Ford introduces an incredible Irish priest by saying that he ‘had a
brogue such as is seldom heard outside old-fashioned English novels of
Irish life’--thereby protecting himself from the start; he would have
been incapable of writing ‘across the _breast_ of her dark _dress_’; and
it goes without saying that in his creditably meagre use of foreign
words he adopts none of the original spellings that star Mr. Arlen’s
romance (_aristocracie_, _giggolo_, and the like). Mr. Ford’s prose is
compact, sober, and restrained. But, since this is true, it becomes the
more important to discover what it is all about.
I am unable at present to obtain a copy of _If Winter Comes_ (one of the
advantages that I neglected to chronicle in the essay on Living Abroad);
but I am struck by the similarity between the plot of Mr. Hutchinson’s
novel, as I remember it, and that of _Some Do Not ..._ Mark
Something-or-Other was a man whom the world in general regarded with
indifference as a failure, and for whose excellent work somebody else
was always getting the credit, but whom a few really fine spirits
reverenced. So was Christopher Tietjens. Each was unhappily married,
though (_If Winter Comes_ not being a sophisticated novel) Mark’s wife
was merely stodgy and insensitive to her husband’s whimsical sweetness
(bless her heart! she had all my sympathy), while Christopher’s Sylvia
was--oh, dear me! Each hero loved another lady, really appreciative and
good, who was eager to sacrifice, in Mark’s case her husband
(unappreciative devil _he_ was, too!), in Christopher’s her virginity.
Each hero refused the gift. (‘Some do not’ ... do that kind of thing).
In neither case did the hero’s wife--or any one else except those few
fine spirits--believe in the refusal. Each, instead of getting himself
profitably _embusqué_, slipped off unassumingly to the war and was badly
hurt. Each slipped back home again to take up modestly and wearily the
old round--a good deal hampered in this by all those _embusqués_ who had
pushed ahead in the meantime. Each, for no obvious reason, became a
social pariah, was slandered and fairly hounded by the world in
general--but not, of course, in the sophisticated novel, to the point of
general hysterics reached in _If Winter Comes_. The endings, naturally,
are different. Mark’s wife divorces him, the other lady’s husband is
conveniently killed in France, and the lovers are felicitously united;
Christopher Tietjens’ wife does not divorce him, he will not become
Valentine’s clandestine lover, and he slips off again, even more
unassumingly than before, to the war--presumably to be killed.
Here, as unmistakably as in _The Green Hat_, we have the artificial
stuff of melodrama. Hardly, since Richardson’s _Pamela_, has such
feverish importance as in _Some Do Not ..._ been attached to the
question of whether a man and a woman will or will not have sexual
relations. The last two hundred pages of the book are virtually devoted
to this problem, and to its answer--‘Some do not.’ Personally, I didn’t
care in the least. Let them, if they wanted to, or not, only, for
heaven’s sake, let them and every one else stop talking about it! What
possible difference could it make to me?
I am aware that I have written about Mr. Ford’s novel in an
insufficiently cool manner; but the truth is (as you may have guessed)
that the book exasperates me. All this cheap sensationalism masquerading
as a serious study of life! _If Winter Comes_ was atrocious, but it was
too silly to be excessively annoying. By the time one reached the
piled-up anguish of the court-room scene one was in the best of spirits.
But _Some Do Not ..._ is too carefully done to be silly. Its material is
that of any ten-twenty-thirty melodrama; but its style is that of
_Madame Bovary_. It arouses the same distaste as in the fairy-tale the
vulgar servant wench who had dressed herself up as the princess.
Even so, I have perhaps not accounted adequately for my conviction that
_Some Do Not ..._ is fundamentally false. The stuff of melodrama
sometimes is the stuff of life, as it is sufficient to read the daily
press to discover; and occasionally a great genius builds up truth out
of just such material. He does this, of course, by creating real
characters. Once a character comes alive, the most improbable things
may happen to him, and no one cares--or doubts them. But Mr. Ford is not
a genius, and his characters are not real. He describes them neatly and
pungently; he even visualises them for us, until they stand out as
sharply as the waxwork figures at Madame Tussaud’s. But that is the end
of it. They will not come to life. And even if Mr. Ford were the genius
that he is not, they could not come to life in that stifling atmosphere
of sophistication, where effect is everything and one eye is always on
an audience. But then, if Mr. Ford were a genius he would not give us
that atmosphere; he would have something too important to say to trouble
with anything so small, superficial and glittering as sophistication.
The truth about the literature of sophistication is, I think, that,
since it is at bottom a form of showing off, it can have no dealings
with truth. In his choice of material the sophisticated writer selects
what is false--not, like that occasional genius, for some other reason
than its falsity, or for no reason at all, but precisely because it is
false, and therefore sure of an easy effect. There is tawdriness in
this, of course. I wonder whether there is not a trace of still another
quality. Children especially delight in showing off. Can it be that
there is something a little ingenuous in sophistication?
MEDITATIONS ABOUT WOMEN
It is doubtless wrong for any except the very young to make
generalizations, because nobody else believes in them--least of all in
the ones he himself makes. But it is great fun, and, paradoxically, the
fun increases in direct proportion to the maker’s disbelief, I suppose
because his generalizations thus tend more and more to become
light-hearted taunts flung, dustwise, in the face of a chaotic universe.
Byron enjoyed defying God, which indicated that he had a God to defy;
your modern sceptic thumbs his nose at emptiness, which is at least as
brave of him. And of all generalizations that such a man can make those
about women are the most entertaining to him. For, having by his time of
life discovered that, save for a small matter of physical formation,
women are almost precisely like men, it becomes for him the more amusing
to unearth or invent differences explaining that ‘almost,’ and to
magnify them and build them up into something artistic that would be a
beautiful explanation of life--if life were only like that. Thus, I do
not believe in any of the generalizations that follow, but I think it
would be quite pleasant if they were true.
_Why do Men generalize especially about Women?_
But that is so simple. Because of their overweening vanity that will not
allow them to admit that a subject on which they spend ninetenths of
their thoughts can in itself be other than a rich subject full of
mystery and significance. Having briefly settled this, I now go on to my
own instructive considerations on women, which begin with an inquiry
into
_Their Untruthfulness._
Men are to be found who frequently tell the truth on principle, and
those are quite common who habitually tell the truth because, though
they would prefer to lie when lying would be advantageous, something
prevents them from doing so, they stammer, grow red, and are forced back
on truth in spite of themselves. Women only tell the truth when lying is
unprofitable, and never on principle. This is because women have not got
principles. Men, not they, are idealists; they only pretend to be
idealists in eras when that is what men want them to be. They live among
facts, and are bored or amused by abstractions, the making of which they
tolerantly consider only one more of the childish games, like curling or
pinochle, men delight to play at; which, indeed, it is. Men generalize
incessantly about women, but women do not generalize about men. They
take men individually as they come--if they do. Also they never
experience any difficulty in telling a lie; on the contrary, they look
more candid then than at other times. This is, again, because they do
not see why truth should be any more important than falsehood, because
almost their chief preoccupation is to keep men quiet and happy, and
because they believe in doing everything as well as it can be done.
_Their Courage._
Every one says that women are braver than men, and perhaps they are, but
this is due to their lack of imagination. Suffering to them means simply
suffering, whereas to men it means suffering plus the agonized
preliminary picture of suffering. A dentist, in whose clutches a woman
is notoriously brave, a man a shuddering coward, does not really hurt
one a tenth as much as a man beforehand fancies he is going to hurt and
at the moment fancies he is hurting. Too much awe is felt (by men) for
what women go through at child-birth. Child-bearing is doubtless
unpleasant for a woman, but it is infinitely worse for her husband, who
sits in an atrocious hospital parlour and conjures up horrors. Women can
have six children in six successive years and suffer detriment only to
their figure; after the same experience their husbands are grey-haired
tottering wrecks.
But let us be thorough. Let us make no assertion about women that we do
not investigate. I have mentioned and therefore must consider
_Their Lack of Imagination._
This is akin to their inaptitude for abstractions, but, whereas they
despise abstractions, they admire imagination and would like to possess
it. But they do not possess it. A woman can readily take a fact and,
with her gift of untruthfulness, develop it into another different fact
or even into a firework-shower of facts; she cannot, as occasionally a
man can do, place it and other facts together and build a cathedral.
Women are far better observers than men, but they are never first-rate
creative artists, hardly creative artists at all, either in cooking or
in dressmaking, in painting or in literature, and (with the exception of
Emily Brontë, who was a miracle) those who have come closest to being so
were very mannish women. George Sand wore trousers, and Lewes’s
unprintable physiological remark about George Eliot is well known. The
excuse women give for this--that they have always been held back by men
and have only recently begun to come into their own--is, and they know
it to be, absurd. Women, at least in western countries, have always done
whatever they wished with men. For two centuries they directed the
political conduct and even the wars of the leading nation in Europe--and
a pretty mess they made of it.
I repeat: women can report but not create. A man’s best work in art is
almost always based on what he has imagined rather than experienced
(witness, among the great and the near-great, Tolstoy and Stephen
Crane); a woman’s, never. Women, since they have a love of facts and an
appreciation of form, make quite creditable artists when they stick to
what they have observed; when they essay to do more than this they fall
heavily to earth. Thus, when Miss Willa Cather confines herself to
describing that section of America which she knows at first-hand, we
read her with interest; when, in the last part of _One of Ours_, she
attempts to throw herself imaginatively into something she has not
experienced, the result is so poor and false as to be not ludicrous but
painful; the reader actually blushes. Miss Katherine Mansfield, Miss
Dorothy Richardson, Miss Stella Benson, Mrs. Edith Wharton, all observe
acutely--and do nothing more, and all are quite creditable artists. It
is not very important to be a quite creditable artist.
On the other hand, one could almost wish that all critics of literature
were women. The criticisms of even stupid women are worth attention,
while those of intelligent women are admirable and suggestive. They have
a way of going directly to the heart of the matter. Their preoccupation
with facts makes them unerring judges of the truth or falsity of a
situation, and their wistful respect for imagination makes them at once
aware of even its shadowy presence. Nowhere do they display more clearly
than in the criticism of a book
_Their Intuition._
Much nonsense has been written about this by men, who have chosen to
consider it something miraculous, outside the laws of nature. It is, of
course, nothing of the sort and would not be half so interesting if it
were. The gift of intuition is merely the ability to think so swiftly
that one’s thought barely grazes the intermediate steps in the process
and appears to an outsider, and often even to oneself, to leap
immediately from the initial fact to the final conclusion. Far from
being contrary to logic, intuition is the most perfect example of logic.
The flying thought must keep straight as an arrow to its course,
disregarding instantly all irrelevancies. And the fact that women
probably do possess the gift more commonly than men is the clearest
disproof of the silly accusation that they are illogical. They are, it
is true, illogical in argument, but that is because they do not care for
or respect argument for its own sake (another silly game) but only as a
practical means to an end, so that when it is going against them they
shift their ground shamelessly and thereby infuriate or delight their
masculine antagonists according to the latter’s emotional attitude
toward them.
There are several excellent reasons why women should be more intuitive
than men. One is that they are not led astray by imagination or fancy,
another that they are more pragmatic, a third that those occupying
so-called subordinate business positions (such as stenographers, among
whom intuition is amazingly common) have better trained minds than their
employers. It is largely a matter of concentration.
_Their Morals._
This is a delicate subject that I would avoid but for its extreme
importance.
Men are essentially moral beings. That is, when they behave badly, as
they generally do, they always feel that this is not the way to
behave--in short, that there _is_ a way to behave. Women have no such
conviction. A great number of them, possibly a majority, always behave
‘well’ because they have been trained to do so and have never
experienced an emotion strong enough to compel them to break the habit,
but there is no personally felt principle behind such virtue.
Accordingly, they are at heart neither moral nor immoral, but a-moral.
Husbands certainly ‘deceive’ their wives more frequently than wives
their husbands, because a man’s opportunities are greater, his risk of
detection is smaller, and his punishment, when he is detected, less, but
an erring husband has always a sense of guilt that is absent from an
erring wife. Marauding lovers themselves are often shocked by their
mistresses’ insouciance and total lack of remorse. They would have a
woman do wrong for their sake, but they would also have her conscious of
wrong-doing. Perhaps this ridiculous desire is in part due to men’s
vanity, which would have the sacrifice made for their sake as great as
possible. In any case, the desire is disappointed. The one sacrifice
that women do not make for men is a moral sacrifice. They have heard
much talk about evil, just as a person born deaf may have read much
about music, but they have no more real understanding of evil than he
has of music. A wicked act is simply one which the doer feels to be
wicked. Accordingly, women can, and often do, pass unscathed, unstained
and fresh through experiences that would brand men’s faces as evil.
_A Reservation._
It will by this time have become clear that when I write of women I do
not usually mean the great sheep-like multitude of women who live their
lives through more or less according to the rules taught them in
childhood, but cultivated civilized women. This I feel to be not only
justifiable but essential. How would it be possible to write of the
capacities of women, and then spend one’s time on those in whom such
capacities remain latent and unrealized? Not Babbitt but Roosevelt is
called the typical American, because in Roosevelt, however rare an
example he may have been, one perceives the complete development of
characteristics that are innate, but remain undeveloped, in most
Americans.
However, it is necessary to bear this reservation (if you can call it
that) in mind when reflecting on the foregoing section of this essay;
otherwise the reader might be puzzled by the seemingly contradictory
existence of numerous noisy ladies engaged in combating Vice. Let them
go. Poor things, they are rotten with complexes! thwarted souls, chafing
(even though they do not know it) over their own inability to expand,
and hating the whole world for their discomfort, as a child hates the
table against which he has bumped his head! An excellent subject for a
novel, they must be summarily dismissed from a brief essay.
_Their Fastidiousness._
If women are not inhibited by moral law from what men deem wrong-doing,
they often are by their fastidiousness--namely, when wrong-doing is at
the same time gross and ugly (which is not nearly always the case). They
have a genuine and profound appreciation of fineness, suavity and
perfection. Neither is this, as men often assume, equivalent to the mere
love of luxury. An indigent girl yields to a wealthy Don Juan not
because he surrounds her with the comforts of riches but because he
surrounds her with smoothness. She obtains a quite different and much
finer satisfaction than he from his spacious silent motor car and from
the polished restaurants to which he takes her. There is something
hypnotic to her in the charm of elegance. The setting means a great deal
to women, far more than men recognize. For while it does not matter so
very much to them what they do, it matters tremendously how they do it.
In this love of perfect setting they are undoubtedly right and centuries
in advance of men. An act in itself--any act--is a bare and meagre
thing; done fittingly, at the proper time, in a perfectly right setting,
it draws upon the richness of a thousand seemly associations. Man’s
world is the barren childish world of an African savage; it is hard to
understand how women, who are civilized and grown-up, can endure it.
_Their Maturity._
It is banal to say that men never grow up, but one should not be afraid
to make a banal remark if it also happens to be true, and this, alas, is
true without qualification. Men are hopeless babies. Not only do they
delight in primitive things, but their whole attitude toward life is
immature and absurd. They expect a great deal from life, and are hurt
when they do not get it. You see them looking out at life with wide
pained eyes, in precisely the same way a child looks out of the window
at the rain that is spoiling his holiday.
Women expect a great deal less from life--once they have passed their
spoiled girlhood, when they expect to receive everything and give
nothing. They become disillusioned very early--as soon, in fact, as they
have recognized men’s essential blundering stupidity and weakness. How
else could it be with them, who know that they depend on men, yet know
what men are? How can a woman look up to some one who, instead, looks up
to her in the most infantile manner? The cave-man ideal is a very young
girl’s ideal; the cave-man at home must be as helpless a baby as any
other man. If a man has a canker on his tongue he fancies it a cancer;
if he has catarrh from over-smoking he fancies it tuberculosis; if some
little thing goes wrong with his house it appears to him an
international catastrophe. Respect creatures of this sort? Lean on them?
Broken reeds! Be kind to them, indulge them, pet them back into
equanimity, yes; lean on them, no.
However, the disillusionment induced by a perception of men’s sorry
nature is not sufficient to account for women’s mature attitude toward
life. Indeed, one would expect it to result in their becoming
embittered, soured, exasperated; whereas all civilized women are mellow,
amazingly tolerant and--oh, just grown-up! I think this is because they
do not start with ideals, see them go smash, and try wretchedly to build
up other ideals from the fragments; because they do not believe in
abstractions but only in facts. A man rejects the innumerable facts that
will not fit into his abstractions; a woman rejects no facts at all.
This makes her world far richer than his. And if it is not glorified,
neither is it falsified, by the radiance of an ideal. A woman, in short,
since she accepts everything, comes to know a vast deal more about life
than a man. At the same time she is calmer about it. She does not credit
this mass of material with any hidden meaning, and therefore does not
worry herself irascible by trying helplessly to find one. Some scraps of
the material are pleasant, some disagreeable, and it is all very
interesting, so the more of it the better--only there is nothing to get
excited about. I confess to admiring this attitude extremely.
Theoretically it may be less noble than the masculine attitude, but it
gets far better results, even on character, since it cultivates
kindliness, tolerance and sympathy, grown-up virtues rare to find among
idealists.
This matter (now, I trust, clear) of the respective youth and maturity
of the sexes reveals a number of gross popular misconceptions. For
example: a good many elderly women are attracted to young men, and all
elderly men are attracted to young girls (though some of them conceal
it). The former phenomenon is popularly considered ludicrous and
pathetic, the latter something satyr-like, disgusting and corrupt. As a
matter of fact, the two judgments should be reversed. There is, if just
as much, no more sensuality in an elderly man’s feeling for a young girl
than in a young man’s. He simply feels what he has always felt. He is
still the callow sentimentalist that he was at twenty; he has not grown
up. On the other hand, an elderly woman’s feeling for a young man is a
thrilling incestuous combination of sensuality and motherliness.
_The Unanswerable Riddle._
It has always pleased men, who are simply incorrigible, to find women
(of whom they are apt to speak as ‘woman’) mysterious. I once knew a man
who asserted that there was nothing more mysterious about women than
about men (and God knew there was nothing mysterious about them!) except
that every once in a while they went temporarily mad, at which moments
no sensible man would pay any attention to them, insanity being without
interest. There is something to be said for this simple estimate; still,
women do seem to me to have one profound secret of which no explanation
appears. Puzzled, I return to it again and again. How, in heaven’s
name, can they put up with men--and why do they?
They do not need to. By now, vast multitudes of women have demonstrated
that even in an economic world organized exclusively by men they can
hold their own with the latter, and they have stripped from the puerile
business of making money much of the silly hieratic pretence of
importance with which men surrounded it. Almost any competent
stenographer is dispassionately aware that she could run her employer’s
business quite as well as he runs it, frequently better. And yet women
continue to marry. Why do they? Any one who has tried both, knows that
it is far easier, as well as more agreeable, to go to a nice, clean,
quiet office for the day than to run a house, even with the supposed
assistance of a servant or two; while, as for having a home, a woman
could have one quite as well without a man, since she must make it in
any case.
There is no difficulty in understanding why a man marries. He gets a
great deal for his money--a home, a housekeeper, some smoothness, a
little fineness, the convenient inexpensive satisfaction of his sexual
desires, a kind mature companion to spoil him and protect him against
the harsh buffets of a world eternally different than he childishly and
sentimentally fancies it.