When, I wonder, did the word “temperament” come into fashion with us?
We can hardly have got it from the French, for the French mean by it
something very different from what we do; though it is just possible
that we did get it from them, and have merely Bowdlerized the term.
At all events, whatever it stands for, it long since became a great
social asset for women, and a great social excuse for men. Perhaps it
came in when we discovered that artists were human beings. At least,
for many years, we never praised an artist without using the word. It
does not necessarily imply “charm,” for people have charm irrespective
of temperament, and temperament irrespective of charm. It is something
that the Philistine never has: that we know. But what, by all the gods
of clarity, does it mean?
It means, I fancy, in one degree or another, the personal revolt
against convention. The individual who was “different,” who did not
let his inhibitions interfere with his epigrams, who was not afraid
to express himself, who hated _clichés_ of every kind--how well
we know that figure in motley, who turned every occasion into a
fancy-dress ball! All the inconvenient things he did were forgiven him,
for the sake of the amusing things he said. Indeed, we hardly stopped
to realize that his fascination was largely a matter of vocabulary.
Now it is one thing to sow your wild oats in talk, and quite another
to live by your own kaleidoscopic paradoxes. The people who frowned
on the manifestations of “temperament” were merely those logical
creatures who believed that if you expressed your opinions regardless
of other people’s feelings, you probably meant what you said. They did
not know the pathology of epigram, the basic truth of which is that
word-intoxicated people express an opinion long before they dream of
holding it. They say what they think, whether they think it or not.
Only, if you talk with incessant variety about what ought to be done,
and then never do any of the wild things you recommend, you become in
the end perfectly powerless as a foe of convention.
This tactical fact the unconventional folk have at last become aware
of; and, accordingly, hostility to convention is ceasing somewhat to
take itself out in phrases. Conventions, at the present moment, are
really menaced. The most striking sign of this is that people are now
making unconventionality a social virtue, instead of an unsocial vice.
The switches have been opened, and the laden trains must take their
chance of a destination.
The praise of temperament, I verily believe, was the entering wedge.
But whatever the first cause, “conventional” is certainly in bad odor
as an epithet. And this is really an interesting phenomenon, worth
investigating. What is it that makes it a term of reproach? Why must
you never say it about your dearest friend? Why must you contradict,
in a shocked tone, if your dearest friend is said to be conventional?
Most of my best friends are conventional, I am glad to say; but even I
should never think of describing them to others thus.
Conventional people are supposed to lack intelligence--the power to
think for themselves. (It seems to be pretty well taken for granted
that you cannot think for yourself, and decide to think what the
majority of your kind thinks. If you agree with the majority, it must
be because you have no mental processes.) They are felt to lack charm:
to have nothing unexpected and delightful to give you. And, nowadays,
they are (paradoxes are popular) supposed to be perilous to society,
because they are immovable, because they do not march with the times,
because they cling to conservative conceptions while the parties of
progress are re-making the world. All these reproaches are, at present,
conveyed in the one word.
Now it is a great mistake to confound conventionality with
simplicity--with that simplicity which indicates a brain inadequate
to dealing with subtleties; or to confound “temperament” and
unconventionality with a highly organized nature. The anthropologists
have exploded all that. I have looked warily at anthropologists ever
since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture
on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers
and leopard-societies. I doubt if the anthropologists have any
more perspective than other scientists. I am as near being an old
Augustan as any twentieth-century observer can be: “nihil humani,”
_etc._ But, for God’s sake, let it be human! Palæontology is a
poor substitute for history. No: I do not love any scientists, even the
anthropologists. But I do think we ought to be grateful to them for
proving to us that primitive people are a hundred times as conventional
as we; and that their codes are almost too complicated for European
minds to master. If any one is still under the dominance of Rousseau,
Chateaubriand _et Cie._, I wish he would sit down impartially
before Messrs. Spencer and Gillen’s exposition of group-marriage among
the Australian aborigines. If, in three hours, he knows whom, supposing
he were a Matthurie of the dingo totem, he could marry without
incurring punishment, or even the death penalty, he had better take his
subtlety into Central Australia: he is quite wasted on civilization.
Some one may retort that I am not exactly making out a shining case
for _tabu_, in citing the very nasty natives of Australia as
notable examples of what _tabu_ can do for society. My point
is only this: that it is folly to chide conventional people for
simplicity, since convention is a very complicated thing; or for
dulness, since it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many
inhibitions to follow a social code. To be different from everyone
else, you have only to shut your eyes and stop your ears, and act as
your nervous system dictates. By that uncommonly easy means, you could
cause a tremendous sensation in any drawing-room, while your brain went
quite to sleep. The natives of Central Australia are not nice; but they
are certainly nicer than they would be if they practised free love
all the year round, instead of on rigidly specified occasions. Their
conventions are the only morality they have. Some day, perhaps, they
will do better. But it will not be by forsaking conventions altogether.
For surely, in order to be attractive, we must have some ideals, and
above all some restraints. Civilization is merely an advance in taste:
accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.
When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere
plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, the
historic sense. I am far from saying that all conventional folk have
it; but they have at least the merit of conforming. If they do not
live by their own intelligence, it is because they live by something
that they modestly value a good deal more. It is better that a dull
person should follow the herd: his initiatives would probably be
very painful to himself and every one else. No convention gets to be
a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful
people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be
pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following
genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is
a good thing to do. Unless we are geniuses, the lone hunt is not worth
while: we had better hunt with the pack. Unless we are geniuses, there
is much more fun in playing the game; there is much more fun in caste
and class and clan. Unconventional people are apt to be Whistlers who
cannot paint. Of course there is something very dull about the person
who cannot give his reasons for his social creed. But if it is all a
question of instinct, better a trained instinct than an untrained one.
I am inclined to think that the mid-Victorian prejudice against--let us
say--actors and actresses, was well founded. Under Victoria (or should
one say under mid-Victoria?) stock companies were not chaperoned,
and ladies and gentlemen went on the stage very infrequently. What
is the point of admitting to your house some one who will be very
uncomfortable there himself, and who will make every one else even
more uncomfortable? It is not that we are afraid he will eat with
his knife: that is a detail we might put up with. But eating or not
eating with your knife is merely one of the little signs by which we
infer other things. In this mad world, any one may do or be anything;
but the man who has been brought up to eat with his knife is the less
likely to have been brought up by people who would teach him to respect
a woman or not to break a confidence. It is a stupid rule of thumb;
but, after all, until you know a person intimately, how are you going
to judge except by such fallible means? I have nothing in the world
against Nature’s noblemen; but the burden of proof is, of practical
necessity, on their shoulders. Manners are not morals--precisely; yet,
socially speaking, both have the same basis, namely, the Golden Rule.
No one must be made more uncomfortable or more unhappy because he has
been with you. Now, in spite of Oscar, it is worse to be unhappy than
to be bored; and I would rather be the heroine of a not very clever
comedy of manners than of a first-class tragedy. Most of us, when we
are once over twenty, are no more histrionic, really, than that. The
conventional person may bore you (though it is by no means certain
that he will) but he will never, of his own volition, make you unhappy
unless by way of justified retort. He will never put you, verbally
or practically, into a nasty hole. Perhaps he will never give you the
positive scarlet joys of shock and thrill. But, dear me! that brings us
to another point.
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 worldy 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 its 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 sponsors, 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 co-operative 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.
Every one 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 some one 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 any one 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 any one 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
some one 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, “high-brow” 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 shop-girl (it is always the shop-girl!) 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: