Part 7

“‘Don’t you like poor people very much yourself?’”

“Towneley gave his face a comical but good-natured screw and said quietly, but slowly and decidedly, ‘No, no, no,’ and escaped.”

“Of course, some poor people were very nice, and always would be so, but as though scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he saw that no one was nicer for being poor, and that between the upper and lower classes there was a gulf which amounted practically to an impassable barrier.”

It is a great pity that Samuel Butler did not live longer and write more novels. But in regretting him, we shall do well to remember that though publication was delayed until some time after the author’s death, the bulk of _The Way of All Flesh_ was written in the ’70’s. _The Way of All Flesh_ is not sympathetic to the contemporary mood; it is one of those books so much ahead of its time (except perhaps in ecclesiastical matters) that the time has not yet caught up with it. It was doomed inevitably to an interval of oblivion. The case reminds one of _Richard Feverel_.

Only in one way is _The Way of All Flesh_ quite contemporary. The hero thinks so well of the prostitute that he marries her. On the other hand, to be sure, he bitterly regrets it, which is not contemporary. I do not mean that the hero’s marrying her is especially in the literary fashion, but his thinking well of her is. You will notice that in our moral fever we do not leave the prostitute out of our novels--no, indeed: she must be there to give spice, as of old. Only now, instead of being entangled with her, the young gentleman preaches to her; and she loves him for it. Perhaps this is what happens nowadays in real life. I do not pretend to know; but I suspect it is true, for I fancy the only kind of person who could invent the contemporary plot is the kind who would live it. The wildest imaginings of the people who are made differently would hardly stretch to it. And not only does the hero find himself immensely touched by the tragedy of the disreputable woman--which is, after all, in certain cases plausible enough--he burns to introduce his fiancée to her. Now that, again, may be life--Mr. Winston Churchill, for example, should know better than I--but it is certainly a world with the sense of values gone wrong. And when we have lost our sense of values, we shall presently lose the values as well. The girl herself is often to blame: did not the fiancée of Simon de Gex go of her own initiative to see the animal-tamer, and come away to renounce him, convinced that the animal-tamer was the nobler woman? Which, emphatically, she was not. But then, as we know from long experience of Mr. Locke, he cannot keep his head with circus-people about; and sawdust is incense to him. Let Mr. Locke have his little foibles by all means; but even Mr. Locke should not have made the spoiled darling of society marry the animal-tamer (one side of her face having been nearly clawed off) and _then_ go with her into city missionary work. Yet I do not believe it is really Mr. Locke’s fault. The public at present loves as a sister the woman with a past; and loves city missionary work, if possible, more.

The fact is that with all our imitation of Meredith--and every one who is not imitating Tolstoï is imitating Meredith--he has failed to save us. We have taken all his prescriptions blindly--except one. We have emancipated our women and emasculated our men; we have cast down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree; we have learned all the Radical shibboleths and say them for our morning prayers; and we have faced the fact of sex so squarely that we can hardly see anything else. But we have not learned his saving hatred of the sentimentalist. Miss May Sinclair has admirably pointed out in her study of the three Brontës that Charlotte Brontë was exceedingly modern in her detestation of sentimentality. Modern she may have been--with Meredith; but not modern with the present novelists, for they are almost too sentimental to be endured. And there is the whole trouble. We think Thackeray an old fool for being sentimental over Amelia Sedley; but how does it better the case to be sentimental, instead, over the heroine of _The Promised Land_? Amelia Sedley was all in all a much nicer person, if not half so clever. She may have snivelled a good deal, but she was capable of loving some one else better than herself.

Of course, I have cited only a few instances--those that happened to come most easily to mind. But let any reader of fiction run over mentally a group of contemporary heroes, and see if the substitutions I have named have not pretty generally taken place. Has not pride given way to humility, reticence to glibness, class-consciousness to a wild democracy, the code of manners to an uncouth unworldliness, and honor in the old sense to a burning passion for reform--“any old” reform? Do not these men lead us into the heterogeneous company of the unclassed of both sexes--and ask us to look upon them as saints in motley? Has not the world of fiction changed in the last twenty years? The hero in old days sometimes fell foul of the law by getting into debt. But we were not supposed, therefore, to be on his side against the law. Now, the hero does not, perhaps, get into legal difficulties himself, but he is always passionately on the side of the people whom laws were devised to protect the respectable from. The scientific tendency to consider that aristocracy consists merely in freedom from certain physical taints has permeated fiction. “Is not one man as good as another?” asked the demagogue. “Of course he is, and a great deal better!” replied the excited Irishman in the crowd. We are in the thick of a popular mania for thinking all the undesirables “a good deal better.” The modern hero is, to my mind, in intention, if not in execution, an admirable figure; and though one rather expects him any day to give his whole fortune for a gross of green spectacles, one will not, for that, find him any less likable. Some day he will rediscover the Dantesque hierarchy of souls implicit in humanity. And then, perhaps, he will get back his charm.

Some one is probably bursting to observe that we have a school of realists at hand; and that no one can accuse Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett of sentimentality--also that we have Mr. Shaw and Mr. Granville Barker and Mr. Masefield as mounted auxiliaries in the field. I grant Mr. Bennett; I am not so sure about Mr. Wells. But certainly Mr. Wells is not sentimental as Mr. William de Morgan, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr. Meredith Nicholson, Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. H. S. Harrison, and Miss Ellen Glasgow are sentimental. If he is sentimental at all, it is rather over ideas than people. (Mr. Masefield, I am inclined to think, is simply catering to the special audience that Thomas Hardy, by his silence, has left gaping and empty.) Let us look into the matter a little. “Sentimental” is one of the most difficult catchwords in the world to define; and you can get a roomful of intelligent people quarrelling over it any time. Perhaps, for our purposes, it will serve merely to say that the sentimentalist is always, in one way or another, disloyal to facts. He cannot be trusted to give a straight account, because his own sense of things is more valuable to him than the truth. He has come in on the top of the pragmatic wave, and the sands of Anglo-Saxondom are strewn thick with him. He serves, in Kipling’s phrase, the God of Things as They Ought to Be (according to his private feeling). His own perversion may be æsthetic, or intellectual, or moral, or sociological, but he is always recognizable by his tampering with truth.

Now, Mr. Wells does tamper with truth. He did it, for example, in the case of Ann Veronica. He wanted Ann Veronica to be a nice girl under twenty, and he wanted her, even more, to be unduly awakened to certain physical aspects of sex. It was sentimentality that made him draw her as he did: determination to prove that the girl who loved as he wanted her to love was just as conventional as any one else. You cannot have your cake and eat it too; but the sentimentalist blindly refuses to accept that. Accordingly, we get the unconvincing creature that Mr. Wells wanted to believe existed. Mr. Wells’s heroes may not seem to bear out my argument so well as Mr. Galsworthy’s. To be sure, Mr. Wells is not so sentimental as Mr. Galsworthy, and he has not, like the author of _The Man of Property_, and _Fraternity_, and _Justice_, one--just one--fixed idea. Mr. Galsworthy always deals with a man who is in love with some other man’s wife; and his world is thereby narrowed. Mr. Wells is interested in a good many things, and his politics are not purely philanthropic as most of our novelists’ politics are. But Mr. Wells’s heroes, even when they are fairly fortunate, are pre-occupied with their own notions of sociological duty, even more than they are pre-occupied with passion, though their passion is “special” enough when it comes. Would any one except a Wells hero take a trip to India and come away having seen nothing but the sweat-shops of Bombay? Always the author’s sympathy is with the under dog; whether it is Kipps or Mr. Polly living out his long foredoomed existence, or George Ponderevo analyzing Bladesover with diabolic keenness and aching contempt. “I’m a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable goddesses,” says Ponderevo in a burst of frankness. There you have the Wells hero to the life. And Mr. Bennett’s people are only spiritual guttersnipes who are _not_ in love with unimaginable goddesses.

The point is that the guttersnipe is having his turn in fiction: if our American heroes are not guttersnipes themselves, it is their sign of grace to be supremely interested in guttersnipes. In one way or the other, the guttersnipe must have his proper prominence. Of course, there are differences and degrees: a few heroes get no nearer the lower classes than a passionate desire for reform tickets and municipal sanitation. But ordinarily they must go through Ernest Pontifex’s state of believing that poor people are not only more important, but in every way way nicer than rich people; and few of them go back utterly on that belief, as Ernest did. Perhaps that, more than anything else, marks the change of fashion in men. For gentlemen were always, in their way, benevolent; but formerly they had not achieved the paradox that the object of benevolence is _ex officio_ more interesting than the bestower.

I said earlier that in life, as well as in literature, men had changed. One’s instances, obviously, must be from books, and not from one’s acquaintance; but I spoke truth. Philanthropy is the latest social ladder, but it would not be so if the people on the top rung were not interested in philanthropy. There has been, for whatever reason, a tremendous spurt of interest in sociological questions. Our hard-headed young men, of high ideals, find themselves fighting, of necessity, on a different battlefield from any that strategists would have chosen thirty years ago. Moreover, philanthropy being woman’s way into politics, women have been giving their calm, or hysterical, attention to problems which, thirty years since, did not, as problems, exist for them. I said that the change of taste in women would probably account for much of the change of fashion in men. A schoolmate of mine, writing me some years since of her engagement, said (in nearly these words), “He is tremendously interested in city missionary work; it wouldn’t have been quite perfect if we hadn’t had that in common.” Both were spoiled darlings of fortune, but the statement was quite sincere. Undoubtedly, without that, it would not have been “quite perfect” in the eyes of either.

The mere conversation of the marriageable young has changed past belief. “Social service” has usurped so many subjects! Have many people stopped to realize, I wonder, how completely the psychological novel and the “problem” play (in the old sense) have gone out of date? The psychology of hero and heroine, their emotional attitudes to each other, are, largely worked out now in terms of their attitudes to impersonal questions, their religious or their sociological “principles.” The individual personal reaction counts less and less. If they agree on the same panacea for the social evils, the author can usually patch up a passion sufficient for them to marry on. Gone, for the most part, are the pages of intimate analysis. No intimate analysis is needed any longer. As for the “problem play,” we have it still with us, but in another form. _The Doll’s House_ and _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ are both antiquated: we do not call a drama a problem play now unless it preaches a new kind of legislation. And as for sex--in its finer aspects it no longer interests us.

There was a great deal more sex, in its subtler manifestations, in the old novels and plays, than in the new ones. Not so long ago, a novel was a love-story; and it was of supreme importance to a hero whether or not he could make the heroine care for him. It was also of supreme importance to the heroine. The romance was all founded on sex; and yet sex was hardly mentioned. Our heroes and heroines still marry; but when they consider sex at all, they are apt to consider it biologically, not romantically. We, as a public, are more frankly interested in sex than ever; but we think of it objectively, and a little brutally, in terms of demand and supply. And so we get often the pathetic spectacle of the hero and heroine having no time to make love to each other in the good old-fashioned way, because they are so busy suppressing the red-light district and compiling statistics of disease. Much of the frankness, doubtless, is a good thing; but, beyond a doubt, it has cheapened passion. For passion among civilized people is a subtle thing; it is wrapped about with dreams and imaginings, and can bring human beings to salvation as well as to perdition. But when it is shown to us as the mere province of courtesans, small wonder that we turn from it to the hero who will have difficulty in feeling or inspiring it. Especially since we are told, at the same time, that even the courtesan plies her trade only from direst necessity.

After all, the only safe person to fall in love with nowadays _is_ a reformer: socially, financially, and sentimentally. And most women, at least, could (if they would) say with the Princesse Mathilde, “Je n’aime que les romans dont je voudrais être l’héroïne.” Certainly, unless for some special reason, no novel of which one would not like to be the heroine--in love with the hero--will reach the hundred thousand mark. If there are any of us left who regret the gentlemen of old--who still prefer our Darcy or even our Plantagenet Palliser--we must write our own novels, and divine our own heroes under the protective coloring of their conventional breeding. For they are not being “featured,” at present, either in life or in literature.

THE NEWEST WOMAN

It was the late George Meredith, if I mistake not, who was credited with bringing women into their joint inheritance of wit and passion. He himself supposed himself to discard, first of the novelists, the “veiled virginal doll.” The _jeune fille_ had, in the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, become somewhat dehumanized. She was far, indeed, from the frank heroines of Shakespeare, to whom every year was leap year. The heroine of the old-fashioned sentimental novel forsook her blushing, fainting, tear-shedding, letter-writing girlhood, only to become, on her wedding day, the British matron. There seems to have been no transition. Meredith apparently felt that the feminine share in romance was deplorably and inaccurately minimized. He exaggerated, perhaps. Scott gave us a few fine examples of the beautiful girl without frill or flutter, who was aware of her own mind. George Eliot knew a thing or two about her sex; and Jane Eyre, in her day, was notoriously explicit.

Not long since, indeed, having brought myself quite up-to-date with the fiction of the contemporary English school--even to the last instalments of its serial novels--I sought out the most _démodé_ of the English novelists. “Let me see,” I murmured to myself, “just what it is that we have thought it worth while, at this expense, to escape.” Accordingly, I procured all the volumes of _Sir Charles Grandison_. Nothing, it seemed, could be fairer than to go to Richardson; and, in all the work of Richardson, fairest, surely, to go to _Sir Charles_.

I have never known any one who was ashamed to confess that _Sir Charles Grandison_ bored him. It is the last work which any defender of the old school of fiction would think of using as a basis for argument. And yet, even in that epic of priggery, the natural note is not wholly lacking. Harriet Byron loved Sir Charles while he was still bound to the Lady Clementina, and bore herself with dignity when her friends cautioned her against her own feeling. “If this should end at last in love” (she writes), “and I should be _entangled in a hopeless passion_, the object of it would be Sir Charles Grandison: he could not insult me; and mean as the word _pity_ in some cases sounds, I had rather have his pity than the love of any other man.” Such a cry, even Richardson, with all his prurient prudishness, could give us.

Yet we must give Meredith his due; and Meredith, on the whole, honestly surpasses these others in the shining list of his adoring heroines--adoring with such dominance in meekness, such gayety in surrender. Rose Jocelyn, Henrietta Fakenham, Aminta Farrell, Clare Doria Forey (let us write it in full, for so she liked it best), Cecilia Halkett, Janet Ilchester--it would be hard to match, within the century, that group of girls.

All these names have been recalled simply as witnesses to the fact that there is--in spite of the contentions of the contemporary novelists--a perfectly consistent tradition, in English novels, of the frank young woman. It is of the first importance to establish this, for these contemporary authors are talking as if their Anns and Isabels and Hildas were the only _jeunes filles_ who had ever dared, in literature, to love as spirited girls in life really do. Just here one quarrels with their pretensions. The Victorian convention may have given us Amelia Sedley, and Lucy Desborough, and Lily Dale; but the Victorian era gave us also Catherine Earnshaw, and Jane Eyre, and Eustacia Vye. Our contemporaries are doing nothing new when they show us the _jeune fille_ falling in love before she is proposed to; they are doing nothing new when they show us the _jeune fille_ wishing, quite specifically, to be a wife; they are not even doing anything new--rather, something quite _dix-huitième_ and _rococo_--when they show us the _jeune fille_ considering whether she will put up with being a mistress. The _jeune fille_ glorying in her choice of the illicit relation is something, let us grant them, more nearly new. Yet how they gabble, upon their peak in Darien!

No; these authors have not broken with the Victorian convention--that simple acrobatic feat demanded of all beginners. But they have broken with the laboratory method. If they think that in Ann Veronica, in Hilda Lessways, in Isabel Rivers, they have been more accurate than their great predecessors, they are quite simply mistaken. I am not proposing to myself, or to any one else, to be shocked by these young women. Being shocked leaves one, in the world of criticism, with no retort. Whether or not one is shocked by them is quite another question, and one that does not come into this discussion. My own objection to the school of Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, is that their heroines are not convincing.

There is a great deal said and written, nowadays, about women as they are and as they ought to be; and very little of it is in the tone of _Sesame and Lilies_. We are told very contradictory things about our sex; and we are exhorted with unvarying earnestness to believe each contradiction. We are jeered at for being Nietzschean Anns, embodying the ruthless life-force, pursuing the man that we may have children by him. We are also preached at for causing race-suicide. We must want children more than anything else in the world; and we must want the state to take care of them for us after they are born. We must return to the Stone Age; and we must, at the same time, join the Fabian Society. We must submit to the intense conservatism of eugenics; but we must, on the other hand, insult Mrs. Grundy, whenever we find it convenient, by taking lovers instead of husbands. We ought not to marry without assurance that our children will be physically perfect; but we may not expose them on a mountain top if by any chance they are not.

Only the pragmatist (be it said in passing), with his avowed power of sucking the truth simultaneously from two mutually exclusive hypotheses, could do all the things that, with authority, we are told to do. “Modern, indeed! She” (Ann Veronica) “was going to be as primordial as chipped flint.” Yet, if we accept the chronologies of history (which seems sane enough) nothing could be more “modern” than Ann Veronica’s way of being prehistoric. Perhaps the solution is for all women to become pragmatists? Some of us are bewildered by all this; and we wonder a little if the heart-breaking medley of preachments is not the fruit of that antique and unpardonable sin--_mêler les genres_. In all this chaos, one thing seems to be generally agreed on: women are, contrary to fusty tradition, very like men--whether like them according to _L’Age Dangereux_, or like them according to the latest suffrage pamphlet. That is the only thing that we shall unfailingly be told.

There is something in it. We _are_ more like men than Mrs. Radcliffe would have believed. But the method chosen by these modern heroines of being like men is chiefly, it would appear, to be more so. They will not go half-way, but three quarters. The old-fashioned man sometimes relented. The new-fashioned woman makes quick work of her lover’s virtue. There is hardly a villain in an old play but would have let the lady off, if she had pleaded with him as Capes pleads with Ann Veronica. The qualms, the scruples, the regrets, are all the man’s: the girl refuses utterly to indulge in anything so weak. Capes is unfortunate enough to say something to Ann Veronica about honor. “Only your queer code of honor--Honor! Once you begin with love you have to see it through.” Away with inhibitions!

“But,” some one will object, “all this has been said before. And literature is full of women who prey passionately on the men they say they love. They are a recognized type.” Granted; but until now, the passionate preying and the unsought soliciting have not been done by the young unmarried girl of respectable traditions. The type is represented, from Potiphar’s wife down, by the woman who is no longer _jeune fille_. One has not traversed either literature or life without hearing of exceptions. But they are exceptions. The point is, not that young women have hitherto been restrained by religion and convention, and that when they become free-thinkers and despise the existing order, they express themselves as they really are. The point is that they really are not, for the most part, like Ann Veronica and Hilda Lessways.