第17章

"Why, these girls;" I showed him the postcard, there ought to have been about a hundred of them.There was not a plain one among the lot.Many of them I should have called beautiful.They were selling flowers and fruit, all kinds of fruit--cherries, strawberries, rosy-cheeked apples, luscious grapes--all freshly picked and sparkling with dew.The gendarme said he had never seen any girls--not in this particular square.Referring casually to the blood of saints and martyrs, he said he would like to see a few girls in that town worth looking at.In the square itself sat six motherly old souls round a lamp-post.One of them had a moustache, and was smoking a pipe, but in other respects, I have no doubt, was all a woman should be.Two of them were selling fish.That is they would have sold fish, no doubt, had anyone been there to buy fish.The gaily clad thousands of eager purchasers pictured in the postcard were represented by two workmen in blue blouses talking at a corner, mostly with their fingers; a small boy walking backwards, with the idea apparently of not missing anything behind him, and a yellow dog that sat on the kerb, and had given up all hope--judging from his expression--of anything ever happening again.With the gendarme and myself, these four were the only living creatures in the square.The rest of the market consisted of eggs and a few emaciated fowls hanging from a sort of broom handle.

"And where's the cathedral?" I asked the gendarme.It was a Gothic structure in the postcard of evident antiquity.He said there had once been a cathedral.It was now a brewery; he pointed it out to me.He said he thought some portion of the original south wall had been retained.He thought the manager of the brewery might be willing to show it to me.

"And the fountain?" I demanded, "and all these doves!"He said there had been talk of a fountain.He believed the design had already been prepared.

I took the next train back.I do not now travel much out of my way to see the original of the picture postcard.Maybe others have had like experience and the picture postcard as a guide to the Continent has lost its value.

The dealer has fallen back upon the eternal feminine.The postcard collector is confined to girls.Through the kindness of correspondents I possess myself some fifty to a hundred girls, or perhaps it would be more correct to say one girl in fifty to a hundred different hats.I have her in big hats, I have her in small hats, I have her in no hat at all.I have her smiling, and I have her looking as if she had lost her last sixpence.I have her overdressed, I have her decidedly underdressed, but she is much the same girl.Very young men cannot have too many of her, but myself Iam getting tired of her.I suppose it is the result of growing old.

[Why not the Eternal Male for a change?]

Girls of my acquaintance are also beginning to grumble at her.Ioften think it hard on girls that the artist so neglects the eternal male.Why should there not be portraits of young men in different hats; young men in big hats, young men in little hats, young men smiling archly, young men looking noble.Girls don't want to decorate their rooms with pictures of other girls, they want rows of young men beaming down upon them.

But possibly I am sinning my mercies.A father hears what young men don't.The girl in real life is feeling it keenly: the impossible standard set for her by the popular artist.

"Real skirts don't hang like that," she grumbles, "it's not in the nature of skirts.You can't have feet that size.It isn't our fault, they are not made.Look at those waists! There would be no room to put anything?""Nature, in fashioning woman, has not yet crept up to the artistic ideal.The young man studies the picture on the postcard; on the coloured almanack given away at Christmas by the local grocer; on the advertisement of Jones' soap, and thinks with discontent of Polly Perkins, who in a natural way is as pretty a girl as can be looked for in this imperfect world.Thus it is that woman has had to take to shorthand and typewriting.Modern woman is being ruined by the artist.

[How Women are ruined by Art.]

Mr.Anstey tells a story of a young barber who fell in love with his own wax model.All day he dreamed of the impossible.She--the young lady of wax-like complexion, with her everlasting expression of dignity combined with amiability.No girl of his acquaintance could compete with her.If I remember rightly he died a bachelor, still dreaming of wax-like perfection.Perhaps it is as well we men are not handicapped to the same extent.If every hoarding, if every picture shop window, if every illustrated journal teemed with illustrations of the ideal young man in perfect fitting trousers that never bagged at the knees! Maybe it would result in our cooking our own breakfasts and making our own beds to the end of our lives.

The novelist and playwright, as it is, have made things difficult enough for us.In books and plays the young man makes love with a flow of language, a wealth of imagery, that must have taken him years to acquire.What does the novel-reading girl think, I wonder, when the real young man proposes to her! He has not called her anything in particular.Possibly he has got as far as suggesting she is a duck or a daisy, or hinting shyly that she is his bee or his honeysuckle: in his excitement he is not quite sure which.In the novel she has been reading the hero has likened the heroine to half the vegetable kingdom.Elementary astronomy has been exhausted in his attempt to describe to her the impression her appearance leaves on him.Bond Street has been sacked in his endeavour to get it clearly home to her what different parts of her are like--her eyes, her teeth, her heart, her hair, her ears.Delicacy alone prevents his extending the catalogue.A Fiji Island lover might possibly go further.We have not yet had the Fiji Island novel.By the time he is through with it she must have a somewhat confused notion of herself--a vague conviction that she is a sort of condensed South Kensington Museum.

[Difficulty of living up to the Poster.]

Poor Angelina must feel dissatisfied with the Edwin of real life.Iam not sure that art and fiction have not made life more difficult for us than even it was intended to be.The view from the mountain top is less extensive than represented by the picture postcard.The play, I fear me, does not always come up to the poster.Polly Perkins is pretty enough as girls go; but oh for the young lady of the grocer's almanack! Poor dear John is very nice and loves us--so he tells us, in his stupid, halting way; but how can we respond when we remember how the man loved in the play! The "artist has fashioned his dream of delight," and the workaday world by comparison seems tame to us.