Too much Postcard.
The postcard craze is dying out in Germany--the land of its birth--I am
told. In Germany they do things thoroughly, or not at all. The German
when he took to sending postcards abandoned almost every other pursuit in
life. The German tourist never knew where he had been until on reaching
home again he asked some friend or relation to allow him to look over the
postcards he had sent. Then it was he began to enjoy his trip.
"What a charming old town!" the German tourist would exclaim. "I wish I
could have found time while I was there to have gone outside the hotel
and have had a look round. Still, it is pleasant to think one has been
there."
"I suppose you did not have much time?" his friend would suggest.
"We did not get there till the evening," the tourist would explain. "We
were busy till dark buying postcards, and then in the morning there was
the writing and addressing to be done, and when that was over, and we had
had our breakfast, it was time to leave again."
He would take up another card showing the panorama from a mountain top.
"Sublime! colossal!" he would cry enraptured. "If I had known it was
anything like that, I'd have stopped another day and had a look at it."
It was always worth seeing, the arrival of a party of German tourists in
a Schwartzwald village. Leaping from the coach they would surge round
the solitary gendarme.
"Where is the postcard shop?" "Tell us--we have only two hours--where do
we get postcards?"
The gendarme, scenting _Trinkgeld_, would head them at the double-quick:
stout old gentlemen unaccustomed to the double-quick, stouter Frauen
gathering up their skirts with utter disregard to all propriety, slim
_Fraulein_ clinging to their beloved would run after him. Nervous
pedestrians would fly for safety into doorways, careless loiterers would
be swept into the gutter.
In the narrow doorway of the postcard shop trouble would begin. The
cries of suffocated women and trampled children, the curses of strong
men, would rend the air. The German is a peaceful, law-abiding citizen,
but in the hunt for postcards he was a beast. A woman would pounce on a
tray of cards, commence selecting, suddenly the tray would be snatched
from her. She would burst into tears, and hit the person nearest to her
with her umbrella. The cunning and the strong would secure the best
cards. The weak and courteous be left with pictures of post offices and
railway stations. Torn and dishevelled, the crowd would rush back to the
hotel, sweep crockery from the table, and--sucking stumpy pencils--write
feverishly. A hurried meal would follow. Then the horses would be put
to again, the German tourists would climb back to their places and be
driven away, asking of the coachman what the name of the place they had
just left might happen to be.
The Postcard as a Family Curse.
One presumes that even to the patient German the thing grew tiresome. In
the _Fliegende Blatter_ two young clerks were represented discussing the
question of summer holidays.
"Where are you going?" asks A of B.
"Nowhere," answers B.
"Can't you afford it?" asks the sympathetic A.
"Only been able to save up enough for the postcards," answers B,
gloomily; "no money left for the trip."
Men and women carried bulky volumes containing the names and addresses of
the people to whom they had promised to send cards. Everywhere, through
winding forest glade, by silver sea, on mountain pathway, one met with
prematurely aged looking tourists muttering as they walked:
"Did I send Aunt Gretchen a postcard from that last village that we
stopped at, or did I address two to Cousin Lisa?"
Then, again, maybe, the picture postcard led to disappointment.
Uninteresting towns clamoured, as ill-favoured spinsters in a
photographic studio, to be made beautiful.
"I want," says the lady, "a photograph my friends will really like. Some
of these second-rate photographers make one look quite plain. I don't
want you to flatter me, if you understand, I merely want something nice."
The obliging photographer does his best. The nose is carefully toned
down, the wart becomes a dimple, her own husband doesn't know her. The
postcard artist has ended by imagining everything as it might have been.
"If it were not for the houses," says the postcard artist to himself,
"this might have been a picturesque old High street of mediaeval aspect."
So he draws a picture of the High street as it might have been. The
lover of quaint architecture travels out of his way to see it, and when
he finds it and contrasts it with the picture postcard he gets mad. I
bought a postcard myself once representing the market place of a certain
French town. It seemed to me, looking at the postcard, that I hadn't
really seen France--not yet. I travelled nearly a hundred miles to see
that market place. I was careful to arrive on market day and to get
there at the right time. I reached the market square and looked at it.
Then I asked a gendarme where it was.
He said it was there--that I was in it.
I said, "I don't mean this one, I want the other one, the picturesque
one."
He said it was the only market square they had. I took the postcard from
my pocket.
"Where are all the girls?" I asked him.
"What girls?" he demanded.
The Artist's Dream.
"Why, these girls;" I showed him the postcard, there ought to have been
about a hundred of them. There was not a plain one among the lot. Many
of them I should have called beautiful. They were selling flowers and
fruit, all kinds of fruit--cherries, strawberries, rosy-cheeked apples,
luscious grapes--all freshly picked and sparkling with dew. The gendarme
said he had never seen any girls--not in this particular square.
Referring casually to the blood of saints and martyrs, he said he would
like to see a few girls in that town worth looking at. In the square
itself sat six motherly old souls round a lamp-post. One of them had a
moustache, and was smoking a pipe, but in other respects, I have no
doubt, was all a woman should be. Two of them were selling fish. That
is they would have sold fish, no doubt, had anyone been there to buy
fish. The gaily clad thousands of eager purchasers pictured in the
postcard were represented by two workmen in blue blouses talking at a
corner, mostly with their fingers; a small boy walking backwards, with
the idea apparently of not missing anything behind him, and a yellow dog
that sat on the kerb, and had given up all hope--judging from his
expression--of anything ever happening again. With the gendarme and
myself, these four were the only living creatures in the square. The
rest of the market consisted of eggs and a few emaciated fowls hanging
from a sort of broom handle.
"And where's the cathedral?" I asked the gendarme. It was a Gothic
structure in the postcard of evident antiquity. He said there had once
been a cathedral. It was now a brewery; he pointed it out to me. He
said he thought some portion of the original south wall had been
retained. He thought the manager of the brewery might be willing to show
it to me.
"And the fountain?" I demanded, "and all these doves!"
He said there had been talk of a fountain. He believed the design had
already been prepared.
I took the next train back. I do not now travel much out of my way to
see the original of the picture postcard. Maybe others have had like
experience and the picture postcard as a guide to the Continent has lost
its value.
The dealer has fallen back upon the eternal feminine. The postcard
collector is confined to girls. Through the kindness of correspondents I
possess myself some fifty to a hundred girls, or perhaps it would be more
correct to say one girl in fifty to a hundred different hats. I have her
in big hats, I have her in small hats, I have her in no hat at all. I
have her smiling, and I have her looking as if she had lost her last
sixpence. I have her overdressed, I have her decidedly underdressed, but
she is much the same girl. Very young men cannot have too many of her,
but myself I am getting tired of her. I suppose it is the result of
growing old.
Why not the Eternal Male for a change?
Girls of my acquaintance are also beginning to grumble at her. I often
think it hard on girls that the artist so neglects the eternal male. Why
should there not be portraits of young men in different hats; young men
in big hats, young men in little hats, young men smiling archly, young
men looking noble. Girls don't want to decorate their rooms with
pictures of other girls, they want rows of young men beaming down upon
them.
But possibly I am sinning my mercies. A father hears what young men
don't. The girl in real life is feeling it keenly: the impossible
standard set for her by the popular artist.
"Real skirts don't hang like that," she grumbles, "it's not in the nature
of skirts. You can't have feet that size. It isn't our fault, they are
not made. Look at those waists! There would be no room to put
anything?"
"Nature, in fashioning woman, has not yet crept up to the artistic ideal.
The young man studies the picture on the postcard; on the coloured
almanack given away at Christmas by the local grocer; on the
advertisement of Jones' soap, and thinks with discontent of Polly
Perkins, who in a natural way is as pretty a girl as can be looked for in
this imperfect world. Thus it is that woman has had to take to shorthand
and typewriting. Modern woman is being ruined by the artist.
How Women are ruined by Art.
Mr. Anstey tells a story of a young barber who fell in love with his own
wax model. All day he dreamed of the impossible. She--the young lady of
wax-like complexion, with her everlasting expression of dignity combined
with amiability. No girl of his acquaintance could compete with her. If
I remember rightly he died a bachelor, still dreaming of wax-like
perfection. Perhaps it is as well we men are not handicapped to the same
extent. If every hoarding, if every picture shop window, if every
illustrated journal teemed with illustrations of the ideal young man in
perfect fitting trousers that never bagged at the knees! Maybe it would
result in our cooking our own breakfasts and making our own beds to the
end of our lives.
The novelist and playwright, as it is, have made things difficult enough
for us. In books and plays the young man makes love with a flow of
language, a wealth of imagery, that must have taken him years to acquire.
What does the novel-reading girl think, I wonder, when the real young man
proposes to her! He has not called her anything in particular. Possibly
he has got as far as suggesting she is a duck or a daisy, or hinting
shyly that she is his bee or his honeysuckle: in his excitement he is not
quite sure which. In the novel she has been reading the hero has likened
the heroine to half the vegetable kingdom. Elementary astronomy has been
exhausted in his attempt to describe to her the impression her appearance
leaves on him. Bond Street has been sacked in his endeavour to get it
clearly home to her what different parts of her are like--her eyes, her
teeth, her heart, her hair, her ears. Delicacy alone prevents his
extending the catalogue. A Fiji Island lover might possibly go further.
We have not yet had the Fiji Island novel. By the time he is through
with it she must have a somewhat confused notion of herself--a vague
conviction that she is a sort of condensed South Kensington Museum.
Difficulty of living up to the Poster.
Poor Angelina must feel dissatisfied with the Edwin of real life. I am
not sure that art and fiction have not made life more difficult for us
than even it was intended to be. The view from the mountain top is less
extensive than represented by the picture postcard. The play, I fear me,
does not always come up to the poster. Polly Perkins is pretty enough as
girls go; but oh for the young lady of the grocer's almanack! Poor dear
John is very nice and loves us--so he tells us, in his stupid, halting
way; but how can we respond when we remember how the man loved in the
play! The "artist has fashioned his dream of delight," and the workaday
world by comparison seems tame to us.