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.