And yet what were these but flappers, a word which no longer needs inverted commas? It is a typically English product, that quintessence of pertness and levity, that preposterous imitation and caricature of womanhood, that graceless state of pigtaildom, that compound of vanity, abandon, chatter and chocolates, that innocent rakishness, that perverse chastity, that boundless but unconcentrated desire, that rapt satisfaction with the present, that gorgeous hopefulness of the future, that delight to the eye, that distress to the ear; those rosebuds in boys’ buttonholes, those thorns in mothers’ sides, those blankets of intelligent conversation, those pitchers with capacious ears, those graceful runners and hideous walkers, those creatures of soft cheeks, shy souls and shameless hearts, the English flappers. The rise of this phenomenon to a precocious but perfectly definite position in society has been extremely rapid. Half of the present generation in England can remember when flappers were not, and there is no sign in previous history that they were ever intended to be. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance women became wives so early that there was no time for flapperdom, yet any flapper of to-day has more independence than the wife of many a knight who flaunted on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The Puritans did not encourage precocity in young women, and as for the Merry Monarch, there is no record that he paid attentions to ladies who were not yet out. The formal eighteenth century kept young ladies very much “in” till they were married, and this perhaps over-repressive attitude continued well into the Victorian age. The flapper, it must be remembered, is not merely a young woman; if she were no more, she would find her parallel in many a heroine of history or fiction. She is more than young, she is immature: she trades upon her immaturity, using it as a temptation, a protection and an excuse. Her hair is down and her skirts are up—though not much more up to-day, I fear, than those of her aunts—and her imitations of maturity are more in the domain of conduct than of dress or deportment. Until the other day this cheerful being did not exist. Who can imagine Miss Bennet or Emma Woodhouse as flappers? What flapper entered the ken of Dickens or Thackeray or George Meredith, except as a monstrosity? Even Henry James was too early for the flapper, with all his tremendous apparatus of modernity. He touched on some problems of flapperdom in “The Awkward Age” it is true, but the unfortunate Nanda was very much “out” when she began so disconcertingly to complicate the existence of her not too admirable mother. No, the flapper suddenly burst upon an amazed nineteenth century at the moment of its exit in an odour of decadence and Yellow Bookery—how Maudle and Postlethwaite would have hated her!—and rode in triumphantly on the first wave-crest of the twentieth century, a callow Venus with her hands on her hips and her tongue in her cheek.
At present the flapper is English entirely, except in so far as she is also American, and of her mode of existence in that mighty country in which the pretensions of all the female sex are allowed to be infinite and where Ella Wheeler Willcox played Corinna in her teens I am not competent to speak. At what age the mantle of bright omnipotence is allowed to be put on with the petticoat is hidden from me. At all events the English flapper is alone in Europe. In Germany, I imagine, her counterpart is still the unwieldy “Backfisch,” with her plait of coarse light hair and her bob of salutation. She is not a creature of much account: professors feed her mind with knowledge and she feeds her body with chocolate and cream cakes. In France, the most progressive of all Latin countries, the “jeune fille” is still not emancipated,[2] in spite of Mademoiselle Lenglen, who has won her way in a censorious world with a tennis racquet. Emancipation is, after all, the note of the flapper: she gives no impression of being held in trust. The “jeune fille” is very much held in trust, a trust which even the most predatory Frenchman will respect. If she is allowed at all to fly, it is as a balloon or a kite at the end of string securely tied to her mother’s apron-strings. She is held in trust, of course, for marriage, an affair which in England is becoming more and more haphazard. For us, whatever other qualities marriage may have—and these may be exquisite—it must, at the least, promise a little diversion. The French, on the contrary, are ready, if need be, to follow Mrs Malaprop’s maxim of beginning with a little aversion. To us, according to our natures, marriage may be primarily a sacrament, an enchantment, or a consummation, but to the French it is essentially an alliance, a solemn and stately word which they properly apply to the wedding ring. With this in prospect little kites must not be allowed to fly too high, nor to become unconscious of the string. They may aspire to greater freedom as much as they please, since it will inevitably come; their curiosities about that free state are not discouraged nor are the arts and graces by which they will shape the most triumphant course untrammelled forgotten; and the joys to which they may attain are kept before them to console them for what they must renounce in the probationary stage. The “jeune fille” may not walk the street of a town alone, after a dance she is returned as a matter of course to her mother, she is not taken out by her boys to dine at restaurants and witness musical comedies from stalls; she does not puff about the country on a motor bicycle nor flash about in the car with the chauffeur for sole cavalier; she does not make a habitual fourth at bridge nor join the lads at snooker when Mama has gone to bed. Indeed, so long as there is any alliance in prospect the French mama never goes to bed, speaking figuratively: she is conscious of the kite-string even in the majesty of her peignoir. The English mama, if she is sensible, takes her normal night’s rest with the addition, possibly, of a nap after lunch. She is not anxious, for, if there is one virtue in the flapper, it is her well-developed faculty of looking after herself.
I permit myself perhaps to speak of the young lady with a certain levity of which she would not approve, for she is apt to take herself pretty seriously, though rather as an individual than as an institution. “My dear,” I heard one say the other day, “I have just taken up theosophy: it’s too thrilling and wonderful. You can’t think what a difference it has made to me.” Her friend, I trust, did not echo my own private reflection that the difference was not yet visible externally, though possibly to the discerning eye her aura had changed colour slightly. Yet the levity, regrettable though it may be, is not in the least to be taken as a cloak for complete disapproval, however negligible such disapproval might be to its objects: it is no more than a trifling insistence—tasteless of course—on the element of comedy that twinkles round this estimable section of feminine society. I respect the flapper, in the first place, because she is on the verge of becoming the young Englishwoman than whom there is no finer creature of her kind. Imperfectly educated she certainly is; ignorance is hers without any mitigating desire for knowledge; artistically she is not successful, nor intellectually; even in dress she has yet to learn, if she ever will, the two advantages of originality and perfect finish: but all this seems almost petty when one considers how magnificent she is as a being, how well made, how frank and generous, how full of energy, how good a comrade, how pleasant a companion. These are the basic virtues of the young Englishwoman, and the flapper has them all. The worst that can be said of her, perhaps, is that she exaggerates certain characteristic shortcomings of her sex in England without contributing any particularly striking grace of her own in compensation. Is there loudness and vulgarity about, then she is conspicuously noisy; is there powder on the nose and carmine upon the lips, then her nose and lips are especially ridiculous; is there a shrill tone, the highest note will be a flapper’s; is there a tendency for the eye to rove, it will be particularly unsuitable in a cheeky orb peeping from a pigtailed head. Her elemental good qualities, at which she would be inclined to turn up her nose, are her principal jewels together with a certain lithe and tempting picturesqueness which is all her own: she is to be loved, at all events, by the discriminating for her promise rather than for her performance and for her very brilliant testimony to the excellence of a social system which encourages and approves this independence in the young. It may be said that the flapper in general is too eager to discount, as she usually does, the pleasures of maturity, but probably this is better for her, in the present and in the future, than to be kept in a state of impatient yearning, of greedy Sehnsucht, which checks the naturally charming spontaneity of her development. In fact, flappers are good and desirable things provided that they do not become too obvious.
There is a certain reason for insistence on this excellent proviso. It may seem paradoxical to argue that the most modern tendency to blur the line of demarcation between the flapper and her elders is a sign of over-obviousness on the part of the former. This line, externally at all events, used to be firmly marked, by the hair on the brow and the skirt about the knee: but now the general cult, bobbed head and the free knee, has made this double line delusive. Short of a study of census returns it would be difficult to tell where the flapper ends and the woman begins. And this confusion—which is my point—does not mean the elimination of the flapper as a separate identity, but rather a prolongation of the flapper standard beyond its legitimate limits. It argues, to my mind, a deplorable abandonment of her own standard on the part of the older woman. Herrick could no longer apostrophise in ecstasy the “sweet liquefaction of her clothes” when he saw his Julia striding along in a woollen jumper and a short tweed skirt with a pudding basin pressed down over her mediæval bob. Woman’s gift is to give line and animation to drapery, to oppose graciousness of the curve to the masculine rectilinear, and to contrast the poetry of motion with the prose of mere movement. Why is it decreed to-day that all women should
By hook or crook
Contrive to look
Both angular and flat—
to quote the song from Patience? Only a century ago Englishwomen had adorably drooping shoulders and soft arms; their contours were well rounded or they were miserable. To-day it is the round who are miserable. So marked a physical change is more than accident: it is a symptom of some constitutional or systematic change, and it has let the flapper in as a concrete symbol of the revolution. Personally I could welcome the return of a measure of rotundity, both in form and manner, not the too doughy rotundity of, say, an Amelia Sedley, but something more in the manner of George du Maurier’s drawings in Punch of Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns and the statuesque ladies who attended her “at homes.” To George du Maurier that was the English type, and his admiration of it is clear in every line. He idealised possibly, but such idealism does him artistically infinite credit. Angularity, for him, was only the price paid in lost charm for intellect, as in his three Miss Bilderbogies: only extreme cleverness, in his view, could excuse such absence of contour in a woman, and even then the excuse would have to be explicitly made with some humility. Where has it all gone, that amplitude, that richness that was present to his eyes and fed his imagination? One would say that there must have been a shortage of cream somewhere to have so encouraged the Bilderbogie strain and repressed the Ponsonby de Tomkyns. It may have been that there was too much cream in the Ponsonby de Tomkyns stratum and too little elsewhere, an error now remedied by a more even distribution. Let us hope so, in the expectation that the traditional creaminess of things English may again become visible in the community. English girls were once compared to rosebuds and cream: the rose is still there, and no nation can compete with it, but when it comes to a question of cream, the best that the average flapper can boast in her composition is a fairly stiff admixture of milk and soda.
I sometimes wonder if there is anything left for the flapper to look forward to when she comes out, since this formality is still talked of. Possibly there are still some functions closed to her, but they can be few. She is to be found at dinner parties and dances, she has men friends to stand her theatres and chocolates, she can flirt to the utmost limit, and unless she habitually wears a pigtail it is ten to one that nobody will notice anything different in the dressing of her hair. She will be forced to assume, possibly, a greater responsibility, but that is a penalty rather than a pleasure. Let us at any rate give her the credit of reaching consciously a greater seriousness of outlook whether she has to fend for herself or not. Frivolity in its worst sense is not a fault of English girls. Fond as they are of enjoyment and unimaginative as they are in their pleasures, they all take life with a measure of earnestness. The war gave to them, or to many of them, an object for their earnestness of which they had hitherto felt the want. Their seizure of the opportunity does them infinite credit. It would be absurd to suppose that their motives were purely altruistic, for women as a whole are not moved to action by abstract ideas. They saw that there were things to be done and that it might be rather fun to do them. It would need an eloquent pen to tell adequately how well they did them, and the fact that they got some fun out of it, even perhaps more than they expected, can in no way diminish our approbation. I confess that the magnificent services of English girls during the war have moved me deeply, and I cannot find it in me to sympathise with those who are inclined to consider the whole thing rather regrettable, unsettling to the girls and likely to provoke antagonisms when, if ever, we return to peaceful conditions. Surely this is a petty point of view. As a matter of national pride their performance takes on quite another aspect. The women of England were the only ones in the world who served in thousands anywhere and everywhere. Other nations could not get over their prejudices so easily, or only in a few cases. Botchkareva, it is true, organised a Battalion of Death in which Russian women actually fought, but the serving Englishwomen were an army. Also, there was nothing strained about it, nothing unnatural, as it would have been in a Latin nation. Here was a vindication of that British prudery and hypocrisy which other nations like to mock at. Our freedom of intercourse, our comradeship of the sexes, which no other people understands, was triumphantly justified in the test of war. The triumph belongs chiefly to the women: it showed the sterling worth of their essential qualities, independence, fearless capability, untiring energy, cheerfulness under difficulty and coolness in danger. The best of them could lead as well as work, and where they led, as in those Serbian hospitals, men worshipped them, glorifying the country that could produce such women. So when I see, or used to see, a pert little figure in khaki carrying its little powdered nose in the air and being a little silly, I tried to remember that these were superficial defects not gravely detrimental to the value of the article. But they can be so dreadfully and exasperatingly silly, can they not? Even Sister Anne, of Number —— General Hospital, who took me out to tea at Aboukir Bay and gave me a Government hot water bottle as a souvenir, was a little silly, but she was a genuine, jolly being all the same who did her country more credit than she was probably aware of.
This excursus into the topic of the war was really unpremeditated, but, after all, it was almost impossible to leave it out in speaking of the English girl. To omit to record that which is eminently worthy of praise, simply because it has been praised before, besides being ungenerous in a critic, accentuates his strictures beyond his intention. No doubt Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns and her age would have responded with equal enthusiasm, but the greater energy and athleticism which succeeded her generation did much to increase the effectiveness of the response when it was actually called for. And now peace is before us again, with much speculation about the future of women. So far as the English girl is concerned, be she flapper or no, I see no reason why she should deteriorate with the disappearance of stress, especially as the condition of modern society for many years to come seems likely to demand strenuous natures.