the root of that proverb. A crowing hen is a disturbance, but so is a
crowing cock. But the hen is not to crow because she only lays eggs,
and because the bulk of hens manage to lay eggs without crowing. They
make, it is true, a peculiar clutter of their own which is just as
disturbing; but that is a thoroughly feminine noise and a dispensation
of Providence; and they don’t do it at all times of the night, and
without a reason for it, as cocks do. But as a matter of fact it is far
more easy to prevent a cock from crowing than a hen from cluttering;
you have only to put a cock in a pen the roof of which knocks his head
whenever he rears himself up to crow and he will remain as silent as
the grave, though he will continue to do that spasmodic duty by his
offspring which is all that nature requires of him. But no such simple
method will stop the cluttering of a hen when her egg is once well and
truly laid; the social disturbance caused by the pomp of masculine
vain-glory is far less inevitable than the disturbance caused by the
circumstances of maternity. Yet the normal masculine claim to pomp of
sound is more readily allowed in our proverbial philosophy than the
occasional feminine claim.
And that is where we have gone wrong; it is really maternity which
under wholesome conditions decides the social order of things; and we
have been fighting against it by putting maternity into a compound
and setting up paternity to crow on the top rail. We have not learned
that extraordinary adaptability to sound economic conditions which we
find in many birds and in a few animals. There exists, for instance,
a particular breed of ostriches, which mates and lays its eggs in a
country where the days are very hot and the nights very cold; and as
it takes the female ostrich some 13 or 14 days to lay all her eggs
and some weeks to incubate, she cannot as she does in other countries
deposit them in the sand and leave the sun to hatch them, because
after the sun has started the process, the cold night comes and kills
them. The mother bird finds, therefore, that she cannot both produce
and nurse her eggs; yet directly they are laid somebody must begin
sitting on them. Well, what does she do? She goes about in flocks,
13 or 14 females accompanied by an equal number of the sterner sex.
And on a given day, all the hens lay each an egg in one nest, and one
of the father birds is selected to sit upon them. And so the process
goes on till all the males are sedentarily employed in hatching out
their offspring. And I would ask (applying for the moment our own
terminology to that wonderfully self-adaptive breed of sociologists)
are not those male ostriches engaged in a thoroughly “manly”
occupation? Could they be better engaged than in making the conditions
of maternity as favourable and as unhampered as possible? Yet how
difficult it is to make our own countrymen see that the strength of a
nation lies mainly--nay, entirely--in eugenics, in sinking every other
consideration for that great and central one--the perfecting of the
conditions of maternity.
But let us come back for a moment to whistling. It is an accomplishment
which, as a rule, men do better than women; it is the only natural
treble left to them after they reach the age of puberty; and they are
curiously proud of it; perhaps, because women, as a rule, have not
the knack of it. Now, the real offence of a woman’s whistling was not
when she did it badly (for that merely flattered the male vanity) but
when she did it well; and no doubt it was because some women managed
to do it well that the proverb I speak of was invented. We should not
have been troubled with such a proverb if crowing hens and whistling
women had been unable to raise their accomplishment above a whisper.
Yet whistling is really quite beautiful, when it is well done; and why
is woman not to create this beauty of sound, if it is in her power
to create it, merely because it finds her in a minority among her
sex? Does it make her less physically fit, less capable of becoming a
mother--less inclined, even, to become a mother? No; it does none of
these things; but it distinguishes her from a convention which has laid
it down that there are certain things which women can’t do; and so,
when the exceptional woman does it, she is--or she was the day before
yesterday--labelled “unwomanly.”
I do not suggest that whistling is a necessary ingredient for
the motherhood of the new race; but, as a matter of fact, I have
noticed that those women who whistle well have, as a rule, strength
of character, originality, the gift of initiative and a strong
organising capacity; and if these things do go together, then surely
we should welcome an increase of whistling as a truly womanly
accomplishment--something attained--which has not been so generally
attained hitherto.
Let us pass now to a much more serious instance of those artificial
divisions between masculine and feminine habits of thought and
action which have in the past seemed so absolute, and are, in fact,
so impossible to maintain. For you can have no code or standard of
manhood that is not intimately bound up with a corresponding code or
standard of womanhood. What raises the one, raises the other, what
degrades the one degrades the other; and if there is in existence,
anywhere in our social system, a false code of manliness, there
alongside of it, reacting on it, depending on it, or producing it, is a
false code of womanliness.
Take, for example, that matter of duelling already referred to, in
relation to the male code of honour, and the manliness which it is
supposed to encourage and develop. You might be inclined to think that
it lies so much outside the woman’s sphere and her power of control,
as to affect very little either her womanliness or her own sense of
honour. But I hope to show by a concrete example how very closely
womanliness and woman’s code of honour are concerned and adversely
affected by that “manly” institution of duelling--how, in fact, it
has tended to deprive women of a sense of honour, by taking it from
their own keeping and not leaving to them the right of free and final
judgment.
Here is what happened in Germany about seven years ago. A young married
officer undertook to escort home from a dance the fiancée of another
officer; and on the way, having drunk rather more than was good for
him, he tried to kiss her. She resented the liberty, and apparently
made him sufficiently ashamed of himself to come next day and beg her
pardon. Whether she would grant it was surely a matter for herself to
decide; she accepted his apology, and there, one would have thought,
the matter might have ended. But unfortunately, several months later,
word of this very ordinary bit of male misdemeanour reached the ears
of the lady’s betrothed. It at once became “an affair of honour”--his
affair, not the lady’s affair--his to settle in his own way, not hers
to settle in her way. Accordingly he calls out his brother officer,
and, probably without intending it, shoots him dead. The murdered
man, as I have said, was married, and at that very time his wife was
in expectation of having a child. The child was prematurely born to a
poor mother gone crazed with grief. There, then, we get a beautiful
economic product of the male code of honour and its criminal effects on
Society; and if traced to its source we shall see that such a code of
honour is based mainly on man’s claim to possession and proprietorship
in woman--for, had the woman not been one whom he looked upon as his
own property, that officer would have regarded the offence very lightly
indeed. But because she was his betrothed the woman’s honour was not
her own, it was his; she was not to defend it in her own way--though
her own way had proved sufficient for the occasion--he must interfere
and defend it in his. And we get for result, a man killed for a petty
offence--the offence itself a direct product of the way in which
militarism has trained men to look on women--a woman widowed and driven
to the untimely fulfilment of her most important social function in
anguish of mind, and a child born into the world under conditions which
probably handicapped it disastrously for the struggle of life.[1]
Now, obviously, if women could be taught to regard such invasions
of their right to pardon offence in others as a direct attack upon
their own honour and liberty--a far worse attack than the act of
folly which gave occasion for this tragedy--and if they would teach
these possessive lovers of theirs that any such intrusion on their
womanly prerogative of mercy was in itself an unforgivable sin against
womanhood--then such invasions of the woman’s sphere would quickly come
to an end. They might even put an end to duelling altogether.
See, on the other hand, how acceptance of such an institution trains
women to give up their own right of judgment, to think even that
honour, at first hand, hardly concerns them. Is it not natural that, as
the outcome of such a system from which we are only gradually emerging,
we should hear it said of these conventionally womanly women that they
have “a very low sense of honour.”
Low it must naturally be. For that attitude of complaisant passivity
on the part of the woman while two male rivals fight to possess her is
the normal attitude of the female in the lower animal world; but it is
an attitude from which, as the human race evolves into more perfect
self-government, you see the woman gradually drawing away. While it
pleases something in her animal instincts, it offends something in her
human instincts; and while to be fought over is the highest compliment
to the female animal, it is coming to be something like an insult to
the really civilized woman--the woman who has the spirit of citizenship
awake within her. One remembers how Candida, when her two lovers are
debating which of them is to possess her--brings them at once to their
senses by reminding them that it is not in the least necessary that
she should be possessed by either of them; but she does in the end
give herself to the one who needs her most. That may be the truest
womanliness under present conditions; as it may once have been the
truest womanliness for the woman to give herself to the strongest. But
it may be the truest womanliness, at times, for the woman to bring men
to their senses by reminding them that it is not necessary for her to
give herself at all. To be quite sure of attaining to full womanliness,
let her first make sure that she possesses herself. In the past men
have set a barrier to her right of knowledge, her right of action,
her right of independent being; and in the light of that history it
seems probable that she will best discover her full value by insisting
on right of knowledge, on right of way, and on right of economic
independence. So long as convention lays upon women any special and
fundamental claim of control--a claim altogether different in kind
and extent from the claim it lays upon men--so long may it be the
essentially womanly duty of every woman to have quick and alive within
her the spirit of criticism, and latent within her blood the spirit of
revolt.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] It may be noted that the war has caused a recrudescence of this
brutal “code of honour” in our own country. But here it has not
troubled to resume the obsolete form of the duel. The “defender of his
wife’s honour” simply commits murder, and the jury acquits.
USE AND ORNAMENT
(OR THE ART OF LIVING)
(1915)
I suppose you would all be very much surprised if I said that not use
but ornament was the object of life.
I refrain from doing so because so definite a statement makes an
assumption of knowledge which it may always be outside man’s power to
possess. The object of life may for ever remain as obscure to us as its
cause. It seems, indeed, likely enough that the one ignorance hinges
necessarily on the other, and that without knowing the cause of life
neither can we know its object.
The writers of the Scottish Church Catechism, it is true, thought
that they knew why man was created. The social products of their
cocksure theology cause me to doubt it. I would prefer to worship more
ignorantly a more lovable deity than the one which is there presented
to my gaze.
But though we may never know why we are here, we may know, by taking a
little thought and studying the manifestations of the life around us,
what aspects of it make us glad that we are here. And gladness is as
good a guide as any that I know to the true values of life.
Examining life from that standpoint I know of nothing that gives me
more delight than the decoration and embellishment with which man has
overlaid all the mere uses of existence--things which without those
embellishments might not delight us at all--or only as a dry crust of
bread delights in his necessity the starving beggar, or ditch-water one
dying of thirst.
I can scarcely think of a use in life which I enjoy, that I do not
enjoy more because of the embellishment placed about it by man, who
claims to have been made “in God’s image.” Nothing that my senses
respond to with delight stays limited within the utilitarian aspect
on which its moral claims to acceptance are too frequently based--or
remains a benefit merely material in its scope.
When we breathe happily, when we eat happily, and when we love happily,
we do not think of the utilitarian ends with which those bodily
instincts are related. The utilitarian motive connects, but only
subconsciously, with that sense of well-being and delight which then
fills us; and the conscious life within us is happy without stooping to
reason.
Underlying our receptivity of these things is, no doubt, the fact that
our bodies have a use for them. But were we to consider the material
uses alone, our enjoyment would be less; and if (by following that
process) we absorbed them in a less joyous spirit, our physical
benefit, so science now tells us, would be less also.
For some reason or another, which is occasionally hard to define, you
find pleasure in a thing over and above its use; and I want to persuade
you that the finer instinct, the genius of the human race, tends always
in that direction--not to rest content with the mere use of a thing,
but to lay upon it that additional touch of adornment--whether by
well-selected material, or craftsman’s skill, or social amenity, which
shall make it a thing delightful to our senses or to our intelligence.
Take, for instance, so simple a thing as a wine-glass, or a
water-glass. Materially, it is subject to a very considerable
drawback; it is brittle, and if broken is practically unmendable.
From the point of view of utility, strength, cheapness, cleanliness,
it has no advantage over hardware or china. But in its relation to
beverages beautiful in colour and of a clear transparency, glass has a
delightfulness which greatly enhances the pleasure of its use. There
is a subtle relation between the sparkle of the glass, and the sparkle
produced in the brain by the sight and the taste of good wine (or--let
me add, for the benefit of temperance members of my audience--of good
ginger-ale). I think one could also trace a similar delight to the
relations subsisting between glass in its transparency and a draught of
pure water.
That relationship set up between two or more senses (in this case
between the senses of sight, taste and touch) brings into being a new
value which I ask you to bear in mind, as I shall have a good deal to
say about it later--the value of association. The more you examine into
the matter, the more you will find that association is a very important
element for evoking man’s faculties of enjoyment; it secures by the
inter-relation of the senses a sort of compound interest for the appeal
over which it presides. And it is association, with this compound
appeal, which again and again decides (over and above all questions
of use) what material is the best, or the most delightful, to be
employed for a given purpose. You choose a material because it makes a
decorative covering to mere utility. That beauty of choice in material
alone is the beginning of ornament.
When I began, I spoke for a moment as though use and ornament were
opposite or separate principles; but what I shall hope soon to show
is that they are so interlocked and combined that there is no keeping
them apart when once the spirit of man has opened to perceive the true
sacramental service which springs from their union, and the social
discordance that inevitably follows upon their divorce. But as man’s
ordinary definition of the word “use” is sadly material and debased,
and as his approval and sanction of the joys of life have too often
been limited by a similar materialism of thought, one is obliged, for
the time being, to accept the ordinary limiting distinction, so that
the finer and less realised uses of beauty and delight may be shown
more clearly as the true end to which all lesser uses should converge.
Life itself is a usage of material, the bringing together of atoms into
form; and we know, from what science teaches of evolution, that this
usage has constantly been in the direction of forms of life which,
for certain reasons, we describe as “higher.” Emerging through those
forms have come manifestations or qualities, which quite obviously give
delight to the holders of them; and we are able to gather in watching
them, as they live, move, and have their being, that for them life
seems good. It is no part of their acceptance of what has come that
they are here not to enjoy themselves.
Thus we see from the upward trend of creation a faculty for enjoyment
steadily emerging, and existing side by side with fears, risks, and
hardships which the struggle for existence entails--probably an even
increased faculty for enjoyment, as those fears and risks become more
consciously part of their lives. And I question whether we should think
that the wild deer had chosen well, could it resign its apprehension
of death at the drinking-place for the sake of becoming a worm--the
wriggling but scarcely conscious prey of the early bird.
Man (the most conscious prey of death) has also his compensations;
but, wishing to eat his cake and have it, he insists that his increased
self-consciousness is the hall-mark of an immortality which he is
unwilling to concede to others. He sees (or the majority of those see,
who preach personal immortality after death) no moral necessity for
conceding immortality to the worm because the early bird cuts short
its career, or to the wild deer because it enjoys life, shrinks from
death, and endures pain; or to the peewit, because she loves her young;
or to the parrot, because it dies with a vocabulary still inadequate
for expressing that contempt for the human species with which the caged
experience of a life-time has filled its brain. Yet, for these and
similar reasons applied to himself, man thinks that immortality is his
due.
In doing so, he does but pursue, to a rather injudicious extent, that
instinct for the ornamentation and embellishment of the facts of life
which I spoke of to begin with. For whether it be well-founded or not,
a belief in immortality gives ornament to existence.
Of course, it may be bad ornament; and I think it becomes bad ornament
the moment he bases it upon the idea that this life is evil and not
good. If he says “Life is so good that I want it to go on for ever and
ever,” and thinks that he can make it better by asserting that it will
go on for ever and ever, that is a playful statement which may have
quite a stimulating effect on his career, and make him a much more
charming and social and imaginative person than he would otherwise be.
But if he wants a future life merely because he regards this life as a
“vale of misery”--and wants that future life to contain evil as well
as good--a Hell as well as a Heaven (in order that he may visualise
retribution meted out on a satisfactory scale upon those whom he cannot
satisfactorily visit with retribution to-day) then, I think, that it
tends to become bad ornament, and is likely to make him less charming,
less social, and less imaginatively inventive for the getting rid of
evil conditions from present existence than he would be if he had not
so over-loaded his brain with doctrinal adornments.
Still, it is ornament of a kind; and with ornament, good or bad (the
moment he has got for himself leisure or any elbow-room at all in the
struggle for existence) man cannot help embellishing the facts of
life--the things that he really knows.
Now that instinct for embellishment is of course latent in Nature
itself, or we should not find it in man; and it comes of Nature (the
great super-mathematician) putting two and two together in a way which
does not merely make four. When two and two are put together by Nature,
they come to life in a new shape; and man is (up-to-date) the most
appreciative receptacle of that fact which Nature has yet produced. Man
builds up his whole appreciation of life by association--by studying
a method of putting two and two together which comes to something very
much more than a dead numerical result.
This, as I have said, is Nature’s way of giving to our investments in
life a compound interest. Man throws into life his whole capital, body,
soul, and spirit; and as a result of that investment Nature steadily
returns to him year by year--not detached portions of his original
outlay, but something new and different. Out of every contact between
man’s energy and Nature’s, something new arises. And yet, though new,
it is not strange; it has features of familiarity; it is partly his,
partly hers; and if his spirit rises above the merely mechanical, it
is endeared to him by and derives its fullest value from association.
All beautiful work, all work which is of real use and benefit to the
community, bears implicitly within it this mark of parentage--of the
way it has been come by, through patience, skill, ingenuity, something
more intimate and subtle than the dead impenetrable surface of a thing
mechanically formed without the accompaniment either of hope or joy.
This creation of new values by association (which you can trace through
all right processes of labour) is seen even in things which have very
little of human about them.
The germ of its expression is to be found in that simplest of
arithmetic propositions to which I have just referred: two and two
make--not two twos but four, which is, in fact, a fresh concept; and
the mind that can embrace so much--the idea of four as a number with
an identity of its own has already raised itself above the lowest
level of savagery. In that mind something has begun out of which the
social idea may presently be developed; for the man who has conceived
the number four will presently be identifying his new concept with a
variety of correspondencies under fresh aspects: he will discover that
certain animals have four legs, whereas, until then, his view of them
was rather that of the child who said that a horse had two legs in
front, two legs behind, and two at each side--a statement which shows,
indeed, that the horse has been earnestly considered from as many
points of view as are sometimes necessary to enable a Cabinet Minister
to make up his mind, but, for all that, never as a whole; and in such a
mind, though the identity of the horse may be established from whatever
point of view he presents himself, the thought of the horse, as a being
of harmoniously related parts, having order and species, has not yet
been established. Until a man can count, and sum up the results of
his counting in synthesis, Nature is composed merely of a series of
units--and the mind cannot begin that grouping and defining process
which leads to association and from that to the development of the
social idea.
You will remember in _Alice through the Looking Glass_, when the two
Queens set to work to test her educational proficiency--you will
remember how the White Queen says (in order to discover whether Alice
can do addition) “What’s one, and one, and one, and one, and one, and
one?”
“I don’t know,” says Alice, “I lost count.”
“She can’t do addition,” says the White Queen.
Well--she “lost count,” and, therefore, that series of ones failed to
have any fresh meaning or association for her.