PART II.
THE WITTY GIRL.
"She is pretty to walk with,
And witty to talk with,
And pleasant, too, to think on."
First let us understand each other.
By the witty girl is not here meant the girl—if such a girl exists—whose conversation has the high brilliancy which characterises the conversation of certain men and women.
No. The thing here meant is nothing more than the common domestic wit-snapper, generally, say her enemies, more of a snapper than a wit, concerning which statement it is perhaps not unpermissible to say that he who makes it shows himself to be less a wit than a snapper.
While all but invariably of a character that loses much by the process of retailing, the wit of the girl here in view will sometimes bear being brought to book. The samples of it given in this paper are all authentic and heretofore unpublished. They do not, perhaps, reach a high standard of excellence, but they who know girls will concede that they are good girl-wit of the middle order.
Take a case like this: "My name is May. I feel I am reaching the age when I should be called Hawthorn."
Or take this: "Your mother will miss you when you marry."
"No—then she'll 'Mrs.' me."
Such jests are the bric-à-brac of home conversation, and make it pretty.
He who listens to the talk between girls and their brothers will sometimes hear a thing worth noting, in compensation for the many things not worth noting which—if the truth is to be told—he will also hear.
The following does not show young Ethel at her best, but it also does not show her at her worst.
"D'you know, Jim," she said, "that two-year-old babies can marry on Jupiter?"
"Don't talk bosh, Ethel!"
"But they can. It's this way. A year on Jupiter is eleven years and ten months of our time, so the two-year-old babies are grown up. Ee—you didn't know that!"
A runaway match on Jupiter the bride being under age
Jim said nothing. But when young Ethel exploited her astronomy with Bob, she found her overmatch. This is precisely what was said by them—
Bob: "One can hear your voice ten miles off, Ethel."
Y. E.: "Make it nine, Bob?"
Bob: "Why?"
Y. E.: "Nine miles is the greatest distance at which thunder can be heard."
Bob: "TIT-BITS."
The fact is that young Ethel is less an astronomer than a student of current periodical literature. What matters it, after all, however, whence she gleans her general information, if her reading enables her to say—as I once heard her say—with veritable wit, to a girl who was wearing a primrose brooch—
"Blossom and leaves of the primrose are —— Radical."
There are funny men in Parliament who have never said anything much more funny than that.
In her captious mood the witty girl is very terrible. A North Briton has been thus described by her: "A big, lumpy, pale-faced, red-haired, freckled Scotchman," and it was a witty, but captious, girl who said of a certain pianist, a concert given by whom she had attended, "His feet obscured the platform."
A pianist's great feet
The literary appreciations of the witty girl are few. She is apt, in appraising poets, to take them at their weakest rather than at their strongest. She judges Wordsworth by his "Idiot Boy," and she would be capable of passing sentence on Cowper as having cut in his door three holes of different sizes for his tom-cat, his tabby cat and his kitten.
She thinks him a victim of heredity
Wordsworth's Idiot Boy
Yet another tendency of the witty girl which must be strongly deprecated, is to harp on phrases which may have once had a faintly comical ring, but which have long lost it; such phrases as, "Where does this live?" applied to inanimate objects, or, "Hang on to this," used in reference to objects held in the hand. It would be interesting to know who first evolved these mild witticisms destined to win such enduring popularity.
The singular phraseology of girls not minded to confine themselves to English of the academies has of late been made the subject of much comment. There follow here some specimens of it in which the facetious was aimed at, and in some cases not unsuccessfully.
Wordsworth was, by a Scotch Annie, described as a "baa-lamby;" a Welsh Beatrice described "a most wizened farewell concert;" her impressions of Holland were summed up by an English Madge in the words "flobby bread and flobby wall-paper," and an Irish Constance, writing to her home in Ireland from a school in France attended by her with her sister Ethel, penned this anomalous statement, "We are here six Irish, counting Ethel, and six English, counting me."
Wordsworth looking sheepish
Both these girls were the daughters of an Irishman and an Englishwoman. She who was accounted of the six English had been born in her mother's country, while she who was accounted of the six Irish had been born in that of her father. In drawing the fine line of distinction which made her English and her sister Irish, the young maid Constance aimed not at precision but at wit, and, as behoved her father's daughter, she did not aim at wit in vain. Her letter was read with laughter.
In almost all girls' letters there is a marked quality of phrasing which, even when not witty, is mirth-provoking. Take the following:
"Papa has just come back from London, and has brought me a very thin umbrella, with a steel stick running through it, just simply frightfully elegant; also a pair of shoes, fawn antelope, embroidered with gold beads. You needn't sniff."
Sniff, indeed? Perish the thought!
"Tinpot" used as an adjective does not spoil the following curious bit of description penned by a London girl during a stay in Ryde:
"I am enjoying myself very much in a quiet, non-dissipated, tinpot way—walking on the sea-wall and the pier, reading Carlyle and Marion Crawford, and making little vests for Kilburn orphans."
A dissipated tinpot
Only a girl could have written that, and of its kind it is admirable.
An idea largely held by girls, in common with women and men who have a witty tendency, is that appreciation is a form of ignorance. It was, be it here called to remembrance, to correct this notion, that Wordsworth wrote, "True knowledge leads to love," and that Browning wrote, "Admiration grows as knowledge grows."
Appreciation a form of ignorance
It is doubtless the circumstance that unkindness is so often confounded with wit that has led to the fact that of all good gifts the good gift of wit is the one held in least liking by the majority of persons. The truth would seem to be that, with wit, as with everything else not intrinsically bad, the thing of main importance is that it be handled carefully. Like gunpowder, it has its uses to him who knows how to avail himself of them. He who does not, would do well to do what certain savages once did. Having come into the possession of a bag of gunpowder, they carefully preserved it till the spring, when they planted it as they did their corn. It did not burst forth when the corn burst forth; so much the better for the sowers. That gunpowder was very safely deposited, and much wit might with equal advantage be held over till the next planting season.
PURE HONEY
BEST BALM
Another thing. The wit-snapper should always carry about with him a little balm and a little honey. That was a good sword that Cambuscan had; it could heal the wounds it gave. Only the wit-snapper who carries a little balm and a little honey will be as well equipped as was the knight whose story Chaucer "left half-told."
A further point which calls for passing comment is this. Wit and merriment do not always go hand in hand; indeed, they are often sundered wide. Thus, of the world's famous humorists, it is well known that they were mostly melancholy at the home-fireside. Something very similar holds good in the case of girls—and there are many such—who, while witty in society, are deplorably glum in the family circle, in this unlike a girl of girls whom her father called "Minnehaha"—laughing water—so merry was she in her home, beyond which her influence was to be shed so far that she is known to-day from Indus to the Pole as the friend of Indian women.
Nell Witty
If they be right who consider, in opposition to Juliet, that something is in a name, then those among us who hold that such a name as Juliet tends to annihilate wit in the possessor of it are not mere fancy-mongers, and we are entitled to a courteous hearing when we submit that on the other hand the name Nelly, and still more the variant of it by which it becomes Nell, almost announces the owner of it to be a wit. This circumstance is quite independent of the fact that Scott has said, in just so many words, in reference to a particular case, "Mistress Nelly, wit she has," and if any explanation of it may be hazarded, the one which will probably satisfy most is that persons named Nelly or Nell—and the number of such is, happily, legion—are hardly ever found lacking in whimsicality. In the few cases in which they are deficient in this quality they should be called—and, as a matter of fact, they are generally called—Nella, the name Nella being that form of Nelly or Nell by which all the sparkle is taken out of it.
In conclusion, a word on wits under their physiognomical aspect. That a certain type of face in general denotes a witty person may be allowed.
"The slightly tossed nose," says one of Thomas Moore's biographers, "confirmed the fun of the expression."
"The slightly tossed nose" for what the French call "nez retroussé" is happy wording. Girl-readers of this who have "tossed" noses are, by their faces, wits. Let this console them, if it so hap that they want consolation. On the other part, girls with short upper lips have a part of beauty, but lack a part of wit. Wherefore, if they be vain, let there be a curb put on their vanity, and let girls with long upper lips hold up their heads, for a long upper lip denotes wit.