A MAD friend of mine will have it that the characteristic of the age is
Make-Believe. He argues that all social intercourse is founded on
make-believe. A servant enters to say that Mr. and Mrs. Bore are in the
drawing-room.
“Oh, damn!” says the man.
“Hush!” says the woman. “Shut the door, Susan. How often am I to tell
you never to leave the door open?”
The man creeps upstairs on tiptoe and shuts himself in his study. The
woman does things before a looking-glass, waits till she feels she is
sufficiently mistress of herself not to show her feelings, and then
enters the drawing-room with outstretched hands and the look of one
welcoming an angel’s visit. She says how delighted she is to see the
Bores—how good it was of them to come. Why did they not bring more Bores
with them? Where is naughty Bore junior? Why does he never come to see
her now? She will have to be really angry with him. And sweet little
Flossie Bore? Too young to pay calls! Nonsense. An “At Home” day is
not worth having where all the Bores are not.
The Bores, who had hoped that she was out—who have only called because
the etiquette book told them that they must call at least four times in
the season, explain how they have been trying and trying to come.
“This afternoon,” recounts Mrs. Bore, “we were determined to come.
‘John, dear,’ I said this morning, ‘I shall go and see dear Mrs. Bounder
this afternoon, no matter what happens.’”
The idea conveyed is that the Prince of Wales, on calling at the Bores,
was told that he could not come in. He might call again in the evening
or come some other day.
That afternoon the Bores were going to enjoy themselves in their own way;
they were going to see Mrs. Bounder.
“And how is Mr. Bounder?” demands Mrs. Bore.
Mrs. Bounder remains mute for a moment, straining her ears. She can hear
him creeping past the door on his way downstairs. She hears the front
door softly opened and closed-to. She wakes, as from a dream. She has
been thinking of the sorrow that will fall on Bounder when he returns
home later and learns what he has missed.
And thus it is, not only with the Bores and Bounders, but even with us
who are not Bores or Bounders. Society in all ranks is founded on the
make-believe that everybody is charming; that we are delighted to see
everybody; that everybody is delighted to see us; that it is so good of
everybody to come; that we are desolate at the thought that they really
must go now.
Which would we rather do—stop and finish our cigar or hasten into the
drawing-room to hear Miss Screecher sing? Can you ask us? We tumble
over each other in our hurry. Miss Screecher would really rather not
sing; but if we insist—We do insist. Miss Screecher, with pretty
reluctance, consents. We are careful not to look at one another. We sit
with our eyes fixed on the ceiling. Miss Screecher finishes, and rises.
“But it was so short,” we say, so soon as we can be heard above the
applause. Is Miss Screecher quite sure that was the whole of it? Or has
she been playing tricks upon us, the naughty lady, defrauding us of a
verse? Miss Screecher assures us that the fault is the composer’s. But
she knows another. At this hint, our faces lighten again with gladness.
We clamour for more.
Our host’s wine is always the most extraordinary we have ever tasted.
No, not another glass; we dare not—doctor’s orders, very strict. Our
host’s cigar! We did not know they made such cigars in this workaday
world. No, we really could not smoke another. Well, if he will be so
pressing, may we put it in our pocket? The truth is, we are not used to
high smoking. Our hostess’s coffee! Would she confide to us her secret?
The baby! We hardly trust ourselves to speak. The usual baby—we have
seen it. As a rule, to be candid, we never could detect much beauty in
babies—have always held the usual gush about them to be insincere. But
this baby! We are almost on the point of asking them where they got it.
It is just the kind we wanted for ourselves. Little Janet’s recitation:
“A Visit to the Dentist!” Hitherto the amateur reciter has not appealed
to us. But this is genius, surely. She ought to be trained for the
stage. Her mother does not altogether approve of the stage. We plead
for the stage—that it may not be deprived of such talent.
Every bride is beautiful. Every bride looks charming in a simple costume
of—for further particulars see local papers. Every marriage is a cause
for universal rejoicing. With our wine-glass in our hand we picture the
ideal life we know to be in store for them. How can it be otherwise?
She, the daughter of her mother. (Cheers.) He—well, we all know him.
(More cheers.) Also involuntary guffaw from ill-regulated young man at
end of table, promptly suppressed.
We carry our make-believe even into our religion. We sit in church, and
in voices swelling with pride, mention to the Almighty, at stated
intervals, that we are miserable worms—that there is no good in us. This
sort of thing, we gather, is expected of us; it does us no harm, and is
supposed to please.
We make-believe that every woman is good, that every man is honest—until
they insist on forcing us, against our will, to observe that they are
not. Then we become very angry with them, and explain to them that they,
being sinners, are not folk fit to mix with us perfect people. Our
grief, when our rich aunt dies, is hardly to be borne. Drapers make
fortunes, helping us to express feebly our desolation. Our only
consolation is that she has gone to a better world.
Everybody goes to a better world when they have got all they can out of
this one.
We stand around the open grave and tell each other so. The clergyman is
so assured of it that, to save time, they have written out the formula
for him and had it printed in a little book. As a child it used to
surprise me—this fact that everybody went to heaven. Thinking of all the
people that had died, I pictured the place overcrowded. Almost I felt
sorry for the Devil, nobody ever coming his way, so to speak. I saw him
in imagination, a lonely old gentleman, sitting at his gate day after
day, hoping against hope, muttering to himself maybe that it hardly
seemed worth while, from his point of view, keeping the show open. An
old nurse whom I once took into my confidence was sure, if I continued
talking in this sort of way, that he would get me anyhow. I must have
been an evil-hearted youngster. The thought of how he would welcome me,
the only human being that he had seen for years, had a certain
fascination for me; for once in my existence I should be made a fuss
about.
At every public meeting the chief speaker is always “a jolly good
fellow.” The man from Mars, reading our newspapers, would be convinced
that every Member of Parliament was a jovial, kindly, high-hearted,
generous-souled saint, with just sufficient humanity in him to prevent
the angels from carrying him off bodily. Do not the entire audience,
moved by one common impulse, declare him three times running, and in
stentorian voice, to be this “jolly good fellow”? So say all of them.
We have always listened with the most intense pleasure to the brilliant
speech of our friend who has just sat down. When you thought we were
yawning, we were drinking in his eloquence, open-mouthed.
The higher one ascends in the social scale, the wider becomes this
necessary base of make-believe. When anything sad happens to a very big
person, the lesser people round about him hardly care to go on living.
Seeing that the world is somewhat overstocked with persons of importance,
and that something or another generally is happening to them, one wonders
sometimes how it is the world continues to exist.
Once upon a time there occurred an illness to a certain good and great
man. I read in my daily paper that the whole nation was plunged in
grief. People dining in public restaurants, on being told the news by
the waiter, dropped their heads upon the table and sobbed. Strangers,
meeting in the street, flung their arms about one another and cried like
little children. I was abroad at the time, but on the point of returning
home. I almost felt ashamed to go. I looked at myself in the glass, and
was shocked at my own appearance: it was that of a man who had not been
in trouble for weeks. I felt that to burst upon this grief-stricken
nation with a countenance such as mine would be to add to their sorrow.
It was borne in upon me that I must have a shallow, egotistical nature.
I had had luck with a play in America, and for the life of me I could not
look grief-stricken. There were moments when, if I was not keeping a
watch over myself, I found myself whistling.
Had it been possible I would have remained abroad till some stroke of
ill-fortune had rendered me more in tune with my fellow-countrymen. But
business was pressing. The first man I talked to on Dover pier was a
Customs House official. You might have thought sorrow would have made
him indifferent to a mere matter of forty-eight cigars. Instead of
which, he appeared quite pleased when he found them. He demanded
three-and-fourpence, and chuckled when he got it. On Dover platform a
little girl laughed because a lady dropped a handbox on a dog; but then
children are always callous—or, perhaps, she had not heard the news.
What astonished me most, however, was to find in the railway carriage a
respectable looking man reading a comic journal. True, he did not laugh
much: he had got decency enough for that; but what was a grief-stricken
citizen doing with a comic journal, anyhow? Before I had been in London
an hour I had come to the conclusion that we English must be a people of
wonderful self-control. The day before, according to the newspapers, the
whole country was in serious danger of pining away and dying of a broken
heart. In one day the nation had pulled itself together. “We have cried
all day,” they had said to themselves, “we have cried all night. It does
not seem to have done much good. Now let us once again take up the
burden of life.” Some of them—I noticed it in the hotel dining-room that
evening—were taking quite kindly to their food again.
We make believe about quite serious things. In war, each country’s
soldiers are always the most courageous in the world. The other
country’s soldiers are always treacherous and tricky; that is why they
sometimes win. Literature is the art of make-believe.
“Now all of you sit round and throw your pennies in the cap,” says the
author, “and I will pretend that there lives in Bayswater a young lady
named Angelina, who is the most beautiful young lady that ever existed.
And in Notting Hill, we will pretend, there resides a young man named
Edwin, who is in love with Angelina.”
And then, there being sufficient pennies in the cap, the author starts
away, and pretends that Angelina thought this and said that, and that
Edwin did all sorts of wonderful things. We know he is making it all up
as he goes along. We know he is making up just what he thinks will
please us. He, on the other hand, has to make-believe that he is doing
it because he cannot help it, he being an artist. But we know well
enough that, were we to stop throwing the pennies into the cap, he would
find out precious soon that he could.
The theatrical manager bangs his drum.
“Walk up! walk up!” he cries, “we are going to pretend that Mrs. Johnson
is a princess, and old man Johnson is going to pretend to be a pirate.
Walk up, walk up, and be in time!”
So Mrs. Johnson, pretending to be a princess, comes out of a wobbly thing
that we agree to pretend is a castle; and old man Johnson, pretending to
be a pirate, is pushed up and down on another wobbly thing that we agree
to pretend is the ocean. Mrs. Johnson pretends to be in love with him,
which we know she is not. And Johnson pretends to be a very terrible
person; and Mrs. Johnson pretends, till eleven o’clock, to believe it.
And we pay prices, varying from a shilling to half-a-sovereign, to sit
for two hours and listen to them.
But as I explained at the beginning, my friend is a mad sort of person.