‘Whomsoever the city may appoint, that man must be obeyed, in little things and great, in just things and unjust . . . disobedience is the worst of evils . . . We must support the cause of order, and in no wise suffer a woman to worst us . . . They must be women, and not range at large. Servants, take them within.’ That is the voice of Creon, the dictator. To whom Antigone, who was to have been his daughter, answered, ‘Not such are the laws set among men by the justice who dwells with the gods below.’ But she had neither capital nor force behind her. And Creon said: ‘I will take her where the path is loneliest, and hide her, living, in a rocky vault.’ And he shut her not in Holloway or in a concentration camp, but in a tomb. And Creon we read brought ruin on his house, and scattered the land with the bodies of the dead. It seems, Sir, as we listen to the voices of the past, as if we were looking at the photograph again, at the picture of dead bodies and ruined houses that the Spanish Government sends us almost weekly. Things repeat themselves it seems. Pictures and voices are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago.
Such then is the conclusion to which our inquiry into the nature of fear has brought us — the fear which forbids freedom in the private house. That fear, small, insignificant and private as it is, is connected with the other fear, the public fear, which is neither small nor insignificant, the fear which has led you to ask us to help you to prevent war. Otherwise we should not be looking at the picture again. But it is not the same picture that caused us at the beginning of this letter to feel the same emotions — you called them ‘horror and disgust’; we called them horror and disgust. For as this letter has gone on, adding fact to fact, another picture has imposed itself upon the foreground. It is the figure of a man; some say, others deny, that he is Man himself,48 the quintessence of virility, the perfect type of which all the others are imperfect adumbrations. He is a man certainly. His eyes are glazed; his eyes glare. His body, which is braced in an unnatural position, is tightly cased in a uniform. Upon the breast of that uniform are sewn several medals and other mystic symbols. His hand is upon a sword. He is called in German and Italian Führer or Duce; in our own language Tyrant or Dictator. And behind him lie ruined houses and dead bodies — men, women and children. But we have not laid that picture before you in order to excite once more the sterile emotion of hate. On the contrary it is in order to release other emotions such as the human figure, even thus crudely in a coloured photograph, arouses in us who are human beings. For it suggests a connection and for us a very important connection. It suggests that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other. But the human figure even in a photograph suggests other and more complex emotions. It suggests that we cannot dissociate ourselves from that figure but are ourselves that figure. It suggests that we are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience but by our thoughts and actions can ourselves change that figure. A common interest unites us; it is one world, one life. How essential it is that we should realize that unity the dead bodies, the ruined houses prove. For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected. But with your letter before us we have reason to hope. For by asking our help you recognize that connection; and by reading your words we are reminded of other connections that lie far deeper than the facts on the surface. Even here, even now your letter tempts us to shut our ears to these little facts, these trivial details, to listen not to the bark of the guns and the bray of the gramophones but to the voices of the poets, answering each other, assuring us of a unity that rubs out divisions as if they were chalk marks only; to discuss with you the capacity of the human spirit to overflow boundaries and make unity out of multiplicity. But that would be to dream — to dream the recurring dream that has haunted the human mind since the beginning of time; the dream of peace, the dream of freedom. But, with the sound of the guns in your ears you have not asked us to dream. You have not asked us what peace is; you have asked us how to prevent war. Let us then leave it to the poets to tell us what the dream is; and fix our eyes upon the photograph again: the fact. Whatever the verdict of others may be upon the man in uniform — and opinions differ — there is your letter to prove that to you the picture is the picture of evil. And though we look upon that picture from different angles our conclusion is the same as yours — it is evil. We are both determined to do what we can to destroy the evil which that picture represents, you by your methods, we by ours. And since we are different, our help must be different. What ours can be we have tried to show — how imperfectly, how superficially there is no need to say.49 But as a result the answer to your question must be that we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods. We can best help you to prevent war not by joining your society but by remaining outside your society but in cooperation with its aim. That aim is the same for us both. It is to assert ‘the rights of all — all men and women — to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.’ To elaborate further is unnecessary, for we have every confidence that you interpret those words as we do. And excuses are unnecessary, for we can trust you to make allowances for those deficiencies which we foretold and which this letter has abundantly displayed.
To return then to the form that you have sent and ask us to fill up: for the reasons given we will leave it unsigned. But in order to prove as substantially as possible that our aims are the same as yours, here is the guinea, a free gift, given freely, without any other conditions than you choose to impose upon yourself. It is the third of three guineas; but the three guineas, you will observe, though given to three different treasurers are all given to the same cause, for the causes are the same and inseparable.
Now, since you are pressed for time, let me make an end; apologizing three times over to the three of you, first for the length of this letter, second for the smallness of the contribution, and thirdly for writing at all. The blame for that however rests upon you, for this letter would never have been written had you not asked for an answer to your own.
Notes and references: One
1. The Life of Mary Kingsley, by Stephen Gwynn, . It is difficult to get exact figures of the sums spent on the education of educated men’s daughters. About £20 or £30 presumably covered the entire cost of Mary Kingsley’s education (b. 1862; d. 1900). A sum of £100 may be taken as about the average in the nineteenth century and even later. The women thus educated often felt the lack of education very keenly. ‘I always feel the defects of my education most painfully when I go out,’ wrote Anne J. Clough, the first Principal of Newnham. (Life of Anne J. Clough, by B. A. Clough, .) Elizabeth Haldane, who came, like Miss Clough, of a highly literate family, but was educated in much the same way, says that when she grew up, ‘My first conviction was that I was not educated, and I thought of how this could be put right. I should have loved going to college, but college in those days was unusual for girls, and the idea was not encouraged. It was also expensive. For an only daughter to leave a widowed mother was indeed considered to be out of the question, and no one made the plan seem feasible. There was in those days a new movement for carrying on correspondence classes . . .’ (From One Century to Another, by Elizabeth Haldane, .) The efforts of such uneducated women to conceal their ignorance were often valiant, but not always successful. ‘They talked agreeably on current topics, carefully avoiding controversial subjects. What impressed me was their ignorance and indifference concerning anything outside their own circle . . . no less a personage than the mother of the Speaker of the House of Commons believed that California belonged to us, part of our Empire!’ (Distant Fields, by H. A. Vachell, .) That ignorance was often simulated in the nineteenth century owing
to the current belief that educated men enjoyed it is shown by the energy with which Thomas Gisborne, in his instructive work On the Duties of Women (), rebuked those who recommend women ‘studiously to refrain from discovering to their partners in marriage the full extent of their abilities and attainments.’ ‘This is not discretion but art. It is dissimulation, it is deliberate imposition . . . It could scarcely be practised long without detection.’
But the educated man’s daughter in the nineteenth century was even more ignorant of life than of books. One reason for that ignorance is suggested by the following quotation: ‘It was supposed that most men were not “virtuous”, that is, that nearly all would be capable of accosting and annoying — or worse — any unaccompanied young woman whom they met.’ (‘Society and the Season’, by Mary, Countess of Lovelace, in Fifty Years, 1882-1932, .) She was therefore confined to a very narrow circle; and her ‘ignorance and indifference’ to anything outside it was excusable. The connection between that ignorance and the nineteenth-century conception of manhood, which — witness the Victorian hero — made ‘virtue’ and virility incompatible is obvious. In a well-known passage Thackeray complains of the limitations which virtue and virility between them imposed upon his art.
2. Our ideology is still so inveterately anthropocentric that it has been necessary to coin this clumsy term — educated man’s daughter — to describe the class whose fathers have been educated at public schools and universities. Obviously, if the term ‘bourgeois’ fits her brother, it is grossly incorrect to use it of one who differs so profoundly in the two prime characteristics of the bourgeoisie — capital and environment.
3. The number of animals killed in England for sport during the past century must be beyond computation. 1,212 head of game is given as the average for a day’s shooting at Chatsworth in 1909. (Men, Women and Things, by the Duke of Portland, .) Little mention is made in sporting memoirs of women guns; and their appearance in the hunting field was the cause of much caustic comment. ‘Skittles’, the famous nineteenth-century horsewoman, was a lady of easy morals. It is highly probable that there was held to be some connection between sport and unchastity in women in the nineteenth century.
4. Francis and Riversdale Grenfell, by John Buchan, p, 205.
5. Antony (Viscount Knebworth), by the Earl of Lytton, .
6. The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Edmund Blunden, p.41.
7. Lord Hewart, proposing the toast of ‘England’ at the banquet of the Society of St George at Cardiff.
8. and 9. The Daily Telegraph, 5 February 1937.
10. There is of course one essential that the educated woman can supply: children. And one method by which she can help to prevent war is to refuse to bear children. Thus Mrs Helena Normanton is of opinion that ‘The only thing that women in any country can do to prevent war is to stop the supply of “cannon fodder”.’ (Report of the Annual Council for Equal Citizenship, Daily Telegraph, 5 March 1937.) Letters in the newspapers frequently support this view. ‘I can tell Mr Harry Campbell why women refuse to have children in these times. When men have learnt how to run the lands they govern so that wars shall hit only those who make the quarrels, instead of mowing down those who do not, then women may again feel like having large families. Why should women bring children into such a world as this one is today?’ (Edith Maturin-Porch, in the Daily Telegraph, 6 September 1937.) The fact that the birth rate in the educated class is falling would seem to show that educated women are taking Mrs Normanton’s advice. It was offered them in very similar circumstances over two thousand years ago by Lysistrata.
11. There are of course innumerable kinds of influence besides those specified in the text. It varies from the simple kind described in the following passage: ‘Three years later . . . we find her writing to him as Cabinet Minister to solicit his interest on behalf of a favourite parson for a Crown living . . .” (Henry Chaplin, a Memoir, by Lady Londonderry, ) to the very subtle kind exerted by Lady Macbeth upon her husband. Somewhere between the two lies the influence described by D. H. Lawrence: ‘It is hopeless for me to try to do anything without I have a woman at the back of me . . . I daren’t sit in the world without I have a woman behind me . . . But a woman that I love sort of keeps me in direct communication with the unknown, in which otherwise I am a bit lost’ (Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p-4), with which we may compare, though the collocation is strange, the famous and very similar definition given by the ex-King Edward VIII upon his abdication. Present political conditions abroad seem to favour a return to the use of interested influence. For example: ‘A story serves to illustrate the present degree of women’s influence in Vienna. During the past autumn a measure was planned to further diminish women’s professional opportunities. Protests, pleas, letters, all were of no avail. Finally, in desperation, a group of well-known ladies of the city . . . got together and planned. For the next fortnight, for a certain number of hours per day, several of these ladies got on to the telephone to the Ministers they knew personally, ostensibly to ask them to dinner at their homes. With all the charm of which the Viennese are capable, they kept the Ministers talking, asking about this and that, and finally mentioning the matter that distressed them so much. When the Ministers had been rung up by several ladies, all of whom they did not wish to offend, and kept from urgent State affairs by this manoeuvre, they decided on compromise — and so the measure was postponed.’ (Women Must Choose, by Hilary Newitt, .) Similar use of influence was often deliberately made during the battle for the franchise. But women’s influence is said to be impaired by the possession of a vote. Thus Marshal von Bieberstein was of opinion that ‘Women led men always . . . but he did not wish them to vote.’ (From One Century to Another, by Elizabeth Haldane, .)
12. English women were much criticized for using force in the battle for the franchise. When in 1910 Mr Birrell had his hat ‘reduced to pulp’ and his shins kicked by suffragettes. Sir Almeric Fitzroy commented, ‘an attack of this character upon a defenceless old man by an organized band of “janissaries” will, it is hoped, convince many people of the insane and anarchical spirit actuating the movement.’ (Memoirs of Sir Almeric Fitzroy, vol. II, .) These remarks did not apply apparently to the force in the European war. The vote indeed was given to English women largely because of the help they gave to Englishmen in using force in that war. ‘On 14 August , Mr Asquith himself gave up his opposition [to the franchise]. “It is true,” he said, “[that women] cannot fight in the sense of going out with rifles and so forth, but . . . they have aided in the most effective way in the prosecution of the war.”’ (The Cause, by Ray Strachey, .) This raises the difficult question whether those who did not aid in the prosecution of the war, but did what they could to hinder the prosecution of the war, ought to use the vote to which they are entitled chiefly because others ‘aided in the prosecution of the war’? That they are stepdaughters, not full daughters, of England is shown by the fact that they change nationality on marriage. A woman, whether or not she helped to beat the Germans, becomes a German if she marries a German. Her political views must then be entirely reversed, and her filial piety transferred.
13. Sir Ernest Wild, K.C., by Robert J. Blackburn, p-5.
14. That the right to vote has not proved negligible is shown by the facts published from time to time by the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. ‘This publication (What the Vote Has Done) was originally a single-page leaflet; it has now (1927) grown to a six-page pamphlet, and has to be constantly enlarged.’ (Josephine Butler, by M. G. Fawcett and E. M. Turner, note, .)
15. There are no figures available with which to check facts that must have a very important bearing upon the biology and psychology of the sexes. A beginning might be made in this essential but strangely neglected preliminary by chalking on a large-scale map of England property owned by men, red; by women, blue. Then the number of sheep and cattle consumed by each sex must be compared; the hogsheads of wine and beer; the barrels of tobacco; after which we must examine careful
ly their physical exercises; domestic employments; facilities for sexual intercourse, etc. Historians are of course mainly concerned with war and politics; but sometimes throw light upon human nature. Thus Macaulay dealing with the English country gentleman in the seventeenth century, says: ‘His wife and daughter were in tastes and acquirements below a housekeeper or still-room maid of the present day. They stitched and spun, brewed gooseberry wine, cured marigolds, and made the crust for the venison pasty.’
Again, ‘The ladies of the house, whose business it had commonly been to cook the repast, retired as soon as the dishes had been devoured, and left the gentlemen to their ale and tobacco.’ (Macaulay, History of England, Chapter Three.) But the gentlemen were still drinking and the ladies were still withdrawing a great deal later. ‘In my mother’s young days before her marriage, the old hard-drinking habits of the Regency and of the eighteenth century still persisted. At Woburn Abbey it was the custom for the trusted old family butler to make his nightly report to my grandmother in the drawing-room. ‘The gentlemen have had a good deal tonight; it might be as well for the young ladies to retire,’ or, ‘The gentlemen have had very little tonight,’ was announced according to circumstances by this faithful family retainer. Should the young girls be packed off upstairs, they liked standing on an upper gallery of the staircase ‘to watch the shouting, riotous crowd issuing from the dining-room.’ (The Days Before Yesterday, by Lord F. Hamilton, .) It must be left to the scientist of the future to tell us what effect drink and property have had upon chromosomes.
16. The fact that both sexes have a very marked though dissimilar love of dress seems to have escaped the notice of the dominant sex owing largely it must be supposed to the hypnotic power of dominance. Thus the late Mr Justice MacCardie, in summing up the case of Mrs Frankau, remarked: ‘Women cannot be expected to renounce an essential feature of femininity or to abandon one of nature’s solaces for a constant and insuperable physical handicap . . . Dress, after all, is one of the chief methods of women’s self-expression . . . In matters of dress women often remain children to the end. The psychology of the matter must not be overlooked. But whilst bearing the above matters in mind the law has rightly laid it down that the rule of prudence and proportion must be observed.’ The Judge who thus dictated was wearing a scarlet robe, an ermine cape, and a vast wig of artificial curls. Whether he was enjoying ‘one of nature’s solaces for a constant and insuperable physical handicap’, whether again he was himself observing ‘the rule of prudence and proportion’ must be doubtful. But ‘the psychology of the matter must not be overlooked’; and the fact that the singularity of his own appearance together with that of Admirals, Generals, Heralds, Life Guards, Peers, Beefeaters, etc., was completely invisible to him so that he was able to lecture the lady without any consciousness of sharing her weakness, raises two questions: how often must an act be performed before it becomes tradition, and therefore venerable; and what degree of social prestige causes blindness to the remarkable nature of one’s own clothes? Singularity of dress, when not associated with office, seldom escapes ridicule.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 373
