And then the higher culture.  I know that culture.  I would not set any man free for it if I could help it.  The effect of it on the rich men who are free for it is so horrible that it is worse than any of the other amusements of the millionaire—­worse than gambling, worse even than philanthropy.  It means thinking the smallest poet in Belgium greater than the greatest poet of England.  It means losing every democratic sympathy.  It means being unable to talk to a navvy about sport, or about beer, or about the Bible, or about the Derby, or about patriotism, or about anything whatever that he, the navvy, wants to talk about.  It means taking literature seriously, a very amateurish thing to do.  It means pardoning indecency only when it is gloomy indecency.  Its disciples will call a spade a spade; but only when it is a grave-digger’s spade.  The higher culture is sad, cheap, impudent, unkind, without honesty and without ease.  In short, it is “high.”  That abominable word (also applied to game) admirably describes it.

No; if you were setting women free for something else, I might be more melted.  If you can assure me, privately and gravely, that you are setting women free to dance on the mountains like maenads, or to worship some monstrous goddess, I will make a note of your request.  If you are quite sure that the ladies in Brixton, the moment they give up cooking, will beat great gongs and blow horns to Mumbo-Jumbo, then I will agree that the occupation is at least human and is more or less entertaining.  Women have been set free to be Bacchantes; they have been set free to be Virgin Martyrs; they have been set free to be Witches.  Do not ask them now to sink so low as the higher culture.

I have my own little notions of the possible emancipation of women; but I suppose I should not be taken very seriously if I propounded them.  I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes.  The average woman, as I have said, is a despot; the average man is a serf.  I am for any scheme that any one can suggest that will make the average woman more of a despot.  So far from wishing her to get her cooked meals from outside, I should like her to cook more wildly and at her own will than she does.  So far from getting always the same meals from the same place, let her invent, if she likes, a new dish every day of her life.  Let woman be more of a maker, not less.  We are right to talk about “Woman;” only blackguards talk about women.  Yet all men talk about men, and that is the whole difference.  Men represent the deliberative and democratic element in life.  Woman represents the despotic.

THE MODERN MARTYR

The incident of the Suffragettes who chained themselves with iron chains to the railings of Downing Street is a good ironical allegory of most modern martyrdom.  It generally consists of a man chaining himself up and then complaining that he is not free.  Some say that such larks retard the cause of female suffrage, others say that such larks alone can advance it; as a matter of fact, I do not believe that they have the smallest effect one way or the other.