Part 6

Conventional folk are often accused of being dull and valueless because they have no original opinions. (How we all love original opinions!) Well: very few people have any original opinions. Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar. “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu”; and dead sages, if there were only retroactive copyrights, could sue most of our modern wits for their best things. What is even Jean-Jacques but Prometheus-and-water, if it comes to that? Very few people since Aristotle have said anything new. What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new--yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp. Some people--like G. B. S. and Mr. Chesterton--seem to think that you can be original by contradicting other people--as if even the person who states a proposition did not know that you could make the verb negative if you chose! Often, they are so hard up that they have to contradict themselves. But they are supposed to be violently--subversively--enchantingly--original. Even the militant suffragettes have not “gone the whole hog”: they have stopped short of Aristophanes. What is the use of congratulating ourselves on our unprecedented courage in packing the house solemnly for _Damaged Goods_, when we have expurgated the _Lysistrata_--and had the barest _succès d’estime_, at that? No: our vaunted unconventionality is usually a matter of words. I have tracked more than one delightful vocabulary through the jungle, only to find that it brought up at the literal inspiration of the Old Testament; and I have inwardly yawned away an afternoon with a person who talked in _clichés_, to discover perhaps, at twilight, that on some point or other he was startlingly revolutionary. The fact is that we are the soft prey of the phrase; and the rhetoricians, whether we know it or not, will always have their way with us. Even the demagogue is only the rhetorician of the gutter. “Take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself”--as the Duchess in _Alice_ did _not_ say. Dulness is a matter of vocabulary; but there are no more dull people among the conventional than among the unconventional. And if a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.

I was arguing at luncheon one day, with three clever women, the advantages and disadvantages of unconventionality. They were all perfectly conventional in a worldly sense, and perfectly convinced of the charms of unconventionality. (That is always the way: we sigh for the paradises that are not ours, like good Christians spurning the Apocalypse and coveting the Mohammedan heaven.) They cited to me a very amusing person--a priestess of intellectual revolt. Yes: she walked thirty blocks to lunch in a pouring rain, and when she came in she took off her wet hat, put it in her chair, and sat on it. The fact that my guest, did she choose, could afford to crown herself with pearls, would not make up to me for the consciousness that she was sitting on an oozing hat throughout luncheon. In spite of epigrams, I should feel, myself, perfectly wet through. Surely it is the essence of good manners not to make other people uncomfortable. Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people. No one except a reformer has a right to batten on other people’s discomfort. And who would ever have wanted John Knox to dinner? To be sure, we are all a little by way of being reformers now--too much, I fear, as people went to see the same _Damaged Goods_, under shelter of its sponsorship, who cared for nothing whatever except being able to see a _risqué_ play without being looked at askance. But we shall come to that aspect of it later.

Now “temperament,” again, has often been confused with charm; and conventional folk--who are, by definition, dull and unoriginal, all baked in the same archaic mould--are supposed to lack charm. They are at best like inferior prints of a Hokusai from worn-out blocks. The “justification” is bad. Their original may have been all very well; but they themselves are hopelessly _manqués_, and besides, there are too many of them. How can they have charm--that virtue of the individual, unmatchable, unpredictable creature?

It is not against the acutest critics, the real “collectors” and connoisseurs of human masterpieces, that I am inveighing. I am objecting to the stupid criticisms of the stupid; to the presence of “conventional” as a legitimate curse on the lips of people who do not know what they are talking about. One often hears it--“I find him” (or “her”) “so difficult to talk to: he” (or “she”) “is so conventional.” Good heavens! As if the conventional person were not always at least easy to talk to! He may be dull, but he knows his cues, and will play the game as long as manners require. It is the wild man on a rock, with a code that you cannot be expected to know, because it is his own peerless secret, who is hard to talk to. The people who say that conventional folk lack charm, often mean by “conventional” not wearing your heart on your sleeve. Now I positively like the sense, when I dine out, and stoop to rescue a falling handkerchief, that I am not going to rub my shoulder against a heart. What are hearts doing on sleeves? Am I a daw, that I should enjoy pecking at them? And who has any right to assume that, because they are not worn there, they are non-existent? It is of the essence of human nature to long for the unattainable. If you do not believe me, look at all the love-poetry in the world. As Mr. Chesterton says, “the coldness of Chloe” has been responsible for most of it. Certainly, if Chloe had worn her heart on her sleeve, the anthologies would have suffered. And with woman the case is the same. Let not the modern hero flatter himself that he will ever arouse the same kind of ardor in the female heart that the heroes of old did: those seared and saddened and magnificent creatures who bore hearts of flame within their granite breasts--but whose breasts were granite, all the same. No, gentlemen, women may marry you, but it is with a diminished thrill. We want--men and women both--to be intrigued; and I venture to say that for purposes of life, not of mere irresponsible conversation, it is the conventional person who intrigues us, since it is only the conventional person who creates the illusion of inaccessibility. He may be accessible, in reality; and the unconventional, temperamental person may be an impregnable fortress. That is the dizzy chance of life. But since all relations must have a beginning, the initial impression is the thing that counts. Of course one wants to know that the Queen of Spain has legs; but then we can be pretty sure that she has. We do not need a slit skirt to reassure us. One wants to know that there is a human face behind the mask; but who shall say that the mask does not heighten such beauty as there is? The conventional manner is a kind of domino: the accepted costume that all civilized people adopt for a time before unmasking. I do not suggest that we should disguise ourselves to the end; but that we should talk a little before we do unmask.

For there must be some ground on which to meet the person we do not know; and why may not the majority decide what grounds are the most convenient for all concerned? There must be some simplification of life: we cannot afford to have as many social codes as we have acquaintances. Imagine knowing five hundred people, and having to greet each with a different formula! Language would not run to it. And would it, in any case, constitute charm? Charm, as we all know, is a rare and treasurable thing; and no one can say where it will be found. But, as far as we can analyze it at all, its elements seem very likely to flourish in conventional air. Of course there may be a fearful joy in watching the man of whom you say: “One can never tell what he is going to do next.” But you do not want him about, except on very special occasions. For the honest truth is that the unconventional person is almost never just unconventional enough. He is pretty sure to take you by surprise at some moment when you do not feel like being taken by surprise. Then you have to invent the proper way to meet the situation, which is a bore. It is not strange that some of our _révoltés_ preach trial marriage: for the only safe way to marry them at all would be on trial. Until you had definitely experienced all the human situations with them, you would have no means of knowing how, in any given situation, they would behave. They might conform about evening-dress, and throw plates between courses; they might be charming to your friends, and ask the waiter to sit down and finish dinner with you. Or they might in all things, little and big, be irreproachable. The point is that you would never _know_. You could never take your ease in your inn, for nothing discoverable in earth or heaven would determine or indicate their code. Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us. Not a fundamentally safe one? Perhaps not. But some test there must be; and this, on the whole, is the easiest to pass for those whom we are likely to want for intimates. That is really the social use of conventions.

And as for charm: your most charming people are those who constantly find new and unexpected ways of delighting us. Are such often to be found among people who are constantly finding new and unexpected ways of shocking us? I wonder. It seems to me doubtful, at the least. For shock--even the superficial social shock, the sensation that does not get far beneath the skin--is not delight. If you have ever really been shocked, you know that it is a disagreeable business. Of course, if some wonderful creature discovers the golden mean, the perfect note: to satisfy in all conventional ways, and still to be possessed of infinite variety in speech and mood--that wonderful creature is to be prized above the phœnix. But you cannot give rein to your own rich temperament in the matter, let us say, of auction bridge. The rules you invent as you go alone may be more shatteringly amusing than anything Hoyle ever thought of; but you cannot call it auction, and you must not expect other people to know how to return your leads. And usually it only means breaking rules without substituting anything better--revoking for a whim. Life is as coöperative a business as football; and we all know what becomes of the team of crack players when it faces a crack team. Only across the footlights are we apt to feel the charm of the Ibsen heroine; and even then we are apt to want supper and some irrelevant talk before we go to a dream-haunted couch.

Now this matter of charm is not really an arguable one; for charm will win where it stands, whether it be conventional or unconventional. Everyone knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister’s friends can’t or won’t. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly. It is not senseless to bring marriage into the question, for when we advisedly call a man or a woman charming, we mean that that man or that woman would apparently be a good person with whom to form an intimate and lasting relation--not for us, ourselves, perhaps, but for someone else of our sort, in whom he or she contrives, by the alchemy of passion, to inspire the “sacred terror.” To amuse for half an hour during which you incur no further responsibilities, to delight, in a relation which has no conceivable future, does not constitute charm; for it is of the essence of charm that it pulls the people who feel it,--pulls, without ceasing. Charm magnetizes at long range. I contend only that conventional people are as apt to have it as anyone else, for they have the requisites, as far as requisites can be named.

As for the charm actually resident in conventionality _per se_: how should anyone who does not feel it be converted to it by words of mine? For it is a beauty of form: not so much of good form as opposed to bad form, as of form opposed to formlessness. The foe of convention enters into the social plan, if at all, as a wild, Wagnerian _motif_. And the truly unconventional person has not even a _motif_; for he disdains repetition. He scorns to stand for anything whatever, and you are insulting his “temperament” if you suppose that it is capable of only one reaction on any given thing. The temperamental critic of literature--like Jules Lemaître in his salad days, before the Church had reclaimed him--prides himself on never thinking the same thing twice about any one masterpiece. Your temperamental creature will not twice hold the same opinion of any one person. If he has ever been notably pleased with a fellow-guest at dinner, it is safest never to repeat the combination. For the honor of his temperament, he must be disgusted the next time. It is his great gift not to be predicable, from day to day, from hour to hour. But a pattern is always predicable; and what you learn about a conventional person goes into the sum of knowledge: you do not have to unlearn it over night. Psychology becomes a lost art, a discredited science, when you deal with the temperamental person. You might as well have recourse to astrology. His very frankness is misleading. He can afford to give himself away, because he gives away nothing but the momentary mood. Never attempt to hold him to anything he has said: for his whole virtuosity consists in never saying the same thing twice, and never necessarily meaning it at all. He does very well for the idle hour, the box at the play; but for the business of life--oh!

And to some of us there is charm in the code itself--charm, that is, in any code, so long as it has behind it an idea, though an antique one, and is adhered to with faith. The right word must always seem “inevitable”; and so must, after all, the right act. An improvisation may be--must be, if it is to succeed--brilliant; but acts, like words, are best if they are in the grand style. Whether in speech or in manners, the grand style is never a mere magnificent idiosyncrasy; for the essence of the grand style is to carry with it the weight of the world.

And conventionality is now said to be subversive of the moral order! At least, most avowedly unconventional people are now treating themselves as reformers. Conventions did not fall, in spite of the neo-pagans; so the neo-Puritans must come in to make them totter. And with the neo-Puritans, it must be admitted (Cromwell did not live in vain) most of the charm of unconventionality has gone. It has become a brutal business. The neo-pagans realized that, to be endured at all, they must make us smile. If they told a _risqué_ story, it must be a really funny one. At the present moment, we may not go in for _risqué_ remarks in the interests of humor, but we may make them in the interests of morality. We may say anything we like at a dinner-party, so long as we put no wit into saying it. We must not quote eighteenth-century _mots_, but we may discuss prostitution with someone we have never seen before. Anything is forgiven us, so long as we are not amusing. If we only draw long faces, we may even descend to anecdote. And when people are asked to break with conventions in the interests of morality, they may feel that they have to do it. It has always been permitted to make the individual uncomfortable for the good of the community. So we cannot snub the philanthropists as we would once have snubbed the underbred: for thereby we somehow damn ourselves. If you refuse to discuss the white slave traffic, you are guilty of civic indifference; and that is the one form of immorality for which now there is no sympathy going. I may have no ideas and no information about the white slave traffic, but I ought to be interested in it--interested to the point of hearing the ideas, and gathering the information, of the person whom I have never seen before. It is the “Shakespeare and the musical glasses” of the present day. Vain to take refuge in plays or books: for what play or book is well known at all unless it deals with the social evil?

Now it has already been pointed out that Vice Commission reports have done as much harm as good. The discussion of them is not limited to the immune, “highbrow” caste. I know of one quite unimperilled stenographer who was frightened by them into the psychopathic ward at Bellevue; and we have all read instructive comments in the daily papers which reiterate that virtue is ten dollars a week. A much lower figure than Becky Sharp’s, but the principle is the same. Out of her weekly wage, we may be sure the shopgirl (it is always the shopgirl!) buys the paper--and therewith her Indulgence for future faults, much cheaper than Tetzel ever sold one. For Purgatory now is replaced by Public Opinion. Even my own small town is not free from the prophylactic “movie.” One small boy nudges another, as they pass the placarded entrance, exclaiming debonairly, “Oh, this ’ere white slave traffic, y’know!” And the child, I have been given to understand, is the father of the man. The unconventional reformers quote to themselves, I suppose:

“Vice is a monster of such frightful mien,” _etc._

It never occurs to them to finish the sentence:

“We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

The fact is that Anglo-Saxon society has got beyond the enduring stage, and is largely occupied in pitying. There is a general sense that the people at large, in all moral matters, know better than the specialists. We will take our creed not from the theologians, but from Mr. Winston Churchill; and we will take our pathology not from medical treatises, but from Brieux. We will discuss the underworld at dinner because, between the fish and the entrée, the thin lady with the pearls may say something valuable about it. If we are made uncomfortable by the discussion, it only shows that we are selfish pigs.

Now I see no reason why decent-minded people should not discuss with their intimate friends anything they please. If you are really intimate with anyone, you are not likely to discuss things unless you both please. But I do see, still, a beautiful result of the old order that the new order does not tend to produce. The conventional avoidance as a general subject of conversation of sex in all its phases was a safeguard to sensibilities. You cannot, in one sense, discuss sex quite impersonally, for everyone is of one sex or the other. The people who cry out against the segregation of the negro in government offices have hardly realized that non-segregation is objected to, not because of itself, but because of miscegenation. There is a little logic left in the world; and there are some people who perceive that sequence, whether they phrase it or not. Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and whom you may not marry. You do not bring people together in society who are _tabu_ to each other. Not that you necessarily expect, out of a hundred dinner-parties, any one marriage to result; but you assume social equality in the people seated about your board. Is not, in the last analysis, the only sense in such a phrase as “social equality,” the sense of marriageability? Even conventions are not so superficial as they seem; and they have that perfectly good human basis. It is vitally important to the welfare and the continuance of the civilized race that sex-sensibilities should be preserved. Otherwise you will not get the romantic mating; and the unromantic mating, once well established in society, will give rise to a perfectly transmissible (whether by heredity or environment, O shade of Mendel!) brutality. It is brutalizing to talk promiscuously of things that are essentially private to the individual; just as it is brutalizing (I believe no one questions that) for a family and eight boarders to sleep in one room--even a large room. All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing. We do not take our tooth-brushes with us when we go out to dinner, and if we did, and did not mind (very soon we should not), the practice, I am sure, would have a brutalizing effect. A certain amount of plain speaking is, perhaps, a good thing; but there is no doubt that at present we have far too much of it to suit most of us, and I cannot see why we should be made to endure it just because a few people who are by way of calling themselves moralists cannot get on with society on its own terms.

It has long been a convention among people who are not cynical that bodily matters are not spoken of in mixed and unfamiliar gatherings. Of course, our great-grandmothers were prudes. The reason why they talked so much about their souls, I fancy, is that there was hardly a limb or a feature of the human body that they thought it proper to mention. They were driven back on religion because they held that the soul really had nothing to do with the body at all. The psychiatrists have done their best to take away from us that (on the whole) comforting belief. In America, at least, we are finding it harder and harder to get out of the laboratory. It is the serious and patriotic American in _The Madras House_ who asks the astonished Huxtable, “But are you the mean sensual man?” In _The Madras House_ the question is screamingly funny; but I cannot imagine any man’s liking, in his own house, to have the question put to him by a total stranger. The fact is that we have dragged our Ibsen and our Strindberg and our Sudermann lovingly across the footlights, and are hugging them to our hearts in the privacy of our boxes. We have decided that manners shall consist entirely of morals. It is just possible that, in the days when morals consisted largely of manners, fewer people were contaminated. You cannot shock a person practically whom you are totally unwilling to shock verbally; and if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically. Above all, when we become incapable of the shock verbal, there will be nothing left for the unconventional people but the shock practical. And that, I imagine, is what we are coming to--all in the interests of morality, be it understood. At no time in history, perhaps, have the people who are not fit for society had such a glorious opportunity to pretend that society is not fit for them. Knowledge of the slums is at present a passport to society--so much the parlor philanthropists have achieved--and all they have to do is to prove that they know their subject. It is an odd qualification to have pitched on; but gentlemen and ladies are always credulous, especially if you tell them that they are not doing their duty.