Chapter IV: Part 4

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to realize, I wonder, how completely the psychological novel and the “problem” play (in the old sense) have gone out of date?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: