The Good Englishwoman
Date: 2018-10-06T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Women -- Social conditions; Women -- Great Britain

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Title: The Good Englishwoman

Author: Orlo Williams

Release date: October 6, 2018 [eBook #58041]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOOD ENGLISHWOMAN ***

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

The half title immediately before the title page has been omitted.

THE
GOOD ENGLISHWOMAN

BY
ORLO WILLIAMS, M.C.

Author of “Vie de Boheme: A Patch of Romantic Paris,”
“The Life and Letters of John Rickman,” etc.

LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS LTD.
ST MARTIN’S STREET
MDCCCCXX

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
THE DUNEDIN PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH

TO BETTY
WHEN SHE IS OLDER
WITH THE SUPERFLUOUS INJUNCTION
NOT TO TAKE THIS BOOK
TOO SERIOUSLY

CONTENTS

CHAPTER | PAGE
I. | The Man in the Sidecar | 9
II. | Little Girls | 29
III. | Big Girls | 51
IV. | The English Wife | 76
V. | The English Mother | 102
VI. | The Englishwoman’s Mind | 128
VII. | The Englishwoman’s Manners | 145
VIII. | The Englishwoman and the Arts | 166
IX. | The Englishwoman in Society | 187
X. | The Englishwoman at Work | 204
XI. | The Englishwoman at Play | 219
XII. | The Englishwoman in Parliament | 234

CHAPTER I
A FEW REMARKS FROM THE MAN IN THE SIDECAR

My uncle Joseph, a solitary man, once broke the silence of a country walk by asserting with explosive emphasis: “I don’t see how any man can understand women.” I assented vaguely, and he went on: “How can we ever grasp their point of view, my dear boy, which is so totally different from ours? How can we understand the outlook on life of beings whose instincts, training, purpose, ambitions have so little resemblance to ours? For my part I have given up trying: it is a waste of time. Never let a woman flatter you into thinking that you understand her: she is trying to make you her tool. The Egyptians gave the Sphinx a woman’s face and they were right. Women are so mysterious.” And the south-west wind took up his words and whispered them to the trees, which nodded their heads and waved their branches, rustling “mysterious, mysterious” in all their leaves.

I do not argue with my uncle Joseph, especially on a country walk when the south-west wind is blowing. So I took out my pipe and lit it in spite of the south-west wind, saying to myself: “You silly wind, you silly trees, you know nothing of wisdom. You would catch up anything that my uncle Joseph said and make it seem important.” And the south-west wind solemnly breathed “important” into the ear of a little quarry, in the tone of a ripe family butler. “There is just as much, and just as little, mystery about men and women as there is about you. It depends how much one wants to know. So far as there is any mystery, as a matter of fact, it is much more on the side of men, who are far more incalculable, far more complex than women in their motives and reactions. But men are lazy, you silly old things, and it saves a lot of trouble to invent a mystery and give it up rather than sit down before a problem to study it. Men have thousands of other things to think about besides women, but women, who have not the same variety, are so devilish insistent, that they would keep men thinking about them all their time if they could. So, in self-defence, men have pacified the dear things by calling them mysterious, which is highly flattering, and by giving them up for three-quarters of their days. Uncle Joseph has probably been arguing unsuccessfully with Aunt Georgiana, as he always will, because he never took the trouble to master her mental and emotional processes. But that does not prove the general truth of his proposition. His is just the mind which grows those weeds of everyday thought the seeds of which thoughtless south-west winds blow about as they do the seeds of thistles. Go off and blow those clouds away, you reverberator of commonplaces.”

Throwing up his hands with a shriek of “commonplaces,” the wind flew up over the hill ruffling its hair as he passed.

I think I was quite right not to answer my uncle Joseph and to rebuke the south-west wind. People are so tiresomely fond of uttering generalisations which they do not really believe and on which they never act. It is surely no less foolish to say that women are complete mysteries than to say that one understands them perfectly. Every individual understands a few men and a few women, or life would be impossible. Besides, understanding has its degrees which approach, but never reach, perfection. Samuel Butler somewhere says that the process of love could only be logically concluded by eating the loved one—a coarse way of saying that perfect love would end in complete assimilation: it is the same with the relation of knowledge. Happily love between human beings of opposite sexes can exist without being pushed to this voracious conclusion: so can understanding.

It may be true that women have quicker intuitions than men, though only over a limited range of subjects: but men, on the other hand, are more widely and studiously observant, besides being far more interested in the attainment of truth as the result of observation. Patient induction is, after all, an excellent substitute for brilliant guessing. Women would be extremely disappointed if men really acted on the “mystery” theory and took to thinking or writing as little about woman as the majority think or write about the problem of existence. Nothing, however, will prevent men from talking and thinking about women, and a glance at any bookshelf will prove that they do not always do so in complete ignorance of their subject. Balzac, who was no magician, was not entirely beside the mark in creating the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and Lady Teazle is a recognizable being. George Meredith’s Diana seems to have human substance: Mr Shaw’s Anne in “Man and Superman” and Mr Wells’ Anne Veronica, though founded on masculine observations, are admitted by women to be reasonable creations. The laziness of men, I repeat, and the vanity of women are responsible for the legend of woman’s inviolable mystery. The laws of gravitation were a mystery till Newton used his observation: the mystery still remains, but the experiments of Newton and other physicists has driven it further back. So it is with the human soul. Each one is a mystery, but observation and familiarity can penetrate a number of its veils, leaving only some of the intimate recesses unexplored, and even these recesses are threatened with exposure as our knowledge of telepathy and of the subconscious elements increases.

There are certain experiences of women which a man cannot share, certain aspirations and fears at whose poignancy he can only guess, certain instinctive impulses of which he is not directly conscious: but he can surmount the barriers in some measure by the use of his eyes and ears. If, therefore, he choose to record what his eyes and ears tell him, he is not exceeding the limits of masculine capacity. My uncle Joseph could hardly deplore so unpretentious a line of approach. A mere man may be content to leave Miss Dorothy Richardson and Miss May Sinclair delving gloomily in the jungles of feminine psychology where he would fear to follow them, and yet feel that, without presumption, he may hold some views about his natural complement. The question is what views are right and what are wrong. The war has changed many things, and man’s views about his natural complement among them. Most people, with that useful faculty of oblivion for which we thank Providence, have forgotten what they thought in 1914: if there were such a thing as a mental gramophone which could record their thoughts of five years ago, they would be extremely surprised. Things that seemed absurd then have now been taken for granted, and it is possible that many things taken for granted then may be shown to have become absurd. It has certainly become ridiculous to speak of the “weaker sex,” except in a strictly muscular sense. Women have revealed capacities for organisation and disciplined effort in large bodies, especially in this country, for which the epithet “surprising” is but feeble. Has this fact alone not caused a revolution of ideas? If we have not all accepted it yet, we shall all soon have to accept the principle that, in all but purely physical exertion, men and women have equal potential abilities. The potential ability of women is still in need of development, for they are starting some centuries behind the men, but the inevitable result will be the recognition of “equal opportunity.” To what sociological crisis this may lead, I do not know, and as this is not a sociological treatise, I need not prophesy: but it is an element that must count heavily in any review of old ideas.

Another element which must count is the franchise, which will, of course, be extended in the near future till there is no inequality between the sexes in this respect. Women are political beings with vast possibilities of becoming a political force. They will play a more and more important part in the history of the nation. They will dance a new dance in the ballet of humanity. That recently so familiar figure in a short skirt of khaki and close-fitting cap, seated firmly but not too gracefully astride a motor bicycle rushing with its side-car, and often its male passenger, through the traffic is more than a phenomenon, it is a symbol. The air has whipped her cheeks pink and blown loose a stray lock above her determined eyes. What beauties she has of form or feature are none of them hid. She is all the woman that the world has known, but with a new purpose and a new poise. For good or ill she has entered the machine, and we came to look on her with an indifferent and familiar eye. But what will she do, what will she think, whither will she carry us in that side-car of hers? To all her ancient qualities she has added a new one: object of desire, mother of children, guardian of the hearth, mate of man or virgin saint, she has now another manifestation, that of fellow-combatant; some say, also of adversary. One might almost say that, bending over the handle-bars of her machine, with her body curved and her legs planted firmly on the footboard she mimes the very mark of interrogation which her changes of social posture present. A living query in khaki, she is a challenge to the prophet and the philosopher. One who is neither will let the challenge pass, sure only of one thing—that develop as she may and carry us where she will, the tradition of the good Englishwoman is safe in her keeping.

“The good Englishwoman,” an untranslatable phrase—I beseech our French neighbours not to translate it la bonne anglaise—is an expression which has a corresponding reality. We all know it, in our flesh, in our bones, in our minds and in our souls. The Englishwoman is a definite person to all of us in England: she is not merely the female of the species living in these isles, she has a significance in the world at large. We love her and we honour her, but we do not often reflect what it is that we love and honour. It is a mental occupation which might be more frequently indulged in, were we not such indifferent reflectors. The ingenious Henry Adams, that enlightened but pensive American, whose death has just given us one of the most fascinating books of modern times, spent his whole life in reflecting on his countrymen, with results which are stimulating if not encouraging. He did not spend so much time reflecting on his countrywomen, though he said that he owed more to them than to any man, but his reflections on that head resolved themselves into a question which no Englishman would formulate in similar circumstances. Henry Adams used to invite agreeable and witty people to dine,1 and, at an unexpected moment, to propound to the “brightest” of the women the question: “Why is the American woman a failure?” He meant a failure as a force rather than as an individual, but it was an irritating question all the same, nor is it surprising that it usually drew the answer: “Because the American man is a failure.” The Englishman would be too chivalrous to ask such a question of his guests, but he would not even formulate it. The Englishman, even a considerably sophisticated one, could never think of the Englishwoman as a failure, whether as an individual, a force or an inspiration. He is bound by his experience, his upbringing and his instincts to think of her as a success. Let us then put the question “Why is the Englishwoman a success?” We shall get no very good impromptu answers, nor do I suggest that “Because the Englishman is a success” would be the correct one. We should be the last to take so much credit to ourselves. We are justly proud of the Englishwoman, but what is it of which we are proud? Of all the approving epithets that have been applied to women, which do we choose for our own? Is our pride in their beauty, their brilliance, their courage, their wit, their tact, their energy, their endurance, their sagacity, their skill in handicraft, their devotion to their young, their taste in art and dress, their grace of movement, the sweetness of their speech or the greatness of their minds? Are they only an attraction or an independent force? Are they better mistresses or mothers? When Henry Adams lived in this country as a young man he found that "Englishwomen, from the educational point of view, could give nothing until they approached forty years old. Then they become very interesting—very charming—to the man of fifty." What do we say to such a criticism from so acute a mind?

It is easier to ask questions than to answer them, and I propose to shirk the harder part of the task. Questions cannot be satisfactorily answered for other people, and, where everyone has to make up his or her mind, the mere asking of questions is in itself an aid to their solution. Each reader will answer the questions I have asked in a different way: having done so, he must pass to another consideration. We are proud of the Englishwoman, but we criticise her, again each one of us differently. We must consider the grounds of our criticism. She dresses badly, some will say; her hair is always untidy, say others; foreigners assert that she is proud and stupid; Englishmen, secretly glad that she is proud, try to forget that she is poorly educated. That she walks gracefully, none will say, but as an athlete she is second to none: it would be rash to say that her taste in the home is remarkable, but the atmosphere of home, which not even the most hideous decoration can kill nor the most beautiful create, emanates from her alone. As a housewife she has her glories and her failings. She has not the almost brutish industry of the German nor the avaricious acuteness of the French bourgeoise; she is, in general, neither expert in household industry nor in business. Nevertheless, the Englishman is only really contented in a household presided over and served by Englishwomen, and that is not only because they understand his wants, but because they are genial and simple, neither servile nor imperious, good comrades who do not expect too little or exact too much. Fearless in her actions, the Englishwoman is timid in her ideas: what she may do in the future is incalculable, her possibilities are unbounded; but there seem to be limits to the expansion, except by imitation, of her power of thought. As an administrator she will find no superior, but the political thinkers, as well as the artists, will for the most part come from other nations. These are but random criticisms which, among others, will occur to any mind that reflects upon the subject. They show, once more, that the essence of the Englishwoman or of her goodness is not a simple one. She is therefore an excellent topic for a conversation that should be provocative and stimulating. If I sustain one part, the reader will mentally sustain the other. Let us continue it.

It is hardly necessary to say that any criticism of the Englishwoman in these pages is not an attack upon her: nor is any approbation to be considered a defence. At least I pay this much respect to my uncle Joseph that no woman shall flatter me into defending her: she is more than capable of doing this for herself. But, beyond this, I quite fail to understand what a friend of mine meant when he suggested that I should write in defence of women. “Against whom or against what?” I asked, but his explanation was not lucid. I gathered that he had in mind the complaint sometimes heard that women have ceased to be women in order to become inferior men; that they are getting hard and conceited; that they turn up their noses at the domestic virtues, at marriage and the whole conception of life as duty, and that they think only of having “a good time.” The isolated instances given as grounds for this complaint are, I am convinced, not typical. That women have developed and broken through the far too narrow restrictions of a hundred years ago is only a matter for thankfulness: something is always lost in every adjustment, but more is gained if the adjustment is natural. The flighty girl whom most grumblers of this kind have in mind is only a fraction, and a very imperfect fraction, of the Englishwoman. A far more serious line was taken by Henry Adams towards the end of his life, when he became finally convinced that he was a man of the eighteenth century living in an unfamiliar world whose guiding forces he could not fathom. Musing over the enormous mass of new forces put into the hand of man by the end of the nineteenth century, he wondered what should be the result of so much energy turned over to the use of women, according to the scientific notions of force. He could not write down the equation. The picture of the world that he saw was of man bending eagerly over the steering wheel of a rushing motor car too intent on keeping up a high speed and avoiding accidents to have leisure for any distractions. The old attraction of the woman, one of the most powerful forces of the past, had become a distraction, and woman, no longer able to inspire men, had been forced to follow them. Woman had been set free: as travellers, typists, telephone girls, factory hands, they moved untrammelled in the world. But in what direction were they moving? After the men, said Henry Adams; discarding all the qualities for which men had no longer any interest or pleasure, they too were bending over the steering wheel in the same rapid career. Woman the rebel was now free and there was only one thing left for her to rebel against, maternity, or the inertia of sex, to speak in terms of force. Inertia of sex, the philosopher truly remarked, could not be overcome without extinguishing the race, yet an immense force was working irresistibly to overcome it. What would happen? Henry Adams gave up the riddle, grateful for the illusion that woman alone of all the species was unable to change.

Superficial observers might say that this movement has been accelerated by the war. Hundreds of homes have loosened their ties in the stress of war, thousands of unrebellious daughters have left their narrow walls at the call of patriotism and are now unwilling to return to them. They have learnt to live in the herd with their own sex, and prefer it to living with their own sex in the pen; physical danger and discomfort are no longer bogeys to frighten them; they have been “on their own,” and “on their own” they intend to stay. All very true, no doubt, with the added complication of serious competition between the sexes in a restricted labour market. At the same time, these superficial observers forget that there has been an extraordinary return to the traditional relations between men and women during the war. The inspiration of the woman has never been stronger; once more, after many years, men have fought for their women and the women have regarded their champions with gratitude; women have tended and worked for men in greater numbers and with greater alacrity than ever before in the history of the world; the comradeship between the sexes has grown warmer and stronger without destroying the still more natural relation, for marriage as an institution has enjoyed a season of abnormal popularity. In a country at war, especially in a country invaded, men and women return to the relations of extreme antiquity; the men fight to protect the home and the family, which they alone can do. If they are beaten, the home is destroyed and the women are ravished.

We in England have escaped this last simplification: we have been lucky, but we have lost the directness of the lesson. Nevertheless, it is patent enough to thoughtful people. War has revealed men and women pretty much as they always have been, and the revelation will not be forgotten. The apprehensions of a Henry Adams, after the five years of war, do, in fact, appear to be exaggerated. The futility of all that vast array of mechanical force which so appalled him has been thoroughly exposed: ideas have come to their own again as the only things that matter. In his search for ideas and in their application man can well afford to listen to women: nor will he be backward in doing so. For my part, I cannot see him racing towards the future alone in an evil-looking 120-horse-power car, leaving women dustily in the distance. I prefer to come back to the khaki figure on a motor-bicycle with a man in the side-car, the woman guiding but in the service of the man, the man a passenger but in transit to his work. And the picture is not, as it may seem at first sight, an inversion of older relations, for it has always been the woman who drives. Men can attract women, seduce them, bully them, desert them and hypnotize them, but they cannot drive them; yet a wise woman can drive almost any man. This art is not likely to be lost by the sex in this or any other country, it is therefore important that the driving should be in the right direction.

This is the chief responsibility that the future lays on the Englishwoman: she must have good hands and a clear head, and it would perhaps be well if she could improve her head without spoiling her hands. Man, regarded not as a passenger but as an animal, is spirited but docile. If the women of this country ever made up a corporate mind to secure any desirable end, they could drive the men towards it with ease, provided they chose the right bits and bridles: and those bits and bridles will be the old patterns. It is the women who think there is no need to drive with skill but trust to their power to progress by themselves on their own machines that make the mistake. When it comes to a tug of war they find their inferiority to the stronger animal. But, my dear ladies, there need be no tug-of-war if you use the forces which are already in your hands. You would have got the suffrage long ago if you had all really wanted it. And when you did get it, it was not by assaulting policemen in small sections and chaining a few of yourselves to Cabinet Ministers’ railings; you got it by exercising an old force, the force of admiration. Your services in the war won you the admiration of all Englishmen, and what an Englishman will not do for women he admires cannot be imagined.

The future of England, or more than half of it, lies in your hands. You are the great reproductive force and the great educative force: you can divert the masculine forces to worthy or unworthy ends by your powers of attraction and inspiration. You are as yet inexperienced in the forum, but in every other place of propaganda—the home, the theatre, the lawn, the beach, the garden, the club and even the press—your voice can make itself heard continuously and without interruption. You can approach man when he is at his weakest, when he is no longer encased in his armour of business, but when he is tired, when he wants sympathy, when he is disposed to be affectionate, when he is comfortable, when he is well fed, when his chivalry deprives him of effective repartee, when he must either listen or run ignominiously away. Who can save a man from a woman but another woman? That was why Madame de Warens gave herself to Rousseau. A man is a bore at his peril, but a woman can be tiresome with impunity. Jeanne d’Arc was tiresome, so was Florence Nightingale: but they got their way. A man has only one reason for being listened to, that what he says is intelligible and advantageous to his hearer: unless he is a clergyman in a pulpit he is bound to persuade his audience that his matter possesses these qualities. But you have a hundred other reasons for being listened to. If you have beauty, that is enough; if you are well dressed, that is also enough; if you are beloved, your speech will sound as music; if you are a wife, a mother, a sister, you have an audience of husband, sons, brothers by natural right; if a man has misunderstood you, he will hear you humbly; if you have understood him, your words will be wisdom. You can preach when you pour out tea, and make proselytes at the dinner table; at rising up and lying down the word is with you. With a whisper and a sigh, or a sally and a smile, you can accomplish more than an hour of oratory in Parliament: make a man feel a brute and he is soil for your seed; make him feel wise and he will praise your wit; make him feel a god and he will graciously hear your prayer. Irritate him and your cause is lost, your sex betrayed. What need you more of arts or opportunities? Pray rather for ideas to be given to you. Man is the chief inventor of ideas, and is likely to remain so, but he is a wise inventor who gets woman to stand for his invention. The ideas for which you, as a body, choose to stand will prevail: heaven send that you choose them wisely.

CHAPTER II
LITTLE GIRLS

A la pêche des moules

Je ne veux plus aller, maman.

A la pêche des moules

Je ne veux plus aller.

Les garçons de Marennes

Me prendraient mon panier, maman.

Les garçons de Marennes

Me prendraient mon panier.

Six year-old Barbara stood in her little frock of spotted muslin by the side of the grand piano piping out in a thin treble the words of this old French nursery rhyme. Her eyes were fixed on the illustration by Boutet de Monvel which shows three most unmistakeable gamins following in the wake of a fisher-girl who shrinks with a timid expression from the words which one can almost hear on their naughty little lips. Barbara understood the picture little more than she understood the words of the song and really, I reflected, that was a very good thing. The old French tune is very dainty, but there is in the words that tang of sexuality which the French seem to imbibe with their mother’s milk. “Ils vous font des caresses,” indeed! Six-year-old Barbara has better things to do at her age than to imagine that she is the quarry of the male with all the advantages and disadvantages of this position. Little French girls, for all the superficial strictness of their bringing up, are, apparently, never allowed to look on the world with any other eyes than the eyes of the woman. Our English girls learn to do this quickly enough, but at least they are allowed to begin their lives in perfect innocence. If they pay for this by seldom acquiring the last fine shade of attractive femininity, they gain in the frankness and fearlessness which are the gift of our incomparable English nursery ways. The bloom then fostered never entirely departs, no matter how experience may try it. To the last the English woman remains a sociable being with whom one could potentially set off with on a walking tour, an inconceivable enterprise with a French one or an Italian, who have learnt the grammar of passion and of its imitations young, to be obsessed with it always, while the English girl has been absorbing the grammar of health, of goodfellowship and of games.

I have no doubt of this, that one reason why the Englishwoman is a success is that she starts as a good little English girl, or even a bad one. No little girl in the world is so attractive, not the overdressed bébé, all ribbons and laces, of the French, not the dumpy product of the German, not the pallid bambina of the Italian, and least of all the spoilt little horror of the American. What can equal the creamy satin of her complexion, the sturdy straightness of her limbs, the curl of her hair, the joyous gleam of her eyes? Beauty, it is sad to say, too often leaves them as they grow older, but, when they are little girls, nearly all Englishwomen are not merely pretty, but beautiful. There can be no sight more nearly approaching the ideal of fairyland than Kensington Gardens on a fine morning of spring or summer, when the sun is glinting through the elm trees and the Broad Walk is all alive with hoops and perambulators. Nor is the sight less enchanting by the sea in the later summer, when golden locks tumble in the wind and bare legs twinkle in the waves. Even the little girls of the back street, when they are not too dirty, and of the remote village are beautiful with the glorious quality of British youth, which no competition can take away from us. It is not a fragile beauty nor one of languorous morbidezza, but it has a jovial quality, and breathes the spirit of the opening lines of “L’Allegro,” yet its colours have a delicacy in their brilliance which give it a special grace. Its merits are not all chargeable to us, the dwellers in England. It is due in part to the English climate which we ever curse and ever discuss, in part to the mixture of races which were blended into our admirable composition, and in part to our excellent nursery tradition and our incomparable English nurses.

The English nurse, though we can see that she varies in excellence, is supreme all over the world. We are all of us prone to idealise our nurses, for we only remember the comfort of their presences and are not aware of their acts of negligence or omission, such as giving us comforters to suck—as I am told, a deadly sin—or letting us fall out of perambulators while they were engaged in ambrosial dalliance. We remember with affection their features and their voices, the Moody and Sankey hymns that they used to sing us—diversified, in my own case, with "Ehren on the Rhine"—and the stories which they used to tell. They also used to have fascinating relations who were sometimes allowed to penetrate to us or whom we were allowed to visit. Modern children, I fear, miss these joys, for parents are getting so particular, no doubt quite rightly. Nurses are now trained in special institutions, so that they do all the right things and none of the wrong ones. They are ladylike, oh, so ladylike, and parents obey their commands in fear and trembling. You can see them any day in the Gardens walking along with turned up noses and conscientious faces—the very last thing in baby culture. But let not the Norland nurses take umbrage at these foolish remarks, for their training gives them, as I readily recognise, a superiority to the old-fashioned Nana which cannot be contested.

In any case, whether she be old-or new-fashioned, the English nurse is supreme. She is in demand all over Europe, she condescends to South America, and is worth her weight in gold in those far lands of the Empire where the one drawback to serving the state is that it makes the proper rearing of children an almost insoluble problem. To account for this superiority of the English nurse is not so easy, for her obviously high place in the ranks of good Englishwomen would, one might suppose, not be so obvious to dwellers in foreign lands, whose women, it is to be presumed, are fond enough of children and better acquainted with the climate and constitutions of their own country than a foreigner could be. A desire to implant early in their offspring a colloquial knowledge of our language cannot be the only reason why foreign parents engage English nurses. One of the real reasons is, I am sure, that the English nurse knows how to combine friendliness with discipline: it is a gift recognised in other relations as supremely belonging to the Englishman. Her pride, also, which stands out against undue interference by the parents in her administration of the nursery is another good reason. Nurses in other countries, I suspect, are apt to humour children too much, to spoil them themselves and to allow the parents to outrage to any extent the proved rules and traditions of infant hygiene, to dress them up and make dolls of them instead of treating them as the immature little animals that they are, to take them out and give them unwholesome food at restaurants, and, in general, to involve them too early in the cogs of adult life. It was against this tendency that Doctor Montessori made her protest, the gist of which is that the adult home is not adapted for giving that scope which is necessary for the proper bringing up of children.

It cannot be denied that an unnecessary fad may be made of the Montessori system, especially in this country for which it was not primarily invented, but the soundness of much that her theory contains is incontestable. Yet the English nursery was evolved long before Doctor Montessori, and it is there that most of what is valuable in her theories had already been developed. There is nothing for which the rather wasteful spaciousness of English life, as compared with that of other countries, is so valuable as for the institution of the nursery. We may overburden ourselves with bricks and mortar and insist on having a house where our fellows abroad are content with a flat: we may use two servants where they use one, and seem to them to strain a limited income quite unreasonably by insisting on so large a shell. That this habit is due to our reserve and the Englishman’s intense longing for privacy in domesticity is undeniable, but it is not all. As a matter of fact, the privacy of the Englishman’s home is, in a sense, far less jealously guarded than that of the Frenchman. But besides privacy an Englishman wants a little space before he can feel comfortable, and he knows instinctively that children want space too. To an English child the lot of a French, German or Italian child must seem intolerable. For no single moment, except when in bed, is it out of the sight of its elders’ eyes. It must always be good and always be tidy, or else in the common living rooms of the appartement it becomes an intolerable nuisance. Where can such a child expand, where can it indulge in those solitary dreams and quaint impulsive activities, the essence of whose enjoyment is that they shall be pursued in secrecy, and whose memory has an undying sweetness?

Contrast with this cramped life, even with an intense affection to grace it, more ardent than that tolerant good comradeship of many English parents with their little children, with the life of a child, even in a quite modest household, who from its earliest moments has had a part of the home sacred to it. That room, small or large, was always loved: it was a peaceful haven to return to after the adventures and exhibitions of a less sympathetic external world. There Nana held beneficent sway, but the real inhabitants were the children themselves and the favourite creatures of their play-world. There was room for disorder in the disorderly mood, even though it all had to be cleared up; there noise was not immediately hushed; there one could loll or sprawl without being reproved; there nothing was precious of that preciousness which meant that throwing cushions was a crime and breakage a disaster; there the air was fresh and not laden with the fumes of cigars or heavy perfumes; there meals could be eaten in one’s own time, for, fearful as were the treats of feeding with the grown-ups, it was discouraging to find that one’s efforts at spritely conversation were apt to fall flat, and that one must get finished about the same time as large people with large mouths who were allowed to talk with their mouths full, at the risk of being told that everybody was waiting and that one was not to talk any more. The nursery is the enemy of self-consciousness, it is the home of frankness and a light hearted innocence. No good Englishwoman is ever out of place in a nursery, whether it be hers or another’s: she knows instinctively that there are few places on earth where her virtues are more obvious, and she herself has been a little English girl in that happy nursery land which is the cradle of all good Englishwomen.

But what of the children whose only nursery is the streets and whose only nurse is a sister but little older than themselves? Well, I believe a great many of them have a happy childhood though they are denied some of the privileges of more gently nurtured children. The little girls with tattered frocks who dance so gaily to the wandering barrel organ no more suggest despair than their brothers who, of a Saturday afternoon, come to play noisy cricket and football outside my window. Nevertheless we cannot afford to be complacent about them. We have only to think of winter borne with poor food and decaying boots; of the appeals for comforts from the poorer parishes of the big towns where the children’s wants make education almost a mockery till they can be to some extent filled. An Italian, or was it a Spaniard, once commenting on our country said: “You have a society for the prevention of cruelty to children: we have none in Italy because it is not necessary. No Italian is cruel to children.” This was possibly an exaggeration, for there are fiends in all nations; but it is a blot on our country that such a society should be so vitally necessary to counteract the harm that poverty and ignorance can do to the precious young lives in whom lies the hope of the future. Dirt and ignorance, drink and vice, these are the enemies of little English girls and boys. The very excellence of children’s upbringing in the upper and middle classes make the backwardness lower down all the more a disgrace. It is a disgrace which we all share, for the responsibility for improvement is incumbent on us all. In education alone is there any hope. All honour therefore to those men and women who by the institution of baby clinics and mothers’ classes endeavour to mitigate the evils that should never exist. The spoiling of one Englishwoman would be a grievous thing, yet thousands are spoiled every year by ignorance, overcrowding, and bad example. The first few chapters of William de Morgan’s “Alice for Short” are not the work of a romantic imagination, but of an observant mind. How far is that wretched mite, who lived in a damp cellar with two drunken parents, from the Alice of “Alice in Wonderland,” who is the very soul of England’s childhood! Absolute equality, no matter what some socialists say, can never exist, but the chances for the two Alices should not differ by so vast a measure. The burden of lessening it must be borne by us all, and no sudden remedy will be of any use. One thing which English parents will never allow is the assumption by the state of the duty of bringing up their children. Nurseries wide enough to hold all the children in England might be built with enough English nurses to staff them, clothes might be provided, toys and even food, but it would be in vain. The cry of pauperisation, or tyranny, or militarism, or some other cry would go up, but the root of the matter would be that Alf Smith and Emma his wife, whatever their views might be upon the nationalisation of railways and mines, have no intention of demanding or submitting to the nationalisation of children. The only alternative is to improve the home of Alf Smith and Emma, or at least to see that little Susie and Jane, their daughters, by some means or other, grow up determined to give their children better training, more care, more space, and higher ideals, though not necessarily greater joyousness, than were theirs in early childhood.

But this is not a sociological treatise. There are people enough already who have remedies to suggest for all the evils of the day. Let me return to Lewis Carroll’s Alice who so engagingly dreamed herself into Wonderland. She belonged to a day before any remarkable innovations in children’s education had arrived among us. The kindergarten may have been in existence then, but Montessori and Dalcroze were not heard of. I have sometimes wondered, I must confess, if the admirable principles of these and other educational spell-workers are not too apt to develop into fads and poses. There are people to-day, for instance, who have a passion for making education play and and play education instead of keeping the two healthily separate. Any decent English girl or boy, if not unduly forced, can learn the rudiments of the three Rs without being beguiled into it by an artful series of games with a purpose which have neither the fun of hide-and-seek nor the zest of hunt-the-slipper. Surely it is a fallacy to proceed on the assumption that children’s brains are sluggish and revolt as naturally against systematic instruction as the palate against unpleasant medicine: a child’s brain, on the contrary, is extraordinarily active and pecks about after knowledge as keenly as any farmyard chicken after grains. While we may be thankful that there is a wholesome fear to-day of brutalising young minds by useless drudgery, dull, formal methods and unsympathetic discipline, we should take care to avoid the equally great danger of overstimulating that very delicate and sensitive instrument, a child’s brain, by encouraging it to absorb too much. After all, we do not encourage a child to eat more than it can digest. Besides, a good trainer knows that conscious effort, without which no activity can produce the best results, cannot grow suddenly out of unconscious following of impulse. The period of effort may be as short as you please and be followed by as long periods as you like of pleasant relaxation, but the mind cannot be accustomed too early to struggling against inertia, and a system of education which only follows the path of inertia can hardly be the best one.

When Alice met the Dodo and his companions she proposed a race not a bout of Dalcrozian eurhythmics, and I do not know that she was much to be pitied. Eurhythmics are excellent things in themselves, but mothers who see in them a complete substitute for reading and racing are making a sad mistake. Every Alice, like Lewis Carroll’s heroine, lives in a dream-world which gradually fades away with the trailing “clouds of glory” into reality, but some parents seem to delight in artificially increasing the fairylike mist of unreality, or at least unworldliness, which surrounds the marvellous time of childhood. They try to keep the child in a kind of mental incubator with elaborate stained glass walls, as if the “dome of many coloured glass” under which we are all born were not enough to stain “the white radiance of eternity.” To do this, in my opinion, is unkind to little Alice. She cannot remain the sleeping beauty for ever, and the odds are that it will not be a Prince Charming who arouses her, but some ugly apparition of the everyday for which her experience has in no way prepared her. As a nation we are mightily fond of illusions, and suffer sadly from indulgence in them. We can overcome best by seeing clearly what it is that stands over against us, and dreamy Alice will be none the worse for being allowed to see a little clearly among the many happy fantasies of her days of wonderland. Old Kingsley had his cranks, but he did not wander far from the mark in his “Waterbabies.” Poor little Tom, the sweep’s lad, came up too hard against bitter realities of a certain material kind, from which his creator rescued him by handing him over to the jolly water babies in the river at the bottom of Harthover Fell. But the fairy life and the caresses of Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby could not save Tom from coming up against certain harder spiritual realities, by mastery of which alone could he become a man. His soul was saved by the uncomfortable Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid, tempered by the loving care of little Effie. If you object that he had much better have became a complete fairy or a Peter Pan who never grew up, then I disagree with you, and the fairies do not agree with you either. They would prefer to have the immortal soul in the perishable body like Hans Andersen’s mermaid who gave up her tail to walk among men, though to walk was like treading on sharp knives. Good Englishwomen are such admirable mortals that it would be a thousand pities to make bad fairies of them. Some mothers of little Alices like to think of life as a long episode in the Russian ballet, all gay colour and perfect pose: they forget that Madame Karsavina works more hours in a day to attain this perfection than they do in a week to attain nothing at all. They are unaware of the surprising fact that it is possible to be more than a little ordinary and only moderately ornamental, and yet to be reasonably happy and useful. What I should like to see to-day would be more reality in the nursery and more dreams in the board school.

If more reality is wanted in the nursery, it is still more wanted in the schoolroom, though fortunately there is a great deal more there now than in the day of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. She, if you remember, in a moment of bewilderment reflected that she could answer some of Mangnall’s questions. You will only find Mangnall’s questions to-day in some dusty bookshelf of a country inn with the maiden name of a portly landlady in faded ink upon the flyleaf. It was simply a portable dictionary of elementary and usually inaccurate knowledge, dished up with most undesirably stuffy maxims, to be learned by rote and not to be understood at all. It could only convey the impression that the aim of lessons was to imbibe a certain quantity of dry facts without the slightest connection and forming no pathway to any connected presentation of reality. The old methods of the Misses Pinkerton’s academy and the old bogey-morality and dragon-instruction of the Goodchild family were still thriving when Alice passed into the looking-glass. The aim of that education was not to make a child an intelligent being or to bring out its natural talents by careful nurture, but, especially if it was a girl, to produce a docile parrot which could read, write and do sums, without asking too many inconvenient questions. To the arch priests and priestesses of that dead formula the idea of a child’s having tastes would have been a dreadful heresy: a child, at all events a girl, had no business with such subversive things. Her business was to acquire humility, deportment and a use of the globes, in fine to learn the things, and those only, which “a lady should know.”

Schools and governesses are better now, but some of the old confusions still hover round the education of a girl. Nowadays everybody airs his views about the public schools in print, but there is a certain element of simplicity in a boy’s education: in most cases, after all, he has got to be prepared for a definite profession. There is no definite profession for which little Alice is to be prepared, unless she takes the reins into her own hands in time, as some of our older Alices are learning to do. There is still the impression abroad, even among the wage-earning classes, that, until it is more or less discernible whether and what she is going to marry, it does not matter very much what she learns or what she does, provided that she keeps out of mischief. In those families, especially, where in the last resort it is not necessary for the daughters to earn their living in the labour market, this policy of drift is most obvious. A little French, a little music, a little history, a little recitation of approved poets—that is the recipe for the education of a “nice, refined girl.” As if any girl worth her salt would be content with a diet of spoon feeding. It is only those who have never learnt anything that imagine any useful learning to be possible without the desire to know more than it was good for you to be taught. The child’s mind is a bursting reservoir of energy, and it is hard that it should be wasted by being drained to make imitation waterfalls in an artificial garden. It usually shows a tendency to flow in some definite direction: why, in Heaven’s name, should it be diverted?

The two great needs in education are enthusiasm and personality, enthusiasm in the pupil and personality in the teacher. Personality is the great wizard who can produce water from stones and gold mines from sand. It would be better to learn skittles from a great man than all the graces in the world from a mere practitioner of knowledge. No system is bad enough to withstand the electric influence of personality, and none is so good that it will succeed if there is no personality to give it life. We have strong characters in England: it is a matter in which we flatter ourselves that we are not behind the rest of the world: yet so often our schoolmasters and schoolmistresses seem to be inanimate beings, mere machines for hearing lessons, setting papers and giving marks. Those to whom learning has been a perfunctory business bear the signs of it all their lives. There are too many of them, and the majority of them are women. They are the people who care to know nothing for its own sake; they regard the suggestion that one could read any book but a light novel as humorous; there is no subject that they can discuss intelligently or with any sign of original reflection. Where they so far rouse themselves as to express views, the views will be nothing but the expression of their appetites, desires and prejudices given by the particular penny paper which they read. They have no interests outside housekeeping, and they don’t take the trouble to do even that scientifically. One sees them in shoals in teashops and on beaches, with their cheap novel in their hand and a vaguely discontented look upon their faces. Their discontent is not surprising, for how can anyone be contented who has never taken a lively interest in anything but food and clothing? If little Alice’s mother lets her become as one of these she is cruelly betraying a sacred trust: she is doing her best to turn the living thing to which she gave birth into a dead one. If she has not the personality herself to turn Alice’s enthusiasms, about which there will be no doubt at all, to good account, then let her have the sense to look for somebody who has.

Little Alice before long will probably make clear what she wants to learn: if so, she may as well learn it. Nobody has yet formulated the end of education with final completeness: it is largely a matter of acquiring good habits and an internal harmony which ensure smooth and profitable running when the engine is competent to run by itself. It certainly does not matter much what is learnt, provided that it is learned thoroughly and with eagerness. Some people insist that mastery of tools is the ideal of education: but what are little Alice’s tools? They are partly physical, partly emotional and partly intellectual: her great charm, in contrast to her sisters in Latin countries and in America, is that she is not encouraged to learn the use of her physical attractions and feminine emotions too early. Mastery of tools and mastery of self are formulas better applicable to the maturer education of the young man. The tools of a woman are hardly suitable in the hands of a little girl, whose older self is still to be. If I were to invent a formula for little Alice it would be something like “happiness, eagerness and enthusiasm.” If she has these while she is young, misery, apathy and boredom are not likely to be hers when she is older.

Barbara has finished her song, and has settled down to give the Teddy Bear a teaparty. There she sits, the acutest judge and observer of her father in all the world. She is gathering memories which will never leave her, as I gathered them from my father—the smell of his shaving soap in the morning, the scratch of his rougher cheek in the good-night kiss, the feel of his clothes, the tones of his voice in pleasure and in anger, his difficult standard of good manners, his awful moments of irritation when he was almost too dreadful to look on and his voice was like the rumbling of an earthquake, his little mysterious jokes with my mother at which I laughed without in the least knowing why, the way in which he could be humoured, the hush that was expected when he was said to be tired or busy, his real but diffident sympathy in tragedies, the jolly way he took sovereigns out of his waistcoat pocket, his one glorious outburst when bicycling against the driver of an obstructive dray, the radiance shed by his approval and the gloom of his, as I now suspect, often legendary displeasure, his never failing urbanity, of a consistency almost comic, amid the extemporary and the haphazard. A sensitive plate is now taking in my own foibles and mannerisms. When in after years that plate is fully developed and the results are contemplated with amused commiseration, I shall be content if there is no injured comment on the chance given to the owner and developer of that plate of becoming what she ought to be, an Englishwoman of the best kind.

CHAPTER III
BIG GIRLS

When I was about nine years old my cousins took me to an entertainment at the girls’ school which all but one of them had lately left. Never shall I forget the awkward fear with which I faced a room full of mature and stately beings for whose benefit the conjurer had been summoned. I wondered how he would dare to conjure lightly before an assembly of so many incarnations of Minerva. There was Olympian superiority upon their brows and their flowing locks were surely ambrosial. The one relief was that to them, apparently, I did not exist, though some younger sprites in shorter skirts giggled embarrassingly when I tripped over a chair. Their accomplishments, too, were miraculous; they played such runs upon the piano and the violin, they recited with such aplomb “The Jackdaw of Rheims,” they even did a German play of which, as I was told many years later by my cousin, none of them understood a word. The goddesses graciously unbent when the conjurer was pleased to be facetious and miraculous after the manner of his kind. He delighted me too, that conjurer, but he was the cause, none the less, of my greater humiliation. He needed an accomplice, or shall we say a butt, upon the stage, and, basely taking advantage of my solitary masculinity, he called me out. The Minervas could no longer ignore my miserable existence. There I was exposed to their censorious gaze, a thing in breeches, a most obvious compound of “toads and snails and puppy dogs’ tails,” placed in one of the less dignified positions of this world with no fellow to support me. I held things for the conjurer and they disappeared, I tied knots which were as water, money issued from my nose and perspiration from my forehead. I had to assure the goddesses that I saw no deception, as if all the assurance to be found in that room was not on their side rather than on mine: I even had to pronounce the ridiculous word “Abracadabra” at the critical moment of a more than usually mystifying illusion. Finally I had to hold a glass of water covered with a silk handkerchief. To my inconsolable despair I dropped the glass, which broke with a hideous crash upon the stage. Blushing scarlet and covered with confusion I was invited to make way for “one of the young ladies who no doubt had a steadier hand than a dissipated young man.” I slunk away into obscurity, hating all conjurers and fearing all big girls more than ever.

“Maud is not yet seventeen

But she is tall and stately”

No lines by an English poet have better crystallised the impression of English womanhood at the moment of its emergence from the chrysalis. The impression, of course, is enormously heightened when it is conveyed in the mass, as in a ceremony at a girls’ school or the sight of the same school progressing formally to church en crocodile. A boy, in the glory of his physical strength and agility, may find it easy to forget the stateliness of one or two, as I did that of my cousins, but no boy exists who would not quail before a combined manifestation.

And yet what were these but flappers, a word which no longer needs inverted commas? It is a typically English product, that quintessence of pertness and levity, that preposterous imitation and caricature of womanhood, that graceless state of pigtaildom, that compound of vanity, abandon, chatter and chocolates, that innocent rakishness, that perverse chastity, that boundless but unconcentrated desire, that rapt satisfaction with the present, that gorgeous hopefulness of the future, that delight to the eye, that distress to the ear; those rosebuds in boys’ buttonholes, those thorns in mothers’ sides, those blankets of intelligent conversation, those pitchers with capacious ears, those graceful runners and hideous walkers, those creatures of soft cheeks, shy souls and shameless hearts, the English flappers. The rise of this phenomenon to a precocious but perfectly definite position in society has been extremely rapid. Half of the present generation in England can remember when flappers were not, and there is no sign in previous history that they were ever intended to be. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance women became wives so early that there was no time for flapperdom, yet any flapper of to-day has more independence than the wife of many a knight who flaunted on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The Puritans did not encourage precocity in young women, and as for the Merry Monarch, there is no record that he paid attentions to ladies who were not yet out. The formal eighteenth century kept young ladies very much “in” till they were married, and this perhaps over-repressive attitude continued well into the Victorian age. The flapper, it must be remembered, is not merely a young woman; if she were no more, she would find her parallel in many a heroine of history or fiction. She is more than young, she is immature: she trades upon her immaturity, using it as a temptation, a protection and an excuse. Her hair is down and her skirts are up—though not much more up to-day, I fear, than those of her aunts—and her imitations of maturity are more in the domain of conduct than of dress or deportment. Until the other day this cheerful being did not exist. Who can imagine Miss Bennet or Emma Woodhouse as flappers? What flapper entered the ken of Dickens or Thackeray or George Meredith, except as a monstrosity? Even Henry James was too early for the flapper, with all his tremendous apparatus of modernity. He touched on some problems of flapperdom in “The Awkward Age” it is true, but the unfortunate Nanda was very much “out” when she began so disconcertingly to complicate the existence of her not too admirable mother. No, the flapper suddenly burst upon an amazed nineteenth century at the moment of its exit in an odour of decadence and Yellow Bookery—how Maudle and Postlethwaite would have hated her!—and rode in triumphantly on the first wave-crest of the twentieth century, a callow Venus with her hands on her hips and her tongue in her cheek.

At present the flapper is English entirely, except in so far as she is also American, and of her mode of existence in that mighty country in which the pretensions of all the female sex are allowed to be infinite and where Ella Wheeler Willcox played Corinna in her teens I am not competent to speak. At what age the mantle of bright omnipotence is allowed to be put on with the petticoat is hidden from me. At all events the English flapper is alone in Europe. In Germany, I imagine, her counterpart is still the unwieldy “Backfisch,” with her plait of coarse light hair and her bob of salutation. She is not a creature of much account: professors feed her mind with knowledge and she feeds her body with chocolate and cream cakes. In France, the most progressive of all Latin countries, the “jeune fille” is still not emancipated,2 in spite of Mademoiselle Lenglen, who has won her way in a censorious world with a tennis racquet. Emancipation is, after all, the note of the flapper: she gives no impression of being held in trust. The “jeune fille” is very much held in trust, a trust which even the most predatory Frenchman will respect. If she is allowed at all to fly, it is as a balloon or a kite at the end of string securely tied to her mother’s apron-strings. She is held in trust, of course, for marriage, an affair which in England is becoming more and more haphazard. For us, whatever other qualities marriage may have—and these may be exquisite—it must, at the least, promise a little diversion. The French, on the contrary, are ready, if need be, to follow Mrs Malaprop’s maxim of beginning with a little aversion. To us, according to our natures, marriage may be primarily a sacrament, an enchantment, or a consummation, but to the French it is essentially an alliance, a solemn and stately word which they properly apply to the wedding ring. With this in prospect little kites must not be allowed to fly too high, nor to become unconscious of the string. They may aspire to greater freedom as much as they please, since it will inevitably come; their curiosities about that free state are not discouraged nor are the arts and graces by which they will shape the most triumphant course untrammelled forgotten; and the joys to which they may attain are kept before them to console them for what they must renounce in the probationary stage. The “jeune fille” may not walk the street of a town alone, after a dance she is returned as a matter of course to her mother, she is not taken out by her boys to dine at restaurants and witness musical comedies from stalls; she does not puff about the country on a motor bicycle nor flash about in the car with the chauffeur for sole cavalier; she does not make a habitual fourth at bridge nor join the lads at snooker when Mama has gone to bed. Indeed, so long as there is any alliance in prospect the French mama never goes to bed, speaking figuratively: she is conscious of the kite-string even in the majesty of her peignoir. The English mama, if she is sensible, takes her normal night’s rest with the addition, possibly, of a nap after lunch. She is not anxious, for, if there is one virtue in the flapper, it is her well-developed faculty of looking after herself.

I permit myself perhaps to speak of the young lady with a certain levity of which she would not approve, for she is apt to take herself pretty seriously, though rather as an individual than as an institution. “My dear,” I heard one say the other day, “I have just taken up theosophy: it’s too thrilling and wonderful. You can’t think what a difference it has made to me.” Her friend, I trust, did not echo my own private reflection that the difference was not yet visible externally, though possibly to the discerning eye her aura had changed colour slightly. Yet the levity, regrettable though it may be, is not in the least to be taken as a cloak for complete disapproval, however negligible such disapproval might be to its objects: it is no more than a trifling insistence—tasteless of course—on the element of comedy that twinkles round this estimable section of feminine society. I respect the flapper, in the first place, because she is on the verge of becoming the young Englishwoman than whom there is no finer creature of her kind. Imperfectly educated she certainly is; ignorance is hers without any mitigating desire for knowledge; artistically she is not successful, nor intellectually; even in dress she has yet to learn, if she ever will, the two advantages of originality and perfect finish: but all this seems almost petty when one considers how magnificent she is as a being, how well made, how frank and generous, how full of energy, how good a comrade, how pleasant a companion. These are the basic virtues of the young Englishwoman, and the flapper has them all. The worst that can be said of her, perhaps, is that she exaggerates certain characteristic shortcomings of her sex in England without contributing any particularly striking grace of her own in compensation. Is there loudness and vulgarity about, then she is conspicuously noisy; is there powder on the nose and carmine upon the lips, then her nose and lips are especially ridiculous; is there a shrill tone, the highest note will be a flapper’s; is there a tendency for the eye to rove, it will be particularly unsuitable in a cheeky orb peeping from a pigtailed head. Her elemental good qualities, at which she would be inclined to turn up her nose, are her principal jewels together with a certain lithe and tempting picturesqueness which is all her own: she is to be loved, at all events, by the discriminating for her promise rather than for her performance and for her very brilliant testimony to the excellence of a social system which encourages and approves this independence in the young. It may be said that the flapper in general is too eager to discount, as she usually does, the pleasures of maturity, but probably this is better for her, in the present and in the future, than to be kept in a state of impatient yearning, of greedy Sehnsucht, which checks the naturally charming spontaneity of her development. In fact, flappers are good and desirable things provided that they do not become too obvious.

There is a certain reason for insistence on this excellent proviso. It may seem paradoxical to argue that the most modern tendency to blur the line of demarcation between the flapper and her elders is a sign of over-obviousness on the part of the former. This line, externally at all events, used to be firmly marked, by the hair on the brow and the skirt about the knee: but now the general cult, bobbed head and the free knee, has made this double line delusive. Short of a study of census returns it would be difficult to tell where the flapper ends and the woman begins. And this confusion—which is my point—does not mean the elimination of the flapper as a separate identity, but rather a prolongation of the flapper standard beyond its legitimate limits. It argues, to my mind, a deplorable abandonment of her own standard on the part of the older woman. Herrick could no longer apostrophise in ecstasy the “sweet liquefaction of her clothes” when he saw his Julia striding along in a woollen jumper and a short tweed skirt with a pudding basin pressed down over her mediæval bob. Woman’s gift is to give line and animation to drapery, to oppose graciousness of the curve to the masculine rectilinear, and to contrast the poetry of motion with the prose of mere movement. Why is it decreed to-day that all women should

By hook or crook
Contrive to look
Both angular and flat—

to quote the song from Patience? Only a century ago Englishwomen had adorably drooping shoulders and soft arms; their contours were well rounded or they were miserable. To-day it is the round who are miserable. So marked a physical change is more than accident: it is a symptom of some constitutional or systematic change, and it has let the flapper in as a concrete symbol of the revolution. Personally I could welcome the return of a measure of rotundity, both in form and manner, not the too doughy rotundity of, say, an Amelia Sedley, but something more in the manner of George du Maurier’s drawings in Punch of Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns and the statuesque ladies who attended her “at homes.” To George du Maurier that was the English type, and his admiration of it is clear in every line. He idealised possibly, but such idealism does him artistically infinite credit. Angularity, for him, was only the price paid in lost charm for intellect, as in his three Miss Bilderbogies: only extreme cleverness, in his view, could excuse such absence of contour in a woman, and even then the excuse would have to be explicitly made with some humility. Where has it all gone, that amplitude, that richness that was present to his eyes and fed his imagination? One would say that there must have been a shortage of cream somewhere to have so encouraged the Bilderbogie strain and repressed the Ponsonby de Tomkyns. It may have been that there was too much cream in the Ponsonby de Tomkyns stratum and too little elsewhere, an error now remedied by a more even distribution. Let us hope so, in the expectation that the traditional creaminess of things English may again become visible in the community. English girls were once compared to rosebuds and cream: the rose is still there, and no nation can compete with it, but when it comes to a question of cream, the best that the average flapper can boast in her composition is a fairly stiff admixture of milk and soda.

I sometimes wonder if there is anything left for the flapper to look forward to when she comes out, since this formality is still talked of. Possibly there are still some functions closed to her, but they can be few. She is to be found at dinner parties and dances, she has men friends to stand her theatres and chocolates, she can flirt to the utmost limit, and unless she habitually wears a pigtail it is ten to one that nobody will notice anything different in the dressing of her hair. She will be forced to assume, possibly, a greater responsibility, but that is a penalty rather than a pleasure. Let us at any rate give her the credit of reaching consciously a greater seriousness of outlook whether she has to fend for herself or not. Frivolity in its worst sense is not a fault of English girls. Fond as they are of enjoyment and unimaginative as they are in their pleasures, they all take life with a measure of earnestness. The war gave to them, or to many of them, an object for their earnestness of which they had hitherto felt the want. Their seizure of the opportunity does them infinite credit. It would be absurd to suppose that their motives were purely altruistic, for women as a whole are not moved to action by abstract ideas. They saw that there were things to be done and that it might be rather fun to do them. It would need an eloquent pen to tell adequately how well they did them, and the fact that they got some fun out of it, even perhaps more than they expected, can in no way diminish our approbation. I confess that the magnificent services of English girls during the war have moved me deeply, and I cannot find it in me to sympathise with those who are inclined to consider the whole thing rather regrettable, unsettling to the girls and likely to provoke antagonisms when, if ever, we return to peaceful conditions. Surely this is a petty point of view. As a matter of national pride their performance takes on quite another aspect. The women of England were the only ones in the world who served in thousands anywhere and everywhere. Other nations could not get over their prejudices so easily, or only in a few cases. Botchkareva, it is true, organised a Battalion of Death in which Russian women actually fought, but the serving Englishwomen were an army. Also, there was nothing strained about it, nothing unnatural, as it would have been in a Latin nation. Here was a vindication of that British prudery and hypocrisy which other nations like to mock at. Our freedom of intercourse, our comradeship of the sexes, which no other people understands, was triumphantly justified in the test of war. The triumph belongs chiefly to the women: it showed the sterling worth of their essential qualities, independence, fearless capability, untiring energy, cheerfulness under difficulty and coolness in danger. The best of them could lead as well as work, and where they led, as in those Serbian hospitals, men worshipped them, glorifying the country that could produce such women. So when I see, or used to see, a pert little figure in khaki carrying its little powdered nose in the air and being a little silly, I tried to remember that these were superficial defects not gravely detrimental to the value of the article. But they can be so dreadfully and exasperatingly silly, can they not? Even Sister Anne, of Number —— General Hospital, who took me out to tea at Aboukir Bay and gave me a Government hot water bottle as a souvenir, was a little silly, but she was a genuine, jolly being all the same who did her country more credit than she was probably aware of.

This excursus into the topic of the war was really unpremeditated, but, after all, it was almost impossible to leave it out in speaking of the English girl. To omit to record that which is eminently worthy of praise, simply because it has been praised before, besides being ungenerous in a critic, accentuates his strictures beyond his intention. No doubt Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns and her age would have responded with equal enthusiasm, but the greater energy and athleticism which succeeded her generation did much to increase the effectiveness of the response when it was actually called for. And now peace is before us again, with much speculation about the future of women. So far as the English girl is concerned, be she flapper or no, I see no reason why she should deteriorate with the disappearance of stress, especially as the condition of modern society for many years to come seems likely to demand strenuous natures.

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.

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.

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.

A boy of six whom once I knew, when his mother prepared to teach him to read, countered her with the grave announcement that, in his opinion, “mothers were not meant to teach.” It is a more reasonable view than appears at first sight, at all events for English children. To them the combination of intense love and a desire to teach is too overwhelming: they prefer a more dispassionate interest in a matter which seems to them one in which all emotion may conveniently be avoided. It is too much at an immature age to be called on to respond to an intellectual and an emotional stimulus combined, and it is unfair from a child’s point of view to be made to feel that laziness or inaccuracy, periodical faults in all of us, are not only faults but failures in devotion towards those for whom devotion is a natural habit. Most English parents, though after some ineffectual struggles against this natural reluctance, acquiesce in the truth of it. The time of the Goodchilds has gone by, and education has been much improved. The acquiescence—to tell the truth—is apt to go too far, and the process of education is left to machines called teachers without any interest at all on the part of the parents. The English mother, I think, is little preoccupied about education. To her it is only one of the many processes of equipment necessary for a child in its passage to an age of discretion—a more elaborate process for boys than for girls, but likely to bring more tangible results. About material and physical well-being she will occupy herself endlessly, to the dismay of masters and matrons, but she will pay comparatively small attention to the development of an intellect, unless her own is exceptionally well developed, in comparison to the development of muscle and character. If her children respond feebly to the teaching they are given, she will resign herself, not without a secret sympathy for them, to having stupid children, but without inquiring whether possibly there is some psychological trouble at the bottom of this failure, which a new adjustment and fresh guidance might overcome: if, on the other hand, the response is conspicuously successful, she rather wistfully regards the soaring of their young intellects beyond her ken, wondering “how she came to have such clever children.”

Cleverness is a horrible word, much overworked in England: it may mean nothing but an aptitude for passing examinations with credit. She is certainly right to regard this aptitude as unimportant, but she is wrong where so often she remains indifferent while a really promising mind is slowly ruined by unsuitable teaching or unsuitable food. Few English mothers—I suspect the French of surpassing them here—manage to keep their children’s confidence in this matter. The play-hours and the friendships of school are inexhaustible subjects of conversation, but lessons quickly come under the head of things not talked about, except in a jocular way or in passing, rather embarrassed, reference. Even the best of mothers is at a disadvantage here, at least where a son is concerned, a fact cleverly illustrated in Mr Arnold Lunn’s novel “Loose Ends.” New interests, new views expressed by new human beings seize hold of him with violence, bursting in on the old close community of two, and leaving the more stable of the couple out in the cold, irritatingly faced with inability to “keep up,” though conscious all the while of no difficulty in keeping up anywhere else in the wide world. Here again, it is often her very passion which throws her out of the race with less devoted rivals: boys and girls can be intellectually as well as morally tiresome, and they feel the need for being able to indulge their tiresomeness without giving pain. As one of my friends put it: “I never talk about these things at home, it always leads to ‘Grief’.” Good schoolmasters and all schoolboys know that “grief” is fatal in the realm of ideas. Few parents can repress ‘grief’ with success, and they must pay the penalty for their over-lively concern. Their only remedy, unless they are content to relapse in their children’s eyes into dear old back numbers, is to wait till the ferment has settled down: “grief” will then neither be so frequent nor so difficult to overcome.

It is the mother more than the father who makes, and who is, the home. Her influence upon her children is incalculable, but surely it is going a little too far, especially in the case of boys, to say that during the time of their education they should not leave home or lose the influence of home. During the controversy over Mr Alec Waugh’s “Loom of Youth,” Sir Sydney Olivier wrote to the Nation a letter in which were these words:

“No parent should be allowed to send his boy to school in a boarding house without special excuse any more than to send him to a private lunatic asylum.”

This very dogmatic assertion leaves out of account one of what seem to be the undisputed advantages of public school education, the advantage of living in an orderly and disciplined community for a greater part of the years of later boyhood. There will always be exceptional boys to whom this life is not appropriate, but for the majority of boys it is both beneficial and enjoyable. It might even be said that the majority of boys demand it. Even the holders of opposite views agree that it is an infinitely better system for boys from inadequate homes than the day school. In my opinion, the definition of an inadequate home would be a very wide one, and likely to remain so in spite of all possible advances in the way of greater social equality and uniformity. The Montessori system is based on the belief that the home, which is organised for the convenience of its adult inhabitants, cannot give the requisite attention and liberty to children, who are slow in action, capricious and inexperienced: home life to young children, in this view, is both too protective and too restrictive. For different reasons there is a case to be made out for holding that, as a rule, the home is not properly organised for the advantage, out of school hours, of growing boys between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. All parents are naturally anxious to prepare their children for life in the world, to enlighten them in their difficulties and aid the opening of their minds, but it remains sadly true that most of them find their incapability of fulfilling this natural function only too soon. As a well known man of letters said to me recently: “Yes, the boys have got to go to school. My wife and I started with all sorts of jolly ideas about keeping them at home and educating them ourselves. But we found it was no good. They said they wanted to go to school, and so they must.”

As I said above, there is something antipathetic to the young in learning from those whom they love: they would rather be controlled and taught by those for whom they have no primary affection. Besides, it must be confessed that parents have other shortcomings, all the shortcomings of varied human nature, which are perfectly patent to the uncanny acuteness of children. The father and mother whose influence during the critical years of childhood and adolescence would be nothing but good are extremely rare. Parents, for one thing, can so seldom hit the mean between taking too much interest and too little. Indifference means either undue indulgence or undue restriction; too great interest leads either to jealousy of other influences, to hampering independence, to surrounding a boy with a close atmosphere of emotion from which he would give anything to get away. Boys like to be treated calmly, to be rewarded calmly and to be punished calmly: they are unemotional creatures whom school suits well in this respect. The continued society of ideal parents may be ideal for a boy, but where parents fall short of the ideal, it is questionable whether their continued society is a good thing: and they may be sure that their lapses will be judged by their children with all the cruelty of innocence and ignorance.

Holidays, to which the boys come back full of affection and pleasant anticipation, are quite long enough to give the good mother and father all the chance they need if they will only take it, to say nothing of the influence of letters. How different is the eagerness with which at a boarding school a boy looks for the letters bearing the well known handwriting of his mother to the apathy with which any home bred boy must regard the daily prospect of banalities over the family tea-table! As a matter of fact, the opportunities of the holidays are too often neglected. It is then that enthusiasm may be reinforced and new interests aroused to counteract the routine and convention which is the chief fault of our schools to-day. Too many parents think their duties are limited then to giving their children enjoyment, forgetting that theirs is the responsibility for sending their boys back to school not one whit more developed or improved than when they left its gates some weeks earlier. This very failure shows the difficulty of home education: the boarding school is organised purely for the advantage of the boys, while in the home the convenience of the parents must be competitive, even where it is not paramount. The interests of young and old cannot possibly entirely coincide, and it would be foolish for parents who, after all, have their own lives to lead and their own developments to be pursued, to sacrifice their time and their arrangements altogether for the sake of their children. To what lengths an English mother will go in this direction many a son will confess, remembering his own insensibility at the moment: but it would be bad that she should be tempted to go too far or be forced, on the other hand, into a habit of indifference through having continually to restrain her natural impulse of devotion in the general interests of the whole household.

Another argument for entirely home education is the moral one. It is one of the most powerful in its appeal to mothers, to whom the idea of adolescent impurity is revolting. Personally, I cannot see any reason for supposing that the temptations of an adolescent male, which are absolutely inevitable, will be any less violent at home than at school. The mother of a French boy certainly does not believe that they are, and does not act on that assumption. So far as strength to resist temptations goes, the influence of judicious parents on boys at school is, as I know perfectly well, quite as strong and quite as successful as it could have been if the boys had never left their sight. Besides, there are few mothers who can resist a kind of morbid spying on their children as they first come into contact with physical experience of their sex. Nothing could possibly be more irritating for a boy, and it may lead him into foolishness out of more defiance and desperation. It is a thorny time for both parties to the relationship, and happy are those mothers and sons who come out of it with mutual love and respect undiminished. Sir Sydney Olivier, to judge from another passage in the letter already referred to, would like the morals of boys to be saved and their sentimental education completed by love affairs with mature females. Such affairs are, no doubt, extremely valuable in certain cases. As Rousseau said in his Confessions: “Il est certain que les entretiens intéressants et sensés d’une femme de mérite sont plus propres à former un jeune homme que toute la pédantesque philosophie des livres.” But he also allowed still closer relations with Madame de Warens to be included in his own scheme of development. It is to be doubted if England is suited to this form of education. Certainly few English mothers would regard without intense suspicion the ideal and elderly Egeria, who is to absorb usefully and harmlessly all the superfluous sentimental energy of their beloved son. Their hearts are so terribly vulnerable in this respect, poor things, for they hate physical truths and love sentimental pruderies. Only the best of them really look things in the face and say to their boys: “Look here, I know how things are. You are growing up and I sympathise deeply with all your feelings and temptations. I have always tried to teach you that the greatest things, and the only things truly valuable, are love and beauty and truth. I think you have learnt what I meant to teach you, and now you will have to begin to put it to the test. I shall trust you to do nothing unworthy. I shall not ask you questions or spy upon you. But, whatever you do, remember there is nobody in the world more ready to hear your troubles or to help you than your mother. That is what mothers are for, even if they suffer in the process. I know you will not make me suffer willingly: but I would rather suffer anything than feel that you were ashamed to turn to me for help and sympathy in any difficulty.” Such confidence breeds strength, the strength in which every good English home should abound. And it must come from that centre of the home—the mother.

The relation of mother and son is essentially different from that of mother and daughter; or rather, the son and the daughter stand in different relations to the home. Also the needs of the two sexes during their growth are different. The natural independence of a girl at the school age is smaller than that of the boy, so that, taking all these things into consideration, there is not the same acuteness about the question of her leaving home during her education. The far greater concentration and the far smaller degree of freedom in most girls’ schools, when compared with the public schools for boys, which are complete little worlds in themselves, limit the advantages which they give to compensate for any loss of home influence. Further, women are not, like men, naturally gregarious, and those who are not suited for living in a herd profit little from being placed in it. Certainly there are difficulties of adjustment to be overcome if girls remain entirely at home, but the adjustment is easier than it is for boys, who are so expansive in their energies and want such a deal of room for their exuberant vitalities. Besides, it is at the “awkward age” that a girl, however great a complication she may then become in the life of her parents, is most dependent on the help and support of her mother. Even the most brazen flapper, so I have been told, endures agonies at her first entry into society as one of its fully fledged members. In fine, a girl’s education may very well take place at home, and I support this theory by the fact that, whereas a home-bred boy is always distinguishable from one who has had the advantages of a public school, it is almost impossible to tell whether a girl has been to a boarding school or not, except where she exhibits an exaggerated hoydenism which is one of the less favourable marks of girls’ boarding schools.

The real crux for mothers and daughters comes after this age is past, unless a girl is very early married. It is then that she feels the keen craving for independence and chafes against the restraint of home life. Her degree of satisfaction at her lot when she reaches this stage is one test of the judiciousness of her parents in her whole early upbringing and of their perception how far they can go towards meeting her natural craving for freedom and responsibility. The first question is whether Mary and Emily are going to have a definite occupation or not. Too often before the war it was certain that they were not, but were going to idle away their days reading novels, playing tennis and munching chocolates in cinemas until some admirer plucked them from their peaceful flowerbed. Even when they wanted to do something real and satisfying, their wish was looked on as something foolish and hysterical, not to be tolerated for an instant in a well-conducted family. Certainly Mary and Emily had no excuse for leaving home if they had nothing to leave it for, but to keep young Englishwomen idle perforce so as to curb their independence is a dangerous and a cruel game. Also it leads to an infinity of bickering in the family. The war has, luckily, knocked some sense into people’s heads on the subject of occupations for women. Mary and Emily have tasted the pleasure of regular work and the joy of leisure earned by toil. They are not going to forget it, and the new direction given to their energies is going to serve for the girls of generations to come after them.

But the fact of a regular occupation does not settle all the vexed questions of daughters in the home. They will always be vexed, and individuals will always have to find their own solutions. Mary’s mother cannot understand why Mary is so discontented in her comfortable home: Emily seems contented enough, but Mary is always chafing and tossing her head and sulking in corners, talking with envy of her friends who live unwholesomely in poky little rooms and threatening to join them if she only gets the chance. “What more can the child want?” cries the mother. “She lives far better here than she could ever do on her own. She can go out when she likes and she can bring her friends here where they are always welcome. She gets properly looked after when she is ill, and when things go wrong she is glad enough of my sympathy and comfort.” Well, for one thing, Mary, who is of a more independent temperament than Emily, has not had the opportunity of finding out that living on one’s own is not all that fancy paints it. She is possessed by the idea, and she will only learn how much she misses her home when she has suffered from some of the facts which its realisation entails. It might be almost worth while to let her try for a time: if she comes back with relief, well and good. If she finds independence preferable with all its drawbacks, the wisdom of having ceased to put constraint upon her will be obvious. Mary, no doubt, is often flighty and does not know what she really wants, but Mary’s mother has possibly taken no trouble to study Mary or to find out where the root of her grievances lie.

She does not probably realise how irksome it is to some temperaments to live perpetually in another person’s house, however great their love for that person. A home is controlled by one will alone, it is impossible to make it a republic. If the will is that of Mary’s mother, Mary will often find it tiresome to submit to it: if, by any chance, it comes to be Mary’s will, it is a bad look out for her mother and father. The mere want of privacy in itself is irritating, unless Mary has a den of her own and time of her own which are inviolable. Some parents think that they have an unlimited claim on the time and convenience of their children, forgetting that filial duty, fine and natural a motive as it is, is only one among many motives for human action, and that these motives are in the habit of conflicting. Mary’s mother may be under the apprehension that Mary has complete liberty at home: but Mary knows better. How often is she hindered from sitting down to a solid morning’s work by the knowledge that if she does not do the flowers nobody will. How often when she is just tucking up on a Sunday afternoon for a good read is she not disturbed by the certainty with which the atmosphere is charged that her father will be grieved if he has no companion for his walk? She could, of course, refuse to go, but she would then have to accept all the onus of seeming to be ungracious, and have that absolutely exasperating feeling of having to be apologetic for not doing something of the doing of which there should have been no legitimate expectation, tacit or otherwise. Duty is mostly a repression of one’s own desires, and therefore salutary: but there is a limit to its value, and in some people there is an intense desire to get away from it sometimes, if only for a little. Many a girl who loves her parents and looks with affection on her home, must frequently think with a sigh that even in the squalidest rooms, there would be no flowers to do and nobody to expect one to go on Sunday walks, no feeling that there is somebody to judge one’s friends when they come and to listen to what one says to them, no rigid times for meals, no callers to be entertained when mother is lying down, however absorbed one is in one’s own work, no Emily to play the piano after dinner, in fact no convenience but one’s own to consult at all.

Men feel this longing for privacy and independence, why should it seem strange and regrettable in girls? As a whole, they are less capable of looking after themselves than their brothers, perhaps, but that is partly due to their weaker social position. Also Mary’s case is by no means that of every girl, a fact which unfairly tells against Mary, who does not care a snap of her fingers for Emily’s docility and want of enterprise. Individuals have got to work out their own salvation, a task which is always made far more difficult for Mary than for her brother. Of course, there are infinite degrees of stress and accommodation in this relation of Mary and her mother: circumstances, character, common sense, temper, nerves, compatibility, all play their parts in different admixtures. Where Mary and her mother are both sensible, or arrive at sense by suffering, the final accommodation is generally satisfactory. Where sense is wanting, or passion clouds it, there will always be trouble: and, however much Mary’s mother may have to put up with from Mary, of which Mary may be only vaguely conscious, yet she is in the main to blame for not agreeing to one obvious solution of letting Mary do what she wants. She may be as certain as the snow is white that Mary is really happier under her roof, and that only her own tactful care prevents Mary from making some disastrous mistakes through her own inexperience or defects of character; she may even be more right than wrong in this belief: yet the fact remains that Mary is grown up and is the only person who can, in the long run, be responsible for her life. Is it right to thwart without convincing her, when it is possible to let her obtain conviction by experience? Only on the most antiquated theory of parental authority and filial subordination, a theory which rests upon no observed facts but rather upon a persistent blindness to the truth.

There is no such thing as natural affection: affection has to be won, and, once it is won, to be kept by effort or to be lost again. It is always assumed that parents and children naturally adopt to one another the attitude of beatific charity, as if they could not be the severest critics and the most bitter haters one of another, when the affectionate habits of childhood have frozen into mere formalities through incompatibilities of temper. In England, where the names of mother and father are treated with every outward respect, there is far less real sentiment for them as ideas than in Latin countries. What makes the relation so close and so warm in England is the comradeship of the English and the glow of the English home, which welds a strong bond so early that an overwhelming amount of tension is required for its complete disruption. But the seeds of strife are sown inevitably in the adolescence of every family: the weeds to which they grow are hardy, too, if they are not nipped in the bud. The English mother has got to do the nipping, but with sympathy not with severity, for the tool of severity will turn against her, and she will suffer a thousand fold the pain she has inflicted thoughtlessly on her children.

The truth is that all parents and children must go through a period of storm and stress, and most of the stress falls on the mothers. All young things are more or less ungrateful, and this is perfectly natural: they are following their strongest impulse in pushing their way out to full growth as ruthlessly as shoots of the rose tree. They have no time to be reflective till this irresistible impulse has weakened, so that they cannot realise before full maturity all that they have forced out of their parents in the way of self-denial, self-restraint, nervous irritation and even physical labour. For tangible pleasures and comforts they are grateful enough, but the intangible prevention of pain, the care and watching, the influence and the teaching do not become visible to them until they are almost on the far horizon of past youth. In the sharp momentary irritations of growth children cannot take these things into account, and for them a sense of injustice blots out gratitude like a sudden black fog. When they look back, and suffer from the rough contact of younger life themselves, then they see the vexed questions of their youth in truer proportions: they may not find that the wrong was always on their side, but at least they will sympathise with the pardonable weakness to which it was due, and will weigh it in the balance with benefits felt but not seen. Those families are happy who see these exasperations pass away like a short-lived storm, leaving no devastated tract behind them, but bringing calm and mellow weather in their wake. The English mind, averse from brooding, ever ready for compromise and comradeship, is a temperate climate, rejoicing in these halcyon anti-cyclones after the chilly gust and the grumbling thunder. When the English family barometer is at “set fair,” the atmosphere is delightful, and there is no more charming or sympathetic friendship possible than that between an English mother and her children, when each looks kindly upon the other with the eye of perfect understanding, in mutual pride and love and tolerance. No distance breaks the bond nor does the lapse of time weaken it, and the mother, seeing the runners to whom she has handed on the torch settling into a steady stride, can enjoy contented the sunset of motherhood and matrimony, with the prospect of assuming a benevolent grandmotherhood that will enable her to spoil her children’s children without paying the consequences.

CHAPTER VI
THE ENGLISHWOMAN’S MIND

Nobody could fail to be impressed by the physical beauty of young Englishwomen. It is confined to no class, though better preserved in the more leisurely. The ball-room and the village green compete easily with any exhibition of it on the stage. The question now to be presented is whether an honest observer, presuming him competent to observe, would be equally impressed with the mental qualities of our women. The answer, I think, would be extremely doubtful. Our young beauties, in any case, proudly conscious of their triumph in the physical test, would be indifferent to the outcome of the intellectual, if they could even conceive that anyone would be foolish enough to apply it. A quick brain is not in England regarded as an enviable possession, which proves it not to be a national one. In his penetrating first chapter to “Diana of the Crossways” George Meredith pointed out that "English men and women feel toward the quick-witted of their species as to aliens—having the demerits of aliens—wordiness, vanity, shallowness, an empty glitter, the sin of posturing." He might have added that, so far as women are concerned, quick wits were only excused by absence of physical attraction, though he implied this addition in his picture of Diana Warwick in her conflict with public opinion. George du Maurier contrasted with evident approbation the beauty of young Vere-de-Veredom with the consoling hideousness of the three clever Miss Bilderbogies, translating thus into art a thoroughly English point of view. One can respect this point of view without adopting it: the British instinct for safety is illustrated by it. Englishmen may well be suspicious, and Englishwomen jealous, of the combination of beauty and brains: it is too overwhelmingly powerful and likely to be disturbing to the peace.

The combination occurs, perhaps, more frequently than is commonly supposed, but it is such a grave departure from the respected tradition that we hasten to forget each instance as quickly as possible, to prevent any danger of a cumulative impression. Yet it is in no spirit of pandering to the tradition that the Englishwoman’s mind appears in this chapter unadorned or unexplained by her appearance: it is simply a matter of convenience. The mind of woman is not legitimately considered by itself, for the whole, the representative woman is not purely a function of her mind. Nevertheless, the Englishwoman’s mind, if not essential to the Englishwoman, exists, and it is growing. It would be unchivalrous to pass it by without observation. In George Meredith’s day it was hardly resolved that a woman might have a mind at all: this in itself is a measure of the later growth, for on this head, at least, there is now no doubt. The creator of Diana Warwick represented the Saxon man firmly treading with his heel on any feminine mental sparks which might set on fire the chips of his crumbling social structure. His faith in the sex’s capacity for growth has been justified to-day, when it would be absurd to represent women as anything but emancipated. Meredith’s view of the men as “pointed talkers” and the women as “conversationally fair Circassians” is no longer true. The women of England have made some progress on the upward route which he hoped that they would take.

At the same time, it will not do to contemplate our ladies as at the end of their journey instead of very much on the road. Exceptional women there have always been in this country, but the average woman still has an average mind, as the exceptional women, who are the severest critics of their sisters, will be the first to assert. They are the leaders through the jungle, forced ever to look back in impatience at the leisurely crowd following in the rear, calmly accepting the removal of the obstacles with which they have not to struggle, and far from guessing the need of the mental hatchet which had so happily cleared them away. It is probably true in all countries, but certainly in ours, that the necessity of cultivating a mind, even the latent possibility of doing so, is not apparent to the majority of women. It is made so easy for them to do without this troublesome acquisition. They are taught at school just sufficient for them to fill their probable station, which they do with docility and without ambition. Neither in their work nor their play have they any sense of a void aching to be filled up. Indeed what void could there be—unless it were pecuniary—when there is golf and tennis, bridge, fox trotting and hesitating, cinema gazing, novel-reading, playgoing to musical comedies and revues, or, in the most domestic regions, sewing and the rearing of children to keep them happily in the conviction that life is full enough without the added burdens of thought and knowledge? Men call them clever if they dress becomingly or if they can shuffle a room-full of guests adroitly, throwing conversational shuttlecocks up in the air for others to sweat in pursuit of: and to them cleverness appears a minor virtue, seeing the little enthusiasm with which their admirers regard it compared with their ecstasy over other more obviously feminine felicities. Or, on a lower scale, what time have they for any adornment of the mind, when the weekly toil of tending children and cooking for husbands, or the long days of drudgery at the factory, so fatigue the body and soul, that the mere bodily adornment of Sunday is almost too strenuous a reaction, when simple pleasures of the senses or even simple repose are the only appropriate drugs for their overstrained systems? Women with minds have still much work to do in order to give those who have none the leisure to look for them. The result is that women lag behind, with an unfortunate effect upon our national appearance. If ever the women overtake the men, much that is shoddy will disappear from the mental shopwindow? of this country.

So much may be said, I think, by a man without incurring the accusation of ordinary masculine prejudice. It is less than what is said and felt by the pioneers among women. That the world, even in England, is still arranged by men mainly for masculine convenience may be true, and will remain so as long as women allow most of their thinking to be done for them, as Miss Ethel Smyth, in her remarkable memoirs, holds that they do. Yet the enlightened man, though he may prefer that change should take place slower than the most ardent wish, may look forward with hope to the time when his convenience may less preponderate and feminine reverberations will cease to attend his thinking, then fulfilling the prophecy of the Lady Psyche in Tennyson’s “Princess”:

Everywhere
Two heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the tangled business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life,

Two plummets dropped for one to sound the abyss

Of science, and the secrets of the mind.

In the contemplation of this hope what he now sees before him in his womankind as a whole is an intellectual plant of idle and promiscuous growth, capable, as its rarer shoots prove, of the sturdiest and most luxuriant upward ranging, but content for the most part to twine itself, like the convolvulus, round the first support offered to its tendrils, a house, a domestic affection, the crumbling tower of antiquated beliefs, the hazily pointing sign-post of a dubious philosophy or the hardier neighbouring weeds which are rooted in passions and desires. From these more handy and material supports it will not tear itself away to grow towards the sun with lithe, independent shoots disdainfully forcing their way past all encumbrances. The rarer instances where from choicer ground and more livening influences this species pushes a vigorous head into the skies serve only to accentuate the lazy lowliness of the general stock. It seems to shrink from the light of ideas, or, where the attraction of the light is too imperious to be resisted, it lifts a shoot gingerly upwards only to curl a tendril lovingly round the first comfortable fact met with in the short upward progress, and to adhere to it gracefully, quite satisfied with the result of its exertion. Or let us vary the illustration. Men, in their intellectual journey, can contemplate with satisfaction at the first glance some vast mansion of knowledge rising up before them from its solid foundations to all the infinite variety of its higher tracery. That they cannot grasp the whole does not trouble them, for they quickly see the stages by which the ascent to greater knowledge will be attained. They are inspired not bewildered by the lofty prospect, resigning themselves happily to a study of the bare plan that will enable them to explore the beauties of the mansion intelligently and in order. The woman, on the other hand, is appalled by such an approach: the mansion swims before her eyes, the plan seems a confusing maze of meaningless lines. Her introduction must proceed on a different method. She must be led in by a side door through some pleasant alley into one of the rooms of the mansion, all comfortably furnished with easy chairs and pictures on the walls. Here, if she is allowed to linger without being too hastily pushed on by the official guide, her curiosity will be aroused. The assimilation of one room will prompt her to a timid sally into the next one, and so by good luck, if she is never frightened, she may in time be as much at home as any other explorer. Yet even then it is questionable whether she will ever venture out into the main court to gain a comprehensive view of the whole and of its relation to the surrounding architecture. Her domestic instinct tells her that she is more at home indoors, attending to the things which she can touch and see. So she is content to inhabit an appartement in the palace of truth, as an invalid pensioner might inhabit a set of rooms in Hampton Court Palace without ever drinking in the beauty of the whole building. It is only her mind which so flinches at magnificences and is afflicted with vertigo on eminences; her heart will take a Mount Everest of difficulties in its stride as if it were Primrose Hill, and her emotions will carry her on wings into the clouds without tremors, though she fall in the end as far and fast as Lucifer. Only when her intellectual dizziness is conquered shall we find her frequently, clear-headed and exultant, on the topmost pinnacles of truth, whence she can look down on her more elderly sisters placidly knitting in the verandah, while the children are playing hide-and-seek upon the stairs.

The less adventurous spirit of woman in purely mental enterprise is shown in the besetting sin of our girl students, the tendency to regard learning as nothing but the accumulation of facts. Women are the most assiduous crammers: they will work long and desperately to “get up” texts and facts, they will industriously follow a teacher, memorising his every word and slavishly following his precepts. Since they are less lazy than men, mere disgust with drudgery does not tempt them off the track laid out for them and, in their determination to gain the end in view, which is usually a concrete one, they plod on and on, neither looking to the right nor the left, neither lingering nor venturing up attractive by-ways, lest they should lose the track, or miss the prescribed turning on the main road. Men try short cuts, often with disastrous consequences, but the tendency in itself has its advantages. It trains the mental eye for the lie of the country, so that the most desultory of male wanderers, though his wanderings do not lead him very far, may yet acquire some broad impression of the whole landscape, which is more stimulating to the imagination than a walk between hedges faithfully performed. But, if a man be tempted to scoff at this greater docility and timidity of his female companions, let him reflect that it is very largely due to the fault of his own kind, a fault which Englishwomen are now bent on clearing away. For centuries a world made for the convenience of men kept women in leading strings which are now being cut, though their habit will take long to eradicate. In their early years, whatever their ultimate aim, men are put out on the pastures of knowledge like young colts. In their case who questions the wisdom of sending them to a university? It is assumed that a general mental training will be of benefit to them in any profession. Not so with a woman: unless teaching is to be her aim she will find the training of a university hard to come by, because it has not become established that a general mental training of the best kind is as needful for a woman as for a man, and that it is as beneficial to the community that she should have it. A generation or two of equal opportunity will work wonders in the comparative aptitudes of the sexes.

Women may well exclaim at the little use men have made of their greater opportunities: boldness in mental adventure is not a salient virtue of our men. Still, even in England, the cloud of scouts which precedes the plodding main army is composed chiefly of men. Women have yet to prove their equal ability for this service. They have got to improve themselves in map-reading if they are to enter these ranks, and maps are only instances of those bogies to most women, abstractions. They take her beyond the immediate range of vision, beyond the hills on the horizon about which she feels instinctively that she has no right to let her imagination play unless the further prospect is displayed before her physical eye, and she is, therefore, apt to pull a man up short when he is measuring the distant ground beyond his view and to bring him back to the church tower in the foreground, if not to the village pump. For this reason general discussion with English women is so often fruitless: they cannot get away from the concrete and, intensely interested as they are in the thing immediately to be done, they feel at sea in the elaboration of general principle from which immediate action could be best taken or criticised. So often, too, a man is brought up short by finding that a woman is winding all his ideas, which have no immediate attachments to anything within view, round some visible peg in the vicinity, or is mentally striving to find the visible peg which she is sure is really the point of attachment. The worst is when she imagines the peg, quite wrongly, to be stuck into her own amour propre: all argument is then futile, for the two are hopelessly at cross purposes. When a man is trying to set out a general point of view and a woman is asking herself meanwhile: “why is he saying this now and to me?” the chance of mutual comprehension is slight.

It is this same passionate attachment to the concrete, where ideas are concerned, which makes women poor critics, though they are keen observers. If there is one application of the intellect where a comprehensive outlook is necessary, it is criticism. The individual judging and the individual thing judged are in themselves such infinitesimal portions of the whole of reality, that the one cannot seize the other unless they become magnified in the imagination so as to display the infinite connection of relations which is the condition of them both. In woman the personal element so enormously preponderates, both in her appreciations and her dislikes, that her critical judgment usually shoots out into the world through a distorted lens only partially illuminating the objects on which it is bent. Nevertheless, it may be a sad day for men if this feminine lens is rectified. The very distortion is one that serves his comfort, since it focusses so much light upon him and his home. I would not personally exchange the eye of the English wife and the English mother which sheds so warm and loving a beam upon the home for any more searching ray which illuminated a whole distant world and left a home in comparative darkness. It is hopelessly foolish idealism to wish for the combination of every virtue in one atom of humanity: we English with our excellent habit of compromise do not habitually act as if such a thing were possible. Yet there are certain idealists in this country who, in their anxiety to secure equality of opportunity for women, seem to assume that progress can be made without profound changes in the thing progressing, and as though by taking thought women could attain to all that men have got without losing some of their own peculiar and valuable possessions. Unfortunately it is not so. Men and women will never be practically interchangeable beings, and, perhaps, the limit of desirable progress would be that any individual should have the chance of deciding what admixture of the male and female qualities and possessions will suit him or her best. Freedom of choice is after all the great essential of liberty: the use of this liberty can only be well guided by what is greater than liberty, wisdom.

This chapter, I fear, has rather belied its title. We must hark back to the Englishwoman. Let me make her amends by asserting that if she pleases she may have as fine a mind as any woman breathing. She has a naturally quick intelligence, if she be careful not to let its keenness rust; she has been dowered with common sense and power of imagination in inverse proportions; in practical matters she has a sure glance for the best course to be taken, but her vision is hazy where principles are concerned. Her critical standards are usually as conventional as her standards of conduct, but she can be strikingly original in action and will stand up nobly for her convictions. Where she attains to a measure of intellectual superiority, except at the highest levels, she is apt to lose her balance, becoming either priggish and cold or luxuriously vague and mystical. The blue stocking is not typical, but she is English and she still exists. There was an awful Miss Benger who invited Charles Lamb and his sister to tea, macaroons and intellectual conversation, as Charles pathetically describes her in his letter to Coleridge:

“From thence she passed into the subject of poetry; where I, who had hitherto sat mute, and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a round assertion that no good poetry had appeared since Dr. Johnson’s time.... I here ventured to question the fact, and was beginning to appeal to names, but I was assured ‘it certainly was the case’.”

She has her counterpart to-day. She lays down the law, with a steely glance through her pince-nez, scattering words like “fundamental” with the self-satisfied air of one distributing sugar-plums to not very deserving children. She will stultify the very best of critics by quoting his most foolish passages as oracles, and contrive, where she admires the right things, to do so for the wrong reasons. The hazy dabbler is quite as bad, and quite as irritating. She vibrates like Memnon’s harp to any breath from higher planes, and mistakes the sympathetic vibrations of her empty head for the sounding of some organ note of the infinite. Like the shallowest pond she may sometimes produce the illusion of reflecting the profundity of the heavens, till a closer examination reveals the mud and the tin kettles such a very little way below the surface. The good Englishwoman is neither of these: she has either too great a simplicity or too well developed a sense of humour, for she hates pretence and is not slow to perceive it in others. So distrustful is she of artifice that she seldom shines in the fine rapier-play of witty conversation: her interchange of ideas may be compared rather to the game of lawn tennis, with plenty of movement and hard-hitting in it, most balls being returned from the base line with a well-timed drive, not snappily volleyed at the net. She is most attractive when a flush of emotion colours her thinking, showing thus as an effective foil to her mankind who think unemotionally or wear the mask of indifference to conceal their sensitiveness. She understands this shyness in Englishmen and overcomes it so delicately by her sympathy that they glow in her society as the Dolomite peaks in the sunset. She does this, if she takes any trouble at all, with a natural simplicity, not with the elaborate study that Balzac’s Princesse de Cadignan exercised to fascinate her D’Arthez.

The worst of it is that so many Englishwomen neglect their natural advantages. They forget their minds in thinking of their bodies, their souls, their duties or their amusements. They are apt, like slatterns, to trot about the material world in intellectual dressing gowns with their ideas in curl papers. This is delightful enough for friendly intimacy, but is calculated to produce a less charming impression in the wider world. But there is hope in the future. The Englishwoman is beginning to study herself more intently in the looking-glass. The result will be what we should expect of an Englishwoman’s turn-out, quiet and workmanlike, neither fussy nor flimsy, but with an unmistakable cut and a richness rather of material than of ornament. But she must submit herself to good tailors who understand her figure, paying them a good price. No cheap intellectual garment off the peg will do justice to the natural graciousness of her lines which, for all their conservatism, Englishmen truly appreciate; and, for all their grumbles, they will not at heart grudge any trouble or expense in enhancing its effect.

CHAPTER VII
THE ENGLISHWOMAN’S MANNERS

The quality, so rare and so unmistakeable, of good manners is more usually appreciated or missed in men than in women: and this in itself shows that the quality is something wider and deeper than good behaviour, which may be required of both sexes. The niceties of deportment, graceful and pleasing as they may be, are of comparatively small moment in human relations. They vary from nation to nation, one preferring to eat with knife and fork, another with its hands; but good manners are good manners all the world over. The Christian ideal of chivalry, at its best, made men exquisite heroes and women exquisite angels, but in its fallings away it turned, for men, the noble practices of knighthood into weapons of conquest for the beleaguering of women, and, for women, stitched the angelic halo formally to the coif of womanhood. Knightly devotion, once an inspiration, became a formality accepted as small change instead of as a choice gift. So decadent knights of a later age opened doors and made pretty speeches to win hearts, while the hearts’ owners permitted themselves impertinences and other licenses in the knowledge that the knights would not dare to reproach them, and as for the other angels—it mattered little what they thought. It has therefore come about that the good manners looked for in men are supposed very largely to consist in those arts of politeness and consideration by which a stronger sex places its protection and devotion at the service of the weaker, and on this supposition the weaker sex, having to receive rather than give, has less scope for exercising similar arts. In fact they are not considered necessary to a female equipment. A man is judged by his manners, but a woman, provided she does not grossly violate the decencies, mainly by her appearance. This distinction was unimportant, perhaps, when women were held in very real subjection, but it becomes a matter of greater concern in modern days of feminine independence.

Most people, however, are aware that good manners, of the signal and striking kind which are like the precious ointment running down into the beard, are more than correct deportment and chivalrous deference. Even if they themselves cannot acquire them, they recognise them in others. This is especially true in England, where men and women can have the most exquisite manners in the world, though they can also have the most execrable. The merits of the English “gentleman” have been celebrated often enough: his praise is justified when he truly lives up to his proud title. The one supreme test of a gentleman is his possession of good manners: gentle birth and speech, taste in dress, tolerable morality, a pliant knee, and a stout heart, all his other qualities, will not turn the scale in his favour if good manners be wanting. These alone, of all heaven’s gifts, are essential to a gentleman, all the rest are optional. They should be equally essential to the lady, but they are not so in common estimation. We still insist that certain accidents of birth and breeding are the differentia of the lady, and though good manners most usually accompany these accidents, they often do not, while they flourish where these accidents are absent. We cannot change the general sense of the language, but only show its implications. There are no finer examples of good manners than those of the best Englishwoman, but they are not the pride of her sex as a whole, which will freely criticise and archly inspire the manners of men without troubling themselves to notice or improve the manners of women.

There is only one motto for good manners: the two words "noblesse oblige"—not in the restricted sense of the word “noblesse” but in the widest sense in which every human being has a conscious nobility. The sense of infinite obligation to one’s fellows is not easy to maintain continuously before one’s eyes, yet it is that sense, never forgotten, insistent as conscience, forcing itself to beautiful expression against the appetites and the prejudices, so ingrained by habit or disposition as to be almost unconscious, which is the root of good manners. St Paul’s “Charity” hardly transcends it, and it towers above the Catechism’s “Duty towards my neighbour” as a Gothic cathedral above a dissenting conventicle. To one in whom this sense, if not perfect, is strongly developed, a lapse from good manners brings inevitable remorse. The great prompter of these lapses is self-seeking, and that is why the best manners are to be found among those who have simplicity of soul and stability of position. The young, the ambitious, the rising with their eye on a far goal, the falling in dread of an abyss, the searcher intent on his quest, the thinker absorbed in his theory, the poet and artist hot-foot after beauty, the over-burdened toiler—all these are forced to swerve by other dominant influences from the path which good manners would point out. But for those who are contented or resigned, even for those who are complacent, the path is not so difficult to trace, for they are not hindered by thickets of their own emotions and desires, while from those whose hearts are single, serenely undistracted by the conflicting desires and aims of human life, good manners come as naturally as light from the sun. The happy ray beams forth from their personalities, illuminating all on whom it falls: it adds a quality to their glances, their voices, their very motions which irresistibly attracts the more dingy and struggling spirits of commoner humanity. It may proceed from a rugged exterior as well as from features delicately chiselled by centuries of selective generation. It is no negation, no monkish self-suppression, no humility of Uriah Heep, but a positive force issuing from a positive feeling of right pride, of “noblesse,” to which any poor-minded action or speech must seem contemptible.

I call to the front of my mind the memory of an Oxfordshire village on the confines of the Cotswold Hills, one of those tiny hamlets of grey stone which vanish into the grey and blue mystery of the surrounding woods and hills. The harmony of its colour, ascending through infinite gradations of lichened roof and blue threads of smoke to the deep velvet of the foliage under a pearly sky, is exquisite; but not more exquisite than the inner harmony of its older villagers, now fast departing. There have I seen the natural flower of good manners in all its beauty, blooming all the more brightly for the grey simplicity of its external setting. A blessing from the soft skies above them seemed to have settled on the hearts of those old people. Life had given them none of its choice gifts: toil had been their daily companion, with poverty his friend, bringing sickness as a frequent visitor, but the sturdy growth of their souls had no more been stunted than the beeches and elms by the nettles around their trunks. Stopping to greet one of these elders, hoeing with bent white head his patch of garden, one felt in converse with the spirit of Shakespeare’s England, which, for all its industrial casing of to-day, is still the real England. One could no more fail of civility with them than with a king, so compelling was the force of their own grave courtesy. They had perfect ease without insolence, respect without a trace of servility. Dignity, natural and unconscious, was in their every tone and gesture. Nor did Mrs Giles within the cottage bely her husband in his garden. She received a visit as an attention, not as a condescension, conveying in her welcome all that a perfect hostess could convey, without awkwardness or restraint, genuine in affection, well-bred in jest. To regard such people otherwise than as equals in all but opportunity would prove a heart devoid indeed of nobility. It was an annual joy and a refreshment of spirit to see these old folk gathered at the Christmas feast. Never could entertainment want more perfect guests. The spirit of ease and gaiety which animated this one bright day in their dim year came from their hearts to warm those of their entertainers. There was no need to force the note of gaiety, so strongly did the tone of simple happiness vibrate in them, for all that good fortune so seldom plucked at their heart-strings. With these old people it was inconceivable that any such festival should fail to “go,” from the first cut of the roast beef to the final round of musical chairs, for every being in that little schoolroom was an English lady or an English gentleman in all the loftiest sense of these two names. All, however circumscribed their condition, had “a noble lustre in their eyes,” and in their gentle spirits there was such an influence that, had the meanest wretch on earth been introduced to such a Christmas gathering, it would have been true to say

“Be he ne’er so vile

This day shall gentle his condition.”

To taste so richly the fine essence of good manners was a rare and memorable privilege. Those who were guests betrayed even in retrospect their fine appreciation of courtly values. To them it was no charity, no prescriptive dole. “Ay, sir,” said Mr Giles next day, “that was a joyful touch!” Many of us, I imagine, who have had the good fortune to see the best, as well as the worst, of those who live the plainer and humbler lives, must have been struck by the pleasant heartiness of natural English manners, when they are not complicated by an uncertainty as to social position. A household known to me welcomed during the war some girls from a factory at a mid-day meal which, for all the simplicity of its preparation, went a trifle beyond the custom of its guests in the way of accessories. Not for one moment were they flustered. “I guess I’ll follow you,” was the simple remark to her hostess of one guest, and all difficulty vanished. A radiant party, bent theatre-ward, left the house to its elderly owners, whose daughter received on the doorstep the ecstatic comment “I just love the dear old dad,” a tribute which the “dad,” a gentleman of some eminence in a learned profession, received with legitimate pride. It all comes back to simplicity of heart, which only belongs to those who are firm in their niche and can look around them. The betwixt-and-betweens are always nervous, and shyness will make them sheepish, self-assertive, familiar, vulgar or dumb according to their temperaments. These wobblers, wherever they are found in the social ladder, all drop good manners with the same anxious trepidation, the rich in the halls of the great, the clerk and his wife in the middle-class drawing room, the wife of the country townsman on the precarious fringe of the county, the shallow prig in the presence of the artist, in fact, the snob generally on the threshold of his desire.

The sad thing is that the natural good manners of English people are so largely corrupted by snobbery of different kinds, and it is the women who are worst affected by this taint, since it is through them that lines of social intercourse are drawn, while men hover more easily on both sides of the fence. The tinge of snobbery may be fierce or faint, but the least trace of it is a stain on the fair face of good manners. The Maria of Mrs John Lane, observed as she is with such witty and lamentable accuracy, is a type of too many Englishwomen. She pushes, struggles and demeans herself daily with lies, subterfuges and petty dishonesties, imposing on the weak, toadying upon the stronger, with an eye of scorn for those below and a beam of adulation for those above—and all for such a sorry end. I saw the suffragettes throw themselves in waves, sobbing hysterically, against the rocky breasts of Westminster policemen till their strength gave out and their hair came down: it was a ridiculous and ugly spectacle, but a worthy cause gave rise to it. The spectacle of our Marias, charging and jostling against social barriers, is more ridiculous and more ugly because it is sanctified by no ideal of any possible value.

How the ladies do push and jostle, to be sure! Woman struggling with her own sex is indeed a tigress. The feminine assault upon a popular ’bus at Piccadilly Circus is a mêlée from which all but the most pugnacious of men would shrink, preferring to be ground to a powder by the trituration of multitudinous humanity in the tube than to be exposed to the shovings and stampings of ’bus-crazed women. They know it themselves, the dear things. My young friend Camilla, who is of the kind who consorts with Cabinet Ministers, told me the other day that in a ’bus-scrum not long ago she felt a peculiarly aggressive blow from behind. Turning round with a heart more furious than Dido’s, to quell her unmannerly aggressor with a look of hatred, an abusive phrase and perchance the jerk of a sharp elbow, she beheld her panting sister, Antonia, in all the frenzy of going over the top. The sisters called a truce, but were not in the least shame-faced. They both meant to get home at any cost, and had declared legitimate war upon the crowd. At a popular sale, so I hear, or in a busy shop, they sweep down like the Assyrians and positively fight for garments, or nearly tear shop-assistants in twain as Pentheus was torn by the Bacchanals.

This power which women have of inspiring fury in one another is very strange—is it confined to this country or is it universal? Englishwomen certainly have the power of goading one another to forget the first rudiments of good manners. They have a ruthless want of consideration for one another which to a man is quite appalling. A woman, usually suave as silk, will behave like a very shrew to a saleswoman or a shop-assistant, adopting in the first preliminaries of the bargain an attitude of suspicious disdain which, I confess, would prompt me to assault and battery. Men may be brutes, but they prefer to be gentle and accommodating in the smaller transactions of life. It is a pleasure to wait on them at meals or to serve them in shops. The man of fashion is urbane with his hosier, and the young clerk who haunts the neighbouring Lyons’ for lunch and dominoes has an easy-going politeness for the “Miss” who takes his order, to which she responds with the official affability of her class, comparable to the limp stiffness of an ill-starched shirt. But watch two Englishwomen at grips in a tea-shop, one serving, one waiting to be served. They measure one another with a chilly eye, each determined not to give an inch, for each knows there will be no pity on either side. They can be very hard, our Englishwomen, when no men are by, for, though they despise his softness and gullibility, they like to preserve the man’s illusion of equal softness in a woman. No man can be well served by women who do not love him: either they will take advantage of his good nature or show complete indifference to his exasperation. In either case he is powerless. He can neither inspire them to probity nor cow them into obedience as he can other men. But from women no women’s secrets are hid, and they do not scruple to use their penetration with a disregard of decency which is sometimes amazing.

But, lest these words should seem to be a universal stricture on all our countrywomen, let me hasten to say that the blemish, though common, is not universal. In their relations with one another Englishwomen are apt, in this matter, to fall away from the best of their type, but that best does not so fall. Women can charm women, as well as goad them, and the good Englishwoman exercises her charm on both sexes alike. The graces of demeanour which Miss Austen drew are perennial. Her stories move in an atmosphere of good manners, which is still fundamental in unspoiled English people. Some of her characters were vulgar, some stalwartly self-seeking, some coarse by idleness and vanity: but a Mrs Norris, a Lady Bertram or even a Mrs Elton preserved good manners, and who can forget poor Emma’s shame at her rudeness to Miss Bates? In an age when passions rather than manners interest our novelists, it is a relief to turn to Miss Austen to be convinced again that English people have them: her praise will not be dimmed among us till good manners have finally vanished. That it is still bright, in spite of all that change in social conditions could do to tarnish it, is in itself an antidote to pessimism.

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.

Possibly, for so it seems to me, a man’s imagination, like his muscular frame, is an engine of far greater potential energy than a woman’s, and far less tied by the limitations of a particular individuality. A man, in his creative, as well as his reflective, thought can soar out of himself to that species æternitatis which is the only point of view for the great artist as well as for the philosopher. Few women can follow him thither, and when they do, the struggle and effort of the flight seem to weaken their imaginative energies. Beatrice reached paradise after death by her virtues: she would never, like her lover, have reached even the Purgatorio alive by the force of her artistic imagination. While I insist on it, I shall not labour the point. In the England of Shakespeare, Milton, Purcell, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Raeburn and Constable, the sex represented by Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Browning, the Brontës, George Eliot, Angelica Kauffmann, Miss Ethel Smyth, yes, even the one and only Jane Austen, can only adopt an attitude of respect and, if they are true artists, of reverence for masculine artistic achievement. Also, what is true of creative art I believe to be true of interpretative. There is not, indeed, the same difference between the highest achievements of the two sexes in the interpretative sphere: Mrs Siddons balances Kean; Ellen Terry, Henry Irving; Melba, Sims Reeves; Beatrice Harrison, Leonard Borwick. Yet in the general survey, the advantage of the men preponderates: whether as actors, singers or instrumentalists they have more vigour, a finer mental grasp of the work they are interpreting, a firmer touch and that greater power of soaring above their own personalities into that realm where beauty walks unhampered by the flesh.

After which lordly pronouncement, a more combative member of her sex might retort, it is hardly necessary to continue this chapter: pray pass blandly on to some other field in which you allow us a fuller measure of accomplishment. But that I reply—mentally spreading out my hands with the traditional gesture of deprecation—would be a great mistake. I should not like to be misapprehended in a fit of momentary pique. Of female accomplishment even in the arts, as Henry James might have said, I abound in recognitions. An enthusiastic admirer of Jane Austen and the Brontës, who has publicly and unreservedly praised the work of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross and the autobiographical art of Miss Ethel Smyth, who has melted before Lady Hallé’s phrasing and Gerhardt’s tone cannot justly be accused of prejudice against woman artists. If I deny supremacy or equality in artistic achievement, up to the present moment, I have every respect for feminine accomplishment, and I put no bounds to my belief in the amplitude of its future, especially when the pen is its weapon. Transcendent musical genius seems to be denied growth upon our soil. We have lost, if we ever had it, our natural melody; our passions do not consume us wholly and our dreaming is too shot with the practical. Where our men have not risen high, our women, though a surpassing voice may here and there be born, are not likely to soar. As for painting and the other plastic arts, well, one can only wait in hopes of something better from women than they have yet been able to give us. But our women can write, heaven knows, though many of them write too much, and where the passionate intensity and the transfiguring imagination of an Emily Brontë is present the result is unqualified greatness, as surely as the work is a masterpiece when the shrewd observation and the elegance of a Jane Austen illuminate it. So perhaps I may be allowed to continue, not in expatiation on the Englishwoman’s contribution to our national art, but in the consideration of the arts generally in relation to the good Englishwoman. Besides, to tell the truth, there are more complaints to be made. I regret them, but they are just, so let us proceed with a thoroughly unpleasant chapter.

The lowest common denominator of artistic taste among those who claim to be educated is indeed low in this country, but that is not surprising, for it is the same in every country; and those who are inclined to lift up their hands in horror at the philistinism of their countrymen, while gushing over the higher artistic standards of other nations, are singularly beside the mark. They are usually applying different standards in one judgment, comparing what is common in the one case with what is remarkable in the other, forgetting that, if masterpieces are in question, England stands below no country in the world save possibly in music, and ignoring the M. Jourdains, the M. Perrichons, the Buchholtz families and other ordinary folk at which the artists of all nations have habitually poked fun. What we have not got is some compensating national felicity in the domain of art, such as the German sensitiveness to musical beauty, the French aptitude for elegant diction, the histrionic talent of the Italian or, possibly, the Spanish gift of rhythmical movement. The unprejudiced foreigner could hardly be struck by any national accomplishment of this kind among English people, whose most obvious national quality is their admirable capacity for practical action. This holds true even of our women, and the point I am inclined to make is that this is strange when it is considered that a greater proportion of educated women practise, albeit with one finger, some art or another in England than in any other country. This is partly due to educational tradition and partly to the greater independence of Englishwomen. For many generations educational tradition has laid stress on the importance of “accomplishments” in the upbringing of a girl, while administering the same in homoeopathic doses and insisting on a more than Greek moderation in the enthusiasm with which they were to be embraced. Most of us remember the faint and ladylike water colours of a great-grandmother, who would have blushed as much to paint anything resembling a picture seen with an artist’s eye as she would to have infused a breath of passion into the ditties she so artlessly sang to the harp or to the guitar. Squire Western wanted nothing but a few old English melodies from Sophia’s piano, and it is not likely that Mr Woodhouse’s taste in music was any higher. Accomplishments were “very nice” for a girl, adding to her attractions, but art was quite a different thing, most unladylike, an affair for not too reputable men, beset with temptations to every kind of depravity. And if women were so bold as to write anywhere but in albums they were well advised to do so anonymously, as did Miss Edgworth, Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. During the nineteenth century, of course, this tradition grew fainter, and for the present generation, with their eurhythmics, their ballet dancing and their self-expression, it has become most admirably attenuated, so that there is good hope of its complete disappearance in the future. We are coming to look on education for girls as well as for boys as a training for a definite end rather than as an affair of landscape gardening. Nevertheless, the old tradition still lingers in our drawingrooms and schoolrooms. While it is generally agreed that no boy is in any need of accomplishments to fulfil his destiny in the world, these doubtful benefits are still pressed indiscriminately upon boys’ sisters in the belief that there is some value for a woman in having acquired, even against her will, a feeble amateurishness in one or more of the arts. Only when it is generally recognised that unless art is spontaneous, unless it is a freely chosen medium for an honest self-expression, it is utterly and absolutely valueless, in fact non-existent, will the standard of artistic taste in this country begin to rise.

The tradition, at all events, has made Englishwomen great dabblers in the arts, and they have been assisted in carrying this dabbling beyond their schooldays by their independence which is younger than the tradition. By this independence—for the good of our nation may it never grow less—they go on sketching tours, set up studios in Chelsea, invade foreign ateliers unattended, trip off to foreign conservatoires free from the tethering ropes which still attach the native pensionnaires to censorious hearths. Never was there such a nation of woman painters and sketchers and etchers, singers, players, music-teachers, journalists and novelists as ours. Yet, for all their quantity, the quality which they achieve is disheartening. Why is it? What do they lack? Is it the furious energy of concentration, is it discontent with easy achievement, is it honesty, is it vision, is it passion? Or is it simply that, except in rare instances, they are weak, birds of short flight who cannot sustain the upward sweep of more powerful masculine pinions? The attainments of a few exceptional women artists go a little way to atone for the shortcomings of the multitude. Here, at least, there is room for progress on the part of Englishwomen during the remainder of the century. Let them throw off the last remnant of hampering tradition and use their increasing independence to better purpose.

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of women’s influence in the formation of taste: if men are the dynamos, women are the distributors. As mothers, as sisters, as wives, their mental energies are playing continuously on the plastic material of their immediate surroundings. Men, as a rule, are only intellectually affected by the artistic views of their fellow men, but the likes and dislikes of women work themselves into the most intimate fibres of domestic life. The decoration of a house, its intimates, its conversation, its amusements, its entertainments reflect far more of the woman than of the man who, if he is not satisfied, prefers to seek a freer artistic atmosphere outside his own doors than to attempt the almost impossible task of bringing it with him into an unreceptive household. The position is not one to be regretted, for women should be the source of beauty as man of protection and maintenance; but the comparative dryness of this source in England is remarkable, seeing the amount of time and money spent upon accomplishments and the multitudes of our women who play, sing and draw all over the world.

When I consider the drawingrooms and diningrooms that English women will complacently regard, the futile pictures upon the walls, the tasteless, shapeless ornaments, and, above all, the absence of harmonious finish which makes their household gods, where they do not blatantly display a common origin in Tottenham Court Road, appear a hasty collection from the junk-shop round the corner rather than a successful combination of effects on an artistic plan—on this count alone I cannot think this remonstrance overstated. The pity is all the greater in that we start with so many advantages. The hideous stiffness of the Germans and the rather uncomfortable formality of the French is not ours. It is natural to us to be comfortable, we make our rooms look as if they were lived in, we have thrown off Victorian dinginess for cheerful colours, we have a magnificent tradition in furniture; yet with all this, while we often achieve the pleasantly habitable, we rarely achieve the completely artistic. There is really no impossibility in this achievement: all we want is a finer eye, a nicer discrimination, a higher standard of design in essentials and a greater regard for elegance and harmony in appurtenances. We are too contented, at present, with the merely pretty or the baldly useful; we buy without criticism, we replace with inconsequence and, worst of all, we inherit with effusion. Our Englishwoman will go out sketching-block in hand to capture the delicate contours of our English hills and our English clouds, and strive to mix in her palette the exquisite harmonies that blend in English heaths and lanes and bricks, yet she will return to stare without loathing at furniture which violates every canon of proportion and colours that cry aloud in their disagreement, as if art was all very well in the fields and woods but wholly out of place in a comfortable home of England. To make matters worse, some efforts to introduce art have been dolefully inartistic, as the reproachful epithet of “arty” in our dictionary too painfully shows. The word “art” itself is suspect to the English, carrying with it a suspicion of artificiality and pose. In the home, at least, let us substitute for it “grace and harmony”; where these are present the result will be artistic. There are sensitive women, women of taste, enough who know this, but their influence does not radiate. We want the energy of these women to be formative and reformative: we want the arts and crafts of this country permeated with their good influence, to counteract the influence of commercial man who makes cheaply and badly what he can sell with ease. This would be an accomplishment worthy of the name.

The state of domestic music is little better. Here again it is the woman who sets the tone. Think of the thousands of English pianos tinkling at this moment, of the wheezing of countless gramophones, and the warbling of a myriad drawing room ditties—with what tune does it fill the shuddering earth?

For whom do ballad concerts flourish, for whom do melodic journeymen pour out machine-made progressions of sixths, ninths, and elevenths to sentimental lyrics?

Chiefly for women.

Who are those who delight to proclaim that they “know a lovely garden” or to inquire in flat tones of musical interrogation where the pink hands they knew beside the Shalimar have got to?

Chiefly women.

For whom has the wearisome infinity of ragtime assaulted humanity?

Again for women.

Who was Chaminade and for whom did she spin her inanities?

A woman who knew what women wanted.

At whom do Jewish violinists ogle while they saw out emotional waltzes through the meaty atmosphere of restaurants?

At women.

And who exclaim that “he plays divinely, my dear?”

Women again.

Oh, the musical repertoire of the English home, how well I used to know it! Its “Erotik,” its “Schmetterling,” its “Pierrette,” its Nocturne in E flat on the piano; its “Humoreske,” its “Benedictus,” its “Serenata,” its “Cavatina” on the violin; and its songs, its “Rosary,” its “Indian Love Lyrics,” its little archnesses by Hermann Löhr, its spasms by Frank Lambert, its sobs by Guy d’Hardelot—really I have often wished that I lived in the good old days of “The Battle of Prague” which at least made no pretensions to be music. The repertoire was always the same, rehearsed in the drawing-room, produced in the village hall with amazing inefficiency and complete self-satisfaction. Standard of execution or criticism there was none: amiable intention was allowed to suffice, and fingers could slither, bows wobble and voices squeeze tremulously out of constricted larynxes without apology. Have we any cause for pride in these things? And the teachers of music, can we praise them? Why do we attempt so much and achieve so little? No wonder Miss Ethel Smyth craved for a climate where music, even in the family, was an art and not an accomplishment: no wonder that she borrowed five shillings from the village postman to go to London concerts till an infuriated father, after kicking in the panel of her bedroom door, gave way and allowed her to fly to Leipzig. For the love of music let us try again now the war is over. We suffer from too much bad music. The women of England are mainly responsible, for I admit that the bulk of the men don’t care; surely women could effect a little improvement. If we cannot have better music all at once, perhaps we might have less. If I were Minister of Fine Arts, I would close all pianos and violin cases but those of certified musicians, for a year, except for the playing of bona fide scales and exercises, and no singing but of solfeggi should be heard from private individuals, a fine of forty shillings being inflicted for each breach of the regulations. Meanwhile Sir Thomas Beecham should have a free hand and unlimited money wherewith to conduct a cleansing and inspiring propaganda for the reform of musical taste in the home. The village entertainments of a year hence would be superb. Raff’s “Cavatina” would at least be played in tune.

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.

But if the Marias show an uncanny quickness in judging the points of contact between the social layers, it is not the Marias who make the layers in the first place. These are the work of all women equally, as naturally made as birds’ nests, but for the protection of themselves rather than of their young. Two men may meet at the office or the club, day in day out, for years without in the least becoming involved in one another’s domestic circumstances or becoming aware of one another’s native layers. But it is impossible for women to meet casually for long without a degree of mutual implication which can never be undone. One visit by a woman to another woman’s home forms a link which the return of that visit closes irrevocably; it can thereafter neither be ignored nor broken without pain: whereas a man, especially a bachelor, may flit for ever like a butterfly, sipping in all freedom the honey where he finds it. At the bottom of this difference is the instinct of the home, which is so peculiarly strong in Englishwomen. A home must have stability and a definite position with regard to other homes, it cannot vaguely exist in an indeterminate social latitude and longitude. As map-readers would say, its coordinates must be settled and cannot be changed without an upheaval. Stability, moreover, is not the only quality of a home to women: they cherish its explanatory quality also. Away from their homes they feel vague and unattached, like travellers without passports, presenting rather a questionable appearance, dependent for recognition rather on the goodwill of others than on their own indubitable claims. In their homes they are solid and substantial, answering every question before it is asked, proof against all error, in a settled place and status with all circumstances and attachments stretching obviously away to the limits of vision. It is to the Englishwoman, far more than to the English man, that home is a castle.

The consequence is that Englishwomen, no less than women of other nations, are strongly individualistic, and stand like boulders in the stream of modern democracy which is running towards collectivism. It is impossible for the majority of women to sympathise with the collective ideal, since all their instincts run counter to it. In England, particularly, where for centuries the stratification of society has gone quietly on without catastrophic changes, it is hard to believe that, with political power now in their hands, women will easily permit a profound revolution in their modes of life. So long as wages and standards of life are in question, they may well vote with the most progressive, even the most aggressive, party: but the old social landmarks will not be entirely swept away unless the women, too, are swept off their feet by a wave of circumstance or emotion. It will be curious to see how the good Englishwoman modifies the course of history in the near future, as she is bound to do if she in a way succeeds in forcing a compromise between the oncoming of collectivist democracy and her own instinctive conservatism. So far as women are concerned, every layer of society is bound to offer resistance to eruption from below simply for its own safety. In this matter the stationmaster’s wife will not be behind the doctor’s or the works-foreman’s sister behind the vicar’s. If eruption comes at all, instead of the steady but almost imperceptible percolation which is the usual process of social change in this country, it can only come from the lowest layers whose Marias have nothing to lose and everything to gain by a more than usually abrupt effort to rise. If only wise statesmanship can discount the need for any abruptness, this eruption will never occur: the essential changes, in my belief, can be wrought without so ruinous a disturbance as to rend our English homespun into rags, or to snap the threads of that womanly warp which gives it its strength and durability.

The married women, at all events, will resist to the last: the weak threads in the womanly warp—and I mean weak in the sense of not withstanding disruptive influences—are the bachelor women. Nowadays it is foolish to talk of “old maids” and “coiffer Sainte Cathérine,” or to use any other patronising phrase for unmarried women which implies that they have missed the only vocation of their sex. Already before the war this attitude was becoming passé in England, and the war has definitely bundled it into the lumber room. The enormous activity of women, young and old, during the war cannot subside leaving no effect at all, and one of its most permanent effects is that large numbers of women have learned to live as self-sufficing lives as men, working independently for an adequate return, dwelling in camps or colonies or bachelor companionships or even in solitude, and using their leisure as the spirit moved them. Young girls who ordinarily would not have dreamed of leaving the home where they were doing nothing in particular, and older women who dabbled more or less aimlessly in existence because they could not catch a proper hold of it, both learned the happiness which comes from doing something in particular. They found in regular work an emancipation of which they had never dreamed: it solved their riddles and blew away their fantasies, besides removing them from those hundred and one insidious little distractions which waste more than half the time of unoccupied women. If this emancipation led to some follies, it led also to much wisdom. The value of regularity became patent to many for the first time: the settling effect of a definite aim for each day, the fact that, in the long run, work passes the time much more quickly than amusement, were revelations; and the realisation of holding a career, albeit a temporary one, in her own two hands gave to many a woman a new assurance and a new pride which were precious as jewels. Thereafter they could never regard with equanimity the possibility of a return to the older more dependent or less purposeful life. The cessation of wartime employment obscured their immediate prospect but did not cloud their new ideals, for they had learnt a new and healthy discontent. It was not that the other ideal of women, marriage and a home, lost its attraction—far from it: but, it had become clear that women need not wait, like wares in a market place, till the arrival of a purchaser, doing odd jobs and maintaining as long as possible the freshness of their looks. They had realised the real virtues of the bachelor state, which are not its opportunities for disorder, laxity and idleness, but, in youth, its freedom, its mobility and its sense of hammering out life with a will on the anvil of ambition, and, in maturer age, the full interests, the easy and untrammelled relations, the opportunities for many sided intercourse without responsibility and the power of unhampered concentration on a purpose which are its compensations for the inevitable loneliness.

In the near future, it seems probable, the English girl will enter bachelorhood as fully and as regularly as an English boy. The old idea of its being unsettling or harmful is quickly passing away. English girls in general are nearly as capable of looking after themselves as their brothers, nor are they more likely than they to withstand the attractions of matrimony when they are offered. In the meantime they will prove themselves of value to society in some definite activity, instead of going shopping, arranging flowers and staying about indefinitely in other people’s houses. Mothers and fathers it is true, will be left forlorn a little earlier, but they will have to put up with it, and it will teach them to preserve the charm of one another’s society with more care against the day when, after the crowded cares of parenthood have vanished, nothing else is left to them.

But, to return to my original point, will the bachelor woman be a stabiliser or will she be disruptive? She will have the feminine instinct for stability and definite surroundings: she will never become so fluid a being socially as a man. Nevertheless, for the time of her bachelorhood she will not so easily indulge those instincts and will be likely, in the first flush of freedom, to hold them of small importance. She is, moreover, apt in these days to be carried away by her head farther than her heart would naturally take her, and her head, like a newly hoisted sail, will belly in the wind of any ready theorist. Girls are poor critics of ideas, and are apt to grasp at them with a touch of flighty passion which is more dangerous than the intellectual trifling of young men, who can play with them as keenly yet as unemotionally as they play with tennis balls. The one foe always lying in wait for bachelor women is hysteria, which takes the form of flightiness in the young and of a sour wilfulness in the older who succumb to it. Disruptive tendencies in the state will always find fruitful ground among hysterical females, who will push a theory to unpractical limits, not out of honest conviction, but from pure passion. But the danger of any permanent damage, provided always that the nation as a whole maintains its sanity, from this source need not be too seriously considered. A career or a profession is in itself a stabilising influence, and, now that women in England have few specific grounds for discontents on the score of sex-inequalities, the sparks of hysteria can fly harmlessly upwards without being gathered into a blaze. However, we shall see. The good Englishwoman, married or single, is riding forward at a round pace into the future. She is not likely to lose her bearings, but we shall all suffer if she does. It rests with her teachers to endow her richly with the faculty of finding her way, even in the dark.

CHAPTER X
THE ENGLISHWOMAN AT WORK

So much has been written lately about women’s work in England that most of the obvious generalisations on the subject have been exhausted. Much has yet to be done before all the vexed questions raised by the increase of woman workers during the war are settled, but that is a matter for the trades themselves. The only principle of primary validity is that women have as much right as men to enter the labour market, but they must win their places legitimately by their performances and not at the price of being sweated. Women, of course, have always worked in England. A book recently published by a woman on woman workers in the seventeenth century has reminded us of this, if we have forgotten Hood’s Song of the Shirt. So that the entry of women into the more technical and highly organised employments, hitherto mainly reserved for men, is nothing more than an inevitable process of development. The one thing, in this connection, which strikes an ordinary observer is that women are still a long way from having acquired men’s capacity for self-organisation, and this is the road on which the Englishwoman who works must progress in the future. Women can learn esprit de corps, but they do not seem to imbibe it naturally. This, I think, is partly due to their more sequestered education, with fewer games in which combined effort is all important, and partly to their intensely personal outlook on the whole of life. To them life is a clash of individual atoms rather than of corporate bodies to whose progress the fate of individual members is of comparatively little interest. History for them, whether past or contemporary, is a drama in which living persons, not ideas and processes, are the protagonists. For the large majority of them the notion of solidarity begins and ends with the home, within which it is absolute, only to be nebulous outside it. Yet the talent is not absent, only dormant. When it awakes the results are striking and often put men to shame. Florence Nightingale teaches us this lesson, and we have learnt it again more recently from the women’s ambulances and the women’s organisations which have helped us to win the war.

The opportunities for corporate action on the part of women are unlimited, and it is a fact which women of all classes are coming to realise in a greater measure. It was made plain, even to the more gently born among them who worked in factories and offices during the war, that without corporate action it was almost impossible to get justice. The rightness of ideas, unfortunately, does not conquer by its own momentum, especially in England where both men and women are apt to await its embodiment in concrete facts. They saw that ameliorations and advantages, the justice of which was admitted as soon as it was urged by common action, did not come to those who did not press for them, and that such action on the part of isolated individuals was triumphantly met by the retort that nobody else had asked for any change, a sufficient proof that it was not necessary. With their gain of political franchise and the removal by law of sex-disqualifications women in this country have every incentive to put into practice lessons of this kind. There is no reason, moreover, why they should restrict their corporate action to their own sex. They work with men domestically, forming combinations of immense strength: there is no reason why they should not do so generally. In the middle classes this truth is at last recognised, but in the working classes it is still regarded with suspicion. The Trades Unions, whether they like it or no, will have to admit women of like trades to full membership.

Another thing, as I have already remarked, which women have learnt more fully during the war, is the healthiness of regular work for its own sake, apart from its merely material rewards. Few that have had this salutary experience will reconcile themselves to a return to an existence of semi-idleness, nor will they bring up their daughters to regard such an existence, even where it is economically possible, as a natural one. The doctrine that no citizen has a right to live unless he or she makes his contribution to the work of the community is no longer a musty relic of simpler ages, but is forcing itself more and more upon universal recognition as an undeniable principle. Some of its most fervent devotees, it is true, would restrict the meaning of “work” to manual labour, but this is a pure delusion which cannot last in any fully organised and orderly community. It is almost impossible to set the limits of utility, and men have often condemned as useless the very activities which were to be the means of abundant progress to future generations. Utility and selfishness, moreover, can easily go together, so that the eradication of the latter can only be accomplished at the price of restricting the former. The one certain negation of utility is self-indulgence, which can only be allowed in small doses when utility has earned its keep. Women have learnt the wider limits of utility: they will no longer, in the more leisured classes, limit their idea of it to domestic utility, and women of the future will be no worse prepared for this important sphere of it if they are trained to enter the world at the age of discretion able to render definite service to the community in a form which it considers valuable.

To the weary worker in shop or factory, to the overworked servant and the harassed mother of a family it may seem ridiculous, even impertinent, to say these things. But they will recognise that, so far as the words contained any reproach, it was not directed at them, and that the diversion of any superfluous feminine energy into regular channels of work is not a matter of trifling import. They themselves will benefit by any such development, for better organisation of women will improve the lot of women who already work at trades, and will win more general recognition for the fact that the domestic labours of the household, whether performed for wages or not, are really work and not merely an occupation. Every woman with a dwelling and a family, irrespective of any other possible employment, is one of the country’s workers, and one of the best kind of workers, since her work is not done for a material reward but to fulfil a duty and attain an ideal. This has been said often enough, but it cannot be said too often. In certain classes the standard of motherhood is low and so is the standard of housewifery. Education alone will not raise these standards to a worthy level: we want a higher conception of domestic work and of its importance in the productiveness of our country, the aim of all labour being production. It always appears strange to me that a man who, if given the amount of individual responsibility in a business which is entailed in the administration of a household, would consider himself a fully-occupied worker, will often look upon his wife’s activities—which keep him comfortable, his children healthy and his servants contented—as mere incidents in an otherwise ornamental life.

Mr. J. Swinburne, a very gifted engineer, in a sensational paper read not long ago before the Musical Association, poked a great deal of good-humoured fun at the claims of women to equal consideration with men. Though “Women in Music” was the title of his paper, he surveyed generally the performances of women in every kind of activity and came to an unfavourable conclusion. One of his criticisms was that women’s minds are almost wholly receptive and hardly at all productive. They were not, he urged, originators of ideas or systems, neither leaders of thought, inventors or captains of industry. In his view, the great impulses which really drive round the wheels of civilisation have always been and always will be virile. So far as the past is concerned, this is certainly true, but it is questionable whether it is necessarily true of the future. The truth is that women are some centuries behindhand in experience of public activity, and this deficiency cannot quickly be made up. But the good Englishwoman will hardly go forward into the future with any damaging assumptions on her back: she will rather dump them by the roadside and press on, acknowledging a somewhat light equipment for her journey, but trusting to capacities in her knapsack to the possibilities of which she will confess no limits.

Englishwomen are excellent employees: they are more docile than men and less lazy by nature. Men are far more critical of their employers and every man, no matter how well suited to him his employment may be, faces his daily task with a certain spirit of rebellion. Having greater activity of mind and body than a woman, he is always distracted by the idea that he might be spending his time more profitably, or at least more agreeably. On the other hand, men are more methodical, and less at the mercy of their emotions when at work. Mary the housemaid runs upstairs at such a pace that she is speechless by the time she reaches the top, and Eliza the cook, if she has had a “few words” or her young man has been faithless, will produce pastry that is uneatable. Men do not run upstairs, and they leave their hearts outside the office with their overcoats, transforming themselves with ease into part of an impersonal machine from which they completely detach themselves at night with the same nonchalance. Mr Swinburne asserts that women take their work too seriously, as if that were a fault: the real fault is that they are apt to brood over it in their leisure hours, thus robbing the mind of its relaxation. Englishwomen might learn of Englishmen a habit of greater attention to themselves as machines.

The Englishman sets great store on physical well-being, a trait which, in exaggeration, is not particularly pleasing. But physical well-being means efficiency, so that on the whole a certain selfishness in insisting on sufficient food and rest for body and mind is valuable to a worker. We men are wisely gross, but we might not like to see the women as gross as we are, nor are we likely to do so, but we have something to teach them in our respect for the body as an engine rather than as an object of admiration, and in the readiness with which we cast away preoccupation when our work is done. I have seen a general in the field sitting in his dugout writing letters home while his force was delivering an important attack. All his arrangements had been made, all his orders framed with care: there was nothing to do at the moment but to allow his subordinates to act and to await their reports. So, like a wise man, he diverted his mind. Few women could have shown as much self-control. Men, of course, are not proof against anxiety, but they do manage to harden themselves against small worries. Women, on the other hand, so often show no discrimination, and give them as much mental and emotional wear and tear over a molehill as over a mountain. To speak mechanically, women would do well to improve their oil-feeds. As it is, their engines knock too readily and frequently seize on small provocation.

And, speaking of oil, there is a precious oil called geniality which I should like to see more freely poured out by Englishwomen whose employment brings them into contact with the body of their fellow creatures. They are much behind their Latin sisters in this respect. A Frenchwoman serves a customer with an empressement which is not merely a professional affectation. She takes a personal interest in the transaction, and would prefer to carry it through with smiles and gaiety on both sides. She is warm in her opening and parting salutations, ready to seize a suggestion with a pleased alacrity and always on the look out for anything that she can do or say to increase the satisfaction of her client or customer. This spontaneous cheerfulness of address is only natural to the Irish among us, but I am bound to say that many Englishwomen who wait or serve push its opposite to an absurd extreme. We all know the awful chilly superiority of the being who takes our orders at a counter or at a tea-shop. She advances either with the air of Juno invoked by a presumptuous mortal or approaches with an irritable scuttle as if she were far too busy with other important affairs to pay much attention to our insignificant wants. At times she will condescend to a kind of Olympian affability, with mincing speech and an affected smirk, but never betray herself an ordinary English girl, cheerful, unaffected, anxious to please, eager to find a personal link of sympathy with all her customers: that would be unladylike and wanting in commercial deportment. Men are much more friendly. For kindly solicitude no Frenchman, Swiss, German or Italian ever beat the old-fashioned English waiter, even if his gastronomical imagination was more limited. Bartenders are comrades, but barmaids are usually Gorgons. I crack a joke with my tailor, even when I owe him money, but I have never seen anything so common pass between the silk-gowned divinity of the dressmaking department and one of her respectful but determined clients: a simper on one side and a sniff on the other are the more usual small change which passes between the feminine server and the feminine served. There seems to be no good reason for this stiffness of Englishwomen. In ordinary social life these same women are as good-humoured as the rest of their kind, and we are not a crabbed race, however reserved we may be. It is, I think, partly a convention which might well be allowed to die, and partly due to the woman’s intense desire to live up to any position in which she may be placed. Her self-consciousness overwhelms her natural humanity, which is a pity, since geniality added to other feminine graces is irresistible.

Women as employers or managers of others are not susceptible of generalisation: they can be very good and very bad. In this respect they have a less even level than men, whose administration, in general, is more exposed to pressure of public opinion and who, in all business relations, are less personal than women. A woman superior can inspire greater personal affection and more bitter personal antipathy in her subordinates, because she carries about with her wherever she goes all her good and bad qualities, while a man, if he is often too lazy to get the best out of his good ones, is equally slow to show the worst of his bad ones: where he at best will create a strong link of common endeavour among the whole of a personnel, a woman will forge chains of most intimate affection, but where he inspires fear and that dislike which is called “unpopularity,” she from sheer perversity can surround herself with an atmosphere of rebellious hatred. There is no doubt that the infinite capacity of Englishwomen at their best for tact and sympathy gives them an immense advantage over men in any kind of personal relation if they care to use it: a motherly employer can do infinitely more for the welfare and happiness of employees than the most fatherly, for men have a delicacy about intruding too far into individual circumstances, whereas there is nothing into which a sympathetic woman cannot inquire without embarrassment. Here, certainly, there is much progress before the Englishwoman. Outside the domestic sphere, she is still in her infancy as an employer, as an administrator or as an industrial organiser. She has so far failed to extend the happy touch with which she can conduct a household or a small personal business to the large concern or to the company, as though her grasp failed the moment she was out of immediate contact with concrete personalities in the more hazy realm of units, aggregations and impersonal figures. Where she calculates in days the man calculates in years, and, though she may know with surprising accuracy the idiosyncrasies and capabilities of a staff within the immediate survey of her own eyes, she leaves it to the man to devise the large schemes which will find useful employment for thousands.

Possibly this wider and more impersonal grasp will never come to women: if so, we shall have to learn more accurately the reason why, for the impossibility is now not obvious. With organisation and combination becoming more and more the rule in every department of human activity, it will be a great loss to the community if, through women’s failure to extend their administrative capacity over wider areas, the fostering care and sympathetic penetration peculiar to women are confined to narrow circles. In that sense they have great need to develop the productive mind and also the gift of leadership, which is the art of attaching energies rather than affections. The proof of clear aims and a keen vision, single-hearted devotion to a worthy end, judicious selection of means to attain it, quick recognition of capacity in others and confidence in it when recognised, care in preparation, incisiveness in action, these are the qualities which draw men after them in spite of personal incompatibilities, and harness a multitude of scattered energies, at their highest efficiency, into a single co-ordinated effort. Women, so far, have been wanting in these qualities, and yet what could they not do if they had them? Joan of Arc and Napoleon both led armies: one touched the hearts of men, the other their pride. A woman who to the moral force of Joan could add the executive genius of Napoleon might lead the world straight to the millennium.

So extreme a combination of unusual qualities is improbable: but it is by no means inconceivable that some Sylvia commended by all the swains should develop the practical powers of a Whiteley or a Burbidge, a phenomenon which might occur sooner than the emergence from among women of a really commanding master-intellect. It may happen in time that a woman starting from small beginnings may earn millions and leave them to her sons as any Carnegie or Pierpont Morgan of to-day. The fact that it now seems impossible is a proof of what women have yet to achieve rather than of their natural limitations. I should not like to lay odds against the success of women as great originators of commercial enterprise, but I would modestly back my opinion that such pioneers will as quickly arise within these islands as from any part of the world outside them.

CHAPTER XI
THE ENGLISHWOMAN AT PLAY

No recent development has been more remarkable than that of athletics among women, particularly among Englishwomen. We are apt to forget how short a time it is since George du Maurier drew his beautiful young ladies elegantly disporting themselves in flounced skirts on the tennis lawn, wielding racquets with diminutive heads and as taut as landing nets with which they gently lobbed back the ball to a swain in side-whiskers and knickerbockers. Women, of course, have always played. Nausicaa and her maidens innocently tossed a ball to and fro before the wondering eyes of shipwrecked Ulysses: the battledore and shuttlecock are nearly as old as cork and feathers. Pastimes, too, which involved no physical exertion have always been favourites with women. But it has been left, one might almost say, to our own generation to see women playing games involving strength and agility of body in the same sense in which men play them, as real trials of skill and endurance, quickeners of the blood, purgers of the body, with seriousness and absorption as ends in themselves. No longer do we tolerate the merely ladylike player who is afraid to perspire or get blisters on her hands; even at croquet she must be strenuous and attentive: pretty incompetence may still attract a certain kind of man in the drawing room, but it is shunned on the field and on the lawn.

In this development Englishwomen have, beyond all doubt, played the leading part, and in England, the home of field sports, it is right that this should be so. Women of other nations are now following their lead, which is all the better for them. We need not regret overmuch that a girl from France should bear away a tennis championship, since there is no sign of decadence among our own women, and it is well for English people to be taught that they cannot have things eternally all their own way. English speaking women still lead the world in sport and games, and it is likely that they will continue to do so. Athletic prowess is in itself a sign of independence, a virtue in which the English woman has by far the longest tradition. All the same, she has made such strides in this tradition lately that there seems little room for her to go any further, since there are inevitable limits to her muscular development. She has finally banished the fetish of being “ladylike,” at all events, while she is playing games. She takes off her coat with a vengeance and lets her limbs have full play. I shudder to think what Mrs Grundy of even fifty years ago would have said to a photograph of a lady champion delivering a smashing volley, with one leg kicked up in the air and her knee-high skirt flying in the wind. And the admirable Miss Pinkerton—I cannot conceive her horror on beholding two teams of schoolgirls, in jerseys, perfunctory skirts, most obvious knickers and shin-guards, facing one another for a hockey match. Hunting she might have allowed—did not Sophia Western hunt? A little archery, perhaps, set off the figure to advantage; straightforward skating—but no figures, please—promoted grace, and possibly bowls might be permitted, though this would not be desirable. But the idea of a woman waving a cricket bat or a golfclub, or actually letting off a horrible gun at a pheasant, or being seen at a billiard table, or tearing along the road astride a motor bicycle, would have seemed to women of that day the height of indecency.

Nobody could wish to return to those old days, though the question may arise, for girls as well as for boys, whether in this country we do not pay too much attention to athletics. I do not believe that in girls’ schools athletic efficiency assumes the abnormal importance which it assumes in the public schools for boys. Women, for one thing, do not particularly worship athletic skill in their own sex, and, for another, they have other little vanities of their own to keep this particular vanity in a reasonable place. Still, there is a type of girl in England who thinks of nothing but games and recreations from the time of getting up to the time of going to bed. We could do very well indeed without her. You will see her in the morning setting out soon after breakfast in a gaudy woollen jumper, a short tweed skirt and the thickest brogues she can find, for her daily round of golf. She always tries to find a man to play with, by the way, and imitates with exaggeration every trick of the masculine game. After lunch it is either another round of golf or a spin in the motor, if she can drive herself. Then hey! for a colossal tea and immediate bridge with innumerable cigarettes till dinner. After dinner it must be more bridge, billiards or dancing. She talks of nothing but games or sport and men, and she thinks of nothing else. If she hunts, she looks down her nose at those who don’t; if she favours winter sports, she has a poor notion of those who cannot rush off to Switzerland as Christmas comes round. And whatever she does, she is not a true sportsman, being far too keenly concerned in her own advantage. She will manœuvre for the most accomplished partner, whether it be at tennis or bridge, and, if he be a man, she will ignore all other deficiencies on his part, so long as he will help her to win and will gain her the kudos of appearing remarkably accomplished in the public eye. She knows nothing of the comradeship of sport, and will unblushingly give her partner at the morning’s golf the cold shoulder at the evening’s dance if some backboneless elegant, with as little muscle as he has character, happens to show her off with greater effect at the jazz or the fox-trot. She has never been known to play for her side, to make light of a partner’s mistakes or to take a beating cheerfully. Games, in her creed, are meant for the display of herself, and she holds any partner who fails to assist her in this aim as simply contemptible. In general, her only ideal in life is to have a good time, which means continuous excitement and always varying pleasure. She has never given up an hour’s pleasure voluntarily to do a kindness: she has never done a stroke of genuine work, and never reads any book but a titillating novel. Her conversation, unless you happen to be interested in one of her many kinds of “shop,” is the abyss of dulness, and she would immediately vote anyone a dreadful bore who endeavoured to lead her thoughts beyond a ball, a card, a dance or a kiss. The war, indeed, made her better in spite of herself. Finding that she had to enjoy herself less, she did turn her thoughts to helping her country. But, whether she drove an ambulance or became a V.A.D., self was not very far away. Having a good time still remained her ideal, and many opportunities she found of having it in company with young officers. The war over, her relapse into the old habits did not take long, and she is now with us again in all her graceful insolence. Her only salvation is to marry and have children, lots of them. This will give her something to do at last, and she will learn, unwillingly, the inevitable self-denials which parenthood entails even for the most selfish.

This, unfortunately, is an essentially English type, but among English women it is in a minority, though a too conspicuous one. The majority, like their men, manage to combine games, as healthy recreations worthy of serious endeavour, with useful work and more important aims in life. On the whole they are far less self indulgent in this respect than men, even the most hard-working of whom seem, as a rule, to find an orgy of games or sport necessary on their holiday, cutting themselves off from all but a minute section of their fellows as surely as if they remained in their offices. Also, Englishwomen in general do not become maniacs about their favourite form of sport, unless they hunt, and all who hunt regard that sport as a solemn profession rather than a recreation. Women do not care twopence about the achievements of professional players of games over whose performances men waste so much time and breath, nor do they learn Wisden’s Almanac by heart in their youthful enthusiasm. In short, they take a more reasonable view of games than English men, giving them no more than their proper place in the whole scheme of values and rating athletic ability no higher than it deserves. Personally, though I admit that this is little more than prejudice, I do not think the more violent games are suitable for women: and if a more than usually robust member of her sex should rise and say: “Men play this and that, why should not we?” I can only answer “Why not, indeed?” and point out in extenuation of my old-fashioned ideas that feminine graces are not the same as masculine ones, and that it is a pity to diminish them by rough usage. It is all very well for women to play cricket among themselves or the mixed cricket of country houses whereat the men use broomhandles left-handed, but they have not the strength or the hardness of body to play the game properly, so why should they trouble to learn it?

And for women’s football there is absolutely no justification. It is only a game for young men who can face bodily injury with equanimity and recover from it quickly. A woman kicks as feebly as she throws, and she may be well content to put up with these limitations. Besides, what can look more idiotic than the sight to which the illustrated papers occasionally treat us, of twenty-two more or less knock-kneed young females in shirts and shorts ambling about a football field? If they only realised how hideous they looked they would run to the pavilion and hide themselves at once. Football, however, is not common, but hockey is. Well, hockey is a good game, healthy and not too physically exacting, but no wise man ever plays mixed hockey. The truth is that a woman’s self-control in games is not proof against more than a certain degree of excitement. When that degree is passed, she will fling rules and safety to the winds in her passion to win victory or avoid defeat. In the clash of hockey sticks the intensity of excitement cannot be limited: opponents with dangerous weapons in their hands come into close physical contact, and the results may be appalling. In any case, I doubt if hockey enhances any of the feminine graces. Let the girls play it at their schools if they must, but do not let them ask us to admire the hockey stoop, with sunk chests and rounded shoulders, which many of them will acquire and which only a long course of carrying waterpots on their heads could ever cure. If men who, from playing games, get kinks in their brains are to be censured, so are women who get kinks in their bodies.

Then there is another question. Should women delight to kill? We all know, of course, that Diana was a huntress and that Atalanta helped to kill the boar: but Diana was a very chilly young goddess who did little to increase the cheerfulness of mortals, and Atalanta’s boar was a public nuisance. Killing is such a small element in the joy of fox-hunting that it would be absurd to look askance at the women who, for the delight of riding across country and of managing a horse with skill, adorn the hunting field and join with ardour in the chase. Fishing, too, is catching rather than killing. But when it comes to shooting, then killing for its own sake is the primary aim. This aim is not a natural one for women. They are by nature the fosterers and the originators of life, and it must surely appear to most of them a perversion of all their natural instincts to take life violently and gratuitously from any living creatures, simply for the pleasure of doing so. Lady Nimrod, therefore, will go without praise from me, for all her prowess in the covert or the trophies of her big game shoots. I would rather she had many scalps of men than one skin of a tiger tracked and slain by herself. There is so much saving of life still to be done in the world, and women are so admirably constituted for this end, that it is not unreasonable to prefer their developing this side of their energies to their adding themselves to the forces of destruction. Lady Nimrods, however, are few and likely to be fewer. As civilisation spreads, hunting, which, after all, is an artificial relic of an earlier state of society, is bound to disappear, with all its advantages and its drawbacks. The world will become too small for it.

Nevertheless, even if the more violent contests and deliberate killing are to be deprecated as recreations for women, there are plenty of games and sports left which they can and do adorn—golf, tennis, squash racquets, croquet, lacrosse, skating, skiing, tobogganing, badminton, and the rest. At all of these they can, if they begin young enough, hold their own with men. Few women keep sufficient suppleness to attain a very high degree of graceful accomplishment in any game which they take up in maturer years, as the painful and awkward swing of many lady golfers bears witness, but nothing is more beautiful than the action of an agile girl driving at golf or serving overhand at lawn tennis. It would be an inestimable advantage to the nation if more of our girls had the time and opportunity to cultivate athletics in their youth, for we should then see less of those anæmic frequenters of cinemas among our girl-workers. But the lesson is being learnt; physical exercises are now practised in every school, and large employers of labour are coming to recognise the wisdom of providing healthy recreation in the open air for female as well as male employees: so that the time may come perhaps when every Englishwoman will have an upright carriage and when the shambling shuffle which too often appears in city streets has given place to a free, easy gait.

In youth, certainly, nothing purges the humours like exercise in recreation, and it is wonderful to think of the good sense and sanity which the young ladies of Miss Austen’s day were able to maintain on walking of a very gentle kind. Emma Woodhouse was a charming person, but she must occasionally have felt the desire to hit something very hard, though there is no record of her hitting anything but the amour propre of poor Miss Bates; and Jane Eyre would have toned her nerves better for a few games of tennis. But, when the days of high spirits and superfluous energy are over, women seem better able to settle down than men, who are rather like children in their dependence on amusement. Women, on the whole, may be thankful that they escape the tyranny of habitual exercise in later years and can compose themselves to a reasonable, healthy life without the need for continually perspiring and violently exercising their muscles. Many a wife, I often think, must look with indulgent wonder on her middle-aged husband who, if he is to keep cheerful and contented, must pass at least half the hours when he is not working in playing at something or other. What she can attain with a mild walk, a little gardening, and a bout of stitching he can only compass after propelling for hours a ball about a field or up against a wall or across a table; or else he must be watching somebody else do these things and becoming ludicrously excited in large crowds at cup-ties and test matches, the importance of which to humanity at large is, to say the least, problematical. Yet, with exquisite forbearance she refrains from exercising her humour at his expense, and even pretends to acknowledge the importance of these things for him, though he would be the first to admit that they had no importance for her. She will hardly complain, though well she might, at the amount of his leisure which he spends on himself alone, for men are unthinkingly extravagant in what they spend in time and money on amusing and feeding themselves. No doubt she is wise in making these accommodations, seeing how men are constituted, but it would be only graceful on the men’s part to acknowledge that they are in need of them. They might be sadly embarrassed if they had to cast up a comparative account of their own and their wife’s expenditure on amusement, and the best they could say for themselves would be that men, as machines, were more expensive to maintain in good running order than women.

However, we need not labour the little difference too hard. English men and women, as a rule, are good sportsmen, the one to the other. They can play together as well as they can work together, without unnecessary ceremony or condescension; and if the man can play the woman off her feet, she can dance him off his legs. Unlike most other nations, English men and women, wherever they go, take their games with them as part of the good fellowship which they spread in the out-of-the-way corners of the world. In India, in Africa, in South America, in ports of call and in remote islands, no British colony settles long before its sporting club is started, where its members may meet one another daily for friendly intercourse and friendly emulation. It is the great bulwark against loneliness, the focus of simple gaiety in the whole station, and, even if it fosters overmuch our insular solidarity, it encourages healthiness and counteracts the potent denaturalising force which other continents are apt to exercise over the European. The picture of Saigon which Claude Farrère draws in his novel “Les Civilisés” is not a pleasant one, nor one that any Englishman could draw of an English colony. As a nation we keep as hard and as healthy abroad as we keep at home, and for this our English amusements are partly to be thanked. The result might possibly be attained with less expense of time and energy, but at least it is attained. Our respect for a good playmate is, perhaps exaggerated, but it is genuine, and the conception of a good playmate, if it does not exhaust the virtues, is not a mean one. Above all, our men and women apply this conception to one another, as a strong attachment between the sexes added to that of nature. Long therefore, may English men and women play together, since thereby they will know one another, respect one another and help one another more thoroughly.

CHAPTER XII
THE ENGLISHWOMAN IN PARLIAMENT

On December 1st, 1919, in London deep darkness covered the land. A dull morning gave place to a mid-day of Stygian gloom, and the members of the House of Commons, as they ate their lunch, looked out on to an inky stream reflecting an inky sky. Had the citizens of London been intellectually as benighted as they were atmospherically, they might have run to bow themselves in frenzy before the images of Gog and Magog, beseeching them, amid the smoke of sacrifice, to turn away their wrath. And had some wily and reactionary priest of these divinities arisen to harangue the people, saying: "Brethren, wherefore do you beat your breasts and offer sacrifices rather than seek out the cause of your offence? The gods indeed are wroth, seeing that ye set at nought the divine laws. Even now at Westminster the unlawful thing is being done: the distinction which they in their wisdom have set between man and woman is being impiously flouted. For this the gods frown, for this the sun’s light is put out, giving promise of greater evils to come"—if he had said such words as these, a crowd of primitive citizens might have rushed from the city to Westminster and prevented, had they been strong enough, the reception of a woman into the assembly of the people.

As it was, no such thing happened. The atmospheric gloom was accepted philosophically as evidence of a deep depression, not on the part of the gods, but of the barometer in the Atlantic, a peaceful crowd gathered in Whitehall to witness what the evening papers would describe as “the scenes” at Westminster, and the Members of the House of Commons finished their lunches and asked their questions undisturbed. Even though the attendance in the House was large, to an unprejudiced observer in the gallery what occurred seemed, as I have been told, quite ordinary. It was almost impossible, at the moment when Mr Lloyd George and Mr Balfour—after a false start—walked to the table with Lady Astor in their midst, to focus the mind upon the revolution in thought and feeling which this event, divided by so few years from that distressing siege of St Stephen’s by wild and dishevelled women, really represented. The first lady member took her seat, and it appeared the most natural thing in the world, particularly as she had so cleverly devised her parliamentary costume as to blend completely with the hundreds of dark coats and white collars that surrounded her. Had she arrived in a “confection,” the contrast, the new element, would have been immeasurably accentuated.

The contrast, the new element, was there, however, though not where people were looking for it. It was faint, almost imperceptible, fleeting as a thought: yet, to the mind of my philosophic informant, it stood for more than the previous old-fashioned ceremony. After her formal introduction, the new member passed round the division lobby to the door of the House opposite the Speaker. My parliamentary philosopher, coming down at this moment from the gallery, was met, all suddenly, by the new thing for which he had vainly looked five minutes earlier. The new element, or rather its symbol, was there in that lobby, but so attenuated that at first it eluded description; but the philosopher’s nose followed its clue as surely as the First Secretary’s in the last act of “Diplomacy.” It was the faintest breath of a perfume, just the thinnest ghost of a delicate scent, but a scent quite beyond the inspiration of a masculine barber. Thus the air of the division lobby, which, sucked as it is from the river, had borne many strange odours wafted from passing barges, knew an element to which, of all the lobbies, this innermost one had ever been a stranger. This was the symbol which truly represented the revolution, though on its actual physical essence he laid no stress: it may have been a sheer illusion. The ceremony of “taking her seat” was only an old formula applied without alteration to a new phenomenon: this elusive breath was the symbol of a new thing applied to an old institution.

From this symbol I take my point of departure in this chapter. The newspapers spent at the time much space and ingenuity in commenting on chance incongruities which might arise if the old rules of parliamentary procedure were applied rigidly to a woman member: this was amusing matter enough for gossip, but of no importance. The only question of interest is in what really consists the novelty at Westminster and in all the political life of our country which has been begun by the presence of a woman on the green benches. It is not, in the narrow sense, a political novelty, but something far wider which affects, or may affect, all English men and women.

There are women who seem now as anxious to obscure the fact of the novelty as they were to bring it to pass. If I might believe a lady novelist with whom I discussed the matter not long ago, the thing to rejoice over is that Lady Astor was adopted and elected as an ordinary party candidate, not primarily as a woman, as a nominee of some women’s party or as champion of some women’s programme. On this view, as I understand it, the winning of full political rights for women, having removed the greatest and most unfair of all the differentiations between the two sexes, leaves them now blended into one both as electors and potential candidates, as if this were a possible, natural or desirable consummation. It is, of course, a quite intelligible point of view, when the mass of stupidity against which it is a protest is considered. Women have suffered so much from the fact of their sex—though they have been inclined to underestimate its privileges and its powers even in the unregenerate days—that they may be excused if the last thing that they wish is to insist on it in the field of politics. Nobody can blame Englishwomen for wishing to come into the arena, as far as possible, unprejudiced, and to be regarded just as citizens, and not, in any sense, as freaks. Obviously, too, it would be impolitic on their part, at the first moment of the innovation, before they have found themselves or gained experience in the new sphere of action, to lay any stress on any kind of antagonism which might exist between them and the sex which has hitherto been in exclusive possession of that sphere. They would rather slip in unobtrusively in their dark coats and skirts and white collars, as not too conspicuous political animals, evading reporters and writers of paragraphs, making no parade of their special feminine experience, but trusting to opportunity to use it; making, also, no special appeal that a man could not equally make, until the novelty has so worn off that their candidature and their election shall become too common to provoke comment.

Let them do so by all means, but that elusive symbol in the division lobby cannot be ignored. Their idea, so long as it is protective of their best interests is legitimate: it will be impossible for them to take their proper share in politics so long as they are regarded as freaks, and, whether or no a time will ever come when a women’s party must of necessity arise, it would be foolish now to forestall necessity. A party crystallises common ideals, which, at this moment, the women of England have not got either by tradition or conviction. Yet the fact remains that women are women, and not men. Is it right, is it even possible, that this should be ignored or disregarded in politics, when it is patent,—usefully, inexorably, so—in all other social activities? With all respect to ladies who take another view, I submit that it is neither possible nor desirable: perhaps I may persuade them that my view, where it is not supported by plain facts, is not a fruit of masculine prejudice and does not aim at nullifying the good of their well-earned enfranchisement, but is really a greater tribute to the value of their appearance in politics than they seem ready to pay themselves.

In all probability, men being more active, more politically ambitious and more in a position by their public activities to gain suffrages than women, the proportion of women to men among members of Parliament will always be small. For this very reason it seems important that this small proportion should get the best out of itself, which it will not do by disregarding its sex. Perhaps it is not the sex so much that matters as the special experience and outlook which are incidental to it. The woman’s point of view may not always be the most just or the most comprehensive, but it will always be valuable when clearly stated. A woman, even from her earliest years, learns to penetrate into recesses of life which defy the penetration of the less supple man: she sees into other minds from a different angle and, where the minds are women’s, from a much more advantageous one. In the ordinary course of life in England the woman’s path begins to diverge from the man’s immediately the confines of babyhood are passed, and, though women will be right to annex for themselves anything that is valuable in masculine upbringing and to press for complete equality of opportunity with men, it is hardly possible that the two paths will ever coincide. It is scarcely conceivable that the mind of a woman should ever take on so completely masculine a form that she will not, by feminine contacts and sympathies, have gathered some experiences beyond the reach of a man. I cannot see why political should differ from social life in this respect. Each of a normal married couple brings some special contribution to the common household: every sensible man leaves some things to his wife as she leaves others to him: and though members of Parliament cannot so absolutely divide the range of their activities, there is no reason why any special qualifications should be left in the cloakroom because they were not specifically included in the issue of a particular election. We want the woman’s point of view in politics, for men will be saved from many grave mistakes by the knowledge of it. That it should always be paramount is not to be expected, but, seeing the English talent for compromise, its recognition would not fail to affect the consideration of any question which brought it forth. The whole of our social life is now undergoing a profound process of modification: it is not easy to realise the depth of this process as it goes on its slow, uneven course from day to day. Now, if ever, there is a great part for women to play as women, not only as members of a political party: women should be watching, advising, and taking an interest, so that the result of the process may be as successful as the best wills and minds of this country can make it.

Therefore, women as electors should be as little deterred from expressing their own point of view as women members. They need not found a women’s party to do this. They have only to take advantage of their voting power and to make it a real force in every constituency. They will not do this in a moment, for the Englishwoman is more apathetic politically even than the man, and her opinion less educated. She will have to learn to scrutinise public questions as carefully as she does domestic ones and to make her conclusions heard as clearly out of the home as in it. The addition of so many million women to the parliamentary register should be something more than the addition of so many million electors. It is not an unmixed blessing, for women have their special faults as well as men, but these faults can be compensated for if the valuable qualities of women are also put into the scale. If Englishwomen are to have political power, it is well that they should learn how to use it, and if women members are a valuable leaven at Westminster, the quantity of that leaven depends largely upon the women electors. We need not be too afraid, I think, that political activity of this kind would bring about a regrettable conflict between the sexes. One might as well be asked to believe that husband and wife inevitably come into regrettable conflict over the colour of the drawing room carpet or the best place for the summer holiday. Here, though there may be a difference of opinion, discussion usually throws up a satisfactory solution which does justice to two different, but not in the least antagonistic, interests. In the larger political life of the nation the same happy solution may be as confidently expected, even if, in rare cases, the argument reaches the emotional acuteness of a domestic “scene.” In normal households “scenes,” if they occur, clear the air; a few tears and a few hard words are better than the silence of apathy: there seems no reason why the analogy should not hold collectively. Hope for the best in this matter is all the more justified in that Englishwomen are by nature peculiarly loyal to their men: they are far more apt to refrain out of motherliness from opposing them than to thwart them out of perversity, and more ready to propitiate their Bills and Toms when they come home tired from work than to expect a similar attention on their part. If the privilege of the franchise was conferred on women as a recognition, the privilege implies duties also, especially the duty of rendering the privilege valuable to the State. The degree to which Englishwomen, as political beings, cultivate a tactful independence will be the measure of the value which they are extracting from the privilege. Besides, women in public life will protect themselves far more successfully against the gapes of idle curiosity by developing a large bulk of political capacity than by trying to merge themselves inconspicuously, but ignominiously, with the men.

In any case, whether they are convinced or not, they will not succeed in what lawyers might call the “merger” of the two sexes. My symbol of the division lobby here tickles the brain conclusively: it may stand, to the philosopher, for all the emotional current which runs as inevitably between the two sexes as electricity between the two poles of a magnet. The granting of full political rights to women has truly introduced a new element into politics which even the most heartfelt wish cannot possibly conjure away. This element is the appeal of woman to man and man to woman which in every degree, from starkest crudity to most refined subtlety, is present in all human relations of the two sexes. That force of attraction, on which Henry Adams so brilliantly and whimsically reflected, is part of that persistent “nature” which the most assiduous application of the pitchfork will never drive out. A constituency is but a collection of human beings who bring to all their preoccupations, politics included, the mental and moral habits which they have acquired, and members of Parliament, as an observer at Westminster has infinite opportunity of noticing, are human beings with all the holes in their logical armour and all the susceptibility to moral influence and emotional suggestion which is a quality of the species however civilised. Until they argue by mathematical symbols, pure thinking in their debates will always be diluted by other influences. If the influence of women be added, this cannot fail to have its effect. Why should anyone expect it to be otherwise? Politics cannot be separated artificially from the rest of life even by the most sedulous endeavour. Political and social elements in existence are inextricably mingled. Queen Elizabeth was an effective ruler, but she showed herself a woman too; the great Empress Catherine and Maria Theresa did not act politically by the dry light of reason alone; and who can deny the influence of the current which runs between man and woman in the political dealings of Queen Victoria, especially with Lords Melbourne and Beaconsfield? If these great women could not avoid the influence, it is hardly to be expected that women politicians and the men with whom they deal politically will avoid it more successfully.

The inevitable introduction, or accentuation in a sphere where it had hitherto been less marked, of this new element was the one consideration on which a fair-minded man might have seriously pondered before making up his mind on the question of votes for women. No professions or good intentions on women’s part could conjure it away, and it was to be admitted that it would make for evil as well as for good. The mutual influence of the sexes may produce the highest devotion and the loftiest endeavour. Men and women will do for one another, both individually and in the mass, greater and finer things than they will do for their own sex alone: they can appeal to each other’s highest feelings. On the other hand, they can appeal to the lowest feelings, and the flow of the current, either by attraction or repulsion, can easily work in such a way as to cause distraction rather than concentration, irrelevancy rather than logical conclusion. It might well have seemed, on dispassionate reflection, that there was already irrelevancy enough in the political life of England. Appeals to prejudice or mere personalities were common enough without increasing the strength and range of their appeal. With every recognition of the logic of the women’s claim, there remained the fear that the woman’s tendency to take an intensely personal view of questions, her ready affection by emotional side-issues, the sway which personal antipathies and repulsions exercise, almost unconsciously, over her mind, and the quite notorious unscrupulousness with which she will use every possible feminine appeal to gain over a man against his better judgment, might be as unfortunate as the influence of her higher qualities would be valuable. The march of events and of political thought triumphantly overbore objections of this kind: they could not possibly stem the tide of great historic necessity. But this tide has not swept facts away: what was true in such objections remains true still, nor will retorts on the nature of corresponding masculine failings destroy them. Men, let it be admitted, are as frail in their way as women, and then let it be recognised that the influence against which they are most frail has burst into a region where they were comparatively exempt from it. There is no disrespect, I feel sure, in reminding Englishwomen, who are not at all averse from criticising other members of their sex, of these things. Those of them who recognise the dangers will have the opportunity of guarding against them by educating the ignorant. It will be for them, the political leaders of the women, to see that women’s influence is used to clarify, not to obscure, judgment, to deprecate the undue intrusion of personal emotions, and to broaden the range of the woman’s political views beyond her own immediate environment. The power which they hold in their hands is enormous: they have not yet learned to use it fully, but they cannot divest themselves of it. The political future of England depends largely on the manner in which they handle it.

There is now a lady members’ room in the Palace of Westminster, which at present has only one occupant. When it has many—and the time may not be long distant—will it not be a dynamo for the storage of the feminine current? Its very existence cuts for the first time across the purely political differences of members within the precincts of the House, typifying a distinction never before drawn between one member and another—that of sex. Its effects may not be immediate and resounding, but there are dormant possibilities there which it would be absurd to overlook, possibilities of a new energy let loose, of drama, even of romance. The collective consciousness of the House or of a committee is extremely susceptible to emotional appeal: it is easily exasperated, readily smoothed by tact, quickly moved to laughter. It would hardly be impervious to an appeal, even tacit, to its chivalry. If a man with a fine appearance and a good voice immediately prepossesses such an audience in his favour, may we not imagine the case of a beautiful woman with a melodious voice rising, let us say, from the Treasury or the front Opposition bench to plead a cause with passion? A crowded House is an effective background for a speaker from such a position: a woman, with her sex’s unerring eye for effective pose, would make full use of it. Would she not project from her whole personality a force infinitely exceeding that of her mere words and arguments, a force of which no man would be capable, given a similar audience? There might be a radiance, a pathos—suppose she ventured a telling sob—an enthusiasm which, though absent from the pages of the morrow’s Hansard, might tell strongly enough upon the night’s division. At ordinary times, it is true, party prepossessions and party whips, as well as logical convictions, are sufficient safeguards against the effect of irrelevant appeal: but, when the point is critical, opinions evenly divided, feeling high, or a government shaking, the smallest thing may turn the scale. The appeal of a woman to men, used consciously or unconsciously, at such a time would not be a small thing. It might be so momentary as to vanish from the ken of history, but it might be decisive. The requisite combination of circumstances may be long in making its appearance, but no one can deny its possibility. The oratorical power of a Fox, a Pitt and a Burke are remembered even now, when their personalities have vanished and the effect of their very words is no longer overpowering. If their emotional mastery over a gathering of men was so great as to outlive their bodies for over a century, surely the history of future centuries may have to tell of women whose mastery was transcendent, of some female Pitt, who led a Parliament, or some new Joan of Arc, who led a nation. Englishwomen and Englishmen may well ponder all that the future may bring out of that lady members’ room with its now solitary occupant. For good and for ill there is a new force at Westminster which, like all new forces, looks innocent enough at the experimental stage, but may yet contain the energy to revolutionise a world.

FOOTNOTES:

1 See The Education of Henry Adams, p. 442

2 Even M. Marcel Proust’s remarkable picture of modern “jeunes filles” in his masterpiece of discursion “A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs” does not convince me that flappers exist in France.

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Table of Contents

- THE GOOD ENGLISHWOMAN

- CONTENTS

- CHAPTER I A FEW REMARKS FROM THE MAN IN THE SIDECAR

- CHAPTER II LITTLE GIRLS
- CHAPTER III BIG GIRLS
- CHAPTER IV THE ENGLISH WIFE
- CHAPTER V THE ENGLISH MOTHER
- CHAPTER VI THE ENGLISHWOMAN’S MIND
- CHAPTER VII THE ENGLISHWOMAN’S MANNERS
- CHAPTER VIII THE ENGLISHWOMAN AND THE ARTS
- CHAPTER IX THE ENGLISHWOMAN IN SOCIETY
- CHAPTER X THE ENGLISHWOMAN AT WORK
- CHAPTER XI THE ENGLISHWOMAN AT PLAY

- CHAPTER XII THE ENGLISHWOMAN IN PARLIAMENT

- FOOTNOTES:

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE