Self and self-management : Essays about existing

By Arnold Bennett

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Title: Self and self-management
Essays about existing

Author: Arnold Bennett

Release date: April 21, 2025 [eBook #75928]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918

Credits: Mairi, Laura Natal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELF AND SELF-MANAGEMENT ***

WORKS BY ARNOLD BENNETT

NOVELS

A Man from the North
Anna of the Five Towns
Leonora
A Great Man
Sacred and Profane Love
Whom God hath Joined
Buried Alive
The Old Wives’ Tale
The Glimpse
Helen with the High Hand
Clayhanger
The Card
Hilda Lessways
The Regent
The Price of Love
These Twain
The Lion’s Share
The Pretty Lady
The Roll-Call

FANTASIAS

The Grand Babylon Hotel
The Gates of Wrath
Teresa of Watling Street
The Loot of Cities
Hugo
The Ghost
The City of Pleasure

SHORT STORIES

Tales of the Five Towns
The Grim Smile of the Five Towns
The Matador of the Five Towns

BELLES-LETTRES

How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
The Human Machine
Mental Efficiency
Literary Taste
Friendship and Happiness
Married Life
Those United States
Paris Nights
Books and Persons

DRAMA

Polite Farces
Cupid and Common Sense
What the Public Wants
The Honeymoon
The Great Adventure
The Title

SELF AND SELF-MANAGEMENT

SELF AND
SELF-MANAGEMENT

ESSAYS ABOUT EXISTING

BY
ARNOLD BENNETT

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
MCMXVIII

CONTENTS

PAGE

RUNNING AWAY FROM LIFE 3

SOME AXIOMS ABOUT WAR-WORK 25

THE DIARY HABIT 45

A DANGEROUS LECTURE TO A YOUNG
WOMAN 65

THE COMPLETE FUSSER 85

THE MEANING OF FROCKS 103

RUNNING AWAY FROM LIFE

I WILL take the extreme case of the social butterfly, because it
has the great advantage of simplicity. This favourite variety of
the lepidopteral insects is always spoken of as female. But as the
variety persists from generation to generation obviously it cannot be
of one sex only. And, as a fact, there are indubitably male social
butterflies, though the differences between the male and the female may
be slight. I shall, however, confine myself to the case of the female
social butterfly--again for the sake of simplicity.

This beautiful creature combines the habits of the butterfly with the
habits of the moth. For whereas the moth flies only by night and the
butterfly flies only by day, the social butterfly flies both by day
and by night. She is universally despised and condemned, and almost
universally envied: one of the strangest among the many strange facts
of natural history. She lives with a single purpose--to be for ever in
the movement--not any particular movement, but _the_ movement,
which is a grand combined tendency comprising all lesser tendencies.
For the social butterfly the constituents of the movement are chiefly
men, theatres, restaurants, dances, noise, and hurry. The minor
constituents may and do frequently change, but the major constituents
have not changed for a considerable number of years. The minor
constituents of the movement are usually ‘serious,’ and hence in a
minor way the social butterfly is serious. If books happen to be of the
movement, she will learn the names of books and authors, and in urgent
crises will even read. If music, she will learn to distinguish from
all other sounds the sounds which are of the movement, the sounds at
which she must shut her eyes in ecstasy and sigh. If social reform, she
will at once be ready to reform everybody and everything except herself
and her existence. If charity or mercifulness, she will be charitable
or merciful according to the latest devices and in the latest frocks.
Yes, and if war happens to be of the movement, she will be serious
about the war.

You observe how sarcastic I am about the social butterfly. It is
necessary to be so. The social butterfly never has since the earliest
times been mentioned in print without sarcasm or pity, and she never
will be. She is greatly to be pitied. What is her aim? Her aim, like
the aim of most people except the very poor (whose aim is simply to
keep alive), is happiness. But the unfortunate creature, as you and
I can so clearly see, has confused happiness with pleasure. She runs
day and night after pleasure--that is to say, after distraction:
eating, drinking, posing, seeing, being seen, laughing, jostling, and
the singular delight of continual imitation. She is only alive in
public, and the whole of her days and nights are spent in being in
public, or in preparing to be in public, or in recovering from the
effects of being in public. Habit drives her on from one excitement to
another. She flies eternally from something mysterious and sinister
which is eternally overtaking her. You and I know that she is never
happy--she is only intoxicated or narcotised by a drug that she calls
pleasure. And her youth is going; her figure is going; her complexion
is practically gone. She is laying up naught for the future save
disappointment, dissatisfaction, disillusion, and no doubt rheumatism.
And all this inordinate, incredible folly springs from a wrong and
childish interpretation of the true significance of happiness.

How much wiser, you say, and indeed we all say, is that other young
woman who has chosen the part of content. She has come to terms with
the universe. She is not for ever gadding about in search of something
which she has not got, and which not one person in a hundred round
about her has got. She has said: ‘The universe is stronger than I am. I
will accommodate myself to the universe.’

And she acts accordingly. She makes the best of her lot. She treats
her body in a sane manner, and she treats her mind in a sane manner.
She has perceived the futility of what is known as pleasure in circles
where they play bridge and organise charity fêtes on the Field of
the Cloth of Gold. She has frankly admitted that youth is fleeting,
and that part of it must be spent in making preparations against the
rigours of old age. She seeks her pleasure in literature and the arts
because such pleasure strengthens instead of weakening the mind,
and never palls. She is prudent. She is aware that there can be no
happiness where duty has been left undone, and that loving-kindness
is a main source of felicity. Hence she is attentive to duty, and
she practises the altruism which is at once the cause and the result
of loving-kindness. She deliberately cultivates cheerfulness and
resignation; she discourages discontent as gardeners discourage a weed.
She has duly noted that the kingdom of heaven is ‘within you,’ not near
the band at the expensive restaurant, nor in the trying-on room of the
fashionable dressmaker’s next door to the expensive restaurant, nor in
the _salons_ of the well-advertised great. Her life is reflected
in her face, which is a much better face than the face of the social
butterfly. Whatever may occur--within reason--she is armed against
destiny, married or single.

III

What can there be in common between these two types? Well, the point
I am coming to is that they may have one tragic similarity which
vitiates their lives equally, or almost equally. One may be vastly more
admirable than the other, and in many matters vastly more sensible.
And yet they may both have made the same stupendous mistake: the
misinterpretation of the significance of the word happiness. Towards
the close of existence, and even throughout existence, the second, in
spite of all her precautions, may suffer the secret and hidden pangs of
unhappiness just as acutely as the first; and her career may in the
end present itself to her as just as much a sham.

And for the same reason. The social butterfly was running after
something absurd, and the other woman knew that it was absurd and left
it alone. But the root of the matter was more profound. The social
butterfly’s chief error was not that she was running after something,
but that she was running away from something--something which I have
described as mysterious and sinister. And the other woman also may
be--and as a fact frequently is--running away from just that mysterious
and sinister something. And that something is neither more nor less
than life itself in its every essence. Both may be afraid of life and
may have to pay an equal price for their cowardice. Both may have
refused to listen to the voice within them, and will suffer equally for
the wilful shutting of the ear.

(It is true that the other woman may just possibly have a true vocation
for a career of resignation and altruism, and the spreading of a
sort of content in a thin layer over the entire length of existence.
If so, well and good. But it is also true that the social butterfly
may have a true vocation for being a social butterfly, and the thick
squandering of a sort of pleasure on the earlier part of existence, to
the deprivation of the latter part. Then neither the one nor the other
will have been guilty of the cowardice of running away from life.)

My point is that you may take refuge in good works or you may take
refuge in bad works, but that the supreme offence against life lies in
taking refuge from it, and that if you commit this offence you will
miss the only authentic happiness--which springs no more from content
and resignation than it springs from mere pleasure. It is indisputable
that the conscience can be, and is constantly narcotised as much by
relatively good deeds as by relatively bad deeds. Nevertheless, to
dope the conscience is always a crime, and is always punished by the
ultimate waking up of the conscience.

To take refuge from life is to refuse it. Life generally offers due
scope for the leading instinct in a man or a woman; and sometimes it
offers the scope at a very low price, at no price at all.

For example, a young man may have a very marked instinct for
engineering, and his father may be a celebrated and wealthy engineer
who is only too anxious that the son should follow the same profession.
Life has offered the scope and charged nothing for it.

But, on the other hand, a man may have a very marked instinct for
authorship, and his father may be a celebrated and wealthy engineer
who, being convinced that literature is an absurd and despicable
profession, has determined that his son shall not be an author but an
engineer. ‘Become an engineer,’ says the father, ‘and I will give you
unique help, and you are a made man. Become an author, and you get
nothing whatever from me except opposition.’

Life, however, which has provided the instinct for literature, has also
provided the scope for its fulfilment. The scope for young authors
is vaster to-day on two continents than ever it was. But the price
which in this case life quotes is very high. The young man hesitates.
The price quoted includes comfort, parental approval, domestic peace,
money, luxury, and perhaps also a comfortable and not unsatisfactory
marriage. It includes practically all the ingredients of the mixture
commonly known as happiness. Of course, by following literature the
young man may recover all and more than all the price paid. But also he
may not. The chances are about a hundred to one that he will not. He is
risking nearly everything in order to buy a ticket in a lottery.

Let us say that, being a prudent and obedient young fellow, he declines
to beggar himself for a ticket in a lottery. His instinct towards
literature has not developed very far; he sacrifices it and becomes
the engineer. By industry and goodwill and native brains he becomes
a very fair engineer, the prop of the firm, the aid, and in due
course the successor, of his father. He treats his work-people well.
He marries a delightful girl, and he even treats her well. He has
delightful children. He is a terrific worldly success, and a model to
his fellow-creatures. That man’s attention to duty, his altruism, his
real kindness, are the theme of conversation among all his friends. He
treats his conscience with the most extraordinary respect.

And yet, if his instinct towards literature was genuine, he is not
fundamentally happy, and when he chances to meet an author, or to read
about authors (even about their suicides of despair), or to be deeply
impressed by a book, he is acutely aware that he has committed the sin
of taking refuge from life; he knows that the extraordinary respect
which he pays to his conscience is at bottom a doping of that organ;
he perceives that the smooth path is in fact the rough path, and that
the rough path, which he dared not face, might have been, with all
its asperities, the smooth one. His existence is a vast secret and
poisonous regret; and there is nothing whatever to be done; there is no
antidote for the poison; the dope is a drug--and insufficient at that.

Women, even in these latter days when reason is supposed to have
got human nature by the neck, have far greater opportunities and
temptations than men to run away from life. Indeed, many of them are
taught and encouraged to do so. The practice of the three ancient
cardinal female virtues--shutting your eyes, stopping your ears, and
burying your head in the sand--is very carefully inculcated; and then,
of course, people turn round on young women and upbraid them because
they are afraid of existence! And, though things are changing, they
have not yet definitely changed. I would not blame a whole sex--no
matter which--for anything whatever. But to state a fact is not to
blame. The fact is that women, when they get a chance, do show a
tendency to shirk life. Large numbers of them come to grips with life
simply because they are compelled to do so. A woman whose material
existence is well assured will not as a rule go out into the world.
Further, she will not marry as willingly as the woman who needs a home
and cannot see the prospect of it except through marriage. By which
I mean to imply that with women the achievement of marriage is due
less to the instinct to mate than to an economic instinct. Men are
wicked animals and know not righteousness, but it may be said of them
generally that with them the achievement of marriage _is_ due to
the instinct to mate.

Examining the cases of certain women who put off marrying, I have been
forced to the conclusion that their only reason for hesitating to
marry is that men are not perfect, and that to marry an imperfect man
involves risk. It does, but the reason is not valid. Risk is the very
essence of life, and the total absence of danger is equal to death.
I do not say that to follow an unsatisfactory vocation and to fail in
it is better than to follow no vocation. But I am inclined to say that
any marriage is better than no marriage--for both sexes. And I think
that the most tragic spectacle on earth is an old woman metaphorically
wrapped in cotton-wool who at some period of her career has refused
life because of the peril of inconvenience and unhappiness.

Both men and women can run away from life in ways far more subtle and
less drastic than those which I have named. For the sake of clearness
I have confined myself to rather crude and obvious examples of flight.
There are probably few of us who are not conscious of having declined
at least some minor challenge of existence. And there are still fewer
of us who can charge ourselves with having been consistently too bold
in our desire to get the full savour of existence.

Each individual must define happiness for himself or herself. For my
part, I rule out practically all the dictionary definitions. In most
dictionaries you will find that the principal meaning attached to the
word is ‘good fortune’ or ‘prosperity.’ Which is notoriously absurd.
Then come such definitions as ‘a state of well-being characterised
by relative permanence, by dominantly agreeable emotion ... and by a
natural desire for its continuation.’ This last is from Webster, and
it is very clever. Yet I will have none of it, unless I am allowed to
define the word ‘well-being’ in my own way.

For me, an individual cannot be in a state of well-being if any of his
faculties are permanently idle through any fault of his own. The full
utilisation of all the faculties seems to me to be the foundation of
well-being. But I doubt if a full utilisation of all the faculties
necessarily involves the idea of good fortune, or prosperity, or
tranquillity, or contentedness with one’s lot, or even a ‘dominantly
agreeable emotion’; very often it rather involves the contrary.

In my view happiness includes chiefly the idea of ‘satisfaction after
full honest effort.’ Everybody is guilty of mistakes and of serious
mistakes, and the contemplation of these mistakes must darken, be it
ever so little, the last years of existence. But it need not be fatal
to a general satisfaction. Men and women may in the end be forced to
admit: ‘I made a fool of myself,’ and still be fairly happy. But no
one can possibly be satisfied, and therefore no one can in my sense be
happy, who feels that in some paramount affair he has failed to take
up the challenge of life. For a voice within him, which none else can
hear, but which he cannot choke, will constantly be murmuring:

‘You lacked courage. You hadn’t the pluck. You ran away.’

And it is happier to be unhappy in the ordinary sense all one’s life
than to have to listen at the end to that dreadful interior verdict.

SOME AXIOMS ABOUT WAR-WORK

THIS essay concerns men, but it concerns women more.

When citizens begin to learn, through newspapers and general rumour,
that voluntary war-work is afoot, and that volunteers are badly wanted,
and that there is work for all who love their country, then those who
love their country are at once sharply divided into two classes--the
people to whom the work comes, and the people who have to go out to
seek the work. The former are the people of prominent social position;
the latter are the remainder of the population. The prominent persons
will see work rolling up to their front doors in quantities huge
enough to overthrow the entire house. The remainder will look out of
the window and see nothing at all unusual in the street. They are then
apt to say: ‘This is very odd. There is much work to do. I am ready to
do my share. Why doesn’t somebody come along and ask me to do it?’ And
they feel rather hurt at the neglect, and finally they sigh: ‘Well, if
no one gives me anything to do, of course I can’t do anything.’

Such an attitude would be quite reasonable if society was like a
telephone-exchange, and anybody could get precisely the person he or
she was after by paying a girl a pound or two a week to stick plugs
into holes. But society not being like a telephone-exchange, the
attitude is unreasonable. Patriots cannot expect the organisers of
war-work to run up and down streets knocking at doors and crying:
‘Come! You are the very woman I need!’ However much urgent war-work
is waiting to be done, nine-tenths of the individuals who are anxious
to do it will have to put themselves to a certain amount of trouble in
order to discover the work, perhaps to a great deal of trouble. Having
located the work, they may even have almost to beg for the privilege of
doing it. Again, they are rather hurt. They demand, why should they go
on their knees? They are not asking a favour.

A woman will say:

‘I went and offered my services. And he looked at me as if I was a
doubtful character, and you never heard such a cross-examination as I
had to go through! It was most humiliating.’

True! True! But could she reasonably expect the cross-examiner to see
into the inside of her head? The first use and the last use of the
gift of speech is to ask questions. Moreover, respected madam, it is
quite probable that the cross-examiner was not a bit suspicious, and
that his manner was simply due to dumbfoundedness, to mere inability
to believe that so ideal a person as yourself had, so to speak, fallen
from heaven straight into his net. And further, respected madam, are
not you yourself suspicious? If the cross-examiner had come to you,
instead of you going to him, might not your first thought have been:
‘What advantage is he trying to gain by coming to me? I shall say No!’
If it is true that people who ask for work are stared at, it is equally
true that people who are asked to work also stare--a little haughtily.
And when the latter graciously promise assistance, they often say to
themselves: ‘I shall do as little as I can, because I’m not going to be
taken advantage of.’ And they almost invariably end by doing more than
they can, and by insisting on being taken advantage of. Human nature
is mean, but it is also noble.

Axiom: The preliminary trouble and weariness and annoyance incidental
to getting the work are themselves a necessary and inevitable part of
war-work, just as much as bandaging the brows of heroes.

Life is a continual passage from one illusion to another. No sooner
has the eager volunteer found out that the desire to help is apt to
be treated as evidence of a criminal disposition, and that war-work
is as shy as deer in the depths of a forest--no sooner has he or she
discovered these things than yet another discovery destroys yet another
illusion. The war-work when brought to bay and caught is not the right
kind of war-work. You--for I may as well admit that I am talking direct
to the eager volunteer--you had expected something else. This war-work
that presents itself is either beneath your powers, or it is beyond
your powers; or it is unsuited to your individuality or to your social
station or to your health or to your hands or feet. You can scarcely
say what you had expected, but at any rate ... I will tell you what
you had expected. You had expected the ideal--work that showed you at
your best, picturesque work, interesting work, work free from monotony,
work of which you could see the immediate beautiful results, work which
taxed you without overtaxing you, really important work without the
moral risks attaching to real responsibility. Such was the work you
had expected, and the chances are ten to one that the work you have
actually got is dull, monotonous, apparently futile; any fool could do
it, though it is exhausting and inconvenient. Or, on the other hand,
it is, while dull and monotonous, too exacting for a well-intentioned
mediocre brain like yours (you don’t actually mean that, but you try to
be modest)--in short it is not suitable work.

Axiom: There is not enough suitable work to go round, nor the
thousandth part of what would be enough. Unsuitableness is a
characteristic of nearly all war-work. Lowering your great powers
down, or forcing your little powers up, to the level of the work
offered--this, too, is part of war-work.

III

Again, you have to get away from the illusion that you can live a
new life and still keep on living the old life. Everybody, as has
somewhere been stated, possesses twenty-four hours in each day.
Everybody occupies every one of his twenty-four hours. You do, though
you may think you don’t. If you do not occupy them in labour then you
occupy them in idleness; if not in usefulness, then in futility. Now
idleness and futility are much more difficult to expel from hours
which they have appropriated than labour and usefulness are difficult
to expel. But if war-work is brought in, something will have to be
expelled. Habits of labour and usefulness are sometimes hard enough
to change; habits of idleness and futility are still harder. If you
were previously spending your afternoons in giving and accepting
elaborate afternoon teas, you will have more trouble in devoting
your afternoons to war-work than if you had been spending them, for
example, in the pursuit of knowledge. It is child’s play to abandon the
pursuit of knowledge; no moral stamina is required; but to give up the
exciting sociabilities of afternoon tea is a tremendous feat. So much
so, that if you are a votary of this indigestive practice, you will
infallibly endeavour to persuade yourself at first: ‘I can manage the
two--war-work and afternoon teas as well. I can fit them in.’

You cannot fit them in--at any rate successfully. The essence of
war-work is that it may not be fitted in. If it does not mean
sacrifice, it means naught. Sacrifice is giving something for nothing.
You cannot give something and yet stick to it. Certain persons are
apt to buy an article to give away, and then are so pleased with
the article that they decide to keep it for themselves. They thus
obtain for a period the sensation of benevolence without any ultimate
corresponding sacrifice. This is the nearest approach, that I know of,
to giving something and yet sticking to it; but it has no relation
whatever to war-work.

Axiom: If a tea-cup is full you cannot pour anything into it until you
have poured something out.

The next, and the next to the last, illusion to go is a masterpiece
of simple-mindedness, and yet nearly all who take up war-work are
found at first to be under its sway. It is the illusion that war-work,
being a fine and noble thing, ought to change people’s natures
and dispositions, in such a manner as to produce the maximum of
co-operating effort with the minimum of friction.

Now the very heart of all war-work is the grand and awe-inspiring
institution of the Committee. If you are engaged on war-work you
are bound to sit on a Committee; or, in default of a Committee, a
Sub-Committee (which usually has more real power than the bumptious
and unwieldy body that overlords it). And, if you are on neither a
Committee nor a Sub-Committee, then you are bound sooner or later to
be called up before a Committee or a Sub-Committee, and to be in a
position to give the Committee or Sub-Committee a piece of your mind.
Thus your legitimate ambition will somehow be satisfied.

But let us suppose that you are at once elected to a Committee. Well,
among the members of the Committee are three persons you know--Miss X,
Mr. Y, and Mrs. Z. Miss X used to be a mannish and reckless and cheeky
young maid. Mr. Y used to be an interfering and narrow-minded old maid.
Mrs. Z used to be nothing in particular. You enter the Committee-room,
and you see these three, together with a few others who have not a
very promising air. (Probably no sight is more depressing than the
cordon of faces round a Committee-room table.) You, however, are not
downcast. You feel in yourself the uplifting power of a great ideal.
You are determined to make the best of yourself and of everybody. And
you are convinced that everybody is determined to do the same. But in
less than five minutes Miss X, despite her obvious lack of experience,
is offering the most absurd proposals; she has put her elbows on the
table; and she is calmly teaching all her grandmothers to suck eggs.
Mr. Y is objecting to the ruling of the Chairman, and obstinately
arguing against a resolution that has been carried, and indeed implying
that the Committee ought not to do anything at all. As for Mrs. Z she
has scarcely opened her mouth; when the Chairman asked her for her
opinion she blushed and said she rather agreed, and she voted both for
and against the first resolution.

‘Is it conceivable,’ you exclaim in your soul, ‘is it conceivable
that these individuals can behave so in such a supreme crisis of
the nation’s history, at a moment when the nation has need of every
citizen’s loyal goodwill, of every--?’ etc. etc. ‘No! They cannot have
realised that we are at war!’

And sundry other members of the Committee are not much better than
the ignoble three. Indeed, your faith in Committees is practically
destroyed. You say to yourself, with your blunt, vigorous common
sense: ‘If only the Committee would adjourn and leave the whole matter
to me, I am sure I could manage it much better than they are doing.’
You consider that a Committee is a device for wasting time and for
flattering the conceit of opinionated fools.... Then Mr. Y becomes
absolutely impossible. You feel that you are prepared to stand a lot,
but that there is a limit and that Mr. Y has gone beyond it. You are
ready to work, and to work hard, but you cannot be expected to work
with people who are impossible. You decide to send in your resignation
to the Chairman at once.

I hope you will not send it in. For at least half the Committee are
thinking just as you are thinking. And one or two of them are thinking
these things, not apropos of Miss X, Mr. Y, or Mrs. Z, but apropos of
you! And if you are startled at the spectacle of people persisting in
being just themselves in war-work, then the fault is yours, and you
should be gently ashamed. You ought to have known that people are never
more themselves than in a great crisis, especially when the crisis is
prolonged. You ought to be thankful that the Committee has unscaled
your eyes to so fundamental a truth. You have realised that we are
at war,--you ought also to realise that it takes all sorts to make a
world, even a world at war. You ought to imagine what would happen if
every member of the Committee, like you, resigned because Mr. Y was
impossible, and thus left the impossible Mr. Y in possession of the
table and the secretary.

Axiom: The most valorous and morally valuable war-work is the work of
working with impossible people.

And may I warn you that you will later on, if you succeed as a
war-worker, encounter more terrible phenomena than Mr. Y, who at the
worst can always be out-voted? You will encounter, for example, the
famous and fashionable lady who, justifiably relying on human nature’s
profound and incurable snobbishness, will give all the hard work to you
and those like you, while appropriating all the glory and advertisement
for herself. And, more terrible even than the famous and fashionable
lady, you will run up against the Official Mind. The Official Mind is
the worst of all obstacles to getting things done. And the gravest
danger of the war-worker, particularly if he attains high rank on
Committees, is the danger of becoming official-minded himself.

When you have proved that in war-work you are a decent human being--and
you will prove this by sticking to the work long after you are weary of
it, and by refusing to fly off to something else because it promises
to be more diverting and less annoying than your present job--then you
will part company with the war-workers’ last illusion. Namely, the
illusion that her efforts will meet with gratitude. Gratitude is going
to be an extremely rare commodity, and it is not a very good thing to
receive, anyhow. You see, there will be so few people with leisure to
devote to gratitude. Everybody is or will be war-working. Even soldiers
and sailors are doing something for the war, though to listen to some
civilians one would suppose the military side of war to be relatively
quite unimportant. No! Gratitude will not choke the market. On the
contrary, criticism will be rife, for we are all experts in war-work.
The highest hope of the average war-worker must be to escape censure.
Official food-controllers, who are possibly the supreme type of
war-worker, are thankful if they escape with their heads. And herein is
a great lesson.

Axiom: The reward of war-work will be in the treaty of peace.

THE DIARY HABIT

LET us consider, first, a strange quality of the written word.

The spoken word is bad enough. Such things as misfortunes, blunders,
sins, and apprehensions become more serious when they have been
described even in conversation. A woman who secretly fears cancer
will fear it much more once she has mentioned her fear to another
person. The spoken word has somehow given reality to her fear. But the
written word is far more formidable than the spoken word. It is said
that the ignorant and the uncultured have a superstitious dread of
writing. The dread is not superstitious; it is based on a mysterious
and intimidating phenomenon which nearly anybody can test for himself.
The fact is that almost all people are afraid of writing--I mean true,
honest writing. Vast numbers of people hate and loathe it, as though
it were a high explosive that might suddenly go off and blow them to
pieces. (That is one reason why realistic novels never have a very
large sale.) But the difference between one man’s dread of writing
and another man’s dread of writing is merely a difference of degree,
not of kind. And if any among you asserts that he has no fear of the
written word, merely because it is written, let him try the following
experiment.

Take--O exceptional individual!--take some concealed and blameworthy
action or series of thoughts of your own. I do not mean necessarily
murder or embezzlement; not everybody has committed murder or
embezzlement, or even desires to do so; I mean some matter--any
matter--of which you are so ashamed, or about which you are so
nervous, that you have never mentioned it to a soul. All of us--even
you--have such matters hidden beneath waistcoat or corsage. Write down
that matter; put it in black and white. The chances are that you won’t;
the chances are that you will find some excuse for not writing it down.

You may say:

‘Ah! But suppose some one happened to see it!’

To which I would reply:

‘Write it and lock it up in your safe.’

To which you may rejoin:

‘Ah! But I might lose the key of the safe and some one might find it
and open the safe. Also I might die suddenly.’

To which I would retort:

‘If you are dead you needn’t mind discovery.’

To which you might respond:

‘How do you know that if I was dead I needn’t mind discovery?’

Well, I will yield you that point, and still prove to you that your
objection to the written word does not spring from the fear of
giving yourself away. The experiment shall be performed under strict
conditions.

Empty your house of all its inhabitants save yourself. Lock the
front-door and the back-door. Go upstairs to your own room. Lock the
door of your own room. Pile furniture before the door, so that you
cannot possibly be surprised. Light a fire. Place the writing-table
near the fire. Arrange it so that at the slightest alarm of discovery
you can with a single movement thrust your writing into the fire. Then
begin to write down that of which you are ashamed. You are absolutely
safe. Nevertheless you will hesitate to write. And you will not have
got very far in your narration before you find yourself writing down
something that is not quite so unpleasant as the truth, or before you
find yourself omitting some detail which ought not to be omitted. You
will have great difficulty in forcing yourself to be utterly frank on
paper. You may fail in being utterly frank; you probably will so fail;
most people do. When you have finished and hold the document in your
hand, you will start guiltily if the newly moved furniture creaks in
front of the door. You will read through the document with discomfort
and constraint. And you will stick it in the fire and watch it burn
with a very clear feeling of relief.

Why all these strange sensations? You could not have been caught in the
act. Moreover, there was nothing on the paper of which you were not
fully aware, and which you had not fully realised. Nobody can write
down that which he does not know and realise. Quite possibly the whole
matter had been thoroughly familiar to you, a commonplace of your
brain, for weeks, months, years. Quite possibly you had recalled every
detail of it hundreds of times, and it had never caused you any grave
inconvenience. But, instantly it is written down it becomes acutely,
intolerably disturbing--so much so that you cannot rest until the
written word is destroyed. You are precisely the same man as you were
before beginning to write; naught is altered; you have committed no
new crime. But you have a new shame. I repeat, why? The only immediate
answer is that the honest written word possesses a mysterious and
intimidating power. This power has to do with the sense of sight. You
see something. You do not see your action or your thoughts as it might
be on the cinema screen--happily!--but you do see _something_ in
regard to the matter.

The above considerations are offered to that enormous class of people,
springing up afresh every year, who say to themselves: ‘I will keep
a diary and it shall be absolutely true.’ You may keep a diary, but
beyond question it will not be absolutely true. You will be lucky, or
you must be rather gifted, if it is not studded with untruths. You
protest that you have a well-earned reputation for veracity. I would
not doubt it. When I say ‘untruths’ I do not mean, for instance, that
if the day was beautifully fine you would write in your diary: ‘A very
wet day to-day; went for a walk and got soaked through.’ I am convinced
that you would be above such lying perversions. But also I am convinced
that if a husband and wife, both as veracious and conscientious as
yourself, had a quarrel and described the history of the quarrel
each in a private diary, the two accounts would by no means coincide,
and the whole truth would be in neither of them. Some people start a
diary as casually as they start golf, stamps, or a new digestive cure.
Whereas to start a diary ought to be a solemn and notable act, done
with a due appreciation of the difficulties thereby initiated. The very
essence of a diary is truth--a diary of untruth would be pointless--and
to attain truth is the hardest thing on earth. To attain partial truth
is not a bit easy, and even to avoid falsehood is decidedly a feat.

III

Having discouraged, I now wish to encourage. Many who want to keep
diaries and who ought to keep diaries do not, because they are too
diffident. They say: ‘My life is not interesting enough.’ I ask:
‘Interesting to whom? To the world in general or to themselves?’ It
is necessary only that a life should be interesting to the person who
lives that life. If you have a desire to keep a diary, it follows that
your existence is interesting to you. Otherwise obviously you would not
wish to make a record of it. The greatest diarists did not lead very
palpitating lives. Ninety-five per cent. of _Pepys’s Diary_ deals
with tiny daily happenings of the most banal sort--such happenings as
we all go through. If Pepys re-read his entries the day after he wrote
them, he must have found them somewhat tedious. Certainly he had not
the slightest notion that he was writing one of the great outstanding
books of English literature.

But diaries are the opposite of novels, in that time increases instead
of decreasing their interest. After a reasonable period every sentence
in a diary blossoms into interest, and the diarist simply cannot be
dull--any more than a great wit such as Sidney Smith could be unfunny.
If Sidney Smith asked Helen to pass him the salt, the entire table
roared with laughter because it was inexplicably so funny. If the
diarist writes in his diary, ‘I asked Helen to pass me the salt,’
within three years he will find the sentence inexplicably interesting
to himself. In thirty years his family will be inexplicably interested
to read that on a certain day he asked Helen to pass him the salt. In
three hundred years a whole nation will be reading with inexplicable
and passionate interest that centuries earlier he asked Helen to pass
him the salt, and critics will embroider theories upon both Helen
and the salt and will even earn a living by producing new annotated
editions of Helen and the salt. And if the diary turns up after three
thousand years, the entire world will hum with the inexplicable
thrilling fact that he asked Helen to pass him the salt; which
fact will be cabled round the globe as a piece of latest news; and
immediately afterwards there will be cabled round the globe the views
of expert scholars of all nationalities on the problem whether, when
he had asked Helen to pass him the salt, Helen did actually pass him
the salt, or not. Timid prospective diarists in need of encouragement
should keep this great principle in mind.

You will say:

‘But what do I care about posterity? I would not keep a diary for the
sake of posterity.’

Possibly not, but some people would. Some people, if they thought their
diaries would be read three hundred years hence, or even a hundred
years hence, would begin diaries to-morrow and persevere with them to
the day of death. Some people of course are peculiar. And I admit that
I am of your opinion. The thought of posterity leaves me stone cold.

There is only one valid reason for beginning a diary--namely, that you
find pleasure in beginning it; and only one valid reason for continuing
a diary--namely, that you find pleasure in continuing it. You may find
profit in doing so, but that is not the main point--though it is a
point. You will most positively experience pleasure in reading it after
a long interval; but that is not the main point either--though it is an
important point. A diary should find its sufficient justification in
the writing of it. If the act of writing is not its own reward, then
let the diary remain for ever unwritten.

But beware of that word ‘writing’. Just as some persons are nervous
when entering a drawing-room (or even a restaurant!), so some persons
are nervous when taking up a pen. All persons, as I have tried to show,
are nervous about the psychological effects of the written word, but
some persons--indeed many--are additionally nervous about the mere
business of writing the word. They begin to hanker, with awe, after
a mysterious ideal known as ‘correct style.’ They are actually under
the delusion that writing is essentially different from talking--a
secret trade process!--and they are not aware that he who says or
thinks interesting things can write interesting things, and that he who
can make himself understood in speech can make himself understood in
writing--if he goes the right way to work!

I have known people, especially the young, who could discourse on
themselves in the most attractive manner for hours, and yet who simply
could not discover in their heads sufficient material for a short
letter. They would bemoan: ‘I can’t think of anything to say.’ It was
true. And, of course, they could not think of anything to _say_,
the reason being that they were trying to think of something to
_write_, and very wrongly assuming that writing is necessarily
different from saying! Writing may be different from saying, but it
need not be different, and for the diarist it should not be different.
And, above all, it should not be superficially different. The
inexperienced, when they use ink, have a pestilent notion that saying
has to be translated or transmogrified into writing. They conceive an
idea in spoken words, and then they subconsciously or consciously ask
themselves: ‘I should say it like that--but how ought I to write it?’
They alter the forms of their sentences. They worry about grammar and
phrase-construction and even spelling. As for grammar and spelling, in
the greatest age of English literature neither subject was understood,
and no writer could be trusted either in spelling or in grammar.
To this day very few writers of genius are to be trusted either in
spelling or in grammar. As for phrase-construction, the phrase that
comes to your tongue is more likely to be well constructed than the
phrase which you bring forcibly into being at the point of your pen.
If you know enough grammar to talk comprehensibly, you know enough to
write comprehensibly, and you need not trouble about anything else; in
fact, you ought not to do so, and you must not. Formality in a diary is
a mistake. Write as you think, as you speak, and it may be given to you
to produce literature. But if while you are writing you remember that
there is such a thing as literature, you will assuredly never produce
literature.

This does not mean that you are entitled to write anyhow, without
thought and without effort. Not a bit. Good diaries are not achieved
thus. Although you may and should ignore the preoccupations of what I
will call, sarcastically, ‘literary composition,’ you must have always
before you the ideal of effectively getting your thought on to the
paper. You would, sooner or later, _say_ your thought effectively,
but in writing it down some travail is needed to imagine what the
perhaps unstudied spoken words would be. And also, the memory must
be fully and honestly exercised to recall the scene or the incident
described. By carelessness you run the risk of ‘leaving out the
interesting part.’ By being conscientious you ensure that the maximum
of interest is attained.

Lastly, it is necessary to conquer the human objection to hard labour
of any sort. It is not a paradox to assert that man often dislikes
the work which he likes. For myself, every day anew, I hate to start
work. You may end your day with the full knowledge that you have had
experiences that day worthy to go into the diary, which experiences
remain in your mind obstinately. And yet you hate to open the diary,
and even when you have opened it you hate to put your back into the
business of writing. You are tempted to write without reflection,
without order, and too briefly. To resist the temptation to be slack
and casual and second-rate involves constant effort. Diary-keeping
should be a pastime, but properly done it is also a task--like many
other pastimes. I have kept a diary for over twenty-one years,
and I know a little about it. I know more than a little about the
remorse--alas, futile!--which follows negligence. In diary-keeping
negligence cannot be repaired. That which is gone is gone beyond
return.

A DANGEROUS LECTURE TO A YOUNG WOMAN

IT was at a war-charity sale, in a hot, crowded public room of
a fashionable hotel, amid the humorous bellowings of an amateur
auctioneer and the guffaws of amused bidders, that this thing happened
to me. A young woman was passing, and, as she passed, she looked and
stopped, and abruptly charged me with being myself. I admitted the
undeniable.

‘I hope you’ll excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’ve read all your books.’

‘The usual amiable chatter,’ I thought, and made aloud my usual,
stilted, self-conscious reply to such a conversational opening:

‘You must have worked very hard.’

She frowned--just a little frown in the middle of her forehead. She
was very well-dressed (which is not a fault), and she had a pleasant,
sympathetic, serious face. She said:

‘I’ve often wanted to tell you; in fact, I thought I ought to tell you
about all those little books of yours about life and improving oneself,
and being efficient and not wasting time, and so on, and so on. They’re
very nice to read, but they’ve never done me any good--practically.’
She smiled.

(No; it was not to be the usual amiable chatter!)

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But, of course, books don’t act by themselves.
You can’t expect them to be of much practical good until you begin to
put them into practice.’

‘But that’s just the point,’ she answered. ‘I can’t _begin_ to put
them into practice. I can’t resolve, and I can’t concentrate, and I
can’t clench my teeth and make up my mind. And if I do make a sort of
start, it’s a failure after the first day. And this goes on year after
year. No use blaming me--I can’t help myself. I want awfully--but I
can’t.’

‘But _what_ do you want?’

‘I want to make the best of myself. I want to stop wasting time and to
perfect my “human machine.” I want to succeed in life. I want to live
properly and bring out all my faculties. Only, you see, I haven’t got
any resolution. I simply have not got it in me. You tell me to make
up my mind, steel myself, resolve, stick to it, and so forth. Well, I
just can’t. And yet I do want to. You’ve never dealt with my case--and,
what’s more, I don’t think you can deal with it. I hope you’ll pardon
all this bluntness. But I thought that, as a student of human nature,
you might be interested.’

I stood silent for a moment. She bowed with much charm and fled away.
I gazed everywhere. But she was lost in the huge room. I could not
very well run in pursuit of her--these things are not done in literary
circles. She had vanished. And I knew naught of her. She might be young
girl, young wife, young mother, anything--but I knew naught of her
except that she had a sympathetic, rather sad face, and that she had
left an arrow quivering in my side.

A few hours later, however, I spoke to the young creature as follows:

‘It seems to me that you may have been running your delightful head
up against an impossible proposition. Perhaps you have been hoping to
_create_ energy in yourself. Now, you cannot create energy, either
in yourself or elsewhere. Nobody can. You can only set energy free,
loosen it, transform it, direct it.

‘You may take a ton of coal and warm a house with it. The heat-energy
of the coal is transformed, set free, and directed to a certain
purpose. But if you try to warm the house by means of open coal fires
in old-fashioned fire-grates, you will warm the chimneys and some of
the air above the chimneys--and yet the rooms of the house will not be
appreciably warmer than they were when you began. On the other hand,
you may take a ton of exactly the same kind of coal and by means of
a steam-heating system in the cellar warm the rooms of the house to
such an extent that you have to wear your summer clothes in the depth
of winter. The steam-heating system, however, has not increased the
heat-energy of the coal; it has merely set free, utilised, and directed
the heat-energy of the coal in a common-sense--that is to say, a
scientific--manner. No amount of common sense and ingenuity will get
as much heat-energy out of half a ton as out of a ton of coal. You may
devise the most marvellous steam-heating system that exists on this
side of the grave, but if there is no fuel in the furnace, or if there
is in the furnace a quantity of coal inadequate to the size of the
house, the house will never be comfortable except for polar bears and
lovers. The available coal is the prime factor.

‘Well, an individual is born with a certain amount of energy--and
no more. Just as you cannot pour five quarts out of a gallon (as a
rule, you cannot pour even four quarts), so you cannot extract from
that individual more energy than there is in him. And, what is more
important, you cannot put additional quantities of energy into him. You
may sometimes seem to be putting energy into him, but you are not; you
are simply setting his original energy free, applying a match to the
coal or fanning the fire. An individual is an island on whose rocky
shores no ship can ever land that most mysterious commodity--energy.
You may transfuse blood, but not the inexplicable force that makes the
heart beat and defies circumstance.

‘Some individuals appear to lack energy, when, as a fact, they are full
of energy which is merely dormant, waiting for the match, or waiting
for direction. Other individuals appear to lack energy, and, in fact,
do lack energy. And you cannot supply their need any more than you can
stop their hair from growing.

‘No, young lady; it is useless to interrupt me by asking me to define
what I mean by the word “energy.” To define some words is to cripple
them. You know well enough what I mean by energy. I mean the most
fundamental thing in you.

‘Being a reasonable woman, you admit this--and then go on to demand,
first, how you can be quite sure whether you have been born with a
large or medium or a small quantity of energy, and, second, how you can
be quite sure that you have not lots of energy lying dormant within
you. You cannot be quite sure of anything. This is not a perfect world.

‘But, as regards the second part of your question, you can be
reasonably sure after a certain number of years--I will not suggest
how many--that energy is not lying dormant within you, awaiting the
match. It is impossible for anybody indefinitely to continue to wander
in a world full of lighted matches without one day encountering the
particular match that will set fire to _his_ fuel. And beware of
that match, for sometimes the result of the contact is an explosion
which shatters everything in the vicinity. If you have dormant energy,
one day it will wake up and worry you, and you will know it is there.

‘As regards the first part of your question, the usual index of the
amount of energy possessed by an individual is the intensity of the
desires of that individual. It is desire that uses energy. Strong
desires generally betoken much energy, and they are definite desires.
Without desires, energy is rendered futile. Nobody will consume energy
in action unless he desires to perform the action, either for itself or
as a means to a desired end.

‘But now you complain that I am once more avoiding your case. You
assert that you have desires without the corresponding energy or
corresponding will to put them into execution. I doubt it. I do not
admit it. You must not confuse vague, general aspirations with desire.
A real desire is definite, concrete. If you have a real desire, you
know what you want. You cannot merely want--you are bound to want
something.

‘Further, to want something only at intervals, when the mind is
otherwise unoccupied, is no proof of a real desire; it amounts to
nothing more than a sweet, sad diversion, a spiritual pastime, a simple
and pleasant way of making yourself believe that you are a serious
person. The desire which indicates great energy is always there,
worrying. It is an obsession; it is a nuisance; it is a whip and a
scorpion; it has no mercy.

‘And individuals having immense energy have commonly been actuated by
a single paramount desire, which monopolises and canalises all their
force. The pity is that these individuals have become the special
symbols of success. When they have achieved their single paramount
desire, they are said to have “got on,” to have succeeded. And every
one points an admiring finger at them and cries, “This is success in
life!” And the majority of books about success in life deal with this
particular brand of success, and assume that it is the only brand
of success worth a bilberry, and exhort all people to imitate the
notorious exemplars of the art of “getting on” and in that narrow
sense. Which is absurd.

‘And now, perhaps, we both feel that I am at last approaching your case.

‘But I do not wish to be personal. Let us take the case of Mr. Flack,
who died last week, unknown. His discerning friends said of him:
“He had a wonderful financial gift. If he’d concentrated on it, he
might have rivalled Harriman. But he wouldn’t concentrate either on
that or on anything else. He was interested in too many different
subjects--books, pictures, music, travel, physical science, love,
economics--in fact, everything interested him, and he was always
interested in something. He was too all-round. He frittered his
energy away, and wasted enormous quantities of time. And so he never
succeeded.”

‘Such was the verdict of some of Flack’s admirers. But it occurs to me
that Flack may have succeeded after all. Certainly he did not succeed
in being a financial magnate. But he succeeded in being interested
in a large number of things, and therefore in having a wide mind. He
succeeded in being always interested. And he succeeded in not being
lop-sided, which men of one supreme desire as a rule are. (Men who are
successful in the narrow sense generally pay a fearful price for their
success.) His friends regret that he wasted his time, but really, if he
accomplished all that he admittedly did accomplish, he couldn’t have
wasted a very great deal of time.

‘Quite possibly the late Mr. Flack used to wake up in the night and
curse himself because he could not concentrate, and because he could
not stick to one thing, and because he wasted his time, and because,
with all his gifts, he did not materially progress, and because he made
no impression on the great public. Quite possibly, in moments of gloom,
he had regrets about the dissipation of his energy. But he could not
honestly have regarded himself as a failure.

‘I should like to know why it is necessarily more righteous to confine
one’s energy to a single direction than to let it spread out in various
directions. It is not more righteous. If a man has one imperious
desire, his righteousness is to satisfy it fully. But if a man has many
mild, equal desires, _his_ righteousness is to satisfy all of them
as reasonably well as circumstances permit. And I see no reason why
one should be deemed more successful than the other.

‘Yes, young woman; I know what your excellent modesty is going to
say. It is going to say that the late Mr. Flack did show energy,
though he “frittered it away,” and that you do not show energy.
Now, I do not want to defend you against yourself (for possibly
you enjoy denouncing yourself and proving that you are worthless).
Nevertheless, I would point out that energy is often used in ways quite
unsuspected. Energy is a very various thing. Some people use energy
in arranging time-tables and sticking to them, and in clenching their
teeth and making terrific resolves and executing them, and in never
wasting a moment, and in climbing--climbing. And this is all very
laudable. But energy can be used in other ways--in contemplation, in
self-understanding, in understanding other people, in pleasing other
people, in appreciating the world, in lessening the friction of life.

‘I have personally come across persons--especially women--who were
idle, who were mentally inefficient, who made no material contribution
to the enterprise of remaining alive, but whose mere manner of
existence was such that I would say to them in my heart, “It is enough
for me that you exist.”

‘We have all of us come across such persons. And the world would be a
markedly inferior sort of place if they did not exist exactly as they
are.

‘You, dear young woman, may or may not be one of these. I cannot
decide. But, anyhow, if you are not one of the hard-striving, resolute,
persevering, teeth-clenching, totally efficient, one-ideaed, ambitious
species, you need not despair.

‘Imagine what the world would be like if we were all ruthlessly
set on “succeeding”! It would be like a scene of carnage. And it is
conceivable that you are, in fact, much more efficient than you think,
and that you are wasting much less time than you think, and that you
are employing much more energy than you think. You complained that
you lacked resolution, which means that you lacked one steady desire.
But perhaps your steady desire and resolution are so instinctive, so
profoundly a part of you, that they function without being noticed.
And if you do indeed lack one steady desire and the energy firmly to
resolve--well, you just do. And you will have to be content with your
lot. Why envy others? An over-mastering desire and its accompanying
energy are not necessarily to be envied.

‘A dangerous doctrine, you say. You say that I am leaving the door open
to sloth and slackness and other evils. You say that I am finding an
excuse for every unserious person under the sun. Perhaps so; but what
I have said is true, and I will not be afraid of the truth because it
happens to be dangerous. Moreover, every person ought to know in his
heart whether or not he is conducting his existence satisfactorily. But
he must interrogate his conscience fairly. It is not fair, either to
one’s conscience or to oneself, to listen to it always, for example, in
the desolating dark hour before the dawn, and never to listen to it,
for example, after one has had a good meal or a good slice of any sort
of honest pleasure.

‘And, lastly, I have mentioned envy. We are apt to mistake mere envy
of the successful for an individual desire to succeed. Yet an envious
realisation of all the advantages (and none of the disadvantages) of
success is scarcely the same thing as a genuine instinct for “getting
on”--is it?’

III

This long speech which I made to the young, dissatisfied creature might
have been extremely effective if I could have made it to her face. I
ought, however, to mention that I did not make it to her face. I have
been reporting a harangue which I delivered in the sleepless middle of
the night to her imagined image. It is easier to be effective in reply
when the argumentative opponent is not present.

THE COMPLETE FUSSER

FREQUENTERS of lunatic asylums are familiar with the person who, being
convinced that he is a poached egg, continually demands to be put on
hot toast, and is continually unhappy because nobody will put him on
hot toast. This man is quite harmless; he is merely a bore by reason of
a ridiculous delusion about the fulfilment of his true destiny being
bound up with hot toast; in character he is one of the most amiable
individuals that ever lived, amiable even to the point of offering
himself for consumption to those of his fellow-patients who are hungry,
and who happen to fancy a poached egg with their tea. Nevertheless, on
the score of his undeniable delusion he is segregated from ordinary
society, and indeed imprisoned for life. Such may be the consequence of
a delusion.

But not all deluded people are treated alike. A lady went for the
week-end to stay in a country cottage. Now, this lady was accustomed to
smoke a cigarette in her bath of a morning.

Let there be no mistake. She was a perfectly respectable lady. In
former days respectable ladies neither smoked cigarettes nor took
baths. The one habit was nearly as disreputable as the other. In the
present epoch they do both with impunity, and though possibly a section
of the public may consider that while for a woman to smoke a cigarette
is quite nice, and for a woman to have a bath is quite nice, to smoke a
cigarette in a bath is not quite nice for a woman, that section of the
public is in a very small minority and should therefore be howled down.

Anyhow the lady in question was everything that a lady ought to be. She
was in fact a well-known social worker and writer on social subjects.
On the Sunday morning a terrible rumour was propagated throughout the
country cottage. The lady did not smoke merely a cigarette in her
bath--she smoked a special brand of cigarette in her bath. And she
had forgotten to bring a due supply of the special brand, and her
cigarette-case had been emptied on the previous night. It became known
that she was in a fearful state, and would not be comforted. The brand
was Egyptian. At first none but the brand would do for her, but after a
period of agony she announced that she was ready to smoke any Egyptian
or Turkish cigarette. The cottage, however, was neither Egyptian nor
Turkish, but a Virginian cottage. She could not be induced to try a
Virginian cigarette, and the cottage was miles from anywhere, and the
day was the Sabbath.

She came downstairs miserable, unnerved, futile, a nuisance to herself
and to her hosts. She could not discuss important social matters,
which she had come on purpose to discuss. She could do naught except
sympathise with herself, and this she did on a tremendous scale. In the
afternoon a visitor called who possessed Egyptian cigarettes. The lady
got one, and at the first puff was instantly restored to her normal
condition. The hot toast had been brought to the poached egg.

The lady, I maintain, was suffering from a delusion at least as
outrageous as the poached egg delusion, the delusion that her body and
brain could not function properly--in other words that her destiny
could not be fulfilled--unless she took into her mouth at a certain
time a particular variety of gaseous fluid scarcely distinguishable
from a thousand other similar varieties of gaseous fluid. Her physical
perceptions were not at all delicate. Like most women, for example,
she could not tell the difference between tea stewed and tea properly
infused. If a Virginian cigarette had been falsely marked in an
Egyptian manner she would have smoked it with gusto. And if she had
been smoking in the dark she could not have told whether her cigarette
was in or out--unless she inhaled.

The delusion was nothing but a delusion. Her mind, by a habitual
process, had imagined it, and she had ended by being victimised by
it. She had ended by seriously believing that she was physically and
spiritually dependent upon a factor which had no appreciable power
beyond the power mistakenly and insanely attributed to it by her morbid
imagination.

But, did any one suggest that she ought to be confined in a lunatic
asylum? Assuredly not. If ever she goes to a lunatic asylum it will
be as a visitor, to smile superiorly at the man whose welfare depends
utterly on hot toast. From the moral height of a cigarette she will
pity hot toast.

Far from scheming to get the lady into a lunatic asylum, her hosts were
extraordinarily sympathetic, and even when they were by themselves the
worst thing they said was:

‘Poor thing! She’s rather fussy about cigarettes.’

No one, I think, will assert that I have overdrawn the picture of
a person victimised by a delusion and yet not inhabiting a lunatic
asylum. Every one will be able out of his own experience of the world
to match my example with examples of his own. And indeed there are few
of us who are not familiar with at least one example immensely worse
than the lady who staked her daily existence on getting an Egyptian
cigarette in her bath. Few of us have not met the gentleman who can
only be described as ‘the complete fusser.’

This gentleman has slowly convinced himself that the proper fulfilment
of his destiny depends absolutely upon about ten thousand different
things. All things of course have their importance, but this gentleman
attaches a supreme and quite fatal importance to all the ten thousand
things. He begins to be fussy on waking up, and he stops being fussy
when he goes to sleep. He may not smoke a cigarette in his bath, but he
will probably keep a thermometer in his bath because he is convinced
that there is a ‘right’ temperature for the bath-water, and that any
other temperature would impair his efficiency. He may detest smoking,
in which case he will probably have rigid ideas about the precise sort
of woven stuff he must wear next to his skin. He may be almost any
kind of character, and yet be fussy. He may be so tidy that he cannot
exist in a room, either in his own house or in anybody else’s, until he
has been round the walls and made all the pictures exactly horizontal.
He may be so untidy that if his wife privily tidies his desk he is put
off work for the rest of the day. He may be so fond of open air that he
can only sleep with his head out of a window, or so afraid of open air
that a draught deranges all his activities for a fortnight. He may be
so regular that he kisses his wife by the clock, or so irregular that
he is never conscious of appetite until a meal has been going cold for
half an hour. And so on endlessly.

But whatever he does and thinks he does and thinks under the conviction
that if he did and thought otherwise the consequences would be
disastrous to himself if not to others. Whereas the truth is that to
change all his habits from morn to eve would result in great benefit
to him. He spends his days attaching vast quantities of importance to a
vast number of things. Whereas the truth is, that scarcely any of the
said things are important in more than the slightest degree. He is the
victim of not one delusion but of hundreds of delusions, and especially
the grand delusion that the world is ready to come to an end on the
most trifling provocation.

But there is no hope of him being sent to join the poached egg in the
lunatic asylum. His friends are content to say of him:

‘He’s rather a particular man.’

True, his enemies scorn and objurgate him, and proclaim him pernicious
to society. You naturally are his enemy, and you scorn him. But you
should beware how you scorn him, because you may unconsciously be on
the way to becoming a complete fusser yourself. All of us--or at
any rate ninety-nine out of every hundred of us--have within us the
insidious microbe of fussiness.

III

The way to becoming a complete fusser is obscure at the start of it.
To determine the predisposing causes to fussiness would necessitate
volumes of research into the secrets of individuality and the origins
of character--and would assuredly lead to no practical result, because
these creative mysteries lie beyond our influence--at any rate for the
present. A man is born with or without the instinct to fuss--that must
suffice for us.

Nevertheless the real instinct to fuss ought not to be confused with
perfectly normal impulses which may superficially resemble it. Thus
it is often assumed that domestic servants as a class are fussy,
especially about their food. I can see no reason why domestic
servants as a class should be fussy, and I do not believe they are.
What is mistaken for fussiness in them is merely the universal human
prejudice against anything to which one is not accustomed. Labouring
people are, unfortunately for themselves, used to a narrow diet. A
hundred comestibles which to their alleged superiors may seem quite
commonplace are fearsomely strange to labouring people. A rural girl
goes to serve in a large house; she is offered excellent fish, and she
refuses it; she ‘can’t fancy it.’ Whereupon the mistress exclaims upon
the astounding fussiness of the poor! The explanation of the affair is
simply that the rural girl has never had opportunity to regard fish as
an article of diet.

Similar phenomena may be observed in children of even the superior
unfussy classes. And, for another instance, gardeners will grow the
most superb asparagus who would not dream of eating it, and could
scarcely bring themselves to eat it. For them asparagus is not a
luxury, but something unnatural in the mouth, like snails or the
hind-legs of frogs. Snails and the hind-legs of frogs are luxuries in
various parts of the world; the Anglo-Saxon maid-scorning mistress
would certainly recoil from them if they were put on her plate, and in
so doing she would not lay herself open to a charge of fussiness. Yet
in recoiling from them she would be behaving exactly like the rural
maid whom she scorns.

Nor must fussiness be confused with certain profound and incurable
antipathies, such as the strong repulsion of some individuals for cats,
apples, horses, etc.

The real instinct to fuss can always be distinguished from the other
thing by this--the real instinct to fuss is progressive. If it is
not checked with extreme firmness it goes steadily on its way. And
though the start of the way to becoming a complete fusser may be
obscure, the later portions of the journey are not so obscure. Pride,
if not conceit, presides over them, and is always pushing forward
the traveller from one abnormality to the next. Thus a man discloses
a dislike to black clothes. His aunt dies at a great distance and
leaves him some money. His wife asks him: ‘Shall you wear black?’ He
answers with somewhat pained dignity: ‘Darling, you know I never wear
black.’ He is now known to himself and to his wife as the man who will
not wear black. Then his father dies, in the same town where the son
lives; the objector to black will have to attend the funeral. After a
little conversation with him the wife says to friends: ‘You know Edward
objects to black. He does really. He _never_ wears it, and I’m
afraid he won’t wear it even for his father’s funeral.’

Henceforth Edward is known not merely to himself and his wife but to
the whole town as the man who won’t wear black. It is a distinction.
He is proud of it. His wife is rather impressed by the sturdiness of
his resolution. He has suffered a little for his objection to black.
His reputation is made. An anti-black clause inserts itself into his
religion. Pride develops into conceit. Success and renown encourage the
instinct to fuss, and soon he has grown fussy about something else. And
thus does the fellow reach his goal of being a complete fusser.

There is no cure for the complete fusser. You might think that some
tremendous disaster--such as marrying a shrew who hated fussing, or
being cast on a desert island, or being imprisoned--would cure him.
But it would not. It would only cause a change in the symptoms; for
every human environment whatsoever gives occasion for fussiness to
the complete fusser. Even in the army, even in the lowest and most
order-ridden grades of the army, the complete fusser contrives to
flourish. And he is incurable because he is unconscious of being fussy.
What the world regards as fussiness he regards as wisdom essential to a
reasonable existence. He sincerely looks down upon the rest of mankind.
Spiritual pride puts him into the category of the hopeless case--along
with the alcoholic drunkard, the genuine kleptomaniac, and other
specimens whom he would chillingly despise.

Apparently the sole use of the complete fusser is to serve as a
terrible warning to those who are on the way to becoming complete
fussers themselves--a terrible warning to pull up.

That fussiness in its earlier stages can be cured is certain. But the
cure is very drastic in nature. There are lucid moments in the life
of the as yet incomplete fusser when he suspects his malady, when he
guiltily says to himself: ‘I know I am peculiar, but--’ Such a moment
must be seized, and immediate action taken. (The ‘but’ must be choked.
The ‘but’ may be full of wisdom, but it must be choked; the ‘but’ is
fatal.) If the fusser is anti-black let him proceed to the shopping
quarter at once. Let him not order a suit-to-measure of black. Let him
buy a ready-made suit. Let him put it on in the store or shop, and let
him have the other suit sent home. Let him then walk about the town in
black.... He is saved! No less thorough procedure will save him.

And similarly for all other varieties of fussiness.

THE MEANING OF FROCKS

BEING a man, I know that on the subject of women’s fashions men
still talk a vast amount of nonsense, partly sincere and partly
insincere--especially when there are no women present. The fact is
that the whole subject is deeply misunderstood, and the great majority
of people, both men and women, live and dress and die without getting
anywhere near the truth of it.

Men try to explain the feminine cult of clothes by asserting that women
as a sex are vain. It is a profound truth that women as a sex are vain.
It is also a profound truth that men as a sex are vain. Have you ever
been with a man into a hosier’s shop? If you are a woman you certainly
have not, because, though a woman is often glad to be accompanied by a
man when she is choosing her adornments, a man will not allow a woman
to watch him at the same work. Fashionable dressmakers are delighted
to welcome the accompanying man. But at the sight of a woman in his
establishment the fashionable hosier would begin to fear for the safety
of the commonwealth. Even if you are a man you probably have not been
with another man into a hosier’s shop. Men prefer to do these deeds
quite alone; they shun even their own sex; the shopman does not count.
Why this secrecy? The answer is clear. Men are ashamed of themselves on
such occasions because on such occasions their real vanity is exposed.
Tailors, hosiers, and hatters are a loyal clan; but it must be admitted
that they all have a strange look on their faces. That look is due to
the revelations of male vanity which they carry locked eternally in
their breasts. To these purveyors men give themselves away and are
shameless before them. The ordinary man well knows that he is vain.
Besides, you can see him surreptitiously glancing at himself in shop
windows any day. And in some American periodicals there are positively
more advertisements of men’s finery than of women’s.

Again, men try to explain the feminine cult of clothes by asserting
that women are like sheep and must follow one another. What one does
all must do. This argument is more than insincere; it is impudent.
For women show much wider originality and variations of attire
among themselves than men do among themselves. Half a dozen average
well-dressed women will be as different one from another as half a
dozen flowers of different species; you could distinguish between
them half a mile off. But half a dozen well-dressed men would be
indistinguishably alike if you decapitated them. It is notorious that
men are the slaves of fashion. If a new shade of cravat or sock comes
out, the city will be painted with that shade in less than a week. One
year every handkerchief is worn in the sleeve. Another year it will be
shocking to wear a handkerchief in the sleeve, because the only proper
place for wearing a handkerchief is in a pocket over the heart. At the
slightest change in the fashionable diameter of the leg of a pair of
trousers every man with adequate cash or credit will rush privily to
his tailor’s, and in sixty hours a parcel will arrive at that man’s
home marked: ‘Very urgent. Deliver at once.’

Men have a perfect passion for being exactly like other men--not merely
in clothes, but in everything. So much so that they cannot bear to
think that there are men unlike themselves. Thus men will form clubs of
which all the members are alike in some important point, so that while
they are in the club they will live under the beautiful illusion of
universal resemblance. They loathe opinions which are unfashionable,
or unfashionable in their particular set and environment; they will
not even read about such opinions if they can help it; they are ready
to imprison or kill (and often actually have imprisoned or killed) the
holders of such opinions, solely because they are not in the fashion.
And could a man with a bag-wig walk down the Strand or Fifth Avenue
without having it knocked off or being arrested for obstruction? He
could not. Nevertheless a bag-wig is less preposterous than a silk hat.

Yet again, men try to explain the feminine cult of clothes by asserting
that women as a sex really enjoy the huge task of dressing, and really
enjoy spending money for the sake of spending money, and have no
brains above personal embellishment. All these arguments are patently
ridiculous. To very many well-dressed women the task of dressing is
naught but a tedious and heavy burden. As for brains, it frequently
occurs that the women with the most intelligence (intelligence far
surpassing that of the average man) are the most _chic_. In regard
to the enjoyment of mere spending, the charge is true. It is, however,
equally true of men. I could refer to tailors, hosiers, and hatters,
but I will not. Take, for a change, two dining parties at a restaurant,
one consisting of three men and three women, the other consisting of
six men. The bill of the six men will be the heavier. As a sex men, in
the French phrase, ‘refuse themselves nothing.’ And their felicity in
spending for the sake of spending is touchingly boyish.

Whatever may be the explanation of the subjection of women to costly
fashion, we are now, at any rate, in a position to say what the
explanation is _not_. It is not that women are specially vain.
It is not that women are specially like sheep. It is not that they
lack intelligence. It is not that they enjoy the tyranny. And it is
not that they are spendthrift. If the explanation lay in any of these
directions men would read fashion papers, go to sales, and change their
suits four times a day.

You will say:

‘Women adorn themselves in order to be attractive to the other sex.’

This is true, but only to a limited extent. And men also adorn
themselves in order to be attractive to the other sex. Moreover, a
woman who has found the man of her desire, and is utterly satisfied
therewith, will still go on adorning herself, even though the man in
question has made it quite clear that she would attract him just as
strongly in a sack as in a Poiret gown. Further, some fashions do
not attract; they excite ridicule rather than admiration; yet they
are persisted in. And women of the classes who do not and cannot
cultivate fashionableness succeed at least as well as the other woman
in attracting men, even when these men by reason of laborious lives
have almost no leisure for dalliance. The truth is that the competition
among women for men is chiefly a legend--not wholly. There are more
women than men, but not many more. Women want marriage more than
men want marriage, but not much more. Competition is by no means so
fierce that women have to perform prodigies of self-ornamentation
in order to inveigle a fellow-creature so simple that he worries
about the tint of his own necktie and socks; and the idea of such a
phenomenon is derogatory to women. After all, nature has the business
of sex-attraction in hand, and she is not dependent on fashions. Long
before fashions had been evolved she managed it precisely as well as
she manages it to-day. She relies, not upon textile stuffs, but upon
the stuff that dreams are made on; namely, glances, gestures, actions,
and speech.

The authentic major explanation of the expensive fashionableness of
women must be sought in another direction. As usual, men are at the
bottom of the affair. When woman gloriously dresses herself up to go
out, she does so in order to prove to the world something which man
wants to be proved to the world. In old days the two attributes which
man held in the highest esteem were wealth and idleness. To be poor was
shameful, and to work for a living was shameful. Man, therefore, had to
demonstrate publicly that he was neither needy nor industrious. One of
the best methods of demonstration was costume, and the costume of the
successful man in those days was very expensive, and so gorgeous and
delicate as to make toil impossible for him.

The time came when man ceased to be proud of his own idleness, and his
costume altered accordingly. Then the duty of demonstrating wealth
and idleness by means of costume fell on woman. Man could not do
the demonstration on his own person--he was too busy--and hence he
employed the lady to be expensive on his behalf. Such was her function,
and still is her function. The Rue de la Paix is based firmly on the
distant past. Assuredly long years will elapse before feminine costume
ceases to be used as a demonstration that man possesses the attributes
that are most admired. Estates demonstrate the possession of those
attributes; bonds demonstrate the possession of those attributes. But
estates are a fixture, and bonds are kept in a safe. Costume walks
about; your wife can take it to the seaside with her; the world cannot
help noticing it; and it has the further advantage of ministering to
the senses.

The proofs of the substantial correctness of this explanation of
women’s dress are innumerable. Perhaps the principal proof is that the
very man who grumbles at fashionableness in women would be the first to
complain if his wife started to ignore fashion and to dress merely for
comfort, utility, and charm. No man objects to the inexpensiveness of
his wife’s clothes, but every man objects to them looking inexpensive.
The advertised lure of a blouse marked one pound at a sale is that it
has the air of a blouse costing two pounds. Suppose a rich man sees
a delightful typewriting young woman walking down the street, falls
in love with her, and marries her. Now, although the clothes in which
he saw her suited her admirably in every way, and although she has
simple tastes, and more elaborate clothes do not suit her so well, the
first thing she has to do on marriage is to alter her style of dress
for a more expensive style. Otherwise the man will say: ‘I don’t want
my wife to look like a clerk.’ In other words: ‘I insist on my wife
demonstrating to the universe that I possess wealth and can afford
to keep her idle on my behalf.’ Even in small provincial towns where
personal adornment is theoretically discouraged, and where people
preach the entirely false maxim that externals don’t matter--even there
the theory holds good. The middle-class wife will have her sealskin
coat before she has her automobile. Fur coats are detestable garments
to walk in, but real sealskin is a symbol which cannot be denied.

And it is as important that that costume should prove idleness as that
it should prove wealth. Hence the fragility of extremely fashionable
costumes, and their unpracticalness. The fashionable costume must be
of such a nature that the least touch of the workaday world will ruin
it; and it must go beyond this--it must be of such a nature that the
wearer is actually prevented by it from her full and proper activity.
An unconsidered movement would rip it to pieces. Rich Chinese males
till recently kept their finger-nails so long that it was impossible
for them to use their hands, and they maimed females so that they could
not walk. Both sexes were thus rendered helpless, and the ability
to be futile was proved like a problem of Euclid. We laugh at that.
Crinolines were admirably designed to hinder honest work. And we laugh
at crinolines too. But we still have the corset, though the corset is
not the homicidal contrivance it once was. And we have the high-heeled
shoe, higher than ever. You say: ‘But women have high heels to increase
their apparent height.’ Not a bit! All women whose business it is to
demonstrate idleness to the universe wear high heels, because high
heels are a clear presumption that the wearer is not obliged really
to exert herself. If a woman with a rich husband is so inordinately
tall that she is ashamed of her height, she will wear high heels to
prove that her husband is rich. And, not to be outdone, the delightful
typewriting girl walking down the street at 8.30 A.M. will
also wear high heels--and each hurried step she takes is a miracle of
balance, pluck, and endurance. Life is marvellous.

III

You will say:

‘Life may be marvellous, but these revelations about human motives are
terrible, and they depress us.’

They ought not to depress you. The saving quality about human motives
is that they are so human, and therefore so forgivable. And, be it
remembered, I have not asserted that the demonstration of wealth and
leisure is the sole explanation of fashionableness. I have already
referred to the desire to be attractive; and to this must be added the
sense of beauty, which is nearly allied to it. The woman who bedecks
herself is actuated by all three motives--the motive of ostentation (to
satisfy primarily the man), the motive to attract, and the motive to
satisfy the sense of beauty.

As regards the last, it may be said that the sense of beauty does not
regularly improve in mankind, like, for instance, the sense of justice.
No feminine raiment has ever equalled the classic Greek, which was
not costly. But then the Greeks were not worried by too much wealth.
And the Greek dress would be highly inconvenient without the Greek
daily life, and especially without the Greek climate. And I doubt if
nowadays we should care greatly for the Greek life. Still, the sense
of beauty does emphatically exist among us, and the desire of women to
be attractive is quite as powerful as it was in the time of Aspasia.
These two motives are constantly, and often victoriously, fighting
against the motive of ostentation, and it is probably the interplay of
the three motives that produces the continual confusing and expensive
changes of fashion, as has been well argued by Professor Franklin Henry
Giddings, one of the most brilliant social philosophers in the United
States.

‘But all this must be altered!’ the ardent among you will cry out.
‘In future women must dress solely to be attractive and to satisfy the
sense of beauty.’

Well, they just won’t. Men will never allow it, and women themselves
would never agree to it. Costume will always be more than costume;
costume is so handy and effective as a symbol of something else; and
that something else will always be--success. When wealth ceases to be
the standard of success, then costume will cease to be employed as a
proof of wealth, and not before. Meanwhile, we must admit that, if the
possession of wealth has to be proved to the world, it could not be
proved in a more charming and less offensive way than in the costumes
of women. The spectacle of a stylish dress stylishly worn is extremely
agreeable. The spectacle of a room full of stylish dresses stylishly
worn is thrilling. He among you who has never been to a ball should go
to one and try the experience for himself.

Leisure, the ability to be idle and useless, is still to a certain
extent a standard of success in life, but not anything like so much
as in the past. People are gradually perceiving that to be idle and
useless is vicious. Hence the unpracticalness of women’s costumes will
gradually decrease. Beyond question high heels, for example, will
vanish from our pavements and from our drawing-rooms. I even have hope
that women will one day wear dresses which they can put on and fasten
unaided without the help of one, two, or three assistants. But such
changes will arrive slowly. You cannot hurry nature. It is a great
truth that the present is firmly rooted in the past. It refuses to be
pulled up by the roots. Futile to announce that you will in future be
guided by nothing but common sense! Whose common sense? Common sense
is a purely relative thing. The common sense of the past often seems
silly to us, and the common sense of the present will often seem silly
to the future. The progress of mankind is an extraordinarily complex
business. It cannot be settled in a phrase. Nothing in it is simple;
nothing in it is unrelated to the rest. Everything in it has a reason
which will appeal to true intelligence. And men should bear this in
mind when they talk lightly and scornfully (and foolishly) about
women’s fashions.

To conclude, let me utter one word about the secret fear that lies
always at the back of most men’s minds--the fear that such-and-such a
change in the habits of women will destroy their femininity. This fear
is groundless. Femininity--thank heaven!--is entirely indestructible.
It will survive all progress and all revolutions of taste. And when the
end comes on this cooling planet the last vestige of it will be there,
fronting the last vestige of masculinity.

Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press.

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