post, with telephones and telegrams, has, in our own beautiful phrase, "come to stay," and has elbowed the art of letterwriting irrevocably from among us. But notes are still written; and there is no reason why they should not be written well. Has the mantle of those anonymous gentlewomen who wrote The Young Lady's Book fallen on no one? Will no one revise that "Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits," adapting it to present needs? . . . A few hints as to Deportment in the Motor-Car; the exact Angle whereat to hold the Receiver of a Telephone, and the exact Key wherein to pitch the Voice; the Conduct of a Cigarette. . . . I see a wide and golden vista.

THE WAY OF IMPERFECTION

Francis Thompson

OVID, with the possible exception of Catullus, is the most modern-minded of Latin poets. It is therefore with delight that we first encounter his dictum, so essentially modern, so opposed to the aesthetic feeling of the ancient world, decentiorem esse faciem in qua aliquis naevus esset. It was a dictum borne out by his own practice, a practice at heart essentially romantic rather than classic; and there can therefore be little wonder that the saying was scouted by his contemporaries as an eccentricity of genius. The dominant cult of classicism was the worship of perfection, and the Goth was its iconoclast. Then at length literature reposed in the beneficent and quickening shadow of imperfection, which gave us for consummate product Shakespeare, in whom greatness and imperfection reached their height. Since him, however, there has been a gradual decline from imperfection. Milton, at his most typical, was far too perfect; Pope was ruined by his quest for the quality; and if Dryden partially escaped, it was because of the rich faultiness with which Nature had endowed him. The stand made by the poets of the early part of this century was only temporarily successful; and now, we suppose, no thoughtful person can contemplate without alarm the hold which the renascent principle has gained

over the contemporary mind. Unless some voice be raised in timely protest, we feel that English art (in its widest sense) must soon dwindle to the extinction of unendurable excellence.

The elementary truth of Ovid's maxim it is scarcely requisite to uphold. We have yet to see the perfect faces that are one half so attractive as the imperfect faces. Can any reader tolerate the novelistic heroine with the Greek features and the exquisitely chiselled nose? The hero invariably marries her instead of the other young lady (whose nose is perhaps a trifle retroussé), in every respect more charming, who misses him simply through this essential note of a heroine.

Would, however, that the thing stopped here. This vicious taste for perfection is the fruitful parent of unnumbered evils. It is difficult to calculate the ravages caused by the insane passion. We will say this-that a man who once indulges in it never knows where he may end. At first, perhaps, he will content himself with spiritual perfection; but the fatal craving, once established, demands continually fresh gratification. He presently begins to find fault with Nature, and to desire an unimpeachably artistic house; insensibly he forms an addiction to the sonnet, and thence glides into the research of orbed perfection in his jokes; by degrees he even comes to admire the paintings of M. Bouguereau, and so to the final abomination of the camellia and the double dahlia. We would not be thought to denounce ex cathedra the wish for religious perfection. Abstractly it is harmless enough; but we should be careful how we allow ourselves even these innocent gratifications, they are often the first step on a course of unconscious declension which we shall regret all our after-lives. It is this which sometimes causes secular poets after a time to write distinctly inferior religious verse; under the impression, apparently, that secular poetry is an error of youth which must be expiated in maturity, and that only by direct consecration to religion can their art give glory to God. As if the flower could not give glory to God, until it abnegated its fragrance; as if the clouds of sunset could not give glory to God, until they had been passed through a bleaching-vat; as if the bird could not give glory to God, until it selected its airs from the diocesan hymnal! Over the whole contemporary mind is the trail of this serpent

perfection. It even affects the realm of colour, where it begets cloying, enervating harmonies, destitute of those stimulating contrasts by which the great colourists threw into relief the general agreement of their hues. It leads in poetry to the love of miniature finish, and that in turn (because minute finish is most completely attainable in short poems) leads to the tyranny of sonnet, ballade, rondeau, triolet, and their kin. The principle leads again to aestheticism, which is simply the aspiration for a hot-house seclusion of beauty in a world which Nature has tempered by bracing gusts of ugliness. And yet again, by a peculiar refinement of perversity, it leads to the desire for perfect wives; though wherefore a man should desire a perfect wife it is indeed difficult to conceive-Why, he has to live with her! Now does any one seriously long to companion a "Treatise on Spiritual Perfection" bound in cloth-with the additional privilege of paying for the rebinding?

Returning to literature, however, let us consider more particularly the iniquity of this cult in generating the hero and heroine; who spring merely from the ambition to draw perfect characters-an ambition fatal to lifelike rendering. The most nobly conceived character in assuming vraisemblance takes up a certain quantity of imperfection; it is its water of crystallization: expel this, and far from securing, as the artist fondly deems, a more perfect crystal, the character falls to powder. We by no means desire those improbable incongruities which, frequent enough in actual life, should in art be confined to comedy. But even incongruities may find their place in serious art, if they be artistic incongruities, not too glaring or suggestive of unlikelihood; incongruities which are felt by the reader to have a whimsical hidden keeping with the congruities of the character, which enhance the consent of the general qualities by an artistically modulated dissent; which just lend, and no more than lend, the ratifying seal of Nature to the dominating regularities of characterization. From the neglect of all this have come the hero and the heroine; and of these two the heroine is the worse. In most cases she is not a woman at all, but a male dream of a woman. Among all prevalent types of heroine, the worst is one apparently founded on Pope's famous dictum,

Most women have no characters at all—

a dictum which we should denounce with scorn, if so acute an observer as De Quincey did not stagger us by defending it. He defends it to attack Pope. Pope (says De Quincey) did not see that what he advances as a reproach against women constitutes the very beauty of them. It is the absence of any definite character which enables their character to be moulded by others; and it is this soft plasticity which renders them such charming companions as wives. It may be so. And it may be paradisaical bliss to have a wife whom you can cut out on a paper pattern. Personally, we should prefer to keep a dog; it would be less expensive. But possibly all these things are so; and we address our remarks to De Quincey, therefore, with diffidence. Nor do we mean them to have more than a generic application: we are by no means of that influential class who think that the Almighty creates men, but makes women-as they make sausages. Still, we are inclined to fancy that you take outward pliability and the absence of imperiousness for lack of essential character. Now to execute your determination by command you must have a position of command; the lever requires a fulcrum. Without this position you must either maintain an isolated, futile obstinacy, or be content to sway not by bending, but by manipulating, the will of others. It is, we think, the pleasanter way, and we are not sure that it is the less effectual way. Partly by nature, partly by the accumulative influence of heredity, partly perhaps by training, it is the way which instinctively commends itself to most women. But because in the majority of cases they accommodate themselves to male character and eschew direct opposition, it by no means follows, if our view be correct, that they forgo their own character. You might as well accuse the late Lord Beaconsfield of being wanting in character, because instead of hurling his ideas against an unstormable opposition he tactfully and patiently insinuated them. We should be inclined to say that the feminine characteristic which De Quincey considered plasticity was rather elasticity. Now the most elastic substance in Nature is probably ivory. What are the odds, you subtle, paradoxical, delightful ghost

of delicate thought, what are the odds on your moulding a billiard ball? Watching the other day an insect which betrayed a scientific curiosity with regard to our lower extremities, we signified our inhospitable disposition by poking it with a stick. Never did we see such a plastic insect. Curling up into a little black-brown pellet, it lay so motionless that we thought it dead; but in a few moments it slowly uncurled, and after a period of cautious delay resumed its advance. Four times this was repeated, and on each occasion the advance was resumed as if never resisted. Then patience gave way. The insect was sent rolling into a little hole, where it lay curled up as before. For twenty minutes by the clock it remained still as death. Death, indeed, we thought had this time certainly overtaken it, and with a passing regret for our thoughtlessness we forgot the tiny being in thought. Tenderer were its recollections of us. When we awoke to consciousness it had resumed its crawling. If this be plasticity, then many women are plastic-very plastic.

An embodiment-or enshadowment-of the villainous saying which De Quincey thus approves, is that favourite creation of fiction which finds its most recognizable (because extremest) expression in Patient Grizzel and the Nut-brown Maid. Does any one believe in. Patient Grizzel? Still more, does any one believe in the Nut-brown Maid? Their descendants infest literature, from Spenser to Dickens and Tennyson, from Una to Enid; made tolerable in the poem only by their ideal surroundings. The dream of "a perfect woman nobly planned" underlies the thing; albeit Wordsworth goes on to show that his "perfect woman" had her little failings. Shakespeare was not afraid to touch with such failings his finest heroines; he knew that these defects serve only to enhance the large nobilities of character, as the tender imperfections and wayward wilfulnesses of individual rosepetals enhance the prevalent symmetry of the rose. His most consummate woman, Imogen, possesses her little naturalizing traits. Take the situation where she is confronted with her husband's order for her murder. What the Patient Grizzel heroine would have done we all know. She would have behaved with unimpeachable resignation, and prepared for death with a pathos ordered according to the best canons of