Mrs. John Lane

“ Is not the best in the world for us?
"The finest jewels are kept for the American market," a famous jeweller once told me. Are not the very best imitations of the old masters sold to us? We are willing to pay, and money in this world can buy everything except just one trifle—contentment. Apart from contentment, money buys everything. It is a credential for virtue and a good name. A millionaire must be good, or Divine Providence would not so have prospered him, and for this all-sufficient reason London takes him to its innocent and gushing heart. ”

“ How tragic to think that even beauty comes to spectacles at last! Now how different it is with men. If they do have to wear spectacles they do it boldly, and not on the sly, and yet they always find some one to love them, so the novelists prove, and they ought to know.
But a heroine with spectacles, that is a different thing. What novelist has the courage for such an innovation? Even realism, which we know usually stops at nothing, does draw the line there.
Now I do ask in all seriousness, are eyeglasses in fiction really so incompatible with romance? ”

“ How feel anything but friendly when a dear feminine gusher declares that you have the loveliest clothes, the most wonderful brains, the brightest eyes, the most agreeable husband, and the best cook in the world! The chances are that you hated her as she swam up and favoured your unyielding hand with cordial pumping; but she thought—no, she didn't think, the process is automatic, she merely dropped a penny in the slot of your evident antagonism on the chance of its possibly resulting in a cool invitation to call, a crush tea or a lunch: nothing is to be despised, for you never can tell! ”

“ But seriously, why should every child be taught to play the instrument quite irrespective of its having any talent or taste for music? Why in the world, where martyrdom is usually the price of living, should a select little army of martyrs suffer a double martyrdom? Why draw them by the hairs of their inoffensive heads to the piano-stool and make, as it were, at one fell swoop, two martyrs, the one at the piano and the wretch who, on the other side of the wall, gives the lie to Congreve, who mistakenly declared that "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast"? ”

“ Something grips at my heart as I recall those bygone days when, as a very young girl, with a bump of reverence as high as the Himalayas, I sat in the corner of a splendid, shabby Boston drawing-room, and watched the great men and women, whose genius has left its imprint on American history and literature. They talked to each other, like ordinary human beings, and refreshed themselves with cold coffee and heavy cake, which was passed by such of the younger generation as the wonderful hostess could press into service. ”

“ The misfortune of our age is that the tools for the divine arts have became so cheap and handy. Literature, especially, is at the mercy of every irresponsible infant with ambition and a penny to spare. Why, the snub-nosed board-school youngster down there skipping joyfully along the gutter has a sheet of paper and a lead-pencil, the excellence of which were beyond the imagination of Shakespeare. It is this cheap and fatal luxury which makes such triumphant mediocrity and so little greatness, and it is the fault of the newspapers, the publishers, too much education, and afternoon teas. ”

“ You dear and uncomplaining sex, how hard you have to work to be called charming by that other sex that so greedily laps up the invention of the great humourist! From artisans of soft-soap you have indeed become artists. To you we owe those delightful multitudes of spoilt men who sulk or sniff or shoulder their pretentious way through society. Yes, your product! If society consisted only of men it would be quite sincere, even if rather brutal, and as for soft-soap, it wouldn't exist. It would be interesting to know the sex of that historical serpent in the Garden of Eden! ”

“ Of course each of us has his own ideal of the millennium, but with multi-millionaires setting the pace, and all the rest of the world racing after, it must be agreed that the millennium is not yet. But when it does come, there will be no more champagne standard, and each person will be judged after his honest value and not his purse. If he has a noble soul nobody will mind if he is a bit shabby, and if he is a man of brains he may even live at the wrong end of the town. ”

“ Why shouldn't we? Does not the Englishman, according to Thackeray, love a lord? With all it represents of tradition, romance, and history, is it a more ignoble passion for the snob than the worship of dollars, or more fatal to republican principles?
The American money-kings are as surely creating a class apart as ever did the English possessors of titles, and there is no greater nobility in a duke, by the grace of a gamble on the stock exchange, than a duke by the grace of tradition or history. ”

“ Did you ever hear a woman declare that it is really cheaper in the end to take a cab? When does a woman ever think of the end? The average woman avoids a cab on principle. She feels it due to this same principle to draggle her skirts through the mud, to get her feet wet, and to come home an "object." But thank goodness, she has saved a cab fare, and you can get twelve quinine pills for tuppence.
Is it not also a part of our extravagant economy that makes women eat such queer things when they are by their lonely selves? What self-respecting man would lunch off a sultana cake, a tart, or an ice? ”

“ Playfully and yet with perfect propriety she peeps through the clustering pink blossoms. It is the same smile, the same irreproachable nose, the same wave to her golden hair, the same great eyes. Now to put this vision of beauty and grace high up in a tree unflushed, unscratched, unruffled, untorn, is really too much to bear—besides, it is false to nature! The head of the house shall not look at her and make cruel comparisons, and decide in his ignorant masculine mind that all women can look so after they have climbed a tree. ”

“ A wintry smile on the matron's lips, enough to chill the most cordial guest, and the strangled remarks of the young girl and her slow, cold eyes, are the triumphant results of the nation of the self-controlled. Those cold eyes and that slow smile that have in them not the ghost of humour. To get behind the eyes and the smile, to discover some inward fire! Is there any? One looks with envy at those faces which, from the lowest up, possess that in common that it is impossible to penetrate into the real self. ”

“ Possibly Americans overdo the introducing; they are rather apt to overdo everything; it is the fault of a high-strung, nervous temperament; but of two evils let me rather be torn away from an interesting conversation every few minutes by a vivacious hostess, than be stranded in a corner looking blankly at my fellow man, for all the world as if I had strayed into a 'bus in a party gown. Blessed will the day be when the American invasion will temper English society with its own possibly rather effusive geniality. ”

“ What a mercy for the novelist in this age of perpetual repetition, of twice told tales, if he might give his heroine a new attribute! One feels sure that if eyeglasses and their variations were permitted they would produce quite a new kind of heroine, to the immense advantage and relief of literature. Of course the novelist has to keep up with the times; it is as imperative for him as for the fashion-books, for it is from him alone that future generations will learn how we lived, dressed and looked, and what were our favourite sufferings. ”

“ No other art is able to inflict such merciless suffering! Under the name of music we are afflicted with every variety of noise, including the hand organ, the bagpipes, the German band, the man who toots the cornet in the street, the harp man, the lady who has seen better days and who sings before our house in the evening, the active piano-organ invented by a heartless genius, the musical box and all its amazing progenies, the gramophone and the pianola. ”

“ What becomes of old servants? It is a mystery. Some possibly become meek, and keep lodging-houses; others, meeker still, become caretakers. Can human imagination conjure up a more dismal fate? To be the companion of beetles and mice; to vegetate in a basement, gloomy with the abysmal gloom of London, and silent with the monumental silence of a deserted house!
Why not think of the possible future, that giddy, independent day, when to give notice, and feast on the consequent anguish, is a cool rapture? Once only I met an ex-parlour maid who rose superior to fate. ”

“ Oh, the terrible tyranny of the shopgirls, or, rather, as we live in a democratic age and one is as good as the other, the shop young ladies. When one of them waits on me, or, to be quite exact, when I grovel to her, and she is very short and snappish and uninterested, I wonder what can be the kind of superior being to whom she, so to speak, bends the knee? Sometimes I think it must be the shopwalker, a great man, but human, except perhaps at Christmas time, but then I suspect he also may be afraid of her. ”

“ It is always our humourists who have tackled truth, and who have shown with a laugh that touches perilously near a sob (a little way of humourists!) that a standard of pure unvarnished truth has never been popular in this erring world; at least not since some of out forefathers scalped their brother forefathers, and the ladies and gentlemen who dwelt in caves took their afternoon tea in the shape of a cosy nibble at the bones of their foes. It is not the bones of our foes we nibble in these enlightened days! ”

“ It is these enchanting sale-days that explain the Englishwoman's orgies of wax beads, picture hats, party frocks at the wrong time, paper-soled slippers and open-worked stockings in pouring rain.
"A strong race, these English," an envious American said to me the other day.
"That's because they kill the weak ones off," I explained. "To be a perfect Englishwoman you must be able to sit with your poor bare shoulders against an open window at a winter dinner-party, preferably in an icy draught, and you must smile. If you can survive that you are one of the elect. ”

“ Now is it not also the extravagance of pure economy that takes women to the "sales," where they buy all the things they do not want? Would there be sales-days if there were only men in the world? Did you ever see a man go from one shop to another to get a necktie "tuppence" cheaper? To be penny wise is indeed the supreme attribute of women! For the economical one it is a terrible ordeal to go shopping with a father or a brother; a lover is different, he is still full of temporary patience. ”

“ In America there is no aristocracy yet, but God help it when the time arrives, for it will be an aristocracy based on the most unworthy of foundations—money. As for romantic traditions, well, it will take several centuries to weave a halo of romance around a pork-packer, a petroleum magnate, a railroad wrecker, or the company promoters who flourish as the green bay tree. In centuries they may arrive at the dignity of being ancestors—at present they are just what they are, and are to be judged accordingly. ”

“ Why should the resources of a modern orchestra be at the disposal of every infant whose mistaken mother plumps it down on the piano-stool and lets it thump the keys to keep it quiet! One would so much rather hear its natural shrieks than that other noise which is supposed to be a harmless substitute! Why music, of all the fine arts, with its power for inflicting untold anguish, should be the most common, passes my understanding. ”

“ Of course it would not do for a heroine to have a wooden leg, I grant, and yet I have met a hero with a wooden leg, and I am quite sure I know several who have lost an arm; why then should it be required of us poor women to be so perfect? If a man can wear spectacles without forfeiting his position as a hero of romance, I demand the same right for a woman. Why, a man can even be bald and she will love him all the same! ”

“ There is hardly a bodily ache which literature has not idealised, but an aching tooth has yet to find its dramatic poet. In fact, there is about it a touch of the ludicrous which its concentrated anguish does not justify. It is curious that so intense a suffering should be so undramatic, but it is the one agony which does not desert us this side of the grave, and which even the genius of a Shakespeare would hesitate to bestow on his hero or heroine. Anguish comes to them in many ways, but the great poet discreetly avoids teeth. ”

“ There is a delicate difference between the English and the American young saleslady. The American, being the daughter of the free, and distinctly of the independent, and having the chance of being the future wife, mother or mother-in-law of presidents, does not demean herself to be on a sympathetic footing with the public. If the public wishes to buy, she is willing to sell, but is perfectly indifferent. Look wistfully into the American saleslady's perfectly cold eye, if you are a wobbly lady and want some one to make up your mind for you, and you are met by a wall of the bleakest ice ”

“ We are recited to, sung to, played to, and there being nothing so "cussed" as human nature, no sooner are we played to and recited to than our "cussedness" will out, and we are seized with a wild longing to talk, and talk we do at the top of our voices. Universal resentment is expressed towards the blameless arts that temporarily check our interchange of what it would be flattery to call ideas, but, in my own experience, when some stray man and I have stood together speechless, no sooner did the piano break into our appalling silence than ideas seemed to inundate us. ”

“ Do we say minor historian, minor novelist, minor painter, minor composer? Why should we belittle an artist who may be infinitely greater than all these, and damn his art with an adjective? It is not for us to judge if a poet be minor or major. That is usually the business of the future, and there is no prophet among us able to prophesy which of our poets will join the immortals. Thank Heaven, advertising is only a temporary product, and has no influence on immortality. ”

“ Let it go, even the loveliest youth, in its own good time. Have we not each had our turn at it? But one thing there is to which we should all cling with might and main, and that is a young heart, for a young heart has the only youth which is immortal. It will make of any woman, when the time comes, what is more rare and lovely than a young beauty, it will make her a charming old woman—and nothing in this wide world can be more charming, even if it is a little out of fashion. ”

“ The comfort for a tired man to come home to her placid, well-dressed society! That she never loses her temper her exquisitely dressed head amply proves, for you can't lose your temper and preserve the serenity of your back hair! The rapture of a man and a father to come home to his perfectly dressed, silent infant which smiles sweetly from the latest thing in lace cribs, while She bends over him in a toilette which expresses as nothing else can maternal solicitude combined with perfect taste. ”

“ But like all warnings it passes unheeded, for no sooner are the next generation's legs long enough to dangle between the key-board and the pedals, than the echoes awaken to the same old false notes that serve no purpose unless an hour of daily martyrdom over a tear-splashed key-board is an excellent preparation for the trials of life.
Music, as it is taught, is not so much a fine art as a bad habit. Alas, we have got into the habit of learning to play the piano, and the bad habit of playing on the violin is fatally on the increase. ”