We still are ruled too much by ready-made phrases. Take, for example: A man must be master in his own house. There’s a good old maxim; we all believe it in theory. Every little boy sees himself a future master in his own house. He grows up with the idea well fixed. So naturally, when his time comes and he finds, as he does pretty often, that he’s not master in his own house, his nose is conventionally out of joint. He says: These overbearing modern women, they insist on bossing the show, and they’re absolutely in the wrong.
What we have to beware of is mass thinking. The idea that a man must be master in his own house is just a mass idea. No man really thinks it for himself. He accepts it en bloc, as a member of the mass. He is born, so to speak, tightly swaddled up in it, like a lamb in its wool. In fact, we are born so woolly and swaddled up in mass ideas, that we hardly get a chance to move, to make a real move of our own. We just bleat foolishly out of a mass of woolly cloud, our mass-ideas and we get no further. A man must be master in his own house. Feed the brute. An Englishman’s home is his castle. Two servants are better than one. Happy is the bride who has her own little car in her own little garage. It is the duty of a husband to give his wife what she wants. It is the duty of a wife to say “Yes, darling!” to her husband; all these are mass ideas, often contradicting one another, but always effective. If you want to silence a man, or a woman, effectively, trot out a mass idea. The poor sheep is at once mum.
Now the thing to do with a mass idea is to individualize it. Instead of massively asserting: A man must be master in his own house, the gentleman in question should particularize and say: I, Jim, must be master in my own house, The Rosebud, or The Doves’ Nest, over my wife, Julia. — And as soon as you make it personal, and drag it to earth, you will feel a qualm about it. You can storm over the breakfast coffee: A man must be master in his own house! But it takes much more courage to say: My name’s Jim, and I must be master in this house, The Rosebud, over you, Julia, my spouse! — This is bringing things to an issue. And things are rarely so brought. The lord and master fumes with a mass idea, and the spouse and helpmeet fumes with a mass resentment, and their mingled fumings make a nice mess of The Rosebud.
As a matter of fact, when Jim begins to look into his own heart, and also to look The Rosebud, which is his own house, firmly in the eye, he finds — O shattering discovery! — that he has very little desire to be master in The Rosebud. On the contrary, the idea rather nauseates him. And when he looks at Julia calmly pouring the coffee, he finds, if he’s the usual Jim, that his desire to be master over that young dame is curiously non-existent.
And there’s the difference between a mass idea and real individual thinking. A man must be master in his own house. But Jim finds the idea of being master in The Rosebud rather feeble, and the idea of being master over the cool Julia somehow doesn’t inspire him. He doesn’t really care whether The Rosebud has pink bows on the curtains or not. And he doesn’t care really what Julia does with her day, while he’s away at his job. He wants her to amuse herself and not bother him. — That is, if he’s the ordinary Jim.
So that man being master in his own house falls flat when the man is indifferent to his mastery. And that’s the worst of mass ideas: they remain, like fossils, when the life that animated them is dead. The problem of a man being master in his own house is today no problem, really, because the man is helplessly indifferent about it. He feels mere indifference; only now and then he may spout up the mass idea, and make an unreal fume which does a lot of harm.
We may take it for granted, that wherever woman bosses the show, it is because man doesn’t want to ft is not rapacity and pushing on the woman’s part. It is indifference on the man’s. Men don’t really care. Wherever they do care, there is no question of the intrusion of women. Men really care still about engineering and mechanical pursuits, so there is very little intrusion of women there. But men are sadly indifferent to clerking pursuits, and journalistic pursuits, and even to parliamentary pursuits. So women flood in to fill the vacuums. If we get a House of Commons filled with women Members, it will be purely and simply for the reason that men, energetic men, are indifferent; they don’t care any more about being Members of Parliament and making laws.
Indifference is a strange thing. It lies there under all the mass thinking and the mass activity, like a gap in the foundations. We still make a great fuss about Parliament — and underneath, most men are indifferent to Parliament. All the fuss about a home of your own and a wife of your own: and underneath, the men are only too often indifferent to the house and the wife both. They are only too willing for the wife to do the bossing and the caring, so that they need neither care nor boss.
Indifference is not the same as insouciance. Insouciance means not caring about things that don’t concern you; it also means not being pinched by anxiety. But indifference is inability to care; it is the result of a certain deadness or numbness. And it is nearly always accompanied by the pinch of anxiety. Men who can’t care any more, feel anxious about it. They have no insouciance. They are thankful if the woman will care. And at the same time they resent the women’s caring and running the show.
The trouble is not in the women’s bossiness, but in the men’s indifference. This indifference is the real malady of the day. It is a deadness, an inability to care about anything. And it is always pinched by anxiety.
And whence does the indifference arise? It arises from having cared too much, from having cared about the wrong thing, in the immediate past. If there is a growing indifference to politics on the part of men, it is because men have cared far too much about politics. If Jim is really indifferent to his little home, The Rosebud, if he leaves it all to Julia, that is because his father and grandfather cared far too much about their little homes, made them a bit nauseating. If men don’t care very vitally about their jobs, nowadays, and leave them to women, it is because our fathers and grandfathers considered the job sacrosanct — which it isn’t — and so wore out the natural feeling for it, till it became repulsive.
Men leave the field to women, when men become inwardly indifferent to the field. What the women take over is really an abandoned battle. They don’t pick up the tools and weapons of men till men let them drop.
And then men, gnawed by the anxiety of their own very indifference, blame women and start reiterating like parrots such mass ideas as: “Man must be master in his own house.”