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The Return of the Girl
By
Maurice Thompson
THE RETURN OF THE GIRL
ταδε νυν ἑταἱραις
ταἱς εμαισι τερπνα καλως ἁεἱσω
– Sappho, Frag. II.
TO begin with, a girl is, generally speaking, an interesting organism, and a perfect specimen finds prompt welcome in any cabinet. The type is not paleozoic; at all events no fossil remains have yet been discovered in any of the rocks; but Jane Austen may serve in that stead, duly pinned and labelled archeparthenos.
Not of grizzled spinsters dully staring, in the mummy stage of existence, out of vitreous eyes furnished by the taxidermist, but of plump, sound, hearty young girls do we now wish some scientific notes. Let the withered type-specimens remain in their glass cases for the benefit of Professor Shelfdust and the English novelists: our heroine is yet under twenty years of age; she has never heard of sociology and is marvellously ignorant of the ethics of elopement; but she is as clever as she is fascinating.
Sappho knew the value of her sex in the bud, when perfect girl nature was just beginning to let go its charming essentials upon the air.
“τἱς δ’ αγροιωτἱς τοι θἑλγει νοον
ουκ επισταμενα τα βρακε’ εγκην επι των σφνρων?”
“What rustic lass can win your heart
Without a touch of girlish art?”
Or literally: “What rustic maiden, even, can captivate your mind, if she is not clever at drawing her skirts around her ankles?” There shows the brush of genius, a fine stroke, like the circle of Giotto, projecting a complete figure; and it is warm with life. The girl is pretty, brown as a berry, smiling, and lissomely graceful. Her sophistication is altogether hereditary. Sidney had her in mind when he wrote: —
“Gay hair, more gay than straw when harvest lies,
Lips red and plump as cherries’ ruddy side,
Eyes fair and great, like fair great ox’s eyes,.
.. Flesh as soft as wool new dressed,
And yet as hard as brawn made hard by art.”
Like a bird in a bush, the strong, healthy girl shows her decorations with enthusiastic willingness, yet shyly, flitting betimes and keeping quite out of reach, while apparently not thinking of danger. Even the wild lass, saucing Daphnis from the doorway of her cave, knew perfectly well that he would hang his head and pass by. She was σὑνοφρυς κὁρα; that is, her eyebrows ran together across her nose, which was not as unfortunate as Herrick’s sort of girl, who was —
“One of those
That an acre hath of nose.”
Why will the thought of berries come up? Dear old Suckling gave vent to it thus: —
“No grape that’s kindly ripe could be
So round, so plump, so soft as she,
Nor half so full of juice.”
No wonder that it has been a persistent dream of masculine poets to —
“Journey along
With an armful of girl and a heart full of song!”
We older folk, who were brought up and educated in the sweet provincial ways, can see that it has been the atrabilious old maids and the matronly flirts who have banished the dear, delicious girl from artistic consideration. The woman of thirty, and upwards, by persistent manœuvring, has got between us and sweet sixteen. What we have to show for the change is the feminine novel of nasty morals. Of course many of these flabby romances about over-mature heroines are written by men; but they are mostly men of a beardless style with much complaint to make against their ancestors. A sound man naturally loves a healthy young girl and wants to be her father, her brother, or her lover, according to propriety. He is, moreover, lenient towards the elderly unmarried females, when they do not insist upon the superiority of an Isabella-colored complexion; but at best they are not girls; in which they differ from happily married women, who keep to themselves a girlish charm late into life.
We all have our misfortunes for which we are not in the least to blame. The single woman whose bloom is gone is interesting as an embodied pathos, but not thrilling as a sweetheart; she looks dry as a heroine of romance; she spoils a love-song. No wonder that the realists cannot fit their art to girlhood while their theory of life excludes sweetness and health. It is a pursuit of love within discouraging limitations when some middle-aged man, with gray in his whiskers, limps rheumatically on the track of a stout lady in her thirties, and with a picture of such a race is pessimism best represented.
But the healthy and natural girl, apple-cheeked and merry-eyed, sweet-voiced – παρθενον αδυφονον – a girl of girls, is what charms mankind in life and literature. Her ways are like thistledown in a summer breeze; they suggest idyllic dreams and make us believe in all manner of delightful human happiness. We are all poets when she engages our imagination; we are all young when she loves us; we are all good in her presence, – holy-minded at thought of her.
Perhaps the surest sign of decadence in art is the appearance of the dame in the space naturally occupied by the lass; for it proves that taste is no longer an elemental impulse, but rather a matter of fashion, or of illicit influence. We do not find Madame Bovary appealing to the ever-fresh wells of our manhood. We could not be glad of having her for mother, wife, daughter, sister, or sweetheart. She poisons our imagination and repels our interest. It is a delight to turn away from her to the blushing young heroine who loves purely and with all her heart, – a girl as fresh and sound as a May strawberry.
Of all unnatural things none can seem quite so unjust as ill health falling upon a girl. Balzac, in one of his hideously interesting romances, pictures to the minutest line a poor child stricken with disease and robbed of her season of bud and bloom. I have always felt that the story was an unpardonable piece of writing. We sometimes see such pitiful and appealing objects in the street, or at some country place; but why should they be put into books written for our delectation?
Once upon a time a friend and I, upon archery intent, tramped together for a fortnight among the hills of North Carolina, in a region given over to the race of mountaineers. It was saddening to observe the lean, vacant, bloodless faces of the girls in the cabins. As a rule, however, activity of body and a certain limberness go with these desiccated-looking countenances, and now and again you find a flower of rustic loveliness wasting its sweetness and ignorance on the mountain air. An instance comes to mind. We were having luncheon at a spring under the hill, upon which an ancient cabin nestled amid its peach-trees.
Down a zig-zag path worn into the brick-yellow clay and rotten slate of the declivity came a maiden bearing on her head a cedar noggin. She stepped briskly and nimbly, not deigning to touch the noggin with her hand, but with scarcely perceptible head-movements kept it at perfect equilibrium on her crown. Barefooted, her coarse blue petticoat very scant and short, a wonderful brush of pale gold hair crinkling over her perfect shoulders, her arms half bare, a throat like a bird’s, and a face-flower full of happy lights, she made just that sudden impression of æsthetic surprise which comes with the poet’s rarest phrase and most unexpected rhyme.
It turned out that this strong young thing was as ignorant and empty as she was beautiful and healthy; but when she spoke to us her voice had the timbre of a hermit thrush’s and she gave us a glimpse of teeth incomparably white and even. She was not timid, not bold, but natural. Took hold of my yew bow, which rested against a tree, and inquired about it, fingered my arrows and quiver, asked my companion whither we were going. All this time the cedar noggin on her sunny head wagged gently, but kept its place, until presently she took it off, and, with a melodious souse in the spring, filled it, replaced it aloft and walked back up the hill, hands down and absolutely sure of foot.
“Well,” said my companion, in a breathless tone, “if I didn’t think for a moment that you meant to shoot her! A regular wood nymph.”
As for myself I did not like the term wood nymph applied to a girl like that. She was as pretty, as pure, and as ignorant as a wild blue violet, and evidently as happy as a lark in a meadow. I felt the better for having seen her, and, as we trudged on, there was a new fragrance in my imagination.
The streets and suburban lanes of our little Western towns and cities offer great facilities for the study of happy girlhood, large thanks to the bicycle. During my summer walks and drives I meet whisps and flocks and bevies of lasses, or they pass me at scorching speed. They put the “bicycle-face” to shame with their rippling countenances and merry chatter. I shall never, I hope, forget one little maid of fifteen who drove her wheel as straight and steady as a flying quail, with her arms folded on her breast, and her lithe body poised inimitably. She looked at me with big round eyes, as if to say: “Do you see how I can do this?”
Indeed, my enjoyment of the frank sweetness in the air where girls are at play would be perfect were it not for the “Little Lord Fauntleroy” so often in evidence; but for him, all becurled and beruffled, I have a supreme and stony aversion. If some ruddy, ragged urchin, of the true Adamic race, would but down him and bedaub him with mud! If some girl would spank him and send him home; but the girl seems actually to like the self-conscious and unnatural little scamp. She smoothes his collar and pulls down his velvet jacket, hugs him and calls him pet names. He is the fellow who will grow up to be gun-shy, and inclined to marry a double-divorced actress, much to the girl’s disgust.
It was Madame de Staël, I believe, who said: “Let my children be not girls; for a woman’s life is so sad.” Even she, however, did not find girlhood unhappy, and the preventive to be used against the misery of womanhood would be to hold on to girlish simplicity, faith, and sanity as long as possible. We grow like what we contemplate, and the question is, do we now-a-days give adequate contemplation to the true, the beautiful, and the good, whose symbol and measure is the heart of a healthy girl? Our civilization must luxuriate in what maidenhood can safely assimilate, or it must grovel at the feet of the yellow woman, tough and passée.
There is encouraging evidence, visible just now, of a desire on the public’s part to get rid of Old Mrs. Woman, and take up once more with her granddaughter, the not wholly unsophisticated, but yet quite innocent and undesigning maiden. Men of the right sort have always felt that the happy married woman should be sheltered from publicity, and that the unhappy wife’s sorrows are sacred; but the love of a youth and a maid, that is something for the delight of the whole world. We are tired of this rank immorality tricked out in the toggery of love, – and the lovers married to other folk, – this rank immorality of the old blasé hero and the adroit, conscienceless and time-battered heroine.
A return to the insipid pastoral of the early centuries would be tolerable, if no better shift can be had, as breach full and wide with the feminine party of faded spinsterhood and preposterous sociology, of tirades against marriage and of the sainthood of grass widows. Let in the young girl of sound body and merry heart; give her another chance; the whole world is ready to welcome her. Her smile will banish the yellow dust of the faded asters; her presence will hush even the whisper of brutalities.
The other day I wrote to a distant friend and put to him Horace’s light question: —
“Quæ circumvolitas agilis thyma?”
Back came the answer: “I am running races with my three little girls. What is there better to do?” A man of gravity and distinction playing with his little daughters has what a politician would call a “pull” upon the gods for the highest joy of existence. From that play-ground he bears away the nectar of incomparable flowers, and the pollen on his thighs will freshen the whole hive of the world.
We may be sure that there is something wrong when we hear it growled around that young maidenhood is insipid in art, and that virility – a murrain seize the word – demands a Harriet Martineau, or the like, for a good, substantial feast of the imagination. Not assuming to know a great deal about virile women, I can venture the statement that truly virile men adore the young girl. She is the heroine of the iron-willed, vastly capable, boy-hearted fellows who make the world move. There is always a love of simple, elemental pleasures in great masculine natures. Precious little they care for artificial cheeks and pencilled eyebrows. Better a healthy, dewy-lipped milkmaid, singing behind the hedge, than a bediamonded old heiress whose teeth have ground luxuries some three dozen long years.
At all events my own preference for the blushing young heroine is unalterable, and I am eager to see her come back, garlanded and happy, to take her rightful place in both life and romance. I long to read yet one more book wherein the sound-hearted story-teller gives full run to that quintessential joy of loving which only the young girl can inspire. I am tired of bacon and potatoes; give me some of old Gervase Markham’s simples —
“The king-cup, the pansy with the violet,
The rose that loves the shower,
The wholesome gilliflower.”
The Art of Saying Nothing Well
By
Maurice Thompson
THE ART OF SAYING NOTHING WELL
La simplicité divine de la pensée et du style.
– Paul Verlaine.
IN our day, as it now flies, there are fine films of distinction to be considered, notably in literary art. The merest gossamer of verbal indication must be respected in the behalf of style, lest a shade of meaning, no matter how vague, be lost from paragraph or phrase. The thing to be said is of no importance, we are told; but how it is said, that is the great matter.
If the title of the present paper be seriously studied it will prove puzzling to the average critic. It is a charming sentence, rich in possibilities of meaning. The last two words, like the tail of a bee, bear honey and poison on the same spike, or in sacs close by. Which shall you receive, a sweet drop or an enraging prick? What, indeed, does “saying nothing” mean? And nothing well said, does that mean a well-said nothing? or shall we understand that anything has been poorly said?
Behold how easily a pen slips into hopeless obscurities of mere ink! I see that I am gone wool-gathering, and that my verbal distinctions just attempted do not distinguish. Was it Horace who said this? —
“Non in caro nidore voluptas summa, sed in te ipso est.”
The “precious smack,” however, goes a long ways when there is nothing else to be had. The art of saying nothing well is the art of the bore or the art of the decadent, as you may interpret it. But a voice at my elbow quietly suggests that the distinction is still without a difference. The decadent, being always a bore, whether he has a precious smack or a smack of preciousness, has the art of saying nothing well and everything ill.
The good old days, when men who wrote were impressed with the value of original thought, were hard on brains, but easy on dictionaries. A tremendous idea was set for all time in a few words grabbed at random from a scant vocabulary. Even after “art for art’s sake” had come to stay, the great early poets were stingy in their verbal dealings with art. It is surprising to note how meagre is the vocabulary of Sappho, or of Theocritus, or of Pindar. And yet what incomparable riches of expression! The masters were in a flux of imagination, and to them a word had no value beyond its fitness to stand as a perfect sign of what the brain originated. But not so with us; we chase the word for the word’s sake. We imagine that there is something precious in verbal style quite independent of what it may be used upon. A cheese, although rotten, is made sweet enough, we think, by being wrapped in an artistic poster.
We are quite familiar with the phrase “good literature,” which has come to mean nothing and that wordy, or a good thing and that well written, according to the individual taste of the critic deciding the matter. But most generally we now take for granted that there is really nothing worth saying on account of its intrinsic value. As a new woman said of her kind the other day, “Oh, the female form is but a clothes-horse nowadays. A woman is suggested, not seen, by what she wears,” we may well say of thought: it is a mere word-rack, a peg upon which to hang attractive diction. Not unfrequently the thought is quite dispensed with and the phrasing hangs upon nothing.
If you have nothing to write, of course write it well. Good literature, like Homer’s and Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s, was well enough before Théophile Gautier invented style; but since then there has come a change, and now we demand, not new matter, but always a new manner. As for durability, we are satisfied with a season’s run; permanency is not desirable. Fame, which once was a thing to die for, has taken on the form of a spring jacket or summer cravat; you wear it till the next change in the weather. The art of saying nothing well is as fickle as the moon; for nothing and woman pride themselves upon varying their fashions; and what is good literature now but woman and nothing? Aminta and her George Meredith strut before us as if they owned the earth; but to-morrow there will be another woman and a new nothing.
The happiest literary folk in all the world must be those in Paris, who actually took Paul Verlaine seriously, and are now making obeisance to Stéphane Mallarmé. They seem to be, if we leave out certain provençal dialect writers and our own American critics, the only litterateurs upon earth who would heroically die rather than be right. M. Mallarmé expresses perfectly in a single phrase the whole ambition of his literary flock: “d’abord et toujours et irrésistiblement Verlaine.” But how charming a thing literature is in the hands of these poêtes maudits, as Verlaine styled them! To be sure, it is naught but nothing well said. Verlaine may have been right when he wrote his eulogy: “Absolus par l’imagination, absolus par l’expression, absolus comme les Reys Netos des meilleurs siècles;” there is much to be said about nothing, and more about such writers as Corbière, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, who have served to amuse a blasé crowd of the best fellows that ever lived, the Alexandrian Greek poets doubtfully excepted.
What Sir Walter Scott called “the big bow-wow” is not suited to the perfect expression of nothing. Browning’s diction gets on better at a pinch, when the poet has to resort to a dazzling display of blank verbal cartridges; for sometimes it is almost impossible to distinguish a meaningless whiff of word-wind from a whizzing bullet of thought. We dodge with delight when either clips too near us. The other day I was auditing the book-bills of “Narcissus,” and found myself delicately and deliciously charmed by what under different circumstances would have been a mere lack of assets to back the paper. Style never went further nor came back with a more fragrant and savory load of nothing. From paragraph to paragraph one glides over a meandering smoothness. It is like bicycling on imaginary asphalt between immaterial clover fields. One hears bumblebees and sheep and kine; but never is there any visible or tangible matter of delectation: only a lulling composite noise; vox et præterea nihil. This voice of the hollow sphere and this dripping of melodious word-showers, to change the figures, combine to high perfection in the latest good literature. Think of what a fascination a style can have, when a young girl fresh from Vassar flings down a volume by William Sharp, or one by I. Zangwill, and rapturously exclaims: “Shakespeare and Scott are not in it for a minute longer!” How delightful to do good that evil may come!
It would be hardly fair to wring into this paper a consideration of the art of writing nothing ill. Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane have given practical demonstrations of what may be done at a venture in that field. Here again my own style persists in obscurity. Nothing to write and the poorest imaginable style, is not exactly the same with plenty to write and not a sentence ill written. The art of writing nothing and writing it ill might, however, be admirable in the hands of a master. For example, there is Andrew Lang’s eulogy of H. Rider Haggard’s stories, which I might cite in any part of this essay with perfect propriety and unqualified approval, as being strictly in point. When Mr. Lang has absolutely nothing for subject he is alluringly objective and revels in good literature. He is singularly expert in writing nothing ill.
But the art of writing nothing well, of writing so that nothing is well said, or whatever I mean, offers difficulties not readily foreseen by the ambitious candidate for authorhood. Nothing must ever be dressed up to look like a great something with an honorable ancestry and a congenital lease upon posterity, unless we accept the other interpretation of my caption. What could, on the other hand, be reasonably described as the bloomer-costume style of writing, by which effeminate imaginings are made to masquerade as virile and of the major origin, demands serious and exhaustive study. To achieve it William Watson has, we hope, a long life of self-reform before him; but some are born to it. Austin Dobson would not, apparently, give a penny to have it, albeit some of his best work neatly grazes the goal. Happy accident has done much on this score for Henry James, reading whose latest work one might exclaim with Mr. Sherburne Hardy: “But yet a woman!” And Mr. Howells should never go near a Shaker village if he has any regard for what old friends think of his style. It makes him say nothing with unusual delight.
When I get back to my Greek, as I usually do at the earliest moment, an essay like Aristotle’s on poetry makes me wonder how it has lived so long and kept so well, seeing that it says something without regard, at any point, to “lightness of touch” or to preciousness of phrasing. It is not good literature, measured by the standard of Robert Louis Stevenson’s style; but in its gnarls of diction are thoughts hard bound with fibres that are indestructible. Aristotle was too busy inside of his brain to have much respect for exterior frills; but where shall we find solider phrases than he snatched out of his stinted vocabulary? It is tough reading, almost as bad as Browning’s best, and the words grate together like teeth with sand between them; still, something is said. You remember his turns of diction by associating them with his thoughts; but you never dream of regarding him as a writer with a style-charm. His fascination comes from deep down, as if sent up by roots squeezed between bowlders.
And it is true that a permanent fascination of style is always due to something more than nothing well said. The attempt has been made in American criticism to stow a poem like Poe’s “Raven” away in the lumber garret as a mere word-trick; but there is something tremendously human in the spiritual adumbration by which that great poem sustains itself. Style is there, superb style; and the clutch of grim sorrow, the pang of despair, and the helplessness of a soul in the presence of fate, are there as well. Poe could not command Stevenson’s nimble diction, nor could he even understand what humor like Lowell’s was. The power in his work came from behind his lines out of a wellspring hidden in a strange and original mind. He “played with dictionaries” and feigned abstruse learning; but he said new and impressive things in a new and impressive style.
The deepest truth connected with the permanency of art is that there must be style, which does not stand for the same thing as diction, nor for the same thing as characteristic stroke, manner, or tone. Mere deftness with the brush, mere cleverness with the fiddle-bow, mere facility in the doing of word-jugglery, cannot pass into permanent art, and this is the lesson we need to-day. We take verbal style too seriously when we reckon with it as of more importance than fresh thought and enlarged ideals. It is not the art of saying nothing well that wins in the long run; it is the art of saying a great thing with a simple charm of style which does most to enrich literature. Indeed, great things are themselves simple, the greatest the simplest. Nothing is well said when nothing is said.
