Wecan hardly fail to perceive that we are living to-day in a period of profound disillusionment. There is nothing strange about that. Every great war has brought disillusionment in its wake. What is of interest is to examine the nature of the disillusionment and estimate its probable results.
In the first year or two after the Armistice it was a bitter and passionate thing, almost as sharply felt among civilians as among the returned soldiers. Life appeared barren and profitless, religion a mockery, civilization a myth. The young cursed the old for creating such a mess; the old, though not conscious of having deliberately created anything of the sort, were broken-hearted at the spectacle of what some one must have done—and who, then, if not they? Governments were a mirthless laughing-stock. Moral laws were thrown overboard; for if all that moral laws had resulted in wasthis, of what possible value were they? Marriage all but went to smash in favour of a cheap promiscuity. No one believed in anything, no one trusted any one else; life resolved itself into three elemental desires—for food and drink, excitement and the gratification of sex. Withall of which unrestraint, there was far less happiness in the world than before. People were ‘fed up’—‘fed up’ even in the midst of their most reckless adventures in gaiety.
This summary of the state of mind in the year of grace 1919 is, of course, exaggerated, but such was undoubtedly the impression one received in any country that had seen the worst of the war.
The reason for the impression and also the reason why it was only a fractionally true impression was that the hubbub was being raised by the articulate minority. As some one has already pointed out, a considerable majority of the world’s inhabitants were not disillusioned by the war, having had no illusions to shed. Life had been hostile to them; they had always been forced to give a great deal to get a very little; they had never had the slightest faith in governments or in human goodness; knowing marriage stripped to its bare essentials, they had always seen it as a fact like any other, never as something sacred and beautiful; they had always been as promiscuous as possible; they had never had the opportunity to dress life up and worship it. Times were either a little harder now or maybe not quite so hard. There was no occasion for all this fuss, though, naturally, they took advantage of it to get as much more for themselves as they could.
No, it was the articulate minority that was upset. But this, though distinctly a minority, is very large. It does not consist of any one class in a rigid social sense, but simply of all thepeople for whom existence is relatively easy. I do not mean the people who have no worries, are never hard-up, never in danger of bankruptcy, nor even altogether people who do not work with their hands; I mean those whose daily life is not among the hard primitive facts, who have not suffered actual griping hunger, whose mental existence follows some sort of order, whose work is not the deadening physical labour of mines, steel-plants or the most squalid factories, and whose homes, however imperfect, offer something better than the horrible promiscuity of one or two crowded rooms. This class, if you can call it such, sees life altogether differently than the majority beneath sees it, and it is almost solely from this class that come the interpreters of life—the thinkers, the writers, the artists, the journalists. Also the two classes never really touch. The minds of each are alien to the minds of the other. There are to-day many individuals among the minority who are trying to get at and understand the minds of the majority; but they cannot, because the majority live among facts, they among ideas about facts. The attempt is as impossible as for a painted figure to step down from its picture and walk the earth—or vice versa, since I do not in the least mean that ideas about facts are necessarily less real than the facts themselves. In short, one half not only does not but cannot know how the other half lives. This is so true that when sometimes, rarely, a writer of genius, such as Gorki, has struggled up from that great,incoherently muttering sea, the account he gives of life there is to us of the minority, even while it moves us, as strange as though it were indeed an account of life in another element.
It was this minority that was disillusioned by the war, and, frankly, I think we deserved to be—though perhaps somewhat less rudely. Not because we had ideas about life, but because we hadsuchideas—so smooth, so smug, so unrelated to the facts, so inconsistent with what, if we had only looked honestly, we might have seen in ourselves. For example, individually none of us was more than spasmodically happy, none contented; cowardice alone or, at best, habit and lack of initiative restrained each of us from committing the most dastardly acts; selfishness lay at the bottom of our behaviour; honest introspection would have revealed to any one of us a handful of impulsive good deeds to show against a lifetime of petty greedy actions the motives for which had been painstakingly disguised: yet, by and large, we believed, really did believe, that the world was growing steadily better, that there was more good than evil in human nature (by which, if we had been honest and intelligent, each of us could only have meant in the nature of every one save himself), that certain things (of which every one of us was capable) simply were not done by decent people, and that, given the high state of moral progress in the world, wars were unthinkable.
The shock of the awakening (which did not come at its fullest during the war, when thoughtwas suspended, but afterward) was tremendous and painful. And the pain and anger were all the worse for being, even if we recognized it but dimly, directed against ourselves. That was the secret of the wretchedness, the disillusionment, that the reason for feeling ‘fed up.’ We blamed it on civilization or governments or God; at heart we knew it was ourselves who were to blame. Beginning with the hurt recognition that the world was not as we had pictured it, we went on logically to the gloomier recognition that we were not what we had fancied ourselves. This was inevitable. A man who distrusts the honesty of others is a man who secretly does not believe in his own honesty; a man who is afraid to leave his wife and his friend alone together is a man with whom his friend’s wife would not be safe.
The disillusionment, then, was potentially salutary. Stripping men of false ideas and ideals, it forced them to look into their own hearts.
Only potentially salutary, however. In its first results it was sheerly destructive; and this, too, was logical. The great Chicago fire of 1871 was doubtless a good thing in that it wiped out a sordid and ugly city, but the first reaction to it of the inhabitants must have been despair. Despair, at any rate, was the prevailing emotion in the hearts of most thinking members of the minority during the chaotic period that followed the Armistice. All these centuries to work with, and we had achieved—this!
But there are two very noble traits in men,or in the best of them: a fundamental love of truth and a refusal to accept defeat. So presently such men began to shake off despair and to look about them clear-sightedly, like Noah and his companions after they had emerged from the Ark. And their love of truth, burning more clearly now that the lamp was less encrusted with illusions, showed them some very heartening facts: that the thirty centuries of recorded human life were not as barren a waste as all that; that always, as far back as eye could see, even in the midst of war, pestilence and external chaos, some men had laboured patiently, and for no other reward than the satisfaction of their love of truth, to guard and, bee-like, add a few drops to the small store of knowledge transmitted to them; that explorers had charted the earth and its seas, and astronomers mapped the movements of the stars; that to have worked up from nothing more than a few primitive sounds to the indescribable beauty of a Mozart symphony was an achievement beyond all praise. True, men were also beasts. Nothing could justify this war or ever excuse it. It was unmitigatedly evil, a crime without a reason, for which not one or two or a dozen, but all men, were responsible. But there, too, was that other side of men, that grazed divinity. All was not lost, though ten million human lives were. Civilization, many said gravely, might come to an end. Sad, if true, but, at bottom, what of it? It would only be one civilization. Another would follow. For what goes onindestructibly is the steady soul of man, loving truth and never defeated. So I conceive such men as meditating for a little while before going back to their patient work.
These, whether they knew it or not, were themselves among the lonely guarders of the flame. But others besides them, many others among the rest of us, have profited by our disillusionment. Indeed, we have profited more than they, since their lives had always a noble directive never entirely obscured, ours none.
One thing that we have gained is the spirit of wholesome mockery for grandiloquent twaddle. This bubbled up to us perhaps from that great mass beneath, which has moments when it is not inarticulate. In Italy, some time about the weary middle of the war, when, as always, generals, politicians, journalists, and diplomats at banquets never opened their mouths or lifted their pens save to speak or write of ‘the Cause of Liberty, Justice and Civilization’ and all the rest of it, a ribald soldiers’ song suddenly swept the country and set it rocking with tonic mirth, though how the song got about so universally is a mystery, since it could not be sung in public. It had many verses, all equally scurrilous, but it will suffice to quote one, the best known:
Il General CadornaScrisse a la Regina:‘Se vuol veder TriesteSi compri una cartolina.’Ah! Ah! Ah!Ah! Ah! Ah!
Il General CadornaScrisse a la Regina:‘Se vuol veder TriesteSi compri una cartolina.’Ah! Ah! Ah!Ah! Ah! Ah!
Il General CadornaScrisse a la Regina:‘Se vuol veder TriesteSi compri una cartolina.’Ah! Ah! Ah!Ah! Ah! Ah!
(General Cadorna wrote to the Queen: ‘If you want to see Trieste, buy a picture postcard.’ Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!)
The music fitted the words outrageously, and the mocking insolence of those six ‘Ah’s,’ each accented, at the end of every stanza, was ineffable (do, mi, re; si, re, do). They were so utterly final—a funeral march for rhetoric.
For obvious reasons there was all too little of this spirit awake during the war; now, since the war, it blows freely through the air and is one of the healthiest results of disillusionment. It makes men read their newspapers sceptically and glance back to see where a dispatch came from before accepting it as truth; it causes them to look with an ironic eye on politicians, governments, philanthropists, institutions of learning, and all other institutions, on everything and every one professionally noble; it supplies readers for such irreverent publications as theAmerican Mercury, and makes satirical novels, likeBabbitt, actually popular. It reveals the grosser forms of credulity as precisely that. Held to be something dreadful, the Ku Klux Klan would wax in strength, but people find it ridiculous; it is doomed. Even before the ‘Protocols’ were exposed as forgeries an amazingly large number of people were unable to swallow them; they were too silly. TheSaturday Evening Post, theRed Bookand the others go on their tawdrily romantic way, but I doubt extremely that the millions who read the stories they contain accept these as anything save sheer senseless relaxation,since the same millions read and take to their hearts the comic strips—Mr. and Mrs.,The Gumps, etc.—which are so sordid, so blowzy, so disillusioned, in both drawing and captions, as to makeBabbittappear by comparison a lilting romance and Mr. H. L. Mencken a blood-brother of Mr. Harold Bell Wright. In short, though it is still possible to ‘get away with’ a good deal of nonsense, it is not possible, even in America, the most sentimental nation under the sun, to ‘get away with’ anywhere near as much as once upon a time.
But there is more behind all this than a mere spirit of sceptical mockery; clean and salty as it is, that spirit is only a part of something bigger. The truth is, I think, that people have grown up—part way up, at least. The incredible childishness of a decade ago is gone—I trust, forever. It is not only that we accept less than before, but that we are more level-headed both in accepting and rejecting. A questioning coolness is abroad. Perhaps we expect less of life; certainly we are less enthusiastic over it. That crass optimism about everything, not openly to share which used to make an American taboo, no longer soars and screams. It still lives, but with a broken wing, fluttering clumsily like a hen. A good thing! There was nothing noble in it. At bottom it represented only a desire not to be troubled, and was popular for the same reason that the man is popular who, in response to an inquiry as to his health, grins and shouts: ‘Fine! Fine! Never better!’
What a load of sentimentality has gone overboard with our illusions!—sentimental notions about happiness, about country, about life, about love. That amazing convicton, for example, that the only thing of real importance in a woman was her chastity. Overboard. Drowned a mile deep, as it deserved to be for the cheap and insulting notion it was. In its long day it must have righteously infuriated thousands of women—possibly more those who happened to be chaste than those who happened not to be. Its loss signifies not more accent on the sex-relation, but less, helping to put the relation where it belongs, as merely one of a number of facts. An immense step has been taken toward an honester, decenter understanding between men and women. And a score of other sentimental notions are gone, too, or tottering. The visualizing of the United States as a benevolent disinterested Uncle Sam, a bit homely, a bit awkward, but strong and infinitely kind, like the hero of a Cape Cod melodrama; and of France as a Jeanne d’Arc in glittering armour, eyes shining, face aglow, shedding her life-blood for Liberty—hum ...! Mr. E. M. Forster has recently written a very remarkable novel in which he punctures, dispassionately, but once for all, the Kipling legend of the English in India as public school demi-gods; yet in both England and America the book has sold by tens of thousands and met with almost unanimous praise.
Quite possibly a little that was fine and true has gone overboard with the rubbish, but mostof the destruction was salutary. And it has served, it seems to me, to bring those two classes, the dumb majority and the articulate minority, closer together than ever before. In a sense it is not a real closeness; for, as I have said, the two can never touch, one living among facts, the other in a picture of facts. But at least the picture now bears some relation to the facts, is by way of becoming what it must become to be of any value—an interpretation of them. This, surely, is something to the credit of our disillusioned period.
It is a puzzling period to study, and would still be so, I think, even were we not in the midst of it. It questions everything, all once accepted premises. Yet it is not like other great periods of change—the Reformation or the Romantic Revival, for instance. They were, in one way or another, periods of revolution, when men brushed aside the past, sure that they had found something better—sure because they felt young and fresh. The present period is not young and fresh; it is very, very tired. And so, despite the obvious and extensive social changes that it has already witnessed, it is not in spirit revolutionary. It questions everything—governments, nationality, economics, religion, human nature, life itself—but it is not young enough or fresh enough to discard recklessly. People question and wonder, yet vote overwhelmingly for the Republicans in America and the Conservatives in England.
Phenomena such as these and others moredistressing are frequently cited as evidence that ours is a period of discouraging reaction. I do not agree. The bitter intolerance displayed by such movements as Fascismo—or, for that matter, Fundamentalism—is, to my thinking, a good sign, rather than a bad. It means that violent intolerance is to-day forced back where it belongs—to the outskirts, to the extreme Right or the extreme Left. It is violent and domineering because it dares not be otherwise; it represents only an inconsiderable fraction of the whole, and is afraid. At the moment when I write this, Fascismo still governs Italy, but it has against it probably eighty per cent. of the population, and governs by force alone, suppressing its most dangerous enemies, muzzling the press, forbidding political gatherings, dissolving societies, outraging the constitutional rights of individuals. Such tyranny signifies fear—fear based on the certain knowledge of the Fascisti that they and their policies do not represent the country.
Yet people have not risen upen masseand turned them out. No, and this, too, is characteristic of the period. It lacks the ardent juvenile faith in Utopias essential to drive multitudes to action. Instead, people ask coolly: ‘What have you got, to put in place of what we so unsatisfactorily have?’ But it is also a rather mature, almost wise period, saying: ‘Let the Fascisti rave. Whom the Gods would destroy....’
The Republicans and the Conservatives mustwatch their step closely. In neither case was the large majority obtained a loving endorsement. A tired period but an extremely clear-eyed one, as periods go, with less belief than usual in miraculous panaceas, but with still less in all things being for the best. It is not a romantic period, though it is full of superficially romantic events; there is no youth in it and small enthusiasm. But it is a period out of which more of permanent value may come than if it were.
Mytext is from Michael Arlen’sThe Green Hat(iv. i. 116) and from Ford Madox Ford’sSome Do Not ...(II. i. 196; ii. i. 215).
Lady Pynte liked young men to be Healthy and Normal; Mrs. Ammon preferred them to be Original. Lady Pynte liked Boys to be Boys; Mrs. Ammon didn’t mind if they were girls so long as they were Original. Lady Pynte insisted on Working For the Welfare of the People at Large and Not just for Our Own Little Class, she played bridge with a bantering tongue and a Borgia heart, she maintained that the best place to buy shoes was Fortnum and Mason’s, and if she saw you innocently taking the air of a sunny morning she would say: ‘You are not looking at all well, my good young man. Why don’t you take some Clean, Healthy exercise? You ought to be Riding.’ That was why one maintained a defensive alliance with one’s haddock rather than do the manly thing and dance with Lady Pynte. She would say one ought to be riding, and for four years I had hidden from Lady Pynte the fact that I did not know how to ride. I simply did not dare to confess to Lady Pynte that I could not ride. I had already tried to pave the way to that dénouement by confessing that I came from the lower classes, but she did not appear to think that any class could be so Low as that.. . . . . . .Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad; she wavered a little to one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole contents fly at Tietjens’ head. She placed the plate on the table and drifted slowly towards the immense mirror over the fireplace.‘I’m bored,’ she said. ‘Bored! Bored!’. . . . . . .‘If,’ Sylvia went on with her denunciation, ‘you had once in our lives said to me: “You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May you rot in hell for it” ... you might have done something to bring us together.’Tietjens said:‘That’s, of course, true.’
Lady Pynte liked young men to be Healthy and Normal; Mrs. Ammon preferred them to be Original. Lady Pynte liked Boys to be Boys; Mrs. Ammon didn’t mind if they were girls so long as they were Original. Lady Pynte insisted on Working For the Welfare of the People at Large and Not just for Our Own Little Class, she played bridge with a bantering tongue and a Borgia heart, she maintained that the best place to buy shoes was Fortnum and Mason’s, and if she saw you innocently taking the air of a sunny morning she would say: ‘You are not looking at all well, my good young man. Why don’t you take some Clean, Healthy exercise? You ought to be Riding.’ That was why one maintained a defensive alliance with one’s haddock rather than do the manly thing and dance with Lady Pynte. She would say one ought to be riding, and for four years I had hidden from Lady Pynte the fact that I did not know how to ride. I simply did not dare to confess to Lady Pynte that I could not ride. I had already tried to pave the way to that dénouement by confessing that I came from the lower classes, but she did not appear to think that any class could be so Low as that.
. . . . . . .
Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad; she wavered a little to one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole contents fly at Tietjens’ head. She placed the plate on the table and drifted slowly towards the immense mirror over the fireplace.
‘I’m bored,’ she said. ‘Bored! Bored!’
. . . . . . .
‘If,’ Sylvia went on with her denunciation, ‘you had once in our lives said to me: “You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May you rot in hell for it” ... you might have done something to bring us together.’
Tietjens said:
‘That’s, of course, true.’
And my subject is—what else with such a text?—Sophistication.
Not sophistication in the original unencrusted meaning of the word, but in the overlaid current understanding of it—an emotional rather than an intellectual condition. It is a condition very hard to define, since it is emotional, yet sufficiently easy to recognize—and admire. To be sophisticated you must beblasé; you must be witty; you must not take anything, especially vice, very hard; you must be gay and casual about problems that unsophisticated people are earnest about, though you may (here you are reaching rarefied heights of sophistication) be as earnest as you like about things that average people consider trivial. You must show familiaritywith the world of High Society, but also amused disdain for it; you must know, and prove that you know, everything about ordering a dinner in such places as Ciro’s (Monte Carlo), the Ritz (Paris), and the Café de Paris (Biarritz). You should also be able to let fall—now and then, very carelessly, merely because you cannot at the moment think of the English word—a French or an Italian or even a German word or phrase; but it is not excessively important that you should do this correctly or even appropriately; the effect will be the same anyway. Among contemporary writers Carl Van Vechten and Ronald Firbank are sophisticated; and so is Michael Arlen, and so is Ford Madox Ford (néHueffer).
There is one small drawback to sophistication: it is impossible without an audience. One cannot pleasurably, perhaps not possibly, be sophisticated all alone by oneself. One cannot think of a man getting into an unshared bed as sophisticated—I mean to say, of course, after his valet has left him. Fiction is full of people marooned on desert islands; but only one writer, M. Jean Giraudoux, has ever thought of thus marooning a sophisticated character. It was a delicious and fantastic idea, which madeSuzanne et le Pacifiquean irresistibly funny book.
This disadvantage, however, is not grave, since sophisticated people are rarely alone, even at night, and in public are sure of an admiring audience. We all admire sophistication in real life, and we admire it still more in novels. Thisis partly because it is never quite so perfect and finished in the former as in the latter, but chiefly because there is a touch of envy in our admiration for sophistication in life, whereas we share flatteringly in that displayed in a novel. We, too, love Iris Storm fastidiously and consider Sylvia Tietjens’ complicated vices with tolerant weariness. We, too, are of thehaut mondeand are very offhand about it. We, too, have lived very, very hard and exhausted everything and have come to look with a mellow amusement on all intensities. It is delightful.
Unluckily for me, I do not know any sophisticated people in real life. I have jealously seen them about, in restaurants and places, but I do not know them—or perhaps I should say that they do not know me. But I know sophistication in novels, none better. The sophisticated novelist must be very sophisticated indeed to satisfy my fine trained taste. Any momentary lapse into ingenuousness, and I am on him like a wolf. Thus, among the writers I have mentioned, and among others whom I have not, I salute most especially Mr. Michael Arlen; and this because, more perfectly than the others, he knows how a sophisticated novel should be written: to wit, in abaroqueand decorative prose. Mr. Firbank and Mr. Van Vechten may also know this; but they lag far behind Mr. Arlen in turning their knowledge into achievement. They do not discover such felicities as: ‘ ... and over the breast of her dark dress five small red elephants were marching towards an unknowndestination’; or, ‘The stormy brittle sunlight, eager to play with the pearls and diamonds of Van Cleef, Lacloche and Cartier, aye, and of Tecla also, chided away the fat white clouds, and now the sun would play with one window of the Rue de la Paix, now with another, mortifying one, teasing another, but all in a very handsome way.’ There you have the authentic manner for sophisticated prose.
The reason why the authentic manner isbaroque, evenrococo, heavily encrusted with ornament, is a melancholy reason. (‘That was a gloomy reason,’ Mr. Arlen would say). It is that there is a certain lack of body in sophistication. To eschew the passions—or perhaps not to eschew them, but to smile at them—to be polished, suave and unobtrusively superior, is delightful, but limits one a bit. Emerson’s assertion that the exclusive man excludes no one but himself is doubtless an exaggeration; but it is certainly true that the exclusive man does also exclude himself. The technique of sophistication in literature is even more exacting than the technique of the drama. Let no one fancy it easy to write sophisticatedly. It is extremely difficult. A considerable proportion of the writers in two continents is attempting it; yet one can count the successes on the fingers of two hands. There is no mistaking the genuine article in sophistication, for the very simple reason that the false is always ludicrous, sometimes violently so, sometimes faintly. English, French and American bookshops, and once aweek theSaturday Evening Post, are half full of hilarious attempts at sophistication. It would be a mistake to deplore them; they add to the gaiety of nations. If you care for clear laughter with no malice beneath it, and must give up one book or the other, which would you sacrifice,Alice in WonderlandorThe Rosary?
Sophistication in literature, then, as (I presume) sophistication in real life, is immensely difficult of attainment; it demands a special skillful technique, a wary sense of humour and a narrow selection of material. Therefore, as I have already suggested, its manner becomes of great importance. To avoid a lurking sense of impoverishment you must be provided with decorative flowers to pluck by the wayside. The luxuriously appointed cruise around the world on theArabic(22,000 tons) is not enough; you need those side-excursions to Capri, the Balearic Islands and the foot-hills of Java. Once again I salute Mr. Michael Arlen. His isthemanner. One can be sophisticated without it—Mr. Ford is, and M. Paul Morand—but how much better to have it!
Let us turn now to the two novels from which I have taken, almost at random, my text. The novels themselves I selected with considerable care; for, while their sophisticated qualities of course overlap, there are certain examples of sophistication inThe Green Hatthat are wanting inSome Do Not ...and a few in the latter book that one will not find in the former. Moreover, the two books are done in very different manners.
What, except any one of a score of others from the same book, could give a more admirable condensed example of sophistication than the passage I have quoted fromThe Green Hat? The narrator introduces you to two ladies—for no reason at all except your amusement and his own. One lady has a title, the other has not. Excellent! He—I have to call him ‘he’ because I do not remember that his name is once mentioned in the book—pokes good-humoured fun at both, but more especially at the one with a title, and then goes on innocently (innocently!) to reveal the fact that he comes from the lower classes and does not know how to ride. You will go far to find a rarer expression of sophistication. For—do you not see?—the narrator, at his ease in the homes of the great, is smiling at class, is actually smiling at riding. This is, by consummate inversion, raising snobbishness to a fine art. And all in such high spirits.
You do not get the high spirits in the two passages I have quoted from a rather long marital conversation inSome Do Not ...(you will look for them in vain in that novel); but you are given a very pretty example of sophistication nevertheless. Sylvia Tietjens is of a most awfully good family, and her husband of an even better one. People in society are not, by plebeians, supposed to throw things at one another. Sylvia does throw something—a plate of food—at her husband. Good! Moreover, it hits him. But observe! He does not upset the dining-roomtable and hit her back. He remains perfectly calm. And as for Sylvia, she drifts slowly towards the enormous mirror over the fireplace (good touch, that!) and remarks that she is bored! bored! Here, too, you are high in the scale of sophistication. For it is obvious that to commit a breach of manners, to do something that simply is not done, and then only to feel bored, is far more sophisticated than to break one of the ten commandments, usually the seventh, in the same spirit. Also I call your attention in passing to the contents of the plate that Sylvia threw—two cold cutlets in aspic and a few leaves of salad. At once elegant and efficient.
The second passage, too, is admirable. The words ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ are not popularly supposed to be addressed by a gentleman to his wife; nor is the wish that she may rot in hell. Yet when Sylvia suggests to her husband that, to ensure their mutual happiness, he ought to have addressed her in this manner, he says reasonably: ‘That’s, of course, true.’ Which is all the more to his credit in that for twenty pages his uniform has been dripping with oil from the salad that hit his shoulder.
Here, too, you perceive, you get inversion. These characters outrage, and thereby show themselves above, the conventions. They always react to stimuli in the opposite way from which average people react. They are violent when we should expect them to be well-bred, and serene when we expect them to be violent.Another example: to ingenuous people the disease called syphilis is a shameful thing, to be considered with horror and never to be mentioned aloud; to average people it is an aesthetically disgusting malady and therefore not an available subject for conversation. But the characters in sophisticated novels talk about syphilis as carelessly as though they were talking of a family-tree.
But is there not in this, you may by now inquire, just a little monotony? Once the trick is apparent, is it not almost as wearisome to watch a man invariably do the unexpected thing as to watch him do the expected? There is. Oh, it is! It is more wearisome. Because when the expected thing is done for any reason more emotional than mere habit it is significant of something other than individual dullness; it has roots that penetrate down into the dark earthy past of a whole race. Whereas to do invariably the unexpected thing, in order to show oneself superior and startle an audience, is significant of nothing at all; beneath such behaviour is emptiness.
Emptiness, indeed, yawns beneath the literature of sophistication. There is no probing of truth below the glitter. There cannot be, since the glitter is achieved through a superior disregard for truth. One would not mind this if the literature of sophistication set out only to be elegant amusing nonsense. (And I ought, in justice, to say here that if Mr. Ronald Firbank were somewhat more amusing, his contributionto such literature might fulfil that requirement). But too often it pretends to be investigating truth. And this pretence, even though in some cases it signify only a crowning sophisticated inversion, is impertinent and annoying.
The Green Hatlies open before me at the page of press comments which the publisher has seen fit to append. I read: ‘The Green Hatis the novel of the year.’ ... ‘The most memorable novel I have read during the past year.’ ... ‘I call it the finest novel of the last five years.’ ... ‘Heavens! what a lot that man knows about men and women—especially women.’
If after this broadside one feels slightly giddy one should not hold it against Mr. Arlen, who of course is not responsible and who distinctly callsThe Green Hata romance; but one would have thought that even reviewers might have had a little more insight than this into what they had pleasurably read.
For, leaving on one side the delightful manner of the book, consider the material of which it is cleverly built. What and whom have we got here? The identical material of those interminable melodramas which the French (probably in an impotent attack on the tyrants of their national life) call ‘literature for concierges,’ and which in England was dear to the hearts of Ouida’s public. A glossy world of high society; some one (just as inUnder Two Flags, and in how many other long-forgotten romances) assuming, for quite inadequate reasons, some one else’s sin and suffering bravely as an outcast until a thirdperson blurts out the truth (the original touch being that inThe Green Hatthe victim is the heroine instead of the hero, that she suffers from a husband’s syphilis instead of from a brother’s embezzlement, and that she dies at the end of the book); the cruel father separating youthful lovers who never, never forget one another (though, for the sake of modernity, during their separation the heroine, not the hero, leads a scandalous life—which, mind you, is never described, since its reality would have been squalid) and come together at last, when, in a final triumphant burst of renunciation, the heroine surrenders her lover to his wife and commits suicide. Sheer melodrama, as false, as quite properly false, asScènes de la Vie de BohèmeorScaramouche—precisely that sort of thing, in fact. And the characters: can youseeHilary, or Guy, or Napier, or Venice? Have they three dimensions? Can you walk around them? Of course not. You’re not (I give Mr. Arlen credit for intending) supposed to be able to. And Iris, the radiant, the well-beloved, what is Iris? What but a very young man’s dream of a woman—experience plus innocence, a prostitute with the soul of a virgin? Go back a generation and you will find her in Mr. Le Gallienne’sThe Quest of the Golden Girl.
Well and good. I have no objection to any of this. I enjoyed the book immensely. But, please, let us not take it for something else than it is.
I know almost nothing about Mr. Arlen, Ihave never even seen his photograph; yet I feel a pleasant personal liking for him. He provided me with an amusing book couched in a delightful style; and I do not for a moment believe that he himself takes it more earnestly than I do or considers it anything other than an agreeably up-to-date fairy-tale. If I have pointed out that the material of which it is constructed appears to me melodrama, not drama, sentimentality, not sentiment, artifice, not life, it is only because I wished to express my opinion that this is true of all the literature of sophistication, which—not here, but elsewhere—frequently presents itself as something more significant.
A reading ofSome Do Not ...does not leave me with a similar affection for its author. I cannot escape the feeling that Mr. Ford takes that book hard! hard! and that in it he set out to write a masterpiece.
To begin with, there is the style. We have often been told that Mr. Ford is a master of style; and so, in truth, he is. But of what use is style all alone by itself? The style ofSome Do Not ...is the grand style, simple, sonorous, purged of affectation, well suited to such a novel asWar and Peace; but it is not the right style forSome Do Not.... Indeed, in my opinion, no style is the right style for that novel.Some Do Not ...has for me all the defects of the literature of sophistication, with none of its virtues. It is false and pretends to be true; it is artificial without being witty; it is romance without glamour; it is essentially literary; it is withoutany more sense of humour than that required to keep it from becoming ridiculous; it has not a touch of spontaneity; it is as dreary as it is well done.
In a negative way the thing is perfect—ever and ever so careful. Mr. Ford introduces an incredible Irish priest by saying that he ‘had a brogue such as is seldom heard outside old-fashioned English novels of Irish life’—thereby protecting himself from the start; he would have been incapable of writing ‘across thebreastof her darkdress’; and it goes without saying that in his creditably meagre use of foreign words he adopts none of the original spellings that star Mr. Arlen’s romance (aristocracie,giggolo, and the like). Mr. Ford’s prose is compact, sober, and restrained. But, since this is true, it becomes the more important to discover what it is all about.
I am unable at present to obtain a copy ofIf Winter Comes(one of the advantages that I neglected to chronicle in the essay on Living Abroad); but I am struck by the similarity between the plot of Mr. Hutchinson’s novel, as I remember it, and that ofSome Do Not ...Mark Something-or-Other was a man whom the world in general regarded with indifference as a failure, and for whose excellent work somebody else was always getting the credit, but whom a few really fine spirits reverenced. So was Christopher Tietjens. Each was unhappily married, though (If Winter Comesnot being a sophisticated novel) Mark’s wife was merely stodgy and insensitive to her husband’s whimsical sweetness (bless her heart! she had all my sympathy), while Christopher’s Sylvia was—oh, dear me! Each hero loved another lady, really appreciative and good, who was eager to sacrifice, in Mark’s case her husband (unappreciative devilhewas, too!), in Christopher’s her virginity. Each hero refused the gift. (‘Some do not’ ... do that kind of thing). In neither case did the hero’s wife—or any one else except those few fine spirits—believe in the refusal. Each, instead of getting himself profitablyembusqué, slipped off unassumingly to the war and was badly hurt. Each slipped back home again to take up modestly and wearily the old round—a good deal hampered in this by all thoseembusquéswho had pushed ahead in the meantime. Each, for no obvious reason, became a social pariah, was slandered and fairly hounded by the world in general—but not, of course, in the sophisticated novel, to the point of general hysterics reached inIf Winter Comes. The endings, naturally, are different. Mark’s wife divorces him, the other lady’s husband is conveniently killed in France, and the lovers are felicitously united; Christopher Tietjens’ wife does not divorce him, he will not become Valentine’s clandestine lover, and he slips off again, even more unassumingly than before, to the war—presumably to be killed.
Here, as unmistakably as inThe Green Hat, we have the artificial stuff of melodrama. Hardly, since Richardson’sPamela, has suchfeverish importance as inSome Do Not ...been attached to the question of whether a man and a woman will or will not have sexual relations. The last two hundred pages of the book are virtually devoted to this problem, and to its answer—‘Some do not.’ Personally, I didn’t care in the least. Let them, if they wanted to, or not, only, for heaven’s sake, let them and every one else stop talking about it! What possible difference could it make to me?
I am aware that I have written about Mr. Ford’s novel in an insufficiently cool manner; but the truth is (as you may have guessed) that the book exasperates me. All this cheap sensationalism masquerading as a serious study of life!If Winter Comeswas atrocious, but it was too silly to be excessively annoying. By the time one reached the piled-up anguish of the court-room scene one was in the best of spirits. ButSome Do Not ...is too carefully done to be silly. Its material is that of any ten-twenty-thirty melodrama; but its style is that ofMadame Bovary. It arouses the same distaste as in the fairy-tale the vulgar servant wench who had dressed herself up as the princess.
Even so, I have perhaps not accounted adequately for my conviction thatSome Do Not ...is fundamentally false. The stuff of melodrama sometimes is the stuff of life, as it is sufficient to read the daily press to discover; and occasionally a great genius builds up truth out of just such material. He does this, of course, by creating real characters. Once a character comes alive, the most improbable thingsmay happen to him, and no one cares—or doubts them. But Mr. Ford is not a genius, and his characters are not real. He describes them neatly and pungently; he even visualises them for us, until they stand out as sharply as the waxwork figures at Madame Tussaud’s. But that is the end of it. They will not come to life. And even if Mr. Ford were the genius that he is not, they could not come to life in that stifling atmosphere of sophistication, where effect is everything and one eye is always on an audience. But then, if Mr. Ford were a genius he would not give us that atmosphere; he would have something too important to say to trouble with anything so small, superficial and glittering as sophistication.
The truth about the literature of sophistication is, I think, that, since it is at bottom a form of showing off, it can have no dealings with truth. In his choice of material the sophisticated writer selects what is false—not, like that occasional genius, for some other reason than its falsity, or for no reason at all, but precisely because it is false, and therefore sure of an easy effect. There is tawdriness in this, of course. I wonder whether there is not a trace of still another quality. Children especially delight in showing off. Can it be that there is something a little ingenuous in sophistication?
Itis doubtless wrong for any except the very young to make generalizations, because nobody else believes in them—least of all in the ones he himself makes. But it is great fun, and, paradoxically, the fun increases in direct proportion to the maker’s disbelief, I suppose because his generalizations thus tend more and more to become light-hearted taunts flung, dustwise, in the face of a chaotic universe. Byron enjoyed defying God, which indicated that he had a God to defy; your modern sceptic thumbs his nose at emptiness, which is at least as brave of him. And of all generalizations that such a man can make those about women are the most entertaining to him. For, having by his time of life discovered that, save for a small matter of physical formation, women are almost precisely like men, it becomes for him the more amusing to unearth or invent differences explaining that ‘almost,’ and to magnify them and build them up into something artistic that would be a beautiful explanation of life—if life were only like that. Thus, I do not believe in any of the generalizations that follow, but I think it would be quite pleasant if they were true.
Why do Men generalize especially about Women?
But that is so simple. Because of their overweening vanity that will not allow them to admit that a subject on which they spend ninetenths of their thoughts can in itself be other than a rich subject full of mystery and significance. Having briefly settled this, I now go on to my own instructive considerations on women, which begin with an inquiry into
Their Untruthfulness.
Men are to be found who frequently tell the truth on principle, and those are quite common who habitually tell the truth because, though they would prefer to lie when lying would be advantageous, something prevents them from doing so, they stammer, grow red, and are forced back on truth in spite of themselves. Women only tell the truth when lying is unprofitable, and never on principle. This is because women have not got principles. Men, not they, are idealists; they only pretend to be idealists in eras when that is what men want them to be. They live among facts, and are bored or amused by abstractions, the making of which they tolerantly consider only one more of the childish games, like curling or pinochle, men delight to play at; which, indeed, it is. Men generalize incessantly about women, but women do not generalize about men. They take men individually as they come—if they do. Also they never experience any difficulty in telling a lie; on the contrary, they look more candidthen than at other times. This is, again, because they do not see why truth should be any more important than falsehood, because almost their chief preoccupation is to keep men quiet and happy, and because they believe in doing everything as well as it can be done.
Their Courage.
Every one says that women are braver than men, and perhaps they are, but this is due to their lack of imagination. Suffering to them means simply suffering, whereas to men it means suffering plus the agonized preliminary picture of suffering. A dentist, in whose clutches a woman is notoriously brave, a man a shuddering coward, does not really hurt one a tenth as much as a man beforehand fancies he is going to hurt and at the moment fancies he is hurting. Too much awe is felt (by men) for what women go through at child-birth. Child-bearing is doubtless unpleasant for a woman, but it is infinitely worse for her husband, who sits in an atrocious hospital parlour and conjures up horrors. Women can have six children in six successive years and suffer detriment only to their figure; after the same experience their husbands are grey-haired tottering wrecks.
But let us be thorough. Let us make no assertion about women that we do not investigate. I have mentioned and therefore must consider
Their Lack of Imagination.
This is akin to their inaptitude for abstractions, but, whereas they despise abstractions, they admireimagination and would like to possess it. But they do not possess it. A woman can readily take a fact and, with her gift of untruthfulness, develop it into another different fact or even into a firework-shower of facts; she cannot, as occasionally a man can do, place it and other facts together and build a cathedral. Women are far better observers than men, but they are never first-rate creative artists, hardly creative artists at all, either in cooking or in dressmaking, in painting or in literature, and (with the exception of Emily Brontë, who was a miracle) those who have come closest to being so were very mannish women. George Sand wore trousers, and Lewes’s unprintable physiological remark about George Eliot is well known. The excuse women give for this—that they have always been held back by men and have only recently begun to come into their own—is, and they know it to be, absurd. Women, at least in western countries, have always done whatever they wished with men. For two centuries they directed the political conduct and even the wars of the leading nation in Europe—and a pretty mess they made of it.
I repeat: women can report but not create. A man’s best work in art is almost always based on what he has imagined rather than experienced (witness, among the great and the near-great, Tolstoy and Stephen Crane); a woman’s, never. Women, since they have a love of facts and an appreciation of form, make quite creditable artists when they stick to what they have observed;when they essay to do more than this they fall heavily to earth. Thus, when Miss Willa Cather confines herself to describing that section of America which she knows at first-hand, we read her with interest; when, in the last part ofOne of Ours, she attempts to throw herself imaginatively into something she has not experienced, the result is so poor and false as to be not ludicrous but painful; the reader actually blushes. Miss Katherine Mansfield, Miss Dorothy Richardson, Miss Stella Benson, Mrs. Edith Wharton, all observe acutely—and do nothing more, and all are quite creditable artists. It is not very important to be a quite creditable artist.
On the other hand, one could almost wish that all critics of literature were women. The criticisms of even stupid women are worth attention, while those of intelligent women are admirable and suggestive. They have a way of going directly to the heart of the matter. Their preoccupation with facts makes them unerring judges of the truth or falsity of a situation, and their wistful respect for imagination makes them at once aware of even its shadowy presence. Nowhere do they display more clearly than in the criticism of a book
Their Intuition.
Much nonsense has been written about this by men, who have chosen to consider it something miraculous, outside the laws of nature. It is, of course, nothing of the sort and would not be half so interesting if it were. The giftof intuition is merely the ability to think so swiftly that one’s thought barely grazes the intermediate steps in the process and appears to an outsider, and often even to oneself, to leap immediately from the initial fact to the final conclusion. Far from being contrary to logic, intuition is the most perfect example of logic. The flying thought must keep straight as an arrow to its course, disregarding instantly all irrelevancies. And the fact that women probably do possess the gift more commonly than men is the clearest disproof of the silly accusation that they are illogical. They are, it is true, illogical in argument, but that is because they do not care for or respect argument for its own sake (another silly game) but only as a practical means to an end, so that when it is going against them they shift their ground shamelessly and thereby infuriate or delight their masculine antagonists according to the latter’s emotional attitude toward them.
There are several excellent reasons why women should be more intuitive than men. One is that they are not led astray by imagination or fancy, another that they are more pragmatic, a third that those occupying so-called subordinate business positions (such as stenographers, among whom intuition is amazingly common) have better trained minds than their employers. It is largely a matter of concentration.
Their Morals.
This is a delicate subject that I would avoid but for its extreme importance.
Men are essentially moral beings. That is, when they behave badly, as they generally do, they always feel that this is not the way to behave—in short, that thereisa way to behave. Women have no such conviction. A great number of them, possibly a majority, always behave ‘well’ because they have been trained to do so and have never experienced an emotion strong enough to compel them to break the habit, but there is no personally felt principle behind such virtue. Accordingly, they are at heart neither moral nor immoral, but a-moral. Husbands certainly ‘deceive’ their wives more frequently than wives their husbands, because a man’s opportunities are greater, his risk of detection is smaller, and his punishment, when he is detected, less, but an erring husband has always a sense of guilt that is absent from an erring wife. Marauding lovers themselves are often shocked by their mistresses’ insouciance and total lack of remorse. They would have a woman do wrong for their sake, but they would also have her conscious of wrong-doing. Perhaps this ridiculous desire is in part due to men’s vanity, which would have the sacrifice made for their sake as great as possible. In any case, the desire is disappointed. The one sacrifice that women do not make for men is a moral sacrifice. They have heard much talk about evil, just as a person born deaf may have read much about music, but they have no more real understanding of evil than he has of music. A wicked act is simply one which the doer feels to be wicked. Accordingly,women can, and often do, pass unscathed, unstained and fresh through experiences that would brand men’s faces as evil.
A Reservation.
It will by this time have become clear that when I write of women I do not usually mean the great sheep-like multitude of women who live their lives through more or less according to the rules taught them in childhood, but cultivated civilized women. This I feel to be not only justifiable but essential. How would it be possible to write of the capacities of women, and then spend one’s time on those in whom such capacities remain latent and unrealized? Not Babbitt but Roosevelt is called the typical American, because in Roosevelt, however rare an example he may have been, one perceives the complete development of characteristics that are innate, but remain undeveloped, in most Americans.
However, it is necessary to bear this reservation (if you can call it that) in mind when reflecting on the foregoing section of this essay; otherwise the reader might be puzzled by the seemingly contradictory existence of numerous noisy ladies engaged in combating Vice. Let them go. Poor things, they are rotten with complexes! thwarted souls, chafing (even though they do not know it) over their own inability to expand, and hating the whole world for their discomfort, as a child hates the table against which he has bumped his head! An excellent subject for anovel, they must be summarily dismissed from a brief essay.
Their Fastidiousness.
If women are not inhibited by moral law from what men deem wrong-doing, they often are by their fastidiousness—namely, when wrong-doing is at the same time gross and ugly (which is not nearly always the case). They have a genuine and profound appreciation of fineness, suavity and perfection. Neither is this, as men often assume, equivalent to the mere love of luxury. An indigent girl yields to a wealthy Don Juan not because he surrounds her with the comforts of riches but because he surrounds her with smoothness. She obtains a quite different and much finer satisfaction than he from his spacious silent motor car and from the polished restaurants to which he takes her. There is something hypnotic to her in the charm of elegance. The setting means a great deal to women, far more than men recognize. For while it does not matter so very much to them what they do, it matters tremendously how they do it. In this love of perfect setting they are undoubtedly right and centuries in advance of men. An act in itself—any act—is a bare and meagre thing; done fittingly, at the proper time, in a perfectly right setting, it draws upon the richness of a thousand seemly associations. Man’s world is the barren childish world of an African savage; it is hard to understand how women, who are civilized and grown-up, can endure it.
Their Maturity.
It is banal to say that men never grow up, but one should not be afraid to make a banal remark if it also happens to be true, and this, alas, is true without qualification. Men are hopeless babies. Not only do they delight in primitive things, but their whole attitude toward life is immature and absurd. They expect a great deal from life, and are hurt when they do not get it. You see them looking out at life with wide pained eyes, in precisely the same way a child looks out of the window at the rain that is spoiling his holiday.
Women expect a great deal less from life—once they have passed their spoiled girlhood, when they expect to receive everything and give nothing. They become disillusioned very early—as soon, in fact, as they have recognized men’s essential blundering stupidity and weakness. How else could it be with them, who know that they depend on men, yet know what men are? How can a woman look up to some one who, instead, looks up to her in the most infantile manner? The cave-man ideal is a very young girl’s ideal; the cave-man at home must be as helpless a baby as any other man. If a man has a canker on his tongue he fancies it a cancer; if he has catarrh from over-smoking he fancies it tuberculosis; if some little thing goes wrong with his house it appears to him an international catastrophe. Respect creatures of this sort? Lean on them? Broken reeds! Be kind to them, indulge them, pet them back into equanimity, yes; lean on them, no.
However, the disillusionment induced by a perception of men’s sorry nature is not sufficient to account for women’s mature attitude toward life. Indeed, one would expect it to result in their becoming embittered, soured, exasperated; whereas all civilized women are mellow, amazingly tolerant and—oh, just grown-up! I think this is because they do not start with ideals, see them go smash, and try wretchedly to build up other ideals from the fragments; because they do not believe in abstractions but only in facts. A man rejects the innumerable facts that will not fit into his abstractions; a woman rejects no facts at all. This makes her world far richer than his. And if it is not glorified, neither is it falsified, by the radiance of an ideal. A woman, in short, since she accepts everything, comes to know a vast deal more about life than a man. At the same time she is calmer about it. She does not credit this mass of material with any hidden meaning, and therefore does not worry herself irascible by trying helplessly to find one. Some scraps of the material are pleasant, some disagreeable, and it is all very interesting, so the more of it the better—only there is nothing to get excited about. I confess to admiring this attitude extremely. Theoretically it may be less noble than the masculine attitude, but it gets far better results, even on character, since it cultivates kindliness, tolerance and sympathy, grown-up virtues rare to find among idealists.
This matter (now, I trust, clear) of the respectiveyouth and maturity of the sexes reveals a number of gross popular misconceptions. For example: a good many elderly women are attracted to young men, and all elderly men are attracted to young girls (though some of them conceal it). The former phenomenon is popularly considered ludicrous and pathetic, the latter something satyr-like, disgusting and corrupt. As a matter of fact, the two judgments should be reversed. There is, if just as much, no more sensuality in an elderly man’s feeling for a young girl than in a young man’s. He simply feels what he has always felt. He is still the callow sentimentalist that he was at twenty; he has not grown up. On the other hand, an elderly woman’s feeling for a young man is a thrilling incestuous combination of sensuality and motherliness.
The Unanswerable Riddle.
It has always pleased men, who are simply incorrigible, to find women (of whom they are apt to speak as ‘woman’) mysterious. I once knew a man who asserted that there was nothing more mysterious about women than about men (and God knew there was nothing mysterious about them!) except that every once in a while they went temporarily mad, at which moments no sensible man would pay any attention to them, insanity being without interest. There is something to be said for this simple estimate; still, women do seem to me to have one profound secret of which no explanation appears. Puzzled, I return to it again and again. How, in heaven’s name, can they put up with men—and why do they?
They do not need to. By now, vast multitudes of women have demonstrated that even in an economic world organized exclusively by men they can hold their own with the latter, and they have stripped from the puerile business of making money much of the silly hieratic pretence of importance with which men surrounded it. Almost any competent stenographer is dispassionately aware that she could run her employer’s business quite as well as he runs it, frequently better. And yet women continue to marry. Why do they? Any one who has tried both, knows that it is far easier, as well as more agreeable, to go to a nice, clean, quiet office for the day than to run a house, even with the supposed assistance of a servant or two; while, as for having a home, a woman could have one quite as well without a man, since she must make it in any case.
There is no difficulty in understanding why a man marries. He gets a great deal for his money—a home, a housekeeper, some smoothness, a little fineness, the convenient inexpensive satisfaction of his sexual desires, a kind mature companion to spoil him and protect him against the harsh buffets of a world eternally different than he childishly and sentimentally fancies it.
But a woman? What does she get in return for marriage? Nothing, so far as I can see, save the satisfaction (at moments not of her choosing) ofhersexual desires. Surely it cannot be forthis alone that women marry. That would be like buying a whole house for the sake of one picture in it. In fact, in this matter women have, potentially, an immense advantage over men. Men, the childish dreamers, will (everywhere save in pure America) follow unknown attractive women about the streets of a city for hours, murmuring compliments from time to time, hoping against hope for some response. It is pathetic. But think of the field that would be open to women if they chose to behave in this manner! Even venal professionals are not without some success. The entire male sex would be at the service of a really ‘nice’ woman; for who ever heard of a man rejecting any woman’s advances, however indifferent he might be to her? His vanity would not let him. A man can have only an inconsiderable fraction of the women he desires; a woman could have any or all of the men who pleased her—and with the minimum of effort. She could select a lover at just the moment when she desired a lover. Equally, if she desired a child she could select a promising father for the child, and, supposing the combination not to work out so well as she hoped, could next time select another. True, at present such behaviour might be looked at askance by the most meticulous; but women could alter this attitude to a sensible one at any time they pleased.
Instead, they elect to marry. Oscar Wilde was wrong to call ‘woman’ ‘a sphinx without a secret.’ Women have their secret, and this is it.
Ministering Angels.
Well, marry they do and will probably continue to do despite my advice. It offers a field for useless but entertaining conjecture. Do they marry because they like to try everything? Or because they are sorry for men? Or because it requires more energy to repel a man’s repeated advances than is worth devoting to anything, either good or bad? At any rate, one thing is certain: unless they marry very, very young, it can hardly be because they expect much of marriage. They cannot fail to know that they must give a great deal and receive very little.
What they do give is amazing. It makes me feel almost as reverently toward them as Charles Dickens in his emotional moments. They are so very kind to men. They habitually smooth out all those difficulties, such as servant troubles, baby troubles, household difficulties, difficulties of the kitchen, which men fatuously call ‘the little problems of existence,’ not seeing that they are gigantic as compared with their own meagre business troubles. They are extraordinarily gentle with their husbands in illness or even in fancied illness, rarely showing any resentment at the impatience with whichtheywere treated whentheywere ill. They put up with a turbulence, grossness and lack of all sense of what is seemly, that outrages their fastidiousness; they put up with men’s bragging, with men’s vanity, with their ridiculous assumption of gravity and importance (precisely like that of children dressed up in their parents’ clothes). In company theylisten to their husbands relate the same, same, same jokes, and, instead of shrieking, smile, as though that were the first time they, too, had heard those jokes. They cajole and caress men out of infantile bad tempers, the logical cure for which would be a spanking. Themselves liking to eat little and delicately, they allow—nay, assist—men to eat much and grossly, and they watch the creatures’ mood change, in the process, from irascibility to mellow tenderness, and merely smile pleasantly, with scarcely perceptible irony. Have I really said that they are not artists? They are consummate artists to endeavour to work in such a hostile medium, to work with such material. But, no, they are not artists; for they do not do anything with the material, not really, not anything permanent. Still, that is not their fault, either. No one could, not even God.
Ah, well, it is not possible that women endure all this, do all this (both so unnecessarily), out of altruism, sheer self-sacrifice. Earth is not heaven. They must have some obscure, if probably simple, reason. In the meantime men flourish and grow fat.