The advent of the Yellow Girl--the mad, fantastic siren who is
beginning to haunt the hoardings and our dreams--is calling forth a
good deal of an outcry among those who hold the cure of morals in the
English public press. It is rather a difficult undertaking to attempt
to import a ray or two of cheer and fantasy into the gloom and drab
of English life, but some of the English artists, touched with the
spirit of the age, have had the audacity to import the Yellow Girl
from Paris. There she is--on every hoarding and bare wall a gleam of
light and color and deviltry, under those dull gray skies, that must
awaken a flash of fantasy here and there in some toil-worn heart in
the crowd, and cheer some fog born pessimists who would fain forget
the necessities and narrowness of their drab existence. Instead of the
old monotonous clumsy pictures and unescapable rivers of hideous black
and white catch words, that seemed to emphasize the limited horizon
and freedom of the millions bound to spend their whole lives in the
great cities, there are ten thousand variations of the Eternal Feminine
in her latest glamor of gold and yellow, and even under the pall of a
London sky, the very walls open out into the land of Fantasia.
But the moralists are shocked, and they are fearful for the future
intellectual and moral stability of England, simply because the Yellow
Girl is the embodiment of an artist’s dream of the modern Circe--a
reminiscence of the Bacchantic dreams that used to fill the poets’
heads in the old days, before they were all become so very respectable.
It is the artist who now puts a little diversion and unreal distraction
from the invading ugliness and melancholy of modern metropolitan life
into the passing current of our fancies. The poets used to serve this
purpose, but they are all so anxious to stand well with Mrs. Grundy
nowadays, whereas Mrs. Grundy and the artists have never really arrived
at any amicable understanding. Old England and civilization are in no
danger from the Yellow Girl.
The moralists, unluckily, have no sense of humor, and so they fail to
perceive that the masses accept the Yellow Girl as an unreal fantastic
abstraction without any sort of relevance to the reality of life, which
yet stirs the imagination and puts a little splash of fitful joy into
reality.
A writer in one of the leading English journals assails the Yellow
Girl in a tremendous tirade, that shows the English intellectual
incapacity for appreciation of the light and good humored caricature
of the superficial aspects of life, which, by exaggeration, puts the
permanent and beautiful things of life into their true proportions and
tempers sanity of thought with a gleam of insight into the fantastic
range of human nature that lies always just below the drab surface
of the show of things. The English mind only seems to understand the
coarse and brutal caricature of Hogarth, with its savage insistence
upon a moral. Hogarth was too great an artist and observer, however,
not to have enjoyed and made capital of the Yellow Girl himself, if
he were alive today. The caricature of today is less obvious, and we
may thank our stars it is. The moralists, like the poor, we have always
with us, and they make modern life one perpetual din that leaves us no
time for thought, meditation or merriment. We should be grateful that
the hoarding places do not assail us at every turn with the sort of
caricature that bites into the heart and soul. There is quite enough
sadness in life in the all absorbing struggle for existence, and I
think that the Yellow Girl is one of those Providential gifts that keep
human life sweet and sane in the stress of the heartless strife for
bread and riches. She is the creation of the law of compensation that
gives us love and poetry, dreams and religion, and every other refuge
from life. The moralists and the realists and the rest of them who
would forever pin our minds in the narrow and sordid round of reality
would drive us all to madness if they had their way. The fantasy of
art and poetry keep life balanced and sane. Human nature requires
this outlet from the horrid nightmare of sordid sorrow it has created
in civilization. The so-called mad poets and unhinged artists give
us that distraction from ourselves and our monomaniac absorption in
money-making that saves the world from becoming one immense lunatic
asylum.
The English moralist describes the Yellow Girl in somewhat of the
fierce contumely of an ancient Hebrew prophet--but the Yellow Girl is
not really to be spoken of in the same breath with Ashtaroth. She is
but the phantom of dreams that pictured or unpictured lives ever in
the heart of youth. But she does not rule life as did Aphrodite. The
moralists should remember that youth and sorrow must have their dreams.
And all the commonplace virtues of domesticity are fed upon them. The
English writer bemoans the decadence of soberness in life in this
fashion:
“The growth of modern life is in great measure the Parisianising of
the civilized world. The worship of the senses is insensibly taking
hold on the world, and so in the land of Milton and the Martyrs is
set up the flaunting sign of the growing worship, this hair-brained
comedienne--the Yellow Girl. Bare armed, bare throated, great hatted,
with parasol a-kimbo, with flapping gown of gold, and snakey boa
bristling in the breeze, with tripping toes a la Chinoise, with waspy
waist, with painted cheeks and sparkling, wine-fed eyes, and a monkey
grin of daftest daftness--there flaunts the Yellow Girl, the she Baal,
the new born goddess of Today, laughing the amazed to scorn. She is the
Spirit of the Age--Circe herself again--Venus in a Regatta gown, the
Devil in petticoats, as he always was.”
This is strong as well as picturesque. But the truth is that the Yellow
Girl puts a splash of color into the dulness of city life, with its
endless bricks and placards and blank walls, and come upon in a sudden
turning her gleaming, impish eyes remind us that it is our own fault if
we take life too sadly, for the spirit of fantasy and joy lurks forever
in nature and life. As for our morals--they are less safe with drab
folk than they are with the Yellow Girl, who simply reminds us that Pan
rules in modern life as much as in the olden days.