XXXVII. Why Invincible?

“I

NVINCIBLE

MINNIE," by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, is a disturbing book. It is a brilliantly vindictive attack, from the modern feminist point of view, on the old-fashioned "womanly woman." Invincible Minnie triumphs by her womanliness. And we are told by the author that Minnie's "womanliness," when you get right down to brass tacks, consists in being a liar and a thief. We are told that her fierce, unthinking "maternal instinct," which makes her so apparently ready to die for her children, makes her at the same time an utterly unfit person to have children. We are shown the children for proof-certainly as unfortunate wretches as have ever appeared in realistic fiction-and we are made to feel that they would have been much better off as orphans. We are told that her charm, such as it is, consists of a kind of greasy warmth of emotion, a crude ineptness of behaviour, a sloppy indifference to results, and an intellectual silliness.

That's all right, so far. Nobody can hurt my feelings by saying such things. But when I am

further told that the so-called modern man (which I take to mean me) is helplessly the victim of such charms-when I am told that Minnie's maternal emotions appeal to something infantile in me, her helplessness to my protective instincts, her idiocy and sloppiness to some streak of bonhomie-and when I am further told that I prefer her to the clean, sensible, capable, honest, modern womanwhy, by heaven, I protest!

I resent the imputation upon my sex that we prefer the primordial female to the 1920 brand. Of course there may be some troglodytic males left in the world who like that sort of woman. But where do they find her? I didn't suppose there were very many of her left. I never have been really acquainted with an authentic Minnie in my life, and I had supposed the type to be obsolescent.

Imagine, then, my surprise when half a dozen of the quite modern and very candid women of my acquaintance, in talking about this book, confessed to finding in Minnie something of a portrait of themselves! Not of their most obvious selves, which are honest and sane and civilized; but of their secret, suppressed selves! "There is," said one of these candid women, "a lot of Minnie's 'pure sex and wilfulness' in all of us." And it seemed, from further remarks, that this Minnie self was not always quite suppressed, either!

Well, I call it noble of them to confess; and I

shall go on thinking that they are not in the least like Minnie. If they have a submerged Minnie self in them, they manage it very well, and their triumphant modernity is all the more to their credit, say I

But I have another quarrel with the book. Minnie, in the story, takes a young man away from her very modern sister, Frances. He isn't very much of a young man, but anyway, Frances loves him. He is a very weak and childish person; and Frances, loving him, hates his weaknesses, and is engaged in sternly and successfully making a man of him when her sister Minnie comes along and takes him away from her. Minnie proceeds to mother him in her terrible way, encouraging him in his weaknesses until she has utterly destroyed his self-respect and made a mess of him. . . . All that I can grant for the sake of argument. But what I want to know is, why did Frances let her sister do it?

The point I wish to make is that there may be some excuse for poor, weak, romantic males being steam-rollered by the invincible Minnies; but why should sane, efficient, honest girls like Frances lie down and let themselves be run over? And if they do, then are they as sane, as efficient, as honestin short, as modern-as they are supposed to be? In a word, if the Minnies are invincible, whose fault is it?

I cannot hold with the author that Minnie is the

right one to blame. In fact, I am much more inclined to blame her quasi-modern sister Frances for the way everything goes wrong. It is because Frances is not quite the real thing in the way of modernism, that Minnie is successful. If Frances were the real thing, she would render all the Minnies in the world harmless. Modernity is not a pious aspiration; it is a thing as fierce and passionate and ruthless as anything the primordial woman can offer, and ten times as effective. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered feminist modernity that (to go on misquoting Milton) never sallies out and swats its adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. In short, I want to read a book about the Invincible Frances!

1920

XXXVIII. Wells the Destroyer

S

OME day, in Soviet England, there will be erected a queer-looking cubistic statue of

H. G. Wells, in some thoroughfare already adorned with stone memorials to Karl Marx, Nicolai Lenin, Sylvia Pankhurst, and other revolutionary heroes. And beside this statue some British workingman will pause, and sticking out an inquiring thumb toward the laudatory inscription on the base of the statue, will say to the bystanders: "Wot are we puttin' up a statue to 'im for? I knew 'im well, the old codger, and I calls him a blarsted counterrevolutionist. Always complainin', 'e was, about everything. When it wasn't 'is grub-ration it was the rotten tram-service-no satisfyin' 'im, there wasn't. And 'ow 'e did fuss when we drafted 'im to shovel snow! I was the foreman of the gang, an' I said to 'im: 'Wot you want is a nice, clean, tidy revolution, don't yer? I suppose you've written a book tellin' 'ow it could 'ave been done all nice and pretty.' 'I 'ave that,' 'e says, 'an' if the idiots that are tryin' to run this 'ere revolution would just let me show 'em 'ow to run things, they'd be