It is the same in the case of girls. I am often solemnly asked what
I think of the new ideas about female education. But there are no new
ideas about female education. There is not, there never has been, even
the vestige of a new idea. All the educational reformers did was to ask
what was being done to boys and then go and do it to girls; just as they
asked what was being taught to young squires and then taught it to young
chimney sweeps. What they call new ideas are very old ideas in the wrong
place. Boys play football, why shouldn’t girls play football; boys
have school colors, why shouldn’t girls have school-colors; boys go
in hundreds to day-schools, why shouldn’t girls go in hundreds to
day-schools; boys go to Oxford, why shouldn’t girls go to Oxford--in
short, boys grow mustaches, why shouldn’t girls grow mustaches--that is
about their notion of a new idea. There is no brain-work in the thing
at all; no root query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that,
and why, anymore than there is any imaginative grip of the humor and
heart of the populace in the popular education. There is nothing but
plodding, elaborate, elephantine imitation. And just as in the case
of elementary teaching, the cases are of a cold and reckless
inappropriateness. Even a savage could see that bodily things, at least,
which are good for a man are very likely to be bad for a woman. Yet
there is no boy’s game, however brutal, which these mild lunatics have
not promoted among girls. To take a stronger case, they give girls very
heavy home-work; never reflecting that all girls have home-work already
in their homes. It is all a part of the same silly subjugation; there
must be a hard stick-up collar round the neck of a woman, because it is
already a nuisance round the neck of a man. Though a Saxon serf, if he
wore that collar of cardboard, would ask for his collar of brass.
It will then be answered, not without a sneer, “And what would you
prefer? Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female, with
ringlets and smelling-bottle, doing a little in water colors, dabbling
a little in Italian, playing a little on the harp, writing in vulgar
albums and painting on senseless screens? Do you prefer that?” To which
I answer, “Emphatically, yes.” I solidly prefer it to the new female
education, for this reason, that I can see in it an intellectual design,
while there is none in the other. I am by no means sure that even in
point of practical fact that elegant female would not have been more
than a match for most of the inelegant females. I fancy Jane Austen was
stronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certain
she was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She could
do one thing neither of them could do: she could coolly and sensibly
describe a man. I am not sure that the old great lady who could only
smatter Italian was not more vigorous than the new great lady who can
only stammer American; nor am I certain that the bygone duchesses who
were scarcely successful when they painted Melrose Abbey, were so much
more weak-minded than the modern duchesses who paint only their own
faces, and are bad at that. But that is not the point. What was the
theory, what was the idea, in their old, weak water-colors and their
shaky Italian? The idea was the same which in a ruder rank expressed
itself in home-made wines and hereditary recipes; and which still, in
a thousand unexpected ways, can be found clinging to the women of the
poor. It was the idea I urged in the second part of this book: that
the world must keep one great amateur, lest we all become artists and
perish. Somebody must renounce all specialist conquests, that she may
conquer all the conquerors. That she may be a queen of life, she must
not be a private soldier in it. I do not think the elegant female with
her bad Italian was a perfect product, any more than I think the slum
woman talking gin and funerals is a perfect product; alas! there are few
perfect products. But they come from a comprehensible idea; and the new
woman comes from nothing and nowhere. It is right to have an ideal, it
is right to have the right ideal, and these two have the right ideal.
The slum mother with her funerals is the degenerate daughter of
Antigone, the obstinate priestess of the household gods. The lady
talking bad Italian was the decayed tenth cousin of Portia, the great
and golden Italian lady, the Renascence amateur of life, who could be a
barrister because she could be anything. Sunken and neglected in the
sea of modern monotony and imitation, the types hold tightly to their
original truths. Antigone, ugly, dirty and often drunken, will still
bury her father. The elegant female, vapid and fading away to nothing,
still feels faintly the fundamental difference between herself and
her husband: that he must be Something in the City, that she may be
everything in the country.
There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to
God; so that even now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a
flower (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and
certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or features
of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of
life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes
the woman--she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me;
save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering
levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt
when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as
run. To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful
sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets
like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human
soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up forever. This is
that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female,
drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it.
She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining
the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of
superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining
the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth
doing, it is worth doing badly.