The larger part of womankind, however, have had to fight for things
slightly more intoxicating to the eye than the desk or the typewriter;
and it cannot be denied that in defending these, women have developed
the quality called prejudice to a powerful and even menacing degree. But
these prejudices will always be found to fortify the main position of
the woman, that she is to remain a general overseer, an autocrat within
small compass but on all sides. On the one or two points on which she
really misunderstands the man’s position, it is almost entirely in order
to preserve her own. The two points on which woman, actually and of
herself, is most tenacious may be roughly summarized as the ideal of
thrift and the ideal of dignity.
Unfortunately for this book it is written by a male, and these two
qualities, if not hateful to a man, are at least hateful in a man. But
if we are to settle the sex question at all fairly, all males must make
an imaginative attempt to enter into the attitude of all good women
toward these two things. The difficulty exists especially, perhaps, in
the thing called thrift; we men have so much encouraged each other in
throwing money right and left, that there has come at last to be a sort
of chivalrous and poetical air about losing sixpence. But on a broader
and more candid consideration the case scarcely stands so.
Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than
extravagance. Heaven knows I for one speak disinterestedly in the
matter; for I cannot clearly remember saving a half-penny ever since I
was born. But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the
more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic
because it is waste. It is prosaic to throw money away, because it is
prosaic to throw anything away; it is negative; it is a confession of
indifference, that is, it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic
thing about the house is the dustbin, and the one great objection to the
new fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a moral
menage the dustbin must be bigger than the house. If a man could
undertake to make use of all things in his dustbin he would be a broader
genius than Shakespeare. When science began to use by-products; when
science found that colors could be made out of coaltar, she made her
greatest and perhaps her only claim on the real respect of the human
soul. Now the aim of the good woman is to use the by-products, or, in
other words, to rummage in the dustbin.
A man can only fully comprehend it if he thinks of some sudden joke or
expedient got up with such materials as may be found in a private house
on a rainy day. A man’s definite daily work is generally run with such
rigid convenience of modern science that thrift, the picking up of
potential helps here and there, has almost become unmeaning to him. He
comes across it most (as I say) when he is playing some game within four
walls; when in charades, a hearthrug will just do for a fur coat, or a
tea-cozy just do for a cocked hat; when a toy theater needs timber
and cardboard, and the house has just enough firewood and just enough
bandboxes. This is the man’s occasional glimpse and pleasing parody of
thrift. But many a good housekeeper plays the same game every day with
ends of cheese and scraps of silk, not because she is mean, but on the
contrary, because she is magnanimous; because she wishes her creative
mercy to be over all her works, that not one sardine should be
destroyed, or cast as rubbish to the void, when she has made the pile
complete.
The modern world must somehow be made to understand (in theology and
other things) that a view may be vast, broad, universal, liberal and yet
come into conflict with another view that is vast, broad, universal and
liberal also. There is never a war between two sects, but only between
two universal Catholic Churches. The only possible collision is the
collision of one cosmos with another. So in a smaller way it must be
first made clear that this female economic ideal is a part of that
female variety of outlook and all-round art of life which we have
already attributed to the sex: thrift is not a small or timid or
provincial thing; it is part of that great idea of the woman watching
on all sides out of all the windows of the soul and being answerable for
everything. For in the average human house there is one hole by which
money comes in and a hundred by which it goes out; man has to do with
the one hole, woman with the hundred. But though the very stinginess
of a woman is a part of her spiritual breadth, it is none the less true
that it brings her into conflict with the special kind of spiritual
breadth that belongs to the males of the tribe. It brings her into
conflict with that shapeless cataract of Comradeship, of chaotic
feasting and deafening debate, which we noted in the last section. The
very touch of the eternal in the two sexual tastes brings them the more
into antagonism; for one stands for a universal vigilance and the other
for an almost infinite output. Partly through the nature of his moral
weakness, and partly through the nature of his physical strength, the
male is normally prone to expand things into a sort of eternity; he
always thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night; and he always
thinks of a night as lasting forever. When the working women in the poor
districts come to the doors of the public houses and try to get their
husbands home, simple minded “social workers” always imagine that every
husband is a tragic drunkard and every wife a broken-hearted saint. It
never occurs to them that the poor woman is only doing under coarser
conventions exactly what every fashionable hostess does when she tries
to get the men from arguing over the cigars to come and gossip over the
teacups. These women are not exasperated merely at the amount of money
that is wasted in beer; they are exasperated also at the amount of time
that is wasted in talk. It is not merely what goeth into the mouth but
what cometh out the mouth that, in their opinion, defileth a man. They
will raise against an argument (like their sisters of all ranks) the
ridiculous objection that nobody is convinced by it; as if a man wanted
to make a body-slave of anybody with whom he had played single-stick.
But the real female prejudice on this point is not without a basis; the
real feeling is this, that the most masculine pleasures have a quality
of the ephemeral. A duchess may ruin a duke for a diamond necklace; but
there is the necklace. A coster may ruin his wife for a pot of beer; and
where is the beer? The duchess quarrels with another duchess in order to
crush her, to produce a result; the coster does not argue with another
coster in order to convince him, but in order to enjoy at once the sound
of his own voice, the clearness of his own opinions and the sense of
masculine society. There is this element of a fine fruitlessness about
the male enjoyments; wine is poured into a bottomless bucket; thought
plunges into a bottomless abyss. All this has set woman against the
Public House--that is, against the Parliament House. She is there to
prevent waste; and the “pub” and the parliament are the very palaces of
waste. In the upper classes the “pub” is called the club, but that makes
no more difference to the reason than it does to the rhyme. High and
low, the woman’s objection to the Public House is perfectly definite and
rational, it is that the Public House wastes the energies that could be
used on the private house.
As it is about feminine thrift against masculine waste, so it is about
feminine dignity against masculine rowdiness. The woman has a fixed
and very well-founded idea that if she does not insist on good manners
nobody else will. Babies are not always strong on the point of dignity,
and grown-up men are quite unpresentable. It is true that there are
many very polite men, but none that I ever heard of who were not either
fascinating women or obeying them. But indeed the female ideal of
dignity, like the female ideal of thrift, lies deeper and may easily
be misunderstood. It rests ultimately on a strong idea of spiritual
isolation; the same that makes women religious. They do not like being
melted down; they dislike and avoid the mob. That anonymous quality we
have remarked in the club conversation would be common impertinence in
a case of ladies. I remember an artistic and eager lady asking me in her
grand green drawing-room whether I believed in comradeship between
the sexes, and why not. I was driven back on offering the obvious and
sincere answer “Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a
comrade you would turn me out of the house.” The only certain rule on
this subject is always to deal with woman and never with women. “Women”
is a profligate word; I have used it repeatedly in this chapter; but
it always has a blackguard sound. It smells of oriental cynicism and
hedonism. Every woman is a captive queen. But every crowd of women is
only a harem broken loose.
I am not expressing my own views here, but those of nearly all the women
I have known. It is quite unfair to say that a woman hates other women
individually; but I think it would be quite true to say that she detests
them in a confused heap. And this is not because she despises her own
sex, but because she respects it; and respects especially that sanctity
and separation of each item which is represented in manners by the idea
of dignity and in morals by the idea of chastity.
*****