They passed one resolution: “Your sub-committee believe
You can lighten the curse of Adam when you’ve lightened the curse of Eve.
But till we are built like angels—with hammer and chisel and pen
We will work for ourself and a woman, forever and ever. Amen.”
TABU AND TEMPERAMENT
When, I wonder, did the word “temperament” come into fashion with us? We can hardly have got it from the French, for the French mean by it something very different from what we do; though it is just possible that we did get it from them, and have merely Bowdlerized the term. At all events, whatever it stands for, it long since became a great social asset for women, and a great social excuse for men. Perhaps it came in when we discovered that artists were human beings. At least, for many years, we never praised an artist without using the word. It does not necessarily imply “charm,” for people have charm irrespective of temperament, and temperament irrespective of charm. It is something that the Philistine never has: that we know. But what, by all the gods of clarity, does it mean?
It means, I fancy, in one degree or another, the personal revolt against convention. The individual who was “different,” who did not let his inhibitions interfere with his epigrams, who was not afraid to express himself, who hated clichés of every kind—how well we know that figure in motley, who turned every occasion into a fancy-dress ball! All the inconvenient things he did were forgiven him, for the sake of the amusing things he said. Indeed, we hardly stopped to realize that his fascination was largely a matter of vocabulary. Now it is one thing to sow your wild oats in talk, and quite another to live by your own kaleidoscopic paradoxes. The people who frowned on the manifestations of “temperament” were merely those logical creatures who believed that if you expressed your opinions regardless of other people’s feelings, you probably meant what you said. They did not know the pathology of epigram: the basic truth of which is that word-intoxicated people express an opinion long before they dream of holding it. They say what they think, whether they think it or not. Only, if you talk with incessant variety about what ought to be done, and then never do any of the wild things you recommend, you become in the end perfectly powerless as a foe of convention.
This tactical fact the unconventional folk have at last become aware of; and, accordingly, hostility to convention is ceasing somewhat to take itself out in phrases. Conventions, at the present moment, are really menaced. The most striking sign of this is that people are now making unconventionality a social virtue, instead of an unsocial vice. The switches have been opened, and the laden trains must take their chance of a destination.