II
THE JUDGMENT
“Now learn what morals critics ought to show,
“For ’tis but half a judge’s task to know,”
says Pope, who himself was hopelessly immoral in the manufacture of couplets. And what two men ever agreed on morality, anyhow? The personal equation is never more prominent than in the expression of the “individual’s views,” as nowadays ethics are dubbed. One may fancy oneself the most catholic of judges, yet one constantly betrays the hereditary prejudices that can be modified but never quite cast off.
I was recently with an Englishman at an outdoor variety theatre in Madrid. We sat restively through the miserable, third-rate performance, grumbling at each number as it proved worse than the last, and finally waxing positively indignant over the ear-splitting trills and outrageous contortions of the prima donna of the evening. “Still,” said the Englishman suddenly, “she has had the energy to keep herself fit, and to come out here and do something. Really, she isn’t so bad, you know, after all.”
Before she had finished, he was actually approving of her: her mere physical soundness had conquered him, and her adherence to his elemental creed of “doing something” and doing it with all one’s might. The artistic and the sentimental viewpoints, which the Englishman always wears self-consciously, slip away from him like gossamer when even the most indirect appeal is made to his fetish of physical fitness. In respect of this, he is by no means a snob, but a true democrat.
As a matter of fact, there are many breaks in the haughty traditional armour. It is in New York, not London, that one hears severe discussion of A’s charwoman grandmother, B’s lady’s maid mother, C’s father who deals in tinned beans. What London wants to know is what A, B, and C do; and how they do it. Snobbism turns its searchlight on the individual, not on his forbears; though to the individual it is merciless enough. In consequence, the city has become a sort of international Athenæum, a clearing-ground for the theories, dreams and fanaticisms of all men.
I remember being tremendously impressed, at my very first London tea-party, by the respect and keen interest shown each of the various enthusiasts gathered there. A Labour leader, a disciple of Buddhism, the founder of a new kind of dramatic school, a missionary from the Congo and a Post-Impressionist painter: all were listened to, in turn, and their several hobbies received with lively attention. The Labour leader got a good deal of counter-argument, the Post-Impressionist his share of good-humoured chaffing; but everyone was given the floor, and a chance to beat his particular drum as hard as he liked, until the next came on.
The essential thing, in London, is that one shall have a drum to beat; small talk, and the polite platitudes that sway the social reunions of New York and Paris, are relegated to the very youthful or the very dull. Nor is cleverness greeted with the raised eyebrow of dismay; people are not afraid, or too lazy, to think. One sees that in the newspapers, the books and plays, as well as in the drawing-room conversation of the English. The serious, even the so-called heavy, topics, as well as the subtle, finely ironic, and sharply critical, are given place and attention; not by a few précieux alone, but by the mass of the people. And not to be well informed is to be out of the world, for both men and women.
Of course, there is the usual set of “smart” fashionables who delight in ignorance and whose languid energies are spent between clothes and the newest one-step. But these are no more typical of London society than they are of any other; though in the minds of many intelligent foreigners they have become so, through having their doings conspicuously chronicled in foreign newspapers and by undiscriminating visitors returning from England. On one point, this confusion of English social sets is easily understood: they share the same moral leniency that permits all to lend themselves to situations and ideas which scandalize the foreigner.