that the Power Behind the Throne--which is the Editorial Chair--is rarely
the Church, scarcely ever the State, infrequently the Capitalist, and
_never_ Labour,--but simply the Advertisement Department.
I was sitting the other afternoon--dreaming, as is my wont; and smoking
cigarettes, which is one of my bad habits,--when the head-representative
of this unseen Power rushed into my sanctum.
"Will you do something for me?" he demanded, with that beneficent smile
on his face which, through experience, I have discovered to be the
prelude of most disagreeable demands.
"Certainly," I answered, inwardly collecting my scattered brains
preparatory to a brilliant defence. "What is it?"
Without more ado he, as it were, threw his bomb.
"Will you write me an Essay on Corsets?"
"On _what_?" I asked incredulously--knowing that he had been a
distinguished soldier, and suspecting that he had suddenly developed what
the soldiers describe as "a touch of the doolally."
"On _Corsets_!"
"But I don't know anything about them," I protested, "except that I
should not like to wear them!"
"That doesn't matter," he answered reassuringly. "All we want is a page
of 'matter.'"
Then he proceeded to explain that he had secured several highly-paid
advertisements from the leading corsetières, and that his "bright idea"
was to connect them together by an essay illustrated by their wares, in
order that those who read might be attracted to buy.
Then he left me.
"Just write a history of corsets," he cried out laughing. Then, by way
of decorating the "bitter pill" with jam, he added: "I'm _sure_ you'll do
it _splendidly_!"
"Splendidly" I know I could not do it, but to do it--rather amused me.
After all, there is one benefit in writing of something you know nothing
about (and you are certain that ninety-nine per cent. of your readers
will not be able to enlighten you) the necessity for accuracy does not
arise. And so, I settled myself down to invent "history," and, if my
historical narrative is all invention, I can defend myself by saying that
if it isn't _true_--it _might be_. And many historical romances cannot
boast even that defence.
Most people who write about the early history of the world have to guess
a good deal; so I don't see why I shouldn't state emphatically that,
after years and years and years of profound research, the first corset
"happened" when Eve suddenly discovered that she was showing signs of
middle-age in the middle. So she plaited some reeds together, tied them
tightly round her waist-line, and, sure enough, Adam had to put off
making that joke about "Once round Eve's waist, twice round the Garden of
Eden" for many moons. But Eve, I suppose, discovered later on, as many a
woman has also discovered since her day, that, though a tight belt maketh
the waistline small, the body bulgeth above and below eventually. So Eve
began making a still wider plait--chasing, as it were, the "bulge" all
over her body. In this manner she at last became encased in a belt wide
enough to imprison her torso quite _un_comfortably, but "she kept her
figure"--or thought she did--and thus easily passed for one hundred and
fifty years old when, in reality, she was over six hundred.
And every woman who is an "Eve" at heart has followed in her time the
example of the mother of all of 'em. As they begin to fatten, so they
begin to tighten, and the inevitable and consequential "bulge" is
imprisoned as it "bulgeth" until no _corsetière_ can do more for them
than hint that men like their divinities a trifle plump in places. But
to arrive at this--the last and only consolation--a woman has to become
rigidly encased from her thighs almost to her neck. She can scarcely
walk and she can hardly breathe, and the fat which must go somewhere has
usually gone to her neck, but--thank Heaven!--"she has kept her figure"
(or she likes to think she has), and many a woman would sooner lose her
character than lose her "line."
You may think that this only applies to frivolous and silly women, but
you are wrong. It applied even to goddesses! Historians inform us that
the haughty Juno, discovering that her husband, Jupiter, was going the
way of all flesh and nearly every husband, borrowed her girdle from
Venus, with the result that when Jupiter returned home that evening from
business, he stayed with his wife--the club calling him in vain. Thus
was Juno justified of her "tightness."
But then, many a wife has cause to look upon a well-cut corset as her
best friend. And many a husband, too, has every reason to be grateful to
that article of his wife's apparel which the vulgar _will_ call "stays."
In earlier days a husband used to lock his wife in a pair of iron-bound
corsets when he went away from home, keeping the key in his pocket, and
thus not caring a tinker's cuss if his home were simply overflowing with
handsome gentleman lodgers! The poor wife couldn't retaliate by locking
her husband in such a virtuous prison, because men never wore such
things--which, perhaps, was one or the reasons why they didn't, who knows?
Also, the corset--or rather, the "bulge" of middle-age, which was the
real cause of their ever being worn--has always strongly influenced the
fashions. I don't know it as a positive fact, though I suspect it to be
true nevertheless, that the woman of fashion who first discovered that no
amount of iron bars could keep her from bulging in the right place, but
to the wrong extent, suddenly, thought of the pannier and the crinoline
and--well, that's where _she_ found that she was laughing. For almost
any woman can make her waist-line small: her trouble only really comes
when she has to tackle other parts of her anatomy which begin to show the
thickening of Anno Domini. Panniers and the crinoline save her an
enormous amount of mental agony. On the principle of "What the eye
doesn't see, to the imagination looks beautiful"--the early Victorian
lady was wise in her generation, and her modern sister, who shows the
world most things without considering whether what she exhibits is worth
looking at, is an extremely foolish person. One thing, however, which
women have never been able to fix definitely, is _exactly where_ her
waist should be. Men know where it is, and they put their arms round it
instinctively whenever they get the chance. But women change their mind
about it every few years. Sometimes it is down-down-down, and sometimes
it is under their armpits. A few years ago a woman who had what is known
as a "short waist" was referred to by other women as a "Poor Thing."
Then the short-waisted woman came into fashion--or rather, fashions
fashioned themselves for her benefit--and her long-waisted sister had to
struggle to make her waist look to be where really her ribs were. Only a
few weeks back a woman's waist and bust and hips had all to be definitely
defined. Nowadays they bundle them all, as it were, into clothes cut in
a sack-line, and are the very last letter of the very latest word in
fashion. I can well imagine that a few years hence women will be as
severely corseted as they were a short time ago.
I can well remember the time when a woman who held "views" and discarded
her stays sent a shudder through the man who was forced to dance with
her--though whether they were pleasurable shudders or merely shuddery
shudders I do not know. Nowadays, the woman who wears an out-and-out
corset, tightly laced, is either a publican's wife or is just bursting
with middle age. The corset of to-day is little more than the original
plaited grass originated by Mother Eve--in width, that is; in texture it
is of a luxury unimaginable in the Garden of Eden.
Women are not so concerned nowadays that their waist should be the
eighteen inches of 1890 beauty as that their figure elsewhere should not
presume their condition to be at once national and domestic. The modern
corset starts soon and finishes quite early. Thus the cycle from Mother
Eve is now complete. "As we were" has once more repeated itself.
The only novelty which belongs to to-day is that _men_ are wearing
corsets more than ever. A well-known _corsetière_ has opened a special
branch for her male customers alone. Their corsets, too, are of a most
beautiful and elaborate description--ranging from the plain belt of the
famous athlete to the brocade, rosebud-embroidered "confection" of a
well-known general. Perhaps--say fifty years hence--my grandson will be
writing of male lingerie, and men will rather lose their reputations than
lose their figure. Well, well! if we live in a topsy-turvy world--as
they say we do--let's all be topsy-turvy!
_The Glut of the Ornamental_
How strange it is that human endeavour is, for the most part, always
expended upon accomplishing something for which no one has any particular
use, while the things which, as it were, are simply begging to be done,
are usually among the great "undone" for which we ask forgiveness every
Sunday morning in church--that is, presuming we go to church. While
there is a world shortage of cooks, the earth is stuffed with lady
typists far beyond repletion. Whereas you can always buy a diamond
necklace (if you have the money), you can hardly find a tiny house, even
if you throw "love" in with the payment. Where you may find a hundred
people to do what you don't want, you will be extremely lucky if you come
across even one ready and willing to do what you really require done.
Nobody seems to like to be merely useful; they would far sooner be
ornamental--and starve. Where a man can have the choice of a thousand
girls who can't even stitch a button on a pillow-case, the feminine
expert in domestic economy will go on economising all by herself, until
the only man who takes any real interest in her is the undertaker! It is
all very strange, and very unaccountable. But I suppose it will forever
continue thuswise until the world ceases to lay its laurels at the foot
of Mary and to give Martha the "go by."
I never can quite understand why the bank clerk who marries a chemist's
"lady" assistant is not considered to marry very much beneath him,
whereas if he elopes with a cook we speak of it as a complete
mésalliance. But the cook would, after all, prove extremely useful to
him, whereas the chemist's "lady" assistant could only make use other
knowledge to poison him one evening without pain. In the same way, if a
bankrupt "Milord" takes in "holy matrimony" a barmaid with a good
business head, the world wonders what heaven was doing to make such an
appalling match. Should, however, he marry "a lady of title" who is
entitled to nothing under the will of her late father, the Duke of
Poundfoolish-pennywise, and can't earn anything herself, the marriage is
spoken of as a romance, and the Church blesses it--and so does the most
exclusive society in Balham. Utility seems never to be wanted. The
world only asks for ornaments.
It is the same in the drama, where Miss Peggy Prettylegs of the Frivolity
Follies will draw the salary of a Prime Minister for showing her surname,
while Miss Georgiana de Montmorency, the actress who knows Shakspere so
intimately that she mutters "Dear old Will" in her sleep, is resting so
long in her top flat in Bloomsbury that if she lived on the ground floor
she would inevitably take root.
It is the same in literature, where "Burnt Out Passion" runs through
sixty editions and dies gloriously in a cheap edition with a
highly-coloured cover on the railway book-stalls, while Professor I.
Knowall's wonderful treatise on "What is the Real Origin of Life?" has to
be bought by subscription, with the Professor's rich wife as principal
purchaser.
It is the same in love, where the worst husbands have the most loving
wives, and a good wife lives for years with a positive "horror," and is
never known really to smile until she lies dead in her bed!
It is the same in art . . . and yet it is not quite the same here,
because the picture which "sells," and is reproduced on post cards,
generally inculcates a respectable moral, even though the sight of it
sends the artistic almost insane. And yet, where you can find a hundred
houses the interiors of which are covered in wallpapers which make you
want to scream, you will find only a comparative few who prove by their
beauty of design just exactly why they were chosen--and these rooms, in
parenthesis, are never let as lodgings.
Not that there seems any cure for this world-wide rage for the useless.
We have just to accept it as a fact--and _wonder_! Meanwhile we have to
make the best of the men and women who, metaphorically speaking, would
far sooner sit dressed in the very latest fashion, underclothed in cheap
flannelette, than buy dainty, real linen "undies," and make last year's
"do-up" do for this year's "best."
_On Going "to the dogs"_
I always secretly wonder what people mean when they say they are "going
to the dogs." Do they mean that they are going to enjoy themselves
thoroughly, with Hell at the end of it?--or do they mean that they are
going to raise Hell in their neighbourhood and prevent everybody else
from enjoying themselves? Personally, I always think that it is a very
empty threat--one usually employed by disillusioned lovers or children.
From the casual study I have made of the authorised "dogs," I find them
unutterably boring "bow-wows." Of course, I am not exactly a canine
expert. Like most men, I have ventured near the kennels once or twice,
and made good my escape almost at the first sound of a real bark. People
who are habitually immoral, who make a habit of breaking all the
Commandments, are rarely any other than very wearisome company. What
real lasting joy is there in a "wild night up West" if you have a "head"
on you next morning that you would pay handsomely to get rid of, and a
"mouth"? . . . "Oh, my dear, _such a_ 'mouth'! Appalling!" Besides,
the men and women who are in the race with you are usually such dreary
company. Either they are so naturally bad that they do not possess the
attraction of contrast or variety, or else they are so bitterly repentant
that one has to sit and endure from them long stories proving that they
are more sinned against than sinning, or that they all belong to old
"county families," or are the left-handed offspring of real earls. In
any case, one must needs open yet another bottle to endure the fiction to
the end.
No, I have long since come to the conclusion that most people don't
really enjoy themselves a bit when they are _determined_ to do so. They
only have a thoroughly "good time" unexpectedly, or when they oughtn't to
have it. Of course, there is always the question whether people are most
happy when they don't _look so_, and whether they are usually most
miserable when apparently smiling their delight. At any rate, if there
be one day, or days, in the whole year when all England looks utterly
miserable, it is on a fine Bank Holiday or at a picnic. Of course, the
newspapers will tell you, for example, that Hampstead Heath was
positively pink with happy, smiling faces. But if you did find yourself
in the midst of the Bank Holiday crush, you would be struck by the hot,
irritated, bored, and weary look of this "happy crowd." Even at the
Derby, the only people you see there who, if they are not happy, at least
look so, are those who have just come out of the saloon bar.
Occasionally, someone here or there will let the exuberance of his
"spirits" overflow, but he won't get much encouragement from the rest of
his listeners squashed together in the same char-a-banc. At the most
they will look at each other and smile in a half-discouraging manner, as
if to say, "Yes, dear, he _is_ very funny. But what a common man!" It
is all rather depressing. Only a street accident or standing in a queue
will make the majority of English people really animated. No wonder that
foreigners believe that we take our pleasures sadly. They only observe
us when we are out to enjoy ourselves. But if they could see us at a
funeral, or when we're suffering from cold feet, then they'd see us
smiling and singing! No wonder the French have never really recovered
from the gaiety of the British soldier as he went into battle. But if
they really want to see the average Britisher looking every bit as
phlegmatic as his Continental reputation, they should look at him when
he's out for a day's gaiety. No wonder that men, when they "go to the
dogs," go to Paris. "The dogs" at home are too much like a moral purge
to make a long stay in the "kennel" anything but a most determined effort
of the will. We possess, as a nation, so strangely the joie de mourir
without much knowledge of the joie de vivre.
_A School for Wives_
All marriage is a lottery--that is why the modern tendency is to examine
both sides of the hedge before you ask someone to jump over it with you.
A single man may be said to have his own career in his own hands; but
once married, he runs the risk of having to begin all over again, and
recommence with a load on his back. A good wife can make a man, but a
bad wife can undo a saint. And how's he to know if she be a good wife or
a bad 'un _until she's his wife_, which is just too late, as the corpse
said to the tax collector. You see, a man has nothing to go on, except
to look at what might be his mother-in-law. A girl is far more
fortunate. If a man can afford to keep a wife, he's already passed the
examination as a "highly recommended." He, at any rate, has to take
marriage seriously. No man wants to put his hard-earned savings into a
purse with a hole at the bottom, nor live with a woman who begins to
"nag" the moment she ceases to snore. If only women were brought up with
the idea that marriage is a very serious business, and not merely the
chance to cock-a-snook at Mamma, marriage would be far less often a
failure. But most girls are brought up to regard the serious business of
matrimony from the problematical point of view of whether her husband
will earn enough money to give her a "good time." If it be a "serious
business," as Mamma and Papa and the parish priest assert it to be, then
let her begin as she would begin a business, by starting to learn it. I
don't see why there shouldn't be a School for Wives, and no girl be
allowed to marry until she has at least passed the fourth standard.
After all, it is only fair on the man that he should know that with the
sweetest-dearest-loveliest-little-darlikins-in-the-whole-world he is also
getting a woman who knows how to boil an egg, and make an old mutton bone
and a few potatoes go metaphorical _miles_. The knowledge would be a
great comfort to him when his little "darlikins'" feet-of-clay began to
show through her silk stockings. As it is, marriage to him is little but
a supreme example of buying a pig in a poke, followed by an immediate
slump in his own special purchase.
I never can understand why women immediately become "ruffled" when a mere
man suggests that, if marriage be a serious business, the least a girl
can do is to learn the business side of that business before she enters
into partnership. But "ruffle" they do. Also they think that you have
insulted the sex, rather as if you had accosted a goddess with a
"tickler," or stood before the Sphynx and, regarding her mysterious
smile, said, "Give it up, old Bean!" For, after all, if the man has to
pay the piper, it's up to the woman to know how to make a tune! As it
is, so many husbands seem to make money for their wives to waste it. No
wonder there are so many bachelors about, and no wonder there is an
outcry to "tax them." Even then many men will pay the tax gladly, plus
an entertainment tax if necessary--who knows? For elder people are so
fond of drilling into the ears of youth the truism that passion dies and
that marriage, to be successful, must be founded upon something more
enduring than a feeling of delirium under the stars. That is why a
School for Wives would be so useful. After passion is dead, it would be
a poor creature of a husband who couldn't find comfort living in the same
house with a woman who had obtained her certificate for economical
housekeeping and sock-mending. You see, the home is the wife's part of
the business. The husband only comes in on sufferance, to pay the bills,
listen to complaints, and be a "man about the place," should a man be
required. A happy home, a comfortable home, that is a wife's creation.
But she can't create the proper atmosphere merely by being an expert on
Futurism in music, nor by possessing a back which it would be a crime of
fashion not to lay bare. She has got to know the business side of
housekeeping and home economics before an indifferent husband can be
turned into a good one. You ask, why not a School for Husbands? Well,
husbands have passed their "final" when they have earned enough money to
keep a wife. The husband provides the house and the wife makes the home.
But most wrecked homes are wrecked through ignorance, so why not let
wisdom be taught? A well-run home is three parts of a happy one. And if
the other part be missing--well, let's have a divorce. Easy divorce
certainly encourages domestic mess-ups, but they are not half such a
"mess" as the mess of a matrimonial "hash." The home is the other side
of a man's business, the side which his wife runs. Well, as he has had
to study to work up his side, why let hers be such a "jump in the dark,"
for him? Let the home become a study, even a science, and let not so
many wives reach a forgivable level of domestic excellence on the "dead
bodies" of so many unforgivable "bloomers." Remember that in matrimony,
as in everything else it is the premier "bloomer" which blows up les
châteaux en Espagne. Afterwards you have to use concrete--and build as
you may.
_The Neglected Art of Eating Gracefully_
Were it not for the fact that we are usually eating at the same time, and
so in no mood to criticise the mastication of others, I am sure that not
half so many people would fall into love, nor be able to keep up the
passionate illusion when fate had pushed them into it. For to watch
people eat is, as a rule, to see them at the same disadvantage as the
housemaid sees them when she calls them in the morning. Very few people
can eat prettily. The majority "munch" in a most unbecoming fashion.
For, say what you will, to eat may possibly be delightful, but it is
certainly not a romantic episode of the everyday. True, restaurants have
done their best to add glamour to our daily chewing. And the better the
cuisine, the less time we have for regarding others. That is why
hostesses are usually so harassed over their menus. Very few guests
arrive really hungry. So she has to entice, as it were, the already
replete stomach by delicacies which it really doesn't want, but is not
too distended to enjoy. Thus they are kept busy all the time, and have
no leisure to observe. But I always wish that part of our education
included a course of lessons in the art of eating enough, and of eating
it elegantly. Not one person in a hundred is anything but a monstrous
spectacle in front of a plateful of stewed tripe. But, as I said before,
we are, happily, so busy with our own plateful at the time that we have
usually no leisure to regard their stuffing. Personally, I always think
that the only way to enjoy a really good dinner is to eat it alone.
People are delightful over coffee, but I want only my dreams with salmon
mayonnaise.