only suggests to brisk young things that the old people are not up with
the times. What wonder, then, that the world caters for youth, and
nobody takes the trouble any more to create fashions for old ladies?
If there is an institution which more than others wards off the coming
of age, it is certainly the great shops. Twice a year these arbiters of
fashion sacrifice themselves for the good of the public. Then do they
guilelessly re-mark the treasures of their warehouses with those
tempting signs which produce on the British public the effect of
_hasheesh_ on the native of India. Beware of those peaceful and alluring
pirates of Oxford and Regent Streets, O frail women who draggle last
year's chiffons in this year's mud, and go to the greengrocers in the
shopworn glory of the year before last. During sale-days the British
matron lives in a state of ecstasy. To buy is bliss; to buy cheap is
rapture. Cotton laces intoxicate her, and so does chiffon. She buys
summer dresses in winter, and furs when the July sun bakes the
sweltering town. That nothing is of any earthly use is of no
consequence. Nor is it of consequence that what she buys is youthful,
and she is old. It is these enchanting sale-days that explain the
Englishwoman's orgies of wax beads, picture hats, party frocks at the
wrong time, paper-soled slippers and open-worked stockings in pouring
rain.
"A strong race, these English," an envious American said to me the other
day.
"That's because they kill the weak ones off," I explained. "To be a
perfect Englishwoman you must be able to sit with your poor bare
shoulders against an open window at a winter dinner-party, preferably in
an icy draught, and you must smile. If you can survive that you are one
of the elect. It ensures you a social position, because you cannot have
a social position in England if you cover up your shoulders."
I wish I could offer up an earnest plea for covered shoulders, at least
for the aged! It seems to me when a brave woman has imperilled her life
for forty years, nobly defying the cold blasts on the wrong side of the
dining-table, and after she has got her young brood safely married, it
does seem as if she then might retire to the well-earned comfort of a
high dress without losing her position in society. But to cover up those
poor melancholy shoulders is to announce the oldest kind of old age, and
what woman has the courage for that?
There is no doubt that old age first went out of fashion when the
bicycle came in, for age was no barrier to its keen enjoyment. But
grandmother could not bicycle in a cap, and so she put on a billycock
hat instead; necessity obliged her to show her ankles, and exhilaration
led her to "scorch." It was then we asked in some perplexity for the
first time, "Where have the aged gone?"
Still let us cling to youth, it is our modern prerogative as women; but
only let us cling to it to a certain extent--to the extent that life
amuses, but does not hurt. There are some of us who still have emotions
at an age when, had we lived in our grandmothers' day, we should already
have found permanent refuge in big frilled caps. We hardly realise the
safeguard there was in a cap. It was the final chord to show that the
symphony of youth had come to an end.
In the days of our grandparents it was the men who kept young, while the
women were old at thirty-five; but in these days men are considered old
in their prime, and it is the women who cling to eternal youth. Yes,
indeed, the modern tendency requires readjustment. But after all, does
it pay to try and keep young when one is really tired and scant of
breath?
Let it go, even the loveliest youth, in its own good time. Have we not
each had our turn at it? But one thing there is to which we should all
cling with might and main, and that is a young heart, for a young heart
has the only youth which is immortal. It will make of any woman, when
the time comes, what is more rare and lovely than a young beauty, it
will make her a charming old woman--and nothing in this wide world can
be more charming, even if it is a little out of fashion.
_A Plea for Women Architects_
Now that it is the fashion, as well as the necessity, for women to earn
their own living, and when they are crowding into all the employments
hitherto sacred to men (and in some of which they are exceedingly out of
place) one wonders that they so rarely take to a profession--or, rather,
to one branch of it--which seems so distinctly adapted to their
characteristic talents; and that is domestic architecture.
The longer I live in England the more I am struck by the singular
inconvenience of the average English house; its supreme aim seems to be
to make the occupier as uncomfortable as possible. I do not, of course,
speak of palaces which rejoice in a majestic dreariness, nor of the
homes of the brand-new rich, who, being unencumbered by ancestors or
ancestral castles, can start fresh with all the newest improvements, so
new, indeed, that they are still quite sticky with varnish. I speak of
the average person, who has a moderate income, and who, without
pretension, would yet like to get the most comfort out of life.
I am well aware that when it comes to a consideration of the defects of
English architecture I shall be completely crushed by a reference to
English cathedrals, to which the American makes adoring pilgrimages. It
is true they are glorious. We do not live in cathedrals, however, but in
houses, and the English houses are far, far behind the English
cathedrals.
In America we are on the high road to perfection in domestic
architecture, owing, possibly, to the acknowledged supremacy of our
women. Where a woman reigns supreme, it is the end and aim of her men to
make her comfortable and happy. Now the American architect, being a man,
and belonging most likely to some woman, makes it his pride to provide
for her--or her sex which she represents--the most comfortable,
convenient and pretty house to adorn with her taste and her presence
until she moves. We have no legacies of famous cathedrals; but, O! we do
have absolute comfort in our houses!
A woman is not wasteful in small things, but a man is; who then is so
adapted to utilise the small space which constitutes the average house?
A house can be the visible expression of all her cleverness, her
economy, her taste and her common sense; it will give her an opportunity
to be great in the minor aspirations. Possibly she might fail if she
tried to build a cathedral--as she has failed in the highest expression
of any of the arts--but she is undoubtedly created to bring that into
the world which stands for comfort and for happiness, and where can she
so fully prove her homely genius as at her own fireside?
Ah me, the fireside reminds me of how one shivers through an English
winter! A man does not realise how terribly cold a woman can be, a mere
man architect who rushes about all day long with twice as much clothing
on as the average woman wears, and who, besides, never undergoes the
ordeal of a low-necked dress!
It really would seem as if the male architect of houses can only
construct the obvious; his imagination declines to soar. If he is an
Englishman he firmly believes in the methods of his ancestors more or
less remote, and that explains why the Victorian house with all its bad
taste, and inconvenience still remains the popular town dwelling-place.
So common is it, that an enterprising burglar having "burgled" one, can
find his way safely over half the houses of London, and be positively
bored by their monotony! Now these houses are the creations of men
architects, who have seen nothing else, and who lack that architectural
intuition which can make them evolve what they have never seen, and
enables them to immortalise in brick and mortar the vagaries of a dream.
Therefore it is high time for women to come to the front! A woman has
intuitions, and when she really doesn't know it is her proud boast that
she can guess, and, surely, that does quite as well. When she builds a
house she will feel it, as a poet does his poem. She will put herself in
the place of that other woman whose destiny it is to live there. She
will create for her all the delightful things she wants herself. She
will warm that house comfortably, because she herself hates to shiver.
She will put in plenty of cupboards, because without cupboards life is
not worth living (to a woman)! Her kitchen will be in just proportion to
the size of the house, and not a kind of baronial hall in which even the
beetles look lonely. Having pity on mere human legs she will cease to
build Towers of Babel.
Then, her genius being for detail, she will see that the interior work
of the house is well and delicately finished. What impresses me most in
comparing the work of an English and an American workman is that the
American is more careful and deft. He leaves no dabs of paint, or seams
of coarse cement. The Englishman is distinctly clumsier in his methods
and his results.
The woman architect will pay especial attention to the plumbing, not
only to its sanitary, but also to its ornamental aspect, which leaves
much to be desired. And she will, if it is humanly possible, construct a
bathroom for those of the household who need it most--the servants; and
when she has done all this, then she has only done what is common in
American houses built for families of comfortable, but not large
incomes.
Further, the woman architect will study the economical use of
electricity. She will not (being a woman) waste it by putting too much
of it in impossible and unbecoming places, and yet at the same time she
will know just where to place an artful lamp so that her long-suffering
sister will at last be able to see, even at night, how her dress hangs.
She will not be extravagant; for extravagance she leaves to her brother
architects, who understand neither the value of space nor the wise
economy of exertion. For this reason I urge that women should become
architects, but only domestic architects. They must not meddle with
cathedrals!
The more comfortable and convenient the houses are the more pleasant the
daily life, and what that means as an influence on the temper of a
nation cannot be over-estimated. It may do for peace what the Hague
Conference has so magnificently failed to do. So we shall inevitably
become a better and happier people when the minor problems of life are
solved once for all: the carrying of coal upstairs; the freezing in
winter, because the heating methods are inadequate; and the shielding
of one's wardrobe from the festive moth in a space already overflowing
with other garments.
No, women should never build cathedrals; but I am quite sure it is their
destiny to build what is possibly of even greater importance, and that
is the homes of the people.
_The Electric Age_
The American contribution to the characteristics of nations is hurry,
and it is so contagious that the whole world has caught the
infection--the whole world is in a hurry!
The modern man has as much emotion and variety crammed into a year of
his life as would have sufficed to leaven generations of lives two
hundred years ago. Now as we can only eat so much with comfort, in the
same way our brains will only assimilate so many impressions, and our
hearts will only bear a certain amount of emotion. If we have too many
impressions we go mad, and if our hearts are too full they break, only
we are told there is no such thing as a broken heart. But there is.
It goes without saying that impressions, both on the heart and the
brain, which are as rapid and broken as the biograph, must be of
infinitesimal duration. It is therefore a foregone conclusion that the
modern man is not only in a perpetual hurry from his cradle to that
final rest where all hurry ceases, but his memory, being limited to a
certain number of photographic plates, while the impressions are
unlimited, has but an infinitesimal space for each. The appeals made to
our understanding in those limited years we call a lifetime are simply
maddening. We have the entire daily history of the world dished up hot
for a ha'penny innumerable times a day, and when it is a day old it is
ancient history fit only to do up bundles with or light the fire.
It is perhaps not one of the least terrors of life that the world is
growing so small, cruelly linked together by the copper coils of the
cable, that before long there will not be left a nook or cranny where
the soul can escape to solitude. There will be nothing left to discover
in this little world, and if the astronomers do not come to our aid
where will the outlet be for eager adventurers?
The world expects so infinitely much, that what constituted a great
explorer fifty years ago and set the world talking, is the common
experience of numberless young fellows, with much money and leisure, who
go to darkest Africa in search of big game, and hardly think it worth
while to mention it.
Everybody does something; the world is on a tiresome level of universal
ability! Everybody writes books: whether they are read is a secret no
publisher will disclose. Art is pursued with frantic haste, but is being
rapidly overtaken by the biograph. Music stuns the air and machine music
proves its superior ability, and in the United States education has
developed into a kind of decorous mental orgie. Even religion we get in
a rush when, as a stray sinner, we wander into a hall and are tossed
into a possible harbour on the crest of a rollicking hymn. Peace to the
soul that finds a harbour, however gained, only the fact remains that it
is often gained in a desperate hurry.
Statistics prove, we are told, that human life is longer now than in the
past, what with the new hygiene and better nourishment; and yet the
working days of a man's life have so pitifully shrunk together that a
man of forty is shelved in these electric days as he once was at sixty.
No wonder then that the world is in a tearing haste, seeing how soon a
man gets over his practical usefulness, which means how soon he gets to
the end of his life, for life is work; after that it does not count.
It is the new creed, and it comes from America along with the hurry. It
is the creed of a people who in their mad haste are losing their sense
of humour, for if a man has a touch of humour certain phases of American
life must, in the vernacular, "tickle him to death."
Minerva is undoubtedly the patron goddess of America; did she not spring
full panoplied from the head of Jove? She took no time to be born; she
had no leisure for celestial teething nor whooping-cough. Education,
under her fostering care, does not come by degrees.
Yesterday the great grubbing material city was intellectually a desert;
to-day it possesses a university in full swing, endowed with millions,
boasting the last "cry" of the most modern of brains. Hastily elbowing
its way along the path which the old universities trod in impressive
silence for centuries, it arrives shoulder to shoulder with them, still
rather fresh in the way of varnish because it is so new, breathing hard
because of the speed, and wanting only what is, of course, of no earthly
consequence--tradition and the memory of what was both good and great.
This seems to be the only thing with which a university cannot be
endowed!
All over the States universities spring up like magnificent
mushrooms--over-night--and what with the men's universities, the women's
colleges, university extension lectures and Chautauqua, not to mention
educational schemes of a more modest nature, the United States may be
said to be getting educated by electricity.
It takes a stranger in America some time to get accustomed to the mental
pace. I shall never forget the German director of a rather famous Art
museum there, who came to us in a towering rage and blurted out his
indignation. He had been in America only a few months and the sober
methods of the Fatherland still clung to him.
"These Americans, O these Americans!" and he tore his long hair. "I haf
a letter this morning from a young man, and he ask me--Gott im Himmel,
is it conceivable?--he ask me can I--I--I--what you call
it?--guarantee--that he can became a portrait painter in three months!
It is to grow mad!"
But not only the Fine Arts. A young doctor was explaining to me how
thorough and broad his medical education had been (he was from the
West), and as impressive and conclusive evidence he added, "I've even
taken an extra term on the eye." Now a term is three months.
Alas, it is all owing to the electric age. Why will inventors invent so
many time and labour-saving machines? Heaven forgive them! The more
intelligent the machine the more machine-like the man who runs it, or is
run by it, if the work it leaves him to do is limited and monotonous.
Inevitably his outlook on life must become very narrow, and he must lose
all ambition, all sense of mental responsibility. Think of spending the
days of one's life making eyelet-holes! Many people do.
What good is all this deadly haste to the world? What real good is it
doing the labourers and the lower middle-class men, of whom the world
mostly consists, if cables and wireless telegraphy make them, so to
speak, the next-door neighbours of an estimable yellow man in China?
What help to them if they know the daily tragedies of the uttermost
corners of the earth the same day rather than never? What use to them
the knowledge of how to murder their fellow men scientifically in a war
with all the modern improvements? What help to them if a million
inventions make their patient hands useless, but provide them with
luxuries they cannot afford?
Every day thousands of new companies are promoted to exploit inventions
that have for their end and aim the doing of something in the greatest
possible hurry with the least possible aid from mere men. Some day the
lower classes will become perfectly unnecessary, like 'bus horses. The
world will then be full of the only people who really count, and who can
afford to be in a hurry: kings and queens, the rich and great, and above
all, those golden calves the world worships, who rule the trusts, who in
turn rule and ruin the world.
The question is, will the world be as well off if it has reached the
summit and apex of hurry? In those days there will be no more
contentment, for the electric age is, of all things, the enemy of
contentment. Yes, by that time the whole world will be discontented, and
the universal characteristic of nations will be that they are
tired--tired--tired. Then, of course, men will die in their early youth,
worn out and old, for, after all, they are only men and not gods.
Besides, have not the gods always had a bad reputation for jealousy, and
have they not always punished the presumptuous mortals who tried to
steal their divine fire?
Even the Electric Age cannot escape its Nemesis.
_Gunpowder or Toothpowder_
Why are the English, admittedly the apostles of the tub, so indifferent,
as a rule, to the condition of their teeth? If they would do only an
infinitesimal bit as much for their preservation as they do for the
preservation of their monuments, it might possibly have a momentous
influence on English history.
Why the inside of a man's mouth should be of no importance compared to
his outer man is a riddle; but so it is, and a man who would feel quite
disgraced to be seen with dirty hands, leaves his teeth in a condition
which is quite appalling. If, as it is said, bad teeth are a sign of the
degeneracy of a race, then are the sturdy English in a very bad way, and
melancholy indeed is their deterioration since the days of their
ancestors of that prehistoric age whose relics are found in Cornwall and
Somerset.
It is a comfort to learn that not only common sense, but vanity, is as
old as the hills, for among those ancient remains were found some
rouge, and a mirror, all of which can be verified in the museum at
Glastonbury. My heart went out to the prehistoric lady who used the
rouge; it brought her very near with its suggestion of frailty and
feminine vanity, and I am quite sure that the mirror as well was her
property. I lingered over the rouge, the mirror, a tooth, a prehistoric
safety-pin, and some needles, and let the others bother themselves about
such really unimportant details as weapons and utensils. As I strolled
on I saw a skull two thousand years older than any recorded history, and
it grinned cheerfully at me with as perfect a set of teeth as ever
rejoiced the heart of a dentist. I could not help thinking what a shabby
exhibition we should make in similar circumstances!
There is no doubt that our over-civilisation deteriorates our teeth,
which is proved whenever prehistoric remains are discovered. The last
were, I believe, found in Cornwall by a lucky man who bought a strip of
land, or, properly, sand, on which to build himself a cottage, and, on
proceeding to dig a cellar, found it already occupied by the remains of
prehistoric human beings. Some of the skeletons were still in the same
curious attitude in which they had been buried, and the superior ones
among them (socially!) had the right sides of their skulls smashed in to
prevent the restless spirit from seeking re-admittance.
It was the most melancholy sight in the world, these bones which even
the alchemy of thousands of years had not resolved into merciful dust.
The immortal skeleton was there nearly intact, while brilliant, as if
brushed that very morning, grinned those splendid prehistoric teeth,
white as the kernel of a nut, impervious to decay.
A big glass case against the wall of the little museum, which has been
built on the spot by the fortunate discoverer of the "bones," was full
of carefully preserved teeth which had been found there, and their
beauty and perfection would have rejoiced the heart of that artist in
teeth _par excellence_, the American dentist.
The room was crowded by middle-class excursionists, who, with a
middle-class joy of horrors, even if prehistoric, in default of anything
fresher, stared round-eyed at the skeletons, skulls, shinbones and
other impedimenta of decease, and I was struck by the solemnity and
dignity of those poor old bones compared to the commonplaceness of the
empty faces gazing at them.
"Oh, I say, don't you wish you had them teeth," I heard a young thing in
a scarlet tam o'shanter and a fringe giggle to the youth by her side,
with an imitation panama tilted back from his receding forehead. I
understood the gentle innuendo, as he promptly stuck his cane into his
mouth and sucked.
There was something very magnificent and tragic in those lonely graves
of a humanity, already extinct when ancient history began, resting under
the roll of the Cornish sand dunes, where the sullen cliffs stand
sentinels against the seas. Until the twentieth century they had rested
forgotten, and then an undignified chance betrayed them.
It was a gold mine for the enterprising proprietor, whose moderate
charge for a sight is only threepence a head. He is a man of engaging
humour, and he is not only on intimate terms with his "bones," but with
the eminent scientists who still wage a bitter but bloodless feud over
the remains, whose biography so far is only written in sand.
That he is not only a cheerful but a witty man is greatly to his credit,
for he lives a lonely life on his sand hills, with only the cliffs as
his neighbours and the roar of the ocean and the whistle of the wind to
break the silence. For labour he excavates his graveyard, and for
relaxation he catalogues his bones. His free and easy comments on his
subject (or subjects, rather) are really very exhilarating to the
philosophic tourist, and indeed it was he who first drew my attention to
the deterioration of English teeth.
The eccentricity of the Early Victorian teeth was for decades the pet
subject of the Continental caricaturist, the peculiarity being generally
ascribed to the British female, her male companion merely rejoicing in
hideous plaids, abnormal side-whiskers, and a fearful helmet decorated
with a flowing puggaree. Times have changed. The British teeth have
ceased to protrude, and, indeed, they now veer around to the other
extreme, and instead of prominent front teeth the Englishman now often
rejoices in no front teeth at all, or between none and the ordinary
number nature intends there are countless variations.