Have you read The Young Lady's Book? You have had plenty of time to do
so, for it was published in 1829. It was described by the two anonymous
Gentlewomen who compiled it as 'A Manual for Elegant Recreations,
Exercises, and Pursuits.' You wonder they had nothing better to think
of? You suspect them of having been triflers? They were not, believe
me. They were careful to explain, at the outset, that the Virtues of
Character were what a young lady should most assiduously cultivate.
They, in their day, labouring under the shadow of the eighteenth
century, had somehow in themselves that high moral fervour which marks
the opening of the twentieth century, and is said to have come in with
Mr. George Bernard Shaw. But, unlike us, they were not concerned wholly
with the inward and spiritual side of life. They cared for the material
surface, too. They were learned in the frills and furbelows of things.
They gave, indeed, a whole chapter to 'Embroidery.' Another they gave
to 'Archery,' another to 'The Aviary,' another to 'The Escrutoire.'
Young ladies do not now keep birds, nor shoot with bow and arrow; but
they do still, in some measure, write letters; and so, for sake of
historical comparison, let me give you a glance at 'The Escrutoire.' It
is not light reading.
'For careless scrawls ye boast of no pretence;
Fair Russell wrote, as well as spoke, with sense.'
Thus is the chapter headed, with a delightful little wood engraving of
'Fair Russell,' looking pre-eminently sensible, at her desk, to prepare
the reader for the imminent welter of rules for 'decorous composition.'
Not that pedantry is approved. 'Ease and simplicity, an even flow of
unlaboured diction, and an artless arrangement of obvious sentiments'
is the ideal to be striven for. 'A metaphor may be used with advantage'
by any young lady, but only 'if it occur naturally.' And 'allusions are
elegant,' but only 'when introduced with ease, and when they are well
understood by those to whom they are addressed.' 'An antithesis renders
a passage piquant'; but the dire results of a too-frequent indulgence
in it are relentlessly set forth. Pages and pages are devoted to a
minute survey of the pit-falls of punctuation. But when the young lady
of that period had skirted all these, and had observed all the manifold
rules of caligraphy that were here laid down for her, she was not, even
then, out of the wood. Very special stress was laid on 'the use of the
seal.' Bitter scorn was poured on young ladies who misused the seal.
'It is a habit of some to thrust the wax into the flame of the candle,
and the moment a morsel of it is melted, to daub it on the paper; and
when an unsightly mass is gathered together, to pass the seal over the
tongue with ridiculous haste--press it with all the strength which the
sealing party possesses--and the result is, an impression which raises
a blush on her cheek.'
Well! The young ladies of that day were ever expected to exhibit
sensibility, and used to blush, just as they wept or fainted, for very
slight causes. Their tears and their swoons did not necessarily betoken
much grief or agitation; nor did a rush of colour to the cheek mean
necessarily that they were overwhelmed with shame. To exhibit various
emotions in the drawing-room was one of the Elegant Exercises in which
these young ladies were drilled thoroughly. And their habit of
simulation was so rooted in sense of duty that it merged into
sincerity. If a young lady did not swoon at the breakfast-table when
her Papa read aloud from The Times that the Duke of Wellington was
suffering from a slight chill, the chances were that she would swoon
quite unaffectedly when she realised her omission. Even so, we may be
sure that a young lady whose cheek burned not at sight of the letter
she had sealed untidily--'unworthily' the Manual calls it--would anon
be blushing for her shamelessness. Such a thing as the blurring of the
family crest, or as the pollution of the profile of Pallas Athene with
the smoke of the taper, was hardly, indeed, one of those 'very slight
causes' to which I have referred. The Georgian young lady was imbued
through and through with the sense that it was her duty to be
gracefully efficient in whatsoever she set her hand to. To the young
lady of to-day, belike, she will seem accordingly ridiculous--seem
poor-spirited, and a pettifogger. True, she set her hand to no
grandiose tasks. She was not allowed to become a hospital nurse, for
example, or an actress. The young lady of to-day, when she hears in
herself a 'vocation' for tending the sick, would willingly, without an
instant's preparation, assume responsibility for the lives of a whole
ward at St. Thomas's. This responsibility is not, however, thrust on
her. She has to submit to a long and tedious course of training before
she may do so much as smooth a pillow. The boards of the theatre are
less jealously hedged in than those of the hospital. If our young lady
have a wealthy father, and retain her schoolroom faculty for learning
poetry by heart, there is no power on earth to prevent her from making
her de'but, somewhere, as Juliet--if she be so inclined; and such is
usually her inclination. That her voice is untrained, that she cannot
scan blank-verse, that she cannot gesticulate with grace and propriety,
nor move with propriety and grace across the stage, matters not a
little bit--to our young lady. 'Feeling,' she will say, 'is
everything'; and, of course, she, at the age of eighteen, has more
feeling than Juliet, that 'flapper,' could have had. All those other
things--those little technical tricks--'can be picked up,' or 'will
come.' But no; I misrepresent our young lady. If she be conscious that
there are such tricks to be played, she despises them. When, later, she
finds the need to learn them, she still despises them. It seems to her
ridiculous that one should not speak and comport oneself as artlessly
on the stage as one does off it. The notion of speaking or comporting
oneself with conscious art in real life would seem to her quite
monstrous. It would puzzle her as much as her grandmother would have
been puzzled by the contrary notion.
Personally, I range myself on the grandmother's side. I take my stand
shoulder to shoulder with the Graces. On the banner that I wave is
embroidered a device of prunes and prisms.
I am no blind fanatic, however. I admit that artlessness is a charming
idea. I admit that it is sometimes charming as a reality. I applaud it
(all the more heartily because it is rare) in children. But then,
children, like the young of all animals whatsoever, have a natural
grace. As a rule, they begin to show it in their third year, and to
lose it in their ninth. Within that span of six years they can be
charming without intention; and their so frequent failure in charm is
due to their voluntary or enforced imitation of the ways of their
elders. In Georgian and Early Victorian days the imitation was always
enforced. Grown-up people had good manners, and wished to see them
reflected in the young. Nowadays, the imitation is always voluntary.
Grown-up people have no manners at all; whereas they certainly have a
very keen taste for the intrinsic charm of children. They wish children
to be perfectly natural. That is (aesthetically at least) an admirable
wish. My complaint against these grown-up people is, that they
themselves, whom time has robbed of their natural grace as surely as it
robs the other animals, are content to be perfectly natural. This
contentment I deplore, and am keen to disturb.
I except from my indictment any young lady who may read these words. I
will assume that she differs from the rest of the human race, and has
not, never had, anything to learn in the art of conversing prettily, of
entering or leaving a room or a vehicle gracefully, of writing
appropriate letters, et patati et patata. I will assume that all these
accomplishments came naturally to her. She will now be in a mood to
accept my proposition that of her contemporaries none seems to have
been so lucky as herself. She will agree with me that other girls need
training. She will not deny that grace in the little affairs of life is
a thing which has to be learned. Some girls have a far greater aptitude
for learning it than others; but, with one exception, no girls have it
in them from the outset. It is a not less complicated thing than is the
art of acting, or of nursing the sick, and needs for the acquirement of
it a not less laborious preparation.
Is it worth the trouble? Certainly the trouble is not taken. The
'finishing school,' wherein young ladies were taught to be graceful, is
a thing of the past. It must have been a dismal place; but the
dismalness of it--the strain of it--was the measure of its
indispensability. There I beg the question. Is grace itself
indispensable? Certainly, it has been dispensed with. It isn't reckoned
with. To sit perfectly mute 'in company,' or to chatter on at the top
of one's voice; to shriek with laughter; to fling oneself into a room
and dash oneself out of it; to collapse on chairs or sofas; to sprawl
across tables; to slam doors; to write, without punctuation, notes that
only an expert in handwriting could read, and only an expert in
mis-spelling could understand; to hustle, to bounce, to go straight
ahead--to be, let us say, perfectly natural in the midst of an
artificial civilisation, is an ideal which the young ladies of to-day
are neither publicly nor privately discouraged from cherishing. The
word 'cherishing' implies a softness of which they are not guilty. I
hasten to substitute 'pursuing.' If these young ladies were not in the
aforesaid midst of an artificial civilisation, I should be the last to
discourage their pursuit. If they were Amazons, for example, spending
their lives beneath the sky, in tilth of stubborn fields, and in armed
conflict with fierce men, it would be unreasonable to expect of them
any sacrifice to the Graces. But they are exposed to no such hardships.
They have a really very comfortable sort of life. They are not expected
to be useful. (I am writing all the time, of course, about the young
ladies in the affluent classes.) And it seems to me that they, in
payment of their debt to Fate, ought to occupy the time that is on
their hands by becoming ornamental, and increasing the world's store of
beauty. In a sense, certainly, they are ornamental. It is a strange
fact, and an ironic, that they spend quite five times the annual amount
that was spent by their grandmothers on personal adornment. If they can
afford it, well and good: let us have no sumptuary law. But plenty of
pretty dresses will not suffice. Pretty manners are needed with them,
and are prettier than they.
I had forgotten men. Every defect that I had noted in the modern young
woman is not less notable in the modern young man. Briefly, he is a
boor. If it is true that 'manners makyth man,' one doubts whether the
British race can be perpetuated. The young Englishman of to-day is
inferior to savages and to beasts of the field in that they are eager
to show themselves in an agreeable and seductive light to the females
of their kind, whilst he regards any such effort as beneath his
dignity. Not that he cultivates dignity in demeanour. He merely
slouches. Unlike his feminine counterpart, he lets his raiment match
his manners. Observe him any afternoon, as he passes down Piccadilly,
sullenly, with his shoulders humped, and his hat clapped to the back of
his head, and his cigarette dangling almost vertically from his lips.
It seems only appropriate that his hat is a billy-cock, and his shirt a
flannel one, and that his boots are brown ones. Thus attired, he is on
his way to pay a visit of ceremony to some house at which he has
recently dined. No; that is the sort of visit he never pays. (I must
confess I don't myself.) But one remembers the time when no
self-respecting youth would have shown himself in Piccadilly without
the vesture appropriate to that august highway. Nowadays there is no
care for appearances. Comfort is the one aim. Any care for appearances
is regarded rather as a sign of effeminacy. Yet never, in any other age
of the world's history, has it been regarded so. Indeed, elaborate
dressing used to be deemed by philosophers an outcome of the
sex-instinct. It was supposed that men dressed themselves finely in
order to attract the admiration of women, just as peacocks spread their
plumage with a similar purpose. Nor do I jettison the old theory. The
declension of masculine attire in England began soon after the time
when statistics were beginning to show the great numerical
preponderance of women over men; and is it fanciful to trace the one
fact to the other? Surely not. I do not say that either sex is
attracted to the other by elaborate attire. But I believe that each
sex, consciously or unconsciously, uses this elaboration for this very
purpose. Thus the over-dressed girl of to-day and the ill-dressed youth
are but symbols of the balance of our population. The one is pleading,
the other scorning. 'Take me!' is the message borne by the furs and the
pearls and the old lace. 'I'll see about that when I've had a look
round!' is the not pretty answer conveyed by the billy-cock and the
flannel shirt.
I dare say that fine manners, like fine clothes, are one of the
stratagems of sex. This theory squares at once with the modern young
man's lack of manners. But how about the modern young woman's not less
obvious lack? Well, the theory will square with that, too. The modern
young woman's gracelessness may be due to her conviction that men like
a girl to be thoroughly natural. She knows that they have a very high
opinion of themselves; and what, thinks she, more natural than that
they should esteem her in proportion to her power of reproducing the
qualities that are most salient in themselves? Men, she perceives, are
clumsy, and talk loud, and have no drawing-room accomplishments, and
are rude; and she proceeds to model herself on them. Let us not blame
her. Let us blame rather her parents or guardians, who, though they
well know that a masculine girl attracts no man, leave her to the
devices of her own inexperience. Girls ought not to be allowed, as they
are, to run wild. So soon as they have lost the natural grace of
childhood, they should be initiated into that course of artificial
training through which their grandmothers passed before them, and in
virtue of which their grandmothers were pleasing. This will not, of
course, ensure husbands for them all; but it will certainly tend to
increase the number of marriages. Nor is it primarily for that
sociological reason that I plead for a return to the old system of
education. I plead for it, first and last, on aesthetic grounds. Let
the Graces be cultivated for their own sweet sake.
The difficulty is how to begin. The mothers of the rising generation
were brought up in the unregenerate way. Their scraps of oral tradition
will need to be supplemented by much research. I advise them to start
their quest by reading The Young Lady's Book. Exactly the right spirit
is therein enshrined, though of the substance there is much that could
not be well applied to our own day. That chapter on 'The Escrutoire,'
for example, belongs to a day that cannot be recalled. We can get rid
of bad manners, but we cannot substitute the Sedan-chair for the
motor-car; and the penny post, with telephones and telegrams, has, in
our own beautiful phrase, 'come to stay,' and has elbowed the art of
letter-writing irrevocably from among us. But notes are still written;
and there is no reason why they should not be written well. Has the
mantle of those anonymous gentlewomen who wrote The Young Lady's Book
fallen on no one? Will no one revise that 'Manual of Elegant
Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits,' adapting it to present needs?...
A few hints as to Deportment in the Motor-Car; the exact Angle whereat
to hold the Receiver of a Telephone, and the exact Key wherein to pitch
the Voice; the Conduct of a Cigarette... I see a wide and golden vista.