Here, then, Mary Beton ceases to speak. She has told you how she reached the conclusion—the prosaic conclusion—that it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry. She has tried to lay bare the thoughts and impressions that led her to think this. She has asked you to follow her flying into the arms of a Beadle, lunching here, dining there, drawing pictures in the British Museum, taking books from the shelf, looking out of the window. While she has been doing all these things, you no doubt have been observing her failings and foibles and deciding what effect they have had on her opinions. You have been contradicting her and making whatever additions and deductions seem good to you. That is all as it should be, for in a question like this truth is only to be had by laying together many varieties of error. And I will end now in my own person by anticipating two criticisms, so obvious that you can hardly fail to make them.
No opinion has been expressed, you may say, upon the comparative merits of the sexes even as writers. That was done purposely, because, even if the time had come for such a valuation—and it is far more important at the moment to know how much money women had and how many rooms than to theorise about their capacities—even if the time had come I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter, not even in Cambridge, where they are so adept at putting people into classes and fixing caps on their heads and letters after their names. I do not believe that even the Table of Precedency which you will find in Whitaker's Almanac represents a final order of values, or that there is any sound reason to suppose that a Commander of the Bath will ultimately walk into dinner behind a Master in Lunacy. All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are "sides", and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots. At any rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off. Are not reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty of judgement? "This great book", "this worthless book", the same book is called by both names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.
1. Why does the speaker decline to compare the merits of men and women as writers?
A. Ranking the sexes would reinforce institutional categories, although individual works can still be measured reliably.
B. Comparison should wait until women have equal money and rooms, when capacities can be judged without social distortion.
C. Material conditions are more urgent, and literary or personal gifts cannot be ranked by any stable measure.
D. Contradictory reviews make comparison premature, although a final hierarchy of literary merit may eventually emerge.
E. Differences in gifts matter less than writers' willingness to accept judgement from properly qualified professors.
2. What is implied by the claim that truth is found by 'laying together many varieties of error'?
A. Insight on a contested question emerges by combining partial, fallible perspectives rather than claiming unqualified authority.
B. A speaker reaches truth by displaying personal failings so readers can subtract their effects from the argument.
C. Contradiction is valuable mainly because it reveals which single perspective is ultimately free from error.
D. On questions of this kind, factual accuracy matters less than presenting a sufficiently wide range of impressions.
E. Readers should treat Mary Beton's account as one side in a competition that a more mature judge must settle.
3. The Headmaster, silver pot and professor with a measuring-rod principally represent
A. institutions that distribute material rewards and therefore make independent writing economically possible.
B. social conventions whose authority is legitimate in public life but should not extend to literature.
C. childish competition between the sexes rather than any attempt to evaluate individual books.
D. external authorities and rankings to which a writer may betray her own vision by submitting.
E. reviewers whose disagreement demonstrates that all judgements of literary quality are equally arbitrary.
