Part 12
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.