For there must be some ground on which to meet the person we do not know; and why may not the majority decide what grounds are the most convenient for all concerned? There must be some simplification of life: we cannot afford to have as many social codes as we have acquaintances. Imagine knowing five hundred people, and having to greet each with a different formula! Language would not run to it. And would it, in any case, constitute charm? Charm, as we all know, is a rare and treasurable thing; and no one can say where it will be found. But, as far as we can analyze it at all, its elements seem very likely to flourish in conventional air. Of course there may be a fearful joy in watching the man of whom you say: “One can never tell what he is going to do next.” But you do not want him about, except on very special occasions. For the honest truth is that the unconventional person is almost never just unconventional enough. He is pretty sure to take you by surprise at some moment when you do not feel like being taken by surprise. Then you have to invent the proper way to meet the situation, which is a bore. It is not strange that some of our révoltés preach trial marriage: for the only safe way to marry them at all would be on trial. Until you had definitely experienced all the human situations with them, you would have no means of knowing how, in any given situation, they would behave. They might conform about evening-dress, and throw plates between courses; they might be charming to your friends, and ask the waiter to sit down and finish dinner with you. Or they might in all things, little and big, be irreproachable. The point is that you would never know. You could never take your ease in your inn, for nothing discoverable in earth or heaven would determine or indicate their code. Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us. Not a fundamentally safe one? Perhaps not. But some test there must be; and this, on the whole, is the easiest to pass for those whom we are likely to want for intimates. That is really the social use of conventions.
And as for charm: your most charming people are those who constantly find new and unexpected ways of delighting us. Are such often to be found among people who are constantly finding new and unexpected ways of shocking us? I wonder. It seems to me doubtful, at the least. For shock—even the superficial social shock, the sensation that does not get far beneath the skin—is not delight. If you have ever really been shocked, you know that it is a disagreeable business. Of course, if some wonderful creature discovers the golden mean, the perfect note: to satisfy in all conventional ways, and still to be possessed of infinite variety in speech and mood—that wonderful creature is to be prized above the phœnix. But you cannot give rein to your own rich temperament in the matter, let us say, of auction bridge. The rules you invent as you go alone may be more shatteringly amusing than anything Hoyle ever thought of; but you cannot call it auction, and you must not expect other people to know how to return your leads. And usually it only means breaking rules without substituting anything better—revoking for a whim. Life is as coöperative a business as football; and we all know what becomes of the team of crack players when it faces a crack team. Only across the footlights are we apt to feel the charm of the Ibsen heroine; and even then we are apt to want supper and some irrelevant talk before we go to a dream-haunted couch.
Now this matter of charm is not really an arguable one; for charm will win where it stands, whether it be conventional or unconventional. Everyone knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister’s friends can’t or won’t. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly. It is not senseless to bring marriage into the question, for when we advisedly call a man or a woman charming, we mean that that man or that woman would apparently be a good person with whom to form an intimate and lasting relation—not for us, ourselves, perhaps, but for someone else of our sort, in whom he or she contrives, by the alchemy of passion, to inspire the “sacred terror.” To amuse for half an hour during which you incur no further responsibilities, to delight, in a relation which has no conceivable future, does not constitute charm; for it is of the essence of charm that it pulls the people who feel it,—pulls, without ceasing. Charm magnetizes at long range. I contend only that conventional people are as apt to have it as anyone else, for they have the requisites, as far as requisites can be named.
As for the charm actually resident in conventionality per se: how should anyone who does not feel it be converted to it by words of mine? For it is a beauty of form: not so much of good form as opposed to bad form, as of form opposed to formlessness. The foe of convention enters into the social plan, if at all, as a wild, Wagnerian motif. And the truly unconventional person has not even a motif; for he disdains repetition. He scorns to stand for anything whatever, and you are insulting his “temperament” if you suppose that it is capable of only one reaction on any given thing. The temperamental critic of literature—like Jules Lemaître in his salad days, before the Church had reclaimed him—prides himself on never thinking the same thing twice about any one masterpiece. Your temperamental creature will not twice hold the same opinion of any one person. If he has ever been notably pleased with a fellow-guest at dinner, it is safest never to repeat the combination. For the honor of his temperament, he must be disgusted the next time. It is his great gift not to be predicable, from day to day, from hour to hour. But a pattern is always predicable; and what you learn about a conventional person goes into the sum of knowledge: you do not have to unlearn it over night. Psychology becomes a lost art, a discredited science, when you deal with the temperamental person. You might as well have recourse to astrology. His very frankness is misleading. He can afford to give himself away, because he gives away nothing but the momentary mood. Never attempt to hold him to anything he has said: for his whole virtuosity consists in never saying the same thing twice, and never necessarily meaning it at all. He does very well for the idle hour, the box at the play; but for the business of life—oh!
And to some of us there is charm in the code itself—charm, that is, in any code, so long as it has behind it an idea, though an antique one, and is adhered to with faith. The right word must always seem “inevitable”; and so must, after all, the right act. An improvisation may be—must be, if it is to succeed—brilliant; but acts, like words, are best if they are in the grand style. Whether in speech or in manners, the grand style is never a mere magnificent idiosyncrasy; for the essence of the grand style is to carry with it the weight of the world.
And conventionality is now said to be subversive of the moral order! At least, most avowedly unconventional people are now treating themselves as reformers. Conventions did not fall, in spite of the neo-pagans; so the neo-Puritans must come in to make them totter. And with the neo-Puritans, it must be admitted (Cromwell did not live in vain) most of the charm of unconventionality has gone. It has become a brutal business. The neo-pagans realized that, to be endured at all, they must make us smile. If they told a risqué story, it must be a really funny one. At the present moment, we may not go in for risqué remarks in the interests of humor, but we may make them in the interests of morality. We may say anything we like at a dinner-party, so long as we put no wit into saying it. We must not quote eighteenth-century mots, but we may discuss prostitution with someone we have never seen before. Anything is forgiven us, so long as we are not amusing. If we only draw long faces, we may even descend to anecdote. And when people are asked to break with conventions in the interests of morality, they may feel that they have to do it. It has always been permitted to make the individual uncomfortable for the good of the community. So we cannot snub the philanthropists as we would once have snubbed the underbred: for thereby we somehow damn ourselves. If you refuse to discuss the white slave traffic, you are guilty of civic indifference; and that is the one form of immorality for which now there is no sympathy going. I may have no ideas and no information about the white slave traffic, but I ought to be interested in it—interested to the point of hearing the ideas, and gathering the information, of the person whom I have never seen before. It is the “Shakespeare and the musical glasses” of the present day. Vain to take refuge in plays or books: for what play or book is well known at all unless it deals with the social evil?
Now it has already been pointed out that Vice Commission reports have done as much harm as good. The discussion of them is not limited to the immune, “highbrow” caste. I know of one quite unimperilled stenographer who was frightened by them into the psychopathic ward at Bellevue; and we have all read instructive comments in the daily papers which reiterate that virtue is ten dollars a week. A much lower figure than Becky Sharp’s, but the principle is the same. Out of her weekly wage, we may be sure the shopgirl (it is always the shopgirl!) buys the paper—and therewith her Indulgence for future faults, much cheaper than Tetzel ever sold one. For Purgatory now is replaced by Public Opinion. Even my own small town is not free from the prophylactic “movie.” One small boy nudges another, as they pass the placarded entrance, exclaiming debonairly, “Oh, this ’ere white slave traffic, y’know!” And the child, I have been given to understand, is the father of the man. The unconventional reformers quote to themselves, I suppose:
“Vice is a monster of such frightful mien,” etc.
It never occurs to them to finish the sentence:
“We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”