IX. A PLEA FOR ARTIFICIALITIES.

“Pretty as a picture!” we often hear enthusiastic persons exclaim at sight of a fair landscape or a beautiful face. The speaker’s genuine appreciation then is evidently for pictures rather than for the actual things which the pictures more or less truthfully represent, and his compliment to nature is in consequence lamentably left-handed. But nature can stand it well enough, and the sentiment underlying such a spontaneous expression is very human and natural. There is indeed almost invariably an instinctive justice behind social traditions and popular prejudices. In this case the fact is that the picture is a simplified adaptation of nature to the general comprehension. In a successful picture much is made of the salient features which pleasantly strike the eye, and everything else is eliminated, for the sight, like the other senses, and like the heart itself, has its own predilections and antipathies, which it subtly imposes upon the reason. It is the discriminating selection and adjustment of these outward affinities, then, that constitute the main function of art. And social artificiality is simply art applied to ethics, to the minor morals and manners of everyday life; hence the unanimous preference of mankind, particularly women—of course, as the old phrase has it, mankind embraces women—for the suave conventionalities of art over the crude verities of nature. It was easy to see that Alphonse Karr had been a philosopher before he turned florist when he said, “Few women love flowers, but all are fond of bouquets.”

Flowers themselves are highly susceptible to the ameliorating influences of artificiality. Compare the wild flowers with the cultivated exotic or even with the favorites of the garden, and see how splendidly nature acknowledges, with what richness of bloom and incense of odor, the ministering attentions of art. How immeasurably the exquisite Parma violet surpasses the modest dogtooth of the wood! While that dainty wild rose, the eglantine, when called by some other name—Jacqueminot, for example, with a fine pedigree of artificiality behind it—really does smell far sweeter. This, of course, is no disparagement to the dewy eglantine, which is charming in its native wilds. All I claim is that the comparison certainly does not slight the queenly Jacque.

So the rule runs all the way up to men and women. High bred is high valued everywhere. War has repeatedly demonstrated that the city man—he of the nervous tension and artificial life—has better soldier stuff in him than the horny-handed patriot fresh from the plow.

Nature lays the foundation of all beauty, moral and physical, but she does not bestow the cachet of distinction. A Parisian grande dame once said in my hearing to Mrs. C., a fair American who prided herself upon that wondrous lily and rose complexion which the late Horace Greeley bequeathed to his daughters: “But, my dear, you should use powder. Not that you need it for beauty’s sake, or to make your skin whiter—no!—but it softens the éclat of color and takes away the shine. All the difference between a dairymaid and a duchess!”

Civilized life at this present stage of the comedy is as full of intricately interwoven artificialities as a bank note is of silken threads and fibers. Paradoxically speaking, these assure its genuineness. From the most trivial affectations of speech and personal adornment to the awfulest concerns of life, death and the hereafter, we progress through such a series of discoveries of things being not at all what they seem that we may well ponder over Berkeley’s theory of the unsubstantiality of the universe. Form and fact bear about the same relation to each other as the lines in a perspective drawing do to those of material objects.

Why, then, rail at artificialities, or vanities, as they are called in the case of most women, or hypocrisies or foibles, in the case of some men? For people, particularly writing and lecturing people, of both sexes, do rail at them constantly, though unprofitably enough, unless in a pecuniary sense. Most of these take their cue from Carlyle, of whom R. H. Hutton significantly remarks in a recent essay that he was forever fulminating in righteous wrath against shams, but never became enthusiastic over any truth.

After all, the main motive of the thousand and one amiable little deceptions practiced by everybody except the “unco guid” is to please us—to please, or at least to avoid displeasing, the onlooking world. Is the wearing of a wig more immoral than a public display of nude cranium in the front parquet of a theater? Who will maintain that a stayless, shapeless woman receives or deserves more deference in public than one who has tastefully made good the deficiencies of nature, while at the same time accentuating her really good points? Can I in my heart care less for the worldling who breezily inquires after my health here than for the saintly person who preaches to me about my hereafter? This reminds me of a little damsel I know who is always making delightful “breaks,” and who once inquired, “Mother, what part of heaven do people go to who are good but not agreeable?”

Keeping up appearances is surely an excusable affectation. It is on the side of setting a good example. What good men conceal is not their virtues, while bad men pay virtue the compliment at least of disguising themselves in her outward semblance. Assume a virtue, if you have it not. Doubtless it is best, on the whole, that a public career should so frequently show of the person who has lived it, like his epitaph, after death,

The gulf between the apparent and the actual is not so impossibly wide. To be something and to appear it are indeed two quite different matters, yet in our time the latter is often the stepping stone to the former.

Love itself is a gorgeous fabric of artiflcialities. Some philosophers have undertaken to prove to us that modern romantic love is entirely a product of latter day æsthetics, developed from the fantastic chivalry of the middle ages. Certainly the passion portrayed in the epics and odes of antiquity, though heroic enough, is far grosser, more sinister and more material than the exquisite sentiment, the “love that is passion’s essence,” in Rousseau, for example, or the fine, fervid exaltation of Tennyson. No; love in our era is, as compared with the classic days of old, far more delicate, far more spiritual and far more artificial. To-day the adorer beholds the adored one encircled with such a nimbus of ideality as can only be approached by a somewhat kindred perfection; hence a studious concealment of defects, a sudden bourgeoning out of qualities, a general putting on of grace. And, on the other side, the adored one is probably making equally strenuous efforts to appear in a favorable, even though artificial, light. Thus we see artificiality in its noblest aspect—that of a striving after the ideal.

But are not such ideals predestined to disillusion and disappointment? Disillusion, no doubt. But why be ungrateful? Why expect too much? The dénouement of a happy dream is necessarily the awakening, yet I fancy all will admit that in such case ’tis better to have so dreamed and wakened than never to have dreamed at all, or than to have had bad dreams. Love is the dream, marriage the waking. Quite pertinently does Byron ask.

Of course not. There was something palpably artificial about Petrarch’s well-sung devotion to the lovely Provençale. But the world is agreed that this immortal fantasy was worth quite as much as the solid reality possessed by Laura’s husband, M. de Sade, who was a commonplace and rather morose bourgeois of Avignon.

What is duty? That which we exact of others, wittily answered Dumas fils. Well, one of the things we are most certain to exact of others is good manners. Good manners, like charity, should begin at home. We must set a good example in this respect, especially we women, whose prerogative of administering the unwritten laws in polite society and in matters of taste I believe even our most churlish critics have not as yet challenged. The five talents of woman, according to Ruskin, are those which enable her, first, to please people; second, to feed them in dainty ways; third, to clothe them; fourth, to keep them orderly, and fifth, to teach them. Pray, and how is she to fulfil all or any of these duties if you deny her the right to exercise her supreme talent, the one which inspires all the rest, her talent for artificiality, for the arts of affectation and dissimulation? Virtue itself fails to please unless it be clothed in gentleness and grace, and, as Miss Edgeworth has told us, even vice loses half its evil by losing all its grossness.

On the masculine side take the Duc de Morny’s succinct illustration of politeness. “A polite person,” he declared, “is one who listens with interest to things he knows all about when they are discussed by a person who knows nothing about them.” Then the politeness of the man of the world, which in truth stands for our modern chivalry, is obviously incompatible with outspoken unartificiality.

In the matter of hospitality this question touches us very nearly. Did you ever feel your heart warm to the winning effusion of a Southern welcome and half unconsciously contrast it with the glacial “sincerity” of the reception you got when you first presented yourself as a stranger somewhere in England, for instance? Not but that the English hospitality was true-hearted and genuine, but, alas! it was masked in that stony British formality which, as a matter of fact, is quite as preposterous an affectation as the superficial extravagance with which all Anglo-Saxons reproach all Latins. If you desire to appreciate them both, to enjoy your visit for all it is worth, you must never dream of taking either one of them literally at his word.

Let us deprecate so far as we can the conventional tirades against conventionality, against artificiality. If by force of repetition they end by almost persuading us against our own conscience, we can take refuge in the sterling maxim of Amiel that human kindness is the first principle of tact, and respect for others’ feelings the primary condition of savoir vivre.