Part 16

Now that the _Literary Supplement_ costs 6_d._, one feels entitled to examine one’s relation to it with a certain sense of solemnity. But I well know what mine is, before examination. Even when it cost 3_d._, my relation to it was always one of weekly disconcertment. It revealed to me so many things I didn’t know and never should know, yet known presumably to some other reader. Now omniscience is derided as a “foible,” but why should one be ashamed to confess it as an ideal? Frankly, I envy the man who was so various that he seemed to be not one but all mankind’s epitome. He must have got more fun out of life than your profound specialist. It is to give this various reader this variety of fun that (I surmise, but the editor will know for certain) the _Supplement_ exists. But for me, imperfectly various, it means something bordering on despair. I suppose other readers are more sensible, and just take what suits them, leaving the rest. But I simply hate leaving anything. Take the ten columns modestly headed “New Books and Reprints.” What a world of unknown topics and alien ideas and unfathomable theories about everything this simple title covers! Is there any reader whose intellectual equipment includes at once the biography of Absalom Watkin, of Manchester, the Indian Trade Inquiry Reports on Hides and Skins, an elementary knowledge of the Bengali language, and the particular philosophy of mysticism entertained by Mr. Watkin (not Absalom, but another)? Mine doesn’t—and there’s the pang, for each and all these subjects, simply because they are there, staring me in the face, the face of an absolutely blank mind about them, excite my intellectual curiosity. I should like to know all about ergatocracy—merely on the strength of its alluring name—and the true story, from the Franciscan point of view, of the Franciscans and the Protestant Revolution in England, and Lord Grey’s reminiscences of intercourse with Mr. Roosevelt, and the history of the Assyrian “millet” in the great war, and what is meant by the “Free Catholic” tendency in the Nonconformist Churches. Yet it is fairly certain that I shall have to do without any knowledge of most, if not all, of these matters which presumably engage the enlightened interest of some other readers.

That is why I say the _Supplement_ disconcerts me every week. It makes me feel ignorant and, what is worse, lonely, cut off from so many human sympathies, cold to enthusiasms that are agitating other breasts, isolated in a crowd who, for all I know, may be banding themselves against me with the secret password “ergatocracy,” an uninitiated stranger among the friends of Mr. Absalom Watkin of Manchester. Indeed, unlike “the master of this college,” I am so far from feeling that “what I don’t know isn’t knowledge” as to find it the one sort of knowledge I itch to possess and suppose myself to have lost a golden opportunity in missing. There are strong men about, I am aware, who say they don’t care. They profess themselves content with knowing a few things thoroughly, with their own little set of enthusiasms, and repeat proverbs about jacks of all trades. I respect these sturdy men, but all the time my heart goes out to the other kind, the men of versatility, the men whose aim is to understand everything, to sympathize with every human emotion, to leave no corner of experience unexplored. And some such aim as this is indispensable for the critic, whose business is primarily to understand. To understand what he criticizes he has to begin by putting himself in its author’s place and standing at his point of view—to take on, in short, in turn, innumerable other personalities, temperaments, and tastes than his own. Other men may, but a critic must, be versatile. He must have the faculty of lending himself, with profusion, to other minds and other experiences—lending himself, but not giving, reserving the right of resuming his own individuality and of applying his own standards.

That resumption of self is easy enough. The true difficulty is in surrendering it, even for a while. One finds the task particularly hard, I think, in lending oneself to tastes one has outgrown. Remember your schoolboy enthusiasm over Macaulay’s style. You have lost that long ago, and are now, perhaps, a little ashamed of it. Yet you must recapture it, if only for a moment; that is to say, you must try to reflect in yourself the joy that Macaulay felt in writing as he did, if you are sitting down to try to criticize him adequately. This is difficult, this momentary renunciation of your present taste in favour of the taste you have outgrown. Remember your schoolboy attitude to Scott; how you read feverishly for the story and nothing but the story, and simply skipped the long prefaces and introductions and copious historical notes? To-day your taste has matured, and you see the prefaces and notes as a welcome setting for the story, as completing for you the picture of the author’s mind in the act of composition. But you will have to go back to your discarded taste and think only of the story if you are recommending Scott to your youngsters.

This difficulty is perpetually confronting one in the theatre. I confess, I find the theatre almost as disconcerting as the _Literary Supplement_ for an analogous, though not identical, reason. In that case you have the bewildering spectacle of things unknown; in this, of tastes outgrown. One afternoon I saw a little play translated from the French, limpid in expression, simplicity itself in form, spare almost to austerity in its use of theatrical means. Not a word, not a situation, was emphasized. This or that point was neatly, briefly indicated, offered just as a germ which might be safely left to your own intelligence to develop. The action was pure acted irony, but not an ironical word was uttered. This, of course, is the sort of play that refreshes the jaded critic, and he has to resist the temptation to over-praise it. The next evening I saw a play diligently crammed with everything that the other had carefully left out—emphasis, repetition, six words where one would have sufficed, “dramatic” situations and suspenses, the gentle humours of life concentrated into eccentricities of stage “character.” There is a numerous, and entirely respectable, public with a taste in this stage; it likes dots on its _i_’s, things thrust under its nose, so that it can see them, and repeated over and over again, so that it can understand them. That is a taste which the jaded critic cannot but have outgrown. Yet the play was good, sound work of its kind, and the critic’s first duty was to force himself back into his outgrown taste and see the play with the spirit with which the author wrote it and its proper public received it. I say his first duty; it was open to him afterwards to recover his own personality and make his distinctions. But this first duty was hard. It is an ever-recurring trial of critical conscience. “These are our troubles, Mr. Wesley,” as the peevish gentleman said when the footman put too much coal on the fire.

WOMEN’S JOURNALS

Who was the wit who, to the usual misquotation from Buffon, _le style c’est l’homme_, rejoined _mais ce n’est pas la femme_? The statement has perhaps as much truth as is required from a witticism; it is half true. Woman, unlike man, does not express all of herself. She has her reticences, her euphemisms, and her asterisks. She will on no account name all things by their names. It is one of the childish weaknesses of men, she holds, to practise veracity to excess. Like children, they cannot help blurting out the truth. But she, from diligent experiments on her own person, has learnt that truth looks all the better for having its nose powdered and its cheeks discreetly rouged. Readers of George Sand’s “Histoire de ma Vie” are often baffled in tracing the fine distinction between the woman and the make-up. Therein the work is typical, illustrating as it does the general desire of women in literature to look pretty—to look pretty in their mirror, for themselves, for their own pleasure. Not, as is sometimes erroneously asserted, to look pretty in the eyes of men or of a particular man. So one is amused but scarcely convinced by Heine’s well-known remark that every woman who writes has one eye on her paper and the other on some man—except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who had only one eye. Evidently the generalization was invented just to spite the countess. Mme. de Sévigné’s letters to her daughter are far better than those to Bussy-Rabutin. George Eliot may have had one eye on Lewes when she did her best to spoil her novels by scientific pedantry—which was sheer waste (let alone the damage to the novels), as Lewes was, by all accounts, the ugliest man in London. But on what man had Jane Austen an eye? One might ask the question about our thousands of women novelists to-day, and at once see the refutation of Heine in simple arithmetic; there would not be enough men to go round. There is clearly no rule. Heine may have been thinking of George Sand, already mentioned, whose eye—her “glad eye,” I fear it must be called—revolved as she wrote upon a round dozen of men in turn.

But there is one department of women’s literature wherein the element of doubt altogether vanishes. I mean the journals they publish, or get published, for themselves. They cannot write here with their eye on some man. Indeed, men, nice men (“nice” in the strict sense, approved in a certain talk between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney), are rather chary of even approaching such journals. They exhibit advertisements of “undies,” corsets, and other things that used to be called feminine mysteries, but are now entitled perhaps to the rank of notorieties which make one instinctively stammer, “Oh, I beg your pardon,” and beat a hasty retreat. So, it will at once be said, do all newspapers nowadays, and that is true. Yet, somehow, one feels more indiscreet in lighting upon them in the women’s journals than in the others. For one thing, they seem to be more dainty and alluring by reason of more artistic execution and glazed paper, so that they may satisfy the critical eye of their proper wearers. And, for another, there is a difference between the high-road of the newspaper, whereon a man willy-nilly must travel, and the by-path of the women’s journal, where he is at best a privileged intruder. If you ask, “Goosey, goosey, gander, whither shall I wander?” there is a distinct difference between answering, “Upstairs and downstairs,” and “in my lady’s chamber.”

All this, of course, as the judicious will have perceived, really means that I am as interested as, I suppose, are most of my fellow-men in all these curiously dainty and elegant ingenuities of women’s apparel, and that I am only pretending to be shocked. (After all, in his pursuit of veracity, even a man may occasionally powder his nose.) The advertisers, bless them, know all about that. They know that the natural man shares the naïve admiration which Pepys once expressed on seeing Lady Castlemaine’s wonderful _lingerie_ and laces hanging out to dry on a clothes-line in Whitehall. But the natural man generally finds it convenient to be more reticent about it than Pepys.

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!