The Angel and the Author, and Others

CHAPTER VII

Too much Postcard

The postcard craze is dying out in Germany – the land of its birth – I am told. In Germany they do things thoroughly, or not at all. The German when he took to sending postcards abandoned almost every other pursuit in life. The German tourist never knew where he had been until on reaching home again he asked some friend or relation to allow him to look over the postcards he had sent. Then it was he began to enjoy his trip.

“What a charming old town!” the German tourist would exclaim. “I wish I could have found time while I was there to have gone outside the hotel and have had a look round. Still, it is pleasant to think one has been there.”

“I suppose you did not have much time?” his friend would suggest.

“We did not get there till the evening,” the tourist would explain. “We were busy till dark buying postcards, and then in the morning there was the writing and addressing to be done, and when that was over, and we had had our breakfast, it was time to leave again.”

He would take up another card showing the panorama from a mountain top.

“Sublime! colossal!” he would cry enraptured. “If I had known it was anything like that, I’d have stopped another day and had a look at it.”

It was always worth seeing, the arrival of a party of German tourists in a Schwartzwald village. Leaping from the coach they would surge round the solitary gendarme.

“Where is the postcard shop?” “Tell us – we have only two hours – where do we get postcards?”

The gendarme, scenting Trinkgeld, would head them at the double-quick: stout old gentlemen unaccustomed to the double-quick, stouter Frauen gathering up their skirts with utter disregard to all propriety, slim Fräulein clinging to their beloved would run after him. Nervous pedestrians would fly for safety into doorways, careless loiterers would be swept into the gutter.

In the narrow doorway of the postcard shop trouble would begin. The cries of suffocated women and trampled children, the curses of strong men, would rend the air. The German is a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, but in the hunt for postcards he was a beast. A woman would pounce on a tray of cards, commence selecting, suddenly the tray would be snatched from her. She would burst into tears, and hit the person nearest to her with her umbrella. The cunning and the strong would secure the best cards. The weak and courteous be left with pictures of post offices and railway stations. Torn and dishevelled, the crowd would rush back to the hotel, sweep crockery from the table, and – sucking stumpy pencils – write feverishly. A hurried meal would follow. Then the horses would be put to again, the German tourists would climb back to their places and be driven away, asking of the coachman what the name of the place they had just left might happen to be.

The Postcard as a Family Curse

One presumes that even to the patient German the thing grew tiresome. In the Fliegende Blätter two young clerks were represented discussing the question of summer holidays.

“Where are you going?” asks A of B.

“Nowhere,” answers B.

“Can’t you afford it?” asks the sympathetic A.

“Only been able to save up enough for the postcards,” answers B, gloomily; “no money left for the trip.”

Men and women carried bulky volumes containing the names and addresses of the people to whom they had promised to send cards. Everywhere, through winding forest glade, by silver sea, on mountain pathway, one met with prematurely aged looking tourists muttering as they walked:

“Did I send Aunt Gretchen a postcard from that last village that we stopped at, or did I address two to Cousin Lisa?”

Then, again, maybe, the picture postcard led to disappointment. Uninteresting towns clamoured, as ill-favoured spinsters in a photographic studio, to be made beautiful.

“I want,” says the lady, “a photograph my friends will really like. Some of these second-rate photographers make one look quite plain. I don’t want you to flatter me, if you understand, I merely want something nice.”

The obliging photographer does his best. The nose is carefully toned down, the wart becomes a dimple, her own husband doesn’t know her. The postcard artist has ended by imagining everything as it might have been.

“If it were not for the houses,” says the postcard artist to himself, “this might have been a picturesque old High street of mediæval aspect.”

So he draws a picture of the High street as it might have been. The lover of quaint architecture travels out of his way to see it, and when he finds it and contrasts it with the picture postcard he gets mad. I bought a postcard myself once representing the market place of a certain French town. It seemed to me, looking at the postcard, that I hadn’t really seen France – not yet. I travelled nearly a hundred miles to see that market place. I was careful to arrive on market day and to get there at the right time. I reached the market square and looked at it. Then I asked a gendarme where it was.

He said it was there – that I was in it.

I said, “I don’t mean this one, I want the other one, the picturesque one.”

He said it was the only market square they had. I took the postcard from my pocket.

“Where are all the girls?” I asked him.

“What girls?” he demanded.

The Artist’s Dream

“Why, these girls;” I showed him the postcard, there ought to have been about a hundred of them. There was not a plain one among the lot. Many of them I should have called beautiful. They were selling flowers and fruit, all kinds of fruit – cherries, strawberries, rosy-cheeked apples, luscious grapes – all freshly picked and sparkling with dew. The gendarme said he had never seen any girls – not in this particular square. Referring casually to the blood of saints and martyrs, he said he would like to see a few girls in that town worth looking at. In the square itself sat six motherly old souls round a lamp-post. One of them had a moustache, and was smoking a pipe, but in other respects, I have no doubt, was all a woman should be. Two of them were selling fish. That is they would have sold fish, no doubt, had anyone been there to buy fish. The gaily clad thousands of eager purchasers pictured in the postcard were represented by two workmen in blue blouses talking at a corner, mostly with their fingers; a small boy walking backwards, with the idea apparently of not missing anything behind him, and a yellow dog that sat on the kerb, and had given up all hope – judging from his expression – of anything ever happening again. With the gendarme and myself, these four were the only living creatures in the square. The rest of the market consisted of eggs and a few emaciated fowls hanging from a sort of broom handle.

“And where’s the cathedral?” I asked the gendarme. It was a Gothic structure in the postcard of evident antiquity. He said there had once been a cathedral. It was now a brewery; he pointed it out to me. He said he thought some portion of the original south wall had been retained. He thought the manager of the brewery might be willing to show it to me.

“And the fountain?” I demanded, “and all these doves!”

He said there had been talk of a fountain. He believed the design had already been prepared.

I took the next train back. I do not now travel much out of my way to see the original of the picture postcard. Maybe others have had like experience and the picture postcard as a guide to the Continent has lost its value.

The dealer has fallen back upon the eternal feminine. The postcard collector is confined to girls. Through the kindness of correspondents I possess myself some fifty to a hundred girls, or perhaps it would be more correct to say one girl in fifty to a hundred different hats. I have her in big hats, I have her in small hats, I have her in no hat at all. I have her smiling, and I have her looking as if she had lost her last sixpence. I have her overdressed, I have her decidedly underdressed, but she is much the same girl. Very young men cannot have too many of her, but myself I am getting tired of her. I suppose it is the result of growing old.

Why not the Eternal Male for a change?

Girls of my acquaintance are also beginning to grumble at her. I often think it hard on girls that the artist so neglects the eternal male. Why should there not be portraits of young men in different hats; young men in big hats, young men in little hats, young men smiling archly, young men looking noble. Girls don’t want to decorate their rooms with pictures of other girls, they want rows of young men beaming down upon them.

But possibly I am sinning my mercies. A father hears what young men don’t. The girl in real life is feeling it keenly: the impossible standard set for her by the popular artist.

“Real skirts don’t hang like that,” she grumbles, “it’s not in the nature of skirts. You can’t have feet that size. It isn’t our fault, they are not made. Look at those waists! There would be no room to put anything?”

“Nature, in fashioning woman, has not yet crept up to the artistic ideal. The young man studies the picture on the postcard; on the coloured almanack given away at Christmas by the local grocer; on the advertisement of Jones’ soap, and thinks with discontent of Polly Perkins, who in a natural way is as pretty a girl as can be looked for in this imperfect world. Thus it is that woman has had to take to shorthand and typewriting. Modern woman is being ruined by the artist.

How Women are ruined by Art

Mr. Anstey tells a story of a young barber who fell in love with his own wax model. All day he dreamed of the impossible. She – the young lady of wax-like complexion, with her everlasting expression of dignity combined with amiability. No girl of his acquaintance could compete with her. If I remember rightly he died a bachelor, still dreaming of wax-like perfection. Perhaps it is as well we men are not handicapped to the same extent. If every hoarding, if every picture shop window, if every illustrated journal teemed with illustrations of the ideal young man in perfect fitting trousers that never bagged at the knees! Maybe it would result in our cooking our own breakfasts and making our own beds to the end of our lives.

The novelist and playwright, as it is, have made things difficult enough for us. In books and plays the young man makes love with a flow of language, a wealth of imagery, that must have taken him years to acquire. What does the novel-reading girl think, I wonder, when the real young man proposes to her! He has not called her anything in particular. Possibly he has got as far as suggesting she is a duck or a daisy, or hinting shyly that she is his bee or his honeysuckle: in his excitement he is not quite sure which. In the novel she has been reading the hero has likened the heroine to half the vegetable kingdom. Elementary astronomy has been exhausted in his attempt to describe to her the impression her appearance leaves on him. Bond Street has been sacked in his endeavour to get it clearly home to her what different parts of her are like – her eyes, her teeth, her heart, her hair, her ears. Delicacy alone prevents his extending the catalogue. A Fiji Island lover might possibly go further. We have not yet had the Fiji Island novel. By the time he is through with it she must have a somewhat confused notion of herself – a vague conviction that she is a sort of condensed South Kensington Museum.

Difficulty of living up to the Poster

Poor Angelina must feel dissatisfied with the Edwin of real life. I am not sure that art and fiction have not made life more difficult for us than even it was intended to be. The view from the mountain top is less extensive than represented by the picture postcard. The play, I fear me, does not always come up to the poster. Polly Perkins is pretty enough as girls go; but oh for the young lady of the grocer’s almanack! Poor dear John is very nice and loves us – so he tells us, in his stupid, halting way; but how can we respond when we remember how the man loved in the play! The “artist has fashioned his dream of delight,” and the workaday world by comparison seems tame to us.

CHAPTER VIII

The Lady and the Problem

She is a good woman, the Heroine of the Problem Play, but accidents will happen, and other people were to blame.

Perhaps that is really the Problem: who was responsible for the heroine’s past? Was it her father? She does not say so – not in so many words. That is not her way. It is not for her, the silently-suffering victim of complicated antecedent incidents, to purchase justice for herself by pointing the finger of accusation against him who, whatever his faults may be, was once, at all events, her father. That one fact in his favour she can never forget. Indeed she would not if she could. That one asset, for whatever it may be worth by the time the Day of Judgment arrives, he shall retain. It shall not be taken from him. “After all he was my father.” She admits it, with the accent on the “was.” That he is so no longer, he has only himself to blame. His subsequent behaviour has apparently rendered it necessary for her to sever the relationship.

“I love you,” she has probably said to him, paraphrasing Othello’s speech to Cassio; “it is my duty, and – as by this time you must be aware – it is my keen if occasionally somewhat involved, sense of duty that is the cause of almost all our troubles in this play. You will always remain the object of what I cannot help feeling is misplaced affection on my part, mingled with contempt. But never more be relative of mine.”

Certain it is that but for her father she would never have had a past. Failing anyone else on whom to lay the blame for whatever the lady may have done, we can generally fall back upon the father. He becomes our sheet-anchor, so to speak. There are plays in which at first sight it would almost appear there was nobody to blame – nobody, except the heroine herself. It all seems to happen just because she is no better than she ought to be: clearly, the father’s fault! for ever having had a daughter no better than she ought to be. As the Heroine of a certain Problem Play once put it neatly and succinctly to the old man himself: “It is you parents that make us children what we are.” She had him there. He had not a word to answer for himself, but went off centre, leaving his hat behind him.

Sometimes, however, the father is merely a “Scientist” – which in Stageland is another term for helpless imbecile. In Stageland, if a gentleman has not got to have much brain and you do not know what else to make of him, you let him be a scientist – and then, of course, he is only to blame in a minor degree. If he had not been a scientist – thinking more of his silly old stars or beetles than of his intricate daughter, he might have done something. The heroine does not say precisely what: perhaps have taken her up stairs now and again, while she was still young and susceptible of improvement, and have spanked some sense into her.

The Stage Hero who, for once, had Justice done to him

I remember witnessing long ago, in a country barn, a highly moral play. It was a Problem Play, now I come to think of it. At least, that is, it would have been a Problem Play but that the party with the past happened in this case to be merely a male thing. Stage life presents no problems to the man. The hero of the Problem Play has not got to wonder what to do; he has got to wonder only what the heroine will do next. The hero – he was not exactly the hero; he would have been the hero had he not been hanged in the last act. But for that he was rather a nice young man, full of sentiment and not ashamed of it. From the scaffold he pleaded for leave to embrace his mother just once more before he died. It was a pretty idea. The hangman himself was touched. The necessary leave was granted him. He descended the steps and flung his arms round the sobbing old lady, and – bit off her nose. After that he told her why he had bitten off her nose. It appeared that when he was a boy, he had returned home one evening with a rabbit in his pocket. Instead of putting him across her knee, and working into him the eighth commandment, she had said nothing; but that it seemed to be a fairly useful sort of rabbit, and had sent him out into the garden to pick onions. If she had done her duty by him then, he would not have been now in his present most unsatisfactory position, and she would still have had her nose. The fathers and mothers in the audience applauded, but the children, scenting addition to precedent, looked glum.

Maybe it is something of this kind the heroine is hinting at. Perhaps the Problem has nothing to do with the heroine herself, but with the heroine’s parents: what is the best way of bringing up a daughter who shows the slightest sign of developing a tendency towards a Past? Can it be done by kindness? And, if not, how much?

Occasionally the parents attempt to solve the Problem, so far as they are concerned, by dying young – shortly after the heroine’s birth. No doubt they argue to themselves this is their only chance of avoiding future blame. But they do not get out of it so easily.

“Ah, if I had only had a mother – or even a father!” cries the heroine: one feels how mean it was of them to slip away as they did.

The fact remains, however, that they are dead. One despises them for dying, but beyond that it is difficult to hold them personally responsible for the heroine’s subsequent misdeeds. The argument takes to itself new shape. Is it Fate that is to blame? The lady herself would seem to favour this suggestion. It has always been her fate, she explains, to bring suffering and misery upon those she loves. At first, according to her own account, she rebelled against this cruel Fate – possibly instigated thereto by the people unfortunate enough to be loved by her. But of late she has come to accept this strange destiny of hers with touching resignation. It grieves her, when she thinks of it, that she is unable to imbue those she loves with her own patient spirit. They seem to be a fretful little band.

Considered as a scapegoat, Fate, as compared with the father, has this advantage: it is always about: it cannot slip away and die before the real trouble begins: it cannot even plead a scientific head; it is there all the time. With care one can blame it for most everything. The vexing thing about it is, that it does not mind being blamed. One cannot make Fate feel small and mean. It affords no relief to our harrowed feelings to cry out indignantly to Fate: “look here, what you have done. Look at this sweet and well-proportioned lady, compelled to travel first-class, accompanied by an amount of luggage that must be a perpetual nightmare to her maid, from one fashionable European resort to another; forced to exist on a well-secured income of, apparently, five thousand a year, most of which has to go in clothes; beloved by only the best people in the play; talked about by everybody incessantly to the exclusion of everybody else – all the neighbours interested in her and in nobody else much; all the women envying her; all the men tumbling over one another after her – looks, in spite of all her worries, not a day older than twenty-three; and has discovered a dressmaker never yet known to have been an hour behind her promise! And all your fault, yours, Fate. Will nothing move you to shame?”

She has a way of mislaying her Husband

It brings no satisfaction with it, speaking out one’s mind to Fate. We want to see him before us, the thing of flesh and blood that has brought all this upon her. Was it that early husband – or rather the gentleman she thought was her husband. As a matter of fact, he was a husband. Only he did not happen to be hers. That naturally confused her. “Then who is my husband?” she seems to have said to herself; “I had a husband: I remember it distinctly.”

“Difficult to know them apart from one another,” says the lady with the past, “the way they dress them all alike nowadays. I suppose it does not really matter. They are much the same as one another when you get them home. Doesn’t do to be too fussy.”

She is a careless woman. She is always mislaying that early husband. And she has an unfortunate knack of finding him at the wrong moment. Perhaps that is the Problem: What is a lady to do with a husband for whom she has no further use? If she gives him away he is sure to come back, like the clever dog that is sent in a hamper to the other end of the kingdom, and three days afterwards is found gasping on the doorstep. If she leaves him in the middle of South Africa, with most of the heavy baggage and all the debts, she may reckon it a certainty that on her return from her next honeymoon he will be the first to greet her.

Her surprise at meeting him again is a little unreasonable. She seems to be under the impression that because she has forgotten him, he is for all practical purposes dead.

“Why I forgot all about him,” she seems to be arguing to herself, “seven years ago at least. According to the laws of Nature there ought to be nothing left of him but just his bones.”

She is indignant at finding he is still alive, and lets him know it – tells him he is a beast for turning up at his sister’s party, and pleads to him for one last favour: that he will go away where neither she nor anybody else of any importance will ever see him or hear of him again. That’s all she asks of him. If he make a point of it she will – though her costume is ill adapted to the exercise – go down upon her knees to ask it of him.

He brutally retorts that he doesn’t know where to “get.” The lady travels round a good deal and seems to be in most places. She accepts week-end invitations to the houses of his nearest relatives. She has married his first cousin, and is now getting up a bazaar with the help of his present wife. How he is to avoid her he does not quite see.

Perhaps, by the by, that is really the Problem: where is the early husband to disappear to? Even if every time he saw her coming he were to duck under the table, somebody would be sure to notice it and make remarks. Ought he to take himself out one dark night, tie a brick round his neck, and throw himself into a pond?

What is a Lady to do with a Husband when she has finished with him?

But men are so selfish. The idea does not even occur to him; and the lady herself is too generous to do more than just hint at it.

Maybe it is Society that is to blame. There comes a luminous moment when it is suddenly revealed to the Heroine of the Problem Play that it is Society that is at the bottom of this thing. She has felt all along there was something the matter. Why has she never thought of it before? Here all these years has she been going about blaming her poor old father; her mother for dying too soon; the remarkable circumstances attending her girlhood; that dear old stupid husband she thought was hers; and all the while the really culpable party has been existing unsuspected under her very nose. She clears away the furniture a bit, and tells Society exactly what she thinks of it – she is always good at that, telling people what she thinks of them. Other people’s failings do not escape her, not for long. If Society would only step out for a moment, and look at itself with her eyes, something might be done. If Society, now that the thing has been pointed out to it, has still any lingering desire to live, let it look at her. This, that she is, Society has made her! Let Society have a walk round her, and then go home and reflect.

Could she – herself – have been to blame?

It lifts a load from us, fixing the blame on Society. There were periods in the play when we hardly knew what to think. The scientific father, the dead mother, the early husband! it was difficult to grasp the fact that they alone were to blame. One felt there was something to be said for even them. Ugly thoughts would cross our mind that perhaps the Heroine herself was not altogether irreproachable – that possibly there would have been less Problem, if, thinking a little less about her clothes, yearning a little less to do nothing all day long and be perfectly happy, she had pulled herself together, told herself that the world was not built exclusively for her, and settled down to the existence of an ordinary decent woman.

Looking at the thing all round, that is perhaps the best solution of the Problem: it is Society that is to blame. We had better keep to that.