It is a platitude, and none the less true for that, that we need to
have an ideal in our minds with which to test all realities. But it is
equally true, and less noted, that we need a reality with which to test
ideals. Thus I have selected Mrs. Buttons, a charwoman in Battersea, as
the touchstone of all modern theories about the mass of women. Her name
is not Buttons; she is not in the least a contemptible nor entirely a
comic figure. She has a powerful stoop and an ugly, attractive face, a
little like that of Huxley--without the whiskers, of course. The courage
with which she supports the most brutal bad luck has something quite
creepy about it. Her irony is incessant and inventive; her practical
charity very large; and she is wholly unaware of the philosophical use
to which I put her.
But when I hear the modern generalization about her sex on all sides I
simply substitute her name, and see how the thing sounds then. When on
the one side the mere sentimentalist says, “Let woman be content to
be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of social art and domestic
ornament,” then I merely repeat it to myself in the “other form,” “Let
Mrs. Buttons be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of
social art, etc.” It is extraordinary what a difference the substitution
seems to make. And on the other hand, when some of the Suffragettes say
in their pamphlets and speeches, “Woman, leaping to life at the trumpet
call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp
the sceptre of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought”--in
order to understand such a sentence I say it over again in the amended
form: “Mrs. Buttons, leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and
Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp the sceptre of
empire and the firebrand of speculative thought.” Somehow it sounds
quite different. And yet when you say Woman I suppose you mean the
average woman; and if most women are as capable and critical and morally
sound as Mrs. Buttons, it is as much as we can expect, and a great deal
more than we deserve.
But this study is not about Mrs. Buttons; she would require many
studies. I will take a less impressive case of my principle, the
principle of keeping in the mind an actual personality when we are
talking about types or tendencies or generalized ideals. Take, for
example, the question of the education of boys. Almost every post
brings me pamphlets expounding some advanced and suggestive scheme of
education; the pupils are to be taught separate; the sexes are to
be taught together; there should be no prizes; there should be no
punishments; the master should lift the boys to his level; the master
should descend to their level; we should encourage the heartiest
comradeship among boys, and also the tenderest spiritual intimacy with
masters; toil must be pleasant and holidays must be instructive; with
all these things I am daily impressed and somewhat bewildered. But on
the great Buttons' principle I keep in my mind and apply to all these
ideals one still vivid fact; the face and character of a particular
schoolboy whom I once knew. I am not taking a mere individual oddity, as
you will hear. He was exceptional, and yet the reverse of eccentric;
he was (in a quite sober and strict sense of the words) exceptionally
average. He was the incarnation and the exaggeration of a certain spirit
which is the common spirit of boys, but which nowhere else became so
obvious and outrageous. And because he was an incarnation he was, in his
way, a tragedy.
I will call him Simmons. He was a tall, healthy figure, strong, but a
little slouching, and there was in his walk something between a slight
swagger and a seaman's roll; he commonly had his hands in his pockets.
His hair was dark, straight, and undistinguished; and his face, if one
saw it after his figure, was something of a surprise. For while the form
might be called big and braggart, the face might have been called weak,
and was certainly worried. It was a hesitating face, which seemed to
blink doubtfully in the daylight. He had even the look of one who has
received a buffet that he cannot return. In all occupations he was the
average boy; just sufficiently good at sports, just sufficiently bad at
work to be universally satisfactory. But he was prominent in nothing,
for prominence was to him a thing like bodily pain. He could not endure,
without discomfort amounting to desperation, that any boy should be
noticed or sensationally separated from the long line of boys; for him,
to be distinguished was to be disgraced.
Those who interpret schoolboys as merely wooden and barbarous, unmoved
by anything but a savage seriousness about tuck or cricket, make the
mistake of forgetting how much of the schoolboy life is public and
ceremonial, having reference to an ideal; or, if you like, to an
affectation. Boys, like dogs, have a sort of romantic ritual which is
not always their real selves. And this romantic ritual is generally the
ritual of not being romantic; the pretence of being much more
masculine and materialistic than they are. Boys in themselves are very
sentimental. The most sentimental thing in the world is to hide your
feelings; it is making too much of them. Stoicism is the direct product
of sentimentalism; and schoolboys are sentimental individually, but
stoical collectively.
For example, there were numbers of boys at my school besides myself
who took a private pleasure in poetry; but red-hot iron would not have
induced most of us to admit this to the masters, or to repeat poetry
with the faintest inflection of rhythm or intelligence. That would have
been anti-social egoism; we called it “showing off.” I myself remember
running to school (an extraordinary thing to do) with mere internal
ecstasy in repeating lines of Walter Scott about the taunts of Marmion
or the boasts of Roderick Dhu, and then repeating the same lines in
class with the colourless decorum of a hurdy-gurdy. We all wished to be
invisible in our uniformity; a mere pattern of Eton collars and coats.
But Simmons went even further. He felt it as an insult to brotherly
equality if any task or knowledge out of the ordinary track was
discovered even by accident. If a boy had learnt German in infancy; or
if a boy knew some terms in music; or if a boy was forced to confess
feebly that he had read “The Mill on the Floss”--then Simmons was in a
perspiration of discomfort. He felt no personal anger, still less any
petty jealousy, what he felt was an honourable and generous shame. He
hated it as a lady hates coarseness in a pantomime; it made him want to
hide himself. Just that feeling of impersonal ignominy which most of us
have when some one betrays indecent ignorance, Simmons had when some one
betrayed special knowledge. He writhed and went red in the face; he used
to put up the lid of his desk to hide his blushes for human dignity,
and from behind this barrier would whisper protests which had the hoarse
emphasis of pain. “O, shut up, I say... O, I say, shut up.... O, shut
it, can't you?” Once when a little boy admitted that he had heard of the
Highland claymore, Simmons literally hid his head inside his desk and
dropped the lid upon it in desperation; and when I was for a moment
transferred from the bottom of the form for knowing the name of Cardinal
Newman, I thought he would have rushed from the room.
His psychological eccentricity increased; if one can call that an
eccentricity which was a wild worship of the ordinary. At last he grew
so sensitive that he could not even bear any question answered correctly
without grief. He felt there was a touch of disloyalty, of unfraternal
individualism, even about knowing the right answer to a sum. If asked
the date of the battle of Hastings, he considered it due to social tact
and general good feeling to answer 1067. This chivalrous exaggeration
led to bad feeling between him and the school authority, which ended
in a rupture unexpectedly violent in the case of so good-humoured a
creature. He fled from the school, and it was discovered upon inquiry
that he had fled from his home also.
I never expected to see him again; yet it is one of the two or three
odd coincidences of my life that I did see him. At some public sports or
recreation ground I saw a group of rather objectless youths, one of whom
was wearing the dashing uniform of a private in the Lancers. Inside that
uniform was the tall figure, shy face, and dark, stiff hair of Simmons.
He had gone to the one place where every one is dressed alike--a
regiment. I know nothing more; perhaps he was killed in Africa. But when
England was full of flags and false triumphs, when everybody was talking
manly trash about the whelps of the lion and the brave boys in red, I
often heard a voice echoing in the under-caverns of my memory, “Shut
up... O, shut up... O, I say, shut it.”