BIG GIRLS
When I was about nine years old my cousins took me to an entertainment
at the girls’ school which all but one of them had lately left.
Never shall I forget the awkward fear with which I faced a room
full of mature and stately beings for whose benefit the conjurer
had been summoned. I wondered how he would dare to conjure lightly
before an assembly of so many incarnations of Minerva. There was
Olympian superiority upon their brows and their flowing locks were
surely ambrosial. The one relief was that to them, apparently, I did
not exist, though some younger sprites in shorter skirts giggled
embarrassingly when I tripped over a chair. Their accomplishments,
too, were miraculous; they played such runs upon the piano and the
violin, they recited with such _aplomb_ “The Jackdaw of Rheims,” they
even did a German play of which, as I was told many years later by my
cousin, none of them understood a word. The goddesses graciously unbent
when the conjurer was pleased to be facetious and miraculous after
the manner of his kind. He delighted me too, that conjurer, but he
was the cause, none the less, of my greater humiliation. He needed an
accomplice, or shall we say a butt, upon the stage, and, basely taking
advantage of my solitary masculinity, he called me out. The Minervas
could no longer ignore my miserable existence. There I was exposed to
their censorious gaze, a thing in breeches, a most obvious compound of
“toads and snails and puppy dogs’ tails,” placed in one of the less
dignified positions of this world with no fellow to support me. I held
things for the conjurer and they disappeared, I tied knots which were
as water, money issued from my nose and perspiration from my forehead.
I had to assure the goddesses that I saw no deception, as if all the
assurance to be found in that room was not on their side rather than on
mine: I even had to pronounce the ridiculous word “Abracadabra” at the
critical moment of a more than usually mystifying illusion. Finally I
had to hold a glass of water covered with a silk handkerchief. To my
inconsolable despair I dropped the glass, which broke with a hideous
crash upon the stage. Blushing scarlet and covered with confusion I
was invited to make way for “one of the young ladies who no doubt
had a steadier hand than a dissipated young man.” I slunk away into
obscurity, hating all conjurers and fearing all big girls more than
ever.
“Maud is not yet seventeen
But she is tall and stately”
No lines by an English poet have better crystallised the impression of
English womanhood at the moment of its emergence from the chrysalis.
The impression, of course, is enormously heightened when it is conveyed
in the mass, as in a ceremony at a girls’ school or the sight of the
same school progressing formally to church _en crocodile_. A boy, in
the glory of his physical strength and agility, may find it easy to
forget the stateliness of one or two, as I did that of my cousins, but
no boy exists who would not quail before a combined manifestation.
And yet what were these but flappers, a word which no longer needs
inverted commas? It is a typically English product, that quintessence
of pertness and levity, that preposterous imitation and caricature of
womanhood, that graceless state of pigtaildom, that compound of vanity,
_abandon_, chatter and chocolates, that innocent rakishness, that
perverse chastity, that boundless but unconcentrated desire, that rapt
satisfaction with the present, that gorgeous hopefulness of the future,
that delight to the eye, that distress to the ear; those rosebuds in
boys’ buttonholes, those thorns in mothers’ sides, those blankets of
intelligent conversation, those pitchers with capacious ears, those
graceful runners and hideous walkers, those creatures of soft cheeks,
shy souls and shameless hearts, the English flappers. The rise of this
phenomenon to a precocious but perfectly definite position in society
has been extremely rapid. Half of the present generation in England
can remember when flappers were not, and there is no sign in previous
history that they were ever intended to be. In the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance women became wives so early that there was no time for
flapperdom, yet any flapper of to-day has more independence than the
wife of many a knight who flaunted on the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
The Puritans did not encourage precocity in young women, and as for the
Merry Monarch, there is no record that he paid attentions to ladies
who were not yet out. The formal eighteenth century kept young ladies
very much “in” till they were married, and this perhaps over-repressive
attitude continued well into the Victorian age. The flapper, it must be
remembered, is not merely a young woman; if she were no more, she would
find her parallel in many a heroine of history or fiction. She is more
than young, she is immature: she trades upon her immaturity, using
it as a temptation, a protection and an excuse. Her hair is down and
her skirts are up—though not much more up to-day, I fear, than those
of her aunts—and her imitations of maturity are more in the domain of
conduct than of dress or deportment. Until the other day this cheerful
being did not exist. Who can imagine Miss Bennet or Emma Woodhouse
as flappers? What flapper entered the ken of Dickens or Thackeray or
George Meredith, except as a monstrosity? Even Henry James was too
early for the flapper, with all his tremendous apparatus of modernity.
He touched on some problems of flapperdom in “The Awkward Age” it is
true, but the unfortunate Nanda was very much “out” when she began so
disconcertingly to complicate the existence of her not too admirable
mother. No, the flapper suddenly burst upon an amazed nineteenth
century at the moment of its exit in an odour of decadence and Yellow
Bookery—how Maudle and Postlethwaite would have hated her!—and rode in
triumphantly on the first wave-crest of the twentieth century, a callow
Venus with her hands on her hips and her tongue in her cheek.
At present the flapper is English entirely, except in so far as she
is also American, and of her mode of existence in that mighty country
in which the pretensions of all the female sex are allowed to be
infinite and where Ella Wheeler Willcox played Corinna in her teens I
am not competent to speak. At what age the mantle of bright omnipotence
is allowed to be put on with the petticoat is hidden from me. At all
events the English flapper is alone in Europe. In Germany, I imagine,
her counterpart is still the unwieldy “Backfisch,” with her plait of
coarse light hair and her bob of salutation. She is not a creature
of much account: professors feed her mind with knowledge and she
feeds her body with chocolate and cream cakes. In France, the most
progressive of all Latin countries, the “jeune fille” is still not
emancipated,[2] in spite of Mademoiselle Lenglen, who has won her way
in a censorious world with a tennis racquet. Emancipation is, after
all, the note of the flapper: she gives no impression of being held
in trust. The “jeune fille” is very much held in trust, a trust which
even the most predatory Frenchman will respect. If she is allowed at
all to fly, it is as a balloon or a kite at the end of string securely
tied to her mother’s apron-strings. She is held in trust, of course,
for marriage, an affair which in England is becoming more and more
haphazard. For us, whatever other qualities marriage may have—and these
may be exquisite—it must, at the least, promise a little diversion.
The French, on the contrary, are ready, if need be, to follow Mrs
Malaprop’s maxim of beginning with a little aversion. To us, according
to our natures, marriage may be primarily a sacrament, an enchantment,
or a consummation, but to the French it is essentially an alliance,
a solemn and stately word which they properly apply to the wedding
ring. With this in prospect little kites must not be allowed to fly
too high, nor to become unconscious of the string. They may aspire
to greater freedom as much as they please, since it will inevitably
come; their curiosities about that free state are not discouraged nor
are the arts and graces by which they will shape the most triumphant
course untrammelled forgotten; and the joys to which they may attain
are kept before them to console them for what they must renounce in
the probationary stage. The “jeune fille” may not walk the street of
a town alone, after a dance she is returned as a matter of course to
her mother, she is not taken out by her boys to dine at restaurants
and witness musical comedies from stalls; she does not puff about
the country on a motor bicycle nor flash about in the car with the
chauffeur for sole cavalier; she does not make a habitual fourth at
bridge nor join the lads at snooker when Mama has gone to bed. Indeed,
so long as there is any alliance in prospect the French mama never goes
to bed, speaking figuratively: she is conscious of the kite-string even
in the majesty of her _peignoir_. The English mama, if she is sensible,
takes her normal night’s rest with the addition, possibly, of a nap
after lunch. She is not anxious, for, if there is one virtue in the
flapper, it is her well-developed faculty of looking after herself.
[2] Even M. Marcel Proust’s remarkable picture of modern “jeunes
filles” in his masterpiece of discursion “A l’ombre des jeunes filles
en fleurs” does not convince me that flappers exist in France.
I permit myself perhaps to speak of the young lady with a certain
levity of which she would not approve, for she is apt to take
herself pretty seriously, though rather as an individual than as an
institution. “My dear,” I heard one say the other day, “I have just
taken up theosophy: it’s too thrilling and wonderful. You can’t think
what a difference it has made to me.” Her friend, I trust, did not
echo my own private reflection that the difference was not yet visible
externally, though possibly to the discerning eye her aura had changed
colour slightly. Yet the levity, regrettable though it may be, is not
in the least to be taken as a cloak for complete disapproval, however
negligible such disapproval might be to its objects: it is no more
than a trifling insistence—tasteless of course—on the element of comedy
that twinkles round this estimable section of feminine society. I
respect the flapper, in the first place, because she is on the verge of
becoming the young Englishwoman than whom there is no finer creature
of her kind. Imperfectly educated she certainly is; ignorance is hers
without any mitigating desire for knowledge; artistically she is not
successful, nor intellectually; even in dress she has yet to learn, if
she ever will, the two advantages of originality and perfect finish:
but all this seems almost petty when one considers how magnificent
she is as a being, how well made, how frank and generous, how full
of energy, how good a comrade, how pleasant a companion. These are
the basic virtues of the young Englishwoman, and the flapper has
them all. The worst that can be said of her, perhaps, is that she
exaggerates certain characteristic shortcomings of her sex in England
without contributing any particularly striking grace of her own in
compensation. Is there loudness and vulgarity about, then she is
conspicuously noisy; is there powder on the nose and carmine upon the
lips, then her nose and lips are especially ridiculous; is there a
shrill tone, the highest note will be a flapper’s; is there a tendency
for the eye to rove, it will be particularly unsuitable in a cheeky
orb peeping from a pigtailed head. Her elemental good qualities, at
which she would be inclined to turn up her nose, are her principal
jewels together with a certain lithe and tempting picturesqueness
which is all her own: she is to be loved, at all events, by the
discriminating for her promise rather than for her performance and for
her very brilliant testimony to the excellence of a social system which
encourages and approves this independence in the young. It may be said
that the flapper in general is too eager to discount, as she usually
does, the pleasures of maturity, but probably this is better for
her, in the present and in the future, than to be kept in a state of
impatient yearning, of greedy _Sehnsucht_, which checks the naturally
charming spontaneity of her development. In fact, flappers are good and
desirable things provided that they do not become _too_ obvious.
There is a certain reason for insistence on this excellent proviso. It
may seem paradoxical to argue that the most modern tendency to blur
the line of demarcation between the flapper and her elders is a sign
of over-obviousness on the part of the former. This line, externally
at all events, used to be firmly marked, by the hair on the brow and
the skirt about the knee: but now the general cult, bobbed head and
the free knee, has made this double line delusive. Short of a study of
census returns it would be difficult to tell where the flapper ends
and the woman begins. And this confusion—which is my point—does not
mean the elimination of the flapper as a separate identity, but rather
a prolongation of the flapper standard beyond its legitimate limits.
It argues, to my mind, a deplorable abandonment of her own standard
on the part of the older woman. Herrick could no longer apostrophise
in ecstasy the “sweet liquefaction of her clothes” when he saw his
Julia striding along in a woollen jumper and a short tweed skirt with
a pudding basin pressed down over her mediæval bob. Woman’s gift is to
give line and animation to drapery, to oppose graciousness of the curve
to the masculine rectilinear, and to contrast the poetry of motion with
the prose of mere movement. Why is it decreed to-day that all women
should
By hook or crook
Contrive to look
Both angular and flat—
to quote the song from _Patience_? Only a century ago Englishwomen
had adorably drooping shoulders and soft arms; their contours were
well rounded or they were miserable. To-day it is the round who are
miserable. So marked a physical change is more than accident: it is a
symptom of some constitutional or systematic change, and it has let
the flapper in as a concrete symbol of the revolution. Personally I
could welcome the return of a measure of rotundity, both in form and
manner, not the too doughy rotundity of, say, an Amelia Sedley, but
something more in the manner of George du Maurier’s drawings in _Punch_
of Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns and the statuesque ladies who attended her
“at homes.” To George du Maurier that was the English type, and his
admiration of it is clear in every line. He idealised possibly, but
such idealism does him artistically infinite credit. Angularity, for
him, was only the price paid in lost charm for intellect, as in his
three Miss Bilderbogies: only extreme cleverness, in his view, could
excuse such absence of contour in a woman, and even then the excuse
would have to be explicitly made with some humility. Where has it all
gone, that amplitude, that richness that was present to his eyes and
fed his imagination? One would say that there must have been a shortage
of cream somewhere to have so encouraged the Bilderbogie strain and
repressed the Ponsonby de Tomkyns. It may have been that there was too
much cream in the Ponsonby de Tomkyns stratum and too little elsewhere,
an error now remedied by a more even distribution. Let us hope so, in
the expectation that the traditional creaminess of things English may
again become visible in the community. English girls were once compared
to rosebuds and cream: the rose is still there, and no nation can
compete with it, but when it comes to a question of cream, the best
that the average flapper can boast in her composition is a fairly stiff
admixture of milk and soda.
I sometimes wonder if there is anything left for the flapper to look
forward to when she comes out, since this formality is still talked
of. Possibly there are still some functions closed to her, but they
can be few. She is to be found at dinner parties and dances, she has
men friends to stand her theatres and chocolates, she can flirt to the
utmost limit, and unless she habitually wears a pigtail it is ten to
one that nobody will notice anything different in the dressing of her
hair. She will be forced to assume, possibly, a greater responsibility,
but that is a penalty rather than a pleasure. Let us at any rate
give her the credit of reaching consciously a greater seriousness
of outlook whether she has to fend for herself or not. Frivolity in
its worst sense is not a fault of English girls. Fond as they are
of enjoyment and unimaginative as they are in their pleasures, they
all take life with a measure of earnestness. The war gave to them, or
to many of them, an object for their earnestness of which they had
hitherto felt the want. Their seizure of the opportunity does them
infinite credit. It would be absurd to suppose that their motives
were purely altruistic, for women as a whole are not moved to action
by abstract ideas. They saw that there were things to be done and
that it might be rather fun to do them. It would need an eloquent pen
to tell adequately how well they did them, and the fact that they
got some fun out of it, even perhaps more than they expected, can
in no way diminish our approbation. I confess that the magnificent
services of English girls during the war have moved me deeply, and
I cannot find it in me to sympathise with those who are inclined
to consider the whole thing rather regrettable, unsettling to the
girls and likely to provoke antagonisms when, if ever, we return to
peaceful conditions. Surely this is a petty point of view. As a matter
of national pride their performance takes on quite another aspect.
The women of England were the only ones in the world who served in
thousands anywhere and everywhere. Other nations could not get over
their prejudices so easily, or only in a few cases. Botchkareva,
it is true, organised a Battalion of Death in which Russian women
actually fought, but the serving Englishwomen were an army. Also,
there was nothing strained about it, nothing unnatural, as it would
have been in a Latin nation. Here was a vindication of that British
prudery and hypocrisy which other nations like to mock at. Our freedom
of intercourse, our comradeship of the sexes, which no other people
understands, was triumphantly justified in the test of war. The triumph
belongs chiefly to the women: it showed the sterling worth of their
essential qualities, independence, fearless capability, untiring
energy, cheerfulness under difficulty and coolness in danger. The best
of them could lead as well as work, and where they led, as in those
Serbian hospitals, men worshipped them, glorifying the country that
could produce such women. So when I see, or used to see, a pert little
figure in khaki carrying its little powdered nose in the air and being
a little silly, I tried to remember that these were superficial defects
not gravely detrimental to the value of the article. But they can be so
dreadfully and exasperatingly silly, can they not? Even Sister Anne,
of Number —— General Hospital, who took me out to tea at Aboukir Bay
and gave me a Government hot water bottle as a souvenir, was a little
silly, but she was a genuine, jolly being all the same who did her
country more credit than she was probably aware of.
This excursus into the topic of the war was really unpremeditated,
but, after all, it was almost impossible to leave it out in speaking
of the English girl. To omit to record that which is eminently
worthy of praise, simply because it has been praised before, besides
being ungenerous in a critic, accentuates his strictures beyond his
intention. No doubt Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns and her age would have
responded with equal enthusiasm, but the greater energy and athleticism
which succeeded her generation did much to increase the effectiveness
of the response when it was actually called for. And now peace is
before us again, with much speculation about the future of women. So
far as the English girl is concerned, be she flapper or no, I see no
reason why she should deteriorate with the disappearance of stress,
especially as the condition of modern society for many years to come
seems likely to demand strenuous natures.
There is, however, one type of young Englishwoman, still existent,
whose extinction would be a blessing. It is the type of Mr Reginald
McKenna’s Sonia, that survival of Dodo into an unwilling generation.
She is a limited species of course. London, money, society connections,
good looks and a vivacious personality are indispensable for success
in this line, and this is a combination of elements within the reach
of few. Yet she does exist outside the pages of novels, and the harm
that she does goes far beyond her own personal futility. She is a bad
example, and unfortunately an example too widely held up to admiration.
She captures the Press, which delights to reproduce her photograph in
her latest posture and to record her latest bid for notoriety, while it
would not dare to print a truthful account of her life, with all its
vanities and selfishnesses and little immoralities. Her motto is to
have a good time even if the world go to pieces. She exaggerates her
ego into a god whom it is the duty of life and the world to appease by
frequent offerings of incense and enjoyment. Of any duty except to look
pretty she is quite unconscious. Any decent feeling she would promptly
dub stuffiness. What she wants is glamour and movement from morning
to night. The drab and dark side of the world is to be excluded, not
by rising superior to it, but by ignoring it and debarring it from
approach to the sacred presence, as the revellers in the story tried
to debar the red death. It is that kind of young woman who never
represses a selfish impulse and who, when self-denial on the part of
the community is called for, assumes that the call is intended for the
drab beings who earn a daily wage but is not to prejudice the pleasures
of superior beings like herself, whose very existence is sufficient
privilege for the community to warrant the transfer to its back of any
burden that would legitimately have been hers. You see her often enough
in London, watching the Russian ballet with an air of proprietorship,
as if her appreciation was the only thing that mattered, that of the
ordinary herd being cold, earthy and altogether negligible; you may see
her selling programmes at charity matinées, flattering and fluttering
by her radiant presence the audience—"oh, my dear, such quaint stuffy
horrors!"—who buy; you will see her in the company of the rich more
often than in that of the well bred, for money is to her infinitely
more than manners and flashy novelty more than solid worth. She was
slightly eclipsed by the war, though it gave her some admirable
opportunities for self-display, but it affected her little. It neither
wrung her heart nor improved her character, since it was to her but
a new excitement and a source of wealth to many of her friends. She
dresses garishly, she spends recklessly, she plays high, she dabbles
in vice as she dabbles in movements for the sake of fresh sensations
for her _blasé_ palate. With a ha’porth of wit she gilds an infinite
vulgarity, and she has the soul of a courtesan without the courtesan’s
excuse. If Rhadamanthus condemns her to be perpetual chambermaid to a
hostel in Hades for the souls of lost commercial travellers he will
have given her an appropriate task in appropriate company.
There are other types of girl whom many of us may dislike, the
pseudo-Bohemian of Chelsea, the _détraquée_ enthusiast who formed in
old days the main guard of Miss Pankhurst’s army, the spoiled chorus
girl whom Mr Compton Mackenzie has so well depicted in “Carnival,”
the horsey young lady who can talk of nothing but hunting and the
merely vacuous devourer of sweets and sensational novels. Most of
these, however, have some compensating virtues and the majority try,
at all events, to do something more than exist. Want of opportunity
or want of ambition have often landed them in their particular groove
and circumscribed their natures: a sudden emergency, in their case,
may bring out unsuspected powers and surprisingly latent virtues. The
Bohemian young lady of Chelsea, I admit, is extremely irritating,
though her worst faults appear on the surface. Her postures, if she
only knew it, give an impression of shallowness and pretence, but she
is a little intoxicated by the glamour of revolt against convention and
the general obtuseness to things artistic, which is an undeniable and
annoying fact to those who are not afflicted with it. Chelsea boasts
many courageous spirits, not all of them men, however above their
accomplishments their aims may be, but it gets deservedly a bad name
when it takes up the attitude of regarding all life as nothing but a
colour scheme, or an arrangement of line and mass. The issues of life
are not all artistic: in fact, the artistic issue is only one of many,
supremely important, of course, but not extremely extensive, a fact
of which Murger was uncomfortably aware when he wrote the inimitable
“Scènes de la Vie de Bohème.” Yet, after all, the artist must have
his or her little bit of fanfaronnade, if only to keep the heart up
in his desolating struggle to give expression to refractory ideas.
The inexcusable beings are those who, not being in any sense artists,
presume on a habitation of artistic regions to flourish the borrowed
panache more furiously than its legitimate possessor.
The enthusiast in unprofitable causes, with no sense of proportion in
her composition, is rather the victim of circumstance than a deliberate
sinner. The remedy for her is simply a matter of providing a more
fitting channel for her energy and her superfluous emotion. This is
difficulty which we have still to face, for the country which, having
a large surplus of women over men, gives the former nothing, or not
enough to do, is asking for trouble and encouraging the development of
its girls into “wild, wild women” in a different sense to that of the
song. If it could only be secured that no young Englishwoman entered
adult life without a solid interest or a definite direction for her
unexpended energy we should neither see the crazy excesses of the
suffragettes nor the abysmal apathy which settles on the young in too
many suburban drawing rooms, country towns and seaside apartments. The
Englishwoman shines far more in activity than in repose: she is most
herself with a flush in her cheek and motion in her limbs, and she can
never successfully imitate the becoming languour appropriate to the
women of sunnier climates. She will move more, I fancy, in the future
with less hesitation and a surer sense of direction.
The English girl, as a rule, marries for love. French people say that
this is an inadequate reason for marriage, but I doubt if the results
in this country are any worse than those of the arranged marriage
in France. As a nation we seem to be suited by a certain youthful
irresponsibility in this, as in other matters. Also there is the fact
that young English folk are not very desperate lovers. They like to
believe that they are, of course, and the authors of sentimental
fiction encourage the belief, but they take care to combine a good dose
of practical sense with their passion. Mistakes occur, it cannot be
denied, but they are due rather to flightiness and self-indulgence than
to the mad lash of real passion. Juliet may have been a typical English
maiden of Shakespeare’s day, but she is not so now, or it would not
need an Englishwoman of fifty to play the part properly; and it would
be ridiculous to imagine one of our nation assuming in real life the
rôle of Carmen or of a D’Annunzianesque heroine, alternately blazing
and languishing in a vapour of eloquence. Rosalind is far more the true
English type: she takes some interest in the physical as well as the
emotional development of her lover.
Indeed, there are English girls of certain classes who conduct their
own alliance almost as coolly and circumspectly as the wariest French
mother. For them it is a matter of stages, first walking out, then
keeping company, and then the engagement with its solemn ring. But the
ring by no means clinches matters: the wait for adequate circumstances
to make the marriage advisable may last one year or more. If during
that wait the probationer fails to answer expectations, or even himself
cools off, the affair is adjusted without undue recrimination. Rings
and other presents are returned and, in all probability, another
probationer is quickly found to begin the round anew. The methods of
the “upper” classes are hasty and ill-considered in comparison, though
the grave love making of Sir Walter Scott’s and Jane Austen’s young
people will show that this was not always so. Yet, on the whole, in
spite of the quite obvious sentimentality of our imaginations on this
subject—what other nation has such a vast yearly output of incredibly
washy love stories?—we are not unduly sentimental in our actions. Love
for us makes the world go round, not merely the head, and it is usually
built on a firm foundation of compatability.
The young Englishwoman does not enter upon the matrimonial voyage
all of a tremble, which is another excellent thing. She has a fairly
shrewd idea of what she wants and of what she is going to get. She is
quite aware that marriage entails duties as well as pleasures, but,
as she has already had a good deal of the fun, she is soberly ready
to welcome the new responsibility which will to some extent diminish
it. Men of other nations may think there is something charming in
the prospect of leading a timid (but rather hungry) child into a new
and fascinating garden full of the delights of the senses and the
emotions, but that is not the Englishman’s desire. For him, too, love
is not all emotion: his passion is tinged unconsciously with prudence.
His nature leads him to look for a companion as well as a divinity,
and since he is a simple soul, to whom the refinements of sentiment
are tiresome in the long run, he prefers a comrade ready-made to a
novice whose transformation into a comrade will take some time and
considerable trouble. The English girl is always a comrade, from the
nursery onwards. The spirit of comradeship is so deeply ingrained in
the family sense of English people that they could not avoid it if they
would. It is on that side that you can always best take an English
girl, for, though she has vanity too, she is not one of those precious
creatures who are sensitive in their vanities and nowhere else; who
will take a rebuff calmly if it is delivered with a courtly word, but
will bitterly resent a gratification if it is proffered too roughly
for their pride. Judged by universal standards Englishmen are splendid
husbands but inadequate lovers: Englishwomen are perfect wives but
unsatisfactory mistresses.