We talk a great deal about liberty, democratic principle, and government by majority; but if those ideals have any real meaning, they mean that—given free trade in ideas and in propaganda on all ethical and moral questions—you have got to trust your community to choose what it thinks good. And to refuse to the general community the means of deciding for itself by the utmost freedom of discussion, is—in a State based on these principles—the most discreditable conduct imaginable.
But of what worth, you may ask, is this moral sanction of a majority? I am not myself greatly enamoured of majority rule in the sense of a majority exercising compulsion on a minority. Compulsion by a majority I should often think it a duty to resist. But to the testimony of a majority that refrained from compulsion I should attach the greatest possible weight. There you would get a public opinion which by its own self-restraint and scrupulous moderation of conduct would be of the highest moral value. For Society fearlessly to admit the full and open advocacy of that which it disapproves is the finest proof I can imagine of its moral stability, and of its faith in the social principles it lives by.
Broadly speaking—with the exception I have already referred to—that view is now admitted in matters of religion; you may hold and you may advocate what religious principles you like. But you are not so free to hold and advocate social and ethical principles. The veto of Society has shifted, and you are far less likely to incur opprobrium and ostracism to-day if you advocate polytheism than if you advocate polygamy or pacifism. And the reason for this, I take to be, that the religion of modern Society is no longer doctrinal but ethical; and so our tendency is to inhibit new ethical teaching though we would not for a moment countenance the inhibition of new doctrinal teaching.
That is our temptation, and I think that in the coming decade there will be a great fightabout it; we are not so prepared as we ought to be to allow a free criticism of those social institutions on which our ideas of moral conduct are based, even when they cover (as at present constituted) a vast amount of double-dealing.
Take for instance this Western civilization of ours which bases its social institutions of marriage, property, and inheritance on the monogamic principle, but persists in moral judgments and practices whose only possible justification is to be found in the rather divergent theory that the male is naturally polygamous and the female monogamous.
These two ideals, or social practices, make mutually discrediting claims the one against the other. I am not concerned to say which I think is right. But on one side or the other we are blinking facts, and are behaving as though they had not a determining effect upon conduct and character which Society ought straightforwardly to recognise.
The man who maintains that it is impossible for the male to live happily and contentedly in faithful wedlock with one wife and then goes and does so, commits himself by such matrimonial felicity to discreditable conduct—discreditable to his professions, I mean. And it is, of course, the same if his inconsistency takes him the other way about.
There may, however, be an alternative and more honest solution to this conflict of claims; both may contain a measure of truth. It may be true that monogamy—or single mating—faithfullypractised by man and woman alike, is ideally by far the best solution of the sex-relations, and the best for the State to recognise and encourage by all legitimate means; just as vegetarianism and total abstinence may be the best solution of our relation to food, or non-resistance of our relation to government, or abject submission of our relation to theological teaching. But though these may be ideals to strive for, it does not follow that human nature is so uniformly constructed upon one model as to justify us in making them compulsory, or in turning round and denouncing as moral obliquity either plural mating or the eating of meat, or the drinking of wine, or rebellion against civil authority, or free thought in matters of religion.
If the community deliberately decides that one of these courses gives the better social results, it is within its power to discourage the other course, without descending to compulsion; and I am inclined to think that this may, in the majority of cases, be done by treating the desires and appetites of resistant minorities as taxable luxuries. If the State finds, for instance, that alcoholism increases the work of its magistrates and police, and diminishes the health and comfort of home-conditions, it may quite reasonably tax beer, wine and spirits, not merely to produce revenue but to abate a nuisance. But it would be foolish, were it to go on to say that everybody who incurred such taxes was guilty of moral obliquity.
In the same way, if the State wishes to discourage vegetarianism and temperance, it will tax sugar, currants, raisins, tea, cocoa and coffee, and will continue to tax them till it has diminished the consumption; and incidentally it will let meat go free. But it will not pass moral judgments—having the fear of human nature before its eyes—on those who conscientiously bear the burden of those taxes rather than give up what they think good for them.
I could imagine the State, in its wisdom, seeking to discourage luxury and the accumulation of wealth into the possession of the few, by imposing a graduated income tax of far more drastic severity than that which is now depleting the pockets of our millionaires—but not therefore saying that all who incurred income tax above a certain scale were guilty of moral obliquity.
We have seen a State which required an increase of its population setting a premium on children so as to encourage parents to produce them; and I can imagine a State which required a diminution in the increase of its population setting a tax on children, but not therefore joining in the cry of the Neo-Malthusians that every married couple who produced more than four children were guilty of a kind of moral depravity. And further, I can imagine a State which wished to encourage pure and unadulterated monogamy putting a graduated tax, practically prohibitive in price, on any other course of conduct productive ofsecond or third establishments. But I do not see why the State, as State, should concern itself further, or why Society should concern itself more deeply about sexual than it does about commercial and trade relations, wherein it allows far more grievous defections from the ideal of human charity to exist.
Leaving it to the individual is not to say that your views as to the desirability of such conduct will not influence your social intercourse, and perhaps even affect your calling list. A great many things affect our calling lists, without any necessity for us to be self-righteous and bigoted about the principle on which we make our own circle select. There are some people who will call upon the wives of their doctors, but not of their dentists; there are others who will not call upon the organist who conducts them to the harmonies of Divine Service on Sunday, but would be very glad to call upon Sir Henry Wood, who conducts their popular concerts for them during the week. We make our selection according to our social tastes and aspirations, and sometimes those social tastes may include a certain amount of moral judgment. But that moral judgment need not make us interfere; if it keeps us at a respectful and kindly distance from those whom we cannot regard with full charity, it keeps us sufficiently out of mischief.
Take the public hangman, for instance. I, personally, would not have him upon my calling list. I would like to put a graduated tax uponhim and tax him out of existence. I think he is lending himself to a base department of State service; but I also think that the State is tempting him; and I think that, in a symbolical way, all of you who approve of capital punishment ought to put the public hangman upon your calling list—or not exclude him because of his profession (which you regard as useful and necessary), but only because he happens to be personally unattractive to you. If you exclude him, because of his profession, while you consider his profession a necessity—you are guilty, I think, of discreditable conduct, and in order to stand morally right with yourselves you had better go (I speak symbolically) and leave cards on him to-morrow.
What I mean seriously to say is this: there is a great danger to moral integrity in any acceptance of social conditions which you would refuse to interpret into social intercourse. If you believe prostitution to be necessary for the safety of the home—which is the doctrine of some—you must accept the prostitute as one who fulfils an honourable function in the State. If you accept capital punishment, you must accept the hangman. If you accept meat, you must accept the slaughterman; if you accept sanitation you must accept the scavenger. If you accept dividends or profit from sweated labour, you must accept responsibility for sweated conditions, and for the misery, the ill-health, the immorality and the degradation which spring from them.
We may be quite sure that far worse things come from these conditions on which we make our profit than are contained in the majority of those lives which, because of their irregularities or breaches of convention, we so swiftly rule off our calling lists. If we are not willing to forego the dividends produced for us out of our tolerated social conditions, why forego contact with that human material which they bring into being? But if you accept contact there, then you will have a difficulty in finding any human material of greater abasement to deny to it the advantage of your acquaintance.
I have purposely put my argument provocatively, and applied it to thorny and questionable subjects, because I want to reach no halfway conclusion in this matter, and because the real test of our spiritual toleration is now shifting from matters religious to matters social, from questions of doctrine to questions of daily life. To-day we must be prepared to tolerate a propaganda of social ideas—the products of which, if they succeeded in obtaining a hold, would in the estimation of many be as regrettable as were the products of Calvinism or Puritanism in the past, when they were much more powerful than now.
Our hatred of these new social ideas may be just as keen as the hatred of Catholicism for Protestantism or of Protestantism for Catholicism, in days when religious doctrine seemed to matter everything. More keen it could not be. The dangers these new ideaspresent could not be greater in our eyes than in the eyes of our forefathers were the dangers of false doctrine three centuries ago. But the principle which demands that they shall be free to state their case and to make converts remains always the same. Nevertheless it is unlikely to be granted without struggle except by an intelligent minority.
The religious movement of the twentieth century, I say again, is not doctrinal but social; and its scripture is not the Bible or any written word, but human nature itself.
We are on the brink of great discoveries in human nature, and many of our ethical foundations are about to be gravely disturbed. The old Manichee dread of the essential evil—the original and engrained sin—of human nature remains with us still, and there will be a great temptation, as there always has been, not merely to controvert (which is permissible) but to persecute and suppress those who preach new ideas. It is against such discreditable conduct that we have now to be on our guard.
At the threshold of this new era to which we have come, with our old civilisation so broken and shattered about us by our own civilising hands, the guiding spirit of man’s destiny has its new word to say, to which we must listen with brave ears. And first and foremost it is this, “Stand upon thy feet—and I will speak with thee.”
(1911)
The title of my lecture has, I hope, sent a good many of you here—the women of my audience, I mean—in a very bristling and combative frame of mind, ready to resent any laying down of the law on my part as to what is or what is not “womanly.” I hope, that is to say, that you are not prepared to have the terms of your womanliness dictated to you by a man—or, for that matter, by a woman either.
For who can know either the extent or the direction of woman’s social effectiveness until she has secured full right of way—a right of way equal to man’s—in all directions of mental and physical activity, or, to put it in one word, the right to experiment?
There are, I have no doubt, many things which women might take it into their heads to do, which one would not think womanly at their first performance, but which one would think womanly when one saw their results at long range. No rule of conduct can be set up as an abstract right or wrong; we must form our ethics on our social results; and in the world’s moral progress the really effective results have generally come by shock of attackupon, or of resistance to, some cherished conventions of the day.
Take, for example, a thing which has seemed to concern only the male sex, but which has really concerned women just as intimately—the history of our male code of honour in relation to the institution of duelling. There was a time in our history when it would have been very difficult to regard as manly the refusal to fight a duel. But it is not difficult to-day to see in such a refusal a very true manliness. We in this country have got rid of the superstition that honour can in any way be mended by two men standing up to take snap-shots at each other; and now that we are free from the superstition ourselves, we can understand, looking at other countries—Germany, for instance—that it must often require more courage to refuse to fight than to consent. But we have arrived at that stage of enlightenment only because in our own history there have been men courageous enough and manly enough to dare to be thought unmanly and cowardly. And as with our manhood so with our womanhood; you cannot judge of what is womanly merely on the lines of past conventions, produced under circumstances very different from those of our own days. You must give to women as you give to men the right to experiment, the right to make their own successes and their own failures. You cannot with good results lay upon men and women, as they work side byside in the world (very often under hard competitive conditions) the incompatible rules which govern respectively a living language and a dead language. A living language is constantly in flux, inventing new words for itself, modifying its spelling and its grammatical construction, splitting its infinitives. In a dead language the vocabulary is fixed, the spelling is fixed, the construction is fixed; but the use and the meaning often remain doubtful. And so, if you attempt to determine the woman’s capabilities merely by her past record, and to fix the meaning of “womanliness” in any way that forbids flux and development, then you are making the meaning and the use of the word very doubtful.
Now, obviously, if to be “womanly” means merely to “strike an average,” and be as like the majority of women as possible—womanliness as a quality is not worth thinking about; it will come of its own accord, and exists probably a good deal in excess of our social need for it. It stands on a par with that faculty for submission to the unconscionable demands of others which makes a sheep sheepish and a hen prolific. To be what Henry James calls “intensely ordinary” is, from the evolutionary point of view, to be out of the running.
We see this directly we start applying the word “manly” to men. For we do not take that to mean merely average quality—if it did, over-eating, over-drinking, and that form ofspeech which I will call over-emphasis—would all be manly qualities—and the evolution of the race would, according to that doctrine, lie on the lines of all sorts of over-indulgence. But when we say “manly,” we mean the pick and polish of those qualities which enable a man to possess himself and to develop all his faculties; and if it denotes discipline it also denotes an insistence on freedom—freedom for development, so that all that is in him may be brought out for social use.
Now, the great poverty which modern civilization suffers from, is the undevelopment or the under-development of the bulk of its citizens. And the great wastage that we suffer from lies in the misdirection toward the over-indulgence of our material appetites—of the energies which should make for our full human development. And you may be quite sure that where in a community of over-population and poverty such as ours, the average man, as master, is demanding for himself more of these things than his share, there the average woman (where she is in economic subjection) is getting less than her share. Yet there are many people who (viewing this problem of woman’s subjection where the savage in man is still uppermost) will tell you that it is “womanly” to be self-sacrificing and self-denying; they will say that it is the woman’s nature to be so more than it is the man’s; for, like Milton, in his definition of the ideal qualities of womanhood, they put the word“subjection” first and foremost. That condition, which, according to Scripture, only followed after the curse as its direct product, was, you will remember, predicated by Milton, quite falsely, as essential even to the paradisal state; and when inParadise Losthe laid down this law of “subjection” as the right condition for unfallen womanhood, he went on to describe the divinely appointed lines on which it was to operate. The woman was to subject herself to man—
“with submission,And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”
“with submission,And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”
“with submission,And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”
“with submission,
And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”
Those, surely, are the qualifications of the courtesan for making herself desired; and it is no wonder, if he had such an Eve by his side as was invented for him by Milton, that Adam fell.
Where true womanliness is to end I do not know; but I am pretty sure of this—that it must begin in self-possession. It is not womanly for a woman to deny herself either in comforts or nourishment, or in her instincts of continence and chastity in order that someone else—whether it be her children or her husband—may over-indulge. Itiswomanly (it is also manly), when there is danger of hurt or starvation to those for whom you are responsible, to suffer much rather than that they should suffer; but it is not in the least womanly or manly to suffer so that they may indulge. The woman who submits to thestarving of herself or of her children by a drunken or a lazy husband is not in any positive sense womanly—for she is then proving herself ineffective for her social task. And she would be more effective, and therefore more womanly, if she could, by any means you like to name, drive that lazy husband into work, or abstract from that drunken husband a right share of his wages. And if by making his home a purgatory to him she succeeded, she would be more womanly in the valuable sense of the word than if (by submission to injustice) she failed, and let her children go starved.
Then, again, a woman may see that the children she and her husband are producing ought never to have been born. And if that is so, is it womanly for her to go on bearing children at the dictates of the man, even though St. Paul says, “Wives, obey your husbands”? Is she any more womanly, if she knowingly brings diseased offspring into the world, than he is manly in the fathering of them?
But now, come out of the home into Society—not into any of those departments of unsolved problems where humanity is seen at its worst—pass all those by for the moment—and come to the seat of administration—into that great regulator of Society, the law-courts (in the superintendence and constitution of which woman is conspicuous by her absence). There, as in matters connected with the male code of honour, any duty of initiative on the part of women may seem,at first sight, to be far removed. But let us see! In the law-courts you meet with a doctrine—a sort of unwritten law—that there are certain cases to which women must not listen. And occasionally “all decent women” are requested to leave the court, when “decent” men are allowed to stay. Now, in the face of that request it must be a very painful thing indeed for a woman to hold her ground—but it may be womanly for her to do so. It may be that in that case there are women witnesses; and I do not think our judges sufficiently realise what mental agony it may be to a woman to give evidence in a court where there are only men. I am quite sure that in such cases, if the judge orders women generally out of court, he ought to provide one woman to stand by the woman in the witness-box. How would any man feel, if he were called before a court composed only of women, women judges, a woman jury, women reporters, and saw all men turned out of the court before he began his evidence? Would he feel sure that it meant justice for him? I think not.
Now these cases to which women are not to listen almost always specially concern women; yet here you have men claiming to deal with them as much as possible behind the woman’s back, and to keep her in ignorance of the lines on which they arrive at a conclusion. Surely, then, it would be well for women of expert knowledge and training to insist thatthese things shall not be decided without women assessors, and to be so “womanly” as to incur the charge of brazenness and immodesty in defending the woman’s interest, which in such matters is also the interest of the race.
But it is only very gradually—and in the face of immemorial discouragement—that this communal or social spirit, when it began to draw woman outside her own domesticity, has fought down and silenced the reproach raised against it, of “unwomanliness,” of an intrusion by woman into affairs which were outside her sphere. The awakening of the social conscience in women is one of the most pregnant signs of the time. But see what (in order to make itself effective) it has had to throw over at each stage of its advance—things to which beautiful names have been given, things which were assumed all through the Victorian era to be essential to womanliness, and to be so engrained in the woman’s nature, that without them womanliness itself must perish. The ideal of woman’s life was that she should live unobserved except when displayed to the world on the arm of a proud and possessive husband, and the height of her fortune was expressed in the phrase enviously quoted by Mrs. Norton, “Happy the woman who has no history.” Now that ideal was entirely repressive of those wider activities which during the last fifty years have marked and made happy, in spite of struggle, the history of woman’s socialdevelopment; and every fresh effort of that social spirit to find itself and to become effective has always had to face, at the beginning of each new phase in its activity, the charge of unwomanliness.
Compare that attack, fundamental in its nature, all-embracing in its condemnation, with the kind of attack levelled against the corresponding manifestations of the social or reforming spirit in man. In a man, new and unfamiliar indications of a stirring-up of the social conscience may earn such epithets of opprobrium as “rash,” “hot-headed,” “ill-considered,” “impracticable,” “utopian”—but we do not label them as “unmanly.” Initiative, fresh adventure of thought or action in man have always been regarded as the natural concomitant of his nature. In a woman they have very generally been regarded as unnatural, unwomanly. The accusation is fundamental: it does not concern itself with any unsoundness in the doctrines put forward; but only with the fact that a woman has dared to become their mouthpiece or their instrument. Go back to any period in the last 200 years, where a definitely new attempt was made by woman toward civic thought and action, and you will find that, at the time, the charge of “unwomanliness” was levelled against her; you find also that in the succeeding generation that disputed territory has always become a centre of recognised womanly activity. Take, for instance, the establishment of higher trainingfor girls; there are towns in this country where the women, who first embarked on such a design, were jeered and laughed at, and even mobbed. And the same thing happened in an even greater degree to the women who sought to recover for their own sex admission to the medical profession: and while the charge levelled against them was “unwomanliness,” it was yet through their instincts of reserve and sex-modesty that their enemies tried to defeat them. Even when they gained the right of admission to medical colleges there were lecturers who tried, by the way they expressed themselves in their lectures, to drive them out again.
Or take the very salient instance of Florence Nightingale. When she volunteered to go out and nurse our soldiers in the Crimea, the opposition to a woman’s invasion of a department where men had shown a hopeless incompetence at once based itself on the plea that such a task was “unwomanly.” Though in their own homes from time immemorial, women had been nursing fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, cousins, servants, masters, through all the refined and modestly-conducted diseases to which these lords of creation are domestically subject, directly one woman proposed to carry her expert knowledge into a public department and nurse men who were strangers to her, she was told that she was exposing herself to an experience which was incompatible with womanly modesty. Well, she was prepared tolet her womanly modesty take its risk in face of the black looks of scandalised officials of Admiralty or War Office; and she managed to live down pretty completely the charge of unwomanliness. But the example is a valuable one to remember, for there you get the claim of convention to keep women from a great work of organisation and public service, although already, in the home, their abilities for that special service had been proved. And so, breaking with that convention of her day Florence Nightingale went to be the nursing mother of the British Army in the Crimea, and came home, the one conspicuously successful general of that weary and profitless campaign, shattered in health by her exertions, but of a reputation so raised above mistrust and calumny that through her personal prestige alone was established that organisation of nursing by trained women which we have in our hospitals to-day.
Take again the special and peculiar opposition which women had to face when they began to agitate against certain laws which particularly affected the lives of women and did cruel wrong to them even in their home relations. Read the life of Caroline Norton, for instance—a woman whose husband brought against her a public charge of infidelity, though privately admitting that she was innocent; and when, after that charge was proved to be baseless, she separated from her husband, refusing to live with him any more, then he, in consequence ofthat refusal cut her off absolutely from her children, though they were all under seven years of age. That wrong, which our laws had immemorially sanctioned, roused her to action, and it was through her efforts, so long ago as 1838, that the law was altered so as to allow a mother of unblemished character right of access to her own children during the years of early infancy!
And that is how the law still stands to-day—a woman’s contribution—the most that could be done at the time for justice to women. But there is no statue to Caroline Norton in Parliament Square—or anywhere else, so far as I know.
But what I specially want to draw attention to is this—that when she wrote the pamphlet with which she started her agitation all her relatives entreated her not to publish it, because it would be an exposure to the world of her own private affairs. By that time, however, Caroline Norton had learned her lesson in “womanliness,” and she no longer said “Happy is the woman who has no history.” Her answer was: “There is too much fear of publicity among women: with women it is reckoned a crime to be accused, and such a disgrace that they wish nothing better than to hide themselves and say no more about it.” Does not that set forth in all its weakness the conventional womanly attitude of the period?
The Bill which, through her efforts, was brought three times before Parliament, was atfirst defeated. How? By the votes of the Judges, to whom the House of Lords left the matter to be decided. And Lord Brougham, in speaking against that Bill used this line of argument: There were, he said, several legal hardships which were of necessity inflicted on women; therefore we should not relieve them from those which are not necessary—the necessary hardships being the greater; and it being bad policy to raise in women a false expectation that the legal hardships relating to their sex were of a removable kind! Was ever a more perverted and devilish interpretation given to the Scripture, “To him that hath shall be given, and from her that hath not shall be taken even that which she hath.”
Let us remember that we are the direct descendants and inheritors of the age and of the men who pronounced these unjust judgments, and that no miracle has happened between then and now to remove the guilt of the fathers from the third and the fourth generation. Heredity is too strong a thing for us to have any good ground for believing that our eyes, even now, are entirely opened. There are many of us who cannot drink port at all, because our grandfathers drank it by the bottle every night of their lives.
We inherit constitutions, personal and political—we also inherit proverbs, which express so vividly and in so few words, the full-bodied and highly-crusted wisdom of former generations. Those proverbs expressedonce—else they had not become proverbs—an almost universal contemporary opinion. Some of them are now beginning to wear thin, have of recent years been dying the death, and will presently be heard no more. But their source and incentive are still quite recognisable; and their dwindled spirit still lives in our midst.
There was one, for instance, on which genteel families were brought up in the days of my youth—a rhymed proverb which laid it down that—
A whistling woman and a crowing henAre hateful alike to God and men.
A whistling woman and a crowing henAre hateful alike to God and men.
A whistling woman and a crowing henAre hateful alike to God and men.
A whistling woman and a crowing hen
Are hateful alike to God and men.
Now let us look into the bit of real natural history which lies at the root of that proverb. A crowing hen is a disturbance, but so is a crowing cock. But the hen is not to crow because she only lays eggs, and because the bulk of hens manage to lay eggs without crowing. They make, it is true, a peculiar clutter of their own which is just as disturbing; but that is a thoroughly feminine noise and a dispensation of Providence; and they don’t do it at all times of the night, and without a reason for it, as cocks do. But as a matter of fact it is far more easy to prevent a cock from crowing than a hen from cluttering; you have only to put a cock in a pen the roof of which knocks his head whenever he rears himself up to crow and he will remain as silent as the grave, though he will continue to do that spasmodic duty by his offspring which isall that nature requires of him. But no such simple method will stop the cluttering of a hen when her egg is once well and truly laid; the social disturbance caused by the pomp of masculine vain-glory is far less inevitable than the disturbance caused by the circumstances of maternity. Yet the normal masculine claim to pomp of sound is more readily allowed in our proverbial philosophy than the occasional feminine claim.
And that is where we have gone wrong; it is really maternity which under wholesome conditions decides the social order of things; and we have been fighting against it by putting maternity into a compound and setting up paternity to crow on the top rail. We have not learned that extraordinary adaptability to sound economic conditions which we find in many birds and in a few animals. There exists, for instance, a particular breed of ostriches, which mates and lays its eggs in a country where the days are very hot and the nights very cold; and as it takes the female ostrich some 13 or 14 days to lay all her eggs and some weeks to incubate, she cannot as she does in other countries deposit them in the sand and leave the sun to hatch them, because after the sun has started the process, the cold night comes and kills them. The mother bird finds, therefore, that she cannot both produce and nurse her eggs; yet directly they are laid somebody must begin sitting on them. Well, what does she do? She goesabout in flocks, 13 or 14 females accompanied by an equal number of the sterner sex. And on a given day, all the hens lay each an egg in one nest, and one of the father birds is selected to sit upon them. And so the process goes on till all the males are sedentarily employed in hatching out their offspring. And I would ask (applying for the moment our own terminology to that wonderfully self-adaptive breed of sociologists) are not those male ostriches engaged in a thoroughly “manly” occupation? Could they be better engaged than in making the conditions of maternity as favourable and as unhampered as possible? Yet how difficult it is to make our own countrymen see that the strength of a nation lies mainly—nay, entirely—in eugenics, in sinking every other consideration for that great and central one—the perfecting of the conditions of maternity.
But let us come back for a moment to whistling. It is an accomplishment which, as a rule, men do better than women; it is the only natural treble left to them after they reach the age of puberty; and they are curiously proud of it; perhaps, because women, as a rule, have not the knack of it. Now, the real offence of a woman’s whistling was not when she did it badly (for that merely flattered the male vanity) but when she did it well; and no doubt it was because some women managed to do it well that the proverb I speak of was invented. We should not havebeen troubled with such a proverb if crowing hens and whistling women had been unable to raise their accomplishment above a whisper. Yet whistling is really quite beautiful, when it is well done; and why is woman not to create this beauty of sound, if it is in her power to create it, merely because it finds her in a minority among her sex? Does it make her less physically fit, less capable of becoming a mother—less inclined, even, to become a mother? No; it does none of these things; but it distinguishes her from a convention which has laid it down that there are certain things which women can’t do; and so, when the exceptional woman does it, she is—or she was the day before yesterday—labelled “unwomanly.”
I do not suggest that whistling is a necessary ingredient for the motherhood of the new race; but, as a matter of fact, I have noticed that those women who whistle well have, as a rule, strength of character, originality, the gift of initiative and a strong organising capacity; and if these things do go together, then surely we should welcome an increase of whistling as a truly womanly accomplishment—something attained—which has not been so generally attained hitherto.
Let us pass now to a much more serious instance of those artificial divisions between masculine and feminine habits of thought and action which have in the past seemed so absolute, and are, in fact, so impossible tomaintain. For you can have no code or standard of manhood that is not intimately bound up with a corresponding code or standard of womanhood. What raises the one, raises the other, what degrades the one degrades the other; and if there is in existence, anywhere in our social system, a false code of manliness, there alongside of it, reacting on it, depending on it, or producing it, is a false code of womanliness.
Take, for example, that matter of duelling already referred to, in relation to the male code of honour, and the manliness which it is supposed to encourage and develop. You might be inclined to think that it lies so much outside the woman’s sphere and her power of control, as to affect very little either her womanliness or her own sense of honour. But I hope to show by a concrete example how very closely womanliness and woman’s code of honour are concerned and adversely affected by that “manly” institution of duelling—how, in fact, it has tended to deprive women of a sense of honour, by taking it from their own keeping and not leaving to them the right of free and final judgment.
Here is what happened in Germany about seven years ago. A young married officer undertook to escort home from a dance the fiancée of another officer; and on the way, having drunk rather more than was good for him, he tried to kiss her. She resented the liberty, and apparently made him sufficientlyashamed of himself to come next day and beg her pardon. Whether she would grant it was surely a matter for herself to decide; she accepted his apology, and there, one would have thought, the matter might have ended. But unfortunately, several months later, word of this very ordinary bit of male misdemeanour reached the ears of the lady’s betrothed. It at once became “an affair of honour”—his affair, not the lady’s affair—his to settle in his own way, not hers to settle in her way. Accordingly he calls out his brother officer, and, probably without intending it, shoots him dead. The murdered man, as I have said, was married, and at that very time his wife was in expectation of having a child. The child was prematurely born to a poor mother gone crazed with grief. There, then, we get a beautiful economic product of the male code of honour and its criminal effects on Society; and if traced to its source we shall see that such a code of honour is based mainly on man’s claim to possession and proprietorship in woman—for, had the woman not been one whom he looked upon as his own property, that officer would have regarded the offence very lightly indeed. But because she was his betrothed the woman’s honour was not her own, it was his; she was not to defend it in her own way—though her own way had proved sufficient for the occasion—he must interfere and defend it in his. And we get for result, a man killed for a petty offence—the offenceitself a direct product of the way in which militarism has trained men to look on women—a woman widowed and driven to the untimely fulfilment of her most important social function in anguish of mind, and a child born into the world under conditions which probably handicapped it disastrously for the struggle of life.[1]
Now, obviously, if women could be taught to regard such invasions of their right to pardon offence in others as a direct attack upon their own honour and liberty—a far worse attack than the act of folly which gave occasion for this tragedy—and if they would teach these possessive lovers of theirs that any such intrusion on their womanly prerogative of mercy was in itself an unforgivable sin against womanhood—then such invasions of the woman’s sphere would quickly come to an end. They might even put an end to duelling altogether.
See, on the other hand, how acceptance of such an institution trains women to give up their own right of judgment, to think even that honour, at first hand, hardly concerns them. Is it not natural that, as the outcome of such a system from which we are only gradually emerging, we should hear it saidof these conventionally womanly women that they have “a very low sense of honour.”
Low it must naturally be. For that attitude of complaisant passivity on the part of the woman while two male rivals fight to possess her is the normal attitude of the female in the lower animal world; but it is an attitude from which, as the human race evolves into more perfect self-government, you see the woman gradually drawing away. While it pleases something in her animal instincts, it offends something in her human instincts; and while to be fought over is the highest compliment to the female animal, it is coming to be something like an insult to the really civilized woman—the woman who has the spirit of citizenship awake within her. One remembers how Candida, when her two lovers are debating which of them is to possess her—brings them at once to their senses by reminding them that it is not in the least necessary that she should be possessed by either of them; but she does in the end give herself to the one who needs her most. That may be the truest womanliness under present conditions; as it may once have been the truest womanliness for the woman to give herself to the strongest. But it may be the truest womanliness, at times, for the woman to bring men to their senses by reminding them that it is not necessary for her to give herself at all. To be quite sure of attaining to full womanliness, let her first make sure that shepossesses herself. In the past men have set a barrier to her right of knowledge, her right of action, her right of independent being; and in the light of that history it seems probable that she will best discover her full value by insisting on right of knowledge, on right of way, and on right of economic independence. So long as convention lays upon women any special and fundamental claim of control—a claim altogether different in kind and extent from the claim it lays upon men—so long may it be the essentially womanly duty of every woman to have quick and alive within her the spirit of criticism, and latent within her blood the spirit of revolt.
[1]It may be noted that the war has caused a recrudescence of this brutal “code of honour” in our own country. But here it has not troubled to resume the obsolete form of the duel. The “defender of his wife’s honour” simply commits murder, and the jury acquits.
(or the Art of Living)
(1915)
I suppose you would all be very much surprised if I said that not use but ornament was the object of life.
I refrain from doing so because so definite a statement makes an assumption of knowledge which it may always be outside man’s power to possess. The object of life may for ever remain as obscure to us as its cause. It seems, indeed, likely enough that the one ignorance hinges necessarily on the other, and that without knowing the cause of life neither can we know its object.
The writers of the Scottish Church Catechism, it is true, thought that they knew why man was created. The social products of their cocksure theology cause me to doubt it. I would prefer to worship more ignorantly a more lovable deity than the one which is there presented to my gaze.
But though we may never know why we are here, we may know, by taking a little thought and studying the manifestations of the life around us, what aspects of it make us glad that we are here. And gladness is as good a guide as any that I know to the true values of life.
Examining life from that standpoint I know of nothing that gives me more delight than the decoration and embellishment with which man has overlaid all the mere uses of existence—things which without those embellishments might not delight us at all—or only as a dry crust of bread delights in his necessity the starving beggar, or ditch-water one dying of thirst.
I can scarcely think of a use in life which I enjoy, that I do not enjoy more because of the embellishment placed about it by man, who claims to have been made “in God’s image.” Nothing that my senses respond to with delight stays limited within the utilitarian aspect on which its moral claims to acceptance are too frequently based—or remains a benefit merely material in its scope.
When we breathe happily, when we eat happily, and when we love happily, we do not think of the utilitarian ends with which those bodily instincts are related. The utilitarian motive connects, but only subconsciously, with that sense of well-being and delight which then fills us; and the conscious life within us is happy without stooping to reason.
Underlying our receptivity of these things is, no doubt, the fact that our bodies have a use for them. But were we to consider the material uses alone, our enjoyment would be less; and if (by following that process) we absorbed them in a less joyous spirit, ourphysical benefit, so science now tells us, would be less also.
For some reason or another, which is occasionally hard to define, you find pleasure in a thing over and above its use; and I want to persuade you that the finer instinct, the genius of the human race, tends always in that direction—not to rest content with the mere use of a thing, but to lay upon it that additional touch of adornment—whether by well-selected material, or craftsman’s skill, or social amenity, which shall make it a thing delightful to our senses or to our intelligence.
Take, for instance, so simple a thing as a wine-glass, or a water-glass. Materially, it is subject to a very considerable drawback; it is brittle, and if broken is practically unmendable. From the point of view of utility, strength, cheapness, cleanliness, it has no advantage over hardware or china. But in its relation to beverages beautiful in colour and of a clear transparency, glass has a delightfulness which greatly enhances the pleasure of its use. There is a subtle relation between the sparkle of the glass, and the sparkle produced in the brain by the sight and the taste of good wine (or—let me add, for the benefit of temperance members of my audience—of good ginger-ale). I think one could also trace a similar delight to the relations subsisting between glass in its transparency and a draught of pure water.
That relationship set up between two ormore senses (in this case between the senses of sight, taste and touch) brings into being a new value which I ask you to bear in mind, as I shall have a good deal to say about it later—the value of association. The more you examine into the matter, the more you will find that association is a very important element for evoking man’s faculties of enjoyment; it secures by the inter-relation of the senses a sort of compound interest for the appeal over which it presides. And it is association, with this compound appeal, which again and again decides (over and above all questions of use) what material is the best, or the most delightful, to be employed for a given purpose. You choose a material because it makes a decorative covering to mere utility. That beauty of choice in material alone is the beginning of ornament.
When I began, I spoke for a moment as though use and ornament were opposite or separate principles; but what I shall hope soon to show is that they are so interlocked and combined that there is no keeping them apart when once the spirit of man has opened to perceive the true sacramental service which springs from their union, and the social discordance that inevitably follows upon their divorce. But as man’s ordinary definition of the word “use” is sadly material and debased, and as his approval and sanction of the joys of life have too often been limited by a similar materialism of thought, one is obliged, for thetime being, to accept the ordinary limiting distinction, so that the finer and less realised uses of beauty and delight may be shown more clearly as the true end to which all lesser uses should converge.
Life itself is a usage of material, the bringing together of atoms into form; and we know, from what science teaches of evolution, that this usage has constantly been in the direction of forms of life which, for certain reasons, we describe as “higher.” Emerging through those forms have come manifestations or qualities, which quite obviously give delight to the holders of them; and we are able to gather in watching them, as they live, move, and have their being, that for them life seems good. It is no part of their acceptance of what has come that they are here not to enjoy themselves.
Thus we see from the upward trend of creation a faculty for enjoyment steadily emerging, and existing side by side with fears, risks, and hardships which the struggle for existence entails—probably an even increased faculty for enjoyment, as those fears and risks become more consciously part of their lives. And I question whether we should think that the wild deer had chosen well, could it resign its apprehension of death at the drinking-place for the sake of becoming a worm—the wriggling but scarcely conscious prey of the early bird.
Man (the most conscious prey of death)has also his compensations; but, wishing to eat his cake and have it, he insists that his increased self-consciousness is the hall-mark of an immortality which he is unwilling to concede to others. He sees (or the majority of those see, who preach personal immortality after death) no moral necessity for conceding immortality to the worm because the early bird cuts short its career, or to the wild deer because it enjoys life, shrinks from death, and endures pain; or to the peewit, because she loves her young; or to the parrot, because it dies with a vocabulary still inadequate for expressing that contempt for the human species with which the caged experience of a life-time has filled its brain. Yet, for these and similar reasons applied to himself, man thinks that immortality is his due.
In doing so, he does but pursue, to a rather injudicious extent, that instinct for the ornamentation and embellishment of the facts of life which I spoke of to begin with. For whether it be well-founded or not, a belief in immortality gives ornament to existence.
Of course, it may be bad ornament; and I think it becomes bad ornament the moment he bases it upon the idea that this life is evil and not good. If he says “Life is so good that I want it to go on for ever and ever,” and thinks that he can make it better by asserting that it will go on for ever and ever, that is a playful statement which may have quite a stimulating effect on his career, andmake him a much more charming and social and imaginative person than he would otherwise be. But if he wants a future life merely because he regards this life as a “vale of misery”—and wants that future life to contain evil as well as good—a Hell as well as a Heaven (in order that he may visualise retribution meted out on a satisfactory scale upon those whom he cannot satisfactorily visit with retribution to-day) then, I think, that it tends to become bad ornament, and is likely to make him less charming, less social, and less imaginatively inventive for the getting rid of evil conditions from present existence than he would be if he had not so over-loaded his brain with doctrinal adornments.
Still, it is ornament of a kind; and with ornament, good or bad (the moment he has got for himself leisure or any elbow-room at all in the struggle for existence) man cannot help embellishing the facts of life—the things that he really knows.
Now that instinct for embellishment is of course latent in Nature itself, or we should not find it in man; and it comes of Nature (the great super-mathematician) putting two and two together in a way which does not merely make four. When two and two are put together by Nature, they come to life in a new shape; and man is (up-to-date) the most appreciative receptacle of that fact which Nature has yet produced. Man builds up his whole appreciation of life by association—bystudying a method of putting two and two together which comes to something very much more than a dead numerical result.
This, as I have said, is Nature’s way of giving to our investments in life a compound interest. Man throws into life his whole capital, body, soul, and spirit; and as a result of that investment Nature steadily returns to him year by year—not detached portions of his original outlay, but something new and different. Out of every contact between man’s energy and Nature’s, something new arises. And yet, though new, it is not strange; it has features of familiarity; it is partly his, partly hers; and if his spirit rises above the merely mechanical, it is endeared to him by and derives its fullest value from association. All beautiful work, all work which is of real use and benefit to the community, bears implicitly within it this mark of parentage—of the way it has been come by, through patience, skill, ingenuity, something more intimate and subtle than the dead impenetrable surface of a thing mechanically formed without the accompaniment either of hope or joy.
This creation of new values by association (which you can trace through all right processes of labour) is seen even in things which have very little of human about them.
The germ of its expression is to be found in that simplest of arithmetic propositions to which I have just referred: two and two make—not two twos but four, which is, infact, a fresh concept; and the mind that can embrace so much—the idea of four as a number with an identity of its own has already raised itself above the lowest level of savagery. In that mind something has begun out of which the social idea may presently be developed; for the man who has conceived the number four will presently be identifying his new concept with a variety of correspondencies under fresh aspects: he will discover that certain animals have four legs, whereas, until then, his view of them was rather that of the child who said that a horse had two legs in front, two legs behind, and two at each side—a statement which shows, indeed, that the horse has been earnestly considered from as many points of view as are sometimes necessary to enable a Cabinet Minister to make up his mind, but, for all that, never as a whole; and in such a mind, though the identity of the horse may be established from whatever point of view he presents himself, the thought of the horse, as a being of harmoniously related parts, having order and species, has not yet been established. Until a man can count, and sum up the results of his counting in synthesis, Nature is composed merely of a series of units—and the mind cannot begin that grouping and defining process which leads to association and from that to the development of the social idea.
You will remember inAlice through the Looking Glass, when the two Queens set towork to test her educational proficiency—you will remember how the White Queen says (in order to discover whether Alice can do addition) “What’s one, and one, and one, and one, and one, and one?”
“I don’t know,” says Alice, “I lost count.”
“She can’t do addition,” says the White Queen.
Well—she “lost count,” and, therefore, that series of ones failed to have any fresh meaning or association for her.
In the same way the primitive savage loses count; beyond three, numbers are too many for him—they become merely a “lot.” But war and the chase begin to teach him the relative value of numbers; and he finds out that if one lot goes out to fight a bigger lot, the smaller lot probably gets beaten; so that, before long, calculation of some sort becomes necessary for the preservation of existence. He finds out also (and this is where ornament begins to come in) that a certain amount of wilful miscalculation has a beauty and a value of its own. So, after going out to fight ten against ten, and defeating them, he comes back and says to his wives and the surrounding communities by whom he wishes to be held in awe—“My lot killed bigger lot—much, much bigger lot.” And so, when he comes later on to set down his wilful miscalculations in records of scripture, he provides delightful problems for the Bishop Colensos of future ages—problems the undoing of which mayshake to the foundations the authority of documents which some mid-Victorian school of Christianity has hitherto held to be divinely and verbally inspired—not realising that the normal tendency of human nature is to be decorative when writing its national history or when giving its reasons for having plunged into war.
You begin now, then, to perceive (if you did not before), the importance of ornamental association, even when confined to matters of arithmetic; and the moral value to future ages not merely of calculated truths but of calculated untruths.
But this merely figurative illustration of the quickness of the human brain, in its primitive stage, to use mathematics to unmathematical ends (or science to ends quite unscientific) does not bring us very far upon the road to that self-realisation, in ornament rather than in use, which I hope to make manifest by tracing to their most characteristic forms of expression the higher grades of civilization.
And I shall hope, by and by, to show that you cannot be social without also being ornamental; it is the beginning of that connecting link which shall presently make men realise that life is one, and that all life is good.
Take, to begin with, the earliest instruments by which primitive man began raising himself from the ruck of material conditions; hisweapons—first of the chase, and then of war. No sooner had he proved their use than he began to ornament them—to make them records, trophies, and so—objects of beauty. He cannot stop from doing so; his delight in the skill of his hands breaks out into ornament. It is the same with the arts of peace, the work of the woman-primitive—she moulds a pot, or weaves a square of material, and into it—the moment she has accomplished the rudiments—goes pattern, beauty, something additional and memorable that is not for use material, but for use spiritual—pleasure, delight.
And that quite simple example, from a time when man was living the life, as we should now regard it, of a harried and hunted beast—with his emergence from surrounding perils scarcely yet assured to him—goes on consistently up and up the scale of human evolution; and the more strongly it gets to be established in social institutions, the more noble is likely to be the form of civilization which enshrines it. And the less it shows, the less is that form of civilization likely to be worthy of preservation, or its products of permanent value to the human race.
It is not the millionaire who leaves his mark on the world so that hereafter men are glad when they name him; it is the “maker” who has turned uses into delights; not the master of the money-market, but the Master of Arts. The nearest thing we have on earthto that immortality which so many look to as the human goal lies in those forms of ornament—of embellishment over and above mere use—which man’s genius has left to us in architecture, poetry, music, sculpture, and painting. Nothing that stops at utility has anything like the same value, for the revelation of the human spirit, as that which finds its setting in the Arts—the sculptures of Egypt and Greece, the Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals of France, England, Germany and Italy, the paintings of the Renaissance, the masterpieces of Bach and Beethoven, the poems and writings all down the ages of men comparatively poor in monetary wealth, but rich beyond the dreams of avarice in their power to communicate their own souls to things material and to leave them there, when their own bodies have turned to dust. In the embellishment they added to life they bestowed on the age in which they lived its most significant commentary. There you will find, as nowhere else, the meaning and the interpretation of the whole social order to which these forms were as flower and fruit. Ancient Greece is not represented to us to-day by its descendants in the flesh (as an expression of that life they have ceased to exist) but by those works of art and philosophy through which men—many now nameless—made permanent the vision of delight to which, in the brief life of the flesh, they had become heirs. The self-realisation of that age—all the best of itthat we inherit—comes to us through embodiment in forms transcending material use.
Run your mind’s eye through the various peoples and nationalities of Europe—of the world—and you will find that their characteristic charm—that which is “racy” of their native soil, marking the distinction between race and race, lies in the expression they have given to life over and above use. If we had kept to use, race would have remained expressionless. Race expresses itself in ornament; and even among a poor peasant people (and far more among them than among the crowded and over-worked populations of our great cities where we pursue merely commercial wealth) comes out in a characteristic appreciation of the superabundance of material with which, at some point or another, life has lifted them above penury. In the great civilizations it extends itself over a rich blend of all these, drawn from far sources; and the more widely it extends over the material uses of life, the higher and the more permanent are the products of that form of civilization likely to be. What does it mean but this?—man is out to enjoy himself.
Having said that, need I add that I put a very high interpretation upon the word “joy”?
To that end—man’s enjoyment of life—all art is profoundly useful. I put that forward in opposition to the specious doctrine of Oscar Wilde that “all art is entirely useless.” But it is usefulness extended in a new direction;leaving the material uses, by which ordinary values are measured, it shifts to the spiritual; and by the spiritual I mean that which animates, vitalizes, socializes.
To that end it may often be—and is generally the case—that, in the material sense, art is a useless addition or refinement upon that which was first planned merely for the service of man’s bodily needs. Yet where the need is of a worthy and genuine kind, art never ceases to rejoice at the use that is underlying it. This can be clearly seen in architecture, where the beauty of design, the proportion, the capacity of the edifice—though far transcending the physical need which called it into being—remain nevertheless in subtle relation thereto, and give to it a new expression—useless indeed to the body—but of this use to the mind, that it awakens, kindles, enlivens, sensitizes—making it to be in some sort creative, by perception of and response to the creative purpose which evoked that form. You cannot enter a cathedral without becoming aware that its embracing proportions mean something far more than the mere capacity to hold a crowd; its end and aim are to inspire in that crowd a certain mental attitude, a spiritual apprehension—to draw many minds into harmony, and so to make them one—a really tremendous fact when successfully achieved.
Now nothing can be so made—to awaken and enlarge the spirit—without some apparentwastefulness of material or of energy. A cathedral will absorb more stone, and the labour of more men’s lives, before it is finished, than a tenement of equal housing capacity which aims only at providing warmth and a cover from the elements. To provide so much joy and enlargement to the human spirit, a kind of waste, upon the material plane, is necessary; and the man without joy or imagination in his composition is likely to say on beholding it: “Why was all this waste made?”
Bear in mind this accusation of waste which can constantly be made, from a certain standpoint against all forms of joy evolved by the art of living—possibly against all forms of joy that you can name; for all joy entails an expenditure of energy, and for those who do not realise the value of joy such expenditure must necessarily seem wasteful.
But when a man employs hand or brain worthily, straightway he discovers (latent within that connection) the instinct of delight, of ornament. He cannot rejoice in his craftsmanship without wishing to embellish it—to place upon it the expression of the joy which went with the making. All that he does to this end is apparently (from the material point of view) useless; but from the spiritual it is profoundly useful; and from the spirit (and this I think is important) it tends to re-act and kindle the craftsman to finer craftsmanship than if he had worked for utility alone.
Now if spirit thus acts on matter—achievingits own well-being only through a certain waste of material, or expenditure of labour upon the lower plane, yet communicating back to matter influences from that state of well-being to which it has thus attained—may it not be that waste of a certain kind (what I would call “selective waste”versus“haphazard waste”) is the concomitant not only of spiritual but of material growth also? May it not be that evolution has followed upon a course of waste deliberately willed and insisted on—and that without such waste, life—even material life—had not evolved to its present stage?
We see a certain wastefulness attaching to many of the most beautiful biological manifestations in the world. Up to a certain point, the construction of flower, bird, beast, fish, shows a wonderful economy of structure, of means to end (it is the same also in the arts). But there comes a point at which Nature, “letting herself go,” becomes fantastic, extravagant—may one not say “wilful”?—in the forms she selects for her final touches of adornment. And is it not nearly always when the matter in hand is most closely related to the “will to live”—or, in other words, in relation to the amative instincts—that the “art of living” breaks out, and that Nature quits all moderation of design and becomes frankly ornamental and extravagant? Just at the point where to be creative is the immediate motive, where, in the fulfilment of that motive, life is found to be a thing of delight,just there, Nature, being amative, becomes playful, exuberant and ornamental.
There are some birds which, in this connection, carry upon their persons adornments so extravagant that one wonders how for so many generations they have been able to live and move and multiply, bearing such edifices upon their backs, their heads, their tails—that they were not a crushing hindrance to the necessary affairs of life. They certainly cannot have been a help; and yet—they still persist in them!
Taking, then, these natural embryonic beginnings as our starting point, I would be inclined to trace out the living value of art and ornament somewhat upon these lines: Exuberance—the emergence of beauty and adornment, in addition to the mere functional grace arising out of fitness for use—has always been going on through the whole process of creation among animate nature. We see it established in a thousand forms, not only in bird, beast and reptile, but in the vegetable world as well. The tendency of all life that has found a fair field for its development, is to play with its material—to show that it has something over and above the straight needs imposed on it by the struggle for existence, which it can spare for self-expression.
It has been lured on to these manifestations mainly by that “will to live” which underlies the attractions of sex. That exuberance is an essential feature of the evolutionary processat the point where self-realisation by self-reproduction is the game to play. Under that impulse the selective principle begins to assert itself, and straightway the outcome is ornament. Self-realisation (by self-reproduction under all sorts of images and symbols) is the true basis of ornament and of art: self-realisation!
The spirit of man, moving through these means, impresses itself reproductively on the spirits of others with a far better calculation of effect than can be secured through bodily inheritance. For in physical parentage there is always the chance of a throw-back to tainted origins; the sober and moral citizen cannot be sure of sober and moral children in whom the desire of his soul shall be satisfied. They may be drawn, by irresistible forces, to take after some giddy and disreputable old grandfather or grandmother instead of after him; for in his veins run the parental weaknesses of thousands of generations; and over the racial strain that passes through him to others he possesses no control whatever. But the man who has given ornament to life in any form of art—though he commits it to the risks and chances of life, the destructive accidents of peace and war—is in danger of no atavistic trick being played upon the product of his soul; he is assured of his effect, and so long as it endures it reflects and represents his personality more faithfully than the descendants of his blood.
Now for the satisfaction of that instinct,the perpetuation of name and identity is not necessary. The artist would not (if told that his self-realisation was destined to become merged anonymously in the existence of fresco, or canvas, or mosaic)—he would not therefore lay down his mallet or his brush, and say that in that case the survival of these things to a future age was no survival for him. The maker of beautiful inlay would not lose all wish to do inlay if the knowledge that he, individually, as the craftsman were destined to oblivion. Let the future involve him in anonymity as impenetrable as it liked, he would still go on expressing himself in ornament; self-realisation would still be the law of his being.
That is the psychology of the artist mind—of that part of humanity which produces things that come nearest, of all which earth has to show, to conditions of immortality, and so presumably are the most satisfying to man’s wish for continued individual existence. The makers of beauty do not set any great store on the continuance of their names—the continuance of their self-realisation is what they care about.