All Things Considered
say eternally, like my correspondent, that the ordinary woman is always
a drudge. And what, in the name of the Nine Gods, is the ordinary man?
These people seem to think that the ordinary man is a Cabinet Minister.
They are always talking about man going forth to wield power, to carve
his own way, to stamp his individuality on the world, to command and to
be obeyed. This may be true of a certain class. Dukes, perhaps, are not
drudges; but, then, neither are Duchesses. The Ladies and Gentlemen of
the Smart Set are quite free for the higher culture, which consists
chiefly of motoring and Bridge. But the ordinary man who typifies and
constitutes the millions that make up our civilisation is no more free
for the higher culture than his wife is.
Indeed, he is not so free. Of the two sexes the woman is in the more
powerful position. For the average woman is at the head of something
with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders
and do nothing else. He has to put one dull brick on another dull
brick, and do nothing else; he has to add one dull figure to another
dull figure, and do nothing else. The woman’s world is a small one,
perhaps, but she can alter it. The woman can tell the tradesman with
whom she deals some realistic things about himself. The clerk who does
this to the manager generally gets the sack, or shall we say (to avoid
the vulgarism), finds himself free for higher culture. Above all, as I
said in my previous article, the woman does work which is in some small
degree creative and individual. She can put the flowers or the
furniture in fancy arrangements of her own. I fear the bricklayer
cannot put the bricks in fancy arrangements of his own, without
disaster to himself and others. If the woman is only putting a patch
into a carpet, she can choose the thing with regard to colour. I fear
it would not do for the office boy dispatching a parcel to choose his
stamps with a view to colour; to prefer the tender mauve of the
sixpenny to the crude scarlet of the penny stamp. A woman cooking may
not always cook artistically; still she can cook artistically. She can
introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the composition
of a soup. The clerk is not encouraged to introduce a personal and
imperceptible alteration into the figures in a ledger.
The trouble is that the real question I raised is not discussed. It is
argued as a problem in pennies, not as a problem in people. It is not
the proposals of these reformers that I feel to be false so much as
their temper and their arguments. I am not nearly so certain that
communal kitchens are wrong as I am that the defenders of communal
kitchens are wrong. Of course, for one thing, there is a vast
difference between the communal kitchens of which I spoke and the
communal meal (_monstrum horrendum, informe_) which the darker and
wilder mind of my correspondent diabolically calls up. But in both the
trouble is that their defenders will not defend them humanly as human
institutions. They will not interest themselves in the staring
psychological fact that there are some things that a man or a woman, as
the case may be, wishes to do for himself or herself. He or she must do
it inventively, creatively, artistically, individually—in a word,
badly. Choosing your wife (say) is one of these things. Is choosing
your husband’s dinner one of these things? That is the whole question:
it is never asked.
And then the higher culture. I know that culture. I would not set any
man free for it if I could help it. The effect of it on the rich men
who are free for it is so horrible that it is worse than any of the
other amusements of the millionaire—worse than gambling, worse even
than philanthropy. It means thinking the smallest poet in Belgium
greater than the greatest poet of England. It means losing every
democratic sympathy. It means being unable to talk to a navvy about
sport, or about beer, or about the Bible, or about the Derby, or about
patriotism, or about anything whatever that he, the navvy, wants to
talk about. It means taking literature seriously, a very amateurish
thing to do. It means pardoning indecency only when it is gloomy
indecency. Its disciples will call a spade a spade; but only when it is
a grave-digger’s spade. The higher culture is sad, cheap, impudent,
unkind, without honesty and without ease. In short, it is “high.” That
abominable word (also applied to game) admirably describes it.
No; if you were setting women free for something else, I might be more
melted. If you can assure me, privately and gravely, that you are
setting women free to dance on the mountains like mænads, or to worship
some monstrous goddess, I will make a note of your request. If you are
quite sure that the ladies in Brixton, the moment they give up cooking,
will beat great gongs and blow horns to Mumbo-Jumbo, then I will agree
that the occupation is at least human and is more or less entertaining.
Women have been set free to be Bacchantes; they have been set free to
be Virgin Martyrs; they have been set free to be Witches. Do not ask
them now to sink so low as the higher culture.
I have my own little notions of the possible emancipation of women; but
I suppose I should not be taken very seriously if I propounded them. I
should favour anything that would increase the present enormous
authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The
average woman, as I have said, is a despot; the average man is a serf.
I am for any scheme that any one can suggest that will make the average
woman more of a despot. So far from wishing her to get her cooked meals
from outside, I should like her to cook more wildly and at her own will
than she does. So far from getting always the same meals from the same
place, let her invent, if she likes, a new dish every day of her life.
Let woman be more of a maker, not less. We are right to talk about
“Woman;” only blackguards talk about women. Yet all men talk about men,
and that is the whole difference. Men represent the deliberative and
democratic element in life. Woman represents the despotic.
THE MODERN MARTYR
The incident of the Suffragettes who chained themselves with iron
chains to the railings of Downing Street is a good ironical allegory of
most modern martyrdom. It generally consists of a man chaining himself
up and then complaining that he is not free. Some say that such larks
retard the cause of female suffrage, others say that such larks alone
can advance it; as a matter of fact, I do not believe that they have
the smallest effect one way or the other.
The modern notion of impressing the public by a mere demonstration of
unpopularity, by being thrown out of meetings or thrown into jail is
largely a mistake. It rests on a fallacy touching the true popular
value of martyrdom. People look at human history and see that it has
often happened that persecutions have not only advertised but even
advanced a persecuted creed, and given to its validity the public and
dreadful witness of dying men. The paradox was pictorially expressed in
Christian art, in which saints were shown brandishing as weapons the
very tools that had slain them. And because his martyrdom is thus a
power to the martyr, modern people think that any one who makes himself
slightly uncomfortable in public will immediately be uproariously
popular. This element of inadequate martyrdom is not true only of the
Suffragettes; it is true of many movements I respect and some that I
agree with. It was true, for instance, of the Passive Resisters, who
had pieces of their furniture sold up. The assumption is that if you
show your ordinary sincerity (or even your political ambition) by being
a nuisance to yourself as well as to other people, you will have the
strength of the great saints who passed through the fire. Any one who
can be hustled in a hall for five minutes, or put in a cell for five
days, has achieved what was meant by martyrdom, and has a halo in the
Christian art of the future. Miss Pankhurst will be represented holding
a policeman in each hand—the instruments of her martyrdom. The Passive
Resister will be shown symbolically carrying the teapot that was torn
from him by tyrannical auctioneers.
But there is a fallacy in this analogy of martyrdom. The truth is that
the special impressiveness which does come from being persecuted only
happens in the case of extreme persecution. For the fact that the
modern enthusiast will undergo some inconvenience for the creed he
holds only proves that he does hold it, which no one ever doubted. No
one doubts that the Nonconformist minister cares more for Nonconformity
than he does for his teapot. No one doubts that Miss Pankhurst wants a
vote more than she wants a quiet afternoon and an armchair. All our
ordinary intellectual opinions are worth a bit of a row: I remember
during the Boer War fighting an Imperialist clerk outside the Queen’s
Hall, and giving and receiving a bloody nose; but I did not think it
one of the incidents that produce the psychological effect of the Roman
amphitheatre or the stake at Smithfield. For in that impression there
is something more than the mere fact that a man is sincere enough to
give his time or his comfort. Pagans were not impressed by the torture
of Christians merely because it showed that they honestly held their
opinion; they knew that millions of people honestly held all sorts of
opinions. The point of such extreme martyrdom is much more subtle. It
is that it gives an appearance of a man having something quite
specially strong to back him up, of his drawing upon some power. And
this can only be proved when all his physical contentment is destroyed;
when all the current of his bodily being is reversed and turned to
pain. If a man is seen to be roaring with laughter all the time that he
is skinned alive, it would not be unreasonable to deduce that somewhere
in the recesses of his mind he had thought of a rather good joke.
Similarly, if men smiled and sang (as they did) while they were being
boiled or torn in pieces, the spectators felt the presence of something
more than mere mental honesty: they felt the presence of some new and
unintelligible kind of pleasure, which, presumably, came from
somewhere. It might be a strength of madness, or a lying spirit from
Hell; but it was something quite positive and extraordinary; as
positive as brandy and as extraordinary as conjuring. The Pagan said to
himself: “If Christianity makes a man happy while his legs are being
eaten by a lion, might it not make me happy while my legs are still
attached to me and walking down the street?” The Secularists
laboriously explain that martyrdoms do not prove a faith to be true, as
if anybody was ever such a fool as to suppose that they did. What they
did prove, or, rather, strongly suggest, was that something had entered
human psychology which was stronger than strong pain. If a young girl,
scourged and bleeding to death, saw nothing but a crown descending on
her from God, the first mental step was not that her philosophy was
correct, but that she was certainly feeding on something. But this
particular point of psychology does not arise at all in the modern
cases of mere public discomfort or inconvenience. The causes of Miss
Pankhurst’s cheerfulness require no mystical explanations. If she were
being burned alive as a witch, if she then looked up in unmixed rapture
and saw a ballot-box descending out of heaven, then I should say that
the incident, though not conclusive, was frightfully impressive. It
would not prove logically that she ought to have the vote, or that
anybody ought to have the vote. But it would prove this: that there
was, for some reason, a sacramental reality in the vote, that the soul