THE ENGLISHWOMAN’S MIND
Nobody could fail to be impressed by the physical beauty of young
Englishwomen. It is confined to no class, though better preserved
in the more leisurely. The ball-room and the village green compete
easily with any exhibition of it on the stage. The question now to
be presented is whether an honest observer, presuming him competent
to observe, would be equally impressed with the mental qualities of
our women. The answer, I think, would be extremely doubtful. Our
young beauties, in any case, proudly conscious of their triumph
in the physical test, would be indifferent to the outcome of the
intellectual, if they could even conceive that anyone would be foolish
enough to apply it. A quick brain is not in England regarded as an
enviable possession, which proves it not to be a national one. In his
penetrating first chapter to “Diana of the Crossways” George Meredith
pointed out that "English men and women feel toward the quick-witted of
their species as to aliens—having the demerits of aliens—wordiness,
vanity, shallowness, an empty glitter, the sin of posturing." He might
have added that, so far as women are concerned, quick wits were only
excused by absence of physical attraction, though he implied this
addition in his picture of Diana Warwick in her conflict with public
opinion. George du Maurier contrasted with evident approbation the
beauty of young Vere-de-Veredom with the consoling hideousness of the
three clever Miss Bilderbogies, translating thus into art a thoroughly
English point of view. One can respect this point of view without
adopting it: the British instinct for safety is illustrated by it.
Englishmen may well be suspicious, and Englishwomen jealous, of the
combination of beauty and brains: it is too overwhelmingly powerful and
likely to be disturbing to the peace.
The combination occurs, perhaps, more frequently than is commonly
supposed, but it is such a grave departure from the respected tradition
that we hasten to forget each instance as quickly as possible, to
prevent any danger of a cumulative impression. Yet it is in no spirit
of pandering to the tradition that the Englishwoman’s mind appears
in this chapter unadorned or unexplained by her appearance: it is
simply a matter of convenience. The mind of woman is not legitimately
considered by itself, for the whole, the representative woman is not
purely a function of her mind. Nevertheless, the Englishwoman’s mind,
if not essential to the Englishwoman, exists, and it is growing. It
would be unchivalrous to pass it by without observation. In George
Meredith’s day it was hardly resolved that a woman might have a
mind at all: this in itself is a measure of the later growth, for
on this head, at least, there is now no doubt. The creator of Diana
Warwick represented the Saxon man firmly treading with his heel on
any feminine mental sparks which might set on fire the chips of his
crumbling social structure. His faith in the sex’s capacity for growth
has been justified to-day, when it would be absurd to represent women
as anything but emancipated. Meredith’s view of the men as “pointed
talkers” and the women as “conversationally fair Circassians” is no
longer true. The women of England have made some progress on the upward
route which he hoped that they would take.
At the same time, it will not do to contemplate our ladies as at the
end of their journey instead of very much on the road. Exceptional
women there have always been in this country, but the average woman
still has an average mind, as the exceptional women, who are the
severest critics of their sisters, will be the first to assert.
They are the leaders through the jungle, forced ever to look back
in impatience at the leisurely crowd following in the rear, calmly
accepting the removal of the obstacles with which they have not to
struggle, and far from guessing the need of the mental hatchet which
had so happily cleared them away. It is probably true in all countries,
but certainly in ours, that the necessity of cultivating a mind, even
the latent possibility of doing so, is not apparent to the majority
of women. It is made so easy for them to do without this troublesome
acquisition. They are taught at school just sufficient for them to
fill their probable station, which they do with docility and without
ambition. Neither in their work nor their play have they any sense of
a void aching to be filled up. Indeed what void could there be—unless
it were pecuniary—when there is golf and tennis, bridge, fox trotting
and hesitating, cinema gazing, novel-reading, playgoing to musical
comedies and revues, or, in the most domestic regions, sewing and the
rearing of children to keep them happily in the conviction that life
is full enough without the added burdens of thought and knowledge? Men
call them clever if they dress becomingly or if they can shuffle a
room-full of guests adroitly, throwing conversational shuttlecocks up
in the air for others to sweat in pursuit of: and to them cleverness
appears a minor virtue, seeing the little enthusiasm with which
their admirers regard it compared with their ecstasy over other more
obviously feminine felicities. Or, on a lower scale, what time have
they for any adornment of the mind, when the weekly toil of tending
children and cooking for husbands, or the long days of drudgery at the
factory, so fatigue the body and soul, that the mere bodily adornment
of Sunday is almost too strenuous a reaction, when simple pleasures of
the senses or even simple repose are the only appropriate drugs for
their overstrained systems? Women with minds have still much work to do
in order to give those who have none the leisure to look for them. The
result is that women lag behind, with an unfortunate effect upon our
national appearance. If ever the women overtake the men, much that is
shoddy will disappear from the mental shopwindow? of this country.
So much may be said, I think, by a man without incurring the accusation
of ordinary masculine prejudice. It is less than what is said and felt
by the pioneers among women. That the world, even in England, is still
arranged by men mainly for masculine convenience may be true, and will
remain so as long as women allow most of their thinking to be done for
them, as Miss Ethel Smyth, in her remarkable memoirs, holds that they
do. Yet the enlightened man, though he may prefer that change should
take place slower than the most ardent wish, may look forward with hope
to the time when his convenience may less preponderate and feminine
reverberations will cease to attend his thinking, then fulfilling the
prophecy of the Lady Psyche in Tennyson’s “Princess”:
Everywhere
Two heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the tangled business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life,
Two plummets dropped for one to sound the abyss
Of science, and the secrets of the mind.
In the contemplation of this hope what he now sees before him in
his womankind as a whole is an intellectual plant of idle and
promiscuous growth, capable, as its rarer shoots prove, of the
sturdiest and most luxuriant upward ranging, but content for the
most part to twine itself, like the convolvulus, round the first
support offered to its tendrils, a house, a domestic affection, the
crumbling tower of antiquated beliefs, the hazily pointing sign-post
of a dubious philosophy or the hardier neighbouring weeds which are
rooted in passions and desires. From these more handy and material
supports it will not tear itself away to grow towards the sun with
lithe, independent shoots disdainfully forcing their way past all
encumbrances. The rarer instances where from choicer ground and more
livening influences this species pushes a vigorous head into the skies
serve only to accentuate the lazy lowliness of the general stock. It
seems to shrink from the light of ideas, or, where the attraction of
the light is too imperious to be resisted, it lifts a shoot gingerly
upwards only to curl a tendril lovingly round the first comfortable
fact met with in the short upward progress, and to adhere to it
gracefully, quite satisfied with the result of its exertion. Or let
us vary the illustration. Men, in their intellectual journey, can
contemplate with satisfaction at the first glance some vast mansion
of knowledge rising up before them from its solid foundations to all
the infinite variety of its higher tracery. That they cannot grasp the
whole does not trouble them, for they quickly see the stages by which
the ascent to greater knowledge will be attained. They are inspired not
bewildered by the lofty prospect, resigning themselves happily to a
study of the bare plan that will enable them to explore the beauties of
the mansion intelligently and in order. The woman, on the other hand,
is appalled by such an approach: the mansion swims before her eyes,
the plan seems a confusing maze of meaningless lines. Her introduction
must proceed on a different method. She must be led in by a side door
through some pleasant alley into one of the rooms of the mansion, all
comfortably furnished with easy chairs and pictures on the walls. Here,
if she is allowed to linger without being too hastily pushed on by the
official guide, her curiosity will be aroused. The assimilation of one
room will prompt her to a timid sally into the next one, and so by
good luck, if she is never frightened, she may in time be as much at
home as any other explorer. Yet even then it is questionable whether
she will ever venture out into the main court to gain a comprehensive
view of the whole and of its relation to the surrounding architecture.
Her domestic instinct tells her that she is more at home indoors,
attending to the things which she can touch and see. So she is content
to inhabit an _appartement_ in the palace of truth, as an invalid
pensioner might inhabit a set of rooms in Hampton Court Palace without
ever drinking in the beauty of the whole building. It is only her mind
which so flinches at magnificences and is afflicted with vertigo on
eminences; her heart will take a Mount Everest of difficulties in its
stride as if it were Primrose Hill, and her emotions will carry her
on wings into the clouds without tremors, though she fall in the end
as far and fast as Lucifer. Only when her intellectual dizziness is
conquered shall we find her frequently, clear-headed and exultant, on
the topmost pinnacles of truth, whence she can look down on her more
elderly sisters placidly knitting in the verandah, while the children
are playing hide-and-seek upon the stairs.
The less adventurous spirit of woman in purely mental enterprise is
shown in the besetting sin of our girl students, the tendency to regard
learning as nothing but the accumulation of facts. Women are the most
assiduous crammers: they will work long and desperately to “get up”
texts and facts, they will industriously follow a teacher, memorising
his every word and slavishly following his precepts. Since they are
less lazy than men, mere disgust with drudgery does not tempt them
off the track laid out for them and, in their determination to gain
the end in view, which is usually a concrete one, they plod on and
on, neither looking to the right nor the left, neither lingering nor
venturing up attractive by-ways, lest they should lose the track,
or miss the prescribed turning on the main road. Men try short cuts,
often with disastrous consequences, but the tendency in itself has its
advantages. It trains the mental eye for the lie of the country, so
that the most desultory of male wanderers, though his wanderings do
not lead him very far, may yet acquire some broad impression of the
whole landscape, which is more stimulating to the imagination than a
walk between hedges faithfully performed. But, if a man be tempted to
scoff at this greater docility and timidity of his female companions,
let him reflect that it is very largely due to the fault of his own
kind, a fault which Englishwomen are now bent on clearing away. For
centuries a world made for the convenience of men kept women in leading
strings which are now being cut, though their habit will take long to
eradicate. In their early years, whatever their ultimate aim, men are
put out on the pastures of knowledge like young colts. In their case
who questions the wisdom of sending them to a university? It is assumed
that a general mental training will be of benefit to them in any
profession. Not so with a woman: unless teaching is to be her aim she
will find the training of a university hard to come by, because it has
not become established that a general mental training of the best kind
is as needful for a woman as for a man, and that it is as beneficial
to the community that she should have it. A generation or two of equal
opportunity will work wonders in the comparative aptitudes of the sexes.
Women may well exclaim at the little use men have made of their greater
opportunities: boldness in mental adventure is not a salient virtue of
our men. Still, even in England, the cloud of scouts which precedes
the plodding main army is composed chiefly of men. Women have yet to
prove their equal ability for this service. They have got to improve
themselves in map-reading if they are to enter these ranks, and maps
are only instances of those bogies to most women, abstractions. They
take her beyond the immediate range of vision, beyond the hills on
the horizon about which she feels instinctively that she has no right
to let her imagination play unless the further prospect is displayed
before her physical eye, and she is, therefore, apt to pull a man up
short when he is measuring the distant ground beyond his view and to
bring him back to the church tower in the foreground, if not to the
village pump. For this reason general discussion with English women
is so often fruitless: they cannot get away from the concrete and,
intensely interested as they are in the thing immediately to be done,
they feel at sea in the elaboration of general principle from which
immediate action could be best taken or criticised. So often, too, a
man is brought up short by finding that a woman is winding all his
ideas, which have no immediate attachments to anything within view,
round some visible peg in the vicinity, or is mentally striving to find
the visible peg which she is sure is really the point of attachment.
The worst is when she imagines the peg, quite wrongly, to be stuck
into her own _amour propre_: all argument is then futile, for the two
are hopelessly at cross purposes. When a man is trying to set out a
general point of view and a woman is asking herself meanwhile: “why is
he saying this now and to me?” the chance of mutual comprehension is
slight.
It is this same passionate attachment to the concrete, where ideas
are concerned, which makes women poor critics, though they are keen
observers. If there is one application of the intellect where a
comprehensive outlook is necessary, it is criticism. The individual
judging and the individual thing judged are in themselves such
infinitesimal portions of the whole of reality, that the one cannot
seize the other unless they become magnified in the imagination so
as to display the infinite connection of relations which is the
condition of them both. In woman the personal element so enormously
preponderates, both in her appreciations and her dislikes, that her
critical judgment usually shoots out into the world through a distorted
lens only partially illuminating the objects on which it is bent.
Nevertheless, it may be a sad day for men if this feminine lens is
rectified. The very distortion is one that serves his comfort, since it
focusses so much light upon him and his home. I would not personally
exchange the eye of the English wife and the English mother which sheds
so warm and loving a beam upon the home for any more searching ray
which illuminated a whole distant world and left a home in comparative
darkness. It is hopelessly foolish idealism to wish for the combination
of every virtue in one atom of humanity: we English with our excellent
habit of compromise do not habitually act as if such a thing were
possible. Yet there are certain idealists in this country who, in
their anxiety to secure equality of opportunity for women, seem to
assume that progress can be made without profound changes in the thing
progressing, and as though by taking thought women could attain to
all that men have got without losing some of their own peculiar and
valuable possessions. Unfortunately it is not so. Men and women will
never be practically interchangeable beings, and, perhaps, the limit
of desirable progress would be that any individual should have the
chance of deciding what admixture of the male and female qualities and
possessions will suit him or her best. Freedom of choice is after all
the great essential of liberty: the use of this liberty can only be
well guided by what is greater than liberty, wisdom.
This chapter, I fear, has rather belied its title. We must hark back
to the Englishwoman. Let me make her amends by asserting that if she
pleases she may have as fine a mind as any woman breathing. She has a
naturally quick intelligence, if she be careful not to let its keenness
rust; she has been dowered with common sense and power of imagination
in inverse proportions; in practical matters she has a sure glance for
the best course to be taken, but her vision is hazy where principles
are concerned. Her critical standards are usually as conventional as
her standards of conduct, but she can be strikingly original in action
and will stand up nobly for her convictions. Where she attains to a
measure of intellectual superiority, except at the highest levels,
she is apt to lose her balance, becoming either priggish and cold or
luxuriously vague and mystical. The blue stocking is not typical, but
she is English and she still exists. There was an awful Miss Benger who
invited Charles Lamb and his sister to tea, macaroons and intellectual
conversation, as Charles pathetically describes her in his letter to
Coleridge:
“From thence she passed into the subject of poetry; where I, who had
hitherto sat mute, and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put
in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a
manner. But I was stopped by a round assertion that no good poetry
had appeared since Dr. Johnson’s time.... I here ventured to question
the fact, and was beginning to appeal to names, but I was assured ‘it
certainly was the case’.”
She has her counterpart to-day. She lays down the law, with a steely
glance through her pince-nez, scattering words like “fundamental”
with the self-satisfied air of one distributing sugar-plums to not
very deserving children. She will stultify the very best of critics
by quoting his most foolish passages as oracles, and contrive, where
she admires the right things, to do so for the wrong reasons. The
hazy dabbler is quite as bad, and quite as irritating. She vibrates
like Memnon’s harp to any breath from higher planes, and mistakes
the sympathetic vibrations of her empty head for the sounding of some
organ note of the infinite. Like the shallowest pond she may sometimes
produce the illusion of reflecting the profundity of the heavens,
till a closer examination reveals the mud and the tin kettles such a
very little way below the surface. The good Englishwoman is neither
of these: she has either too great a simplicity or too well developed
a sense of humour, for she hates pretence and is not slow to perceive
it in others. So distrustful is she of artifice that she seldom
shines in the fine rapier-play of witty conversation: her interchange
of ideas may be compared rather to the game of lawn tennis, with
plenty of movement and hard-hitting in it, most balls being returned
from the base line with a well-timed drive, not snappily volleyed
at the net. She is most attractive when a flush of emotion colours
her thinking, showing thus as an effective foil to her mankind who
think unemotionally or wear the mask of indifference to conceal their
sensitiveness. She understands this shyness in Englishmen and overcomes
it so delicately by her sympathy that they glow in her society as the
Dolomite peaks in the sunset. She does this, if she takes any trouble
at all, with a natural simplicity, not with the elaborate study that
Balzac’s Princesse de Cadignan exercised to fascinate her D’Arthez.
The worst of it is that so many Englishwomen neglect their natural
advantages. They forget their minds in thinking of their bodies, their
souls, their duties or their amusements. They are apt, like slatterns,
to trot about the material world in intellectual dressing gowns with
their ideas in curl papers. This is delightful enough for friendly
intimacy, but is calculated to produce a less charming impression in
the wider world. But there is hope in the future. The Englishwoman
is beginning to study herself more intently in the looking-glass.
The result will be what we should expect of an Englishwoman’s
turn-out, quiet and workmanlike, neither fussy nor flimsy, but with an
unmistakable cut and a richness rather of material than of ornament.
But she must submit herself to good tailors who understand her figure,
paying them a good price. No cheap intellectual garment off the peg
will do justice to the natural graciousness of her lines which, for all
their conservatism, Englishmen truly appreciate; and, for all their
grumbles, they will not at heart grudge any trouble or expense in
enhancing its effect.