THE GENTLER SEX

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22437, 25 June 1938, Page 18

THE GENTLER SEX

So we have been called, just as all readers were once addressed as gentle readers. Up till now, women have not made a very wonderful showing. We haven’t had very much of a chance; we’ve hardly been long enough in the field, and what we’ve claimed of it is still not much bigger than a pocket handkerchief. But we’re extending it day by day and every decade we’re casting off more chains. Whether our intellectual range and grasp will ever equal man’s is hardly the question. The brain, the seat of these powers, is structurally different in men and women. Yet I think, let the limit be what it may, we have our own contribution to make.

Yes, taking the sum total, we’re smaller fry. Why not admit it? If Jane Austen has been called the lady-bird of fiction, lady-birds have their place—and it’s distinctly decorative —as well as the larger species. In her own miniature •world of squires and squires’ relations, Jane Austen has never been excelled. I think it is true that in any creative sphere women in general are concerned with things and persons, and men more with ideas and systems of thought. The personal against the metaphysical. The lyrical Yes against the reflective Why and How. Constitutionally, woman is more blind to what Joyce terms “the ineluctable modality of visible things.” Observe the widely different approach of women’s and men’s, writing in the newspapers, gay. Denis Glover’s-couplet, a little twisted, rather fits our case. To coalmine themes we’ll never tune our lyre; iWe only want the pictures in the fire. Even in criticism our feeling is always paramount. It is a strange thing that women are not as factual as men; yet neither can they transcend fact as man can. Women In Literature Although Georges Sand had a more vigorous intellect than most of the women of her time, that did not prevent Nietzsche from sneering at her as being “an ink-yielding cow” or Heine from saying of her that she wrote with one eye on the page and the other on a man. Male jealousy? I don’t knowMary Wollstonecraft was a remarkable woman, who wrote probably the first feminist study. Her equally remarkable daughter. Mary Shelley, wrote a novel, “Frankenstein,” with a most unfeminine theme, the creation of mechanical men by a scientist. As likely as not, Capek is indebted to her for the idea of his play, “R.U.R.” Fanny Burney, Dorothy Osborne, Mrs Gaskell were all outstanding women. Nor was George Eliot altogether typically feminine in her outlook, but had a man’s more prodigious ambit. She was one of the first novelists to psychologise and analyse the motives of behaviour, and although shg is no longer read, her influence has been considerable. Strangely enough, one of the first best-sellers was writteh by a woman. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” written last century by Harriet Beecher Stowe, did much to awaken the world to the injustices and cruelties suffered by the negroes in the United States. From the far north come Ellen Key, sociological writer, Selma Lagerlof, famous Swedish novelist, Sigrid Undset, who in the magnificent “Kristin Lavransdatter” made thirteenth century Norway so real to us. Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewess of astonishing gifts, the friend of Goethe and Jean Paul Richter, gathered around her in Germany all fte distinguished people of her age. Original and yet the true woman recessive type, Rahel was greatly fevered by Carlyle, who has written of her and quoted her extraordinary sayings. That the Bronte sisters made a mark in their own confined day is a tribute to their power. Such women, especially Emily, Would make a mark in any age. Music and Painting Very obviously musical composition seems to be beyond women’s achievement. Madame Chaminade could hardly be counted. However, Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser has made no negligible contribution in putting the Hebrides of Scotland on the musical map. For all that, women have been brilliant performers of music. And there is the virile Dame Ethel Smyth. Women are prominent enough in the plastic arts. In her day Rosa Bonheur was a notable painter of animals, and a few years ago Lucy HiH *bl° work m the same field. But Mary Cassatt, who mdved in the French impressionist group, was much more typically a woman painter, who painted little domestic scenes—women bathing and nursing babies. She painted with her feelings and painted well. Her contemporaries, Degas and Carriere,' often portrayed similar

Women in Art

(spccixllt waimi iob tot potss.) [By JESS BARCLAY.]

subjects; but the painting of Degas in particular has the cooler objectivity of a man. Women seldom resort to humour and less frequently still to satire. For instance, the bold social satire of Hogarth, Goya, Daumier, and, in our own century, the German George Grosz, could never be the work of anyone but a man. So far there has been no female counterpart of Dean Swift. Although women make as many triumphs on the stage as men, there are no women Greeks or Charlie Chaplins. Near and Far If in general feeling a woman’s work often approximates to a man’s (as in Georges Sand, Emily Bronte, Laura Knight, Dame Ethel Smyth), sometimes the reverse holds good also. Nothing could be easier than t< believe that the luscious Greuze portraits in oil were painted by some sentimental girl. Burne-Jones, too, and Rossetti at times might easily have been women at work. Not so Rubens, Rembrandt, Raeburn, Michel Angelo, and Rodin: unmistakable man-power there! But women must admit that in El Greco’s apocalyptic visions (in an essay Huxley 'puts El Greco’s case supremely well) they are moving uncomfortably ?in regions where they have no home or ease. A woman could write ~ sea story; but she could never write a “Moby Dick.” Neither Homer’s Ulysses nor

James Joyce’s could come from any woman’s pen. In “Middlemarch” George Eliot is building large and building handsomely; but no woman could produce the Book of Job, “Hamlet,” the B minor Mass, the Ninth Svmph<--"v, “The Ring and the Book,” “The Agony in the Garden,” “The Brothers Karamazov,” “War and Peace.”Some Peaks of Achievement Yet “Wuthering Heights,” a superlative achievement as a woman’s, would have been a superlative achievement, also, as a man’s. Emily Dickinson, American poet, has her own authentic voice; and it -is a woman’s. Dorothy Wordsworth’s. Journal is as fine as anything that can be done in that field. The letters - of the nimble-witted Jane Welsh Carlyle could stand with any. Sir Walter Scott’s brilliant young friend, Marjorie Fleming, was astonishing her immediate world at the age of six. What might she not have done, if she had lived? The feminine counterpart of Aldous Huxley might be, say, Virginia Woolf. She and Edith Sitwell can keep their place with any man (giants excepted); but their writing remains essentially woman’s writing. That is, it is preoccupied with sensory modes of feeling, with ready exchanges from one art medium to another. Edith Sitwell, particularly, tends to think of one art in terms of another. I have merely hinted at woman’s artistic work in our society, as at presept constituted. I have done no more than jot down names that have occurred to me while writing. Books of reference, no doubt, would bring forth a much richer crop. A man would have used them. A woman writes at random, from the rag-bag of her impressions. Here are some interesting points which another could deve l op. It would be interesting to know, of ■the many women who have expressed themselves in art, how many were childless, how many were beyond the reach of financial worries, and how many were purely feminine in their gifts.

E. M. FORSTER The Writings of E. M. Forster. By Rose Macaulay. The Hogarth Press. 304 pp. (7/6 net.) Writers, like other people, are rooted in time and place, embedded in, growing and flowering out these conditioning soils, so that you will only with some pains sort their elements, disentangle the individual from the background, and never (I think) quite; indeed, how could you, since all the background, the march of all the centuries, the crowding shades of, all the dead up to that moment, of all the living in that moment, charge the lightest unspoken word at any given hour, with their unescapable rhythms, echoes, syntheses, and purposes. Heigh-ho! No, this is one book the reviewer is not going to read. How many modern books about books have begun with that shattering sentence? That developed metaphor, .that archly up-to-date “conditioning, , that portentous “syntheses in its meaningless list, that literary crowding of the shades, this march of time! Have done. Look at the chapter heads and read Modern Literature and Dante,” Alexandrian Essays,” and “The Sinister Corridor.” E. M. Forster is a good novelist, so is Rose Macaulay. But the time is not yet when “Howard s End” and “A Passage to India, need the exegesis of Shakespearean scholarship. Nor is it_ likely that such a book as this will make for E. M. Forster what he probably deserves, more readers. If there are already readers who desire information about “his literary work, his outlook upon the world and life, and its significance in relation to his ag-.,” Miss Macaulay’s book may satisfy their desire.