Produced by Meredith Bach and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
THE BOOK OF THIS AND THAT
THE BOOK
OF THIS AND THAT
BY
ROBERT LYND
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.
_Published 1915_
IN MEMORIAM
WILLIAM BARKLEY
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. SUSPICION 1
II. ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS 9
III. THE SIN OF DANCING 17
IV. THOUGHTS AT A TANGO TEA 25
V. THE HUMOURS OF MURDER 34
VI. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF HELL 43
VII. ON CHEERFUL READERS 51
VIII. ST G. B. S. AND THE BISHOP 59
IX. STUPIDITY 68
X. WASTE 77
XI. ON CHRISTMAS 85
XII. ON DEMAGOGUES 94
XIII. ON COINCIDENCES 102
XIV. ON INDIGNATION 111
XV. THE HEART OF MR GALSWORTHY 120
XVI. SPRING FASHIONS 129
XVII. ON BLACK CATS 137
XVIII. ON BEING SHOCKED 145
XIX. CONFESSIONS 154
XX. THE TERRORS OF POLITICS 162
XXI. ON DISASTERS 170
XXII. THE RIGHTS OF MURDER 180
XXIII. THE HUMOUR OF HOAXES 188
XXIV. ANATOLE FRANCE 197
XXV. THE SEA 205
XXVI. THE FUTURISTS 215
XXVII. A DEFENCE OF CRITICS 224
XXVIII. ON THE BEAUTY OF STATISTICS 232
_These essays have appeared from week to week in_ The New
Statesman, _to the Editor and Proprietors of which I make
grateful acknowledgment._
R. L.
THE BOOK OF THIS AND THAT
I
SUSPICION
Suspicion is a beast with a thousand eyes, but most of them are blind,
or colour-blind, or askew, or rolling, or yellow. It is a beast with a
thousand ears, but most of them are like the ears of the deaf man in
the comic recitation who, when you say "whiskers" hears "solicitors,"
and when you are talking about the weather thinks you are threatening
to murder him. It is a beast with a thousand tongues, and they are all
slanderous. On the whole, it is the most loathsome monster outside the
pages of _The Faerie Queene_. Just as the ugliest ape that ever was
born is all the more repellent for being so like a man, so suspicion
is all the more hideous because it is so close a caricature of the
passion for truth. It is a leering perversion of that passion which
sent Columbus looking for a lost continent and urged Galileo to turn
his telescope on the heavens. Columbus may, in a sense, be said to
have suspected that America was there, and Galileo suspected more than
was good for his comfort about the conduct of the stars. But these
were noble suspicions--leaps into the light. They are no more
comparable to the suspicions which are becoming a feature of public
life than the energies of an explorer of the South Pole are comparable
to the energies of one of those private detectives who are paid to
grub after evidence in divorce cases. One might put it a good deal
more strongly, indeed, for the private detective may in his own way be
an officer of truth and humanity, while the suspicious politician is
the prophet only of party disreputableness. He is like the average
suspicious husband, in the case of whom, even when his suspicions are
true, one is inclined to sympathise with the wife for being married to
so green-eyed a fool. Suspicion, take it all in all, is the most
tedious and scrannel of the sins.
It would be folly, of course, to suggest that there is no such thing
as justifiable suspicion. If you see a man in a Tube lift with his
hand on some old gentleman's watch-chain, you are justified in
suspecting that his object is something less innocent than to persuade
the old gentleman to become a Plymouth Brother. But the man of
suspicious temperament is not content with cases of this sort. He is
the sort of man who, if it were not for the law of libel, would
suspect the Rev. F. B. Meyer of having stolen La Gioconda from the
Louvre.
His suspicions are like those of a man who would accost you in the
street with the assertion that you had just murdered the President of
the United States or that you were hiding a stolen Dreadnought in your
pocket. Obviously there would be no reply to a man like this, except
that he was mad. He has got an idea into his head, and it is his idea,
and not the proof or disproof that the idea has any justification,
which seems to him to be the most important thing in the world.
Suspicion, indeed, is a well-known form of mania. Husbands suspect
their wives of trying to poison their beer; friends suspect friends of
planning the most extraordinary series of losses and humiliations for
them. Nothing can happen but the suspicious man believes that somebody
did it on purpose. He is like the savage who cannot believe that his
great-grandmother died without somebody having plotted it. Obviously,
to believe things like this is to put poison in the air, and it is not
surprising to learn that the savage goes out and murders the first man
he meets for being his great-grandmother's murderer. In this matter
civilised man is little better than the savage. He knows a little more
about natural laws, and so he is not suspicious of quite the same
things; but his suspicions, as soon as he begins to harbour them,
swiftly strip off his civilisation as a drunken man strips off his
coat in order to fight in the street. He becomes Othello while the
clock is striking. Straightway, all the world's his bolster; there is
no creature on earth so innocent or so beautiful that he will not
smother it in the insanity of his passion. Literature is to a great
extent an indictment of suspicion. _The Ring and the Book_ is an epic
of suspicion, and the _Blot on the 'Scutcheon_ is its tragedy. In the
story of Paolo and Francesca, again, we are made feel that the hideous
thing was not the love of Paolo and Francesca, but the murderous
suspicion of Malatesta. In this case it may be admitted, there was
justice in the suspicion; but suspicion is so very loathsome a thing
that, even when it is just, we like it as little as we like spying.
All we can say in its favour is that it is more pitiable. Men do not
go spying because there is a fury in their bosoms, but the suspicious
man is one who is being eaten alive at the heart. He wears the mark of
doom on his sullen brows as surely as Cain. For such a man the sun
does not shine and the stars are silver conspirators. He is a person
who can suspect whole landscapes; he sees a countryside, not as an
exciting pattern of meadow and river-bend and hills and smoke among
trees, but as an arrangement of a thousand farms with fierce dogs
eager for the calves of his legs. He can concentrate his affections on
nothing beautiful. He can see only worms in buds. He can ultimately
follow nothing with enthusiasm but will-o'-the-wisps. To go after
these he will leave wife and children and lands, and he will dance
into the perils of the marshes, into sure drowning--a lost figure of
derision or pity, according to your gentleness.
Nor is it only in private life that suspicion is a light that leads
men into bog-holes. Suspicion in public life is also a disaster among
passions. Englishmen who realise this must have noticed with
apprehension the growth of suspicion as a principle in recent years.
Suspicion is the arch-calumniator. That is why, of all weapons, it is
most avoided by decent fighters. Every honourable man would rather be
calumniated than a calumniator--every sensible man, too, for calumny
is the worst policy. It is clear that while the public men of a
country are prepared to believe each other capable of anything there
can be no more national unity than in present-day Mexico or than in
Poland before the partition. It is the same with parties as with
nations. The reason why revolutionary parties are so rarely successful
is that the members suspect not only everybody else but each other.
The more revolutionary the party is, the more the members are inclined
to regard each other, not as potential Garibaldis, but potential
traitors. For much the same reasons criminal conspiracies seldom
prosper. Crime seems to create an atmosphere of suspicion, and
co-operation among men who doubt each other is impossible. But it is
the same with every conspiracy, whether it is criminal or not. Secrecy
seems to awaken all the nerves of suspicion, even when one is secret
for the public good, and the conspirators soon find themselves
believing the most ludicrous things. Who has not known committees on
which some man or woman will not sit because of an idea that some
other member is in the pay of Scotland Yard? The amusing part of the
business is that this kind of thing goes on even in committees about
the proceedings of which there is no need of secrecy at all and at
which reporters from the _Times_ might be present for all the harm to
man or beast that is discussed. But there is a tradition of suspicion
in some movements that serves the purpose of enabling many innocent
people to lead exciting lives. I once knew a man who spent half his
time tying up his bootlaces under lamp-posts. He had an invincible
belief that detectives followed him, and he was never content till he
had allowed whoever was behind him to get past. Scotland Yard, I am
confident, knew as little of him as it does of Wordsworth. But it was
his folly to think otherwise, and for all I know he may be going on
with those slow but sensational walks of his through the London
streets at the present day. This is the amusing side of suspicion.
Unfortunately, it has also its base and mirthless side. Practically,
every bloody mistake--I use the word not as an oath--in the French
Revolution was the result of suspicion. It began with suspicion of the
Girondins; but suspicion of Danton and Robespierre soon followed.
Suspicion is a monster that devours her own children. Manifestly, no
movement can succeed in which men believe that their friends are viler
than their enemies. But in every movement, there are men who make a
trade of suspecting the leaders in their own camp, and the Socialist
movement is as much exposed to the plague as any other. Suspicion of
this kind, I think, is a bitter form of egoism. It is a trampling of
the suspected persons under one's own white feet.
Nor is it only in movements and in nations that suspicion plays havoc.
International suspicion is a no less costly visitor. We live in a
world in which every cup of tea we drink and every pipe of tobacco we
smoke pays toll to this ancient and gluttonous dragon. Every year each
country sets up huge altars of men and ships and guns to the beast,
but he is not satisfied. He demands universal power, and insists that
we shall give all our goods to him except just enough to keep
ourselves alive and that we shall not shrink even from offering up
human sacrifices at a nod of his head. Perhaps some day a new St
George will arise and release us from so shameful a subjection. Common
sense seems to have as little force against him as an ordinary
foot-soldier against Goliath. We feel the need of some miraculous
personage to put an end to our distress. Meanwhile, one may hail as
prophetic the continual organisation of new knighthoods for the
Suppression of the Dragon.
II
ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS
There is too little respect paid to the good resolutions which are so
popular a feature of the New Year. We laugh at the man who is always
turning over a new leaf as though he were the last word in absurdity,
and we even invent proverbs to discourage him, such as that "the road
to Hell is paved with good intentions." This makes life extremely
difficult for the well-meaning. It robs many of us of the very last of
our little store of virtue. Our virtue we have hitherto put almost
entirely into our resolutions. To ask us to put it into our actions
instead is like asking a man who has for years devoted his genius to
literature to switch it off on to marine biology. Nature,
unfortunately, has not made us sufficiently accommodating for these
rapid changes. She has appointed to each of us his own small plot; has
made one of us a poet, another an economist, another a politician--one
of us good at making plans, another good at putting them into
execution. One feels justified, then, in claiming for the maker of
good resolutions a place in the sun. Good resolutions are too
delightful a form of morality to be allowed to disappear from a world
in which so much of morality is dismal. They are morality at its
dawn--morality fresh and untarnished and full of song. They are golden
anticipations of the day's work--anticipations of which, alas! the
day's work too often proves unworthy. Work, says Amiel somewhere, is
vulgarised thought. Work, I prefer to say, is vulgarised good
resolutions. There are, no doubt, some people whose resolutions are so
natively mediocre that it is no trouble in the world to put them into
practice. Promise and performance are in such cases as like as a pair
of twins; both are contemptible. But as for those of us whose promises
are apt to be Himalayan, how can one expect the little pack-mule of
performance to climb to such pathless and giddy heights? Are not the
Himalayas in themselves a sufficiently inspiring spectacle--all the
more inspiring, indeed, if some peak still remains unscaled,
mysterious?
But resolutions of this magnitude belong rather to the region of
day-dreams. They take one back to one's childhood, when one longed to
win the football cup for one's school team, and, if possible, to have
one's leg broken just as one scored the decisive try. Considering that
one did not play football, this may surely be regarded as a noble
example of an impossible ideal. It has the inaccessibility of a star
rather than of a mountain-peak. As one grows older, one's resolutions
become earthier. They are concerned with such things as giving up
tobacco, taking exercise, answering letters, chewing one's food
properly, going to bed before midnight, getting up before noon. This
may seem a mean list enough, but there is wonderful comfort to be got
out of even a modest good resolution so long as it refers, not to the
next five minutes, but to to-morrow, or next week, or next month, or
next year, or the year after. How vivid, how beautiful, to-morrow
seems with our lordly regiment of good resolutions ready to descend
upon it as upon a city seen afar off for the first time! Every day
lies before us as wonderful as London lay before Bluecher on the night
when he exclaimed: "My God, what a city to loot!" Our life is gorgeous
with to-morrows. It is all to-morrows. Good resolutions might be
described, in the words in which a Cabinet Minister once described
journalism, as the intelligent anticipation of events. They are,
however, the intelligent anticipation of events which do not take
place. They are the April of virtue with no September following.
On the other hand, there is much to be said for putting a good
resolution into effect now and then. There is a brief introductory
period in most human conduct, before the novelty has worn off, when
doing things is almost, if not quite, as pleasant as thinking about
them. Thus, if you make a resolve to get up at seven o'clock every day
during the year 1915, you should do it on at least one morning. If you
do, you will feel so surprised with the world, and so content with
your own part in it, that you will decide to get up at seven every
morning for the rest of your life. But do not be rash. Getting up
early, if you do it seldom enough, is an intoxicating experience. But
before long the intoxication fades, and only the habit is left. It was
not the elder brother with his habits, but the prodigal with his
occasional recurrence into virtue, for whom the fatted calf was
killed. Even for the prodigal, when once he had settled down to
orderly habits, the supply of the fatted calves from his father's farm
was bound before long to come to an end.
There are, however, other good resolutions in which it is not so easy
to experiment for a single morning. If you resolved to learn German,
for instance, there would be very little intoxication to be got out
of a single sitting face to face with a German grammar. Similarly, the
inventors of systems of exercise for keeping the townsman in condition
all stress the fact that, in order to attain health, one must go on
toiling morning after morning at their wretched punchings and
twistings and kickings till the end of time. This is an unfair
advantage to take of the ordinary maker of good resolutions. He is
enticed into the adventure of trying a new thing only to discover that
he cannot be said to have tried it until he has tried it on a thousand
occasions. Most of us, it may be said at once, are not to be enticed
into such matters higher than our knees. We may go so far as to buy
the latest book on health or the latest mechanical apparatus to hang
on the wall. But soon they become little more than decorations for our
rooms. That pair of immense dumb-bells which we got in our boyhood,
when we believed that the heavier the dumb-bell the more magnificently
would our biceps swell--who would think of taking them from their
dusty corner now? Then there was that pair of wooden dumb-bells light
as wind, which we tried for a while on hearing that heavy dumb-bells
were a snare and only hardened the muscles without strengthening them.
They lie now where the woodlouse may eat them if it has so lowly an
appetite. But our good resolutions did really array themselves in
colours when the first of the exercisers was invented. There was a
thrill in those first mornings when we rose a little earlier than
usual and expected to find an inch added to our chest measurement
before breakfast. That is always the characteristic of good
resolutions. They are founded on a belief in the possibility of
performing miracles. If we could swell visibly as a result of a single
half-hour's tug at weights and wires, we would all desert our
morning's sleep for our exerciser with a will. But the faith that
believes in miracles is an easy sort of faith. The faith that goes on
believing in the final excellence, though one day shows no obvious
advance on another, is the more enviable genius. It is, perhaps, the
rarest thing in the world, and all the good resolutions ever made, if
placed end to end, would not make so much as an inch of it. One man I
knew who had faith of this kind. He used to practise strengthening his
will every evening by buying almonds and raisins or some sort of sweet
thing, and sitting down before them by the hour without touching them.
And frequently, so he told me, he would repeat over to himself a
passage which Poe quotes at the top of one of his stories--_The_
_Fall of the House of Ussher_, was it not?--beginning "Great are the
mysteries of the will." I envied him his philosophic grimness: I
should never have been able to resist the almonds and raisins. But
that incantation from Poe--was not that, too, but a desperate
clutching after the miraculous?
There is nothing which men desire more fervently than this mighty
will. It may be the most selfish or unselfish of desires. We may long
for it for its own sake or for the sake of some purpose which means
more to us than praise. We are eager to escape from that continuous
humiliation of the promises we have made to ourselves and broken. It
is all very well to talk about being baffled to fight better, but that
implies a will on the heroic scale. Most of us, as we see our
resolutions fly out into the sun, only to fall with broken wings
before they have more than begun their journey, are inclined at times
to relapse into despair. On the other hand, Nature is prodigal, and in
nothing so much as good resolutions. In spite of the experience of
half a lifetime of failure, we can still draw upon her for these with
the excitement of faith in our hearts. Perhaps there is some instinct
for perfection in us which thus makes us deny our past and stride off
into the future forgetful of our chains. It is the first step that
counts, says the proverb. Alas! we know that that is the step that
nearly everybody can take. It is when we are about to take the steps
that follow that our ankle feels the drag of old habit. For even those
of us who are richest in good resolutions are the creatures of habit
just as the baldly virtuous are. The only difference is that we are
the slaves of old habits, while they are the masters of new ones....
On the whole, then, we cannot do better as the New Year approaches
than resolve to go out once more in quest of the white flower which
has already been allowed to fade too long, where Tennyson placed it,
in the late Prince Consort's buttonhole.
III
THE SIN OF DANCING
It is a pleasure to see a modern clergyman expressing his horror of
the dancing of the moment as Canon Newbolt did in St Paul's. One had
begun to fear lately that the clergy were trying to run a race of
tolerance with the dramatic critics and the nuts. On the whole I
prefer clergymen in the denouncing mood. They are there to remind us
that the soul does not pour out its riches in rag-time songs, that
Peter is not to be bribed with trinkets, and that the gates of Heaven
will not--so far as is known--open to the bark of a toy-dog. They are
there, in a sentence, as the shaven critics of a saltatory world. The
history of civilisation might be interpreted with some reason as a
prolonged conflict between the preachers and the dancers. The preacher
and the dancer may both be necessary to us, like east and west in a
map; but we feel that, like east and west, they should keep their
distance from each other in censorious irreconcilement. I know, of
course, that the modern anthropologist is inclined to insist upon the
kinship between dancing and religion. We are told that the Church was
born not, it may be, under a dancing star, but at any rate under a
dancing savage. The theory is that man originally expressed his
deepest emotions about food, love, and war in dances. In the course of
time the leaping groups felt the need of a leader, and gradually the
leader of the dance evolved into a hero, or representative of the
group soul, and from that he afterwards swelled into a god. This, we
are asked to believe, is the lineage of Zeus. The theory strikes me as
being too simple to be true. It is like an attempt to spell a long
word with a single letter. At the same time, it gains colour from the
fact that the heads of the Church have continually shown a tendency to
dancing since the days of King David. We have it on good authority
that in the Latin Church the Bishops were called Praesules because they
led the dances in the church choir on feast days. It is a fact of some
significance, indeed, that at more than one period of history it has
been the heretics rather than the orthodox who have raged most
furiously against dancing. The Albigenses and the Waldenses are both
examples of this. Superficially, this may seem to weaken my contention
that preaching and dancing can no more become friends than the lion
and the unicorn. But, if you reflect for a moment, you will see that
it is the heretics rather than the orthodox who are, of all men, the
most given to preaching. Bishops preach as a matter of duty;
Savonarola and Mr Shaw preach for the religious pleasure of it. So
rare a thing is it to find an orthodox clergyman of standing doing
anything that deserves the name of preaching--and by preaching I mean
protesting in capable words against the subordination of life to
luxury--that, whenever he does so, the newspapers put it on their
posters among the great events, like a scandal about a Cabinet
Minister or an earthquake.
It is not difficult to see why the preachers have usually been so
doubtful about the dancers. It is simply that dancing is for the most
part a rhythmical pantomime of sex. It is the most haremish of
pastimes. One is not surprised to learn that Henry VIII was the most
expert of royal dancers. He was an enthusiast for the kissing dances
of his day, indeed, even before he had abandoned his youthful
straitness for the moral code of a farmyard that had gone off its
head. I can imagine how a preacher with his craft at his fingers' ends
could deduce Henry's downfall from those first delicate trippings.
Even the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ is driven to admit the presence of
the amorous element in dancing. "Actual contact of the partners," it
insists, "is quite intelligible as matter of pure dancing; for, apart
altogether from the pleasure of the embrace, the harmony of the double
rotation adds very much to the enjoyment." But that reference to "the
pleasure of the embrace" is fatal to the sentence. How are we simple
people as we whirl in the waltz to know whether it is the pleasure of
the embrace or the harmony of the double rotation that is making us
glow so? The preachers will certainly not give us the benefit of the
doubt. They will follow the lead of Byron, who, in his horror at the
popularisation of the waltz, declared that Terpsichore was henceforth
"the least a vestal virgin of the Nine." Many people will remember the
letter which Byron prefaced to _The Waltz_ over the signature of
Horace Hornem, supposed to be a country gentleman from the Midlands.
Describing his sensations on first seeing his wife waltzing, Mr Hornem
says:--
Judge of my surprise ... to see poor Mrs Hornem with her arms
half round the loins of a huge hussar-looking gentleman I
never set eyes on before; and his, to say truth, rather more
than half round her waist, turning round, and round, and
round, to a d----d see-saw, up-and-down sort of tune, that
reminded me of the "Black joke."
Cynics explain Byron's attitude to dancing as a matter of envy, since
he himself was too lame to waltz. At the same time, I fancy that an
anthropologist from Mars, if he visited the earth, would take the same
view of the drama of the waltz as Byron did. I do not mean to say that
the waltz cannot be danced in a sublime innocence. It can, and often
is. But the point is that sex is the arch-musician of it, and whether
you approve of waltzing or disapprove of it will depend upon whether,
like the preachers, you regard sex as Aholah and Aholibah, or, like
the poets, as April and the song of the stars. It is worth remembering
in this connection that a great preacher like Huxley took much the
same view of poetry that Byron took of dancing. Most of it, he said,
seemed to him to be little more than sensual caterwauling. Tolstoi, if
I am not mistaken, interpreted _Romeo and Juliet_ in the same spirit.
This kind of analysis, whether it is just or foolish, always shocks
the crowd, which can never admit the existence of the senses without
blushing for them. Confirmed in its sentimentalism--and therefore
given to "harping on the sensual string"--it swears that it finds the
Russian ballet more edifying than church, and would have no objection
to seeing the Merry Widow waltz introduced into a mothers' meeting.
There is nothing in which we are such hypocrites as our pleasures.
That is why some of us like the preachers. Even if they are grossly
inhuman in wanting to take our amusements away from us, they at least
insist that we shall submit them to a realistic analysis. In this they
are excellent servants of the scientific spirit.
What, then, is a reasonable attitude to adopt towards sex in dancing?
Obviously we cannot abolish sex, even if we wished to do so. And if we
try to chain it up, it will merely become crabbed like a dog. On the
other hand, there is all the difference in the world between putting a
dog on a chain and encouraging it to go mad and bite half the parish.
There is nearly as wide a distance separating the courtly dances of
the eighteenth century from the cake-walk, and the apache dance from
the Irish reel. Priests, I know, in whom the gift of preaching has
turned sour, have been as severe on innocent as on furious dances. But
this is merely an exaggeration of the prevailing sense of mankind that
sex is a wild animal and most difficult to tame into a fireside pet.
It is upon the civilisation of this animal, none the less, though not
upon the butchering of it, that the decencies of the world depend. And
this is exercise for a hero, for the animal in question has a
desperate tendency to revert to type. One noticed how its eye bulged
with the memory of African forests when the cake-walk affronted the
sun a few years ago. The cake-walk, I admit, seemed a right and
rapturous thing enough when it was danced by those in whose veins was
the recent blood of Africa. But when young gentlemen began to
introduce it as a figure in the lancers in suburban back-parlours one
resented it, not merely as an emasculated parody, but as an act of
dishonest innocence. But everywhere it has been the tendency of
dancing in recent years to become more noisily sexual. I am not
thinking of the dancing in undress which for a time captured the
music-halls. That is almost the least sexual dancing we have had. The
dancing of Isidora Duncan was of as good report as a painting by old
Sir Joshua. We may pass over the Russian ballet, too, because of the
art which often raised it to beauty, though it is interesting to
speculate what St Bernard would have thought of Nijinsky. But, as for
rag-time, it is a silly madness, a business for Maenads of both sexes;
and all those gesticulations of the human frame known as bunny-hugs,
turkey-trots, and the rest of it are condemned by their very names as
tolerable only in the menagerie. On the other hand, because the bunny
in man and the turkey in woman have revived themselves with such
impudence, are we to get out our guns against all dancing? Far from
it. One is not going to sacrifice the flowery grace of Genee, or
Pavlova with her genius of the butterflies, because of the multitude
of fools. All we can do is to insist upon the recognition of the fact
that dancing may be good or bad, as eggs are good or bad, and to
remind the world that in dancing, as in eggs, freshness is even more
beautiful than decadence. Perhaps some of the performances of the
Russian ballet would come off limping from such a test. Opinions will
differ about that. In any case, one cannot help the logic of one's
belief. Each of us, no doubt, contains something of the preacher and
something of the dancer; and our enthusiasms depend upon which of the
two is dominant in us. Meanwhile, we are likely to go on preaching
against our dancing, and dancing against our preaching, till the end
of time. That merely proves the completeness of our humanity. It makes
for balance, like, as I have said, east and west in a map. That,
surely, is a conclusion which ought to satisfy everybody.
IV
THOUGHTS AT A TANGO TEA
It is not easy to decide what is the dullest feature in the Tango Teas
upon which Londoners are now wasting their afternoons and their
silver. The most disconcertingly tedious part of the whole
entertainment is, in my opinion, the Tango itself: it is mere
virtuoso-work in dancing--an eccentric caper, not after beauty, but
after variety. But the rest of the programme has no compensating
liveliness. The songs are sad affairs, even for a music-hall, and the
band, with its continual "selections" dropped into every available
hole in the afternoon's amusement, gets on the nerves like a tune
played over and over again. And then, to crown everything, comes the
parade of mannequins wearing the latest fashions in women's dress, or
what will be the latest fashions in another month or two. On the whole
I think this part of the show must be given the prize for inanity. The
Tango is bad, and the tea varies, but this milliner's business--it is
more than dull, it is an outrage on human intelligence.
Students of society cannot afford to leave unnoticed this new
development in the tastes of the upper and middle classes. It seems to
me to represent almost the extreme limit in the evolution of the
English theatre. The actor-managers have often in recent years turned
Shakespeare into a dress parade, but here is the dress parade with
Shakespeare left out. Musical comedies, hundreds of them, have been as
amazing as fireworks with their wonder of costumes, and here is the
wonder of costumes without any alloy of musical comedy. Nor are these
costumes flashed upon you with a chorussed insolence. Slowly and
separately each girl appears, sometimes from the back of the stalls,
sometimes from the back of the stage, and marches before your vision
as obtrusive as an advertisement, while the band plays some tune like
"You made me love you." One should not say "marches" perhaps, but
glides. The glide seems to be the ideal at which the modern woman aims
in her walk, and the mannequin glides with every exaggeration. But, if
you have ever seen cows ambling along a country road you have seen
something strangely like the glide that is now in fashion, yet no one
thinks of speaking of cows as "gliding." The mannequins come before
us one by one at this slow cattle-walk, and pass along one of those
Reinhardt pathways above the heads of the people in the stalls. Then
they raise their arms and turn round as in a showroom and smile as in
the advertisement of a tooth-wash. And so on till ten or a dozen of
them have appeared and disappeared. Then out glides the whole school
of them again not singly this time, but in a procession, all smiling
under their barbaric panaches and their towering crest of feathers,
and one of them with her head and chin wrapped in gilt embroideries
that make her look like a queen with a toothache. All smiles and
paint, the girls nevertheless seem to have no more relation to their
gowns than a statue to the hat which someone has perched on its head.
They give us no drama of dress. They are simply lay-figures imitating
the colours of the rainbow. Perhaps, to a student of fashion, they
have some meaning and interest. But a student of fashion does not go
for his lessons to a music-hall. To the rest of us they are simply a
trash of fine clothes. They are a decadent substitute for gladiatorial
exhibitions. They are a last wild--no, no; not wild--a last tame
parody on life. Life as a parade of mannequins--the satiric
imagination could invent nothing more contemptuously comic. Perhaps,
in the theatre of the future, the characters of the plays will remain
as mannequins, while the words will be left out as superfluous. Hamlet
will appear in his inky cloak at the right intervals, turn round so as
to give us a good back and front view, and Ophelia will then take his
place in a procession of fine dresses, the whole play being a solemn
in-and-out movement of silent gowned figures. Shakespeare ought to be
much more popular that way. Even Shakespeare on the cinematograph
could hardly compete with it.
What, one wonders, is the cause of all this mannequinism? Is it a
survival of the passion for dolls? Or is it a case of woman's flying
to a refuge after man has ousted her from all her old busy pleasures?
Scarcely anything but the dress interest is left to her. Woman--at
least the kind of woman whom one sees at Tango Teas--no longer bakes,
or weaves, or spins, or makes medicines, or even sews as her
grandmothers--or, to be quite accurate, her grandmothers'
grandmothers--did. She has gradually been led to hand over her baking
to the baker, her medicines to the chemist, her weaving and spinning
to the mills. What could Penelope herself do in such circumstances?
Without her loom there would have been nothing for her but to think
out fresh ways of arranging her hair and to disguise herself
endlessly in new draperies which would have led to her being pestered
more than ever by the suitors. Idleness, it does not take a
Sunday-school teacher to see, is the universal dressmaker, and a woman
who is not allowed to work and does not drink and has not even a vote
is driven among the mannequins as surely as if you forced her there by
law. After all, if one has nothing to do, one must do something. One
must put one's virtue into hats and stockings if one is not allowed to
practise it more soberly. It may be, of course, that the mannequin
stage which the women of the comfortable classes have now reached is
really a step towards a more sober dignity. Woman had to be released
from the old servitude of the house--from the predestined making of
beds and sewing of clothes and cooking of dinners--in order to assert
her equal capacities with those of the man who rode to war and cozened
his fellows in the city and sat on committees and stayed out till all
hours. She may not have realised at the time that it was merely an
escape from one drudgery to another--from the drudgery of housework to
the drudgery of pleasure--but she cannot take her brains with her into
a music-hall matinee without realising it now. And she is learning to
hate the one as much as the other. Feminism is woman's great protest
against the drudgery of pleasure. Some of the feminists, it may be
granted, turn it into a claim to share with man all those old
pleasures with which man's eyes have long been yellow and weary. But
the spectacle of the middle-aged male followers of the life of
pleasure in any restaurant or theatre ought to terrify these bold
ladies from maintaining such a demand. The supreme philosophers of
pleasure, from Epicurus to Stevenson, have all had to turn to hard
work and virtue as the only forms of amusement which did not spoil the
bloom of one's cheek. Even the supreme philosopher of clothes would
have kept us far too busy ever to think about them.
People unfortunately have got it into their heads, as the result of a
long process of civilisation, that, in order to be beautiful, clothes
must be a kind of finery to which one gives the thoughts of one's
nights and days. And the result is that most women would rather take
the advice of their dressmaker than of Epicurus. It is one of the most
ludicrous misdirections that the human race has ever followed. The
dressmaker's living depends on her keeping off Epicurus with one hand
and the Twelve Apostles with the other, and she has certainly done so
with the most brilliant efficiency. We who do not live by dressmaking,
however, should be coolly critical of the dressmaker's point of view.
It was not she, perhaps, who invented, but it is she who most brazenly
keeps alive, the great delusion of civilised society that woman's
foolish dresses are more beautiful than the reasonable clothes of men.
In fifteen thousand years or so, when the idea of beauty will have had
time to develop into a tiny bud, men and supermen will laugh at this
old absurdity. The idea that modern men's clothes are ugly is a
deception chiefly maintained by advertisement agents and shopkeepers.
There is, I admit, much to be said against the bowler hat. But the
jacket, the trousers, and the sock--so long as it does not match the
tie--come nearer what is excellent and appropriate in dress than any
other costume that has been invented since the strong silent
Englishman left his coat of paint behind him in the wood. It is
possible, no doubt, to spoil the effect of it all with too much
folding and pressing. Dandyism means the ruin of one's clothes from
the aesthetic point of view. One must be ready to expose them to all
weathers--to have them rained upon and rumpled--if one wants them to
be really beautiful, say, like an old church.
It is because woman's dress at its finest does not stand this test of
beauty that a marchioness is worse clad than the driver of a coal cart
or a chimney-sweep. Not luxury, but necessity, is the creator of
beauty. Beauty comes from our submission to Nature; it is not a matter
of thieving a few handfuls of coloured feathers from Nature's breast
and wings. It comes by accident, as you will see if you look down from
a hill at night on a gas-lit town. Almost the only kind of lights
which are not beautiful are those which are deliberately so. One has
to go out of the streets among the lights of the White City in order
to see beauty giving way to prettiness. Similarly, one might say that
the only kind of dresses which are not beautiful are those which are
deliberately so. Even among the poor there is more grace to be found
among mill-girls in their shawls than when on Sundays they dress
themselves up to look as like their dream of riches as possible. I
hope that the dress parades in the West End theatres and music-halls
will sooner or later be transferred to the poorer districts. They may
not at once kill envy and the respect for wealth. They may not strike
people as being so ridiculous as they really are, though anyone who
finds amusement in waxworks ought to get sufficient entertainment from
a dress parade. But if the show has not this effect, it may at least
open the eyes of the poor to the barbarous conditions in which the
rich live and fire them with the determination to hurry to the rescue
and release them from the gilded cage of their luxuries. The beginning
of the social revolution, I foresee, will be a rising against the
mannequins. It will be an infinitely greater event in history than the
taking of the Bastille.
V
THE HUMOURS OF MURDER
Almost everyone who has committed a murder knows that the business has
its tragic side. Whether it also has its comic side is a question that
has been raised since the production of Sir James Barrie's play, _The
Adored One_. This, as most people are aware, is a farce about a lady
who kills a man by pushing him out of a railway carriage because he
will not allow the window to be shut. Some of the critics have
protested that the theme is too grim for light entertainment. They
are, most of them, probably, lovers of fresh air, who foresee a new
danger in railway travel if women--creatures already enjoying the
possession of an extremely feeble moral sense--are taught to regard
the murder of a hygienic fellow-passenger as a laughing matter. Some
years ago, when _The Playboy of the Western World_ was first put on
the stage in Dublin, there were similar denunciations of the idea of
making a comedy of murder. It was then considered, however, that
nobody outside Ireland could take murder so seriously as to miss
seeing the joke of it. As a matter of fact, I believe the average
respectable man all the world over would side in his heart with the
Dublin demonstrators. Murder is, after all, one of the oldest
institutions on earth. It dates from the second generation of the
human race. It is almost as venerable as a sin can be, and to treat it
flippantly is as shocking to comfortable ears as the blasphemies of a
boy. Everybody knows how Baudelaire used to shock the citizens of
Brussels by opening his conversation in cafes in a raised voice with
the words: "The night I killed my father." He has himself related how
he began the thing as a joke in order to punish the Belgians for
believing everything he said. "Exasperated by always being believed,"
he wrote, "I spread the report that I had killed my father, and that I
had eaten him, and that if I had been allowed to escape from France it
was only on account of the services I had rendered to the French
police, and I was BELIEVED!"
That is the penalty of the jester on serious subjects like murder. He
is nearly always believed. The very mention of prepense death puts a
great many people into a solemn mood that is hostile to wit and humour
and any kind of facetiousness. I have met men and women, for
instance, who were quite unable to see the entertaining side of
cannibalism. Gilbert's ballad of the _Nancy Lee_, about the cook who
gradually ate all the rest of the crew, moves them not to laughter but
to horror. When the cook, or somebody else, as he gobbles one of his
mates, enthusiastically exclaims: "Oh, how like pig!" they merely
shudder. Those of us who are amused, on the other hand, are so only
because we are not such inveterate realists as our neighbours. We
treat comic murders as Charles Lamb treated comic cuckoldries. We
regard them as happening, not in our world of realities, but in a kind
of no-man's-land of humour. If it were not so, we should probably be
as shocked as anyone else--those of us, that is, who are old-fashioned
enough to consider murder and adultery as on the whole reprehensible.
Luckily, human beings in the mass have gradually developed an artistic
sense which enables them to leave the world of serious facts for the
world of comic pretences at a moment's notice. And even the strictest
humanitarian can smile with a good conscience at the most hideous of
the tortures--"something with boiling oil in it"--discussed in the
paper-fan world of _The Mikado_. I can imagine a sensitive child's
being sharply disturbed by the punishments that at one time seem to be
in store for so many of the characters in the opera. But for the rest
of us Gilbert's Japan is as unreal as a nest of insects, where even
the crimes seem funny. In the same way we have made a child's joke of
Bluebeard, whose prototype was at least as atrocious a character as
Jack the Ripper. Perhaps, in some distant island of the South Seas,
where Europe is sufficiently remote to be unreal, the children are
already enjoying the humours of Jack the Ripper in the local
substitute for the Christmas pantomime.
Even a real murder, however, may strike one as amusing, if only it has
about it something incongruous. A thousand people have laughed for one
who has wept over Wainwright's murder of Helen Abercrombie, not
because it was not a filthy deed, but because the murderer, on being
reproached for it, uttered his famous reply: "Yes; it was a dreadful
thing to do, but she had very thick ankles." Here it is the
incongruity between the deed and the excuse for it that appeals to our
sense of humour. We laugh at it as we would laugh at Milton's Satan if
we saw him dressed in baby clothes. Similarly, when Peer Gynt and the
Cook fight after the shipwreck for possession of the place of safety
on the upturned boat, and Peer in effect murders the Cook, the
situation is comic because of the incongruity between what is said
and what is done. Take, for instance, the Lord's Prayer scene:
THE COOK (_slipping_): I'm drowning!
PEER (_seizing him_): By this wisp of hair
I'll hold you; say your Lord's Prayer, quick!
THE COOK: I can't remember; all turns black----
PEER: Come, the essentials in a word!
THE COOK: Give us this day----!
PEER: Skip that part, Cook.
You'll get all _you_ need, safe enough.
THE COOK: Give us this day----
PEER: The same old song!
'Tis plain you were a cook in life----
(THE COOK _slips from his grasp_.)
THE COOK (_sinking_): Give us this day our----
(_Disappears.)_
PEER: Amen, lad!
To the last gasp you were yourself.
(_Draws himself up on to the bottom of the boat._)
So long as there is life there's hope.
It is the paradox that delights us here--the exquisite
inappropriateness of Peer's invitation to the Cook to say a prayer
before he lets him dip under for the last time, and of the only
petition which the Cook can remember in his extremity. The latter
amuses us like Mr George Moore's story about the Irish poet who was
asked to say a prayer when out in a curragh on Galway Bay during a
furious gale, and who astonished the boat's crew by beginning: "Of
man's first disobedience and the fruit." Even in _The Playboy_ it is
the humours of the inappropriate that make Christy Mahon's narrative
of how he slew his da comic. One remembers the sentence in which he
first lets the secret of his deed slip out:
CHRISTY: Don't strike me. I killed my poor father, Tuesday
was a week, for doing the like of that.
PEGEEN (_in blank amazement_): Is it killed your father?
CHRISTY (_subsiding_): With the help of God I did surely, and
that the Holy Immaculate Mother may intercede for his soul.
There you have incongruity to a point that shocks an ordinary
Christian like a blasphemy. And Christy's reflection, as he finds that
the supposed murder has made him a hero--"I'm thinking this night
wasn't I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone
by"--tickles us because it brings a new and incongruous standard to
the measurement of moral values. De Quincey's essay, "On Murder
considered as one of the Fine Arts," owes its reputation for humour to
the same kind of unexpectedness in its table of values. At least,
that passage in which the lecturer of the essay describes the warning
he gave to a new servant whom he suspected of dabbling in murder plays
a delightful topsy-turvy game with our everyday moral world:
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes
to think very little of robbing; and from robbing he comes
next to drinking and Sabbath breaking, and from that to
incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward
path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has
dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he
thought little of at the time.