Men and Women

[A symposium was recently published; wherein eight well-known authoresses set forth their views on the opposite sex. To entrust the criticism of such a work to a male reviewer would have been to incur a charge of bias ; and the same may be said of asking a lady to review it. Accordingly we publish below two reviews, one by a male and one by a female critic.]

I.

BY ALDOI'S HUXLEY.

"'MEN," affirms Miss E. M.- Delafield, "are not imaginative. They do not want to -be imag, inative."

But " men," according to Miss Storm Jameson, " are more imaginative and more sensitively alive to circum- stances than women. They are the creatures of air and fire. (A female Ariel'would be a conception profoundly false to human nature.)" Luckily,' there is also Miss G. B. Stern. " They say," she writes, " men are the romantic sex. But equally, from the other side of the choir, might rise the chant : Women are the romantic sex." Men are more con- siderate.'—' Women are more considerate.' Men like a settled home.'—' Women like a settled home.' Men are not so sentimental.'—` Women are not so senti- mental.' " Both Miss Delafield and Miss Jameson are right. Which means that both are also wrong.

Physiologically a species, Homo Sapiens is, psycho- logically, at least an order, almost a zoological class. Between the mind of a completely unmusical man and the mind of John Sebastian Bach there is, I should say, at least as much difference as exists between the body of a sea-lion and the body of a giraffe. Bats do not differ from whales more widely than Mrs. Eddy from David Hume. There are, of course, profound resem- blances as well as profound differences. Bats and -whales are both mammals, and Professor Einstein is sufficiently like a Patagonian savage, even in mind, to he regarded as a member of the same psychological Class ; both are recognizably People, just as a whale and a bat are both recognizably Mammals.

There are many more mice in the world than gorillas, more sheep than kangaroos. Similarly, among people, the stupid enormously outnumber the able ; the definitely evil are far rarer, most fortunately, then the well-meaning but weak. Quantitatively, some genera are much more important than others. But this does not mean that the numerically smaller genera do not exist. Mice abound ; but if you look carefully and in the right places, you will find a few gorillas.

Specimens of both men and women are to be met with, I should say, in every one of the orders, genera and species of People. To affirm, in a sweeping generaliza- tion, that men have less imagination than women (or, in equally sweeping terms, that they have more) is wildly rash. Here, for example, is Miss Delafield, who complains that men Write books about women without knowing anything about them. Being what they are, men cannot know anything about women. Men have no intuition or imagination, so that they cannot divine what women are like. They do not bother to ask women about themselves, and when women volunteer to tell them, they refuse to listen. " Men when they do not .want to hear—and what man ever does want to hear a woman talk about herself ?—do not listen. They walk .away, or they hide behind the newspaper, or they fall asleep. . . . In no circumstances whatever do they listen, with profound and passionate interest, and take mental notes, and go home and think it ...all over, and

• Moe, Proud Man. A Commentary by Mary Borden, E. M. Delafield, Susan Ertz, Storm. Jameson, Helen Simpson, G. B. Stern, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West. (Burnish Hamilton. 7s. &L) analyse it from A to Z. Men are always most fright- fully particular about wasting time, and meditations of this kind might encroach seriously upon hours that could, otherwise have been devoted to the killing of an animal,, or to playing with a ball."' As description of a certain rather repellent type of business man this is excellent. But does Miss Delafield want us to believe that it is these people who write the books about women ? Does; she seriously imagine that Stendhal walked away, or that Dostoevsky hid behind the newspaper, or that Tolstoy went to sleep, or that Lawrence resented the spending in human relationships of hours that could otherwiSe have been devoted to the killing of an animal, or to playing with a ball ? And now that we are asking questions, let us 'put a 'couple to Miss Jameson. Does she really think that a Delafieldian stockbroker is a creature of air and fire ? And was not Caliban as much a male as Arid ?

No, these generalizations from particular cases won't do. If we want to be accurate, we must say that many men have less imagination than some women ; and, conversely, that many women have less imagination than some men. And so through all the catalogue of mental " faculties." Any attempt to classify people in terms of the Eternal Masculine and the Eternal Feminine is doomed to failure. People are Much too various to be adequately catalogued under only two heads. The classifier must begin with other concepts, such as the Eternal.Stupid and the Eternal Intelligent, the Eternal Good and the Eternal Worthless, the Eternal Sensitive and the Eternal Lubberly. When he has arranged his individuals under these heads, it will be time to start thinking in terms of the Eternal Feminine and the Eternal Masculine ; time, for example, to show how an unimaginative man differs from an unimaginative woman, a male from a female saint, and so on.

I have expatiated at some length on unwarrantable generalizations, because unwarrantable generalizations are such fun to make and so fatal to believe. But it must not be supposed that this book is made up of unwarrantable generalizations. For the most part, the essays it contains are cautious and acute. Miss Rebecca West, for example, has some very valuable things to say on the differences between masculine and feminine religion. Miss Townsend Warner's essay on men's strange love of rules for rules' sake is both witty and profound. Miss Storm Jameson and Miss Susan Ertz are good on man as helpmate and man as pleasure-seeker respectively. And Miss Delafield's essay on personal relations would have been quite admirable if she had admitted the existence of other genera of men besides that large and unpleasant order which she describes with such devastating accuracy.

II.

BY STELLA BENSON

To laugh while expressing irritation is rather an unfairly safe method of reproach; for then, if the butt shows signs of affront, it is easy to say, ":.Good Lord, man, I was only in fun ; cannot you take a joke against yourself ? " A joke's a joke, as our nurses used to say when there was a difference of opinion in the' nursery as to whether a joke was, in fact, a joke. From the butt's point of view a joke at the expense of the thing-in-itself 'Must alWays seem superfluens. ' The . thing-in-itself—the bone, in fact—never either feels amusing or is amused. Man, Proud Matt seems to be written in irritation against men-in-themselves—irritation expressed largely in amusing terms. I have noticed for some time—and loudly commented on—the fact that an unduly large number of recent books by men of my generation have been written under the influence of irritation against women-in-themselves. I had sup- posed that this was a natural result of the War. " Farewell all joy, 0 death come close my eyes. More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise," seemed to me a natural outburst on the part of those who have assisted at the death of swans. Natural though it may be, however, it seems to me a waste of time to try and shame the changeless into change, and it seems disappoint- ing that women should now turn the irascible male solo into a duet. I had supposed that women had too practical a feeling for• economy in temper.

It is easy to think of an enormous number of irritating things in the world. Pretence is unbearably irritating ; caution is irritating to many ; the masks behind which real faces dodge are irritating ; pretence is a form of trespass, I think, and all trespass and encroachment are irritating ; the words Uplift and Ought are irritating ; anything is irritating that gets in our way or blocks our view. Since, being human, we all think we know best on a large number of subjects, we must inevitably feel justified in expressing irritation with every nuisance that might, in our opinion, be remedied by a salutary outburst of anger. I may reasonably carp at your way of talking to me with your mouth full, and I may hope that my carping will shock you into changing your habits —but surely I cannot carp at the fact that you eat. What you are is your business ; what you pretend to be is everybody's business ; what you prevent me from doing or force me to do is emphatically my business. That men and women should be men and women is nobody's business but their own.

Man, Proud Man, is a book by a group of clever Women determined to score off stupid men. I suppose it is comparatively new in women's experience to be brave enough to be funny at men's expense—new, that is, within .a' hundred years or so. Jane Austen was one of the pioneer smilers-at-men-behind-the-hand, and she managed to do it without putting out her tongue at them ; she retained a perfect recognition of the glass houses of treacherous flesh and blood and mood and vanity that the bones of all of us inhabit. She consistently smiled at masks and disguises ; she never lashed herself into a temper over the inevitable shapes of bones. But smilers-behind-the-hand to-day snigger a little and end On a note of defiance—like the schoolchild's So there

• or Sucks to You. I suggest that it is no fun to put out our tongues with such bravado, now that nobody is likely to smack us and put us to bed. Miss E. M. Delafield scores off Man, Proud Man more astutely than any of her co-scorers. (But how silly of you to be offended, George ; of course I was only in fun !) Almost anything seems to make sense, at the time, if it is written by Miss E. M. Delafield ; almost anything she writes is deceptively convincing, and all comment from her pen seems fair comment—until you remember that she is ostensibly writing about men—male human beings with bones inside them. Almost every sentence in this witty chapter of hers implies an ought ; men ought to change into some biped more convenient to women—men oughtn't to be men. Choose any noun— say crocodile—and add to it a list of relevant epithets ; if you make out your list while under the influence of irritation, it will make a very shocking show. And if you make out another list—while still in a condition of irritation and still inspired by a determination to score off crocodiles—cataloguing, tacitly or explicitly, all the oughts that might conceivably turn the crocodile into something else—say a inilch-cow—the poor saurian will be left with scarcely a leg to stand on—on paper. Never- theless, stand lie will, unchanged, on the banks of his native Nile—take him or leave him.

Miss G. B. Stern presents her point of view almost literally in the form of such a list as I have suggested, and hers is therefore the most impressively intelligent contribution to the book. Rough Notes, like unfinished crayon sketches, always seem to have more cleverness— the difficult joins can be left out. Actually Miss G. B. Stern has, of course, far more than the intelligence necessary to put in the joins—had she, in this instance, thought it worth while to do so. I like to imagine that she was hampered at the beginning by her realization that man, if roused—(and he often is roused)—Calk say almost exactly the same things about woman as woman can say about man. The grounds on which he can say them differ only in detail. The question is, whether they are worth saying, either by men or by women. Miss G. B. Stern, having protected herself by this reservation, throws us a few neat. fragmentary records of masculine faux pas.

Miss Susan Ertz, who writes the only really good- natured chapter in the book, might justly claim to be commenting on those pretences and defences of that rather charming though pampered animal—man—that may be said to be everybody's business. She records gaily and without malice—from a friendly rather than a corrective point of view—the manifestations of the manly instinct to seek a retreat in games and gaieties from the inconvenience of conscious identity.

Miss Storm Jameson, though writing, like most of her friends, in irritation, recognizes the existence of the sea against which she takes up arms. She reserves, in fact, some of her reproaches for tradition, instead of making man the solitary culprit. Both she and Miss Mary Borden admit the mixed quality of the blessing of woman's emancipation, and Miss Storm Jameson makes a witty and convincing story of her analysis of man encroaching and man repulsed in the course of two generations. She does not, however, deny herself that touch of defiant bravado which is the keynote of this book.