This act of envelopment, performed in the marriage ceremony, is infinitely symbolic, allegorical, susceptible of amplification to any sentimental or moral tune that you please. It is the commonplace of the “few well-chosen words” to which married couples have to submit from the steps of the altar. The symbol and the allegory, the moral and the sentiment, are, however, less interesting than the actual degree of reality which attends and follows the act. The grace or otherwise which a wife imparts to the folds of the mantle around her is one of the tests of proficiency in the married profession. It is a test out of which the English wife comes very well; much better for instance than the German, who accepts the covering with thankfulness and humility, poking out a meek head now and then but otherwise only amplifying, as the years go on, the circumference of the garment; whereas the American assimilates the whole garment to herself with any amount of dash, leaving it to her partner to supply the motive power and fill the pockets, while taking up as little room as he conveniently can,—and the American man’s capacity for social compression is as striking as his capacity for commercial expansion.
The Englishwoman wears her mantle neither selfishly nor cringingly: she appropriates her part of it with a natural dignity which so incorporates it with herself that the imagination almost fails to grasp the fact of her ever having been without it. She is by no means indifferent to the fall of its folds round her own figure, taking a good deal of pride and trouble in the arrangement of them, but her self-consciousness in this respect does not make her forgetful of the figure cut by her partner. She insists that the elegance of his posture, which she would be the first to exaggerate, shall be unimpaired by any extravagance on her part which might strain the buttons or mar the flowing lines of the side which he presents to the world. It is rather a heavy mantle that the Englishman throws, a solid article in tweed or homespun, not lightly to be shifted and apt to be impervious to gentle breezes as well as to more blustering elements: but if the Englishwoman inevitably feels at times a trifle overpowered and would gratefully welcome the respite of a button or two, she is not given to any awkward wriggles of betrayal or to moppings of the brow in public. In private the owner of the mantle may have, for his good, to be aware of sharp elbows, and even to submit in domestic seclusion to the terrifying total emergence from the common garment of an overheated partner; but, after this salutary breathing space, he usually finds no reluctance on her part to re-assume and rearrange the folds. He can, in fact, rely upon his wife to minimise any possible appearance of misfit, since an Englishwoman resents above all any diminution of the common dignity, by which she means her husband’s dignity more than her own. No wives are more proud of their husbands nor more anxious that the world should appreciate them at their true worth: for failure in this respect they are readier to blame the world’s obtuseness than any defect in their own estimate.
The English wife’s greatest disappointment, perhaps, is that her husband should fail to do himself justice by any fault of his own. She will carry him gaily through failure after failure so long as her own confidence is unimpaired, repairing the cuts and mending the holes worn by unlucky tumbles so skilfully, in the happiest instances, as even to escape his own eye; but if he slip through mere blundering awkwardness, through diffidence or through shortsightedness in missing the step obviously to be taken, then indeed she is smitten to the heart, for has it not destroyed the great illusion, which she might be the first to suspect but the last to give up, that it is he who is carrying her through?
It is remarkable how this illusion persists, when it is an illusion, on the part of a man, without his suspecting the reverse of the illusion to be the truth, as it may sometimes be. The indignant refusal to desert Mr Micawber was less, we may suspect (though he did not), due to a sense of his protection than to an agonised fear on his behalf. Yet, even at the best, when a man does his fair share, even to a degree of enviable brilliance, of carrying through, the amount contributed by his wife towards diminishing her own and his dead weight is not so widely recognised. A man, certainly an Englishman, is a costly engine which requires a great deal of attention if the best is to be got out of it: the feeding, coaxing, tuning up, adjustment and lubrication that he constantly needs is enough to occupy one woman’s time for most of a year. If he has never had it, he contrives to run along smoothly enough with the attentions of well paid hirelings who see to his physical lubrication, leaving the mental and emotional gear to look after itself. But once he has it, he surrenders to its need. Thenceforward he has nothing to do but to make his daily run in the outer world knowing that a far more efficient and faithful attendant is waiting to adjust any part of his gear that may have got shaken or damaged in the course of the day. He would pretend to himself, I dare say, that he performs similar services in return to his attendant, but he would find it hard to substantiate his claim. The man returns from the day’s work with the sense of having thrown off a burden till the next morning. Seldom has a woman any similar sensation. Her burden, if less exhausting, is practically continuous: she must sort out her pile of cares and get to the bottom of them daily, for a household will not tolerate the arrears which grow with impunity in a man’s office. If a man felt the same responsibility for his wife’s welfare as she for his, his burden, too, would be continuous. Nature is kind to him in this respect, or perhaps she is only wise. If he is to do most of the public work of the world, he must be allowed to be a trifle impervious to the need for the private adjustments which are, strictly speaking, in his province. He will be excused, even profusely visited with thanks, if he show sympathy and gratitude. Who knows if the English wife gets enough of these commodities, since she will seldom confess to their deficiency? That her deserts are great no Englishman will deny, more than ever since the war, which saw poignant anxiety, intensity of nervous strain, every kind of economic difficulty and an incalculable increase in the coefficient of domestic friction added to her normal lot. She bore it all with courage, neither losing her presence of mind nor diminishing her dignity; and though some hastily assumed and badly stitched matrimonial mantles may have shown the strain of the violent disruption during periods of the war, the majority showed what very serviceable garments in time of stress they really were, capable of almost infinite elasticity without the straining of a fibre, warming him in the camp and her in her lonely bed.
During the war the English wife kept the English home going, and at all times it is she who is the centre of the English home. This fact alone would give her a unique position among wives, for the English home is unique. If the man maintains it, the woman gives it its peculiar character, and the character is one which at once impresses itself upon all foreign observers. What the Englishwoman preserves, what she warms, one might almost say, with her blood, is not a dining-room for her husband, a nursery for her children, a drawing-room for herself and a sleeping place for them all; it is not even only a focus for purely family radiations to concentrate themselves upon; still less is it just a background to set off the more agreeable side of life, carefully concealing the obscure and dusty delvings that make it possible. All these elements come into it, but there is much more. It is the symbol of British hospitality, that spring of unsuspected warmth in a traditionally cold nation, which guards its privacy fiercely that it may share it without embarrassment. There is no stiffness in its welcome, no constraint in its entertainment: that its guests should for a moment forget their guesthood is its wish and its triumph. In this triumph the woman has the greater share. However much her husband may have invited, it is she who entertains. Her husband’s friendships are to that extent in her keeping, for the masculine link that he has strained in marrying cannot be reforged by his own good fellowship alone.
Charles Lamb complained humorously of the behaviour of married people in this respect, but his complaints have no great body in them. A friendship that depended mainly upon bachelor roysterings must inevitably suffer by a roysterer’s marriage, but to accuse the English wife of wishing to destroy what is valuable in her husband’s feelings for other men or women is to do her an injustice. Indeed, I have often found the anxiety of English wives to prove the contrary almost pathetic, and it may be advanced as a reasonable proposition that the man who exchanges his welcome in a bachelor flat for one in an English home has the better of the exchange. The note of the English home, except in its most ceremonial moments, is domesticity, not a domesticity of shirtsleeves and happy-go-luckydom, but one in which the domestic affections do not find it necessary to run and hide themselves in the closet when the frontdoor bell rings, and in which an increase in the steam pressure of the domestic machinery is not obviously made for the comfort of added society. The guest slides into an English home, be it for an evening or for a month, as easily as a new leaf is slid into the dining-room table. If any sacrifices are made on his behalf, it is a matter of pride that he should be unaware of them: if his pleasures are consulted it is, for him, with the assurance that the meeting of them would only be an extension, the most natural in the world, of the admirable activities of his host and hostess.
Few Englishwomen, perhaps, could preside in a salon, but nearly all can infuse cheerful ease into a gathering of guests, whether it be at a house party or a humble Sunday supper. Lady Monkshood, who puts me at once at ease when I am ushered into a room full of opulent and unknown strangers of a Saturday afternoon at The Hall, sheds no ray by one atom warmer than little Mrs Periwinkle who keeps a piece of cold beef and some stewed fruit going on Thursdays in the Temple for any scribbling folk who care to drop in. And both of them, Lady Monkshood and Mrs Periwinkle, have this in common, that there is no corner of the globe in which they show to greater advantage than in the room where they welcome their friends. The Englishwoman’s home is her most perfect setting, and those who do not know her in it know her not. She grows into it, by some wonderful instinct of Englishwomen, irradiating it and letting it irradiate her. Her husband may show to more advantage in spacious and crowded scenes, but if she look not well at her own table she will look well nowhere: for in the house that she has made her own, built up and ruled, among the “things” that are so part of herself that she can hardly leave them without a pang, even for the joy of returning to them with rapture, watching the service which answers her will and the faces which reflect her love, an added grace is given to her figure, a brightness to her eyes and a melody to her voice. The homes of England go far to make England herself, they are her mystic source of strength, her pledge of security. Not all are splendid, not all have ease; care knocks daily at the door of too many, as poverty too often dims their lustre: but within them all the same essential quality shines out, of hospitality without ceremony, comfort without extravagance, intercourse without parade; and the Englishwoman with her unostentatious pride, her wistful solicitude, her rather unresponsive mind and her extremely sensitive heart is there at the centre.
Wherefore those misguided women are to be reprobated who, having the means at their disposal to create an English home, use them to produce the illusion of a cosmopolitan hotel. This crime, whether it be due to American influence and example, or only inspired by the mad desire to spend an unnecessary amount of money, must fortunately be rare, if it is unfortunately conspicuous. It is almost impossible to believe that one of English blood who in youth has known any of the spell thrown over the existence of those who share it by an English home can have the misguided courage to banish voluntarily so much that is precious from their life. A home can be rich as well as poor, as complete in a palace as in a cottage, but those who land themselves in great houses which they cannot assimilate, filling them with objects for which they have neither affection nor reverence, creating no atmosphere but that of magnificence, asking for no service but that of well-paid but stingily given obsequiousness, who gather guests as carelessly as the footman shovels coal and disperse them as nonchalantly as the housemaid scatters ashes, having thrown before them all the impersonal luxuries of which a Ritz can boast—those are the people who have forgotten what home, what comfort, what cosiness, what an English hearth, an English gathering round an English fire, an English muffin, an English welcome can be to those who have not lost one of the most desirable sweets of their nationality, how gracious their appeal to the happily present, how warm and soothing their memory to the unwillingly absent.
The inner light, however, the participation in a perfect spirit and a peculiar, fine-flavoured quality, which distinguishes the English home does not, I fear, carry with it an irreproachability in externals. Here the English wife is perhaps less admirable. The temperamental harmony of the home so often is somewhat oddly contrasted with the decorative inharmoniousness of its material objects. Let me hasten to admit that when the Englishwoman has taste in her choice of a setting for herself she has very good taste indeed. She can achieve, at her best, with her mise en scène, her hangings, her furniture, her colours, her pictures, her ornaments, the same successful temperamental fusion that she achieves in her personal relations. She can create the appearance in a room of being continuously and gracefully inhabited, of having come together in all its parts inevitably, not for show but for the plainer usages of life, and yet keep it fresh and unruffled, free from the dusty footmarks of yesterday as from the odour of yesterday’s meals. The drawing-room or sitting-room of an enlightened English woman is neither a salon, awful in its bleak precision, nor simply a feminine boudoir, beflowered and rustling like a robe de chambre to which the entry of a man, even of a husband, takes on the air of a gallantry or an intrusion. It remains sacred to the woman, yet rather as the main sanctuary of the household of which she is the priestess than as the holy of holies; and, in this connection, it is interesting to remark that the English woman, as a rule, has no visible inner sanctuary. She carries it, I suspect, so securely in her own heart that her writing table and her workbox are sufficient to contain its material overflow. This capacity for fusion is naturally most remarkable when it is æsthetic as well as temperamental, but striking success on the side of temperament will carry off a wonderful measure of æsthetic incongruity. There are rooms that I know full of conventional horrors, all photographs and sham Chippendale, easy chairs and uneasy tables, that I would not have changed for the world for the sake of the friend who animates them. Yet it must be confessed that the majority of our women have little taste in the appointments of a house. A long and bad Victorian tradition may to some extent account for this, but it is due also to a want of clearness in balancing the claims of comfort and beauty, and to a certain practical hastiness, a kind of unselfish frugality, which forbids them to spend too much forethought on what is not in itself immediately useful.
Much may be forgiven, no doubt, to those who can afford little, but might they not at least make better use of the space which the builder has given them, not by filling every inch of it, but by letting it do a little more work unhindered? Most English rooms give one the sense of being hemmed in on every side by the furniture and of being at all points afflicted by a multiplicity of objects which seem unable to give any satisfactory explanation of their presence to any interested observer. This mania for overcrowding rooms is not confined to any one stratum of society: the millionairess who encumbers herself with Chinese porcelain, Chelsea figures, brocade cushions and satinwood tables suffers from it just as badly as the greengrocer’s wife whose parlour, with its photographs of all possible relations, its glass vases dangling prisms, its presents from various seasides, its mats, antimacassars and footstools, has hardly a spare inch of space uncovered. We have not much to learn from the Japanese, I believe, but a touch of their unfailing eye for the proper effect of simplicity and congruity would be an excellent addition to the æsthetic equipment of the Englishwoman, just as in dress she owes herself a lesson from the Frenchwoman in the art of completeness in every detail from hat and hair to shoes. In matters of decoration, domestic as well as personal, the Englishwoman is a good improviser but a bad composer.