A Dream of Fair Women

I

SINCE no one, I suppose, reads Tennyson nowadays, I may recall that, in the poem whose title I am borrowing in order to attempt to reinterpret it, he begins by explaining that before his ‘eyelids dropt their shade’ he had been reading Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. With its magic in his brain, he fell asleep and, by a natural transformation, saw an array of women by no means all of whom Chaucer, or anyone else, would have called good, but all of whom, like Tennyson, he would have called fair. Eve he did not see distinctly, but, in those of her daughters whom he did perceive, beauty was destiny, and its record pain. Everywhere, for him, beauty and anguish walked hand in hand. Into the moral, if any, in that, I do not stay to inquire; my quarry is rather different.

Tennyson wrote his ‘Dream’ in 1832. Fourteen years later Charlotte Brontë began Jane Eyre. To Jane Eyre belongs the distinction of being the first heroine of romantic experience and appeal whose creator threw any claim to fairness, in the Tennysonian sense, out of the window, while endowing her, in full measure, with fairness of mind, in the masculine sense. This was an adventure by no means risked by the parent of Becky Sharp. Thackeray dropped the conventional exterior, but retained the conventional interior. Not Jane’s plainness of face, but her fairness of mind makes Jane Eyre a revolutionary book, and keeps it so, despite all that is old-fashioned in it. It enunciated a notion which is still regarded as a paradox, although time is more and more giving it proof — the notion that the standard of fairness in woman is the standard of fairness in man; that in her, as in him, it applies to mind and conduct, and not to face only.

When we talk of a man as being fair, we mean that he has a mind in which truth has its lodgment, which assigns just values to different elements, and decides on balance, unswayed by personal prejudice or predilection — a mind for which standards exist and have compulsive force. And we mean, above all, that he has a sense of honor, and that it is operative. Jane Eyre is fair in this sense. This element in her retains its freshness and its force even at a period when the other novelty in her creation — that of direct and unashamed passion, a feeling that does not wait to be asked, but comes forth, autonomous, glorying in itself — has lost its brightness through perpetual iteration.

That women, whether homely or comely, can feel, we have been shown ad nauseam; are they not, to-day, apt to claim a superiority on that count? Its validity may well be doubted; what has been less noticed, but is, actually, far more significant, is that they are claiming, in action, their birthright and their inheritance as creatures whose fairness goes more than skindeep. There are plenty of reasons for thinking ill of our own period (as of any other); there is, surely, this reason for thinking well of it: that, beneath its unexhilarating chaos of standards and turmoil of assertions, it is — in fact, if not with full awareness — working out a dream of women fair in this sense; and that, in so doing, it is, through all the uncomfortable throes that belong to any creative process, working out its own salvation.

Nor are women, in this, casting off their ancestress. On the contrary, they are, at long last, being true to her. Eve, the great ‘mother of us all,’ is, I have long thought, a much maligned character. Not because it is assumed, in flat contempt of the laws of heredity, that she is the parent of all women and of no men; that all women are her daughters, and no men her sons. She need no more be ashamed of her progeny than they of her. Many of them might, indeed, be glad could they believe that they have no kinship with the man who despicably tried to shuffle off responsibility by saying, ‘The woman tempted me’ — surely the meanest utterance on record. But they know, to their sorrow, that Adam is their father; the ‘primal curse’ rests and has rested upon them as heavily as upon their brothers — perhaps the more heavily that it has not, until these latter days, been recognized.

No, the injustice to Eve is darker and more ungrateful than this. She has been presented, in innumerable paintings and poems, as the mere temptress. Beautiful, it is true, dangerously beautiful; but in character a creature of the simplest impulses and appetites, a mere weakling who could not restrain her hurried greed, but ate the fruit of the tree when she was solemnly told not to do so. As if that were all!

Where, without Eve, should we have been? Like Adam, content to sleep in the sun, ignorant, helpless, irresponsible, incapable of achievement, of the construction of any standard or scale of values. She set her little white teeth into the apple, and so gave us a knowledge of good and evil. Idle and irrelevant to call it the ‘accursed fruit,’ when good could be known by us only at the price of knowing evil. Adam, content to know neither, to do as he was told without questioning why, was as the beasts of the field. A simpler world we might have inherited, had his numb incuriosity determined its shape for us — but how much less interesting, and how devoid of hope! It would, in that case, have been a world about which we could have known nothing. It is to Eve we owe the best things we possess: hard recognition of the fact that everything has to be paid for, and, above all, intellectual curiosity. Yet, until quite recent times, these keys of Heaven have been confined, in the main, to the keeping of men, who have asked of the daughters of Eye that they should look like their mother, and have taken little interest in the daughters’ efforts to be like her. But those efforts are now very active. Intellectual curiosity may be, to-day, causing some unedifying experimentation, and a good deal of loud smashing of crockery; but not all the crockery deserved the piety with which it was preserved, and the clearance is making it possible to see things obscure before.

II

It is, as a rule, the particular that illuminates the general. As an example of the type of woman, numerous to-day, who heralds and in herself represents the new, fair-minded strain, I think of my friend Daphne Marjoribanks. Daphne is characteristic, further, in this: those whose contacts with her are merely social get an impression that is strictly misleading. I last met her at a dinner party. By way, perhaps, of relieving the tedium of the interval that occurs sometimes in the drawing-room before the gentlemen rejoin the ladies, Daphne was enlarging upon the superior attractions of what she called ‘bad men.’ She had at table sat next a man described, by his partner on the other side, as a ‘person of shocking reputation’ whom she was ‘rather surprised to meet here,’ and partly, I fancy, out of a malicious pleasure in teasing this other lady Daphne sang his praises loudly.

‘I always find that type of man amusing, and they generally return the compliment — which is even more amusing!’

‘I, on the contrary,’ said the other lady, ‘always find their attention just a shade insulting!’

‘Really?’ Daphne’s smile was brilliant. ‘I don’t. With a man like that, one has such a comfortable, easy feeling; he knows the ropes, he can play the game.’

‘Of course; he flirts with everyone.’

‘Well, I like that. It pleases me. It keeps my hand in. Nowadays so few men know how to do that neatly. He does. You can see from his technique that he is a skilled performer, and that’s always such a comfort. I have yet to meet the good man who is that. Good men are either afraid or out of practice, or never knew how. The latter mostly, I suspect.’

At this all the wives present bristled, as though they felt that their husbands had been personally attacked — accused of either dullness or lightness. But Daphne was on one of her hobbyhorses now, and did not care.

‘I always find I get on better with bad men than with good. You can talk to bad men — or, which is even better, they know how to talk to you. Good men bore me — they make me feel plain. Bad men make me feel handsome.’

In Daphne’s talk — always ‘modern’ to the last degree; so modern, indeed, that she might serve as Exhibit A for any foreigner or visitant from Mars to whom one wanted, briefly and succinctly, to convey where we are, in that regard — this preference for ‘ bad ’ men is a standing topic. Her conversation, anyhow, is notably free; she has a penchant for all that is broad and Rabelaisian in humor, and delights, or says she delights, in plays and novels which stress that note. Her vocabulary is anything but elegant or refined, and is enriched by a first-hand familiarity with the stable and the stock book. She never adjusts her conversation to her company. The older notion that there are things that women may mention to one another or discuss in female company, but not when men arc present, is one for which she has an exasperated contempt. She is attractive to men and has endless cheery companions with whom she goes to shows, race meetings, and night clubs. She dances well, rides even better, is an expert driver of any and every type of car, can take anyone on at cards. Blatantly she enjoys herself. There are people among her large and varied acquaintance who put Daphne down as a ‘bad hat’ and can produce evidence sufficient to satisfy themselves that such is the case.

Such, however, is not the case. She may take risks, but she is thoroughly aware of what she is doing, and certainly would never blame anyone but herself for any awkward consequences of a misjudgment. But I do not think that she makes many mistakes, perhaps because she has so few illusions. The ‘evidence’ that satisfies those of her acquaintance who find it amusing to think ill of her has this weakness: if is almost exclusively conversational. And Daphne’s conversation is the one thing about her that is conventional. In that, it resembles the conversation of many women — and men — of her day.

III

‘Time,’ said Goethe to Eckermann, nearly a hundred years ago, ‘is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every country has a different face for all that one says and does. We cannot, with propriety, say things which were permitted to the ancient Greeks; and the Englishman of 1830 cannot endure what suited the vigorous contemporaries of Shakespeare: so that, at the present day, it is found necessary to have a Family Shakespeare.’

In 1928, we may say ‘things permitted to the ancient Greeks.’ In 1928, the Englishman and the Englishwoman can ‘endure what suited the vigorous contemporaries of Shakespeare.’ But in return for these freedoms we have a new set of taboos. That is all that has happened. People who still cling to the old enjoy the luxury of being horrified by their contemporaries, while those same contemporaries are horrified if they are ever found out in being or doing anything ‘old-fashioned.’

Nor is the rule of fashion confined to words, though it is in relation to words that its swift permutations can be most easily tracked. It applies all over the ‘moral’ world. Thus, for instance, in Jane Austen’s day Sunday traveling was, quite seriously, taken as a sign of looseness of morals. Half a century later, under the Victorian dispensation, gambling, drinking, attendance at prize fights, were all dubious practices, even in men. To-day they are ‘smart,’ even in women. To-day, per contra, not to be easy in such matters, free, and, if possible, a shade risqué in speech, is to incur the reproach of a Puritan respectability — and from respectability men and women shrink as from the plague.

Daphne is of her period, and accepts its conventions. They are, in their way, quite as rigid as the old, though they happen to be the old, upside down. So, being modern, she would be injured if she were called respectable, and would blush to find herself liking a respectable character. But it is, as ever, the label she cares about, not the fact. And, for herself, her talk is one thing, her action quite another. It is her action, which is individual, not her talk, which is conventional, that you must interrogate if you want to understand her. And she is typical and, therefore, worth understanding.

Daphne, though she likes to hide it, has an energetic brain. She reads far more widely than anyone would gather who met her socially, since, socially, she thinks ‘brainy’ talk bad form. But her social life is only intermittent, — an interlude, — her real sphere of action is in the country, where she spends most of her time, only dashing up to town every now and then for what she calls ‘a little light relief.’ The country occupies nine tenths of her days, though less than one tenth of her conversation. She runs her father’s stables and his farm. Of rural and agricultural problems she has a firsthand knowledge; she knows all there is to know about fertilizers, agricultural machinery, coöperative credit, and so on; she has studied Denmark and written a small manual on dairy work, a masterpiece of lucidity and compression. (She would bite my head off if I mentioned it in town.) She is ‘in’ farming politics and on innumerable committees, where she is one of those invaluable and rare members who really attend to business. An intelligent musician, she has established a flourishing series of local concerts.

In all this she knows what she is about, and has a clear and animating sense of purpose. Her town friends know nothing of this side of her life, but for her, in the long run, it is the point. She enjoys it. It is from it that her authentic, individually effective scale of values — those standards of conduct to which she would, indignantly, deny the name of morals — is derived. In her work, she separates sheep from goats with unsparing clarity. She has a principle of discrimination, which she calls ‘decency.’ Decency with her is not, of course, a matter of sex relationships. It is a social quality. The decent man or woman is the one who can be relied upon not to let you, or the side, down; the one who takes his work conscientiously, whatever it be; who does not tell lies, or put the blame on others; who knows, though he may not talk about it, that there are some things that must, and others that cannot, by a decent person, be done. Her definitions may not be very clear, but Daphne knows what she means and can ‘spot’ what she calls the decent, and I should cal! the fair, man or woman with unerring accuracy — and the indecent. Where decency is concerned, she is harsh and swift in her judgments. She will pursue the offender against it with a quite mediæval ruthlessness and rejoices when she can exact an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. At the same time, she is endlessly generous toward the failings of those whom she has passed as decent. Her loyalty to them has an almost religious authority. She may talk as though she were careless of the sanctity of the marriage contract, but in her enforcement of any and every other contract she is rigorous. Especially of that unwritten contract which declares the things that the decent must do or leave undone.

If there is one adjective that describes her attitude and her action, it is ‘fair.’ She is fair to men — fair, above all, in that she does not, in any part of her mind, cherish an expectation, from any one of them, of a transformation of her own life into endless happiness. She knows that life is what she herself can make it; that it is a question of giving, rather than of taking. This saves her from the characteristic bitter unfairness of the single woman’s attitude toward men, or from the hardly veiled resentment of many of the married.

I ought, perhaps, at this point, to explain that Daphne is not the ‘young girl’ about whom there has been so much throwing about of brains. She represents a not less numerous group, of equal social significance, and of more significance in the making of opinion. She is forty. True, like other women of forty to-day, it must be said of her, as of the lady in the Punch cartoon: ‘Whatever your age, mum, you don’t look it.’ If, at forty, she is unmarried, that is by her own choice. In other words, the person she desired at one time to marry was not available, and, since it was him and not the ‘institution’ she desired, she has not married anybody else. She accepts her state; she bears no grudge against it. Flirtations she enjoys all the more that, like a man, she, as she would herself put it, takes them ’in her stride,’ does not put any great stress upon them. There are other things in her life. Her talk about sex does not imply that she is always thinking about it — rather, that she is not. It has for her, as for so many women, passed, once and for all, out of the category of prohibited and therefore attractive secrets, and settled down into the category of things that are to be taken as they come. She pays her tribute to ruling convention in her conversational references, but in action is more concerned with other aspects of life — that very large subject, of which sex is a small part. And in nothing is she more typical of the ‘new woman’ than in this.

IV

Women, traditionally, keep the world’s conscience. Even in times when they were permitted little else of their own, and might be guardians neither of their children nor of their property, they had assigned to them this somewhat double-edged privilege of being the guardians of morality.

This fact, historically, in the times from which we are now emerging, has had a very curious result. Women looked after morals. Women were restricted in their action, and, to a large extent, in their thought, to a very limited portion of the area of human conduct. Morals, almost without anyone’s noticing it, submitted, consequentially, to a similar restriction.

Morals, in the older, original sense of the word mores, cover the whole of a man’s relations to his fellows, the whole area of social as well as of individual behavior, and concern conduct in all the relations of life. Essentially, mores are the body of rules gradually worked out by experience and accepted by human beings as its result, to enable them to live, as they must live, together—the handbook of communal life. In this sense, moral conduct is that which conduces to happy and fruitful social living; immoral, that which makes it dangerous, insecure, and sterile.

But it is not so that, in common contemporary parlance, we employ the term. Morals, in actual usage, have been confined in their application to one aspect of social relations — that between the two sexes. ‘Moral’ and ‘immoral,’ used as adjectives descriptive of men or women, or of their behavior, have come to be limited, almost technical, terms. The broad and general meaning that belongs to mores has shrunk to something narrowly specific.

The shrinkage is not due to the substitution of Christian for pagan ethics. In mediæval times, when the Christian rule was more definite and effective than to-day, the conception of morals was far wider than ours. Compare, for instance, the current and familiar use of the word with such a catalogue as the ‘Seven Deadly Sins.’ Lust there is only one item in a series which comprises pride, anger, envy, avarice, gluttony, and sloth in addition to it. To-day, lust has eaten up all the rest. Pride, anger, envy, avarice, and gluttony are signs of the successful everywhere. Sloth, still a sin in the working classes, is the mark of achievement in the upper. What a devastating clearance would society have to undergo were all the arrogant, the gourmands, the ill-tempered, all who covet their neighbors’ goods or hoard their own, to be condemned! Public life would become a desert. No profession would be safe. As it is, if we read in the newspapers that a prominent man or woman has been found out in ‘ flagrant immorality,’ it is not of any of these sins that we think, but only of an infraction of one item in the social code.

This curious shift of emphasis is, in the main, surely due to the fact that morals have been consigned to the supervision of a sheltered caste. The outcome of such relegation has been, as it is bound to be, the erection of a code that is not only barrenly limited, but — and this is, really, more important — almost purely negative.

If one interrogates current opinion, one finds that morality means no more than a state of freedom from any accusation of immorality. It has no positive content. We class those men and women as moral against whom no act of immorality has been adduced; and by immorality we mean that particular sexual offense which women have been allowed to condemn, while they were compelled to tolerate it in the persons of their male relations. For the chastity of which women were constituted the defenders was, in the legal codes of most nations, an aspect of the fact that they were the property of their husbands. Nowhere is this point of view more barbarously revealed than in the practice of the British divorce courts, which allow the injured husband to claim monetary damages from the corespondent assessed in ratio to the degree of virtue which the court assigns to the erring wife.

Precarious and unstable as is this whole ‘moral’ construction, it has proved incapable of maintaining itself, its guardians once emancipated from their ‘shelter.’ Within the last half century, our common social life has been transformed; and the changes that have taken place in it have been changes primarily of the status, occupation, and outlook of women. These changes, to which there is no parallel save those in industry at the turn of the nineteenth century, will, like them, require decades before their effects are worked out; but they too represent a revolution. Between the woman of 1928 and the lady of 1878 lies a whole hemisphere of experience and discovery. It amounts to nothing less than this: that into the inner life of women there has crashed the whole of the world outside, before closed off from them, in theory if not. always in fact. They have entered into contact with all the forces — social, economic, political — that before made the world, as men knew it, different from the world as women did. The artificial barriers, the so-called shelter, have been washed away. What is happening is that women are, with a striking rapidity, adjusting their highly sensitive — to a large extent artificially sensitized — emotional apparatus to a world whose sustained and steady pressure on men has long ago forced them to indurate and segregate their emotional reactions.

One of the first actions of any released prisoner is to kick off his fetters. If the wine of liberty goes to his head, he may go on to sing paeans to license. That does not last long, however. He is back in a world where conduct is more difficult than in prison and requires a much more various and intelligent technique. So it is with women. Thrust, to-day, into the large world from which they were once secluded, the inadequacy of the code to whose service they were dedicated is now becoming apparent to them. Achievement, whether conceived of in material or in spiritual terms, requires positive, not merely negative, qualities; a code of action must have a positive content, whether or no it be called moral. Even within the home they are asking whether, in either partner, envy, greed, ill temper, idleness, gross physical excess, an overweening arrogance, an unbridled egotism, are not as detrimental, domestically and socially, as flightiness of affection. If, for the moment, they are inclined to take that last item lightly, this is a natural reaction against long overemphasis. A preference for ‘ bad ’ men is a last shade of the prison house. As they come out, more and more, from those old shadows, and new interests and wide responsibilities press on them, a new conception of companionship arises. Integrity of attraction may be one of its elements; but it, in its turn, is but one aspect of that ‘decency’ which constitutes the basis of Daphne’s effective code, as of that ‘fairness’ which is the same thing under another name.

Do not forget, either, that if fairness in character and conduct is what men have always prized in one another, though they have only rarely and intermittently looked for it in the other sex, exactly the same is true of women. The woman whom women admire resembles very closely the man whom men do. The beauty that either sex looks for in itself is more than skindeep. Each sex has hitherto looked, with an astonishment in which there is no small infusion of contempt, at the individuals selected from among it for admiration by the other. Women scorn the ‘man’s woman’ no less than men do the ‘woman’s man’ — and for the same reasons; in each case they see a being inferior in fairness, who would be rejected by his own kind on that ground. This is the point at which the ‘dual standard of morality’ has really been fatal. If, as I believe, the emancipation of the minds of women is really breaking it down here, there may be a wider realization than was dreamed of in the strange words of Francis Thompson: —