OMITTED SILHOUETTES

Last year[4] I ventured to submit for public inspection a small collection of Social Silhouettes. From time to time during the last few months I have received several kind enquiries about Omitted Portraits. For instance, there is the Undertaker. Perhaps a friend will write: "Dickens made capital fun out of Mr. Mould and the 'Hollow Elm Tree.' Couldn't you try your hand at something of the same kind?" Another writes, perhaps a little bluntly: "Why don't you give us the Barrister? He must be an awfully easy type to do." A third says, with subtler tact: "I feel that, since Thackeray left us, yours is the only pen which can properly handle the Actor"—or the Painter, or the Singer, or the Bellringer, or the Beadle, as the case may be. Now, to these enquiries, conceived, as I know them all to be, in the friendliest spirit, my answer varies a little, according to the type suggested. With regard to the Barrister, I stated quite early in my series that I did not propose to deal with him, because he had been drawn repeatedly by the master-hands of fiction, and because the lapse of years had wrought so little change in the type that Serjeant Snubbin, and Fitz-Roy Timmins, and Sir Thomas Underwood, and Mr. Furnival, and Mr. Chaffanbrass were portraits which needed no retouching. I must, indeed, admit that the growth of hair upon the chin and upper lip is a marked departure from type, and that a moustached K.C. is as abnormal a being as a bearded woman or a three-headed nightingale; but the variation is purely external, and the true inwardness of the Barrister remains what it was when Dickens and Thackeray and Trollope drew him. So, again, with regard to the Family Solicitor; as long as men can study the methods of Mr. Tulkinghorn (of Lincoln's Inn Fields) and Mr. Putney Giles (of the same learned quarter) they may leave Mr. Jerome K. Jerome in undisturbed possession of his stage-lawyer, who "dresses in the costume of the last generation but seven, never has any office of his own, and (with the aid of a crimson bag) transacts all his business at his clients' houses."

When I am asked why I do not describe the Painter, my reply is partly the same. We have got Gaston Phoebus, and Clive Newcome, and Claude Mellot, and the goodly company of Trilby, and we shall not easily improve upon those portraits, whether highly finished or merely sketched. But in this case I have another reason for reticence. I know a good many painters, who about this time of year bid me to their studios. I have experienced before now the delicate irritability of the artistic genius, and I know that a reverential reticence is my safest course. Conversely, my reason for not describing the Actor is that I really do not know him well enough. An actor off the stage is about as exhilarating an object as a theatre by daylight. The brilliancy and the glamour have departed; the savour of sawdust and orange-peel remains. Let us render all honour to the histrion when his foot is on his native boards; but if we are wise we shall eschew in private life the society of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummles, nor open our door too widely to the tribe of Costigan and Fotheringay.

The mention of that great actress's name (for did not Emily Costigan, afterwards Lady Mirabel, figure as "Miss Fotheringay" on the provincial stage?) reminds me that, according to some of my critics, women played too rare and too secluded a part in my series of "Typical Developments." It is only too true, and no one knows as well as the author the amount of brilliancy and interest which has been forfeited thereby. But really it is a sacred awe that has made me mute. Even to-day, as I write, I am smarting under a rebuke recently administered to me, at a public gathering, by an outraged matron. This lady belongs to the political section of her tribe; holds man, poor man! in proper contempt; and clamours on Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's doorstep for that suffrage which is to make her truly free. At present she esteems herself little better than a Squaw, and has been heard to declare, in moments of expansive eloquence, that she was not created to be the Toy of Man—a declaration in which her hearers most heartily concurred. Well, this stern guardian of her sex's rights recently took me to task in a public place for the levity with which I had criticized a gathering of political ladies, and my nerve has scarcely rallied from the sudden onslaught. Had I been more myself I might even yet have tried my unskilled hand at female portraiture. Perhaps, in the spirit of that Cambridge professor who calls William II. "quite the nicest Emperor I know," I might have begun in the most illustrious circles, and have sketched the stone-laying and bazaar-opening activities of Royal Princesses. Or, yielding precedence to the Church, I might have discoursed of Episcopal ladies and have traced the influence of a tradition received from the beatified Mrs. Proudie. "We had a very nice Ordination this Trinity," says one lady of this class. "The Bishop and I were much disappointed by the poor response of the laity to our appeal," wrote another. When in May 1899 the Archbishops were playing at a Court for the trial of Ritualism, Episcopal ladies sat knitting by the judgment-seat, and stared at the incriminated clergymen, as the tricoteuses of the French Revolution may have stared at the victims of the guillotine, or as Miss Squeers peered through the keyhole at the flagellation of Smike. Or again, on a lowlier rung of the Ecclesiastical ladder, I might have drawn the Parochial Worker—the woman of waterproof and gingham, the distributor of tracts, the disciplinarian of the Sunday School, the presiding spirit of Mothers' Meetings. At a General Election this type of lady varies her activities—canvasses for the Conservative candidate, and tells the gaping washerwomen that Mr. Lloyd-George wishes to convert the Welsh cathedrals into music-halls for the Eisteddfod. Of all Parochial Workers the highest type is the Deaconess; and not long ago, in a parish with which I am conversant, the Deaconess and the Curate used to do their parochial rounds on a double bicycle, to the infinite amusement of the gutter-children and the serious perturbation of the severely orthodox. There was a picture worthy of the pen and pencil of Thackeray, but it faded all too soon into the blurred commonplace of matrimony.

The Deaconess may be called the Marine of the Church's army, with one foot on sea and one on shore—only half a Worldling, yet not quite a Nun. With ladies of the last-named type, my acquaintance has been prolonged and intimate. Of their excellence and devotion it would be impertinent to speak; but I may say without offence that some of the ablest, most agreeable, and most amusing women I have known I have encountered in the Cloister. But, alas! even into the Cloister the serpent of political guile will wend his sinuous way; nor could I, though her friend, commend the action of Sister G—— M—— when, in order to prevent a patient in a Convalescent Home from voting for a Radical candidate, she kept his trousers under lock and key till the poll was over.

"Old age," it has been bitterly said, "when it can no longer set a bad example, gives good advice;" and when, as sometimes happens, I am asked to hortate my younger fellow-citizens, one of my most emphatic lessons is a Reverence for Womanhood, even in its least ideal aspects. This, I declare to be an essential attribute of the ideal character—of that manhood, at once beautiful and good, to which the philosophers have taught us to aspire; and, lest I should seem to be violating my own oft-repeated precept, I tear myself from a fascinating theme.