Chapter VIII: Part 8

The first number of the _Woman’s Supplement_, which has prompted these reflections, suggests another: the perpetual wonder and delight of men at the success with which women accommodate facts to their ideals. We saw them, just now, doing this with their literature; we saw them determined that, at all costs, this shall be pleasing and themselves the most pleasing things in it; we saw the notable success of George Sand in accommodating her historical to her ideal self. But they are as successful with nature as with history. Just now, for example, sloping shoulders are manifestly the ideal—sloping shoulders with the obviously appropriate balloon sleeves, as in Mr. Bernard Lintott’s lady, or else with no sleeves at all, as in M. Jean Doumergue’s. And part of the same ideal is that the “figure” shall be anything but “full.” Now are women’s shoulders naturally more sloping or their figures less full than they used to be? These are puzzling questions, but not beyond conjecture, and, for my part, I guess that the answer is No. Yet our women have easily triumphed over nature and slope their shoulders with the uniformity of a regiment sloping arms, while every woman with a full figure has quietly become a _fausse maigre_.

While I am about it, let me echo the usual male protest. As the _Supplement_ shows, women have not yet persuaded themselves to abandon their detestable high heels. The consequence is that there threatens to be no longer any such thing as a graceful gait. _Incessu patuit dea_ will soon have become an incomprehensible allusion. And that hideous square patch which too often peeps above the back of the shoe? I suppose it is just a practical device to strengthen the stocking in a part of stress; but I hardly think really “nice” women can abide it. On the whole, however, I subscribe cheerfully to the current opinion that woman’s dress was never so charming as it is at present. That is probably an illusion. The mysterious laws that regulate fashion mercifully regulate also the capacity for enjoying it. And it is a mercy, too, that the beauty of woman can triumph even over “old-fashioned” things. To our modern eyes the fashions of the ’70’s and ’80’s were far from beautiful in themselves—bunchy, humpy, without “line.” Yet, when they were playing _Peter Ibbetson_, one saw some fair women in them—and was at once reconciled, able in fact to see them with the eye of their period.

PRACTICAL LITERATURE

“Pray, Sir,” a leader-writer is said to have asked Delane, “how do you say ‘good fellow’ in print?” and to have been answered, “Sir, you should not say it at all.” There are thousands of ambitious young people to-day who want to know how you say good fellow, or awful snipe, or old bean, or whatever, in print, and that is why there are Schools of Journalism. A paper of instructions from one of these excellent institutions has lately fallen into my hands, and there seems no reason for withholding it from publication. It appears to be in the nature of a preliminary introduction to what a distinguished journalist has well called “practical literature.” For Journalists, in Matthew Arnold’s quotation, drive at practice, and to be practical you must begin by learning the shibboleths—that is to say, the turns of phrase and modes of treatment that long experience has approved and constant readers are accustomed to expect. There is no mystery about it; they are much more simple than a vain people supposeth. But it is all-important to get them right at the outset—or, as is said in practical literature, from the word “go”—and the advice the paper has to give about them is as follows:—

_Descriptive Articles on Great Occasions._—The beginner will probably find there is very little to describe. He must learn to invent. Street crowds have a pestilent habit of not cheering at the appropriate moment; your first business will be to make them. Celebrities flash by in closed carriages, totally hidden by the police; you will ruthlessly expose them, bowing to the storm of applause which sweeps across the multitude filling the square and lining the classic steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. If the Royal Family is present you will need especial tact. Find the golden mean between the familiar and the abject. Be human, like Euripides. Above all, the homely “note” is recommended. You cannot say too often that the King “looked bronzed.” Thousands of pallid readers who go to Margate for a week in order to come back looking bronzed will appreciate that. It is loyal, it attests that robust health that we all desire for his Majesty, and at the same time it is homely. “I, too, have been bronzed,” the reader says, as the barber at Byron’s funeral said, “I, too, have been unhappy.” Whatever is offered the Queen, a bouquet, a trowel, a sample of the local product the Queen will “smilingly accept.” If she tastes the men’s (or boy scouts’ or factory girls’) soup, she will “pronounce it excellent.” Preserve a cheerful tone, especially with _contretemps_. If Gold Stick in Waiting drops his gold stick, you will note that “the Royal party were highly amused” and that “the little Princess laughed heartily.”

_Politics and International Affairs._—Here practical literature takes a hint from the other sort. Be historical. Be reminded of the great Westminster Election and the Duchess of Devonshire. Remember Speaker Onslow. Compare whatever you dislike to the Rump. Magna Charta and Habeas Corpus must now be allowed a rest, but you may still allude to Thermidor and Brumaire, the Mountain and the Cordeliers Club. “Mr.” Pitt sounds well. Open your leader with “Nothing in the annals of diplomacy since the Treaty of Utrecht (or the Treaty of Vienna, or whatever other treaty you can think of) has so disgraced,” &c. The second paragraph should begin “Nor is that all.” Be slightly archaistic. Words like “caitiff” and “poltroon” may be discreetly used. Books recommended for the course: Gibbon, Junius, early volumes of Punch, Mahan’s “Sea Power,” and (for quotations) R. L. Stevenson’s “Wrong Box.”

_Foreign Correspondence._—Remember that the particular capital you happen to be posted at is the real hub of your newspaper, and wonder every morning “what those fellows at the London office can be about” to print so much stuff about their silly local affairs. Practise political divination from the minutest data. If some little actress at the Marigny, or Belasco’s, makes you a _pied de nez_ you will say that “the Gallic temper (or public opinion in the Eastern States) is showing signs of dangerous exasperation.” If you find a junior Attaché lunching at the golf club on Sunday, you will say “the political tension is now at any rate momentarily relaxed.” If they charge you a few centimes or cents more for your box of chocolates you will say “the population is now groaning under famine prices, and State intervention cannot be much longer delayed.”

_Criticism of the Arts and the Theatre._—As criticism is not practical, it hardly comes within the scope of instructions on practical literature. But newspapers, after all, must be filled, and, if the advertisements permit, room may be found even for criticism. Fortunately, it requires little if any instruction. The office boy, if he is not proud, may be turned on to it at a pinch. The charwomen, when they can be spared from their more useful work, often prove neat hands at it. Ideas are to be discouraged; a few catchwords are all that is necessary, with one decent hat for Private Views and one ditto dress suit for First Nights. The art critic will do well to find a new and unknown artist and track him down from show to show, comparing him in turn to Tintoretto, the lesser Umbrians, and the Giottos at Padua. (See Vasari _passim_, a repertory of delightful names.) The theatrical critic will make it his chief care to construct a striking sentence which the managers can quote, without excessive garbling, in their advertisements. It can end with “rapturously applauded,” with “rocked with laughter,” or with “for many a night to come.”

_N.B._—Personally conducted parties of students taken to the theatre to see leading actresses “making great strides in their art” and “having the ball at their feet” and to watch Mr. Collins “surpassing himself.” They will afterwards be shown cases of type and instructed in the thermometrical test of the temperature at which it becomes “cold print.”

... The paper does not end here. In a special section on the language of the poster, it offers a prize for any hitherto undiscovered application of the word “amazing.” It goes on to give instructions to writers on cricket, golf, and sport, with a stock selection of anecdotes about “W.G.” and “E.M.,” and a plan to scale of the Dormy House and Mr. Harry Tate’s moustache when he addresses the ball and the audience. But these are awful mysteries which I dare not follow the paper in profaning.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMAN

The serious research that some contemporary French students are devoting to our English literature is one of the most valuable by-products of the Entente. We have had of recent years remarkable French monographs on Wordsworth, on Cowper, on Crabbe, on Hazlitt, which are fully as authoritative as any of our native commentaries. And, turning over the new volumes at a French bookseller’s the other day, I came across another Gallic tribute of this kind, with a rather lengthy title, “La Femme Anglaise au XIXᵉ siècle et son évolution d’après le roman anglais contemporain,” by Mme. Léonie Villard. Mme. Villard seems to have read all our modern English novels, from Richardson’s “Pamela” down to the latest piece of propagandism of Mr. H. G. Wells. Of course mere literary curiosity could never have carried any human being through all that; Mme. Villard is an ardent “feminist,” and, like her sisters, capable of miraculous physical endurance for the “cause.” A mere man may “devour whole libraries,” but it takes a fair feminist to swallow the huge mass of English fiction.

Reading exclusively from a single point of view, Mme. Villard seems to have sometimes sacrificed her critical sense to her principles. Thus, as a type of the nineteenth-century “old maid,” so neglected, so ill-used by society, she selects Miss Rachel Wardle! Dickens, generally “so pitiful to the weak, so generous to the oppressed and the conquered,” had no pity for her. But upon us it is incumbent to pity and understand and find excuses for her. “At any rate, her desire to be loved and, above all, to experience in other surroundings a freer and less humiliating life should have nothing surprising for us.” Isn’t this rather a solemn way of describing the lady’s amours with Mr. Tupman and Mr. Jingle? Is it really the fault of society if an amorous old dame will be silly? And is she not to be laughed at if she happen to fall into the category “old maid”? Mrs. Bardell was amorous too. So was Mr. Tupman. Dickens laughs at these also—but then they were not old maids, they didn’t illustrate a “feminine case.” Then there was Mrs. Jellyby. She reminded some people of Harriet Martineau. But Dickens had deformed the type (who was intelligent and was not the mother of a family) so as to present the “new woman” in the least favourable light. He “has fixed for half a century the type of the intellectual or enfranchised woman, as conceived by those who trust the judgment of others rather than their own direct observation.” The question, surely, is not whether Mrs. Jellyby was unlike Harriet Martineau, but whether in herself she was a sufficiently comic personage. Most readers of Dickens find her so. What injustice is there in this to the real “new woman,” whom, as Mme. Villard has shown, she did _not_ resemble? As a matter of fact, when Dickens had a mind to draw a real “strong-minded” woman he drew her most sympathetically. Is there any of his women more delightful than Miss Trotwood? “To-day,” says Mme. Villard, “she appears to us an unconscious feminist whose feminism misses its mark, since it can find no field of action amid narrow, provincial, routine surroundings.” Poor Miss Trotwood!

We are to understand that it was the domination and the selfishness of man that created the lamentable type of nineteenth-century “old maid.” But who were unkindest to Miss Wardle? Her nieces, members of her own sex. Who created the typical “old maid” and terrible bore, Miss Bates? Another “old maid,” Jane Austen. The fact is, old maids like other human beings have their foibles. Are these never to be put into a book? Feminism seems to make its disciples terribly serious. Miss La Creevy is Dickens’s example of the _femme artiste_. See, says Mme. Villard, how types of “independent women” are caricatured! She cannot laugh at Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig, because they testify to the social contempt attaching to the nursing profession at their date! Has it never occurred to her that novels are sometimes written merely as novels and not as _dossiers_ in a “case” for the “evolution” of woman?

After all, however, there are plenty of serious novelists who do supply good evidence—more particularly the quasi-propagandists like Mrs. Gaskell (when she chose) and Mrs. Humphry Ward (sometimes), and (nearly always) Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells. Mme. Villard makes effective play with these. She has no difficulty, for instance, in showing the immense economic advance of the woman-worker during the last century, though even here her eye seems too exclusively fixed on her own sex. True, women were the chief victims of the old “factory” and “sweating” systems, but the amelioration of their condition, if I am not mistaken, came only as part of the general amelioration in the condition of “labour,” without sex-distinction.

It is when she comes to the sentimental side of her subject, the relation of woman to man whether in marriage or “free love,” that Mme. Villard finds her material a little too much for her. Naturally, for our novelists and playwrights can never let the too fascinating subject alone and seem to go on saying the same things about it over and over again—_con variazioni_. You have, for example, Mrs. Gaskell, so far back as 1850, dealing with the same theme as Mr. Stanley Houghton dealt with in “Hindle Wakes” (1910)—the refusal of the seduced woman to accept the regularization of her position by marriage. Then there are the free-lovers “on principle,” who end by conceding marriage to social prejudice—like Mr. Wells’s Ann Veronica. There must be English novels where the “free lovers” maintain their principle triumphantly to the end, though I haven’t read them; but I seem to remember several in the French language. It is all very confusing. Perhaps—I only say perhaps—those are wisest who leave “principle” in these matters to the heroes and heroines of the novelists and are content to live ordinary lives in an ordinary jog-trot way, without too much thinking about it. There is this comfort for the old-fashioned commonplace people among us, at any rate, that whatever “evolution” of woman there may have been in the nineteenth century, she remains in all essentials very much what she used to be. I can find it as easy to-day to be in love with Emma and Elizabeth and Anne—I needn’t mention their surnames—who are more than a century old, bless them, as with (not to compromise myself with any contemporary English heroine) M. Barrès’s Bérénice, or with one of M. Marcel Proust’s “Jeunes filles en Fleurs.”

PICKLES AND PICARDS

A writer in the _Nouvelle Revue Française_ drops a remark which it does one good to read. He says that in the old French villages on the Picardy front all that the English have taught the countryfolk in five years of cohabitation is to eat pickles with their boiled beef. Very likely this is a humorous perversion of the truth; but I should like to believe it. Not from any personal interest in pickles, though that will seem odd, and perhaps incredible, to my French friends, who seem to think that every Englishman must be a pickle-eater—just as we English used to think every Frenchman ate frogs. No doubt, however, this French generalization is fairly accurate; we are a nation of pickle-eaters, and if any one asks why, I guess the answer is cold beef. Anyhow, the idea has fascinated the French mind. Among the English characteristics of which Jules Lemaître once gave a list (from hearsay, which he thought, good, easy man, as authentic evidence as coming to see England for himself) I remember he mentions “Les _pickles_.” And it is the one English characteristic that has infected the Picards!

My reason for rejoicing is that they have not been infected by more than one, that in spite of all temptations, etc., they remain (pickles excepted) true Picards. There have been times (particularly in mid-eighteenth century) when the French have shown a tendency to Anglomania. Let us be glad that these are over. Probably the French Revolution settled that point, as it settled so many others, by isolating France for the time being, and making her the common enemy. More than one of the Terrorists were Picards by race, but you may be sure they never ate pickles. But cohabitation may bring about the same result as isolation, in a different way. Our armies have lived for five years with the French; both natives and visitors have had ample opportunities for observing each other’s characteristics; and I like to think that both have parted with the profound conviction that, on either side, these are inimitable. Condiments, of course, excepted. They have adopted our pickles, and we have taken their _sauce bigarade_, which is excellent with wild duck. Condiments, by the way, include the linguistic sort. We have seen the delight with which Lemaître wrote down that strange, abrupt, tart English word “pickles” in his French text. So some of our own scribblers wantonly and wickedly flavour their writings with an occasional French phrase, because it seems to them to give a piquancy, a zest. These apart, let us by all means admire one another’s qualities without seeking to interchange them. Let us jealously preserve our own characteristics, our own type, like the Picardy villagers. National peculiarities are the perpetual joy of travel (except when one side wants the window down and the other up), the _bouquet_ of literature, the salt of life.

Talking of travel, we have been having a correspondence in _The Times_ on the lavatories and the closed windows on the P.L.M. I am not using that railway myself just now, and I confess I like to see that here again the French remain obstinately French. France is endeared to us, like any other friend, by its weaknesses as well as its virtues; it would, for many of us, not be the old friend that we know and love without its occasional stuffiness and its occasional smells. Louis Veuillot once wrote a book called “Les Odeurs de Paris.” We have all smelt them, and should hardly recognize our Paris without them—though they must have had more pungency, a more racy, romantic flavour in Balzac’s Paris, the Paris of our dreams. Nowadays for the rich Balzacian smells you will have to visit some of the provincial towns of his novels, and so your pilgrimage will combine a literary with all factory interest. I know of one old Burgundian town—I will not name it, for obvious reasons—not mentioned, I fancy, by Balzac, quite untouched by time, with pepper-pot towers, a river in a deep ravine, and well worth a literary pilgrimage if only for its associations with Mme. de Sévigné and the Président de Brosses, where you have the added delight of the richest medieval odours powerfully assisted by a tannery—an unrivalled combination! Why do so many Englishmen grumble at these things instead of appreciating them æsthetically, as accompaniments of the French scene, as part of that varied experience which we call “abroad”? Or why do they explain them on the illiberal assumption of some inherent inferiority in the French character?

I find a typical specimen of this kind of explanation in Hazlitt’s “Notes of a Journey through France and Italy,” made about a century ago, when France was the very France (think of it!) that was being observed, and about to be described, by Balzac. One would have thought that the Londoner of 1824 (who must have been pretty well used to smells at home) would have found some other explanation than the physiological and psychological inferiority of the French. But hear him. “A Frenchman’s senses and understanding are alike insensible to pain—he recognizes (happily for himself) the existence only of that which adds to his importance or his satisfaction. He is delighted with perfumes, but passes over the most offensive smells and will not lift up his little finger to remove a general nuisance, for it is none to him.” To which he appends a note:—“One would think that a people so devoted to perfumes, who deal in essences and scents, and have fifty different sorts of snuffs, would be equally nice, and offended at the approach of every disagreeable odour. Not so. They seem to have no sense of the disagreeable in smells or tastes, as if their heads were stuffed with a cold, and hang over a dunghill, as if it were a bed of roses, or swallow the most detestable dishes with the greatest relish. The nerve of their sensibility is bound up at the point of pain.... They make the best of everything (which is a virtue)—and treat the worst with levity or complaisance (which is a vice).”

Well, well. When this was written French and English had not long ceased to be at war, and Hazlitt was never a sweet-tempered man. But you can still find the censorious Englishman who is ready decisively to mark off French characteristics into “virtues” and “vices,” according to his own English standard. There may, for all I know, be some Frenchman who gives us tit for tat. This type of critic is tiresome enough; but there is another that seems to me quite intolerable, the critic who detests all national peculiarities as such, and would level down all humanity to one monotonous level of sameness. As though uniformity were not already the plague of the modern world! We men all wear the same hat (despite the efforts of the _Daily Mail_), women all powder their noses in the same way, and the “cinema palaces” all show the same films, with the same “Mary” and the same “Dug.” For heaven’s sake, let us cling to our national peculiarities!

And that is why I welcome the intelligence that the Picards have taken over nothing from us but our pickles, and that the French travellers on the P.L.M. still insist on keeping the window up. Let our enthusiasts for a uniform world ponder these facts. And it is a relief to think that they can never unify national landscapes. The village green, the cottage gardens, the chalk downs, the chines, the red coombs will always be English. The long straight _route nationale_ and the skinny fowls that are always straying across it, the poplar-bordered streams, the trim vines ranked along the hill-side, the heavily-accoutred gendarme and the fat farmer in the stiff indigo blouse hobnobbing at the _estaminet_, these will always be French. Oh, but I would give something to see that indigo blouse again, and have a morning chat with the farmer! “Hé! père Martin, ça va toujours bien? Pas mal, m’sieu. Et la récolte? Dame! je ne m’en plains pas ... à la votre, m’sieu!” They may take our pickles, if they will, but let them remain themselves, our old French friends.

THE BUSINESS MAN

It is not easy for the slave of “copy,” sedentary and shy, to know that triumphant figure of the active, bustling world, the business man. The business man is too busy, and can only be seen in office hours, when the scribe is correcting proofs or, perhaps, not yet up. Nevertheless, I once nearly saw the Governor of the Bank of England. I hold the Governor to be the archetype of the business man. In my green unknowing youth I used to take the gentleman in cocked hat and picturesque robe at the Threadneedle Street entrance for the Governor, but now know better. Well, I once nearly saw the Governor. It was on the stage. Mr. Gerald du Maurier was in the bank-parlour when a servant entered and said: “The Governor of the Bank of England to call on you, sir.” “Show him in,” said Mr. du Maurier with the easy _nonchalance_ of which only actors have the secret. It was a tremendous moment. I seemed to hear harps in the air. And just then, down came the curtain! It was felt, no doubt, that the Governor of the Bank of England ought not to be made a motley to the view. But I was inconsolable. I had been robbed of my one chance of seeing the supreme business man.

Of late, however, the veil that shrouds the business man from the non-business eye has been partly lifted. The pictorial advertisement people have got hold of him and give brief, tantalizing glimpses of his daily life. Maeterlinck speaks of “l’auguste vie quotidienne” of Hamlet. That only shows that Hamlet (it is indeed his prime characteristic) was not a business man. For the business man’s daily life, if the advertisements are to be trusted, is not so much august as alert, strenuous, and, above all, devoted to the pleasures of the toilet. And his toilet seems, for the most part, to centre in or near his chin. Indeed, it is by his chin that you identify the business man. You know what Pascal said of Cleopatra’s nose: how, if it had been an inch shorter, the whole history of the world would have been different. Much the same thing may be said about the business man’s chin. Had it been receding or pointed or dimpled or double, there would have been no business man and consequently no business. But things, as Bishop Butler said, are what they are and their consequences will be what they will be. The business man’s chin is prominent, square, firm, and (unless he deals in rubber tires—the sole exception to the rule) smooth. It is as smooth as Spedding’s forehead, celebrated by Thackeray and Edward Fitzgerald. It is, indeed, like that forehead, a kind of landmark, a public monument. Even the rich, velvety lather, which does not dry on the face and leaves behind a feeling of complete comfort and well-grooming, cannot disguise it. No wonder the business man is so particular about shaving it! It is a kind of religious rite, an Early Matins, with him.

Outside the bank-parlour, the mart and the exchange the business man takes no risks, and at his toilet-table he prefers safety razors. Indeed, he collects them. Sometimes he favours the sort that can be stropped in a moment with one turn of the wrist; sometimes the sort that needs no stropping at all. But, like all collectors, he is never so happy as when handling, or rather caressing the objects of his collection. Mark how his eyes dance with delight and his smile sweetens as the razor courses over his chin. Evidently life at this moment is burning for him with a hard gem-like flame. Call it not shaving! Say, rather, he is ministering to the symbolic element in him, daintily smoothing the proud emblem of his power—to which he will add the finishing touch of pearl-powder, whose constant use produces a delicate bloom, tones up the complexion, and protects the skin against the ravages of time.

When the chin has been prepared for the business day he tries and contrasts the several effects of it over a variety of collars. For the business man collects collars, too. His chin protrudes with quiet but firm insistence over some of them, nestles coyly in others, or it may be emerges with ease from the sort designed to give ample throat room and especially favoured by men who seek considerable freedom but at the same time a collar of character and distinction. Nor has he any false shame about being seen in his shirt-sleeves. In fact, he seems to be in the habit, when half-dressed, of calling in his friends (evidently, from their chins, fellow business men) to see how perfectly his shirt fits at the neck and how its thoroughly shrunk material is none the worse for repeated visits to the laundry.

Once dressed—and I pass over his interviews with his tailor (he collects overcoats), because that would lead us far and might land us, unawares, among sportsmen, or airmen, or other non-business men—once dressed, he is to be seen at his office. That does not mean that he is to be seen at work. No, it is a somewhat sinister fact that the advertisements hardly ever show the business man engaged in business. You may find him at an enormous desk bristling with patent devices and honeycombed with pigeon-holes, where he sees himself invested with perfect control and rid of all petty routine anomalies, with a mind free to consider questions of policy and the higher aspirations of his house. But not, in blunt English, working, oh dear no! He is pleasantly gossiping with another business man, who is lolling over the edge of the desk smoking a cigarette. Now and then, it is true, you may get a glimpse of him at the telephone. But then his tender smile gives him away. It is obviously no business conversation but an appointment for lunch with his _fiancée_.

Only one advertisement artist has ever “spotted” him at work. He was addressing the board. The board all wore white waistcoats, the same business chin, and the same dry smile as the orator, who with clenched fist and flashing eye assured them of his conviction that increased production results from the bond of mutual goodwill created between employer and employee by the board’s system of life assurance. Altogether, a very jolly party. But outside the world of business men it wouldn’t be considered work. Really, for work it looks as though you would have to go to the non-business man. Think of Balzac’s eighteen hours a day!

But the business man, I daresay, will reply, as they said to the sonneteer in Molière, that “Le temps ne fait rien à l’affaire.” Certainly, the business man’s time doesn’t—for you next find him, in spick and span evening dress, at the dinner-table, beaming at the waiter who has brought him his favourite sauce. The business man collects sauces, but prefers the sauce that goes with everything. After dinner you may see him, before a roaring fire, holding up his glass of port to the light and telling another business man who the shipper is. Last scene of all, a night-piece, you have a glimpse of him in his pyjamas merrily discoursing with several other business men (in different patterns of the same unshrinkable fabric) all sitting cross-legged and smoking enormous cigars. This is the end of a perfect business day. And you conclude that business men sleep in dormitories.

THE END.

THE WHITEFRIARS PRESS, LTD., LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.