The Champagne Standard Part 15

One wonders who was the first reviewing misanthrope who called the modern singers "minor poets"? Why should that branch of the writing Art have evoked his particular animosity? Do we say minor historian, minor novelist, minor painter, minor composer? Why should we belittle an artist who may be infinitely greater than all these, and d.a.m.n his art with an adjective? It is not for us to judge if a poet be minor or major. That is usually the business of the future, and there is no prophet among us able to prophesy which of our poets will join the immortals. Thank Heaven, advertising is only a temporary product, and has no influence on immortality.

The misfortune of our age is that the tools for the divine arts have became so cheap and handy. Literature, especially, is at the mercy of every irresponsible infant with ambition and a penny to spare. Why, the snub-nosed board-school youngster down there skipping joyfully along the gutter has a sheet of paper and a lead-pencil, the excellence of which were beyond the imagination of Shakespeare. It is this cheap and fatal luxury which makes such triumphant mediocrity and so little greatness, and it is the fault of the newspapers, the publishers, too much education, and afternoon teas. May they all be forgiven!

The truth is the poets should not be published, nor should the newspapers be permitted to crown the singer with a laurel-wreath still dripping with printers' ink. The poet should be handed down as was old Homer and sung in the market place; if then in the future there is enough of him left to be considered at all, let him then be considered seriously, but let him not, O let him not, do it for himself prematurely, for fear. Remember the famous and cla.s.sic tragedy of Humpty Dumpty who sat on a wall.

Once I came upon an editor--a great editor!--who in a moment of frenzy was sincere. I was looking respectfully at that tomb of fame, his wastepaper basket.

"Did you pa.s.s a fellow going down?" and he threw a scowl after the departed one. "That is Jones." He really didn't say Jones, but he mentioned a name so famous in literature that the tramcars proclaim it along with the best brands of whiskies, soap, corsets, and sapolio, and it adorns sandwich men in the gutter by the dozens; h.o.a.rdings bellow it forth silently, and the newspapers devote pages to it as if it were the greatest thing in patent medicine.

"I made him," and the editor thumped his sacred desk. "I boomed him and I printed his first confounded rot," and he strode up and down the room with a full head of steam on.

"I've always said it is the advertising that does it, not the stuff one advertises. Proved it, too, and then sat back and watched their heads swell. He is the last. A year ago he sat in that very chair and gurgled obsequious thanks. Last week we invited him to dinner and he forgot to come. To-day he came in just to say if I don't pay him just double the rate I've been giving him he'll take his stuff to the "Rocket," for the "Rocket" editor has made him an offer. And this to me who boomed him and made him out of nothing. O, by Jove!"

"That is only the artistic temperament," I said soothingly.

"Artistic temperament! There is no such thing. It's only another name for d----d bad manners and a swelled head."

I was greatly interested in this artless definition of the artistic temperament, and I went off deeply pondering as to what const.i.tutes a swelled head.

Now swelled head and taking yourself seriously are much the same, only that swelled heads are common in all grades of society. I once had a butcher who had it, being convinced that he was most beautiful to look upon. He used to put a great deal of his stock-in-trade on his curling brown locks. He was not a bit proud of the inside of his head, to do him justice, but he was so absolutely sure of the effect of his shiny hair, his big black moustache, his red cheeks and his round brown eyes.

He was a very happy man. Now you may take yourself seriously, but in a crevice of your mind you can still have the ghost of a doubt. But a swelled head never has a doubt. I have been told by those who have had an opportunity of studying, that swelled heads are not uncommon among shop-walkers, literary people, butlers and members of Parliament, and that musicians even are not all as great as they think they are. The last fiddler I had the joy of hearing scratched with so much temperament and so out of tune! What a mercy it is that so many people do not know a false note when they hear it!

It has even been whispered that some painters who paint very great pictures (in size) are really not so wonderful as they think they are.

But if anyone is excusable for a too benevolent opinion of himself it is surely a painter who stands before an acre of canvas, and squeezes a thousand dear little tubes, and daubs away and has the result hung on the line. Then we go to the private view, turn our backs on it and say, "Isn't it sublime--did you ever!" Ah, me, it is no use being modest in this world!

Take yourself seriously, and clap on a swelled head and you will impress all such as have time to attend to you. Have we not come across the pretty third-rate actress who puts on the airs of the great, and refers to her wooden impersonations as "Art"? O art, art, what sins have been committed in thy name! Have we not met the pet of the papers, the celebrated lady novelist? How did she get her exalted position? Goodness knows! She sweeps through society with superb a.s.surance, and she is really so rude at afternoon teas that that alone proves how great she is; she only relents when she meets editors and reviewers. She coos at them, and well she may for she is crowned with the laurel-wreath of the best up-to-date advertising.

Once I met a little politician who thought he was a statesman. A rare instance of course. Circ.u.mstances made me helpless, so to speak, and so he inflicted on me all the speeches he did not make in the "House." He gave me to understand that the Chancellor of the Exchequer consulted him on all intricate matters of finance; that he was in fact the power behind the throne. Now the truth was, and he knew it, and I knew it, that his serious work consisted in paying those little tributes his const.i.tuency demanded, to subscribe bravely to drinking fountains, almshouses, and fairs--the kind with the merry-go-rounds--and, in his enlightened patriotism, to open bazaars, and also to dance for the good of his party. His supreme glory was to write M.P. after his name, which made him much sought after at innocent dinner-parties that aspired to shine with reflected glory. On such occasions he was often in great form and delivered extracts from those tremendous speeches he never made. But everybody was deeply impressed and it was rumoured in the suburbs that he would certainly be in the next Cabinet.

If you have a grain of humour you can't take yourself too seriously, for then you do realise how desperately unimportant you are. The very greatest are unimportant; what then about the little bits of ones who const.i.tute the huge majority? Was there ever anyone in the world who was ever missed except by one or two, and that not because he was great or even necessary, but only because he was beloved by some longing, aching heart? The waters of oblivion settle over a memory as quickly as over a puddle which is disturbed by a pebble thrown by a careless hand. Alas!

Perhaps the most tremendous instance of the unimportance of the greatest was Bismarck's discharge by his Emperor, with no more ceremony, indeed less, than a housewife employs to discharge her cook. The greatest man of his time, the creator of an empire, the inspirer of a nation! To whom in his very lifetime statues were erected, north, south, east and west.

To whom the ardent hearts of the young went forth in adoration; whose possible death could only be reckoned on as a misfortune that would leave the country in chaos, when that iron hand should drop the reins.

Then one memorable day he dropped the reins, not because death was greater than he, but simply because a young, untried man wished to do the driving himself. So he was discharged. What happened? Nothing. Since then who can believe in the importance of anyone? If the world can do perfectly well without such a giant, why take yourselves so seriously, you little second-rate people who have written a little book that is dead as a door nail in three months, you little second-rate spouters of talk on the stage, forgotten as soon as the light is turned out, you little second-rate musicians with your long hair, your bad nerves and your greed for adulation! Why, there have been greater folks than all of you put together, and they have been forgotten as a summer breeze is forgotten. Then what about you? Why even shop-walkers, and butlers and parlour maids, though undoubtedly very important, should think of Bismarck and not be so dreadfully haughty!

Then, too, how many people think themselves great who are only lucky, vulgarly lucky. There is that solemn puffed-up one! Would he be so important if he had not married a rich wife who can pay the bills? And there is that other dull piece of prosperity who owes all his success to his pretty and clever wife who knows just how to wheedle good things out of the really great. And yet how seriously he takes himself! There is the lucky parson who thinks he attracts such shoals of worshippers to G.o.d's house. Why it is not he at all, but a royal princess who has strayed in and whom the dear, unworldly sheep are following. Yet how seriously he takes his reverend self!

There is the great medical light, who, while curing an eminent personage of nothing in particular, interspersed a few racy anecdotes that made him roar. No wonder his waiting-room overflows, and that he is called in consultation all over the land. He is bound to be knighted. Why?

Goodness knows.

There is the popular M.P. "I am the great I am," he all but says as he comes in. Once he was a modest man with modest friends, now he thinks he is a great man, and he wisely turns his back on his modest friends because he realises that he can serve his country best in the higher social circles. The first time I ever saw a real live M.P. was in America, and I held my breath I was so impressed.

We were even stirred by an Englishman who came over and who only aspired to be an M.P. He talked of nothing but himself and his political views, and he used to point out the majesty of his own intellect. That was possibly the result of the American atmosphere; it is rather given to that! He is not yet an M.P., and over here he has lucid intervals of modesty. In a fit of humility a real M.P. once confessed to me that it would answer all practical purposes if he sent his footman to that magnificent building on the Thames, where the English legislator covers his gigantic intellect with that silk hat, which represents nothing if not perfect propriety.

One curious phase of taking ourselves so seriously is the enormous increased importance of the Interesting. Society bristles with the Interesting. Sometimes one wonders where the uninteresting go? Modern society demands that you should be something or do something or say something, or at least pretend to. You elbow your way through the other struggling mediocrities, and behold you arrive and that proves that you are interesting, whereupon you are invited to luncheon and dinner and things to meet the other Interestings. Now I ask, as one perplexed, are you ever invited to meet the thoroughly uninteresting? And yet don't the uninteresting want to meet people and eat things? Of course they do, but the world does not want them at any price!

Is there, perhaps, a dreary corner of the earth where the uninteresting, one is not invited to meet, come together, and from this modest refuge wistfully watch the Interesting asked out to breakfast and other revels?

But, really, have we the courage these days to invite anybody without asking an "interesting" person to meet them? Have we the moral courage to invite anyone to meet only--oneself? Of course a stray uninteresting may wander into the haunts of the other kind. One does sometimes meet a human being at a terribly intellectual afternoon tea or at a serious dinner party, whose conversation does not absolutely thrill one's pulses.

Fortunately the world's standard of what is interesting varies, or there would be an appalling monotony in its circles, but it is understood that you must be celebrated, or notorious, or well advertised or cheeky and even dishonest, if it is on a magnificent scale. At any rate you must take yourself seriously and get a swelled head.

Each Interesting carries about with him his own barrel organ on which he grinds out his little tune, not always so great a tune as he honestly thinks, but still it is his very own. You may have all the virtues enumerated in the dictionary, but if you have not done something, or said something, or been something, and if you are only a well-meaning, law-abiding citizen and regularly pay your bills, a humdrum virtue which the hard-up Interesting occasionally ignores, then you had better give up and retire to the dull society to which you belong.

In studying the Interesting, one discovers that they do not always carry their credentials on the outside. Sometimes, it is humiliating to confess it, one nearly mistakes them for the other kind; still, it is always an honour to sit on the outskirts of a Great Mind, and humbly wonder in what forgotten corner genius has so triumphantly hidden itself. However, an uninteresting celebrity is quite a different affair from the uninteresting pure and simple, who are never asked to meet anybody and certainly not to meals.

There was once, so we were taught at school, an age of stone and an age of iron. After much study I have decided that we have arrived at the age of Lions. Not the four-legged, dangerous kind, but the two-legged ones who drink tea and nibble biscuits. The a.n.a.logy is even more solemnly striking for they both have enormous heads. The lion is evolved from the Interesting. First you have to be interesting, and then you must practise roaring, modestly at first, but not too modestly; then louder and louder until society simply can't ignore you, you make so much noise, and so you become a lion, and in these days it must be a very pleasant business to be a lion, the only drawback being that the supply rather exceeds the demand. However, no matter how excellent a thing is, there is sure to be some trifling drawback.

Even when you take yourself seriously the effect you produce if not irritating is often so delightfully funny! But one ought to be thankful for that, for the world owes a debt of grat.i.tude even to the unconscious humourist. It is so much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh! We are all little ready-made tragedians; do we not come into the world with a cry? I feel convinced that it is easier to write a great tragedy than a great comedy. Life's keynote is minor. We can turn on tears at short notice, but humour is not every man's province.

"Our customers," the courteous attendant of a circulating library said to me recently, "don't like funny books and so we don't stock them."

Perhaps for this reason the discouraged humourist in search of amus.e.m.e.nt, seizes rejoicing on those refreshing people who take themselves seriously. It adds indeed the last epicurean touch to his delight that they don't know how awfully funny they are.

"_Soft-Soap_"

It takes a great deal of heroism to tell an unpleasant truth, but it takes a great deal more of heroism to hear it. The privilege of telling an unpleasant truth is strictly confined to one's familiar friends, one's family, or one's enemies, which is probably the reason that no one is a hero to any of these, and that he sometimes likes his familiar friends and his family quite as much as he does his enemies. It is, after all, an exceptional person who has a great opinion of himself; even the most conceited has, I feel sure, his quarter hours when he sits in sackcloth and ashes and contemplates his failures. No one rises superior to a compliment, and without such and other little amenities of life how the world's machinery would creak! I admire all those Spartan souls who declare that they love the truth, and it is humiliating to confess that I don't love the truth unless it is a pleasant one.

Everybody is, I do believe, his own best critic, and there is hardly any thing unpleasant your family can tell you about yourself that you have not known long before; but it is an added humiliation to see yourself betrayed to the world. For example, it is the exception for the creator of any work which is in reality poor, but which the voice of the people acclaims (and the people are about the poorest critics going), if he does not realise down in his doubting heart, that his stuff is poor stuff. It is that which keeps the human balance, or some of our greatest ones, or rather our noisiest ones, would be inflated to the danger-point. There is a right standard in every heart, even if warped by circ.u.mstances, and the excuse, "He knew no better," hardly holds good out of a lunatic asylum.

It is always our humourists who have tackled truth, and who have shown with a laugh that touches perilously near a sob (a little way of humourists!) that a standard of pure unvarnished truth has never been popular in this erring world; at least not since some of out forefathers scalped their brother forefathers, and the ladies and gentlemen who dwelt in caves took their afternoon tea in the shape of a cosy nibble at the bones of their foes. It is not the bones of our foes we nibble in these enlightened days!

It was an immortal humourist who, having discovered that truth is not what we want,--unless like a pill in sugar,--provided the world with a subst.i.tute--soft-soap. It is really soft-soap which makes social intercourse so delightfully easy, and we therefore owe our humorous benefactor a heavy debt of grat.i.tude.

Nothing is, however, perfect, and if this blessed discovery has one little defect, it is that, like patent medicine, the more you swallow the more you want; so it occasionally happens that the great ones of this world have finally to have it administered in buckets where once they were grateful for only a sip.

The philosophic mind will discover that society can be quite simply divided into two cla.s.ses,--one soft-soaps and the other permits itself to be soft-soaped. The humourist who invented the precious subst.i.tute for truth hardly realised the value of what he did; for had he taken out a patent he would have rivalled in wealth the great Rockefeller himself, who has been so divinely blessed in that other oily article--petroleum.

When soft-soap was invented it was constructed out of the best materials of insincerity, surface enthusiasm, a touch sometimes of covert satire (or it would spoil), and just enough truth to mix the ingredients and make them digest. This is administered in all grades of society with the greatest success, and of it can be said, in the pathetic words of an American advertis.e.m.e.nt of a preparation of medicine not usually popular with childhood, castor-oil, "Even children cry for it."

Of the two cla.s.ses, those who administer and those who swallow this pleasant mixture, it is needless to say that in the lower cla.s.s are those who administer soft-soap. If in course of time the soft-soaper proves that he is possessed of transcendent abilities he graduates after hard, hard struggles, resigns his bucket, and proceeds to enjoy the superior privilege of being soft-soaped in turn; and the curious fact is that, after having administered it so long, when he comes to taste it himself he does not recognise the familiar article at all. Of course there are some soft-soapers who never advance and never aspire.

As one strolls observingly through society, one discovers it is some people's mission in life to draw other people out. It is rare to find two persons talking together who give and take with equal facility, who contribute equally to the charm and brightness of the occasion. One of the two is sure to lead the other into those conversational oases where he loves to gambol--and very hard work it sometimes is!

Alas! the pioneers who soft-soap are usually women. You dear and uncomplaining s.e.x, how hard you have to work to be called charming by that other s.e.x that so greedily laps up the invention of the great humourist! From artisans of soft-soap you have indeed become artists. To you we owe those delightful mult.i.tudes of spoilt men who sulk or sniff or shoulder their pretentious way through society. Yes, your product! If society consisted only of men it would be quite sincere, even if rather brutal, and as for soft-soap, it wouldn't exist. It would be interesting to know the s.e.x of that historical serpent in the Garden of Eden!

A man, if he ever soft-soaps another man, does it for a definite object and hardly realises his own insincerity, but a woman--well, it is a woman's religion to make a man think her charming, and I am afraid--desperately afraid--that she does this most successfully when she makes him talk about himself. Women, poor things, are like the heathen: first they create an idol, sometimes out of very common clay it is to be feared, and then they proceed to worship it.

How often does a man turn over in his mind what subject of conversation the woman will talk about best with whom accident has thrown him, especially if she be plain and shy? Now, what about women, on the other hand? Why, a man must be a great idiot indeed if he does not find some woman to coo little nothings at him; to lead him tenderly out of narrow, monosyllabic paths into the glowing b.u.t.tercup and dandelion fields of conversation where he can gambol joyfully. "I came out strong, by Jove!" he congratulates himself proudly as they separate, and the goose never realises, as he supports himself against his usual wall and stares vacantly at the crowd, that the beguiling young thing, who smiled up at him like a rising sun, laboured with him with an energy which would have appalled a coal-heaver. Now, would a man fatigue himself as much to chatter with an empty-headed unattractive girl? Hand on heart, gentlemen, confess!

It was Thackeray who said that any woman not disfigured with a hump might marry any man. It is presumption to contradict the immortal master, but I don't believe it. Rather do I believe the words of wisdom of our old family cook. She finished a dissertation on matrimony with the following profound reflections:--

"Women ain't so particular as men. There ain't a man but'll find some woman to have him! If every woman could get a man there wouldn't be so many old maids. Down to our village there was a man who hadn't any arms or legs, but goodness me! even he got a wife. She came to call with him one day, and she'd fixed up a soap-box on wheels and was drawing him along as comfy as you please, and she never made a cent out of him, for he wa'ant a freak. Now I'd just like to see a man up and do that for a woman, I guess! No, women ain't so particular."

Surely it holds good in society. If we don't drag around a gentleman without the usual complement of arms and legs, we more often than not support a gentleman without brains or manners, and we make him more insufferable than he naturally is by giving him a false valuation, in which he proceeds at once to believe, because, if there is one thing the stupidest man can do, it is, he can get conceited. Indeed the weaker s.e.x has much to answer for, for she has created the twentieth century man, who would be a dear if only the women would leave him alone.