The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17

I

The Lamp of Hatred

Selected Articles from

The Freewoman and

The New Freewoman,

November 1911 – October 1913

The Position of Women in Indian Life

The Position of Women in Indian Life by the Maharani of Baroda and S. M. Mitra

THERE ARE TWO kinds of imperialists – imperialists and bloody imperialists. The feminist who belongs to the first variety, and considers blood to be an incident in imperialism and not its aim and glory, has long wanted some sort of description of Indian womanhood and how its conditions have been affected by British rule. And this is what the title of the book written by the Maharani of Baroda and S. M. Mitra, The Position of Women in Indian Life, seems to promise.

However, it turns out to be an account of the various social organisations and activities of women in Great Britain, and a rough sketch of the path down which Indian feminism is going to progress – or rather toddle. For the Maharani’s aims would not justify a quicker pace. She seems to regard the unseemly muddle into which women’s affairs have fallen today in Europe as something for which Indian women should strive. In fact, she takes a step backward. She actually recommends women to take up ‘genteel callings’, such as enamelling, furniture carving, decorative needlework, illuminating. Her timid attitude towards the woman worker may be estimated from the following extract:

The profession of domestic architect is in itself exceedingly interesting, and one which Indian women might, in part, very well take up. The oversight of the workmen would have to be left to men, nor could women very well climb the scaffolding to superintend the progress of the building; but the drawing of the plans and the details could easily be done by our women if they made it the subject of professional study. There is, however, no need for women to undertake the entire architecture of the house. There is ample room for their talent in designing portions of the interior – such as useful wall-cupboards, mouldings, friezes, ornamental designs for doors and windows, and the general decorative details of construction.

Now we in England know what this playing at wage-earning, this pathetic skulking on the outskirts of industry, brought us to during the Victorian era. It brought to women the most humiliating and the most hungry period of oppression they had ever endured. The feminist must take a bolder line. If she is going to enter the labour market she must take capital with her – she must try from the first to capture the commanding fortresses of industry, from which she can dictate the conditions of her own labour.

Moreover, the authors repeat over and over again that most malignant libel spoken by the rich against the poor – that the average housewife of the lower and middle classes is an ignorant incompetent. This is one of the most cherished beliefs of the wholly un-domesticated women of the aristocratic classes. It is, of course, a device to cheat poor girls out of their education. ‘Domestic science’ is designed to elbow out of the school curriculum all subjects likely to develop the minds of the girl scholars, and thus leave them, irrespective of their individual gifts, fit for nothing but domestic service. The authors err, too, in attributing the over-supply of ‘poorly paid governesses and half-educated girl-clerks’ to ‘a training … far too abstract, too intellectual’. It is obvious that this glut of worthless labour is partly due to the desire of parents to absorb their daughters into unprofitable domestic labour, partly to the lack of first-rate educational facilities, and partly to the fact that a woman knows that her labour capital – her education, her talent, her experience – is confiscated on her entrance into marriage.

The truth is, the authors’ feminism is out of date. They apologise for woman, and nag at her for the inborn failings of human nature. They are too complaisant about her underpayment, blandly remarking, after a comment on the miserable wages of matrons, that ‘salaries in England are not large. For instance, the Prime Minister of England gets a smaller salary than the Governor of an Indian Province.’ And they are confused by the old-fashioned idea that it is the labour of women who are not wholly dependent on their own earnings which depresses the general level of women’s salaries. As a matter of fact, we know that these make the finest trade-unionists. Surely the authors misinterpret the feminist opposition to regulative legislation of women’s labour. It is not the regulative aspect of it that the women object to, but the fact that it is regulation framed according to the conception of woman held by the public-schoolboys who make up the House of Commons.

Yet the authors have an immense enthusiasm for the cause of feminism, and see it as a coming force in the movement towards the unity of India. The pity is that they have not seen beneath the surface of English life. They do not realise that in spite of that august institution, the International Council of Women, the average woman worker is growing thin on ‘no salary but ample opportunities for Christian work’.

[This article signed Cicily Fairfield.]

The Freewoman, 30 November 1911

The Gospel According to Mrs Humphry Ward

Barricaded from the fastidious craftsman behind the solid Tottenham-Court-Road workmanship of her mental furniture, Mrs Humphry Ward has been able to preach her gospel unappreciated by revolutionaries. This is a pity. Because Mrs Ward reveals to us the psychology of the clergyman class – the class which throughout the Victorian era peopled the Church and the universities to the exclusion of any other. With the single exception of the scientist group, they have sent no message of inspiration to this generation. Yet the excellent economic position which they enjoyed, which enabled them to monopolise the higher education, made it inevitable that they should leave their mark on England. To take only one instance of their activities, they were responsible for the beginnings of modern journalism – God forgive them! But, on the whole, they mean very little to us – Matthew Arnold, Kingsley, Coventry Patmore, Anthony Trollope. But it helps us to understand the House of Commons if we can grasp their point of view: and that is most lucidly and naively shown in the works of Mrs Humphry Ward.

Even her deficiencies are of value to the student. For instance, at first sight it seems merely a very damning proof of the worthlessness of Mrs Ward’s writing that she should have written her two most pretentious works, Robert Elsmere and The Case of Richard Meynell, about a national movement which could not exist, but a movement which she describes as sweeping over the country and turning the hearts of Englishmen to flame. This modernist movement, which aimed at regulating the Church of England’s doctrine and ritual according to the conclusions of historical research upon the life of Christ, is alien from, not only the Englishman, but the human mind. Jesus of Nazareth sits in a chamber of every man’s brain, immovable, immutable, however credited or discredited. The idea of Christ is the only inheritance that the rich have not stolen from the poor. It is now a great national interest (not a faith), and as such is treated with respect, and as securely protected from ‘modernising’ as the tragedy of Hamlet. And although Mrs Ward has been ‘turning her trained intellect’ (to quote her publisher) on the universe for nigh on sixty years, that has not struck her. She regards the Englishman as going to church with the same watchful eye of possible improvements as when he attends the sanitary committee of the borough council. She does not understand that the Englishman, having discovered something that, whether true or not, is glorious to the human soul, is not going to tamper with it. This misunderstanding is so typical of her class. For, see how in the House of Commons the respectable always try, by encouraging mean thrift, to rob the poor of their improvidence, which, uncomfortable as it is in its results, is nevertheless their one means of protest against their conditions.

A defect which Mrs Ward shares not only with her own class, but with the modern world, is her lack of honour. Honour, in the time of Elizabeth, was quite a lovely and sensible thing. It was a jolly sort of code, such as holds good between skippers on the high seas, a fine cheerful recognition of mutual responsibilities. It bound together those bands of pioneers as they trampled down dangers on the virgin shores of the New World in loneliness and thirst. It made literature beautiful with discussion of the debts of the soul. The difference between our outlook and theirs is very well illustrated by Thomas Middleton’s imperial tragedy, The Changeling. Beatrice, a noble lady, is betrothed to a man she hates. She hires de Flores, a poor gentleman, to kill this man. That service done, de Flores demands that she should become his mistress. On her refusal, he holds the secret of their conspiracy over her head. Now, what struck the Elizabethan about this ghastly story was not the blood-guilt of Beatrice, nor the brutal lustfulness of de Flores, but the treachery of de Flores in blackmailing the lady, and the nice point as to exactly how far Beatrice had contracted these base obligations. We have travelled far from that now. For the Englishman became spoilt by too much prosperity, and began to worry about his soul and, as a Puritan, reverted to savagery. For henceforth he did not regulate his moral conduct according to honour, but according to his various taboos. So honour left us, to shine only in broken reflections from the work of our great artists.

Mrs Ward is not one of these. For an example of her complete lack of sense, let us turn to Daphne. There you see, set down without disgust, the wooing of an underbred American heiress, Daphne, by an able-bodied young Englishman, Roger Barnes, who is frankly in love with her money. Mrs Ward seems to think it quite a wholesome arrangement, even setting down in cold fact that Roger blamed his wife for extravagance. They live an uneventful and, one might say, animal life in England for some years, and then Daphne gets bored with Roger. She moves over to America and divorces him according to the kindly laws of that country, taking custody of their only child. With a fine sense of what is fitting, the child dies. Hence the father takes to drink and lives with a shop-girl. Had he been a workman who had lost his job, how disgusted and contemptuous Mrs Ward would have been! So, overcome by remorse, Daphne returns to England and offers to live with him again. Then comes the one gleam of horse-sense discernible in Mrs Ward’s books. Roger prefers to die without the companionship of a woman he dislikes. Mrs Ward does not see it like that, however. It seems to her the most tragic note of all.

Now, what lesson does Mrs Ward learn from this rather trivial story? The chief lesson would be, one would think, that it is a bad thing that a man should eat if he does not work; and that it is a very vile thing that a man should earn his living by entering into a sexual relationship. But actually the only thing it suggests to Mrs Ward’s trained intellect is that divorce is too easily granted in America. Unmoved and undismayed, she suggests that the rich woman and her parasite should have continued to live together until death corrupted their mean bodies. And why? Mrs Ward never answers that question. She never hears it, because she does not consider that personal relationships need the sanction of honour. To her, all things done in the name of the taboo of marriage seem beautiful.

It may strike one in reading Daphne that it shows a strange habit of mind to consider whisky and shop-girls as the only alternative to a happy married life. But Mrs Ward has a poor opinion of men, and a worse one of women, whom, with Zarathustra, she considers ‘still cats and birds: or, at the best, cows’. Of course, Mrs Ward is largely in agreement with Nietzsche – not only in this, but in her firm belief in the Superman, whom she considers to be realised in the aristocratic classes of this country, her contempt for democratic art and her voluble prejudice against socialism. But Nietzsche’s Superman is to have quite a good time, exulting in his eternal Bank Holiday, with the wide world on Hampstead Heath. But Mrs Ward’s characters, judging from her ideal figure, Catherine Leyburn, would at their highest fail to enjoy the spiritual exhilaration of a meeting of the Poor Law Guardians.

Catherine Leyburn is revealed to us in her youth and in her late middle-age in the pages of Robert Elsmere and The Case of Richard Meynell. The distinguishing characteristic which differentiates her from, for instance, Isabel, in The New Machiavelli, is her physical abandonment. On every page her face works with emotion and is illuminated by a burning flush; once she has slowly succumbed to the turgid wooing of Robert Elsmere, she drenches him with tears and kisses. A spiritual upheaval is a picnic to her. Whensoever she approaches a deathbed, one has an uneasy suspicion that she is glad to ‘be in at the death’. After many years of widowhood, whiled away by the perusal of the lives of bishops, she dies as easily as she has lived. What a life! Never once had she earned the bread she ate. She had spent her life in thinking beautiful thoughts, in being a benign and beautiful influence … Never will Woman be saved until she realises that it is a far, far better thing to keep a jolly public-house really well than to produce a cathedral full of beautiful thoughts. ‘Here they talk of nothing else than love – its beauty, its holiness, its spirituality, its Devil knows what!… They think they have achieved the perfection of love because they have no bodies! – sheer imaginative debauchery!’ It was of Hell that that was said. When people plead that ‘Woman should stand aside from the ugly mêlée’ of things as they are, and ‘hold high the banner of the Ideal’, which is the usual way of alluding to Catherine’s life of loaferdom, they are instructing her in her damnation.

Mrs Ward’s gospel is an easy one. If she was Mrs Mary A. Ward, of Port Matilda, Pa., USA, it would be expressed something like this: ‘Girls! Make life a joy-ride! But don’t talk back to the police!’ This easy gospel will give its disciples the heritage one may see in the faces of so many ‘sheltered women’: a smooth brow, that has never known the sweat of labour; the lax mouth, flaccid for want of discipline; eyes that blink because they have never seen anything worth looking at; the fat body of the unexercised waster. And within, the petulance of those who practise idealism on the easiest methods: a pastime that develops the conceit of the artist, with none of the wisdom and chastening of art.

The Freewoman, 15 February 1912

Letter to the Editor of The Freewoman

A Reply to Mr Hubert Wales

Madam,

This is most damping. In ‘The Gospel of Mrs Humphry Ward’ I write a positively eloquent paean on energy, and hurl my thunderbolts at the woman who will not think. And three weeks later Mr Hubert Wales startles me by accusing me of worshipping industrialism, and despising the contemplative life (in which he seems to include the practice of art and philosophy). I feel hurt.

Of course, I meant nothing of the sort! How could a feminist worship the industrial system? It makes the same demand from women as does the home – physical drudgery, combined with mental inertia.

When I wrote that sentence, ‘Never will woman be saved until she realises that it is a far, far better thing to keep a jolly public-house really well than to produce a cathedral full of beautiful thoughts,’ I was writing about the parasitic women of the upper and middle classes, whose ‘beautiful thoughts’ are the effortless pulp of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, not the fierce struggles towards the light of George Bernard Shaw. The Catherine Leyburns of England are about as fit for the stern intellectual discipline of the contemplative life as are the loafers on the Embankment.

I really advised the parasitic women to become publicans because it occurred to me that the various duties of that profession, such as wringing a licence out of a bench of insolent country gentlemen, paying the rent regularly on quarter-days and chucking out the drunkards on Saturday night, might foster the qualities of independence, thrift and firmness of character, so sadly lacking among upper-class women of today.

Rebecca West

The Freewoman, 14 March 1912

Taking on Mrs Humphry Ward in 1912 was brave and foolhardy for a young woman with literary aspirations, equivalent to a young man, expecting to launch his career with insults to Henry James. For she was the grand old woman of English letters and the formidable figurehead of the Tory anti-suffrage campaign. Rebecca West has herself described her as intellectually formidable. She was the niece of Matthew Arnold and the daughter of Dr Thomas Arnold ‘famed for his desperate attempts to make something of the male sex at Rugby’. Mrs Ward’s most famous coup against the cause of women was the publication in the magazine Nineteenth Century of an anti-suffrage petition signed by many of England’s most prominent women, including Virginia Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen, and Beatrice Webb (who later recanted). Delia Blanchflower, a novel written by Mrs Ward to expose the iniquities of the suffragettes probably did the Cause more good than harm. Dame Rebecca found the anti-suffragist’s literary debasement mysterious, for she found her memoirs A Writer’s Recollections admirable. Virginia Woolf agreed with Rebecca West’s estimation of the novelist who dominated the female literary world of their youth; she found the novels encrusted with Victorian black beads, hanging like the ‘mantles of our aunts’ in the lumber-room of literature. Yet she too admired the memoirs and used them for the writing of her Oxford chapters in The Years. Her formidable presence must have seemed to those radical young women like a female equivalent of the statue in Don Giovanni, a matriarchal bulwark, against whom the ‘freewomen’ threw the manifesto of their paper, ‘the revolt of women, philosophic anarchism and a general whip-round for ideas which would reform simultaneously life and art.’ ‘More, no doubt, we would have taken on,’ says Rebecca West, ‘had there been time.’

The Gospel According to Granville-Barker

Humanity is a little lost dog looking for a master. Men seek without cease some pilot passion to which they can surrender their heavy burden of freedom. The heroes worshipped by the people are those who have succeeded in this search. St Teresa was the slave of her religion, Paolo and Francesca stripped themselves of all worldly things for love, Joseph Chamberlain gave himself up to a flame-like passion for Tariff Reform. To be respectable one must abandon oneself to duty, that impulse to seek salvation by doing the things one doesn’t want to do, which is so deeply rooted in all savages. But there has always been an unconsidered minority who wanted to keep the burden of their freedom, in order to indulge in the joy of thinking. They found a pure joy in solving an equation, and dreamed of the greater joy in solving the problems of life itself. They imagined victories of reason more splendid than any amorous conquest or the slaying of any wild beast. This was resented by the slaves of passion as cold and inhuman. In the Middle Ages the slaves burnt the thinkers in large numbers: and now they use ‘intellectuals’ as a term of acrid dislike and contempt. So that the thinkers have usually stood aloof and disguised their ecstasy. Hence, when a man arises who shamelessly revels in the joys of thinking, who flaunts it as Chesterton flaunts his love of beer, we ought to stand back and look at him.

Granville-Barker is this man. Thought bubbles from him like laughter from a healthy child. It is more than a religion to him – it is a sport. One can imagine the hostess at a country-house dinner party asking him, ‘And do you hunt, Mr Barker?’ He would reply, with the proud modesty of one who knows a trick worth two of that, ‘No. I think.’ Every one of the four plays that he has published is an eager and happily passionate discussion of some important discussion of some important problem of life. The smallest of them, The Voysey Inheritance, seems at first only the story of a young solicitor who finds that his father’s flourishing family practice has been built up by the wholesale embezzlement of his clients’ funds and the payment of princely dividends out of non-existent capital; and his struggles to right the accounts by further embezzlement that shall at least protect the poorer clients from utter destitution. But really it shows the difficulties of the honest man who tries to build a just commonwealth out of the swindling social system of today. Even in his one short story, Georgiana, which was written during convalescence after a severe illness, his delighted spirit hovers over the hard problem of an irregular relationship.

Of course Shaw, too, has this insatiable appetite for debate, this fierce refusal to leave things as they are. But there are two great characteristics that mark off Barker from Shaw. One is Barker’s unconventionality. For all Shaw’s audacious discussions, there is not one character in all his eighteen plays who infringes the conventions in practice. But Barker again and again draws sinners of the deepest dye with the most ardent sympathy. In that comprehensive survey of modern womanhood, The Madras House, the woman he values most is Miss Yates. She has the talent to become an excellent shop-assistant: she has a spark of genius which makes her refuse to accept the convention that if marriage is denied to her so is motherhood.

Shaw never brought anything so anarchic as an unmarried mother on to his stage. Although he cultivates the flower of argument so well, he does not like the fruit of action. But Barker, glad disciple of the joy of thinking, embraces logic like a lover, and shows all the consequences of the theories he advances. The other distinguishing characteristic of Barker is his humility. He has not forgotten God. He knows that any moment the skies above may open and a mailed hand descend to wreck the reasoned course of human life. He respects the mysterious fumblings of the human mind. There is an illuminating evidence of this in The Madras House, when Philip Madras, the head of the drapery firm, Miss Chancellor, the stern spinster guardian of the shop-girls’ morals, and Miss Yates are met together to discuss the question of the latter’s fall. She has told them how she brought a wedding-ring to wear when she saw the doctor:

Philip: Miss Yates, have you the wedding-ring with you?

Miss Yates: Yes, I have … it’s not real gold.

Philip: Put it on.

Miss Yates, having fished it out of a petticoat pocket, rather wonderingly does so, and Philip turns, maliciously humorous, to Miss Chancellor.

Philip: Now where are we, Miss Chancellor?

Miss Chancellor: I think we’re mocking at a very sacred thing, Mr Madras.

Miss Yates: Yes … and I won’t now.

With a sudden access of emotion she slams the ring upon the table. Philip meditates for a moment on the fact that there are some things in life still inaccessible to his light-hearted logic.

Philip: True … true … I beg both your pardons.

Wild censors would not have dragged that apology out of Shaw. And it is just that spirit, that reverence towards Life, that makes Barker’s thought so valuable.

Now, at present, the great result of the thirteen years of ecstatic contemplation of the earth that have passed since the writing of Barker’s first play is a very vigorous hatred. He hates the sterility of life. All emotion, not only love, is a desire for procreation. When a little child hears a pleasant sound, it cries, ‘Again! again!’ But soon mere repetition fails to satisfy. The child imitates the sound, and that fails too. At last it achieves happiness in the creation of a new sound. Older children always sit down to paint or write after they have seen a picture or read a story that appeals to them, and attempt to create. So life ought to be a struggle of desire towards adventures whose nobility will fertilise the soul and lead to the conception of new, glorious things. To avoid the ordeal of emotion that leads to the conception is the impulse of death. Sterility is the deadly sin. Today so many of our activities are sterile. Our upper classes are impotent by reason of their soft living. Our lower classes have had their vitality sweated out of them by their filthy labours: they can only bear dead things. They say that the work that is the excuse for the rowdy bustling of the hideous city could, under a more efficient system of organisation, be adequately performed by a third of the existing firms. Parliament, built up by the lawyers, the fine flower of the intellectual classes of England, is a barren thing. Our art is an anaesthetic rather than an inspiration.

Every one of Barker’s plays is a protest against some form of this sterility. Ann Leete is a cry against the fruitlessness of a highly bred class whose energies are diverted into political intrigue. The Voysey Inheritance is an indictment of the profitless muddle of the present economic conditions. Waste contains not only the picture of a woman who had so much of the fear of life that is the beginning of all evil that she could kill her unborn child; it is an accusation against the governing class which has lost the mysterious quality that makes one’s actions bear fruit. ‘A peasant … a dog might have it.’ The Madras House is a judgement of womankind. He shows many types, and they are all spiritually sterile. The six Miss Huxtables, who exist in idle maidenhood on Denmark Hill, getting nothing from life, giving nothing to life. Old Mrs Madras, who refuses to cultivate the qualities of her humanity and womanhood, but ceaselessly demands from her husband the rights of submission and companionship she should only have expected during the brief hours of their love, that are really not much use to her now that she hates him. But the worst scoundrel of all is Jessica Madras, the married woman who, by virtue of being Philip’s wife and the mother of one child, has secured the right to complete idleness for the rest of her life. Everything she touches turns to voluptuousness. She whiles away the boredom of her lazy life by delicately thrusting flirtation on hard-working men, well knowing that her ladyhood will protect her from any disagreeable complications. Even art she uses to smother God in her. When she comes in, sick with disgust at the squalid world of ugliness and suffering outside her four walls, she can sit down and forget it all in playing Beethoven. To her, whom the world excuses on the ground of her grace, her culture and her motherhood, Barker says: ‘You consume much, but you produce nothing. You live by your sex. When you walk abroad you distract men’s thoughts to petty sensuousness. You must either be shut up in a harem or you must be a free woman.’ And he tells her how she must do it. ‘There’s a price to be paid for free womanhood, I think … and how many of you ladies are willing to pay it? Come out and be common women among us common men!’

That is the solution of the question. We accept it, and we are working towards it. But sometimes it seems rather a questionable ideal – to work among common men, to be sucked under into the same whirlpool of sterile activity. In The Marrying of Ann Leete, the earliest and most exquisite of all his plays, Barker showed us a fruitless family. There is Carnaby Leete, who has infected his whole family with the perverted passion of political intrigue; his daughter Sarah, who has flitted lovelessly from a husband in one political camp to a lover in the other, to serve her father’s interest; his son George, who despises the game, but is too sick of soul to leave it; and the younger daughter Ann, who, at the very moment of her betrothal to her father’s latest political ally, rebels. She means to find her place in the eternal purpose. She finds it by going ‘back to the land’. She marries the gardener, thinking that in the simple life of the people, spent so innocently in ‘sowing seeds and watching flowers grow and cutting away dead things’, she will be able to live and feel fruitfully.

It is the easy solution that would appeal to a very young man. It is the solution that fascinates the child-like minds of Chesterton and Belloc. Perhaps Barker realises now that one finds oneself no nearer the essential things of life by going back to the peasantry than a civilised man would achieve freedom by joining a savage tribe. He would find the religious ceremonies of an African tribe more complex than those of the Church of England; he would find the etiquette of beads far stricter than any decree of fashion in Mayfair, and the marriage laws would be more irrational than those of Holy Church herself. And in the same way the peasant has to live up to more superstitions than the most over-civilised town-dweller. He is bound to the past, which is no guide to us. Perhaps if Barker returned to the manner of Ann Leete, in which he speaks with a vivid dramatic idiom he has since obscured by echoes of Shaw and the Fabian Society, he might suggest some other way to freedom. As it is, he has given us a strong hatred, the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.

The Freewoman, 7 March 1912

Rebecca West’s father had once been known in London as the only man to equal Shaw in debate. She herself found much to admire in Shaw’s work and often praised his skill in argument and his gift of tongues in an age which saw the debasement of the language. She once described his head as like that of a ‘flirtatious Moses’. But she criticised some of his arguments and positions, though this was from the first a battle between equals. He admired her wit and style, and was flattered when she was called a ‘Shaw in skirts’. The play he wrote for the suffragettes to use as a fund raiser, Press Cuttings, is a polemical farce in which all the characters, male and female, are presented as stereotypes. But though the women win the arguments, their stereotypes are also the more offensive and extreme. It is true that Shaw wrote to the papers to denounce forcible feeding and the Cat and Mouse Act, but his dialectical arguments for women’s rights did less to advance the Cause than has generally been supposed.

On 25 September 1913, Rebecca West reviewed Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion in The New Freewoman, lamenting the fact that ‘we have no English drama’ except for Granville-Barker’s Marrying of Ann Leete, and mocking his stage-managing of Shaw’s play. That Granville-Barker whose talents she compared to Chekhov’s in The Cherry Orchard, should be stage-managing Shaw seemed to her ridiculous, especially when he had contrived to represent a forest by a washing line hung with purple, white and green kimonos. (The audience got the point, for these were the colours of the suffragette martyrs.)

Against the background of broken light and perverse images of beauty shone the religious faith of Mr Shaw, unintelligible to the average pagan dramatic critic by reason of its Christian bias. Androcles is an early Christian Kipps, a simple soul. He, the tamest thing among men, is not afraid of the wildest thing among beasts because he loves it. He is the truly religious man fearing not the fiercest passion that may rise out of his humanity because he loves life. He is the middle-class man who will not practise asceticism, and who has made all revolutions since the beginning of time; who goes off with his lion friend, crying, ‘While we are together no slavery for me, no cage for him!’ And there was genius in the picture of the martyrs so Christian that they talk no more of Christ than William Blake talked of God, which is a lesson in psychology to the Alice Meynell and Francis Thompson school of poets. There was, in the decision of Lavinia and Ferrovius, a splendid illumination on the duty of the soul. In her hour of martyrdom fear showed Lavinia that the stories and dreams of Christianity were but stories and dreams! Yet she chose to die for the passion she had poured into her worship of them, and for the great truth too great to be grasped by the little brain that lay behind them. And Ferrovius, finding that all his body was made for man, served man rather than the Christ for whose service he had not been made. It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master-passion.

The New Freewoman, 15 September 1913

Views and Vagabonds

Views and Vagabonds by Rose Macaulay

Miss Macaulay’s new novel, Views and Vagabonds, has the initial disadvantage of a heroine who lets her father feed the baby on beer and red herring, keeps old and sticky paper-bags because it do seem a pity to waste paper-bags, and kills mice with the poker. And not only does Miss Macaulay gloss over nothing; she actually defends her heroine’s right to amuse herself in all these ways.

Louie Robinson, a hand at the Enderby papermills, had the misfortune to be married by Benjie Bunter, a wealthy young man, who had come to the conclusion that only the workers had any right to exist, and consequently had set up a blacksmith’s forge at Wattles, the Cambridgeshire village where she had her home. Louie thought he was marrying her for love. Her own love was not such as gave or invited demonstrations; she seems to have done little but gaze at him with dumb affection, except when he scalded his hand, when she sat on gazing but also fetched the Vaseline. But gradually she began to realise that his marriage was only an incident in his ‘World for the Workers’ campaign. ‘I said, and I maintain, that we should all marry the hardest workers we know.’ But as for affection … ‘That is naturally one of the points I have taken into consideration. It would be ridiculous not to. In my opinion people ought not to marry without caring for each other.’ A temperate frame of mind that disheartened Louie.

Then a baby came, and Louie felt that she had justified her position by providing a son for Benjie, whom he could train up as a worker in the way he should go. But then old Mr Robinson, ‘knowing that babies like a bit of whatever we get’, gave John a fatal taste of beer and red herring. Louie said little, certainly no word of blame against her father, but henceforward stood about the garden hugging a pet rabbit in her empty arms, a sad figure of colourless, speechless grief.

So for a change Benjie takes her up to London to stay with his people. And Louie is put under the magnifying-glass as a type: the representative working woman. All the Bunter family jostle round, calling their friends to look. They decide to educate her, and she follows them apathetically from the Academy to St Paul’s, from the House of Commons to Lohengrin. Their attitude of interest in her class and their disregard of her personality shows her the more clearly the place she fills in her husband’s life. So she leaves him, saying: ‘You took me along with the forge and the rest… You can marry for a sort of game, but I can’t, and that’s ’ow it is.’

So they part company. Benjie goes off caravanning with his cousin Cecil, a Girton girl, to preach the gospel of garden cities, and Augustus John, and sweetness and light in the agricultural counties. And people talk scandal, which Louie hears, and nearly breaks her heart over. But she suffers in silence, until news comes that alters her attitude to Benjie. He isn’t really a Bunter, but their adopted child; he is no longer an aristocrat with a self-conscious mission to the lower orders, but a peasant like herself. Furthermore, he has been burnt in a fire and needs her mothering. So she starts off at once to find him and bring him home.

It is a bad moment for Benjie. For he has just come to the conclusion that expounding the beauties of Augustus John to rustics isn’t much use, and that indictments of the ugliness of their dwellings and the inadequacy of their religion aren’t really in good taste. He adopts a new philosophy. ‘If joy should fill the world, the Kingdom of Heaven would be come upon it in truth; so let each do his part in that fulfilling, and make and take joy while he could, and strive no more against life, which was surely good enough.’ So he is just going off to seek his way of joy by caravanning round the country without a propaganda.

And then Louie turns up, demanding that he should return to ‘a nice new-looking house, none of them old nasty whitewash-and-thatch things they had there before; they’re all gone, and these are nice semis – yellow brick, you know, with pretty carved porticoes – ever so nice, they are.’ So Benjie had to puzzle out a new aspect of his philosophy. ‘Happiness counts. But whose? Yours or mine?’ More out of moral bewilderment than any real love for humanity, he decides, ‘yours’.

So Louie gets her yellow semi, ever so nice, and calls it Daisyville. And later on she also gets a new baby, and she calls it Stanley Wilfred, and feeds it with cake out of her mouth. And she won’t let Benjie have tea in the garden in case them nasty sniggering Wilkinsons next door overlook the tea-table. And everything is very horrible and vulgar, as Miss Macaulay says Louie has every right to be.

Of course, Louie’s troubles are most distressing. Probably she did look as ‘if, giving up all solutions of immediate problems, she fell back on the wisdom of the age’. My tortoiseshell tabby looks like that sometimes. She has her troubles, too; only last week they drowned two of her kittens. But that doesn’t make her a tragic or dignified figure. And neither is Louie. In fact, from her general character, her want of physical charm, her lack of response to other personalities, her apathy towards new sights and sounds, we may suspect anaemia. There are two ways of wanting love. There is the way of sending out the whole force of one’s vitality to a fair fight – perhaps to win, perhaps to lose, but certainly to fight. And there is the way of waiting outside as though love were a soup-kitchen and a marriage-certificate the soup-ticket, in the tremulous attitude of one cringing for charity. Louie’s way was the second.

Of course, the painting of weak personalities may be good art. In the present case it certainly is, for Views and Vagabonds is an exquisitely written book. But, unfortunately, Miss Macaulay uses Louie as a representative type of the poor – the inarticulate poor, she would probably call them. She appears to think that vitality decreases in direct ratio to social position, and that Louie with her weak grip on life is a typical peasant. If this were so it would be an excellent thing to form immediately an oligarchy with the proletariat in chains. But the proletariat isn’t like that. Even the agricultural labourers have shown in their peasant revolts that they have courage and passion. In view of the fact (quoted quite shamelessly in a pamphlet which invites subscriptions to the Anti-Socialist Union) that 956,185 agricultural labourers earn from 9s 3d to 20s 9d a week, the modern movement towards the city is an evidence of their good sense. To appeal for love towards the poor on the ground of their occasional imbecility is treachery. Of course, they do this often in sketches in the Saturday Westminster Gazette, when Liberal ladies write in the style of Mr A. C. Benson breathless accounts of how on the way home from a Free Trade lecture they met a man quite bent with rheumatism, and another man who was a little drunk (but quite respectful) … No, they didn’t say anything… but it was so impressive … deep, slumbering passions of the poor … their silent tragedies … Of course, Miss Macaulay, being a worthy artist, does not indulge in these spiritual picnics over the ailments and orgies of the poor. But she says we ought to forgive the poor their vulgarities, because of their weakness, not because of their strength.

And that, by the way, is a treachery women often commit in the name of feminism. They say that they too ‘give up all solutions of immediate problems’. They allege that they ‘fall back on the wisdom of the ages’. Which is a transparent trick. And they appeal for equal rights with men because of their weakness. In other words, they claim liberty because they are natural slaves.

The Freewoman, 21 March 1912

Woman Adrift

Woman Adrift by Harold Owen

Mr Harold Owen is a natural slave, having no conception of liberty nor any use for it. So, as a Freewoman, I review his anti-feminist thesis, Woman Adrift, with chivalrous reluctance, feeling that a steam-engine ought not to crush a butterfly.

Woman Adrift is a respectable piece of journalism, illuminated towards the end by some passages of meteoric brilliance, which starts out to prove that men are the salt of the earth, and women either their wives or refuse … ‘Woman is wholly superfluous to the State save as a bearer of children and a nursing mother.’ There is a kind of humour in the way these things work out. Just as Napoleon proved in his latter end that no man dare be a despot, so Mr Owen finishes by showing that all men are fools and a great many of them something worse.

It would be unchivalrous, and might tend to increase arrogance among women were I to describe Mr Owen’s loose thinking and arbitrary judgement. So we will pass over his arguments in favour of his conclusions. Two examples will suffice to show how he arrives at these. He attempts to quash the argument that a woman ought to have a vote because she pays taxes by stating that in return for her taxes she is a ‘citizeness’ – which sounds like something odd out of a menagerie – and that anyway John Hampden was an MP. And in a chapter entitled ‘Superfluous Woman’, which ought to stand for all time as an example of the impudence sex-privilege may engender in the most insignificant male, he is obviously upset by the fact that two women really have attained to the first rank of scientific eminence. So this is how he turns it off: before these women can receive any credit, ‘it will be necessary to prove that the collaborated discovery made by Madame Curie, and the original researches of Mrs Ayrton would not have been made by a man, if not thereabout, then very shortly after’.

I trust this pernicious principle will not be generally adopted. Particularly in the literary world. I shall be ruined if, when I complete my monograph on ‘The Possibilities of Polygamy in the South-Eastern Suburbs of London’, my publisher accepts it, but declines to pay me until I can prove that Mrs Humphry Ward would not have written it, if not thereabout, then very shortly after.

But when I said that this book proved the worthlessness of men, I was not arguing from the particular to the general. It is a fact that his conclusions result logically to the discredit of men. He begins by describing the average man as a ‘big, powerful man, all brain and muscle, and not only the governing spirit in the home, but the breadwinner outside it’: a combination of Jack Johnson, Mr Gladstone and Shakespeare; of such immense wage-earning powers that he can support all his unmarried female relatives as well as his children and wife (or wives, as the fine fellow may choose); of such delicate moral perceptions and universal experience that he is the wise arbiter of all these destinies.

And he leaves one wondering whether one can safely lend an umbrella to one’s uncle.

To take up one of these conclusions by which Mr Owen damns his own sex, one should turn to Chapter XIII, in which he argues that women should not be enfranchised because the administrators of the law deal leniently with women criminals. In support of this assertion he brings forward a few cases in which women appear to have been treated gently on account of their sex, and one case in which a woman received a much lighter sentence than her male partner in guilt. It would be easy to prove that such is not the general rule by citing the opinion of greater legal authorities than Mr Owen. But that would spoil the fun. So let us concede him his point. This amounts to an admission that men prefer bad women. For in no other branch of industry but crime do women receive preferential treatment. And the tenderness of the administrators of the law does not extend to women when they are victims of crime: witness the overwhelming number of cases in which sympathetic judges sentence men to trivial terms of imprisonment, varying from a fortnight to three months, for the most barbarous crimes against women and girls. I present Mr Owen with the further evidence that the female officials of institutions governed by men are often remarkable for hardness and brutality, and that the circulating libraries are full of the biographies of courtesans and murderesses written by men for men.

Now, consider the appalling results of the recognition of this principle, if all we brazen hussies who are suffragettes and feminists became converted to Mr Owen’s belief that every women ought to throw up her economic independence, and get some man to keep her! Think of us rushing about, trying with all that vitality we are at present misdirecting in clawing policemen and wrecking the home to attract men whom we knew did not value goodness in a woman! We will paint the town red. And it will be Mr Owen’s fault.

Again, Mr Owen gives his sex away in the course of his remarks on Mill’s The Subjection of Women. He quotes a passage in which Mill pleads that the higher education will increase domestic happiness by creating a community of interests between men and women, and he triumphantly points out that after fifty years of the higher education, women have begun to turn their backs on marriage. How naïve, how frank! If I belonged to a sex that was so transparently undesirable, that after only fifty years of the higher education women recoil from it in aversion, I should bury myself tidily in quicklime.

But why do women sometimes turn away from marriage in aversion? Mr Owen again obliges. It appears that men are hogs. This is not my own belief, it is Mr Owen’s. In Chapter XII he sets forth with enthusiasm that men have no sense of decency in conduct, that they are even as beasts of the field, and that unimaginative debauchery – ‘bodily unfaithfulness … rather than spiritual unfaithfulness’ – comes natural to them. ‘If a wife is unfaithful to her husband, a bigger revolution takes place in her moral nature than may take place in the moral nature of her husband.’ In other words, a man is always more of a hog than is a woman.

Ugh! Men aren’t like this – brawny and immoral pigs, with their swelled heads up in the clouds and their feet firmly planted in the