Read Ebook: The Good Englishwoman by Williams Orlo

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 151 lines and 56255 words, and 4 pages

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.

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.

LITTLE GIRLS

A la p?che des moules Je ne veux plus aller, maman. A la p?che des moules Je ne veux plus aller. Les gar?ons de Marennes Me prendraient mon panier, maman. Les gar?ons de Marennes Me prendraient mon panier.

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.

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.

BIG GIRLS

"Maud is not yet seventeen But she is tall and stately"

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.

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 mediaeval 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

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.

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 r?le 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 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.

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.

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 , 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.

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.

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 aesthetic 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.

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.

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.

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.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet