The praise of temperament, I verily believe, was the entering wedge. But whatever the first cause, “conventional” is certainly in bad odor as an epithet. And this is really an interesting phenomenon, worth investigating. What is it that makes it a term of reproach? Why must you never say it about your dearest friend? Why must you contradict, in a shocked tone, if your dearest friend is said to be conventional? Most of my best friends are conventional, I am glad to say; but even I should never think of describing them to others thus.
Conventional people are supposed to lack intelligence—the power to think for themselves. (It seems to be pretty well taken for granted that you cannot think for yourself, and decide to think what the majority of your kind thinks. If you agree with the majority, it must be because you have no mental processes.) They are felt to lack charm: to have nothing unexpected and delightful to give you. And, nowadays, they are (paradoxes are popular) supposed to be perilous to society, because they are immovable, because they do not march with the times, because they cling to conservative conceptions while the parties of progress are re-making the world. All these reproaches are, at present, conveyed in the one word.
Now it is a great mistake to confound conventionality with simplicity—with that simplicity which indicates a brain inadequate to dealing with subtleties; or to confound “temperament” and unconventionality with a highly organized nature. The anthropologists have exploded all that. I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies. I doubt if the anthropologists have any more perspective than other scientists. I am as near being an old Augustan as any twentieth-century observer can be: “nihil humani,” etc. But, for God’s sake, let it be human! Palæontology is a poor substitute for history. No: I do not love any scientists, even the anthropologists. But I do think we ought to be grateful to them for proving to us that primitive people are a hundred times as conventional as we; and that their codes are almost too complicated for European minds to master. If anyone is still under the dominance of Rousseau, Chateaubriand et Cie., I wish he would sit down impartially before Messrs. Spencer and Gillen’s exposition of group-marriage among the Australian aborigines. If, in three hours, he knows whom, supposing he were a Matthurie of the dingo totem, he could marry without incurring punishment, or even the death penalty, he had better take his subtlety into Central Australia: he is quite wasted on civilization. Or he might go over and reform Yuan-Shi’h-Kai’s administration: the Chinese would take to him enormously.
Someone may retort that I am not exactly making out a shining case for tabu, in citing the very nasty natives of Australia as notable examples of what tabu can do for society. My point is only this: that it is folly to chide conventional people for simplicity, since convention is a very complicated thing; or for dulness, since it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code. To be different from everyone else, you have only to shut your eyes and stop your ears, and act as your nervous system dictates. By that uncommonly easy means, you could cause a tremendous sensation in any drawing-room, while your brain went quite to sleep. The natives of Central Australia are not nice; but they are certainly nicer than they would be if they practised free love all the year round, instead of on rigidly specified occasions. Their conventions are the only morality they have. Some day, perhaps, they will do better. But it will not be by forsaking conventions altogether. For surely, in order to be attractive, we must have some ideals, and above all some restraints. Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.
When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, the historic sense. I am far from saying that all conventional folk have it; but they have at least the merit of conforming. If they do not live by their own intelligence, it is because they live by something that they modestly value a good deal more. It is better that a dull person should follow the herd: his initiatives would probably be very painful to himself and everyone else. No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius—a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do. Unless we are geniuses, the lone hunt is not worth while: we had better hunt with the pack. Unless we are geniuses, there is much more fun in playing the game; there is much more fun in caste and class and clan. Unconventional people are apt to be Whistlers who cannot paint. Of course there is something very dull about the person who cannot give his reasons for his social creed. But if it is all a question of instinct, better a trained instinct than an untrained one. I am inclined to think that the mid-Victorian prejudice against—let us say—actors and actresses, was well founded. Under Victoria (or should one say under mid-Victoria?) stock companies were not chaperoned, and ladies and gentlemen went on the stage very infrequently. What is the point of admitting to your house someone who will be very uncomfortable there himself, and who will make everyone else even more uncomfortable? It is not that we are afraid he will eat with his knife: that is a detail we might put up with. But eating or not eating with your knife is merely one of the little signs by which we infer other things. In this mad world, anyone may do or be anything; but the man who has been brought up to eat with his knife is the less likely to have been brought up by people who would teach him to respect a woman or not to break a confidence. It is a stupid rule of thumb; but, after all, until you know a person intimately, how are you going to judge except by such fallible means? I have nothing in the world against Nature’s noblemen; but the burden of proof is, of practical necessity, on their shoulders. Manners are not morals—precisely; yet, socially speaking, both have the same basis, namely, the Golden Rule. No one must be made more uncomfortable or more unhappy because he has been with you. Now, in spite of Oscar, it is worse to be unhappy than to be bored; and I would rather be the heroine of a not very clever comedy of manners than of a first-class tragedy. Most of us, when we are once over twenty, are no more histrionic, really, than that. The conventional person may bore you (though it is by no means certain that he will) but he will never, of his own volition, make you unhappy unless by way of justified retort. He will never put you, verbally or practically, into a nasty hole. Perhaps he will never give you the positive scarlet joys of shock and thrill. But, dear me! that brings us to another point.
Conventional folk are often accused of being dull and valueless because they have no original opinions. (How we all love original opinions!) Well: very few people have any original opinions. Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar. “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu”; and dead sages, if there were only retroactive copyrights, could sue most of our modern wits for their best things. What is even Jean-Jacques but Prometheus-and-water, if it comes to that? Very few people since Aristotle have said anything new. What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new—yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp. Some people—like G. B. S. and Mr. Chesterton—seem to think that you can be original by contradicting other people—as if even the person who states a proposition did not know that you could make the verb negative if you chose! Often, they are so hard up that they have to contradict themselves. But they are supposed to be violently—subversively—enchantingly—original. Even the militant suffragettes have not “gone the whole hog”: they have stopped short of Aristophanes. What is the use of congratulating ourselves on our unprecedented courage in packing the house solemnly for Damaged Goods, when we have expurgated the Lysistrata—and had the barest succès d’estime, at that? No: our vaunted unconventionality is usually a matter of words. I have tracked more than one delightful vocabulary through the jungle, only to find that it brought up at the literal inspiration of the Old Testament; and I have inwardly yawned away an afternoon with a person who talked in clichés, to discover perhaps, at twilight, that on some point or other he was startlingly revolutionary. The fact is that we are the soft prey of the phrase; and the rhetoricians, whether we know it or not, will always have their way with us. Even the demagogue is only the rhetorician of the gutter. “Take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself”—as the Duchess in Alice did not say. Dulness is a matter of vocabulary; but there are no more dull people among the conventional than among the unconventional. And if a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.
I was arguing at luncheon one day, with three clever women, the advantages and disadvantages of unconventionality. They were all perfectly conventional in a worldly sense, and perfectly convinced of the charms of unconventionality. (That is always the way: we sigh for the paradises that are not ours, like good Christians spurning the Apocalypse and coveting the Mohammedan heaven.) They cited to me a very amusing person—a priestess of intellectual revolt. Yes: she walked thirty blocks to lunch in a pouring rain, and when she came in she took off her wet hat, put it in her chair, and sat on it. The fact that my guest, did she choose, could afford to crown herself with pearls, would not make up to me for the consciousness that she was sitting on an oozing hat throughout luncheon. In spite of epigrams, I should feel, myself, perfectly wet through. Surely it is the essence of good manners not to make other people uncomfortable. Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people. No one except a reformer has a right to batten on other people’s discomfort. And who would ever have wanted John Knox to dinner? To be sure, we are all a little by way of being reformers now—too much, I fear, as people went to see the same Damaged Goods, under shelter of its sponsorship, who cared for nothing whatever except being able to see a risqué play without being looked at askance. But we shall come to that aspect of it later.
Now “temperament,” again, has often been confused with charm; and conventional folk—who are, by definition, dull and unoriginal, all baked in the same archaic mould—are supposed to lack charm. They are at best like inferior prints of a Hokusai from worn-out blocks. The “justification” is bad. Their original may have been all very well; but they themselves are hopelessly manqués, and besides, there are too many of them. How can they have charm—that virtue of the individual, unmatchable, unpredictable creature?
It is not against the acutest critics, the real “collectors” and connoisseurs of human masterpieces, that I am inveighing. I am objecting to the stupid criticisms of the stupid; to the presence of “conventional” as a legitimate curse on the lips of people who do not know what they are talking about. One often hears it—“I find him” (or “her”) “so difficult to talk to: he” (or “she”) “is so conventional.” Good heavens! As if the conventional person were not always at least easy to talk to! He may be dull, but he knows his cues, and will play the game as long as manners require. It is the wild man on a rock, with a code that you cannot be expected to know, because it is his own peerless secret, who is hard to talk to. The people who say that conventional folk lack charm, often mean by “conventional” not wearing your heart on your sleeve. Now I positively like the sense, when I dine out, and stoop to rescue a falling handkerchief, that I am not going to rub my shoulder against a heart. What are hearts doing on sleeves? Am I a daw, that I should enjoy pecking at them? And who has any right to assume that, because they are not worn there, they are non-existent? It is of the essence of human nature to long for the unattainable. If you do not believe me, look at all the love-poetry in the world. As Mr. Chesterton says, “the coldness of Chloe” has been responsible for most of it. Certainly, if Chloe had worn her heart on her sleeve, the anthologies would have suffered. And with woman the case is the same. Let not the modern hero flatter himself that he will ever arouse the same kind of ardor in the female heart that the heroes of old did: those seared and saddened and magnificent creatures who bore hearts of flame within their granite breasts—but whose breasts were granite, all the same. No, gentlemen, women may marry you, but it is with a diminished thrill. We want—men and women both—to be intrigued; and I venture to say that for purposes of life, not of mere irresponsible conversation, it is the conventional person who intrigues us, since it is only the conventional person who creates the illusion of inaccessibility. He may be accessible, in reality; and the unconventional, temperamental person may be an impregnable fortress. That is the dizzy chance of life. But since all relations must have a beginning, the initial impression is the thing that counts. Of course one wants to know that the Queen of Spain has legs; but then we can be pretty sure that she has. We do not need a slit skirt to reassure us. One wants to know that there is a human face behind the mask; but who shall say that the mask does not heighten such beauty as there is? The conventional manner is a kind of domino: the accepted costume that all civilized people adopt for a time before unmasking. I do not suggest that we should disguise ourselves to the end; but that we should talk a little before we do unmask.