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 Women’s Studies

Women’s Studies: The Basics is an accessible introduction to the path-

breaking and cross-­disciplinary study of women—past and present.
Tracing the history of the field from its origins, this revised and
updated text sets out the main topics making up the discipline,
exploring its global development and its relevance to our own times.
A new chapter on militarization and violence provides fresh insight
into trends in the contemporary world and adds to curricular signifi-
cance. Reflecting the diversity of the field, core themes include:

• The interdisciplinary nature of women’s studies

• Core feminist theories and the feminist agenda
• Issues of intersectionality: women, race, class, gender, ethnicity,
and religion
• Violence, militarization, security, and peace
• Women, sexuality, and the body

Women’s Studies: The Basics provides an informed foundation for

those new to the subject and is especially meant to guide under-
graduates and postgraduates concentrating in women’s studies and
gender studies. Those in related disciplines will find in it a valuable
overview of and background to women-­centered issues and con-
cerns, including global ones. The work also provides an updated list
of suggested reading to help in further study, classroom presenta-
tions, and written exercises.

Bonnie G. Smith is the author, editor, or co-­author of more than

twenty books and many essays in women’s and gender history,
European and world history, and historiography. As Board of Gov-
ernors Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, she has taught
women’s studies courses, including the comparative history of
feminism.
The Basics Series

The Basics is a highly successful series of accessible guidebooks

which provide an overview of the fundamental principles of a
subject area in a jargon-­free and undaunting format.
Intended for students approaching a subject for the first time, the
books both introduce the essentials of a subject and provide an ideal
springboard for further study. With over 50 titles spanning subjects
from artificial intelligence (AI) to women’s studies, The Basics are
an ideal starting point for students seeking to understand a
subject area.
Each text comes with recommendations for further study and
gradually introduces the complexities and nuances within a subject.

SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS AND TERRORISM

DISABILITY (SECOND EDITION) James Lutz and Brenda Lutz
Janice Wearmouth
THEATRE STUDIES (SECOND EDITION)
SPORT MANAGEMENT Robert Leach
Robert Wilson and Mark Piekarz
TRANSLATION
SPORT PSYCHOLOGY Juliane House
David Tod
WITCHCRAFT
SPORTS COACHING Marion Gibson
Laura Purdy
WOMEN’S STUDIES
STANISLAVSKI Bonnie G. Smith
Rose Whyman
WORLD HISTORY
SUBCULTURES Peter N. Stearns
Ross Haenfler
WORLD THEATRE
SUSTAINABILITY E. J. Westlake
Peter Jacques
WOMEN’S STUDIES (SECOND EDITION)
TELEVISION STUDIES Bonnie G. Smith
Toby Miller

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/

The-Basics/book-series/B
Women’s Studies

The Basics
Second edition

Bonnie G. Smith
Second edition published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Bonnie G. Smith
The right of Bonnie G. Smith to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2013
British Library Cataloguing-­i n-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-Publication Data
Names: Smith, Bonnie G., 1940- author.
Title: Women’s studies : the basics / Bonnie G. Smith.
Description: 2 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Revised edition of
the author’s Women’s studies, 2013.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018055156| ISBN 9781138495913 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138495937 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781351022989 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women’s studies.
Classification: LCC HQ1180 .S58 2019 | DDC 305.4–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055156

ISBN: 978-1-138-49591-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-49593-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-02298-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo and Bliss
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
 Contents

1 The invention of women’s studies 1

2 The foundations of interdisciplinarity 21
3 Intersectionality and difference: race, class, and
gender 41
4 Global agendas 61
5 Violence, militarization, security, and peace 83
6 Women’s studies and the question of gender 101
7 Feminist theories and methods 119
8 Embodiment, sexuality, identity 137
9 Classrooms, controversies, and citizenship 157
10 The future of women’s studies in our
information age 173
Index 191
 1
1
The Invention of
Women’s Studies

Women’s Studies is arguably the most revolutionary new field of

intellectual inquiry of our current age. In its early form Women’s
Studies brought all of women’s experience under the scholarly
microscope, subjecting it to the most advanced scientific methods
available in the university. Researchers would dig up facts and
develop insights about that experience and then teachers and stu-
dents looked at the findings coming from an array of disciplines,
processing and often perfecting them. Women’s Studies programs
include almost every perspective—from the natural sciences to the
social sciences, from law to the arts. This breadth makes Women’s
Studies the most wide-­ranging of academic fields. Its rich diversity
provides the judgments, research, and energy of a broad group of
scholars and students. They advance and constantly transform the
discipline.
Women’s Studies is a global undertaking. It began almost simul-
taneously around the world. Ewha University in Seoul, South
Korea began its first Women’s Studies program in 1977. In the
United States, Cornell University and California State University—
San Diego began Women’s Studies programs in 1969; more gener-
ally in the United States, Women’s Studies went from several
courses in individual universities across the country late in the
2 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

1960s to more than 600 degree granting majors and programs

today. India established vigorous Women’s Studies research early in
the 1970s and became one of the most active countries in the world
to investigate women’s experience and thought. Even this phenom-
enal growth hardly captures the energy that continues to motivate
those in Women’s Studies.
The founding of Women’s Studies was full of drama, as the
enthusiasm of the first students and teachers met with disapproval
from the male university establishment in the West. Some non-­
Western governments pushed for Women’s Studies programs as
part of their new-­found independence from imperial control. The
1970s and 1980s saw women at the global grassroots challenging
established dictators. At the time, celebrated Western intellectuals
in socio-­biology and anthropology were asserting women’s biologi-
cal and intellectual inferiority as scientific fact. They pointed, in
contrast, to the risk-­taking and intellectual originality of men.
Women’s Studies was a fad, other naysayers claimed, and one
without the slightest intellectual merit. The field was simply gyne-
cological politics, according to many. Yet, after several millennia of
women’s being seen as simply unworthy of consideration, Women’s
Studies inquiry emerged to take the innovative path that it still
pursues today.

Women’s Studies: What Is It?

Women’s Studies is not exactly new. Despite public and profes-
sional neglect, for centuries there have been histories of women,
anthologies of women’s literary writing, statistical and sociological
studies of such topics as the working conditions of women and the
organization of family life. The African oral history tradition had
long celebrated noble, accomplished women. Written studies from
the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries that included
women were mostly produced by amateurs. They often found
appreciative women readers and even received praise male com-
mentators. Yet not everyone applauded. Consider the case of Lucy
Maynard Salmon who taught an early form of Women’s Studies at
Vassar College until the 1920s. Salmon had trained with the great
scholars of her day, including Woodrow Wilson, who would
 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES 3

become US president in 1913. Salmon’s master’s thesis on the

appointing powers of American presidents won a national prize.
After that, however, professional scholars disapproved when she
began writing about domestic service, kitchens, cookbooks, and
outdoor museums that displayed farm houses and household tools.
She was interdisciplinary and used methods that historians, art
historians, sociologists, and others use today in their study of
women. At the time, however, young male teachers tried to get
her fired from her post as department chair even as others began
adopting some of her methods. Salmon was an unsung pioneer in
Women’s Studies, inspiring methodological creativity.
In the late 1960s, some half a century after Salmon’s retirement,
individual courses took shape in Canada, Great Britain, the United
States, India, and elsewhere around the world to investigate
women’s literature, history, and psychology and to look at them
through the lens of the professional lens of sociology, economics,
and politics. Scholars probed their disciplines for evidence on
women and came up with astonishing material such as criminal and
work records, diaries and account books, reports on fertility, health,
and activism. What was most astonishing is that disciplines had
almost unanimously claimed no such evidence existed and that
studies of women in most fields were impossible because traces of
their existence simply did not exist. We know the outcome: essays,
anthologies, monographs, novels, and ultimately reference works
came rolling off the presses; databases and online bibliographies
came into being; encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries pro-
duced millions of words and multiple volumes, all of them testify-
ing to the infinite amount of facts, works of art, writing, scientific
material, and philosophical thought by women. Hundreds of thou-
sands of books sold, and within a few years Women’s Studies was
thriving.
Almost immediately, the new Women’s Studies curriculum of
the 1970s galvanized teachers in individual disciplines to main-
stream this new information—that is, to add it to the content of
regular courses. The floodgates of knowledge opened. At the
beginning, Women’s Studies came to offer a cafeteria-­like array of
disciplinary investigations of the past and present conditions under
which women experienced, acted, and reflected upon the world.
4 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

Initially the field mounted courses in women in the arts, the soci-
ology of women and sex roles, women in politics, and the history
of women—to name a few of the offerings. Such courses were
revolutionary simply because they explicitly brought the study of
women into an academic curriculum that was almost exclusively
about men. There came to be more to the field of Women’s
Studies—in fact, much, much more. This book presents some of
yesterday’s and many of today’s concerns and achievements.
Created as a comprehensive field, programs in Women’s Studies
attract tens of thousands of students worldwide, and these students
come from every conceivable discipline. In my own Women’s
Studies courses, women, trans individuals, and men from psych-
ology, social work, education, engineering, the sciences, and liter-
ature make the classroom a lively place as they share expertise and
debate ideas with other students from history, the arts, and politics,
all sharing wildly different points of view. From the beginning
Women’s Studies engaged those who were the most intellectually
adventurous, whether the course took place in Seoul, South Korea
or Los Angeles, United States. In short, Women’s Studies is a global
scholarly enterprise with sparks of energy crossing the disciplines
and building varied communities of students and teachers. All this
makes Women’s Studies an exciting and innovative program of
study.
It is hard to recapture the ignorance of women’s achievements
that existed in those days when Women’s Studies was founded.
Many of us, for example, could not name five notable women from
the past or five major women authors. We were utterly ignorant of
women’s major role in activism—whether political or economic.
The 1970s was Women’s Studies’ “age of discovery.” Whereas
some fields of study such as philosophy go back millennia, it was
only recently that Women’s Studies came into being as a coherent
program. Often they began with experts in history and literature,
who re-­educated themselves to investigate women. Sometimes pio-
neers in sociology and literature team-­taught to bring a comparative
perspective to their initial study of women. They looked for exem-
plary and forgotten women writers or women actors in historical
events such as revolutions and strikes. Women’s Studies also
focused on social scientific investigation of women in the workforce
 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES 5

or the underground economy or women in political parties—but

again, with many instructors building their own expertise. The idea
behind social scientific investigation was to uncover structures,
create models, or to discover the ways in which social roles oper-
ated and were created. Ignorance among academics on issues such
as gender inequity in the workforce was phenomenal—although
women in trade unions were all too aware. Behind such investiga-
tions there was often an urgency to remedy what was seen as dis-
crimination and the “oppression” of women through fact-­finding.
Over the decades Women’s Studies has changed from an initial
cluster of fledgling courses springing up in a few colleges and
universities to populous programs with majors and graduate curric-
ula. Whereas Women’s Studies started in undergraduate education,
new findings entered elementary and high schools, transforming the
curriculum. Feminists criticized the ordinary curricula in schools
for the complete lack of information on women. They also blamed
schools for fostering traditional sex roles, which gave young girls
the idea that they only had one course in their lives: to be a wife
and mother. Women’s Studies showed options in the many contri-
butions that women had made to society and the many ways in
which they had made those contributions. Women’s Studies inves-
tigations also gave hard evidence of the bias toward boys and young
men in education. For example, they received more feedback when
they talked in class and were said to be “brilliant” whereas girls and
young women were characterized as “hard-­working.” Additional
scholarship by Women’s Studies researchers in the 1970s showed
that in schools an essay with a boy’s name attached to it consistently
received a higher grade than an identical essay with a girl’s name
attached—a fact that remains true today. Women’s Studies findings
sparked attempts to even the playing field for girls and young
women as they progressed through the curriculum. The 1970s
became an eye-­opening time for everyone concerned with fairness,
citizenship, and equal opportunity.
Along the way, Women’s Studies itself changed in its content
and even its personnel, as we will see in the chapters that follow.
Soon after cobbling together a curriculum of individual courses
from the disciplines, Women’s Studies brought the various forms of
inquiry under one umbrella and asked that the individual forms of
6 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

inquiry join in working with others. From a cluster of courses,

Women’s Studies became an international phenomenon with jour-
nals published and read internationally and with a subject matter in
constant evolution. From a program that sometimes did not want
male students, it found itself engaging women and men alike in
classrooms and in research. It branched out to adult education
courses and to technical, law, and business schools. It embraced the
study not just of women but of gender. Finally, in some cases
Women’s Studies has changed its name and identity over the
decades, going from Women’s Studies to Women’s and Gender
Studies and sometimes becoming Gender Studies, Feminist Studies,
Gender and Sexuality Studies, or simply Sexuality Studies.
Women’s Studies multiplied and became diverse, highlighting
variety in national and international meetings and associations. This
evolving, sometimes contested, identity will be traced in the chap-
ters of this book.

Feminist Roots of Women’s Studies:

A Brief Look Back
As we may know, the late 1960s and 1970s in the West were the
heyday of what is sometimes called “second wave feminism.” There
was noisy activism around the world for equal pay, control of
women’s reproduction, an end to violence against women, and
women’s under-­representation in politics and public affairs as
elected officials. Women also wanted access to good jobs and an
end to discrimination in the workforce. Many countries were con-
cerned with women’s poverty, women’s brutalization in the house-
hold, and sexual abuse not only of women but of girls and boys.
This list of concerns was long and the activism earnest and sincere.
In some cases, the problems were so glaring that governments
found themselves forced to pay attention and even change policies
both to protect and to advance the well-­being of women.
Before this activism came the “first feminist wave,” which
occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when
women around the world organized to gain basic rights such as the
right to own property (including the wages they earned), to receive
an education, to appear as witnesses in court, to bring suits against
 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES 7

aggressors, and to have the same political rights men, such as the
vote. During the “first wave,” many women became avid readers
of novels and their own histories. They participated in clubs, dis-
cussion groups, and politics. Women in Egypt, India, and other
colonized countries sought reforms not only for their own sake but
to show that their countries were as modern as the imperial powers.
In 1905, one Bengali woman, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, wrote a
short story, “Sultana’s Dream,” describing how very advanced her
country would be if women ruled: gone was deadly warfare.
Instead the women rulers of “Ladyland” defeated the nation’s
enemies by harnessing the sun’s powers to drive them back; in
Hossain’s world there was technological efficiency and, because of
it, harmonious rule. Many men in nationalist movements, including
Hossain’s husband, supported women’s efforts because they too saw
an improved status of women as making a strong statement about
the nation’s fitness for self-­rule.
In the long run, World War I (1914–1918) brought the vote to
many women in the West (though not in populous European states
such as Italy and France). After 1945, full independence for
countries such as Vietnam and Egypt, where women had played
major activist roles in anti-­imperialist movements, resulted in few
specific advances for women. The goal of independence meant
everything—including a sense of belonging—and it took energy
and funds to nation-­build. For many women the goal of equality
was a distant dream and they contented themselves with freedom.
Likewise, in the West, the vote hardly brought permanent
improvement in conditions for women. Instead, “first wave fem-
inism” seemed to weaken as a public phenomenon. Yet, union
women and civil service workers kept agitating for fair wages in the
1940s and 1950s while gay and lesbian activists lobbied quietly for
basic human rights.
There was additional movement below the surface. Research
and writing about women’s literature and women’s history con-
tinued, and “liberated” women around the world loved reading
such works in translation as John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of
Women, which boldly advocated for women’s equality and rights.
In 1926, Arthur Waley published a translation of Lady Murasaki’s
Tale of Genji, an eleventh-­century classic of men, women, and
8 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

court life in Japan. American author Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth
(1931) was translated into more than thirty languages, while
Chinese novelist Pa Chin’s Family—filled with oppressed women
characters—was equally read worldwide. There were, most impor-
tantly, women’s periodicals around the world that published
researched articles full of statistics on their status in the economy
and society. Magazines for housewives showed women being
informed mothers and rational household managers—that is, “new”
or “modern” women. Activism as some women lobbied against
Apartheid in South Africa and colonialism in India, and culture laid
additional building blocks for the rise of Women’s Studies around
the world.

Women’s Studies and the University

Although “first wave” feminism helped some women enter higher
education and become professionals in the social sciences, history,
and literature, their numbers were small. When the second wave of
women’s activism began in the 1960s, a new emphasis on educa-
tion was already taking place, as societies became “post-­industrial.”
That is, breakthroughs in science and technology showed the need
for a knowledge-­based society. As a result, new universities and
technical schools sprang up overnight and existing universities
expanded both in numbers of students and in the variety of their
offerings. One accomplishment of the “second wave” was to
mount a clear and surprisingly successful assault on the male domi-
nation of higher education even as it engaged in this expansion.
“Women’s studies grew out of the recognition of the gross inequi-
ties in women’s lived realities,” one South Korean researcher
explained, “and through an accumulation of academic knowledge
from across the disciplines exploring these problems.”1 From the
1970s on the number of women students in universities began
slowly outnumbering men. Some critics charged that such statistics
showed the neglect of men and boys and the discrimination they—
not women—faced. The truth of the matter was that women then
and today understand that they need to get a university diploma
simply to match the wages of a man who has graduated from high
school.
 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES 9

Male domination of higher education continues, but the pres-

ence of women as professors has made for change. It’s not that
there were no women professors before the “second wave” and the
creation of Women’s Studies. A small number of women professors
had served in universities for centuries, for example as professors of
chemistry and math in eighteenth-­century Italy. The important
point is that Women’s Studies and the feminist movement changed
the consciousness of many women and men in academe to recog-
nize the vast problem of discrimination in education. This discrimi-
nation existed in the number, salaries, and status of women in
universities. There was also a laser-­like focus on the consistent priv-
ileging of men in the curriculum and classroom. Women’s Studies
and its feminist advocates awakened awareness of this fact.
Women’s Studies programs spawned many offspring. There are
now centers for women’s leadership, women in politics, the study
of sexuality, queer, trans, and lesbian studies, women and race, and
many others. Women’s research centers also flourish and many of
these reach out within and outside of regions. There are
cooperative ventures for publishing in the East Asian region, for
example, that come out of Women’s Studies. Many of these have
included programs for global cooperation: for example, Rutgers
University houses a Center for Women’s Global Leadership, from
which programs with worldwide resonance and to which ideas
from women around the globe flow. Such offshoots of Women’s
Studies add to the changing profile of the university.

Women’s Studies Grows from

Knowledge Outside the Academy
Women’s Studies was born alongside the women’s movement and
prospered with a fruitful interaction between amateurs outside the
academy and professionals within it. Beyond the academy, activists
were founding magazines such as Ms., publishing about women in
the women’s press, and starting their own publishing houses such as
the Feminist Press in New York, the Des Femmes press in Paris,
and Kali for Women in New Delhi. These institutions sponsored
the work of researchers and freelance writers, which became
another building block of Women’s Studies. Soon university and
10 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

trade presses alike saw that there was a demand for books to read as
part of one’s everyday life or to use in courses. Women filmmakers
and those in television were also active at the birth of Women’s
Studies. In Europe, for example, there were dozens of well-­
received films by directors such as Italian Lina Wertmüller. US
artist Judy Chicago composed “The Dinner Party”—an installation
celebrating the great women of the past, a sampling of whom
Chicago grouped around a large triangular table. Knowledge about
and portrayals of women helped businesses thrive.
Finally, Women’s Studies and the centers associated with it
attracted numerous independent scholars—researchers who for one
reason or another did not hold positions in the university. These
scholars threw and continue to throw their considerable energy
into the many projects that Women’s Studies now comprises.
“Non-­traditional” students such as those who had interrupted their
studies to raise a family or who were imprisoned also found a place
in Women’s Studies and added their vitality to these programs.
Their perspectives brought enormous vitality to the research and
community building side of Women’s Studies for young and older
students.

Changing the Classroom as Part of

Changing the University—First Steps
Women’s Studies began at a time of social change and activism
and many movements pointed to the need for reform in colleges
and universities. They were out of touch, students chanted on
streets globally during the protests of the 1960s. Women’s Studies,
many believed, would make universities more relevant by offering
courses that had direct meaning in young people’s lives. This
program, it was argued, would attract people to the university who
had thought the teaching of Plato or poetry out-­of-touch with the
need for practical subjects. Learning how to combat violence
against women or to protect the rights of children, women
prisoners, and the female poor, as taught in Women’s Studies,
would open jobs up to women who were generally shut out of
positions of authority in the welfare state. Women’s Studies pro-
vided new opportunities.
 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES 11

The university itself began to change in important ways when it

introduced Women’s Studies. For one thing, more women students
came to attend universities and found the curriculum relevant, even
exciting. At the time, as mentioned, the wages of a woman with a
college degree was below that of a man with no college education
or even without a high school diploma. By the early twenty-­first
century when women generally composed more than half the
college population, the need for a university degree remained as
important as ever. Women’s Studies took credit for expanding the
university’s appeal to women with its array of courses that could
help bring them jobs in social work, psychology, technical fields
such as reproductive counseling, and an array of other positions. It
made the university friendlier to them.
Women’s Studies also led the way in changing the classroom. In
the first place it brought new knowledge to the university. Valuing
information about women and appreciating the contributions of
women in the classroom marked a drastic alteration in intellectual
hierarchies. Male and female students alike became able to chal-
lenge sexist clichés and they actually did so as probably every
Women’s Studies professor will attest. They had facts at their
fingertips; women in particular gained a new-­found confidence.
The simple phenomenon of women—whether student or
professor—speaking authoritatively in what was traditionally a male
space marked a dramatic change. Simultaneously, the functioning
of classrooms changed to value student voices more generally and
to question the droning voice of a professor reading from frayed
and faded notes. Informed participation by everyone flourished
along with the expansion of opportunity for women to learn. Crea-
tivity thrived.
The combined influence of feminist activism and Women’s
Studies lobbying brought more women onto both the permanent
and part-­time faculty and boosted the percentage of women among
students. Gradually some women scholars involved in Women’s
Studies moved up the ranks to become high level administrators
such as university deans, chancellors, vice-­presidents, and even
presidents. This advance occurred in every type of institutions of
higher education—from community colleges, to the Ivy League,
and beyond. Whereas once a woman scholar might be dean of a
12 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

woman’s college (but rarely its president), in the twenty-­first

century women headed major research institutions. Even though
percentages of women’s advancement to the ranks of full or chaired
professor remain low even today, there was far greater potential
than had existed a century earlier.
Indications remained that despite the growth of Women’s
Studies programs, which many had first seen as a fad soon to dis-
appear, there was still a powerful gender hierarchy at work. The
status of Women’s Studies in the 1970s and 1980s and even down
to the present remained an inferior one. Because Women’s Studies
is about a less well-­considered social group—women—its status in
the university is generally lower than that of other fields. Here’s an
example: one of my favorite colleagues some thirty years ago com-
miserated over the inferior nature of Women’s Studies teaching and
writing. “It must be difficult,” he said soberly, “working in a field
where all the books are so poor in quality.” A scholar in early
modern history, he continued, “In my own field, a brilliant book is
published almost every day.” This kind person had most likely
never read a book in Women’s Studies or women’s history, but
there was and remains even today the conviction that any study of
women had to be less well-­written, less well-­researched, and less
important than books about men. This is not because Women’s
Studies actually is less important or because its books actually are
less well-­crafted and researched but because women themselves still
receive lower pay and fewer social benefits and are still held in
lower esteem than men. These values shape the university and the
ranking of the disciplines within the curriculum. Women’s Studies
helped improve the climate to some extent but has not yet per-
fected it. There remains more to do.

What Is a Woman? And Other Early

Questions
In the first days of Women’s Studies, several issues were key to
laying foundations and shaping debates. They have resonated ever
since, so we need to understand them even though they are not
front-­burner concerns today. The first was posed in Simone de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), arguably the most influential
 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES 13

book about women written in the twentieth century. Translated

and read around the world, The Second Sex asked “What is a
woman?” No one, the author claimed, would ever ask a similar
question about men, nor would anyone really be puzzled about
men’s wants and desires. That was because men were taken to be
the norm, the unquestioned human type, the universal category by
which all else was measured. In contrast, women were the non-­
norm, the opposite, and the Other.
Simone de Beauvoir was a first-­class French philosopher, and she
lived at the center of a popular philosophical circle of Existentialists.
This philosophical school claimed that biological life in itself was
not true existence but merely a natural or biological condition.
Existence was something one chose and acted upon in order to
create freedom. Men, de Beauvoir claimed, lived out such an exist-
ence based on choice and action. Women, as the other, lived in an
unfree state, following the dictates of nature to reproduce.
Additionally, women made no rational choices but rather lived as
the “Other” by following the notions men had of them and all the
rules and regulations for female life that society constructed. The
“Other” as a concept became foundational to early Women’s
Studies and other fields such as post-­colonial and cultural studies. It
has only grown in importance, while continuing to evolve, as we
shall see in later chapters.
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) picked up on de
Beauvoir’s question. It described the dwindling intelligence of
women who stayed at home to be housewives and mothers. Her
contention that middle-­class women’s IQs actually dropped over
their life course in the home was based on interviews with her
college classmates and on statistical studies done of similar women.
Moreover, Friedan claimed, women who should have led sparkling
lives of creativity that enhanced society, saw only banality in their
existence: “Is this all?” she found them repeatedly asking. A woman
was a trapped housewife.
Yet when women went to look for work outside the home,
they faced a hostile culture. Friedan looked at psychology as it was
shaped by influential voices such as that of Sigmund Freud, inven-
tor of psychoanalysis. Therapists followed in Freud’s footsteps when
they diagnosed women who wanted jobs outside the home as
14 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

driven by “penis envy”—that is filled with a neurotic desire to have

the power of men. Friedan, like de Beauvoir, wanted to combat
the entire culture of women’s inferiority and they did so by taking
on men’s words about women and by analyzing women’s own
belief in those words. Mostly writing about white, middle-­class
women, these two very brainy pioneers laid some of the ground-
work for further study of women’s condition.
Another important body of writing that informed and continues
to inform Women’s Studies is the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, nineteenth-­century philosophers and activists who built the
foundations for a socialist/communist analysis of women’s situation.
Their thinking argued that the oppression of women began with
the institution of private property, which developed by overthrow-
ing a system from the early days of human society in which land
and tools were shared among everyone. The end of common pos-
session of the earth’s goods (from which comes the term “com-
munism”) and the subsequent creation of individual property led to
the heavy regulation of women’s sexuality so that there could be
legitimate heirs to a father’s property. Thus, the confinement of
women and their inequality began. Marx and Engels had what is
known as a “materialist” view of society and of history. In other
words, the conditions of private property, production, and work
under capitalism determined how society functioned. Once the
material system of private ownership disappeared, there would be
no more inequality among men and women. Instead, the return to
a more communal or communist ownership by all people would
provide liberation.
Marx and Engels’s analysis influenced initial Women’s Studies
debates and often it still does in China, India, and Latin America.
Scholars see in global capitalism, in which there are extremely
wealthy owners of factories, financial institutions, and land, the
cause of women’s poverty. They find the present-­day flows of
capital around the world as particularly oppressive to women.
Other theorists used Marxist materialist concerns to dig into the
conditions under which women lived and worked. In particular,
they demanded that the conditions not just of work and production
be considered important but the conditions of reproduction,
including the birthing and raising of children. That reproduction
 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES 15

needed to be investigated as a fundamental structure of life, just as

work was, proved revolutionary in universities globally. Mother-
hood became a rich field for Women’s Studies scholarship because
of Marxist theorists and their concerns.
Women’s Studies grew up at a time of intense questioning of the
social, political, and economic order, and feminists in other parts of
the world looked to the communist countries for guidance. There
was the thought that because all women worked in countries such
as the Soviet Union (present-­day Russia and the smaller spinoffs in
Central Asia such Uzbekistan), East Germany, Hungary, China, and
others there was greater equality than in capitalist countries. The
investigation of working women became a touchstone of Women’s
Studies. A concern to understand disadvantaged women’s lives and
their place in pre-­capitalist societies and under present-­day global
capitalism still characterizes Women’s Studies research. Marx and
Engels had described women’s condition under capitalism a century
earlier and women’s situation had changed drastically since then.
Women’s strikes, their situation in the workforce, their political
activism, and their poverty were crucial to understanding how to
make society more just. Given the field’s mission to study oppres-
sion, Marxist insights about the operation of capitalism came to
underpin investigations that would become increasingly complex
by the twenty-­first century.

Nature Versus Culture

A spinoff of de Beauvoir’s question in Women’s Studies has been
about “nature” in all its forms. As women entered the university in
greater numbers, they did so in an atmosphere of general doubt.
Women’s “nature,” the belief went, was emotional and better
suited to such nurturing activities as childcare and home manage-
ment than to the hard thinking involved in mastering university
courses. Moreover, because women reproduced the human species,
they were attached to childlike things rather than to sophisticated
reasoning. Women’s Studies confronted and still confronts the
prejudice about women’s “natural” intellectual capacities.
Great effort laid the groundwork for undermining clichés about
women’s connection to nature. In 1970, Canadian artist Shulamith
16 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

Firestone published The Dialectic of Sex in which she wrote that

women needed to be liberated from their biology. Artificial wombs
needed to be designed, so that women would not have to be hin-
dered in their quest for jobs and lives of accomplishment. Far from
being uplifting and “natural,” Firestone claimed, childbirth was like
“shitting a pumpkin.” Attacks on women’s nature and their mutual
relationship with nature continued in the press, while Women’s
Studies took up the issue of women’s natural lives or life-­cycles.
Anthropologists looked more broadly at the extent to which
women’s lives and behavior were determined by their biology—or
nature. The thought was that “culture” was the more important
factor in shaping the course of women’s lives. In coming to this
conclusion, examples from other societies proved decisive. Outside
the West, for example, childbirth proved no deterrent to women
leading highly active lives. Chinese peasants, the evidence taught,
spent little time in childbirth and no time in getting back to work.
Nature, it was believed, should take a back seat when it came to
assessing women’s capacities.
Instead the role of culture in shaping an image of women as
more emotional and less rational than men, weaker and less capable
than the “stronger” sex, needed to be re-­examined. Looking at
school books for young children showed that early lessons in
reading told highly gendered stories. The women in them were all
mothers and wives, who tended the house and dealt with children.
In contrast, the adult men left the home to work and provide for
the family. They did rugged outdoor activities and, as leaders, made
the important decisions that women and children followed. School
books created the inequality of women simply through storytelling
for children. Although the storybooks showed these roles as natural,
Women’s Studies judged them to be the result of culture. By all
sorts of means, the superiority of men in societies came to look as if
nature had simply made men more talented and skilled than
women, whom nature made overly emotional.
The debate rages on. Women are slighter and, according to
scientists, have hormones that make them unstable before
menstruation—that is to say, women are regularly and predictably
unstable. Nature makes women unreliable for leadership because
they might have difficult decisions to make at “that time of the
 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES 17

month.” Reproduction would also weigh on women’s capacity for

focused participation in public life. Those wanting women’s equal-
ity argued that all of this was cultural, not natural. Down to the
present, women have been successful heads of state in the vast
majority of important nations around the world except the United
States. It was culture alone that kept women in the home.

Women’s Studies Around the World

Broadens the Questioning
Other questions emerged globally as companions to these, depend-
ing on specific national concerns, especially of post-­colonial society.
In India, for example, a government-­sponsored study of women by
researchers preceded and even sparked the university-­wide investi-
gations that began in the mid-­1970s, and government funding and
that of private donors fed research to help Women’s Studies in
India rapidly become one of the world’s pioneers in the field. This
initial report, “Toward Equality,” helped guide the development of
a parallel focus on poverty and literacy for women, some of the
answers informed by Marxist analysis. Women’s Studies spread
across the West in the 1970s and 1980s. During this time women
in Latin America were struggling against dictators, and with success
in the 1980s, some of their early Women’s Studies initiatives
focused on political relations, especially those deriving from neo-­
imperialism alongside the more theoretical questions on the nature
of women. Activists in Africa were also involved in national libera-
tion movements during the formative years of Women’s Studies in
the West. They too responded to what they saw as the neo-­
imperialist programs for “development” from international organi-
zations that were aimed at the continent: most of them affected
women negatively by targeting men for development aid and by
aiming to have active women marketers and farmers pulled out of
the workforce and confined to housekeeping. Health and mother-
hood along with women’s economic well-­being were at the fore-
front of questioning as Women’s Studies programs developed in
Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. We will examine the important
questions arising in post-­colonial nations in greater detail in many
chapters but specifically in Chapter 4.
18 THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

In yet another scenario, central and eastern European teachers

only felt themselves free enough to study women after the fall of
the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s and early 1990s—that is, after
the fall of Communist rule. Still, many voices had been raised
before then. In 1968, the short story “A Week Like Any Other” by
Natalya Baranskaya appeared in the Soviet press and circulated like
wildfire. It described a typical day in the life of an ordinary Russian
woman scientist, including the stresses and strains of being a career
woman, wife, and mother, as most Soviet women were. The book
resonated with the population at large. A Russian feminist, Tatiana
Mamonova, published a collection of women’s testimonials to their
working lives under communism, sparking feminist debate.
Mamonova cited specific accounts of discrimination and was sent
into exile in 1980 because of it. Mamonova’s crime was to docu-
ment sexism in the Soviet system despite official declarations that
the USSR was a workers’ paradise. Women, Mamonova’s anthol-
ogy showed, were discriminated against, kept from important posi-
tions, and vastly overworked.
Once the Soviet system collapsed in 1989 and thereafter, many
of these voices reappeared, some of them in Women’s and Gender
Studies programs. There were interactions with scholars around the
world, thanks to financing by non-­governmental organizations
(NGOs), but there was simultaneously a rejection of what came to
be called “Western feminism.” Unevenness plagued Women’s
Studies in the post-­Soviet world. On the one hand, the more open
climate for academic research agenda motivated the kind of novel
inquiry that the study of women offered. On the other, Women’s
Studies came to be seen as a luxury that a country in transition
could not handle. Even more, it was also seen as an example of the
kind of women’s equality that had been a slogan of the old Soviet
Union. Russians and those administering other post-­Soviet nations
wanted to escape the professed equality of communism to be more
like the United States where women’s inequality was striking in
wages and lack of leadership positions. After rising interest in the
1990s, Women’s Studies declined in Russia especially with changes
in the political climate and the rise of what one scholar has called
the grand “automobile and harem culture” of the newly rich
“oligarchs”—virtually all of them male.
Another random document with
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 Morris at a single stroke seemed to restore the legend to its historical place, and to
recapture a part of its passionate significance. I confess that no later work of his has ever
affected me to the same degree, though there runs in them all that exquisite and ineffable
charm of the born story-teller. In poetry as in fiction there are, and have always been, two
competing schools of thought, the one moved by the love of the story to be told, and the
other primarily attracted to the story by the opportunities it may offer for the presentment
of an ethical idea, or the interpretation of individual character.
They may both reach the same goal, but there remains that contrast in the quality of
the workmanship which is born of its different origin.
I remember Morris saying to me once that he did not much care for a story unless it
was long, and although the statement perhaps was not intended to be taken literally, it
bore witness to that element in his genius which led him to bury himself with unwearied
delight in every smallest detail of the tale he had chosen to tell. Morris, I think, was not
easy to know well. There was a certain rough shyness in his manner that kept him aloof
from the initial advances of ordinary acquaintance, and it was only as an acquaintance that
I knew him. But he must have had deeply lovable qualities to have become so endeared,
as he was, to Burne-Jones. It was their custom for years to spend every Sunday morning
together in Burne-Jones’s studio; and on the many occasions when Burne-Jones has
spoken to me of him, I can recall no word of abatement from the deep and lasting
affection in which he held his life-long friend.
The influence wielded by Mr. Swinburne over the younger men of his generation was
of a widely different kind. That new music of which I have spoken, already announced in
the Atalanta, and presented with even greater variety and exuberance of expression in the
Poems and Ballads, set us all thinking. It seemed at the first as though music in its fullest
sense had never before entered into the arena of poetry, and his inexhaustible invention of
new metre and rhythmic phrasing set the mind in wonder for a while as to whether all that
had gone before was not the mere preface to this final achievement. The immediate effect
of the fluent melodies he could command was for the time, at least, to put earlier masters
upon their trial, and it was not until the overpowering glamour of these earlier poems had
passed that it was possible to reckon at their true worth his lasting claims as a poet.
I have always thought that Mr. Swinburne’s handling of language as a musical
instrument raises an interesting question in regard to the relation of the arts. Of them all,
music alone claims an absolute and independent position. Its appeal does not rely upon
association, and demands no definable intellectual foundation. It stands in this way, even
in its most primitive forms, as an example to all other arts, serving to remind them of
what there is in each of the essential artistic quality; to remind them yet again of the
inevitable danger that must be encountered when the artist adds to his natural burden the
task of interpreting the changing ideals of life.
Of all the other arts literature, by reason of the intellectual material out of which it is
moulded, stands at the farthest pole from music. Painting and sculpture have their own
manifest laws and limitations, which may serve to remind their exponents of the peril
which awaits their transgression, but literature, even in the supreme form of verse, must of
necessity be exposed to dangers from which only the intuitive instinct of the artist can
preserve it. Borrowing as by right from all the arts, and pressing into its service all that
has been won in the region of form and colour to enforce its own message of the spirit, it
is nevertheless inevitable that to music it must remain the heaviest debtor, for its chosen
vehicle of rhythmic language approaches most nearly to the abstract instrument of the
musician. And yet, I think, even in Mr. Swinburne’s highest triumphs in metrical
expression, it is made manifest that the attempt directly to capture the kind of melody that
in the last resort belongs to music alone, there lurks a peril that no artist, however gifted,
can hope to escape.
It is not in any spirit of depreciation of Mr. Swinburne’s unchallenged gift, a gift
which, in its kind, has perhaps never been surpassed in literature, that I have set down
these stray thoughts upon the possible limits of music in verse. What I have said is rather
intended to record an experience of changing taste in myself in the interval that has
elapsed since the time when his earlier poems first captured my imagination. It has grown
clearer to me as the years have passed that, even in poetry, only that music is enduring
where the melody is subtly interwoven with passionate truth, and that the highest triumph
of mere music, in so far as its effects are applicable to literature, must be won by constant
cultivation of the simplest means of expression.
To the serious student of poetry such a conclusion may deservedly rank in the region
of the accepted commonplace, but some of the utterances of our later-day critics yield at
least an excuse for its recall. Not long ago I encountered in a seriously written review the
astounding announcement that Oscar Wilde was the author of some of the most
remarkable verse of the nineteenth century, and this is hardly an isolated instance of an
endeavour that seems at the moment widely spread to make the pitiable disaster of poor
Wilde’s career the occasion of the most deplorably exaggerated appreciation of his gifts as
a writer.
I met Wilde very often in those earlier days, before he had begun to seek to win by
personal eccentricity the attention which his literary talent had not secured, and I am
bound to confess that, in the light of my later knowledge of the man and of his work, any
attempt to set him in the front rank as a literary personality or a great literary influence
seems to me in the highest degree ludicrous and grotesque.
In view of the terrible fate that overtook him, no one could desire to deal harshly at
this time with his qualities as a man. That he had a certain charm of manner is undoubted,
and that he possessed a measure of wit, as often imitative as original, need not be denied.
But there is always a tendency in certain literary circles that lean towards decadence, to
exaggerate the genius of those who are morally condemned. A tragic fate such as his, even
in one less gifted, naturally tends in such minds to exalt his claims to artistic
consideration. It is, at least to my thinking, only on such an assumption that any serious
student of poetry, having read the “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” could ever be induced to
rank Wilde as a poetic genius, or to consider the body of his work as a man of letters, with
whatever luxuries of habiliment it may be offered to the world, as constituting an
enduring claim to rank him among the higher influences of his time.
Wilde’s best work was unquestionably, I think, done for the stage, and here it may be
conceded he struck out a path of his own. He had the sense of the theatre, a genuine
instinct for those moments in the conflict of character to which the proper resources of the
theatre can grant both added force and added refinement. It is not an uncommon
assumption, especially among writers of fiction, that the drama by comparison is an art of
coarse fibre, incapable, by reason of its limitations, of presenting the more intimate
realities of character, or the more delicate shades of feeling. The truth is that each art has
its own force, its own refinement, and cannot borrow them of another. What is perfectly
achieved in one form remains incomparable, and for that very reason cannot in its
completed form be appropriated by an art that has other triumphs and is subject to other
laws and conditions. And it is here that the novelist so often breaks down in attempting to
employ his own special methods in the service of the stage. Wilde made no such blunder.
By constant study as well as by natural gift he knew well the arena in which he was
working when he chose the vehicle of the drama. His wit has perhaps been over-praised;
his epigrams so loudly acclaimed at the time bear the taint of modishness that seems to
render them already old-fashioned. But his grip of the more serious situations in life, and
his ability to exhibit and interpret them by means genuinely inherent in the resources at
the disposal of the dramatist, are left beyond dispute.
 Emery Walker
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
From the painting by Sir William Richmond, K.C.B., R.A., in the
National Portrait Gallery.

To face page 215.

 CHAPTER XV

A YOUNGER GENERATION

During the ’seventies I got to know many of the younger men of letters whose fame
had not yet completely asserted itself. My association with the Saturday Review brought
me into closer contact with my old friend, Walter Pollock, whom I had known from a boy,
and it was as his guest that I constantly found myself at lunch-time at the Savile Club, a
favourite haunt of Robert Louis Stevenson when he happened to be in London.
Those lunches at the Savile, with discussions carried late into the afternoon and
sometimes prolonged to the dinner-hour, remain as a vivid and delightful recollection. It
was there that I met Henley, a notable individuality, at that time almost without
recognition in the world of literature; and Charles Brookfield, who would look in now and
then to lighten our graver discussions with his keen and incisive wit; and among others,
Richard Duffield, a strange yet not unattractive individuality who won instant recognition
by reason of a fortuitous resemblance to Michael Angelo, due to a broken nose; but whose
literary claims, as far as I can remember, rested chiefly upon a presumably exclusive
knowledge of the work of Cervantes.
But of the figures of that little coterie to which I was so often and so hospitably
bidden, the engaging personality of Robert Louis Stevenson stands out distinctly. He
carried with him throughout all the period in which I had any knowledge of him the
indestructible character of a boy. The conscious artistic quality which marks his literary
work, yielding to it a perfection which made it even then a mark of envy for us all, had no
place in his personal converse. As a talker he made no demand for consideration, and it
was that perhaps which lent to his companionship such a singular charm. What he had to
say, though it was often brilliantly said, left little sense of premeditation. The topic of the
moment, however carelessly it might have been suggested, seemed in him for the moment
to be all-absorbing. However trivial it might be, it was not too trivial for his acceptance;
and however unpromising it might seem to others, his quick agile spirit contrived to draw
from its discussion something that was notable and memorable.
I think of him now with his long straight hair carelessly flung backward, and the swift
alert eyes, quick in expressive response to any point of humour that arose, as one of the
most fascinating characters it has ever been my fortune to encounter in conversation. He
said nothing that appeared to be considered, and little that was not illuminating, and yet
through it all, though his talk could rise on occasion to heights of deep earnestness and
enthusiasm, there remained the ever-present sense of the boy. Something of the spirit of
boyish adventure inspired his presence, something, too, of boyish recklessness, so that it
was not always easy to remember, in the perfect freedom of intercourse which his nature
allowed, that he was before all things a man of letters, a man to whom no refinement of
our tongue was unknown: above all things a student and a master of style, in his work
constantly perfecting an instrument which we, who were his contemporaries, were very
well aware that we used by comparison only as bunglers and beginners.
In this sense I used to feel that there was a striking contrast between the man and his
writing. Personally, and as a talker, it was the carelessness of his attack of any subject that
first impressed me. His interest seemed wholly centred and absorbed by the incident, the
character, or the episode under discussion, and the means by which his thought and
feeling concerning it might be expressed, were by contrast almost negligently employed.
As a writer, great as is the rank he deservedly holds in the region of romance, his work
yields to me exactly the opposite impression. His own faith in the story he has to tell is
never, to my thinking, entirely convincing. Something too much of the conscious artist
intrudes itself between the narrator and the reader, something that robs the result of the
sense that the recorded fact is a fact indeed. It is impossible to forget, I think, even in
Stevenson’s happiest work that he is an accomplished man of letters; and although there is
no great writer who is not, the greatest and ablest allow us to forget it.
Certainly in contact with Stevenson the man, one had no temptation to remember it.
One was never haunted in those delightful hours of social intercourse by the suspicion
that he was searching for a phrase, and yet often enough our conversation turned upon
points of style; and I remember once in a selected line of a poet, where the fitness of a
single word was under discussion, Stevenson swiftly checked our condemnation by a
remark that seemed all the more apt because it came from his lips:
“My dear Carr, every word looks guilty when it is put into the dock.”
I suppose no one ever had a juster or more generous appreciation of the great leisurely
genius of Sir Walter Scott than was possessed by Stevenson. No one by intention or
design was more desirous to exclude from his own work the sense of modishness in style,
and yet it remains with me as a final impression of Stevenson as a writer, that he
occasionally laid himself open to the reproach that he would, as a critic, have been the
first to detect in the work of another.
But I can think of him now only as I knew him then, an unconquerable boy with his
heart set for adventure, lending to our talk as often as he came into it something of that
daring outlook into worlds as yet undiscovered which characterised the adventurers of the
seventeenth century.
It may have been something of this fighting quality in himself that attracted Stevenson
to the combative spirit of Henley. Their first association, of course, bore an early date, and
it may have been again something in poor Henley’s physical disability which provoked
and sustained Stevenson’s affectionate regard. It is not altogether pleasant to reflect that
such affection loyally rendered on Stevenson’s part was not at the close so loyally
recognised by his comrade. Henley’s vehement personality rendered his presence on those
particular afternoons at the Savile Club a constant factor of vitality. It was impossible for
thought to slumber while Henley was awake. There was no opinion he would not
question, no proposition, however confidently or however modestly put forward, he
would not immediately set upon its trial. Those were his days of battle, and it was not
easy then to guess that a few years later he would win to his standard quite a troop of
young men eager to enforce the gospel he had to preach.
 At the time of which I am thinking he was fighting for his own hand, and he fought
strenuously; the mere love of the conflict was a dominating passion, and if there was, as I
think sometimes there was, an underlying note of personal bitterness, may it not be set
down in the hearts of those who knew him, and who survive him, as the inevitable price
humanity has to pay for the long martyrdom of pain to which nature had doomed him?
And yet Henley, for all the valorous spirit that was in him, was not always proof
against sudden attack. One night when we were gathered at the Savile after some public
dinner where we had all been present, Irving was of the party. Irving had a trick of waiting
for his foe, and on this particular occasion, as I recall it, he was chafing under a criticism
which had been delivered by Henley upon his impersonation of Macbeth. Henley
appeared to be well aware that the matter in difference between them would come under
discussion before the evening was ended, and was obviously ready with all the destructive
weapons that were arrayed in his critical armoury. But quick and vigilant as he was as a
fighting force, he nevertheless proved himself unready for the kind of attack which Irving
had designed. Very quietly and almost deferentially the actor came to his point. After
much genial interchange of cordial sentiment on one side and the other, Irving suddenly
pounced upon his man.
“I notice,” he said, speaking to Henley in that tone of reverie which with him always
concealed an imminent blow, “that you do not approve of my conception of Macbeth. Tell
me now, for I should be interested to hear it, how would you play Macbeth if you were
called upon to present the character on the stage? What is your conception?”
Henley was hardly prepared for such an invitation, and as we sat in expectation of
what he would have to say, it was easy to perceive that the critic’s destructive method,
which at that time was uppermost in him, could not suddenly readjust itself to the task of
offering any coherent appreciation of the character which Irving, according to his
allegation, had misinterpreted.
Irving was notoriously skilful in this kind of combat. He was patient in the endurance
of any slight which he conceived to be passed upon his work as an actor, but his patience
was never forgetful, and when the hour came, however long it might have been delayed,
when he thought that he could claim his own, he was wont to strike mercilessly.
I remember an incident concerning myself, belonging to the earlier stages of our
friendship. It was after the conclusion to a dinner of the Rabelais Club, when he invited
several of us to adjourn to his rooms in Grafton Street for a final cigar. I was very
cordially bidden to be of the company, little guessing that he had selected this particular
occasion to single me out as the mark of his disapproval. When we were all comfortably
seated round him, and he was reclining deep in his chair in an easy attitude that I
afterwards learned to know was nearly always ominous, he threw out for our discussion a
proposition in regard to which we could not fail to find ourselves unanimous.
“Now, talking among friends,” he said, “I suppose that you would all agree that
criticism ought to be fair?”
With no possible exception we were all loudly enthusiastic in assent.
 “Quite so,” replied Irving, in the same dispassionate and measured tones. “Well, then,”
he continued, in a voice somewhat threateningly raised but still carefully controlled,
“there is a criticism I have read in a magazine called The Theatre about a play of mine.
Very clever!” And then with sudden vehemence, pointing to me, he added, “You wrote
it!”
“Do you mean,” I inquired, “the article on Iolanthe?”—an adaptation by W. G. Wills
of King Rene’s Daughter which had recently been presented at the Lyceum. “Yes, I wrote
it!”
“Quite so,” returned Irving, his voice now rising in a tenser strain. “Well, nothing
more unfair and more unjust has ever been written.”
I was young enough then not to be unmoved by this sudden and unexpected onslaught,
but I summoned the courage to ask him, in reply, if the magazine was in the room. I saw
as I spoke that it was lying on the table, and I asked him, as the article was short, if he
would allow me to read it to those of my fellow-critics who were present, some of whom
might fairly be supposed to be unaware of its import.
Irving could not, of course, but assent to my demand, but when I had concluded he
appealed with even greater vehemence to those who were present in justification of what
he had already said.
“You see! You see!” he cried. “Not one word about me!”
“It is quite true, Irving,” I answered. “And I will tell you why. I do not think any one
has a higher appreciation of your genius as an actor than I have, and if I could have found
the occasion to praise this particular performance I would gladly have seized it, but I
thought it, rightly or wrongly, a bad performance, and, out of a spirit of loyalty to my
larger admiration of your talent, I refrained from saying so. But I see now that I was
wrong. In view of what you have said to-night I feel it would have been better to have
said what I thought. You may however be assured, after what has occurred, that I shall not
commit that blunder again.”
My defence was absolutely sincere, and I think Irving realised it. At any rate, I know
that this little incident, which occurred upon the threshold of our friendship, did not
hinder the formation of a close fellowship which endured and strengthened during the
greater part of his career.
Bret Harte was an occasional visitor to the Savile, but I saw him more often and more
intimately at the delightful meetings of the Kinsmen Club, a society that was designedly
founded to bring together men of kindred interest in Art and Letters from both sides of the
Atlantic. It has often been something of a puzzle to me that Bret Harte should not have
ranked higher as an author among his own compatriots. In his own realm as a story-teller
it seems to me hardly possible to rank him too high. That he owed much to Dickens he
himself, I believe, would have been the first to acknowledge; but that his own
individuality, both in humour and pathos, outstripped any reproach of imitation cannot, I
think, be questioned by those to whom his work makes any strong appeal.
Socially he never made any endeavour to press for consideration of his literary claims.
He was willing to speak of his work on the invitation of others, and always with modesty.
In converse you would hardly have guessed he was a writer, nor did he often lead
conversation on to the subject of literature, but I found in him, what I have always found
in his writings, a certain reticent delicacy of perception, touched and fired now and again
with a quick chivalry of feeling in all that concerned the relation of the sexes.
To his own countrymen I suppose he belonged to a past era in literary art, an era
which preceded that elaborate analysis of the feminine temperament as distinguished from
feminine character which to the mind of so many modern novelists appears to rank as the
final victory of fiction.
 CHAPTER XVI

MEN OF THE THEATRE

My association with the theatre began somewhat disastrously. It was my father’s

kindly thought, while we were still children, to afford us an annual visit to the pantomime,
a visit that was accomplished for our large family by means of two hired flies, which
transported us from our house at Barnes to the chosen place of amusement.
But my particular enjoyment of this long-desired entertainment was mitigated by
circumstances both moral and physical. We had at that time a nurse who, though by nature
endowed with most affectionate impulses, strongly disapproved of all dramatic
entertainment, and who, for some weeks before this annually projected tampering with the
forces of evil, tormented my spirit by a somewhat vivid picture of the eternal perils which
I was destined to encounter.
On the first of these theatre parties that I can recollect, when she was coerced by my
mother to form one of the party, in order that her numerous flock should have proper
protection, her original antipathy to all things theatrical was strongly enforced and
confirmed from the fact that, in the first piece which preceded the pantomime, one of the
actors, shipwrecked upon a desert shore, gave utterance to a sentiment which to her mind
seemed profoundly impious—that “what man could do he had done, and that God must
do the rest.” As she explained to me the next evening, when I lay tucked up in bed, the
mere mention of God within the four walls of a theatre was an act of profanity altogether
unpardonable, and from that time forward she would never consent to take any part in
these annual orgies.
But her manifest disapproval, as the recurring season of Christmas approached, set my
spirit in terrible debate between the pleasure I longed for and the sin I knew I was about to
commit. That internal struggle, fierce as it seemed to me at the time, must, I suppose, have
been conducted with insufficient force on her side, for the issue left me always eager and
ready for the adventure of sin. Indeed, so eager was our anticipation of the treat in store
for us, that for many days beforehand we could think of nothing else; and so great our
excitement as the appointed day approached, that the long-looked-for pleasure nearly
always ended in disaster. Excitement in our family always revealed itself in an
overmastering tendency to sickness, and from the age of five till the age of ten my vision
of the splendours of the pantomime was intermittent, such glimpses of its glory as I
derived being for the most part only obtained through the small lunette at the back of the
dress-circle, the remainder of the evening being nearly always passed in a state of utter
prostration in the ladies’ cloak-room. I neither claim nor profess any isolated distinction
in this recurring malady, it was the abiding characteristic of our family; and I have often
since, looking back on those days, reflected with admiration upon the dauntless courage
of my father and mother to whom these occasions, repeated again and again, in spite of all
example, must have been fraught with nothing short of misery.
But to me personally there was this added penalty, that when I returned from each
such woful debauch, like a stricken soldier from the field, I was compelled to endure
without defence the reproachful glance of my nurse’s eye, which told me as clearly as
though it were written upon the wall that I had but earned the appointed wages of sin.
This nurse of mine was in many ways a remarkable character. Linked with a nature surely
the most loving and affectionate that a child could desire, were the sternest principles of
religion and morality ever implanted in the human breast—principles associated with so
slender a store of intellectual endowment that even to my childish mind their vehement
announcement was sometimes grotesque.
One of her most deeply rooted convictions was that the principle of life insurance was
a direct defiance of the laws of God: a proposition which she sought to establish by a
terrible tale of a butcher of Lewes, who, having flouted Providence by affecting an
insurance upon his life, within half an hour after the conclusion of this prudent operation
fell down dead as he descended the steps of the market-hall.
Her intellectual equipment was perhaps no scantier than that of many other women,
but the fervour with which she employed it in the service of her religious principles might
have made her a desolating influence upon the life of a child, if her loving and kindly
nature had not constantly given the lie to the rigid creed she innocently believed was
guiding her conduct through life.
It is undeniable, however, that such influences first exercised in childhood are long
remembered, and it was many a day before I could quite free myself from the thought that
the study of dramatic art was not in some degree associated with a sinful life. It is difficult
to say whether this hovering sense of wrong-doing is not in its nature an added incentive
to enjoyment. Certain it is that the pleasures of the play-house became a factor of
increasing influence in my life. There was an old laundry attached to our house at Barnes
which seemed to us singularly unfitted for its destined purpose, but which might, as we
thought, be easily adapted as an arena for the performance of stage plays, and here, urged
on by a wicked cousin who has since, as a fitting penalty for his youthful delinquencies,
become a clergyman, I began my career as an amateur actor. We had at that time a distrust
of all feminine help, and chose for our essays in histrionic art only those plays in Lacy’s
list wherein the plot might be expounded by the exclusive support of male performers.
It chanced, while I was at Bruce Castle School, I had for one of my comrades poor
Dick Bateman, son of Richard Bateman, who had about that time, or soon after, become
Irving’s manager at the Lyceum. Together we became editors of a school magazine, and it
was through him afterwards that I won my first introduction to the theatre.
He was remarkable as a schoolboy for a prodigious and extraordinary memory. I have
spoken, in the earlier pages of this book, of the memory of Churton Collins, but in Dick
Bateman’s case the faculty was differently exercised. It seemed in him to be purely
mechanical, and we used to delight, as schoolboys, to set him the task, in which he rarely
failed, of reading over a page of any author and then requiring of him that he should
repeat it word for word. That special kind of memory which appeared to be detached from
any personal interest in the matter recalled, it has not been my chance to see equalled in
any other man I have known.
I have spoken of him as “poor” Dick Bateman because he met an early and tragic fate,
for after a few years spent in London in occasional employment under his father he was
sent upon some business adventure to the East, and was drowned in a shipwreck which
occurred off the coast of Japan. But in our schooldays, and in the years immediately
succeeding our schooldays, we were close comrades, and it was through him that I won
my first knowledge of Irving, who had already appeared in several plays in which I had
seen him, but who had then been recently engaged by Mr. Bateman as a leading actor to
support his daughter, Isabella Bateman, in whose interests he had undertaken the
management of the Lyceum Theatre. I had seen Irving before that time when he had
played Bob Gassett in Dearer than Life at the Queen’s Theatre, and I had seen him again
in Uncle Dick’s Darling at the Gaiety, when he had appeared in company with Toole.
It was of the latter performance that Toole afterwards told me Charles Dickens had
said, when he saw it, that he thought it admirable in the promise it gave of the young
actor’s ability; though he had added: “I fancy that both he and the author have cast an eye
over my character of Mr. Dombey—eh, Toole?” And to any one who saw the
performance there could have been no doubt as to the justice of Dickens’s suggestion. It
was at a little later date that Irving achieved his first great success with the public in the
character of Digby Grant in Mr. Albery’s play of The Two Roses, and it was after that
again that he became permanently engaged to Mr. Bateman.
But Mr. Bateman’s endeavour to force his younger daughter Isabella upon the
acceptance of the public as a leading actress was not successful. The play of Fanchette,
with which he opened his management, was a failure, and the part of the youthful hero,
for which Irving was cast, was entirely unsuited to his special abilities. Other adventures
followed, and they only had the effect of somewhat lowering the mark Irving had made in
The Two Roses, and there came a time in the steadily waning fortunes of the theatre when
it seemed that Mr. Bateman’s management was destined to come to an inglorious end. It
was at that time that Irving, who had had for some little while in his possession Leopold
Lewis’s dramatised version of Erckmann-Chatrian’s Polish Jew, persuaded Mr. Bateman
to allow him to put it on the stage of the Lyceum.
Irving has more than once told me the story himself, of how he and Bateman paced up
and down the Adelphi terrace at midnight debating the possibilities of its success.
Bateman, as he frankly avowed to the actor, had no faith in the popular appeal of the play,
and it was, I suppose, only because he found himself at the end of his tether that he
somewhat reluctantly consented to permit Irving to make the experiment. How hardly
pressed the enterprising manager must have been at the time was proved by the fact that
one evening, when I was walking with him down the Haymarket, he pointed to a corner
public-house and said to me, “The owner of that house once held an umbrella over me in
the rain when I most needed it, and I shall never forget it.”
Nor shall I ever forget the extraordinary impression made upon my own imagination
by my first sight of Irving in his performance of The Bells. I have often recalled in
recollection the sentence penned by Dutton Cook, who was then the dramatic critic of the
Pall Mall Gazette, wherein he said, “Acting at once so intelligent and so intense has not
been seen upon the stage for years”; nor do I think any one who witnessed that
performance, as it was rendered by Irving in the plenitude of his powers, would be
disposed to question the verdict of the critic. To a youth I know it came as an astounding
revelation—a revelation charged with such extraordinary concentration of personal
feeling that the first vision of it as I recall it now seemed to have almost transgressed the
limits of art, so poignant, even to the verge of pain, was the actor’s relentless portraiture
of crime and remorse.
It was in Dick Bateman’s company that I first witnessed Irving’s performance of The
Bells, and it was through Mr. Bateman’s introduction that I first learned to know the actor
himself.
In order to realise the kind and the measure of effect which Irving’s intense
individuality exercised over the public of that date, it is necessary to recall, if only for a
moment, the condition of the stage at the time. Phelps’s career, in which he had so loyally
and so honourably sustained the great tradition he had received from Macready, had
practically, for all its influence upon the art, come to an end. He was still to be seen, as I
saw him, in occasional engagements at Drury Lane, and later under the management of
John Hollingshead at the Gaiety, and it was still possible to appreciate the great and
sterling qualities of high training and accomplishment that he brought to the service of the
theatre. But the magic which could win the attention of a new generation was no longer
there. Its influence, perhaps, had been partly destroyed by the advent of Fechter’s more
romantic method, which, even in his rendering of the classic drama, granted to his
performance something of the charm and allurement of the conquering hero of a fairy
story. And on the other side of the picture there was gradually arising a new school,
though it seemed to be at the time exercised in only the tiniest arena, wherein a
determined effort was being made to bring life as it was presented on the stage into closer
alliance with the accepted realities of contemporary manners.
A revolution in little had been started in the theatre in Tottenham Court Road—a
revolution due in the first instance to the talent of Robertson, which was destined to
exercise a lasting influence over the theatre in England. Robertson’s new outlook, ably
supported as it was by Marie Bancroft and her husband, who found and captured an ally
of added strength in the person of John Hare, had the effect, for a while at least, of
throwing classical drama into discredit, and it was therefore a matter of supreme difficulty
for an actor equipped as Irving was, whose vision struck deeper and whose ambition took
a wider range, to find a way to draw back the wandering attention of the public to the
more passionate drama which for the time had fallen out of fashion. It was left to him
almost unaided to forge a convention of his own, and it is perhaps the highest tribute to
his innate gift as an actor that, although endowed by nature with few of the graces an
actor might desire to claim, he was enabled from this first adventure in The Bells to win
little by little, and with every step in his career fiercely disputed, a commanding position
among the professors of his art.
I think at the first nobody was more surprised than Mr. Bateman at the success
achieved by Irving’s experiment. In those days the favourite haunt of actors was the old
Albion Tavern in Drury Lane. Clubs were comparatively few, and fewer still the actors
who belonged to them. The licensing laws imposing the early closure upon the London
taverns had not yet been passed, and it was the habit of those who were interested in the
theatre to gather in the old-fashioned boxes of the Albion, and to remain in eager
discussion over the things of the drama till the small hours of the morning. It was on one
evening during the first rendering of The Bells that I found myself seated there in
company with a few genial spirits including Henry Montague, Toole, and Tom Thorne,
when we noticed that Irving’s manager, Mr. Bateman, had entered and was gazing round
the room as though in search of some one he had appointed to meet. It occurred at once to
the mischievous spirit of Toole to turn the occasion to account. In a whispered sentence he
made the rest of us co-conspirators in the little drama he had suddenly devised, and as Mr.
Bateman, still scanning the visitors assembled, advanced from box to box, he and
Montague, in tones designedly pitched so that all might hear, began an animated
discussion as to Irving’s rightful claims to a larger salary than he was at that time
receiving. I believe, in fact, that Irving’s remuneration was something like £15 a week,
which represented a substantial advance upon the payment he had received during his
engagement for The Two Roses at the Vaudeville Theatre; but Montague and Toole vied
with one another like competing bidders at an auction in loud proclaim of his larger
worth.
“£15 a week!” said Toole. “Why, he’s worth £20 at any rate!”
“£20!” retorted Montague. “Nonsense! He’s worth £30 if he’s worth a penny!”
And then Thorne, topping Montague, said he would be perfectly willing to give him
£40 if he would return to the Vaudeville; and as the voices grew louder in the increasing
estimate of Irving’s value, Bateman, attracted by the discussion, drew nearer and nearer to
the box in which we sat, until at last, leaning with his elbows upon the mahogany
partition, he leant forward with lowering brows no longer able to contain the indignation
which these comments had provoked. And then at last Toole, always incorrigible in
humorous mischief, topped all previous bidders by the emphatic announcement that
Henry Irving was worth £50 a week if he was worth a shilling, to which Bateman, now
incensed beyond measure, retorted, “Yes, and you are the scoundrels who would put him
up to asking it.”
Another anecdote, at that time related to me by Irving himself, also belongs to those
old days of the Albion. Seated one evening at supper after the play he found himself
opposite to a little old gentleman, who was unable to conceal his remembered enjoyment
of the performance he had just witnessed at the theatre. Irving, encouraged by his
manifest geniality, inquired where he had been, to which the stranger replied that he had
come from the Vaudeville, where he had seen the most delightful play, The Two Roses,
wherein, of course, at the time Irving was acting. Nothing could exceed the old
gentleman’s enthusiasm for the performers, as he recalled them one after another.
Montague was superb! Thorne was excellent! and so on and so on in a liberal catalogue of
the several performers, his appreciation rising with each added name.
Irving, at last a little nettled, as he confessed to me, at the exclusion of all reference to
himself, ventured to inquire of his neighbour whether there was not in the play a character
called Digby Grant.
“Ah yes! Ah yes!” assented the old gentleman, reflectively.
“Well, now,” said Irving, “what did you think of that performance?”
“Very good,” returned the old gentleman—“very good,” in tones which seemed to
imply that he was only half-willingly conceding a point upon which he was not wholly
convinced. “Ah yes, yes,” he added; “very good, but, by heavens,” he continued, “what a
part Johnny Hare would have made of it!”
The progress made by Irving in those earlier times of his histrionic career was fiercely
disputed at each step of the way. It could hardly have been foreseen then that he would
ultimately win the larger fame that was accorded to him, and it must be conceded to those
critics who blocked his path that there was much in the individuality of the man himself to
account for the slow growth of his appeal to the public. I have often heard him say
himself in later days that his success was achieved in spite of many natural disabilities.
His figure at that time was accounted ungainly, his gestures were often reckoned
grotesque, and the quality of his voice was such as naturally to repel those whom his
individuality did not powerfully attract. But it was in virtue of that individuality, and by
reason of those very attributes that barred his progress on the threshold of his career, that
he at last reached the goal.
The peculiarities of his personality could not by their nature, on their first appeal, be
widely accepted as forming a normal vehicle for the expression of poetic drama. For
many years his career presented
 HENRY IRVING IN THE CHARACTER OF BECKET
From a photograph by H. H. Cameron.

To face page 237.

a fierce encounter between the message that was in him to convey and the restricted
means that nature had placed at his disposal. His individuality betrayed at the first, and
indelibly stamped upon every creation even to the close of his career, formed at first a
serious weakness and again, finally, the saving element of strength in the work that he had
to offer to the theatre.
There will always, I suppose, be a radical divergence of thought as to the proper
attributes of an actor. To some minds it seems a self-evident proposition that the highest
triumph of histrionic art is that in which the personality of the performer is most
effectively concealed. To such critics completeness of disguise is completeness of victory,
and in the region of comedy there is perhaps room for the confident assertion of this idea,
for it is unquestionable that a full measure of enjoyment is conferred upon his audience by
the actor’s successful assumption of alien idiosyncrasies of bearing and manner. In what
is technically known in the theatre as character-acting, this is a goal of perfection that is
rightly sought for; and although Irving proved himself on occasion a capable actor of
character, it seems to me that his efforts in this direction bore with rare exception an
impression of exaggeration.
And the reason is not far to seek. Conscious of his own peculiarities, so difficult if not
impossible to efface, he was disposed to seek for concealment by forcing to the verge of
the grotesque the personation of characteristics that were not his own. He was for this
reason, to my thinking, never wholly successful as an actor of disguise; but at the opposite
pole of histrionic achievement lies, I think, a faculty that is both rarer and greater, the
faculty of revelation. Between these two spheres of disguise and revelation lie all the
possibilities of the actor’s art. The choice of the one or of the other must be determined by
the temperament of the actor, and in an equal measure by the response he receives from
the temper of his audience. Speaking only for myself, I may frankly say that the greatest
impressions I have received in the theatre have been made upon me by performers who
never left me for a moment to imagine they were not themselves; but who, without greatly
striving to realise the external attributes of the characters they were presenting, have
succeeded in the power of constantly identifying themselves with the culminating
passions of life. And of course these greater victories, if they are greater, belong in the
nature of things to those actors whose ambition it is to present and interpret the deeper
emotions—those emotions, I mean, so deeply seated in humanity that their occasional
difference of expression counts as for nothing beside the intensity with which they are felt
and experienced by all.
The justice of this view of the final victory of the actor’s art can only be decided by
individual experience and individual impression. Looking back and recalling the
performances that have most deeply moved me, I find myself suddenly reverting in
recollection to those supreme moments in a great play or in a great impersonation in
which the individual is forgotten, and the supreme power of sounding the depths of
human feeling is indelibly stamped upon the memory.
I saw Desclée, and greatly admired her; and I remember, long afterwards, when I
witnessed Sarah Bernhardt’s performance of Frou-frou, how much I thought it suffered in
comparison with the original in those lighter and earlier scenes of the play in which the
qualities of the heroine’s temperament have to be exhibited; and yet, when Madame
Bernhardt came to the great scene in the third act, the recollection of Desclée, by a single
stroke of genius, was almost effaced, and I can only think of Frou-frou as it is recalled to
me by that superb exhibition of passion in her encounter with Louise.
It was not Irving’s performance of The Bells or the impression it yielded which
satisfied me, even in those days, that he was a great actor. The picture as drawn, both by
the author and by the actor, is so narrowly concentrated upon almost a single phase of
criminal instinct and abnormal remorse, that it might well have been the outcome of an
intelligence intense assuredly and yet confessedly limited in its outlook. It gave no
assurance that the actor could touch the finer or deeper notes of feeling, and it was only
when he afterwards played Hamlet that he convinced me of the possession of deeper
imaginative powers.
À propos of Hamlet, Irving used to tell a story that was characteristic of his
imperturbable self-possession and was no less interesting in the light it throws upon the
striking individuality of a youth who afterwards rose to a foremost position in public
affairs. It was some few years after his performance of the character in London that Irving
found himself in Dublin at a time when the Duke of Marlborough, the father of Lord
Randolph Churchill, was Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Hamlet was the play of the evening,
and Lord Randolph, seated alone, occupied the viceregal box. When the second act was
ended he went behind the scenes to Irving’s dressing-room and introduced himself to the
actor. With an apology that was evidently sincere he expressed his regret that, owing to a
reception at the Castle, he was unable to wait for the conclusion of the performance. He
declared himself, however, intensely interested with what he had seen, and begged Irving
to tell him in a few words, as his time was limited, how the play ended. Irving, as he told
me, was at first so taken aback that he thought his visitor was indulging in a humorous
sally at the expense of the immortal dramatist, but a quick glance at the young man’s
earnest face sufficed to reassure him, and he then told Lord Randolph the outline of that
concluding part of the story which his social engagement did not permit him to see
represented upon the boards.
“When do you play it again?” inquired the young man of the actor.
“On Wednesday next,” answered Irving.
“I shall be there,” replied Lord Randolph, earnestly; and there assuredly he was from
the rise of the curtain to its fall, in rapt attention to every succeeding scene of the tragedy.
At the conclusion he again went round to Irving’s room, even more enthusiastic than
on the occasion of his previous visit; and, with a naïveté that was, I think, deeply
characteristic of that power he afterwards displayed in public affairs—the power of
swiftly appropriating the knowledge needful for every successive post he occupied—he
made the frank avowal that, since their last meeting, he had read for himself, not only
Hamlet, but two or three other plays by the same author.
“And do you know, Mr. Irving,” he said, “I find them enormously interesting.”
Lord Randolph, I think, must have retained to the last his admiration of Irving’s talent
as an actor, for I met him several times in later years at those little suppers in the
Beefsteak Room of the Lyceum Theatre, which formed so memorable a feature of Irving’s
management. Here, indeed, might be met many of the most notable people of the time,
and amongst them, an almost constant figure in these pleasant gatherings, Irving’s life-
long friend, J. L. Toole. The lasting friendship between these two men, so differently
gifted and yet so enduringly allied, forms, I think, a touching tribute to certain great
qualities of loyalty resident in them both.
My relations with Irving were not so close or so intimate during the later years of his
life, and I prefer to think of him now as I knew him best, before the days of
discouragement had overtaken him. To a man of his commanding personality and
indomitable will, it was difficult to acknowledge, without a reluctance that sometimes
bordered on resentment, the need of any resources but his own. The feeling, I think, was
natural enough. He had carved out his career with such splendid courage and persistence
that it must have been hard for him to realise, even when his powers were no longer at the
full, that he had not the needful strength for the conflict. But this feeling of impatience
with the position in which he found himself, pardonable enough in itself, made him, I
think, sometimes suspicious of his friends. In my own case I know he entirely
misconceived the motives with which I had sought to recapture for him his threatened
position in the theatre he had made famous; but although such misunderstanding must of
necessity at the time cause a measure of pain, it is to the closer friendship of earlier days
that my memory now recurs, to the many years during which we were fast friends and
staunch allies.
The other day I came across a little letter belonging to that happier time which I love
to preserve as a touching record of the deeper side of Irving’s nature. Something had
occurred, what precisely it was I now forget, which caused me to write to him in warm
appreciation of the great services I always felt he had rendered to the stage, and my letter
drew from him the following response:—
“Your letter,” he writes, “gave me much happiness. I know our hearts are one in many
things, and I often wish we could sometimes be by the still waters and speak of things
deeper even than could be spoken of before the best of other friends.”
There was a strong emotional element in Irving’s character that could scarcely have
been suspected by those who did not know him intimately. Sometimes when he was
deeply moved I have seen the tears start suddenly to his eyes, and at such moments his
voice would often break and tremble as he sought to express the feeling that stirred him.
In the summer of 1886 he invited my wife and myself to accompany him on a visit to
Nuremberg. Miss Ellen Terry and her daughter were of the party, and as Faust was to be
produced at the end of the year, our holiday had in part a practical purpose. Irving and I
made an exhaustive study of the gardens of the old German city in order to find suitable
material for the scenery of the play, the greater part of which was to be painted by Mr.
Hawes Craven. We even carried our researches as far as Rothenberg-on-the-Tauber, a
most beautiful example of a mediæval fortified town; and at the last Irving deemed it wise
to summon Craven from London in order that he might make a few preparatory studies on
the spot.
There was one incident of our journey that was rather unfortunate. I was acting as
paymaster for the party, and at Cologne Irving cashed a circular note of £100, and the
German notes we received in exchange were in my pocket-book as I took our tickets for
Wurtzburg. At a junction on the route the train made a halt of some minutes to allow time
for refreshments, and as I stood at the door of the buffet a young American of great
politeness of manner questioned me as to the identity of Irving and Miss Terry. His tone
was reverent and confidential, and as the crowd pressed through the doorway he
apologised for jostling me in so unmannerly a fashion. When I retired for the night I
realised that his apology was certainly not unneeded, for on emptying my pockets I found
that my pocket-book was gone, and with it about £80 of Irving’s money and £30 of my
own. We heard afterwards that a young gentleman answering to the description of my
chance railway acquaintance had been doing a thriving trade on the Rhine steamers, and I
daresay he still preserves my pocket-book as a souvenir of a prosperous day.
It is, I think, impossible for any one who has been closely associated with the modern
theatre not to be impressed with the need of some worthier support of the drama than is
afforded by the fickle and shifting taste of the public; and the career of Irving, both as an
actor and a manager, only goes to emphasise a truth that had been repeatedly enforced by
the fortunes of his predecessors. We pride ourselves in this country upon what is achieved
by individual enterprise, but we do not always remember at what a cost such
achievements are won. The harvest is ours, but the labourers who have reaped and stored
it are too often but miserably rewarded. Charles Kean, at the close of his long struggle at
the Princess’s, confessed that he left the theatre a poorer man than when he entered it;
Phelps’ fortunes at Sadler’s Wells left him nothing to boast of; and Henry Irving, though
he enjoyed at the zenith of his career a popularity greater than was accorded to either of
his predecessors, had good reason before its close to realise that the motley public of a
great capital is not to be counted upon for the enduring support of the more serious form
of dramatic enterprise.
It is strange that there should be so much reluctance in the English mind to entertain
the idea of a National Theatre. In regard to other forms of art, the need of public support
is recognised and accepted. The treasures of sculpture and painting accumulated in the
British Museum, the National Gallery, and the South Kensington Museum owe their
existence, in part at least, to the expenditure of the money of the people, and when the
Royal Academy failed to initiate any comprehensive system of art teaching, it was
undertaken by the nation. On every ground of public policy the claims of the drama might
be urged with even greater plausibility. Its appeal as an educational force is even greater
and more immediate, and as a humanising influence it is capable of reaching that larger
class who are not yet prepared to appreciate the masterpieces of ancient art. Of the
countless thousands who can enjoy Molière’s incomparable humour, how many are there
who would pause before Leonardo’s Monna Lisa in the Louvre? How many again in our
own country, of those who are familiar with the tragedies of Shakespeare, ever find their
way into the British Museum or the National Gallery?
And yet the prejudice against the public support of the theatre endures, and can only, I
think, be broken down by the demands of the democracy. If a national theatre is to be
established in England, it must realise that it has a national mission. The Theatre Français
was established at a time when means of communication were difficult, and when,
therefore, it was only possible to cater for the public of the metropolis. But under modern