“WHAT woman suffers from,” said the Philosopher, “is over-praise. It has
turned her head.”
“You admit, then, that she has a head?” demanded the Girton Girl.
“It has always been a theory of mine,” returned the Philosopher, “that by
Nature she was intended to possess one. It is her admirers who have
always represented her as brainless.”
“Why is it that the brainy girl invariably has straight hair?” asked the
Woman of the World.
“Because she doesn’t curl it,” explained the Girton Girl. She spoke
somewhat snappishly, it seemed to me.
“I never thought of that,” murmured the Woman of the World.
“It is to be noted in connection with the argument,” I ventured to
remark, “that we hear but little concerning the wives of intellectual
men. When we do, as in the case of the Carlyles, it is to wish we did
not.”
“When I was younger even than I am now,” said the Minor Poet, “I thought
a good deal of marriage—very young men do. My wife, I told myself, must
be a woman of mind. Yet, curiously, of all the women I have ever loved,
no single one has been remarkable for intellect—present company, as
usual, of course excepted.”
“Why is it,” sighed the Philosopher, “that in the most serious business
of our life, marriage, serious considerations count for next to nothing?
A dimpled chin can, and often does, secure for a girl the best of
husbands; while virtue and understanding combined cannot be relied upon
to obtain her even one of the worst.”
“I think the explanation is,” replied the Minor Poet, “that as regards,
let us say, the most natural business of our life, marriage, our natural
instincts alone are brought into play. Marriage—clothe the naked fact in
what flowers of rhetoric we will—has to do with the purely animal part of
our being. The man is drawn towards it by his primeval desires; the
woman by her inborn craving towards motherhood.”
The thin, white hands of the Old Maid fluttered, troubled, where they lay
upon her lap. “Why should we seek to explain away all the beautiful
things of life?” she said. She spoke with a heat unusual to her. “The
blushing lad, so timid, so devotional, worshipping as at the shrine of
some mystic saint; the young girl moving spell-bound among dreams! They
think of nothing but of one another.”
[Picture: Why should we seek to explain away all the beautiful things of
life?]
“Tracing a mountain stream to its sombre source need not mar its music
for us as it murmurs through the valley,” expounded the Philosopher.
“The hidden law of our being feeds each leaf of our life as sap runs
through the tree. The transient blossom, the ripened fruit, is but its
changing outward form.”
“I hate going to the roots of things,” said the Woman of the World.
“Poor, dear papa was so fond of doing that. He would explain to us the
genesis of oysters just when we were enjoying them. Poor mamma could
never bring herself to touch them after that. While in the middle of
dessert he would stop to argue with my Uncle Paul whether pig’s blood or
bullock’s was the best for grape vines. I remember the year before Emily
came out her favourite pony died; I have never known her so cut up about
anything before or since. She asked papa if he would mind her having the
poor creature buried in the garden. Her idea was that she would visit
now and then its grave and weep awhile. Papa was awfully nice about it
and stroked her hair. ‘Certainly, my dear,’ he said, ‘we will have him
laid to rest in the new strawberry bed.’ Just then old Pardoe, the head
gardener, came up to us and touched his hat. ‘Well, I was just going to
inquire of Miss Emily,’ he said, ‘if she wouldn’t rather have the poor
thing buried under one of the nectarine-trees. They ain’t been doing
very well of late.’ He said it was a pretty spot, and that he would put
up a sort of stone. Poor Emily didn’t seem to care much where the animal
was buried by that time, so we left them arguing the question. I forget
how it was settled; but I know we neither of us ate either strawberries
or nectarines for the next two years.”
“There is a time for everything,” agreed the Philosopher. “With the
lover, penning poetry to the wondrous red and white upon his mistress’
cheek, we do not discuss the subject of pigment in the blood, its cause
and probable duration. Nevertheless, the subject is interesting.”
“We men and women,” continued the Minor Poet, “we are Nature’s
favourites, her hope, for whom she has made sacrifice, putting aside so
many of her own convictions, telling herself she is old-fashioned. She
has let us go from her to the strange school where they laugh at all her
notions. We have learnt new, strange ideas that bewilder the good dame.
Yet, returning home it is curious to notice how little, in the few
essential things of life, we differ from her other children, who have
never wandered from her side. Our vocabulary has been extended and
elaborated, yet face to face with the realities of existence it is
unavailing. Clasping the living, standing beside the dead, our language
still is but a cry. Our wants have grown more complicated; the
ten-course banquet, with all that it involves, has substituted itself for
the handful of fruits and nuts gathered without labour; the stalled ox
and a world of trouble for the dinner of herbs and leisure therewith.
Are we so far removed thereby above our little brother, who, having
swallowed his simple, succulent worm, mounts a neighbouring twig and with
easy digestion carols thanks to God? The square brick box about which we
move, hampered at every step by wooden lumber, decked with many rags and
strips of coloured paper, cumbered with odds and ends of melted flint and
moulded clay, has replaced the cheap, convenient cave. We clothe
ourselves in the skins of other animals instead of allowing our own to
develop into a natural protection. We hang about us bits of stone and
metal, but underneath it all we are little two-legged animals, struggling
with the rest to live and breed. Beneath each hedgerow in the springtime
we can read our own romances in the making—the first faint stirring of
the blood, the roving eye, the sudden marvellous discovery of the
indispensable She, the wooing, the denial, hope, coquetry, despair,
contention, rivalry, hate, jealousy, love, bitterness, victory, and
death. Our comedies, our tragedies, are being played upon each blade of
grass. In fur and feather we run epitomised.”
“I know,” said the Woman of the World; “I have heard it all so often. It
is nonsense; I can prove it to you.”
“That is easy,” observed the Philosopher. “The Sermon on the Mount
itself has been proved nonsense—among others, by a bishop. Nonsense is
the reverse side of the pattern—the tangled ends of the thread that
Wisdom weaves.”
“There was a Miss Askew at the College,” said the Girton Girl. “She
agreed with every one. With Marx she was a Socialist, with Carlyle a
believer in benevolent despotism, with Spinoza a materialist, with Newman
a fanatic. I had a long talk with her before she left, and tried to
understand her; she was an interesting girl. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘I
could choose among them if only they would answer one another. But they
don’t. They won’t listen to one another. They only repeat their own
case.’”
“There never is an answer,” explained the Philosopher. “The kernel of
every sincere opinion is truth. This life contains only the
questions—the solutions to be published in a future issue.”
“She was a curious sort of young woman,” smiled the Girton Girl; “we used
to laugh at her.”
“I can quite believe it,” commented the Philosopher.
“It is so like shopping,” said the Old Maid.
“Like shopping!” exclaimed the Girton Girl.
The Old Maid blushed. “I was merely thinking,” she said. “It sounds
foolish. The idea occurred to me.”
“You were thinking of the difficulty of choosing?” I suggested.
“Yes,” answered the Old Maid. “They will show you so many different
things, one is quite unable—at least, I know it is so in my own case. I
get quite angry with myself. It seems so weak-minded, but I cannot help
it. This very dress I have on now—”
“It is very charming,” said the Woman of the World, “in itself. I have
been admiring it. Though I confess I think you look even better in dark
colours.”
“You are quite right,” replied the Old Maid; “myself, I hate it. But you
know how it is. I seemed to have been all the morning in the shop. I
felt so tired. If only—”
The Old Maid stopped abruptly. “I beg your pardon,” she said, “I am
afraid I’ve interrupted.”
“I am so glad you told us,” said the Philosopher. “Do you know that
seems to me an explanation?”
“Of what?” asked the Girton Girl.
“Of how so many of us choose our views,” returned the Philosopher; “we
don’t like to come out of the shop without something.”
“But you were about to explain,” continued the Philosopher, turning to
the Woman of the World, “—to prove a point.”
“That I had been talking nonsense,” reminded her the Minor Poet; “if you
are sure it will not weary you.”
“Not at all,” answered the Woman of the World; “it is quite simple. The
gifts of civilisation cannot be the meaningless rubbish you advocates of
barbarism would make out. I remember Uncle Paul’s bringing us home a
young monkey he had caught in Africa. With the aid of a few logs we
fitted up a sort of stage-tree for this little brother of mine, as I
suppose you would call him, in the gun-room. It was an admirable
imitation of the thing to which he and his ancestors must have been for
thousands of years accustomed; and for the first two nights he slept
perched among its branches. On the third the little brute turned the
poor cat out of its basket and slept on the eiderdown, after which no
more tree for him, real or imitation. At the end of the three months, if
we offered him monkey-nuts, he would snatch them from our hand and throw
them at our head. He much preferred gingerbread and weak tea with plenty
of sugar; and when we wanted him to leave the kitchen fire and enjoy a
run in the garden, we had to carry him out swearing—I mean he was
swearing, of course. I quite agree with him. I much prefer this chair
on which I am sitting—this ‘wooden lumber,’ as you term it—to the most
comfortable lump of old red sandstone that the best furnished cave could
possibly afford; and I am degenerate enough to fancy that I look very
nice in this frock—much nicer than my brothers or sisters to whom it
originally belonged: they didn’t know how to make the best of it.”
“You would look charming anyhow,” I murmured with conviction, “even—”
“I know what you are going to say,” interrupted the Woman of the World;
“please don’t. It’s very shocking, and, besides, I don’t agree with you.
I should have had a thick, coarse skin, with hair all over me and nothing
by way of a change.”
“I am contending,” said the Minor Poet, “that what we choose to call
civilisation has done little beyond pandering to our animal desires.
Your argument confirms my theory. Your evidence in support of
civilisation comes to this—that it can succeed in tickling the appetites
of a monkey. You need not have gone back so far. The noble savage of
today flings aside his clear spring water to snatch at the missionary’s
gin. He will even discard his feathers, which at least were picturesque,
for a chimney-pot hat innocent of nap. Plaid trousers and cheap
champagne follow in due course. Where is the advancement? Civilisation
provides us with more luxuries for our bodies. That I grant you. Has it
brought us any real improvement that could not have been arrived at
sooner by other roads?”
“It has given us Art,” said the Girton Girl.
“When you say ‘us,’” replied the Minor Poet, “I presume you are referring
to the one person in half a million to whom Art is anything more than a
name. Dismissing the countless hordes who have absolutely never heard
the word, and confining attention to the few thousands scattered about
Europe and America who prate of it, how many of even these do you think
it really influences, entering into their lives, refining, broadening
them? Watch the faces of the thin but conscientious crowd streaming
wearily through our miles of picture galleries and art museums; gaping,
with guide-book in hand, at ruined temple or cathedral tower; striving,
with the spirit of the martyr, to feel enthusiasm for Old Masters at
which, left to themselves, they would enjoy a good laugh—for chipped
statues which, uninstructed, they would have mistaken for the damaged
stock of a suburban tea-garden. Not more than one in twelve enjoys what
he is looking at, and he by no means is bound to be the best of the
dozen. Nero was a genuine lover of Art; and in modern times August the
Strong, of Saxony, ‘the man of sin,’ as Carlyle calls him, has left
undeniable proof behind him that he was a connoisseur of the first water.
One recalls names even still more recent. Are we so sure that Art does
elevate?”
[Picture: Are we so sure that Art does elevate?]
“You are talking for the sake of talking,” told him the Girton Girl.
“One can talk for the sake of thinking also,” reminded her the Minor
Poet. “The argument is one that has to be faced. But admitting that Art
has been of service to mankind on the whole, that it possesses one-tenth
of the soul-forming properties claimed for it in the advertisement—which
I take to be a generous estimate—its effect upon the world at large still
remains infinitesimal.”
“It works down,” maintained the Girton Girl. “From the few it spreads to
the many.”
“The process appears to be somewhat slow,” answered the Minor Poet. “The
result, for whatever it may be worth, we might have obtained sooner by
doing away with the middleman.”
“What middleman?” demanded the Girton Girl.
“The artist,” explained the Minor Poet; “the man who has turned the whole
thing into a business, the shopman who sells emotions over the counter.
A Corot, a Turner is, after all, but a poor apology compared with a walk
in spring through the Black Forest or the view from Hampstead Heath on a
November afternoon. Had we been less occupied acquiring ‘the advantages
of civilisation,’ working upward through the weary centuries to the city
slum, the corrugated-iron-roofed farm, we might have found time to learn
to love the beauty of the world. As it is, we have been so busy
‘civilising’ ourselves that we have forgotten to live. We are like an
old lady I once shared a carriage with across the Simplon Pass.”
“By the way,” I remarked, “one is going to be saved all that bother in
the future. They have nearly completed the new railway line. One will
be able to go from Domo d’Orsola to Brieg in a little over the two hours.
They tell me the tunnelling is wonderful.”
“It will be very charming,” sighed the Minor Poet. “I am looking forward
to a future when, thanks to ‘civilisation,’ travel will be done away with
altogether. We shall be sewn up in a sack and shot there. At the time I
speak of we still had to be content with the road winding through some of
the most magnificent scenery in Switzerland. I rather enjoyed the drive
myself, but my companion was quite unable to appreciate it. Not because
she did not care for scenery. As she explained to me, she was
passionately fond of it. But her luggage claimed all her attention.
There were seventeen pieces of it altogether, and every time the ancient
vehicle lurched or swayed, which on an average was once every thirty
seconds, she was in terror lest one or more of them should be jerked out.
Half her day was taken up in counting them and re-arranging them, and the
only view in which she was interested was the cloud of dust behind us.
One bonnet-box did contrive during the course of the journey to make its
escape, after which she sat with her arms round as many of the remaining
sixteen articles as she could encompass, and sighed.”
“I knew an Italian countess,” said the Woman of the World; “she had been
at school with mamma. She never would go half a mile out of her way for
scenery. ‘Why should I?’ she would say. ‘What are the painters for? If
there is anything good, let them bring it to me and I will look at it.
She said she preferred the picture to the real thing, it was so much more
artistic. In the landscape itself, she complained, there was sure to be
a chimney in the distance, or a restaurant in the foreground, that spoilt
the whole effect. The artist left it out. If necessary, he could put in
a cow or a pretty girl to help the thing. The actual cow, if it happened
to be there at all, would probably be standing the wrong way round; the
girl, in all likelihood, would be fat and plain, or be wearing the wrong
hat. The artist knew precisely the sort of girl that ought to be there,
and saw to it that she was there, with just the right sort of hat. She
said she had found it so all through life—the poster was always an
improvement on the play.”
[Picture: The artist knew precisely the sort of girl that ought to be
there]
“It is rapidly coming to that,” answered the Minor Poet. “Nature, as a
well known painter once put it, is not ‘creeping up’ fast enough to keep
pace with our ideals. In advanced Germany they improve the waterfalls
and ornament the rocks. In Paris they paint the babies’ faces.”
“You can hardly lay the blame for that upon civilisation,” pleaded the
Girton Girl. “The ancient Briton had a pretty taste in woads.”
“Man’s first feeble steps upon the upward path of Art,” assented the
Minor Poet, “culminating in the rouge-pot and the hair-dye.”
“Come!” laughed the Old Maid, “you are narrow-minded. Civilisation has
given us music. Surely you will admit that has been of help to us?”
“My dear lady,” replied the Minor Poet, “you speak of the one
accomplishment with which Civilisation has had little or nothing to do,
the one art that Nature has bestowed upon man in common with the birds
and insects, the one intellectual enjoyment we share with the entire
animal creation, excepting only the canines; and even the howling of the
dog—one cannot be sure—may be an honest, however unsatisfactory, attempt
towards a music of his own. I had a fox terrier once who invariably
howled in tune. Jubal hampered, not helped us. He it was who stifled
music with the curse of professionalism; so that now, like shivering
shop-boys paying gate-money to watch games they cannot play, we sit mute
in our stalls listening to the paid performer. But for the musician,
music might have been universal. The human voice is still the finest
instrument that we possess. We have allowed it to rust, the better to
hear clever manipulators blow through tubes and twang wires. The musical
world might have been a literal expression. Civilisation has contracted
it to designate a coterie.”
“By the way,” said the Woman of the World, “talking of music, have you
heard that last symphony of Grieg’s? It came in the last parcel. I have
been practising it.”
“Oh! do let us hear it,” urged the Old Maid. “I love Grieg.”
The Woman of the World rose and opened the piano.
“Myself, I have always been of opinion—” I remarked.
“Please don’t chatter,” said the Minor Poet.