THE LIMITS OF FLIRTATION
THE LIMITS OF FLIRTATION
Feb. 20, 19—.
My dear Alexa,—
What a very short note! Its brevity and its interrogativeness give it almost the urgency of a telegram. And yet how am I to answer it, how am I even to begin to answer it in less than half a dozen pages of quarto?
I will not remind you of the old saying that a certain sort of person can ask more questions in five minutes than a wise man can answer in a lifetime. I will not remind you, I say, because you are not the sort of person the old saying means, and I feel sure that when you asked your question you did not do it just to annoy, but because for some reason or another you really wanted to know. Was it personal, that reason? Because, if so, I think, perhaps, on the whole you had better come home.
What, you ask me, are the limits of flirtation? Where does it begin; where end?
I wish you hadn’t used the word: it is a word I happen intensely to dislike, to dislike with one of those prejudices of which we can never give a satisfactory account. I think, perhaps, I dislike it because it always brings before me a mental image of one of my own sex making a fool or a rogue of himself. And yet I cannot blame you, for I myself have been quite unable to find a synonym for it.
“Coquetry” is a pretty word, but coquetry, I quite recognise, is a different thing. Coquetry is exclusively feminine. Now it takes two to make a flirtation, and one of them must not be a woman. And then, after all, the word has a worthy ancestry.
Do you know who invented it? A dozen pairs of gloves to one you don’t? It was that greatest of all gentlemen that ever were, Lord Chesterfield, and he, like the gallant fellow he was, modestly attributed it to some unnamed lady of his acquaintance.
I came across it quite a little while ago inVolume XVI. of myBritish Essayists. You know them, those little books bound in expensive calf with red labels, which nearly fill a whole bookshelf in the library, and which you always refuse to open because you say they look so dull. Well, in No. 101 ofThe World, dated December 5, 1754, Lord Chesterfield is praising your sex for the good service it has done to the English tongue; and I can’t think how he could! “I never see a pretty mouth opening to speak,” he says, “but I expect, and am seldom disappointed, some new improvement of our language.”
Happy times! Happy man! If only he could have been here the other day when the Darkleigh girls called. Their entire vocabulary consisted of one word, “ripping.” No, I do them wrong. There was another, “rag.” And yet what an extremely charming girl Muriel is, isn’t she? And, after all, why should a woman be a dictionary?
But to return to Lord Chesterfield. He goes on to say:—
“I assisted at the birth of that most significant word ‘flirtation,’ which droppedfrom the most beautiful mouth in the world, and which has since received the sanction of our most accurate Laureate in one of his comedies. Some inattentive and undiscerning people have, I know, taken it to be a term synonymous with coquetry; but I lay hold of this opportunity to undeceive them, and eventually to inform Mr Johnson that flirtation is short of coquetry and intimates only the first hints of approximation, which subsequent coquetry may reduce to those preliminary articles that commonly end in a definitive treaty.”
“I assisted at the birth of that most significant word ‘flirtation,’ which droppedfrom the most beautiful mouth in the world, and which has since received the sanction of our most accurate Laureate in one of his comedies. Some inattentive and undiscerning people have, I know, taken it to be a term synonymous with coquetry; but I lay hold of this opportunity to undeceive them, and eventually to inform Mr Johnson that flirtation is short of coquetry and intimates only the first hints of approximation, which subsequent coquetry may reduce to those preliminary articles that commonly end in a definitive treaty.”
I have quoted Chesterfield merely for the sake of historic interest, not because his definition is much to the point just now. Since his time the word flirtation has changed its meaning, just as the thing has changed its character. It means a good deal more to-day than those “first hints of approximation.” Flirtation with us does not end (except by some calamitous accident) in the “definitive treaty” of marriage. The proof of which is that when it does we usually say, or think, “Oh, then it wasn’t a flirtation after all, it was serious;” implying, ofcourse, that that which is serious is not flirtation.
Not but what stupid people among us misuse the word abominably. You will sometimes hear a woman accused of flirting with a man when she has been merely making herself as delightful as she knows how to him; doing her simple duty to herself and to him, that is.
But we need not trouble ourselves, you and I, as to what stupid people say or think. We agreed that we wouldn’t, a long time ago, you remember. I have noticed, too, that people who say things about us always are stupid—which is one to us, isn’t it?
No, no, flirtation to-day may go a long way beyond those first hints of approximation and still remain flirtation, without reaching those limits you talk of. It may ... but perhaps only concrete instances have value in a discussion of this sort, so let me give you one. A day or two ago, I went, rather late in the afternoon, to the Exhibition of Old Masters now on in Burlington House. I wish you had been there too; there is gorgeous Sir Joshua, which you would have knelt down and worshipped. I should havedone it myself but for a sense of humour and a touch of rheumatism in the knee. Well, in the water-colour gallery I came upon a man I know and you know, with a woman I know and so do you. They were not looking at the drawings, they were sitting on a seat between two screens. My almost feminine intuition (don’t jeer) told me that they had not looked at a picture since they had passed the turnstile. However, please understand, Alexa, that there was not the slightest harm in those two people being where they were on that afternoon.
At our time of day and amongst our set, I should hope, any man might go to any picture gallery with any woman and escape censure. But the point about these two people was this. When they saw me, and saw that I saw them, they seemed embarrassed. And then the man gave me a look which meant, if ever a look meant anything, “I know you’re a decent chap, and I am confident you will hold your tongue,” and the lady did not look at me at all, she fidgeted with the edge of her veil. The veil, by the way, of course, gave the whole thing away. It was thickish. People who want to seepictures don’t wear thick veils. Now, that embarrassment, that look of the man’s at me, that little nervous gesture of the lady’s, told me that here was a flirtation. Nothing more than a flirtation so far. I am confident of that. But a flirtation, mind you, that had almost reached the limits.
An understanding, a secret understanding, an understanding from which the rest of the world is excluded, is of the very essence of flirtation. Theentente, the agreement, may never have been made by words spoken in corners, or written in notes, but it must at least have been made in looks or, no, perhaps not by anything so definite as they, by the creation of that most impalpable but most real thing, an atmosphere, an emotional atmosphere.
When does a flirtation begin, then? It begins directly she has succeeded in convincing him (of course you may reverse the sexes) that he is more attractive to her than any of the other men about. Mind, I say in convincing him. Until he is convinced the thing has not begun; it is only an attempt at a flirtation—and to fail in such an attempt is, with one exception, the most disastrousdefeat a woman can sustain. No woman can encounter two beatings of that sort and retain her self-esteem. Heramour propreis irreparably ruined. A man, on the other hand, can survive any number of rebuffs and come up smiling to face the next; for he can always comfort himself with the thought that it was the lady’s prudence and not his own unattractiveness that was responsible for the licking.
A flirtation must be without serious intent. If one of the parties to it have anything more definite in view, consciously in view, then he or she is not flirting; it is a one-sided affair. It is in no way destructive of the accuracy of my definition that most affairs are one-sided affairs.
There may be in a flirtation, there nearly always is, a sort of subtle subconsciousness of delightful possibilities, of dangerously delightful possibilities, but that is all there may be; and it is just these vague possibilities that give the salt to the dish.
Flirtation then you see, Alexa, is, like virtue, its own reward. That, I think, is the only respect in which it does resemble virtue. Like art, it must exist only for its own sake;and it is remarkably like art. Indeed, it is no inconsiderable part of the art of life. The object of art, as Pater says somewhere, is to render radiant, to intensify, our moments. That and nothing else is the object, so far as it has an object, of flirtation.
Of course it gratifies our vanity, and of all gratifications, or nearly all, the gratification of vanity is the sweetest, the one with least alloy or unpleasant after-taste. Vanity suffers from hunger, but never from indigestion, no, nor from satiety. There are few things in this world which give a man, who is a man and not a pudding, such a tingling thrill of pleasure as the consciousness that a woman, an ordinarily discreet woman, has run the ever-so-slightest risk of compromising herself for his sake.
A woman once told me—quite a nice woman, Alexa, not a cat, nothing like a cat—that life’s height was the knowledge that she could raise a man to the summits or cast him down to the depths, by giving or withholding a glance as she left the dinner-table for the drawing-room. So you see flirtation has its points as a form of sport.
Obviously then, as I said, there must be anunderstanding, a tacit, if temporary, alliance between the pair. They must have made a little circle for themselves, a little circle in which they two move alone, from which the rest of the world is excluded, as it were, by a burning bush. There may be aménage à trois, indeed, I am told that theménage à troisis one of the commonest of social phenomena, but a flirtationà troisthere can never be. A woman may flirt with two men, or a man with two women, but neither of the two must know of the other’s existence or the thing falls to pieces.
It is in truth a sort of exercise preliminary to the duel of sex. The combatants are combatants only by courtesy; they fence with the buttons on the foils. So long as the game is played according to the rules, there is likely to be naught more seriously discommoding than a scratch or a tiny little blue bruise which in a day or two will disappear. But, and here is the spice of it, at any moment one of the buttons may come off by accident, or be taken off by fraud, and then—well, then certainly a garment may be torn to rags, possibly a heart may be pierced.
Where does flirtation end? you ask. Well,I can tell you where it never ends. It never ends in a row. Never, at any rate, when he or she has more brains than a guinea-pig. Of course, with downright fools there is no telling. If there be ever so slight a row, ever so faint a scandal, then there has been something more than a flirtation. The limits have been passed; a button, somehow or other, has come off a foil. When somebody is trying to get back somebody’s letters somebody has leaped the limits: be sure of that.
Miss Rhoda Broughton, an author whom young women of to-day are a little apt to slight, makes Sarah inBelindasay:—“I may be a flirt, but thank heaven in the whole length and breadth of Europe there exists not a scrap of my handwriting.” Or words to this effect. May be a flirt forsooth! Of course she was a flirt, and a flirt of accomplishment, or she could never truthfully have made the boast.
But the limits? Well, they are like most other limits that determine the conduct of men and women. They are shifting limits, they change from age to age, and from climate to climate; nay, more than that, from social set to social set. Judging from what I hearon the top and bottom levels of our present society there is no fault to find with their narrowness; and even with us though they may be not so wide as a church door (horrid simile that; a church should never even be thought of in connection with a flirtation) they will do, they will serve.
Perhaps you want me to be practical though. Well, here goes then. Secret assignations should be avoided as beyond the limits, so should the underground post. You know what I mean by the underground post; letters sent to clubs or to post-offices.
Dark corners at dances? Well—yes. A dark corner may just be inside the boundary, but a clasped hand in that dark corner is well over it. But by the way, Alexa, on the whole it seems not wise in me to set out these limits for you, because the limits of flirtation are also the perilous edges of—find the word for me in theThesaurus. There is plenty of room well within those limits for you to entertain yourself, and others, in security. Keep away from the limits, for, as I said, they are vague, apt sometimes, in emotional moments, to become blurred, invisible even perhaps. When a girl of your tender years gets near to thelimits she is likely to call for the prompt and most disagreeable intervention of a, and particularly of
Your, stern and relentless,
Though never heavy,
Father.