The serious research that some contemporary French students are devoting
to our English literature is one of the most valuable by-products of
the Entente. We have had of recent years remarkable French monographs
on Wordsworth, on Cowper, on Crabbe, on Hazlitt, which are fully as
authoritative as any of our native commentaries. And, turning over
the new volumes at a French bookseller’s the other day, I came across
another Gallic tribute of this kind, with a rather lengthy title, “La
Femme Anglaise au XIXᵉ siècle et son évolution d’après le roman anglais
contemporain,” by Mme. Léonie Villard. Mme. Villard seems to have read
all our modern English novels, from Richardson’s “Pamela” down to the
latest piece of propagandism of Mr. H. G. Wells. Of course mere literary
curiosity could never have carried any human being through all that;
Mme. Villard is an ardent “feminist,” and, like her sisters, capable of
miraculous physical endurance for the “cause.” A mere man may “devour
whole libraries,” but it takes a fair feminist to swallow the huge mass
of English fiction.
Reading exclusively from a single point of view, Mme. Villard seems to
have sometimes sacrificed her critical sense to her principles. Thus, as
a type of the nineteenth-century “old maid,” so neglected, so ill-used by
society, she selects Miss Rachel Wardle! Dickens, generally “so pitiful
to the weak, so generous to the oppressed and the conquered,” had no
pity for her. But upon us it is incumbent to pity and understand and
find excuses for her. “At any rate, her desire to be loved and, above
all, to experience in other surroundings a freer and less humiliating
life should have nothing surprising for us.” Isn’t this rather a solemn
way of describing the lady’s amours with Mr. Tupman and Mr. Jingle? Is
it really the fault of society if an amorous old dame will be silly? And
is she not to be laughed at if she happen to fall into the category “old
maid”? Mrs. Bardell was amorous too. So was Mr. Tupman. Dickens laughs
at these also—but then they were not old maids, they didn’t illustrate a
“feminine case.” Then there was Mrs. Jellyby. She reminded some people of
Harriet Martineau. But Dickens had deformed the type (who was intelligent
and was not the mother of a family) so as to present the “new woman” in
the least favourable light. He “has fixed for half a century the type
of the intellectual or enfranchised woman, as conceived by those who
trust the judgment of others rather than their own direct observation.”
The question, surely, is not whether Mrs. Jellyby was unlike Harriet
Martineau, but whether in herself she was a sufficiently comic
personage. Most readers of Dickens find her so. What injustice is there
in this to the real “new woman,” whom, as Mme. Villard has shown, she
did _not_ resemble? As a matter of fact, when Dickens had a mind to draw
a real “strong-minded” woman he drew her most sympathetically. Is there
any of his women more delightful than Miss Trotwood? “To-day,” says Mme.
Villard, “she appears to us an unconscious feminist whose feminism misses
its mark, since it can find no field of action amid narrow, provincial,
routine surroundings.” Poor Miss Trotwood!
We are to understand that it was the domination and the selfishness of
man that created the lamentable type of nineteenth-century “old maid.”
But who were unkindest to Miss Wardle? Her nieces, members of her own
sex. Who created the typical “old maid” and terrible bore, Miss Bates?
Another “old maid,” Jane Austen. The fact is, old maids like other
human beings have their foibles. Are these never to be put into a book?
Feminism seems to make its disciples terribly serious. Miss La Creevy
is Dickens’s example of the _femme artiste_. See, says Mme. Villard,
how types of “independent women” are caricatured! She cannot laugh at
Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig, because they testify to the social contempt
attaching to the nursing profession at their date! Has it never occurred
to her that novels are sometimes written merely as novels and not as
_dossiers_ in a “case” for the “evolution” of woman?
After all, however, there are plenty of serious novelists who do supply
good evidence—more particularly the quasi-propagandists like Mrs.
Gaskell (when she chose) and Mrs. Humphry Ward (sometimes), and (nearly
always) Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells. Mme. Villard makes effective play
with these. She has no difficulty, for instance, in showing the immense
economic advance of the woman-worker during the last century, though even
here her eye seems too exclusively fixed on her own sex. True, women
were the chief victims of the old “factory” and “sweating” systems, but
the amelioration of their condition, if I am not mistaken, came only as
part of the general amelioration in the condition of “labour,” without
sex-distinction.
It is when she comes to the sentimental side of her subject, the
relation of woman to man whether in marriage or “free love,” that Mme.
Villard finds her material a little too much for her. Naturally, for
our novelists and playwrights can never let the too fascinating subject
alone and seem to go on saying the same things about it over and over
again—_con variazioni_. You have, for example, Mrs. Gaskell, so far back
as 1850, dealing with the same theme as Mr. Stanley Houghton dealt with
in “Hindle Wakes” (1910)—the refusal of the seduced woman to accept
the regularization of her position by marriage. Then there are the
free-lovers “on principle,” who end by conceding marriage to social
prejudice—like Mr. Wells’s Ann Veronica. There must be English novels
where the “free lovers” maintain their principle triumphantly to the end,
though I haven’t read them; but I seem to remember several in the French
language. It is all very confusing. Perhaps—I only say perhaps—those are
wisest who leave “principle” in these matters to the heroes and heroines
of the novelists and are content to live ordinary lives in an ordinary
jog-trot way, without too much thinking about it. There is this comfort
for the old-fashioned commonplace people among us, at any rate, that
whatever “evolution” of woman there may have been in the nineteenth
century, she remains in all essentials very much what she used to be.
I can find it as easy to-day to be in love with Emma and Elizabeth and
Anne—I needn’t mention their surnames—who are more than a century old,
bless them, as with (not to compromise myself with any contemporary
English heroine) M. Barrès’s Bérénice, or with one of M. Marcel Proust’s
“Jeunes filles en Fleurs.”