PERSONALITY

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 97, 19 January 1924, Page 15

PERSONALITY

HOW IT RE-ACTS ON OTHERS

I feel very deeply on the subject of woman’s personality, says Gilbert Frankau, the novelist, for personality, character, more especially in our women, is everything. Everything! If the woman personality of a nation be bad, weak, idle, inefficient, that nation is doomed 1 nor can any creed, any social system, any trick of arms or politics or finance, save it. You need not go far, woman reader, to' prove this point. Yon need only examine—as the old Greeks, even though they despised women, taught themselves to examine—yourself. SureIv you know, if only you will admit it, the effect which your character, vour personality,' has on the people about you? Surely you realise that your nerve-storms and. your nerve-calms, your tears and vour laughter, vour good will and your ill will react on every single person with whom vour daily business brings vou into contact? Let me tell vou. without fear of contradiction. 'that, in ninety-five cases out of a hundred, the atmosphere of a house whether happy or unh.nnpv radiates from the woman, from tire female rather than from the male inhabitant of it. I repeat: You. woman reader, are the foJus of all lifm H is m vour hands, in in vour hands onlv, to make o r to mar the homo. You sbmild know —vou do know—that everv house you enter reveals, more cleariv than ton thousand Pages of analytical novel writing, the character pf the woman who is resnonsildo for it. And you know, too, how little mere money can bring of ronl comfort. There are humble cottages. tinv flats, scattered all about this coimtrv. wherein everv nook and comer betokens cleanliness, where everv litt’e possesrion. Imyoyer inexpensive, is a possession of delmht,. and wherein evm-v morsel cf food, however economically nnrebnsed. is a- ioy to the naln+o. And there am crest houses in this country where there is neither delimit, nor iov nor ceanliness. but onlv dim and slummcekincss and inefficiency. Why? I nm not going to answer that last question. I am going to leave it to yon to answer. Because you, looking into your heart, know the reason of it so much better than I do. Let us pass on to finer, more spiritual, more vivid, more vital things than the mere mechanism of the home. Hove you ever realised, the true meaning of that word which so many novelists flog to death, “atmosphere” 9 Has it ever struck you. crossing the threshold of a house, th: t you fire plunging your ego into 'Happiness or plunging it into the reverse of happiness? Of course it has. Of course you know as well as I do that certain hmises you visit smooth every crease from your soul, and certain others ; crumple all your rose-leaves so that I long after you have left these houses 1 the unpleasant memory of them ruffles all your day The simple truths. < ven in a. world of complications, remain the great truths. And the simple truth of woman’s personality, whether in her

home or outside her homo is—let me tty and put it in the simplest words — this: ... That woman’s personality is her all, that it is above beauty, above brains, above all art nmh 'hove all artifice, j That ,un to, a, point it can be trained | as a plant is trained, by others; but that beyond that point woman herself is responsible for herself. And that her responsibilities, because she, being both the child-bearer and the- homemaker, is the very focus of life, nre greater, jierhaps, than any mere man yet knows.