Produced by Al Haines
THE MAYFAIR SET
III
CONVERSATIONS
WITH AN
UNCLE
[Illustration: Title page]
SELECT
CONVERSATIONS
WITH
AN UNCLE
(now extinct)
and two other
reminiscences by
H. G. WELLS
LONDON:
JOHN LANE
NEW YORK
THE MERRIAM COMPANY
1895
_Copyrighted in the United States._
_All rights reserved._
_Second Edition_
TO
MY DEAREST
AND BEST FRIEND
R. A. C.
PREFATORY
He was, I remember, short, but by no means conspicuously short, and of
a bright, almost juvenile, complexion, very active in his movements and
garrulous--or at least very talkative. His judgments were copious and
frequent in the old days, and some at least I found entertaining. At
times his fluency was really remarkable. He had a low opinion of
eminent people--a thing I have been careful to suppress, and his
dissertations had ever an irresponsible gaiety of manner that may have
blinded me to their true want of merit. That, I say, was in the old
days, before his abrupt extinction, before the cares of this world
suddenly sprang upon, and choked him. I would listen to him,
cheerfully, and afterwards I would go away and make articles out of him
for the _Pall Mall Gazette_, so adding a certain material advantage to
my mental and moral benefit. But all that has gone now, to my infinite
regret; and sorrowing, I have arranged this unworthy little tribute to
his memory, this poor dozen of casual monologues that were so
preserved. The merits of the monument are his entirely; its faults
entirely my own.
CONTENTS
SELECT CONVERSATIONS--
OF CONVERSATION AND THE ANATOMY OF FASHION
THE THEORY OF THE PERPETUAL DISCOMFORT OF HUMANITY
THE USE OF IDEALS
THE ART OF BEING PHOTOGRAPHED
BAGSHOT'S MURAL DECORATIONS
ON SOCIAL MUSIC
THE JOYS OF BEING ENGAGED
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
ON A TRICYCLE
AN UNSUSPECTED MASTERPIECE
THE GREAT CHANGE
THE PAINS OF MARRIAGE
A MISUNDERSTOOD ARTIST
THE MAN WITH A NOSE
OF CONVERSATION AND THE ANATOMY OF FASHION
This uncle of mine, you must understand, having attained--by the purest
accident--some trifles of distinction and a certain affluence in South
Africa, came over at the earliest opportunity to London to be
photographed and lionised. He took to fame easily, as one who had long
prepared in secret. He lurked in my chambers for a week while the new
dress suit was a-making--his old one I really had to remonstrate
against--and then we went out to be admired. During the week's
retirement he secreted quite a wealth of things to say--appropriate
remarks on edibles, on music, on popular books, on conversation,
off-hand little things, jotting them down in a note-book as they came
into his mind, for he had a high conception of social intercourse, and
the public expectation. He was ever a methodical little gentleman, and
all these accumulations that he could not get into his talk, he
proposed to put away for the big volume of "Reminiscences" that was to
round off his life. At last he was a mere conversational firework,
crammed with latent wit and jollity, and ready to blaze and sparkle in
fizzing style as soon as the light of social intercourse should touch
him.
But after we had circulated for a week or so, my uncle began to
manifest symptoms of distress. He had not had a chance. People did
not seem to talk at all in his style. "Where do the literary people
meet together, George? I am afraid you have chosen your friends ill.
Surely those long-haired serious people who sat round my joke like old
cats round a beetle--what is it?--were not the modern representatives
of a _salon_. Those abominable wig-makers' eccentricities who talked
journalistic 'shop,' and posed all over that preposterous room with the
draperies! Those hectic young men who have done nothing except run
down everybody! Don't tell me that is the literary society of London,
George. Where do they let off wit now, George? Where do they sparkle?
I want to sparkle. Badly. I shall burst, George, if I don't."
Now really, you know, there are no salons now--I suppose we turn all
our conversation into "copy"--or the higher education has eliminated
the witty woman--and my uncle became more and more distressed. He said
a lot of his good things to me, which was sheer waste. I became
afraid. I got him all the introductions I could, pushed him into every
lion's den I had access to. But there was no relief.
"I see what it is, George," said my uncle, "these literary people write
themselves out. They say nothing for private use. Their brains are
weary when they come into company. They get up in the morning fresh
and bright, and write, write, write. Then, when they are jaded, they
condescend to social intercourse. It is their way of resting. But why
don't they go to bed? No more clever people for me, George. Let us
try the smart. Perhaps among them we shall find smart talking still
surviving. _Allons_, George!"
That is how my uncle came into collision with fashion, how I came to
take him to the Fitz-Brilliants.
Of course you have heard of the Fitz-Brilliants? If you have not, it
is not their fault. They are the smartest people in London. Always
hard at work, keeping up to date, are the Fitz-Brilliants. But my
uncle did not appreciate them. Worse! They did not appreciate my
uncle. He came to me again, more pent up than ever, and the thing I
had feared happened. He began to discourse to me. It was about
Fashion, with a decided reference to the Fitz-Brilliants, and some
reflections upon the alleys of literary ability and genius I had taken
him through.
"George," said my uncle, "_this Fashion is just brand-new vulgarity_.
It is merely the regal side of the medal. The Highly Fashionable and
the Absolutely Vulgar are but two faces of the common coin of humanity,
struck millions at a time. Spin the thing in the light of wealth, and
I defy you, as it whizzes from the illumination of riches to the shadow
of poverty, to distinguish the one stamp from the other. You cannot
say, here the _mode_ ends, and there the unspeakable thing, its
counterpart, has its beginning. Their distinction of mere position has
vanished, and they are in seeming as in substance one and indivisible."
My uncle was now fairly under way.
"The fashionable is the foam on the ocean of vulgarity, George, cast up
by the waves of that ocean, and caught by the light of the sun. It is
the vulgar--blossoming. The flower it is of that earthly plant,
destined hereafter to run to seed, and to beget new groves and
thickets, new jungles, of vulgar things.
"Note, George, how true this is of that common property of the vulgar
and fashionable--slang. The apt phrase falls and applause follows, and
then down it goes. The essential feature of slang is words misapplied;
the essential distinction of a coarse mind from one refined, an
inability to appreciate fine distinctions and minor discords; the
essential of the vulgar, good example misused. First the fashionable
get the apt phrase, and bandy it about in inapt connections until even
the novelty of its discordance has ceased to charm, and thereafter it
sinks down, down. _Fin de siecle_ and _cliche_ have, for instance,
passed downward from the courts of the fashionable among journalists
into the unspeakable depths below. Soon, if not already, _fin de
siecle_ gin and onions and haddocks will be for sale in the
Whitechapel-road, and Harriet will be calling Billy a "cliche faced
swine." Even so do ostrich feathers begin a career of glory at the
Drawing-Room and the fashionable photographer's, and, after endless
re-dyeing, come to their last pose before a Hampstead camera on a
bright Bank Holiday.
"The fashionable and vulgar are after all but the expression of man's
gregarious instinct. Every poor mortal is torn by the conflicting
dreads of being 'common-place,' and of being 'eccentric.' He, and more
particularly she, is continually imitating and avoiding imitation,
trying to be singular and yet like other people. In the exquisitely
fashionable and in the entirely vulgar the sheep-like longing is
triumphant, and the revolting individual has disappeared. The former
is a mechanical vehicle upon which the new 'correct thing' rides forth,
to extort the astonishment of men; the latter a lifeless bier bearing
its corrupt and unrecognisable remains away to final oblivion, amidst
universal execration.
"It is curious to notice, George, that there has of late been a fashion
in 'originality.' The commonplace has turned, as it were, upon itself,
and vehemently denied its identity. So that people who were not
eccentric have become rare, and genius, so far as it is a style of
hairdressing, and originality, so far as it is a matter of etiquette or
morals, have become the habitual garments of the commonplace. The
introduction of the word 'bourgeois' as a comminatory epithet into the
English language, by bourgeois writers writing for the bourgeois, will
remain a memorial for ever, for the philological humourist to chuckle
over. If good resolutions could change the natures of men, opinion has
lately set so decidedly against the fashionable and the vulgar that
their continued existence in this world would be very doubtful. But
the leopard cannot change his spots so easily. While the stars go on
in their courses, until the cooling of the earth puts an end to the
career of life, and the last trace of his ancestral tendency to
imitation disappears as the last man becomes an angel, depend upon it,
George, the fashionable will ever pursue this chimaera of distinguished
correctness, and trail the inseparable howling vulgar in its wake--for
ever chased, like a dog with a tin can attached, by the horror of its
own tail."
Thus my uncle. He had said a few of his things. It is possible his
trick of talking like a disarticulated essay had something to do with
his social discomfort. But anyhow he seemed all the better for the
release.
"Talking of tails, George," he said, "reminds me. I noticed the men at
the Fitz-Brilliants' had their coats cut--well, I should say, just a
half inch shorter here than this of mine. Your man is not up to date.
I must get the thing altered to-morrow."
THE THEORY OF THE PERPETUAL DISCOMFORT OF HUMANITY
He had been sitting with his feet upon the left jamb of my mantel,
admiring the tips of his shoes in silence for some time.
"George," he said, dropping his cigar-ash thoughtfully into my
inkstand, in order, I imagine, to save my carpet, "have you ever done
pioneer work for Humanity?"
"Never," I said. "How do you get that sort of work?"
"I don't know. I met a man and a woman, though, the other night, who
said they were engaged in that kind of thing. It seems to me to be
exhausting work, and it makes the hair very untidy. They do it chiefly
with their heads. It consists, so I understand, of writing stuff in a
hurry, rushing about in cabs, wearing your hair in some unpleasant
manner, and holding disorderly meetings."
"Who are these people?"
"Never heard of them before, though they told me they were quite well
known. The lady asked me if I had been to Chicago."
I chuckled. I could imagine no more hideous insult to my uncle.
"I told her that I had been to most places south-eastward and eastward,
but never across the Atlantic. She informed me that I ought to have
gone to Chicago, and that America was a great country, and I remarked
that I had always thought it was so great that one could best
appreciate it at a distance. Then she asked me what I thought of the
condition of the lower classes, and I told her I was persuaded, from
various things I had noticed, that a lot of them were frightfully hard
up. And with that she started off to show whose fault it was, by the
Socratic method."
"Entertaining?"
"A little. I did not get all my answers right. For instance, when she
asked, 'Who sends the members of Parliament to Westminster?' I answered
her, 'The governors of the young ones and the wives of the others.'
And when she said that was wrong--I don't remember Socrates ever saying
bluntly that an answer was wrong--I said I supposed she referred to the
Evil One. It was very dull of me, of course, and it obliged her to
dictate the right solution.
"Afterwards she threw over teaching me anything, and explained to me
all about her Movements. At least, I got really interested in her
Movements. One thing she said struck me very much, though it could
hardly be called novel. It was that the fads of one age were the
fashions of the next; that while the majority of people were engaged in
their little present-day chores, persons like herself are making the
laws and preparing the customs for the generation to follow."
"Poor generations to follow!" I said.
"Yes, but there is a lot of truth in it; and do you know there flashed
upon me all at once a great theory, the Theory of the Perpetual
Discomfort of Humanity. Just let me explain it to you, George," he
said, bringing himself round so that his legs hung over the arm of his
chair. "I think you will see I have made a very great discovery, gone
to the root of the whole of this bother of reform movement, advancement
of humanity, and the rest of it." He sucked his cigar for a moment.
"Each age," he said, "has its own ideals of what constitutes human
happiness."
"A very profound observation," said I.
"Looking down the vista of history, one may generalise and say that we
see human beings continually troubled by the conditions under which
they live. I can think of no time in the world when there was not some
Question or other getting fussed about: at one time episcopal celibacy,
at another time the Pict and Scot problem, and so on. Always a
crumpled rose-leaf. Hence reform movements. Now, reforms move slowly,
and by the time these reforms come about, the people whom they would
have made happy, and who fussed and encountered dislike and satire and
snubbing, and burning and boiling in oil, and suchlike discouragements,
for the sake of them, were dead and buried and mere sanitary problems.
The new people had new and quite different needs, and the reforms for
which their fathers fought and died more or less uncomfortably, and got
into debt with the printers, so soon as there were printers to get into
debt with, were about as welcome as belated dinner guests. You take
me? Ireland, when Home Rule comes home to it, will simply howl with
indignation. And we are living in the embodied discontent of the
eighteenth century. Adam Smith, Tom Paine, and Priestley would have
looked upon this age and seen that it was good--devilish good; and as
you know, George, to us it is--well, a bit of a nuisance anyhow.
However, most people are like myself, and try to be as comfortable as
they can, and no doubt the next generation might do very well with it.
And then the pioneer people begin legislating, agitating, and ordering
things differently. As you know, George, I am inclined to
conservatism. Constitutionally, I tend to adapt myself to my
circumstances. It seems to me so much easier to fit the man to the age
than to fit the age to the man. Let us, I say, settle down. We shall
never be able to settle down while they keep altering things. It may
not be a perfect world, but then I am not a perfect man: Some of the
imperfections are, at least, very convenient. So my theory is this:
the people whom the age suits fairly well don't bother--_I_ don't
bother; the others do. It is these confounded glaring and unshorn
anachronisms that upset everything. They go about flapping their
ideals at you, and writing novels with a motive, and starting movements
and societies, and generally poking one's epoch to rags, until at last
it is worn out and you have to start a new one. My conception of the
progress of humanity is something after the Wandering Jew pattern.
Your average humanity I figure as a comfortable person like myself,
always trying to sit down and put its legs somewhere out of the way,
and being continually stirred up by women in felt hats and short
skirts, and haggard men with those beastly, long, insufficient beards,
and soulful eyes, and trumpet-headed creatures, and bogles with
spectacles and bald heads, and nephews who look at watches. What are
you looking at your watch for, George? I'm very happy as I am.
"Has it ever occurred to you, George, that one of the most
uncomfortable things in the world must be to outlive your age? To have
all the reforms of your boyish liberalism coming home to roost, just as
you are settling down to the old order....
"Six o'clock, by Jove! We shall keep them waiting if we don't mind."
THE USE OF IDEALS
"Ideals!" said my uncle; "certainly Ideals. Of course one must have
ideals, else life would be bare materialism. Bare fact alone, naked
necessity, is impossible barren rock for a soul to root upon. Life,
indeed, is an unfurnished house, an empty glass in a thirsty land--good
and necessary for foundation, but insufficient for any satisfaction
unless we have ideals. Or, again, ideals are the flesh upon the
skeleton of reality, and it cannot live without them.
"It always appears to me," said my uncle, "that the comparison of
ideals to furniture is particularly appropriate. They are the
draperies of the mind, and they hide the nakedness of truth. Your
fireplace is ugly, your mere necessary shelves and seats but planks and
crudity, all your surroundings so much office furniture, until the
skilful hand and the draperies come in. Then a few cunning loopings
and foldings, and behold softness and delicacy, crudity gone, and life
well worth the living. So that you cannot value ideals too highly.
"Yet at the same time----" My uncle became meditative.
"I would not have a man the _slave_ of his ideals. Hangings make the
room comfortable, but, after all, hangings _are_ hangings. Perhaps,
now and then--of course, I would not suggest continual inconstancy--a
slight change, a little rearrangement, even a partial replacement,
might brighten up the dear old dwelling-place. An ideal may be clung
to too fondly. When the moth gets into it, or the dust--did not
Carlyle warn us against this, lest they 'accumulate and at last produce
suffocation'? I am exactly at one with him there.
"And that, as any Cabinet Minister explains every time he opens a
public library, is why we have literature. Good books are the
warehouses of ideals. Does it strike you your furniture is sombre, a
bit Calvinistic and severe--try a statuette by Pope, or a classical
piece out of Heine. Too much white and gold for every-day
purposes--then the Reverend Laurence Sterne will oblige. Urban tone
may be corrected by Hardy, and Lowell will give you urbanity. And,
however well you match and balance them, remember there is a time for
ideals, and a time when they are better out of the way.
"The Philistine of Victorian literature, is a person without ideals,
the practical man. But just now the fashion is all for the things.
Ruskin and Carlyle set it going, and to-day the demand for ideals
exceeds the supply. And as a result, we meet with innumerable people
anxious to have the correct thing, but a little unsympathetic or
inexpert, and those unavoidable people who do not like the things but
feel compelled to get them. Ideals are not the easiest possessions to
have and manage, and they may even rise to the level of serious
inconveniences. So that I sometimes wonder these Extension people have
not taken up the subject of their management and use.
"Note, for instance, the folly of bringing ideals too much into the
daily life; it is childish, like a baby insisting on its new toy at
meal times, and taking it to bed. Never use an ideal as a standard,
and avoid any that reflect upon your conduct. The extremest decorative
people refrain from enamelling their kettles, and my cook though a
'born lady' does not wear her silk dress in the kitchen. Ideals are
the full dress of the soul. A business man, for instance, who let
visions of reverend Venetian and Genoese seigniors interfere with his
agile City movements--who, to carry out our comparison, draped his mind
with these things--would be uncommonly like a bowler in a dressing-gown.
"Then an ideal, we are also told, is an elevating influence in life;
but unless one is very careful one may get hoist with one's own petard
to a pitifully transitory soar above common humanity. The soar itself
is not unpleasant, but the sequel is sometimes disagreeable.
"To show how an ideal may trip up an inexpert mortal, take that man
Javvers and his wife. She also had an ideal husband, which was,
indeed, a kind of bigamy, and her constant references to this creation
of hers used to drive poor old Javvers frantic. It became as
objectionable as if she had been its sorrowing widow, and ultimately it
wrecked the happiness of their little home very completely.
"The seat of ideals, then, in one's mind, should be, as it were, a
lounge, over which these hangings may drape and flap harmlessly; but it
may easily become as the bed of Procrustes. To turn ideals to idols,
and to command your whole world to bow down to them, savours of the
folly of Nebuchadnezzar the king. Let your ideal world be far away
from reality, fit it with rococo furniture, angels and
birds-of-paradise, Minnesinger flowers and views of the Delectable
Mountains: and go there occasionally and rest--to return without
illusions, without encumbrance, but with renewed zest, to the sordid
world of the actual, the world of every day. Herein is the real use of
the ideal; all other is fanaticism and folly."
THE ART OF BEING PHOTOGRAPHED
"An album," said my uncle, as he sat and turned over my collection of
physiognomy, "is, I think, the best reading in the world. You get such
sidelights on the owner's heredity, George; distant cousins caricature
his features and point the moral of his nose, and ancestral faces
prophesy his fate. His friends, moreover, figure the secret of his
soul. But what a lot we have to learn yet in the art of being
photographed, what grotesque and awkward blunders your common sitters
make! Why, for instance, do men brush their hair so excessively when
they go before the lens? Your cousin here looks like a cheap chess
pawn about the head, whereas as I know him his head is a thing like a
worn-out paint-brush. Where but in a photograph would you see a
parting so straight as this? It is unnatural. You flatten down all a
man's character; for nothing shows that more than the feathers and
drakes' tails, the artful artlessness, or revolutionary tumult of his
hair. Mind you, I am not one of those who would prohibit a man wearing
what he conceives to be his best clothes to the photographer's. I like
to see the little vanity peeping out--the last moment's folly of a
foolish tie, nailed up for a lifetime. Yet all the same, people should
understand that the camera takes no note of newness, but much of the
cut and fit. And a man should certainly not go and alter his outline
into a feminine softness, by pouring oil on his troubled mane and
plastering it down with a brush and comb. It is not tidiness, but
hypocrisy.
"We have indeed very much to learn in this matter. It is a thing that
needs teaching, like deportment or dancing. Plenty of men I have
noticed, who would never do it in real life, commit the sin of being
over-gentlemanly in an album. Their clothes are even indecently
immaculate. They become, not portraits, but fashion-plates. I hate a
man who is not rumpled and creased a little, as much as I do a brand
new pipe. And, as a sad example of sin on the other hand, on the side
of carelessness, I have seen renderings of a very august personage
indeed, in a hat--a _hat_! It was tilted, and to add to the atrocity,
he was holding a cigar. This I regard as horrible. Think! your
photograph may go into boudoirs. Imagine Gladys opening the album to
AEnone; 'Now I will show you _him_.' And there you sit, leering at
their radiant sweetness, hat on, and a cigar reeking between your
fingers.
"No, George, a man should go very softly to a photographer's, and he
should sit before the camera with reverence in his heart and in his
attitude, as if he were in the presence of the woman he loved."
He turned to Mrs Harborough's portrait, looked at it, hesitated, looked
again, and passed on.
"I often think we do not take this business of photography in a
sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage:
you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe. I know of one man
who has an error of youth of this kind on his mind--a fancy-dress
costume affair, Crusader or Templar--of which he is more ashamed than
many men would be of the meanest sins. For sometimes the camera has
its mordant moods, and amazes you by its saturnine estimate of your
merits. This man was perhaps a little out of harmony with the garments
of chivalry, and a trifle complacent and vain at the time. But the
photograph of him is so cynical and contemptuous, so merciless in its
exposure of his element of foolishness, that we may almost fancy the
spook of Carlyle had got mixed up with the chemicals upon the film.
Yet it never really dawned upon him until he had distributed this
advertisement of his little weakness far and wide, that the camera had
called him a fool to his face. I believe he would be glad now to buy
them all back at five pounds a copy.
"This of Minnie Hobson is a work of art. Bless me, the girl must be
thirty-seven or thirty-eight now, and just look at her! These
photographers have got a trick now, if your face is one of the long
kind, of raising the camera, bending your head forward, and firing down
at you. So our Minnie becomes quite chubby again. Then, this thing
has been retouched." My uncle peered into the photograph. "It seems
to me it is pretty nearly all retouching. For instance, if you look at
the eye, that high light is not perfectly even; that was touched in on
the negative with a pencil. Then about the neck of our Minnie I have
observed certain bones, just the slightest indication of her
collar-bone, George, but that has disappeared under the retoucher's
pencil. Then the infantile smoothness of her cheek, and the
beautifully-rounded outline, is produced by the retoucher carefully
scraping off the surface of the film where the cheekbone projected with
a sharp knife. There are also in real life little lines between the
corner of our Minnie's mouth and her nostril. And again, Minnie is one
of those people whose dresses never seem to fit, but this fits like a
glove. These retouchers are like Midas, and they turn all that comes
to their hands to gold; or, like Spring, the flowers come back at their
approach. They reverse the work of Ithuriel, and restore brightness to
the fallen. They sit at their little desks, and scratch, scratch,
scratch with those delicate pencils of theirs, scratching away age,
scratching away care, making the crooked straight, and the rough
smooth. They are the fairies of photography, and fill our albums with
winsome changelings. Their ministry anticipates in a little way the
angels who will take us when we die, releasing us from the worn and
haggard body of this death, and showing something of the eternal life
and youth that glows within. Or one might say that the spirit of the
retoucher is the spirit of Love. It makes plain women beautiful, and
common men heroic. Her regal fingers touch for the evil of
ungainliness, and, behold, we are restored. Her pencil is like the
Queen's sword, and it makes knights out of common men.
"When I have my photograph taken," said my uncle, "I always like to
think of the retoucher. I idealise her; I fancy her with the sweetest
eyes I have ever seen, and an expression infinitely soft and tender.
And she looks closely into my face, and her little pencil goes gently
and lovingly over my features. Tickle, tickle. In that way, George, I
get a really very nice expression indeed." My uncle turned to his own
presentment, and mused pleasantly for a space. Then he looked again at
Mrs Harborough as if inadvertently, and asked her name.
"I like this newer way of taking your photograph, against a mere grey
background; just the head of you. One should always beware of the
property furniture of the photographer. In the seventies they were
great at such aids--a pedestal, a cork rustic stile, wide landscape in
the distance, but I think that we are at least getting beyond that now.
People in those days must have been afraid to be left alone before a
camera, or they wanted it to seem that they were taken unawares, quite
against their modesty--did not know what the camera was, and were just
looking at it. A very favourite pose for girls was a graceful droop
over a sofa, chin on elegant hand. When I was at Dribblebridge--I was
a bright young fellow then--I collected a number of local photographs,
ladies chiefly, and the thing was very noticeable when I put them in a
row over my mantleshelf. The local 'artist' was intensely fond of that
pose. But fancy the local leader finding her cook drooping over the
same sofa as herself! Nowadays, I see, you get merely the heads of
your girls, with their hair flossed up, intense light from above, and
faces in shadow. I think it is infinitely better.
What horrible things hands become in a photograph! I wonder how it is
that the hand in a photograph is always four shades darker than the
arm. Every girl who goes to be photographed in evening dress should be
solemnly warned to keep her hands out of the picture. They will look
as though she has been enamelling the grate, or toying with a bucket of
pitch. There is something that sins against my conception of womanly
purity in those dark hands."
My uncle shut the album. "Yes, it is a neglected field of education,
an important branch of deportment altogether forgotten. Our well-bred
ease fails us before the camera; we are lucky if we merely look stiff
and self-conscious. I should fancy there would be an opening for some
clever woman to teach people how to dress for the occasion and how to
sit, what to avoid and how to avoid it. As it is, we go in a state of
nervous agitation, obsequiously costumed; our last vestige of
self-assertion vanishes before the unwinking Cyclops eye of the
instrument, and we cower at the mercy of the thing and its attendant.
They make what they will of us, and the retoucher simply edits the
review with an eye to the market. So history is falsified before our
faces, and we prepare a lie for our grandchildren. We fail to stamp
our individualities upon our photographs, and are mere 'dumb-driven
cattle' in the matter. We sin against ourselves in this neglect, and
act against the spirit of the age. Sooner or later this haphazard
treatment of posterity must come to an end." He meditated for a
moment. Then, as if pursuing a train of thought, "That Mrs Harborough
is a very pretty woman, George. Where did you happen to meet her?"
BAGSHOT'S MURAL DECORATIONS
Bagshot was rather proud of his new quarters until my uncle called upon
him. Up to then he felt assured he was doing right; had, indeed, not
the faintest doubt in the matter until my uncle unsettled him. "Nice
carpet, Bagshot," said my uncle, "nice and soft. This chair certainly
very comfortable. But what the mischief do you mean--you, with your
pretence to culture--by hanging your dwelling with all those framed and
glazed photograph and autograph dittoes? I should have thought you at
least would have known better. Love and Life, and Love and Death, the
Daphnephoria, Rembrandt's portrait--Wild Havoc, man! What were you
thinking of?"
Bagshot seemed staggered. He ventured to intimate feebly his
persuasion that the things were rather good.
"Good they certainly are, and well reproduced, but only the Bible and
Shakspeare could stand this incessant reiteration, and not all
Shakspeare. These things are in shop windows, man--drawing-rooms,
offices, everywhere. They afflict me like popular songs--like popular
quotations. They are good enough--as a matter of fact they are too
good. Only, don't you know Willis has Love and Life and Love and
Death? And so has Smith, and Bays has Rembrandt's portrait in his
office, and my niece Euphemia has the Daphnephoria in her drawing-room.
I can't understand, George, why you let it stay there. It is possible
to have too much of a good thing. There is no getting away from these
all too popular triumphs. They cover up the walls everywhere. They
consume all other art. I shall write a schedule some day of the Fifty
Correct Pictures of the British People. And to find _you_, Bagshot,
among the Philistines!"
"I thought they showed rather an improvement in the general taste,"
said Bagshot. "There is no reason why a thing should not be common,
and yet very beautiful. Primroses, for instance----"
"That is true enough, but pictures are not primroses," said my uncle.
"Besides, I think we like primroses all the better because they must
soon be over; but these are perennial blossoms, like the everlasting
flowers and dried grass of a lodging house. They may still be
beautiful, but by this time, Bagshot, they are awfully dry and dusty.
Who looks at them? I notice our eyes avoid them even while we talk
about them. We have all noticed everything there is to be noticed, and
said all the possible things that are to be said about them long ago.
Surely a picture must be a little fresh to please. Else we shall come
at last to the perfect picture, and art will have an end. Don't you
see the mere popularity of these things of the pavement is enough to
condemn them in the estimation of every right-minded person?"
"I don't see it," said Bagshot, making head against the torrent. "I
cannot afford to go to these swells and get original work of theirs----"
"What do you want with 'these swells' and their original work?"
interrupted my uncle fiercely. "Haven't they used up all their
originality ages ago? Is it not open to such men as yourself to
discover new men? There are men pining in garrets now for you,
Bagshot. Fancy the delight of having pictures that are unfamiliar,
pictures that catch the eye and are actually to be looked at, pictures
that suggest new remarks, pictures by a name that the stray visitor has
never heard of and which therefore puzzle him dreadfully because he
hasn't the faintest idea whether to praise or blame them! Isn't it
worth hunting studios for, and even, maybe, going to the Academy?
Besides, suppose your struggling artist comes to the front. What price
the five-guinea specimen of his early style then? Your artistic virtue
is indeed its own reward, and, besides, you can boast about finding
him. The poor man of culture and the struggling artist live for one
another, or at least they ought to--though I am afraid it is not much
of a living for the struggling artist." He paused abruptly. "I
suppose that autotype cost thirty shillings, and this carpet about five
pounds?"
Bagshot assumed an elegant attitude against his bureau. He had
discovered his reply. "You know you are bitten by the fashion for
originality. Why should I make my room hideous with the work of
third-rate mediocrity, or of men who are still learning to paint,
simply in order to be unlike my neighbour?"
"Why," returned my uncle, "should you hang up things less interesting
than your wall paper, in mere imitation of your neighbours? For this
on your walls, Bagshot, deny it though you may, is not art but fashion.
I tell you, you do not care a rap for art. You think pictures are a
part of virtue, like a silk hat--or evening dress at dinner. And in
your choice of pictures you follow after your kind. I never met a
true-born Briton yet who dared to buy a picture on his own
accord--unless he was a dealer. And then usually he was not really a
true-born Briton. He waits to see what is being hung. He has these
things now because he thinks they are right, not because they are
beautiful, just as he used to have the Stag at Bay and the Boastful
Hound. It is Leighton now; it was Landseer then. Really I believe
that very soon the ladies' papers will devote a column to pictures.
Something in this style. 'Smart people are taking down their
Rossetti's Annunciations now, and are hanging Gambler Bolton's new
Hippopotamus in the place of it. This Hippopotamus is to be the
correct thing in pictures this year, and no woman with any claim to be
considered smart will fail to have it over her piano. Marcus Stone's
new engraving will also be rather chic. Watts's Hope is now considered
a little dowdy.' And so forth. This gregarious admiration is the very
antithesis of artistic appreciation, which I tell you, simply must be
individual."
"Go on," said Bagshot, "go on."
"And that," said my uncle, with the glow of discovery in his face,
"that is where the vulgar critic goes wrong. He conceives an
orthodoxy. He tries to explain why Velasquez is better than Raphael
and Raphael better than Gerard Dow. As well say why a cirrus cloud is
better than a sycamore and a sycamore better than a scarlet hat. Every
painter, unless he is a mere operative, must have his peculiar public.
It is incredible that any painter can really satisfy the aesthetic needs
of such a public as these reproductions indicate. True art is always
sectarian. Why were Landseer and Sidney Cooper popular a few years
ago, and why does every tea-table sneer at them now? There must be
something admirable in them, or they would never have been admired.
Then why has my niece Annie dropped admiring Poynter, and why does she
pretend--and a very thin pretence it is--to admire Whistler?"
"You are wandering from my pictures," said Bagshot.
"I want to," said my uncle. "But why do you try and hide your taste
under these mere formalities in frames? Why do you always say 'I pass'
in the game of decoration? Better a mess of green amateurs and love
therewith, than the richest autotypes and dull complacency. Have what
you like. There is no such thing as absolute beauty. That is the
Magna Charta of the world of art. What is beautiful to me is not
beautiful to another man, in art as in women. But take care to get the
art that fits you. Frankly, that 'Love and Death' suits you, Bagshot,
about as much as a purple toga would. Orchardson is in your style. I
tell you that the greengrocer who buys an original oil painting for
sixteen shillings with frame complete is far nearer artistic salvation
than the patron of the popular autotype. Surely you will wake up
presently, Bagshot, and wonder what you have been about.
"Half-past four, by Jove! I must be getting on. Well, Bagshot, ta-ta.
One must talk, you know. I really hope you will be comfortable in your
new rooms."
And so good-bye to Bagshot, staring in a puzzled way at his reviled and
desecrated walls.
ON SOCIAL MUSIC
My poor uncle came to me the other evening in a most distressful state,
broken down to common blasphemy. His ample front was rumpled with
sorrow and his tie disorderly aslant. His hair had gone rough with his
troubles. "The time I have had, George!" he panted. "Give me
something to drink in the name of Holy Charity."
Since the _Pall Mall Gazette_ took to reporting his little sayings
about photographs and ornaments, ideals and fashions, he has been
setting up as a conversationalist. He thinks he was designed by
Providence to that end, and aids his destiny as much as he can by
elaborately preparing remarks.
Yet this thing had happened. "They put," said my uncle, "a little chap
at the piano, and me at a very nice girl indeed as she looked; and the
little chap began, and so did I. I said a prelude thing of mine, brand
new and rather pretty."
He stopped. He turned to nerve himself with whisky.
"Well," I said, when the pause seemed sufficient; "what did she say?"
My uncle looked unspeakable things. Then in a whisper, bending towards
me:
"_She said----Sssh_!"
He repeated it that I might grasp its full enormity, "_Sssh_!--so!"
"What _is_ music," said my uncle, after a moody silence, "that
reasonable people should listen to it? I _had_ to listen to it myself,
and it struck me. It was just a tune this little chap was trying to
remember, and now he would come at it this way and now that. He never
got it quite right, though he fumbled about it for ten minutes or a
quarter of an hour. And then two girls went, and one punished the
piano while the other, with a wrist rather than an ear for music,
drowned its cries with a violin. So it went on all the evening, and
when I moved they all looked at me; I had been put on a nervous wicker
chair, and I knew my shoes squeaked like a carnival of swine, and so I
could not get away. And all the things that kept coming into my head,
George, the neat remarks and graceful sayings!
"You see, I look at it in this light. Music is merely background, and
ought to be kept in its place. I am no enemy of music, George. The
air in a room should be melodious, for the same reason that it should
be faintly pleasing to the olfactory sense, and neither hot nor stuffy.
Just as the walls should be delightfully coloured and softly lit, and
the refreshments pleasant and at the moment of need. But surely we
meet for human intercourse. When I go to see people I go to see the
people--not to hear a hired boy play the piano. But these people plant
a _chevaux de frise_ of singers and performers upon instruments of
music between themselves and me. They gag me with a few pennyworths of
second-hand opera. There I was bursting to talk, and nice,
intelligent-looking girls to talk to, and whenever I began to say
something they said '_Sssh_!' Tantalus in a drawing-room it was--the
very Hades of hospitality.
"Surely some day we shall learn refinement in our entertaining. Your
modern hostess issues her invitations and seems overcome with
consternation at her gathering. 'What _shall_ I do with all these
people?' she seems to ask. So she dabs cakes upon them, piles coffee
cups over them: 'Eat,' she says, 'and shut up!' and stifles their
protests with a clamorous woman and a painful piano.
"No, of course I don't object to having music. But it is an accessory,
not an object, in life. It is, after all, a physical comfort, a
pleasant vibration in one's ears. To make an object of it is
sensuality. It is on all-fours with worshipping the wallpaper. Some
wall-papers are very beautiful things nowadays, harmonious in form and
colour, skilful in invention; but people do not expect you to sit down
and admire wall-paper, or promise you 'wallpaper at eight.' Neither do
they put an extinguisher over any girl who does not go with the
wall-paper, or expect you to dress in neutral tint on account of it,
and they are not hurt if you go away without seeming to see it.
Gustatory harmony, too, is very delicious. Yet there is no hush during
dinner; they do not insist upon a persistent gnawing in honour of the
feast. But these musical people! their god is their piano. They set
up an idol in their salon, and command all the world to bow down to it.
They found a priestcraft of pianists, and an Inquisition of fiddlers.
When I came away they were all crowded round a violin, the women
especially. They could not have fussed more if it had been a baby.
They stroked it and admired its figure. It _had_ rather a fashionable
figure, but the neck was too long...."
I began to suspect the cause of this bitterness.
"Yes. She was there. And while some of this piano was going on she
looked at the ear of the man who was playing with a dreamy, tender
look.... No. I couldn't get a word with her the whole evening."
THE JOYS OF BEING ENGAGED
As I was passing the London University the other day I saw my uncle
emerge from the branch of the Bank of England opposite, and proceed in
the direction of the Burlington Arcade. He was elaborately disguised
as a young man, even to the youthful flower, and I was incontinently
smitten with curiosity respecting the dark purpose he might veil in
this way. There is, to me, a peculiar and possibly rather a childish
fascination in watching my more intimate friends unobserved, and,
curiously enough, I had never before studied the avuncular back view.
I found something singularly entertaining in the study of the graceful
contour of his new frock coat, and in the cheerful carriage of his
cane. He paraded, a dignified procession of one, some way down the
Arcade, hesitated for a moment outside a jeweller's shop, and then
entered it. I strolled on as far as Piccadilly, returned to the shop,
and so fell upon him suddenly in the midst of his buying.
"Hullo, George!" he said hastily, facing me so as to hide as much of
the counter as possible. "How's Euphemia?"
I looked him fairly in the eye. "You are buying a _ring_," I said in a
firm, decided voice.
He turned to the counter with an air of surprise. "By Jove, so I am!"
"A lady's ring," I said. He was, I could see, hastily collecting his
sufficiently nimble powers of subterfuge. "One must buy something, you
know, George, sometimes," he said feebly.
He had selected some dozen or so already, the most palpable engagement
rings I think I ever saw. One of them had visible on its inner
curvature the four letters MIZP--. He looked at them, saw the posy,
and then, glancing at me, laughed affably. "I meant to tell you
yesterday, George--I will take these," to the shopman. And we emerged
with a superficial amiability; the case of rings in my uncle's pocket.
The thing was rather a shock to me, coming so suddenly and
unexpectedly. I had anticipated some innocent purchase of the
jewellery he reviles so much, but certainly not significant rings,
golden fetters for others to wear and enslave him; and we were past the
flowershop towards Hyde Park before either of us spoke. It seemed so
dreadful to me that the cheerful, talkative man beside me, my own
father's little brother, a traveller in distant countries, and a most
innocent man, and with all the inveterate habits of thirty years'
honourable bachelorhood and all the mellowness of life upon him,
should, without consulting me, have taken the first irrevocable step
towards becoming a ratepayer, a pew tenant, paterfamilias, a fighter
with schoolmasters, and the serf of a butler, that I scarcely knew what
to say adequate to the occasion.
"Well," said I at last, with an involuntary sigh, "I suppose I must
congratulate you."
"Don't look at it in that light, George," said my uncle; and he added
in a more cheerful tone, "I am only going to get engaged, you know."
"You can scarcely imagine, George," he proceeded, "how I have longed to
be engaged. All my life it has been my hope and goal. It is, I think,
the ideal state of man. There was a chap with me when I was at
Kimberley who first put the idea into my head. His ways were animated
and cheerful even for a diamond field, where you know animation and
cheerfulness are, so to speak, _de rigueur_. Whisky he affected, and
jesting of the kind that paints cities scarlet. And he used every
night, before festivities began, to write a long letter to some girl in
England, and say, within limits, how bad he had been and how he longed
to reform and be with her, and never, never do anything wrong any more.
He poured all the higher and better parts of his nature into the
letter, and folded it up and sealed it very carefully. And then he
came to us in a singularly relieved frame of mind, and would be the
life and soul of as merry a game of follow-your-leader as one can well
imagine."
Pleasant reminiscences occupied him for a moment. "Every man should be
engaged, I think, to at least one woman. It is the homage we owe to
womankind, and a duty to our souls. His _fiancee_ is indeed the
Madonna of a true-hearted man; the thought of her is a shrine at the
wayside of one's meditations, and her presence a temple wherein we
cleanse our souls. She is mysterious, worshipful, and inaccessible,
something perhaps of the woman, possibly even propitious and helpful,
and yet something of the Holy Grail as well. You have no rights with
her, nor she with you; you owe her no definite duties, and yet she is
singularly yours. A smile is a favour, a touch of her fingers, a faint
pressure of your hand, is an infinite privilege. You cannot demand the
slightest help or concern of her, so you ask it with diffident grace
and there is an overflowing stream of gratitude from small occasions.
Whatever you give her is a gift too, while a husband is just property,
a mere draught-camel for her service. All your functions are
decorative, you hang her shrine with flowers and precious stones. You
treat her to art and literature, and as for vulgar necessities--some
one else sees to that."
"Until you are married," began I.