Surely clothes are designed, apart from their warmth, to make the best show of the body which is in them. Having discovered that style in which the average man or woman looks his very best, it seemed so needlessly ridiculous to keep changing it. Beauty and comfort—that surely is the raison d'être of apparel—apart from modesty, which, however, a few fig leaves can satisfy. Fashion opens the gate, as it were, and we pass through it, one by one, like foolish sheep—without a sheep's general utility. Mr. Smith, who is short, fat, and podgy, dresses exactly like Mr. Brown, who is tall, muscular, and well proportioned. Mr. Smith would not look so dreadful if he wore a coat well "skirted" below the waist, with tight-fitting knickerbockers and stockings. Mr. Brown's muscles and fine proportions are very nearly lost in a coat and trousers, which only make his muscular development look like fat and his fine proportions merely breadth without much shape. Mrs. Smith, who is modelled on the lines of Venus, bares her back at the dictates of some obscure couturiere in Paris, and the result gives a certain aesthetic pleasure. Mrs. Brown, determined also to be in the fashion, valiantly strips herself, and looks like a bladder of not particularly fresh lard! Were she to wear a modified fashion of the mode 1760 she would probably look almost charming.
And so we might go on citing examples and improvements until we had tabulated and docketed every human being. For an absolute proof that the present mode of dressing for both men and women is generally wrong, is, that the men and women who look best in it are those who possess bones without flesh, length with just that one suggestion of a curve common to all humanity. And think how much more interesting the world would be were each of us to dress in that style which showed our good points to advantage. For, after all, what is the object of clothes, apart from modesty and warmth—which a blanket and a few safety pins could satisfy—if it be not to create an effect pleasant to the eye. And why, when once we have discovered a style which certainly makes the majority of people look their best, should we wilfully discard it and return to the unimaginative and drab? We complain that the world of to-day, whatever may be said in its favour, cannot possibly be called picturesque. Well let us make it picturesque! And having made it more beautiful—for Heaven's sake let us KEEP it beautiful. Let it be a sign of cowardice—not one of the greatest signs of courage of the age—to fail to put on overalls, if we look our best in them! After all, every reform is in our own hands. But most people seem so entirely helpless to do anything but, metaphorically speaking, flick a fly off their own noses, that they leave reformation to God, and look upon their own unbeautiful effect and the unbeautiful effect of other men as an act of blind destiny. So we, as it were, sigh "Kismet"—in front of garments which a monkey, with any logic or reason in his composition, would not deign to wear. Yes, certainly, if "these old walls could only speak," they would tell us a few home truths. Our ears would surely burn at their eloquence.
A Sense of Universal Pity
Nearly everybody can "feel sorry"—some, extremely so! Lots of people can exclaim, "How ghastly!" in front of a mangled corpse—and then pass shudderingly on their way with a prayer in their hearts that the dead body isn't their own, nor one belonging to their friends and acquaintances. But very few people, it seems to me, possess what I will call a sense of universal pity, which is the intuition to know and sympathise with people "who have never had a chance"; with men and women who have never had "their little day"; with the poor, and hungry, and needy; with those whom the world condemns, and the righteous consider more worthy of censure than of pity. That is to say, while nearly everybody can sympathise with a tragedy so palpable that a dog could perceive it, there are very few people who can sympathise with the misery which lies behind a smiling face, that sorrow of the "soul" which would sooner die than be found out. They can realise the tragedy of a broken back, but they cannot realise the tragedy of a broken heart, still less of a broken spirit. And if that heart and that spirit struggle to hide their unshed tears behind a mask of cheerfulness, or bravado, or assumed—and sometimes very real—courage, they neither can perceive it nor realise it, and the well-spring of their sympathy, should it be pointed out to them, is a very faint and uncertain trickle indeed. Most of us like to take the sorrows of other people merely at their face value, and if the face be cheerful our imagination does not pierce behind that mask to take, as it were, the secret sorrow in its all-loving arms. But personally, to my mind, the easiest sorrows of all to bear are the sorrows which need not be hidden, which, maybe, cannot be hidden, and which bring all our friends and neighbours around us in one big echoing wail. The sorrows which are the real tragedies are the sorrows which we carry in our hearts every hour of our lives, which stalk beside us in our days of happy carelessness, and add to the misery of our days of woe. We do not speak of them—they are too personal for that. We could not well describe them—their history would be to tell the whole story of our lives. But we know that they are there nevertheless. And the men or women who are our intimates, if they do not perceive something of this shadow behind our smiles, can never call themselves our friends, although we may live in the same house with them and exist side by side on the most friendly terms. That is why, if we probe deep down into the hearts of most men and women, we discover that, in spite of all their gaiety and all their outward courage, inside they are very desolate, and in their hearts they are indescribably lonely.
The Few
But just a few people seem to be enabled to see beneath the surface of things. Around them they seem to shed an extraordinary kind of understanding sympathy. They are not entirely the "people in trouble" who appeal to them; rather they seem able to perceive the misery of a "state of life"—something which obtains no sympathy because people either condemn it or fail to realise the steps which led up to it—in the long, long ago. To them, everybody unfortunate—whether it be by their own fault or by the economic, moral, or social laws of the country—arouses their sympathy. It would seem as if Nature had given them the gift of intuition into another's sorrow—especially when that sorrow is not apparent to the outside world. You will find these people working, for the most part, among the poor and needy, in the slums of big cities, in the midst of men and women whose life is one long, hard struggle to keep both ends meeting until death releases them from the treadmill which is their life. They do not advertise themselves nor their philanthropy. One often never hears of them at all—until they are dead. They do not seek to hide their light under a bushel, because to them all self-advertisement is indecent. They do not realise that what they do is "light" at all. But the world does not realise all that it owes to these unknown men and women, whose sympathies are so wide, so all-absorbing, that they can give up their lives to minister to the sorrows and hardships of others—and, in succouring them, find their only reward. I have known one or two of these people in my life, and they have given me a clearer insight into the nobility inherent in human nature than all the saints whose virtues were ever chronicled, than all the wealthy philanthropists whose gifts and generosity were ever overpraised.
The Great and the Really Great
I always think that one of the most amusing things (to watch), in all life, is what I term the "Kaiser-spirit" in individuals. Nearly everyone mistakes the trimmings of greatness for the real article, and most people would sooner expire than not be able to flaunt these wrappings, or the rags or them, before somebody's eyes. And this spirit exists in individuals in almost every grade of society; until you get to the rock bottom of existence, when the immediate problems of life are so menacing that men and women dare not play about with the gilded imitations. This "Kaiser-spirit"—or the spirit which, if it can't inspire homage, will buy the "props" of it and sit among the hired gorgeousness in the full belief that their own individual greatness has deserved it—is everywhere. Very few men and women are content to be simply men and women. They all seek strenuously to be mistaken for Great Panjandrums. The woman who takes a little air in the park in the afternoon with two full-grown men sitting up, straight-backed and impassive, on the box of the carriage, is one example of this. The chatelaine of a jerry-built villa, who is pleased to consort with anybody except servants and the class below servants, is another. The majority of people need money, not in order to live and be happy, but in order to impress the crowd that they are of more value than those who are thereby impressed. The drama which goes on around and around the problem of whom to "call upon" and whom to "cut," fills the lives of more men and women than the problem of how to make the best of life and pave one's way to the hereafter. If Christ came back to earth, He would have to choose one set or another—Belgravia, Bayswater, or Brixton.
Love "Mush"
I was standing outside a music shop the other day, gazing through the windows at the songs "everybody is singing." Their titles amused me. Not a single one promised very much real sense. They were all what I will call love "mush"—"If you were a flowering rose," and "Come to my garden of love," were two typical examples. The remainder of the verses—with which the suburban sopranos will doubtless break the serenity of the suburban nights this summer—were of a "sloppy" sentimentality combined with a kind of hypersexual idiocy unparalleled except in an English ballad of the popular order. On such belief, I said to myself, are young lovers brought up. Well, I suppose it would be difficult for a youthful soprano to put "her soul" into a song which asked, "What shall I give my dear one every morning for his breakfast?" or, "Who'll soothe your brow when the Income Tax is due, dear?" And yet, sooner or later, she will be faced with some such problems, and then her beloved won't ask her if she be a flowering rose or invite her into his garden of love unless she can find an answer which will carry them both over to the next difficulty fairly successfully. But to live in an eternal state of love-mush is what young people are brought up to regard as matrimony. The plain facts of matrimony are carefully hidden from them, as either being too "prosaic" or too indelicate. The most responsible position in all life for a man and a woman is entered upon by them with an ignorance and an irresponsibility which are neither dignified nor likely to be satisfactory. A woman goes in for several years' training before she can become a cook; a worker in every grade of life has to go through a long period of initiation before she can be said to be really fit for her "job." But any girl thinks she is fit to become a wife, with no other qualification except that she is a woman, and can return endearment for endearment when required. She is not expected to know or do anything else. But her husband expects many and more important things from her if he is not to live to regret his bargain. He may not know it when he is asking her to live with him in his garden of love, but he will realise it a few years later, especially if she has turned that garden of love into a wilderness of expensive weeds.