AN OPEN QUESTION.
[To TER EDITOR 07 THE " SPECTATOR.".1 Sin,—My attention has been called to your strenuous review of my last book, "Ann Veronica," under the heading "A Poisonous Book." I have considered that review very care- fully, and after a first phase of natural resentment, I am disposed to acquit the writer of anything but an entirely honest and intolerant difference of opinion. I would like with your permission to offer a few remarks upon that difference, because I think very wide issues are involved in your suggestion that my book should be burnt, so to speak, by the common hangman and myself trampled underfoot.
My book was written primarily to express the resentment and distress which many women feel nowadays at their unavoidable practical dependence upon some individual man not of their deliberate choice, and in full sympathy with the natural but perhaps anarchistic and anti-social idea that it is intolerable for a woman to have sexual relations with a man with whom she is not in love, and natural and desirable and admirable for her to want them, and still more so to want children by a man of her own selection. Now these may be very shocking ideas indeed, but it is not the first time they have crept into literature, and I submit that a case can be made out for tolerating their discussion. The case lies in the fact that the opposite arrangement by which a woman is subdued, first to her father, and then to a husband of his choice, is not in our present phase of civilisation working satisfactorily. I do not, of course, expect you to attach any great value to the distress, inconvenience, and even misery that this inflicts upon many women, over-educated to a painful delicacy of perception; but I know your keen and vigorous patriotism, and it seems to me that you overlook the fact that in practice the arrangement you manifestly approve is not giving the modern State enough children, or fine enough children, for its needs. Your ideals have had the fullest play in the United States of America among the once prolific population of English and Dutch descent. There, if any- where, the Christian ideal of marriage and woman's purity, as you conceive it, has prevailed exclusively. So late as 1906, the Gorki incident in New York called attention to the con- tinuing vigour of these conceptions. And yet that colonial strain has dwindled to a mere fraction of the population of the States, and still dwindles. In France, again, the man-ruled family has become insufficiently prolific for the public need. People of your persuasion have denounced " race suicide " with a quite remarkable eloquence, but it has produced no appreciable effect upon the decline. Now I explain this decline, rightly or wrongly, by the fact that the man in a man-ruled family, which is competing for existence against other families, has not only no great national passion for offspring, but has also under our present conditions every practical inducement to limit their number; that there is an enormous pressure as well as an enormous temptation for the wife to shirk what you, I think, would agree with me in regard- ing as her chief public duty; and so I believe that the development of civilisation demands a revision of the consti- tution of the family and of our conventions of the relations of men and women; which will give tl.; natural instincts of womanhood freer play. I have come to this belief after years of thought and hesitation, and I mean to give it expression. The Family does not work as it used to do, and we do not know why, and we have to look into it. With the best will in the world to damage my book, your reviewer could not find anything to call pornographic in it, and so I enter my plea for an arrest of judgment and liberty of discussion in this
vitally important field.—I am, Sir, &c., H. G. WELLS. 17 Church Row, Hampstead.
[Mr. Wells is entitled to a hearing, but we cannot open our columns to any general discussion of the points he raises. He does not plead to the issue. We say that he has written a book which glorifies incontinence, and the yielding to a lustful impulse if it is a sufficiently strong one,—a book which is a negation of the duty of self-control, and, further, a book which treats a squalid case of double adultery and faithlessness to his marriage obligations by a married man, aggravated by the heartless betrayal of his friend, as an incident calling for no condemnation by the girl-lover of the man, by the author, or by the reader. We add that such a book is poisonous, and that its sentimental sophistries are calculated to have a corrupting effect on those who read it. Mr. Wells replies, in effect, that his book is written to express his sympathy with the idea that it is intolerable for a woman to have sexual relations with a man with whom she is not in love, and that it is natural and desirable for her to want to have children by a man of her own selection. Mr. Wells goes on in a strain of smug and self-complacent sophistry, which would be funny were it not so nauseous, to write as if we had advocated girls being forced to marry men whom they hated, and had expressed satisfac- tion at a declining birth-rate and the break-up of the family. In a word, he adopts the familiar device of trying to drag a red-herring across the scent. He makes no answer• whatever to our charge, but tries to imply that he is on the side of the angels by a kind of unctuous affectation of a higher virtue. Oddly enough, he has forgotten his own novel in his effort to wriggle into the position of the defender of female virtue and purity and family love against the brutal assaults of the Spectator. He forgets that in a particularly disagreeable passage at the end of his book the heroine tells us by inference that she has taken good care that there shall be no offspring during the four years of her illicit connexion with Mr. Capes. Till a divorce has been obtained and everything is regular and in order we are expressly told that all idea of children had been put aside. Mr. Wells should have remembered this passage before he talked about race suicide. The notion that the kind of promiscuity which he advocates will people the earth with sound children is, as all experience shows, utterly untenable. One man and one woman is the law of fecundity. His American example is worthless. It is not because the marriage-tie has been upheld in America, but because of the laxity of the Divorce-law and the morbidly sentimental indulgence of female inclination, that the English section of the population has declined in the Eastern States with such terrible rapidity. That decline is a vital part of our case. One more point and we have done. Mr. Wells's defenders have hitherto told us that " Ann Veronica " has been unfairly judged by us, because it is a piece of beautiful realism,—a brilliant transcript from life. Now Mr. Wells cuts this ground entirely from under their feet by admitting fully that his is a novel with a serious purpose. That was, of course, the assumption on which we condemned his book. He preaches a doctrine which must be the downfall of any community that adopts it—the doctrine of inclination and free-love--the negation of marriage, continence, self- sacrifice, and self-control in the relations of sex. Looking back at what we have written, we feel somewhat ashamed to have dealt at such length with Mr. Wells's defence of his novel, which lies in a nutshell :—" Don't you realise that in writing an exciting and sympathetic description of how a girl bolts with a married man I am helping to solve the decline in the birth-rate ? " Perhaps, after all, silence would have been the at answer to so impudent a plea.—En. Spectator.]
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