Thus the Suffragette will say, “I have passed through the paltry duties of pots and pans, the drudgery of the vulgar kitchen; but I have come out to intellectual liberty.”  The sound philosopher will answer, “You have never passed through the kitchen, or you never would call it vulgar.  Wiser and stronger women than you have really seen a poetry in pots and pans; naturally, because there is a poetry in them.”  It is right for the village violinist to climb into fame in Paris or Vienna; it is right for the stray Englishman to climb across the high shoulder of the world; it is right for the woman to climb into whatever cathedrae or high places she can allow to her sexual dignity.  But it is wrong that any of these climbers should kick the ladder by which they have climbed.  But indeed these bitter people who record their experiences really record their lack of experiences.  It is the countryman who has not succeeded in being a countryman who comes up to London.  It is the clerk who has not succeeded in being a clerk who tries (on vegetarian principles) to be a countryman.  And the woman with a past is generally a woman angry about the past she never had.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.  The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth.  And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.

THE ANGRY AUTHOR:  HIS FAREWELL

I have republished all these old articles of mine because they cover a very controversial period, in which I was in nearly all the controversies, whether I was visible there or no.  And I wish to gather up into this last article a valedictory violence about all such things; and then pass to where, beyond these voices, there is peace—­or in other words, to the writing of Penny Dreadfuls; a noble and much-needed work.  But before I finally desert the illusions of rationalism for the actualities of romance, I should very much like to write one last roaring, raging book telling all the rationalists not to be so utterly irrational.  The book would be simply a string of violent vetoes, like the Ten Commandments.  I would call it “Don’ts for Dogmatists; or Things I am Tired Of.”

This book of intellectual etiquette, like most books of etiquette, would begin with superficial things; but there would be, I fancy, a wailing imprecation in the words that could not be called artificial; it might begin thus:-(1) Don’t use a noun and then an adjective that crosses out the noun.  An adjective qualifies, it cannot contradict.  Don’t say, “Give me a patriotism that is free from all boundaries.”  It is like saying, “Give me a pork pie with no pork in it.”  Don’t say, “I look forward to that larger religion that shall have no special dogmas.”  It is like saying, “I look forward to that larger quadruped who shall have no feet.”  A quadruped means something with four feet; and a religion means something that commits a man to some doctrine about the universe.  Don’t let the meek substantive be absolutely murdered by the joyful, exuberant adjective.