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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.

"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 int?ressants et sens?s d'une femme de m?rite sont plus propres ? former un jeune homme que toute la p?dantesque 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 Bront?s, 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 Hall?'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 Bront? 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.

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?

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