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Title: Modes and morals

Author: Katharine Fullerton Gerould


        
Release date: March 28, 2026 [eBook #78310]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODES AND MORALS ***




                          Transcriber’s Note


  1. Certain typographic errors & hyphenation inconsistencies were
     silently corrected.

  2. The text version is marked up as follows:

      (a) italics are indicated thus _italic_;

      (b) small-caps are indicated thus +Small-Caps+;

  3. Footnotes added to the CONTENTS and moved to the end of the file.





                          _MODES AND MORALS_


                                 _BY_

                     _KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD_


  _MODES AND MORALS_
  _A CHANGE OF AIR_
  _HAWAII: +SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS+_
  _VAIN OBLATIONS_
  _THE GREAT TRADITION_


                       _CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_




                          _MODES AND MORALS_




                          _MODES AND MORALS_

                                  _BY
                     KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD_

                           [publisher-logo]

                               _NEW YORK
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                                 1920_




                         _Copyright, 1920, by
                       Charles Scribner’s Sons_

                      _Published February, 1920_
                        _Reprinted March, 1920_


                +COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY+ HARPER & BROTHERS
              +COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY+ HENRY HOLT & COMPANY
      +COPYRIGHT, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1918, 1919, BY+
                     THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
         +COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY+ THE YALE PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION


                          THE SCRIBNER PRESS




                              _CONTENTS_


        PAGE

  _The New Simplicity_                                                 3

  _Dress and the Woman_                                               37

  _Caviare on Principle_                                              58

  _The Extirpation of Culture_                                        66

  _Fashions in Men_                                                   94

  _The Newest Woman_                                                 118

  _Tabu and Temperament_                                             134

  _The Boundaries of Truth_                                          164

  _Miss Alcott’s New England_                                        182

  _The Sensual Ear_                                                  199

  _British Novelists, Ltd._                                          218

  _The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling_                      254

  Footnotes                                                          278




                           MODES AND MORALS




                          THE NEW SIMPLICITY


My first caption was _Democracy, Plumbing, and the War_. That will
hardly do as a title, for it does not hint the heart of the matter;
though the war has precipitated conditions which our special form of
democracy has long been preparing us for, and plumbing is perhaps as
symbolic as it is ubiquitous in the American domestic scene. All three,
with all their implications, are factors, certainly, in our present
problem of living, and if war has brought that problem to acuteness,
democracy and plumbing (and what they may be taken to stand for) have
made us ripe for upheaval. Edison and his like are as responsible,
in their way, as Thomas Jefferson or William Haywood. All three
have, without doubt, contributed to the present and future dilemma
of educated people in moderate circumstances. War has, of necessity,
turned moderate circumstances to actual poverty; but democracy and
plumbing were already preparing the _débâcle_ for this group.
All of us--the educated classes as well as the uneducated--are guilty
together, that is, of pampering ourselves with physical comforts;
and democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind
of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly
speaking, physical. Democracy and plumbing, as well as war, make the
problem of our immediate future a rather special one. We do not share
all phases of it with our Allies. Let me explain, a little, what I mean.

If America has led the world in labor-saving devices, it is because
America is democratic on a bigger scale than any other country. The
person who profits by the labor-saving device is the person who does
the work. The fact that France and England have not kept pace with
us in plumbing and tiled kitchens and electrical appliances does not
mean--as we have sometimes fatuously taken it to mean--that they are
less civilized than we. It means only that personal service has been,
with them, cheaper and more a matter of course. Where prosperous
Americans multiply vacuum cleaners and electric washing machines and
garbage incinerators, prosperous Europeans multiply their number of
servants. The Englishman really prefers a huge tin tub in his bedroom
of a morning. We prefer to walk into the bathroom and turn on the tap.
That preference may well have become so natural that we cannot explain
it. But the origin of the American preference is surely that in America
only the very rich could afford a personal servant whose duty it was to
set up the tub, fetch in huge cans of water, and remove all traces of
the bath as soon as it was done with. Even a few years ago, I remember
having great difficulty in a London hotel of the better sort (but very
English and almost totally unfrequented by Americans) in getting the
chambermaid to procure me a slop-jar. The hotel was much too British to
run to numbers of private baths. Hence the crying need of a slop-jar.
The maid finally stole one for me from a room across the corridor, and
assured me that the gentleman from whom she stole would not miss it.
Nothing would induce her to resume, in his behalf, the treasure. I
am informed, by friends who have more British social experience than
I, that slop-jars are not in the best English tradition--because,
theoretically, in the opulent old-fashioned household, as soon as
you have washed your hands, the water in which you washed them, the
towel on which you wiped them, mysteriously and gracefully disappear.
Perfection of service lies in having plenty of dexterous servants lying
in wait to discover your needs; so many servants, and such well-trained
ones, that you cannot wash your hands without their becoming aware of
it and, with the least possible impinging on your notice, removing the
traces of your ablutions. Perfection of service does not involve your
emptying your own wash-basin, even into a slop-jar. Hence, no slop-jar.

Now there are very few of us who would take the trouble to invent a
tiled bathroom if our tubs were automatically fetched, filled, and
removed for us, all at the proper instant; or if a hot-water can
miraculously sprang into being as soon as the desire for hot water
seized us. There is no labor-saving device so perfectly convenient
as ringing a bell and having some one else do the thing for you
with complete competence. It is by no means strange that well-to-do
Europeans have been content to be supremely waited upon, instead of
making practical tasks mechanically easier for themselves. The goddess
of the labor-saving invention is the woman who does all, or a good
share, of “her own work.” Old-fashioned English and French houses are
cold; but (climate apart) nothing like so cold as American houses
would be if Americans depended on open fires. For in England or France
there are ten people to make the fires, to one in America. We simply
dare not--again, climate apart--depend, as our British cousins have
been wont to, on open fires. The average household cannot afford the
servants to do incessant fire-making all over the house.

So we have multiplied devices, from the modest kitchen cabinet up;
because that majority which advertisers and inventors are always trying
to reach does a lot of things for itself. Even those Americans who
always have had, and perhaps still will have, plenty of servants, have
indulged in these devices. For pure philanthropy’s sake? Well, I am
afraid not quite. Rather, because the standard having been set by the
mistress who is also the servant, the standard must be lived up to, or
professional servants would complain. The interesting point is that
in America the standard is set by the woman who does her own work or
a part of it, or who may, at any given moment, have to occupy herself
thus. We are, you see, a democracy beyond the democracies of other
lands. For it is not simply a question of money; it is a question of
our all being in the same boat.

I am not going into the servant question, for that is a question as
trite as it is tragic. But, as we all know, even before the war it was
growing acute. The best servants we had in the old days came from the
countries where personal service was a tradition--chiefly from the
territories of Great Britain. But northern Europe is ceasing to enter
domestic service; rather, it seeks to employ. One has only to read the
pathetic testimony in the daily press, in the “women’s magazines,”
even sometimes in philanthropic periodicals. What they all say is that
the only way you can keep your cook in your kitchen is to treat her as
if she were the governess, or to give her factory hours and factory
freedom--to put her on a level, that is, with the more independent
worker. At that, they do not give us much hope of keeping her. But I
fancy that, before we turn the whole house over to the cook, we shall
dispense with her and get our meals from co-operative kitchens.

I have noticed of late years in the magazines that deal with
architectural and decorative problems increasing stress on the
absurdity of having a dining-room. Why absurd? For only one reason:
that here is a room which must be cleaned, which, therefore, means more
service. If you have your meals in the “living-room,” you dispense with
so much floor-and-wall space to be gone over. In only that sense is it
absurd. For most of us will agree that while English lodgings are all
very well, especially for a solitary creature, it is a painful business
for a large family to eat three meals a day in a room which has to be
lived in otherwise. All people may not have the prejudice known to some
of us against social consumption of food; but any one will agree that
the best dinner in the world leaves a smell behind it. A dining-room
may be a luxury, but it is not an absurdity, so long as you can by
any means afford it. If the æsthetic and pseudo-æsthetic experts in
domesticity are telling us that a dining-room is ridiculous, it is
only because they wish to prepare us for an inevitable contraction
of our comfort, an unavoidable mitigation of decency. The one most
aristocratic element in life, physically speaking, is spaciousness;
it has always been in the best tradition to be frugal to starvation
in a corner of a palace. But we have come nowadays to care more for
what we eat (I fear) than for how or where we eat it. The abolition of
the dining-room is only a further step on the road we entered when we
moved _en masse_ out of houses into flats. It has been hard to get
service; and meanwhile we have grown soft and would rather do without
those amenities which are not conveniences than to furnish them for
ourselves.

It must in fairness be admitted that two things have combined to bring
us to this pass. The most obvious fact is this of the labor situation,
which is now immensely accentuated by the war. But another force has
always been at work. Except in that part of the country which imported
slaves early and kept them as long as it could, more or less pioneer
standards prevailed. We were a new country; we dispensed perforce
(as in other colonies) with many of the inherited comforts. Our love
of personal (I do not mean political) independence was a kind of
protective coloring. The enforced simplicity of the pioneer scene bred
in us a distaste for being waited on too importunately. Because we
had to do certain things for ourselves, we developed a preference for
doing them, a distaste for the constant interposition of another human
being among the more private processes of existence. Even in the South,
some modification of the tradition must have been necessary, for the
South must always have been badly, though exuberantly, served. Here
and there a butler, a lady’s maid, may, after years of struggle, have
been highly trained; and the colored race has a gift for cooking. But
in many ways Southerners must have contended with the disheartening
conditions faced by all English households in the outposts of empire,
dependent on another and a stupid race for the satisfaction of their
needs. Southern luxury lay in having a score of inadequate menials to
keep the masters as comfortable as three or four really good servants
would have done. It was slave labor, and slave labor reaches competence
only by sheer force of numbers. There was never an ideal of domestic
service there, because there was never the rounded conception of
civilized domestic comfort in any slave’s mind. And nothing is more
slovenly or incompetent in domestic service than the younger generation
of free-born negroes. I do not think the colored race is going to prove
our domestic salvation.

We welcomed the labor-saving device, in the first place, for the
reasons I have given. By the labor-saving device we have been brought
insensibly to an almost animal dependence on creature comforts. With
all our theoretical glorification of simplicity, we have really prided
ourselves supremely on our physical luxuries, and most of all, it
must be said, on those physical luxuries which have no æsthetic value.
Our plumbing has been our civilization. The European aristocracy is
for the most part not so “comfortable” as the American middle class;
and therefore we have considered ourselves the greatest nation in the
world. We have been snobbish about many things, but about nothing
so much as our electrical appliances and our skyscrapers. We have
sinned, all of us together, as I said before; and now we are paying.
Simplicity, austerity, even, are forced upon us; and it behooves those
of us who really care, in spite of temporary apostasies, about real
values, to take thought and to plan. The vital question is not whether
we shall simplify, but how. On that depends our civilization.

Neither the new war millionaires nor skilled labor can teach us
that. We shall have need of all our trained perceptions, of all our
first-hand and all our book knowledge, of what money has been most
wisely spent for in the past, to make our choice intelligently. The
new millionaire and the enriched laboring man will not, for the most
part, be able to help us; for, by and large, having no experience of
the finer things of civilization, they will not know. For ourselves,
it does not much matter--for us who have seen a world in ruin and can
never “care” for anything in the same way again--but this is perhaps
our first duty to our children. They cannot have all the things we were
brought up to crave and expect; but they must have the essentials.
What, in a practical sense, are those going to be?

The Pennsylvania miner, making from forty to seventy-five dollars
a day, buys an automobile--not necessarily a Ford--which waits for
him at the entrance to the mine. His wife buys finery. Both buy the
best food they can get. It has been publicly said, I understand, by a
distinguished representative of the Food Administration, that almost
every class of the community was doing its duty in the way of food
conservation, except skilled labor. That is the class which cannot
be reached by appeal. The very poorest are still very poor, and they
have neither the money nor the knowledge to enable them to indulge
in forbidden gastronomic luxuries. The rich are apparently--in most
cases--making it a point of honor to help out. But skilled labor, which
is so necessary to the prosecution of war, which has never in its life
been so pampered, so flattered, so kow-towed to, so overpaid (yes, I
mean that; it is overpaid, and I will explain what I mean presently),
has lost its head. It probably believes the things the politicians and
its own leaders have been saying to it. It will work, and consider
itself patriotic for working--but it will exact from the rest of us,
the public, a price it has no right to, and, lest the honor of our
country and the ideals we fight for be lost, we shall pay it. It may be
that the reckoning will come later; or it may be that we are so sunk in
materialism that skilled labor will continue to rule the earth. Just
so long as we feel our greatest need to be of the things it furnishes
us with, and its greatest need is for the things we cannot furnish it
with, our necks will be bowed under labor’s yoke. Our only chance of
emancipation lies in finding some of our greatest goods in fields not
under labor’s control. In other words, to live at all, in any peace,
in any equanimity and longanimity, we must be as little materialistic
in temper and desire as possible. We must teach our children that the
greatest goods are not the things that skilled labor produces. That is
not only truth; it is self-preservation. Labor will have the motor-cars
and the delicacies of the table, the jewels and the joy-rides; we must
see to it that we keep something else, and learn to feel the importance
of our treasure. If we can maintain a prestige value for the things
of our choice (frankly, I doubt if we can) “the lords of their hands”
may come to desire the things we have chosen, and help to make them
accessible. But we must be careful to make no concessions; we must not
take one step, ourselves, in the materialistic direction.

This is not snobbishness; it is a matter of life and death. No one is
going to have leisure, any more, to be a snob or any such non-essential
thing. At least, if any one has the time, it will not be the educated
classes. We shall have to work as we have never worked before,
physically as well as mentally. We shall have to learn to co-operate
with one another, too; to make an almost religious brotherhood. For it
is our children who matter, and we cannot begin too soon to prepare
them for a world which has nothing in common with the world we knew.
Only by joining in utmost effort with the like-minded can we hope to
protect them.

I know there are Utopians who see in the socialization of Anglo-Saxon
governments hope, along Marxian lines, for Anglo-Saxondom. They
foresee, I suppose, the kind of Paradise that the Admirable Crichton
(in Barrie’s immoral and delightful play) must have experienced on the
desert island. There is going to be only one party in England, Mr.
Arthur Henderson has recently said--the Labor party. It may be. Let
us hope that some of the “unattached leaders” will at least preserve
logic if they do not preserve majorities. Mr. Henderson’s own argument
is about as convincing as though one should say: in certain abnormal
conditions martial law is the only régime that will work; therefore,
since civil law has been found inadequate to conditions of riot and
pestilence and famine, we must give it up altogether, and make martial
law perpetual.

The real arguments against private, and for public, ownership are, of
course, quite other than those Mr. Henderson offers. The point is that
Mr. Henderson evidently does not know bad logic when he sees it. Let
Mr. Henderson and his followers keep the motor-cars, one is inclined to
say, and we will keep the logic he discards. Private perception of the
laws of logic is something we shall not be taxed for; though--let us
not deceive ourselves--we shall have to make sacrifices to keep it. If
we can acquire logic, we may have it. It may be increasingly difficult
to maintain the methods of acquiring it: the best education, moral and
intellectual, was becoming endangered before the war, and there is no
telling what may become of it afterward.

I seem to have wandered far afield from plumbing; and yet plumbing
(as a symbol of materialistic comfort) is more than germane to the
question. The group whose problem I am concerned with is a very large
one, though always, anywhere, a minority: the professional man, the man
in the smaller business position, the man on a salary, who has been
decently bred, and who can never look forward to any real financial
fortune. I do not include every one who has to economize strictly, for
a large proportion of the people who have to economize strictly are
totally uneducated as to real values. But distinctly I include any of
the last mentioned who are alive to something besides materialistic
needs. I do not include the people who want intellectual and æsthetic
goods only for social and snobbish reasons or out of blind jealousy.
That group, in any case, will cease to exist if intellectual and
æsthetic goods cease to have a social value--as is more and more
definitely coming to be the case. They were never anything but paid
mercenaries in the struggle.

How are we going to save, for our children and our children’s children,
the real amenities of life? Hitherto the new millionaires, for reasons
of social prestige, have tended to link themselves to the group of
the civilized. But the new millionaire has always been an individual
case, and has, therefore, had to make concessions to the group
already established. What we have never had before is the proletariat
suddenly becoming, overnight, in its vast numbers, at once richer and
more powerful politically than the little “educated” aristocracy. We
all know what happens when that happens; if we have forgotten the
French Revolution (and since 1914 a good many of us have) we have the
Russian Revolution to remind us. In this morning’s newspaper I saw
that the daily bread ration in Petrograd was one-half a pound for the
proletariat, one-eighth of a pound for the bourgeoisie. That may or may
not be true, but there is nothing in known facts to make it incredible.
Even granting that skilled labor is not going to Bolshevize itself
completely, there is no doubt that the minority of which I speak is
going to be virtually, if not theoretically, discriminated against.
Labor is not going to draw distinctions between employers of labor; the
college professor is going to have to pay the plumber, the carpenter,
at as exorbitant rates as the great manufacturer. Any one who employs
labor at all--even if it is only to repair a leak--is going to be
gouged. All along the line, the producers of every necessary element in
civilized physical existence are going to rob the ultimate consumer. It
is labor that is responsible for the high cost of living. Labor may say
that the high cost of living is responsible for its increased demands.
In point of fact, there is every evidence that labor at present
is demanding money, not for the necessities of life, but for the
luxuries--just like the capitalists they have so inveighed against. One
would have to be a professional reformer to be shocked. Any knowledge
of human nature leaves one perfectly unsurprised by this phenomenon.
Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession
has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism. That is what labor
has always said about the employers of labor; and the employers can say
it quite as truly of the employed. So long as you make the basis of
life materialistic, this law will prevail.

What, then, are we going to do about it? We shall not be able to
afford many of the luxuries we once thought necessities, and we must
decide, with the utmost possible wisdom, what are necessities and what
are not. We had better make our list as short as possible, at that.
Obvious luxuries we shall not have: motor-cars, fine clothing, plenty
of domestic service, the joys of travel. It is costing us more, all the
time, to provide the hygienic necessities for our children: pure milk,
nourishing food, good air, healthful recreation, seasonable clothing. I
do not mean complicated food, or extravagant amusements, or elaborate
clothing; I mean the irreducible minimum required for health and simple
comfort and decency. And we cannot all--especially the professional
people--go back to the farm and live on our own produce. We have to
struggle along as best we can in the communities to which our work has
called us.

In some ways the life of the spirit and the life of the intellect have
always been expensive. The more obvious material comforts--rich food,
for example--have not been necessary to either. Neither, in a sense,
has fine clothing or expensive furniture. Yet it must be remembered
that both the life of the spirit and the life of the intellect tend, in
most cases, to develop the sense of beauty; and that too much ugliness
can become a pain and an obstacle to calm. There is a simplicity that
is pleasing, and a simplicity that is hideous. Leaving aside the social
importance of good clothes and good furniture, there is, in downright
ugliness, a power to fret the soul, a power to lessen the power to
work. But we will neglect, for the moment, the æsthetic side of it.
In the matter of food we will willingly simplify. In the matter of
adornment, whether of our persons or of our houses, we shall have to
simplify, and we can only hope that our simplification can be conducted
more along quantitative than along qualitative lines. We shall try to
omit rather than commit; to be austere rather than cheap.

The matter of servants is going to hit us harder; for only with
“help”--in the quite literal sense--can we manage to get any peace or
any time, in the hours left free by our wage-earning, for reading,
for contemplation, for conversation. The “general houseworker” has
tended to disappear; which is an acknowledgment that when a great
many different things have to be done, one human being cannot stand
the strain. Only by her being helped out by the family, only by some
features of household service being scanted or ill done, could the
general houseworker ever manage to keep outside her job. The good cook
could not also be the perfect parlor-maid and the perfect child’s
nurse. Neither can the good physician, the good lawyer, the good
clergyman, also be the perfect choreman, the perfect gardener, and
the perfect butler--with hours of casual bookkeeping, plumbing, and
carpentering. Even if he had the talent, he would not have the time;
for the physician, the lawyer, and the clergyman are not safeguarded
by an “eight-hour day.” His wife, moreover, even if she has no private
intellectual interests, cannot suffice to all the modern domestic
tasks any more than can the general houseworker, who has faded out of
existence precisely because she could not. We shall modify as we can;
shall have our food sent in from outside where that is possible; shall
buy vacuum cleaners (on the instalment plan); shall win occasional
hours of freedom by hiring some safe person to come in and watch over
the children while they sleep. Hospitality will, of necessity, be
much curtailed. Our personal freedom--in any familiar sense of the
term--will be almost _nil_. We might defy our house, our garden,
our table, our door-bell, to shackle us; but we cannot defy our
children to shackle us.

In these ways, we shall probably intrigue for the life of the
spirit, the life of the intellect. But, still, they are expensive.
Education--good education--is, in the first place, expensive. I do
not know how much it costs to make a man a good plumber or a good
coal-miner or a good carpenter; but I am sure it does not cost so much
as it does to make him a good doctor or a good clergyman. It takes
seven years after the “prep” school or the high school to start the
professional man on his road, costing fairly heavily all the time. That
is why I said that skilled labor is overpaid--it gets an exorbitant
return for its expenditure. Most of us hope to have college for our
boys, even if they do not take up a profession--just because we think
that education is going to matter to a man, all his life, no matter
in what field he works. The joys of travel, as I intimated, are going
to be cut out for most of us; the opera and the play will become
infrequent blessings. But we shall have to have some books--even if
we do not start the furnace until December. Indeed, the books we have
ourselves are perhaps going to be our best guarantee of our children’s
being educated at all. To be sure, we shall be taxed on them, with
increasing heaviness; but then, the coal-miner will (let us hope) be
taxed on his motor-car.

It may be that we shall come to state-endowed motherhood, and all the
rest. But the trouble is that all these socialistic schemes are based
on a lower-class demand on life. State endowment of motherhood will
perhaps have to come; but what does it guarantee except the child born
under decent conditions? The health of the mother, and through her of
the child, is to be safeguarded. Very well. _Et après?_ Pure milk
may be provided at municipal stations; there will be a day nursery and
then a public kindergarten. There will follow--if modern “educators”
have their way--the whole desolating career in the public schools,
where real education is reduced to a minimum, and “vocational” training
is substituted. The child will, in time, be graduated into the ranks of
skilled labor, and perhaps will eventually have his motor-car and his
tiled bathroom and his “movie” every night.

Yet for some of us this is not a supremely cheering prospect, because
it is a wholly materialistic vision. Certainly it is a good thing
to start with health as a requisite. Certainly everything that can
be done to insure a healthy childhood, in every case where it is
physically possible, should be done. But the great mistake of the
reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and
that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to
enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind. It may be that the
enormous expense of guaranteeing health to all children born in our
vast American community will take all the money that the community
has. It may be that no one will ever be free to devote his health to
pursuing the life of the mind and the spirit--to the purposes, that is,
of civilization not purely physical. But we have not come to that yet;
and the war is there to remind us that we really do not know precisely
what will come. If real socialism--as distinguished from our temporary
utilization of certain socialistic methods--comes, we shall inevitably
turn our backs on civilization for a time. Successful socialism depends
on the perfectibility of man. Unless all, or nearly all, men are
high-minded and clear-sighted, it is bound to be a rotten failure in
any but a physical sense. Even though it is altruism, socialism means
materialism. You can guarantee the things of the body to every one, but
you cannot guarantee the things of the spirit to every one; you can
guarantee only that the opportunity to seek them shall not be denied
to any one who chooses to seek them. And socialism, believing as it
must (to hold its head high) in the spiritual as well as the political
equality of men, is not going to create special opportunities for
the special case. “To hell with the special case” is implicit in the
socialist slogan. Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect
and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That
any minority is precious? Is there any evidence whatever that the
socialist is less avid of personal political power, less averse to
demagogic methods, than the other person? Does he himself go far to
prove his perfectionism? A good many socialists are calling other
socialists names because they put nationality before internationality;
though any one with any sense could have told them beforehand that they
would, because human beings are--fortunately or unfortunately--like
that. Lenin and Trotzky are disappointed because the German socialists
do not rise to betray their rulers; and some socialists are
disappointed because Lenin and Trotzky appear to be selling Russia out
to Germany in order to keep themselves--two individuals--in places of
power. Every one is calling names all round; and if socialism were
anything in particular, it would (one would think) be very sorry for
itself.

What is clear is this: that the socialization of governments places
vast power in the hands of the skilled laborer. It is only in order
that labor shall produce as fast and as furiously as possible that
we have socialized our national organization. We need, chiefly for
war’s sake, certain physical things--food, munitions, coal, khaki
clothing, and transportation for the same. We are calling for Y. M.
C. A. men, and K. of C., and chaplains; but what we really expect of
them, more than anything else, is to go under fire, if necessary, to
give the soldiers tobacco and hot chocolate. The newspapers lay eager
and delighted stress on the unclerical nature of the services these
gentlemen find themselves cheerfully performing. War, you see, is
a physical business. Of the spiritual side of it I am not going to
speak. No one really can speak of it in terms of actual achievement
until the armies have come home and we see what manner of men they
are. You cannot tell from the straws you see which way the great last
wind of all is going to blow. Some wise people doubt whether the
veterans of this war are going to spiritualize the world. Many of
them will have had, at this or that supreme moment, something akin to
a spiritual revelation. But the spiritual adventure is a desperately
and exclusively personal thing; you cannot socialize it. It is
incommunicable, and for the most part inexpressible. The attempt to
socialize a spiritual experience ends in the camp-meeting; it goes no
farther. Like all mental ecstasies, it cannot be felt simultaneously by
millions of people. I fancy that the opinions the veterans are going
to express at the polls are quite unforeknowable. We are all willingly
kow-towing to the materialists for the sake of the armies. Whether
the armies will wish to kow-tow to them when the war is over is a
question more difficult of present solution than the Balkan boundaries.
Certainly, if the armies have developed an _esprit de corps_
and a philosophy of their own, they will be listened to. We shall
inevitably be very sentimental about them. Whether we shall continue
to be sentimental about the man who selected this moment to hold up
his country and his compatriots for exorbitant pay, and demonstrated
his patriotism by earning it, I do not know. We can deal only with the
present situation.

What, the present outlook being what it is, can we count on for our
children? We shall be practically aided, in time, as I have said, by
all sorts of co-operative schemes--invented for the use of the very
poor, and adapted and expanded, of necessity, for the not quite so
poor. Some of the amenities of life, some of the space and the privacy,
will have gone irretrievably. After considerations of health come
considerations of education. We shall not be able, probably, to afford
private schools for our children; and our sole comfort must be that
most private schools are not much good, anyhow. They are a little safer
gamble, in most communities, than the public schools. That is all. We,
the parents, must supplement the bad teaching as best we can, must
keep at least some spark of intelligent interest in the universe alive
by the gas-log. It may well become our painful and subversive duty to
inform our children, from the beginning, that what is being offered
them by the state as education is not really education at all; and that
teaching a boy how to make bookshelves is in no sense a substitute
for teaching him to read and appreciate Latin. (Better not mention
Greek!) It is very desirable, if not absolutely necessary, for our
daughter to know how to cook; but we must not permit her to consider
that domestic science is education, in the proper sense. We must keep
the fact before ourselves and before the next generation that the
training of the mind does not mean quite the same thing as the training
of the muscles. Time was when a cobbler--and I do not mean anything so
remote and legendary as Hans Sachs--found philosophy a very natural
complement to cobbling. I knew a cobbler in my childhood who was much
in demand among the intellectuals, as being one of the few people who
could expound Emerson’s transcendentalism in a completely satisfactory
way. He went about--I can still recall the spun snow of his hair, the
canny saintliness of his much-modelled face, the thin figure under the
long black cloak--to philosophical conferences, to discuss metaphysics
with the metaphysicians; and returned to sit in his little shop and
cobble shoes. But one has yet to hear of philosophy’s coming from a
member of the lasters’ union. Machinery means specialization; and it
is an old story that there is no mental comfort or development in
repeating the same gesture for eight hours a day, even if one has time
and a half for overtime. The single gesture is not educative. When you
saw the shoe as an entity, when it grew under your hands and you built
up the whole consciously from the related parts; even when you were
a mere cobbler, a physician to sick shoes, and had to know the whole
shoe-organism--there was something in that humblest, most physical of
tasks which demanded a conception in the brain. That time is gone,
and if William Morris in the flesh could not bring it back, certainly
his ghost will not. But if you think for a moment of the difference in
mental attitude and mental grasp, it shows up skilled labor for what it
is.

I am far from saying that, in this much simpler world which the
increasing complication of life is going, paradoxically, to create for
some of us, it is a bad thing that children should be “vocationally”
trained. (You cannot say “vocationally educated,” for that is virtually
a contradiction in terms.) Even so, it is only to a very limited degree
that our sons can be, in the intervals, their own plumbers or their own
carpenters or their own masons, for the unions will never allow it.
It is a very minor tinkering that is permitted to the private person.
You cannot help to paint your own woodwork in your own house, for the
union painter will leave his job if you touch your private paint-brush
in his presence. What good, after all, is this famous vocational
training, except as you definitely choose to follow through life some
one of the trades they teach you? It will not really make the whole
man more efficient; for he will not be allowed to use his potential
efficiency. It may teach him whether he prefers to be a steamfitter or
a bricklayer; but it cannot guarantee him any power to practise either
steamfitting or brick-laying, unless he is willing to forsake all
else and cling only to that. Never was such nonsense talked by any one
as by the new “educators.” Labor frankly uses the argument of might
and the big stick; but labor, as far as I know, does not pretend that
it is something else. It rests its case cynically on our own pampered
inability to get on without it.

“Philosophy can bake no bread,” replied some philosopher to his
critics, “but it can give us God, freedom, and immortality.” Those are
the last things, I take it, that modern philosophy is really concerned
with giving us; but the perversity of one generation need not obscure
all history. It is possible for the contemplation of great ideas, of
great art, of great poetry, of the epic motions of the human race as
revealed in history, to mitigate physical deprivation. It is possible
to have plain living and high thinking together--though it is not
easy, and never has been, and some of the best-known exponents of that
theory have been pitiful failures. Certainly we of the minority must
accept for ourselves austerities we were not bred to in our easy-going,
materialistic generation. Without taking, like St. Simeon, to the
wilful discomfort of a pillar, we must learn to do without a hundred
“necessities” that Dante and Shakespeare never dreamed of. We must
keep it possible for our children to delight in Dante and Shakespeare;
we must not let the authentic intellectual thrill disappear from the
world. And, for that, we must insist that the past be not closed to
them, and that learning shall not be an unknown good. They will have to
do it on bread and milk, not on caviare; but it can be done on bread
and milk. That is the point.

I confess that as I look forth in these distressed times on the vast
American scene, I find myself pinning my hope to two things--the
self-consciousness of this minority, and the older Eastern
universities. For unless we plan our simplicities cannily, the other
people will have won out; and unless the older universities keep up a
standard of learning, hold the door open, by main force, to the past,
the garnered lore of the world will fail us. We shall progress--but
blindly, as the brute creation. The fact is that we are living in
an obscurantist epoch. For surely it is obscurantism to deny the
legitimacy of any field of knowledge or of virtue, and those folk who
would reduce everything to a physical basis are as deadly foes of light
as their ancestors who saw in physical experiments nothing but the
black art. Every sane person wants science left free to accomplish its
marvellous work; but no sane person past early youth would say, as a
young woman fresh from her college laboratories said to me a few days
since, that chemistry is the root of all knowledge. The Protestants,
when they were on top, were as given to obscurantism, and its
accompaniment of persecution, as the Catholics.

In the matter of education, as I have suggested, we shall have to rely
on the older colleges of the East. We cannot count on the West to help
us, for the West is cursed with state universities. It is by no means
my intention or my private inclination to minimize the value of the
state universities. The point is that they are uncertain; they are
not free; they are dependent, in the last analysis, on public favor,
which means public funds, on a kind of initiative and referendum.
They may have good luck and become great schools of learning; they
may have bad luck and become indifferent and negligible places. They
are not really allowed to set their own standards; they must ever be
compromising with the personnel of state legislatures. The private
colleges and universities of the East at least are not dependent on
politics. Their funds are for the most part inadequate, but they do
not have to change their curricula to please people who know nothing
about what a curriculum should be. As long as their private fortunes
last, they can afford to say the thing which they believe to be true.
One of the most heartening things that have happened since 1914 is
the acquisition of great wealth by Yale University. It means--one
hopes--that one at least of our old academic foundations can snap its
fingers at ignorance enthroned; that it can send out its thousands
endowed with some sense of intellectual values. Intellectual values
are not the only ones; but most sane people believe that only by the
rigid training of the mind can human beings be taught wise living and
moral values. There is no morality by instinct, though there can be
morality by inherited inhibitions. There is no social salvation--in the
end--without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application
of logic to human experience. These things, because they are not the
natural man, are not carelessly come by; they must be deliberately
achieved. You will not learn them from the Bolsheviki, or from the I.
W. W., or even from Mr. Arthur Henderson. A great deal is said nowadays
about practical politics and the rôle of the practical man in building
the social structure. Before you can carry out an idea you must have
the idea. You cannot get rid of the world of abstract thought. One
after the other, leaders of the Church are laying more and more stress
on religion’s being a strictly social matter. Perhaps it is, though
I do not believe it. I should have said that social regeneration was
a by-product of religion, not religion itself. But even the folk who
think that Christianity means no slums, and means little else, derive
their sanction--or think they do--from Christ, who dealt in abstract
ideas more exclusively than any other religious teacher the world has
had.

We must, then, seriously facing the moral, political, and physical
conditions of our time, be frankly ascetic. We must make our children
healthy, first of all--if only because specialists will be beyond our
pocketbooks. I have implied that the combination of plain living and
high thinking is a difficult one; I fancy it is the most difficult in
the world. “The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.”
We shall obliterate the coarser contacts, as far as possible, not by
engaging other people to take the burden of those coarser contacts,
but by buying, as we can, the machinery that will suffice to them
impersonally. We shall “co-operate” to the limit of our incomes, losing
thereby, I repeat, many of the amenities which tend to civilize.
We shall not sleep soft, we shall not live high, and we shall do
without external beauty to a painful extent. We shall exist in cramped
quarters, and if we achieve the dignity of one spacious room, that
will be a great deal. We cannot hope to furnish it fittingly. But if
we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a
book, not on asparagus out of season. If we have a holiday, we shall
not go to Europe or Asia, which would be beyond our means; but we shall
find some quiet spot where there will at least be trees and sky and
no motor-cars or aeroplanes. We shall, I hope, ameliorate our lack of
space and privacy by a very perfectly developed courtesy and by the
capacity for silence. It sounds monastic, and, at its best, monastic
it will be. Certain things we shall have given up at the start;
certain ambitions will have been erased from our tablets. We shall not
compete with, or interfere with, the lords of this world. We shall do
our modest work, and receive our modest pay, and by a corresponding
modesty of life and temper we shall disarm, we hope, the unsympathetic
and uncomprehending. Our kingdom cannot be of this world; and instead
of complaining and criticizing, we must apply ourselves to realizing
that our compensations can be made greater than our losses. We shall
be passionately concerned with humanity; the more so, that we shall
endeavor to be aware of the voice of God as well as of the voice of the
people. We shall not be snobs in any sense; for we shall have the same
charity for other people’s choices that we beg them to have for ours.
Besides, snobbishness dies out quickly--in America, at least--among the
impoverished.

Even those who find all this an intolerable idea will dub it Utopian.
A counsel of perfection it certainly is. But the higher the standard
we set for ourselves the less likely we are to put up with a low
one. And if we merely drift, I fear we shall find ourselves getting
nothing--wearing ourselves out in the unequal, familiar race for
physical privileges, and leaving to one side the intangible goods. We
can guarantee our children nothing except that they shall be armored
against certain kinds of suffering; the lust of non-essentials, for
example. I do not say that we shall not lose much that our best
interest would suggest our having; but we shall not lose everything.
And with the new simplicity will come some of the compensations of
earlier simplicity. The man who has three things gets more pleasure out
of one than does the man who has a hundred. Perhaps we shall capture
the “joy in widest commonalty spread.” A rose will always be cheaper
than an alligator pear, and it is quite possible to enjoy it as much
and as vividly. We shall be very grateful, I have no doubt, to Thomas
Edison and the other genii of democracy. In some ways we shall fare
better than folk of our clan in Europe. We must thank our stars for
plumbing--itself a “joy in widest commonalty spread.” But we shall
value it chiefly as it releases time for better things, and those
better things not physical pleasures.

Not only shall we not glorify our plumbing with marble; we shall see
that there is really no sense in marble when porcelain will do as
well--that marble has better uses and should be kept for them. Not only
shall we have no ermine to shield us from the cold; we shall see that
ermine was more beautiful when rarely and ritually worn. We shall learn
to take pleasure in beautiful things that do not and never can belong
to us; and we shall purge ourselves of the ignoble passion of envy. But
the power to discriminate between the truth and a lie--which is the
foundation of all moral and intellectual enjoyment--we shall cling to
with greed. For in keeping that we rob no one, and insult no law. I am
far from believing that any group of people can achieve all this with
completeness. But I believe we shall do well to set it before us as a
goal.




                          DRESS AND THE WOMAN


The creed and the fallacy of fashion, it seems to me, have seldom been
better expressed than in the retort once made to a friend of mine,
in one of our more conservative New England towns. Sojourning there
for a time, she had reason to order a hat from a local milliner. When
she tried it on, it did not resemble in the least the headgear of the
metropolis. “They are wearing hats very low, this year, you know,” she
protested. “Ah,” was the unperturbed reply, “they are wearing them
high in Newburyport.” I do not remember the fate of the hat--which is
unimportant; but the statement has remained with me for years as one
of the most significant imaginable. It was at once the glorification
and the _reductio ad absurdum_ of modishness. My friend and the
milliner spoke in the same spirit. For provincialism in dress consists
merely in adhering rigidly to the _avant-dernier cri_. The object
of allegiance may be, in the provinces, a little tardily come up with;
but the rigidity is precisely the rigidity of the rue de la Paix.
Fashion is not simply a question of longitude.

The sense of mode might be considered, as so many other things have
been, the possession that distinguishes man from the beasts. The
peacock is no proof to the contrary; for if, as scientists suggest to
us, all radiant plumage has been developed as a means of attraction,
at least the ideal of adornment has been, in the case of the birds,
consistently æsthetic. The feathery fashions have always been
intrinsically good. Whereas (to be flippant) the attraction exercised
by the latest mode would seem usually to point to some principle of
unnatural selection. The bird of Paradise, who is probably irresistible
in his native forest, can be positively repellent on a hat. Yes; the
sense of mode is curiously different from the sense of beauty. Let us,
however, be serious.

Preachers of all time--and satirists, who are lay-preachers--have
declaimed against female extravagance in dress. It must be confessed
that the sex of the more peaceful pursuits has been the more
exuberantly adorned. The male costume worn, say, at the court of
Henri III, was every bit as bad as anything that contemporary ladies
could have boasted; but even in the time of Henri III, a man had to
hold himself ready for the saddle and the tented field. Some part of
his life was bound to be spent in garments as rational as he could
conceive them. It was the female sex that could expand, unchecked and
unpruned, into such wild tendrils, such orchid-like incontinent bloom,
of “changeable apparel.”

From the earliest times, it is the woman who has been designated as the
sinner in this respect. On this point, the Old and New Testaments are,
for once, agreed; Isaiah and St. Paul are at one. “The chains, and the
bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets ... and the earrings ... the
mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping-pins ... the fine linen, and
the hoods and the veils,” the one accuses; “broidered hair, or gold, or
pearls, or costly array,” complains the other. Ezekiel thunders against
“the women that sew pillows to the armholes” (the _gigot_ sleeve
in the reign of Zedekiah!) “and make kerchiefs for the head of persons
of every stature, to hunt souls.” And the tradition has remained. It
is perhaps the only subject on which St. Ignatius Loyola and John Knox
would have been thoroughly sympathetic. One is certainly at liberty to
infer from the chorus that it is easier for a camel to pass through the
needle’s eye than for anything really _chic_ to enter the Kingdom
of Heaven.

All these gentlemen, to be sure, seem to have objected to the fact
and purpose of feminine adornment, rather than to rapid changes in
the methods adopted. But I cannot believe that St. Paul, who scored
the Attic curiosity born of the Attic _ennui_, would not have
preached even more violently, had he foreseen the need, against fashion
than against beauty. And is it not fashion rather than beauty that is
subtly discriminated against by all religious orders? The nun, like
the Quakeress, must adopt a single color and a single mode; though nun
and Quakeress, both, often find their chosen garb the most becoming
they could possibly wear. No dress could be more beautiful than that
which I remember from my childhood’s convent. It fell in rich and
simple folds of _violet_--_violet_ being neither purple nor
crimson, but something indefinably magnificent midway between--enhanced
by white linen _guimpe_ and cream-colored veiling. It gave the
daughter of a French duke, I remember, the aspect of a queen regnant.
Yet it represented poverty, chastity, and obedience. No one is
especially concerned with the nun’s being unbecomingly clad. A subtler
mortification is supposed to lie in her engaging to dress in exactly
the same way all her life. The mortification is of course heightened
by the fact that she shares her style of dress with the rest of the
community, regardless of type. But in any case the first thing that the
postulant renounces is fashionable clothing. They leave her curls to be
cut off later.

It is not, however, with the moral aspect of fashion that I am
concerned. The moral question, indeed, has ceased to be very poignant;
even our Calvinist great-grandmothers permitted a shy predominance of
trimming on the “congregation side” of their bonnets. The moral aspect
of fashion disguises itself nowadays as an economic consideration. With
economic considerations, again, I have no special concern. They are
writ large over half the printed pages of our time. Some statistician
every month proves to us something appalling: either that,

 ... since our women must walk gay, and money buys their gear,

materials are adulterated, or sewing-women are starved, or shop-girls
seek the primrose path, or husbands die of the strain in their early
forties. To much the same music, the New York Customs officials stage,
each day, an elaborate melodrama on the steamship piers. We know that,
from “Nearseal” to “Near-silk,” the poor will sacrifice comfort to cut,
and that a really “good” milliner makes a profit of a hundred per cent
on each hat. These things are all true; and Heaven forbid that one
should shirk the economic question! But I very much doubt if either
moralist or statistician will turn the trick. Yet they have only, it
would seem, to enlist a few other facts as good as their own, to be
quite sure of success.

For not even the cynic will pretend that the real object of fashions
is to disfigure. It is quite without intention that M. Worth and
Mme. Paquin and all their prototypes, congeners, and successors,
have become the foes of beauty. They have simply never stopped to
consider that the very notion of the changing mode is the negation of
all aesthetic law. The most damning thing about fashions is that they
make inevitably, nine years out of ten, for the greatest ugliness of
the greatest number. And this is the real Achilles tendon of _la
mode_. Can anything be more absurd than to impose a single style on
the fat and the thin, on the minimum wage and the maximum income?

I admit that no fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean
purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker’s ideal is undoubtedly the
thin millionairess. But the fat woman and the lean purse must make the
best of each style in turn, as it comes along. And if one has ever
seen a fat woman in (for example) a hobble skirt--even in an academic
edition of a hobble skirt--one knows that this is not a light thing to
say. As for the lean purse, it is not only in alarmist articles that
the working-girl goes without half her luncheons to buy a rhinestone
sunburst. One has known the cases. Nor is the coercion purely
psychological. The cheapest Eighth Avenue suit, which, ready-made,
costs something-and-ninety-eight cents, is sure to be a hasty and
sleazy imitation (at many removes, and losing something with each) of
a Fifth Avenue model. It is one of the few true paradoxes that people
who must dress cheaply must dress “in style.” And that is a hard fate
for the hypothetical poor woman with intelligence, who secretly desires
a garment that will be no more conspicuous next year than this, and
longs to put some of her money into good materials. It is only a very
good (and expensive) dressmaker whose handiwork can both elude the
exaggerations of the present fashion and foreshadow the essentials of
the next. That is another thing that every woman knows.

The hypothetical poor woman with intelligence must content herself with
looking a travesty on the successful chorus-girl. This, unfortunately,
she comes only too easily to do. “But,” some one might object, “the
poor woman is precisely an economic, not an æsthetic consideration.”
Granted: yet since we must all dress, why not invent dresses that are
widely adaptable--to different materials, to different occasions, to
different human types? It would purge our streets of many a sorry
and sordid spectacle, and in that sense would be an æsthetic service
both particular and public. But, as it is, we must all dress alike:
_blonde_ and _brune_, fat and thin, tall and short, rich and
poor. The socialists have threatened us with no more rigid sisterhood
than this.

The principle of fashion is, as I have intimated, the principle of the
kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the
same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin over.
Recently we have had rather a Napoleonic tendency. Occasionally we are
Colonial. We have been known to be Japanese. Now and then we have a
severe classic moment--usually very unbecoming to all of us. We used to
hear from our grandmothers of silk dresses that could “stand alone.”
What we need now is a silk dress that could somehow manage to run.

There is no reward, in the world of woman’s dress, for a successful
experiment. The most charming design in the world has no future. One
is seldom tempted to apostrophize a fashion with, “Verweile doch! du
bist so schön!”; but if one were, the adjuration would be as vain as
ever. And that is another sin against beauty, for it deprives a woman
of the privilege of dressing as best becomes her. There is something
peculiarly bitter in watching the superseding of a mode that wholly
suits one. Now and then a woman confides to me her intention of keeping
to some style that is especially adapted to her. “It suits me, and I
am going to stick to it,” she declares. She has found that it makes
the most of all her “points”; it has given her, perhaps, renewed
respect for her appearance and fresh zest for life. Such a woman is
always, I believe, sincerely congratulated by her friends. They do not
imitate her, but they really and unmaliciously envy her her point of
view. She is proud of herself, and keeps to her decision for--say--a
year. I never knew a woman to try such an experiment longer. She
finds herself invariably conspicuous--and no well-bred woman likes to
be unnecessarily conspicuous. For modesty’s sake she must adopt the
extravagance of the moment. Otherwise, she discovers herself to be not
rational but “queer,” and her attempt at wisdom to be the worst of
affectations. It may be ironic that a woman who looks best in the mode
of the Empress Josephine should be forced to dress _en chinoise_;
but it is more than ironic when she has to dress _en chinoise_ one
year and _en grecque_ the next. I have once or twice known elderly
women who achieved something like a fixed costume for themselves; but
they were semi-invalids. The consistent costume is, like the nun’s
habit, the best possible proof of having renounced the world.

And into what pits do the great _couturières_ not fall in the
search for something “new” enough to destroy the eligibility of all
last year’s frocks! I never knew what ladies patronized, a few years
since, the London woman who invented “emotional dressmaking”; but I
can testify to having seen, in a show-window of one of the largest
department stores in America, a model from her--is not the word
“atelier”? A large group of plain women were gathered, staring at
it. I joined the group and read the legend. The name of the dress
was “Passion’s Thrall.” At least, as the White Knight said, “that
was what the name was _called_.” Within the shop, in the spirit
of curiosity, I followed a similar group to the “department” where
such things live. Again, the emotional dressmaker. Isolated in a
glass drawing-room, stood two draped figures: “Her Dear Desire,”
and “Afterwards.” I could have imagined some one’s buying “Her Dear
Desire”--it was of sad-colored chiffon. But I could not imagine any
one’s buying “Afterwards”; and it was inconceivable that the name
should help to sell it. I am bound to say that eventually I found
myself alone in the contemplation of this sartorial drama. The crowd
had followed a living model who was illustrating the possibility and
method of walking in the new “Paquin skirt.” The gravity of every
one concerned was unbelievable. Mr. Granville Barker has done some
admirable satire on dressmaking in _The Madras House_; but his
third act is positively less poignant than a reality like that.

Yet this is not the worst. Even if we said to ourselves, “Let us be
always--but varyingly--ugly,” we should not have phrased our greatest
danger. Our greatest danger is simply the loss of all standards of
beauty in dress. “Why do all the women walk like ducks this year?”
was the question put to a friend of mine, years since, by a younger
brother. He did not know that a quite new kind of corset had suddenly,
during the summer months, “come in.” To wear it meant change of gait
and posture, eventually actual change of shape. Yet we all wore it--and
doubtless went on praising the Venus of Melos as we did so. The notion
that, after we have learned from the scientists to deal in evolutionary
periods of millions of years, we ought not naïvely to expect to alter
the human form in a season or two, never occurred, I fancy, to any of
us. “Business is business,” men are credited with saying, when invited
to apply abstract laws of honor. “Fashion is fashion,” women would
surely say if invited to apply abstract laws of beauty.

The worst thing is that the drapery or the trimming that is lovely and
desirable in our eyes one year, is unspeakably offensive to our gaze
the next. (Consider, for example, the chequered history of fringe!--its
career like that of a French Pretender.) Fashion has vitiated our
taste to that point. Our welcoming raptures are as sincere as our
shuddering rejections. There was a time when sleeves could not--I say
it advisedly--be too large. I remember seeing a girl turn to edge
sideways through a large door, for fear of crushing the sleeves of
a new bodice. Her brothers laughed; but I--I was very young--felt a
pang of clear, unmitigated envy. I remember at that time prophecies
that tight sleeves would never come in again--they were so ugly. Yet
how many times, since then, have tight sleeves come in--and gone out?
While, if one dared to make any prophecy about the clothes of the
future, it would be that those _very_ large sleeves would never
again be worn: they are so hideous.

There is no point in pretending that one is superior to this
fluctuating standard. One is not. Ideally speaking, every woman should
keep the language of fashion and the language of taste rigidly apart.
“Fashionable” and “beautiful” should not be used interchangeably.
Theoretically, we all acknowledge the difference; but it is another
matter when we are faced by the actual product. There may be, here
and there, a woman who can say with sincerity, “She wore a hideous
thing she has just got from Worth”; but where is the woman who could
ingenuously report: “She had on a lovely frock made in the style of
year before last”? I could not do it myself; nor, I fancy, could you.
We may not like the new mode the very first time that we see it; we may
pity before we endure; but we end by embracing. The bravest of us can
do no more than criticize for its ugliness something fashionable. When
it comes to praising for its beauty something unfashionable, the words
stick in our throats. Clothes that are unfashionable simply do not look
beautiful to us. Presently they may, when the kaleidoscope has been
turned again; but not now. And that means that we have given up a good
deal of intellectual freedom.

I have called the loss of æsthetic standards our greatest danger.
One would prefer to think that it is. One likes to believe that the
“prestige value” of the current mode is due to an honest if mistaken
conviction of its beauty, not to the implications of income that
both fashionable and unfashionable clothes make so definitely. It
is pleasanter to say to one’s self that the woman who refuses an
invitation to dinner because her best frock is two years old fears
criticism of her taste, than that she fears an estimate of her
dressmaker’s bill. The code is more alluring. But even assuming
this to be the cause, the result is no less unfortunate: namely, an
almost universal social timidity on the part of unfashionably dressed
women--by which I mean, for the moment, nothing worse than women in
frocks that were fashionable a season since. And that is a pity.

One does not, on the whole, regret history; and our institutions are
by this time historic. I offer the suggestion as one who is glad,
rather than sorry, that John Adams was not (according to his reputed
desire) created Duke of Braintree. But an hereditary aristocracy serves
some charming minor purposes, one of them being, perhaps, the social
countenancing of dowdiness. A duchess may be as dowdy as she likes;
and other women may with impunity be the less smart in a land where
there are always duchesses being dowdy. I am sufficiently American,
myself, not really to admire the typical Englishwoman’s clothes. Half
a dozen queer necklaces and a perfectly irrelevant bit of lace pinned
on somewhere, do not atone to me for a faded straw hat at Christmas
and a skirt that is six inches shorter in front than in back. Not many
years ago, I went, with the briefest possible interval, from a British
suffrage meeting to a dress-rehearsal at the Comédie Française. The
resulting sensation amounted to a shock. “Frenchwomen could not dress
like Englishwomen without conviction of sin,” I said to my companion.
“And ought not to,” was his firm rejoinder. At the moment, I agreed
with him. But there is something fine, after all, in the attitude of
the woman who, having occasion to go to some “function” of a kind
that she usually avoided, brought out a frock from her ten-year-old
trousseau, and had it furbished up by a sempstress. The frock, I should
say, had passed from her mother’s trousseau into her own, having served
for the former’s presentation at court on the occasion of her marriage.
It may be that an untitled woman could not have done it so debonairly.
It would certainly be hard for a good American to follow her example.
But the very idea brings one such a hint of freedom as it takes--they
say--a limited monarchy to give.

Sensible people realize that children should not be overdressed, and
a few schools in this country have adopted the conventual method of
putting their pupils into uniforms. But the uniforms are, I fear, only
another turn of the kaleidoscope. I know that in one such school,
at least, the girls wear the school costume all day, but dress in
the evening as variously and as elaborately as they choose. A rule
like that is _magnifique et pas cher_. For grown-ups, there is
no uniform at all. The fact is that we are uncomfortable if we are
not fashionably dressed. No man understands the subtle and complex
significance of the phrase “nothing to wear”--witness the distressed
but utterly puzzled expression that overspreads a man’s face at the
words. He knows that his wife or his sister looks charming in “the blue
one,” or “the lace one,” or “the one with the jet.” She has looked
charming in it often enough for him at last to identify it--and that,
unless he is an exception to his sex, is very often. He is cheerfully
getting into his evening coat for the fiftieth time. No wonder he does
not realize that some frock which, the first time it was worn, made for
triumph, should, the tenth time, make for humiliation. But the most
strong-minded woman--the woman who will, if necessary, go to the opera
on a gala night in a coat and skirt--at heart exonerates the woman who
so foolishly, for the reason mentioned, stops at home.

There is much to be said, whether in the fifteenth century or the
twentieth, for the aristocracy of wealth and all that it can do for
the community in which it prevails. Neither Florence nor New York,
probably, if consulted, would wish, or would have wished, to give up
its Magnificent. But there are minor ways in which an aristocracy of
wealth makes us all more sordid. Obviously, in these conditions, one’s
income must constitute one’s claim to distinction, and, obviously, one
can give mannerly evidence of one’s income only by the amount visibly,
not audibly, spent. How more silently and more visibly than by personal
adornment? Is all this too trite to say? It behooves the man, for
many reasons, not to adorn himself--perhaps, even, not in any merely
personal way to outshine other men--while his wife may not only please
herself but render his reputation a positive service by out-shining
other women. She makes no indiscreet disclosures of fact, but she
rustles with pecuniary implications. In an aristocracy of wealth, Paris
may go far to make a peeress of her.

I do not wish to imply that this is the sole American standard: there
are communities in which “family” counts; and there are the academic
backwaters where strange-scaled fish constitute among themselves
aristocracies of intellect. It need hardly be said that in the latter
places dress counts least of all. One may go to hear even the most
distinguished lecturer in any rag one has; and we are judged rather
by the obvious intention of a frock than by its actual achievement.
There is so much of Oxford in any of our college towns. But no one can
deny that the aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of
wealth. It is developed in places that are really too small to afford
an aristocracy at all. I myself have known women whose fathers carried
dinner-pails and whose husbands have never even stopped to regret that
their own education ended with the grammar-school course, who simply
did not feel that the shabbily or simply dressed woman could be in
their class. She may be descended from a half a dozen Signers, and be
at home in every picture-gallery in Europe, but she is some one to
whom, socially, they cannot but condescend.

I am told that precisely the same standards prevail in the newer
urban civilizations of England: it would seem to be an inevitable
immediate result of the supremacy of riches. There is perhaps no
limit to the sophistication that vast wealth can eventually give to
its own possessors; but this law of fashion is what, consciously or
unconsciously, they impose on the seething estates beneath them. I
have known tragedies in smallish American cities that began and ended
in dress: women deprived of their all too infrequent intellectual and
social delights, simply because they could not bring themselves to face
an assembly in which other women whose authority their own taste could
not acknowledge, knew their “best” dresses by heart.

I have said that the economic considerations are no concern of mine;
nor are they, Yet it may not be amiss to suggest in this context
that the women who are responsible for the almost unpaid toil of the
slum-children over “willow” plumes are not the rich women who will
give for their willow plumes any price that is asked of them. It is
the harpy of the suburbs, the frequenter of bargain-counters and
Monday morning “sales,” the woman whose most instructive reading is
done among the designs and patterns of the “women’s” magazines, who
is responsible. From what one reads, one is certainly compelled to
infer that if these little children are to be saved, willow plumes
should be put at prohibitive prices. “But since our women _must_
walk gay,” the aristocracy that is rooted in democracy can hardly do
without its willow plumes. Fashion has got itself into a position of
such importance as that. It is so terrible a thing to be unfashionable
that the vast majority of women--and the vast majority of women are
not rich or anything like it--stretch every nerve to be in fashion.
They miss, if they are not, too much that is legitimately theirs.
The requirement is irrelevant, is absurd; but it is made. They will,
therefore, pay what they can; but they cannot pay much. The logic is
clear. They go to the great shops to demand their willow plumes, and
their Irish-lace collars, in the very spirit which took the Dames de la
Halle to Versailles. Hence many of the conditions of labor about which
we read so many lurid articles. For demand creates supply.

The American woman of moderate income is alternately congratulated on
her “smartness” and scolded for her extravagance. She cannot very well,
as things stand, be smart without being extravagant. But the fact that
chiefly gives one pause is this: that a woman cannot mingle comfortably
with her equals unless she can clothe herself each season in a way that
both to her and to them would have looked preposterous a twelvemonth
before. It has luckily become, in the strictest sense, vulgar, to be
_endimanchée_; but most people are--by definition--vulgar; and
I have known women, again, who stayed at home from church because
they could not so clothe themselves. Not unadvisedly, I am tempted
to say; for in one of the most famous churches of America, I have
seen the shabbily dressed woman seated, by the usher, with reference
solely to her costume; and I have heard, too, the testimony of other
women of her kind, turned into “stay-at-homes” because precisely that
thing they could not endure. An odd battle of pride with pride; and
there are better uses to put pride to than that. More blatant and
less grim is the authentic anecdote recently told me concerning a
Newport “colonist.” She and her daughter entered the church one Sunday
morning, marvellously dressed in contrasting shades of red. “There
will be no one else in our pew this morning,” she murmured graciously
to the usher; “put some one in with us, if you like--any one in white
or black.” What could not Dean Swift have done with that! One does
not wish to make tragedy out of what is essentially comic. Yet it may
fairly be said that comedy has its rough side, and that a comedy retold
from the point of view of the comic character himself, would often make
melancholy stuff. It would be possible, over this matter of fashion, to
shed the bitter tears of the satirist.

It is odd that “dress reform” should always have meant something ugly.
There would be so tremendous a chance for any one who wished to reform
dress in the interest of beauty! But the most amused and disgusted of
us will, very likely, forever shrink from the task. “The pilgrims were
clothed with such kind of raiment as was diverse from the raiment of
any that traded in that fair. The people, therefore, of the fair made
a great gazing upon them: some said they were fools, some they were
bedlams, and some they were outlandish men.” There are two reasons why
we shall shrink from it: we should have to begin with ourselves; and we
should certainly be called bedlams. But oh, the pity of it!




                         CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE


One can usually either begin or end with Mr. Chesterton, though one
can seldom do both. “It is simpler to eat caviare on impulse than to
eat grape-nuts on principle,” he says, in one of his intervals of
pure lucidity. I should like to make a Chestertonian transposition,
and pronounce that it is better (I do not say simpler) to eat caviare
on principle than to eat grape-nuts on impulse. The fact is that the
modern fad of simplicity for its own sake has ceased to be merely
ridiculous; it has become dangerous. May not some of us lift our voices
against it?

I have no right, I suppose, to ally, in my own mind, socialists and
vegetarians. But I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if
he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the
answer is in the affirmative. I am sure that they, on their side,
confuse snobs with meat-eaters. One could forgive them, were they more
bitterly logical. For my own part, I should be quite willing to go
the length of all Hinduism and say that rice itself has a soul. I can
even see myself joining a “movement” for giving the vote to violets
and disfranchising orchids. This, however, is not their desire. They
do not wish to make even the ox a citizen--only a brother; and I have
never discovered that vegetarians--even when they were “hygienic,”
not “sentimental,” ones--were anxious to reproduce the history of the
rice-fed peoples. But let their logic take care of itself. My point is
really that socialists and vegetarians are banded together to fight for
the simplifying of life. Socialism, of course, organizes as furiously
as Capital itself; and I leave it to any one if a nut-cutlet is not
complicated to the point of mendacity. But ostensibly both sects are
on the side of Procrustes against human vagaries. Both would surely
consider caviare immoral; either because no one ought to eat it, or
because every one cannot. It does not much matter, I fancy, which point
you make against the dried roe of the sturgeon. My own plea for caviare
rests precisely on the fact that it is not, and cannot be, thrust into
every one’s mouth. It is not simple, no. The only really “simple”
food-stuff is manna. Imagine, for example, calling anything simple that
has to be shot out of a cannon by way of preparation. In point of fact,
very few people eat caviare save on impulse,--otherwise, they find it
too nasty. But it is an impulse worthy of being dogmatized; of becoming
a principle.

Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively
complicates life. The hardest command to follow has always been that
which bids us take no thought for the morrow. Perhaps that is what Mr.
Chesterton means when he talks of the difficulty of eating grape-nuts
on principle. The real drawback to “the simple life” is that it is not
simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There
is not time. For the simple life demands virtually that there shall be
no specialization. The _Hausfrau_ who is living the simple life
must, after all, sweep, scour, wash, and mend. She must also cook;
from that, even Battle Creek cannot save her. She may dream sternly
of Margaret Fuller, who read Plato while she pared apples; but in her
secret heart she knows that either Plato or the apples suffered. And
from what point of view is it simpler to have a maid-of-all-work than
to indulge one’s self in liveried lackeys? Not, obviously, for the
mistress; and it is surely simpler to be an adequate second footman
than to be an adequate _bonne-à-tout-faire_. We should really
simplify life by having more servants rather than fewer; more luxury
instead of less. The smoothest machinery is the most complicated; and
which of us wants to sink the Mauretania and go back to Robert Fulton’s
steamboat? One would think that the decision would be made naturally
for one by one’s income. But it is the triumph of the new paradox that
this is not so. Thousands of people seem to be infected with the idea
that by doing more themselves they bestow leisure on others; that by
wearing shabby clothes they somehow make it possible for others to
dress better--though they thus admit tacitly that leisure and elegance
are not evil things. Or perhaps--though Heaven forbid they should be
right!--they merely think that by refusing nightingales’ tongues, they
make every one more content with porridge. Let us be gallant about
the porridge that we must eat, but let us never forget that there are
better things to eat than porridge.

  And all time past, was it all for this?
  Times unforgotten, and treasures of things?

What is the use of throwing great museums open to the people, if
you tell them at the same time that to possess the contents of the
museums would not make a private person happier? Why should there
be _cordons bleus_ in the world, if we ought to live on bread
and milk? Above all, why have we praised, through the centuries, all
the slow processes, the tardy consummations, of perfection, if raw
material, either in art or life, is really best? I recall at this
instant a friend of mine who expresses her democracy in her footwear.
Her frocks are as charming as money can induce Paquin to make them; but
if her frocks are an insult to the poor, her boots are an insult to the
rich. I have seen her walk to a garden-party, in real lace, and out at
heel. She fancied, I think, that her inadequate boots obliterated the
deplorable social distinction between herself and her cook. In point
of fact, her cook would not have condescended to them; would not have
considered herself a “lady” if she had.

I have other friends who feel strongly the ignominy of personal
service: who agree with many ignorant young women that it is more
dignified to be a bullied, insulted, underpaid shop-girl with a
rhinestone sunburst, than a well-paid, highly-respected parlor-maid
in a uniform. Accordingly, they conscientiously deprive themselves of
the parlor-maid, and spend her wages in trying to get a vote for the
shop-girl. I do not understand their distinctions in liberty, or their
definition of degradation. The parlor-maid at least can choose the
mistress, but the shop-girl cannot choose the floor-walker.

I am, myself, essentially an undomestic woman, and I dislike the
parlor-maid’s tasks to the point of feeling excessive irritation
at having, occasionally, in this mad world, to perform them. But,
seriously speaking, apart from the temperamental quirk, I would don her
clothes and follow officially her career, rather than that parlor-maids
in uniforms should pass wholly from the world. It is as if these
people said, “Since those who are parlor-maids themselves cannot very
well employ parlor-maids, then let no one have a parlor-maid.” Their
factitious altruism, with all its peril, might be forgiven them; but
the misguided creatures (who are human beings and egotists, after all,
and as such must “save their face”) go on to say that it is really much
nicer not to have parlor-maids. And that lie is unpardonable, for it
strikes at the root of human experience. Parlor-maids would never have
become a convention if they had not been found desirable.

Are we really, at this late day, going to be duped by the mid-century
fallacy that “plain living and high thinking” are a natural
combination? Even if Shakespeare at New Place teaches us nothing, we
cannot fail to be impressed by the memory of Thoreau, stealing home
from Lake Walden by dark, to provide himself secretly with better fare
than the woods afforded. As if, indeed, any one who had tried plain
living did not know that high thinking was done, if at all, in spite
of it! “The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense,” as
Shakespeare long since said. Let us open our own front doors, polish
our own shoes, dust our own bibelots, and make messes on a chafing-dish
when the cook is out; and let us do it gallantly. But let us not
pretend that it is more civilized to do these things ourselves than to
have them skilfully done for us. The prince in disguise makes the most
charming beggar in the world, no doubt; but that is because--as all
fairy-tales from the beginning of time have taught us--the prince wears
his rags as if they were purple. And, to do that, he not only must once
have worn purple, but must never forget the purple that he has worn.
And to the argument that all cannot wear purple, I can, as I say, only
reply that that seems to me to be no reason why all should wear rags.

Until every one is too good to be a parlor-maid, let us open our own
doors, if we must--provided we do it according to the great tradition
of door-opening; but how can we do it according to the great tradition
if we abolish parlor-maids and dry up the fount of the great tradition?
And, whatever the simplifiers say, there is no doubt that, as yet,
there are, to one person who is too good for door-opening, ten persons
who are by no means good enough for it. I have never been able to
imagine just how the sound of the Last Trump is going to shiver the
aristocracy of earth into the democracy of Heaven. To be sure, it is
not my affair. But at least one can have, this side the grave, little
patience with the altruisms of the Procrusteans. They merely wish to
make each of us an incompetent Jack-at-all-trades. And one had thought
the German universities, if they had done nothing else, had blown that
bubble!

A friend of mine asked me the other day if I did not feel degraded to
be at the mercy of servants; humiliated by knowing that they could
perform domestic tasks better than I, and could take advantage of that
fact. I confess it had never occurred to me. If my cook felt degraded
by being unable to talk French, I should think her a silly snob.
Are we not all, economically, at one another’s mercy? Of what does
enthusiastic living of the “simple” life make us independent, save
of a few hard-learned and precious lessons of taste? The successful
housewife is the one who has succeeded in imitating perfectly several
trained servants. But the criterion is still the trained servant. The
distinguished beggar is the one who wears his rags as if they were
purple. But, to appreciate him, we must know the look of purple rightly
worn. The admirable vegetarian eats his shredded wheat as if it were
caviare. But where would be the beauty of his performance were not
someone, somewhere, eating caviare as if it were shredded wheat?




                      THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE


It is odd how words recur. There has been more talk about culture,
among educated people in America, during the last months, than there
had been for years. To be sure, the culture discussed since August,
1914, has been German Kultur; but that does not matter. We have
actually been talking about culture once more; rehabilitating it, if
only for the sake of denying that the Germans, by and large, have a
monopoly of anything so good. To some of us, this recurrence of a word
so long _tabu_ is welcome--and as side-splittingly funny as it
is welcome. For the fact is that for twenty years--ever since Matthew
Arnold went out of fashion--to speak of culture has meant that one
did not have it. The only people who have talked about it have been
the people who have thought you could get it at Chautauquas. To use
the word damned you in the eyes of the knowing. Now I have always,
privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word should go
out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you
are very apt to lose the thing it stands for. Indeed, it has seemed
only too clear that we were doing all in our power to lose both the
word and the thing. I fancy we ought to be grateful to the Germans for
getting “culture” on to all the editorial pages of the country; though
I admit it sometimes seems as if the Germans bore out the rule that
only those people talk about it who have it not. I should really like
to make a plea for the temporary reversal of the rule. Indeed, I think
we are getting to a point where we are so little “cultured” that we can
really afford to talk about it. When the plutocrat goes bankrupt, he
may once more, with decency, mention the prices of things. Culture has
ceased to be a passionate American preoccupation. Perhaps we shall not
offend modesty if we use the word once more.

Now there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best
of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than
to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly
be found to have more of it than we had a generation since; and that if
we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth
seeking. Having, myself, a congenital case of agoraphobia, I habitually
say nothing to the professional optimists in the public square. The
wilderness is a good place to cry in; the echoes are magnificent. So
I shall not attempt to deprive any one of Candide’s happy conviction.
If any person is kind enough to listen, I will simply ask him to
contemplate a few facts with me. No one will be too optimistic, I
fancy, to grant that there are _proportionally_ fewer Americans
who care about culture--and who know the real thing when they see
it--than there were one or two generations ago. Contact with “the best
that has been thought and said in the world” is not desired by so
large a proportion of the community as it was. That there are new and
_parvenu_ branches of learning, furiously followed, I, on my part,
shall not attempt to deny. But culture is another matter. Perhaps the
sociologists can show that this is a good thing. I do not ask any one
to deplore anything. I only ask the well-disposed to examine the change
that has come over the spirit of our American dream.

If I were asked to give, off hand, the causes of the gradual
extirpation of culture among us, I should name the following:

1. The increased hold of the democratic fallacy on the public mind.

2. The influx of a racially and socially inferior population.

3. Materialism in all classes.

4. The idolatry of science.

Only one of these is purely intellectual; two might almost be called
political. In point of fact, all four are interwoven.

I should be insultingly trite if I proceeded here to expound the
fallacy of the historic statement that all men are born free and
equal. We have all known for a long time that individual freedom
and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since
Thomas Jefferson (and may I express my doubts even of that inspired
charlatan?) has really believed it. No one could believe it at the
present day except the people who are flattered by it; and of people
who are flattered by it, it is obviously not true. The democracy of the
present day--like the aristocracy of another day--is fostered by the
people whom it advantages; and the people whom it advantages are adding
themselves, at the rate of a million a year, to our census lists. When
even democracy has to reckon with the fact that its premises are all
wrong, and that men are not born equal--that hierarchies are inherent
in human kind regardless of birth or opportunity--it proceeds to do its
utmost to equalize artificially; it becomes Procrustes. But will any
one contend that Procrustes left people free?

Now, what has this to do with culture? Simply this: that culture
is not a democratic achievement, because culture is inherently
snobbish. Contact with “the best that has been thought and said in
the world” makes people intellectually exclusive, and makes them draw
distinctions. Those distinctions, seriously speaking, are not founded
on social origins or great possessions; they are founded on states of
mind. So long as democracy is simply a political matter, culture is
left free to select its groups and proclaim its hierarchies. But it
is characteristic of our democracy that political equality has not
sufficed to it; the “I am as good as you are” formula has been flung
out to every horizon. The people with whom it has become a mania
insist that their equality with every one else in their range of
vision is a moral, an intellectual, a social, as well as a political,
equality. Let that formula prevail, and culture, with its eternal
distinction-drawing, will naturally die. For contact with the best that
has been thought and said in the world induces a mighty humility--and
a mighty scorn of those who do not know enough to be humble before
the Masters. They are an impersonal humility and an impersonal
scorn--attitudes of the mind, both, not of the heart. But humility and
scorn are both ruled, theoretically, out of the democratic court.

The pure-bred American once cared for culture, and no longer--to the
same extent, at least--does. If any one asks why America (I use the
word loosely, as meaning our United States), having always, since the
Revolution, been a democracy, can have cared for so undemocratic a
thing, the answer is simple. The democracy of our forefathers was a
purely pragmatic affair. The Declaration of Independence was framed by
men living in a world where it was almost true enough to be workable.
Roughly speaking, in pioneer and colonial days--wherever and whoever
the pioneers and colonists may be--the community is a democracy because
it is an aristocracy. In those grimmer worlds, the fittest do survive
because there is no incubator process to keep the feeble going. A
pioneer and colonial group, moreover, is apt to be like-minded; people
do not exile themselves in each other’s company unless they want
the same things. Minor differences of opinion are swallowed up in
like major needs: you form coalition governments against savages and
famine or a specially detested tyranny. In the modern “I am as good as
you are” sense, our ancestors were not democratic at all. They were
democratic for their own special group, and a pragmatic truth misled
them--as, because we admire them, we are permitting it to mislead us.
They were Brahminical in their attitude to learning; they thought it
supremely valuable, and they did not believe in--no Brahmin wants to
believe in--a royal road to it, any more than they believed in a royal
road to the salvation of the soul. They believed in intellectual, as
much as they did in spiritual, election; and they certainly did not
think that politics could influence either. Up to the last generation
or two, they looked upon the cultured man as a peculiarly favored
person; and because culture (unlike beauty, let us say) depended to
some extent on the effort of the individual, they thought it fit to
mention.

Now there is this about a pragmatic truth: like any other invention
of the devil, it smooths the road for the lazy. If it did not smooth
the road, it would not be, by pragmatic definition, truth. And the
great bulk of us have found the “free and equal” statement such a help
that, though we cannot pretend for a moment that it is true, we stick
to it. The schoolboy sticks to it because it greases his oratory; the
politician sticks to it because his constituents like the sound of it;
the detrimental sticks to it because it is his only apology. And, just
as you cannot suppress a word without eventually suppressing the thing
it stands for, so you cannot utter a statement forever without imbibing
some of its poison. Even as our reasonable national pride turned into
the spread-eagleism that Dickens and Mrs. Trollope caricatured, so
the “free and equal” shibboleth turned into the “I am as good as you
are” formula. Why trouble about anything, if you were already lord of
the world? At first, it was Europe we defied. What were the ancient
oligarchies, to impose on us their standards, intellectual, social, or
moral? We set up our own standards, because we were as good as any one
else--and also because it was a little easier.

Let me say before going further, that I am not blaming the lower
classes alone for the extirpation of culture among us. The upper
classes are equally responsible--if, indeed, not even more to blame.
We have become materialistic: our very virtues are more materialistic
than they were. It is forgivable in the poor man to be materialistic;
for unless he has bread to keep his body alive, he will presently
have no soul to cherish. Materialism is less pardonable in the man
who always knows where his next meal is coming from. He, if you like,
does have time to worry about his soul. None the less, he worries
about it very little. There used to be a good deal of fun poked
at settlement-workers who tried to read Dante and Shakespeare to
slum-dwellers. I am not sure that those misguided youths and maidens
who first carried Dante and Shakespeare into the slums were not right
as to substance, however wrong they were as to sequence. The only
morally decent excuse for wanting to have a little more money than
you actually need to feed and clothe your family, is your ambition
to have a little mental energy to spend on things not of the body.
The ultimate tragedy of the slums is that, in slum conditions, one
can scarcely think, from birth to death, of anything but the body.
The upper-class people who think of pleasing their palates instead of
relieving hunger, of being in the fashion instead of covering their
nakedness, are no more civilized than the slum-dwellers. They are apt,
it is true, to become more so; for it is a strange fact that a family
can seldom be rich through several generations without discovering
some æsthetic truths. And æsthetic truths lead to moral perceptions.
You cannot with impunity fill your ears with good music, your eyes
with good painting and sculpture and architecture. Something happens
to you, after a time, no matter how vulgar you may be. But wealth is
very fluctuating in our country; and several generations of it are not
often seen. The people who are now rich are generally people whose
grandfathers and great-grandfathers were fighting for sheer existence.
So we have the spectacle of the dominant plutocrats (no one will deny
that plutocracy is the order of the day, both here and in Europe)
either mindful themselves of the struggle for existence, or in a state
of having only just forgotten it. They are not going to push their
children into a race for intangible goods. And the more we recruit from
immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America
is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming
desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about
culture, or even know what it is. And it is another misfortune of our
over-quickened social evolution that the middle classes do not stay
middle class. They climb to wealth, or sink to indigence. Neither that
quick rise nor that quick fall is a period in which to cherish their
own or their children’s intellects.

Both from above and below, then, our colleges and schools have felt
the hostile pressure. Colleges are, on the one hand, jeered at for
doing their business badly, and, on the other, accused of being too
difficult. We are always hearing that college is of no earthly use to
a man except as he learns there to rub up against other men. We are
always hearing, also, that the college curriculum is a cruel strain
on the average boy or girl. On one score or another, the colleges are
always being attacked; and the attack usually includes the hint that
the real test of a “college education” is not the intrinsic value,
but its success or failure in preparing the youth for something that
has nothing to do with learning. Will it be of social or financial
use to him? If not, why make sacrifices to get it? Far be it from me
to assert that the intellectual flame never burns in the breast of
collegiate youth! But I do believe it provable that there is far less
tendency to regard learning as a good in itself, and far more tendency
to cheat scholarship, if possible, in the interest of some other thing
held good, than there was two generations ago. Ignorance of what real
learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a
consequent intellectual laxity--both of these have done destructive
work in the colleges.

The education of younger children is in like case. We put them into
kindergartens where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we
can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for
semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and
give them prizes for sleeping. Every one knows what a fight the old
universities have had to put up to keep their entrance standards at
all. With the great new army of state universities admitting students
from the public schools without examination, because they themselves
are part of the big public-school system, how can it be otherwise?

Now the patriotic American may see--and rightly enough--in the
public-school system which includes a college training, a relic of the
desperate desire of our forefathers that education, as a major good,
should be within the reach of all and sundry. But even the patriotic
American must see another impulse at work: the impulse to put the
college intellectually, as well as financially, within the reach of
all. The Colleges must not set up standards for themselves that the
average boy or girl, from the ordinary school, cannot reach without
difficulty, because that is undemocratic.

Now I know as well as other people that it is positively harder to get
into our old universities to-day than it was in our fathers’ day. But
granted the enormously increased facilities for preparation all over
the land, it is not relatively anything like so hard. Certainly, once
in, it is possible to get through the college course with less work
than ever before. In the first place, there is a much wider choice of
subjects on which a boy can get his degree: his tastes are consulted
as they never used to be. If he does not want to endure the discipline
of Greek, he can get an A.B. at every college in the country--except
Princeton--without knowing a word of Greek. Even at Princeton, he can
take a Litt.B. and let Greek forever alone.[A] He can study sociology,
or Spanish, or physical culture, or nearly anything he likes. I have
even heard that in one of our state universities there is a department
of hat-trimming, which contributes its quota to the courses for a
(presumably feminine) academic degree.

It may be objected at this point that the fluctuations of colleges
have nothing to do with our standards of culture. I think they have,
a great deal. No one will deny that culture can be got elsewhere,
or that colleges do not suffice in themselves to give it. But if
colleges do not consider themselves custodians of culture, warders and
cherishers of the flame, they have no reason for existence. It is a
platitude that business men consider college a worthless preparation
for business life--save as a young man may have laid up there treasure
for himself in the shape of valuable “connections.” Even the conception
of college as a four years’ paradise intervening before the hell of an
active struggle for existence, does not touch upon the original reason
for universities’ being at all. Universities were invented for the sake
of bringing their fortunate students into contact with the precious
lore of the world, there garnered and kept pure. There was no idea on
the part of their founders that every one would or could partake of
academic benefits. The social scheme would not originally have allowed
that; still less would the conception of the public intellect have
admitted the notion. Every one was not supposed to be congenitally
qualified for intimacy with the best that has been thought and said
in the world. They had no notion, until very recently, of so changing
the terms of that intimacy that every one might think he could have
it. Learning, culture, were not to be adulterated so that any mental
digestive process whatsoever could take them in.

But now, in America, there is a tendency that way. If a boy does not
feel a pre-established harmony between his soul and the humanities,
then give him an academic degree on something with which his soul will
be in pre-established harmony. And if there is no pre-established
harmony between his soul and any form of learning, then create
institutions that will give him a degree with no learning to speak of
at all. I do not mean to deny that many of our virtually valueless
colleges were founded in the pathetic inherited conviction that
learning and culture were too great goods not to be accessible to all
who cared passionately for them. But I do believe that the reverence
for learning and culture has been largely replaced by a conviction that
anything which has so great a reputation as a college degree must be
put within the reach of all, even at the risk of making its reputation
a farce. The privileged have been unwilling that their children should
be made to work; the unprivileged have been unwilling that their
children should see anything of good repute, anything with a prestige
value, denied to them. We have all demanded a royal road to a thing to
which there is no royal road. The expensive schools lead their pupils
from kindergarten to nature-study and eurhythmics, with basket-work
and gymnastics thrown in; the public schools follow them as closely
as they can. Of real training of the mind there is very little in any
school. The rich do not want their children overworked; the poor want a
practical result for their children’s fantastically long school hours.
So domestic science comes in for girls, and carpentering for boys.
Anything to make it easy, on the one hand; anything to make a universal
standard possible, on the other.

Take one example only: the attitude towards Greek. There are two
arguments against teaching our children Greek: one, that it is too
hard; the other, that it is useless. The mere fact that public opinion
has drummed Greek out of court as an inevitable part of a college
curriculum shows that these arguments have been potent. No person
who could be influenced by either has the remotest conception of
the meaning or the value of culture. Culture has never renounced a
thing because it was difficult, or because it did not help people to
make money. And the mere fact that Greek is no longer supposed by
the vast majority of parents to be of any “use”--even as a matter of
reputation--to their sons, shows that the old standards of culture have
changed. The larger number of our public schools no longer teach Greek
at all; a great many private schools have to make special arrangements
for pupils who wish to study it. And the attitude towards Greek is only
a sign of our democratic, materialistic times.

Now I have done with the colleges. I have dealt with them at all only
by way of hinting that they have been so democratized that culture
means, even to its avowed exponents, something different from what it
has ever meant before. May I speak for one moment explicitly of the
public schools? For we must trace all this back to the source--must
begin with the ostensible homes of “culture” and follow up the stream
to the latent public consciousness. Each class that comes into college
has read fewer and fewer of what are called the classics of English
literature. An astonishing number of boys and girls have read nothing
worth reading except the books that are in the entrance requirements.
An increasing proportion of the sons and daughters of the prosperous
are positively illiterate at college age. They cannot spell; they
cannot express themselves grammatically; and they are inclined to
think that it does not matter. General laxity, and the adoption of
educational fads which play havoc with real education, are largely
responsible. In the less fortunate classes, the fact seems to be that
the public schools are so swamped by foreigners that all the teachers
can manage to do is to teach the pupils a little workable English.
Needless to say, the profession of the public-school teacher has become
less and less tempting to people who are really fit for it.

It is not only in the great cities that the immigrant population swamps
the schoolroom. An educated woman told me, not long since, that there
was no school in the place where she lived--one of our oldest New
England towns--to which she could send her boy. The town could not
support a private school for young children; and the public school
was out of the question. I had been brought up to believe that public
schools in old New England towns were very decent places; and I asked
her why. The answer made it clear. Three fourths of the school-children
were Lithuanians, and a decently bred American child could simply
learn nothing in their classes. They had to be taught English, first
of all; they approached even the most elementary subjects very slowly;
and--natural corollary--the teachers themselves were virtually
illiterate. Therefore she was teaching her boy at home until he could
go to a preparatory school. Fortunately, she was capable of doing it;
but there are many mothers who cannot ground their children in the
languages and sciences. A woman who could not would have had to watch
her child acquiring a Lithuanian accent and the locutions of the slum.

An isolated case is never worth much. But one has only to consider
conditions at large to see that this has everything to make it typical.
One has only to look at any official record of immigration, any chart
of distribution of population by races, to see how the old American
stock is being numerically submerged. If you do not wish to look at
anything so dull as statistics, look at the comic papers. A fact
does not become a stock joke until it is pretty well visible to the
average man. Our forefathers cared immensely for education; they felt
themselves humble before learning; and their schools followed, soon and
sacredly, upon their churches. They stood in awe of the real thing;
and they had no illusions as to the ease of the scholar’s path. They
legislated for their schools solemnly, and if not with complete wisdom,
always at least with accurate ideals. Educational (like all other)
legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and
the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a
reproach to them. If any one chooses to say that culture must always
be in the hands of an oligarchy, and that the oligarchy has not been
touched, I will only ask him to consider the pupils and the teaching in
most private schools. In the end, prestige values are going to tell;
and the vast bulk of our population will see to it that the prestige
values are not absolutely unattainable to them. The great fortunes
have made their way to the top--yes, really to the top. In many cases
there has been time for a quick veneer of grammar to be laid over their
original English. In many cases there has not; and no one cares. The
custodians of culture cannot afford to care; for their custody must
either be endowed or be forsaken.

Oh, yes, there are a few Brahmins left; but one has only to look
at the marriages of any given season to see what is becoming of the
purity of the Brahmin caste. The Brahmins themselves are beginning to
see that they are lost unless they compound with the materialists, and
make or marry money--or increase, by aid of the materialists, what
they have inherited. In what New England village, now, is the minister
or the scholar looked up to as a fount of municipal wisdom because he
is a learned man? Is he a “good mixer”? That is what they ask: I have
heard them. Once it was possible in America for a poor man to hope to
gain for his children, if they deserved it, the life of the intellect
and of the spirit. Now it no longer is; for the poor themselves have
defiled the fount. They are a different kind of poor, that is all; and
they have become an active and discontented majority, with hands that
pick and steal. When they no longer need to pick and steal, they carry
their infection higher and give it as a free gift. And they have been
aided by the Brahmins themselves; who, having dabbled in sociology
_pour se désoeuvrer_, and then for charity’s sake, are now
finding that sociology is a grim matter of life and death, and endow
chairs of it--as if one should endow chairs of self-preservation. But
self-preservation is not culture and never will be; and no study of the
manners and customs of savages or slums can call itself “contact with
the best that has been thought and said in the world.”

We owe, too, I think, a great deal of our cultural deterioration (which
I admit is a villainous phrase) to science. Science has come in with a
rush, and is at present--why deny it?--on top. “Scientific” is a word
to charm with, even though it has already had time to be degraded.
If Mrs. Eddy had called her bargain-counter Orientalism anything but
“science,” would she have drawn so many followers? Science has done
great things for us; it has also pushed us hopelessly back. For,
not content with filling its own place, it has tried to supersede
everything else. It has challenged the super-eminence of religion; it
has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its
skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend
on it; and it has bribed the skeptics by giving us immense material
comforts. To the plea, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every
word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” it has retorted that no
word proceeds authentically out of the mouth of God save what it has
issued in its own translations. It is more rigorous and more exclusive
than the Index of the Roman Church. The Inquisition never did anything
so oppressive as to put all men, innocent or guilty, into a laboratory.
Science cares supremely for physical things. If it restricted itself to
the physical world, it would be tolerable: we could shut ourselves away
with our souls in peace. But it must control the soul as well as the
body: it insists on reducing all emotions, however miraculous and dear,
to a question of nerve-centres. There has never been tyranny like this.

Now I do not mean to say that all scientists despise culture. That
would be silly and untrue. But the “scientific” obsession has changed
all rankings in the intellectual world. The insidiousness of science
lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. You could ignore
a subject: no subject is all-inclusive. But a method can plausibly be
applied to anything within the field of consciousness. Small wonder
that the study of literature turns into philology, the study of history
into archæology, and the study of morals and æsthetics into physical
psychology. With the finer appeals of philosophy and poetry and
painting and natural beauty, science need not meddle; because about
their direct effect on the thought and wills of men if can say nothing
valuable. You cannot determine the value of a Velasquez by putting your
finger on the pulse of the man who is looking at it; or the value of
Amiens Cathedral by registering the vibration of his internal muscles;
or of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado by declaring that all perception
of beauty is a function of sex. Nor does it matter very much, at the
moment, to the enraptured reader or observer that such and such a work
of art was the logical result of a given set of conditions. The point
is that it is there; and that it works potently upon us in ways which
we can scarce phrase. Culture puts us disinterestedly in communication
with the distilled and sifted lore of the world. Science is in
comparison a prejudiced affair--prejudiced because it seeks always to
bring things back to literal and physical explanations. Far be it from
me to deny that geology, biology, physics, have given us unapprehended
vistas down which to stray--only, strictly speaking, it forbids the
straying. The moment the layman’s imagination begins to profit, begins
to get real exhilaration from scientific discoveries, it contributes
something unwelcome to science. Science has its own stern value; in
the end we are all profoundly affected by its gains in the field of
fact. One’s quarrel is not with science as such, but with science as
demanding an intellectual and spiritual hegemony. With nothing less
than hegemony, however, will science be content.

Now if it is not yet clear what effect all this must have on culture,
a few words may make it clearer. The great danger of the scientific
obsession is not the destruction of all things that are not science,
but the slow infection of those things. If the laboratory is your real
test, then most philosophies and all art are no good. The scientists
are not good philosophers, and they are not good artists; and if
science is to rule everywhere, we must shelve philosophy and art,
or else take them into the laboratory. I need not point out what
has become of literature under a scientific régime. We all know the
hopeless fiction that is created by the scientific method; fiction
that banks on its anecdotal accuracy and has in it no spiritual truth.
Literature is simply a different game: you do not get the greatest
literary truth by the laboratory method. Art is not reducible to
science, because science takes no account of the special truth which is
beauty, of the special truth which is moral imagination.

It is not only by the laboratory method that our fiction has been
ruined: a great many of our writers of fiction are not up to the
laboratory method. But all our fiction has been harmed by the prevalent
idea that no fiction is any good which is not done according to the
laboratory method, and that even fiction which attempts that method is
of little value in comparison with a card-catalogue. There were some
snobs who were not affected by the democratic fallacy; but even the
snobs have been affected by scientific scorn.

I may have seemed to be showing rather the reasons for the extirpation
of culture among us than the fact of the extirpation. Perhaps that
is not the best way to go to work. But the actual evidence is so
multitudinously at hand that it was hardly worth while beginning with
solemn proofs of the fact. In all branches of art and learning we have
a cult of the modern. Modern languages rank Latin and Greek in our
schools and colleges; practical and “vocational” training is displacing
the rudiments of learning in all of our public and many of our private
institutions for the teaching of the young; the books admitted to the
lists of “literature” include many that never have been and never
will be literature. I found, a few years ago, the following books on
a list from which students of English were allowed to choose their
reading for the course--this, in one of the old and respectable high
schools of Massachusetts, not twenty miles from Boston: _Soldiers
of Fortune_, _Pushing to the Front_, _Greifenstein_,
_Doctor Latimer_, _The Prisoner of Zenda_, _The Honorable
Peter Stirling_, _The First Violin_, and “any of the works of
Stewart Edward White.” These, and many others, may be, in their way,
good reading, but there is no excuse for offering them to the young
student of English as examples of “literature.”

Standards of beauty and truth are no longer rigidly held up. In
philosophy we have produced pragmatism; in art we have produced
futurism--and what not, since then?--in literature we have produced the
pathologic and the economic novel, and no poetry worth speaking of.
The “grand style” has gone out; and the classics are back numbers. Our
children do not even speak good English; and no one minds. They cannot
be bored with Scott and Dickens; they cannot be bored with poetry at
all. And why should they, when their fathers and mothers are reading
_Laddie_ and _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_, and their clergymen
are preaching about _The Inside of the Cup_--or the latest work
dealing with the slums by some one who was slum-born and slum-bred and
is proud of it? You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve
something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be
proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be
of a continued decent tradition back of one. The cultured person must
have put in a great many years with nothing to show for it; his parents
have usually put in a great many years, for him, for which they have
nothing to show. There is nothing to show, until you get the complex
result of the disciplined and finished creature. “Culture” means a long
receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit. There is no money in
it; there is nothing striking in it; there is in it no flattery of our
own time, or of the majority.

Ours is a commercial age, in which most people are bent on getting
money. That is a platitude. It is also, intellectually speaking,
a materialistic age, when most of our intellectual power is given
either to prophylaxis, or to industrial chemistry, or to the invention
of physical conveniences--all ultimately concerned with the body.
Even the philanthropists deal with the soul through the body, and
Christianity has long since become “muscular.” How, in such an age, can
culture flourish--culture, which cares even more about the spirit than
about the flesh? It was pointed out not long ago, in an _Atlantic_
article, that many of our greatest minds have dwelt in bodies that
the eugenists would have legislated out of existence. Many of the
greatest saints found sainthood precisely in denying the power of the
ailing flesh to restrict the soul. There is more in the great mystics
than psychiatry will ever account for. But science, in spite of its
vistas, is short-sighted. It talks in æons, but keeps its eye well
screwed to the microscope. The geologic ages are dealt with by pick
and hammer and reduced to slides, and the lore of the stars has become
a pure matter of mathematical formulæ. Human welfare is a question of
microbes. Neither pundit nor populace cares, at the present day, for
perspectives. The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to
be modern is the great sin.

So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And
surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we
must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living
dog? And is it not a crime against human nature to consider negligible
“the best that has been thought and said in the world”? It is only
by considering it negligible that we can consent to let ourselves be
overrun by the hordes of ignorance and materialism--the people (God
save the mark!) of to-morrow. Let us stand, if we must, on practical
grounds: the bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. As if our only
guaranty that to-morrow would be tolerable were not precisely that
it is sprung from a past that we know to have been, at many points,
noble! It is pathetic to see people refusing to learn the lessons of
history; it is a waste that no efficiency expert ought to permit. All
learning is a text-book which would save much time to him who works
for the perfection of the world. But I begin to think that our age
does not really care about perfection; and that it Would rather make a
thousand-year-old mistake than learn a remedy from history. So much the
worse for to-morrow!

But meanwhile let us--those of us who can--see to it that the
pre-eminent brains of other ages shall not have passed away in vain. M.
Anatole France, in _La Révolte des Anges_, has a good deal to say
about the absurdity of a Jehovah who still believes in the Ptolemaïc
system. Well, the Ptolemaïc system did not prevent the ancient world
from giving us Greek theatres and Roman law, or England from giving us
Magna Charta. We are still imitating Greek theatres (rather badly, I
admit) in our stadia; Roman law is still, by and large, good enough
for such an enlightened country as France; and Magna Charta--or its
equivalent--had to be there before we could have a Declaration of
Independence. Our superior scientific knowledge has not given us
our standards of beauty or justice or liberty. Let us take what the
present offers--airplanes and all. But let us not throw away what other
men, in other ages, have died for the sake of discovering. If the
lore of the past is useless, there is every chance--one must be very
overweening indeed not to admit it--that the lore of our generation
will be useless, too. Culture--whether you use the word itself or find
another term--means only a decent economy of human experience. You
cannot improve on things without keeping those things pretty steadily
in mind. Otherwise you run the risk of wasting a lot of time doing
something that has already been done. Any one, I think, will admit
that. And it is not a far step to the realization that on the whole it
is wise not to lose the past out of our minds. There is no glory in
being wiser than the original savage; there is glory in being wiser
than the original sage. But in order to be wiser than he, we must have
a shrewd suspicion of how wise he was. By and large, without culture,
that shrewd suspicion will never be ours.




                            FASHIONS IN MEN


Never, I fancy, has it been more true than it is to-day, that fiction
reflects life. The best fiction has always given us a kind of
precipitate of human nature--_Don Quixote_ and _Tom Jones_
are equally “true,” and true, in a sense, for all time; but our modern
books give us every quirk and turn of the popular ideal, and fifty
years hence, if read at all, may be too “quaint” for words. And to
any one who has been reading fiction for the last twenty years, it is
cryingly obvious that fashions in human nature have changed.

My first novel was _Jane Eyre_; and at the age of eight, I fell
desperately in love with Fairfax Rochester. No instance could serve
better to point the distance we have come. I was not an extraordinary
little girl (except that, perhaps, I was extraordinarily fortunate in
being permitted to encounter the classics in infancy), and I dare say
that if I had not met Mr. Rochester, I should have succumbed to some
imaginary gentleman of a quite different stamp. It may be that I should
have fallen in love--had time and chance permitted--with V. V. or The
Beloved Vagabond. But I doubt it. In the first place, novels no longer
assume that it is the prime business of the female heart (at whatever
age) to surrender itself completely to some man. Consequently, the men
in the novels of to-day are not calculated, as they once were, to hit
the fluttering mark. The emotions are the last redoubt to be taken, as
modern tactics direct the assault.

People are always telling us that fashions in women have changed: what
seems to me almost more interesting is that fashions in men (the stable
sex) have changed to match. The new woman (by which I mean the very
newest) would not fall in love with Mr. Rochester. It is therefore “up
to” the novelists to create heroes whom the modern heroine will fall in
love with. This, to the popular satisfaction, they have done. And not
only in fiction have the men changed; in life, too, the men of to-day
are quite different. I know, because my friends marry them.

It is immensely interesting, this difference. One by one, the man has
sloughed off his most masculine (as we knew them) characteristics.
Gone are Mr. Rochester, who fought the duel with the vicomte at dawn,
and Burgo Fitzgerald (the only love of that incomparable woman, Lady
Glencora Palliser), who breakfasted on curaçao and pâté de foie gras.
No longer does Blanche Ingram declare, “An English hero of the road
would be the next best thing to an Italian bandit, and that could
only be surpassed by a Levantine pirate.” Blanche Ingram wants--and
gets--the Humanitarian Hero: some one who has particular respect for
convicts and fallen women, and whose favorite author is Tolstoï.
He must qualify for the possession of her hand by long, voluntary
residence in the slums; he may inherit ancestral acres only if he has,
concerning them, socialistic intentions. He must be too altruistic to
kill grouse, and if he is to be wholly up-to-date, he must refuse to
eat them. He must never order “pistols and coffee”: his only permitted
weapon is benevolent legislation.

I do not mean that he is to be a milk-sop--“muscular Christianity”
has at least taught us that it is well for the hero to be in the pink
of condition, as he may any day have a street fight on his hands.
And he should have the tongues of men and of angels. Gone is the
inarticulate Guardsman--gone forever. The modern hero has read books
that Burgo Fitzgerald and Guy Livingstone and Mr. Rochester never
heard of. He is ready to address any gathering, and to argue with any
antagonist, until dawn. He is, preferably, personally unconscious of
sex until the heroine arrives; but he is by no means effeminate. He is
a very complicated and interesting creature. Some mediæval traits are
discernible in him; but the eighteenth century would not have known him
for human.

What has he lost, this hero, and what has he gained? How did it all
begin? In life, doubtless, it began with a feminine change of taste.
Brilliant plumage has ceased to allure; and, I suspect, the peacock’s
tail, as much as the anthropoid ape’s, is destined to elimination. We
women of to-day are distrustful of the peacock’s tail. We are mortally
afraid of being misled by it, and of discovering, too late, that the
peacock’s soul is not quite the thing. Never has there been among
the feminine young more scientific talk about sex, and never among
the feminine young such a scientific distrust of it. Before a young
woman suspects that she wants to marry a young man, she has probably
discussed with him, exhaustively, the penal code, white slavery,
eugenics, and race-suicide. The miracle--the everlasting miracle of
Nature--is that she should want, in these circumstances, to marry him
at all. She probably does not, unless his views have been wholly to her
satisfaction. And with those views, what has the perpetual glory of the
peacock’s tail to do?

So much for life. In our English fiction, I am inclined to believe
that George Eliot began it with Daniel Deronda. But, in our own day,
Meredith did more. Up to the time of Meredith, the dominant male was
the fashionable hero. Tom Jones, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Fairfax
Rochester, and “Stunning” Warrington are as different as possible;
but all of them, in their several ways, keep up one male tradition
in fiction. It is within our own day that that tradition has entirely
changed. Have you ever noticed how inveterately, in Meredith’s novels,
the schoolmaster or his spiritual kinsman comes out on top? Lord Ormont
cannot stand against Matey Weyburn, Lord Fleetwood against Owain
Wythan, Sir Willoughby Patterne against Vernon Whitford. The little
girl who fell in love with Mr. Rochester would have preferred any one
of these gentlemen (yes, even Sir Willoughby!) to his rival; but I
dare say the event would have proved her wrong. Certainly the wisdom
of the ladies’ choice was never doubtful to Meredith himself. The
soldier and the aristocrat cannot endure the test they are put to by
the sympathetic male with a penchant for the enfranchised woman. Vain
for Lord Ormont to accede to Aminta’s taste for publicity; vain for
Lord Fleetwood to become the humble wooer of Carinthia Jane: each has
previously been convicted of pride.

Now, in an earlier day, no woman would have looked at a man who was not
proud--who was not, even, a little too proud. Pride, by which Lucifer
fell, was the chief hall-mark of the gentleman. Moreover, in that
earlier day, women did not expect their heroes to explain everything
to them: a certain amount of reticence, a measure of silence, was also
one of the hall-marks of the gentleman. If a bit of mystery could be
thrown in, so much the better. It gave her something to exercise her
imagination on. Think of the Byronic males--Conrad, Lara, and the rest!
If they had told all, where would they have been? Think of Lovelace and
Heathcliff and Darcy and Brian de Bois Guilbert!

Heroes, once, were always disdaining to speak, and spurning their
foes. Nowadays, no hero disdains to speak, and no hero ventures to
spurn anyone--least of all, his foes. He is humble of heart and very
loquacious. Mrs. Humphry Ward has inherited from George Eliot; and
the latest heroes of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Hewlett, for example, are
the children of Vernon Whitford, Matey Weyburn, and Owain Wythan (of
whom it is not explicitly written that they had any others). They are
humanitarian and democratic; they are ignorant of hatred; they are
inclined to think the ill-born necessarily better than the well-born;
and they are quite sure that women are superior to men. True, Mr.
Galsworthy always seems to be looking backward; he never forgets the
ancient tradition that he is combating. His young aristocrats who
eschew the ways of aristocracy are unhappy, and virtue in their case is
“its only reward.” Perhaps that is why his novels always leave us with
the medicinal taste of inconclusion in our mouths. But take a handful
of heroes elsewhere: the Reverend John Hodder, the ex-convict “Daniel
Smith,” V. V., or even Coryston, the Socialist peer. Where, in a lot of
them, do you find either pride or reticence in the old sense? Where, in
any one of them, do you find the Satanic charm? Which one would Harriet
Byron, or Jane Eyre, or Catherine Earnshaw, or Elizabeth Bennett, have
looked at with eyes of love?

The “Satanic charm.” The phrase is out. Milton, I suspect, is
responsible for the tradition that has lasted so long, and is now
being broken utterly to pieces. Milton made Satan delightful, and our
good Protestant novelists for a long time followed his lead, in that
they gave their delightful men some of the Satanic traits. Proud they
were and scornfully silent, as we have recalled; and conventional to
the last degree. “Conventional,” that is, in the stricter sense; by
which it is not meant that as portraits they were unconvincing, or
that, as men, they never offended Mrs. Grundy. They were conventional
in that they followed a convention; in that they were, to a large
extent, predicable. They were jealous of their honor, and believed
it vindicable by the duel; they had no doubt that good women were
better than bad, and that pedigree in human beings was as important as
pedigree in animals; and though they might be quixotic on occasion,
they were not democratic _pour deux sous_. The barmaid was
not their sister, nor the stevedore their brother. (The Satan of
_Paradise Lost_, as we all remember, was a splendid snob.)

Moreover, they were sophisticated--and not merely out of books. The
Faust idea, having prevailed for many centuries, has at last been
abandoned--and perhaps, our sober sense may tell us, rightly; but not
so long ago there was still something more repellent to the female
imagination about the man who chose not to know, than about the man who
chose not to abstain. I do not mean that we were supposed always to be
looking for a Tom Jones or a Roderick Random--we might be looking for a
Sir Charles Grandison, no less; but at least, when we found our hero,
we expected to find him wiser than we. Nowadays, a girl rather likes to
give a man points--and often (in fiction, at least) has to. Meredith
railed against the “veiled virginal doll” as heroine. Well: our
heroines now are never veiled virginal dolls; but sometimes our heroes
are. Lancelot has gone out, and Galahad has come in. I suspect that
there is a literary law of compensation, and that, Ibsen and Strindberg
to the contrary notwithstanding, there has to be a veiled virginal
doll somewhere in a really taking romance. Perhaps it is fair that the
sterner sex should have its turn at guarding ideals by the hearthstone,
while women make the grand tour.

Let me not be misunderstood. I am not referring particularly to
that knowledge which any man is better without, but to the Odyssean
experience which, in their respective measures, heroes were wont to
have behind them:

  ‘And saw the cities, and the counsels knew

         *       *       *       *       *

  Of many men, and many a time at sea
  Within his heart he bore calamity.’

They had at least seen the towns and the minds of men, and their morals
were the less likely to be upset by a conventional assault upon them.
Does any one chance to remember, I wonder, Theron Ware, led to his
“damnation” by his first experience of a Chopin nocturne? It would
have taken more than a Chopin nocturne to make any of our seasoned
heroes do something that he did not wish to. They knew something of
society, and _ergo_ of women; they had experienced, directly or
vicariously, human romance; and they had read history. Nowadays, they
are apt to know little or nothing--to begin with--of society, women, or
romance, except what may be got from brand-new books on sociology; and
they pride themselves on knowing no history. History, with its eternal
stresses and selections, is nothing if not aristocratic, and our heroes
nowadays must be democratic or they die. It is an age of complete faith
in the superiority of the lower classes--the swing of the pendulum, no
doubt, from the other extreme of thinking the lower classes morally and
æsthetically negligible. “Privilege” is as detestable now in matters
of intellect and breeding as in matters of finance and politics. The
man with the muck-rake has got past the office into the drawing-room.
If your hero has the bad luck not to have been born in the slums, he
must at least have the wit to take up his habitation there as soon
as he comes of age. We have learned that riches are corrupting, but
(except in the special sense of vice-commission reports) we have not
yet learned that poverty is rather more corrupting than wealth.

Sophistication, whether social, intellectual, or æsthetic, is now the
deadly sin. If we are sophisticated, we may not be good enough for
Ellis Island. And there goes another of the hall-marks of the gentleman
as he was once known to fiction. Our hero in old days might not have
condescended to the glittering assemblies of fashion, but there was
never any doubt that, if he had, he would, in spite of himself, have
been king of his company as soon as he entered the room. He might
have been hard up, but his necktie would not have been “a black sea
holding for life a school of fat white fish.” He might have been lonely
or gloomy, but he would not have been diffident, and he would never,
never, _never_ have “blinked” at the heroine. “My godlike friend
had carelessly put his hair-brush into the butter,” says Asticot, at
the outset, of the Beloved Vagabond. Now in picaresque novels, we were
always meeting people who did that sort of thing; but they were not
gentlemen. Whereas, the Beloved Vagabond is of noble birth, and despite
his ten years’ abeyance, finds the countess quite ready to marry him.
She does not marry him in the end, to be sure, but we are permitted to
feel that there was something lacking in her because Paragot’s manners
at tea did not please her. The hero of old had what used to be called
“a sense of fitness,” and a saving sense of humor, which combined to
prevent his entering a ball-room as John the Baptist. The same lucky
combination would have prevented him--in literature, at least--from
wooing the millionaire’s child with dusty commonplaces of the Higher
Criticism or jeremiads against the daughters of Heth. But perhaps
millionaires’ children to-day take that sort of thing for manners. To
the argument that a performance of the kind takes courage, one can only
reply that, judging from the enthusiasm with which the preaching hero
is received by the heroine, it apparently does not. And in any case,
the hero is too sublimely ignorant of what socially constitutes courage
to deserve any credit for it.

Sometimes, of course, like Mr. Galsworthy’s men, he perceives, with
some inherited sense, that his kind of thing is not likely to be
welcomed; and then he goes sadly and sternly away, leaving the girl to
accept a wooer with more technique. But usually he cuts out everybody.
For the chief hall-mark of a gentleman, now, is the desire to reform
his own class out of all recognition.

Women, as we know, have long wanted to be talked to as if they were
men; and the result is that heroines now let themselves be lectured
at in a way that very few men would endure. Alison Parr marries the
Rev. John Hodder, and Carlisle Heth would have married V. V. if he had
lived. Well: Clara Middleton married Vernon Whitford, and Carinthia
Jane married Owain Wythan, and Aminta married Matey Weyburn.

I may have seemed to be speaking cynically. That, I can give my word of
honor, I am not. It is well that we have come to realize that there are
some adventures which, in themselves, add no lustre to a man’s name. It
is well that we take thought for the lower strata of humanity--though
our actual reforms, I fancy, show their authors as taking thought not
for to-morrow but for to-day. Certainly brutality, or the indifference
which is negative brutality, is not a beautiful or a moral thing; and
certainly we do not particularly sympathize with Thackeray shedding
tears as he went away from his publishers because they had obliged him
to save Pendennis’s chastity. That dreadful person, Arthur Pendennis,
would surely not have been made any less dreadful by being permitted to
seduce Fanny Bolton.

It is right to think of the poor; it is right to bend our energies, as
citizens, to the economic bettering of their lot. No one could sanely
regret our doing so. But there is always danger in saying the thing
which is not, and in pretending that because some virtues have hitherto
not been recognized, the virtues that have been recognized are no good.
One sympathizes with Towneley (in that incomparable novel _The Way of
All Flesh_) when Ernest asks him:

“‘Don’t you like poor people very much yourself?’”

“Towneley gave his face a comical but good-natured screw and said
quietly, but slowly and decidedly, ‘No, no, no,’ and escaped.”

“Of course, some poor people were very nice, and always would be so,
but as though scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he saw that no
one was nicer for being poor, and that between the upper and lower
classes there was a gulf which amounted practically to an impassable
barrier.”

It is a great pity that Samuel Butler did not live longer and write
more novels. But in regretting him, we shall do well to remember that
though publication was delayed until some time after the author’s
death, the bulk of _The Way of All Flesh_ was written in
the ’70’s. _The Way of All Flesh_ is not sympathetic to the
contemporary mood; it is one of those books so much ahead of its time
(except perhaps in ecclesiastical matters) that the time has not yet
caught up with it. It was doomed inevitably to an interval of oblivion.
The case reminds one of _Richard Feverel_.

Only in one way is _The Way of All Flesh_ quite contemporary. The
hero thinks so well of the prostitute that he marries her. On the other
hand, to be sure, he bitterly regrets it, which is not contemporary. I
do not mean that the hero’s marrying her is especially in the literary
fashion, but his thinking well of her is. You will notice that in our
moral fever we do not leave the prostitute out of our novels--no,
indeed: she must be there to give spice, as of old. Only now, instead
of being entangled with her, the young gentleman preaches to her; and
she loves him for it. Perhaps this is what happens nowadays in real
life. I do not pretend to know; but I suspect it is true, for I fancy
the only kind of person who could invent the contemporary plot is the
kind who would live it. The wildest imaginings of the people who are
made differently would hardly stretch to it. And not only does the
hero find himself immensely touched by the tragedy of the disreputable
woman--which is, after all, in certain cases plausible enough--he burns
to introduce his fiancée to her. Now that, again, may be life--Mr.
Winston Churchill, for example, should know better than I--but it is
certainly a world with the sense of values gone wrong. And when we
have lost our sense of values, we shall presently lose the values as
well. The girl herself is often to blame: did not the fiancée of Simon
de Gex go of her own initiative to see the animal-tamer, and come
away to renounce him, convinced that the animal-tamer was the nobler
woman? Which, emphatically, she was not. But then, as we know from long
experience of Mr. Locke, he cannot keep his head with circus-people
about; and sawdust is incense to him. Let Mr. Locke have his little
foibles by all means; but even Mr. Locke should not have made the
spoiled darling of society marry the animal-tamer (one side of her face
having been nearly clawed off) and _then_ go with her into city
missionary work. Yet I do not believe it is really Mr. Locke’s fault.
The public at present loves as a sister the woman with a past; and
loves city missionary work, if possible, more.

The fact is that with all our imitation of Meredith--and every one
who is not imitating Tolstoï is imitating Meredith--he has failed to
save us. We have taken all his prescriptions blindly--except one.
We have emancipated our women and emasculated our men; we have cast
down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree; we
have learned all the Radical shibboleths and say them for our morning
prayers; and we have faced the fact of sex so squarely that we can
hardly see anything else. But we have not learned his saving hatred of
the sentimentalist. Miss May Sinclair has admirably pointed out in her
study of the three Brontës that Charlotte Brontë was exceedingly modern
in her detestation of sentimentality. Modern she may have been--with
Meredith; but not modern with the present novelists, for they are
almost too sentimental to be endured. And there is the whole trouble.
We think Thackeray an old fool for being sentimental over Amelia
Sedley; but how does it better the case to be sentimental, instead,
over the heroine of _The Promised Land_? Amelia Sedley was all in
all a much nicer person, if not half so clever. She may have snivelled
a good deal, but she was capable of loving some one else better than
herself.

Of course, I have cited only a few instances--those that happened
to come most easily to mind. But let any reader of fiction run over
mentally a group of contemporary heroes, and see if the substitutions I
have named have not pretty generally taken place. Has not pride given
way to humility, reticence to glibness, class-consciousness to a wild
democracy, the code of manners to an uncouth unworldliness, and honor
in the old sense to a burning passion for reform--“any old” reform? Do
not these men lead us into the heterogeneous company of the unclassed
of both sexes--and ask us to look upon them as saints in motley? Has
not the world of fiction changed in the last twenty years? The hero in
old days sometimes fell foul of the law by getting into debt. But we
were not supposed, therefore, to be on his side against the law. Now,
the hero does not, perhaps, get into legal difficulties himself, but he
is always passionately on the side of the people whom laws were devised
to protect the respectable from. The scientific tendency to consider
that aristocracy consists merely in freedom from certain physical
taints has permeated fiction. “Is not one man as good as another?”
asked the demagogue. “Of course he is, and a great deal better!”
replied the excited Irishman in the crowd. We are in the thick of a
popular mania for thinking all the undesirables “a good deal better.”
The modern hero is, to my mind, in intention, if not in execution, an
admirable figure; and though one rather expects him any day to give his
whole fortune for a gross of green spectacles, one will not, for that,
find him any less likable. Some day he will rediscover the Dantesque
hierarchy of souls implicit in humanity. And then, perhaps, he will get
back his charm.

Some one is probably bursting to observe that we have a school of
realists at hand; and that no one can accuse Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett
of sentimentality--also that we have Mr. Shaw and Mr. Granville Barker
and Mr. Masefield as mounted auxiliaries in the field. I grant Mr.
Bennett; I am not so sure about Mr. Wells. But certainly Mr. Wells
is not sentimental as Mr. William de Morgan, Mr. Winston Churchill,
Mr. Meredith Nicholson, Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. H. S. Harrison, and
Miss Ellen Glasgow are sentimental. If he is sentimental at all, it
is rather over ideas than people. (Mr. Masefield, I am inclined to
think, is simply catering to the special audience that Thomas Hardy, by
his silence, has left gaping and empty.) Let us look into the matter
a little. “Sentimental” is one of the most difficult catchwords in
the world to define; and you can get a roomful of intelligent people
quarrelling over it any time. Perhaps, for our purposes, it will serve
merely to say that the sentimentalist is always, in one way or another,
disloyal to facts. He cannot be trusted to give a straight account,
because his own sense of things is more valuable to him than the
truth. He has come in on the top of the pragmatic wave, and the sands
of Anglo-Saxondom are strewn thick with him. He serves, in Kipling’s
phrase, the God of Things as They Ought to Be (according to his private
feeling). His own perversion may be æsthetic, or intellectual, or
moral, or sociological, but he is always recognizable by his tampering
with truth.

Now, Mr. Wells does tamper with truth. He did it, for example, in
the case of Ann Veronica. He wanted Ann Veronica to be a nice girl
under twenty, and he wanted her, even more, to be unduly awakened to
certain physical aspects of sex. It was sentimentality that made him
draw her as he did: determination to prove that the girl who loved as
he wanted her to love was just as conventional as any one else. You
cannot have your cake and eat it too; but the sentimentalist blindly
refuses to accept that. Accordingly, we get the unconvincing creature
that Mr. Wells wanted to believe existed. Mr. Wells’s heroes may not
seem to bear out my argument so well as Mr. Galsworthy’s. To be sure,
Mr. Wells is not so sentimental as Mr. Galsworthy, and he has not, like
the author of _The Man of Property_, and _Fraternity_, and
_Justice_, one--just one--fixed idea. Mr. Galsworthy always deals
with a man who is in love with some other man’s wife; and his world is
thereby narrowed. Mr. Wells is interested in a good many things, and
his politics are not purely philanthropic as most of our novelists’
politics are. But Mr. Wells’s heroes, even when they are fairly
fortunate, are pre-occupied with their own notions of sociological
duty, even more than they are pre-occupied with passion, though their
passion is “special” enough when it comes. Would any one except a Wells
hero take a trip to India and come away having seen nothing but the
sweat-shops of Bombay? Always the author’s sympathy is with the under
dog; whether it is Kipps or Mr. Polly living out his long foredoomed
existence, or George Ponderevo analyzing Bladesover with diabolic
keenness and aching contempt. “I’m a spiritual guttersnipe in love with
unimaginable goddesses,” says Ponderevo in a burst of frankness. There
you have the Wells hero to the life. And Mr. Bennett’s people are only
spiritual guttersnipes who are _not_ in love with unimaginable
goddesses.

The point is that the guttersnipe is having his turn in fiction: if
our American heroes are not guttersnipes themselves, it is their sign
of grace to be supremely interested in guttersnipes. In one way or the
other, the guttersnipe must have his proper prominence. Of course,
there are differences and degrees: a few heroes get no nearer the lower
classes than a passionate desire for reform tickets and municipal
sanitation. But ordinarily they must go through Ernest Pontifex’s state
of believing that poor people are not only more important, but in every
way way nicer than rich people; and few of them go back utterly on that
belief, as Ernest did. Perhaps that, more than anything else, marks
the change of fashion in men. For gentlemen were always, in their way,
benevolent; but formerly they had not achieved the paradox that the
object of benevolence is _ex officio_ more interesting than the
bestower.

I said earlier that in life, as well as in literature, men had changed.
One’s instances, obviously, must be from books, and not from one’s
acquaintance; but I spoke truth. Philanthropy is the latest social
ladder, but it would not be so if the people on the top rung were not
interested in philanthropy. There has been, for whatever reason, a
tremendous spurt of interest in sociological questions. Our hard-headed
young men, of high ideals, find themselves fighting, of necessity, on
a different battlefield from any that strategists would have chosen
thirty years ago. Moreover, philanthropy being woman’s way into
politics, women have been giving their calm, or hysterical, attention
to problems which, thirty years since, did not, as problems, exist for
them. I said that the change of taste in women would probably account
for much of the change of fashion in men. A schoolmate of mine, writing
me some years since of her engagement, said (in nearly these words),
“He is tremendously interested in city missionary work; it wouldn’t
have been quite perfect if we hadn’t had that in common.” Both were
spoiled darlings of fortune, but the statement was quite sincere.
Undoubtedly, without that, it would not have been “quite perfect” in
the eyes of either.

The mere conversation of the marriageable young has changed past
belief. “Social service” has usurped so many subjects! Have many
people stopped to realize, I wonder, how completely the psychological
novel and the “problem” play (in the old sense) have gone out of date?
The psychology of hero and heroine, their emotional attitudes to
each other, are, largely worked out now in terms of their attitudes
to impersonal questions, their religious or their sociological
“principles.” The individual personal reaction counts less and less.
If they agree on the same panacea for the social evils, the author can
usually patch up a passion sufficient for them to marry on. Gone, for
the most part, are the pages of intimate analysis. No intimate analysis
is needed any longer. As for the “problem play,” we have it still with
us, but in another form. _The Doll’s House_ and _The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray_ are both antiquated: we do not call a drama a problem
play now unless it preaches a new kind of legislation. And as for
sex--in its finer aspects it no longer interests us.

There was a great deal more sex, in its subtler manifestations, in
the old novels and plays, than in the new ones. Not so long ago, a
novel was a love-story; and it was of supreme importance to a hero
whether or not he could make the heroine care for him. It was also
of supreme importance to the heroine. The romance was all founded on
sex; and yet sex was hardly mentioned. Our heroes and heroines still
marry; but when they consider sex at all, they are apt to consider
it biologically, not romantically. We, as a public, are more frankly
interested in sex than ever; but we think of it objectively, and a
little brutally, in terms of demand and supply. And so we get often
the pathetic spectacle of the hero and heroine having no time to make
love to each other in the good old-fashioned way, because they are so
busy suppressing the red-light district and compiling statistics of
disease. Much of the frankness, doubtless, is a good thing; but, beyond
a doubt, it has cheapened passion. For passion among civilized people
is a subtle thing; it is wrapped about with dreams and imaginings, and
can bring human beings to salvation as well as to perdition. But when
it is shown to us as the mere province of courtesans, small wonder that
we turn from it to the hero who will have difficulty in feeling or
inspiring it. Especially since we are told, at the same time, that even
the courtesan plies her trade only from direst necessity.

After all, the only safe person to fall in love with nowadays _is_
a reformer: socially, financially, and sentimentally. And most women,
at least, could (if they would) say with the Princesse Mathilde, “Je
n’aime que les romans dont je voudrais être l’héroïne.” Certainly,
unless for some special reason, no novel of which one would not like to
be the heroine--in love with the hero--will reach the hundred thousand
mark. If there are any of us left who regret the gentlemen of old--who
still prefer our Darcy or even our Plantagenet Palliser--we must write
our own novels, and divine our own heroes under the protective coloring
of their conventional breeding. For they are not being “featured,” at
present, either in life or in literature.




                           THE NEWEST WOMAN


It was the late George Meredith, if I mistake not, who was credited
with bringing women into their joint inheritance of wit and passion.
He himself supposed himself to discard, first of the novelists, the
“veiled virginal doll.” The _jeune fille_ had, in the course
of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, become
somewhat dehumanized. She was far, indeed, from the frank heroines
of Shakespeare, to whom every year was leap year. The heroine of
the old-fashioned sentimental novel forsook her blushing, fainting,
tear-shedding, letter-writing girlhood, only to become, on her wedding
day, the British matron. There seems to have been no transition.
Meredith apparently felt that the feminine share in romance was
deplorably and inaccurately minimized. He exaggerated, perhaps. Scott
gave us a few fine examples of the beautiful girl without frill or
flutter, who was aware of her own mind. George Eliot knew a thing or
two about her sex; and Jane Eyre, in her day, was notoriously explicit.

Not long since, indeed, having brought myself quite up-to-date with
the fiction of the contemporary English school--even to the last
instalments of its serial novels--I sought out the most _démodé_
of the English novelists. “Let me see,” I murmured to myself, “just
what it is that we have thought it worth while, at this expense, to
escape.” Accordingly, I procured all the volumes of _Sir Charles
Grandison_. Nothing, it seemed, could be fairer than to go to
Richardson; and, in all the work of Richardson, fairest, surely, to go
to _Sir Charles_.

I have never known any one who was ashamed to confess that _Sir
Charles Grandison_ bored him. It is the last work which any defender
of the old school of fiction would think of using as a basis for
argument. And yet, even in that epic of priggery, the natural note is
not wholly lacking. Harriet Byron loved Sir Charles while he was still
bound to the Lady Clementina, and bore herself with dignity when her
friends cautioned her against her own feeling. “If this should end at
last in love” (she writes), “and I should be _entangled in a hopeless
passion_, the object of it would be Sir Charles Grandison: he could
not insult me; and mean as the word _pity_ in some cases sounds, I
had rather have his pity than the love of any other man.” Such a cry,
even Richardson, with all his prurient prudishness, could give us.

Yet we must give Meredith his due; and Meredith, on the whole,
honestly surpasses these others in the shining list of his adoring
heroines--adoring with such dominance in meekness, such gayety in
surrender. Rose Jocelyn, Henrietta Fakenham, Aminta Farrell, Clare
Doria Forey (let us write it in full, for so she liked it best),
Cecilia Halkett, Janet Ilchester--it would be hard to match, within the
century, that group of girls.

All these names have been recalled simply as witnesses to the fact
that there is--in spite of the contentions of the contemporary
novelists--a perfectly consistent tradition, in English novels, of
the frank young woman. It is of the first importance to establish
this, for these contemporary authors are talking as if their Anns
and Isabels and Hildas were the only _jeunes filles_ who had
ever dared, in literature, to love as spirited girls in life really
do. Just here one quarrels with their pretensions. The Victorian
convention may have given us Amelia Sedley, and Lucy Desborough, and
Lily Dale; but the Victorian era gave us also Catherine Earnshaw, and
Jane Eyre, and Eustacia Vye. Our contemporaries are doing nothing new
when they show us the _jeune fille_ falling in love before she is
proposed to; they are doing nothing new when they show us the _jeune
fille_ wishing, quite specifically, to be a wife; they are not even
doing anything new--rather, something quite _dix-huitième_ and
_rococo_--when they show us the _jeune fille_ considering
whether she will put up with being a mistress. The _jeune fille_
glorying in her choice of the illicit relation is something, let us
grant them, more nearly new. Yet how they gabble, upon their peak in
Darien!

No; these authors have not broken with the Victorian convention--that
simple acrobatic feat demanded of all beginners. But they have broken
with the laboratory method. If they think that in Ann Veronica, in
Hilda Lessways, in Isabel Rivers, they have been more accurate than
their great predecessors, they are quite simply mistaken. I am not
proposing to myself, or to any one else, to be shocked by these young
women. Being shocked leaves one, in the world of criticism, with
no retort. Whether or not one is shocked by them is quite another
question, and one that does not come into this discussion. My own
objection to the school of Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, is
that their heroines are not convincing.

There is a great deal said and written, nowadays, about women as they
are and as they ought to be; and very little of it is in the tone of
_Sesame and Lilies_. We are told very contradictory things about
our sex; and we are exhorted with unvarying earnestness to believe each
contradiction. We are jeered at for being Nietzschean Anns, embodying
the ruthless life-force, pursuing the man that we may have children by
him. We are also preached at for causing race-suicide. We must want
children more than anything else in the world; and we must want the
state to take care of them for us after they are born. We must return
to the Stone Age; and we must, at the same time, join the Fabian
Society. We must submit to the intense conservatism of eugenics; but
we must, on the other hand, insult Mrs. Grundy, whenever we find it
convenient, by taking lovers instead of husbands. We ought not to marry
without assurance that our children will be physically perfect; but we
may not expose them on a mountain top if by any chance they are not.

Only the pragmatist (be it said in passing), with his avowed power
of sucking the truth simultaneously from two mutually exclusive
hypotheses, could do all the things that, with authority, we are
told to do. “Modern, indeed! She” (Ann Veronica) “was going to be as
primordial as chipped flint.” Yet, if we accept the chronologies of
history (which seems sane enough) nothing could be more “modern” than
Ann Veronica’s way of being prehistoric. Perhaps the solution is for
all women to become pragmatists? Some of us are bewildered by all this;
and we wonder a little if the heart-breaking medley of preachments
is not the fruit of that antique and unpardonable sin--_mêler les
genres_. In all this chaos, one thing seems to be generally agreed
on: women are, contrary to fusty tradition, very like men--whether
like them according to _L’Age Dangereux_, or like them according
to the latest suffrage pamphlet. That is the only thing that we shall
unfailingly be told.

There is something in it. We _are_ more like men than Mrs.
Radcliffe would have believed. But the method chosen by these modern
heroines of being like men is chiefly, it would appear, to be more so.
They will not go half-way, but three quarters. The old-fashioned man
sometimes relented. The new-fashioned woman makes quick work of her
lover’s virtue. There is hardly a villain in an old play but would have
let the lady off, if she had pleaded with him as Capes pleads with Ann
Veronica. The qualms, the scruples, the regrets, are all the man’s:
the girl refuses utterly to indulge in anything so weak. Capes is
unfortunate enough to say something to Ann Veronica about honor. “Only
your queer code of honor--Honor! Once you begin with love you have to
see it through.” Away with inhibitions!

“But,” some one will object, “all this has been said before. And
literature is full of women who prey passionately on the men they say
they love. They are a recognized type.” Granted; but until now, the
passionate preying and the unsought soliciting have not been done
by the young unmarried girl of respectable traditions. The type is
represented, from Potiphar’s wife down, by the woman who is no longer
_jeune fille_. One has not traversed either literature or life
without hearing of exceptions. But they are exceptions. The point is,
not that young women have hitherto been restrained by religion and
convention, and that when they become free-thinkers and despise the
existing order, they express themselves as they really are. The point
is that they really are not, for the most part, like Ann Veronica and
Hilda Lessways.

I and my friends do not object to Ann and Hilda because we are afraid
that, if we do not, people will think that we are like that. We object
to them because we are told that they are normal, healthy-minded young
women who have led perfectly respectable lives on the borders, at
least, of gentility; and because we know that normal, healthy-minded
young women who have lived such lives do not approach their first love
affairs in the temper of these heroines. If you wish to say that the
authors are merely discussing pathological cases, you will to some
extent be letting them out, but they will not thank you for it. What is
perfectly clear is that they believe girls of eighteen or twenty are
like that. The last thing that they think, evidently, is that these
young ladies need any attention from physicians or alienists. They
think--God save the mark!--that they have described, in each case, a
really nice girl. Up to a certain point, Ann Veronica _is_ nice.
When she falls in love, her author goes back on her disgracefully. He
does not go back on her by making her horrid: he goes back on her by
destroying her actuality.

One is ready to grant, I say, that women are more like men than
some--not all--of the old-fashioned novelists would have had us
believe. Let us rail, by all means, at the “veiled virginal doll.” Let
us disagree with Tolstoï (it is always good to disagree with Tolstoï!)
when he says, in the _Sonate de Kreutzer_, “une jeune fille pure
ne veut pas un amant; elle veut des enfants.” Let us admit that the
modern girl really is frank with herself about her desire to marry the
man she has chosen. Indeed, I cannot think who will deny it. But there
our respect for realism bids us stop. It is a complex and misty matter,
this probing of the young girl’s secret attitude to life and her lover.

Perhaps the greatest blunder of the new realists is that they do
not see how complex and misty it is. The whole question is almost
impossible of discussion, it is so difficult and delicate. Record
the images in the girl’s mind, if you must--that is the exhaustive,
exhausting rule of realism. But for God’s sake, record them as vague,
since vague they are! These authors fail, precisely because they must,
at each instant, be vivid. One is tempted to recall to them Mr.
Chesterton’s difficulty with Browning’s biography: “One can make a map
of a labyrinth, but who can make a map of a mist?” Mr. Wells and Mr.
Bennett are, apparently, the successful cabmen who can. They offer to
take you anywhere you like in this London fog of the girl’s mind. Under
their fitful guidance, you will get somewhere; but it may not be the
address you gave them.

It is time to come to instances. Luckily for one’s contention,
the frank young feminine thing is, in spite of a few sentimental
aberrations of a century ago, in the great English literary tradition.
(What the new novelists have given us, one might remark, is more like
the frank young thing crossed with the highwayman.) No one need be more
explicit than Juliet in desiring possession of the man she loves, but
even Juliet does not find her passion for Romeo summing itself up in
Ann Veronica’s desire to kiss her idol’s feet because she is sure that
they must have the firm texture of his hands; nor is she overpowered
at every turn, like Hilda, by his “faint, exciting, masculine odor.”
And, surely, if any one were to bring up an explicit heroine, it would
be the Nurse! Romantic lovers have always prayed for union. Long
since, Sir Thomas Browne said, “United souls are not satisfied with
embraces, but desire to be truly each other; which, being impossible,
their desires are infinite, and must proceed without a possibility of
satisfaction.” What lover has not known that hurt? What lover, man or
woman, has not welcomed marriage, and, at the same time, thought it a
_pis-aller_? The notion is not a new one. It has never been in the
greatest tradition of poetry or of life for the woman who loves to hold
back.

That is not our quarrel with these misrepresented heroines. Our quarrel
with them is that, being misrepresented themselves, they misrepresent
their prototypes. It is a matter chiefly, perhaps, of the actual
content of their minds. The visions of experience are not the visions
of inexperience; moreover, there is not one frank young thing in ten
thousand who does not wrap her ardor in a blessed cloak of vagueness.
She may laugh at her faint atavistic shiver; but she feels it. She
may immensely like the feeling of her lover’s arms about her; but she
does not instinctively set herself to imagining details that only the
slow processes of intimacy will normally familiarize her with. She may
glory in his total effect of physical perfection; but she does not go
over his “points,” as if she were buying a horse, or drawing an athlete
in a life-class. Imagine Chaucer’s feelings, if any one had tried to
confound Emilye with the Wife of Bath! Yet it is something very like
that which Mr. Bennet has done in his analysis of Hilda’s psychology
during the momentous half-hour before she becomes engaged to Cannon.

“But at the same time she was in the small hot room, and both George
Cannon’s hands were on her unresisting shoulders; and then they were
round her, and she felt his physical nearness, the texture of his
coat and of his skin; she could see in a mist the separate hairs of
his tremendous moustache and the colors swimming in his eyes; her
nostrils expanded in alarm to a faint exciting masculine odor. She was
disconcerted, if not panicstruck, by the violence of his first kiss;
but her consternation was delectable to her.”

Every woman and most men know, I fancy, that if Hilda’s first
proximity to the man who dominated her imagination was of precisely
that nature, her reaction was probably not precisely of that sort.
Even the impersonal machinery of the psychological laboratory would
have registered in her a distinct recoil. The microscope is not,
and never has been, the lover’s favorite instrument. It is doubtful
if even the man himself would have been allured by the accurate and
intimate perception of the coarseness of his beloved’s skin. One thinks
a little, in spite of one’s self, of Gulliver and Glumdalclitch.
Certain it is--and rather amusing, all things considered--that none
of the men in these novels indulges in the sensations that crowd the
heroines’ hours; though it is written of nearly all the heroes that
they had experienced matrimony, at the least. May it not be that the
authors know their own sex better than ours? Granted that women are
very like men: can one justly, on that hypothesis, show them as more
scornful of conventions, of codes of honor, of every reticence, moral,
intellectual, and physical, than these men whom they consider their
masters? It is in each case the man who has the bad quarters of an hour
over their common breaches, real or fancied, of loyalty and decency
and public opinion; the man who has, for his own peace, to find a
philosophy that justifies them both.

These authors are not alone among contemporaries in recording such
heightened moments of a girl’s life. One calls to mind, for the sheer
similarity of the mental plight, Elizabeth, in _The Iron Woman_.
Thus Elizabeth writes to David:

“‘Dear’ (she stopped to kiss the paper), ‘dear, I hope you won’t burn
it up because I am tired of waiting, and I hope you are too’;--when
she wrote those last words, she was suddenly shy; ‘Uncle is to give me
the money on my birthday--let us be married that day. I _want_
to be married. I am all yours, David, all my soul, and all my mind,
and all my body. I have nothing that is not yours to take; so the
money is yours. No, I will not even give it to you! it belongs to you
already--as I do. Dear, come and take it--and me. I love you--love
you--love you. _I want you to take me._ I want to be your wife. Do
you understand? I _want_ to belong to you. I _am_ yours.’”

“So she tried, this untutored creature, to put her soul and body into
words, to write the thing that cannot even be spoken, whose utterance
is silence.”

There is no need to follow further Mrs. Deland’s analysis of the
situation: the proud and practical reply from David, which the girl
considers a rebuff; her sudden marrying of the man she does not
love--as sheer expression of outraged modesty, and recoil from the man
who had not known how to treat her confession. There would be no wisdom
in comparing _The Iron Woman_, from any other point of view, with
the novels we have been mentioning. This one episode is interesting
simply as a different and more convincing record of the frank young
thing’s relation to her own frankness, and of the fiery limits of that
frankness; pages of racking accuracy, in which the girl nearly dies of
the memory of her own explicitness. One has not even power to protest
against Elizabeth’s tragic and foolish act in marrying Blair; it
follows upon that mood with the raw inevitability of life.

Some adherents of the new school may think it indelicate to base a
general accusation on the single point of the heroine’s psychology. In
the first place, the accusation is not so general as to preclude very
definite admiration of other aspects of the school’s achievement. There
is much in Mr. Wells’s _New Machiavelli_ besides the hero’s affair
with Isabel Rivers; much that goes to the mind and heart of all of us.
As for effectiveness of method and brilliancy of style--one simply
does not see the need of adding one piping voice to the harmonious and
already deafening chorus. Were there the need, one would do it.

But the contemporary school has set out to “do” a new type of woman: a
type which it considers important, if not dominant. It has even the air
of saying: “This is the kind of girl with whom intelligent men in the
immediate future will have overwhelmingly (and to their salvation!) to
deal. Behold the Newest Woman.”

The _crux_ in each book, for the average reader, is the maturing
of the relation between the man and the girl. The girl exists only, in
spite of her intellectual qualities, for the sake of that relation. In
each case, she is the ideal mate, the high exponent of her sex. She
deserves, and must bear, serious consideration from every point of
view. One has chosen the realistic point of view because realism is
the method these authors abide by. They aim at telling the truth as it
is; therefore, they stand or fall by the accuracy of their vivid and
multitudinous detail. We are not in the pulpit, but in the laboratory.
One’s honest impression is that the scientific observers have mixed
their slides.

It is one thing to make your heroine believe in free love--doubtless
many women do. It is pardonable to science to exhibit exceptions to
the feminine rule, in the person of the girl initially over-sexed or
neurotic: such cases are known to other scientists than these. But
it is quite another thing to insist on the niceness, the normality,
the uninterruptedly respectable and uneventful breeding of a girl--to
exhibit her as the type, in other words--and then credit her with
reactions that do not belong to the type.

There is no point in preaching against a modern spirit that is going to
develop Anns and Hildas and Isabels _ad libitum_. The conception
of them as heroines may be a sign of the times; but they themselves are
not yet numerous enough to be a sign of the times. It is even doubtful
if novelists can do in a decade what Nature has never shown any sign of
doing in all her lazy evolutionary progress: completely alter natural
feminine instincts. “But the worst of Ann Veronica is that she’s
_there_!” a friend complained to me, not long since. Everything
has always been there, one fancies. All one insists on is that neither
Ann Veronica nor Hilda Lessways is the normal representative of the
sex. About the morality of Mr. Wells’s and Mr. Bennett’s books, there
are probably a hundred opinions. One’s own present quarrel with them is
not that they are bad morals, but that they are bad biology.




                         TABU AND TEMPERAMENT


When, I wonder, did the word “temperament” come into fashion with us?
We can hardly have got it from the French, for the French mean by it
something very different from what we do; though it is just possible
that we did get it from them, and have merely Bowdlerized the term.
At all events, whatever it stands for, it long since became a great
social asset for women, and a great social excuse for men. Perhaps it
came in when we discovered that artists were human beings. At least,
for many years, we never praised an artist without using the word. It
does not necessarily imply “charm,” for people have charm irrespective
of temperament, and temperament irrespective of charm. It is something
that the Philistine never has: that we know. But what, by all the gods
of clarity, does it mean?

It means, I fancy, in one degree or another, the personal revolt
against convention. The individual who was “different,” who did not
let his inhibitions interfere with his epigrams, who was not afraid
to express himself, who hated _clichés_ of every kind--how well
we know that figure in motley, who turned every occasion into a
fancy-dress ball! All the inconvenient things he did were forgiven him,
for the sake of the amusing things he said. Indeed, we hardly stopped
to realize that his fascination was largely a matter of vocabulary.
Now it is one thing to sow your wild oats in talk, and quite another
to live by your own kaleidoscopic paradoxes. The people who frowned
on the manifestations of “temperament” were merely those logical
creatures who believed that if you expressed your opinions regardless
of other people’s feelings, you probably meant what you said. They did
not know the pathology of epigram, the basic truth of which is that
word-intoxicated people express an opinion long before they dream of
holding it. They say what they think, whether they think it or not.
Only, if you talk with incessant variety about what ought to be done,
and then never do any of the wild things you recommend, you become in
the end perfectly powerless as a foe of convention.

This tactical fact the unconventional folk have at last become aware
of; and, accordingly, hostility to convention is ceasing somewhat to
take itself out in phrases. Conventions, at the present moment, are
really menaced. The most striking sign of this is that people are now
making unconventionality a social virtue, instead of an unsocial vice.
The switches have been opened, and the laden trains must take their
chance of a destination.

The praise of temperament, I verily believe, was the entering wedge.
But whatever the first cause, “conventional” is certainly in bad odor
as an epithet. And this is really an interesting phenomenon, worth
investigating. What is it that makes it a term of reproach? Why must
you never say it about your dearest friend? Why must you contradict,
in a shocked tone, if your dearest friend is said to be conventional?
Most of my best friends are conventional, I am glad to say; but even I
should never think of describing them to others thus.

Conventional people are supposed to lack intelligence--the power to
think for themselves. (It seems to be pretty well taken for granted
that you cannot think for yourself, and decide to think what the
majority of your kind thinks. If you agree with the majority, it must
be because you have no mental processes.) They are felt to lack charm:
to have nothing unexpected and delightful to give you. And, nowadays,
they are (paradoxes are popular) supposed to be perilous to society,
because they are immovable, because they do not march with the times,
because they cling to conservative conceptions while the parties of
progress are re-making the world. All these reproaches are, at present,
conveyed in the one word.

Now it is a great mistake to confound conventionality with
simplicity--with that simplicity which indicates a brain inadequate
to dealing with subtleties; or to confound “temperament” and
unconventionality with a highly organized nature. The anthropologists
have exploded all that. I have looked warily at anthropologists ever
since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture
on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers
and leopard-societies. I doubt if the anthropologists have any
more perspective than other scientists. I am as near being an old
Augustan as any twentieth-century observer can be: “nihil humani,”
_etc._ But, for God’s sake, let it be human! Palæontology is a
poor substitute for history. No: I do not love any scientists, even the
anthropologists. But I do think we ought to be grateful to them for
proving to us that primitive people are a hundred times as conventional
as we; and that their codes are almost too complicated for European
minds to master. If any one is still under the dominance of Rousseau,
Chateaubriand _et Cie._, I wish he would sit down impartially
before Messrs. Spencer and Gillen’s exposition of group-marriage among
the Australian aborigines. If, in three hours, he knows whom, supposing
he were a Matthurie of the dingo totem, he could marry without
incurring punishment, or even the death penalty, he had better take his
subtlety into Central Australia: he is quite wasted on civilization.

Some one may retort that I am not exactly making out a shining case
for _tabu_, in citing the very nasty natives of Australia as
notable examples of what _tabu_ can do for society. My point
is only this: that it is folly to chide conventional people for
simplicity, since convention is a very complicated thing; or for
dulness, since it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many
inhibitions to follow a social code. To be different from everyone
else, you have only to shut your eyes and stop your ears, and act as
your nervous system dictates. By that uncommonly easy means, you could
cause a tremendous sensation in any drawing-room, while your brain went
quite to sleep. The natives of Central Australia are not nice; but they
are certainly nicer than they would be if they practised free love
all the year round, instead of on rigidly specified occasions. Their
conventions are the only morality they have. Some day, perhaps, they
will do better. But it will not be by forsaking conventions altogether.
For surely, in order to be attractive, we must have some ideals, and
above all some restraints. Civilization is merely an advance in taste:
accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere
plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, the
historic sense. I am far from saying that all conventional folk have
it; but they have at least the merit of conforming. If they do not
live by their own intelligence, it is because they live by something
that they modestly value a good deal more. It is better that a dull
person should follow the herd: his initiatives would probably be
very painful to himself and every one else. No convention gets to be
a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful
people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be
pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following
genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is
a good thing to do. Unless we are geniuses, the lone hunt is not worth
while: we had better hunt with the pack. Unless we are geniuses, there
is much more fun in playing the game; there is much more fun in caste
and class and clan. Unconventional people are apt to be Whistlers who
cannot paint. Of course there is something very dull about the person
who cannot give his reasons for his social creed. But if it is all a
question of instinct, better a trained instinct than an untrained one.
I am inclined to think that the mid-Victorian prejudice against--let us
say--actors and actresses, was well founded. Under Victoria (or should
one say under mid-Victoria?) stock companies were not chaperoned,
and ladies and gentlemen went on the stage very infrequently. What
is the point of admitting to your house some one who will be very
uncomfortable there himself, and who will make every one else even
more uncomfortable? It is not that we are afraid he will eat with
his knife: that is a detail we might put up with. But eating or not
eating with your knife is merely one of the little signs by which we
infer other things. In this mad world, any one may do or be anything;
but the man who has been brought up to eat with his knife is the less
likely to have been brought up by people who would teach him to respect
a woman or not to break a confidence. It is a stupid rule of thumb;
but, after all, until you know a person intimately, how are you going
to judge except by such fallible means? I have nothing in the world
against Nature’s noblemen; but the burden of proof is, of practical
necessity, on their shoulders. Manners are not morals--precisely; yet,
socially speaking, both have the same basis, namely, the Golden Rule.
No one must be made more uncomfortable or more unhappy because he has
been with you. Now, in spite of Oscar, it is worse to be unhappy than
to be bored; and I would rather be the heroine of a not very clever
comedy of manners than of a first-class tragedy. Most of us, when we
are once over twenty, are no more histrionic, really, than that. The
conventional person may bore you (though it is by no means certain
that he will) but he will never, of his own volition, make you unhappy
unless by way of justified retort. He will never put you, verbally
or practically, into a nasty hole. Perhaps he will never give you the
positive scarlet joys of shock and thrill. But, dear me! that brings us
to another point.

Conventional folk are often accused of being dull and valueless because
they have no original opinions. (How we all love original opinions!)
Well: very few people have any original opinions. Originality usually
amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar. “The wildest dreams
of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu”; and dead sages, if there were only
retroactive copyrights, could sue most of our modern wits for their
best things. What is even Jean-Jacques but Prometheus-and-water, if
it comes to that? Very few people since Aristotle have said anything
new. What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an
original phrase. Old lamps for new--yes; but it is always the same
oil in the lamp. Some people--like G. B. S. and Mr. Chesterton--seem
to think that you can be original by contradicting other people--as
if even the person who states a proposition did not know that you
could make the verb negative if you chose! Often, they are so hard up
that they have to contradict themselves. But they are supposed to be
violently--subversively--enchantingly--original. Even the militant
suffragettes have not “gone the whole hog”: they have stopped short
of Aristophanes. What is the use of congratulating ourselves on our
unprecedented courage in packing the house solemnly for _Damaged
Goods_, when we have expurgated the _Lysistrata_--and had the barest
_succès d’estime_, at that? No: our vaunted unconventionality is
usually a matter of words. I have tracked more than one delightful
vocabulary through the jungle, only to find that it brought up at the
literal inspiration of the Old Testament; and I have inwardly yawned
away an afternoon with a person who talked in _clichés_, to discover
perhaps, at twilight, that on some point or other he was startlingly
revolutionary. The fact is that we are the soft prey of the phrase;
and the rhetoricians, whether we know it or not, will always have
their way with us. Even the demagogue is only the rhetorician of the
gutter. “Take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of
itself”--as the Duchess in _Alice_ did _not_ say. Dulness is a matter
of vocabulary; but there are no more dull people among the conventional
than among the unconventional. And if a person is to be unconventional,
he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the
case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee
you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself
that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable
chair.

I was arguing at luncheon one day, with three clever women, the
advantages and disadvantages of unconventionality. They were all
perfectly conventional in a worldy sense, and perfectly convinced of
the charms of unconventionality. (That is always the way: we sigh for
the paradises that are not ours, like good Christians spurning the
Apocalypse and coveting the Mohammedan heaven.) They cited to me a very
amusing person--a priestess of intellectual revolt. Yes: she walked
thirty blocks to lunch in a pouring rain, and when she came in she took
off her wet hat, put it in her chair, and sat on it. The fact that my
guest, did she choose, could afford to crown herself with pearls, would
not make up to me for the consciousness that she was sitting on an
oozing hat throughout luncheon. In spite of epigrams, I should feel,
myself, perfectly wet through. Surely it is the essence of good manners
not to make other people uncomfortable. Society, by its insisting on
conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which
we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort
of other people. No one except a reformer has a right to batten on
other people’s discomfort. And who would ever have wanted John Knox
to dinner? To be sure, we are all a little by way of being reformers
now--too much, I fear, as people went to see the same _Damaged
Goods_, under shelter of its sponsors, who cared for nothing
whatever except being able to see a _risqué_ play without being
looked at askance. But we shall come to that aspect of it later.

Now “temperament,” again, has often been confused with charm; and
conventional folk--who are, by definition, dull and unoriginal, all
baked in the same archaic mould--are supposed to lack charm. They are
at best like inferior prints of a Hokusai from worn-out blocks. The
“justification” is bad. Their original may have been all very well;
but they themselves are hopelessly _manqués_, and besides, there
are too many of them. How can they have charm--that virtue of the
individual, unmatchable, unpredictable creature?

It is not against the acutest critics, the real “collectors” and
connoisseurs of human masterpieces, that I am inveighing. I am
objecting to the stupid criticisms of the stupid; to the presence of
“conventional” as a legitimate curse on the lips of people who do not
know what they are talking about. One often hears it--“I find him” (or
“her”) “so difficult to talk to: he” (or “she”) “is so conventional.”
Good heavens! As if the conventional person were not always at least
easy to talk to! He may be dull, but he knows his cues, and will play
the game as long as manners require. It is the wild man on a rock,
with a code that you cannot be expected to know, because it is his
own peerless secret, who is hard to talk to. The people who say that
conventional folk lack charm, often mean by “conventional” not wearing
your heart on your sleeve. Now I positively like the sense, when I
dine out, and stoop to rescue a falling handkerchief, that I am not
going to rub my shoulder against a heart. What are hearts doing on
sleeves? Am I a daw, that I should enjoy pecking at them? And who has
any right to assume that, because they are not worn there, they are
non-existent? It is of the essence of human nature to long for the
unattainable. If you do not believe me, look at all the love-poetry in
the world. As Mr. Chesterton says, “the coldness of Chloe” has been
responsible for most of it. Certainly, if Chloe had worn her heart on
her sleeve, the anthologies would have suffered. And with woman the
case is the same. Let not the modern hero flatter himself that he will
ever arouse the same kind of ardor in the female heart that the heroes
of old did: those seared and saddened and magnificent creatures who
bore hearts of flame within their granite breasts--but whose breasts
were granite, all the same. No, gentlemen, women may marry you, but
it is with a diminished thrill. We want--men and women both--to be
intrigued; and I venture to say that for purposes of life, not of
mere irresponsible conversation, it is the conventional person who
intrigues us, since it is only the conventional person who creates the
illusion of inaccessibility. He may be accessible, in reality; and the
unconventional, temperamental person may be an impregnable fortress.
That is the dizzy chance of life. But since all relations must have a
beginning, the initial impression is the thing that counts. Of course
one wants to know that the Queen of Spain has legs; but then we can be
pretty sure that she has. We do not need a slit skirt to reassure us.
One wants to know that there is a human face behind the mask; but who
shall say that the mask does not heighten such beauty as there is? The
conventional manner is a kind of domino: the accepted costume that all
civilized people adopt for a time before unmasking. I do not suggest
that we should disguise ourselves to the end; but that we should talk a
little before we do unmask.

For there must be some ground on which to meet the person we do not
know; and why may not the majority decide what grounds are the most
convenient for all concerned? There must be some simplification
of life: we cannot afford to have as many social codes as we have
acquaintances. Imagine knowing five hundred people, and having to greet
each with a different formula! Language would not run to it. And would
it, in any case, constitute charm? Charm, as we all know, is a rare
and treasurable thing; and no one can say where it will be found.
But, as far as we can analyze it at all, its elements seem very likely
to flourish in conventional air. Of course there may be a fearful
joy in watching the man of whom you say: “One can never tell what he
is going to do next.” But you do not want him about, except on very
special occasions. For the honest truth is that the unconventional
person is almost never just unconventional enough. He is pretty sure
to take you by surprise at some moment when you do not feel like being
taken by surprise. Then you have to invent the proper way to meet
the situation, which is a bore. It is not strange that some of our
_révoltés_ preach trial marriage: for the only safe way to marry
them at all would be on trial. Until you had definitely experienced all
the human situations with them, you would have no means of knowing how,
in any given situation, they would behave. They might conform about
evening-dress, and throw plates between courses; they might be charming
to your friends, and ask the waiter to sit down and finish dinner with
you. Or they might in all things, little and big, be irreproachable.
The point is that you would never _know_. You could never take
your ease in your inn, for nothing discoverable in earth or heaven
would determine or indicate their code. Conventional manners are a kind
of literacy test for the alien who comes among us. Not a fundamentally
safe one? Perhaps not. But some test there must be; and this, on the
whole, is the easiest to pass for those whom we are likely to want for
intimates. That is really the social use of conventions.

And as for charm: your most charming people are those who constantly
find new and unexpected ways of delighting us. Are such often to be
found among people who are constantly finding new and unexpected ways
of shocking us? I wonder. It seems to me doubtful, at the least. For
shock--even the superficial social shock, the sensation that does not
get far beneath the skin--is not delight. If you have ever really been
shocked, you know that it is a disagreeable business. Of course, if
some wonderful creature discovers the golden mean, the perfect note: to
satisfy in all conventional ways, and still to be possessed of infinite
variety in speech and mood--that wonderful creature is to be prized
above the phœnix. But you cannot give rein to your own rich temperament
in the matter, let us say, of auction bridge. The rules you invent as
you go alone may be more shatteringly amusing than anything Hoyle ever
thought of; but you cannot call it auction, and you must not expect
other people to know how to return your leads. And usually it only
means breaking rules without substituting anything better--revoking for
a whim. Life is as co-operative a business as football; and we all know
what becomes of the team of crack players when it faces a crack team.
Only across the footlights are we apt to feel the charm of the Ibsen
heroine; and even then we are apt to want supper and some irrelevant
talk before we go to a dream-haunted couch.

Now this matter of charm is not really an arguable one; for charm will
win where it stands, whether it be conventional or unconventional.
Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the
chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister’s friends
can’t or won’t. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her
departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as
that, is still the classic example of folly. It is not senseless to
bring marriage into the question, for when we advisedly call a man or a
woman charming, we mean that that man or that woman would apparently be
a good person with whom to form an intimate and lasting relation--not
for us, ourselves, perhaps, but for some one else of our sort, in whom
he or she contrives, by the alchemy of passion, to inspire the “sacred
terror.” To amuse for half an hour during which you incur no further
responsibilities, to delight, in a relation which has no conceivable
future, does not constitute charm; for it is of the essence of charm
that it pulls the people who feel it--pulls, without ceasing. Charm
magnetizes at long range. I contend only that conventional people are
as apt to have it as any one else, for they have the requisites, as
far as requisites can be named.

As for the charm actually resident in conventionality _per se_:
how should any one who does not feel it be converted to it by words
of mine? For it is a beauty of form: not so much of good form as
opposed to bad form, as of form opposed to formlessness. The foe
of convention enters into the social plan, if at all, as a wild,
Wagnerian _motif_. And the truly unconventional person has not
even a _motif_; for he disdains repetition. He scorns to stand
for anything whatever, and you are insulting his “temperament” if you
suppose that it is capable of only one reaction on any given thing.
The temperamental critic of literature--like Jules Lemaître in his
salad days, before the Church had reclaimed him--prides himself on
never thinking the same thing twice about any one masterpiece. Your
temperamental creature will not twice hold the same opinion of any one
person. If he has ever been notably pleased with a fellow-guest at
dinner, it is safest never to repeat the combination. For the honor of
his temperament, he must be disgusted the next time. It is his great
gift not to be predicable, from day to day, from hour to hour. But a
pattern is always predicable; and what you learn about a conventional
person goes into the sum of knowledge: you do not have to unlearn it
over night. Psychology becomes a lost art, a discredited science,
when you deal with the temperamental person. You might as well have
recourse to astrology. His very frankness is misleading. He can afford
to give himself away, because he gives away nothing but the momentary
mood. Never attempt to hold him to anything he has said: for his whole
virtuosity consists in never saying the same thing twice, and never
necessarily meaning it at all. He does very well for the idle hour, the
box at the play; but for the business of life--oh!

And to some of us there is charm in the code itself--charm, that is,
in any code, so long as it has behind it an idea, though an antique
one, and is adhered to with faith. The right word must always seem
“inevitable”; and so must, after all, the right act. An improvisation
may be--must be, if it is to succeed--brilliant; but acts, like words,
are best if they are in the grand style. Whether in speech or in
manners, the grand style is never a mere magnificent idiosyncrasy; for
the essence of the grand style is to carry with it the weight of the
world.

And conventionality is now said to be subversive of the moral order! At
least, most avowedly unconventional people are now treating themselves
as reformers. Conventions did not fall, in spite of the neo-pagans;
so the neo-Puritans must come in to make them totter. And with the
neo-Puritans, it must be admitted (Cromwell did not live in vain) most
of the charm of unconventionality has gone. It has become a brutal
business. The neo-pagans realized that, to be endured at all, they must
make us smile. If they told a _risqué_ story, it must be a really
funny one. At the present moment, we may not go in for _risqué_
remarks in the interests of humor, but we may make them in the
interests of morality. We may say anything we like at a dinner-party,

so long as we put no wit into saying it. We must not quote
eighteenth century _mots_, but we may discuss prostitution with
some one we have never seen before. Anything is forgiven us, so long
as we are not amusing. If we only draw long faces, we may even descend
to anecdote. And when people are asked to break with conventions in
the interests of morality, they may feel that they have to do it. It
has always been permitted to make the individual uncomfortable for
the good of the community. So we cannot snub the philanthropists as
we would once have snubbed the underbred: for thereby we somehow damn
ourselves. If you refuse to discuss the white slave traffic, you are
guilty of civic indifference; and that is the one form of immorality
for which now there is no sympathy going. I may have no ideas and no
information about the white slave traffic, but I ought to be interested
in it--interested to the point of hearing the ideas, and gathering the
information, of the person whom I have never seen before. It is the
“Shakespeare and the musical glasses” of the present day. Vain to take
refuge in plays or books: for what play or book is well known at all
unless it deals with the social evil?

Now it has already been pointed out that vice-commission reports have
done as much harm as good. The discussion of them is not limited to the
immune, “high-brow” caste. I know of one quite unimperilled stenographer
who was frightened by them into the psychopathic ward at Bellevue;
and we have all read instructive comments in the daily papers which
reiterate that virtue is ten dollars a week. A much lower figure than
Becky Sharp’s, but the principle is the same. Out of her weekly wage,
we may be sure the shop-girl (it is always the shop-girl!) buys the
paper--and therewith her Indulgence for future faults, much cheaper
than Tetzel ever sold one. For Purgatory now is replaced by Public
Opinion. Even my own small town is not free from the prophylactic
“movie.” One small boy nudges another, as they pass the placarded
entrance, exclaiming debonairly, “Oh, this ’ere white slave traffic,
y’know!” And the child, I have been given to understand, is the father
of the man. The unconventional reformers quote to themselves, I suppose:

  Vice is a monster of such frightful mien, _etc._

It never occurs to them to finish the sentence:

  We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

The fact is that Anglo-Saxon society has got beyond the enduring
stage, and is largely occupied in pitying. There is a general sense
that the people at large, in all moral matters, know better than the
specialists. We will take our creed not from the theologians, but from
Mr. Winston Churchill; and we will take our pathology not from medical
treatises, but from Brieux. We will discuss the underworld at dinner
because, between the fish and the entrée, the thin lady with the pearls
may say something valuable about it. If we are made uncomfortable by
the discussion, it only shows that we are selfish pigs.

Now I see no reason why decent-minded people should not discuss with
their intimate friends anything they please. If you are really intimate
with any one, you are not likely to discuss things unless you both
please. But I do see, still, a beautiful result of the old order that
the new order does not tend to produce. The conventional avoidance
as a general subject of conversation of sex in all its phases was a
safeguard to sensibilities. You cannot, in one sense, discuss sex quite
impersonally, for every one is of one sex or the other. The people who
cry out against the segregation of the negro in government offices
have hardly realized that non-segregation is objected to, not because
of itself, but because of miscegenation. There is a little logic left
in the world; and there are some people who perceive that sequence,
whether they phrase it or not. Social distinctions concern themselves
ultimately with whom you may and whom you may not marry. You do not
bring people together in society who are _tabu_ to each other.
Not that you necessarily expect, out of a hundred dinner-parties, any
one marriage to result; but you assume social equality in the people
seated about your board. Is not, in the last analysis, the only sense
in such a phrase as “social equality,” the sense of marriageability?
Even conventions are not so superficial as they seem; and they have
that perfectly good human basis. It is vitally important to the welfare
and the continuance of the civilized race that sex-sensibilities should
be preserved. Otherwise you will not get the romantic mating; and the
unromantic mating, once well established in society, will give rise
to a perfectly transmissible (whether by heredity or environment, O
shade of Mendel!) brutality. It is brutalizing to talk promiscuously of
things that are essentially private to the individual; just as it is
brutalizing (I believe no one questions that) for a family and eight
boarders to sleep in one room--even a large room. All violations of
essential privacy are brutalizing. We do not take our tooth-brushes
with us when we go out to dinner, and if we did, and did not mind (very
soon we should not), the practice, I am sure, would have a brutalizing
effect. A certain amount of plain speaking is, perhaps, a good thing;
but there is no doubt that at present we have far too much of it to
suit most of us, and I cannot see why we should be made to endure
it just because a few people who are by way of calling themselves
moralists cannot get on with society on its own terms.

It has long been a convention among people who are not cynical that
bodily matters are not spoken of in mixed and unfamiliar gatherings. Of
course, our great-grandmothers were prudes. The reason why they talked
so much about their souls, I fancy, is that there was hardly a limb or
a feature of the human body that they thought it proper to mention.
They were driven back on religion because they held that the soul
really had nothing to do with the body at all. The psychiatrists have
done their best to take away from us that (on the whole) comforting
belief. In America, at least, we are finding it harder and harder to
get out of the laboratory. It is the serious and patriotic American
in _The Madras House_ who asks the astonished Huxtable, “But are
you the mean sensual man?” In _The Madras House_ the question is
screamingly funny; but I cannot imagine any man’s liking, in his own
house, to have the question put to him by a total stranger. The fact
is that we have dragged our Ibsen and our Strindberg and our Sudermann
lovingly across the footlights, and are hugging them to our hearts in
the privacy of our boxes. We have decided that manners shall consist
entirely of morals. It is just possible that, in the days when morals
consisted largely of manners, fewer people were contaminated. You
cannot shock a person practically whom you are totally unwilling to
shock verbally; and if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual
verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.
Above all, when we become incapable of the shock verbal, there will be
nothing left for the unconventional people but the shock practical.
And that, I imagine, is what we are coming to--all in the interests of
morality, be it understood. At no time in history, perhaps, have the
people who are not fit for society had such a glorious opportunity to
pretend that society is not fit for them. Knowledge of the slums is
at present a passport to society--so much the parlor philanthropists
have achieved--and all they have to do is to prove that they know their
subject. It is an odd qualification to have pitched on; but gentlemen
and ladies are always credulous, especially if you tell them that they
are not doing their duty.

Moreover, when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble
in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about,
you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precocious
curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about
life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly
advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and
who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by
their information? If we discuss the pathology of divorce with the
first-comer, what is to prevent divorce from becoming, in the end, as
natural as daily bread? And if nothing is to be _tabu_ in talk,
how many things will remain _tabu_ in practice? The human race is,
in the end, as relentlessly logical as that. Even the aborigines that
we have occasionally mentioned turn scandals over to the medicine-man,
and keep a few delicate silences themselves. Perhaps we are “returning
to Nature,” as the Rousseauists wanted us to; with characteristic
Anglo-Saxon thoroughness, going the savages one better. But it is a
pity to forget how to blush; for though in the ideal society a blush
would never be forced to a cheek, it would not be because nothing was
considered (as a German might say) blushworthy. Each man’s private
conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer:
he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within
himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings,
however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from
crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like
to confess to people with a code. I do not contend that that is a
high form of morality; but it has certainly saved society a good many
practical unpleasantnesses. And we are clearly courting the danger
of essentially undiscussable actions when we admit every action to
discussion.

I saw it seriously contended in some journal or other, not long ago,
that, whether any other women were enfranchised or not, prostitutes
ought undoubtedly to have the vote, because only thus could the social
evil be effectively dealt with. Incredible enough; but there it was.
Not many people, perhaps, would agree with that particular reformer;
but undoubtedly there is a mania at present, in the classes that used
to be conventional, for getting one’s information from the other camp.
It is valuable to know the prostitute’s opinion--facts never come
amiss; but why assume that we have only to know it to hold it? Is it
not conceivable that other generations than our own have known her
opinions, and that lines of demarcation have been drawn because a lot
of people, as intelligent as we, did not agree with her? The present
tendency, however, is to consider every one’s opinion important, in
social and ethical matters, except that of respectable folk. My own
pessimistic notion is, as I have hinted, that the philanthropic assault
on the conventional code has come primarily from people who were too
ignorant, or too lazy, or too undisciplined, to submit to the code;
and that the success of the assault results from the sheer defenceless
niceness--the mingled altruism and humility--of the people accused
of conventionality. At all events, the fact is that our reticences
have somehow become cases of cowardice, and our rejections forms of
brutality. We are all a little pathetic in our credulity, and we are
very like Moses Primrose at the fair. Well: let us buy green spectacles
if we must; but let us, as long as we can, refuse to look through them!

It may seem a far cry from “temperament” to social service. I have
known a great many people who went in for social service, and I do
not think it is. The motives of the heterogeneous foes of convention
may lie as far apart as the Poles (one Pole is very like the other,
by the way, as far as we can make out from Peary and Amundsen) but
the object is the same: to destroy the complicated fabric which the
centuries have lovingly built up. (Even if you call it “restoration,”
it is apt to amount to the same thing, as any good architect knows.) At
the bar of Heaven, sober Roundheads and drunken rioters will probably
be differently dealt with; but here on earth, both have been given to
smashing stained-glass windows. Many of us do not believe in capital
punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot
give. The iconoclasts do the same thing; for civilization, whether
it be perfect or not, is a fruit of time. Conventions are easy to
come by, if you are willing to take conventions like those of the
Central Australians. The difference between a perfected and a barbaric
convention is a difference of refinement, in the old alchemical sense.
A lot of the _tabu_ business is too stupid and meaningless for
words. Civilization has been a weeding-out process, controlled and
directed by increasing knowledge. We have infinitely more conventions
than the aborigines: we simply have not such silly ones. The foes of
modern convention are not suggesting anything wiser, or better, or more
subtle: they are only attacking all convention blindly, as if the very
notion of _tabu_ were wrong. The very notion of _tabu_ is
one of the tightest notions in the world. Better any old _tabu_
than none, for a man cannot be said to be “on the side of the stars” at
all, unless he makes refusals. What the foes of convention want is to
have all _tabu_ overthrown. It is very dull of them, for even if
a cataclysm came and helped them out--even if we were all turned, over
night, into potential fossils for the delight of future scientists--the
next beginnings of society would be founded on _tabu_. We shudder
at the Central Australians; we should hate life on their terms. But I
would rather live among the Warramunga than among the twentieth-century
anarchists, for I cannot conceive a more odious society than one
where nothing is considered indecent or impious. We may think, that
the mental agility of the Warramunga could be better applied. Well:
in time, it will be. But they are lifted above the brute just in so
far as they develop mental agility in the framing of a moral law,
however absurd a one. I said that their conventions were almost too
complicated for us to master. That, I fancy, is because any mind they
have, they give to their conventions. It is the natural consequence
of giving your mind to science and history and philology and art,
that you simplify where you can; also, that your conventions become
purified by knowledge. Even the iconoclasts of the present day do not
want us to throw away such text-book learning as we have achieved.
They do ask us, though, to throw away the racial inhibitions that we
have been so long acquiring. Is it possible that they do not realize
what a slow and difficult business it is to get any particular opinion
into the instincts of a race? Only the “evolution” they are so fond of
talking about can do that. Perhaps we ought to take comfort from the
reflection. But it is easier to destroy than to build up; and they are
quite capable of wasting a few thousand years of our time.

No: the iconoclasts want to bring us, if possible, lower than the
Warramunga. Some of them might be shocked at the allegation, for some
of them, no doubt, are idealists--after the fashion of Jean-Jacques,
be it understood. These are merely, one may say respectfully,
mistaken: for they do not reckon with human nature any more than do
the socialists. But the majority, I incline to believe, are merely the
natural foes of dignity, of spiritual hierarchy, of wisdom perceived
and followed. They object to guarded speech and action, because they
themselves find self-control a nuisance. So, often, it is; but if the
moral experience of man-kind has taught us anything, it has taught us
that, without self-control, you get no decent society at all. When
the mistress of Lowood School told Mr. Brocklehurst that the girls’
hair curled naturally, he retorted: “Yes, but we are not to conform
to nature; I wish these girls to become children of grace.” We do not
sympathize with Mr. Brocklehurst’s choice of what was to be objected
to in nature; we do not, indeed, sympathize with him in any way, for
he was a hypocrite. But none the less, it is better to be, in the
right sense, a child of grace than a child of nature. Attila did not
think so; and Attila sacked Rome. We may be sacked--the planet is
used to these _débâcles_--but let us not, either as a matter of
mistaken humility or by way of low strategy, pretend that the Huns were
Crusaders!




                        THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH


It is pretty much taken for granted by decent folk that the truth
should be told in all circumstances. “It is never permissible to lie”
has been, ever since the Christian era came in, the common opinion,
if not the common practice. And yet, which one of us has never lied,
I will not say against his conscience, but for the very sake of his
conscience? Conventional religion has been assumed to be our sole
guide, while our actual conduct is usually based on the different,
and more explicit, code of honor. Honor is not religion, though with
real religion it has always been at peace; civilized manners are not
religion, though, again, they have always been at peace with it. In the
matter of lying, both honor and civilized manners have a great deal to
say; and the fact that we realize this subconsciously is responsible
for a great many minor perplexities.

Strictly speaking, in Candide’s “best of possible worlds” lies should
not pass human lips. There are many people who stick to the literal
interpretation of the precept: ladies, for example, who retire to
the back porch before they permit their maids to tell the unwelcome
caller that they are “out.” There, presumably, they gaze at the blue
sky, and congratulate themselves on their unimpeachable veracity. Yet
even scrupulous people allow their servants to say they are out when
they are in, because “out” is conventionally understood to mean many
things. On the other hand, Mr. Chesterton tells us that, under certain
conditions, mere silence is the most damnable lie of all. The matter is
not so simple as it seems: its intricacies may become a morass for the
unwary, and an enchanted garden for the casuist.

Very few people, I fancy, would say, after deliberation, that no lie
was ever justified. To be sure, I once heard a serious young man
protest that Shakespeare had damned Desdemona by allowing her, at her
last gasp, to exculpate Othello. I have also known people who objected
vehemently to the late Mark Twain because he said so many things that
were not so. But there are occasions when lies are taken for granted,
even by the law. A man on trial for his life is supposed to tell the
truth, but not if it will incriminate him. A wife is not dragged to
the witness-stand against her will to testify against her husband--no
one would legitimately expect anything but perjury from her. I do
not see much difference between legally permitting a man to say “Not
guilty” when he is guilty, and legally permitting him to lie. Is there
any solitary maiden lady who would not willingly give the midnight
marauder to understand that her husband was just coming down the
stairs, armed to the teeth? A man is not supposed, except by an extinct
type of Puritan, to “give away” the lady who has made sacrifices for
him; and even the extinct type of Puritan would hardly expect you
to tell your hostess that her dinner-party had been dull. From this
heterogeneous group of examples, one may infer that there are lies and
lies; and while it is never permissible to lie, it is sometimes quite
unpermissible to do anything else.

Most lies of the decenter sort are social. “The admixture of a lie doth
ever give pleasure,” said the moralist Bacon. There is certainly very
little defence for the lie that does not give pleasure. It is to save
other people’s feelings, not our own, that we tell lies. Let me put a
case quite bluntly. How, without lying, is a man to thank his small
niece properly for the necktie which she has selected for his Christmas
present? No one wants merely to be thanked for one’s trouble; every
one wants to be told that his taste has been perfect. Now that the
late Phillips Brooks’s handsome evasion of fact has become historic,
who ever dares _not_ to praise a baby explicitly? I confess that
it goes against the grain with me to say that I have enjoyed something
which I have detested; and I have frequently accepted invitations
(especially over the telephone) because my tongue would not twist
itself round the phrase “another engagement” when the other engagement
was non-existent. But I have never had the slightest compunction about
saying that I was sorry I had another engagement, when I did have
another engagement and was not sorry.

I know only one person whom I could count on not to indulge herself in
these conventional falsehoods, and she has never been able, so far as
I know, to keep a friend. The habit of literal truth-telling, frankly,
is self-indulgence of the worst. Nothing could be more delightful,
in an evil sense, than telling certain people that their Christmas
presents, their babies, and their hospitalities are all horrors which
defy description; especially if one could count it a virtue to one’s
self to say those things starkly. But one cannot keep that weapon only
for one’s foes: the only excuse for saying inexcusable things is that
one always says them. Roughly speaking, one’s friends are the people
of whom one thinks, habitually, pleasant things. But even friends can
be annoying, or unbeautiful, or dull. And it is of the essence of
those manners which are morals not to tell them so if one can help it.
“Faithful are the wounds of a friend”--and must sometimes be dealt.
But no stabbing over non-essentials! And above all, no stabbing when
it is a pleasure to stab. Sometimes these truth-tellers congratulate
themselves that their praise is immensely enhanced by its rarity.
There, I fancy, they are mistaken: for in the first place, praise
that is too long on the way loses its savor; and in the second, they
acquire, I have noticed, a censorious habit of mind that prevents them
from praising at all.

No: in the course of mere conventional living, a certain amount of
lying must be done. “How do you do?” “I am very well, thank you.”
You may have indigestion, and in that case you have lied. Yet is it
your business to make your acquaintance uncomfortable by telling him
the facts in the case? Certain things are true of any man personally
which have nothing to do with his social existence: personally, if
he has a toothache, he has it; socially, he has not a toothache
unless he mentions it. Then, there are lies which are not verbal at
all--lies of implication. The early Puritans who objected to paint and
powder, objected to them, I fancy, on perfectly Catholic grounds--it
was immoral to make yourself attractive, and paint and powder were
literally meretricious. On the same principle, to this day, a nun cuts
off her hair. The modern feeling against paint and powder--for it
does in some quarters survive--is rather, I imagine, on the score of
dishonesty. You are not supposed to disguise a beautiful complexion
if you really have it. But if you have not a good complexion, you are
deceiving people--you are acting a lie--by making yourself look as if
you had. The ground of the objection has shifted.

Some author--is it Mr. Kipling?--says of one of his heroines that
she was as honest as her own front teeth. I know a great many people
who are as honest as their own front teeth are false; and certainly
no one expects them to go about calling attention to the skill of
their dentist. Perhaps some sophist will say that between wearing
false hair and declaring one’s false hair to be one’s own, there is
all the difference in the world. I protest that it is tacit falsehood
to wear it at all--unless one does it after the fashionless fashion
of an ancient lady I knew in my childhood who, quite bald at the age
of ninety-five, hung two wads of chestnut hair across her head, like
saddle-bags, on a black velvet ribbon. And such tacit falsehoods are
all in the spirit of the conventional politeness we use daily. To
rouge a pale face may be vanity; but to thank a stupid hostess for the
pleasure she has not given, is loving one’s neighbor as one’s self. I
am inclined to think that even rouge is more often than not altruistic
in intention. One does not wish, for the sake of society, to be either
a fright or a brute. Certain things are demanded of every man who meets
the world on its own ground. From the moment he has “accepted with
pleasure,” he has agreed to play the game; and it is as unfair of him
to give or take the wrong cues as it would be for the castle to insist
on making the knight’s move. No: we need not go out of our way to lie;
but we must not, even to be clever, tell the truth when an innocent
lie is innocently demanded of us.

It occurs to me that my examples of conventional falsehood are largely
feminine. So, I fancy, they should be. One of the reasons, surely,
why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is
that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them. A
man expects his wife to do this kind of thing for him. It is she who
accepts or refuses their common invitations, directs their joint social
manœuvres, encounters the world for them both on the purely social
side. He is not expected to do it any more than he is expected to order
the dinner. There is more straight-from-the-shoulder talk, I imagine,
among men by themselves than among women by themselves; but that is
partly because women slip out of the social harness less frequently and
less easily. A man among men is perhaps (I speak under correction) more
inveterately his personal self; a woman among women more inveterately
her social self. It may be that it is easier to wear the harness
constantly than to gall one’s shoulders afresh each day with putting
it on. I am inclined to think that women are as honest with their
intimate friends as are men; but--they have had an age-long training
in the penalties of making one’s self unpleasant. So many low motives
are imputed to women--and most of them, at the present day, quite
unjustly--that they are driven to the lesser mendacities for the sake
of getting some justice done them. When Mr. A. asks Mrs. B. if she does
not think Mrs. C. beautiful, she is almost bound to say that she does,
though she does not. Otherwise, she will be taken for a jealous fool.
One lie is better than two; and it is better to be thought a fool when
you are not, than jealous and a fool when you are neither.

Comparatively few people, however, will cavil at these mendacities,
which are indeed ψευδῆ ἀψευδῆ--as mechanical and uncalculated as a
gentleman’s “I beg your pardon” when a lady has insisted on colliding
with him in the street. Truth is not so difficult to bound on that
side; for most people recognize the social exigency, and if you
are praising some one’s unskilful cook on one day, the chances are
that she will be congratulating you on your amateur gardening the
next. We simply have to be polite, as our race and clime understand
politeness; and no one except a _naïf_ is really going to take
this sort of thing seriously. It is perhaps regrettable that we do not
carry courtesy even further; for nothing makes people so worthy of
compliments as occasionally receiving them. One is more delightful for
being told one is delightful--just as one is more angry for being told
one is angry. Let us pass, however, to more debatable ground.

There is an old refrain which runs, “Ask me no questions, I’ll
tell you no lies.” I am inclined to think that it is full of social
philosophy. Most of us, probably, have put up our hardest fights for
veracity on occasions when questions have been asked us that never
should have been asked. “Refuse to answer,” says the ghost of that
extinct Puritan whom we have evoked. An absurd counsel: for, as we all
know, to most of these questions no answer is the most explicit answer
of all. If the Devil has given you wit enough, you may contrive to
keep the letter of the commandment. But usually that does not happen.
I dare say many moralists will not agree with me; but I hold that a
question put by some one who has no right, from any point of view, to
the information demanded, deserves no truth. If a casual gossip should
ask me whether my unmarried great-aunt lived beyond her means, I should
feel justified in saying that she did not, although it might be the
private family scandal that she did. There are inquiries which are a
sort of moral burglary. The indiscreet questioner--and by indiscreet
questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man’s duty
either to the community or to any individual to answer--is a marauder,
and there is every excuse for treating him as such. I am sure that
every reader remembers, in his own experience, such questions, and
counts among his acquaintance at least one such questioner. Let him say
whether, in these conditions, he has felt it his moral duty to hand
over information, any more than he would consider it his moral duty to
hand over his plate to a thief. I am not speaking of cases where the
temptation to lie is merely the temptation to save one’s face: it is
not permissible to lie merely to save one’s face. But it is sometimes
permissible to lie to save another person’s face--as it was pardonable,
surely, in Desdemona to declare that Othello had not murdered her.

In regard to the lie of exaggeration, a word should perhaps
parenthetically be said. We all know the child who has seen two
elephants in the garden eating the roses. We also know the delightful
grown-up who “embroiders” his narratives. He will never tell the same
adventure twice with the same details. The fact remains that he may
each time leave you with precisely the same impression of the adventure
in its entirety. It is quite possible that you trust him exceedingly.
Of course it is also possible that his _ben trovato_ is never
_vero_. You will have to determine after long experience of him
whether he is fundamentally false, or merely has a sense of style.
Personally, I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are
only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives
are only lies. There is a subtle distinction between the two. At the
risk of being at loggerheads with the rhetoricians, one must say
that truth goes deeper than words, and that there is not much in a
truthfulness which is only phrase-deep.

The old ladies who are shivering on the back porch will disapprove of
me for saying these things, almost as much as I disapprove of them
for being on the back porch. To speak frankly, I have not found that
the people who cling to the letter are always the people who cling to
the spirit of the law. Some of the men and women who will not say in
so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false
impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites
of truth. The ladies I have referred to may be technically “out”; but
they are really “out” only to the undesired visitor--exactly as much
as if they had stopped in their own sitting-rooms. (Remember, please,
that I am not speaking of the people who receive the unwelcome caller
rather than permit a maid to fib--they are in a very different case.)
I should not instinctively go to these people for an accurate account
of a serious situation. Any one whose conscience is satisfied with that
kind of loyalty to fact knows very little about the spirit of truth.

I do not jeer at literal accuracy: I think it an excellent safeguard
for all of us. The person who has never indulged in a literal falsehood
is the less likely to have indulged in a real one. Generally speaking,
words follow facts with a certain closeness. Not always, however. I
may truthfully say that my teeth are my own, if I have paid for them;
but I shall none the less give a wrong impression to the engaging
creature who has asked me if they are false. Substitute serious
equivalents for that kind of veracious reply, and you will see what I
mean. I am not at all sure that, where there is room for doubt, the
people I have cited will not largely take the benefit of the doubt
to themselves. I am not sure, for example, that the formula “I will
not tell any one” stands to them for anything but a fallible human
prophecy--something apt to be set at naught by the God who maketh
diviners mad. I strongly suspect that mere loyalty will never make them
hold their tongues. And I am quite sure that they will often be silent
when silence is the most damnable lie of all. For, in their technical
sense, silence can never be a lie.

In this short distance, we have come near to the heart of the matter.
Remember that the only lie forbidden in the Decalogue is false witness
against one’s neighbor. I may feel real respect for the lady on the
porch--when I think that it may be hailing, I feel positive awe--but I
should not like to make her the recipient of an intimate confidence.
Such a person is wholly at the mercy of the unscrupulous. To be, for
one’s self, at the mercy of the unscrupulous, suggests, I admit, the
saint; to be, for one’s friends, at the mercy of the unscrupulous,
suggests the cad. It is not, for the normal person, a pleasant thing
to lie: it is much easier to record the truth quite automatically.
There is in each of us who have been decently brought up a natural
antipathy to saying “the thing which is not.” The basis of truth is so
much the finest basis on which to meet one’s fellow-men! I have much
sympathy with the unpopular people who cannot bring themselves, even in
a ball-room, to “play the game.” Of all ugly things to be, perhaps a
liar is the ugliest. And yet, and yet--We may not go into Victor Hugo’s
rapture over the nun in _Les Misérables_ who gave the mendacious
answer to Javert; but which of us wishes she had told the inspector
that Jean Valjean was actually in the room? Fortunately, such crucial
instances are rare; and usually we can benefit our friends most by
telling the truth about them--if it were not so, they would not be
beloved. It is a poor cause which has to be lied for regularly. But in
the rare case like that of Sœur Simplice, let us hope that we, too,
should lie, and be as sure as she of making our peace with Heaven.

For one’s self alone, it is a question whether any lie could bring such
luxury as that of telling the simple truth. To lie to save one’s self
is the mark of the beast; to lie to save another person may make one
distrust the cosmos, but at least it is a purer fault. For it seems
to be agreed on by all codes that the unselfish motive is a mightily
purging element. On the whole, I should say that the person who likes
to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the
lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.

Perhaps the greatest conflict for Puritan youth has always come when it
faced for the first time the unfamiliar shape of Honor. Honor and John
Calvin have fought on many a strange battlefield for the young soul,
and the young soul must often have wondered which was friend and which
was foe.

  Honour and wit, foredamned they sit,

sings Kipling in an atavistic moment. Which of us has not at some time
or other shudderingly understood him? And yet it is only the fortuitous
trappings of Honor which can so disturb. For the truest thing about
Honor is that, like Charity, it “seeks not itself”; and Honor in the
mediæval sense was the darling child of the Church. Honor does not
break its word; it protects the weak against itself, and against
others; it keeps its engagements. It is more immediately concerned with
its duty to humanity than with its duty to God; which is doubtless
why the Puritan mystic saw it as a foe. The code of honor is the
etiquette-book of the Christian; and the people who have attacked it
are the people who have considered that Christians needed no etiquette.
By our ancestors who were bred in the cold and windy times of the
Reformation it was held to deal chiefly with duelling, gaming, and
illicit affairs. “The debt of honor,” “the affair of honor”--what do
even these corrupted phrases mean except that the gentleman has found
more ways to bind himself than the laws of the land afford? I do not
know that Honor ever compelled a man to gamble or to provoke a quarrel;
but if he has gambled or if he has quarrelled--if he has undertaken to
play the lamentable game--he must not skulk behind a policeman, like
a cry-baby or a _sans-culotte_, because things have not gone his
way. If he has broken, he must pay.

Part of the code of honor begins only when the Christian precept has
been broken. Is it so bad a thing, in a fallible world, to be told
what to do after you have once done something wrong? The Catechism,
as a practical guide, is wofully incomplete without the code of the
gentleman as an appendix. If you had sinned, the Puritan told you to
repent; and he was quite right. But there is work left for the sinner
after the repenting has been done. Both Honor and the Catechism will do
their best to keep you out of a mess. The difference comes later: for
after you have got into a mess, the Catechism leaves you to God, while
Honor shows you how, if you have done ill to fellow beings, to repair
that ill and not extend it.

Honor is a matter of practical politics--frightfully unpractical
politics, in another sense, they often are. A cynical young woman once
said to me that she found cads more interesting than gentlemen, because
you could always tell what a gentleman would do in a given situation,
whereas you could never tell, in any situation, what a cad would do.
Cads may or may not be the proper sport of cynical young women; but to
the average busy creature the gentleman is wholly delightful in that he
is wholly predicable. The Christian is not predicable, for the simple
reason that he has been given a counsel of perfection. You know that
any given Christian will, by the day of his majority, have done some,
at least, of the things which the Catechism has expressly warned him
not to do. “The way that can be walked upon is not the perfect way,”
said Laotse long ago. The Church does not believe that you have always
done everything that your sponsors in baptism so cheerfully said you
would do. The confessional is itself the greatest confession that the
Church has ever made. One of the most convenient things about Honor is
that its explicit code is limited; and you can say of some men when
they die that they have never for a moment ceased to be gentlemen.
Honor is of the world, worldly--and some people have distorted that
magnificent fact into an accusation. That is what Mr. Kipling has done
in “Tomlinson.”

All this about Honor is not so much a digression as an approach.
For if few people will quarrel with the lies of implication and of
convention, and most people pray to be delivered from the lie of
self-defence, the lie “of obligation” cannot be juggled away; and it is
the lie of obligation which Honor commands. Honor has never permitted,
still less commanded, a lie for personal gain or satisfaction of any
kind; but there are cases when the gentleman must lie if he is to be
a gentleman. The gentleman does not betray the friend who has trusted
him, even though he may bitterly object to having that friend’s
secrets on his hands. From that supreme obligation lies sometimes of
necessity result. I said just now that Honor and John Calvin must often
have fought for the young soul; and it does not take an over-vivid
imagination to conceive cases. Religion (in spite of the Decalogue)
has tended to lump all lies together as the offspring of the Devil,
while the code of the gentleman has always set aside a few lies as
consecrated and _de rigueur_. But the gentleman, I venture to
say, has always told those lies in the spirit in which a man lays down
his life for his friend. For no gentleman lies, on any occasion, with
unmixed pleasure. He feels, rather, as if he had put on rags.

It is easier--as some sociologists do--to plot the curves of a
desire than to fix the boundaries of truth. The domain of truth
is not world-wide: that, we know. They must be home-keepers
indeed--perpetually cradled--who need never lie. Literal truth is
imprisoned in a palace, like the Pope in the Vatican, affecting to be
the ruler of the world. Even the faithful know that the claim is vain.
The lies of obligation and convention are not, in the deepest sense,
unveracious; for they are not pre-eminently intended to deceive. We
expect them of other civilized beings and expect other civilized beings
to expect them of us. Speaking such falsehoods, and such falsehoods
only, we are still on truth’s own ground. The lie told for the liar’s
own sake marks the moment when a man has passed from beneath her
standard, across her shadowy sphere of influence, and is already
hot-foot into the jungle.




                       MISS ALCOTT’S NEW ENGLAND


I remember being very much impressed--and not a little shocked--when
a friend of mine told me that she had never, in her childhood, been
able to get any real pleasure out of Louisa Alcott’s stories. It had
never occurred to me that being brought up in New York instead of in
New England, or even being of Southern instead of Pilgrim stock, could
make all that difference. Miss Alcott seemed the safe inheritance,
the absolutely inevitable delight, of childhood. _Little Women_
was as universal as _Hamlet_. I remembered perfectly that French
playmates of mine in Paris had loved _Les Quatre Filles du Docteur
March_ (though the French version was probably somewhat expurgated).
If children of a Latin--moreover, of a Royalist and Catholic--tradition
could find no flaw in Miss Alcott’s presentment of young life, I
could not see why any free-born American child should fail to find it
sympathetic.

I questioned my friend more closely. Her answer set me thinking; and it
is probably to her that I owe my later appreciation of Miss Alcott’s
special quality and special documentary value. For what my friend
said was simply that the people in the books were too underbred for
her to get any pleasure out of reading about them. My friend was not,
when I knew her, a snob; and I took it that she had made the criticism
originally at a much earlier age. All children are as snobbish as they
know how to be; and I fancy that the child’s perennial delight in
fairy-tales is not due solely to the epic instinct. One is interested
in princes and princesses, when one is eight, simply because they are
princes and princesses. Of royalty, one is perfectly sure. I have never
known a child who did not prefer the goose-girl to be a princess in
disguise, or who felt any real sympathy with the princess who was only
a disguised goose-girl. You do not have to expound the Divine Right to
any one under twelve. Peasants are an acquired taste; and socialism is
an illusion of age.

Out of such axioms as these, I made my explanation of my friend’s
heterodoxy. I remembered my own reaction, when very young, on a story
that centred in a masked ball to which all the inhabitants of the
kingdom were bidden. All the milkmaids went as court ladies, and all
the court ladies went as milkmaids--a mere rounding out of the Petit
Trianon episode. The moral was obvious; and I recall being frightfully
disturbed by my own absolute certainty that, if I had been going to
a masked ball, I should, without hesitation, have gone as grandly
as I possibly could. I should never have gone as a milkmaid, so long
as the costumer had a court train left. Did it perhaps mean that I
was, on the whole, nearer to the milkmaid than to the court lady? I
did not like the story, but I have never, to this day, forgotten it.
Perhaps my friend had been of the same age when she discriminated
against Miss Alcott. But then, I and my contemporaries had made no
such discrimination. As I say, it set me to thinking. Since then, I
have read Miss Alcott over, not once, but many times, and I think I
understand.

The astounding result of re-reading Miss Alcott at a mature age is a
conviction that she probably gives a better impression of mid-century
New England than any of the more laborious reconstructions, either
in fiction or in essay. The youth of her characters does not hinder
her in this; for childhood, supremely, takes life ready-made. Mr.
Howells’s range is wider, and he is at once more serious and more
detached. Technically, he and Miss Alcott can be compared as little as
_Madame Bovary_ and the _Bibliothèque Rose_. Yet, although
their testimonies often agree, his world does not “compose” as hers
does. It may be his very realism--his wealth of differentiating detail,
his fidelity to the passing moment--that makes his early descriptions
of New England so out of date, so unrecognizable. Miss Alcott is
content to be typical. All her people have the same background, live
in the same atmosphere, profess the same ideals. Moreover, they were
ideals and an atmosphere that imposed themselves widely during their
period. Mr. Howells gives us modern instances in plenty, but nowhere
does he give us clearly the quintessential New England village. It
is precisely the familiar experiences of life in that quintessential
village that Miss Alcott gives us, with careless accuracy, without
_arrière-pensée_. And it must be remembered that, in spite of Dr.
Holmes’s brave and appropriating definitions of aristocracy, and the
urbanity which the descendants of our great New Englanders would fain
persuade us their ancestors possessed, our great New Englanders were
essentially villagers, and that the very best thing to be said of them
is that they wrought out village life to an almost Platonic perfection
of type. “Town” will not do to express the Boston, the Cambridge,
the Salem, the Concord, of an earlier time: it smacks too much of
London--and freedom. The Puritans founded villages; and, spiritually
speaking, the villages that they founded are villages still. The
village that Miss Alcott knew best was Concord; and if, for our present
purpose, we find it convenient to call Concord typical of New England,
we shall certainly not be doing New England any injustice.

As I say, what strikes one on first re-reading her, is the
extraordinary success with which she has given us our typical New
England. Some of her books, obviously, are less successful in this
way than others--_Under the Lilacs_, for example, or _Jack
and Jill_, where (one cannot but agree with her severer critics)
there is an inexcusable amount of love-making. There is an equally
inexcusable amount of love-making, it is interesting to remember, in
much of the earlier Howells. But for contemporary record of manners and
morals, you will go far before you match her masterpiece, _Little
Women_. What Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, and Laurie do not teach us about
life in New England at a certain time, we shall never learn from any
collected edition of the letters of Emerson, Thoreau, or Hawthorne.

The next--and equally astounding--result of re-reading Miss Alcott
was, for me, the unexpected and not wholly pleasant corroboration of
what my friend had said about her characters. They were, in some ways,
underbred. Bronson Alcott (or shall we say Mr. March?) quotes Plato in
his family circle; but his family uses inveterately bad grammar. “Don’t
talk about ‘labelling’ Pa, as if he was a pickle-bottle!”--thus Jo
chides her little sister for a malapropism. Bad grammar we might expect
from Jo, as a wilful freak; but should we expect the exquisite Amy (any
little girl will tell you how exquisite Amy is supposed to be) to
write to her father from Europe, about buying gloves in Paris, “Don’t
that sound sort of elegant and rich?”

The bad grammar, in all the books, is constant. And yet, I know of no
other young people’s stories, anywhere, wherein the background is so
unbrokenly and sincerely “literary.” Cheap literature is unsparingly
satirized; Plato and Goethe are quoted quite as every-day matters; and
“a metaphysical streak had unconsciously got into” Jo’s first novel. In
_The Rose in Bloom_, Miss Alcott misquotes Swinburne, to be sure,
but she does it in the interest of morality; and elsewhere Mac quotes
other lines from the same poet correctly. Of course, we all remember
that Emerson’s _Essays_ helped on, largely, Mac’s wooing--if,
indeed, they did not do the whole trick. And has there ever been an
“abode of learning”--to slip, for a moment, into the very style of
_Jo’s Boys_--like unto Plumfield, crowned by “Parnassus”? After
all, too, we must remember how familiarly even those madcaps, Ted
and Josie, bandied about the names of Greek gods. The boys and girls
who scoff at the simple amusements of Miss Alcott’s young heroes and
heroines are, alack! not so much at home with classical mythology
as the young people they despise. Yet, as I say, the bad grammar is
everywhere--even in the mouths of the educators.

Breeding is, of course, not merely a matter of speech; and I fancy
that my friend referred even more specifically to their manners--their
morals being unimpeachable. Miss Alcott’s people are, as the author
herself says of them, unworldly. They are even magnificently so;
and they score the worldly at every turn. You remember Mrs. March’s
strictures on the Moffats? and Polly’s justifiable criticisms of Fanny
Shaw’s friends? and Rose’s utter lack of snobbishness about Phœbe,
the little scullery-maid, who eventually was brought up with her? Of
course, Archie’s mother objects, at first, to his marrying Phœbe, but
she is soon reconciled--and apologetic.

Granted their unworldliness, their high scale of moral values, where,
then, is the trace of vulgarity that is needed to make breeding bad?
They pride themselves on their separation from all vulgarity. “My
mother is a lady,” Polly reflects, “even if”--even if she is not rich,
like the Shaws. The March girls are always consoling themselves for
their vicissitudes by the fact that their parents are gentle-folk.
Well, they are underbred in precisely the way in which, one fancies,
the contemporaries of Emerson in Concord may well have been underbred.
It is the “plain living” side of the “high thinking.” They despised
externals, and, in the end, externals had their revenge. Breeding,
as such, is simply not a product of the independent village. (Some
one may mention Cranford; but you cannot call Cranford independent,
with its slavish adherence to the etiquette of the Honourable Mrs.
Jamieson, its constant awed reference to Sir Peter Arley and the
“county families.”) The villagers have not--and who supposes that
Bronson Alcott and Thoreau had it?--the gift of civilized contacts. A
contact, be it remembered, is not quite the same thing as a relation.
Manners are a natural growth of courts. Recall any mediæval dwelling
of royalty; then imagine life lived in those cramped chambers, in
the perpetual presence of superiors and inferiors alike--and lived
informally!

In Miss Alcott’s world, all that is changed. According to the older
tradition, a totally unchaperoned youth would mean lack of breeding.
Here, on the contrary, all the heroines are unchaperoned, while the
match-making mamma is anathema. We did not cut off King Charles’s head
for nothing. The reward of the unchaperoned daughter is to make a good
match. In that rigid school, conventions are judged--and nobly enough,
Heaven knows!--from the point of view of morals alone (of absolute, not
of historic or evolutionary morals) and many conventions are thereby
damned. The result is a little like what one has heard of contemporary
Norway. “Underbred” is very likely too strong a word; yet one does
see how the social state described in _Little Women_ might
easily shock any one brought up in a less provincial tradition. There
is too much love-making, for example. Though sweethearting between
five-year-olds is frowned on, sweethearting between fifteen-year-olds
is quite the thing. In real life, it would not always be safe to
marry, very young, your first playmate. Any one who has lived in the
more modern New England village knows perfectly well that people still
marry, very young, their first playmates, and that disaster often
results. Nor can Una always depend on the protection of a lion that is
necessarily invisible. Granted that Jo’s precocious sense was right,
and that it would have been a mistake for her to marry Laurie; which of
us believes that, in real life, she would not have made the mistake?
You cannot depend on young things in their teens to foresee the future
of their temperaments accurately. One cannot but feel that if Mrs.
March really saw the complete unfitness of those two for each other, it
was her duty to put a few conventional obstacles in their path.

Perhaps all this was part of what my friend meant by lack of breeding
in the traditional sense: the social _laissez-aller_ in
extraordinary (and perhaps not eternally maintainable?) combination
with moral purity. But I suspect that she referred, as well, to another
aspect of Miss Alcott’s environment: to the unmistakable lack of the
greater and lesser amenities of life. The plain living is quite as
prominent as the high thinking. The whole tissue of the March girls’
lives is a very commonplace fabric. You know that their furniture was
bad--and that they did not know it; that their æsthetic sense was
untrained and crude--and that they did not care; that the simplicity
of their meals, their household service, their dress, their every day
manners (in spite of the myth about Amy) was simplicity of the common,
not of the intelligent, kind. You really would not want to spend a week
in the house of any one of them. Nor had their simplicity in any wise
the quality of austerity. Remember the pies that the older March girls
carried for muffs (the management whereof was one of the ever unsolved
riddles of my childhood).

No: in so far as breeding is a matter of externals, one must admit that
there is some sense in calling Miss Alcott’s people underbred. Perhaps
we do not choose to call breeding a matter of externals. In that, we
should perfectly agree with Miss Alcott’s people themselves; and to
that we shall presently come. For what is incontrovertible is that Miss
Alcott’s work is a genuine document.

I have spoken of the unimpeachable morality of Miss Alcott’s world.
Charlie lost Rose for having drunk one glass of champagne too much.
That is the worst sin committed in any of the books, so far as I
remember. Of course, the black sheep, Dan, had been in prison; but he
had killed his man inevitably, almost helplessly, in self-defence;
and besides, the treatment of Dan is purely snobbish, from start to
finish. Even Mrs. Jo, while she stands by him, is acutely conscious of
the social difference between him and her own kin. The moment he lifts
his eyes to Bess--! No: the books are quite snobbish enough, in their
way. Nat, foundling and fiddler, is permitted to marry Daisy in the end
(though, really, anybody might have married Daisy!). But Nat, though
a _parvenu_, is a milk-sop, and is quite able to say that he has
never done anything really disgraceful. The fact is that their social
distinctions, while they operate socially, are yet all moral in origin.
And this is a very “special” note: the bequest, it may well be, of
Calvin.

  We’re the elect, and you’ll be damned;
  Hell, like a wallet, shall be crammed
        With God’s own reprobates.

The transcendental Mr. March would never have sung it; but he and his
knew something akin to those resolute discriminations.

Another point is perhaps even more interesting. There are not, I
believe, any other books in the world so blatantly full of morality--of
moral issues, and moral tests, and morals passionately abided by--and
at the same time so empty of religion. The Bible is never quoted;
almost no one goes to church; and they pray only when very young and
in extreme cases. The only religious allusion, so far as I know,
in _Little Women_, is the patronizing mention of the Madonna
provided for Amy by Aunt March’s Catholic maid. And even then, you
can see how broad-minded Mrs. March considers herself, to permit Amy
the quasi-oratory; and Amy does not attempt to disguise the fact that
she admires the picture chiefly for its artistic quality. Yet it is
only fair to remember that, in Miss Alcott’s day, people were reading,
without so much as one grain of salt, the confessions of “escaped”
nuns, and the novels of Mrs. Julia McNair Wright--and that Elsie
Dinsmore developed brain fever when her father threatened to send her
to a convent school. Perhaps Mrs. March had a right to flatter herself.
Again, as I say, these are documents.

There are many other straws to show which way the wind blows. Would
any one but Miss Alcott, for example, have allowed her chief heroine
to marry a Professor Bhaer? No modern child ever quite recovers from
the shock of it. But we must remember that, in Miss Alcott’s time,
German metaphysicians were not without honor in Concord. The breath of
reform, too, is hot upon the pages. “Temperance”--remember Charlie’s
unlucky glass of champagne, and Laurie’s promise to Meg on her
wedding-day; the festivals of the virtuous are a perpetual bath of
lemonade. “Woman Suffrage”--recall the discussions alluded to in “The
Pickwick Portfolio,” and the fate of the few scoffers in co-educational
Plumfield. The children are all passionate little Abolitionists;
and the youths are patriotic with a fervid, unfamiliar patriotism,
which touches, at its dim source, emotions that to us are almost more
prehistoric than historic.

In the minds of Miss Alcott’s world, there is still a lively distrust
of the British. They are wont to oppress their colonies, and they cheat
at croquet. Indeed, Miss Alcott’s characters look a little askance
at all foreigners--except German professors. There is no prophecy of
the Celtic Revival in their condescending charity to poor Irishwomen.
The only people, not themselves, whom they wholly respect, are the
negroes. The rich men are nearly all East India merchants, and their
money goes eventually to endow educational institutions. The young
heroes have a precocious antipathy to acquiring wealth for its own
sake. Demi would rather, he says, sweep door-mats in a publishing-house
than go into business, like “Stuffy” and his kind. “I would rather be a
door-keeper in the house of the Lord”--it would hardly over-emphasize
Demi’s so typical feeling for the sanctity of the printed page; for
the utter desirability of the publisher’s own office, where, as he
says, great men go in and out, with respect. And--to complete the
evidence--the books do not lack the note of New English austerity,
though they come by it indirectly enough. The New English literary
tradition seems to be fairly clear: either passion must be public, or,
if it is private, it must be thwarted. There is a good deal of public
passion--for philanthropy, for education, and what-not--in the books,
after all. There is no private passion at all: though the books brim
with sentiment. Miss Alcott writes as one who had never loved. It would
be difficult to find, anywhere, stories so full of love-making and so
empty of emotion.

Straws show which way the wind blows; and these straws are all borne
in the same direction. Is not this the New England on which, if not
in which, we were all brought up? Any honest New Englander--a New
Englander of the villages, I mean--will admit that the New English are
singularly ungifted for social life and manners. We suspected that long
ago, when we first read Miss Alcott, if we happened to turn, after
_Little Women_, to any one of Mrs. Ewing’s or Mrs. Molesworth’s
stories. Imagine Jo dressed, as Mrs. Molesworth’s heroines all were,
by Walter Crane! The real “old-fashioned girl” was not Polly Milton,
but Griselda, in _The Cuckoo Clock_. Polly was simply of no
fashion at all. There was some (wistful?) sense of this in us, even
then. Yet of course we admitted that, in comparison, Mrs. Molesworth
lacked plot--as Heaven knows she did! Any New Englander of the villages
is familiar, too, with the passion for “education”; a passion that,
I suspect, you can match now only in the Middle West. We all know
that bigoted scholarliness, in combination, precisely, with nasal and
ungrammatical speech, which there is no special point in flattering
with the term “idiomatic.” One or two of Mr. Churchill’s novels have
preserved to us instances of it. We are fortunate if we have come off
quite free of the superstition, so prevalent through the March family,
that a book--“any old” book--is sacred. We scoff heartily at the
_parvenu_ whose books are bound without first being printed; but
I am not sure that any pure-bred villager would not rather have sham
books than no books at all. We cannot help it. No other furniture seems
to us quite so good.

We have all been brought up, too, to be moral snobs. New England
mothers must often be put to it to find purely moral grounds for
discriminating against some of the playmates their children would
ignorantly bring home. They must often yearn to say, without
indirection, “I do not wish you to play with the butcher’s little
girl, and her being in your Sunday-school class makes no difference
whatever.” But the real New England mother never does. She must manage
it otherwise; since the only legitimate basis for her discriminations
would be some sort of proof that butchers’ little girls were apt to be
naughty. The respective fates of Nat and Dan are, I dare to say, as
accurate as if they had been recorded by the official investigators of
the Eugenics Society. The lack of religion, some one may object, is
anything but typically New English. Perhaps, a hundred years ago, it
would not have been. And we have not, to be sure, been transcendental
with impunity: we have the Calvinistic Unitarian. But the average
New England conscience has always had a more natural turn for ethics
than for pure piety. Children in Miss Alcott’s books were brought up
like ourselves, to obey their parents. It was Elsie Dinsmore, on her
Southern plantation, who (like a Presbyterian St. Rose of Lima) defied
her father for religion’s sake. Of course we all had to read about
Elsie surreptitiously. We knew that without asking. There was a good
deal of plain thinking, as well as of high thinking, in our and Miss
Alcott’s world. As for our unworldliness: we have come a long way since
Miss Alcott; yet I verily believe that, even now, almost any bounder
can take us in if he poses as a philosopher. So many have done it!

I have not done more than indicate Miss Alcott’s exceeding fidelity.
Begin recalling her for yourself, and you will agree that she gives us
social life as New Englanders, for decades, have, on the whole, known
it. The relations of parent and child, brother and sister, community
and individual, of playmates, of lovers, of citizens, are all such as
we know them. They are familiar to us, if not positively in our own
experience. Life has grown more complicated everywhere. Yet I doubt if,
even now, any New English child would instinctively call Miss Alcott’s
people underbred. We still understand their code, if we do not practise
it. New England is still something more than a convenient term for
map-makers. These be our own villages.




                            THE SENSUAL EAR


I have a friend who always calls--when he remembers to, for alas! he
sometimes forgets--the Methodist Church building in our village, a
“conventicle.” I wish he did not sometimes forget, for nothing makes
me so at peace with my hereditary nonconformity as to hear an Anglican
imply, by such verbal affectations, what he thinks of the dissidence
of dissent. Methodism is as foreign to me as Anglicanism; yet, I
doubt not, the Epworth League sings, in its handsome “conventicle,”
just the hymns that of old were sung by the Y. P. S. C. E. It is
many a year since I attended a Y. P. S. C. E. meeting; and I have an
idea--it is almost a fear--that _Gospel Hymns, No. 5_, is by this
time _Gospel Hymns, No. 10_, and that some of the most haunting
melodies are gone therefrom. Perhaps the “Endeavorers” are now chanting
_Hymns Ancient and Modern_. But I hope not. Oh, I cannot think it!

When life grows very dreary; when the Hindenburg line seems to turn
from shadow to substance; when the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’
Deputies has indulged in a new “democratic” vagary; when flour has
gone up two dollars more a barrel and the priceless potato is but a
soggy pearl, deserving to be cast before swine; when another member of
the family has broken a leg or had appendicitis--then my husband (he,
too, of yore an “Endeavorer”) and I are wont to burst, simultaneously,
mechanically, unthinking and unconspiring, into song. And the songs we
hear each other humming in separate recesses of the house are _Gospel
Hymns_. Humming, we converge upon the drawing-room from our
different retreats; and sometimes we look each other in the eye and say
hardily, “Let’s.” Then we sit down and incite each other to a desperate
vocalism. We see how many we can remember, out of our evangelistic
youth, and we sing them all. We remember a good many, if truth be told;
and once I found a rapt huddle of colored servants on the stair-landing
getting a free “revival.” Neither of us has a voice worth mentioning,
so I think that we must, without realizing it, have reproduced the
fervor along with the words.

They were cannily arranged, those Moody and Sankey hymns: if you sing
them at all, you cannot help pounding down on the essential words. They
wallow in beat and accent. “A _Shelter_ in the _Time_ of
_Storm_.” We usually begin with that. It is ineluctable. But oh,
how I wish that either of us could remember more than one “verse” of

  Well, wife, I’ve found the model church,
    And worshipped there to-day;
  It made me think of good old times
    Before my hair was gray.

I have never heard it sung--I never “belonged” to the Y. P. S. C.
E.--but my husband says that he has. My husband also says that he
has heard “the trundle-bed one.” I do not believe it, though he is a
truthful man. I cannot believe it; the less, that he remembers none of
the words, and that it is only I, who recall, visually, in the lower
corner of a page,--

  Poking (perhaps it was another verb) ’mid the dust and rafters
      There I found my trundle-bed.

A slight altercation always develops here. Why should he be more
royalist than the king? It is not conceivable that it was ever
_sung_; and even he cannot remember the tune; so we join forces in
“To the Work, to the Work,” or “There Shall Be Showers of Blessing.”

  (Mercy-drops round us are _fall_-ing,
    But for the _showers_ we plead.)

He has an uncanny and inexplicable prejudice against “God Be with You
Till We Meet Again”--perhaps because they always sang it for the last
one. But I can usually get him to “oblige” with a solo--“Throw Out
the Life-Line”--which I am sure was not in “No. 5,” because we never,
never sang it; though I do remember hearing a returning delegate to
a Y. P. S. C. E. convention say that it was the one “the people of
Montreal seemed to like best.” Somewhere in the nineties, Endeavorers
in thousands sang it all up and down Sherbrooke Street, apparently.
Well: I am like the people of Montreal. It always “gets” me, in the
dissenting marrow of my dissenting soul; and when my husband has
“obliged” me with it, I am ready to forget the Council of Workmen’s and
Soldiers’ Deputies. What _can_ the devil do in the face of “Throw
Out the Life-Line,” and its “linked sweetness long drawn out”?

By all of which it is made evident that, in the matter of hymns, mine
is the “sensual ear.” (Not so my husband’s: he sings them in the
critical spirit, as he might illustrate a violation of rhetoric. He
loathes “Throw Out the Life-Line,” even while the chorus makes his
voice appeal and yearn in spite of him. As I said, he does it only to
oblige.) The church of my choosing, if not of my profession, is the
same as that of my friend who talks of “conventicles.” There I sing
_Hymns Ancient and Modern_ (or that American corruption thereof,
the _Hymnal_) with the most conforming. And certainly, except
for a few time-honored chants which they share with all Dissenters,
their hymns are to me “ditties of no tone.” My husband disagrees with
me; but he is not, equally with me, the predestined prey of the brass
band. He is better educated than I; has listened oftener at twilight
to the enchanted choirs of New College and Magdalen. He likes the
non-committal melodies of the _Hymnal_ far, far better than the
sentimental _parti pris_ of _Gospel Hymns_.

I know as well as he does that the sentimental quality is of a sort
that ought not to be there at all. I know that the music of “Throw
Out the Life-Line” belongs morally with the music of “Old Black
Joe,” and “Oh, Promise Me,” and “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old
Town To-night.” I know that the appeal of that tune is sensuous and
emotional and personal, and, for a hymn, all, all wrong. I realize
that, for church, Gregorian is the only wear; and that the less you
diverge therefrom, the more decent you are. I, too, prefer Bach and
Palestrina, and, for congregational singing, the oldest Latin hymns you
can get. I can even see that the aridity and sameness of the Anglican
“hymn-tunes” are more dignified, and more to the purpose, than the
plangent and catchy refrains by which Sankey lured “wandering boys”
back to be safe-folded with “the ninety and nine.” And yet, when my
husband (by request) croons “Throw Out the Life-Line,” I cannot resist.
I am evangelized.

True, I perceived this perniciousness early. Perhaps the white light
dawned on me when, in Y. P. S. C. E. days, an older friend (who was in
love) confided to me that the words of a certain Gospel Hymn seemed to
her not altogether reverent: they could so easily be applied to a human
love-affair. She was quite right, I think. Some of us have felt the
same about Crashaw and Giles Fletcher. But though the words were, in
all conscience, carnal enough, I believe it was the tune that did the
trick and set her dreaming of her young hero.

  For I am his, and he is mine,
    Forever and forever.

Oh, the yearning of that refrain: slow and honeyed and melancholy
as “My Old Kentucky Home” or “Way Down Upon the Suwanee River”!
Musically, doubtless, not so good; but musically of the same school,
and suggestive--it, too--of plantations and moonlight and banjos and
rich, heart-rending negro voices. My friend was right: they are not
in the best tradition of reverence, those Moody and Sankey hymns. And
yet--here’s the rub--why do we remember them, when all but the most
universal of the hymns we sang in church and sang much oftener than
these, have gone beyond recapturing? My husband resents remembering
them; he would far rather remember more worthy things. But I do not:
I would not, for anything, lose them out of the rag-bag which is my
mind. I am not sure I would not rather lose certain stanzas from the
Greek Anthology, which come to my lips in much the same unvolitional
fashion. From those refrains I reconstruct a whole moral and social
world, even as Cuvier reconstructed his mastodon. You remember what
the “Evening Hymn” did for Mottram and Lowndes in “The End of the
Passage”? Just that “I Know that My Redeemer Lives” does for me.
And--this is the point--“Rock of Ages” and “Holy, Holy, Holy,” do not
do it; though I knew these even earlier, and am still, on occasion,
singing them. So it is not all a question of association and the power
of youthful memories. It is the very quality of the music--the words
were negligible, when they were not atrocious--that touched in me, and
can still touch, something popular, emotional, vulgar; something very
low-brow and democratic, not to say mobbish. “The sensual ear.”

Even in youth, I had the sense to differentiate. “Jerusalem the
Golden,” discovered in another hymn-book than our own, was for many
years my favorite hymn--even during those years when I was singing
“Beulah Land” and “Wonderful Words of Life.” I knew it was better; I
knew I liked it better; I knew that it had more to do with religion
than all the “Beulah Lands” ever written. True, the words helped; and
the words of the Gospel Hymns were a hindrance, even then. But my soul
recognized the validity, the reality of the music. “Jerusalem the
Golden” remained my favorite until “The Son of God Goes Forth to War”
succeeded it in my affections; always to be, until I die, my very
favorite. And even while we sang--

  And view the shining glory shore,
  My heaven, my home, for evermore.

I had memories of something still better than “Jerusalem the Golden”:
memories of an interval in a French convent where we chanted the
Magnificat to its proper plain-song; Though, even there--but I shall
come to that later.

Not long ago, we had a friend staying with us who was bred a Romanist.
How Moody and Sankey got mentioned, I do not know--but they did; and
our friend insisted that Moody and Sankey could not conceivably be
so bad as the modern Catholic hymns. We exclaimed; she reaffirmed.
There was nothing for it but to put the burning question to the
proof. Quietly, by the fire, we staged a little contest. We sang our
Gospel Hymns; and she--well, she sang dreadful things. There was in
particular a hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodalities.... No, I think
her “exhibit” was really worse than ours. It had the rag-time flatness
without the rag-time catchiness, or the crooning negro quality. Bred
up in part on such modern by-products of the Holy Catholic Church, no
wonder that she succumbed utterly to my husband’s rendition of “Throw
Out the Life-Line.” “I think it’s lovely,” she said; siding with me, to
his great chagrin. How I wished that our friend of the “conventicles”
were there to decide between us--he who in his youth was forbidden to
accompany his friends to Y. P. S. C. E. meetings as he might have been
forbidden to go to dime-museums. But he has no ear--“sensual” or other.
Perhaps he could not have helped.

Our Catholic friend’s exhibit gave me pause. I knew that in France
they sing, nowadays, hymns unworthy of Gothic architecture. Not so
many years ago, in a beautiful French cathedral which I was by way of
frequenting, I heard the children of some sodality or con-fraternity
pouring forth as poor a piece of holy rag-time as any conventicle has
ever echoed. It jerked me back into the past, violently, as Hassan’s
carpet must have jerked its fortunate owner through space.

  Vierge, notre espérance,
      Étends sur nous ton bras.
  Sauve, sauve la France,
      Ne l’abandonne pas,
      Ne l’abandonne pas.

So we sang it, too, at the Assomption, in happier days, each with a
veil and a candle, winding in and out among the green alleys of the
convent park. But the young Tourangeaux went on to sing worse things:
songs less catholic, more evangelical, with words more bitter and tones
more shrill. I escaped, to return only at the hour of Benediction,
when I knew that the “O Salutaris Hostia” and “Tantum Ergo” would mount
again with the incense towards the rich mediæval windows.

I fear it is true, as our Catholic friend said, that the Church has
fallen musically, as it has done architecturally, on evil days. Well:
these shrill and senseless tunes are their equivalent for our Moody and
Sankey. Even in conventicles, we have more dignified hymn-books for
use in “church” as opposed to Sunday-school or Y. P. S. C. E., and the
like. And as our Primary Department (of the Sunday-school) was handed
over to the works of Fanny Crosby (did she write

  Roses in bloom,
  Filling the room.
  With perfume rich and rare.

I wonder? Anyhow, she wrote most of them), so the young Catholics in
both France and America are handed over to the musical divagations of
ill-educated priests. It is a pity; for they have a tradition that
cannot be bettered. _My_ ancestors sang lustily out of the old
_Bay Psalm Book_:

  Ye monsters of the mighty deep,
    Your Maker’s praises spout;
  Up from the sands ye codlings peep.
    And wag your tails about.

But, at the same period, _their_ ancestors were singing the Latin
hymns of the Middle Ages in undegenerate solemnity. It is natural
enough, perhaps, that I should have emerged on “There’s a Light in the
Valley for Me”; but why should they have emerged on “Souvenez-vous,
Jésus,” and the Mariolatrous wailing of “Im-mac-u-late, Im-mac-u-late”?
Take as fine a Protestant hymn as, on the whole, we have inherited--“O
God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Its tune is, to my thinking, bad:
difficult to sing and monotonous to hear. But in the very church that
these poor French infants are innocently desecrating, a few hours, more
or less, see a whole congregation chanting, with passionless and awful
reverence,

 Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo; nec in æternum irascaris nobis.

Whoever has heard that welling slowly from crowded choir, nave, and
transept, the coifed peasant and the trained _séminariste_ singing
in unison (no staginess of part-singing there!), and has joined his
voice to the multitudinous supplication, will not cease to regret that
modern vulgarity is as Catholic as it is Protestant.

It was the most delightful of Huysmans’s perversities to contend, in
all seriousness, that the Devil, driven out of an immemorial haunt of
his own near Lourdes by the advent in that spot of the Blessed Virgin,
took his sullen revenge on the æsthetic sense of her priests. He could
no longer hold his filthy Sabbaths there; but he could and did bewitch
the clergy into making Lourdes a thing of ugliness. Their taste went
wrong with everything they touched in Lourdes; and while Satan could
not prevent the Blessed Virgin from working miracles, he could still
bring it about that the faithful should be healed amid the most hideous
architectural surroundings. Perhaps Huysmans would have credited the
modern Catholic music unhesitatingly to the devil.

But certainly Moody and Sankey were not clerics of Lourdes. Nor could
the Presbyterians who first sang the rhymed version of the Twenty-Third
Psalm to the air of “So bin ich vergessen, vergessen bin ich” be
suspected of any part in the Devil’s private feuds with the Virgin.
Indeed, the particular Presbyterians whom I have heard sing it thus had
not, I fancy, much more reverence for the one than for the other.

I do not think that we can account for _Gospel Hymns No. 5_ by the
Huysmans formula. Even the hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodalities,
is, I believe, mere modern pandering to the uncultured majority:
revivalism in essence, like Moody and Sankey and the Salvation Army
and Billy Sunday. But at least the Catholics have this advantage:
that though they too have indulged in operatic music and have even
sunk to “Vierge, notre espérance,” they still hear from their choirs
the ancient music and the ancient words. You lose the sodalities and
confraternities when you hear once more the familiar “Tantum Ergo” (I
do not mean the florid one that they sing at St. Roch in Paris, and
elsewhere); the new vulgarity is forgotten, as many vulgarities have
been touched and then forgotten by Rome, in her time.

I used to think that the worst of our bad Protestant hymns was their
ignoring of the human intelligence.

  Many giants great and tall,
    Stalking through the land,
  Headlong to the earth would fall
    If met by Daniel’s Band.

(My fortunate husband sang it in his youth.) But even that, while it
could have a religious meaning, I should say, only for a sub-normal
intelligence, is not a deliberate and explicit defiance of the
intellect of man.

  Verbum caro, panem verum
    Verbo camera efficit:
  Fitque sanguis Christi merum;
    Et si sensus deficit,
  Ad firmandum cor sincerum
    Sola fides sufficit.

  Tantum ergo sacramentum
    Veneremur cernui,
  Et antiquum documentum
    Novo cedat ritui:
  Præstet fides supplementum
    Sensuum defectui.


It took St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor Angelicus, thus to state, in one
supreme utterance, the whole case against the Higher Criticism.

No, I do not think that the sense of a hymn counts so much. The
mediæval “Ave Maris Stella” has not much more to recommend it,
philosophically speaking, than the hymn with the “Im-mac-u-late,
Im-mac-u-late” refrain. A poem, even a religious poem, is good poetry
or bad poetry, and that is all there is to it. “From Greenland’s Icy
Mountains” is a silly poem, and “The Son of God Goes Forth to War” is
a rather fine poem; and Bishop Heber wrote both. But the permanent
superiority of the latter is in the music to which it is set. One
Presbyterian sect sings, I believe, nothing but the Psalms--rather
unfortunately metricized, to be sure--and their church singing is
the dreariest in the world. Yet the Psalms are rated high. “Onward,
Christian Soldiers” gets its appeal from Sir Arthur Sullivan and not
from the author. I do not believe that “Nearer, My God, to Thee” would
have been the favorite hymn of the late President McKinley were it not
for the slow, swinging tempo, which needs only a little quickening to
be an excellent waltz, with all the emotional appeal of good waltz
music.

On the whole, _Hymns Ancient and Modern_ are far better, from the
point of view of poetry, than _Gospel Hymns, No. 5_--but they
have not converted half so many people. The elect, the high-brows,
may say what they like: if you are doing your evangelizing on the
grand scale, the “sensual ear” must be pleased. I do not believe that
the music I have referred to, of the “Tantum Ergo” or the “Parce,
Domine,” would ever convert the crowd in a tent or a tabernacle--even
if D. L. Moody or Fanny Crosby wrote new words to it. But if you let a
grammar-school pupil hack words out of the New Testament and set them
to the tune of “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground”--well, it would be
strange if some one were not converted. You may be very sure that the
Roman Catholic Church has not taken to vulgar and catchy hymns without
a set purpose of winning souls.

  At the Cross, at the Cross, where I first saw the light
    And the burden of my sin rolled away,
  It was there by faith I received my sight,
    And now I am happy all the day.

The last line might almost have been lifted bodily from one of Stephen
Foster’s negro-melodies. It has the very lilt of

  My old Kentucky home far away.

And it is only one of many in _Gospel Hymns, No. 5_. That is why
my husband remembers them, in spite of himself. He may contemn them,
but he cannot forget. There is hardly one of them that would not
consort happily with the right kind of brass band. They connote crowds
and the “emotion of multitude.” So, to me, does the “Parce, Domine”
connote crowds--but crowds awe-struck, unweeping, and in no mood for
stimulation by a cornet accompaniment. There is a cardinal difference.
The success of almost any Gospel Hymn depends on an emotional appeal
very like that of Kipling’s banjo:

  And the tunes that mean so much to you alone--
  Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose,
  Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan--
    I can rip your very heartstrings out with those.

Whatever Bach and Palestrina and Scarlatti and good Gregorian do to
you--well, it is not that. Whereas almost any good Gospel Hymn gets
you, if it gets you at all, in the banjo way. There is the revivalistic
essence in all of them. And when the Catholics wish to be revivalistic,
they imitate, rather badly, the Protestant “hymn-tune.”

Most of my friends are so truly high-brow that they cannot be “got” in
the banjo way. They do not like cornet solos; and brass bands playing
negro-melodies leave them dry-eyed. They honestly prefer the Kniesel
Quartet or a Brahms symphony. Their arid and exquisite æstheticism
rejects these low appeals. Did I not say that my husband loathes “Throw
Out the Life-Line” even while he is reducing me to an emotional
crumple? I refuse to admit that I am incapable of that same arid and
exquisite æstheticism; but the lower appeal reaches me too. I do weep,
over the brass bands. I do choke over the flag appropriately carried.
I do fall in love (if I am careful to shut my eyes) with a good tenor
voice. And while there are, luckily, a great many people like my
husband, there must be millions more like me. He remembers the Gospel
Hymns; but I like them.

Not quite to the trail-hitting point; but then I fancy the hymns of
the tabernacle are less good than they used to be. I do not know the
tune of “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” Though my six-year-old son
has learned it from the cook, I do not believe he has the tune right.
He cannot have it right: if it were right, there would be no sawdust
trail. Nor do I know the music of “The Brewer’s Big Horses Cannot Roll
Over Me.” But I have a suspicion that Billy Sunday’s hymns are nothing
like so good as Moody and Sankey. The dance music of the day always has
its effect on popular airs of every kind, even religious. I venture to
say (_pace_ the shade of Lord Byron) that the waltz, throughout
the nineteenth century, had a strong religious influence. Every one
knows that good waltz music, if played slowly enough, is the saddest
thing in the world. The emotion aroused by good waltz music well
played is blood-brother to the emotion aroused by “God Be with You Till
We Meet Again” and “For You I Am Praying, I’m Praying for You.” Waltzes
and Gospel Hymns reinforce each other--which is probably why the unco’
guid object to dancing. But with all due allowances for mob-emotion and
the sensual ear, I cannot believe that syncopation serves the Lord.
People’s eyes do not grow dim as they listen to a fox-trot. It does
nothing to bring forth that melting sense of universal love which the
old popular music did. All waltz music was in essence melancholy; and
all sentimental melancholies meet together somewhere in the recesses
of the vulgar heart. Yes: when popular composers were writing good
waltzes, it was easier for the Sankeys and Blisses to write good hymns.
The Y. P. S. C. E. must have had easier work with the young people who
were singing “Marguerite,” than it has now with the young people who
are singing “At the Garbage Gentlemen’s Ball.” I have a notion that the
young people who are singing “At the Garbage Gentlemen’s Ball” do not
go to Y. P. S. C. E. meetings at all. Well, you see, those who sang
“Marguerite” did.

Those who know say that we are growing more vulgar all the time.
Perhaps the difference between D. L. Moody and Billy Sunday is a good
index of that degeneration. Certainly the silly young things who wept
while they sang “God Be with You Till We Meet Again” would not have
pretended to call Christ up on the telephone--or have permitted any one
else to do it in their presence. But, thank Heaven, the conventicles
are like to outlast the tabernacle.

At all events, I am sure of one thing: that my husband will not be
persuaded, twenty years hence, to “oblige” with “The Brewer’s Big
Horses.” But I hope he will continue at intervals to oblige with “Throw
Out the Life-Line.” For, so long as he does, I shall continue to be
evangelized.




                        BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD.


I was reading a novel, the other day; had got about half-way through
it. The novel in question was by one of the younger English authors.
It was very odd, I thought to myself as I perused it, that I should
not (for I read a great deal of fiction) have read before anything by
Mr. D. H. Lawrence. I had always meant to, but his work had, for some
reason or other, not come my way. And I was glad I was reading it. I
ought to have done D. H. Lawrence before. Some people had told me he
was “different.” He was not so different as all that; still, there was
something fresh about him. Perhaps one could differentiate within that
group, though I had long since despaired of doing so. I would certainly
get something else of D. H. Lawrence’s. At that point I decided to go
to bed, and shut the book up smartly. The cover revealed to me that
the author was J. D. Beresford. Why I had ever thought it was D. H.
Lawrence, I do not know. Some false association of ideas at the moment
of borrowing it, probably.

The joke is on me, as the younger generation would say. And yet,
there is something to be said on my side. The fact is that I had not
expected D. H. Lawrence to be one whit different from Hugh Walpole, J.
D. Beresford, Compton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan, Oliver Onions, and
W. L. George. I found, I thought, a little difference: not much, but
enough to give one hope. To be sure, the hope would have ebbed, in any
case, before the book was finished. My only gain was the knowledge
that Mr. Beresford can do something besides Jacob Stahl. I have yet to
experience D. H. Lawrence. Still, I submit that when, to distinguish
between one author and another, you are satisfied with so tiny a
difference in style as appears between two works by the same man, it
means that differences in style within that particular group are not
very startling. One would never have read half of _Tess_ and taken
it for the work of Henry James; or half of _Nostromo_ and taken
that for the work of Meredith. One would have been brought up standing
at the first page. It may be, as I say, that D. H. Lawrence is going to
be to me, some day, a revelation of individuality. But the reviews do
not give one much hope of that.

Now, there are three authors in England who stand a little away from
this larger group, though they are not precisely contemporaries
of Hardy or of Conrad. Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy have some
individuality of style. A chapter of Mr. Wells is “different.” A
chapter of Arnold Bennett or of Mr. Galsworthy is different. Or let me
put it in this way. You would not get through half of any one of Mr.
Wells’s later novels without a deal of pseudo-philosophical reflection
on the scheme of things. You would not read so far in any book by Mr.
Arnold Bennett without meeting and recognizing his peculiar kind of
humor: semi-grin, semi-farcical. And I am sure that you would not get
through many chapters of a typical Galsworthy novel without hearing a
bird calling to its mate--not if there were a human love-affair going
on. I do not think you could comfortably sit down with any one of them
for half an evening and think that you were reading D. H. Lawrence. You
would know whom you were reading.

These three gentlemen have, of course, been writing longer than the
aforesaid younger group. They are, one might say, the elder brothers
of the brood. If any one of them has served as model to the younger
fry, it is Mr. Wells. None of the younger fry has ever approached the
technical excellence of _Kipps_; but, on the other hand, almost
any one of them could have written _Ann Veronica_. Mr. Wells has
certainly led them all astray in his time. But there is another equally
important thing to be said: Mr. Wells has gone on. In his later phases,
he stands quite apart from them all. _The Research Magnificent_
and _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ are perfectly individual:
they are not, and never could have been, the product of a syndicate.
Time was when Wells and Bennett seemed to be drawing near each other,
_Tono-Bungay_ is Bennett-ish in spots; and _Bealby_ is,
superficially, almost straight Bennett. But Mr. Wells, for weal or woe,
has always been interested in the social scheme. The most important
thing in _Tono-Bungay_ is Bladesover and Bladesover’s moral
effect; and even in the ridiculous _Bealby_ there is more than an
echo of Bladesover. Mr. Wells is interested in moral values. Sometimes
he has had very queer notions about them; but his reward for having
been perpetually pre-occupied with them is to have won through to _The
Research Magnificent_ and _Mr. Britling_. You may not agree
with the hero of either book; but at least he is a person for whom you
have respect. His is a dignified moral reaction, even if it is not
the moral reaction you would have preferred. He is a serious person,
envisaging his relations to the world in a serious temper.

One does not see Mr. Bennett’s characters thus envisaging the world;
not, at all events, since _The Old Wives’ Tale_. And even in
_The Old Wives’ Tale_ you feel rather the deterministic net
in which the characters are caught, than any personal decisions of
their own. The moral of the book is that heredity is more powerful
than environment, if these two come to grips. In the later books,
when they are not, like _Denry the Audacious_ and _Buried
Alive_, delicious bits of fooling, you get men and women of a
monstrous egotism, of whom it cannot be discerned that either heredity
or environment explicitly controls them against their will. An
acute critic, who has incidentally had his own say about Wells and
Bennett, told me the other day that he thought Bennett’s people had
“character.” I should have said rather that they were “characters,” in
the colloquial sense. They have self-assertiveness; like Aunty Hamps,
they may subjugate their world. But “character”? No: that is a finer,
more complicated possession. They want things, sometimes good things
and sometimes bad; but they are (especially the women) blond beasts as
to their methods. If there is, on the whole, a less decent creature in
modern fiction than Hilda Lessways, or a more idiotic one than Audrey
Moze, I have still to encounter her. They invoke their gods

  By the hunger of change and emotion,
  By the thirst of unbearable things.

Ann Veronica, as I once tried to point out, is not true to life:
she is a nice girl who proceeds to have reactions that a nice girl
does not have without a lot of intervening history. Hilda is never a
nice girl; she is a monster from the start and to the finish. As for
Audrey--_pace_ Mr. Bennett--she is a “moron,” or very near it.
Mr. Bennett spends more time on his female than on his male characters.
He began with the evident intention of “doing” young Clayhanger. But
poor Clayhanger eventually turned into Hilda’s daily bread. He exists
only to be masticated by her. She lifts her head from that “fiero
pasto,” immitigable as Ugolino.

Now, I may well be accused, by Mr. Bennett’s admirers, of a belated
Victorianism, because I do not like his Hildas and Leonoras and
Audreys. Well, I do not like Balzac’s Valérie Marneffe; yet surely
_La Cousine Bette_ is one of the great novels of the nineteenth
century. Henry James, some years ago, drew a distinction between
Thackeray and Balzac in their treatment of unpleasant characters;
insisting that Thackeray did not give his a fair chance. “Balzac loved
his Valérie as Thackeray did not love his Becky,” said Mr. James.
However much Balzac loved his Valérie, he did not love her to the point
of trying to make us think her delightful. The love he bore her was
a love as impersonal as the right hand of Rhadamanthus: a love that
consented to be just. Balzac may have loved his Valérie as Thackeray
did not love his Becky; but he did not love his Valérie as Mr. Bennett
loves his Hilda and his Audrey. He loved her, that is, in a quite
different sense. Mr. Bennett positively seems to think that Hilda is as
decent as any one else, and more interesting than most people. If he
does not really think so, then his method is at fault, and his books
belie him. His method is not at fault in _Denry_, because there
is no implication anywhere that Denry exists in a moral sense: he is a
“card,” and only a “card.” It is never hinted that we ought to take him
seriously. He is merely funny; the humor of him is the moral equivalent
of an obstacle race or the pursuit of a greased pig.

If only Mr. Bennett would keep to his Denrys! For in the realm of
extravaganza he is irresistible. Also, when he does the detail of the
Five Towns, he is delightful for sheer convincingness. But he must
stick to concrete detail. He must not deal with the human soul, for
when he comes to moral reactions, he shows that he has no conception of
differences. Mr. Bennett’s world, frankly, seems to me like the world
of the dead as described by the poet:

  Outside of all the worlds and ages,
  There where the fool is as the sage is,
    There where the slayer is clean of blood;
  No end, no passage, no beginning,
  There where the sinner leaves off sinning,
    There where the good man is not good.

  There is not one thing with another,
  But Evil saith to Good: My brother,
    My brother, I am one with thee.

His world is a world where Evil saith to Good: “My brother, I am one
with thee.” If he cannot write us another _Old Wives’ Tale_, we
must at least hope, as I say, that he will stick to Denry and Alice
Challis. _The Lion’s Share_ does not give much promise that he
will do a second _Old Wives’ Tale_. He has a positive fondness for
mean people; people who walk blind through a world with beauty in it;
people who think their own emotions supremely valuable simply because
they are their own.

The realists, I know, have always contended that an author should be
impersonal; that he should not have an “attitude”; that he should
record life as it is, without comment. Into the possibility or
impossibility of that feat (the old technical controversy) we need
not go, here and now. The general opinion is that you can tell where
an author stands, in spite of him. Certainly Mr. Bennett is not
impersonal; he does have an attitude. Not in any of the permitted
ways (comment of other characters, logical and retributive results of
committed acts, etc.) does he show himself suspicious of his people’s
real natures, or disapproving of their odiousness. If he were only
scourging, satirist-fashion, the egotism of man-kind, one could bear it.
But no: Mr. Bennett seems to love his Yahoos. If he does not love them,
then, as I say, his methods are at fault.

Another author who has gone dwindling is Mr. Galsworthy. Tremendous
hopes of him and of our permanent joy in him, we had when _The Man
of Property_ appeared. And, of course, one knows people who stick to
him for his “style.” One does not quite know why: as style, it cannot
touch either Mr. Wells’s or Mr. Bennett’s style. I fancy it is because
there will always be a perceptible number of people who are reverent
before long descriptions of nature. Nature, when it gets into a book,
is somehow sacred. Perhaps it is Wordsworth’s fault. Literary pieties
die hard. Anyhow, there always are long descriptions of nature in Mr.
Galsworthy’s novels, and if they are delicately confused with mating
animals and human sex impulses, and all the connotation of stirring sap
and swelling buds and the like, that will certainly not make them any
less popular. Yet the fact is that Mr. Galsworthy has gone on, from
book to book, steadily becoming more sentimental and more flabby. I
am speaking here of his novels. His _Five Tales_ hold their own
with _The Man of Property_. His work cannot be called rich in
situations, since he has never, so far, failed to repeat (I think I am
not mistaken) the same situation: a man in love with some woman he has
no legal right to be in love with. Often, that is a very interesting
situation; but it is not the only source of drama in life, and one does
get tired of it. And I do not think that Mr. Galsworthy makes it any
more interesting or sympathetic by constantly involving the vegetable
world, or by punctuating every declaration of unlawful love with the
calls of mating birds. One is tempted to assure him that “The flowers
that bloom in the spring (tra-la!) have nothing to do with the case.”
But the sanity of W. S. Gilbert is gone from among us.

With Thomas Hardy, one feels at least the reality of this intrusion of
external nature; because, as some critic (I think, Mr. W. J. Dawson)
has said, his people are children of the soil in no trite sense. They
are akin to the landscape in which they move; they seem, that is, to
have a personal relation to Gaia, like mortals in an old myth; to
be half man, half rock or tree. They are apotheoses of the power of
natural environment. But Mr. Galsworthy’s civilized people run down
from town to hold hands amid the bracken because they feel that they
are somehow justified by the fact of sap. It is all vague, of course;
anything of that sort is bound to be vague. And if you are going
to lean heavily on the cosmos, you want first to be sure that your
_point d’appui_ is not a spot where the cosmic force has chosen to
manifest itself in vapor.

Mr. Galsworthy seems not to know in the least what he thinks about
life. That state of maze may be satisfying to a hyper-sensitive soul,
but it does not make for style. Besides, Mr. Galsworthy is old enough
to have some idea as to what he does think about life. As far as one
can make out, he thinks that most people are sensual, that everybody
ought to be kind, and that there is a sustaining sanction for sex
emotion in the fauna and flora of England. I do not know what Mr.
Galsworthy’s totem is; but it should be some small, defenceless bird.
The snipe, perhaps.

_Justice_ is said to have had a profound effect on English
officials. Of that, one is glad; but one’s quarrel with Mr. Galsworthy
is that he will never think anything out. He inveighs against solitary
confinement, which is a good thing to do; but he does not offer any
substitute solution, which would be an even better thing to do. He
sentimentalizes over dead pheasants and dead everything; but he gives
you no suggestions as to what kind of laws to pass. He objects to
existing divorce laws, but he does not come out into the open and say
just what divorce laws, if any, he would propose to enact. It is not,
apparently, either cowardice or expediency on his part; it is sheer
inability to think constructively in any way. That is characteristic
of many modern reformers: they want the bars let down here or there,
but they never tell you in what spot the bars ought to be set up again.
Beyond their gentle impulses, they are perfectly vague. It comes, I
suppose, of trying to do your thinking with your heart instead of with
your head. And in Mr. Galsworthy’s case, the vagueness has permeated
to the last recesses of his style. It is rhetorically accurate--“the
English of a gentleman”--but it is jejune and spineless. It has become,
you might say, a purely vegetarian meal. Only the graminivorous should
read the later Galsworthy. And he will not rid himself of that fault by
being increasingly explicit about sexual emotions. In fact, that never
was his game.

I may seem to speak bitterly. I confess that I feel some bitterness.
For I admired _The Man of Property_ exceedingly, and looked to Mr.
Galsworthy to carry on a great tradition of fiction. Instead of which,
he has gone on backing, backing--farther and farther away from the
Presence. Some people, I know, gave him up with _The Patrician_
because, they said, it was straight Mrs. Humphry Ward. I gave him up
forever with _The Freelands_ because it was bad Mrs. Humphrey
Ward; in fact, _The Coryston Family_ was much better.

Now we come to our syndicate. With which shall we begin? It is
hard to choose. Indeed, can you deal with them separately? For the
outstanding fact is that they all write alike; that they deal in the
same characters, the same backgrounds, and the same situations; and
that they have the same point of view. They are like the Pléïade or
the seven New Realists. Only they do not know it. At least, they give
no sign of intending to be several peas in one pod. Yet you would
almost say that none of them had ever read anything but the works of
the others. Is there some master-mind behind them, some literary Lloyd
George or Dr. Fu-Manchu, who assigns their tasks; who says that Mr.
Beresford, not Mr. Walpole, shall write of Jacob Stahl, and that Mr.
Mackenzie, not Mr. W. L. George, shall deal with Michael Fane? And
does Mr. Walpole sneak off o’ nights to Mr. Beresford and offer to do
some _Jacob Stahl_ if Mr. Beresford will take a few chapters of
_Fortitude_ off his hands? Does Mr. Mackenzie write a page of _A
Prelude to Adventure_ while Mr. Walpole takes a turn at _Sinister
Street_? Who does the murders? Is it Mr. Walpole or Mr. Onions?
Which one of them has been appointed to frequent the Empire? Does Mr.
George investigate female psychology for the group? And what (but this
I cannot even guess) does Mr. D. H. Lawrence “cover”?

This may seem to be mere petulance, but it is not. The chief value
of fiction is, I take it, to provide us with vicarious experience. A
great novelist who sticks to the truth is, above all, informing. We
enlarge our own world by reading him. No one, in his own person, can
investigate all social _milieux_ in all civilized lands; and the
big novels and the big plays are text-books to the humanist. How much
intimate knowledge of France should we lose if we lost Balzac; how
much intimate knowledge of England if we lost the great Victorians!
Did we really, before the war, know anything about the Russian soul
and temperament except what we got from the Russian novelists? Most of
us get our India from Kipling. There are not wanting people to quarrel
with Kipling’s interpretation, even with his description; but the fact
remains that a vast number of people know a few simple facts about
Indian and Anglo-Indian life that they would never have known without
him.

So that it is really not only the monotony, but the wilful
extravagance, of the British syndicate that we complain of. Why waste
half a dozen authors and a round score of novels to tell us the same
thing in the same way? They do not even react differently to the
same facts: they react precisely alike. Perhaps that is valuable as
reinforcing and emphasizing the stated or implied opinion. But one has
the sense that one is never going to learn anything more from any of
them; and that is discouraging to the humanist, on vicarious experience
bent. Perhaps one should except Mr. Walpole from that charge, to this
extent: he gave us something new in _The Dark Forest_. In that
book, at least, he made the Russians pleasanter than any of their
own novelists (except possibly Turgenev) have succeeded in making
them. But even so, if someone should tell us that Mr. Walpole, in
the flesh, went to Russia to work with an ambulance corps, and that
Mr. Beresford or Mr. Mackenzie wrote _The Dark Forest_ from Mr.
Walpole’s notes, who could, from any internal evidence, deny it? If
they were all Elizabethans, the scholars would still be wrangling
over problems of their collaboration. Their novels would be like the
Beaumont-Fletcher-Middleton-Rowley plays.

To begin with, there is always the same young man. Sometimes he
has a university education, and then he is the hero of _Sinister
Street_ or _The Stranger’s Wedding_; sometimes he has omitted
the university, and then he is the hero of _Jacob Stahl_ or
_Fortitude_. He has usually decided, when we meet him, that there
is nothing in religion; he is usually anxious to do something noble
and unconventional; and sooner or later he nearly always encounters
very seriously a young woman of, actually or potentially, light morals.
Sometimes he is rich and meets her at the Empire; sometimes he is poor
and meets her in the slums. Sometimes it is an accident, but usually
he might fairly be said to be looking for her. For he is humanitarian,
always; either by his gentle nature, or because socialistic arguments
have got hold of him; and a good deal of space is always given up to
sheer intellectual worrying. It _is_ worrying--it seldom “gets”
anywhere; and though Mr. Wells’s people “worry” similarly, and do not
always get anywhere, still, with Mr. Wells, you feel as if those men
would, perhaps, sometime win through to a philosophy of their own.
They go at it in a more mature fashion; and they possess themselves
of information. There is something of the hard scientific temper in
his men. They are more apt to have got their humanitarianism out of a
laboratory than out of their first sight of Piccadilly Circus at night.
Mr. Wells’s men, when they are likable at all, are likable for some
intellectual quality in them, for their attitude to ideas. When the
syndicate’s men are likable, it is for sheer pity, because they are
such helpless young fools.

One expects every one in fiction, nowadays, to be an egotist; but one
does sometimes sigh for the old days when an egotist knew enough to
be polite. No one, I think, could feel any affection for Jacob Stahl;
but it is possible to feel affection for Michael Fane, though it is
perfectly impossible to feel him important, except as a householder
always is important. Perhaps the most charming thing one remembers in
any of these novels (they do not abound in charm) is the description
of Oxford undergraduate life in _Sinister Street_. And it
leads to--what? Michael’s conscientious and pathetic progress among
prostitutes and ruffians. Luckily, he does not, in the end, marry
Lily; but he is saved from it by mere accident. There was no reason to
suppose that destiny would play on his side.

This excursion into the underworld has become, in English fiction,
almost as much _de rigueur_ for a young gentleman as the grand
tour used to be. Sometimes it is curiosity that urges him; but it is
more apt to be a kind of humanitarian sympathy. The adventure is not
new: one remembers, after all, Richard Feverel. But the temper in which
it is taken is new. Richard was a chivalrous young fool; but then
Mrs. Mount was something out of the ordinary. He did not, at first,
dream what she was; and when he found out, she was able to lure him
to think well of her. These young gentlemen we are considering do not
have to be lured to think well of the young women they altruistically
encounter. They know before they meet them what they are going to be.
They cultivate them because they are that, or are obviously going to
be that. They prefer the girl of the lower classes; prefer marriage
with her or free love with her, as the case may be. They find her
more interesting, just as a settlement-worker finds the slums more
interesting. The difference between them and the settlement-worker is
that they are not out to convert her to religion or even to better
manners. They are perfectly naïve in their refusal to perceive
differences. They have a preconceived notion to the effect that there
are no differences; and to that notion they often sacrifice themselves.
Sometimes they sacrifice the girl.

You see, they do not think much of marriage, these young men. Jacob
Stahl insists on going off to a solitary cottage with Betty Gale,
unblessed. (Of course, he does have a wife in the background.) He
never quite forgives her for wanting to be a legal wife. Though,
characteristically enough, by the time she has reconciled herself to
the irregularity (as any decent woman would have somehow to do, if
she were going to endure it) his wife dies, and he insists on Betty’s
marrying him so that they can have children. Ann Veronica over again!
But, indeed, Mr. Beresford has it in for marriage anyhow. I know of
nothing more pathetic in modern fiction than the way Dick Lynneker,
brought up among gentle-folk, successful in his own career, in love with
a girl of his own class, has to cast about in his mind for some way of
squaring that conventional situation with his radicalism. Up to that
time, his only chance has been in approving of his sister’s elopement
with the village carpenter. Now he is in love himself, and there is
no obstacle, social or financial, to his happiness. But he has not
protested against convention all his young life, only to sit down and
be comfortable now in a conventional situation. Listen:

“‘I never tried to fight against my love for you, dear, after that
first day at Oakstone,’ he went on. ‘I hadn’t ever cared before for
anyone like this. I’ve never had any sort of love-affair. And now, I
want....’”

“She clung to him eagerly.” ‘What do you want, darling?’ she asked, and
then added inconsequently, ‘I feel such a little thing.’

“He drew her down to her knees and knelt before her in the darkness.”
‘I want our love to be all our own. I don’t want it talked about and
stared at. If we get married, it must be as quietly as possible--and it
must be afterwards, if you know what I mean, dear? That legal business
isn’t for us at all; it’s only a kind of registration. Our love
hasn’t anything to do with anyone else. We must make our vows without
witnesses. Do you know what I mean, dear? Don’t you feel like that,
too?’

“He felt her heart throbbing violently against his; and they clung to
each other like two frightened children.” There, in the stillness and
the darkness, the world had vanished and they were alone; and afraid;
and yet passionately desirous to draw closer together.

“‘Oh! Dickie, I do love you so,’ she whispered, as she put her lips to
his.”

Mr. Beresford never tells us whether or not Dick put his idea through.
Sybil was the niece of a bishop. But then, Mr. Beresford made her.
Perhaps Dick succeeded. The implication certainly is that he was going
to succeed.

Now, I honestly think that pathetic. Not nearly so shocking as it is
pathetic. For the author is looking for the realities of life in the
wrong place. Every lover knows the sense of shrinking from a public
ceremony. I doubt if any two people deeply in love with each other
would choose, for their own sakes, a “wedding.” Dick Lynneker need not
think that his great idea is new. But look at the mad egotism of it!
Take it that the legal or the ecclesiastical ceremony is merely a heavy
price that one has to pay. Is that happiness not worth paying for?
Generations of lovers have thought that it was. Suppose, even, that you
think it not so much too heavy as the wrong kind of payment--something
unjustly, shamelessly exacted of you, that should never have been
exacted at all; a sort of Oriental “squeeze.” Other lovers, in other
times, have had a kindred sense of desecration; but they have realized
that society, from its point of view, had a right to demand of them
this public acknowledgment. They have realized, too, that no public act
of this kind could really touch or affect their private sense of their
private sacrament.

These modern folk are neither unselfish enough to make their little
salute to organized society cheerfully, nor strong enough to realize
that the merely conventional tribute cannot hurt their private
sanctities. There is no such unselfishness or strength possible to a
person like Dick Lynneker. If we must face free love, we must face
it, I suppose. But nothing in heaven or earth need make us face a
compromise like Dick’s. Defy all ritual and symbolism if you must. But,
for sheer topsy-turviness, commend me to his notion of insisting on the
consummation’s preceding, instead of following, the ceremony! There is
quite as much superstition in one order of things as in the other. Dick
Lynneker is bound, quite as much as his family, by prejudices. After
all, the black mass is only the real mass reversed.

I have dwelt on this instance because it seems to me typical, in its
way, of the work of the whole group of English novelists. Except
for Mr. Arnold Bennett, who seems to be satisfied with the mean and
low-minded people of whom he feels that the world consists, they are
all protesting. But they have nothing to suggest. When their own fitful
attempts to set things straight result in failure or disaster, they
blame the _status quo_. It never occurs to them to blame their
own way of going about the business of changing things. A little study
of history or even of sociology would teach them what not to waste
their time on. But their only use for the past is to “curse it out.”
“Les grands-pères ont toujours tort.” Yet they themselves go down like
ninepins, knocked over by the same forces that, for a few thousand
years at least, have been antagonizing the idealism and altruism of
men. As I said before, one has some sympathy with Mr. Wells; for his
people (his men, at least, since he does not think much better of women
than does Arnold Bennett) are trying to inform themselves, trying to
think it all out in terms of reason. The syndicate is not trying to
think anything out. It rests content with replying to every affirmation
of history: “You lie.” That is not argument: it is the mere sticking
out of tongues. The conventionally accepted thing _must_ be wrong;
and that is all there is to it.

Take the matter of their whole attitude to sex--which is, by and
large, the question they are most pre-occupied with. A certain person,
a scholar and a gentleman, was pointing out to me, the other day, the
accuracy of Chaucer’s treatment of Troilus. Troilus lets Cressida
go, not because he does not love her passionately, but because the
chivalrous Code demands it of him, demands that he should protect her
reputation. Pandar cannot move him from his knightly duty. If ever
a hero loved exuberantly, it was Troilus. Yet the inhibition works.
Chaucer knew what he was talking about. Whereas, as my interlocutor
went on to say, with these contemporary authors, the lack of inhibition
seems to be the index of emotion. They ask you to take lawlessness for
depth of feeling. The decorously behaved, according to them, are only
the passionless. That is plain bad psychology. For if love is the real
thing, it takes perpetually into account the duty to the beloved. Love
will bring out the scruples of a comparatively unscrupulous person. No
real lover wants to put the beloved “up against” anything disagreeable.
And this being brave for someone else is not a natural expression of
love. You may be brave to the rack and the gridiron for yourself; but
being vicariously brave to the rack and the gridiron is a mean, modern
kind of courage. Suppose you do not believe in the social order: the
social order, none the less, is powerful enough to make a decent man
want its approval for the woman he loves. He does not wish to have her
inconvenienced--not if he loves her.

But the woman who does not wish to run up against the social order
gets scant sympathy from the modern British hero. She ought to want to
run counter to it; and if he has anything to say about it, she will
jolly well have to. I do not know how other people feel about Betty
Gale, but I am exceedingly sorry for her. I am sufficiently sorry for
the girl who married Mr. Onions’s murderer, the hero of _The Debit
Account_ and _In Accordance with the Evidence_. I am even sorry
for Pauline in _Plashers Mead_; though, frankly, I think Mr.
Mackenzie is fairer to his characters than any of the others. These
young women (I am speaking, you see, at the moment, of the respectable
ones) have such selfish, cantankerous, and muddle-headed gentlemen to
deal with!

Our authors do succeed in making their conventional folk disagreeable.
That is, they make the hero acutely perceptive of the conventional
vices. But if ever there was a case of the beam and the mote! Look at
a fair list of them: the hero of _The Invisible Event_, of _The
Strangers’ Wedding_, of _Round the Corner_, of _Plashers
Mead_, of _The Debit Account_. Was there ever a more vaporing
bunch of egotists anywhere? A great deal of fun has been poked at the
heroes of the romantic period: the Manfreds and Laras, the Heathcliffs
and Rochesters. Their revolts against society have been jests for
the critics to split their sides over, these fifty years. But they
were dignified creatures in comparison, and they had far more sense
of fact. They knew, for example, when they bucked society, what they
were bucking. They knew the process was not going to be entirely
comfortable, and they did not complain of discomfort, because they saw
a reason why it should be made hot for them. They simply felt that
they had a _quid pro quo_. They had, as I have said elsewhere,
the Satanic charm; they had also some of the Satanic logic. These
heroes have been, for many decades, considered the wildest travesties
of humanity. But, indeed, they are far more comprehensible than the
young men in the modern British novels. A young woman in love with
Lara might well expect the worst; but at least she would know what
to expect. Lara would never have shilly-shallied about among the
conventions like Dick Lynneker, or Capes, or Jacob Stahl, changing his
mind from chapter to chapter, and never knowing precisely what he did
want, anyhow. Lara would have known what he wanted and why. He would
not even have hesitated to attribute to himself an evil motive, if he
had one. But none of these young men would attribute to himself an evil
motive. Whatever they want must be right; and if eventually they want
the exact opposite, then that must be right, too. The bewildered woman
follows in their wake.

That is why, by and large, they are so corrupting. Yes, more corrupting
than the effervescent geniuses of the nineties. You might be shocked
by Dorian Gray, or by Aubrey Beardsley’s gentlemen and ladies; but
you were never tricked into imagining that it was “up to you” to look
like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing or to behave like Dorian Gray. The
shining lights of the nineties lived to _épater le bourgeois_--and
they did it. On the whole, that was greatly to the credit of _le
bourgeois_. People who would rather die than show themselves
_épatés_ (there are always a lot of such folk) were very
entertained. I dare say some of these authors and poets did harm in
their day. But they did not do it by deluding the public into thinking
that they were virtuous: they did it by being witty at the expense of
virtue. Our novelists are not witty at the expense of virtue (or at
the expense of anything else, be it said in passing). They perform all
their antics in the very name of virtue. They are right, and everyone
else is wrong.

Now the _révolté_ with a programme we can endure, for we have
often, during the muddled history of civilization, had to endure him.
Sometimes he does a lot of damage; sometimes he does a lot of good.
The point is that, in either case, his emotional force has been at
the service of his programme. The trouble with these people is that
they have no programme. They are _révoltés_ because they are
dissatisfied or in hard luck, and they hit wildly. They have not the
brains to think anything out. Our friends of the nineties thought
that nothing was sacred--except, perhaps, beauty. These folk know
nothing about beauty--even Mr. Galsworthy, who may set you down on
a hillside to look at a lovely landscape, and leave you there for
several pages, but who spends his time during those pages in infecting
that natural loveliness with notions of agrarian reform. The only
thing that is sacred to these young folk is their own impulses;
which makes them about as satisfactory to deal with as the wild gun
in _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_. Since their own impulses chop and
change--and are always sacred--you can do nothing except express
perfect confidence in their temperaments. You are not to know them by
their fruits; you are to judge them by their good intentions--for which
you must take their own word.

Nor are they “ineffectual angels.” If they only were! They are guilty
of a lot of very ignoble impulses, and proceed often to gratify them.
So did the romantic hero-villains, you may say. Ah, but here is the
difference. The romantic hero-villains were proud, sometimes, of their
sin; but they called it sin, even while they boasted of it. So did
the æsthetes of the nineties. If it had not been sin, there would
have been no fun in it. A very lamentable point of view, doubtless;
but less dangerous to society than the contemporary mode. For while
you still call it sin, you are accepting the categories, if not the
judgments, of society. You will not hurt society much while you accept
its categories. What these young men and young women do is to call
anything virtuous that they happen to want to do. They have not even
the logic of Satanists, perceiving evil and preferring it. The thing
that is evil is the thing that makes them suffer; the thing that is
good is the thing that pleases them. When free love is convenient,
free love, only, is virtuous; marriage becomes virtuous the moment
marriage becomes convenient. As you never know when obstacles are going
to appear or disappear--as convenience is often in the hands of mere
fortuitous fate--there is no test left. You must, I repeat, have blind
faith in their temperaments. I do not think this is too hard a saying.

As for the women who match and mate with the men: they do not give us
much more hope. They are, to speak plainly, an unlovely lot. You may
be as sorry as you like for them, but pity is not praise. Mr. Wells’s
women are too apt to be selfish and treacherous; Mr. Bennett’s opinion
is evidently that no woman can be decent unless she is a fool--like
Constance, say, in _The Old Wives’ Tale_. (I know there is Alice
Challis; but I fancy Alice is only a symbol of what every man wants
and never gets.) And look, for a moment, at the women described by the
syndicate. They are cheap: hard without being strong; cold without
being pure; sentimental without being kind. There is the sensual
type--Madeline Paignton, the aristocratic wanton, or Lily Haden, who
cannot be continent for a few weeks, even for the sake of wealth
and a husband; there is all the crew of light women among whom the
heroes make their humanitarian progress. There is the intellectual
(God save the mark!) type: the heroine of _Gray Youth_, or even
Rachel Beaminster, whose mental energy all goes into revolt. If Mr.
Walpole had made the Duchess of Wrexe a human being, in whose reality
we could believe, we might have more sympathy with Rachel’s spiteful
traffickings with the family ne’er-do-well. But we should have to
be far sunk in fetishism to believe in the Duchess; she is a mere
Mumbo-Jumbo; and her family seems about as intelligent as the first
circles of Dahomey. Compare her, for an instant, with Lady Kew. No, a
tyranny like that is an invented tyranny; it has nothing to do with
life. The Duchess of Wrexe (to borrow a term from the anthropologists)
has no _mana_ at all. Rachel’s revolt is absurd; and simply shows
up Rachel as a very disagreeable and headstrong person. True, there
is always something to make their revolts absurd. They seem not to be
dealing with facts at all, these young people; probably because they
are all sentimentalists, and for a sentimentalist a delusion is as good
as a fact, any day. A wicked giant is, by definition, anything you
happen to be tilting at--even if in real life he is a windmill.

You may say that two facts these characters do often deal with:
poverty and the sex instinct. Yes, they are sometimes poor, and have a
hard time. But they have just as hard a time when they are not poor.
Poverty is not the root of all evil, logically exposed as such, as it
so often is in the work of George Gissing. Not one of this group of
authors has ever achieved the cumulative, inevitable tragedy of _New
Grub Street_, for example: a far better indictment of some of the
ills of the social order than all this modern mouthing. Indeed, not
one of them is able to make anything seem inevitable. If they would
only let the indictment be pitiless and let it stand; let us draw our
own conclusions! And as for poverty, have you noticed that even when
these young men are as poor as the hero of Mr. Onions’s trilogy, they
get over it? They never end in poverty. Yet their grievances are not
disposed of when they become rich. By that time, they are worried about
something else. They have the complaining habit. Rich or poor, married
or unmarried, they are always, one foresees, going to complain. These
authors convince one that their Utopia would be a hell on earth. They
cannot reason; they cannot even dream convincingly. They are in a state
of pitiful intellectual poverty--or, at least, penuriousness; for, if
they have wealth, they certainly do not distribute it.

The sex instinct is, on the whole, their long suit. I do not think
there is much more to be said about their treatment of it. They have
not painted for us a nobler, or a more romantic, or a more passionate
love between man and woman, than have some of their predecessors. I
cannot see that these novelists give us anything new in the way of
human information--except, perhaps, just one thing.

That one thing can best be described as a new theory--no, not a theory,
a kind of Futurist presentment--of human types. There are just two
possible things to do with the heroes and heroines of the new school;
either to say that, as human beings, they do not exist; or to assume
that they do exist and to lament the fact. The kinder, I believe, is to
say that they do not exist. It is also the easier conclusion. For they
are not consistent with themselves; they pass kaleidoscopically from
one state of being to its opposite; as mortals, they are incalculable,
and as literary creations they are unconvincing. “I don’t believe
there’s any sich a person,” is the natural reply to their presented
cases. The authors have not the power of assuring us of the real
existence of their characters. Life is not in them. If it is not a
fault of vision, then it is a fault of technique. I have spoken of
the complete unreality of the Duchess of Wrexe; but she is no more
unreal than Dick Lynneker, or the hero of Mr. Onions’s trilogy. You can
believe in far viler and wickeder people, if you must; you can believe
in Moll Flanders or Carker or Long John Silver. It is not moral but
intellectual squeamishness that makes it difficult to accept them.
Psychologically speaking, they are freaks in side-shows. Mr. Bennett
presents us with a whole gallery of ignoble folk; but one is inclined
to believe in some of them, at least. Indeed, one is inclined to
believe, thanks to Mr. Bennett, that the Five Towns are almost entirely
populated with such (which may be hard on the Five Towns, but that is
Mr. Bennett’s look-out). The syndicate has not Mr. Bennett’s technique.

Yet this is just where the very fact of the syndicate gives one pause.
Since there are so many novelists in England doing precisely the same
kind of inconsistent, unconvincing, unlovable person, there may well
be some genuine type that they are trying to describe. Almost never,
it seems to me, do they “get it across”; but there must be people
wandering about the English landscape who have given the syndicate the
idea. We hardly believe that their portraits are accurate; for their
portraits are not psychologically possible. But one comes to believe in
prototypes. The syndicate would not all, at a given signal, have gone
off their heads in exactly the same way. They must have some warrant
in fact. If the prototypes of Jacob Stahl and of Dick Lynneker, of
Rachel Beaminster and of the heroine of _Gray Youth_ exist, these
books are, in a sense, a portent. The Five Towns might be responsible
for Hilda Lessways, but the Five Towns are not responsible for the
girl in _Gray Youth_. One does not feel that the syndicate gives
one more than circumstantial evidence, but of that, there is an almost
overwhelming amount. This is depressing. Perhaps, eventually, Mr.
Compton Mackenzie will resign from the syndicate and really tell us
something. At present he too is bound by their conventions. But in
_Plashers Mead_, tiresome as it is with the reiterant egotism
of half-fledged youth, he does “get it across.” Certain people whose
opinion is worth much more than mine, tell me that Mr. Walpole has got
it across in _The Dark Forest_. I must admit, in my own case,
the strict limitations of western Europe: it will take more than
Mr. Walpole to make Russians credible to me. He seems to me no more
plausible than Dostoievsky, and far, far short of Turgenev. And, after
all, I am not sure that Nijinsky is not a better expositor than either.

It has been much more difficult than I dreamed, to deal with these
gentlemen at all. The work of one shifts and plays into the work
of the other so maddeningly that it is hard, not only to treat of
them individually, but to treat of them even as a group. You think
you have a line on Mr. Walpole, and you find him melting into Mr.
Beresford or Mr. Onions. Everyone knows what a miserable business a
composite photograph is. No feature is really defined. These authors
differentiate themselves just enough by detail of plot and setting
and diction, to avoid a grand inclusive charge of plagiarism. You
cannot say that one has filched a page from another, because there
is no telling who began it. But I believe that, as far as style is
concerned, if you inserted six consecutive pages written severally
by the six of them, in any chapter of any book, no one would ever
know the difference. Of course, you would have to allow for different
names of characters, and some havoc might be played with continuity of
plot--if there happened to be any plot in that chapter. But the style
would, I am sure, stand the test. Mr. Mackenzie forces his vocabulary
as the others do not (he prides himself, I fancy, particularly on the
number of his metaphors for the moon); but apart from Mr. Mackenzie’s
occasional exoticism, they write alike. They have the same rhythms,
the same sentence-structure, the same syntactical habits. It is
clever, nervous writing, but it is not the grand style. They are not
memorable: they do not stand out, any one of them, or any one of their
works, as a mental experience. The only adventure to be got from them
is to read them all, and then, forgetting (as you inevitably do) who is
who and which is which, analyze the effect of the group. It is a hazy
and perplexing effect--as I fear I have too meticulously said.

For in the long run, one’s main feeling about the younger English
writers is one of sheer disappointment. They have their reputation:
people are always telling you that this one or that one is really
important. I cannot believe that they are. As portrayers of life, they
do not convince--a matter partly of muddle-headedness and partly of
technique in the narrower sense. Moreover, they are dull. Mr. Bennett
may not convince in the end, because in the end one becomes aware of
his moral myopia; but he is not usually dull. He writes better than
they do--that is what it comes to. If there were only one of them, we
might put up with him; but how can we put up with six of him? There
is not time. As for their attack on convention, whatever it may be,
they will have to do it better to get any serious attention paid to
them. You need seasoned troops to attack that fortress--or at least
bigger guns. The only person who thinks that anything, no matter what,
is better than the _status quo_, is the anarchist. Most of us
are not anarchists; and while most of us are willing to have things
improved, if necessary, at our own expense, we want some assurance
that they will be improved. And if we must make blind experiments--as
the reformers all want us to--let us at least know the object of the
experiment. These writers do not seem to know what they would like to
achieve if they could.

What they chiefly breed in one is hopelessness. If this is the best
that England can do for us in the way of fiction, we must either
encourage our native product, or eschew fiction and take to “serious”
reading. These men are too dull. The time is ripe, once more, I
believe, for a few big picaresque novels: something in the mode of the
_Satyricon_, and _Gil Blas_, and _Huckleberry Finn_. For I do not think
that people will put up forever with being bored--especially as they
are not boring us in the interests of virtue.

To be sure--though it is some time since I began this essay--I have
still not read D. H. Lawrence.




              THE REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF RUDYARD KIPLING


It looks Chestertonian as I write it. As if a world of concrete things
were to be gathered into the titular abstraction; or as if Kipling’s
rightness were presently to be proved remarkable in that it is all
wrong.

And yet, I think, Chesterton or no Chesterton--where is he, by the
way?--I mean precisely what I have set down: Rudyard Kipling’s
remarkable rightness. Right, because time has sustained him against
scoffers; remarkable, because no one originally expected that
particular kind of rightness from him.

This is not to be a discursive or an exhaustive discussion of Kipling’s
utterances on planetary or even racial questions. I have not annotated
his complete works with his “rightness” in mind. Indeed, to treat him
exhaustively would be a very difficult task; for the sum of his wisdom
is made up, not of a few big “works,” but of an infinite number of
significant brevities. My only excuse for dealing with him at all is
that I have lived a long time with the prose and verse of Kipling, and
that my knowledge of him has reached what Henry James called the point
of saturation. I will not pretend that I have read every word he has
ever printed in the Allahabad _Pioneer_ or even in the London
_Times_; but I know him very well. I belong to the generation that
took its Kipling hard. My friends who are five years older or five
years younger never took him quite so hard as that. They knew other
gods.

Rudyard Kipling, in his later life, has suffered under two great
disadvantages: his insistence on a political point of view which was
unpopular, and the gradual diminishing of his flow of masterpieces.
The dullest people will tell you smartly that he is “written out”; the
cleverest will tell you that he was precocious, but always cheap, if
not vulgar. Perhaps someone will fling “The Female of the Species” at
you. This paper is not to be a catalogue of Kipling’s virtues, nor yet
of his achievements. But I should like you to consider with me for a
few moments that little volume of verse, _The Five Nations_. I
take _The Five Nations_ purposely, for it is the Kipling of _The
Five Nations_ that I mean. Not the better known Kipling of the
_Barrack-Room Ballads_ or _The Seven Seas_. But supremely the
Kipling I refer to.

Two things changed the Kipling we first knew: renewed residence in
England, and the Boer War. Of course, he was always an imperialist; he
always loved Lord Roberts--as long ago as the _Plain Tales_, when
Kipling was at once younger and cleverer than anyone else. But he saw
these things, then, from the angle of India; he was an imperialist only
in embryo. He cared more for the British army--in red--than for the
British navy; and Anzacs were not within his vision.

Then--by devious paths--he returned to England; and England held him as
it held the man and the woman in “An Habitation Enforced.” The Boer War
came; and _The Five Nations_ tells how he reacted. He has gone on
very consistently from that day, developing, but never swerving from
the path of his conviction. England did not listen to him: the Liberals
of the first decade of the twentieth-century did not propose to listen
to anyone who wrote short stories for the sake of the plot, and verse
for the sake of a Tory idea. They were much too serious in Great
Britain, in those days, to hearken to Rudyard Kipling. And, so far as I
know, neither Lord Roberts nor Kipling ever said, “I told you so.”

Yet listen to “The Lesson”:

  It was our fault, and our very great fault--and now we must turn it
      to use;
  We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse!

How one has heard that rough-and-ready poem reviled--in the early
nineteen-hundreds! Even now one recalls abusive editorials in American
newspapers about the poem which mentioned

  ... the flannelled fools at the wicket ... the muddied oafs at the
      goals.

“Oblige me by referring to the files.” I remember those taunting
comments very well. Not an editor but was so sane that he could make
his little mock of Kipling as an extremist. But if you will get out
_The Five Nations_ and read “The Islanders” through soberly, you
will curse those editors for fools. “Preparedness” is so familiar
to us all now, not only as a word but even as an idea, that we can
hardly believe intelligent people were calling a man names fifteen
years ago for stating axioms. We are always thinking the days of
Galileo are over. But they are not; they never will be; the human race
instinctively and always has it in for Galileo. Kipling could get an
audience for tales and ballads and jungle-books; but the moment he
tried to speak nationally, he could not get an audience. Even now, they
would rather read H. G. Wells.

  Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnel ere ye learn how a gun is laid?
  For the low red glare to southward when the raided coast towns burn?
  “(Light ye shall have on that lesson, but little time to learn.)”

“Yes, thanks,” came the sarcastic answer from all the wise British
millions; “we jolly well _do_ wait.” And they “jolly well” did;
and a dozen years later it all came true, and their sarcasm was put
where it belonged. That is, if they had the sense to see it.

  Will ye pray them or preach them, or print them, or ballot them back
      from your shore?
  Will your workmen issue a mandate to bid them strike no more?

Well: it very nearly came to that. But I suggest that you re-read “The
Islanders.” I cannot quote any more. Every word of “The Islanders”
is true to make one weep; and it was the storm-centre of _The Five
Nations_. How many thousands of people felt that, in writing “The
Islanders,” Kipling had destroyed his own reputation! Doubtless
the Germans would have felt the same way about “The Parting of the
Columns”; though, if they had read it and had taken the trouble to
believe it, it would have saved them a good many millions spent in
propaganda. But the Germans were quite as stupid as the British public.

There has been more than one reason, as I have said, for the waning of
Kipling’s popularity. In the first place, he does not give us so many
good stories as once, in the full flush of his genius, he did. That
is a perfectly legitimate reason. Then, too, he has had an unlucky
trick of seeing ahead. When “The Edge of the Evening” was first
published (in 1913), it passed for hysteria. Only “fools” believed
in German spies--in 1913. But there are other causes more insidious
and more potent. He stands, not only politically for the highest type
of Toryism--at least, one fancies he does--but for a lot of other
outdated things: pious attachment to the soil; romantic love, enduring,
clean outside and in; the beauty of childhood and the bitterer beauty
of parenthood; patriotism unshrinking and unashamed; loathing of the
mob and the mob’s madness and meanness; the continuity of the English
political tradition, from Magna Charta down; religious toleration;
scrupulous perception of differences between race and race, type and
type; the White Man’s Burden. And I doubt if, even now, he is an ardent
believer in Woman Suffrage.

Almost any one of these attitudes would have been enough to damn him
with the British democracy. One quite understands that _The Five
Nations_ would not have been Mr. Lloyd George’s _vade mecum_.
One perfectly sees why Mr. Asquith, following the usual tradition,
passed Kipling over for the Laureateship in favor of a gentleman whom
few people had heard of and no one could read. (“The Widow at Windsor”
probably shocked Balliol as much as it shocked Queen Victoria.) No
Kipling-lover, for that matter, particularly wanted Kipling to be
Laureate. One even realizes--though this time with amusement--why he
is _persona non grata_ to the “brittle intellectuals who crack
beneath a strain.” The intellectuals say that he is good at times for
children, and often for the vulgar, and take their refuge in not taking
him seriously. The intellectuals have been Russianizing themselves, in
these last years; and Kipling’s laughter at that phenomenon must have
been unholy. They could scarcely afford to feel him remarkably right,
it would prove them so remarkably wrong.

As I say, one quite understands why the gorged and flattered
workingman, the demagogue, and the “brittle intellectual” have not read
him or listened to him; but it is none the less a mystery that some one
should not have listened to him and seen that he was eminently sane on
many vital points. There is, after all, no one living in England who
writes so well, who is so nearly master of the English language. But
one has to conclude that his audience has made up its mind only to be
amused during a train-journey.

There was a merry little international correspondence in 1914 or 1915
over “The Truce of the Bear.” What did Mr. Kipling say _now_? It
was all a great joke on him. People also raked up “The Man Who Was.”
I believe Mr. Kipling never replied to his humorous questioners, or,
if he did, it was to the effect that a man, like a government, might
change his foreign policy with changing conditions. Still, everybody
was very much amused, and for some reason (it can have been only his
unpopularity) very much pleased. Perhaps they had not forgiven some of
the other poems in _The Five Nations_, and looked to discredit
Kipling by pitching on “The Truce of the Bear” as they had once pitched
on “The Islanders.” With Russia driving back the Teutons on the eastern
front, I do not see that Kipling, as a patriot, could proceed to defend
his ancient position very loudly. But I do not remember--here I speak
under correction, for his war-poems are very elusive--that even since
1914 he has written of Russia as he has written of France. And I have
often wondered if, in the last months, he has not taken a very private
comfort in his own refrain of years ago:

  Make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man.

He may at least feel that he was essentially right about Russia, if
incidentally wrong. If I am not mistaken, “The Truce of the Bear”
was written on the occasion of the invitation to the first Hague
Conference. We took it that it was the Tsar whom England was to
mistrust. Very likely. But I cannot help believing that Kipling had
a private suspicion that the Hague Conference was all tommy-rot.
Which, obviously, it was, pragmatically judged. The sheer decency and
competence of certain Russian generals did save the world in the first
year of the war: let us never forget it. There never was a Russian
steam-roller, but the Germans thought there was going to be one. Let
us, as I say, never forget it. But for the last year, the Russian
people has been behaving allegorically in the sense of the poem.

  ‘When he stands up like a tired man, tottering near and near;
  When he stands up as pleading, in wavering, man-brute guise....

  When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands in prayer,
  That is the time of peril--the time of the Truce of the Bear!’

  Eyeless, noseless, and lipless, asking a dole at the door,
  Matun, the old blind beggar, he tells it o’er and o’er;
  Fumbling and feeling the rifles, warming his hands at the flame,
  Hearing our careless white men talk of the morrow’s game;

  Over and over the story, ending as he began:--
  ‘_There is no truce with Adam-zad--the bear that looks like a man!_’

I should be particularly sorry to say anything that German
propagandists would like to have said. It is perfectly impossible
for the average person to know what is the proper and what the
improper attitude to take to Russia at the moment. Even those in
high places might be forgiven for being perplexed. What the average
person perceives is that the Russians are behaving very much, and very
vividly, like “the bear that looks like a man.” Certainly they stood up
at Brest-Litovsk “in wavering, man-brute guise.”

The only point of all which is that the folk who made so merry, a few
years ago, over “The Truce of the Bear” had better find another joke.
One does not base the rightness of Kipling on his merely having been a
little less ridiculous, in a given instance, than his contemporaries
wanted to think him.

I wonder, too--still as I turn the pages of _The Five Nations_--if
there is not a tonic value to-day in the poem called “Sussex.”

  God gave all men all earth to love,
    But since our hearts are small,
  Ordained for each one spot should prove
    Beloved over all;
  That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
    So we, in godlike mood,
  May of our love create our earth
    And see that it is good.

  So one shall Baltic pines content,
    As one some Surrey glade,
  Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
    Before Levuka’s trade.
  Each to his choice, and I rejoice
    The lot has fallen to me
  In a fair ground--in a fair ground--
    Yea, Sussex by the sea!

  So to the land our hearts we give
    Till the sure magic strike,
  And Memory, Use, and Love make live
    Us and our fields alike--
  That deeper than our speech and thought,
    Beyond our reason’s sway,
  Clay of the pit whence we were wrought
    Yearns to its fellow-clay.

The windy internationalism to which we are so often invited, nowadays,
to listen, would deny it--might even call it “_chauvinisme de
clocher_.” The reply is that people actually do feel as Kipling
says they do. He has always tended to serve (in his own phrase) the
God of Things as They Are. Granted, for the sake of argument, that it
would be good for you to love all men and all countries alike, the
fact remains that you do not. If that is your duty, most decent people
do not perform their duty; their fathers did not, and their children
will not. Even the most radical internationalists wish to substitute
class-consciousness for patriotism--on the whole, a less enlightened
chauvinism than the other. And, judging from the present war, they have
not been able to pull even that off.

As for saying that one has the same sense of personal insult in seeing
a foreign land invaded as in seeing one’s own, that is nonsense.
France has been the home of the spirit to many of us; the thought of
an invaded France is of a bitterness hardly to be borne. But though
one has lived in it and loved it, one is not so angry, in the very
depths of one, at Teuton occupation of France as one would be at Teuton
occupation of one’s own soil. I will not say what German invasion of
my own New England would be to me. “Ten generations of New England
ancestors” would rise up to curse the enemy. But even an invaded
Oshkosh (and Oshkosh is a mere name to me) would be to me, an American,
an even deadlier insult than an invaded Paris. I should take it more
personally, I know. And if that can be so for us, in our far-flung,
heterogeneous republic, what must be the case with the children of
homogeneous France? If I know that I should feel that way about
Oshkosh, what must the Kentish man feel about Kent, the Devonshire man
about Devon, the Englishman about England? Did not all sane Americans
between Bangor and San Diego react in precisely similar fashion to Herr
Zimmermann’s plans for Texas? I have never even been in Texas, but
Texas belongs to me and I belong to it.

No: say what you please, geography is the great human science; it is
more intimate than biology. And Kipling has had the sense to see it
because he really knows something about the _genus homo_. It was
a delightful phrase of the Frenchman’s that charmed our youth--“the
passion for the planet”; but are we not a little undeceived now? Do we
not at last realize that the only real “man without a country” is the
cosmopolite? If there be such a person.

I can almost hear someone quoting ironically,

  But there is neither East nor West, border nor breed nor birth,
  When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends
      of the earth.

That is very taking; and in a sense it is true, thank Heaven. But I
fancy Kipling would want to modify it now. At least he would like to
write a foot-note containing a careful definition of the word “strong.”
It would not apply to the average German.

Kipling was called, for many years, by the pacifist-Liberals, a jingo.
All imperialists were, _ex officio_, jingoes. Some of these
people have got into their heads, by this time, the conception of a
“preparedness” that makes for peace, and realize the difference between
a real jingo and a man who wants to avert war in the only way possible
when a considerable portion of the world remains militaristic. We all
know by this time that, if England had been prepared in 1914, there
would have been no war in 1914; that, very probably, if Sir Edward Grey
had been empowered to say, at the proper instant, that England would
fight, there would have been no war in 1914. Had “The Army of a Dream”
been there, the mailed fist would not have been shaken at the world.
But that is ancient history. It is to be hoped that not every one who
preached preparedness in the old days is now stigmatized as a jingo. If
anyone still thinks of Kipling vaguely as a war-mad imperialist, let
him read “The Settler”:

  Earth where we rode to slay or be slain,
    Our love shall redeem unto life;
  We will gather and lead to her lips again
    The waters of ancient strife,
  From the far and fiercely guarded streams
    And the pools where we lay in wait,
  Till the corn cover our evil dreams
    And the young corn our hate.

That is not the accent of the dyed-in-the-wool jingo.

And here again--still out of _The Five Nations_--the “Half-Ballad
of Waterval”:

  _They_’ll never know the shame that brands--
    Black shame no livin’ down makes white,
  The mockin’ from the sentry-stands,
    The women’s laugh, the gaoler’s spite.
    We are too bloomin’ much polite,
      But that is ’ow I’d ’ave us be ...
    Since I ’ave learned at Waterval
    The meanin’ of captivity.

Written at least fifteen years ago--and still, I fancy, the core of
the matter. Certainly very different from imperialistic-militaristic
conceptions of the rights of prisoners as exemplified by--Wittenberg,
let us say.

All these later quotations go to show merely that Kipling need not
have been so slanged for _The Five Nations_, since in much of _The
Five Nations_ he has pretty well expressed fundamental British
feeling--as is now, day by day, being proved. And--let us face it
squarely--fundamental British feeling is on the whole the most decent
on earth. As Americans, we like to think that we share it. No one, to
be sure, paid much attention to the poems just cited: they took it out
in criticizing things like “The Lesson,” “The Islanders,” and “The Old
Men.” Now we find that in those much-execrated poems he told the simple
truth. Why not admit it? Admit, that is, ungrudgingly, not only that he
has been right since 1914, but that he was right much earlier, and that
it is the other people who have had to shift their point of view.

But policies--as well foreign as domestic--have, from of old, made
bitter enemies and excited acrimonious controversy. No one could have
said anything worse about Kipling than political folk in all the
serious English reviews were saying (before the war), all the time,
about their political opponents. You could never take up one of those
famous periodicals without feeling that vitriol had been spilled in
your very presence. If there is a special rhetoric of vituperation, the
English political article was its text-book. We milder Americans gasped.
No Southern gentleman, on the floor of the Senate, ever went quite so
far.

So we should expect Kipling to be called horrid names by those who
disagreed with him politically, because that is English political
manners. No one really minds, except as one has always resented the
doom of Cassandra. What one does mind, what one does resent, is the
judgment of the “intellectuals” on Kipling’s general human knowledge.
They seem to agree with Oscar Wilde that, in turning over the pages,
“one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by
superb flashes of vulgarity.... From the point of view of literature
Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates.... He is our first
authority on the second-rate, and has seen marvellous things through
key-holes, and his backgrounds are real works of art.” Even Henry James
spoke of him tentatively, as a young man who had gone a long way before
breakfast. Politics always make people see red; but the human emotions
in general, people ought to be able to discuss amicably. And the
intellectuals have never been willing to discuss Kipling at all. When
he is dead, they will, of course. But at present they still consider
him negligible.

Now no one--unless Rudyard Kipling himself--is less tempted than I
to set Rudyard Kipling up as “saint and sage,” or to try to establish
a Kipling philosophy or a Kipling cult. You may take a man seriously
without taking him religiously, I should hope. But the intellectuals
take other people religiously, not to say seriously; and why Kipling
is to be forever relegated by our arbiters of taste to the ranks of
the frivolous or the hysterical or the vulgar, passes the normal
understanding.

Two demands can respectably be made of a writer, in order that he
should be taken “seriously”: that he should be to some extent a master
of style, and that he should have sane and serious things to say about
life. To those who insist that Kipling is not a master of English
style, one has, really--now I come to think of it--nothing to say.
Especially as many of them will tell you, with straight faces, that
Galsworthy, or Arnold Bennett, or someone else, _is_ a master of
style. Chiefly, it means that they care so little about what he says
that they belittle his way of saying it. They persist in taking a
purely momentary point of view. Kipling, I fancy, can afford to await
the judgment of posterity. He is destined to become a great English
name.

There are probably several reasons for this critical scorn. One is that
he writes short stories, and short stories are not yet so dignified
as novels--unless the writer be Maupassant. Some of the critics
have never read anything but the earliest Kipling. Largely, it is
because they have not the faintest approximation to a Chaucerian or
Shakespearean sense of life--life, good and bad, high and low, grave
and gay--and they find no charm, no “distinction” in the blessed,
common, earthy Englishness of the English scene. Most of all, they
are uninterested in the very universality of the emotions and events
he deals with: patriotism, love, childhood and parenthood, duty,
and death. Nor have they much taste for laughter. As for tradition,
they are so busy scrapping it, that they are not concerned with
illustrations of its continuity and deathlessness.

I could get up a better brief for Kipling on the human score, if I were
not making it a point of honor to stick to _The Five Nations_. For
Kipling has gone on very much, even since then. _The Five Nations_
deals particularly with the Boer War and reactions after the Boer War.
His more explicitly “human” wisdom is not to be found there in greatest
measure. Yet in some ways _The Five Nations_ comes home to us just
now more than other things, when we are in the midst of the very war
which he therein prophesied.

Take the “Chant-Pagan.” When the war is over, there will be some
millions of Englishmen (to leave out the other Allies) who will
come home singing that chant--if not literally, then in spirit.
In fact, that is the most encouraging thing in all Kipling for the
reformers--except that I do not believe the returned soldier will care
much more for the English industrial paradise than for the “Squire an’
’is wife.” Even old-age pensions and the abolition of great estates,
and all the other articles of Lloyd George’s faith, are not going to
make him happy. He is going to know too much about real values. There
is just a chance that, after having saved England in the field, he may
save England at home. There will--God send!--be so many of him. No man
can prophesy; and yet already, in America, one hears people wondering
about our own boys, in the very sense of the “Chant-Pagan.”

Naturally, as I say, the more personal human relations are not dealt
with in _The Five Nations_. But there remains “The Second Voyage.”
I do not know that anything saner or wiser or more poignant has ever
been written about that love between man and woman which is the bulwark
of Occidental civilization. No one can deal more tenderly than Kipling
with the idyll between boy and girl--look at “The Brushwood Boy.” He
can even deal convincingly with the great illicit love (though it is
not a favorite theme of his)--witness “Without Benefit of Clergy” and
the great paragraph in “Love o’ Women.” But the love that he most
often treats is the love between husband and wife: the love that is
built on shared tears and laughter, on deep domestic sympathies and
clean sex-attraction, the love that many waters cannot quench. In “The
Second Voyage” he explicitly renounces all others; it expresses love,
if you like, more or less according to the prayer-book. He sacrifices
to the god of Romantic Marriage. If you choose to put it that way,
there ain’t a lady livin’ in the land as he’d change for ’is dear old
Dutch. Perhaps that is why they call him vulgar. Many of our “serious”
contemporaries appear to resent any account of human relations that
is both vitally human and essentially decent, because it leaves at
one side their two preferred groups: the very sophisticated, and the
criminal classes.

I suspect that one difficulty, for the more sincere, if still brittle,
intellectuals, lies in the unconventional verse-forms which Kipling
often affects. They can stand any amount of slang in prose, but they
cannot endure it in verse. At least, they do not believe that “high
seriousness” can wear such a garb. I dare say they would throw out even
“The Second Voyage” on the score of unconventionality. Well: let them.
I was going to quote some of it, but I am too out of temper with the
intellectuals. They may read it for themselves. And probably none of
the moderns would be able to endure the mention of “Custom, Reverence,
and Fear.” I give it up. But they need not think that Kipling’s own
education in the matter of sex-relations stopped with the Gadsbys.

To the mind of the serious Kipling-lover, the thing that grows more
and more impressive is his universality. Perhaps it seems to some
an unimportant list of allegiances that I have mentioned: “pious
attachment to the soil; romantic love, enduring, clean outside and
in; the beauty of childhood and the bitterer beauty of parenthood;
patriotism unshrinking and unashamed; loathing of the mob and the
mob’s madness and meanness; the continuity of the English political
tradition, from Magna Charta down; religious toleration; scrupulous
perception of differences between race and race, type and type; the
White Man’s Burden.” Many a man has had a tablet in Westminster Abbey
for a lesser creed. And almost no one has sought his wisdom and his
delight in so many places or so many classes of society. Engineers,
subalterns, ladies of the manor, cockney privates, Hindu bearers,
Boer farmers, half-caste Portuguese nursemaids, Gloucester fishermen,
bank clerks, reporters, young English children, German scientists,
law lords, public-school boys, lamas, pilots, children of the zodiac,
even the beast-folk of the jungle--what a Shakespearean welter,
and, humanly speaking, what a Shakespearean result! It is the “good
gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth.” And the far-flung adventure
has brought Kipling back to a very simple but not too easy code. At
least, one cannot say that he sticks by the most English of English
traditions because he has never seen anything else. He has had room
and chance to choose. He has ended by being very orthodox, not to say
conventional, about the fundamental human duties; and he reads history
with a canny eye. But I do not think anyone can accuse Kipling of
being a stick-in-the-mud. “With the Night Mail” does not look so Jules
Verne-ish now as it did when it was printed. Perhaps some day we shall
even have to give the benefit of the doubt to the later “flight of
fact” called “As Easy as A. B. C.” Though I admit that that is going
far.

Just there, I did leave _The Five Nations_ for the moment; but it
is impossible to mention “As Easy as A. B. C.” and not also quote some
of “MacDonough’s Song.”

  Whether the People be led by the Lord,
    Or lured by the loudest throat;
  If it be quicker to die by the sword
    Or cheaper to die by vote--
  These are the things we have dealt with once,
    (And they will not rise from their grave)
  For Holy People, however it runs,
    Endeth in wholly Slave.

  Whatsoever, for any cause,
    Seeketh to take or give
  Power above or beyond the Laws,
    Suffer it not to live!
  Holy State or Holy King--
    Or Holy People’s Will--
  Have no truck with the senseless thing.
    Order the guns and kill!

    _Saying--after--me_:--

  ‘Once there was The People--Terror gave it birth;
  Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.
  Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!
  Once there was The People--it shall never be again!’

Easy enough to see why Kipling is not popular. Yet Kipling is by no
means the only person who is warning us that mob-rule may come and
sweep away our institutions. Most people who fear that event are
doing their best to ingratiate themselves with the mob before it
wholly loses its temper. I confess that--politics apart, and as a
mere matter of dignity--it is a comfort to hear some man speak in
another spirit and sense than that of craven conciliation. I have not
quoted from “MacDonough’s Song” because I think it is a great poem;
but because it is perhaps the most nakedly, blatantly “unpopular”
thing Kipling has ever written. There it is, openly admitted, in all
its offensiveness--his greatest crime. Damn him for it if you feel
inclined, but confess that to write as uncompromisingly as that is
better manners than to have loathing or fear in your heart and honey
on your lips. “We reason with them in Little Russia,” says Dragomiroff
in “As Easy as A. B. C.” Well, it looks as if, several generations
ahead, that might still be the method in Little Russia. The story was
written in 1912.

_The Five Nations_ ends with the “Recessional,” which preceded
the Boer War by three years. And there is nothing to add to the
“Recessional,” even now; except that Germany needs to read it, at
present, more than England does. All that I have meant to do is to
point out that Kipling was right about preparedness, right about the
Colonies, right about Germany, right about Russia, right about the
Boers, right about Kitchener, right about demagogues and “labor,” right
about the elderly politicians, right about the decent British code,
right about patriotism and the human heart--right about love; and that
for all those things (except the last) he was slanged as if he were
wrong. In political matters, “thought is free,” with us, at least. But
in the matter of literary criticism, it seems a pity not to realize the
worth and distinction of the few people we have who possess either. I
have been told that Kipling still sells better than any other author
in America. When I think of Harold Bell Wright, I hope, for the credit
of America, that it is true. Perhaps the attitude of the intellectuals
is mere snobbishness, which cannot consent to think a best-seller
literature. But, as I say, it is a pity that the greatest living master
of English style (for Conrad’s is a restricted field) should not be
confessed to as such by the few who still profess to care about style.
One would not mind so much if they did not commend such a lot of
third-rate stuff.

I am glad that Kipling himself has the vulgar consolation of royalties.
He has, to be sure--I repeat--the disadvantage of telling the truth
prematurely. If we have just about caught up with _The Five
Nations_--well, let us hope that the argument from analogy will
not work in this case: that we shall never have to catch up with “As
Easy as A. B. C.”; that that, at least, may not be an instance of
his remarkable rightness. For it does not make one happy about the
immediate future.


                              FOOTNOTES:

[A] I have been told, since writing this essay, that the University of
Chicago demands a modicum of Greek for the A. B. degree. The Catholic
University does the same. And it is only fair to say, also, that, since
this essay was written, Princeton has abdicated her well-nigh unique
position. It will hereafter be possible to acquire the Princeton A. B.
without knowing _alpha_ from _omega_.



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