Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman Part 30

Mr. Haweis many years ago said a very significant thing. He said that the best--if the rarest--men had always a good share of the woman nature in themselves. Francis Newman was one of these men. He understood the woman's point of view without any telling. He knew instinctively, intuitively, the mental cramp, the moral inability to rise to her full stature, which is induced by man's perpetual effort to fit her into a measured mould prepared by himself. He knew that if "a man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" what a h.e.l.l faced the woman who could not even _reach_ forward to fulfil all the many aims which she was conscious were stirring within her, longing for attainment. He had seen women, his countrywomen, shake the bars behind which they faced their world for the very pa.s.sion of revolt against these man-set limits, which kept them in on every side. He knew that, of all hard fates, perhaps few are more bitter than to feel the power and ability within you to do some work as well as another does it, and yet to have no freedom to use that power. To be forced, by man-made laws, to wrap up your talent in the napkin of legal red-tapeism, when everything within you, perhaps, urges you to turn it to good account.

Let us look for one moment at some of the legal disabilities of women to- day. Perhaps some of us are hardly aware to what an almost incredible distance they reach.

Mr. Henry Schloesser, barrister-at-law of the Inner Temple, [Footnote: In his pamphlet published by the Women's Social and Political Union.] very explicitly explains how they affect women. "At Common Law the father is ent.i.tled against the mother to the custody of the children, and this right he could only forfeit by gross misconduct; so also he was ent.i.tled to prescribe their mode of education.... He remains _prima facie_ the guardian of his children, _to the exclusion of the mother_" [the italics are my own]. "Alone of the learned professions, the medical is open to women...." (She constantly proves her apt.i.tude to take the same honours as man as regards the others, but he still growls over his share and keeps _her_ out.) "A husband is not bound at Common Law to cohabit with or maintain his wife."

These facts show luridly against the sky of woman's world, but perhaps few men know what purgatorial fires they light in many a woman's heart to-day.

They show that man's injustice to her does not only concern her in public life, but even in the home life (to which he would fain limit her energies); she has practically no legal status at all. She has not even a right to her own children in the eye of the law. Quite recently a judge decided that "a woman is not a parent in the eye of the law," and therefore powerless in things relating to her children. She is excluded from the guardianship of them. Yet so curiously irrational is this same English law that, should any woman wronged by a man become mother to an illegitimate child, upon her falls the whole onus of its maintenance until it is sixteen years old. The man gets off scot-free; for the world which condones an offence (which is shared by both) in the case of the man, condemns it in the _woman_.

Thus, as Mr. Thomas Johnston [Footnote: _The Case for Woman's Suffrage_, by Thomas Johnston. Published by the Women's Social and Political Union.]

very clearly puts it: "Where there is any stigma or blame, the woman bears it alone.... Under the law of England to-day a man can secure divorce by simply proving the unfaithfulness of his wife. But the wife, in order to obtain a divorce from her husband for the same unfaithfulness, must, in addition, prove cruelty or desertion." This in itself is very one-sided law, and certainly indefensible.

Francis Newman describes this law in no measured terms. He declares in his article on "Marriage Laws" (1867) that what undeniably needs reform in our country's government is "the extravagant power given by our law to a husband.... The exclusive right attributed to him over the children is unjust and pernicious. His rights over his wife's person [Footnote: According to English law, as evidenced in a recent case, the wife is _not_ "a person" at all; presumably, therefore, she is simply his chattel!] are extreme and monstrous.... We need a single short, sweeping enactment that, _notwithstanding anything to the contrary in past statutes, no woman henceforth shall by marriage change her legal status or lose any part of her rights over property_....

"We implore all true and genuine Conservatives not to delay and use half- measures, but to do justice to the s.e.x in good time. He who tries to uphold injustice is the true and efficient revolutionist, while he thinks he is Conservative."

He goes on to touch thus on what is perhaps the most cruel injustice of all--that the law permits a man to deprive his wife of the children, who, before G.o.d, are as equally hers as his:--

"Not only with regard to _property_, also in regard to _children_, the law is unjust to women. The mother has to undergo much in bringing a child to maturity--the agony of childbirth... the countless cares of tending and watching by night and day. The child becomes the darling of her heart, the image of her dreams, the great centre of her thoughts and hopes; and after all her toils, the law permits a husband to take the child permanently out of her sight, and (if he choose) to put it under the charge of an enemy ... who will fill its mind with falsehoods and teach it to hate and despise its mother. Such things are not possibilities merely and dreams; they are stern realities, and the law gives her no redress."

When one thinks of all that these words mean, one is face to face with the almost unthinkable fact that the case of the woman in England is unjust beyond description, and for this reason, that, as Newman says, "Men, who alone make the laws, make them with but little account of woman." At home with her children she is defenceless. She has no power over them, and her husband is not bound to "maintain" her, notwithstanding the sentence, which English law has made absolutely meaningless, of his marriage vow to her: "With all my worldly goods I thee endow."

In the world, if she have no husband or be unmarried, she is not a "person" in a legal sense; and during election time her house is described, in canva.s.sing for votes, as having "no occupier"! In the world, too, she is unable to obtain a fair wage for her work. She may do the work as well as man, but nevertheless, in most cases, her pay is less. Mr.

Johnston tells us that the average male worker's wage has been calculated to be about 18s., but the average woman worker's wage is only about 7s.

And when women find out these many injustices suffered at home and in the world by their s.e.x, as Miss Christabel Pankhurst says, they are absolutely unable to right these wrongs, for "women have no political power."

Here is the pivot round which the wrongs of women revolve--her lack of legal status, her voicelessness as regards the laws of her country, the country which is so openly irrational as to count her a "person" when it wants to get a tax out of her, but refuses to do so at any other time when she has something to ask of it in return!

Once the parliamentary vote is given to women, the same results would follow in England as have followed elsewhere. Wages and hours of labour are made just for women, as in many respects they have been now made for men. The laws of divorce are the same. Mothers are made joint guardians of their children with their fathers. The age of protection for girls is raised to 18. [Footnote: At the present moment, by the English law, a girl can contract a valid marriage at twelve years of age; a boy at fourteen.

(See _Legal Status of Women_, by H. H. Schloesser.)] In New South Wales, after the women were given the vote, Dr. Mackellar brought in a bill to deal with the protection of illegitimate children, which has answered admirably; while in New Zealand and Australia the Wages Board, which the women's vote helped to pa.s.s, has raised in both countries the wages of women from 5s. to l6s. per week for the same amount of work done. And in other respects it has abolished sweating--that crucial question of crucial questions in England to-day.

There is another point, too, amongst many others, in which the vote helped the national life in Australia in the giving of old age pensions. Perhaps had women the vote here in England, the shameful system in which old men and women are separated in the last years of their life, as the workhouses ordain, would be altered. And this is a question which demands immediate attention--_immediate_ attention; for more than 26,000,000 are paid by taxpayers each year to be spent in great part on our wretched system of poor laws.

Francis Newman was strongly against poor laws administered as they are in England to-day, as, indeed, is every thoughtful man. He was also strongly of opinion that there should be women on juries in some cases. And indeed it is a fact that women magistrates, as well as women jurors, are most certainly a _sine qua non_ in those cases where, at the present moment, owing to juries being composed of men only, common justice for the unrepresented Englishwoman in relation with the other s.e.x is not, in a great proportion of cases, rendered her. But even were women made eligible for these offices, it would be no new thing, for in Mary Tudor's reign there were two women appointed justices of the peace; and, of course, always there has been a provision in law for "a jury of matrons" in certain cases.

Indeed, when one goes far enough back in research into most questions, the invariable lesson, is taught us, which we are always so reluctant, in our c.o.c.ksureness of the "antiquity" of our present-day conditions of life, to learn, and we find that our arrangements very often are _not_ "as it was in the beginning," but only mushroom growths of a decade or two. As Mrs.

Wolstenholme Elmy very justly says in her recent pamphlet on "Woman's Franchise," women possessed voting rights from time immemorial, and the year 1832 was the year when they were dispossessed of many ancient rights by the Reform Act pa.s.sed in that year.

As regards other disabilities of women, Francis Newman wrote very fully and very strongly upon them, and it is impossible to leave them unmentioned here. In 1869 he wrote: "There is one important matter which young men need specially to be taught, viz. that at no time of life is any man ... exempt from the essential duty of curbing animal impulses....

Nothing so paralyzes his force of Will as to be told that some men have from G.o.d the gift of continence, and _others have it not_. This doctrine is disastrously prominent in the Anglican marriage service, and is borrowed from St. Paul. But that great and deep-hearted apostle was unmarried and without personal experience. He writes, not as one revealing supernatural communications, _but as imparting his best wisdom_.... A general and just inference is, that a firm self-restraint is necessary and salutary for every man."

It is impossible to write more strongly and clearly of the wickedness of women's ancestral personal rights being swept away than does Newman in articles published in the fourth volume of his _Miscellanies_. He does not disguise the shameful state of the law as it affects woman to-day, and as it is carried out by Government--that law which makes wrongdoing so easy and unpunishable for man, and so hard and unjust to woman. The unjustifiableness of certain laws was shown up with no uncertain pen by him. He was himself convinced of their iniquity; and once convinced, he stood forward as a modern John the Baptist, spared no one, and pa.s.sionately accused his countrymen of the injustice, immorality, and cruelty of their making one law for men and another for women. He inveighed against the world's point of view of this subject: and this not once, nor twice, but constantly; and urged with all his might that these wrongs to his countrywomen should be righted. Nevertheless his articles, many of them, are forgotten. The dust of neglect is lying thick upon them on many an unused shelf to-day. His voice has long been silent; and no doubt it has been said of him (as it was by a Church dignitary of Father Dolling at his death): "We shan't be worried any more by _him_ now about the righting of social abuses." Laws against which Newman declaimed are not altered yet, and we are a long way from those far-reaching reforms he advocated. But the words he wrote are not dead. They are in our midst to- day, and they stir depths to-day in the hearts of his countrymen in suggestions towards social reformation; towards the righting of wrongs just as glaring to-day as they were a century ago. Questions which can never be put superficially aside, by men who, like Newman, cannot endure to leave a social wrong unredressed, if they can by any searching find the remedy.

CHAPTER XVIII

FRANCIS NEWMAN AND HIS RELIGION

More than one person has said to me in connection with this memoir: "If the whole of Frank Newman's heterodox religious opinions be not given, the book will lose half its point."

To my mind there are quite two, if not more, sides to this question. My strongest argument, however, in favour of only dealing briefly with them is this: It is quite true that Agnosticism more or less held its sway over him during the years between 1834 and 1879. I am quite aware of how tremendous a slice that is of a man's life. But it is not an overwhelming testimony when one comes to look at it not from the worldly point of view.

There are periods in which Time--as Time--seems almost beside the mark. "A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday." When the Israelites had once achieved their journey through the wilderness--nay, even through the earlier time of tyranny amongst the Egyptians-I suppose the actual years seemed as a dream _when one awaketh_.

I myself have known forty years pa.s.s, for someone afflicted with a terrible mental disability, as a watch in the night, once light pierced through the clouds of the long-darkened mental vision. Time, as s.e.x, is purely temporary. In this present world we cannot do without either, but when Time itself pa.s.ses for good, the old implements which were necessary to make the clock go round will pa.s.s likewise.

So, in Newman's case, when that tremendous slice in a man's life--forty- five years--was overpast, he sloughed off the old garments of Agnosticism, and came back to the Christian faith professed by him in early childhood so conscientiously--and, indeed, up to the year after his missionary journey, 1834.

This fact influences me largely in the matter of dealing only briefly with the time-as regards his religious professions--which lies between these two dates, and for these reasons, which I hope to prove, carry considerable weight.

The first is that people are mistaken in considering that it was his religious opinions which made Newman great. The real valour of his life was shown in the splendid aspects of Social Reform which he showed to the world; the way of the New Citizenship, of the New Patriotism, which he was for ever preaching and writing about. He was the Perseus of To-day whose wholehearted efforts were spent in freeing the Andromedas from their antiquated bonds and fetters; whose good sword was ever pointed at the throats of the dragons which lift their ugly heads against freedom-- against reforms of all sorts; the dragons who take so long in dying.

But there are many who will regret bitterly that a man who served his generation so splendidly as he did in these matters should ever have written a book such as the _Phases of Faith_; for though it is undeniably clever, yet it is not convincing; and very much of it is very painful reading for those who do not care to wander out of the way in the wilderness of religious speculation and doubt.

Newman declares in this book that he did not give up Christianity; yet he gave up all that made Christianity Christianity. He said in it that he was looking for a "religion which shall combine the tenderness, humility, and disinterestedness that are the glories of the purest Christianity, with that activity of intellect and untiring pursuit of truth." [Footnote: He said once he wished for a religion which should combine the best out of all religions in the world.]

When he mentions that, in his time, "of young men at Oxford not one in five seemed to have any convictions at all," he seems to imply that it was on account of the desire for a new religion; whereas it was far more traceable to the after-effects of Calvinism and Puritanism, which have stuck, as spiritual limpets, to England's religious rocks ever since they first reached them. They are certainly looser in their hold than was the case formerly, but they are there still.

_Phases of Faith_ was published in 1850. But the year before a book of far more religious suggestiveness had come out, though that too was a book of opposition to the accepted forms of religion, _The Soul: its Sorrows and Aspirations_.

Regarded as a work postulating a new spiritual point of view, it was vague and unsatisfying. It was without form and void. It desired that most unsatisfying thing, a religion with no dogmas:--those stakes which preserve the ground on which grow the flowers of religious truth, from those who come but to spoil and destroy.

Yet, with all its lack of convincing power, and those parts of it which are, like _Phases of Faith_, painful reading and profitless--to Christians--there are here and again striking pa.s.sages such as this, whose beauty cannot fail to appeal to us: "None can enter the kingdom of Heaven without becoming a little child. But behind and after this there is a mystery revealed to but few; namely, if the Soul is to go on into higher spiritual blessedness, it must become a _woman_. Yes, however manly thou be among men, it must learn to love being dependent; must lean on G.o.d, not solely from distress and alarm, but because it does not like independence or loneliness.... G.o.d is _not_ a stern Judge; exacting every t.i.ttle of some law from us.... He does not act towards us (spiritually) by generalities ... but His perfection consists in dealing with each case by itself as if there were no other...." And again: "The Bible is a blessed book if we do not stifle the Holy Spirit within us."

The second reason why I touch on these religious opinions (before mentioned) but briefly, is because of my own _strong impression_ since I have been writing this memoir, that in that next chapter of existence upon which Newman has now entered, he may not impossibly be nearer the Light, the religious truth, which here he so earnestly sought, but mistakenly; and in his regret for his own phases of religious unfaith, now cast aside, may not wish them to be recapitulated anew. There is a certain pathetic sentence of his, in a letter in later life, which seems to give a certain amount of confirmation to this idea: "It is a sad thing to have printed erroneous fact. I have three or four times contradicted and renounced the pa.s.sage ... _but I cannot reach those whom I have misled_."

I have mentioned before that Francis Newman returned to his earlier faith in Christianity a few years before his death.

It remains, therefore, to give the proofs which have been put into my hands regarding this fact.

Two of his very greatest friends, Anna Swanwick and Dr. Martineau, received from his own hands the knowledge that he wished it to be known that he died a Christian. I shall give a quotation from one of Newman's last letters to the former, from Miss Bruce's _Memoir of Recollections of Anna Swanwick_. In almost illegible writing, he says:--

"If I live through this year, I hope to effect, by aid of a friend's eyes, a third ... edition of my _Paul of Tarsus_, with grateful acknowledgment that, in spite of a few details, I more and more come round to the substance of the views of my honoured friend, James Martineau. Also I close by my now sufficient definition of a Christian--'one, who in heart, and steadily, is a disciple of Jesus in upholding the prayer called the Lord's Prayer as the highest and purest in any known national religion.' I think J. M. will approve this."

I should also like to add Miss Bruce's own words in this connection:--

"He" (Newman) "was drawn back at the end of his long life by the sweet reasonableness and loving sympathy of his friend Anna Swanwick, and the teaching of Dr. Martineau."

Also these words from a letter written by Anna Swanwick: "It is delightful to me to think how, when the veil shall have fallen from the eyes of our friend" (F. W. Newman), "he will love and venerate Him in Whose footsteps he is unconsciously treading." Yet I must add here that in a letter from Newman to Anna Swanwick (to which I had access) in 1897, there is no definite statement of his belief in Immortality. "If G.o.d gives me immortality, I am content. If it pleases Him to annihilate me, it is well.

Let Him do with me as seemeth to Him good."

As regards Dr. Martineau's statement, I quote now from a letter received by me from Mr. William Tallack, who gave me particulars of a letter written in 1903, by Mr. W. Garrett Horder, on a meeting he had with Dr.

Martineau:--