Part 17
We are to understand that it was the domination and the selfishness of man that created the lamentable type of nineteenth-century “old maid.” But who were unkindest to Miss Wardle? Her nieces, members of her own sex. Who created the typical “old maid” and terrible bore, Miss Bates? Another “old maid,” Jane Austen. The fact is, old maids like other human beings have their foibles. Are these never to be put into a book? Feminism seems to make its disciples terribly serious. Miss La Creevy is Dickens’s example of the _femme artiste_. See, says Mme. Villard, how types of “independent women” are caricatured! She cannot laugh at Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig, because they testify to the social contempt attaching to the nursing profession at their date! Has it never occurred to her that novels are sometimes written merely as novels and not as _dossiers_ in a “case” for the “evolution” of woman?
After all, however, there are plenty of serious novelists who do supply good evidence—more particularly the quasi-propagandists like Mrs. Gaskell (when she chose) and Mrs. Humphry Ward (sometimes), and (nearly always) Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells. Mme. Villard makes effective play with these. She has no difficulty, for instance, in showing the immense economic advance of the woman-worker during the last century, though even here her eye seems too exclusively fixed on her own sex. True, women were the chief victims of the old “factory” and “sweating” systems, but the amelioration of their condition, if I am not mistaken, came only as part of the general amelioration in the condition of “labour,” without sex-distinction.
It is when she comes to the sentimental side of her subject, the relation of woman to man whether in marriage or “free love,” that Mme. Villard finds her material a little too much for her. Naturally, for our novelists and playwrights can never let the too fascinating subject alone and seem to go on saying the same things about it over and over again—_con variazioni_. You have, for example, Mrs. Gaskell, so far back as 1850, dealing with the same theme as Mr. Stanley Houghton dealt with in “Hindle Wakes” (1910)—the refusal of the seduced woman to accept the regularization of her position by marriage. Then there are the free-lovers “on principle,” who end by conceding marriage to social prejudice—like Mr. Wells’s Ann Veronica. There must be English novels where the “free lovers” maintain their principle triumphantly to the end, though I haven’t read them; but I seem to remember several in the French language. It is all very confusing. Perhaps—I only say perhaps—those are wisest who leave “principle” in these matters to the heroes and heroines of the novelists and are content to live ordinary lives in an ordinary jog-trot way, without too much thinking about it. There is this comfort for the old-fashioned commonplace people among us, at any rate, that whatever “evolution” of woman there may have been in the nineteenth century, she remains in all essentials very much what she used to be. I can find it as easy to-day to be in love with Emma and Elizabeth and Anne—I needn’t mention their surnames—who are more than a century old, bless them, as with (not to compromise myself with any contemporary English heroine) M. Barrès’s Bérénice, or with one of M. Marcel Proust’s “Jeunes filles en Fleurs.”
PICKLES AND PICARDS
A writer in the _Nouvelle Revue Française_ drops a remark which it does one good to read. He says that in the old French villages on the Picardy front all that the English have taught the countryfolk in five years of cohabitation is to eat pickles with their boiled beef. Very likely this is a humorous perversion of the truth; but I should like to believe it. Not from any personal interest in pickles, though that will seem odd, and perhaps incredible, to my French friends, who seem to think that every Englishman must be a pickle-eater—just as we English used to think every Frenchman ate frogs. No doubt, however, this French generalization is fairly accurate; we are a nation of pickle-eaters, and if any one asks why, I guess the answer is cold beef. Anyhow, the idea has fascinated the French mind. Among the English characteristics of which Jules Lemaître once gave a list (from hearsay, which he thought, good, easy man, as authentic evidence as coming to see England for himself) I remember he mentions “Les _pickles_.” And it is the one English characteristic that has infected the Picards!
My reason for rejoicing is that they have not been infected by more than one, that in spite of all temptations, etc., they remain (pickles excepted) true Picards. There have been times (particularly in mid-eighteenth century) when the French have shown a tendency to Anglomania. Let us be glad that these are over. Probably the French Revolution settled that point, as it settled so many others, by isolating France for the time being, and making her the common enemy. More than one of the Terrorists were Picards by race, but you may be sure they never ate pickles. But cohabitation may bring about the same result as isolation, in a different way. Our armies have lived for five years with the French; both natives and visitors have had ample opportunities for observing each other’s characteristics; and I like to think that both have parted with the profound conviction that, on either side, these are inimitable. Condiments, of course, excepted. They have adopted our pickles, and we have taken their _sauce bigarade_, which is excellent with wild duck. Condiments, by the way, include the linguistic sort. We have seen the delight with which Lemaître wrote down that strange, abrupt, tart English word “pickles” in his French text. So some of our own scribblers wantonly and wickedly flavour their writings with an occasional French phrase, because it seems to them to give a piquancy, a zest. These apart, let us by all means admire one another’s qualities without seeking to interchange them. Let us jealously preserve our own characteristics, our own type, like the Picardy villagers. National peculiarities are the perpetual joy of travel (except when one side wants the window down and the other up), the _bouquet_ of literature, the salt of life.
Talking of travel, we have been having a correspondence in _The Times_ on the lavatories and the closed windows on the P.L.M. I am not using that railway myself just now, and I confess I like to see that here again the French remain obstinately French. France is endeared to us, like any other friend, by its weaknesses as well as its virtues; it would, for many of us, not be the old friend that we know and love without its occasional stuffiness and its occasional smells. Louis Veuillot once wrote a book called “Les Odeurs de Paris.” We have all smelt them, and should hardly recognize our Paris without them—though they must have had more pungency, a more racy, romantic flavour in Balzac’s Paris, the Paris of our dreams. Nowadays for the rich Balzacian smells you will have to visit some of the provincial towns of his novels, and so your pilgrimage will combine a literary with all factory interest. I know of one old Burgundian town—I will not name it, for obvious reasons—not mentioned, I fancy, by Balzac, quite untouched by time, with pepper-pot towers, a river in a deep ravine, and well worth a literary pilgrimage if only for its associations with Mme. de Sévigné and the Président de Brosses, where you have the added delight of the richest medieval odours powerfully assisted by a tannery—an unrivalled combination! Why do so many Englishmen grumble at these things instead of appreciating them æsthetically, as accompaniments of the French scene, as part of that varied experience which we call “abroad”? Or why do they explain them on the illiberal assumption of some inherent inferiority in the French character?
I find a typical specimen of this kind of explanation in Hazlitt’s “Notes of a Journey through France and Italy,” made about a century ago, when France was the very France (think of it!) that was being observed, and about to be described, by Balzac. One would have thought that the Londoner of 1824 (who must have been pretty well used to smells at home) would have found some other explanation than the physiological and psychological inferiority of the French. But hear him. “A Frenchman’s senses and understanding are alike insensible to pain—he recognizes (happily for himself) the existence only of that which adds to his importance or his satisfaction. He is delighted with perfumes, but passes over the most offensive smells and will not lift up his little finger to remove a general nuisance, for it is none to him.” To which he appends a note:—“One would think that a people so devoted to perfumes, who deal in essences and scents, and have fifty different sorts of snuffs, would be equally nice, and offended at the approach of every disagreeable odour. Not so. They seem to have no sense of the disagreeable in smells or tastes, as if their heads were stuffed with a cold, and hang over a dunghill, as if it were a bed of roses, or swallow the most detestable dishes with the greatest relish. The nerve of their sensibility is bound up at the point of pain.... They make the best of everything (which is a virtue)—and treat the worst with levity or complaisance (which is a vice).”
Well, well. When this was written French and English had not long ceased to be at war, and Hazlitt was never a sweet-tempered man. But you can still find the censorious Englishman who is ready decisively to mark off French characteristics into “virtues” and “vices,” according to his own English standard. There may, for all I know, be some Frenchman who gives us tit for tat. This type of critic is tiresome enough; but there is another that seems to me quite intolerable, the critic who detests all national peculiarities as such, and would level down all humanity to one monotonous level of sameness. As though uniformity were not already the plague of the modern world! We men all wear the same hat (despite the efforts of the _Daily Mail_), women all powder their noses in the same way, and the “cinema palaces” all show the same films, with the same “Mary” and the same “Dug.” For heaven’s sake, let us cling to our national peculiarities!
And that is why I welcome the intelligence that the Picards have taken over nothing from us but our pickles, and that the French travellers on the P.L.M. still insist on keeping the window up. Let our enthusiasts for a uniform world ponder these facts. And it is a relief to think that they can never unify national landscapes. The village green, the cottage gardens, the chalk downs, the chines, the red coombs will always be English. The long straight _route nationale_ and the skinny fowls that are always straying across it, the poplar-bordered streams, the trim vines ranked along the hill-side, the heavily-accoutred gendarme and the fat farmer in the stiff indigo blouse hobnobbing at the _estaminet_, these will always be French. Oh, but I would give something to see that indigo blouse again, and have a morning chat with the farmer! “Hé! père Martin, ça va toujours bien? Pas mal, m’sieu. Et la récolte? Dame! je ne m’en plains pas ... à la votre, m’sieu!” They may take our pickles, if they will, but let them remain themselves, our old French friends.
THE BUSINESS MAN
It is not easy for the slave of “copy,” sedentary and shy, to know that triumphant figure of the active, bustling world, the business man. The business man is too busy, and can only be seen in office hours, when the scribe is correcting proofs or, perhaps, not yet up. Nevertheless, I once nearly saw the Governor of the Bank of England. I hold the Governor to be the archetype of the business man. In my green unknowing youth I used to take the gentleman in cocked hat and picturesque robe at the Threadneedle Street entrance for the Governor, but now know better. Well, I once nearly saw the Governor. It was on the stage. Mr. Gerald du Maurier was in the bank-parlour when a servant entered and said: “The Governor of the Bank of England to call on you, sir.” “Show him in,” said Mr. du Maurier with the easy _nonchalance_ of which only actors have the secret. It was a tremendous moment. I seemed to hear harps in the air. And just then, down came the curtain! It was felt, no doubt, that the Governor of the Bank of England ought not to be made a motley to the view. But I was inconsolable. I had been robbed of my one chance of seeing the supreme business man.
Of late, however, the veil that shrouds the business man from the non-business eye has been partly lifted. The pictorial advertisement people have got hold of him and give brief, tantalizing glimpses of his daily life. Maeterlinck speaks of “l’auguste vie quotidienne” of Hamlet. That only shows that Hamlet (it is indeed his prime characteristic) was not a business man. For the business man’s daily life, if the advertisements are to be trusted, is not so much august as alert, strenuous, and, above all, devoted to the pleasures of the toilet. And his toilet seems, for the most part, to centre in or near his chin. Indeed, it is by his chin that you identify the business man. You know what Pascal said of Cleopatra’s nose: how, if it had been an inch shorter, the whole history of the world would have been different. Much the same thing may be said about the business man’s chin. Had it been receding or pointed or dimpled or double, there would have been no business man and consequently no business. But things, as Bishop Butler said, are what they are and their consequences will be what they will be. The business man’s chin is prominent, square, firm, and (unless he deals in rubber tires—the sole exception to the rule) smooth. It is as smooth as Spedding’s forehead, celebrated by Thackeray and Edward Fitzgerald. It is, indeed, like that forehead, a kind of landmark, a public monument. Even the rich, velvety lather, which does not dry on the face and leaves behind a feeling of complete comfort and well-grooming, cannot disguise it. No wonder the business man is so particular about shaving it! It is a kind of religious rite, an Early Matins, with him.
Outside the bank-parlour, the mart and the exchange the business man takes no risks, and at his toilet-table he prefers safety razors. Indeed, he collects them. Sometimes he favours the sort that can be stropped in a moment with one turn of the wrist; sometimes the sort that needs no stropping at all. But, like all collectors, he is never so happy as when handling, or rather caressing the objects of his collection. Mark how his eyes dance with delight and his smile sweetens as the razor courses over his chin. Evidently life at this moment is burning for him with a hard gem-like flame. Call it not shaving! Say, rather, he is ministering to the symbolic element in him, daintily smoothing the proud emblem of his power—to which he will add the finishing touch of pearl-powder, whose constant use produces a delicate bloom, tones up the complexion, and protects the skin against the ravages of time.
When the chin has been prepared for the business day he tries and contrasts the several effects of it over a variety of collars. For the business man collects collars, too. His chin protrudes with quiet but firm insistence over some of them, nestles coyly in others, or it may be emerges with ease from the sort designed to give ample throat room and especially favoured by men who seek considerable freedom but at the same time a collar of character and distinction. Nor has he any false shame about being seen in his shirt-sleeves. In fact, he seems to be in the habit, when half-dressed, of calling in his friends (evidently, from their chins, fellow business men) to see how perfectly his shirt fits at the neck and how its thoroughly shrunk material is none the worse for repeated visits to the laundry.
Once dressed—and I pass over his interviews with his tailor (he collects overcoats), because that would lead us far and might land us, unawares, among sportsmen, or airmen, or other non-business men—once dressed, he is to be seen at his office. That does not mean that he is to be seen at work. No, it is a somewhat sinister fact that the advertisements hardly ever show the business man engaged in business. You may find him at an enormous desk bristling with patent devices and honeycombed with pigeon-holes, where he sees himself invested with perfect control and rid of all petty routine anomalies, with a mind free to consider questions of policy and the higher aspirations of his house. But not, in blunt English, working, oh dear no! He is pleasantly gossiping with another business man, who is lolling over the edge of the desk smoking a cigarette. Now and then, it is true, you may get a glimpse of him at the telephone. But then his tender smile gives him away. It is obviously no business conversation but an appointment for lunch with his _fiancée_.
Only one advertisement artist has ever “spotted” him at work. He was addressing the board. The board all wore white waistcoats, the same business chin, and the same dry smile as the orator, who with clenched fist and flashing eye assured them of his conviction that increased production results from the bond of mutual goodwill created between employer and employee by the board’s system of life assurance. Altogether, a very jolly party. But outside the world of business men it wouldn’t be considered work. Really, for work it looks as though you would have to go to the non-business man. Think of Balzac’s eighteen hours a day!
But the business man, I daresay, will reply, as they said to the sonneteer in Molière, that “Le temps ne fait rien à l’affaire.” Certainly, the business man’s time doesn’t—for you next find him, in spick and span evening dress, at the dinner-table, beaming at the waiter who has brought him his favourite sauce. The business man collects sauces, but prefers the sauce that goes with everything. After dinner you may see him, before a roaring fire, holding up his glass of port to the light and telling another business man who the shipper is. Last scene of all, a night-piece, you have a glimpse of him in his pyjamas merrily discoursing with several other business men (in different patterns of the same unshrinkable fabric) all sitting cross-legged and smoking enormous cigars. This is the end of a perfect business day. And you conclude that business men sleep in dormitories.
THE END.
THE WHITEFRIARS PRESS, LTD., LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.