Edmund Gosse (1849- ) THE WHOLE DUTY OF WOMAN

PROSE

Duty of Man, published in the reign of Charles II, a volume which, if he had had the courage of his opinions, he would have named The Whole Duty of Woman. Under the tamer 5 title of The Ladies' Calling it achieved a great success. In the frontispiece to this work a doleful dame, seated on what seems to be a bare altar in an open landscape, is raising one hand to grasp a crown dangled out of her 10 reach in the clouds, and in the other, with an air of great affectation is lifting her skirt between finger and thumb. A purse, a coronet, a fan, a mirror, rings, dice, coins, and other useful articles lie strewn at her naked feet; she spurns them, and lifts her streaming eyes to heaven. This is the sort of picture which does its best to prevent the reader from opening the book; but The Ladies' Calling, nevertheless, is well worth reading. It excites in us a curious wish to know more exactly what manner of women it was addressed to. How did the greatgrandmothers of our great-grandmothers behave? When we come to think of it, how 25 little we know about them!

15

It is universally conceded that our great-
grandmothers were women of the most pre-
cise life and austere manners. The girls
nowadays display a shocking freedom; but
they were partly led into it by the relative
laxity of their mothers, who, in their turn,
gave great anxiety to a still earlier genera-
tion. To hear all the 'Ahs' and the 'Well,
I nevers' of the middle-aged, one would fancy
that propriety of conduct was a thing of the
past, and that never had there been a 'gaggle
of girls' (the phrase belongs to Dame Juliana
Berners) so wanton and rebellious as the race
of 1895. Still, there must be a fallacy some-
where. If each generation is decidedly
wilder, more independent, more revolting,
and more insolent than the one before, how 20
exceedingly good people must have been four
or five generations ago! Outside the pages
of the people so sweetly advertised as
'sexual female fictionists,' the girls of to-day
do not strike one as extremely bad. Some
of them are quite nice; the average is not
very low. How lofty, then, must have been
the standard one hundred years ago, to make
room for such a steady decline ever since!
Poor J. K. S. wrote:

'If all the harm that 's been done by men
Were doubled and doubled and doubled again,
And melted and fused into vapour, and then
Were squared and raised to the power of ten,
There wouldn't be nearly enough, not near,
To keep a small girl for a tenth of a year.'
This is the view of a cynic. To the ordinary
observer, the 'revolting daughters,' of whom
we hear so much, do not revolt nearly enough 40
to differentiate them duly from their virtuous
great-grandmothers.

The customary source of information is the play-book of the time. There, indeed, we come across some choice indications of ancient woman's behaviour. Nor did the 30 women spare one another. The woman' dramatists outdid the men in attacking the manners of their sex, and what is perhaps the most cynical comedy in all literature was written by a woman. It will be some time 35 before the Corinnas of The Yellow Book contrive to surpass The Town Fop in outrageous frankness. Our ideas of the fashions of the seventeenth century are, however, taken too exclusively, if they are taken from these plays alone. We conceive every fine lady to be like Lady Brute, in The Provoked Wife, who wakes about two o'clock in the afterWe fear that there was still a good deal of noon, is 'trailed' to her great chair for tea, human nature in girls a hundred, or even two leaves her bedroom only to descend to dinner, hundred, years ago. That eloquent and 45 spends the night with a box and dice, and animated writer, the author of The Whole does not go to bed until the dawn. Comedy

* By permission of the Author.

has always forced the note, and is a very unsafe (though picturesque) guide to historic manners. Perhaps we obtain a juster notion from the gallant pamphlets of the age, such as The Lover's Watch and The Lady's Looking-Glass; yet these were purely intended for people whom we should nowadays call 'smart,' readers who hung about the outskirts of the Court.

recated: it is, at all events, so distasteful to the writer of The Ladies' Calling that he gives it an early prominence in his exhortation. A woman's tongue,' he says, 'should 5 be like the imaginary music of the spheres, sweet and charming, but not to be heard at distance.' Modesty, indeed, he inculcates as the first ornament of womanhood, and he intimates that there was much neglect of it

Lynn Linton speaking when, with uplifted hands, he cries, 'Would God that they would take, in exchange for that virile Boldness, which is now too common among many even of the best Rank,' such a solidity and firmness of mind as will permit them to succeed in keeping a secret! Odd to hear a grave and polite divine urging the ladies of his congregation not to 'adorn' their conversation with

For materials, then, out of which to con- 10 in his day. We might fancy it to be Mrs. struct a portrait of the ordinary women of the world in the reign of Charles II, we are glad to come back to our anonymous divine. His is the best-kept secret in English literature. In spite of the immense success of The Whole 15 Duty of Man, no one has done more than conjecture, more or less vaguely, who he may have been. He wrote at least five works besides his most famous treatise, and in preparing each of these for the press he took 20 oaths and imprecations, of which he says, more pains than Junius did a century later to conceal his identity. The publisher of The Ladies' Calling, for example, assures us that he knows no more than we do. The MS. came to him from an unknown source 25 and in a strange handwriting, 'as from the Clouds dropped into my hands.' The anonymous author made no attempt to see proofs of it, nor claimed his foundling in any way

with not less truth than gallantry, that 'out of a woman's mouth there is on this side Hell no noise that can be more amazingly odious.' The revolting daughters of to-day do not curse and swear; at all events, they do not swear in print, where only we have met the shrews. On the other hand, they smoke, a contingency which does not seem to have occurred to the author of The Ladies'

whatever. In his English Prose Selections, 30 Calling, who nowhere warns the sisterhood

the recent third volume of which covers the
ground we are dealing with, Mr. Craik, al-
though finding room for such wretched
writers as Bishop Cumberland and William
Sherlock, makes no mention of the author of 35 rare even among women of quality.
The Whole Duty. That is a curious over-
sight. There was no divine of the age who
wielded a more graceful pen. Only the
exigencies of our space restrain us from
quoting the noble praise of the Woman- 40
Confessor in the preface to The Ladies'
Calling. It begins 'Queens and Empresses
knew then no title so glorious'; and the
reader who is curious in such matters will
refer to it for himself.

against tobacco. The gravity of his indict-
ment of excess in wine, not less than the
evidence of such observers as Pepys, proves
to us that drunkenness was by no means

There never, we suppose, from the beginning of the world was a man-preacher who did not warn the women of his congregation against the vanity of fair raiment. The author of The Ladies' Calling is no exception; but he does his spiriting in a gentlemanlike way. The ladies came to listen to him bedizened with jewels, with all the objects which lie strewn at the feet of his penitent 45 in the frontispiece. He does not scream to them to rend them off. He only remonstrates at their costliness. In that perfectly charming record of a child's mind, the Memoir of Marjorie Fleming, the delicious little wiseacre records the fact that her father and mother have given a guinea for a pineapple, remarking that that money would have sustained a poor family during the

The women of this time troubled our author by their loudness of speech. There seems some reason to believe that with the Restoration, and in opposition to the affected whispering of the Puritans, a truculent and 50 noisy manner became the fashion among Englishwomen. This was, perhaps, the 'barbarous dissonance' that Milton dep

same human nature prevailed. The author of The Ladies' Calling considered that the greatest danger of his congregation lay in the fact that 'the female Sex is eminent for 5 its pungency in the sensible passion of love'; and, although we take other modes of saying it, that is true now.

entire winter. We are reminded of that
when our divine tells his auditors that 'any
one of the baubles, the loosest appendage of
the dress, a fan, a busk, perhaps a black
patch, bears a price that would warm the
empty bowels of a poor starving wretch.'
This was long before the days of very elab-
orate and expensive patches, which were
still so new in Pepys' days that he remarked
on those of Mr. Penn's pretty sister when he 10
saw her in the new coach, 'patched and very
fine.' Our preacher is no ranter, nor does
he shut the door of mercy on entertainments;
all he deprecates is their excess. His peni-
tents are not forbidden to spend an after- 15
noon at the theatre, or an evening in dancing
or at cards; but they are desired to remem-
ber that, delightful as these occupations are,
devotion is more delightful still.

1895

George Bernard Shaw (1856- )

THE CASE FOR THE CRITIC-
DRAMATIST *

A discussion has arisen recently as to whether a dramatic critic can also be a dramatic author without injury to his integrity and impartiality. The feebleness

be guessed from the fact that the favorite opinion seems to be that a critic is either an honest man or he is not. If honest, then dramatic authorship can make no difference

The attitude of the author to gaming is 20 with which the point has been debated may curious. I question not the lawfulness of this recreation,' he says distinctly; but he desires his ladies not to make cards the business of their life, and especially not to play on Sundays. It appears that some great ladies, in 25 to him. If not, he will be dishonest whether the emptiness of their heads and hearts, took advantage of the high pews then always found in churches to play ombre or quadrille under the very nose of the preacher. This conduct must have been rare; the legends 30 of the age prove that it was not unknown. The game might be concealed from every one if it was desisted from at the moment of the sermon, and in many cases the clergyman was a pitiful, obsequious wretch who 35 knew better than to find fault with the gentlefolks 'up at the house.' It was not often that a convenient flash of lightning came in the middle of service to kill the impious gamester in his pew, as happened, to 40 the immense scandal and solemnization of everybody, at Withycombe, in Devonshire.

he writes plays or not. This childish evasion cannot, for the honor of the craft, be allowed to stand. If I wanted to ascertain the melting-point of a certain metal, and how far it would be altered by an alloy of some other metal, and an expert were to tell me that a metal is either fusible or it is not - that if not, no temperature will melt it; and if so, it will melt anyhow I am afraid I should ask that expert whether he was a fool himself or took me for one. Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as absolute temperature or absolute value. A dramatic critic who would die rather than read an American pirated edition of a copyright English book might be considered an absolutely honest man for all practical purposes on that one particular subject · I say on that one, because very few men have more than one point of honor; but as far as I am aware, no such dramatic critic exists. If he did, I should regard him as a highly dangerous monomaniac. That honesty varies inversely with temptation is proved by the fact that

On the whole, it is amusing to find that the same faults and the same dangers which occupy our satirists to-day were pronounced 45 imminent for women two hundred years ago. The ladies of Charles II's reign were a little coarser, a little primmer, a good deal more ignorant than those of our age. Their manners were on great occasions much better, 50 every additional penny on the income-tax

and on small occasions much worse, than those of their descendants of 1895; but the

yields a less return than the penny before it, showing that men state their incomes less * Dramatic Opinions and Essays, Brentano's, 1906. By permission of the Publishers.

honestly for the purposes of taxation at sevenpence in the pound than sixpence. The matter may be tested by a simple experiment. Go to one of the gentlemen whose theory is that a man is either honest or he is not, and obtain from him the loan of half-acrown on some plausible pretext of a lost purse or some such petty emergency. He will not ask you for a written acknowledgment of the debt. Return next day and ask 10 for a loan of £500 without a promissory note, on the ground that you are either honest or not honest, and that a man who will pay back half a crown without compulsion will also pay back £500. You will find that the 15 of their masterpieces remain unacted to this theory of absolute honesty will collapse at

permanent, no man really secures his advancement as a dramatist by making himself despised as a critic. The thing has been tried extensively during the last twenty 5 years; and it has failed. For example, the late Frank Marshall, a dramatist and an extravagantly enthusiastic admirer of Sir Henry Irving's genius, followed a fashion. which at one time made the Lyceum Theatre a sort of court formed by a retinue of literary gentlemen. I need not question either their sincerity or the superiority of Canute to their idolatry; for Canute never produced their plays: 'Robert Emmet' and the rest

once.

day. It may be said that this brings us back to honesty as the best policy; but honesty has nothing to do with it: plenty of the men who know that they can get along faster fighting

first Napoleon was. No virtue, least of all courage, implies any other virtue. The cardinal guarantee for a critic's integrity is simply the force of the critical instinct itself. To try to prevent me from criticizing by pointing out to me the superior pecuniary advantages of puffing is like trying to keep a young Irving from going on the stage by pointing out the superior pecuniary advan

Are we then to believe that the criticdramatist who stands to make anything from five hundred to ten thousand pounds by per- 20 than crawling, are no more honest than the suading a manager to produce his plays, will be prevented by his honesty from writing about that manager otherwise than he would if he had never written a play and were quite certain that he never should write one? I 25 can only say that people who believe such a thing would believe anything. I am myself a particularly flagrant example of the criticdramatist. It is not with me a mere case of an adaptation or two raked up against me 30 tages of stockbroking. If my own father as incidents in my past. I have written halfa-dozen 'original' plays, four of which have never been performed; and I shall presently write half-a-dozen more. The production of one of them, even if it attained the merest 35 by no means the willing victim of this in

success of esteem, would be more remunera-
tive to me than a couple of years of criticism.
Clearly, since I am no honester than other
people, I should be the most corrupt flatterer
in London if there were nothing but honesty 40
to restrain me. How is it, then, that the most
severe criticisms of managers come from me
and from my fellow critic-dramatists, and
that the most servile puffery comes from
writers whose every sentence proves that 45
they have nothing to hope or fear from any
manager? There are a good many answers
to this question, one of the most obvious
being that as the respect inspired by a good
criticism is permanent, whilst the irritation 50
it causes is temporary, and as, on the other
hand, the pleasure given by a venal criticism
is temporary, and the contempt it inspires

were an actor-manager, and his life depended on his getting favorable notices of his performance, I should orphan myself without an instant's hesitation if he acted badly. I am

stinct. I am keenly susceptible to contrary influences to flattery, which I swallow greedily if the quality is sufficiently good; to the need of money, to private friendship or even acquaintanceship, to the pleasure of giving pleasure and the pain of giving pain, to consideration for people's circumstances and prospects, to personal likes and dislikes, to sentimentality, pity, chivalry, pugnacity and mischief, laziness and cowardice, and a dozen other human conditions which make the critic vulnerable; but the critical instinct gets the better of them all. I spare no effort to mitigate its inhumanity, trying to detect and strike out of my articles anything that would give pain without doing any good. Those who think the things I say severe, or even malicious, should just see the things I