies, not of mere compliments, naturally issued from mutual recognition of worth and mutual acknowledgement of dependence. For English women too this intimacy, which included a consciousness of the emotions it engendered in men, has had its peculiar grace. It has given them that frankness, that independence without bravado, that air of being equal to any situation, which are their remarkable qualities. At any age, even the most flighty, they fall too naturally into the performance of their stabilising function to waste more than a small and pardonable amount of energy upon private timidities and pursuits betraying a more primitive woman. They are in some sort aware of a national part to play which it would be indecent to abandon, either from passion or indifference. Hence they have a freer stride and a less self-conscious attitude than those women of other countries who are only credited with the graces and weaknesses of undiluted femininity.
But, if women stabilise, they also stratify. Men are more liquid entities, coalescing temporarily with other men at any level without difficulty and without feeling themselves engaged to remain at that or any other level longer than they please. But there is a viscosity about women—it is only another way of regarding their stabilising function—which forbids them to flow so freely and makes it harder for them to disengage themselves after any coalition with other entities of their own kind. So they arrange themselves inevitably in strata, the number of which in England is legion, which rise with an infinity of gradation from the labourer’s cottage to the royal palace. The process is almost too natural to be called snobbery, though its result often gives rise to that unpleasant quality, for the feminine element is buoyant and subject rather to the laws of expansion than those of gravity. Mrs John Lane’s Maria, good-natured but vulgarly pushing, will stick at nothing to penetrate the layers immediately above her: armed with determination, selfishness and ingratitude she marches brazenly to the attack, braving the snub to force the breach, feeling the wound but snatching the dart from it to add to the armoury which, from her ultimate vantage point, she will discharge upon her subsequent imitators. And a Maria will drag a man upwards with her, protesting but powerless, for men have not the force to abjure or to withstand such campaigns. Comic enough in fiction, it is nauseating in reality, especially as these pushing particles admit nothing but entirely laudable ambitions, whereas the scale in which they so furiously struggle to rise is not one of wit or merit, but one of trivialities, of pennies and titles, motor cars and meals.