to be an indictment of Sex Antagonism, but indeed it is an artless
demonstration of it. It was first published as anonymous, but then came
paragraphs ascribing it to Miss Elizabeth Robins. Now I gather she
admits her authorship. I find little of her fine gloomy talent in it.
Possibly she is only partly responsible.
It is under a confusing number of heads a tirade against the hostility
of man to woman. Instances from all the ages jostle one another. Men
do not even give women fair literary criticism, and this point is
rather stressed. Mr. Birrell disliked the work of Hannah More; Mr.
Max Beerbohm, in a delightful and probably untruthful sketch, says he
cut up and burnt a work by some woman novelist unnamed. But I doubt
if strong sexual feeling underlay either offence. It happened to be a
woman novelist. But Mr. Max Beerbohm has been distinctly unflattering
to various men contemporaries, and I doubt if Mr. Birrell would wallow
in praise of Herbert Spencer. It happens that I have annotated several
of the works of Professor Nicholas Murray Butler in a disparaging
spirit; marginal illustrations are my weakness; and I have been at
great pains to destroy by fire a large nobly printed card, very thick
and strong and stylish, exhibiting one of his aphorisms. It was sent me
by some American admirer we evidently share between us; it was probably
intended to dominate my bedroom or study; and it found a useful rôle at
last, charred but invincible--for fire recoiled from it--as packing for
a picture. I suppose these facts would win me a place side by side with
Mr. Birrell and Mr. Max Beerbohm in a revised edition of _Ancilla’s
Share_. As it is they merely prove that we all have our literary
dislikes. I don’t think Jane Austen has any case against men for lack
of appreciation. I don’t think that any writing woman of Miss Robins’s
generation can complain of anything in her reception by male critics,
except perhaps a too eager welcome.
But I will not embark upon any detailed treatment of the confused riot
of assertions against men in this book. Need one even pretend to take
seriously Miss Robins’s proposition that women would have managed the
world better than men have done, that they would have prevented the
world war and arrested the financial disorganisation of Europe? This
talk of Ancilla’s tremendous nobility in the political field is sheer
nonsense. So far the enfranchisement of women in Britain and America
has had a confusing and belittling influence upon politics. It was the
women’s influence in politics which achieved the crowning silliness of
making Prohibition a part of the constitution of the United States, and
in England women have done nothing to save the face of the countryside
from Mr. Wheatley’s dismal women-enslaving house pustules. The drive
for better education is no stronger than it was before our sisters
had the vote; the drive for more scientific research is perceptibly
feebler. Disarmament is manifestly a question of minor importance to
women. Nevertheless this book proves by its temper what it fails to
prove by its arguments, that sex antagonism is a fact of very great and
increasing importance in our world.
Miss Robins thinks she is at war with men; she is really at war with
sex. She wants to have men restrained, reproached, and incessantly
scolded for things for which they are no more responsible than girls
in a nunnery. Women dress extravagantly, paint their faces, brighten
their eyes, wear high heels, disregard serious for trivial effective
interests. It is the men, she says, who make them do it. It is not. It
is the presence of men in the world which leads to these exaggerations
and intensifications of sexual attraction; but that is a different
matter altogether. If all men were reduced to a helot class, there
would still be magnificent dresses and extreme physical display by
women. And men do not welcome women as a sort of neutral competitors
in their fields of work, because sex imposes a different attitude upon
them. Sex is mentally as important, if not more important, to a normal
man than it is to a normal woman. I am not writing of what ought to be,
but of what is. Sex is an enormous physiological burthen for a woman,
but not, it would seem, in most cases, such a mental burthen, and it
does not last out her lifetime as it does a man’s. But for a normally
constituted man woman is the natural symbol of life, and he cannot live
fully and happily without her companionship and reassurance. She has
a material need of his strength and his greater power over resources,
but he is dependent upon her for gifts of peace and encouragement that
cannot be covenanted for.
Nature’s way has always been a paradoxical way, and it is a fundamental
fact in this connection that as human life struggles up from the
instinctive level we find no prepared adjustment of woman’s mind to
man’s. There is no feminine mind different from and reciprocal to
a man’s mind. They are both, man’s mind and woman’s mind alike, in
the form of pure egotism. As the life of man becomes more civilised
and mental, his need for an adequate helpmeet increases. He can no
longer get along with a woman bought or captured and set to her
special business in the harem. But while his need for a free and
willing helpmeet increases and his demands upon her expand, we find
no corresponding disposition in able women to co-operate with men.
They seem to want to drop their sex and set up as imitations of all
the successful male types. They become a new sex of little aggressive
pseudo-men. They want to wear the wig of the judge and carry the mace
in just the same spirit that makes the dressmaker adapt soldiers’
uniforms and turn the djibba of a dervish into a coquettish garment.
They want to substitute Great Women for Great Men in our histories
and turn out Buddha and Mahomet and Christ in favour of feminine
equivalents. They will presently want a Lady God in a world in which
the male will be a fading memory. It will be a parallel and parodied
world. That is what makes this tumultuous eager book so significant and
so dismaying. It is an incoherent silly sort of book, but it is written
in deadly earnest. It is probably widely representative. It expresses
very typically a vast movement towards non-co-operation which will
involve the profoundest changes in our social life. But it would take
up far beyond the limitations set to newspaper articles to discuss the
possible treaty that may at last end this profound instinctive breach.
LIII
LIVING THROUGH: THE TRUTH ABOUT AN INTERVIEW
6.9.24
It is a foolish thing for a writer to see an interviewer. Other men
may want an intermediary to tell the world of their thoughts and
intentions, but a writer should be able to do his own telling. Yet I am
always falling again into this folly.
They come along with such nice introductions. They are so young and
respectful and reassuring. They do not make it clear that they mean to
turn your unguarded civilities into an article until quite at the end
of the encounter.
And then arrives the interview, with one’s casual suggestions made into
oracular statements, clothed in uncongenial and sometimes horrible
phrases, and mixed up with one’s visitor’s ideas and--amplifications.
And everybody takes notice of it and judges one by it. One’s writings
may be as copious as the Nile in flood, but nobody ever seems to get
concerned about what one says in _them_. But let loose an interview,
and people quote your alleged utterances as though they were your most
polished thoughts, write articles rubbing in the young gentleman’s
choicest phrases, preach sermons reproving your unwonted expressions.
They seem to feel that at last they have really got you.
I write with one occasion fresh in my mind. A little while ago an
interviewer told the world that I said the next few years will be an
age of fun--the world was tired of tragedy. For my own part I was to
write funny books henceforth.... I shall probably never hear the last
of that.
Oddly enough I do not remember that particular interviewer at all
distinctly, nor what friend’s introduction it was let him in on me. I
shouldn’t know him again. But I do remember the conversation to which
he gave this astonishing twist. I remember my train of thought because
it is one that has been rather frequently with me nowadays.
He had tried to get me talking of the extravagant horrors of the Next
Great War. I suppose he thought I should talk impossible rubbish about
bombs as big as houses and whole cities destroyed by poison gas and
so forth, and he would be able to retail this monstrous stuff half
jeeringly and half credulously. At any rate, I found myself talking
of the improbability of there ever being a war in Europe even so
mechanically destructive as the last war. The Great War had been
the explosion of a vast accumulation of energy, moral and social as
well as material. Europe might, and probably would, bicker, murder,
bomb, massacre, and starve, but for another generation at least she
would not have either the spirit or the discipline or the material
to produce such munitions and such wide-sweeping concerted action as
devastated her in the Great War. She is morally and physically bankrupt
and prostrate. She may go on sinking, as Asia Minor sank, back even
to barbarism. Even if she does not do so, it will take forty or fifty
years to reassemble energy for another such world-wide outbreak.
I went on to talk of the disappointment of the peace. Which had failed
us most, intelligence or moral force? Both had failed us. For four
years now Europe had been disintegrating. This poor League of Nations
at Geneva, snubbed and brow-beaten by the French and Italians, who
belonged to it and did not believe in it, and distrusted and hated by
the excluded Russians and Germans, seemed to confirm the futility of
any constructive effort. Things grew worse instead of better. Tariffs,
currency manipulation, the cost of armaments, were destroying urban and
industrial life under our eyes. The parasitic speculator flourished;
the peasant in his self-centred way held on; the rest faded out. If one
did not foresee another Great War one foresaw the certainty of endless
little ones.
And so talking, and perhaps a little forgetful of my hearer, sitting
almost knee to knee, intent to translate whatever he could catch of my
talk and hand it out in his own phrases and colouring, I recalled a
conversation I had had quite recently in Paris with my friend Philippe
Millet, who is now dead. We were old friends. We had talked about the
affairs of the world in Paris both before the war and during the war
and at Washington during the Conference; and even in 1921 at Washington
we could still believe that the Western world in which we were born
and by which we lived might yet make an effort sufficiently creative
and generous to save itself and develop a new and greater phase of
civilisation. I was then publicly denouncing the French for their
trust in submarines and Senegalese, but that made no difference in our
mutual good will. He understood the spirit that moved me. But this
last summer, when we met for the last time, Millet was an ailing and
disillusioned man.
“My dear Wells,” he said, “you expect too much of this world.
In the early part of the war there was splendid heroism and
devotion--especially among the young. And they died. That was tragedy.
But there is no tragedy now. There is nothing left great enough in
Europe now for tragedy. It is a comedy now, a grotesque comedy of
haggling and bargaining while the ship sinks. The sinking makes no
difference. Absurd and preposterous people will still remain absurd and
preposterous, even when they are running about on a sinking ship that
they will not even observe to be sinking.” It was a point of view I had
been approaching, but which it needed the push of his assertion for me
to reach. It is a seizing and desolating point of view.
Suppose it is true that this system in which we live in Europe,
the system of national sovereignty reacting upon an economic system
of privately owned, profit-seeking capital, is entirely unteachable
and inadaptable. Suppose its competitions are incurably destructive.
Suppose there is indeed nothing sufficient to arrest this decay.
Suppose that in consequence all Europe has to go on breaking down as
Russia has broken down, as Germany breaks down, as Poland and Hungary
will probably soon break down, with no sufficient attempt at transition
or reconstruction, then what are we to do--we who have some vision
of what is happening? How are we going to live through it? Whole
generations may have to live through it.
I think that we are justified in saving ourselves as far as possible. I
think we are bound to do whatever we can to salvage science and art and
social experience against the days when the breakdown reaches its final
phase and a real rebuilding is possible. I think we have to do all
we can to maintain and extend an educational process and educational
methods that will lay the foundations of a new order, a civilisation
of service. And to do such things at all effectively we must keep our
minds as sweet as we can and press our purposes as good-temperedly as
possible.
“Grotesque comedy”!--in a world of that quality we must not simply
“live dangerously,” but humorously. With aggressive wealth and canting
patriotism floundering destructively about us, in an atmosphere of
catchwords and wild misconceptions, with masses of people angry,
distressed, and misinformed, and with worse to follow, the straight
path to martyrdom is a mere evasion of our responsibilities. You cannot
make a new world in gaols and exile; you must make it in schools and
books, in Legislatures and business affairs, humorously, obstinately,
and incessantly. This monstrous, distressful, pathetic, but
preposterous social disarticulation is too intricate and complicated
for any simple act or any simple formula to avail. We must all do what
we can, but our best efforts may, after all, be not so much right as
_right-ish_. It would be hard enough to struggle in a world in which
other people did not understand, but in which we at least were sure
we were right; it is infinitely harder to struggle, as many of us are
doing now, with a realisation that our own understanding is limited and
faulty.
In such circumstances a jest, laughter, may come as relief, as
illumination. Of all men of modern times, I am inclined to think
Lincoln was the greatest. He held on; he, more than anyone, saved the
unity of the New World. And throughout the worst of that dark and weary
struggle against disruption he joked, he told stories. Nobody has ever
attempted yet to make an anthology of those extraordinary stories.
But they were of infinite benefit to him and the world. They kept him
supple. They saved him from the rigor of a pose.
And now, in still darker and more perplexing times, our need for the
flexible reconciliations of humour is still greater....
To this effect I thought aloud in the presence of the bright young man
who had come to make an interview out of me. He thanked me profusely,
won my foolish permission to write something about our “most inspiring”
talk, and went out to report to the world that the notorious prophet
foretold an age of fun, and was, so to speak, painting his nose for the
festival.
LIV
THE CREATIVE PASSION
13.9.24
Do men and women generally want a better world than this?
Do they want a world free from war, general economic security, a higher
level of general health, long life, freedom and hope for everyone,
beauty as the common quality of their daily lives?
The conventional answer to that question, especially if you put it to a
public meeting with the appropriate gestures, is “Of course they do.”
But the true answer is, “Not much!”
They may do so when they read an inspiring book by the fireside or
hear a rousing speech, but they do not do so all round the twenty-four
hours, or, indeed, at any time when there is any possibility of helping
to realise such generous desires. “They,” I write, but I should write
“we.” For we all are much of the same quality; the tallest man in the
world is not much more than twice the height of the shortest, and the
crime for which the murderer dies is just the concrete realisation of
the saint’s flash of anger. We are all but very little above egotism;
our passions are warm only when they are immediate. I do not believe
there has ever been a man who has lived steadfastly, continuously,
and completely in pursuit of great ends. We are all vain, amenable to
flattery, stirred by physical impulses, by the competitive instinct and
jealousy, by anger at opposition, liable to fatigue, irritation, and
uncontrollable and sometimes quite unaccountable fluctuations of motive.
Simple people like to believe there are Great Men in the world who are
altogether above this tangle of drive and impulse. But indeed there are
no such divinities.
What do we all find in our hearts? An immense self-love, a tremendous
concentration of our attention upon our personal drama, physical
cravings bare and physical cravings disguised and sublimated, desire to
possess, desire for securities, and such-like fear-begotten desires,
a desire for praise and approval and an instinctive dread of the
disapproval and hostility of our fellow-men, an aggressive pride and
self-assertion so soon as fear is allayed. We find, too, imitative
impulses, competitive impulses--jealousy. In most cases there is also
an extension of our egotism to cover our offspring, our dear ones, our
friends and near kin. It is an extension of our egotism rather than a
suppression of it. Is not that the drive and quality of most of our
living?
How much of that complex of motives can be used to bind men together
into a civilised state? One can no doubt play upon their fears,
represent the dangers of conquest and cruelty by hostile peoples so
vividly as to make them fight and compel others to fight for them
in great wars, rally them to the flag in a state of panic, fill them
with that frantic distrust and hate of strangers which is the basis of
vulgar “Patriotism.” With a little coercion one may even get them to
pay national taxes under the influence of these same mass-fears. The
human animal is a semi-social animal, and though you cannot stampede
it, as the American bison used to be stampeded, to rush over cliffs in
a heaped herd-suicide, or like the Russian lemming to swarm into the
sea and be drowned; yet it can be got moving in masses for collective
ends, either good ends or bad ends, in an only very slightly rational
manner.
But though these human motives I have cited so far do serve to keep us
human beings together in smaller and larger communities with a sort of
mutual restraint and help and tolerance, they supply no real force for
any progressive betterment of human relations, and still less do they
supply any driving force to organise and maintain a higher order of
civilisation throughout the world.
As soon as the mass urgency subsides we tend to relapse into our own
little personal lives of eating, drinking, and “having a good time,”
of “getting on,” of posing to ourselves and others, of thinking and
talking ourselves into agreeable states of self-approval, of doing
pleasantly spiteful things to people we dislike. And if there is
nothing more in our human composition than these common impulses of
the everyday life, this coarse stuff of our common humanity, then all
our talk and writing about a world peace and a higher civilisation
is just dream stuff and nonsense. If that is all we are then we have
no more chance of escaping more wars, more famines and disorders,
cruelties, and diseases than a trainload of hogs bound for Chicago has
of escaping the stockyard. None of the hogs may like the journey to the
stockyard, or their experiences when they get there; that does not help
them in the slightest degree to escape their destiny.
But there is something more in humanity than this, and it is this
something more that transfuses all our life, our politics, our business
and social organisation, with the colour of romance and the quality of
a great adventure. Let me take two common incidents to show the kind of
“something more” that I mean--the something more in which all our hopes
reside.
It is night on the embankment of a river that flows through a great
city, and a commonplace youngster leans over the parapet watching and
thinking. Great warehouses, tall buildings, a tower or so, three or
four graceful bridges, one beyond the other, set with bright lights
and bearing a luminous traffic, drop their images into the stream, and
each light they bear makes a long, slightly wavering reflection upon
the smooth black water. A little steam-launch, just blackness and a red
head-lamp, fusses by. As it passes it tears through these tranquil
banks of lamp reflections, drags a trail of startled and trembling
shreds of light behind it, flings them apart, elongates them, re-unites
them, weaves them into a dancing pattern that changes every moment into
a fresh intricacy. Splash, splash, splash, comes the impact of the
little boat’s wash against the embankment. The youngster, struck with a
strange wonder of beauty, watches these changes, tries to follow them,
tries to detect the law of their dexterous, wonderful rearrangements.
All the heat and egotism of his personal life are forgotten. He is
lifted outside all our everyday scheme of motives. He is possessed by
the desire to know and understand.
Every one of us has had such moments of pure mental desire. For most
of us they pass; we are too busy and preoccupied. Some few of us they
seize upon and make into those devotees of inquiry, men of science.
Now take my second instance, a row of yards behind a row of mean houses
in the same great city. Scarcely one of these yards is neglected or
purely utilitarian. In more than half of them are evidences of effort
to make some sort of garden or arbour or such-like pleasant and orderly
arrangement. You rarely see people playing in these yards or resting in
them; they are overlooked by a railway and very noisy. But nevertheless
there you have the plainest evidence of an impulse to order and make,
the rudiment of the garden-making, house-building impulse. In most
of these yards it has been an unprofitable, useless, and perhaps
disappointing effort, but it has been at work there. In nearly
every man and woman there is something of this same garden-making,
arbour-building impulse. Here again is a second impersonal motive to
which we can turn from the personal and jealous passions that commonly
possess us. It is an ennobling motive; witness the face of a skilful
painter or carpenter intent upon his work.
Now this desire for knowledge and the impulse to make are the really
hopeful creative forces in human life. They are the something more and
the something different, on which I base all my hopes. Submerged and
undeveloped, overridden by competition, fear, jealousy, vanity, they
are yet to be found in nearly all of us. The aim of true education is
to release them, nourish them, give them power and the possibility of
co-operation. In this possibility lies our sole hope that the ultimate
fate of mankind, now packed in its nationalist trucks upon the railroad
of nationalism, warfare, and economic selfishness, will not be the same
as that of those hogs upon their way to Chicago.
LV
AFTER A YEAR OF JOURNALISM: AN OUTBREAK OF AUTO-OBITUARY
20.9.24
Fifty-four articles have I written in the past twelve months and this
will be the fifty-fifth and last. I desist. I turn over the book
into which my secretary with a relentless regularity has pasted them
all. Some I like; most seem to be saying something quite acceptable
to me, but imperfectly in a rather ill-fitting form; some are just
bad. My admiration for the masters of journalism has grown to immense
proportions after these efforts. Their confidence! Their unstrained
directness! Their amazing certainty of their length! And their
unfaltering quality!