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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2011 with funding from 
 The Library of Congress 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/modesmoralsOOgero 
 
BY 
 KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD 
 
 MODES AND MORALS 
 A CHANGE OF AIR 
 
 HAWAII: SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS 
 
 VAIN OBLATIONS 
 
 TEE GREAT TRADITION 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
^ 
 
 MODES AND MORALS 
 
 BY 
 KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD 
 
 NEfF YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1920 
 
 C^t^f 2r 
 

 Copyright, 1920, hy 
 Charles Scribners Sons ^' 
 
 Piiblished February, 1920 
 
 Copyright, 1918, by HARPER c& BROTHERS 
 
 Copyright. 1914, by HENRY HOLT & COMPANY 
 
 Copyright, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1918, 1919, by THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY 
 
 COMPANY 
 
 FEB 25 1920 
 
 THE 6CRIBNER PRE68 
 
 OCI.A565022 
 
 fs/\:< -V 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The New Simplicity 3 
 
 Dress and the Woman 37 
 
 Caviare on Principle 58 
 
 The Extirpation of Culture 66 
 
 Fashions in Men 94 
 
 The Newest Woman 118 
 
 Tabu and Temperament 134 
 
 The Boundaries of Truth 164 
 
 Miss Alcott's New England 182 
 
 The Sensual Ear 199 
 
 British Novelists, Ltd. 218 
 The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling 254 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 MY first caption was Democracy, Plumb- 
 ing, and the War, That will hardly 
 do as a title, for it does not hint the 
 heart of the matter; though the war has pre- 
 cipitated conditions which our special form of 
 democracy has long been preparing us for, and 
 plumbing is perhaps as symbolic as it is ubiquit- 
 ous in the American domestic scene. All three, 
 with all their implications, are factors, certainly, 
 in our present problem of living, and if war 
 has brought that problem to acuteness, democ- 
 racy and plumbing (and what they may be 
 taken to stand for) have made us ripe for up- 
 heaval. Edison and his like are as responsible, 
 in their way, as Thomas Jefferson or William 
 Haywood. All three have, without doubt, con- 
 tributed to the present and future dilemma of 
 educated people in moderate circumstances. 
 War has, of necessity, turned moderate circum- 
 stances to actual poverty; but democracy and 
 plumbing were already preparing the debacle 
 for this group. All of us — the educated classes 
 as well as the uneducated — are guilty together, 
 that is, of pampering ourselves with physical 
 comforts; and democracy always makes for 
 materialism, because the only kind of equality 
 
 [3] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 that you can guarantee to a whole people 
 is, broadly speaking, physical. Democracy and 
 plumbing, as well as war, make the problem of 
 our immediate future a rather special one. We 
 do not share all phases of it with our Allies. 
 Let me explain, a little, what I mean. 
 
 If America has led the world in labor-saving 
 devices, it is because America is democratic on 
 a bigger scale than any other country. The per- 
 son who profits by the labor-saving device is 
 the person who does the work. The fact that 
 France and England have not kept pace with 
 us in plumbing and tiled kitchens and electrical 
 appliances does not mean — as we have some- 
 times fatuously taken it to mean — that they are 
 less civilized than we. It means only that per- 
 sonal service has been, with them, cheaper and 
 more a matter of course. Where prosperous 
 Americans multiply vacuum cleaners and elec- 
 tric washing machines and garbage incinerators, 
 prosperous Europeans multiply their number 
 of servants. The Englishman really prefers a 
 huge tin tub in his bedroom of a morning. We 
 prefer to walk into the bathroom and turn on 
 the tap. That preference may well have become 
 so natural that we cannot explain it. But the 
 origin of the American preference is surely 
 that in America only the very rich could afford 
 a personal servant whose duty it was to set up 
 the tub, fetch in huge cans of water, and re- 
 move all traces of the bath as soon as it was 
 
 [4] 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 done with. Even a few years ago, I remember 
 having great dIfEculty In a London hotel of the 
 better sort (but very English and almost to- 
 tally unfrequented by Americans) in getting 
 the chambermaid to procure me a slop-jar. The 
 hotel was much too British to run to numbers 
 of private baths. Hence the crying need of a 
 slop-jar. The maid finally stole one for me 
 from a room across the corridor, and assured 
 me that the gentleman from whom she stole 
 would not miss it. Nothing would induce her 
 to resume, in his behalf, the treasure. I am 
 informed, by friends who have more British 
 social experience than I, that slop-jars are not 
 in the best English tradition — ^because, theo- 
 retically, in the opulent old-fashioned house- 
 hold, as soon as you have washed your hands, 
 the water in which you washed them, the towel 
 on which you wiped them, mysteriously and 
 gracefully disappear. Perfection of service lies 
 in having plenty of dexterous servants lying in 
 wait to discover your needs; so many servants, 
 and such well-trained ones, that you cannot 
 wash your hands without their becoming aware 
 of it and, with the least possible impinging on 
 your notice, removing the traces of your ablu- 
 tions. Perfection of service does not involve 
 your emptying your own wash-basin, even into 
 a slop-jar. Hence, no slop-jar. 
 
 Now there are very few of us who would 
 take the trouble to invent a tiled bathroom if 
 
 [5] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 our tubs were automatically fetched, filled, and 
 removed for us, all at the proper instant; or if 
 a hot-water can miraculously sprang into being 
 as soon as the desire for hot water seized us. 
 There is no labor-saving device so perfectly 
 convenient as ringing a bell and having some 
 one else do the thing for you with complete 
 competence. It is by no means strange that 
 well-to-do Europeans have been content to be 
 supremely waited upon, instead of making 
 practical tasks mechanically easier for them- 
 selves. The goddess of the labor-saving inven- 
 tion is the woman who does all, or a good 
 share, of *'her own work." Old-fashioned 
 English and French houses are cold; but 
 (climate apart) nothing like so cold as Ameri- 
 can houses would be if Americans depended on 
 open fires. For in England or France there are 
 ten people to make the fires, to one in America. 
 We simply dare not — again, climate apart — 
 depend, as our British cousins have been wont 
 to, on open fires. The average household can- 
 not afford the servants to do incessant fire- 
 making all over the house. 
 
 So we have multiplied devices, from the 
 modest kitchen cabinet up; because that ma- 
 jority which advertisers and inventors are 
 always trying to reach does a lot of things for 
 itself. Even those Americans who always have 
 had, and perhaps still will have, plenty of ser- 
 vants, have indulged in these devices. For 
 
 [6] 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 pure philanthropy's sake? Well, I am afraid 
 not quite. Rather, because the standard hav- 
 ing been set by the mistress who is also the 
 servant, the standard must be lived up to, or 
 professional servants would complain. The 
 interesting point is that in America the stand- 
 ard is set by the woman who does her own 
 work or a part of it, or who may, at any given 
 moment, have to occupy herself thus. We are, 
 you see, a democracy beyond the democracies 
 of other lands. For it is not simply a question 
 of money; it is a question of our all being in 
 the same boat. 
 
 I am not going into the servant question, 
 for that is a question as trite as it is tragic. 
 But, as we all know, even before the war it was 
 growing acute. The best servants we had in the 
 old days came from the countries where per- 
 sonal service was a tradition — chiefly from the 
 territories of Great Britain. But northern 
 Europe is ceasing to enter domestic service; 
 rather, it seeks to employ. One has only to read 
 the pathetic testimony in the daily press, in the 
 "women's magazines," even sometimes in phil- 
 anthropic periodicals. What they all say is that 
 the only way you can keep your cook in your 
 kitchen is to treat her as if she were the gover- 
 ness, or to give her factory hours and factory 
 freedom — to put her on a level, that is, with 
 the more independent worker. At that, they do 
 not give us much hope of keeping her. But I 
 
 [7] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 fancy that, before we turn the whole house 
 over to the cook, we shall dispense with her 
 and get our meals from co-operative kitchens. 
 I have noticed of late years in the magazines 
 that deal with architectural and decorative 
 problems increasing stress on the absurdity of 
 having a dining-room. Why absurd? For only 
 one reason: that here is a room which must 
 be cleaned, which, therefore, means more ser- 
 vice. If you have your meals in the "living- 
 room," you dispense with so much floor-and- 
 wall space to be gone over. In only that sense 
 is it absurd. For most of us will agree that 
 while English lodgings are all very well, espe- 
 cially for a solitary creature, it is a painful 
 business for a large family to eat three meals 
 a day in a room which has to be lived in other- 
 wise. All people may not have the prejudice 
 known to some of us against social consump- 
 tion of food; but any one will agree that the 
 best dinner in the world leaves a smell behind 
 it. A dining-room may be a luxury, but it is 
 not an absurdity, so long as you can by any 
 means afford it. If the aesthetic and pseudo- 
 aesthetic experts in domesticity are telling us 
 that a dining-room is ridiculous, it is only be- 
 cause they wish to prepare us for an inevitable 
 contraction of our comfort, an unavoidable 
 mitigation of decency. The one most aristo- 
 cratic element in life, physically speaking, is 
 spaciousness; it has always been in the best 
 [81 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 tradition to be frugal to starvation in a corner 
 of a palace. But we have come nowadays to 
 care more for what we eat (I fear) than for 
 how or where we eat it. The abolition of the 
 dining-room is only a further step on the road 
 we entered when we moved en masse out of 
 houses into flats. It has been hard to get ser- 
 vice; and meanwhile we have grown soft and 
 would rather do without those amenities which 
 are not conveniences than to furnish them for 
 ourselves. 
 
 It must in fairness be admitted that two 
 things have combined to bring us to this pass. 
 The most obvious fact is this of the labor situa- 
 tion, which is now immensely accentuated by 
 the war. But another force has always been at 
 work. Except in that part of the country which 
 imported slaves early and kept them as long as 
 it could, more or less pioneer standards pre- 
 vailed. We were a new country; we dispensed 
 perforce (as in other colonies) with many of 
 the inherited comforts. Our love of personal 
 (I do not mean political) independence was a 
 kind of protective coloring. The enforced sim- 
 plicity of the pioneer scene bred in us a distaste 
 for being waited on too importunately. Because 
 we had to do certain things for ourselves, we 
 developed a preference for doing them, a dis- 
 taste for the constant interposition of another 
 human being among the more private processes 
 of existence. Even in the South, some modifica- 
 
 [9] ■ 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 tion of the tradition must have been necessary, 
 for the South must always have been badly, 
 though exuberantly, served. Here and there a 
 butler, a lady's maid, may, after years of 
 struggle, have been highly trained; and the 
 colored race has a gift for cooking. But in 
 many ways Southerners must have contended 
 with the disheartening conditions faced by all 
 English households in the outposts of empire, 
 dependent on another and a stupid race for the 
 satisfaction of their needs. Southern luxury lay 
 in having a score of inadequate menials to keep 
 the masters as comfortable as three or four 
 really good servants would have done. It was 
 slave labor, and slave labor reaches compe- 
 tence only by sheer force of numbers. There 
 was never an ideal of domestic service there, 
 because there was never the rounded conception 
 of civilized domestic comfort in any slave's 
 mind. And nothing is more slovenly or incom- 
 petent in domestic service than the younger 
 generation of free-born negroes. I do not think 
 the colored race is going to prove our domestic 
 salvation. 
 
 We welcomed the labor-saving device, in the 
 first place, for the reasons I have given. By 
 the labor-saving device we have been brought 
 insensibly to an almost animal dependence on 
 creature comforts. With all our theoretical 
 glorification of simplicity, we have really prided 
 ourselves supremely on our physical luxuries, 
 
 [lO] 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 and most of all, it must be said, on those 
 physical luxuries which have no aesthetic value. 
 Our plumbing has been our civilization. The 
 European aristocracy is for the most part not 
 so "comfortable" as the American middle 
 class; and therefore we have considered our- 
 selves the greatest nation in the world. We 
 have been snobbish about many things, but 
 about nothing so much as our electrical appli- 
 ances and our skyscrapers. We have sinned, 
 all of us together, as I said before; and now 
 we are paying. Simplicity, austerity, even, are 
 forced upon us; and it behooves those of us 
 who really care, in spite of temporary aposta- 
 sies, about real values, to take thought and to 
 plan. The vital question is not whether we shall 
 simplify, but how. On that depends our civiliza- 
 tion. 
 
 Neither the new war millionaires nor skilled 
 labor can teach us that. We shall have need of 
 all our trained perceptions, of all our first-hand 
 and all our book knowledge, of what money 
 has been most wisely spent for in the past, to 
 make our choice intelligently. The new million- 
 aire and the enriched laboring man will not, 
 for the most part, be able to help us; for, by 
 and large, having no experience of the finer 
 things of civilization, they will not know. For 
 ourselves, it does not much matter — for us 
 who have seen a world in ruin and can never 
 "care'' for anything in the same way again — 
 
 [11] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 but this is perhaps our first duty to our chil- 
 dren. They cannot have all the things we were 
 brought up to crave and expect; but they must 
 have the essentials. What, in a practical sense, 
 are those going to be? 
 
 The Pennsylvania miner, making from forty 
 to seventy-five dollars a day, buys an auto- 
 mobile — not necessarily a Ford — which waits 
 for him at the entrance to the mine. His wife 
 buys finery. Both buy the best food they can 
 get. It has been publicly said, I understand, by 
 a distinguished representative of the Food 
 Administration, that almost every class of the 
 community was doing its duty in the way of 
 food conservation, except skilled labor. That is 
 the class which cannot be reached by appeal. 
 The very poorest are still very poor, and they 
 have neither the money nor the knowledge to 
 enable them to indulge in forbidden gastro- 
 nomic luxuries. The rich are apparently — in 
 most cases — making it a point of honor to help 
 out. But skilled labor, which is so necessary 
 to the prosecution of war, which has never in 
 its life been so pampered, so flattered, so kow- 
 towed to, so overpaid (yes, I mean that; it is 
 overpaid, and I will explain what I mean pres- 
 ently), has lost its head. It probably believes 
 the things the politicians and its own leaders 
 have been saying to it. It will work, and con- 
 sider itself patriotic for working — but it will 
 exact from the rest of us, the public, a price it 
 
 [12] 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 has no right to, and, lest the honor of our 
 country and the ideals we fight for be lost, we 
 shall pay it. It may be that the reckoning will 
 come later; or it may be that we are so sunk in 
 materialism that skilled labor will continue to 
 rule the earth. Just so long as we feel our 
 greatest need to be of the things it furnishes 
 us with, and its greatest need is for the things 
 we cannot furnish it with, our necks will be 
 bowed under labor's yoke. Our only chance of 
 emancipation lies in finding some of our great- 
 est goods in fields not under labor's control. In 
 other words, to live at all, in any peace, in any 
 equanimity and longanimity, we must be as 
 little materialistic in temper and desire as pos- 
 sible. We must teach our children that the 
 greatest goods are not the things that skilled 
 labor produces. That is not only truth; it is 
 self-preservation. Labor will have the motor- 
 cars and the delicacies of the table, the jewels 
 and the joy-rides; we must see to it that we 
 keep something else, and learn to feel the im- 
 portance of our treasure. If we can maintain 
 a prestige value for the things of our choice 
 (frankly, I doubt if we can) "the lords of their 
 hands" may come to desire the things we have 
 chosen, and help to make them accessible. But 
 we must be careful to make no concessions; we 
 must not take one step, ourselves. In the ma- 
 terialistic direction. 
 
 This is not snobbishness; it is a matter of 
 
 [13] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 life and death. No one is going to have leisure, 
 any more, to be a snob or any such non- 
 essential thing. At least, if any one has the 
 time, it will not be the educated classes. We 
 shall have to work as we have never worked 
 before, physically as well as mentally. We shall 
 have to learn to co-operate with one another, 
 too; to make an almost religious brotherhood. 
 For it is our children who matter, and we can- 
 not begin too soon to prepare them for a world 
 which has nothing in common with the world 
 we knew. Only by joining in utmost effort with 
 the like-minded can we hope to protect them. 
 I know there are Utopians who see in the 
 socialization of Anglo-Saxon governments hope, 
 along Marxian lines, for Anglo-Saxondom. 
 They foresee, I suppose, the kind of Paradise 
 that the Admirable Crichton (in Barriers im- 
 moral and delightful play) must have experi- 
 enced on the desert island. There is going to 
 be only one party in England, Mr. Arthur 
 Henderson has recently said — the Labor party. 
 It may be. Let us hope that some of the "un- 
 attached leaders'* will at least preserve logic 
 if they do not preserve majorities. Mr. Hen- 
 derson's own argument is about as convincing 
 as though one should say: in certain abnormal 
 conditions martial law is the only regime that 
 will work; therefore, since civil law has been 
 found inadequate to conditions of riot and 
 pestilence and famine, we must give it up 
 altogether, and make martial law perpetual. 
 
 [Hi 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 The real arguments against private, and for 
 public, ownership are, of course, quite other 
 than those Mr. Henderson offers. The point is 
 that Mr. Henderson evidently does not know 
 bad logic when he sees it. Let Mr. Henderson 
 and his followers keep the motor-cars, one is 
 inclined to say, and we will keep the logic he 
 discards. Private perception of the laws of 
 logic is something we shall not be taxed for; 
 though — let us not deceive ourselves — we shall 
 have to make sacrifices to keep it. If we can 
 acquire logic, we may have it. It may be in- 
 creasingly difficult to maintain the methods of 
 acquiring it: the best education, moral and 
 intellectual, was becoming endangered before 
 the war, and there is no telling what may be- 
 come of it afterward. 
 
 I seem to have wandered far afield from 
 plumbing; and yet plumbing (as a symbol of 
 materialistic comfort) is more than germane to 
 the question. The group whose problem I am 
 concerned with is a very large one, though 
 always, anywhere, a minority: the professional 
 man, the man in the smaller business position, 
 the man on a salary, who has been decently 
 bred, and who can never look forward to any 
 real financial fortune. I do not include every 
 one who has to economize strictly, for a large 
 proportion of the people who have to econo- 
 mize strictly are totally uneducated as to real 
 values. But distinctly I include any of the last 
 mentioned who are alive to something besides 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 materialistic needs. I do not include the people 
 who want intellectual and aesthetic goods only 
 for social and snobbish reasons or out of blind 
 jealousy. That group, in any case, will cease to 
 exist if intellectual and aesthetic goods cease to 
 have a social value — as is more and more 
 definitely coming to be the case. They were 
 never anything but paid mercenaries in the 
 struggle. 
 
 How are we going to save, for our children 
 and our children's children, the real amenities 
 of life? Hitherto the new millionaires, for rea^ 
 sons of social prestige, have tended to hnk 
 themselves to the group of the civilized. But 
 the new millionaire has always been an indi- 
 vidual case, and has, therefore, had to make 
 concessions to the group already established. 
 What we have never had before is the pro- 
 letariat suddenly becoming, overnight, in its 
 vast numbers, at once richer and more powerful 
 politically than the little ^'educated" aristoc- 
 racy. We all know what happens when that 
 happens; if we have forgotten the French 
 Revolution (and since 19 14 a good many of us 
 have) we have the Russian Revolution to 
 remind us. In this morning's newspaper I saw 
 that the daily bread ration in Petrograd was 
 one-half a pound for the proletariat, one-eighth 
 of a pound for the bourgeoisie. That may or 
 may not be true, but there is nothing in known 
 facts to make it incredible. Even granting that 
 
 [16] 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 skilled labor is not going to Bolshevize itself 
 completely, there is no doubt that the minority 
 of which I speak Is going to be virtually, if not 
 theoretically, discriminated against. Labor Is 
 not going to draw distinctions between employ- 
 ers of labor; the college professor is going to 
 have to pay the plumber, the carpenter, at as 
 exorbitant rates as the great manufacturer. 
 Any one who employs labor at all — even if it 
 is only to repair a leak — is going to be gouged. 
 All along the line, the producers of every ne- 
 cessary element in civilized physical existence 
 are going to rob the ultimate consumer. It is 
 labor that is responsible for the high cost of 
 living. Labor may say that the high cost of 
 living is responsible for its increased demands. 
 In point of fact, there is every evidence that 
 labor at present is demanding money, not for 
 the necessities of life, but for the luxuries — 
 just like the capitalists they have so inveighed 
 against. One would have to be a professional 
 reformer to be shocked. Any knowledge of 
 human nature leaves one perfectly unsurprised 
 by this phenomenon. Most men harve always 
 wanted as much as they could get; and posses- 
 sion has always blunted the fine edge of their 
 altruism. That is what labor has always said 
 about the employers of labor; and the employ- 
 ers can say it quite as truly of the employed. 
 So long as you make the basis of life material- 
 istic, this law will prevail. 
 
 [ 17 ] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 What, then, are we going to do about it? 
 We shall not be able to afford many of the 
 luxuries we once thought necessities, and we 
 must decide, with the utmost possible wisdom, 
 what are necessities and what are not. We had 
 better make our list as short as possible, at 
 that. Obvious luxuries we shall not have: 
 motor-cars, fine clothing, plenty of domestic 
 service, the joys of travel. It is costing us more, 
 all the time, to provide the hygienic necessities 
 for our children: pure milk, nourishing food, 
 good air, healthful recreation, seasonable cloth- 
 ing. I do not mean complicated food, or ex- 
 travagant amusements, or elaborate clothing; 
 I mean the irreducible minimum required for 
 health and simple comfort and decency. And 
 we cannot all — especially the professional peo- 
 ple — go back to the farm and live on our own 
 produce. We have to struggle along as best we 
 can in the communities to which our work has 
 called us. 
 
 In some ways the life of the spirit and the 
 life of the intellect have always been expensive. 
 The more obvious material comforts — rich 
 food, for example — have not been necessary to 
 either. Neither, in a sense, has fine clothing or 
 expensive furniture. Yet it must be remem- 
 bered that both the life of the spirit and the 
 life of the intellect tend, in most cases, to 
 develop the sense of beauty; and that too much 
 ugliness can become a pain and an obstacle to 
 
Tui NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 calm. There Is a simplicity that is pleasing, and 
 a simplicity that is hideous. Leaving aside the 
 social importance of good clothes and good 
 furniture, there is, in downright ugliness, a 
 power to fret the soul, a power to lessen the 
 power to work. But we will neglect, for the 
 moment, the aesthetic side of It. In the matter 
 of food we will willingly simplify. In the mat- 
 ter of adornment, whether of our persons or 
 of our houses, we shall have to simplify, and 
 we can only hope that our simplification can be 
 conducted more along quantitative than along 
 qualitative lines. We shall try to omit rather 
 than commit; to be austere rather than cheap. 
 The matter of servants is going to hit us 
 harder; for only with "help" — In the quite 
 literal sense — can we manage to get any peace 
 or any time, in the hours left free by our 
 wage-earning, for reading, for contemplation, 
 for conversation. The "general houseworker" 
 has tended to disappear; which is an acknowl- 
 edgment that when a great many different 
 things have to be done, one human being can- 
 not stand the strain. Only by her being helped 
 out by the family, only by some features of 
 household service being scanted or ill done, 
 could the general houseworker ever manage to 
 keep outside her job. The good cook could not 
 also be the perfect parlor-maid and the perfect 
 child's nurse. Neither can the good physician, 
 the good lawyer, the good clergyman, also be 
 
 [I9l 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 the perfect choreman, the perfect gardener, 
 and the perfect butler — with hours of casual 
 bookkeeping, plumbing, and carpentering. Even 
 if he had the talent, he would not have the 
 time; for the physician, the lawyer, and the 
 clergyman are not safeguarded by an "eight- 
 hour day.'* His wife, moreover, even if she 
 has no private intellectual interests, cannot suf- 
 fice to all the modern domestic tasks any more 
 than can the general houseworker, who has 
 faded out of existence precisely because she 
 could not. We shall modify as we can; shall 
 have our food sent in from outside where that 
 is possible; shall buy vacuum cleaners (on the 
 instalment plan) ; shall win occasional hours of 
 freedom by hiring some safe person to come in 
 and watch over the children while they sleep. 
 Hospitality will, of necessity, be much cur- 
 tailed. Our personal freedom — in any familiar 
 sense of the term — will be almost n'lL We 
 might defy our house, our garden, our table, 
 our door-bell, to shackle us; but we cannot 
 defy our children to shackle us. 
 
 In these ways, we shall probably intrigue for 
 the life of the spirit, the life of the intellect. 
 But, still, they are expensive. Education — good 
 education — is, in the first place, expensive. I do 
 not know how much it costs to make a man a 
 good plumber or a good coal-miner or a good 
 carpenter; but I am sure it does not cost so 
 much as it does to make him a good doctor or 
 
 [20] 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 a. good clergyman. It takes seven years after 
 the "prep" school or the high school to start 
 the professional man on his road, costing fairly 
 heavily all the time. That is why I said that 
 skilled labor is overpaid — it gets an exorbitant 
 return for its expenditure. Most of us hope to 
 have college for our boys, even if they do not 
 take up a profession — ^just because we think 
 that education is going to matter to a man, all 
 his life, no matter in what field he works. The 
 joys of travel, as I intimated, are going to be 
 cut out for most of us; the opera and the play 
 will become infrequent blessings. But we shall 
 have to have some books — even if we do not 
 start the furnace until December. Indeed, the 
 books we have ourselves are perhaps going to 
 be our best guarantee of our children's being 
 educated at all. To be sure, we shall be taxed 
 on them, with increasing heaviness; but then, 
 the coal-miner will (let us hope) be taxed on 
 his motor-car. 
 
 It may be that we shall come to state- 
 endowed motherhood, and all the rest. But 
 the trouble is that all these socialistic schemes 
 are based on a lower-class demand on life. 
 State endowment of motherhood will perhaps 
 have to come ; but what does it guarantee except 
 the child born under decent conditions? The 
 health of the mother, and through her of the 
 child, is to be safeguarded. Very well. Et apresf 
 Pure milk may be provided at municipal sta- 
 
 [21]' 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 tions; there will be a day nursery and then a 
 public kindergarten. There will follow — if 
 modern "educators" have their way — the 
 whole desolating career in the public schools, 
 where real education is reduced to a minimum, 
 and 'Vocational" training is substituted. The 
 child will, in time, be graduated into the ranks 
 of skilled labor, and perhaps will eventually 
 have his motor-car and his tiled bathroom and 
 his "movie" every night. 
 
 Yet for some of us this is not a supremely 
 cheering prospect, because it is a wholly ma- 
 terialistic vision. Certainly it is a good thing to 
 start with health as a requisite. Certainly every- 
 thing that can be done to insure a healthy 
 childhood, in every case where it is physically 
 possible, should be done. But the great mistake 
 of the reformers is to believe that life begins 
 and ends with health, and that happiness be- 
 gins and ends with a full stomach and the 
 power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the 
 finer kind. It may be that the enormous expense 
 of guaranteeing health to all children born in 
 our vast American community will take all the 
 money that the community has. It may be that 
 no one will ever be free to devote his health to 
 pursuing the life of the mind and the spirit — 
 to the purposes, that is, of civilization not 
 purely physical. But we have not come to that 
 yet; and the war is there to remind us that we 
 really do not know precisely what will come. 
 
 [22] 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 If real socialism — as distinguished from our 
 temporary utilization of certain socialistic 
 methods — comes, we shall inevitably turn our 
 backs on civilization for a time. Successful 
 socialism depends on the perfectibility of man. 
 Unless all, or nearly all, men are high-minded 
 and clear-sighted, it is bound to be a rotten 
 failure in any but a physical sense. Even though 
 it is altruism, socialism means materialism. You 
 can guarantee the things of the body to every 
 one, but you cannot guarantee the things of the 
 spirit to every one ; you can guarantee only that 
 the opportunity to seek them shall not be de- 
 nied to any one who chooses to seek them. 
 And socialism, believing as it must (to hold its 
 head high) in the spiritual as well as the politi- 
 cal equality of men, is not going to create spe- 
 cial opportunities for the special case. "To hell 
 with the special case" is implicit in the socialist 
 slogan. Do you see any majority, anywhere, in 
 this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting 
 that the minority is precious? That any minor- 
 ity is precious? Is there any evidence whatever 
 that the socialist is less avid of personal politi- 
 cal power, less averse to demagogic methods, 
 than the other person? Does he himself go far 
 to prove his perfectionism? A good many 
 socialists are calling other socialists names 
 because they put nationality before interna- 
 tionality; though any one with any sense could 
 have told them beforehand that they would, 
 
 [231 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 because human beings are — fortunately or un- 
 fortunately — like that. Lenin and Trotzky 
 are disappointed because the German socialists 
 do not rise to betray their rulers; and some 
 socialists are disappointed because Lenin and 
 Trotzky appear to be selling Russia out to 
 Germany in order to keep themselves — two 
 individuals — in places of power. Every one is 
 calling names all round; and if socialism were 
 anything in particular, it would (one would 
 think) be very sorry for itself. 
 
 What is clear is this: that the socialization 
 of governments places vast power in the hands 
 of the skilled laborer. It is only in order that 
 labor shall produce as fast and as furiously as 
 possible that we have socialized our national 
 organization. We need, chiefly for war's sake, 
 certain physical things — food, munitions, coal, 
 khaki clothing, and transportation for the 
 same. We are calling for Y. M. C. A. men, 
 and K. of C, and chaplains; but what we 
 really expect of them, more than anything else, 
 is to go under fire, if necessary, to give the sol- 
 diers tobacco and hot chocolate. The news- 
 papers lay eager and delighted stress on the 
 unclerical nature of the services these gentle- 
 men find themselves cheerfully performing. 
 War, you see, is a physical business. Of the 
 spiritual side of it I am not going to speak. No 
 one really can speak of it in terms of actual 
 achievement until the armies have come home 
 
 1241 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 and we see what manner of men they are. You 
 cannot tell from the straws you see which way 
 the great last wind of all is going to blow. 
 Some wise people doubt whether the veterans 
 of this war are going to spiritualize the world. 
 Many of them will have had, at this or that 
 supreme moment, something akin to a spiritual 
 revelation. But the spiritual adventure is a des- 
 perately and exclusively personal thing; you 
 cannot socialize It. It is incommunicable, and 
 for the most part Inexpressible. The attempt to 
 socialize a spiritual experience ends In the 
 camp-meeting; it goes no farther. Like all men- 
 tal ecstasies, It cannot be felt simultaneously by 
 millions of people. I fancy that the opinions 
 the veterans are going to express at the polls 
 are quite unforeknowable. We are all willingly 
 kow-towing to the materialists for the sake of 
 the armies. Whether the armies will wish to 
 kow-tow to them when the war Is over Is a ques- 
 tion more difficult of present solution than the 
 Balkan boundaries. Certainly, If the armies have 
 developed an esprit de corps and a philosophy 
 of their own, they will be listened to. We shall 
 inevitably be very sentimental about them. 
 Whether we shall continue to be sentimental 
 about the man who selected this moment to 
 hold up his country and his compatriots for 
 exorbitant pay, and demonstrated his patriot- 
 ism by earning it, I do not know. We can deal 
 only with the present situation. 
 
 [25] ' 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 What, the present outlook being what it is, 
 can we count on for our children? We shall be 
 practically aided, in time, as I have said, by all 
 sorts of co-operative schemes — invented for 
 the use of the very poor, and adapted and 
 expanded, of necessity, for the not quite so 
 poor. Some of the amenities of life, some of 
 the space and the privacy, will have gone Irre- 
 trievably. After considerations of health come 
 considerations of education. We shall not be 
 able, probably, to afford private schools for 
 our children; and our sole comfort must be 
 that most private schools are not much good, 
 anyhow. They are a little safer gamble, in most 
 communities, than the public schools. That is 
 all. We, the parents, must supplement the bad 
 teaching as best we can, must keep at least 
 some spark of intelligent interest in the uni- 
 verse alive by the gas-log. It may well become 
 our painful and subversive duty to inform our 
 children, from the beginning, that what Is be- 
 ing offered them by the state as education Is 
 not really education at all ; and that teaching a 
 boy how to make bookshelves is In no sense a 
 substitute for teaching him to read and appre- 
 ciate Latin. (Better not mention Greek!) It Is 
 very desirable, if not absolutely necessary, for 
 our daughter to know how to cook; but we 
 must not permit her to consider that domestic 
 science Is education, in the proper sense. We 
 must keep the fact before ourselves and before 
 F26I 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 the next generation that the training of the 
 mind does not mean quite the same thing as 
 the training of the muscles. Time was when a 
 cobbler — and I do not mean anything so re- 
 mote and legendary as Hans Sachs — found 
 philosophy a very natural complement to cob- 
 bling. I knew a cobbler in my childhood who 
 was much In demand among the intellectuals, 
 as being one of the few people who could 
 expound Emerson's transcendentalism in a 
 completely satisfactory way. He went about — 
 I can still recall the spun snow of his hair, the 
 canny saintllness of his much-modelled face, the 
 thin figure under the long black cloak — to 
 philosophical conferences, to discuss metaphy- 
 sics with the metaphysicians; and returned to 
 sit in his little shop and cobble shoes. But one 
 has yet to hear of philosophy's coming from a 
 member of the lasters' union. Machinery means 
 specialization; and It is an old story that there 
 is no mental comfort or development In repeat- 
 ing the same gesture for eight hours a day, 
 even if one has time and a half for overtime. 
 The single gesture is not educative. When you 
 saw the shoe as an entity, when it grew under 
 your hands and you built up the whole con- 
 sciously from the related parts; even when you 
 were a mere cobbler, a physician to sick shoes, 
 and had to know the whole shoe-organism — 
 there was something In that humblest, most 
 physical of tasks which demanded a conception 
 
 [27] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 in the brain. That time is gone, and If William 
 Morris in the flesh could not bring it back, 
 certainly his ghost will not. But If you think 
 for a moment of the difference in mental atti- 
 tude and mental grasp, it shows up skilled 
 labor for what it Is. 
 
 I am far from saying that, in this much 
 simpler world which the increasing complica- 
 tion of life Is going, paradoxically, to create 
 for some of us, it is a bad thing that children 
 should be ^'vocationally" trained. (You cannot 
 say "vocationally educated," for that is virtu- 
 ally a contradiction In terms.) Even so, it is 
 only to a very limited degree that our sons can 
 be, in the intervals, their own plumbers or 
 their own carpenters or their own masons, for 
 the unions will never allow it. It Is a very 
 minor tinkering that Is permitted to the private 
 person. You cannot help to paint your own 
 woodwork In your own house, for the union 
 painter will leave his job if you touch your 
 private paint-brush in his presence. What good, 
 after all, is this famous vocational training, 
 except as you definitely choose to follow 
 through life some one of the trades they teach 
 you? It will not really make the whole man 
 more efficient; for he will not be allowed to 
 use his potential efficiency. It may teach him 
 whether he prefers to be a steamfitter or a 
 bricklayer; but it cannot guarantee him any 
 power to practise either steamfitting or brick- 
 
 .[ 28.] 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 laying, unless he is willing to forsake all else 
 and cling only to that. Never was such non- 
 sense talked by any one as by the new "edu- 
 cators.'* Labor frankly uses the argument of 
 might and the big stick; but labor, as far as I 
 know, does not pretend that it is something 
 else. It rests its case cynically on our own pam- 
 pered inability to get on without it. 
 
 ^'Philosophy can bake no bread," replied 
 some philosopher to his critics, "but it can give 
 us God, freedom, and Immortality." Those are 
 the last things, I take it, that modern philoso- 
 phy is really concerned with giving us; but the 
 perversity of one generation need not obscure 
 all history. It is possible for the contemplation 
 of great ideas, of great art, of great poetry, 
 of the epic motions of the human race as re- 
 vealed in history, to mitigate physical depriva- 
 tion. It is possible to have plain living and high 
 thinking together — though it is not easy, and 
 never has been, and some of the best-known 
 exponents of that theory have been pitiful fail- 
 ures. Certainly we of the minority must accept 
 for ourselves austerities we were not bred to 
 in our easy-going, materialistic generation. 
 Without taking, like St. Simeon, to the wilful 
 discomfort of a pillar, we must learn to do 
 without a hundred "necessities" that Dante 
 and Shakespeare never dreamed of. We must 
 keep it possible for our children to delight In 
 Dante and Shakespeare; we must not let the 
 
 [29] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 authentic intellectual thrill disappear from the 
 world. And, for that, we must insist that the 
 past be not closed to them, and that learning 
 shall not be an unknown good. They will have 
 to do it on bread and milk, not on caviare ; but 
 It can be done on bread and milk. That is the 
 point. 
 
 I confess that as I look forth in these dis- 
 tressed times on the vast American scene, I 
 find myself pinning my hope to two things — 
 the self-consciousness of this minority, and the 
 older Eastern universities. For unless we plan 
 our simplicities cannily, the other people will 
 have won out; and unless the older universities 
 keep up a standard of learning, hold the door 
 open, by main force, to the past, the garnered 
 lore of the world will fail us. We shall progress 
 — but blindly, as the brute creation. The fact 
 is that we are living In an obscurantist epoch. 
 For surely it is obscurantism to deny the legiti- 
 macy of any field of knowledge or of virtue, 
 and those folk who would reduce everything to 
 a physical basis are as deadly foes of light as 
 their ancestors who saw in physical experi- 
 ments nothing but the black art. Every sane 
 person wants science left free to accomphsh 
 its marvellous work; but no sane person past 
 early youth would say, as a young woman 
 fresh from her college laboratories said to me 
 a few days since, that chemistry is the root of 
 all knowledge. The Protestants, when they 
 
 [30] 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 were on top, were as given to obscurantism, 
 and its accompaniment of persecution, as the 
 Catholics. 
 
 In the matter of education, as I have sug- 
 gested, we shall have to rely on the older 
 colleges of the East. We cannot count on the 
 West to help us, for the West is cursed with 
 state universities. It is by no means my inten- 
 tion or my private inclination to minimize the 
 value of the state universities. The point is 
 that they are uncertain ; they are not free ; they 
 are dependent, in the last analysis, on public 
 favor, which means public funds, on a kind of 
 initiative and referendum. They may have 
 good luck and become great schools of learn- 
 ing; they may have bad luck and become indif- 
 ferent and negligible places. They are not 
 really allowed to set their own standards; they 
 must ever be compromising with the personnel 
 of state legislatures. The private colleges and 
 universities of the East at least are not depend- 
 ent on politics. Their funds are for the most 
 part inadequate, but they do not have to 
 change their curricula to please people who 
 know nothing about what a curriculum should 
 be. As long as their private fortunes last, they 
 can afford to say the thing which they believe 
 to be true. One of the most heartening things 
 that have happened since 1914 is the acquisi- 
 tion of great wealth by Yale University. It 
 means — one hopes — that one at least of our 
 
 [31] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 old academic foundations can snap its fingers 
 at Ignorance enthroned ; that it can send out its 
 thousands endowed with some sense of intel- 
 lectual values. Intellectual values are not the 
 only ones; but most sane people believe that 
 only by the rigid training of the mind can 
 human beings be taught wise living and moral 
 values. There is no morality by instinct, though 
 there can be morality by inherited inhibitions. 
 There is no social salvation — in the end — 
 without taking thought; without mastery of 
 logic and application of logic to human experi- 
 ence. These things, because they are not the 
 natural man, are not carelessly come by; they 
 must be deliberately achieved. You will not 
 learn them from the Bolsheviki, or from the 
 I. W. W., or even from Mr. Arthur Hender- 
 son. A great deal is said nowadays about prac- 
 tical politics and the role of the practical man 
 in building the social structure. Before you can 
 carry out an idea you must have the idea. 
 You cannot get rid of the world of abstract 
 thought. One after the other, leaders of the 
 Church are laying more and more stress on 
 religion*s being a strictly social matter. Per- 
 haps It is, though I do not believe it. I should 
 have said that social regeneration was a by- 
 product of religion, not religion itself. But 
 even the folk who think that Christianity 
 means no slums, and means little else, derive 
 their sanction — or think they do — from Christ, 
 
 [32] 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 who dealt In abstract Ideas more exclusively 
 than any other religious teacher the world has 
 had. 
 
 We must, then, seriously facing the moral, 
 political, and physical conditions of our time, 
 be frankly ascetic. We must make our children 
 healthy, first of all — If only because specialists 
 will be beyond our pocketbooks. I have Implied 
 that the combination of plain living and high 
 thinking is a difficult one ; I fancy it is the most 
 difficult in the world. ''The hand of little em- 
 ployment hath the daintier sense.'* We shall 
 obliterate the coarser contacts, as far as pos- 
 sible, not by engaging other people to take the 
 burden of those coarser contacts, but by buy- 
 ing, as we can, the machinery that will suffice 
 to them impersonally. We shall "co-operate" 
 to the limit of our incomes, losing thereby, I 
 repeat, many of the amenities which tend to 
 civilize. We shall not sleep soft, we shall not 
 live high, and we shall do without external 
 beauty to a painful extent. We shall exist in 
 cramped quarters, and if we achieve the dig- 
 nity of one spacious room, that will be a great 
 deal. We cannot hope to furnish it fittingly. 
 But if we have a dollar to spend on some wild 
 excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on 
 asparagus out of season. If we have a holiday, 
 we shall not go to Europe or Asia, which 
 would be beyond our means; but we shall find 
 some quiet spot where there will at least be 
 
 [33]' 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 trees and sky and no motor-cars or aeroplanes. 
 We shall, I hope, ameliorate our lack of space 
 and privacy by a very perfectly developed cour- 
 tesy and by the capacity for silence. It sounds 
 monastic, and, at its best, monastic it will be. 
 Certain things we shall have given up at the 
 start; certain ambitions will have been erased 
 from our tablets. We shall not compete with, 
 or interfere with, the lords of this world. We 
 shall do our modest work, and receive our 
 modest pay, and by a corresponding modesty 
 of life and temper we shall disarm, we hope, 
 the unsympathetic and uncomprehending. Our 
 kingdom cannot be of this world; and instead 
 of complaining and criticizing, we must apply 
 ourselves to realizing that our compensations 
 can be made greater than our losses. We shall 
 be passionately concerned with humanity; the 
 more so, that we shall endeavor to be aware 
 of the voice of God as well as of the voice of 
 the people. We shall not be snobs in any sense ; 
 for we shall have the same charity for other 
 people's choices that we beg them to have for 
 ours. Besides, snobbishness dies out quickly — 
 in America, at least — among the impoverished. 
 Even those who find all this an intolerable 
 idea will dub it Utopian. A counsel of perfec- 
 tion It certainly is. But the higher the standard 
 we set for ourselves the less likely we are to 
 put up with a low one. And if we merely drift, 
 I fear we shall find ourselves getting nothing — 
 
 l34] 
 
THE NEW SIMPLICITY 
 
 wearing ourselves out in the unequal, familiar 
 race for physical privileges, and leaving to one 
 side the intangible goods. We can guarantee 
 our children nothing except that they shall be 
 armored against certain kinds of suffering; the 
 lust of non-essentials, for example. I do not 
 say that we shall not lose much that our best 
 interest would suggest our having; but we shall 
 not lose everything. And with the new simplic- 
 ity will come some of the compensations of 
 earlier simplicity. The man who has three 
 things gets more pleasure out of one than does 
 the man who has a hundred. Perhaps we shall 
 capture the "joy in widest commonalty spread." 
 A rose will always be cheaper than an alligator 
 pear, and it is quite possible to enjoy it as 
 much and as vividly. We shall be very grateful, 
 I have no doubt, to Thomas Edison and the 
 other genii of democracy. In some ways we 
 shall fare better than folk of our clan in 
 Europe. We must thank our stars for plumbing 
 — itself a "joy in widest commonalty spread." 
 But we shall value it chiefly as it releases time 
 for better things, and those better things not 
 physical pleasures. 
 
 Not only shall we not glorify our plumbing 
 with marble; we shall see that there is really 
 no sense in marble when porcelain will do as 
 well — that marble has better uses and should 
 be kept for them. Not only shall we have no 
 ermine to shield us from the cold; we shall see 
 
 [35] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 that ermine was more beautiful when rarely 
 and ritually worn. We shall learn to take pleas- 
 ure in beautiful things that do not and never 
 can belong to us; and we shall purge ourselves 
 of the ignoble passion of envy. But the power 
 to discriminate between the truth and a lie — 
 which is the foundation of all moral and intel- 
 lectual enjoyment — we shall cling to with 
 greed. For in keeping that we rob no one, and 
 insult no law. I am far from believing that 
 any group of people can achieve all this with 
 completeness. But I believe we shall do well 
 to set it before us as a goal. 
 
 36] 
 
DRESS AND THE WOMAN 
 
 THE creed and the fallacy of fashion, it 
 seems to me, have seldom been better 
 expressed than in the retort once made to 
 a friend of mine, in one of our more conserva- 
 tive New England towns. Sojourning there for 
 a time, she had reason to order a hat from a 
 local milliner. When she tried It on, it did not 
 resemble in the least the headgear of the me- 
 tropolis. "They are wearing hats very low, this 
 year, you know," she protested. "Ah," was the 
 unperturbed reply, *'they are wearing them 
 high in Newburyport." I do not remember the 
 fate of the hat — which is unimportant; but the 
 statement has remained with me for years as 
 one of the most significant Imaginable. It was 
 at once the glorification and the reductio ad 
 ahsurdum of modishness. My friend and the 
 milliner spoke in the same spirit. For provin- 
 cialism in dress consists merely In adhering 
 rigidly to the av ant-dernier cri. The object of 
 allegiance may be, in the provinces, a little 
 tardily come up with; but the rigidity is pre- 
 cisely the rigidity of the rue de la Paix. Fash- 
 ion is not simply a question of longitude. 
 
 The sense of mode might be considered, as 
 so many other things have been, the possession 
 
 [37] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 that distinguishes man from the beasts. The 
 peacock is no proof to the contrary; for If, as 
 scientists suggest to us, all radiant plumage has 
 been developed as a means of attraction, at 
 least the Ideal of adornment has been, in the 
 case of the birds, consistently aesthetic. The 
 feathery fashions have always been intrinsic- 
 ally good. Whereas (to be flippant) the at- 
 traction exercised by the latest mode would 
 seem usually to point to some principle of 
 unnatural selection. The bird of Paradise, who 
 is probably irresistible In his native forest, can 
 be positively repellent on a hat. Yes; the sense 
 of mode is curiously different from the sense 
 of beauty. Let us, however, be serious. 
 
 Preachers of all time — and satirists, who 
 are lay-preachers — have declaimed against 
 female extravagance in dress. It must be 
 confessed that the sex of the more peace- 
 ful pursuits has been the more exuberantly 
 adorned. The male costume worn, say, at the 
 court of Henri III, was every bit as bad as 
 anything that contemporary ladles could have 
 boasted; but even in the time of Henri III, a 
 man had to hold himself ready for the saddle 
 and the tented field. Some part of his life was 
 bound to be spent In garments as rational as 
 he could conceive them. It was the female sex 
 that could expand, unchecked and unpruned, 
 into such wild tendrils, such orchid-like incon- 
 tinent bloom, of "changeable apparel." 
 
 [38] 
 
DRESS AND THE WOMAN 
 
 From the earliest times, it is the woman 
 who has been designated as the sinner In this 
 respect. On this point, the Old and New Testa- 
 ments are, for once, agreed; Isaiah and St. 
 Paul are at one. "The chains, and the brace- 
 lets, and the mufflers, the bonnets . . . and the 
 earrings . . . the mantles, and the wimples, 
 and the crisplng-pins . . . the fine linen, and 
 the hoods and the veils," the one accuses; 
 "broldered hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly 
 array," complains the other. Ezeklel thunders 
 against "the women that sew pillows to the 
 armholes" (the gigot sleeve in the reign of 
 Zedeklah!) "and make kerchiefs for the head 
 of persons of every stature, to hunt souls." 
 And the tradition has remained. It is perhaps 
 the only subject on which St. Ignatius Loyola 
 and John Knox would have been thoroughly 
 sympathetic. One is certainly at liberty to Infer 
 from the chorus that it is easier for a camel to 
 pass through the needle's eye than for anything 
 really chic to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 All these gentlemen, to be sure, seem to 
 have objected to the fact and purpose of femi- 
 nine adornment, rather than to rapid changes 
 in the methods adopted. But I cannot believe 
 that St. Paul, who scored the Attic curiosity 
 born of the Attic ennui, would not have 
 preached even more violently, had he foreseen 
 the need, against fashion than against beauty. 
 And is it not fashion rather than beauty that 
 
 [39] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 Is subtly discriminated against by all religious 
 orders? The nun, like the Quakeress, must 
 adopt a single color and a single mode; though 
 nun and Quakeress, both, often find their 
 chosen garb the most becoming they could 
 possibly wear. No dress could be more beauti- 
 ful than that which I remember from my 
 childhood's convent. It fell in rich and simple 
 folds of violet — violet being neither purple nor 
 crimson, but something Indefinably magnificent 
 midway between — enhanced by white linen 
 guimpe and cream-colored veiling. It gave the 
 daughter of a French duke, I remember, the 
 aspect of a queen regnant. Yet It represented 
 poverty, chastity, and obedience. No one Is 
 especially concerned with the nun's being un- 
 becomingly clad. A subtler mortification Is sup- 
 posed to lie in her engaging to dress in exactly 
 the same way all her life. The mortification is 
 of course heightened by the fact that she 
 shares her style of dress with the rest of the 
 community, regardless of type. But In any case 
 the first thing that the postulant renounces is 
 fashionable clothing. They leave her curls to 
 be cut off later. 
 
 It is not, however, with the moral aspect of 
 fashion that I am concerned. The moral ques- 
 tion, Indeed, has ceased to be very poignant; 
 even our Calvinist great-grandmothers per- 
 mitted a shy predominance of trimming on the 
 "congregation side" of their bonnets. The 
 
 [40] 
 
DRESS AND THE WOMAN 
 
 moral aspect of fashion disguises itself nowa- 
 days as an economic consideration. With eco- 
 nomic considerations, again, I have no special 
 concern. They are writ large over half the 
 printed pages of our time. Some statistician 
 every month proves to us something appalling : 
 either that, 
 
 . . . since our women must walk gay, and money buys 
 their gear, 
 
 materials are adulterated, or sewing-women 
 are starved, or shop-girls seek the primrose 
 path, or husbands die of the strain in their early 
 forties. To much the same music, the New 
 York Customs officials stage, each day, an 
 elaborate melodrama on the steamship piers. 
 We know that, from "Nearseal" to "Near- 
 silk," the poor will sacrifice comfort to cut, and 
 that a really "good" milliner makes a profit of 
 a hundred per cent on each hat. These things 
 are all true; and Heaven forbid that one 
 should shirk the economic question ! But I very 
 much doubt if either moralist or statistician 
 will turn the trick. Yet they have only. It would 
 seem, to enlist a few other facts as good as 
 their own, to be quite sure of success. 
 
 For not even the cynic will pretend that the 
 real object of fashions is to disfigure. It is 
 quite without intention that M. Worth and 
 Mme. Paquin and all their prototypes, con- 
 geners, and successors, have become the foes 
 
 [41] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 of beauty. They have simply never stopped to 
 consider that the very notion of the changing 
 mode is the negation of all aesthetic law. The 
 most damning thing about fashions is that they 
 make inevitably, nine years out of ten, for the 
 greatest ugliness of the greatest number. And 
 this is the real Achilles tendon of la mode. 
 Can anything be more absurd than to impose 
 a single style on the fat and the thin, on the 
 minimum wage and the maximum income? 
 
 I admit that no fashion has ever been 
 created expressly for the lean purse or for the 
 fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is undoubt- 
 edly the thin millionairess. But the fat woman 
 and the lean purse must make the best of each 
 style in turn, as it comes along. And if one has 
 ever seen a fat woman In (for example) a 
 hobble skirt — even in an academic edition of 
 a hobble skirt — one knows that this is not a 
 light thing to say. As for the lean purse, it is 
 not only in alarmist articles that the working- 
 girl goes without half her luncheons to buy a 
 rhinestone sunburst. One has known the cases. 
 Nor is the coercion purely psychological. The 
 cheapest Eighth Avenue suit, which, ready- 
 made, costs something-and-ninety-eight cents, is 
 sure to be a hasty and sleazy imitation (at 
 many removes, and losing something with 
 each) of a Fifth Avenue model. It is one of 
 the few true paradoxes that people who must 
 dress cheaply must dress *'in style." And that 
 
 [42] 
 
DRESS AND THE WOMAN 
 
 is a hard fate for the hypothetical poor woman 
 with intelHgence, who secretly desires a gar- 
 ment that will be no more conspicuous next 
 year than this, and longs to put some of her 
 money into good materials. It is only a very 
 good (and expensive) dressmaker whose 
 handiwork can both elude the exaggerations of 
 the present fashion and foreshadow the essen- 
 tials of the next. That is another thing that 
 every woman knows. 
 
 The hypothetical poor woman with intelli- 
 gence must content herself with looking a trav- 
 esty on the successful chorus-girl. This, unfor- 
 tunately, she comes only too easily to do. 
 *'But," some one might object, "the poor wo- 
 man is precisely an economic, not an aesthetic 
 consideration." Granted: yet since we must all 
 dress, why not invent dresses that are widely 
 adaptable — to different materials, to different 
 occasions, to different human types? It would 
 purge our streets of many a sorry and sordid 
 spectacle, and in that sense would be an 
 aesthetic service both particular and public. 
 But, as it is, we must all dress alike : blonde 
 and brum, fat and thin, tall and short, rich 
 and poor. The socialists have threatened us 
 with no more rigid sisterhood than this. 
 
 The principle of fashion is, as I have inti- 
 mated, the principle of the kaleidoscope. A 
 new year can only bring us a new combination 
 of the same elements; and about once in so 
 
 [43] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 often we go back and begin over. Recently we 
 have had rather a Napoleonic tendency. Occa- 
 sionally we are Colonial. We have been known 
 to be Japanese. Now and then we have a 
 severe classic moment — usually very unbecom- 
 ing to all of us. We used to hear from our 
 grandmothers of silk dresses that could "stand 
 alone." What we need now is a silk dress that 
 could somehow manage to run. 
 
 There is no reward, in the world of 
 woman's dress, for a successful experiment. 
 The most charming design in the world has 
 no future. One is seldom tempted to apostro- 
 phize a fashion with, "Verweile doch ! du bist so 
 schon!"; but if one were, the adjuration would 
 be as vain as ever. And that is another sin 
 against beauty, for it deprives a woman of the 
 privilege of dressing as best becomes her. 
 There is something peculiarly bitter in watch- 
 ing the superseding of a mode that wholly 
 suits one. Now and then a woman confides to 
 me her intention of keeping to some style that 
 is especially adapted to her. "It suits me, and 
 I am going to stick to it," she declares. She 
 has found that it makes the most of all her 
 "points"; it has given her, perhaps, renewed 
 respect for her appearance and fresh zest for 
 life. Such a woman is always, I believe, sin- 
 cerely congratulated by her friends. They do 
 not imitate her, but they really and unmali- 
 ciously envy her her point of view. She is 
 
 [44] 
 
DRESS AND THE WOMAN 
 
 proud of herself, and keeps to her decision 
 for — say — a year. I never knew a woman to 
 try such an experiment longer. She finds her- 
 self invariably conspicuous — and no well-bred 
 woman likes to be unnecessarily conspicuous. 
 For modesty's sake she must adopt the extrava- 
 gance of the moment. Otherwise, she discovers 
 herself to be not rational but *' queer/' and her 
 attempt at wisdom to be the worst of affecta- 
 tions. It may be ironic that a woman who looks 
 best in the mode of the Empress Josephine 
 should be forced to dress en chinoise; but it is 
 more than ironic when she has to dress en 
 chinoise one year and en grecque the next. I 
 have once or twice known elderly women who 
 achieved something like a fixed costume for 
 themselves; but they were semi-invaHds. The 
 consistent costume is, like the nun's habit, the 
 best possible proof of having renounced the 
 world. 
 
 And into what pits do the great couturieres 
 not fall in the search for something "new" 
 enough to destroy the eligibility of all last 
 year's frocks ! I never knew what ladies patron- 
 ized, a few years since, the London woman 
 who invented ^'emotional dressmaking"; but I 
 can testify to having seen, in a show-window of 
 one of the largest department stores in Amer- 
 ica, a model from her — is not the word 
 *'atelier"? A large group of plain women were 
 gathered, staring at it. I joined the group and 
 
 [45] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 read the legend. The name of the dress was 
 "Passion's Thrall." At least, as the White 
 Knight said, "that was what the name was 
 calledJ* Within the shop, in the spirit of curi- 
 osity, I followed a similar group to the 
 "department" where such things live. Again, 
 the emotional dressmaker. Isolated in a glass 
 drawing-room, stood two draped figures : "Her 
 Dear Desire," and "Afterwards." I could have 
 imagined some one's buying "Her Dear De- 
 sire" — it was of sad-colored chiffon. But I 
 could not imagine any one's buying "After- 
 wards" ; and it was inconceivable that the name 
 should help to sell it. I am bound to say that 
 eventually I found myself alone in the contem- 
 plation of this sartorial drama. The crowd had 
 followed a living model who was illustrating 
 the possibility and method of walking in the 
 new "Paquin skirt." The gravity of every one 
 concerned was unbelievable. Mr. Granville 
 Barker has done some admirable satire on 
 dressmaking in The Madras House; but his 
 third act is positively less poignant than a 
 reality like that. 
 
 Yet this is not the worst. Even if we said to 
 ourselves, "Let us be always — but varyingly — 
 ugly," we should not have phrased our greatest 
 danger. Our greatest danger is simply the loss 
 of all standards of beauty in dress. "Why do 
 all the women walk like ducks this year?" was 
 the question put to a friend of mine, years 
 
 [ -!6 ] 
 
DRESS AND THE WOMAN 
 
 since, by a younger brother. He did not know- 
 that a quite new kind of corset had suddenly, 
 during the summer months, ^'come in." To 
 wear It meant change of gait and posture, 
 eventually actual change of shape. Yet we all 
 wore It — and doubtless went on praising the 
 Venus of Melos as we did so. The notion that, 
 after we have learned from the scientists to 
 deal in evolutionary periods of millions of 
 years, we ought not naively to expect to alter 
 the human form in a season or two, never 
 occurred, I fancy, to any of us. "Business is 
 business," men are credited with saying, when 
 invited to apply abstract laws of honor. *'Fash- 
 ion is fashion," women would surely say if 
 invited to apply abstract laws of beauty. 
 
 The worst thing is that the drapery or the 
 trimming that is lovely and desirable in our 
 eyes one year, is unspeakably offensive to our 
 gaze the next. (Consider, for example, the 
 chequered history of fringe ! — its career like 
 that of a French Pretender.) Fashion has viti- 
 ated our taste to that point. Our welcoming 
 raptures are as sincere as our shuddering rejec- 
 tions. There was a time when sleeves could 
 not — I say it advisedly — ^be too large. I re- 
 member seeing a girl turn to edge sideways 
 through a large door, for fear of crushing the 
 sleeves of a new bodice. Her brothers laughed; 
 but I — I was very young — felt a pang of clear, 
 unmitigated envy. I remember at that time 
 
 [47] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 prophecies that tight sleeves would never come 
 in again — they were so ugly. Yet how many 
 times, since then, have tight sleeves come in — 
 and gone out? While, if one dared to make 
 any prophecy about the clothes of the future, 
 It would be that those very large sleeves would 
 never again be worn : they are so hideous. 
 
 There is no point in pretending that one is 
 superior to this fluctuating standard. One is 
 not. Ideally speaking, every woman should 
 keep the language of fashion and the language 
 of taste rigidly apart. "Fashionable" and 
 ''beautiful" should not be used interchangeably. 
 Theoretically, we all acknowledge the differ- 
 ence; but It Is another matter when we are 
 faced by the actual product. There may be, 
 here and there, a woman who can say with 
 sincerity, "She wore a hideous thing she has 
 just got from Worth"; but where is the 
 woman who could ingenuously report: "She 
 had on a lovely frock made In the style of year 
 before last"? I could not do it myself; nor, I 
 fancy, could you. We may not like the new 
 mode the very first time that we see it; we may 
 pity before we endure; but we end by embrac- 
 ing. The bravest of us can do no more than 
 criticize for Its ugliness something fashionable. 
 When It comes to praising for its beauty some- 
 thing unfashionable, the words stick In our 
 throats. Clothes that are unfashionable simply 
 do not look beautiful to us. Presently they 
 
 [48] 
 
DRESS AND THE WOMAN 
 
 may, when the kaleidoscope has been turned 
 again; but not now. And that means that we 
 have given up a good deal of intellectual 
 freedom. 
 
 I have called the loss of aesthetic standards 
 our greatest danger. One would prefer to think 
 that it is. One likes to believe that the "pres- 
 tige value'* of the current mode is due to an 
 honest if mistaken conviction of its beauty, not 
 to the Implications of income that both fash- 
 ionable and unfashionable clothes make so 
 definitely. It is pleasanter to say to one's self 
 that the woman who refuses an Invitation to 
 dinner because her best frock Is two years old 
 fears criticism of her taste, than that she fears 
 an estimate of her dressmaker's bill. The code 
 is more alluring. But even assuming this to be 
 the cause, the result Is no less unfortunate: 
 namely, an almost universal social timidity on 
 the part of unfashlonably dressed women — by 
 which I mean, for the moment, nothing worse 
 than women in frocks that were fashionable a 
 season since. And that Is a pity. 
 
 One does not, on the whole, regret history; 
 and our Institutions are by this time historic. I 
 offer the suggestion as one who is glad, rather 
 than sorry, that John Adams was not (accord- 
 ing to his reputed desire) created Duke of 
 Braintree. But an hereditary aristocracy serves 
 some charming minor purposes, one of them 
 being, perhaps, the social countenancing of 
 
 [49] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 dowdiness. A duchess may be as dowdy as she 
 likes; and other women may with impunity be 
 the less smart in a land where there are always 
 duchesses being dowdy. I am sufficiently Amer- 
 ican, myself, not really to admire the typical 
 Englishwoman's clothes. Half a dozen queer 
 necklaces and a perfectly irrelevant bit of lace 
 pinned on somewhere, do not atone to me for 
 a faded straw hat at Christmas and a skirt 
 that is six inches shorter in front than in back. 
 Not many years ago, I went, with the brief- 
 est possible interval, from a British suffrage 
 meeting to a dress-rehearsal at the Comedie 
 Frangaise. The resulting sensation amounted to 
 a shock. "Frenchwomen could not dress like 
 Englishwomen without conviction of sin," I 
 said to my companion. "And ought not to," 
 was his firm rejoinder. At the moment, I 
 agreed with him. But there is something fine, 
 after all, in the attitude of the woman who, 
 having occasion to go to some "function" of a 
 kind that she usually avoided, brought out a 
 frock from her ten-year-old trousseau^ and had 
 it furbished up by a sempstress. The frock, I 
 should say, had passed from her mother's 
 trousseau into her own, having served for the 
 former's presentation at court on the occasion 
 of her marriage. It may be that an untitled 
 woman could not have done it so debonairly. 
 It would certainly be hard for a good Ameri- 
 can to follow her example. But the very idea 
 
 [so] 
 
DRESS AND THE WOMAN 
 
 brings one such a hint of freedom as it takes — 
 they say — a limited monarchy to give. 
 
 Sensible people realize that children should 
 not be overdressed, and a few schools in this 
 country have adopted the conventual method 
 of putting their pupils into uniforms. But the 
 uniforms are, I fear, only another turn of the 
 kaleidoscope. I know that in one such school, 
 at least, the girls wear the school costume all 
 day, but dress in the evening as variously and 
 as elaborately as they choose. A rule like that 
 is ma^nifique et pas cher. For grown-ups, there 
 is no uniform at all. The fact is that we 
 are uncomfortable if we are not fashionably 
 dressed. No man understands the subtle and 
 complex significance of the phrase ^'nothing to 
 wear" — witness the distressed but utterly puz- 
 zled expression that overspreads a man's face 
 at the words. He knows that his wife or his 
 sister looks charming in ^'the blue one," or 
 "the lace one," or *'the one with the jet." She 
 has looked charming In it often enough for 
 him at last to identify it — and that, unless he 
 is an exception to his sex, is very often. He is 
 cheerfully getting into his evening coat for the 
 fiftieth time. No wonder he does not realize 
 that some frock which, the first time it was 
 worn, made for triumph, should, the tenth 
 time, make for humiliation. But the most 
 strong-minded woman — the woman who will, 
 if necessary, go to the opera on a gala night in 
 
 [SI] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 a coat and skirt — at heart exonerates the 
 woman who so foolishly, for the reason men- 
 tioned, stops at home. 
 
 There is much to be said, whether in the 
 fifteenth century or the twentieth, for the aris- 
 tocracy of wealth and all that it can do for 
 the community in which it prevails. Neither 
 Florence nor New York, probably, if con- 
 sulted, would wish, or would have wished, to 
 give up its Magnificent. But there are minor 
 ways in which an aristocracy of wealth makes 
 us all more sordid. Obviously, in these condi- 
 tions, one's income must constitute one's claim 
 to distinction, and, obviously, one can give 
 mannerly evidence of one's income only by the 
 amount visibly, not audibly, spent. How more 
 silently and more visibly than by personal 
 adornment? Is all this too trite to say? It 
 behooves the man, for many reasons, not to 
 adorn himself — perhaps, even, not in any 
 merely personal way to outshine other men — 
 while his wife may not only please herself but 
 render his reputation a positive service by out- 
 shining other women. She makes no indiscreet 
 disclosures of fact, but she rustles with pecu- 
 niary implications. In an aristocracy of wealth, 
 Paris may go far to make a peeress of her. 
 
 I do not wish to Imply that this is the sole 
 American standard: there are communities In 
 which "family" counts; and there are the 
 academic backwaters where strange-scaled fish 
 
 [52] 
 
DRESS AND THE WOMAN 
 
 constitute among themselves aristocracies of 
 intellect. It need hardly be said that in the 
 latter places dress counts least of all. One may 
 go to hear even the most distinguished lecturer 
 in any rag one has; and we are judged rather 
 by the obvious intention of a frock than by its 
 actual achievement. There is so much of 
 Oxford in any of our college towns. But no 
 one can deny that the aristocracy most widely 
 developed in America is that of wealth. It is 
 developed in places that are really too small 
 to afford an aristocracy at all. I myself have 
 known women whose fathers carried dinner- 
 pails and whose husbands have never even 
 stopped to regret that their own education 
 ended with the grammar-school course, who 
 simply did not feel that the shabbily or simply 
 dressed woman could be in their class. She may 
 be descended from a half a dozen Signers, and 
 be at home in every picture-gallery in Europe, 
 but she is some one to whom, socially, they 
 cannot but condescend. 
 
 I am told that precisely the same standards 
 prevail in the newer urban civilizations of Eng- 
 land: it would seem to be an inevitable imme- 
 diate result of the supremacy of riches. There 
 is perhaps no limit to the sophistication that 
 vast wealth can eventually give to its own pos- 
 sessors; but this law of fashion is what, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, they impose on the 
 seething estates beneath them. I have known 
 
 [53] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 tragedies In smallish American cities that be- 
 gan and ended in dress : women deprived of 
 their all too infrequent intellectual and social 
 delights, simply because they could not bring 
 themselves to face an assembly in which other 
 women whose authority their own taste could 
 not acknowledge, knew their "best" dresses by 
 heart. 
 
 I have said that the economic considerations 
 are no concern of mine; nor are they. Yet it 
 may not be amiss to suggest in this context 
 that the women who are responsible for the 
 almost unpaid toil of the slum-children over 
 *'willow" plumes are not the rich women who 
 will give for their willow plumes any price that 
 is asked of them. It is the harpy of the sub- 
 urbs, the frequenter of bargain-counters and 
 Monday morning "sales," the woman whose 
 most instructive reading is done among the 
 designs and patterns of the "women's" maga- 
 zines, who is responsible. From what one 
 reads, one is certainly compelled to infer that 
 if these little children are to be saved, willow 
 plumes should be put at prohibitive prices. 
 "But since our women must walk gay," the 
 aristocracy that is rooted in democracy can 
 hardly do without its willow plumes. Fashion 
 has got itself into a position of such impor- 
 tance as that. It is so terrible a thing to be 
 unfashionable that the vast majority of women 
 — and the vast majority of women are not rich 
 
 [54] 
 
DRESS AND THE WOMAN 
 
 or anything like it — stretch every nerve to be 
 in fashion. They miss, If they are not, too 
 much that is legitimately theirs. The require- 
 ment Is irrelevant, is absurd; but it Is made. 
 They will, therefore, pay what they can; but 
 they cannot pay much. The logic is clear. They 
 go to the great shops to demand their willow 
 plumes, and their Irlsh-lace collars, in the very 
 spirit which took the Dames de la Halle to 
 Versailles. Hence many of the conditions of 
 labor about which we read so many lurid 
 articles. For demand creates supply. 
 
 The American woman of moderate Income 
 is alternately congratulated on her "smartness^' 
 and scolded for her extravagance. She cannot 
 very well, as things stand, be smart without 
 being extravagant. But the fact that chiefly 
 gives one pause is this: that a woman cannot 
 mingle comfortably with her equals unless she 
 can clothe herself each season In a way that 
 both to her and to them would have looked 
 preposterous a twelvemonth before. It has 
 luckily become, in the strictest sense, vulgar, to 
 be endimanchee; but most people are — by defi- 
 nition — vulgar; and I have known women, 
 again, who stayed at home from church be- 
 cause they could not so clothe themselves. Not 
 unadvisedly, I am tempted to say; for In one 
 of the most famous churches of America, I 
 have seen the shabbily dressed woman seated, 
 by the usher, with reference solely to her cos- 
 
 [55] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 tume; and I have heard, too, the testimony of 
 other women of her kind, turned into "stay- 
 at-homes'* because precisely that thing they 
 could not endure. An odd battle of pride with 
 pride; and there are better uses to put pride to 
 than that. More blatant and less grim is the 
 authentic anecdote recently told me concerning 
 a Newport "colonist.'' She and her daughter 
 entered the church one Sunday morning, mar- 
 vellously dressed In contrasting shades of red. 
 "There will be no one else in our pew this 
 morning," she murmured graciously to the 
 usher; "put some one in with us, if you like — 
 any one in white or black." What could not 
 Dean Swift have done with that! One does 
 not wish to make tragedy out of what is essen- 
 tially comic. Yet it may fairly be said that 
 comedy has its rough side, and that a comedy 
 retold from the point of view of the comic 
 character himself, would often make melan- 
 choly stuff. It would be possible, over this mat- 
 ter of fashion, to shed the bitter tears of the 
 satirist. 
 
 It is odd that "dress reform" should always 
 have meant something ugly. There would be so 
 tremendous a chance for any one who wished 
 to reform dress in the interest of beauty! But 
 the most amused and disgusted of us will, very 
 likely, forever shrink from the task. "The pil- 
 grims were clothed with such kind of raiment 
 as was diverse from the raiment of any that 
 
 [56] 
 
DRESS AND THE WOMAN 
 
 traded In that fair. The people, therefore, of 
 the fair made a great gazing upon them : some 
 said they were fools, some they were bedlams, 
 and some they were outlandish men." There 
 are two reasons why we shall shrink from it: 
 we should have to begin with ourselves; and 
 we should certainly be called bedlams. But oh, 
 the pity of it I 
 
 [57] 
 
CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE 
 
 ONE can usually either begin or end with 
 Mr. Chesterton, though one can seldom 
 do both. "It is simpler to eat caviare on 
 impulse than to eat grape-nuts on principle," he 
 says, in one of his intervals of pure lucidity. I 
 should like to make a Chestertonian transposi- 
 tion, and pronounce that it is better (I do not 
 say simpler) to eat caviare on principle than to 
 eat grape-nuts on impulse. The fact is that the 
 modern fad of simplicity for its own sake has 
 ceased to be merely ridiculous; it has become 
 dangerous. May not some of us lift our voices 
 against it? 
 
 I have no right, I suppose, to ally, in my 
 own mind, socialists and vegetarians. But I 
 nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if 
 he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vege- 
 tarian, that the answer is in the affirmative. I 
 am sure that they, on their side, confuse snobs 
 with meat-eaters. One could forgive them, 
 were they more bitterly logical. For my own 
 part, I should be quite willing to go the length 
 of all Hinduism and say that rice itself has a 
 soul. I can even see myself joining a "move- 
 ment" for giving the vote to violets and dis- 
 franchising orchids. This, however, is not their 
 
 [58] 
 
CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE 
 
 desire. They do not wish to make even the ox 
 a citizen — only a brother; and I have never 
 discovered that vegetarians — even when they 
 were "hygienic," not '^sentimental," ones — 
 were anxious to reproduce the history of the 
 rice-fed peoples. But let their logic take care 
 of itself. My point is really that socialists and 
 vegetarians are banded together to fight for 
 the simplifying of life. Socialism, of course, 
 organizes as furiously as Capital itself; and I 
 leave it to any one if a nut-cutlet is not compli- 
 cated to the point of mendacity. But ostensibly 
 both sects are on the side of Procrustes against 
 human vagaries. Both would surely consider 
 caviare immoral; either because no one ought 
 to eat it, or because every one cannot. It does 
 not much matter, I fancy, which point you 
 make against the dried roe of the sturgeon. 
 My own plea for caviare rests precisely on 
 the fact that it is not, and cannot be, thrust 
 into every one's mouth. It is not simple, no. 
 The only really "simple" food-stuff is manna. 
 Imagine, for example, calling anything simple 
 that has to be shot out of a cannon by way of 
 preparation. In point of fact, very few people 
 eat caviare save on impulse, — otherwise, they 
 find it too nasty. But it is an impulse worthy of 
 being dogmatized; of becoming a principle. 
 
 Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, 
 left free, instinctively complicates life. The 
 hardest command to follow has always been 
 
 I 59] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 that which bids us take no thought for the 
 morrow. Perhaps that is what Mr. Chesterton 
 means when he talks of the difficulty of eating 
 grape-nuts on principle. The real drawback to 
 *'the simple life" is that it is not simple. If you 
 are living it, you positively can do nothing else. 
 There is not time. For the simple life demands 
 virtually that there shall be no specialization. 
 The Hausfrau who is living the simple life 
 must, after all, sweep, scour, wash, and mend. 
 She must also cook; from that, even Battle 
 Creek cannot save her. She may dream sternly 
 of Margaret Fuller, who read Plato while she 
 pared apples; but in her secret heart she knows 
 that either Plato or the apples suffered. And 
 from v/hat point of view is it simpler to have a 
 maid-of-all-work than to indulge one's self in 
 liveried lackeys? Not, obviously, for the mis- 
 tress; and it is surely simpler to be an adequate 
 second footman than to be an adequate bonne- 
 a-tout-faire. We should really simplify life by 
 having more servants rather than fewer; 
 more luxury instead of less. The smoothest 
 machinery is the most complicated; and which 
 of us wants to sink the Mauretania and go 
 back to Robert Fulton's steamboat? One would 
 think that the decision would be made naturally 
 for one by one's income. But it is the triumph 
 of the new paradox that this is not so. Thou- 
 sands of people seem to be Infected with the 
 idea that by doing more themselves they 
 
 [60] 
 
CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE 
 
 bestow leisure on others; that by wearing 
 shabby clothes they somehow make it possible 
 for others to dress better — though they thus 
 admit tacitly that leisure and elegance are not 
 evil things. Or perhaps — though Heaven for- 
 bid they should be right! — they merely think 
 that by refusing nightingales' tongues, they 
 make every one more content with porridge. 
 Let us be gallant about the porridge that we 
 must eat, but let us never forget that there are 
 better things to eat than porridge. 
 
 And all time past, was it all for this ? 
 Times unforgotten, and treasures of things ? 
 
 What is the use of throwing great museums 
 open to the people, if you tell them at the 
 same time that to possess the contents of the 
 museums would not make a private person 
 happier? Why should there be cordons hleus 
 in the world, if we ought to live on bread and 
 milk? Above all, why have we praised, through 
 the centuries, all the slow processes, the tardy 
 consummations, of perfection, if raw material, 
 either in art or life, is really best? I recall at 
 this instant a friend of mine who expresses her 
 democracy in her footwear. Her frocks are as 
 charming as money can induce Paquin to make 
 them; but if her frocks are an insult to the 
 poor, her boots are an insult to the rich. I 
 have seen her walk to a garden-party, in real 
 lace, and out at heel. She fancied, I think, that 
 
 [6i] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 her inadequate boots obliterated the deplorable 
 social distinction between herself and her cook. 
 In point of fact, her cook would not have con- 
 descended to them; would not have considered 
 herself a *'lady" if she had. 
 
 I have other friends who feel strongly the 
 Ignominy of personal service: who agree with 
 many ignorant young women that it is more 
 dignified to be a bullied, insulted, underpaid 
 shop-girl with a rhinestone sunburst, than a 
 well-paid, highly-respected parlor-maid in a 
 uniform. Accordingly, they conscientiously de- 
 prive themselves of the parlor-maid, and spend 
 her wages in trying to get a vote for the shop- 
 girl. I do not understand their distinctions in 
 liberty, or their definition of degradation. The 
 parlor-maid at least can choose the mistress, 
 but the shop-girl cannot choose the floor- 
 walker. 
 
 I am, myself, essentially an undomestic 
 woman, and I dislike the parlor-maid's tasks 
 to the point of feeling excessive irritation at 
 having, occasionally, in this mad world, to 
 perform them. But, seriously speaking, apart 
 from the temperamental quirk, I would don 
 her clothes and follow officially her career, 
 rather than that parlor-maids in uniforms 
 should pass wholly from the world. It is as if 
 these people said, *'Since those who are parlor- 
 maids themselves cannot very well employ 
 parlor-maids, then let no one have a parlor- 
 f62l 
 
CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE 
 
 maid.'* Their factitious altruism, with all its 
 peril, might be forgiven them; but the mis- 
 guided creatures (who are human beings and 
 egotists, after all, and as such must "save their 
 face'') go on to say that it is really much nicer 
 not to have parlor-maids. And that lie is un- 
 pardonable, for it strikes at the root of human 
 experience. Parlor-maids would never have 
 become a convention if they had not been 
 found desirable. 
 
 Are we really, at this late day, going to be 
 duped by the mid-century fallacy that "plain 
 living and high thinking" are a natural combi- 
 nation? Even if Shakespeare at New Place 
 teaches us nothing, we cannot fail to be im- 
 pressed by the memory of Thoreau, stealing 
 home from Lake Walden by dark, to provide 
 himself secretly with better fare than the woods 
 afforded. As if, indeed, any one who had tried 
 plain living did not know that high thinking 
 was done, if at all, in spite of it! "The hand of 
 little employment hath the daintier sense,'* as 
 Shakespeare long since said. Let us open our 
 own front doors, polish our own shoes, dust 
 our own bibelots, and make messes on a chafing- 
 dish when the cook is out; and let us do it gal- 
 lantly. But let us not pretend that it is more 
 civilized to do these things ourselves than to 
 have them skilfully done for us. The prince in 
 disguise makes the most charming beggar in 
 the world, no doubt; but that is because — as all 
 
 [63] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 fairy-tales from the beginning of time have 
 taught us — the prince wears his rags as if they 
 were purple. And, to do that, he not only must 
 once have worn purple, but must never forget 
 the purple that he has worn. And to the argu- 
 ment that all cannot wear purple, I can, as I 
 say, only reply that that seems to me to be no 
 reason why all should wear rags. 
 
 Until every one is too good to be a parlor- 
 maid, let us open our own doors, if we must — 
 provided we do It according to the great tradi- 
 tion of door-opening; but how can we do it 
 according to the great tradition if we abolish 
 parlor-maids and dry up the fount of the great 
 tradition? And, whatever the simpliflers say, 
 there Is no doubt that, as yet, there are, to one 
 person who is too good for door-opening, ten 
 persons who are by no means good enough for 
 it. I have never been able to imagine just how 
 the sound of the Last Trump is going to shiver 
 the aristocracy of earth into the democracy of 
 Heaven. To be sure, it is not my affair. But at 
 least one can have, this side the grave, little 
 patience with the altruisms of the Procrust- 
 eans. They merely wish to make each of us an 
 incompetent Jack-at-all-trades. And one had 
 thought the German universities, if they had 
 done nothing else, had blown that bubble ! 
 
 A friend of mine asked me the other day if 
 I did not feel degraded to be at the mercy of 
 servants; humiliated by knowing that they 
 
 [64] 
 
CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE 
 
 could perform domestic tasks better than I, and 
 could take advantage of that fact. I confess it 
 had never occurred to me. If my cook felt 
 degraded by being unable to talk French, I 
 should think her a silly snob. Are we not all, 
 economically, at one another's mercy? Of what 
 does enthusiastic living of the ''simple" life 
 make us Independent, save of a few hard- 
 learned and precious lessons of taste? The 
 successful housewife is the one who has suc- 
 ceeded in imitating perfectly several trained 
 servants. But the criterion is still the trained 
 servant. The distinguished beggar is the one 
 who wears his rags as if they were purple. But, 
 to appreciate him, we must know the look of 
 purple rightly worn. The admirable vegetarian 
 eats his shredded wheat as if It were caviare. 
 But where would be the beauty of his perform- 
 ance were not someone, somewhere, eating 
 caviare as If It were shredded wheat? 
 
 [6s] 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 IT Is odd how words recur. There has been 
 more talk about culture, among educated 
 people in America, during the last months, 
 than there had been for years. To be sure, the 
 culture discussed since August, 1914, has been 
 German Kultur; but that does not matter. We 
 have actually been talking about culture once 
 more; rehabilitating It, if only for the sake of 
 denying that the Germans, by and large, have a 
 monopoly of anything so good. To some of us, 
 this recurrence of a word so long tahu is wel- 
 come — and as side-splittingly funny as it is 
 welcome. For the fact is that for twenty years 
 — ever since Matthew Arnold went out of 
 fashion — to speak of culture has meant that 
 one did not have it. The only people who have 
 talked about it have been the people who have 
 thought you could get it at Chautauquas. To 
 use the word damned you in the eyes of the 
 knowing. Now I have always, privately and 
 humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word 
 should go out of the best vocabularies; for 
 when you lose an abstract term, you are very 
 apt to lose the thing it stands for. Indeed, it 
 has seemed only too clear that we were doing 
 all in our power to lose both the word and the 
 [66] 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 thing. I fancy we ought to be grateful to the 
 Germans for getting "culture'^ on to all the 
 editorial pages of the country; though I admit 
 it sometimes seems as If the Germans bore out 
 the rule that only those people talk about it 
 who have It not. I should really like to make a 
 plea for the temporary reversal of the rule. 
 Indeed, I think we are getting to a point where 
 we are so little "cultured'* that we can really 
 afford to talk about it. When the plutocrat 
 goes bankrupt, he may once more, with de- 
 cency, mention the prices of things. Culture has 
 ceased to be a passionate American preoccupa- 
 tion. Perhaps we shall not offend modesty if 
 we use the word once more. 
 
 Now there are some who, believing that all 
 is for the best in the best of possible worlds, 
 and that to-morrow is necessarily better than 
 to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing 
 we shall Infallibly be found to have more of It 
 than we had a generation since; and that If we 
 can be shown not to have more of It, It can be 
 shown not to be worth seeking. Having, my- 
 self, a congenital case of agoraphobia, I 
 habitually say nothing to the professional 
 optimists in the public square. The wilderness 
 is a good place to cry in; the echoes are 
 magnificent. So I shall not attempt to deprive 
 any one of Candlde's happy conviction. If any 
 person is kind enough to listen, I will simply 
 ask him to contemplate a few facts with me. 
 
 [67] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 No one will be too optimistic, I fancy, to grant 
 that there are proportionally fewer Americans 
 who care about culture — and who know the 
 real thing when they see it — than there were 
 one or two generations ago. Contact with "the 
 best that has been thought and said in the 
 world" is not desired by so large a proportion 
 of the community as it was. That there are 
 new and parvenu branches of learning, furi- 
 ously followed, I, on my part, shall not attempt 
 to deny. But culture Is another matter. Perhaps 
 the sociologists can show that this is a good 
 thing. I do not ask any one to deplore any- 
 thing. I only ask the well-disposed to examine 
 the change that has come over the spirit of 
 our American dream. 
 
 If I were asked to give, off hand, the causes 
 of the gradual extirpation of culture among us, 
 I should name the following: 
 
 1. The increased hold of the democratic fal- 
 lacy on the public mind. 
 
 2. The influx of a racially and socially in- 
 ferior population. 
 
 3. Materialism In all classes. 
 
 4. The Idolatry of science. 
 
 Only one of these Is purely Intellectual; two 
 might almost be called political. In point of 
 fact, all four are interwoven. 
 
 I should be insultingly trite if I proceeded 
 here to expound the fallacy of the historic 
 statement that all men are born free and equal. 
 [68] 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 We have all known for a long time that indi- 
 vidual freedom and individual equality cannot 
 co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jeffer- 
 son (and may I express my doubts even of that 
 inspired charlatan?) has really believed it. No 
 one could believe it at the present day except 
 the people who are flattered by it; and of people 
 who are flattered by it, it is obviously not true. 
 The democracy of the present day — like the 
 aristocracy of another day — is fostered by the 
 people whom it advantages; and the people 
 whom it advantages are adding themselves, at 
 the rate of a miUion a year, to our census lists. 
 When even democracy has to reckon with the 
 fact that its premises are all wrong, and that 
 men are not born equal — that hierarchies are 
 inherent in human kind regardless of birth or 
 opportunity — it proceeds to do its utmost to 
 equalize artificially; it becomes Procrustes. 
 But will any one contend that Procrustes left 
 people free? 
 
 Now, what has this to do with culture? 
 Simply this: that culture is not a democratic 
 achievement, because culture is inherently snob- 
 bish. Contact with "the best that has been 
 thought and said in the world" makes people 
 intellectually exclusive, and makes them draw 
 distinctions. Those distinctions, seriously speak- 
 ing, are not founded on social origins or great 
 possessions; they are founded on states of mind. 
 So long as democracy is simply a political mat- 
 
 1 69] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 ter, culture is left free to select its groups and 
 proclaim its hierarchies. But it is characteristic 
 of our democracy that political equality has 
 not sufficed to it; the "I am as good as you 
 are" formula has been flung out to every hori- 
 zon. The people with whom it has become a 
 mania insist that their equality with every one 
 else in their range of vision is a moral, an in- 
 tellectual, a social, as well as a political, equality. 
 Let that formula prevail, and culture, with its 
 eternal distinction-drawing, will naturally die. 
 For contact with the best that has been thought 
 and said in the world induces a mighty humility 
 — and a mighty scorn of those who do not 
 know enough to be humble before the Masters. 
 They are an impersonal humility and an imper- 
 sonal scorn — attitudes of the mind, both, not 
 of the heart. But humility and scorn are 
 both ruled, theoretically, out of the democratic 
 court. 
 
 The pure-bred American once cared for cul- 
 ture, and no longer — to the same extent, at 
 least — does. If any one asks why America (I 
 use the word loosely, as meaning our United 
 States), having always, since the Revolution, 
 been a democracy, can have cared for so un- 
 democratic a thing, the answer is simple. The 
 democracy of our forefathers was a purely 
 pragmatic affair. The Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence was framed by men living in a world 
 where it was almost true enough to be work- 
 able. Roughly speaking, in pioneer and colonial 
 
 [70] 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 days — wherever and whoever the pioneers and 
 colonists may be — the community Is a democ- 
 racy because It Is an aristocracy. In those 
 grimmer worlds, the fittest do survive because 
 there Is no Incubator process to keep the feeble 
 going. A pioneer and colonial group, more- 
 over, Is apt to be like-minded; people do not 
 exile themselves In each other's company unless 
 they want the same things. Minor differences 
 of opinion are swallowed up In like major 
 needs: you form coalition governments against 
 savages and famine or a specially detested 
 tyranny. In the modern "I am as good as you 
 are'* sense, our ancestors were not democratic 
 at all. They were democratic for their own 
 special group, and a pragmatic truth misled 
 them: — as, because we admire them, we are 
 permitting It to mislead us. They were Brah- 
 minical In their attitude to learning; they 
 thought It supremely valuable, and they did not 
 believe In — no Brahmin wants to believe In — a 
 royal road to It, any more than they believed 
 in a royal road to the salvation of the soul. 
 They believed In Intellectual, as much as they 
 did In spiritual, election; and they certainly did 
 not think that politics could influence either. 
 Up to the last generation or two, they looked 
 upon the cultured man as a peculiarly favored 
 person; and because culture (unlike beauty, let 
 us say) depended to some extent on the effort 
 of the Individual, they thought it fit to mention. 
 Now there Is this about a pragmatic truth: 
 
 [71! 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 like any other invention of the devil, it 
 smooths the road for the lazy. If it did not 
 smooth the road, it would not be, by pragmatic 
 definition, truth. And the great bulk of us have 
 found the "free and equal" statement such a 
 help that, though we cannot pretend for a 
 moment that it is true, we stick to it. The 
 schoolboy sticks to it because it greases his 
 oratory; the politician sticks to it because his 
 constituents like the sound of it; the detrimen- 
 tal sticks to it because it is his only apology. 
 And, just as you cannot suppress a word with- 
 out eventually suppressing the thing it stands 
 for, so you cannot utter a statement forever 
 without imbibing some of its poison. Even as 
 our reasonable national pride turned into the 
 spread-eagleism that Dickens and Mrs. Trol- 
 lope caricatured, so the "free and equal" shib- 
 boleth turned into the "I am as good as you 
 are" formula. Why trouble about anything, if 
 you were already lord of the world? At first, 
 it was Europe we defied. What were the an- 
 cient oligarchies, to impose on us their stan- 
 dards, intellectual, social, or moral? We set 
 up our own standards, because we were as 
 good as any one else — and also because it was 
 a little easier. 
 
 Let me say before going further, that I am 
 not blaming the lower classes alone for the 
 extirpation of culture among us. The upper 
 classes are equally responsible — if, indeed, not 
 
 [72] 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 even more to blame. We have become materi- 
 alistic: our very virtues are more materialistic 
 than they were. It is forgivable in the poor 
 man to be materialistic; for unless he has 
 bread to keep his body alive, he will presently 
 have no soul to cherish. Materialism is less 
 pardonable in the man who always knows where 
 his next meal is coming from. He, if you like, 
 does have time to worry about his soul. None 
 the less, he worries about it very little. There 
 used to be a good deal of fun poked at settle- 
 ment-workers who tried to read Dante and 
 Shakespeare to slum-dwellers. I am not sure 
 that those misguided youths and maidens who 
 first carried Dante and Shakespeare into the 
 slums were not right as to substance, however 
 wrong they were as to sequence. The only 
 morally decent excuse for wanting to have a 
 little more money than you actually need to 
 feed and clothe your family, is your ambition 
 to have a little mental energy to spend on 
 things not of the body. The ultimate tragedy 
 of the slums is that, in slum conditions, one 
 can scarcely think, from birth to death, of any- 
 thing but the body. The upper-class people 
 who think of pleasing their palates instead of 
 relieving hunger, of being in the fashion in- 
 stead of covering their nakedness, are no more 
 civilized than the slum-dwellers. They are apt, 
 it is true, to become more so ; for it is a strange 
 fact that a family can seldom be rich through 
 
 [73] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 several generations without discovering some 
 aesthetic truths. And aesthetic truths lead to 
 moral perceptions. You cannot with impunity 
 fill your ears with good music, your eyes with 
 good painting and sculpture and architecture. 
 Something happens to you, after a time, no 
 matter how vulgar you may be. But wealth is 
 very fluctuating in our country; and several gen- 
 erations of it are not often seen. The people 
 who are now rich are generally people whose 
 grandfathers and great-grandfathers were fight- 
 ing for sheer existence. So we have the spectacle 
 of the dominant plutocrats (no one will deny 
 that plutocracy is the order of the day, both 
 here and in Europe) either mindful them- 
 selves of the struggle for existence, or in a 
 state of having only just forgotten it. They are 
 not going to push their children into a race for 
 intangible goods. And the more we recruit 
 from immigrants who bring no personal tradi- 
 tions with them, the more America is going to 
 ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose 
 consuming desire is either for food or for 
 motor-cars is going to care about culture, or 
 even know what it is. And it is another mis- 
 fortune of our over-quickened social evolution 
 that the middle classes do not stay middle- 
 class. They climb to wealth, or sink to indi- 
 gence. Neither that quick rise nor that quick 
 fall is a period in which to cherish their own 
 or their children's intellects. 
 
 [74] 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 Both from above and below, then, our col- 
 leges and schools have felt the hostile pressure. 
 Colleges are, on the one hand, jeered at for 
 doing their business badly, and, on the other, 
 accused of being too difficult. We are always 
 hearing that college is of no earthly use to a 
 man except as he learns there to rub up against 
 other men. We are always hearing, also, that 
 the college curriculum is a cruel strain on the 
 average boy or girl. On one score or another, 
 the colleges are always being attacked; and the 
 attack usually includes the hint that the real 
 test of a "college education" is not the intrinsic 
 value, but its success or failure in preparing 
 the youth for something that has nothing to 
 do with learning. Will it be of social or finan- 
 cial use to him? If not, why make sacrifices to 
 get it? Far be it from me to assert that the 
 intellectual flame never burns in the breast of 
 collegiate youth! But I do believe it provable 
 that there is far less tendency to regard learn- 
 ing as a good in itself, and far more tendency 
 to cheat scholarship, if possible, in the interest 
 of some other thing held good, than there was 
 two generations ago. Ignorance of what real 
 learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; 
 materialism, and a consequent intellectual lax- 
 ity — ^both of these have done destructive work 
 in the colleges. 
 
 The education of younger children is in like 
 case. We put them into kindergartens where 
 
 [75] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we 
 can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that 
 were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian 
 slums ; or we send them to outdoor schools and 
 give them prizes for sleeping. Every one 
 knows what a fight the old universities have 
 had to put up to keep their entrance standards 
 at all. With the great new army of state uni- 
 versities admitting students from the public 
 schools without examination, because they 
 themselves are part of the big public-school 
 system, how can it be otherwise? 
 
 Now the patriotic American may see — and 
 rightly enough — in the public-school system 
 which includes a college training, a relic of the 
 desperate desire of our forefathers that educa- 
 tion, as a major good, should be within the 
 reach of all and sundry. But even the patriotic 
 American must see another impulse at work: 
 the impulse to put the college intellectually, as 
 well as financially, within the reach of all. The 
 colleges must not set up standards for them- 
 selves that the average boy or girl, from the 
 ordinary school, cannot reach without difficulty, 
 because that is undemocratic. 
 
 Now I know as well as other people that it 
 is positively harder to get into our old universi- 
 ties to-day than it was in our fathers' day. But 
 granted the enormously increased facilities for 
 preparation all over the land, it Is not rela- 
 tively anything like so hard. Certainly, once in, 
 
 [76] 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 it IS possible to get through the college course 
 with less work than ever before. In the first 
 place, there is a much wider choice of subjects 
 on which a boy can get his degree: his tastes 
 are consulted as they never used to be. If he 
 does not want to endure the discipline of 
 Greek, he can get an A.B. at every college in 
 the country — except Princeton — without know- 
 ing a word of Greek. Even at Princeton, he 
 can take a Litt.B. and let Greek forever alone.* 
 He can study sociology, or Spanish, or physical 
 culture, or nearly anything he likes. I have 
 even heard that in one of our state universities 
 there is a department of hat-trimming, which 
 contributes its quota to the courses for a (pre- 
 sumably feminine) academic degree. 
 
 It may be objected at this point that the 
 fluctuations of colleges have nothing to do with 
 our standards of culture. I think they have, a 
 great deal. No one will deny that culture can 
 be got elsewhere, or that colleges do not suffice 
 in themselves to give it. But if colleges do 
 not consider themselves custodians of culture, 
 warders and cherishers of the flame, they have 
 no reason for existence. It is a platitude that 
 
 * I have been told, since writing this essay, that the Univer- 
 sity of Chicago demands a modicum of Greek for the A. B. de- 
 gree. The Catholic University does the same. And it is only 
 fair to say, also, that, since this essay'was written, Princeton has 
 abdicated her well-nigh unique position. It will hereafter be 
 possible to acquire the Princeton A. B. without knowing alpha 
 from omega. 
 
 [77] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 business men consider college a worthless pre- 
 paration for business life— ^save as a young 
 man may have laid up there treasure for him- 
 self in the shape of valuable "connections." 
 Even the conception of college as a four years' 
 paradise intervening before the hell of an 
 active struggle for existence, does not touch 
 upon the original reason for universities' being 
 at all. Universities were invented for the sake 
 of bringing their fortunate students into con- 
 tact with the precious lore of the world, there 
 garnered and kept pure. There was no idea on 
 the part of their founders that every one 
 would or could partake of academic benefits. 
 The social scheme would not originally have 
 allowed that; still less would the conception of 
 the public intellect have admitted the notion. 
 Every one was not supposed to be congenitally 
 qualified for intimacy with the best that has 
 been thought and said in the world. They had 
 no notion, until very recently, of so changing 
 the terms of that Intimacy that every one 
 might think he could have it. Learning, culture, 
 were not to be adulterated so that any mental 
 digestive process whatsoever could take them 
 in. 
 
 But now, in America, there Is a tendency 
 that way. If a boy does not feel a pre-estab- 
 lished harmony between his soul and the hu- 
 manities, then give him an academic degree on 
 something with which his soul will be in pre- 
 
 [78] 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 established harmony. And if there is no pre- 
 estabHshed harmony between his soul and any 
 form of learning, then create institutions that 
 will give him a degree with no learning to 
 speak of at all. I do not mean to deny that 
 many of our virtually valueless colleges were 
 founded in the pathetic inherited conviction 
 that learning and culture were too great goods 
 not to be accessible to all who cared passion- 
 ately for them. But I do believe that the rever- 
 ence for learning and culture has been largely 
 replaced by a conviction that anything which 
 has so great a reputation as a college degree 
 must be put within the reach of all, even at the 
 risk of making its reputation a farce. The 
 privileged have been unwilling that their chil- 
 dren should be made to work; the unprivileged 
 have been unwilling that their children should 
 see anything of good repute, anything with a 
 prestige value, denied to them. We have all 
 demanded a royal road to a thing to which 
 there is no royal road. The expensive schools 
 lead their pupils from kindergarten to nature- 
 study and eurhythmies, with basket-work and 
 gymnastics thrown in ; the public schools follow 
 them as closely as they can. Of real training of 
 the mind there is very little in any school. The 
 rich do not want their children overworked; 
 the poor want a practical result for their 
 children's fantastically long school hours. So 
 cjpmestic science comes in for girls, and. can- 
 
 [79] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 pentering for boys. Anything to make it easy, 
 on the one hand; anything to make a universal 
 standard possible, on the other. 
 
 Take one example only: the attitude towards 
 Greek. There are two arguments against teach- 
 ing our children Greek: one, that it Is too 
 hard; the other, that It is useless. The mere 
 fact that public opinion has drummed Greek 
 out of court as an inevitable part of a college 
 curriculum shows that these arguments have 
 been potent. No person who could be influ- 
 enced by either has the remotest conception of 
 the meaning or the value of culture. Culture 
 has never renounced a thing because it was 
 difficult, or because it did not help people to 
 make money. And the mere fact that Greek is 
 no longer supposed by the vast majority of 
 parents to be of any "use" — even as a matter 
 of reputation — to their sons, shows that the 
 old standards of culture have changed. The 
 larger number of our public schools no longer 
 teach Greek at all; a great many private 
 schools have to make special arrangements for 
 pupils who wish to study it. And the attitude 
 towards Greek is only a sign of our democratic, 
 materialistic times. 
 
 Now I have done with the colleges. I have 
 dealt with them at all only by way of hinting 
 that they have been so democratized that cul- 
 ture means, even to its avowed exponents, 
 something different from what It has ever 
 
 [80] 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 meant before. May I speak for one moment 
 explicitly of the public schools? For we must 
 trace all this back to the source — must begin 
 with the ostensible homes of "culture" and 
 follow up the stream to the latent public con- 
 sciousness. Each class that comes into college 
 has read fewer and fewer of what are called 
 the classics of English literature. An astonish- 
 ing number of boys and girls have read nothing 
 worth reading except the books that are in the 
 entrance requirements. An increasing propor- 
 tion of the sons and daughters of the prosper- 
 ous are positively illiterate at college age. 
 They cannot spell; they cannot express them- 
 selves grammatically; and they are inclined to 
 think that it does not matter. General laxity, 
 and the adoption of educational fads which 
 play havoc with real education, are largely 
 responsible. In the less fortunate classes, the 
 fact seems to be that the public schools are so 
 swamped by foreigners that all the teachers 
 can manage to do is to teach the pupils a little 
 workable English. Needless to say, the profes- 
 sion of the public-school teacher has become 
 less and less tempting to people who are really 
 fit for it. 
 
 It is not only in the great cities that the 
 immigrant population swamps the schoolroom. 
 An educated woman told me, not long since, 
 that there was no school in the place where 
 she lived — one of our oldest New England 
 [8i] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 towns — to which she could send her boy. The 
 town could not support a private school for 
 young children; and the public school was out 
 of the question. I had been brought up to 
 believe that public schools in old New England 
 towns were very decent places ; and I asked her 
 why. The answer made it clear. Three fourths 
 of the school-children were Lithuanians, and a 
 decently bred American child could simply 
 learn nothing in their classes. They had to be 
 taught English, first of all; they approached 
 even the most elementary subjects very slowly; 
 and — natural corollary — the teachers them- 
 selves were virtually illiterate. Therefore she 
 was teaching her boy at home until he could 
 go to a preparatory school. Fortunately, she 
 was capable of doing it; but there are many 
 mothers who cannot ground their children in 
 the languages and sciences. A woman who 
 could not would have had to watch her child 
 acquiring a Lithuanian accent and the locutions 
 of the slum. 
 
 An isolated case is never worth much. But 
 one has only to consider conditions at large to 
 see that this has everything to make it typical. 
 One has only to look at any official record of 
 immigration, any chart of distribution of popu- 
 lation by races, to see how the old American 
 stock is being numerically submerged. If you 
 do not wish to look at anything so dull as 
 statistics, look at the comic papers. A fact 
 [ 82 1 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 does not become a stock joke until It is pretty 
 well visible to the average man. Our fore- 
 fathers cared immensely for education; they 
 felt themselves humble before learning; and 
 their schools followed, soon and sacredly, upon 
 their churches. They stood in awe of the real 
 thing; and they had no illusions as to the ease 
 of the scholar's path. They legislated for their 
 schools solemnly, and if not with complete 
 wisdom, always at least with accurate ideals. 
 Educational (like all other) legislation now- 
 adays is largely in the hands of illiterate 
 people, and the illiterate will take good care 
 that their illiteracy is not made a reproach to 
 them. If any one chooses to say that culture 
 must always be in the hands of an oligarchy, 
 and that the oligarchy has not been touched, 
 I will only ask him to consider the pupils and 
 the teaching in most private schools. In the 
 end, prestige values are going to tell; and the 
 vast bulk of our population will see to It that 
 the prestige values are not absolutely unattain- 
 able to them. The great fortunes have made 
 their way to the top — ^yes, really to the top. In 
 many cases there has been time for a quick 
 veneer of grammar to be laid over their origi- 
 nal English. In many cases there has not; and 
 no one cares. The custodians of culture cannot 
 afford to care; for their custody must either 
 be endowed or be forsaken. 
 
 Oh, yes, there are a few Brahmins left; but 
 
 I831 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 one has only to look at the marriages of any 
 given season to see what is becoming of the 
 purity of the Brahmin caste. The Brahmins 
 themselves are beginning to see that they are 
 lost unless they compound with the material- 
 ists, and make or marry money — or increase, 
 by aid of the materialists, what they have 
 inherited. In what New England village, now, 
 is the minister or the scholar looked up to as 
 a fount of municipal wisdom because he is a 
 learned man? Is he a *'good mixer'*? That is 
 what they ask : I have heard them. Once it was 
 possible in America for a poor man to hope to 
 gain for his children, if they deserved it, the 
 life of the intellect and of the spirit. Now it no 
 longer is; for the poor themselves have defiled 
 the fount. They are a different kind of poor, 
 that is all; and they have become an active and 
 discontented majority, with hands that pick 
 and steal. When they no longer need to pick 
 and steal, they carry their infection higher and 
 give it as a free gift. And they have been aided 
 by the Brahmins themselves; who, having dab- 
 bled in sociology pour se desoeuvrer, and then for 
 charity's sake, are now finding that sociology 
 Is a grim matter of life and death, and endow 
 chairs of it — as if one should endow chairs of 
 self-preservation. But self-preservation is not 
 culture and never will be; and no study of the 
 manners and customs of savages or slums can 
 call itself "contact with the best that has been 
 thought and said in the world.'* 
 
 I84] 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 We owe, too, I think, a great deal of our 
 cultural deterioration (which I admit is a vil- 
 lainous phrase) to science. Science has come in 
 with a rush, and is at present — why deny it? — 
 on top. "Scientific" is a word to charm with, 
 even though it has already had time to be 
 degraded. If Mrs. Eddy had called her 
 bargain-counter Orientalism anything but "sci- 
 ence," would she have drawn so many follow- 
 ers? Science has done great things for us; it 
 has also pushed us hopelessly back. For, not 
 content with filling its own place, it has tried 
 to supersede everything else. It has challenged 
 the super-eminence of religion; it has turned 
 all philosophy out of doors except that which 
 clings to Its skirts; It has thrown contempt on 
 all learning that does not depend on It; and It 
 has bribed the skeptics by giving us Immense 
 material comforts. To the plea, "Man shall 
 not live by bread alone, but by every word 
 which proceedeth out of the mouth of God," 
 It has retorted that no word proceeds authen- 
 tically out of the mouth of God save what it 
 has Issued In Its own translations. It is more 
 rigorous and more exclusive than the Index of 
 the Roman Church. The Inquisition never did 
 anything so oppressive as to put all men, Inno- 
 cent or guilty, Into a laboratory. Science cares 
 supremely for physical things. If It restricted 
 itself to the physical world. It would be toler- 
 able: we could shut ourselves away with our 
 souls in peace. But it must control the soul as 
 
 [85] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 well as the body : it Insists on reducing all emo- 
 tions, however miraculous and dear, to a ques- 
 tion of nerve-centres. There has never been 
 tyranny like this. 
 
 Now I do not mean to say that all scientists 
 despise culture. That would be silly and untrue. 
 But the "scientific" obsession has changed all 
 rankings in the intellectual world. The insidi- 
 ousness of science lies In Its claim to be not a 
 subject, but a method. You could ignore a sub- 
 ject: no subject Is all-inclusive. But a method 
 can plausibly be applied to anything within the 
 field of consciousness. Small wonder that the 
 study of literature turns Into philology, the 
 study of history into archaeology, and the study 
 of morals and aesthetics Into physical psychol- 
 ogy. With the finer appeals of philosophy and 
 poetry and painting and natural beauty, science 
 need not meddle; because about their direct 
 effect on the thought and wills of men It can 
 say nothing valuable. You cannot determine 
 the value of a Velasquez by putting your finger 
 on the pulse of the man who is looking at it; 
 or the value of Amiens Cathedral by register- 
 ing the vibration of his internal muscles; or of 
 the Grand Caiion of the Colorado by declaring 
 that all perception of beauty is a function of 
 sex. Nor does it matter very much, at the 
 moment, to the enraptured reader or observer 
 that such and such a work of art was the 
 logical result of a given set of conditions. The 
 [861 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 point IS that it is there; and that it works 
 potently upon us in ways which we can scarce 
 phrase. Culture puts us disinterestedly in com- 
 munication with the distilled and sifted lore of 
 the world. Science is in comparison a preju- 
 diced affair — prejudiced because It seeks always 
 to bring things back to literal and physical 
 explanations. Far be it from me to deny that 
 geology, biology, physics, have given us un- 
 apprehended vistas down which to stray — 
 only, strictly speaking, it forbids the straying. 
 The moment the layman's imagination begins 
 to profit, begins to get real exhilaration from 
 scientific discoveries, it contributes something 
 unwelcome to science. Science has its own stern 
 value; in the end we are all profoundly affected 
 by its gains in the field of fact. One's quarrel 
 is not with science as such, but with science as 
 demanding an intellectual and spiritual hegem- 
 ony. With nothing less than hegemony, how- 
 ever, will science be content. 
 
 Now if It is not yet clear what effect all this 
 must have on culture, a few words may make 
 it clearer. The great danger of the scientific 
 obsession Is not the destruction of all things 
 that are not science, but the slow infection of 
 those things. If the laboratory Is your real 
 test, then most philosophies and all art are no 
 good. The scientists are not good philosophers, 
 and they are not good artists; and if science is 
 to rule everywhere, we must shelve philosophy 
 
 1 87] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 and art, or else take them into the laboratory. 
 I need not point out what has become of litera- 
 ture under a scientific regime. We all know 
 the hopeless fiction that is created by the scien- 
 tific method; fiction that banks on its anec- 
 dotal accuracy and has in it no spiritual truth. 
 Literature is simply a different game: you do 
 not get the greatest literary truth by the lab- 
 oratory method. Art is not reducible to science, 
 because science takes no account of the special 
 truth which is beauty, of the special truth which 
 is moral imagination. 
 
 It is not only by the laboratory method that 
 our fiction has been ruined: a great many of 
 our writers of fiction are not up to the labor- 
 atory method. But all our fiction has been 
 harmed by the prevalent idea that no fiction is 
 any good which is not done according to the 
 laboratory method, and that even fiction which 
 attempts that method is of little value in com- 
 parison with a card-catalogue. There were some 
 snobs who were not affected by the democratic 
 fallacy; but even the snobs have been affected 
 by scientific scorn. 
 
 I may have seemed to be showing rather the 
 reasons for the extirpation of culture among us 
 than the fact of the extirpation. Perhaps that 
 is not the best way to go to work. But the 
 actual evidence is so multitudinously at hand 
 that it was hardly worth while beginning with 
 solemn proofs of the fact. In all branches of 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 art and learning we have a cult of the modern. 
 Modern languages rank Latin and Greek in 
 our schools and colleges; practical and "voca- 
 tional" training is displacing the rudiments of 
 learning in all of our public and many of our 
 private institutions for the teaching of the 
 young; the books admitted to the lists of "liter- 
 ature" include many that never have been and 
 never will be literature. I found, a few years 
 ago, the following books on a list from which 
 students of English were allowed to choose 
 their reading for the course — this, in one of 
 the old and respectable high schools of Massa- 
 chusetts, not twenty miles from Boston: Sol- 
 diers of Fortune y Pushing to the Front, Greif en- 
 stein, Doctor Latimer, The Prisoner of Zenda, 
 The Honorable Peter Stirling, The First Violin, 
 and "any of the works of Stewart Edward 
 White." These, and many others, may be, in 
 their way, good reading, but there is no excuse 
 for offering them to the young student of Eng- 
 lish as examples of "literature." 
 
 Standards of beauty and truth are no longer 
 rigidly held up. In philosophy we have produced 
 pragmatism ; in art we have produced futurism 
 — and what not, since then? — in literature we 
 have produced the pathologic and the economic 
 novel, and no poetry worth speaking of. The 
 "grand style" has gone out; and the classics 
 are back numbers. Our children do not even 
 speak good English; and no one minds. They 
 
 [89] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 cannot be bored with Scott and Dickens; they 
 cannot be bored with poetry at all. And why 
 should they, when their fathers and mothers 
 are reading Laddie and The Sick-a-Bed Lady, 
 and their clergymen are preaching about The 
 Inside of the Cup — or the latest work deal- 
 ing with the slums by some one who was 
 slum-born and slum-bred and Is proud of it? 
 You can be slum-born and slum-bred and 
 still achieve something worth while; but it is 
 a stupid Inverted snobbishness to be proud of 
 it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, 
 it would be of a continued decent tradition 
 back of one. The cultured person must have 
 put in a great many years with nothing to show 
 for it; his parents have usually put in a great 
 many years, for him, for which they have 
 nothing to show. There is nothing to show, 
 until you get the complex result of the discip- 
 lined and finished creature. "Culture" means a 
 long receptivity to things of the mind and the 
 spirit. There is no money in it; there is nothing 
 striking in it; there is in it no flattery of our 
 own time, or of the majority. 
 
 Ours is a commercial age, in which most 
 people are bent on getting money. That is a 
 platitude. It is also, intellectually speaking, a 
 materialistic age, when most of our intellectual 
 power is given either to prophylaxis, or to 
 industrial chemistry, or to the invention of 
 physical conveniences — all ultimately concerned 
 
 [90] 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 with the body. Even the philanthropists deal 
 with the soul through the body, and Chris- 
 tianity has long since become "muscular.'* 
 How, in such an age, can culture flourish — 
 culture, which cares even more about the spirit 
 than about the flesh? It was pointed out not 
 long ago, in an Atlantic article, that many of 
 our greatest minds have dwelt in bodies that 
 the eugenists would have legislated out of 
 existence. Many of the greatest saints found 
 sainthood precisely in denying the power of the 
 ailing flesh to restrict the soul. There is more 
 in the great mystics than psychiatry will ever 
 account for. But science, in spite of its vistas, 
 is short-sighted. It talks in seons, but keeps its 
 eye well screwed to the microscope. The geol- 
 ogic ages are dealt with by pick and hammer 
 and reduced to slides, and the lore of the stars 
 has become a pure matter of mathematical 
 formulae. Human welfare is a question of 
 microbes. Neither pundit nor populace cares, 
 at the present day, for perspectives. The past 
 is discredited because it is not modern. Not to 
 be modern is the great sin. 
 
 So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his 
 day, been modern. And surely even modernity 
 is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we 
 must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a 
 dead lion than a living dog? And is it not a 
 crime against human nature to consider negli- 
 gible "the best that has been thought and said 
 
 [91] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 in the world"? It is only by considering it 
 negligible that we can consent to let ourselves 
 be overrun by the hordes of ignorance and 
 materialism — the people (God save the 
 mark!) of to-morrow. Let us stand, if we 
 must, on practical grounds: the bird in the 
 hand is worth two in the bush. As if our only 
 guaranty that to-morrow would be tolerable 
 were not precisely that it is sprung from a past 
 that we know to have been, at many points, 
 noble! It is pathetic to see people refusing to 
 learn the lessons of history; it is a waste that 
 no efficiency expert ought to permit. All learn- 
 ing is a textbook which would save much time 
 to him who works for the perfection of the 
 world. But I begin to think that our age does 
 not really care about perfection; and that it 
 would rather make a thousand-year-old mistake 
 than learn a remedy from history. So much the 
 worse for to-morrow ! 
 
 But meanwhile let us — those of us who 
 can — see to it that the pre-eminent brains of 
 other ages shall not have passed away in vain. 
 M. Anatole France, in La Revolte des 
 AngeSj has a good deal to say about the 
 absurdity of a Jehovah who still believes in 
 the Ptolemaic system. Well, the Ptolemaic sys- 
 tem did not prevent the ancient world from 
 giving us Greek theatres and Roman law, or 
 England from giving us Magna Charta. We 
 are still imitating Greek theatres (rather 
 
 [92] 
 
THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 
 
 badly, I admit) In our stadia; Roman law 
 is still, by and large, good enough for such 
 an enlightened country as France; and Magna 
 Charta — or Its equivalent — had to be there 
 before we could have a Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence. Our superior scientific knowledge 
 has not given us our standards of beauty or 
 justice or liberty. Let us take what the present 
 offers — airplanes and all. But let us not throw 
 away what other men, In other ages, have died 
 for the sake of discovering. If the lore of the 
 past is useless, there Is every chance — one must 
 be very overweening indeed not to admit It — 
 that the lore of our generation will be useless, 
 too. Culture — whether you use the word Itself 
 or find another term — means only a decent 
 economy of human experience. You cannot 
 Improve on things without keeping those things 
 pretty steadily in mind. Otherwise you run the 
 risk of wasting a lot of time doing something 
 that has already been done. Any one, I think, 
 will admit that. And It Is not a far step to the 
 realization that on the whole It Is wise not to 
 lose the past out of our minds. There Is no 
 glory In being wiser than the original savage; 
 there Is glory In being wiser than the original 
 sage. But In order to be wiser than he, we must 
 have a shrewd suspicion of how wise he was. 
 By and large, without culture, that shrewd 
 suspicion will nev€r be ours. 
 
 [93] 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 NEVER, I fancy, has It been more true 
 than it is today, that fiction reflects life. 
 The best fiction has always given us a 
 kind of precipitate of human nature — Don 
 Quixote and Tom Jones are equally "true," 
 and true, in a sense, for all time; but our 
 modern books give us every quirk and turn of 
 the popular ideal, and fifty years hence, If read 
 at all, may be too "quaint" for words. And to 
 any one who has been reading fiction for the 
 last twenty years, it is cryingly obvious that 
 fashions in human nature have changed. 
 
 My first novel was Jane Eyre; and at the 
 age of eight, I fell desperately In love with 
 Fairfax Rochester. No Instance could serve 
 better to point the distance we have come. I 
 was not an extraordinary little girl (except 
 that, perhaps, I was extraordinarily fortunate 
 In being permitted to encounter the classics in 
 Infancy), and I dare say that If I had not met 
 Mr. Rochester, I should have succumbed to 
 some Imaginary gentleman of a quite different 
 stamp. It may be that I should have fallen in 
 love — had time and chance permitted — ^with 
 V. V. or The Beloved Vagabond. But I 
 doubt it. In the first place, novels no longer 
 
 [94l 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 assume that it is the prime business of the 
 female heart (at whatever age) to surrender 
 itself completely to some man. Consequently, 
 the men in the novels of today are not calcu- 
 lated, as they once were, to hit the fluttering 
 mark. The emotions are the last redoubt to be 
 taken, as modern tactics direct the assault. 
 
 People are always telling us that fashions 
 in women have changed: what seems to me 
 almost more interesting is that fashions in men 
 (the stable sex) have changed to match. The 
 new woman (by which I mean the very new- 
 est) would not fall in love with Mr. Roches- 
 ter. It is therefore "up to" the novelists to 
 create heroes whom the modern heroine will 
 fall in love with. This, to the popular satis- 
 faction, they have done. And not only in fiction 
 have the men changed; in life, too, the men 
 of to-day are quite different. I know, because 
 my friends marry them. 
 
 It is immensely interesting, this difference. 
 One by one, the man has sloughed off his most 
 masculine (as we knew them) characteristics. 
 Gone are Mr. Rochester, who fought the duel 
 with the vicomte at dawn, and Burgo Fitz- 
 gerald (the only love of that incomparable 
 woman. Lady Glencora Palliser), who break- 
 fasted on curagao and pate de foie gras. No 
 longer does Blanche Ingram declare, "An Eng- 
 lish hero of the road would be the next best 
 thing to an Italian bandit, and that could only 
 
 (9Sl 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 be surpassed by a Levantine pirate." Blanche 
 Ingram wants — and gets — the Humanitarian 
 Hero : some one who has particular respect for 
 convicts and fallen women, and whose favorite 
 author is Tolstoi. He must qualify for the 
 possession of her hand by long, voluntary resi- 
 dence in the slums; he may inherit ancestral 
 acres only if he has, concerning them, social- 
 istic intentions. He must be too altruistic to 
 kill grouse, and if he is to be wholly up-to- 
 date, he must refuse to eat them. He must 
 never order "pistols and coffee" : his only per- 
 mitted weapon is benevolent legislation. 
 
 I do not mean that he is to be a milk-sop — 
 "muscular Christianity" has at least taught us 
 that it is well for the hero to be in the pink of 
 condition, as he may any day have a street 
 fight on his hands. And he should have the 
 tongues of men and of angels. Gone is the 
 inarticulate Guardsman — gone forever. The 
 modern hero has read books that Burgo Fitz- 
 gerald and Guy Livingstone and Mr. Roches- 
 ter never heard of. He is ready to address any 
 gathering, and to argue with any antagonist, 
 until dawn. He is, preferably, personally un- 
 conscious of sex until the heroine arrives; but 
 he is by no means effeminate. He is a very 
 complicated and interesting creature. Some 
 mediaeval traits are discernible in him; but the 
 eighteenth century would not have known him 
 for human. 
 
 [96] 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 What has he lost, this hero, and what has 
 he gained? How did it all begin? In life, 
 doubtless, it began with a feminine change of 
 taste. Brilliant plumage has ceased to allure; 
 and, I suspect, the peacock's tail, as much as 
 the anthropoid ape's. Is destined to elimination. 
 We women of to-day are distrustful of the 
 peacock's tail. We are mortally afraid of being 
 misled by it, and of discovering, too late, that 
 the peacock's soul is not quite the thing. Never 
 has there been among the feminine young more 
 scientific talk about sex, and never among the 
 feminine young such a scientific distrust of it. 
 Before a young woman suspects that she wants 
 to marry a young man, she has probably dis- 
 cussed with him, exhaustively, the penal code, 
 white slavery, eugenics, and race-suicide. The 
 miracle — the everlasting miracle of Nature — 
 IS that she should want, in these circumstances, 
 to marry him at all. She probably does not, 
 unless his views have been wholly to her satis- 
 faction. And with those views, what has the 
 perpetual glory of the peacock's tail to do? 
 
 So much for life. In our English fiction, I 
 am Inclined to believe that George Eliot began 
 it with Daniel Deronda. But, In our own day, 
 Meredith did more. Up to the time of Mere- 
 dith, the dominant male was the fashionable 
 hero. Tom Jones, and Sir Charles Grandison, 
 and Fairfax Rochester, and "Stunning" War- 
 rington are as different as possible; but all of 
 
 [97] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 them, in their several ways, keep up one male 
 tradition in fiction. It is within our own day 
 that that tradition has entirely changed. Have 
 you ever noticed how inveterately, in Mere- 
 dith's novels, the schoolmaster or his spiritual 
 kinsman comes out on top? Lord Ormont can- 
 not stand against Matey Weyburn, Lord Fleet- 
 wood against Owain Wythan, Sir Willoughby 
 Patterne against Vernon Whitford. The little 
 girl who fell in love with Mr. Rochester would 
 have preferred any one of these gentlemen 
 (yes, even Sir Willoughby!) to his rival; but 
 I dare say the event would have proved her 
 wrong. Certainly the wisdom of the ladies' 
 choice was never doubtful to Meredith him- 
 self. The soldier and the aristocrat cannot en- 
 dure the test they are put to by the sympathetic 
 male with a penchant for the enfranchised 
 woman. Vain for Lord Ormont to accede to 
 Aminta's taste for publicity; vain for Lord 
 Fleetwood to become the humble wooer of 
 Carinthia Jane: each has previously been con- 
 victed of pride. 
 
 Now, in an earlier day, no woman would 
 have looked at a man who was not proud — 
 who was not, even, a little too proud. Pride, 
 by which Lucifer fell, was the chief hall-mark 
 of the gentleman. Moreover, In that earlier 
 day, women did not expect their heroes to 
 explain everything to them: a certain amount 
 of reticence, a measure of silence, was also one 
 
 [98] 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 of the hall-marks of the gentleman. If a bit of 
 mystery could be thrown in, so much the better. 
 It gave her something to exercise her imagina- 
 tion on. Think of the Byronic males — Conrad, 
 Lara, and the rest! If they had told all, where 
 would they have been? Think of Lovelace and 
 HeathcHff and Darcy and Brian de Bols 
 GuUbert ! 
 
 Heroes, once, were always disdaining to 
 speak, and spurning their foes. Nowadays, no 
 hero disdains to speak, and no hero ventures 
 to spurn anyone — least of all, his foes. He is 
 humble of heart and very loquacious. Mrs. 
 Humphry Ward has inherited from George 
 Eliot; and the latest heroes of Mr. Gals- 
 worthy and Mr. Hewlett, for example, are the 
 children of Vernon Whitford, Matey Weyburn, 
 and Owain Wythan (of whom it is not ex- 
 plicitly written that they had any others). 
 They are humanitarian and democratic; they 
 are ignorant of hatred; they are inclined to 
 think the ill-born necessarily better than the 
 well-born; and they are quite sure that women 
 are superior to men. True, Mr. Galsworthy 
 always seems to be looking backward ; he never 
 forgets the ancient tradition that he is com- 
 bating. His young aristocrats who eschew the 
 ways of aristocracy are unhappy, and virtue in 
 their case is ''its only reward." Perhaps that 
 is why his novels always leave us with the 
 medicinal taste of inconclusion in our mouths. 
 
 [99] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 But take a handful of heroes elsewhere: the 
 Reverend John Hodder, the ex-convict "Dan- 
 iel Smith," V. v., or even Coryston, the 
 Socialist peer. Where, in a lot of them, do 
 you find either pride or reticence In the old 
 sense? Where, in any one of them, do you find 
 the Satanic charm? Which one would Harriet 
 Byron, or Jane Eyre, or Catherine Earnshaw, 
 or Elizabeth Bennett, have looked at with eyes 
 of love? 
 
 The "Satanic charm." The phrase Is out. 
 Milton, I suspect, is responsible for the tradi- 
 tion that has lasted so long, and Is now being 
 broken utterly to pieces. Milton made Satan 
 delightful, and our good Protestant novelists 
 for a long time followed his lead, in that they 
 gave their delightful men some of the Satanic 
 traits. Proud they were and scornfully silent, 
 as we have recalled; and conventional to the 
 last degree. "Conventional," that is, In the 
 stricter sense; by which It Is not meant that as 
 portraits they were unconvincing, or that, as 
 men, they never offended Mrs. Grundy. They 
 were conventional In that they followed a con- 
 vention; In that they were, to a large extent, 
 predicable. They were jealous of their honor, 
 and believed It vindicable by the duel; they had 
 no doubt that good women were better than 
 bad, and that pedigree In human beings was as 
 important as pedigree In animals; and though 
 they might be quixotic on occasion, they were 
 not democratic pour deux sous. The barmaid 
 
 [ lOO] 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 was not their sister, nor the stevedore their 
 brother. (The Satan of Paradise Lost, as we 
 all remember, was a splendid snob.) 
 
 Moreover, they were sophisticated — and not 
 merely out of books. The Faust idea, having 
 prevailed for many centuries, has at last been 
 abandoned — and perhaps, our sober sense may 
 tell us, rightly; but not so long ago there was 
 still something more repellent to the female 
 imagination about the man who chose not to 
 know, than about the man who chose not to 
 abstain. I do not mean that we were supposed 
 always to be looking for a Tom Jones or a 
 Roderick Random — we might be looking for 
 a Sir Charles Grandison, no less; but at least, 
 when we found our hero, we expected to find 
 him wiser than we. Nowadays, a girl rather 
 likes to give a man points — and often (in fic- 
 tion, at least) has to. Meredith railed against 
 the "veiled virginal dolF' as heroine. Well: 
 our heroines now are never veiled virginal 
 dolls; but sometimes our heroes are. Lancelot 
 has gone out, and Galahad has come in. I 
 suspect that there is a literary law of compen- 
 sation, and that, Ibsen and Strindberg to the 
 contrary notwithstanding, there has to be a 
 veiled virginal doll somewhere in a really tak- 
 ing romance. Perhaps it is fair that the sterner 
 sex should have its turn at guarding ideals by 
 the hearthstone, while women make the grand 
 tour. 
 
 Let me not be misunderstood. I am not 
 
 [ lOI ] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 referring particularly to that knowledge which 
 any man is better without, but to the Odyssean 
 experience which, in their respective measures, 
 heroes were wont to have behind them: 
 
 *And saw the cities, and the counsels knew 
 
 Of many men, and many a time at sea 
 Within his heart he bore calamity.* 
 
 They had at least seen the towns and the 
 minds of men, and their morals were the less 
 likely to be upset by a conventional assault 
 upon them. Does any one chance to remember, 
 I wonder, Theron Ware, led to his "damna- 
 tion" by his first experience of a Chopin noc- 
 turne? It would have taken more than a 
 Chopin nocturne to make any of our seasoned 
 heroes do something that he did not wish to. 
 They knew something of society, and ergo of 
 women; they had experienced, directly or 
 vicariously, human romance; and they had 
 read history. Nowadays, they are apt to know 
 little or nothing — to begin with— of society, 
 women, or romance, except what may be got 
 from brand-new books on sociology; and they 
 pride themselves on knowing no history. His- 
 tory, with its eternal stresses and selections, is 
 nothing if not aristocratic, and our heroes now- 
 adays must be democratic or they die. It is an 
 age of complete faith in the superiority of the 
 lower classes — the swing of the pendulum, no 
 [ 102] 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 doubt, from the other extreme of thinking the 
 lower classes morally and aesthetically negli- 
 gible. ^'Privilege" Is as detestable now In mat- 
 ters of Intellect and breeding as In matters of 
 finance and politics. The man with the muck- 
 rake has got past the office into the drawing- 
 room. If your hero has the bad luck not to 
 have been born in the slums, he must at least 
 have the wit to take up his habitation there as 
 soon as he comes of age. We have learned that 
 riches are corrupting, but (except In the special 
 sense of vice-commlsslon reports) we have not 
 yet learned that poverty is rather more cor- 
 rupting than wealth. 
 
 Sophistication, whether social, intellectual, 
 or aesthetic, is now the deadly sin. If we are 
 sophisticated, we may not be good enough for 
 Ellis Island. And there goes another of the 
 hall-marks of the gentleman as he was once 
 known to fiction. Our hero in old days might 
 not have condescended to the glittering assem- 
 blies of fashion, but there was never any doubt 
 that, if he had, he would, in spite of himself, 
 have been king of his company as soon as he 
 entered the room. He might have been hard 
 up, but his necktie would not have been "a 
 black sea holding for life a school of fat white 
 fish." He might have been lonely or gloomy, 
 but he would not have been diffident, and he 
 would never, never, never have "blinked" at 
 the heroine. "My godlike friend had carelessly 
 
 [103] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 put his hair-brush Into the butter," says Asti- 
 cot, at the outset, of the Beloved Vagabond. 
 Now in picaresque novels, we were always 
 meeting people who did that sort of thing; but 
 they were not gentlemen. Whereas, the Be- 
 loved Vagabond is of noble birth, and despite 
 his ten years' abeyance, finds the countess quite 
 ready to marry him. She does not marry him 
 In the end, to be sure, but we are permitted to 
 feel that there was something lacking in her 
 because Paragot's manners at tea did not 
 please her. The hero of old had what used to 
 be called "a sense of fitness," and a saving sense 
 of humor, which combined to prevent his enter- 
 ing a ballroom as John the Baptist. The same 
 lucky combination would have prevented him — 
 in literature, at least — from wooing the mil- 
 lionaire's child with dusty commonplaces of the 
 Higher Criticism or jeremiads against the 
 daughters of Heth. But perhaps millionaires' 
 children today take that sort of thing for 
 manners. To the argument that a performance 
 of the kind takes courage, one can only reply 
 that, judging from the enthusiasm with which 
 the preaching hero is received by the heroine, 
 it apparently does not. And in any case, the 
 hero is too sublimely ignorant of what socially 
 constitutes courage to deserve any credit for It. 
 Sometimes, of course, like Mr. Galsworthy's 
 men, he perceives, with some Inherited sense, 
 that his kind of thing is not likely to be wel- 
 [ 104] 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 corned; and then he goes sadly and sternly 
 away, leaving the girl to accept a wooer with 
 more technique. But usually he cuts out every- 
 body. For the chief hall-mark of a gentleman, 
 now, is the desire to reform his own class out 
 of all recognition. 
 
 Women, as we know, have long wanted to 
 be talked to as if they were men; and the 
 result is that heroines now let themselves be 
 lectured at in a way that very few men would 
 endure. Alison Parr marries the Rev. John 
 Hodder, and Carlisle Heth would have mar- 
 ried V. V. if he had lived. Well: Clara 
 Middleton married Vernon Whitford, and 
 Carinthia Jane married Owain Wythan, and 
 Aminta married Matey Weyburn. 
 
 I may have seemed to be speaking cynically. 
 That, I can give my word of honor, I am not. 
 It is well that we have come to realize that 
 there are some adventures which, in them- 
 selves, add no lustre to a man's name. It Is 
 well that we take thought for the lower strata 
 of humanity — though our actual reforms, I 
 fancy, show their authors as taking thought 
 not for to-morrow but for to-day. Certainly 
 brutality, or the indifference which is negative 
 brutality, is not a beautiful or a moral thing; 
 and certainly we do not particularly sympa- 
 thize with Thackeray shedding tears as he 
 went away from his publishers because they 
 had obliged him to save Pendennis's chastity. 
 
 [losl 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 That dreadful person, Arthur Pendennis, 
 would surely not have been made any less 
 dreadful by being permitted to seduce Fanny 
 Bolton. 
 
 It is right to think of the poor; it is right to 
 bend our energies, as citizens, to the economic 
 bettering of their lot. No one could sanely 
 regret our doing so. But there is always danger 
 in saying the thing which is not, and in pre- 
 tending that because some virtues have hith- 
 erto not been recognized, the virtues that have 
 been recognized are no good. One sympathizes 
 with Towneley (in that incomparable novel 
 The Way of All Flesh) when Ernest asks him: 
 
 " *Don't you like poor people very much 
 yourself?' 
 
 "Towneley gave his face a comical but good- 
 natured screw and said quietly, but slowly and 
 decidedly, 'No, no, no,' and escaped. 
 
 "Of course, some poor people were very 
 nice, and always would be so, but as though 
 scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he 
 saw that no one was nicer for being poor, and 
 that between the upper and lower classes there 
 was a gulf which amounted practically to an 
 impassable barrier." 
 
 It is a great pity that Samuel Butler did not 
 live longer and write more novels. But in re- 
 gretting him, we shall do well to remember 
 that though publication was delayed until some 
 time after the author's death, the bulk of The 
 
 [io6] 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 Way of All Flesh was written in the '70's. 
 The Way of All Flesh is not sympathetic to 
 the contemporary mood; it is one of those 
 books so much ahead of its time (except per- 
 haps in ecclesiastical matters) that the time has 
 not yet caught up with it. It was doomed in- 
 evitably to an interval of oblivion. The case 
 reminds one of Richard Feverel. 
 
 Only in one way is The Way of All Flesh 
 quite contemporary. The hero thinks so well 
 of the prostitute that he marries her. On the 
 other hand, to be sure, he bitterly regrets it, 
 which is not contemporary. I do not mean that 
 the hero's marrying her is especially in the 
 literary fashion, but his thinking well of her 
 IS. You will notice that in our moral fever we 
 do not leave the prostitute out of our novels — 
 no, indeed: she must be there to give spice, as 
 of old. Only now, instead of being entangled 
 with her, the young gentleman preaches to her; 
 and she loves him for It. Perhaps this is what 
 happens nowadays In real life. I do not pretend 
 to know; but I suspect it is true, for I fancy 
 the only kind of person who could invent the 
 contemporary plot Is the kind who would live 
 it. The wildest imaginings of the people who 
 are made differently would hardly stretch to 
 it. And not only does the hero find himself 
 immensely touched by the tragedy of the 
 disreputable woman — which is, after all, in 
 certain cases plausible enough — he burns to 
 
 [107] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 introduce his fiancee to her. Now that, again, 
 may be life — Mr. Winston Churchill, for 
 example, should know better than I — but it is 
 certainly a world with the sense of values gone 
 wrong. And when we have lost our sense of 
 values, we shall presently lose the values as 
 well. The girl herself is often to blame: did 
 not the fiancee of Simon de Gex go of her own 
 initiative to see the animal-tamer, and come 
 away to renounce him, convinced that the 
 animal-tamer was the nobler woman? Which, 
 emphatically, she was not. But then, as we 
 know from long experience of Mr. Locke, he 
 cannot keep his head with circus-people about; 
 and sawdust is incense to him. Let Mr. Locke 
 have his little foibles by all means; but even 
 Mr. Locke should not have made the spoiled 
 darling of society marry the animal-tamer (one 
 side of her face having been nearly clawed off) 
 and then go with her into city missionary work. 
 Yet I do not believe it Is really Mr. Locke's 
 fault. The public at present loves as a sister 
 the woman with a past; and loves city mission- 
 ary work, if possible, more. 
 
 The fact is that with all our Imitation of 
 Meredith — and every one who is not imitating 
 Tolstoi* is imitating Meredith — he has failed 
 to save us. We have taken all his prescriptions 
 blindly — except one. We have emancipated our 
 women and emasculated our men; we have cast 
 down the mighty from their seats and exalted 
 
 [io8] 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 them of low degree; we have learned all the 
 Radical shibboleths and say them for our 
 morning prayers; and we have faced the fact 
 of sex so squarely that we can hardly see any- 
 thing else. But we have not learned his saving 
 hatred of the sentimentalist. Miss May Sin- 
 clair has admirably pointed out in her study of 
 the three Brontes that Charlotte Bronte 
 was exceedingly modern in her detestation of 
 sentimentality. Modern she may have been — 
 with Meredith; but not modern with the 
 present novelists, for they are almost too senti- 
 mental to be endured. And there is the whole 
 trouble. We think Thackeray an old fool for 
 being sentimental over Amelia Sedley; but how 
 does It better the case to be sentimental, In- 
 stead, over the heroine of The Promised 
 Land? Amelia Sedley was all in all a much 
 nicer person, if not half so clever. She may 
 have snivelled a good deal, but she was capable 
 of loving some one else better than herself. 
 
 Of course, I have cited only a few instances 
 — those that happened to come most easily to 
 mind. But let any reader of fiction run over 
 mentally a group of contemporary heroes, and 
 see If the substitutions I have named have not 
 pretty generally taken place. Has not pride 
 given way to humility, reticence to glibness, 
 class-consciousness to a wild democracy, the 
 code of manners to an uncouth unworldliness, 
 and honor In the old sense to a burning pas- 
 [ 109] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 sion for reform — "any old" reform? Do not 
 these men lead us into the heterogeneous com- 
 pany of the unclassed of both sexes — and ask 
 us to look upon them as saints in motley? Has 
 not the world of fiction changed in the last 
 twenty years ? The hero in old days sometimes 
 fell foul of the law by getting into debt. But 
 we were not supposed, therefore, to be on his 
 side against the law. Now, the hero does not, 
 perhaps, get into legal difficulties himself, but 
 he is always passionately on the side of the 
 people whom laws were devised to protect the 
 respectable from. The scientific tendency to 
 consider that aristocracy consists merely in 
 freedom from certain physical taints has per- 
 meated fiction. "Is not one man as good as 
 another?" asked the demagogue. "Of course 
 he is, and a great deal better!" repHed the 
 excited Irishman in the crowd. We are in the 
 thick of a popular mania for thinking all the 
 undesirables "a good deal better." The modern 
 hero is, to my mind, in intention, if not in 
 execution, an admirable figure; and though one 
 rather expects him any day to give his whole 
 fortune for a gross of green spectacles, one 
 will not, for that, find him any less likable. 
 Some day he will rediscover the Dantesque 
 hierarchy of souls implicit in humanity. And 
 then, perhaps, he will get back his charm. 
 
 Some one is probably bursting to observe 
 that we have a school of realists at hand; and 
 that no one can accuse Mr. Wells and Mr. 
 [no] 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 Bennett of sentimentality — also that we have 
 Mr. Shaw and Mr. Granville Barker and Mr. 
 Masefield as mounted auxiliaries in the field. 
 I grant Mr. Bennett; I am not so sure about 
 Mr. Wells. But certainly Mr. Wells Is not 
 sentimental as Mr. William de Morgan, Mr. 
 Winston Churchill, Mr. Meredith Nicholson, 
 Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. H. S. Harrison, 
 and Miss Ellen Glasgow are sentimental. If 
 he is sentimental at all, It is rather over ideas 
 than people. (Mr. Masefield, I am inclined to 
 think, is simply catering to the special audience 
 that Thomas Hardy, by his silence, has left 
 gaping and empty.) Let us look into the mat- 
 ter a little. ^'Sentimental" is one of the most 
 difiicult catchwords in the world to define; and 
 you can get a roomful of intelligent people 
 quarrelling over It any time. Perhaps, for our 
 purposes, it will serve merely to say that the 
 sentimentalist is always, in one way or another, 
 disloyal to facts. He cannot be trusted to give 
 a straight account, because his own sense of 
 things is more valuable to him than the truth. 
 He has come in on the top of the pragmatic 
 wave, and the sands of Anglo-Saxondom are 
 strewn thick with him. He serves, in KlplIng^s 
 phrase, the God of Things as They Ought to 
 Be (according to his private feeling). His own 
 perversion may be aesthetic, or intellectual, or 
 moral, or sociological, but he is always recog- 
 nizable by his tampering with truth. 
 
 Now, Mr. Wells does tamper with truth. 
 
 [Ill] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 He did It, for example, in the case of Ann 
 Veronica. He wanted Ann Veronica to be a 
 nice girl under twenty, and he wanted her, 
 even more, to be unduly awakened to certain 
 physical aspects of sex. It was sentimentality 
 that made him draw her as he did : determina- 
 tion to prove that the girl who loved as he 
 wanted her to love was just as conventional as 
 any one else. You cannot have your cake and 
 eat It too; but the sentimentalist blindly refuses 
 to accept that. Accordingly, we get the uncon- 
 vincing creature that Mr. Wells wanted to 
 believe existed. Mr. Wells's heroes may not 
 seem to bear out my argument so well as Mr. 
 Galsworthy's. To be sure, Mr. Wells Is not so 
 sentimental as Mr. Galsworthy, and he has 
 not, like the author of The Man of Prop- 
 erty, and Fraternity, and Justice, one — just 
 one — fixed Idea. Mr. Galsworthy always deals 
 with a man who is In love with some other 
 man's wife; and his world is thereby nar- 
 rowed. Mr. Wells is Interested in a good many 
 things, and his politics are not purely phil- 
 anthropic as most of our novelists' politics 
 are. But Mr. Wells's heroes, even when they 
 are fairly fortunate, are pre-occupied with their 
 own notions of sociological duty, even more 
 than they are pre-occupied with passion, though 
 their passion is "special" enough when It 
 comes. Would any one except a Wells hero 
 take a trip to India and come away having 
 
 [112] 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 seen nothing but the sweat-shops of Bombay? 
 Always the author's sympathy is with the 
 under dog; whether it is Kipps or Mr. Polly 
 living out his long foredoomed existence, or 
 George Ponderevo analyzing Bladesover with 
 diabolic keenness and aching contempt. "Fm a 
 spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable 
 goddesses," says Ponderevo in a burst of 
 frankness. There you have the Wells hero to 
 the life. And Mr. Bennett's people are only 
 spiritual guttersnipes who are not In love with 
 unimaginable goddesses. 
 
 The point is that the guttersnipe is having 
 his turn in fiction : if our American heroes are 
 not guttersnipes themselves, it Is their sign of 
 grace to be supremely interested in gutter- 
 snipes. In one way or the other, the gutter- 
 snipe must have his proper prominence. Of 
 course, there are differences and degrees: a 
 few heroes get no nearer the lower classes 
 than a passionate desire for reform tickets and 
 municipal sanitation. But ordinarily they must 
 go through Ernest Pontlfex's state of believing 
 that poor people are not only more important, 
 but In every way way nicer than rich people; 
 and few of them go back utterly on that 
 belief, as Ernest did. Perhaps that, more than 
 anything else, marks the change of fashion In 
 men. For gentlemen were always, in their way, 
 benevolent; but formerly they had not achieved 
 the paradox that the object of benevolence is 
 
 ["3 1 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 ex officio more interesting than the bestower. 
 
 I said earlier that in life, as well as in 
 literature, men had changed. One's instances, 
 obviously, must be from books, and not from 
 one's acquaintance; but I spoke truth. Philan- 
 thropy is the latest social ladder, but it would 
 not be so if the people on the top rung were 
 not interested in philanthropy. There has been, 
 for whatever reason, a tremendous spurt of 
 interest in sociological questions. Our hard- 
 headed young men, of high ideals, find them- 
 selves fighting, of necessity, on a different 
 battlefield from any that strategists would have 
 chosen thirty years ago. Moreover, philan- 
 thropy being woman's way into politics, women 
 have been giving their calm, or hysterical, 
 attention to problems which, thirty years since, 
 did not, as problems, exist for them. I said 
 that the change of taste in women would prob- 
 ably account for much of the change of fashion 
 in men. A schoolmate of mine, writing me 
 some years since of her engagement, said (in 
 nearly these words), "He is tremendously in- 
 terested in city missionary work; it wouldn't 
 have been quite perfect if we hadn't had that 
 in common." Both were spoiled darlings of 
 fortune, but the statement was quite sincere. 
 Undoubtedly, without that, it would not have 
 been "quite perfect" in the eyes of either. 
 
 The mere conversation of the marriageable 
 young has changed past belief. "Social service" 
 
 [114] 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 has usurped so many subjects! Have many- 
 people stopped to realize, I wonder, how com- 
 pletely the psychological novel and the "prob- 
 lem" play (in the old sense) have gone out of 
 date? The psychology of hero and heroine, 
 their emotional attitudes to each other, are 
 largely worked out now in terms of their atti- 
 tudes to impersonal questions, their religious 
 or their sociological "principles." The indi- 
 vidual personal reaction counts less and less. 
 If they agree on the same panacea for the 
 social evils, the author can usually patch up a 
 passion sufficient for them to marry on. Gone, 
 for the most part, are the pages of intimate 
 analysis. No intimate analysis is needed any 
 longer. As for the "problem play," we have 
 It still with us, but in another form. The Doll's 
 House and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray are 
 both antiquated : we do not call a drama a prob- 
 lem play now unless it preaches a new kind of 
 legislation. And as for sex — in its finer aspects 
 it no longer interests us. 
 
 There was a great deal more sex, in its 
 subtler manifestations. In the old novels and 
 plays, than in the new ones. Not so long ago, 
 a novel was a love-story; and it was of su- 
 preme importance to a hero whether or not he 
 could make the heroine care for him. It was 
 also of supreme importance to the heroine. 
 The romance was all founded on sex; and yet 
 sex was hardly mentioned. Our heroes and 
 
 I "5 1 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 heroines still marry; but when they consider 
 sex at all, they are apt to consider It biologic- 
 ally, not romantically. We, as a public, are 
 more frankly Interested in sex than ever; but 
 we think of It objectively, and a little brutally, 
 in terms of demand and supply. And so we get 
 often the pathetic spectacle of the hero and 
 heroine having no time to make love to each 
 other in the good old-fashioned way, because 
 they are so busy suppressing the red-light dis- 
 trict and compiling statistics of disease. Much 
 of the frankness, doubtless, is a good thing; 
 but, beyond a doubt, it has cheapened passion. 
 For passion among civilized people is a subtle 
 thing; it is wrapped about with dreams and 
 imaginings, and can bring human beings to 
 salvation as well as to perdition. But when it 
 is shown to us as the mere province of cour- 
 tesans, small wonder that we turn from it to 
 the hero who will have difficulty in feeling or 
 Inspiring it. Especially since we are told, at 
 the same time, that even the courtesan plies 
 her trade only from direst necessity. 
 
 After all, the only safe person to fall in love 
 with nowadays is a reformer: socially, finan- 
 cially, and sentimentally. And most women, at 
 least, could (if they would) say with the Prln- 
 cesse Mathilde, *'Je n'alme que les romans 
 dont je voudrais etre I'heroine.'' Certainly, 
 unless for some special reason, no novel of 
 which one would not like to be the heroine — in 
 [116I 
 
FASHIONS IN MEN 
 
 love with the hero — will reach the hundred 
 thousand mark. If there are any of us left who 
 regret the gentlemen of old — who still prefer 
 our Darcy or even our Plantagenet Palliser — 
 we must write our own novels, and divine our 
 own heroes under the protective coloring of 
 their conventional breeding. For they are not 
 being "featured," at present, either in life or 
 in literature. 
 
 [1171 
 
THE NEWEST WOMAN 
 
 IT was the late George Meredith, if I mis- 
 take not, who was credited with bringing 
 women into their joint inheritance of wit 
 and passion. He himself supposed himself to 
 discard, first of the novelists, the "veiled vir- 
 ginal doll." The jeune file had, in the course 
 of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth 
 centuries, become somewhat dehumanized. She 
 was far, indeed, from the frank heroines of 
 Shakespeare, to whom every year was leap 
 year. The heroine of the old-fashioned senti- 
 mental novel forsook her blushing, fainting, 
 tear-shedding, letter-writing girlhood, only to 
 become, on her wedding day, the British ma- 
 tron. There seems to have been no transition. 
 Meredith apparently felt that the feminine 
 share in romance was deplorably and inaccu- 
 rately minimized. He exaggerated, perhaps. 
 Scott gave us a few fine examples of the beau- 
 tiful girl without frill or flutter, who was 
 aware of her own mind. George Eliot knew a 
 thing or two about her sex; and Jane Eyre, in 
 her day, was notoriously explicit. 
 
 Not long since, indeed, having brought my- 
 self quite up to date with the fiction of the 
 contemporary English school — even to the 
 
 [118] 
 
THE NEWEST WOMAN 
 
 last instalments of its serial novels — I sought 
 out the most demode of the English novelists. 
 "Let me see/' I murmured to myself, "just 
 what It Is that we have thought it worth while, 
 at this expense, to escape." Accordingly, I pro- 
 cured all the volumes of Sir Charles Grandi- 
 son. Nothing, it seemed, could be fairer than 
 to go to Richardson; and, in all the work of 
 Richardson, fairest, surely, to go to Sir Charles. 
 
 I have never known any one who was 
 ashamed to confess that Sir Charles Grandi- 
 son bored him. It is the last work which any 
 defender of the old school of fiction would 
 think of using as a basis for argument. And 
 yet, even in that epic of priggery, the natural 
 note is not wholly lacking. Harriet Byron 
 loved Sir Charles while he was still bound to 
 the Lady Clementina, and bore herself with 
 dignity when her friends cautioned her against 
 her own feeling. "If this should end at last In 
 love" (she writes), "and I should be entangled 
 in a hopeless passion, the object of It would be 
 Sir Charles Grandison: he could not insult me; 
 and mean as the word pity In some cases 
 sounds, I had rather have his pity than the 
 love of any other man." Such a cry, even 
 Richardson, with all his prurient prudishness, 
 could give us. 
 
 Yet we must give Meredith his due; and 
 Meredith, on the whole, honestly surpasses 
 these others In the shining list of his adoring 
 
 [1191 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 heroines — adoring with such dominance in 
 meekness, such gayety In surrender. Rose Joce- 
 lyn, Henrietta Fakenham, Aminta Farrell, 
 Clare Doria Forey (let us write it In full, for 
 so she liked it best), Cecilia Halkett, Janet 
 Ilchester — it would be hard to match, within 
 the century, that group of girls. 
 
 All these names have been recalled simply 
 as witnesses to the fact that there Is — In spite 
 of the contentions of the contemporary novel- 
 ists — a perfectly consistent tradition. In Eng- 
 lish novels, of the frank young woman. It is of 
 the first importance to establish this, for these 
 contemporary authors are talking as If their 
 Anns and Isabels and Hildas were the only 
 jeunes piles who had ever dared, In literature, 
 to love as spirited girls In life really do. Just 
 here one quarrels with their pretensions. The 
 Victorian convention may have given us Ame- 
 lia Sedley, and Lucy Desborough, and Lily 
 Dale; but the Victorian era gave us also 
 Catherine Earnshaw, and Jane Eyre, and 
 Eustacia Vye. Our contemporaries are doing 
 nothing new when they show us the jeune fille 
 falling in love before she Is proposed to; they 
 are doing nothing new when they show us the 
 jeune fille wishing, quite specifically, to be a 
 wife; they are not even doing anything new — 
 rather, something quite dix-huitieme and ro- 
 coco — when they show us the jeune fille con- 
 sidering whether she will put up with being a 
 [ 120] 
 
THE NEWEST WOMAN 
 
 mistress. The jeune fille glorying In her choice 
 of the Illicit relation Is something, let us grant 
 them, more nearly new. Yet how they gabble, 
 upon their peak In Darlen! 
 
 No; these authors have not broken with the 
 Victorian convention — that simple acrobatic 
 feat demanded of all beginners. But they have 
 broken with the laboratory method. If they 
 think that in Ann Veronica, in Hilda Lessways, 
 in Isabel Rivers, they have been more accurate 
 than their great predecessors, they are quite 
 simply mistaken. I am not proposing to myself, 
 or to any one else, to be shocked by these 
 young women. Being shocked leaves one, in 
 the world of criticism, with no retort. Whether 
 or not one is shocked by them is quite another 
 question, and one that does not come Into this 
 discussion. My own objection to the school of 
 Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, Is 
 that their heroines are not convincing. 
 
 There is a great deal said and written, now- 
 adays, about women as they are and as they 
 ought to be ; and very little of it is in the tone 
 of Sesame and Lilies, We are told very con- 
 tradictory things about our sex; and we are 
 exhorted with unvarying earnestness to believe 
 each contradiction. We are jeered at for being 
 NIetzschean Anns, embodying the ruthless life- 
 force, pursuing the man that we may have 
 children by him. We are also preached at for 
 causing race-suicide. We must want children 
 
 [121] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 more than anything else in the world; and we 
 must want the state to take care of them for 
 us after they are born. We must return to the 
 Stone Age; and we must, at the same time, 
 join the Fabian Society. We must submit to 
 the intense conservatism of eugenics; but we 
 must, on the other hand, insult Mrs. Grundy, 
 whenever we find it convenient, by taking 
 lovers instead of husbands. We ought not to 
 marry without assurance that our children will 
 be physically perfect; but we may not expose 
 them on a mountain top if by any chance they 
 are not. 
 
 Only the pragmatist (be it said in passing), 
 with his avowed power of sucking the truth 
 simultaneously from two mutually exclusive 
 hypotheses, could do all the things that, with 
 authority, we are told to do. "Modern, indeed! 
 She" (Ann Veronica) "was going to be as 
 primordial as chipped flint." Yet, if we accept 
 the chronologies of history (which seems sane 
 enough) nothing could be more "modern" than 
 Ann Veronica*s way of being pre-historic. Per- 
 haps the solution is for all women to become 
 pragmatists? Some of us are bewildered by all 
 this; and we wonder a little if the heart-break- 
 ing medley of preachments is not the fruit of 
 that antique and unpardonable sin — meler les 
 genres. In all this chaos, one thing seems to be 
 generally agreed on: women are, contrary to 
 fusty tradition, very like men — whether like 
 [ 122] 
 
THE NEWEST WOMAN 
 
 them according to UAge Dangereux, or like 
 them according to the latest suffrage pamphlet. 
 That is the only thing that we shall unfailingly 
 be told. 
 
 There is something in it. We are more like 
 men than Mrs. Radcliffe would have believed. 
 But the method chosen by these modern hero- 
 ines of being like men is chiefly, it would 
 appear, to be more so. They will not go half- 
 way, but three quarters. The old-fashioned 
 man sometimes relented. The new-fashioned 
 woman makes quick work of her lover^s virtue. 
 There is hardly a villain in an old play but 
 would have let the lady off, if she had pleaded 
 with him as Capes pleads with Ann Veronica. 
 The qualms, the scruples, the regrets, are all 
 the man's : the girl refuses utterly to indulge in 
 anything so weak. Capes is unfortunate enough 
 to say something to Ann Veronica about honor. 
 "Only your queer code of honor — Honor I 
 Once you begin with love you have to see it 
 through." Away with inhibitions! 
 
 "But," some one will object, "all this has 
 been said before. And literature is full of 
 women who prey passionately on the men they 
 say they love. They are a recognized type." 
 Granted; but until now, the passionate preying 
 and the unsought soliciting have not been done 
 by the young unmarried girl of respectable 
 traditions. The type is represented, from Poti- 
 phar's wife down, by the woman who is no 
 [ 123 ] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 longer jeune fille. One has not traversed either 
 literature or life without hearing of exceptions. 
 But they are exceptions. The point is, not that 
 young women have hitherto been restrained by 
 religion and convention, and that when they 
 become free-thinkers and despise the existing 
 order, they express themselves as they really 
 are. The point is that they really are not, for 
 the most part, like Ann Veronica and Hilda 
 Lessways. 
 
 I and my friends do not object to Ann and 
 Hilda because we are afraid that, if we do 
 not, people will think that we are like that. 
 We object to them because we are told that 
 they are normal, healthy-minded young women 
 who have led perfectly respectable lives on 
 the borders, at least, of gentility; and because 
 we know that normal, healthy-minded young 
 women who have lived such lives do not ap- 
 proach their first love affairs in the temper of 
 these heroines. If you wish to say that the 
 authors are merely discussing pathological 
 cases, you will to some extent be letting them 
 out, but they will not thank you for it. What 
 is perfectly clear is that they believe girls of 
 eighteen or twenty are like that. The last thing 
 that they think, evidently, is that these young 
 ladies need any attention from physicians or 
 alienists. They think — God save the mark! — 
 that they have described, in each case, a really 
 [124] 
 
THE NEWEST WOMAN 
 
 nice girl. Up to a certain point, Ann Veronica 
 is nice. When she falls in love, her author goes 
 back on her disgracefully. He does not go back 
 on her by making her horrid: he goes back on 
 her by destroying her actuality. 
 
 One is ready to grant, I say, that women are 
 more like men than some — not all — of the 
 old-fashioned novelists would have had us 
 believe. Let us rail, by all means, at the "veiled 
 virginal doll." Let us disagree with Tolstoi 
 (it is always good to disagree with Tolstoi!) 
 when he says, in the Sonate de Kreutzer, 
 "une jeune fille pure ne veut pas un amant; 
 elle veut des enfants." Let us admit that the 
 modern girl really is frank with herself about 
 her desire to marry the man she has chosen. 
 Indeed, I cannot think who will deny it. But 
 there our respect for realism bids us stop. It 
 IS a complex and misty matter, this probing of 
 the young girl's secret attitude to life and her 
 lover. 
 
 Perhaps the greatest blunder of the new 
 realists is that they do not see how complex 
 and misty it is. The whole question is almost 
 impossible of discussion, it is so difficult and 
 delicate. Record the images in the girl's mind, 
 if you must — that is the exhaustive, exhausting 
 rule of realism. But for God's sake, record 
 them as vague, since vague they are! These 
 authors fail, precisely because they must, at 
 
 [125] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 each instant, Ife vivid. One is tempted to 
 recall to them Mr. Chesterton's difficulty with 
 Browning's biography: "One can make a map 
 of a labyrinth, but who can make a map of a 
 mist?" Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett are, appar- 
 ently, the successful cabmen who can. They 
 offer to take you anywhere you like in this 
 London fog of the girl's mind. Under their 
 fitful guidance, you will get somewhere; but it 
 may not be the address you gave them. 
 
 It is time to come to instances. Luckily for 
 one's contention, the frank young feminine 
 thing is, in spite of a few sentimental aberra- 
 tions of a century ago, in the great English 
 literary tradition. (What the new novelists 
 have given us, one might remark, is more like 
 the frank young thing crossed with the high- 
 wayman.) No one need be more explicit than 
 Juliet in desiring possession of the man she 
 loves, but even Juliet does not find her passion 
 for Romeo summing itself up in Ann Veron- 
 ica's desire to kiss her idol's feet because she 
 is sure that they must have the firm texture of 
 his hands; nor is she overpowered at every 
 turn, like Hilda, by his "faint, exciting, mascu- 
 line odor." And, surely, if any one were to 
 bring up an explicit heroine, it would be the 
 Nurse! Romantic lovers have always prayed 
 for union. Long since, Sir Thomas Browne said, 
 "(United souls are not satisfied with embraces, 
 but desire to be truly each other; which, being 
 
 [126] 
 
THE NEWEST WOMAN 
 
 impossible, their desires are inftnite, and must 
 proceed without a possibility of satisfaction." 
 What lover has not known that hurt? What 
 lover, man or woman, has not welcomed mar- 
 riage, and, at the same time, thought it a pis- 
 alter? The notion is not a new one. It has 
 never been in the greatest tradition of poetry 
 or of life for the woman who loves to hold 
 back. 
 
 That is not our quarrel with these misrepre- 
 sented heroines. Our quarrel with them is that, 
 being misrepresented themselves, they misrep- 
 resent their prototypes. It is a matter chiefly, 
 perhaps, of the actual content of their minds. 
 The visions of experience are not the visions 
 of inexperience; moreover, there is not one 
 frank young thing in ten thousand who does 
 not wrap her ardor in a blessed cloak of 
 vagueness. She may laugh at her faint ata- 
 vistic shiver; but she feels it. She may im- 
 mensely like the feeling of her lover's arms 
 about her; but she does not Instinctively set 
 herself to imagining details that only the slow 
 processes of intimacy will normally familiarize 
 her with. She may glory in his total effect of 
 physical perfection; but she does not go over 
 his "points," as if she were buying a horse, or 
 drawing an athlete in a life-class. Imagine 
 Chaucer's feelings, if any one had tried to 
 confound Emilye with the Wife of Bath! Yet 
 it is something very like that which Mr. Ben- 
 [127] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 net has done in his analysis of Hilda's psychol- 
 ogy during the momentous half-hour before 
 she becomes engaged to Cannon. 
 
 "But at the same time she was in the small 
 hot room, and both George Cannon's hands 
 were on her unresisting shoulders; and then 
 they were round her, and she felt his physical 
 nearness, the texture of his coat and of his 
 skin; she could see in a mist the separate hairs 
 of his tremendous moustache and the colors 
 swimming in his eyes; her nostrils expanded in 
 alarm to a faint exciting masculine odor. She 
 was disconcerted, if not panicstruck, by the vio- 
 lence of his first kiss; but her consternation 
 was delectable to her." 
 
 Every woman and most men know, I fancy, 
 that If Hilda's first proximity to the man who 
 dominated her Imagination was of precisely that 
 nature, her reaction was probably not precisely 
 of that sort. Even the Impersonal machinery of 
 the psychological laboratory would have regis- 
 tered In her a distinct recoil. The microscope 
 is not, and never has been, the lover's favorite 
 instrument. It Is doubtful if even the man him- 
 self would have been allured by the accurate 
 and intimate perception of the coarseness of 
 his beloved's skin. One thinks a little, In spite 
 of one's self, of Gulliver and Glumdalclitch. 
 Certain It Is — and rather amusing, all things 
 considered — that none of the men In these nov- 
 els indulges in the sensations that crowd the 
 [128] 
 
THE NEWEST WOMAN 
 
 heroines' hours; though it is written of nearly 
 all the heroes that they had experienced matri- 
 mony, at the least May it not be that the 
 authors know their own sex better than ours? 
 Granted that women are very like men: can 
 one justly, on that hypothesis, show them as 
 more scornful of conventions, of codes of 
 honor, of every reticence, moral, intellectual, 
 and physical, than these men whom they con- 
 sider their masters? It is in each case the man 
 who has the bad quarters of an hour over their 
 common breaches, real or fancied, of loyalty 
 and decency and public opinion; the man who 
 has, for his own peace, to find a philosophy 
 that justifies them both. 
 
 These authors are not alone among con- 
 temporaries in recording such heightened mo- 
 ments of a girl's life. One calls to mind, for 
 the sheer similarity of the mental plight, Eliza- 
 beth, in The Iron Woman. Thus Elizabeth 
 writes to David: 
 
 " *Dear' (she stopped to kiss the paper), 
 *dear, I hope you won't burn it up because I 
 am tired of waiting, and I hope you are too'; — 
 when she wrote those last words, she was sud- 
 denly shy; *Uncle is to give me the money on 
 my birthday — let us be married that day. I 
 want to be married. I am all yours, David, all 
 my soul, and all my mind, and all my body. I 
 have nothing that is not yours to take; so the 
 money is yours. No, I will not even give it to 
 [129] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 you ! it belongs to you already — as I do. Dear, 
 come and take it — and me. I love you — love 
 you — love you. / want you to take me. I want 
 to be your wife. Do you understand .? I want 
 to belong to you. I am yours.' 
 
 "So she tried, this untutored creature, to 
 put her soul and body into words, to write the 
 thing that cannot even be spoken, whose utter- 
 ance is silence." 
 
 There is no need to follow further Mrs. 
 Deland's analysis of the situation: the proud 
 and practical reply from David, which the girl 
 considers a rebuff; her sudden marrying of the 
 man she does not love — as sheer expression of 
 outraged modesty, and recoil from the man 
 who had not known how to treat her confession. 
 There would be no wisdom in comparing The 
 Iron Woman, from any other point of view, 
 with the novels we have been mentioning. This 
 one episode is interesting simply as a different 
 and more convincing record of the frank young 
 thing's relation to her own frankness, and of 
 the fiery limits of that frankness; pages of 
 racking accuracy, in which the girl nearly dies 
 of the memory of her own expHcitness. One 
 has not even power to protest against Eliza- 
 beth's tragic and fooHsh act in marrying Blair; 
 it follows upon that mood with the raw inev- 
 itability of life. 
 
 Some adherents of the new school may 
 think it indelicate to base a general accusation 
 
 [130] 
 
THE NEWEST WOMAN 
 
 on the single point of the heroine's psychology. 
 In the first place, the accusation is not so gen- 
 eral as to preclude very definite admiration of 
 other aspects of the school's achievement. 
 There is much in Mr. Wells's New Machiavelli 
 besides the hero's affair with Isabel Rivers; 
 much that goes to the mind and heart of 
 all of us. As for effectiveness of method and 
 brilliancy of style — one simply does not see the 
 need of adding one piping voice to the har- 
 monious and already deafening chorus. Were 
 there the need, one would do it. 
 
 But the contemporary school has set out to 
 "do" a new type of woman: a type which it 
 considers important, if not dominant. It has 
 even the air of saying: "This is the kind of girl 
 with whom intelligent men in the immediate 
 future will have overwhelmingly (and to 
 their salvation !) to deal. Behold the Newest 
 Woman." 
 
 The crux m each book, for the average 
 reader, is the maturing of the relation between 
 the man and the girl. The girl exists only, in 
 spite of her intellectual qualities, for the sake 
 of that relation. In each case, she is the ideal 
 mate, the high exponent of her sex. She de- 
 serves, and must bear, serious consideration 
 from every point of view. One has chosen the 
 realistic point of view because realism is the 
 method these authors abide by. They aim at 
 telling the truth as it is; therefore, they stand 
 
 [131] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 or fall by the accuracy of their vivid and multi- 
 tudinous detail. We are not in the pulpit, but 
 in the laboratory. One's honest impression is 
 that the scientific observers have mixed their 
 slides. 
 
 It is one thing to make your heroine believe 
 in free love — doubtless many women do. It is 
 pardonable to science to exhibit exceptions to 
 the feminine rule, in the person of the girl 
 initially over-sexed or neurotic: such cases are 
 known to other scientists than these. But it is 
 quite another thing to insist on the niceness, 
 the normality, the uninterruptedly respectable 
 and uneventful breeding of a girl — to exhibit 
 her as the type, in other words — and then 
 credit her with reactions that do not belong to 
 the type. 
 
 There is no point in preaching against a 
 modern spirit that is going to develop Anns 
 and Hildas and Isabels ad libitum. The con- 
 ception of them as heroines may be a sign of 
 the times; but they themselves are not yet 
 numerous enough to be a sign of the times. It 
 is even doubtful if novelists can do in a decade 
 what Nature has never shown any sign of 
 doing in all her lazy evolutionary progress: 
 completely alter natural feminine instincts. 
 "But the worst of Ann Veronica is that she's 
 there!'' a friend complained to me, not long 
 since. Everything has always been there, one 
 fancies. All one insists on is that neither Ann 
 
 I 132] 
 
THE NEWEST WOMAN 
 
 Veronica nor Hilda Lessways is the normal 
 representative of the sex. About the morahty 
 of Mr. Wells's and Mr. Bennett's books, there 
 are probably a hundred opinions. One's own 
 present quarrel with them is not that they are 
 bad morals, but that they are bad biology. 
 
 [ 133 ] 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 WHEN, I wonder, did the word "tem- 
 perament" come into fashion with us ? 
 We can hardly have got it from the 
 French, for the French mean by it something 
 very different from what we do; though it is 
 just possible that we did get it from them, and 
 have merely Bowdlerized the term. At all 
 events, whatever it stands for, it long since 
 became a great social asset for women, and a 
 great social excuse for men. Perhaps it came in 
 when we discovered that artists were human 
 beings. At least, for many years, we never 
 praised an artist without using the word. It 
 does not necessarily imply "charm," for people 
 have charm irrespective of temperament, and 
 temperament irrespective of charm. It is some- 
 thing that the Philistine never has: that we 
 know. But what, by all the gods of clarity, does 
 it mean ? 
 
 It means, I fancy, in one degree or another, 
 the personal revolt against convention. The 
 individual who was "different," who did not 
 let his inhibitions interfere with his epigrams, 
 who was not afraid to express himself, who 
 hated cliches of every kind — how well we know 
 that figure in motley, who turned every occa- 
 
 [134] 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 sion into a fancy-dress ball ! All the inconve- 
 nient things he did were forgiven him, for the 
 sake of the amusing things he said. Indeed, we 
 hardly stopped to realize that his fascination 
 was largely a matter of vocabulary. Now it is 
 one thing to sow your wild oats in talk, and 
 quite another to live by your own kaleidoscopic 
 paradoxes. The people who frowned on the 
 manifestations of "temperament" were merely 
 those logical creatures who believed that if you 
 expressed your opinions regardless of other 
 people's feelings, you probably meant what you 
 said. They did not know the pathology of epi- 
 gram, the basic truth of which is that word- 
 intoxicated people express an opinion long be- 
 fore they dream of holding it. They say what 
 they think, whether they think it or not. Only, 
 if you talk with incessant variety about what 
 ought to be done, and then never do any of the 
 wild things you recommend, you become in the 
 end perfectly powerless as a foe of convention. 
 This tactical fact the unconventional folk 
 have at last become aware of; and, accord- 
 ingly, hostility to convention is ceasing some- 
 what to take itself out in phrases. Conventions, 
 at the present moment, are really menaced. 
 The most striking sign of this is that people 
 are now making unconventionality a social vir- 
 tue, instead of an unsocial vice. The switches 
 have been opened, and the laden trains must 
 take their chance of a destination. 
 
 [I3S] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 The praise of temperament, I verily believe, 
 was the entering wedge. But whatever the first 
 cause, "conventional" is certainly in bad odor 
 as an epithet. And this is really an interesting 
 phenomenon, worth investigating. What is it 
 that makes it a term of reproach ? Why must 
 you never say it about your dearest friend ? 
 Why must you contradict, in a shocked tone, if 
 your dearest friend is said to be conventional .? 
 Most of my best friends are conventional, I 
 am glad to say; but even I should never think 
 of describing them to others thus. 
 
 Conventional people are supposed to lack 
 intelligence — the power to think for them- 
 selves. (It seems to be pretty well taken for 
 granted that you cannot think for j^ourself, and 
 decide to think what the majority of your kind 
 thinks. If you agree with the majority, it must 
 be because you have no mental processes.) 
 They are felt to lack charm: to have nothing 
 unexpected and delightful to give you. And, 
 nowadays, they are (paradoxes are popular) 
 supposed to be perilous to society, because they 
 are immovable, because they do not march with 
 the times, because they cling to conservative 
 conceptions while the parties of progress are 
 re-making the world. All these reproaches are, 
 at present, conveyed in the one word. 
 
 Now it is a great mistake to confound 
 conventionality with simplicity — with that sim- 
 plicity which indicates a brain inadequate to 
 
 [136] 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 dealing with subtleties; or to confound "tem- 
 perament" and unconventionality with a highly 
 organized nature. The anthropologists have 
 exploded all that. I have looked warily at 
 anthropologists ever since the day when I went 
 to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the 
 Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about 
 bull-roarers and leopard-societies. I doubt if 
 the anthropologists have any more perspective 
 than other scientists. I am as near being an old 
 Augustan as any twentieth-century observer 
 can be: "nihil humani," etc. But, for God's 
 sake, let it be human ! Palaeontology is a poor 
 substitute for history. No: I do not love any 
 scientists, even the anthropologists. But I do 
 think we ought to be grateful to them for prov- 
 ing to us that primitive people are a hundred 
 times as conventional as we; and that their 
 codes are almost too complicated for European 
 minds to master. If any one is still under the 
 dominance of Rousseau, Chateaubriand et Cie., 
 I wish he would sit down impartially before 
 Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's exposition of 
 group-marriage among the Australian aborig- 
 ines. If, in three hours, he knows whom, sup- 
 posing he were a Matthurie of the dingo totem, 
 he could marry without incurring punishment, 
 or even the death penalty, he had better take 
 his subtlety into Central Australia: he is quite 
 wasted on civilization. 
 
 Some one may retort that I am not exactly 
 
 [137] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 making out a shining case for tabu, in citing the 
 very nasty natives of Australia as notable ex- 
 amples of what tabu can do for society. My 
 point is only this: that it is folly to chide con- 
 ventional people for simplicity, since conven- 
 tion is a very complicated thing; or for dulness, 
 since it takes a good deal of intelligence and a 
 great many inhibitions to follow a social code. 
 To be different from everyone else, you have 
 only to shut your eyes and stop your ears, and 
 act as your nervous system dictates. By that 
 uncommonly easy means, you could cause a 
 tremendous sensation in any drawing-room, 
 while your brain went quite to sleep. The 
 natives of Central Australia are not nice; but 
 they are certainly nicer than they would be if 
 they practised free love all the year round, 
 instead of on rigidly specified occasions. Their 
 conventions are the only morality they have. 
 Some day, perhaps, they will do better. But it 
 will not be by forsaking conventions altogether. 
 For surely. In order to be attractive, we must 
 have some ideals, and above all some restraints. 
 Civilization is merely an advance In taste : 
 accepting, all the time, nicer things, and reject- 
 ing nasty ones. 
 
 When the temperamental and unconven- 
 tional people are not mere plagiarists of dead 
 eccentrics, they lack. In almost every case, the 
 historic sense. I am far from saying that all 
 conventional folk have It; but they have at 
 
 [138] 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 least the merit of conforming. If they do not 
 live by their own Intelligence, it Is because they 
 live by something that they modestly value a 
 good deal more. It is better that a dull person 
 should follow the herd: his Initiatives would 
 probably be very painful to himself and every 
 one else. No convention gets to be a convention 
 at all except by grace of a lot of clever and 
 powerful people first Inventing It, and then 
 Imposing It on others. You can be pretty sure, 
 if you are strictly conventional, that you are 
 following genius — a long way off. And unless 
 you are a genius yourself, that Is a good thing 
 to do. Unless we are geniuses, the lone hunt is 
 not worth while: we had better hunt with the 
 pack. Unless we are geniuses, there Is much 
 more fun in playing the game; there Is much 
 more fun In caste and class and clan. Uncon- 
 ventional people are apt to be Whistlers who 
 cannot paint. Of course there is something 
 very dull about the person who cannot give 
 his reasons for his social creed. But if it Is all 
 a question of Instinct, better a trained Instinct 
 than an untrained one. I am inclined to think 
 that the mid-Victorian prejudice against — let 
 us say — actors and actresses, was well founded. 
 Under Victoria (or should one say under mid- 
 Victoria?) stock companies were not chaper- 
 oned, and ladies and gentlemen went on the 
 stage very infrequently. What is the point of 
 admitting to your house some one who will be 
 
 [139] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 very uncomfortable there himself, and who 
 will make every one else even more uncomfort- 
 able? It is not that we are afraid he will eat 
 with his knife: that is a detail we might put 
 up with. But eating or not eating with your 
 knife is merely one of the little signs by which 
 we infer other things. In this mad world, any 
 one may do or be anything; but the man who 
 has been brought up to eat with his knife is the 
 less likely to have been brought up by people 
 who would teach him to respect a woman or 
 not to break a confidence. It is a stupid rule of 
 thumb; but, after all, until you know a person 
 intimately, how are you going to judge except 
 by such fallible means? I have nothing in the 
 world against Nature^s noblemen; but the bur- 
 den of proof is, of practical necessity, on their 
 shoulders. Manners are not morals — precisely; 
 yet, socially speaking, both have the same 
 basis, namely, the Golden Rule. No one must 
 be made more uncomfortable or more unhappy 
 because he has been with you. Now, in spite of 
 Oscar, it is worse to be unhappy than to be 
 bored; and I would rather be the heroine of a 
 not very clever comedy of manners than of a 
 first-class tragedy. Most of us, when we are 
 once over twenty, are no more histrionic, 
 really, than that. The conventional person may 
 bore you (though it is by no means certain that 
 he will) but he will never, of his own volition, 
 make you unhappy unless by way of justified 
 
 [ 140] 
 
 { 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 retort. He will never put you, verbally or prac- 
 tically, Into a nasty hole. Perhaps he will never* 
 give you the positive scarlet joys of shock and 
 thrill. But, dear me ! that brings us to another 
 point. 
 
 Conventional folk are often accused of be- 
 ing dull and valueless because they have no 
 original opinions. (How we all love original 
 opinions I) Well: very few people have any 
 original opinions. Originality usually amounts 
 only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar. 
 *'The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of 
 Khatmandhu"; and dead sages, if there were 
 only retroactive copyrights, could sue most of 
 our modern wits for their best things. What Is 
 even Jean-Jacques but Prometheus-and-water, 
 if it comes to that? Very few people since 
 Aristotle have said anything new. What passes 
 for an original opinion is, generally, merely an 
 original phrase. Old lamps for new — yes; but 
 it is always the same oil in the lamp. Some 
 people — like G. B. S. and Mr. Chesterton — 
 seem to think that you can be original by con- 
 tradicting other people — as if even the person 
 who states a proposition did not know that you 
 could make the verb negative if you chose! 
 Often, they are so hard up that they have to 
 contradict themselves. But they are supposed 
 to be violently — subversively — enchantlngly — 
 original. Even the militant suffragettes have 
 not "gone the whole hog" : they have stopped 
 
 1 141 ] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 short of Aristophanes. What Is the use of con- 
 gratulating ourselves on our unprecedented 
 courage in packing the house solemnly for 
 Damaged Goods, when we have expurgated 
 the Lysistrata — and had the barest succes 
 d'estime, at that? No: our vaunted unconven- 
 tionality is usually a matter of words. I have 
 tracked more than one delightful vocabulary 
 through the jungle, only to find that it brought 
 up at the literal inspiration of the Old Testa- 
 ment; and I have inwardly yawned away an 
 afternoon with a person who talked in cliches, 
 to discover perhaps, at twilight, that on some 
 point or other he was startlingly revolutionary. 
 The fact is that we are the soft prey of the 
 phrase ; and the rhetoricians, whether we know 
 it or not, will always have their way with us. 
 Even the demagogue is only the rhetorician of 
 the gutter. "Take care of the sounds and the 
 sense will take care of itself" — as the Duchess 
 in Alice did not say. Dulness is a matter of 
 vocabulary; but there are no more dull people 
 among the conventional than among the uncon- 
 ventional. And if a person is to be unconven- 
 tional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable : 
 for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees 
 you nothing but amusement. He does not guar- 
 antee you any of the little amenities by which 
 society has assured itself that, if it must go to 
 sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable 
 chair. 
 
 [ 142] 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 I was arguing at luncheon one day, with 
 three clever women, the advantages and dis- 
 advantages of unconventionality. They were all 
 perfectly conventional in a worldy sense, and 
 perfectly convinced of the charms of unconven- 
 tionality. (That is always the way: we sigh for 
 the paradises that are not ours, like good Chris- 
 tians spurning the Apocalypse and coveting the 
 Mohammedan heaven.) They cited to me a 
 very amusing person — a priestess of intellec- 
 tual revolt. Yes: she walked thirty blocks to 
 lunch in a pouring rain, and when she came in 
 she took off her wet hat, put it in her chair, 
 and sat on it. The fact that my guest, did she 
 choose, could afford to crown herself with 
 pearls, would not make up to me for the con- 
 sciousness that she was sitting on an oozing 
 hat throughout luncheon. In spite of epigrams, 
 I should feel, myself, perfectly wet through. 
 Surely it is the essence of good manners not to 
 make other people uncomfortable. Society, by 
 its insisting on conventions, has merely insisted 
 on certain convenient signs by which we may 
 know that a man is considering, in daily life, 
 the comfort of other people. No one except 
 a reformer has a right to batten on other 
 people's discomfort. And who would ever 
 have wanted John Knox to dinner? To, be sure,, 
 we are all a little by way of being reformers 
 now — too much, I fear, as people went to see 
 tlje, same Damaged Goods, under shelter of 
 
 [1431 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 Its sponsors, who cared for nothing what- 
 ever except being able to see a risque play 
 without being looked at askance. But we shall 
 come to that aspect of It later. 
 
 Now ^'temperament,'' again, has often been 
 confused with charm; and conventional folk — 
 who are, by definition, dull and unoriginal, all 
 baked In the same archaic mould — are sup- 
 posed to lack charm. They are at best like 
 inferior prints of a Hokusai from worn-out 
 blocks. The "justification" is bad. Their origi- 
 nal may have been all very well; but they them- 
 selves are hopelessly manques, and besides, 
 there are too many of them. How can they 
 have charm — that virtue of the Individual, 
 unmatchable, unpredlcable creature? 
 
 It Is not against the acutest critics, the real 
 "collectors" and connoisseurs of human mas- 
 terpieces, that I am inveighing. I am objecting 
 to the stupid criticisms of the stupid; to the 
 presence of "conventional" as a legitimate 
 curse on the lips of people who do not know 
 what they are talking about. One often hears 
 It— "I find him" (or "her") "so difficult to 
 talk to: he" (or "she") "Is so conventional." 
 Good heavens! As if the conventional person 
 were not always at least easy to talk to ! He 
 may be dull, but he knows his cues, and will 
 play the game as long as manners require. It 
 is the wild man on a rock, with a code that you 
 cannot be expected to know, because it is his 
 
 [ 144] 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 own peerless secret, who is hard to talk to. 
 The people who say that conventional folk 
 lack charm, often mean by "conventional'^ not 
 wearing your heart on your sleeve. Now I posi- 
 tively like the sense, when I dine out, and stoop 
 to rescue a falling handkerchief, that I am not 
 going to rub my shoulder against a heart. 
 What are hearts doing on sleeves? Am I a 
 daw, that I should enjoy pecking at them? 
 And who has any right to assume that, because 
 they are not worn there, they are non-existent? 
 It is of the essence of human nature to long 
 for the unattainable. If you do not believe me, 
 look at all the love-poetry in the world. As Mr. 
 Chesterton says, "the coldness of Chloe" has 
 been responsible for most of it. Certainly, if 
 Chloe had worn her heart on her sleeve, the 
 anthologies would have suffered. And with 
 woman the case is the same. Let not the mod- 
 ern hero flatter himself that he will ever arouse 
 the same kind of ardor in the female heart 
 that the heroes of old did: those seared and 
 saddened and magnificent creatures who bore 
 hearts of flame within their granite breasts — 
 but whose breasts were granite, all the same. 
 No, gentlemen, women may marry you, but it 
 is with a diminished thrill. We want — men and 
 women both — to be Intrigued; and I venture 
 to say that for purposes of life, not of mere 
 irresponsible conversation, it is the conven- 
 tional person who intrigues us, since it is only 
 
 I 145] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 the conventional person who creates the illu- 
 sion of inaccessibility. He may be accessible, in 
 reality; and the unconventional, temperamen- 
 tal person may be an impregnable fortress. 
 That is the dizzy chance of life. But since all 
 relations must have a beginning, the initial 
 impression is the thing that counts. Of course 
 one wants to know that the Queen of Spain has 
 legs; but then we can be pretty sure that she 
 has. We do not need a slit skirt to reassure us. 
 One wants to know that there is a human face 
 behind the mask; but who shall say that the 
 mask does not heighten such beauty as there 
 is? The conventional manner is a kind of 
 domino : the accepted costume that all civilized 
 people adopt for a time before unmasking. I 
 do not suggest that we should disguise our- 
 selves to the end; but that we should talk a 
 little before we do unmask. 
 
 For there must be some ground on which to 
 meet the person we do not know; and why may 
 not the majority decide what grounds are the 
 most convenient for all concerned? There must 
 be some simplification of life : we cannot afford 
 to have as many social codes as we have 
 acquaintances. Imagine knowing five hundred 
 people, and having to greet each with a differ- 
 ent formula ! Language would not run to it. 
 And would it, in any case, constitute charm? 
 Charm, as we all know, is a rare and treasur- 
 able thing; and no one can say where it will.be, 
 
 [.1461 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 found. But, as far as we can analyze it at all, 
 its elements seem very likely to flourish in con- 
 ventional air. Of course there may be a fearful 
 joy in watching the man of whom you say: 
 "One can never tell what he is going to do 
 next.'' But you do not want him about, except 
 on very special occasions. For the honest truth 
 IS that the unconventional person is almost 
 never just unconventional enough. He is pretty 
 sure to take you by surprise at some moment 
 when you do not feel like being taken by sur- 
 prise. Then you have to invent the proper way 
 to meet the situation, which is a bore. It is not 
 strange that some of our revoltes preach trial 
 marriage : for the only safe way to marry them 
 at all would be on trial. Until you had definitely 
 experienced all the human situations with them, 
 you would have no means of knowing how, in 
 any given situation, they would behave. They 
 might conform about evening-dress, and throw 
 plates between courses; they might be charm- 
 ing to your friends, and ask the waiter to sit 
 down and finish dinner with you. Or they might 
 in all things, little and big, be irreproachable. 
 The point is that you would never know. You 
 could never take your ease in your inn, for 
 nothing discoverable in earth or heaven would 
 determine or indicate their code. Conventional 
 manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien 
 who comes among us. Not a fundamentally 
 safe one? Perhaps not. But some test there 
 
 [147] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 must be; and this, on the whole, Is the easiest 
 to pass for those whom we are likely to want 
 for intimates. That is really the social use of 
 conventions. 
 
 And as for charm: your most charming 
 people are those who constantly find new and 
 unexpected ways of delighting us. Are such 
 often to be found among people who are con- 
 stantly finding new and unexpected ways of 
 shocking us? I wonder. It seems to me doubt- 
 ful, at the least. For shock — ^even the super- 
 ficial social shock, the sensation that does not 
 get far beneath the skin — is not delight. If you 
 have ever really been shocked, you know that 
 it is a disagreeable business. Of course, if some 
 wonderful creature discovers the golden mean, 
 the perfect note: to satisfy in all conventional 
 ways, and still to be possessed of infinite variety 
 in speech and mood — that wonderful creature is 
 to be prized above the phoenix. But you cannot 
 give rein to your own rich temperament in the 
 matter, let us say, of auction bridge. The rules 
 you invent as you go alone may be more shat- 
 teringly amusing than anything Hoyle ever 
 thought of; but you cannot call It auction, and 
 you must not expect other people to know how 
 to return your leads. And usually it only means 
 breaking rules without substituting anything 
 better — revoking for a whim. Life Is as co-op- 
 erative a business as football ; and we all know 
 what becomes of the team of crack players 
 
 [148] 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 when it faces a crack team. Only across the 
 footlights are we apt to feel the charm of the 
 Ibsen heroine; and even then we are apt to 
 want supper and some Irrelevant talk before 
 we go to a dream-haunted couch. 
 
 Now this matter of charm is not really an 
 arguable one; for charm will win where it 
 stands, whether it be conventional or unconven- 
 tional. Every one knows about the young man 
 who falls in love with the chorus-girl because 
 she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends 
 can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, 
 expecting that all her departures from conven- 
 tion will be as agile or as delightful to him as 
 that, is still the classic example of folly. It is 
 not senseless to bring marriage into the ques- 
 tion, for when we advisedly call a man or a 
 woman charming, we mean that that man or 
 that woman would apparently be a good per- 
 son with whom to form an intimate and lasting 
 relation — not for us, ourselves, perhaps, but 
 for some one else of our sort, in whom he or 
 she contrives, by the alchemy of passion, to 
 inspire the "sacred terror." To amuse for half 
 an hour during which you incur no further 
 responsibilities, to delight, in a relation which 
 has no conceivable future, does not constitute 
 charm; for It Is of the essence of charm that it 
 pulls the people who feel it — pulls, without 
 ceasing. Charm magnetizes at long range. I 
 contend only that conventional people are as 
 
 [149] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 apt to have it as any one else, for they have the 
 requisites, as far as requisites can be named. 
 As for the charm actually resident in conven- 
 tionality per se: how should any one who does 
 not feel it be converted to it by words of mine? 
 For it is a beauty of form : not so much of good 
 form as opposed to bad form, as of form 
 opposed to formlessness. The foe of conven- 
 tion enters into the social plan, if at all, as a 
 wild, Wagnerian motif. And the truly uncon- 
 ventional person has not even a motif; for he 
 disdains repetition. He scorns to stand for any- 
 thing whatever, and you are insulting his "tem- 
 perament" if you suppose that it is capable of 
 only one reaction on any given thing. The 
 temperamental critic of literature — like Jules 
 Lemaitre in his salad days, before the Church 
 had reclaimed him — prides himself on never 
 thinking the same thing twice about any one 
 masterpiece. Your temperamental creature will 
 not twice hold the same opinion of any one 
 person. If he has ever been notably pleased 
 with a fellow-guest at dinner, it is safest never 
 to repeat the combination. For the honor of 
 his temperament, he must be disgusted the next 
 time. It is his great gift not to be predicable, 
 from day to day, from hour to hour. But a 
 pattern is always predicable; and what you 
 learn about a conventional person goes into the 
 sum of knowledge : you do not have to unlearn 
 it over night. Psychology becomes a lost art, 
 
 [ISO] 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 a discredited science, when you deal with the 
 temperamental person. You might as well have 
 recourse to astrology. His very frankness is 
 misleading. He can afford to give himself 
 away, because he gives away nothing but the 
 momentary mood. Never attempt to hold him 
 to anything he has said: for his whole virtu- 
 osity consists in never saying the same thing 
 twice, and never necessarily meaning it at all. 
 He does very well for the Idle hour, the box 
 at the play; but for the business of life — oh I 
 
 And to some of us there is charm in the code 
 Itself — charm, that is, in any code, so long as 
 it has behind it an idea, though an antique one, 
 and is adhered to with faith. The right word 
 must always seem "inevitable"; and so must, 
 after all, the right act. An improvisation may 
 be — must be, if it is to succeed — brilliant; but 
 acts, like words, are best if they are In the 
 grand style. Whether in speech or in manners, 
 the grand style is never a mere magnificent 
 idiosyncrasy; for the essence of the grand 
 style is to carry with It the weight of the world. 
 
 And conventionality is now said to be sub- 
 versive of the moral order! At least, most 
 avowedly unconventional people are now treat- 
 ing themselves as reformers. Conventions did 
 not fall, in spite of the neo-pagans; so the neo- 
 Puritans must come in to make them totter. 
 And with the neo-Purltans, It must be admitted 
 (Cromwell did not live in vain) most of the 
 
 [iSi] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 charm of unconventlonallty has gone. It has 
 become a brutal business. The neo-pagans real- 
 ized that, to be endured at all, they must make 
 us smile. If they told a risque story, it must be 
 a really funny one. At the present moment, we 
 may not go in for risque remarks in the inter- 
 ests of humor, but we may make them in the 
 interests of morality. We may say anything we 
 like at a dinner-party, so long as we put no wit 
 into saying it. We must not quote eighteenth- 
 century mots, but we may discuss prostitution 
 with some one we have never seen before. Any- 
 thing is forgiven us, so long as we are not 
 amusing. If we only draw long faces, we may 
 even descend to anecdote. And when people 
 are asked to break with conventions in the 
 interests of morality, they may feel that they 
 have to do it. It has always been permitted to 
 make the individual uncomfortable for the 
 good of the community. So we cannot snub the 
 philanthropists as we would once have snubbed 
 the underbred: for thereby we somehow damn 
 ourselves. If you refuse to discuss the whitS 
 slave traffic, you are gailty of civic indifference; 
 and that is the one form of immorality for 
 which now there is no sympathy going. 1 may 
 have no ideas and no information about the 
 white slave traffic, but I ought to be interested 
 in it — interested to the point of hearing the 
 ideas, and gathering the information, of the 
 person whom I have never seen before. It is 
 the "Shakespeare and the musical glasses" of 
 
 [152] 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 the present day. Vain to take refuge In plays 
 or books : for what play or book is well known 
 at all unless It deals with the social evil? 
 
 Now it has already been pointed out that 
 vice commission reports have done as much 
 harm as good. The discussion of them Is not 
 limited to the immune, *'hIghbrow" caste. I 
 know of one quite unimperilled stenographer 
 who was frightened by them into the psycho- 
 pathic ward at Bellevue; and we have all read 
 Instructive comments in the daily papers which 
 reiterate that virtue is ten dollars a week. A 
 much lower figure than Becky Sharp's, but the 
 principle is the same. Out of her weekly wage, 
 we may be sure the shopgirl (It is always the 
 shopgirl I) buys the paper — and therewith her 
 Indulgence for future faults, much cheaper 
 than Tetzel ever sold one. For Purgatory now 
 is replaced by Public Opinion. Even my own 
 small town is not free from the prophylactic 
 *'movie." One small boy nudges another, as 
 they pass the placarded entrance, exclaiming 
 debonairly, "Oh, this 'ere white slave traffic, 
 y'know!" And the child, I have been given to 
 understand, is the father of the man. The un- 
 conventional reformers quote to themselves, I 
 suppose : 
 
 Vice is a monster of such frightful mien, etc. 
 
 It never occurs to them to finish the sentence: 
 
 We first endure, then pity, then embrace. 
 
 [153] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 The fact Is that Anglo-Saxon society has got 
 beyond the enduring stage, and Is largely occu- 
 pied In pitying. There Is a general sense that 
 the people at large, in all moral matters, know 
 better than the specialists. We will take our 
 creed not from the theologians, but from Mr. 
 Winston Churchill; and we will take our path- 
 ology not from medical treatises, but from 
 Brieux. We will discuss the underworld at din- 
 ner because, between the fish and the entree, 
 the thin lady with the pearls may say something 
 valuable about it. If we are made uncomfort- 
 able by the discussion, it only shows that we 
 are selfish pigs. 
 
 Now I see no reason why decent-minded 
 people should not discuss with their intimate 
 friends anything they please. If you are really 
 Intimate with any one, you are not likely to dis- 
 cuss things unless you both please. But I do see, 
 still, a beautiful result of the old order that the 
 new order does not tend to produce. The con- 
 ventional avoidance as a general subject of 
 conversation of sex in all Its phases was a safe- 
 guard to sensibilities. You cannot, in one sense, 
 discuss sex quite impersonally, for every one is 
 of one sex or the other. The people who cry 
 out against the segregation of the negro in 
 government offices have hardly realized that 
 non-segregation is objected to, not because of 
 Itself, but because of miscegenation. There Is 
 a little logic left in the world; and there 
 
 [154] 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 are some people who perceive that sequence, 
 whether they phrase it or not. Social distinc- 
 tions concern themselves ultimately with whom 
 you may and whom you may not marry. You 
 do not bring people together in society who are 
 tahu to each other. Not that you necessarily 
 expect, out of a hundred dinner-parties, any 
 one marriage to result; but you assume social 
 equality in the people seated about your board. 
 Is not, in the last analysis, the only sense in 
 such a phrase as "social equality,'' the sense of 
 marriageability? Even conventions are not so 
 superficial as they seem; and they have that 
 perfectly good human basis. It is vitally impor- 
 tant to the welfare and the continuance of the 
 civilized race that sex-sensibilities should be 
 preserved. Otherwise you will not get the 
 romantic mating; and the unromantic mating, 
 once well established in society, will give rise 
 to a perfectly transmissible (whether by hered- 
 ity or environment, O shade of Mendel!) 
 brutality. It is brutalizing to talk promiscu- 
 ously of things that are essentially private to 
 the individual; just as it is brutalizing (I be- 
 lieve no one questions that) for a family and 
 eight boarders to sleep in one room — even a 
 large room. All violations of essential privacy 
 are brutalizing. We do hot take our tooth- 
 brushes with us when we go out to dinner, and 
 if we did, and did not mind (very soon we 
 should not), the practice, I am sure, would 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 have a brutalizing effect. A certain amount of 
 plain speaking is, perhaps, a good thing; but 
 there is no doubt that at present we have far 
 too much of it to suit most of us, and I cannot 
 see why we should be made to endure it just 
 because a few people who are by way of calling 
 themselves moralists cannot get on with society 
 on its own terms. 
 
 It has long been a convention among people 
 who are not cynical that bodily matters are not 
 spoken of in mixed and unfamiliar gather- 
 ings. Of course, our great-grandmothers were 
 prudes. The reason why they talked so much 
 about their souls, I fancy, is that there was 
 hardly a limb or a feature of the human body 
 that they thought it proper to mention. They 
 were driven back on religion because they held 
 that the soul really had nothing to do with the 
 body at all. The psychiatrists have done their 
 best to take away from us that (on the whole) 
 comforting belief. In America, at least, we are 
 finding it harder and harder to get out of the 
 laboratory. It is the serious and patriotic 
 American in The Madras House who asks 
 the astonished Huxtable, "But are you the 
 mean sensual man?" In The Madras House 
 the question is screamingly funny; but I cannot 
 imagine any man's liking, in his own house, to 
 have the question put to him by a total stranger. 
 The fact is that we have dragged our Ibsen and 
 our Strindberg and our Sudermann lovingly 
 
 [1561 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 across the footlights, and are hugging them to 
 our hearts In the privacy of our boxes. We 
 have decided that manners shall consist entirely 
 of morals. It is just possible that, In the days 
 when morals consisted largely of manners, 
 fewer people were contaminated. You cannot 
 shock a person practically whom you are totally 
 unwilling to shock verbally; and if you are per- 
 fectly willing to shock an individual verbally, 
 the next thing you will be doing is to shock 
 him practically. Above all, when we become 
 incapable of the shock verbal, there will be 
 nothing left for the unconventional people but 
 the shock practical. And that, I imagine, is 
 what we are coming to — all in the interests of 
 morality, be it understood. At no time in his- 
 tory, perhaps, have the people who are not fit 
 for society had such a glorious opportunity to 
 pretend that society is not fit for them. Knowl- 
 edge of the slums is at present a passport to 
 society — so much the parlor philanthropists 
 have achieved — and all they have to do is to 
 prove that they know their subject. It is an odd 
 qualification to have pitched on; but gentlemen 
 and ladles are always credulous, especially if 
 you tell them that they are not doing their duty. 
 Moreover, when you make it a moral neces- 
 sity for the young to dabble in all the subjects 
 that the books on the top shelf are written 
 about, you kill two very large birds with one 
 stone: you satisfy precocious curiosities, and 
 
 [157] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 you make them believe that they know as much 
 about life as people who really know some- 
 thing. If college boys are solemnly advised to 
 listen to lectures on prostitution, they will lis- 
 ten; and who is to blame if some time, in a less 
 moral moment, they profit by their informa- 
 tion? If we discuss the pathology of divorce 
 with the first-comer, what is to prevent divorce 
 from becoming, In the end, as natural as daily 
 bread? And if nothing is to be tahu in talk, 
 how many things will remain tahu in practice? 
 The human race Is, in the end, as relentlessly 
 logical as that. Even the aborigines that we 
 have occasionally mentioned turn scandals over 
 to the medicine-man, and keep a few delicate 
 silences themselves. Perhaps we are "returning 
 to Nature," as the Rousseauists wanted us to; 
 with characteristic Anglo-Saxon thoroughness, 
 going the savages one better. But it is a pity to 
 forget how to blush; for though in the ideal 
 society a blush would never be forced to a 
 cheek, It would not be because nothing was con- 
 sidered (as a German might say) blushworthy. 
 Each man's private conscience ought to be a 
 nice little self-registering thermometer: he 
 ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and 
 explicitly within himself, and not care what the 
 world thinks. The mass of human beings, how- 
 ever, are not made that way; and many people 
 have been saved from crime or sin by the simple 
 dislike of doing things they would not like to 
 
 [IS81 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 confess to people with a code. I do not contend 
 that that is a high form of morality; but it has 
 certainly saved society a good many practical 
 unpleasantnesses. And we are clearly courting 
 the danger of essentially undiscussable actions 
 when we admit every action to discussion. 
 
 I saw it seriously contended in some journal 
 or other, not long ago, that, whether any other 
 women were enfranchised or not, prostitutes 
 ought undoubtedly to have the vote, because 
 only thus could the social evil be effectively 
 dealt with. Incredible enough ; but there it was. 
 Not many people, perhaps, would agree with 
 that particular reformer; but undoubtedly 
 there is a mania at present, in the classes that 
 used to be conventional, for getting one's infor- 
 mation from the other camp. It is valuable to 
 know the prostitute's opinion — facts never 
 come amiss ; but why assume that we have only 
 to know it to hold it? Is it not conceivable that 
 other generations than our own have known 
 her opinions, and that lines of demarcation 
 have been drawn because a lot of people, as 
 intelligent as we, did not agree with her? 
 The present tendency, however, is to consider 
 every one's opinion important, in social and 
 ethical matters, except that of respectable folk. 
 My own pessimistic notion is, as I have hinted, 
 that the philanthropic assault on the conven- 
 tional code has come primarily from people 
 who were too ignorant, or too lazy, or too 
 
 [159] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 undisciplined, to submit to the code; and that 
 the success of the assault results from the sheer 
 defenceless niceness — the mingled altruism and 
 humility — of the people accused of conven- 
 tionality. At all events, the fact is that our 
 reticences have somehow become cases of cow- 
 ardice, and our rejections forms of brutality. 
 We are all a little pathetic in our credulity, and 
 we are very like Moses Primrose at the fair. 
 Well: let us buy green spectacles if we must; 
 but let us, as long as we can, refuse to look 
 through them! 
 
 It may seem a far cry from "temperament" 
 to social service. I have known a great many 
 people who went In for social service, and I do 
 not think it Is. The motives of the hetero- 
 geneous foes of convention may lie as far apart 
 as the Poles (one Pole is very like the other, 
 by the way, as far as we can make out from 
 Peary and Amundsen) but the object is the 
 same: to destroy the complicated fabric which 
 the centuries have lovingly built up. (Even if 
 you call it "restoration," It is apt to amount to 
 the same thing, as any good architect knows.) 
 At the bar of Heaven, sober Roundheads and 
 drunken rioters will probably be differently 
 dealt with; but here on earth, both have 
 been given to smashing stained-glass windows. 
 Many of us do not believe in capital punish- 
 ment, because thus society takes from a man 
 what society cannot give. The iconoclasts do 
 
 [i6o] 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 the same thing; for civilization, whether it be 
 perfect or not, is a fruit of time. Conventions 
 are easy to come by, if you are willing to take 
 conventions like those of the Central Austra- 
 lians. The difference between a perfected and 
 a barbaric convention is a difference of refine- 
 ment, in the old alchemical sense. A lot of the 
 tahu business is too stupid and meaningless for 
 words. Civilization has been a weeding-out 
 process, controlled and directed by increasing 
 knowledge. We have infinitely more conven- 
 tions than the aborigines: we simply have not 
 such silly ones. The foes of modern convention 
 are not suggesting anything wiser, or better, or 
 more subtle: they are only attacking all con- 
 vention blindly, as if the very notion of tahu 
 were wrong. The very notion of tahu is one of 
 the rightest notions in the world. Better any 
 old tahu than none, for a man cannot be said 
 to be "on the side of the stars" at all, unless he 
 makes refusals. What the foes of convention 
 want Is to have all tahu overthrown. It is very 
 dull of them, for even if a cataclysm came and 
 helped them out — even if we were all turned, 
 over night, Into potential fossils for the delight 
 of future scientists — the next beginnings of 
 society would be founded on tahu. We shudder 
 at the Central Australians; we should hate life 
 on their terms. But I would rather live among 
 the Warramunga than among the twentieth- 
 century anarchists, for I cannot conceive a 
 [i6i] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 more odious society than one where nothing is 
 considered indecent or impious. We may think 
 that the mental agility of the Warramunga 
 could be better applied. Well: in time, it will 
 be. But they are lifted above the brute just in 
 so far as they develop mental agility in the 
 framing of a moral law, however absurd a one. 
 I said that their conventions were almost too 
 complicated for us to master. That, I fancy, is 
 because any mind they have, they give to their 
 conventions. It is the natural consequence of 
 giving your mind to science and history and 
 philology and art, that you simplify where you 
 can; also, that your conventions become puri- 
 fied by knowledge. Even the iconoclasts of the 
 present day do not want us to throw away such 
 text-book learning as we have achieved. They 
 do ask us, though, to throw away the racial 
 inhibitions that we have been so long acquiring. 
 Is it possible that they do not realize what a 
 slow and difficult business it is to get any par- 
 ticular opinion into the instincts of a race? Only 
 the "evolution" they are so fond of talking 
 about can do that. Perhaps we ought to take 
 comfort from the reflection. But it Is easier to 
 destroy than to build up; and they are quite 
 capable of wasting a few thousand years of 
 our time. 
 
 No : the iconoclasts want to bring us, if pos- 
 sible, lower than the Warramunga. Some of 
 them might be shocked at the allegation, for 
 
 f 162I 
 
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 
 
 some of them, no doubt, are idealists — after the 
 fashion of Jean-Jacques, be it understood. 
 These are merely, one may say respectfully, 
 mistaken: for they do not reckon with human 
 nature any more than do the socialists. But the 
 majority, I incline to believe, are merely the 
 natural foes of dignity, of spiritual hierarchy, 
 of wisdom perceived and followed. They object 
 to guarded speech and action, because they 
 themselves find self-control a nuisance. So, 
 often, it is; but if the moral experience of man- 
 kind has taught us anything, it has taught us 
 that, without self-control, you get no decent 
 society at all. When the mistress of Lowood 
 School told Mr. Brocklehurst that the girls' hair 
 curled naturally, he retorted : "Yes, but we are 
 not to conform to nature; I wish these girls to 
 become children of grace.'* We do not sympa- 
 thize with Mr. Brocklehurst's choice of what 
 was to be objected to in nature; we do not, in- 
 deed, sympathize with him in any way, for he 
 was a hypocrite. But none the less, it is better 
 to be. In the right sense, a child of grace than a 
 child of nature. Attila did not think so; and 
 Attila sacked Rome. We may be sacked — the 
 planet is used to these debacles — but let us not, 
 either as a matter of mistaken humility or by 
 way of low strategy, pretend that the Huns 
 were Crusaders! 
 
 [1631 
 
THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 
 
 IT is pretty much taken for granted by decent 
 folk that the truth should be told in all 
 circumstances. "It is never permissible to 
 lie" has been, ever since the Christian era came 
 in, the common opinion, if not the common 
 practice. And yet, which one of us has never 
 lied, I will not say against his conscience, but 
 for the very sake of his conscience? Conven- 
 tional religion has been assumed to be our sole 
 guide, while our actual conduct is usually based 
 on the different, and more explicit, code of 
 honor. Honor is not religion, though with real 
 religion it has always been at peace; civilized 
 manners are not religion, though, again, they 
 have always been at peace with it. In the mat- 
 ter of lying, both honor and civilized manners 
 have a great deal to say; and the fact that we 
 realize this subconsciously is responsible for a 
 great many minor perplexities. 
 
 Strictly speaking, in Candide's "best of pos- 
 sible worlds" lies should not pass human lips. 
 There are many people who stick to the literal 
 interpretation of the precept: ladies, for ex- 
 ample, who retire to the back porch before 
 they permit their maids to tell the unwelcome 
 caller that they are "out." There, presumably, 
 
 [164] 
 
THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 
 
 they gaze at the blue sky, and congratulate 
 themselves on their unimpeachable veracity. 
 Yet even scrupulous people allow their servants 
 to say they are out when they are in, because 
 "out" is conventionally understood to mean 
 many things. On the other hand, Mr. Chester- 
 ton tells us that, under certain conditions, mere 
 silence is the most damnable lie of all. The 
 matter is not so simple as it seems: its intrica- 
 cies may become a morass for the unwary, and 
 an enchanted garden for the casuist. 
 
 Very f^w people, I fancy, would say, after 
 deliberation, that no lie was ever justified. To 
 be sure, I once heard a serious young man pro- 
 test that Shakespeare had damned Desdemona 
 by allowing her, at her last gasp, to exculpate 
 Othello. I have also known people who ob- 
 jected vehemently to the late Mark Twain 
 because he said so many things that were not 
 so. But there are occasions when lies are taken 
 for granted, even by the law. A man on trial 
 for his life is supposed to tell the truth, but not 
 if it will incriminate him. A wife is not dragged 
 to the witness-stand against her will to testify 
 against her husband — no one would legiti- 
 mately expect anything but perjury from her. 
 I do not see much difference between legally 
 permitting a man to say "Not guilty" when he 
 is guilty, and legally permitting him to lie. Is 
 there any solitary maiden lady who would not 
 willingly give the midnight marauder to under- 
 
 [ 165 ] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 stand that her husband was just coming down 
 the stairs, armed to the teeth? A man is not 
 supposed, except by an extinct type of Puritan, 
 to "give away" the lady who has made sacri- 
 fices for him; and even the extinct type of 
 Puritan would hardly expect you to tell your 
 hostess that her dinner-party had been dull. 
 From this heterogeneous group of examples, 
 one may infer that there are lies and lies; and 
 while it is never permissible to lie, it is some- 
 times quite unpermissible to do anything else. 
 Most lies of the decenter sort are social. 
 *'The admixture of a lie doth ever give pleas- 
 ure,** said the moralist Bacon. There is cer- 
 tainly very little defence for the lie that does 
 not give pleasure. It is to save other people's 
 feelings, not our own, that we tell lies. Let me 
 put a case quite bluntly. How, without lying, is 
 a man to thank his small niece properly for the 
 necktie which she has selected for his Christ- 
 mas present? No one wants merely to be 
 thanked for one's trouble; every one wants to 
 be told that his taste has been perfect. Now 
 that the late Phillips Brooks's handsome eva- 
 sion of fact has become historic, who ever 
 dares not to praise a baby explicitly? I confess 
 that it goes against the grain with me to say 
 that I have enjoyed something which I have 
 detested; and I have frequently accepted invi- 
 tations (especially over the telephone) because 
 my tongue would not twist itself round the 
 phrase "another engagement" when the other 
 [i66] 
 
THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 
 
 engagement was non-existent. But I have never 
 had the slightest compunction about saying 
 that I was sorry I had another engagement, 
 when I did have another engagement and was 
 not sorry. 
 
 I know only one person whom I could count 
 on not to Indulge herself In these conventional 
 falsehoods, and she has never been able, so far 
 as I know, to keep a friend. The habit of literal 
 truth-telling, frankly, Is self-Indulgence of the 
 worst. Nothing could be more delightful, in an 
 evil sense, than telling certain people that their 
 Christmas presents, their babies, and their hos- 
 pitalities are all horrors which defy descrip- 
 tion; especially if one could count it a virtue to 
 one's self to say those things starkly. But one 
 cannot keep that weapon only for one's foes: 
 the only excuse for saying Inexcusable things is 
 that one always says them. Roughly speaking, 
 one's friends are the people of whom one 
 thinks, habitually, pleasant things. But even 
 friends can be annoying, or unbeautlful, or dull. 
 And it is of the essence of those manners which 
 are morals not to tell them so if one can help 
 it. "Faithful are the wounds of a friend" — 
 and must sometimes be dealt. But no stabbing 
 over non-essentials ! And above all, no stabbing 
 when it is a pleasure to stab. Sometimes these 
 truth-tellers congratulate themselves that their 
 praise is Immensely enhanced by Its rarity. 
 There, I fancy, they are mistaken: for In the 
 first place, praise that is too long on the way 
 
 [167] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 loses its savor; and in the second, they acquire, 
 I have noticed, a censorious habit of mind that 
 prevents them from praising at all. 
 
 No: in the course of mere conventional liv- 
 ing, a certain amount of lying must be done. 
 "How do you do?'* "I am very well, thank 
 you." You may have indigestion, and in that 
 case you have lied. Yet is it your business to 
 make your acquaintance uncomfortable by tell- 
 ing him the facts in the case? Certain things 
 are true of any man personally which have 
 nothing to do with his social existence : person- 
 ally, if he has a toothache, he has it; socially, 
 he has not a toothache unless he mentions it. 
 Then, there are lies which are not verbal at 
 all — lies of implication. The early Puritans 
 who objected to paint and powder, objected to 
 them, I fancy, on perfectly Catholic grounds — 
 it was immoral to make yourself attractive, 
 and paint and powder were literally meretri- 
 cious. On the same principle, to this day, a nun 
 cuts off her hair. The modern feeling against 
 paint and powder — for it does in some quar- 
 ters survive — is rather, I imagine, on the score 
 of dishonesty. You are not supposed to disguise 
 a beautiful complexion if you really have it. 
 But if you have not a good complexion, you are 
 deceiving people — you are acting a lie — by 
 making yourself look as if you had. The ground 
 of the objection has shifted. 
 
 Some author — is it Mr. Kipling? — says of 
 
 [i68] 
 
THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 
 
 one of his heroines that she was as honest as her 
 own front teeth. I know a great many people 
 who are as honest as their own front teeth are 
 false; and certainly no one expects them to go 
 about calling attention to the skill of their 
 dentist. Perhaps some sophist will say that 
 between wearing false hair and declaring one's 
 false hair to be one's own, there Is all the differ- 
 ence in the world. I protest that It is tacit false- 
 hood to wear It at all — unless one does it after 
 the fashlonless fashion of an ancient lady I 
 knew in my childhood who, quite bald at the 
 age of ninety-five, hung two wads of chestnut 
 hair across her head, like saddle-bags, on a 
 black velvet ribbon. And such tacit falsehoods 
 are all In the spirit of the conventional polite- 
 ness we use daily. To rouge a pale face may be 
 vanity; but to thank a stupid hostess for the 
 pleasure she has not given, is loving one's 
 neighbor as one's self. I am Inclined to think 
 that even rouge Is more often than not altru- 
 istic in intention. One does not wish, for the 
 sake of society, to be either a fright or a brute. 
 Certain things are demanded of every man 
 who meets the world on Its own ground. From 
 the moment he has "accepted with pleasure," 
 he has agreed to play the. game; and It Is as 
 unfair of him to give or take the wrong cues 
 as it would be for the castle to Insist on making 
 the knight's move. No : we need not go out of 
 our way to lie; but we must not, even to be 
 
 [169] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 clever, tell the truth when an innocent He is 
 innocently demanded of us. 
 
 It occurs to me that my examples of conven- 
 tional falsehood are largely feminine. So, I 
 fancy, they should be. One of the reasons, 
 surely, why women have been credited with less 
 perfect veracity than men is that the burden of 
 conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them. 
 A man expects his wife to do this kind of thing 
 for him. It is she who accepts or refuses their 
 common invitations, directs their joint social 
 manoeuvres, encounters the world for them 
 both on the purely social side. He is not ex- 
 pected to do it any more than he is expected to 
 order the dinner. There is more straight-from- 
 the-shoulder talk, I imagine, among men by 
 themselves than among women by themselves; 
 but that is partly because women slip out of the 
 social harness less frequently and less easily. 
 A man among men is perhaps (I speak under 
 correction) more inveterately his personal 
 self; a woman among women more inveter- 
 ately her social self. It may be that it is easier 
 to wear the harness constantly than to gall 
 one's shoulders afresh each day with putting it 
 on. I am inclined to think that women are as 
 honest with their intimate friends as are men; 
 rbut — they have had an age-long training in the 
 penalties of making one's self unpleasant. So 
 many low motives are imputed to women — and 
 most of them, at the present day, quite unjustly 
 
 [ 170] 
 
THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 
 
 — that they are driven to the lesser mendacities 
 for the sake of getting some justice done them. 
 When Mr. A. asks Mrs. B. if she does not 
 think Mrs. C. beautiful, she is almost bound to 
 say that she does, though she does not. Other- 
 wise, she will be taken for a jealous fool. One 
 lie is better than two; and it is better to be 
 thought a fool when you are not, than jealous 
 and a fool when you are neither. 
 
 Comparatively few people, however, will 
 cavil at these mendacities, which are indeed 
 ^eu5^ aypevhri — as mechanical and uncalcu- 
 lated as a gentleman's "I beg your pardon'* 
 when a lady has insisted on colliding with him 
 in the street. Truth is not so difficult to bound 
 on that side; for most people recognize the 
 social exigency, and if you are praising some 
 one's unskilful cook on one day, the chances 
 are that she will be congratulating you on your 
 amateur gardening the next. We simply have 
 to be polite, as our race and clime understand 
 politeness; and no one except a naif is really 
 going to take this sort of thing seriously. It is 
 perhaps regrettable that we do not carry cour- 
 tesy even further; for nothing makes people 
 so worthy of compliments as occasionally re- 
 ceiving them. One is more delightful for being 
 told one is delightful-r-just as one is more 
 angry for being told one is angry. Let us pass, 
 however, to more debatable ground. 
 
 There is an old refrain which runs, "Ask me 
 
 [171] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 no questions, FU tell you no lies." I am inclined 
 to think that it is full of social philosophy. 
 Most of us, probably, have put up our hardest 
 fights for veracity on occasions when questions 
 have been asked us that never should have 
 been asked. "Refuse to answer," says the ghost 
 of that extinct Puritan whom we have evoked. 
 An absurd counsel: for, as we all know, to 
 most of these questions no answer is the most 
 explicit answer of all. If the Devil has given 
 you wit enough, you may contrive to keep the 
 letter of the commandment. But usually that 
 does not happen. I dare say many moralists 
 will not agree with me ; but I hold that a ques- 
 tion put by some one who has no right, 
 from any point of view, to the information 
 demanded, deserves no truth. If a casual gos- 
 sip should ask me whether my unmarried great- 
 aunt lived beyond her means, I should feel 
 justified in saying that she did not, although it 
 might be the private family scandal that she 
 did. There are inquiries which are a sort of 
 moral burglary. The indiscreet questioner — 
 and by indiscreet questions I mean questions 
 which it is not conceivably a man's duty either 
 to the community or to any individual to answer 
 — IS a marauder, and there is every excuse for 
 treating him as such. I am sure that every 
 reader remembers, in his own experience, such 
 questions, and counts among his acquaintance at 
 least one such questioner. Let him say whether, 
 
 [172] 
 
THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 
 
 in these conditions, he has felt it his moral duty 
 to hand over information, any more than he 
 would consider it his moral duty to hand over 
 his plate to a thief. I am not speaking of cases 
 where the temptation to lie is merely the temp- 
 tation to save one's face : it is not permissible to 
 lie merely to save one's face. But it is sometimes 
 permissible to lie to save another person's face 
 — as it was pardonable, surely, in Desdemona 
 to declare that Othello had not murdered her. 
 In regard to the lie of exaggeration, a word 
 should perhaps parenthetically be said. We all 
 know the child who has seen two elephants in 
 the garden eating the roses. We also know the 
 delightful grown-up who "embroiders" his nar- 
 ratives. He will never tell the same adventure 
 twice with the same details. The fact remains 
 that he may each time leave you with precisely 
 the same impression of the adventure in its 
 entirety. It is quite possible that you trust him 
 exceedingly. Of course it is also possible that 
 his hen trovato is never vero. You will have 
 to determine after long experience of him 
 whether he is fundamentally false, or merely 
 has a sense of style. Personally, I know exag- 
 gerators of both kinds: people whose lies are 
 only picturesque adjectives, and people whose 
 picturesque adjectives are only lies. There is 
 a subtle distinction between the two. At the 
 risk of being at loggerheads with the rhetori- 
 cians, one must say that truth goes deeper than 
 
 [173] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 words, and that there is not much in a truthful- 
 ness which is only phrase-deep. 
 
 The old ladies who are shivering on the back 
 porch will disapprove of me for saying these 
 things, almost as much as I disapprove of them 
 for being on the back porch. To speak frankly, 
 I have not found that the people who cling to 
 the letter are always the people who cling to 
 the spirit of the law. Some of the men and 
 women who will not say in so many words the 
 thing which is not, will deliberately give a false 
 impression. They are not the servants of truth; 
 they are the parasites of truth. The ladies I 
 have referred to may be technically "out" ; but 
 they are really "out" only to the undesired visi- 
 tor — exactly as much as if they had stopped in 
 their own sitting-rooms. (Remember, please, 
 that I am not speaking of the people who re- 
 ceive the unwelcome caller rather than permit 
 a maid to fib — they are in a very different 
 case.) I should not instinctively go to these 
 people for an accurate account of a serious sit- 
 uation. Any one whose conscience is satisfied 
 with that kind of loyalty to fact knows very 
 little about the spirit of truth. 
 
 I do not jeer at literal accuracy: I think it 
 an excellent safeguard for all of us. The person 
 who has never indulged in a literal falsehood 
 is the less likely to have indulged in a real 
 one. Generally speaking, words follow facts 
 with a certain closeness. Not always, however. 
 
 [1741 
 
THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 
 
 I may truthfully say that my teeth are my own, 
 if I have paid for them; but I shall none the 
 less give a wrong impression to the engaging 
 creature who has asked me if they are false. 
 Substitute serious equivalents for that kind of 
 veracious reply, and you will see what I mean. 
 I am not at all sure that, where there is room 
 for doubt, the people I have cited will not 
 largely take the benefit of the doubt to them- 
 selves. I am not sure, for example, that the 
 formula "I will not tell any one" stands to 
 them for anything but a fallible human proph- 
 ecy — something apt to be set at naught by the 
 God who maketh diviners mad. I strongly sus- 
 pect that mere loyalty will never make them 
 hold their tongues. And I am quite sure that 
 they will often be silent when silence is the most 
 damnable lie of all. For, in their technical 
 sense, silence can never be a lie. 
 
 In this short distance, we have come near to 
 the heart of the matter. Remember that the 
 only lie forbidden in the Decalogue is false 
 witness against one's neighbor. I may feel real 
 respect for the lady on the porch — when I 
 think that it may be hailing, I feel positive 
 awe — ^but I should not like to make her the 
 recipient of an intimate confidence. Such a per- 
 son is wholly at the mercy of the unscrupulous. 
 To be, for one's self, at the mercy of the un- 
 scrupulous, suggests, I admit, the saint; to be, 
 for one's friends, at the mercy of the unscru- 
 
 [I7S] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 pulous, suggests the cad. It is not, for » the 
 normal person, a pleasant thing to lie: it is 
 much easier to record the truth quite auto- 
 matically. There is in each of us who have been 
 decently brought up a natural antipathy to say- 
 ing "the thing which is not." The basis of truth 
 is so much the finest basis on which to meet 
 one's fellow-men! I have much sympathy with 
 the unpopular people who cannot bring them- 
 selves, even in a ball-room, to "play the game." 
 Of all ugly things to be, perhaps a liar is the 
 ugliest. And yet, and yet — We may not go into 
 Victor Hugo's rapture over the nun in Les 
 Miserables who gave the mendacious answer 
 to Javert; but which of us wishes she had told 
 the inspector that Jean Valjean was actually in 
 the room? Fortunately, such crucial instances 
 are rare ; and usually we can benefit our friends 
 most by telling the truth about them — if it 
 were not so, they would not be beloved. It is a 
 poor cause which has to be lied for regularly. 
 But in the rare case like that of Soeur Simplice, 
 let us hope that we, too, should lie, and be as 
 sure as she of making our peace with Heaven. 
 For one's self alone, it is a question whether 
 any lie could bring such luxury as that of telling 
 the simple truth. To lie to save one's self is the 
 mark of the beast; to lie to save another per- 
 son may make one distrust the cosmos, but at 
 least it is a purer fault. For it seems to be 
 agreed on by all codes that the unselfish motive 
 
 [176] 
 
THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 
 
 is a mightily purging element. On the whole, I 
 should say that the person who likes to lie 
 should never, in any circumstances, be allowed 
 to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. 
 You will not find them indulging often. 
 
 Perhaps the greatest conflict for Puritan 
 youth has always come when it faced for the 
 first time the unfamiliar shape of Honor. 
 Honor and John Calvin have fought on many 
 a strange battlefield for the young soul, and 
 the young soul must often have wondered 
 which was friend and which was foe. 
 
 Honour and wit, foredamned they sit, 
 
 sings Kipling in an atavistic moment. Which of 
 us has not at some time or other shudderingly 
 understood him? And yet it is only the for- 
 tuitous trappings of Honor which can so dis- 
 turb. For the truest thing about Honor is that, 
 like Charity, it "seeks not itself"; and Honor 
 in the mediaeval sense was the darling child of 
 the Church. Honor does not break its word; it 
 protects the weak against itself, and against 
 others; it keeps its engagements. It is more 
 immediately concerned with its duty to human- 
 ity than with its duty to God; which is doubt- 
 less why the Puritan mystic saw it as a foe. 
 The code of honor is the etiquette-book of the 
 Christian; and the people who have attacked 
 It are the people who have considered that 
 Christians needed no etiquette. By our ances- 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 tors who were bred in the cold and windy times 
 of the Reformation it was held to deal chiefly 
 with duelling, gaming, and illicit affairs. *'The 
 debt of honor," "the affair of honor" — what 
 do even these corrupted phrases mean except 
 that the gentleman has found more ways to 
 bind himself than the laws of the land afford? 
 I do not know that Honor ever compelled a 
 man to gamble or to provoke a quarrel; but 
 if he has gambled or if he has quarrelled — if 
 he has undertaken to play the lamentable game 
 — he must not skulk behind a policeman, like a 
 cry-baby or a sans-culotte, because things have 
 not gone his way. If he has broken, he must 
 pay. 
 
 Part of the code of honor begins only when 
 the Christian precept has been broken. Is it so 
 bad a thing, in a fallible world, to be told what 
 to do after you have once done something 
 wrong? The Catechism, as a practical .guide, 
 is wofully incomplete without the code of the 
 gentleman as an appendix. If you had sinned, 
 the Puritan told you to repent; and he was 
 quite right. But there is work left for the sinner 
 after the repenting has been done. Both Honor 
 and the Catechism will do their best to keep 
 you out of a mess. The difference comes 
 later: for after you have got into a mess, the 
 Catechism leaves you to God, while Honor 
 shows you how, if you have done ill to fellow 
 beings, to repair that ill and not extend it. 
 
 Honor is a matter of practical politics — 
 
 [178] 
 
THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 
 
 frightfully unpractical politics, In another sense, 
 they often are. A cynical young woman once 
 said to me that she found cads more interest- 
 ing than gentlemen, because you could always 
 tell what a gentleman would do in a given 
 situation, whereas you could never tell, In any 
 situation, what a cad would do. Cads may or 
 may not be the proper sport of cynical young 
 women; but to the average busy creature the 
 gentleman is wholly delightful in that he is 
 wholly predicable. The Christian is not pred- 
 icable, for the simple reason that he has been 
 given a counsel of perfection. You know that 
 any given Christian will, by the day of his 
 majority, have done some, at least, of the 
 things which the Catechism has expressly 
 warned him not to do. "The way that can be 
 walked upon is not the perfect way," said Lao- 
 tse long ago. The Church does not believe that 
 you have always done everything that your 
 sponsors in baptism so cheerfully said you 
 would do. The confessional is itself the great- 
 est confession that the Church has ever made. 
 One of the most convenient things about Honor 
 is that its explicit code is limited; and you can 
 say of some men when they die that they have 
 never for a moment ceased to be gentlemen. 
 Honor is of the world, worldly — and- some 
 people have distorted that magnificent fact into 
 an accusation. That is what Mr. Kipling has 
 done in "Tomllnson." 
 
 All this about Honor is not so much a digres- 
 
 [ 179] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 sion as an approach. For If few people will 
 quarrel with the lies of implication and of con- 
 vention, and most people pray to be delivered 
 from the lie of self-defence, the lie "of obliga- 
 tion" cannot be juggled away; and it Is the lie 
 of obligation which Honor commands. Honor 
 has never permitted, still less commanded, a lie 
 for personal gain or satisfaction of any kind; 
 but there are cases when the gentleman must 
 He If he Is to be a gentleman. The gentleman 
 does not betray the friend who has trusted him, 
 even though he may bitterly object to having 
 that friend's secrets on his hands. From that 
 supreme obligation lies sometimes of necessity 
 result. I said just now that Honor and John 
 Calvin must often have fought for the young 
 soul; and it does not take an over-vivid imag- 
 ination to conceive cases. Religion (in spite of 
 the Decalogue) has tended to lump all lies 
 together as the offspring of the Devil, while 
 the code of the gentleman has always set aside 
 a few lies as consecrated and de rigiieur. But 
 the gentleman, I venture to say, has always 
 told those lies in the spirit in which a man lays 
 down his life for his friend. For no gentleman 
 lies, on any occasion, with unmixed pleasure. 
 He feels, rather, as if he had put on rags. 
 
 It is easier — as some sociologists do — to 
 
 plot the curves of a desire than to fix the 
 
 boundaries of truth. The domain of truth Is 
 
 not world-wide: that, we know. They must be 
 
 [ 180I 
 
 J 
 
THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 
 
 home-keepers Indeed — perpetually cradled — ■ 
 who need never lie. Literal truth is impris- 
 oned in a palace, like the Pope in the Vatican, 
 affecting to be the ruler of the world. Even the 
 faithful know that the claim is vain. The lies of 
 obligation and convention are not, In the deep- 
 est sense, unveracious; for they are not pre- 
 eminently intended to deceive. We expect them 
 of other civilized beings and expect other civi- 
 lized beings to expect them of us. Speaking 
 such falsehoods, and such falsehoods only, we 
 are still on truth's own ground. The lie told for 
 the liar's own sake marks the moment when a 
 man has passed from beneath her standard, 
 across her shadowy sphere of influence, and is 
 already hot-foot into the jungle. 
 
 [i8il 
 
MISS ALCOTT'S NEW ENGLAND 
 
 I REMEMBER being very much impressed 
 — and not a little shocked — when a friend 
 of mine told me that she had never, in her 
 childhood, been able to get any real pleasure 
 out of Louisa Alcott's stories. It had never 
 occurred to me that being brought up in New 
 York instead of in New England, or even 
 being of Southern instead of Pilgrim stock, 
 could make all that difference. Miss Alcott 
 seemed the safe inheritance, the absolutely in- 
 evitable delight, of childhood. Little Women 
 was as universal as Hamlet, I remembered 
 perfectly that French playmates of mine in 
 Paris had loved Les Quatre Filles du Doc^ 
 teur March (though the French version was 
 probably somewhat expurgated). If children 
 of a Latin — moreover, of a Royalist and Cath- 
 olic — tradition could find no flaw in Miss 
 Alcott's presentment of young life, I could not 
 see why any free-born American child should 
 fail to find it sympathetic. 
 
 I questioned my friend more closely. Her 
 answer set me thinking; and it is probably to 
 her that I owe my later appreciation of Miss 
 Alcott's special quality and special documen- 
 tary value. For what my friend said was simply 
 [182] 
 
MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 
 
 that the people in the books were too under- 
 bred for her to get any pleasure out of reading 
 about them. My friend was not, when I knew 
 her, a snob; and I took it that she had made 
 the criticism originally at a much earlier age. 
 All children are as snobbish as they know how 
 to be; and I fancy that the child's perennial 
 delight in fairy-tales Is not due solely to the 
 epic instinct. One is interested in princes and 
 princesses, when one is eight, simply because 
 they are princes and princesses. Of royalty, one 
 is perfectly sure. I have never known a child 
 who did not prefer the goose-girl to be a prin- 
 cess in disguise, or who felt any real sympathy 
 with the princess who was only a disguised 
 goose-girl. You do not have to expound the 
 Divine Right to any one under twelve. Peas- 
 ants are an acquired taste; and socialism is an 
 illusion of age. 
 
 Out of such axioms as these, I made my 
 explanation of my friend's heterodoxy. I re- 
 membered my own reaction, when very young, 
 on a story that centred In a masked ball to 
 which all the Inhabitants of the kingdom were 
 bidden. All the milkmaids went as court ladies, 
 and all the court ladles went as milkmaids — a 
 mere rounding out of the. Petit Trianon epi- 
 sode. The moral was obvious; and I recall 
 being frightfully disturbed by my own absolute 
 certainty that. If I had been going to a masked 
 ball, I should, without hesitation, have gone as 
 
 [183] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 grandly as I possibly could. I should never 
 have gone as a milkmaid, so long as the cos- 
 tumer had a court train left. Did it perhaps 
 mean that I was, on the whole, nearer to the 
 milkmaid than to the court lady? I did not 
 like the story, but I have never, to this day, 
 forgotten it. Perhaps my friend had been of 
 the same age when she discriminated against 
 Miss Alcott. But then, I and my contempo- 
 raries had made no such discrimination. As I 
 say. It set me to thinking. Since then, I have 
 read Miss Alcott over, not once, but many 
 times, and I think I understand. 
 
 The astounding result of re-reading Miss 
 Alcott at a mature age Is a conviction that she 
 probably gives a better Impression of mld- 
 jCentury New England than any of the more 
 laborious reconstructions, either in fiction or In 
 essay. The youth of her characters does not 
 hinder her In this; for childhood, supremely, 
 takes life ready-made. Mr. Howells's range Is 
 wider, and he is at once more serious and more 
 detached. Technically, he and Miss Alcott can 
 be compared as little as Madame Bovary 
 and the Bihliotheque Rose, Yet, although 
 their testimonies often agree, his world does 
 not "compose" as hers does. It may be his very 
 realism — his wealth of differentiating detail, 
 his fidelity to the passing moment — that makes 
 his early descriptions of New England so out 
 of date, so unrecognizable. Miss Alcott Is con- 
 
 [184] 
 
MISS ALCOTVS NEW ENGLAND 
 
 tent to be typical. All her people have the same 
 background, live In the same atmosphere, pro- 
 fess the same ideals. Moreover, they were 
 ideals and an atmosphere that imposed them- 
 selves widely during their period. Mr. Howells 
 gives us modern instances in plenty, but no- 
 where does he give us clearly the quintessential 
 New England village. It is precisely the famil- 
 iar experiences of life in that quintessential 
 village that Miss Alcott gives us, with careless 
 accuracy, without arriere-pensee. And it must 
 be remembered that, in spite of Dr. Holmes's 
 brave and appropriating definitions of aristoc- 
 racy, and the urbanity which the descendants of 
 our great New Englanders would fain per- 
 suade us their ancestors possessed, our great 
 New Englanders were essentially villagers, and 
 that the very best thing to be said of them is 
 that they wrought out village life to an almost 
 Platonic perfection of type. "Town'* will not 
 do to express the Boston, the Cambridge, the 
 Salem, the Concord, of an earlier time: It 
 smacks too much of London — and freedom. 
 The Puritans founded villages ; and, spiritually 
 speaking, the villages that they founded are 
 villages still. The village that Miss Alcott knew 
 best was Concord; and if, for our present pur- 
 pose, we find It convenient to call Concord 
 typical of New England, we shall certainly not 
 be doing New England any Injustice. 
 
 As I say, what strikes one on first re-reading 
 
 [185] ■ 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 her, IS the extraordinary success with which 
 she has given us our typical New England. 
 Some of her books, obviously, are less success- 
 ful in this way than others — Under the 
 Lilacs, for example, or Jack and Jill, where 
 (one cannot but agree with her severer critics) 
 there is an inexcusable amount of love-making. 
 There Is an equally inexcusable amount of 
 love-making. It is Interesting to remember, 
 in much of the earlier Howells. But for con- 
 temporary record of manners and morals, you 
 will go far before you match her masterpiece. 
 Little Women. What Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, 
 and Laurie do not teach us about life in New 
 England at a certain time, we shall never learn 
 from any collected edition of the letters of 
 Emerson, Thoreau, or Hawthorne. 
 
 The next — and equally astounding — result 
 of re-reading Miss Alcott was, for me, the un- 
 expected and not wholly pleasant corrobora- 
 tion of what my friend had said about her 
 characters. They were, In some ways, under- 
 bred. Bronson Alcott (or shall we say Mr. 
 March?) quotes Plato in his family circle; but 
 his family uses inveterately bad grammar. 
 *'Don't talk about ^labelling' Pa, as If he was a 
 pickle-bottle I" — thus Jo chides her little sister 
 for a malapropism. Bad grammar we might 
 expect from Jo, as a wilful freak; but should 
 we expect the exquisite Amy (any little girl 
 will tell you how exquisite Amy is supposed to 
 [i86] 
 
 i 
 
MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 
 
 be) to write to her father from Europe, about 
 buying gloves In Paris, *'Don't that sound sort 
 of elegant and rich?" 
 
 The bad grammar, in all the books, is con- 
 stant. And yet, I know of no other young 
 people's stories, anywhere, wherein the back- 
 ground is so unbrokenly and sincerely "liter- 
 ary." Cheap literature is unsparingly satirized; 
 Plato and Goethe are quoted quite as every- 
 day matters; and "a metaphysical streak had 
 unconsciously got into" Jo's first novel. In 
 The Rose in Bloom, Miss Alcott misquotes 
 Swinburne, to be sure, but she does it in the 
 interest of morality; and elsewhere Mac quotes 
 other lines from the same poet correctly. Of 
 course, we all remember that Emerson's 
 Essays helped on, largely, Mac's wooing — 
 if. Indeed, they did not do the whole trick. 
 And has there ever been an "abode of learn- 
 ing" — to slip, for a moment, into the very 
 style of Jo's Boys — like unto Plumfield, 
 crowned by "Parnassus"? After all, too, we 
 must remember how familiarly even those 
 madcaps, Ted and Josle, bandied about the 
 names of Greek gods. The boys and girls who 
 scoff at the simple amusements of Miss Alcott's 
 young heroes and heroines are, alack! not so 
 much at home with classical mythology as the 
 young people they despise. Yet, as I say, the 
 bad grammar is everywhere — even in the 
 mouths of the educators. 
 
 [1871 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 Breeding is, of course, not merely a matter 
 of speech; and I fancy that my friend referred 
 even more specifically to their manners — their 
 morals being unimpeachable. Miss Alcott's 
 people are, as the author herself says of them, 
 unworldly. They are even magnificently so; 
 and they score the worldly at every turn. You 
 remember Mrs. March's strictures on the 
 MofFats ? and Polly's justifiable criticisms of 
 Fanny Shaw's friends? and Rose's utter lack 
 of snobbishness about Phoebe, the little scullery- 
 maid, who eventually was brought up with her? 
 Of course, Archie's mother objects, at first, to 
 his marrying Phoebe, but she is soon recon- 
 ciled — and apologetic. 
 
 Granted their unworldllness, their high scale 
 of moral values, where, then, is the trace of 
 vulgarity that Is needed to make breeding 
 bad? They pride themselves on their separa- 
 tion from all vulgarity. "My mother is a lady," 
 Polly reflects, "even If" — even if she Is not 
 rich, like the Shaws. The March girls are 
 always consoling themselves for their vicissi- 
 tudes by the fact that their parents are gentle- 
 folk. Well, they are underbred in precisely the 
 way in which, one fancies, the contemporaries 
 of Emerson in Concord may well have been 
 underbred. It Is the "plain-living" side of the 
 "high thinking." They despised externals, and. 
 In the end, externals had their revenge. Breed- 
 ing, as such, is simply not a product of the 
 [i88] 
 
MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 
 
 independent village. (Some one may mention 
 Cranford; but you cannot call Cranford inde* 
 pendent, with its slavish adherence to the eti- 
 quette of the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson, its 
 constant awed reference to Sir Peter Arley 
 and the "county families.") The villagers have 
 not — and who supposes that Bronson Alcott 
 and Thoreau had it? — the gift of civilized 
 contacts. A contact, be It remembered, is not 
 quite the same thing as a relation. Manners 
 are a natural growth of courts. Recall any 
 mediaeval dwelling of royalty; then imagine 
 life lived in those cramped chambers, in the 
 perpetual presence of superiors and inferiors 
 alike — and lived informally! 
 
 In Miss Alcott's world, all that is changed. 
 According to the older tradition, a totally un- 
 chaperoned youth would mean lack of breed- 
 ing. Flere, on the contrary, all the heroines are 
 unchaperoned, while the match-making mamma 
 is anathema. We did not cut off King Charles's 
 head for nothing. The reward of the unchap- 
 eroned daughter is to make a good match. In 
 that rigid school, conventions are judged — and 
 nobly enough, Heaven knows ! — from the 
 point of view of morals alone (of absolute, 
 not of historic or evolutionary morals) and 
 many conventions are thereby damned. The 
 result is a little like what one has heard of 
 contemporary Norway. "Underbred'' is very 
 likely too strong a word ; yet one does see how 
 
 [1891 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 the social state described in Little Women 
 might easily shock any one brought up in a less 
 provincial tradition. There is too much love- 
 making, for example. Though sweethearting 
 between five-year-olds is frowned on, sweet- 
 hearting between fifteen-year-olds is quite the 
 thing. In real life, it would not always be safe 
 to marry, very young, your first playmate. Any 
 one who has lived in the more modern New 
 England village knows perfectly well that 
 people still marry, very young, their first play- 
 mates, and that disaster often results. Nor can 
 Una always depend on the protection of a lion 
 that is necessarily invisible. Granted that Jo's 
 precocious sense was right, and that it would 
 have been a mistake for her to marry Laurie; 
 which of us believes that, in real life, she would 
 not have made the mistake? You cannot de- 
 pend on young things in their teens to foresee 
 the future of their temperaments accurately. 
 One cannot but feel that if Mrs. March really 
 saw the complete unfitness of those two for 
 each other, it was her duty to put a few con- 
 ventional obstacles in their path. 
 
 Perhaps all this was part of what my friend 
 meant by lack of breeding in the traditional 
 sense: the social laissez-aller m extraordinary 
 (and perhaps not eternally maintainable?) 
 combination with moral purity. But I suspect 
 that she referred, as well, to another aspect 
 of Miss Alcott's environment : to the unmistak- 
 
 [190] 
 
MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 
 
 able lack of the greater and lesser amenities 
 of life. The plain living is quite as prominent 
 as the high thinking. The whole tissue of the 
 March girls' lives is a very commonplace fab- 
 ric. You know that their furniture was bad — 
 and that they did not know it; that their 
 aesthetic sense was untrained and crude — and 
 that they did not care; that the simplicity of 
 their meals, their household service, their 
 dress, their every day manners (in spite of the 
 myth about Amy) was simplicity of the com- 
 mon, not of the intelligent, kind. You really 
 would not want to spend a week in the house 
 of any one of them. Nor had their simplicity 
 in any wise the quality of austerity. Remember 
 the pies that the older March girls carried for 
 muffs (the management whereof was one of 
 the ever unsolved riddles of my childhood). 
 
 No: in so far as breeding is a matter of 
 externals, one must admit that there is some 
 sense in calling Miss Alcott's people under- 
 bred. Perhaps we do not choose to call breed- 
 ing a matter of externals. In that, we should 
 perfectly agree with Miss Alcott's people 
 themselves; and to that we shall presently 
 come. For what is incontrovertible is that Miss 
 Alcott's work is a genuine document. 
 
 I have spoken of the unimpeachable moral- 
 ity of Miss Alcott's world. Charlie lost Rose 
 for having drunk one glass of champagne too 
 much. That is the worst sin committed in any 
 
 1 191] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 of the books, so far as I remember. Of course, 
 the black sheep, Dan, had been in prison; but 
 he had killed his man Inevitably, almost help- 
 lessly, in self-defence; and besides, the treat- 
 ment of Dan Is purely snobbish, from start to 
 finish. Even Mrs. Jo, while she stands by him, 
 Is acutely conscious of the social difference be- 
 tween him and her own kin. The moment he 
 lifts his eyes to Bess — ! No: the books are 
 quite snobbish enough, in their way. Nat, 
 foundling and fiddler, Is permitted to marry 
 Daisy in the end (though, really, anybody 
 might have married Daisy!). But Nat, though 
 a parvenu, Is a milksop, and Is quite able to 
 say that he has never done anything really 
 disgraceful. The fact Is that their social dis- 
 tinctions, while they operate socially, are yet 
 all moral In origin. And this Is a very "special" 
 note : the bequest, It may well be, of Calvin. 
 
 We're the elect, and you'll be damned; 
 Hell, like a wallet, shall be crammed 
 With God's own reprobates. 
 
 The transcendental Mr. March would never 
 have sung It; but he and his knew something 
 akin to those resolute discriminations. 
 
 Another point Is perhaps even more inter- 
 esting. There are not, I believe, any other 
 books in the world so blatantly full of moral- 
 ity — of moral Issues, and moral tests, and 
 morals passionately abided by — and at the 
 
 [ 192] 
 
MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 
 
 same time so empty of religion. The Bible Is 
 never quoted; almost no one goes to church; 
 and they pray only when very young and in 
 extreme cases. The only religious allusion, so 
 far as I know, in Little Women, is the 
 patronizing mention of the Madonna provided 
 for Amy by Aunt March's Catholic maid. And 
 even then, you can see how broad-minded Mrs. 
 March considers herself, to permit Amy the 
 quasi-oratory ; and Amy does not attempt to 
 disguise the fact that she admires the picture 
 chiefly for its artistic quality. Yet it is only fair 
 to remember that, in Miss Alcott's day, people 
 were reading, without so much as one grain of 
 salt, the confessions of "escaped" nuns, and the 
 novels of Mrs. Julia McNair Wright — and 
 that Elsie DInsmore developed brain fever 
 when her father threatened to send her to a 
 convent school. Perhaps Mrs. March had a 
 right to flatter herself. Again, as I say, these 
 are documents. 
 
 There are many other straws to show which 
 way the wind blows. Would any one but Miss 
 Alcott, for example, have allowed her chief 
 heroine to marry a Professor Bhaer? No mod- 
 ern child ever quite recovers from the shock 
 of it. But we must remember that, in Miss 
 Alcott's time, German metaphysicians were 
 not without honor in Concord. The breath of 
 reform, too, is hot upon the pages. "Temper- 
 ance"- — remember Charlie's unlucky glass of 
 
 [ 193 1 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 champagne, and Laurie's promise to Meg on 
 her wedding-day; the festivals of the virtuous 
 are a perpetual bath of lemonade. "Woman 
 Suffrage" — recall the discussions alluded to in 
 "The Pickwick Portfolio," and the fate of the 
 few scoffers in co-educational Plumfield. The 
 children are all passionate little Abolitionists; 
 and the youths are patriotic with a fervid, 
 unfamiliar patriotism, which touches, at its 
 dim source, emotions that to us are almost more 
 prehistoric than historic. 
 
 In the minds of Miss Alcott's world, there 
 is still a lively distrust of the British. They are 
 wont to oppress their colonies, and they cheat 
 at croquet. Indeed, Miss Alcott's characters 
 look a little askance at all foreigners — except 
 German professors. There is no prophecy of 
 the Celtic Revival in their condescending char- 
 ity to poor Irishwomen. The only people, not 
 themselves, whom they wholly respect, are the 
 negroes. The rich men are nearly all East 
 India merchants, and their money goes event- 
 ually to endow educational institutions. The 
 young heroes have a precocious antipathy to 
 acquiring wealth for its own sake. Demi would 
 rather, he says, sweep door-mats In a publish- 
 ing-house than go into business, like "Stuffy" 
 and his kind. "I would rather be a door-keeper 
 in the house of the Lord" — it would hardly 
 over-emphasize Demi's so typical feeling for 
 the sanctity of the printed page; for the utter 
 
 [ 194 ] 
 
MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 
 
 desirability of the publisher's own office, where, 
 as he says, great men go in and out, with 
 respect. And — to complete the evidence — the 
 books do not lack the note of New English 
 austerity, though they come by it indirectly 
 enough. The New English literary tradition 
 seems to be fairly clear: either passion must 
 be public, or, if it is private, it must be 
 thwarted. There is a good deal of public pas- 
 sion — for philanthropy, for education, and 
 what-not — in the books, after all. There is no 
 private passion at all: though the books brim 
 with sentiment, Miss Alcott writes as one who 
 had never loved. It would be difficult to find, 
 anywhere, stories so full of love-making and so 
 empty of emotion. 
 
 Straws show which way the wind blows; 
 and these straws are all borne in the same 
 direction. Is not this the New England on 
 which, if not in which, we were all brought up? 
 Any honest New Englander — a New Eng- 
 lander of the villages, I mean — will admit that 
 the New English are singularly ungifted for 
 social life and manners. We suspected that 
 long ago, when we first read Miss Alcott, if 
 we happened to turn, after Little Women, 
 to any one of Mrs. Ewing's or Mrs. Moles- 
 worth's stories. Imagine Jo dressed, as Mrs. 
 Molesworth's heroines all were, by Walter 
 Crane! The real "old-fashioned girl" was not 
 Polly Milton, but Griselda, in The Cuckoo 
 
 [I9S] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 Clock. Polly was simply of no fashion at all. 
 There was some (wistful?) sense of this in us, 
 even then. Yet of course we admitted that, in 
 comparison, Mrs. Molesworth lacked plot — 
 as Heaven knows she did! Any New Eng- 
 lander of the villages is familiar, too, with the 
 passion for "education"; a passion that, I sus- 
 pect, you can match now only in the Middle 
 West. We all know that bigoted scholarllness, 
 in combination, precisely, with nasal and un- 
 grammatical speech, which there is no special 
 point In flattering with the term "idiomatic." 
 One or two of Mr. Churchiirs novels have 
 preserved to us instances of It. We are for- 
 tunate if we have come off quite free of the 
 superstition, so prevalent through the March 
 family, that a book — "any old" book — is 
 sacred. We scoff heartily at the parvenu whose 
 books are bound without first being printed; 
 but I am not sure that any pure-bred villager 
 would not rather have sham books than no 
 books at all. We cannot help it. No other fur- 
 niture seems to us quite so good. 
 
 We have all been brought up, too, to be moral 
 snobs. New England mothers must often be put 
 to It to find purely moral grounds for discrimi- 
 nating against some of the playmates their 
 children would Ignorantly bring home. They 
 must often yearn to say, without indirection, 
 "I do not wish you to play with the butcher's 
 little girl, and her being in your Sunday-school 
 
 [1961 
 
MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 
 
 class makes no difference whatever." But the 
 real New England mother never does. She 
 must manage It otherwise ; since the only legiti- 
 mate basis for her discriminations would be 
 some sort of proof that butchers' little girls 
 were apt to be naughty. The respective fates 
 of Nat and Dan are, I dare to say, as accurate 
 as if they had been recorded by the official 
 investigators of the Eugenics Society. The 
 lack of religion, some one may object, is any- 
 thing but typically New English. Perhaps, a 
 hundred years ago, it would not have been. 
 And we have not, to be sure, been transcen- 
 dental with Impunity: we have the Calvinlstic 
 Unitarian. But the average New England con- 
 science has always had a more natural turn for 
 ethics than for pure piety. Children in Miss 
 Alcott's books were brought up like ourselves, 
 to obey their parents. It was Elsie DInsmore, 
 on her Southern plantation, who (like a Pres- 
 byterian St. Rose of Lima) defied her father 
 for religion's sake. Of course we all had to 
 read about Elsie surreptitiously. We knew that 
 w^Ithout asking. There was a good deal of 
 plain thinking, as well as of high thinking, in 
 our and Miss Alcott's world. As for our un- 
 worldliness: we have come a long way since 
 Miss Alcott; yet I verily believe that, even 
 now, almost any bounder can take us in if he 
 poses as a philosopher. So many have done it! 
 I have not done more than indicate Miss 
 
 [197] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 Alcott's exceeding fidelity. Begin recalling her 
 for yourself, and you will agree that she gives 
 us social life as New Englanders, for decades, 
 have, on the whole, known it. The relations of 
 parent and child, brother and sister, commu- 
 nity and individual, of playmates, of lovers, of 
 citizens, are all such as we know them. They 
 are familiar to us, if not positively in our own 
 experience. Life has grown more complicated 
 everywhere. Yet I doubt If, even now, any 
 New English child would instinctively call Miss 
 Alcott's people underbred. We still understand 
 their code, if we do not practise it. New Eng- 
 land Is still something more than a convenient 
 term for map-makers. These be our own 
 villages. 
 
 [198] 
 
THE SENSUAL EAR 
 
 I HAVE a friend who always calls — when 
 he remembers to, for alas! he sometimes 
 forgets — the Methodist Church building in 
 our village, a "conventicle.'' I wish he did not 
 sometimes forget, for nothing makes me so at 
 peace with my hereditary nonconformity as to 
 hear an Anglican imply, by such verbal affec- 
 tations, what he thinks of the dissidence of 
 dissent. Methodism is as foreign to me as 
 Anglicanism; yet, I doubt not, the Epworth 
 League sings, in its handsome "conventicle," 
 just the hymns that of old were sung by the 
 Y. P. S. C. E. It is many a year since I attended 
 a Y. P. S. C. E. meeting; and I have an idea — 
 it is almost a fear — that Gospel Hymns, No. 5, 
 is by this time Gospel Hymns, No. 10, and that 
 some of the most haunting melodies are gone 
 therefrom. Perhaps the "Endeavorers" are 
 now chanting Hymns Ancient and Modern. 
 But I hope not. Oh, I cannot think it I 
 
 When life grows very dreary; when the 
 Hindenburg line seems to turn from shadow to 
 substance; when the Council of Workmen's 
 and Soldiers' Deputies has indulged in a new 
 "democratic"^ vagary; when flour has gone up 
 two dollars more a barrel and the priceless 
 potato is but a soggy pearl, deserving to be 
 cast before swine; when another member of 
 
 [ 199] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 the family has broken a leg or had appendi- 
 citis — then my husband (he, too, of yore an 
 *'Endeavorer") and I are wont to burst, simul- 
 taneously, mechanically, unthinking and uncon- 
 spiring, into song. And the songs we hear each 
 other humming In separate recesses of the 
 house are Gospel Hymns. Humming, we 
 converge upon the drawing-room from our dif- 
 ferent retreats; and sometimes we look each 
 other in the eye and say hardily, "Let's." Then 
 we sit down and incite each other to a desper- 
 ate vocalism. We see how many we can remem- 
 ber, out of our evangelistic youth, and we sing 
 them all. We remember a good many, if truth 
 be told; and once I found a rapt huddle of col- 
 ored servants on the stair-landing getting a 
 free "revival." Neither of us has a voice worth 
 mentioning, so I think that we must, without 
 realizing it, have reproduced the fervor along 
 with the words. 
 
 They were cannily arranged, those Moody 
 and Sankey hymns: if you sing them at all, you 
 cannot help pounding down on the essential 
 words. They wallow In beat and accent. "A 
 Shelter in the Time of Storm^ We usually 
 begin with that. It Is Ineluctable. But oh, how 
 I wish that either of us could remember more 
 than one "verse" of 
 
 Well, wife, I've found the model church, 
 
 And worshipped there to-day; 
 It made me think of good old times 
 Before my hair was gray. 
 
 [ 200 ] 
 
THE SENSUAL EAR 
 
 I have never heard it sung — I never **be- 
 longed" to the Y. P. S. C. E. — but my husband 
 says that he has. My husband also says that he 
 has heard "the trundle-bed one.'* I do not 
 believe it, though he is a truthful man. I can- 
 not believe it; the less, that he remembers 
 none of the words, and that it is only I, who 
 recall, visually, in the lower corner of a page, — 
 
 Poking (perhaps it was another verb) 'mid the dust and 
 rafters 
 There I found my trundle-bed. 
 
 A slight altercation always develops here. 
 Why should he be more royalist than the king? 
 It is not conceivable that it was ever sung\ and 
 even he cannot remember the tune; so we join 
 forces in "To the Work, to the Work,'* or 
 "There Shall Be Showers of Blessing." 
 
 (Mercy-drops round us are fall-mgy 
 But for the showers we plead.) 
 
 He has an uncanny and inexplicable preju- 
 dice against "God Be with You Till We Meet 
 Again" — perhaps because they always sang It 
 for the last one. But I can usually get him to 
 "oblige" with a solo — "Throw Out the Llfe- 
 Llne" — which I am sure was not in "No. 5," 
 because we never, never sang it; though I do 
 remember hearing a returning delegate to a 
 Y. P. S. C. E. convention say that it was the one 
 "the people of Montreal seemed to like best." 
 Somewhere in the nineties, Endeavorers in 
 [ 20I ] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 thousands sang it all up and down Sherbrooke 
 Street, apparently. Well: I am like the people 
 of Montreal. It always "gets" me, In the dis- 
 senting marrow of my dissenting soul; and 
 when my husband has ''obliged" me with it, I 
 am ready to forget the Council of Workmen's 
 and Soldiers' Deputies. What can the devil do 
 in the face of "Throw Out the Llfe-LIne," and 
 Its "linked sweetness long drawn out"? 
 
 By all of which It Is made evident that, in 
 the matter of hymns, mine Is the "sensual ear." 
 (Not so my husband's: he sings them In the 
 critical spirit, as he might Illustrate a violation 
 of rhetoric. He loathes "Throw Out the Life- 
 Llne," even while the chorus makes his voice 
 appeal and yearn In spite of him. As I said, he 
 does It only to oblige.) The church of my 
 choosing, if not of my profession, Is the same 
 as that of my friend who talks of "con- 
 venticles." There I sing Hymns Ancient and 
 Modern (or that American corruption thereof, 
 the Hymnal) with the most conforming. 
 And certainly, except for a few time-honored 
 chants which they share with all Dissenters, 
 their hymns are to me "ditties of no tone." 
 My husband disagrees with me; but he Is 
 not, equally with me, the predestined prey of 
 the brass band. He is better educated than I; 
 has listened oftener at twilight to the en- 
 chanted choirs of New College and Magdalen. 
 He likes the non-committal melodies of the 
 
 [ 202 ] 
 
THE SENSUAL EAR 
 
 Hymnal far, far better than the sentimental 
 parti pris of Gospel Hymns. 
 
 I know as well as he does that the senti- 
 mental quality Is of a sort that ought not to be 
 there at all. I know that the music of "Throw 
 Out the Life-Line" belongs morally with the 
 music of "Old Black Joe," and "Oh, Promise 
 Me," and "There'll Be a Hot Time In the Old 
 Town To-night." I know that the appeal of 
 that tune is sensuous and emotional and per- 
 sonal, and, for a hymn, all, all wrong. I realize 
 that, for* church, Gregorian Is the only wear ; 
 and that the less you diverge therefrom, the 
 more decent you are. I, too, prefer Bach and 
 Palestrlna, and, for congregational singing, the 
 oldest Latin hymns you can get. I can even see 
 that the aridity and sameness of the Anglican 
 "hymn-tunes" are more dignified, and more to 
 the purpose, than the plangent and catchy re- 
 frains by which Sankey lured "wandering boys" 
 back to be safe-folded with "the ninety and 
 nine." And yet, when my husband (by request) 
 croons "Throw Out the Llfe-LIne," I cannot 
 resist. I am evangelized. 
 
 True, I perceived this perniciousness early. 
 Perhaps the white light dawned on me when, 
 in Y. P. S. C. E. days, an older friend (who 
 was in love) confided to me that the words of 
 a certain Gospel Hymn seemed to her not 
 altogether reverent: they could so easily be 
 applied to a human love-affair. She was quite 
 [203 ] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 right, I think. Some of us have felt the same 
 about Crashaw and Giles Fletcher. But though 
 the words were, in all conscience, carnal 
 enough, I believe it was the tune that did 
 the trick and set her dreaming of her young 
 hero. 
 
 For I am his, and he is mine, 
 Forever and forever. 
 
 Oh, the yearning of that refrain: slow and 
 honeyed and melancholy as "My Old Kentucky 
 Home" or "Way Down Upon the Suwanee 
 River' M Musically, doubtless, not so good; but 
 musically of the same school, and suggestive — 
 it, too — of plantations and moonlight and ban- 
 jos and rich, heart-rending negro voices. My 
 friend was right: they are not in the best tra- 
 dition of reverence, those Moody and Sankey 
 hymns. And yet — here's the rub — why do we 
 remember them, when all but the most univer- 
 sal of the hymns we sang in church and sang 
 much oftener than these, have gone beyond 
 recapturing? My husband resents remembering 
 them; he would far rather remember more 
 worthy things. But I do not : I would not, for 
 anything, lose them out of the rag-bag which 
 IS my mind. I am not sure I would not rather 
 lose certain stanzas from the Greek Anthology, 
 which come to my lips in much the same unvoli- 
 tional fashion. From those refrains I recon- 
 struct a whole moral and social world, even as 
 [204] 
 
THE SENSUAL EAR 
 
 Cuvier reconstructed his mastodon. You re- 
 member what the "Evening Hymn" did for 
 Mottram and Lowndes In "The End of the 
 Passage"? Just that "I Know that My Re- 
 deemer Lives" does for me. And — this Is the 
 point — "Rock of Ages" and "Holy, Holy, 
 Holy," do not do It; though I knew these even 
 earlier, and am still, on occasion, singing them. 
 So It Is not all a question of association and 
 the power of youthful memories. It is the very 
 quality of the music — the words were negli- 
 gible, when they were not atrocious — that 
 touched In me, and can still touch, something 
 popular, emotional, vulgar; something very 
 low-brow and democratic, not to say mobblsh. 
 "The sensual ear." 
 
 Even In youth, I had the sense to differen- 
 tiate. "Jerusalem the Golden," discovered in 
 another hymn-book than our own, was for 
 many years my favorite hymn — even during 
 those years when I was singing "Beulah Land" 
 and " Wonderful Words of Life." I knew It 
 was better; I knew I liked It better; I knew 
 that It had more to do with religion than all 
 the "Beulah Lands" ever written. True, the 
 words helped; and the words of the Gospel 
 Hymns were a hindrance, even then. But my 
 soul recognized the vahdity, the reality of the 
 music. "Jerusalem the Golden" remained my 
 favorite until "The Son of God Goes Forth to 
 War" succeeded It In my affections; always to 
 [205] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 be, until I die, my very favorite. And even 
 while we sang — 
 
 And view the shining glory shore. 
 My heaven, my home, for evermore. 
 
 I had memories of something still better than 
 ^'Jerusalem the Golden" : memories of an Inter- 
 val in a French convent where we chanted the 
 Magnificat to Its proper plain-song. Though, 
 even there — ^but I shall come to that later. 
 
 Not long ago, we had a friend staying with 
 us who was bred a Romanist. How Moody and 
 Sankey got mentioned, I do not know — but 
 they did; and our friend Insisted that Moody 
 and Sankey could not conceivably be so bad as 
 the modern Catholic hymns. We exclaimed; 
 she reaffirmed. There was nothing for It but to 
 put the burning question to the proof. Quietly, 
 by the fire, we staged a little contest. We sang 
 our Gospel Hymns; and she — well, she sang 
 dreadful things. There was In particular a 
 hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodalities. . . . 
 No, I think her "exhibit" was really worse 
 than ours. It had the rag-time flatness without 
 the rag-time catchlness, or the crooning negro 
 quality. Bred up In part on such modern by- 
 products of the Holy Catholic Church, no 
 wonder that she succumbed utterly to my hus- 
 band's rendition of "Throw Out the Life- 
 Line." "I think it's lovely," she said; siding 
 with me, to his great chagrin. How I wished 
 [206] 
 
THE SENSUAL EAR 
 
 that our friend of the "conventicles" were 
 there to decide between us — he who in his 
 youth was forbidden to accompany his friends 
 to Y. P. S. C. E. meetings as he might have 
 been forbidden to go to dime-museums. But 
 he has no ear — "sensuaP'or other. Perhaps he 
 could not have helped. 
 
 Our Catholic friend's exhibit gave me pause. 
 I knew that in France they sing, nowadays, 
 hymns unworthy of Gothic architecture. Not so 
 many years ago, In a beautiful French cathe- 
 dral which I was by way of frequenting, I 
 heard the children of some sodality or con- 
 fraternity pouring forth as poor a piece of 
 holy rag-time as any conventicle has ever 
 echoed. It jerked me back into the past, vio- 
 lently, as Hassan's carpet must have jerked its 
 fortunate owner through space. 
 
 Vierge, notre esperance, 
 
 Etends sur nous ton bras, 
 
 Sauve, sauve la France, 
 Ne Tabandonne pas, 
 Ne Tabandonne pas. 
 
 So we sang it, too, at the Assomption, iri 
 happier days, each with a veil and a candle, 
 winding in and out among the green alleys of 
 the convent park. But the young Tourangeaux 
 went on to sing worse things : songs less catho- 
 lic, more evangelical, with words more bitter 
 and tones more shrill. I escaped, to return only 
 
 [ 207 ] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 at the hour of Benediction, when I knew that 
 the "O Salutaris Hostia" and 'Tantum Ergo*' 
 would mount again with the incense towards 
 the rich mediaeval windows. 
 
 I fear It Is true, as our Catholic friend said, 
 that the Church has fallen musically, as It has 
 done architecturally, on evil days. Well: these 
 shrill and senseless tunes are their equivalent 
 for our Moody and Sankey. Even In conven- 
 ticles, we have more dignified hymn-books for 
 use In "church" as opposed to Sunday-school or 
 Y. P. S. C. E., and the like. And as our Pri- 
 mary Department (of the Sunday-school) was 
 handed over to the works of Fanny Crosby 
 Xdid she write 
 
 Roses in bloom. 
 
 Filling the room, 
 
 With perfume rich and rare. 
 
 I wonder? Anyhow, she wrote most of them), 
 so the young Catholics In both France and 
 America are handed over to the musical diva- 
 gations of ill-educated priests. It Is a pity; for 
 they have a tradition that cannot be bettered. 
 My ancestors sang lustily out of the old Bay 
 Psalm Book : 
 
 Ye monsters of the mighty deep, 
 
 Your Maker's praises spout; 
 Up from the sands ye codlings peep, 
 
 And wag your tails about. 
 
 But, at the same period, their ancestors were 
 singing the Latin hymns of the Middle Ages in 
 
 [208] 
 
THE SENSUAL EAR 
 
 undegenerate solemnity. It Is natural enough, 
 perhaps, that I should have emerged on 
 "There's a Light in the Valley for Me"; but 
 why should they have emerged on *'Souvenez- 
 vous, Jesus," and the Mariolatrous wailing of 
 "Im-mac-u-late, Im-mac-u-late" ? Take as fine 
 a Protestant hymn as, on the whole, we have 
 inherited — *'0 God, Our Help in Ages Past." 
 Its tune Is, to my thinking, bad : difficult to sing 
 and monotonous to hear. But In the very 
 church that these poor French infants are Inno- 
 cently desecrating, a few hours, more or less, 
 see a whole congregation chanting, with pas- 
 sionless and awful reverence, 
 
 Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo; nee in aeternum 
 irascaris nobis. 
 
 Whoever has heard that welling slowly 
 from crowded choir, nave, and transept, the 
 coifed peasant and the trained seminariste sing- 
 ing In unison (no staginess of part-slnging 
 there I), and has joined his voice to the multi- 
 tudinous supplication, will not cease to regret 
 that modern vulgarity Is as Catholic as it is 
 Protestant. 
 
 It was the most delightful of Huysmans's 
 perversities to contend, in all seriousness, that 
 the Devil, driven out of an immemorial haunt 
 of his own near Lourdes by the advent In that 
 spot of the Blessed Virgin, took his sullen 
 revenge on the aesthetic sense of her priests. 
 He could no longer hold his filthy Sabbaths 
 [209] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 there; but he could and did bewitch the clergy 
 into making Lourdes a thing of ugliness. Their 
 taste went wrong with everything they touched 
 in Lourdes; and while Satan could not prevent 
 the Blessed Virgin from working miracles, he 
 could still bring it about that the faithful 
 should be healed amid the most hideous 
 architectural surroundings. Perhaps Huysmans 
 would have credited the modern Catholic 
 music unhesitatingly to the devil. 
 
 But certainly Moody and Sankey were not 
 clerics of Lourdes. Nor could the Presbyter- 
 ians who first sang the rhymed version of the 
 Twenty-Third Psalm to the air of "So bin ich 
 vergessen, vergessen bin ich" be suspected of 
 any part in the Devil's private feuds with the 
 Virgin. Indeed, the particular Presbyterians 
 whom I have heard sing it thus had not, I 
 fancy, much more reverence for the one than 
 for the other. 
 
 I do not think that we can account for Gos- 
 pel Hymns No. 5 by the Huysmans formula. 
 Even the hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodal- 
 ities, is, I believe, mere modern pandering to 
 the uncultured majority : revivalism in essence, 
 like Moody and Sankey and the Salvation 
 Army and Billy Sunday. But at least the Cath- 
 olics have this advantage: that though they 
 too have indulged in operatic music and have 
 even sunk to "Vierge, notre esperance," they 
 still hear from their choirs the ancient music 
 
 [210I 
 
THE SENSUAL EAR 
 
 and the ancient words. You lose the sodalities 
 and confraternities when you hear once more 
 the familiar "Tantum Ergo'* (I do not mean 
 the florid one that they sing at St. Roch in 
 Paris, and elsewhere) ; the new vulgarity is 
 forgotten, as many vulgarities have been 
 touched and then forgotten by Rome, in her 
 time. 
 
 I used to think that the worst of our bad 
 Protestant hymns was their ignoring of the 
 human intelligence. 
 
 Many giants great and tall. 
 
 Stalking through the land, 
 Headlong to the earth would fall 
 
 If met by Daniers Band. 
 
 (My fortunate husband sang it in his youth.) 
 But even that, while it could have a religious 
 meaning, I should say, only for a sub-normal 
 intelligence. Is not a deliberate and explicit defi- 
 ance of the intellect of man. 
 
 Verbum caro, panem verum 
 
 Verbo carnem efficit: 
 Fitque sanguis Christi merum; 
 
 Et si sensus deficit, 
 Ad firmandum cor sincerum 
 
 Sola fides sufficit. 
 
 Tantum ergo sacramentum 
 
 Veneremur cernui, 
 Et antiquum documentum 
 
 Novo cedat ritui: 
 Praestet fides supplementum 
 
 Sensuum defectui. 
 
 [211] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 It took St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor Angellcus, 
 thus to state, in one supreme utterance, the 
 whole case against the Higher Criticism. 
 
 No, I do not think that the sense of a hymn 
 counts so much. The mediaeval *'Ave Maris 
 Stella" has not much more to recommend it, 
 philosophically speaking, than the hymn with 
 the *'Im-mac-u-late, Im-mac-u-late" refrain. A 
 poem, even a religious poem, is good poetry or 
 bad poetry, and that is all there is to it. ''From 
 Greenland's Icy Mountains'* is a silly poem, 
 and "The Son of God Goes Forth to War" is 
 a rather fine poem; and Bishop Heber wrote 
 both. But the permanent superiority of the lat- 
 ter is in the music to which it is set. One Pres- 
 byterian sect sings, I believe, nothing but the 
 Psalms — rather unfortunately metricized, to be 
 sure — and their church singing is the drear- 
 iest in the world. Yet the Psalms are rated 
 high. *'Onward, Christian Soldiers" gets its 
 appeal from Sir Arthur Sullivan and not from 
 the author. I do not believe that "Nearer, My 
 God, to Thee'* would have been the favorite 
 hymn of the late President McKinley were it 
 not for the slow, swinging tempo, which needs 
 only a little quickening to be an excellent waltz, 
 with all the emotional appeal of good waltz 
 music. 
 
 On the whole. Hymns Ancient and Mod- 
 ern are far better, from the point of view of 
 poetry, than Gospel Hymns, No. 5 — but 
 [212] 
 
THE SENSUAL EAR 
 
 they have not converted half so many people. 
 The elect, the high-brows, may say what they 
 like: if you are doing your evangelizing on 
 the grand scale, the ''sensual ear" must be 
 pleased. I do not believe that the music I have 
 referred to, of the "Tantum Ergo" or the 
 *Tarce, Domlne," would ever convert the 
 crowd in a tent or a tabernacle — even if D. L. 
 Moody or Fanny Crosby wrote new words to 
 it. But if you let a grammar-school pupil hack 
 words out of the New Testament and set them 
 to the tune of "Massa's in the Cold, Cold 
 Ground" — well, it would be strange if some 
 one were not converted. You may be very sure 
 that the Roman Catholic Church has not taken 
 to vulgar and catchy hymns without a set pur- 
 pose of winning souls. 
 
 At the Cross, at the Cross, where I first saw the light 
 And the burden of my sin rolled away. 
 
 It was there by faith I received my sight, 
 And now I am happy all the day. 
 
 The last line might almost have been lifted 
 bodily from one of Stephen Foster's negro 
 melodies. It has the very lilt of 
 
 My old Kentucky home far away. 
 
 And it is only one of many In Gospel Hymns, 
 No. 5. That is why my husband remembers 
 them, in spite of himself. He may contemn 
 them, but he cannot forgot. There is hardly 
 
 [213] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 one of them that would not consort happily 
 with the right kind of brass band. They con- 
 note crowds and the "emotion of multitude." 
 So, to me, does the "Parce, Domine" connote 
 crowds — but crowds awe-struck, unweeping, 
 and in no mood for stimulation by a cornet 
 accompaniment. There is a cardinal difference. 
 The success of almost any Gospel Hymn de- 
 pends on an emotional appeal very like that of 
 Kipling's banjo : 
 
 And the tunes that mean so much to you alone — 
 Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose, 
 Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan — 
 I can rip your very heartstrings out with those. 
 
 Whatever Bach and Palestrina and Scarlatti 
 and good Gregorian do to you — well, it is not 
 that. Whereas almost any good Gospel Hymn 
 gets you, if it gets you at all, in the banjo way. 
 There is the revivalistic essence in all of them. 
 And when the Catholics wish to be revival- 
 istic, they imitate, rather badly, the Protestant 
 * 'hymn-tune." 
 
 Most of my friends are so truly high-brow 
 that they cannot be "got" in the banjo way. 
 They do not like cornet solos ; and brass bands 
 playing negro-melodies leave them dry-eyed. 
 They honestly prefer the Kniesel Quartet or a 
 Brahms symphony. Their arid and exquisite 
 aestheticism rejects these low appeals. Did I 
 not say that my husband loathes "Throw Out 
 [214] 
 
THE SENSUAL EAR 
 
 the Life-Line" even while he is reducing me to 
 an emotional crumple? I refuse to admit that 
 I am Incapable of that same arid and exquisite 
 aesthetlclsm ; but the lower appeal reaches me 
 too. I do weep over the brass bands. I do 
 choke over the flag appropriately carried. I do 
 fall In love (If I am careful to shut my eyes) 
 with a good tenor voice. And while there are, 
 luckily, a great many people like my husband, 
 there must be millions more like me. He re- 
 members the Gospel Hymns; but I like them. 
 Not quite to the trail-hitting point; but then 
 I fancy the hymns of the tabernacle are less 
 good than they used to be. I do not know the 
 tune of "Brighten the Corner Where You 
 Are." Though my six-year-old son has learned 
 It from the cook, I do not believe he has the 
 tune right. He cannot have It right: if it were 
 right, there would be no sawdust trail. Nor do 
 I know the music of "The Brewer's Big 
 Horses Cannot Roll Over Me." But I have a 
 suspicion that Billy Sunday's hymns are noth- 
 ing like so good as Moody and Sankey. The 
 dance music of the day always has Its effect 
 on popular airs of every kind, even religious. 
 I venture to say [pace the shade of Lord 
 Byron) that the waltz, throughout the nine- 
 teenth century, had a strong religious Influence. 
 Every one knows that good waltz music, If 
 played slowly enough. Is the saddest thing In 
 the world. The emotion aroused by good waltz 
 
 [215] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 music well played is blood-brother to the emo- 
 tion aroused by "God Be with You Till We 
 Meet Again" and "For You I Am Praying, 
 I'm Praying for You." Waltzes and Gospel 
 Hymns reinforce each other — which is prob- 
 ably why the unco' guid object to dancing. But 
 with all due allowances for mob-emotion and 
 the sensual ear, I cannot believe that syncopa- 
 tion serves the Lord. People's eyes do not 
 grow dim as they listen to a fox-trot. It does 
 nothing to bring forth that melting sense of 
 universal love which the old popular music 
 did. All waltz music was in essence melan- 
 choly; and all sentimental melancholies meet 
 together somewhere in the recesses of the vul- 
 gar heart. Yes: when popular composers were 
 writing good waltzes, it was easier for the San- 
 keys and Blisses to write good hymns. The 
 Y. P. S. C. E. must have had easier work with 
 the young people who were singing "Marguer- 
 ite," than it has now with the young people 
 who are singing "At the Garbage Gentlemen's 
 Ball." I have a notion that the young people 
 who are singing "At the Garbage Gentlemen's 
 Ball" do not go to Y. P. S. C. E. meetings at 
 all. Well, you see, those who sang "Marguer- 
 ite" did. 
 
 Those who know say that we are growing 
 more vulgar all the time. Perhaps the differ- 
 ence between D. L. Moody and Billy Sunday 
 is a good index of that degeneration. Cer- 
 
 [216] 
 
THE SENSUAL EAR 
 
 talnly the silly young things who wept while 
 they sang ''God Be with You Till We Meet 
 Again" would not have pretended to call 
 Christ up on the telephone — or have per- 
 mitted any one else to do it in their presence. 
 But, thank Heaven, the conventicles are like to 
 outlast the tabernacle. 
 
 At all events, I am sure of one thing: that 
 my husband will not be persuaded, twenty 
 years hence, to ^'oblige" with "The Brewer's 
 Big Horses.'* But I hope he will continue at 
 intervals to oblige with "Throw Out the Life- 
 Line." For, so long as he does, I shall con- 
 tinue to be evangelized. 
 
 [217] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 I WAS reading a novel, the other day; had 
 got about half way through it. The novel 
 in question was by one of the younger Eng- 
 lish authors. It was very odd, I thought to 
 myself as I perused it, that I should not (for 
 I read a great deal of fiction) have read be- 
 fore anything by Mr. D. H. Lawrence. I had 
 always meant to, but his work had, for some 
 reason or other, not come my way. And I was 
 glad I was reading it. I ought to have done 
 D. H. Lawrence before. Some people had told 
 me he was "different." He was not so different 
 as all that; still, there was something fresh 
 about him. Perhaps one could differentiate 
 within that group, though I had long since 
 despaired of doing so. I would certainly get 
 something else of D. H. Lawrence's. At that 
 point I decided to go to bed, and shut the book 
 up smartly. The cover revealed to me that the 
 author was J. D. Beresford. Why I had ever 
 thought it was D. H. Lawrence, I do not 
 know. Some false association of ideas at the 
 moment of borrowing it, probably. 
 
 The joke is on me, as the younger genera- 
 tion would say. And yet, there is something to 
 be said on my side. The fact is that I had not 
 [218] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 expected D. H. Lawrence to be one whit dif- 
 ferent from Hugh Walpole, J. D. Beresford, 
 Compton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan, Oliver 
 Onions, and W. L. George. I found, I thought, 
 a little difference: not much, but enough to 
 give one hope. To be sure, the hope would 
 have ebbed, in any case, before the book was 
 finished. My only gain was the knowledge that 
 Mr. Beresford can do something besides Jacob 
 Stahl. I have yet to experience D. H. Law- 
 rence. Still, I submit that when, to distinguish 
 between one author and another, you are satis- 
 fied with so tiny a difference in style as appears 
 between two works by the same man, it means 
 that differences in style within that particular 
 group are not very startling. One would never 
 have read half of Tess and taken it for the 
 work of Henry James; or half of Nostromo 
 and taken that for the work of Meredith. One 
 would have been brought up standing at the 
 first page. It may be, as I say, that D. H. 
 Lawrence is going to be to me, some day, a 
 revelation of individuality. But the reviews do 
 not give one much hope of that. 
 
 Now, there are three authors in England 
 who stand a little away from this larger group, 
 though they are not precisely contemporaries 
 of Hardy or of Conrad. Wells and Bennett and 
 Galsworthy have some individuality of style. A 
 chapter of Mr. Wells is "different.'' A chapter 
 of Arnold Bennett or of Mr. Galsworthy is dif- 
 [219] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 ferent. Or let me put it in this way. You would 
 not get through half of any one of Mr. Wells's 
 later novels without a deal of pseudo-philosoph- 
 ical reflection on the scheme of things. You 
 would not read so far in any book by Mr. Arn- 
 old Bennett without meeting and recognizing 
 his peculiar kind of humor: semi-grin, semi- 
 farcical. And I am sure that you would not get 
 through many chapters of a typical Galsworthy 
 novel without hearing a bird calling to its mate 
 — not if there were a human love aflPair going 
 on. I do not think you could comfortably sit 
 down with any one of them for half an evening 
 and think that you were reading D. H. Law- 
 rence. You would know whom you were read- 
 ing. 
 
 These three gentlemen have, of course, been 
 writing longer than the aforesaid younger 
 group. They are, one might say, the elder 
 brothers of the brood. If any one of them has 
 served as model to the younger fry. It Is Mr. 
 Wells. None of the younger fry has ever 
 approached the technical excellence of Kipps; 
 but, on the other hand, almost any one of them 
 could have written Ann Veronica. Mr. Wells 
 has certainly led them all astray In his time. 
 But there is another equally important thing 
 to be said: Mr. Wells has gone on. In his later 
 phases, he stands quite apart from them all. 
 The Research Magnificent and Mr. Britling 
 Sees It Through are perfectly individual : they 
 [ 220] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 are not, and never could have been, the 
 product of a syndicate. Time was when Wells 
 and Bennett seemed to be drawing near each 
 other. TonO'Bungay is Bennett-ish in spots; 
 and Bealby is, superficially, almost straight 
 Bennett. But Mr. Wells, for weal or woe, has 
 always been interested in the social scheme. 
 The most important thing in Tono-Bungay 
 is Bladesover and Bladesover's moral effect; 
 and even in the ridiculous Bealby there is 
 more than an echo of Bladesover. Mr. Wells 
 is interested in moral values. Sometimes he has 
 had very queer notions about them; but his 
 reward for having been perpetually preoccu- 
 pied with them is to have won through to 
 The Research Magnificent and Mr. Britling. 
 You may not agree with the hero of either 
 book; but at least he is a person for whom you 
 have respect. His is a dignified moral reaction, 
 even if it is not the moral reaction you would 
 have preferred. He is a serious person, envis- 
 aging his relations to the world in a serious 
 temper. 
 
 One does not see Mr. Bennett's characters 
 thus envisaging the world; not, at all events, 
 since The Old Wives' Tale. And even in 
 The Old Wives* Tale you feel rather the 
 deterministic net in which the characters are 
 caught, than any personal decisions of their 
 own. The moral of the book is that heredity 
 is more powerful than environment, if these 
 [221] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 two come to grips. In the later books, when 
 they are not, like Denry the Audacious and 
 Buried Alive, delicious bits of fooling, you 
 get men and women of a monstrous egotism, 
 of whom it cannot be discerned that either 
 heredity or environment explicitly controls 
 them against their will. An acute critic, who 
 has incidentally had his own say about Wells 
 and Bennett, told me the other day that he 
 thought Bennett's people had "character." I 
 should have said rather that they were "char- 
 acters," in the colloquial sense. They have self- 
 assertlveness ; like Aunty Hamps, they may sub- 
 jugate their world. But "character" ? No : that 
 is a finer, more complicated possession. They 
 want things, sometimes good things and some- 
 times bad; but they are (especially the women) 
 blond beasts as to their methods. If there is, 
 on the whole, a less decent creature In modern 
 fiction than Hilda Lessways, or a more idiotic 
 one than Audrey Moze, I have still to encoun- 
 ter her. They invoke their gods 
 
 By the hunger of change and emotion, 
 By the thirst of unbearable things. 
 
 Ann Veronica, as I once tried to point out, is 
 not true to life : she Is a nice girl who proceeds 
 to have reactions that a nice girl does not have 
 without a lot of intervening history. Hilda is 
 never a nice girl; she is a monster from the 
 start and to the finish. As for Audrey — pace 
 
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BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 Mr. Bennett — she Is a "moron," or very near it. 
 Mr. Bennett spends more time on his female 
 than on his male characters. He began with the 
 evident intention of *'doing" young Clayhanger. 
 But poor Clayhanger eventually turned into 
 Hilda's daily bread. He exists only to be masti- 
 cated by her. She lifts her head from that "fiero 
 pasto," immitigable as Ugolino. 
 
 Now, I may well be accused, by Mr. Ben- 
 nett's admirers, of a belated Victorianism, be- 
 cause I do not like his Hildas and Leonoras 
 and Audreys. Well, I do not like Balzac's Val- 
 erie Marneffe; yet surely La Cousine Bette 
 is one of the great novels of the nineteenth 
 century. Henry James, some years ago, drew 
 a distinction between Thackeray and Balzac in 
 their treatment of unpleasant characters; in- 
 sisting that Thackeray did not give his a fair 
 chance. "Balzac loved his Valerie as Thack- 
 eray did not love his Becky," said Mr. James. 
 However much Balzac loved his Valerie, he 
 did not love her to the point of trying to make 
 us think her delightful. The love he bore her 
 was a love as impersonal as the right hand 
 of Rhadamanthus : a love that consented to 
 be just. Balzac may have loved his Valerie as 
 Thackeray did not love his Becky; but he did 
 not love his Valerie as Mr. Bennett loves his 
 Hilda and his Audrey. He loved her, that is, 
 in a quite different sense. Mr. Bennett posi- 
 tively seems to think that Hilda is as decent 
 
 [223] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 as any one else, and more interesting than most 
 people. If he does not really think so, then his 
 method is at fault, and his books belie him. 
 His method is not at fault in Denry, because 
 there is no implication anywhere that Denry 
 exists in a moral sense: he is a "card," and 
 only a "card." It is never hinted that we ought 
 to take him seriously. He is merely funny; the 
 humor of him is the moral equivalent of an 
 obstacle race or the pursuit of a greased pig. 
 If only Mr. Bennett would keep to his 
 Denrys ! For in the realm of extravaganza he 
 is irresistible. Also, when he does the detail of 
 the Five Towns, he is delightful for sheer con- 
 vincingness. But he must stick to concrete de- 
 tail. He must not deal with the human soul, 
 for when he comes to moral reactions, he shows 
 that he has no conception of differences. Mr. 
 Bennett's world, frankly, seems to me like the 
 world of the dead as described by the poet: 
 
 Outside of all the worlds and ages. 
 There where the fool is as the sage is, 
 
 There where the slayer is clean of blood; 
 No end, no passage, no beginning, 
 There where the sinni^r leaves off sinning, 
 
 There where the good man is not good. 
 
 There is not one thing with another. 
 
 But Evil saith to Good : My brother. 
 
 My brother, I am one with thee. 
 
 His world is a world where Evil saith to Good : 
 
 "My brother, I am one with thee." If he can- 
 
 [224] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 not write us another Old Wives* Tale, we 
 must at least hope, as I say, that he will stick 
 to Denry and Alice Challis. The Lion's 
 Share does *not give much promise that he 
 will do a second Old Wives' Tale. He has a 
 positive fondness for mean people ; people who 
 walk blind through a world with beauty in 
 it; people who think their own emotions su- 
 premely valuable simply because they are their 
 own. 
 
 The realists, I know, have always contended 
 that an author should be impersonal; that he 
 should not have an "attitude"; that he should 
 record life as it is, without comment. Into the 
 possibility or impossibility of that feat (the 
 old technical controversy) we need not go, 
 here and now. The general opinion is that you 
 can tell where an author stands, in spite of 
 him. Certainly Mr. Bennett is not impersonal; 
 he does have an attitude. Not in any of the 
 permitted ways (comment of other characters, 
 logical and retributive results of committed 
 acts, etc.) does he show himself suspicious of 
 his people's real natures, or disapproving of 
 their odiousness. If he were only scourging, 
 satirist-fashion, the egotism of mankind, one 
 could bear it. But no: Mr. Bennett seems to 
 love his Yahoos. If he does not love them, 
 then, as I say, his methods are at fault. 
 
 Another author who has gone dwindling is 
 Mr. Galsworthy. Tremendous hopes of him 
 [225] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 and of our permanent joy in him, we had 
 when The Man of Property appeared. And, 
 of course, one knows people who stick to him 
 for his "style." One does not quite know why: 
 as style, it cannot touch either Mr. Wells^s or 
 Mr. Bennett's style. I fancy it is because there 
 will always be a perceptible number of people 
 who are reverent before long descriptions of 
 nature. Nature, when it gets into a book, is 
 somehow sacred. Perhaps it Is Wordsworth's 
 fault. Literary pieties die hard. Anyhow, 
 there always are long descriptions of nature 
 in Mr. Galsworthy's novels, and If they are 
 delicately confused with mating animals and 
 human sex Impulses, and all the connotation 
 of stirring sap and swelling buds and the like, 
 that will certainly not make them any less 
 popular. Yet the fact Is that Mr. Galsworthy 
 has gone on, from book to book, steadily be- 
 coming more sentimental and more flabby. 
 I am speaking here of his novels. His Five 
 Tales hold their own with The Man of Prop- 
 erty, His work cannot be called rich in situa- 
 tions, since he has never, so far, failed to repeat 
 (I think I am not mistaken) the same situation: 
 a man in love with some woman he has no 
 legal right to be In love with. Often, that Is 
 a very interesting situation; but It Is not the 
 only source of drama in life, and one does get 
 tired of It. And I do not think that Mr. Gals- 
 worthy makes it any more interesting or sym- 
 
 [226] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 pathetic by constantly Involving the vegetable 
 world, or by punctuating every declaration of 
 unlawful love with the calls of mating birds. 
 One is tempted to assure him that "The flow- 
 ers that bloom in the spring (tra-la!) have 
 nothing to do with the case.'' But the sanity 
 of W. S. Gilbert is gone from among us. 
 
 With Thomas Hardy, one feels at least the 
 reality of this intrusion of external nature; 
 because, as some critic (I think, Mr. W. J. 
 Dawson) has said, his people are children of 
 the soil in no trite sense. They are akin to the 
 landscape in which they move; they seem, that 
 is, to have a personal relation to Gaia, like 
 mortals in an old myth; to be half man, half 
 rock or tree. They are apotheoses of the 
 power of natural environment. But Mr. Gals- 
 worthy's civilized people run down from town 
 to hold hands amid the bracken because they 
 feel that they are somehow justified by the 
 fact of sap. It is all vague, of course; any- 
 thing of that sort is bound to be vague. And 
 if you are going to lean heavily on the cosmos, 
 you want first to be sure that your point 
 (Tappui is not a spot where the cosmic force 
 has chosen to manifest itself in vapor. 
 
 Mr. Galsworthy seems not to know in the 
 least what he thinks about life. That state of 
 maze may be satisfying to a hyper-sensitive 
 soul, but it does not make for style. Besides, 
 Mr. Galsworthy is old enough to have some 
 [227] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 idea as to what he does think about life. As 
 far as one can make out, he thinks that most 
 people are sensual, that everybody ought to 
 be kind, and that there is a sustaining sanction 
 for sex emotion in the fauna and flora of 
 England. I do not know what Mr. Gals- 
 worthy's totem is ; but it should be some small, 
 defenceless bird. The snipe, perhaps. 
 
 Justice is said to have had a profound 
 effect on English officials. Of that, one is glad; 
 but one's quarrel with Mr. Galsworthy is that 
 he will never think anything out. He inveighs 
 against solitary confinement, which is a good 
 thing to do; but he does not offer any sub- 
 stitute solution, which would be an even better 
 thing to do. He sentimentalizes over dead 
 pheasants and dead everything; but he gives 
 you no suggestions as to what kind of laws 
 to pass. He objects to existing divorce laws, 
 but he does not come out into the open and 
 say just what divorce laws, if any, he would 
 propose to enact. It is not, apparently, either 
 cowardice or expediency on his part; it is 
 sheer inability to think constructively in any 
 way. That is characteristic of many modern 
 reformers: they want the bars let down here 
 or there, but they never tell you in what spot 
 the bars ought to be set up again. Beyond 
 their gentle impulses, they are perfectly vague. 
 It comes, I suppose, of trying to do your 
 thinking with your heart instead of with your 
 
 [228] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 head. And in Mr. Galsworthy^s case, the 
 vagueness has permeated to the last recesses 
 of his style. It is rhetorically accurate — "the 
 English of a gentleman" — ^but it is jejune and 
 spineless. It has become, you might say, a 
 purely vegetarian meal. Only the graminivor- 
 ous should read the later Galsworthy. And he 
 will not rid himself of that fault by being 
 increasingly explicit about sexual emotions. In 
 fact, that never was his game. 
 
 I may seem to speak bitterly. I confess that 
 I feel some bitterness. For I admired The 
 Man of Property exceedingly, and looked to 
 Mr. Galsworthy to carry on a great tradition 
 of fiction. Instead of which, he has gone on 
 backing, backing — farther and farther away 
 from the Presence. Some people, I know, gave 
 him up with The Patrician because, they said, 
 It was straight Mrs. Humphry Ward. I gave 
 him up forever with The Freelands because 
 it was bad Mrs. Humphrey Ward ; in fact. The 
 Coryston Family was much better. 
 
 Now we come to our syndicate. With which 
 shall we begin? It is hard to choose. Indeed, 
 can you deal with them separately? For the 
 outstanding fact is that they all write alike; 
 that they deal in the same characters, the same 
 backgrounds, and the same situations; and 
 that they have the same point of view. They 
 are like the Pleiade or the seven New Real- 
 ists. Only they do not know it. At least, they 
 
 [229] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 give no sign of intending to be several peas in 
 one pod. Yet you would almost say that none 
 of them had ever read anything but the works 
 of the others. Is there some master-mind 
 behind them, some literary Lloyd George or 
 Dr. Fu-Manchu, who assigns their tasks; who 
 says that Mr. Beresford, not Mr. Walpole, 
 shall write of Jacob Stahl, and that Mr. Mac- 
 kenzie, not Mr. W. L. George, shall deal 
 with Michael Fane? And does Mr. Walpole 
 sneak off o' nights to Mr. Beresford and offer 
 to do some Jacob Stahl if Mr. Beresford 
 will take a few chapters of Fortitude off 
 his hands? Does Mr. Mackenzie write a page 
 of A Prelude to Adventure while Mr. Wal- 
 pole takes a turn at Sinister Street? Who 
 does the murders? Is it Mr. Walpole or Mr. 
 Onions? Which one of them has been ap- 
 pointed to frequent the Empire? Does Mr. 
 George investigate female psychology for the 
 group? And what (but this I cannot even 
 guess) does Mr. D. H. Lawrence "cover"? 
 This may seem to be mere petulance, but 
 it is not. The chief value of fiction is, I take 
 it, to provide us with vicarious experience. A 
 great novelist who sticks to the truth is, above 
 all, informing. We enlarge our own world by 
 reading him. No one, in his own person, can 
 investigate all social milieux in all civilized 
 lands; and the big novels and the big plays 
 are text-books to the humanist. How much 
 
 [230] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 intimate knowledge of France should we lose 
 if we lost Balzac; how much intimate knowl- 
 edge of England if we lost the great Victor- 
 ians! Did we really, before the war, know 
 anything about the Russian soul and tempera- 
 ment except what we got from the Russian 
 novelists? Most of us get our India from 
 Kipling. There are not wanting people to 
 quarrel with Kipling's interpretation, even 
 with his description; but the fact remains that 
 a vast number of people know a few simple 
 facts about Indian and Anglo-Indian life that 
 they would never have known without him. 
 
 So that it is really not only the monotony, 
 but the wilful extravagance, of the British 
 syndicate that we complain of. Why waste 
 half a dozen authors and a round score of 
 novels to tell us the same thing in the same 
 way? They do not even react differently to 
 the same facts: they react precisely alike. Per- 
 haps that is valuable as reinforcing and em- 
 phasizing the stated or implied opinion. But 
 one has the sense that one is never going to 
 learn anythmg more from any of them; and 
 that is discouraging to the humanist, on vicar- 
 ious experience bent. Perhaps one should ex- 
 cept Mr. Walpole from that charge, to this 
 extent: he gave us something new in The 
 Dark Forest. In that book, at least, he made 
 the Russians pleasanter than any of their own 
 novelists (except possibly Turgenev) have 
 I 231 ] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 succeeded in making them. But even so, if 
 someone should tell us that Mr. Walpole, in 
 the flesh, went to Russia to work with an 
 ambulance corps, and that Mr. Beresford or 
 Mr. Mackenzie wrote The Dark Forest from 
 Mr. Walpole's notes, who could, from any 
 internal evidence, deny it? If they were all 
 Elizabethans, the scholars would still be 
 wrangling over problems of their collabora- 
 tion. Their novels would be like the Beaumont- 
 Fletcher-Middleton-Rowley plays. 
 
 To begin with, there is always the same 
 young man. Sometimes he has a university 
 education, and then he is the hero of Sinis- 
 ter Street or The Stranger s Wedding; some- 
 times he has omitted the university, and then 
 he is the hero of Jacob Stahl or Fortitude. 
 He has usually decided, when we meet him, 
 that there is nothing in religion; he is usually 
 anxious to do something noble and unconven- 
 tional; and sooner or later he nearly always 
 encounters very seriously a young woman 
 of, actually or potentially, light morals. 
 Sometimes he Is rich and meets her at the 
 Empire; sometimes he is poor and meets her 
 in the slums. Sometimes it is an accident, but 
 usually he might fairly be said to be looking 
 for her. For he is humanitarian, always ; either 
 by his gentle nature, or because socialistic 
 arguments have got hold of him; and a good 
 deal of space is always given up to sheer in- 
 
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BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 tellectual worrying. It is worrying — It seldom 
 *'gets" anywhere; and though Mr. Wells's peo- 
 ple "worry" similarly, and do not always get 
 anywhere, still, with Mr. Wells, you feel as If 
 those men would, perhaps, sometime win 
 through to a philosophy of their own. They 
 go at it in a more mature fashion; and they 
 possess themselves of information. There is 
 something of the hard scientific temper in his 
 men. They are more apt to have got their 
 humanitarianism out of a laboratory than out 
 of their first sight of Piccadilly Circus at 
 night. Mr. Wells's men, when they are likable 
 at all, are likable for some intellectual quality 
 in them, for their attitude to ideas. When the 
 syndicate's men are likable, it is for sheer pity, 
 because they are such helpless young fools. 
 
 One expects every one in fiction, nowadays, 
 to be an egotist; but one does sometimes sigh 
 for the old days when an egotist knew enough 
 to be polite. No one, I think, could feel any 
 affection for Jacob Stahl; but it is possible to 
 feel affection for Michael Fane, though it is 
 perfectly impossible to feel him important, 
 except as a householder always is important. 
 Perhaps the most charming thing one remem- 
 bers in any of these novels (they do not 
 abound in charm) is the description of Oxford 
 undergraduate life in Sinister Street. And 
 it leads to — what? Michael's conscientious and 
 pathetic progress among prostitutes and ruf- 
 
 [233 ] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 fians. Luckily, he does not, In the end, marry 
 Lily; but he is saved from it by mere accident. 
 There was no reason to suppose that destiny 
 would play on his side. 
 
 This excursion into the underworld has be- 
 come, in English fiction, almost as much de 
 rigueur for a young gentleman as the grand 
 tour used to be. Sometimes it is curiosity that 
 urges him; but it is more apt to be a kind of 
 humanitarian sympathy. The adventure is not 
 new: one remembers, after all, Richard Fev- 
 erel. But the temper in which it is taken is 
 new. Richard was a chivalrous young fool; 
 but then Mrs. Mount was something out of 
 the ordinary. He did not, at first, dream what 
 she was; and when he found out, she was able 
 to lure him to think well of her. These young 
 gentlemen we are considering do not have to 
 be lured to think well of the young women 
 they altruistically encounter. They know be- 
 fore they meet them what they are going to 
 be. They cultivate them because they are that, 
 or are obviously going to be that. They prefer 
 the girl of the lower classes; prefer marriage 
 with her or free love with her, as the case 
 may be. They find her more interesting, just 
 as a settlement-worker finds the slums more 
 interesting. The difference between them and 
 the settlement-worker is that they are not out 
 to convert her to religion or even to better 
 manners. They are perfectly naive in their 
 
 [234] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 refusal to perceive differences. They have a 
 preconceived notion to the effect that there 
 are no differences; and to that notion they 
 often sacrifice themselves. Sometimes they sac- 
 rifice the girl. 
 
 You see, they do not think much of mar- 
 riage, these young men. Jacob Stahl insists on 
 going off to a solitary cottage with Betty Gale, 
 unblessed. (Of course, he does have a wife in 
 the background.) He never quite forgives her 
 for wanting to be a legal wife. Though, char- 
 acteristically enough, by the time she has rec- 
 onciled herself to the irregularity (as any 
 decent woman would have somehow to do, if 
 she were going to endure it) his wife dies, 
 and he insists on Betty's marrying him so that 
 they can have children. Ann Veronica over 
 again! But, indeed, Mr. Beresford has it in 
 for marriage anyhow. I know of nothing more 
 pathetic in modern fiction than the way Dick 
 Lynneker, brought up among gentlefolk, suc- 
 cessful in his own career, in love with a girl 
 of his own class, has to cast about in his 
 mind for some way of squaring that conven- 
 tional situation with his radicalism. Up to that 
 time, his only chance has been in approving of 
 his sister's elopement with the village carpen- 
 ter. Now he Is in love himself, and there is no 
 obstacle, social or financial, to his happiness. 
 But he has not protested against convention 
 all his young life, only to sit down and be 
 
 [235] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 comfortable now in a conventional situation. 
 Listen : 
 
 " 'I never tried to fight against my love for 
 you, dear, after that first day at Oakstone,* 
 he went on. *I hadn't ever cared before for 
 anyone like this. I've never had any sort of 
 love-affair. And now, I want . . . .* 
 
 '*She clung to him eagerly. *What do you 
 want, darling? she asked, and then added in- 
 consequently, *I feel such a little thing.' 
 
 *'He drew her down to her knees and knelt 
 before her in the darkness. 'I want our love 
 to be all our own. I don't want it talked about 
 and stared at. If we get married, it must be 
 as quietly as possible — and it must be after- 
 wards, if you know what I mean, dear? That 
 legal business isn't for us at all; It's only a 
 kind of registration. Our love hasn't anything 
 to do with anyone else. We must make our 
 vows without witnesses. Do you know what I 
 mean, dear? Don't you feel like that, too?' 
 
 *'He felt her heart throbbing violently 
 against his; and they clung to each other like 
 two frightened children. There, in the stillness 
 and the darkness, the world had vanished and 
 they were alone; and afraid; and yet passion- 
 ately desirous to draw closer together. 
 
 " 'Oh I Dickie, I do love you so,' she whis- 
 pered, as she put her lips to his." 
 
 Mr. Beresford never tells us whether or 
 not Dick put his idea through. Sybil was the 
 
 [236] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 niece of a bishop. But then, Mr. Beresford 
 made her. Perhaps Dick succeeded. The impli- 
 cation certainly is that he was going to 
 succeed. 
 
 Now, I honestly think that pathetic. Not 
 nearly so shocking as it is pathetic. For the 
 author is looking for the realities of life in 
 the wrong place. Every lover knows the sense 
 of shrinking from a public ceremony. I doubt 
 if any two people deeply in love with each 
 other would choose, for their own sakes, a 
 "wedding." Dick Lynneker need not think 
 that his great idea is new. But look at the mad 
 egotism of it! Take it that the legal or the 
 ecclesiastical ceremony is merely a heavy price 
 that one has to pay. Is that happiness not 
 worth paying for? Generations of lovers have 
 thought that it was. Suppose, even, that you 
 think it not so much too heavy as the wrong 
 kind of payment — something unjustly, shame- 
 lessly exacted of you, that should never have 
 been exacted at all; a sort of Oriental 
 "squeeze." Other lovers, in other times, have 
 had a kindred sense of desecration; but they 
 have realized that society, from its point of 
 view, had a right to demand of them this 
 public acknowledgment. They have realized, 
 too, that no public act of this kind could 
 really touch or affect their private sense of 
 their private sacrament. 
 
 These modern folk are neither unselfish 
 
 [237] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 enough to make their little salute to organ- 
 ized society cheerfully, nor strong enough to 
 realize that the merely conventional tribute 
 cannot hurt their private sanctities. There is 
 no such unselfishness or strength possible to 
 a person like Dick Lynneker. If we must face 
 free love, we must face it, I suppose. But 
 nothing in heaven or earth need make us face 
 a compromise like Dick's. Defy all ritual and 
 symbolism if you must. But, for sheer topsy- 
 turviness, commend me to his notion of insist- 
 ing on the consummation's preceding, instead 
 of following, the ceremony! There is quite as 
 much superstition in one order of things as in 
 the other. Dick Lynneker is bound, quite as 
 much as his family, by prejudices. After all, 
 the black mass is only the real mass reversed. 
 I have dwelt on this instance because it 
 seems to me typical, in its way, of the work 
 of the whole group of English novelists. Ex- 
 cept for Mr. Arnold Bennett, who seems to be 
 satisfied with the mean and low-minded people 
 of whom he feels that the world consists, they 
 are all protesting. But they have nothing to 
 suggest. When their own fitful attempts to set 
 things straight result in failure or disaster, 
 they blame the status quo. It never occurs to 
 them to blame their own way of going about 
 the business of changing things. A little study 
 of history or even of sociology would teach 
 them what not to waste their time on. But 
 [238] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 their only use for the past is to "curse it out.'* 
 *'Les grands-peres ont toujours tort." Yet they 
 themselves go down like ninepins, knocked 
 over by the same forces that, for a few thou- 
 sand years at least, have been antagonizing 
 the idealism and altruism of men. As I said 
 before, one has some sympathy with Mr. 
 Wells; for his people (his men, at least, since 
 he does not think much better of women than 
 does Arnold Bennett) are trying to inform 
 themselves, trying to think it all out in terms 
 of reason. The syndicate is not trying to think 
 anything out. It rests content with replying to 
 every affirmation of history: *'You lie." That 
 is not argument: it is the mere sticking out of 
 tongues. The conventionally accepted thing 
 must be wrong; and that is all there is to it. 
 Take the matter of their whole attitude to 
 sex — which is, by and large, the question they 
 are most preoccupied with. A certain person, 
 a scholar and a gentleman, was pointing out 
 to me, the other day, the accuracy of Chau- 
 cer's treatment of Troilus. Troilus lets Cres- 
 sida go, not because he does not love her 
 passionately, but because the chivalrous code 
 demands it of him, demands that he should 
 protect her reputation. Pandar cannot move 
 him from his knightly duty. If ever a hero 
 loved exuberantly, it was Troilus. Yet the 
 inhibition works. Chaucer knew what he was 
 talking about. Whereas, as my interlocutor 
 
 [ 239 ] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 went on to say, with these contemporary au- 
 thors, the lack of inhibition seems to be the 
 index of emotion. They ask you to take law- 
 lessness for depth of feeling. The decorously 
 behaved, according to them, are only the pas- 
 sionless. That is plain bad psychology. For if 
 love is the real thing, it takes perpetually into 
 account the duty to the beloved. Love will 
 bring out the scruples of a comparatively un- 
 scrupulous person. No real lover wants to put 
 the beloved "up against" anything disagree- 
 able. And this being brave for someone else 
 is not a natural expression of love. You may 
 be brave to the rack and the gridiron for 
 yourself; but being vicariously brave to the 
 rack and the gridiron is a mean, modern kind 
 of courage. Suppose you do not believe in the 
 social order: the social order, none the less, 
 is powerful enough to make a decent man want 
 Its approval for the woman he loves. He does 
 not wish to have her inconvenienced — not if he 
 loves her. 
 
 But the woman who does not wish to run 
 up against the social order gets scant sym- 
 pathy from the modern British hero. She 
 ought to want to run counter to It; and if 
 he has anything to say about it, she will jolly 
 well have to. I do not know how other people 
 feel about Betty Gale, but I am exceedingly 
 sorry for her. I am sufficiently sorry for the 
 girl who married Mr. Onions's murderer, the 
 [240] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS. LTD, 
 
 hero of The Debit Account and In Accordance 
 with the Evidence. I am even sorry for Pauline 
 in Plashers Mead; though, frankly, I think Mr. 
 Mackenzie is fairer to his characters than any 
 of the others. These young women (I am 
 speaking, you see, at the moment, of the re- 
 spectable ones) have such selfish, cantankerous, 
 and muddle-headed gentlemen to deal with ! 
 
 Our authors do succeed in making their 
 conventional folk disagreeable. That is, they 
 make the hero acutely perceptive of the con- 
 ventional vices. But if ever there was a case 
 of the beam and the mote! Look at a fair 
 list of them: the hero of The Invisible Event, 
 of The Strangers* Wedding, of Round the 
 Corner, of Plashers Mead, of The Debit 
 Account. Was there ever a more vaporing 
 bunch of egotists anywhere? A great deal 
 of fun has been poked at the heroes of 
 the romantic period : the Manf reds and Laras, 
 the Heathcliffs and Rochesters. Their revolts 
 against society have been jests for the critics 
 to split their sides over, these fifty years. But 
 they were dignified creatures in comparison, 
 and they had far more sense of fact. They 
 knew, for example, when they bucked society, 
 what they were bucking. They knew the pro- 
 cess was not going to be entirely comfortable, 
 and they did not complain- of discomfort, be- 
 cause they saw a reason why it should be 
 made hot for them. They simply felt that they 
 [241] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 had a quid pro quo. They had, as I have said 
 elsewhere, the Satanic charm; they had also 
 some of the Satanic logic. These heroes have 
 been, for many decades, considered the wild- 
 est travesties of humanity. But, indeed, they 
 are far more comprehensible than the young 
 men in the modern British novels. A young 
 woman in love with Lara might well expect 
 the worst; but at least she would know what 
 to expect. Lara would never have shilly- 
 shallied about among the conventions like 
 Dick Lynneker, or Capes, or Jacob Stahl, 
 changing his mind from chapter to chapter, 
 and never knowing precisely what he did want, 
 anyhow. Lara would have known what he 
 wanted and why. He would not even have 
 hesitated to attribute to himself an evil mo- 
 tive, if he had one. But none of these young 
 men would attribute to himself an evil motive. 
 Whatever they want must be right; and if 
 eventually they want the exact opposite, then 
 that must be right, too. The bewildered wo- 
 man follows in their wake. 
 
 That is why, by and large, they are so 
 corrupting. Yes, more corrupting than the 
 effervescent geniuses of the nineties. You 
 might be shocked by Dorian Gray, or by 
 Aubrey Beardsley's gentlemen and ladies; but 
 3^ou were never tricked into imagining that it 
 was ^'up to you" to look like an Aubrey 
 Beardsley drawing or to behave like Dorian 
 [242] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 Gray. The shining Hghts of the nineties lived 
 to epater le bourgeois — and they did it. On 
 the whole, that was greatly to the credit of 
 le bourgeois. People who would rather die 
 than show themselves Spates (there are always 
 a lot of such folk) were very entertained. I 
 dare say some of these authors and poets did 
 harm In their day. But they did not do it by 
 deluding the public into thinking that they 
 were virtuous: they did it by being witty at 
 the expense of virtue. Our novelists are not 
 witty at the expense of virtue (or at the expense 
 of anything else, be it said in passing). They 
 perform all their antics In the very name of 
 virtue. They are right, and everyone else is 
 wrong. 
 
 Now the revoke with a programme we can 
 endure, for we have often, during the mud- 
 dled history of civilization, had to endure him. 
 Sometimes he does a lot of damage; some- 
 times he does a lot of good. The point is that, 
 in either case, his emotional force has been at 
 the service of his programme. The trouble 
 with these people is that they have no pro- 
 gramme. They are revokes because they are 
 dissatisfied or in hard luck, and they hit 
 wildly. They have not the brains to think 
 anything out. Our friends of the nineties 
 thought that nothing was sacred — except, per- 
 haps, beauty. These folk know nothing about 
 beauty — even Mr. Galsworthy, who may set 
 
 [243] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 you down on a hillside to look at a lovely 
 landscape, and leave you there for several 
 pages, but who spends his time during those 
 pages In Infecting that natural loveliness with 
 notions of agrarian reform. The only thing 
 that Is sacred to these young folk is their 
 own impulses; which makes them about as 
 satisfactory to deal with as the wild gun in 
 Quatre-Vingt'Treize. Since their own impulses 
 chop and change — and are always sacred — 
 you can do nothing except express perfect con- 
 fidence In their temperaments. You are not to 
 know them by their fruits; you are to judge 
 them by their good Intentions — for which you 
 must take their own word. 
 
 Nor are they "Ineffectual angels." If they 
 only were! They are guilty of a lot of very 
 Ignoble impulses, and proceed often to gratify 
 them. So did the romantic hero-villains, you 
 may say. Ah, but here Is the difference. The 
 romantic hero-villains were proud, sometimes, 
 of their sin; but they called It sin, even while 
 they boasted of It. So did the aesthetes of the 
 nineties. If it had not been sin, there would 
 have been no fun in it. A very lamentable 
 point of view, doubtless ; but less dangerous to 
 society than the contemporary mode. For 
 while you still call It sin, you are accepting the 
 categories. If not the judgments, of society. 
 You will not hurt society much while you 
 accept its categories. What these young men 
 
 [ 244 1 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 and young women do Is to call anything vir- 
 tuous that they happen to want to do. They 
 have not even the logic of Satanists, perceiv- 
 ing evil and preferring it. The thing that is 
 evil is the thing that makes them suffer; the 
 thing that is good is the thing that pleases 
 them. When free love is convenient, free love, 
 only, is virtuous; marriage becomes virtuous 
 the moment marriage becomes convenient. As 
 you never know when obstacles are going to 
 appear or disappear — as convenience is often 
 in the hands of mere fortuitous fate — there 
 is no test left. You must, I repeat, have blind 
 faith in their temperaments. I do not think 
 this is too hard a saying. 
 
 As for the women who match and mate 
 with the men: they do not give us much 
 more hope. They are, to speak plainly, an 
 unlovely lot. You may be as sorry as you 
 like for them, but pity is not praise. Mr. 
 Wells's women are too apt to be selfish and 
 treacherous; Mr. Bennett's opinion is evi- 
 dently that no woman can be decent unless 
 she is a fool — like Constance, say, in The 
 Old Wives* Tale. (I know there is Alice 
 Challis; but I fancy Alice is only a symbol of 
 what every man wants and never gets.) And 
 look, for a moment, at the women described 
 by the syndicate. They are cheap: hard with- 
 out being strong; cold without being pure; 
 sentimental without being kind. There is the 
 
 [245] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 sensual type — Madeline Paignton, the aristo- 
 cratic wanton, or Lily Haden, who cannot be 
 continent for a few weeks, even for the sake 
 of wealth and a husband; there is all the crew 
 of light women among whom the heroes make 
 their humanitarian progress. There is the 
 intellectual (God save the mark!) type: the 
 heroine of Gray Youth, or even Rachel Bea- 
 minster, whose mental energy all goes Into 
 revolt. If Mr. Walpolehad made the Duchess 
 of Wrexe a human being, in whose reality we 
 could believe, we might have more sympathy 
 with Rachel's spiteful traffickings with the 
 family ne'er-do-well. But we should have to be 
 far sunk in fetishism to believe in the Duch- 
 ess; she is a mere Mumbo-Jumbo; and her 
 family seems about as intelligent as the first 
 circles of Dahomey. Compare her, for an 
 instant, with Lady Kew. No, a tyranny like 
 that is an invented tyranny; it has nothing to 
 do with life. The Duchess of Wrexe (to bor- 
 row a term from the anthropologists) has no 
 mana at all. Rachel's revolt is absurd; and 
 simply shows up Rachel as a very disagree- 
 able and headstrong person. True, there is 
 always something to make their revolts ab- 
 surd. They seem not to be dealing with facts 
 at all, these young people; probably because 
 they are all sentimentalists, and for a senti- 
 mentalist a delusion is as good as a fact, any 
 day. A wicked giant is, by definition, anything 
 
 [246] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 you happen to be tilting at — even if In real 
 life he is a windmill. 
 
 You may say that two facts these charac- 
 ters do often deal with: poverty and the sex 
 instinct. Yes, they are sometimes poor, and 
 have a hard time. But they have just as hard 
 a time when they are not poor. Poverty is not 
 the root of all evil, logically exposed as such, 
 as it so often Is in the work of George Giss- 
 ing. Not one of this group of authors has 
 ever achieved the cumulative, Inevitable trag- 
 edy of New Grub Street, for example: a 
 far better indictment of some of the ills of 
 the social order than all this modern mouth- 
 ing. Indeed, not one of them is able to make 
 anything seem inevitable. If they would only 
 let the indictment be pitiless and let it stand; 
 let us draw our own conclusions ! And as for 
 poverty, have you noticed that even when 
 these young men are as poor as the hero of 
 Mr. Onions's trilogy, they get over it? They 
 never end In poverty. Yet their grievances are 
 not disposed of when they become rich. By 
 that time, they are worried about something 
 else. They have the complaining habit. Rich 
 or poor, married or unmarried, they are al- 
 ways, one foresees, going to complain. These 
 authors convince one that their Utopia would 
 be a hell on earth. They cannot reason; they 
 cannot even dream convincingly. They are in 
 a state of pitiful intellectual poverty — or, at 
 
 [247] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 least, penuriousness; for, If they have wealth, 
 they certainly do not distribute it. 
 
 The sex instinct is, on the whole, their long 
 suit. I do not think there is much more to be 
 said about their treatment of It. They have 
 not painted for us a nobler, or a more roman- 
 tic, or a more passionate love between man 
 and woman, than have some of their predeces- 
 sors. I cannot see that these novelists give us 
 anything new in the way of human information 
 — except, perhaps, just one thing. 
 
 That one thing can best be described as a 
 new theory — no, not a theory, a kind of 
 Futurist presentment — of human types. There 
 are just two possible things to do with the 
 heroes and heroines of the new school; either 
 to say that, as human beings, they do not 
 exist; or to assume that they do exist and to 
 lament the fact. The kinder, I believe, is to 
 say that they do not exist. It is also the 
 easier conclusion. For they are not consistent 
 with themselves; they pass kaleidoscopically 
 from one state of being to its opposite; as 
 mortals, they are Incalculable, and as literary 
 creations they are unconvincing. ^'I don't be- 
 lieve there's any sich a person," is the natural 
 reply to their presented cases. The authors 
 have not the power of assuring us of the real 
 existence of their characters. Life is not in 
 them. If it is not a fault of vision, then it is 
 a fault of technique. I have spoken of the 
 
 [248] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 complete unreality of the Duchess of Wrexe; 
 but she is no more unreal than Dick Lynn- 
 eker, or the hero of Mr. Onions's trilogy. 
 You can believe in far viler and wickeder 
 people, if you must; you can believe in Moll 
 Flanders or Carker or Long John Silver. 
 It is not moral but intellectual squeamlsh- 
 ness that makes it difficult to accept them. 
 Psychologically speaking, they are freaks in 
 side-shows. Mr. Bennett presents us with a 
 whole gallery of ignoble folk; but one is in- 
 clined to believe in some of them, at least. 
 Indeed, one is inclined to believe, thanks to 
 Mr. Bennett, that the Five Towns are almost 
 entirely populated with such (which may be 
 hard on the Five Towns, but that is Mr. Ben- 
 nett's look-out). The syndicate has not Mr. 
 Bennett's technique. 
 
 Yet this is just where the very fact of the 
 syndicate gives one pause. Since there are so 
 many novelists in England doing precisely the 
 same kind of inconsistent, unconvincing, un- 
 lovable person, there may well be some gen- 
 uine type that they are trying to describe. 
 Almost never, it seems to me, do they "get It 
 across"; but there must be people wandering 
 about the English landscape who have given 
 the syndicate the Idea. We hardly believe that 
 their portraits are accurate; for their por- 
 traits are not psychologically possible. But 
 one comes to believe in prototypes. The syndi- 
 
 [249] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 cate would not all, at a given signal, have 
 gone off their heads in exactly the same way. 
 They must have some warrant in fact. If the 
 prototypes of Jacob Stahl and of Dick Lynn- 
 eker, of Rachel Beaminster and of the hero- 
 ine of Gray Youth exist, these books are, 
 in a sense, a portent. The Five Towns might 
 be responsible for Hilda Lessways, but the 
 Five Towns are not responsible for the girl 
 in Gray Youth. One does not feel that the 
 syndicate gives one more than circumstantial 
 evidence, but of that, there is an almost over- 
 whelming amount. This is depressing. Per- 
 haps, eventually, Mr. Compton Mackenzie 
 will resign from the syndicate and really tell 
 us something. At present he too is bound by 
 their conventions. But in Plashers Mead, tire- 
 some as it is with the reiterant egotism of 
 half-fledged youth, he does ''get it across." 
 Certain people whose opinion is worth much 
 more than mine, tell me that Mr. Walpole 
 has got it across in The Dark Forest. I 
 must admit, in my own case, the strict limita- 
 tions of western Europe: it will take more 
 than Mr. Walpole to make Russians credible 
 to me. He seems to me no more plausible than 
 Dostoievsky, and far, far short of Turgenev. 
 And, after all, I am not sure that Nijinsky 
 is not a better expositor than either. 
 
 It has been much more difficult than I 
 dreamed, to deal with these gentlemen at all. 
 [250] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 
 
 The work of one shifts and plays into the 
 work of the other so maddeningly that it is 
 hard, not only to treat of them individually, 
 but to treat of them even as a group. You 
 think you have a line on Mr. Walpole, and 
 you find him melting into Mr. Beresford or 
 Mr. Onions. Everyone knows what a miser- 
 able business a composite photograph is. No 
 feature is really defined. These authors dif- 
 ferentiate themselves just enough by detail of 
 plot and setting and diction, to avoid a grand 
 inclusive charge of plagiarism. You cannot 
 say that one has filched a page from another, 
 because there is no telling who began it. But 
 I believe that, as far as style is concerned, if 
 you Inserted six consecutive pages written sev- 
 erally by the six of them, in any chapter of 
 any book, no one would ever know the differ- 
 ence. Of course, you would have to allow for 
 different names of characters, and some havoc 
 might be played with continuity of plot — if 
 there happened to be any plot in that chapter. 
 But the style would, I am sure, stand the test. 
 Mr. Mackenzie forces his vocabulary as the 
 others do not (he prides himself, I fancy, 
 particularly on the number of his metaphors 
 for the moon) ; but apart from Mr. Mac- 
 kenzie's occasional exoticism, they write alike. 
 They have the same rhythms, the same sen- 
 tence-structure, the same syntactical habits. It 
 is clever, nervous writing, but it is not the 
 
 [251] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 grand style. They are not memorable: they 
 do not stand out, any one of them, or any one 
 of their works, as a mental experience. The 
 only adventure to be got from them is to read 
 them all, and then, forgetting (as you inevit- 
 ably do) who is who and which is which, 
 analyze the effect of the group. It is a hazy 
 and perplexing effect — as I fear I have too 
 meticulously said. 
 
 For in the long run, one's main feeling 
 about the younger English writers is one of 
 sheer disappointment. They have their repu- 
 tation: people are always telling you that this 
 one or that one is really important. I cannot 
 believe that they are. As portrayers of life, 
 they do not convince — a matter partly of 
 muddle-headedness and partly of technique in 
 the narrower sense. Moreover, they are dull. 
 Mr. Bennett may not convince in the end, 
 because in the end one becomes aware of his 
 moral myopia; but he is not usually dull. He 
 writes better than they do — that is what it 
 comes to. If there were only one of them, we 
 might put up with him; but how can we put 
 up with six of him? There is not time. As for 
 their attack on convention, whatever it may 
 be, they will have to do it better to get any 
 serious attention paid to them. You need sea- 
 soned troops to attack that fortress — or at 
 least bigger guns. The only person who thinks 
 that anything, no matter what, is better than 
 [252] 
 
BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD, 
 
 the status quo, is the anarchist. Most of us 
 are not anarchists; and while most of us are 
 willing to have things improved, if necessary, 
 at our own expense, we want some assurance 
 that they will be improved. And if we must 
 make blind experiments — as the reformers all 
 want us to — let us at least know the object of 
 the experiment. These writers do not seem to 
 know what they would like to achieve if they 
 could. 
 
 What they chiefly breed in one is hopeless- 
 ness. If this is the best that England can do 
 for us in the way of fiction, we must either 
 encourage our native product, or eschew fic- 
 tion and take to "serious" reading. These men 
 are too dull. The time is ripe, once more, I 
 believe, for a few big picaresque novels : some- 
 thing in the mode of the Satyricon, and Gil 
 Bias, and Huckleberry Finn, For I do not 
 think that people will put up forever with 
 being bored — especially as they are not boring 
 us in the interests of virtue. 
 
 To be sure — though it is some time since I 
 began this essay — I have still not read D. H. 
 Lawrence. 
 
 [253 ] 
 
THE REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS 
 OF RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 r^ looks Chestertonian as I write it. As if a 
 world of concrete things were to be gath- 
 ered into the titular abstraction; or as if 
 Kipling's rightness were presently to be proved 
 remarkable in that it is all wrong. 
 
 And yet, I think, Chesterton or no Ches- 
 terton — where is he, by the way? — I mean 
 precisely what I have set down : Rudyard Kip- 
 ling's remarkable rightness. Right, because 
 time has sustained him against scoffers; re- 
 markable, because no one originally expected 
 that particular kind of rightness from him. 
 
 This is not to be a discursive or an exhaust- 
 ive discussion of Kipling's utterances on plan- 
 etary or even racial questions. I have not 
 annotated his complete works with his "right- 
 ness" in mind. Indeed, to treat him exhaust- 
 ively would be a very difficult task; for the 
 sum of his wisdom is made up, not of a few 
 big "works," but of an infinite number of 
 significant brevities. My only excuse for deal- 
 ing with him at all is that I have lived a long 
 time with the prose and verse of Kipling, and 
 that my knowledge of him has reached what 
 Henry James called the point of saturation. I 
 
 [254] 
 
REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF KIPLING 
 
 will not pretend that I have read every word 
 he has ever printed in the Allahabad Pioneer 
 or even in the London Times \ but I know him 
 very well. I belong to the generation that took 
 its Kipling hard. My friends who are five 
 years older or five years younger never took 
 him quite so hard as that. They knew other 
 gods. 
 
 Rudyard Kipling, in his later life, has suf- 
 fered under two great disadvantages: his in- 
 sistence on a political point of view which was 
 unpopular, and the gradual diminishing of his 
 flow of masterpieces. The dullest people will 
 tell you smartly that he is ^'written out''; the 
 cleverest will tell you that he was precocious,- 
 but always cheap, if not vulgar. Perhaps some- 
 one will fling "The Female of the Species" at 
 you. This paper is not to be a catalogue of 
 Kipling's virtues, nor yet of his achievements. 
 But I should like you to consider with me for 
 a few moments that little volume of verse, 
 The Five Nations.. I take The Five Nations 
 purposely, for it is the Kipling of The Five 
 Nations that I mean. Not the better known 
 Kipling of the Barrack-Room Ballads or The 
 Seven Seas, But supremely the Kipling I refer 
 to. 
 
 Two things changed the Kipling we first 
 knew: renewed residence in England, and the 
 Boer War. Of course, he was always an im- 
 perialist; he always loved Lord Roberts — as 
 
 [2SSl 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 long ago as the Plain Tales, when Kipling 
 was at once younger and cleverer than anyone 
 else. But he saw these things, then, from the 
 angle of India; he was an imperialist only in 
 embryo. He cared more for the British army 
 — in red — than for the British navy; and 
 Anzacs were not within his vision. 
 
 Then — by devious paths — he returned to 
 England; and England held him as it held the 
 man and the woman in "An Habitation En- 
 forced." The Boer War came; and The Five 
 Nations tells how he reacted. He has gone 
 on very consistently from that day, developing, 
 but never swerving from the path of his con- 
 viction. England did not listen to him: the 
 Liberals of the first decade of the twentieth 
 century did not propose to listen to anyone 
 who wrote short stories for the sake of the 
 plot, and verse for the sake of a Tory idea. 
 They were much too serious In Great Britain, 
 in those days, to hearken to Rudyard Kipling. 
 And, so far as I know, neither Lord Roberts 
 nor Kipling ever said, "I told you so.'* 
 
 Yet listen to 'The Lesson" : 
 
 It was our fault, and our very great fault — and now we 
 
 must turn it to use; 
 We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a 
 
 single excuse ! 
 
 How one has heard that rough-and-ready 
 poem reviled — In the early nineteen-hundreds ! 
 Even now one recalls abusive editorials in 
 
 [256] 
 
REMARKABLE RIGHT NESS OF KIPLING 
 
 American newspapers about the poem which 
 mentioned 
 
 . . . the flannelled fools at the wicket . . . the muddied 
 oafs at the goals. 
 
 "Oblige me by referring to the files." I 
 remember those taunting comments very well. 
 Not an editor but was so sane that he could 
 make his little mock of Kipling as an extrem- 
 ist. But if you will get out The Five Nations 
 and read *'The Islanders" through soberly, 
 you will curse those editors for fools. "Pre- 
 paredness" is so familiar to us all now, not 
 only as a word but even as an idea, that we 
 can hardly believe intelligent people were call- 
 ing a man names fifteen years ago for stating 
 axioms. We are always thinking the days 
 of Galileo are over. But they are not; they 
 never will be ; the human race instinctively and 
 always has it in for Galileo. Kipling could 
 get an audience for tales and ballads and 
 jungle-books ; but the moment he tried to speak 
 nationally, he could not get an audience. Even 
 now, they would rather read H. G. Wells. 
 
 Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnel ere ye learn how 
 
 a gun is laid ? 
 For the low red glare to southward when the raided 
 
 coast towns burn ? 
 (Light ye shall have on that lesson, but little time to 
 
 learn.)" 
 
 "Yes, thanks," came the sarcastic answer 
 from all the wise British millions; "we jolly 
 
 [257] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 well do wait." And they "jolly well" did; and 
 a dozen years later It all came true, and their 
 sarcasm was put where it belonged. That is, if 
 they had the sense to see it. 
 
 Will ye pray them or preach them, or print them, or 
 
 ballot them back from your shore ? 
 Will your workmen issue a mandate to bid them strike 
 
 no more? 
 
 Well: it very nearly came to that. But I sug- 
 gest that you re-read "The Islanders." I can- 
 not quote any more. Every word of "The 
 Islanders" is true to make one weep; and it 
 was the storm-centre of The Five Nations. 
 How many thousands of people felt that, in 
 writing "The Islanders," Kipling had destroyed 
 his own reputation! Doubtless the Germans 
 would have felt the same way about "The 
 Parting of the Columns"; though, if they had 
 read it and had taken the trouble to believe it, 
 it would have saved them a good many mil- 
 lions spent in propaganda. But the Germans 
 were quite as stupid as the British public. 
 
 There has been more than one reason, as I 
 have said, for the waning of Kipling's popu- 
 larity. In the first place, he does not give us so 
 many good stories as once, in the full flush of 
 his genius, he did. That is a perfectly legiti- 
 mate reason. Then, too, he has had an un- 
 lucky trick of seeing ahead. When "The Edge 
 of the Evening" was first published (in 1913), 
 
 [258] 
 
 J 
 
REMARKABLE RIGHT NESS OF KIPLING 
 
 it passed for hysteria. Only "fools" believed 
 in German spies — in 1913. But there are other 
 causes more insidious and more potent. He 
 stands, not only politically for the highest type 
 of Toryism — at least, one fancies he does — 
 but for a lot of other outdated things: pious 
 attachment to the soil; romantic love, endur- 
 ing, clean outside and in; the beauty of child- 
 hood and the bitterer beauty of parenthood; 
 patriotism unshrinking and unashamed; loath- 
 ing of the mob and the mob's madness and 
 meanness; the continuity of the English pol- 
 itical tradition, from Magna Charta down; 
 religious toleration; scrupulous perception of 
 differences between race and race, type and 
 type; the White Man's Burden. And I doubt 
 if, even now, he is an ardent believer in 
 Woman Suffrage. 
 
 Almost any one of these attitudes would 
 have been enough to damn him with the Brit- 
 ish democracy. One quite understands that 
 The Five Nations would not have been Mr. 
 Lloyd George's vade mecum. One perfectly 
 sees why Mr. Asquith, following the usual 
 tradition, passed Kipling over for the Lau- 
 reateshlp in favor of a gentleman whom few 
 people had heard of and no one could read. 
 ("The Widow at Windsor" probably shocked 
 Balllol as much as it shocked Queen Victoria.) 
 No Kipling-lover, for that matter, particularly 
 wanted Kipling to be Laureate. One even real- 
 
 [259] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 izes — though this time with amusement — why 
 he is persona non grata to the "brittle intel- 
 lectuals who crack beneath a strain." The 
 intellectuals say that he is good at times for 
 children, and often for the vulgar, and take 
 their refuge in not taking him seriously. The 
 intellectuals have been Russianizing them- 
 selves, in these last years; and Kipling's 
 laughter at that phenomenon must have been 
 unholy. They could scarcely afford to feel 
 him remarkably right, it would prove them so 
 remarkably wrong. 
 
 As I say, one quite understands why the 
 gorged and flattered workingman, the dema- 
 gogue, and the "brittle intellectual" have not 
 read him or listened to him; but it is none the 
 less a mystery that some one should not have 
 listened to him and seen that he was eminently 
 sane on many vital points. There is, after all, 
 no one living in England who writes so well, 
 who is so nearly master of the English lan- 
 guage. But one has to conclude that his audi- 
 ence has made up its mind only to be amused 
 during a train-journey. 
 
 There was a merry little International cor- 
 respondence in 1914 or 1915 over "The Truce 
 of the Bear." What did Mr. Kipling say now? 
 It was all a great joke on him. People also 
 raked up "The Man Who Was." I believe 
 Mr. Kipling never replied to his humorous 
 questioners, or, if he did, It was to the effect 
 [ 260 1 
 
REMARKABLE RIGHT NESS OF KIPLING 
 
 that a man, like a government, might change 
 his foreign poHcy with changing conditions. 
 Still, everybody was very much amused, and 
 for some reason (It can have been only his 
 unpopularity) very much pleased. Perhaps 
 they had not forgiven some of the other poems 
 in The Five Nations, and looked to dis- 
 credit Kipling by pitching on "The Truce of 
 the Bear" as they had once pitched on *'The 
 Islanders." With Russia driving back the Teu- 
 tons on the eastern front, I do not see that 
 Kipling, as a patriot, could proceed to defend 
 his ancient position very loudly. But I do not 
 remember — here I speak under correction, for 
 his war-poems are very elusive — that even 
 since 1914 he has written of Russia as he has 
 written of France. And I have often wondered 
 If, In the last months, he has not taken a very 
 private comfort In his own refrain of years 
 ago: 
 
 Make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the bear that walks 
 like a man. 
 
 He may at least feel that he was essentially 
 right about Russia, If incidentally wrong. If I 
 am not mistaken, *'The Truce of the Bear" 
 was written on the occasion of the Invitation 
 to the first Hague Conference. We took it that 
 it was the Tsar whom England was to mis- 
 trust. Very likely. But I cannot help believing 
 that Kipling had a private suspicion that the 
 
 [261] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 Hague Conference was all tommy-rot. Which, 
 obviously, it was, pragmatically judged. The 
 sheer decency and competence of certain Rus- 
 sian generals did save the world in the first 
 year of the war: let us never forget It. There 
 never was a Russian steam-roller, but the Ger- 
 mans thought there was going to be one. Let 
 us, as I say, never forget it. But for the last 
 year, the Russian people has been behaving 
 allegorically In the sense of the poem. 
 
 *When he stands up like a tired man, tottering near and 
 
 near; 
 When he stands up as pleading, in wavering, man-brute 
 guise. . . . 
 
 When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands 
 
 in prayer, 
 That is the time of peril — the time of the Truce of the 
 
 Bear!' 
 
 Eyeless, noseless, and lipless, asking a dole at the door, 
 Matun, the old blind beggar, he tells it o'er and o'er; 
 Fumbling and feeling the rifles, warming his hands at 
 
 the flame, 
 Hearing our careless white men talk of the morrow's 
 
 game; 
 
 Over and over the story, ending as he began : — 
 
 * There is no truce with Adam-zad — the hear that looks like 
 a man /' 
 
 I should be particularly sorry to say any- 
 thing that German propagandists would like 
 to have said. It is perfectly impossible for the 
 average person to know what is the proper 
 [ 262 ] 
 
REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF KIPLING 
 
 and what the improper attitude to take to 
 Russia at the moment. Even those in high 
 places might be forgiven for being perplexed. 
 What the average person perceives is that the 
 Russians are behaving very much, and very 
 vividly, like "the bear that looks like a man." 
 Certainly they stood up at Brest-LItovsk *'in 
 wavering, man-brute guise.'* 
 
 The only point of all which Is that the folk 
 who made so merry, a few years ago, over 
 "The Truce of the Bear'' had better find 
 another joke. One does not base the rightness 
 of Kipling on his merely having been a little 
 less ridiculous, in a given instance, than his 
 contemporaries wanted to think him. 
 
 I wonder, too — still as I turn the pages of 
 The Five Nations — if there is not a tonic 
 value today in the poem called "Sussex." 
 
 God gave all men all earth to love, 
 
 But since our hearts are small, 
 Ordained for each one spot should prove 
 
 Beloved over all; 
 That, as He watched Creation's birth, 
 
 So we, in godlike mood, 
 May of our love create our earth 
 
 And see that it is good. 
 
 So one shall Baltic pines content, 
 
 As one some Surrey glade, 
 Or one the palm-grove's droned lament 
 
 Before Levuka's trade. 
 Each to his choice, and I rejoice 
 
 The lot has fallen to me 
 In a fair ground — in a fair ground — 
 
 Yea, Sussex by the sea ! 
 
 [263] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 So to the land our hearts we give 
 
 Till the sure magic strike, 
 And Memory, Use, and Love make live 
 
 Us and our fields alike — 
 That deeper than our speech and thought. 
 
 Beyond our reason's sway, 
 Clay of the pit whence we were wrought 
 
 Yearns to its fellow-clay. 
 
 The windy internationalism to which we are 
 so often invited, nowadays, to listen, would 
 deny it — might even call it ^'chauvinisme de 
 clocherJ* The reply is that people actually do 
 feel as Kipling says they do. He has always 
 tended to serve (in his own phrase) the God 
 of Things as They Are. Granted, for the sake 
 of argument, that it would be good for you to 
 love all men and all countries alike, the fact 
 remains that you do not. If that is your duty, 
 most decent people do not perform their duty; 
 their fathers did not, and their children will 
 not. Even the most radical internationalists 
 wish to substitute class-consciousness for patri- 
 otism — on the whole, a less enlightened chau- 
 vinism than the other. And, judging from the 
 present war, they have not been able to pull 
 even that off. 
 
 As for saying that one has the same sense 
 of personal insult in seeing a foreign land 
 invaded as in seeing one's own, that is non- 
 sense. France has been the home of the spirit 
 to many of us; the thought of an invaded 
 France is of a bitterness hardly to be borne. 
 
 [264] 
 
REMARKABLE RIGHT NESS OF KIPLING 
 
 But though one has lived In it and loved it, 
 one is not so angry, in the very depths of one, 
 at Teuton occupation of France as one would 
 be at Teuton occupation of one's own soil. I 
 will not say what German invasion of my own 
 New England would be to me. "Ten genera- 
 tions of New England ancestors" would rise 
 up to curse the enemy. But even an Invaded 
 Oshkosh (and Oshkosh Is a mere name to me) 
 would be to me, an American, an even dead- 
 lier insult than an Invaded Paris. I should take 
 it more personally, I know. And If that can be 
 so for us. In our far-flung, heterogeneous re- 
 public, what must be the case with the children 
 of homogeneous France? If I know that I 
 should feel that way about Oshkosh, what 
 must the Kentish man feel about Kent, the 
 Devonshire man about Devon, the Englishman 
 about England? Did not all sane Americans 
 between Bangor and San Diego react in pre- 
 cisely similar fashion to Herr Zimmermann's 
 plans for Texas? I have never even been in 
 Texas, but Texas belongs to me and I belong 
 to it. 
 
 No: say what you please, geography is the 
 great human science; It is more Intimate than 
 biology. And Kipling has had the sense to see 
 it because he really knows something about 
 the genus homo. It was a delightful phrase of 
 the Frenchman's that charmed our youth — 
 "the passion for the planet"; but are we not a 
 
 [265] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 little undeceived now? Do we not at last real- 
 ize that the only real "man without a country" 
 is the cosmopolite? If there be such a person. 
 I can almost hear someone quoting iron- 
 ically, 
 
 But there is neither East nor West, border nor breed 
 
 nor birth, 
 When two strong men stand face to face, though they 
 
 come from the ends of the earth. 
 
 That is very taking; and in a sense it is true, 
 thank Heaven. But I fancy Kipling would 
 want to modify it now. At least he would like 
 to write a foot-note containing a careful defi- 
 nition of the word "strong." It would not 
 apply to the average German. 
 
 Kipling was called, for many years, by the 
 pacifist-Liberals, a jingo. All imperialists were, 
 ex officio^ jingoes. Some of these people have 
 got into their heads, by this time, the concep- 
 tion of a "preparedness" that makes for 
 peace, and realize the difference between a 
 real jingo and a man who wants to avert war 
 in the only way possible when a considerable 
 portion of the world remains militaristic. We 
 all know by this time that, if England had 
 been prepared in 1914, there would have been 
 no war in 1914; that, very probably, if Sir 
 Edward Grey had been empowered to say, at 
 the proper instant, that England would fight, 
 there would have been no war in 1914. Had 
 [266] 
 
REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF KIPLING 
 
 "The Army of a Dream" been there, the 
 mailed fist would not have been shaken at the 
 world. But that is ancient history. It is to be 
 hoped that not every one who preached pre- 
 paredness in the old days is now stigmatized as 
 a jingo. If anyone still thinks of Kipling 
 vaguely as a war-mad imperialist, let him read 
 "The Settler": 
 
 Earth where we rode to slay or be slain, 
 
 Our love shall redeem unto life; 
 We will gather and lead to her lips again 
 
 The waters of ancient strife, 
 From the far and fiercely guarded streams 
 
 And the pools where we lay in wait, 
 Till the corn cover our evil dreams 
 
 And the young corn our hate. 
 
 That is not the accent of the dyed-in-the-wool 
 jingo. 
 
 And here again — still out of The Five 
 Nations— the "Half-Ballad of Waterval" : 
 
 They*\\ never know the shame that brands — 
 
 Black shame no livin* down makes white, 
 The mockin' from the sentry-stands. 
 
 The women's laugh, the gaoler's spite. 
 
 We are too bloomin' much polite. 
 But that is 'ow I'd 'ave us be . . . 
 
 Since I 'ave learned at Waterval 
 
 The meanin' of captivity. 
 
 Written at least fifteen years ago — and still, I 
 fancy, the core of the matter. Certainly very 
 
 [267] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 different from Imperialistic-militaristic concep- 
 tions of the rights of prisoners as exemplified 
 by — Wittenberg, let us say. 
 
 All these later quotations go to show 
 merely that Kipling need not have been so 
 slanged for The Five Nations, since in much 
 of The Five Nations he has pretty well 
 expressed fundamental British feeling — as is 
 now, day by day, being proved. And — let us 
 face it squarely — fundamental British feeling 
 is on the whole the most decent on earth. As 
 Americans, we like to think that we share it. 
 No one, to be sure, paid much attention to the 
 poems just cited: they took it out in criticizing 
 things like "The Lesson," "The Islanders," 
 and "The Old Men." Now we find that in 
 those much-execrated poems he told the simple 
 truth. Why not admit it? Admit, that Is, 
 ungrudgingly, not only that he has been right 
 since 1914, but that he was right much earlier, 
 and that it is the other people who have had 
 to shift their point of view. 
 
 But policies — as well foreign as domestic — 
 have, from of old, made bitter enemies and 
 excited acrimonious controversy. No one could 
 have said anything worse about Kipling than 
 political folk in all the serious English reviews 
 were saying (before the war), all the time, 
 about their political opponents. You could 
 never take up one of those famous periodicals 
 without feeling that vitriol had been spilled in 
 [ 268 ] 
 
REMARKABLE RIGHT NESS OF KIPLING 
 
 your very presence. If there Is a special rhet- 
 oric of vituperation, the EngHsh political 
 article was its textbook. We milder Americans 
 gasped. No Southern gentleman, on the floor 
 of the Senate, ever went quite so far. 
 
 So we should expect Kipling to be called 
 horrid names by those who disagreed with him 
 politically, because that is English political 
 manners. No one really minds, except as one 
 has always resented the doom of Cassandra. 
 What one does mind, what one does resent, 
 is the judgment of the "Intellectuals" on Kip- 
 ling's general human knowledge. They seem to 
 agree with Oscar Wilde that, in turning over 
 the pages, "one feels as if one were seated 
 under a palm-tree reading life by superb 
 flashes of vulgarity. . . . From the point of 
 view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who 
 drops his aspirates. . . . He is our first author- 
 ity on the second-rate, and has seen marvellous 
 things through key-holes, and his backgrounds 
 are real works of art." Even Henry James 
 spoke of him tentatively, as a young man who 
 had gone a long way before breakfast. Politics 
 always make people see red; but the human 
 emotions in general, people ought to be able 
 to discuss amicably. And the Intellectuals have 
 never been willing to discuss Kipling at all. 
 When he is dead, they will, of course. But at 
 present they still consider him negligible. 
 
 Now no one — unless Rudyard Kipling him- 
 [269] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 self — IS less tempted than I to set Rudyard 
 Kipling up as "saint and sage," or to try to 
 establish a Kipling philosophy or a Kipling 
 cult. You may take a man seriously without 
 taking him religiously, I should hope. But the 
 intellectuals take other people religiously, not 
 to say seriously; and why Kipling is to be 
 forever relegated by our arbiters of taste to 
 the ranks of the frivolous or the hysterical or 
 the vulgar, passes the normal understanding. 
 
 Two demands can respectably be made of 
 a writer, In order that he should be taken 
 "seriously" : that he should be to some extent 
 a master of style, and that he should have 
 sane and serious things to say about life. To 
 those who insist that Kipling is not a master 
 of English style, one has, really — now I come 
 to think of It — nothing to say. Especially as 
 many of them will tell you, with straight faces, 
 that Galsworthy, or Arnold Bennett, or some- 
 one else, is a master of style. Chiefly, It means 
 that they care so little about what he says that 
 they belittle his way of saying It. They persist 
 in taking a purely momentary point of view. 
 Kipling, I fancy, can afford to await the judg- 
 ment of posterity. He Is destined to become a 
 great English name. 
 
 There are probably several reasons for this 
 critical scorn. One Is that he writes short 
 stones, and short stories are not yet so digni- 
 fied as novels — unless the writer be Mau- 
 
 [270] 
 
REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF KIPLING 
 
 passant. Some of the critics have never read 
 anything but the earliest Kipling. Largely, It 
 is because they have not the faintest approxi- 
 mation to a Chaucerian or Shakespearean 
 sense of life — life, good and bad, high and 
 low, grave and gay — and they find no charm, 
 no "distinction" in the blessed, common, earthy 
 Englishness of the English scene. Most of all, 
 they are uninterested in the very universality 
 of the emotions and events he deals with: 
 patriotism, love, childhood and parenthood, 
 duty, and death. Nor have they much taste for 
 laughter. As for tradition, they are so busy 
 scrapping it, that they are not concerned with 
 illustrations of its continuity and deathlessness. 
 
 I could get up a better brief for Kipling on 
 the human score, if I were not making it a 
 point of honor to stick to The Five Nations. 
 For Kipling has gone on very much, even since 
 then. The Five Nations deals particularly 
 with the Boer War and reactions after the 
 Boer War. His more explicitly "human" wis- 
 dom is not to be found there in greatest meas- 
 ure. Yet in some ways The Five Nations 
 comes home to us just now more than other 
 things, when we are in the midst of the very 
 war which he therein prophesied. 
 
 Take the "Chant-Pagan." When the war is 
 over, there will be some millions of English- 
 men (to leave out the other Allies) who will 
 come home singing that chant — if not literally, 
 
 [271] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 then in spirit. In fact, that is the most encour- 
 aging thing in all Kipling for the reformers — 
 except that I do not believe the returned sol- 
 dier will care much more for the English in- 
 dustrial paradise than for the "Squire an' 'is 
 wife." Even old-age pensions and the abolition 
 of great estates, and all the other articles of 
 Lloyd George's faith, are not going to make 
 him happy. He is going to know too much 
 about real values. There is just a chance that, 
 after having saved England in the field, he 
 may save England at home. There will — God 
 send! — ^be so many of him. No man can 
 prophesy; and yet already, in America, one 
 hears people wondering about our own boys, 
 In the very sense of the "Chant-Pagan." 
 
 Naturally, as I say, the more personal hu- 
 man relations are not dealt with in The Five 
 Nations. But there remains "The Second 
 Voyage." I do not know that anything saner 
 or wiser or more poignant has ever been writ- 
 ten about that love between man and woman 
 which is the bulwark of Occidental civilization. 
 No one can deal more tenderly than Kipling 
 with the idyll between boy and girl — look at 
 "The Brushwood Boy." He can even deal con- 
 vincingly with the great illicit love (though it 
 is not a favorite theme of his) — witness 
 "Without Benefit of Clergy" and the great 
 paragraph in "Love o' Women." But the love 
 that he most often treats Is the love between 
 
 [ 272 ] 
 
REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF KIPLING 
 
 husband and wife: the love that is built on 
 shared tears and laughter, on deep domestic 
 sympathies and clean sex-attraction, the love 
 that many waters cannot quench. In "The Sec- 
 ond Voyage" he explicitly renounces all others; 
 it expresses love, if you like, more or less 
 according to the prayer-book. He sacrifices to 
 the god of Romantic Marriage. If you choose 
 to put it that way, there ain't a lady livin' in 
 the land as he'd change for 'is dear old Dutch. 
 Perhaps that Is why they call him vulgar. 
 Many of our "serious" contemporaries appear 
 to resent any account of human relations that 
 is both vitally human and essentially decent, 
 because it leaves at one side their two pre- 
 ferred groups: the very sophisticated, and the 
 criminal classes. 
 
 I suspect that one difficulty, for the more 
 sincere, if still brittle. Intellectuals, lies in 
 the unconventional verse-forms which Kipling 
 often affects. They can stand any amount of 
 slang in prose, but they cannot endure it in 
 verse. At least, they do not believe that "high 
 seriousness" can wear such a garb. I dare say 
 they would throw out even "The Second Voy- 
 age" on the score of unconventionality. Well: 
 let them. I was going to quote some of It, 
 but I am too out of temper with the intellec- 
 tuals. They may read it for themselves. And 
 probably none of the moderns would be able 
 to endure the mention of "Custom, Reverence, 
 
 [273 ] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 and Fear." I give it up. But they need not 
 think that Kipling's own education in the mat- 
 ter of sex-relations stopped with the Gadsbys. 
 To the mind of the serious Kipling-lover, 
 the thing that grows more and more impres- 
 sive is his universality. Perhaps it seems to 
 some an unimportant list of allegiances that I 
 have mentioned: "pious attachment to the soil; 
 romantic love, enduring, clean outside and in; 
 the beauty of childhood and the bitterer beauty 
 of parenthood; patriotism unshrinking and un- 
 ashamed; loathing of the mob and the mob's 
 madnessi and meanness; the continuity of 
 the English political tradition, from Magna 
 Charta down; religious toleration; scrupulous 
 perception of differences between race and 
 race, type and type; the White Man's Bur- 
 den." Many a man has had a tablet in West- 
 minster Abbey for a lesser creed. And almost 
 no one has sought his wisdom and his delight 
 in so many places or so many classes of 
 society. Engineers, subalterns, ladies of the 
 manor, cockney privates, Hindu bearers, Boer 
 farmers, half-caste Portuguese nursemaids, 
 Gloucester fishermen, bank clerks, reporters, 
 young English children, German scientists, 
 law lords, public-school boys, lamas, pilots, 
 children of the zodiac, even the beast-folk of 
 the jungle — what a Shakespearean welter, and, 
 humanly speaking, what a Shakespearean re- 
 sult! It is the "good gigantic smile o' the 
 
 [274] 
 
REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF KIPLING 
 
 brown old earth." And the far-flung adventure 
 has brought Kipling back to a very simple but 
 not too easy code. At least, one cannot say 
 that he sticks by the most English of English 
 traditions because he has never seen anything 
 else. He has had room and chance to choose. 
 He has ended by being very orthodox, not to 
 say conventional, about the fundamental hu- 
 man duties; and he reads history with a canny 
 eye. But I do not think anyone can accuse Kip- 
 ling of being a stick-in-the-mud. ^'With the 
 Night Mail" does not look so Jules Verne-Ish 
 now as it did when it was printed. Perhaps 
 some day we shall even have to give the bene- 
 fit of the doubt to the later "flight of fact" 
 called "As Easy as A. B. C." Though I admit 
 that that is going far. 
 
 Just there, I did leave The Five Nations 
 for the moment; but it is impossible to men- 
 tion "As Easy as A. B. C." and not also quote 
 some of "MacDonough's Song." 
 
 Whether the People be led by the Lord, 
 
 Or lured by the loudest throat; 
 If it be quicker to die by the sword 
 
 Or cheaper to die by vote — 
 These are the things we have dealt with once, 
 
 (And they will not rise from their grave) 
 For Holy People, however it runs, 
 
 Endeth in wholly Slave. • 
 
 Whatsoever, for any cause, 
 Seeketh to take or give 
 
 [275] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 Power above or beyond the Laws, 
 
 SuJfFer it not to live ! 
 Holy State or Holy King — 
 
 Or Holy People's Will- 
 Have no truck with the senseless thing. 
 
 Order the guns and kill ! 
 
 Saying — after — me : — 
 
 *Once there was The People — ^Terror gave it birth; 
 Once there was The People and it made a Hell of 
 
 Earth. 
 Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain ! 
 Once there was The People — it shall never be again !' 
 
 Easy enough to see why Kipling is not popu- 
 lar. Yet Kipling Is by no means the only 
 person who Is warning us that mob-rule may 
 come and sweep away our Institutions. Most 
 people who fear that event are doing their 
 best to Ingratiate themselves with the mob 
 before It wholly loses its temper. I confess 
 that — ^politics apart, and as a mere matter of 
 dignity — It Is a comfort to hear some man 
 speak in another spirit and sense than that of 
 craven conciliation. I have not quoted from 
 "MacDonough's Song" because I think it is 
 a great poem; but because it is perhaps the 
 most nakedly, blatantly ^'unpopular" thing Kip- 
 ling has ever written. There it is, openly ad- 
 mitted, in all its offenslveness — his greatest 
 crime. Damn him for it If you feel Inclined, 
 but confess that to write as uncompromisingly 
 as that is better manners than to have loathing 
 [276] 
 
REMARKABLE RIGHT NESS OF KIPLING 
 
 or fear in your heart and honey on your lips. 
 "We reason with them in Little Russia," says 
 Dragomiroff in "As Easy as A. B. C." Well, 
 it looks as if, several generations ahead, that 
 might still be the method in Little Russia. The 
 story was written in 1912. 
 
 The Five Nations ends with the "Re- 
 cessional," which preceded the Boer War by 
 three years. And there is nothing to add to 
 the "Recessional," even now; except that Ger- 
 many needs to read it, at present, more than 
 England does. All that I have meant to do is 
 to point out that Kipling was right about pre- 
 paredness, right about the Colonies, right 
 about Germany, right about Russia, right 
 about the Boers, right about Kitchener, right 
 about demagogues and "labor," right about 
 the elderly politicians, right about the decent 
 British code, right about patriotism and the 
 human heart — right about love; and that for 
 all those things (except the last) he was 
 slanged as if he were wrong. In political mat- 
 ters, "thought is free," with us, at least. But 
 in the matter of literary criticism, it seems a 
 pity not to realize the worth and distinction 
 of the few people we have who possess either. 
 I have been told that Kipling still sells better 
 than any other author in America. When I 
 think of Harold Bell Wright, I hope, for the 
 credit of America, that it is true. Perhaps the 
 attitude of the intellectuals is mere snobbish- 
 
 [277] 
 
MODES AND MORALS 
 
 ness, which cannot consent to think a best- 
 seller literature. But, as I say, it is a pity that 
 the greatest living master of English style (for 
 Conrad's is a restricted field) should not be 
 confessed to as such by the few who still pro- 
 fess to care about style. One would not mind 
 so much if they did not commend such a lot 
 of third-rate stuff. 
 
 I am glad that Kipling himself has the vul- 
 gar consolation of royalties. He has, to be 
 sure — I repeat — the disadvantage of telling 
 the truth prematurely. If we have just about 
 caught up with The Five Nations — well, let 
 us hope that the argument from analogy will 
 not work in this case : that we shall never have 
 to catch up with ''As Easy as A. B. C"; that 
 that, at least, may not be an instance of his 
 remarkable rightness. For it does not make 
 one happy about the immediate future. 
 
 [278] 
 
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