THE ENGLISHWOMAN AND THE ARTS
The recognition accorded in previous chapters to the good
Englishwoman’s claims and virtues has, I hope, dispelled any impression
that they are the work of a mind befogged with old masculine
prejudices, for I must begin this chapter with a confession that with
regard to the arts I hold a view which is not too complimentary to
women. However, many women of judgment admit its truth, so that the
indignation of a few will leave me unrepentant. The view is, simply,
that given roughly the same environment and training men are far better
creative artists than women. To inquire fully into the reasons for this
would be a long matter, for they are complex and, in some measure,
below the external surface of personality: it is for the psychologist
to dig them out. But I claim the fact to be sufficiently proved by
the record of history, which shows that for one even capable woman
artist there are ten men at least, and that among the company of the
sublime masters, unless we adopt Samuel Butler’s absurd theory of the
authorship of the Odyssey, there is not a single woman. That this is
due simply to the long oppression of the sex and the denial to it of
equal opportunity with men cannot for a moment be admitted. There have
been women enough to show that, given the talent and the inspiration,
the sex has had ample scope to reach its full capacity in the arts. Yet
its performance, in spite of all that brilliant individuals may have
achieved, has not come within measurable distance of the performance
of men. It does seem as if the capacity for physical creation which is
woman’s pride and burden has stood in the way of that other creation—so
analogous in its ecstasies and its agonies to childbearing—for which
men have proved themselves peculiarly suited. Where the subtle
difference, the little falling-off, exactly comes is difficult to
determine, even on a careful comparison of the two sexes: no particular
gift belongs to one which may not belong to the other. Yet, to whatever
art you look, be it poetry, music or painting, on a general survey the
work of men sweeps right up to a lofty pinnacle beside which the work
of women is but a moderate hill.
Possibly, for so it seems to me, a man’s imagination, like his muscular
frame, is an engine of far greater potential energy than a woman’s,
and far less tied by the limitations of a particular individuality. A
man, in his creative, as well as his reflective, thought can soar out
of himself to that _species æternitatis_ which is the only point of
view for the great artist as well as for the philosopher. Few women
can follow him thither, and when they do, the struggle and effort of
the flight seem to weaken their imaginative energies. Beatrice reached
paradise after death by her virtues: she would never, like her lover,
have reached even the Purgatorio alive by the force of her artistic
imagination. While I insist on it, I shall not labour the point. In
the England of Shakespeare, Milton, Purcell, Reynolds, Gainsborough,
Raeburn and Constable, the sex represented by Christina Rossetti,
Elizabeth Browning, the Brontës, George Eliot, Angelica Kauffmann, Miss
Ethel Smyth, yes, even the one and only Jane Austen, can only adopt an
attitude of respect and, if they are true artists, of reverence for
masculine artistic achievement. Also, what is true of creative art I
believe to be true of interpretative. There is not, indeed, the same
difference between the highest achievements of the two sexes in the
interpretative sphere: Mrs Siddons balances Kean; Ellen Terry, Henry
Irving; Melba, Sims Reeves; Beatrice Harrison, Leonard Borwick. Yet
in the general survey, the advantage of the men preponderates: whether
as actors, singers or instrumentalists they have more vigour, a finer
mental grasp of the work they are interpreting, a firmer touch and that
greater power of soaring above their own personalities into that realm
where beauty walks unhampered by the flesh.
After which lordly pronouncement, a more combative member of her sex
might retort, it is hardly necessary to continue this chapter: pray
pass blandly on to some other field in which you allow us a fuller
measure of accomplishment. But that I reply—mentally spreading out my
hands with the traditional gesture of deprecation—would be a great
mistake. I should not like to be misapprehended in a fit of momentary
pique. Of female accomplishment even in the arts, as Henry James might
have said, I abound in recognitions. An enthusiastic admirer of Jane
Austen and the Brontës, who has publicly and unreservedly praised the
work of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross and the autobiographical art
of Miss Ethel Smyth, who has melted before Lady Hallé’s phrasing and
Gerhardt’s tone cannot justly be accused of prejudice against woman
artists. If I deny supremacy or equality in artistic achievement, up to
the present moment, I have every respect for feminine accomplishment,
and I put no bounds to my belief in the amplitude of its future,
especially when the pen is its weapon. Transcendent musical genius
seems to be denied growth upon our soil. We have lost, if we ever had
it, our natural melody; our passions do not consume us wholly and our
dreaming is too shot with the practical. Where our men have not risen
high, our women, though a surpassing voice may here and there be born,
are not likely to soar. As for painting and the other plastic arts,
well, one can only wait in hopes of something better from women than
they have yet been able to give us. But our women can write, heaven
knows, though many of them write too much, and where the passionate
intensity and the transfiguring imagination of an Emily Brontë is
present the result is unqualified greatness, as surely as the work is
a masterpiece when the shrewd observation and the elegance of a Jane
Austen illuminate it. So perhaps I may be allowed to continue, not in
expatiation on the Englishwoman’s contribution to our national art,
but in the consideration of the arts generally in relation to the good
Englishwoman. Besides, to tell the truth, there are more complaints to
be made. I regret them, but they are just, so let us proceed with a
thoroughly unpleasant chapter.
The lowest common denominator of artistic taste among those who
claim to be educated is indeed low in this country, but that is not
surprising, for it is the same in every country; and those who are
inclined to lift up their hands in horror at the philistinism of their
countrymen, while gushing over the higher artistic standards of other
nations, are singularly beside the mark. They are usually applying
different standards in one judgment, comparing what is common in the
one case with what is remarkable in the other, forgetting that, if
masterpieces are in question, England stands below no country in the
world save possibly in music, and ignoring the M. Jourdains, the M.
Perrichons, the Buchholtz families and other ordinary folk at which
the artists of all nations have habitually poked fun. What we have not
got is some compensating national felicity in the domain of art, such
as the German sensitiveness to musical beauty, the French aptitude for
elegant diction, the histrionic talent of the Italian or, possibly, the
Spanish gift of rhythmical movement. The unprejudiced foreigner could
hardly be struck by any national accomplishment of this kind among
English people, whose most obvious national quality is their admirable
capacity for practical action. This holds true even of our women, and
the point I am inclined to make is that this is strange when it is
considered that a greater proportion of educated women practise, albeit
with one finger, some art or another in England than in any other
country. This is partly due to educational tradition and partly to the
greater independence of Englishwomen. For many generations educational
tradition has laid stress on the importance of “accomplishments” in
the upbringing of a girl, while administering the same in homoeopathic
doses and insisting on a more than Greek moderation in the enthusiasm
with which they were to be embraced. Most of us remember the faint
and ladylike water colours of a great-grandmother, who would have
blushed as much to paint anything resembling a picture seen with an
artist’s eye as she would to have infused a breath of passion into the
ditties she so artlessly sang to the harp or to the guitar. Squire
Western wanted nothing but a few old English melodies from Sophia’s
piano, and it is not likely that Mr Woodhouse’s taste in music was any
higher. Accomplishments were “very nice” for a girl, adding to her
attractions, but art was quite a different thing, most unladylike,
an affair for not too reputable men, beset with temptations to every
kind of depravity. And if women were so bold as to write anywhere but
in albums they were well advised to do so anonymously, as did Miss
Edgworth, Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. During the nineteenth century,
of course, this tradition grew fainter, and for the present generation,
with their eurhythmics, their ballet dancing and their self-expression,
it has become most admirably attenuated, so that there is good hope
of its complete disappearance in the future. We are coming to look on
education for girls as well as for boys as a training for a definite
end rather than as an affair of landscape gardening. Nevertheless, the
old tradition still lingers in our drawingrooms and schoolrooms. While
it is generally agreed that no boy is in any need of accomplishments
to fulfil his destiny in the world, these doubtful benefits are still
pressed indiscriminately upon boys’ sisters in the belief that there
is some value for a woman in having acquired, even against her will,
a feeble amateurishness in one or more of the arts. Only when it is
generally recognised that unless art is spontaneous, unless it is a
freely chosen medium for an honest self-expression, it is utterly
and absolutely valueless, in fact non-existent, will the standard of
artistic taste in this country begin to rise.
The tradition, at all events, has made Englishwomen great dabblers
in the arts, and they have been assisted in carrying this dabbling
beyond their schooldays by their independence which is younger than
the tradition. By this independence—for the good of our nation may
it never grow less—they go on sketching tours, set up studios in
Chelsea, invade foreign _ateliers_ unattended, trip off to foreign
_conservatoires_ free from the tethering ropes which still attach the
native pensionnaires to censorious hearths. Never was there such a
nation of woman painters and sketchers and etchers, singers, players,
music-teachers, journalists and novelists as ours. Yet, for all their
quantity, the quality which they achieve is disheartening. Why is
it? What do they lack? Is it the furious energy of concentration, is
it discontent with easy achievement, is it honesty, is it vision, is
it passion? Or is it simply that, except in rare instances, they are
weak, birds of short flight who cannot sustain the upward sweep of more
powerful masculine pinions? The attainments of a few exceptional women
artists go a little way to atone for the shortcomings of the multitude.
Here, at least, there is room for progress on the part of Englishwomen
during the remainder of the century. Let them throw off the last
remnant of hampering tradition and use their increasing independence to
better purpose.
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of women’s influence
in the formation of taste: if men are the dynamos, women are the
distributors. As mothers, as sisters, as wives, their mental energies
are playing continuously on the plastic material of their immediate
surroundings. Men, as a rule, are only intellectually affected by the
artistic views of their fellow men, but the likes and dislikes of women
work themselves into the most intimate fibres of domestic life. The
decoration of a house, its intimates, its conversation, its amusements,
its entertainments reflect far more of the woman than of the man who,
if he is not satisfied, prefers to seek a freer artistic atmosphere
outside his own doors than to attempt the almost impossible task of
bringing it with him into an unreceptive household. The position is not
one to be regretted, for women should be the source of beauty as man of
protection and maintenance; but the comparative dryness of this source
in England is remarkable, seeing the amount of time and money spent
upon accomplishments and the multitudes of our women who play, sing and
draw all over the world.
When I consider the drawingrooms and diningrooms that English women
will complacently regard, the futile pictures upon the walls, the
tasteless, shapeless ornaments, and, above all, the absence of
harmonious finish which makes their household gods, where they do not
blatantly display a common origin in Tottenham Court Road, appear a
hasty collection from the junk-shop round the corner rather than a
successful combination of effects on an artistic plan—on this count
alone I cannot think this remonstrance overstated. The pity is all the
greater in that we start with so many advantages. The hideous stiffness
of the Germans and the rather uncomfortable formality of the French
is not ours. It is natural to us to be comfortable, we make our rooms
look as if they were lived in, we have thrown off Victorian dinginess
for cheerful colours, we have a magnificent tradition in furniture;
yet with all this, while we often achieve the pleasantly habitable,
we rarely achieve the completely artistic. There is really no
impossibility in this achievement: all we want is a finer eye, a nicer
discrimination, a higher standard of design in essentials and a greater
regard for elegance and harmony in appurtenances. We are too contented,
at present, with the merely pretty or the baldly useful; we buy without
criticism, we replace with inconsequence and, worst of all, we inherit
with effusion. Our Englishwoman will go out sketching-block in hand to
capture the delicate contours of our English hills and our English
clouds, and strive to mix in her palette the exquisite harmonies that
blend in English heaths and lanes and bricks, yet she will return to
stare without loathing at furniture which violates every canon of
proportion and colours that cry aloud in their disagreement, as if
art was all very well in the fields and woods but wholly out of place
in a comfortable home of England. To make matters worse, some efforts
to introduce art have been dolefully inartistic, as the reproachful
epithet of “arty” in our dictionary too painfully shows. The word
“art” itself is suspect to the English, carrying with it a suspicion
of artificiality and pose. In the home, at least, let us substitute
for it “grace and harmony”; where these are present the result will be
artistic. There are sensitive women, women of taste, enough who know
this, but their influence does not radiate. We want the energy of these
women to be formative and reformative: we want the arts and crafts of
this country permeated with their good influence, to counteract the
influence of commercial man who makes cheaply and badly what he can
sell with ease. This would be an accomplishment worthy of the name.
The state of domestic music is little better. Here again it is the
woman who sets the tone. Think of the thousands of English pianos
tinkling at this moment, of the wheezing of countless gramophones, and
the warbling of a myriad drawing room ditties—with what tune does it
fill the shuddering earth?
For whom do ballad concerts flourish, for whom do melodic journeymen
pour out machine-made progressions of sixths, ninths, and elevenths to
sentimental lyrics?
Chiefly for women.
Who are those who delight to proclaim that they “know a lovely garden”
or to inquire in flat tones of musical interrogation where the pink
hands they knew beside the Shalimar have got to?
Chiefly women.
For whom has the wearisome infinity of ragtime assaulted humanity?
Again for women.
Who was Chaminade and for whom did she spin her inanities?
A woman who knew what women wanted.
At whom do Jewish violinists ogle while they saw out emotional waltzes
through the meaty atmosphere of restaurants?
At women.
And who exclaim that “he plays divinely, my dear?”
Women again.
Oh, the musical repertoire of the English home, how well I used to know
it! Its “Erotik,” its “Schmetterling,” its “Pierrette,” its Nocturne in
E flat on the piano; its “Humoreske,” its “Benedictus,” its “Serenata,”
its “Cavatina” on the violin; and its songs, its “Rosary,” its “Indian
Love Lyrics,” its little archnesses by Hermann Löhr, its spasms by
Frank Lambert, its sobs by Guy d’Hardelot—really I have often wished
that I lived in the good old days of “The Battle of Prague” which at
least made no pretensions to be music. The repertoire was always the
same, rehearsed in the drawing-room, produced in the village hall
with amazing inefficiency and complete self-satisfaction. Standard of
execution or criticism there was none: amiable intention was allowed
to suffice, and fingers could slither, bows wobble and voices squeeze
tremulously out of constricted larynxes without apology. Have we any
cause for pride in these things? And the teachers of music, can we
praise them? Why do we attempt so much and achieve so little? No wonder
Miss Ethel Smyth craved for a climate where music, even in the family,
was an art and not an accomplishment: no wonder that she borrowed five
shillings from the village postman to go to London concerts till an
infuriated father, after kicking in the panel of her bedroom door, gave
way and allowed her to fly to Leipzig. For the love of music let us try
again now the war is over. We suffer from too much bad music. The women
of England are mainly responsible, for I admit that the bulk of the
men don’t care; surely women could effect a little improvement. If we
cannot have better music all at once, perhaps we might have less. If I
were Minister of Fine Arts, I would close all pianos and violin cases
but those of certified musicians, for a year, except for the playing
of _bona fide_ scales and exercises, and no singing but of _solfeggi_
should be heard from private individuals, a fine of forty shillings
being inflicted for each breach of the regulations. Meanwhile Sir
Thomas Beecham should have a free hand and unlimited money wherewith to
conduct a cleansing and inspiring propaganda for the reform of musical
taste in the home. The village entertainments of a year hence would be
superb. Raff’s “Cavatina” would at least be played in tune.
In letters, at all events, there is no need to be so irritable. In this
domain of art, ornamented by no nation more signally than our own, the
critic of to-day may discern so much that has been notably done and so
much that is indubitably promised that, in regarding our Englishwomen
of letters, he may surrender himself to a benevolent glow of gratitude
and admiration. With the names of Virginia Woolf, Clemence Dane, Rose
Macaulay, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, “Somerville and Ross,”
Elizabeth of the German Garden, Jane Harrison and Evelyn Underhill
occurring agreeably, among many others, to his mind, he might well be
content to succumb to the temptation of gracefully acknowledging in
this art a divided empire and withdrawing with a courtly bow. But he
would be neglecting his duty. There is a goodly body of women upon
the heights, but it is nothing to the multitudes still ambling in
the sentimental lanes of the Valley of Twaddle. The home, the home
is the test, the bookstall counter, the lending library, the beach
on a summer’s day. Turn thither the eye, and who shall say that the
Englishwoman has reached the limits of progress? In this country and
in America a mass of second-rate novels is yearly produced which it is
appalling to contemplate. For whom are they, and for whom are those
drugs of the mind, the story magazines, produced? Chiefly for women.
The lending library of a seaside town tells a plain enough tale. Which
are the well-thumbed books with dog-eared pages? Not those on whose
title page appears any of the names that I have mentioned above, but
senseless masquerades of artistic fiction, panderings to prurience
and love of sensation, spongy sweets of sentiment and little tarts
of so-called “mystery.” The tale that these shelves tell is that the
bulk of Englishwomen have no wish to think when they read. Books are
to them as a cup of tea—a pleasant narcotic—or as a stick of chewing
gum that can be comfortably sucked for hours in a state of vacuity.
And when they are moved, dear sensitive ladies, who touches their
delicate chords? Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Mrs Barclay. It is no use for
them to retort that the men are just as bad, for it is not true. It is
women who keep up the circulation of the worse popular novelists. The
Englishman who works with his head or his hands reads comparatively
little: his work, exercise, cards, billiards, golf and other sport
leave him too little time. He only sips the cup of sentiment and
sensation of which the woman swallows daily goblets. Also, it is the
man who sets out deliberately to improve his mind far more frequently
than the woman. Men are the chief customers for the “Everyman” editions
and “The Home University Library”; men read technical books and papers
about their hobby, whether it be chess or motor cycling or stamp
collecting or photography, while women at best acquire a new stitch in
knitting; men read the political news in the papers while their wives
snatch up the outer cover with the _feuilleton_.
If only the Englishwoman, in the mass, could learn to take some
pleasure in thinking and to bear thinking in taking her pleasure, the
artistic standards of this country would be raised immeasurably. We
should have better plays in our theatres, for one thing, and—how badly
we want it—better actresses. The stage minx who has a few tricks and
looks pretty might disappear before the disapprobation of her sex, and
learn before she reappeared how to speak and walk and stand still on
the stage. We might evolve again a really great tragic actress or even
a comic one. We have neither of them now. We might, impossible as it
may seem, make some artistic use of the cinema, for that, if anything,
is the haunt of women who find that it saves them even the trouble
of reading. It is well, perhaps, for one’s peace of mind that one
does not stop to imagine the possible appearance in all its nakedness
of the soul to which the bulk of modern films appeals. Would it not
be a distorted impish little thing, with vacuous goggling eyes, a
slobbering mouth and a receding chin? Would it not have a woman’s
form to wriggle in ecstasy as a gigantic tear squeezed out of Mary
Pickford’s magnified eyelid? It is a monstrosity unworthy to exist,
and yet it now thrives amazingly upon its ample diet. In thousands
of halls in towns, villages and cities it is fed every afternoon and
evening with variations of the same crudity which never palls upon its
unregenerate palate. Who can speak of art in England with this vast
daily sacrifice to its negation drawing millions to the unedifying
rites?
And now this unpleasant chapter is ended. Even if it has done no more
than annoy, it has perhaps attained its object, which was to point out
the vast room still left for women in the strengthening and purifying
of our country’s art. The influence of women, when they choose to
exercise it, is so irresistible and so salutary that they cannot
really be injured by an honest complaint of its failure hitherto to
act sufficiently upon national taste and of its tendency, where it is
exercised, to be hampering rather than helpful. The chosen spirits
among Englishwomen who, by general acknowledgment, are pursuing high
ideals with success in the various arts must feel that an injustice
is being done to them by their more numerous sisters. Like ardent
mountain climbers, pressing on towards a far glistening peak, they
must be irritated that the bulk of the party choose to sit down in
Teutonic fashion in some comfortable châlet a few hundred feet up to
imbibe in perfect contentment small beer and smaller lemonade. Nor are
men indifferent. Not at their behest do women lag behind. It is not
their wish that women should be feeble critics possessed of uncertain
standards or of no standards at all, easily misled by tinsel and facile
tears, hypnotised by charlatans, enticed by plausible pedlars of the
cheap and showy, charmed by smooth phrases but repelled by fine ideas,
partial in their views, lazy in their judgments; for men, in their
rambles after the true and the beautiful, often have reason to regret
the rarity of feminine companionship to sympathise and share in these
loftier activities of the mind. Why should man any longer deplore his
masculine solitude? There is nothing now to hinder women from hastening
to his side: their knees are no longer hampered by the trailing skirts
of prejudice and tradition, they have only to put on intellectual
breeches and strike upwards with a will. If they fail there will be no
excuse for them: the reproach of being weaker vessels, not by nature’s
decree nor men’s foolishness, but of their own deliberate choice, will
not be easily avoided. The good Englishwoman has unlimited will and
energy: she may yet, if she wishes, lead the women of the world as well
in artistic cultivation as in practical activity.