It takes a great deal of heroism to tell an unpleasant truth, but it takes a great deal more of heroism to hear it. The privilege of telling an unpleasant truth is strictly confined to one's familiar friends, one's family, or one's enemies, which is probably the reason that no one is a hero to any of these, and that he sometimes likes his familiar friends and his family quite as much as he does his enemies. It is, after all, an exceptional person who has a great opinion of himself; even the most conceited has, I feel sure, his quarter hours when he sits in sackcloth and ashes and contemplates his failures. No one rises superior to a compliment, and without such and other little amenities of life how the world's machinery would creak! I admire all those Spartan souls who declare that they love the truth, and it is humiliating to confess that I don't love the truth unless it is a pleasant one.

Everybody is, I do believe, his own best critic, and there is hardly any thing unpleasant your family can tell you about yourself that you have not known long before; but it is an added humiliation to see yourself betrayed to the world. For example, it is the exception for the creator of any work which is in reality poor, but which the voice of the people acclaims (and the people are about the poorest critics going), if he does not realise down in his doubting heart, that his stuff is poor stuff. It is that which keeps the human balance, or some of our greatest ones, or rather our noisiest ones, would be inflated to the danger-point. There is a right standard in every heart, even if warped by circumstances, and the excuse, "He knew no better," hardly holds good out of a lunatic asylum.

It is always our humourists who have tackled truth, and who have shown with a laugh that touches perilously near a sob (a little way of humourists!) that a standard of pure unvarnished truth has never been popular in this erring world; at least not since some of out forefathers scalped their brother forefathers, and the ladies and gentlemen who dwelt in caves took their afternoon tea in the shape of a cosy nibble at the bones of their foes. It is not the bones of our foes we nibble in these enlightened days!

It was an immortal humourist who, having discovered that truth is not what we want,—unless like a pill in sugar,—provided the world with a substitute—soft-soap. It is really soft-soap which makes social intercourse so delightfully easy, and we therefore owe our humorous benefactor a heavy debt of gratitude.

Nothing is, however, perfect, and if this blessed discovery has one little defect, it is that, like patent medicine, the more you swallow the more you want; so it occasionally happens that the great ones of this world have finally to have it administered in buckets where once they were grateful for only a sip.

The philosophic mind will discover that society can be quite simply divided into two classes,—one soft-soaps and the other permits itself to be soft-soaped. The humourist who invented the precious substitute for truth hardly realised the value of what he did; for had he taken out a patent he would have rivalled in wealth the great Rockefeller himself, who has been so divinely blessed in that other oily article—petroleum.

When soft-soap was invented it was constructed out of the best materials of insincerity, surface enthusiasm, a touch sometimes of covert satire (or it would spoil), and just enough truth to mix the ingredients and make them digest. This is administered in all grades of society with the greatest success, and of it can be said, in the pathetic words of an American advertisement of a preparation of medicine not usually popular with childhood, castor-oil, "Even children cry for it."

Of the two classes, those who administer and those who swallow this pleasant mixture, it is needless to say that in the lower class are those who administer soft-soap. If in course of time the soft-soaper proves that he is possessed of transcendent abilities he graduates after hard, hard struggles, resigns his bucket, and proceeds to enjoy the superior privilege of being soft-soaped in turn; and the curious fact is that, after having administered it so long, when he comes to taste it himself he does not recognise the familiar article at all. Of course there are some soft-soapers who never advance and never aspire.

As one strolls observingly through society, one discovers it is some people's mission in life to draw other people out. It is rare to find two persons talking together who give and take with equal facility, who contribute equally to the charm and brightness of the occasion. One of the two is sure to lead the other into those conversational oases where he loves to gambol—and very hard work it sometimes is!

Alas! the pioneers who soft-soap are usually women. You dear and uncomplaining sex, how hard you have to work to be called charming by that other sex that so greedily laps up the invention of the great humourist! From artisans of soft-soap you have indeed become artists. To you we owe those delightful multitudes of spoilt men who sulk or sniff or shoulder their pretentious way through society. Yes, your product! If society consisted only of men it would be quite sincere, even if rather brutal, and as for soft-soap, it wouldn't exist. It would be interesting to know the sex of that historical serpent in the Garden of Eden!

A man, if he ever soft-soaps another man, does it for a definite object and hardly realises his own insincerity, but a woman—well, it is a woman's religion to make a man think her charming, and I am afraid—desperately afraid—that she does this most successfully when she makes him talk about himself. Women, poor things, are like the heathen: first they create an idol, sometimes out of very common clay it is to be feared, and then they proceed to worship it.

How often does a man turn over in his mind what subject of conversation the woman will talk about best with whom accident has thrown him, especially if she be plain and shy? Now, what about women, on the other hand? Why, a man must be a great idiot indeed if he does not find some woman to coo little nothings at him; to lead him tenderly out of narrow, monosyllabic paths into the glowing buttercup and dandelion fields of conversation where he can gambol joyfully. "I came out strong, by Jove!" he congratulates himself proudly as they separate, and the goose never realises, as he supports himself against his usual wall and stares vacantly at the crowd, that the beguiling young thing, who smiled up at him like a rising sun, laboured with him with an energy which would have appalled a coal-heaver. Now, would a man fatigue himself as much to chatter with an empty-headed unattractive girl? Hand on heart, gentlemen, confess!

It was Thackeray who said that any woman not disfigured with a hump might marry any man. It is presumption to contradict the immortal master, but I don't believe it. Rather do I believe the words of wisdom of our old family cook. She finished a dissertation on matrimony with the following profound reflections:—

"Women ain't so particular as men. There ain't a man but'll find some woman to have him! If every woman could get a man there wouldn't be so many old maids. Down to our village there was a man who hadn't any arms or legs, but goodness me! even he got a wife. She came to call with him one day, and she'd fixed up a soap-box on wheels and was drawing him along as comfy as you please, and she never made a cent out of him, for he wa'ant a freak. Now I'd just like to see a man up and do that for a woman, I guess! No, women ain't so particular."

Surely it holds good in society. If we don't drag around a gentleman without the usual complement of arms and legs, we more often than not support a gentleman without brains or manners, and we make him more insufferable than he naturally is by giving him a false valuation, in which he proceeds at once to believe, because, if there is one thing the stupidest man can do, it is, he can get conceited. Indeed the weaker sex has much to answer for, for she has created the twentieth century man, who would be a dear if only the women would leave him alone.

However, it is not only men women soft-soap—they soft-soap each other as well. The motives are twofold. Sometimes the wielder of the bucket has an axe to grind, or she likes to be popular at a cheap price. She always says something agreeable, and it is indeed a steel-clad heart that can resist. How feel anything but friendly when a dear feminine gusher declares that you have the loveliest clothes, the most wonderful brains, the brightest eyes, the most agreeable husband, and the best cook in the world! The chances are that you hated her as she swam up and favoured your unyielding hand with cordial pumping; but she thought—no, she didn't think, the process is automatic, she merely dropped a penny in the slot of your evident antagonism on the chance of its possibly resulting in a cool invitation to call, a crush tea or a lunch: nothing is to be despised, for you never can tell!

When a woman decides to say something real nice she stops at nothing. She even sacrifices her nearest and dearest.

"How is that handsome, brilliant boy of yours?" a devoted mother asked me the other day. "How I wish my Jack were like him! But he's only just a dear, good, ordinary boy who'll never set the Thames on fire; well, we can't all be the mother of a genius!" Now, could one do anything else than invite that truly discriminating woman to lunch?

As I said before, it is some people's mission to draw others out. Some take everything hard, among other things, society. They hate to be among their kind, but they hate just as much the dignity of solitude; so they compromise matters by going about as dull and dreary as graven images, surrounded by a private atmosphere of frost. Then there are the adaptable ones who talk and laugh, while down in their souls they are bored to death. But never mind about being bored, the crime is to look bored. Adaptability is distinctly not an English national trait, rather is it American, the race made up of all races, and for this reason American society is, even if only on the surface,—and who in society ever gets below the surface?—more amusing than English society.

Oh, the heavenly rest and comfort when you pause exhausted after having pumped at a perfectly empty human being to find the process applied to yourself, and after all you do respond.

I was struck by it the other day when, in a roomful of English people who had been talked to and trotted out and made to show their best paces each in his own little field, there came to the charming, but exhausted, hostess a Frenchman who proceeded to draw her out. The sweet restfulness of it! She had not to originate a single idea, and I am perfectly sure that every other man in the room was holding forth on some subject originated by the woman he was talking to; he was likely to talk till he had run down, and then she would have to wind him up with a new subject. If she didn't he would go away and leave her mortified and alone, and a woman can stand being bored, but she cannot stand looking deserted. A lovely woman told me all about it once.

"The reason I am so popular," she said frankly, "is because I flatter the men to the top of their bent. Vanity and love make the world go round,—vanity first and love a long way after. Nothing else.

"Tell a woman she is perfect and she doubts you—sometimes. But tell a man that (one can in all sorts of ways), why, he only thinks it is his due—possibly he will think you are clever. Most men are stupid—I don't mean their working brains, their bread-and-butter brains, but their society brains. They swallow anything you tell them. They originate everything in this blessed world—but conversation.

"If a man converses he discourses and he improves your mind. Now you don't always want to have your mind improved! I don't say he doesn't know how to make love; but that doesn't count, for after all, making love is, often as not, silence À deux. So if he isn't improving your mind or making love he is stranded, and that is where we women come in.

"I don't want my mind improved at an afternoon tea, nor do I wish to be made love to over an uninspiring biscuit, and I should feel eternally disgraced if either of us looked bored; so I give him leading questions like sugar-plums, and while he nibbles away at each in turn till he has sucked it up, I have learnt to look at him with all my eyes—a kind of subdued rapture which I adjust according to the man, and then I detach my mind and consider what the clever stupid can talk about next.

"It isn't necessary to do anything but to smile, especially if you have nice teeth, as he does all the talking; but he'll think you are the cleverest woman going. Possibly you are, only he doesn't really know how clever you are! There are some women you have to treat in the same way, and they are either very distinguished and spoilt or they are very influential, or they have missions; but it's always a bore, and unless you are 'on the make'—a very ill-bred expression, I think—it's tiresome and doesn't pay. I don't mind being bored for the sake of a man, but I really won't be bored for the sake of a woman.

"But, my dear, it is very fatiguing at best, and no wonder the women crowd into retreats and nervine asylums. It isn't the pace that kills, but the unearthly dulness. After I have talked to half a dozen men for whom I make conversation I go home to bed, and the vitality I have left wouldn't be enough for an able-bodied worm.

"Do I ever find a man who is interested in me if he is not in love with me? Never! If he is in love with me; yes! That's another story. Then everything about me interests him, but, perhaps, even then only because I am his temporary ideal. I daresay it's only another form of selfishness, bless him! The stupidity of men! That's the reason they are so fatuous; they don't understand!

"Find me the man who isn't under the impression that some woman is hopelessly in love with him; and only because she has taken such pains to smile and coo at him, which she generally does to keep her hand in; any man is to her an instrument on which she, as an artist, finds it serviceable to play a few scales. To call men the ruling sex,"—and my friend laughed till I saw every one of her beautiful teeth,—"they are the ruled sex, and they get married by the women who want them most."

She evidently agreed with Thackeray. I don't, as I explained before.

"My dear, how many an innocent young thing has said 'Yes' when 'he' has had no earthly intention of asking for anything—certainly not for her dear little hand.

"'May I?' was possibly all he said, but he looked three thrilling volumes. 'Yes,' she whispered innocently, 'but do first ask papa.' How can he explain to her that the question trembling on his lips was whether he should bring her a lemon-squash or a strawberry-ice. He asked papa and they lived happily ever after, and it answered just as well. Now what I wonder is," she concluded, "which is the stupider—he or she?"

One hasn't time to soft-soap one's relatives. For its successful use there is required a certain exhilaration of spirits which familiarity does not encourage. It is more easy to be charming to one's acquaintances or intimate enemies than to the bosom of one's family. One can be kinder to one's own, but more charming to the outside world, alas!

A woman doesn't go on for ever coquetting with her husband—it is a pity, but it's true. Perhaps if it were less true there would be fewer divorces. When, in the happy past, your husband was your lover and he looked at you with adoring eyes, why, then you could be charming,—at least for a few hours, because to be charming longer gets on one's nerves. Later, when you are married and he won't get up in the morning, and you say to him severely, "Samuel, are you never going to get up? It's nine o'clock, and cook says she'll give notice, for she can't and she won't live in such a late family," and your Samuel grunts, turns over, and hurriedly takes forty more winks, how can you possibly be charming just then?

Nor can you murmur to your Samuel that he is the most interesting man you ever met, and that his brain is superior to all other brains. He doesn't care a rap what you think about his brains, and he'd much rather you wouldn't bother him but go downstairs; and so you do go downstairs in that very unbecoming frock of your pre-married days in which you wouldn't have had him see you for worlds. But now it has come again to the fore, ever since the time Samuel said pleasantly—he certainly has no talent for soft-soap—that after people have been married a year neither knows how the other looks. This from your Samuel, for whose sake you ran up an awful dressmaker's bill in other days. So you unearth your hideous frock with a desperate sigh.

But you always know how your Samuel looks, and when he wears an unbecoming necktie you grieve and nag and give him no peace. Perhaps it were well, after all, if a bit of soft-soap could be bottled up during courting-time and labelled "To be used after marriage."

When men soft-soap men it is in devious ways. One of the most subtle, if you are a little man and you wish to flatter a great man, is to disagree with him. He is much impressed by your independence, and he is sorry for you too, because you own up to your awful presumption, and by inference you can soft-soap him up and down just as they whitewash a wooden fence. And he says he likes your independence, and he shakes hands with you and knows you the next time you meet, and calls you "My independent young friend," and invites you to luncheon. Now, had you agreed with every word he said you would have been only one of the usual job-lot of admirers, and he wouldn't have remembered you from Adam.

Of course you have to administer disagreement with great caution, because when a man reaches the highest eminence there is nothing that makes him so mad as contradiction. The first sign of real greatness shows itself when you decline to be contradicted. If, as it is stated, Lord Beaconsfield never contradicted his Queen, then did he well deserve her most loyal friendship. The bliss of never being contradicted! for that alone it is worth being a queen; but of course that is essentially a royal prerogative. It is said that there are people who by the exercise of this great negative gift have worked their way up from being quite modest members of society until they are now shining social lights.

Tell a man how great he is and will he come to tea? for there are crowds dying to meet him; why, of course he will come. Who has ever yet met a really celebrated recluse. One has heaps of recluses who professed to like solitude, but only in a crowd, but there was never one, however famous, who chose to exile himself in a desert island without the morning paper.

It is said of a famous poet, whose footsteps were much dogged by the enterprising tourist, that he complained bitterly and wrathfully of his inability to have even his own privacy; but that his bitterness and wrath were as nothing to what he felt when the blameless tripper was discovered to be paying no attention to him whatever. One wonders if this innocent form of soft-soap is out of fashion, or are the poets less great? How many pious pilgrims wandered to the old Colonial house in Cambridge, America, where Longfellow lived, and looked with awe at his front windows. Did not pilgrims by the car-load go to Concord to catch a glimpse of the great Emerson, while they leaned reverently across the philosopher's white picket-fence?

The poets of the past were accustomed to this innocent worship; what about the poets of to-day? Do they also walk along the streets haughtily (like the illustrious Mr. and Mrs. Crummles) whilst admiring passers-by stop and say with bated breath, "This is the great Smith!" or is that involuntary form of flattery out of fashion, or haven't the new poets grown up yet?

Perhaps an ardent admirer might suggest Miss Marie Corelli as one to whom the twentieth century pilgrim makes pilgrimages; but that isn't fair, for how can any one distinguish her pilgrims from Shakespeare's pilgrims? Pilgrims are not labelled like trunks. One hardly ventures to say so, but it seems to me that in this Miss Corelli has taken an unfair advantage of Shakespeare and the other poets.

There is nothing so democratic as true greatness, and this is a democratic age, and everybody exhibits to the public. We are either a great orator or we loop the loop, or we are a transcendent poet, or we walk from Cheapside to the Marble Arch on a wager. But do we do all these great things alone, unseen or unheard of by the world? No, we don't! Not a bit of it! It is not praise we want—we want more. We clamour for soft-soap; we demand it at the point of the bayonet.

It is an age of coarse effects, an age of advertisement. A poet could not conscientiously sing now about a rose left to bloom unseen, for excursion trains would be sure to be arranged there at reduced rates. It is a confidential age, and we demand a confidant as much as a matter of course as the heroine of the old-fashioned Italian opera,—in fact we demand the undivided attention of the whole world.

We sing our songs and listen greedily for the applause of the gallery; we meet with domestic misfortune, and we weep on the bosom of the divorce court, and the daily papers weep with us. We do not do good by stealth, but rather in such a way that we get a baronetcy or a decoration; so when you see a man all tinkley with little stars and things, you will know that he is always a very great and charitable man indeed, and charity is not only alms bestowed on the poor. It is the beauty of charity that it is not bigoted.

We put our breaking hearts under a microscope and make "copy" out of them and money and notoriety,—and notoriety in these days pays much better than mere celebrity, and what therefore so fitting a tribute to notoriety as soft-soap? Ah me! it is enough to make the cat laugh! I really have never understood this curious fact in natural history, though I know how hard it is to make a cat laugh; this whole morning I spent trying to make Mr. Boxer laugh (Mr. Boxer being the purry commander-in-chief of our mouse-holes), and did not succeed.

Our modern world is a hippodrome, and we demand hippodrome effects and thunders of applause, because ordinary applause cannot be heard. Watch the next painted face you see, and observe how familiarity with the process has coarsened it. Not that one has any objection to paint if it is well done. It is a woman's duty to look her best; and if paint makes her more beautiful, let her put it on—but, one does implore, not with the trowel.

The other night there was a great unbecoming function, but then all great functions are unbecoming by reason of the presence of woman's arch-enemy—electricity. It is quite certain that the first electrician was not only deplorably ignorant of the social virtues of soft-soap, but he was, besides, a jilted and misanthropic old bachelor who avenged his wrongs by harnessing electricity to a lamp, and cynically rejoiced when, for the first time, he turned its cruel light on the wrinkles, the hair-dye, and the dull jaded eyes of Society, and changed the pink of art into an unconvincing blue.

It was on that same occasion that I became deeply impressed by the tiara of Great Britain, which, it appears, is a National Institution, worn by the Aged instead of caps, only caps are much more comfortable. I also discovered that it need have nothing in common with the rest of the toilet; at any rate one worthy lady so adorned had a little breakfast-shawl about her shoulders.

If it is true that the ladies of the United States have recently plucked up enough courage to adopt the tiara of Great Britain, and should any one perhaps insinuate that this is inconsistent with austere republican principles, a sufficient and crushing reply is that in America every woman is a "lady," and every "lady" is a queen.

To return to her of the tiara and the breakfast-shawl. One did wonder what illusion she laboured under when she fastened that diamond structure to the thin bandeaux of her faded hair, where it swayed insecurely. Did some one send the poor soul away from home and tell her she looked lovely, and as she trundled off in her brougham did fifty years slide temporarily from her old shoulders? After all, soft-soap has its virtues; it is just the thing for the aged!

What are illusions but soft-soap self-administered, and what would life be without illusions? Show me the heroic soul who can look into a mirror and who sees what she really sees! O self-administered soft-soap! what does she really see?

Upon my word, I have come to the conclusion that a certain measure of soft-soap is not only a social necessity, it is more, it is a social duty; only one would like to offer a plea, just a little plea, for a fair division of labour! It is so hard always to say delightful things, especially if you don't mean them! It is being a thirsty Ganymede at the feast of the gods.

O, great humourist of soft-soap, you made two mistakes when you invented your wonderful lubricator of social intercourse; not only, like patent medicine, does the dose require to be constantly increased, but you forgot to insist on what is most vital—a periodic change of parts.

My plea is that the soft-soaped one should occasionally be obliged to step down from his pedestal and turn his own insincere admiration, his surface enthusiasm, and the countless and well-meant lies with which he helps to make the existence of the soft-soaped so pleasant, upon that unwearied and energetic prevaricator, whose mission it is to praise, no matter how untruthfully.

Yes, even "little tin gods on wheels" should be made to step down from high Olympus and, in turn, serve their thirsting and patient Ganymede.