Orlo Williams

“ It is the settled people, I have already said, who bring forth the fine fruit of English manners, and where is settlement to-day? Society is regrouping itself busily like iron filings on a sounding board, values are profoundly changing, ideals are in the agonies of birth and death. The seething crowd in Oxford Street is England in miniature: people are everywhere hurrying to and fro, physically and mentally, laden with new ideas, new purposes and new experiences. ”

“ You see her often enough in London, watching the Russian ballet with an air of proprietorship, as if her appreciation was the only thing that mattered, that of the ordinary herd being cold, earthy and altogether negligible; you may see her selling programmes at charity matinées, flattering and fluttering by her radiant presence the audience—"oh, my dear, such quaint stuffy horrors!"—who buy; you will see her in the company of the rich more often than in that of the well bred, for money is to her infinitely more than manners and flashy novelty more than solid worth. ”

“ Let me plead with the women of England not so to misuse the name of a great ideal, as it has been misused before: they will not by so doing redress the wrongs of inequality. If they are supremely conscious of their worth, let them at least preserve the urbanity of the truly great who assert no claim but act upon the easy assumption of its general recognition. But it would be better if they could emulate the humility of the truly wise who, measuring themselves humbly by their ideals, find no delight in standing on tip-toe among their fellow mortals. ”

“ The nursery is the enemy of self-consciousness, it is the home of frankness and a light hearted innocence. No good Englishwoman is ever out of place in a nursery, whether it be hers or another’s: she knows instinctively that there are few places on earth where her virtues are more obvious, and she herself has been a little English girl in that happy nursery land which is the cradle of all good Englishwomen. ”

“ The guest slides into an English home, be it for an evening or for a month, as easily as a new leaf is slid into the dining-room table. If any sacrifices are made on his behalf, it is a matter of pride that he should be unaware of them: if his pleasures are consulted it is, for him, with the assurance that the meeting of them would only be an extension, the most natural in the world, of the admirable activities of his host and hostess. ”

“ As a matter of fact, the privacy of the Englishman’s home is, in a sense, far less jealously guarded than that of the Frenchman. But besides privacy an Englishman wants a little space before he can feel comfortable, and he knows instinctively that children want space too. To an English child the lot of a French, German or Italian child must seem intolerable. For no single moment, except when in bed, is it out of the sight of its elders’ eyes. It must always be good and always be tidy, or else in the common living rooms of the appartement it becomes an intolerable nuisance. ”

“ So distrustful is she of artifice that she seldom shines in the fine rapier-play of witty conversation: her interchange of ideas may be compared rather to the game of lawn tennis, with plenty of movement and hard-hitting in it, most balls being returned from the base line with a well-timed drive, not snappily volleyed at the net. She is most attractive when a flush of emotion colours her thinking, showing thus as an effective foil to her mankind who think unemotionally or wear the mask of indifference to conceal their sensitiveness. ”

“ In those families, especially, where in the last resort it is not necessary for the daughters to earn their living in the labour market, this policy of drift is most obvious. A little French, a little music, a little history, a little recitation of approved poets—that is the recipe for the education of a “nice, refined girl.” As if any girl worth her salt would be content with a diet of spoon feeding. It is only those who have never learnt anything that imagine any useful learning to be possible without the desire to know more than it was good for you to be taught. ”

“ It seems to shrink from the light of ideas, or, where the attraction of the light is too imperious to be resisted, it lifts a shoot gingerly upwards only to curl a tendril lovingly round the first comfortable fact met with in the short upward progress, and to adhere to it gracefully, quite satisfied with the result of its exertion. Or let us vary the illustration. Men, in their intellectual journey, can contemplate with satisfaction at the first glance some vast mansion of knowledge rising up before them from its solid foundations to all the infinite variety of its higher tracery. ”

“ Let her harry overweening man as much as she will, shaking her broom in his face, compelling him to call her in to reinforce his weakness and striving victoriously for equality with him in every service to the community; but only at her peril will she cast aside permanently her good manners as despicable relics of older restraints and seclusions. They are the natural flower of her good comradeship and motherliness: why should she stunt the growth from those two roots which are fixed ineradicably in the deepest fibres of her nature? ”

“ Beauty, it is sad to say, too often leaves them as they grow older, but, when they are little girls, nearly all Englishwomen are not merely pretty, but beautiful. There can be no sight more nearly approaching the ideal of fairyland than Kensington Gardens on a fine morning of spring or summer, when the sun is glinting through the elm trees and the Broad Walk is all alive with hoops and perambulators. ”

“ Well, for one thing, Mary, who is of a more independent temperament than Emily, has not had the opportunity of finding out that living on one’s own is not all that fancy paints it. She is possessed by the idea, and she will only learn how much she misses her home when she has suffered from some of the facts which its realisation entails. It might be almost worth while to let her try for a time: if she comes back with relief, well and good. If she finds independence preferable with all its drawbacks, the wisdom of having ceased to put constraint upon her will be obvious. ”

“ Her husband may show to more advantage in spacious and crowded scenes, but if she look not well at her own table she will look well nowhere: for in the house that she has made her own, built up and ruled, among the “things” that are so part of herself that she can hardly leave them without a pang, even for the joy of returning to them with rapture, watching the service which answers her will and the faces which reflect her love, an added grace is given to her figure, a brightness to her eyes and a melody to her voice. ”

“ Our Englishwoman will go out sketching-block in hand to capture the delicate177 contours of our English hills and our English clouds, and strive to mix in her palette the exquisite harmonies that blend in English heaths and lanes and bricks, yet she will return to stare without loathing at furniture which violates every canon of proportion and colours that cry aloud in their disagreement, as if art was all very well in the fields and woods but wholly out of place in a comfortable home of England. ”

“ It is not their wish that women should be feeble critics possessed of uncertain standards or of no standards at all, easily misled by tinsel and facile tears, hypnotised by charlatans, enticed by plausible pedlars of the cheap and showy, charmed by smooth phrases but repelled by fine ideas, partial in their views, lazy in their judgments; for men, in their rambles after the true and the beautiful, often have reason to regret the rarity of feminine companionship to sympathise and share in these loftier activities of the mind. Why should man any longer deplore his masculine solitude? ”

“ Where our men have not risen high, our women, though a surpassing voice may here and there be born, are not likely to soar. As for painting and the other plastic arts, well, one can only wait in hopes of something better from women than they have yet been able to give us. But our women can write, heaven knows, though many of them write too much, and where the passionate intensity and the transfiguring imagination of an Emily Brontë is present the result is unqualified greatness, as surely as the work is a masterpiece when the shrewd observation and the elegance of a Jane Austen illuminate it. ”

“ It is rather a heavy mantle that the Englishman throws, a solid article in tweed or homespun, not lightly to be shifted and apt to be impervious to gentle breezes as well as to more blustering elements: but if the Englishwoman inevitably feels at times a trifle overpowered and would gratefully welcome the respite of a button or two, she is not given to any awkward wriggles of betrayal or to moppings of the brow in public. ”

“ Would it not have a woman’s form to wriggle in ecstasy as a gigantic tear squeezed out of Mary Pickford’s magnified eyelid? It is a monstrosity unworthy to exist, and yet it now thrives amazingly upon its ample diet. In thousands of halls in towns, villages and cities it is fed every afternoon and evening with variations of the same crudity which never palls upon its unregenerate palate. Who can speak of art in England with this vast daily sacrifice to its negation drawing millions to the unedifying rites? ”

“ Men’s clubs, which flourish on the assumption of the individual’s unalterable identity and a nebulous tolerance of most of his general social connections, would find the new flavour of enigma too disruptive for their continuance in comfort. There is no getting over this difference by any amount of tact. The most unassuming of men, the most diffident, amplifies his personality in marriage, casting his name, like a protective cloak, round the person whom he has chosen with a generous finality which makes any inquiry as to the nature of her former covering theoretically superfluous. ”

“ During the war the English wife kept the English home going, and at all times it is she who is the centre of the English home. This fact alone would give her a unique position among wives, for the English home is unique. If the man maintains it, the woman gives it its peculiar character, and the character is one which at once impresses itself upon all foreign observers. What the Englishwoman preserves, what she warms, one might almost say, with her blood, is not a dining-room for her husband, a nursery for her children, a drawing-room for herself and a sleeping place for them all ”

“ There is nothing for which the rather wasteful spaciousness of English life, as compared with that of other countries, is so valuable as for the institution of the nursery. We may overburden ourselves with bricks and mortar and insist on having a house where our fellows abroad are content with a flat: we may use two servants where they use one, and seem to them to strain a limited income quite unreasonably by insisting on so large a shell. That this habit is due to our reserve and the Englishman’s intense longing for privacy in domesticity is undeniable, but it is not all. ”

“ Education alone will not raise these standards to a worthy level: we want a higher conception of domestic work and of its importance in the productiveness of our country, the aim of all labour being production. It always appears strange to me that a man who, if given the amount of individual responsibility in a business which is entailed in the administration of a household, would consider himself a fully-occupied worker, will often look upon his wife’s activities—which keep him comfortable, his children healthy and his servants contented—as mere incidents in an otherwise ornamental life. ”

“ She rises to it like a well-bred horse to a jump, self-spurred by the exercise of an activity for which she is so admirably suited. She may not always be sufficiently imaginative to fit her hospitable offerings to the particular temperament of every guest—though it is just in this discrimination and adaptability that the best Englishwomen shine—but her intention is invariably in that direction. Even Mrs Proudie at the Palace, Barchester, intolerable woman as she was, would have meant well by those who shared her formidable tea-table. ”

“ Woman in England has never been a mystery, an intricate engine with simple aims and complicated methods, of a different order from man with his complex aims and simpler methods. The texture of English life is, and has always been, compounded of both as the warp and the woof—the more active man passing rapidly between the more stable feminine strands which keep his thread in place. ”

“ To regard such people otherwise than as equals in all but opportunity would prove a heart devoid indeed of nobility. It was an annual joy and a refreshment of spirit to see these old folk gathered at the Christmas feast. Never could entertainment want more perfect guests. The spirit of ease and gaiety which animated this one bright day in their dim year came from their hearts to warm those of their entertainers. There was no need to force the note of gaiety, so strongly did the tone of simple happiness vibrate in them, for all that good fortune so seldom plucked at their heart-strings. ”

“ For him, too, love is not all emotion: his passion is tinged unconsciously with prudence. His nature leads him to look for a companion as well as a divinity, and since he is a simple soul, to whom the refinements of sentiment are tiresome in the long run, he prefers a comrade ready-made to a novice whose transformation into a comrade will take some time and considerable trouble. The English girl is always a comrade, from the nursery onwards. The spirit of comradeship is so deeply ingrained in the family sense of English people that they could not avoid it if they would. ”

“ My uncle Joseph, a solitary man, once broke the silence of a country walk by asserting with explosive emphasis: “I don’t see how any man can understand women.” I assented vaguely, and he went on: “How can we ever grasp their point of view, my dear boy, which is so totally different from ours? How can we understand the outlook on life of beings whose instincts, training, purpose, ambitions have so little resemblance to ours? For my part I have given up trying: it is a waste of time. Never let a woman flatter you into thinking that you understand her: she is trying to make you her tool. ”

“ English society is held together by English women, for the men of England have a strange aloofness from one another and a want of curiosity about one another which is always an astonishment to women, who can make or break men’s friendships without an effort. English men cling to one another with such feeble tendrils that the faintest tug pulls them apart. Yet, if women sometimes almost involuntarily apply the tug, they are coagulators of men, linking knots of them together by tighter bonds of familiarity than they could have ever manufactured for themselves. ”

“ Men, as a rule, are only intellectually affected by the artistic views of their fellow men, but the likes and dislikes of women work themselves into the most intimate fibres of domestic life. The decoration of a house, its intimates, its conversation, its amusements, its entertainments reflect far more of the woman than of the man who, if he is not satisfied, prefers to seek a freer artistic atmosphere outside his own doors than to attempt the almost impossible task of bringing it with him into an unreceptive household. ”