contains some very interesting speculations on the position and the
future of women in the modern State. The one objection to the equality
of the sexes that he considers deserves serious attention is that made by
Sir James Stephen in his clever attack on John Stuart Mill. Sir James
Stephen points out in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, that women may
suffer more than they have done, if plunged into a nominally equal but
really unequal contest in the already overcrowded labour market. Mr.
Ritchie answers that, while the conclusion usually drawn from this
argument is a sentimental reaction in favour of the old family ideal, as,
for instance, in Mr. Besant's books, there is another alternative, and
that is the resettling of the labour question. 'The elevation of the
status of women and the regulation of the conditions of labour are
ultimately,' he says, 'inseparable questions. On the basis of
individualism, I cannot see how it is possible to answer the objections
of Sir James Stephen.' Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his Sociology, expresses
his fear that women, if admitted now to political life, might do mischief
by introducing the ethics of the family into the State. 'Under the
ethics of the family the greatest benefits must be given where the merits
are smallest; under the ethics of the State the benefits must be
proportioned to the merits.' In answer to this, Mr. Ritchie asks whether
in any society we have ever seen people so get benefits in proportion to
their merits, and protests against Mr. Spencer's separation of the ethics
of the family from those of the State. If something is right in a
family, it is difficult to see why it is therefore, without any further
reason, wrong in the State. If the participation of women in politics
means that as a good family educates all its members, so must a good
State, what better issue could there be? The family ideal of the State
may be difficult of attainment, but as an ideal it is better than the
policeman theory. It would mean the moralisation of politics. The
cultivation of separate sorts of virtues and separate ideals of duty in
men and women has led to the whole social fabric being weaker and
unhealthier than it need be. As for the objection that in countries
where it is considered necessary to have compulsory military service for
all men, it would be unjust and inexpedient that women should have a
voice in political matters, Mr. Ritchie meets it, or tries to meet it, by
proposing that all women physically fitted for such purpose should be
compelled to undergo training as nurses, and should be liable to be
called upon to serve as nurses in time of war. This training, he
remarks, 'would be more useful to them and to the community in time of
peace than his military training is to the peasant or artisan.' Mr.
Ritchie's little book is extremely suggestive, and full of valuable ideas
for the philosophic student of sociology.
* * * * *
Mr. Alan Cole's lecture on Irish lace, delivered recently before the
Society of Arts, contains some extremely useful suggestions as to the
best method of securing an immediate connection between the art schools
of a country and the country's ordinary manufactures. In 1883, Mr. Cole
was deputed by the Department of Science and Art to lecture at Cork and
at Limerick on the subject of lace-making, and to give a history of its
rise and development in other countries, as well as a review of the many
kinds of ornamental patterns used from the sixteenth century to modern
times. In order to make these lectures of practical value, Mr. Cole
placed typical specimens of Irish laces beside Italian, Flemish, and
French laces, which seem to be the prototypes of the lace of Ireland. The
public interest was immediately aroused. Some of the newspapers stoutly
maintained that the ornament and patterns of Irish lace were of such a
national character that it was wrong to asperse them on that score.
Others took a different view, and came to the conclusion that Irish lace
could be vastly improved in all respects, if some systematic action could
be taken to induce the lace-makers to work from more intelligently
composed patterns than those in general use. There was a consensus of
opinion that the workmanship of Irish laces was good, and that it could
be applied to better materials than those ordinarily used, and that its
methods were suited to render a greater variety of patterns than those
usually attempted.
These and other circumstances seem to have prompted the promoters of the
Cork Exhibition to further efforts in the cause of lace-making. Towards
the close of the year 1883 they made fresh representations to Government,
and inquired what forms of State assistance could be given. A number of
convents in the neighbourhood of Cork was engaged in giving instruction
to children under their care in lace and crochet making. At some, rooms
were allotted for the use of grown-up workers who made laces under the
supervision of the nuns. These convents obviously were centres where
experiments in reform could be tried. The convents, however, lacked
instruction in the designing of patterns for laces. An excellent School
of Art was at work at Cork, but the students there had not been
instructed in specially designing for lace. If the convents with their
workrooms could be brought into relation with this School of Art, it
seemed possible that something of a serious character might be done to
benefit lace-makers, and also to open up a new field in ornamental design
for the students at the School of Art. The rules of the Department of
Science and Art were found to be adapted to aid in meeting such wants as
those sketched out by the promoters at Cork. As the nuns in the
different lace-making convents had not been able to attend in Cork to
hear Mr. Cole's lectures, they asked that he should visit them and repeat
them at the convents. This Mr. Cole did early in 1884, the masters of
the local Schools of Art accompanying him on his visits. Negotiations
were forthwith opened for connecting the convents with the art schools.
By the end of 1885 some six or seven different lace-making convents had
placed themselves in connection with Schools of Art at Cork and
Waterford. These convents were attended not only by the nuns but by
outside pupils also; and, at the request of the convents, Mr. Cole has
visited them twice a year, lecturing and giving advice upon designs for
lace. The composition of new patterns for lace was attempted, and old
patterns which had degenerated were revised and redrawn for the use of
the workers connected with the convents. There are now twelve convents,
Mr. Cole tells us, where instruction in drawing and in the composition of
patterns is given, and some of the students have won some of the higher
prizes offered by the Department of Science and Art for designing lace-
patterns.
The Cork School of Art then acquired a collection of finely-patterned old
laces, selections from which are freely circulated through the different
convents connected with that school. They have also the privilege of
borrowing similar specimens of old lace from the South Kensington Museum.
So successful has been the system of education pursued by Mr. Brennan,
the head-master of the Cork School of Art, that two female students of
his school last year gained the gold and silver medals for their designs
for laces and crochets at the national competition which annually takes
place in London between all the Schools of Art in the United Kingdom. As
for the many lace-makers who were not connected either with the convents
or with the art schools, in order to assist them, a committee of ladies
and gentlemen interested in Irish lace-making raised subscriptions, and
offered prizes to be competed for by designers generally. The best
designs were then placed out with lace-makers, and carried into
execution. It is, of course, often said that the proper person to make
the design is the lace-maker. Mr. Cole, however, points out that from
the sixteenth century forward the patterns for ornamental laces have
always been designed by decorative artists having knowledge of the
composition of ornament, and of the materials for which they were called
upon to design. Lace pattern books were published in considerable
quantity in Italy, France and Germany during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, and from these the lace-makers worked. Many lace-
makers would, no doubt, derive benefit from practice in drawing, in
discriminating between well and badly shaped forms. But the skill they
are primarily required to show and to develop is one of fine fingers in
reproducing beautiful forms in threads. The conception, arrangement, and
drawing of beautiful forms for a design, have to be undertaken by
decorative artists acquainted with the limitations of those materials and
methods which the ultimate expression of the design involves.
This lovely Irish art of lace-making is very much indebted to Mr. Cole,
who has really re-created it, given it new life, and shown it the true
artistic lines on which to progress. Hardly 20,000 pounds a year is
spent by England upon Irish laces, and almost all of this goes upon the
cheaper and commoner kinds. And yet, as Mr. Cole points out, it is
possible to produce Irish laces of as high artistic quality as almost any
foreign laces. The Queen, Lady Londonderry, Lady Dorothy Nevill, Mrs.
Alfred Morrison, and others, have done much to encourage the Irish
workers, and it rests largely with the ladies of England whether this
beautiful art lives or dies. The real good of a piece of lace, says Mr.
Ruskin, is 'that it should show, first, that the designer of it had a
pretty fancy; next, that the maker of it had fine fingers; lastly, that
the wearer of it has worthiness or dignity enough to obtain what is
difficult to obtain, and common-sense enough not to wear it on all
occasions.'
* * * * *
The High-Caste Hindu Woman is an interesting book. It is from the pen of
the Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati, and the introduction is written by Miss
Rachel Bodley, M.D., the Dean of the Woman's Medical College of
Pennsylvania. The story of the parentage of this learned lady is very
curious. A certain Hindu, being on a religious pilgrimage with his
family, which consisted of his wife and two daughters, one nine and the
other seven years of age, stopped in a town to rest for a day or two. One
morning the Hindu was bathing in the sacred river Godavari, near the
town, when he saw a fine-looking man coming there to bathe also. After
the ablution and the morning prayers were over, the father inquired of
the stranger who he was and whence he came. On learning his caste, and
clan, and dwelling-place, and also that he was a widower, he offered him
his little daughter of nine in marriage. All things were settled in an
hour or so; next day the marriage was concluded, and the little girl
placed in the possession of the stranger, who took her nearly nine
hundred miles away from her home, and gave her into the charge of his
mother. The stranger was the learned Ananta Shastri, a Brahman pundit,
who had very advanced views on the subject of woman's education, and he
determined that he would teach his girl-wife Sanskrit, and give her the
intellectual culture that had been always denied to women in India. Their
daughter was the Pundita Ramabai, who, after the death of her parents,
travelled all over India advocating the cause of female education, and to
whom seems to be due the first suggestion for the establishment of the
profession of women doctors. In 1866, Miss Mary Carpenter made a short
tour in India for the purpose of finding out some way by which women's
condition in that country might be improved. She at once discovered that
the chief means by which the desired end could be accomplished was by
furnishing women teachers for the Hindu Zenanas. She suggested that the
British Government should establish normal schools for training women
teachers, and that scholarships should be awarded to girls in order to
prolong their school-going period, and to assist indigent women who would
otherwise be unable to pursue their studies.
In response to Miss Carpenter's appeal, upon her return to England, the
English Government founded several schools for women in India, and a few
'Mary Carpenter Scholarships' were endowed by benevolent persons. These
schools were open to women of every caste; but while they have
undoubtedly been of use, they have not realised the hopes of their
founders, chiefly through the impossibility of keeping caste rules in
them. Ramabai, in a very eloquent chapter, proposes to solve the problem
in a different way. Her suggestion is that houses should be opened for
the young and high-caste child-widows, where they can take shelter
without the fear of losing their caste, or of being disturbed in their
religious belief, and where they may have entire freedom of action as
regards caste rules. The whole account given by the Pundita of the life
of the high-caste Hindu lady is full of suggestion for the social
reformer and the student of progress, and her book, which is wonderfully
well written, is likely to produce a radical change in the educational
schemes that at present prevail in India.
(1) Venetia Victrix. By Caroline Fitz Gerald. (Macmillan and Co.)
(2) Darwinism and Politics. By David Ritchie, Jesus College, Oxford.
(Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)
(3) The High-Caste Hindu Woman. By the Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati. (Bell
and Sons.)
OUIDA'S NEW NOVEL
(Pall Mall Gazette, May 17, 1889.)
Ouida is the last of the romantics. She belongs to the school of Bulwer
Lytton and George Sand, though she may lack the learning of the one and
the sincerity of the other. She tries to make passion, imagination, and
poetry part of fiction. She still believes in heroes and in heroines.
She is florid and fervent and fanciful. Yet even she, the high priestess
of the impossible, is affected by her age. Her last book, Guilderoy as
she calls it, is an elaborate psychological study of modern temperaments.
For her, it is realistic, and she has certainly caught much of the tone
and temper of the society of our day. Her people move with ease and
grace and indolence. The book may be described as a study of the peerage
from a poetical point of view. Those who are tired of mediocre young
curates who have doubts, of serious young ladies who have missions, and
of the ordinary figureheads of most of the English fiction of our time,
might turn with pleasure, if not with profit, to this amazing romance. It
is a resplendent picture of our aristocracy. No expense has been spared
in gilding. For the comparatively small sum of 1 pound, 11s. 6d. one is
introduced to the best society. The central figures are exaggerated, but
the background is admirable. In spite of everything, it gives one a
sense of something like life.
What is the story? Well, we must admit that we have a faint suspicion
that Ouida has told it to us before. Lord Guilderoy, 'whose name was as
old as the days of Knut,' falls madly in love, or fancies that he falls
madly in love, with a rustic Perdita, a provincial Artemis who has 'a
Gainsborough face, with wide-opened questioning eyes and tumbled auburn
hair.' She is poor but well-born, being the only child of Mr. Vernon of
Llanarth, a curious recluse, who is half a pedant and half Don Quixote.
Guilderoy marries her and, tiring of her shyness, her lack of power to
express herself, her want of knowledge of fashionable life, returns to an
old passion for a wonderful creature called the Duchess of Soria. Lady
Guilderoy becomes ice; the Duchess becomes fire; at the end of the book
Guilderoy is a pitiable object. He has to submit to be forgiven by one
woman, and to endure to be forgotten by the other. He is thoroughly
weak, thoroughly worthless, and the most fascinating person in the whole
story. Then there is his sister Lady Sunbury, who is very anxious for
Guilderoy to marry, and is quite determined to hate his wife. She is
really a capital sketch. Ouida describes her as 'one of those admirably
virtuous women who are more likely to turn men away from the paths of
virtue than the wickedest of sirens.' She irritates herself, alienates
her children, and infuriates her husband:
'You are perfectly right; I know you are always right; I admit you
are; but it is just that which makes you so damnably odious!' said
Lord Sunbury once, in a burst of rage, in his town house, speaking in
such stentorian tones that the people passing up Grosvenor Street
looked up at his open windows, and a crossing-sweeper said to a match-
seller, 'My eye! ain't he giving it to the old gal like blazes.'
The noblest character in the book is Lord Aubrey. As he is not a genius
he, naturally, behaves admirably on every occasion. He begins by pitying
the neglected Lady Guilderoy, and ends by loving her, but he makes the
great renunciation with considerable effect, and, having induced Lady
Guilderoy to receive back her husband, he accepts 'a distant and arduous
Viceroyalty.' He is Ouida's ideal of the true politician, for Ouida has
apparently taken to the study of English politics. A great deal of her
book is devoted to political disquisitions. She believes that the proper
rulers of a country like ours are the aristocrats. Oligarchy has great
fascinations for her. She thinks meanly of the people and adores the
House of Lords and Lord Salisbury. Here are some of her views. We will
not call them ideas:
The House of Lords wants nothing of the nation, and therefore it is
the only candid and disinterested guardian of the people's needs and
resources. It has never withstood the real desire of the country: it
has only stood between the country and its impetuous and evanescent
follies.
A democracy cannot understand honour; how should it? The Caucus is
chiefly made up of men who sand their sugar, put alum in their bread,
forge bayonets and girders which bend like willow-wands, send bad
calico to India, and insure vessels at Lloyd's which they know will go
to the bottom before they have been ten days at sea.
Lord Salisbury has often been accused of arrogance; people have never
seen that what they mistook for arrogance was the natural, candid
consciousness of a great noble that he is more capable of leading the
country than most men composing it would be.
Democracy, after having made everything supremely hideous and
uncomfortable for everybody, always ends by clinging to the coat tails
of some successful general.
The prosperous politician may be honest, but his honesty is at best a
questionable quality. The moment that a thing is a metier, it is
wholly absurd to talk about any disinterestedness in the pursuit of
it. To the professional politician national affairs are a manufacture
into which he puts his audacity and his time, and out of which he
expects to make so much percentage for his lifetime.
There is too great a tendency to govern the world by noise.
Ouida's aphorisms on women, love, and modern society are somewhat more
characteristic:
Women speak as though the heart were to be treated at will like a
stone, or a bath.
Half the passions of men die early, because they are expected to be
eternal.
It is the folly of life that lends charm to it.
What is the cause of half the misery of women? That their love is so
much more tenacious than the man's: it grows stronger as his grows
weaker.
To endure the country in England for long, one must have the rusticity
of Wordsworth's mind, and boots and stockings as homely.
It is because men feel the necessity to explain that they drop into
the habit of saying what is not true. Wise is the woman who never
insists on an explanation.
Love can make its own world in a solitude a deux, but marriage cannot.
Nominally monogamous, all cultured society is polygamous; often even
polyandrous.
Moralists say that a soul should resist passion. They might as well
say that a house should resist an earthquake.
The whole world is just now on its knees before the poorer classes:
all the cardinal virtues are taken for granted in them, and it is only
property of any kind which is the sinner.
Men are not merciful to women's tears as a rule; and when it is a
woman belonging to them who weeps, they only go out, and slam the door
behind them.
Men always consider women unjust to them, when they fail to deify
their weaknesses.
No passion, once broken, will ever bear renewal.
Feeling loses its force and its delicacy if we put it under the
microscope too often.
Anything which is not flattery seems injustice to a woman.
When society is aware that you think it a flock of geese, it revenges
itself by hissing loudly behind your back.
Of descriptions of scenery and art we have, of course, a large number,
and it is impossible not to recognise the touch of the real Ouida manner
in the following:
It was an old palace: lofty, spacious, magnificent, and dull. Busts
of dusky yellow marble, weird bronzes stretching out gaunt arms into
the darkness, ivories brown with age, worn brocades with gold threads
gleaming in them, and tapestries with strange and pallid figures of
dead gods, were all half revealed and half obscured in the twilight.
As he moved through them, a figure which looked almost as pale as the
Adonis of the tapestry and was erect and motionless like the statue of
the wounded Love, came before his sight out of the darkness. It was
that of Gladys.
It is a manner full of exaggeration and overemphasis, but with some
remarkable rhetorical qualities and a good deal of colour. Ouida is fond
of airing a smattering of culture, but she has a certain intrinsic
insight into things and, though she is rarely true, she is never dull.
Guilderoy, with all its faults, which are great, and its absurdities,
which are greater, is a book to be read.
Guilderoy. By Ouida. (Chatto and Windus.)
SOME LITERARY NOTES--VI
(Woman's World, June 1889.)
A writer in the Quarterly Review for January 1874 says:
No literary event since the war has excited anything like such a
sensation in Paris as the publication of the Lettres a une Inconnue.
Even politics became a secondary consideration for the hour, and
academicians or deputies of opposite parties might be seen eagerly
accosting each other in the Chamber or the street to inquire who this
fascinating and perplexing 'unknown' could be. The statement in the
Revue des Deux Mondes that she was an Englishwoman, moving in
brilliant society, was not supported by evidence; and M. Blanchard,
the painter, from whom the publisher received the manuscripts, died
most provokingly at the very commencement of the inquiry, and made no
sign. Some intimate friends of Merimee, rendered incredulous by
wounded self-love at not having been admitted to his confidence,
insisted that there was no secret to tell; their hypothesis being that
the Inconnue was a myth, and the letters a romance, with which some
petty details of actual life had been interwoven to keep up the
mystification.
But an artist like Merimee would not have left his work in so unformed a
state, so defaced by repetitions, or with such a want of proportion
between the parts. The Inconnue was undoubtedly a real person, and her
letters in answer to those of Merimee have just been published by Messrs.
Macmillan under the title of An Author's Love.