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 anyone 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. Or he might go over and
reform Yuan-Shi’h-Kai’s administration: the Chinese would take to him
enormously.
Someone 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 everyone 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 someone who will be very uncomfortable
there himself, and who will make everyone 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, anyone 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 worldly 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 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 sponsorship, 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 coöperative 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.
Everyone 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 someone 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 anyone 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 anyone 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 someone 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, “highbrow” 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 shopgirl (it is always the shopgirl!) 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:
“Vice is a monster of such frightful mien,” _etc._
It never occurs to them to finish the sentence:
“We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
The fact is that Anglo-Saxon society has got beyond the enduring
stage, and is largely occupied in pitying. There is a general sense
that the people at large, in all moral matters, know better than the
specialists. We will take our creed not from the theologians, but from
Mr. Winston Churchill; and we will take our pathology not from medical
treatises, but from Brieux. We will discuss the underworld at dinner
because, between the fish and the entrée, the thin lady with the pearls
may say something valuable about it. If we are made uncomfortable by
the discussion, it only shows that we are selfish pigs.
Now I see no reason why decent-minded people should not discuss with
their intimate friends anything they please. If you are really intimate
with anyone, you are not likely to discuss things unless you both
please. But I do see, still, a beautiful result of the old order that
the new order does not tend to produce. The conventional avoidance
as a general subject of conversation of sex in all its phases was a
safeguard to sensibilities. You cannot, in one sense, discuss sex quite
impersonally, for everyone is of one sex or the other. The people who
cry out against the segregation of the negro in government offices
have hardly realized that non-segregation is objected to, not because
of itself, but because of miscegenation. There is a little logic left
in the world; and there are some people who perceive that sequence,
whether they phrase it or not. Social distinctions concern themselves
ultimately with whom you may and whom you may not marry. You do not
bring people together in society who are _tabu_ to each other. Not
that you necessarily expect, out of a hundred dinner-parties, any one
marriage to result; but you assume social equality in the people seated
about your board. Is not, in the last analysis, the only sense in such
a phrase as “social equality,” the sense of marriageability? Even
conventions are not so superficial as they seem; and they have that
perfectly good human basis. It is vitally important to the welfare and
the continuance of the civilized race that sex-sensibilities should
be preserved. Otherwise you will not get the romantic mating; and the
unromantic mating, once well established in society, will give rise
to a perfectly transmissible (whether by heredity or environment, O
shade of Mendel!) brutality. It is brutalizing to talk promiscuously of
things that are essentially private to the individual; just as it is
brutalizing (I believe no one questions that) for a family and eight
boarders to sleep in one room--even a large room. All violations of
essential privacy are brutalizing. We do not take our tooth-brushes
with us when we go out to dinner, and if we did, and did not mind
(very soon we should not), the practice, I am sure, would have a
brutalizing effect. A certain amount of plain speaking is, perhaps,
a good thing; but there is no doubt that at present we have far too
much of it to suit most of us, and I cannot see why we should be made
to endure it just because a few people who are by way of calling
themselves moralists cannot get on with society on its own terms.
It has long been a convention among people who are not cynical that
bodily matters are not spoken of in mixed and unfamiliar gatherings. Of
course, our great-grandmothers were prudes. The reason why they talked
so much about their souls, I fancy, is that there was hardly a limb or
a feature of the human body that they thought it proper to mention.
They were driven back on religion because they held that the soul
really had nothing to do with the body at all. The psychiatrists have
done their best to take away from us that (on the whole) comforting
belief. In America, at least, we are finding it harder and harder to
get out of the laboratory. It is the serious and patriotic American in
_The Madras House_ who asks the astonished Huxtable, “But are you the
mean sensual man?” In _The Madras House_ the question is screamingly
funny; but I cannot imagine any man’s liking, in his own house, to have
the question put to him by a total stranger. The fact is that we have
dragged our Ibsen and our Strindberg and our Sudermann lovingly across
the footlights, and are hugging them to our hearts in the privacy of
our boxes. We have decided that manners shall consist entirely of
morals. It is just possible that, in the days when morals consisted
largely of manners, fewer people were contaminated. You cannot shock a
person practically whom you are totally unwilling to shock verbally;
and if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the
next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically. Above all,
when we become incapable of the shock verbal, there will be nothing
left for the unconventional people but the shock practical. And
that, I imagine, is what we are coming to--all in the interests of
morality, be it understood. At no time in history, perhaps, have the
people who are not fit for society had such a glorious opportunity to
pretend that society is not fit for them. Knowledge of the slums is
at present a passport to society--so much the parlor philanthropists
have achieved--and all they have to do is to prove that they know their
subject. It is an odd qualification to have pitched on; but gentlemen
and ladies are always credulous, especially if you tell them that they
are not doing their duty.
Moreover, when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble
in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about,
you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precocious
curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about
life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly
advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and
who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by
their information? If we discuss the pathology of divorce with the
first-comer, what is to prevent divorce from becoming, in the end, as
natural as daily bread? And if nothing is to be _tabu_ in talk, how
many things will remain _tabu_ in practice? The human race is, in the
end, as relentlessly logical as that. Even the aborigines that we have
occasionally mentioned turn scandals over to the medicine-man, and
keep a few delicate silences themselves. Perhaps we are “returning
to Nature,” as the Rousseauists wanted us to; with characteristic
Anglo-Saxon thoroughness, going the savages one better. But it is a
pity to forget how to blush; for though in the ideal society a blush
would never be forced to a cheek, it would not be because nothing
was considered (as our German friends might say) blushworthy. Each
man’s private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering
thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and
explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The
mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people
have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things
they would not like to confess to people with a code. I do not contend
that that is a high form of morality; but it has certainly saved
society a good many practical unpleasantnesses. And we are clearly
courting the danger of essentially undiscussable actions when we admit
every action to discussion.
I saw it seriously contended in some journal or other, not long ago,
that, whether any other women were enfranchised or not, prostitutes
ought undoubtedly to have the vote, because only thus could the social
evil be effectively dealt with. Incredible enough; but there it was.
Not many people, perhaps, would agree with that particular reformer;
but undoubtedly there is a mania at present, in the classes that used
to be conventional, for getting one’s information from the other camp.
It is valuable to know the prostitute’s opinion--facts never come
amiss; but why assume that we have only to know it to hold it? Is it
not conceivable that other generations than our own have known her
opinions, and that lines of demarcation have been drawn because a lot
of people, as intelligent as we, did not agree with her? The present
tendency, however, is to consider everyone’s opinion important, in
social and ethical matters, except that of respectable folk. My own
pessimistic notion is, as I have hinted, that the philanthropic assault
on the conventional code has come primarily from people who were too
ignorant, or too lazy, or too undisciplined, to submit to the code;
and that the success of the assault results from the sheer defenceless
niceness--the mingled altruism and humility--of the people accused
of conventionality. At all events, the fact is that our reticences
have somehow become cases of cowardice, and our rejections forms of
brutality. We are all a little pathetic in our credulity, and we
are very like Moses Primrose at the fair. Well: let us buy green
spectacles if we must; but let us, as long as we can, refuse to look
through them!
It may seem a far cry from “temperament” to social service. I have
known a great many people who went in for social service, and I do
not think it is. The motives of the heterogeneous foes of convention
may lie as far apart as the Poles (one Pole is very like the other,
by the way, as far as we can make out from Peary and Amundsen) but
the object is the same: to destroy the complicated fabric which the
centuries have lovingly built up. (Even if you call it “restoration,”
it is apt to amount to the same thing, as any good architect knows.) At
the bar of Heaven, sober Roundheads and drunken rioters will probably
be differently dealt with; but here on earth, both have been given to
smashing stained-glass windows. Many of us do not believe in capital
punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot
give. The iconoclasts do the same thing; for civilization, whether
it be perfect or not, is a fruit of time. Conventions are easy to
come by, if you are willing to take conventions like those of the
Central Australians. The difference between a perfected and a barbaric
convention is a difference of refinement, in the old alchemical sense.
A lot of the _tabu_ business is too stupid and meaningless for words.
Civilization has been a weeding-out process, controlled and directed
by increasing knowledge. We have infinitely more conventions than the
aborigines: we simply have not such silly ones. The foes of modern
convention are not suggesting anything wiser, or better, or more
subtle: they are only attacking all convention blindly, as if the very
notion of _tabu_ were wrong. The very notion of _tabu_ is one of the
rightest notions in the world. Better any old _tabu_ than none: for
a man cannot be said to be “on the side of the stars” at all, unless
he makes refusals. What the foes of convention want is to have all
_tabu_ overthrown. It is very dull of them: for even if a cataclysm
came and helped them out--even if we were all turned, over night, into
potential beginnings of society would be founded on _tabu_. We shudder
at the Central Australians: we should hate life on their terms. But I
would rather live among the Warramunga than among the twentieth-century
anarchists, for I cannot conceive a more odious society than one where
nothing is considered indecent or impious. We may think that the mental
agility of the Warramunga could be better applied. Well: in time, it
will be. But they are lifted above the brute just in so far as they
develop mental agility in the framing of a moral law, however absurd a
one. I said that their conventions were almost too complicated for us
to master. That, I fancy, is because any mind they have, they give to
their conventions. It is the natural consequence of giving your mind
to science and history and philology and art, that you simplify where
you can; also, that your conventions become purified by knowledge. Even
the iconoclasts of the present day do not want us to throw away such
text-book learning as we have achieved. They do ask us, though, to
throw away the racial inhibitions that we have been so long acquiring.
Is it possible that they do not realize what a slow and difficult
business it is to get any particular opinion into the instincts of a
race? Only the “evolution” they are so fond of talking about, can do
that. Perhaps we ought to take comfort from the reflection. But it
is easier to destroy than to build up; and they are quite capable of
wasting a few thousand years of our time.
No: they want to bring us, if possible, lower than the Warramunga.
Some of them might be shocked at the allegation, for some of them,
no doubt, are idealists--after the fashion of Jean-Jacques, be it
understood. These are merely, one may say respectfully, mistaken: for
they do not reckon with human nature any more than do the Socialists.
But the majority, I incline to believe, are merely the natural foes
of dignity, of spiritual hierarchy, of wisdom perceived and followed.
They object to guarded speech and action, because they themselves find
self-control a nuisance. So, often, it is; but if the moral experience
of mankind has taught us anything, it has taught us that, without
self-control, you get no decent society at all. When the mistress
of Lowood School told Mr. Brocklehurst that the girl’s hair curled
naturally, he retorted: “Yes, but we are not to conform to nature; I
wish these girls to become children of grace.” We do not sympathize
with Mr. Brocklehurst’s choice of what was to be objected to in nature;
we do not, indeed, sympathize with him in any way, for he was a
hypocrite. But none the less, it is better to be, in the right sense,
a child of grace than a child of nature. Attila did not think so; and
Attila sacked Rome. We may be sacked--the planet is used to these
_débâcles_--but let us not, either as a matter of mistaken humility or
by way of low strategy, pretend that the Huns were Crusaders!