Part 4

In every well-constructed drama there is some central point of interest around which all the other incidents are grouped. The personality of the girl Pegeen, Christy’s sweetheart, is here the central interest. She towers over every one, not only by her force, but by her maidenly purity and Diana-like fierceness; nothing, neither the coarseness she herself utters in wild humour, nor what the others say or do, can soil her sunshine. And in the love-talk between the lovers, he is all imagination and poet’s make-believe, and she all heart and passion and actuality, which is the peasant woman’s good sense! It is among peasants of the west of Ireland that the poetical dramatist must henceforth find his opportunity. Young gentlemen and young ladies in America have doctrinaire minds; they have grown up attending classes and listening to lectures in the atmosphere of a specious self-improvement, and know nothing of the surroundings amid which this peasant girl grew up straight and tall as a young tree. Some day people will recognize in this play Synge’s tribute to the Irish peasant girl. “And to think it’s me is talking sweetly, Christy Mahon, and I the fright of seven townlands for my biting tongue. Well, the heart’s a wonder, and I’m thinking there won’t be our like in Mayo for gallant lovers from this hour.”

The peasants of the west of Ireland are like Christy Mahon; sorrow and danger and ignorance are their daily portion, yet like him they live the life of the imagination. Liberate them from what oppresses, but so that they may still live the life of the imagination.

Synge’s history was peculiar. He took up music as his profession and studied it in Germany, Rome, and Paris; and having only a very small income, for economy’s sake always lived with poor people. In Paris he stayed with a man cook and his wife, who was a _couturière_. He told me that they had but one sitting-room, in which the man did his cooking and the wife her sewing, with another sewing-woman who helped. When, as sometimes happened, a large order for hats came in, Synge, who by this time had given up music for philology, would drop his studies and apply himself also to hat-making, bending wires, etc. After a year or so he moved into a hotel, where he met my son, who urged him to leave Paris for the west of Ireland and apply himself to the study of Irish. Among these western peasants he thenceforth spent a great part of every winter, living as one of the family, they calling one another by their Christian names; and he told me that he would rather live among them than in the best hotel.

Synge was morally one of the most fastidious men I ever met, at once too sensitive and too proud and passionate for anything unworthy. He was a well-built, muscular man, with broad shoulders, carrying his head finely. He had large, light-hazel eyes which looked straight at you. His conversation, like his book on the Aran Islands, had the charm of entire sincerity, a quality rare among men and artists, though it be the one without which nothing else matters. He neither deceived himself nor anybody else, and yet he had the enthusiasm of the poet. In this combination of enthusiasm and veracity he was like that other great Irishman, Michael Davitt. Like Davitt, also, he was without any desire to be pugnacious; resolute, yet essentially gentle, he was a man of peace.

THE MODERN WOMAN

REFLECTIONS ON A NEW AND INTERESTING TYPE

Queen Elizabeth, we know, had many lovers, but was herself never in love; and so she was able to get the better of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, who, poor soul! allowed herself to be ensnared by the tender passion. Queen Elizabeth, on the historic page, is a monster. Yet what was singular in her is now quite general.

It has been America which has given the world, this strange type; like everything else that happens in this country, she has sprung suddenly upon us, as if she had neither father nor mother nor any visible ancestry.

She may be in a minority, yet she is not difficult to discover, for she is most active, showing herself everywhere. Nor is it difficult to describe her, since she spends much of her time in describing herself. In the first place, like the orator, she is made rather than born; indeed, she is herself a good deal of an orator, always being ready to harangue her friends, explaining and enforcing her ideas. Self-improvement is her passion; improvement in what direction? you will ask. She herself does not know. Meantime she insists on absolute personal liberty--moral, physical, mental, and also political. That she may be free she places a ban on the senses and upon sex; either of these would put her back under subjugation. She announces herself to be eager for affection, but its object must be some person who is supernaturally perfect and complete; anything else would be illogical and unworthy and enslaving. And while her mother dreamed of a life of love and duty in a world where both are necessary because of its sorrowful imperfections, she will be satisfied with nothing less than a perfect love and a perfect affection. At the same time, while resolved on liberty she does not forget that she is born into a business community; therefore she has adopted the business man’s creed--efficiency: “Whatsoever thou doest, do it with all thy might.”

The young men know liberty to be a chimera--that vision has never flattered their eyes. Life to them means hard work and obedience and a constant struggle in circumstances where everything is compromise, and where even honesty is not always the best policy; and as to success and the making of money, even the greatest energy will not suffice if there be not good luck and the opportunity. Unlike the women, these young men have their dreams, for dreams are the solace of labour and abstinence: dreams, first of all, of success and fortune, of which they constantly speak; and then another dream not so easy to talk about: that each may marry some day the girl of his choice.

Here you have American life as it is among the young. The man under discipline and a dreamer; the woman a triumphant egotist, and without any dreams at all. And as to this liberty which she haughtily demands, what is it, among the girls, except the right to choose and dismiss her teachers, abandoning everything and everybody as soon as she ceases to feel interested? Never having been curbed, she has not learned to prefer another to herself. In vain nature cries out within her for the sweet burden of service and sacrifice; she is much too busy listening to her own voice, repeating its new catch words: “I will be myself. I belong to myself, I must lead my own life.” Once she enters society and becomes a woman and meets men, she acquires a very definite purpose, and goes straight for it. Since she will not serve the men, let the men serve her. “The American woman,” said a languidly insolent Englishman to me, “are interesting; the men are nonentities.” In the Englishman’s conception, the man who does not take the upper hand with his women is a poor creature.

The ladies in England do not like the modern American woman. Her success with their own menkind is bitter to bear; yet they envy her. For these men are serving woman as they never served before; and it is precisely because, like the Englishman, the modern woman is herself an egotist. Egoism the Englishman understands: it has always been his honoured creed and his practice; and here at last is a woman who, because of her frank selfishness, is perfectly intelligible; no longer the mystery she used to be, but simple like a child’s puzzle. Her frantic, brand-new egoism is not quite the sober article he patronizes for himself, but it delights him nevertheless, because it is so like his own daily contest with antagonists whom he must overcome in business. And here is a beautiful enemy, whom he must both overcome and capture and carry away with him as a prize of war; to be the ornament of his house and a delight to the eyes, to be his courtier, his worshipper, his wife; and as to the extravagance of her egoism, he feels that as a man he can soon teach her a different lesson, so that she will settle back into tameness and play her woman’s part, and be his English wife. And even if she does not, consider what an advantage it is to have within doors a wife who is perfectly intelligible, and with whom he knows what to do! Why, he can be as logical in his own home as in his place of business. The woman used to be the greatest mystery in the world--you might defy her, or be kind and yield to her, or crush her with your iron will; but you couldn’t understand her. No man could read that riddle. The writers of comedy, the writers of tragedy, all tried their hands at it. Satirists and wits were never tired of the fascinating theme. Yet it was all guess-work. No one pretended to know, and the husbands least of all. Henry the Eighth, who cut off the heads of his wives, knew no more than last year’s lover. Such used to be woman. Now she is as easy to read as an old almanac. Watch her as she paces Fifth Avenue, with her businesslike air. How bright her eyes, and yet hard as jewels! Her smile how thin-lipped! and her figure that of a young athlete. Her mode of dress and of personal array, how smart and efficient and almost military! She is the very embodiment of briskness, and of commanding decision. But all the lines of allurement are vanished, and she no longer undulates with slow grace. She is not feline, neither is she deerlike; and she no longer caresses, for her voice is as uncompromising as her style of dress. The ordinary man, unless he was a gentleman of the old school, or a high-placed nobleman, or an Irish peasant, has always despised the arts of pleasing, until some charming woman has taken him in hand; but the modern woman has ceased to instruct him, and has become his imitator, so that her manners are almost as intimidating as those of the successful business man. Where is that threefold charm of mystery, subtlety and concealment, under which womanhood was wont to veil its powers; and while so many bow down before the conquering woman, where are the poets? The astronomers, the mathematicians, the scientists, the men of business, the lawyers, especially the lawyers, _are_ at her feet, but no music comes from the poet; and she--is she so happy?

Egoism is unhappiness for man and woman. Talleyrand called Napoleon “the unamusable.” It used to be the man who was egotist and the woman who served, for she said: Our mission is to please. Hence her all-prevailing charm, and hence also her invincible happiness, for happiness is the denial of egoism. However it be at other times, the happy woman and the happy man are righteous--in man’s sight and in God’s.

Happiness is the secret known only to poets and to women; and it was the women who taught it to the poets. Mere man knows little about it; least of all the successful man, for risking everything he has mostly lost everything; under his prosperity there is generally distaste. And how sorrow and disaster can at times degrade a man we all know; he becomes gloomy, bitter, or drearily self-contained, or he drops into dissipation and becomes vulgar. The woman, on the other hand, finds in disaster her opportunity; and sorrow, which the woman’s life seldom escapes, however it be with the men, only intensifies her womanhood, so that she anticipates a later wisdom, and luminously refuses to recognize any distinction except that between the happy and the unhappy. There are only two people who are perfectly content--a woman busy in her home and a poet among his rhymes. They have the secret; they share it between them; they break bread together, they are of the company, even though the poet knows nothing of domestic life nor the other of rhymes. The true, the natural woman is like a bird, she has wings. When she is a young girl she is like a bird just spreading her wings for flight; when she is a matured woman she is like a bird in full flight: desire gives her wings, and stirs within her the creative impulse; and nothing can stop her strong flight towards happiness. She has the creative gifts--wherever her eye lights, there is happiness--she gilds with “heavenly alchemy” whatever she touches.

The resolute, practical man puts away the thought of happiness, and for it substitutes pleasures, which are the gratification of the senses, and his unquenchable thirst for variety and movement. These gratifications he can resign with little effort--mere pleasure is ashes in the mouth, while the other he thinks would unnerve him; that is for poets, he will tell you. The woman does not believe in pleasures, she believes in happiness. A supreme belief in happiness is the woman’s soul. It awakens in her the moment she is in love or has a child, and accompanies her everywhere. It explains, I think, the curious self-centredness of her mind, and that strange aloofness which seems to envelop her who has husband and children. In her presence we talk of this and that, and do this and that, and she watches us with eyes in which is the light of knowledge and foreknowledge.

The man is a worker and a fighter; with strenuous effort he pushes along the car of progress, and dies under its wheels; and we make lamentations. But these women should be carried to their graves with song of hope and wistful triumph; any other kind of music would be wounding to our recollections. A man talks mysticism and he argues; and I am bored. A woman looks and perhaps smiles, and almost as by the touching of hands communicates her own unfading hopes. She does not use words, and we do not oppose her with words.

Long ago people talked much of ladies’ eyes, and ancient Homer, as we know, sang of the x-eyed Juno and the azure-eyed Minerva. Now ladies’ eyes are too bright and too exacting to be so eloquent, so persuading; and for all her dominating ways she is not the queen she was, nor for all her witchlike effectiveness is she so calmly beautiful. By turning egotist she has dropped down to our level. She is one of us.

And yet the modern woman is right and has arrived in the nick of time; she is needed because the modern man is not always a gentleman. Some fifteen years ago I was witness to a strange scene on Kew Bridge, outside London, one Sunday morning. A line of five young ladies came riding by on cycles, wearing bloomers. This excited the loud derision of some loafers, some half-breeds, standing together on the side-path, and one of them said something, I did not know what, but the last of the girls heard it and understood. She stopped, and, carefully adjusting her machine so that it stood up against the curb of the side-path, walked back to the young man and asked him if he had used the offensive words; she then knocked him down, and he fell, probably not so much because of her strength as because of his own surprise. Sheepishly he got up, brushing his clothes, and his companions laughed as sheepishly, while she remounted and rode after her friends. Here was the modern woman but immature, effective on this occasion, yet much too crude for anything except a guerrilla war. In Belfast, famous for its bad manners, every one tries to be “boss” over some one else; yet if every one can’t be “boss” in Belfast, there is no man even now who cannot find, both in Belfast and New York and everywhere else, a woman whom he may “boss.” This is one of the solid comforts of the masculine existence; but young ladies teaching in the public schools are watching sympathetically the career of the modern woman.

It insults a woman nowadays to say that the woman’s destiny is to be always dependent on some man; but we who say this know perfectly well that it is equally true to say of the man that it is his destiny to be dependent on some woman. These two must patch up their differences. Man must yield to woman equality and dignity; and she must take him back into favour. There is no such companionship as that between a man and a woman. She brings her wisdom, traditional with her sex, and derived from a long study of the question how to live, and he brings his energy, derived from his long study of how to make a living. When energy makes him say, Let us forget the present and think about the future, she will reply: Let us enjoy the present--am I not young? Is not the childhood of these children exquisite?

People forget or do not know that man’s desire for liberty is not greater than his desire for restraint. By practising the art of happiness he gets both. The gratification of all the desires, tempered each by each, is happiness--hope restrained by memory and the lust of the flesh by affection and sympathy; herein is richest harmony and a servitude which is perfect freedom. Pleasure is the gratification of some one desire pushed to excess and followed by weariness and satiety; and while pleasure overwhelms intellect and silences it, happiness makes intellect supreme. Happiness enforces discipline spontaneously; pleasure relaxes it and brings on licence, which is the shadow of liberty and its final destruction.

It is character, they say, that saves the world. Does this mean the will that is strong to grasp and hold? If so, then I know of something infinitely greater: the full and varied knowledge that comes from the whole complex human personality--every instrument in the orchestra--being developed in our consciousness, so that no single desire is “refused a hearing,” as in a good democracy where every citizen has his rights secured. Here we have the benign wisdom of Shakespeare and of good women, and its motive is the deliberate search for happiness; it kindles the heart and shines in the eyes of a beautiful woman when she goes about in her home and among her friends and neighbours--beautiful and a sceptre-bearing queen; because in a world where every one runs mad after this and that falsehood, she stands for the simple truth of human happiness and all its possibilities. Wisdom is better than force, and supersedes it.

WATTS AND THE METHOD OF ART.[1]

I have often wished that some great painter had written his autobiography, beginning with his earliest childhood. Saints and sinners have left us their memoirs in more than sufficient detail; and we have also the autobiographies of many famous writers.

As yet we have not had the confessions of the Painter; for I am sure they would be called confessions, since it would have been with a sense of shame that these men, including the magnificent Michael Angelo himself, would have confessed their failures at school to learn as other boys learned, and receive, as other boys did, instruction from their teachers.

We are all familiar with instances of boys who, exceptionally quick and clever to ordinary observation, are almost unteachable at school. It would be thought cruel, as well as impossible, to attempt teaching grammar and arithmetic to a young musical genius in a concert-room where musicians were playing; yet this is precisely what is done every time we try to teach grammar and such things to a boy with the eyes of a painter. Time and experience have at last taught us to be respectful and tender with the musical mind; we accept, and we understand it; and the boy with the wonderful ear is caught up and carried away and instructed and fondled, and the world is made smooth for him. But how about the boy with the wonderful eye? And yet the musical boy is only tempted when music is actually being played, whereas this other is never free from solicitation, since to him there is always, except in the dark, colour and form and light and shade. He will know the shape and surface of every object in his schoolroom, and how light falls on desk and table; he will know among his school-fellows all the profiles and all the front faces, what colour the eyes are, and how they are shaped; every detail of form and colour will be familiar to him, since to watch these things and to draw from them a continuous, intellectual intoxication is the very purpose for which he has been created; for with him the eyes are the gates of wisdom; and with young children these eyes are so thronged by wisdom trying to get in that all their time is taken up in opening the gates to its inrush.

In this progress of the painter--in this preparation for what, if the conditions are favourable, ought to be the solemn business of painting or sculpture--there will be various stages. At first it will be all observation; after that will come a time in which the boy will make inferences; to him the face will be the index of the mind; and, looking round on master and boy, he will be a physiognomist who has never heard of Lavater, or a craniologist or phrenologist, until some happy moment when, having exhausted his interest in scientific inquiry, there will burst upon him the glorious world of intellectual desire.

A friend of mine--an old painter, who went to school in the North of Scotland--described to me his experience. The dominie had one morning been particularly drastic in his methods, and this led to great concentration of thought among the pupils, while at the same time it did not in the least alter the usual current of their ideas. My friend, for instance, busied himself as usual, observing form and colour, only with a keener zest and, as I have said, a more concentrated purpose. It was a spring morning, and, for the first time that year, a ray of sunshine came into the room, making a square of yellow light on the dusty floor at his feet. It was only at that particular period of the year such a thing was possible: later on there would be too many leaves on the trees, and in winter the sun was not in that quarter of the heavens. My friend was an unhappy and anxious schoolboy, but the events of that morning and the menaces of the dominie, combined with the sudden sunlight at his feet, made a new boy of him, and he looked at the square of brightness which stirred his heart. He received, as it were, his mystical message; and some time afterwards, leaving school, he became a landscape-painter.

With a man like Mr. Watts the world of desire would have burst differently. He was the greatest figure-painter England has ever produced. With the exception of Blake, who hardly counts, I may say he was the one painter who worked in the grand manner and on great subjects. Years ago, by a happy accident, I met him in my studio. I remember his handsome face and a certain air, as it seemed to me, of imperious detachment; in his voice also there was a touch of austerity. He looked at my pictures without a word, till I asked him for his opinion. It then came clear, frank, and to the point. I did not tell him what, nevertheless, was the fact--that, though I had never seen him before, I had been his diligent pupil for years, and that from him first I learned the true meaning of painting, and why I, or indeed anyone else, had been induced to take up the craft.