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THE ANGEL AND THE AUTHOR AND OTHERS
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Another collection of musings by the author, around serious questions with unexpected humour resulting from the Frank admissions or disclosures most would refrain from making.
Jerome K Jerome was, it seems, very disturbed about women seeking equal footing in society, and is scathing in his caricatures thereof, while suggesting that the two separate spheres of activity aren't either lower than other. While the said separation belongs to the era when brawn was still overpowering brain and nature prevailed in reproduction area, he also fails to admit that, of the two spheres separated artificially by society, only one was rewarded with power and wealth by patriarchy, and this was far more so post industrial era when wealth changed its forms, and was numbers in an account that could be kept from being shared with the wife, thus fraud being committed against the wedding vows in church of endorsing her with all earthly goods. Hence the domestic slavery label, not because his work outside is better as the author interprets and easily refutes, but because he can run away with the money and leave her destitute with kids, no education and no well paid work. As was evident in U.S. post WWII.
Amazingly, he zaps one with a complete turnabout in the last chapter!
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"Really, seeing the amount we give in charity, the wonder is there are any poor left. It is a comfort that there are. What should we do without them? Our fur-clad little girls! our jolly, red-faced squires! we should never know how good they were, but for the poor? Without the poor how could we be virtuous? We should have to go about giving to each other. And friends expect such expensive presents, while a shilling here and there among the poor brings to us all the sensations of a good Samaritan. Providence has been very thoughtful in providing us with poor."
"Where the real poor creep I fear there is no room for Lady Bountiful’s fine coach. The ways are very narrow — wide enough only for little Sister Pity, stealing softly."
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"Our skins harden to the blows of Fate. I was lunching one Wednesday with a friend in the country. His son and heir, aged twelve, entered and took his seat at the table.
"“Well,” said his father, “and how did we get on at school to-day?”
"“Oh, all right,” answered the youngster, settling himself down to his dinner with evident appetite.
"“Nobody caned?” demanded his father, with — as I noticed — a sly twinkle in his eye.
"“No,” replied young hopeful, after reflection; “no, I don’t think so,” adding as an afterthought, as he tucked into beef and potatoes, “‘cepting, o’ course, me.”"
"It is a simple science, philosophy. The idea is that it never matters what happens to you provided you don’t mind it. The weak point in the argument is that nine times out of ten you can’t help minding it.
"“No misfortune can harm me,” says Marcus Aurelius, “without the consent of the dæmon within me.”
"The trouble is our dæmon cannot always be relied upon. So often he does not seem up to his work.
"“You’ve been a naughty boy, and I’m going to whip you,” said nurse to a four-year-old criminal.
"“You tant,” retorted the young ruffian, gripping with both hands the chair that he was occupying, “I’se sittin’ on it.” His dæmon was, no doubt, resolved that misfortune, as personified by nurse, should not hurt him.
"The misfortune, alas! proved stronger than the dæmon, and misfortune, he found did hurt him.
"The toothache cannot hurt us so long as the dæmon within us (that is to say, our will power) holds on to the chair and says it can’t. But, sooner or later, the dæmon lets go, and then we howl. One sees the idea: in theory it is excellent. One makes believe. Your bank has suddenly stopped payment. You say to yourself.
"“This does not really matter.”
"Your butcher and your baker say it does, and insist on making a row in the passage."
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"I confess that personally the terms “provincial” and “suburban,” as epithets of reproach, have always puzzled me. I never met anyone more severe on what she termed the “suburban note” in literature than a thin lady who lived in a semi-detached villa in a by-street of Hammersmith. Is Art merely a question of geography, and if so what is the exact limit? Is it the four-mile cab radius from Charing Cross? Is the cheesemonger of Tottenham Court Road of necessity a man of taste, and the Oxford professor of necessity a Philistine? I want to understand this thing. I once hazarded the direct question to a critical friend:
"“You say a book is suburban,” I put it to him, “and there is an end to the matter. But what do you mean by suburban?”
"“Well,” he replied, “I mean it is the sort of book likely to appeal to the class that inhabits the suburbs.” He lived himself in Chancery Lane."
"The modern novel takes care, however, to avoid all doubt upon the subject. Its personages, one and all, reside within the half-mile square lying between Bond Street and the Park — a neighbourhood that would appear to be somewhat densely populated. True, a year or two ago there appeared a fairly successful novel the heroine of which resided in Onslow Gardens. An eminent critic observed of it that: “It fell short only by a little way of being a serious contribution to English literature.” Consultation with the keeper of the cabman’s shelter at Hyde Park Corner suggested to me that the “little way” the critic had in mind measures exactly eleven hundred yards. When the nobility and gentry of the modern novel do leave London they do not go into the provinces: to do that would be vulgar. They make straight for “Barchester Towers,” or what the Duke calls “his little place up north” — localities, one presumes, suspended somewhere in mid-air."
"A modern nursery rhymester to succeed would have to write of Little Lord Jack and Lady Jill ascending one of the many beautiful eminences belonging to the ancestral estates of their parents, bearing between them, on a silver rod, an exquisitely painted Sèvres vase filled with ottar of roses.
"I take up my fourpenny-halfpenny magazine. The heroine is a youthful Duchess; her husband gambles with thousand-pound notes, with the result that they are reduced to living on the first floor of the Carlton Hotel. The villain is a Russian Prince. The Baronet of a simpler age has been unable, poor fellow, to keep pace with the times. What self-respecting heroine would abandon her husband and children for sin and a paltry five thousand a year? To the heroine of the past — to the clergyman’s daughter or the lady artist — he was dangerous. The modern heroine misbehaves herself with nothing below Cabinet rank."
"How can we lay bare the souls of Duchesses, explain the heart-throbs of peers of the realm? ... Those of us who are not Primrose Knights miss even this poor glimpse into the world above us. We know nothing, simply nothing, concerning the deeper feelings of the upper ten. Personally, I once received a letter from an Earl, but that was in connection with a dairy company of which his lordship was chairman, and spoke only of his lordship’s views concerning milk and the advantages of the cash system. Of what I really wished to know — his lordship’s passions, yearnings and general attitude to life — the circular said nothing."
"But, as I explain to them, it is the law of literature never to write except about what you really know. I want to mix with the aristocracy, study them, understand them; so that I may earn my living in the only way a literary man nowadays can earn his living, namely, by writing about the upper circles.
"I want to know how to get there."
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Chapter IV begins deceptively with
"There is one thing that the Anglo-Saxon does better than the “French, or Turk, or Rooshian,” to which add the German or the Belgian. When the Anglo-Saxon appoints an official, he appoints a servant: when the others put a man in uniform, they add to their long list of masters. If among your acquaintances you can discover an American, or Englishman, unfamiliar with the continental official, it is worth your while to accompany him, the first time he goes out to post a letter, say."
And then explodes in bubbles all around one as one reads on, of a laughter that threatens a reader familiar with the author's work that could turn into a side-splitting one.
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"The knowledge that insincerity is our universal garment has reduced all compliment to meaningless formula. A lady one evening at a party drew me aside. The chief guest — a famous writer — had just arrived.
“Tell me,” she said, “I have so little time for reading, what has he done?”
"I was on the point of replying when an inveterate wag, who had overheard her, interposed between us.
"“‘The Cloister and the Hearth,’” he told her, “and ‘Adam Bede.’”
"He happened to know the lady well. She has a good heart, but was ever muddle-headed. She thanked that wag with a smile, and I heard her later in the evening boring most evidently that literary lion with elongated praise of the “Cloister and the Hearth” and “Adam Bede.” They were among the few books she had ever read, and talking about them came easily to her. She told me afterwards that she had found that literary lion a charming man, but —
"“Well,” she laughed, “he has got a good opinion of himself. He told me he considered both books among the finest in the English language.”"
"A young friend of mine — a man of good family — contracted a mésalliance: that is, he married the daughter of a Canadian farmer, a frank, amiable girl, bewitchingly pretty, with more character in her little finger than some girls possess in their whole body. I met him one day, some three months after his return to London."
"“Well,” I asked him, “how is it shaping?”
"“She is the dearest girl in the world,” he answered. “She has only got one fault; she believes what people say.”"
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"They are odd folk, these foreigners. There are moments of despair when I almost give them up — feel I don’t care what becomes of them — feel as if I could let them muddle on in their own way — wash my hands of them, so to speak, and attend exclusively to my own business: we all have our days of feebleness. They will sit outside a café on a freezing night, with an east wind blowing, and play dominoes. They will stand outside a tramcar, rushing through the icy air at fifteen miles an hour, and refuse to go inside, even to oblige a lady. Yet in railway carriages, in which you could grill a bloater by the simple process of laying it underneath the seat, they will insist on the window being closed, light cigars to keep their noses warm, and sit with the collars of their fur coats buttoned up around their necks."
"In your own house you can, of course, open the windows, and thus defeat the foreign stove. The rest of the street thinks you mad, but then the Englishman is considered by all foreigners to be always mad. It is his privilege to be mad. The street thinks no worse of you than it did before, and you can breathe in comfort. But in the railway carriage they don’t allow you to be mad. In Europe, unless you are prepared to draw at sight upon the other passengers, throw the conductor out of the window, and take the train in by yourself, it is useless arguing the question of fresh air. The rule abroad is that if any one man objects to the window being open, the window remains closed. He does not quarrel with you: he rings the bell, and points out to the conductor that the temperature of the carriage has sunk to little more than ninety degrees, Fahrenheit. He thinks a window must be open."
"Unless you happen to be an American woman. Never did my heart go out more gladly to America as a nation than one spring day travelling from Berne to Vevey."
"The first thing that each woman did, the moment she could get her hands free, was to dash for the nearest window and haul it down."
"The carriage rose and cursed them in six languages. Bells were rung: conductors came flying in. It was all of no use. Those American ladies were cheerful but firm. They argued with volubility: they argued standing in the open doorway. The conductors, familiar, no doubt, with the American lady and her ways, shrugged their shoulders and retired. The other passengers undid their bags and bundles, and wrapped themselves up in shawls and Jaeger nightshirts.
"I met the ladies afterwards in Lausanne. They told me they had been condemned to a fine of forty francs apiece. They also explained to me that they had not the slightest intention of paying it."
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"The postcard craze is dying out in Germany — the land of its birth — I am told. In Germany they do things thoroughly, or not at all. The German when he took to sending postcards abandoned almost every other pursuit in life. The German tourist never knew where he had been until on reaching home again he asked some friend or relation to allow him to look over the postcards he had sent. Then it was he began to enjoy his trip."
"I often think it hard on girls that the artist so neglects the eternal male. Why should there not be portraits of young men in different hats; young men in big hats, young men in little hats, young men smiling archly, young men looking noble. Girls don’t want to decorate their rooms with pictures of other girls, they want rows of young men beaming down upon them."
"“Nature, in fashioning woman, has not yet crept up to the artistic ideal. The young man studies the picture on the postcard; on the coloured almanack given away at Christmas by the local grocer; on the advertisement of Jones’ soap, and thinks with discontent of Polly Perkins, who in a natural way is as pretty a girl as can be looked for in this imperfect world. Thus it is that woman has had to take to shorthand and typewriting. Modern woman is being ruined by the artist."
"Perhaps it is as well we men are not handicapped to the same extent. If every hoarding, if every picture shop window, if every illustrated journal teemed with illustrations of the ideal young man in perfect fitting trousers that never bagged at the knees! Maybe it would result in our cooking our own breakfasts and making our own beds to the end of our lives.
"The novelist and playwright, as it is, have made things difficult enough for us. In books and plays the young man makes love with a flow of language, a wealth of imagery, that must have taken him years to acquire. What does the novel-reading girl think, I wonder, when the real young man proposes to her! He has not called her anything in particular. Possibly he has got as far as suggesting she is a duck or a daisy, or hinting shyly that she is his bee or his honeysuckle: in his excitement he is not quite sure which. In the novel she has been reading the hero has likened the heroine to half the vegetable kingdom. Elementary astronomy has been exhausted in his attempt to describe to her the impression her appearance leaves on him. Bond Street has been sacked in his endeavour to get it clearly home to her what different parts of her are like — her eyes, her teeth, her heart, her hair, her ears. Delicacy alone prevents his extending the catalogue. A Fiji Island lover might possibly go further. We have not yet had the Fiji Island novel. By the time he is through with it she must have a somewhat confused notion of herself — a vague conviction that she is a sort of condensed South Kensington Museum."
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"That one fact in his favour she can never forget. Indeed she would not if she could. That one asset, for whatever it may be worth by the time the Day of Judgment arrives, he shall retain. It shall not be taken from him. “After all he was my father.” She admits it, with the accent on the “was.” That he is so no longer, he has only himself to blame. His subsequent behaviour has apparently rendered it necessary for her to sever the relationship."
That quote above is almost orthogonal to the rest of the diatribe in this first part of chapter VIII, rest being quite patriarchal in its tone of contempt for the stage heroine, including ending up in her having deserved a physical assault from the paterfamilias and being without virtue for want of it, a sentiment and view of the better half of humanity that goes well with the religious bent of the author who's very divided between his common sense and his need of abrahmic guilt to feel virtuous.
"Considered as a scapegoat, Fate, as compared with the father, has this advantage: it is always about: it cannot slip away and die before the real trouble begins: it cannot even plead a scientific head; it is there all the time. With care one can blame it for most everything. The vexing thing about it is, that it does not mind being blamed. One cannot make Fate feel small and mean. It affords no relief to our harrowed feelings to cry out indignantly to Fate: “look here, what you have done. Look at this sweet and well-proportioned lady, compelled to travel first-class, accompanied by an amount of luggage that must be a perpetual nightmare to her maid, from one fashionable European resort to another; forced to exist on a well-secured income of, apparently, five thousand a year, most of which has to go in clothes; beloved by only the best people in the play; talked about by everybody incessantly to the exclusion of everybody else — all the neighbours interested in her and in nobody else much; all the women envying her; all the men tumbling over one another after her — looks, in spite of all her worries, not a day older than twenty-three; and has discovered a dressmaker never yet known to have been an hour behind her promise! And all your fault, yours, Fate. Will nothing move you to shame?”"
Convenient, sarcasm, for someone with both a common sense and a deeply imbued abrahmic need of guilt and patriarchal mindset, to solve the question of who is to blame for the attractive young woman's lack of "virtue" as defined by patriarchy, since he couldn't possibly blame males, patriarchy, or society, much less his own religion! That a young woman is targeted by males, and without protection of her parents against them, is left by his society with not only lack of protection but also little to depend on in way of a respectable means of income to sustain herself, couldn't have occurred to him, one surmised - for he assumes charwomen are protected by being invisible, and other similiar workers by being unwashed in those times in England, presumably! For, much as he mentions washing, the one constant harassment experienced in that era by travellers from India, unless they were rich and thus not under domination of landlords, was being not allowed to bathe more than once a week, and if they bathed (as they were used to every day back home), being threatened by the landlady who spied.
"She is a careless woman. She is always mislaying that early husband. And she has an unfortunate knack of finding him at the wrong moment. Perhaps that is the Problem: What is a lady to do with a husband for whom she has no further use? If she gives him away he is sure to come back, like the clever dog that is sent in a hamper to the other end of the kingdom, and three days afterwards is found gasping on the doorstep. If she leaves him in the middle of South Africa, with most of the heavy baggage and all the debts, she may reckon it a certainty that on her return from her next honeymoon he will be the first to greet her."
"She is indignant at finding he is still alive, and lets him know it — tells him he is a beast for turning up at his sister’s party, and pleads to him for one last favour: that he will go away where neither she nor anybody else of any importance will ever see him or hear of him again. That’s all she asks of him. If he make a point of it she will — though her costume is ill adapted to the exercise — go down upon her knees to ask it of him.
"He brutally retorts that he doesn’t know where to “get.” The lady travels round a good deal and seems to be in most places. She accepts week-end invitations to the houses of his nearest relatives. She has married his first cousin, and is now getting up a bazaar with the help of his present wife. How he is to avoid her he does not quite see.
"Perhaps, by the by, that is really the Problem: where is the early husband to disappear to? Even if every time he saw her coming he were to duck under the table, somebody would be sure to notice it and make remarks. Ought he to take himself out one dark night, tie a brick round his neck, and throw himself into a pond?"
Where does Jerome K. Jerome find this stuff? Was stage in England really filled with this sort of thing in his times?
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"When a Palæolithic politician claimed to have “crushed his critic,” he meant that he had succeeded in dropping a tree or a ton of earth upon him. When it was said that one bright and intelligent member of that early sociology had “annihilated his opponent,” that opponent’s friends and relations took no further interest in him. It meant that he was actually annihilated. Bits of him might be found, but the most of him would be hopelessly scattered. When the adherents of any particular Cave Dweller remarked that their man was wiping the floor with his rival, it did not mean that he was talking himself red in the face to a bored audience of sixteen friends and a reporter. It meant that he was dragging that rival by the legs round the enclosure and making the place damp and untidy with him."
"Imagine some scientific inhabitant of one of the larger fixed stars examining us through a magnifying-glass as we examine ants. Our amusements would puzzle him. The ball of all sorts and sizes, from the marble to the pushball, would lead to endless scientific argument.
"“What is it? Why are these men and women always knocking it about, seizing it wherever and whenever they find it and worrying it?”
"The observer from that fixed star would argue that the Ball must be some malignant creature of fiendish power, the great enemy of the human race. Watching our cricket-fields, our tennis-courts, our golf links, he would conclude that a certain section of mankind had been told off to do battle with the “Ball” on behalf of mankind in general.
"“As a rule,” so he would report, “it is a superior class of insect to which this special duty has been assigned. They are a friskier, gaudier species than their fellows."
"“The singers have sung, and the builders have builded. The artists have fashioned their dreams of delight.” The martyrs for thought and freedom have died their death; knowledge has sprung from the bones of ignorance; civilization for ten thousand years has battled with brutality to this result — that a specimen gentleman of the Twentieth Century, the heir of all the ages, finds his greatest joy in life the striking of a ball with a chunk of wood!
"Human energy, human suffering, has been wasted. Such crown of happiness for a man might surely have been obtained earlier and at less cost. Was it intended? Are we on the right track? The child’s play is wiser. The battered doll is a princess. Within the sand castle dwells an ogre. It is with imagination that he plays. His games have some relation to life. It is the man only who is content with this everlasting knocking about of a ball. The majority of mankind is doomed to labour so constant, so exhausting, that no opportunity is given it to cultivate its brain. Civilization has arranged that a small privileged minority shall alone enjoy that leisure necessary to the development of thought. And what is the answer of this leisured class? It is:
"“We will do nothing for the world that feeds us, clothes us, keeps us in luxury. We will spend our whole existence knocking balls about, watching other people knocking balls about, arguing with one another as to the best means of knocking balls about.”"
"But maybe all this is mere jealousy. Myself, I have never been clever at knocking balls about."
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"To the English traveller, the foreign waiter in the earlier stages of his career is a burden and a trial. When he is complete — when he really can talk English I rejoice in him. When I object to him is when his English is worse than my French or German, and when he will, for his own educational purposes, insist, nevertheless, that the conversation shall be entirely in English. I would he came to me some other time. I would so much rather make it after dinner or, say, the next morning. I hate giving lessons during meal times."
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"It is the old fable reversed; man said woman had nothing to do all day but to enjoy herself. Making a potato pie! What sort of work was that? Making a potato pie was a lark; anybody could make a potato pie.
"So the woman said, “Try it,” and took the man’s spade and went out into the field, and left him at home to make that pie.
"The man discovered that potato pies took a bit more making than he had reckoned — found that running the house and looking after the children was not quite the merry pastime he had argued. Man was a fool."
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"If the hero of the popular novel swims at all, it is not like an ordinary human being that he does it. You never meet him in a swimming-bath; he never pays ninepence, like the rest of us, for a machine. He goes out at uncanny hours, generally accompanied by a lady friend, with whom the while swimming he talks poetry and cracks jokes. Some of us, when we try to talk in the sea, fill ourselves up with salt water. This chap lies on his back and carols, and the wild waves, seeing him, go round the other way."
"He does not have to get up early and worry dumb-bells in his nightshirt; he just lies on a sofa in an elegant attitude and muscle comes to him."
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"“It did not trouble me, Mrs. Wilkins,” I replied, “in this particular instance. It was my determination never to see that umbrella again. The young man behind the counter seemed suspicious, and asked where I got it from. I told him that a friend had given it to me.”
"“‘Did he know that he had given it to you?” demanded the young man.
"“Upon which I gave him a piece of my mind concerning the character of those who think evil of others, and he gave me five and six, and said he should know me again; and I purchased an umbrella suited to my rank and station, and as fine a haddock as I have ever tasted with the balance, which was sevenpence, for I was feeling hungry."
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"The late King of Saxony, did, I believe, on one occasion make a feeble protest at being asked to receive the daughter of a retail bootmaker. The young lady, nonplussed for the moment, telegraphed to her father in Detroit. The answer came back next morning: “Can’t call it selling — practically giving them away. See Advertisement.” The lady was presented as the daughter of an eminent philanthropist.
"It is due to her to admit that, taking her as a class, the American girl is a distinct gain to European Society. Her influence is against convention and in favour of simplicity. One of her greatest charms, in the eyes of the European man, is that she listens to him. I cannot say whether it does her any good. Maybe she does not remember it all, but while you are talking she does give you her attention. The English woman does not always. She greets you pleasantly enough:
"“I’ve so often wanted to meet you,” she says, “must you really go?”
"It strikes you as sudden: you had no intention of going for hours. But the hint is too plain to be ignored. You are preparing to agree that you really must when, looking round, you gather that the last remark was not addressed to you, but to another gentleman who is shaking hands with her:
"“Now, perhaps we shall be able to talk for five minutes,” she says. “I’ve so often wanted to say that I shall never forgive you. You have been simply horrid.”
"Again you are confused, until you jump to the conclusion that the latter portion of the speech is probably intended for quite another party with whom, at the moment, her back towards you, she is engaged in a whispered conversation. When he is gone she turns again to you. But the varied expressions that pass across her face while you are discussing with her the disadvantages of Protection, bewilder you. When, explaining your own difficulty in arriving at a conclusion, you remark that Great Britain is an island, she roguishly shakes her head. It is not that she has forgotten her geography, it is that she is conducting a conversation by signs with a lady at the other end of the room. When you observe that the working classes must be fed, she smiles archly while murmuring:
"“Oh, do you really think so?”
"You are about to say something strong on the subject of dumping. Apparently she has disappeared. You find that she is reaching round behind you to tap a new arrival with her fan.
"Now, the American girl looks at you, and just listens to you with her eyes fixed on you all the time. You gather that, as far as she is concerned, the rest of the company are passing shadows. She wants to hear what you have to say about Bi-metallism: her trouble is lest she may miss a word of it. From a talk with an American girl one comes away with the conviction that one is a brilliant conversationalist, who can hold a charming woman spell-bound. This may not be good for one: but while it lasts, the sensation is pleasant."
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"A clergyman friend of mine told me of a German Kurhaus to which he was sent for his sins and his health. It was a resort, for some reason, specially patronized by the more elderly section of the higher English middle class. Bishops were there, suffering from fatty degeneration of the heart caused by too close application to study; ancient spinsters of good family subject to spasms; gouty retired generals. Can anybody tell me how many men in the British Army go to a general? Somebody once assured me it was five thousand, but that is absurd, on the face of it. The British Army, in that case, would have to be counted by millions. There are a goodish few American colonels still knocking about. The American colonel is still to be met with here and there by the curious traveller, but compared with the retired British general he is an extinct species. In Cheltenham and Brighton and other favoured towns there are streets of nothing but retired British generals — squares of retired British generals — whole crescents of British generals. Abroad there are pensions with a special scale of charges for British generals. In Switzerland there has even been talk of reserving railway compartments “For British Generals Only.” In Germany, when you do not say distinctly and emphatically on being introduced that you are not a British general, you are assumed, as a matter of course, to be a British general. During the Boer War, when I was residing in a small garrison town on the Rhine, German military men would draw me aside and ask of me my own private personal views as to the conduct of the campaign. I would give them my views freely, explain to them how I would finish the whole thing in a week.
"“But how in the face of the enemy’s tactics—” one of them would begin.
"“Bother the enemy’s tactics,” I would reply. “Who cares for tactics?”
"“But surely a British general—” they would persist. “Who’s a British general?” I would retort, “I am talking to you merely as a plain commonsense man, with a head on my shoulders.”
"They would apologize for their mistake.
"My clergyman friend found life there dull. The generals and the spinsters left to themselves might have played cards, but they thought of the poor bishops who would have had to look on envious. The bishops and the spinsters might have sung ballads, but the British general after dinner does not care for ballads, and had mentioned it. The bishops and the generals might have told each other stories, but could not before the ladies."
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"There have been evenings when I have sung “God save the Queen” six times. Another season of it, and I should have become a Republican."
"This world is much too small for me. Up to a century or two ago the intellectual young man found it sufficient for his purposes. It still contained the unknown — the possible — within its boundaries. New continents were still to be discovered: we dreamt of giants, Liliputians, desert-fenced Utopias. We set our sail, and Wonderland lay ever just beyond our horizon. To-day the world is small, the light railway runs through the desert, the coasting steamer calls at the Islands of the Blessed, the last mystery has been unveiled, the fairies are dead, the talking birds are silent. Our baffled curiosity turns for relief outwards."
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"There is nothing the parent can do right. You would think that now and then he might, if only by mere accident, blunder into sense. But, no, there seems to be a law against it. He brings home woolly rabbits and indiarubber elephants, and expects the Child to be contented “forsooth” with suchlike aids to its education. As a matter of fact, the Child is content: it bangs its own head with the woolly rabbit and does itself no harm; it tries to swallow the indiarubber elephant; it does not succeed, but continues to hope. With that woolly rabbit and that indiarubber elephant it would be as happy as the day is long if only the young gentleman from Cambridge would leave it alone, and not put new ideas into its head. But the gentleman from Cambridge and the maiden lady Understander are convinced that the future of the race depends upon leaving the Child untrammelled to select its own amusements. A friend of mine, during his wife’s absence once on a visit to her mother, tried the experiment.
"The Child selected a frying-pan. How it got the frying-pan remains to this day a mystery. The cook said “frying-pans don’t walk upstairs.” The nurse said she should be sorry to call anyone a liar, but that there was commonsense in everything. The scullery-maid said that if everybody did their own work other people would not be driven beyond the limits of human endurance; and the housekeeper said that she was sick and tired of life. My friend said it did not matter. The Child clung to the frying-pan with passion. The book my friend was reading said that was how the human mind was formed: the Child’s instinct prompted it to seize upon objects tending to develop its brain faculty. What the parent had got to do was to stand aside and watch events.
"The Child proceeded to black everything about the nursery with the bottom of the frying-pan. It then set to work to lick the frying-pan clean. The nurse, a woman of narrow ideas, had a presentiment that later on it would be ill. My friend explained to her the error the world had hitherto committed: it had imagined that the parent knew a thing or two that the Child didn’t. In future the Children were to do their bringing up themselves. In the house of the future the parents would be allotted the attics where they would be out of the way. They might occasionally be allowed down to dinner, say, on Sundays.
"The Child, having exhausted all the nourishment the frying-pan contained, sought to develop its brain faculty by thumping itself over the head with the flat of the thing. With the selfishness of the average parent — thinking chiefly of what the Coroner might say, and indifferent to the future of humanity, my friend insisted upon changing the game."
" ... Tell me how to talk to my baby, and I am willing to try. It is not as if I took a personal pride in the phrase: “Did ums.” I did not even invent it. I found it, so to speak, when I got here, and my experience is that it soothes the Child. When he is howling, and I say “Did ums” with sympathetic intonation, he stops crying. Possibly enough it is astonishment at the ineptitude of the remark that silences him. Maybe it is that minor troubles are lost sight of face to face with the reflection that this is the sort of father with which fate has provided him. But may not even this be useful to him? He has got to meet with stupid people in the world. Let him begin by contemplating me. It will make things easier for him later on."
" ... The young gentleman from Cambridge thinks, when we call up the stairs to say that if we hear another sound from the nursery during the next two hours we will come up and do things to that Child the mere thought of which should appal it, that is silencing the Child. It does not occur to him that two minutes later that Child is yelling again at the top of its voice, having forgotten all we ever said."
" ... The dear Child is not going to be overworked: he is seeing to that."
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"Marriages are made in heaven—”but solely,” it has been added by a cynical writer, “for export.”"
"Civilization lays her laws upon us; they are the laws of gods — of the men that one day, perhaps, shall come. But the primeval creature of the cave still cries within us."
" ... Passion is the seed. Love grows from it, a tender sapling, beautiful to look upon, but wondrous frail, easily broken, easily trampled on during those first years of wedded life. Only by much nursing, by long caring-for, watered with tears, shall it grow into a sturdy tree, defiant of the winds, ‘neath which Darby and Joan shall sit sheltered in old age."
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"The modern writer goes to work scientifically. He tells us that the creature wore a made-up tie. From that we know he was not a gentleman; it follows as the night the day. The fashionable novelist notices the young man’s socks. It reveals to us whether the marriage would have been successful or a failure. It is necessary to convince us that the hero is a perfect gentleman: the author gives him a gold cigarette case."
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"“Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside,” is a safe rule for those who would always retain the good opinion of that all-powerful, but somewhat unintelligent, incubus, “the average person,” but the pioneer, the guide, is necessary. That is, if the world is to move forward.
"The freedom-loving girl of to-day, who can enjoy a walk by herself without losing her reputation, who can ride down the street on her “bike” without being hooted at, who can play a mixed double at tennis without being compelled by public opinion to marry her partner, who can, in short, lead a human creature’s life, and not that of a lap-dog led about at the end of a string, might pause to think what she owes to the “unsexed creatures” who fought her battle for her fifty years ago."
"Can the working woman of to-day, who may earn her own living, if she will, without loss of the elementary rights of womanhood, think of the bachelor girl of a short generation ago without admiration of her pluck? There were ladies in those day too “unwomanly” to remain helpless burdens on overworked fathers and mothers, too “unsexed” to marry the first man that came along for the sake of their bread and butter. They fought their way into journalism, into the office, into the shop. The reformer is not always the pleasantest man to invite to a tea-party. Maybe these women who went forward with the flag were not the most charming of their sex. The “Dora Copperfield” type will for some time remain the young man’s ideal, the model the young girl puts before herself. Myself, I think Dora Copperfield charming, but a world of Dora Copperfields!
"The working woman is a new development in sociology. She has many lessons to learn, but one has hopes of her. It is said that she is unfitting herself to be a wife and mother. If the ideal helpmeet for a man be an animated Dresden china shepherdess — something that looks pretty on the table, something to be shown round to one’s friends, something that can be locked up safely in a cupboard, that asks no questions, and, therefore, need be told no lies — then a woman who has learnt something of the world, who has formed ideas of her own, will not be the ideal wife."
"Maybe the working woman, looking for a husband, and not merely a livelihood, may end by formulating standards of her own. She may end by demanding the manly man and moving about the world, knowing something of life, may arrive at the conclusion that something more is needed than the smoking of pipes and the drinking of whiskies and sodas. We must be prepared for this. The sheltered woman who learnt her life from fairy stories is a dream of the past. Woman has escaped from her “shelter” — she is on the loose. For the future we men have got to accept the emancipated woman as an accomplished fact."
"Speaking as a lover, I welcome the openings that are being given to women to earn their own livelihood. I can conceive of no more degrading profession for a woman — no profession more calculated to unfit her for being that wife and mother we talk so much about than the profession that up to a few years ago was the only one open to her — the profession of husband-hunting.
"As a man, I object to being regarded as woman’s last refuge, her one and only alternative to the workhouse. I cannot myself see why the woman who has faced the difficulties of existence, learnt the lesson of life, should not make as good a wife and mother as the ignorant girl taken direct, one might almost say, from the nursery, and, without the slightest preparation, put in a position of responsibility that to a thinking person must be almost appalling.
"It has been said that the difference between men and women is this: That the man goes about the world making it ready for the children, that the woman stops at home making the children ready for the world. Will not she do it much better for knowing something of the world, for knowing something of the temptations, the difficulties, her own children will have to face, for having learnt by her own experience to sympathize with the struggles, the sordid heart-breaking cares that man has daily to contend with?"
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September 17, 2020 - September 20, 2020.
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