Chapter VI: Part 6

No other art is able to inflict such merciless suffering! Under the name of music we are afflicted with every variety of noise, including the hand organ, the bagpipes, the German band, the man who toots the cornet in the street, the harp man, the lady who has seen better days and who sings before our house in the evening, the active piano-organ invented by a heartless genius, the musical box and all its amazing progenies, the gramophone and the pianola. Not to mention the millions of pianos and the millions of fiddles that never cease being thumped and scratched all the world over night and day. The contemplation of such collective discord is truly appalling.

Unfortunately for us we live in an inventive and imitative age, and one is inclined to think that the devil is the patron saint of inventors, or why has the blameless spinet waxed great and blossomed into a piano? Why should the resources of a modern orchestra be at the disposal of every infant whose mistaken mother plumps it down on the piano-stool and lets it thump the keys to keep it quiet! One would so much rather hear its natural shrieks than that other noise which is supposed to be a harmless substitute! Why music, of all the fine arts, with its power for inflicting untold anguish, should be the most common, passes my understanding.

The printed page is undoubtedly long-suffering, but it is silent. It is of course true that to be an author, nothing is necessary but a sheet of paper and a pencil, but I defy the most energetic author to read his work to ears that refuse to hear. Now with music it is different, one simply _can't_ get away from it, because cruel inventions--I do not think I am exaggerating?--have brought its exercise within reach, I will not say of the poor only, for the thumping of the rich and great is equally horrid, but of the mistaken poor.

I do not urge that the infant mind, in the process of being cultivated, should be turned to literature, for it is bad enough already owing to benevolent publishers who, in the praiseworthy desire not to allow any light to be hidden under a bushel, emulate each other in trying to illuminate the world with farthing tallow-dips! It would, indeed, be ghastly to listen to the literary outpourings of every infant one met, and equally ghastly never to be able to flee from the rendering of masters of literature as interpreted by the intellect of three years up. Thank heaven, we are spared this in literature if not in music, but, I ask, if we must have a fine art to trifle with, why not take to painting? Painting is _so_ inoffensive.

It was the English who, before they became so musical, dallied for a while with painting. There was a time, if we may believe those biographers of manners, the novelists, when all England sketched, and so gave vent to all its superabundant emotion in paint. There was no landscape safe from the emotional Englishwoman. Instead of strumming false notes on the hotel piano she went out with a paint-box and sketched the uncomplaining landscape. At any rate the long-suffering landscape made no sound.

It cannot be denied that one suffers less from a bad picture than from a bad anything else, the agony also is short, nor is it necessary in the process of painting to inflict pain. Painting is an exceedingly silent art, and its results are easily disposed of as wedding presents, because the recipient cannot possibly rebel.

There is, also, that delightful alternative of decorating one's house with one's own immortal works. I was recently shown a lovely picture gallery entirely hung with the work of its owner. I emerged from the experience smiling and quite calm. Now what would have been my condition had the good lady insisted on reciting to me eighty of her poems (there were eighty pictures), or, more harrowing still, had she insisted on playing to me eighty compositions of her own, or even eighty compositions of others, with stiff and reluctant hands? For which reason I maintain that painting is the most inoffensive of the arts and deserves to be encouraged.

But seriously, why should every child be taught to play the instrument quite irrespective of its having any talent or taste for music? Why in the world, where martyrdom is usually the price of living, should a select little army of martyrs suffer a double martyrdom? Why draw them by the hairs of their inoffensive heads to the piano-stool and make, as it were, at one fell swoop, two martyrs, the one at the piano and the wretch who, on the other side of the wall, gives the lie to Congreve, who mistakenly declared that "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast"? Had Congreve lived now he would have hesitated to make so rash a statement.

In Congreve's day the piano, the greatest instrument of torture of modern times, had not been evolved. Its ancestor, the spinet, tinkled plaintively away under its breath like a musical mosquito with a cold on its chest, and was--alas, how happily!--within reach of only the few. In those days, when its feeble tinkle was a mere whisper, house-walls were made of such stupendous thickness that not even the turmoil of a modern orchestra in the next room could have penetrated.

But now, in these unhappy days, when every family is obliged to have a piano or be despised, and when in apartment-houses each floor quivers to a piano of its own, the architect and contractor--a terrible combination for evil!--have conspired together to erect walls like tissue paper, behind which the harassed householder cowers, mercilessly exposed to musical scales as practised on an instrument powerful enough to have cast down the walls of Jericho. And here he vainly seeks for a peaceful retreat from the noise of cabs, 'buses, motors, traction-engines, electric trams, and all the other ear-splitting sounds which, apparently, follow in the relentless march of progress.

It is very appalling to consider that at this very moment the children of the entire civilised world are, with few exceptions, engaged in playing false notes on a variety of musical instruments. It is not too much to say that in this respect the uncivilised have a colossal advantage over the civilised.

In a certain familiar oratorio innumerable pages and much time are taken up in an endless reiteration of the words, "All we like sheep." I beg to ask if the worthy sopranos, altos, tenors and the rest, ever did realise the profound truth of that over-repeated and rather monotonous statement? We _are_ all like sheep! We do what our neighbours do; we think what they think and we wear what they wear. In fact, we are tailor-made inside and out; no, we are worse than tailor-made, we are ready-tailor-made, for we are made by the gross.

If there is a thing the world shudders at and resents it is originality. If a human being cannot be classified as belonging to a certain cut of trousers, coat or waistcoats, let him beware, for he is a misfit human being, and we all know the cheap end of all misfits! It is as embarrassing to have anything obtrusive in one's mental make-up as in one's physical. Happy is he who is on a dead level!

One would like to offer up a meek plea for originality were one not aware how unpopular it would be. To be original is only next worse thing to being a genius. We do resign ourselves to sporadic cases of genius, but a world peopled by genius (for we all know what that is akin to) is more than we could stand. It is about the same with originality. So the next time we sing "All we like sheep," let us consider well the meaning of these inspiring but misunderstood words, and greatly rejoice.

This train of thought is the result of my landlady's little boy, separated from me only by a thin lath partition of a wall, playing five-finger exercises in halting rhythm and with innumerable false notes. The instrument is one in which the flight of years has left a tone like a discontented nutmeg-grater. If the little boy had the legs of a centipede and played his chosen instrument with these instead of two dingy little hands, he could not perpetrate more false notes.

The number of false notes that can be evolved through the medium of eight fingers and two thumbs is simply appalling! The little boy, a pale child in a long pinafore and big white ears, hates his chosen instrument as much as I do, and so we meet on a level of mutual affliction. I loathe hearing him, and he hates his instrument; now, in the name of good common sense, why must he be offered up as a sacrifice?

His mother is a poor woman, and the tinkling cottage piano with the plaited faded-green front represents the chops and many other wholesome things she has not eaten, and what she allows the young lady in third-floor back, who takes her board out in piano lessons, is a serious sacrifice. Now, I ask, what for?

Why is all the world playing an unnecessary piano?

Marriage has a fatal effect on music. For some occult reason as soon as a girl is married, the piano--the grave of so much money and time--retires out of active life, and swathed in "art draperies," burdened by vases, cabinet photographs and imitation "curios," serves less as a musical instrument than a warning. But like all warnings it passes unheeded, for no sooner are the next generation's legs long enough to dangle between the key-board and the pedals, than the echoes awaken to the same old false notes that serve no purpose unless an hour of daily martyrdom over a tear-splashed key-board is an excellent preparation for the trials of life.

Music, as it is taught, is not so much a fine art as a bad habit. Alas, we have got into the habit of learning to play the piano, and the bad habit of playing on the violin is fatally on the increase. Seriously now: why? Because it is considered both uncultivated and quite unfashionable not to be fond of music or to pretend to be. Why? The answer, "All we like sheep."

I know of only one man who has the courage to say that he hates music. It is his misfortune, not his fault, and without doubt there is something wrong about his inner ear. Still, I always wonder why his frank and honest confession is received with a kind of pitying contempt, as if he had writ himself down to be both a brute-beast and a heathen.

Love music, and for some unexplained reason you at once have a profound scorn for all such as do not. My friend who hates music understands and loves both pictures and poetry, and, goodness knows, there are plenty who do not! And yet I have never heard him inveigh against those who love neither. Yes, music may be a divine art, but it is certainly not a charitable art.

Even as long as one can remember, the study of music and the making of musical instruments have been terribly on the increase. Mediocrity, that might do excellent work in other fields, strums away at the piano or scratches away at the violin, or with quavering voice sings those songs which have inspired the poet to write:

I am saddest when I sing,
And so are those who hear me!

The world is full of music schools, that turn out thousands of young musicians every year, who take to music instead of dressmaking or plumbing or any other useful employment, and these are let loose on a foolish world and proceed in turn to make martyrs of the defenceless infants of our land. And it is curious, too, and instructive to observe, considering the vast sums of money and the amount of time spent in the pursuit of music, how rarely one can find any one who plays or sings well enough to give even a little pleasure.

The possible reason may be that the standard of mediocrity has become so terribly high! For the halting amateur of to-day might have served as a Paderewski of the past. Our ears have grown hopelessly fastidious.

No more is the afternoon caller regaled with _The Happy Farmer_, as performed by the talented child of the house, and listened to with real pleasure by unsophisticated grandparents. We know too much to listen to the talented child, and as for the talented child it generally developes into a young person who has nervous prostration at the mere idea of playing before anyone. For what purpose, then, these hours of five-finger agony and those enormous bills which might have been paid for so much better results?

Then, too, consider the awful competition to which the present votary of music is subjected--pitted, as it were, against the pianola, the Æolian, the gramophone, and the other countless mechanical devices, which so successfully prove that human ingenuity can create everything but a soul. Wet blankets they are to all musical aspiration, for what musical aspiration can successfully compete against steel fingers without nerves?

I do not think one would feel so acutely about the matter if music were a silent art, and if it did not represent such a waste of money and energy which, turned to other uses, might have been of such value.

Let us have the courage to say, when it is the truth, that we dislike music. It is nothing to boast of, but neither is it a crime nor a disgrace. If your blessed Sammy bedews the piano keys with tears of anguish, and if, after a time, you discover that his soul is not amenable to the poetry of sound, then earn the fervid gratitude of your neighbour on the other side of that jerry-built wall, and release the young sufferer.

Be merciful!

_A Domestic Danger_

There are certain times of the year when the shops, the acute arbiters of fashion, send broadcast those entrancing picture-books which advise the wavering woman what to buy, what to wear, and how to wear it; and every year the lovely creatures portrayed grow more lovely. Once my dream was to be a queen in a black velvet garment, that hid my pinafore, and a spiky crown--the kind as old as fairy stories. While waiting for the real article I practised with a bed sheet and crowned myself with a brass jardiniere that leaked, but was very imposing, though upside down. I have had other aspirations since, and my very last has just come by a discontented postman because it would not go into the letter-box.

One goes through all stages of dreams until one comes to the conclusion, but that is always very late in life, that one must resign oneself to the inevitable; even science cannot turn one's nose down, when nature has turned it up, and no longing for five feet ten will help one whom nature has finished off at five feet two, though shops have been known to succeed where nature and science have failed, and it is owing mainly to them that this is the age of tall women. Why the men do not keep pace is partly a physiological riddle and partly because the shops are not interested in mere men. But it is a common sight these days to see a great blonde goddess with gigantic feet and hands, which she takes no trouble to conceal, having in tow a little man just tall enough to tickle her shoulder with his moustache. It is perhaps a merciful dispensation of Divine Providence that extremes not only meet, but evidently like to meet.

Yes, one's ideals in the process of living change. However, one feels convinced that the feminine ideal is always connected with clothes, and whatever the Venus of Milo may be to men I am quite sure that with her generous waist and rudimentary costume she has never been the ideal of a feminine dreamer. It is not so much the impropriety of having on few clothes that disturbs the female mind as it is the having on no real nice clothes. The old ideals are getting so dreadfully old-fashioned! A Greek goddess at an afternoon tea would have nothing in common with the new ideal but her height; her ample waist and her heroic simplicity would be out of it in an age which is trying to live up to the new standard of beauty as set by those infallible connoisseurs--the dry-goods stores. The enchanting books which these send out at the beginning of each season represent as nothing else the world's ideal of perfect feminine beauty. I will not discuss men's beauty, because a more gifted pen than mine has been at quite unnecessary pains to increase their already alarming vanity. But I must confess that now my own standard of womanly loveliness veers like a weather-cock to the wind, as I study the pictorial production commercial generosity stuffs into my letter-box. Once I wanted to be a queen with a real crown, now I want to be just like the beauteous creature on that paper cover.

Once I thought to be perfectly beautiful was to be broad at the shoulders and pinched at the knees; then it was the other way about. Finally I was educated--literature helped the delusion--to think that to be acceptable one had to be a tiny thing stopping just where "his" manly heart throbbed. I have seen shopworn feminine articles left over from that bygone season, and how ridiculous they do look!

I am sorry these days for a short girl, for the man with the throbbing heart is always on the look-out for a young giantess, into whose lovely eyes he can only gaze by standing on a step-ladder.

Yes, I really want to look just like that enchanting creature who gazes at me from the book Mr. Whiteley, in his subtle study of my weak mind, sent me yesterday. Who is the divine original? Apart from wearing such beautiful clothes, what has she done to be so perfectly lovely? She cannot be less than seven feet tall, and crowned by a dream of a hat. Her eyes are so big and brown and trustful, and her mouth is the traditional rosebud, while her nose--a feature to which in real life nature is usually most unkind--is so small that fashions for pocket-handkerchiefs must soon go out. Her shoulders are so broad, and yet her waist is so attenuated, that I wonder if--well--if she has any organs, or does she rise superior to organs? I ask in the spirit of serious inquiry, for I should not like to be misunderstood. And then when it comes to that which society, in its exquisite propriety, blushes to mention, I do believe that under those frilly petticoats, Nature, ever considerate and bountiful to her, has provided her with telescopic stilts, and not the other thing. At least that is the only explanation I have ever found for her divine length! So what wonder if one sits at one's dressmaker's day in and day out, while that patient woman produces volume after volume representing perfect beauty combined with perfect taste, that the average woman is crushed at the impossibility of reaching such a standard of perfection?

If I were a man, my only aim in life would be to find the original of that superb creature, and lay at her feet my heart, my life and my purse. The last is very necessary, for she needs all those innumerable and fascinating things with which Mr. Whiteley, Mr. Harrod, Mr. Barker, and all the rest of those well-meaning but cruel tempters fill up the pages of their catalogues. These catalogues are really a biography in pictures, in which the beautiful She is shown to the world from the most intimate undress up, and in every phase she is lovely and dignified. Her perfect propriety in "combinations"--for which occasion she evidently discards stilts!--her _svelte_ and sinuous grace in corsets, while in petticoats one hardly knows which to admire most, her frills or her bland unconsciousness, and as for her dresses, from the one in which she is thrillingly pictured as pouring out a slow cup of coffee, she cannot fail to arouse in each the jealousy of the most generous of her sex.

Her characteristics are always dignity, vacancy, and a smile not always appropriate to the occasion, I am free to confess, for I have seen her smile, by mistake of course, in the heaviest of widow's weeds. But perhaps that was because her head is always supremely unconscious of what the rest of her is doing. It is the unconsciousness of a great artist who is attending strictly to business; for she has not even a touch of vulgar feminine coquetry.

If she fascinates the weak-minded man who idly turns the leaves of the fashion-book, it is in spite of herself. When she stands confessed in, say, corsets--an attitude which must be trying in the cold eye of the public--she does not look embarrassed, she only looks dignified. She is, in fact, the direct modern descendant of the Vestal Virgins who sacrificed their beauty to religion, only she sacrifices her beauty to business. The comfort for a tired man to come home to her placid, well-dressed society! That she never loses her temper her exquisitely dressed head amply proves, for you can't lose your temper and preserve the serenity of your back hair! The rapture of a man and a father to come home to his perfectly dressed, silent infant which smiles sweetly from the latest thing in lace cribs, while She bends over him in a toilette which expresses as nothing else can maternal solicitude combined with perfect taste.

Then to see her play tennis, unflushed, unruffled, with her adorable hair still intact; skipping with such ladylike activity, and always smiling. What rapture for a loving man! The delight of golfing with her and her numerous sisters--such a family resemblance!--unexcited, ladylike, the linen collar about her swan like throat never wilted, but a monument to some celestial laundress, and delivering her strokes into the landscape with that inconsequential feebleness which men love, say what they will.

Then, too, to see her listening, in full dress, to the touching strains of the pianola, as performed by a soul-inspired being in the last thing in party frocks and a flower-crowned _coiffure_, is a study of controlled emotion. She _is_ moved, but too much emotion might ruffle what the poetry of commerce has so sweetly named her "transformation." So she controls her feelings, and looks with calm and thoughtful eyes at the back of the "artiste's" marvellous toilette, and possibly wonders, to the strains of the "Largo" of Händel, how she got into her "creation." But that is a dead and awful secret only known to Mr. Harrod or possibly to Messrs. Derry and Toms.

How many a time have I watched her in a paper-garden-party mingling with other lovely beings of her own sex, for her sense of propriety never allows her to mingle with those gallant gentlemen in frock-coats and evening dress we admire in the tailors' windows. The landscape is--if I may say so--of a most ladylike nature. Mud is absent, for the fair beings meander about in a landscape which nature has apparently cleaned with a tooth-brush. I suppose their need for amusement is amply satisfied with staring at their lovely sisters or offering them fans or bouquets--for I have rarely seen them do anything else, though once the artist who portrayed them became dramatic, and introduced two young things of their kind playing at battledore and shuttlecock in the background.

The greatest innovation was when She was pictured as pouring tea in a baronial hall. The exquisite grace with which she "poured" was a lesson, though I had a terrible doubt as to whether there was anything in that perfect teapot. She wore a tea-gown which was the last "cry" in fluffiness, and the friends about her were gorgeous, in attitudes which did more justice to their toilettes than their manners, for the way they turned their flat backs on each other might, in other society, have given offence. Another innovation in the picture was a perfect footman, a perfect page-boy, and a perfect butler, a noble being like an Archbishop, but much more serious. It was well that no other mere man was present even on paper, for the combination of loveliness was overpowering.

Ah, yes, indeed, if the usual run of mothers and wives were like these, then would there need to be no outcry against the selfish bachelor who refuses to marry. Instead, the bachelor in his five hundred horse-power motor, defying speed limit, palpitating with eagerness, would fly to lay himself at her exquisitely shod feet. For what does man care for beauty unadorned! As for intellect, well, intellect has never been in it!

I am quite sure that neither Mr. Whiteley, nor Mr. Harrod, nor the rest of the public-spirited gentlemen, whose only object in life is to make us beautiful, know what harm they are doing; or why do they portray a race of women to whose perfections mortal women must ever vainly aspire.

Your lovely syrens with their divine legs--there, the awful word is out!--never go shopping through the mud in the early morning! When they wear a dress it is called a "creation," and it is certainly not the year before last's best in reduced circumstances. When they lift their elegant robes, and show their sumptuous frills, it proves that they know nothing of the depravity of "model" laundries. Nor do I for a moment believe that their smiling babies--the smile inherited from their mother, sweet, but slightly vacant--know the agonies of teeth, nettle-rash or colic.

In fact, I refuse to believe that such perfect loveliness can exist. It is a poet's dream, evolved by those worthy gentlemen who only make life a greater trial for us by sending us quarterly reminders of what we ought to be, but what most of us are not. It is a crime to introduce into the bosom of contented families such presentments of too lovely women. Man _is_ weak, and when the wife of his heart comes home from shopping with her hat on one side, by accident, not coquetry, her ostrich plume limp and lank from a battle with the rain, a rent for the convenience of her nose, her _chaussures_ caked with mud to match her petticoats, and on her face an expression which is not bland as she hears shrieks proclaiming colic, how can he help but make sorrowful comparisons with a vision in his mind of a silent infant in a lace-smothered crib that smiles at him from Messrs. Dickins and Jones's alluring book?

Then is the harm done; the weak father falls a victim to his ideal, and his heart turns from his distracted, bedraggled wife to that lovely vision who entered a happy home through the innocent letter-box to the eternal destruction of its domestic peace. Thus "home," once the bulwark of the British nation, is rapidly becoming a mere mockery.

I ask, in the interest of society, why cannot the lovely beings in the fashion-papers and fashion-books be made less lovely? Whatever you are, and I commend this sentiment to all, as well as to distinguished haberdashers, be truthful. Be truthful! Chop off at least one foot and eight inches from those lovely ones who imperil our peace. Be realists at least occasionally; portray them with a rip, or a skirt which is short where it should be long; let their hair be out of curl, and buttons off their boots--anything, only to prove that they also are human.

The postman has just brought another big, square, flat familiar parcel. I shall destroy it; it is too entrancing. It portrays Her in a golden _coiffure_ crowned by a hat that breathes of spring. Clad in a perfect and appropriate "creation" she has climbed into an apple-tree, to which she clings with white gloved hands. Playfully and yet with perfect propriety she peeps through the clustering pink blossoms. It is the same smile, the same irreproachable nose, the same wave to her golden hair, the same great eyes. Now to put this vision of beauty and grace high up in a tree unflushed, unscratched, unruffled, untorn, is really too much to bear--besides, it is false to nature! The head of the house shall not look at her and make cruel comparisons, and decide in his ignorant masculine mind that all women can look so after they have climbed a tree. Then grow discontented when one tries to explain to him that they cannot. So then, before it is too late, here goes--into the fire! One domestic peace at least is saved.

Now I ask Mr. Whiteley, Mr. Harrod, Mr. Robinson, and all the rest of the gentlemen who stand for all that is best in the way of hats and clothes and things, and to whose benevolent guidance we women trust ourselves, be merciful as well as truthful, we beg, and do not make those beautiful creatures quite so beautiful!

It is the new invasion, compared to which the possible arrival of hordes of worthy yellow men is as nothing. The invasion, think, of too beautiful ideals into hitherto contented homes! Mr. Whiteley, you who have always provided everything, start a new branch,--give us peace! Head a great movement which shall have as object to portray the fashions by less bewildering beauty. Earn what has probably no commercial value, and that is our gratitude! Remember that we are not only women but customers.

Now supposing all your customers should revolt? What then?

_A Study of Frivolity_

After studying the veracious and thrilling works of our modern dramatists, one comes to the conclusion that the lady with a past, though she may suffer from nothing else, does suffer tortures from tight boots. Whatever situation they put her in, however harrowing, pathetic or revolting, when boots would seem to be the last consideration of a tortured conscience, yet hers have that exquisite, brand-new perfection which proves that, when she is not planning wickedness nor torn by remorse, she spends the rest of her time buying boots, and we all know that new boots hurt rather more than a bad conscience.

It is also the happy destiny of this lady to wear the most superlatively beautiful clothes, and when, in moments of guilty emotion, she swishes her train about, we have a vision of petticoats which only she, indifferent to the voice of conscience and laundry charges, dares to wear; and still more damning witness than her petticoats to her evil conscience is the elegance of her feet. Your real hardened adventuress on the stage always wears the most delicious slippers, no matter how inappropriate to the occasion, but she wears them prophetically as it were, for she alone knows that she is destined to die in the fifth act, with her feet to the footlights.

To the social philosopher there is no more interesting sight than the window of a fashionable shoemaker's, there to make mental notes of the destiny of all those charming little shoes and slippers that confront one in all the coquetry of commerce. The only thing needed is a band to make them frisk about in all their gold, white, scarlet and bronze frivolity. The sophisticated curve of the satin heel and the tiny pointed satin toe are still innocent of worldly knowledge. Care, even in the shape of the daintiest foot, has not touched them yet, they have not been danced in, nor kicked off, nor made love to; in fact, they have not been born.

There is, however, a destiny for slippers as well as other things, and there is a certain slipper, long and slender, with arched instep and Louis XV heel which, so instinct tells us, is inevitably destined to belong to a lady with a past. Virtue never wears anything so subtle nor so pretty, for, indeed, it is only conscious rectitude that dares to dispense with coquetry, and wears her boots boldly down at the heel.

Given a woman's shoe, and one can easily evolve out of it her entire emotional history, just as a naturalist reconstructs from a bone the entire animal to which it once belonged. Not long ago I saw a famous German actress as Beata in Sudermann's play "The Joy of Living." It is a fine melodramatic part. She has a lover and a husband--familiar combination--but the sin is in the past, and they have all three reached that comfortable middle age when people are supposed to know better.

Unfortunately at the eleventh hour the husband discovers the secret of his wife's old faithlessness and his best friend's treachery. At a dinner in the last act Beata drinks a toast to "The Joy of Living," and promptly solves the riddle of existence by staggering into the next room and poisoning herself. It was as she staggered away that the German actress deprived me of all my illusions for, as she lifted her dress rather high in her anguish, she exhibited a pair of broad, flat boots, with patent leather tips, and the kind of heels only virtue wears, broad and flat and low. I thought I saw side elastics, but that may have been the effect of a perturbed vision.

However, from that moment I lost all belief in Beata's trials. A woman with such boots never takes her own life, never has a lover, never has a past, but she has a good sensible husband who falls asleep after dinner, and while he snores she knits him golf stockings. The audience was under the impression that Beata had killed herself in the next room, but I knew better. No, those feet were not made for tragedy, even Sudermann's art could not convince me, and so a pair of German boots spoiled my illusions.

It is not often that we poor philistines have the privilege of studying at close range the lady who may be truly described as the pet of the stage, and when we do so we owe it entirely to our kind dramatists; and find however much she and her sisters may differ in the details of their interesting careers, they have in common the transcendent charms of their toilettes and the fascination of their slippers.

When one sees how uninteresting the play would be without her, how often virtue is rather fatiguing and not nearly so well dressed, and how the dramatist gives his favourite the most interesting talk and the most dramatic situations, one realises her importance, and that she is quite indispensable to the stage, whatever she is in real life. One only regrets, when society is a little fatiguing, that she is not occasionally permitted to pass through in her gorgeous toilette and her immoral slippers, and that bewitching side glance which one only sees on the stage, just to make society, like the stage, a little more thrilling.

Now in the days of the older dramatists when much was left to what in this material age is fast dying out, that is the imagination, if the dungeon of Lord de Smyth was wanted, the scene-painter nailed up a sign-post with the simple notice, "This is the Dungeon of Lord de Smyth," and the audience were as much thrilled as if they could hear the clanking of the fetters.

In these days we refuse to take our dungeons so absolutely on faith, and, still, if we see a too beautiful creature in red hair (fascinating crime always has red hair), gorgeous clothes, and slippers with Louis XV heels--that estimable monarch was responsible for so much sinfulness combined with singular good taste--and an opera cloak all lace and allurement, the kind for which virtue has neither the money nor the taste, then we can settle down to a good three hours' thrill, for those perfect garments are as much an indication of the dramatist's intentions as in less sophisticated days the sign-post which announced the dungeon of the de Smyths.

We have learnt by experience that certain kinds of clothes always come to a bad end, though never until the fifth act; while virtue, without any nice clothes to comfort her, has a very bad time for at least four acts and a half. One could wish the dramatists would give virtue a better chance!

A very charming woman regretfully confessed to me that the old proverb, that virtue is its own reward, is distinctly discouraging. She felt, with a perfectly blameless existence behind her, that she had a right to demand of fate jewels more precious than imitation pearls, and a mode of transit more patrician than a 'bus or the "tube," or a four-wheeler on state occasions. Her bitterness was enhanced by a picture in the "tube-lift" of a lovely creature ablaze with diamonds, who advertises a firm of philanthropists from whom one can get one's Koh-i-noors on the instalment plan.

If ever a young person looks as if she had had a chequered past, it is this young person, so radiant, so self-satisfied, and so prosperous. She is a painful satire on virtue in a mackintosh with a dripping umbrella, who has no earthly hope of diamonds, no matter how she may long for them, and who stares drearily at the lovely being until she is bounced out upon terra firma, and then pushed into the rain by other virtues with umbrellas and very sharp elbows. The charming woman further declared that virtue should be offered a more substantial reward than imitation pearls these days when the shoemakers, dressmakers and dramatists form a "combine" for the exclusive glorification of the lady in question.

But it is not only the eloquence of slippers, but the eloquence of petticoats! Are not our shop windows the Frenchiest of French novels, divided not into chapters, but into petticoats? Do they not form flamboyant rainbows behind those glittering plate-glass fronts? That there is no one inside of them takes nothing away from their charm. To see them out-spread against a window--a bewildering chaos of colours, frilly, fluffy and fantastic, is the outward and visible sign of an inarticulate poet who lives sonnets in silk without putting them on paper. How much more satisfactory to live poems than merely to write them!

So every shop window proclaims that this is the age of petticoats. Who buys them, who wears them? Why are they never seen again? Yet well may we ask what sylph can worthily wear those coquettish fantasies? It must be conceded, though it will hurt out national pride, that only the women of one nation have that sovereign right.

It is the Frenchwoman alone who can lift her skirts with that supreme elegance which turns even the worst mud puddle into an instrument for the display of her exquisite grace. She is the artist of the petticoat--and if she lifts her skirts rather high, it is because she does not feel it her duty to help the County Council to sweep the streets with the tail of a draggled gown.

Now when an English woman lifts her skirt, she does it as one on business bent; coquetry is not in it. She makes a frantic clutch at the back of her skirt, grabs a solid handful, and drags it uncompromisingly forward until she outlines herself with simple, cruel distinctness. Her silhouette is a curious study in angles.

Though she has no coquetry about her feet or her petticoats, the fatality of fate ordains that she should always wear high-heeled slippers and cobweb stockings in that downpour which Divine Providence reserves exclusively for the English nation. This opportunity she also takes to wear those lace petticoats which, having survived the terrors of the British laundry, succumb to British mud. Heaven, in its inscrutable wisdom, has denied to the Anglo-Saxons and Teutons that subtle turn of the wrist which makes the lifting of a skirt a fine art. Even the American woman, conqueror though she be of dukes and lesser things, has never yet conquered that Latin grace.

Now who buys those silken rainbows in the shops? Get the sphinx to answer that riddle if you can. Do they vanish into space, or are they bought by those radiant beings who flit about in electric landaulettes, and whom we never meet, because we flit about in 'buses?

If the rainbow ever touches earth it is on exceptional occasions which only prove the rule. And it is always when virtue, always elderly and stout, with big, flat feet in cloth boots, lifts her skirt and exhibits to the eye of the public a yellow or scarlet silk confection which hangs limp and dejected. Its melancholy flop and want of rustle plainly show its consciousness of being misunderstood and in a false position. The irreproachable petticoat, sacred to the eminently respectable, is usually black and of a material of the nature of horsehair. No shop boasts of it, and it is always pulled out of an ignoble pile when required, and is quite Spartan in its unadorned simplicity.

That virtue is best adorned by itself we concede; still virtue is a little handicapped. I put it to the dramatists: Why not give her better clothes and let her for once triumph in the second act? The dramatists, inspired photographers of manners though they are, have a great deal to answer for! At best they give her a white dress, a blue sash, ankle-ties and no conversation. One asks how is she to compete with a stately creature with dramatic red hair and that sinuous and glittering costume fraught with tragic situations? What a fatal contrast when studied by the youth of our land who have been taught to regard the stage as an educator!

The stage is conceded to be a great educational and moral force, and yet I beg of those excellent gentlemen who provide the lessons that the stage so eloquently recites not to lavish on the lady in question that bewildering wardrobe which must give her a sense of peace and calm security that even a good conscience cannot bestow. For once put her into a bargain coat and skirt left over from a sale at Tooting, adorn her with a tam o'shanter, the kind with a quill that sticks out in front, and put on her feet the boots of a perfect propriety, always short and broad, then see if the pit will adore her!

No, the pit will not adore her at all, for say what you will, it is the clothes that sway the earnest and indiscriminating lover of the drama. For once put virtue in a gossamer _peignoir_, the clinging, fascinating kind, and slip her number six feet into a number three satin slipper, and how the pit will rise at her as one man, as they have never done before, and take her to their hearts, for human nature is as yielding as putty to grief that wears nice clothes and is well scrubbed. Unfortunately the world is full of undramatic tragedies that are all the more tragic because of a dire need of soap and water.

As the educator of a public swayed by the eloquence of a slipper and moved to tears by the pathos of a petticoat, one can but beg and implore our dramatists, even at the risk of making their dramas less thrilling, to give virtue a tiny bit of a chance--for a change.

_On Taking Oneself Seriously_

Never has mediocrity been so triumphantly successful as now, and that is the reason we take ourselves so seriously. Never before has it attained such a high level of excellence, and if, for that reason, we miss those grand and lonely peaks that represent the supreme glory of the past, we can at least cheer ourselves by the comfortable reflection that we are each a glorious little peak. That being conceded it goes without saying that, occupied as we are with ourselves, we really have too much to do to bother about the greatness of our friends.

In the past the great man was surrounded by a band of ardent worshippers who circled about him and trumpeted forth his praise. In these degenerate days if there is a great man, he is not surrounded by satellites, for the satellites are practically employed circling about themselves. So the great man girds up his loins and wisely proclaims his own greatness.

Then, too, it is a bother to chant another man's praises if you are quite convinced, and you are probably right, that he is no greater than you are, so you abstain from the folly of it and devote all your energies to blowing your own little trumpet with seraphic vigour. In the past the little bands of ardent worshippers were quite disinterested, a merit to which the occasional ardent worshipper of the present cannot always lay claim. Our modern attitude is one of doubt, and so when we hear a pæan of praise we close one eye and ask "Why?" The fact is we decline to take anyone else seriously, but we make up for that by taking ourselves with redoubled seriousness. In previous ages there were no newspapers who took upon themselves the role of Fame, poising aloft a laurel wreath ready to drop it on the head of the best-advertised genius. In those blissful days, so little appreciated now, when the world could neither read nor write, hero worship was so popular that the lauded one found it unnecessary to take himself too seriously, for others kindly did it for him.

This is undoubtedly an age of emphasis and capitals. If you don't see the capitals in print you are sure to see them in the attitude. Woman, Millionaire, Poet, Statesman, Composer, Dramatist, Novelist, Artist--to mention only a few--may not be spelled with a capital, but one never has the honour of meeting any of these worthy people without recognising the capital in their haughty intercourse with their fellow men.

Possibly it even permeates the lower strata of society, but one can only judge by the experience that comes in one's modest way. The gentlemen, who are at this moment shovelling in our winter coal, may take themselves seriously. Possibly the one with the coal-sack lightly twined across his shoulders has his own opinion as to the superior way in which he shovels the coal down the hole. It is more than probable that the plumber who came this morning to screw up a leaking tap takes himself seriously. I think he does for he left a small boy and his tools to remind me of him, and he has proudly retired from the scene. Still I really think that the disorder generally attacks those who work with what "the reverend gentleman is pleased to call his mind," and it is most fatal where, besides dollars and cents, the sufferer demands the tribute of instant applause.

Supposing the greatest singer in the world were to sing to stolid faces and dead silence and were to receive no applause for two or three years; her attitude towards the public would become one of praiseworthy modesty. It is this frantic, ill-considered admiration which gives the good lady such a mistaken sense of her own importance.

If the last work of the last great mediocrity in the way of novelists were to be ignored, and only reviewed a couple of years after its publication, many an estimable gentleman and lady would step down from their pedestal and walk quite modestly on a level with their fellow beings.

If the poets received their meed of praise long after they were nicely buried instead of at afternoon teas, they would write better, indeed they would. Weak tea praise has never been good for the mental stamina, and it is awfully misleading. Because a gushing thing with an ardent eye protests over a tea-cup that your poems are the most beautiful poems she has ever read, it is not necessary to believe her. Do not on the strength of that go home and snub your old mother who, to her sorrow, has been educated to believe that among her goslings she has hatched a swan. Gosling or swan in these days at best you can reach no higher altitude than to be called a minor poet.

One wonders who was the first reviewing misanthrope who called the modern singers "minor poets"? Why should that branch of the writing Art have evoked his particular animosity? Do we say minor historian, minor novelist, minor painter, minor composer? Why should we belittle an artist who may be infinitely greater than all these, and damn his art with an adjective? It is not for us to judge if a poet be minor or major. That is usually the business of the future, and there is no prophet among us able to prophesy which of our poets will join the immortals. Thank Heaven, advertising is only a temporary product, and has no influence on immortality.

The misfortune of our age is that the tools for the divine arts have became so cheap and handy. Literature, especially, is at the mercy of every irresponsible infant with ambition and a penny to spare. Why, the snub-nosed board-school youngster down there skipping joyfully along the gutter has a sheet of paper and a lead-pencil, the excellence of which were beyond the imagination of Shakespeare. It is this cheap and fatal luxury which makes such triumphant mediocrity and so little greatness, and it is the fault of the newspapers, the publishers, too much education, and afternoon teas. May they all be forgiven!

The truth is the poets should not be published, nor should the newspapers be permitted to crown the singer with a laurel-wreath still dripping with printers' ink. The poet should be handed down as was old Homer and sung in the market place; if then in the future there is enough of him left to be considered at all, let him then be considered seriously, but let him not, O let him not, do it for himself prematurely, for fear. Remember the famous and classic tragedy of Humpty Dumpty who sat on a wall.

Once I came upon an editor--a great editor!--who in a moment of frenzy was sincere. I was looking respectfully at that tomb of fame, his wastepaper basket.

"Did you pass a fellow going down?" and he threw a scowl after the departed one. "That is Jones." He really didn't say Jones, but he mentioned a name so famous in literature that the tramcars proclaim it along with the best brands of whiskies, soap, corsets, and sapolio, and it adorns sandwich men in the gutter by the dozens; hoardings bellow it forth silently, and the newspapers devote pages to it as if it were the greatest thing in patent medicine.

"I made him," and the editor thumped his sacred desk. "I boomed him and I printed his first confounded rot," and he strode up and down the room with a full head of steam on.

"I've always said it is the advertising that does it, not the stuff one advertises. Proved it, too, and then sat back and watched their heads swell. He is the last. A year ago he sat in that very chair and gurgled obsequious thanks. Last week we invited him to dinner and he forgot to come. To-day he came in just to say if I don't pay him just double the rate I've been giving him he'll take his stuff to the "Rocket," for the "Rocket" editor has made him an offer. And this to me who boomed him and made him out of nothing. O, by Jove!"

"That is only the artistic temperament," I said soothingly.

"Artistic temperament! There is no such thing. It's only another name for d----d bad manners and a swelled head."

I was greatly interested in this artless definition of the artistic temperament, and I went off deeply pondering as to what constitutes a swelled head.

Now swelled head and taking yourself seriously are much the same, only that swelled heads are common in all grades of society. I once had a butcher who had it, being convinced that he was most beautiful to look upon. He used to put a great deal of his stock-in-trade on his curling brown locks. He was not a bit proud of the inside of his head, to do him justice, but he was so absolutely sure of the effect of his shiny hair, his big black moustache, his red cheeks and his round brown eyes.

He was a very happy man. Now you may take yourself seriously, but in a crevice of your mind you can still have the ghost of a doubt. But a swelled head never has a doubt. I have been told by those who have had an opportunity of studying, that swelled heads are not uncommon among shop-walkers, literary people, butlers and members of Parliament, and that musicians even are not all as great as they think they are. The last fiddler I had the joy of hearing scratched with so much temperament and so out of tune! What a mercy it is that so many people do not know a false note when they hear it!