Critical Woodcuts/Rose Macaulay and Women
ROSE MACAULAY is one of the wittiest writers going. But she makes me as uncomfortable as a patch of nettles, and very anxious about the future of mankind. I sit here uneasily studying her photograph. I conjecture that she herself has described it under the name of Katherine Varick in "Potterism": "frosty blue eyes, a pale square-jawed, slightly cynical face, a first in Natural Science, and a chemical research fellowship." I blench under the rapier points of those eyes, so piercing, so ironically mocking, so candid, so caustic, so pitiless.
Is that the way a woman's eyes should rest upon this wounded, weary world? What did Byron say about soft eyes looking love to eyes that spake again in the same soft dialect? Or is that "old stuff" Have we had rather too many soft eyes healing the wounds our own folly has made?
At any rate, this face knows too much! It knows everything that I know—which is pardonable; and a great deal besides—which is dangerous and disturbing. In seeing through me and all around me, I suppose she is like every well-informed woman that I have met in the last twenty years. I have never imagined that superior women were dull. But she differs from others in making no concealment of her scathing insight. Ever since I can remember I have adored, under the name of "feminine tact," women's readiness and ability to lie imperturbably in order to spare other people's feelings, particularly the feelings of their husbands and other male dependents. But Rose Macaulay rejects "tact." Her intelligence has no reservations. She looks at me without gloves. To the brutal frankness which is English she adds a hard, realistic thrust which is feminine—the special characteristic, it seems, of the full-fledged feminine Intellectual.
Once started on logical courses, women, I surmise, run through them faster than men. Consider the mad speed with which Rose Macaulay has run through the bright hopes of the feminist program. Her course was slowly prepared and her lamp was trimmed by such poor, old, patient plodders as Samuel Butler, G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells. Forty years it took these fumbling iconoclasts to get the Victorian candelabra thoroughly junked and the clean cinder path laid out for the Ann Veronicas of the present age. With "Potterism," 1920, Rose Macaulay caught up what for brevity we may call the Wellsian torch, and in four short years she burned it out and tossed us the charred wick in "Told by an Idiot."
If she had refrained from the race, who knows?—perhaps dear old Mr. Wells with his rich resources of erotic sentiment and his vast social hopefulness might have kept his beloved young people "forward-looking" for another ten years. As it is, Mr. Wells is collecting his works, and closing the great epoch of social expectation, while Rose Macaulay cynically explains to the now tittering young people that before they can get around to reform the world they themselves will be old, and then, of course, it will be useless to try to do anything about it.
With a presentiment that she has now pretty well exhausted the satirical vein, I have been re-reading "Potterism," 1920. It is a breezy book, and with "Dangerous Ages" contains nearly everything of hers that fans the smoldering ashes of my sanguine years. It is dedicated, a bit pedantically, to "the unsentimental precisians in thought, who have, on this confused, inaccurate and emotional planet, no fit habitation." People who hankered to be "unsentimental precisians" were not so few as one feared. In 1921 "Potterism" had run through thirty-five editions.
Just what was it in this first book that cried "come hither" to so many readers? The gospel of Wells, the ideas of Wells, with the rose color rubbed off, the sentiment squeezed out. The Anti-Potterite League for the Investigation of Fact, for the destruction of cant, the slapdash, the second-rate, pomposity, mush, shellacked propriety and every hollow, plausible form of words employed to mask and blur the hard, sharp edges of actuality. Youth was there, shameless, fearless, uncompromising youth, truculently showing up the base compliances of parents. Above all, young women were there, with Cambridge honors, scientifically trained, tempered, edged, going into the world fully prepared to compete with their brothers, and bent on getting some of the important jobs, and demonstrating that "woman's work" is a disgusting Potterism.
"Dangerous Ages," which followed hard upon "Potterism" in 1921, is the only book of Rose Macaulay's which wrings the heart, or, indeed, much recognizes the existence of that organ. It is my impression that no dozen novels of my time have given me so much authentic information about womankind as this one.
There are girls of twenty here, clean, fine and candid, who have read Freud and Ellis and don't wish to marry, but, open-eyed, to take the risks of a free companionship, in a "keen, jolly, adventuring business, an ardent thing, full of gallant dreams and endeavors." There are women of thirty who write—experienced, brilliant, gay, with a cynical twist, with no religious illusions, yet "with a queer desire, to put it simply, for goodness, for straight living and generous thinking, even, within reason, for usefulness." There are women of forty-three, with satisfactory husbands and promising young children—women turning, at forty-three, to the medical career interrupted twenty years before, turning back to the career, in horror of the threatening vacancy of the rest of life. There are grandmothers and great-grandmothers who have ceased to rebel at their wrinkles, and who stave off the ennui of age by reading Russian fiction and consulting the psychoanalyst.
Pathos broods over them all. For they are all hungry for some more adequate self-expression than they are ever likely to attain. They are bitten with a desire to leave behind in the world some record more permanent, more personal, less undistinguished than—merely children! They are so sick of this self-sacrificial song! They want to live their own lives—for a little while, before they descend into the eternal nothingness. There is a hard core of egotism in them—just as there is in every man who sticks to his career. But one likes these girls and these women, so deliberately clean and fine and slim and taut; and one pities them, too. The intellectual life? Not many of them, one fears, want it, as men of their class want it—as the first indispensable life choice. And a career chosen on any other basis is bitter with relinquishment.
In "Dangerous Ages" as it appears to me, Rose Macaulay let herself go as in none of her other books. She is more or less in love with all these women who are trying to make something satisfactory out of the little interval which is theirs before the swiftly shifting bright dance of the earth shall know them no more. Consequently she has here for once revealed her poignant emotional as well as her pungent intellectual qualities, and she has expressed intensely and adequately the consciousness of existence which her persons feel within themselves—the courage and verve with which they take up life's gauntlet.
If you scrutinize the story, however, you see that she has few illusions about the capacity of her sex to live the "life of reason." Her perception is lucid that the great majority of her sisters, struggling for "emancipation," are inextricably in the grip of the life-force, the passionate admiration of men remains still the secret ultimate object of their heart's desire and at a pinch they will fight for it with the crude ferocity of savages.
She has seen through them.
From the first, therefore, she has been anxious to make known that she is by no means committed to the positions in which her dramatis persone are found. In "Potterism," for example, she gave us a long epigraph from Evelyn Underhill on that "disinterestedness" of the artist which enables him to see things "for their own sakes." The point of view at which she philosophized upon the pangs of the feminine heart at the ages of twenty, thirty, forty, sixty and eighty is indicated by this epigraph in "Dangerous Ages": "Reflecting how, at the best, human life on this minute and perishing planet is a mere episode and as brief as a dream."
She has, however, a personal register in one of the characters in "Dangerous Ages." In the final chapter we are told that Pamela has the "key" to the door against which various of the other women bruise their eager hands. The key is not an important job, not a career, nor yet a man, but a philosophic attitude—an attitude of blithe philosophic despair. I will quote a passage which makes a close link between this book and "Told By An Idiot" and "Orphan Island": "Pamela, going about her work, keen, debonair and detached, ironic, cool and quiet, responsive to life and yet a thought disdainful of it, lightly holding and easily renouncing, the world's lover, yet not its servant, her foot at times carelessly on its neck to prove her power over it—Pamela said blandly to grandmama, when the old lady commented one day on her admirable composure, 'Life is so short, you see. Can anything which lasts such a little while be worth making a fuss about?'"
One sees at a glance that Rose Macaulay has flung aside the torch with which Mr. Wells started the Ann Veronicas of 1909 marching toward the earthly kingdom of "God, the Invisible King." She has reverted to a mood nearer the "blithe paganism" of George Moore and Oscar Wilde and old Samuel Butler, with his seductive maxim: "We have all sinned and come short of the glory of making ourselves as comfortable as we easily might have done."
In 1923 she blithely expressed her political disillusion in "A Mystery at Geneva"—not a satire, she assures us in a prefatory note; no, not a satire, but a simple straightforward "mystery story" about an imaginary League of Nations Assembly which somehow dissolves without much result in a subterranean banquet chamber.
In 1924 she chose as epigraphs for "Told By An Idiot" the walking shadow passage from "Macbeth" and a sentence of Paul Morand's to the effect that "history, like an idiot, mechanically repeats itself." If there was to be laughter at the expense of the feminine Intellectuals Rose Macaulay proposed to herself the pleasure of being the first to laugh!
"Told By An Idiot" is saturated with the pitiless, disintegrating, depressing irony of one who conceives that she has seen through "the illusion of progress." "Why so hot, little man, little woman?" she seems to inquire, with a frosty detachment which I find extraordinarily exasperating. "What we are doing and planning and hoping so hotly, with such an elate sense of its novelty, is very old stuff, my children. Come, peep in here at my little puppet show. Here you shall see the generations pass, one by one—Victorian, Fin-de-siècle, Edwardian and Georgian. Mark them well and four times you shall see history mimic the vain spectacle of your anxious progress from the cradle to the grave, with all your empty mouthings and ineffectual gestures. Come, let us amuse ourselves. As the whirligig of dead time spins past us I will mention for you all of the score or so of odd little 'interests' which constituted life and its zest for each of our little marionettes, as, for examples, the untimely death of the Duke of Clarence, the alarming increase of female bicyclists and the prevalent nuisance of that popular song, 'Ta-ra-ra-ra-boomdeay.'"
I should like to call "Told By An Idiot" a heart-breaking tale, but if I did that its author would turn her cool, frosty intelligence in my direction and inquire exactly what physiological change I conceived to take place when I spoke of the rupture of that organ. Let us say nothing of the heart. "Told By An Idiot" is a satire of great wit and even of erudition, but I find it horribly depressing, because it systematically belittles life and denies the possibility of progress.
Fancy becoming so superior to mundane events that in a chronicle of forty years you can tuck such an event as the World War into a couple of pages. On a scale of that sort the individual dwindles to a pin point, and births, marriages and deaths become of infinitesimal consequence. I ask, whose is this sublime point of view? Where does the observer sit who whiffs all our human affairs into the air like a puff of cigarette smoke? No longer, certainly, at the point of view of the artist, according to Evelyn Underhill's definition, for she no longer is making any effort to see people "for their own sakes." She is no longer expressing the consciousness of existence which her persons feel within themselves.
I search again for Rose Macaulay's "register," and I find it in Miss Garden, a wholly disillusioned feminist—"a little cynical, a little blasé, very well dressed, intensely civilized, exquisitely poised, delicately, cleanly fair. She would soon be thirty-nine, and looked just that, neither more nor less." Miss Garden gambles very intelligently at Monte Carlo; she inquires how the wars are going—"the most noticeable wars at the moment were those between America and Spain and between Great Britain and the Sudanese"; she visits the picture galleries and the theaters; she spends some hours in the shops buying a clear jade elephant and a dull jade lump that swings on a platinum chain, a tortoise shell cigarette case, some Irish lace, ivory opera glasses and considering the purchase of a Poltalloch terrier. She understands that to be a little in love is fun and adds a zest, but one must be careful not to be perturbed by it. She philosophizes thus:
"Funny, hustling, strutting, vain, eager little creatures that we are, so clever and so excited about the business of living, so absorbed and intent about it all, so proud of our achievements, so tragically deploring our disasters, so prone to talk about the wreckage of civilization, as if it mattered much, as if civilization had not been wrecked and wrecked all down human history and it all came to the same thing in the end. Nevertheless, thought Rome, we are really rather wonderful little spurts of life."
In "Orphan Island" I find this yawning bright-eyed satire far less of an affliction—on the contrary, decidedly exhilarating, I suppose because it is directed at the Victorians, and I am gradually beginning to see the necessity of proving the Victorians ridiculous in order to fortify my own sense of progress.
According to the ingenious scheme of this antilltopia, a kind-hearted evangelical lady, Miss Charlotte Smith, undertaking to conduct some fifty miscellaneous orphans from East London to San Francisco, is wrecked on a coral island, with all the culture of an early Victorian evangelical spinster safe in her head. Seventy years later a scientific and sociological party set out from Cambridge to discover and rescue the survivors, if any.
It transpires that the survivors of the castaways number something like a thousand, and they haven't the faintest desire to be rescued. The island population is divided into two classes, the descendants of the orphans, the working class, and the descendants of Charlotte Smith by the ship's doctor, who are capitalists and land owners. Charlotte herself, aged ninety-eight, and generally tipsy on cocoanut wine, is the recognized source of religion, government and morals. Through the decay of her memory she has almost lost the distinction between herself and Queen Victoria. The society to which she gives the tone is perfectly smug and thoroughly hypocritical. It talks prohibition, chastity, etc., and it does just as it pleases.
For a time I had an awful suspicion that Orphan Island was meant for the United States, but I read an article by Robert L. Duffus in the February "Century" on the progress we have made in the last twenty-five years and decided that my surmise was absurd.
Clearly "Orphan Island" is a picture of Victorian England, and how as intelligent a woman as Rose Macaulay can fail to regain her faith in progress after painting it is past my comprehension. As for myself, I find that my faith and hope and charity are all restored to me when I let my imagination dwell for an hour or so with that tippling, pedantic bigot, Charlotte Smith, and then turn swiftly to the description of Neville's forty-third birthday in "Dangerous Ages."
I see that adorable woman, mother of two grown children, waked from her dream-broken sleep at sunrise of a summer dawn, "roused by the multitudinous silver calling of a world full of birds." She cups her tanned face in her sunburnt hands and, looking out of sleepy violet eyes, she shivers and says, "Another year gone and nothing done yet." She decides to change all that. She hops out of bed, spreads two chunks of bread with marmalade, trots across the lawn in her pajamas and down through the wood to the broad swirling pool in the stream. There she strips, has her swim, eats her bread, "resumes" her pajamas, swarms up the smooth trunk of a beech tree to a limb in the sun and sits there, whistling.
If that doesn't represent progress I give it up.