Part 8

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.