Why are the English, admittedly the apostles of the tub, so indifferent, as a rule, to the condition of their teeth? If they would do only an infinitesimal bit as much for their preservation as they do for the preservation of their monuments, it might possibly have a momentous influence on English history.
Why the inside of a man's mouth should be of no importance compared to his outer man is a riddle; but so it is, and a man who would feel quite disgraced to be seen with dirty hands, leaves his teeth in a condition which is quite appalling. If, as it is said, bad teeth are a sign of the degeneracy of a race, then are the sturdy English in a very bad way, and melancholy indeed is their deterioration since the days of their ancestors of that prehistoric age whose relics are found in Cornwall and Somerset.
It is a comfort to learn that not only common sense, but vanity, is as old as the hills, for among those ancient remains were found some rouge, and a mirror, all of which can be verified in the museum at Glastonbury. My heart went out to the prehistoric lady who used the rouge; it brought her very near with its suggestion of frailty and feminine vanity, and I am quite sure that the mirror as well was her property. I lingered over the rouge, the mirror, a tooth, a prehistoric safety-pin, and some needles, and let the others bother themselves about such really unimportant details as weapons and utensils. As I strolled on I saw a skull two thousand years older than any recorded history, and it grinned cheerfully at me with as perfect a set of teeth as ever rejoiced the heart of a dentist. I could not help thinking what a shabby exhibition we should make in similar circumstances!
There is no doubt that our over-civilisation deteriorates our teeth, which is proved whenever prehistoric remains are discovered. The last were, I believe, found in Cornwall by a lucky man who bought a strip of land, or, properly, sand, on which to build himself a cottage, and, on proceeding to dig a cellar, found it already occupied by the remains of prehistoric human beings. Some of the skeletons were still in the same curious attitude in which they had been buried, and the superior ones among them (socially!) had the right sides of their skulls smashed in to prevent the restless spirit from seeking re-admittance.
It was the most melancholy sight in the world, these bones which even the alchemy of thousands of years had not resolved into merciful dust. The immortal skeleton was there nearly intact, while brilliant, as if brushed that very morning, grinned those splendid prehistoric teeth, white as the kernel of a nut, impervious to decay.
A big glass case against the wall of the little museum, which has been built on the spot by the fortunate discoverer of the "bones," was full of carefully preserved teeth which had been found there, and their beauty and perfection would have rejoiced the heart of that artist in teethpar excellence, the American dentist.
The room was crowded by middle-class excursionists, who, with a middle-class joy of horrors, even if prehistoric, in default of anything fresher, stared round-eyed at the skeletons, skulls, shinbones and other impedimenta of decease, and I was struck by the solemnity and dignity of those poor old bones compared to the commonplaceness of the empty faces gazing at them.
"Oh, I say, don't you wish you had them teeth," I heard a young thing in a scarlet tam o'shanter and a fringe giggle to the youth by her side, with an imitation panama tilted back from his receding forehead. I understood the gentle innuendo, as he promptly stuck his cane into his mouth and sucked.
There was something very magnificent and tragic in those lonely graves of a humanity, already extinct when ancient history began, resting under the roll of the Cornish sand dunes, where the sullen cliffs stand sentinels against the seas. Until the twentieth century they had rested forgotten, and then an undignified chance betrayed them.
It was a gold mine for the enterprising proprietor, whose moderate charge for a sight is only threepence a head. He is a man of engaging humour, and he is not only on intimate terms with his "bones," but with the eminent scientists who still wage a bitter but bloodless feud over the remains, whose biography so far is only written in sand.
That he is not only a cheerful but a witty man is greatly to his credit, for he lives a lonely life on his sand hills, with only the cliffs as his neighbours and the roar of the ocean and the whistle of the wind to break the silence. For labour he excavates his graveyard, and for relaxation he catalogues his bones. His free and easy comments on his subject (or subjects, rather) are really very exhilarating to the philosophic tourist, and indeed it was he who first drew my attention to the deterioration of English teeth.
The eccentricity of the Early Victorian teeth was for decades the pet subject of the Continental caricaturist, the peculiarity being generally ascribed to the British female, her male companion merely rejoicing in hideous plaids, abnormal side-whiskers, and a fearful helmet decorated with a flowing puggaree. Times have changed. The British teeth have ceased to protrude, and, indeed, they now veer around to the other extreme, and instead of prominent front teeth the Englishman now often rejoices in no front teeth at all, or between none and the ordinary number nature intends there are countless variations.
I have been waiting for a genial caricaturist to seize on this simple and unostentatious national trait. If bad teeth are a common sign of ill-health, then alas for the English masses who form the strength of the nation, for their neglected teeth are a menace and a warning.
There is no emotion in the world, except the fear of death, that will not succumb to an aching tooth. A villain with the toothache is more villainous than without it; while a lover with the toothache does not exist, for a lover with the toothache ceases to be a lover. The toothache is so exquisite a pain that it demands the undivided attention of the brain, with a persistency so nagging that no other pain enjoys. It will even wreck a man's career. What man can write a great poem or win a battle with an ulcerated tooth tearing at his nerves! Should we investigate, it will be discovered that the greatest men in the world who made history, art, and science, never had toothache, which first of all kills the imagination. Mathematicians might survive, for such imagination as they have is riveted in facts.
In addition to the other disabilities, toothache is undignified; there is nothing interesting or romantic about it! It is one of the first pains impartial nature bestows on her children, and which is the only common heritage that justifies that misleading clause in the American Constitution that all men are born free and equal. That pain and what was in our childhood euphoniously called "tummy ache" lead the revolt in nurseries.
There is hardly a bodily ache which literature has not idealised, but an aching tooth has yet to find its dramatic poet. In fact, there is about it a touch of the ludicrous which its concentrated anguish does not justify. It is curious that so intense a suffering should be so undramatic, but it is the one agony which does not desert us this side of the grave, and which even the genius of a Shakespeare would hesitate to bestow on his hero or heroine. Anguish comes to them in many ways, but the great poet discreetly avoids teeth.
The only historical reference to teeth I have ever noticed is when the sacred Inquisition, always original and playful, tears them one by one out of the mouths of heretics and Jews as being gently conducive to confession. But even this undoubted torture is singularly undramatic, and has, I believe, never been used by a tragic poet.
It is one of the aggravations of toothache that it inspires but lukewarm sympathy; even your parents know you will not die of it. The greatest concession to your suffering is that you may stay away from school, and, if you are very bad, mother ties a big handkerchief about your face, which is something, but not much. But even parents are strangely inconsiderate, and I realised even in my infant days that had these same sufferings been situated more favourably in my body I should have been promoted to bed and the family doctor.
A very famous American dentist met the English husband of an American friend of mine with the genial congratulation, "My dear sir, I wish you joy! You have married a first-rate, A1 set of teeth."
Possibly the tribute was too professional, but it really meant so much. Indeed, one of the most promising signs of the future of the American people is the importance they attach to good teeth. The American dentist is the greatest in the world. His deft skill constructs those delicate and complicated instruments that help him to repair the ravages of time and ill-health. Not only does he produce an exact copy of nature, but his is the only instance known to science where human ingenuity excels nature's—his teeth do not ache! It is also required of the modern dentist not only that he should be a consummate mechanic, but he must be a doctor and surgeon as well, to be able to cure the cause behind the damage.
When I see so many people here who have bad teeth—which to say the least is a blemish—it is a prophecy that the next generation will have even worse, which means a deterioration in health, therefore in intelligence and ambition. So in due course England will lose her proud position as the greatest nation in the world, simply because England would not go to the dentist; which is a curious neglect for a people whose morning tub is much less likely to be neglected than their morning prayers.
If I were one of the powers that be I should require all Board Schools to furnish their pupils with tooth-brushes and toothpowder, and the morning session should be opened with a general brushing of teeth. Not only that, but I would have a dentist attached to each school district, whose duty it should be to attend to the children's teeth free of charge. If England wants good war material (and there has been some adverse criticism of the quality of her soldiers) she must cultivate it, and it is her duty to step in where the parent fails. A day labourer with a large family does his best if he and they keep body and soul together. It is for the State to step in and rescue the young teeth from premature decay, thus undoubtedly increasing the health of the growing body, and at the same time teaching the young things those cleanly habits which make for self-respect and health.
The English have not the habit of going to the dentist; money paid to him they consider wasted—there is nothing to show for it. It is like putting new drains into the house, only not so necessary. They still have teeth taken out rather than stopped (filled), as being cheaper, and when they are all out they replace them on too slight a provocation by what American humour calls "store teeth."
Nor are the English supersensitive. Their complacency, which upholds them in more important things, inclines them to believe that if their fathers muddled along with bad teeth so can they. It does not take away, they think, from the charms of their best girl if she smiles at them with a gap in her teeth, or if in colour they shade into the darkest of greys. As for a man, he can always lie in ambush behind his moustache, or at worst he can draw down his upper lip and leave the unseen a mystery.
Still, there is hope for the future, and England shows signs of awakening! A truly progressive member of a certain board of guardians recently had the temerity to demand tooth-brushes for the pauper children. The worthy mayor who presided at the meeting was nearly paralysed at the audacity of the request. He not only sternly refused, but he denounced it as pampered luxury and extravagance, and he was so roused by the outrageous proposal that he taunted his brother guardians, and said they themselves had probably not indulged in the sinful luxury of a tooth-brush for forty-five years. Possibly, but at any rate it proves that England is really awakening, and that even an infant pauper may some day look forward to the rapture of possessing a tooth-brush!
Yet even bad teeth sometimes find their Nemesis! A very important public position was recently vacant for which there were some two hundred applicants. These slowly resolved themselves down to two—one an able man, and the other an exceptionally able man. They had to have a deciding interview with the arbiter of their fate, so great a man that he is called a personage, and he gave the position to the able man rather than the exceptionally able man. His explanation for his curious choice was quite simple, "He really had such horrid teeth that I could not bear to have him always about."
Has any historian left his testimony as to the teeth of the ancient Romans, when that great nation fell into decadence? Statues all testify that the deterioration did not affect their noses, but I feel sure that if their rigid marble lips could open we should find the first cause of their historic downfall.
As the extinction of a nation is foreordained in its very inception, so the fall of America is possibly already predestined. Well, it may be owing to trusts, but it will not be owing to teeth. All over the American land is heard the busy wheel of the dentist. Hundreds of thousands of dentists are forever filling and scraping and pulling American teeth, and the American people emerge from their dentist chairs and smile broadly, a source of joy to the beholder and not pain. They pay their dentists, if not with rapture, at least with resignation, because they know that their children will inherit good teeth, and it will be a pleasure to kiss them from their cradle on, at all stages. Nor when their young men go out to war will they be declared by the medical examiners unfit because of their bad teeth. Instead, they will clench their good teeth and fight right pluckily, as only those can who attend strictly to business, undisturbed by pain.
One hears England called the freeest republic in the world, and that here, as nowhere else, every man has his chance. Well, England may be, to all intents and purposes, a republic, but to rise from the ranks is only for the man of commanding talent, and for him there is always room at the top—everywhere—all over the world. But for the ordinary man who has ordinary abilities, and yet is not without ambition, America is the land.
He may start as a day labourer and have luck and his son may one day be President of the United States; or he may grace any one of those innumerable offices which are in the gift of a grateful party! That keeps self-respect lively in a man, and is what makes him know not only his own trade, but just a little more. How one suffers because the British workman only does what he is obliged to—and not that. How often one rebels because the subordinate English official knows just what he is obliged to know, and not a hair's breadth more! That same man set down in America will learn to the fullest extent of his intelligence.
Tooth-brushes make for health, health makes for intelligence, and it is the intelligent man the world wants and pays for; which proves the incalculable importance of tooth-brushes in the progress of the world. Possibly the atmosphere of a republic is more conducive to good teeth; but, really, England should make a supreme effort to save her waning power from falling into the grasp of the great republic, which it is inevitably bound to do if England does not go to the dentist.
In the political economy of nations the tooth-brush is of much more importance than the sword, and toothpowder is infinitely more important than gunpowder. As England never considers the millions she annually spends in gunpowder, why does she not pause in her martial career and spend a few thousand pounds in toothpowder?
In the way of rulers there is nothing quite so nice as a king. A king focuses one's patriotism, and being above everybody in his kingdom is probably the only person in it who arouses no envy. The fact is he inspires in us a sense of proud proprietorship. We rejoice that he has the loveliest of queens, and the lovelier she looks the more we are gratified, just as if she were one of the family. So when the king's diplomacy wins a bloodless victory we are as proud as if most of the credit belonged to us.
Indeed, one realises the intimate pleasures of patriotism most on coming from an impersonal republic to a kingdom where the royal family is a vital part of the national life. We republicans are nothing if not patriotic, but while we are loyal to the broader aspects of patriotism we miss perhaps its little intimate pleasures.
It is, for example, rather difficult to feel a deep sense of personal loyalty towards the man whom the freak of fortune places for four years at the head of the nation, and of whom one knows very little. The personal interest one takes in him and his family is quite artificial. Opposed to him in politics, one doubts his fitness for his great position; and if one is of his party one favours him with that frank criticism which one naturally feels for the man who yesterday was no better than oneself, and who in four years will come down from his exalted height with the rapidity of a sky-rocket, only to join the army of the "forgotten" so delightfully characteristic of republics.
A republic is a worthy and useful institution, but there is a monotony in a country that consists entirely of kings and queens. It is very nice for all to be born free and equal, but it is not interesting, and there is some comfort in knowing it is not true, for Nature hurls us into the world a living contradiction to that rash statement of the Declaration of Independence.
It is only since I have lived in England that I have recognised the value of the lesser patriotism. Without being in any way disloyal to my own country, I must confess that I am conscious of quite new emotions in this at least partial possession of a king. One feels a critical sense of ownership. The Houses of Parliament belong to me, and Westminster Abbey, and the Horse Guards. A whole troop of these clattered past me in Oxford Street to-day, and, though they didn't know it, I reviewed them from the top of a 'bus. I own the sentries before Buckingham Palace, and I take a personal interest in the new gilding of the great railings, for so much gilding must impress visiting royalities, and visiting royalities ought to be impressed!
Now our American Government not only declines to impress foreigners, but takes unnecessary pains to remind us that Benjamin Franklin appeared in homespun and wollen stockings at the Court of France. Times have changed since then, and though we have discarded wollen stockings in our intercourse with foreign Courts, our republic, in her consistent encouragement of an out-of-date Spartan simplicity, leaves her ambassadors to pay her legitimate little bills themselves, with the result that she limits her choice of representatives to men who are not only distinguished, but also rich enough to pay the heavy and necessary expenses of their great position, which should by right be covered by an adequate salary.
It is not that our Government is impecunious; it is only pennywise. Now for the first time in our history America has an embassy in London worthy of her greatness, thanks not to our Government, but to the princely munificence of her new Ambassador. Perhaps he will never know the impetus he has given to the lesser patriotism, nor with what innocent pride we have contemplated his residence from every point of view, and with what patriotic rapture we watched the erection of that splendid marquee destined for the welcome of his fellow-countrymen.
For the first time I realised that this wasourembassy andourmarquee, and I was proud of my country. These were the outward and visible sign of our great prosperity. Perhaps our Ambassador thinks he is the temporary owner of this stately splendour. It is a pardonable mistake, but the fact is we are the owners, we Americans who have strayed into this crowded and lonely London by way of Cook's tours, and floating palaces, and who are, many of us, homesick for the sight of something "real American."
Last Saturday we celebrated that famous Fourth of July which England is so courteous as to forgive. For the first time we penetrated into our embassy. We were aliens no more, we were, so to speak, on our native heath, we could not be crushed even by those magnificent footmen in powder and plush—our footmen—who, as beseems the footmen of a free and independent people, were quite affable.
How proudly we patriots filed up the marble stairs and stared at the pictures and at each other, and acknowledged with a genuine glow of pride how well we were all dressed. I guess!
"We are a prosperous nation," I exulted, as I had some republican refreshment in the marquee under a roof of green-and-white striped bunting. How good the lemonade tasted! A patriotic lady, with a huge bow of stars and stripes tied in her buttonhole, said enthusiastically, "There is nothing like American lemonade!"
For once one rose superior to the English. One longed to recite to them the Declaration of Independence. I swelled with pride, it was all so well done, and it was my embassy, my marquee, my ices, and my Ambassador. For the first time one revelled in the joy of a worthy possession. For once the English accent was relegated where it belonged—to the background—and we Americans talked unreproved with all those delightful and familiar intonations which eighty millions of people have stamped as classic.
My only other experience of a Fourth of July reception, though there have been many distinguished and hospitable American Ministers since, was years ago. Two of us, urged on by patriotism, chartered a four-wheeler, and were deposited before a modest house, which was so dark inside, compared to the glare outside, that we stumbled up the dim stairs behind other ardent republicans, and groped for the hand of our hostess, who had apparently mislaid her smile early in the day. Then we blinked our way into a dark drawing-room, where a circle of patriots stared coldly at us.
In our search for our Minister we attached ourselves to a little procession that filed into the next room, and we found him talking with delightful affability to an Englishman. To an Englishman, and on this day of all days! To an enemy of that great country which paid him his inadequate salary, while we, his own people, stood meekly about waiting until it should suit him to notice us, and bestow on us that handshake which is the inexpensive entertainment of all republican functions.
First we stood on one foot, and then we stood on the other, and then we coughed—a deprecating, appealing cough—and finally our Minister took a lingering, fond farewell of his Englishman, and then turned to us, with a frost-bitten expression of resignation which did not encourage us to linger. We shook his limp hand, and then we jostled each other into the dining-room.
We were filled with an acute resentment, but far from declining to break bread in his house we decided to take it out of him in refreshments; but the unobtrusive simplicity of the preparations foiled our unworthy designs.
Those were simpler days, and enthusiastic republicans arrived in every variety of attire. Most popular of all was that linen "duster" with which in all its creases the travelling American loved to array himself. Sometimes he wore a coat under it and sometimes he didn't. Those were the days of paper collars and "made-up" ties, and on state occasions a cluster diamond "bosom pin." It was a stifling hot day, and we passed into the small dining-room, where a long table imprisoned three waiters. It was a question of each for himself, and I remember the father of a family clutching a plate of what we Americans call "crackers," and refusing the contents to all but his own offspring.
How we struggled for tea, and what a mercy it was that the waiters were protected from bodily assault by the table! One bestowed on me a tablespoonful of ice cream, densely flavoured with salt. For a moment I hated my country. Republican elbows poked me in every direction, and while I stood helpless in the crush I saw an elderly and stout compatriot pour the tea she had captured into the saucer, and with a placid composure proceed to drink it in that simple way.
"To think of it," a voice cried into my ear in pained and shocked surprise, "and she a relation of Longfellow's!"
Exhausted I found myself in the street in a chaos of frantic republicans, part of whom clamoured to get into the house, and part struggled to get out.
If our great Government would only realise that there is nothing so good for the soul as a thrill of patriotism! It is worth cultivating. We cannot all lay down our lives for our country, but there are lesser acts of loyalty which are of infinite value. It belongs to the lesser patriotism to show other folks that we are just as good as they are, if not a bit better. It is our patriotic duty to wear good clothes, to look prosperous, and to prove to foreigners that the star-spangled banner is quite at home even when floating over a palace. It is really worth while going down Park Lane just to say "Our Embassy!"
When I told the cabman to drive to the American Embassy, and for the first time in history he positively knew the way, I thrilled with patriotic pride. It marked an epoch.
It is curious to observe that even the greatest realists do not venture to bestow eyeglasses on their heroines. It is rather odd too, seeing how many charming women do in real life wear them, nor are they debarred by them from the most dramatic careers and the most poignant emotions. But while the modern novelist has bestowed eyeglasses on everybody else he has not yet had the hardihood to put them on the nose of his heroine. Why?
It is a problem which again shows the unquestionably undeserved and superior position of man, for a novelist does not hesitate to put him behind any kind of glasses, and leave him just as fascinating and dangerous as he was before. Eyeglasses are so much the common lot of humanity these degenerate days that babies are nearly born with them, to judge at least from the tender age of the bespectacled infants one sees trundled past in their perambulators. And there is no doubt that the time will come, if the strain on the hearing increases from the diabolic noises in the streets, that the next generation's hearing will be as much affected as our eyes are now. The result will be that all the world will be using ear-trumpets, and the novelist of the future, the accredited historian of manners, will be obliged, if he is at all accurate, to have his love-sick hero whisper his passion to the heroine through an ear-trumpet. However it is a comfort not to be obliged to solve the riddles of the future.
Still if it is inevitable that the future deaf hero will have to fall in love with a deaf heroine, why should not the present astigmatic hero in novels be permitted to fall in love with a beautiful creature in glasses? He certainly does it often enough in real life. Of course it would not do for a heroine to have a wooden leg, I grant, and yet I have met a hero with a wooden leg, and I am quite sure I know several who have lost an arm; why then should it be required of us poor women to be so perfect? If a man can wear spectacles without forfeiting his position as a hero of romance, I demand the same right for a woman. Why, a man can even be bald and she will love him all the same! Now I ask would the hero love her under the same circumstances? There is no use arguing, for that very fact proves that there are laws for men and laws for women.
The truth is she will love him under every objectionable kind of circumstance, both in real life and in novels. Has not a thrilling romance of recent years produced a hero without legs, and made him all the more hideously captivating to the patron of the circulating library? Now what novel reader would, even under the auspices of so gifted a novelist, take any stock in a heroine similarly afflicted? Yes I fear, though it is neither here nor there, that men also have it their own way in literature.
To be sure there are instances of blind heroines inspiring a passion, and also, I believe, of lame heroines limping poetically through the pages of a novel, as well as burdened with other disabilities which apparently never take away from their charms; but I know of no heroine whom the novelist has endowed with apince-nez. Now why are glasses in literature so incompatible with romance in a woman while they never damage a man?
Why can a man look at the object of his passionate adoration through all the known varieties of glasses and yet not lose for an instant the breathless interest of the most gushing of novel readers? His eyeglasses may even grow dim with manly tears, and the lady readers' own eyes will be blurred with sympathetic moisture. But let the heroine weep behind her glasses and the most inveterate devourer of novels will close the book in revolt. It is no use to describe how the heroine's great brown eyes looked yearningly at the hero behind her glasses, nor how they swam in tears behind those same useful articles, the reader refuses to read, and even if the heroine is only nineteen and bewitchingly beautiful, she is at once divested of any romance.
What a mercy for the novelist in this age of perpetual repetition, of twice told tales, if he might give his heroine a new attribute! One feels sure that if eyeglasses and their variations were permitted they would produce quite a new kind of heroine, to the immense advantage and relief of literature. Of course the novelist has to keep up with the times; it is as imperative for him as for the fashion-books, for it is from him alone that future generations will learn how we lived, dressed and looked, and what were our favourite sufferings. So the novelist cannot of course ignore what is so common as eyeglasses and he has in turn bestowed them on all his characters except his heroines. One can understand his hesitation when one tries oneself to put glasses on the noses of one's own literary pets, and then realises how they war with romance. Put a pair on the nose of the loveliest Rosalind who ever wandered through the enchanted forest of Arden, or let the most pathetic Ophelia look through them at Hamlet with grief-stricken eyes, and I am quite sure that even Shakespeare's poetry would not survive the shock.
But if eyeglasses are tabooed by novelists, what shall we say of spectacles? What gallery would accept a Juliet with spectacles? For a woman in literature to wear spectacles is to put her out of the pale of romance at once. Even in real life spectacles are a problem, but to the heroine of a novel they are impossible. No novelist with any regard for his publisher or his sales would venture to give his heroine gold spectacles. The only ones I remember as the property of a heroine of fiction belonged to the heroine when she repented, and they more than anything else proved the sincerity of her remorse, and these were the famous blue spectacles in "East Lynne" that worked such an amazing transformation upon that erring and repentant lady.
Yes, a heroine can be repentant behind spectacles, but I defy her to be alluring. I was struck by their sobering effect on studying the head of the Venus de Medici decorated with a pair in the window of an inspired optician. They so changed her expression that she might have successfully applied for a position in a board-school.
It is possibly a digression, but I should like to know why opticians and corset-makers look upon the young Augustus and Clytie, who loved Apollo the sun-god, as especially created to exhibit their wares? It seems but a pitiful ending to the career of a Roman Emperor to show the passing multitude how to wear spectacles, or to prove the superior excellence of a certain kind of green shade for weak eyes. And why should Clytie, with her face shyly downbent, as well it may be, be obliged to appear in the newest things in stays, in Great Portland Street? I wonder.
To return to glasses. Perhaps the only thing in glasses on which a rash novelist might venture is the monocle. I have not yet met a feminine monocle in fiction, but we all know its entrancing effect when worn by a man. We even realise its power in real life. It gives a man a kind of moral support and even changes his character. I have seen meek and rather ordinary men stick in a monocle, and it at once gave them that fictitious fascination, that, so to speak, go-to-the-devil impudence which is so irresistible. It is the aid to sight essentially of the upper classes, or of the best imitation, and as such it naturally inspires the confidence of society.
Of course the feminine monocle is not adapted to all costumes, but there is about it a rakishness, a coquetry particularly suited to a riding-habit. The suggestion is quite at the service of any harassed novelist. It may be quite as much a help to sight as spectacles, but, O, the difference! A woman buries her youth behind spectacles, but she can coquet to the very end behind a monocle.
A charming creature used to pass my window every day on horseback. I had a distant vision of a rounded figure in the perfection of a habit, a silk hat at just the right angle and a monocle. I wove romances about her; she was Lady Guy Spanker and all the rest of those mannish and dangerous coquettes of whom I had read. Yesterday we met at a mutual greengrocer's. She was elderly, and she had discarded the monocle for a pair of working eyeglasses with black rims, through which she studied the vegetables with the eye of experience. She also wore a wig, a black wig. I was so aghast that I stared speechlessly at the greengrocer who patiently offered me cabbages at "tuppence" a piece. "It can't be," I said, still staring. "I beg your pardon, Madam," he said, quite offended, "it's the usual price." "It must be the monocle," and I pursued my train of thought aloud. "No," the greengrocer retorted with some impatience, "it's a Savoy."
But it is only the monocle which has that rejuvenating effect. The other day I called on the loveliest woman I know, and who has always seemed to me the picture of exquisite and immortal youth. She looked up from the corner of a couch sumptuous with brilliant cushions. She had been reading, and she laid aside her book and something else. I followed her hand and felt as guilty as if I had been caught eavesdropping. There lay a pair of gold spectacles and I saw a red line across the bridge of her lovely nose. Those wicked spectacles! How they took away the bloom of her youth. To me she will never seem young again, only well-preserved, alas! How tragic to think that even beauty comes to spectacles at last! Now how different it is with men. If they do have to wear spectacles they do it boldly, and not on the sly, and yet they always find some one to love them, so the novelists prove, and they ought to know.
But a heroine with spectacles, that is a different thing. What novelist has the courage for such an innovation? Even realism, which we know usually stops at nothing, does draw the line there.
Now I do ask in all seriousness, are eyeglasses in fiction really so incompatible with romance?
Yesterday as I strolled through this little Hampshire village, I passed a woman with a baby in her arms, followed by a chubby boy of about three, whose little trousers had only just emerged from the petticoat stage. He lingered behind his mother, and drew across his pursed-up lips and his puffed-out red cheeks the instrument called a mouth harmonica, and drank in rapturously his own celestial harmonies.
"Come 'long with your mewsic," his mother remarked briefly over her shoulder. And he came.
I looked smilingly after that young disciple of what may be truly described as the most offensive of the fine arts, and meditated on the poverty of language which describes by the same word the art of Beethoven and the tooting of a penny whistle—at least in the vernacular of the people.
There is, perhaps, no common characteristic more unfortunate than the sheep-like habit human beings have of imitating each other. As infants, the howling of one baby certainly encourages any evilly disposed infant in the neighbourhood to imitation, and a group of roaring youngsters rejoice in their rivalling shrieks.
As we grow older this artless love of noise is of necessity controlled, but human nature must have vent, so by a kind of common consent we give way to our natural exuberance in what, for lack of other description, we are pleased to call "music." Music is the only divine art we are promised in Heaven, and it is certainly the only divine art with which we are tortured on earth.
The nerves of the ear must be the most sensitive of the whole nervous system, for they have it in their power to inflict the most exquisite torture. The silent arts, no matter how outrageously presented, cannot possibly make one quiver in agony, nor set one's teeth on edge with the sharp lash of a discord. Eyes are long-suffering, and they look at what is discordant with indifference, possibly with resignation, and at most with impatience; nor have these silent discords the power to leave the human being distinctly the worse for his experience.
No other art is able to inflict such merciless suffering! Under the name of music we are afflicted with every variety of noise, including the hand organ, the bagpipes, the German band, the man who toots the cornet in the street, the harp man, the lady who has seen better days and who sings before our house in the evening, the active piano-organ invented by a heartless genius, the musical box and all its amazing progenies, the gramophone and the pianola. Not to mention the millions of pianos and the millions of fiddles that never cease being thumped and scratched all the world over night and day. The contemplation of such collective discord is truly appalling.
Unfortunately for us we live in an inventive and imitative age, and one is inclined to think that the devil is the patron saint of inventors, or why has the blameless spinet waxed great and blossomed into a piano? Why should the resources of a modern orchestra be at the disposal of every infant whose mistaken mother plumps it down on the piano-stool and lets it thump the keys to keep it quiet! One would so much rather hear its natural shrieks than that other noise which is supposed to be a harmless substitute! Why music, of all the fine arts, with its power for inflicting untold anguish, should be the most common, passes my understanding.
The printed page is undoubtedly long-suffering, but it is silent. It is of course true that to be an author, nothing is necessary but a sheet of paper and a pencil, but I defy the most energetic author to read his work to ears that refuse to hear. Now with music it is different, one simplycan'tget away from it, because cruel inventions—I do not think I am exaggerating?—have brought its exercise within reach, I will not say of the poor only, for the thumping of the rich and great is equally horrid, but of the mistaken poor.
I do not urge that the infant mind, in the process of being cultivated, should be turned to literature, for it is bad enough already owing to benevolent publishers who, in the praiseworthy desire not to allow any light to be hidden under a bushel, emulate each other in trying to illuminate the world with farthing tallow-dips! It would, indeed, be ghastly to listen to the literary outpourings of every infant one met, and equally ghastly never to be able to flee from the rendering of masters of literature as interpreted by the intellect of three years up. Thank heaven, we are spared this in literature if not in music, but, I ask, if we must have a fine art to trifle with, why not take to painting? Painting issoinoffensive.
It was the English who, before they became so musical, dallied for a while with painting. There was a time, if we may believe those biographers of manners, the novelists, when all England sketched, and so gave vent to all its superabundant emotion in paint. There was no landscape safe from the emotional Englishwoman. Instead of strumming false notes on the hotel piano she went out with a paint-box and sketched the uncomplaining landscape. At any rate the long-suffering landscape made no sound.
It cannot be denied that one suffers less from a bad picture than from a bad anything else, the agony also is short, nor is it necessary in the process of painting to inflict pain. Painting is an exceedingly silent art, and its results are easily disposed of as wedding presents, because the recipient cannot possibly rebel.
There is, also, that delightful alternative of decorating one's house with one's own immortal works. I was recently shown a lovely picture gallery entirely hung with the work of its owner. I emerged from the experience smiling and quite calm. Now what would have been my condition had the good lady insisted on reciting to me eighty of her poems (there were eighty pictures), or, more harrowing still, had she insisted on playing to me eighty compositions of her own, or even eighty compositions of others, with stiff and reluctant hands? For which reason I maintain that painting is the most inoffensive of the arts and deserves to be encouraged.
But seriously, why should every child be taught to play the instrument quite irrespective of its having any talent or taste for music? Why in the world, where martyrdom is usually the price of living, should a select little army of martyrs suffer a double martyrdom? Why draw them by the hairs of their inoffensive heads to the piano-stool and make, as it were, at one fell swoop, two martyrs, the one at the piano and the wretch who, on the other side of the wall, gives the lie to Congreve, who mistakenly declared that "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast"? Had Congreve lived now he would have hesitated to make so rash a statement.
In Congreve's day the piano, the greatest instrument of torture of modern times, had not been evolved. Its ancestor, the spinet, tinkled plaintively away under its breath like a musical mosquito with a cold on its chest, and was—alas, how happily!—within reach of only the few. In those days, when its feeble tinkle was a mere whisper, house-walls were made of such stupendous thickness that not even the turmoil of a modern orchestra in the next room could have penetrated.
But now, in these unhappy days, when every family is obliged to have a piano or be despised, and when in apartment-houses each floor quivers to a piano of its own, the architect and contractor—a terrible combination for evil!—have conspired together to erect walls like tissue paper, behind which the harassed householder cowers, mercilessly exposed to musical scales as practised on an instrument powerful enough to have cast down the walls of Jericho. And here he vainly seeks for a peaceful retreat from the noise of cabs, 'buses, motors, traction-engines, electric trams, and all the other ear-splitting sounds which, apparently, follow in the relentless march of progress.
It is very appalling to consider that at this very moment the children of the entire civilised world are, with few exceptions, engaged in playing false notes on a variety of musical instruments. It is not too much to say that in this respect the uncivilised have a colossal advantage over the civilised.
In a certain familiar oratorio innumerable pages and much time are taken up in an endless reiteration of the words, "All we like sheep." I beg to ask if the worthy sopranos, altos, tenors and the rest, ever did realise the profound truth of that over-repeated and rather monotonous statement? Weareall like sheep! We do what our neighbours do; we think what they think and we wear what they wear. In fact, we are tailor-made inside and out; no, we are worse than tailor-made, we are ready-tailor-made, for we are made by the gross.
If there is a thing the world shudders at and resents it is originality. If a human being cannot be classified as belonging to a certain cut of trousers, coat or waistcoats, let him beware, for he is a misfit human being, and we all know the cheap end of all misfits! It is as embarrassing to have anything obtrusive in one's mental make-up as in one's physical. Happy is he who is on a dead level!
One would like to offer up a meek plea for originality were one not aware how unpopular it would be. To be original is only next worse thing to being a genius. We do resign ourselves to sporadic cases of genius, but a world peopled by genius (for we all know what that is akin to) is more than we could stand. It is about the same with originality. So the next time we sing "All we like sheep," let us consider well the meaning of these inspiring but misunderstood words, and greatly rejoice.
This train of thought is the result of my landlady's little boy, separated from me only by a thin lath partition of a wall, playing five-finger exercises in halting rhythm and with innumerable false notes. The instrument is one in which the flight of years has left a tone like a discontented nutmeg-grater. If the little boy had the legs of a centipede and played his chosen instrument with these instead of two dingy little hands, he could not perpetrate more false notes.
The number of false notes that can be evolved through the medium of eight fingers and two thumbs is simply appalling! The little boy, a pale child in a long pinafore and big white ears, hates his chosen instrument as much as I do, and so we meet on a level of mutual affliction. I loathe hearing him, and he hates his instrument; now, in the name of good common sense, why must he be offered up as a sacrifice?
His mother is a poor woman, and the tinkling cottage piano with the plaited faded-green front represents the chops and many other wholesome things she has not eaten, and what she allows the young lady in third-floor back, who takes her board out in piano lessons, is a serious sacrifice. Now, I ask, what for?
Why is all the world playing an unnecessary piano?
Marriage has a fatal effect on music. For some occult reason as soon as a girl is married, the piano—the grave of so much money and time—retires out of active life, and swathed in "art draperies," burdened by vases, cabinet photographs and imitation "curios," serves less as a musical instrument than a warning. But like all warnings it passes unheeded, for no sooner are the next generation's legs long enough to dangle between the key-board and the pedals, than the echoes awaken to the same old false notes that serve no purpose unless an hour of daily martyrdom over a tear-splashed key-board is an excellent preparation for the trials of life.
Music, as it is taught, is not so much a fine art as a bad habit. Alas, we have got into the habit of learning to play the piano, and the bad habit of playing on the violin is fatally on the increase. Seriously now: why? Because it is considered both uncultivated and quite unfashionable not to be fond of music or to pretend to be. Why? The answer, "All we like sheep."
I know of only one man who has the courage to say that he hates music. It is his misfortune, not his fault, and without doubt there is something wrong about his inner ear. Still, I always wonder why his frank and honest confession is received with a kind of pitying contempt, as if he had writ himself down to be both a brute-beast and a heathen.
Love music, and for some unexplained reason you at once have a profound scorn for all such as do not. My friend who hates music understands and loves both pictures and poetry, and, goodness knows, there are plenty who do not! And yet I have never heard him inveigh against those who love neither. Yes, music may be a divine art, but it is certainly not a charitable art.
Even as long as one can remember, the study of music and the making of musical instruments have been terribly on the increase. Mediocrity, that might do excellent work in other fields, strums away at the piano or scratches away at the violin, or with quavering voice sings those songs which have inspired the poet to write: