twice told tales, if he might give his heroine a new attribute! One
feels sure that if eyeglasses and their variations were permitted they
would produce quite a new kind of heroine, to the immense advantage and
relief of literature. Of course the novelist has to keep up with the
times; it is as imperative for him as for the fashion-books, for it is
from him alone that future generations will learn how we lived, dressed
and looked, and what were our favourite sufferings. So the novelist
cannot of course ignore what is so common as eyeglasses and he has in
turn bestowed them on all his characters except his heroines. One can
understand his hesitation when one tries oneself to put glasses on the
noses of one's own literary pets, and then realises how they war with
romance. Put a pair on the nose of the loveliest Rosalind who ever
wandered through the enchanted forest of Arden, or let the most pathetic
Ophelia look through them at Hamlet with grief-stricken eyes, and I am
quite sure that even Shakespeare's poetry would not survive the shock.
But if eyeglasses are tabooed by novelists, what shall we say of
spectacles? What gallery would accept a Juliet with spectacles? For a
woman in literature to wear spectacles is to put her out of the pale of
romance at once. Even in real life spectacles are a problem, but to the
heroine of a novel they are impossible. No novelist with any regard for
his publisher or his sales would venture to give his heroine gold
spectacles. The only ones I remember as the property of a heroine of
fiction belonged to the heroine when she repented, and they more than
anything else proved the sincerity of her remorse, and these were the
famous blue spectacles in "East Lynne" that worked such an amazing
transformation upon that erring and repentant lady.
Yes, a heroine can be repentant behind spectacles, but I defy her to be
alluring. I was struck by their sobering effect on studying the head of
the Venus de Medici decorated with a pair in the window of an inspired
optician. They so changed her expression that she might have
successfully applied for a position in a board-school.
It is possibly a digression, but I should like to know why opticians and
corset-makers look upon the young Augustus and Clytie, who loved Apollo
the sun-god, as especially created to exhibit their wares? It seems but
a pitiful ending to the career of a Roman Emperor to show the passing
multitude how to wear spectacles, or to prove the superior excellence of
a certain kind of green shade for weak eyes. And why should Clytie, with
her face shyly downbent, as well it may be, be obliged to appear in the
newest things in stays, in Great Portland Street? I wonder.
To return to glasses. Perhaps the only thing in glasses on which a rash
novelist might venture is the monocle. I have not yet met a feminine
monocle in fiction, but we all know its entrancing effect when worn by a
man. We even realise its power in real life. It gives a man a kind of
moral support and even changes his character. I have seen meek and
rather ordinary men stick in a monocle, and it at once gave them that
fictitious fascination, that, so to speak, go-to-the-devil impudence
which is so irresistible. It is the aid to sight essentially of the
upper classes, or of the best imitation, and as such it naturally
inspires the confidence of society.
Of course the feminine monocle is not adapted to all costumes, but there
is about it a rakishness, a coquetry particularly suited to a
riding-habit. The suggestion is quite at the service of any harassed
novelist. It may be quite as much a help to sight as spectacles, but, O,
the difference! A woman buries her youth behind spectacles, but she can
coquet to the very end behind a monocle.
A charming creature used to pass my window every day on horseback. I had
a distant vision of a rounded figure in the perfection of a habit, a
silk hat at just the right angle and a monocle. I wove romances about
her; she was Lady Guy Spanker and all the rest of those mannish and
dangerous coquettes of whom I had read. Yesterday we met at a mutual
greengrocer's. She was elderly, and she had discarded the monocle for a
pair of working eyeglasses with black rims, through which she studied
the vegetables with the eye of experience. She also wore a wig, a black
wig. I was so aghast that I stared speechlessly at the greengrocer who
patiently offered me cabbages at "tuppence" a piece. "It can't be," I
said, still staring. "I beg your pardon, Madam," he said, quite
offended, "it's the usual price." "It must be the monocle," and I
pursued my train of thought aloud. "No," the greengrocer retorted with
some impatience, "it's a Savoy."
But it is only the monocle which has that rejuvenating effect. The other
day I called on the loveliest woman I know, and who has always seemed to
me the picture of exquisite and immortal youth. She looked up from the
corner of a couch sumptuous with brilliant cushions. She had been
reading, and she laid aside her book and something else. I followed her
hand and felt as guilty as if I had been caught eavesdropping. There lay
a pair of gold spectacles and I saw a red line across the bridge of her
lovely nose. Those wicked spectacles! How they took away the bloom of
her youth. To me she will never seem young again, only well-preserved,
alas! How tragic to think that even beauty comes to spectacles at last!
Now how different it is with men. If they do have to wear spectacles
they do it boldly, and not on the sly, and yet they always find some one
to love them, so the novelists prove, and they ought to know.
But a heroine with spectacles, that is a different thing. What novelist
has the courage for such an innovation? Even realism, which we know
usually stops at nothing, does draw the line there.
Now I do ask in all seriousness, are eyeglasses in fiction really so
incompatible with romance?
_The Plague of Music_
Yesterday as I strolled through this little Hampshire village, I passed
a woman with a baby in her arms, followed by a chubby boy of about
three, whose little trousers had only just emerged from the petticoat
stage. He lingered behind his mother, and drew across his pursed-up lips
and his puffed-out red cheeks the instrument called a mouth harmonica,
and drank in rapturously his own celestial harmonies.
"Come 'long with your mewsic," his mother remarked briefly over her
shoulder. And he came.
I looked smilingly after that young disciple of what may be truly
described as the most offensive of the fine arts, and meditated on the
poverty of language which describes by the same word the art of
Beethoven and the tooting of a penny whistle--at least in the vernacular
of the people.
There is, perhaps, no common characteristic more unfortunate than the
sheep-like habit human beings have of imitating each other. As infants,
the howling of one baby certainly encourages any evilly disposed infant
in the neighbourhood to imitation, and a group of roaring youngsters
rejoice in their rivalling shrieks.
As we grow older this artless love of noise is of necessity controlled,
but human nature must have vent, so by a kind of common consent we give
way to our natural exuberance in what, for lack of other description, we
are pleased to call "music." Music is the only divine art we are
promised in Heaven, and it is certainly the only divine art with which
we are tortured on earth.
The nerves of the ear must be the most sensitive of the whole nervous
system, for they have it in their power to inflict the most exquisite
torture. The silent arts, no matter how outrageously presented, cannot
possibly make one quiver in agony, nor set one's teeth on edge with the
sharp lash of a discord. Eyes are long-suffering, and they look at what
is discordant with indifference, possibly with resignation, and at most
with impatience; nor have these silent discords the power to leave the
human being distinctly the worse for his experience.
No other art is able to inflict such merciless suffering! Under the name
of music we are afflicted with every variety of noise, including the
hand organ, the bagpipes, the German band, the man who toots the cornet
in the street, the harp man, the lady who has seen better days and who
sings before our house in the evening, the active piano-organ invented
by a heartless genius, the musical box and all its amazing progenies,
the gramophone and the pianola. Not to mention the millions of pianos
and the millions of fiddles that never cease being thumped and scratched
all the world over night and day. The contemplation of such collective
discord is truly appalling.
Unfortunately for us we live in an inventive and imitative age, and one
is inclined to think that the devil is the patron saint of inventors, or
why has the blameless spinet waxed great and blossomed into a piano? Why
should the resources of a modern orchestra be at the disposal of every
infant whose mistaken mother plumps it down on the piano-stool and lets
it thump the keys to keep it quiet! One would so much rather hear its
natural shrieks than that other noise which is supposed to be a harmless
substitute! Why music, of all the fine arts, with its power for
inflicting untold anguish, should be the most common, passes my
understanding.
The printed page is undoubtedly long-suffering, but it is silent. It is
of course true that to be an author, nothing is necessary but a sheet of
paper and a pencil, but I defy the most energetic author to read his
work to ears that refuse to hear. Now with music it is different, one
simply _can't_ get away from it, because cruel inventions--I do not
think I am exaggerating?--have brought its exercise within reach, I will
not say of the poor only, for the thumping of the rich and great is
equally horrid, but of the mistaken poor.
I do not urge that the infant mind, in the process of being cultivated,
should be turned to literature, for it is bad enough already owing to
benevolent publishers who, in the praiseworthy desire not to allow any
light to be hidden under a bushel, emulate each other in trying to
illuminate the world with farthing tallow-dips! It would, indeed, be
ghastly to listen to the literary outpourings of every infant one met,
and equally ghastly never to be able to flee from the rendering of
masters of literature as interpreted by the intellect of three years up.
Thank heaven, we are spared this in literature if not in music, but, I
ask, if we must have a fine art to trifle with, why not take to
painting? Painting is _so_ inoffensive.
It was the English who, before they became so musical, dallied for a
while with painting. There was a time, if we may believe those
biographers of manners, the novelists, when all England sketched, and so
gave vent to all its superabundant emotion in paint. There was no
landscape safe from the emotional Englishwoman. Instead of strumming
false notes on the hotel piano she went out with a paint-box and
sketched the uncomplaining landscape. At any rate the long-suffering
landscape made no sound.
It cannot be denied that one suffers less from a bad picture than from a
bad anything else, the agony also is short, nor is it necessary in the
process of painting to inflict pain. Painting is an exceedingly silent
art, and its results are easily disposed of as wedding presents, because
the recipient cannot possibly rebel.
There is, also, that delightful alternative of decorating one's house
with one's own immortal works. I was recently shown a lovely picture
gallery entirely hung with the work of its owner. I emerged from the
experience smiling and quite calm. Now what would have been my condition
had the good lady insisted on reciting to me eighty of her poems (there
were eighty pictures), or, more harrowing still, had she insisted on
playing to me eighty compositions of her own, or even eighty
compositions of others, with stiff and reluctant hands? For which reason
I maintain that painting is the most inoffensive of the arts and
deserves to be encouraged.
But seriously, why should every child be taught to play the instrument
quite irrespective of its having any talent or taste for music? Why in
the world, where martyrdom is usually the price of living, should a
select little army of martyrs suffer a double martyrdom? Why draw them
by the hairs of their inoffensive heads to the piano-stool and make, as
it were, at one fell swoop, two martyrs, the one at the piano and the
wretch who, on the other side of the wall, gives the lie to Congreve,
who mistakenly declared that "Music has charms to soothe a savage
breast"? Had Congreve lived now he would have hesitated to make so rash
a statement.
In Congreve's day the piano, the greatest instrument of torture of
modern times, had not been evolved. Its ancestor, the spinet, tinkled
plaintively away under its breath like a musical mosquito with a cold on
its chest, and was--alas, how happily!--within reach of only the few. In
those days, when its feeble tinkle was a mere whisper, house-walls were
made of such stupendous thickness that not even the turmoil of a modern
orchestra in the next room could have penetrated.
But now, in these unhappy days, when every family is obliged to have a
piano or be despised, and when in apartment-houses each floor quivers to
a piano of its own, the architect and contractor--a terrible combination
for evil!--have conspired together to erect walls like tissue paper,
behind which the harassed householder cowers, mercilessly exposed to
musical scales as practised on an instrument powerful enough to have
cast down the walls of Jericho. And here he vainly seeks for a peaceful
retreat from the noise of cabs, 'buses, motors, traction-engines,
electric trams, and all the other ear-splitting sounds which,
apparently, follow in the relentless march of progress.
It is very appalling to consider that at this very moment the children
of the entire civilised world are, with few exceptions, engaged in
playing false notes on a variety of musical instruments. It is not too
much to say that in this respect the uncivilised have a colossal
advantage over the civilised.
In a certain familiar oratorio innumerable pages and much time are taken
up in an endless reiteration of the words, "All we like sheep." I beg to
ask if the worthy sopranos, altos, tenors and the rest, ever did realise
the profound truth of that over-repeated and rather monotonous
statement? We _are_ all like sheep! We do what our neighbours do; we
think what they think and we wear what they wear. In fact, we are
tailor-made inside and out; no, we are worse than tailor-made, we are
ready-tailor-made, for we are made by the gross.
If there is a thing the world shudders at and resents it is originality.
If a human being cannot be classified as belonging to a certain cut of
trousers, coat or waistcoats, let him beware, for he is a misfit human
being, and we all know the cheap end of all misfits! It is as
embarrassing to have anything obtrusive in one's mental make-up as in
one's physical. Happy is he who is on a dead level!
One would like to offer up a meek plea for originality were one not
aware how unpopular it would be. To be original is only next worse thing
to being a genius. We do resign ourselves to sporadic cases of genius,
but a world peopled by genius (for we all know what that is akin to) is
more than we could stand. It is about the same with originality. So the
next time we sing "All we like sheep," let us consider well the meaning
of these inspiring but misunderstood words, and greatly rejoice.
This train of thought is the result of my landlady's little boy,
separated from me only by a thin lath partition of a wall, playing
five-finger exercises in halting rhythm and with innumerable false
notes. The instrument is one in which the flight of years has left a
tone like a discontented nutmeg-grater. If the little boy had the legs
of a centipede and played his chosen instrument with these instead of
two dingy little hands, he could not perpetrate more false notes.
The number of false notes that can be evolved through the medium of
eight fingers and two thumbs is simply appalling! The little boy, a pale
child in a long pinafore and big white ears, hates his chosen instrument
as much as I do, and so we meet on a level of mutual affliction. I
loathe hearing him, and he hates his instrument; now, in the name of
good common sense, why must he be offered up as a sacrifice?
His mother is a poor woman, and the tinkling cottage piano with the
plaited faded-green front represents the chops and many other wholesome
things she has not eaten, and what she allows the young lady in
third-floor back, who takes her board out in piano lessons, is a serious
sacrifice. Now, I ask, what for?
Why is all the world playing an unnecessary piano?
Marriage has a fatal effect on music. For some occult reason as soon as
a girl is married, the piano--the grave of so much money and
time--retires out of active life, and swathed in "art draperies,"
burdened by vases, cabinet photographs and imitation "curios," serves
less as a musical instrument than a warning. But like all warnings it
passes unheeded, for no sooner are the next generation's legs long
enough to dangle between the key-board and the pedals, than the echoes
awaken to the same old false notes that serve no purpose unless an hour
of daily martyrdom over a tear-splashed key-board is an excellent
preparation for the trials of life.
Music, as it is taught, is not so much a fine art as a bad habit. Alas,
we have got into the habit of learning to play the piano, and the bad
habit of playing on the violin is fatally on the increase. Seriously
now: why? Because it is considered both uncultivated and quite
unfashionable not to be fond of music or to pretend to be. Why? The
answer, "All we like sheep."
I know of only one man who has the courage to say that he hates music.
It is his misfortune, not his fault, and without doubt there is
something wrong about his inner ear. Still, I always wonder why his
frank and honest confession is received with a kind of pitying contempt,
as if he had writ himself down to be both a brute-beast and a heathen.
Love music, and for some unexplained reason you at once have a profound
scorn for all such as do not. My friend who hates music understands and
loves both pictures and poetry, and, goodness knows, there are plenty
who do not! And yet I have never heard him inveigh against those who
love neither. Yes, music may be a divine art, but it is certainly not a
charitable art.
Even as long as one can remember, the study of music and the making of
musical instruments have been terribly on the increase. Mediocrity, that
might do excellent work in other fields, strums away at the piano or
scratches away at the violin, or with quavering voice sings those songs
which have inspired the poet to write:
I am saddest when I sing,
And so are those who hear me!
The world is full of music schools, that turn out thousands of young
musicians every year, who take to music instead of dressmaking or
plumbing or any other useful employment, and these are let loose on a
foolish world and proceed in turn to make martyrs of the defenceless
infants of our land. And it is curious, too, and instructive to observe,
considering the vast sums of money and the amount of time spent in the
pursuit of music, how rarely one can find any one who plays or sings
well enough to give even a little pleasure.
The possible reason may be that the standard of mediocrity has become so
terribly high! For the halting amateur of to-day might have served as a
Paderewski of the past. Our ears have grown hopelessly fastidious.
No more is the afternoon caller regaled with _The Happy Farmer_, as
performed by the talented child of the house, and listened to with real
pleasure by unsophisticated grandparents. We know too much to listen to
the talented child, and as for the talented child it generally
developes into a young person who has nervous prostration at the mere
idea of playing before anyone. For what purpose, then, these hours of
five-finger agony and those enormous bills which might have been paid
for so much better results?
Then, too, consider the awful competition to which the present votary of
music is subjected--pitted, as it were, against the pianola, the Æolian,
the gramophone, and the other countless mechanical devices, which so
successfully prove that human ingenuity can create everything but a
soul. Wet blankets they are to all musical aspiration, for what musical
aspiration can successfully compete against steel fingers without
nerves?
I do not think one would feel so acutely about the matter if music were
a silent art, and if it did not represent such a waste of money and
energy which, turned to other uses, might have been of such value.
Let us have the courage to say, when it is the truth, that we dislike
music. It is nothing to boast of, but neither is it a crime nor a
disgrace. If your blessed Sammy bedews the piano keys with tears of
anguish, and if, after a time, you discover that his soul is not
amenable to the poetry of sound, then earn the fervid gratitude of your
neighbour on the other side of that jerry-built wall, and release the
young sufferer.
Be merciful!
_A Domestic Danger_
There are certain times of the year when the shops, the acute arbiters
of fashion, send broadcast those entrancing picture-books which advise
the wavering woman what to buy, what to wear, and how to wear it; and
every year the lovely creatures portrayed grow more lovely. Once my
dream was to be a queen in a black velvet garment, that hid my pinafore,
and a spiky crown--the kind as old as fairy stories. While waiting for
the real article I practised with a bed sheet and crowned myself with a
brass jardiniere that leaked, but was very imposing, though upside down.
I have had other aspirations since, and my very last has just come by a
discontented postman because it would not go into the letter-box.
One goes through all stages of dreams until one comes to the conclusion,
but that is always very late in life, that one must resign oneself to
the inevitable; even science cannot turn one's nose down, when nature
has turned it up, and no longing for five feet ten will help one whom
nature has finished off at five feet two, though shops have been known
to succeed where nature and science have failed, and it is owing mainly
to them that this is the age of tall women. Why the men do not keep pace
is partly a physiological riddle and partly because the shops are not
interested in mere men. But it is a common sight these days to see a
great blonde goddess with gigantic feet and hands, which she takes no
trouble to conceal, having in tow a little man just tall enough to
tickle her shoulder with his moustache. It is perhaps a merciful
dispensation of Divine Providence that extremes not only meet, but
evidently like to meet.
Yes, one's ideals in the process of living change. However, one feels
convinced that the feminine ideal is always connected with clothes, and
whatever the Venus of Milo may be to men I am quite sure that with her
generous waist and rudimentary costume she has never been the ideal of a
feminine dreamer. It is not so much the impropriety of having on few
clothes that disturbs the female mind as it is the having on no real
nice clothes. The old ideals are getting so dreadfully old-fashioned! A
Greek goddess at an afternoon tea would have nothing in common with the
new ideal but her height; her ample waist and her heroic simplicity
would be out of it in an age which is trying to live up to the new
standard of beauty as set by those infallible connoisseurs--the
dry-goods stores. The enchanting books which these send out at the
beginning of each season represent as nothing else the world's ideal of
perfect feminine beauty. I will not discuss men's beauty, because a more
gifted pen than mine has been at quite unnecessary pains to increase
their already alarming vanity. But I must confess that now my own
standard of womanly loveliness veers like a weather-cock to the wind, as
I study the pictorial production commercial generosity stuffs into my
letter-box. Once I wanted to be a queen with a real crown, now I want to
be just like the beauteous creature on that paper cover.