WORLD REFORMERS—AND DUSTERS
THOUGH often entranced by that brilliant group of cosmic problem-solvers—Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Chesterton, and others—I insist on my personal irresponsibility for the state of Mankind as a whole. These men are always nursing civilization. They regard it as a sort of potted plant which they fear to find frost-bitten of a morning. This is especially clear in the latest writings of Mr. H. G. Wells, who would tidy up the whole world at once. At one swoop he would remove the shirts from our clothes-lines and the errors from our minds. The world is too large for his feather duster; he had thought to find it a smaller planet that he might have kept at least half-way clean. Now see what he has on his hands—everything in a mess, Africa backward, China careless, the sex relation by no means straightened out, socialism, imperialism, industrialism, planless progressivism littering up things, and nobody caring a rap—at times it seems to the good housewifely soul almost too much for one person to manage. And then that infernal human diversity—slow minds, stupid minds, minds made up too soon, or not at all, closed minds, tough minds, tender minds—what’s to be done with them? He burns to do something. At least he says he does.
In one of his books he describes himself in fancy as going about the country and, with the keenest joy, spearing Anglican bishops. Though I am myself a stranger to the sport, I believe the pleasure of spearing bishops is exaggerated. For once begun it must lead logically to a daily drudgery of slaughter among the great crowds of folks who are not intellectually independent or morally daring—lead, in short, to the massacre of those who are not particularly exciting, a large task and tedious.
I wonder if we commonplace persons are not right after all in a certain instinct of distrust toward these gifted writers. We believe implicitly in their fancies and not at all in their facts. We believe in the world they have invented and not in the world they have observed; and we distrust them utterly as world-pushers. The signs are plain—terribly plain sometimes—that it is when they have the smallest notions that they say their largest things.
The Senior Wrangler.
LADY CLARA VERE DE VERE: NEW STYLE
(REFORMER, UPLIFTER, SOCIAL SERVICER AND BELIEVER IN BETTERMENT)
BY ANNE O’HAGAN
WITH A PICTURE BY E. L. BLUMENSCHEIN
LADY CLARA: NEW STYLE
LADY CLARA VERE DE VERE,
Though, ’neath the Tennysonian frown,
You’ve ceased to play at hearts, what need
For throwing all the graces down?
The quip, the wile, the wingèd smile,
Must these in truth be quite retired,
Reformer of a thousand ills,
O lady with a mission fired?
Lady Clara Vere de Vere,
You cause a tumult in my head.
I do not know how many quarts
Of coal-tar every year are fed
In store-made pies, or what dread dyes
Give that bright emerald to canned peas.
I do not know the cure for graft,
Or juvenile delinquencies;
And, oh, my very soul is sick
Of these and topics like to these!
Lady Clara Vere de Vere,
On suffragism you’ve a view.
You have one on the cost of war,
And what the working-girl should do.
Your uplift crusade comprehends
The stage, the mart, the funeral bier;
Your dinner-table talk has grown
Statistical and very drear.
Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere,
By yon blue heavens above us bent,
The gardener Adam and his wife
Yawn at your plans for betterment.
We never see such sad ennui
Among our hapless human brood
As when the ladies’ motto runs:
“’Tis fashionable to do good.”
· · · · · · ·
Clara, Clara Vere de Vere,
If time hangs heavy on your hands,
Are there no suitors at your gates,
No squires of dames about your lands?
Go, play the game of hearts again,
Coquette, and sparkle, languish, glow;
Ask pardon of the folk you’ve bored,
And let the thousand causes go!
Drawn by Reginald Birch
“THE PET HAS BECOME OF MATERIAL AID TO HIM IN HIS WALL STREET WORK”