A Room of One's Own
by
Virginia Woolf
[* This essay is based upon two papers read to the Arts Society
at Newnharn and the Odtaa at Girton in October 1928. The papers
were too long to be read in full, and have since been altered and
expanded.]
Contents
One
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six.
ONE
But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and
fiction—what, has that got to do with a room of one's own? I
will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and
fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what
the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny
Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës
and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; some witticisms if
possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot;
a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done. But at second
sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction
might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they
are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write;
or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them,
or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed
together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I
began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the
most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I
should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be
able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer
to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to
wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the
mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion
upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of
her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see,
leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true
nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a
conclusion upon these two questions—women and fiction remain,
so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. But in order to make
some amends I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived
at this opinion about the room and the money. I am going to develop
in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought
which led me to think this. Perhaps if I lay bare the ideas, the
prejudices, that lie behind this statement you will find that they
have some bearing upon women and some upon fiction. At any rate,
when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about
sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only
show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can
only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own
conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the
idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain
more truth than fact. Therefore I propose, making use of all the
liberties and licences of a novelist, to tell you the story of the
two days that preceded my coming here—how, bowed down by the
weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I
pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. I need
not say that what I am about to describe has no existence; Oxbridge
is an invention; so is Fernham; 'I' is only a convenient term for
somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but
there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you
to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is
worth keeping. If not, you will of course throw the whole of it
into the waste-paper basket and forget all about it.
Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael
or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any
importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in
fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken
of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a
subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my
head to the ground. To the right and left bushes of some sort,
golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt
with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in
perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river
reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and
when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections
they closed again, completely, as if he had never been. There one
might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought—to
call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line
down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and
thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift
it and sink it until—you know the little tug—the sudden
conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the
cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas,
laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine
looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the
water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and
eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you
look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what
I am going to say.
But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious
property of its kind—put back into the mind, it became at
once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and
flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas
that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found
myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly
a man's figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand
that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away
coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror
and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he
was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path.
Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the
place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I
regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its
usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no
very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the
Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was
that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300
years in succession they had sent my little fish into hiding.
What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously
trespassing I could not now remember. The spirit of peace descended
like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells
anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine
October morning. Strolling through those colleges past those
ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away;
the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through
which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any
contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was
at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony
with the moment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some
old essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought
Charles Lamb to mind—Saint Charles, said Thackeray, putting a
letter of Lamb's to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I
give you my thoughts as they came to me), Lamb is one of the most
congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, Tell me then
how you wrote your essays? For his essays are superior even to Max
Beerbohm's, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that
wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the
middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred
with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years
ago. Certainly he wrote an essay—the name escapes
me—about the manuscript of one of Milton's poems which he saw
here. It was Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked
him to think it possible that any word in Lycidas could have
been different from what it is. To think of Milton changing the
words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege. This led me
to remember what I could of Lycidas and to amuse myself with
guessing which word it could have been that Milton had altered, and
why. It then occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which
Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one
could follow Lamb's footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous
library where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I
put this plan into execution, it is in this famous library that the
manuscript of Thackeray's Esmond is also preserved. The
critics often say that Esmond is Thackeray's most perfect
novel. But the affectation of the style, with its imitation of the
eighteenth century, hampers one, so far as I can remember; unless
indeed the eighteenth-century style was natural to
Thackeray—a fact that one might prove by looking at the
manuscript and seeing whether the alterations were for the benefit
of the style or of the sense. But then one would have to decide
what is style and what is meaning, a question which—but here
I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I
must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian
angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white
wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a
low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the
library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with
a letter of introduction.
That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of
complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with
all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps
complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever.
Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that
hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger. Still
an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one to do? Stroll on
the meadows? sit by the river? Certainly it was a lovely autumn
morning; the leaves were fluttering red to the ground; there was no
great hardship in doing either. But the sound of music reached my
ear. Some service or celebration was going forward. The organ
complained magnificently as I passed the chapel door. Even the
sorrow of Christianity sounded in that serene air more like the
recollection of sorrow than sorrow itself; even the groanings of
the ancient organ seemed lapped in peace. I had no wish to enter
had I the right, and this time the verger might have stopped me,
demanding perhaps my baptismal certificate, or a letter of
introduction from the Dean. But the outside of these magnificent
buildings is often as beautiful as the inside. Moreover, it was
amusing enough to watch the congregation assembling, coming in and
going out again, busying themselves at the door of the chapel like
bees at the mouth of a hive. Many were in cap and gown; some had
tufts of fur on their shoulders; others were wheeled in
bath-chairs; others, though not past middle age, seemed creased and
crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those
giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand
of an aquarium. As I leant against the wall the University indeed
seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would
soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of
the Strand. Old stories of old deans and old dons came back to
mind, but before I had summoned up courage to whistle—it used
to be said that at the sound of a whistle old Professor
—— instantly broke into a gallop—the venerable
congregation had gone inside. The outside of the chapel remained.
As you know, its high domes and pinnacles can be seen, like a
sailing-ship always voyaging never arriving, lit up at night and
visible for miles, far away across the hills. Once, presumably,
this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings and
the chapel itself was marsh too, where the grasses waved and the
swine rootled. Teams of horses and oxen, I thought, must have
hauled the stone in wagons from far countries, and then with
infinite labour the grey blocks in whose shade I was now standing
were poised in order one on top of another, and then the painters
brought their glass for the windows, and the masons were busy for
centuries up on that roof with putty and cement, spade and trowel.
Every Saturday somebody must have poured gold and silver out of a
leathern purse into their ancient fists, for they had their beer
and skittles presumably of an evening. An unending stream of gold
and silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually
to keep the stones coming and the masons working; to level, to
ditch, to dig and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and
money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep
foundation, and when the stones were raised, still more money was
poured in from the coffers of kings and queens and great nobles to
ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught. Lands
were granted; tithes were paid. And when the age of faith was over
and the age of reason had come, still the same flow of gold and
silver went on; fellowships were founded; lectureships endowed;
only the gold and silver flowed now, not from the coffers of the
king. but from the chests of merchants and manufacturers, from the
purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and
returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more
chairs, more lectureships, more fellowships in the university where
they had learnt their craft. Hence the libraries and laboratories;
the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate
instruments which now stands on glass shelves, where centuries ago
the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Certainly, as I strolled
round the court, the foundation of gold and silver seemed deep
enough; the pavement laid solidly over the wild grasses. Men with
trays on their heads went busily from staircase to staircase. Gaudy
blossoms flowered in window-boxes. The strains of the gramophone
blared out from the rooms within. It was impossible not to
reflect—the reflection whatever it may have been was cut
short. The clock struck; it was time to find one's way to
luncheon.
It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us
believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for
something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that
was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is
part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon
and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no
importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a
glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that
convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began
with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had
spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded
here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a
doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple
of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges,
many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads,
the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as
coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more
succulent. And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done
with than the silent servingman, the Beadle himself perhaps in a
milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in napkins, a
confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding
and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult. Meanwhile
the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been
emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, half-way
down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little
electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon
our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which
is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry.
No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all
going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company—in other words,
how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this
grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society
of one's kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the
cushions in the window-seat.
If by good luck there had been an ash-tray handy, if one had not
knocked the ash out of the window in default, if things had been a
little different from what they were, one would not have seen,
presumably, a cat without a tail. The sight of that abrupt and
truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed by
some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional light for
me. It was as if someone had let fall a shade. Perhaps the
excellent hock was relinquishing its hold. Certainly, as I watched
the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too
questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed
different. But what was lacking, what was different, I asked
myself, listening to the talk? And to answer that question I had to
think myself out of the room, back into the past, before the war
indeed, and to set before my eyes the model of another luncheon
party held in rooms not very far distant from these; but different.
Everything was different. Meanwhile the talk went on among the
guests, who were many and young, some of this sex, some of that; it
went on swimmingly, it went on agreeably, freely, amusingly. And as
it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and
as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the
descendant, the legitimate heir of the other. Nothing was changed;
nothing was different save only here I listened with all my ears
not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current
behind it. Yes, that was it—the change was there. Before the
war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely
the same things but they would have sounded different, because in
those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not
articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the
words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to words?
Perhaps with the help of the poets one could.. A book lay beside me
and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson. And here I
found Tennyson was singing:
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near';
And the white rose weeps, 'She is late';
The larkspur listens, 'I hear, I hear';
And the lily whispers, 'I wait.'
Was that what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war? And
the women?
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit,
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Was that what women hummed at luncheon parties before the
war?
There was something so ludicrous in thinking of people humming
such things even under their breath at luncheon parties before the
war that I burst out laughing and had to explain my laughter by
pointing at the Manx cat, who did look a little absurd, poor beast,
without a tail, in the middle of the lawn. Was he really born so,
or had he lost his tail in an accident? The tailless cat, though
some are said to exist in the Isle of Man, is rarer than one
thinks. It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is
strange what a difference a tail makes—you know the sort of
things one says as a lunch party breaks up and people are finding
their coats and hats.
This one, thanks to the hospitality of the host, had lasted far
into the afternoon. The beautiful October day was fading and the
leaves were falling from the trees in the avenue as I walked
through it. Gate after gate seemed to close with gentle finality
behind me. Innumerable beadles were fitting innumerable keys into
well-oiled locks; the treasure-house was being made secure for
another night. After the avenue one comes out upon a road—I
forget its name—which leads you, if you take the right
turning, along to Fernham. But there was plenty of time. Dinner was
not till half-past seven. One could almost do without dinner after
such a luncheon. It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the
mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road. Those
words——
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear——
sang in my blood as I stepped quickly along towards Headingley.
And then, switching off into the other measure, I sang, where the
waters are churned up by the weir:
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree...
What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk, what poets
they were!
In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and
absurd though these comparisons are, I went on to wonder if
honestly one could name two living poets now as great as Tennyson
and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I
thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare them. The
very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such
rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have
(at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds
easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to
compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express
a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the
moment. One does not recognize it in the first place; often for
some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares
it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew.
Hence the difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this
difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines
of any good modern poet. For this reason—that my memory
failed me—the argument flagged for want of material. But why,
I continued, moving on towards Headingley, have we stopped humming
under our breath at luncheon parties? Why has Alfred ceased to
sing
She is coming, my dove, my dear.
Why has Christina ceased to respond
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me?
Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August
1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other's
eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in
particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see
the faces of our rulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly
they looked—German, English, French—so stupid. But lay
the blame where one will, on whom one will, the illusion which
inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately
about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then. One has
only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But why say 'blame'?
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it
was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place? For
truth...those dots mark the spot where, in search of truth, I
missed the turning up to Fernham. Yes indeed, which was truth and
which was illusion? I asked myself. What was the truth about these
houses, for example, dim and festive now with their red windows in
the dusk, but raw and red and squalid, with their sweets and their
bootlaces, at nine o'clock in the morning? And the willows and the
river and the gardens that run down to the river, vague now with
the mist stealing over them, but gold and red in the
sunlight—which was the truth, which was the illusion about
them? I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no
conclusion was found on the road to Headingley, and I ask You to
suppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and
retraced my steps to Fernham.
As I have said already that it was an October day, I dare not
forfeit your respect and imperil the fair name of fiction by
changing the season and describing lilacs hanging over garden
walls, crocuses, tulips and other flowers of spring. Fiction must
stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the
fiction—so we are told. Therefore it was still autumn and the
leaves were still yellow and falling, if anything, a little faster
than before, because it was now evening (seven twenty-three to be
precise) and a breeze (from the south-west to be exact) had risen.
But for all that there was something odd at work:
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit—
perhaps the words of Christina Rossetti were partly responsible
for the folly of the fancy—it was nothing of course but a
fancy—that the lilac was shaking its flowers over the garden
walls, and the brimstone butterflies were scudding hither and
thither, and the dust of the pollen was in the air. A wind blew,
from what quarter I know not, but it lifted the half-grown leaves
so that there was a flash of silver grey in the air. It was the
time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification
and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an
excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world
revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden,
for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about),
the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges,
one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The
gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and
open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were
daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times,
and now wind-blown and waving as they tugged at their roots. The
windows of the building, curved like ships' windows among generous
waves of red brick, changed from lemon to silver under the flight
of the quick spring clouds. Somebody was in a hammock, somebody,
but in this light they were phantoms only, half guessed, half seen,
raced across the grass—would no one stop her?—and then
on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe the air, to glance at
the garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her
great forehead and her shabby dress—could it be the famous
scholar, could it be J—— H—— herself? All
was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung
over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword—the gash
of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart
of the spring. For youth——
Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in the great
dining-hall. Far from being spring it was in fact an evening in
October. Everybody was assembled in the big dining-room. Dinner was
ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was
nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the
transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the
plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain. Next
came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes—a homely
trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and
sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and
cheapening and women with string bags on Monday morning. There was
no reason to complain of human nature's daily food, seeing that the
supply was sufficient and coal-miners doubtless were sitting down
to less. Prunes and custard followed. And if anyone complains that
prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable
vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser's heart and
exuding a fluid such as might run in misers' veins who have denied
themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to
the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity
embraces even the prune. Biscuits and cheese came next, and here
the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is the nature of
biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core. That was
all. The meal was over. Everybody scraped their chairs back; the
swing-doors swung violently to and fro; soon the hall was emptied
of every sign of food and made ready no doubt for breakfast next
morning. Down corridors and up staircases the youth of England went
banging and singing. And was it for a guest, a stranger (for I had
no more right here in Fernham than in Trinity or Somerville or
Girton or Newnham or Christchurch), to say, 'The dinner was not
good,' or to say (we were now, Mary Seton and I, in her
sitting-room), 'Could we not have dined up here alone?' for if I
had said anything of the kind I should have been prying and
searching into the secret economies of a house which to the
stranger wears so fine a front of gaiety and courage. No, one could
say nothing of the sort. Indeed, conversation for a moment flagged.
The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed
together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will
be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great
importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep
well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not
light on beef and prunes. We are all probably going to
heaven, and Vandyck is, we hope, to meet us round the next
corner—that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind that
beef and prunes at the end of the day's work breed between them.
Happily my friend, who taught science, had a cupboard where there
was a squat bottle and little glasses—(but there should have
been sole and partridge to begin with)—so that we were able
to draw up to the fire and repair some of the damages of the day's
living. In a minute or so we were slipping freely in and out among
all those objects of curiosity and interest which form in the mind
in the absence of a particular person, and are naturally to be
discussed on coming together again—how somebody has married,
another has not; one thinks this, another that; one has improved
out of all knowledge, the other most amazingly gone to the
bad—with all those speculations upon human nature and the
character of the amazing world we live in which spring naturally
from such beginnings. While these things were being said, however,
I became shamefacedly aware of a current setting in of its own
accord and carrying everything forward to an end of its own. One
might be talking of Spain or Portugal, of book or racehorse, but
the real interest of whatever was said was none of those things,
but a scene of masons on a high roof some five centuries ago. Kings
and nobles brought treasure in huge sacks and poured it under the
earth. This scene was for ever coming alive in my mind and placing
itself by another of lean cows and a muddy market and withered
greens and the stringy hearts of old men—these two pictures,
disjointed and disconnected and nonsensical as they were, were for
ever coming together and combating each other and had me entirely
at their mercy. The best course, unless the whole talk was to be
distorted, was to expose what was in my mind to the air, when with
good luck it would fade and crumble like the head of the dead king
when they opened the coffin at Windsor. Briefly, then, I told Miss
Seton about the masons who had been all those years on the roof of
the chapel, and about the kings and queens and nobles bearing sacks
of gold and silver on their shoulders, which they shovelled into
the earth; and then how the great financial magnates of our own
time came and laid cheques and bonds, I suppose, where the others
had laid ingots and rough lumps of gold. All that lies beneath the
colleges down there, I said; but this college, where we are now
sitting, what lies beneath its gallant red brick and the wild
unkempt grasses of the garden? What force is behind that plain
china off which we dined, and (here it popped out of my mouth
before I could stop it) the beef, the custard and the prunes?
Well, said Mary Seton, about the year 1860—Oh, but you
know the story, she said, bored, I suppose, by the recital. And she
told me—rooms were hired. Committees met. Envelopes were
addressed. Circulars were drawn up. Meetings were held; letters
were read out; so-and-so has promised so much; on the contrary, Mr
—— won't give a penny. The Saturday Review has
been very rude. How can we raise a fund to pay for offices? Shall
we hold a bazaar? Can't we find a pretty girl to sit in the front
row? Let us look up what John Stuart Mill said on the subject. Can
anyone persuade the editor of the —— to print a letter?
Can we get Lady —— to sign it? Lady —— is
out of town. That was the way it was done, presumably, sixty years
ago, and it was a prodigious effort, and a great deal of time was
spent on it. And it was only after a long struggle and with the
utmost difficulty that they got thirty thousand pounds
together.
[* We are told that we ought to ask for £30,000 at
least...It is not a large sum, considering that there is to be but
one college of this sort for Great Britain, Ireland and the
Colonies, and considering how easy it is to raise immense sums for
boys' schools. But considering how few people really wish women to
be educated, it is a good deal.'—Lady Stephen, Emily
Davies and Girton College.] So obviously we cannot have wine
and partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on their heads, she
said. We cannot have sofas and separate rooms. 'The amenities,' she
said, quoting from some book or other, 'will have to wait.' [*
Every penny which could be scraped together was set aside for
building, and the amenities had to be postponed.—R.
Strachey, The Cause.]
At the thought of all those women working year after year and
finding it hard to get two thousand pounds together, and as much as
they could do to get thirty thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn
at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers been
doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their
noses? Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte
Carlo? There were some photographs on the mantelpiece. Mary's
mother—if that was her picture—may have been a wastrel
in her spare time (she had thirteen children by a minister of the
church), but if so her gay and dissipated life had left too few
traces of its pleasures on her face. She was a homely body; an old
lady in a plaid shawl which was fastened by a large cameo; and she
sat in a basket-chair, encouraging a spaniel to look at the camera,
with the amused, yet strained expression of one who is sure that
the dog will move directly the bulb is pressed. Now if she had gone
into business; had become a manufacturer of artificial silk or a
magnate on the Stock Exchange; if she had left two or three hundred
thousand pounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease
to-night and the subject of our talk might have been archaeology,
botany, anthropology, physics, the nature of the atom, mathematics,
astronomy, relativity, geography. If only Mrs Seton and her mother
and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money
and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers
before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and
scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex, we might
have dined very tolerably up here alone off a bird and a bottle of
wine; we might have looked forward without undue confidence to a
pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the
liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or
writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting
contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an
office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a
little poetry. Only, if Mrs Seton and her like had gone into
business at the age of fifteen, there would have been—that
was the snag in the argument—no Mary. What, I asked, did Mary
think of that? There between the curtains was the October night,
calm and lovely, with a star or two caught in the yellowing trees.
Was she ready to resign her share of it and her memories (for they
had been a happy family, though a large one) of games and quarrels
up in Scotland, which she is never tired of praising for the
fineness of its air and the quality of its cakes, in order that
Fernham might have been endowed with fifty thousand pounds or so by
a stroke of the pen? For, to endow a college would necessitate the
suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing
thirteen children—no human being could stand it. Consider the
facts, we said. First there are nine months before the baby is
born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months
spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are
certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it
seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen
them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant
one. People say, too, that human nature takes its shape in the
years between one and five. If Mrs Seton, I said, had been making
money, what sort of memories would you have had of games and
quarrels? What would you have known of Scotland, and its fine air
and cakes and all the rest of it? But it is useless to ask these
questions, because you would never have come into existence at all.
Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if
Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed
great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and
library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible
for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied
them the right to possess what money they earned. It is only for
the last forty-eight years that Mrs Seton has had a penny of her
own. For all the centuries before that it would have been her
husband's property—a thought which, perhaps, may have had its
share in keeping Mrs Seton and her mothers off the Stock Exchange.
Every penny I earn, they may have said, will be taken from me and
disposed of according to my husband's wisdom—perhaps to found
a scholarship or to endow a fellowship in Balliol or Kings, so that
to earn money, even if I could earn money, is not a matter that
interests me very greatly. I had better leave it to my husband.
At any rate, whether or not the blame rested on the old lady who
was looking at the spaniel, there could be no doubt that for some
reason or other our mothers had mismanaged their affairs very
gravely. Not a penny could be spared for 'amenities'; for
partridges and wine, beadles and turf, books and cigars, libraries
and leisure. To raise bare walls out of bare earth was the utmost
they could do.
So we talked standing at the window and looking, as so many
thousands look every night, down on the domes and towers of the
famous city beneath us. It was very beautiful, very mysterious in
the autumn moonlight. The old stone looked very white and
venerable. One thought of all the books that were assembled down
there; of the pictures of old prelates and worthies hanging in the
panelled rooms; of the painted windows that would be throwing
strange globes and crescents on the pavement; of the tablets and
memorials and inscriptions; of the fountains and the grass; of the
quiet rooms looking across the quiet quadrangles. And (pardon me
the thought) I thought, too, of the admirable smoke and drink and
the deep armchairs and the pleasant carpets: of the urbanity, the
geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and
privacy and space. Certainly our mothers had not provided us with
any thing comparable to all this—our mothers who found it
difficult to scrape together thirty thousand pounds, our mothers
who bore thirteen children to ministers of religion at St
Andrews.
So I went back to my inn, and as I walked through the dark
streets I pondered this and that, as one does at the end of the
day's work. I pondered why it was that Mrs Seton had no money to
leave us; and what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect
wealth has on the mind; and I thought of the queer old gentlemen I
had seen that morning with tufts of fur upon their shoulders; and I
remembered how if one whistled one of them ran; and I thought of
the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the
library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I
thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of
the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and
insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the
lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that
it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its
arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and
cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the
blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable
society. All human beings were laid asleep—prone, horizontal,
dumb. Nobody seemed stirring in the streets of Oxbridge. Even the
door of the hotel sprang open at the touch of an invisible
hand—not a boots was sitting up to light me to bed, it was so
late.
TWO
The scene, if I may ask you to follow me, was now changed. The
leaves were still falling, but in London now, not Oxbridge; and I
must ask you to imagine a room, like many thousands, with a window
looking across people's hats and vans and motor-cars to other
windows, and on the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper on
which was written in large letters Women and Fiction, but no
more. The inevitable sequel to lunching and dining at Oxbridge
seemed, unfortunately, to be a visit to the British Museum. One
must strain off what was personal and accidental in all these
impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of
truth. For that visit to Oxbridge and the luncheon and the dinner
had started a swarm of questions. Why did men drink wine and women
water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What
effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for
the creation of works of art?—a thousand questions at once
suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions; and an
answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the
unprejudiced, who have removed themselves above the strife of
tongue and the confusion of body and issued the result of their
reasoning and research in books which are to be found in the
British Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the
British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a
pencil, is truth?
Thus provided, thus confident and enquiring, I set out in the
pursuit of truth. The day, though not actually wet, was dismal, and
the streets in the neighbourhood of the Museum were full of open
coal-holes, down which sacks were showering; four-wheeled cabs were
drawing up and depositing on the pavement corded boxes containing,
presumably, the entire wardrobe of some Swiss or Italian family
seeking fortune or refuge or some other desirable commodity which
is to be found in the boarding-houses of Bloomsbury in the winter.
The usual hoarse-voiced men paraded the streets with plants on
barrows. Some shouted; others sang. London was like a workshop.
London was like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and
forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern. The British
Museum was another department of the factory. The swing-doors swung
open; and there one stood under the vast dome, as if one were a
thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled
by a band of famous names. One went to the counter; one took a slip
of paper; one opened a volume of the catalogue, and the five dots
here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and
bewilderment. Have you any notion of how many books are written
about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many
are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most
discussed animal in the universe? Here had I come with a notebook
and a pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that
at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my
notebook. But I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought,
and a wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the animals
that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed, to
cope with all this. I should need claws of steel and beak of brass
even to penetrate the husk. How shall I ever find the grains of
truth embedded in all this mass of paper? I asked myself, and in
despair began running my eye up and down the long list of titles.
Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex and its
nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was
surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that
sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable
essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the
M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent
qualification save that they are not women. Some of these books
were, on the face of it, frivolous and facetious; but many, on the
other hand, were serious and prophetic, moral and hortatory. Merely
to read the titles suggested innumerable schoolmasters, innumerable
clergymen mounting their platforms and pulpits and holding forth
with loquacity which far exceeded the hour usually alloted to such
discourse on this one subject. It was a most strange phenomenon;
and apparently—here I consulted the letter M—one
confined to the male sex. Women do not write books about
men—a fact that I could not help welcoming with relief, for
if I had first to read all that men have written about women, then
all that women have written about men, the aloe that flowers once
in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to
paper. So, making a perfectly arbitrary choice of a dozen volumes
or so, I sent my slips of paper to lie in the wire tray, and waited
in my stall, among the other seekers for the essential oil of
truth.
What could be the reason, then, of this curious disparity, I
wondered, drawing cart-wheels on the slips of paper provided by the
British taxpayer for other purposes. Why are women, judging from
this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to
women? A very curious fact it seemed, and my mind wandered to
picture the lives of men who spend their time in writing books
about women; whether they were old or young, married or unmarried,
red-nosed or hump-backed—anyhow, it was flattering, vaguely,
to feel oneself the object of such attention provided that it was
not entirely bestowed by the crippled and the infirm—so I
pondered until all such frivolous thoughts were ended by an
avalanche of books sliding down on to the desk in front of me. Now
the trouble began. The student who has been trained in research at
Oxbridge has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past
all distractions till it runs into his answer as a sheep runs into
its pen. The student by my side, for instance, who was copying
assiduously from a scientific manual, was, I felt sure, extracting
pure nuggets of the essential ore every ten minutes or so. His
little grunts of satisfaction indicated so much. But if,
unfortunately, one has had no training in a university, the
question far from being shepherded to its pen flies like a
frightened flock hither and thither, helter-skelter, pursued by a
whole pack of hounds. Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists,
clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no
qualification save that they were not women, chased my simple and
single question—Why are some women poor?—until it
became fifty questions; until the fifty questions leapt frantically
into midstream and were carried away. Every page in my notebook was
scribbled over with notes. To show the state of mind I was in, I
will read you a few of them, explaining that the page was headed
quite simply, Women and Poverty, in block letters; but what
followed was something like this:
Condition in Middle Ages of,
Habits in the Fiji Islands of,
Worshipped as goddesses by,
Weaker in moral sense than,
Idealism of,
Greater conscientiousness of,
South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among,
Attractiveness of,
Offered as sacrifice to,
Small size of brain of,
Profounder sub-consciousness of,
Less hair on the body of,
Mental, moral and physical inferiority of,
Love of children of,
Greater length of life of,
Weaker muscles of,
Strength of affections of,
Vanity of,
Higher education of,
Shakespeare's opinion of,
Lord Birkenhead's opinion of,
Dean Inge's opinion of,
La Bruyere's opinion of,
Dr Johnson's opinion of,
Mr Oscar Browning's opinion of,...
Here I drew breath and added, indeed, in the margin, Why does
Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'?
Wise men never say anything else apparently. But, I continued,
leaning back in my chair and looking at the vast dome in which I
was a single but by now somewhat harassed thought, what is so
unfortunate is that wise men never think the same thing about
women. Here is Pope:
Most women have no character at all.
And here is La Bruyère:
Les femmes sont extrêmes, elles sont meilleures ou pires
que les hommes——
a direct contradiction by keen observers who were contemporary.
Are they capable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them
incapable. Dr Johnson thought the opposite. [* '"Men know that
women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the
weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never
could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves."...In
justice to the sex, I think it but candid to acknowledge that, in a
subsequent conversation, he told me that he was serious in what he
said.'—Boswell, The Journal of o Tour to the
Hebrides.] Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages
say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women
are half divine and worship them on that account. [* The ancient
Germans believed that there was something holy in women, and
accordingly consulted them as oracles.'—Frazer, Golden
Bough.] Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain;
others that they are deeper in the consciousness. Goethe honoured
them; Mussolini despises them. Wherever one looked men thought
about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make head
or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next
door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A
or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest
scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was
bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers.
Every drop had escaped.
I could not possibly go home, I reflected, and add as a serious
contribution to the study of women and fiction that women have less
hair on their bodies than men, or that the age of puberty among the
South Sea Islanders is nine—or is it ninety?—even the
handwriting had become in its distraction indecipherable. It was
disgraceful to have nothing more weighty or respectable to show
after a whole morning's work. And if I could not grasp the truth
about W. (as for brevity's sake I had come to call her) in the
past, why bother about W. in the future? It seemed pure waste of
time to consult all those gentlemen who specialize in woman and her
effect on whatever it may be—politics, children, wages,
morality—numerous and learned as they are. One might as well
leave their books unopened.
But while I pondered I had unconsciously, in my listlessness, in
my desperation, been drawing a picture where I should, like my
neighbour, have been writing a conclusion. I had been drawing a
face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X
engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental,
Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. He was not
in my picture a man attractive to women. He was heavily built; he
had a great jowl; to balance that he had very small eyes; he was
very red in the face. His expression suggested that he was
labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper
as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even
when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on
killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation
remained. Could it be his wife, I asked, looking at my picture? Was
she in love with a cavalry officer? Was the cavalry officer slim
and elegant and dressed in astrakhan? Had he been laughed at, to
adopt the Freudian theory, in his cradle by a pretty girl? For even
in his cradle the professor, I thought, could not have been an
attractive child. Whatever the reason, the professor was made to
look very angry and very ugly in my sketch, as he wrote his great
book upon the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women.
Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable
morning's work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the
submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. A very elementary
exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of
psychoanalysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the
sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had
snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there?
Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom—all these emotions I
could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the
morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes,
said the sketch, anger had. It referred me unmistakably to the one
book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the
professor's statement about the mental, moral and physical
inferiority of women. My heart had leapt. My cheeks had burnt. I
had flushed with anger. There was nothing specially remarkable,
however foolish, in that. One does not like to be told that one is
naturally the inferior of a little man—I looked at the
student next me—who breathes hard, wears a ready-made tie,
and has not shaved this fortnight. One has certain foolish
vanities. It is only human nature, I reflected, and began drawing
cartwheels and circles over the angry professor's face till he
looked like a burning bush or a flaming comet—anyhow, an
apparition without human semblance or significance. The professor
was nothing now but a faggot burning on the top of Hampstead Heath.
Soon my own anger was explained and done with; but curiosity
remained. How explain the anger of the professors? Why were they
angry? For when it came to analysing the impression left by these
books there was always an element of heat. This heat took many
forms; it showed itself in satire, in sentiment, in curiosity, in
reprobation. But there was another element which was often present
and could not immediately be identified. Anger, I called it. But it
was anger that had gone underground and mixed itself with all kinds
of other emotions. To judge from its odd effects, it was anger
disguised and complex, not anger simple and open.
Whatever the reason, all these books, I thought, surveying the
pile on the desk, are worthless for my purposes. They were
worthless scientifically, that is to say, though humanly they were
full of instruction, interest, boredom, and very queer facts about
the habits of the Fiji Islanders. They had been written in the red
light of emotion and not in the white light of truth. Therefore
they must be returned to the central desk and restored each to his
own cell in the enormous honeycomb. All that I had retrieved from
that morning's work had been the one fact of anger. The
professors—I lumped them together thus—were angry. But
why, I asked myself, having returned the books, why, I repeated,
standing under the colonnade among the pigeons and the prehistoric
canoes, why are they angry? And, asking myself this question, I
strolled off to find a place for luncheon. What is the real nature
of what I call for the moment their anger? I asked. Here was a
puzzle that would last all the time that it takes to be served with
food in a small restaurant somewhere near the British Museum. Some
previous luncher had left the lunch edition of the evening paper on
a chair, and, waiting to be served, I began idly reading the
headlines. A ribbon of very large letters ran across the page.
Somebody had made a big score in South Africa. Lesser ribbons
announced that Sir Austen Chamberlain was at Geneva. A meat axe
with human hair on it had been found in a cellar. Mr justice
—— commented in the Divorce Courts upon the
Shamelessness of Women. Sprinkled about the paper were other pieces
of news. A film actress had been lowered from a peak in California
and hung suspended in mid-air. The weather was going to be foggy.
The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up
this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered
testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody
in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the
professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He
was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He
was the Foreign Secretary and the judge. He was the cricketer; he
owned the racehorses and the yachts. He was the director of the
company that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders. He left
millions to charities and colleges that were ruled by himself. He
suspended the film actress in mid-air. He will decide if the hair
on the meat axe is human; he it is who will acquit or convict the
murderer, and hang him, or let him go free. With the exception of
the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry. I knew
that he was angry by this token. When I read what he wrote about
women—I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself.
When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the
argument; and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too.
If he had written dispassionately about women, had used
indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no
trace of wishing that the result should be one thing rather than
another, one would not have been angry either. One would have
accepted the fact, as one accepts the fact that a pea is green or a
canary yellow. So be it, I should have said. But I had been angry
because he was angry. Yet it seemed absurd, I thought, turning over
the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry.
Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant
sprite on power? Rich people, for example, are often angry because
they suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth. The
professors, or patriarchs, as it might be more accurate to call
them, might be angry for that reason partly, but partly for one
that lies a little less obviously on the surface. Possibly they
were not 'angry' at all; often, indeed, they were admiring,
devoted, exemplary in the relations of private life. Possibly when
the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the
inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority,
but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting
rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a
jewel to him of the rarest price. Life for both sexes—and I
looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is
arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic
courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of
illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without
self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we
generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable,
most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to one
self. By feeling that one has some innate superiority—it may
be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a
grandfather by Romney—for there is no end to the pathetic
devices of the human imagination—over other people. Hence the
enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to
rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race
indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of
the chief sources of his power. But let me turn the light of this
observation on to real life, I thought. Does it help to explain
some of those psychological puzzles that one notes in the margin of
daily life? Does it explain my astonishment of the other day when
Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca
West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, 'The arrant feminist!
She says that men are snobs!' The exclamation, to me so
surprising—for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for
making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other
sex?—was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a
protest against some infringement of his power to believe in
himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses
possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure
of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the
earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars
would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of
deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep
skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste.
Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar
and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever
may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to
all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini
both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if
they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to
explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And
it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how
impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this
picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more
pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the
same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in
the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How
is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws,
writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he
can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size
he really is? So I reflected, crumbling my bread and stirring my
coffee and now and again looking at the people in the street. The
looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges
the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and
man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. Under the
spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out of the window, half
the people on the pavement are striding to work. They put on their
hats and coats in the morning under its agreeable rays. They start
the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss
Smith's tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room,
I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they
speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have
had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such
curious notes in the margin of the private mind.
But these contributions to the dangerous and fascinating subject
of the psychology of the other sex—it is one, I hope, that
you will investigate when you have five hundred a year of your
own—were interrupted by the necessity of paying the bill. It
came to five shillings and ninepence. I gave the waiter a
ten-shilling note and he went to bring me change. There was another
ten-shilling note in my purse; I noticed it, because it is a fact
that still takes my breath away the power of my purse to breed
ten-shilling notes automatically. I open it and there they are.
Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed and lodging, in return for
a certain number of pieces of paper which were left me by an aunt,
for no other reason than that I share her name.
My aunt, Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by a fall from her
horse when she was riding out to take the air in Bombay. The news
of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act
was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor's letter fell into
the post-box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five
hundred pounds a year for ever. Of the two—the vote and the
money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.
Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from
newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I
had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old
ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small
children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief occupations that
were open to women before 1918. I need not, I am afraid, describe
in any detail the hardness of the work, for you know perhaps women
who have done it; nor the difficulty of living on the money when it
was earned, for you may have tried. But what still remains with me
as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and
bitterness which those days bred in me. To begin with, always to be
doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave,
flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it
seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks; and
then the thought of that one gift which it was death to
hide—a small one but dear to the possessor—perishing
and with it my self, my soul,—all this became like a rust
eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its
heart. However, as I say, my aunt died; and whenever I change a
ten-shilling note a little of that rust and corrosion is rubbed
off, fear and bitterness go. Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver
into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of
those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring
about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred
pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine forever. Therefore not
merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness.
I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any
man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself
adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race.
It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great
bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are
driven by instincts which are not within their control. They too,
the patriarchs, the professors, had endless difficulties, terrible
drawbacks to contend with. Their education had been in some ways as
faulty as my own. It had bred in them defects as great. True, they
had money and power, but only at the cost of harbouring in their
breasts an eagle, a vulture, forever tearing the liver out and
plucking at the lungs—the instinct for possession, the rage
for acquisition which drives them to desire other people's fields
and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags; battleships and
poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children's lives.
Walk through the Admiralty Arch (I had reached that monument), or
any other avenue given up to trophies and cannon, and reflect upon
the kind of glory celebrated there. Or watch in the spring sunshine
the stockbroker and the great barrister going indoors to make money
and more money and more money when it is a fact that five hundred
pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine. These are
unpleasant instincts to harbour, I reflected. They are bred of the
conditions of life; of the lack of civilization, I thought, looking
at the statue of the Duke of Cambridge, and in particular at the
feathers in his cocked hat, with a fixity that they have scarcely
ever received before. And, as I realized these drawbacks, by
degrees fear and bitterness modified themselves into pity and
toleration; and then in a year or two, pity and toleration went,
and the greatest release of all came, which is freedom to think of
things in themselves. That building, for example, do I like it or
not? Is that picture beautiful or not? Is that in my opinion a good
book or a bad? Indeed my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me, and
substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which
Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open
sky.
So thinking, so speculating I found my way back to my house by
the river. Lamps were being lit and an indescribable change had
come over London since the morning hour. It was as if the great
machine after labouring all day had made with our help a few yards
of something very exciting and beautiful—a fiery fabric
flashing with red eyes, a tawny monster roaring with hot breath.
Even the wind seemed flung like a flag as it lashed the houses and
rattled the hoardings.
In my little street, however, domesticity prevailed. The house
painter was descending his ladder; the nursemaid was wheeling the
perambulator carefully in and out back to nursery tea; the
coal-heaver was folding his empty sacks on top of each other; the
woman who keeps the green grocer's shop was adding up the day's
takings with her hands in red mittens. But so engrossed was I with
the problem you have laid upon my shoulders that I could not see
even these usual sights without referring them to one centre. I
thought how much harder it is now than it must have been even a
century ago to say which of these em ployments is the higher, the
more necessary. Is it better to be a coal-heaver or a nursemaid; is
the charwoman who has brought up eight children of less value to
the world than, the barrister who has made a hundred thousand
pounds? it is useless to ask such questions; for nobody can answer
them. Not only do the comparative values of charwomen and lawyers
rise and fall from decade to decade, but we have no rods with which
to measure them even as they are at the moment. I had been foolish
to ask my professor to furnish me with 'indisputable proofs' of
this or that in his argument about women. Even if one could state
the value of any one gift at the moment, those values will change;
in a century's time very possibly they will have changed
completely. Moreover, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my
own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex.
Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions
that were once denied them. The nursemaid will heave coal. The
shopwoman will drive an engine. All assumptions founded on the
facts observed when women were the protected sex will have
disappeared—as, for example (here a squad of soldiers marched
down the street), that women and clergymen and gardeners live
longer than other people. Remove that protection, expose them to
the same exertions and activities, make them soldiers and sailors
and engine-drivers and dock labourers, and will not women die off
so much younger, so much quicker, than men that one will say, 'I
saw a woman to-day', as one used to say, 'I saw an aeroplane'.
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected
occupation, I thought, opening the door. But what bearing has all
this upon the subject of my paper, Women and Fiction? I asked,
going indoors.
THREE
It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening
some important statement, some authentic fact. Women are poorer
than men because—this or that. Perhaps now it would be better
to give up seeking for the truth, and receiving on one's head an
avalanche of opinion hot as lava, discoloured as dish-water. It
would be better to draw the curtains; to shut out distractions; to
light the lamp; to narrow the enquiry and to ask the historian, who
records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions
women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say, in the
time of Elizabeth.
For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that
extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was
capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women
lived? I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is
not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be;
fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps,
but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the
attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for
instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the
web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one
remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal
creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are
attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the
houses we live in.
I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and
took down one of the latest, Professor Trevelyan's History of
England. Once more I looked up Women, found 'position of' and
turned to the pages indicated. 'Wife-beating', I read, 'was a
recognized right of man, and was practised without shame by high as
well as low...Similarly,' the historian goes on, 'the daughter who
refused to marry the gentleman of her parents' choice was liable to
be locked up, beaten and flung about the room, without any shock
being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of
personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the
"chivalrous" upper classes...Betrothal often took place while one
or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when they
were scarcely out of the nurses' charge.' That was about 1470, soon
after Chaucer's time. The next reference to the position of women
is some two hundred years later, in the time of the Stuarts. 'It
was still the exception for women of the upper and middle class to
choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned,
he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could
make him. Yet even so,' Professor Trevelyan concludes, 'neither
Shakespeare's women nor those of authentic seventeenth-century
memoirs, like the Verneys and the Hutchinsons, seem wanting in
personality and character.' Certainly, if we consider it, Cleopatra
must have had a way with her; Lady Macbeth, one would suppose, had
a will of her own; Rosalind, one might conclude, was an attractive
girl. Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than the truth when
he remarks that Shakespeare's women do not seem wanting in
personality and character. Not being a historian, one might go even
further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works
of all the poets from the beginning of time—Clytemnestra,
Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phedre, Cressida, Rosalind,
Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among
the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina,
Emma Bovary, Madame de Guermantes—the names flock to mind,
nor do they recall women 'lacking in personality and character.'
Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by
men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very
various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful
and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even
greater [1*]. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor
Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the
room.
[1* 'It remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in
Athena's city, where women were kept in almost Oriental suppression
as odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet have produced
figures like Clytemnestra and Cassandra Atossa and Antigone, Phedre
and Medea, and all the other heroines who dominate play after play
of the "misogynist" Euripides. But the paradox of this world where
in real life a respectable woman could hardly show her face alone
in the street, and yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man,
has never been satisfactorily explained. In modern tragedy the same
predominance exists. At all events, a very cursory survey of
Shakespeare's work (similarly with Webster, though not with Marlowe
or Jonson) suffices to reveal how this dominance, this initiative
of women, persists from Rosalind to Lady Macbeth. So too in Racine;
six of his tragedies bear their heroines' names; and what male
characters of his shall we set against Hermione and Andromaque,
Berenice and Roxane, Phedre and Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what
men shall we match with Solveig and Nora, Heda and Hilda Wangel and
Rebecca West?'—F. L. LucaS, Tragedy, pp. 114-15.]
A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is
of the highest importance; practically she is completely
insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all
but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and
conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose
parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired
words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from
her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell,
and was the property of her husband.
It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the
historians first and the poets afterwards—a worm winged like
an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up
suet. But these monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have
no existence in fact. What one must do to bring her to life was to
think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus
keeping in touch with fact—that she is Mrs Martin, aged
thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes;
but not losing sight of fiction either—that she is a vessel
in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing
perpetually. The moment, however, that one tries this method with
the Elizabethan woman, one branch of illumination fails; one is
held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed,
nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely
mentions her. And I turned to Professor Trevelyan again to see what
history meant to him. I found by looking at his chapter headings
that it meant——
'The Manor Court and the Methods of Open-field Agriculture...The
Cistercians and Sheep-farming...The Crusades...The University
...The House of Commons...The Hundred Years' War...The Wars of the
Roses...The Renaissance Scholars...The Dissolution of the
Monasteries...Agrarian and Religious Strife...The Origin of English
Sea-power...The Armada...' and so on. Occasionally an individual
woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great
lady. But by no possible means could middle-class women with
nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part
in any one of the great movements which, brought together,
constitute the historian's view of the past. Nor shall we find her
in collection of anecdotes. Aubrey hardly mentions her. She never
writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a
handful of her letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by
which we can judge her. What one wants, I thought—and why
does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply
it?—is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how
many children had she as a rule; what was her house like, had she a
room to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to
have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in
parish registers and account books; the life of the average
Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one
collect it and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my
daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were
not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that
they should rewrite history, though I own that it often seems a
little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why should they not
add a supplement to history, calling it, of course, by some
inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without
impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse of them in the lives
of the great, whisking away into the back ground, concealing, I
sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear. And, after all,
we have lives enough of Jane Austen; it scarcely seems necessary to
consider again the influence of the tragedies of Joanna Baillie
upon the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe; as for myself, I should not
mind if the homes and haunts of Mary Russell Mitford were closed to
the public for a century at least. But what I find deplorable, I
continued, looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing is
known about women before the eighteenth century. I have no model in
my mind to turn about this way and that. Here am I asking why women
did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how
they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they
had sitting-rooms to themselves; how many women had children before
they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in the
morning till eight at night. They had no money evidently; according
to Professor Trevelyan they were married whether they liked it or
not before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or sixteen very
likely. It would have been extremely odd, even upon this showing,
had one of them suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare, I
concluded, and I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now,
but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for
any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of
Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady
who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of
fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How
much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders
of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to
heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.
Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the
works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at
least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and
entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in
the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to
come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully
gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went,
very probably,—his mother was an heiress—to the grammar
school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and
Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is
well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer,
and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman
in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was
right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He
had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses
at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a
successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting
everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards,
exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the
palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister,
let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as
imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not
sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic,
let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now
and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But
then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind
the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have
spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who
knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their
daughter—indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of
her father's eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple
loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them.
Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be
betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out
that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely
beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her
instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her
marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat,
he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey
him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone
drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let
herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to
London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge
were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a
gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a
taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to
act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat,
looselipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles
dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could possibly be
an actress. He hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no
training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern
or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and
lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the
study of their ways. At last—for she was very young, oddly
like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and
rounded brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity
on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and
so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's
heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?—killed
herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads
where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a
woman in Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius. But for my
part, I agree with the deceased bishop, if such he was—it is
unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had
Shakespeare's genius. For genius like Shakespeare's is not born
among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in
England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born to-day
among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among
women whose work began, according to Professor Trevelyan, almost
before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their
parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet
genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have
existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily
Brontë or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence.
But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one
reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a
wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had
a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a
suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some
Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped
and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift
had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who
wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman. It was
a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads
and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her
spinning with them, or the length of the winter's night.
This may be true or it may be false—who can say?—but
what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of
Shakespeare's sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with
a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone
crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage
outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.
For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly
gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have
been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and
pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have
lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have
walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into
the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and
suffering an anguish which may have been irrational—for
chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown
reasons—but were none the less inevitable. Chastity had then,
it has even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has
so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it
free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the
rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the six teenth
century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a
nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had
she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and
deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. And
undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no
plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she
would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of
chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the
nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the
victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought
ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus
they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the
other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a
woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a
much-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable.
Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still
possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health
of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a
tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to
cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert or Chas. must do in obedience
to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fine woman go by, or
even a dog, Ce chien est a moi. And, of course, it may not be a
dog, I thought, remembering Parliament Square, the Sieges Allee and
other avenues; it may be a piece of land or a man with curly black
hair. It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one
can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an
Englishwoman of her.
That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the
sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against
herself. All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts,
were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free
whatever is in the brain. But what is the state of mind that is
most propitious to the act of creation? I asked. Can one come by
any notion of the state that furthers and makes possible that
strange activity? Here I opened the volume containing the Tragedies
of Shakespeare. What was Shakespeare's state of mind, for instance,
when he wrote Lear and Antony and Cleopatra? It was
certainly the state of mind most favourable to poetry that there
has ever existed. But Shakespeare himself said nothing about it. We
only know casually and by chance that he 'never blotted a line'.
Nothing indeed was ever said by the artist himself about his state
of mind until the eighteenth century perhaps. Rousseau perhaps
began it. At any rate, by the nineteenth century self-consciousness
had developed so far that it was the habit for men of letters to
describe their minds in confessions and autobiographies. Their
lives also were written, and their letters were printed after their
deaths. Thus, though we do not know what Shakespeare went through
when he wrote Lear, we do know what Carlyle went through
when he wrote the French Revolution; what Flaubert went
through when he wrote Madame Bovary; what Keats was going
through when he tried to write poetry against the coming death and
the indifference of the world.
And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of
confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is
almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is
against the likelihood that it will come from the writer's mind
whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it.
Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health
will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and
making them harder to bear is the world's notorious indifference.
It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it
does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the
right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that
fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so
the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the
creative years of youth, every form of distraction and
discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of
analysis and confession. 'Mighty poets in their misery
dead'—that is the burden of their song. If anything comes
through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book
is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.
But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these
difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place,
to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof
room, was out of the question, unless her parents were
exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Since her pin money, which depended on the
goodwill of her father, was only enough to keep her clothed, she
was debarred from such alleviations as came even to Keats or
Tennyson or Carlyle, all poor men, from a walking tour, a little
journey to France, from the separate lodging which, even if it were
miserable enough, sheltered them from the claims and tyrannies of
their families. Such material difficulties were formidable; but
much worse were the immaterial. The indifference of the world which
Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to
bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did
not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no
difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the
good of your writing? Here the psychologists of Newnham and Girton
might come to our help, I thought, looking again at the blank
spaces on the shelves. For surely it is time that the effect of
discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured, as I
have seen a dairy company measure the effect of ordinary milk and
Grade A milk upon the body of the rat. They set two rats in cages
side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and small, and
the other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women
as artists upon? I asked, remembering, I suppose, that dinner of
prunes and custard. To answer that question I had only to open the
evening paper and to read that Lord Birkenhead is of
opinion—but really I am not going to trouble to copy out Lord
Birkenhead's opinion upon the writing of women. What Dean Inge says
I will leave in peace. The Harley Street specialist may be allowed
to rouse the echoes of Harley Street with his vociferations without
raising a hair on my head. I will quote, however, Mr Oscar
Browning, because Mr Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge
at one time, and used to examine the students at Girton and
Newnham. Mr Oscar Browning was wont to declare 'that the impression
left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers,
was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman
was intellectually the inferior of the worst man'. After saying
that Mr Browning went back to his rooms—and it is this sequel
that endears him and makes him a human figure of some bulk and
majesty—he went back to his rooms and found a stable-boy
lying on the sofa—'a mere skeleton, his cheeks were cavernous
and sallow, his teeth were black, and he did not appear to have the
full use of his limbs... "That's Arthur" [said Mr Browning]. "He's
a dear boy really and most high-minded."' The two pictures always
seem to me to complete each other. And happily in this age of
biography the two pictures often do complete each other, so that we
are able to interpret the opinions of great men not only by what
they say, but by what they do.
But though this is possible now, such opinions coming from the
lips of important people must have been formidable enough even
fifty years ago. Let us suppose that a father from the highest
motives did not wish his daughter to leave home and become writer,
painter or scholar. 'See what Mr Oscar Browning says,' he would
say; and there so was not only Mr Oscar Browning; there was the
Saturday Review; there was Mr Greg—the 'essentials of
a woman's being', said Mr Greg emphatically, 'are that they are
supported by, and they minister to, men'—there was an
enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could
be expected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not
read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself;
and the reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered
her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work. There would always
have been that assertion—you cannot do this, you are
incapable of doing that—to protest against, to overcome.
Probably for a novelist this germ is no longer of much effect; for
there have been women novelists of merit. But for painters it must
still have some sting in it; and for musicians, I imagine, is even
now active and poisonous in the extreme. The woman composer stands
where the actress stood in the time of Shakespeare. Nick Greene, I
thought, remembering the story I had made about Shakespeare's
sister, said that a woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing.
Johnson repeated the phrase two hundred years later of women
preaching. And here, I said, opening a book about music, we have
the very words used again in this year of grace, 1928, of women who
try to write music. 'Of Mlle. Germaine Tailleferre one can only
repeat Dr Johnson's dictum concerning, a woman preacher, transposed
into terms of music. "Sir, a woman's composing is like a dog's
walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are
surprised to find it done at all."' [* A Survey of Contemporary
Music, Cecil Gray, P. 246.] So accurately does history repeat
itself.
Thus, I concluded, shutting Mr Oscar Browning's life and pushing
away the rest, it is fairly evident that even in the nineteenth
century a woman was not encouraged to be an artist. On the
contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted. Her mind
must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of
opposing this, of disproving that. For here again we come within
range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex which
has had so much influence upon the woman's movement; that
deep-seated desire, not so much that she shall be inferior
as that he shall be superior, which plants him wherever one
looks, not only in front of the arts, but barring the way to
politics too, even when the risk to himself seems infinitesimal and
the suppliant humble and devoted. Even Lady Bessborough, I
remembered, with all her passion for politics, must humbly bow
herself and write to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower:
'...notwithstanding all my violence in politicks and talking so
much on that subject, I perfectly agree with you that no woman has
any business to meddle with that or any other serious business,
farther than giving her opinion (if she is ask'd).' And so she goes
on to spend her enthusiasm where it meets with no obstacle
whatsoever, upon that immensely important subject, Lord Granville's
maiden speech in the House of Commons. The spectacle is certainly a
strange one, I thought. The history of men's opposition to women's
emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that
emancipation itself. An amusing book might be made of it if some
young student at Girton or Newnham would collect examples and
deduce a theory,—but she would need thick gloves on her
hands, and bars to protect her of solid gold.
But what is amusing now, I recollected, shutting Lady
Bessborough, had to be taken in desperate earnest once. Opinions
that one now pastes in a book labelled cock-a-doodledum and keeps
for reading to select audiences on summer nights once drew tears, I
can assure you. Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers
there were many that wept their eyes out. Florence Nightingale
shrieked aloud in her agony. [* See Cassandra, by Florence
Nightingale, printed in The Cause, by R. Strachey.]
Moreover, it is all very well for you, who have got yourselves to
college and enjoy sitting-rooms—or is it only
bed-sitting-rooms?—of your own to say that genius should
disregard such opinions; that genius should be above caring what is
said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the men or women of
genius who mind most what is said of them. Remember Keats. Remember
the words he had cut on his tombstone. Think of Tennyson; think but
I need hardly multiply instances of the undeniable, if very
fortunate, fact that it is the nature of the artist to mind
excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the
wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of
others.
And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate, I
thought, returning again to my original enquiry into what state of
mind is most propitious for creative work, because the mind of an
artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole
and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like
Shakespeare's mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which lay
open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be no obstacle in
it, no foreign matter unconsumed.
For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare's state
of mind, even as we say that, we are saying something about
Shakespeare's state of mind. The reason perhaps why we know so
little of Shakespeare—compared with Donne or Ben Jonson or
Milton—is that his grudges and spites and antipathies are
hidden from us. We are not held up by some 'revelation' which
reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to
proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the
witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and
consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded.
If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was
Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought,
turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare's mind.
FOUR
That one would find any woman in that state of mind in the
sixteenth century was obviously impossible. One has only to think
of the Elizabethan tombstones with all those children kneeling with
clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with
their dark, cramped rooms, to realize that no woman could have
written poetry then. What one would expect to find would be that
rather later perhaps some great lady would take advantage of her
comparative freedom and comfort to publish something with her name
to it and risk being thought a monster. Men, of course, are not
snobs, I continued, carefully eschewing 'the arrant feminism' of
Miss Rebecca West; but they appreciate with sympathy for the most
part the efforts of a countess to write verse. One would expect to
find a lady of title meeting with far greater encouragement than an
unknown Miss Austen or a Miss Brontë at that time would have
met with. But one would also expect to find that her mind was
disturbed by alien emotions like fear and hatred and that her poems
showed traces of that disturbance. Here is Lady Winchilsea, for
example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year
1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she was
childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to
find her bursting out in indignation against the position of
women:
How we are fallen! fallen by mistaken rules,
And Education's more than Nature's fools;
Debarred from all improvements of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and designed;
And if someone would soar above the rest,
With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed,
So strong the opposing faction still appears,
The hopes to thrive can ne'er outweigh the fears.
Clearly her mind has by no means 'consumed all impediments and
become incandescent'. On the contrary, it is harassed and
distracted with hates and grievances. The human race is split up
for her into two parties. Men are the 'opposing faction'; men are
hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to
what she wants to do—which is to write.
Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed,
The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.
They tell us we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play,
Are the accomplishments we should desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to enquire,
Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,
And interrupt the conquests of our prime.
Whilst the dull manage of a servile house
Is held by some our utmost art and use.
Indeed she has to encourage herself to write by supposing that
what she writes will never be published; to soothe herself with the
sad chant:
To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing,
For groves of laurel thou wert never meant;
Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.
Yet it is clear that could she have freed her mind from hate and
fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment, the fire was
hot within her. Now and again words issue of pure poetry:
Nor will in fading silks compose,
Faintly the inimitable rose.
—they are rightly praised by Mr Murry, and Pope, it is
thought, remembered and appropriated those others:
Now the jonquille o'ercomes the feeble brain;
We faint beneath the aromatic pain.
It was a thousand pities that the woman who could write like
that, whose mind was tuned to nature and reflection, should have
been forced to anger and bitterness. But how could she have helped
herself? I asked, imagining the sneers and the laughter, the
adulation of the toadies, the scepticism of the professional poet.
She must have shut herself up in a room in the country to write,
and been torn asunder by bitterness and scruples perhaps, though
her husband was of the kindest, and their married life perfection.
She 'must have', I say, because when one comes to seek out the
facts about Lady Winchilsea, one finds, as usual, that almost
nothing is known about her. She suffered terribly from melancholy,
which we can explain at least to some extent when we find her
telling us how in the grip of it she would imagine:
My lines decried, and my employment thought
An useless folly or presumptuous fault:
The employment, which was thus censured, was, as far as one can
see, the harmless one of rambling about the fields and
dreaming:
My hand delights to trace unusual things,
And deviates from the known and common way,
Nor will in fading silks compose,
Faintly the inimitable rose.
Naturally, if that was her habit and that was her delight, she
could only expect to be laughed at; and, accordingly, Pope or Gay
is said to have satirized her 'as a blue-stocking with an itch for
scribbling'. Also it is thought that she offended Gay by laughing
at him. She said that his Trivia showed that 'he was more
proper to walk before a chair than to ride in one'. But this is all
'dubious gossip' and, says Mr Murry, 'uninteresting'. But there I
do not agree with him, for I should have liked to have had more
even of dubious gossip so that I might have found out or made up
some image of this melancholy lady, who loved wandering in the
fields and thinking about unusual things and scorned, so rashly, so
unwisely, 'the dull manage of a servile house'. But she became
diffuse, Mr Murry says. Her gift is all grown about with weeds and
bound with briars. It had no chance of showing itself for the fine
distinguished gift it was. And so, putting, her back on the shelf,
I turned to the other great lady, the Duchess whom Lamb loved,
hare-brained, fantastical Margaret of Newcastle, her elder, but her
contemporary. They were very different, but alike in this that both
were noble and both childless, and both were married to the best of
husbands. In both burnt the same passion for poetry and both are
disfigured and deformed by the same causes. Open the Duchess and
one finds the same outburst of rage. 'Women live like Bats or Owls,
labour like Beasts, and die like Worms...' Margaret too might have
been a poet; in our day all that activity would have turned a wheel
of some sort. As it was, what could bind, tame or civilize for
human use that wild, generous, untutored intelligence? It poured
itself out, higgledy-piggledy, in torrents of rhyme and prose,
poetry and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos and folios
that nobody ever reads. She should have had a microscope put in her
hand. She should have been taught to look at the stars and reason
scientifically. Her wits were turned with solitude and freedom. No
one checked her. No one taught her. The professors fawned on her.
At Court they jeered at her. Sir Egerton Brydges complained of her
coarseness—'as flowing from a female of high rank brought up
in the Courts'. She shut herself up at Welbeck alone.
What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret
Cavendish brings to mind! as if some giant cucumber had spread
itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked
them to death. What a waste that the woman who wrote 'the best bred
women are those whose minds are civilest' should have frittered her
time away scribbling nonsense and plunging ever deeper into
obscurity and folly till the people crowded round her coach when
she issued out. Evidently the crazy Duchess became a bogey to
frighten clever girls with. Here, I remembered, putting away the
Duchess and opening Dorothy Osborne's letters, is Dorothy writing
to Temple about the Duchess's new book. 'Sure the poore woman is a
little distracted, shee could never bee soe rediculous else as to
venture at writeing book's and in verse too, if I should not sleep
this fortnight I should not come to that.'
And so, since no woman of sense and modesty could write books,
Dorothy, who was sensitive and melancholy, the very opposite of the
Duchess in temper, wrote nothing. Letters did not count. A woman
might write letters while she was sitting by her father's sick-bed.
She could write them by the fire whilst the men talked without
disturbing them. The strange thing is, I thought, turning over the
pages of Dorothy's letters, what a gift that untaught and solitary
girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a
scene. Listen to her running on:
'After dinner wee sitt and talk till Mr B. com's in question and
then I am gon. the heat of the day is spent in reading or working
and about sixe or seven a Clock, I walke out into a Common that
lyes hard by the house where a great many young wenches keep Sheep
and Cow's and sitt in the shades singing of Ballads; I goe to them
and compare their voyces and Beauty's to some Ancient Shepherdesses
that I have read of and finde a vaste difference there, but trust
mee I think these are as innocent as those could bee. I talke to
them, and finde they want nothing to make them the happiest People
in the world, but the knoledge that they are soe. most commonly
when we are in the middest of our discourse one looks aboute her
and spyes her Cow's goeing into the Corne and then away they all
run, as if they had wing's at theire heels. I that am not soe
nimble stay behinde, and when I see them driveing home theire
Cattle I think tis time for mee to retyre too. when I have supped I
goe into the Garden and soe to the syde of a small River that runs
by it where I sitt downe and wish you with mee...'
One could have sworn that she had the makings of a writer in
her. But 'if I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to
that'—one can measure the opposition that was in the air to a
woman writing when one finds that even a woman with a great turn
for writing has brought herself to believe that to write a book was
to be ridiculous, even to show oneself distracted. And so we come,
I continued, replacing the single short volume of Dorothy Osborne's
letters upon the shelf, to Mrs Behn.
And with Mrs Behn we turn a very important corner on the road.
We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those
solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for
their own delight alone. We come to town and rub shoulders with
ordinary people in the streets. Mrs Behn was a middle-class woman
with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage; a
woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate
adventures of her own to make her living by her wits. She had to
work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard,
enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything
that she actually wrote, even the splendid 'A Thousand Martyrs I
have made', or 'Love in Fantastic Triumph sat', for here begins the
freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course
of time the mind will be free to write what it likes. For now that
Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say,
You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen. Of
course the answer for many years to come was, Yes, by living the
life of Aphra Behn! Death would be better! and the door was slammed
faster than ever. That profoundly interesting subject, the value
that men set upon women's chastity and its effect upon their
education, here suggests itself for discussion, and might provide
an interesting book if any student at Girton or Newnham cared to go
into the matter. Lady Dudley, sitting in diamonds among the midges
of a Scottish moor, might serve for frontispiece. Lord Dudley,
The Times said when Lady Dudley died the other day, 'a man
of cultivated taste and many accomplishments, was benevolent and
bountiful, but whimsically despotic. He insisted upon his wife's
wearing full dress, even at the remotest shooting-lodge in the
Highlands; he loaded her with gorgeous jewels', and so on, 'he gave
her everything—always excepting any measure of
responsibility'. Then Lord Dudley had a stroke and she nursed him
and ruled his estates with supreme competence for ever after. That
whimsical despotism was in the nineteenth century too.
But to return. Aphra Behn proved that money could be made by
writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities;
and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a
distracted mind, but was of practical importance. A husband might
die, or some disaster overtake the family. Hundreds of women began
as the eighteenth century drew on to add to their pin money, or to
come to the rescue of their families by making translations or
writing the innumerable bad novels which have ceased to be recorded
even in text-books, but are to be picked up in the fourpenny boxes
in the Charing Cross Road. The extreme activity of mind which
showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women—the
talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the
translating of the classics—was founded on the solid fact
that women could make money by writing. Money dignifies what is
frivolous if unpaid for. It might still be well to sneer at 'blue
stockings with an itch for scribbling', but it could not be denied
that they could put money in their purses. Thus, towards the end of
the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were
rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of
greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses.
The middle-class woman began to write. For if Pride And
Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Villette
and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters far more than
I can prove in an hour's discourse that women generally, and not
merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her
folios and her flatterers, took to writing. Without those
forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot
could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written
without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without
those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural
savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and
solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in
common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the
experience of the mass is behind the single voice. Jane Austen
should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and
George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza
Carter—the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead
in order that she might wake early and learn Greek. All women
together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn,
which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in
Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to
speak their minds. It is she—shady and amorous as she
was—who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you
to-night: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.
Here, then, one had reached the early nineteenth century. And
here, for the first time, I found several shelves given up entirely
to the works of women. But why, I could not help asking, as I ran
my eyes over them, were they, with very few exceptions, all novels?
The original impulse was to poetry. The 'supreme head of song' was
a poetess. Both in France and in England the women poets precede
the women novelists. Moreover, I thought, looking at the four
famous names, what had George Eliot in common with Emily
Brontë? Did not Charlotte Brontë fail entirely to
understand Jane Austen? Save for the possibly relevant fact that
not one of them had a child, four more incongruous characters could
not have met together in a room—so much so that it is
tempting to invent a meeting and a dialogue between them. Yet by
some strange force they were all compelled when they wrote, to
write novels. Had it something to do with being born of the middle
class, I asked; and with the fact, which Miss Emily Davies a little
later was so strikingly to demonstrate, that the middle-class
family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a
single sitting-room between them? If a woman wrote, she would have
to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was
so vehemently to complain,—"women never have an half
hour...that they can call their own"—she was always
interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction
there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is
required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. 'How
she was able to effect all this', her nephew writes in his Memoir,
'is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and
most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room,
subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that
her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or
any persons beyond her own family party.
[* Memoir of Jane Austen, by her nephew, James Edward
Austen-Leigh.]
Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of
blotting-paper. Then, again, all the literary training that a woman
had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation
of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been
educated for centuries by the influences of the common
sitting-room. People's feelings were impressed on her; personal
relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the
middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels,
even though, as seems evident enough, two of the four famous women
here named were not by nature novelists. Emily Brontë should
have written poetic plays; the overflow of George Eliot's capacious
mind should have spread itself when the creative impulse was spent
upon history or biography. They wrote novels, however; one may even
go further, I said, taking Pride and Prejudice from the
shelf, and say that they wrote good novels. Without boasting or
giving pain to the opposite sex, one may say that Pride and
Prejudice is a good book. At any rate, one would not have been
ashamed to have been caught in the act of writing Pride and
Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so
that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. To Jane
Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and
Prejudice. And, I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice
have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it
necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or
two to see; but I could not find any signs that her circumstances
had harmed her work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief
miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing
without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest,
without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought,
looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare
Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both
had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know
Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason
Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does
Shakespeare. If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her
circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed
upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She
never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or
had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of
Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her
circumstances matched each other completely. But I doubt whether
that was true of Charlotte Brontë, I said, opening Jane
Eyre and laying it beside Pride and Prejudice.
I opened it at chapter twelve and my eye was caught by the
phrase 'Anybody may blame me who likes'. What were they blaming
Charlotte Brontë for? I wondered. And I read how Jane Eyre
used to go up on to the roof when Mrs Fairfax was making jellies
and looked over the fields at the distant view. And then she
longed—and it was for this that they blamed her—that
'then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that
limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of
life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired more of
practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my
kind, of acquaintance with variety of character than was here
within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs Fairfax, and what
was good in Adele; but I believed in the existence of other and
more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to
behold.
'Who blames me? Many, no doubt, and I shall be called
discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my
nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes...
'It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with
tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they
cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine,
and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows
how many rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people
earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel
just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a
field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer
from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as
men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged
fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to
making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and
embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at
them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has
pronounced necessary for their sex.
'When thus alone I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole's
laugh...'
That is an awkward break, I thought. It is upsetting to come
upon Grace Poole all of a sudden. The continuity is disturbed. One
might say, I continued, laying the book down beside Pride and
Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those pages had more genius
in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that
jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get
her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed
and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write
calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She
will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She
is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped
and thwarted?
One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what
might have happened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say
three hundred a year—but the foolish woman sold the copyright
of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds; had somehow
possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions
full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse with her
kind and acquaintance with a variety of character. In those words
she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a
novelist but upon those of her sex at that time. She knew, no one
better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not
spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience
and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not
granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all
those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights,
Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of
life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written
too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by
women so poor that they could not afford to buy more than a few
quires of paper at a time upon which to write Wuthering
Heights or Jane Eyre. One of them, it is true, George
Eliot, escaped after much tribulation, but only to a secluded villa
in St John's Wood. And there she settled down in the shadow of the
world's disapproval. 'I wish it to be understood', she wrote, 'that
I should never invite anyone to come and see me who did not ask for
the invitation'; for was she not living in sin with a married man
and might not the sight of her damage the chastity of Mrs Smith or
whoever it might be that chanced to call? One must submit to the
social convention, and be 'cut off from what is called the world'.
At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young
man living freely with this gypsy or with that great lady; going to
the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied
experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when
he came to write his books. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in
seclusion with a married lady 'cut off from what is called the
world', however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I
thought, have written War And Peace.
But one could perhaps go a little deeper into the question of
novel-writing and the effect of sex upon the novelist. If one shuts
one's eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to be
a creation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though
of course with simplifications and distortions innumerable. At any
rate, it is a structure leaving a shape on the mind's eye, built
now in squares, now pagoda shaped, now throwing out wings and
arcades, now solidly compact and domed like the Cathedral of Saint
Sofia at Constantinople. This shape, I thought, thinking back over
certain famous novels, starts in one the kind of emotion that is
appropriate to it. But that emotion at once blends itself with
others, for the 'shape' is not made by the relation of stone to
stone, but by the relation of human being to human being. Thus a
novel starts in us all sorts of antagonistic and opposed emotions.
Life conflicts with something that is not life. Hence the
difficulty of coming to any agreement about novels, and the immense
sway that our private prejudices have upon us. On the one hand we
feel You—John the hero—must live, or I shall be in the
depths of despair. On the other, we feel, Alas, John, you must die,
because the shape of the book requires it. Life conflicts with
something that is not life. Then since life it is in part, we judge
it as life. James is the sort of man I most detest, one says. Or,
This is a farrago of absurdity. I could never feel anything of the
sort myself. The whole structure, it is obvious, thinking back on
any famous novel, is one of infinite complexity, because it is thus
made up of so many different judgements, of so many different kinds
of emotion. The wonder is that any book so composed holds together
for more than a year or two, or can possibly mean to the English
reader what it means for the Russian or the Chinese. But they do
hold together occasionally very remarkably. And what holds them
together in these rare instances of survival (I was thinking of
War And Peace) is something that one calls integrity, though
it has nothing to do with paying one's bills or behaving honourably
in an emergency. What one means by integrity, in the case of the
novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the
truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could
be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have
convinced me that so it is, so it happens. One holds every phrase,
every scene to the light as one reads—for Nature seems, very
oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of
the novelist's integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather
that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible
ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great
artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire
of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it
come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have
always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with
excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as
if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long
as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf, I said, taking War
And Peace and putting it back in its place. If, on the other
hand, these poor sentences that one takes and tests rouse first a
quick and eager response with their bright colouring and their
dashing gestures but there they stop: something seems to check them
in their development: or if they bring to light only a faint
scribble in that corner and a blot over there, and nothing appears
whole and entire, then one heaves a sigh of disappointment and
says. Another failure. This novel has come to grief somewhere.
And for the most part, of course, novels do come to grief
somewhere. The imagination falters under the enormous strain. The
insight is confused; it can no longer distinguish between the true
and the false, it has no longer the strength to go on with the vast
labour that calls at every moment for the use of so many different
faculties. But how would all this be affected by the sex of the
novelist, I wondered, looking at Jane Eyre and the others.
Would the fact of her sex in any way interfere with the integrity
of a woman novelist—that integrity which I take to be the
backbone of the writer? Now, in the passages I have quoted from
Jane Eyre, it is clear that anger was tampering with the
integrity of Charlotte Brontë the novelist. She left her
story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some
personal grievance. She remembered that she had been starved of her
proper due of experience—she had been made to stagnate in a
parsonage mending stockings when she wanted to wander free over the
world. Her imagination swerved from indignation and we feel it
swerve. But there were many more influences than anger tugging at
her imagination and deflecting it from its path. Ignorance, for
instance. The portrait of Rochester is drawn in the dark. We feel
the influence of fear in it; just as we constantly feel an acidity
which is the result of oppression, a buried suffering smouldering
beneath her passion, a rancour which contracts those books,
splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain.
And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its
values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious
that the values of women differ very often from the values which
have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is
the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and
sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of
clothes 'trivial'. And these values are inevitably transferred from
life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes,
because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it
deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a
battle-field is more important than a scene in a
shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value
persists. The whole structure, therefore, of the early
nineteenth-century novel was raised, if one was a woman, by a mind
which was slightly pulled from the straight, and made to alter its
clear vision in deference to external authority. One has only to
skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in
which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting
criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way
of conciliation. She was admitting that she was 'only a woman', or
protesting that she was 'as good as a man'. She met that criticism
as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with
anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was
thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her
book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the centre of it. And I
thought of all the women's novels that lie scattered, like small
pock-marked apples in an orchard, about the second-hand book shops
of London. It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them. She
had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.
But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge
either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it
must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of
that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they
saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily
Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their
caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the
thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored
the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write
this, think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent voice,
now grumbling, now patronizing, now domineering, now grieved, now
shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let
women alone, but must be at them, like some too-conscientious
governess, adjuring them, like Sir Egerton Brydges, to be refined;
dragging even into the criticism of poetry criticism of sex; [*1]
admonishing them, if they would be good and win, as I suppose, some
shiny prize, to keep within certain limits which the gentleman in
question thinks suitable—'... female novelists should only
aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations
of their sex'. [*2] That puts the matter in a nutshell, and when I
tell you, rather to your surprise, that this sentence was written
not in August 1828 but in August 1928, you will agree, I think,
that however delightful it is to us now, it represents a vast body
of opinion—I am not going to stir those old pools; I take
only what chance has floated to my feet—that was far more
vigorous and far more vocal a century ago. It would have needed a
very stalwart young woman in 1828 to disregard all those snubs and
chidings and promises of prizes. One must have been something of a
firebrand to say to oneself, Oh, but they can't buy literature too.
Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle
though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if
you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set
upon the freedom of my mind.
[*1 [She] has a metaphysical purpose, and that is a dangerous
obsession, especially with a woman, for women rarely possess men's
healthy love of rhetoric. It is a strange lack in the sex which is
in other things more primitive and more
materialistic.'—New Criterion, June 1928.]
[*2 'If, like the reporter, you believe that female novelists
should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the
limitations of their sex (Jane Austen [has] demonstrated how
gracefully this gesture can be accomplished...).'—Life and
Letters, August 1928.]
But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their
writing—and I believe that they had a very great
effect—that was unimportant compared with the other
difficulty which faced them (I was still considering those early
nineteenth-century novelists) when they came to set their thoughts
on paper—that is that they had no tradition behind them, or
one so short and partial that it was of little help. For we think
back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to
the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for
pleasure. Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De
Quincey—whoever it may be—never helped a woman yet,
though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to
her use. The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too
unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him
successfully. The ape is too distant to be sedulous. Perhaps the
first thing she would find, setting pen to paper, was that there
was no common sentence ready for her use. All the great novelists
like Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac have written a natural prose,
swift but not slovenly, expressive but not precious, taking their
own tint without ceasing to be common property. They have based it
on the sentence that was current at the time. The sentence that was
current at the beginning of the nineteenth century ran something
like this perhaps: 'The grandeur of their works was an argument
with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no
higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art
and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to
exertion; and habit facilitates success.' That is a man's sentence;
behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a
sentence that was unsuited for a woman's use. Charlotte
Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and
fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed
atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at
it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely
sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus,
with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got
infinitely more said. Indeed, since freedom and fullness of
expression are of the essence of the art, such a lack of tradition,
such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools, must have told enormously
upon the writing of women. Moreover, a book is not made of
sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image
helps, into arcades or domes. And this shape too has been made by
men out of their own needs for their own uses. There is no reason
to think that the form of the epic or of the poetic play suit a
woman any more than the sentence suits her. But all the older forms
of literature were hardened and set by the time she became a
writer. The novel alone was young enough to be soft in her hands
another reason, perhaps, why she wrote novels. Yet who shall say
that even now 'the novel' (I give it inverted commas to mark my
sense of the words' inadequacy), who shall say that even this most
pliable of all forms is rightly shaped for her use? No doubt we
shall find her knocking that into shape for herself when she has
the free use of her limbs; and providing some new vehicle, not
necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her. For it is the poetry
that is still denied outlet. And I went on to ponder how a woman
nowadays would write a poetic tragedy in five acts. Would she use
verse?—would she not use prose rather?
But these are difficult questions which lie in the twilight of
the future. I must leave them, if only because they stimulate me to
wander from my subject into trackless forests where I shall be lost
and, very likely, devoured by wild beasts. I do not want, and I am
sure that you do not want me, to broach that very dismal subject,
the future of fiction, so that I will only pause here one moment to
draw your attention to the great part which must be played in that
future so far as women are concerned by physical conditions. The
book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one
would say that women's books should be shorter, more concentrated,
than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours
of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will
always be. Again, the nerves that feed the brain would seem to
differ in men and women, and if you are going to make them work
their best and hardest, you must find out what treatment suits
them—whether these hours of lectures, for instance, which the
monks devised, presumably, hundreds of years ago, suit
them—what alternations of work and rest they need,
interpreting rest not as doing nothing but as doing something but
something that is different; and what should that difference be?
All this should be discussed and discovered; all this is part of
the question of women and fiction. And yet, I continued,
approaching the bookcase again, where shall I find that elaborate
study of the psychology of women by a woman? If through their
incapacity to play football women are not going to be allowed to
practise medicine—
Happily my thoughts were now given another turn.
FIVE
I had come at last, in the course of this rambling, to the
shelves which hold books by the living; by women and by men; for
there are almost as many books written by women now as by men. Or
if that is not yet quite true, if the male is still the voluble
sex, it is certainly true that women no longer write novels solely.
There are Jane Harrison's books on Greek archaeology; Vernon Lee's
books on aesthetics; Gertrude Bell's books on Persia. There are
books on all sorts of subjects which a generation ago no woman
could have touched. There are poems and plays and criticism; there
are histories and biographies, books of travel and books of
scholarship and research; there are even a few philosophies and
books about science and economics. And though novels predominate,
novels themselves may very well have changed from association with
books of a different feather. The natural simplicity, the epic age
of women's writing, may have gone. Reading and criticism may have
given her a wider range, a greater subtlety. The impulse towards
autobiography may be spent. She may be beginning to use writing as
an art, not as a method of selfexpression. Among these new novels
one might find an answer to several such questions.
I took down one of them at random. It stood at the very end of
the shelf, was called Life's Adventure, or some such title,
by Mary Carmichael, and was published in this very month of
October. It seems to be her first book, I said to myself, but one
must read it as if it were the last volume in a fairly long series,
continuing all those other books that I have been glancing
at—Lady Winchilsea's poems and Aphra Behn's plays and the
novels of the four great novelists. For books continue each other,
in spite of our habit of judging them separately. And I must also
consider her—this unknown woman—as the descendant of
all those other women whose circumstances I have been glancing at
and see what she inherits of their characteristics and
restrictions. So, with a sigh, because novels so often provide an
anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead
of rousing one with a burning brand, I settled down with a notebook
and a pencil to make what I could of Mary Carmichael's first novel,
Life's Adventure.
To begin with, I ran my eye up and down the page. I am going to
get the hang of her sentences first, I said, before I load my
memory with blue eyes and brown and the relationship that there may
be between Chloe and Roger. There will be time for that when I have
decided whether she has a pen in her hand or a pickaxe. So I tried
a sentence or two on my tongue. Soon it was obvious that something
was not quite in order. The smooth gliding of sentence after
sentence was interrupted. Something tore, something scratched; a
single word here and there flashed its torch in my eyes. She was
'unhanding' herself as they say in the old plays. She is like a
person striking a match that will not light, I thought. But why, I
asked her as if she were present, are Jane Austen's sentences not
of the right shape for you? Must they all be scrapped because Emma
and Mr Woodhouse are dead? Alas, I sighed, that it should be so.
For while Jane Austen breaks from melody to melody as Mozart from
song to song, to read this writing was like being out at sea in an
open boat. Up one went, down one sank. This terseness, this
short-windedness, might mean that she was afraid of something;
afraid of being called 'sentimental' perhaps; or she remembers that
women's writing has been called flowery and so provides a
superfluity of thorns; but until I have read a scene with some
care, I cannot be surewhether she is being herself or someone else.
At any rate, she does not lower one's vitality, I thought, reading
more carefully. But she is heaping up too many facts. She will not
be able to use half of them in a book of this size. (It was about
half the length of Jane Eyre.) However, by some means or
other she succeeded in getting us all—Roger, Chloe, Olivia,
Tony and Mr Bigham—in a canoe up the river. Wait a moment, I
said, leaning back in my chair, I must consider the whole thing
more carefully before I go any further.
I am almost sure, I said to myself, that Mary Carmichael is
playing a trick on us. For I feel as one feels on a switchback
railway when the car, instead of sinking, as one has been led to
expect, swerves up again. Mary is tampering with the expected
sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the
sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both these things if
she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of
creating. Which of the two it is I cannot be sure until she has
faced herself with a situation. I will give her every liberty, I
said, to choose what that situation shall be; she shall make it of
tin cans and old kettles if she likes; but she must convince me
that she believes it to be a situation; and then when she has made
it she must face it. She must jump. And, determined to do my duty
by her as reader if she would do her duty by me as writer, I turned
the page and read...I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there
no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over
there the figure of Sir Charles Biron is not concealed? We are all
women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I
read were these—'Chloe liked Olivia...' Do not start. Do not
blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these
things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.
'Chloe liked Olivia,' I read. And then it struck me how immense
a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time
in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely
Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done
so! As it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a
little from Life's Adventure, the whole thing is simplified,
conventionalized, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra's only
feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am?
How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But
how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the
two women had been more complicated. All these relationships
between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of
fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out,
unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my
reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an
attempt at it in Diana of the Crossways. They are
confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are
now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception
they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think
that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day,
not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the
other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that; and how
little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the
black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence,
perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing
extremes of her beauty and horror; her alternations between
heavenly goodness and hellish depravity—for so a lover would
see her as his love rose or sank, was prosperous or unhappy. This
is not so true of the nineteenth-century novelists, of course.
Woman becomes much more various and complicated there. Indeed it
was the desire to write about women perhaps that led men by degrees
to abandon the poetic drama which, with its violence, could make so
little use of them, and to devise the novel as a more fitting
receptacle. Even so it remains obvious, even in the writing of
Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his
knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men.
Also, I continued, looking down at the page again, it is
becoming evident that women, like men, have other interests besides
the perennial interests of domesticity. 'Chloe liked Olivia. They
shared a laboratory together...' I read on and discovered that
these two young women were engaged in mincing liver, which is, it
seems, a cure for pernicious anaemia; although one of them was
married and had—I think I am right in stating—two small
children. Now all that, of course, has had to be left out, and thus
the splendid portrait of the fictitious woman is much too simple
and much too monotonous. Suppose, for instance, that men were only
represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never
the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in
the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature
would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good
deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no
Jaques—literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed
literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that
have been shut upon women. Married against their will, kept in one
room, and to one occupation, how could a dramatist give a full or
interesting or truthful account of them? Love was the only possible
interpreter. The poet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless
indeed he chose to 'hate women', which meant more often than not
that he was unattractive to them.
Now if Chloe likes Olivia and they share a laboratory, which of
itself will make their friendship more varied and lasting because
it will be less personal; if Mary Carmichael knows how to write,
and I was beginning to enjoy some quality in her style; if she has
a room to herself, of which I am not quite sure; if she has five
hundred a year of her own—but that remains to be
proved—then I think that something of great importance has
happened.
For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to
express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody
has yet been. It is all half lights and profound shadows like those
serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down,
not knowing where one is stepping. And I began to read the book
again, and read how Chloe watched Olivia put a jar on a shelf and
say how it was time to go home to her children. That is a sight
that has never been seen since the world began, I exclaimed. And I
watched too, very curiously. For I wanted to see how Mary
Carmichael set to work to catch those unrecorded gestures, those
unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves, no more palpably
than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone,
unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex. She
will need to hold her breath, I said, reading on, if she is to do
it; for women are so suspicious of any interest that has not some
obvious motive behind it, so terribly accustomed to concealment and
suppression, that they are off at the flicker of an eye turned
observingly in their direction. The only way for you to do it, I
thought, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were there, would be
to talk of something else, looking steadily out of the window, and
thus note, not with a pencil in a notebook, but in the shortest of
shorthand, in words that are hardly syllabled yet, what happens
when Olivia—this organism that has been under the shadow of
the rock these million years—feels the light fall on it, and
sees coming her way a piece of strange food—knowledge,
adventure, art. And she reaches out for it, I thought, again
raising my eyes from the page, and has to devise some entirely new
combination of her resources, so highly developed for other
purposes, so as to absorb the new into the old without disturbing
the infinitely intricate and elaborate balance of the whole.
But, alas, I had done what I had determined not to do; I had
slipped unthinkingly into praise of my own sex. 'Highly
developed'—'infinitely intricate'—such are undeniably
terms of praise, and to praise one's own sex is always suspect,
often silly; moreover, in this case, how could one justify it? One
could not go to the map and say Columbus discovered America and
Columbus was a woman; or take an apple and remark, Newton
discovered the laws of gravitation and Newton was a woman; or look
into the sky and say aeroplanes are flying overhead and aeroplanes
were invented by women. There is no mark on the wall to measure the
precise height of women. There are no yard measures, neatly divided
into the fractions of an inch, that one can lay against the
qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter, or the
fidelity of a sister, or the capacity of a housekeeper. Few women
even now have been graded at the universities; the great trials of
the professions, army and navy, trade, politics and diplomacy have
hardly tested them. They remain even at this moment almost
unclassified. But if I want to know all that a human being can tell
me about Sir Hawley Butts, for instance, I have only to open Burke
or Debrett and I shall find that he took such and such a degree;
owns a hall; has an heir; was Secretary to a Board; represented
Great Britain in Canada; and has received a certain number of
degrees, offices, medals and other distinctions by which his merits
are stamped upon him indelibly. Only Providence can know more about
Sir Hawley Butts than that.
When, therefore, I say 'highly developed', 'infinitely
intricate' of women, I am unable to verify my words either in
Whitaker, Debrett or the University Calendar. In this predicament
what can I do? And I looked at the bookcase again. There were the
biographies: Johnson and Goethe and Carlyle and Sterne and Cowper
and Shelley and Voltaire and Browning and many others. And I began
thinking of all those great men who have for one reason or another
admired, sought out, lived with, confided in, made love to, written
of, trusted in, and shown what can only be described as some need
of and dependence upon certain persons of the opposite sex. That
all these relationships were absolutely Platonic I would not
affirm, and Sir William Joynson Hicks would probably deny. But we
should wrong these illustrious men very greatly if we insisted that
they got nothing from these alliances but comfort, flattery and the
pleasures of the body. What they got, it is obvious, was something
that their own sex was unable to supply; and it would not be rash,
perhaps, to define it further, without quoting the doubtless
rhapsodical words of the poets, as some stimulus; some renewal of
creative power which is in the gift only of the opposite sex to
bestow. He would open the door of drawing-room or nursery, I
thought, and find her among her children perhaps, or with a piece
of embroidery on her knee—at any rate, the centre of some
different order and system of life, and the contrast between this
world and his own, which might be the law courts or the House of
Commons, would at once refresh and invigorate; and there would
follow, even in the simplest talk, such a natural difference of
opinion that the dried ideas in him would be fertilized anew; and
the sight of her creating in a different medium from his own would
so quicken his creative power that insensibly his sterile mind
would begin to plot again, and he would find the phrase or the
scene which was lacking when he put on his hat to visit her. Every
Johnson has his Thrale, and holds fast to her for some such reasons
as these, and when the Thrale marries her Italian music master
Johnson goes half mad with rage and disgust, not merely that he
will miss his pleasant evenings at Streatham, but that the light of
his life will be 'as if gone out'.
And without being Dr Johnson or Goethe or Carlyle or Voltaire,
one may feel, though very differently from these great men, the
nature of this intricacy and the power of this highly developed
creative faculty among women. One goes into the room—but the
resources of the English language would be much put to the stretch,
and whole flights of words would need to wing their way
illegitimately into existence before a woman could say what happens
when she goes into a room. The rooms differ so completely; they are
calm or thunderous; open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give
on to a prison yard; are hung with washing; or alive with opals and
silks; are hard as horsehair or soft as feathers—one has only
to go into any room in any street for the whole of that extremely
complex force of femininity to fly in one's face. How should it be
otherwise? For women have sat indoors all these millions of years,
so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative
force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and
mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and
business and politics. But this creative power differs greatly from
the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a
thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by
centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to
take its place. It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like
men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are
quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the
world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to
bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?
For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should
come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the
branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater
service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into
the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to
prove himself 'superior'.
Mary Carmichael, I thought, still hovering at a little distance
above the page, will have her work cut out for her merely as an
observer. I am afraid indeed that she will be tempted to become,
what I think the less interesting branch of the species—the
naturalist-novelist, and not the contemplative. There are so many
new facts for her to observe. She will not need to limit herself
any longer to the respectable houses of the upper middle classes.
She will go without kindness or condescension, but in the spirit of
fellowship, into those small, scented rooms where sit the
courtesan, the harlot and the lady with the pug dog. There they
still sit in the rough and ready-made clothes that the male writer
has had perforce to clap upon their shoulders. But Mary Carmichael
will have out her scissors and fit them close to every hollow and
angle. It will be a curious sight, when it comes, to see these
women as they are, but we must wait a little, for Mary Carmichael
will still be encumbered with that self-consciousness in the
presence of 'sin' which is the legacy of our sexual barbarity. She
will still wear the shoddy old fetters of class on her feet.
However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor
courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all
through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there
came to my mind's eye one of those long streets somewhere south of
the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. With the
eye of the imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the
street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her daughter, perhaps,
both so respectably booted and furred that their dressing in the
afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in
cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer
months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for the
dusk is their favourite hour), as they must have done year after
year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her
life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the
streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire
in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one
asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but
what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of
November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember
nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups
washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world.
Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or
history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning
to, inevitably lie.
All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I
said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went
on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination
the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life,
whether from the women at the street corners with their arms
akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers,
talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare's words;
or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones
stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like
waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the
flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to
explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your
hand. Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its
profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its
generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your
plainness, and what is your relation to the everchanging and
turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and down
among the faint scents that come through chemists' bottles down
arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudo-marble. For in
imagination I had gone into a shop; it was laid with black and
white paving; it was hung, astonishingly beautifully, with coloured
ribbons. Mary Carmichael might well have a look at that in passing,
I thought, for it is a sight that would lend itself to the pen as
fittingly as any snowy peak or rocky gorge in the Andes. And there
is the girl behind the counter too—I would as soon have her
true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or
seventieth study of Keats and his use of Miltonic inversion which
old Professor Z and his like are now inditing. And then I went on
very warily, on the very tips of my toes (so cowardly am I, so
afraid of the lash that was once almost laid on my own shoulders),
to murmur that she should also learn to laugh, without bitterness,
at the vanities—say rather at the peculiarities, for it is a
less offensive word—of the other sex. For there is a spot the
size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see
for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge
for sex—to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the
back of the head. Think how much women have profited by the
comments of Juvenal; by the criticism of Strindberg. Think with
what humanity and brilliancy men, from the earliest ages, have
pointed out to women that dark place at the back of the head! And
if Mary were very brave and very honest, she would go behind the
other sex and tell us what she found there. A true picture of man
as a whole can never be painted until a woman has described that
spot the size of a shilling. Mr Woodhouse and Mr Casuabon are spots
of that size and nature. Not of course that anyone in their senses
would counsel her to hold up to scorn and ridicule of set
purpose—literature shows the futility of what is written in
that spirit. Be truthful, one would say, and the result is bound to
be amazingly interesting. Comedy is bound to be enriched. New facts
are bound to be discovered.
However, it was high time to lower my eyes to the page again. It
would be better, instead of speculating what Mary Carmichael might
write and should write, to see what in fact Mary Carmichael did
write. So I began to read again. I remembered that I had certain
grievances against her. She had broken up Jane Austen's sentence,
and thus given me no chance of pluming myself upon my impeccable
taste, my fastidious ear. For it was useless to say, 'Yes, yes,
this is very nice; but Jane Austen wrote much better than you do',
when I had to admit that there was no point of likeness between
them. Then she had gone further and broken the sequence—the
expected order. Perhaps she had done this unconsciously, merely
giving things their natural order, as a woman would, if she wrote
like a woman. But the effect was somehow baffling; one could not
see a wave heaping itself, a crisis coming round the next corner.
Therefore I could not plume myself either upon the depths of my
feelings and my profound knowledge of the human heart. For whenever
I was about to feel the usual things in the usual places, about
love, about death, the annoying creature twitched me away, as if
the important point were just a little further on. And thus she
made it impossible for me to roll out my sonorous phrases about
'elemental feelings', the 'common stuff of humanity', 'the depths
of the human heart', and all those other phrases which support us
in our belief that, however clever we may be on top, we are very
serious, very profound and very humane underneath. She made me
feel, on the contrary, that instead of being serious and profound
and humane, one might be—and the thought was far less
seductive—merely lazy minded and conventional into the
bargain.
But I read on, and noted certain other facts. She was no
'genius' that was evident. She had nothing like the love of Nature,
the fiery imagination, the wild poetry, the brilliant wit, the
brooding wisdom of her great predecessors, Lady Winchilsea,
Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen and George
Eliot; she could not write with the melody and the dignity of
Dorothy Osborne—indeed she was no more than a clever girl
whose books will no doubt be pulped by the publishers in ten years'
time. But, nevertheless, she had certain advantages which women of
far greater gift lacked even half a century ago. Men were no longer
to her 'the opposing faction'; she need not waste her time railing
against them; she need not climb on to the roof and ruin her peace
of mind longing for travel, experience and a knowledge of the world
and character that were denied her. Fear and hatred were almost
gone, or traces of them showed only in a slight exaggeration of the
joy of freedom, a tendency to the caustic and satirical, rather
than to the romantic, in her treatment of the other sex. Then there
could be no doubt that as a novelist she enjoyed some natural
advantages of a high order. She had a sensibility that was very
wide, eager and free. It responded to an almost imperceptible touch
on it. It feasted like a plant newly stood in the air on every
sight and sound that came its way. It ranged, too, very subtly and
curiously, among almost unknown or unrecorded things; it lighted on
small things and showed that perhaps they were not small after all.
It brought buried things to light and made one wonder what need
there had been to bury them. Awkward though she was and without the
unconscious bearing of long descent which makes the least turn of
the pen of a Thackeray or a Lamb delightful to the ear, she
had—I began to think—mastered the first great lesson;
she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is
a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality
which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.
All this was to the good. But no abundance of sensation or
fineness of perception would avail unless she could build up out of
the fleeting and the personal the lasting edifice which remains
unthrown. I had said that I would wait until she faced herself with
'a situation'. And I meant by that until she proved by summoning,
beckoning and getting together that she was not a skimmer of
surfaces merely, but had looked beneath into the depths. Now is the
time, she would say to herself at a certain moment, when without
doing anything violent I can show the meaning of all this. And she
would begin—how unmistakable that quickening
is!—beckoning and summoning, and there would rise up in
memory, half forgotten, perhaps quite trivial things in other
chapters dropped by the way. And she would make their presence felt
while someone sewed or smoked a pipe as naturally as possible, and
one would feel, as she went on writing, as if one had gone to the
top of the world and seen it laid out, very majestically,
beneath.
At any rate, she was making the attempt. And as I watched her
lengthening out for the test, I saw, but hoped that she did not
see, the bishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the
patriarchs and the pedagogues all at her shouting warning and
advice. You can't do this and you shan't do that! Fellows and
scholars only allowed on the grass! Ladies not admitted without a
letter of introduction! Aspiring and graceful female novelists this
way! So they kept at her like the crowd at a fence on the
racecourse, and it was her trial to take her fence without looking
to right or to left. If you stop to curse you are lost, I said to
her; equally, if you stop to laugh. Hesitate or fumble and you are
done for. Think only of the jump, I implored her, as if I had put
the whole of my money on her back; and she went over it like a
bird. But there was a fence beyond that and a fence beyond that.
Whether she had the staying power I was doubtful, for the clapping
and the crying were fraying to the nerves. But she did her best.
Considering that Mary Carmichael was no genius, but an unknown girl
writing her first novel in a bed-sitting-room, without enough of
those desirable things, time, money and idleness, she did not do so
badly, I thought.
Give her another hundred years, I concluded, reading the last
chapter—people's noses and bare shoulders showed naked
against a starry sky, for someone had twitched the curtain in the
drawing-room—give her a room of her own and five hundred a
year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts
in, and she will write a better book one of these days. She will be
a poet, I said, putting Life's Adventure, by Mary
Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in another hundred years'
time.
SIX
Next day the light of the October morning was falling in dusty
shafts through the uncurtained windows, and the hum of traffic rose
from the street. London then was winding itself up again; the
factory was astir; the machines were beginning. It was tempting,
after all this reading, to look out of the window and see what
London was doing on the morning of the 26th of October 1928. And
what was London doing? Nobody, it seemed, was reading Antony and
Cleopatra. London was wholly indifferent, it appeared, to
Shakespeare's plays. Nobody cared a straw—and I do not blame
them—for the future of fiction, the death of poetry or the
development by the average woman of a prose style completely
expressive of her mind. If opinions upon any of these matters had
been chalked on the pavement, nobody would have stooped to read
them. The nonchalance of the hurrying feet would have rubbed them
out in half an hour. Here came an errand-boy; here a woman with a
dog on a lead. The fascination of the London street is that no two
people are ever alike; each seems bound on some private affair of
his own. There were the business-like, with their little bags;
there were the drifters rattling sticks upon area railings; there
were affable characters to whom the streets serve for clubroom,
hailing men in carts and giving information without being asked for
it. Also there were funerals to which men, thus suddenly reminded
of the passing of their own bodies, lifted their hats. And then a
very distinguished gentleman came slowly down a doorstep and paused
to avoid collision with a bustling lady who had, by some means or
other, acquired a splendid fur coat and a bunch of Parma violets.
They all seemed separate, self-absorbed, on business of their
own.
At this moment, as so often happens in London, there was a
complete lull and suspension of traffic. Nothing came down the
street; nobody passed. A single leaf detached itself from the plane
tree at the end of the street, and in that pause and suspension
fell. Somehow it was like a signal falling, a signal pointing to a
force in things which one had overlooked. It seemed to point to a
river, which flowed past, invisibly, round the corner, down the
street, and took people and eddied them along, as the stream at
Oxbridge had taken the undergraduate in his boat and the dead
leaves. Now it was bringing from one side of the street to the
other diagonally a girl in patent leather boots, and then a young
man in a maroon overcoat; it was also bringing a taxi-cab; and it
brought all three together at a point directly beneath my window;
where the taxi stopped; and the girl and the young man stopped; and
they got into the taxi; and then the cab glided off as if it were
swept on by the current elsewhere.
The sight was ordinary enough; what was strange was the
rhythmical order with which my imagination had invested it; and the
fact that the ordinary sight of two people getting into a cab had
the power to communicate something of their own seeming
satisfaction. The sight of two people coming down the street and
meeting at the corner seems to ease the mind of some strain, I
thought, watching the taxi turn and make off. Perhaps to think, as
I had been thinking these two days, of one sex as distinct from the
other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind. Now
that effort had ceased and that unity had been restored by seeing
two people come together and get into a taxicab. The mind is
certainly a very mysterious organ, I reflected, drawing my head in
from the window, about which nothing whatever is known, though we
depend upon it so completely. Why do I feel that there are
severances and oppositions in the mind, as there are strains from
obvious causes on the body? What does one mean by 'the unity of the
mind'? I pondered, for clearly the mind has so great a power of
concentrating at any point at any moment that it seems to have no
single state of being. It can separate itself from the people in
the street, for example, and think of itself as apart from them, at
an upper window looking down on them. Or it can think with other
people spontaneously, as, for instance, in a crowd waiting to hear
some piece of news read out. It can think back through its fathers
or through its mothers, as I have said that a woman writing thinks
back through her mothers. Again if one is a woman one is often
surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in
walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of
that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it,
alien and critical. Clearly the mind is always altering its focus,
and bringing the world into different perspectives. But some of
these states of mind seem, even if adopted spontaneously, to be
less comfortable than others. In order to keep oneself continuing
in them one is unconsciously holding something back, and gradually
the repression becomes an effort. But there may be some state of
mind in which one could continue without effort because nothing is
required to be held back. And this perhaps, I thought, coming in
from the window, is one of them. For certainly when I saw the
couple get into the taxicab the mind felt as if, after being
divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The
obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to
co-operate. One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour
of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the
greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness. But the sight
of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it
gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind
corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also
require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and
happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul
so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and
in the man's brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the
woman's brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and
comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony
together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the
woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must
have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this
when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this
fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all
its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot
create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought.
But it would be well to test what one meant by man-womanly, and
conversely by woman-manly, by pausing and looking at a book or
two.
Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind
is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy
with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to
their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to
make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant,
perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it
transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally
creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to
Shakespeare's mind as the type of the androgynous, of the
man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what
Shakespeare thought of women. And if it be true that it is one of
the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think
specially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain
that condition now than ever before. Here I came to the books by
living writers, and there paused and wondered if this fact were not
at the root of something that had long puzzled me. No age can ever
have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own; those innumerable
books by men about women in the British Museum are a proof of it.
The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in
men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must have made
them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics
which they would not have troubled to think about had they not been
challenged. And when one is challenged, even by a few women in
black bonnets, one retaliates, if one has never been challenged
before, rather excessively. That perhaps accounts for some of the
characteristics that I remember to have found here, I thought,
taking down a new novel by Mr A, who is in the prime of life and
very well thought of, apparently, by the reviewers. I opened it.
Indeed, it was delightful to read a man's writing again. It was so
direct, so straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated
such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in
himself. One had a sense of physical well-being in the presence of
this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind, which had never been
thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch
itself in whatever way it liked. All this was admirable. But after
reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It
was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter
'I'. One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the
landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman
walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the
letter 'I'. One began to be tired of 'I'. Not but what this 'I' was
a most respectable 'I'; honest and logical; as hard as a nut, and
polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding. I respect
and admire that 'I' from the bottom of my heart. But—here I
turned a page or two, looking for something or other—the
worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter 'I' all is
shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But...she has
not a bone in her body, I thought, watching Phoebe, for that was
her name, coming across the beach. Then Alan got up and the shadow
of Alan at once obliterated Phoebe. For Alan had views and Phoebe
was quenched in the flood of his views. And then Alan, I thought,
has passions; and here I turned page after page very fast, feeling
that the crisis was approaching, and so it was. It took place on
the beach under the sun. It was done very openly. It was done very
vigorously. Nothing could have been more indecent. But...I had said
'but' too often. One cannot go on saying 'but'. One must finish the
sentence somehow, I rebuked myself. Shall I finish it, 'But—I
am bored!' But why was I bored? Partly because of the dominance of
the letter 'I' and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree,
it casts within its shade. Nothing will grow there. And partly for
some more obscure reason. There seemed to be some obstacle, some
impediment in Mr A's mind which blocked the fountain of creative
energy and shored it within narrow limits. And remembering the
lunch party at Oxbridge, and the cigarette ash and the Manx cat and
Tennyson and Christina Rossetti all in a bunch, it seemed possible
that the impediment lay there. As he no longer hums under his
breath, 'There has fallen a splendid tear from the passion-flower
at the gate', when Phoebe crosses the beach, and she no longer
replies, 'My heart is like a singing bird whose nest is in a
water'd shoot', when Alan approaches what can he do? Being honest
as the day and logical as the sun, there is only one thing he can
do. And that he does, to do him justice, over and over (I said
turning the pages) and over again. And that, I added, aware of the
awful nature of the confession, seems somehow dull. Shakespeare's
indecency uproots a thousand other things in one's mind, and is far
from being dull. But Shakespeare does it for pleasure; Mr A, as the
nurses say, does it on purpose. He does it in protest. He is
protesting against the equality of the other sex by asserting his
own superiority. He is therefore impeded and inhibited and
self-conscious as Shakespeare might have been if he too had known
Miss Clough and Miss Davies. Doubtless Elizabethan literature would
have been very different from what it is if the women's movement
had begun in the sixteenth century and not in the nineteenth.
What, then, it amounts to, if this theory of the two sides of
the mind holds good, is that virility has now become
self-conscious—men, that is to say, are now writing only with
the male side of their brains. It is a mistake for a woman to read
them, for she will inevitably look for something that she will not
find. It is the power of suggestion that one most misses, I
thought, taking Mr B the critic in my hand and reading, very
carefully and very dutifully, his remarks upon the art of poetry.
Very able they were, acute and full of learning; but the trouble
was that his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed
separated into different chambers; not a sound carried from one to
the other. Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it
falls plump to the ground—dead; but when one takes a sentence
of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all
kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which
one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.
But whatever the reason may be, it is a fact that one must
deplore. For it means—here I had come to rows of books by Mr
Galsworthy and Mr Kipling—that some of the finest works of
our greatest living writers fall upon deaf ears. Do what she will a
woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the
critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate
male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it
is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a
woman incomprehensible. It is coming, it is gathering, it is about
to burst on one's head, one begins saying long before the end. That
picture will fall on old Jolyon's head; he will die of the shock;
the old clerk will speak over him two or three obituary words; and
all the swans on the Thames will simultaneously burst out singing.
But one will rush away before that happens and hide in the
gooseberry bushes, for the emotion which is so deep, so subtle, so
symbolical to a man moves a woman to wonder. So with Mr Kipling's
officers who turn their Backs; and his Sowers who sow the Seed; and
his Men who are alone with their Work; and the Flag—one
blushes at all these capital letters as if one had been caught
eavesdropping at some purely masculine orgy. The fact is that
neither Mr Galsworthy nor Mr Kipling has a spark of the woman in
him. Thus all their qualities seem to a woman, if one may
generalize, crude and immature. They lack suggestive power. And
when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the
surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
And in that restless mood in which one takes books out and puts
them back again without looking at them I began to envisage an age
to come of pure, of self-assertive virility, such as the letters of
professors (take Sir Walter Raleigh's letters, for instance) seem
to forebode, and the rulers of Italy have already brought into
being. For one can hardly fail to be impressed in Rome by the sense
of unmitigated masculinity; and whatever the value of unmitigated
masculinity upon the state, one may question the effect of it upon
the art of poetry. At any rate, according to the newspapers, there
is a certain anxiety about fiction in Italy. There has been a
meeting of academicians whose object it is 'to develop the Italian
novel'. 'Men famous by birth, or in finance, industry or the
Fascist corporations' came together the other day and discussed the
matter, and a telegram was sent to the Duce expressing the hope
'that the Fascist era would soon give birth to a poet worthy of
it'. We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether
poetry can come of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as
well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid
little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of
some county town. Such monsters never live long, it is said; one
has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field.
Two heads on one body do not make for length of life.
However, the blame for all this, if one is anxious to lay blame,
rests no more upon one sex than upon the other. All seducers and
reformers are responsible: Lady Bessborough when she lied to Lord
Granville; Miss Davies when she told the truth to Mr Greg. All who
have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and
it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a
book, to seek it in that happy age, before Miss Davies and Miss
Clough were born, when the writer used both sides of his mind
equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare
was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb
and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson
had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and
Tolstoi. In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps
a little too much of a woman. But that failing is too rare for one
to complain of it, since without some mixture of the kind the
intellect seems to predominate and the other faculties of the mind
harden and become barren. However, I consoled myself with the
reflection that this is perhaps a passing phase; much of what I
have said in obedience to my promise to give you the course of my
thoughts will seem out of date; much of what flames in my eyes will
seem dubious to you who have not yet come of age.
Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I
said, crossing over to the writing-table and taking up the page
headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for anyone who writes
to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and
simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a
woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with
justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And
fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that
conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized.
Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear
for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in
the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the
mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can
be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.
The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense
that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect
fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a
wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close
drawn. The writer, I thought, once his experience is over, must lie
back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness. He must
not look or question what is being done. Rather, he must pluck the
petals from a rose or watch the swans float calmly down the river.
And I saw again the current which took the boat and the
under-graduate and the dead leaves; and the taxi took the man and
the woman, I thought, seeing them come together across the street,
and the current swept them away, I thought, hearing far off the
roar of London's traffic, into that tremendous stream.
Here, then, Mary Beton ceases to speak. She has told you how she
reached the conclusion—the prosaic conclusion—that it
is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on
the door if you are to write fiction or poetry. She has tried to
lay bare the thoughts and impressions that led her to think this.
She has asked you to follow her flying into the arms of a Beadle,
lunching here, dining there, drawing pictures in the British
Museum, taking books from the shelf, looking out of the window.
While she has been doing all these things, you no doubt have been
observing her failings and foibles and deciding what effect they
have had on her opinions. You have been contradicting her and
making whatever additions and deductions seem good to you. That is
all as it should be, for in a question like this truth is only to
be had by laying together many varieties of error. And I will end
now in my own person by anticipating two criticisms, so obvious
that you can hardly fail to make them.
No opinion has been expressed, you may say, upon the comparative
merits of the sexes even as writers. That was done purposely,
because, even if the time had come for such a valuation—and
it is far more important at the moment to know how much money women
had and how many rooms than to theorize about their
capacities—even if the time had come I do not believe that
gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and
butter, not even in Cambridge, where they are so adept at putting
people into classes and fixing caps on their heads and letters
after their names. I do not believe that even the Table of
Precedency which you will find in Whitaker's Almanac
represents a final order of values, or that there is any sound
reason to suppose that a Commander of the Bath will ultimately walk
in to dinner behind a Master in Lunacy. All this pitting of sex
against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of
superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the
private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides',
and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the
utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the
hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people
mature they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in
highly ornamental pots. At any rate, where books are concerned, it
is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that
they do not come off. Are not reviews of current literature a
perpetual illustration of the difficulty of judgement? 'This great
book', 'this worthless book', the same book is called by both
names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the
pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all
occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most
servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write,
that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only
for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of
your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster
with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a
measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the
sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the
greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.
Next I think that you may object that in all this I have made
too much of the importance of material things. Even allowing a
generous margin for symbolism, that five hundred a year stands for
the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power
to think for oneself, still you may say that the mind should rise
above such things; and that great poets have often been poor men.
Let me then quote to you the words of your own Professor of
Literature, who knows better than I do what goes to the making of a
poet. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch writes:' [* The Art of
Writing, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.]
'What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or
so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson,
Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop
there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University
men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his
prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal
thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of
hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it
listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a
matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men:
which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get
the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of
the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I
challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more
have attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book
than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters
if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had
a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains
but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a
mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug
disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It
is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that,
by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these
days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance. Believe
me—and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching
some three hundred and twenty elementary schools, we may prate of
democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more
hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into
that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.'
Nobody could put the point more plainly. 'The poor poet has not
in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's
chance...a poor child in England has little more hope than had the
son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual
freedom of which great writings are born.' That is it. Intellectual
freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon
intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two
hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have
had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves.
Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is
why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.
However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of
whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the
Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and
the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some
sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered.
Otherwise you would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning
five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still
is, would be minute in the extreme.
Still, you may object, why do you attach so much importance to
this writing of books by women when, according to you, it requires
so much effort, leads perhaps to the murder of one's aunts, will
make one almost certainly late for luncheon, and may bring one into
very grave disputes with certain very good fellows? My motives, let
me admit, are partly selfish. Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I
like reading—I like reading books in the bulk. Lately my diet
has become a trifle monotonous; history is too much about wars;
biography too much about great men; poetry has shown, I think, a
tendency to sterility, and fiction but I have sufficiently exposed
my disabilities as a critic of modern fiction and will say no more
about it. Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books,
hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook
or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money
enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past
of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and
let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no
means confining you to fiction. If you would please me—and
there are thousands like me—you would write books of travel
and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and
biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing
you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way
of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for
standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy. Moreover, if you
consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady
Murasaki, like Emily Brontë, you will find that she is an
inheritor as well as an originator, and has come into existence
because women have come to have the habit of writing naturally; so
that even as a prelude to poetry such activity on your part would
be invaluable.
But when I look back through these notes and criticize my own
train of thought as I made them, I find that my motives were not
altogether selfish. There runs through these comments and
discursions the conviction—or is it the instinct?—that
good books are desirable and that good writers, even if they show
every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings. Thus
when I ask you to write more books I am urging you to do what will
be for your good and for the good of the world at large. How to
justify this instinct or belief I do not know, for philosophic
words, if one has not been educated at a university, are apt to
play one false. What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem to be
something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in
a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a
daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some
casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and
makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and
then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly.
Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to
discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and
makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day
has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and
of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance
to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It
is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the
rest of us. So at least I infer from reading Lear or
Emma or La Recherche du Temps Perdu. For the reading
of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the
senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared
of its covering and given an intenser life. Those are the enviable
people who live at enmity with unreality; and those are the
pitiable who are knocked on the head by the thing done without
knowing or caring. So that when I ask you to earn money and have a
room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of
reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can
impart it or not.
Here I would stop, but the pressure of convention decrees that
every speech must end with a peroration. And a peroration addressed
to women should have something, you will agree, particularly
exalting and ennobling about it. I should implore you to remember
your responsibilities, to be higher, more spiritual; I should
remind, you how much depends upon you, and what an influence you
can exert upon the future. But those exhortations can safely, I
think, be left to the other sex, who will put them, and indeed have
put them, with far greater eloquence than I can compass. When I
rummage in my own mind I find no noble sentiments about being
companions and equals and influencing the world to higher ends. I
find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more
important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of
influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it
sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.
And again I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels
and biographies that when a woman speaks to women she should have
something very unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are hard on women.
Women dislike women. Women—but are you not sick to death of
the word? I can assure you that I am. Let us agree, then, that a
paper read by a woman to women should end with something
particularly disagreeable.
But how does it go? What can I think of? The truth is, I often
like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their
completeness. I like their anonymity. I like—but I must not
run on in this way. That cupboard there,—you say it holds
clean table-napkins only; but what if Sir Archibald Bodkin were
concealed among them? Let me then adopt a sterner tone. Have I, in
the preceding words, conveyed to you sufficiently the warnings and
reprobation of mankind? I have told you the very low opinion in
which you were held by Mr Oscar Browning. I have indicated what
Napoleon once thought of you and what Mussolini thinks now. Then,
in case any of you aspire to fiction, I have copied out for your
benefit the advice of the critic about courageously acknowledging
the limitations of your sex. I have referred to Professor X and
given prominence to his statement that women are intellectually,
morally and physically inferior to men. I have handed on all that
has come my way without going in search of it, and here is a final
warning—from Mr John Langdon Davies. [* A Short History Of
Women, by John Langdon Davies.] Mr John Langdon Davies warns
women 'that when children cease to be altogether desirable, women
cease to be altogether necessary'. I hope you will make a note of
it.
How can I further encourage you to go about the business of
life? Young women, I would say, and please attend, for the
peroration is beginning, you are, in my opinion, disgracefully
ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of
importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into
battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never
introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What
is your excuse? It is all very well for you to say, pointing to the
streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black
and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in
traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have had other work on
our hands. Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and
those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and
taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand
six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are,
according to statistics, at present in existence, and that,
allowing that some had help, takes time.
There is truth in what you say—I will not deny it. But at
the same time may I remind you that there have been at least two
colleges for women in existence in England since the year 1866;
that after the year 1880 a married woman was allowed by law to
possess her own property; and that in 1919—which is a whole
nine years ago she was given a vote? May I also remind you that
most of the professions have been open to you for close on ten
years now? When you reflect upon these immense privileges and the
length of time during which they have been enjoyed, and the fact
that there must be at this moment some two thousand women capable
of earning over five hundred a year in one way or another, you will
agree that the excuse of lack of opportunity, training,
encouragement, leisure and money no longer holds good. Moreover,
the economists are telling us that Mrs Seton has had too many
children. You must, of course, go on bearing children, but, so they
say, in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves.
Thus, with some time on your hands and with some book learning
in your brains—you have had enough of the other kind, and are
sent to college partly, I suspect, to be uneducated—surely
you should embark upon another stage of your very long, very
laborious and highly obscure career. A thousand pens are ready to
suggest what you should do and what effect you will have. My own
suggestion is a little fantastic, I admit; I prefer, therefore, to
put it in the form of fiction.
I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a
sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the
poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies
buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and
Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and
was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in
me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are
washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she
lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences;
they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This
opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give
her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I
am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the
little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have
five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the
habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if
we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human
beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation
to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be
in themselves; if we look past Milton's bogey, for no human being
should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact,
that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our
relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of
men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who
was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so
often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who
were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be
born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that
effort on our part, without that determination that when she is
born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry,
that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain
that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even
in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.
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THE END