“Perceptive Miriam. … You have a flair, Miriam. I grant you that. I believe in your flair.”
“Well, it’s true, what I’m trying to tell you. It’s one of the answers to the question about women and art. It’s all there. It doesn’t show, like men’s art. There’s no drama or publicity. There; d’you see? It’s hard and exacting; needing ‘the maximum of detachment and control.’ And people have to learn, or be taught, to see it.”
“Y … es. Is it conscious?”
“Absolutely. And there you are again. Artists, well, and literary people, say they have to get away from everything at intervals. They associate with queer people, and some of them are dissipated. They can only rest, stop being artists, by getting away. That is why so many women get nervy and break down. The only way they can rest, is by being nothing to nobody, leaving off for a while giving out any atmosphere.”
“Stop breathing.”
“Yes. But if you laugh at that, you must laugh at artists, and literary people.”
“I will. I do.”
“Yes; but in general. You must see the identity of the two things for good or for bad. If people reverence men’s art and feel their sacrifices are worth while, to themselves, as well as to other people, they must not just pity the art of women. It doesn’t matter to women. But it’s so jolly bad for men, to go about feeling lonely and superior. Men, and the women who imitate them, bleat about women ‘finding their truest fulfilment in self-sacrifice.’ In speaking of male art it is called self-realisation. That’s men all over. They get an illuminating theory—man must die, to live—and apply it only to themselves. If a theory is true, you may be sure it applies in a most thoroughgoing way to women. They don’t stop dead at self-sacrifice. They reap … freedom. Self-realisation. Emancipation. Lots of women hold back. Just as men do—from exacting careers. I do. I don’t want to exercise the feminine art.”
“It’s true you don’t compete or exploit yourself, Miriam.”
“Some women want to be men. And the contrary, men wanting to be women, is almost unknown. This is supposed to be evidence of the superiority of the masculine state. It isn’t. Women only want to be men before they begin their careers. It’s a longing for exemptions. Young women envy men, as young men, faced with the hard work of life, envy dogs.”
“Harsh Miriam.”
“It’s true. At any rate it’s deserved, after all men have said. And I believe it’s true.”
“Pugilistic Miriam. … Your atmospheric idea is quite illuminating. I think there’s some truth in it; and I’d be with you altogether but for one … damning … yes, I think absolutely damning, fact.”
“Well?”
“The men women will marry. The men quite fine, intelligent women marry; and idolise, my dear Miriam.”
“Many artists have to use any material that comes to hand. The treatment is the thing.”
“Treatment that mistakes putty for marble, my dear Miriam—”
“And you don’t see that you are proving my point. Women see things when they are not there. That’s creativeness. What is meant by women ‘making’ men.”
“They don’t. They’ll make idols of nothing at all; and go on burning incense—all their lives.”
“I don’t believe women are ever deceived about their husbands. But they don’t give up hope. And there’s something in everybody. That’s what women see.”
“Nonsense, Miriam. Girls, with quite good brains and abilities will marry anything; accept its views and quote them.”
“Yes; just as they will show off a child’s tricks. Views and opinions are masculine things. Women are indifferent to them, really. Any set will do. I know the way a woman’s opinions and interests change with her different husbands, if she marries more than once, is supposed to prove the vacuity of her mind. Half the satirists of women have made their reputation on that idea. It isn’t so. It is that women can hold all opinions at once, or any, or none. It’s because they see the relations of things which don’t change, more than things which are always changing, and mostly the importance to men of the things men believe. But behind it all their own lives are untouched.”
“Behind. … What is there behind, Miriam?”
“Life.”
“What do they do with it?”
“Live.”
“Mysterious, Miriam. … The business of women; the career; that makes you all rivals, is to find fathers. Your material is children.”
“Then look here, if you think that, there’s a perfect instance. If women’s material is people, their famous ‘curiosity’ is the curiosity of the artist. Men call it ‘incurable’ in women. Men’s curiosity, about things, science and so forth, is called divine. There you are. My word.”
“I don’t, Miriam.”
“Shaw knows how wildly interested women are in psychology. That’s funny. … But about children. If only you could realise how incidental all that is.”
“Incidental to what?”
“To the life of the individual.”
“Try it, Miriam. Marry your Jew. You know Jew and English makes a good mix.”
“You see I never knew he was a Jew. It did not come up until a possible future came in view. I couldn’t have Jewish children.”
“Incidents. Mere incidents.”
“No; the wrong material. I, being myself, couldn’t do anything with it; couldn’t be anything in relationship to it.”
“You’d be, through seeing its possibilities and making an atmosphere.”
“I’ve told you I’m not one of those stupendous women.”
“What are you?”
“Well, now here’s something you will like. If I were to marry a Jew, I should feel that all my male relatives would have the right to beat me.”
“That’s strange. … And, I think, great nonsense, Miriam.”
“And I’m not anti-semite. I think Jews are better Christians than we are. We have things to learn from them. But not by marrying them, until they’ve learnt things from us. Women, particularly, can’t marry Jews. Men can
