Part 10

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 to let 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 of that 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 at first 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 expressed once--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 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 is all 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 goes about 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 have been 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 to maintain. 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 sufficiently ashamed 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 offence itself 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 said of 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 she possesses 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.

FOOTNOTE:

[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.

USE AND ORNAMENT

(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, our physical 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 or more 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 the time 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.