There is, however, one type of young Englishwoman, still existent, whose extinction would be a blessing. It is the type of Mr Reginald McKenna’s Sonia, that survival of Dodo into an unwilling generation. She is a limited species of course. London, money, society connections, good looks and a vivacious personality are indispensable for success in this line, and this is a combination of elements within the reach of few. Yet she does exist outside the pages of novels, and the harm that she does goes far beyond her own personal futility. She is a bad example, and unfortunately an example too widely held up to admiration. She captures the Press, which delights to reproduce her photograph in her latest posture and to record her latest bid for notoriety, while it would not dare to print a truthful account of her life, with all its vanities and selfishnesses and little immoralities. Her motto is to have a good time even if the world go to pieces. She exaggerates her ego into a god whom it is the duty of life and the world to appease by frequent offerings of incense and enjoyment. Of any duty except to look pretty she is quite unconscious. Any decent feeling she would promptly dub stuffiness. What she wants is glamour and movement from morning to night. The drab and dark side of the world is to be excluded, not by rising superior to it, but by ignoring it and debarring it from approach to the sacred presence, as the revellers in the story tried to debar the red death. It is that kind of young woman who never represses a selfish impulse and who, when self-denial on the part of the community is called for, assumes that the call is intended for the drab beings who earn a daily wage but is not to prejudice the pleasures of superior beings like herself, whose very existence is sufficient privilege for the community to warrant the transfer to its back of any burden that would legitimately have been hers. You see her often enough in London, watching the Russian ballet with an air of proprietorship, as if her appreciation was the only thing that mattered, that of the ordinary herd being cold, earthy and altogether negligible; you may see her selling programmes at charity matinées, flattering and fluttering by her radiant presence the audience—"oh, my dear, such quaint stuffy horrors!"—who buy; you will see her in the company of the rich more often than in that of the well bred, for money is to her infinitely more than manners and flashy novelty more than solid worth. She was slightly eclipsed by the war, though it gave her some admirable opportunities for self-display, but it affected her little. It neither wrung her heart nor improved her character, since it was to her but a new excitement and a source of wealth to many of her friends. She dresses garishly, she spends recklessly, she plays high, she dabbles in vice as she dabbles in movements for the sake of fresh sensations for her blasé palate. With a ha’porth of wit she gilds an infinite vulgarity, and she has the soul of a courtesan without the courtesan’s excuse. If Rhadamanthus condemns her to be perpetual chambermaid to a hostel in Hades for the souls of lost commercial travellers he will have given her an appropriate task in appropriate company.
There are other types of girl whom many of us may dislike, the pseudo-Bohemian of Chelsea, the détraquée enthusiast who formed in old days the main guard of Miss Pankhurst’s army, the spoiled chorus girl whom Mr Compton Mackenzie has so well depicted in “Carnival,” the horsey young lady who can talk of nothing but hunting and the merely vacuous devourer of sweets and sensational novels. Most of these, however, have some compensating virtues and the majority try, at all events, to do something more than exist. Want of opportunity or want of ambition have often landed them in their particular groove and circumscribed their natures: a sudden emergency, in their case, may bring out unsuspected powers and surprisingly latent virtues. The Bohemian young lady of Chelsea, I admit, is extremely irritating, though her worst faults appear on the surface. Her postures, if she only knew it, give an impression of shallowness and pretence, but she is a little intoxicated by the glamour of revolt against convention and the general obtuseness to things artistic, which is an undeniable and annoying fact to those who are not afflicted with it. Chelsea boasts many courageous spirits, not all of them men, however above their accomplishments their aims may be, but it gets deservedly a bad name when it takes up the attitude of regarding all life as nothing but a colour scheme, or an arrangement of line and mass. The issues of life are not all artistic: in fact, the artistic issue is only one of many, supremely important, of course, but not extremely extensive, a fact of which Murger was uncomfortably aware when he wrote the inimitable “Scènes de la Vie de Bohème.” Yet, after all, the artist must have his or her little bit of fanfaronnade, if only to keep the heart up in his desolating struggle to give expression to refractory ideas. The inexcusable beings are those who, not being in any sense artists, presume on a habitation of artistic regions to flourish the borrowed panache more furiously than its legitimate possessor.
The enthusiast in unprofitable causes, with no sense of proportion in her composition, is rather the victim of circumstance than a deliberate sinner. The remedy for her is simply a matter of providing a more fitting channel for her energy and her superfluous emotion. This is difficulty which we have still to face, for the country which, having a large surplus of women over men, gives the former nothing, or not enough to do, is asking for trouble and encouraging the development of its girls into “wild, wild women” in a different sense to that of the song. If it could only be secured that no young Englishwoman entered adult life without a solid interest or a definite direction for her unexpended energy we should neither see the crazy excesses of the suffragettes nor the abysmal apathy which settles on the young in too many suburban drawing rooms, country towns and seaside apartments. The Englishwoman shines far more in activity than in repose: she is most herself with a flush in her cheek and motion in her limbs, and she can never successfully imitate the becoming languour appropriate to the women of sunnier climates. She will move more, I fancy, in the future with less hesitation and a surer sense of direction.
The English girl, as a rule, marries for love. French people say that this is an inadequate reason for marriage, but I doubt if the results in this country are any worse than those of the arranged marriage in France. As a nation we seem to be suited by a certain youthful irresponsibility in this, as in other matters. Also there is the fact that young English folk are not very desperate lovers. They like to believe that they are, of course, and the authors of sentimental fiction encourage the belief, but they take care to combine a good dose of practical sense with their passion. Mistakes occur, it cannot be denied, but they are due rather to flightiness and self-indulgence than to the mad lash of real passion. Juliet may have been a typical English maiden of Shakespeare’s day, but she is not so now, or it would not need an Englishwoman of fifty to play the part properly; and it would be ridiculous to imagine one of our nation assuming in real life the rôle of Carmen or of a D’Annunzianesque heroine, alternately blazing and languishing in a vapour of eloquence. Rosalind is far more the true English type: she takes some interest in the physical as well as the emotional development of her lover.
Indeed, there are English girls of certain classes who conduct their own alliance almost as coolly and circumspectly as the wariest French mother. For them it is a matter of stages, first walking out, then keeping company, and then the engagement with its solemn ring. But the ring by no means clinches matters: the wait for adequate circumstances to make the marriage advisable may last one year or more. If during that wait the probationer fails to answer expectations, or even himself cools off, the affair is adjusted without undue recrimination. Rings and other presents are returned and, in all probability, another probationer is quickly found to begin the round anew. The methods of the “upper” classes are hasty and ill-considered in comparison, though the grave love making of Sir Walter Scott’s and Jane Austen’s young people will show that this was not always so. Yet, on the whole, in spite of the quite obvious sentimentality of our imaginations on this subject—what other nation has such a vast yearly output of incredibly washy love stories?—we are not unduly sentimental in our actions. Love for us makes the world go round, not merely the head, and it is usually built on a firm foundation of compatability.
The young Englishwoman does not enter upon the matrimonial voyage all of a tremble, which is another excellent thing. She has a fairly shrewd idea of what she wants and of what she is going to get. She is quite aware that marriage entails duties as well as pleasures, but, as she has already had a good deal of the fun, she is soberly ready to welcome the new responsibility which will to some extent diminish it. Men of other nations may think there is something charming in the prospect of leading a timid (but rather hungry) child into a new and fascinating garden full of the delights of the senses and the emotions, but that is not the Englishman’s desire. For him, too, love is not all emotion: his passion is tinged unconsciously with prudence. His nature leads him to look for a companion as well as a divinity, and since he is a simple soul, to whom the refinements of sentiment are tiresome in the long run, he prefers a comrade ready-made to a novice whose transformation into a comrade will take some time and considerable trouble. The English girl is always a comrade, from the nursery onwards. The spirit of comradeship is so deeply ingrained in the family sense of English people that they could not avoid it if they would. It is on that side that you can always best take an English girl, for, though she has vanity too, she is not one of those precious creatures who are sensitive in their vanities and nowhere else; who will take a rebuff calmly if it is delivered with a courtly word, but will bitterly resent a gratification if it is proffered too roughly for their pride. Judged by universal standards Englishmen are splendid husbands but inadequate lovers: Englishwomen are perfect wives but unsatisfactory mistresses.
[CHAPTER IV]
THE ENGLISH WIFE
When I dine out and look around me, or when I am present at any other social function at which men and their wives appear in unmistakeable couples, the infinite variety of married people affects me strongly. There they all are, Mrs Anderson who simply exists to provide a stout and comfortable background for her picturesque husband, fragile Mrs Conkling whose pathetic anxiety to bring out her angular husband’s laboured wit would be tiresome if it were not so genuinely maternal, Lady Manville of the truly refined apprehensions who puts up so complacently with an irritable snob, Mrs Fitzmaurice who pants to live up, and Mrs Dobbs who does not trouble to live down, to the man whose name she carries, Mrs Cantelupe who mentally embraces the doctor, and Mrs Martingale who openly snubs the Major, and many more of them, all with nothing in common but that they are English wives. One might imagine the existence of some subtle common bond that would unite the persons who had gone in for so definite a profession—at least for a woman—as matrimony. Yet it does not seem obvious even to the most acute perception. If it were more obvious the question would not so often insolubly put itself how such and such persons ever come to marry at all. True, there are many married people who have to so successful a measure assimilated one another that it is an impossible effort to imagine them otherwise than married, yet in their case a more subtle form of the question is often suggested, as to the spirit and the emotion with which they first determined to unite their destinies. Further investigations into the subconscious may in time reveal the deep mysteries of affinity, real or imagined, but at present a dark curtain hangs over them. It cannot be mere luck that makes an English wife. The Englishman has a national, as well as an individual, quality. His chief consoler and supporter, therefore, is likely to have some national quality too, whether it dimly exists from the beginning in a maidenly consciousness, or whether it grows in the married state as a natural result of the contiguity. A Frenchman, or a French woman, who had as sure a touch as the author of “Les Silences du Colonel Bramble,” might throw some light on the nature of this essential quality, but for an Englishman the task is too difficult to be formally attempted. The best he could contribute would be sidelights and reflections.
A man may well ponder, as he seldom does, on the change of identity undergone by a woman who takes another name on signing the register. In general, the sacrifices and accommodations involved in marriage are mutual. If the woman loses some independence, the man loses more; the elimination of caprice is equal for both, though one may eliminate more freely than the other; the community of goods and persons hits, on the whole, both sides equally; both are vulnerable in the same degree by ills affecting their complement. But a woman loses her maiden name, and the man makes no equivalent sacrifice. The possibility of so doing would hardly strike him, for the assumption of a new identity is to him almost inconceivable. It would appear strange to him, indeed, if the case were reversed, and that ever after marriage he should feel about himself the implied question “Who was he?” Men feel that there is so little about themselves that requires explanation, a fact which accounts for what is to women their extraordinary want of curiosity about one another. Men take one another for granted as they take themselves: were this state of things altered it would be tantamount to a revolution. Men’s clubs, which flourish on the assumption of the individual’s unalterable identity and a nebulous tolerance of most of his general social connections, would find the new flavour of enigma too disruptive for their continuance in comfort. There is no getting over this difference by any amount of tact. The most unassuming of men, the most diffident, amplifies his personality in marriage, casting his name, like a protective cloak, round the person whom he has chosen with a generous finality which makes any inquiry as to the nature of her former covering theoretically superfluous. But the woman, however fondly she may cherish the garment of her maiden name, even to the extent of showing it at every opportunity through the chance openings of her new covering, has accepted a restriction as she has accepted a label. A man’s appellation or title reveals nothing of his private state, but a married woman’s name is a sign to all the world that she is, or has been, wrapped in the mantle of a man.