as natural and as spontaneous as eating peas with a fork; it is the
habit of saying “Thank you” for minor services rendered. We are all of
us taught that in the nursery, I know, but an uncountable number of us,
or rather of you, seem to forget it when you lengthen your skirts. Let
me tell you something that happened only yesterday. I went up to Charing
Cross by a mid-day train from here. The only other person in the carriage
was a woman. She was a lady—you know what I mean—the sort of woman who
lives in a hundred-a-year house, who keeps three maidservants and a
boot boy, possibly a carriage, and who goes for a month or six weeks to
the Continent or elsewhere every autumn with her husband. The sort of
person who when she gives a small dinner party has little pink shades
over the candles and at least two sorts of wine. I think, by the way,
she was the sort who would call a table napkin a serviette, but perhaps
I’m prejudiced by what happened. Well, when she reached Blackheath she
rose to leave the carriage. I was sitting in the corner by the door
through which she had to get out, and, of course, I opened it for her.
If you sit by the door you have to open it for all the outgoers. It is
a nuisance, but it has its compensation in the extra comfort of the
corner seat. This woman did not say “Thank you”; she passed me without
even an inclination of her sulky head. Presently two other women got
in, two women of the same social standing as the one who had left. At
Lewisham one of these got out. I opened the door for her. She didn’t say
“Thank you.” At London Bridge precisely the same thing happened with the
remaining third. All the way thence I meditated on writing a stinging
letter to the _Times_ on “The Decadence of Manners in the Upper Middle
Class,” but you who know me know that the letter is still to write. What
happened psychologically to me was this: that I felt just a trifle less
regard and respect for your sex, Alexa, than I was conscious of when I
left home. I daresay it was unreasonable of me, but there it was. Women
of our class are not really nice, I found myself saying to myself, not
really and truly nice in the innermost soul of them. No wonder they
don’t get on with their servants, I thought to myself, for if they are
rude to their social equals, what must they be to those whom they think
their inferiors? I rather hated your sex for about twenty-five minutes.
And please don’t tell me that these impolite hussies were exceptions,
because on the balance of probabilities it is most unlikely that I should
have struck three exceptions in the course of one short train journey.
No, Alexa, you are very rude. You are attractive sometimes, I admit; you
are even, in passing moments of folly and madness, bewitching, but you
are very rude. I don’t mean you personally, of course, but you regarded
collectively—you women, you!
I find myself getting cross even now as I write when I recall that
incident, getting cross and asking myself all sorts of questions which
it were well for women that men should not ask. As, for instance: Why do
we put up so tamely with so much of your cheek? Cheek is a slang word,
but made venerable by long use, and I can think of no other so exactly
adequate, so comprehensively expressive. Why do we not give you more
severe talkings to than we do? They would do you no end of good, and we
know it, and yet refrain. You scarcely ever get a severe talking to,
any of you. Yesterday, after leaving Charing Cross Station, I walked up
Bond Street. I was really going somewhere, oh sceptical child; you must
not think your father was merely loafing. I was not in a hurry, and I
looked at the shops. There were lots of pretty women driving up and down
in their carriages, but I did not look at them; I was at odds with the
whole sex. Well, those shops! With the exception of a fishmonger’s, a
few most attractive tobacconists, in which you cannot get a briar root
pipe under 25s., and a stray tailor or two, all those shops were women’s
shops; full of hats for women to wear, each hat to be worn about twice,
or at the most half-a-dozen times; shops full of frocks, each frock
costing more than a week’s earnings of a man who works hard to make, say,
£2000 a year; shops creaming over with fluffy, frilly under-things, the
fluffiest and the frilliest of which disappear for ever when once they
leave the shop, or, let us say, almost disappear. And then the jewellers!
Rubies, emeralds, sapphires, opals in little heaps on velvet-lined trays.
Diamonds and diamonds, and yet more diamonds flashing in the sunlight,
flashing scorn and contempt upon all such as are too poor to purchase
them; and gold, gold enough to have paved the street! Oh, and the pearls,
the ropes, nay, rather the cables of pearls. Pearl fishing, they used to
tell me in my _Child’s Guide to Knowledge_, is a perilous profession,
and a profession followed wholly by men. And all the things that these
shops displayed—of course, there was more than as much again in drawers
and cupboards and stout iron safes within the shops—were to be bought by
men and given to women. For what? For what, in the name of reason? Men,
merely as men, give to women as much as women, just as women, give to
men; and so that part of the account is squared by nature’s self, as it
were. But all this balance, this ransack of Bond Street, of South African
and Eastern and Australasian mines, of ocean depths, of forest solitudes,
all this is collared by women, and they won’t even say “Thank you.” It is
true I did not give those three women yesterday any jewels to speak of;
but still I did save them the soiling of their light-coloured gloves, and
you know by experience, Alexa, that carriage door handles on our railway
are always filthy.
Forgive this outburst, which, after all, so far as you are concerned,
is quite impersonal, but out of the bitterness of the heart the pen
writeth. You want to be, and I want you to be, an exceptional woman, and
the easiest way in which to be an exceptional woman is to be a polite
one. I don’t think there is any radical difference between the sexes in
the way of politeness. We are all born impolite—there is nothing much
more impolite than a young baby—but one sex acquires politeness and the
other doesn’t—that’s where it is. I wonder if you have ever noticed that.
If not, just use your eyes for the next four-and-twenty hours, and once
more you will be compelled to admit and to admire the accuracy of your
father’s criticisms of life. Watch, watch closely, next time you see two
or three young men talking to two or three women in a drawing-room or at
a garden party. Notice the difference (it is not a subtle, it is a quite
blatant difference) between the attitude and tone of the men to the women
and those of the women to the men. Unless the men be rank outsiders, and
that sort is not likely to come your way, you will find in the men’s
attitude and tone a deference, a respectful diffidence—how shall I put
it?—quite lacking in the women. However foolish, jejune, inconsequential
be the remarks of any one of the women the man immediately talking to
her will put on an air of interest; he will treat her as though anything
she said had some real importance; he will receive her feeblest joke as
though it were wit of the most polished. But she, well, if he doesn’t
amuse her she won’t even try to look amused, and if he bores her she
will most unmistakably look bored. It is horribly impolite to look bored,
you know. To bore is beastly, but to look bored is damnable. Most women
behave as though their mere existence were a blessing to men, as though
all that men could possibly ask of them was just to be there! It is not
enough, you know, Alexa; it really isn’t, and in our saner moods we men
feel that. We don’t say unpleasant things of you, but we feel them.
The worst of it is that social custom accepts the woman’s point of
view and enforces it. Think what happened to me last week. It was on
Wednesday—on Wednesday your mother and I dined with the Devrients.
Your mother was all right from start to finish. She was taken down by
Forsyth—I know you rather admire him, and you are right, for he is about
as clever as they make them, and talks even better than he writes. But,
then, your mother is a woman, and these sort of things are arranged for
the likes of her and you. But I! In obedience to that monstrous social
convention which pairs off married men with married women—I never felt it
so bitterly before, for your friend, the beautiful Janet, was there and
sat opposite me, hidden behind a tall epergne of tall flowers, and I’m
fond of Janet, and you say she likes me—I was sent down with Mrs ⸺ (never
mind, I won’t mention names), a middle-aged woman, who has no beauty nor
traces of beauty, who is neither clever nor interesting, who is nothing,
so far as I could make out, but stupid and rather greedy. For the whole
of that awful dinner—it lasted from eight until a quarter to ten—I had to
make myself agreeable to that preposterous person. And I did it. I was
as nice and kind as anything. I plied her with banalities, such as her
soul (what there was of it) loved. I wouldn’t have minded her not being
intelligent had she been pretty. I wouldn’t have minded her not being
pretty had she been intelligent; but she was neither, and at the end of
it I felt as though my brain had been wiped out with a sponge. Now, there
was a man there with whom I particularly wanted to talk, he is one of
the few men out of whom one always sets an idea or two, but devil a word
could I get with him, and all because it is taken for granted that I, a
man, must needs want to sit next to a woman. On the way home your mother
remarked what a delightful evening it had been, and how quickly it had
passed! I said—but you who know me, Alexa, know quite well that I said
nothing.
The Registrar-General’s returns inform me that men are marrying less
freely than they used, and that each year they marry less freely than in
the year before. It is almost the one piece of evidence I can discover
of the growth and development of intelligence among my sex. It means,
say the commentators in the newspapers and the magazines, that men are
getting more selfish, more exacting. It does. As we get more and more
civilised so shall we demand more and more from life. My savage ancestor
asked but little here below. I ask quite a lot, and get some. My remote
descendant will ask more, and get all of it. Of course, men who fall in
love will continue to marry; the Registrar-General will always have them
to go on with. For a man in love the _mere girl_ suffices. But hitherto
the marriage returns have been made up by the marriages of a certain
number, and a pretty large number, of men who have not been in love and
who consequently can see things, I mean women, more or less as they
really are. For them the mere girl does not suffice. She has got to be
a nice girl as well, a girl who takes as much trouble to be nice as she
does, say, to be clean. These are the fellows, I feel certain, whose
defection has caused, and will further cause, the fall in the marriage
rate. Your sex is being found out, my child, found out at long last by
mine. When the discovery is quite complete Lord only knows what sort of a
world we shall have!
I don’t suppose it has ever struck you before how nice we are to
you—now has it?—how patient we are with your caprices, how tolerant of
your tempers, how semi-blind to your deficiencies, how little and how
rarely we use against you the strength, moral, mental, and physical,
that is ours. An excellent French priest once advised me, as a cure for
discontent, to spend half an hour three times a week in meditating upon
my blessings. You do that, Alexa, and don’t forget that perhaps, on the
whole, the chiefest of yours is the possession of a most wise and always
a most loving
FATHER.
DRESS AND FASHION
DRESS AND FASHION
_Jan. 2, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
Don’t be alarmed at getting a letter from me not in reply to one of
yours. Nothing has happened. “All is silver grey,” as Andrea del Sarto
says. I won’t add “placid and perfect with my art” as he does, because it
is cheek to call one’s work perfect even when it is, but, at any rate,
both I and my art are placid enough.
No, nothing has happened. That is the worst of it. When one reaches my
age nothing ever does happen unless one makes it happen. When one is
young adventures, excitements, thrills, come suddenly out of the void,
thus adding to the ordinary joy of them the throb of the unexpected.
But when one is older one has to fare forth out into the void and seek
diligently adventures, excitements, thrills; and if one has one’s living
to earn, and a whole lot of little things to see after, why then one
hasn’t much time for excursions into the void.
This is a purely selfish letter. It is written to relieve my mind; by way
of getting down in black and white some thoughts that have been twisting
and twirling about like maggots in my brain all the afternoon. In that
respect, at least, I am an artist, Alexa, and, forgive me, my daughter,
in that same respect, you are not.
The artistic temperament is not, as fools of novelists appear to think,
an itching to be singular or noticeable in any way, an inclination to
wear ridiculous neck-ties, to omit to wash behind the ears, or to live
with people to whom one is not married; and to quarrel with them. It is
the desire, the invincible desire, to externalise and express in paint or
pencil, in clay or marble, in musical sounds or in written words, one’s
emotions, one’s thoughts, one’s aspirations, one’s dreams.
You, for instance, draw. For a girl of your years and training you draw
rather well. But when you see a thing that appeals to you—a face, a
landscape, a little bit of an interior, you do not ache and ache until
you have got it down in pencil upon paper. You are quite content to
keep it within you. I, when I get ever such a stupid idea in my head,
am miserable until I see it before me in words, in words arranged as
well as I know how to arrange them. I would rather, far rather, keep an
aching tooth in my jaw than an aching idea in my head. And so, though my
neck-ties are ever the correctest of their kind that Bond Street knows,
and though I never do any of those other things peculiar to the artistic
temperament of rubbishy fiction, I do claim to belong to the great
company of artists.
By the way, I have often wondered what the author of the _Te Deum_ was
about not to have added another line to it:—
“The great Brotherhood of Artists, throughout all the world: Praise
Thee.”
Every artist, in every bit of honest work he does, though he may not
mean it or know it, praises God. How supremely well Kipling expressed
the gist of our creed when he wrote in that exquisite _Envoi_ to “Life’s
Handicap”; you remember it:—
“One instant’s toil to Thee denied
Stands all Eternity’s offence.”
And now to come down from the heights to the valley—I never could
breathe freely on mountain tops, Alexa; that’s why I hate Switzerland so
cordially. It is not the touring Anglican clergy and their impossible
wives I object to so much; it is those appalling Alps. But, as I was
going to say, I write this letter because I spent a whole half-hour this
morning reading a woman’s paper. At least, I’m not sure it called itself
a woman’s paper, it might have been a woman’s page in an ordinary paper.
I don’t know where the thing has got to now, so I can’t refer to it. I
found it on the hall table when I came down to breakfast.
Doesn’t it make you feel a good deal ashamed of your sex and of yourself,
as one of it, when you come across a woman’s page in a newspaper? Doesn’t
it make you feel pretty much as you would feel if you saw someone of your
own standing behaving rudely at dinner? or being impolite to a child?
Don’t you ask yourself, with something as near to a swear word as you
can get, “Whom on earth is all the rest of the paper for then? Are women
so small, so narrow, such children, such idiots as to have no interest
in politics, in art, in science, in literature; in all the extraordinary
doings of human beings all over the world, such as the rest of the paper
discusses and records?”
“The Women’s Corner!” Think of it, Alexa, child of my heart! The corner
into which the poor stunted, shrivelled, petty-minded creature must
betake herself to read about dress. Pah!
Here your feminine intuition will tell you that I am in rather a bad
temper. There, there, I don’t mean to sneer at feminine intuition. Heaven
knows I have both profited and suffered from it enough, and more than
enough in my time, and when the sum comes to be cast up it will be found,
I daresay, that I have profited as much as I have suffered.
But I am in rather a bad temper with that woman’s paper, not because it
was all about dress, but because it was all wrong about dress. I don’t
mean wrong in the absurd details—I know nothing of them—but wrong in the
essence, wrong in the soul of it.
Here anyone but you would say “What in the world does the man mean by
talking about soul in an article on dress?” You won’t say it because you
know—we have agreed about it often—that an article on anything whatever
that has no soul in it, is not an article at all; it is just a bladder of
rattling peas.
It is not because I despise or even think lightly of dress, that I am
so unwontedly annoyed with the person who wrote all this slops. On the
contrary, it is because I am fulfilled with the idea of the importance
of dress and of the part it plays in the amenities and pleasures of
life. You have often told me after we have been out together, or people
have been here, and I have been admiring this lady or that, that I
did not even know what she had on. Precisely. That was because she
was well-dressed. Had she been badly dressed I should have known fast
enough. The woman is well-dressed of whose costume you remember only the
_ensemble_, what we artists call the total impression—an impression of
colour and contour. Or sometimes of nothing even so definite as that, of
fluffiness merely.
Now the writer of all this abominable fustian knew nothing of that, that
elementary philosophy of dress. He, she, it—I don’t know what the sex of
the creature was—thought all of the costume and nothing of the woman.
With him, her, it, the woman was a thing to be worn with a costume,
not the costume a thing for a woman to wear. You do see the tremendous
difference, don’t you? But, of course, you do.
Really—but there, one must be tolerant. These people are flatly ignorant,
and, moreover, they are the hirelings of others whose business it is
to make money out of dress. That, nowadays, at anyrate, is the meaning
of fashion in the restricted sense of the word. Fashion is not a mode
of being beautiful or even of changing from one variety of beauty to
another, or of changing to meet changing circumstances. It is a means of
putting money into the pockets of dressmakers and manufacturers. These
people are getting stronger and stronger, more and more arrogant.
Take a case in point. Once upon a time, not so long ago, every woman in
our class had what was called “a set” of furs. It was horribly expensive
to begin with, but it was taken care of and it lasted, oh, I don’t know
how long. Of course, that didn’t suit the furriers and fur sellers—the
fierce competition of commerce and all the silly rest of it—and so,
though the wearing of furs is still the comfortable fashion, each season
sees a change in the smaller fashion of the furs, the cut of them, the
kind, and so on, and the women even in our class, who don’t adopt the
latest thing, feel hopelessly uncomfortable and out of it. They either
go cold, or wear cat-skin or rabbit-skin faked to look like something
expensive, or spend money that they haven’t got.
With that rabbit-skin and cat-skin I have struck the note of fashion as
it is in the suburbs, the provinces, and everywhere else except among the
rich and idle people to whom money does not matter, the people who do
nothing to make money, and so have most of it to spend. The designers for
the big dressmakers design something that is perhaps, though by no means
certainly, beautiful enough. If perchance it be beautiful, its beauty
lives in the artistry and science of its fashioning, and the material of
which it is made. Now the people at the top can purchase, without feeling
it, the artistry, the science, the rare and costly material. But the
others, you see, can’t.
Nevertheless, pricked and spurred by the low-down fashion journalists,
they feel that life is a desert without the new thing in some shape or
another. So they get it inartistically designed, unscientifically cut,
and of some cheaper, commoner stuff. Result, they don’t look a bit like
Duchesses after all, but only like what they are, silly and snobby women.
These are hard words, Alexa, but I am cross to-day.
Fashion in its smaller sense, “the fashion” as it is forced upon women
by the dressmakers and designers, as a card is forced by a sharper on
a flat, is for nine people out of ten an accursed thing, a monstrous
thing. It assumes that all women will look well dressed in the same way.
Now, if anything is certain, it is that of any hundred women selected
haphazard, not more than ten can dress in the same way and look anything
but ridiculous. The human body is, as you learnt when you used to draw it
at the Slade and at Colorossi’s, a subtle thing, and demands the subtlest
treatment. There are idiosyncrasies of body as there are of mind. I don’t
mean merely that some women are tall, some short, some thick, and others
thin, some curvy and others angular. That has to be remembered, too, but
I mean something more elusive than that.
Let us take a concrete case. You are not very different in height or
form from your friend, Berta Roselli. You are not a bit prettier. A
person just looking casually at you two—a second-rate milliner sort
of person—would say that the same sort of costume would suit you both
equally well. Yet how delightful you used to look in those frocks which
you call, I think, “Princess” frocks, and how completely they took away
the delightfulness from Berta. I told her so once in so many words when
we were walking round the garden together, and she had the good sense
never to wear them again. If you ask me why they enhanced your charm, and
destroyed Berta’s, I can’t tell you. Perhaps there is no “why.”
Then again, colour. It drives the artistic soul furious to be told that
“heliotrope is to be fashionable in the approaching season,” because one
knows at once what one is in for. Think of heliotrope or of any other
colour or tint in the universe worn beside every sort of complexion,
with every sort of shade of hair! It makes one’s nerves stand on end
like quills. There again, the rich women score because they can, and do,
change their complexions and their hair to “match,” as this putrid paper
calls it, the fashionable colour. The poorer women try to do the same
thing, and look—well. Or don’t even try, and then!—
This is merely a grumbling letter, not a didactic essay, and so I will
offer no advice in it. To offer advice one should be in a judicial mood,
serene, detached! but I may just say this. The one fatal thing in dress
is to wear anything because you happened to have admired it on someone
else, and for that reason only. The one triumphant thing in the matter of
dress is to remember that you are yourself and not that other person. In
all other matters women seem to remember it easily enough. In the matter
of dress only do they lose their sense of identity.
Now, Alexa, turn on me, do, and _riposte_ by telling me that men are
every bit as bad; that they too are the slaves of fashion. Say things
about my waistcoats if you like; I don’t care, for I have a crushing
retort up my sleeve. Think of the things that tailor people have tried to
force upon us and how miserably they have failed; how they have tried to
make us go back to peg-tops, to wear coloured coats and knee-breeches, as
evening dress. Think of these things and withhold the gibe. Or, don’t. I
do not mind. Sedate in my sense of my sex’s immeasurable superiority,
I remain,
Your angry and æsthetic
FATHER.
A MORAL QUESTION
A MORAL QUESTION
_Jan. 15, 19—._
MY DEAR ALEXA,—
Your last letter interested and amused me vastly, as I know you intended
it should. It is much the best thing in the way of writing you have ever
done. I read and re-read and read it yet again after breakfast, and then
I carefully, though regretfully, burnt it. One can spare oneself and
others a lot of unhappiness by the simple process of burning letters,
especially women’s letters, more especially still charming women’s
charming letters. Indeed, the more charming the woman and the more
charming the letter the more urgently do the flames clamour for their
rights of destruction. Had anyone else read this last letter of yours,
say, ten years hence, they would have formed an entirely false impression
of you, and had even you read it yourself after that lapse of time you
would have formed almost as false an impression of yourself. Almost, I
say, not quite, for you, I fain hope, would remember the sort of man to
whom it was written. And it is the character of the recipient even more
than that of the writer which gives the keynote of every letter worth the
reading. An intimate letter is the achievement of _two_ personalities—it
is a kind of dialogue in which one of the interlocutors is silent, or
rather, is heard only by the other. That is why published letters nearly
always lack interest; we do not hear that other.
Now, if anyone but your understanding father had read that last letter
of yours, they would have thought you “not quite a nice girl” to have
repeated little bits of scandal which you have picked up in a house in
which you are a welcome guest, and to have criticised so freely your
hosts and their friends. They would have liked the letter, mind you—they
would have chortled over it in pharisaical glee—I chortle, too, but I
chortle not as the Pharisees chortle—but they would not have liked you,
for they would have feared and distrusted you, as critics are always
distrusted and feared by the stodgy, especially critics of life. They,
you see, these hypothetical but now impossible readers of your letter,
would not have known me—would not have known, as you do, that I enjoy
scandal and appreciate criticism; and would therefore have failed to
realise how dutiful a daughter you were in giving me the things I like.