What's Wrong with the World
of mankind. She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an
unalterable cosmos and also with the practical rules of the rapid and
thrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student and told
fairy tales to the children; it was her business to confront the
nameless gods whose fears are on all flesh, and also to see the streets
were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearing
ribbons or an hour for ringing bells. The large uses of religion have
been broken up into lesser specialities, just as the uses of the hearth
have been broken up into hot water pipes and electric bulbs. The romance
of ritual and colored emblem has been taken over by that narrowest of
all trades, modern art (the sort called art for art’s sake), and men are
in modern practice informed that they may use all symbols so long as
they mean nothing by them. The romance of conscience has been dried
up into the science of ethics; which may well be called decency for
decency’s sake, decency unborn of cosmic energies and barren of artistic
flower. The cry to the dim gods, cut off from ethics and cosmology,
has become mere Psychical Research. Everything has been sundered from
everything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon we shall hear of
specialists dividing the tune from the words of a song, on the ground
that they spoil each other; and I did once meet a man who openly
advocated the separation of almonds and raisins. This world is all one
wild divorce court; nevertheless, there are many who still hear in
their souls the thunder of authority of human habit; those whom Man hath
joined let no man sunder.
This book must avoid religion, but there must (I say) be many, religious
and irreligious, who will concede that this power of answering many
purposes was a sort of strength which should not wholly die out of our
lives. As a part of personal character, even the moderns will agree that
many-sidedness is a merit and a merit that may easily be overlooked.
This balance and universality has been the vision of many groups of
men in many ages. It was the Liberal Education of Aristotle; the
jack-of-all-trades artistry of Leonardo da Vinci and his friends; the
august amateurishness of the Cavalier Person of Quality like Sir William
Temple or the great Earl of Dorset. It has appeared in literature in our
time in the most erratic and opposite shapes, set to almost inaudible
music by Walter Pater and enunciated through a foghorn by Walt Whitman.
But the great mass of men have always been unable to achieve this
literal universality, because of the nature of their work in the world.
Not, let it be noted, because of the existence of their work. Leonardo
da Vinci must have worked pretty hard; on the other hand, many a
government office clerk, village constable or elusive plumber may do
(to all human appearance) no work at all, and yet show no signs of the
Aristotelian universalism. What makes it difficult for the average man
to be a universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist; he
has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well as to uphold
him in a more or less ruthless society. This is generally true of males
from the first hunter to the last electrical engineer; each has not
merely to act, but to excel. Nimrod has not only to be a mighty hunter
before the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters.
The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer, or he is
outstripped by engineers yet more electrical. Those very miracles of the
human mind on which the modern world prides itself, and rightly in the
main, would be impossible without a certain concentration which disturbs
the pure balance of reason more than does religious bigotry. No creed
can be so limiting as that awful adjuration that the cobbler must not go
beyond his last. So the largest and wildest shots of our world are but
in one direction and with a defined trajectory: the gunner cannot go
beyond his shot, and his shot so often falls short; the astronomer
cannot go beyond his telescope and his telescope goes such a little way.
All these are like men who have stood on the high peak of a mountain and
seen the horizon like a single ring and who then descend down different
paths towards different towns, traveling slow or fast. It is right;
there must be people traveling to different towns; there must be
specialists; but shall no one behold the horizon? Shall all mankind
be specialist surgeons or peculiar plumbers; shall all humanity be
monomaniac? Tradition has decided that only half of humanity shall be
monomaniac. It has decided that in every home there shall be a tradesman
and a Jack-of-all-trades. But it has also decided, among other things,
that the Jack-of-all-trades shall be a Jill-of-all-trades. It has
decided, rightly or wrongly, that this specialism and this universalism
shall be divided between the sexes. Cleverness shall be left for men and
wisdom for women. For cleverness kills wisdom; that is one of the few
sad and certain things.
But for women this ideal of comprehensive capacity (or common-sense)
must long ago have been washed away. It must have melted in the
frightful furnaces of ambition and eager technicality. A man must be
partly a one-idead man, because he is a one-weaponed man--and he is
flung naked into the fight. The world’s demand comes to him direct; to
his wife indirectly. In short, he must (as the books on Success say)
give “his best”; and what a small part of a man “his best” is! His
second and third best are often much better. If he is the first violin
he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth
bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a fountain pen, a hand
at whist, a gun, and an image of God.
*****
III. THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY
And it should be remarked in passing that this force upon a man to
develop one feature has nothing to do with what is commonly called
our competitive system, but would equally exist under any rationally
conceivable kind of Collectivism. Unless the Socialists are frankly
ready for a fall in the standard of violins, telescopes and electric
lights, they must somehow create a moral demand on the individual that
he shall keep up his present concentration on these things. It was
only by men being in some degree specialist that there ever were any
telescopes; they must certainly be in some degree specialist in order to
keep them going. It is not by making a man a State wage-earner that you
can prevent him thinking principally about the very difficult way he
earns his wages. There is only one way to preserve in the world that
high levity and that more leisurely outlook which fulfils the old vision
of universalism. That is, to permit the existence of a partly protected
half of humanity; a half which the harassing industrial demand troubles
indeed, but only troubles indirectly. In other words, there must be in
every center of humanity one human being upon a larger plan; one who
does not “give her best,” but gives her all.
Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one. The fire need
not blaze like electricity nor boil like boiling water; its point is
that it blazes more than water and warms more than light. The wife is
like the fire, or to put things in their proper proportion, the fire
is like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected to cook: not to
excel in cooking, but to cook; to cook better than her husband who is
earning the coke by lecturing on botany or breaking stones. Like the
fire, the woman is expected to tell tales to the children, not original
and artistic tales, but tales--better tales than would probably be
told by a first-class cook. Like the fire, the woman is expected to
illuminate and ventilate, not by the most startling revelations or the
wildest winds of thought, but better than a man can do it after breaking
stones or lecturing. But she cannot be expected to endure anything
like this universal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty
of competitive or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not
a competitive cook; a school mistress, but not a competitive
schoolmistress; a house-decorator but not a competitive house-decorator;
a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not
one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her
second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first in
what is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women. Women
were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary,
they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside
the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse
of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman
that she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come
almost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades.
But the woman’s professions, unlike the child’s, were all truly and
almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing but her
universality and balance prevented them being merely morbid. This is the
substance of the contention I offer about the historic female position.
I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I
doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the
absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive
clerks at the same time. I do not deny that even under the old tradition
women had a harder time than men; that is why we take off our hats. I do
not deny that all these various female functions were exasperating; but
I say that there was some aim and meaning in keeping them various. I do
not pause even to deny that woman was a servant; but at least she was a
general servant.
The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands
for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must
return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its
way to wild places is the poet’s; but the mind that never finds its way
back is the lunatic’s. There must in every machine be a part that moves
and a part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes
a part that is unchangeable. And many of the phenomena which moderns
hastily condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as the
center and pillar of health. Much of what is called her subservience,
and even her pliability, is merely the subservience and pliability of
a universal remedy; she varies as medicines vary, with the disease. She
has to be an optimist to the morbid husband, a salutary pessimist to the
happy-go-lucky husband. She has to prevent the Quixote from being put
upon, and the bully from putting upon others. The French King wrote--
“Toujours femme varie Bien fol qui s’y fie,”
but the truth is that woman always varies, and that is exactly why we
always trust her. To correct every adventure and extravagance with its
antidote in common-sense is not (as the moderns seem to think) to be
in the position of a spy or a slave. It is to be in the position
of Aristotle or (at the lowest) Herbert Spencer, to be a universal
morality, a complete system of thought. The slave flatters; the complete
moralist rebukes. It is, in short, to be a Trimmer in the true sense of
that honorable term; which for some reason or other is always used in a
sense exactly opposite to its own. It seems really to be supposed that
a Trimmer means a cowardly person who always goes over to the stronger
side. It really means a highly chivalrous person who always goes over
to the weaker side; like one who trims a boat by sitting where there are
few people seated. Woman is a trimmer; and it is a generous, dangerous
and romantic trade.