Griselda Wellwood went with Julian, Charles/Karl, Wolfgang and Florence. Griselda was interested in what she thought were Wagner’s own adaptations of the myths in the Edda and the Nibelungenlied. She told Julian that there was no source for the cutting-down of the World Ash to set fire to the World and Valhalla. It was Wagner’s own invention, his addition to the story. Julian said the singing made him feel impotent. Charles/Karl, still interested in groups and instinct, said an audience was a different animal from a man reading on his own. An audience—if the work was good—was a creature. Like a dragon, said Griselda. You can lull dragons with music. Julian said a dissatisfied audience was a creature too, its emotions were common, it worked itself up. Wolfgang said, be quiet, pay attention, the music begins again. And the dangerous sound hung in tantalising strands, and answered itself, and grew stronger, and wove itself together.
Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister’s wife, wrote in her journal in 1906: “I have not one woman friend who knows or cares about politics—they love the personal aspect, the prestige, the Cabinet-making.” She had written: “Women are d—d stupid really, and only have instinct, which after all animals have. They have no size or reason—very little humour, hardly any sense of honour or truth, no sort or sense of proportion, merely blind powers of personal devotion and all the animal qualities of the more heroic sort.” She despised and feared the suffrage agitators, who spat at her at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet and in 1908 threw stones through her windows in Downing Street, making her fear for her infant son.
“I nearly vomited with terror that he should wake and scream. Why should my life be burdened by these worthless, vicious, cruel women? They say men would not be so seriously dealt with, what lies they tell! Men would be horsewhipped on every street corner.”
She had great faith in her own feminine authority and intuition. In late 1910 she made an appeal to Lloyd George during the election campaign. It was a silly letter, sublimely unaware of its own silliness.
I am sure you are as generous as you are impulsive. I am going to make a political appeal to you. I say political against personal for, if you do not respond to my appeal, I shall be very unhappy, but not affronted. Don’t when you speak on platforms arouse what is low and sordid and violent in your audience; it hurts those members of it that are fighting these elections with the noblest desire to see fair play; men animated by no desire to punch anyone’s head; men of disinterested emotion able to pity and heal their fellow men, whether it be a lord or a sweep. I expect the cool-blooded class hatred shown for some years in the corporate councils of the House of Lords has driven you into saying that lords are high like cheese etc. etc. etc.
If your speeches only hurt and alienated lords, it would not perhaps so much matter—but they hurt and offend not only the King and men of high estate, but quite poor men, Liberals of all sorts—they lose us votes …
Lloyd George replied with steel irony
… I have undertaken in spite of a racking cold to address a dozen meetings before the election is over. If you would only convey to the Whips your emphatic belief that my speeches are doing harm to the cause you will render the party a service and incidentally confer on me a great favour…
In November 1911 Lloyd George mischievously announced that he had torpedoed the Conciliation Bill, which would have given the Vote to a limited number of women. Instead there was to be a Bill on Manhood Suffrage Reform. The women, both the militant suffragettes and the calm and reasonable suffragists, were appalled.
In February Emmeline Pankhurst stated: “The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in politics.” Women had discomfited the daily life of the nation, as it had been, with increasing wit and venom. “Votes for Women” was burned into the greens of golf courses and written in scarlet greasepaint on the Prime Minister’s blotting pad. Respectable black-garbed ladies, under respectable black hats, produced from comfortable, large, respectable handbags claw hammers and large stones, and walked steadily down the great shopping streets of cities, rhythmically crashing down the plate-glass windows. Miss Christabel Pankhurst, in various disguises, pink straw hat, blue sunglasses, evaded the one hundred hunting detectives to the tune of the “d___d elusive Christabel.” She finally slid away to Paris, from
where she directed the increasingly extravagant acts of outrage, and took her small, pretty dog for walks in the Park. Her mother was, as she frequently was, suffering in prison.
In March Mr. Asquith, the silver-tongued, spoke in the House about the coal-miners’ strike which was paralysing the country. He appealed to the miners and to the members of Parliament. He broke down in tears.
In March, also, Margot Asquith decided to intervene secretly. She wrote to a labour leader who had been invited to luncheon, and proposed a secret meeting. It was a very feminine plea.
The big question I long to ask a man of your ability, sympathy and possibly very painful experience is: What do you want?
I don’t, of course, mean for yourself, as I am certain you are as straight as I am, and disinterested. It would be on far higher grounds than this that I would ask it.
Do you want everyone to be equal in their material prosperity? Do you think quality of brain could be made equal if we had equal prosperity?
Do you think in trying or even succeeding in making Human Nature equal in their bank books, they would also be equal in the sight of God and Man?
I am a socialist, possibly not on the same lines as you… People who get what they want at the cost of huge suffering to others I would like to understand more perfectly.
Just now I suspend judgement, as I don’t really comprehend. I don’t care what creed a man holds, but the bed-rock of that creed should be Love, even of your enemies, which is a hard creed to put into practice.
Having suffered greatly yourself, I expect you don’t want anyone else to suffer, and this is what makes you a socialist. It is also my point of view, but I am only a woman. I don’t like to see my husband suffer in his longing to be fair, just and kind to both sides in this tragic quarrel.
The letter continues on the same note, which William Trotter would have been able to identify as a making of human moral structures into tangible Things, where they are not. She received no answer. The strikes went on.
So did the suffrage protests. Miss Emily Davison was arrested in Parliament Street holding a piece of linen, saturated with paraffin, burning brightly, which she was inserting into the pillar box of the Post Office. The Prime Minister and a gathering of friends and family, returning from a Scottish holiday, were jostled at Charing Cross by a crowd of shouting suffragettes. The party fought back: Violet Asquith “had the satisfaction of crunching the fingers of one of the hussies.” It was Violet, wielding a golf club, who had driven off a group of women attempting to strip
